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Stop Continuing To Let The Military Sneak Into The High Schools-Down With JROTC And Military Recruiter Access
Frank Jackman comment:
One of the great struggles on college campuses during the height of the struggle against the Vietnam War back in the 1960s aside from trying to close down that war outright was the effort to get the various ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps, I think that is right way to say it) programs off campus. In a number of important campuses that effort was successful, although there has been back-sliding going on since the Vietnam War ended and like any successful anti-war or progressive action short of changing the way governments we could support do business is subject to constant attention or the bastards will sneak something in the back door.
To the extent that reintroduction of ROTC on college campuses has been thwarted, a very good anti-war action indeed which had made it just a smidgen harder to run ram shot over the world, that back door approach has been a two-pronged attack by the military branches to get their quota of recruits for their all-volunteer military services in the high schools. First to make very enticing offers to cash-strapped public school systems in order to introduce ROTC, junior version, particularly but not exclusively, urban high schools (for example almost all public high schools in Boston have some ROTC service branch in their buildings with instructors partially funded by the Defense Department and with union membership right and conditions a situation which should be opposed by teachers’ union members).
Secondly, thwarted at the college level for officer corps trainees they have just gone to younger and more impressible youth, since they have gained almost unlimited widespread access to high school student populations for their high pressure salesmen military recruiters to do their nasty work. Not only do the recruiters who are graded on quota system and are under pressure produce X number of recruits or they could wind doing sentry guard duty in Kabul or Bagdad get that access where they have sold many young potential military personnel many false bills of goods but in many spots anti-war veterans and other who would provide a different perspective have been banned or otherwise harassed in their efforts.
Thus the tasks of the day-JROTC out of the high schools-military recruiters out as well! Let anti-war ex-soldiers, sailors, Marines and airpersons have their say.
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU)-initiated Fight for $15 campaign held its first national convention on August 12-13 in Richmond, Virginia. Several thousand young and overwhelmingly black and Latino workers from some 20 industries across the country, including fast food, home health care and airport operations, were bused in for the occasion. Packing the meeting hall and filling the streets in a follow-up march, the boisterous workers expressly wanted to engage in a fight to achieve union representation and end the poverty wages and tenuous employment that are increasingly common for workers—black, white and Latino—in capitalist America. Winning such gains will take serious class battles. But the SEIU bureaucracy, long wedded to the illusion of a partnership of labor and capital, is committed to the opposite course: the lie that the way to advance workers’ interests (here a still-paltry $15 minimum wage) is to lobby capitalist Democratic Party politicians.
Union officials set up the weekend as one big pre-election photo-op for the Democrats, who no less than the Republicans are a party of the capitalist class enemy. In her headline speech, SEIU honcho Mary Kay Henry contended that labor unity “is especially important this year, with this election. We all know that one of the candidates for president is trying to divide us in dangerous and sometimes frightening ways.” Donald Trump is certainly frightening, but Hillary Clinton—the favorite of Wall Street—is no “friend of labor.” Notably, several black workers told Workers Vanguard that they were not voting for any candidate.
The “Richmond Resolution” passed at the convention called for pushing the right candidates for president, Senate and other elected offices, which alongside other activities would supposedly “balance the power that the richest Americans have in our government.” No amount of voting for, or pressuring, the Democrats will change the reality that the government rules on behalf of the capitalist masters of this class-divided society, in which the handful who own the banks and industry amass profits by exploiting the laboring masses. There can be no “balanced power” between the exploiters and the exploited in the capitalist government. The only way for workers to throw off their chains is to wrest the productive wealth from the hands of the capitalists in a socialist revolution and establish a workers government.
The Fight for $15’s upcoming September 12 national day of action planned for state capitols across the country is more of the same—another attempt by the union tops to divert into legalistic channels the evident fighting spirit of the low-wage workers, who are frustrated by the campaign’s four years of incessant begging with little to show for it. Truth is, an entirely different kind of mobilization is needed to win increased pay and union recognition from the bosses: strike action at the workplace. By withholding their labor and cutting off the flow of profits, workers have the potential to wrest better wages and working conditions from the employers and to organize the unorganized. Unions are forged in class struggle. With low-wage workers often atomized and easily replaced, crucially important to victory are concrete acts of labor solidarity by existing unionized workforces in related industries, such as the transportation and warehouse supply chain in the case of fast food.
Campaign organizers said they selected Richmond, the seat of the former Confederacy, as the convention site in order to draw the link between the country’s racist history and low wages. (Conveniently for the union bureaucrats, the city is also the home base of Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine.) This link was hardly news to the many black workers in attendance. Chants of “Black lives matter!” erupted throughout the weekend’s events in protest against the rampant cop terror endemic to this viciously racist society, where the black population is confronted every day by the legacy of chattel slavery.
With anti-black racism wielded by the bosses to pit black and white workers against one another, what is urgently needed is for the working class as a whole to champion black liberation. Especially in the South, any serious effort to unionize will have to directly confront the deep racial divide that has crippled past organizing drives. The labor fakers, who do their level best to avoid struggle even to defend and expand their own organizations, must go, to be replaced by a new union leadership willing to fight it out class against class.
After the march through the streets of Richmond ended at a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, pockets of workers cried out: “Tear it down!” Like chattel slavery before it, the system of wage slavery deserves to perish. To those who want to make a fight of it instead of begging the Democrats for crumbs, we offer the perspective of building a multiracial workers party in which black workers will be within the front ranks. Such a party will be dedicated to shattering the capitalist order once and for all and ushering in an egalitarian socialist society.
*****Okay, Rosalie Sorrels Have You Seen Starlight On The Rails
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Okay, Rosalie Sorrels Have You Seen Starlight On The Rails
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Every hobo, tramp, and bum and there are known social distinctions long recognized among the brethren even if with a touch of envy by those not among the elect although the general population, you know, the honest citizenry who make the rules against vagrancy and pay the enforcers to keep the riffraff out of their towns called the whole heap nothing but bums knows the road is hard, but that is the road they have chosen, or had chosen for them by their whole freaking life choices. Despite the claims of oneness for the whole heap of bummery by those honest citizens of small town America (or these days the world) where the fear exists every really honest person, even every thoughtful amateur sociologist should know that among the wandering tribes the hobos, “the kings and queens of the transient peoples,” are merely migrant or walking through the land rucksack on the back day laborer-type worker, what Oswald Spengler and Jack Kerouac called the fellahin, the outcasts, who has not forgotten the dignity of labor, just not for him (or occasionally her) the nine to five grind and such brethren can be found out back in many a restaurant throughout the land especially at diners and truck shop eateries “diving for pearls, working,” working as dishwashers.
Every hobo has some problem, usually some Phoebe Snow problem, a woman problem, that forced him or her on the road (I don’t know what it would be for the distaff side so call him Jack Snow, any other sexual combination more acceptable today although definitely not unknown in the male-heavy “jungle camps” along the transcontinental railroad lines). That Phoebe Snow designation from some old time railroad advertisement when they finally figured how to keep their respectable passengers from looking like coalminers after alighting from a train by changing the way the engine was maneuvered and to express that new found discovery they had a virginal young woman in white getting on their trains ready for every civilized adventure in some faraway place (or maybe an illicit tryst but we will ask no questions). And so many a campfire night as the trains went westbound, or wherever bound, you would find many a man, maybe in his cups just then, dreaming back to their own Phoebes and wondering damn why they ever left Peoria, Lima, Scranton and that white dress with flowers in her hair standing in the wind. So, make no mistake, fear of work is not what drove the hobo out on to the roads.
See that royalty, the hobo, and his or her ability to work is why the Industrial Worker of the World (IWW, Wobblies, moniker origin unknown so Wobblies) went into the jungle camps (and gin mills too) in order to recruit labor fighters against the bosses when the deal went down, particularly in the West. (Although more famously in the great Lawrence, Massachusetts “Bread and Roses” textile strike of 1912 when they gathered in the nations of immigrants that the textile bosses recruited on the assumption that they could “divide and conquer.” Yid and gentile, Mick and Dago, Hunky and Frog, name your national derogatory moniker but didn’t they get a surprise that first morning when the nations gathered against the Wasp oligarchy.) Of course that transient work habit was also the down side of that organization as the kings of the transient road hit the road west, or somewhere, when it came to defending the unions over the long haul.
As for the other two, the tramp who only worked when forced to like on some thirty day county jailhouse for vagrancy gig or some Salvation Army work program to keep the body and soul together for a few days when whatever con, what grift was played out and the bum, Jesus, the bum wouldn’t work if he was Rockefeller himself, the dregs, winos, jack-rollers, sappers, petty crooks, mother’s purse stealers, the crippled up, sorry, and the dumb, sorry again, to put the matter plainly in the old- fashioned parlance how the hell could you organize them. You might as well try to organize air, might as well go down without a fight since they have probably already sold you out and the boss man will be waiting arms in hand, you can bet on that. There was a very good reason that the beloved heroic Paris Communards in 1871 as desperate as they were for fighters placed the placate “Death to Thieves” above the Hotel de Ville. Yeah, they had that right, don’t give the lumpen a change to breathe or he will steal your breathe just for kicks, or a jug of low-grade wine.
Now that you are all caught up on the differences, the “class differences,” between each cohort recognized among themselves, oh how recognized, and subject to fierce dispute including some faux fists, if not quite so definitely by rump academic sociologists who lump them all together but that is a story for another day (there is some hope for the amateur versions as long as the avoid the graduate schools of social work the bane of every person on the road, and rightly so). What they do have in common since they are out in the great outdoors more than the rest of us gentile folk is that they to a person have seen starlight on the rails. Yeah, had their fill of train smoke and dreams.
Now all these sullen subtle distinctions among the brethren I probably would have not been able to draw in my youth when I would have lumped the lot together as collective losers and riff-raff, the bums to honest citizens, before I hit the hitchhike road heading west at one time in search of the blue-pink great American West night out there somewhere. Thought I found it for a minute out in Mendocino with a sweet Lorraine all long hair, long granny dress and flowers, garlands really around her neck and in her hair. Go check out a Botticelli painting if you are near an art museum something or google up the man’s name on the Internet if you can’t wait, my own Phoebe Snow, before the hordes descended.Thought I had it another time in a hash/opium dream outside of Monterey after the jazz festival and some dark-haired, dark laughing eyes, hot-blooded, Juanita curled my toes for a while until I fought there were seventeen burn down the country club golf course and I had not enough matches and fled. Ah, you know and man’s reach should exceed his grasp like the Jack poet said.
I had, broken dreams aside, broken but not forgotten Botticelli dreams included, on one more than one occasion along with the late Peter Paul Markin who led the way among the North Adamsville corner boys on that trail been forced to stop along a railroad trestle “jungle camp,” under a cardboard city bridge, or out in the arroyos if you got far enough west to live for a few days and rest up for the road further west.
The hobos of the “jungle” were princes among men (there was no room for women then in such a male-dominated society, not along the jungle although at the missions and Sallys, Salvation Army Harbor Lights, that might be a different story) as long as you did not ask too many damn questions. Shared olio stews, cigarettes, cheap rotgut wine, Thunderbird “what’s the word, Thunderbird, what’s the price, forty twice” and that eighty cents tough to gather some days no matter how smooth the pan-handle, or Ripple, ‘save the nipple, cripple” sorry, whichever was cheapest after cadging the day’s collective pennies together. Later, after the big dream American West busted me up when my “wanting habits” (getting many worldly goods off easy street paid for by working the drug trade down south of the border along with Markin before he became the late Markin face down in some dusty Mexican bracero fellahin town when a drug deal he was trying to finagle caught him short, two slugs to the head short by some angry hombre who didn’t like gringos messing with their trade, or their dark-haired, dark laughing-eyed, hot-blooded women) built up from the edges of that sullen youth got the better of me and my addictions placed me out in that same “jungle” for keeps for a while that distinction got re-enforced.
But hobo, bum or tramp each had found him or herself (mainly hims though like I said out on the “jungle” roads) flat up against some railroad siding at midnight having exhausted every civilized way to spent the night. Having let their, our, collective wanting habits get the best of them, us. Maybe penniless, maybe thrown out of some flophouse in arrears and found that nobody bothers, or did bother you out along the steel rails, I won’t vouch for that now with all the weirdness in the world, when the train lost its luster to the fast speed Interstate automobile and one coast in the morning the other in the afternoon plane and rusted and abandoned railroads gone belly up, Union Pacific, SP, Denver, Rio Grande, Baltimore and Ohio, Illinois Central, all train smoke names for lack of use provided safe haven from the vagaries of civilization. So sure I too have seen with the brethren, those nameless hobos, tramps, and bums (to you they had among themselves monikers like Railroad Shorty, Black River Red, Smokestack, Philly Jack, mine, the Be-Bop Kid although I always had to explain what the be-bop was since these guys were well behind the curve, back in Benny Goodman swing time) the stars out where the spots are darkest and the brilliance of the sparkle makes one think of heaven for those so inclined, think of the void for the heathen among them. Has dreamed penitent dreams of shelter against life’s storms, had dreamed while living for the moment trying to get washed clean after the failure of the new dispensation to do the job (hell, what did they/Markin/me think just because the drugs or alcohol flowed freely once, just because the fixer man fixed, fixed fine, that that was the Garden of Eden, that was Nirvana, hell, those ancient forebears all after they had been expelled from the earthly paradise saw that same starlight as they/he/we/I did).
Maybe this will explain it better. An old man, or at least he has the marks of old age, although among the iterant travelling peoples, the hoboes, tramps, and bum, who have weathered many of life’s storms bottle or needle in hand, panhandled a million quarters now lost, old age, or their marks wear a soul down early so a guy who has been on the road enough years if he is say thirty looks about fifty by the time the train smoke and the busted dreams have broken his will, white beard, unkempt, longish hair, also unkempt, a river of lines in his face, deep crow’s feet setting off his vacant eyes, a second-hand soiled hat atop his head, a third-hand miner’s jacket “clipped” off some other lonesome traveler (“clipped”- stolen for clueless or those who led sheltered childhood and did not in order to satisfy some youthful wanting habit stakeout a jewelry store say and grab a few trinkets while the salesperson was looking the other way), shredded at the cuffs chino pants of indeterminate age, and busted up shoes, soles worn, heels at forty-five degree angles from crooked walks on crooked miles and game legs is getting ready to unroll his bedroll, ground cloth a tablecloth stolen from Jimmy Jack’s Diner’s somewhere, a blanket stolen from a Sally [Salvation Army] Harbor Light house in salad days, rolled newspapers now for a mattress for the hundredth, hundredth time against the edge of the railroad trestle just outside Gallup, New Mexico.
Do not ask him, if you have the nerve to approach him, and that is an iffy proposition just ask a guy going under the moniker of Denver Shorty how he got that deep scar across his face, where he is going or where he has come from because just that moment, having scratched a few coins in the town together for a jug of Thunderbird he is ready to sleep his sleep against the cold-hearted steel of the Southern Pacific railroad tracks just ten yards from where he stands.
And this night, this starlit brown, about eight colors of brown, desert night he hopes that he will not dream, not dream of that Phoebe Snow whom he left behind in Toledo when he had no beard, no longish unkempt hair, and no rivers of lines on his misbegotten face. (Why the brethren called every long gone sweetheart Phoebe Snow, why they would get misty over the dying campfire after some younger traveler stopped by and told his tale of leaving some young thing behind is unknown except, according to some old wizened geezer who might have just made the story up, in the old, old day when the railroads finally figured out how to keep people from being blackened by the train smoke every trip they took they started advertising this the fact with this white-dressed virginal young woman who went under the name Phoebe Snow. That’s probably as good an explanation as any since whatever the name, or the young woman almost every guy in camp would in his sorrows get weepy about that situation. Hey, didn't I tell that story before, Jesus, the dope or old age is getting to me but what the hell maybe that Phoebe Snow dream is worth a repeat I know it got me through many a restless night thinking about sweet Botticelli Lorraine and Goya Juanita.) Dream as he always did about whatever madness made him run from all the things he had created, all the things that drove him west like a million other guys who needed to put space between himself and civilization.
