*****Lady Day Is In The House-With Torch Singer Billie Holiday In Mind

*****Lady Day Is In The House-With Torch Singer Billie Holiday In Mind

 

 

From The Pen Of Josh Breslin 

 

 

I remember one day many years ago now, although it could have been any number of years before or since given the woman who I want to talk about, talk about Lady Day, and how she made me feel better about things, about blue things going on in my life those many years ago that I am thinking of, or many years before or many years after that. By the way although I know that this is confessional age, an age when every emotion seemingly has to be publicly wrought out over no matter how private this is not about my blues, or not much but about the lady in question, Lady Day helped chase some of them away and I will leave it to the reader to decide whether I am running a confessional scene like some errant Catholic schoolboy, a faith that I grew up in incense and high Latinisms and all but which probably was trumped by that finer Irish Catholic grandmother heritage of not "airing the damn, her term, family's or your dirty linen in public." Yeah, I do believe the latter prevailed in the long haul. So, yes, I want to talk about a woman whom I never knew personally since she was of my parents generation and thus removed by at least a generation from any possibility of being a direct influence unlike my Olde Saco, Maine corner boys, was hanging out in New York City a place I never went to until my high school years long after she was a shade and was black a condition that would not have played well in that Irish Catholic grandmother-etched neighborhood where I grew up. Had moreover had never been that aware of her as a performer although I believe I heard her one wisp of a time on the Ed Sullivan Show but don’t quote me on that.

Yeah, talk about how a lady from my parents time, from a foreign city and a foreign color chased away my blues, unlike a number of women who I have known from my own time and place, and white too, Irish Catholic red-headed women mostly who have given me endless heartache (although having grown up in a different time and eventually place than grandmother's Irish Catholic-etched Olde Saco neighborhood streets I did had a couple of black women who gave me that same endless heartache), more than once before that day I am thinking about and did so after. This particular day Lady Day came in very handy, it must have been a winter day for sure since I still can feel the frosty feeling, the snow whirling outside and inside my brain I had while the events were unfolding.

So add that to the depression I was feeling over the latest serious quarrel I had had with my wife, the chill and bluster of that winter day had me down as well, as I entered a bookstore in Harvard Square, I think the Harvard Bookstore which is still there although it could have been the Paperback Book Smith which is long gone as Square fixture. That wife very soon thereafter to be my ex-wife, an ex-wife who with her alimony demands and child support would continue to have plenty to do with my blues for a long time thereafter, but who just that moment had plenty to do with the particular depression I felt that time so don’t blame the winter for that, but don’t ask for the particulars of the dispute, that time, that is another story, a story already done and wrapped up in a bow. And don’t blame Billie for either the cold or subsequent divorce since people have blamed Billie enough for what ails them and I have come today to honor that fresh flower lady day.

Now that I think about it on that blustery day I have it ass backwards I think I was entering the old long gone Paperback Booksmith store but it might have been the still there Harvard Book Store up the street so don’t hold me to the particular bookstore just know that it was a bookstore, in Harvard Square, in the cold raw winter (and you know about the depression part so onward).

In any case that is the day and place where I heard this low sad torchy female voice coming out of the sound system most of those places had (have) to liven things up while you were (are) browsing (or “cruising” as I found out later when somebody told me bookstores were the “hot” spot if you were looking for a certain kind of woman [or man], needless to say my kind of woman, bookish, sassy and, well, a little neurotic but the dating circling ritual among the bookish, sassy whatevers is also a story for another day). 

A smoky voice for smoky darkly lit rooms where the smoke hangs on the walls through daylight but best seen in low wattage light  and where romances might burst open (or at least be an inexpensive cheap date at a couple of cups of coffee and a pasty or a couple of glasses of sweet red wine hopefully not just out of the press and more hopefully loosen her up, loosen up that hot date you had been moving heaven and hell to get to for weeks,for the night’s anticipations) reminding me of cafés and coffeehouses in places like New York, Boston, San Francisco. New York around the Village when smoking was “cool,” when cigarettes smokers like me (heavily at times especially whisky drinking or dope pulling times all now mercifully quieted) ruled the roost with regulation butt hanging out of side of one's mouth in the old con man or French gangster imitating Chicago gangster style (and now pity for French style smokers now banished, now desperate refugees in the outer edge of the outdoor café tables, rain or shine, destroying the whole noir cinema night).

When smoky rooms lived and jazz (okay, okay jazz and some rarified urban blues too not the country bumpkin Delta kind every black person who could follow the northern star was fleeing from to break Mister James Crow’s grip) was king and such a rasp-edged cut the air with a knife voice would be  swaying in the background amidst the cling of glasses, small wine glasses bulb-like with slender stems filled maybe one third of the way with some house blend (again hopefully not newly pressed) and sturdy whisky shot glasses which spoke of hard-edged ethnic enclaves, workingmen drowning themselves in sorrows to break the hunger sorrows of their lives and their sons taking right up where they left off except maybe since café prices unlike men’s taverns were dear sipping the edges of the glass more slowly. A voice to cut through the edge of the air around the small murmurs of collective voices (two, three, four but an uncomfortable fit to a table times whatever number Bob, Ray or Sam could squeeze into the space without the fire marshal raising hell about capacity or asking for a bigger extortionous pay-off)  talking of the news of the day (Jesus, that damn war is starting to heat up), the current hardship of life (Christ, the damn rent man was looking for his draw and I barely culled him out of the damn thing), the latest lost romance (divorces, two-timings, will write when I get a chance, waiting by the midnight phone the damn thing growing out of the ear waiting for that prisoner’s one call) or just cheesy chitchat. Yeah just the dross of daily life until the singer (you already know who she is because I set it up that she is smoky-voiced, can cut the air with the damn thing), yeah, until she hits that high white note and for one second, maybe today the time a nanosecond but whatever the count the room is silent, no glasses tinkling (some slender dame almost ready to put the stem of the glass to her mouth, some guy, maybe Red Radley who was famous for the slow whisky sipping and all of the bartender in town dreaded his appearance at their doors because he would take up a table or a stool and the tip would be nada), no dishes clanging (those pastries with two forks almost gone and the parties asking why they had bothered to order the damn thing since it tasted like last week’s stale remainders at some Salvation Army Harbor Lights retreat, which I can tell you is pretty stale, no voices chattering their hearts out (that midnight waiting suspended in the air) but stopped against that neck-turning sound.

