Scenes From An Ordinary Be-Bop 1960s Life-The Intellectuals Or The Jocks?-With The Late Norman Mailer In Mind

Scenes From An Ordinary Be-Bop 1960s Life-The Intellectuals Or The Jocks?-With The Late Norman Mailer In Mind

 

[A while back we, a bunch of us who knew Markin who wrote the sketch below back in sunnier days, in hang around corner boy high school days and afterward too when we young bravos imbibed in the West Coast dragon chase he led us on in the high hellish mid-1960s summers of love, got together and put out a little tribute compilation of his written sketches that we were able to cobble from whatever we collectively still had around. Those writings were from a time when Markin was just gaining steam as a writer for many of the alternative magazines, journals and newspapers that were beginning to be the alternative network of media resources that we were reading once we knew the main media outlets were feeding us bullshit on a bun, excuse my English, no, don’t that will serve today as then as good if earthy a description of the prostitute Fourth Estate as any, were working hand in glove with big government, big corporations, big whatever that was putting their thumbs in our eyes. Seeking revenge pure and simple for the little niches we were trying to create in that small, very small as it turned out, space we were claiming as a freedom zone (the politics of that process are much too complex to be reduced to a couple of words bust this introduction is about Markin not about my take on what went wrong, or right in those lustrous days.  

On big series, a series that Markin was nominated, or won, I don’t remember which, Sam Lowell the lawyer from our crowd would know better which one was the case, an award for, which I will tell you about some other time was from a period toward the end of his life, a period when he was lucid enough to capture such stories. He had found himself a couple of years after his own Vietnam military had ended out in Southern California with a bunch of homeless fellow Vietnam veterans, no homeless was not the right word, guys from ‘Nam, his, their word not mine since I did not serve in the military having been mercifully declared 4-F, unfit for military duty by our local draft board, who having come back to the “real” world just couldn’t, or wouldn’t adjust and started “creating” their own world, their own brethren circle, such as it was out along the railroad tracks, rivers and bridges. Bruce Springsteen would capture the pathos and pain of the situation in his classic tribute song-Brothers Under The Bridge.  Markin’s series was called To The Jungle reflecting both the hard ass jungle of Vietnam from which they had come from to the old-timey hobo railroad track jungle they had found themselves coming to.    

Yeah, those were the great million word and ten thousand fact days, the mid to late 1960s, and after he had gotten back from Vietnam the early 1970s say up to 1974 or so when whatever Markin wrote seemed like pure gold, seemed like he had the pulse of what was disturbing our youth dreams, had been able to articulate in words we could understand the big jail-break out he was one of the first around our town to anticipate. Had gathered himself in to cut the bullshit on a bun world out.

That was before Markin took the big fall down in Mexico, let his wanting habits, a term Markin put in local circulation that our acknowledged high school corner boy leader Frankie Riley used incessantly to describe the poor boy hunger we had for dough, girls, stimulants, life, whatever, get the best of him. Of course Markin and through him Frankie had “cribbed” the term from some old blues song.  Maybe Bessie Smith who had her habits on for some no good man cheating on her and spending all her hard-earned dough. Maybe Howlin’ Wolf wanting every gal he saw in sight, skinny or big-legged to “do the do.” Markin had turned us on to these steamy blues ideas although I admit in my own case that it took me many years, many years after Markin was long gone before I appreciated the blues that he kept trying to cram down our throats as the black-etched version of what hellish times were going through in the backwaters of North Adamsville while the rest of the world was getting ahead. Heading to leafy suburban golden dreams while we could barely rub two dimes together and hence made up the different with severe wanting habits-even me.  

From what little we could gather about Markin’s fate from Josh Breslin, a guy from Maine, a corner boy himself, who I will talk about more in a minute and who saw Markin just before he hit the lower depths, before he let sweet girl cousin cocaine “run all around his brain, they say it is going to kill you but they won’t say when” let the stuff alter his judgment, he went off to Mexico to “cover” the beginnings of the cartel action there. Somewhere along the line the down there Markin decided that dealing high heaven dope was the way that he would gather in his pot of gold, would get the dough he never had as a kid, and get himself well. “Well” meaning nothing but his nose so full of “candy” all the time that the real world would no longer intruded on his life. Somehow in all that mixed up world he had tried his usual end-around, tried to do either an independent deal outside the cartel, a no-no, or stole some “product” to start his own operation, a very big no-no. Either scenario was possible when Markin got his wanting habits on. So he wound up dead, very mysteriously dead, in a dusty back street down Sonora way in 1975, 1976 and we don’t even have the comfort of knowing that actual date of his passing.