Dream too about the days when he could ride the rails in the first-class cars (having not only left Phoebe Snow behind but a growing specialty printing business started from scratch before the alcohol, and later the dope although now back to cheapjack alcohol got the better of him), and about the lure of the rails once he got unhinged from civilization. About how the train pace had been chastised by fast cars and faster planes when a the speed of a train fitted a man’s movements, about the days when they first built the transcontinental, this line that he was about to lie his head down beside, about the million Chinks, Hunkies, Russkies, Hibernians, hell, Micks, Dagos who sweated to drive the steel in unforgiving ground, many who laid down their heads down to their final rest along these roads, and later guys he knew on the endless road like Butte Bobby, Silver Jones, Ding-dong Kelly, who did not wake up the next morning and were carried out to the carcass vulture desert having left no way to get a hold of kin. Almost all guys had left no forwarding address, no real one anyway, no back address, for fear of the repo man or some other dunning, an angry wife or about ten thousand other reasons. So the desert was good enough as a potter’s field as any other place.
As he settled in to sleep the wine’s effect settling down too he noticed the bright half- moon out that night reflecting off the trestle, and the arroyos edges, and thought about what a guy, an old wizard like himself told him about the rails one time when he was laid up in Salt Lake City, in the days when he tried to sober up. The guy, a guy who had music in his soul or something said to him that it was the starlight on the rails that had driven him, rumble, stumble, tumble him to keep on the road, to keep moving away from himself, to forget who he was. And here he was on a starlit night listening down the line for the rumble of the freight that would come passing by before the night was over. But as he shut his eyes, he began to dream again of Phoebe Snow, always of Phoebe Snow.
But not everybody has the ability to sing to those starlit heavens (or to the void if that is what chances to happen as the universe expands quicker than we can think, bang- bang or get smaller into dust if that is the deal once the philosopher-king physicists figure out the new best theory) about the hard night of starlight on the rails and that is where Rosalie Sorrels, a woman of the American West out in the Idahos, out where, as is said in the introduction to the song by the same name ripping some wisdom from literary man Thomas Wolfe who knew from whence he spoke, the states are square (and at one time the people, travelling west people and so inured to hardship, played it square, or else), sings old crusty Utah Phillips’ song to those hobo, tramp, bum heavens. Did it while old Utah was alive to teach the song (and the story behind the song) to her and later after he passed on in a singular tribute album to his life’s work as singer/songwriter/story-teller/ troubadour.
Worked her way to a big sold out night at Saunders Theater at Harvard too when she called the road quits a decade or so ago. Sang some nice stuff speaking about the west, about the Brazos, about the great Utah desert which formed Utah Phillips a little too, formed him like his old friend Ammon Hennessey, the old saint Catholic Worker brother who sobered some guys up, made them take some pledges, made them get off the railroad steel road. Sobered me up too, got me off that railroad track too, but damn if I didn’t see that starlight too. So listen up, okay.
Click on the title to link the the Marx-Engels Internet Archive's copy of Engels' "Origin of The Family,Private Property and The State".
For the Right of Gay Marriage...and Divorce!
Marriage and the Capitalist State
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 824, 16 April 2004.
"Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
"On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
"The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital."
—Communist Manifesto (1848)
Until the welcome day capitalism does vanish, the monogamous family remains the legally enforced social model, at least in Western societies, for the organization of private life in its most intimate aspects: love, sex, bearing and raising children. It is the central social institution oppressing women; anti-gay bigotry flows from the need to punish any "deviations" from this patriarchal structure. Why anyone not under social pressure or economic duress would voluntarily enter the bonds of matrimony is, of course, one of life's mysteries. Nonetheless, it appears that these days the only people who actually want to get married are the only ones President Bush wants to stop: gays and lesbians.
Absolutely, they ought to have the right to marry. And just as absolutely, we socialists fight for a society in which no one needs to be forced into a legal straitjacket in order to get medical benefits, visitation rights, custody of children, immigration rights, or any of the many privileges this capitalist society grants to those, and only those, who are embedded in the traditional "one man on one woman for life" legal mold.
Controversy over "gay marriage" has roiled the U.S. since last November, when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that permitting only "civil unions" for gay couples was unconstitutional, thus establishing the right to gay marriage in Massachusetts. In February the San Francisco mayor ordered same-sex marriage licenses issued, and 4,037 gay and lesbian couples from 46 states and eight countries got hitched before ceremonies were ordered halted on March 11. The Green Party mayor of New Paltz, New York, jumped into the fray, officiating at 25 same-sex marriages. When he was barred by court order from continuing, two local Unitarian ministers took over, only to have criminal charges filed against them by the Ulster County D.A. for solemnizing "unlicensed marriages" in March.
In 1996, Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act which pronounced, "the word ‘marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife." With unholy glee, Christian fundamentalists of all sorts are now pushing an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning states from recognizing gay marriage (39 states already refuse to countenance it). Others warn direly that the floodgates of unspeakable immorality are now open. Polygamy is the least of it; Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting from last year's Supreme Court decision overturning Texas sodomy laws, claimed that decision could abolish bans not only on same-sex marriage, but also "adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity."
President Bush, supporting the anti-gay constitutional amendment, intoned: "The union of a man and a woman is the most enduring human institution, honored and encouraged in all cultures and by every religious faith," complaining that "After...millennia of human experience, a few judges and local authorities are presuming to change the most fundamental institution of civilization." Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal, beady profit-making eye on the bottom line, featured a piece on "Cashing In on Gay Marriage" (March 11), while vendors presented "Loveland," a "Same-Sex Wedding Expo" at New York's Jacob Javits convention center.
All this sudden churning of the crazed, hypocritical witches' brew that passes for American political discourse these days, especially on questions involving sex, certainly has its darkly humorous and bizarre side. Partly that's because the messy reality most people actually live in bears little resemblance to the rigid official portraits of Christian moral rectitude this government claims as models of social behavior. But the deeper social issues involved are deadly serious, ranging from the most intimate personal questions to broad areas of responsibility for raising new generations, and how to care for others, whether family, friends or lovers; in short, how "private life" in its entirety is defined and organized.
Workers Must Fight for Democratic Rights for Gays!
Apocalyptic predictions of the end of civilization if gays are allowed to marry are obviously hysterical fantasies; at the same time, gay marriage in itself will not end the often deadly prejudice and pain gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people encounter every day in this homophobic, anti-sex society. But that pain makes it even more important to fight for every possible democratic right, every form of social and political equality that can be wrested from this society.
It is a vital task of the workers revolutionary vanguard to fight for full democratic rights for gays—including, today, marriage rights—and to fight to win the working class to this cause. The Spartacist League has done this since its inception. As Lenin pointed out in his 1902 work What Is To Be Done?:
"Working class consciousness cannot be genuinely political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence and abuse, no matter what class is affected....Why is it that the Russian workers as yet display so little revolutionary activity in connection with the brutal way in which the police maltreat the people, in connection with the persecution of the religious sects, with the flogging of the peasantry, with the outrageous censorship, with the torture of soldiers, with the persecution of the most innocent cultural enterprises, etc.?... We must blame ourselves for being unable as yet to organize a sufficiently wide, striking and rapid exposure of these despicable outrages. When we do that (and we must and can do it), the most backward worker will understand, or will feel, that the students and religious sects, the muzhiks and the authors are being abused and outraged by the very same dark forces that are oppressing and crushing him at every step of his life."
Here in the United States, one of the most politically backward "advanced" capitalist countries on earth, saddled with a huge burden of puritanism and religious fundamentalism to boot, there is a lot of backwardness on the gay question.
Even among black workers, historically among the most militant in the proletariat and in general those with the fewest illusions in the "good nature" of this rotten capitalist social order, there is a significant amount of anti-gay prejudice. Much of it is pushed by conservative forces in the black church, although even the black churches are deeply split on this question. As we wrote in our article, "For the Right to Gay Marriage!": "In its extreme, one gets the phenomenon of a black Baptist minister, the Rev. Gregory Daniels, who declared, ‘If the K.K.K. opposes gay marriage, I would ride with them' (New York Times, 1 March). He might saddle up, but it will be a short ride—the first target of this motley collection of nativist, anti-labor fascists is black people" (WV No. 821, 5 March).
In contrast to this myopic anti-gay prejudice is the compassion so many black people feel because they know firsthand the torment and danger of oppression and discrimination. A Massachusetts State Senator from Roxbury put it well: "I know the pain of being less than equal, and I cannot and will not impose that status on anyone else. I was but one generation removed from an existence in slavery. I could not in good conscience ever vote to send anyone to that place from which my family fled." Others can't see that an injury to one is an injury to all, and so in a backhanded way end up in the camp of the racist anti-gay bigots. Black columnist Adrian Walker, writing in the Boston Globe (12 February), quoted one clergyman: "Think about Emmett Till, the Scottsboro Boys, and those police dogs in Birmingham—and then tell me they've faced what we've faced. This has nothing to do with civil rights." This reflects in part the pernicious influence of Democratic Party "constituency" politics, where one sector of the oppressed is pitted against another in the scramble for aid from a state which defends capitalist rule.
Of course there are many, and qualitative, differences between black oppression and gay oppression in this society. Racism is the bedrock of American capitalism, the great fault line in American politics since the founding of the nation on the backs of black slaves. The ruling class consciously manipulates racism to weaken the proletariat. The fight for black freedom will be central to the proletarian revolution in the U.S. For that revolution to succeed, the working class, including its strategic black component, must understand its historic task is to abolish class society in order to open the road to human freedom for everyone. And that most certainly includes gays—and everyone else who, however self-defined, rebels against the straitjacket social roles imposed by the capitalist ruling class.
Further, violence against gays, lesbians and, increasingly, transgendered people is a deadly constant on America's mean streets and in the repressive holding pens known as public schools. The grisly 1998 murder in Laramie of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay Wyoming student who was kidnapped, beaten, burnt and then left tied to a fence to die, shocked the nation. Though accurate statistics are almost impossible to come by, given that many victims don't come forward because they rightly fear more harassment from cops, school authorities or parents, and because official statistics don't always accurately list "hate crimes," there are still well over 1,000 reported cases a year of violence, sometimes fatal, against gays and lesbians and others deemed sexually "deviant."
A recent Internet search uncovered an article from the Arizona Tucson Citizen (23 February) titled "Gays, Jews Top Targets of Hate Crimes Here," which described the June 2002 beating to death of 24-year-old Philip Walsted, who was gay. It was a hate crime, according to police. In January of this year another gay man was found lying on the street, badly beaten, near a gay bar in Tucson, while a gay University of Arizona student was stabbed in 2000. That's just a few stories from one city. According to the Winter 2003 Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report, there were 27 murders of transgendered people in a 21-month period (2002-2003) in the United States. The point of these few examples is not to "prove" that any social group is more or less hurt than any other, but to indicate that moral regimentation is part of what keeps this unjust society running the way it does.
It was a good thing that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down sodomy statutes in its 2003 Lawrence v. Texas ruling, because it explicitly overturned the Court's infamously reactionary 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick that upheld states' anti-sodomy laws. That decision castigated gays with statements like "proscriptions against sodomy have ancient roots." Chief Justice Warren Burger practically called for a holy war against homosexuals, writing approvingly in his concurrence that "Blackstone described ‘the infamous crime against nature' as an offense of ‘deeper malignity' than rape, a heinous act ‘the very mention of which is a disgrace to human nature,' and ‘a crime not fit to be named'." This is the legal language that gives cover to gay-bashing.
Gays still don't have full civil rights: they aren't allowed to serve openly in the U.S. military, for example. According to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a gay rights group, in the ten years since Democratic president Bill Clinton adopted the infamous "don't ask, don't tell" policy, around 10,000 service members have been discharged for being openly gay. As we stated when that policy was raised: "Open gays and lesbians have just as much right as anyone else to participate in the armed forces," while raising the classic Marxist slogan of "Not one man, not one penny" for the military ("Gays in the Military," WV No. 569, 12 February 1993). This is the tradition of militant Marxism in opposition to imperialist war. At the same time, the military is a microcosm of society as a whole, and so we fight against racist atrocities and discrimination in the armed forces just as we do in the rest of society. The fight to integrate black soldiers fully into the armed forces toward the end of World War II created a potentially powerful base for struggles for black emancipation—and in fact black civil rights activists also fought for homosexual rights in the armed forces then.
Government and Social Control of Women
Many people still would argue, gays should have democratic rights, but why marriage? The capitalist politicians running for president are all dancing around the pretty meaningless "civil union" cop-out, basically catering to religious reactionaries with votes. But isn't marriage in some sense "special," more private, more "sacred" somehow? Not at all. Monogamous marriage is a creation of society, not god (since there isn't one), and it has been used historically as a means of reactionary social control by the ruling class.
We advocate effective consent in all sexual relations and think that what any combination of individuals do in bed is nobody's business but the participants themselves, as long as it's consensual. While defending the right to gay marriage, we also argue that the "marriage mania" represents a fundamentally conservative thrust by the well-to-do petty-bourgeois gay milieu. It's a far cry from "free love" and the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 to today's marriage ceremonies, PTA meetings and Democratic and Republican Party fund-raisers. In the quest for bourgeois "respectability," gay pride day organizers have viciously banned NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association) from their marches (thereby fueling the "anti-pedophilia" hysteria which targets all gays) and welcomed contingents of gay cops who spend a good part of their time busting "sex offenders."
Nonetheless, by analogy to our position on the armed forces, we oppose excluding any category of people from access to the privileges and benefits such institutions offer in this society. At the same time, in the course of fighting for these rights, we seek to convince activists that to really resolve women's and gay oppression it is necessary to create a socialist society, in which the current functions of the bourgeois family are socialized: communal childcare; communal kitchens; free, quality health care; and in all ways freeing women from the burden of child rearing and household slavery.
A look at the history of monogamous marriage in the United States reveals its use as a tool of governmental control. A valuable book on this subject, Nancy F. Cott's Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Harvard University Press, 2000), states: "The structure of marriage...facilitates the government's grasp on the populace.... In the form of the law and state enforcement, the public sets the terms of marriage, says who can and cannot marry, who can officiate, what obligations and rights the agreement involves, whether it can be ended and if so, why and how." The following history is largely drawn from that book; quotations from other sources are noted.
One of the book's central themes is how entire categories of people, especially those deemed "inferior," were denied the legal right to marry in many states. This included, most notoriously, black slaves, who of course had no rights whatsoever. And for decades after the Civil War, blacks and Asians were banned from marrying whites. Additionally, as Cott writes, "Prohibiting divergent marriages has been as important in public policy as sustaining the chosen model." Thus polygamous Mormons and Native Americans were forbidden to practice their own forms of "marriage," while attempts at utopian communes made in the years before the Civil War came under massive assault following the North's victory and the consolidation of the American nation under the strengthening grip of industrial capitalism.
In America from the beginning, marriage, though infused with Christian doctrine, was a matter of governmental control, not primarily a religious institution, because the U.S. was established on the formal basis of separation of church and state. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, marriage itself, based on older common law, was seen as "a form of governance.... A man's headship of a family, his taking the responsibility for dependent wife and children, qualified him to be a participating member of a state.... Under the common law, a woman was absorbed into her husband's legal and economic persona upon marrying, and her husband gained the civic presence she lost." This concept in fact continued right up through the 20th century, and was really only dealt a decisive blow, in terms of public civil rights at least, with women getting the right to vote nationally in 1920. However, Congress determined in 1922 that a wife would lose her citizenship if she married a foreigner and stayed in his country for two years; other grounds for female loss of citizenship included marriage to an Asian, a polygamist—or an anarchist!