The hushed patrons searching the dark smoky night for the source finally fixing in on an ill-lit stage, a joke of a stage put together slap-dash, a few boards, a little varnish, raised just enough to see whoever was performing, hell, to see Lady Day performing she was practically indentured to the owner since he had advanced her seven weeks pay when she had to see the “fixer man” to get well, in order not to cut down on the number of café tables that could be squeezed into the space, a third-rate bass player strumming his beat message (that’s all Harry could afford he said then ranting about the musicians' union scale but what were you going to do  otherwise she would have to hoof it alone), likewise the pitter-patter of the second-rate drummer not playing too loudly in order avoid drowning out the voice in front of him (see he had been her lover before that “fixer man” became her true lover, gave her that smoky voice, let the night air be cut by her voice), and a first-rate big sexy sax man (a second cousin to Johnny Hodges and so had something big and high white culled in his genes) blowing his brains out and mentally taking note that amid the clutter of daily life, the insolvability of the hardships and the need to go on to find the next romance that for that one moment those concerns were suspended.

Yeah, a voice, now that he had been through his own troubles with sister cocaine (hence the knowledge of slow whisky sipping a la Red Radley, Salvation Army Harbor Light retreats, and if you could get through the “detox” then the screwy message they had to spread the gospel that you had to listen to and no Sky’s Miss Sarah Brown all pert, petite, and pious, and of waiting around midnight phones after the twelfth “cure” had not taken and your own Miss Sarah Brown has abandoned ship, has moved onto some other Eddie whose only virtue, and maybe no virtue was that he was not you, that his nose was clean [a pun] and that she would at least have a breather until whatever fatal weakness he was hiding took hold) having just an edge fortified by some back room dope (she was trying to ease off “boy”, H, heroin to the squares and so the “fixer man” was squeezing sweet cousin cocaine into her brain) to break the monotony of the day (and who knows maybe the life, maybe of everything that had led her to this dark, ill-lit stage filled with too many tables, no room to breathe, no drink in hand to get through the numbers until the break as her cousin was wearing off after that early rush) with its phrasing (strange how the phrasing separated out those who could reach that high white note, not every night like this night for she would know but the silence, by the absence of glass clanging, the shuffling of dishes, the small murmurs all in suspension except those clouds of smoke rising to meet her, and her wishing to chase down that damn drink with a nice mellow cigarette to calm her fucking nerves), pleading with you like in some biblical battle between heaven’s angels and hell’s like something old revolutionary divine John Milton would think up but which she just the deliverer of high white notes not some literary light to take your blues away.

Like in that second (okay to be all up to date nanosecond) aside from whatever the dope that was still running round her brain could do she had a space there in that frail shimmering body with its pit-marked skin that could end that fucking war, could make that rent man disappear, could sent that guy a dime to drown that midnight phone madness, hell, could make the decision between red or white for the living room walls, to solve your pain, to take yours on, and get rid of hers.  

Not placing the alluring voice in that bookstore that day since my torch singers of choice then were the likes of Bessie Smith, Dinah Washington, Eartha Kitt, Helen Morgan, or Peggy Lee I asked one of the clerks who the person who was singing that song, the old Cole Porter tune, Night and Day with such sultry, swaying feeling on the PA sound system. She, looking like a smarmy college student, probably a senior ready to graduate and enlighten us, the heathens some way, and therefore wise to the worldly world who didn’t mind the job she was doing while waiting for her small change fame but was not in the habit of answering questions about who or what was being played over the loudspeaker since she had been hired to cater to help patrons find where such-and-such a best seller, academic, or guide book was located, looked at me like I was some rube from the sticks when she said Billie Holiday, of course (and she could have added stupid, which is what that look meant).      

Now that event was memorable for two things, listening to that song and a follow-up one, All of Me (which she did not hit the high white note on in that PA version), almost immediately thereafter got me out of my funk despite the fact that the subjects of the songs were about love, or romance anyway, something I was at odds with just that moment (remember the wife, ex-wife business). The other, as is my wont when I hear, see, read something that grabs my attention big time also was the start of my attempt to get every possible Billie Holiday album or tape (yeah, it’s been a while since that wintry day of which I speak) I could get my hands on. So thereafter any time that I felt blue I would put on a Billie platter or tape and feel better, usually.

In my book, and I am hardly alone on this, Billie Holiday is the torch singer's torch singer. Maybe it is the phrasing on her best songs (like I heard in that first song that got me thinking back to old time cafes and coffeehouses). That well-placed hush, the dying gasp. The hinted fragrant pause which sets the next line up. Maybe it is the unbreakable link between her voice when she is on a roll and the arrangements which with few exceptions make me think whoever else might have been scheduled to cover the song the composer had Billie in the back of his or her mind when they were playing the melody in their heads. Hell, maybe in the end it was the dope that kept her edge up but, by Jesus, she could sing a modern ballad of love (Cole Porter show tunes, Irving Berlin goof stuff, Gershwin boys white boy soul), lose, or both like no other.

And if in the end it was the dope that got her through the day and performance, let me say this- a “normal” nice singer could sing for a hundred years and never get it right, the way Billie could get it right when she was at her best. Dope or no dope. Was she always at her best? Hell no, as a review of all her recorded material makes clear. Some recordings, a compilation, for example, done between 1945 and her death in 1959 for Verve show the highs but also the lows as the voice faltered a little and the dope put the nerves over the edge toward the end.

Here is the funny thing though, no, the strange thing now that I think about the matter, the politically correct strange thing although those who insist on political correctness in everyday civil life should lay off anybody’s harmless cultural preferences and personal choices if you ask me. One time I was touting Billie’s virtues to a group of younger blacks, a mixed group, who I was working with on some education project and the talk came around to music, music that meant something other than background noise, other than a momentarily thrill and I mentioned how I had “met” Billie and the number of times and under what circumstances she had sung my blues away when times were tough. A few of these young blacks, smart kids who were aware of more than hip-hop nation and interested in roots music, old time blues, Skip James on the country end and Howlin’ Wolf on the city end, to an extend that I found somewhat surprising, when they heard me raving about Billie startled me when they wrote her off as an empty-headed junkie, a hophead, and so on. Some of their responses reflected, I think, the influence of the movie version of her life (Lady Sings the Blues with Diana Ross) or some unsympathetic black history ‘uplift,’ “you don’t want to wind up like her so keep your eyes on the prize and stay away from dopers, hustlers, corner boys and the like, or else” views on her life that have written her off as an “addled” doper.

I came back on them though, startled them when I said the following, “if Billie needed a little junk, a little something for the head, a little something to get through the night, to keep her spirits up I would have bought her whatever she needed just to hear her sing that low, sultry and sorrowful thing she did in some long lost edgy New York café that chased my blues away.” Enough said.     

