Rubbing at her wrist, then removing the waterproof watch; circling her wrist the width of the watch band was a solid red circle of a thousand itching chigger bites.
Woodstock 19: Day Two
Woodstock Festival of Music and Love
Bethel, New York
Notation: Woodstock, the legendary music festival taking place on the cow field of a dairy farm located in the foothills of the Catskill mountains was also a miserable manure infused mud pit.
August 16, 1969
2:55 AM
Those drunk and stoned people that are no longer thrashing in sexual ecstasy.
Those that are asleep, or more likely those that are passed out reaming here, where — as this place on the wet, manure scented ground is no better, or in most cases — a bit drier than from where they had come.
Lifting Sharon to her feet, ineffectively attempting to brush the grounds debris from her backside, steering her towards her and Clyde’s tent as…
Murmuring unintelligible words from inside her LSD inspired pink bubble; Sharon’s feet no longer solidly earth-bound, rather as bounding skyward from the taunt vibrating cover of an unworldly trampoline.
Clyde still somewhere, fucking some hippie girl still remaining awake… or maybe— Franklin noting his character— fucking some hippie girl while not awake, or possibly, for the third time, his mother.
Laying Sharon face down onto her cot, once again brushing dirt and mosquitoes from her back, Franklin covered her with the light blanket that had been crumpled on the edge of the cot.
Westlake Village, California
March 19,2011
11:10 PM
Laying front to back, spoon fashion, Marsha’s head
resting on Mitchell’s shoulder, she had been telling Sharon’s Woodstock story… Woodstock saga that had been told to Marsha in the utmost, old woman to old woman confidence because there was so much that if sober she would never reveal. So much that she had wilfully forgotten.
Especially about that seventeen year old boy.
11:28 PM
Turning from his back, Marsha and Mitchell’s faces about a foot apart, but yet close enough to feel each others breath in the blackness of their bedroom.
“That orgy…”
“Makes you wish you were there?” Marsha asked.
“By sixty-nine we had four kids…”
“And you weren’t even into that kind of music then.”
“Yeah. I was just starting to like ‘Elvis, and besides, like always I was still trying to figure out how to support all of us, and something like Woodstock was the furthest thing from my mind.”
“Kind of reminds me of a book we had to read in English-one. Uh…?”
“Yeah, us too.” Thinking a moment. “The one where those English kids got shipwrecked and were stranded on some kind of an island, all by themselves…”
“Yeah. With no adults to tell them what to do.”
“Or what not to do.”
The books name coming to him. “ ‘Lord of the Flies’!”
“Yeah, that’s the one.” Marsha said. “so do you?”
“So ‘do I what’?”
“Wish you’d have been there.”
“At Woodstock with all those drunk and stoned, naked hippie chicks?”
Her head moving fractionally closer.
Sensing Marsha’s breath onto his lips, the tip of his
tongue, minutely moving outward was met by the very tip his wife’s tongue, where, barely touching, thoughts transmitting through the good and bad fifty-six years of marriage, over the better or worst fifty-six years of their marriage sensually transmitting: ‘I love you!’.
As...
Mitchell’s hand probing the bottom end of Marsha’s panama top. Slipping beneath, the husbands hand closed about the very soft, very warm flesh of his seventy-five year old wife’s right breast.
“Nah! With tits like this, who needs a young hippie chick.”
“That’s dirty and smells like cow shit, Huh?”
“Yeah! Well, dirty I don’t know, but smelling like shit? Nah!”
The wife’s hand moving downward upon the husbands bare stomach, probing the elastic top of his panamas, where, stretching a bit further, the wife held the husbands seventy-seven year old flaccid penis within her hand.
Seconds passing… Remaining flaccid, but feeling so nice, moaning, Mitchell Lipensky asked, “When Sharon woke up, who was she with?”
“Well, it was like she was forcing herself to remember something she didn’t want to remember, so it’s a bit sketchy here because...”
Woodstock Festival of Music and Love
Bethel, New York
August 16, 1969
7:10 AM
Buzzing! Sounding as a million bees had escaped the hive and were buzzing within her head… about her head.
Hot! Sunlight pouring from within the opening of the tent bringing along hot humid air.
