*****Sitting On The Rim Of The World- With The Son Of The Neon Wilderness Nelson Algren In Mind -Sam Eaton’s Take

*****Sitting On The Rim Of The World- With The Son Of The Neon Wilderness Nelson Algren In Mind -Sam Eaton’s Take

From The Pen Of Bart Webber 

A number of years ago when I was in the midst of one of my periodic re-readings of the gritty Chicago-etched novelist Nelson Algren who worked the steamy, misbegotten streets of that town when it was like now "an anything goes" place from the endlessly brutal and arbitrary cops, Chicago's finest, doing what they damn well please to the mayhem and lost dreams down at the base of society if not up on Lake Shore Drive I wrote a rat-tat-tat rush of words and phrases extolling his work. My old friend from Carver in Massachusetts where I grew up, Sam Eaton, read the piece recently after he had read Walk On The Wild Side arguably one of the great novels chronicling the plight of the white trash in the last century who could not adjust, did not want to adjust when the deal went down and got nothing but knuckles and billy-clubs for breakfast for their efforts said he wanted to give his take on Algren, a more nuance  take. Sam said to me that he would take responsibility for what was written. He had better since I will not, no way.      

********

Yeah, Bart was right about Nelson Algren, right about how he had the misfits, the guys and gals who because of upbringing, hubris, fate didn’t cut the mustard, couldn’t go the distant in normal society and thus got burned up in the process, pegged. Had their number just like the midnight copper captain in one of his more famous who, just like today if you want to know the truth about cops, got tired of their same old, same old in a story Bart had me read one time. That is what got me interested in reading Walk On The Wild Side, got me hopped up on one Dove Linkhorn, a guy born to lose, imprinted with that born to lose sign so he might as well not have been born. Period. Here in this book or rather in the description of the origins of the Doves when they came to this green breast of American land, the origins of the Tobacco Road set, the “white trash” guys, is where I knew Algren was no fake, no fake at all no matter how good he might have had it growing up himself, no matter how far away from cheap street he might have actually been (and after Bart filled me in about a junkie girlfriend he tried to help go “cold turkey, ” more than once knew I was on to something about what Algren knew about what Jack Kerouac called the fellahin, Marx called the lumpen, who have always been with us we just don't see them except when they are pan-handling around the inner cities or conning somebody anywhere).

Bart, although these days he probably would not admit to it, wouldn’t mention it unless he was asked directly, and I came from Doveville, came from that “white trash” environment that Algren captured in the first couple of chapters about where guys like Dove got off the rails right from the start. We both grew up in the “projects” in Carver, you know the public housing every town and city has provided for a while to those who are down on their luck, can’t do better, or won’t. No matter how pretty a town tries to make the place look and the town of Carver didn’t bother much it is still the projects. It’s the projects because it is not so much the condition of the places, the lack of space and amenities people out in the leafy suburbs expect as a matter of course, or the sameness of everybody’s condition and thus poor material to jump up in the world in but because of the way it breaks your spirit, the way it grinds you down worrying about the basics of life and not having them, making your “wanting habits” larger than life.                 

Although Bart, whose father was just a poorly educated man who got caught up in World War II, got stationed for a while in Boston before being discharged, met Bart’s mother and decided to stay rather than going back up to rural Maine and his white trash kindred (I am not being unkind here to the old man, believe me, Bart said he could not believe a place was worse than the Carver projects when he saw the broken down shack, complete with rusted non-descript vehicles, the outhouse which served for relief of the bodily functions and the rat’s ass condition of the interior, the couple of times he went up there as a kid to see where his father grew up) and I, whose father was a drunk, a drunk straight up without the excuse of military service to explain his rotten ways escaped the worst the projects had to dish out it was a close thing, a very close thing. We saw Doves all around us, had some for friends, got tied up a little with their wanting habits which intersected our own.       

Let me give you one example, the one Bart would pick too if I had asked him to name the guy from the old neighborhood who could go toe to toe with the Doves of the world. “Red” Radley was the toughest hombre around (and that “red” moniker was not about his political affiliations, not in the red scare 1950s when we grew up under the cloud of the Cold War, he would have clobbered anybody who said that, clobbered anybody who claimed to be a red, or maybe even though about it too).  A couple of years older than us so his exploits worthy of our attention and admiration (and garnered us a couple of appearances in “juvie,” in kid’s court as a result for the "clip,"  you know the "five-finger discount" and trying to jack-roll a guy, an old town drunk after he got his monthly check, Jesus) Red didn’t look that tough but everybody knew that he was the guy who almost chain-whipped a guy to death from another neighborhood, another corner really which is the way “turf” was divided in those days leaving a bloody mass on the ground when he walked away just for being in Red’s corner (Harry’s Variety where even tough and "connected" Harry once told me long after Red went up to do his first armed robbery stretch that he was afraid of Red when he was only sixteen and that was why he never made an issue of Red staking out his store as his corner for him and his boys even though he was "protected" by the cops).       

Red had the classic story, a drunken long gone father (if it was his father since the guy he knew as this father before the guy split always claimed Red was not his kid), a tramp of a mother whose claim to fame was that she could outdrink most guys and gave the best blowjobs in town. No one questioned the latter by the way and there was plenty of anecdotal evidence for that claim from high school guys to old time winos who knew her when she was younger and they cared more about satisfaction of their sexual urges, having her "toot the whistle" they called it then than the hunt for Ripple). Red didn’t care if school kept or not once he got the idea to start “clipping” stuff from department schools and selling it to us (or anybody else) cheap to keep himself in clover. Got himself a gang of corner boys (Harry’s Variety, remember) including Bart and me for a few minutes (that is where our “juvie” experiences came in) and ruled his ‘kingdom” with an iron fist until he graduated to armed robberies (the place where Bart and I jumped ship). Wound up pimping his younger sister, only thirteen, for a while in between robberies (we thought it was cool although we were far from knowing what that pimping really meant). There was some talk too of incest with her but we let that slide not being sure what that meant or understanding the implications. Later, when he was between jail terms he would pimp whatever girlfriend he had to keep himself in dough.

Funny despite his outlaw status he could get some good-looking novena, rosary bead and "Bible between their knees" Catholic girls who you wouldn’t think would look at him once although he was a good-looking wiry guy and turn them into whores. And they didn’t think twice about it according to what Red told Bart one time about Cissie Gaffney whom Bart had had a crush on in his younger days. It took no big brain to know that Red’s attitude toward women was about the same as his attitude about doormats.         

Naturally the Reds of the world just like their kindred Doves try to go further than their inner resources will take them. Begin to think the whole world is just a little larger than the small pond they are swimming in where they have all the other fishes terrified, forget there are a ton of other tough hungry guys out there. Forget the coppers will throw you down if you do not own them. And so early on at about sixteen Red started getting taken down many pegs. The first time for a botched armed robbery of a gas station up on Palmer Street when a cop car was passing by and saw the action, the coppers put Red down to the ground and he stayed down as they handcuffed him, trussed him really. That began the cycle from which Red never broke until, from what we heard about twenty-five years later, Red fell to earth down South, North Carolina I think, strung out on junk, a habit which he picked up in one of his jail terms (and which made more than one girlfriend a whore to keep him from his horrors), fell down in a shoot-out with local cops when he was trying to rob a White Hen convenience store, armed to the teeth. So when we say Algren knew the Reds, (and us) of the world, wrote about them true you can take that wisdom to the bank. Here’s why if you need a more rounded out picture:       

He, Nelson Algren, the poet-king of the midnight police line-up, poet-king and true, no short-cuts, no pretty pictures, no lies leave that to the dopes in the line-up, leave that to the prosaic night watch captain who has heard it all, night court shuffle (whores, pimps, winos, and denizens of the all-night Hayes-Bickford weak coffee but cheap who are out and about gathered up by a whole unknown to John and Jane Q Public justice system which is grinding away relentlessly keeping John and Jane ignorant), drug-infested jack-roller (who likes the sound of a roll of nickels on bone, likes to work the dark streets around Jimmy the Polack’s Tavern on Friday nights when guys get paid and he gets “paid”), dope-peddler (mostly the guy who takes the fall, the guy who cuts the dope so tight that it makes Minnie squeal to high heaven but also the guy when that fifteenth “cold turkey” time didn't make it is the sainted bastard savoir our lord “fixer-man” all hail), illicit crap game back alleys (watch the Doves, Reds, and Shortys for they will always tilt the game if not watched just like back in some Harry’s Variety time when the messed up Madame La Rue pinball wizard games and Harry caught hell from his connected boys, Chicago-style, what did Carl Sandburg the old dusty poet call Chi ( a very far stretch from old hosanna westward trek all men are brothers Walt Whitman although he too knew grime), oh yeah, hog-butcher and steel-driver of the world. Wrote of small-voiced people(you know Joe regular guy this gas jockey smelling of greases and oils even with the Borax treatment, Jane regular gal waitress in the dead-end Pops’ Eats diner complete with stained tight white uniform and tired legs), mostly people who had started out in the world with small voices, small voices which never got louder.

