***Out In The American Neon Wilderness-In The Beginning
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
This is the way that I
heard the story, a story out of the neon wilderness, a story of a still not
quite finished love, one sad, rainy, bluesy Cambridge bar stool night in the
late 1970s, the Miller Hi-Life sign blinking off and on making strange shadows
on Josie’s sad brown world eyes as she talked:
…she,
Josie Little (Anglicized from Litvinov a couple of generations back, back
around the turn of the 20th century, by paternal grandparents from
Russia seeking Americanization as well as by immigration officials at Ellis
Island who could not spell the old country name correctly), had been at her
wit's end, or maybe that was too harsh a term to express her condition giving
her need, but she had been unhappy in the early 1970s, a few years before this
Miller-Hi-Life sign-etched bar stool conversation took place. Unhappy after
years, her growing up years, of being the dutiful daughter, the New York Jewish
middle-class gentile- emulating dutiful daughter. No JAP princess she although
she had dreamed of that exalted position when she was young and had hung out
with some serious JAPs when she attended Hunter College High School in
Manhattan where she had been an outstanding student, and they, well, they
attended the school and it looked good on the future husband-hunting resumes.
Just then though she had been unhappy,
having just finished an internship (via Boston University) with Doctor Telly,
yes that Telly, the big up and coming quantum sociologist who was on the
cutting edge of the next big thing in the field, and she was also exhausted
from study, research and her gofer existence on his team..
Having
been the dutiful daughter, striving to please her parents as she accumulated
each new degree and award, she had missed the turmoil on the campuses in the
1960s (her undergraduate campus the volatile University Of Wisconsin, although
given her dogged attention to her studies she might as well have been at North
Dakota State or some such Podunk school). She had only found out about half the
anti-war, anti-establishment, anti, well, anti- everything, every not student
thought of stuff that went on there when she had come to Boston, and her fellow
doctoral program students kept quizzing her about this and that thing that had happened
there and had she been she involved in it once they knew where she was from.
More importantly, she had missed that new wave breeze that had come through the
land in those days, the sense of jailbreak from what pleased (or didn’t please)
parents, professors, police, employers , or anyone else who got in the way. She
was ready, all twenty-five years of her ready, to break out, break out and
check out what he had called the American neon wilderness.
The
he in question, Allan Murphy, her boyfriend, companion, partner, lover whatever
term of art, relationship art you wished to use in those topsy-turvy times, had
told her about the search for the American neon wilderness one night when they
had been together for while (not living together, that came later), the night
when she first tried some mescaline with him. And after that night she had been
frantic to get out and see the American countryside and make her own estimate
about what was going, or not going, on. As part of that mescaline dream night
Allan had steadily tried to coax her into travelling with him on that journey,
a journey that would probably last six months to a year depending, depending on
what pleased them, what they wanted to see, what happened on that far-flung
road and she had gotten getting rid of enough hesitations in order to get rid
of that wit's end condition, or whatever it was that was eating at her to buy
into his plan. But she said she was getting ahead of herself. She hadn’t
explained to me how she had come to be entranced by Allan, how she was
beginning to smell those open roads wherever they might lead and to dream of
them, and to begin to think of a defensive barrage against her parents’
seventy-seven wishes, expectations, and disappointments when explanation time
came.
Sometime
after she had come to Boston in late 1970 she had settled into the student
ghetto across the river in in Brighton with her own little first- floor
apartment off of Commonwealth Avenue, and after she had settled into her
studies, those Telly-inspired studies that she was exhausted from, she had become
interested in what was then to be the last stages of the anti-Vietnam war
movement. That interest was sparked (along with some square-baiting by some
fellow interns when she expressed her basic previous un-political nature) on a
couple of dates with a guy whom she met through a girl in her seminar, Lucy,
who was something in the Socialist Workers Party, an organization that at the
time was involved in a last push to end the war before President Nixon blew the
place to kingdom come. That organization was also involved (as were other
groups) in trying to corral in or contribute to the burgeoning anti-war fever
among the U.S. soldiers, both in America and in Vietnam. The rank and file
soldiers of the Army, in particular, were half in mutiny over the pace of
withdrawal and other issues related to their cannon-fodder existence.