Within the strict confines of the marriage relationship, male supremacy remained largely intact. Cott describes three U.S. Supreme Court cases, in 1904, 1908 and 1911, all of which essentially upheld the husband's right to control of his wife's body. The 1904 case determined a husband's right to collect "damages" from his wife's lover in a case of adultery, even asserting that the husband's right to "exclusive" sexual intercourse was "a right of the highest kind, upon...which the whole social order rests" (rhetorical excess, to be sure; were this literally true, civilization would have collapsed long ago). The 1908 case justified Congress's ban on bringing women to the U.S. for an "immoral purpose," thus keeping out a man and his mistress and upholding the government's authority to legislate monogamy and punish women who transgressed. The 1911 case involved a woman's attempt to sue her husband for assault and battery. The Supreme Court refused to interfere between man and wife, rejecting the "radical and far-reaching" belief that a wife could sue her husband for injuries "as though they were strangers," and that it was "better to draw the curtain, shut out the public gaze," as an earlier North Carolina court decision put it, on the prerogatives of male brutality within the family circle. It took massive social upheaval and a wave of New Left-derived feminist activism in the 1970s to finally breach what was in fact the husband's right to rape his wife; only in 1984 did a New York court finally overturn that state's marital rape exemption, then followed by others.
Native Americans, Blacks, Asians, Immigrants: Forced or Banned Marriages
The creation of the American nation rested on the backs of black slaves— and on the virtual obliteration of the native Indian population of tribal hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists—resulting in the creation of a bourgeois democracy for white, male property owners. How much more we could have learned about the early history of our species from these indigenous peoples, relentlessly slaughtered and driven onto "reservations," is a question American Marxists must feel keenly. Friedrich Engels' work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), was after all inspired by American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan's pioneering research into the family patterns of North American tribes. It was this research, in good part, that led to the Marxist understanding that in fact human beings have lived "for millennia" in non-patriarchal relationships, in tribal, matrilineal societies in which women were not enslaved within the straitjacket of monogamous marriage, in which children were the responsibility of both men and women. Monogamous marriage is a social invention brought to North America by the colonizers, along with their diseases, their "sacred family" and their slaves.
So the Native American population, when not simply killed, was offered an "enlightened" choice by their overseers: rot on the reservation or give up your "heathen" ways. As Cott puts it, "Most groups—notably the Iroquois, who dominated the eastern part of North America—did not make the nuclear family so fundamental an economic and psychological unit as Protestants did, nor did they generally recognize private property as such.... The federal government consistently encouraged or forced Indians to adopt Christian-model monogamy as the sine qua non of civilization and morality." In some cases it was considered that Indians could be "civilized" by converting to Christianity, and marriage of an Indian woman to a white male was tolerated, though in some dozen states marriages between Indians and whites were declared non-valid. The 1887 Dawes Act stole Indians' communal land and undermined their tribal way of life, assigning male family "last names" to Indians (against native cultural tradition), and establishing "individual property-ownership, and further subverted native American women's roles as agriculturists by presuming the Indian male should be the landowner and farmer." Cott writes: "Like ex-slaves and ex-polygamists, Indians were required by the federal government to adopt monogamy as ‘the law of social life' to become citizens."
On the other hand, for black slaves in America, legal marriage was out of the question, though slaveholders did encourage childbearing to reproduce and expand the slave population, especially after 1808 when importation of slaves was banned. "Concubinage, which is voluntary on the part of the slaves, and permissive on that of the master…in reality, is the relation, to which these people have ever been practically restricted," wrote the Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court in 1838. Thus the fight for the right to marriage, as an assertion of the right to control one's own body and make a free contract with another human being, was seen as an important aspect of the fight for black freedom.
As it is with just about everything else in America, racism is deeply intertwined with marriage law. Attempts to keep the "white race" "unmixed" were a unique feature of the American colonies since their inception (with the peculiar result that people of all different skin tones and ancestral background are automatically considered "black" if there is even a hint of a black ancestor somewhere). Ever since the inception of monogamous marriage and the family, from ancient times on, laws against intermarriage between different classes aimed to preserve ruling-class privileges. Spain in 1776 had such laws, as did the British imperialists in Ireland in the 14th century, for example. But America uniquely developed the illogic of racism, due to its slaveholding history, to such an extent that even after the victorious Civil War that freed the slaves, many states still banned black-white marriage; in Mississippi the penalty was life imprisonment. The miscegenation law was not repealed in Alabama until 2000!
The relationship between slavery and women's subordinate position in marriage was widely noted and utilized by those on both sides of the issues. Southern evangelical Protestant ministers, who published more than half of pre-Civil War pro-slavery tracts, regularly quoted the Bible; a typical claim was that god "included slavery as an organizing element in that family order which lies at the very foundation of Church and State." On the other side, those among the anti- slavery abolitionists and early women's rights advocates who shared the liberal ideals of individual freedom and the view that "self-ownership" was a natural right, saw that both slaves and married women lacked this basic right. As Lucy Stone put it, "Marriage is to woman a state of slavery. It takes from her the right to her own property, and makes her submissive in all things to her husband."
Following the Civil War, successive stages of immigration fed the fires of growing industrialization in the U.S. Here too the government's marriage policies were aimed at social control. Chinese immigrants on the West Coast, who first came in the gold rush, were in demand for mining and railroad-building, but when the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, an explosion of anti-Chinese racism was unleashed. The first federal step to restrict immigration, the Page Act of 1875, was aimed at Asian women, who were supposedly all prostitutes, and required "the U.S. consul to make sure that any immigrant debarking from an Asian country was not under contract for ‘lewd and immoral purposes'." By 1913 eight states had laws against whites marrying Japanese or Chinese people.
"Free Love" Utopias and Polygamy
In the stormy years leading up to the great social explosion that was the American Civil War, the last progressive gasp of the bourgeoisie (like the 1848 Revolutions in Europe) in North America, many experimental utopian socialist alternatives to monogamous marriage flowered. There were many "free love" communities established in the U.S., inspired by such utopian visionaries as Robert Owen, Claude Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, whose profound insight that the status of women is the decisive indicator of social progress inspired further Marxist theory on the subject. The New York Oneida community, founded in 1849 with a pamphlet called Slavery and Marriage: A Dialogue, did away with the exclusive pairing of couples, though within a rather formal structure. These groups, though ridiculed and condemned, were not by and large prosecuted before the Civil War, but afterward, when in the name of "consolidating" the nation, a crackdown on most forms of "social deviation" began.
One interesting—and still contemporary—group stands out in all this: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, one of whose founding tenets is the right of men to polygamy, or multiple marriage to many women at once. Right-wingers today throw up their hands in horror at gay marriage, breathlessly bemoaning that polygamy will be next. Well, guess what, it's already here, and has been for over a hundred years, out in Utah and other Western states, where an estimated 30,000 old-style Mormons still practice the sect's early preaching, though the "official" church formally renounced it a long time ago. We believe the Mormons have the right to be left alone, to practice their religion and live their private lives however they see fit. Our position for the right of gay marriage, like the right of Mormons to practice polygamy, stems from our opposition to government interference with the rights of individuals to effect whatever consensual arrangements they wish. We pointed out that American Mormons, including the women, essentially freely choose their practice, unlike in countries without bourgeois revolutions, where women are still little more than property of their patriarchal masters and where polygamous social systems must be relentlessly opposed. As we wrote in "Free Tom Green! Mormon Polygamists: Leave Them Alone!" (WV No. 764, 14 September 2001), defending a man convicted of felony bigamy charges:
"The family structure—whether monogamous or polygamous—necessarily oppresses women. However, not everybody understands the source of their oppression, and people do all sorts of things that are undoubtedly bad for them that the state still has no business throwing them in prison for. As Marxists we understand that the family serves a real social purpose and cannot simply be ‘abolished,' even in a workers state, but must be replaced with alternate social institutions."
Women's Liberation, Individual Freedoms and the Fight for Socialism
So, as radical columnist Alexander Cockburn put it, "Why rejoice when state and church extend their grip, which is what marriage is all about" ("Sidestep on Freedom's Path," CounterPunch, 20/21 March). Cockburn quotes early ACT UP activist Jim Eigo on the question: "Why are current mainstream gay organizations working to strike a bargain with straight society that will make some queers less equal than others?... Marriage has no more place in efforts to achieve equality than slavery or the divine right of kings. At this juncture in history, wouldn't it make more sense for us to try to figure out how to relieve heterosexuals of the outdated shackles of matrimony?"
It certainly would. And it is the modern Marxist movement which has figured out how to break those shackles, through abolishing the system of private property in the means of production, thus abolishing the need for the bourgeois family structure to pass on such private wealth. As Leon Trotsky, co-leader with Lenin of the 1917 Russian Revolution, wrote in response to the magazine Liberty (14 January 1933) which asked, "Is Bolshevism deliberately destroying the family?":
"If one understands by ‘family' a compulsory union based on the marriage contract, the blessing of the church, property rights, and the single passport, then Bolshevism has destroyed this policed family from the roots up.
"If one understands by ‘family' the unbounded domination of parents over children, and absence of legal rights for the wife, then Bolshevism has, unfortunately, not yet completely destroyed this carryover of society's old barbarism.
"If one understands by ‘family' ideal monogamy—not in the legal but in the actual sense—then the Bolsheviks could not destroy what never was nor is on earth, barring fortunate exceptions."
Damn It-Leonard Peltier Must Not Die In Jail-President Obama Pardon Leonard Peltier-Sign The Petition
Please sign Friends of Leonard Pelletier and the ILPDC's petition to grant executive clemency to Leonard Pelletier of the American Indian Movement who has unconscionably locked up by the U.S. federal government since 1975.
AGood Man Is Hard To Find You Always Get The Other Kind-The Diary Of Ms. Josie Davis
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
There was always something, some damn thing to remind Josie Davis, Class of 1964, a fateful year in her life and not just because that was the year that she had graduated from Hunter College High School in the heart of Manhattan (yeah, the famous one for the intellectually-gifted girls from the city who showed more promise than to be someone’s wife, mother, cook, although that happened too, happened to many of the Josies back then including Jose herself on the wife now co-educational). She had recently (2014, and if you did the math you would know that represented the fiftieth anniversary of the her graduation from that esteemed institution) gone through something of a serious traumatic experience which left her numb every time something came up about that year, some remembrance. If you knew Josie, with her two divorces and several affairs although no children as her career, her life, and her world-view when young kept her away from that option although more recently with small pangs of regret as she has gotten older and, well, just gotten older and things like that, decisions made young keep popping up, you would know that it was about a man, always about a man, she eternally afflicted as old, no, make that mature, as she was.
Now that Josie was no longer running the day to day operations of the small social services consulting firm she had established back in the late 1970s in Cambridge in conjunction with her Sociology teaching job at Tufts University after she had finally wormed her way through to her doctorate at Boston University she had time think back about those man problems, the ones that caused her eternal grief in the end. So to keep things straight in her head as she tried to reassemble her past she would keep a little diary, no, not a diary so much as a series of notes when she decided to write everything down which she had always been most comfortable doing when anything bothered her. She had initially made a list in no particular order of her “men,” some of them anyway, and why they had slipped away (or why she pushed them away in some cases including that latest one, Bradley, which had acted as a catalyst for the whole exploration). When she looked over the list she noticed that she neglected to put her two husbands on the list which she chuckled to herself at. That seemed about right, seemed to be some kind of poetic justice as she decided to keep the list as she had created it in the moment and throw the husbands in her notes as their existences had some part in the story.
Staring at that list of names though Josie Davis had to admit, had to finally admit, that she never had much luck with men, never had much luck at all as she sat there in her bedroom cleaning out the stuff he had left behind, that last he, the stuff that certainly would have tied him down as he fled the scene, literally fled the scene with no good-byes and no sorrows either. But that he will get his moment of glory later and need not detain us right here. Right her being the hard thought that it was not as though Josie had started out life with man trouble, certainly in high school and a little in big amorphous college at Wisconsin she had had her pick of good guys, guys who brought gifts, guys who didn’t mind picking up the check although that trend was going out of fashion back in the 1960s even before women were expected, as part of their liberation, to pick up on occasion previously male-responsible dinner bills. Guys who made her laugh, guys who provided her with dope for a good time, guys who knew more than her in the sex department and were willing to teach her a thing or two. One Josie Davis, a quick learner that way, caught on fast, worked her way through a good segment of the Karma Sutra and enjoyed most of what she experienced except maybe that S&M stuff that she got a little too frisky with at one time or another. With those thoughts in mind she started writing her little notes on her iPad in the third person which she was also more comfortable with although she had spent years in therapy working through her own identity crises. Here is what she ahd to say:
Sounds Of The City
Josie was afraid of New York City, had been made mother-afraid as she was growing up. You know the usual mother talk “don’t talk to, much less take candy from, strangers, (and maybe not from known parties either)” “don’t go into darkened areas at night, in fact don’t go out at night,” “avoid the subways at all costs and always have taxi money available in your well-guarded pocketbook.” So she was smart afraid and silly afraid and it was not always clear which one prevailed. In addition to that Josie had always been afraid, been made Josie-afraid of the tall buildings in Manhattan which dwarfed her 5’ 3” height, had made her afraid even of looking down to the pavement in the Stuyvesant Town building where she and her family lived in an eighth floor apartment. Afraid to go along with the rest of the afraid-ness of the usual eternal car honk noises of the bustling city that never slept, afraid to cross the zooming streets and afraid to take that early morning subway trip to Hunter College High School and would as often as not take a cab if her mother had given her enough money for the fare. That an iffy thing since her mother, a teacher in the city school system, would often have left before Josie had a chance to ask for taxi fare but was always provided on request.
So Josie as soon as she finished high school fled, there is no other way to put the matter, to bucolic (bucolic by New York City standards anyway) Madison, Wisconsin to attend the well-regarded university there (along with many other New York City and Long Island college age ex-patriates who has the same hectic feelings about the pace and scale of life in the big city). After college she had moved to Boston, another lesser scale city, to pursue her advanced degree programs (eventually Master’s and Doctor’s degrees so we could properly call her Doctor Josie but she did not stand on such ceremony except at professional conferences where to be called familiarly rather than doctor among the brethren who attended was a well-known social and academic snub so just Josie here) and decided after that to stake her career prospects on that city.
And so she remained in Boston but would every once in a while have a hankering to go back to New York, to get the feel of the pulse of the city, to see what was happening (that hankering very distinct from the necessity of going home to family for certain holidays, Jewish high holy days, Thanksgiving and the like obligatory since as a dependent student and budding professional she depended on their “monetary subsidies” as she called them to keep her head above water financially). That feeling would come back to her especially when something would remind her of Washington Square, Washington Square in the early 1960s when she learned to hold her fears in abeyance for the time she spent there. This time, the time we are talking about, the tripping point had been her reading Henry James’ novel Washington Square which while it spoke of a much earlier time in the 19th century and centered on the ill-fated romance of a proper New York woman and a cad, made her think of the first time she had gone to the Square and taken in the life there.
Josie had had as much teenage angst and alienation as any member of her generation which had been feeling squeezed in by the cautious, “keep your head down” life of the post-World War II Cold War night. Until she was about sixteen she handled those hurts by internalizing them, by working like a dog at her studies and keeping indoors and safe most of the time which satisfied her mother’s dictates as well as her own predilections. But sixteen is a funny age, a funny age in teen world and in teen sexual desire world and Josie was not immune to those thoughts. Thoughts egged on by the talk in the girls’ lav at school and by her best friend the precocious Frida Hoffman. Frida had her tales of sexual exploration and of getting around town that filled Josie’s ear with a certain wonder. Some of those tales were not true. Like the one, the reputation one, about not letting boys “go all the way” with her which Manny, Frida’s first boyfriend told her was a lie had told Josie that Frida had practically “raped” him one night after they hadhad some wine from his father’s liquor cabinet when his parents were out. And Manny had no reason to lie since he had been the one, after Frida moved on to be a Washington Square denizen attached to another Washington Square hangout guy, who “broke” Josie in to the delights of sex when she was sixteen and had been very interested in becoming a “woman” like a lot of the other girls in Monday morning lav talk land although some of the them, the Jewish-American Princesses (JAPs) lied as baldly as Frida about their escapades.
