From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- From The “Brothers Under the Bridge” Series- Jeanbon Leclerc’s Thunder Road

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Bruce Springsteen performing his classic Thunder Road.

Thunder Road Lyrics

Artist: Bruce Springsteen
Album: Born To Run

The screen door slams, Mary's dress waves
Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays
Roy Orbison singing for the lonely
Hey, that's me and I want you only
Don't turn me home again, I just can't face myself alone again
Don't run back inside, darling, you know just what I'm here for
So you're scared and you're thinking that maybe we ain't that young anymore
Show a little faith, there's magic in the night
You ain't a beauty but, hey, you're alright
Oh, and that's alright with me

You can hide 'neath your covers and study your pain
Make crosses from your lovers, throw roses in the rain
Waste your summer praying in vain
For a savior to rise from these streets
Well now, I ain't no hero, that's understood
All the redemption I can offer, girl, is beneath this dirty hood
With a chance to make it good somehow
Hey, what else can we do now?
Except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair
Well, the night's busting open, these two lanes will take us anywhere
We got one last chance to make it real
To trade in these wings on some wheels
Climb in back, heaven's waiting on down the tracks

Oh oh, come take my hand
We're riding out tonight to case the promised land
Oh oh oh oh, Thunder Road
Oh, Thunder Road, oh, Thunder Road
Lying out there like a killer in the sun
Hey, I know it's late, we can make it if we run
Oh oh oh oh, Thunder Road
Sit tight, take hold, Thunder Road

Well, I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk
And my car's out back if you're ready to take that long walk
From your front porch to my front seat
The door's open but the ride ain't free
And I know you're lonely for words that I ain't spoken
But tonight we'll be free, all the promises'll be broken

There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away
They haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets
They scream your name at night in the street
Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet
And in the lonely cool before dawn
You hear their engines rolling on
But when you get to the porch, they're gone on the wind
So Mary, climb in
It's a town full of losers, I'm pulling out of here to win
*************
Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:

As I mentioned in an earlier entry in this series, courtesy of my old yellow brick road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler, Peter Paul Markin, who seems to think I still have a few things to say about this wicked old world, recently, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod I came across a song that stopped me in my tracks, Brothers Under The Bridge. I had not listened to or thought about that song for a long time but it brought back many memories from the late 1970s when I did a series of articles for the now defunct East Bay Eye (California, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam veterans who, for one reason or another, could not come to grips with “going back to the real world” and took, like those a Great Depression generation or two before them, to the “jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramps camps located along the abandoned railroad sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of California, mainly down in Los Angeles, and created their own “society.”

Not every guy I interviewed, came across, swapped lies with, or just snatched some midnight phrase out of the air from was from hunger. Most were, yes, in one way or another but some, and the one I am recalling in this 1979 sketch had an off-beat story that brought him down to the ravines. But see he, Jeanbon Leclerc (the bon part after Jean is organic for those of us who trace some French-Canadian [ F-C] Downeast Maine heritage, mine via my mother Delores, nee LeBlanc), out of the lowland white clay back water potato road Calais night (north of my hometown Olde Saco, way north and don’t pronounce it Calay, not if you if you don’t want an argument) , did not want to talk about ‘Nam, about his war- weary troubles in the “real world” or about how he got himself hoboed up a continent away. No he wanted to talk about the time before Vietnam, 1966 time, the time when he was the max daddy of the Calais (Callus, and he drawled it out just that way) night down on Thunder Road (my term) and about how he “won” Diana Dubois away from all the Podunk corner boys. The story that accompanies the song to this little piece, Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road, is written under that same sign.

I should note again since these sketches are done on an ad hoc basis, that the format of the story here follows those of the “Brothers Under The Bridge” series previously posted .The editor of the East Bay Eye, Owen Anderson, gave me that long ago assignment after I had done a smaller series for the paper on the treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam veterans by the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and in the course of that series had found out about this band of brothers roaming the countryside trying to do the best they could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one piece. My qualifications for the assignment other than empathy, since I had not been in the military during the Vietnam War period, were based simply on the fact that back East I had been involved, along with several other radicals, in running an anti-war GI coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and down near Fort Dix in New Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of my 1960s generation who had clued me in on the psychic cost of the war so I had a running start.

After making connections with some Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys down in L.A. who knew where to point me I was on my way. I gathered many stories, published some of them in the Eye, and put the rest in my helter-skelter files. A while back, after having no success in retrieving the old Eye archives, I went up into my attic and rummaged through what was left of those early files. I could find no newsprint articles that I had written but I did find a batch of notes, specifically notes from stories that I didn’t file because the Eye went under before I could round them into shape.

The ground rules of those long ago stories was that I would basically let the guy I was talking to give his spiel, spill what he wanted the world to heard, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I, like with the others in this series, have reconstructed this story here as best I can although at this far remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said. This is Jeanbon Leclerc’s short, breathless story, the story of a soldier born under the sign of that blasted Thunder Road:

Hell, I don’t know when I first started fooling around with cars, putting parts together to make some heap that would run for a while and then daddy would sell it, or trade it for whiskey and I would have to put another one together. That happened five, six times anyway. I do know that I was running the back roads in some kind of car when I was maybe twelve or thirteen. And no I didn’t have a license, hell, which needed a license in the back country.

I know for sure though that I was a lot more interested in cars than girls for a long time until I got my ’64 green Mustang put together and I had to be interested in girls, or I couldn’t drive the streets of Calais. That’s way up in Maine right along the Canadian border and I am F-C and Mainaic proud too or was, before ‘Nam. But I already told you I don’t want to talk about that, that ‘Nam part. I want to talk, and you said I could talk about anything I wanted to, about when I was the king of the road, back roads anyway, and they called me; she called me her Rock and Roll Johnnie. And she, the she I am talking about was Diana Dubois, the girl who made me interested in girls more than cars, almost.

It really doesn’t take much these days, these old time memory L.A. smogged in days, to have some snippet come swirling out of the air, some caught phrase in a passing conversation, some half-glanced word mentioned on some media outlet, some fragrance smelled from long ago soaps, perfumes, downy billows, to get me into that frame of mind to speak of old time Calais and Diana now that she is long gone and I am stuck here under this f-----g ravine. That’s what happened to me when you mentioned about the “chicken runs” you used to go on with your corner boy down at Olde Saco Beach on Saturday nights. Yah, we had them too up in Calais and we hung out, when not all-out fixing up our cars, in front of Jake’s Pool Hall over on East Main Street. [Really Route 1, the end of U.S. Route 1-JLB.] That was the Calais of the 1960s dying textile mills, of various working- class rites of passage, of teenage this and that, and most of all of the French-Canadian ethos, pathos, and bathos that permeated the town. And of course, of F-C loves, lost and found.

That stuff brought to mind my mad passion for fast cars, fast Mustangs a specialty, and my fate. Strange to think of now since I haven’t even owned a car of any kind of a couple of years. What it really brought to mind though was about, Diana Dubois, who had been a class mate of mine at Calais High School (I never finished so don’t ask me my graduation year, it did not happen) who one Jeanbon Leclerc “stole” with his fast cars, and fast hands in 1966 (exact date and month unknown, Christ what day is it today? I have trouble enough with that.).

I had better start at the beginning otherwise you will accuse me of puffing stuff up, or something like that. Yes, she had to be a dizzy blonde (don’t make anything out of that I just had, and have, when I am sober enough to get cleaned up and have a yearning for women have a preference for non-dizzy brunettes as a rule) and yes, she looked good in an early 1960s cashmere high school sweater. And yes, she had nice legs and such. But mostly she had six gallons of personality and, well, a smiling interest in me, or rather what I had to ride in those high school days. And what I had to say. See I was what they called an alienated youth , a beatnik they called me in Podunk Calais just because I tried to be the spitting image of Jean Dean with maybe a The Wild Ones Marlon Brando thrown in.

And what I had to say in those days was almost every arcane fact I could find out about the “beats.” You know on the road Jack Kerouac, om-ing Allen Ginsburg, doped-up drugstore cowboy William S. Burroughs and most of all, mad monk, mad cosmic traveler Neal Cassady. [The real life model for Dean Moriarty in that on the road Kerouac search for the great American night-JLB]. But see that is all I cared about, except cars, so I never got hip to school or stuff like that until it was too late, until they called my number.