One
night, one Monday night, she attended a meeting here in Cambridge, at the
Harvard Divinity School, where there was to be planning for a retreat to help
organize that anti-war G.I. movement. A lot of those in attendant were
ex-servicemen, including Allan. Allan had just been released from an Army
stockade after about a year for refusing to fight in Vietnam (or anywhere else
for that matter, although she did not know that at the time) and as the meeting
progressed and it was his turn to speak he was explaining the ins and outs of his
struggle to get out of the clutches of the military, the complicated legal case
that was waged to get him out, and the absolute (his word) necessity of
continuing to directly cramp the military’s style by going right to the source,
the soldier, the cannon fodder(his term that is where she got it from having
had absolutely no experience or knowledge about the military). He said all of
this in a slow, steady style with a wicked Boston accent, you know that “pahk
the cah in Harvard Yahd” goof stuff that Kennedy had made everybody aware of a
few years back, with a little working-class twist. While he was addressing the
audience she, sitting not twenty feet away from him, noticed that he had some
very fierce blue eyes. She, from a brown-eyed, brown hair, brown everything
world (including all brown herself) had never seen such blue eyes, and fierce
too. She was mesmerized.
After
he finished and the audience broke into groups that were split up according to
what task one wished to participant in to help organize that anti-war G.I.
retreat she gravitated toward the group where he was sitting, the contacting
GIs group. When the members introduced themselves she noticed that he was kind
of staring, well, not staring but he kept looking in her direction, and gave a
little smile her way. She responded with little smiles too, and a little
confusion too because while she considered herself nice, and maybe pretty, she
was not some movement heavy or anything like that, as were some of the women in
the room. She tried to see if he was smiling at anybody else, at any other
woman there. She did not think so. At the close of the meeting he went up to
her and softly, very softly, shook her hand and said that he hoped that she
would be able to make the retreat to be held at a site, a well-known retreat
site, just over the New Hampshire border that had been donated to the cause by
some anonymous people who wanted to make sure that the movement had a place to
put on such events. People, according to Allan and others were always doing
stuff like that then. It was part of that wave that she had missed most of by
being the dutiful daughter. That was it. A hand-shake. Darn, that was it.
The
retreat was to be held two weekends after that meeting and she had originally
planned to attend it, if she got her studies completed by then. After “meeting”
Allan she knew she would be going and as it turned out she would be going up in
the same car as him. That retreat Friday night as they met in Harvard Square to
take the trip north she noticed Allan looking at her in that same way he had
looked at her at that first meeting with that little smile when they greeted. After
arriving at their destination and while waiting in line to register he asked
her, expressing a hope, a fervent hope he said later, that she would spare some
time to talk to him if she had a chance.
This
comment disarmed her a little, most of the guys she had dated (and slept with,
while she may have been dutiful daughter she was no prude, not since back in
Hunter College High days when those Jewish princesses told her, and showed her,
what was what with guys), mostly Jewish guys from Long Island or places like
that, not the city, when she went to Wisconsin, had been, maybe sensing
something in her, kind of pushy, kind of bossy and took the lead, like it was a
manly right. And in the boy and girl wars then those were kind of the rules, at
least that is what she thought and everybody else too, new breeze coming
through or not. Here though was a guy who was asking her if she had time for
him, like he didn’t take that local poster boy of the anti-war GI struggle role
assigned to him all that seriously. At least with her. With a dry throat and
barely getting it out she remembered she said she hoped that he might have some
time to talk to her. She blushed, red-brown blushed, and he, sensing the
oddness of the moment just squeezed her hand, squeezed it almost as softly as at
their first meeting. Then he said with those blue eyes sparkling, not fierce
but devilish sparkling , showing his little blarney Irish side (his term,
explained later), he would not have bothered to come up if he hadn’t expected
to talk to her. And then he blushed, and out of nowhere she squeezed his hand.
Whether it was softly done or not she could not remember but it was a squeeze.
Just then someone yelled out the first call for the meeting to start and they
parted, him turning back to her with that quizzical smile as they did so. And
that was how they had started and maybe why she was ready later to chance
things, to chuck everything to travel with him wherever the winds might take
them.
Jose
kept coming back to that first mescaline-edged night when Allan laid out his
puff dream scenario, scenarios really, since they were, drug-induced, up all
night and half the next day. Allan had said all along, or from pretty early on
in their affair, that he had a childhood dream that he wished to tell her
about, wished to bring her in on, wished her to make part of her dreams too but
that he felt that he should wait until the proper moment to discuss it. The
proper moment being understood as a time when they were comfortable with each
other, comfortable enough that he could spill what he had to say and not be
dismissed out of hand. And also, to be in some drug –induced state, not weed
but mescaline which she had never tried, that they could feel totally honest
with each other and then he changed his mind and said she could dismiss the
thing out of hand if it felt too crazy to her.
