Out In The Be-Bop, Be-Bop 1960s
Night- The Great San Francisco Summer Of
Love Explosion-Take Two
Introduction to the series by Bart
Webber
My old
friend the late Peter Paul Markin who we always called Markin, or once Frankie
Riley our leader anointed him “the Scribe” since he was basically Frankie’s
flak, always writing stuff about Frankie like it was scripture and Frankie did
nothing to dissuade anybody about its worthiness as such, around the corner
where we used hang in high school, the corner right next to Jack Slack’s
bowling alley where sometimes we would cadge a few free games if Jack’s son,
our fellow classmate in the North Adamsville Class of 1964, got as caught up in
what he called the jailbreak of the 1960s as any man I knew from that time. Got
caught up in the acid-etched music from the Dead, the Airplane and a million
other minute niche rock bands (that acid being not “throw in your face” acid
but LSD okay), the drugs from ganja to peyote although not LSD he always
claimed but with some of the stuff he did toward the end I don’t know, the sex
in about seventeen different variations once he got the hang of the Kama Sutra
and a couple of adventurous West Coast women to indulge him, the madcap adventure
of hitchhiking west, the bummer of riding freight when he tired of the
hitchhike road and which he often said was not for the faint-hearted , not for
those who didn’t breathe track smoke and dreams the way he put it to me one
time when he was in high dudgeon. Not only got caught up in all the commotion of
the counter-culture that kids today scratch their heads about the minute some
old geezer like Josh Breslin, Jack Dawson, Sam Lowell, or, hell, me starts
going on about “wasn’t that a time” but brought me, Frankie Riley, Jack, Jimmy
Jenkins, Josh, and a few other guys from around our way (except Josh who was
from Olde Saco up in Maine although in the end he was as much a corner boy
refugee as the rest of us from North Adamsville) into the action as well. All
of us (again except Josh whom he had met out on Russian Hill in Frisco in the
summer of love, 1967 version) at one time or another travelled west with the
Scribe, and lived to tell about it, although it was a close thing, a very close
thing a couple of times, drug times and wrong place at the wrong time times.
But as the
1960s decade closed, maybe a little into the early 1970s the luster faded, the
ebb came crashing in, and most of the old corner boys like Frankie and Sam who
led things back to the “normal” went back to the old grind (both of them to the
law). Josh went to writing for a lot of what he called advanced publications
(meaning low circulation, meaning no dough, meaning doing it for the glory to
hear him tell it now, now that he is out of the grind). And Markin, well,
Markin, as we all expected, also took up the pen, for a while. Wrote according
to Josh some pretty good stuff that big circulation publications were
interested in publishing. Wrote lots of stuff in the early 1970s once he
settled down in Oakland (Josh lived out there with him them and I know Sam and
maybe Frankie visited him there) about his corner boys, his old working class
neighborhood, about being a screwed-up teen filled with angst and alienation in
the old days. Good stuff from what I read even if I was a little miffed when he
referred to me as a guy with two left feet, two left hands and too left out
with the girls which wasn’t exactly true, well a little. One big series that he
did, did as homage to his fellow Vietnam veterans who had trouble getting back
to the “real world” and wound up under bridges and along railroad tracks mainly
in Southern California where he interviewed them and let them tell their
stories their way called Going to the
Jungle (a double-reference to the jungle in ‘Nam and the railroad “jungle”
of hobo legend) was short-listed for some important award but I forget which
one.
And then he
stopped. Fell off the earth. No, not really, but the way I got the story mostly
from Josh and Sam, with a little stuff from Frankie thrown in that is what the
thing amounted to. Markin had always been a little volatile in his appetites,
what he called in high school (and we started calling too) his “wanting habits”
coming out of the wretched of the earth North Adamsville deep down working poor
neighborhoods where he came from (me and Sam too). At some point about 1975 or
1976 but probably the earlier date he started doing girl, snow, you know,
cocaine that was no big thing in the 1960s (I had never tried it and has only
heard about it from guys who went to Mexico for weed and would pick up a couple
of ounces to level out with when the pot got weary. Cocaine then was pretty
expensive and so if you got your “wanting habits” on with that stuff, if you
liked running it constantly up your nose until you always sound like you have a
stuffed up nose then you had better either start robbing banks, a dicey thing,
a very dicey thing the one time we tried to rob as little a thing as a variety
store or start dealing to keep the demons away. He choose the latter.
So once
Markin moved up the drug dealer food chain that is where things got weird, got
so weird that when I heard the story I thought he must have taken too much acid
back in the day no matter what he claimed. He was “muling” a lot for the boys
down south, meaning bringing the product over the border which was a lot easier
then as long as you were not Mexican or a “hippie,” or looked like either. From
what Sam said things went okay for a while but see, and this I know from my own
story, those kid “wanting habits” play funny tricks on you, make you go awry as
Markin used to say. In the summer of 1976 (we are not sure which month) Markin
went south (Mexico) to pick a big (for him) two kilogram batch of coke to bring
back to the states. And that was the end of Markin, the end that we can believe
part. They found his body in a back alley down in Sonora face down with two slugs
in his head. Needless to say the Federales did next to nothing to find out who
murdered him. Frankie then a budding lawyer, once the news got back to Boston, sent
a private detective down there but all he was able to find out from a shaky
source was that Markin had either stolen the two kilogram shipment and was
going to go independent (not a good idea even then when the cartels were
nothing like today, Jesus) or the negotiations went bad, went off the track,
and somebody got offended by the gringo marauder. Life is cheap in that league.
