Ti
Jean wondered sitting on Pawtucketville silts listening to the rushing rock-strewn
Merrimack coming by, wondered like maybe those old-time Dutch sailors sighting
that green fresh breast of land that would become Long Island as they entered the sound, another
waterway a metaphor for Jack life, and found a new world unspoiled for that
fifteen minutes before they laid anchor and claim on the cheap. That wonder
drove Jack boy, all fourteen- year old Jack boy so not worried by red dress
Paula Cole coming hither Friday night dates or that damn Maggie down by the almost
Chelmsford dream side of the river, damn already the river is in play with her
Irish braids and that god damn Bible between her knees to wonder if James was
it MacNeil Abbott or Abbott MacNeil Whistler sat beside this same river
thinking about his own Mere, his mother and how he could do justice to that
forlorn Puritan face which razzled him with blacks, browns and greys, as if to
mock the very idea of mother. Hell, James, he would never be called Jimmy like
the other boys once he “did” his mother in those woe begotten colors decided he
would use the old dame, and she was an old dame to star in his various studies
of colors and only philistines would dare to call the work some mother lode
draught.
This
is where the story gets interesting, although we know that Jack was not
bothered just then by come hither girls in red dresses or Bible-kneed Irish
girls since he had, playing hooky, crept into his holy of holy spots in the
cubicle at the school library gone beyond the wonder of those muddy splat
riverbanks where he first wondered the wonder akin to those Dutch sailors
seeking his own fresh green breast of land, the land of the mind. Wondering how
to stop wondering Jack picked up a biography of James Whistler complete with
mother on the front except she was painting title called some study in black
and white, something like that by one Lancelot Grey who Jack would later find
out was the central figure in what he would wind up calling the pre-war art
cabal that was attempting to “dress up,” read, protect American art and artists
from the onslaught of European critics who basically call that art “folk art”
meaning show the bastards the door and maybe get them shown in Peoria or better
Grand Island but stay away from European shores.
Grey’s
take on Whistler, taking the American born but life-long ex-patriate in was
that he never left the American shores and stuff like that. What interested
Jack though was not that art cabal stuff (art cabal a term he would not know
until later when landing in New York he came face to face with the denizens of
that cabal through various Student Art League girlfriends and others met in
Village garrets when garrets were there and not in Soho). But that was after
the war (World War II in case a younger reader has happened on this piece) when
New York told cheapjack art Europe to fuck off, to step back and various
abstraction movements were all the rage. Just then Grey delved into Whistler’s
various non-mother pieces (than mother painting an iconic come on since back
then only the art cabal knew other paintings and the publisher insisted that
that painting be on the front).
The
most interesting one, and one that seemed to contradict what the art cabal was
doing to protect American artists, was a painting called The White Girl (now in the National Gallery but then in private
hands). Jack was fascinated by the young woman portrayed who he learned from
Grey had been one of Whistler’s mistresses. The title intrigued and confused
him since somebody else called it that study in white gag that had handcuffed poor
Mrs. Whistler when it suited her James. Jack would wonder, would have deep
chaste Roman Catholic dreams (some say that would by his writings really always
be his dreams, his Jesus-sweated dreams) and wonder what it was like to have
been James’ girlfriend, and wondered too whether James wondered that he would
paint his mistresses to help pay the rent. Jack would later laugh about how
many girls he would con into paying the rent, walking the streets if necessary
or going in some café back room to play the flute for the night’s booze and
dope money and so he had kindred feelings for Brother James somewhat akin to the
bandit prince Gregory Corso. But at fourteen in some library cubicle in Lowell
mill-town hard by the Merrimack all he could think of was how long he would
have to wonder about lots of things, too many things when the world was moving
way to quickly but he would always say with pride that James was from Lowell
and leave it at that. Even when he found out that James’ white girl was like
his Mexican junkie- whore Tristessa. By then though that fresh green breast
wonder had hardened into funk, dunk and drunk.
************
Jack
popcorn for eyeballs sitting in the last row of the orchestra section of the
old Majestic Theater off of Bridge Street across from the offices of the Lowell Sun waiting as the screen heated
up after some very ordinary news of the week reels and an off-color cartoon
which he never did get even after watching several times over the next few Saturday
matinee double-feature week. The films changed every Friday but Mr. Le Blanc
cheapened up his operation by re-running those silly cartons built for
ten-years olds with no brains but silly to a strapping boy of sixteen who
actually took girls to the shows. (Le Blanc also sold stale popcorn with so
much salt laid in it would make your eyelids curl and watered down the tonic,
old-fashioned New England word for soda, so much it might as well have been
water and even made boys like Jack with strong kidneys ran to restrooms
frequently.) Of course, that was a totally different proposition, that messing
with girls stuff that he had pretty much figured out by sixteen with plenty of street advise some of it recklessly
dangerous and no, zero, parent advise but that was when you asked a girl if she
wanted to sit in the orchestra section or go up to the heavy-breathing pitch
dark moaning balcony. If the former that would be a last date (one time he left
the girl in the front lobby to fend her herself on the way home while he went
off to Renoir’s Ice Cream Shop with Even Stephen and Dizzy Izzy). This day,
this Thursday afternoon first show skipping afternoon classes was different when
Jack was all business trying to figure some stuff out that was going to appear
on the satin silk screen.
