He Gave It All Away-With Tom Paxton’s Song “She Is My Reason To Be” In Mind

He Gave It All Away-With Tom Paxton’s Song “She Is My Reason To Be” In Mind 

By Freeman Steel

He had it all. Jeffrey Davis had it all although until he lost it, until he gave it away, he did not realize that he had had it all. By the way for the curious who thing that they recognize the named party to this piece Jeffrey Davis is not the real name of our protagonist but like the Jeffrey Davis that you do think you know from his various screen exploits our Jeffrey Davis has his own similar reasons for using an alias here. Part of the reason is that he although not connected in any way with the screen, with movies or television is well-known in the literary field for his work and works of criticism. Part of the reason to be completely candid is that he was not sure that the statute of limitations might not have run out of various small crimes and legal evasions in his past so that publishing his real name might not bring to notice in the circles that he formerly ran in to haul his ass into court, especially the ex-wives he left high and dry. And part of the reason was that he just plain asked me as a long-time friend (and one time victim of his youthful cons) to not use his name as a test of my loyalty after all these years if I wanted the story. I did and so Jeffrey Davis it is.

But enough of subterfuges and diversions around identity confidentiality and on to the reason why our boy, my old corner boy from, well, I had better not say from when, what times or where since his beginnings are well known to part of the public and that would defeat his purpose in forcing me at virtual reality gunpoint to guard like a sacred temple his real name, had lost what he had, had given it all away. Jeffrey Davis’ wife, Lorraine Daley not her real name either since if you knew that name you, you the literary sort would figure out who that old corner boy from wherever he was from back in the day was and I would be out a “think piece” story about the pitfalls of statutory neglect (not a crime, a legal crime anyway, and not the reason that Jeffrey was worried about statute of limitation run outs), had recently left Jeffrey high and dry. Had left him for her own reasons mostly according to Jeffrey’s frail understandings in the matter to “find” herself whatever that might have meant to her.

Left in the middle of the night one night a few months back bag and baggage as they use to say around the old neighborhood when some married partner high-tailed it out of town with no explanation (in those unenlightened days either male leaving female or female leaving male but not one leaving one of the same gender just so you know we are talking about it has been a while back since that phrase had fresh currency). NO public explanation but it did not take much to figure out that some stay married forever woman had had enough of the abuse, physical and mental, from some bastard of a drunken husband (and father which is how we began to figure such abnormal leavings, abnormal for the old neighborhood), or that some husband had done the high-tailing with some barroom floozy. In any case Lorraine left and left no forwarding address-none. Had discontinued her previous cellphone and presumably gotten a new one although Jeffrey speculated that in the process of “finding” herself Lorraine may have decided to forgo the modern conveniences if she had wound up in some ashram as she had talked about, had threatened to do in previous versions of the downward slide of their relationship.                  

Despite the several month time lapse Jeff had not really reconciled himself as to what had caused him to forget that he had had it all with Lorraine, had given it all away. Then one night he called me on his cellphone, called me Sid Lawrence if I have not introduced myself before and looking over the previous paragraphs it appears that I have not although the important information, Jeff and my connection for the old neighborhood I did give you and wanted me to come over to his house in, well it is a big city so I can say it and he will proof this piece anyway, Los Angeles, over in the hills and canyons and sit with him while he tried to tell me how he had by his own freaking hand, his term, lost it all. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to hear what he had to say but in the interest of old corner boy friendship I agreed.            

We met at his well-appointed bungalow a few nights later and after a couple of stiff belts of well-preserved scotch he sat me down in one of his comfortable (and expensive) easy chairs and sat himself down on his long couch to speak about what ailed him about what was on his mind. Jeff whatever his literary skills, whatever line of pure, unmitigated bullshit he could throw at male or female, but mostly female and whatever the gods had granted him in the wisdom department was not a reflective man, did not dwell on the past, conveniently forgot the past (as in the big time con for several thousand hard-luck earned dollars he ran by me back in the days when for what he called “literary” purposes he ran tens of thousands of somebody else’s dollars up his snowman nose) and lived in the moment. I could tell though by his demeanor (and his willingness to sit me down after only two stiff scotches) that he had been thinking about some past stuff, about his character which was so explosive, so unstable at times that giving it all away in the past was coming back to haunt his dreams-or his desires.

