***Out In The American Neon Wilderness-In The Beginning-Take Two

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Introduction

Memory, or rather memories, are funny. A while back my old friend and yellow brick road 1960s on-the-road travelling companion, Josh Lawrence, and I were discussing a recent trip that he and his wife, Laura, had taken to ocean-splashed and verdant Pacifica out in California just south of San Francisco. That place name brought back memories of my own last visit to that town some thirty years ago there with Josie, Josie Little, whom I had a torrid affair with back then the details of which I will not bore the reader with, except as they pertain to Josie’s story that will be related below. Pacifica was the place, the paradise that we retreated to when we went on vacation in the sunnier days of our relationship. Although I have been in San Francisco and in California in general many, many times since those days I have avoided, consciously avoided, that town. Reason: Josie Little and our eventual sad parting of the ways which occurred there at the end.

But see this is where the proverbial “one memory leads to another” comes in. Later on the night of the day Josh and I had our discussion about Pacifica I started thinking about something Josh had mentioned earlier. About how Josie and I met, although not really how we met as much as what glue stuck us together back then. That “glue” was the story that Josie related to me one night about how if we were to proceed with our affair, if it was to grow that she was going to have to exorcise the ghost of her previous lover, Allan Murphy. She was going to have to  tell me about how he was still under her skin, about their time together or part of it and I was going to have to understand her by letting her talk it out. So one night in Cambridge while we were sitting at the bar in the Blue Parrot she told her story. But maybe I should backtrack a little to explain how we met and some of the events that led up to the talk that night.            

I had met Josie at another Cambridge bar, Jack’s (the place where Bonnie Raitt, and others, used to hang out before they became famous, and after too), in late 1977, when she was sitting by herself kind of forlorn on a stool at the bar listening (she would tell me later half-listening) to the weekday house band and sipping her whiskey, neat. I was in town then trying to track down a story, or rather information for a story that a well-known Cambridge denizen had at his disposal and had just finished up a series of interviews with him. I decided to stop at Jack’s for a quick drink or two (mine whisky, water chaser, in those days) before heading back to my hotel when I spied her at the other end of the bar.

Forlorn looking yes but she had something about her, not girl next door, not femme fatale, not temptress, none of those exactly but something that spoke of stained satin sheets and good companionship if one were up for that. Pretty, maybe thirty years old, certainly not with that pallid look of a college student, even a graduate student in eternal student Cambridge, long legs, nicely dressed, short-ish brown hair, brown eyes (not identified until later, one of them slightly askew which made them sexier when she looked directly at you) and that was all I needed to take shot at her.

So I sat down at the stool beside her, introduced myself, and she in turn introduced herself and we made small conversation for a while until I saw her drink was empty and offered to buy her one. She accepted. A little later she noticed that I was out and offered to buy me a drink. Taken. After a while I felt strong enough to mention that when I came in that she had looked rather forlorn. That is when she first  told me about Allan, Allan Murphy, the guy who she though would be the love of her life, and whom she had to, just had to (her words), let go of since their relationship had gone beyond repair a few months before and she was still in its grip.  We talked a while longer, had a couple more drinks (trading off on buying the rounds) and wound up in my hotel room over in Boston that night. Forlorn she might have been but as she told me later that night (really the next morning) she liked sex, liked it a lot, liked to be inventive, liked to try things if they were not kinky and had long given up the silly “not on the first date” ritual that used to drive her sexual calendar and just went with guys who she felt safe with. She had come to the right guy that night.

The next day I had to leave town for a week or so but promised to be in touch and did call her up about a week later and invited her to a house in Watertown that I was to stay in for about a month while I gathered material for a new story and to write it up. She accepted and we ruffled the sheets like that first night again. During my Watertown stay I got more and more interested in her, and I believed that she did in me as well although she held her cards close to the vest. When my Watertown time was up she asked me if I wanted to stay at her place over in Brighton (Allston, really) and I said yes if she thought we were going someplace. She gave a smile, said maybe, and I accepted that answer as good enough at the time.

For the next couple of months things seemed okay but I was getting deeper into her and she seemed less so with me. I kept asking her what the problem was but she continually refused to elaborate. Then one night she said let’s go out to Jack’s again because she wanted to tell me a story that she thought I needed to hear if I wanted to understand her.  An Allan story of course since, if unspoken, he hovered over our affair just then although I had been doing my best to deny it willing to live in a fantasy world about the subject. Josie, and this tells you something about her and maybe about me as well, had written it up in something like a draft form because she wanted me to have it in writing just in case something bad happened between us. And here is where memory comes in again because I went up into my attic where in the old pre-digital days I stored my notebooks and other written materials and retrieved her draft.

The only thing that I noticed in re-reading the draft that startled me was how much information Josie gave about the various stages of her sex life until then. She liked sex, no question, and I liked that she liked sex, and we had tried many different techniques in our time together but I did not realize then that sharing the intimate details of her sexual profile were that important to her for me to understand along with that Allan forlornness. Of course that time was just the start up time of great women’s liberation awakening when women like Josie began to express themselves in more explicit sexual terms and the like but still in looking over the notes I, a little older, and who had come up learning a different notion of women, blushed a few times. Sexual difficulties however were certainly not the reason we parted when our time together was up. The only thing I have done as far as the original draft goes is to make some clarifying comments which are bracketed throughout the manuscript.     

So this, according to the notes and my memory, is the way that I heard the story one bar stool night from Josie Little, a young woman in the troubled last throes of a dying love that would not quite quit. Yeah, this is the way I heard a story out in the American neon wilderness. Another one of those in a long line of stories of a still not quite finished love that nevertheless had nowhere to go, a story Josie felt needed to be told just then, just that one long sad, rainy, bluesy Cambridge bar stool night in late 1977, the Miller Hi-Life sign blinking off and on making strange shadows on Josie’s sad brown eyes world as she spoke. 

**********

…Hi my name is Josie Little, my last name Anglicized from Litvinov a couple of generations back, back around the turn of the 20^th century, by my paternal Jewish grandparents from Russia seeking Americanization as well as by the sleight-of- hand of immigration officials at Ellis Island who could not spell the old country name correctly. I want to tell a story about an unhappy love affair I had with a guy named Allan Murphy in the early 1970s that ended up awfully bad in late 1976 so that I can try to exorcise the demons and move on to a budding relationship with a new guy, a reporter, Frank Jackman. This addressed mainly to him and some stuff only to him but if you read this then you will know why I had to leave my sweet walking daddy Allan behind, just couldn’t go on with him even though his scent lingers on. So here goes:      

I had been at my wit's end, or maybe that was too harsh a term to express my condition then given my need, but I had been unhappy in the early 1970s, a few years before I met Frank at that Miller-Hi-Life sign-etched bar stool conversation where he hit on me, caught me in a down Allan moment. Unhappy after years, my growing up years, of being the dutiful daughter, the New York Jewish middle-class gentile-emulating dutiful daughter. No JAP princess, no way, although I had dreamed of that exalted position when I was young and had hung out with some serious JAPs when I attended Hunter College High School in Manhattan where I had been an outstanding student, and they, well, they attended the school and that name looked good on the future husband-hunting resumes. Just that early 1970s moment though I had been unhappy, having just finished an internship (via Boston University) with Doctor Thaddeus Telly, yes that Telly, the big up and coming quantum sociologist who at the time was on the cutting edge of the next big thing in the field [now superseded by about twenty-seven newer cutting edges], and I was also exhausted from study, research and my go-fer existence on his team.