To this day that is all we know, and old Markin is buried down there in some
potter’s field unmarked grave still mourned and missed.
That brings me
back to my purpose here. I mentioned above that in the early 1970s Markin did a
series of articles about the old days and his old corner boys in North
Adamsville and we, Frankie, Josh, Sam and I agreed that a few of them were
worth publishing if only for ourselves and the small circle of people whom
Markin wrote about. And so that is exactly what we are doing here. Since not
all of us had everything that Markin wrote, what the hell they were newspaper
or magazine articles, to be used to wrap up the fish in or something after we
were done reading them, we decided to print what was available. Since I was
able to find a copy of the following sketch up in the attic of my parents’ home
I got “elected” to start things off.
Just below is
the introduction that Sam Lowell wrote for this first article trying to put
what Markin was about in content and the article itself The Great San Francisco Summer
Of Love Explosion is below that:
The late Peter
Paul Markin, also known as “the Scribe, ” so anointed by Frankie Riley the
self-designated king hell king of the schoolboy night among the corner boys who
hung around the pizza parlors, pool halls, and bowling alleys of the town, in
telling somebody else’s story about life in the old days in the working class
neighborhoods of North Adamsville where he grew up in his own voice, or when others,
threating murder and mayhem, wanted him
to tell their stories usually gave each and every one of that crew enough rope
to hang themselves without addition comment. He would take down, just like he
would do later with the Going To The
Jungle series that won a couple of awards and was short-listed for the
Globe award, what they wanted the world to hear, spilled their guts out as he
one time uncharitably termed their actions (not the veterans, no way, but the
zanies from our old town), and then
lightly, very lightly if the guy was bigger, stronger than him, or in the case
of girls if they were foxy, mainly clean up the language for a candid world to
read.
In the case
of one “Foul-Mouth” Phil Larkin (or better the corner boy formerly known as
“Foul-Mouth” Phil, although he joined the Jack Slack’s corner boys later that
the rest of us who had gone to junior high school together as well, which will
be explained below) the main character of this sketch and a genuine madman of
the first order Markin felt, as he said at the time, an elementary act of
social hygiene and in an effort to keep the facts straight, a need to make such
comments which are contained within brackets below.
A YouTube
film clip of Jim Morrison and The Doors performing their signature “acid” rock
classic, The End to set the mood for
this piece.
The Great San Francisco
Summer Of Love Explosion
From The Pen
Of Peter Paul Markin
Phil Larkin,
just then road-weary “Far-Out” Phil Larkin, for those who want to trace his
evolution from North Adamsville early 1960s be-bop night “Foul-Mouth” Phil, and
at that time the vocal terror of every mother’s daughter from six to sixty now
morphed into full-fledged merry prankster, sat on a June such-and-such 1967
be-bop night on a nameless San Francisco hill.
[Markin:
Phil, despite his excessive lewd language in his school days was, occasionally,
a secret delight of some girls, secret delight of one Minnie Callahan for one,
damn him since she had been my girl after all, for just one example of such
girl classmates, she proper Catholic novena and rosary beads in public and in
Sunday chapel pew me late a couple of rows behind her so I could watch her ass
without drawing attention as it turned out with a little venal sin heart which
responded to Phil’s utterances with a titter at first and then got more
interested, went out with him and to the senior prom as well, and here I was
treating her like the second coming of a convent nun back then (except that
ass-watching but that only a venal sin when you think about all the real madness
in this wicked old world in that North Adamsville night.]
Alongside
him sat new conquest, not conquered with his old time wicked corner boy
devil-inspired charm like with Minnie Callahan who he claimed he took under the
satin sheets but everybody, all his corner boys including me but I was so
disappointed in Minnie’s rejection of me that I half-hoped that it was true,
assumed he was lying as we all did in those days but with mere patter (and dope,
dope the new magic elixir to pave the way to sexual conquests or just jumping
to bed for the sake of the song), new flame Butterfly Swirl met on a La Jolla
beach a month or so back, not entirely by accident. And next to her his old
flame, old in that quickly met moment when old was measured in days, weeks,
months and year or years were hardly comprehensible, this merry prankster bus
flame met in Ames, Iowa late the previous year, accidentally except to those
cosmically inclined and Phil was not one of them not one bit, Luscious Lois.
Lois, however, now transformed into Lilly Rose, transformed at the flip of a
switch, as was her way when some whim, or some word in the air, hit her dead
center. Along the road west, again by whimsy she had been variously, Lupe
Matin, Loretta Nova, Lance Opal (figure that one since as every guy on the bus
and lots of guys off the knew she was a flaming hetero, certainly no dyke
excuse the term but that was familiar corner boy usage then and Phil had no
other term to use since was unaware of the isle of Lebos or of Sappho’s
daughters then and if they didn’t know she would make it clear, clear as day
despite her tease), and so on. (Phil just gave up and started calling her
honey, or sweet pea, and left it at that)
[Markin:
Sometime, but not now, remind me to give you my take on this name-changing
epidemic. Not only were we re-inventing ourselves physically and spiritually
but in our public personas shedding our “slave names” much as some blacks were
doing for more serious reasons than we had at the time. Hell, I got caught up in
moniker stuff myself, and was for a time, Blackie Saint James. Yes, remind me
to flesh this whole thing out.]