Then
it, no, she started. All fresh as a new born daisy fending off some sidewalk
Lothario, if only in Jack’s imagination, really only some lug like a million
lugs he knew in Lowell High School and who if he hadn’t been on a mission this
afternoon could have stood in front of the high school at close of day and
counted the number of lugs from the class of 1939 carousing out the door some
he could name by name. So, no this lug was going nowhere, was getting nothing
except the desert breezes from this girl. Jack swore the girl with the Bette
Davis eyes after beating the clown off with a car jack sat in her dust-filled
private reading spot reading some French poet from the fourteenth century. Jack
pressed his popcorn eyeballs to see book jacket cover and his heart beat a mile
a minute once he saw that she, Gabby let’s give her a name, was reading his
hero prince bandit poet Francois Villon, like him a Breton when that meant
something before the wave of diasporas which led angelized angel-headed
Kerouacs to the shores of the Saint Lawrence River and downwardly mobile fates
stripped the clan of their respective dignities.
Yes,
Villon the prince of thieves who Jack had discovered in that broken- down
school library where he hid out when he could not deal with bullshit chemistry
classes or some such subject around the time that he read that book by Lancelot
Grey about that pimp daddy, holy goof (first use of the term “holy goof” came
from reading Grey) James Whistler the artist who kept himself from the Thames
and watery graves by selling his paintings or more usually “selling” his
mistresses to make the rent money when times were tough. He still loved
Whistler (although he could only mock a guy who had to practically handcuff his
mother to the chair to get her to stand still for what he called a study in
black and white, something like that) if only because he was Lowell, was a
native son and that counted a lot for Jack then even if James was not a Breton.
(Funny later he would go through seven kinds of hell with his own mother before
telling her to kiss off.) But Villon was a legitimate bandit-prince who hung
with the lumpen outside the guarded moats ready to pounce one minute on the
next jackroll victim (some historians have speculated that Villon and his
scumbags invented the jackroll, taking a bag of nails or coins if they had any
wrapping them in a small cloth and under cover of darkness bopping some old
lady or drunken sot for their dough). A lost art that Jack would use more than
once in Times Square when some pansy hipster tried to do tricks on him and he
bopped him for hot dog money at Howard Johnson’s stuff like that, yes, a lost
but helpful art for those who lived outside the law, for those whose only road
was the road.
And
there she was the girl with the Bette Davis eyes all dewy even as a desert dust
storm was brewing just outside the Gates of Eden reading Villon in French (her
mother was French a catch for her woe begotten father during World War I
service in France with the American Expeditionary Force who came back to Eden
saw the dust and stone wood and left on the next train with some Singer sewing
machine salesman with four quarters and a quart of wine). That Garden of Eden
business a gag, a gag of sorts since the diner that he father owned, no, really
her grandfather who was getting too old to run the place but too ornery to let
his deadbeat son who couldn’t keep a French whore, Gramp’s words, in the middle
of the desert from running away with the next time that came by with long pants
on was just outside the main entrance to the Petrified Forest (couldn’t later a
guy like Allan Ginsberg or even novice poet Dean Moriarty have a field day with
that idea as the 1930s was tearing America, tearing the world apart, making the
world turn in on itself). The gag was that Gramps an old Kentucky coalminer
until he was thirteen and figured out that he would rather not die in
Appalachia with the muskrats had headed out of the hills and hollows as fast as
he could. Head out to California where he had heard had streets paved of gold
and young girls ready to give whatever they had to give. But see Gramps and his
forbears were sitting folk, were tied to the tired land so long that they would
sit down anywhere where that didn’t have to pretend to seek prosperity. So
Gramps stopped at the Petrified Forest once he ran into some Nevada Jane
heading east after busting out heading west who worked at the diner and who
played the flute for him until she too ran off with some calico salesman. Gramps
just stayed put and married the first woman who smiled at him (Gabby’s grandma)
and that ended the road west in that generation.
So
poor rattled and pestered Gabby was torn between sweet perfume dreams of Left
Bank Paris cafes and that endless rock-hard dust. Then out of the blue some
pretty hobo came walking up the road to the diner all dusty and road worn, a
hobo whose name turned out to be Leslie Howard (that would be important later
to Gabby if meaningless to Jack when she inherited his life insurance policy
but that was later long after Jack had gathered in the wanderlust that set that
first Breton to Canadian shores and that fucking raging Saint Lawrence River of
no returns) Listen up, Jack did, this Leslie Howard was no stumble bum like
half the hoboes, tramps, bums, and there are social distinctions among the
brethren who were running around the country stopping at railroad jungle camps
or sleeping under unkempt bridges and arroyos but a real live itinerant
intellectual who had when he had seen the first turnings of the world inward in
those times got the hell out of Europe
as fast as he could (he would be found later when Gabby looked for next of kin
to see if anybody would contest the life insurance policy to have been Jewish
not a good thing to be in Europe in those times to be a “rootless
cosmopolitan”) This Howard, let’s call him that since it is as good as any
other and who knows what he real name was if he was on the run bedazzled Gabby
from minute one leaving that lug gas jockey out to dry with the trees. Knew his
Villon cold, knew that he too was a bandit prince who hung outside the moats
with the lumpen.