Yes, I know , I know now, in 1966 these guys, these beats, were “old news” in places like Greenwich Village and Harvard Square but in Podunk Maine talking about such things was “cool.” Especially if accompanied by the “look,” black chinos, work boots, flannel shirts, and mandatory midnight sunglasses worn 24/7/365. And don’t forget the French-Canadian connection, Jeanbon Kerouac was an F-C as were half the residents of that old working class mill town just like in your Olde Saco (we were just a northern, way northern, Kerouac hometown Lowell). More importantly so was Diana.

And that is exactly where the problem, my problem, began and ended, the midnight crying hour began and ended. See Diana was crazy for beat stuff but she wanted a guy, and an F-C guy, with a little more speed. Literally. She was looking, and looking hard, and I know this because she told me so straight out, for a guy with big wheels, maybe a 1964 Mustang (green, of course) like mine so she could be sitting high and wide on the front seat but with some dough, and some prospects. Not white picket fence, spotted dog, three kids, two boys and a girl, prospects but dough to take her places and see things. And she found him, Rene Genet, a little older, out of school, working at the Downeast Valley Textile Mill (like about a quarter of the town’s population in those long gone good-paying mill jobs days) and with some dough to spent . But I am getting slightly ahead of my story.

Diana and I went on a few dates, afternoon dates, after school, mainly down to Jimmy Jack’s Homemade Diner (the one on Main Street, not the one on East Main that is strictly for tourists and “summer guests”) to listen to some jazz, rock or other be-bop stuff on the big old jukebox that drew every half-hip kid in town. But mainly we talked, talked late on the telephone, about this and that, mainly dreams, and mainly abstract stuff. I was in seventh heaven and I thought she was too. What I didn’t know, and never thought to know (or really wanted to know thinking back) was that Diana was working her way out of my front seat into beau Rene’s front seat. Want to know, or not, one night, one Thursday night, when I rang her up about eleven o’clock (her sole provider mother worked the second shift at the mill so I could call then) her younger sister answered the phone. Answered that her sister, Diana, was out and about with Rene Genet and that she would not be taking any more midnight calls from me. Period.

After our unceremonious “break-up” I would see Diana around school and we would “nod” heads but that was about it. Then just before school got out that summer I heard that Diana and Rene were having some troubles. I decided to make my move and to challenge Rene to a “chicken run’ down Route 1 early one morning going south as fast and furious as we could. Winning prize: Diana Dubois. Rene was a little unsure about taking the bet because he knew, knew in his heart if he had a heart, he couldn’t beat me not with those stakes. Diana? Diana was sky high like any princess would be when two modern knights were ready to do battle to win her favors. One June Saturday night I left Rene Genet in a puddle of water in some side ditch about twenty miles south of Calais. Diana, cool as a cucumber, and very aware of the spoils of war rules stepped right into my waiting Mustang like we had never parted. Moreover that night, or really that morning, after she had been totally turned on by the joust, the thought of the joust, and everything else she was crazy, crazy like I had never seen her before, in bed. And, hell, I guess I was too.

Diana and I got married a short time after her graduation and set up household in Ellsworth (Maine) where I got a good paying job in a paper mill. Naturally, 1960s F-C naturally, a child came along, and that complicated things, complicated things for me.

See I was really a “homer,” a Calais guy to the bone and while I was in love with Diana I knew that with the baby (and presumably more babies in Gallic Roman Catholic F-C speak knowledge ) I wasn’t going to be able to go back to dying mill town Calais any time soon.

That meant I wasn’t going to be the king hell king (my term –JLB) of the northern Maine back roads. And that last sentiment was important to understanding what happened later. It wasn’t, by the way, just Calais lonesomeness that distracted me but that I had actually lost the title as king hell king of the back roads “chicken runs” to one Rene Genet by default. That was a title I had held since I first learned to drive and “soup up” any old automobile (a burned-out ’57 Chevy was my first reclamation project). Nobody around northern Maine challenged , or even thought of challenging me and my 1964 green Mustang now named “Diana” after I put Rene in that ditch. Another distraction was a slight flirtation with Laura Bleu, Diana’s second cousin back in Calais before we moved to Ellsworth. Hell I was a good looking guy then, and like I said I had that fast car and fast hands so I would never lack for “flirtations” for the always plentiful girls who wanted to sit in that green Mustang front seat of mine.

But still and all I was always thinking about Calais, figuring ways to get to Calais (to see, uh, Laura?), or yakking about it to one and all in Ellsworth. And when I was in high dudgeon (my term JLB) I would take it out on Diana. Not physically, not for anything, but I would pout, I would spend endless hours working on the “Diana,” and I would be gone for hours. With no explanation (but also with no whiskey breathe or woman’s fragrance on my clothes either). I would head over to Cadillac Mountain in the Arcadia National Park the other side of Bar Harbor wind out on the deserted curves and sit, just sit, and stare out at the homeland sea. I know that sea stare-out, I know it from my father, I might have invented it, at least for our generation up there, so I know that I was troubled in mind, no question.

Time passed this way, a few months, a year. Rumors though started to swirl around that Jimmy Jack’s’ son, Pierre, (Jimmy Jack was the owner of two teenage hang-out diners, one complete with an incredible jukebox where I had taken Diana a few times) had a super-souped up Chevy that would “blow” my Mustang away. Way down in Ellsworth I heard those rumors. Then one night, one kind of foggy October night, a night not uncommon in Maine almost any part of the year, I found myself, and not by accident, in Calais. And not just in any spot in Calais but down at the corner of Main and East Main where every chicken run started ,where every head-to-head car duel started since back before memory, ready, willing and able to take on one Pierre Jacques (Jimmy Jack’s real last name) in the “chicken run to end all chicken runs.”

I won’t bore you with the details of the run; you have probably if you have seen that film that came out a few years ago, American Graffiti, or Rebel Without A Cause, or about twelve other teen alienation /angst films seen the scenes. Fast souped-up cars. Pierre’s “Lonnie Jean” against my “Laura.” They are off. And the winner is… Pierre. End of story. No. Diana, when she found out what I had done (and my thing with Laura), left me. Left for parts unknown with the baby one night, one night when I was up in Calais with Laura. End of story.

[End of story? No. One more little detail needs to be brought up although the details around it are sketchy. Like how Jeanbon drifted back to Calais after our talk in L.A., how he got the old heap running and what was on his mind that fateful night. Was he thinking of some lost Diana? Laura? On October 14, 1980 (really the early morning of the 15th according to the police report) one Jeanbon Leclerc was D.O.A. at Bangor General Hospital after being pried out of a rusted out green 1964 Mustang that had still been in great running order and that had been clocked doing one hundred and twenty miles an hour on Route One by the police in pursuit. The car had spun out of control and crashed about one hundred yard inside of the Calais border. JLB]

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin-From The "Brothers Under The Bridge" Series-The Snow Is Falling

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Rolling Stones performing Sister Morphine.

Rolling Stones Sister Morphine Lyrics

Songwriters: JAGGER, MICK / RICHARDS, KEITH / FAITHFULL, MARIEANNE
(m. jagger/k. richards/m. faithfull)

Here I lie in my hospital bed
Tell me, sister morphine, when are you coming round again?
Oh, I don't think I can wait that long
Oh, you see that I’m not that strong

The scream of the ambulance is sounding in my ears
Tell me, sister morphine, how long have I been lying here?
What am I doing in this place?
Why does the doctor have no face?

Oh, I can't crawl across the floor
Ah, can't you see, sister morphine, I’m trying to score

Well it just goes to show
Things are not what they seem
Please, sister morphine, turn my nightmares into dreams
Oh, can't you see I’m fading fast?
And that this shot will be my last

Sweet cousin cocaine, lay your cool cool hand on my head
Ah, come on, sister morphine, you better make up my bed
Cause you know and I know in the morning I'll be dead
Yeah, and you can sit around, yeah and you can watch all the
Clean white sheets stained red.

Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:

As I mentioned in an earlier entry in this space, courtesy of my old yellow brick road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler, Peter Paul Markin, who seems to think I still have a few things to say about this wicked old world, recently, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod I came across a song that stopped me in my tracks, Brothers Under The Bridge. I had not listened to or thought about that song for a long time but it brought back many memories from the late 1970s when I did a series of articles for the now defunct East Bay Eye (California, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam veterans who, for one reason or another, could not come to grips with “going back to the real world” and took, like those a great depression generation or two before them, to the “jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramps camps located along the abandoned railroad sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of California, mainly down in Los Angeles, and created their own “society.”

Not every guy I interviewed, came across, swapped lies with, or just snatched some midnight phrase out of the air from was from hunger, most were, yes, in one way or another but some, and the one I am recalling in this sketch had a nuanced story that brought him down to the ravines. The story that accompanies the song to this little piece, Bob Dylan’s Masters of War, is written under that same sign as the earlier pieces.

I should note again since these sketches are done on an ad hoc basis, that the genesis of this story follows that of the “Brothers Under The Bridge” previously posted (and now is developing into a series).The editor of the East Bay Eye, Owen Anderson, gave me that long ago assignment after I had done a smaller series for the paper on the treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam veterans by the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and in the course of that series had found out about this band of brothers roaming the countryside trying to do the best they could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one piece. My qualifications for the assignment other than empathy, since I had not been in the military during the Vietnam War period, were based simply on the fact that back East I had been involved, along with several other radicals, in running an anti-war GI coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and down near Fort Dix in New Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of my 1960s generation who had clued me on the psychic cost of the war so I had a running start.

After making connections with some Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys down in L.A. who knew where to point me I was on my way. I gathered many stories, published some of them in the Eye, and put the rest in my helter-skelter files. A couple of weeks ago, after having no success in retrieving the old Eye archives, I went up into my attic and rummaged through what was left of those early files. I could find no newsprint articles that I had written but I did find a batch of notes, specifically notes from stories that I didn’t file because the Eye went under before I could round them into shape.

The format of those long ago stories was that I would basically let the guy I was talking to give his spiel, spill what he wanted the world to heard, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I have reconstructed this story here as best I can although at this far remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said. This is Peter Paul Markin’s short, poignant story, a soldier trying to turn his nightmares into dreams:
***********
Snow was falling; at least it was falling snow in his head. A childhood scene of cold New England winter heavy flakes swirling to the ground, some evaporating on contact others accumulating under the relentless driving swirls creating some classic Christmas card, some Currier& Ives sleigh in the snow scene. All of this fevered brain seen from safe inside a frosted front window, child’s nose pressed against the pane creating his own flakes in the always, always under-heated “projects” apartment where he grew up. That ramshackle old place of brothers gone to foreign parts, foreign then meaning a few miles away to schools, of parents frittering away their lives just keeping things together in their little hovel.

But it was the outside snow, or the fever-breaking thought of it just then, that kept him from going over the edge. To the place where he had been before, and a couple of times had almost not made it back. The falling off the edge right then being holed up, brain fevered, against a hot “bracero” tio taco room barely cooler than the one hundred plus degree outside in sunny summer El Paso on the Estados Unidos side of the Tex-Mex border. The falling off the edge part being holed up, as well, waiting for Dora to come back with the goods from down sunny Mexico way, down Sonora way. The falling off the edge being that he needed “something for his head” bad, bad as it had been for a while. And where the hell was Dora. It had been three days.

How he, let’s call him Peter Paul Markin to keep everybody on board, but his name was legion in those days along the Tex-Mex border and not always on the Tex side either. After he, Peter Paul, told his story about how he came to be in a sweat box tio taco bracero rooming house in dusty Mex-town in sunny El Paso in the year of our lord 1978 legion was just about right, I had heard it all before, just the particular circumstances changed with the stories, and even that not by much. His was a bad low- note tale. But he wanted to tell it, tell it all, just in case he didn’t “make it ”out of Mex-town alive. And he wanted to talk, sweat pouring off of him that no handkerchief could absorb fast enough from drinking that rotgut tequila (he never knew there were, like whiskey and scotch, gradations of tequila but when he got to Mex-town and was waiting, snowless waiting, he learned quickly). I was there when it all got balled up for him and he had to get out of that room for a while, have another drink, and get away from thinking about that snow and childhood dreams. Hell, he wanted a father-confessor or something like that although god and I were not on speaking terms. If you want to listen here it is, sweat, a couple of shakes, some frayed nerves, and all.
*********
He had been nicked up, nicked up a little, in ‘Nam, ‘Nam around 1970, 1971 he wasn’t sure exactly on dates except that he was nicked up, and had the purple heart to show for it. It wasn’t a life or death nick, or it didn’t start out that way any way. Medevac got him (an a couple of buddies) out but on the helicopter to keep him from screaming his brains out the medic gave him a hit of morphine (he kept calling it sister morphine, every other word calling it sister morphine, saying look it up on some Rolling Stones rock lyrics like he had) maybe a couple before he got to the base hospital at Pleiku. Maybe a couple more hits there before they took the fragment out, maybe a couple more later when he was feeling some after effects.

A few weeks later, after some hospital time light duty, he went back on the line, not in bad shape, not enough for that precious discharge that most guys in those days were itching for as their ticket home to the “real world” except every once in a while he would get a pain for a couple of hours. He would go on morning sick call when it stayed for too long , they gave him some prescription stuff (some kind of zombie tranquilizer from the way he phonetically described the name of the drug used and after I looked it later). No go. The occasional pain persisted. He asked, innocently enough, for some morphine but they, the doctors on his case, looked at him like he was crazy. Hey that stuff is strictly for guys coming in off the line wounded, badly wounded. Bad stuff to mess around with.

Bad stuff was right. But this was Vietnam, golden triangle mystery dreams Vietnam, this was a busted up 1970s American army that had no will to fight, fight for anything except survival, buddies, and home, otherwise practically each guy for himself, and his own woes. He made a connection, a G.I. connection (he got foggy on that, on the network, conveniently foggy), an easily done deal, who made a connection with an ARVN (South Vietnamese Army soldier) and he got his “fix.” And got what he needed for the rest for his tour, cheap and no problem.

Toward the end of 1971 he was headed back stateside. He got nervous, no connections with that kind of stuff (hell, he was strictly a whiskey and beer chaser guy, drinking rotgut mainly except when he was in the chips, he from maybe a joint or two to be “hip,” back in the “real world”), and no way of making any stateside connection. Or so he thought then. After the discharge from the Army process was over he went straight to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Los Angeles (he was from North Adamsville in Massachusetts but had meet a girl, a Mexican girl, a girl from Sonora, on the Cambridge Common, back shortly before he was drafted whom he had kept in touch with and who was coming up from Sonora to meet him there). He told one of the medical staff there his story and he was put (after plenty of snafus that he didn’t want to talk about because it only got him mad) in a “de-tox” unit. [Later in checking the details of Peter Paul’s story I found out that he omitted some stuff and had been shaky, very shaky on the timeline of events but basically he story checked out.] He dried out. And for a few years he was fine.

That fine included going back to school nights at UCLA, getting married to that Mexican girl, Dora Del Rios, and making small things happen in the world, his small world. Then about 1976 the pains started coming back. He knew right away the cause, and also knew that he was not going to get relief from what the V.A. (or civilians) was going to give him, those tranquilizer/pain-killer things that were worthless for his pains. He wasn’t going to live with the pain though. No way.

Here he backed up a little to tell about how he had met Dora. When he announced that intention I said it better be quick, and relevant. It was. See Dora, while a student, an exchange student for the summer at Harvard, exchanged from Sonora University down in Mexico, was on Cambridge Common the day he met her selling weed, righteous weed, for coffee and cakes (his expression for walking around money). That is how they met, strangely enough. What he didn’t know, and she didn’t tell him then, was that she had “muled” two kilos of weed on the trip up from Sonora for her brother. Her brother then being some “street” dealer looking to make the move up in that world. Those facts are germane because this Dora connection with her brother was what got him back on Jump Street (his name for “high, sister morphine high”. Dora begged him not to make her go to her brother, but after a few days of on the floor pain she relented. She made the brother connection, no problem.