When he began talking about Annie Dubois, his first real love, his, well, I had better not mentioned marriages and leave everything as affairs so the smart reader will not figure out who Jeff really is and we would have wasted good time and cyberspace creating a ruse, I knew he been in a sullen introspective mood. That sullen part no literary device on my part Jeff really did get sullen which showed up remarkably clearly on his face when he had to think through some ramification of some off-the-wall thing he had done. He just hid that trait these days better in public than when I first noticed his reaction back in sophomore year in high school. 

What I know is that he had not mentioned her name in front of me for years, hell, decades so I knew that sullen look was real. I should mentioned here before I tell you how Jeff related his feelings about how he had loved and lost that young woman, had given it all away, that I was half, maybe more, in love with her myself, had seen her first at a college mixer but she after looking me over on a few dates had decided that my roommate Jeff was more to her liking (they called them the now rightly taboo “smokers” in those days for some unknown to me reason but probably because since everybody was hopped up to find some companion the air was filled with anxious smoke, anxious Marlboro, Salem, Newport, Winston smoke). So I was not disappointed those many years when he did not mention her name. That night my heart raced at the mention of her name just like it had when I was some smitten schoolboy. Damn, Jeff.                        

I never, because I did not want to know and you can understand why now, knew the details of the break-up between Jeff and Annie. Painfully I listened as Jeff went through the litany. He and Annie stuck like glue together all through college. They essentially lived together for much of that time after freshman year in an apartment in Cambridge (not the real location but close-what I do for Jeff in the interest of a story) during the school year and at various seaside resorts in the summer. A classic 1960s romance with the sword of Damocles hanging over it. That sword –the raging crazy and unjust Vietnam War that we were all very aware of, we males anyway, since its’ seemingly endless travails put despite huge and growing protests and calls from even many governmental quarters to stop the damn thing placed us all at risk of being drafted. Eventually as the reader can probably figure out by now Jeff’s number came up with no further student exemption and no serious reason not to accept induction he allowed himself to be drafted. That “allowed” his term later for what had happened to him. (Although he and Annie were prominent anti-war rally attendees he did not consider himself under the rules for such status and under his Catholic upbringing a conscientious objector and under no circumstances was he going to jail or to Canada the other options that faced almost every young male then. I was 4-F, unfit for military duty, because of a crippling knee accident as a kid and the Army may overlook lots of disabilities but they want their charges to be able to march- and march great distances- as necessary)                

Once he got his draft notice Jeff began to panic. Started worrying about things like never having been married if he was killed in Vietnam. Not having any family to mourn him (he had been estranged from his parents for many years, had lived with his grandmother who just before senior year had passed away). Stuff like that that if the times were different he would have not given a fuck about, my term. So he and Annie tied the knot, got married. A bad move, a “war-time marriage” bad move that they could have seen coming if they had watched just a few old time movies like I did although even that might not have helped.    

He eventually like some horrible nightmare coming to pass as things developed against him was trained as an infantryman, the only thing in the late 1960s the Army cared about training since the attrition rate with one year deployments in Vietnam was eating up personnel at a fast clip.  And at just that time the only place in the great wide world that a U.S. infantryman was heading for was that hell hole Vietnam. So after his training and month’s leave Jeff had orders issued to him report to Fort Lewis in the state of Washington for transfer to Vietnam. He panicked, or maybe if not panicked then reverted back to his corner boy ways-or part of the corner boy ethos-lie like a bastard and hope things worked out    

After his leave was up he suddenly told Annie that he had through political connections had had his orders changed and he was to report to Fort Dix in New Jersey where he was to be discharged under some administrative regulation so that he could go work on the staff of a Congressman in Washington, D.C. Annie was elated (and relieved) by the news and ready to run to D.C. with him for their new future. The whole scenario seemed very reasonable since Jeff had worked like seven dervishes for the late Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign and even as he was telling me this over forty years later I could see where if he had told me the same story then I would have bought it hook, line and sinker.    