Small-voiced except that solitary confinement in some locked room junkie wail when deep in the “cold turkey” fits screaming for sweet Jesus lord fixer man, except that drunk dark tavern cheap low-shelf rye whiskey shrieking in the early morning high moon can’t find the way home some blind and another shriek when Lenny works that roll of nickels on his bones, yeah, except that stealthy jack-roller cry of delight once his victim wears that spot of blood on the back of his neck like some red badge of sap-dom, except that scream when some he-man decides that for a minute he would gain a big voice and smack his woman a few times to straighten her out (and she sporting a bruised eye and crippled shoulder, nowhere to go, what about the kids, and oh how he used to love her so and maybe he will change some day), except that holler when some john decided to bust up his paid-up junkie whore just because he could  (hell, she tried to hold out on him her protector, tried to do a trick on her own hook, tried to take the night off, the reasons are endless), except, oh, hell, enough of exceptions in the neon-blazing small voice night. Let little sketch, do, do for all the suffering mass who fall way under the social radar: 

“Frankie, I ain’t feelng so good, need a little something to calm my nerves down, get me back on top, get be back to being your sweet loving lady, your sweet Lorraine,” Marybeth Dolan said to her latest lover man Frankie, Frankie Malone, whom she had met about a year before when she was feeling blue and had gone out to Skipper’s Bar &Grille over on Division, that’s Chi town for the gyps, to have a few drinks, maybe pick up a guy for the night, maybe more she wasn’t that picky that night when she had her wanting habits on that way, when she needed a man in her bed to stop the crazy feeling she got when she didn’t have a man around.

She had seen Frankie around, around Division, remember in Chi town,  and around Skipper’s before, Skipper’s her home away from home when she wanted a man, heard he was “connected” to Lance Kelly, the big guy in the dope scene and who knows what else and as she was strictly a whiskey drinker she kind of passed him by, kind of brushed him off her dance card even if he was pretty good looking, and looked like he might be good in the saddle, her saddle. Heard too though that he had been hung up on junk, H, horse, whatever the guys at Skipper’s called it to show they were hip, or something after he got back from Iraq, back the first time in 2005 but had gone “cold turkey” and kept off the stuff as far as she knew.           

That first night they met she had gone into Skipper’s with her best red “come hither” dress on (some girlfriend had told her when she was just a girl, just starting to figure out guys, started wanting to figure out guys that red was the primo color to attract guys who were looking to score with girls, red come hither dresses seemed to work the best), sat down on a stool at the bar and ordered her regular drink, Chivas on the rocks, from Benny the bartender who sometimes when the place was not busy would have her drink ready as he spied her coming in the door, although not this night when the place was crowded since Eddie Clearwater, the old time electric blues guy who played with Magic Jim back in the day was performing on the small stage in the back room and he always drew a crowd.

Frankie had been sitting a few seats down when he first noticed her but since the seat next to hers was clear he came up to the empty seat and asked if anybody was sitting there. After the obvious “no” he asked if she wanted a drink, she said “no” since she already had a drink in front of her and thought that would be that. Instead Frankie said in a low murmur so nobody else would hear, “I’ve seen you in here before, seen you with Lenny Price a few times, and then lately by yourself. What did you do, get old Lenny the brush-off?”

“No,” she answered starting to think that very subtle thought that this guy was trying to pick her up and that might not be so bad, might be very good if he was off the junk like she had heard, “Lenny drifted out West somewhere, left me high and dry if you want to know, and good riddance since the guy was going nowhere and wasn’t that good a lover anyway.” That last part startled Frankie a little as he replied, “I’m a guy going somewhere, I’m a guy who you might want to get to know,” looking her up and down. Marybeth blushed her always Irish Catholic novena rosary bead blush which came up whenever a guy was giving her the sexy treatment although she had long ago given up her maidenhead, quaint word, and the Church.

Then Marybeth said, “Well, maybe I might if you are clean these days.” Frankie turned his head back away from her as if to say that how did she know that, and why, and answered, “Yeah, I’m clean, clean as jaybird although it wasn’t something I wanted to do, no way.” And thus started the love affair between one Francis Malone and one Marybeth Dolan, both to the Church born but now wayward sinners as she took him to her small studio apartment later that night after they had talked, danced a couple of slow ones when Eddie was finishing his last set and had closed the joint.                         

And so it went along for a couple of months they alternating between her place and Frankie’s room, efficiencies they call them in Chi town with a small kitchenette and half shower bathroom but really one big room, so room, going out to eat supper at various spots, some ritzy like The Four Winds, some just plain apple America steamed Wagon Wheel Diner when their appetites were up (usually after sex and she had performed a few tricks on him, “played the flute,” she called the trick which both agreed no self-respecting Irish Catholic girl should even know about less be able to do, to get down her throat that far although both laughed when she said from Frankie’s very limp penis he was glad that she did know and he just smiled the smile of a guy who knew he could get her to do that trick whenever he wanted). Skipper’s when the place had live music playing and just kind of going along.

Then one night, one Saturday night when they were in Frankie’s room after drinking the night away at the Sunset Club over near the Loop Frankie suggested they try a little something for the head, some righteous cocaine, girl, cousin he called it. Marybeth was confused, wasn’t sure that what Frankie meant was junk, heroin that he was offering her. So Marybeth asked what the hell was going on she thought he was off the stuff, off of heroin. Frankie laughed a sly laugh and said, “Yeah, I’m off that stuff but a guy needs a little something for the head to even out after tough days and so a little sniff, a couple of snorts gets me right. Besides its not addictive, really.” For some reason known only to her, a reason she would search for over the next few months she took him at his word.

Furthermore she was just drunk enough to want to stay high, wanted some “kicks” to go with their love-making, see where that led. See it made it easier to “play the flute,” not that Frankie wanted that steady and sometimes when she was drinking too much she had trouble gagging for some reason. Frankie took out his packet of white dust, grabbed a small plate from his kitchen cabinet and started crushing the stuff up with a razor. Then he took a dollar bill out of his pocket and roll it up to make a straw and say “Ladies, first” after explaining to Marybeth that you had hold the dollar bill straw to your nose and inhale through your nose. She did so and after taking a hit started to cough a little. Then she said she felt funny in her stomach and Frankie said that was natural as the cocaine dissolved. He told her to take another hit to cool her out. The second inhalation was not so bad and kind of made her horny. Made her want Frankie, who said just take another hit and I’ll take a few and we will hit the sheets. That night Marybeth had some of the best sex of her life, had an orgasm or thought she did, screamed through their love-making enough.

For the next few months almost every time Frankie and Marybeth made love they got going by doing a few lines, a few more each time although nobody was counting. Then one day a couple of months back Marybeth went into the bureau drawer where Frankie kept his stash opened the packet and set herself up a few lines to chase the blues away. That is what she told Frankie when he asked whether she had opened his stash or not, had said yes and then quickly asked if he wanted her to “play the flute” to get his mind off of her invading his stash. This went on a few more times when Marybeth said she was feeling blue before Frankie started to keep his stash outside the rooming house. He would bring just enough to keep her from feeling blue if she asked or if they were making love which was less frequent these days.     

