AMERICA
FRIDAY, AUGUST 15, 1969
If you’ve never tried to lead a guy who’s stoned and a girl who’s completely tripping across a huge field of partying strangers in the half dark, to a pair of blankets that look just like a hundred thousand other pairs of blankets, then clearly you’re not me. I was having enough trouble just keeping David, Tina, and Debbie together, much less finding Michael and Willow. The task was not simplified by the fact that David and Tina had their arms around each other, and Tina kept attempting to follow things that only she could see. She was babbling about “celestial guides” and “star energy,” while David just kept giggling and saying, “Far out, Teeny. I mean Neeta. Neena. Tina.”
Debbie whispered to me, “I have no idea what was in that water she drank, but I wouldn’t have thought Tina knew any of these words. By the way, have you noticed your friend is getting stupider?”
I winced. Truthfully, I had.
Somewhere in our endless trek across the wasted audience lands, Tina stepped on somebody’s foot, and David must have stepped on part of someone, too. A male voice barked, “Ow!” A female voice said, “Hey, do you mind watching where you’re—David, is that you? Thank goodness, your brother has been worried sick!”
One doesn’t generally encounter such a literal case of stumbling upon one’s destination, but here we were, standing on our very own blanket. In fact, once Michael sat up, cursing and groaning, I saw that David was standing on his very own brother. Michael had been busy demonstrating how worried sick he was by rolling around, at least half naked, in a sleeping bag with Willow.
Dang, I wanted to be worried sick.
I guess the sixties really were the era of free love, because nobody else seemed to feel the ensuing introductions were at all tinged with awkwardness. Of course, none of them were cursed with the knowledge that they were sitting amid a bizarre cross between a family reunion picnic and a drug-fueled orgy. So that probably helped keep them at ease.
Anyway, orange juice was produced. Another joint was passed around. A guy named Bert Sommer came onstage and played mellow singer-songwriter music with his band. I said, “No offense, but this doesn’t sound very rock-and-roll. He sounds like a Broadway singer.”
Debbie said, “Okay, I should have asked what century you were from. He is from Broadway. This is Bert Sommer—from Hair! You know, the musical? I saw it, and he was amazing. He’s going to be a huge star!”
I was like, Oh, yeah, he’s going to be huge. Mega huge. In the future, we will worship him with monuments and great days of feasting. Wherever cheesy Broadway singers are remembered, his name will be whispered in hushed, reverent tones. But if I ever write a book called Richie’s Dating Bro-tips, Volume I, the very first entry will read:
Never, ever mock a girl’s taste in music.
Not that this was a date or anything. I had a girlfriend. Or I would. Several decades hence. Once her parents became sperms and eggs, and then, eventually, people who met and reproduced. So all I said was, “You know who’s really going to be huge? Santana. Wait til you see them!”
She said, “I’ve never even heard of them. How good can they be?”
I just smiled. I knew she would find out in a day or so. Carlos Santana and his band had been total unknowns at Woodstock—they hadn’t even released an album yet—but their performance on Saturday night would basically turn them into superstars.
It was kind of cool knowing that, almost like having a superpower.
Near the end of his set, the Bert guy started playing a Simon and Garfunkel song I recognized called “America,” about a young couple that run away together by bus across the country because they feel lost and purposeless. The crowd loved it and gave him a pretty massive standing ovation. Which was awkward for me, because I suddenly noticed that Debbie and I were the only members of the blanket party who weren’t too intertwined to stand up.
“Uh, is that okay?” I asked, gesturing vaguely toward the writhing mass of my dad and her friend. (Yes, the sight was exactly as emotionally scarring as it sounds.) “I mean, it’s not like Tina is in any shape to, um, give consent or whatever.”
It was getting fairly dark, but I could make out Debbie’s eyes well enough to know that they were getting kind of misty-looking. “You really are incredibly sweet, Gabriel. You’re … I don’t know … chivalrous. I know I teased you before, but it is almost like you’re from another time. Like you stepped out of the 1940s, or something.”
Wrong direction, I thought.