Josie
had not experimented with drugs while she was at drudge Wisconsin although she
(or anybody else ) could not walk in a dorm or most any place on campus, or its
immediate environs like the Rathskeller, the big hip local drink, drug, and rock and roll hang-out, without getting at
least a second-hand high (she did not know what that meant then but only
learned what it meant subsequently) from some pungent mary jane, weed, herb or
whatever somebody called it on any given day or reflecting any given local
moniker for the stuff. She had heard, as well, that peyote buttons, mescaline,
a little LSD (for the advanced heads but not as widely used as on the East and
West coasts), and more and more, cocaine were becoming favored recreational
drugs de jus but no, she had not
partaken of those pleasures.
When
she had come to Boston some people in one of her classes, Advanced Quantum
Sociology (taught by Professor Telly himself), organized a party and that was
where she had her first drug encounter as a big old joint was passed around and
she felt she had to be cool and so took a few hits and coughed, coughed like
crazy for a while when the harsh smoke hit her throat and everybody laughed. [Join
the club, sister.] She liked it, like the way it relaxed her, like the odd
feeling and strange moods that she felt while high but had seldom imbibed in while
she was in her drudge phase before Allan. Strangely she had kept some hash,
given as a gift from some guy who took her fancy one night at the Kasbah Grille
in Harvard Square when she was “on the hunt” with her girlfriends. He had spent
the night with her at her apartment after he had introduced her to the bong of
hashish (and its far less harsh throat-tickling and more vivid sweet dreams
than weed) that next morning, since he was heading out of the hitchhike road to
D.C. for some anti-war demonstration and knew, especially in Connecticut knew,
that if he did not want to spend some hard time, some very hard time, in the
pokey that he better not be “holding.” And thus the gift (fired up when Allan
and she were looking for a different kick when he said he had never tried it.).
Allan
and she, started, discreetly, to smoke more weed (his term, she always had
called it pot from what she heard it called in her Wisconsin days but she
picked up his more street-wise term for some reason) both to relax, relax while
having sex, and just to kind of catch up with their generation and its
predilections. The discreet part was necessary because he, and to a lesser extent
she, had a high political profile doing that anti-war G.I. work that placed
them square in the sights of the state and federal cops. Once he had been
hauled in for questioning by the feds in Boston and that clinched the discreet
part. So no smoking in the Wild West streets of Boston, or at parties, and
such. Their connection was through an interesting third party, Sam Stevens, who had a millions
connections for dope, mostly weed, going all the way down to high-grade Mexico
and back, although he, himself was not a dealer but an angel of mercy, a guy
who passed the stuff on to his friends. He lived like a lot of Boston student
ghetto denizens off a very hefty trust fund and so not only did he have the
capacity to show largesse, but did so. A
real cool guy.
Allan
admitted to her that he had not been much of a drug user; he said maybe he
would do a little speed on exam prep nights to catch up on that reading he had
put off until the last minute at school, before his army stint, before he got
“religion” on what the American state was all about. Previously he had been, as an official member in
good-standing of the working- class, of the Irish working- class, a heavy
drinker, whisky mainly, with a beer chaser when he was frisky, water chaser
when he was broke, and had done just a little in the service, some passed joints.
He said that he didn’t like the taste of
the stuff, the way the smoke bothered his throat, although he was a tobacco
smoker, or the way it made him feel, feel out of control, in another place
without kicks. And that was how they got to the idea of trying mescaline and
other drugs, but mainly mescaline to help express eternal truths or whatever
they thought would come from such experimentation. Naturally Sam was the
friendly provider for the stuff, and also to insure that it was righteous since
in that period of time lots of awful stuff was being put into drugs by street
dealers who were looking to make quick scores and blow town, the stuff of
dreams, or of dream puffs.
So
that first mescaline night Allan told of his child dream, his dream to escape
the damn world that he was born into and hadn’t any say in creating, or being
asked about. One could see when he talked like that why he would be a prime
candidate for some foreboding army stockade when the deal went down, although his
decision to confront the Army head-on was a closer thing than one might think
as he explained one night, one non drug-induced night. That” had not being
asked about stuff” he said bothered him since about age ten or eleven. He
related some stuff about his family, as she did about hers but that later,
about how he was in a constant civil war with his mother from as early as he
could remember. His poor, hard-working when he could find work father, with no
breaks in the world, the hard scrabble world of coal mine Appalachia, was a
shadow figure somewhere in the background. The main bouts were with “Ma,” over
money, over going, or not going here or there, of breathing, breathing too much
to hear him tell it. Kid’s stuff but big on some kid horizon. So that around
ten or eleven he started dreaming, first started dreaming about escaping from
his tumble- down working poor boy fate, about the big jail breakout.
