Remembrances of Fair Angelina-With Bob Dylan’s Farewell Angelina In Mind

Remembrances of Fair Angelina-With Bob Dylan’s Farewell Angelina In Mind

By Sam Lowell

Josh Breslin, the fairly well-known writer of articles and essays by conscious choice when he first started out in half the unread and coffee table small press journals, magazines and newspapers in America, recently retired from steady writing as a profession and thus given of later to memory thoughts of his youth as part of his plan to write a semi-memoir of his growing up times in the 1960s automatically thought about his big time love affair with fair Angelina. Well maybe Josh had not automatically been thinking about that affair but had been led to those thoughts by two prompts, one good, one bad. The first one, the good one, listening while working on his computer which had become also of late his favorite way to listen to music to one of the never-ending bootleg series CDs of Bob Dylan where a version of his Farewell, Angelina came on. The second, the bad one, very bad for several days, an obituary in the New York Times which reported that the once well-known former 1970s and 1980s movie actress and commercial spoke-person Angelina Farrell had passed away at 70 after a long battle against cancer. That Angelina, his Angelina, Angelina Donnelly, when he knew her before she went into the movies and changed her name was that big affair from his youth that he was drifting back to in memory time. Sad day, sad days.

Looking back from grim memory think Josh thought it funny that probably in no time but the middle 1960s when all hell was breaking loose but all kinds of possibilities were also opening up that he would have run into a woman such Angelina. Josh had met her, met vivacious Angelina Farrell, when he decided to hitchhike west to see what all the commotion was about in the summer of love, 1967 version, just after he had graduated from high school and was aimlessly wandering around his hometown of Olde Saco up in Maine waiting to start college at State U in the fall. That decision had come about as a result of his having run into a wild man “hippie” in full regalia, long hair, pony tailed, wispy beard, the fate of many a youthful male, blue jeans, Army jacket, and bottomed off by roman sandals. No, bottomed off by that wild look Josh was beginning to see on more and more young people which indicated too many long nights around a corn cob pipe full of marijuana, a bong bowl of hashish, a rolled dollar bill of cocaine, or, more probably a Dixie cup full of acid-etched Kool-Aid, you know LSD. He, Lenny Josh thought his name was but don’t hold him to those memory names, had just gotten back from the Coast and had been visiting his grandmother in Portland who told Josh about the doings out there and about what was expected to happen that summer. He was intrigued, so intrigued that he gave up, to his father’s anger, a job working as a janitor in the textile mill where his father had gotten him a job for the summer. Packed up soon after meeting that wild man “hippie” (a term not widely used in 1967 but very descriptive now) and started hitchhiking west to save precious money needed for tuition in the fall, although he lied to his parents and told them he was taking the bus out when they tried to argue him out of such a forlorn adventure.

Of course as anybody who had read Jack Kerouac, the “king of the beats” author of On The Road who got many youth started, well, on the road as Josh had earlier that summer, could tell you the vagaries of the road, of hitching then, maybe now too if any ill-advised person still does that form of travel, was that you would not necessarily get to where you wanted to go in a straight line but where whatever ride on whatever road you hitched and accepted took you. That vagary had been how Josh wound up at Jimmy Jack’s Diner on the outskirts of Steubenville flat up on the Ohio River after being left there by a good guy trucker, Denver Slim (who was neither from Denver, nor slim, go figure) who had originally planned to drive directly to Chicago with his load but had changed his mind when he decided he needed to see his girlfriend who lived in Steubenville (his wife lived in Toledo but that was another story). So Jimmy Jack’s outside out of the way southeastern Ohio it was on that first run out to search for the great blue-pink American West night as another writer he would meet out in San Francisco put the matter. Yes, nowhere backroad truck stop Jimmy Jack’s Diner was where he met Angelina Donnelly from Muncie out in the wilds of Indiana who was serving them off the arm at the diner when he wandered in to grab a quick bit, a bowl of beef stew in the days when he ate meat which had the virtue of being cheap, hearty, in the way diner food was always hearty, and filling, before heading on the road again.      

Something about her as she served him his beef stew well before other patrons who were impatiently waiting for their cooling meals on the pick-up counter, something about him with that sly grin spoke to her,  spoke to both almost immediately of attraction. Angelina, young, pretty, very pretty in a Midwestern way, a way as he would later put it as fetching to others when she began to appear in films and commercials. Not the drop dead ice queen first female lead who would never disturb your dreams because you could never get through the layers, layers of every possible description to block your way, but the one you think about later, think sexual thoughts about, think about how if you played your cards just right you could probably find yourself under silky sheets. The kind of woman too who once she got you on her wavelength whatever ever she was selling you would buy whether you needed it or not just because she had that effect on you. A look to make a film career out of, no question although such thoughts never passed her lips. The attraction for her, just out of classes in business school, the Bancroft Business School, for the summer in Muncie and looking for “adventure” decided to head East to see what was up there was that he was her very first “hippie,” the first one that she had seen in  person and he seemed as she put it later “nice.” She had heard about such creatures, and been warned away from such evil by her parents and friends back in Muncie, but she was curious, very curious about this example of the new breeze the newspapers and magazines were talking about.                    

So they made a match. Hit it off that very night when after circling each other all day as he took his sweet time finishing his meal and several cups of coffee to make the moments last  they “made the roof shake to the heavens” in the cabin up the road from the diner where Angelina was staying with their love-making. Later on good days, on the sunnier days of their relationship they would tenderly refer to that fresh green lust. It was thus not surprising then when a few days later after Josh had worked the dishes at Jimmy Jack’s to grab some quick dough and Angelina worked double shifts that they headed out on the highway together to see what they would see. They had first headed south to Prestonsburg down in coal country Kentucky to see a cousin of hers and then began heading west again. They had their ups and downs on the road, getting short and long rides, depending on where they were let off. (In those days guys travelling with a young woman, a fetching woman, would grab rides much more easily than if alone although the duration might still be long or short depending on the driver’s destination.

That plan westward so Angelina could see the Pacific Ocean for the first time worked out okay for a while, they had fun meeting groups of fellow spirits on the road, spent an interesting week hanging out in the rustic campsite with a bunch of “freaks” where Josh stayed dope high all week (Angelina a true daughter of the Midwest just then still hearing those warnings against the devil’s doings from her parents in her head). They made great tumbling love, sex which Angelina did not heed her parents’ warning about, praise be, as she was curious, willing and resourceful in that regard. But as the weeks went by, as they were making no serious headway west, as she could not wash her hair daily, as she became less enamored of the small tent they had purchased in Louisville for nighte when they had no other way to sleep Josh could sense that Angelina was not built for the road, was built for other kinds of adventures, was built for comfortable beds and silky sheets.

