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Wednesday, January 11, 2017
The Cold Civil War Has Started- Escalate the Resistance to Inauguration Day!
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
*****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.
Yet Again Further In-With Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters And The Yellow Brick Road School Bus In Mind
Yet Again Further In-With Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters And
The Yellow Brick Road School Bus In Mind
By Sam Lowell
Maybe it had been the time of Josh Breslin’s time, the time of
his now more nomadic life since he had moved back to his Maine growing up town
of Olde Saco and had retired, well sort of, retired from the hurly-burly pressure
of getting out an assortment of by-lines for half the unread small publications
and journals in America.(That assortment of publications driven by the need for
hard currency, cash, checks as the financial end of his three, count them,
three failed marriages, the alimony, child support and college education
tuitions for his brood of children that nearly broke him rather that any
overwhelming loyalty to the publications since half the time he could have
given a rat’s ass, his works, about the publication or the subject matter he
was writing about.) Maybe it had been the very hard to fathom fact that after a
lifetime of writing, drivel or star quality, whatever music, whatever beat,
beat in his head mostly from being immersed early on in in late 1950s Jack
Kerouac, king of beats be-bop beats when he wrote, had driven him to write for
those unread small publications and journals over the years had deserted him of
late, that he had been flat, had been recycling in different scenarios the same
old stuff.
Maybe though if you wanted to get closer to the truth of the
matter it had been “karma.” world-spirit, something in the air that all came
together the day that he was driving down the Maine Turnpike toward Boston
where he was to deliver a small article about a film noir, an old film noir,
the classic B-noir Kansas City
Confidential he had reviewed for yet another small artsy publication-Film Noir Finale listening to a CD
titled Bleecker Street on the car CD
player, a compilation of covers of 1960s folk music standards done by later
well-known artists who had been inspired by the music in their own up and
coming careers. Bleecker Street in New York, one of the central arteries of the
coffeehouses that spawned the 1960s folk minute that he had recently endlessly
wrote about from about every possible vantage point. With the Bleecker Street
CD or rather a cover of Phil Och’s 1960s anti-war, war-resister, draft resister
classic I Ain’t Marching Anymore playing Josh noticed a school bus in the
distance. Not just any school bus though but what he would have called back in
that beat-driven youth when all things were possible and he had to rein in his
writing, or rather what his late old friend Peter Markin would have called a “yellow
brick road school bus.”
From the speed with which Josh caught up with the bus hunkered
down in the extreme right lane it seemed to be going too slow though to be
carrying school children and in any case school was out for the summer so that
it was unlikely to be carrying children. As he got within eyesight though the
bus was nothing but an old time relic from the 1960s school bus converted to be
a home for the travelling gypsy wanderers of that good night. In the year 2015!
He at first he thought that maybe he had had a retro-flashback, that LSD he had
drunk in Dixie cups of Kool-Aid or licked off some Owsley blotter had finally
reared its ugly head like all the parents, pastors, professors, panic-mongers
had predicted would occur of the youth nation succumbed to demon drugs. He
could not believe his eyes, thought that he had been transformed to an earlier
time in some time machine, to the time when he himself had been a wanderer
gypsy out in the high holy California night aboard Captain Crunch’s version of
that very same vehicle for almost two
years in the days when being a member of such a travelling home made you one of
the brethren (a common sight then out on the Pacific Coast Highway if not so
much in the East until after the first one, Ken Kesey’s Further In crewed by his Merry Pranksters got written up by Tom
Wolfe and Hunter Thompson).
All Josh could do at the time he saw the sight since he was
on a fast-moving traffic highway not close to an exit had been to beep the beep
of recognition and solidarity and accept the wave of the grey-bearded driver
who looked at least at window view like he too had come out of some time
machine. Josh thought later once he got to Boston after delivering his article and
hence it was too late that he should have somehow gotten the bus to stop and grabbed
the stories he knew were jam-packed in that vehicle along with the assorted
mattresses, mismatched pots, pans, dishes and silverware, odd-end chairs, and
master of the universe sound system that he knew was standard for such homes,
some of which he could see had been attached to the roof of the bus. But that
was later when the journalist instinct in Josh was in high dudgeon.