I might as well tell you, I was also having an affair with Professor Telly for strictly mercenary reasons so that I could get good grades and more importantly a good recommendation. Some of my girlfriends kind of looked sideways on that but funny I found out later they had done the same thing with professors, not even good-looking and charming ones like Teddy, to get good grades. For me it was a case of a mutual bargain but Teddy always said he thought he got the better of it since I had given him the best oral sex, you know, blowjobs he had ever had. And he might have been right but I did not complain at all since he gave me a great recommendation, and I like oral sex so there. And you know I do Frank from that first time I surprised you coming out of the bathroom after you had taken a shower and I went down on you while you were all wet. Funny, funny about that oral sex stuff, okay, okay I will just call them blowjobs here so you will know what I mean, because the first few times I did it in high school I didn’t like it.

Of course then it was done instead of vaginal intercourse to keep from getting pregnant that all the sexually- active girls like me and my JAP friends were deathly afraid of. I didn’t like the taste of the cum when a guy came in my mouth and I would spit it out. One guy, Andy, though told me to eat a mint or something while I was doing him because he made a big deal out of me swallowing his cum and I liked him a lot and wanted to please him. He said that it had a lot of protein and was good for me. So I did it one time with gum in my mouth and swallowed and it wasn’t bad. After that I actually liked to swallow the cum if I really liked a guy. I know they, and you, liked me to do that although maybe not with the gum part.                  

[She had never told Allan about the affair with Professor Telly at the time because although it was before she had met him she was not sure how he would take it. How it started was a couple of times the Professor and her got high on dope and went over to his house on Commonwealth Avenue when his wife was out of town and did the “do the do.” Telly was clear that he was looking for sex and she was clear she was looking for good grades and a nice recommendation so it was a fair trade-off. She still thought so, although like she said a couple of her girlfriends had raised their eyebrows when she told them.]

 

Having been the dutiful daughter, striving to please my parents as I accumulated each new degree and award, I had missed the turmoil on the campuses in the 1960s, my undergraduate campus the volatile radical hotbed University Of Wisconsin, although given my dogged attention to my studies I might as well have been at North Dakota State or some such Podunk school. I 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 I had come to Boston, and my fellow doctoral program students kept quizzing me about this and that thing, the demonstrations, the shuts-downs, the music and dope, that had happened in Madison and had I been involved in it once they knew where I was from. I would deflect such talk with some sex exploits or something to show I was a little cool. More importantly though, I had missed that new wave breeze that had come through the land in those days, the palpable sense of jailbreak from what pleased (or didn’t please) parents, professors, police, employers , or anyone else who got in the way. I was ready, all twenty-five years of me ready, to break out, break out and check out what Allan had called the American neon wilderness.

As you know Frank the he in question, that not quite finished love with nowhere to go, Allan Murphy, my boyfriend, companion, partner, lover whatever term of art, relationship art you wished to use in those topsy-turvy times, had told me about the search for the American neon wilderness one night after we had been together for while (not living together, that came later), the night when I first tried some mescaline with him. After that night I was frantic to get out and see the American countryside and make my own estimate about what was going, or not going, on. As part of that mescaline dream night Allan had steadily tried to coax me into travelling with him on that journey, a journey that would probably last six months to a year depending, depending on what pleased us, what we wanted to see, what happened on that far-flung road and I had gotten rid of enough hesitations in order to get rid of that wit's end condition, or whatever it was that was eating at me to buy into his plan. But I am getting ahead of myself. I  haven’t explained to you how I had come to be entranced by Allan, how I had begun to smell those open roads wherever they might lead and to dream of them, and to begin to think of a defensive barrage against my parents’ seventy-seven wishes, expectations, and disappointments when explanation time came.

Sometime after I came to Boston in late 1970 I had settled into the student ghetto across the river in Brighton with my own little first- floor apartment off of Commonwealth Avenue, and after I had settled into my studies, those Telly-inspired studies that I eventually became exhausted from, I, new to town started to go to bars alone to pick up guys, usually one night stands. I had done the same kind of thing when I arrived as a freshman at Wisconsin trying to outdo some of other girls in my dorm who were having a little contest to see how many guys they could pick up in a week. I wanted both then and later to be known as smart but also that I was a good lay in bed if you approached me right. Most guys thought they were picking me up although some got my point when I said the reverse was true but that is another story.     

 

I also became 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 I expressed my previous basically un-political nature) on a couple of dates with a guy whom I had met through a girl in my Advanced Quantum Sociology seminar, Lucy, who was something in the Socialist Workers Party or their youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance, organizations that at the time were involved in a last push to end the war in Southeast Asia before President Nixon blew the places to kingdom come. Those organizations were 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 in- your- face cannon-fodder existence.

One night, one Monday night, I 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 Josie 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 I 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 the slain President Kennedy had made everybody aware of a few years previously when we were growing up and coming of age, combined with a little working-class twist. While he was addressing the audience I, sitting not twenty feet away from him, noticed that he had some very fierce blue eyes. I, from a brown-eyed, brown hair, brown everything world (including all brown myself) had never seen such blue eyes, and fierce too. I was mesmerized.

After Allan finished his talk and the audience broke into groups that were split up according to what task one wished to participant in to help organize that upcoming anti-war G.I. retreat I gravitated toward the group where he was sitting, the contacting GIs group. When the members introduced themselves I noticed that he was kind of staring, well, not staring but he kept looking in my direction, and gave a little smile my way. I responded with little smiles too, and a little confusion too because while I considered myself nice, and maybe pretty, I was not some “movement” heavy or anything like that, as were some of the other women in the room. I tried to see if he was smiling at anybody else, at any other woman there. I did not think so.

At the close of the meeting Allan came up to me and softly, very softly, shook my hand and said that he hoped that I 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 I had missed most of by being the dutiful daughter. That was all that happened that night though. A hand-shake. Damn, that was it.

