Once Again-The Summer Of Love, 1967-Postcards From A Lost
Planet-The Complete Trilogy
“The Scribe Turns The World
Upside Down”- “Buddha Swings-Jack
Kerouac Wings”- “When Butterfly Swirl
Swirled”
[The well- known writer
and book critic Zack James eventually began to feel that he had signed on to an
assignment from hell after spending a fair amount of time this summer of 2017
chronicling the 50th Anniversary of the San Francisco-centered
Summer of Love, 1967. Especially so since he was far too young by about a
decade to have any personal affinity to that celebration. His whole involvement
had come about after his oldest brother, Alex, had taken a business trip to San
Francisco and had noticed an advertisement for an exhibition at the de Young
Art Museum in Golden Gate Park entitled The
Summer of Love Experience. For Alex it was crucial that he attend that
exhibition since he had actually been out there in that decisive summer of 1967
and for about two years afterward before settling down to pursue his current
life as a high-end lawyer in Boston. When Alex returned to Boston he gathered
together whatever friends were left standing as he called it from his growing
up town of North Adamsville and who had also gone out to the Bay area for
various amounts of time in 1967.
As a result of that
meeting the group of seven agreed with Alex that they should commission Zack to
help write, edit, and prepare for publication a small book of memoirs of those
times. The book to be dedicated to the late Peter Paul Markin, forever known
among that crowd as “Scribe” once Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader of the
guys he hung around dubbed him with that title for his blasted tenacity about
knowing every possible fact in the universe for any occasion. More importantly
the Scribe had always been something of a bell-weather for all kinds of trends
like the rise of folk music in the early 1960s, the anti-war movement, and what
he called according to Alex who was his closest friend at the time, the “fresh
new breeze coming through the land.” The Scribe was the first to head out to San
Francisco after quitting college in the spring of 1967. (The consequences of that
ill-advised decision will be mentioned below.) He came back a couple of months
later and rounded up every “corner boy,” that is what they were called then, to
head back by bus, by hitchhiking or whatever means they could get there.
Zack put together the
book and saw to its publication thinking that was the end of the matter. Not
so. Alex, and then the others, kept asking him to write more stories about the
Scribe and those times. That led to some reviews of the music, books, and other
social events of the times. Some ten pieces in all. That is when he said
enough. Told Alex to tell the “brethren” (Zack’s word) he needed to finish a
book on the legendary revolutionary pre-Civil War abolitionist John Brown which
was running up against a publication dead-line. That is when he “drafted” me to
do some short pieces remaining from that period. Of course I am even younger
than Zack so I had only heard about the Summer of Love through books and lately
through looking at YouTube videos which are plentiful. Since I owned Zack
couple of favors I agreed to finish up for him.
At first the three
pieces that I contributed stood by themselves based on some postcards Alex had
given Zack as prompts to write up about. But as I looked into more background
material especially that Scribe tribute memoir book Zack had carefully put
together I came to see that they all were linked together. Linked together by
the character of the mad monk Peter Paul Markin, the Scribe. So I have, after
re-writing some of the material, put the pieces together as a trilogy. If Alex
and his guys want to dedicate this stuff to the Scribe then that is okay by
me-Jeffrey Thorne]
***********
The Scribe Turned The
World Upside Down
The Scribe said it best
one night, one Summer of Love, 1967 night, one cold San Francisco night, a
summer night when the Japan currents went awry and reminded one of old Mark
Twain’s witty sayings about the coldest winter he had ever spent-August in the
city of sweet brethren Saint Francis, when he declared (so like that mad man to
use the seventh person imperative, to declare in his world-historic way, for
such small letter asterisk events), that the breeze coming through the land
would shake society to its foundations. Would make nine to five work-a-day
world a bore (and give his poor brethren a chance to partake of the golden age
that he, his parents, his Acre neighborhood, and most of the known world had
been short-changed of for millennia), make that long suburban tract complete
with dishwasher and sanitary garbage disposal obsolete before the last mortgage
payment hit the dirt (get people to think differently about space, about
community, and give that same and give that poor brethren a chance to partake
of the golden age of living space that he, his parents, his Acre neighborhood,
and most of the known world had been short-changed of for millennia), would
make those three point two kids and that one dog a victim of old-fashioned
thinking (well, okay).
