This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
One night Sam Eaton was talking on his cellphone to his old friend from high school (Carver High, Class of 1967), Jack Callahan about how his grandson, Brandon, his oldest grandson from his daughter Janice from his first marriage (first of three all ending in divorce but that is merely a figure for the Census Bureau and not germane to what following so enough) had beguiled him recently with his arcane knowledge of classical jazz (the jazz from the age of King Oliver say until the death of the big bad swings bands which died in the late 1940s for the most part giving way to cool ass be-bop and what followed). Jack braced himself for the deluge, got very quiet and did say word one, since lately the music Sam mentioned, maybe even thought about mentioning the slightest thing connected with jazz he knew he was in for it, in for a harangue of unknown duration on the subject. Sam, recently more conscious that Jack, who hated jazz, hated it worse when as a child of rock and roll as Sam was, his father would endlessly play Count this, King that, Duke the other thing and not allow the family record player centered in the family living room to be sullied (his father’s word) by heathen stuff like Roll Over Beethoven or One Night With You, would go silent at the word “jazz” said not to worry he would only say a few words from his conversation with Brandon:
No, Jack, my man, this will not be a screed about how back in the day, back in the 1950s the time of our complete absorption into rock and roll, when be-bop jazz was the cat’s meow, when cool was listening to the Monk trip up a note, consciously trip up a note to see if anybody caught it and then took that note to heaven and back, and worked it out from there or Dizzy burping then hitting the high white note all those guys were struggling against the limits of the instruments, high as hell on tea, you know what we called ganja, herb, stuff like that, to get to. Frankly I was too young, you too but I knew how you felt since I couldn’t listen to rock in my house either since the 1940s Andrews Sisters/Perry Como/Frank Sinatra/Peggy lee cabal were front and center in our living room and I was reduced to listening on my transistor radio, way too young to appreciate such work then and I only got the tail end, you know when Hollywood or the popular prints messed the whole be-bop jazz “beat” thing up and we got spoon-fed Maynard G. Krebs faux black and white television beatnik selling hair cream oil or something like that, and ten thousand guys hanging around the Village on Saturday night in full beret and whatever they could put together for a beard from the outreaches of Tenafly, New Jersey (sorry but Fort Lee was out) and another ten thousand gals, all in black from head to toe, maybe black underwear too so something to imagine at least from Norwalk, Connecticut milling around as well. Square, square cubed. No, this will not be some screed going back further in the hard times of the Great Depression and the slogging through World War II when “it did not mean a thing, if you ain’t got that swing” when our parents, the parents of the kids who caught the end of be-bop “swang,” did dips and twirls to counts, dukes, earls, princes, marquises even leading big band splashes to wash that generation clean. Come on now that was our parents and I wasn’t even born so no way I can “screed” about that. And, no, no, big time no, this will not be about some solitary figure in some dank, dusty, smoke-filled café, the booze flowing, the dope in the back alleys inflaming the night while some guy, probably a sexy sax player, blows some eternal high white note out against some bay, maybe Frisco Bay, and I was hooked, hooked for life on the be-bop jazz scene.
No, it never even came close to starting out like that, never even dreamed such scenes. Unlike rock and roll, the classic kind that was produced in our 1950s growing up time and which we have had a life-long devotion to or folk music which I came of age, political and social age to later in the early 1960s, jazz was a late, a very late acquisition to my understanding of the American songbook. Oh sure I would hear a phrase, a few bing, bang, bong notes blowing out the window, out the door, sitting in some bar over drinks with some hot date, maybe hear it as backdrop in some Harvard Square bookstore when I went looking for books (and, once somebody hipped me to the scene, looking for bright young women who also were in the bookstore looking for books, and bright young men but that scene is best left for another time), or at some party when the host tired of playing old-time folk music and decided to kick out the jams and let the jazz boys wreak their havoc. But jazz was, and to a great extent still is, a side bar of my musical tastes.
About a decade ago, a little more, I got seriously into jazz for a while. The reason: the centennial of the birth of Duke Ellington being celebrated when I was listening to some radio show which was commemorating that fact and I heard a few faint bars which required me to both turn up the volume and to listen to the rest of the one hour tribute. The show played a lot of Duke’s stuff from the early 1940s when he had Ben Webster, Harry Carney, and Johnny Hodges on board. The stuff blew me away and as is my wont when I get my enthusiasms up, when something blows me away, I grabbed everything by the Duke and his various groupings and marveled at how very good his work was, how his tonal poems reached deep, deep down and caught something in me that responded in kind. Especially when those sexy saxs, when Johnny or Cootie blew me away when they let it all hang out.
