Читать книгу Woodstock Rising - Tom Wayman - Страница 10
ОглавлениеI assured Pump I was aware of the Woodstock Festival and that Edward and I had been discussing it earlier.
Jay spoke in a tone of wonder. “You know Eddie could have gone. Chance of a lifetime, and he —”
“It’s the future, man,” Pump declared.
“‘Bound to be the very next phase,’ is it?” Edward mocked, quoting Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow.”
Pump was heating the blade of one of the dinner knives over the candle flame. “Woodstock happened right when we got out of the army. Jay and me talked it over. It’s a sign, man.”
“It’s a sign you and Jay have fried your brains,” Edward said.
Pump shook his head. “No, man. Woodstock’s the future.”
“Enormous rock festivals are the future?” Edward jeered. “There’s been big rock festivals ever since Monterey. Exactly how are they the future?”
Pump put the heated knife on the porch floor alongside the unheated one. He unwrapped the twist of plastic wrap, and with a penknife, carefully cut a chunk away from a lump of hash. “Who’s first?”
Jay crouched beside Pump. He lifted the smaller portion of hash onto the blade of the unheated dinner knife and stuck the other blade back into the candle flame. After a moment or two, he applied the heated blade to the top of the hash. Thick, tarry-smelling smoke instantly curled upward, which he bent to inhale. He struggled to hold the smoke in his lungs, coughed, laughed at himself, then vented smoke from his nostrils in a series of convulsive spasms. “Woooo!” he cried when the jerks finally subsided. “Eddie?” he asked, gesturing toward the candle.
Edward swung off the recliner and positioned himself by the flame.
“This stuff about demonstrations and fighting the power sounds cool,” Pump said as Edward hot-knived a share of the hash. “It’s still conflict, man. We do this, they do that in return. Like Nam — we escalate, they escalate, so we escalate more.”
“Are you suggesting we shouldn’t take any action against —” I started in.
“Woodstock was about just being,” Pump interrupted. “People were there to groove, not fight in the streets. Being together ended up being stronger than anything. Who’s going to oppose a million heads?”
“There are how many million Vietnamese?” I asked. “How many million blacks? Chicanos? The government doesn’t hesitate to —”
“I been in the army, man. You have no idea what they can unleash. Even in Nam, like our sergeant said, we’re fighting with one hand tied behind our back.”
Pump’s claim about peace and love somehow vanquishing oppression was standard hippie fare. What startled me was his linkage of this fantasy with the usual right-wing excuse for the U.S. failure to defeat the NLF: the military wasn’t allowed to operate to its full potential.
“There’s a saying,” I countered. “The power of the people is greater than the —”
“In unarmed combat they taught us to fight by using the enemy’s momentum against him. That’s the power of Woodstock — we showed once and for all we’re unstoppable, man. We did it without a confrontation trip. We simply were, all together.”
“Wayman?” Edward beckoned. As I rose and approached the knives, he reminded Pump that Woodstock was a commercial venture. “The promoters put the festival together to make money, dough, filthy lucre.” Edward lowered himself again into his deck chair. “Don told me Woodstock only became a free concert because the site wasn’t fenced properly. The event wasn’t even held at the real Woodstock. The backers —”
“The name doesn’t matter, man,” Pump said. “What’s more important is —”
“The backers got into a zoning beef with the locals,” Edward continued. “The location had to be shifted fifty miles away at the last minute. That meant the new site was never completely prepared. Hundreds of thousands more customers showed up than anticipated, and the promoters lost control. Too many gate-crashers were getting onto the site, so the organizers bowed to the inevitable and announced that Woodstock was free. Radio stations in Manhattan broadcast the news, and that convinced even more people to go. Don says the promoters lost big dollars.”
The sweetly dense smoke off the knife poured into my nostrils and from there inside my brain, coating my thoughts with pure honey. Pump was suddenly kneeling beside me, and took the tools out of my hands. I floated through air to resume my former seat. Jay had levered himself up with his arms and sat on the porch rail, his back to the night sea.
Pump was poised over the knives, still disputing with Edward. “Maybe the organizers were messing with something bigger than they understood. Maybe karma took a hand, man, and set things in motion that had to be.”
“Definitely,” Edward mocked. “Except, as Don tells it, the bigger force was a county zoning board that refused the original permit.”
Astonishingly, Edward and the other two seemed unaffected by their inhalation of the hash. Whereas my mind was drifting on an ocean of aromatic bougainvillea-like petals, pillowy with cellular gratification.
From the living room the emphatic guitar and drumbeat of Crosby, Stills and Nash’s “Long Time Gone” was displaying the self-confident assurance of tires covering ground on asphalt hour after hour. The rhythm wafted me back to my long drive, reminding me how tired I was and simultaneously infusing me with energy. The feeling echoed how when I was behind the wheel, the freeway after a time casting its spell: highway hypnosis, I called it. I hated to pull over to eat or even refuel. The road that unfurled ahead of me compelled me to follow, to see where it led next, to learn what the universe would reveal.
I glanced at my watch. Quarter to one. CS&N were insisting:
Turn, turn any corner.