The problem though, and I would have been harassed like crazy for believing one word of the story back in corner boy days when he (and we) thought nothing of lying about everything from having sex with hot girls to how much we paid for a shirt (usually nothing since we stole stuff like that), it was all bullshit. He had just unilaterally taken himself AWOL for that whole time, the whole few months. The way the whole thing exploded was that the FBI had come to Annie’s parents’ house (he had used their address with their permission on his Army information file) looking for him, AWOL him. He did turn himself in and faced the music. That however was the last straw for Annie and her parents. Especially Annie since as it turned out he had done a number of unsavory or illegal things unknown then to me during their courtship. She left him to go back to her parents’ home. Eventually Annie got a civil divorce and as a Catholic member of a church who at the time, maybe now too, had very strict rules about remarriage after a divorce finally got a church annulment from Jeff. As for Jeff he on his return to the Army did the honorable thing and refused to go to Vietnam and wound up in the stockade for his efforts. But the details of that story are for his next serious giving it all away and besides this is about his first serious love life, his giving it all away when the deal went down. Typical Jeff though a heel one day a hero the next.          

 As Jeff started to explain why he had never forgotten about Annie I urged him to change the subject and something in my tone told him that I meant it, meant that I too had not forgotten Annie and what she had meant to me back then. So he went on about his thunder-struck whirlwind relationship with Josie, Josie Stein, a woman who I had never met because I had stayed on the West Coast while Jeff after a wild man run with me and a few others from the old neighborhood at various times there returned to the East. Josie would be the first, and most serious, of a string of young Jewish women that would checkerboard through his later relationships. Fine women who he never fully understood either. This meeting up with Josie had come about because like half of the things that Jeff did in his life he was on a vengeance roll to obliterate all the stupid things he had done by letting himself be inducted in the Army.

As I mentioned before after blowing up the world, the Annie world, with his fears Jeff when he went back into the Army made up his mind not to go to Vietnam, not to be complicit. He paid the price with two special court-martials for disobeying orders and did altogether something over a year in an Army stockade (partly broken up by what amounted to house arrest in between times). He wound up though getting out of the Army with an honorable discharge to boot as a conscientious objector through a writ of habeas corpus which his civilian lawyer had managed to convince a federal court judge was due him. As part of his struggle, his righteous struggle okay, a number of anti-war activists and Quaker-types came to his defense, publicized what he was doing and held vigils and other events in and around the Army base where he was being held. This was a time when some elements of the anti-war movement began, after the war was dragging out to what seemed like eternity, to pay attention to the soldiers, the “grunts” who were carrying out the war on the ground. So Jeff became for a while before he and I left for California and some mad but harmless dope-enhanced adventures up and down the Pacific Coast Highway something of a poster child for the local anti-war G.I. resistance. Some of that reputation would stick for a while as the war finally wound down.                

Josie had been born in Manhattan but had gone in order to get away from the city, her parents, her Jewish roots you name the reason to the University of Wisconsin which the way Jeff told it was a magnet for New York City and Long Island Jewish kids looking to break out back then, maybe now too. While there she had become radicalized, had become somewhat prominent in the campus anti-war, anti-imperialist and the beginnings of the women’s liberation movement. After graduating from Wisconsin she had decided to go to graduate school in Boston (at BU for the School of Social Work). While in Boston she again took up her political causes in the red-hot milieu there. Jeff had met her a couple of months after he had returned East at an anti-war conference, no, I have that wrong, at a meeting to discuss having another in the long line of anti-war conferences. This one to take place in a rural conference center which had been converted from being a farmhouse about fifty miles from Boston and had donated by some movement “angels” for such purposes. Such things happened with some frequency then.