Funny though I thought at the time that I hadn’t picked up on this sound before, this reaching for the soul, for the essence of the matter, before since there are very definitely elements of the blues in Brother Duke’s work. And I have been nothing but a stone blown blues freak since the early 1960s when I first heard Howlin’ Wolf hold forth practically eating that harmonica of his on Little Red Rooster and Smokestack Lightnin’. Moreover I had always been a Billie Holiday fan although I never drew the connection to the jazz in the background since it usually was muted to let her rip with that throaty sultry voice, the voice that chased the blues, my blues, away.
So, yes, count me among the guys who are searching for the guys who are searching for the great big cloud puff high white note, guys who have been searching for a long time as the notes waft out into the deep blue sea night. Out into the surly Japan deep blue seas foaming out the bay the one time I was sitting in fog-bound Frisco town, sitting around a North Beach bar, the High Hat maybe, when on Monday nights that was the place where young talent took to the boards and played, played for the “basket” just like the folkies used to do, and probably get as few dollars from the mostly regular heavy drinker crowd that populate any gin mill on Monday. Most of the stuff early on was so-so some riffs stolen from more famous guys nothing that would keep a steady drinker, me, from steady drinking in those days when I lifted low-shelf whiskeys with abandon. Then this young guy, young black guy, barely out of his teens if that, hell, he could have been sixteen for all I know and snuck out of the house to play, to play to reach the stars if that is what he wanted, slim a reed, maybe a little from hunger at hunger, with the just forming yellow eyes of high king hell dope-dom blew a sax as big as he was, certainly fatter, blew the hell out of one note after another, then paused, paused to suck up the universe of air in the place, and went over to Jordan for a minute, rested, came back with a big blow that would get at least to Hawaii, rested again, maybe just a little uncertain where to go like kids always are, blew up a big cloud puff riff alternating with pauses hard to do, went at it again this time to the corner of paradise. Stopped, I thought he was done, he looked to hell like he was done, done in eyes almost closed, and then onward, a big beautiful dah, dee, dah, dee, dah, dee, blow, a “max daddy” blow then even this old chattering wino in a booth stopped to wonder at, and that big high white note went ripping down Bay Street, I swear I could see it, on into the bay and on its way, not stopping until Edo. He had it, that it means only it and if he never blew again he had that it moment. So yeah count me too among Duke’s boys, down at Duke’s place where he eternally searched for that elusive high white note. See I didn’t take too long, right.
As I mentioned in an earlier entry in this space, courtesy of my old yellow
brick road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler, Peter Paul
Markin, who seems to think I still have a few things to say about this wicked
old world, recently, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from
1998 to download into my iPod I came across a song that stopped me in my
tracks, Brothers Under The Bridge. I had not listened to or thought
about that song for a long time but it brought back many memories from the late
1970s when I did a series of articles for the now defunct East Bay Eye
(California, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam veterans who, for
one reason or another, could not come to grips with “going back to the real
world” and took, like those a great depression generation or two before them,
to the “jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramps camps located along the abandoned
railroad sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of
California, mainly down in Los Angeles, and created their own “society.”
Not every guy I interviewed, came across, swapped lies with, or just snatched
some midnight phrase out of the air from was from hunger, most were, yes, in
one way or another but some, and the one I am recalling in this sketch had a
nuanced story that brought him down to the ravines. The story that accompanies
the song to this little piece, Bob Dylan’s Masters of War, is written under
that same sign as the earlier pieces.
I should note again since these sketches are done on an ad hoc basis, that the
genesis of this story follows that of the “Brothers Under The Bridge” story
previously posted (and now is developing into a series).The editor of the East
Bay Eye, Owen Anderson, gave me that long ago assignment after I had done a
smaller series for the paper on the treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam
veterans by the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and in the course of
that series had found out about this band of brothers roaming the countryside
trying to do the best they could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one
piece. My qualifications for the assignment other than empathy, since I had not
been in the military during the Vietnam War period, were based simply on the
fact that back East I had been involved, along with several other radicals, in
running an anti-war GI coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and down
near Fort Dix in New Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of
my 1960s generation who had clued me on the psychic cost of the war so I had a
running start.