Hear, you must hear what the people say.
You know there’s something that’s going on around here
That surely, surely, surely
Won’t stand the light of day.
Pump was leaning over the hash. “You and Jay are a little late with Flower Power,” Edward said. “While you were busy defending the country from enemies foreign and domestic, that crap came and went. Right, Wayman?”
I could only nod.
“When we first got here, a bunch of hippies were living in Laguna Canyon,” Edward said, as if presenting a parable. He recounted how the civic authorities didn’t like the freak colony, claiming it created a bad image for the town, had no sanitation, and the inhabitants paid no taxes on their ramshackle homes. The canyon dwellers were served with eviction papers. “At the appointed hour, not only the Laguna Beach cops but the Orange County sheriff ’s deputies arrived with lights flashing and paddy wagons to do the dirty deed,” Edward said. “A few of the more enlightened profs from UC Irvine showed up, too, to serve as witnesses, along with some students. Their hope was that the public eye would keep the Orange County sheriff ’s boys from doing what they’re famous for. Fat chance.”
Pump glanced up and started to say something, but Edward rode over him. “The Canyon freaks had decided non-violence was the route to take. They were going to preach peace to the peace officers. The hippies started chanting ‘Ommm’ as the cops approached with drawn clubs. Didn’t seem to have much effect. People got kicked, punched, clubbed, dragged off, busted. Even one of the Irvine profs, Shoemaker in philosophy, was arrested. Police brutality was the talk of the town for a week, then everybody forgot about it. There’s your power of non-confrontation.”
Jay slid onto the deck from the rail and stood. “I bet there weren’t so many freaks around in those days. That’s why the pigs could get away with it.”
Edward snorted. “That’s not the reason. Then or now, it’s —”
“More and more people have turned on to what’s happening,” Jay cut him off. “Woodstock’s just the beginning. If good vibes aren’t the answer, tell me why a million of us were there? Where’d they come from — the moon?”
“Best estimate I heard was half a million,” Edward corrected him. “Don says the crowd was hard to get a fix on. People were arriving and leaving continually.”
Pump placed the knives on the deck and hauled himself to his feet. “So nobody really knows how many —”
“I heard they had to close the fucking freeway to the area, Eddie, because so many people were trying to get there,” Jay persisted. “More than a million would’ve attended if they hadn’t shut down the roads.”
“I don’t dispute that popular music is popular,” Edward retorted. “But music is something that’s bought and sold. The bands weren’t performing for free. Maybe the audience for rock music is even larger than the people merchandising it knew. That doesn’t make Woodstock any challenge to the establishment.”
CS&N were imploring:
Speak out, you got to speak out
Against the madness.
You got to speak your mind
If you dare.
Pump leaned against the porch rail beside Jay. “It’s about beliefs, man. What you believe in.”
“Values,” Jay seconded.
“Values?” his brother jeered. “When did you pay any attention to values?”
“Look around you,” Jay declared. “We’re spending a pleasant evening breaking the law. What we’re doing isn’t hurting anybody. We fight the power by just doing our thing. They can’t arrest everybody.”
“Can’t they?” Edward said.
“If nobody does what they say, they can pass all the laws they want. They can’t control us anymore.”
I marvelled again how the hash didn’t seem to slow the others’ abilities to function. My mind, buoyed in a cocoon woven of gossamer threads, was finding it hard to concentrate on their argument.
“Everything we’ve been rapping about tonight,” Jay said, “protests and busted heads — the big stuff? If people don’t obey, the bad shit won’t go down. What can the Man do? That’s what Woodstock is about.”
Edward sneered. “‘Suppose they gave a war and nobody came,’ is that it?”
“Something like that,” Pump said.
I felt I should contribute to the discussion, but my brain wouldn’t work properly, couldn’t establish contact with the outside world. I tried to clarify my feelings about Woodstock. The event in upper New York State verified for me, as I had mentioned earlier to Edward, that we had become a significant component of the population rather than a minuscule fringe. The excitement I experienced when I read about or saw pictures of Woodstock was like the rush sparked by the Columbia University strike the spring before last, where SDS played a central role. Or by the determination of the protesters at the Democratic National Convention that summer. Or by the San Francisco State strikers last fall. Or when, this year, the ever-expanding opposition to the war resulted in more and larger peace marches. Or when the Harvard strike erupted in April. When People’s Park was occupied in May. Each of these examples of resistance indicated a swelling momentum for change, yet except for Woodstock they involved comparatively few people. By far, most students on a campus or citizens on a street pursued their customary, short-haired, conformity-restricted lives. Woodstock, in contrast, was massive.
Nevertheless, I agreed with Edward that good vibes weren’t about to affect anything. People could put a daisy into the barrel of a National Guardsman’s rifle, like at the Pentagon demonstrations, all they wanted. If the trigger was ever pulled, they’d discover vegetation is no impediment to a bullet. The war would end only when enough people were in the street saying the war was immoral, when significant numbers of GIs refused to fight, when enough potential draftees split for Canada or Sweden so that the White House understood the war was lost on the home front. Of course, this equation hinged on the NLF not being defeated, but to date the insurgents had proven able to hold their own.