Said, get this for a guy
who became a non-believer, a non-believer in risen Christ if you can believe
that very early in his teens (and went to church, sliding side door church solely
to sit a few rows behind some lovely he was pining over just to watch her ass
so yes a non-believer) that the new dispensation was at hand-if they could keep
it, keep the bastards, and you know who the bastards were then-the night-takers
and guys who conned you into nine to five dreams, suburban flats and, what was
it three point two kids (we will pass on the not mandatory dog) from barking at
the door.
Sure the Scribe talked
the talk and walked the walk, oh boy did he, spouting forth about one love,
about the new garden of eden (small case is right remember he was a
non-believer, maybe had always been something of an outlaw even when he cruised
the books, had his nose in some book, for a sign), about that turning the world
upside down and making it stick. Making the night-takers back down
(night-takers Zack’s word via the Scribe which I am happy to ‘steal”). Hell, from
what the corner boys said in their memories of the guy he sounds like he was always
a closet Digger. Not the Diggers who fed the people in down-trodden
Haight-Ashbury when the desperate young had wandered to San Francisco with
nothing but dreams and knapsacks but the people around Gerrard Winstanley on
Saint George’s Hill who, for a while before they were kicked off that spot by
Oliver Cromwell’s agents, tried a form of primitive communism based on communal
living and common use of land. Check that out sometime if you delve back into
the 17th century English revolution. They appear to have been
forbears of what went down in 1967 before the experiment got out of hand
through hubris, dope and confusion about how to keep the thing going against
the wrath of the night-takers. Of course coming “from hunger” he, the other
guys, Zack’s brethren and the Scribe’s corner boys, were not above certain
larcenies, scams, cons to keep body and soul together. That contradiction was
suppressed for a time, for the time before the night-takers came back with a
vengeance. The ebb the Scribe called it as he descended down a slippery slope
in the mid-1970s.
That was the rub, that
was the factor that got away from the Scribe as much as he knew that he/they were
on tender mercies ground, knew that that little counter attack from out of the
blue would come when he thought the world had stopped turning on itself and had
gone upside down that eventually would do in even the Scribe. Would turn his
mouth to ashes, would turn a sainted brethren (not many out in Frisco in those
days knew his full given name began with Francis at a time when everybody was
“reinventing” themselves including clustering up new monikers to get washed
clean, also a Scribe expression and so only knew the moniker) down the gutter
road, float him out to the Japan seas long before he ever heard the Duke blast
that high white note. Yeah, blast the times, blast the whole fucking world for
taking down a brethren as pure as snow.
[I was not sure where I
should put a bit of information about the Scribe’s fate although I knew that I
had to bring some information out in the interest of completeness and to give
sense of the Scribe’s contradiction so I am placing it here. I have mentioned
above something about “wanting habits” and how they were suppressed for a time.
The Scribe’s downfall, as witnessed by all who mentioned him from the old days,
started with his quitting college given up a scholarship to “find himself” out
in San Francisco in fateful 1967. Such were the times that a lot of people did
that. His problem, a big problem, was that left his subject to the draft which
came the next year. For reasons I could never understand at this remove he
accepted induction and wound up in Vietnam as an infantryman, did his tour and
came back to what he called the “real” world where he on the surface thrived
for the next few years while the spirit of the communal vision 1960s still held
sway. Stayed on the West Coast and did some good journalism around the fate of
some returning fellow Vietnam veterans who were “lost” and living out in camps
and other places away from the “real” world. But all his guys mention that
there was something that Vietnam had taken out of him, had left him internally
shattered. When the 1960s faded, when that “newer world” idea faded he lost his
mooring. Got more heavily into dope, into cocaine. Started dealing to keep his
growing habit intact. Then took a mysterious trip to Mexico to consummate a
drug deal. Whatever happened and nobody has much to go on he wound dead in a
back street in Sonora with two bullets in his chest. The situation was so fraught
with danger that he was buried in a potter’s field down there. Like I said I
still am not able to get a handle on all of that but there it is-maybe the
contradiction of the times if it came right down to it.]