Then this night, this lowdown night when Marybeth pleaded with him to give her a few lines Frankie for the first time realized, or maybe realized was too strong a word that Marybeth was getting too crazy on the stuff and he told her she would have to give it up, give it up just like he had kicked junk. She begged, pleaded with him, told him she would let him chain her to the bedpost and do what he wanted to do to her which she had previously refused to do as being too kinky, as not being sex but a perversion, if he would only make her well. She started jabbering loudly and Frankie could only calm her down a little by saying he would go get his stash. She cried out after him as he left, Oh Frankie, you are my angel of mercy, you are my guardian angel.” As Frankie walked down the stairs he shook his head in disgust, some angel of mercy."          

Yeah, Nelson had it right, had that ear to the ground for the low moan (more of a groan, not for him his contemporary Jack Kerouac’s moan for man, “beat” moan for man, all Catholic beat and rise, although they heard those same longings, that same rat’s ass despair of the midnight oil), the silence in the face of ugly Division Street tenements not fit for the hogs much less the hog-butchers (cold water flats, rooms so small so no space to breath, no private thoughts except that some guy next door knew what you were thinking and said cut it out, peeling wallpaper or paint it does not matter, dripping sinks that spoke of no recent plumbing and why should the landlord care but get this Division Street had kindred in Taffrail Road, Carver, Columbia Point, south-side Racine, the Bronx, they are legend), had the ear for the dazed guys, drunk, disorderly, maybe on the nod so quiet (that nod not the nod of youth when you recognized some guy you sort of knew in passing as a sign he was cool with you but the low-down nod of somebody in a place that nobody can reach) spilling their pitter-patter to Captain just like back in home sweet Mississippi, Georgia, wherever ( and could never go back to face Mister James Crow and his do this, don’t do that, stay here, don’t stay there, keep your head down enough of that).

Algren had the ear for the strange unrequited fates of what did that same Jack Kerouac of the “moan for man” call them, yes, the fellahin, the lump mass peasants (and what is the same thing once they get off the farms and the out of the country air, the urban peasants, for at least in America they are when you scratch underneath their surly looks and bitter end despair they are not that far removed from their roots, from all their old sack of potatoes lives), met coming out of men’s bars on fugitive mile long riverbank mill town Lowell streets loud and boisterous ready for a fight or a kiss with some waylaid back alley); broken-back Fresno fruit fields (stoop labor, bracero labor that only the Aztec bronzed “wetback” could stand picking cucumbers here, garlic there going norte); and, Mexican nights all night bumpy bus ride sweating and stinking coming of going someplace) except now they are hell-bound bunched up together on the urban spit ( a righteous word and it fits), small voices never heard over the rumble of the thundering subway build to drown out the cries of men), working stiffs (stinking hog-butchers with blood-stained hands hulking slabs of pork, sweated steel-driving men edging toward the melting point as they hurl their metals into the grinder to mesh and mix the great urban superstructure, grease-stained tractor-builders out at John Deere, frayed-collared night clerks in some seedy flop (frayed collar both necessary for night work since the winos could have cared less about what some holy goof wore, the  con men are sneaking out the back door and the whores are trying to hold off their latest john until they see cash), porters sweeper out Mister’s leaving from his executive bathroom, and glad they have the work since it beats down home sweated fields).

And their women too, the fellahina [sic], cold-water flat housewives making do with busted up toasters, egg-shelled stained coffee pots (shaking their heads at some Anglo-American poet going on and on about measuring lives by coffee spoons), Bargain Center leftover drapes, frayed kitchen curtains; cheap Jimmy Jack’s Diner waitresses to earn the family daily bread their misters of the golden dream youth the world is our oyster promises couldn’t deliver surly pencil in ear and steam-tray sweated too tight faded white uniform with telltale leftover gravy stains hustling for nickels and dimes; beaten down shoe factory workers flipping soles and heels by the score at piece rate, piece rate if you can believe that, work men did not do, would not do; working back room donut shops filling donuts with jelly, cream, whatever, hairnet caked with debris, ditto her ill-fitted sugar encrusted uniform, to feed the tribe that she had too close together and proved too much when the deal when down; the younger ones, pretty or plain, hitting Benny’s Tavern for a few quick ones and maybe a quick roll in the hay if some guy pays the freight (the plain ones depending on that); older women sitting alone at smoke-filled bars on early evening paydays looking that look, that come hither honey look, doing tricks for extra no tell husband cash to fill those weekly white envelopes when the rack-renter and the utilities bill collectors hammer at the door; other older women, younger ones too come to think of it, hustling for a fix if she is on the quiet jones).

Sometimes despite all their best wishes and fruitless rantings their kids (already street-wise watching older brothers working back alley jack-rolls, cons, hanging in front of Harry’s Variety doing, well, just doing until the midnight sifter time rolls around),  growing up like weeds with nobody at home in an age when mothers stayed at home, who turned out to be disappointments. But who could expect more from the progeny of small-voiced people, of guys who sat around gin mills all night (maybe all day too I knew a few who inhabited the Dublin Grille in my old hometown of Carver, a smaller version of Chi town, another town filled with small-voice people, just fewer, small tenements, cold-water flats, same seedy places not fit to hang in, genteel people hang in).

Nelson never wrote, or wrote much, about big-voiced people those who Greek tragedy played big but rather those who stumbled, tumbled down to the sound of rumble subway stops out their doors (that damn elevated shaking the damn apartment day and night, rattling the windows, so close passengers got an eyeful when some floozy readied herself for her night’s work or not bothering with modesty, high as a kite, just letting herself not feel anything). Never spoke of people who fell off the rim of the world from some high place due to their hubris, their addictions, their outrageous wanting habits never sated before the fall, not some Edenic fall, not some “searching for the garden” like Jack and Burroughs uptown tea-fed hipsters claimed they were seeking just ask them, but a silly little worldly fall that once it happened the world moved on and ignored.

Wrote instead of the desperately lonely, a shabby-clothed wino man talking to himself on some forsaken park bench the only voice, not a big voice but a voice that had to be reckoned with, of the donut and coffee stuffed cop swaggering his billy club menacingly to move him on, or else; a woman, unhappy in love, hell maybe jilted at the altar, sitting alone like some Apple Annie in that one Ladies Invited tavern on the corner, the one just off Division where she had met that man the first time and meets all men now, all men with the price of a drink, maybe two, no more, and that eternal price of a by-the-hour flop over on neon hotel, motel, no tell Mitchell Street.

Yeah, a big old world filled with the lonely hearing only their own heartbeats, heard no other heartbeats as they waited out their days. What did T.S. Eliot, the poet and a guy who if strait-laced and Victorian knew what he was talking about call it like I said before but it all fits, oh yeah, measured out their lives in coffee spoons. Nelson wrote of alienated people too, not the Chicago intellectuals who were forever belly-aching about the de-humanization of man  about how we had built a mechanical world from which we had to run but the common clay, the ones who manned the conveyor belts, ran the damn rumbling subways, shoveled the snow, hell, shoveled shit day and night. (Studs Terkel, a guy Algren knew, a guy who knew a thing or two about the fellahin and the dirty linen Chi streets, could quote chapter and verse on these guys and their eternal studies about the plight of man, and they merely made of the same clay.)

Wrote of the night people, not the all night champagne party set until dawn and sleep the day away but of the ones who would show up after midnight in some police precinct line-up, the winos, the jack-rollers, the drifters, the grifters, the midnight sifters, maybe a hooker who had not paid the paddy and thus was subject to the grill. Wrote of the  people who inhabit the Nighthawk Diner (artist Edward Hopper’s all sharp angles, all dim lights outside, bright fluorescent no privacy, no hiding lights inside, all the lonely people eating their midnight hamburgers with all the fixings from the look of it meaning a no go night and so that lonely burger and cup of joe, fresh off the greased grill, another grill that forlorn hooker knew well), or Tom Waits’ rummies, bummies, stumblers, street-walkers looking for respect all shadows left behind, take your pick), the restless, the sleepless, the shiftless, those who worked the late shift, those who drew the late shift of life, those who worked better under the cover of night in the dark alleyways and sullen sunken doorways.