It had been
one long roller-coaster year for Foul-Mouth as he drifted with the new age
winds. [Markin: Alright, let’s split the difference on his moniker and just
call him Phil from here on in since I knew him way back when in that weird
early 1960s corner boy night when he didn’t know from nothing about which way
the winds were blowin’, could have cared less which way they were blowin’, or
if they were, and made fun of me, as did
Frankie Riley, and a couple of others, although not Sammy Russo, when I said
some big changes were coming that would throw off our old school, work, green
lawn little white house with picket fence, two point four children, mongrel dog
futures notions. Foul-mouthed or far out Phil was some hell-bound character.]
After high
school, no college Joe he, from the bowels of despair rank no serious future
retail clerk hustling mens’ apparel up
at Raymond’s Department Store in slowly dying (dying from suburban mall-it is, then
all the rage) Adamsville Center, harassed beyond endurance at home for lacking
some unfathomable ambition from dear mother, with an occasional assist from dad
to further infuriate him (that ambition entailing pursuing some low-rent,
GS-10, government job with security unto the grave, egad), and a late sniffing
of that wind that this fellow corner boy had predicted was coming although he
was vague on the contours of that change Phil broke out one night.
Literally
late one night, one May 1966 night.
Around two in the morning, with his all his earthly belongings on his
back in an old time World War II army knapsack picked up at Bill’s Army
&Navy Store Phil lit out like Walt Whitman way back when to places unknown
and Jack Kerouac and his gang just a few years before for the coast, although
if you had mentioned those names to him then he would have stared blankly back
at you. Maybe now too. But here, let’s let Phil tell the story for a while
about how he got to ‘Frisco and then we’ll see what is up with him and his
“family” (okay, okay, Butterfly Swirl and Lilly Rose, if that is her name by
the time we get back) on that nameless 1967 San Francisco hill:
“Hey, I am
no slave to convention, whatever the conventions are, but in those days I
looked like a lot of young guys. Longish hair, a beard, a light beard at the
time, blue jeans, an army jacket, sunglasses, a knapsack over my shoulder, and
work boots on my feet. Sandals would not come until later when I got off the
road and was settled in a “pad” [Markin: house, rented or maybe abandoned, apartment,
hovel, back of a “free” church, back of a store, whatever, a place to rest
those weary bones, or “crash”] in La Jolla and were, in any case, not the kind of footwear that would carry you
through on those back road places you might find yourself in, places like
Deadwood, Nevada at three in the morning with a ten mile walk to the nearest
real town in front of you. I mention all this because that “look” gave me the
cache to make it on the road when I headed out of the house that Spring 1966
be-bop night after one final argument with dear mother about where I was going,
what was I going to do when I got there, and what was I going to do for money.
Standard mother fare then, and now I suppose.
So short on
dough, and long on nerve and fearlessness then I started to hitchhike with the
idea of heading west to California like about eight million other people, for
about that same number of reasons, have been heading there since the Spanish,
or one of those old time traveling by boat nations, heard about the place. Of course, nowadays I would not think to do
such a thing in such a dangerous world, unless I was armed to the teeth and
that would take a little edge off that “seeking the newer world” Markin has
been blabbing about since about 1960. But then, hard to believe that it was
only a few years ago, problem, let’s get going. Especially no problem when just
a few miles into my journey a Volkswagen
mini-bus (or van, neither in the same league as the yellow brick road school
bus, no way, that I will tell you about later but okay for a long ride, and
definitely okay when you are in some nowhere, nowhere Nebraska maybe, back road, hostile territory dominate by
squares, squares with guns and other evil implements and they, the VW-ites,
stoned, stoned to the heavens stop to ask you directions because they are “lost”
and invite you on board) stops on Route 128, backs up, and a guy who looks a
lot like me, along with two pretty young girls says, “where are you heading?”
(Okay, okay, Markin, young women, alright.)
West, just west. And then the beatified words, “Hop in.”
Most of the
road until the Midwest, Iowa is the Midwest right, was filled with short little
adventures like that. A mini-bus frolic for a few hours, or a few days. Maybe a
few short twenty miles non-descript square Chevy rides in between but heading
west by hook or by crook. Did I like it? Sure I did although I was pretty much
an up-tight working-class guy (that was what one of those pretty girls I just
mentioned on that first hitchhike ride out called me when I “passed” on smoking
a joint and, hell, she was from next door Clintondale for chrissakes) who liked
his booze, a little sex [Markin: Phil, come on now, a little?], and just
hanging around the old town waiting for the other shoe to drop. But I could
see, after a few drug experiences, no, not LSD, that I was starting to dig the
scene. And I felt every day that I was out of North Adamsville that I was
finally shaking off the layers of dust that I had acquired from that place.
Then one
night, sitting in the front seat of a big old Pontiac (not everybody, not every
“hip” everybody had the mini-bus, van, or school bus handy for their “search”
for the great American night), Big Bang Jane between us, the Flip-Flop Kid
driving like god’s own mad driver, smoking a joint, laughing with the couple in
back, Bopper Billy and Sweet Pea, we headed into a pay-as- you go roadside camp
near Ames out in Iowa. And at that campsite parked maybe five or six places
over from where we planted ourselves was god’s own copy of that day-glo merry
prankster bus I mentioned before. I flipped out because while I had hear about,
and seen from a distance, such contraptions I hadn’t been up close to one
before. Wow!
