The Phaselock Code by Roger Hart

Author:Roger Hart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2007-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Later that same summer, I attended an extraordinary event that confirmed many aspects of the near-death experience I had been part of in Tierra del Fuego.

I met Maggi in Central Park. “It’s supposed to be the greatest rock-and-roll show ever,” said Maggi. “Let’s go.”

“Ah—Is Roger Whitehouse going?” I asked.

“No, he’s on a road trip, probably in New Orleans by now.”

We took a Greyhound from the Port Authority bus station to the Catskills and spent the night in a hotel in Monticello. The next day we hitchhiked to the festival grounds. Traffic was backed up, row after row of cars were parked helter-skelter along the road and in the fields. A car leaving slowed down, and a girl in the passenger seat rolled down her window, and yelled to us, “Are you guys going in?”

“Yeah, we’re trying,” I said.

“Take this.” She handed us a car-window PRESS pass. “Pass it on.”

I held up the pass over my head, and the very next car going in, a ′55 Chevy, stopped. Thunder peeled out and rain poured down in sheets. The traffic controllers in white armbands stenciled with a dove directed us around a roadblock into a service road. The car bounced through muddy ruts; the wipers slapped at the windshield. Thousands had already left the Woodstock festival, a river of teenage youth straight out of middle-class suburbia, sopping wet and covered with mud. Like dog soldiers in Vietnam, they slogged through the mud lugging knapsacks and sleeping bags, oblivious of appearance. Laughing and singing, they marched with stringy and matted hair. Clothes stuck to their limbs as if they were in a wet T-shirt contest that was evolving into a no-T-shirt butt-naked contest, holding sheets of white plastic over their heads. The children of the suburbs were enduring, albeit temporarily, the hardships of the poorest Third World culture. Instead of watching the incessant replays and analyses of the first moon landing and Kopechne drowning on TV, these children of America chose the mud and discomforts of Woodstock. In fact they seemed oblivious to the discomforts. We pulled into the middle of the concert area and hopped out of the car. Some youths were running up to a long runway of mud and launching themselves onto it on sheets of cardboard and sliding into each other.

The chain-link fence had long been trampled into the ground, the box office closed, and the grass field transformed to mud. Joe Cocker had just finished singing “With a Little Help from My Friends.”

“It looks like we’re going to get a little bit of rain, so cover up. Hold on to your neighbor. You gotta get hold of your friends now,” Wavy Gravy yelled into the speaker system.

The scene was dismal—drab, gray, no color, only white T-shirts and jeans like a crowd at a high school football game. People were wrapped in blankets, some shared blankets, and others huddled under sheets of white plastic that also covered the muddy field.

One of them saw me staring.

“Hey, brother,” he said.

Let’s get out of here, I thought.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.