Right
then Jack’s already strong flight of fantasy knew that he was kindred, here was
guy who loved to read but could not settle down with at crazy-mixed up world
pounding tattoos in his fevered brain. If anybody had been near Jack in that
darkened orchestra section fit only for one-date girls and sullen adults they
would have heard him gasp every time this Howard said anything of import to
Gabby. Jack’s fevered mind started sketching things out, read like crazy, write
like crazy and keep on the move, always on the move. What Jack would call later
in one of his lesser but more philosophical books the quest, the grail hunt,
the breaking from the holy goofs that keep you penned in and unfree, that holy
goof a well-worn word in Jack talk. For now though just the germ of a plan.
They
say that Bretons are not only are hearty but also headstrong and Jack sensed in
Gabby just such characteristics even though she was nothing but some dirt
farmer Okie, Arkie descendent. He would forever search for his Gabby but never
find her, and frankly that search was just one among a number of searches
later. This guy Leslie, what made him tick, why Jack was drawn to him like
lemmings from the sea was more problematic. The Villon, hobo road warrior
philosopher king part was straight up. He would have a million sleepless night
visions of being out on some tramp road in say Winnemucca or Yuma facing no
dough and no food or water and glad-tiding himself into soft spot, some soft
bed if that was the way the thing played out. Pearl-diving, you know washing
dishes for his meal in some such Garden of Eden diner somewhere if necessary
just to stay on the road one more day. That part held romance, held him in
thrall.
What
Jack couldn’t figure out especially since the girl with the Bette Davis eyes
was totally smitten by him and his wayward ways against the lugs, demented
grandpas, jelly-fish fathers and abandoned down some Seine River mother not
unlike the Merrimack always close to his dreams especially that rocky crest
around the old Lowell Textile Institute why this modern day troubadour had so
little regard for himself that he would let a bum like the notorious Duke
Mantee, yes, that Duke who was the scourge of the West just then put two random
slugs into his body. He tries, and would continue to try later to understand
the idea of the retreat of the intellectuals, that the time of the caveman was
making a reappearance after so much spent trying to come up from the mud and
slime. Backwards. Damn, that bothered Jack, would bother him until his own
dying breath when he turned on the intellectuals with a vengeance. The now dank
dark movie hall left him utterly perplexed about what would happen to him when
he had to face his own road west.
Outside
the movie theater, actually he had been in the lobby when he spied her and then
hailed her, Jack stopped that come hither Paula Cole and asked her if she would
like to go to the movies that next Friday night when the films changed. When
she answered yes Jack now a veteran of the ploy asked Paula -orchestra or
balcony? Answer: “don’t be silly I would not have accepted if we weren’t going
to the balcony.” With that he would put the fate of Howard in the back of his
mind. First things first.
********************
Jack
brought the Tokay, the cheap wine of the day that got him through the day and
the only other wine beside kosher Mogen David mad monk (although just then
demurely so) Allan Ginsberg, hereafter Monk, would drink to set himself up to
read some sliver of a poem. This night expecting a bunch of people to of all
things a North Beach (San Fran) converted garage gallery something the Monk
would put an end to guys like T.S. Eliot, bum of the month Nazi-symp Ezra Pound
and about fifty other guys and twenty other gals including his high school
prose father. Would burn their old-fashioned words now of no account on a pile
of burnt offerings, a pile of faggots (he would not learn until later that
word’s common origins use to destroy brethren fellow homosexuals). Would get
the world well, for a minute, in search of some fatherless compadre, in search
of the father Jack claimed he had never known, and not he alone in the welter
of great depressions and slogging through war. Maybe in the end they were
searching for Father Death who knows. Jack passed the wine, passed all
understanding before that search was consummated.
Some
guy, some guy who claims that his mother had worked at City Lights Bookstore in
those days and had had an affair with the poet Phillip Larkin and had brought
the dago red and him to the reading. Claimed to know Jack, or maybe it was the
Monk in the old days, in the days when they raged with so many words they
couldn’t keep enough Woolworth 5 &10 notebooks in flannel shirts or golf
scorecard pencils ready wrote this, second hand about being present at the creation,
second hand. At this far remove it is hard to tell fact from fiction, tell who
is bullshitting and who has the goods especially since virtually all the
background characters are gone, some long gone. Make of that what you
will.