*****The Latest From The Justice For Lynne Stewart Website

*****The Latest From The Justice For Lynne Stewart Website

 

 

 Click below to link to the Justice For Lynne Stewart website

http://lynnestewart.org/

Although Lynne Stewart has been released by “Uncle” on medical grounds since last winter (2014) after an international campaign to get her adequate medical attention her case should still be looked at as an especially vindictive ploy on the part of the American government in post-9/11 America to tamp down on attorneys (and others concerned about the fate of "los olvidados," the forgotten ones, the forgotten political prisoners)  who  have been zealously defending their unpopular clients (and political prisoners). A very chilling effect on the legal profession and elsewhere as I have witnessed on too many occasions when legal assistance is desperately needed. As a person who is committed to doing political prisoner defense work I have noted how few such “people’s lawyers” there around to defend the voiceless, the framed and “the forgotten ones.” There are not enough, there are never enough such lawyers around and her disbarment by the New York bar is an added travesty of justice surrounding the case. 

Back in the 1960s and early 1970s there were, relatively speaking, many Lynne Stewarts. Some of this reflecting the radicalization of some old-time lawyers who hated what was going in America with its prison camp mentality and it’s seeking out of every radical, black or white but as usual especially black revolutionaries, it could get its hands on.  Hell, who hated that in many cases their sons and daughters were being sent to the bastinado. But mostly it was younger lawyers, lawyers like Lynne Stewart, who took on the Panther cases, the Chicago cases, the Washington cases, the military cases (which is where I came to respect such “people’s lawyers” as I was working with anti-war GIs at the time and we needed, desperately needed, legal help to work our way in the arcane military “justice” system then, and now witness Chelsea Manning) who learned about the class-based nature of the justice system. And then like a puff those hearty lawyers headed for careers and such and it was left for the few Lynne Stewarts to shoulder on. Probably the clearest case of that shift was with the Ohio Seven (two, Jann Laamann and Tom Manning, who are still imprisoned) in the 1980s, working-class radicals who would have been left out to dry without Lynne Stewart. Guys and gals who a few years before would have been heralded as front-line anti-imperialist fighters like thousands of others were then left out to dry. Damn.      

Stop The Endless Wars-Listen To The Gals And Guys Who Have Been There-Veterans For Peace-VFP

Stop The Endless Wars-Listen To The Gals And Guys Who Have Been There-Veterans For Peace-VFP

By Frank Jackman

Recently I wrote a comment in this space about “street cred,” anti-war street cred in that case placing the anti-war organization Military Families Speak Out directly in the front line of those who have earned that honor, earned it big time as those of us, even many veterans like myself could expect out in those mean sullen anti-war streets. In that comment I had placed Military Families in the same company as those from my generation, my war generation, the Vietnam War, who too “got religion” on the questions of war and peace and who ran into the streets in the late 1960s and early 1970s to put muscle into that understanding. I noted that there was no more stirring sight in those days than to see a bunch of bedraggled, wounded, scarred, ex-warriors march in uniform or part uniform as the spirit moved them, many times in silent or to a one person cadence, in places like Miami and Washington with the crowds on the sidelines dropping their jaws as they passed by. Even the most ardent draft-dodging chicken hawk in those days held his or her thoughts in silence in the face of such a powerful demonstration.       

That was then and now is now. Now that spirit of military-borne   resistance resides a greying, aging, illness gathering relatively small group of veterans who have formed up under the dove-tailed banner of Veterans for Peace (VFP). While that organization is open to all who adhere to the actively non-violent principles stated below who are veterans and supporters the vast bulk of members are from the Vietnam era still putting up the good fight some forty plus years later. Still out on the streets with their dove-tailed banners flailing away in some off-hand ill-disposed wind stirring those crowds on the sidewalk once again. Still having that very special “street cred” of those who had have to confront the face of war in a very personal way. Listen up.

*****The Hills And Hollas Of Home- In Honor Of The Late Hazel Dickens

*****The Hills And Hollas Of Home- In Honor Of The Late Hazel Dickens

 

From The Pen Of Josh Breslin

Kenny Jackman, the well-known classic rock and roll and early 1960s folk music minute blogger and website contributor Frank Jackman’s younger brother, had heard the late “First Lady Of The Mountains” Hazel Dickens (d. 2011) for the very first time on her CD album It’s Hard To Tell The Singer From The Song some years back, maybe in 2005. At that time he was in thrall to mountain music after being hit hard by Reese Witherspoon’s role as June Carter in the film Walk The Line (and Kenny maybe a little too had been under the spell of the film The Song Catcher whose soundtrack also had many classic mountain tunes including Iris Dement, the “Arky Angel,” Frank’s Arky Angel anyway performing Pretty Saro , a traditional mountain song probably going back to the old country, the British Isles old country, and Child ballads collected in Cambridge and distilled among the folk who put their own oral tradition take on the material speaking of forlorn love, decked out in poor mountain woman clothing, practical calico brought down at Miller’s General Store and brought to life by primitive seamstress hands, a little ill-fitting, a smudge on her cheek reflecting her dirt-poor work on the played out truck farm keeping the rabbits from devouring the family winter-surviving turnips and eking out whatever nutrients the worked-out land would yield for those who did not move west a couple of generations before when the writing was on the wall for all to see but from their hubris or sloth remained in place and miss the end of Professor Turner’s frontier thesis, sitting on the front porch of a broken down old mountain cabin that had seen better days, the typical dwelling with things scattered all over, old time farm equipment, maybe John Deere when new and prospects seemed reasonable that couple of generations before that they would not have to constantly move west like some forbear parents, but who could tell by the rusted paint peeled off condition, the inevitable 1949 Hudson scavenged for spare parts for the still running 1951 Hudson sitting there looking forlorn like some museum piece dinosaur skeleton gone out of style. A scene replicated all along the ridges of the Appalachian and Ozark ranges).
 

At that time Kenny got into all things Carter Family, at first June’s mother Maybelle and June’s sisters who constituted the second wave of the Carter Family experience then reaching back to the first Clinch Mountain threesome (her, A.P., his wife sister Ruth) once he heard Maybelle performing Blue-Eyed Boy accompanied by her on the mountain harp (that blue-eyed boy so legend had it was a guy whom had had an affair with Ruth, had been scared off, threatened by the rabid A.P., or had just left like so many others drifting west after the land played out, after the romance had nowhere to go, and so the song sung by all three since as rabid as A.P. was he was no fool when it came to staking his claims to songs that were already in the loose public domain, or just ripped some placid no account melody off and threw a variation of the words on the thing and recorded it for the dough).