 

The retreat was to be held two weekends after that meeting and I had originally planned to attend the event even before the talk with Allan, if I got my studies completed by then. After “meeting” Allan I knew I would be going and as it turned out I would be going up in the same car as him. That retreat Friday night as we met in Harvard Square with those who would drive them up on the trip north I noticed Allan looking at me in that same way he had looked at me at that first meeting with that little smile when we greeted. After arriving at our destination in New Hampshire (Brookline)  and while waiting in line to register he asked me, expressing a hope, a fervent hope he said later, that I would spare some time to talk to him if I had a chance.

This comment disarmed me a little, most of the guys I had dated (and slept with, while I may have been dutiful daughter I was no prude, not since back in Hunter College High days when those Jewish princesses told me, and showed me, what was what with guys), mostly Jewish guys from Long Island or places like that, not the city, when I went to Wisconsin, had been, maybe sensing something in me, 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 I thought and everybody else did too, new breeze coming through or not. Here though was a guy who was asking me if I 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 me. With a dry throat and barely getting what I had to say out I remembered I said I hoped that he might have some time to talk to me. I blushed, red-brown blushed, and he, sensing the oddness of the moment just squeezed my hand, squeezed it almost as softly as at our first meeting.

Then he said with those blue eyes sparkling, not fierce but devilishly 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 me. And then he blushed, and out of nowhere I squeezed his hand. Whether it was softly done or not I could not remember but it was a squeeze. Just then someone yelled out the first call for the meeting to start and we parted, him turning back to me with that quizzical smile as we did so. And that was how we got started and maybe why I was ready later to chance things, to chuck everything to travel with him wherever the winds might take us.

[Josie 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 the whole enterprise felt too crazy to her.]

I had not experimented with drugs while I was at drudge Wisconsin although I (or anybody else ) could not walk into 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 (I 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 those substances on any given day or reflecting any given local moniker for the stuff. I 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, I had not partaken of those pleasures.

When I came to Boston some people in one of my classes, Advanced Quantum Sociology (a seminar taught by Professor Telly himself), organized a party and that was where I had my first drug encounter as a big old joint was passed around and I felt I had to be cool and so took a few hits and coughed, coughed like crazy for a while when the harsh smoke hit my throat and everybody laughed. [Join the club, sister.] I liked it, like the way it relaxed me, liked the odd feeling and strange moods that I felt while high but had seldom imbibed in while I was in my drudge phase before Allan.

Strangely sometime after that first experience I had kept some hash, given as a gift from some guy who took my fancy one night at the Kasbah Grille in Harvard Square when I was “on the hunt” with my girlfriends. He had spent the night with me at my apartment after he had introduced me 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 had better not be “holding.” And thus the gift (fired up when Allan and I were looking for a different kick when he said he had never tried the stuff).

Allan and I, started, discreetly, to smoke more weed (his term, I always had called it “pot” from what I heard it called in my Wisconsin days but I 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 my generation and its predilections. The discreet part was necessary because he, and to a lesser extent me, had a high political profile doing that anti-war G.I. work that placed us square in the sights of the state, its military, and the 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. Our 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 me that he had not previously 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. Until then 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 dope 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 we got to the idea of trying mescaline and other drugs, but mainly mescaline to help express eternal truths or whatever we 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, and let the rubes figure out the stuff of dreams, or of dream puffs.

So that first mescaline night Allan told me 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. I could see when Allan talked like that, in that Jehovah righteous tone why he would be a prime candidate for some foreboding army stockade or the bastinado 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. Allan mentioned that “had not being asked about stuff” had bothered him since about age ten or eleven. He related some stuff about his family, as I did about mine but that was 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, straight from 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. Kids’ 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, starting dreaming about the big jail breakout from the old ways.

Where Allan 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 into 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 flee to the big wide world parts 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 read about, and seen too on that old black and white television screen we all were glued to which crowded his brain.

That failed raft experiment, in any case, was not the end of his strivings although it ended his physical break-out end for a while. He spoke one night of sneaking out the back of the family house (he called it a shack and when he took me there on one ill-advised meeting with his mother I had to agree with him although I was always too polite to say anything bad about the place) on midnight runs to Harvard Square at sixteen. Of walking a couple of miles to catch 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 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 to 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 I would go on and on about what the experience was like in order to get a feel for who I was getting tied up with, about what happened while he was in the military, the Army. He would cut me 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 added, 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, oh no what did he call it, oh yeah, the 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 I knew needed help from when I read Michael Harrington’s The Other America for a sociology class that I took as an under-graduate where he described the white folks left behind in the go-go America of the 1950s.

Allan had turned red one time when I mentioned that book and that I 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 [Allan had shown her that fact listed on his birth certificate one day]. 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 Allan 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, and with a sneer on his face 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.

Allan told me 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 a 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 down in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, 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 me 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 me 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. Jack who was crying out loud about the “missile gap,” nuclear missiles to be sure. So he stumbled and mumbled fitfully through the problem.

Of course if you were part of the military, down in some boondock (Allan’s 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” (my expression after I heard this part of his story), and also surrounded by guys, maybe sullen, maybe gung-ho, but mainly who like you were kind of committed to their 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 Vietnam 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 there.

And still he mumbled, stumbled, and tumbled. He, political animal he, tried to work around it administratively, pulling some chips 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 grounds 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 then make a splash at some public civilian anti-war rally. That AWOL, absent without leave part was important for him, and later me, since he stayed away just long enough from the Replacement Center at Fort Lewis in Washington state to be  “dropped for the rolls,” meaning that he could turn himself in at Fort Devens about forty miles from Boston and stay there pending new orders. The importance for me was, unknowingly, or half knowingly, that I had been one of the demonstrators clamoring for his release in a rally in front of the fort after he was incarcerated. 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. he would not do that but something more dramatic and timely. 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) Allan 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 with his sign). 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 the Army couldn’t sent him to Fort Leavenworth without violating a civilian judge’s restraining order.) Like I 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 me as he told his story) in its thrall.

[I realized that the way she told this part of 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 Allan was in what he called (and she started to get a drift sense of it more and more after that 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 his 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, no 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 its 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 as Allan started talking to me about stone cold jetties, the ones 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 we first started going together, before we 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 we could check that out as we 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 Denver snows 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, we needed new adventures, new sittings for hours druid Stonehenge by the sea stones.

I did not learn until later, later when the trip was well under way, that while Allan 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, 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 as the fellaheen lobster boatmen 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 those pots 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 as a come-on, 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 we 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 all these travels up with thoughts of 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 the same blarney at times , although I blushed when she smiled as she mentioned the rocks, mentioned the love-making on the rocks and maybe had  thought back to nights of risings and falling of the sea and of them making love, 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 of nakedness and fucking  with her delight at the sea that day and had suggested that very idea to him and they found a secluded spot not an easy thing to do in the tourist-heavy summer cove. I sighed on that one.]