Those were the bad end days, the days out in Oakland where they were both staying before Markin headed south when according to Josh he said “fuck you” to writing for squally newspapers and journals and headed for the sweet dream hills. But he left plenty of material behind that had been published or at the apartment that he shared with Josh in Oakland before the nose candy got in the way. That material wound up in several locations as Josh in his turn took up the pen, spent his career writing for lots of unread small journals and newspapers in search of high-impact stories and drifted around the country before he settled down in Cambridge working as a free-lance editor for several well-known if also small publishing houses around Boston. When the idea was proposed by Jack Callahan to pay a final written tribute to our fallen comrade we went looking for whatever was left wherever it might be found. You know from cleaning out the attics, garages, cellars looking for boxes where an old newspaper article or journal piece might still be found after being forgotten for the past forty or so years.

The first piece we found, found by Jack Callahan, one of the guys who hung around with us corner boys although he had a larger circle since as a handsome guy he had all the social butterfly girls around him and as a star football player for North Adamsville High he had the girls and all the “jock” hangers-on bumming on his tail, was a story by Markin for the East Bay Other about the transformation of Phil Larkin from “foul-mouth” Phil to “far-out’ Phil as a result of the big top social turmoil events which grabbed many of us who came of political, social, and cultural age in the roaring 1960s. Markin like I said before had been the lead guy in sensing the changes coming, had us following in his wake not only in our heads but in his gold rush run in the great western trek to California where a lot of the trends got their start.

That is where we met the subject of the second piece, or rather Phil did and we did subsequently too as we made our various ways west, Josh Breslin, Josh from up in Podunk Maine, actually Olde Saco fast by the sea, and he became in the end one of the corner boys, one of the North Adamsville corner boys. But before those subsequent meetings he had first become part of Phil’s “family,” and as that second story documented also in the East Bay Other described it how Josh, working his new life under the moniker Prince Love, “married” one of the Phil’s girlfriends, Butterfly Swirl. The third one in the series dealt with the reality of Phil’s giving up that girlfriend to Prince Love and the “marriage” and “honeymoon,” 1960s alternative-style that cemented that relationship between them.

Yeah, those were wild times and if a lot of the social conventions accepted today without too much rancor like people living together as a couple without the benefit of marriage, same-sex marriage, and maybe even friends with benefits let me clue you in to where they all started, or if not started got a big time work-out to make things acceptable. But that was not all Markin wrote about, just the easy to figure a good story about 1960s. Markin also wrote about those wanting habits days, our growing up poor in the 1950s days which while we had no dough, not enough to be rich was rich in odd-ball stuff we seemingly were forced to do to keep ourselves just a little left of the law, very little sometimes. Naturally he wrote about the characters around the neighborhood like Stew-ball Stu, whom I still hope doesn’t read this sketch if he is still alive because he might still take umbrage and without Markin around he might come after me with a wrench or jackknife. Yeah wrote about guys like Stew-ball, who we young boys, maybe girls too but then it was boys’ world mostly looked up to. The actual Stew-ball Stu he used in his fourth sketch was from a story told to him by Josh Breslin long after he shed his 1960s moniker of Prince Love when Markin was looking for corner boy stories. But believe me while the names might have been different old North Adamsville had its own full complement of Stus.  

I really believe in his heart Markin hated being a corner boy, hated being the guy who like some gypsy fortuneteller called which way the social winds were blowing, or going to blow. Hated being called the Scribe once king hell king Frankie Riley our leader christened him with that moniker one night when he started endlessly spouting some of the two thousand fact that he knew while under “the influence of alcohol” as we used to describe the condition. Worse, worst of all, was that he did that spouting while we have a few “hot” girls hanging around who could have given a fuck about his foolish knowledge (although as good Irish Catholic girls, or wanna-be good Irish Catholic girls they would not have used that term of art). They just wanted to be kissed, or maybe more but old Markin broke the mood, no question. Yeah I think in the end that Markin would have been happier with his bookworms and his and their jabberings. But here is the rub. They wouldn’t have had him as far as I could tell. He had been nabbed as a corner boy very early and the “intellectuals” would have had nothing to do with him even if he could have outtalked and outthought half of them and had time for lunch. That is the gist of the story Markin told Josh one frosty night on the road and which Josh remembered enough of to write about recently using Markin’s persona.             