Where
he lived growing up was near the water in Hull, about fifteen or twenty miles
from Boston. He said he could see across to Castle Island on a good day and so
he could see the tankers and other ships coming in the bay to leave off their
product or pick up stuff. That is where he then got the idea to build a raft
and go out to join a ship moored in the channel and fled to the big wide world
part unknown. In the end it didn’t work out since his reach exceeded his grasp,
he could not, not being very good mechanically even then, even with brother
help get a sea-worthy, a channel worthy raft together. But that escape idea,
that idea of seeing the great big world, of seeing in person the places and
persons that he had heard about, from teachers and others heard about, read
about, big sassy book poured over and thumbed over until he was exhausted, and
seen too that old black and white television screen we all were glued to crowded
his brain.
That
failed raft experiment, in any case, was not the end of it although it ended
his physical break-out end for a while. He spoke of sneaking out the back of
the house on midnight runs to Harvard Square at sixteen. Of walking a couple of
miles to caught a local all-night bus to then catch the subway at Fields Corner
in Dorchester and to rumble, tumble, amble his way over to Cambridge, to the
all-night open Hayes-Bickford. Being there just to feel the air of the place when
things were beginning to happen there in 1962, to just be around the new thing,
the jailbreak out thing that he sensed was coming. And then rumble, tumble,
amble back on that subway before dawn to avoid mother worries, mother hassles
and mother penalties. And then one thing led to another and he put the dream on
hold, put it on hold through college, through whisky nights, through some
personal political dream etched out in Kennedy days splendor, in short to get his while helping others get theirs.
And so his horizon narrowed, his fervent desire to see, hear, read, be with
everything, everybody, to see how things ticked is what he said he called it
faded, childhood, young manhood faded.
And
then came the Army. Allan didn’t like to talk about it, talk about it all that
much, especially when early on she would go on and on about it trying to get a
feel for who she was getting tied up with, about what happened while he was in
the military, the Army. He would cut her short with this- he did what he had to
do, did it, and he was not sorry, nor sorry for a minute, that he did what he
did. He said, chuckling, the worst of it was when they threw him in solitary
for a while and wouldn’t let him smoke cigarettes in those days when he was a
fairly heavy smoker (although the system worked out among solitary prisoners
allowed him to cadge a few puffs while in the rest room, ah, latrine). He had
begun to smoke more after he was inducted when there was so much dead time that
the trainees would just stand around smoking one cigarette after another to
kill time until some jackass (his word) sergeant sadistically decided he wanted
his charges to double- time with full backpack somewhere for some reason known only
to that self-same sergeant, for some odd national or personal security reason.
Mainly
though Allan said he would go back and forth in his mind about whether before
he went in he should have decided differently and not allowed himself to be
inducted. The back and forth really centered on that faded dream, that faded
break out dream that he let fall on the back burner at a time when having it
front and center would have counted . See, he came from working-class people,
no, working poor, a notch below that, his poor be-draggled father, from down in
Podunk (his term) Kentucky, down in white hillbilly Appalachia, down among the
poor white trash of literature. The just poor that she knew needed help from
when she read Michael Harrington’s The Other America for a sociology
class that she took as an under-graduate where he described the white folks
left behind in the go-go America of the 1950s.
Allan
turned red one time when she mentioned that book and that she knew, book knew, of
what his father, and his people were all about, the wretched of the earth in
America. He related a story, a school story, about how his high school, Hull High, was going to reach out to the
victims in Appalachia by sending food, clothing and money down there, down to
Hazard, Kentucky. Jesus, he said when the headmaster announced the program over
the loudspeaker, that was where his father was born (he had shown her that fact
listed on his birth certificate). In any case his father was always out of
work, out of luck, and out of Allan’s frame of reference especially when he got
older and started drifting away from the family and started to develop his own
political perspective and his own jailbreak way out of the scene he grew up
with.