He wrote big time, big words, about the small-voiced people, big words for people who spoke in small words, spoke small words about small dreams, or no dreams, spoke only of the moment, the eternal “only the moment.” The next fix, how to get it, worse, how to get the dough to pay the fixer man, he, sending his woman out on the cold damp streets standing under some streetlight waiting for Johnnie and his two minute pleasures, she if she needed a fix, well, she trading blow jobs for smack, so as not to face that “cold turkey” one more day. The next drink, low boy rotgut wines and cheap whiskies, how to get it, the next bet, how to con the barkeeper to put him on the sheet, the next john, how to take him, the next rent due, how to avoid the dun and who after all had time for anything beyond that one moment.

Waiting eternally waiting to get well, you in such bad shape you can’ t get down the stairs, waiting for the fixer man to walk up the stairs and get you well, well beyond what any medical doctor could prescript, better than any mumbo-jumbo priest could absolve, to get some kicks. (Needle, whiskey, sex although that was far down the list by the time that needle was needed or that shot of low-shelf whiskey drove you to your need, again.) Waiting for the fixer man, waiting for the fixer man to fix what ailed them.

So not for Algren the small voice pleasant Midwestern farmers providing breadbaskets to the world talking to kindred about prices of wheat and corn walking the road to their proper Sunday white-clad church after a chaste Saturday red barn dance over at Fred Brown’s; not for him  the prosperous small town drugstore owners filling official drug prescriptions hot off some doctor’s pad and selling the under-aged liquor as medicine without prescription for whatever the traffic would bear; and ,not of Miss Millie’s beauty salon where the blue-haired ladies get ready for battle and gossip about how Mister so and so had an affair with Miss so and so from the office and how will Mildred whom of course they would never tell to keep the mills rolling do when the whole thing goes public.

Nor was Algren inclined to push the air out of the small town banker seeking a bigger voice (calling in checks at a moment’s notice), the newspaper publisher seeking to control the voices or the alderman or his or her equivalent who had their own apparatuses for getting their small voices heard. One suspects that he could have written that stuff, written and hacked away his talent like those who in the pull and push of the writing profession had (have) forsaken their muses for filthy lucre. No, he, Nelson Algren, he, to give him his due took dead aim at the refuge of society, the lumpen as he put it in the title of one short story, those sitting on the rim of the world.

And he did good, did good by his art, did good by his honest snarly look at the underside of society, and, damn, by making us think about that quarter turn of fate that separated the prosperous farmer (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not short-weighting the world), the drugstore owner (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not dispensing his wares, his potent drugs, out the back door to a craving market) , Miss Millie (assuming as we must that she, secretly, was not running a call girl service on the side), the banker (assuming as we must that he, maybe secretly, maybe not, was not gouging rack rents and usurious interest), the newspaper editor (assuming as we must that he, very publicly, in fact was printing all the news fit to print), and the politician (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not bought and paid for by all of the above, or others) from the denizens of his mean streets. The mean city streets, mainly of Chicago, but that is just detail, just names of streets and sections of town to balance his work where his characters eked out an existence, well, anyway they could, some to turn up face down in some muddy ravine, under some railroad trestle, in some dime flop house, others to sort of amble along in the urban wilderness purgatory.

Brother Algren gave us characters to chew on, plenty of characters, mostly men, mostly desperate (in the very broadest sense of that word), mostly with some jones to work off, mostly with some fixer man in the background to wreak havoc too. He gave us two classics of the seamy side genre, one, from The Man With The Golden Arm, the misbegotten Frankie Machine, the man with the golden needle arm, the man with the chip on his shoulder, the mid-century(20^th century, okay) man ill at ease in his world, ill at ease with the world and looking, looking for some relief, some kicks in that mid-century parlance, and, two, from Walk On The Wild Side, that hungry boy, that denizen of the great white trash night already mentioned, Dove Linkhorn, who, perhaps more than Frankie spoke to that mid-century angst, spoke to that world gone wrong, for those who had just come up, come up for some place where time stood still to gain succor in the urban swirl, to feast at the table, come up from the back forty lots, the prairie golden harvest wheat fields, the Ozarks, all swamps and ooze, mountain wind hills and hollows, the infested bayous and were ready to howl, howl at the moon to get attention.

Bart said he remembered reading somewhere, and I have forgotten where now, that someone had noted that Nelson Algren’s writing on Dove Linkhorn’s roots was the most evocative piece on the meaning of the okie–arkie out migration (but that is just a moniker to stick on those people they were legend all over the South and Southwest as the fields of gold went fallow) segment of that mid-century America ever written, the tale of the wandering boys, the railroad riders, the jungle camp jumpers, the skid row derelicts. Hell, call it by its right name, the white trash, that lumpen mush. And he or she was right, of course, after I went back and after Bart mentioned the idea re-read that first section of Walk On The Wild Side where the Linkhorn genealogy back unto the transport ships that brought the first crop of that ilk from thrown out Europe are explored. All the pig thieves, cattle-rustlers, poachers, highwaymen, the -what did some sociologist who looked at the in the Age of Jackson when they were coming over in swarms once the industrial wheels seriously kicked up in Great Britain, call them?, oh yeah, “the master-less men,” those who could not or would not be tamed by the on-rushing wheels of free-form capitalism as the system relentlessly picked up steam, the whole damn lot transported. And proper society said good riddance (and proper Eastern seaboard would later echo that sentiment).  

The population of California after World War II was filled to the brim with such types, the progeny, the feckless “hot rod” boys who took some wreck of car (sometimes literally) and made to “spec,” boys mostly too young to have been though the bloodbaths of Europe and Asia like their older brothers would be the vanguard of the “golden age of the 1950s” now spoken of with reverence, building some powerful road machines out of baling wire and not much else, speeding up and down those Pacific coast ocean-flecked highways can’t you just picture them now looking for the heart of Saturday night, looking for kicks just like those Chicago free-flow junkies, those twisted New Orleans whoremasters. Wandering hells angels riding two by two (four by four if they felt like it in Mill Valley or Pacifica and who was to stop them not the good citizens of the “golden age” and maybe not the cops, not when they were in a swarm anyway) creating havoc for the good citizens of those small towns they descended on, descended on unannounced (and unwelcomed by those same good citizens). In and out of jail, Q, Folsom, not for stealing pigs now, but armed robberies or some egregious gang bang felony, but kindred to those lost boys kicked out of Europe long ago. Corner boys, tee-shirted, black leather jacket against cold nights, hanging out with time on their hands and permanent smirks, permanent hurts, permanent hatreds, put paid to that Algren observation. All the kindred of the cutthroat world, or better “cut your throat” world, that Dove drifted into was just a microcosm of that small-voiced world.

Algren spoke of cities, even when his characters came fresh off the farm, abandoned for the bright lights of the city and useless to that short-weighting farmer who now is a prosperous sort, making serious dough as the breadbasket to the world. They, the off-hand hot rod king, the easy hell’s rider, the shiftless corner boy, had no existence, no outlets for their anger and angst, in small towns and hamlets for their vices, or their virtues, too small, too small for the kicks they were looking for. They needed the anonymous city rooming house, the cold-water flat, the skid- row flop house, the ten- cent beer hall, hell, the railroad jungle, any place where they could just let go with their addictions, their anxieties, and their hunger without having to explain, endlessly explain themselves, always, always a tough task for the small-voiced of this wicked old world. They identified with cities, with city 24/7/365 lights, with Algren’s blessed neon lights, city traffic (of all kinds), squalor, cops on the take, cops not on the take, plebeian entertainments, sweat, a little dried blood, marked veins, reefer madness, swilled drinks, white towers (the hamburger joint with cheap fast wares before Big Mac drowned out everybody else), all Pops’ Eats night diners (see it always comes back to that lonely, alienated Nighthawk Diner just ask Waits), the early editions (for race results, the number, who got dead that day, the stuff of that world), a true vision of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawk for a candid world.