    

When Markin was on his game, when he was “walking with the king,” an old religious expression that did double-duty as a local drug term out in the West Coast ocean night, he could write about anything and it sounded like something like the “second coming.” And maybe that “second coming” was what drove his work, what pushed his buttons when he was walking with that king. I mentioned above that Markin well before any of the rest of us corner boys could “give a fuck,” a term we often used when he would bring up his idea that a new breeze was coming that would change what was driving us like big jobs, a nice house, a “boss” car, maybe a wife and kids down the road all upside down. A lot of what he was driving at in the beginning was something like a cultural revolution, you know first the emergence of rock and roll that loosened things up a little before it was crushed beneath our feet by irate parents and gutless record companies, then Markin’s discovery of the blues, folk music, wild wind poetry which we all yawned at. But as he got older say about fourteen or fifteen he started putting that cultural stuff together with what today would be called a political revolution. Started to see the break-down of the red scare Cold War night, yeah, that’s what the bastard called the thing, the escape from that dead air, dead ass night. That’s what he wanted to lay on a candid world, candid a word he said he got from Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence. Jesus. No wonder there was no room for him, no air for him to breathe once the 1960s took a nosedive           

    

For those not in the know, for those who didn’t read the first Phil Larkin piece where I mentioned what corner boy society in old North Adamsville was all about Phil was one of a number of guys, some say wise guys but we will let that pass who hung around successively Harry’s Variety Store over on Sagamore Street in elementary school watching the older guys playing pinball and planning various midnight creeps which enflamed our telltale hearts,  Doc’s Drugstore complete with soda fountain and more importantly his bad ass jukebox complete with all the latest rock and roll hits as they came off the turntable on Newport Avenue in junior high school when we finally figured out that girls were, well, okay, and Salducci’s Pizza “up the Downs” in high school, don’t worry nobody in the town could figure that designation out either, as their respective corners as the older guys in the neighborhood in their turn moved up and eventually out of corner boy life. That latter corner is where all the business about wanting habits got played out, for good or evil.  

More importantly Phil was one of the guys who latter followed in “pioneer” Markin’s wake when he, Markin, headed west in 1966 after he had finished up his sophomore year in college and made a fateful decision to drop out of school in Boston in order to “find himself.” Fateful in that without a student deferment that “find himself” would eventually lead him to induction into the U.S. Army at the height of the Vietnam War, an experience which he never really recovered from for a lot of reasons that had nothing to do directly with that war but which honed his “wanting habits” for a different life than he had projected when he naively dropped out of college to see “what was happening” out on the West Coast.

Phil had met, or I should say that Josh Breslin had met Phil, out on Russian Hill in San Francisco when Josh, after hitchhiking all the way from Maine in the early summer of 1967, had come up to the yellow brick road converted school bus (Markin’s term for the travelling caravan that he and Phil were then part of and which the rest of us, including even stay-at-home me would be a part of later if only in my case for a few months) he and a bunch of others were travelling up and down the West Coast on and had asked for some dope. Phil was the guy he had asked, and who had passed him a big old joint, and their eternal friendship formed from there. (Most of us would meet Josh later that summer as we in our turns headed out. Sam Lowell, Frankie Riley, Jack Callahan, Jimmy Jenkins and me all headed out after Markin who had “gone native” pleaded with us to not miss this big moment that he had been predicting was going to sea-change happen for a few years.) Although Markin met a tragic end murdered down in Mexico several years later over a still not well understood broken drug deal with some small cartel down there as a result of an ill-thought out pursuit of those wanting habits mentioned earlier he can take full credit along with Phil Larkin for our lifetime friendship with Josh.-Bart Webber]

 

From The Pen Of The Late Peter Paul Markin

 

Every school since back in Socrates’ time, maybe before, has had discernable social groupings within so that I was not surprised when I was asked recently what group(s) I hung around with, if any, at High back in the mid-1960s. Here is my answer and I solicit yours as well…      