I had to laugh as I thought of telling you about Allan’s dream, Allan’s get out in the wide world dream for he was, like me, 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 I cut him short. It must have been the honesty brought forth by the drugs that I chirped up that I at least had been to camp when I 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 (I 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 we hit some 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 I think. In the event they 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).

Allan 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, grab the air and turn it into sound and sights. That drove him mad (although when I explained a couple of things to him, things picked up at Hunter College High, to dispel his heathen-like  “seeing silver flying birds in the sky” theory of the universe, he waved it off, “too heavy” he said, waved it off, and I relented). What drove him crazier though was the idea of natural stuff, stuff like the reversing falls at Saint John’s up in New Brunswick, or craters come down to earth and then they just sit there. Old Faithful out in Wyoming or someplace out there on the prairie was the end though, imagine he said something blowing off steam every ninety minutes or something like that, He had 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 me again about that afternoon they rocked the rocks in old Perkin’s Cove, saying maybe they started 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. 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 exiled 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. I still remember the half-lilt in his voice when he did that recital (how the hell did he do that, I thought). I 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 my own, although I did not identify as strongly with that diaspora sentiment as he did, after all my people, my parents, their kin too, had made the grade  in America, as had I) 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 our ever- expanding itinerary.

Allan floored me 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 I don’t remember. I had read On The Road as an undergraduate although it didn’t make a big impact on me since I 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. I 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 need (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 I had to take him up quick on the subject of his some of his still old-fashioned notions of a women’s place ) 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 like 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 me, since I expected that we would either tent or stop at an occasional bed and board. I also thought we were a little too old to be sitting in some dorm thing, like we were at college, with a million people who maybe didn’t speak English (or French, her college language) and we might not even, from the way he told it, depending on the hostel, be able to sleep together. I didn’t like that idea since I had gotten used to us sleeping in our 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, we drifted off to sleep.    

[That next late afternoon at “breakfast” Allan started up again about the trip to end all trips. That breakfast Josie was at pains to point out had been made by Allan since he was then in, as a lot of young men were at the time, his women’s “lib” moment. While she and Allan had more than a few battles later over who was to do, and not do, what in sharing household chores she thought his initiative in requesting to feed her breakfast was, well, charming. In those days when a lot of what women, including Josie, were growling over had been the male king in his castle thing and so any slight effort to off-set that mystique was taken as good coin. Later when things got more political, when the question of real power came up a lot of guys went into the tank. So in those early days the easier way to show one’s male liberation from mother’s apron strings fetch-all was to make and serve meals to milady, Josie remember that menu, eggs, bagels and lox, some juice and coffee like it had come down from the mountain… ]    

…while Allan was cleaning up the dishes (added points if a man did the cooking and the cleaning up) he mentioned that he was crazy to go to Neil’s Harbor and Peggy’s Cove up in Cape Breton and could hardly wait to get on the road out of Halifax and push north unless we were somewhat behind in our schedule, our rough schedule, to try to head west and then south before the winter set in. He wanted to take in the beauty, the hills rising above the ocean along the road that encircled the whole place, and the separate circle that enveloped Cape Breton, Nova Scotia beyond that Arcadia notion. Moreover a friend had told him that the provincial parks, unlike the state parks in the states, were cheap, were well kept-up, provided firework and hearths, and had decent showers facilities (except in the few “primitive” sites which we might be confronted with at certain points where you had to backpack in and take your chances, ugh) He had hoped to get his fill of ocean views to strengthen him against the mid-American continent bump where you might be lucky to see a lake or something.

They would head west when they were both heartily tired of endless seas, endless looking at seas, although not of walking them, sitting and listening to the ocean, or making love as the waves rolled in if they had the chance. His thing was to chart things like the furthest point in all directions they hit on the trip, how many of this and that they saw, how many that and this, things they did, you could tell he was a real numbers and geography guy. Not where those places were in the world so much, no, so he could said, sometimes brag, brag a little, but mostly say, well, he had been this far  in case somebody might think he was a rube if he hadn’t been far enough from home.

[Funny too because Josie said in his politics, his political drive that he would be  suppressing a little on the trip for her sake, he was always talking, and doing something about it which is where they were beginning to differ, about the struggle against the American government in Vietnam, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the fate of the Palestinians (the one major point where she, a half-hearted Zionist, daughter of Zionists, and he would have a few blow-ups including one night in Boston before the trip when they, drunk and stoned, were at some party which was being attended by something like the central committee of the Zionist movement in Boston, although neither of them originally knew that was the case. They were raising money for something in Israel, and he started talking his liberation talk, talking about the Irgun gang, about the King David Hotel, about Deir Yessin, jesus, stuff Josie didn’t even know about. He got heated, got heated at her, most of all, for half-defending the infidels at the party, or just their right to support Israel, something like that.]

When we got back to my place, we weren’t living together then he was living in a commune down the road, I threw him out, after we had probably woken up half of the student ghetto in Allston. Then around four o’clock I was missing “my sweet walking daddy” [I blushed when she said that.] and called him up to come on back over. He didn’t want to, didn’t want to because he was sleepy, and we had another row over that. He, when I propositioned him, propositioned him with a little secret thing that that I did to him with my mouth [expecting me to know what that was without further description, which I did and made a mental note on], a thing that as he said, or as he had heard on some blues song, maybe David Bromberg, maybe Muddy Waters I don’t remember, that “curled his toes,” he came over, but it was not a good night, not a good omen at all.

It’s funny because I am, and Allan later admitted that he was too, very provincial, not in the sense of being some hayseed thing out in Iowa but provincial in the way we interpreted Saul Steinberg’s sardonic New Yorker cover, the one where his map of America started in Manhattan big and then the rest of America was about one inch of space. I related to that sense of the world and would tell him, at his request, endless things odd-ball things about growing up in Manhattan what I had seen, and did. He said he felt the same about Boston and maybe that is why he had to have charts and lists and a stuff like that, his stuff in the world.                             