The whole thing started to come to a head during one tough rainy stretch in Moline when they were forced by the continual bad weather to grab a cheapjack motel. That stuck situation strained their good feelings toward each other as Josh got more into being “on the road” the farther away he got from Maine and the less Angelina cared about seeing the wide Pacific. After the rains stopped in Moline they decided to give it one more try but by the time they got to Neola out in Iowa, got to Aunt Betty’s Dinner where Angelina was working for a few days to make some money and old Aunt Betty, a real Aunt Betty began to work on her to go home, the die was cast. The way they left it, left the situation between them Angelina would head back to school and meet Josh who had along the way decided that he would postpone going to college for a year to “find himself” somewhere out on the Coast during her winter break. Josh headed west mostly alone although he had a wild time with some serious freaks out in Joshua Tree channeling the ghosts of ten thousand years before Apache warriors (under the influence of a bunch of eaten peyote buttons). Several weeks later he wound up near La Jolla north of San Diego joined up as part of a traveling caravan, a yellow brick road converted school bus caravan heading north toward San Francisco where the summer of love was going full blast.      

Josh had thought that Angelina’s decision to go back to school and then meet him out West during winter break was so much wishful thinking but in December Angelina got a message to him through some people he was staying with outside of LA in a commune that she was coming out to see him as planned. Josh met her in car rented by one of the people who was staying at the commune at the LA airport and they headed up the Pacific Coast Highway to an ocean campsite near Point Magoo which Josh had picked out specifically to show her the ocean. There they frolicked in the ocean in which Angelina, not knowing the wild ways of the waters almost drowned in a riptide she was so happy to be in the water, make great love almost as great as that first night back in Steubenville where they made the roof shake. Angelina had on their second night out there also smoked dope for the first time. Josh said he would always remember that star-filled moon-filled night with the ocean waves crashing just beneath them when they seemed as one, that they had shared a Zen moment even if neither could have articulated their feelings exact way. (She said she too would remember that night and occasionally when he thought about her and that night over the years and specifically after he had read of her passing Josh wondered if she did later when she wound up living most of her life in  Southern California not fifty miles from Point Magoo.) But like a lot of things in life, lots of things having to do with timing, with the times, with things that tugged at your whole freaking life parents, home, who you were and how you had been brought up Angelina was not ready to live a nomad’s life and so they departed with some remorse but also knowing that they would not see each other again. 

A couple of years later after Josh had had his fill of the road and the nomadic life and was back in Maine in school at State U he saw a movie advertisement on campus with a photo of  somebody named Angelina Farrell who looked very much like his Angelina. He went to the theater and couldn’t believe that there she was on screen playing a secondary role but he could hardly keep his eyes off the screen whenever she was in a scene. The story that all the film magazines had when he checked later was that Angelina had gone back to California from Muncie a few months after she had left Josh and had stayed at the commune where he had been staying (he was drifting north to Oregon heading toward Alaska at the time). One of the communards was a budding director, Lance Lane, who saw something in Angelina of film star quality (that fetching and that sexually thoughts stuff about downy billows that Josh mentioned earlier which Josh had sensed when he first saw her behind the counter of Jimmy Jake’s in her white uniform and had his lusts up) and cast her in one of his low budget independent films that an assistant producer for one of the big movie companies saw one night and called Lane up to find out who the hell she was. And the rest was history. She has a decent career playing second and third leads and when that dried out she did even better as an ad spokesperson for everything from Ford cars to female products.       

Their paths never crossed again although a couple of times when Josh was on the West Coast on a story he thought to try to get in touch but figured that the studios would block his way as just another Angelina Farrell fan and blow him off. Eventually he heard that she had married a studio executive, had a couple of kids, and gone into retirement, and so his time had passed. After reading of Angelina’s death something gnawed at Josh though. Then he finally figured it out. With three unsuccessful marriages under his belt, years of alimony, child support, and a mountain of debt for multiple college educations for his kids which almost broke him Josh wondered whether if he had had the sense that God gave geese he had grabbed Angelina with both arms and said the hell with the road back then that would have changed the course of his, and her, life. With that thought in mind he played Dylan’s Farewell, Angelina one more time.

*****The Labor Party Question In The United States- An Historical Overview-Fight For A Workers Party That Fights For A Workers Government

*****The Labor Party Question In The United States- An Historical Overview-Fight For A Workers Party That Fights For A Workers Government

From  The Pen Of Josh Breslin 

Back in the early 1970s after they had worked out between themselves the rudiment of what had gone wrong with the May Day 1971 actions in Washington, D.C. Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris began some serious study of leftist literature from an earlier time, from back earlier in the century. Those May Day anti-Vietnam War actions, ill-conceived as they in the end turned out to be, centered on the proposition that if the American government would not close down the damn blood-sucking war then they, those thousands that participated in the actions, would close down the government. All Sam, Ralph and those thousands of others got for their efforts was a round-up into the bastinado. Sam had been picked off in the round-up on Pennsylvania Avenue as his group (his “affinity group” for the action) had been on their way to “capture” the White House. Ralph and his affinity group of ex-veterans and their supporters were rounded-up on Massachusetts Avenues heading toward the Pentagon (they had no plans to capture that five-sided building, at least they were unlike Sam’s group not that naïve, just surround it like had occurred in an anti-war action in 1967 which has been detailed in Norman Mailer’s prize-winning book Armies Of The Night). For a time RFK (Robert F. Kennedy) Stadium, the home of the Washington Redskins football team) had been the main holding area for those arrested and detained. The irony of being held in a stadium named after the martyred late President’s younger brother and lightening rod for almost all anti-war and “newer world” political dissent before he was assassinated in the bloody summer of 1968 and in a place where football, a sport associated in many radical minds with all that was wrong with the American system was lost on Sam and Ralph at the time and it was only later, many decades later, as they were sitting in a bar in Boston across from the JFK Federal Building on one of their periodic reunions when Ralph was in town that Sam had picked up that connection.

Sam, from Carver in Massachusetts, who had been a late convert to the anti-war movement in 1969 after his closest high school friend, Jeff Mullin, had been blown away in some jungle town in the Central Highlands was like many late converts to a cause a “true believer,” had taken part in many acts of civil disobedience at draft boards, including the one in hometown Carver, federal buildings and military bases. From an indifference, no that’s not right, from a mildly patriotic average young American citizen that you could find by the score hanging around Mom and Pop variety stores, pizza parlors, diners, and bowling alleys in the early 1960s, he had become a long-haired bearded “hippie anti-warrior.” Not too long though by the standards of “youth nation” of the day since he was running a small print shop in Carver in order to support his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away suddenly of a massive heart attack in 1965 which exempted him from military service. Not too short either since those “squares” were either poor bastards who got tagged by the military and had to wear their hair short an appearance which stuck out in towns like Cambridge, Ann Arbor, Berkeley and L.A. when the anti-war movement started embracing the increasingly frustrated and anti-war soldiers that  they were beginning to run across or, worse, cops before they got “hip” to the idea that guys wearing short hair, no beard, looked like they had just taken a bath, and wore plaid short-sleeved shirts and chinos might as well have a bulls-eye target on their backs surveilling the counter-cultural crowd.