**************
“Buddha Swings-Jack Kerouac Wings”
Beat down (not to be
mistaken for abuse, child abuse or anything like that against up against it
mothers and distant fathers but just poor, bedraggled poor, “wanting habit” as
the Scribe would have coming jointly out of their respective Acres). Beat around (check beat down except just
hanging around luckless, shoeless, waiting for somebody else’s shoe to drop). Beat
sound (hell easier to figure, listen to the swish of the sticks battling the
pots and pans, some out of Africa our mother riff culled into cool be-bop
be-bop and all that jazz away from big swing and into the big blast air). Beat
to the ground (luckless fellahins stashed away in back room closets, gambling,
washing endless dishes, what did some wit call it-diving for pearls, losing always
losing, losing worst when blood-lust bullies take the law into their own hands).
Fuck it, fuck
explanation since everybody will get it wrong just like the guys back in the
Acre could never figure what was bothering the guy, what made him jump. Fuck it
Jack just jumped into it, into its sea, into it misty sea, foghorn blasting
some jazz-like moan, from his beautified beatified skull, maybe thinking of
youthful skull behind some bushes or out on some back road highway jumping the
bones of some friend’s one and only, that is pure speculation though. But
really and truly Jack man, Jean-bon in old times jumped from some river of
life, mill town life like a million guys before him and now in foreign lands a
million guys after him, the river flowing to steam up some engine to grind the
fabric that will clothe the world. Ha, like we who come naked into this holy
coil can take solace from that low catholic trip it took him, and not just him
but lots of others who broke the square habit at least for a time, for the
youth duration. Damn beatitude in the end when all the shouting was over and
Jack in some drunken grave under a pile of suffering dirt (the Buddha in him
cried out as it did for that guy down in Sonora before they found him in some
hideous back alley unnamed and unloved, maybe un-nameable if there is such a
word) Why couldn’t he have listened to that guy out in Frisco town, the guy, a
kid really, maybe sixteen set up in a too big older brother 1940s zoot suit, a
wisp of beard which could not be shaven so wisp, eyes glazed on dope , on love
on the high, on the low, who all nervous on bennie nevertheless blew that high
white note that was in his DNA, provided by grandma, mother left for parts
unknown, father shiva blew town with some chick who had a stash and gave her
gash, to like everything else out to the fucking China seas. But that was at
the end. That was when the music was over, when it no longer made sense. At the
beginning hell no said Jack.
The world wasn’t big
enough to hold all his desperations, keep them in check, keep those wanting
habits every poor boy has inside him talk about DNA. Even rama jamma Buddha
didn’t have no cure for that except maybe some jimson and jetsam and mystical
balm for a shattered world. Like I say that was at the end though. At the
beginning our boy took off as fast as he could from that mill town river and
never looked back (except to take the dust off his shoes and bow down before
our Lady of the River when luck ran out, the booze ran out, hell, the sweet tea
sticks ran out and all of beat solace ran to catholic rivers, yeah I know
capital C but those were the breaks, the end knotted up in some rat hole, some
mother-forgotten rat hole and no more joy, stick either). Took it on the lam,
went west east south north (I think on that last direction maybe back to the
homeland, back to the stinking big river up north that some earlier Jack, some
Jacques, crossed to get to that fucking mill river, Jesus, looking for the holy
grail, looking for about six ways to get out of that beat down, beat around,
beat sound, beat to the ground bitch stuff. Took up with some fat fast mad secular
monk with crazed mom and sweet word poet father, not father William Blake but
worldly father, who spouted stuff about negro streets (and angel-headed hipsters
like we didn’t know he hung around Time Square Joe and Nemo’s midnight coffees looking
for queers, con artists and hustlers, always hustlers, crazies (in and out of
the asylums of the mind) and Moloch devouring the land (make no mistake ancient
and evil dressed in grey flannel suits and quoting stock prices into those same
China seas as that benny-suckled kid blowing that high white Frisco note), the
land of milk and honey, rama rama, went to the mat (secret love in more ways
than one with that loose bastard who couldn’t keep his mouth shut or cock in
his pants -and that was that-for a time). No, not then that street wise New
Jack City gangster poet taking liberties with the language and ladies’
pocketbooks or that highbrow junkie hanging around New Orleans looking for
quick fixes although they qualified if it came to that.