********
I have seen the best
poet of the generation before mine, no, let me start over, I have seen a
universal max daddy poet speaking some truths to put old Homer and freaking
staid T.S. Eliot in the shade. Starting off by
declaring that he had seen that the
best minds of his generation, guys like brother in soul Kerouac, be-bop Charlie
Parker, Phil Larkin when he was sober, Johnny Spain when off the needle and
doing cold turkey and of course the daddy them all one Carl Solomon turn to
mush. Turned out in the barren wilderness, not the friendly desert-scrapes
heading west on lonely Greyhound buses or Tourist Bureau hang-ups wilderness
out pass Butte or Boise but what a novelist named Nelson Algren who called the
shots and gave many a troubled youth the keys to the fixer man and
wellness called the neon wilderness,
called that place where the bright lights of the city blinded a proper man (or
woman) some junkie Frankie Machine haven with a wife he hated and a girlfriend
who couldn’t stick with him when he was on the junk. That neon beast from which
no one returned except for quick stays in safe haven mental asylums (called
ironically funny farms but even the Monk, whose own mother had her share of
sorrows in such places could find no humor in such designations).
Get this, no, let me
start again against the cold nose of my sister filled heart. Saw, he the Monk
okay in case I lose my train of thought passing through Salt Lake City and
thoughts of Joseph Smith’s grand hustle taking a bunch of farmers from burned
over lands to the searing sun of the western depot. Saw the same Negro streets Jack,
and one time Jack and he when he, Jack was looking for some rough trade sailors
just off the China Seas pierce earring trail saw around Blue Hill Avenue and
Dudley Street blank, 125th Street blank, Dearborn Street blank,
MacArthur Boulevard blank, Central Avenue blank, Cielo Street in Tijuana blank,
Plaza del Mayo, Montezuma revenge Mexico blank, and wasted in the sweated fetid
humid Thunderbird-lushed night dreaming of pink Cadillacs and stony-faced fixer
men getting wise by the hour on Carl’s ancient fears. (And, this is funny or so
the winos and every hobo, vagrant, escapee, drifter and grafter yelling out in
unison thought so “what is the word-Thunderbird-what is the price forty twice.”
Ready to jackroll some senior citizen lady for the price, for fucking eighty
cents which any self-respecting junkie could cadge in two minutes even in Cielo
Street, Tijuana and that is a hard peso to drill,-ready to commit mayhem at
Park Street subway stations for their “boy,” to be tamped by girl but I will be
discrete since the Feds might raid the place sometime looking for the ghost of
Trigger Burke who eluded them for a very long time. (Trigger who captured
Jack’s imagination and the Monk’s but here is the weird part Carl’s too who
started strutting like him too after the prince of bandit-poets Corso showed
him how to do that slinky swagger on the last visit before the blade at
Sandhill).
Thought that those
angel-headed hipsters hearing choruses of angels strumming their noiseless
wings, those cold as ice in a man’s veins hep cats hanging around Times,
Lafayette, Dupont, Harvard squares (you can fill in your own squares, square
the Monk laughed and Jack hee-hawed) crying in pools of blood coming out of the
wolves-stained sewers around the black corner would never stop bleating for
their liquor. Would not stop until they got popular and headed for the sallow
lights of Harvard Square where they, those angel-headed hipsters in case you (and Carl) forgot hustled young college students, young
impressionable college students green as grass whose parents had had their best
minds, those hallowed students’ mines, okay, wasted in the turbid streets of
south Long Island (not the West Egg of Gatsby’s dream out of Fitzgerald’s fresh
green breast of land to stir even sullen rough trade Dutch sailors looking for
whips and cuts, conquering everything in sight like any other poor-boy
arriviste with too much money and not enough imagination and not East Egg of
the fervid elites but any-town, Levitt-town of those who would escape to Boston
or Wisconsin to face the angel of death, that angel frightening even Monk when
Carl was not around to anchor his brain. Up front and say no go, pass, under
luminous moons which light up sparks and say to that candid world which could
have given a fuck hard times please come again no more.
Here is the beauty of
the green as grass hustle working fast to get enough to fix that jones. Dangle
some college guy, maybe with a girl, shy, with dreams of hard-core liquor or a
well-twisted joints to loosen her up and her fragile come hither virginity (reminding
Jack of that Paula Coe who played the flute for him more than one time in that
Majestic Theater balcony some hardcore Friday night and the Monk, searching for
some blue-eyed Adonis, settling for some
pimpled has been teenager seeking his own father dreams). Lay out the story-kid
your booze and something for me. Done. Later, a big bottle wrapped tight in a
paper bag. Trick, a very thin brew of whiskey split and cash for him to get
himself well. Oh the hipster cons which would have made even the Monk laugh.
The Monk saw hipsters
cadging wine drinks from sullen co-eds staying out too late in the Harvard
Square night who turned out to be slumming from some plebian colleges across
the river maybe good Irish girls from frail Catholic parishes with rosaries in
their fair-skinned hands and a novena book between their knees who nevertheless
has Protestant lusts, strong Protestant lusts busting down the shrines to
Immaculate Conception Virgin Marys pretty painted by guys like Tintoretto and
marching to the church door just behind Martin Luther and his bag of lusts and
Salvation Army clothing in their pallid hearts but unrequited. Here’s how-they those
sullen salty Irish girls, not all redheads but close would arrive at the Café Lana with ten bucks
and their virginity and leave with both leaving some guy with dreams of salty
sucking blowjobs walking out the backdoor and doing the whack job behind the
dumpster –a waste of precious fluids and according to Norman Mailer who would
have known from his perch down in Provincetown when the mix of homosexuals and
straight, except those lusty lonely Portuguese fisherman Marsden Hartley loved
to paint (and to love) the waste of world-historic
fucks which would product the best minds of the next generation all dribbled
away.