But
that was exactly the problem, that from hunger bringing up, that
hand-me-down-where-is-the-rent-money-coming-from-keep-your-eyes-to-the-ground-shame
and sorry combined with three thousand pounds of plain ordinary vanilla 1950s
all ships rising teen angst and teen alienation, that came between him and all
his decisions in those days. Along with some very standard American idiotic
patriotic my-country-right-or- wrong local mores and customary Roman Catholic
subservience to authority, Rome or D.C.(in this life he said, all was to be
milk and honey in the next) in that Irish neighborhood that he grew up in. That
and his very real appetite for going for the main chance in politics. That was
what he had been aiming for, a career, a regular career in politics, helping
his people while helping himself, is the way he put it.
He
told Josie that he had spent most of 1968 working that main chance idea as he
was getting ready to graduate from school and had some time to “build his
resume.” He started out that fateful year holding his nose and committed to
backing Lyndon Johnson for re-election until Eugene McCarthy (Irish Gene he mentioned,
a poet and a dreamer and thus worthy of support) pushed the envelope and
Johnson backed out. He went wild for Robert Kennedy, his idea of beau political
animal then, ruthless to political enemies, young or old, and not forgetful
about old wounds either, and this beautiful patrician vision of “seeking a
newer world.” When Bobby was assassinated he went over to Humphrey and would up
there under the principal that Richard Noxious, uh, Nixon was the main enemy of
the people of the world (and of his political advancement). So not the profile
of a guy who was going to chance charging windmills, or crush dreams of
bourgeois break-outs, no way
So
Allan went, sullenly went when drafted. After about three days he realized that
he had made a mistake, a serious mistake and that he should have chanced draft-
dodger jail instead. But see, it was hard for a guy hard wired for a political
career to shift gears like that, so he fumbled and bumbled with the problem for
a while. He had always been anti-war in kind of an abstract way; kind of an “all
men are brothers” way. He told Josie that he had first expressed that opinion
on the Boston Common back in the fall of 1960 when he attended a small demonstration
at the Park Street Station with a bunch of little old angel ladies in tennis sneakers
and stern-faced Jehovah-etched Quakers who were calling for nuclear
disarmament. He also told her as if to express the Janus nature of the times,
of himself, that the next week he was working the streets of Hull passing out
Jack Kennedy presidential literature. So he stumbled and mumbled fitfully
through the problem.
Of
course if you were part of the military, down in some boondock (his term)
southern town out in nowhere far from northern gentility, even rough-edged
northern working- class gentility, you were up the creek without a paddle (her
expression), and also surrounded by guys, maybe sullen, maybe gung-ho, but
mainly like you were kind of committed to your fate (and afraid, afraid like
hell of that constant threat, Fort Leavenworth, the main Army penal threat)
then stumbling and mumbling is what you did, and did it for a while. But the
military fates were not kind, not wartime kind, not 1969 wartime kind, when the
war was eating up men and material at prestigious rates, while the world
clamored for shut-down and so Allan’s fate was to be a grunt, a foot soldier,
and the only place that foot soldiers were being gainfully employed in those
days was in sweaty, sullen Southeast Asia. And in the normal course of events
after training he was so ordered.
And
still he mumbled, stumbled, and tumbled. He, political animal he, tried to work
around it administratively, pulling some chip dues in with his cronies, no go.
He tried to do an end- around by claiming conscientious objector status,
although he was uneasy about it since he believed that there were some just
wars and that position was not a ground for discharge then, no go. Then one
night, one night, a Sunday night, a hot and sweaty Sunday night, sitting in the
base PX after the library had closed he decided, decided that some form of
resistance was the only way out. Personal resistance since he saw no other
kindred. He went out in the sultry night and started walking and planning, and
half-hesitating. He would make a public display; he would go AWOL and make a
splash. Other soldiers he had heard had done such stunts prodded on by those
same Jehovah Quakers who formed the backdrop of his political coming of age in
Boston Common as a boy. No. As his resolve firmed up, and as he got courage,
some well-spring of Appalachia hunker- down father genes- bought courage he
thought later when he had plenty of time to think, he decided that he would make
a showing in front of his fellow soldiers.
So
one Monday morning as the base gathered for its weekly gathering of troops on
the parade ground for inspection (and to see who was missing, if anybody) he
walked out, walked out of his nearby barracks in civilian clothes, carrying a
simple homemade sign “Bring The Troops Home.” He was immediately seized and
man-handled by some what he called ‘lifer’ sergeants (who, when he thought
about it later probably didn’t know if he was soldier or just a damn hippie
protester trespasser and he therefore should have been in uniform). And the
rest was mainly legal proceedings, and doing the time, doing that almost a year
in the base stockade. (Under the outside civilian parallel legal proceedings on
his behalf then in effect they couldn’t sent him to Fort Leavenworth without
violating a civilian judge’s order.) Like Josie said, he didn’t like it talk
about it all that much, except he had plenty of time to think, think those
ancient break-out thoughts that had him (and her as he told his story) in its
thrall.