For a time no question
since the pull of fast fat monks could wear off fast under the sun of boze,
booze, bennies and grand simon jimson ladies. Took his hat off and let the world
slip in-thought maybe the way was the way. Startled guys like desolation angels
and dharma bums into thinking they could do what had never been done like some
lead pipe cinch. Ran up the mountain (no Prometheus Adonis more likely who was
to know) to place incense in the fatted calf body singing, singing, singing
some cross between the stations of the cross and plastic nirvana (just to be
cute, cute as a nine thieves). Saw Siva run the river gauntlet and leave
satiated beyond compare, saw Rama too walking down Post Street in his
nightshirt.
Then fame got in his
way, somebody bought into his million word notebook thoughts wanderings this is
poor boy long time waiting wanting habits Jack we are talking about remember in
case you have lost the drift. Make him surly and brazen wondering why the hell
if fame was fame didn’t it jump out at him when he started on his Calvary Road road(and
it was such a road breaking from deep incense and Adam and Eve free falls so
much for free will, started out in dirty sneakers and crusted blue jeans, and when
he jumped out of his skull and fled that mountebank river town. Funny no more
Harvard hipsters and Columbia ranters and raspers or Denver Adonis. Now fools
and jesters following his every move, hiding in bushes and make that fat monk
look like some holy fool, like a goof (again remember please not that
street-wise New Jack City gangster poet taking liberties with language and
ladies’ pocketbooks). Ah, sullen lost planet life.
How was he to know, how
was Jack to blessed know that his illegitimate children, not child, children
would abandon their flea-etched sins only a short time later, hang out their
own signs, reach for their own suns, reach with thumbs furled, and follow the
pied piper. Follow the brethren saint mad man with the wooly beard and the
incense announcing his arrival at the table singing, singing, singing and it
wasn’t hosannas but some odd unspoken tune which ripped across the land for a
while. Defying that man in the grey suit (defying mother and father got to dust
and never figured out). Drew magnetic forces around themselves and expected the
kingdom to last until end times. Hah, Jack could have given them the word on
that little mistake. I am the light Jack thought and then he faded from the
scene into utter darkness those unwashed, unloved, unspoken for illegitimate
children to lay waste to the desert for forty years. Jesus
*******
Once Again-The Summer Of
Love, 1967-Postcards From A Lost Planet-When Butterfly Swirl Swirled
By Jeffrey Thorne
The times were out of
sort, the times were frankly a mess and in that little window of time, the time
of Josh Breslin’s Summer of Love, 1967 time he saw a little chance to jailbreak
out of his humdrum existence, to skip the nine to five world that his parents
thrived in and expected him to follow like a lemming to the sea and thrive too for
a while anyhow. We will skip all his thinking that got him there, got him to
act on his jailbreak impulses, he had done enough thinking on lonely desolate
roads heading west in placed like Neola, Iowa, Grand Island, Nebraska,
Winnemucca, Nevada and a whole slew of nameless Main Street pass-through towns to
last a lifetime. Except to say that he was not alone in his jailbreak passions
as the decade as it progressed gave ample evidence of and that he was maybe
unusually sensitive for a guy who ran in circles that were anything but
receptive to jailbreak ideas. Let’s get him to Summer of Love epicenter Frisco
and into the whole thing, the passion thing, the thing that happened between Butterfly
Swirl and the Prince of Love.