My, God! Unaware if the buzzing came from within or from outside her head. Covering both ears with her hands, the buzzing diminished.
Looking to her right, Clyde’s cot was empty.
Still covered with the light blanket, throwing it off as she stood, feeling as though within a fog and unsteady on her feet as, Oh, my God! Small flakes of dried mud dropping from her breasts, stomach and thighs. Realising she was nude and, Oh, my God! Itching! Mosquito bites itching from a hundred blood sucking bites, Sharon’s fingernails scratching beneath her breasts so hard, they left bleeding scratch streaks as now, ineffectively scratching at her stomach, there came a high pitched shriek, piercing the buzzing that— not within her head, but emanating from near a half million tightly packed, hot, muddy and mosquito bitten people having no place to go for fear of loosing whatever near or far off advantaged position they had until the start of day two of the Woodstock Festival.
Rubbing at her wrist, then removing the waterproof watch; circling her wrist the width of the watch band was a solid red circle of a thousand itching chigger bites.
Never wanting to be here in the first place. Hating this place and this festival that her errant husband had dragged her to.
In absolute desperate need of clenching dirt and the itching bugs from her body, wrapping herself in the blanket as she slid into a pair of flip-flops, thinking she knew how to find it, anxiously starting her way to the pond Clyde had led her to yesterday.
7:13 AM
Margery Binkowski, AKA Autumn Dawn— a blanket over her shoulders partially covering her nude body —sitting in the shade of the lean-to.
“You see my husband lately?”
“Clyde? Yeah. He’s at your car getting breakfast.”
“Tell him I went to the pond to get clean, will you!”
Answered with the utmost disdain. “Sure, I will sweetie.”
Having a foggy resemblance of Dawn putting something in her mouth.
“What the hell did you give me last night?”
Thinking, Don’t give a shit what this cunt thinks.. “LSD, sweetie. Make you feel really good, did it!”
“No...” angry that anyone would do such a thing “...it did not! What in the hell gave you the right to do that without asking my permission?”
“Fucked a few guys, though, didn’t you, including my seventeen year old son!”
A few guys? I fucked a ‘few’ guys including her ‘seventeen’ year old son. “He told me… Franklin said he was twenty!”
“Oh, my son told you his name, did he.” Standing, moving the few feet between her lean-to— the blanket opening, revealing her own thirty-seven year old body— and the tent. “Pretty fucking stupid, aren’t you!” Near face to face. “You don’t think a kid’ll lie to screw a fancy old broad like you?”
“Don’t know why he’d need me...” Sharon’s angry words spitted into Margery Binkowski, AKA Autumn Dawn’s face “...when he has his own mother to fuck!”
Moving back to the lean-to. “You just remember, you fucking bitch…” squatting, sitting cross-legged her entire front-side exposed “... my son’s a minor! You fucked a minor!”
The implication making Sharon nauseous.
‘A few guys? I fucked a few guys ‘including’ her ‘seventeen’ year old son’.
Knowing Franklin had fucked her yesterday — without, by the way, any preamble or participation on her part, but remembering nothing from the moment Dawn had put the LSD tab onto her tongue.
I fucked a few guys ‘including’ her ‘seventeen’ year old son!
Knowing she could not have children, the thought of an unwanted pregnancy not a concern, however fully aware that at a different time, at a different place she could be arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Having no reply, turning to the woods with the thought of having both herself and Clyde checked for any sexually transmitted disease as soon as they returned home.
7:18 AM
Remembering the stench! Steeling herself for the stench, Sharon started into the shallow woods doing her best to avoid the clumps of human waste that closely dotted the now trampled weedy earth.
The pond actually a shallow catch basin emptying into a stream that, travelling a mile and a half downhill flowed into one of the higher tributaries of White Lake— which was now packed with dozens of people having the same bodily clenching need as Sharon.
8:03 AM
Sipping her cup of warm cherry Kool-Aid.“So what time did you get in this morning?”
“Never did.”
“So where’d you sleep?”
Snickering. “Don’t really know.”
“Don’t really k now who you slept with last night?”
Angered at this questioning. “No one tells their name here, Sharon.”