Markin had
it just about right when he described that old bus after I told him about it:
“A rickety,
ticky-tack, bounce over every bump in the road to high heaven, gear-shrieking
school bus. But not just any yellow brick road school bus that you rode to
various educationally good for you locations like movie houses, half yawn,
science museums, yawn, art museums, yawn, yawn, or wind-swept picnic areas
for some fool weenie roast, two yawns
there too, when you were a school kid. And certainly not your hour to get home
daily grind school bus, complete with surly driver (male or female, although
truth to tell the females were worst since they acted just like your mother,
and maybe were acting on orders from her) that got you through K-12 in one
piece, and you even got to not notice the bounces to high heaven over every
bump of burp in the road. No, my friends, my comrades, my brethren this is
god’s own bus commandeered to navigate the highways and by-ways of the 1960s
come flame or flash-out. Yes, it is rickety, and all those other descriptive
words mentioned above in regard to school day buses. That is the nature of such
ill-meant mechanical contraptions after all. But this one is custom-ordered,
no, maybe that is the wrong way to put it, this is “karma”-ordered to take a
motley crew of free-spirits on the roads to seek a “newer world,” to seek the
meaning of what one persistent writer on the subject has described as the
search for the great blue-pink American Western night.”
“Naturally
to keep its first purpose intact this heaven-bound vehicle is left its mustard
yellow body surface underneath but over that primer the surface has been
transformed by generations (generations here signifying not twenty-year cycles
but trips west, and east) of, well, folk art, said folk art being heavily
weighted toward graffiti, toward the psychedelic day-glo splashes and zodiacally
meaningful symbols. And the interior.
Most of those hardback seats that captured every bounce of childhood have been
ripped out and discarded who knows where and replaced by mattresses, many
layers of mattresses for this bus is not merely for travel but for home. To
complete the “homey” effect there are stored, helter-skelter, in the back
coolers, assorted pots and pans, mismatched dishware and nobody’s idea of the
family heirloom china, boxes of dried foods and condiments, duffle bags full of
clothes, clean and unclean, blankets, sheets, and pillows, again clean and
unclean.
Let’s put it
this way, if someone wants to make a family hell-broth stew or a made up bed
there is nothing in the way to stop them. But also know this, and know it now,
as we start to focus on this journey that food, the preparation of food, and
the desire, except in the wee hours when the body craves something inside, is a
very distant concern for these “campers.” If food was what you desired in the
foreboding 1960s be-bop traveling night you took a cruise ship to nowhere or a train (if you
could find one), some southern pacific, great northern, union pacific, and
worked out your dilemma in the dining car. Of course, no heaven-send, merry
prankster-ish yellow brick road school bus would be complete without a high-
grade stereo system to blast the now obligatory “acid rock” coming through the
radiator practically.”
Thanks
Markin. After we settled in at our campsite, the Flip-Flop Kid (and the guy
really could never make up his mind about anything, anything except don’t go
too close to Big Bang Jane, no kidding around on that), Bopper Billy (who
really thought he was king of the be-bop night, but, hell in the North
Adamsville corner boy night Frankie Riley, hell, maybe even Markin, would have
out be-bopped him for lunch and had time for a nap), Big Bang Jane (guess what
that referred to, and she gave herself that nickname, but I never tried to make
a move on her because she was just a little too wild, a little too “I would
have to keeping looking over my shoulder for” me then, probably later too when
things got even looser. And then there was the Flip-Flop Kid’s warning ), and
Sweet Pea (and she was a sweet pea, if Bopper Billy, wasn’t around, well we
both agreed there was something there but in those 1966 days we were still half
tied up with the old conventions of not breaking in between a guy and his girl,
well that was the convention anyway and whether it was generally honored or
not, I did) we headed over once we heard the vibes from the sound system
churning out some weird sounds, something like we had never heard before.
(Weird then, little did we know that this was the wave of the future, for a few
years anyway).
Naturally,
well naturally after the fact, once we learned what the inhabitants of the bus
were about, they invited us for supper, or really to have some stew from a big
old pot cooking on a fireplace that came with the place. And if you didn’t want
the hell-broth stew then you could partake of some rarified dope. No, again, no
on the LSD thing. It was around, it was around on the bus too, among its
various denizens, but mainly it was a rumor, and more of a West Coast thing. In
the self-proclaimed, tribal self-proclaimed Summer of Love and after that is
when the acid hit, and when I tried it, but not on this trip. This trip was
strictly weed, hemp, joint, mary jane, marijuana, herb, whatever you wanted to
called that stuff that got you high, got you out of yourself, and got you away
from what you were in North Adamsville, Mechanicsville or whatever ville you
were from, for a while.
So that
night was the introduction to the large economy size search for the freedom we
all, as it turned out, were looking for. I remember saying to Sweet Pea as we
went back to our campsite (and wishing I wasn’t so square about messing with
another guy’s girl, and maybe she was too, maybe wishing I wasn’t so square
about it) that we had turned a corner that night and that we had best play it
out right then for the chance might not come again.
The next
day, no, the next night because I had spent the day working up to it, I became
“Far-Out” Phil, or the start of that Phil. Frankly, to not bore you with a pipe
by pipe description of the quantity of dope that I smoked (herb, hashish, a
little cocaine, more exotic and hard to get then than it became later which guys
going on dope runs to Mexico would bring back as a “snack”) or ingested (a tab
of mescaline) that day, I was “wasted.”
