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who ended:

    > Linda is pissed off that she's not invited, but when I told her there wouldn't be any producers of teen beach movies (she's an actress, don'tcha know), she felt better. Then when I told her that the evening would consist of a bunch of old farts like myself reminiscing through dope-wasted brains and telling each other why we haven't really sold out, she decided that another Saturday night around the pool looked pretty fucking good. Kids today . . . sheesh .

    Woody kept trying to write, immersed himself in sixties music, kept practicing on the half dozen wind instruments he had mastered. Sometimes late at night, unable to sleep, he played records by the Doors, or Jefferson Airplane, or the Beatles, and created fantasias on the tunes with his oboe, its voice piercing the darkness like a laser through ice.
    But none of the tunes that he wrote completely satisfied him, except for the one he had heard in his head on the stairs to the apartment. The others lacked what he could only think of as authenticity.
    Two weeks before the party he flew to his parents' home in Scranton, Pennsylvania. They had lived in the same house for the past forty years, and prided themselves on never throwing anything out. This was the first time that Woody found their pack rat mentality an advantage, for his years in college still existed in a corporeal form. All his back issues of Rolling Stone , piles of the Iselin student newspaper, the paperbacks he had bought by the armful from The Alt's used bins—they were all there in the large room above the old two car garage.
    There too was the stereo he had in college, a little Panasonic component set which he had played through his sophomore year until Frank and his larger Magnavox/Garrard combination moved in with him.
    In a back closet, he found his old TV, a GE twelve-inch encased in a plastic, red-orange cabinet. He plugged in the cord and turned it on, but nothing happened. Good, he thought. Who wanted to watch MTV or a film from the eighties when you were recreating the sixties? It would help set the scene, that was all.
    The crowning touch was the cardboard tubes that still held the posters he had Plasti -tacked on the apartment walls—a map of Middle-Earth, psychedelic Day-Glo landscapes, a Fillmore West poster advertising Big Brother and the Doors, and Keith's poster of Jesus with a gun. Woody had kept that one. It was hardly the thing to return to a pair of grief-stricken parents.
    He felt relieved as he drove his father's big Ford from Scranton to Iselin. Now he wouldn't have to search all over for proper artifacts to help dress the apartment, but, more importantly, the things would be authentic, his own, the books and records and posters that were actually present when he and Frank and Keith had lived there.
    His clothes should be all right too. He had tried on an assortment of things his mother had saved in plastic bags that hung like fat cocoons in the attic. They fit, though the bellbottoms were snug around the waist.
    Several guests had written to tell him that they could dress themselves, while others, like Alan, said they had thrown away all the old stuff, and enclosed lists of sizes. Ron Dewey's wife was a costumer in the Bay area, and Woody had hired her to hit the thrift stores and outfit his party. At last report she was doing well. After all, if you couldn't find hippie duds in Berkeley, where else could you find them?
    It was while Woody was hauling the stereo, TV, and piles of Rolling Stone into the old bookstore that the question hit him, and he sat on the dirty floor, gazed up at the ghosts of bookshelves on the otherwise bare walls, and asked himself aloud, "What the hell am I doing?"
    The total re-creation he was after, his insistence that no one come who could not have been there in 1969, his concentration on this future night that was, after all, just a party , had blocked out the rest of the world. It was all he thought about. Even his music, when he deigned