At first, like in ‘Nam it was just a little something to take the pain away. Something to get him through the work day (he was a whiz at fixing computers up with software and stuff like that, tech stuff then just getting off the ground) and home to Dora and collapse. He then increased the dosage as a couple of hits weren’t enough. As he said you know the rest of the story, hooked bad, real bad. He couldn’t work (or wouldn’t, he got vague on this when he went through the timeline of his dosage increases), Dora was laid off from her job (and had to increasingly spend her time “feeding” him). She also had some vague immigration problems that he was also vague in detailing.

Then the brother “came through,” came through in two ways. One he offered to give the morphine “free.” [Of such small kindnesses civilizations decline, decline big time.] Two the brother, Diego, wanted he/she/ they to do a little “muling” of snow, you know, cocaine (cousin cocaine he, Peter Paul, called it copycatting from the Stones lyrics) in return for his largesse. At first they balked, no way, no way in hell, but a week, maybe ten days, without sister, without another connection, and without dough, walking around dough, and they took the ride. That was few years ago and that explains why one Peter Paul Markin, shaky like a leaf, gray, sweating tequila sweat was sitting in a stinking tio taco room in El Paso waiting for Dora to come back from down Sonora way to make him “well.”

After he told his story, leaving all gray and shaky still, tequila bottle in hand, he went back to his room. A few hours later, no sign of Dora, somebody heard a persistent low moan from room, and then no sound. [Dora, I found out later, had been held up in Sonora by the Federales who were investigating the murder of her brother by a split-off rival drug gang over some mal deal) A little later that somebody who heard moans and then no sounds, knocked on his door, found it unlocked, entered and found him on the floor face down, face down. Had he been thinking of falling snow?

From The Brothers Under The Bridge Series-Jamal Pratt’s Personal Peace Treaty

From The Brothers Under The Bridge Series-Jamal Pratt’s Personal Peace Treaty

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin:

In the first installment of this series of sketches space provided courtesy of my old 1960s yellow brick road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler, Peter Paul Markin, I mentioned, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod, that I had come across a song that stopped me in my tracks, Brothers Under The Bridge. I had not listened to or thought about that song for a long time but it brought back many memories from the late 1970s when I did a series of articles for the now defunct East Bay Eye (Frisco town, California East Bay, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam veterans who, for one reason or another, could not come to grips with “going back to the real world” and took, like those a Great Depression generation or two before them, to the “jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramp camps located along the abandoned railroad sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of California, mainly down in Los Angeles, and created their own “society.”

The editor of the East Bay Eye, Owen Anderson, gave me that long ago assignment after I had done a smaller series for the paper on the treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam veterans by the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and in the course of that series had found out about this band of brothers roaming the countryside trying to do the best they could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one piece. My qualifications for the assignment other than empathy, since I had not been in the military during the Vietnam War period, were based simply on the fact that back East I had been involved, along with several other radicals, in running an anti-war GI coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and another down near Fort Dix in New Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of my 1960s generation who had clued me in on the psychic cost of the war so I had a running start.

After making connections with some Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys down in L.A. who knew where to point me I was on my way. I gathered many stories, published some of them in the Eye, and put the rest in my helter-skelter files. A while back, after having no success in retrieving the old Eye archives, I went up into my attic and rummaged through what was left of those early files. I could find no newsprint articles that I had written but I did find a batch of notes, specifically notes from stories that I didn’t file because the Eye went under before I could round them into shape.

The ground rules of those long ago stories was that I would basically let the guy I was talking to give his spiel, spill what he wanted the world to hear, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I, like with the others in this current series, have reconstructed this story as best I can although at this far remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said.

Not every guy I interviewed, came across, swapped lies with, or just snatched some midnight phrase out of the air from was from hunger. Most were, yes, in one way or another but some, and the one I am recalling in this sketch from 1979 fits this description, had no real desire to advertise their own hunger but just wanted to get something off their chest about some lost buddy, or some event they had witnessed. I have presented enough of these sketches both back in the day and here to not make a generalization about what a guy might be hiding in the deep recesses of his mind.

Some wanted to give a blow by blow description of every firefight (and every hut torched) they were involved in, others wanted to blank out ‘Nam completely and talk of before or after times, or talk about the fate of some buddy, some ‘Nam buddy, who maybe made it back the “real world” but got catch up with stuff he couldn’t handle, or got caught up in some stuff himself that he couldn’t handle, couldn’t handle because his whole blessed life pointed the other way. Jamal Pratt’s story fit that description, the couldn’t handle part. He just kind of drifted around the West Coast (after spending a minute back home in the East) after he got out of the service, got caught up with some wrong geeks, did too much dope and a little time and landed in the “jungle,” the one they set up in Westminster after being herded out of Compton by the cops. What makes his story different from others, almost uniquely different, is that he was one of the very few black guys who drifted into the camps. Maybe it was a racial thing like the rest of society although nobody messed with Jamal or did any but welcome a fellow broken spirit but black guys just didn’t show up in the jungles as a rule. Now that I think of it the race card probably did have something to do with it but more about where guys, veterans, would hang, and how they would hear about some brothers under the bridges where they were. I like to finish up these introductions by placing these sketches under a particular sign; no question Jamal' s sign was that of his personal peace treaty with the world.
*******
Jamal Pratt, Boy’s English High School Class of 1965, was crazy to go into the military right after high school come June, a plan that he had been mulling in the back of his mind for the previous couple of years. In addition to that intense desire to prove his manhood, his righteous black manhood, to prove that he had what it took to step off with the tough guys, the tough guys when and where it counted, he was having troubles with Ma at home (rolling stone Pa, a blur when young, was long gone, gone with some other woman in some other town as far as his mother and his paternal grandmother knew).

You know the steady drumbeat of what are you going to do with your life (he had only vaguely alluded to that service career which she might have freaked at if he explained it in too much detail), why were you hanging out with who you were hanging out with, don't you know those corner boys of yours will just get you in trouble (in fact she was only about half right about that since Junior was headed for college and Roy the Boy had military ideas too, although Jesse and Preston were slated to do time, black time, for some cheap jack robberies) , the universal mother drill. Moreover he had no steady girlfriend since Sheila had moved back down south with her grandmother after her parents split up and he was just keeping his head above water when it came to that corner boy midnight shifter stuff his mother kept harping on (he was under Jesse’s spell in particular just then). He was desperately in need of a change of scenery, no question.

Besides he wanted, English High proud wanted (the glass case in the front lobby exhibited many of the servicemen and others who had distinguished themselves in service to the country in the long line of campaigns this country has conducted as befitted the oldest public high school in the country, both fact drummed in the boys from day one of grade nine), to do his duty for his country against the communist menace that it was facing, besides big dog Red Russia, from a place called Vietnam, a place where, from all the reports, the citizenry was growing wild, and getting wilder and would take down the whole region with it. That, of course was part of it, part of what any red-blooded American, black or white, feared and Jamal thought rightfully so, although he was loose, pretty loose, on exactly what the hell was happening there. The big part though was that Jamal Pratt was smitten by a John Wayne Army Special Forces action film, The Green Berets, having seen it several times and having bored, bored there was no other word for it, his corner boys as they hung around nights in front of his apartment house over on the corner of Washington Street and Geneva Avenue in the high Roxbury neighborhood of Boston.

What got to Jamal was how smooth these guys were, these Special Forces guys (and how they he heard also got plenty of action from the girls around North Carolina and places like that who were ready to do just about anything to get their kicks with a Green Beret), how they were able to take on about ten gooks (yes, that was the term he used for them and a term of common usage, Charlie only came later when the deal went down in–country, and the more respectful Mr. Charlie even later) and whip their sorry asses before they knew what hit them, about how they saved little rice-growing peasant village after little rice-growing peasant village when those crummy cowardly commie bastards tried to stake out their claim, and about how cool their weapons were that made quick victories possible (especially that quick-action M-16 that every guy got to carry, later he would pray, pray to high heaven for a sweet AK-47 that Mr. Charlie had at his disposal when his goddam M-16 would jam at the wrong freaking time ).He wanted in, wanted in bad on that action, and since he had not planned to go to college anyway for lack of money and interest he figured that when he signed up down at the recruiting station on Tremont Street he would try his luck as a Green Beret recruit even though his physical aspect (thin and short) was just inside the stiff Special Forces regulations. He figured if that didn’t work out, although he was pretty sure he had the stuff that the Green Berets were made of, he would pick a skill school, maybe carpentry or plumbing like his uncle, and be all set for when after he got out.