He spoke of jazz and the blues, as if all the hell in this wicked old world could be held off for a minute while that sound sifted thought the night fog air reaching the rooming house, the flop, the ravine, the beer hall as it drifted out to the river and drowned. Music not upfront but as a backdrop to while the steamy summer nights away, and maybe the frigid lake front winter too. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, he spoke of a small-voiced white world, residents of white slums and pursuers of white- etched dreams and only stick character blacks but his beat, his writing rhythm made no sense without the heat of Trouble In Mind or that cool blast of Charlie Parker, Miles, Dizzie be-bopping, made absolutely no sense, and so it went.

He spoke of love too. Not big flamed love, big heroes taking big falls for some hopeless romance like in olden times but squeezed love, love squeezed out of a spoon, maybe, but love in all its raw places. A guy turning his woman into a whore to feed his endless habit love, and her into a junkie love. A woman taking her man through cold turkey love. A man letting his woman go love, ditto woman her man when the deal went wrong. When the next best thing came by. Not pretty love all wrapped in a bow, but love nevertheless. And sometimes in this perverse old world the love a man has for a woman when, failing cold turkey, he goes to get the fixer man and that fixer man get his woman well, almost saintly and sacramental. Brothers and sisters just read The Last Carousel if you want to know about love. Hard, hard love. Yah, Nelson Algren knew how to give voice, no holds barred, to the small-voiced people.

*****From The Archives Of The International Labor Defense (ILD)-1925-1946)-In Defense Of Political Prisoners

*****From The Archives  Of The International Labor Defense (ILD)-1925-1946)-In Defense Of Political Prisoners

Click below to link to an introduction to the work of the ILD-

https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/eam/other/ild/ild.html

Click below to link to New York Public Library materials on ILD

http://archives.nypl.org/scm/20647

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Introducing The Committee For International Labor Defense

Mission Statement

The Committee for International Labor Defense (CILD) is a legal and political defense organization working on behalf of the international working class and oppressed minorities providing aid and solidarity in legal cases. We stand today in the traditions of the working-class defense policies of the International Labor Defense (ILD) 1925-1946, the defense arm of the American Communist Party which won its authority as a defense organization in cases like Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro Boys, defense of Black Sharecropper’ Union and Birmingham steelworkers union efforts in the South in the 1930s and 1940s, and garnering support in the United States for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. 

The ILD takes a side. In the struggles of working people to defend their unions and independent political organizations and to organize themselves we stand in solidarity against their exploiters. In the struggles of the oppressed and other socially marginalized peoples to defend their communities and to organize themselves we stand in solidarity with their efforts against their oppressors.  While favoring all possible legal proceedings for the cases we support, we recognize that the courts, prisons and police exist to maintain the ruling class’ dominance over all others. To paraphrase one of the founding members of the original ILD said “we place 100% of our faith in the power of the masses to mobilize to defend their own and zero faith, none, in the ‘justice’ of the courts or other tribunals.”

As we take the side of working people and oppressed minorities we also strive to be anti-sectarian. We will, according to our abilities, critically but unconditionally support movements and defend cases of organizations or individuals with whose political views we do not necessarily agree. We defend, to paraphrase the original statement of purpose of the old ILD, “any member of the workers and oppressed movement, regardless of their views, who has suffered persecution by the capitalist courts and other coercive institutions because of their activities or their opinions.” As the old labor slogan goes-“an injury to one is an injury to all.”

More information-  c_for_intl_labor_defense@lists.digitalexplorations.org

In the long arc, the now fifty years long arc of Sam Lowell’s left-wing political activism, the question of the plight of political prisoners, class-war prisoners to distinguish them from death squad Nazis and thugs and the commonality of other criminals has always played a central role in his work. Part of this was out of necessity in the old days when the American government was whipping away drafter resisters for their righteous opposition to the Vietnam War then raging and threatening to take a whole generation down with it both soldiers and civilians, military resisters who once a critical mass of soldiers started coming back and telling the real story of the war became more prevalent as the American Army was in near mutiny before the thing got closed down by the heroic Vietnamese resistance fighters, the civilly disobedient from little old ladies in tennis sneakers, Quakers, Shakers and later radicals and reds, rowdy according to them anti-war protesters, Black Panthers, at least the ones they did not try to just outright kill in their beds like Fred Hampton and Mark Clark or frame up almost to death like Geronimo Pratt (when he was going by that name before his conversion to a Muslim name he could not remember) or anybody else who got in their way when they pulled the hammer down and began the long “night of the long knives” that we have been subject to ever since without any apparent end in sight.

Since then through the vagaries of whatever small struggles he and what he calls the “remnant,” those who still hold the torch seeking the “newer world” and those too few who have joined those old new leftists political prisoner work has been the one constant when other struggles have failed like the now endless wars of the American government or situations that have been resolved at least partially like the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

(Sam by the way has this very big thing about not calling the government “our government” ever since those days, those days when his best friend from high school, Jeff Mullins, was killed in Vietnam and in letters home begged Sam to tell a candid world what the hell was going on over there and he saw what the hell it was doing to young kids, kids out of high school just like him making them nothing but animals and so unless you want, and I don’t, a ration of grief we will stick with his designation.)

So Sam Lowell in his time has defended, has tried to publicize the plight of political prisoners as they have come up starting back in the day with the various anti-war protestors rounded up on May Day, 1971 (including himself), the Panthers and other black nationalists when they were under the gun of the American government, the victims of the coup in Chile in 1973, the aforementioned anti-apartied fighters led by the later Nelson Mandela in South Africa, the British coal-miners in the 1980s, many anti-death penalty struggles including the Mumia Abu Jamal (now serving a “living death” life without parole sentence) Troy Davis (executed by the state of Georgia in 2011)cases (and lately the case of the surviving member of the Boston Marathon bombings now under death sentence when he stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the Federal Courthouse in Boston down by the waterfront with Catholic Workers and Veterans for Peace but not anybody from Amnesty International or Massachusetts Committee Against the Death Penalty), and lots of others. All done, whether Sam was conscience of it at the time or not under the old slogan from the Wobblie days (Industrial Workers of the World, IWW)-“an injury to one is an injury to all.”

Lately Sam has been thinking, as he has reduced his law practice work, let others run the day to day operations of his small practice down in Carver about thirty miles from Boston, about that slogan, about the history of that idea. On the face of it the proposition makes total sense but what Sam was looking at was how that proposition was made concrete at least since the high holy hell days when the Wobblies needed all the defense they could muster against the bosses and their state. Now Sam, and you need to know this about him as well, has some method to his madness when he is thinking along such lines and this is the case here as well. Back in August of 2015 he had been invited to a planning meeting of an ad hoc group of Boston left-wing political activists who were interested in setting up a Committee for International Labor Defense (CILD). That name was not accidentally picked since what the group was trying to do was revive the traditions of the International Labor Defense (ILD) which been set up under the aegis of the American Communist Party in 1925 to deal organizationally with the continuing struggle for freedom for left-wing and labor militants under ban from the American government by Jim Cannon, Bill Haywood and others. That organization in turn had been affiliated with the International Red Aid which had previously been set up by the Communist International shortly after its own establishment in 1919.