What he thought on the seventy or eighty mile trip left
before Boston though was a different matter. Josh had only one thought-what
would his late friend Markin make of such a sight. Markin who had brought Josh
into the tribe, who had given Josh his
first joint up on Russian Hill in San Francisco in the summer of love 1967 when
all things were possible, or maybe under the rages of youth nation trying to
jail-break from a world it hadn’t created and had no say in, impossible. He
could hardly wait to tell the surviving members of the group, mostly Markin’s
old growing up corner boy friends who had stuck together all these years after
Markin’s demise down in forlorn mysterious Sonora, Mexico in the mid-1970s.
They would periodically meet at Jack’s over in Cambridge and swap stories and
other lies but just then he was in a somber mood thinking about his and
Markin’s now forever lost youth.
Yes, all roads led back to Markin, Markin and his search for
the great blue-pink American West night as he called it, and as he, Josh, and
the other corner boys from his youth Markin introduced to him along the way and
who formed the coterie that gathered at Jack’s on occasion also got caught up
in before the night-takers and who knows maybe their own hubris took command
and burned what they thought they were creating to the ground. Fifty years
later the night-takers were still throwing oil on the flames, still trying to
stamp out the embers as a look at the news on any given day painfully
demonstrated. How was Josh to know that some fifty years later he would still
be etched by that experience, that experiment in a new way of living, a new way
of thinking all because he like lots of others in the summer of love, 1967, had
the wanderlust, had let whatever gypsy, traveler nation, genes in his DNA
package (a scientific term he had never heard of then but appropriate just now)
run amok.
Who knew that the simple act of asking for a joint, you
know, marijuana, dope, then getting a huge boost among the younger, non-junkie
tribe gathering out West, on a then unknown hill in San Francisco from a
long-bearded, long-haired, long gone daddy guy sitting on the ground beside an
old-time yellow brick road school bus would lead to a few thousand thought
flash-backs now. That in all simplicity had been how it all started. Well,
maybe there had been a little more than that. Josh had just finished high
school at Olde Saco that year and had been kind of restless, had been kind of
thinking he had some time on his hands before he headed to State U in the fall
to start his freshman year. He was supposed to work for the summer as a janitor
in the now long gone and converted to condominiums MacAdams Textile Mills along
the Olde Saco River. His father who had worked there since his discharge from
the Marines after World War II had gotten him the job through some pull he had with
the plant superintendent in order for Josh to made some cash for expenses at
school since his family was rock bottom poor what with five kids in the family
and only his father working then.
Josh would be the first member of his extended family to go
to college so this was important to his parents. (His father had been brought
up in coal country Kentucky where the boys went to the mines for their
educations early and his mother’s people had come down from the farms in Quebec
to get work in the factories rather than starving on the land.) One day in very
early summer Josh had met a guy on Olde Saco Beach who had just come back from
California, had come back to Maine on some family errant after staying around
Big Sur, staying in a canyon called if you can believe this Todo el Mundo, the
whole wide blessed world who told him some exciting stories about dope, women
and the new dispensation. That conversation had decided him on his course for
the summer. He was heading west, would wind up taking his first hitchhike
expedition west and let loose that bebop wanderer’s beat that had been in his
head since the late 1950s when he had finally heard about the “beats” who were
trying to do their own thing, and MacAdams be damned. Not without some bitter family
controversy, especially from his enraged father, he left one morning on a
Trailways bus to head to Boston as a first stop. That guy on the beach at Olde
Saco had told him Boston, Cambridge really, was the best place to start since hitchhiking
West there was a huge truck depot in back of the Coca-Cola plant right near the
Massachusetts Turnpike there and lonely for company or fast talking truckers
were usually a good source of rides.
And so he went, went out to the Coast pretty uneventfully,
at least uneventfully enough to not be able to think back now to what it was
really like since over the course of the next two years he would travel back
and forth across the country about six times before the deluge hit in the early
1970s. What is more important is what he did when he got to San Francisco the
first time. He had been told by a young guy who looked from the way he was
dressed like Buffalo Bill he had met on Post Street to go to Golden Gate Park
to search for whatever he was looking for. He had been left off on his last truck
ride on famous Market Street (where the ancient trolleys still ply their trade
for the tourist who flock there to ride up and down the hills) and had originally
asked for directions to Mission Street. Those direction were off, the giver of
them probably like Josh among the thousands of new comers to the city once word
got out that a new nation, youth nation was a-borning and he wound up on
Russian Hill where he saw his first yellow brick road bus and decided to test
the waters asking for some dope. And hence his first meeting with Markin.
Something about Markin demeanor and Josh’s response to it
just seemed to mesh from the get-go although Markin had already been on the
yellow brick road since the previous summer after, unwisely as it would turn
out, dropping out of college in Boston to “find himself” out in the wilderness.
