Once More Time, On Intergenerational Sex “…And Keep Me Young As I Grow Old”- Foul-Mouth Phil Is On The Loose-Again

Once More Time, On Intergenerational Sex “…And Keep Me Young As I Grow Old”- Foul-Mouth Phil Is On The Loose-Again

By Sam Lowell

 

A YouTube film clip of Van Morrison performing The Beauty Of The Days Gone By which has the "... and keep me young as I grow old" line in it.

Several years ago back in 2011 I was forced, yes, forced by friendship, forced by the weirdness of the circumstances, forced if truth be known by the point of a gun, metaphorically of course, to publicize the hardly noteworthy fact that my old friend from North Adamsville, a man who used to back then and back in that town be known as “Foul-Mouth” Phil Larkin had in his early 60s latched onto a twenty something graduate student named Amy from Penn State as his “honey,” his girlfriend. Since even a rough approximation of the math involved meant that the age difference between the two that no question this was a situation involving intergenerational sex, a subject at once intriguing and disquieting in American society (not so much in other societies for whatever reasons those societies seem to have less problems with the concept).

Such terms as “robbing the cradle, “old enough to be her father,” “when he is eighty-six she will be thirty nine,’” etc. and plenty of social snubbing, snickers, and scorn come with that designation. Maybe not rightly so concerning consenting adults who should be able to do what they want if the love mood strikes them but there you have it. As such things go the affair with that Penn State doctoral student lasted a year or so and faded into the dew. Not on her, Amy’s part, as she still was very interested in keeping him around but his since he could not understand why a busy student did not have more time for a then recently retired businessman. Tough luck.

Well, now in the year of our lord 2016, the man who used to be known as one Foul-Mouth Phil (more on how he got that moniker and why that name was rightly bestowed to follow and how he was changed in the heat of the 1960s counter-cultural minute to Far-Out Phil below) has been as he expressed it “on the prowl” and now has another girlfriend, Sofia, also twenty-something and they are into some hot relationship according to his latest e-mail to me on the subject. Needless to say this is again a case of the scorned intergenerational sex taboo that Phil seems hell-bent on defying. At this rate since Foul-Mouth is getting older while his girl- friends are staying in the same age range we should be calling him Dorian Gray after the character in an Oscar Wilde novel. More importantly Phil has forced me, yes, forced by friendship, forced by the weirdness of the circumstances, forced if truth be known by the point of a gun, metaphorically of course, to publicize the hardly noteworthy fact that my old friend from North Adamsville, Foul-Mouth Phil Larkin had in his late 60s latched onto a twenty-something young professional women. What price friendship. 

What price friendship, indeed since to lure me into this task the old reprobate invoked the name of Peter Markin, Markin the guy who introduced us back in the 1960s out in California when we were all free-wielding sex maniacs, among other things like ardent anti-war activists, druggies, hippies, music freaks and much else but you get the idea, in the various summer of love experiments. Phil baldly told me that a guy like Markin, a straight-shooter, who was killed in the mid-1970s down in Mexico under mysterious circumstances involving a botched drug deal of some sort, would be proud to tell of the sexual exploits of one of his fellow corner boys, his fellow hippies, and his fellow-travelers.

Invoking Markin’s name was the last straw, the last defense I had against Phil’s onslaught since I had met Markin when I had hitchhiked out to San Francisco in the summer of love, 1967. He was travelling with Captain Crunch’s psychedelic yellow brick road converted school bus which was then parked in Golden Gate Park when I arrived and I walked up asked for some dope. Markin was the guy hanging out one of the bus windows who I had asked for the dope and he gave me a huge blunt and with it my friendship as long as he lasted. He was the guy who would call Phil, just as I from Carver about thirty miles south of North Adamsville called Bart Webber and some of my other corner boys to come out and join the bus. That was also the summer we met Josh Breslin from up in Maine whom Phil had also tried to guilt-trip into writing of his “exploits.” Josh brushed Phil off with the very correct “I’m not going to write about some dirty old man who can‘t keep his member in his pants.” (You know what that “member” means as we don’t want to be gross here since some kids might be reading this although from what my grandkids tell me they know more about sex at twelve than we knew at twenty and we considered ourselves maniacs remember.) So here I am again shoveling, well, shoveling shit for Phil and he wants me to like it.        