[…A lot of what Josie said that sad rainy Cambridge night, after she had a few scotches, neat, got mixed-up, not purposefully mixed-up but mixed between the great Allan dream stretch and events that occurred when they actually did get out on the neon wilderness road. I confess too that I having had that same liquor concoctions that I was mixed-up prone. What follows is to the best of my recollection the real travelogue of the trip. Like I say it was a long rainy Cambridge night but she wanted to talk, and I wanted to listen. Let us continue]:   

…My feelings about Peggy’s Cove, Cape Breton, and the like when we got there though was (besides the great view and friendly huge immense rocks we could sit on and get splashed by the sea and feel clean although I was never an ocean freak like him) that since this was to be the eastern most point of our trip (and he thought at the time it would be the northernmost as well) we could stay in a bed and breakfast place. Indoors with an indoor shower, private, or not wait in line, or anything like that. Maybe something just off the main road, “Mrs. Miller’s Bed and Breakfast” or something like that. And if that name of the kind of places and who ran them sounds like something out of about 1947 then you are right because that is exactly what it was like, and what Mrs. Miller was like when we  found ourselves looking for such a place. Of course out in the provinces, the gentle provinces, among the folk who live in the little off-the-road places, the places where times stands still, they depend on the travelling peoples of the world who want to see great natural beauty, and relax against the craziness of the world depend on making, what did Allan call it, their harsh lonely winter tide-me-over money in season.

But these people, and Allan and I ran into many, on the outskirts of civilization, have their limits, and have their own mores, and good for them. Except not good for us, almost. Mrs. Miller wanted to know if we were married, and we, thinking we were in Boston or New York, said, well no, and, essentially, what of it. She kind of flipped out and did not want to let us stay in her “home.”  So we, tired for a long day on the road, sometime in the rock-bound sea sun, and not sure where the next B&B was, if  any started back-tracking, started  talking about our travels, about tiredness, about using this trip to see if we should get married. (That contribution was by me so you could see Allan’s blarney side rubbing off.) Mrs. Miller didn’t like it, but as a good Christian woman, she had to welcome us. It was close though, very close. See too though we had intended that this indoor scene would allow us to freshen up, have a shower, have a nice dinner, maybe some wine to get a little high (we had no intention of doing reefer, no way), and then some serious gentle sex. We were both tired of hard-scrabble dirt, of rocks, of fleas, gnats and every other bug taking the edge off of our love-making. So we had to debate whether to do this deed in this good Christian woman’s house. We did but did it so quietly that both of us thought afterwards that this is the way that they are forced to do it in Chinese villages and working- class neighborhood where everybody is packed in together. But here is the best part, the next morning Mrs. Miller made the best pancake-waffle-eggs-anyway you wanted them-ham-hash-home fries- muffins-juice- and whatever for us the best breakfast that we had ever had. And to top it off a big old fresh baked blueberry pie for us to eat on our travels. [Josie said this, smiling, a remembrance smile, a good Christian angel woman, indeed, Mrs. Miller  has her place reserved in heaven, if such a place was worthy of her.]

[Although Josie lived on the island of Manhattan growing up she never had an occasion to ride the Staten Island ferry which people who don’t come from Manhattan don’t understand, especially since it was only a nickel then. Allan said that his mother told him when she was a girl that she would take the boat from Boston down to New York via the Cape Cod Canal and the two things that he remembered that she went on and on about were the cheap-jack Automat, the cafeteria where you inserted coins and got your food via the cubicles, a far out thing in the 1930s Josie guessed, and the ride on the cheap Staten Island (and the view of downtown Manhattan from the Staten Island side). So Allan told her that the first time they went down to New York City together to face the fireworks from her parents and they wouldn’t, no way, let them stay together in her room he actually spent the night riding the ferry back and forth, a very cheap way to keep out of the cold and away from harm and copper eyes. So when they made the turn past Neil’s Harbor and headed west, the first real west move they had made on the trip Allan said remembering the Staten Island Ferry experience “let’s take the ferry over to Prince Edward Island,” and so they did and while Josie thought it was interesting to be on the water with their funny old Datsun it wasn’t anything like the big deal Allan made of it. Josie said to me “Let’s put it this way I still haven’t taken the Staten Island Ferry.” Prince Edward Island certainly had its charm, small fishing and farming villages dotted the highway around the island but Josie was getting a little antsy about moving on to see some different scenery from the boats and cows.]

The one thing that stuck out in my mind though was this incredible beach on the north side, this Brackley Beach which extended for miles jutting out into the Saint Lawrence, and which if you can believe this up that far north had no qualms about allowing nude bathing. They had it right on the sign, the sign that reserved the area for nude bathers. We were kind of shocked, or I was but I said to Allan that I was game, although I had a swim suit along. Allan was kind of funny about that though, some Irish Catholic working- class hang-up about public exposure, or something. He used to hang around the various water spots we landed on with a light- weight long sleeve shirt, his jeans and sandals, he refused to wear a bathing suit, and as it turned out didn’t even have one with him. This get-up thing he said he wore because of the bugs, bugs that really did seem to draw a bee-line to him.

 That day though I coaxed him out of his jeans and all when I whispered in his ear that I was kind of horny, horny like down in Maine that time at Perkin’s Cover when I had given him the first blow job I had given him [she said to me that “thing she did with her mouth” but I knew what she meant] and I said maybe I was up for giving a little skull that day too. That perked him up as we headed to some private area of the dunes, put down a big towel, maybe a small blanket and I went to work on him. He was all smiles when I “curled his toes” for him.                                 

Down river flow that is what Allan kept practically chanting as we drifted down the Saint Lawrence River headed to Quebec City. But along the way we had stopped at seemingly twenty different towns, Trois this and that kind of towns, three river places, all the same place as far as I was concerned, but one town that we stopped in could stand for my little road story for that leg of the trip because it really could stand in for all of them. The story also can stand as testimony to the cool, kooky, kinky stuff that made our days go by nicely, and too fast with my sweet walking daddy. All of these river towns had like a lot of towns we had seen, a small main street, a few stores, maybe a library, a school showing here and there, and all had churches, but not the New England big steeple white simple church gathering in the pious brethren on Sunday to hear some big top theology from some learned Harvard-trained minister praise big bad Jehovah, or something like that.

What these towns had was heavy stone-etched imposing cathedral-like edifices with plenty of artwork, devotional stuff, and dank, dark, and smelling of death about them, or really the readiness for death that the Catholics are always hankering for. Really though just like the New England pine-box churches once you have seen one you have pretty much gotten all you need to know about the damn things. And I would have left it at that but something about the whole sanctified, sacred, scented scene, kind of took Allan off his moorings. I mentioned before that he was off the church thing but like he said such things when so intense die hard, die out only after some kind of sacred exorcism, and so that is how he schemed (schemed in the good sense of planning something out) to do a mock exorcism at the church in Trois Rivieres, a couple of hundred miles from Quebec City. Now this was not some churchy thing he was thinking of but rather as was his first thought thing then, a little sexual escapade. See his idea was that he and I would do some hanky-panky in that dark church (dark, because like the New England white steeple church brethren the parishioners were deep in work on the farms or in the cotton mill that provided some work for the town folk). So we snuck over to the chapel at least that is what I thought they called it, Allan did anyway (like maybe he knew that was the best place, although he swore, swore after we were done that he had never done it in church, or even thought about it until the ride down the Saint Lawrence). I had been afraid to take my clothes off, and insisted that I wouldn’t so we settled on me giving him some head, but he said that for once they would use a condom and leave the residue there as a burnt offering for the sins of the world. I said that I did not usually like condoms (rubbers) in my mouth because they tasted funky but this time I kind of didn’t notice it so much because frankly, as we got started I got so turned on by the idea we were doing it in church, a sacred place, that I just went about my work, and I could tell by his little moanings that Allan was appreciating  my efforts, although after a bit I started thinking about how maybe we should “do the do” (our little term for love-making courtesy of  a Howlin’ Wolf song) and I suggested that to him but once he got into my “giving head”  thing that usually was what he wanted. Well, Allan came, after I had given him the best blow job I thought I had ever given him until then, at least he had a big grin on his face after I took the condom off and we placed it carefully in front of the altar. I told him I was still turned on and so we went back to that secluded area and did “do the do”, twice.