He was also a few years older than Josh. Maybe it was the similar working-class
backgrounds, no, desperate working poor, a notch below working class,
backgrounds, Josh’s already mentioned precarious textile mills in Olde Saco and
Markin’s dying shipbuilding industry a precursor to the deindustrialization of
America in North Adamsville down south of Boston. Those resulting “wanting
habits” they would spent endless dope high nights trying to control, trying too
to make sense out of tightened their bond. Maybe too it was their mutual love
of the sea put paid to by being in another ocean scene. Maybe it was their love
of language when later both would dip their respective pens in the inkwell of
literary life. But as Josh thought about that first encounter up on Russian
Hill it had probably been a little thing like after Josh, who didn’t know Markin
from Adam, asked him for a joint, a blunt, Markin had passed it along without a
thought to a guy he didn’t know from Adams with the already classic line “don’t
bogart that joint” meaning keep the residue for the start of another joint,
meaning too that any guy with the audacity to ask for joint in the middle of
nowhere was already a kindred spirit.
And so they were, kindred spirits, until the bitter end, the
time a few years later when Markin had gone over the edge and wound up in a
very dark place in sunny Mexico. But that later stuff the stuff after the bus
caravan disbanded was a story for another day. Josh’s thoughts were about the
couple, almost three years, he spend alongside Markin on Captain Crunch’s
yellow brick road traveling caravan bus, The
Living End. A bus very similar to the one he had seen on that Maine
highway.
Now this bus stuff, the Further
In, made famous by author Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and recorded for
eternity later by the writer Tom Wolfe’s Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test was in 1967 still something of an oddity, especially on
the East Coast. Josh until he ran in Captain Crunch’s The Living End had only heard about them as he headed west and when
he approached Markin that was the closest he had ever been to such a vehicle.
Over the next couple of years as youth nation gathered itself along the Pacific
Coast Highway for adventures it would be almost impossible to go ten miles
without seeing one, or of dropping into any campsite, rustic or full service
without at least one “freak” bus disturbing the mental space of the square
regular campers. They were of a piece usually and were distinct from the ubiquitous
Volkswagen buses both in size and purpose. The “school day golden rule day”
seats a lot of youth nation knew from riding in the damn things endlessly
during their school days had been ripped out and replaced by layers of
mattresses, boxes of camping materials, boxes of dry goods, knapsacks and
whatever any current traveler had for personal effects topped off by a sound
system worthy of a concert hall to give the beat once the drug intake reached
nirvana proportions. Captain Crunch’s bus layout was no different except it had
a compliment of folding chairs and a folding table for eating purposes, if
anybody was interested in culinary delights. Go to it.
Despite Josh’s best efforts he had been unable to unravel
how or why Captain Crunch, real name, Samuel Malone, a college graduate,
Michigan, Class of 1954, so older than his fellow travelers for the most part,
had given up his career in Mad Man Manhattan Madison Avenue advertising and
headed west, began to hang around the haunts of North Beach when that was the
time when the beat Jack, beat Allen, beat Neal, beat Gregory were social lions
and kings in the late be-bop 1950s cool jazz breeze that swung through the land
and landed in Frisco town before heading out to the Japan seas. Word around was
that he had become a tea devotee (now in the new dispensation called grass,
herb, ganja but it all came down to marijuana and plenty of high-grade dope
too) it in the Village and that tripped him west. Word around was that he had
been left money by some wealthy uncle and indifferent to the wiles of
advertising when he had free-flow dough he split the New York scene. Word
around was that in the Village he had met a girl, a woman from Vassar really,
Susan Stein, Class of 1958, who persuaded him to go west with her and see what
was what on the West Coast. That seemed to be the best version since Susan now
known among the bus occupants as Mustang Sally was riding alongside the Captain
as he made his way up and down the Coast, looking, looking for his (and her, he
was very jealous of an independence on her part and he went silently crazy when
she developed a taste for rock and roll band members of the new acid rock
groups that were starting to emerge creating a distinct rock sound to go with
the new dope-induced lifestyle), well, looking for something. Word had also been
around that the Captain who knew everybody, was connected in with a serious
dope-line that put him in touch with the Kesey crowd in La Honda and he had
traded a bag of dope, a big humongous bag of dope for the bus but that was in
the realm of urban legend. All Josh figured out after giving up trying to get a
scoop on what was going on was take the ticket, take the ride as Doctor Gonzo,
Hunter Thompson would say when he coined the phrase.
