Woodstock Day Two
Woodstock
Day Two
After the crew had spent time shuffling gear on and off a giant turntable in the middle of the stage, the Grateful Dead appeared. Over the weekend I’d overheard conversations about Jerry Garcia. People talked about him as if he was a demigod. I couldn’t wait to find out what all the hype was about.
Since darkness had fallen, I didn’t notice the clouds sneaking in.
When the wind picked up, so did my angst. I looked around at folks standing near me.
Hair was blowing around their faces. Their shirttails looked like they might catch sail.
A gust caught my pink top and blew it straight up as high as my chin.
The canvas top over the stage undulated with the wind as it whipped through Woodstock as fiercely as a lion’s roar. Not five minutes later, the skies opened. With no warning whatsoever, a gully washer returned, falling much harder than it had the night before.
Yet again, I was soaked to the bone.
The rain blew onto the stage. Jerry Garcia looked at the water pooling underneath his feet and gave the cute guitar player to his left a horrified look.
Their giant light show screen, hanging above them, flapped like a sailboat caught in a mighty wind.
Someone climbed up and slashed it right as some crazy dude ran onto the stage and flung LSD pills into the audience.
If we hadn’t been seated so close, I would have missed the whole thing.
I thought back to all the warnings about the poisonous acid and wondered why in the world this guy was allowed on the stage in the first place.
Fifteen minutes into their annoyingly slow first song, Livy turned around to the people behind her with hands pressed into her hips and a rageful stare.
“Stop talking!” she yelled, even though she couldn’t have possibly heard anyone over the music. “People are trying to hear the band.” With that she turned back around, crossing her arms over her chest like she was mad as hell.
I’d never seen her act that way. Her sudden mood change came out of nowhere. Swallowing my growing resentment, I stood up, put my arm around her. “You okay, Liv?”
She shook her head from side to side for what seemed like a full minute, then pointed frantically at the stage. “Do you smell that?”
“Smell what?” I asked. She didn’t answer, so I got in front of her face and asked again. “Smell what?”
“The flowers!” Her smile warned me that her mood had flipped again.
I had to get next to her face to hear what she was saying, because the music muffled her voice.
“Aren’t they beautiful?” She pushed me aside and thrust a hand toward the stage, seemingly picking flowers—one by one—until she had formed a bouquet.
“Gardenias. My favorite.” She dipped her nose inside the bouquet, then handed the thing to me.
“There are no flowers,” I shouted over the music, with rain dripping off my nose.
She ignored me. “Look at the red wine bubbling from the stage!” With a wide-open mouth, she leaned her head back.
Her jaw moved, like she was guzzling it down her throat.
Or so she imagined. She started singing something familiar, but the music drowned out her voice.
Then tears sprang into her eyes. Seconds later she wailed like a grieving widow.
Einstein may not have been my last name, but I knew what was happening. I turned around and peered desperately at Leon. He’d been watching the whole affair. “After all the announcements?” I said. “Tell me she’s not that stupid.”
He shrugged.
“For a Harvard student, she has no common sense.”
“Wait a second. Livy goes to Harvard?”
“Well, Radcliffe.”
“Damn.” He pushed his wet hair back from his forehead. “She’s one complicated chick.”
As happy as his remark made me, my panic over what she had done escalated. “Suppose she took the brown acid? Or the green acid? I need to take her to the medical tent right now.” I may have been furious at her earlier, but now I was scared. I didn’t want Livy poisoned.
“Suzie.” Leon cupped my wet shoulders. “You don’t need to worry about Livy.” He pointed at Johnny. “Look at him. He’s tripping too.”
Johnny had a faraway look in his eyes, but he sure wasn’t crying. Or shouting. He was dancing.
“He’d never be dumb enough to take the bad shit going around here. They probably got it from Henry. Just ignore her. She’ll come down eventually.”
“Ronny! You are beautiful,” Livy shouted at the stage. “I’m so happy you’re here!”
What the hell? I turned around to Leon again. He simply raised his palms.