[Josie, the little tease, one of the reasons I was interested in her, said she would tell me more, a couple of little extra things that happened that day at that church but she said she could  tell I was getting turned on while she was talking and so she left it at that. She was right I was.]                

[After the farms, field and rivers coming down the Saint Lawrence all of a sudden out of the river mist, out of the river turn around Ile de Orleans there came into view the great fortress city of Quebec City, a city that Allan and Josie both confessed that they knew about mainly from the Plains of Abraham, bloody deaths of Montcalm and Wolfe in some 18^th century part of the world-wide battle for world supremacy, for the ports, the commercial ports of entry. Quebec to her though was mainly a matter of about ten million churches, Gallic Roman Catholic churches fit for the lame, halt, and crippled it seemed by their names or names associated with each parish, with all grey stone, all gothic, all forbidding, foreboding and frankly hostile, hostile to whatever Jewish identity she felt, felt being among those who not that long before (or maybe they still did) called her people Christ-killers and did stuff about it.

Allan, a long lapsed, lapsed  since about fourteen when he started reading some stuff , some stuff by Jews like Karl Marx and Sartre, Catholic, and feeling out of sorts and oppressed by the Catholic-ness of the place ,except for those bloody Plains of Abraham alongside the Saint Lawrence and really beautiful, for his own reasons, stated categorically that he would defend me, my honor, the bones of my forbears, even my fussy parents, if anybody, anybody under cloak of clerical authority, or just any lay person who got crazy, tried any rough stuff, and that kept her in check, and made her love him even more, and ready then to show some him decidedly non-Catholic loving out of wedlock, and out of procreation’s way too.]

Despite the architectural beauty of the city, the gothic old time sense of some very much earlier age, some age when men and women were not afraid to come out and face the wilds, the hostile Indians, the even more hostile wildlife and stake their claim to new world riches and pay homage to the providence that spared those who survived put paid to that good wind by those incredible churches, nunnery and chapel (and the vast number of personal to service them), the current crop of  French-Canadians who just then dominated the very nationalistic times were short with Anglos, including sympathetic Anglos like Allan and me.  This was the heyday of Quebec independence movement and the tensions were still in the air against the Anglo government which had at one point before we came had declared martial law in the province. The way that edge came out was when we would go into restaurant in Old Town and try to order lunch or something (admittedly my high school and first year of college long past French and later Allan’s Spanish in Mexico were too Anglo to fake anybody out that they were anything but Norte Americanos) and be snubbed at every turn, deliberately snubbed by waiters, slumming while students like was almost universal then, maybe now too, who you could overhear speaking perfectly usable English among themselves when they wanted to make some obscure point. Allan would get on his high- horse about the heathens (his term for any high-hat snub anywhere usually followed by-“well, my people were creating great culture when their forbears were trying to figure out how to use a spoon, or what it was useful for”).  While Allan wasn’t happy about snubs, or any other of the small change of people, people like his Irish forbears, who couldn’t respond to their oppression any other way he was more tolerate than I was toward what he called his fellahin brethren . 

I asked him, asked him seriously one time when we were driving out of Quebec City toward Montreal what he meant by fellahin, where he had heard or seen the word, was it in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road where I  had seen it as part of Jacks’  trip in southern California in describing the places, the night after hard day fields places the mex places, where he and his lady of the time, his little mex whore, landed on that famous trip, and the people and their mores, his kindreds. Allan said no he had learned it in seventh grade over at Hull Junior High School when some history teacher, a Jewish guy if he remembered correctly, held the class in awe with stories about the Jewish struggles in the Middle East with the Palestinians, including labor Zionists, and Allan had held the word like a lot of odd-ball words that interested him in his head since then. What Allan meant, maybe like Kerouac, and like that history teacher, was life’s dispossessed, those left behind in the dust who, until their judgment day (not that foolish religious one) when they were liberated, maybe generations, would forget that bondage times but until then he wanted to be very indulgence toward them, even if we got poor wait staff service, ouch. Yeah, the fetid fellaheen night was what was in store for, I wondered that night for the first time if could I take it …             

 

[…It started to go bad, not the bad bad of their being together bad, or of the not being able to be together which drove her to leave him and eventually drove her to this rough draft of their fallen love. At least she did not think that was the start of the downslide of their now slightly wilting love, but just trip bad, after Quebec City as they were heading down to Montreal.]

 Allan had begun to doubt the whole purpose of the trip, expounding on the bourgeois nature of the thing (a word he used for just about everything at one point just like a kid with a toy that he or she would play with endlessly even beyond liking the thing), the dilettante thing they were doing while the peoples’ struggles were going on all around us. [That night in Quebec City that she had mentioned to me before when I mentioned that I had covered some of left-wing political action up in Quebec for an alternative newspaper when they stood in solidarity with the students fighting the national liberation struggle kind of set things off in Allan’s head.] He was going through something of an ocean change in his head, something more in line with his slightly changed political views as he moved away from peaceful rallies and sweet reason conferences and workshops like the one when we first met up in snowy night New Hampshire, something that had been gnawing at him since that time down in Washington, that May Day 1971 time when I had refused to stay with him to participant in a mass civil disobedience action on that day to try to shut down the government in order to shut down the Vietnam War.

We had had arguments over the correctness of that series of actions as we were hitch-hiking down with a couple of my work friends to attend a mass rally that I had energetically helped organize the Boston part of and which Allan when I told him about my organizing efforts expecting him to approve vociferously called hopelessly futile(and bourgeois). He was staying over for the civil disobedience on that fateful Monday and I and my friends were heading back to Boston directly after that Saturday rally. What bothered Allan after he came back about a week later after having been incarcerated in the RFK stadium for a few days was how futile that action was as well, how they, mainly students and young unaffiliated radicals, had been easily defeated militarily by the cops and guardsmen. Swept up like the rubbish and with less fuss it seemed to him. He got into a mood like it didn’t matter what they did, those brethren students and unaffiliated radicals, without some other force to help them out they would stay just as isolated and defeated as if they had just stayed with those like me who called for more and more massive peaceful marches as a strategy.