“I can’t believe my own brother would believe a lot of hippie-trippy bullshit,” Edward said in a mock-rueful voice. “I expected better from you.” His comment set off a further exchange between the three.
I inventoried what, if anything, was positive about the freak world. The war, I was convinced, was a symptom of deeply rooted disease, a system that depended on processing its own citizens through the meat grinder of school, jobs, debt, and war for the sake of the Great God Profit. The backing of any brutal dictator — in South Vietnam or anywhere in the world — as long as he claimed to be anti-Communist or pro-U.S. investment was a by-product of the meat grinder, of the worship of the dollar. My liking for the hippies was their refusal to be part of these crimes. Whatever their personal contradictions, inconsistencies, and faults, the freaky people wanted something more life-affirming than a chance to mindlessly consume, or an existence based on the pursuit of personal wealth at any cost.
For all my disparaging of the love-peace-and-flowers types, I believed a monument should be erected to the Unknown Hippie: a statue of a young man and young woman in appropriate attire. It took a lot of courage to be the only hippie in your sis-boom-bah high school, or in your red-white-and-blue small town, or to be out on the road passing through unfriendly territory. When I first arrived on the Gold Coast, plenty of restaurants and other businesses would refuse to serve people with long hair. In Orange County, tires were slashed on cars displaying a peace symbol bumper sticker.
Three years later that symbol was flaunted on earrings, belt buckles, chest medallions. Yet the opportunity to safely wear these was a path others had blazed at considerable risk. Obtaining any sort of job remained difficult if your appearance didn’t conform to how people dressed in the ads in Life magazine. Up the road at Disneyland, “hippie-looking” potential customers — men with beards and long hair, or women who were barefoot, beaded, and wearing too-colourful long dresses — still were routinely refused entrance. Crowd shots of happy Disneyland patrons were a feature on the Disney Company’s TV series, and Disney executives wanted only the image of “normal” Americans to be broadcast.
I surfaced momentarily from my hash-induced ruminations to hear CS&N’s counsel:
It’s been a long time coming
It’s going to be a lo-ong
Time gone.
Despite Woodstock, I didn’t want to exaggerate the hippies’ sartorial influence: most people on the street still looked like the date was 1959. The male ideal was to resemble clean-cut FBI recruits, and the female, to present variations of Doris Day — both sexes were garbed like department store mannequins. But visible amid the crowd now — in small numbers, admittedly — were freewheeling tie-dyed, multihued, unisex costumes. Stores had even opened that specialized in such clothing. Beards and beads and earrings on men were still the exception. Each month, however, a few more were discernible in public, just as more alternatives to the close-cropped businessman’s and bureaucrat’s pencil-thin tie and stiff white shirt were evident.
As outcasts, heads could share camaraderie. Hippiedom at its finest was a brotherhood and sisterhood: freaks giving rides to other freaks hitchhiking, freaks letting other freaks crash at their apartments or communal houses, the sharing of whatever you had — food, shelter, drugs. You recognized each other by how you appeared, by the buttons you wore, and you assumed you both agreed on some basic beliefs: opposition to the war, to the draft, to consumerism, to racism, to what Herbert Marcuse down in San Diego had termed a “one-dimensional” existence. You took for granted both of you wanted each day and every night to be as full of energy, beauty, humour, and raunchiness as our music.
In practice, though head acknowledged head on the street, flashed each other the “V” peace sign or the clenched fist of revolt, a spectrum of freakiness existed. Some suburbanite kids were heads only on weekends, or tourists at be-ins and rock concerts. That was okay: none of us had been heads from birth.
I became aware Jay had teleported himself from his stance by the rail to a chair. “All right. Let’s agree for the sake of argument that Woodstock was a commercial deal.”
“I knew you’d come around to my opinion,” Edward gloated.
“If Woodstock — the bands, the festival — was what the producers made happen,” Jay said, ignoring his brother’s interruption, “something also went down there that we created.”
“Yes — fifty tons of garbage.”
En route back from the April 15 anti-war demonstration in San Francisco at the start of the Summer of Love, we had picked up a hitchhiker in the early evening on the shoulder of 101 near Salinas: long hair, clean-shaven, army jacket with an “A” shoulder patch, jeans. Once in the car, our passenger rapped non-stop. First he apologized for his slowness of speech, saying he was just down from a week on Dexedrine. He had hitched to San Francisco for the march, we learned, from Marina del Rey. He’d been staying with his younger brother there for the past three weeks, having recently arrived from Dallas to assist his sibling with a light show the brother put on for money.
In San Francisco our passenger had crashed with the Diggers. These were the Bay Area hippie self-help group who took their name from a land reform movement during the English Civil War of the mid-1600s, suppressed by Oliver Cromwell as too revolutionary.