“Anyway, she’s fine. They’re just making out. I’ll stop it if it gets too out of hand. Your friend doesn’t have any diseases, does he?”
Well, at least I could be sure neither of them would catch AIDS, because it hadn’t been invented yet. Or discovered. I always get those two mixed up. But I remembered from school that AIDS became a thing in the 1980s. No wonder everybody was so casual about sex in 1969.
“No, he should be okay.” I couldn’t believe I was serving as my own father’s wingman. If I did get back to my own time, I figured I was going to need months of therapy just to get over this one conversation.
We sat back down, and Debbie asked, “So, do you ever feel lost like this? Like there’s no hope left in America?”
Wow. I thought of all the historic stuff she had experienced in her childhood: John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., all getting assassinated; the constant threat of nuclear war with Russia; civil rights marches, battles, and riots all over the country; the Vietnam conflict; the election of Richard Nixon to the presidency.
I realized, too, that my dad had taught me a ton about his subject without my realizing it.
Anyway, then I thought of all the bad stuff that was still to come: Watergate. President Nixon resigning in disgrace. The end of the Vietnam conflict, with the United States pulling out in defeat. The hippie generation growing up and becoming adults who were just as conservative as every other generation of old people. AIDS. Global warming. 9/11. Afghanistan. Iraq.
Barney.
Miley Cyrus.
“Yeah,” I said. “But I don’t think it’s true. Whenever my father gets upset about stuff in the newspaper or whatever, my mom squeezes his hand and says, ‘You’re not helping your blood pressure, honey.’ Then she says, ‘This, too, shall pass.’ And I think it always does. I don’t know if you can hope for things to get a hundred percent better for the whole planet or anything, but I can guarantee the world isn’t going to end anytime soon.”
I felt kind of guilty talking about my mom while my dad was snogging with Tina five feet away. Ick.
Debbie hugged her knees and said, “It must be nice to feel so sure.”
Glancing over past Dad and Tina, I saw that Michael and Willow were putting up a tiny tent. I assumed they were about to go inside, which would be kind of nice. I didn’t want to look at my uncle right then, because unless Jimi and I were going to pull off a miracle together, I knew exactly when Uncle Mike’s world was going to end.
“There are a lot of things I don’t feel sure about,” I said. “Just because I don’t think the Russians are about to blow us up doesn’t mean I don’t worry about stuff.”
We talked all through the next act, a guy named Tim Hardin who was flat-out awful. At some point, Michael and Willow popped back out of the tent, and David and Tina sat back up, so that all six of us were conversing. Willow said, “Wow, that guy is really strung out. It’s pretty bad when you can tell from three football fields away in the dark.”
I knew just from the train-wreck badness of the sounds emanating from the stage that “strung out” had to be something negative, but I didn’t want to ask exactly what it meant, because then Debbie would point out again how I didn’t know any of the, ahem, current slang. Fortunately, I’m pretty good with context clues. “Well, it’s not like he’d be the first musician ruined by H, right?” David asked.
“H” must be heroin, I figured. It was incredible what experts everyone
was on drugs in 1969. And why not? The whole Woodstock was like a giant amateur pharmaceutical research lab.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Michael said. “Maybe heroin gets a bad rap. You know, the government wants us to believe that all these things are bad for us because they can’t control them. They can’t tax them, right? Meanwhile, who’s making all the money on cigarettes and alcohol, huh? That’s right, Uncle Sam. It’s just like Vietnam. Follow the money, Davey.”
“So what are you saying? We should just get high on everything, all the time, because the government says not to?”
“Well, I’ll tell you this, little bro, I haven’t seen any of it mess anybody up as bad as alcohol does. Have you?”
These kids were pretty tense, considering. Willow had her hand on the back of Michael’s neck, and there was a little brother-to-brother staredown going on. I didn’t understand why Michael kept going from happy-go-lucky to bitter and old sounding, but I had seen it a few times over the course of the afternoon and evening. It hit me: When he does this, he sounds like Dad. Future Dad. But that was backward, of course. Future Dad sounded like him. This was the sound of the guy who had trained my father to be bitter.