When Allan got back he also got into a reading jag as he usually did when he was puzzled by something and needed books to help think things through. So he read, really read when he got off of whatever temporary job his was doing to help us get the dough to make the trip (he said he had not read so much, with so much purpose since the stockade days), and went to different political meetings to try to see if anybody else knew what the hell way that the wars could be stopped, or some rough economic and social justice could be brought into this wicked old world. After several months he finally gravitated toward some socialist stuff, some stuff by Marx, but the big thing was that massive three-volume set by Leon Trotsky the assassinated Bolshevik leader, History of the Russian Revolution. I knew enough about Trotsky, and about Allan, to get secretly stirred inside when he lost himself in that “project” (Allan’s term). In the span between that night when he laid out his dream trip and the actual start of the trip several months later he thus found “religion.” Found socialism, for good or evil.  

[One of the things about Josie, one that she saw as a positive trait, and I did too, was that she was a drone when it came to research, that was why Professor Telly liked her, worked with her closely. It turned out that Allan was the same way about things, a drone when he got into something, not necessarily academic things but things that he thought important and so he began reading everything he could about the socialist movement, revolutions, the labor movements and all that.]

Allan would read his books as well on the trip, which was fine sometimes but a few times when I did not want him to when I was feeling kind of lonely and looking for attention from him. Looking for him to do stuff with and to me. Especially when we were in cities and not the long lost shadow campers. So that was what made Montreal, a perfectly beautiful city sitting there on the Saint Lawrence with nice clean, busy, happy streets and great scenery, kind of a bummer, kind of a turning point. We had rented a small room with a kitchenette near the student ghetto for a week and for that week he almost hibernated there reading, reading, reading one political book after another.

One night, maybe our third night there, I said, “hey, we are in the city, if you don’t want to go out I do.” He said go ahead and returned to his book. So I left and walked down Saint Catherine’s Street which was only a few blocks from where our room was. Now since I was in the city I had dressed up a bit, wore a mini-skirt which Allan had said that he liked and that showed my legs to good effect. While I was walking a young guy, Jean Bon I called him, maybe a little older than me, asked me (in French) if I was looking for company. I said yes. We stepped into a café for a drink, maybe a couple and without too much coaxing by then he brought me to his studio apartment. He went to a bowl, rolled a couple of joints, passed me some of the dope and that got me going a little. Well maybe a lot, because he was pretty good- looking and I had always had a thing that turned me  on about making it with a stranger who seemed okay the first night. [He had great technique but that she would tell me about that some other time since she had already told me enough about the specifics of her sex life that evening.]  When we were done and I was ready to leave he handed me fifty-dollars (Canadian). I asked what that was for and he explained that he assumed that I was a prostitute (although he was more delicate than that) since I was on Saint Catherine Street and I was an easy pick up and that was the going rate for good hookers then. I started to protest but then stopped quickly and said to myself well why not keep the money. It made me a little wet thinking about it as I walked the streets back to our room although while I had that stranger fantasy thing I never before that night had a working street girl fantasy.

When I got back to the room I told Allan about my “date” (except the money part). He said, as he always said we weren’t tied up like some bourgeois parents nonsense, and then went back to reading. I was furious and to take my revenge I went to Jean Bon’s place a couple more times before we left Montreal. And, both of us smiling, took my fifty-dollar “fee” each time (and it really was the going rate as he said because I had asked a couple of streets girls on Saint Catherine’s about it after that first time, I didn’t want to be some cheap whore. They looked at me strangely when I asked in my Americanized French since to them I did not look like I was in the “trade,” strictly an amateur slumming, if anything). After those sessions then not so furious I also bought myself a nice dress with my “earnings” before we left Montreal. Allan did say I looked sexy in when I tried it on in front of him, and I did. He took the dress off of me fast enough when he saw me swaying gently (and suggestively) in that slinky thing. The wages of war.                   

[Josie said that really after Montreal a lot of the rest of the trip got kind of blurry, Allan blurry. Driven hard by Allan blurriness, triggered more and more by what he read,  about what he was about, what hungers drove him, what injustices in the world he took personally and his odd, odd to staid well-off or at least not poor, down at the base of society poor, Josie his feeling never quite directly expressed but always hidden just below the surface and that would come out in full flower when he let his vile addictions get the better of him his sense that “the world owed him a living” since he had risen on his own from the social slime. Maybe too she speculated he was driven off the edge by the drugs he was inhaling to keep awake for many hours in order to devour everything he wanted to read.

Sadly and when Josie got tired and maybe a little tipsy that Cambridge night  and tried to shortcut some of the travelogue stuff and get a little more to the heart of what had driven them apart this sadness draped itself over her shoulders when she almost whispered that what had started out for Alan as some fulfillment of a childhood quest had turned to ashes, some desperate need to get out from under, to satisfy some wanting habits if only vicariously, turned in on itself after he got “religion” and began to think more about how he was going to fit into the “new world” after the end of the trip. She told me that night that Allan never would get a handle on his place in that new world and that ate at him, ate at him and made him increasingly sour and bitter about the world, and about his own personal plight.

He and Josie had both agreed that they could see signs, definite signs that the big cultural wave that had risen in the 1960s to smite the giants had lost steam, had begun to fade as the war in Vietnam, and America’s central role in the fiasco, diminished. As the various counter-cultural movements turned in on themselves and as people, the people expected to create the newer world, went back to school, the professions or the workaday world. Frankly Josie said she was less concerned about what to do in the post-revolt world since she had not been washed as much by the phenomenon but she knew the events piling up weighed on Allan’s mind. He after all had staked his political future, had done his stockade time without rancor but with a sense of social solidarity with that fellahin world, on some kind of people’s victory in the ongoing struggles to right the world’s wrongs.]

We would argue over that future a bit, more and more as our time on the trip went on, and Allan kept thinking almost daily that the travels should be shortened and that we should get back to the “real world.” He included me in that “real world” future although he knew that my political commitments were much less sure than his, he said he would carry us along until I caught up. I confessed to him that my “radical moment’ was wearing thin as I saw the movements turn in on themselves, disintegrate, or reduce themselves to endless bickering which I hated and which had driven me to work closely with the Jehovah stern Quakers and the little old ladies in tennis sneakers who were gentile in their fervent opposition to war and other tragedies of life. I knew I would not catch up, I was not built that way and in my own thinking I was much more concerned about pursuing my professional career and had the glint of an idea of settling down in the not distance future. I kept that glint, and would keep that glint from Allan probably until about 1975 when our relationship turned on the question of settling down or not with no more “in betweens” which had sustained our affair for a couple of years after we got off the road.

