Like People in History

by Felice Picano

  I didn't. Phone calls to our friends from work elicited more or less the same response. Maria had heard somewhat more. "They're saying everyone's going to show up: the Mamas and the Papas, Janis Joplin. Even the Beatles!"

  "It might be a cool place to go," Carl said. "They were selling tickets through the mail, but they couldn't have sold them all."

  So the concert upstate became known to me. But once we tried to make plans for getting there, it seemed pretty impossible to manage, especially without a car.

  That night, I attended a party given by a friend of a friend of a friend and had a bad and boring and weird time, and I ended up pretty stoned and drunk. I crashed hard, naturally in my own bed, naturally alone, and awoke twice during the night needing a drink of water. The third time I got up, the bathroom was locked. I heard the shower running. Michelle must have come home. Sure enough, it was six A.M.

  The kitchen was lighter. I got my drink there but avoided the brighter living room windows. I was back in bed, asleep again in a minute.

  At first I wasn't sure whether it was a dream or not; too many of my dreams began this same deceptive way: I'm in bed, in my own bedroom, then... But I was awake, or somewhat awake. No, I must have been. After all, I felt warm, though I was naked, the top sheet twisted barely across the middle of my body. And there was Michelle, standing in the bedroom doorway, leaning against one side of it, her arms raised above her head, drying her hair with a towel. One hip shifted her weight to that side, and suddenly every angle softly flowed into another. She was wearing a pair of the palest blue panties and nothing else.

  "You home?" I asked stupidly, my voice slurred despite all the water.

  "Been out late?" she asked back. Her voice also sounded furred.

  I said something I didn't remember as I finished saying it, and she answered something else I failed to grasp, then she said something I didn't understand even after a few seconds of silence. "Well, that looks interesting," she said, looking at my erection barely contained in the sheet. I found myself looking at it too, somewhat objectively, asking myself what it was doing there, then she was standing closer, no longer toweling off her hair, then somehow I was handing my erection over to her, and she was touching it, saying something in a low voice. Suddenly she was on the bed, straddled across my body, my erection inside her, and her hair was all over my face and chest and we were rocking together and apart and acting like I don't know, those ponies in that animated Russian fairy tale I used to see on TV all the time when I was a kid, so white and elegant and untamed, romping together in perfect synchronicity through snow-whitened pastures and huge iced fields.

  "I figured it was okay, since you were within my list of possible birth signs," Michelle explained after the trumpeting orgasm which confirmed for me that the incident, though dreamlike, wasn't a dream. Her explanation, in all its prosaicness, was further proof, if any were needed.

  "I better get dressed," I said, hoping she'd try to stop me. "I've got to go to work."

  "That's a bummer." Michelle sat up and turned half aside, holding one breast as though testing a change in its mass as a consequence of intercourse. "I thought maybe you'd want to go upstate to this weekend thing."

  "The concert they've been talking about on the radio? Sure! How?"

  She and I pooled our resources: not much—renting a car was out of the question. I could take the afternoon off from work as sick leave. This was officially frowned on—it being a sunny Friday afternoon in the summer—but not impossible.

  More important than any mere logistics was the stunning fact that I'd just been laid for the first time in months. This alone would, I was certain, significantly alter anyone's thinking. It went without saying that I was now certain I was in love with Michelle and she with me. We simply had to be together from now on. So I thought, okay, we'll follow her plan, even though it does seem kind of naive and mostly unworkable.

  She and I were to meet back at the apartment, pack overnight bags— a blanket, towel, thermos of water, snacks, change of underwear—and take the Seventh Avenue IRT subway uptown, switch there to the Jerome Avenue line and take that train to its penultimate stop at the northernmost end of the Bronx. Michelle had done this before; she knew it was close to a major highway headed upstate. From there all we had to do was hitch a ride. If this concert was as big as everyone said it was and if it was being attended by as many hip people as the FM broadcasters assured us it was, we should have no trouble hitching a ride.