Since like every lawyer which has been my career the past almost forty years I like to have some continuity when presenting these matter and since the only interest this screed could possible do is stir the prurient interests of the AARP-worthy set I have expanded what I originally intended to do with the Phil’s story by editing my previous efforts on his part and including them as prelude to the current flame story. Read, if you can take it (and have taken your heart medication).

I mentioned above that I would describe the transformation of Foul-Mouth Phil into Far-Out Phil in the 1960s hippie minute when we were all trying to shed our old personas and take on new ones in order to cope with the new world aborning we were expecting to bring the new Garden of Eden and took new monikers to express that transformation. My had been successively The Dew Drop Kid (do dropping acid, LSD, and whatever other drug I could get my hands on) and Prince Pappy (after travelling on Captain Crunch’s bus all through California for a couple of years and being by then with Markin a senior traveler on that yellow brick road). Markin’s was always “The Scribe,” something someone had dubbed him with one night when he would under the influence of who knows how many bennies endlessly ask questions of everybody he came in contact with. Here goes with some editing from its earlier incarnation:         

“You Are On The Bus Or Off The Bus”- The Transformation Of “Foul-Mouth” Phil Into “Far-Out” Phil- With Mad Hatter Writer Ken Kesey And His 1960s Merry Pranksters In Mind (Fall 2011)

A link to a Wikipedia entry for Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters

By Sam Lowell:

Everybody, well everybody who checks things out here, or on other sites that I am associated with, knows that I am dedicated to swapping lies about the old days. [This piece was originally composed for the popular Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night blog whose followers are deeply immersed in all things 1960s nostalgia.] The old days in this case being the 1960s, and more specifically the 1960s old time corner boy days in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor in North Adamsville, Foul-Mouth Phil’s growing-up working class hometown. And, of course, if one wants to swap lies about those old days, or any days, then one needs a, well, foil, or foils. Needless to say, via the “miracle” of the Internet, in its various incantations, all one has to do is latch onto some search engine, type in “corner boys,” “North Adamsville,” or some such combinations and, like lemmings from the sea, our homeland the sea, every surviving corner boy with enough energy to lift his stubby little fingers will be on your screen before you can say, well, say, be-bop night.

Frankie Riley, the chieftain of the guys who hung around Salducci’s was the first, although he has lost much speed in his pitch since the old days. I won’t bore you with the details of his “exploits.” You can fumble through the archives here for that. [Check the Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night archives.] Nor will I speak of fast-talking Johnny Silver, except to point out that he is the culprit, there is no other way to put it, who started the sexual revolution. No, no the real one that started with “the pill” in the early 1960s and continues through to today with the struggle for women’s liberation, liberation from all kinds of second-class citizen stuff from jobs and wages to help with childcare and housework. No, Johnny started the AARP-version of the sexual revolution-old geezers looking for love, looking for love in all the wrong places, if you ask me but nobody is, asking that is. Those gripping tales can also be found in the archives as well. [Ditto.]

All of this, of course, is prelude to the real subject here. Phil Larkin’s transformation from corner boy “Foul-Mouth” Phil (and he really was, as he would tell you in that moment of candor that he is occasionally capable of) in early 1960s North Adamsville to “Far-Out” Phil on one of the ubiquitous Merry Prankster-inspired converted yellow brick road school buses that dotted the highways and by-ways of the American be-bop heading west night from about the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s (maybe a little earlier in the ‘70s). (For those too young to know, those who have forgotten, and those who have conveniently feigned forgetfulness just in case some statute of limitations has not run out I have placed a link above to a Wikipedia entry for the Merry Pranksters with this post.)

When last we hear from Phil he was heading to Pennsylvania to meet up with some doctoral program research addict whom he “met” on Facebook. [That tale, ah, can also be found below.] However, unlike these seemingly endless “haunting the Internet” schoolboy antics from guys old enough, well I am no snitch, so let’s say old enough to know better, looking for the fountain of youth, or whatever this Phil transformation story actually interests me in a weird kind of way. And so here it is. As usual I have edited it, lightly. but it is Phil’s story, and I am pleased to say a good one.