Sam’s first reaction to the invitation and afterward thinking about the meeting which he had attended that August was that you cannot go home again, that whatever virtues the old ILD had any they were many especially in the 1920s and 1930s well before the operation went out of business in1946, that was over and done with. Then one night he began to think about that “traditions” part, about what the ILD had actually done in its best days. Back then, back in the 1920s when it all started the Wobblies had been decimated by the American government in its vendetta against that organization for its opposition to the First World War and a goodly number were still languishing in jail. Bill Haywood, a Wobblie founder, contacted Jim Cannon then a big wheel in the leadership of the CP and former Wobblie himself about setting up a non-sectarian pro-labor, political prisoner defense group since despite the low level of struggle then the CP was the only organization with the political, financial and legal resources to put together an effective organization. The ILD first won its spurs as a labor defense organization in the unsuccessful fight to save the framed anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti who were executed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1927. The organization was critical in the 1930s in saving the lives of the Scottsboro boys, nine young black men who were accused of raping two white women and who were being railroaded to death row by the state of Alabama. All through the 1930s the ILD helped out labor militants in nasty strike actions and other social struggles like support for the Spanish Republican.

Sam had to admit that in its heyday the ILD did very good work and it would not be disrespectful to try to try to resurrect the traditions of such an organization. But know this about Sam as well he is a devout student of history  so he has to dig into the archives and find material that might be helpful in working through the logistics of “an injury ot one is an injury to all.” Hence this archival piece.                        

                      

*From The "Blob Feldman 68" Blog- The Anniversary Of Kent State/Jackson State

Click on the headline to link to a "Bob Feldman 68" blog entry marking the anniversary of the murders at Kent State in Ohio and Jackson State in Mississippi.

Markin comment:

I wrote the comment below the asterisks for a "Bob Feldman 68" blog entry on his marking the 40th anniversary of the murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. With due regard for the fact that the American government carried out a systematic and long term plan of extermination of black militants, as exemplified by Hampton and Clark, the thrust of those remarks are also appropriate here in marking the 40th anniversaries of Kent State and Jackson State.

********

The late "Gonzo" journalist, Hunter S. Thompson, once noted in his madman escapades posing as a novel, "Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas", that at some point in the late 1960s the high water mark of the counter-cultural revolutionary possibilities had been met and thrown back. From then on the tide receded. We can quibble over exact dates and events but one of the clearest ones for me politically was the murders in Chicago of Black Panther leaders, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in late 1969. To be black, especially a black man, or to be different hereafter in any out of the sort way from mainstream politics or culture put one at grave risk. Maybe not the kind of fiendish risk that Fred Hampton faced but some degree nevertheless. And we are still paying for those defeats forty years later.

Remembering Easter 1916-With The Shamrock Irish In Mind

Remembering Easter 1916-With The Shamrock Irish In Mind

By Jack Murphy

Funny how all the guys I used to hang around with at Harry Variety, then Doc’s Drugstore, and finally at Tonio’s Pizza Palace in our school days around Riverdale about thirty miles south of Boston would claim some Irish heritage every time Saint Patrick’s Day came around. Even guys like Ray Rizzo, a stone-cold Italian guy would go on and on about how, maybe, about six generations back one of his forebears stopped in Ireland and left a little something behind, a little bundle so to speak, and thus could claim kinship to Irish Republican Brotherhood (we were all in the thrall to that name as well as the Irish Citizens’ Army and the then blessed Volunteers even though none of us, the fully Irish included, knew anything about those organizations and the roles they played except the late lamented “half-arse Peter Paul Markin of blessed memory.) That last place, the high school hang-out, the Class of 1970 hang-out, Tonio’s Pizza by the way was owned by Tonio a very cool guy from Italy who was we latter found out was “connected,” connected big time who took our friend Frankie Riley, a full-blooded Irishman with parents just off the boat from Cork a few years before as his “son” to show just how deep the Irish roots went in our part of town, the poor but proud Atlantic section, the section of town nearest to the ocean and the Nappy River from which the town got its name. 

Every time we have a reunion of whoever is left from the good old days in the neighborhood somebody has inevitably brought out the Saint Patrick’s Parade in South Boston “skip school” prank (we are now at the age where the assumption that somebody might not be able to attend because of death or serious illness is a commonplace unlike our first one ten years out in 1980 when “no shows” were because of work, travel or “working out” with some new girlfriend or wife under some silky sheets the latter a fine reason for “no show” then).

Here is how it played out. In those days Saint Patrick’s Day (and the parade) were actually celebrated on March 17^th whatever day of the week it was unlike now when it is the closest Sunday to the 17^th  and in Suffolk County (Boston and whatever other towns made up the county) that was a holiday. Not because of blessed peacemaker Saint Pat but because of Evacuation Day, the day the bloody British were kicked out of Boston by the fearless rebels who liberated this country from John Bull’s damn yoke. A situation worthy of a holiday on its own hook but in then Irish-dominated Boston everybody knew the real reason, the parade and the fun and drinking associated with it.       

That was fine for Boston, and for Boston school kids because they had the day off anyhow. But we were in Norfolk County (these county names showing the still malignant effect of English rule) and did not have the day off-except if your parent, your mother really, sent a note-before March 17th-saying you had permission to take the day off in observance of Saint Patrick you were considered excused (there were enough Irish in town to force that concession). Usually it was easy for the kids with Irish surnames to get by but what about Jimmy James and Bob Alexander and Ray Rizzo. Well they would play “hooky,” take the day off and take their chances.

This is the punch-line though that half-arse Irishman, meaning only his mother was Irish in that case, Peter Paul Markin, mentioned before for years would claim that he always took those days off, made it a point of pride to tell one and all that he had skipped school. And we dutifully believed him, although in those days if we had thought about it we should have been suspicious because he loved school and was nothing a bookworm and nerd whom we derisively called the “Scribe,” since that was so contrary to what he was about. A few years after graduation one night a bunch of the old crowd was sitting in Jack’s over in Cambridge and Peter Paul began with his “skip school” story. Jimmy Jenkins was there who lived on the same street as him challenged Peter on that skipping, challenged everybody. The way to prove it, prove the skipping school of not the attendance at the parade, was to ask for a transcript of you attendance record from the Riverdale School Department which kept such records on a daily basis for each student then in ink before computers made somebody’s work very easy. Peter’s transcript (a couple of others too)-no days off in high school-period. That’s a true Irishman for you in lots of ways, full of the blarney.     

Of course later after graduation when we could go to Southie without fear, drink hard liquor until we fell down, chased and were beaten down by the treacherous Irish girls, especially the redheads whom I was attracted to in those days, you know the ones who came into the barroom or nightclub with ten dollars and their girlfriends and left with the same, you know exactly who I mean the novena girls with the rosaries kissing their lips and the Bible between their knees. God how did we survive all of that until we learned to ween ourselves off the Irish girls and go find nice Jewish and WASP girls, hell, Yugoslav girls, who actually liked sex, liked to get and receive it for crying out loud without remorse or recrimination, praise be. Didn’t think it was a sign from God or from the Holy Mother to leave a guy with a sore dick from that “no action” scene those red-headed Irish girls learned at Sunday school or some dastardly place like that. It wasn’t until later either, much later that we found out some of those novena with a Bible between their knees girls were “putting out” but just not for the boys in the neighborhood so they could keep their nice girl reputations. Damn them.

Now that was all about the ethos, or what passed for the ethos in the old neighborhood but as we grew older, as “the troubles” in the North blew up and it was a question of taking sides, of supporting the liberation struggle, of supporting the “boyos” up there (meaning for anybody who is clueless the six counties, what is now called Northern Ireland) we got more serious about the roots of our heritage. Got what Peter Paul Markin called “religion” on the Irish question and him right if only a half-arse Irishman and started to do more than attend Saint Patrick Day parades and drink as ocean of rotgut Johnny Walker Black whiskey, started to shift away from My Wild Irish Rose and Rose Of Tralee to Through The Foggy Dew, Kevin Barry and The Rising Of The Moon, while drinking that Johnny Walker. Yeah, it was the music that got things going, and not just the song and be done with it but to listen to what the lyrics said, what event they were commemorating and why. Why Wolfe Tone’s United Irishmen rose, rose together, why they did the poor croppy boy in, why Kevin Barry faced the hangman’s noose. Yeah, the music changed us in many ways, changed us from Happy Hour Cape Cod Saturday and Sunday afternoon Shamrock Irish to something more, something grander.                   