Well Jamal’s dream, like a lot of things, and not just black things, in this wicked old world, didn’t pan out, the Green Beret part (strangely he couldn't pass the hearing test, although, strangely too it did not disqualify him from the military as a whole), although he did gain a skill school, not exactly the one he had planned on, partly any way. He was assigned to be 11-Bravo, a grunt, a foot soldier, cannon fodder (although that thought term only came later, grunt was the word his used to his friends back on the block when he came home on leave the first time). He did take advantage of an opportunity to go to jump school, paratrooper school, down at Fort Benning in Georgia and was thereafter sent to Fort Bragg (where the Special Forces units were also located) down in North Carolina to be part of the 82^nd Airborne Division.

As luck would have it 1966 was a year that the action was getting hot and heavy in Vietnam and so units, including his unit, of the 82^nd were ordered to that hot spot as President Johnson acceded to every request from the general in charge, General Westmoreland, for more and more troops (that’s when he first heard the term cannon fodder but he did not connect it with himself then). As stories started coming back in about the actual fighting situation in Vietnam and as he gathered from the training he had received in how to kill gooks by the score (although that Mr. Charlie designation and constant rumors about how the night belonged to him was becoming more and more the term of usage among his fellow soldiers whatever term was being used on the streets or in the barrooms) Jamal started getting more anxious, anxious for a very good reason since he had met a girl, Tonya, from Fayetteville, the town outside the fort, and they had plans to marry and all. (Apparently girls, girls around Fayetteville anyway, were just as happy to get their kicks with airborne guys as with Green Berets or any other elite military units but that attraction is a question for another time).

Jamal did his time in 'Nam, did his rotation (a year and a month’s R&R in Hawaii where Tonya met him on the quiet since she wasn’t supposed to do so), although he never did want to talk about it that much, about the killing (the constant firing part, the fields of fire part, although he would go on and on about that damn jamming M-16 and when he complained about it being told by the sergeant that he must not have cleaned it properly, Jesus, he could clean it in his sleep), about the burning down of villages to save them (although he never asked the reason for doing so he just heard that some colonel from his brigade had said that was the reason), about having black sweats every night every single fucking night on the perimeter waiting for Mr. Charlie to come back and take his back (and some black sweat nights later in the “real world” too, for a while), and a few things he swore he would never tell anybody about what he had done there, about what he had seen done there, and about who these peasants really were anyway.

What he did want to talk about was the sea-change in his own attitude, him and some of the brothers (a few white guys too but not from the 82^nd they, the white guys anyway, were still gung-ho), about how Cassius Clay turned Mohammed Ali was right-“that no Viet Cong ever called him nigger,” that he had no quarrel with those yellow-skinned people, that this red scare thing was a white man’s idea, a white man’s war, taking down poor black, brown, yellow-skinned peoples and making them like it, or trying to make them like it. He read some stuff given to him by a guy, a fellow soldier, whose brother was what he called a Black Panther, a black hell-raiser out on the streets of Oakland in California, some stuff by a guy named Fanon, a West Indian guy, a doctor who had been all wrapped up helping bring down the French in Algeria (the same French had been kicked out of Vietnam by Mr. Charlie he found out when he started looking into stuff. Some of it made sense, some just flat-out didn’t (like the hokey black nation thing, he already knew about what that looked like, just walk down Washington Street and Geneva, Jesus.

Well, when he got back to the "real world" he and a few brothers decided, after hearing their unit might be going back to take on Mr. Charlie again , that they didn’t like it, didn’t like it enough to say something about it, say it out loud, and say it in public. At that point, that 1968 point, especially after Charlie went wild during his Tet earlier in the year, a number of guys, dog soldiers like him, were raising hell, white guys too, but mainly brothers because wouldn't you know the brothers were taking an immense amount of the burden in all those hellish fire-fights that was burning up the dreaded Vietnamese countryside. And so they wound up, fistfuls of service combat decorations and all, in that dreaded Fort Bragg stockade for a while before some publicity-conscious general decided that the best thing to do was to get him and the brothers out, give them undesirable discharges and be done with it. He didn’t like the deal but he took it (he would later fight to change it, get it upgraded when that was possible). He had had enough of Mister’s war, enough of killing, and enough of losing everything he held dear (his Fayetteville girl heeding her army father left him in the lurch too) but he had made his peace, his personal peace treaty with the world…

From The “Brothers Under The Bridge” Series- Fritz John Taylor’s –“With Juana From Down Sonora Way In Mind”

From The “Brothers Under The Bridge” Series- Fritz John Taylor’s –“With Juana From Down Sonora Way In Mind”

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin:

In the first installment of this series of sketches space provided courtesy of my old 1960s yellow brick road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler, Peter Paul Markin, I mentioned, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod, that I had come across a song that stopped me in my tracks, Brothers Under The Bridge. I had not listened to or thought about that song for a long time but it brought back many memories from the late 1970s when I did a series of articles for the now defunct East Bay Eye (Frisco town, California East Bay, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam veterans who, for one reason or another, could not come to grips with “going back to the real world” and took, like those a Great Depression generation or two before them, to the “jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramp camps located along the abandoned railroad sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of California, mainly down in Los Angeles, and created their own “society.”

The editor of the East Bay Eye, Owen Anderson, gave me that long ago assignment after I had done a smaller series for the paper on the treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam veterans by the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and in the course of that series had found out about this band of brothers roaming the countryside trying to do the best they could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one piece. My qualifications for the assignment other than empathy, since I had not been in the military during the Vietnam War period, were based simply on the fact that back East I had been involved, along with several other radicals, in running an anti-war GI coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and down near Fort Dix in New Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of my 1960s generation who had clued me in on the psychic cost of the war so I had a running start.

After making connections with some Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys down in L.A. who knew where to point me I was on my way. I gathered many stories, published some of them in the Eye, and put the rest in my helter-skelter files. A while back, after having no success in retrieving the old Eye archives, I went up into my attic and rummaged through what was left of those early files. I could find no newsprint articles that I had written but I did find a batch of notes, specifically notes from stories that I didn’t file because the Eye went under before I could round them into shape.

The ground rules of those long ago stories was that I would basically let the guy I was talking to give his spiel, spill what he wanted the world to hear, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I, like with the others in this current series, have reconstructed this story as best I can although at this far remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said.

Not every guy I interviewed, came across, swapped lies with, or just snatched some midnight phrase out of the air from was from hunger. Most were, yes, in one way or another but some, and the one I am recalling in this sketch from 1979 fits this description, had no real desire to advertise their own hunger but just wanted to get something off their chest about some lost buddy, or some event they had witnessed. I have presented enough of these sketches both back in the day and here to not make a generalization about what a guy might be hiding in the deep recesses of his mind.

Some wanted to give a blow by blow description of every firefight (and every hut torched) they were involved in, others wanted to blank out ‘Nam completely and talk of before or after times, or talk about the fate of some buddy, some ‘Nam buddy, who maybe made it back the “real world” but got catch up with stuff he couldn’t handle, or as is the case here with Fritz John Taylor, got caught up in some stuff himself that he couldn’t handle, couldn’t handle because his whole blessed life pointed the other way. Some stuff he told me when he started skidding down the pole after riding high for a while. I like to finish up these introductions by placing these sketches under a particular sign; no question Fritz’s sign was that of that dark night Juana rose perfume smell.
*******
“United States," answered Fritz Taylor to the burly “la migra” U.S. border guard who was whip-lashing the question of nationality a mile a minute at the steady stream of border-entering people, and giving a cursory nod to all but the very most suspect looking characters, the most illegal Mexican- looking if you want to know. Yes, American, Fritz thought, Fritz John Taylor if they looked at his passport, his real passport, although he had other identification with names like John Fitzgerald, Taylor Fitzgerald, and John Tyler on them, as he passed the huge "la migra” U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint at El Paso on the American side across from old-time Cuidad Juarez, Mexico. Juarez, a city in passing that March, 1972 day that looked very much like something out of Orson Welles’ 1950s Touch of Evil, except the automobiles were smaller and less flashy and the graft now more expensive, and no longer guaranteed to grease the rails, the illegal rails; drugs, women, illegals, gambling, fenced goods, you name it. But just then he didn’t want to think about greasing any rails, or anything else illegal for that matter.