When Jeff was introduced to speak about his G.I resistance experiences he spied Josie in the audience. During a break he, she, maybe both at the same time Jeff had forgotten that detail took dead aim at each other (that part he remembered) although nothing occurred that night. Their big moment came when both had showed up at the rural site for the conference and they were almost inseparable for the rest of the weekend. So started the torrid off and on again five year love affair between Jeff and Josie. According to Jeff they had their ups and downs, mostly toward the end downs over Josie’s increasingly incessant desire to settle down, to have a family, to be “at peace” with herself as the turbulent ‘60s shuttered down around them. Jeff in an uncharacteristic denial of some kind of realty thought that the whole experiment would go on forever and he could ride that wave into old age.

Funny about that, funny that he would still remember that he had felt that way those many years ago since I remember that we had both distinctly understood that after May Day, 1971 when we foolhardily thought we could close down the U.S. government if they would not close down the war and had been militarily defeated, had taken tens of thousands of arrests, we had reached an ebb tide of the movement, had passed the high water mark.               

That however was not what laid the relationship between Jeff and Josie low but yet another of the contradictions of the angel-devil Jeffrey Davis. Jeff, and I could see where this came from since I had thoughts along those lines a little myself, had a hard-edged chip on his shoulder, thought that because he (and I) had come up “from hunger,”  from utter poverty, from the old projects ethos that the world owed him a living, or something like that. I got over it by high school, maybe a little later but Jeff took much longer, maybe still hasn’t gotten over it even now but if you want to understand why he periodically would give it all away you have to know that hard sad fact. The particulars this time were that he had gotten seriously into dope, first speed and mescaline and later as it became more popular and more available cocaine. Now we all did our fair share of dope during the 1960s, usually marijuana and other light-headed drugs like hashish and peyote buttons. This cocaine thing though was something else, had Jeff by the balls. Had laid him low. This is where all his past kind of came up and bit him. He couldn’t or wouldn’t stop. Kept it from Josie mostly although at the end she asked him point blank if he was on heroin or something. Of course a young guy with no dough, or not much, not working much with a habit that called out to him needed dough. So he ran though everybody, everybody including leaving me high and dry out on the Coast broke as well, who he knew for dough using every lame excuse in the book to get the dough-and of course would pay it back just as soon as he could.

He didn’t hit Josie until the end, or near the end. That was when he was seeing some hopped-up Judy on the side who kept him company in his wanting habits. Once he started asking Josie for money for this and that after a while she started getting wise, found out about the Judy from some friend and that was that. She broke off with him in a minute once she knew the score (prodded he said by her parents who were not happy that she was serious about a non-Jewish guy). She got an unlisted number, moved from their sometimes shared apartment which she paid for, or rather her parents paid for. The end. Gave it all away for a razor, mirror and a rolled up dollar line.                     

Which brings us back to Lorraine and Jeff’s newly discovered troubled mind and why he gave it all away once again when she left to find herself.  Or whatever had driven her away from him. After a number of years out in the West Coast trying to “find” myself I finally headed back to the East, back to Boston via Riverdale after my last stormy marriage that ended not well. Not well enough that despite being broken as a smashed soda bottle, splintered if you like that better, I desperately hitchhiked across the country to get away from that last horrible scene (which was partly, a big partly, due to my own “from hunger” thinking that the world owed me a living from getting deeply in debt to the gambling gods). But enough of that this is Jeff’s story and my travails can wait another day. I just wanted to point that out since this return to the East meant that I was back in touch after several year’s absence with Jeff which was deep in the throes of his stormy relationship with Lorraine. So unlike Josie whom I had to take Jeff’s word on I knew Lorraine although unlike Annie of blessed memory I had no half in love thoughts about her.        