Hell I am getting “high” now just thinking about how high I was that
day. By nightfall I was ready for almost anything as that weird music that
crept up your spine got hold of me. I just, as somebody put a match to the wood
to start the cooking of a tonight pot of stew to keep us from malnutrition,
started dancing by myself. Phil Larkin, formerly foul-mouthed Phil, a cagy,
edgy guy from deep in corner boy, wise guy, hang-out guy, never ask a girl to
dance but just kind of mosey up world started dancing by myself. But not for
long because then he, me, took that dance to some other level, some level that
I can only explain by example. Have you heard The Doors album, the one that traces the max-daddy rocker of the
late 1960s night, Jim Morrison’s career from garage band leader to guru? And
has photographs of the band in concert. One of the scenes pictured at one of
the outdoor concerts, in a canyon somewhere I think, had him, head full of
dope, practically transformed into a shaman. Yeah, one of those Indian (Markin:
Native American, Phil] religious leaders who did a trance-dance. That was me in
late May of 1966, if you can believe that.
And see,
although I wasn’t conscious of it first I was being joined by one of the women
on the bus, Luscious Lois, whom I had met, in passing, the night before. This
Lois, not her real name, as you can tell not only were we re-inventing
ourselves physically and spiritually but in our public personas shedding our
“slave names” much as some blacks were doing for more serious reasons than we
had at the time. [Markin: Nice point, Phil, although I already ‘stole’ that
point from you before.] Her real name
was Sandra Sharp, a college girl from Vassar who, taking some time off from
school, was “on the bus” trying to find herself. She was like some delicate
flower, a dahlia maybe, like I had never encountered before.
I won’t bore
you with the forever have to tell what she looked like thing because that is
not what made her, well, intriguing, maddeningly intriguing, like some femme fatale in a crime noir film that
Markin, from what I can gather, is always running on about these days when he
is not getting us to tell our stories.
She was pretty, no question, maybe even a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty if
it came to a fair description in the light of day but what made her fetching,
enchanting, if that is a different way to say it, was the changes in her facial
expressions as she danced, and danced provocatively, dance half-nakedly, around
my desire. And I danced, shedding my shirt although I do not remember doing so,
and also danced half-naked around her desire. Then, faintly like a buzz from
some hovering insect, maybe a bee, and then more loudly I kept hearing the
on-lookers, half-mad with dope and with desire themselves, yelling far out, far
out. And Far-Out Phil was born.
Oh, as for
Luscious Lois and her desire, well, you figure it out. I might not have been
wise to the ways of the Vassar world in those days when such places were
bastions to place the young women of the elite and keep them away from clawing
upstarts from the corner boy night as I should have been but the rest of my
time on the bus was spend hovering around Lois, and keeping other guys
away. I even worked some plebeian
“magic” on her one night when I started using certain swear words in her ear that had worked for me with
every Sunday at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, Millie Callahan, back in the day.
Far-Out Phil got a little something extra that night, proper Vassar girl or
not.
No offense
against Iowa, well only a little offense for not being near an ocean, I think.
No offense against the university there, well only a little offense for not
being Berkeley but after about a week of that campsite and its environs I was
ready to move on and it did not matter if it was with Flip-Flop and his crowd
or with Captain Crunch (the guy who “led” his merry pranksters, real name,
Samuel Jackman, Columbia, Class of 1958 who long ago gave up searching,
searching for anything, and just hooked into the idea of taking the ride).
Captain Crunch, as befitted his dignity (and since it was “his” bus paid for
out of some murky deal, probably a youthful drug deal, from what I heard), was
merely the “leader” here.
The driving
was left to another, older guy. This driver
was not your mother-sent,
mother-agent, old Mrs. Henderson, who prattled on about keeping in your seats
and be quiet while she is driving (maybe that, subconsciously, is why the seats
were ripped out long ago on the very first “voyage” west) but a very, very
close imitation of the god-like prince-driver of the road, the ‘on the road”
pioneer, Neal Cassady, shifting those gears very gently but also very
sure-handedly so no one noticed those
bumps (or else was so stoned, drug or music stoned, that those things passed
like so much wind). His name: Cruising Casey (real name, Charles Kendall,
Haverford College Class of ’62, but just
this minute, Cruising Casey, mad man searching for the great American be-bop
night under the extreme influence of one Ken Kesey, the max-daddy mad man of
the great search just then). And Cruising was, being just a little older, and
about one hundred years more experienced, also weary, very weary of co-eds,
copping dope and, frankly, staying in one place for so long. He also wanted to
see his girlfriend or his wife I am not sure which in Denver so I knew that was
where we were heading. So off we go, let’s get going.
And the
passengers. Nobody from the Flip-Flop Express (although Flip-Flop, as usual
lived up to his name and hemmed and hawed about it), they were heading back
east, back into the dark Mechanicsville night. I tried, tried like hell, to get
Sweet Pea to come along just in case the thing with Lois fell apart or she took
some other whim into her head. See, re-invented or not, I still had some
all-the-angles boyhood rust hanging on me. We knew for sure that Casey was
driving, and was still driving effortlessly so the harsh realities of his
massive drug intake had not hit yet, or maybe he really was superman. Others
whose names I remember: Mustang Sally (Susan Stein, Michigan, Class of 1959,
ditto on the searching thing), Captain Crunch’s girlfriend, (although not
exclusively, not exclusively by her choice, not his, and he was not happy about
it for lots of reasons which need not detain us here). Most of the rest of the
“passengers” have monikers like Silver City Slim, Penny Pot (guess why), Moon
Man, Flash Gordon (from out in space somewhere, literally, as he told it),
Denver Dennis (from New York City, go figure), and the like. They also had real
names that indicated that they were from somewhere that had nothing to do with
public housing projects, ghettos or barrios. And they were also, or almost all
were, twentyish, and had some highly-rated college years after their names,
graduated or not. And they were all either searching or, like the Captain, were
at a stage where they were just hooked into taking the ride.