The immediate effect of all antsy behavior on Allan’s part was that after Montreal the former leisurely pace of a hundred or two hundred miles a day, max, went by the boards as we they travelled from Montreal to Detroit, really Ann Arbor in one day (skipping right through Toronto, which had been part of the original trip plan but was scuttled since Allan said we had been there the year before anyway. I did not mind the skip although I hated the fast pace, the risky driving and his peevishness when we got caught in a traffic jam outside of Detroit as Allan pushed that day to hit Ann Arbor before dusk).       

Ann Arbor in late 1972 represented all that Allan feared about what was happening to that big splash 1960s wave that he had ridden(at that point he looked and dressed still like God’s own hippie poster child, beard, long hair and all which I found sexy I will tell you). Since I had gone to fellow Michigan Big Ten Wisconsin and had made connections on that campus that way and had also gone to Hunter College High with several women who went Michigan and had kept in touch we stayed at the house of one of those of high school friends. Or rather the house, the doctor’s house, outside of town, that my girlfriend (and her boyfriend) were house-sitting while the doctor’s family was in Europe. During our stay there were several parties, nothing too wild but enough to be entertaining, except for Allan.

He was shocked by the lack of any political talk from people who I had assured him had been big wheels in the burgeoning Ann Arbor radical and anti-war movements of the late 1960s. He did make me laugh when he said we could have been in Tea Neck or Newburgh given the scene at one party. Worse much, worse was when we went down to the Quad and around the streets surrounding the campus and Allan remarked (although I did not laugh this time) about the place turning into a den of “cockroach” capitalists. The week we expected to spend in friendly Ann Arbor (and that my friend expected as well) turned into four days and Allan got antsy.

That quick departure was also the first time that as I would find out later Allan had done, or someone had done since we could never pin it on him, some suspicious things in that doctor’s house. But that did not come out until much later, a couple of years later when I saw that high school girlfriend who told me some things, valuable things, had gone missing from the doctor’s house around the time she was house-sitting. He never admitted to taking anything back then later when his bad actor activities, his lying, his drug-running to feed his habits and to “fund” his political activities (the feeding of both which got his best friend, Peter Markin, killed down in Mexico lying face down with two slugs in the back of his head when they ran up against the cartels in some scam I never really could figure out) came to light and helped to seal the break-up of our relationship. There was no way to prove he took anything but it was after we left that house, that opulent house (to him as he commented on incessantly while we stayed there and thereafter too), that Allan started his rant about doing and taking what was necessary for the “revolution.”  I dismissed it at the time as so much influence of Che Guevara or Frantz Fanon and the “wretched of the earth” stuff they had promoted along the way and which Allan was reading about at the time but later I was not so sure.

Later anyway the other stuff that had piled up made that early incident pale by comparison. But that latter information that I learned about was not part of the trip story, the idea of the trip as it formed in Allan’s head, the planning, the actual start and the abrupt finish and later chaos which was kind of a metaphor for our whole relationships  and the reason that I am spending  some much time given some details about his joys and his anguishes which drove our topsy-turvy relationship and helps explain why it took so long for me to cut him off when the time came and nothing else could be done. I do not, in any case, want to go into a lot of those sordid Allan details except that he took lots of stuff from me and every friend he knew to feed his habits and keep the bad guys from his door when he got behind in his payments before the hammer came down and we all had to cut him adrift. [Josie’s expression in telling this part of the story even over a year after the whole thing collapsed was one verging on tears, and rage.]       

After Ann Arbor there were mad spurs through big cities, small towns and plenty of flatland prairie, Iowa cornfields, strange Western state rock formations, and dry desert as we at Allan’s insistence had decided to get to the West Coast in a far shorter period than we had originally planned. That grasping between Chicago and the Coast, San Francisco was to originally have taken two months, with the proviso that if the weather in the Rockies got bad, got to the squalls and whiteouts, early we would push on faster. In any case the new plan called for us to be on the Coast in two week. Most of it was kind of a blur between racing between points and ignoring many point that I wanted to see in the Western desert night. [She did mention a couple of interesting stops and what happened, or almost happened in a couple of places. Some tinged with disputes others just signifying that the writing was on the wall, or would be eventually even if it took a very long time to break the bonds.]

[That rainy Cambridge night Josie also felt comfortable enough with me to pass me a sheath of type-written pages that she wanted me to read over later since she was too tired then to speak about those blur days and nights. She told me that the first few months after she let Allan go in order to figure out what went wrong in the past she had converted her woes into short stories and fictionalized those latter adventures. Her name in the stories was Angelica and they were told in Allan’s voice although Josie insisted that the important point for me to take from the stories was not the facts, although the locales were true, but the feelings about how things had changed between her and Allan. When I read them later they did provide some insight into the destructive nature of the relationship, Allan’s increasingly secretive ways, his constant edging toward illegality and amorality, his almost Svengali-like way with young impressible women whom he spent increasing amounts of time trying to conquer, and to ill-use later when he went seriously off the rails, but the travel parts didn’t add to my understanding of his continuing pull on her so I have left them out here. The most telling aspect of those later parts of the trip to my mind remains that Josie look in describing her take on Allan’s alleged activities and afterward changes in that doctor’s house in Ann Arbor mentioned above. That image as I think about it today is still quite vivid.]

Let me kind of finish up here, okay Frank because I am a little sleepy after putting all my thoughts together for you. That neon wilderness travelling talk night (and the next day) when Allan and my love was young (and we were high as kites) and what followed on the trip, the ups and downs, and the sideways too, was our beginning. Our real beginning, our love time with all the bumps, maybe despite all the bumps. And that held us together for a long time. Then I could no longer be with him, although I don’t’ want to go beyond the details of our love and its failings that I have spoken of already. He had gone to a place that I could not follow, he had cut me too badly by then by his careless love actions with other women (lying like crazy about where he was at any given time usually using “at a meeting” as the lie), by his waywardness and refusal to settle down, by his angers and hatreds, by his deceits and casual lies, so no way, there had been too much sorrow between them.

Every once in a while though on wind-swept nights, or when I am near some ocean, or some raggedy scruffy guy selling some left-wing newspaper passes me by I get all misty about my sweet walking daddy. Then I would try to reach out again for that love that had passed us by, that he, my be-bop sweet walking daddy when he was in the mood, had never known how to handle. I would wonder to myself when I was in that mood if he ever found that neon wilderness that he wandered after, and which we together had not found.

[She said I would have to know that, know that up front, on that rainy, sad, bluesy night. And that was our beginning…]