I just finished a nutritious watermelon lunch. It was almost as good as the delicious watermelon dinner I had the other night.
I was flooded with fond memories as I slurped my way through the lucious orb and reached something close to food ecstasy when the sweet juice dribbled off my chin and onto my waiting
peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the paper plate below. One insistent fly circled, vulture-like above the carnage.
Damn! I love watermelon. I dont’ understand how it got to be such a lowly item on the food totem. Is watermelon the white trash of fruits?
It is a fruit, isn’t it?
I grew up in the South in the 50s and 60s and I remember the hateful stereotypes that proliferated: grinning pickaninnies cradling half eaten slices of whatermelon, their mothers sucking on chicken bones in the yard behind. It got to the point where you really couldn’t use the words ‘watermelon’ and ‘Negro’ in the same sentence. And, if you were Black, the last thing you wanted to be caught eating on your lunch hour was a mess of fried chicken and some greasy greens.
Times have changed. Now we have Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles in Hollywood and in Long Beach. The place is packed all the time and the food is outstanding. 
Roscoe has figured out how to get folks to pay $3.50 for a single scoop serving of his world famous greens. Mine are better, of course, but everytime I go there I pay the fare and sample his . . . if only to say how mine are better.
Today it’s ok to like watermelon and fried chicken. I sure do. And I’m proud of it, damnit! If it makes me trashy or low class to wanna wash the chicken fat off of my chin with a honkin slurp of watermelon, then low class trash I be.
I believe my affection for the melon is not nearly as trashy as the kinds of abuses that have routinely been heaped on it through the years. Like the fraternity boys who inject it with grain alcohol and feed it to not so unsuspecting girls. I even saw an art film not too long ago of four young men, crudely having their way with a watermelon! They had opened four holes in the thing along the same radius and stood in a circle around the poor melon, each one by his own hole and. . . well; you get the picture. I guess the beautiful red flesh of the watermelon is a kind of womb to the seeds that rest inside . . . but I doubt that God ever intended for man to lay with melon as he does with woman, much less be permitted to marry one.
Here’s one of the fond watermelon memories that came back to me today as I dined on my fleshy fruit. It was 1970, the era of the Music Festival. They’d been spreading all across the country: huge events where us kids would flock to take drugs and hear all of our favorite bands. Of course there was Woodstock and Montery Pop. But the southern event was 
the Atlanta Pop Festival. I remember the posters: a phychadelic hand raised in peace salute fashion. Everyone in the universe was there, including me and my pal, Carson.
Like most such events, the drama of survival became almost as memorable as the burning of guitars or the smashing of amplifiers. The promoters NEVER understood how many people would come and what kind of provision should be made for them. In Atlanta, in July (!) it is rather . . . HOT! After a day of tripping their brains out in the baking sun, people were passing out right and left. Heat and sun stroke were rampant. There was no shade and hardly any water.
Some brave souls shed their clothes and played in a nearby river, quickly turning the surrounding area into a mud bog — which was even more fun. Others wandered through the crushing pack, asking for Coke and meaning Cola, becoming more disoriented with each step. Finally, there was a roar and a parting of the crowd at the back of the festival grounds: 
A large flatbed truck was making it’s way towards the center of the event, it’s bed loaded with ripe juicy watermellons.
They were distributed sanely for about half a minute then golrious chaos broke out, people throwing whole melons then hunks at each other. Probably 200 of the 250,000 people in attendance got some benefit. But it was the gesture that counted. . . and the memory of the sight now 56 years later.
Finally, in the late afternoon, a water tanker of the type used by road crews to wet down the dust came in and began hosing people off and dispensing jugs of water. The water truck became part of the routine for the rest of that 3 day event.
What of Carson and I? I hate to admit this, but we were actually pretty miserable. The biggest problem was our inability to score drugs. We spent literal hours cruising the crowd asking for anything that would get us blasted. 
I guess we looked like narcs or something, because we were utterly out of luck until the end of day 2. Just as we became almost certain that we’d be the only 2 guys to not get high at the festival when a girl, probably smitten by Carson’s ‘better qualities’ (we used to call him ‘Sledge’) relented and gave us each of hit of what was supposed to be acid. I don’t think it was ’cause neither of us saw God or even a pink lizard. We just started feeling bad. So much so that in the early hours of day 3, we made our way out of the Atlanta Pop Festival and drove home where we had passable pot and a couple of guitars of our own.
Funny; that’s almost all I remember about Atlanta Pop. Was there music? Oh, yes: Grand Funk Railroad made their debut at the festival. They’d driven all the way from Michigan or wherever they were from to the event and, though they weren’t on the bill, talked their way on as one of the opening acts. The crowd liked them so much they were brought back for another set the second day. I vaguely remember Janice Joplin and my idols of the day, Jefferson Airplane. 
Local heros The Alman Brothers Band blew everyone away as usual, Duane (now Dead Old Duane) playing guitar like a ring in a bell with a handy Coke (not as in cola) spoon on a chain around his neck. Oh, and I remember the Hampton Grease Band. Who could forget? That’s Bruce Hampton’s photo over there on the left. They were musically amazing, in the way that Frank Zappa and the Dixie Dregs were amazing; and they were also funny as hell. I remember Bruce chasing other band members around the stage with a 2 gallon jug of mayonaise, throwing great handfuls of the stuff on everyone. ‘Eggs! Grease! 
Ramage!’ he yelled into the microphone. ‘Ramage! Ramage! Rammage!’ I wonder if Bruce ever abused a melon?
Oh, By the way, did you know there’a a National Watermelon Queen? I didn’t either until I started looking for photos for this blog. Her name is: Jennifer Ann Carden and she lives in Texas, of course. This is her picture.
There’s a whole other story about Pop Festivals that I have to tell. It’s about my boy, Jeffrey, and how our lives intersected a year earlier, in 1969, at the biggest of these events . . . and the tie that unites us to this day. But, like I said, that’s another story . . .