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| the nasty vitriol and hot-air from the “alternative press” would have sent a thousand balloons into the stratosphere. |
While awaiting the day’s wonders, I struck up a conversation
with a young couple sitting next to our spot. Dan and Linda had been part of
the overnight set-up scene but escaped the reveille beatings. They had the
sense, or intuition, to move back from the stage area before the disastrous
call from the stage. This meeting was another coincidence that because it
turned out that this couple came from my home town, Spokane Washington. Linda
was petite and pretty in a gauzy, see-through, dress displaying her little
apples of breasts and that dark triangle above her thighs that I found very
attractive. I was disappointed to find that she and Dan were on their
honeymoon. They had just gotten married a few days before at the Zen Center in
San Francisco. Finding she was likely off-limits, I was willing to feign
interest in every detail as she explained her Buddhist beliefs. However, I’d
heard none of it except for the part where she explained that she had been on a
bad acid trip in which she had stripped naked in front of a full-length mirror,
examined her body, and accepted it as beautiful.
I understood because, as the acid came on, I too loved her
body and was pleasantly surprised that this talk about spirituality so far had
nothing to do with the usual crap about angels and demons I’d heard of in
churches. There she was, almost nude in her gauzy dress talking about her body
and Zen Buddhism to a strange horny man right in front of her newly-wed husband
who just sat there listening knowingly. I was mesmerized.
She went on, “I stood there naked and followed the contours
of my flesh. I saw my body as something beautiful reaching its prime but
already going towards decay and death.”
I tried to lighten it up a bit by complimenting her on her
form, “I don’t see any decay going on.”
She didn’t respond and continued, “I saw all that and stood
there for what seemed an eternity and watched myself…, approved myself… and
embraced myself.”
God, she was driving me nuts. My hormones were screaming and
only abated because the crowd began pressing in. A hot air balloon hissed and
drifted above, the music began and we had to stand. It was one of those, elbow
to elbow, things… At one point the ground became muddy under my feet. I’d lost
track of Randy and the sleeping bags we’d spread out. We were down-hill from the dozen or so porta-potties
that were entirely inadequate for the crowd they were to service. Perhaps there
had been plans to service them but there was no way for the septic pump trucks
to cut through the crowd. I looked around and saw that it was a sea of humanity
completely filling that entire natural bowl with nowhere, no way, was there a
route out of there to take a leak if one needed to. Besides the steady stream
of urine running from each porta-potty, I saw people pissing where they stood:
women simply hiked up their skirts and squatted on the spot.
At another juncture during that day, while I was still
standing near Dan and Linda, a couple of school-busses were driven down into
the crowd by the Hells Angels. There was nowhere, and no way, to get out of the
path of the busses but that didn’t stop the buses. They simply plowed into the
crowd. It was some kind of wonder that nobody was seriously injured by that
Hell’s Angels display of humanity. This was only some of the stuff I witnessed
and some more that I didn’t. It was said that women were being pulled out of
the crowd onto the busses and raped but I hadn’t seen that happen. It was bad
enough what I did see. The hot-air balloon hissed and climbed and hovered over
the scene …this Woodstock West crap was getting old.
Well, everyone knows what happened on the stage with the
Jefferson Airplane, Santana and so on: it is history. The evening ended after
the Stones came out with Sympathy for the Devil… Mick Jagger strutted his usual
stuff on the stage. “But what’s troubling you is the nature of my game… hoooh…
hoo… hooo-ooh!” Then the Stones
stopped playing. Jagger called out to the outa-control crowd, “C’mon people....
people, people...!” No one where I stood, crushed in the crowd, an anonymous
sardine, could see what was happening.
After the music was over, the crowd was milling around in a
daze. I had been tripping all day on the several hits of free acid I’d dropped
by then and trying hard to understand what had happened. Camp fires here and
there lit up little groups huddled around them. The medical Tripping Tent was
full to capacity. I had hung out there for shelter, waiting for dawn. Some came
in reporting a campfire overrun by a car driven frantically by someone
paranoid; tripping; thinking the Hells Angels were after him. Three people were
killed in that one. I had no idea what I was going to do next. I was in one of
those here and now spaces.