Ralph, from Troy, New York, had been working in his father’s electrical shop which had major orders from General Electric the big employer in the area when he got his draft notice and had decided to enlist in order to avoid being an 11B, an infantryman, a grunt, “cannon fodder,” although he would not have known to call it that at the time, that would come later. He had expected to go into something which he knew something about in the electrical field at least that is what the recruiting sergeant in Albany had “promised” him. But in the year 1967 (and 1968 too since he had extended his tour six months to get out of the service a little early) what the military needed in Vietnam whatever else they might have needed was “cannon fodder,” guys to go out into the bushes and kill commies. Simple as that. And that was what Ralph Morris, a mildly patriotic average young American citizen, no that is not right, a very patriotic average young American citizen that you could also find by the score hanging around Mom and Pop variety stores, pizza parlors, diners, and bowling alleys in the early 1960s, did. But see he got “religion” up there in Pleiku, up there in the bush and so when he had been discharged from the Army in late 1969 he was in a rage against the machine. Sure he had gone back to the grind of his father’s electrical shop but he was out of place just then, out of sorts, needed to find an outlet for his anger at what he had done, what had happened to buddies very close to him, what buddies had done, and how the military had made them animals, nothing less. (Ralph after his father retired would take over the electric shop business on his own in 1991 and would thereafter give it to his son to take over after he retired in 2011.)

One day he had gone to Albany on a job for his father and while on State Street he had seen a group of guys in mismatched military garb marching in the streets without talking, silent which was amazing in itself from what he had previously seen of such marches and just carrying a big sign-Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) and nobody stopped them, no cops, nobody, nobody yelled “commie” either or a lot of other macho stuff that he and his hang out guys used to do in Troy when some peaceniks held peace vigils in the square. The civilian on-lookers held their tongues that day although Ralph knew that the whole area still retained a lot of residual pro-war feeling just because America was fighting somewhere for something. He parked his father’s truck and walked over to the march just to watch at first. Some guy in a tattered Marine mismatched uniform wearing Chuck Taylor sneakers in the march called out to the crowd for anybody who had served in Vietnam, served in the military to join them shouting out their military affiliation as they did so. Ralph almost automatically blurred out-“First Air Cav” and walked right into the street. There were other First Air Cav guys there that day so he was among kindred. So yeah, Ralph did a lot of actions with VVAW and with “civilian” collectives who were planning more dramatic actions. Ralph always would say later that if it hadn’t been for getting “religion” on the war issue and doing all those political actions then he would have gone crazy, would have wound up like a lot of guys he would see later at the VA, see out in the cardboard box for a home streets, and would not until this day have supported in any way he could, although lately not physically since his knee replacement, those who had the audacity to march for the “good old cause.”                          

That is the back story of a relationship has lasted until this day, an unlikely relationship in normal times and places but in that cauldron of the early 1970s when the young, even the not so very young, were trying to make heads or tails out of what was happening in a world they did not crate, and were not asked about there were plenty of such stories, although most did not outlast that search for the newer world when the high tide of the 1960s ebbed in the mid-1970s. Ralph had noticed while milling around the football field waiting for something to happen, waiting to be released, Sam had a VVAW button on his shirt and since he did not recognize Sam from any previous VVAW action had asked if he was a member of the organization and where. Sam told him the story of his friend Jeff Mullin and of his change of heart about the war, and about doing something about ending the damn thing. That got them talking, talking well into the first night of their captivity when they found they had many things in common coming from deeply entrenched working-class cultures. (You already know about Troy. Carver is something like the cranberry bog capital of the world even today although the large producers dominate the market unlike when Sam was a kid and the small Finnish growers dominated the market and town life. The town moreover has turned into something of a bedroom community for the high-tech industry that dots U.S. 495.) After a couple of days in the bastinado Sam and Ralph hunger, thirsty, needing a shower after suffering through the Washington humidity heard that people were finding ways of getting out to the streets through some side exits. They decided to surreptiously attempt an “escape” which proved successful and they immediately headed through a bunch of letter, number and state streets on the Washington city grid toward Connecticut Avenue heading toward Silver Springs trying to hitchhike out of the city. A couple of days later having obtained a ride through from Trenton, New Jersey to Providence, Rhode Island they headed to Sam’s mother’s place in Carver. Ralph stayed there a few days before heading back home to Troy. They had agreed that they would keep in contact and try to figure out what the hell went wrong in Washington that week. After making some connections through some radicals he knew in Cambridge to live in a commune Sam asked Ralph to come stay with him for the summer and try to figure out that gnarly problem. Ralph did, although his father was furious since he needed his help on a big GE contract for the Defense Department but Ralph was having none of that.    

So in the summer of 1971 Sam and Ralph began to read that old time literature, although Ralph admitted he was not much of a reader and some of the stuff was way over his head, Sam’s too. Mostly they read socialist and communist literature, a little of the old IWW (Wobblie) stuff since they both were enthrall to the exploits of the likes of Big Bill Haywood out West which seemed to dominate the politics of that earlier time. They had even for a time joined a loose study group sponsored by one of the myriad “red collectives” that had sprung up like weeds in the Cambridge area. Both thought it ironic at the time, and others who were questioning the direction the “movement” was heading in stated the same thing when they were in the study groups, that before that time in the heyday of their anti-war activity everybody dismissed the old white guys (a term not in common use then like now) like Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and their progeny as irrelevant. Now everybody was glued to the books.

It was from that time that Sam and Ralph got a better appreciation of a lot of the events, places, and personalities from the old time radicals. Events like the start of May Day in 1886 as an international working class holiday which they had been clueless about despite the   May Day actions, the Russian Revolutions, the Paris Commune, the Chinese Revolutions, August 1914 as a watershed against war, the Communist International, those aforementioned radicals Marx, Lenin, Trostky, adding in Mao, Che, Fidel, Ho whose names were on everybody’s tongue (and on posters in every bedroom) even if the reason for that was not known. Most surprising of all were the American radicals like Haywood, Browder, Cannon, Foster, and others who nobody then, or almost nobody cared to know about at all.

As they learned more information about past American movements Sam, the more interested writer of such pieces began to write appreciation of past events, places and personalities. His first effort was to write something about the commemoration of the 3 Ls (Lenin, Luxemburg, and Liebknecht) started by the Communist International back in the 1920s in January 1972, the first two names that he knew from a history class in junior college and the third not at all. After that he wrote various pieces like the one below about the labor party question in the United States (leftist have always posed their positions as questions; the women question, the black question, the party question, the Russian question and so on so Sam decided to stick with the old time usage.) Here is what he had to say then which he had recently freshly updated. Sam told Ralph after he had read and asked if he was still a “true believer” said a lot of the piece he would still stand by today:      

“These notes (expanded) were originally intended to be presented as The Labor Question in the United States at a forum on the question on Saturday August 4, 1972. They were updated for a study class in 2012 recently again [2015] for this space. As a number of radicals have noted, most particularly organized socialist radicals, after the dust from the fall bourgeois election settled [2014], regardless of who won [the Republicans as it turned out], the working class lost Pressure for an independent labor expression, as we head into 2016, may likely move from its current propaganda point as part of the revolutionary program to agitation and action so learning about the past experiences in the revolutionary and radical labor movements is timely.

I had originally expected to spend most of the speech at the forum delving into the historical experiences, particularly the work of the American Communist Party and the American Socialist Workers Party with a couple of minutes “tip of the hat” to the work of radical around the Labor Party experiences of the late 1990s. However, the scope of the early work and that of those radical in the latter work could not, I felt, be done justice in one forum. Thus these notes are centered on the early historical experiences. If I get a chance, and gather enough information to do the subject justice, I will place notes for the 1990s Labor party work in this space as well.

