Wednesday

Wednesday nights were our weekly night of debauchery — as much debauchery as you can get into when you’re thirty and work for Los Angeles’ dilapidated City Hall, and Wednesday is the only night you and two of your somewhat tolerable coworkers are able to slip away for a while. Wednesday. What a useless day. Middle-of-the-week, redheaded stepchild of a day. I never liked it.

Kevin, Liz, and I like this run-down bar on the corner of Washington Boulevard. It smells, it’s humid, it’s cramped — but the people are authentic there. That’s something the 70s lacks: authenticity. I can’t go one day without seeing forty-seven different girls wearing Jordache jeans or a crowd of toe-headed dudes wearing their OP shirts. The 60s were authentic, man. Full of love and acceptance…it was so much more organic. Or maybe that was the weed. Still better than whatever the hell these kids are doing now.

We like to grab a seat at one of the high tops in the corner of the bar, directly under the Budweiser sign so we have a red glow around us. Atmosphere, y’know? Liz has her whiskey sour in hand, bitching about whatever Maria said to her in the copy room. Kevin can’t even pretend to be interested — he’s too busy ordering his third Old Fashioned and trying to put the moves on the bartender. I’ve been running my finger around the rim of my beer, nodding when appropriate so Liz thinks I give a third of a shit about what she’s saying. Where’s the authenticity?

“Liz, I’m sorry, but I actually don’t feel like hearing what Maria the Shrew said about God-knows-what today.”

“Alright then, David. Why don’t you contribute something? Would you like to talk about how much you hate your job — again?”

“No.” Am I an asshole? She sure knows how to make me sound like an asshole.

“What are we talking about?” Kevin saddles onto his chair, eating the cherry floating on the ice of his drink, tossing the stem to the center of the table.

Liz gestures toward me, David the Asshole. “David is apparently the treasurer of great conversation. So, now we wait to see what gem of a topic he could possibly bestow upon us common-folk.”

They both stare at me. What the hell do I have to talk about? I file papers all day, I’m single, and I dabbled in acid one too many times back in the day.

Acid. That’s it.

“You guys go to Woodstock?”

Liz’s brow furrows. Is she shocked that I provided a topic? Or do I sound like her when she talks about I-don’t-care-what?

“Yeah, I lived in New York at the time,” Liz offers. “Did you go?”

“Yup. Most bitchin’ three days of my life, from what I can remember. Kev, did you get a chance to go?”

“Sure. Hated it.” Kevin sucks down the last of his drink.

“Man, if I could go back. Can’t believe it’s only been nine years since it passed. I feel like I’m a lifetime away from who I was then. Those three days, man. Those are days to talk about.”

“So, talk about them,” Liz says.

An eventful summer — 1969. The same year Charles Manson made his devilish debut, four-hundred-thousand people stomped through the mud-ridden fields of Yasgur’s Farm to get to Woodstock, the single most iconic rock festival in history. Man, 1969. That was a bitchin’ year.

“I went with some buddies from my fraternity. We barely scrounged up enough for gas money to drive from Idaho to New York and scalp some tickets when we got there. We forgot about food, but we weren’t even hungry. Food wasn’t as important as the chance to see legends in the flesh.” I laugh a little, remembering the hot, run-down Volkswagen Bus we drove, the four of us, long-haired, broke college kids. “The van broke down at least four times on the way there. We ended up pushing it the last three miles to the highway near the festival grounds. I remember stopping, covered in sweat and grime and dirt, ignoring the miserable east coast humidity for a second, and looking in front of me. We were still a mile from the festival, and the highway was a parking lot. I’m talking 405-freeway at rush hour times twenty. People were laying on top of their cars, smoking joints, walking the remainder of the way to the festival, not even caring that their car was parked on a highway. So, we did the same. We lit up and we walked.

“We found a pair of scalpers and bought our tickets. They could have been fake — we were too excited to even check them out. Everyone was more trusting back then. Won’t see that happening in 1978.”

“You’re thirty and you already sound like a pissed-off old man. That’s literally how my father reminisces about World War II,” Liz jokes.

“Wait your turn, Lizzie. The pissed-off old man has more to tell ya.