So Kenny knew the Carter mountain roots unto the nth generation. A friend, a Vermont mountain boy, a regular Ethan Allan swamp Yankee from out around Marbury a tiny hamlet in the hills and a place where a sizable migration of New Yorkers and Bostonians would wind up when the struggle against the “monster” government in the early 1970s got too intense and they retreated, strategically retreated to hear them tell the tale to “work the land,” and worked the land no more successfully than that primitive mountain woman Iris Dement was portraying but stayed anyway, Jeffrey Salem, a transfer from Norwich College, who had been a classmate of his at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst back in the early 1970s, and a man whose knowledge of mountain music was sincere and deep although in school that knowledge had gone over Kenny’s head anytime Jeffrey mentioned it had “hipped” him to Hazel during his frenzy. He remembered the name if not the work she had done to keep the vanishing mountain traditions alive, keep them alive on the female side almost single-handedly as Norman Blake would do on the male side. Kenny had picked up the CD second-hand in a Harvard Square record shop, really outside of Harvard Square heading toward Central Square on Massachusetts Avenue, one of the few places around before the advent of Amazon.com where one could get an off the mainstream, second-hand recording of anything folk or its derivatives. The shop, really Sandy’s located in case you forgot between Harvard and Central Squares, a folk institution around that town where until recently Sandy had been holding forth since the early 1960s folk minute when everybody was desperately looking for roots music and that was the place to look first. Hazel’s You’ll Get No More Of Me, A Few Old Memories and the classic Hills of Home from that CD had knocked him out.

All of this mountain dew business you understand came out of left field for Kenny since he was if anything more of a man of the rock and roll era than Frank who at least had been bitten by that early 1960s folk minute that Kenny was too young for, and which he had winced at every time Frank put on some obscure folk song by guys like Buell Kazee and Hobart Smith on the record player in their shared bedroom (these guys would become living gods when hip urban New Yorkers and dour Boston puritans, kin of Francis Child in their academic appreciation of the ballads headed south, or sent emissaries like the ghosts of the Lomaxes, father and son, to mine the lore and regaled to all things mountain for a minute in that folk minute but for our purposes Kenny would grind his teeth). Later where older brothers Lawrence and Phillip in their turns moved out of the family house and Frank moved up the food chain Kenny as the youngest boy had no one below him in the food chain and in solitude would finally not have to hear the stuff and considered himself lucky, foolish him.)   

 

One of the latter mentioned songs on the CD, Hills Of Home, after repeated playing, seemed kind of familiar and later, a couple of months later, he finally figured out why. He had really first heard Hazel back in 1970 when he was down in the those very hills and hollows that are a constant theme in her work, and that of the mountain mist winds music coming down the crevices. What was going on though? Was it 2005 when he first heard Hazel or back in that 1970 time? Let me go back and tell that 1970 story and you can figure it out for yourselves:

Kenny Jackman like many of his generation who were just brushed by the counter-cultural events of the 1960s like older brother Frank had been just brushed by the “beat” uprising of the late 1950s, was feeling foot loose and fancy free, especially after he had been mercifully declared unlike brother Frank, 4-F, medically unfit for military duty a classification lots of  draft age youth in the holy hell high wire days of the inferno Vietnam War would go to the gates of hell for once the news started seeping back from the mounting body-bag count or from guys who made it back to the “real” world and called the thing by its right name, a horror, by his friendly neighbors at the local draft board in old hometown Carver (declared 4-F in those high draft days because he had a seriously abnormal foot problem which precluded walking very far, a few hundred yards at a time without some aid. Walking a skill, just ask Frank, that the army likes its soldiers to be able to do. This classification system had been the one in place before the lottery, and the last recruitment system in place before the draft was ended, which would presumably have still placed him outside the clutches of the military, unlike Frank’s fate, Frank who had serious problems adjusting to the “real” world before he got sober, and that of Frank’s friend, the late Benjamin Smith who laid down his head in Vietnam for no got purpose no good Benny purpose, except as an added name down on that mirror glass black granite down in D.C.).

So Kenny, every now and again, took to the hitchhike road, not like his mad man brother Frank would do a little later with some heavy message purpose a la Jack Kerouac and his “beat” brothers (and a few sisters) after a reading of On The Road whacked everybody who read the damn thing, including me, with the “get away from home and the nine to five routine bug but just to see the country while he, and it, were still in one piece no pun intended but that Kenny soberly told me since the country was in about fifteen pieces then.

On one of these trips he found himself stranded just outside Norfolk, Virginia hard by the Chesapeake Bay, the place where the U.S. Navy has a big installation and they built big ass war ships although those facts are not part of the story but just to give you a sense of what was what then, at a road-side campsite just outside of town. (Like a lot of military towns, with constant transfers in and out, and migrant labor at harvest farm towns such places are common enough to replace the vagrant real housing which is over-crowded or non-existent.) Feeling kind of hungry one afternoon, and tired, tired unto death of camp-side gruel and stews he stopped at a diner, Billy Bob McGee’s, an old-time truck stop diner a few hundred yards up the road from his camp for some real food, maybe meatloaf or some pot roast like grandma used to make or that was how it was advertised on the makeshift blackboard menu written in chalk on the wall as he entered the place. When Kenny entered the mid-afternoon half-empty diner he sat down at one of the single stool counter seats, usually red-topped, that always accompany the red vinyl-covered side booths in such places. But all of this was so much descriptive noise that could describe a million, maybe more, such eateries. You know the chalkboard menu listing the daily specials, which turned out to be the same as the items listed on the plastic embossed menu in front of each paper placemat complete with napkin-folded silverware, coffee cup at the ready to answer the inevitable “coffee” call from the professional waitress behind the counter whose seniority gave her that spot which as any professional waitress will tell you is the goldmine in the diner business since those counter stools are usually the preserve of single truckers, or single guys, who for a kind smile or at least no surliness will leave a larger tip than any hard-pressed father with wife and four kids in one of the booths will leave despite a much larger bill. You know too the menu contained “breakfast all day” in honor of the eighteen hours a day on the road truckers who frequent such places (don’t tell the ICC, about the eighteen hours, or the menu for that matter, please), the meatloaf dinner, the turkey dinner, the grandmother-like pot roast diner, and of course no self-respecting diner worthy of the name would leave you without bread pudding, and that settling the nerves second cup of coffee.      