You already know about
what you need to know about Protestant girls with their upfront Protestant
lusts although they would not be caught dead, or alive, in Sally splendor
although they certainly could play the penny whistle and damn those world
historic fucks. Maybe tasty Jewish girls from the shtetl not in East or West
Egg who flocked to the other side of the river and gave Irish guys who
previously had dribbled their spunk behind dumpsters after losing out to ten
bucks and virginity in tack tickey-tack Catholic girls who refused to give that
head that would have brought some of the best minds some freaking relief
(better not say fucking relief because that would be oxymoronic). Maybe some off-center
sullen fair-skinned and blonded Quaker, Mennonite, Primitive Baptist or
Brethren of the Common Life kind of Protestant girls, like I said off-center,
who spouted something about one god and no trinities, no god and no trinities
and just feel good stuff.
All three varieties and
yes there were more off-centers but who even knew of Quakers, Mennonites, lusty
Amish girls run away from home, Tantric card-wheelers, and fresh- faced red
light district sluts who at least played the game straight-played the cash
nexus for pure pleasure and maybe to even up some scores. All-Catholic, Jewish,
Protestant, yeah, Quakers (fakirs, fakers and Shakers included), the sluts,
Mennonites and yes those lusty red-faced Amish runaways all coming together
after midnight far from the negro streets, the Monk’s beat and no anachronism
like saying black or Afro-American back to those Mister James Crow days, but
not far from the all night hustlers and dime store hipsters with their ten-cent
cigar store rings and cheap Irish whiskeys bought on the installment plan who
converged around the Hayes-Bickford just a seven league jump from the old end
of the line dead of night Redline subway stop in order to keep the angel of
death at arms’ length. The angel of death a tough bitch to break, and tougher
to cross when they deal went down. There to listen until dawn to homosexuality-
affixed hungry for the keyhole blast or the running sperm fakir poets, the Monk
number one of all the number ones and
slamming singsters (to keep up with the gangster, mobster, hipster theme, okay)
fresh out of cheapjack coffeehouses where three chords and two-line rhymes repeated
in call and response got you all the action you wanted although maybe a little
light on the breadbasket sent around to show that you were appreciated. Yeah,
now that I think about the matter more closely hard times please come again no
more.
Saw the angel of death
make her appearance one night at the Café Lana and then backstopped the Club
Nana to fetch one young thing who warbled like heaven’s own angel. Some Norman
Mailer white hipster (read the Partisan
Review essay if you don’t get this about all kinds of cultural mishmash and
sexual too just ask the Monk when he was in his hungers and not worried about
singing some Walt Whitman song about the rotgut of his generation) turned her
on to a little sister and then some boy and she no longer warbled. No longer
warbled like that angel angle heaven- shamed chorus but did sweet candy cane
tricks for high-end businessmen with homely wives or fruitless ones who had
given up that sort of “thing” after the third junior had been born and who were
ready to make her their mistress if she would just stop singing kumbaya after
every fuck like she was still a freaking warbler. A freaking virgin or
something instead of “used” goods or maybe good for schoolboys whose older
brothers took them to her for their first fling at going around the world,
welcome to the brotherhood or maybe some old fart who just wanted to relive his
dreams before the booze, the three wives and parcel of kids did him in and then
the hustler sent her back to the Club Nana to “score” from the club owner who
was connected with Nick the dream doper man, what did Nelson Algren and Frankie
Machine call him in dead of night, yes, the fixer man, Christ who would get
him- and her well –on those mean angel-abandoned death watch streets. Who knew
that one night at the Hayes (everybody called it just that after they had been
there one night), one after midnight night where they had that first cup of
weak-kneed coffee replenished to keep a place in the scoreboarded night where
hari-kara poets dreamed toke dreams, and brought paper-bag wrapped Tokay wines
just like Monk’s Jack and some Mister dreamed of fresh-faced singer girls
looking for kicks. So please, please, hard times come again no
more.
I have seen frosted
lemon trees jammed against the ferrous night, the night of silly foolish
childhood dreams and misunderstanding about the world, the world that that poet
spoke of in a teenage dream of indefinite duration about who was to have and who
was to have not once those minds were de-melted and made hip to the
tragedies of life, the close call with the mental house that awaits us all.
Yeah Monk was right even about Carl Solomon and all his sorrows before the
knife.
***********
What
the hell did sullen Carl Solomon start before he went under the knife with his
pleading for his father, a father that he had never known since he had been
left back in Poland to peddle his fruits and vegetables to his brethren and his
mother and the four kids headed to the Americas on some tub of a boat and never
looked back. Rumors abounded that he survived because he had a gentile mistress
grabbed after his wife and kids left. That at least is the story Carl told,
told endlessly which would not be so bad but the Monk picked it up in his own
moment of despair.
