Chapter 1 Our Own Orbit
Our Own Orbit
A purple bus with white daisies, decorated by amateurs with paint not meant for an automobile, waited for stragglers on the corner of Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco.
Deep inside sat Otis Till, packed in with a host of barely dressed hippies getting high and singing Woody Guthrie songs along with a long-haired shirtless man strumming a guitar with a rainbow strap.
A hand-rolled cigarette hung from the mouth of Sally, the bus driver, and he stood counting heads, his lips moving behind a thick golden beard.
Bumping into Sally as the man passed out flyers days earlier, Otis had been intrigued.
Besides the drive from Montana to California, he hadn’t seen much of the US.
This was a chance for a quick adventure before his freshman year at Berkeley, one last romp before four years of a serious commitment in the pursuit of a career in journalism.
He’d been in the city only a month, having come early to get a taste of his new home.
Even in Montana he’d heard that San Francisco was the center of the universe for budding freaks and renegades and lovers and seekers and lost souls who were tired of stumbling around like zombies following the footsteps of their parents, tired of letting the government decide who to fight, weary of racing from school to a job that was nothing more than a hamster-wheel-waiting-room for death.
Though Otis was indeed a lost soul, he was a long way from a hippie, but they intrigued him, this life they lived .
.. or, at least, tried to live. How nice it would be to drop out of the rat race and go in search of what mattered, whatever and wherever that might be.
Not that being a journalist was exactly racing with rats.
More like observing and documenting them.
He admired the profession and looked up mightily to his father, who’d been a news correspondent for The Daily Telegraph in London before assuming his current role writing for the Bozeman Daily Chronicle .
He’d garnered shelves full of awards and even written a couple of books along the way.
Though Otis wasn’t the writer his father was, he believed he’d get there in time.
He was not quite seventeen and about to start Berkeley as one of the youngest freshmen on campus, an honor he’d earned with a work ethic instilled in him by generations of workaholics.
If anything, he felt torn between the man he expected to become and the parts of him that hung around in the fringes of his soul, the person who wouldn’t mind taking a few years off to chase music festivals and expand his mind with psychedelics.
He might even find a worthy reason to keep working like a dog.
For the last month Otis had been working at a car wash and crashing in an accordion closet of a two-bedroom flat with two Texans who were trying to open a barbecue joint.
They listened to loud hillbilly music, and their place constantly smelled like ketchup and molasses, but the cheap rent and endless supply of pork were hard to beat.
Though he certainly hadn’t planned on leaving San Francisco so quickly, the intrigue of this journey to Woodstock had been too tempting.
Otis was trying hard not to take another peek at the tennis-ball breasts of the topless woman with hairy underarms who stood in the aisle catching up with a friend, laughing with abandon, as if flaunting her goods were a normal activity among strangers.
Had she tried that on a bus in Bozeman, both men and women would’ve raced to throw a horse blanket over her as if she were on fire.
Along with the luck of a naked woman in his view, he also had an empty seat beside him.
With this crew of yahoos, who knew how long that might last, but for now, he had a place to keep his satchel and room to breathe.
It was almost like they all knew that he was an outsider.
Americans could be so invasive sometimes, as if they had a completely different sense of personal space.
Of course, his father had taught Otis that he had to learn to fit in to get a good story.
Otis was trying, but this was a tough crowd.
Considering the way he was dressed, his button-down shirt and Sherlock Holmes hat, he supposed there was no hiding who he was.
He couldn’t quite bring himself to grow his hair out and stick a flower behind his ear and wrap bracelets around his wrist and dance in circles to the rhythm of twenty-five unlearned bongo drummers.
When someone had asked if he’d checked out Zeppelin, Otis had looked up to the sky, wondering whether he’d missed a big balloon.
The guy had laughed. “The band, man. Led Zeppelin.”
Otis looked at him like he spoke Mandarin. “The band man?”
The guy put his hands on Otis’s shoulders and peered deeply into his eyes. “It’s gonna be all right, brother. It’s all gonna be all right.”