After making connections with some Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys
down in L.A. who knew where to point me I was on my way. I gathered many
stories, published some of them in the Eye, and put the rest in my
helter-skelter files. A couple of weeks ago, after having no success in
retrieving the old Eye archives, I went up into my attic and rummaged
through what was left of those early files. I could find no newsprint articles
that I had written but I did find a batch of notes, specifically notes from
stories that I didn’t file because the Eye went under before I could
round them into shape.
The format of those long ago stories was that I would basically let the guy I
was talking to give his spiel, spill what he wanted the world to heard, and I
would write it up without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I have
reconstructed this story here as best I can although at this far remove it is
hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said. This is Kenneth
Edward Jackson’s short, poignant, and hell for once, half-hopeful story, a
soldier born under the thumb of the masters of war:
********
Hell, you know I didn’t have to go
to Vietnam, no way. Yah, my parents, when I got drafted, put some pressure on
me to “do my duty” like a lot of the neighborhood guys in my half-Irish, half-
French- Canadian up the old New Hampshire mill town of Nashua. Maybe, you’ve
heard of that town since you said you were from up there in Olde Saco, Maine.
Hell, they were the same kind of towns. Graduate from high school, go to work
in the mills if they were still open, go into the service if you liked, or got
drafted, come home, get married, have kids and let the I Ching cycle run its
course over and over again. You laughed so you know what I mean. Yah, that kind
of town, and tight so if you went off the rails, well it might not be in the Nashua
Telegraph but it sure as hell got on the Emma Jackson grapevine fast
enough, except if it was about her three boys. Then the “shames” silence of the
grave. Nothing, not a peep, no dirty linen aired in public.
See though I was a little different.
I went to college at the University of New Hampshire over in Durham, studied
political science, and figured to become either a lawyer or teacher, maybe both
if things worked out. So Emma and Hank (my father) were proud as peacocks when
I graduated from there in 1967 and then announced I was going to Boston
University to pick up a Master’s degree in Education and be on my way. That’s
where I met Bettina, my ex-wife, who was studying for her Master’s in
Government at the time but was mainly holding up a big share of the left-wing
anti-war universe that was brewing at that time, especially as all hell broke
loose in Vietnam when in early 1968 the North Vietnamese and their southern
supporters ran rampaging through the south. That’s around the time that LBJ
(Lyndon Baines Johnson, President of the United States at the time) got cold
feet and decided to call it quits and retire to some podunk Texas place.
Bettina, a girl from New York City,
and not just New York City but Manhattan and who went to Hunter College High
School there before embarking on her radical career , first at the University
of Wisconsin and then at B.U. was the one who got me “hip,” or maybe better
“half-hip” to the murderous American foreign policy in Vietnam. Remind me to
tell you how we met and stuff like that sometime but for now let’s just say she
was so smart, so different, did I tell you she was Jewish, so full of life and
dreams, big dreams about a better world that I went head over heels for her and
her dreams carried me (and us) along for a while. [Brother Jackson did tell me
later the funny details of their relationship but, as I always used to say
closing many of my columns, that is a story for another day-JLB.]
Bettina was strictly SDS, big-time
SDS (Students for a Democratic Society, 1960s version. Look it up on Wikipedia
for more background-JLB), and not just some pacifist objector to the war, she
really thought she was helping to build “the second front” in aid of the
Vietnamese here in America, or as it was put at the time Amerikkka, and I went
along with her, or half-way along really in her various actions, marches, and
rallies. Later, 1969 later when SDS blew up into three separate and warring
factions she went with the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) the group most
committed to that idea of the second front. But that is all inside stuff and
not really what was important in 1968. The summer of 1968 when I got, via my
parents, notice that my friends and neighbors at the Nashua Draft Board had
called my name. And me with no excuses, no draft excuses, none.