What really caught his attention though was a waitress serving them “off the arm” that he knew immediately he had to “hit on” (although that is not the word used in those days but “hit on” conveys what he was up to in the universal boy meets girl world attractions). As it turned out she, sweetly named Fiona Fay, and, well let’s just call her fetching, Kenny weary-eyed fetching, was young, footloose and fancy free herself, had decided like half of those under about thirty to spent her summer break travelling east from her hometown of Valparaiso, Indiana since she had never seen the ocean, had drawn a bead on him as he entered the place. Had drawn that bead knowing with some kind of female knowing that he was not a family man and definitely not a trucker and dressed in his semi-hippie garb (emulating older brother Frank as to dress, flannel shirt despite the horrible humidity saved only by the well-soaked tee-shirt underneath which never got dry down south but always had a slightly musky smell, and damp to the touch, blue jeans not bell-bottomed though, sturdy work boots though clunky lasted longest on those hard asphalt and concrete highways where half the time was spent walking between rides to keep moving, and to keep any nosy coppers from “vagging” you, although with no long hair done up in a ponytail for hitch hike road purposes and no long biblical prophet beard, no way) struck her fancy since he had never talked to a hippie guy before. (Jesus, in 1970, was she kidding.) And as they eyed each other and Fiona came over to his stool disregarding her other family customers in the booths and the evil eye of that inevitable professional waitress with her pencil in her hair, her too tight steam stained uniform who was about to approach Kenny’s spot she asked “coffee.” And, …well this story is about Hazel, so let us just leave it as one thing led to another and let it go at that.

Well, not quite let’s let it go at that because when Kenny left Norfolk a few days later one ex-waitress Fiona Fay was standing by his side on the road south. And the road south was leading nowhere, nowhere at all except to Podunk, really Prestonsburg, Kentucky, and really, really a dink town named Pottsville, just down the road from big town Prestonsburg, down in the hills and hollows of Appalachia, wind-swept green, green, mountain mist, time forgotten. And the reason two footloose and fancy free young people were heading to Podunk is that a close cousin of Fiona’s lived there with her husband and child and wanted Fiona to come visit (visit “for a spell” is how she put it but I will spare the reader the localisms). So they were on that hell-bend road but Kenny, Kenny was dreading this trip and only doing it because, well because Fiona was the kind of young woman, footloose and fancy free or not, that you followed, at least you followed if you were eye-weary Kenny Jackson and hoped things would work out okay.

What Kenny dreaded that day was that he was afraid to confront his past, his no hard luck past but his past in any case. And that past just then entailed having to go to his father’s home territory just up the road in Hazard. See Kenny saw himself as strictly a Yankee, a hard “we fought to free the slaves and incidentally save the union” Yankee for one and all to see back in old Carver, a pose that he had learned from Frank who was about fifty times more political than him, lived for it after “Nam” or rather after he settled down and adjusted to the “real” world enough to want to change the thing instead of grouse about it when he was using sweet sister morphine to face that  world (the older brothers and indeed their father never got beyond calling those “stinking” blacks they worked with “n-----s”). And Kenny denied, denied to the high heavens, that he had any connection with the south, especially the hillbilly south that everybody was making a fuse about trying to bring into the 20th century around that time what with Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. (Frank had had it worse since during his high school time Michael Harrington’s The Other America came out, a  shocking expose of Appalachian poverty, including mention of his father’s birthplace had everybody trying to help out with various book, clothes, and food drives right in Carver High School announced each day for a while over the loud speaker by Mister Thomas, the principal.) And here he was with a father with Hazard, Kentucky, the poorest of the poor hillbillies, right on his birth certificate although Kenny had never been there before. Yeah, Fiona had better be worth it.

Kenny had to admit, as they picked up one lonely truck driver ride after another (it did not hurt in those days to have a comely lass standing on the road with you in the back road South, or anywhere else, especially if you had what was short hair in the north but longish hair down there and a wisp of a beard from not shaving for few days), that the country was beautiful. As they entered coal country though and the shacks got crummier and crummier he got caught up in that 1960s Michael Harrington Other America no running water, outhouse, open door, one window and a million kids and dogs running around half-naked, the kids that is, vision. But they got to Pottsville okay and Fiona’s cousin and husband (Laura and Stu) turned out to be good hosts. So good that they made sure that Kenny and Fiona stayed in town long enough to attend the weekly dance at the old town barn (red of course, run down and in need of paint to keep red of course) that had seen such dances going back to the 1920s when the Carter Family had actually come through Pottsville on their way back to Clinch Mountain from visiting legendary yodeler Jimmy Rodger down in Texas some place. (The first Carter Family combination and Jimmy had been “discovered” at the same Bristol, Tennessee 1920s record sessions by an RCA agent who had conducted these demonstration to expand the audience for records and radios.)  

Kenny buckled at the thought, the mere thought, of going to some Podunk Saturday night “hoe-down” and tried to convince Fiona that they should leave before Saturday. Fiona would have none of it and so Kenny was stuck. Actually the dance started out pretty well, helped tremendously by some local “white lightning” illegal corn liquor that Stu provided and which he failed to mention should be sipped, sipped sparingly by guys who were not practically breast-fed on the stuff. Not only that but the several fiddles, mandolins, guitars, washboards and whatnot made pretty good music. Music like Anchored in Love and Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies, stuff that Frank had heard in the folk clubs in Harvard Square when he used to hang out there in the early 1960s and which had driven Kenny up the wall before liberation day when Philip had moved out. And music that even Kenny, old two left-feet, one way out of whack, draft-free out of whack, Kenny, could dance to with Fiona.

So Kenny was sipping, well more than sipping, and dancing and all until maybe about midnight when this woman, this local woman came out of nowhere and began to sing, sing like some quick, rushing wind sound coming down from the hills and hollas (hollows for Yankees, okay, please). Kenny began to toss and turn a little, not from the liquor but from some strange feeling, some strange womb-like feeling that this woman’s voice was a call from up on top of these deep green hills, now mist-filled awaiting day. And then she started into a long, mournful version of Hills of Home, and he sensed, sensed strongly if not anything he could articulate that he was home.