But why?
Tim Hardin finished up, and Ravi Shankar took the stage. This was something I wanted to see. Ravi Shankar was an Indian classical musician who played a stringed instrument called the sitar. He was the guy who had taught George Harrison all about India’s musical instruments and traditions. Without him, the Beatles wouldn’t have written some of the most amazing songs ever, and the music of the entire second half of the sixties would have been almost unrecognizably different.
Ravi and two men playing Indian drums got up there and played some amazing trance music. It was completely different from anything I had ever seen. It was around ten at night, and drizzling, but none of us tried to cover up with the blankets or go into the tent or anything. Without really thinking about it, Debbie and I started holding hands, but it wasn’t like a sexy thing. It felt more like we had somehow gotten to be old friends already.
Everything felt so peaceful, at least to me.
Michael and Willow had their heads leaning together and their eyes closed, and she was whispering in his ear on and off. I wished I could hear what was going on, because obviously there was something huge I didn’t know. But on the other hand, I was really sleepy, and Debbie’s hand was really warm, and the music was really nice in a mystical kind of way.
Speaking of mystical, after a while, Tina started feeling another wave of her mystery dosage again, because she began saying stuff like, “Guru, call down the rain! Wet us! Wash us!”
David was saying, “It’s okay, Tina, we’re all right, we’re getting just a little wet and washed. That’s good, isn’t it?” At the moment, everything was all right with David.
“No, he is calling! The rains will come! Come, O rain! Come and wet us! Come and wash us! Wet us and wash us!”
This was when David committed a drug-fueled tactical error. He imitated Elmer Fudd, the annoying old guy from Bugs Bunny. He shouted, “Wet us and wash us, wascally wabbit!” Then he collapsed backward onto the blanket, cracking up.
Tina was enraged. “He will call down the rain!” she intoned. “The rains will smite you! The rains will wash your soul clean!”
Oh, geez, I thought. Here we go again with the souls. Nice job, Dad. Debbie looked pretty exasperated, too. “I should have known this would happen,” she said. “You really can’t mix stoners with trippers. Am I right?” Willow and Michael both nodded solemnly. Apparently, this was accepted 1960s wisdom, even though it had been lost in the sands of time before I got to age fifteen.
“Tina,” Debbie said, “it’s cool. The rains are coming, all right? We’ll all just watch the music. Everything’s groovy, so—”
Then things got freaky. A flash of lightning illuminated the entire field. There was David, still on his back, still grinning. Michael and Willow, together, peering up at the sky in awe. Debbie, her mouth opened in mid-syllable.
And Tina, shrieking. “Here it is! Ten! Nine! Eight!”
She only got down to three before the skies opened up and a pelting storm engulfed us. It didn’t last super-long, but by the time it ended, we were six mud-encrusted citizens of a swamped city.
In the eerie, dark silence that followed, Tina turned to David and said, “Told you.” Then she threw up on his lap, lay down in the mud, and fell asleep.
I LIVE ONE DAY AT A TIME
FRIDAY, AUGUST 15, 1969
You know the thing at a concert when everybody holds up their cell phone screen or their lighter, or whatever, and waves it back and forth? Did you ever wonder how that happened for the first time? Well, I’m the kind of kid who does wonder about stuff like that, and it used to puzzle me.
Not anymore.
After Tina’s eruption, David and I walked over to a row of water pumps we had passed on our way back from the concession stands. I got him washed off as best I could. I felt kind of guilty, because apparently I was wearing his only spare shirt, but to his eternal credit, he didn’t ask me to switch or anything. I was quite grateful. I was also thrilled that we found our way back, because it had gotten so dark that our only source of light for navigation was the glow of the mixing desk near our blankets.
When we got back, David fell asleep right beside Tina, soaked shirt and all, and I sat down next to Debbie to watch the next act, a solo singer named Melanie. The stage announcer had noticed the amazing darkness, too, because he said something to the crowd about lighting candles to keep the rain away. It was incredible: At some point during one of Melanie’s songs, I looked around and the entire bowl we were sitting in was alight with flickering, wavering candle flames.