“Diggers are a good idea,” the hitchhiker informed us. “It just doesn’t work. They’re against leaders, but too many slack off. Like there was nothing to eat at the Digger House, despite what you hear, Friday night. And the commode wasn’t working. They run out of paper and don’t buy more. Somebody uses a rag, and the commode backs up. They can’t afford a plumber, so it stays that way. About five in the morning they start waking us up because they had some hot spaghetti prepared. My taste buds aren’t ready for that at that hour of the morning.”
After delivering himself of how bummed he was by his hosts’ shortcomings, our hitchhiker smoked a cigarette begged from somebody in the car, then nodded off. We woke him at 3:00 a.m. at the sign for Culver Boulevard. The last we saw of him was in the harsh illumination at the interchange as he dropped over the shoulder of the exit ramp.
“What I’m trying to tell you, Eddie,” Jay was holding forth, “is that when hundreds of thousands of heads arrived at Woodstock, dug the scene, and wiped out the intentions of the money-grubbing guys, they created another way of existing.”
“Yay!” Pump cheered. “The Woodstock Nation!”
“That tag is strictly a media invention,” Edward scoffed. “Someone probably would have talked about the Monterey Nation if they’d thought of it. All it means is —”
I didn’t disagree with our passenger’s criticism of the Diggers a couple of years ago. The hippie trip could be too disconnected from reality. Surely, a functioning toilet was a minimal requirement for a communal crash pad.
Plus, the ideal of love and peace could be an opportunity for the unscrupulous to rip off naive freaks who believed in the inherent goodness of other freaks. Already in the Frozen North stories were circulating about land communes gone wrong. Several people would pool money to buy a rural acreage, and somebody would volunteer that the title be put in his name “just for convenience’s sake,” since the authorities frowned on twenty-six names on a title. A year later the hapless commune members found themselves kicked off “their” land by their obliging compatriot, with no legal recourse. Bridget, in a pronouncement I could get behind, once summed up why she couldn’t adopt the Flower Power philosophy wholesale: “We are all beings of light, true enough. But some of us have our jerk suits on.”
The mysticism, the passivity preached by Eastern religions, and the belief in the eternal merit of non-violence that were stirred into the hippie mix resulted too frequently in pathetic scenes like the Laguna Canyon episode. Martin Luther King’s reward for preaching non-violence was a bullet, which I would’ve thought was a convincing argument against his approach to obtaining civil rights. Certainly, the ghettos didn’t express their dismay at King’s murder by adopting the peaceful forms of protest he advocated. To factor love into major social change, into revolution, that emotion had better be — to quote one of the new slogans I’d heard — Armed Love.
“No, man, you’re dead fucking wrong.” Pump was jabbing a forefinger at Edward. “Dig it — when we were in the army looking out, you could see two different groups. I never thought of them as nations, but that’s what they are. One with long hair and drugs and a way of life different from our parents. The other the straight world. Like Jay says, the Woodstock concert might have been the promoter’s idea. The Woodstock Nation is all ours.”
Not that I was a wild-in-the-streets, bloodthirsty violence advocate — far from it. I counted myself one of the biggest chickens alive. Brawwwk-awwk-awwk was my motto. One of the posters I kept tacked up on my wall on Cajon Street was issued by SDS after Malcolm X was shot. Underneath Malcolm’s portrait was the caption: HE WAS READY. ARE YOU? I looked at the words every day, and inevitably thought, Well, not really. No. The poster reminded me each time I glanced at it how far I was from measuring up to what social change probably would demand.
How was it somebody like me, definitely deficient in the fearlessness department, could wear the buttons I had pinned on, believe the ideas I did? I recognized that I was able to participate in acts of resistance to injustice and oppression because I was surrounded by brave men and women whose leadership by example I could follow. If a protest picket involved only twenty of us circling outside the Santa Ana courthouse, for instance, while a bail hearing for a local anti-draft activist was proceeding inside, I felt embarrassed and vulnerable at being one of such a pitiful handful parading around and around while we clutched ferociously worded signs and raised a feeble-sounding chant: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh. NLF is gonna win.” But I was there.
Even if an action involved many more participants, like a peace protest, I was gripped since Century City by nervousness at the first glimpse of the police and at the audacity of our radical contingent’s thundered call-and-response: “What do we want? Revolution. When do we want it? Now.” Yet as long as people more courageous than me were confronting an enemy I shared with them, you’d find me beside them in the fray — albeit twitchy, anxious, sweating.
I couldn’t conceive any more of a life without participating in the fight to dismantle a social system that would cheerfully send my friends to die in a indefensible and unjust war, that would perpetuate its anti-human values through the educational institutions I was caught up in, and that would condemn me to a working life that would further enhance the control of a handful of individuals over huge portions of the globe and its citizens — including me. I was grateful, though, that so many people weren’t as inclined as I to tally up the hazards of taking action.
I wakened to a silence between the boys and Edward. Though I was still ripped, my head felt clearer. Had I missed some resolution of the debate? Or had the hash finally affected their brains enough that the dispute had evaporated? What time was it? Shouldn’t I be getting home?
“I read in the Free Press that Abbie Hoffman is writing a book called Woodstock Nation,” Jay said after a moment. “You can’t say Abbie is on the same trip as the Woodstock promoters.”