So that is when things got dicey, my
parents pulling me to do my family, my Nashua, my New Hampshire, my United
States, hell, my mother pulled out even my Catholic duty (my father, a deeply
patriotic man, in the good sense, and a proud Marine who saw plenty of action in
the Pacific in World War II, but kept quiet about it, just rolled his eyes on
that one). Bettina, and her friends, and really, some of them my friends too,
were pulling me to run away to Canada (she would follow), refuse to be inducted
(and thus subject to arrest and jail time), or head underground (obviously here
with connections that may have rivaled, may have I say, my mother’s
neighborhood grapevine). In the end though I let myself be drafted and was
inducted in the fall of 1968.
Bettina was mad, mad as hell, but
not as much for the political embarrassment as you would think, but because
she, well, as she put it, the first time she said it “had grown very fond of
me,” and more than that she had her own self-worth needs, so we were secretly
married (actually not so much secretly as privately, very privately, her
parents, proudly Jewish and heavily committed Zionists and my parents,
rosary-heavy Catholics who were a little slow, Vatican Council II slow, on the
news that Jews were not Christ-killers and the like would not have approved )
just before I was inducted.
I will spare the Vietnam details,
except to say I did my thirteen month tour (including a month for R&R, rest
and recreation) from early 1969 to early 1970, a period when the talk of
draw-down of the American troop commitment was beginning to echo through the
camps and bases in Vietnam and guys were starting to take no chances, no overt
chances of getting KIA (killed in action) or anything like that. I, actually
saw very little fighting since as a college grad, and lucky, and they needed
someone, I was a company clerk and stayed mainly at the base camp. But every
night I fired many rounds any time I heard a twig break on guard duty or in
perimeter defense. And more than a few times we had bullets and other ammo
flying into our position. So no I was no hero, didn’t want to be, I just wanted
to get back home to Bettina in one piece. And I did.
But something snapped in Vietnam,
sometime in having had to confront my own demons, my own deep-seeded fears and
coming out not too badly, and to confront through my own sights the way my
government was savagely conducting itself in Vietnam (and later in other parts
of the world) that made me snap when I came back to the “real world.” I had
only a few months left and so I was assigned to a holding company down at Fort
Dix in New Jersey. And all I had to do was stay quiet, do some light silly busy
work paper work duty b.s., have a few beers at the PX and watch a few movies.
Nada.
I guess Bettina really did win out
in the end, the stuff she said about war, about American imperialism being some
two-headed vulture, about class struggle and guys like me being cannon fodder
was kind of abstract when she said it at some meeting at B.U., or shouted
herself silly a t some rally on Boston Common or got herself arrested a few
times at draft boards (ironic, huh).But after ‘Nam I knew she was on to
something. Better, I was on to something. So, without telling Bettina, my
parents, or anybody, the day I was to report to that holding company at Fort
Dix I did. But at that morning formation, I can still see the tears rolling
down my face, I reported in civilian clothes with a big peace button on my
shirt and yelling for all to hear-“Bring The Troops Home.” I was tackled by a couple
of soldiers, lifer-sergeants I found out later, handcuffed and brought to the
Fort Dix stockade.
A couple of days later my name was
called to go the visitors’ room and there to my surprise were my parents, my
mother crying, my father stoic as usual but not mad, and Bettina. The Army had
contacted my parents after my arrest to inform them of my situation. And
Bettina, in that strange underground grapevine magic that always amazed me,
found out in that way, had called them in Nashua to say who she was (no, not
about us being married, just friends, they never did know). They had offered to
bring her down to Fort Dix and they had come down together. What a day though.
My parents, for one of very few times that I can remember said, while they
didn’t agree with me fully, that they were proud and Nashua be damned. They
were raising money on their home to get me the best civilian lawyer they could.
And they did.
Of course for Bettina a soldier-
resister case was just the kind of activity that was gaining currency in the
anti-war movement in 1969 and 1970 and she was crazy to raise heaven and hell
for my defense(including money, and money from her parents too although they
also did not know we were married, and maybe they still don’t). She moved to
hard town Trenton not too far from Fort Dix to be closer to the action as my
court-martial was set. She put together several vigils, marches, rallies and
fundraisers (including one where my father, a father defending his own, spoke
and made the crowd weep in his halting New England stoic way).
The court-martial, a general court
martial so I faced some serious time, was held in early 1970. As any court
proceedings will do, military or civilian, they ran their typical course, which
I don’t want to go into except to say that I was convicted of the several
charges brought against me (basically, as I told the guys at VVAW later, for
being ugly in the military without a uniform-while on duty) , sentenced to a
year of hard labor at Fort Leavenworth out in Kansas, reduced in rank to
private ( I was a specialist, E-4), forfeited most of my pay, and was to be
given an undesirable discharge (not dishonorable).