As Josh looked back to those days he thought how easy it had
been to become a “member” of this Living
End war circus-commune-ghost dance-beat-hippie bandwagon. Of course there
was no official membership people just kind of came on board and left as they
desired. The Captain was pretty liberal in letting people stay with the caravan
as long as they didn’t freak out from the dope too much and need
hospitalization, didn’t hog the dope, drink, food, didn’t trash wherever they
were camped and didn’t steal from or lay “bummers,” a term of art for a bad
scene, anybody on board. Although not everybody was built for the road over the
long haul like Josh and Markin, some people just gravitated to the bus in say
Golden Gate Park and stayed around as long as the bus stayed and then left.
Others took the ride for a few days and then headed home and back to the old
life or to somewhere else for whatever it was they were looking for. Not much
stealing or hogging of dope in the early days, or ever on the Living End although later on other buses
and the whole scene in Haight-Ashbury and elsewhere there was plenty of bummer material once the less idealistic pioneers
drifted back to where they came from and
the lumpen crazies and batos locos reared their ugly heads.
Josh had been welcomed aboard pretty easily on the basic of
Markin’s “good vibes” about him. After that introductory joint Markin had
invited him to stay for the party that was going to happen later in the day and
through the night. It had been a great party although Josh was now very vague
about what had happened except that having stayed through the night and having
found himself on a big old fluffy mattress in the bus Markin had said that
morning after that he was “on the bus,” meaning that if he wanted to stay with
the group he was in. He decided that he would stay, stay until the end of the
summer, maybe a week before Freshman Orientation at State U in early September
and then head back. That part was simple. The part that had been hard was when
the end of summer came and the bus was camped at Todo el Mundo south of Big Sur
he had to make a big decision about whether he wanted to go back to Maine or do
as Markin suggested and play his hand out on the Coast and go back some time
later. Aside from where that would have left Josh in draft land status since
the war in Vietnam was raging out of control and eating up men and materials at
a prestigious rate requiring more draftees than ever he had to face the issue
of his parents and their rages against the night if he told them he was going
to forego being the first in the family to go to college for a lark. He did
choose to stay, did it but not without the rancor that would alienate him from
his parents for many years thereafter, had never really gotten back on an even
keel with them before they passed away.
Of course a lot of that family business, a lot of that worry
about the draft, a lot of that what would he do in life if Josh didn’t go to
college right away and lose his place in the rat race was later time
rationalizations. The real reason that he stayed, or the primary reason why he
stayed after the end of summer was that he was “married” to Butterfly Swirl.
Butterfly Swirl, real name, Carol Clark, a surfer girl from Carlsbad down in
Southern California near San Diego who had broken loose, who had run a “jail-break”
from her golden boy surfer boy when she heard about what was happening in the
summer of love up north in Frisco town and had taken the Greyhound bus up to
see what it was all about. Somebody had directed her to Golden Gate Park and
after checking out a few other scenes along the way wound up in front of The Living End with some guy who knew
one of the “passengers” on the bus. She too had just finished high school but
somehow she gravitated toward Markin although he was far from interested in surfer
girls as could be. (Markin who, by the way, was always called “the Scribe” in
those days on the bus, a moniker he had carried with him from the East from his
corner boy days in North Adamsville and not laid on him out West like with so
many others who were trying to escape their old names, their old slave names to
hear them tell it just like blacks like Malcolm X and Mohammed Ali who had shed
their slave names with much greater justification.)
But those were odd times, times when hardened corner boys from
nowhere in the East in places like Olde Saco and North Adamsville could hook up
with surfer girls, JAPs, Native Americans, then still called Indians, brown
skinned daughters of the braceros and batos locos and black as coal women from
everywhere then called negroes. And so Butterfly Swirl and the Scribe “played
house” together until, well, until Josh hit the scene looking for that vagrant
joint at the end of Markin’s hand. The night of that first party had been the
night when Butterfly made her play for Josh, wound up next to him on that
mattress “on the bus.”
Now we are talking about people, young people, who were
trying to turn the world upside down, get away from their family value values,
get away from some straight-jacket existence in Elmira, Evanston, East LA, and
so it was considered corny, old-fashioned to take umbrage if your girl, or guy,
took off with somebody else. That was the way it was, everything, everybody
free. But as in the case of Captain Crunch who saw red, or some evil color
whenever Mustang Sally went off with some young rocker the Scribe was bitched
out for a while over the new combination of Butterfly and his new friend Josh.