Josie at least had had sense to be quiet about her “broken in” non-virginal status to avoid being hit on by every guy in Washington Square.Getting back to Frida who really was something else if her tales were not complete lies then some of Frida’s tales were only half true. Like Frida making a big deal in Monday morning girls’ lav before school talk about refusing to give a boy [not Manny] a blow job because it was nasty which she maintained she still had refused to do even after a guy on a date told her to chew gum to kill the taste. The truth had been that after that “tip” Frida had begun to like to “play the flute” as she called it when alone with Josie but still steadfastly held to her horror of the act in the lav talkfest. Josie had, at one point just to see what it was like, tried “playing the flute” with a guy at Madison who had said he had sexual dysfunction and could only get hard that way but she thought the whole thing really was nasty, too nasty, gum or no gum and would only do it years later when a guy had a condom on to prevent any jimson getting in her mouth.
Josie was especially enthralled beyond the sexual exploits by Frida’s talk of the doings in Washington Square, the folk scene that was just budding, or rather breaking out of the confines of some clubs in Greenwich Village.So one Saturday afternoon, Josie did not want to venture out at night even after Frida told her that the place was lit up like daylight at night, Frida and Josie took a cab from Josie’s apartment building to the Square. After being let off Frida noticed a crowd around a guy singing with a guitar and told Josie they should head over there since that was where the action was for the moment. As they reached the edge of the crowd they, Josie, heard the guy (who later she found out was Guy Vander, one of the lesser lights of the New York folk revival) singing this mournful tune, The Cukoo Bird, followed by another one, East Virginia, and as they settled in she told Frida that while she had heard something about folk music she thought it was all Yiddish stuff from the old country back in Russia before both sets of grandparents had migrated at the turn of the 19th century that her parents’ were trying like hell to get away from. This music she liked.
What got to Josie was the simple message of the music, the simple melodies that evoked an early time and while the themes could range from the gruesome murder in Tom Dooley to forlorn love in Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies to the foolery of the Banana BoatSong she had the feeling that the music spoke to her. She, along with Frida and a few other girls from school who were recruited by Frida, were along the cutting edge of the folk revival minute of the 1960s when the old stuff on the rock radio stations was not enough to satisfy that craving for roots, for something different.
Oh yeah it didn’t hurt that a guy, a guy in a short beard and beret, shod in sandals, Morris Stein, a sophomore at nearby New York University,came up to her and asked if she was a folksinger, if she planned to sing that afternoon. Whatever the value of that line in the history of male introduction lines, and it was not bad if you think about it, it got him two, no, three things. Got him to spout forth for the entire afternoon about the this and that of the New York folk scene, more than she ever needed to know about some guy in Kentucky named Hobart Smith who played the fiddler; got him to escort Frida and Josie back to Josie’s home; and, got him a real live date for the next Saturday night, if you can believe this, to go to hear this guy Dave Von Ronk playing at the Gaslight in the Village. And they did although Morris in the fog of the folk world blizzard left her shortly after those few dates for a real woman folksinger from New Jersey he had met on another Saturday afternoon at Washington Square. And before long she had met another guy too who at least didn’t give her two thousand facts about Hobart Smith like Morry did. And whose “toes she liked to curl”, an expression she had picked up from some old-time blues song and liked to use when she asked a guy if their love-making had been good.
On Wisconsin
Josie had to laugh, an ironic laugh to be sure, about the days when she had met her beau, Jeff Patterson, freshman year at Wisconsin. Of course coming from the big city she had to get used to the smaller scale of things on campus and the more sanitary slower life-style but after a few weeks she adjusted, an adjustment made easier by her roommate from Chicago, Susan Phillips who was totally unlike girls like sex-crazed Frida and the JAPs from Hunter College High who were catty and devastating to those who were not JAPs. Susan was the daughter of a kosher meat butcher, a working class Jewish girl a type of Jew except for Uncle Rudy, her father Nathan’s older brother who was a bricklayer, that she was not familiar with.
Susan was smart but also less pretentious in her manner than any girl at Hunter, including Frida, who were using that institution as a resume builder to catch some rich Jewish husbands from Long Island, something like that. Susan was different as well in that she did not eat, drink, breath her Jewishness unlike Josie and her brown-eyed world crowd but had a boyfriend, a blue-eyed blonde boyfriend, Jason Robbs, from Racine who was into folk music, illegally drinking at the constant frat parties, and involved in a campus project against nuclear proliferation and whose friends were too. Normal Midwestern kids.
Susan had met Jason at the Rathskeller, the hang-out for all Freshman since officially they could not go into the bars that dotted the Quad, where he was tuning up his guitar to go out into the Quad and sing for a crowd that would gather anytime a singer who could actually sing, some couldn’t, would strum a tune, something from the protest songs that were becoming a staple of the folk milieu. Susan had asked him what he would sing and among the songs on his playlist he listed Pete Seeger’s Where Have All The Flowers Gone which she had only heard once on the campus radio folk hour on a Sunday night but which she liked. Jason said he would dedicate the song to her and that gesture, a few more like it, a few coffeehouse dates, cheap college dates to be explained more fully as the things move along, a few tussles under the sheets, Susan doing the tussling sometimes since she was a bit more experienced than Jason if you can believe that, eventually led to that boyfriend status.
So Susan certainly was a pleasant roommate to have around but here is where the laugh part of what Josie was thinking about came into view. It was through Susan, or rather through Jason that Josie met Jeff Patterson, Jason’s roommate from a small town outside of Milwaukee who was even more political than Jason since he organized stuff on campus through Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and was building a reputation as a radical in the Quad. He was a blue-eyed brown-haired guy, slender and could talk a mile a minute which fascinated her. More importantly Jeff seemed to pay special attention to her and while he was a campus big shot politico he had rather shyly asked her for a date.
Here is the funny part their first date almost didn’t happen, or rather lead to a second date. Of course in those days rich or poor the guy, especially on the first date was supposed to ante up the dough for the date (although that tradition was thinning out in spots even then before the big women’s liberation push since young women had more discretionary spending money that earlier generations but then it played out as “Dutch treat” more than the woman paying the whole bill). Jeff though was a dirt poor kid, a working class kid at Madison on scholarship and financial aid and so had to borrow a couple of bucks from Jason to go on the date. Otherwise he would have had to cancel because no way was he going to ask Josie to either go Dutch treat or pay his way. Jesus no way he would never live it down.
So date night came and he picked Josie up at her dorm (they had originally intended to double-date with Susan and Jason but Josie said she would rather not since she wanted to talk to him about what was happening in the world, campus, him, well everything okay) and headed the Boar’s Head one of the cheap coffeehouses that had sprung up around campus once the great folk revival moment hit the Midwest, hit it hard. The beauty of the Boar was that you could sit there and listen to what they called the “open mic” performers, amateurs who wanted their folk minute in the sun without you having to throw anything in the basket unlike with performers who were putting on show or set and who were trying to make a living at it. So you could listen all evening as long as you had a coffee in front of you.
Thoughts of bright blue-eyed blonde and sexy Jeff though got Josie all melancholy, got her distracted about all the relationship disasters that happened after she graduated from Madison in 1968. That start-up with Jeff seemed so simple a way to show a man she understood things, understood things were changing, understood that not everybody, not every man had the same breaks she had received from doting if uncomprehending parents (and received aid for a long time after most men who were expected to pay their way while she was working on her equally eternal doctorate). It seemed that once she left Madison, leftthe bucolic campus life where the hardest task seemed to stay focused on graduating with a high enough GPA to get into that increasingly necessary set of advanced degree programs to avoid some clerical job in some rustic Department of Social Services or worse, the humiliation of waitressing with its sloppy drunks and leering looks the male hunters in the eternal male-female dance that ruled her life (ruled it since that first time she had sex in high school with Manny and liked it, liked it enough to have periodic erotic dreams where she got herself into some strange sexual situations when study, work or some project took her too long away from mankind but that was something that she was working out, eternally working out with her own psychologist) always turned out to be less than they looked like, a lot less when it came right down to it.
She knew she had never been a great beauty although guys who wanted to get next to her would flower her with such praise, knew though that what one guy, Max, sweet old Max from Sociology 201 class, she wondered where he was now all these years later having dropped out of school to go “find himself” after sophomore year and had not been heard from since, someone said Mexico the last anybody heard of his doings, called her “fetching,” meaning that her brand of prettiness, smarts and pleasing personality meant that she would not have to spent too many lonely nights by some midnight telephone. And whatever else she never had to sit by that dreaded midnight phone that even someone as popular as Frida, or better Dora Denny who was a social butterfly at Hunter had to deal with on occasion.
What she had going for her whether that fetching business was anything but bluster or the latest line of male “come on” which Max usually picked up very quickly was nice straight long dark brown hair which in those days, slave to fashion that she was, slave to folkie fashion after the “queen” of female folk singers Joan Baez got on the cover of Time and sent every girl with short hair or long to the dorm ironing board to emulate her (because every folkie guy would swoon uncontrollably when pretty straight long-haired girls passed by she had noticed in the coffeehouses). She had a pleasing body which when she usually felt comfortable with since she did not worry about the other fashion statement of the day razor thinness like ones you would see in all the fashion magazines which still were the way that young women caught the latest fashion statements whether they followed them or not, that Josie figured out where she belonged in the universe before the days when women’s liberation said “fuck all that.” More intriguingly, and guys would comment on the subject, one of her soft brown eyes was just ever so slightly cross-eyed and so she appeared like some exotic flower especially after a day at the beach when her brownish skin turned dark brown.
But her run of luck, maybe her fetching looks, maybe that slightly cross-eyed look turned evil-looking outside of campus life, something happened, seemed to sour out of the friendly confines of some campus, soured when she came to Boston to make her mark in the world, the world of sociology, really in the end social psychology, where she would begin her advanced degree programs, including a nice stipend after her first year’sMaster’s program as an intern (along with the inevitable family treasury back in Manhattan supplementing that nice stipend, nice as far as academic stipends went, which would not pay for extras like clothes, trips home and away, and that car that she just absolutely needed to get to her clinical sites). Still after all these years not able to figure it out she returned to her list, her wistful list.
Gee, But It’s Hard To Love Someone When That Someone Don’t Love You
“Hey, turn that record over and play Empty Bed Blues will you,” yelled Stanley Peters to his sweetheart of a couple of years now Josie Davis. Of course if any records were being turned over that day, by “pretty please” request or not, any long-playing records that meant that this pair, Stan (his preference) and Josie, was in the midst of their periodic all stops out listening to the four double record albums, Columbia Records version updated from the Vanguard Record series (less scratchy and clearer tone of voice coming through the marvels of modern audio technology) of Bessie Smith, the Empress of the blues. That title, that royal title disputed by the likes of Mame Smith and a bunch of last name Smith black female blues singers from say 1923 to 1933 the year when the market went crash for blues as well as everything else people who had previously been willing to pay for hearing when they had discretionary funds in their pockets was not a common situation at the end of that period. Disputed too by Memphis Minnie although not one would deny that she could hold court as the Queen of barrelhouse blues and Miss Sippy Wallace bringing down the high lord Jehovah against her soul singing the devil’s music and not comfortable with the title princess not when big old Bessie was strutting her stuff about how she was number one and step aside sisters, step aside.
Leaving the question of genealogy aside for the aficionados to ponder over that periodic all out recording playing unto the night and early morning part bears some further explanation. See a couple of years before, maybe late 1969, early 1970 a little before they had met Josie had heard a blues singer, a woman blues singer on WNUB the low- watt radio station over in Cambridge that she listened to at night while working like crazy on her Master’s degree in social psychology. She had started out all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed coming out of Hunter College High in Manhattan that she would wound up being an English Lit major and eventually teach that subject, hopefully at the university level, but once she got to Madison out in Wisconsin, out to the well-regarded Big Ten campus there she realized that going in that direction with ten thousand budding liberal arts English Lit majors in the making who would wind up driving taxi cabs or waitressing that she did not want to be number ten thousand and one on that pile. Fortunately she tested very high in sociology tests and decided on that as a major with the idea of being a Sociology teacher, hopefully as well at the university level but when she looked around on the matter senior year she saw that same ten thousand and one pile on that path and so moved on to the at least employable profession of social psychology.
Josie was just then attempting to finish up that Master’s degree program at Boston University on her way to a doctorate since anything less would put her on that well-worn pile and into the steamy white uniform of a waitress in some roadside diner, if she was lucky. That extra degree decision (which perplexed her parents they then were both high-level management types in the city with bachelor’s degrees which seemed enough to get a job but what didthey know) since had been made for her by the democratic explosion of kids born, like her, 1948, within few years of the close of World War II who were filling up the nation’s colleges and universities creating a crowded field of fiery liberal arts students who had honed in on that discipline as a place to make their mark, that soft-soap sociology, after being frozen out, totally frozen out, of the English Lit market by the endless lines of applicants.
But a Master’s degree could only be a stepping stone. Otherwise all that blood and sweat for the Master’s degree provided was a chance to wait on tables at some swanky bistro in the Back Bay or downtown for tips and some leers. And on a good night maybe an off-hand tumble in the hay (she was subject to periodic exotic sex dreams when she was grinding out some project and one such dream had her waitressing and getting caught up in a threesome thing with a guy and his wife and so thoughts of the tumble but let her psychologist deal with those issues). But the reality of high-end waitressing from what one of her classmates told her who was working at swanky El Cid’s downtown to help defray her tuition costs which she was footingherself (making Josie thankful as hell for those uncomprehending parents and their monthly checks for odds and ends ) was usually not the case since the bistro scene was either guys loaded up with a date who expected said date to come across in the hay after that expensive meal and the date expected to come across since the guy had class enough to buy her an expensive meal and all after she had had to deal with a string of coffeehouse coffee and pastry guys or worse, guys whose idea of a cool date was coffee minus the pastry watching the winos, con men, hipsters and other nighttime riffraff at the Hayes-Bickford. A little roll for a very good meal seemed a good trade-off under those circumstances as more than one girlfriend of Josie’s had told her after they graduated from cheapo campus dates to the real world. Or maybe married guys from out of town with a wife and three kids in some leafy Connecticut suburb who wanted to set you up as some kind of concubine as he sat in his single chair table making a play for you.
Josie had been through that whole routine since her arrival in Boston except the not the waitress stuff her cross to bear being visiting professors, married with requisite three children in some cloistered Ivy League town, New Haven, Princeton, clamoring for close work with interns like her- and pillow talk. The guys from out of town at the sad sack bistros might have been more honest about their desires anyway and the couple of time she went to downtown bars to have a drink, maybe get picked up when she was feeling horny and got picked up the guys were better in bed than the hoary old professors who wanted to talk about the one bright idea that they had had about thirty years before, a lifetime before in social psychology circles where a new “theory” comes off the press every other day and thirty years’ ago big idea is now relegated to the catacombs, and had in any case worked that idea to the bone for all expenses paid trips to conference in exotic locales. Or, like one well known, very well-known professor in the field, trying to impress a younger woman would let slip how they personally knew Emil Durkheim or something. And maybe they did, did know Emil but he was strictly in the catacombs as well.