But above all it was a half-arse Irishman, an Anglo-Irishman, William Butler Yeats who put the matter to us- who gave us “a word,” who told us about Easter 1916 (a very different proposition than to honor old Saint Pat) in a short poem of that name. Told us about men (and lately as the centennial has been upon us about the bravo woman as well), men of ordinary clay who saw a chance to tweak the British lion’s tail and took it. Told us about the extraordinary transition that a group, granted a small group but hasn’t that ever been the case made in a short time to cause a stir- to bring forth a “terrible beauty.” And these days these centennial days not a man among us from the old neighborhood who is still with us doesn’t think in the back of his mind about the music in old Pete Markin’s  voice when that half-arse Irishman would go on and on about the old sod, about the times of heroic action among our kin. Our day will come.

Black Lives Matter-Know The Score-Know Your Rights

President Obama Free Oscar Lopez Rivera -Sign The Petition

President Obama Free Oscar Lopez Rivera -Sign The Petition

*****Okay, Rosalie Sorrels Have You Seen Starlight On The Rails

*****Okay, Rosalie Sorrels Have You Seen Starlight On The Rails

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Okay, Rosalie Sorrels Have You Seen Starlight On The Rails

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Every hobo, tramp, and bum and there are known social distinctions long recognized among the brethren even if with a touch of envy by those not among the elect although the general population, you know, the honest citizenry who make the rules against vagrancy and pay the enforcers to keep the riffraff out of their towns called the whole heap nothing but bums knows the road is hard, but that is the road they have chosen, or had chosen for them by their whole freaking life choices. Despite the claims of oneness for the whole heap of bummery by those honest citizens of small town America (or these days the world) where the fear exists every really honest person, even every thoughtful amateur sociologist should know that among the wandering tribes the hobos, “the kings and queens of the transient peoples,” are merely migrant or walking through the land rucksack on the back day laborer-type worker, what Oswald Spengler and Jack Kerouac called the fellahin, the outcasts, who has not forgotten the dignity of labor, just not for him (or occasionally her) the nine to five grind and such brethren can be found out back in many a restaurant throughout the land especially at diners and truck shop eateries “diving for pearls, working,” working as dishwashers.

Every hobo has some problem, usually some Phoebe Snow problem, a woman problem, that forced him or her on the road (I don’t know what it would be for the distaff side so call him Jack Snow, any other sexual combination more acceptable today although definitely not unknown in the male-heavy “jungle camps” along the transcontinental railroad lines). That Phoebe Snow designation from some old time railroad advertisement when they finally figured how to keep their respectable passengers from looking like coalminers after alighting from a train by changing the way the engine was maneuvered and to express that new found discovery they had a virginal young woman in white getting on their trains ready for every civilized adventure in some faraway place (or maybe an illicit tryst but we will ask no questions). And so many a campfire night as the trains went westbound, or wherever bound, you would find many a man, maybe in his cups just then, dreaming back to their own Phoebes and wondering damn why they ever left Peoria, Lima, Scranton and that white dress with flowers in her hair standing in the wind. So, make no mistake, fear of work is not what drove the hobo out on to the roads.

See that royalty, the hobo, and his or her ability to work is why the Industrial Worker of the World (IWW, Wobblies, moniker origin unknown so Wobblies) went into the jungle camps (and gin mills too) in order to recruit labor fighters against the bosses when the deal went down, particularly in the West. (Although more famously in the great Lawrence, Massachusetts “Bread and Roses” textile strike of 1912 when they gathered in the nations of immigrants that the textile bosses recruited on the assumption that they could “divide and conquer.” Yid and gentile, Mick and Dago, Hunky and Frog, name your national derogatory moniker but didn’t they get a surprise that first morning when the nations gathered against the Wasp oligarchy.) Of course that transient work habit was also the down side of that organization as the kings of the transient road hit the road west, or somewhere, when it came to defending the unions over the long haul.

As for the other two, the tramp who only worked when forced to like on some thirty day county jailhouse for vagrancy gig or some Salvation Army work program to keep the body and soul together for a few days when whatever con, what grift was played out and the bum, Jesus, the bum wouldn’t work if he was Rockefeller himself, the dregs, winos, jack-rollers, sappers, petty crooks, mother’s purse stealers, the crippled up, sorry, and the dumb, sorry again, to put the matter plainly in the old- fashioned parlance how the hell could you organize them. You might as well try to organize air, might as well go down without a fight since they have probably already sold you out and the boss man will be waiting arms in hand, you can bet on that. There was a very good reason that the beloved heroic Paris Communards in 1871 as desperate as they were for fighters placed the placate “Death to Thieves” above the Hotel de Ville. Yeah, they had that right, don’t give the lumpen a change to breathe or he will steal your breathe just for kicks, or a jug of low-grade wine.          

Now that you are all caught up on the differences, the “class differences,” between each cohort recognized among themselves, oh how recognized, and subject to fierce dispute including some faux fists, if not quite so definitely by rump academic sociologists who lump them all together but that is a story for another day (there is some hope for the amateur versions as long as the avoid the graduate schools of social work the bane of every person on the road, and rightly so). What they do have in common since they are out in the great outdoors more than the rest of us gentile folk is that they to a person have seen starlight on the rails. Yeah, had their fill of train smoke and dreams.

Now all these sullen subtle distinctions among the brethren I probably would have not been able to draw in my youth when I would have lumped the lot together as collective losers and riff-raff, the bums to honest citizens, before I hit the hitchhike road heading west at one time in search of the blue-pink great American West night out there somewhere. Thought I found it for a minute out in Mendocino with a sweet Lorraine all long hair, long granny dress and flowers, garlands really around her neck and in her hair. Go check out a  Botticelli painting if you are near an art museum something or google up the man’s name on the Internet if you can’t wait, my own Phoebe Snow, before the hordes descended.  Thought I had it another time in a hash/opium dream outside of Monterey after the jazz festival and some dark-haired, dark laughing eyes, hot-blooded, Juanita curled my toes for a while until I fought there were seventeen burn down the country club golf course and I had not enough matches and fled. Ah, you know and man’s reach should exceed his grasp like the Jack poet said.

I had, broken dreams aside, broken but not forgotten Botticelli dreams included, on one more than one occasion along with the late Peter Paul Markin who led the way among the North Adamsville corner boys on that trail been forced to stop along a railroad trestle “jungle camp,” under a cardboard city bridge, or out in the arroyos if you got far enough west to live for a few days and rest up for the road further west.

The hobos of the “jungle” were princes among men (there was no room for women then in such a male-dominated society, not along the jungle although at the missions and Sallys, Salvation Army Harbor Lights, that might be a different story) as long as you did not ask too many damn questions. Shared olio stews, cigarettes, cheap rotgut wine, Thunderbird “what’s the word, Thunderbird, what’s the price, forty twice” and that eighty cents tough to gather some days no matter how smooth the pan-handle, or Ripple, ‘save the nipple, cripple” sorry, whichever was cheapest after cadging the day’s collective pennies together. Later, after the big dream American West busted me up when my “wanting habits” (getting many worldly goods off easy street paid for by working the drug trade down south of the border along with Markin before he became the late Markin face down in some dusty Mexican bracero fellahin town when a drug deal he was trying to finagle caught him short, two slugs to the head short by some angry hombre who didn’t like gringos messing with their trade, or their dark-haired, dark laughing-eyed, hot-blooded women) built up from the edges of that sullen youth got the better of me and my addictions placed me out in that same “jungle” for keeps for a while that distinction got re-enforced.  