A twangy plainsong plain folk voice brushed by the mountain streams, grabbing that mist between gasps of her breath that spoke of leaving the old country, mostly the British Isles, mostly from the countryside when the fens were hedged in, the common land got sold for grazing, and men, if they were men drifted toward the cities, “drifted” the operative word, just keep moving, keep one jump ahead of whoever was following, leaving  a bunch of generations before, maybe just before the law was ready to set the gallows high, set the noose upon some forbear’s neck for stealing Mister’s pigs, Sir somebody’s wood, the Duke’s deer, poachers all and no respecters of property, maybe a highwayman or con man but in need of quick exit of the clamp would come down and so, desperate, the desperate are always the fodder for leaving when the old home chances ran out of luck headed to the indentured ships, the transport vessels and headed to the new land, the, what did Fitzgerald call it, yeah, the fresh green breast of the new world, where it seemed nobody lived and so the possibilities were endless. But see in that voice there was also this knowledge, not spoken, how could it be too many generations had passed but maybe it was embedded in the DNA by now, that some men, some folk were meant to move, to rumble, tumble, grab this, grab that and then move on, move in that fresh green breast land westward since the harsh seas lay eastward and that noose still held its charms. And so they moved, moved out of East Coast cities (or were forced out, maybe by the same king’s writ that scattered them in the old country) and into the wilderness like some ancient adventurers, some kept pushing west, became rolling stones and some stayed put, some had lost the energy to move west and so stayed put, stayed in ramshackle cabins and shacks letting the farm equipment rust, scavenging for the refuse, stripping the slender leavings, and waited for better times, waited and waited and watched any progeny with any energy head out of the hills to find their own new world, guys like Kenny and Frank’s father who could not get out fast enough whatever sorrows were ahead, and there were sorrows.             

Yes, Kenny Jackson, Yankee, city boy, corner boy-bred was “home,” hillbilly home. So see Kenny really did hear Hazel Dickens for first time in 1970.

[As for Fiona Fay she stayed on the road with Kenny until they headed toward the Midwest where she veered off to head home to Valparaiso in Indiana, her hometown, back to the local business school she was attending and had taken time off from to “find herself” just as Kenny and ten million other generational wanderers were trying like hell to do. Kenny headed west via Denver and the Utahs to California, to Big Sur and a different mountain ethos, splashed by the sea, splashed by the Japan seas, splashed by everything that in his everlasting life needed to be washed clean. They were supposed to meet out there a few months later after she finished up the semester and attended to some family business. They never did, a not so unusual occurrence of the time when people met and faded along the way, but Kenny thought about her, about that red barn dance night, about that lady of the mountains and that wind-swept mountain coming down the hollows night for a long time after that.]    

  

A View From The Left-Anti-Russia Hysteria and Democrats’ Sour Grapes Down With the Sanctions!

Workers Vanguard No. 1103	13 January 2017

Anti-Russia Hysteria and Democrats’ Sour Grapes

Down With the Sanctions!

Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign had two major themes. The first asserted that voters were well on the road to recovery from the ravages of the 2008 recession, an assertion garnished with a sprig of patriotic parsley encapsulated in the slogan “America is great.” The second theme was to question whether a sexist, racist, egomaniacal admirer of Russian president Vladimir Putin should be placed in charge of the nuclear launch button. The rather contradictory implication was that he might casually ignite an atomic Armageddon or fail to do so if the annihilation of Russia (and the rest of humanity) rose to the top of the imperialists’ agenda. In the event, a major chunk of the electorate thought the first theme was hogwash, and many were apparently unmoved by the efforts to revive the battle cries of the Cold War and McCarthy eras. In the final analysis, what won the day in the key swing states was the claim by the reactionary Trump that he, and he alone, could provide the personal elixir required to purge the country of the forces that have eroded the good jobs and prosperity that once were the supposed birthright of every white American male.

Since the election, the Democrats have pulled out all the stops in an effort to persuade the world that “we wuz robbed” by an attack of hackers operating under the command of Putin with the intent of undermining “American democracy” by electing his puppet Trump. Their proof: a gilt-edged report prepared by the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA) that purportedly tracks the chain of command to the Kremlin. Widely accused of playing a role in tipping the election to Trump is WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, as well as FBI director James Comey. It is as yet unclear if the Pope played any role in this cabal.

These complaints of Russian interference in the presidential election are pretty rich coming from the U.S. rulers. Ever since American imperialism emerged onto the world stage during the 1898 Spanish American War, it has intervened around the world through outright invasion or “regime change.” In the early years of the 20th century, the U.S. routinely dispatched troops to countries across Latin America, including Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama. After World War II, Washington was behind the coups that ousted Mohammad Mossadeq in Iran in 1953, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. The CIA-linked National Endowment for Democracy funded groups opposed to Putin during Russia’s 2012 elections, which reportedly has the Russian president still fuming.

The bourgeois media that is now howling about Russian hacking has long promoted the CIA as the pinnacle of veracity. Founded in 1947, at the onset of the Cold War, that agency has provided the lies to justify every one of U.S. imperialism’s unending stream of wars from Korea and Vietnam through Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. Including 14 years ago when it provided the “proof” that Saddam Hussein had accrued an arsenal of “weapons of mass destruction.”

Instead of providing any actual evidence of Putin’s role in hacking the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign chairman (which John McCain labeled “an act of war”), the intelligence chiefs engaged in some classic bait and switch, directing their main attention to RT, a Russian English-language news outlet that few Americans watch. RT’s coverage of Clinton, the report tells us, “was consistently negative and focused on her leaked emails and accused her of corruption, poor physical and mental health and ties to Islamic extremism.” How was that different from Fox News? The report also has the temerity to complain: “RT has also focused on criticism of the US economic system, US currency policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the US national debt.” Americans hardly need RT to tell them about the depredations of the U.S. economic system, Washington and Wall Street.

Barack Obama, who has evidently been “trumped” by Putin in Syria, was quick to endorse the intelligence findings. At the same time, the president made clear that the full version of the exposé will not be available for popular consumption since it would reveal the ever-so-secret methods employed by U.S. operatives. The FBI managed for a while to maintain a skeptical attitude toward the findings of the CIA and NSA. It recently caved in to pressures to join the chorus, perhaps reflecting its director’s desire to maintain his security clearance. Trump voters are hardly alone in remaining decidedly unconvinced by the supposed revelations, in spite of the patriotic hue and cry.

In fact, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the election. The responsibility for this quite undemocratic result lies entirely with the U.S. Constitution and its Electoral College, an institution created by the “founding fathers” to give disproportionate power to the slaveowning states. To quote the memorable cartoon character Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” For our part, as Marxists we are equally opposed to any candidates for public office of the bourgeois parties—Democrats, Republicans and Greens—while fighting against all attacks on the right to vote.

It is immaterial whether the alleged hackers were mobilized by Vladimir Putin or the tooth fairy, as in this instance no attack on voting rights occurred. The real undermining of voting rights in the U.S. starts with mass incarceration, especially of black people and Latinos, and the denial of their right to vote. It continues with the gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court in 2013 and the subsequent barrage of voter ID laws and other anti-voting measures passed by mostly Republican-controlled statehouses.