Monk
searched his valium brain for his own prose-filled father but that was not
nearly good enough, kept him awake at night because he had strange dreams that
his father was not some fake high school teacher writing awful poems in broken
down post-war America. Was afraid that his real father was William Appleton
Williams who denied him three times, didn’t want to believe that his broken
words would mesh so well. Had better dreams that his real father was sexy Walt
Whitman (this remember in dialogue with Carl Solomon before the knife so it is
not clear whether Carl remembered) whose vagabond dreams matched his and his homosexual
desire beating out some Johnny Reb who could give Walt the ride he desired.
Here is the trick though the Monk had sweet dreams whenever he read Leaves of Grass (usually on grass) and
he passed that on to Jack in some secret moment in Denver when some screwball
Adonis was looking for his father.
Now
Jack, funny before Carl grabbed Monk with the father who we never knew
religion, always thought he knew his father, knew the con artist, poker
cheater, movie theater ticket taker great bear of a French-Canadian who came
down the Jackson, Maine road with five cents Canadian in his pocket and dreams
of printing up ads. But that was not the father that he knew but some skinny
stiff wino pissant who he sought out in greater Denver cattle yards. Always
deferred to everlasting Mere, Mere out of some fresh Breton conceit never
getting some whiplash from old father time who died before his time of
heartache and heartbeats. So Jack conned himself into some holy goof, his words
exactly, metaphysical search going up the Bear Mountain, Jackson, Wyoming
Jackson not that trail of tears from down in Maine Jackson where the red brick
and mortar spinning wheels beckoned and he spent and spilled his young manhood
trying to get the fuck out from under even if he couldn’t drive, made him
nervous, to save his life. Funny again that fame never stopped the bleeding
inside looking behind some bushes for some father death, some father time
pissing against that Tokay dream he figured out back in about 1946 but could
never get past. The Monk did him no service on that long trail drive from
Monument Creek to Sunnyvale and then drop off and outs at Big Sur where he got
sober for a week.
Damn
that stuff is contagious, will drive you crazy, when twice removed Lance, me,
went looking for the father he never knew too. Looked for him behind closed
doors to his heart. That distant slightly dim figure who brought home not
enough pay checks. Who never talked about but never got over the Pacific war
like a lot of guys who found themselves on tubs picking up stray comrades from
washed-up beaches, picking up too guys who got too close to chore, got wasted
in some windless fire and fell down into the green-gray-blue surf that gets us
all in the end. The old man, father, never talked much, much about anything
that Lance, me would understand and so Jack-like Ma, Mere, Mom, Mere whatever
you want to call her ran rough-shot over childish dreams and insecurities.
Here’s the worst of it though, Jack-like, he never got to say good-bye to that
father he never knew and crushed his days with regret, total regret that he
didn’t have the sense of a holy goof, Jack talk, to have called a truce, even
an armed truce to the madness that wracked his silly excuse for a family, and
now all his has is slate grey stone to place the remnants down in some unknown
holy place where he can never dwell, yes, Lawrence, me, got caught in the
Monk’s version of Carl’s plainsong, no, got stuck in the damn mire.
Silly
to think that the father time search would only apply to men, young men, holy
goofs like Lawrence, me, when the max daddy sin of all was the way Jack, in
Jack speak, abandoned his Jan, his spitting image Jan, denied like Christ was
denied three times by the count. Jan who would search like some strange Kenneth
Rexroth figure for the father we all knew, or thought we knew once he pointed
us toward the light, once we got the beat, the second-hand beat that washed us
clean in places like Big Sur and Todo el Mundo where Jan still searches in some
desperate wild water surf for some broken down guy who wasted away with drink,
and she with drink too. Jesus, funny he was searching for his father too out in
Middle Eastern wildernesses, will it never end.
Contagious
that is what Sam Lowell said about the freaking search for that lost father
world made up of pure sand and not much else. Some goof, the holy part excluded
was looking for his father, his famous private detective father, a guy named
Lew Archer, who back around Jack time in California ran the rack on few good
cases and then rested for forty years something like that. Tried to claim that
his father’s life death was due to his father’s overused whip, his sorrows that
he could not go the distance with his wife, this goof’s grandmother, his code
of honor that once he took a job he was in, totally in, for good or evil,
and
maybe
that he drank too much Tokay, Jack-like when he wound up behind some freaking
wino pissant dumpster saved but some sister of mercy who could not save him in
the end. Get this though that junkie weirdo so-called grandson, some modern-day
Carl Solomon without the sorrows before he went under the knife could not be
searching for Lew, Lew Archer since Lew never had a son, had no children. Sorry
goof,
Out
on the Jersey looking east first to see the great ocean that drove his forbears
to search for fresh green breasts of land then west to seek dungeon filled
fathers never known in Denver, Santa Fe, Salt Lake City Salvation Army hotels
or whatever they call those blessed places of rest the whole deal was to figure
out a way to look for some American cowboy past, looking for the Monk’s Adonis
if he couldn’t make it with sexy Walt Whitman with the furl of whiskers. There
sat Dean Moriarty, no, fuck that, one Neal Cassidy who would ride the freight
trains west looking for that father the others really did think they had found.