“That’s quite good to know.”
“Ah, listen to that accent. Sweet music to my ears. You’re part of the British Invasion. The Stones, the Beatles. You are welcome here, man.”
That particular guy now wielded an acoustic guitar and played another song that Otis didn’t know.
He knew Guthrie and Bob Dylan because his American mother and aunt loved them.
Mostly, though, Otis’s taste had been formed by his British father, who had raised him on classical music and jazz, the likes of Bach and Bix Beiderbecke.
The Beatles and Stones were okay too. That other side of him, the part he’d hidden, could dig what they were about. Dig . Wasn’t that a funny word?
“All aboard!” Sally yelled as he shut the door. Otis felt a sigh of relief. He’d at least enjoy this first leg sitting by himself. Sally turned back to the passengers and pulled the fag from his mouth. “Okay, brothers and sisters, you gotta sit down. At least while I get out of the city.”
No one listened to him.
Sally raised his voice. “Who’s ready to go to New York?”
A tepid cheer rose from the passengers.
“I said , who is ready to go to New fucking York?”
All but Otis yelled and clapped their hands and beat the backs of the seats. “Woodstock, Woodstock!” they chanted, firing up joints and ceramic pipes and grinning like there was no war going on, like all was right in the world.
Without moving his head, Otis peered left and right and up and down through the cloud of marijuana and cigarette smoke.
What in God’s name had he gotten himself into?
He wanted to be this free, but something deep within held him back.
He might explore some drugs and crack a smile or two, but he would not be taking his shirt off during this trip.
He would not be dancing with abandon. He would not become one with everyone.
He’d linger on the outside, watching like a journalist would, studying these people to find what made them tick.
Then he’d put his findings into an article that he could turn into his first published piece.
His dad would flip, and likely even forgive him for sneaking off to the festival.
Once the commotion died down, Sally gave them the rules of the road, and then everybody returned to their conversations.
The guitarist started playing again. Otis pulled out his notebook and scribbled a few observations.
He’d almost told his parents about this trip.
Phrased correctly, his father might support the idea of Otis writing a piece about the biggest music festival this country had ever known.
More likely, his father would tell him that if he climbed on this bus, he’d be in the biggest heap of shite of his life.
The only way Otis would tell his parents about the trip was if he could get the piece published.
The bus pulled away, and Otis slipped into his own world, wondering what angle might interest readers. Would they care to read about a young British man’s journey east? Or would they prefer a drier form of reporting, ticking off the facts?
The bus stopped abruptly, and Otis’s head snapped forward.
Looking back, that moment changed everything, the shift in the universe, the sudden stop with the squeaky brakes, the door swinging open.
Otis tensed, knowing what it meant: Whoever had paid for the seat next to him was about to get on the bus.
Not that he didn’t like people. He enjoyed a good conversation, but these strange beings were from another planet.
Otis peered through the smoke and past the braided hair and handmade jewelry and bare breasts and big smiles and eyed the door, waiting to see who would climb the steps.
Whoever it is, he thought, may they have showered recently .
The sight of the boarding passenger made his head fall back. A petite and curvaceous blonde in cutoff jeans and a white crop top apologized to Sally for her tardiness.
“Nah, man, don’t worry about it. You made it just in time.”
Travel bag in hand, the woman, if she could be called a woman, a girl maybe, looked down the aisle.
Her sandy-blond hair fell into a mess of curls.
Her necklace was even longer, a collection of feathers and copper beads dangling from a leather strand.
A variety of bracelets wrapped around her wrist. Her eyes were the color of the sagebrush back in Bozeman.
She stood a foot shorter than Otis, but she didn’t carry herself small.
She looked like the kind of person who could hustle people with her size, fooling them into thinking she couldn’t fend for herself.
Those eyes, however, told a different story.
I might appear innocent, they said, but I know how to defend myself .
There was a lot to like about her, but he was instantly drawn to her wild hair and those don’t-mess-with-me eyes.