*********

The subject today is the Labor Party Question in the United States. For starters I want to reconfigure this concept and place it in the context of the Transitional Program first promulgated by Leon Trotsky and his fellows in the Fourth International in 1938. There the labor party concept was expressed as “a workers’ party that fights for a workers’ government.” [The actual expression for advanced capitalist countries like the U.S. was for a workers and farmers government but that is hardly applicable here now, at least in the United States. Some wag at the time, some Shachtmanite wag from what I understand, noted that there were then more dentists than farmers in the United States. Wag aside that remark is a good point since today we would call for a workers and X (oppressed communities, women, etc.) government to make our programmatic point more inclusive.]

For revolutionaries these two algebraically-expressed political ideas are organically joined together. What we mean, what we translate this as, in our propaganda is a mass revolutionary labor party (think Bolsheviks first and foremost, and us) based on the trade unions (the only serious currently organized part of the working class) fighting for soviets (workers councils, factory committees, etc.) as an expression of state power. In short, the dictatorship of the proletariat, a term we do not yet use in “polite” society these days in order not to scare off the masses. And that is the nut. Those of us who stand on those intertwined revolutionary premises are few and far between today and so we need, desperately need, to have a bridge expression, and a bridge organization, the workers party, to do the day to day work of bringing masses of working people to see the need to have an independent organized expression fighting programmatically for their class interests. And we, they, need it pronto.

That program, the program that we as revolutionaries would fight for, would, as it evolved, center on demands, yes, demands, that would go from day to day needs to the struggle for state power. Today focusing on massive job programs at union wages and benefits to get people back to work, workers control of production as a way to spread the available work around, the historic slogan of 30 for 40, nationalization of the banks and other financial institutions under workers control, a home foreclosure moratorium, and debt for homeowners and students. Obviously more demands come to mind but those listed are sufficient to show our direction.

Now there have historically been many efforts to create a mass workers party in the United States going all the way back to the 1830s with the Workingmen’s Party based in New York City. Later efforts, after the Civil War, mainly, when classic capitalism began to become the driving economic norm, included the famous Terence Powderly-led Knights of Labor, including (segregated black locals), a National Negro Union, and various European social-democratic off -shoots (including pro-Marxist formations). All those had flaws, some serious like being pro-capitalist, merely reformist, and the like (sound familiar?) and reflected the birth pangs of the organized labor movement rather than serious predecessors.

Things got serious around the turn of the century (oops, turn of the 20th century) when the “age of the robber barons” declared unequivocally that class warfare between labor and capital was the norm in American society (if not expressed that way in “polite” society). This was the period of the rise the Debsian-inspired party of the whole class, the American Socialist Party. More importantly, if contradictorily, emerging from a segment of that organization, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) was, to my mind the first serious revolutionary labor organization (party/union?) that we could look to as fighting a class struggle fight for working class interests. Everyone should read the Preamble to the IWW Constitution of 1905 (look it up on Wikipedia or the IWW website) to see what I mean. It still retains its stirring revolutionary fervor today.

The most unambiguous work of creating a mass labor party that we could recognize though really came with the fight of the American Communist Party (which had been formed by the sections, the revolutionary-inclined sections, of the American Socialist Party that split off in the great revolutionary/reformist division after the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917) in the 1920s to form one based on the trade unions (mainly in the Midwest, and mainly in Chicago with the John Fitzgerald –led AFL). That effort was stillborn, stillborn because the non-communist labor leaders who had the numbers, the locals, and, ah, the dough wanted a farmer-labor party, a two class party to cushion them against radical solutions (breaking from the bourgeois parties and electoralism). Only the timely intervention of the Communist International saved the day from a major blunder (Go to the James P. Cannon Internet Archives for more, much more on this movement, He, and his factional allies including one William Z. Foster, later the titular head of the Communist Party, were in the thick of things to his later red-faced chagrin).

Moving forward, the American Communist Party at the height of the Great Depression (the one in the 1930s, that one, not the one we are in now) created the American Labor Party (along with the American Socialist party and other pro-Democratic Party labor skates) which had a mass base in places like New York and the Midwest. The problem though was this organization was, mainly, a left-handed way to get votes for Roosevelt from class conscious socialist-minded workers who balked at a direct vote for Roosevelt. (Sound familiar, again?) And that, before the Labor Party movement of the 1990s, is pretty much, except a few odd local attempts here and there by leftist groups, some sincere, some not, was probably the last major effort to form any kind of independent labor political organization. (The American Communist Party after 1936, except 1940, and even that is up for questioning, would thereafter not dream of seriously organizing such a party. For them the Democratic Party was more than adequate, thank you. Later the Socialist Workers Party essentially took the same stance.)

So much then for the historical aspects of the workers party question. The real question, the real lessons, for revolutionaries posed by all of this is something that was pointed out by James P. Cannon in the late 1930s and early 1940s (and before him Leon Trotsky). Can revolutionaries in the United States recruit masses of working people to a revolutionary labor party (us, again) today (and again think Bolshevik)? To pose the question is to give the answer (an old lawyer’s trick, by the way).

America today, no. Russia in 1917, yes. Germany in 1921, yes. Same place 1923, yes. Spain in 1936 (really from 1934 on), yes. America in the 1930s, probably not (even with no Stalinist ALP siphoning). France 1968, yes. Greece (or Spain) today, yes. So it is all a question of concrete circumstances. That is what Cannon (and before him Trotsky) was arguing about. If you can recruit to the revolutionary labor party that is the main ticket. We, even in America, are not historically pre-determined to go the old time British Labor Party route as an exclusive way to create a mass- based political labor organization. If we are not able to recruit directly then you have to look at some way station effort. That is why in his 1940 documents (which can also be found at the Cannon Internet Archives as well) Cannon stressed that the SWP should where possible (mainly New York) work in the Stalinist-controlled (heaven forbid, cried the Shachtmanites) American Labor Party. That was where masses of organized trade union workers were.

Now I don’t know, and probably nobody else does either, if and when, the American working class is going to come out of its slumber. Some of us thought that Occupy might be a catalyst for that. That has turned out to be patently false as far as the working class goes. So we have to expect that maybe some middle level labor organizers or local union officials feeling pressure from the ranks may begin to call for a labor party. That, as the 1990s Socialist Alternative Labor Party archives indicates, is about what happened when those efforts started.

[A reference back to the American Communist Party’s work in the 1920s may be informative here. As mentioned above there was some confusion, no, a lot of confusion back then about building a labor party base on workers and farmers, a two -class party. While the demands of both groups may in some cases overlap farmers, except for farm hands, are small capitalists on the land. We need a program for such potential allies, petty bourgeois allies, but their demands are subordinate to labor’s in a workers’ party program. Fast forward to today and it is entirely possible, especially in light of the recent Occupy experiences that some vague popular frontist trans-class movement might develop like the Labor Non-Partisan League that the labor skates put forward in the 1930s as a catch basin for all kinds of political tendencies. We, of course, would work in such formations fighting for a revolutionary perspective but this is not what we advocate for now.]