The radio, that station, and Jim Miller’s American Folk Show at night on that station was her way of staying focused pouring over the endless statistics that she had culled over the previous two years in order to fill out her thesis about the close correlation in the year 1968 between those kids who dropped out of high school and their ability to spent a lot of time tied up in the justice system. About the psychological stress that combination put on their self-esteem and their ability to function in society as productive citizens. (According to Stan later, later when things had already gone awry between them he had to agree that Josie did a very good job of proving her point and her research would not look shabby even later much later in the 1980s when tracing the fates of lumpen kids, projects kids really, went out of fashion, along with the liberals who had previous championed their cause.)
About ten o’clock in the evening on Wednesday nights Jim Miller would have an hour of blues, usually featuring a single performer or group, although Josie no fan of blues despite her love of folk music ever since high school, starting back in about 1962 when she got caught up with the folk minute craze running through the campuses and urban oases and hung around Washington Square Park and the Village seeing what was what. Usually tired, having to get up early the next morning she would pass on Miller’s show that late at night, couldn’t see what the big deal was all about with old black guys from Mississippi or hot shot younger black or white guys pushing their electric guitars to some netherworld. But as she was beginning to head to the radio on the shelf above her refrigerator to shut it off she caught the beginning Bessie Smith’s Down-hearted Blues and decided to listen until the end of the song since the words “spoke” to her, the words about some two-timing man who spent all her money on whiskey and dope, ran off with her best friend and left her sad and blue.
Josie didn’t know about the whiskey and dope part but she certainly knew about her guy running off with her best friend. Before she had come to Boston and just after she had graduated from Wisconsin her best friend from way back in high school, Frida Hoffman, had taken her boyfriend, blue-eyed, blonde hair, Midwestern “aw shucks” Todd Morgan whom she had met in the Quad one afternoon when he was playing his guitar and she went up asked if he knew Oh Had I A Golden Thread by Pete Seeger and he did and they thereafter “did,” right from under her nose when she had lived with Frida in her Soho apartment for the summer with Todd in tow. They had run off to summer of love San Francisco. Later Frida and Josie would reconcile after Frida had after a couple of years out in Haight-Ashbury with Todd who eventually headed north to Oregon while she wound up with a drug-runner for a while before she headed back East and went to law school at Boston College although Josie always looked over her shoulder when she was with a man and Frida was in sight before she got married to a partner in the law firm she got snagged up by when they were looking to, under pressure, increase the number of female lawyers in the firm. By then though Frida had dropped the folk-singer male hunt and only cared about potentially rich lawyer-types so there was not threat from that corner and they are still good friends, very good friends as they age gracefully, or that is what they tell each other although Frida with a group of maladies for all occasions has as a result declared to one and all that “aging sucks,” and look back at the old days.
So the song hit home and as Josie reached to finally turn the damn thing off on came Empty Bed Blues and she was hooked, listened to the whole hour and heard that soulful melancholy voice all night in her sleep. Here is the funny part, the part that ties everything together as she listened she found that she got more and more into the music, that it kind of grew on her, she didn’t want it to end. Josie was haunted by the whole experience and the next day she ran over to Central Square in Cambridge, got off at that stop on the Red Line anyway and walked up to Sandy’s Record Shop heading toward Harvard Square to see if he, a connoisseur, the guru of all things folk unto the Child ballads if not before, which if you think about it really encompasses the blues and asked him, since in those days he ran the store himself mostly, if he had any Bessie Smith records available for purchase. Sandy gave her a big smile and said-“I have got a not bad condition, not too scratchy used complete four album eight record Columbia vintage set of her stuff that you won’t want to turn off.” Sold.
Sold after Josie explained that effect that Bessie’s feature on Jim Miller’s show had on her. Sandy gave a sly nod. Needless to say that weekend she perhaps drove her fellow tenants on Commonwealth Avenue batty, or murderous, playing the compete set while drinking wine to drown her sorrows. Drinking her blues away and it was six, two and even which of the two drugs was chasing her blues away.
Bessie safely in her grasp Josie got more interested in other women blues singers available for sale at Sandy’s like the newly “discovered” Sippy Wallace who told one and all in her time not to “advertise your man,” good advice if the man was anything worth keeping like Stan who had helped her get through the male fright Todd blues,Big Mama Thornton who did the original version of Hound Dog which she had heard Elvis cover when she was young and was crazy see him do with that swagger and snarled look on his face and whose version put Elvis to shame and a whole bunch of women named Smith, or so it seemed beside Bessie. Got into those little old guys from hot-house Delta Mississippi too although she was still stand-offish toward those bad ass Chicago blues guys with the wicked bad lyrics of lust, dope and booze.
One afternoon at Sandy’s while she was looking for a Skip James recording she saw a sign that Big Tommy Johnson who was reputed to be the latest reincarnation of blues legend Robert Johnson, Robert Johnson the max daddy blues man according to Sandy but whom she could take or leave, was playing at a club in Inman Square a few blocks up from Sandy’s called Joe’s Place. She asked Sandy about this Johnson and about the place, including about whether she was going to get hassled if she went alone and sat at the bar. Sandy told her he was not that familiar with this Johnson (don’t ask, please don’t’ ask Sandy about Skip James as Josie found out because you will get harangued for an hour or more with every arcane fact known to man about that bluesman) but that she would have to take her chances, as always, when guys see a single pretty young women after they have had a few drinks.
So that Saturday night feeling a little blue about her progress on developing a master theme for her thesis, a little fearful about going alone but also a little man hungry if she was honest with herself especially if a guy knew something about the blues and wasn’t just sitting there at Joe’s leering at his next “conquest” she went into Joe’s and sat unmolested at the bar while Johnson was playing. As it turned out he wasn’t what she was interested in for blues music but she wasn’t hassled, half damn it, either.
She would go there a few more times until the night she met Stanley who had walked up to her and told her he had seen her in the place before, did she like the blues, did she know the blues and about six thousand bits of other information. And not once did he “hit” on her, didn’t ask her what she was doing after the show. What did get him somewhere, get him two years of loving as it turned out, although not that night when he left, half damn it, her at the door of the club with a “hope to see you here again” was a date after he mentioned about three thousand stray facts about Bessie Smith. Including this observation-“You know when you start listening to Bessie, especially if you start at Volume One of the Columbia record set, you half want to shut the thing off but as you listen more you don’t want it to end, want to play the thing all day and night.”Yes, Josie thought, a kindred. A kindred who she was getting ready to go to her record player and turn over the vinyl so Stan could hear Empty Bed Blues.
Variety Is The Spice Of Life, Maybe
You would be surprised, or might have been surprised if you were a certain age (funny expression that Josie’s mother had repeatedly used to cover up her age, or the ages of her friends, into a mishmash of just indeterminate mature women and now she was using that same expression to cover up her age, weren’t we supposed to have gotten over that in the enlightened 1960s when truth will out ruled the roads), at the kind of talk that you would find in girls’ lav, locker rooms, at female table, or on the ubiquitous phone, the telephone now the cellphone, about men, about sex and about what women would tell each other that would never cross over to the ears of men, even if they were with them for fifty years. Josie was thinking of the various times when just like the long straight black hair craze which Joan Baez started and which everybody who could was emulating making iron companies rich in the process, when peasant blouses were the height of fashion having sex with certain categories of men was a craze among some young women once they started to have sexual relations (called “going steady” in high school, “going out with” in college and “one night stands” in the post-graduate world).
In high school for Josie (and her friend Frida as well) it had started with just Jewish boys but that soon became wearisome when they had more neuroses that she did, came from that same stinking brown world that she came from (brown eyes, brown skin, brown hair, brown, brown). So the fad after that was to snag a Washington Square folk-singer (at least that was what Frida and the JAPs at Hunter College High were experimenting with), a rough-edged, raggedy muffin blue-eyed WASP was the goal (and she had got her wish, Frida too and some JAPs did too if the Monday morning girls’ lav rumors had any truth). What Josie didn’t know until much later, and Frida had heard the same from some guy she had gone out with, was those WASP folksingers were learning their three chord songs to snag pretty Jewish girls when they got tired of Muffy and Buffy WASP this and that out in the suburbs. Heard that Jewish girls were “easy” too so there.
Later in college, at Madison during the height of the civil rights movement, and a little after, it was black men, the blacker the better to check to see if it was true about their manhood size, their penises, and just to do it as a flavor of the month kind of thing. That “little after” part stopped things between black men and white women when black nationalism, the Panthers swept the imaginations of students but they also called on the “brothers” to be fruitful with their black sisters and keep the black nation alive and well and not go after honky women (which didn’t stop many of the brothers, brothers at Madison she knew from personal experience, from bedding white women, “easy” Jewish girls or blonder than blonde Swedish girls it did not matter- on the QT). There might have been other flavors of the month but between WASP folk-singers and black men she kept herself as busy in bed as she wanted.
But she was always willing in her dreams to explore further and when she arrived in Boston, a city that she thought was all Irish from what her parents had told her trying to dissuade her from going among the Irish Catholic heathens who still in their hearts believed that Jews had killed their Christ, their Messiah, she had thoughts of trying one out. Not the city-bred ones she had had enough of those black-hearts and drunks at Madison and in New York where some of the girls at Hunter had these awful red-faced snaggle-toothed Irish boyfriends who liked to swear and drink without end as young as they were. When she got into Boston by the early 1970s the Irish Republican Army (IRA) bravos were making noise over in Derry and other hotspots in the North (not Londonderry, not if you didn’t want an argument, a serious argument about British imperialism and naming thing their way in a foreign country not their own, male or female) and some under British ban were heading to Boston in exile, to lick their wounds or to raise funds for the “struggle.” And so her new flavor of the month, although if she had known what the end would be like she would have hunkered down with some poor Wasp folk-singer around Harvard Square or nice Jewish boy from Long Island like her mother always wanted for her.
So take Jack Donovan (please do), an Irishman who had only been in the country for a few months when she, curious about the night life in Boston ran into him at the Plough and Stars in Cambridge a favorite watering hole for the ex-pat Irish fleeing the turmoils in the old country. She, a Jewish girl from Manhattan via Hunter College High School, had fled that overwhelmingly sad city for Madison and now Boston, had been intrigued by his accent and by his winsome manner and although she knew nothing about his Irish heritage having been immersed in finding her own Jewish identity of late she had decided to take the ride, decided to see where things would lead. And for a while they were great, a few months of going out several nights a week to the Plough or some other Cambridge bar, lots of laughs and lots of singing, good times and pretty good sex.
Then the other shoe kind of dropped which Josie, the queen of social psychology and so supposed to know something of human nature in the raw should have seen it coming, Jack lost his job down at the docks where he had been an alternate (a B-man he called it as opposed to an A “steady” man who still had work) but there had been plenty of work which suddenly dried up and he began to drink more heavily, lost his small shabby room where he had to share a common bathroom on Beacon Hill and moved in with her. Got more morose as he could not find work, working class job work since he had left Cork without a high school diploma. Then the beatings started, at first just a belt to the shoulder or someplace soft and hidden but it hurt and she thought it was just his frustrations at not having a job and basically living off a woman although he never articulated the matter that way.
Then he belted her in the eye and she had had to stay in the apartment for a few days while the swelling went down and she was embarrassed when she went back to work and her girlfriends quizzed her about the residue black and blue around her eye and of course she lied, lied and said she had hit her eye on the eternal door. Said to herself that he hadn’t meant it, hadn’t been himself and for that one forlorn minute asked herself what would she do without him, how before the drink caught up with him, maybe his whole life caught up with him, he had loved her so. One night in a rage, loaded to the gills, smelling of vomit and whiskey he pummeled her which required her to go the hospital where she had to make a report, a police report, and while she did not want to be the reason Jack went to jail (and would later be deported after building a criminal record) she had no choice, she did not want to go on that way, for love or not. She was sour on men for a long time after that, was going to see her psychologist more often than once a week because after Jack lost his grip on her she was totally immersed in finding out why she had taken the beatings, why she had not left him high and dry after that first hard “meant it” punch toher shoulder that hurt for several days.
Maybe Happier Blue-With Blue Guys In Mind
Who knows when love fades like the morning dew as the old Child Ballad, or one version of it sung by Marianne Le Bert on her Tramps and Trips album, had it. Certainly Josie Davis knew when she pushed Stanley Peters out the door after a two year hot and cold love affair that the love had faded, the love that was pleasing and teasing when new had turned to ashes in her mouth in the six months previous to lowering the hammer on her ex-lover, pushing him not so gently out that condo door not physically but with her wildcat tongue. It hadn’t started out that way, hadn’t started out like it was going to fade as both sensed in the other a kindred, a soulmate he had called it one night when in bed they had made a game out of how many common interests they shared and above all their love of the blues singers on the radio or record player that were always forming the background music in the condo day and night.
They had met at Joe’s Place in Cambridge across the river, the Charles River, from Boston University where she was trying to finish up her Master’s degree in social psychology as prelude to pursuing the doctorate necessary to get anywhere in a field crowded with liberal arts graduates like her who needed to find some niche in academia outside of the over-the-top English Lit programs which only produced a surfeit of waitresses and taxi cab drivers. Joe’s Place at that time had probably been the outstanding blues club in Greater Boston, a place which drew the better blues performers still alive and working and hence the serious blues aficionados. Josie had only then recently become a serious blues enthusiast having for years before, since high school at Hunter College Hunt in Manhattan under the guidance of her then best friend Frida Hoffman whom she had not spoken to in a couple of years since Frida had run off to California and the Haight-Ashbury summer of love scene with her boyfriend, Todd, an up and coming folk-singer from Wisconsin where Josie had gone to school as an undergraduate, been a traditional folkie.
One night she had heard Bessie Smith, the self-styled Empress of the blues, 1920s and 1930s barrelhouse blues featured on Jim Miller’s American Folk Hour on the local Cambridge radio station, WNUB, had been so enthralled by her style and lyrics (and having just been two-timed by a guy she had recently met and thought was on the level, Gene Solomon, so very amenable that minute to Bessie’s bitter-sweet memories of her two-timing guys who left her high and dry, took her hard earned dough too), and decided to pursue the matter further.
After a few inquiries about where to get that old time blues material Josie had gone to Sandy’s over outside Central Square in Cambridge heading toward Harvard to grab some albums, used as it turned out but serviceable, and through Sandy, the owner and one of his blues-crazy staff found out about other artists, mostly female but a few males too like Skip James whose piano riffs grabbed her. One afternoon she saw a poster as she walked into Sandy’s advertising that Big Tommy Johnson, one of the last of the old-time country blues singers from down South, from Alabama, would be playing at Joe’s Place that weekend. Not having gone to a blues club before she was not sure what to expect having been strictly a coffeehouse denizen in the Village, later in Madison and then after she moved to Boston to Harvard Square, the Club Nana being her main hang-out since Tom Rush and Jack Elliott played there on a regular basis. After asking Ted, the blues-crazy clerk at Sandy’s whether Joe’s was the kind of place where she could go and sit at the bar alone not happy with Sandy’s kind of old-fashioned response about single pretty girls and guys who have had a few in a bar,have a couple of drinks and not be hassled by guys looking to “hit” on her and he told her she was big girl and could handle any blues-crazed guys who came her way, and if not Red Radley the bartender would make sure that things were right she decided to check the place out. (That not hassled by guys, by the way, somewhat half-hearted since she was “single” and frankly a little horny but really did want to hear Big Tommy’s act without being bothered, unless she wanted to be.)
That Saturday night she showed up just before Big Tommy’s opening set, sat down at the bar and ordered a scotch and soda, without being molested. In fact that night and the next several times she went there over the next couple of months she had not been not bothered, including a couple of time when she saw guys who she might have liked to have bothered her. In the meantime she learned a lot about various blues song, traditions and players, lately many white who were carrying on the tradition since young blacks were mainly not into their heritage music, were screaming Motown stuff, urban love stuff. Then one night, a Thursday night, Buddy Guy was playing and she had taken her customary seat at the bar and ordered her scotch and soda from Red (who had only made a couple of half-serious, half in jest passes at her when serving her liquor to her), when Stanley Peters showed up at the seat next to hers. Not by accident. He introduced himself and told her that he had noticed her several times before as she seemed a strictly “no-go” ice queen but that she seemed to enjoy the blues and he was an aficionado. Was she.