Fritz thought again, this time with easier breathing, whether "la migra” had looked at his passport or not, he was glad, glad as hell, to be saying his nationality, his American, gringo, Estados Unidos, call it what you will citizenship, something he never thought possible, not after Vietnam, not after all the shooting and killing of his thirteen month tour of hell (one month R&R included, a month in Hawaii where he thought he must have set the world record for boozing, mostly scotch, low-shelf scotch to make his dough last, dope-sniffing from opium to cocaine to brother and sister, reefer was the least of it, whoring, some paid, some free what did it matter when a man had his wanting habits on, whoring running through the Kama Sutra and a couple of other tricks not listed in that volume that one of the girls, a white girl too from respectable parents back on the mainland who was looking for kicks, odd-ball kicks and found a partner, for a while, willing to indulge her, Angelina her name, ask her how she got that tattoo on her upper inner thigh and why, if you ever run across her in Lima, Ohio) except these last three weeks down south of the border had been almost as bad, and no more profitable, Fritz profitable. Now that he breathed gringo air, American air he could tell his story, or tell parts of it because he was not quite sure that parts might not still be inside the statute of limitations, for him or his former confederates. So some stuff was better left unsaid.

Yah, it started in ‘Nam really, Fritz thought, as he traced his life-sized movements back in time while he started for a bus, a gringo bright yellow and green El Paso Transit bus that would take him to a downtown hotel where he could wash the dust of Mexico, wash that clotting dust of the twenty hour bus ride from Cuernavaca off his body, if not his soul. Hell, he confessed to himself, a thing he would be very reluctant to mention to others, others impressed by his publicly impervious persona, if it hadn’t been 'Nam, it could have been any one of a thousand places, or hundred situation a few years back, back when he first caught the mary jane, ganga, herb, weed, call your name joy stick, delight habit, tea was his favorite term of rite though. And then he graduated to girl, cousin cocaine when that became the drug of choice and then mainly cheaper that high-grade reefer.

Or, maybe, it really started in dead-end Clintondale when he graduated from high school and with nothing particular to do, allowed himself, chuckling a little to hear him call it that way now, allowed himself to be drafted when his number came up. And drafted, 1960s drafted, meant nothing but 'Nam, nothing but 'Nam and grunt-hood, and that thirteen months of hell, minus one, the boozing, doping, whoring one. And maybe, just maybe, it was even earlier than Clintondale high school days, days when he just hung around Sammy’s garage, watching him tool up some old Chevy or Dodge to make all the valley boys twist in the wind when early morning “chicken runs” beckoned down around the far end of Squaw Rock, took more days off from school than he should have and maybe spent too much time in the back seat of one of Sammy’s cars down the other end, the lovers’ end of Squaw Rock with older girls, Sammy’s “cast-offs,” that only made him restless, restless to break out of one-horse Clintonville. Or reaching down deep the hard fact that he grew up, grew up desperately poor, in the Clintondale back alley projects and so had spent those precious few years of his life hungry, hungry for something, something easy, something sweet, and something to take the pain away.

But mainly he was looking for something easy. And that something easy pushed him, pushed him like the hard fates of growing up poor, down Mexico way, down Sonora way, mostly, as his liked to hum from a vaguely remembered song, some old time cowboy song, on any one of his twenty or so trips down sur. Until, that is, this last Cuernavaca madness, this time there was no humming, no sing-song Mexican brass band marching humming. But stop right there, Fritz said to himself, if he was ever going to figure what went wrong, desperately wrong on this last, ill-fated trip, he had to come clean and coming clean meant, you know, not only was it about the get to easy street, not only was it to get some tea (and later cousin cocaine like he said) delight to chase the soul pain away, but it was about a woman, and as every guy, every women-loving guy, even honest women-loving guy, will tell you, in the end it is always about a woman.

Always about a woman from hard-hearted Irish Catholic Cecilias like he knew, kid knew with their novena books in one hand and their red dress come hither flick with the other, yes, knew them backwards and forwards, to kicks-loving Angela. Knew the score since from kid time or some other combinations foxed out later but a woman, no question. Although not always about a woman named Juana, his sweet Juana. Although, maybe the way she left him hanging by his thumbs in Mexico City before the fall, not knowing, or maybe caring, of his danger, he should be a little less forgiving. Yah, that’s easy to say, easy off the hellish now tongue, but this was Juana not just some hop-head floozy out for kicks.

Jesus, he could still smell that sweetness, that exotic Spanish sweetness, that rose something fragrance Juana always wore (and don’t tell her if you run into her down Sonora way, and you will if you are looking for grade A dope for sure, drove him as crazy as a loon), that smell of her freshly-washed black hair which got all wavy, naturally wavy, and big so that she looked like some old-time Goya senorita, all severe front but smoldering underneath. And those big laughing eyes, yah, black eyes you won’t forget, or want to. Yes, his thoughts drifted back to Juana, treacherously warm-blooded Juana. And it seems almost sacrilegious thinking of her, sitting on this stinking, hit every bump, crowded, air-fouling bus filled with “wetbacks,” sorry, braceros, okay, going to work, or wherever they go when they are not on these stinking buses.

Yah, Juana, Juana whom he met in Harvard Square when he first got back to the world and was looking to deep-six the memories of that 'Nam thing, deep-six it with dope, mope, cope, and some woman to chase his blues away. And there she was sitting on a bench in Cambridge Common wearing some wild seventy-two colored ankle-length dress that had him mesmerized, that and that rose something fragrance. But that day, that spring 1970 day, what Juana-bonded him was the dope she was selling, selling right there in the open like it was some fresh produce (and it was). Cops no too far off but not bothering anyone except the raggedy drunks, or some kid who took too much acid and they needed to practically scrape him off the Civil War monument that centered the park and get him some medical attention, quick.

See Juana, daughter of fairly well-to-do Mexican “somebodies,” needed dough to keep her in style. He never did get the whole story straight but what was down in Sonora well-to-do was nada in the states. She needed dough, okay, just like any gringa dame. And all of that was just fine by him but Juana was also“connected,” connected through some cousin, to the good dope, the Acapulco Gold and Colombian Red that was primo stuff. Not the oregano-laced stuff that was making the rounds of the Eastern cities and was strictly for the touristas, for the week-end warrior hippies who flooded Harvard Square come Saturday night. So Juana was to good tea like Owsley was to the acid scene, the maestro.

Fitz thought back, as that rickety old bus moved along heading, twenty-seven-stop heading, downtown trying to be honest, honest through that dope-haze rose smell, that black hair and those laughing eyes (and that hard-loving midnight sex they both craved when they were high as kites) about whether it was all that or just the dope in the beginning. Yah, it was the Columbia Red at first. He was just too shattered, 'Nam and Clintondale shattered, to know when he had a woman for the ages in his grasp. But he got“religion” fast. Like every religion though, godly or womanly, there is a price to pay, paid willingly or not, and that price was to become Juana’s “mule” on the Mexico drug runs.

To keep the good dope in stock you had to be willing to make some runs down south of the border. If not, by the time it got to say some New York City middle man, it had been cut so much you might as well have been smoking tea leaves. He could hear himself laugh when she first said that tea leave thing in her efforts to enlist him. But by then he had religion, Juana religion, and he went off on that first trip eyes wide open. And that was probably the problem because it went off without a hitch. Hell, he brought a kilogram over the border in his little green knapsack acting just like any other tourist buying a cheap serape or something.