As for the
rest. Well, no one could be exactly sure, by the time the bus approached the outskirts
of Denver, as this was strictly a revolving cast of characters depending on who
was hitchhiking on that desolate back road State Route 5 in Iowa, or County
Road 16 in Wyoming, and desperately needed to be picked up, or face time, and
not nice time with a buzz on, in some small town pokey. Or it might depend on
who decided to pull up stakes at some outback campsite and get on the bus for a
spell, and decide if they were, or were not, on the bus. After all even all-day
highs, all-night sex, and 24/7 just hanging around listening to the music is
not for everyone. And while we had plenty of adventures on those strange day
roads winding up the crest of the Rockies to Denver, thinking back on it now,
they all came down to drugs, sex, and rock and roll, with a little food on the
side.
Well, except
that one time, camping on a primitive clearing, not really a campsite, not a
commercial site, no way, near ranch land
in some Wyoming Podunk we got the hell scared out of us by some ranchers, some
nasty-looking cowboys. Three or four but that was all it took, if you to want
to know the truth, who moseyed (and that is exactly the right word because this
was THEIR god’s country and moseying was just exactly the way you moved when
that hard fact is involved. No city scratching and scrambling to claim your
little corner, not for these boys). We could see they were armed, armed to the
teeth, not on the off-hand chance they would run into some merry prankster
dangers, but carrying that full array of armament was just their normal work
conditions, god’s country or not.
This was one
time that Captain Crunch really showed his mettle, and acted as an upfront
leader. Most of the time he was in a running battle with Mustang Sally over who
she was, or was not, sleeping with or just controlling the action of the bus
indirectly. One maneuver was to always, always, slip off to Cruising any
questions about where we were headed or could we stop here or there to see some
long lost friend, some scenic view or any one of a thousand things that come up
on a prankster trip, or as I found out later even a square’s kiddies –laden
family trip. Straight up Captain, who was not skinny guy and was probably
pretty well built before he started his prankster gag although there was some
sag now, yelled at the top of his lungs, “You, boys hungry?, We’ve got plenty
of stew if you are.” Well, for always
lean times, eating from the hip, cowboys the idea of having plenty to eat right
there in front of you must have been appealing. But the lead cowboy, Joe Bob
Buck, was his name, I swear, said in that slow drawl Sam Shepard way, “Nope,
but we heard that you guys had some decent dope. Is that straight?” Well, of
course that was straight. And in a flash a big pipe of the Captain’s finest was
heading Joe Bob’s way. Hey, I guess this was a dope story after all so, yah, I
guess it did all come down to just drugs, sex, and rock and roll. But if you
want to know what the sixties were all about then just think about a clan of
hippies sharing a pipe of high grade Panama with some lonesome cowboys out in
Podunk Wyoming and nobody thought nothing of it
and you have got the idea.
Oh, sure, we
also had our share of “casualties” of war and basket cases on that trip. It
wasn’t all cowboy peace and rockies vistas. I remember, more than once, we had
to leave people behind in various emergency rooms suffering from anything from
a “bad trip” to normal medical problems
or make that call home that spelled the end for some half-dazed
kid. Come pick up the wreckage, mom and
dad. The worst was some poor bedraggled
girl, who probably should not have been allowed to stay because she was a
little wacky coming in, who we picked up near some rural bus stop. Captain had
a big heart on this “on the bus” question, and unless you proved to be some
kind of thief, or something like that you stayed if you wanted to. Anyway this
young woman, hardly more than a girl, just started screaming one day, no drugs
involved that we knew of , just started screaming and even Captain and Sally
couldn’t stop her. We left her in
Cheyenne but like a lot of things from that transient time I never did find out
what happened to her. Just like some
people can’t live in the high altitudes not everybody could survive on the bus.
Living out on edge city, and no question we all were, maybe not 24/7 but enough
to know that city was our home, is a high wire act and not for the faint of
heart.
We, the core
of Captain Crunch’s crew anyway, stayed in Denver for a while, for as long as
it took Cruising to have his fill (his word) of his wife, or girlfriend, or
maybe both and was ready to hit the road again. As fall approached the time was
the time and we started heading west again, well southwest because Cruising did
not want to get catch up in some Rockies whiteout and the rest of us wanted to
get the warmth of some desert sun under our skins. Most, including me who had
never been west of New York City and then just for a moment, had never seen the
desert although we all, children of the television 1950s, had ‘seen’ it on the
screen in the Westerns. So we were all pumped for desert stones, desert
“stones,” and seeking the ghost of the lost tribes, the lost tribes whose
shamanic powers has us in thrall. I, personally, was looking forward to
investigating some ghost- dancing that I had heard about in Denver and which,
as I became more drug-steady, I was dying to “see” a vision of off some wayward
canyon wall before some blazing fire.