“The first day was pretty folkish and I wasn’t a huge folk fan. But I remember Joan Baez played the ending set that night. Man, I loved Joan Baez. She finished with ‘We Shall Overcome,’ and, I swear, the whole lot of us shut up and listened. That place was dead silent while she sang. You don’t see that happening at a Talking Heads concert. It was the coolest damn thing.

“Day two, man, day two was wild. That was my favorite day. I hadn’t eaten in 24 hours, I was exhausted as all hell, but I was out there dancing to Santana and Creedence and Grateful Dead and The Who. Man, day two.” I trail off for a second, a flood of sound rushing my head: the audience, the bands. “I think I slept most of day three on an itchy blanket one of us packed. But I woke up the minute I heard the guitar riff for ‘Hear My Train A Comin’,’ Hendrix, man. I still can’t believe I saw Jimi Hendrix. Then he did the Star Spangled Banner…I’m not even patriotic, but I tell ya, my ass was moved damn near to tears during that.

“And then it was over and we hiked back to the van. Man, I swear that walk back felt longer that day than it did when we got there. Finally got the van to start, turned around, and drove back to Idaho. Then I graduated. Then I moved to California. And now I work at City Hall with you two chumps and sit in a smelly ass bar every Wednesday. What the hell happened?”

Liz laughs. “Life — that’s what happened. How did you not mention that massive downpour of rain that threatened the festival? Do you remember how cool that was? Not a single person, not even the bands were deterred. A massive deluge on-and-off for three straight days, people dancing in the mud and sleeping in a soaked field, happier than they had ever been before. That was really incredible to me.” Liz lets out a tiny sigh. “I may be a stick-in-the-mud now, but I was pretty cool nine years ago, too.”

Kevin returns with another drink. “Yeah? How cool?” he says, smirking, taking the cherry off of its stem.

“Pretty damn cool,” she says pointedly, hitting him lightly on the arm with the back of her hand. “I was the one handing out cups of granola to four-hundred-thousand hungry hippies. The concession stands became too crowded and the people in the front rows refused to lose their spots by the stage, so they were literally starving themselves. I can’t name anything more Rock n’ Roll than that. I was right next to the stage doing the grandiose granola giveaway when Jefferson Airplane came on. I loved Grace Slick. I lost it when they did ‘White Rabbit.’ I sang louder than I knew was even humanly possible.

“The best part was Hendrix closing out with ‘Hey Joe.’ What time was it then? That was the cool part about day three. It didn’t end at midnight like the other days. Jimi played right along with the sunrise and sent us on our merry, hungover ways. A swarm of hippies leaving their mark on history.”

Liz looks at me and we share a smile. David the Asshole and boring old Lizzie weren’t too bad in their 21-year-old prime.

“How about you, Kev?” I ask.

“I told you already. I hated it.”

“Yeah, but why?”

Kevin sighs — one of those sighs you let out before you admit to something you did wrong. “I don’t remember much of it. I just know I hated it. I remember day one for the most part — I didn’t really like any of the bands. I was there for Janis Joplin and Joe Cocker, but I don’t remember hearing them.”

Liz is laughing, a genuine laugh. “Well, what do you remember?”

Kevin sighs again. “Alright. It was the beginning of day two — like seriously, barely ten o’clock in the morning. Quill was playing. I still have no idea who they are and their set sucked and I was bored, so I scrounged my way through the sea of filthy hippies and found a dude wearing a green kaftan and beads selling acid. He had a kaftan — I trusted him. And then some dude got on stage and made an announcement: ‘DO NOT TAKE THE BLUE ACID.’ So, there I am, running around asking everyone what color acid I took. It was the blue one. Apparently, the blue one puts you on one hell of a trip. I think I smoked a joint with Joplin, but it could have been a dude… she kinda looked like one… from what I do remember, though, Woodstock was a flash of colors and beauty and peace and love. It was everything I imagined it would be, even if three-quarters of those things were hallucinations. And then I slept the whole third day and woke up in the back of my brother’s station wagon in a McDonald’s parking lot and it was all over. I missed Woodstock and I wasted my money and I hated it.”

He finishes his story, and Liz and I are begging for air to breathe after laughing so hard. “Ah, Kev,” I say, slapping him on the back, “you never disappoint.”

And here we sit in our beloved dive bar, three people who never thought they had anything cool to talk about. Maybe Wednesday isn’t the redheaded stepchild, just the forgotten middle child who actually has some pretty cool things to offer.