But those were the days when everybody was looking for new “family” and so
after sulking for a couple of days Markin finally gave his “blessing” to the
pairing, finally “married” them and became the “patriarch” of his little
family.
Although the “marriage” ceremony was performed by Captain
Crunch in his role as leader of the ship it was the Scribe who gave Josh his
new name “Prince of Love” that he carried with him for the two almost three
years he traveled up and down the Coast with The Living End. Needless to say also as a sign of the times after
Butterfly and Prince had their “honeymoon,” taking their first hits of acid,
LSD, at a Jefferson Airplane and going down the coast for several months
Butterfly decided that she was not cut out for the vagabond life and went back
to her surfer boy life. But by then the Prince was totally into the alternative
lifestyle scene provided by the Scribe and the other passengers on the bus.
Many nights Markin would regale his “family,” Butterfly and
Prince, as well as whoever else sat around the fireplace wherever they were
camped eating whatever hell-broth olio concoction somebody who was hungry
enough to do so started to throw in the big metal bucket of a pot that most
stews started in, with stories of his corner boy days, of his long-time corner
boys. Mostly about, Frankie, now a lawyer, now Josh’s lawyer along with most of
the other old-time corner boys who needed his services for whatever reason, Frankie
Riley, the acknowledged leader of the crew who gave Markin him the moniker “the
Scribe” since he was always writing something, something about Frankie and after
a while, became his “flak.” What Markin
called Frankie’s Boswell although nobody knew or gave a rat’s ass about the
analogy with Doctor Johnson’s biographer except Markin. Markin was a pip that
way as everybody on the bus would find out eventually if they stayed long
enough. He relished the fact that he
knew about two thousand arcane pieces of information like that Boswell thing.
Markin also mentioned guys like Jack Callahan, the great
football player and now Mister Toyota of Eastern Massachusetts, the hooligan
Jimmy Jenkins who developed the five finger discount, the “clip” into an art
form, now a dentist, Sal Russo who laid his head down for his country for no
good reason down in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam and whose name is now etched in
granite on the North Adamsville memorial to the Vietnam war dead of the town
and down in D.C. too but in black marble,
Bart Webber, who became a printer, now retired after turning the
business over to his youngest son, Alex Johnson, a musician, now passed away after years of heavy drug addiction and
horror, Sam Lowell, also a lawyer but who unlike Frankie who ran a mid-level
law office in Boston ran a small two man operation in his old hometown and is
now semi-retired, and Frank Jackman, who went into writing advertising for a
big Boston public relations firm and had been doing penance for that career
recently by writing stuff about the old days which many people are very eager
to read.
The reason Josh thought of these names is that they were all
still familiar to him, the ones still alive since with the exception of Sal
Russo whom he never met before the reports of his death got transmitted to
Markin. Josh had met each and every one of them out on
the West Coast when Markin, after have made a beachhead told them that they had
better get there asses out to the Coast because the big tidal wave sea-change
that he had been predicting, had been boring them to tears, boring them until
they could give a rat’s ass about the subject, since about tenth grade was
unfolding before his eyes. See aside for those two thousand facts that he loved
to hoard like a king’s ransom and then pop on some unsuspecting doper Markin
had sensed that big things were floating in the air for his, their generation
to grab onto, and now that they were all out of school they had better hurry up
and get west any way they could, by wagon train if necessary. So not only was
the summer of 1967 the summer that Josh would latch onto that big tidal wave
change he had also sensed coming although he could not articulate it quite that
way Markin could but the summer that he met Markin’s corner boys who took him
as one of their own. And he them.
Something new was in the air, longer hair, boys and girls,
bearded for those males who unlike Josh could muster up enough facial hair to
not appear ridiculous, less ownership of girl-boy single and forever ideas,
freer sex, protected or not, the break away from the missionary one-position-
fits-all, all taboos about sinister dope thrown out the windows, fuck you to
the war, the Vietnam War, the central event that fifty years later still
defined the life of the generation, except for those who like Markin and
Sal got caught in the draft vice and
couldn’t figure a way out, and a general hell let’s turn the world upside down
attitude for its own sake but some old-time working-class kindred spirit thing
was working among the old friends of Markin and his new friend Josh.