I did not then, nor do I now, know Fredda Kostoff (I think I spelled that right although it might be Kostov all I remember is that she was Russian and I don’t know if she came from there or some forebears did but my apologies to her if I misspelled her name),  Melinda Malloy ( I know I spelled that one right since beside her being smart I had a from a distance “crush” on her although the most I ever did about it was have her exchange yearbook good luck notes with me and so I did not “know” her), or Irvin Jack Stein (a wild man who made his friends laugh from what I had heard beside being what would later be called nerd or dweeb at MIT I think but by far the smartest guy in the class), fellow classmates at High, Class of 1966, and among the class geniuses, the intellectuals. I don’t remember if my old “jock” running buddy Charles William Badger, Bill (nobody called him Charles, his drunken father’s name, not unless you wanted grief about it so Bill), whose very existence learned after years of statutory neglect and recent reuniting prompted me to recently write some teary-eyed thing about him running amok on the back streets of home and down toward the Plymouth shores in the old days knew them or not, but it was with them in mind that I wrote the following. I, today, strongly believe that I could have learned a lot from that trio and maybe Bill believes that as well but you will have to ask him that question yourself. No way, no way on god’s good green earth in the year 2015 and while I am still breathing, old time “jock” buddies or not, am I going to vouch for that maniac. Here goes:

Every September, like clockwork, I am transported to a place called the beginning of the year. No, not New Year’s Day like any rational person would expect, but the school year for most students, younger or older. That is a frame of reference that I have not changed in all these years. And every year at that time, or in many of those years anyway, my thoughts go back to the road not taken, or really not taken then, when I ask myself the following question that I am posing in such a way here so that you can ask it to yourself as well: What group(s) did you hang around with in high school?

This question is meant to be generic and more expansive that the two categories listed in the headline. The “intellectuals” and the “jocks” were hardly the only social groupings that existed at our high school (or any high school, then or now, for that matter) but the ones that I am interested in personally for the purpose of this sketch. The list of other possibilities is long: white tee-shirt, denim jeans, leather jacket, engineer boots complete with whipsaw chain corner boy devotees; wanna-be gangster hoods hanging out one knee bent against the school wall menacing all who entered; the latest Seventeen magazine-attired social butterflies, girl social butterflies, populating the spirit and dance committees and come senior year that prized prom committee looking down their noses at us, the peasantry, below;  teases, male and female, also a sub-genre of social butterflies, avoiding furtive glances thrown their way and then “hurt” when no one pays attention to them after a while; school administration “brown noses” (really “snitches,” the bastards) who had been in that sorry condition since some ill-disposed elementary school-teacher made them hall monitor; nerdy four-eyed science nuts ready to blow the whole school up in order to satisfy some morbid curiosity (including one time I heard Irvin Jack but that might just have been just be a vicious rumor by some forgotten science bug who couldn’t make lemonade without threatening World War III); oil-stained auto mechanics grease monkeys forever talking about engine compression, riding around town in their customized ‘57 Chevys, and strangely leaving a trail of broken-hearted lovely foxy girls behind; incipient Bolsheviks just waiting for the word from Moscow; black-sweatered  faux “beats” ready to hang “square” on a candid world; choral music nation devotees (okay, okay glee club) ready to sing at the drop of a hat; could-care-less-if-school-keeps-or-not-ers, no explanation necessary; chronic school skippers; drop-outs, religious nuts, and who knows what other “social network” combines, maybe bowling. If any of these groups read like your experiences you can relate your own thoughts on behalf of your high school “community.” I have other thoughts this day.

You, fellow alumni from the High School, North Adamsville, Massachusetts, U.S.A. may also feel free to present your own categories of hang-out groups in case I missed anything above like baton-twirlers, infamous band members (by the way the stories I have heard about what went on after practice with the instruments in the band room shocked me, made me blush), square-dancers, bird-watchers, or stamp collectors, or all of them intertwined, if your tastes ran that way then. However, for me, and perhaps some of you, there was an unequal running battle between the two choices presented in the title. Or maybe the choice I wished I had chosen is a better way to put the matter.

I did not hang out with the intellectuals, formerly known as the "smart kids.” You know, the ones that your mother was always, usually unfavorably, comparing you to come report card time in order to embarrass you or get you to buckle down in the great getting out from under the graying nowhere working- class night and make something of yourself that she (and dad) could be proud of. Yes, those kids who could be seen at the library after school, and even on Saturday, Saturdays if you can believe that, and endlessly trudging, trudging like some Promethean wanderers with about forty- six pounds of books, books large and small, books in all colors, and here is the kicker, well-thumbed, very well-thumbed.

I did hang with the “jocks, to the extent I could be identified with any school group. You know, the guys and in those days it was almost exclusively guys (girls came in as cheer-leaders or girlfriends-sometimes the same thing) who lived to throw, heave, punch, pull, leap upon, trample, block, jump, pummel, everything in sight but, ah, books. You know too, mainly, the Goliaths of the gridiron, their hangers-on, wannabes and "slaves." The guys who were not carrying any forty-six pounds of books, although maybe they were wearing that much poundage in sports gear. And any books that needed carrying was done by either girlfriends or the previously mentioned slaves. Other sports may have had some shine but the “big men” on campus were the fall classic guys. Some sports such as cross-country and track and field, my sports, didn’t usually rate even honorable mention compared to say a social butterfly-driven senior bake sale or some high school confidential school dance in the school social pecking order.