After blushing somewhat over that ice queen remark (she couldn’t believe that her demeanor showed that way in public since she considered herself a free spirit of sorts, maybe that damn degree-clinching thesis she was working frantically on was getting the best of her) she gave Stan the details of her stepping into the blues scene. He in turn gave her about three thousand facts about Bessie Smith from cradle to grave (an untimely early grave due to serious racial animosities in the deep South where a hurt in an accident black woman, famous or infamous, could not get aid at a white hospital and was turned away and got help too late elsewhere) and then about six thousand facts about the blues tradition in general, not all of the information she felt she needed to know. But he was pretty charming, funny, and well she still had that unresolved horny thing so she expected that he might take her home, or at least ask for a date. No deal, he only expressed the hope that she would come back to Joe’s again. So no go that night anyway although she found herself going to Joe’s a couple of times expecting to see him.
Then one night, Bonnie Raitt, who had gone to Radcliffe and then gave it up for the iterant blues mama wanderer, was playing, playing blues learned at the feet of Mississippi Fred McDowell a name she knew now, Stanley showed up next to her at the bar a little stoned, nothing serious but she could tell from her own bouts with weed, mainly at Wisconsin where you could hardly turn a dorm or apartment complex corner without the whiff of ganga filling the night air and said hello. Got a little brave and asked her if he could buy her a drink (yes, but only if she could buy him one in return) and once that was settled they sat listening to Bonnie as she played some very complex notes, and talking in a low voice to one another while she was playing.
At intermission Stan asked Josie if she wanted to step outside and have a few hits of a “joint.” At first she was undecided but then she said what the hell and then went out in the back alley of Joe’s where others were also lighting up and split a joint. She was mellow for the rest of the evening and when he asked if she wanted to go to his place and listen to a new Little Walter album he had purchased at Cheapo’s she took the bait and went with him. (The next morning Josie made him laugh when she told him she thought it funny that he had used a variation on the “come and see my etchings” come on with that Little Walter come on and so some things don’t change in the boy-girl world.)
So their affair started held together by the music, by their mutual interest in film noir, their love of the beach and long autumn walks among other things (you know favorite colors, food, cars, etc.) and eventually Stan moved in with her. Stan had always been a little vague about what he did for a living, although sometimes he would say he was a painter (he did show her his work which was quite good although she was not sure whether the subjects he painted would earn him a living) at others a handyman but he for most of the time they were together up until that last awful six months before she called it quits he pulled his share of expenses.
Then he just stopped, stopped paying his share of expenses, stopped painting and stopped making love to her. What she didn’t know was that Stan, beautiful, charming, funny Stan had “graduated.” The more than occasional Stan joints was being supplanted by sister (his term), by cocaine that she knew was making the rounds at Joe’s and other places as the drug of choice of the month. It had become “hip” (and easier to conceal and carry than reefer) to do lines with dollar bills before blues concerts and Stan had joined the mob.
They constantly argued about the drugs, Stan tried to have her do a line or two but she refused, and she was getting angrier each day, getting blue as blue could be is the way she confessed it to a fellow worker at the social service office she worked at as part of gaining information for her dissertation. Then one night in a rage he hit her, not hard but hit her. That was the end, or the start of the end since they still had several more days of arguments before she started wild tongue screaming, screaming she would be happier blue, much happier. Then she pulled the hammer down.Out.Damn these men and their idea that a woman is a punching bag. Again gist for the mill of her twice weekly therapy sessions.
Down In The Dumps
After Jack, after Stan, Josie was shy around men for a while, wouldn’t you be if you had previously been a punching bag for gone losers, didn’t want to get involved playing the percentages of winding up with another wrong “gee” (an expression she had picked up from Stan who was addicted not only to sister cocaine but to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler 1930s hard-boiled detectives who did not see the irony of his own being a wrong gee when she mentioned that hard fact to him after the first time he swatted her), hell, had been afraid to get involved with almost anybody after the Jack black eye incidents, that on top of Stan’s abuse too, his made worse by the drugs which laid him low just when she was beginning to believe in men again, believe in Stan who knew so much about the blues that the words about doing his honey wrong must have sunk in to his brain, but she like a lot of women needed intimate relations with a man and so one day her friend Susie from the clinic where she worked introduced her to a guy whom Susie had known back in college at New York University, Jeff Goldman, whom Josie hit it off with right away. (Susie one of the voices she listened to when deciding that Jack would wind up a bum and who knows what would have happened to her if she had stayed with him any longer that she had and later that Stan’s drug habits were social psych 101 evidence that she needed to ditch him).
Both Jeff and Josie had cultural (a serious taste for art, Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism in particular), ethnic (both had been raised secular Jews, vanilla American assimilated Jews, who once the Holocaust, Shoah, began to be a topic for fit conversation rather than awful denial or something by their parents’ generation to be put aside and left unspoken were among those who wanted to know some Jewish history, know the shtetl, know Yiddish, know that Eastern European Jewish culture that their grandparents had fled in the dead of night from, fled from the ever present pogroms) and musical interests in common (he had tried out as a folk-singer in New Jersey, out in a Tenafly folk venue where they had “open mic” nights and later helped run a coffeehouse off McDougall Street while he was in college and we already know Josie’s long resume as an aficionado).
Jeff had told her from the beginning that he lived on Long Island and so would only be able to see her when he came to Boston on business (he ran a small accounting firm looking to get bigger, to expand into the Boston market where a lot of small high-tech geeks he called them and she knew what he meant needed stable financial help before they went belly-up no matter how cutting edge their ideas were, he told her where he could then see her more often was the hook he had used this time), or when he decided to take her on some whirlwind weekend in some secluded resort where they would have a great time. And they did going to places like the Bahamas when she mentioned to Jeff that she could use some sunshine one winter day, down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras on another jaunt, several romantic trips to San Francisco just to see the Golden Gate Bridge and eat some clams. Shorter trips closer to home too. Nice times, nice times indeed.
She slowly really did think that she was onto a guy who would treat her right, 100% right. Then the other shoe dropped, again. Jeff started making excuses for why he couldn’t see her, said he had business in Chicago, was making deals that required his serious time just then. She wondered a little about that since he had been so gung-ho about making a splash in the Boston market to be with her but she let it slide. When he called from Chicago or Los Angeles Josie would hear muted voices in the background and at first did not think anything of it but after three consecutive brush-off weekends she started to think he was having an affair with another woman and that she had better head for cover. She did not know how right she was when Jeff did finally come by to see her and after they had made love she and he had fallen asleep she fished through his wallet and found a photograph of his wife and two children smiling in front of their large Long Island home. Adieu, Jeff.
Dumps Redux
During Josie’s studies at Boston University as part of her doctoral program she had worked as a cross-discipline, multi-campus experiment for the summer at Harvard University for the famous Doctor Samuel Potter, academically famous anyway, who was the king hell king of the latest trends in sociology. The idea was to put the latest findings of empirical research in social psychology to the test, you know, stuff like if you put twenty people unknown to each other and who did not know each other’s individual profiles and personalities would you replicate the social divisions in existing society over time; whether there was an innate social desire to create an ordered world out of an anonymous mass. Josie’s input was to create the theoretical social psychological model that would support either conclusion. Exciting stuff at least in the world of academia, although life would have sorted the thing out easier and with no need to pile up more paper on the ocean of that material which already was afloat on such subjects.
Potter’s claim to fame on this whole project was that he had actually been granted a government subsidy from the Department of Defense back in the 1950s to do an experiment based on the negative conclusion of that premise, that people would create a new class society, and was continuing to subsidize his work while Josie was an intern(the source of the grants unknown to Josie whose anti-war views may have made her take some second thoughts about helping out the war machine then still very much involved with burning or otherwise trying to send the small country of Vietnam back to the Stone Age). The good Professor had been using the sparsely drawn conclusions from his work to lure ever fawning students to his studies since and had been filling up every possible academic journal which would publish him with his statistics despite the fact that about ten subsequent studies had showed his so-called definitive results were at best inconclusive.
Professor Potter had never paid much attention to Josie since her field was social psychology a field that despite this joint experiment he had determined was so much hot air and since he was bedding Susie, another intern, Josie’s closest friend in Boston then and was preoccupied with that hellion (Susie’s term about herself confessed one drunken night when she and Josie were both in the dumps after Josie had ditched Stan and she had made a play for Josie who was just too shattered to response to any sexual advances, male or female, then although later they did have a short fling but both decided that they needed a man, at least for their beds) until either he broke it off or Susie sensing that he was smoking way to much dope, doing too many lines of cocaine the new drug of choice among hipsters around Cambridge saw the writing on the wall. Whichever reason was correct, or if they were both correct, Professor Potter then honed in on Josie. (Later Susie confided to Josie that it was because the dope was making him a lousy lover and she began seeing an old boyfriend again who could deal with her urges, her hellion urges.)
Now in the world of academia this honing in process is something of an art form and here is how it worked, maybe still does even with almost forty years of women’s liberation to cut through the bullshit. Let’s just confine the observations to male professors, the vast majority on most faculties then, and high gloss professors like Potter worked the thing to a science. Professor Potter would personally interview and load up his intern staff with women, a little easier to do since sociology and social psychology acted as a magnet for young women wishing to make a name for themselves in academia or research. Of course the women he picked would be the kind that would be so excited to be working with the Professor Potter whom they had been required to read about in their 101 textbooks that he could have a field day with whomever he wanted and if nothing happened just move on. Or there might but a woman like Susie who had taken dead aim at the Professor figuring that for a few romps in the hay she could move up in the pecking order more quickly. Susie admitted as much to Josie when they first met and almost from day one she was on the good Professor’s trail. It didn’t hurt that he was pretty good looking and soft-spoken as well.
Josie was betwixt and between about the Professor, Sam as he insisted she call him since as he put it in that pseudo-democratic way some men in authority have, they were colleagues not professor and intern, not in his offices, because she really was ready to be off men for a while, wanted to get that dissertation she was about half way through done but he began to make it clear that she had better pay attention to him if she wanted any kind of career in the profession. This in the days before such behavior against female subordinates was strictly off-limits, and even then if Josie or any young woman had pressed the issue, and not every woman would, she would have had said professor in front of a very big carpet complete with rack, and maybe a noose. So she dabbled with the good professor, took his threats seriously until one day after she had not seen him for a week Susie called and told her on the QT that Professor Potter had flipped out on some hell-bent mixture of dope and hubris and had been checked into posh McClean’s Hospital in Belmont until further notice.
Josie’s reaction, after all that had happened to her, was that she felt sorry for him, hoped things worked out. They didn’t as the family held him in seclusion for a number of years afterward and Josie was not quite sure what had become of him except that he was no longer the king hell king of the latest trends in sociology, especially after it came out that the experiment that he had initiated in the 1950s had been compromised since about half the subjects, gathered through a university-wide ad, had known each other a question that the good Professor had not bothered to ask about in his interviews and only came out because one of the subjects was in McClean’s with Potter and spilled the beans in the patient’s lounge and some sharp-witted young doctor overheard the conversation.
Remembrances Of Things Past
Josie was in one of what she called her “frets,” her can’t get something off her mind, times. If this writing of hers is her diary then she wanted to break away and think once again about that disaster with Bradley since it was still a fresh wound that drove her to write all the other entries. Here is where the “frets” came in like a storm. She had decided that each entry would have a little title for reference, for her reference and since this was to be about Bradley she thought that “you can’t go home again” snatched from the title of one of Thomas Wolfe’s novels would suffice. But that didn’t get to the depth of her despair in naming what might very well have been unnamable, not an uncommon occurrence in Jewish religious lore and philosophy. She thought “what goes around, comes was too cute” and discarded that. Then she though back to old Proust, Marcel Proust, and how he was trying to consciously, very consciously remember every detail of what was important to him, and write it all down endlessly. She toyed with the idea of the alternative title she would see in some versions of his work-“in search of lost time” but that seemed a bit too precious under the circumstances. That former would do as she scrambled to re-write some stuff about Bradley, about how in the end men let you down, easy or hard, but they let you down.
She couldn’t help but thinking, getting red in her brown world face that there was always something, some damn thing to remind Josie Davis, Class of 1964, a fateful year in her life and not just because that was the year that she had graduated from Hunter College High School in the heart of Manhattan. She had recently (2014, and if you did the math you would know that represented the fiftieth anniversary of the her graduation from that esteemed institution) gone through something of a serious traumatic experience which left her numb every time something came up about that year, some remembrance. If you knew Josie, with her two divorces and several affairs along with a few flings, one night stands a couple of afternoon trysts, you would know that it was about a man, always about a man, she eternally afflicted as old as she was.
About a man this time, this eternal timenamed Bradley Drury (not Brad or worse Leeno way he was not anything but a proper Bradley-type, who held maybe some Oxford don or Boston Brahmin Beacon Street savant with three names as his model, even in high school) whom she had had a brief puff of air affair with in that same 2014 but which had seemingly vanished in her dust of memory until she went up into the attic to clean up some stuff, get rid of most of it in anticipation of selling her house in the leafy suburbs of Boston which she had lived in since that last ill-fated marriage to Alfred who had split for California with a younger woman, a much younger woman and had left her the house (and the mortgages and maintenance) as the booby prize of their arrangements and move into a more manageable condo in Cambridge.
Funny old Cambridge where she had started out her life away from New York City which she had fled right after high school and had been fleeing ever since (occasional trips back to see her parents before they passed away and 5th Avenue shopping sprees notwithstanding) when she first came to Boston to work on her Master’s Degree and later her Doctorate (Social Psychology). She had found a faded tattered copy of her high school class’ remembrance card. You know those time vault cards that card companies like Hallmark, the source of this one, put out so that people, or this case the whole class, by some tabulations, can put down favorite films, people, records, who was President, and other momentous events from some important year like a graduation to be looked at in later years and ahhed over. That yellowed sheet brought back not just memories of that faded long ago year but of Bradley in the not so faded past. So, yes, it was always some damn thing.
But maybe we had better take you back to the beginning, back to how 1964 and Bradley Drury had been giving one Josie Davis late of New York City nothing but pains. Josie, although always urged on by her fellow classmates Dora Denny and Frida Hoffman who she had kept in touch with over the years had been for many, many years agnostic about attending class reunions, had early on after graduation decided that she needed to show her back to the whole high school experience and to that monstrously isolating New York town. A lot of that teenage angst having to do with her beginnings as a daughter of a “brogger,” a father who worked in the garment factories that used to, still do, dot Seventh Avenue when there was work since most of it was drifting to New Jersey or the low-wage (really low-wage) South for which that part of town was then famous and which represented the low-end of Manhattan society. The low-end which others in the city including her fellow classmates in high school who were as socially class conscious as any Mayfair swells. Especially the Jewish-American Princesses (JAPs) who were using their Hunter High resumes as a calling card to find rich Jewish husbands and move to Long Island unlike her and the other “grinds” who were using the place to get out from under, who made her feel like a nobody and a nothing for no known reason except that she was the daughter of a brogger which after all she could not help. (Of course those social exclusions played themselves out under the veil of her not dressing cool, living off the leavings her father brought home after the clothing was out of fashion, living off of Rudy’s Discount Center rejected materials on Third Avenue not even cool when purchased, you know, white striped shirts with blue stripes when that was not cool, black flouncy dresses like some farmer’s Saturday night barn dance daughter when tight form-fitting skirts were cool, ditto, dinky Elizabeth Bennet shoes with buckles for Chrissake, just as her younger sisters lived off of hers as they got older in that tight budget world of the desperate working poor, of her not having money to buy nice dresses, sometimes any new dresses, for dates even with fellow broggers’ sons, and hanging out Friday night in the library on West 20th Street with Frida also in the same situation and with fellow odd-ball brogger outcasts (although Frida would gain non-transferrable cachet in school when she introduced Josie, and half the girls in school including some social butterfly JAPs to the New York City Village folk minute through the folk-singer she was dating whom she met in Washington Square). Later, toward the end of high school, her father got involved in the start-up of serious electronics and computers through his brother Larry and that would allow them to move up in the world a bit and have enough extra money to support her (and those younger sisters) in their academic endeavors, or when they needed financial help. But the early slights, hurts, and deprivations lingered on, still touched a sore spot.