And like a lot of things done over and over again the trips turned into a routine, a routine though that did not take into consideration some of the greater not-knowing, maybe not knowable things, although he now had his suspicions, things going on, like the cartelization of the international drug trade, like the squeeze out of the small unaffiliated tea ladies, like Juana, and placing them as mere employees like some regular corporate structure bad trip. But the biggest thing was Juana, Juana wanted more and more dough, and that meant bigger shipments, which meant more Fritz risk, and later Fritz and Tommy risk (Tommy, ah, let’s just leave it at Tommy, rest his soul, face down in some Cuernavaca muddy craven back alley with two slugs in his back from when some cartel guy got jumpy when Tommy moved the wrong way, or maybe just moved when el jefe was present as thing went awry). And on this last trip it mean no more friendly Sonora lazy, hazy, getting high off some free AAA perfecto weed after the deal was made and then leisurely taking a plane (a plane for chrissakes) from some Mexican city to Los Angeles, or Dallas, depending on the connections. And then home.

This time, this time the deal was going down in Cuernavaca, in a church, or rather in some side room of a church, Santa Maria’s Chapel, in downtown Cuernavaca, maybe you know it if you have been there it's kind of famous. He didn’t like the switch, but only because it was out of the routine, a habit he learned in ‘Nam and that saved him more than once. What he didn’t know, and what his connections on the other side should have known (and maybe did, but he was not thinking about that part right that minute) was that the Federales, instead of chasing Pancho Villa’s ghost like they should have been doing, were driving hard (prompted by the gringo DEA) to close down Cuernavaca, just then starting to become the axis of the cartels further south.

And what he also didn’t know, until too late, was that Juana, getting some kind of information from some well-connected source in the states, had fled to Mexico, first Mexico City where he had met her to make connections further south, and then back to her hometown of Sonora he heard later. So when the deal in Cuernavaca went sour, after he learned at the almost the last minute that the deal was “fixed,” he headed Norte on the first bus, first to Mexico City and then to El Paso. And there he was, now alighting from that yellow green bus, ready to walk into that fresh soap. As he got off he though he staggered for a minute, staggered in some kind of fog, as he “smelled,” smelled, that rose fragrance something in the air. He said to himself, yah, I guess it's still like that with Juana. If you read this and are down Sonora way and see her tell her Fritz said hello.
*******
Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues Lyrics

When you're lost in the rain in Juarez

And it's Eastertime too

And your gravity fails

And negativity don't pull you through

Don't put on any airs

When you're down on Rue Morgue Avenue

They got some hungry women there

And they really make a mess outa you.



Now if you see Saint Annie

Please tell her thanks a lot

I cannot move

My fingers are all in a knot

I don't have the strength

To get up and take another shot

And my best friend, my doctor

Won't even say what it is I've got.



Sweet Melinda

The peasants call her the goddess of gloom

She speaks good English

And she invites you up into her room

And you're so kind

And careful not to go to her too soon

And she takes your voice

And leaves you howling at the moon.



Up on Housing Project Hill

It's either fortune or fame

You must pick up one or the other

Though neither of them are to be what they claim

If you're lookin' to get silly

You better go back to from where you came

Because the cops don't need you

And man they expect the same.



Now all the authorities

They just stand around and boast

How they blackmailed the sergeant-at-arms

Into leaving his post

And picking up Angel who

Just arrived here from the coast

Who looked so fine at first

But left looking just like a ghost.



I started out on burgundy

But soon hit the harder stuff

Everybody said they'd stand behind me

When the game got rough

But the joke was on me

There was nobody even there to bluff

I'm going back to New York City

I do believe I've had enough.

From The “Brothers Under The Bridge” Series-“The Sign Of The Easy Rider”

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin:

In the first installment of this series of sketches space provided courtesy of my old 1960s yellow brick road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler, Peter Paul Markin, I mentioned, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod, that I had come across a song that stopped me in my tracks, Brothers Under The Bridge. I had not listened to or thought about that song for a long time but it brought back many memories from the late 1970s when I did a series of articles for the now defunct East Bay Eye (Frisco town, California East Bay, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam veterans who, for one reason or another, could not come to grips with “going back to the real world” and took, like those a Great Depression generation or two before them, to the “jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramp camps located along the abandoned railroad sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of California, mainly down in Los Angeles, and created their own “society.”

The editor of the East Bay Eye, Owen Anderson, gave me that long ago assignment after I had done a smaller series for the paper on the treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam veterans by the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and in the course of that series had found out about this band of brothers roaming the countryside trying to do the best they could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one piece. My qualifications for the assignment other than empathy, since I had not been in the military during the Vietnam War period, were based simply on the fact that back East I had been involved, along with several other radicals, in running an anti-war GI coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and down near Fort Dix in New Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of my 1960s generation who had clued me in on the psychic cost of the war so I had a running start.

After making connections with some Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys down in L.A. who knew where to point me I was on my way. I gathered many stories, published some of them in the Eye, and put the rest in my helter-skelter files. A while back, after having no success in retrieving the old Eye archives, I went up into my attic and rummaged through what was left of those early files. I could find no newsprint articles that I had written but I did find a batch of notes, specifically notes from stories that I didn’t file because the Eye went under before I could round them into shape.

The ground rules of those long ago stories was that I would basically let the guy I was talking to give his spiel, spill what he wanted the world to hear, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I, like with the others in this current series, have reconstructed this story as best I can although at this far remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said.

Not every guy I interviewed, came across, swapped lies with, or just snatched some midnight phrase out of the air from was from hunger. Most were, yes, in one way or another but some, and the one I am recalling in this sketch from 1979 fits this description, had no real desire to advertise their own hunger but just wanted to get something off their chest about some lost buddy, or some event they had witnessed. I have presented enough of these sketches both back in the day and here to not make a generalization about what a guy might be hiding in the deep recesses of his mind.

Some wanted to give a blow by blow description of every firefight (and every hut torched) they were involved in, others wanted to blank out ‘Nam completely and talk of before or after times, or talk about the fate of some buddy, some ‘Nam buddy, who maybe made it back the “real world” but got catch up with stuff he couldn’t handle, as is the case here with Doug Powers , who went way out of his way to avoid talking much about ‘Nam, or about how he wound up in the hobo camps in the late 1970s after heading west from Ohio in the early 1970s, but who wanted to talk about his biker friend from Maine, not a Hell’s Angel-type biker just a guy who liked to ride, ride free, a guy who had gotten him (and a few other guys too) through the ‘Nam hellhole, Jeff Crawford, and about his life on the road, on the biker road, and of his sorry, beautiful life ( Jeff’s forever expression). I like to finish up these introductions by placing these sketches under a particular sign; no question Jeff’s sign was that of the easy rider.
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Additional comment for this sketch:

Usually when a guy told me a story he was either telling his own story, or that of somebody who he had first-hand knowledge about. Stuff that could be readily verified, or at least could be checked out in some detail. Doug Powers was drying out in a Sally shelter in San Diego in late 1976 when he saw the news on the shelter television that Jeff had made his last ride. All the details about the guy fit,‘Nam veteran, Norton bike, from Maine, living up in Albany, suspected drug smuggler, about 30 years old and so once he got clean (for a while) he drifted north to check up on what had happened to his old amigo. So this is the way Doug Powers told me the story, Jeff’s story, the story of his big ride, the way he got it from Little Peach, Jeff’s last sweet mama and the one who was with him on that journey, told him the road stuff, straight up, so some of stuff probably has the old hearsay problem, although later when he checked up, checked against stuff that he knew about Jeff from ‘Nam days and after it held up well enough. Held up well enough when I checked too.