  I'd briefly thought to tell my friends at work about our plan. But the truth was I wanted to be with Michelle, to have her to myself, partly because I was now able to, and partly because I still didn't myself believe in this sudden new relationship—I wanted to check it out for myself. So I didn't tell Debbie and Maria I was going; I did mention to Carl that I might be picked up by some friends of friends later that night or next morning, but I worked to make even that sound as unsubstantial as the plans we'd all ended up making the night before on the phone. Most important, I told no one I was planning to leave work "ill" that afternoon. Their surprise would help make it look more legitimate, should Kovacs ask where I was.

  Michelle was packed when I got home, and even more enthusiastic for us to take off right away: she'd been listening to FM station reports all morning, and she regaled me with these facts: people had already begun to gather at the concert grounds; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Dr. John, Janis Joplin, and the Jefferson Airplane all had agreed to be part of the concert. Dylan might still appear at the last minute; still no word on the Fab Four, but it looked like just about everyone else in rock or folk music would be there.

  I changed out of my work clothes and into my denims and T-shirt to get into the mood. By noon the temperature outdoors was already in the mid-eighties, but I knew what mountain nights could be like and I packed my big Bolivian wool sweater. As for Michelle, besides her enthusiasm for our journey, I couldn't for the life of me figure out what else she was feeling— say, for example, about me, about us. This was crucial: because of what had happened last night, I'd put my entire future into Michelle's hands.

  The subway trip seemed endless, even on the express train. We were the last passengers in our or any other car we could see. Equally empty once we arrived was the amazingly clean, white-tiled station at Mosholu Parkway, smelling heavily of recently used disinfectant. We trudged up out of dim tunnel lighting into broad daylight.

  It was 2 P.M., and we were in the middle of nowhere. The subway station stairway sat surreally within grass and trees upon a broad, flat area of the northern Bronx dominated by a virtually untrafficked avenue. Across the street was another subway station as Dadaistically set amid suburban grass and trees. In the distance, we could make out a neighborhood of cottages cloistered by tall trees, enclosed by thick bushes, all loosely wrapped in hurricane fencing. In the opposite direction, low brick buildings were barely visible along a strip of such magnificent green I swore it had to be a golf course.

  "This is the Bronx?"

  "I told you," Michelle gloated.

  Despite the heat, the short walk to the highway wasn't unpleasant. We bypassed the entry to Van Cortlandt Park to walk along a short block of square-roofed buildings two stories high, with shops on their lower levels: a shoemaker, a grocery store, a stationers, and a garden supply. I was reminded of the neighborhood I'd grown up in.

  "What street is this?" I asked.

  The closest signs read "Van Brunt Blvd." and "212th Street."

  "I grew up in a place just like this, only in eastern Queens," I told Michelle, pointing southeast. "Only that one was called Vanderveer Street and Two Hundred and Twentieth Street."

  The side of the highway: cars slipping by, those in the closest lane slowing to get off onto a ramp. We'd dropped our bags when one stopped.

  "That's quick," I said, wondering if in fact it wasn't too quick.

  "Looks like a cool guy driving," Michelle said. "Let's go."

  An older guy d
efinitely. At least twenty-six. With a fall auburn beard and a spatter-dyed T-shirt and—we saw once he opened the front door of the pickup—tight-fitting denims like those we wore, and great-looking old cowboy boots.

  "You headed upstate?" he asked, looking us over coolly.

  I was about to say yes, when Michelle said, "We're going to the concert up there near Woodstock. You know about it?"

  "It's closer to Bethel," he said, ignoring me totally now. "Up at Yasgur's farm. And you are in luck, pretty lady. I'm headed right up there."

  "It far?" I asked, unwilling to be left out. Truth is, I didn't like either the way he was looking at Michelle or the way she was looking back at him.

  "Not far once we cross the Hudson at the Tappan Zee Bridge; it's only an hour or so. You traveling together?" He had to ask the obvious. "Well, then throw your bags in the backbed." He smiled, and I had to admit it was a killer smile. "That's what it's called," he said to Michelle. "Honest injun."