Neal’s old man was in some wino jailcell speaking in tongues to a candid world.
Maybe Carl was right, Monk too we should all cry to the high heavens looking
for the fathers we never knew.
Click on the title to link to an "American Left History" blog entry, dated May 25, 2007, reviewing David Halberstam's "The Fifties", a different look at the "American Dream" from the entry below.
In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th
Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)
By Book Critic Zack James
To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for
something, maybe the truth, maybe just for kicks, for stuff, important stuff that
had happened down in the base of society where nobody in authority was looking or
some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a
name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet
Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a
junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in
flea-bit hotels, all-night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on
every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation. (Yes, I know that the actual term “beat” was first
used by Kerouac writer friend John Clemmon Holmes in an article in some arcane
journal but the “feel” had to have come from a less academic source so I will
crown the bandit prince Corso as genesis)
Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax
player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my oldest
brother Alex who was washed clean in the Summer of Love, 1967 but must have
known the edges of Jack’s time since he was in high school when real beat
exploded on the scene in Jack-filled 1957, they called “blowing to the China
seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, that high white note he heard
achieved one skinny night by famed sax man Sonny Johns, dead beat, run out on
money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for
the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you
will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at
home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being,
hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all Jack’s kid
stuff high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man
caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the
world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings.
Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out
on the poet princely mean streets of New York, Chi town, Mecca beckoning North
Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps (and the
fleas were real no time for metaphor down in the bowels where the cowboy
junkies drowse in endless sleeps, raggedy winos toothless suck dry the dregs
and hipster con men prey on whoever floats down), half stirred left on corner diners’
coffees and groundling cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).
I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing
reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling
out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my
brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about
that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at
a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory
two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an
event whose 50th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well
and so very appropriate to mention since there were a million threads, fibers,
connections between “beat” and “hippie” despite dour grandpa Jack’s attempts to
trash those connection when the acolytes and bandit hangers-on came calling looking for the “word.” So even
Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave
that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan
Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel
book of a different kind (not found on the AAA, Traveler’s Aid, Youth Hostel
brochure circuit if you please although Jack and the crowd, my brother and his
crowd later would use such services when up against it in let’s say a place
like Winnemucca in the Nevadas or Neola in the heartlands).
Literary stuff for sure but the kind of stuff that moves
generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the
creation documents the latter of which would drive Alex west before he finally
settled down to his career life as a high-road lawyer (and to my sorrow and
anger never looked back which has caused more riffs and bad words than I want
to yell about here).
Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then
add my brother’s Alex name into the mix that automatically brings up memories
of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex
and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Frankie, Jack, Jimmy, Si,
Josh (he a separate story from up in Olde Saco, Maine and so only an honorary
corner boy after hitching up with the Scribe out on a Russian Hill dope-filled
park), Bart, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a
tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967, their birthright
event, just mentioned. Markin was the
vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker, what did Jack
call his generation’s such, oh yeah, holy goofs, who
got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there
was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of
years before 1967 (and which nobody in the crowd paid any attention to, or
dismissed out of hand, what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the
local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural
days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of
Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran
wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major
towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie and a bunch of other guys who took a very
different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of
a very different world.
But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s travel adventure book
which had caused a big splash in 1957(after an incredible publishing travail
since the story line actually related to events in the late 1940s and which
would cause Jack no end of trauma when the kids showed up at his door looking
to hitch a ride on the motherlode star, and had ripple effects into the early
1960s and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that
book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and
hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway, like I say I think the best
part, have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by
hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going
high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain, desert night but staying
unsettled for a while anyway.
Like I said above Alex was out on the road two years and
other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that
was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not
always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first
back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into
the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more
years upon his return before his untimely and semi-tragic end down some dusty
Jack-strewn road in Mexico cocaine deal blues. With maybe this difference from
today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly
bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and
pinkos called it that for fear of being tarred with those brushes. Alex,
Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin
included, were strictly “from hunger” working class kids who when they hung
around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money
fast any way they could or of getting into some hot chick’s pants any way they could as
anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s
goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little bit “from hunger”
takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not
the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law back then when
the coppers were just waiting for corner boy capers to explode nay Friday or
Saturday night, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack
when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was
what for corner boys, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on
forlorn Friday night corners anymore.
What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor
corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley “Scribe” from
the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and
that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was
as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and
poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the
“midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would
have the inept Markin actually execute the plan. That was for smooth as silk
Frankie now also like Alex a high-road lawyer to lead. That operational sense
was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous
lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against
him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would
confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the
social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise.
That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about
ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked
him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.
The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy
life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae
for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get
out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to
folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still
doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny
Bob Dylan above all else.) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and
his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956
which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less
Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that
they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road.