Dawn finally arrived and the light of day revealed a scene
after a battle. Sleeping bags abandoned were scattered throughout. Baggies with
sandwiches… pot… some film cans with known and unknown pills were there too. I
found a bag with a fresh ham n’ cheese sandwich, ate it, and also reclaimed another
baggie with some joints already rolled and lit one up. I saw a young-looking
girl in shorts with strong thighs, thick calves, wearing heavy wool socks and
hiking boots doing the same… eating a sandwich. I approached her with the
joint, “Have a hit.”
“I don’t smoke pot,” she answered in a non-judgmental tone
that commanded respect.
“Oh, really, what is your name?” my curiosity was piqued.
“Miriam.”
She wore thick… very thick, coke-bottle eye-glasses but she
reached down and picked up a joint by my feet. “You want it?”
“Sure, how did you see that?” I scratched my head. “I was
looking right at it and didn’t see it.”
“You mean my eye-sight?” She adjusted her glasses on her
perky little nose.
Despite her powerful legs she was a cute and pixie looking
little thing, “How did you get here?” I ventured, thinking maybe she had a ride
back to somewhere.
“I hitched.”
“Alone?” I probed. She picked up another joint I hadn’t seen
and handed it to me.
“I was with some people from Sacramento but we went separate
ways… how about you?”
“Yeah, I came in from San Francisco but my partner is
nowhere… I lost contact with him by the time the music started.”
She was not only scavenging for sandwiches but she was
putting trash in the cardboard barrels positioned everywhere around the area. I
started doing so too. Dan and Linda were doing the same further down the hill.
By this time the stage and amp towers had been broken down and the
port-a-potties taken away but the tiny airflow-trailer the acts changed in was
still there looking lonesome next to the race track. They waved and I followed
their lead picking up trash but scavenging baggies for whatever was in them
too.
News people showed up with a camera crew and interrupted us
with a lot of questions. Dan and Linda refused to give their names and asked
not to be filmed. Miriam and I followed suit. The woman reporter wanted to know
why we didn’t want to be in the news. Were we wanted by the police or something
like that? Dan responded, “Can you think of any other reason we might want
anonymity?”
She looked at Miriam, “Are you a run-away?”
Miriam looked at her as though she been asked the most stupid
question on earth… “Like, um, maybe we escaped from an insane asylum?”
The reporter wanted to know why we were picking up the trash.
I wanted to tell her that we were scavenging sandwiches and dope but I let Dan
do the talking:
Like the sage, he said, “Because the trash is here.”
“Were you hired and how long will it take?”
The owner of the race track, Dick Carter, showed up. He
fielded all the questions and told the news crew we were volunteers helping
out. I didn’t see the evening news but I had seen enough public interest
stories to know that the evening news would have a bit about how wonderful it
is that the dirty hippies, who’d made this mess, were also helping to clean it
up. Dick Carter talked for some time with the reporters and told them all about
the damages to the fences and so on hoping that people would join these
volunteers to help-out. He offered us the race track tower as a place to live
until the work was done after the news gang left.
The Berkeley Barb reported that some such politically
connected group, The Environmental Action Committee, was in charge of the
volunteer action. No one there... not one person having anything at all to do
with the clean-up, saw any sign of such a group at the Speedway. A dozen or so
like us, picking up trash and going through all the vials and baggies looking
for drugs, were all that we saw. Dan and Linda moved into the abandoned trailer
left and unpaid for by Sam Cutler or Bill Graham… whoever. Miriam and I moved
into the pillow shack. The rest (a dozen or so in flux) stayed in the tower.
It was rumored that Bill Graham had offered a benefit concert
at Fillmore West that next Saturday for the clean-up effort; inviting all of
the clean-up committee free entry… oh boy. I was so sick of the whole rock-star
bit by that time. I just knew it would never happen or the Environmental Action
Committee would glom-in on it. A group of us piled in a pick-up and went all
the way into the city anyway. No-one there knew anything at all about Mr.
Graham’s offer. Our motley crew stood outside waiting for someone to let us in…
Miriam and I hitched a ride back to the pillow shack where we made love, ate,
slept, made love, and slept for about a month. I made up for all the lost time
with four years of little or no poontang in the USN. Meanwhile, the hippy-press
bad mouthed Dick Carter as a capitalist opportunist and everyone soon forgot
about the concert and its aftermath.
It was expected of the Chronicle and the Examiner,
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