I guess I do want to say one last
thing about the trial thought. As any defendant has the right to do at trial,
he or she can speak in their own defense. I did so. What I did, turning my back
to the court-martial judges and facing the audience, including that day my
parents and Bettina was to recite from memory Bob Dylan’s Masters of War.
I did so in my best stoic (thanks, dad) Nashua, New Hampshire voice. The crowd
either heckled me or cheered (before being ordered to keep quiet) but I had my
say. So when you write this story put that part in. Okay? [See lyrics
above-JLB]
So how come I am down here in some
Los Angeles hobo jungle just waiting around to be waiting around. Well I did my
time, all of it except good time, and went back home, first to Nashua but I
couldn’t really stay there ( a constant “sore” in the community and worry to my
parents) and then to Boston where I fit in better. Bettina? Well, my last
letter from her in Leavenworth was that she was getting ready to go
underground, things with her group (a group later associated with the Weather
Underground) had gotten into some stuff a little dicey and she would not be
able to communicate for a while. That was the last I heard from her; it has
been a few years now.
I understand, and I feel happy for
her. We were fond of each other but I was thinking in the stockade that a “war
marriage” was not made to last, not between us anyway. Then after a few months
in Boston, doing a little or this and a little of that, I drifted out here
where things might pop up a little (it’s tough even with millions of people
hating the war, hating it until it finally got over a couple of years ago to
have an undesirable discharge hanging around your neck. I’m not sorry though,
no way, and if I do get blue sometime I just recite that Masters Of War thing
and I get all welled up inside).
I hear the new president, Jimmy
Carter, is talking about amnesty for Vietnam guys with bad discharges and maybe
I will check into it if it happens. Then maybe I will go to law school and pick
up my life up again. Until then though I feel like I have got to stick with my
“band of brothers” who got broken up, broken up bad by that damn war. Hey,
sometimes they ask me to recite that Masters Of War thing over some
night fire.
[The last connection I had with
Kenneth Edward Jackson was in late 1979 when he sent a short note to me saying
he had gotten his discharge upgraded, was getting ready to start law school and
that he was publicly getting re-married to some non-political gal from upstate
New York . Still no word from Bettina though.-JLB]
F. Scott Fitzgerald At The Movies-Almost-The Last Tycoon
Book Review
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1941
I suppose that it is just a matter of taste, or maybe just
being a cranky literary guy of sorts, but publishing a well-known author’s last
unfinished work, as here with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon seems
rather sacrilegious or perhaps just publisher’s greed to play off one last time
on an author’s fame. I have no problem with, say, a publisher publishing a
posthumous book like one did with Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast since that book had beencompleted and moreover provided a great
snapshot into the American self-imposed literary exile community, including
some interesting insights into Fitzgerald as well, of post-World War I Paris. Those
included more than one needed to know about Hemingway’s culinary interests as
he crisscrossed France in open car and on foot, his of Gertrude Stein’s lesbianism
and Fitzgerald’s worries about his manhood to be delicate about the matter.
The subject here, the partially told saga of the last of the
self-made maverick movie producers, is hardly definitive, or as compellingly
told about the corporatization of that profit-filled medium. Moreover the
pieces here add nothing to Fitzgerald’s reputation which will always hinge on
the novel, The Great Gatsby, perhaps
the best evocation of the modern age as it came steaming out of World War I when
every grafter, con man and hustler had a field day trying to figure out his or
her place in the Jazz Age before the hammer came down on everybody between the Great
Depression and the “night of the long knives” in Europe. Grasps in an extraordinary
way the particular “taming of America” in ways that previous generations would
have had trouble understanding and beautifully evoked the loss of wonder that
subsequent generations have not been able to regain in the fight to return to
some Edenic age of innocence when wonder drove the new world. Perhaps he will
be remembered as well for Tender Is The
Night the hard drama of his flamed out love of Zelda as she went over the
edge, and a slew of his short stories from the quasi-innocent Basil and Josephine
stories to the endless run of salable items to titter the readers of the
Saturday Evening Post when that meant something out in white picket fence
America.