My patience was growing razor thin. With a scowl on my face, I stepped right in front of her. “Ron is not here. He is in Vietnam!”
She stepped aside—I had blocked her view—then waved and hollered at the good-looking guitar player onstage. “I’m right here, Ronny.”
With eyes pinned on the dude, I studied him head to toe. There was an uncanny resemblance between him and Ron. “What’s that guitar player’s name?” I asked Leon. “The one next to Jerry Garcia.”
“Bob Weir.”
I twisted back around. “Livy!”
She wouldn’t look at me.
“Livy.” With hands on both shoulders, I shook her. “That’s. Not. Ron. It’s. Bob. Weir!”
She flat ignored me, like she was unaware of my presence. “Play ‘For Your Love,’ Ronny!” she shouted. “Play it for me.”
Ron loved the Yardbirds. He even wore their signature sunglasses.
“Get a grip, Livy!” I shouted, inches from her face. “Ron is not on that stage.”
Leon wrapped his arm around my waist and spoke into my ear. “No point in trying to talk her down. The LSD has to wear off.”
Laughing like a lunatic, Livy reached out and placed her hand on my forehead. “Your head. Your head. It’s huuuuge!”
“No, it’s not,” I said, growing more incensed. “You’re the one with a big head.”
Leon shook his. “No point in arguing with her.”
“Why did you drop my ring, Ronny?” she shouted at Bob Weir.
Drop your ring? Okay, that’s it. Drenched to the bone, I turned away, scheming how to get as far away from her as I could. Meanwhile, the Grateful Dead continued with an instrumental number that had been going on for at least twenty minutes. I wanted to slit my wrists.
“It was my favorite ring,” Livy cried, with real tears in her eyes. Then she started to wail for the second time in minutes.
As much as I wanted to ignore her, I couldn’t. Unable to hold back, I shook her again. Hard. “What? Ring?”
Finally recognizing my presence, she held up her pinkie finger. “My signet ring. It’s gone.”
I remembered that ring. Signet rings were all the rage. Of course, Livy got one. It was a birthday gift from her parents, gold with cursive initials—OAF, for Olivia Adele Foster, named after her grandmother. We had always joked about her initials spelling oaf.
It was all coming back. I remembered her telling me that she had lost her ring over Easter break.
She placed her hands on either side of her mouth to yell at Bob Weir, “I said you could try it on. Not drop it behind Rosie’s bed.”
Rosie’s bed? Rosie was our housekeeper. She slept in the little bedroom off our kitchen whenever my parents were out of town—
Oh. My. God.
My brain flatlined as a steady, high-pitched hum took over. The ground tilted underneath my feet. I felt dizzy. Nauseous. And, worse, betrayed. The girl in Rosie’s bed. Ron refusing to tell me her identity. How could I have been so stupid?
I had been bushwhacked with the lie of the century.
Easter had come right on time, mid-April of ’66. Memphis city schools had a holiday on Good Friday, but it didn’t mean I’d get a holiday from my piano lesson. Thank goodness it had been moved up to one o’clock. Ron and I had big plans for the afternoon.
“See you next Friday, Mrs. Bohannon,” I said, once my lesson was over.
“Good work today, Suzannah. You have a terrific grasp of this Beethoven piece.” Mrs. Bohannon had often told me I was her best, most advanced student, a compliment that made my parents prouder than it did me.
Dad believed the piano was meant for church hymns and classical compositions.
I believed it was meant for Beatles songs. Paul played the piano.
“Aw, thanks,” I said, peering out the front window. Ron was late. Again.
Mrs. Bohannon and her next pupil had already entered the lesson room, and the door was nearly shut when I asked, “May I please borrow your phone?”
“Be my guest. You know where it is.”
I certainly did. On the wall, in the kitchen. Punctuality was not my brother’s strong suit.
I dialed home. Twenty-five rings later, I hung up, waited thirty more minutes, and called again. Ron had forgotten about me and was in the basement playing music too loud to hear the phone. He often turned up the volume when our parents were away.