So Josie had no trouble drifting away from that milieu, had no trouble putting dust on her shoes to get out and head west to Wisconsin (Wisconsin west as everything west of Manhattan was west as a famous Saul Silverstein cover on the New Yorker magazine acerbically pointed out for a candid world to understand) when the doings out west were drawing every iterant youth to the flame, to the summers of love.
And there things stood in Josie’s Hunter High (remember that is really Hunter High and Manhattan joined together eternally in her mind) consciousness for many years until maybe 2012, 2013 when very conscious that a hallmark 50th class reunion would be in the works and with more time on her hands as she had cut back on the day to day operation of her successful consultant practice in Cambridge she decided that she would check out the preparations, and perhaps offer her help to organize the event. She had received notification of her class’ fortieth reunion (which she had dismissed out of hand only wondering how the reunion committee had gotten her address for while she was not hiding from anything she was also not out there publicly since she did not have clients other than other professional sociologists and social psychologists whom she wrote research articles and the like for, until she realized that as a member of the American Sociological Association and the American Psychological Associationshe would have had that kind of information on her professional profile page. And Frida had despite Josie’s best efforts told the committee her address when they were soliciting for the twenty-fifth class reunion as she found out later). So via the marvels of modern day technology, through the Internet she was able to get hold of Donna Marlowe (married name Rossi) who had set up a Facebook page to advertise the event.
That connection led to Josie drafting herself onto the reunion committee and led directly to the big bang of pain that she would subsequently feel. Naturally in a world filled with social media and networking those from the class who either knew Donna or the other members of the committee or were Internet savvy joined the class’ Facebook page and then were directed to a class website (as she found out later her generation unlike later ones was on the borderline of entering the “information superhighway” and so not all classmates, those still alive anyway, were savvy that way). On that website set up by tech savvy Donna (she had worked in the computer industry at IBM during her working career) each classmate who joined the site had the ability to put up a personal profile next to their class photograph like many other such sites and that is where Josie saw Elizabeth Drury’s profile (nee Kelly), the classmate who eventually married Bradley, and a flood of memories and blushes.
In high school Josie had been smitten by Bradley, a student at Bronx School Of Science, who had beendating her friend, Dora, before she took up with Danny Ross, and was a son of a couple of school teachers who worked on Long Island (and would eventually move there) and therefore stationed well above the “broggers” of the city. But in things of the heart obstacles like class distinctions, especially in democratically-etched America, are forgotten and sometimes make one foolhardy. That had almost happened to Josie, except for close friend Frida who was wired into the Monday morning girls’ “lav” grapevine about who did, or did not do what to whom, over the weekend and other exotica, made up half the stuff that got around when she was in one of her bitchy moods about the JAPs that ran the social butterfly world in school and had communicated some stuff that would make a cooped-up CIA operative or an NSA techie blush with envy, put her wise.
Josie and Bradley had seen each other several times when he was dating Dora during senior year and sat across from each other, eying each other, in their coffeehouse double-dates when he was with Dora and she with Max or some other folk aficionado. Both loved literature and were in their respective schools recognized as such and they had certain other interests in common. So they talked, talked in what Josie thought was very friendly manner about folk music, art, and pleading ignorance various aspects of science which she had had trouble getting her mind around (or as she thought recently after the flame had burned out maybe she just hoped that was the case) and she had formed an intention once Dora had dumped him for odd-ball Danny to ask him to join her some afternoon even if only to Stein’s Drugstore for an after school soda and a listen to the latest platters on the jukebox which had all the good stuff that kids were dancing to in those days. She figured from there she could work up to prodding him to ask her for a real date. But sometimes the bumps and bruises of the brogger life left a little sense in their progeny and so before making attempts at such a conquest Josie consulted with Frida to see if Bradley was “spoken for.” (Josie’s term if you can believe that). See Frida, the queen of the budding folk set so a new force to be reckoned with even if a brogger’s daughter got something of an exemption from the rigid routine of the social structure of the Senior class just by being able to get dates for girls with guys who could strum three chords on a guitar and not make the subway sound symphonic in comparison when they sang and take them to the Village coffeehouses had that excellent “intelligence” on the whole school system’s social network, in other words who was, or was not, spoken for. (By the way that “grapevine” any high school grapevine, maybe middle school too would also put the poor technicians at the CIA and the spooks at NSA to shame with the accuracy of the information. It had to be that resourceful otherwise fists or something would fly.) The word on Bradley, forget it, off-limits, he was “spoken for” now by Elizabeth Kelly, an “ice queen,” but whose parents ran the Kelly line of kitchen products and had plenty of dough. So Josie saved herself plenty of anguish and she moved on with her small little high school life.
Seeing Elizabeth’s name and profile with her own telltale divorced status listed though that many years later made her curious, made her wonder what had happened to Bradley and since Josie was now “single” she decided she would write Elizabeth a private e-mail to her profile page. This private e-mail exchange slot something which the website was set up to perform and which the reunion committee was recommending alumnus to do rather than take up a lot of space on the main page yakking about personal stuff that nobody else but the two correspondents gave a damn about. That “single” status, a condition that Josie now considered the best course after two shifts of fighting for equitable alimony payment made her realize after that last battle with Alfred that it was infinitely cheaper to just live with a man and be done with it, indulging that way her still very keen sexual appetites. Not if Bradley retained any of his youthful good looks, maybe even if he had turned to dust if he still had his humor and his interest in the literary life.
Josie wrote a short message asking Elizabeth whether she remembered her and how things were going and what had happened to Bradley whom she referenced by saying that she knew him from when Dora Denny had dated him in high school and they had double-dated going to Village coffeehouses.Elizabeth replied that she very well did remember her and their “great” (her term) conversations about Thomas Hardy, Ernest Hemingway and Edith Wharton in English class. (Josie did not remember any such conversations although the three authors mentioned were then in her firmament so it was possible since she would talk anybody’s ear off who would listen about the not so subtle allusions to “sex” and abnormal sex problems in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises that seemed kind of timid back in the 1960s, and when such veiled references to get by the publisher responding to the public censors and their lawyers would be ridiculed now).
Elizabeth also wrote that several years back after the kids had grown up that she and Bradley had agreed to an amicable divorce since neither could think of a blessed reason to stay together. She corresponded with him (about the kids, family stuff) up in Connecticut where he lived outside of Hartford doing some archival literary work now that he had retired. Elizabeth had sent an e-mail to Bradley after getting Josie’s message and Bradley had asked her to send Josie his e-mail address so they could talk about those old times at the coffeehouse (although he said as part of his message via Elizabeth that he would rather not talk about Dora Denny since she had ditched him for dopey Danny Ross and he could never figure out why except that she had developed a liking for cuckoo contrary guys that were as thick as flies in the Village).
That short message with the e-mail address and Josie’s quick reply “sparked” something as Josie and Bradley began a flurry of e-mails giving outlines of their subsequent history, including the still important one to Josie of whether he was “spoken for.” She made it plain that she was not but had been busy in her career as a consultant with several major universities and a couple of high-tech start-ups which she was now letting a younger associate handle so she could do other things. Somehow these messages back and forth led Josie to tell Bradley about her talk with Frida Hoffman about him back in high school. And he laughed (signified these days by the ubiquitous lol in e-mail and cyberspace land) not at the “intelligence” which was correct as usual with Frida when it was not about some snooty JAP but not for the reasons that she gave (his father was an abusive “asshole” and drunk, his term, so he was shy and reticent around other people for a long time) for his standoffishness and reputation as “ice queen” Elizabeth Drury’s boy.(Elizabeth as it turned out had similar problems, her father’s drinking problem, the curse of the Irish despite all their money and good luck, as she would tell Bradley when she asked him to pick her up at the corner rather than at the front door). He wanted to get somebody with dough and although he did have some interest in her then she was after all a daughter of a brogger and that said all he had to know then. Sorry, sorry now.
Bradley laughed (lol, okay) because despite his being slightly flirty, at least that was what he thought he was attempting to do because he certainly was interested in her before he latched onto Elizabeth’s train when they would talk on those long ago double-dates he had never asked her out and then one day she just stopped talking to him for no known reason. Damn. Now post hoc he knew why. Double damn.
They say, or at least Thomas Wolfe did in the title of one of his novels-you can’t go home again but neither Bradley nor Josie after that last furious exchange of e-mails about the fateful missing chance and subsequent cellphone calls when all they thought they had to say to each other seemed too cumbersome by e-mail would heed Wolfe’s message. They decided to meet in Cambridge one night to see if that unspoken truth had any substance. They did meet, got along great, had many stories to exchange and it turned out many of the same interests (except golf a sport which relaxed Bradley when he was all wound up but which Alfred had tried to teach her to no avail). And so their little affair started, started with great big bursts of flames but wound up after a few months smoldering out and being blown away like so much dust in the wind once Bradley started talking about marriage. Josie was willing to listen to living together but her own strange marital orbit had made her very strongly again any more marriages. So this pair could not go home again, not at all, and after some acrimonious moments they parted.
Josie knew that was the best course, knew she had to break it off but it still hurt enough that any reference to 1964 made her sad. As she took a look at the sentiments expressed in that tattered yellowed document she had a moment’s reprieve as she ahh-ed over the information presented. Had she really forgotten that there was not Vice-Presidential succession then when Lyndon Johnson became President after the assassination of Irish Jack Kennedy? That My Fair Lady was popular then as now. That the Beatles had appeared on Ed Sullivan’s Show and done a film that year, and that the great Chapel of Love by the Dixie Cups had been a hit that year as well. That 1964 was the year the Mustang that every guy she knew (except Danny) would have died for came out into the world. That gas was only about thirty cent a gallon, and that another Elizabeth, Elizabeth Taylor, married one Richard Burton for the first time (although not the last). On that note she put the yellowed tattered document in the trash pile. She would remember things past in her own way.
I’d Rather Be With The Devil Than To Be That Man’s Woman
Even when a thing, a fling, okay an affair is over there is always, always some residue, some flash back point that gets the blood boiling especially when a guy takes the walk on you, leave’s you flat. Josie Davis certainly had been down that road ever since she left the friendly confines of her family’s New York City apartment and had chosen to go to the wilds of Madison, Wisconsin and go to the university there (friendly in that she hardly went out of the house to face any heartbreak, and went to Hunter College High where she was a nose-to-the-grindstone drudge until she got immersed by Frida in the burgeoning folk scene in the Village and even then there was a lot of drudge about her since she wanted to go to a good, faraway school and would she thought at the time need a lot of scholarship money).
Enter one James Prescott from Racine, a guy she had met one night at the Dusty Dog, the local coffeehouse hang-out for budding sophomores (the class structure, school class, and in effect social order class, would baffle any half-bright sociologist since Freshmen hung at The Grog, Sophs at the Dog, Juniors at the Hungry Hawk, and Seniors at The Club Algiers and while there were no obvious roadblocks for anyone to enter any of those establishments without the appropriate escort it wasn’t worth the hassle or the evil eyes which bore into the offender stuff that would not go down in big city life but was tolerated in campus towns). He had spied her (and she him) knowing each other slightly from American History class (along with about two hundred other students filling the big hall) since he had a running battle with the professor conducting the class about George Washington’s place in the American pantheon and she had congratulated him on his efforts after one class. So they talked a bit, or rather he talked a lot since he was hot that night on the subject of country blues from down South, down in the Delta in Mississippi now that folk-singers or archivists had gone down there and “discovered” a bunch of old black guys who were famous and influences on the development of the blues, electric blues that everybody knew about. Guys down south that everybody was going crazy over. Guys like Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt, Bukka White, Son House and James’ favorite, Skip James.
And so their thing started although Josie was a little put off by James’ habit of cutting her off before she was finished with her thought, and more put off by his off-key singing which was pretty bad for a guy who knew some of the most esoteric information about folk and blues music she had ever heard. Put off because he would sing at the drop of a hat even in the streets which embarrassed her. Especially when he tried to do a falsetto version of Skip James’ most famous, or infamous song “I’d rather be with the devil than be that woman’s man.” She assumed everybody would think that he meant her, the gal he was walking with as opposed to some bitch in a song who did her man wrong, tangled with whiskey and with his best friend neither of which she at that moment could be accused of. Although if he kept it up she might need a quick shot of booze and take a run at his friend Tyrone just for good measure. So they went along for a while until she tired of his ways, tired of being treated like some rag doll with no opinions of her own (checked Tyrone out too although he proved to be a one night stand, maybe a couple of nights but knew from nothing about blues and it showed in his whole self-righteous pose).
After she had given him his walking papers she found herself for a while humming that Skip James’ song except she would sing-“I’d rather be with the devil than be that man’s woman.” Yeah, two could play that game but she sorely wished that Jack Kiley would find himself soon and come clutter up her doorway.
At The Crossroads
This crossroads business was not really Josie’s story except around the edges, around the place where she intersected her friends’ love lives although the cheap date scene she was all too familiar with once she got out of the friendly confines of “nice Jewish boy” New York and Long Island and came in contact with the “from hunger” boys as America democratized its institutions of higher learning with the great push to get the post-war baby boomers, the great unwashed, moving a step or two up from their parents.
Danny Ross was a born contrarian, young as he was to take on such a burden along with his studies as a college student, or what would pass for such a contrary person until a more contentious one came along. You know Danny was the kind of person who if you said an orange he has to say an apple if you asked for a preference in fruits even if for all of his life he had had oranges every day and hated the very sound of the word apple. Better, better example, and this was pure Danny since he was enrolled as a biology major, if you said some scientific study had shown that something like pomegranates helped stop lesions he would cite some obscure study by some half-baked researcher, a study that had been proven to be bunk about one hundred years ago, about how that same fruit caused cancerous growths. Yeah, pure Danny.
And that contrariness extended beyond purely personal preferences and scientific niceties. Listen to this. Danny, despite his obtuseness showing that he had the minimal social skills to survive in this wicked old world when he would let them shine, had this very pretty, smart, sympathetic and convivial girlfriend, Dora Denny whom he had met in Washington Square Park on one afternoon while listening to folk music of which he, she, they were very interested in at the time when it was beginning to blossom out from some Greenwich Village exotica in the early 1960s. Dora went to school, Hunter College High, with Josie and along with Frida Hoffman were three famous friends almost allthrough school. Dora had just picked up the interest through Frida and listening to WMNC, a station which was beginning to mix up some folk programs along with its basic rock and roll formal but Danny as was his wont when he got enthusiastic about anything had become something of an aficionado.
Aficionado meaning for Danny that if you say you liked the Weavers version of Goodnight, Irene as Dora did then Danny would almost compulsively tell you that Leadbelly’s version was infinitely better, cleaner, more nuanced, more mournful or whatever he was feeling at that time to oppose your proposition. But you can never tell about the influences of attraction, of budding romance because Dora, remember she is the sympathetic, convivial type, thought Danny was being cute when he said that contrary information to her that first afternoon.