For those who are
already confused by the now seemingly strange fetish for monikers
that somehow were expected to wash one clean that latter one was Josh
Breslin’s self-anointed moniker once he hit Russian Hill in that Bagdad of a
city (Bagdad not of these times, not humbled bombed-out times, but back when
that town was an epicenter of the world and whole civilization flocked to
imitate the latest ideas, cultural artifacts and visionary experience and Frisco
could stand the comparison without shutter). In those days, in that little
window of time when the world was turned upside down(an expression from back in
the 17th to express what was happening in revolutionary England when
lots of amazing similar experiences were being attempted as that Cromwellian
Puritan-like brethren tried to in its
turn wash itself clean), or a small segment of society, mainly young, when you
looked back from a fifty year view, everybody was try to “reinvent” themselves,
making a new washed clean beginning and so an epidemic of name-changing rushed
the land. (Of course those who were trying to seek the “newer world” a Lord
Tennyson phrase but apt assumed that everybody was on board that everybody was
into the turmoil but while the media-driven headlines were large the nine to
five world went about its nine to five business which encapsulated that great
majority of young-don’t be fooled by universal long hair, granny dresses and
talk, endless talk of dope and sexual fantasies those were just signposts not
the real deal.) Josh a very good looking
guy what with that Sam Shepard father-aided gene and mother- aided Quebec
flair, with some ego, a lot of ego for a working class kid from up in ocean-side
Maine, Olde Saco to be exact, decided that he was royalty or something and so
tagged himself with that moniker. (The Scribe, whom we will get to in a moment,
used to kid him that he was really the Prince of Lvov, a Podunk town in Poland
just to tweak his ego a bit. By the way after careful research the long-held
rumor that the Scribe gave Josh his moniker is erroneous. Josh had been
thinking about that moniker almost all the way from that Maine until he reached
the Pacific shores).
So Josh Breslin just out
of high school and full of the getting the dust of Podunk Maine off his shoes hit
Frisco town, hit first stop Russian Hill after being told by some holy goof,
that term no put down but a real live Yippie freak who called attention to
himself using that idea, in Golden Gate Park, the epicenter of the epicenter at
a certain point, that righteous dope could be had up that hill. (Holy goof as
Josh was later to find out from the Scribe a term used to describe certain
personages by Scribe hero “beat” writer Jack Kerouac who got it from Buddha
himself.) As he walked up the long drawn out hill in a city with a fistful of
hills, mostly long and drawn out, he stopped near a park when he saw this
amazing sight, amazing to him then but common to the emerging scene as he would
find out later, a converted yellow school bus. Converted the operative word. The
bus had been transformed on the outside into some fantastic psychedelic moving
art show and inside a cheap travelling mobile home of a new sort after the
seats had been ripped out and mattresses completely covered the floor and in
the back boxes filled with spare clothes, food, and utensils. Topped off by a
big sound speaker system just then blaring out some unheard of by him music
from he thought maybe India or something (music which turned out to the
Jefferson Airplane as they moved into the acid rock music world which took a
spin as the rock genre of choice among the dope aficionados of the time like
cool jazz had sustained the tea head “beats” a half generation before).
More importantly for our
tale as he approached the bus for closer inspection Josh noticed a young guy, a
guy who looked a few years older than him but still young with a long beard and
long hair (Josh was beardless, would never have much more than stubble whenever
he tried to grow a beard, a wisp of a beard really, and had only let his jet black hair start to grow after he fled staid
bi-weekly routine barber shop Olde Saco and got on the road) sitting on the
sidewalk beside this monster of a bus. Without hesitating a moment Josh walked
up to the guy and asked if he had a joint. The guy, the Scribe, Peter Paul
Markin, also without hesitation, reached into his denim jacket pocket and
passed Josh a big old joint, a blunt in the dope world language of the day, and
said “fire her up brother, fire her up.” (Josh’s first dope experience which is
a bit outside what we are trying to get across here was the usual endless and
chaotic coughing that seized beginners not used to the harshness of the dried
plant once he took a few “hits” and a kind of trance-like feeling in his brain
that the cares of the world had been left behind.) That exchange began the Josh-Scribe
friendship, a little rocky at times, but a lasting time until the Scribe’s
untimely and mysterious early death several years later.
What that converted
yellow school bus was about to give an idea of the times was that the owner,
although don’t make a today’s assumption about the owner part, Captain Crunch
(real name Jack Shepard, Yale, Class of 1958) had bought it or traded for it
that never was clear to Josh as he heard different stories from different
sources for a bag of dope in order to roam up and down the West Coast ocean-side
highways picking up and letting people off along the way. The Scribe, who had
quit college in Boston to head west once he heard about the Summer of Love
stuff happening. Stuff which had confirmed for him his long time prediction
that a new breeze was about to hit the land, to hit youth nation in particular
had met Captain Crunch in Golden Gate Park and had already taken one trip up
and down the coast to San Diego and back. It was on that trip back up the coast
in Carlsbad about forty miles north of San Diego that Kathy Callahan, Carlsbad
High School Class of 1968, the Butterfly Swirl of this scenario comes into the
picture.