*********

Phil Larkin here. Jesus, Prince Pappy [Lowell: Like I warned the other guys, Phil, watch on that Prince Pappy, or just Pappy thing] actually liked this idea of me telling about riding the, what did he call it, oh yeah, the yellow brick road bus, back in my prankster days [Lowell: Just to keep things straight, since Phil still likes to play a little rough with the truth, not the famous Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters bus made famous through Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, but certainly inspired by it]. I barely got by with my stories about real stuff that people want to read like the trials and tribulations of an older guy trying to “hook-up” with the ladies on what amounted to a sexless sex site and my rendezvous with Amy (and she is not a research addict, Sam, no way, although she is an addict another way but you don’t want to hear that real stuff story), my lovely sociology doctoral student down from at Penn State (Go, Nittany Lions!). But he is all over, all f—king over, some little bit of “cultural history” stuff that nobody, except AARP-guys (and dolls) would do anything but yawn over. And those AARP-guys (and dolls) are too busy trying to “hook-up,” to grab some sex before is too late to spent more than two seconds on ancient history. So this one is strictly for the, Prince, oops, Sam Lowell.

What got the whole memory lane thing started was that somewhere Sam picked up, probably second-hand off of Amazon if I know him, a CD from Time-Life Music entitled something like Shakin’ It Up: 1966. Now the music on the compilation, the music in the post-British invasion, heart of acid rock night, was strictly for laughs. But the artwork on the cover (as Sam had told me was true on other CDs in that expansive classic rock 'n' roll era series) featured nothing more, or nothing less, than a day-glo bus right out of our prankster days, complete with some very odd residents (odd now, not then, then they were righteous, and maybe, just maybe still are). That scene gave us a couple of hours’ conversation one night and jogged my memory about a lot of things. Especially about what Pete Markin, hell, me too, called the search of the great American freedom night. (He put some colors, blue-pink like just before dark, dark out West anyway, in his but we, for once. were on the same page.)

Naturally, Sam as is his wont [Sam: “Wont” is my word not Phil’s. His, I prefer, strongly prefer, to not to post], once he played the CD and played me for information (I know this guy, remember) ran off like a bunny and wrote his version as part of a review of the CD. Of course, being, well, being Sam he got it about half-right. So let me tell the story true and you can judge who plays “rough” with the truth.

Sam at least had it just about right when he described that old bus:

“A rickety, ticky-tack, bounce over every bump in the road to high heaven, gear-shrieking school bus. But not just any yellow brick road school bus that you rode to various educationally good for you locations like movie houses, half yawn, science museums, yawn, art museums, yawn, yawn, or wind-swept picnic areas for some fool weenie roast, two yawns there too, when you were a school kid. And certainly not your hour to get home daily grind school bus, complete with surly driver (male or female, although truth to tell the females were worst since they acted just like your mother, and maybe were acting on orders from her) that got you through K-12 in one piece, and you even got to not notice the bounces to high heaven over every bump of burp in the road. No, my friends, my comrades, my brethren this is god’s own bus commandeered to navigate the highways and by-ways of the 1960s, come flame or flash-out. Yes, it is rickety, and all those other descriptive words mentioned above in regard to school day buses. That is the nature of such ill-meant mechanical contraptions after all. But this one is custom-ordered, no, maybe that is the wrong way to put it, this is “karma”-ordered to take a motley crew of free-spirits on the roads to seek a “newer world,” to seek the meaning of what one persistent blogger on the subject has described as the search for the great blue-pink American Western night.”