Earlier this year AFL-CIO President Trumka [2012]made noises about labor “going its own way.” I guess he had had too much to drink at the Democratic National Committee meeting the night before, or something. So we should be cautious, but we should be ready. While at the moment tactics like a great regroupment of left forces, a united front with labor militants, or entry in other labor organizations for the purpose of pushing the workers party are premature we should be ready.

And that last sentence brings up my final point, another point courtesy of Jim Cannon. He made a big point in the 1940s documents about the various kinds of political activities that small revolutionary propaganda groups or individuals (us, yet again) can participate in (and actually large socialist organizations too before taking state power). He lumped propaganda, agitation, and action together. For us today we have our propaganda points “a workers’ party that fights for a workers (and X, okay) government.” In the future, if things head our way, we will “united front” the labor skates to death agitating for the need for an independent labor expression. But we will really be speaking over their heads to their memberships (and other working class formations, if any, as well). Then we will take action to create that damn party, fighting to make it a revolutionary instrument. Enough said.

  

An Encore-Just Before The Sea Change - With The Dixie Cups Going To The Chapel Of Love In Mind

An Encore-Just Before The Sea Change - With The Dixie Cups Going To The Chapel Of Love In Mind

 

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 

There were some things about Edward Rowley’s youthful activities, those that he thought would bring some small honor to his name, that he would rather not forget, things that defined his life, gave him that “fifteen minutes of fame,” if only to himself and his, that everybody kept talking about that everyone deserved before they departed this life. That “fifteen minutes of fame” business which he thought had been uttered by the Pop-artist Andy Warhol in one of his prankster moments, one of his New York high society put-downs, was fine by him even if it had been the result of some small honor thing.

The subject of that small honor done in the spurt of his youth that had defined a lot of what came later is what got him thinking one sunny afternoon in September about five years ago as he waited for the seasons to turn almost before his eyes about the times around 1964, around the time that he graduated from North Adamsville High School, around the time that he realized that the big breeze jail-break that he had kind of been waiting for was about to bust out over the land, over America. (His world view did not encompass the entire world or what was the same thing the "youth nation" part of that view but later after making plenty of international connections from here and there he could have said he was waiting for that breeze to bust out over the world.)

It was not like Edward was some kind of soothsayer, like some big think tank thinker paid well to keep tabs on social trends for those in charge so they didn’t get waylaid like they did with the “rebel without a cause” and “beat” phenomena or anything like that back in the 1950s that had them all scared like hell that society was going down in the ditch. No, it was like he could read tea leaves or tarot cards like some latter day Madame La Rue who actually did read his future once down at the Gloversville Fair when she had come to that location with her daughter, Gypsy Anne, one hot August week when he was about twelve. Madame that day read that he was made for big events. The big event that he was interested in just then was winning a doll, a stuffed animal or something like that for dark-haired, dark-eyed just starting to fill out  Gypsy Anne at the Skee game of which he was an expert at.


(For those clueless about Skee, have forgotten or have never spent their illicit youths around carnivals, small time circuses, or penny-ante amusement parks, the game is simplicity itself once you get the hang of it and play about 10,000 hours’ worth of games you roll small balls, which come down a chute once you pay your dough, or credit/debit card the way they have the machines worked nowadays, and you roll them like in bowling up to a target area like in archery and try to get a ton of points which gives you strips of coupons to win a prize depending on high your score is, and what you want. Like I say, simple.) 


And Edward did win his Gypsy Anne a stuffed animal, a big one, and got a very big long wet kiss for his heroics down by the beach when she gave her best twelve year old “come hither” look, not the last time he would be snagged by that look by her or any other women later (and by the way “copped a little feel” from that starting to fill out shape of hers and he finally solved, no, he solved for that one minute that budding girls turned to women were as interested in sex, or at least being “felt up” as the other guys around Harry’s Variety Store had told him  they were if approached the right way).  No way though that tarot reading when he was twelve left an impression, left him with that vague feeling about the big breeze coming, not then when his hormones drove his big thoughts, and not for a long while thereafter.

That big breeze blowing through the land thing had not been Edward’s idea anyway, not his originally although he swore by it once he thought about the possibilities of breaking out of Podunk North Adamsville, but came from “the Scribe,” the late Peter Paul Markin, a corner boy at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys on Thornton Street where he occasionally hung out in high school since he had been childhood friends with the leader of that crowd, Frankie Riley. Markin, despite a serious larcenous heart which would eventually do him in, read books and newspapers a lot and would go on and on about the jail-break thing on lonesome Friday nights when all the guys were waiting, well, just waiting for something to happen in woebegone North Adamsville where the town mainly went to sleep by ten, or eleven on Friday and Saturday night when Jack Slack’s closed late.  (For the younger set, Doc’s Drugstore, the place where he and Frankie hung in their younger days as well, the place where they all first heard rock and roll played loud on Doc’s jukebox by the soda fountain, every night was a nine o’clock close just when things were getting interesting as the shadows had time to spank vivid boy imaginations and you wonder, well, maybe not you, but parents wondered why their kids were ready to take the first hitchhike or hitch a freight train ride out of that “one-horse town” (an expression courtesy of the grandmothers of the town, at least the ones he knew, mostly Irish grandmothers with corn beef and cabbage boiling on their cast-iron stoves and smirks on their faces, if grandmothers could have smirks over anything, about how dear the price of everything was if you could get it a very big problem, including for Edward’s Anna Riley, where he first heard the words).

Here is where that big breeze twelve million word description thing Markin was talking about intersected with that unspoken trend for Edward (unknown and unspoken since the corner at Jack Slacks’ did not have a professional academic sociologist in residence to guide them since those “hired guns” were still hung up on solving the juvenile delinquency problem and so as usual were well behind the curve  and Markin, the Scribe as smart as he was, was picking his stuff up strictly from newspapers and magazines who were always way also behind the trends until the next big thing hit them in the face). Edward’s take on the musical twists and turns back then is where he had something the kids at North Adamsville High would comment on, would ask him about to see which way the winds were blowing, would put their nickels, dimes and quarters in the jukeboxes to hear based on his recommendations.

Even Markin deferred to him on this one, on his musical sense, the beat or the “kicks” as he called then although he, Markin, would horn in, or try to, on the glory by giving every imaginable arcane fact about some record’s history, roots, whatever which would put everybody to sleep, they just wanted to heard the “beat” for crying out loud. Edward did have to chuckle though when he thought about the way, the main way, that Markin worked the jukebox scene since he was strictly from poverty, from the projects, poorer even than Edward’s people and that was going some if you saw the ramshackle shack of a house that he and his four older brothers grew up in. The Scribe used to con some lonely-heart girl who maybe had just broken up with her boyfriend, maybe had been dateless for a while, or was just silly enough to listen to him into playing what he wanted to hear based on what Edward had told him.