Late August of 1967 was the high water mark of those who
came out from North Adamsville and met Josh. They came in a couple of waves,
came hitchhiking mostly except Alex Johnson who was working in a band that was
heading west on a tour. They all eventually met in what today would seem like
pioneer days manner via snail mail, Western Union telegrams and over the
land-line telephone. Met in Todo el Mundo just south of Big Sur in a then
isolated forest clearing with a few cabins, primitive cabins and a clear view
of the pacific Pacific Ocean (just kidding the ocean down on the edge of the
western world was wind-swept even on good days, so windy that you had to back
yourself to the wind in order to light a cigarette and use about six matches to
get a light for a smoke which they all did in those days). Met Josh and Markin
there and struck up those life-long connections.
Josh was thinking how improbable it was that they would all
meet in such a desolate isolated spot, such an isolated desolate spot for city
boys, born and raised but that was just a matter of Captain Crunch’s whims, or
some deal he was running to keep everything afloat, keeping his own counsel on
how and why too. The most probable rumor among the passengers, those not too
stoned at all times to give a fuck or who just “grooved” on the ride, on the
scene and could care less about the finances or the social niceties, was that
the Captain was running a high-grade dope operation getting the best dope from
south of the border from guys, bad hombres from what Josh could tell when they
headed in the bus down to San Diego one time to stay “house-sitting” this huge
hacienda mansion place called Rancho San Pedro for a “friend” of the Captain’s,
he knew from many trips down there. The most persistent rumor that never faded
in the time Josh and Markin were on the bus was that The Living End like he said before was either bought with the
proceeds of a dope deal or the Captain got it in trade.
So the Captain, although he ran a loose ship except when it
came to Mustang Sally and in that case he was totally frustrated with her
antics, was the guy who decided when the bus was leaving for another site. That
why the bus had been sitting on Russian Hill the fateful day Josh asked Markin
for some dope. It had also been why Markin had first picked up the bus down in
Monterrey (and where he meet a short-time fling, Mother Earth, a slender red-head
wearing one of the first granny dresses which had caught his eyes down near
beat down Cannery Row where he was paying homage to the muse of John Steinbeck,
and yes, the monikers, the break from slavery monikers were fast and furious
then.) And this was why through a whole ration of crap trying to get West in
the first place and then trying to find this place that nobody knew of even longtime
denizens of Big Sur the North Adamsville crew met up in the middle of nowhere
California.
Of course as early 1960s corner boys formed by rock and roll
and the deep freeze red scare Cold War night they all loved the wine, women and
song, and the add-on dope until it came out of their ears. They even bought
into Markin’s (and Josh’s) idea of building a commune, getting back to real
life and not the nine to five grind of their parents and of what those parents
had instilled in them. But as time went by, after what Josh thought was about
six months later, after the high tide of the ghost dance they had all performed
on peyote buttons under the direction of a neo-shaman, it was clear that like
with Butterfly Swirl who had left in the late fall of 1967 that not everybody
shared Markin’s dream, not everybody was built for the new world a-borning.
Especially when the real world intruded, like hassles from the cops, like not
being welcomed in various towns and establishments and like the frictions of
living together got too intense. But most of all the whole thing went poof when
Markin got his belated draft notice and decided he had no good reason not to be
inducted into the Army, a decision he would sorely cometo regret, the old gang
started drifting away. Except Josh who would still be on the bus until Markin
got back from the service and he meet him in Oakland to see what they would do
next.
They stayed on the bus for a while, although clearly,
clearly to Josh, something, something the usually gregarious Markin would not
talk about happened in Vietnam, something that had taken the edge off of his free
spirit. So they got off the bus, got a place in Oakland, did a lot of political
work, mainly defending the Black Panthers and other political prisoners who
were increasing under the gun of the American government. One night Markin
mentioned that just as he saw in the early 1960s that a new day was dawning, that
all things were possible by the end of the decade, the first couple of years of
the 1970s, the high tide had been broken, the ebb tide was flowing. Josh held
out for a few more years until Markin went over the edge, started doing
cocaine, got into bad drug deals, went south on some kind of drug deal never
fully explained and wound up with two slugs in his heart in a back alley in
Sonora or and was buried in a potter’s field down there.
Josh thought though after he had gotten back to Olde Saco
from his Boston chore that day he saw the blast from the past yellow brick road
bus on the Maine highway as he was phoning and e-mailing the old companions
about what he had seen that day not everything was for naught. Maybe that bus
was a harbinger of things to come. He was ready.
The Cold Civil War Has Started-Resist Trump this week in Boston! -Join The Resistance!
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