But hobo, bum or tramp each had found him or herself (mainly hims though like I said out on the “jungle” roads) flat up against some railroad siding at midnight having exhausted every civilized way to spent the night. Having let their, our, collective wanting habits get the best of them, us. Maybe penniless, maybe thrown out of some flophouse in arrears and found that nobody bothers, or did bother you out along the steel rails, I won’t vouch for that now with all the weirdness in the world, when the train lost its luster to the fast speed Interstate automobile and one coast in the morning the other in the afternoon plane and rusted and abandoned railroads gone belly up, Union Pacific, SP, Denver, Rio Grande, Baltimore and Ohio, Illinois Central, all train smoke names for lack of use provided safe haven from the vagaries of civilization. So sure I too have seen with the brethren, those nameless hobos, tramps, and bums  (to you they had among themselves monikers like Railroad Shorty, Black River Red, Smokestack, Philly Jack, mine, the Be-Bop Kid although I always had to explain what the be-bop was since these guys were well behind the curve, back in Benny Goodman swing time)     the stars out where the spots are darkest and the brilliance of the sparkle makes one think of heaven for those so inclined, think of the void for the heathen among them. Has dreamed penitent dreams of shelter against life’s storms, had dreamed while living for the moment trying to get washed clean after the failure of the new dispensation to do the job (hell, what did they/Markin/me think just because the drugs or alcohol flowed freely once, just because the fixer man fixed, fixed fine, that that was the Garden of Eden, that was Nirvana, hell, those ancient forebears all after they had been expelled from the earthly paradise saw that same starlight as they/he/we/I did).   

Maybe this will explain it better. An old man, or at least he has the marks of old age, although among the iterant travelling peoples, the hoboes, tramps, and bum, who have weathered many of life’s storms bottle or needle in hand, panhandled a million quarters now lost, old age, or their marks wear a soul down early so a guy who has been on the road enough years if he is say thirty looks about fifty by the time the train smoke and the busted dreams have broken his will, white beard, unkempt, longish hair, also unkempt, a river of lines in his face, deep crow’s feet setting off his vacant eyes, a second-hand soiled hat atop his head, a third-hand miner’s jacket “clipped” off some other lonesome traveler (“clipped”- stolen for clueless or those who led sheltered childhood and did not in order to satisfy some youthful wanting habit stakeout a jewelry store say and grab a few trinkets while the salesperson was looking the other way), shredded at the cuffs chino pants of indeterminate age, and busted up shoes, soles worn, heels at forty-five degree angles from crooked walks on crooked miles and game legs is getting ready to unroll his bedroll, ground cloth a tablecloth stolen from Jimmy Jack’s Diner’s somewhere, a blanket stolen from a Sally [Salvation Army] Harbor Light house in salad days, rolled newspapers now for a mattress for the hundredth, hundredth time against the edge of the railroad trestle just outside Gallup, New Mexico.

Do not ask him, if you have the nerve to approach him, and that is an iffy proposition just ask a guy going under the moniker of Denver Shorty how he got that deep scar across his face, where he is going or where he has come from because just that moment, having scratched a few coins in the town together for a jug of Thunderbird he is ready to sleep his sleep against the cold-hearted steel of the Southern Pacific railroad tracks just ten yards from where he stands.      

And this night, this starlit brown, about eight colors of brown, desert night he hopes that he will not dream, not dream of that Phoebe Snow whom he left behind in Toledo when he had no beard, no longish unkempt hair, and no rivers of lines on his misbegotten face. (Why the brethren called every long gone sweetheart Phoebe Snow, why they would get misty over the dying campfire after some younger traveler stopped by and told his tale of leaving some young thing behind is unknown except, according to some old wizened geezer who might have just made the story up, in the old, old day when the railroads finally figured out how to keep people from being blackened by the train smoke every trip they took they started advertising this the fact with this white-dressed  virginal young woman who went under the name Phoebe Snow. That’s probably as good an explanation as any since whatever the name, or the young woman almost every guy in camp would in his sorrows get weepy about that situation. Hey, didn't I tell that story before, Jesus, the dope or old age is getting to me but what the hell maybe that Phoebe Snow dream is worth a repeat I know it got me through many a restless night thinking about sweet Botticelli Lorraine and Goya Juanita.) Dream as he always did about whatever madness made him run from all the things he had created, all the things that drove him west like a million other guys who needed to put space between himself and civilization.

Dream too about the days when he could ride the rails in the first-class cars (having not only left Phoebe Snow behind but a growing specialty printing business started from scratch before the alcohol, and later the dope although now back to cheapjack alcohol got the better of him), and about the lure of the rails once he got unhinged from civilization. About how the train pace had been chastised by fast cars and faster planes when a the speed of a train fitted a man’s movements, about the days when they first built the transcontinental, this line that he was about to lie his head down beside, about the million Chinks, Hunkies, Russkies, Hibernians, hell, Micks, Dagos who sweated to drive the steel in unforgiving ground, many who laid down their heads down to their final rest along these roads, and later guys he knew on the endless road like Butte Bobby, Silver Jones, Ding-dong Kelly, who did not wake up the next morning and were carried out to the carcass vulture desert having left no way to get a hold of kin. Almost all guys had left no forwarding address, no real one anyway, no back address, for fear of the repo man or some other dunning, an angry wife or about ten thousand other reasons. So the desert was good enough as a potter’s field as any other place.

As he settled in to sleep the wine’s effect settling down too he noticed the bright half- moon out that night reflecting off the trestle, and the arroyos edges, and thought about what a guy, an old wizard like himself told him about the rails one time when he was laid up in Salt Lake City, in the days when he tried to sober up. The guy, a guy who had music in his soul or something said to him that it was the starlight on the rails that had driven him, rumble, stumble, tumble him to keep on the road, to keep moving away from himself, to forget who he was. And here he was on a starlit night listening down the line for the rumble of the freight that would come passing by before the night was over. But as he shut his eyes, he began to dream again of Phoebe Snow, always of Phoebe Snow.         

But not everybody has the ability to sing to those starlit heavens (or to the void if that is what chances to happen as the universe expands quicker than we can think, bang- bang or get smaller into dust if that is the deal once the philosopher-king physicists figure out the new best theory) about the hard night of starlight on the rails and that is where Rosalie Sorrels, a woman of the American West out in the Idahos, out where, as is said in the introduction to the song by the same name ripping some wisdom from literary man Thomas Wolfe who knew from whence he spoke, the states are square (and at one time the people, travelling west people and so inured to hardship, played it square, or else), sings old crusty Utah Phillips’ song to those hobo, tramp, bum heavens. Did it while old Utah was alive to teach the song (and the story behind the song) to her and later after he passed on in a singular tribute album to his life’s work as singer/songwriter/story-teller/ troubadour.         

Now, for a fact, I do not know if Rosalie in her time, her early struggling time when she was trying to make a living singing and telling Western childhood stories had ever along with her brood of kids been reduced by circumstances to wind up against that endless steel highway but I do know that she had her share of hard times. Know that through her friendship with Utah she wound up bus-ridden to Saratoga Springs up in the un-squared state of New York where she performed and got taken under the wing of Lena from the legendary Café Lena during some trying times. And so she flourished, flourished as well as any folk-singer could once the folk minute burst it bubble and places like Café Lena, Club Passim (formerly Club 47), a few places in the Village in New York City and Frisco town became safe havens to flower and grow some songs, grow songs from the American folk songbooks and from her own expansive political commentator songbook. And some covers too as her rendition of Starlight on the Rails attests to as she worked her way across the continent.

Worked her way to a big sold out night at Saunders Theater at Harvard too when she called the road quits a decade or so ago. Sang some nice stuff speaking about the west, about the Brazos, about the great Utah desert which formed Utah Phillips a little too, formed him like his old friend Ammon Hennessey, the old saint Catholic Worker brother who sobered some guys up, made them take some pledges, made them get off the railroad steel road. Sobered me up too, got me off that railroad track too, but damn if I didn’t see that starlight too. So listen up, okay.         

*From The Pen Of Rosa Luxemburg-"Peace Utopias"

Click on title to link to Rosa Luxemburg's 1911 article "Peace Utopias". And listen up as well. She speaks a truth that we sorely need to hear today. U.S. Out Of Afghanistan and Iraq-Hands Off The World!