“Naturally to keep its first purpose intact this heaven-bound vehicle is left with its mustard yellow body surface underneath but over that primer the surface has been transformed by generations (generations here signifying not twenty-year cycles but trips west, and east) of, well, folk art, said folk art being heavily weighted toward graffiti, toward psychedelic day-glo splashes, and zodiacally meaningful symbols. And the interior. Most of those hardback seats that captured every bounce of childhood have been ripped out and discarded who knows where and replaced by mattresses, many layers of mattresses for this bus is not merely for travel but for home. To complete the “homey” effect there are stored, helter-skelter, in the back coolers, assorted pots and pans, mismatched dishware and nobody’s idea of the family heirloom china, boxes of dried foods and condiments, duffel bags full of clothes, clean and unclean, blankets, sheets, and pillows, again clean and unclean. Let’s put it this way, if someone wants to make a family hell-broth stew there is nothing in the way to stop them. But also know this, and know it now, as we start to focus on this journey that food, the preparation of food, and the desire, except in the wee hours when the body craves something inside, is a very distant concern for these “campers.” If food is what you desired in the foreboding 1960s be-bop night you could take a cruise ship to nowhere or a train (if you could find one), some southern pacific, great northern, union pacific, and work out your dilemma in the dining car. Of course, no heaven-send, merry prankster-ish yellow brick road school bus would be complete without a high- grade stereo system to blast the now obligatory “acid rock” coming through the radiator practically.”

That says it all pretty much about the physical characteristics of the bus but not much about how I got on the damn thing. Frankly, things were pretty tough around my house, things like no having much of a job after high school just working as a dead-ass retail clerk up at Raymond’s Department Store in Adamsville Plaza. Not really, according to dear mother, with dear old dad chiming in every once in a while especially when I didn’t come up with a little room and board money, being motivated to “better myself,” and being kind of drift-less with my Salducci’s Pizza Parlor corner boys long gone off to college, the service, or married, stuff like that.

Then too I was having some girl trouble, no, not what you think girl baby trouble just regular the battle of the sexes stuff when my honey, Ginny McCabe, practically shut me off because I didn’t want to get married just then. But I knew something was in the air, something was coming like “the Scribe” was always predicting. And for once I wanted in on that. But the specific reason that I split in the dead of the North Adamsville night was that I was trying to avoid the military draft, now that the war in Vietnam was escalating with nowhere else to go. I knew my days were numbered and while I was as patriotic (and still am, unlike that parlor pinko, commie, Sam Lowell and his funny anti-war views every time America has to take a pop in the world to get thing right) as the next guy (and these days, girls) I was not ready to lay down my life out in the boondocks right then. So I headed out on the lam.

[Sam: Phil, as he related this part of the story that night, had me all choked up about his military plight and I was ready to say brother, welcome to the anti-imperialist resistance. Then I realized, wait a minute, Phil was 4-F (meaning he was not eligible for drafting for military service due to some medical or psychological condition in those days for those who do not know the reference). A prima facie example, I might add, of that playing rough with the truth I warned you about before.]

Hey, I am no slave to convention, whatever the conventions are, but in those days I looked like a lot of young guys. Longish hair, a beard, a light beard at the time, blue jeans, an army jacket, sunglasses, a knapsack over my shoulder, and work boots on my feet. Sandals would not come until later when I got off the road and was settled in a “pad” [Sam: house, rented or maybe abandoned, apartment, hovel, back of a “free” church, back of a store, whatever, a place to rest those weary bones, or “crash”] in La Jolla and were, in any case, not the kind of footwear that would carry you through on those back road places you might find yourself in, places like Deadwood, Nevada at three in the morning with a ten-mile walk to the nearest town in front of you. I mention all this because that “look” gave me the cache to make it on the road when I headed out of the house that Spring 1967 be-bop night after one final argument with dear mother about where I was going, what was I going to do when I got there, and what was I going to do for money. Standard mother fare then, and now I suppose.

So short on dough, and long on nerve and fearlessness, then I started to hitchhike with the idea of heading west to California like about eight million people, for about that same number of reasons, have been heading there since the Spanish, or one of those old-time traveling by boat nations, heard about the place. Of course, nowadays I would not think to do such a thing in such a dangerous world, unless I was armed to the teeth and that would take a little edge off that “seeking the newer world” old Markin had been blabbing about since about 1960. But then, no problem, let’s get going. Especially no problem when just a few miles into my journey a Volkswagen mini-bus (or van, neither in the same league as the yellow brick road school bus, no way, that I will tell you about later but okay for a long ride, and definitely okay when you are in some nowhere, nowhere Nebraska maybe, back road, hostile territory dominate by squares, squares with guns and other evil implements and they, the VW-ites, stoned, stoned to the heavens stop to ask you directions because they are “lost” and invite you on board) stopped on Route 128, backed up, and a guy who looked a lot like me, along with two pretty young girls says, “where are you heading?” (Okay, okay, Sam, young women, alright.) West, just west. And then the beatified words, “Hop in.”