That said, that off my chest I will say that Fitzgerald who
did do work as a screenwriter, although it is not clear how successfully, has a
pretty good idea of what was going on in Hollywood once the “talkies” came in
and forced the story line and dialogue of a film to ratchet up several notches
from the pantomime, the placards and organ musical interludes which drove the
silent movies. And then there is the skewed economic question of putting what
looks like a good idea on the screen with many times temperamental actors and
inadequate financial backing. In any case the movie producer here, Monroe
Stahr, is foredoomed to be the last of the independent filmmakers not only by
the new system coming in place in Hollywood as the old-timers die off or have
run out of steam by the fact that despite his “boy wonder” status for producing
mostly hits and getting the most out of his employees come hell or high water
he is headed for an early grave due to rough living and a weak heart.
The story, his story as far as it goes, is told by the
daughter of one of his associates who is young enough, to be unworldly enough, sheltered
enough as a college student at Bennington when college was for the rich and prosperous
or the “from hunger” New York City immigrant children who roamed City College,
to be seriously in love with him although he is only, at best, tepid toward
her. Reason, or rather reasons, Monroe is still in thrall to the memory of his
late actress wife, and, is smitten by a woman he met randomly on his studio lot
who preternaturally looks like his late wife.
That short tremulous love affair which ends in sorrow and
departure is the human interest center of the story. Additionally there are
scenes about how screenwriters write (or don’t), the importance of skilled
cameramen in setting up shots and giving that glow so necessary to those old-time
black and white productions, how stars were made (or unmade) in those day when
actors were just short of indentured servants, and which gives an insight into
the collective nature of the film industry no matter who produces, who directs,
and who stars. That theme was done very well cinematically in the 1950s film, The Bad and the Beautiful about a
post-World War II Monroe Stahr –like figure, a mad man director who scorched
the earth of a natural born actress, a innovative budding director and an
inventive sleepy town professor turned thoughtful screenwriter before he went
belly up.
There is also an interesting scene, and some references
sprinkled throughout the story, about the coming unionization of the industry,
the fears that produced in the movie moguls, including Stahr, and a decidedly
more morbid fear about the “reds” bringing revolution to their Hollywood front
door in the 1930s which, perhaps, foreshadows the post-warred scare Hollywood Ten blacklist night. But
the thing is all tangled up at the end, left hanging and so rightly should have
stayed on the shelf in manuscript form. Enough said.
Out In The Be-Bop
1950s Night- The Time Of Motorcycle Bill-Take Two
From The Pen Of
Joshua Lawrence Breslin
[My old friend, Sam Lowell, whom I know
from the summer of love days out in Frisco days in the late1960s and who hails
from Carver down in Massachusetts asked me to fill in a few more details about
this relationship between Motorcycle Bill and Lily. He thought I was originally
kind of skimpy on why a nice Catholic girl would go all to pieces over a motorcycle
guy, would get on his bike like she was some low-rent tart from the wrong side
of town the usual type that went for motorcycle guys in his book. Sam didn’t get
the idea that when that cycle surge came lots of ordinary teens went with the
flow. So here is a little extra, a take two for Sam, and maybe for others who missed
that big motorcycle moment.]
********
There was a scourge in the land, in the
1950s American land. No, not the one you are thinking of from your youth of
from your history book, not the dreaded but fatalistically expected BIG ONE,
the mega-bomb that would send old mother earth back to square one, or worst, maybe
only the amoebas would survive to start the long train of civilization up the
hill once again. Everybody expected that blow to come if it did come and we in
America were not vigilant, did not keep our shoulders to the wheel and not ask questions
from the nefarious Russkies (of course we that were just coming to age in the
rock and roll night would not have had a clue as to what questions to ask if
asking questions was acceptable then and it was not and we as young as were
knew that it was not from parents to teachers to Grandpa Ike and his cabinet).
From a guy named Joe Stalin which one of our teachers said meant “steel” in Russian
but it could have been from any Russian guy as we learned later after Stalin died
and other atomic bomb-wielding guys took over in Red Square.