Jeff quickly went through how he had met Lorraine since I knew most of the details of the story. He had been half in and half out of a bunch of relationships which had not worked out for several Jeff reasons when one night he happened to be in a bar in Harvard Square, a country bar if you can believe that, when there had been outlaw country music minute around the East after people tired once again of the way rock was heading. That “if you can believe that” reflecting the hard fact that Jeff, whose father hailed from the South, having been inundated with that stuff around the house hated that music with a passion growing up. One night by accident he had heard the late Townes Van Zandt at a local club and something in his mournful lyrics and presence “spoke” to Jeff. So for a while he was hopped up on the outlaws, took in the scene. You know it had to be some kind of fad if in high Brahmin Harvard Square a couple of country music bars had sprung up and so he headed to one of them, Jackie Speed’s, it is no longer there, to hear some local country band which was making some noise about breaking out and heading to the bright lights of Nashville and stardom.  He sat at the bar as was his habit when he was “single” in order to survey the scene and maybe an hour in and a couple of Anchor Steam beers put away, a beer we had both developed a habit for in Frisco town, he spied Lorraine all in white sitting at a far corner table with a couple of girlfriends. When one of those girls came pass the bar he mentioned to her that he thought her friend in white was cute, pretty, something like that and to tell her his message. And she was. A delicate flower, thin, longest black hair and a nice smile that he could see even across the room. His type no question. That girlfriend not knowing what else to say told him to go over and tell her himself. For some reason Jeff usually only a little shy about meeting a young women for the first time definitely did not like to approach a table full of women to make his play. His play was one on one, in a barroom scene maybe sitting on a stool at the bar. While they took peep-a-boo meaningful glances at each other nothing happened that night.                 

A few weeks later Jeff was sitting at that same bar one night getting ready to listen to what somebody had told him previously was the “next best thing” band coming along the pipeline to break-out Nashville this young woman who he had not recognized came and sat down at the stool next to his and ordered a drink, an exotic one if he remembered correctly. She was thin, pretty, had longish black hair and a nice smile. When it came time for her to order another one Jeff offered to buy her a drink. She accepted and that kind of broke the ice as they found that they had several interests in common around art, literature and folk music which was in a serious hiatus then and the reason that she, Lorraine, was taking in the insurgent country scene that was beginning to take root around town. She had been brought up in the country, on a farm in upstate New York so she had heard country music, a different old-timey Grand Old Opry kind of music, and also hated it growing up. Toward the end of evening as they were chatting like two jaybirds Lorraine asked Jeff if had ever seen her before. He said no he did not think so. Lorraine then reminded him of the night several weeks before when they had done their peek-a-boos. She also told him that she had looked for him a couple of times later when she had been at the bar. Funny Jeff said he had done the same. Fate and an exchange of telephones numbers got them on the start of their torrid romance.       

For a while, a fairly long while by Jeff’s standards things went along pretty well. They had plenty in common not only in the like to do things department but a commonality in the ways they grew up, the hard family lives they had faced as kids. Especially around holidays when under normal circumstances there was to be a shared joy they shared a “get through the day” kinship. Like a lot of Jeff things though known to me or not something in his inner life, something in his vacant soul, his term, would not leave him alone. Would not let him break from his youthful defensiveness inherited from years of mother harassment and ill-will when dealing with Lorraine. In the end, or rather toward the end, the last few years anyway for a whole assortment of reasons from health to intimations of immortality to use the phrase from the poet’s brain he shut down, became unresponsive to Lorraine’s needs. They lived together but were in his words two ships passing in the night (and hers as well as they tried to figure out what had gone wrong before she had had to flee for her own sanity). Both tried to do the right thing, sought various forms of help but in the end she had to flee, had to find herself and what she wanted to be in this wicked old world. Jeff didn’t like the idea, actually hated it but he grudgingly respected her for her bravery in striking out on her own. Had to admit that rather than his lying, cheating, stealing destruction of his companionships he could be accused of statutory neglect-a more serious social crime, much more serious.       

One night many weeks later after I had written up this piece from the notes I had taken over the course of time we were sitting in Jimmy’s Grille, symbolically enough only a couple of blocks from where Jeff and Lorraine had met at the now defunct Jackie Speed’s, when he was feeling kind of melancholy since her birthday was approaching, something they both made a big deal over he mentioned a song he had heard recently. A song by the old-time folksinger Tom Paxton whom he had liked to hear in the old folk minute days and whom the local college folk station was playing to honor his birthday (forget his age), She Is My Reason To Be. Yeah, too late Jeff figured that hard truth out. But maybe he should have also checked out Bob Dylan’s I Threw It All Away because once again he had thrown it all away.