Josie
realized that the way she told the story, told Allan’s childhood dream story,
all cold sober, no sweet dream drug haze, no colors, no pizzazz, sounded as
straight narration like a good description for why he wanted to see the world,
or at least the continent which was what his preliminary plan had entailed, but
did not half-explain how she was inflamed by his fire that night, or
thereafter. Or why he was either. That night as she remembered it he was in
what he called (and she started to get a drift sense of it more and more after
that drift snowdrift night they connected up in New Hampshire) his high blarney
Irish lost land poet and prophet mood, a mood for him enhanced not by the color
dream sequences going through hi mescaline-fueled brain but ancient memory
longing to understand the world, the fellahin world that she associated, via
her fervent Zionist parents, with the Palestinian refugee camps but he
associated with his own bog Irish, his mill town Lowell, Nashua, Lawrence,
Saco, his Iowa farmhands, his Nova Scotia Grand Banks hearty and hellish
fisherman, his Woody Guthrie okie and arkie dust- blown refugees, his bracero
mex, or flip (Filipino) grape-picking field hands, and mex dark home land
village runaways when the land gave out or the federales got too close. And
that was just on this continent. He wanted to understand, as well, what made
people tick, why they worked so hard to keep in one place, in order to keep
from going backwards.
And
why too in certain spots, in certain cultural oases she called them (and he
yelled at her, faux yelled at her although as she thought back on the moment he
probably was serious, to stop with the soc jargon that was destroying the
common language of explanation, almost like a damn church that has spent too
much time in the wilderness and developed a secret coda among the elect but had
only generals, no corporals, not followers), new forms of expression, new words
to explain life’s struggles were developed and nowhere else. Places like Frisco
town (his always usage for that place after he heard Memphis Minnie’s song of
the same name) with its beat down, beat around, beat beatitude beat scene and
later it summer of love, like L.A. and its characters out of central casting,
cast really on the beaches of Santa Monica, Venice Beach, and surfer- ready
Malibu, like New Jack City (although that locale, her hometown and his place of
a thousand times, was not scheduled except to end at and to dump whatever was
to be dumped at her parents place when they finished up), like Boston even to
some extent. So that was what was on his mind but that was just the outline,
they talked for hours (and other days after that first extended outline they
continues talking about it, about what was remembered, tip of tongue remembered
since color, and other less ancient dreams also snuck into that night).
Strangely
he started talking about stone cold jetties, the one up in Hampton, up in New
Hampshire (not our first bonding New Hampshire old converted farmland homestead
night but the seacoast, by the water, that drove a lot of his imaginings) and
how a man could sit for hours and watch the seas come and go, crashing against
that rock-strewn jetty, ripping the face of the stone and shipping it express
back to the shoreline sands. He had actually done such sitting one time when
they first started going together, before they lived together, and he ran up
there to see some old anti-war G.I. buddy, a kooky guy, a wild monk guy all
caped up, for real, named Magic Mick, who was transforming himself into some
kind of groupie zen master. He had heard from Magic Mick that up in mill town
Saco, up in Maine there was a jetty that made Hampton look like dry land
slumbers, stretching out to motherland sea, the homeland, the place where we
started from. Allan said they could check that out as they headed up the coast.
See the vague outline of the trip was to head north before it got too cool,
head west before the cold Denvers hit, California about November and then south
to Mexico for the winter and then back east. There was no need to stop at
Hampton though as those stones were, as he said, passé, they needed new
adventures, new sittings for hours druid Stonehenge by the sea stones. She did
not learn until later, later when the trip was well under way, that while he
was addicted to ocean edges, tepid waters running to shore, fetid marshes to
feed mother oceans starving denizens, and mephitic smucks at low tide fetching
earthbound clams for human hungers, that he feared, deathly feared, and rightly
so mother sea’s fury. Feared since childhood being on the water, being
boat-stirred or swim- stirred since he had logged drifted out to sea and almost
three dip drowned and so he searched, searched longingly for succor from the
ocean depths by getting landward as far out as possible.