Dora at the time of this story had graduated, as had her friend Josie Davis, a couple of years before from high school in New York City, the esteemed Hunter College School in Manhattan where she had gone to school. Her friend Josie Davis would then go as an undergraduate to Wisconsin while Dora stayed in the city to attend NYU. Dora couldn’t remember whether Josie was a sophomore or a junior at Wisconsin just then since she had taken some time off to “find herself” read; get over an affair with a budding folk singer, Todd Whiting, whom she had met when she had gone to Washington Square one summer vacation Saturday afternoon. You might have heard of Todd Whiting, you can still get his records on Amazon or at places like Sandy’s in Cambridge, since he was something of a hot coffeehouse act out in the Frisco scene before the acid-etched rock of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and the Doors took the town over by a storm in the summer of love, 1967. Josie had met Todd, had met and fallen hard for him while she was still in high school, hell, he was only nineteen but things moved fast in the 1960s, when he had dedicated a song, Angel In The Mercy Night, to her after Frida Hoffman had introduced her to him that one Saturday afternoon(Frida was the Hunter College High true insider on the blooming folk scene down the Village way and knew plenty of Todds to the delight of the grasping JAPs who previously had snubbed her).
Todd eventually left Manhattan for the West Coast after the on and off long distance affair with Josie had run its course to as the farewell expression went to “find himself” which he had apparently done with that local success he achieved out in the West before the furies came and ate him alive. (Josie had selected, if you are interested about the why of that “long distance romance” that was bound to expire, Wisconsin like a lot of other New York City and Long Island kids just because it was not either of those locales, that it was far from the homes which were driving them, and not just them, crazy.)
This is where Danny and his odd-ball ways came in. Josie had been close, very close, friends with Dora, closer than with Frida at one point, since they both were seriously into English Literature, completewith capitalization of the L in literature to show how serious they were. One day after she had been seeing Todd a few times Josie took Dora over to Todd’s apartment to hear him do his rendition of Angel In The Mercy Night that song which he had dedicated to her that fatal day at Washington Square and which he was to perform that next Saturday night when he was the feature at Murry’s Coffeehouse across for the Gaslight in the Village. (Everybody was almost forced to use that “Murry’s Coffeehouse across from the Gaslight” designation for Murry’s or Murry got his feelings hurt since his business, his coffeehouse success had depended for a long time on grabbing the overflow from sold-out shows at the Gaslight to come in and listen to the new talent that performed three songs and then out at the “open mics” he presented at his place.)
Dora, after hearing the song, deemed it very good, very good as an example of what the new folksingers she had been hearing of late should be doing instead of just covering old traditional songs from God knows where about people who seemed to be clueless about doing anything but killing, boozing, and having worthless romantic relationships. Todd’s song she said spoke to the new wave folk listeners like her. And she told Todd so, and he told her to come hear him Saturday at Murry’s with Josie. She said she would try except she had a date with a guy, Danny, who she wasn’t sure had enough money to cover expenses. Jesus, Todd thought then and as he mentioned to Josie later, the guy couldn’t cover a couple of coffees and a shared pastry, and a couple of bucks for the “basket” to keep him and his date in Murry’s seats, the cheapest of cheap dates none cheaper than that except just hanging around the Hayes-Bickford across from the Square watching the weird mixture of winos, rummies, con men, drifters, low profile poets, mad monk writers and flipped-out singers buzz around. Yeah, Jesus.
As it turned out Danny, a financially struggling student at New York University since his father worked for the railroads which were in a dying cycle then and so not many weeks with fulltime work, and hence the reason behind the “no dough” status somehow pulled enough money to take Dora to the show. (He had borrowed the money from his older sister who had forced him to baby-sit her two children while she and hubby went to the movies downtown for a few hours relief in return.)
The way the show, the “open mic” nights worked at Murry’s Coffeehouse (we will dispense with the “across from the Gaslight” since you already know the reason for that designation), the way they still work now if you are near any of the fading remaining folk centers still around like Boston, Frisco and LA and still kicking out the jams with the greying population who have not heard the news that the folk minute had passed a while ago, was that performers would sign up as they came in to sing one, maybe two depending on the number of performers, for an hour or so and then the featured performer (the person those two coffee and a shared pastry people were really there for) would come out to do two sets and close the joint. Things went well enough for the “open mic” section and then Todd came on to do the first of his two sets. This first set was all the classics, the old time traditional stuff folk audiences expected to hear. Tom Dooley, East Virginia, Cuckoo Bird stuff like that. Pretty well received.
The second set Todd came out and sat on the stool placed on the small stage which some performers used and began to fiddle with his guitar. What he was doing was plugging his guitar into an amplifier in order to get more sound out of the instrument although nobody could see the amplifier from the front of the house. Then he started playing Angel In The Mercy Night with the amplifier on. Sounded good from what both Josie and Dora said later, later after the new world was crushed.
See Murry went crazy when he heard what he thought was going to be some rock and roll song when the decibel level went way up as Todd started Angel, really had believed the thing was some rock and roll song what with the amplification, and had gone in back of Todd and pulled the plug so he never finished his song in that manner. Murry made it clear that Todd, or any entertainer, had to play acoustic or else forget Murry’s, go to Coney Island and weep sounds on the corners or something. So Todd finished up that night playing his usual acoustic guitar. Weird night.
Here is the not so weird part though Danny born like all of them to the sound of the rock and roll night sided with Murry, sided with old time impresario who maybe grew up with Duke Ellington or Frank Sinatra bop Murry against Dora, Josie and from the startled applause after Todd finished Angel most of the rest of the audience. Danny said folk music was only worthy of that designation when the juice was off. Jesus.
Looking For Beulah Land- With Mississippi John Hurt In Mind
One night Josie Davis “discovered” a little old man in a soft felt hat, a well-worn brown suit, a little shinny from plenty of wear, maybe his Sunday best down wherever he came from which she heard was Mississippi, Mississippi that was all in the news since it was the place where Negroes, blacks, she was not sure what they called themselves in public since she would see about six different words, a couple nasty like nigra in reference to their racial identity were being denied everything under the son by Mister James Crow, his skin black as coal sitting on a small ill-lit makeshift stage at Murry’s Coffeehouse across from the Gaslight. The little old man just sitting on that stage getting ready to tune up a gnarly ratty-ass old guitar that looked to Josie’s eyes like one she saw one time in a Sears& Roebuck catalogue when she was thinking about taking up an instrument in elementary school and her mother told her to look in the catalogue since she did not know what a lot of the instruments the music teacher mentioned looked like. Or maybe better, a better description of what the guitar looked like, was that it had that beat up look that you would see when looking in pawnshop windows at the walls where about ten guitars were hung waiting to be redeemed by the junkies and alkies who owned them which would never happen in ten thousand years once they got on their “wanting habits” on (that junkie drug stuff learned later from a guy, Brad, she met at Wisconsin where she went to college so no she was not some high school whizz about the world, far from it).
Yeah, that little black man, and he was little, wizened with age and dried like a prune by the daily sun from a life of working in Mister’s cotton plantations as she would learn in a few minutes when Murry, the owner of the coffeehouse and as he termed himself a folk aficionado, filled the crowd in as to who the heck the guy was, was just sitting there fretting over the tuning of that guitar and would look up every once in a while with a great big smile from his very white teeth, except the couple that were missing which accentuated that whiteness.
But maybe it is best to go back a few hours, a couple of days even to find out how Josie and that little old black man wound up in the heart of the Village, McDougall Street, in the heart of the great folk revival of the early 1960s which would bring a bright Jewish high school student and an ancient Mister James Crow cotton-picker to the depths of New York night life. Josie, a junior at Hunter College High, was besides being a very good student (a drudge as the Jewish-American Princesses, JAPs, who also went to school there but only to build their resumes in the rich husband search and transit to Long Island out of the smelly, smoky city called her and her kind who sought, well, something not Long Island) was also restless as most sixteen year olds, bright or not, were in those times maybe now too. Her best friend Frida, who skirted the world between the JAPs and the drudges with some dexterity, got her interested one afternoon in going to Washington Square down by New York University where all kinds of performers would do their thing and maybe grab a few dollars from appreciative passers-by to keep the rent-collector at arms-length. (They all had their buckets out from ex-cardboard coffee cups to some sand pail restored from some parents’ garage to do duty as a collection agent along with their vagrant smiles, with the look of the unfed whether true or not, usually “not” down at the Square.) At that time the overwhelming majority of performers were singers, and not pop singers like Frank Sinatra or rock singers like Elvis but folk singers who with guitar in hand would play what they called traditional ballads and stuff like that (a few but not many that day would sing protest songs against nuclear weapons, Mister James Crow, the whole ticky-tack vanilla experience that most kids from suburbia faced in those days).
One guy, Ted Higgins, tall, blue-eyed, brownish blonde hair and so not from their brown everything Jewish enclave Manhattan world of tall apartment buildings and fearssang 500 Miles as she and Frida entered under the arch and they stood and listened for a while. He gave Josie a big smile, pointed to her and said he was dedicating his next song, Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies, to her. That introduction and some conversation after he finished that set and sat down on a bench with them to have a soda to quench their thirsts (really his since singing for him dried his mouth something awful he said) led to a few dates but the thing never worked out because Ted was a rolling stone like a lot of young people then and told Josie that while he liked being with her he had to “find himself,” find out whether he was cut out for the iterant folk life like his hero Woody Guthrie and head west, west to California which was drawing young and old to the continental end of the line or go back to school at Ohio State and finish his engineering degree.
It also did not, or would not have worked out, because Josie’s parents while professing secular beliefs were dead set against Josie dating anybody but Jewish boys, nice Jewish boys, from Stuyvesant Town or Long Island where they had friends with nice Jewish boy sons. After Ted left though, after she got over the usual drama of first serious love and pandering around the edges of sexual experience, at least that “pandering “ was how she expressed the matter to Frida who arched her big brown eyebrows on that one, with an older man (he nineteen almost twenty to her sixteen so older man in that very age conscious time) Josie was still caught up in the folk scene, liked the music and listened to a radio show on Sunday nights, WMAD, which featured three hours of straight folk music to meet a growing demand in the New York area (Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Old Town Chicago, Harvard Square and a bunch of other oases too).
That continued interest was how one Josie Davis from Manhattan wound up with a nice Jewish boy date, Jeffrey Goldman, a son of a friend of Josie’s mother, Rebecca, sitting in Murry’s having the obligatory coffee and pastry for the under-aged patrons listening to the amateur performers who had signed up to perform that night in the weekly talent search Murry’s sponsored who filled up that make-shift stage before the little old wizened black man stepped on the stage after their fifteen minutes of fame was over. And the only reason they wound up at Murry’s a couple of hours before and wound up listening to guys and gals polish up their acts is that they had been shut out of the Gaslight which featured the better acts in town (the distinction being those at the Gaslight were paid and those at Murry’s worked for the “basket” or whatever object was sent around to collect dough so they could make a few bucks to keep that afore-mentioned rent collector away from their doors).
The wizened old man’s story was as different as night from day than that of Josie’s travels to Murry’s. See he had been a folksinger, made his living at it for a while as a young man down in the Delta, down in hard-boiled Mister James Crow Mississippi, had made a few records, “race records” the record companies called them, pitched to a mostly Southern black audience that sold some but come the Great Depression nobody, or hardly anybody, had money for the luxury of records when there were plenty of hungry mouths to feed and anyway you could heard the stuff for free on the radio as long as you could stand the commercials and so he went to work for Mister doing the best he could. Doing the best he could being picking that damn cotton out in Mister’s broiling sun. And that for better or worse was how he had planned to finish up his days.
But then as the dry rot 1950s turned into the flowering1960s between a lot of white kids going down South from the North trying to register blacks to vote (and would hear whiskey-etchedSaturday night juke joint sing and contrition Sunday high Jehovah hymns when they settled into the rural communities they were sent to) and students who were looking for what they called “roots music” (having made some cosmic connections with guys who had gone down there before in the 1930s and 1940s like the Seegers, the Lomaxes, and Harry Smith) who started rooting around the depths of Mississippi to see if any of the guys they heard were still around (as they would have on that wizened little black man who was on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music) or guys that they had never heard ofwho might know some blues. And lo and behold that little man was still around, still working Mister’s damn cotton. More importantly could still play some very good Delta blues on the ratty old guitar he had on the wall of his family’s cabin. So through the magic of money, of impressarios and booking agents and of air flight that little old man got some bookings up North. Made audiences clap in wonder at his playing and at that gentle foxy voice that beguiled everybody.
That little old black man who played so well, who played Creole Belle, Candy Man, Frankie and Albert, and went home to Beulah Land had been “found” down there in goddam Mississippi by among others, Murry Stein, owner ofMurry’s Coffeehouse and while that black man, Mississippi John Hurt by name, required more money than Murry could pay John said he would show his appreciation by playing a set for the crowd at his place that night in between sets at the Gaslight. And so that was how Josie “discovered” the legendary bluesman that night.
Al Fin
A half a dozen years later now safely in the profession, now with the designation name doctor in front of her name and after having at most had a few dates with men after the litany of failures, of dead-beats and the cruel, nothing substantial, noting that ever worked out past a few dinners and concerts, nothing that would have led anywhere she met the human dynamo, Peter Grogan. A financier he called himself when she had met him at Jack’s where she occasionally stopped for a solo bar stool drink before heading home after a busy and trying day setting up the first group of contracts for consulting work with some local universities and colleges as a reward for that doctor designation that she hoped would finally pay off after abandoning first love, English lit and second love sociology. It had been a while since she would go to Jack’s with a date, or fellow workers to see what new small stage acts were working out their routines before heading to bigger venues, or bust since the demise of an active and larger enough folk scene to make it worthwhile for the ownership of Jack’s, Jack himself to book such acts. That dynamo part was right since he swept her off of her feet with the force of his personality.
Half Irish wit, half smooth operator, half, wait a minute that is too many half, so part guy who knew two thousand facts about lots of things, and a little about her bailiwick social psychology although that would only come out later after he was long gone. That was Peter Grogan in a nutshell. He did not come on strong though, was rather tentative about asking if the seat next to hers was open, it was and so were half the seats at the bar so there was a little mischief brewing in her when she said yes. Maybe it was just her time to get back in the ring but she fell hard for him like some drunken sailor pining for some faraway hometown girl. That took a while though since that is where the Peter smooth part came in. He hooked her by being the very soul of modesty, she had had to when they time came nudge him into her bed (she wasn’t aware until later that his preoccupations were not about sex but about other things and so bedding her was presumably far down on his list-smooth though on its face since Josie had decidedly given up on rushing to bed with every guy who did not seem going in the sheets like a mass murderer).
Here ’s where things went awry though after several months, after he had hooked her good, Peter kept insisting that he could set her up with a nice institute, a place where she could do all the research she wanted. Naturally a person, a woman with limited personal resources looking to break from the parental financial stranglehold which they held over her like a sword would listen attentively to such an offer, an offer which dovetailed with her dreams. Here’s the come on though, although having very little experience with serious con men she was not wise to that world when he said he just needed some dough to tide him over on a deal and could she lend him some few thousands to close the deal and then they would be as he said “in the clover.”
She, the fool, took his words as good coin and lent the bum the dough even though it would take a serious chunk out of her cash reserves. And lent more money a couple more times until her account and stocks (given by her father to be saved for a rainy day) were almost depleted. Even then he had flim-flammed her enough that she was not suspicious when that deal that was supposed to be a piece of cake to close kept keeping more, rather than less, complicated. Then while she was away at a two week conference/retreat in San Francisco she let Peter use her place while she was gone, for a business deal he said which couldn’t be concluded at his office, or his home. When she came back from Frisco the whole place had been denuded of every saleable item, and to boot Peter had tried to sell the condo she owned to some poor snook who gave him a $5000 down payment. When they caught up with Peter in Rhode Island it turned out the only financing he was doing was financing various losing horses at local race tracks with whoever’s money he could grab (well over a quarter million dollars at least that was the total from those who were not too embarrassed to keep quiet about their loses).
Yeah, Josie sighed as she bundled up Peter’s debris, a few clothes, a couple of books, some utensils, to be thrown away in the garbage with her love, she had crumbled up a thousand man thoughts over her life to find one truth-a good man is hard to find, very hard to find.
