Summer of 69 by Gordon Glasgow
Chloe was seventeen when she learned her father never actually attended Woodstock.
Those three days in August in the summer of 1969 seemed to have had such an effect on her father’s life. There were the countless family dinners and gatherings where it was all he talked about, what with the three days of peace and music, the crowds, the energies, the big fuck you to Henry Kissinger and the Vietnam War. Apparently, her dad was the kind of Jew who believed in Karl Marx and civil rights, free love and counterculture. Sure, he was a corporate lawyer, but he was a card-carrying member of the Woodstock generation, the spirit of the 60s flowed through his veins all the way to 2021. And in the summer of 2021, at her father’s house in the Catskills, Chloe finally realized that it had all been a sham.
‘So you mean, you never actually went to Woodstock?’ Chloe asked her dad, standing outside on a manila rug laid out on the patio by the large, heated pool adjacent to the hot tub and outdoor shower.
‘Well, no, I didn’t exactly go.’ Kurt, her father, responded.
‘Well, were you there?’
‘There?’
‘Yes. Were you, physically, there, at the Woodstock Music Festival in August 1969.’
Kurt scratched his head.
‘What were the dates again?’
‘Dad!’ Chloe screamed.
‘Well, just remind me of the dates so I can make sure. It was a long time ago, babe!’
Chloe hated it when her father called her babe. Still, it was one of his various quirks, one of the idiosyncrasies she repeatedly accepted due to the ostensible fact that he was just an eccentric, unconventional man part of the powerful and influential, 1960s flower power movement. Her perception of him was beginning to fall apart. She feared in that very moment that she would see her dad for who he was: a crass businessman without an identity rooted in anything concrete. Actually, it was worse. He suddenly appeared to be a liar, someone who based their whole persona on life-events that never happened, off something they never experienced. Kurt, born in 1952, was turning out to be the absolute antitheses of authenticity, a figure of pure simulacra.
She pulled out her phone and googled, ‘woodstok music festival 60s.’
‘Woodstock was August 15-18, 1969. Were you or were you not there?’
Kurt began to sweat past his small, circular, John Lennon sunglasses.
‘No.’ He said. ‘I think I went to go see the Yankees play that weekend.’
‘You think?’
‘No, no. Honey. I know. Yes, they had a series versus The White Sox. I was there with Michael and Jimmy Dubin, at the Yankees White Sox game’
Chloe began to heat up. Her eyes would shoot lasers if they physically could. She stormed past her father into the house, past the banjo, the guitars, classic vinyl and tie-die banners hung onto the (second) living room wall. The other living room was more of a shrine to classic movies, classic movies Chloe began to suspect her father had never even watched. In fact, she’d never really seen him watch anything on TV other than the news and sports. And all those classic vinyl he collected, Hendrix, Grateful Dead, Crosby, Stills, & Nash, Janis Joplin, they only ever came off the wall or out of the ($5000) vintage trunk when the Stewarts, the Levys, and the Weintraubs were over. To Chloe, something she long felt but was unable to either prove or articulate was finally becoming clear: her father’s interests were all one great big performance, all a formulated way to rationalize to himself, and his friends, that he isn’t just and only just an upper-middle-class dude who decided to become a corporate lawyer.
It was all the more uncomfortable to Chloe because it caused in her, for the first time, a real reckoning with her own identity. For a second or two, life appeared to be one long quest for legitimacy, a process of deluding oneself and proving to others that you are more than just an everyday consumer with no real passions or interests. A true sense of self, therefore, did not seem to exist, at least not in America, at least not to Chloe.
‘You’re completely full of shit.’ She screamed to her father.
He barged into the house, red in the cheeks.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Practically every day I’ve been around you for my whole life you mention Woodstock and the 1960s, how it was the greatest time of your life, how my generation, with our TikTok and Instagram, will never really know what it’s like, how Woodstock is what made you want to live in the Catskills, how it caused you to feel a certain ‘oneness with the world.’ But in reality, you were probably just the same as every other douchebag clinging on to the status quo, sitting at a Yankee game during the day and chasing sorority girls at night.’
‘I was never, ever in a Fraternity.’ Kurt said.
‘Then what was Kai Lambda Alpha?’
‘An honors organization that would host socials.’
Chloe stomped her feet in frustration, walking down to the guest kitchen in the basement, past a row of taxidermy hung by the wall along the stairway.
‘No wonder Mom left you!’ Chloe shouted.
Kurt scurried down to the basement.
‘Chloe! What a thing to sa—’
‘And you know what’s even worse? That you wouldn’t be so fucking annoying if you just knew who you were, if you just accepted that you don’t like this music, that you aren’t into Ram Dass or Maharishi Yogi. I’ve never, in my entire life, bought it for one second.’
Kurt pouted in distress, unable to formulate an answer. Unlucky for him, Chloe was just gaining steam.
‘So tell me, Dad, how was it at Woodstock in the summer of 69’? Were you there when The Who sang My Generation, or when Hendrix played The Star Spangled Banner on electric guitar, all these videos on YouTube that you’ve forced me and my friends to watch with you over and over again, saying cringeworthy things like “groovy,” “far-out,” and “what a time to be alive.’”
‘I’m sorry, Chloe!’ Kurt said, taking a seat on his green leather arm chair next to the red satin pool table ($15,000). ‘You don’t understand. It’s a thing, in my generation, that time was important. We all hold on to it.’
‘You weren’t even fucking there!’
Chloe walked over to the mini fridge near the pool table and grabbed a mango flavored kombucha, plopping herself onto the couch, sighing.
‘My dad’s just a loser.’ She exhaled.
Kurt went up to his room to lie down on his bed, open his laptop, and play online poker for a few hours to calm his mind.
‘What a spoiled, ungrateful bitch.’ He muttered underneath his breath while losing $750 to a teenager in Moscow.
Chloe left abruptly that night while her father was upstairs, deciding to drive out to her step-father’s house in Bridgehampton in a Mercedes Benz E Class that she got for her 16th birthday. She thought it would be a good idea to spend some time with her mother before going off to college, to leave her father and his fake facade behind her, to one day hopefully build a genuine character of her own. She still, after all, did not know who she was.