But Markin was smooth in his way since he would draw a bee-line to the girl who just put her quarter in for her three selection on Jack Slack’s jukebox (Doc’s, sweet and kindly saint Doc whose place was a bee-hive after school for that very reason , had five for a quarter if you can believe that). He would become her “advisor,” and as the number one guy who knew every piece of teenage grapevine news in the town and whom everybody therefore deferred on that intelligence so he would let her “pick” the first selection, usually some sentimental lost love thing she could get weepy over, the second selection would be maybe some “oldie but goodie,” Breathless or At The Hop, which everybody still wanted to hear, and then on number three, the girl all out of ideas Markin would tout whatever song had caught his ear. Jesus, Markin was a piece of work. Too bad he had to end the way he did down in Mexico now lying in some unmarked grave in some town’s potter’s field back in the mid-1970s which guys from the old town were still moaning over.

That was Markin on the fringes but see Edward’s senses were very much directed by his tastes in music, by his immersion into all things rock and roll in the early 1960s where he sensed what he called silly “bubble gum” music that had passed for rock(what high priest Markin called something like the “musical counter-revolution” but he was always putting stuff in political bull form like that). Which, go figure, the girls liked, or liked the look of the guys singing the tunes, guys with flipped hair and dimples like Fabian and Bobby Rydell but was strictly nowhere with Edward. The breeze Edward felt was going to bury that stuff under an avalanche of sounds going back to Elvis, and where Elvis got his stuff from like Lonnie Johnson and the R&B and black electric blues guys, the rockabilly hungry white boys, and forward to something else, something with more guitars all amped to big ass speakers that were just coming along to bring in the new dispensation.

More importantly since the issue of jailbreaks and sea changes were in the air Edward was the very first kid to grasp what would later be called “the folk minute of the early 1960s,” and not just by Markin when he wrote stuff about that time later before his sorry end. Everybody would eventually hone in on Dylan and Baez, dubbed the “king and queen” of the moment by the mass media always in a frenzy to anoint and label things that they had belatedly found about out about and run into the ground.  But when folk tunes started showing up on the jukebox at Jimmy Jack’s Diner over on Latham Street where the college guys hung out and where families went to a cheap filling dinner to give Ma a break from the supper meal preparations it was guys like the Kingston Trio, the Lettermen, and the Lamplighters who got the play after school and some other girls, not the “bubble gum” girls went crazy over the stuff when Edward made recommendations.

He had caught the folk moment almost by accident late one Sunday night when he picked up a station from New York City and heard Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie songs being played, stuff that Mr. Dasher his seventh grade music teacher had played in class to broaden youthful minds, meaning trying to break the Elvis-driven rock and roll habit. So that musical sense combined with his ever present sense that things could be better in this wicked old world drilled into him by his kindly old grandmother, that Anna Riley with her boiling kettles and smirks mentioned before,   who was an old devotee of the Catholic Worker movement kind of drove his aspirations (and Markin’s harping with the political and so-called historical slant triggered by his own grandmother’s devotion to the Catholic Worker movement added in). But at first it really was the music that had been the cutting edge of what followed later, followed until about 1964 when that new breeze arrived in the land.

That fascination with music had occupied Edward’s mind since he had been about ten and had received a transistor radio for his birthday and out of curiosity decided to turn the dial to AM radio channels other that WJDA which his parents, may they rest in peace, certainly rest in peace from his incessant clamoring for rock and roll records and later folk albums, concert tickets, radio listening time on the big family radio in the living room, had on constantly and which drove him crazy. Drove him crazy because that music, well, frankly that music, the music of the Doris Days, the Peggy Lees, the Rosemary Clooneys, the various corny sister acts like the Andrews Sisters, the Frank Sinatras, the Vaughn Monroes, the Dick Haynes and an endless series of male quartets did not “jump,” gave him no “kicks,’ left him flat. As a compromise, no, in order to end the family civil war, they had purchased a transistor radio at Radio Shack and left him to his own devises.

One night, one late night in 1955, 1956 when Edward was fiddling with the dial he heard this sound out of Cleveland, Ohio, a little fuzzy but audible playing this be-bop sound, not jazz although it had horns, not rhythm and blues although sort of, but a new beat driven by some wild guitar by a guy named Warren Smith who was singing about his Ruby, his Rock ‘n’ Roll Ruby who only was available apparently to dance the night away. And she didn’t seem to care whether she danced by herself on the tabletops or with her guy. Yeah, so if you need a name for what ailed young Edward Rowley, something he could not quite articulate then call her woman, call her Ruby and you will not be far off. And so with that as a pedigree Edward became one of the town’s most knowledgeable devotees of the new sound.

Problem was that new sound, as happens frequently in music, got a little stale as time went on, as the original artists who captured his imagination faded from view one way or another and new guys, guys with nice Bobby this and Bobby that names, Patsy this and Brenda that names sang songs under the umbrella name rock and roll that his mother could love. Songs that could have easily fit into that WJDA box that his parents had been stuck in since about World War II.

So Edward was anxious for a new sound to go along with his feeling tired of the same old, same old stuff that had been hanging around in the American night since the damn nuclear hot flashes red scare Cold War started way before he had a clue about what that was all about. It had started with the music and then he got caught later in high school up with a guy in school, Daryl Wallace, a hipster, or that is what he called himself, a guy who liked “kicks” although being in high school in North Adamsville far from New York City, far from San Francisco, damn, far from Boston what those “kicks” were or what he or Edward would do about getting those “kicks” never was made clear. But they played it out in a hokey way and for a while they were the town, really high school, “beatniks.”  So Edward had had his short faux “beat” phase complete with flannel shirts, black chino pants, sunglasses, and a black beret (a beret that he kept hidden at home in his bedroom closet once he found out after his parents had seen and heard Jack Kerouac reading from the last page of On The Road on the Steve Allen Show that they had severely disapproved of the man, the movement and anything that smacked of the “beat” and a beret always associated with French bohemians and foreignness would have had them seeing “red”). And for a while Daryl and Edward played that out until Daryl moved away (at least that was the story that went around but there was a persistent rumor for a time that Mr. Wallace had dragooned Daryl into some military school in California in any case that disappearance from the town was the last he ever heard from his “beat” brother).

Then came 1964 and  Edward was fervently waiting for something to happen, for something to come out of the emptiness that he was feeling just as things started moving again with the emergence of the Beatles and the Stones as a harbinger of what was coming.

That is where Edward had been psychologically when his mother first began to harass him about his hair. Although the hair thing like the beret was just the symbol of clash that Edward knew was coming and knew also that now that he was older that he was going to be able to handle differently that when he was a kid.  Here is what one episode of the battle sounded like:                   

“Isn’t that hair of yours a little long Mr. Edward Rowley, Junior,” clucked Mrs. Edward Rowley, Senior, “You had better get it cut before your father gets back from his job working on repairing that ship up in Maine, if you know what is good for you.” That mothers’-song was being endlessly repeated in North Adamsville households (and not just those households either but in places like Carver, Hullsville, Shaker Heights, Ann Arbor, Manhattan, Cambridge any place where guys were waiting for the new dispensation and wearing hair a little longer than boys’ regular was the flash point) ever since the British invasion had brought longer hair into style (and a little less so, beards, that was later when guys got old enough to grow one without looking wispy, after they had taken a look at what their Victorian great-grandfathers grew and though it was “cool.” Cool along with new mishmash clothing and new age monikers to be called by after giving up their "slave" names.)