The next time I called—fifteen minutes later—I let it ring fifty times. When I got no answer, I could feel anger rising inside my throat. Ron had promised we would spend the afternoon learning a new Beatles tune on his guitar.
At three o’clock, after sixty rings, my anger turned to fear. The ghastly thoughts of what might have happened were impossible to dismiss. I plopped down in a chair on the front porch with nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs. And worry.
“I thought you’d be long gone,” Mrs. Bohannon said, once her last pupil had left.
“I can’t get in touch with Ron.”
“Have you tried your parents?”
“No ma’am, they’re at church. Setting up for Good Friday supper. I’m worried about him.”
“I’ll take you home, honey. Just let me grab my pocketbook.”
A minute later we loaded up in Mrs. Bohannon’s Buick Skylark, and she drove the ten minutes to my house. Cuda was parked out front.
“He must have lost track of time,” I said with a sigh, stepping out of the car. “Thank you so much for the ride.” I flew inside the house, so damn mad. Ron often lost track of time. And often got in trouble for it.
“Ron,” I called as soon as I opened the front door. After no answer, I sprinted up to his bedroom. He wasn’t there, so I barreled back down the stairs and flew to the basement. Not there either.
Convinced something was terribly wrong—like he’d been hurt or kidnapped, even—I hurried back up the basement steps and happened to hear a funny noise coming from the little room off the kitchen. Rosie’s room. The one we rarely entered.
Pressing my ear to the door, I heard someone’s heavy breathing. It scared me, to be honest. Even so I pushed the door open, afraid of what I’d find.
What I found was a shirtless Ron propped up in bed with his head against the wall and his eyes closed.
“I’ve been waiting at piano for two . . . hours.” It was then that I noticed a hump underneath the sheet, strategically positioned.
Ron jerked the covers up to his chin. He just stared at me, mute, while the nameless hump stayed stock still.
I stared back, unable to speak myself, as the reality of what I’d walked into crystallized.
With a mixture of dread and embarrassment tingling through my body, I slowly backed out of the room, shocked that Ron had taken such a big risk. You are such an idiot, I wanted to scream. If Dad had been the one to catch you, there’s no telling what he would have done.
After softly shutting the door behind me, I flew up to my bedroom and yanked my diary out of the nightstand.
Breathing solely on life support, I stared at the stage, unable to move. While the drizzle continued to coat 450,000 people listening to the Grateful Dead rock Yasgur’s dairy farm, the lie rocked me, encasing my body in a thick coat of plaster.
Though I grappled to put the last pieces together, the puzzle had been solved. Looking back now, I could see all the signs were there.
My sophomore year in high school, when Livy and I were having a sleepover, I’d found her in Ron’s room propped up on his bed, flipping through his albums in her nightgown. She didn’t want to come back to my room even though I had asked her to.
That should have been the harbinger.
There was the time I had looked everywhere for Livy and found her in the basement dancing with him. I’d never thought anything of it. We always danced with Ron when our parents were away.
The times Livy had sneaked off with him at the University Club to smoke cigarettes should have been another clue, as well as the many occasions she had hitched rides home with Ron from school.
It had all seemed normal. She’d told me she considered Ron the brother she never had.
Sure, she flirted with him, but she did that with every boy.
The unanswered questions tumbled through my mind like balls in a bingo cage.
Where is Livy’s signet ring now? Is it still underneath Rosie’s bed?
Was she in love with my brother three years ago, or did she just want to go all the way with him, like she had with John Dearing?
At that moment, I didn’t know all the answers.
All that mattered was that I had been lied to by my very own brother and my very best friend, two people I should have been able to trust.
Something else occurred to me. It had the worst sting of all. It was Livy’s fault my brother was in Vietnam. Not mine. I had been stupid and left my diary on the bed for my nosy parents to discover, but Livy was the one to seal his fate. Even more despicable, she knew I blamed myself.
Livy Foster was the most screwed-up individual I had ever met.
There was only one way to extricate myself from this quagmire. I had to get the hell away from her. That instant.