Hacking foreign governments is the stock in trade of all spy agencies. The espionage operations of the U.S. imperialists are especially devoted to this pursuit, sparing no one, including loyal allies like German chancellor Angela Merkel. Domestically, especially since 9/11, the U.S. government has arrogated to itself the right to monitor everyone’s emails and other personal communications. At the same time, the “right” to proscribe all leaks and exposures has been a special obsession of the Obama presidency.

In the eyes of liberal pundits who portray skepticism of the recent intelligence report as apostasy, the real “crime against democracy” is that the information gathered by hacking was released to the public. No doubts have been raised about its accuracy or authenticity. The leaks merely revealed a portion of the wheelings, dealings and hypocrisy of Clinton and her campaign staff. As Julian Assange noted during a January 9 press conference: “If WikiLeaks had an effect it’s because people read the words of Hillary Clinton and her team and didn’t like what they saw.” Bourgeois democracy evidently demands that its subjects be kept ignorant of the machinations of their leaders.

Indeed, control of information by the capitalist class—through its control of the education system, the press and mass media—is vital to the normal workings of bourgeois democracy, a fig leaf for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Elections under bourgeois democracy allow the oppressed masses to “choose” who will subjugate them during the next few years. Ultimately, domination by the capitalist rulers is ensured through the armed might of the military, the police and the prisons, which together constitute the core of the capitalist state.

The hysteria the Democrats desire to provoke against the fictional war on democracy is simply to cover with jingoist bluster their failure to retain control of the White House, regain control of the Senate or end the ongoing losses of state legislative seats. This has had some impact on the gullible as many Democratic supporters were reportedly willing to believe that the ballot boxes had been hacked.

The diplomatic sanctions against Russia recently put in place by Obama are the cosmetic and fairly routine measures employed by states to signal their displeasure with each other. Not so those put in place almost three years ago to punish Putin for the actions he took in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Those sanctions have exacerbated Russian economic difficulties that were set off by the decline of world oil prices. All these sanctions are an expression of U.S. imperialism’s diktats and must be opposed.

The confrontation with Putin over Ukraine was touched off by the February 2014 fascist-spearheaded coup in Kiev that was engineered by Washington with the assistance of the European Union. With the overwhelming support of the ethnic Russian majority in Crimea, historically part of Russia, Putin moved to reclaim the peninsula the following month, an action we supported. In the ethnically mixed but predominantly Russian-speaking provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, militants fighting government and fascist attacks held a referendum that resulted in an overwhelming vote in favor of “self-rule.” We defended the right of the population of those areas to conduct the poll and act on the result of the vote. That position is an expression of our support for the democratic right of national self-determination, i.e., the right of peoples to amalgamate or to separate. At the same time, we give no political support to the Great Russian chauvinist rebel leaders of Donetsk and Luhansk, nor to Putin’s repressive capitalist regime.

The imperialist NATO alliance has expanded into East Europe, right up to Russia’s doorstep. U.S. imperialism has also sponsored color “revolutions” to install pro-Washington regimes in several former republics of the USSR. The largest contingent of U.S. tanks since the fall of the Soviet Union is just arriving in northern Germany, to be stationed in the Baltics and East Europe, backed up by troops from Britain, France and Germany. In the 2016 budget, Obama laid the groundwork for spending a trillion dollars to upgrade the U.S. nuclear arsenal, a stance echoed by Trump.

The belligerence of the U.S. rulers toward Putin’s Russia is rooted in their determination to keep Russia out of the club of imperialist powers. Arising out of capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92, post-Soviet Russia inherited a large nuclear arsenal in a country with enormous natural resources. Yet it remains essentially a regional capitalist power. Where imperialist countries are characterized by the export of capital, Russia mainly exports oil and other natural resources as well as armaments. The imperialists intervene militarily throughout the world in their drive to control markets, raw materials and cheap labor. Moscow’s main military campaigns, with the exception of Syria, have been within the borders of the former Soviet Union: above all, two brutal wars in Chechnya to prevent the oppressed Chechens from asserting their right to secede, a right that we support.

Trump is no less committed than the Cold Warriors and neocons—from Hillary Clinton to John McCain—to expanding, prosecuting and enforcing the dominance of U.S. imperialism. That is the real content of Trump’s promise to make America great again. Trump’s obsession is to conduct the orchestra; he cares little about the program as long as it promises to further American might. While his opponents fret about whether “fake news” stories influenced the electorate, Trump wants to throw flag burners in prison, the First Amendment be damned. Meanwhile, he appears intent on acquiring many more megatons of nuclear explosive capacity as he charges off to duel with those he perceives as America’s enemies.

The recent U.S. elections revealed the widespread contempt the citizenry has for the governmental administrators of the capitalist system. However, this is not a threat to that system absent a proletarian-centered social upheaval led by a revolutionary working-class party. The model for such a revolutionary transformation is the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. It is necessary to abandon all illusions in lesser-evil nostrums and commit to the building of a workers party that embraces the traditions and intent of the Bolsheviks to overthrow the imperialist order through international socialist revolution.

Doll’s Story-With The Film Adaptation Of W.R. Burnett’s “The Asphalt Jungle” In Mind

Doll’s Story-With The Film Adaptation Of W.R. Burnett’s “The Asphalt Jungle” In Mind

By Si Landon

“I never had a man who drew an even break, never had a man who drew an honest breathe, never had a man who could go all the way, could take me out of the B-girl tinsel town racket. Dix tried, Dix from back about twenty years ago now tried, tried like hell but he was just a hooligan and how could a girl pin her hopes on such a guy,” pined Doll Savoy, but any surname would do she sure had used enough of them, as a tear formed under her mascara eyes thinking about that big lug who went down in a blaze of nothingness twenty years to the day.

No matter where she was, what guy was paying her bills, who she was fucking or taking around the world she would always shed a tear thinking about Dix, Dix Dixon if you needed a last name and how he came to that terrible end in some horseshit meadow in blue mountain Kentucky where he hailed from, where they were supposed to get a fresh start. Fresh start she said with a shrug and a wicked-edged laugh at the irony of Dix pushing up daisies and leaving her alone to fend for herself back at Tilly’s the biggest “clip joint” west of the Mississippi. Left alone to let some guy pick up her bills for a few months before he blew town, went back to his wife or something. Or she got tired of him, tired of the cheap cons, tired of the tired sex, tired of looney guys and their blow-job desires.