They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about
some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a
mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my
brother Alex’s memory bank.)
Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown
up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he
had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some
grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the
base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring.
So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure
on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several
times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was
having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping
almost like Jack wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper
scroll in about three weeks. So it was through the Scribe via Alex that I got
the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60th anniversary I am passing on the
bug to you.
Frank Jackman comment:
Not all the entries in this space are connected to politics, although surely most of them can be boiled down into some political essence, if you try hard enough. The following is one of those instances where trying to gain any “political traction”, or as I am fond of saying drawing any “lessons” would be foolhardy. I should also note that this entry is part of a continuing, if sporadic, series of “trips down memory lane” provoked by a fellow high school classmate who has been charged with keeping tabs on old classmates and their doings, even those of old-line communists like this writer. Go figure?
****************
Markin comment: This one is in response to an e-mail from an old elementary school classmate. Ouch, no double ouch!
The Project Boys, And Girls-For Dennis V.
"Ain't got no time for the corner boys, down in the street making all that noise"-a line from Bruce Springsteen's classic song of working class love, "Jersey Girl".
Taffrail Road, Yardarm Lane, Captain's Walk, Quarterdeck Road, Sextant Circle, and Snug Harbor School. Yes, those names and places from the old housing project down in Germantown surely evoke imagines of the sea, of long ago sailing ships, and of battles fought off some mist-driven coast by those hearty enough to seek fame and fortune. But, of course, we know that anyone with even a passing attachment to the old town has to have an instinctual love of the sea, and fear of its furies when old Mother Nature turns her back on us. Yes, the endless sea, our homeland the sea, the mother we never knew, the sea... But, enough of those imaginings.
Today I look to the landward side of that troubled housing project peninsula, that isolated expanse of land jutting out of the water and filled with wreckage of another kind. No, this will not be a sociological survey of working class pathologies made inevitable by the relentless struggle to scramble for life's necessities, the culture of poverty, or the like. Nor will it be a political screed about rising against the monsters that held us down, or the need for such a rising. Nor even about the poetic license necessary to cobble pretty words together to speak of the death of dreams, dreamless dreams or, maybe, just accepting small dreams to fit a small life. Rather, I am driven by the jumble of images that passed through the thoughts of a ragamuffin of a project boy as he tried to make sense out of a world that he did not create, and that he had no say in.
Ah, the scenes. Warm, sticky, humid summer nights, the air filled with the pungent, overpowering soapy fragrance from the Proctor and Gamble factory across the channel that never quite left one's nostrils. Waking up each morning to face the now vanished Fore River Shipyard superstructure; hearing the distant clang of metals being worked to shape; and, the sight of flickering welding torches binding metals together. The endless rust-encrusted, low-riding oil tankers coming through the channel guided to port by ear-shattering, whistle-blowing tugs. The interminable wait for the lifeline, seemingly never on time, Eastern Mass bus that took one and all in and out through that single Palmer Street escape route. Or that then imposing central housing authority building where I was sent by my mother, too proud to go herself, with the monthly rent, usually short. Oh, did I mention Carter's Variety Store, the sole store for us all the way to Sea Street, another lifeline. Many a time I reached in Ma's pocketbook to steal money, or committed other small larcenies, in order to hike down and get my sugar-drenched stash.
And the kids. Well, the idea in those days was that the projects were a way-station to better things, or at least that was the hope. So there was plenty of turnover of friends but there was a core of kids, like me and my brothers, who stayed long enough to learn the ropes. Every guy had to prove himself, tough or not, by hanging with guys that were "really" tough. That was the ethos, and thems were the rules. I took my fair share of nicks but also, for a moment, well for more than a moment as it turned out, I was swayed by the gangster lifestyle. Hell, it looked easy. With classmate Rickie B. (who, later, served twenty years for a series of armed robberies) I worked my first "clip" in some downtown jewelry store. Moving on, I was the "holder" for more expansive enterprises with George H. (who, later, got killed when a drug deal he was promoting went south on him). But that was then, right?
Oh, the different things that came up. Oddball things like Christmas tree bonfires, and annual Halloween hooliganism... Hey, all this is so much eyewash because what, at least in memory's eye, is the driving "projects" image is the "great awakening". Girls. And being ill at ease around them, and being a moonstruck kid, and the shoe leather-wearing out marathon walking, thinking about what to do about them, especially when the intelligence-gatherers told you about a girl who liked you. And the innocent, mostly dreaded, little petting parties, in dank little basements that served as 'family rooms' for each apartment, trying to be picked by the one you want to pick you and, well, you get the drift. Now a lot of this is stuff any kid goes through, except just not in "the projects". And some of it is truly "projects" stuff - which way will he go, good or bad? But this next thing kind of ties it together. Just about the time when I seriously committed to a petty criminal lifestyle I found the Thomas Crane Library branch that was then in the Snug Harbor School. And one summer I just started to read every biography they had in the Children's section. While looking, longingly, over at the forbidden Adult section on the other side of the room for the good stuff. And I dreamed. Yes, I am a "projects" boy, and I survived to tell the tale.