Of course when one was thinking about the British invasion in the year 1964 one was not thinking about the American Revolution or the War of 1812 but the Beatles. And while their music has taken 1964 teen world by a storm, a welcome storm after the long lonely mainly musical counter-revolution since Elvis, Bo, Jerry Lee and Chuck ruled the rock night and had disappeared without a trace, the 1964 parent world was getting up in arms.

And not just about hair styles either. But about midnight trips on the clanking subway to Harvard Square coffeehouses to hear, to hear if you can believe this, folk music, mountain music, harp music or whatever performed by long-haired (male or female), long-bearded (male), blue jean–wearing (both), sandal-wearing (both), well, for lack of a better name “beatniks” (parents, as usual, being well behind the curve on teen cultural movements since by 1964 “beat”  except on silly television shows and by “wise” social commenters who could have been “Ike” brothers and sisters, was yesterday’s news).

Mrs. Rowley would constantly harp about “why couldn’t Edward be like he was when he listened to Bobby Vinton and his Mr. Lonely or that lovely-voiced Roy Orbison and his It’s Over and other nice songs on the local teen radio station, WMEX (he hated that name Eddie by the way, Eddie was also what everybody called his father so you can figure out why he hated the moniker just then). Now it was the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and a cranky-voiced guy named Bob Dylan that had his attention. And that damn Judy Jackson with her short skirt and her, well her… looks” (Mrs. Rowley like every mother in the post-Pill world refusing to use the “s” word, a throw-back to their girlish days when their mothers did not use such a word either and so everybody learned about sex is some strange osmotic way out in the streets, in the school boys' and girls' lavs Monday mornings before school when some Ben or Lisa would lie like crazy about their sex bouts weekend, and from older almost as clueless older brothers and sisters just like now.)     

Since Mrs. Rowley, Alice to the neighbors, was getting worked up anyway, she let out what was really bothering her about her Eddie’s behavior, "What about all the talk about doing right by the down-trodden Negros down in Alabama and Mississippi. And you and that damn Peter Markin, who used to be so nice when all you boys hung around together at Jimmy Jack’s Diner [Edward: corner boys, Ma, that is what we were and at Jack Slack’s alleys not Jimmy Jack’s that was for the jukebox and for checking out the girls who were putting dough in that jukebox] and I at least knew you were no causing trouble, talking about organizing a book drive to get books for the little Negro children down there. If your father ever heard that there would be hell to pay, hell to pay and maybe a strap coming out of the closet big as you are. Worse though, worse than worrying about Negros down South is that treasonous talk about leaving this country, leaving North Adamsville, defenseless against the communists with your talk of nuclear disarmament. Why couldn’t you have just left well enough alone and stuck with your idea of forming a band that would play nice songs that make kids feel good like Gale Garnet’s We’ll Sing In The Sunshine or that pretty Negro girl Dionne Warwick and Her Walk On By instead of getting everybody upset."

And since Mrs. Rowley, Alice, to the neighbors had mentioned the name Judy Jackson, Edward’s flame and according to Monday morning before school girls’ “lav” talk, Judy’s talk they had “done the deed” and you can figure out what the deed was let’s hear what was going on in the Jackson household since one of the reasons that Edward was wearing his hair longer was because Judy thought it was “sexy” and so that talk of doing the deed may well have been true if there were any sceptics. Hear this:      

“Young lady, that dress is too short for you to wear in public, take it off, burn it for all I care, and put on another one or you are not going out of this house,” barked Mrs. James Jackson, echoing a sentiment that many worried North Adamsville mothers were feeling (and not just those mothers either but in places like Gloversville, Hullsville, Shaker Heights, Dearborn, Cambridge any place where gals were waiting for the new dispensation and wearing their skirts a little shorter than mid-calf was the flash point) about their daughters dressing too provocatively and practically telling the boys, well practically telling them you know what as she suppressed the “s” word that was forming in her head. She too working up a high horse head of steam continued, "And that Eddie [“Edward, Ma,” Judy keep repeating every time Mrs. Jackson, Dorothy to the neighbors, said Eddie], and his new found friends like Peter Markin taking you to those strange coffeehouses in Harvard Square with all the unwashed, untamed, unemployed “beatniks” instead of the high school dances on Saturday night. And that endless talk about the n-----s down South, about get books for the ignorant to read and other trash talk about how they are equal to us, and your father better not hear you talk like that, not at the dinner table since he has to work around them and their smells and ignorance over in that factory in Dorchester.  


And don’t start with that Commie trash about peace and getting rid of weapons. They should draft the whole bunch of them and put them over in front of that Berlin Wall. Then they wouldn’t be so negative about America."

Scene: Edward, Judy and Peter Markin were sitting in the Club Nana in Harvard Square sipping coffee, maybe pecking at the one brownie between them, and listening to a local wanna-be folk singing strumming his stuff (who turned out to be none other than Eric Von Schmidt whose Joshua Gone Barbados and a couple of other songs would become folk staples and classics). Beside them cartons of books that they are sorting to be taken along with them when they head south this summer after graduation exercises at North Adamsville High School are completed in June. (By the way Peter’s parents were only slightly less irate about their son’s activities and used the word “Negro” when they were referring to black people, black people they wished their son definitely not to get involved with were only slightly less behind the times than Mrs. Rowley and Mrs. Jackson and so requires no separate screed by Mrs. Markin. See Peter did not mention word one about what he was, or was not, doing and thus spared himself the anguish that Edward and Judy put themselves through trying to “relate” to their parents, their mothers really since fathers were some vague threatened presence in the background in those households.)

They, trying to hold back their excitement have already been to some training sessions at the NAACP office over on Massachusetts Avenue in the Roxbury section of Boston and had purchased their tickets for the Greyhound bus as far as New York’s Port Authority where they will meet others who will be heading south down to Mississippi goddam and Alabama goddam on a chartered bus. But get this Peter turned to Edward and said, “Have you heard that song, Popsicles and Icicles by the Mermaids, it has got great melodic sense.” Edward made a very severe off-putting “no way” face. Yes, we are still in the time just before the sea change after which even Peter will chuckle about “bubble gum” music. Good luck on your journey though, young travelers, good luck.

 

 

 

 

If You Ain’t Got The Do Re Mi-With Woody Guthrie’s Song Of The Same Name In Mind

If You Ain’t Got The Do Re Mi-With Woody Guthrie’s Song Of The Same Name  In Mind 

By Sam Lowell

Peter Markin, Peter Paul Markin to his mother and a high-brow first wife, Sarah Jenkins of the Puritan three name Boston Stock Exchange Jenkins, who was trying to impress her Wellesley leafy suburban parents, with his three names to no avail since they sensed instinctively he was not to the manor born, not close since he could not recite his family tree unto the fifth generation and had unfortunately one night in his cups at dinner mentioned his maternal bog Irish “famine ships” roots always had a hard time living in California, hell, even his short visits always seemed to go over the edge. The way things worked out, or didn’t work out, which is perhaps a better way to say it, on that marriage business neither did Sarah when she split up with him, deserted him really for a fourth-cousin Puritan three name stockbroker from Connecticut.