The quiet that had startled me was obviously only a breather.
“Hoffman!” Edward hooted. “You know what Don says happened to Hoffman at Woodstock?”
“What?” Jay asked.
“He was booed offstage by the crowd. There’s your Woodstock Nation.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“He got up onstage and was trying to give some spiel. People wanted to hear the music and shouted him down. The Who was either on, or on next. Peter Townsend bopped him across the head with his guitar.”
“What was Abbie saying, though? Maybe he was on a different trip.”
“Yeah, maybe he got hip to the scene after Woodstock was over,” Pump contributed. “Anyway, whatever Hoffman did or didn’t do, the Woodstock Nation is where it’s at.”
“Bullshit,” Edward said. “You just don’t —”
I missed his next sentences under a throbbing crescendo of noise as five Marine choppers swept low above the house and out to sea. Overflights of Marine helicopters and fighter jets occurred several times a day: training missions from the Corps’ El Toro airbase northeast of UC Irvine. I assumed the choppers were ultimately headed toward the USMC’s Camp Pendleton, which sprawled for twenty miles along Pacific Coast Highway south of San Clemente, not far down the coast from Laguna. I had no idea where the Phantom fighters were bound when they screamed by. Neither type of aircraft ordinarily rattled Laguna this late, though. I watched the choppers’ blinking lights as their racket faded across the Pacific.
My attention slipped off to ponder Pump’s and Jay’s advocacy of a Woodstock Nation. The freak world, for all its flaws, was no supporter of the system. If their numbers could be combined with the political energy of active opposition to the root causes of the war, the result would be mighty. I knew this was the notion behind Abbie Hoffman’s and Jerry Rubin’s pronouncements, supposedly on behalf of the Youth International Party. But with no actual organization, the Yippies had to rely on the media to carry their message — a shaky basis on which to build social change.
Plus, missing from the Yippies was any hint of democracy. Had anybody elected Rubin, or his sidekick Hoffman, to their roles as spokesmen? Or were they essentially media creations — flamboyant, highly inflated egos posturing as emblems of rebellious youth, depending on attention from the media for their legitimacy?
I heard from a distance Jay taunt his brother. “Is there anything that would convince you the Nation’s real?”
“Wayman’s the history scholar,” Edward said. “Ask him what constitutes a nation.”
I was absorbed with considering how I enjoyed the Yippies’ energy and regarded lots of their pronouncements as right on. But there was no Yippie equivalent to SDS’s ongoing work at hundreds of universities and colleges, to the mass demonstrations on campus and in the community we had sparked or helped spearhead. SDS chapters across the country were involved, I knew from New Left Notes, with local labour issues, with high-school kids, with black and Chicano and Puerto Rican youth organizations, even with church groups. Few of these activities were covered by the mainstream press. The Yippies, for all their great rebellious theatre in the media spotlight, seemed to be solely about symbolic gestures by relatively few individuals. The idea of a Woodstock Nation, I concluded, could possibly represent the evolution of both aspects of the youth movement: the hippie and the political. Of course, the Woodstock Nation concept could also have zero potential to be anything other than hype, as Edward maintained.
“Wayman.” Someone was trying to get my attention.
“He’s tripping free.”
I tried to focus. Everyone was staring at me.
“What characteristics define a nation?” Edward demanded.
“Nation?” I stalled for time, mentally reviewing the disputes in the Frozen North about whether Quebec, or the rest of Canada for that matter, constituted a genuine country. I recalled Fanon’s thesis in The Wretched of the Earth about how a population effects the transition from colony to state. My thoughts seemed tangled in webs of molasses-like ganglia.
“Uh,” I finally managed. “A nation? A nation, uh, is a population with, um, common beliefs? Shared … usually a common language or religion? Also, uh, common attitudes toward certain historical events. Toward the past. Their past, I mean. It —”
“Check,” said Jay.
“What?” Edward and I both blurted.
“That all applies to the Woodstock Nation.”
I dredged up another facet. “Usually, um, there’s a geographic component to nationhood.”
“Check,” Pump contributed.
“Which specific territory does your addled brain believe the Woodstock Nation occupies?” Edward asked archly.
“When I went into the army,” Jay said, “I always felt it was California I was going to fight for, not the U.S.”
“Irrelevant,” Edward said. “Give me the name of the place you believe the Woodstock Nation inhabits.”
“Planet Earth,” Pump said promptly.
Edward rolled his eyes.
“Like Baba Ram Das says, ‘Wherever you go, there you are,’” Jay affirmed.
“Hippie drivel,” retorted Edward.
I wracked my brain concerning anything else that defined nationhood. “Uh, another characteristic would be a willingness, a desire to function as a nation.”
“Check,” Pump and Jay said in unison.
Fanon’s book sprang back into my memory. “This Algerian writer, Franz Fanon? He claims a colony can only win independence through armed struggle. Nationhood can … it can never be a gift of the imperial power, but must be won militarily.” I tried to recall more. “Otherwise, Fanon says, the new country is still hopelessly tied to its colonial past.”
“Pretty bloodthirsty concept,” Edward said.