This Little Peach, by the way, this sweet mama easy rider woman of Jeff’s whom he met at Ginny’s Coffee Shop in Albany, California where he hung out for breakfast, where she was serving them off the arm, was at the time of her telling just returning to school at San Francisco State where she was an excellent student if that helps any in making the story more trustworthy. It’s worth mentioning too that like a lot of us then Little Peach was young, restless, working, going to school, living at home with mother, no boyfriend to speak of, a little unlucky in previous affairs and so when she saw Jeff, a little older which she liked, not a rough guy from appearances, seemingly a free spirit with that Norton, once he started giving her a look, starting paying attention to her, started making his moves she was ready, ready to jail-break, to ready to be his sweet mama, no regrets.
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He, the ghost of… Peter Fonda he, Captain America he , Dennis Hooper, Billy The Kid he, Hunter Thompson he, Doctor Gonzo on an Indian he, James Ardie he, Vincent Black Lightning he, hell, Sonny Barger or one of one hundred grunge, nasty mothers keep your daughters indoors under lock and key Hell's Angels brethren he (as if that would help, help once she, the daughter, saw that shiny silver sleek Indian , Harley, Vincent, name it, whatever by and did some fancy footwork midnight creep out that unlocked suburban death house ranchero house back door to meet with that power), Jeff Crawford he, Norton he, just wanted to drive down that late night Pacific coast highway. Where else in the American world could you have the hair-raising blown warm wind at your back and the sometimes hard-hearted, but mainly user-friendly, ocean at your right. Somehow Maine icy stretch Ellsworth Point did not make its case against that scenario. He knew those forlorn streets and back roads like the back of his hand but there was no going back, and no reason to since his divorce and his Ma dying.

Drive, ride really, motorcycle ride just in case you were clueless and thought that this was to be some sedan buggy family, dad and mom, three kids and Rover, car saga. Maybe with his new sweet mama behind holding on to her easy rider in back, holding tight, her breasts rising and falling hard against his waiting back, and riding, laughing every once in a while at the square world, his old square world (and hers too, she used to serve then off the arm while attending some dink college when he fell into her at the local breakfast place), against the pounding surf heading south heading Seals Rock, Pacifica, Monterrey, Big Sur, Xanadu, Point Magoo, Malibu, Laguna, Carlsbad, LaJolla, Diego, south right to the mex border, riding down to the see, sea. Riding down to the washed sea, the sea to wash him clean. Her, she had nothing to be washed, hadn’t been out in life long enough to build up soul dirts, that’s what he told her and made her laugh, except maybe a little off-hand kinky sex she picked up somewhere and had curled his toes doing one night, and that didn’t count in the soul-washing department . Not in his book. And made her laugh again. Not some big old poet- wrangled washed clean either, some what did old ‘Nam Brad call it, some metaphor, if that was right, if that was how he remembered it, not for him, just washed clean.

Easy, Jeff thought, just an easy rider and his sweet, sweet mama, her hair, her flaming red hair, or whatever color it was that week (he didn’t care what color really just as long as it was long. He had had enough of short- haired women all boyish bobbed, all snarling every which way, all kind of boyish do it this way and that way, all tense, and making him tense. He liked the swish of a woman’s hair in his face all snarly and flowing and letting things take their course easy. A ‘Nam lesson.) blowing against the weathers, against the thrust of that big old Norton engine, all tight tee-shirt showing her tiny breasts in outline that a shirt or sweater made invisible (he didn’t care, like a lot of guys around the bar, the biker hang-out, where he hung out over in Richmond, the Angel Tavern, the one run by Red Riley, about big breasts, or small), tight jeans (covering long legs which he did care about), tight. Maybe a quick stop off at Railroad Jim’s over on Geary before heading to ‘Frisco land’s end Seals Rock and the trip south (and if he wasn’t in then Saigon Pappy’s, Billy Blast’s or Sunshine Sue’s) to cope some dope (weed, reefer, a little cousin cocaine to ease that ‘Nam pain, the one Charley kissed his way one night through his thigh when he decided to prove, prove for the nth time that he, Charley, was king of the night) to handle those sharp curves around Big Sur, and get her in the mood (she, ever since that midnight creep out Ma’s back door over in Albany a few months before when he had challenged her to do so when he wanted to test her to see if she was really his sweet mama, craved her cousin, craved it to get her into the mood, and just to be his outlaw girl).

Yah, it was supposed to be easy, all shoreline washed clean (no metaphor stuff, remember, just ocean naked stuff), stop for some vista here (about a million choices, he would let her pick since this was her first run, her first working run), some dope there and then down to cheap Mexico, cheap dope, and a haul back norte and easy street, easy street, laying around with sweet mama, real name, Susan White, road moniker, Little Peach (an inside joke, a joke about a certain part of her anatomy that was all she would give out) until Red Riley needed another run, another run against the washed sea night.

Then, like a lot of things in his sorry, beautiful life, it turned into one thing after another. He took a turn around Pacifica curve way too fast, went way over the edge with his right hand throttle (Little Peach so excited by this her first outlaw run she slipped her hands low, too low while he was making that maneuver, thinking, maybe, they were in bed and well you know things happen, distracting things, just bad timing) and skidded hair- pin twirl skidded off the on-coming road. Little Peach was hurt a little, a couple of bruises, but the bike was dented enough to require some work at Loopy Lester’s (Red Riley had guys up, bike magic guys, up and down the coast) back in Daly City. So delay, money draining delay.

A few more days delay too, they ran into rain down around Big Sur, pouring rain and Little Peach moaned about it and they had to shack up in a motel for those few days, days looking at that fierce ocean. She loved it, had never been that far south but to him just more delay. After those mishaps, he then made his first serious mistake, short on funds he decided to rob a liquor store in Paseo Robles, the nearest town big enough to have a liquor store large enough to rob. Hell, he had not decided to do that deed (never telling Little Peach who would have cried bloody hell about it), he was hard-wired compelled to make that decision, hard –wired by his whole sorry, beautiful life, his father (a drunk) then mother (none too stable, a product of those too close Maine family relationships and those long, bad ass Maine winter nights) left him Maine dumped, his whore first wife from over in Richmond cheating on him with every blue jean guy in town while he was in ‘Nam, his very real ‘Nam pain (while saving Brad’s, metaphor Brad’s city boy, college boy sorry ass when Mister Charlie decided, probably hard-wired too to come prove who was boss of the night), and, a little his dope habit (picked up courtesy of ‘Nam too, he was strictly always a whisky and beer man before). Little Peach, gentle in some previous unknown, unknown to him, womanly ways, especially for her age, no question, and the eternal ocean, gentle, when it co-operated, his only rays.

Hard-wired to just take now, take it fast, and get out fast. Hell, it was easy, he had been doing since he was about sixteen and just needed that first Harley some Ellsworth guy was selling, selling cheap, since was headed to Shawshank for a long stretch. That first time he wasn’t even armed, easy. As so it went. Easy, except that time down in Rockland where the clerk flipped the alarm and the cops were just a block away. Yah, he didn’t figure that one right, not at any point. That was when he got the choice- three to five in county or ‘Nam. He hadn’t messed with that kind of thing, that robbery, in California since he hooked up with Red’s operation about a month after he got out of the VA hospital over in ‘Frisco.

Trouble this time, the night he tried to rob the Paseo Robles liquor store, was the owner, and he identified himself as the owner to Jeff, must have thought he was Charley, shot at him, nicking him in the shoulder. He grabbed the owner’s gun in the tussle that followed and bang, bang. Grabbed the dough (almost five thousand dollars in that two -bit town), and the extra ammo under the counter and roared off, Little Peach waiting on the Norton, trembling, confused about what happened, into the Pacific highway night.

A serious mistake, for sure, one the cops kind of had the habit of pressing the issue on. They caught up with him just outside Carlsbad, South Carlsbad down pass the airport road, near the state park camp sites, where he was resting up a little (bleeding a little too). He had left Little Peach back in Laguna to keep her out of it and with most of the dough, telling her to get out of town on the quiet, to use the dough to go back to school, and have a nice life. He was okay that she didn’t argue a lot about staying, or getting all weepy about his fate. She had been his ray and that was enough, enough for what was ahead. So alone, not wanting to face some big step ahead, he wasn’t built for jails and chambers, not wanting to face another downer in his sorry, beautiful life, taking a long look at the heathered, rock strewn, smashing wave shoreline just below, he took out that damn gun, loaded the last of the ammo, doubled around to face the blockading police cars, and throttled –up his Norton. Varoom, varoom…