Short Fiction

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Up Against the Woodstock Wall

(excerpted from Gates of Eden, a work-in-progress)

Boston

August, 1969

“I can’t do anything with this.” Sam Saltonstall held Madeline’s article. “'Up Against the Woodstock Wall?’” he read. “‘The Real Tragedy'? You want us to run this?"

"Yessir, I do!"

"The people you trash in here... “ Sam rattled the pages at her. “They bought a full-page ad in the Rat. You think they’ll do that again?”

“Wow.” She batted the manuscript away.  “Listen to you! What an asshole!”

“Listen to me? Shit, man, listen to you!” He read aloud:

Nature can be elegant. Nature can be messy. Woodstock was messy. Why? Because it was promoted by guys who wear their hair long, smoke dope and are in it for the money. At Woodstock, the peace train rolled for profit and it showed.

“The promoters you kick around in here are the guys who paid your way up there.”

“They bought an ad to push their sleazy event. Big deal. What am I supposed to do? Suck dick or write what I see?”

Sam Saltonstall, the Rat’s editor and publisher, was unused to such resistance; money had accumulated steadily in his family’s coffers since Massachusetts had become a colony. Despite his blue-blood, Brahmin entitlement, Madeline liked him. He espoused a soulful political stance, had cast off his family’s patrician values, he commanded a thorough understanding of history and journalism and was a walking encyclopedia. "Maybe you're supposed to do both," he snapped back. "Suck dick and write what you see. He continued reading:

If swimming nude in a muddy cattle pond, picking up acres of garbage, or fucking everybody in sight spells freedom, then we were all free at Woodstock.

“Look,” Sam said, “we’re trying to make this paper turn a profit for a change.” He felt on edge. What had begun as a work partnership had turned sexual only days after Madeline joined the staff of Boston's scruffy underground newspaper, The Back Bay Rat.  He adored Madeline, but he also felt vulnerable; she knew how to fight in a way that his Yankee upbringing had never trained him for. Shouting was not allowed around the Saltonstall home; Madeline raised her voice whenever she felt provoked and could argue circles around him on any subject.

Madeline was angry with herself. She had — once again — glommed on to a man, albeit attractive, from whom she could learn. Now she was paying for it, more than it was worth.

“Look, we have to give a little here, Mad. You want us to keep running girlie ads?”

“Yeah.” Madeline leaned forward. “I’d stick with the girlies, honey. They don’t tell us what to write.” She felt betrayed, unclean. This guy, her lover, was bullshitting her. "Aren’t you embarrassed?”

“Embarrassed?” Sam reddened. He always flushed when he angered. “About what? Trying to keep this paper solvent?”

She  could feel Sam's patrician instincts, generations deep, pushing him back into the system -- where he belonged. Did everyone want to jump ship and go home? Couldn’t somebody get it right? She couldn’t, but she desperately wanted somebody to show the way but there was no “way” to be shown. It was all too new, too different. She grabbed the copy pages from his hand and threw them on the desk. She paused, then picked up the last page. “Let’s get to the point, Sam.”

For those who think that revolution means peace and love and rock and roll and living in mud and bum tripping on bad acid and getting the clap…

“You think that’s the whole story?” Sam shouted. “Hell, never mind the ads, these guys could sue you for slander.”

She continued reading, more insistent now.

The sad part is, they’ll have to settle for that hippie rip-off in upstate New York as the only evidence that they were part of a revolution. And that, brothers and sisters — given the ecstatic, ongoing nature of our struggle — is the tragedy of Woodstock.

“Just print that paragraph and I’ll get off your case.”

“No,” Sam said. “You can’t fight a revolution if you don’t have a press. And this press won’t exist in another month if we keep going the way we are.”

“Okay.” She picked up the pages. “Shit, man, we don’t need the FBI to raid the Rat. You’ve already raided it. And they won’t have to tell you what to do. You already know. You’re part of the club. You’re white. You got a dick. Just like them. You’ve been bought, Sam Saltonstall. You were bought before you were born.”

“Fuck you,” he muttered, unable to look Madeline in the eye.

“No, man,” she sighed. “Fuck you.”

*  *  *

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