He
expected to see from that Saco jetty vantage point as well the fellaheen
lobster boat men plying the waters off the coast, plying their lobster trap
trade. Fierce men fiercely defending their flash- colored pots against
all-comers, all comers except king Neptune with his quirky habit of dumping a
certain percentage of them on land as tribute to his generous nature at other
times. Allan knew, childhood knew, the mucky gypsy clam muckers down at Hull’s
Hell’s End (real gypsies who worked the carnivals by night, their women the old
wilting rose for the lady trick, and
maybe the night sweat trick as well for a lonely carnival fortune wheel losers,
pay up, pay up twice, brother). Swarthy, dark heathens, gruff, gruff even to
homeland ocean boys and gruff about who could and could not ply the mudflats
seeking clam bits to spice up some off-hand spur-of-the-moment family barbecue
before it all, the family, fell apart and went about six different ways. So he
wanted to know their brethren, their swamp yankee down east brethren brought up
in small seacoast villages harsh learning life against the Atlantic gales, out
in the creeping boats, seaworthy or not, fully-equipped or not, at dawn, if not
before, coffee-filled, some stone cold breakfast so they could get a little extra
sleep, maybe rum brave when all was said and done. Knowing fair shares of “oh
yah jim, he fell overboard a few years back, they have his name over on the
seamen’s memorial in town if you want to know, a fine lobster man, “Sam well, Sam
never, was right after that boom hit him, hit him square on the noggin, maybe
his name should go up there too,” and such.
When
Allan got his fill of sitting and viewing, and viewing and sitting they would
move on up the coast, maybe picking blueberries along the way for fresh fire-
side breakfast pancakes, or just pop it in with the oatmeal, and head to Bar
Harbor and the swells, and some Arcadian delight. And of sweetening it up with
thoughts midnight love-makings on the secluded rocks all naked and free and
away from prying eyes and with the sea playing some kind of sea symphony to the
rhythm of their love. [Yes, I could see what she meant about his blarney, myself
full of blarney, although she smiled when she mentioned the rocks, mentioned
the love-making on the rocks and maybe thought back to nights of risings and
falling of the sea and of them, or as she related another time, when she told
me a story about them in Perkin’s Cove also up in Maine, that she had started
that whole idea with her delight at the sea that day and had suggested that
very idea.]
Josie
had to laugh as she told of Allan’s dream, Allan’s get out in the wide world
dream for he was, like her, strictly a city dweller even if he grew up in the
working- class suburbs. When he started going on and on about being some
mountain man she cut him short. It must have been the honesty brought forth by
the drugs that she chirped up that she at least had been to camp when she was a
kid and remembered how to pitch a tent, work camp fires, and hike a freaking
trail without needing first aid or a bevy of hospital services. He stopped for
a moment, for a candid moment. He confessed, confessed that come the first
night of camp, that he would be fearful when he was away from city lights, lamp
posts, when the only light was from some blinking star (she shared part of that
fear, not for dark nights, but what lurked, lurked for a woman, in an untamed
world), and that while he was the ocean’s own nature boy, some son of Neptune
his oceans always bordered land, sighted land. That was all prelude he
confessed to pre-excuses for any difficulties when they traversed (what the
heck was traverse he asked) some small trail headed up to the summit of
Cadillac Mountain in Arcadia National Park.
Allan
then, as if to change the subject, got back to his point about the beauty of
seeking nature’s course like some latter day Thoreau rising with the dawn,
rising with the sun, rising to the sound of birds, to keep faith with the
handiwork of nature especially when they hit the summit and could see all of
the ocean for miles around that he had seen in pictures. (And Magic Mick had told him about one
desperate hashish night when they were preparing for some protest, or something
and needed new age “rum bravery” to see them through. They were going to
distribute some anti-war material on an army base, Daniel Ellsberg’s The
Pentagon Papers she thought, and had been arrested and thrown off the base
and told in no uncertain terms not to come back, sixty days in the some
stinking federal pokey, if they did. So maybe that courage was necessary).
Then
he got on his high horse about natural wonders, which while he didn’t
understand he could appreciate. Like that idea behind television and transistor
radios when he was a kid, and the red scare cold war sputnik, about how did
they do that stuff. That drove him mad (although when she explained a couple of
things to him, things picked up at Hunter College High, to dispel his “heathen
seeing silver flying birds” theory of the universe, he waved it off, “too heavy”
waved it off, and she relented. What drove him crazier though was the idea of natural
stuff, stuff like the reversing falls at Saint John up in New Brunswick, or
craters come down to earth and then just sit there. Old Faithful out in Wyoming
or someplace out there on the prairie was the end though, imagine something
blowing off steam every ninety minutes or something like that, He hoped they
would get to see that on their way to Denver if the thing moved along okay and
it was not too late to chance a detour if it looked like the snow squalls didn’t
block them in late October or so. But the Bay of Fundy and its funny tides had
him flipped, he said maybe that would be worth watching for hours like that
Saco jetty (and coming back on her about that afternoon they rocked the rocks
in old Perkins Cove, maybe they could start an international trend like some
new edition of the Kama Sutra.