Sure that red scare Cold War was in the
air and every school boy and girl had their giggling tales of having to hide,
hide ass up, under some desk or other useless defense in air raid drill
preparations for that eventually. I wasn’t any revolutionary or radical or “red”
although one teacher looked at me kind of funny but I couldn’t the purpose of
hiding under some old-timey elementary school wooden desk when every film I
ever saw of what an atomic blast looked like said you might as well not have your
ass sticking up in the air when Armageddon came. Like I said one teacher looked
at me very funny. So sure the air stunk of red scare, military build-up cold
war “your mommy is a commie turns her in (and there were foolish kids who did
try to use that ploy when dear mother said no to some perfectly reasonable
request and junior thought to get even he would rat her out)”
But the red scare, the Cold War ice
tamp down on society to go along to get along was not the day to day scare for
every self-respecting parent from Portsmouth to the Pacific. That fear was
reserved for the deadly dreaded motorcycle scare that had every father telling
his son to beware of falling under the Marlon Brando sway once they had seen
the man complete with leather jacket, rakish cap and surly snarl playing Johnny
Bad in The Wild One at the Strand Theater
on Saturday afternoon and deciding contrary to the cautionary tale of the film
that these Johnnies were losers spiraling down to a life, a low life of crime
and debauchery (of course said son not knowing of the word, the meaning of
debauchery, until much later just shrugged his innocent shoulders).
More importantly, more in need of a
five alarm warning, every mother, every blessed mother, self-respecting or not,
secretly thinking maybe a toss in with Marlon would bring some spice to her otherwise
staid ranch house with breezeway existence warned off their daughters against
this madness and perversity in leather. Warned those gleaming-eyed daughters
also fresh from the Saturday afternoon matinee Stand Theater to not even think
about hanging with such rascals contrary to the lesson that cute waitress in
the film gave about blowing Johnny off as so much bad air. (Of course
forgetting, as dad had with junior, to bring up the question of sex which is what
Sissy had on her mind after one look at that cool attire of Johnny and her
dream about how she could get that surly smirk off of his face.)
Of course that did not stop the wayward
sons of millworkers slated for work in the mills when their times came from
mooning over every Harley cat that rode his ride down Main Street, Olde Saco
(really U.S. Route One but everybody called it Main Street and it was) or the
daughters slated for early motherhood under proper marriage or maybe sales
clerks in the Monmouth Store from mooning (and maybe more) over the low- riders
churning the metal on those bad ass machines when they went with their girlfriends
over to Old Orchard Beach on sultry sweaty weekend nights in summer.
This is how bad things were, how the
cool cats on the bikes sucked the air out of any other guys who were looking
for, well, looking whatever they could get from the bevies of girls watching
their every move like hawks. Even prime and proper Lily Dumont, the queen of
Saint Brigitte’s Catholic Church rectitude on Sunday and wanna-be “mama” every
other waking minute of late. Now this Lily was “hot” no question so hot that my
best friend in high school Rene Dubois, the best looking guy around the Acre
where we all lived and who already had two girlfriends (and later in life would
have four, count them, four wives before he gave the marriage game up and just
shacked up with whatever romantic interest he had at the moment), would go to
eight o’clock Mass every Sunday and sit a couple of rows in back of her and
just watch her ass. (I know because I was sitting beside him watching that same
ass). He never got anywhere with her, she knew about the two girlfriends since
they were friends of hers, and neither did I. Lily was a classic French-Canadian
beauty long thin legs, petite shape but with nice curves, long black hair and
pop-out blue eyes. Nice but like I said but strictly the ice queen as far as we
could tell. Especially when she would constantly talk about her friendship with
Jesus and the need to say plenty of rosaries and attend many novenas to keep in
touch with him.
In this time of the motorcycle craze
though something awoken in her though, maybe just the realization that Jesus
was okay but guys who thought she was hot maybe needed some tending too. In any
case, and I didn’t find this out until several years later after Lily had left
town, my sister who was one of Lily’s close friends then and Lily could confide
girl talk to her during this motorcycle dust up Lily would find herself restless
at night, late at night and contrary to all good Catholic teachings would put
her hand in a place where she shouldn’t (this is the way my sister put it you
know Lily was just playingwith herself a
perfectly natural feeling for teenagers, and older people too) and she was embarrassed
about it, didn’t know if she could go to confession and say what sin she
committed to old Father Pierre. I don’t know if she ever did confess or things
got resolved a different way and that idea was out of play but there you have
it.