Frankly, although I was in one grouping and thought about the other in high school I was mainly a "loner" for reasons that are beyond what I want to discuss here except it very definitely had to do with confusion about the way to get out from under that graying working- class nowhere night. And about “fitting in” somewhere in the school social order that had little room for guys (or girls for that matter) who did not fit into some classifiable niche. Little room for teen angst and alienated guys, 1960s shorts-wearing track guys, running the streets of the old town to the honks of automobiles trying to scare us off the road (no “share the road with a runner” then) and jeers, the awful jeers of the girls, that space was very small. The most I could hope for was a “nod” from the football guys (or basketball in winter) in recognition that I was a fellow athlete, of sorts. Yeah, times were tough.

But as this is a confessional age I can now come out of the closet, at last. I read books back then. Yes, I read them, no, devoured them endlessly (and still do), and as frequently as I could (can). I LIKED reading, let’s say, “max daddy” English poet John Milton’s tangled Paradise Lost. I lived to read footnotes in arcane history books. You know, for example, the sources for the big controversy over whether in Cromwell’s time, the time of the 17^th century English Revolution that event was driven by declining or rising gentry. Yeah stuff like that.

Did you see me carrying tons of books over my shoulder in public though? Be serious, please. Here is the long held secret (even from Bill). I used to go over to the library on the other side of town, the Adamsville Commons side, where no one, no one who counted anyway (meaning no jock, of course), would know me. One summer I did that almost every day for at least part of the day. So there you have it. Well, not quite.

In recent perusals of our class yearbook I have been drawn continually to the page where the description of the Great Books Club is presented. I was unaware of this club, did not know it existed, at the time but, apparently, it met after school and discussed Plato, John Stuart Mill, Shakespeare, Karl Marx and others. (See below.) Fredda and the others were members. Hell, after I read the description of what went on there that club sounded like great fun. One of the defining characteristics of my life has been, not always to my benefit, an overweening attachment to books and ideas. So what was the problem? What didn't I hang with that group?

Well, uh..., you know, they were, uh, nerds, dweebs, squares, not cool (although we did not use some of those exact terms in those days). That, at least, was the public reason, but here are some other more valid possibilities. Coming from my “shanty” background, where the corner boys had a certain cachet, I was somewhat afraid of mixing in with the "smart kids." The corner boys counted, after school anyway, and if they didn’t count then it was better to keep a wide, down low berth from anything that looked like a book reader in their eyes. I, moreover, feared that I wouldn't measure up, that the intellectuals seemed more virtuous somehow. I might also add that a little religiously-driven plebeian Irish Catholic anti-intellectualism might have entered into the mix as well (you know, be “street” smart but not too “book” smart in order to get ahead in one version of that getting out from under graying working -class nowhere night my family kept harping on).

But, damn, I sure could have used the discussions and fighting for ideas that such groups like that book club would have provided. I had to do it the hard way later. As for the jocks I have not mentioned a thing about their long- term effects on me. And, in the scheme of things, that is about right. So now you know my belated choice, except to steal a phrase from something that I wrote recently honoring my senior English teacher, Miss (Ms.) Lenora Somos-"Literature matters. Words matter." I would only add here that ideas matter as well. Hats Off to the North Adamsville High  Class of 1966 intellectuals!

This list is from a letter written in the early 1950s by the late American writer, Norman Mailer, and printed in The New York Review Of Books a few years ago, detailing his choices for "must reads" in the American literary canon. What would your ten choices be?

 

Norman Mailer




Ten Favorite American Novels

U.S.A.- John Dos Passos

Huckleberry Finn- Mark Twain

Studs Lonigan -James T. Farrell

Look Homeward, Angel- Thomas Wolfe

The Grapes of Wrath- John Steinbeck

The Great Gatsby- F. Scott Fitzgerald-1^st on my list

The Sun Also Rises- Ernest Hemingway

Appointment in Samarra- John O'Hara

The Postman Always Rings Twice- James M. Cain

Moby-Dick- Herman Melville



This would be my list as well sticking to Mailer’s early 1950s selection time period except instead of Moby Dick I would put Nelson Algren’s Walk On The Wild Side and instead of Huckleberry Finn I would put J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.