“Look at the difference between the U.S. and Canada,” I continued, warming to the theme. “The U.S. won its Revolutionary War. Canada’s revolution against the British in 1837 was crushed. Which is unquestionably most a country?”
“Checkmate, regardless,” Edward purred. “The Woodstock Nation isn’t into armed revolt.”
“I didn’t ever think of Canada as not a country,” Jay said. “Isn’t that where the cold weather comes from?”
I grimaced. “Also Zal Yanovsky of the Spoonful. Neil Young. Paul Anka, if you remember him.”
Pump appeared agitated by the turn the conversation had taken. “You can’t have a nation without war? I don’t fucking believe it.”
“The Woodstock Nation could be the first,” Jay insisted.
“That’s just Fanon’s theory,” I assured him. “Nobody really knows how you’d prove it if you —”
“The war business makes sense, come to think of it,” Edward said. “All those Commie countries are the result of violent revolution — Russia, Cuba, Red China, Vietnam.”
“The Panthers also say liberation of the black colony in the U.S. will only occur once blacks are armed,” I said.
“You wouldn’t believe in the Woodstock Nation unless it goes to war?” Pump asked.
Edward smirked. “I doubt anyone would seriously claim a nation is a series of rock concerts.”
“Nobody’s saying that, man,” Pump burst out. “It’s how we live that’s the Woodstock Nation.”
“Why not the Bowling League Nation then?” Edward needled. “Or, think of Willow and Phil — why not the Surfer Nation?”
“Nothing else will convince you the Woodstock Nation is real?”
Jay began to roll a number. “Leave it alone, Pump. Eddie’s on a negativity trip.”
Edward raised his hands, palms upward, as if to appeal to reason. “A Woodstock Nation might be a nice dream. But I’ve worked in advertising.”
“What would make the Woodstock Nation not just a scam for you?” Pump persisted.
Jay fired up the joint. “Pump, you’re not going to convince him.” He took a drag.
“Some act of nationhood,” Edward said. “Other than attending rock festivals, growing your hair long, and smoking dope.”
“What kind of act?” Jay demanded.
“It would have to reveal a determination to be a nation,” Edward mused. “Something tangible, maybe even confrontational. Not simply buying concert tickets.”
Pump took a hefty hit off the joint and passed it to Edward. “Such as?”
“You tell me. This is your baby.” Edward, retaining smoke from the doobie, proffered it to me.
I waved it off. As the effects of the hash dissipated, I was increasingly weary. “I should be headed home. It’s pretty late and it’s been a long day.”
“You’re welcome to crash here,” Edward said.
“Thanks, but it’s my first night back. I’ve been looking forward to sleeping in my own place again.”
Jay took the joint from Edward. He and Pump seemed preoccupied, churning over in their minds the test Edward had proposed. “It can’t be war, yet has to show the Woodstock Nation’s serious about being a country,” Jay muttered, then inhaled deeply.
“You have any ideas?” Pump asked me.
I shook my head.
“We don’t have to prove nothing, man,” declared Pump after a silence. “We are a nation. Who cares if that isn’t good enough for Edward? He’s not God.”
“Wait a minute,” Jay said, smoke streaming out of his nose. He handed the number to Pump and turned toward me. “You said the Chinese orbited a satellite?”
“Edward brought it up,” I reminded him. “But, yeah, this summer. It broadcast —”
Jay had swivelled toward Pump. “Didn’t you say the satellite was for national pride?”
Pump nodded, looking quizzical.
“That’s it!” Jay cried. “Let’s put up a satellite in the name of the Woodstock Nation.”
Edward laughed. “You’ve flipped. Wigged out completely. I suggest a lengthy stay in a certain facility I know where you can weave these nice baskets and —”
“No,” Jay insisted. “We can do it.”
Pump was staring at him, mouth ajar.
“Why stop with a satellite?” Edward mocked. “Why not land a hippie on the moon? ‘It’s a small step for a head, but a giant leap for the Woodstock Nation.’”
“We can do it,” Jay repeated.
Pump abandoned an attempt to relight the doobie and put it and his matchbook on the deck. I noticed his hand shaking. “You’re not thinking of the Revere?”
“Affirmative.”
“Jesus,” Pump breathed. “The Sitton site?”
“Affirmative.”
“It could be done. It fucking could be done.”
“What’s the Revere?” Edward asked.
“Jay’s right, man,” Pump said solemnly. “We can do it.”
“We even used to joke about launching one of those birds,” Jay added.
“Let’s do the thing, man — a Woodstock Satellite,” Pump said, chuckling.
“How about it, Eddie?” Jay asked. “If we orbit a satellite in the name of the Woodstock Nation, would that make a believer out of you?”
“‘Then I saw it in space,’” Pump sang, parodying the Monkees’ “I’m a Believer,” “‘now I’m a believer. Without a trace of doubt in my mind —’”
“You idiots are out of your minds,” Edward said. “Far too much Smoky El Ropo. Between you, you couldn’t put a basketball through a hoop, let alone put up a satellite.”
“Want to bet?” jeered his brother.