And so
Cruising did his merry prankster bus magic (he really was some zen master with
that damn bus, especially for a college guy, and especially when we hit some
tough spots where the damn thing would give out and he would “breathe” live
back into the thing, like, well, like some zen master). A one-time example will suffice. We were
heading to Gallup, New Mexico in the heart of Indian country [Markin; Native
American, Phil], maybe fifty miles away and not really close to anything like a
full service gas station, when the clutch seized, just seized. Nada, nunca,
nada, nothing as we used to say in our corner boy days. Cruising gets out,
opens the hood, fools around with this and that and maybe forty-five minutes
later we are on the road again. And whatever he did, whatever zen thing he had
with that fickle bus lasted all the way until we hit La Jolla and he had the
whole thing worked on. Magic. Captain Crunch mapped out our itinerary and the
rest of us got the bus travel-ready, travel-ready being a good cleaning, a
re-ordering of the mattresses, and a checking out (and chucking off) of what was necessary and what was not for
the trip westward, westward down to New Mexico first.
The desert
was all that it was cracked up to be except, being fall it wasn’t as hot as
Cruising said it was when he went through various times in the early or late
summer (mid-summer, as I later found out, forget about even in the cooler high
desert, low desert, Death Valley desert, forget it), the Grand Canyon
magnificent, if overused even then and then the high desert in California. By
then I was getting homesick, no not homesick for North Adamsville (that would
not come until many, many years later), but for my homeland, the sea. I hadn’t
been away from an ocean breeze for that long ever and I missed it. And out in
that high desert, high Joshua Tree, Twenty-Nine Palms desert I started to
“smell” the ocean. By this time I had some “rank” on the bus, some say in what
we did, or didn’t do, and the Captain liked me, or liked the idea that a
working- class kid with some brains and some thoughts was traveling alongside
him (mostly stuff “cribbed” from what Markin used to talk about in those
sometimes long, seemingly boring Jack Slack’s corner boy nights but it went
over, if you can believe that). So when I started my “campaign” to head to the
ocean, and gained some allies, especially Lois, just then, going under the name
Lupe Matin, I think, and Mustang Sally and, most importantly, Cruising didn’t
raise an objection I was home free. Come
on, let’s get moving.
We wound up
in La Jolla, after a few weeks of stopping here and there to see people
the Captain (or Sally) wanted to see in
Los Angeles ( I never called it LA then just Los Angeles, city of angels) and
down in Laguna. Needless to say the Pacific Ocean around La Jolla and places
like that made our East Coast puddles look sick. La Jolla- translation,
surfers’ paradise, says it all. But the two most important things about La
Jolla were that, after months of bus life, we finally were settled in a “pad.”
[Markin: house, in this case, or rather something like an ocean view
semi-estate owned by some wealthy drug lord known to the Captain, according to
the way Phil told it.] Real toilets, real showers, real fireplaces, real
everything. Nice, very nice for a poor old working- class boy who a few months
earlier was scratching for change to give dear mother some rent for his two by
four room. This was to be our winter quarters (and as it turned out spring ones
as well) and all we had to do was act as caretakers, not real caretakers like servants
but just make sure nobody stole the family silverware, stole the place, or
decided to “squat” there.
This is also
where important number two came in. Walking along the rock-strewn cove in front
of downtown La Jolla, is where I met Butterfly Swirl, my blonde-haired,
blue-eyed angel who was just sixteen at the time, a high school student from up
in Carlsbad who was down in La Jolla trying to “find” herself while tagging
along with her boyfriend, some eternally blonde, blue-eyed surfer guy from Del
Mar, christ. Just then said surfer boy was out looking for the perfect wave, or
something, and so I invited Butterfly Swirl (real name, Kathleen Clarke,
Carlsbad High School Class of 1968) over to La Grande (the name of the estate,
hell, they all had Spanish names like that) to smoke a little dope. She
brightened at that.
Well, of
course, I could see where this was heading, if it was heading anywhere what
with my one girl-one guy rule (although I admit, admit now not then, now that I
think the statute of limitations is probably over on lying to 1967 girlfriends,
I went astray a couple of times in Denver and Joshua Tree but those weren’t
really girlfriend-worthy trysts). I brought her home, anyway. We had some dope,
and had some sex. Simple. And just when I thought I had her safely out the door
(literally and figuratively) Lupe stepped into the room. Instead of exploding
though, after checking out Butterfly with a bemused look, she said, “Is she
staying?” And before I could get word one out Butterfly chirped out, “Yes.” And
Lupe said, “Good” in a kind of distracted way. The new age has dawned, praise
be. But that was later. Then I just said
out loud to no one in particular, “Damn, women I will never figure them out.” And I never have. [Markin: Brother Phil you are preaching to
the choir on this one.] That is why when
we headed north for the rumored summer of love in San Francisco a month or so
later I had my angel-devil girlfriends, my “family” as Captain Crunch called
them, with me.”
Thanks Phil.
Now you are filled in on the “what and the why” of Phil’s being on that
nameless San Francisco hill mentioned a while back. A nameless hill, nameless
to first time in ‘Frisco Phil, although maybe not to some ancient Native
American shaman delighted to see our homeland, the sea, out in the bay working
its way to far-off Japans. Or to some Spanish conquistador, full of gold dreams
but longing for the hills of Barcelona half a world away. Right then though a
tall young man, well taller than Phil, lanky, maybe not as lanky as Phil with
his drug stews diet having taken some pounds off, and some desire for pounds as
well, dressed in full “hippie” regalia (army jacket, blue jeans, bandana
headband to keep his head from exploding, striped flannel shirt against the
cold bay winds, against the cold bay winds even in summer, and nighttime colds
too, and now that we are on the West Coast, roman sandals) walked up the street
that paralleled the hill the entourage was then planted on, cast a glance as
that company, nodded slightly, and then turned around and asked to no one in
particular but kind of zeroed in on Butterfly, “Got some dope for a hungry
brother?” Except for shorter hair, which only meant that this traveler had
either not been on the road very long or had just recently caught the “finding
himself” bug he could have been Phil’s brother, biological brother.