Then
Allan got serious again, real serious, which meant that he was going to go onto
some political thing, some political-etched thing. Then he started reciting
from memory Longfellow’s Evangeline the one about the French in Arcadia
being pushed out of their ancient land by the bloody British after the various
world- wide battles those two European powers fought throughout the eighteenth
century, and about love, land love, ocean love, love love being uprooted and
they were exile sent down to swamp Cajun country. Jesus he almost cried. He
said he wanted to stand in solidarity with another victim of John Bull’s
tyranny, to stand with the lost fellahin long suffering on another of history’s
long marches to oblivion and the death of the Arcadian dream then, and now. She
still remembered the half-lilt in his voice when he did that recital (how the
hell did he do that, she thought ). She could see in the way that he spoke that
he was thinking his own fellaheen thoughts, his old neighborhood thoughts about
how his people had been displaced (like her own, although she did not identify
as strongly with that diaspora sentiment as he did, after all her people, her parents
their kin had made it in America, as had she) and about some nagging, festering
sore that would not quit him, about those small dream days, about how everybody
pushed hard to stay in the same place (some of the kindred had been in the
neighborhood for four generations, a long time in go-go America), He named a
spot, Grand Pre where he wanted to stop and express his solidarities and so that
was plotted onto their ever- expanding itinerary.
Allan
floored her after that recital and gabfest with a thing he picked up from Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, which he said he had read
again in the stockade along with a bunch of his other books, Desolation Angels, Dharma Bums, Big Sur,
and a couple of others she didn’t remember. She had read On The Road as
an undergraduate although it didn’t make a big impact on her since she felt
that it was mainly a man’s book, a book about guys doing what guys always do,
try to screw women and then take off for some other adventure, or other women.
She thought he was going to go on and on about the beauty of the relationship
between Sal and Dean, about some mystical lost kindred spirit, about the wide
open spaces, and of a man’s (or woman’s, Allan was pretty good about including
women in the road, and real worlds, without making a big deal about it although
a couple of times she had to take him up quick on the subject of a women’s
place ) need to break-out of convention, to explore stuff, and to observe human
nature in the raw, and do something about it, if only to write about it.
Instead
he berated the characters of On The Road
for not stopping at some youth hostels where they could have stayed for cheap,
or little dough, in clean (you helped keep it that way as part of the fee),
rooms or dorms instead of sleeping in the back seats of cars, on the side of
the road, in some freaking corn field, or something that. Besides they could
have met better people, better ride-sharing and expenses people, and people with
some dough, since there usually were people from Europe or places like there who
had traveler’s cheques and such, than at the Traveler’s Bureaus or u-ride
places. See when he was in the stockade there was a guy he used to talk to
(before that guy got shipped to Leavenworth, he was doing some big time for the
same kind of things Allan was in for but without his civilian legal backing),
Bruce, from New York City who had done some on the road travelling and “hipped”
him to that scene. It sounded kind of hokey to her, since she expected that
they would either tent or stop at an occasional bed and board.
Josie
also thought they were a little too old to be sitting in some dorm thing, like
they were at college, with a million people who maybe didn’t speak English (or
French, her college language) and they might not even, from the way he told it,
depending on the hostel, be able to sleep together. She didn’t like that idea
since she had gotten used to them sleeping in their double bed. He said the one
in Halifax, the first one that he figured they would try was co-ed, and had
private rooms so they should try it, try, he laughed to be more “progressive,”
road progressive than Jack and his crowd. There would be time enough to sleep
on the sides of roads, or in some lazy cottage, or with friends dotted at spots
over the American landscape. And with that, after many fretful hours, they
drifted off to sleep.
That night (and day) was their
beginning, their real beginning and she said every once in a while although she
could no longer be with him, no way, there had been too much sorrow between
them, on wind-swept nights, or when she was near some ocean, or some raggedy
scruffy guy selling some left-wing newspaper passed by her she would get misty
about her sweet walking daddy. She said I would have to know that, know that up
front, on that rainy, sad, bluesy night. And that was our beginning… 