“Wow, that’s new,” Debbie said.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Don’t people do this at concerts all the time?”
“Do what?”
“You know. Light stuff and wave it around?”
“No, of course not. Otherwise, why would I have said, ‘That’s new’?”
“Uh, right. I, um, well, my parents don’t let me go to concerts much.”
My mind was boggling. This was so cool! Yet again, I was the only person in the whole place who knew what we were witnessing. If I ever got back to my own time, and if my parents ever ungrounded me, and if they ever actually allowed me to go to a concert, I knew I would never be able to see cell phones being hoisted aloft during an encore without smiling a secret smile.
I knew the next singer, but only because of his last name. He was Arlo Guthrie. His father, Woody Guthrie, was the folk singer who had written “This Land Is Your Land.” Woody had died tragically of a terrible genetic disease called Huntington’s disease, which makes its victims go insane at some point in their adult lives without any warning after totally normal childhoods. I remembered hearing about Arlo’s case, because he had had to grow up not knowing whether he would inherit his father’s condition. In the end, he had been fine, but I was pretty sure he hadn’t known that yet at the time of Woodstock.
What would it be like to know there was a fifty-fifty chance you’d suddenly go insane, with no chance of a cure?
As Arlo was getting ready to play, Debbie said, “I’d hate to be him.”
It felt kind of great to finally know what she was talking about. “The disease?”
“Yeah. I mean, how do you live, knowing it might all be for nothing?”
“Why would it be for nothing?” I asked. “I mean, he’s getting to play at the biggest concert in history. He’s a famous singer. He sounds like he’s having fun up there, right? Isn’t that something? Whatever happens later, doesn’t this matter?” Actually, Arlo sounded like he was completely high. Between songs, his voice was all sniffly and giggly, his words were strangely elongated, and he kept losing his train of thought.
“Well, but … okay, what if you knew right now that you had even odds of getting Huntington’s disease? Would you bother to study in school? Would
you bust your butt in college, or would you drop out and go live on a commune somewhere? I think I might just drop out and stay high, or something.”
I thought about that. It was hard to ignore what I knew: that Arlo Guthrie was not going to go insane. As far as I remembered, he would still be plugging away, old and white-haired, singing these same old songs on Woodstock reunion tours in the 2010s. “But then, what if you did screw around and mess up your future, and you never got sick?”
We sat for a while, listening to the music and wondering together what it would be like to be semi-doomed. Then I looked over at my sleeping father, and my uncle’s legs sticking out of his tent, and asked Debbie, “What if you could know?”
“Could know what?”
“Your fate. Would you want to?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, let’s say you were Woody Guthrie, and there was some kind of blood test you could take that would let you know for sure whether you were going to get the disease or not later on. Would you want to know, or would you want to wait and see?”
“Shit, Gabriel, that’s hard. I couldn’t do anything to change the results, right?”
I shook my head.
“And I wouldn’t be able to forget them once I knew them. AND there’s no treatment for the disease, so knowing in advance doesn’t do any good, right?”
I shook my head again.
“Yup, I’d just stay high.” She laughed, but it wasn’t a ha-ha kind of laugh. I wondered about David and Michael. Was my uncle doomed, or semi-doomed like Arlo Guthrie? Could I change Michael’s fate, or was it already written somewhere? And if I couldn’t change it, would he want to know what was coming? Was there any point in trying to influence anything that happened this weekend? Was I here to tell my uncle something, to tell my father something, or to learn something for myself?
Another thing hit me: What if Michael knew exactly what was going to happen? What if he already was planning to kill himself, and this was his big last party weekend? Maybe going to Woodstock with his girlfriend and his brother was Michael’s version of staying high. If so, I just didn’t get it. He was definitely on edge at times about something—I had seen that. But he had calmed down again as soon as Willow had touched him. And yeah, he had awful parents, but so did my father. And clearly, my dad was going to make it to adulthood. Plus, Michael had Willow.
Are You Experienced? Page 7