That line,
that single line, could have been echoed a thousand, maybe ten thousand times
that day along a thousand hills (well maybe not that many in San Fran), aimed
at any small clot of like-minded spirits. And Phil sensing that just that one
sentence spoke of kindred said, “Sure, a little Columbia Red for the head,
okay?” And so started the long, well hippie long, 1960s long anyway,
relationship between one Phillip Larkin and one Johnny Devlin (a.k.a. Prince Lvov,
although don’t hold it against him now if you know or have seen Johnny lately).
And the women, of course.
And, of
course, as well was that sense that Far Out had that he and Prince Love were
kindred was based on the way that the prince posed that first question. His
accent spoke, spoke hard of New England, not Boston but further north. And once
the pipe had been passed a couple of times and the heat of day started getting
everybody a little talkative then Johnny spilled out his story. Yes, he was
from Portland, Maine, born and bred, a working class kid whose family had worked the town mills for a couple of generations,
maybe more, but times were getting hard, real hard in those northern mill towns
now that the mill-owners had got the big idea to head south and get some
cheaper labor, real cheap. So Johnny, after he graduated from high school a few
weeks before decided, on a whim (not really a whim though), to head west and
check out prospects here on the coast. Johnny finished up his story by saying,
“And here I am a few weeks later sitting on Russian Hill smoking righteous dope
and sitting with some sweet ladies. [Markin: Phil never said what his reaction
to that last part was which seemed, the way it was spoken, spoken by Phil in
the re-telling, filled with menace.
Girl-taking menace. Well, old corner boy Phil menace, hell Markin menace too
would have felt that way but maybe in that hazed-out summer it just passed by
like so much air.]
Everybody else
giggled now that they knew the name of this hill that they had been trying to
guess the name of for the last half hour when he blurted that out. Naturally
Phil, a road warrior now, whatever his possible misgivings, invited Johnny to
stay with them, seeing as they were practically neighbors back home. Johnny was
“family” now, and Butterfly seemed gladder than the others of that fact.
But enough
of old-time visions, of old time rites of passage, and of foundling dreams.
Phil, and his entourage (nice word, huh, no more girlfriend solo, or as here
paired, lovingly paired, to be hung up about, just go with the flow). Phil,
Butterfly, hell, even jaded Lilly Rose (formerly known as Luscious Lois in case
you forgot, or were not paying attention), and now Prince Love, are a “family,”
or rather part of the Captain Crunch extended intentional family of merry
pranksters. [Markin: Small case, so as
not to be confused with their namesakes and models legendary mad man writer Ken
Kesey and his La Honda Merry Pranksters, okay]
Just yesterday they hit ‘Frisco and have planted their de rigueur day-glo bus in the environs
of Golden Gate Park after many months on
the road west, and some sitting down time down south in La Jolla. Hearing the
siren call buzzing all spring they have now advanced north to feast on the
self-declared Summer of Love that is guaranteed to mend broken hearts, broken
spirits, broken rainbows, broken china, and broken, well broken everything. The
glue: drug, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll, although not just any old-timey be-bop
fifties rock and roll but what everybody now calls “acid” rock. And acid, for
the squares out there, is nothing but the tribal name for LSD that has every
parent from the New York island to the Redwood forests, every public official
from ‘Frisco to France, and every police officer (I am being nice here and will
not use the oink word) from Boston to Bombay and back, well, “freaked out” (and
clueless). Yes, our Phil has come a long way from that snarly wise guy corner
boy night of that old town he lammed out from (according to his told story)
just about a year ago.
Or had he?
Well, sure Phil’s hair was quite a bit longer, his beard less wispy and more
manly, his tattered work boots and later Chuck Taylor sneakers transformed into
sensible (West Coast ocean sensible) roman sandals and his weight, well, his
weight was way down from those weekly bouts with three-day drug escape, and
fearful barely eaten four- in-the-morning open hearth stews, and not much else.
And as he sat on that Russian Hill looking out into that bay with his brood he
could not even look forward, as he originally planned, to the expectation of
just trying LSD for the hell of it in ‘Frisco, having licked it (off a
blotter), or drank it (the famous, or infamous, kool-aid fix), several times
down in La Jolla. In those lazy hazy days watching the surf (and surfers)
splashing against the Pacific world with blond-haired, blue-eyed, bouncy
Butterfly, and the raven-haired, dark as night-eyed Lilly Rose, or both listening
to the music fill the night air. Not square music either (anything pre-1964
except maybe some be-bop wild piano man Jerry Lee Lewis, or some Chicago blues
guitar fired by Muddy Waters or microphone-eating Howlin’ Wolf), but moog, boog, foog-filled music.
Just that
Russian Hill minute though, and to be honest, while in the midst of another
acid trip (LSD, for the squares just in case you forgot), Phil sensed that
something had crested in the approaching blue-pink Pacific night and that just
maybe this scene would not evolve into the “newer world” that everybody,
especially Captain Crunch, kept expecting any day. Worse now that he knew
that he couldn’t, no way, go back to
some department store clerk’s job, some picket-fenced white house with dog, two
point three children, and a wife what was to happen to him when Butterfly,
Lilly Rose, Joshua, and even Captain Crunch “find” themselves and go back to
school, home, academic careers, or whatever. For now though he will just take
it all in.
