So we sat around and wondered what we should do next. We had a whole summer to do whatever we wanted and all we had to do was figure it out. Then, that next morning, Jack had the idea that we should go to Newport, start our beards growing, sleep in the open, and sweat and not bother to wash until we got back. It sounded great to me and that night we drove down in my VW. But when we hit the town we saw that there were a million kids around with the same idea and all of us looked alike, and the local pig-cops wouldn’t let us sleep on the ground. They had a lot of sawdust on the ground and we dragged our feet through it and threw it up in the air and on each other. Jack even tried to stuff some of it in his pockets to bring back with us and make our place smell better, but the pigs stopped us there too. The Festival was on that weekend and a lot of the little rock groups were singing “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” a real oldie. It seemed to catch on, though, and even way up on the stage, about a hundred benches from us, Christopher Robin and the Sparrows, a new group in from the Coast, were singing it too. It was our first night there and I looked around in the bright white outdoor lamplight and at all the faces and there was this girl, a Jew with a big nose trying to keep warm in a blanket, and she was singing it too, right next to me on the bench, and she was crying.

I nudged Jack. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.

“All right,” Jack said. He was as set to go as me: our beards had not grown as much as some of the others there. We left the benches but Jack thought we should wander around some to pick up a couple of girls to bring back with us. I was thinking about Ellen and the plant.

“I don’t want to,” I told him.

“Why not?”

“Let’s just get the hell out, alone.”

Jack didn’t push it or bitch about it much. I guess he didn’t mind that either.

So we came back to the city with some groovy sawdust in our shoes that we had managed to pick up. But that night in our place when we poured it out of our shoes on the floor it looked too much like dirt. And we had to throw that out too.

“I’m tired of this shit,” said Jack.

“What’s wrong?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Want to call Ellen and Katie over and get laid?”

“If you want to,” Jack said.

“I don’t really want any unless you need some.”

“No. I don’t want any.”