  I was busily trying to think of something to keep us from getting in the truck. But I knew I'd fail because he was taking us right there. And there was room, so what in the hell could I say?

  "By the way, I'm Edgar," he introduced himself, at the same time he reached down a well-muscled forearm to pull Michelle up next to him inside the truck's cabin. I was left to throw our bags in back, next to a hundred-pound bag of cement. The truck was already rolling back onto the highway before I'd managed to get myself in or the door closed.

  Michelle was already lighting up a pipeful of grass. I thought she was sitting awfully close to Edgar, given the hand gear was right against her leg and he kept his hand on it whether he was shifting or not.

  "You two planning to be together for the weekend?" he asked. Uncool question, I thought. So obvious.

  Evidently Michelle didn't think so. "We've planned to go to this concert gig," she said, which sounded awfully ambiguous to me.

  I watched with undulled pain as during the rest of the drive Michelle slowly, but I thought surely, turned all of her attention from me to Edgar. It was subtle, doubtless, made up of some of the tiniest of attentions, of motions. But it was clear, and it was inexorable. She let us both know she preferred him, though she'd come with me; this despite the fact that, as Edgar told us, he was already "hooked up with my old lady"— Sarah, who was at this moment in their house near the Ashokan Reservoir, toward which we were headed.

  Michelle got that information out of him, even got his astro-data out of him (I wasn't sure whether or not he fit her paternal sign format), using a series of questions and turnaround revelations.

  My future was beginning to look so bleak I became increasingly silent, stared out at the scenery along the Governor Dewey Thruway, sulked over Michelle's faithlessness, then wondered if that's really what it was or if I were merely being stupidly overpossessive about her. After all, we'd only screwed once. It made no sense at all. Michelle was simply being herself and thus independent, and I was being ridiculously jealous and thus not at all myself. What had happened between us last night had been a fluke, a mistake: it meant nothing. I couldn't rely on it as an answer to my future.

  But if that was true, what would this weekend turn out to be like?

  Since I couldn't pull anything even close to an answer out of my head, I sulked more. Once when Michelle turned to hand me the pipe— finally remembering I was there, I thought—she had to tap my shoulder twice before I bothered to take it.

  Past Kingston the thruway traffic thinned out. At the next turnoff, it thickened again as cars from various other directions joined us, and then we were off the main road, driving on a two-lane highway through the Catskills—this was real country to a city- and suburbs-raised boy.

  The town of Woodstock itself seemed small and sort of makeshift, but it was evident even to strangers like me and Michelle that it wasn't usually so filled with cars and people. Edgar got stuck in what he told us was an unprecedented Main Street traffic jam and had to find a shortcut through several alleys, all the while asking, "Jesus! Where'd they all come from?"

  Once we hit the road out of town, a sign suddenly announced the concert. By then traffic was thick coming and going from all the roads we could see, and people were simply abandoning their cars on the side of the road and walking to the place. "I don't believe this," Edgar said. We did: we'd been listening to the DJ's updated reports on the concert grounds.

  The four-wheel drive on Edgar's pickup came in handy now. He drove alongside the parked and stopped cars as long as he could, then when it was clear we couldn't go any farther, he tore away on bare ground up through bushes and over a hill, onto a dirt road he alone could see, headed away rather than toward the concert ground, I thought. He slowed down once we reached an apple orchard. As we drove through, apples shaken from their branches by the truck's vibrations rattled onto the hood and roof. Finally, he stopped. We walked through the trees, polishing and chomping apples, headed toward a bluff that faced what Edgar remembered from earlier drives here on a dirt bike as "the only more or less bowl-shaped place in the whole area."