And the object of her desire? One
“Motorcycle Bill,” the baddest low- rider in all of Olde Saco. Now baddest in
Olde Saco (that’s up in ocean edge Maine for the heathens and others not in the
know) was not exactly baddest in the whole wide world, nowhere as near as bad
as say Sonny Barger and his henchmen outlaws-for- real bikers out in Hell’s
Angels Oakland as chronicled by Doctor Gonzo (before he was Gonzo), Hunter S.
Thompson in his saga of murder and mayhem sociological- literary study
Hell’s Angels. But as much is true in life one must accept the context. And
the context here is that in sleepy dying mill town Olde Saco mere ownership,
hell maybe mere desire for ownership, of a bike was prima facie evidence of
badness. So every precious daughter was specifically warned away from
Motorcycle Bill and his Vincent Black Lightning 1952 (although no mother, and
maybe no daughter either, could probably tell the difference between that sleek
English bike and a big pig Harley). But Madame Dumont felt no need to do so
with her sweet sixteen Lily who, maybe, pretty please maybe was going to be one
of god’s women, maybe enter the convent over in Cedars Of Lebanon Springs in a
couple of years after she graduated from Olde Saco High along with her Class of
1960.
But that was before Motorcycle Bill
appeared on the horizon. One afternoon after school walking home to Olde Saco’s
French- Canadian (F-C) quarter, the Acre like I said where we all lived, all
French-Canadians (on my mother’s side, nee LeBlanc for me) on Atlantic Avenue
with classmate and best friend Clara Dubois (my sister was close to Lily but
not as close as Clara since they had gone to elementary school together), Lily
heard the thunder of Bill’s bike coming up behind them, stopping, Bill giving
Lily a bow, and them revving the machine up and doing a couple of circle cuts
within a hair’s breathe of the girls. Then just a suddenly he was off, and
Lily, well, Lily was hooked, hooked on Motorcycle Bill, although she did not
know it, know it for certain until that night in her room when she tossed and
turned all night and did not ask god, or any of his associates, to guide her in
the matter (the matter of that wayward hand for those who might have forgotten).
One thing about living in a sleepy old
town, a sleepy old dying mill town, is that everybody knows everybody’s
business at least as far as any person wants that information out on the public
square. Two things are important before we go on. One is that everybody in town
that counted which meant every junior and senior class high schooler in Olde
Saco knew that Bill had made a “play” for Lily. And the buzz got its start from
none other than Clara Dubois who had her own hankerings after the motorcycle
man (her source of wonder though was more, well lets’ call it crass than Lily’s,
Clara wanted to know if Bill was build, build with some sexual power, power like
his motorcycle. She had innocently, perhaps, understood the Marlon mystique).
The second was that Bill, other than his bike, was not a low life low- rider
but just a guy who liked to ride the roads free and easy. See Bill was a
freshman over at Bowdoin and he used the bike as much to get back and forth to
school from his home in Scarborough as to do wheelies in front of
impressionable teenage girls from the Acre.
One day, one afternoon, a few days
after their Motorcycle Bill “introduction,” when Lily and Clara were over at
Seal Rock at the end of Olde Saco Beach Bill came up behind them sans his bike.
(Not its real name but given the name Seal Rock because the place was the local
lovers’ lane at night and many things had been sealed there including a fair
share of “doing the do,” you know hard and serious sex. During the day it was
just a good place to catch a sea breeze and look for interesting clam shells which
washed up in the swirling surf there.) Now not on his bike, without a helmet,
and carrying books, books of all things, he looked like any student except
maybe a little bolder and a little less reserved.
He started talking to Lily and
something in his demeanor attracted her to him. (Clara swore, swore on seven
bibles, that Lily was kind of stand-offish at first but Lily said no, said she
was just blushing a lot.) They talked
for a while and then Bill asked Lily if she wanted a ride home. She hemmed and
hawed but there was just something about him that spoke of mystery (who knows
what Clara thought about what Lily thought about that idea). She agreed and
they walked a couple of blocks to where he was parked. And there Lily saw that
Vincent Black Lightning 1952 of her dreams. Without a word, without anything
done by her except to tie her hair back and unbutton a couple of buttons from
her starched white shirt she climbed on the back of the bike at Bill’s beckon.
And that is how one Lily Dumont became William Kelly’s motorcycle “mama.”
