He wandered over to a battered Victorian couch on the far side of the room, away from the piano, and sat next to a man who introduced himself as Alex Namath, “no relation to Joe.” Alex was with the New York Times, and he immediately began lamenting Nixon’s plea to Congress the month before, urging passage of a bill that would stop the flow of drugs at their foreign sources (“Antelope City,” the girl sang, “slow-pokey pretty”), provide stringent penalties for violations of federal drug laws (“Dusky-dawn ditty”), and permit federal narcotics agents with search warrants to enter private dwellings unannounced.
In Woodstock, New York, 400,000 kids were openly smoking marijuana in the rain, and listening to the rock star Richie Havens exclaiming into a microphone, “Wow! Phew! I mean like wow! Phew!”
She could not have got to a telephone even if she wanted to, but she was so overwhelmed by the sheer excitement of it all that long before dusk, she’d completely forgotten the promise to her mother. The festival site had been leased from a dairy farmer named Max Yasgur who by now must have been entertaining second thoughts about the whole idea. He certainly could not have had any notion that his six hundred acres would be turned overnight into the third largest city in New York State, a city without adequate food, shelter, water or sanitation facilities. Nor could he have surmised that a modestly proposed “music and art fair” would become a tribal gathering of such enormous proportions. Then again, neither could anyone else in the United States have reckoned that so many damn kids could convene at the drop of a hat to express the ideas and feelings of an entire generation.
The rain had stopped — but who cared about rain? The field was a quagmire — but who gave a damn about mud? On the loudspeaker system, one of the festival’s twenty-four-year-old promoters was warning that somebody in the crowd was selling bad acid, but Lissie hadn’t seen anyone shooting dope, and the Sullivan County cops weren’t even making any marijuana busts. How could they? This was one gigantic smoke-in, one coming together of the Age of Aquarius, one enormous reaffirmation of the love people as opposed to the hate people. In Vietnam tonight, the airplanes were maybe defoliating the jungles with napalm, and the soldiers were maybe on vill sweeps in the boonies. But here in America, the heart of America, the future of America, the kids were offering each other food and pot and water and solace and sympathy and Lissie had never in her life felt more a part of something truly important.
At eleven that night, while the party was still in full swing, Jamie learned from the television set in the Lanes’ bedroom that the Woodstock Music and Art Fair had mushroomed beyond the wildest expectations of its promoters and that half the kids in the nation (or so it seemed) were crammed onto the upstate New York site, sleeping in the open or in tents, and passing around marijuana as if it were salted peanuts. He had come upstairs to escape a rendition of “Falling in Love Again” by a sixty-year-old lady who began her impression of Marlene Dietrich by straddling a chair and inadvertently showing her lacy black panties to a somewhat startled audience. When she showed her panties a second time, Jamie decided the exhibition was something less than accidental, and he eased his way through the crowd, found the steps leading to the second story of the house, and — drink in hand — climbed stealthily upstairs.
He had nothing more in mind than flopping onto the paisley-covered bed in the guest room, but he’d had a little more to drink than was normally good for him, and as he came down the narrow hallway he felt the familiar buzz that told him he was on the thin edge of inebriation. When he looked into the Lanes’ bedroom, he thought it was his own, his own for the weekend at any rate, except that he couldn’t remember a television set in his room. He went into the room, sat on the floor in front of the set, searched for the on-off volume control, found it, and then scanned the channels for a news report, finally getting one originating in Boston.
In near-intoxicated wonder, he listened while the commentator told all about the appalling lack of toilet facilities at the Woodstock festival, the drenching rain that had turned the festival site into a semblance of a World War I battlefield, the lines of automobiles still backed up for fifteen miles in any direction from White Lake, the half-naked boys and girls romping in the mud. He was calmed somewhat, but only somewhat, when the commentator mentioned that there had been only one short-tempered incident thus far, an argument between two boys, which was promptly squelched when all the kids around them began chanting, “Peace, peace.” The festival-goers, in fact, seemed to be in exceptionally high spirits despite the rain (Small wonder, Jamie thought, with all that dope around), helping each other to cope with the elements and inadequate facilities.
“There hasn’t been a single fistfight,” the commentator said, “and it’s impossible to believe that anything like a rape or a stabbing could occur here at Woodstock this weekend. The message here is love. Soggy, but loud and clear nonetheless.” The commentator paused, looked at his notes, and then said, “An Australian-American board of inquiry into the June third collision between...”
“That’s what the message should be all the time,” a voice behind Jamie said.
He turned from where he was sitting cross-legged before the television set. The blonde in the gold-link top was standing in the doorway to the bedroom, leaning against the jamb, a drink in her hand.
“Love,” she said.
“... and the Australian carrier Melbourne in the South China...”
“Why don’t you turn that off?” she said.
“... concluded that the American ship...”
He snapped off the television set.
“I was rude to you,” she said. “I’m Joanna Berkowitz. I should have introduced myself when we talked in the kitchen.”
“Well, don’t worry about it,” he said.
“You’re the photographer, aren’t you?”
“A photographer.”
“With the marvelous pictures in New York this week.”
“Thank you.”
“When did you take them?”
“In March.”
“The kids all looked cold.”
“They were cold,” Jamie said, and nodded. “Very cold night.”
“I loved that one of the old men playing checkers.”
“I liked that one, too.” He drank from his glass, and looked up at her. “What did you think of Marlene downstairs?”
“Sort of sad. Harrison told me she was a beauty when she was young.”
“Who’s Harrison?”
“The man I came with.”
“Ah, yes, Harrison. Knew her when she was younger, did he?”
“Harrison knew everybody when they were younger,” she said, and smiled.
“Was younger,” Jamie said. “When he was younger.”
“Yes, Harrison.”
“No, everybody,” Jamie said.
“I’m not following you.”
“Everybody. Singular. Everybody was younger.”
“Oh.”
“Right.” He nodded, swallowed what was left in his glass, and said, “Pain in the ass, right? People who correct your grammar.”