Tonight thought Doll would have no truck with guys paying her bills, guys looking to go around the world, guys looking for a quick blow-job behind the alley to Tilly’s (and the bitch of it was if she wanted to keep her job, wanted to be a Tilly’s B-girl, wanted “the life” at her age then she had better be ready to suck cock as Eddie G., Tilly’s night manager made very clear one night when some jerk complained that she didn’t want to go under the table on him. Yeah, where was a real man like Dix when a girl needed a safe harbor and maybe no loving, a guy like Dix had had all loving bled out of him by the time he was about thirteen, but also no bullshit either. The straightest shooter she had ever known. Hell she had enough love to carry the two of them. Didn’t she prove it riding with him through cop roadblocks and blood so he could get back to that fucking hayseed farm he kept dreaming about going back to, going back to get washed clean like in some old time Bible story. And she didn’t say word one when the coppers came to that bloody horseshit meadow about who he was and where he had been so his kin, that was Dix’s word for his folks could cash in some jewels he had in his pocket and reclaim the old farm lost in some Depression wildness. (She had never taken diamond one from his pocket when he went down to that blaze of nothingness. Yeah she had her own straight-shooter code too.)

Dix’s anniversary always made Doll think about how close they had come to happiness, happiness for her anyway since Dix probably was clear out of happiness as much as he was out of loving. She would have created enough happiness for the two of them. Then as the night got darker and she sat in a push-broom hotel room thinking about her own  place, a flop really with that fucking roll-up bed and that never working stove, drinking her Thompson’s blended. Dix’s drink that was how they got started the night he had come into Benny’s, the clip joint she was working at then, and he noticed that she was drinking the same low blend drink that he was looking to buy.  (When she had her Dix “wanting habits” on she wanted no truck with her place over on Kendall Street that Sal was paying the bills on who knows for how long, probably not long as he kept talking about his wife and how maybe if she would just give him a blow-job now and again they might work things out-never a good sign when a man was talking about some other dame, wife or not, giving him head). So this night she was sitting in this cheap Paradise Hotel broom closet, some name for the hour tricks that kept the place going, drinking her Thompson’s blended and working her way back to those final few days when if things had gone according to plan, according to Doc’s big ass fucking fool-proof plan, she and Dix might have gotten off cheap street. Who knows she might have grown to like that horseshit meadow although she had not lived away from the city for more than three days, the one time when she was a kid and a kindly aunt took her to the mountains outside of Denver where she had grown up.             

Her thoughts always went back to the night when Louie Lomax came into Benny’s looking for Dix. It was early and Dix was sitting at the bar drinking his maybe third shot of Thompson’s and she was getting ready down the other end of the bar for her B-girl chores for the night. She had hoped that she would not have to go out into some guy’s car or to some motel since earlier in the afternoon she and Dix had had a great bout of sex, he seemed to relax for once and seemed to enjoy the sex, liked when she took his cock in her mouth and did him until he cried   “uncle” when after he cummed she kept her mouth on that big thing until he really did cry uncle. That was the first time he said she was alright, was a fit woman for him and she blushed with joy when he uttered those few words. She would omit that afternoon tryst with Dix part when she retailed the story of her lost love to her girlfriends like Dottie although Dottie could probably figure out what kept Dix on her leash even if only for a few days.     

Louie went straight to where Dix was sitting and asked him if he wanted a drink something Louie would not spring for if he wasn’t looking for something. Dix, after Louie left, had told her when she wasn’t hustling some guy for a drink (so-called drink-it was nothing but Lipton’s tea for her at ten bucks a pop-a “clip” no question) that he was going out, going to a meeting with some guy named Doc who was looking for a guy who could throw his weight around (a “hooligan” is what they called them but she didn’t know the term until the coppers ran down his felony sheet and one cop said he was nothing but a hooligan and she asked him what was that-and that was exactly what her big man, six two, two hundred pounds was built for-pushing his weight around).The next morning when Dix woke up he told he in vague terms whether she liked the idea of heading to easy street. She had thought nothing of it, had heard that from a million guys before-usually looking for some quick sex in the meantime, except she privately thrilled that Dix had said “we” would be on easy street. Told her too that Doc had a plan so that the whole crew (Doc, a box man, a wheel, a hooligan-and then a fence) would be on easy street from here on in. (She did not find out who the others were until after the caper had been completed-and Dix was on the run.)      

After that morning she had not seen Dix for several days until one late night she heard a rapping on her door and there was Dix with a small, wiry foreign looking guy bleeding, Doc. The plan had been to rob Kaye’s Jewelry Store, the high-end jewelers, from the inside out. Doc had had it all figured. Had it figured right, they had grabbed half a million, maybe more in precious stones-except he, Doc, had forgotten about the accidental which can monkey up any perfect plan. First “forgot” was that the box man, the guy who blew the safe got shot accidently when he had tumbled to guys inside the building after the safe explosion had set off every alarm system in the area-bringing in every copper. Dix had tried to stop the copper and his gun dropped to the ground shooting both the box man in the stomach and grazing Dix. He had shrugged off the wound as nothing at the time-just like Dix. Then the coppers having sensed that the job, the plan for the job, could only have been hatched by Doc who had just been released from prison started their full-court press. Got to Louie first. Cheapjack stoolie no heart feet of clay Louie turned over Jimmy the wheelman.      

That wasn’t all that went wrong on the caper once the script went awry. A big job like this jewelry caper needed plenty of front money to get the crew gathered and so Doc had turned to Allan Ladd, the big well-known crooked lawyer who fronted for half the mob in town, was their mouthpiece when they got to court (and he got them off a lot-the fix was usually in). Ladd was going to front the dough but it turned out he was keeping half the whores in town under his wings and was broke. He was looking to “steal” the stones by a sleigh of hand and get himself out of hock. What were Doc and his boys going to do-go to the cops and complain. What a laugh. He was working with his own guy who was going to be the stick-up man for Ladd. No go-Dix might have been behind the eight-ball but he was a good hooligan-took his job seriously and he wasted Ladd’s confederate. Another guy gone when Ladd put him in the river face down and with as much remorse as he would have a killing a flea.

Then the coppers came for Ladd, knowing that such a caper could not have been greased without a guy who get the stuff fenced on the quiet-and fast. He bought his own life, bought it cheap when all things were considered, wasn’t built for tough guy prisons anyway. Everybody was out of the paly except Dix and Doc. Some cop had ruffled Doc and that was how Dix and Doc had gotten to Doll’s place. Doc decided to head out of town and try to sell the stuff. Dix, bleeding still from that wound at the jewelry store decided he would blow for home. Without me. I talked him out of that with a quick roll in the hay. Then we were off to hayseed Kentucky. You know the rest as Dix bled away in that horseshit Kentucky meadow. Yeah, Dix never drew an even break. And neither did Doll Savoy.