“You know what we were doing in the army?” Pump asked.
“Something in electronics. Jay always told me it was classified.”
“Missile tech. Mainly instrumentation. When Jay and I were posted to California, we were part of a team that was —”
As Pump spoke, I heard Guantanamero Bay’s front door open, and voices inside the house. A moment later Willow and Phil were at the living-room doorway.
Willow smiled. “Look at these degenerates. Still awake and toking at this hour. Hi, Wayman. Welcome back.”
If possible, she looked more stunning than ever. Her dress, a micro-mini, was covered with large pastel flowers and fitted her exquisite body tighter than a glove on a hand. Curves aside, I didn’t know why a short dress was so sexy. I had seen Willow in a bikini many times; the upper regions of her shapely legs weren’t unobserved territory. Yet her garment’s hemline revealed a tantalizing expanse between its edge and her knees that was mind-warping. When she tossed her sun-kissed long blond hair back off her face, as she did intermittently, I heard in my brain the rising falsetto of several Beach Boys’ tunes. She was so gorgeous and lovely and desirable that she almost transcended sexiness.
I rose to receive my hug from her, an experience akin to embracing an aura of pure light. Then I shook hands with Phil, who appeared more tanned and muscular than ever.
Since there wasn’t enough space on the porch for all six of us to sit, we moved inside at Edward’s suggestion and settled into the living room’s funky chairs and sofa. During the relocation process, I learned a bit about Willow’s and Phil’s summer. He was planning to stay on with the Costa Mesa roofing crew until Christmas. I asked about his draft status, and he shrugged. He and Willow had taken over the downstairs bedroom at the Bay. Willow recounted their visit that evening to Phil’s mother’s place. She and Phil had stopped off at the Saucy Swan — an English-style pub in Costa Mesa we frequented — for a drink en route home.
Now that Willow had appeared, I remembered my earlier resolve to nudge a conversation with her toward picking up information about Janey. Ranged against the likelihood of this was the lateness of the hour and the distraction of the boys’ absurd notion of launching a hippie satellite. Willow herself was a distraction. As I watched her across the room, the stereo seemed to be serenading her with the piercingly sweet flute riffs of Canned Heat’s “Going Up the Country.”
Jay brought the new arrivals up-to-date on the evening’s dispute over the Woodstock Nation.
“Wasn’t Woodstock bitchin’?” Willow enthused, breaking into Jay’s account. Then, turning to me, she asked, “Did you hear about Woodstock in Canada?”
I was amazed that Willow, whose bag was surfing, would respond so positively to the rock festival. Even Phil ventured that the gathering was far-out. I reminded myself that surfers, like freaks, represented a spectrum of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours, even if they got lumped together under one label. In her other life, Willow was studying art at UCI, just as Phil at the moment was nominally also a roofer.
“You can’t put up a satellite,” Phil said once Jay finished explaining his concept. “Those things cost millions to launch. The phone companies pay NASA big money to have satellites lifted into orbit — Telstar and all that. How could you ever —”
Willow sighed. “Wouldn’t it be groovy if they could, though?”
“Where would you get the bread?” Phil asked. “Organize a benefit concert? I read somewhere even Woodstock’s promoters didn’t make enough profit to —”
“No, no,” Jay said. “We’re not going to pay anybody. What we’ll do is borrow the launch vehicle. From Uncle Sam.”
“What?” sounded simultaneously from Edward, Willow, Phil, and myself.
Jay was unfazed by the blast of disbelief aimed at him. “I was trying to tell you before. This is probably still classified ‘secret,’ so don’t mention it outside this room. When Pump and I got our orders for California, we were assigned to a team decommissioning Revere missile silos. One of them isn’t that far from here. Off 74 toward Lake Elsinore, east of San Juan Capistrano. You go a couple of miles past the Riverside County line and —”
“Decommissioning missile silos?” repeated Phil. “What’s that got to do —”
“I thought you guys were in electronics,” Edward said. “How is it —”
“Isn’t the government building missile silos?” Phil asked. “I saw something about it in Time. The Minuteman system?”
Willow laughed. “Listen to everybody getting excited. I think the guys are just having some fun with us.”
“We’re talking about the Paul Revere sites,” Jay said. “Prototypes for the Minuteman silos. Only eight or ten were operational around the country. Two were in Southern California. One was on Edwards Air Force Base in the desert fifty miles northeast of L.A. The other was over here on Sitton Peak in the Santa Anas. Fifty miles southeast of L.A.”
“The Sitton site is in the desert, too,” Pump said. “They call it the Cleveland National Forest, but it’s nothing but rocks and mesquite.”
“Agave. And tumbleweeds.”
“Snakes and lizards, man. Don’t forget the time —”
“Never mind,” Edward ordered. “How does any of this relate to satellites?”
“The missiles are still there,” Pump said. “We were assigned to mothball the silos. But the brass decided it was easier to —”
“Cheaper,” Jay contributed.
“And cheaper to cement shut the silos with the birds still inside.”
For a moment I heard the surf through the windows.
“The logistics guys took the warheads away,” Jay continued. “We stood down the launch and control stuff. But the birds are intact.”