Kathy, let’s call her Butterfly Swirl to keep with the
times and her time, had been nothing but a Southern California surfer girl
meaning in those days that she looked beautiful, tanned and curvaceous on the
beach while her golden-haired surfer boyfriend went hunting for the perfect
wave. It was along the Pacific Coast Highway one late afternoon as it passed
through Carlsbad where the yellow brick road bus had stopped to see the breath-taking
ocean view that the Scribe spied Butterfly Swirl sunning herself waiting for
her by then pruned surfer boy to come ashore for the day. The Scribe used to
the more intellectually driven and somewhat neurotic co-ed who he was addicted
to in the Boston-Cambridge haunts he frequented was fascinated by Butterfly
Swirl fresh new world look. (The Scribe would admit later that he was totally
unprepared to see hundreds of such beauties up and down the coast waiting on
land for their own golden-haired surfer boys seeking their won perfect waves.)
He went up to her and started asking questions about surfers, surfing, a
subject he knew nothing about having come from the East where such a sport did
not have any cache then. They talked for a while and during that time the
Scribe found out that Butterfly, kind of restless going into her senior year of
high school about what to do with her life, whether to go to college, whether
she should work on her art, was intrigued by what she heard was happening up in
youth nation San Francisco.
Yeah, the times were like that. You would expect a guy
like the Scribe to head west once he got the message. Hell he, driven by his
faded beat dreams, was built for that experience. Maybe even expect a guy like
Josh before heading on to other things, as most of the brethren who formed that
small segment of youth nation would eventually do, to head west and see what
was what. What was extraordinary was the jail breakout of a gal like Butterfly
Swirl who if she was a few years older would have been so totally immersed in
the surfer culture that she could have given a damn about some weirdos up north
where the weirdos congregated and had done so for a couple of generations. The
long and short of it was that a couple of days later Butterfly Swirl after the
Scribe’s coaxing was “on the bus” heading north.
One of the things that
guys like the Scribe was trying to break out of was the old girl-guy one and
only thing although breaking through that barrier had been easier said than done.
For a few weeks though as the bus headed to Xanadu, Big Sur, Carmel, and
Monterey then up through Pacifica before landing once again in Golden Gate Park
the Scribe and Butterfly Swirl were lovers. The Scribe gave Butterfly Swirl her
first experiences with dope mostly marijuana, peyote buttons and mescaline, the
LSD, the Kool-Aid acid test would come later. And Butterfly being an easy-going
young woman began to fit in with the travelling band of gypsies spiritual and
intellectual wanderers who populated the bus.
Then the same day Josh
met the Scribe on Russian Hill after he had brought Josh on board the bus
Butterfly Swirl who had been out pan-handling to get some provisions for the
bus saw him and that was that. Something happened between them from minute one
but it was not until later that night that the big switch happened after they
were all stoned. The Scribe who had taken a half-lover, half-fatherly interest
in Butterfly Swirl once he saw that she was not very intellectually curious beyond
her restlessness and her fear of a surfer girl’s fate (although very sexually
curious and inventive) saw the writing on the wall and “blessed” the union,
became head of that little trio family. Being just a few years older in youth
nation made him a logical little father. A couple of weeks later at a Grateful
Dead concert at the Fillmore Butterfly Swirl and the Prince of Love had their
first Kool-Aid acid test and through the dreams and colors became “one with the
universe.” The Scribe, satanic love preacher that night “married” them. Yeah,
like I said the times were like that, exactly like that.
[As mentioned above the
Scribe and Josh would be friends until the Scribe’s untimely death in the
mid-1970s. As for Butterfly Swirl by summer’s end she had had enough of roaming
and cavorting and returned to her golden-haired surfer boy still looking for
that perfect wave. Not everybody was built to go the distance even in the
Summer of Love. J.T. ]
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