Of course Peter, no, let’s call him Markin like all of his corner boys down in North Adamsville did and everybody else thereafter when the deal went down was always on edge financially every time he went out to California, every time he lived there which was sporadically over the course of his short not sweet life, a few months here, six months there. A couple of years straight toward the end but by that time he was knee-deep in the booming and expanding cocaine traffic which he thought would finally end that wanting habit craving for dough that had haunted him since childhood but which got him nothing but that short not sweet life when he mixed with the wrong hard boys down south of the border.

That thought, that California dreaming thought which had driven Markin to make so many wrong decisions, to go off the edge in the end, was what Josh Breslin a guy from Olde Saco, Maine who had met Markin out in San Francisco in the summer of love, 1967 was thinking about when he had one of his periodic Markin moans, moans even forty years after the sainted bastard had passed to the great beyond. Back then Markin had hitched his wagon to Captain Crunch’s big ass yellow brick road converted school bus and was staying in California for what he thought would be an indefinite time once he had broken free from his growing up town and from a couple of years of college to go West to “find himself” as it seemed half his generation was doing just then. Josh who had himself hitched from Maine to “find himself” before heading to freshman year at State U.  had also hitched his wagon to the Captain’s travelling commune of a bus as well had gone up to the bus when it was parked on the hill across from a small park on Russian Hill and, green at the time to the ways of hippie-dom and probably acting like the 49ers, the Okies and Arkies later thinking the streets of California were paved with gold, asked the first guy he saw for a joint (marijuana, for the clueless or the too young to know). And that first guy was Markin who passed Josh a big old blunt of a joint and that symbolic transfer started a friendship that lasted until Markin went over the edge.

(It is not too early to say that whatever way guys met Markin, guys who were on the same wavelength, guys who knew Markin, guys like Frankie Riley and Jimmy Jenkins from his hometown of North Adamsville, Bart Webber and Jack Callahan from Carver, down about thirty miles south of that town and of course Josh to this day would get wistful, maybe a little teary-eyed these days when they thought about all the promise he had, about all the funny schemes he cooked up, all his stockpile of two million facts that he laid on an unsuspecting  world before his baser instinct got the better of him).

Thinking back Josh thought maybe Markin was guy who never should have hit California, maybe his stars were ill-lined up that way. Maybe he should had done as Woody Guthrie suggested in his California Garden of Eden song Do Re Mi  that he had heard out in Concord the previous summer which still troubled him. Yeah, out in Concord where the New England Folk Song Society held its annual Woody Guthrie Tribute at the Old Manse which he had attended in the company of Sam Lowell and his lovely long-time companion Laura Perkins (whom he had had half a flame for since who knows how long but who made it clear to Josh on more than one occasion that she was true blue to Sam although she thanked him for the attraction compliment, damn) Jason Reed had done the cover with the chorus line that would have fit Markin when after busting out the first time he should have gone back to Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia, Tennessee, gone back to his growing up Massachusetts after that first California time in 1967. Maybe stayed the summer and then split and gone back to where no dough guys had a chance to live okay with less filthy lucre than you needed in the Golden State. But Markin was a guy who always seemed to head toward the danger, didn’t always have a good sense of when to back off so he stayed in California that first time until he got his induction notice for the Army in late 1968 (except a for couple of weeks’ worth of trips back and forth to deal with his North Adamsville Draft Board).       

But after accepting his induction fate, accepting his cannon-fodder fate (his term), after ‘Nam Markin could not really go back home anymore, had broken off most of his family relationships, particularly with his hard-assed, hard luck, hard scrabble mother, had gotten himself married to that first wife Sarah in a mad frenzy of not being left with nobody left behind but who had essentially abandoned him for that Puritan three name stockbroker after he left for ‘Nam and did Dear John on him before he got back. (Jesus, what a bitch Josh thought since he had met her a couple of times, had disliked her from the start and sensed that if it had not been for the war and Markin’s overweening need to be married in case he died over there was not a marriage made in heaven. And it wasn’t.) So Markin drifted out to California again. Met up in Big Sur in early 1971 with Josh again who had also drifted back to California after he had gotten a half-serious job on an alternative journal in the East Bay. Had met up with first Annie Dubois in Golden Gate Park whom he should have married and gone back to Lima, Ohio with which she had done once she realized that she was not built for the communal vagabond life and then Josie Davis, the latter who turned out to be his second wife and another holy hell of a woman who abandoned him for some guy from Los Angeles who promised her some kind of job in the film industry. Josh agreed though that she had better grounds for splitting once Markin started into his fatal involvement in the international drug trade.      

Get this though about the man’s contrary instincts. After ‘Nam Markin was rabidly against the government that had sent him and a lot of guys from places like North Adamsville, Portsmouth, Nashua, New Hampshire, Harlem, Detroit, the prairies of Kansas and the like so he got caught up (as did Josh) with the anti-war struggle, But more importantly, since he and Josh were living in a vaguely communal house on the Oakland-Berkeley line at the time after Josie split, supporting  the Black Panthers who were square in the gunsights of the cops from the rabid local Oakland cops to the feds and needed dough, plenty of dough for bail and legal expenses. Of course Markin, as usual had nada for dough to help himself much less the hard-pressed Panthers. That was the first time Markin got caught up in the drug trade. He ran into Rancho Rick, a well-known San Francisco drug-dealer (in those naïve days just grass, marihuana, maybe some bennies, an odd lot of LSD), in Golden Gate Park who got to like and trust Markin after a while. What happened was that Markin became Rancho’s “mule,” the upfront guy who went down to Mexico to bring back the “product” as they called it. Once in a while Rancho would let Markin bring some stuff, a couple of bricks or so, a suitcase full maybe, on his own account. That “independent” dealer thing got to Markin’s head-eventually. What Markin would do was sell his stuff and then give some big percentage to the Panther Defense Fund (they didn’t know the source of Markin’s dough but they probably suspected he was dealing in any case they were so hard-pressed especially around the various BP leader Huey Newton cases that they would not have as Markin said given a fuck about how the money had been made).    

That was, more or less, the way that Markin held himself together in those days when everybody knew the ebb-tide of the 1960s was in full play but that California was still a better to live that North Adamsville, Lima, Nashua, Harlem, and so he staked himself on his cunning, and maybe his on some magic karma that he thought he had after doing about fifteen drug deals on his own account and never having been caught. But it was one thing to deal in grass, even smoke your brains out on the product without undue duress but another thing once the cocaine trick started being the new drug of the month choice among the hipper crowd.

See Markin had a crazy mixed psychic make-up. Bright, street bright too, but always with that freaking hunger, worse that sense that he was a moonchild. So as the trend moved to a harder drugs he got caught up doing the product, lots of it. One time so much he could hardly breathe out of his nose and told everybody he just had a cold. Yeah, lost his judgment. No longer were the honchos guys like easy-going Rancho but hard boys from down south of the border who wanted to control the whole traffic. And control it they did, right over Markin’s ill-fated head. Nobody knows to this day what really happened and now it is too long past to worry about. But not to moan over. Yeah, California is a tough dollar if you don’t have the do re mi. Just listen to Woody.