  He was right about it being bowl-shaped. But even Edgar was astounded by how it had been transformed. Although it was still only about four in the afternoon, a hundred thousand people must have already congregated. From where we stood, the land dropped suddenly then rose all around like a multicolored Pointillist tablecloth being shaken of its crumbs. At the very far end, it dipped smartly then rose again. Sound and light structures had been set up at a distant rise; even from this far away, their metal glittered brightly in the afternoon sun. The little depression seemed to have been the original space laid out for the concert, but the crowd had already grown far beyond the established limitations. From where we stood, Michelle pointed out what must have been the original fence laid out around the concert area. I located what must have been the original parking lot, now partly wedged into a side of the crowd. Edgar spotted where the ticket takers had been. By the time we arrived at that spot some fifteen minutes later, even these vestiges of the original organization had vanished, absorbed into the ever growing mass of young people arriving by the hundreds every minute.

  "I don't believe it," Edgar kept saying.

  "I do," Michelle said. We were within the crowd now, and it was far out—simply amazing.

  "Who are all these people?" Edgar asked.

  "Us," Michelle replied.

  "Us," I confirmed, repeating Jerry Garcia's line, "We're the people your mother warned you about."

  My annoyance with Michelle was gone. I no longer cared how she acted, what she said, what she thought, whom she preferred, or even what happened next. It was more than being high from all the marijuana smoke in the air around us. I simply knew that I was going to have a good time this weekend. I could sense the assurance of it in the kids, in their easy, fun behavior, in the solidity of the very vibrations around us.

  We passed about a score of Portosan toilets, which seemed to be all that had been brought in. An enterprising hot dog vendor and an icecream truck just managed to pull up to one edge of the crowd, and proceeded to sell out their entire stock in minutes. We kept walking, passing beautiful, young, stoned, dancing-to-the-portable-radio men and women, boys and girls. They were long-haired, or wore Afros. They had granny glasses on, or pale blue-, pink-, or yellow-lensed sunglasses. They wore shorts and halters, T-shirts and jeans. They were blond and brunette and red-haired, wearing it long and straight or kinky and fuzzy. Pale-skinned, tanned, olive-skinned, Creole yellow, and Nigerian brown, they were dancing and kissing and smoking grass and just standing around grooving on the sheer growing mass of themselves.

  Up ahead, speakers were being tested at the sound structures, and it looked as though we'd easily find ourselves a good spot anywhere around here, since nobody was crowding anybody, and everyone was leaving more than enough breathing space.

  Edgar kept saying, "I don't believe this."

  He had wondered out loud about going back to his place and getting his old
lady and the other couple visiting them, when he bumped into some friends who told him they were there already—house guests and all!—up ahead, closer to the musicians.

  Close enough, it turned out once we got there, for us to see the stage clearly and anyone who'd be standing on it. Trucks and vans and other vehicles belonging to entertainers and technicians had begun to gather in numbers off to one side of the structure, and the speaker system— originally only at the stage area—was now being widely extended to enclose a much greater space. Allegedly the concert promoters had flown this new equipment onto the farm in helicopters. No music yet—the first acts were due to start by sundown.

  Michelle, Edgar, and I settled in with his old lady and their house guests on their blanket, as they explained why and how they'd come here—driving over to check it out and remaining when they heard who'd be playing and singing. They had a jug of wine with them and grass, and we were all pretty comfortable by the time we could hear—clearly, if off-mike—the sounds of an electrified guitar, as someone warmed up.

  Someone onstage—an engineer or promoter, it wasn't clear—asked for lights. They were provided, though it was still daytime. He then tested microphones and speakers. Once those were working, he left the stage. Seconds later, we heard a voice over the microphones.

  "Welcome to the Woodstock Music Festival. Our first performer of many in the following two days will be Richie Havens."

  Applause rumbled and cascaded so far around and in back of us that it was clear that many more people had arrived since we had. Havens started with his own characteristic guitar lick and distinctive lisping bass voice—the concert was on.

  It lasted until about two o'clock that night, with Janis Joplin wailing out "Ball and Chain" until we thought she'd drop dead right there onstage. Depressing as that might sound, it wasn't—it was completely exhilarating; it left the crowd in the highest possible mood, demanding more.