Attempting to show indifference. “Yeah, that’s true .”
Completely unabashed.
“Was drunk and stoned so, you know.”
“Last I saw you, you were dancing with some Hippie girl on the far side.”
What happens at Woodstock Stays in Woodstock!
“Last I saw you…” Clyde said “… it was you on the far side with some guy humping your ass.”
“And you didn’t care enough to come over and stop him?”
“Seemed to me you were, uh, to say the least, kind of out of it yourself.”
Seething. Words said no longer mattering because, after all, ‘what happened at Woodstock stays in Woodstock’! As though in two days when this Oz-like place and time ends, Clyde and Sharon Murphy would not return to their old life, and their hardware store in a Cincinnati, Ohio suburb.
“Your fuck friend…” nodding her head to so called, Autumn Dawn “… forced a LSD tab on me. So, yeah, I was so far out of it I don’t even remember how I got to bed…”
“She…” nodding to Autumn Dawn, who was in process of finishing he second cherry tart with her sagging tits folded over her prominent belly “...forced you to open your mouth so she could jam a LSD tab into it! That’s what you want me to believe?”
“Yeah. Something like that.”
“And you don’t remember how you got to bed, or who put you there, and probably what happened once, whoever it was that got you to bed, fucked you?”
Sharon’s heart pounding with anger, with fear. “Yeah, that’s right, Clyde. I do not remember!”
Words between the husband and wife no longer spoken.
9:45 AM
This day lovely. A cool breeze from the mountains to the south lowering the temperature to a comfortable eighty-two, with a breeze strong enough to keep mosquitoes away.
Having nothing else to say to her husband, and nothing else to do, bringing a folding lawn lounge to the entrance of the tent, Sharon reclined pretending she was reading a paperback book.
“Concert’ll be starting with ‘Quill’ at twelve-fifteen, and seeing as you’re not talking to me anyway, might as well see if I can squeeze in close enough to actually see who’s on stage.”
“Sure you’ll find some Hippie broad that’ll let you share her blanket.”
Sarcastically spoken. “Good idea, Sharon.” Hoping for this release. “Yeah! I’m sure I will!” Patting the pocket of his sleeveless shirt to be sure the rolled joint received from Autumn Dawn in payment for this mornings breakfast hadn’t fallen out as he put the shirt on.
Clyde’s back to his wife. “See you later!”
Closing her eyes. “No need to rush back.”
10:35 AM
the constant buzz from the hundreds of thousands in the shallow valley below now as a contiguous melody, the book dropping onto her chest as scattered cotton like clouds dot the deep blue sky, along with the warm breeze brings Sharon to that pleasant place of half sleep, where aware of motion beyond the thin veil of mental conscious, yet where within that veil sleep is but a wisp from mental subconscious.
11:06 AM
Turning the red of the inside of her eyelids dark as a shadow stood alongside blocking the sun.
Shading her eyes from the sun.
Sharon’s eyes adjusting.
About 5’5”. The woman was young, maybe twenty- five, dressed in black, extremely flared bell bottom slacks and a plain, loose fitting, white cotton blouse. Actually rather homely with long brown-blond hair and about a half dozen bracelets of varying widths on her left wrist.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you, you looked so comfortable, and…” nodding her head backwards “...so clean.”
“No, no, it’s okay, and…” nodding her head upward “... the last rain did it.”
The young woman looking somewhat familiar, holding her hand forward. “I’m Sharon.”
You accidentally added a lot of space after your story. Had to scroll a long way to get here to the chatterbox. ;-)
As your alter ego, Mitchell, who didn't really leave the big bands behind and was just starting to like Elvis when Woodstock appeared, it makes me wonder why you are now thoroughly digging into Woodstock like you have. I really dug Woodstock. And, if I had been a little bit freer of obligation and had heard of the concert--I didn't--I would've made every effort to be there.
I made the mistake of lying in the grass one time to get some sun at my West Virginia home. Came up with thousands of little itchy chigger bites. Believe me, North country mosquitoes, deer flies, and bloodsucking ticks.
Am I to believe that Janis Joplin was wandering through the crowds greeting her fans without an entourage? You sure know how to make the reader want to look at the next chapter, you devil, you!