“Like those bombers you can see from the freeway to Arizona?” Phil mused. “Hundreds of old jet bombers lining a runway out in the Mojave?”
“Yeah. They’re obsolete, so they’re parked.”
“You can’t be serious about firing off an ICBM,” Edward said.
“Why not?” Jay asked. “We were trained to do it.”
“Not exactly, man,” Pump said.
“Okay,” Jay agreed. “We’ve got the know-how, though. You just have to pump the fuel aboard, target it for orbit instead of Moscow or Shanghai or someplace, install the Woodstock Satellite, and wham-o! We have liftoff.”
“The Woodstock Nation takes to the skies,” Pump said.
“Bitchin’,” Willow approved.
“Hold on, hold on,” Edward broke in. “Even if this wasn’t a dope-induced delusion, you’ve overlooked a few tiny details. One is that you’d be committing every felony in the book — breaking into a silo, stealing a missile. Second —”
“The Reveres are obsolete,” Pump said. “The bird they’re using for silo deployment now is the Minuteman, like Phil said.”
“If they’re obsolete, what makes you think they’d launch the satellite?” Phil asked.
“They’re obsolete because they’re too slow or have less range or something,” Jay said. “Not because they won’t work.”
“You hope,” Phil said.
“We hope,” Jay confirmed.
“Forget it,” Edward declared. “Besides being horrendously illegal, if you idiots could launch a missile, you’d probably start World War III. Ever think of that?”
“We’d launch southwest,” Jay said.
“Southwest?”
“We could lift southwest out over the Pacific. Nobody’s radar would pick it up as a hostile. If any major malfunction developed, the bird would land harmlessly in the sea.”
Pump giggled. “Unless it hit Hawaii.”
“What if a screw-up happened right after launch?” Edward said. “Before it reached the ocean?”
Jay grinned. “We might take out the Western White House in San Clemente.” He held up his hand. “I know, I know — that could start the Big One. But at least we’d get rid of that asshole Nixon.”
“No loss,” Willow said.
“If he was in residence,” Phil said.
“We could route the launch over Pendleton, Jay,” Pump said.
“Nobody lives in most of it. If there was a big explosion, they’d think it was part of a training exercise.”
“Good plan,” Edward jeered. “A missile out of nowhere lands in the middle of the largest Marine Corps installation on the West Coast and nobody would imagine for a second it might be an act of war.”
“We could notify the Pentagon, man, before we —” began Pump.
“Why am I even discussing this?” Edward asked. “Light up another number, boys, and rave on. You probably couldn’t even find the silo you’re talking about. And if you could find it, how would you break in? If you managed to get inside, you couldn’t fire off the missile. If it was actually left in there, which I also doubt. At best you’d kill yourselves. At worst you’d be arrested. They’d probably decide you’re spies and lock you away permanently. Assuming you didn’t get the chair. I’m going to bed.”
Jay stood. “Let’s check it out. We’ll need a hacksaw, and probably we should take a crowbar. What else, Pump?”
Pump also rose. “Flashlights, man. Till we get the power on. I know where the main —”
“You mean, go tonight?” Willow asked.
My brain was spinning. Willow’s question had leaped into my mind, too, and was instantly jostled by a dozen other concerns. How serious were Jay and Pump about this scenario? Even in my woozy, late-at-night, too-many-days-on-the-road, too-much-of-the-killer-weed headspace, I recognized the sensation of adrenaline coursing through my arteries. The sickening energy that suddenly suffused my body matched how I felt when a speaker at a meeting urged we embark on a protest action that could involve a serious confrontation with the cops. Pump’s and Jay’s intention that we drive off in the middle of the night and force an entry into a top-secret facility involving guided missiles and nuclear warfare was something I didn’t want any part of.
“Count me out if you mean tonight,” Phil was saying, to my relief. “I have to work in the morning.”
“I’m certain by tomorrow,” Edward declared, “you retards will have no memory of —”
“Must be jelly, ’cause jam don’t shake like that,” Pump retorted. “Wayman?”
I pleaded weariness to the core after my driving and the lateness of the hour.
Pump shook his head in disgust. I felt a surge of guilt, after my talk tonight about the need to oppose the status quo. But this scheme was too flaky.
“I hear the vote tending toward postponing the mission until tomorrow night,” Jay said, resuming his seat. “We’ll need a few more people along, because we can’t launch with just this handful. We’ll contact some trustworthy folks, and everybody will rendezvous here at 2100 hours.”
“Roger on that,” Pump confirmed. He also sat.
“Which ‘trustworthy folks’?” Phil asked.
“Opposed?” Jay inquired.
“What’s 2100 hours?” Willow asked.
“By tomorrow you boys will have regained a nodding acquaintance with reality,” Edward pronounced.
His response, though I would have phrased it differently, echoed my conviction. Beyond any doubt, this fantasy was not only impossible, it was a bad idea. Yet as the gathering dissolved and I headed for the front hallway, Pump and Jay were huddled over a piece of paper on the coffee table, scribbling something that looked very much like a list.