Most of the road until the Midwest, Iowa is the Midwest right, was filled with short little adventures like that. A mini-van frolic for a few hours, or a few days. Maybe a few short twenty-miles non-descript rides in between but heading west by hook or by crook. Did I like it? Sure I did although I was pretty much an up-tight working class guy (that was what one of those pretty girls I just mentioned called me when I “passed” on smoking a joint and, hell, she was from next door Clintondale for chrissakes) who liked his booze, a little sex [Sam: Phil, come on now, a little?], and just hanging around the old town waiting for the other shoe to drop. But I could see, after a few drug experiences, no, not LSD, that I was starting to dig the scene. And I felt every day that I was out of North Adamsville that I was finally shaking off the dust from that place.

Then one night, sitting in the front seat of a big old Pontiac (not everybody, not every “hip” everybody had the mini-bus, van or school bus handy for their “search” for the great American night), Big Bang Jane between us, the Flip-Flop Kid driving like god’s own mad driver, smoking a joint, laughing with the couple of in back, Bopper Billy and Sweet Pea, we headed into a pay-as- you go roadside camp near Ames out in Iowa. And at that campsite parked maybe five or six places over from where we planted ourselves was god’s own copy of that day-glo merry prankster bus I mentioned before. I flipped out because while I had hear about, and seen from a distance, such contraptions I hadn’t been up close to one before. Wow!

After we settled in, the Flip-Flop Kid (and the guy really could never make up his mind about anything, anything except don’t go too close to Big Bang Jane, no kidding around on that, no sir), Bopper Billy (who really thought he was king of the be-bop night, but, hell in the North Adamsville corner boy night Frankie Riley, hell, maybe even Markin, would have out be-bopped him for lunch and had time for a nap), Big Bang Jane (guess what that referred to, and she gave herself that nickname, but I never tried to make a move on her because she was just a little too wild, a little too I would have to keeping looking over my shoulder for me to see what she was up to then, probably later too when things got even looser. And then there was the Flip-Flop Kid’s warning ), and Sweet Pea (and she was a sweet pea, if Bopper Billy wasn’t around, well we both agreed there was something there but in those 1967 days we were still half tied up with the old conventions of not breaking in between a guy and his girl, well that was the convention anyway whether it was generally honored or not, I did) we headed over once we heard the vibes from the sound system churning out some weird sounds, something like we had never heard before (weird then, little did we know that this was the wave of the future, for a few years anyway).

Naturally, well naturally after the fact once we learned what the inhabitants of the bus were about, they invited us for supper, or really to have some stew from a big old pot cooking on a fireplace that came with the place. And if you didn’t want the hell-broth stew then you could partake of some rarefied dope (no, again, no on the LSD thing. It was around, it was around on the bus too, among its various denizens, but mainly it was a rumor, and more of a West Coast thing just then. In the self-proclaimed, tribal self-proclaimed Summer of Love of 1967, and after that, is when the acid hit, and when I tried it but not on this trip. This trip was strictly weed, hemp, joint, mary jane, marijuana, herb, whatever you wanted to called that stuff that got you high, got you out of yourself, and got you away from what you were in North Adamsville, Mechanicsville or whatever ville you were from, for a while.

So that night was the introduction to the large economy size search for the freedom we all, as it turned, out were looking for. I remember saying to Sweet Pea as we went back to our campsite (and wishing I wasn’t so square about messing with another guy’s girl, and maybe she was too, maybe wishing I wasn’t square about it) that we had turned a corner that night and that we had best play it out all the way to the end right then for the chance might not come again.

The next day, no, the next night because I had spent the day working up to it, I became “Far-Out” Phil, or the start of that Phil. Frankly, to not bore you with a pipe by pipe description of the quantity of dope that I smoked (herb, hashish, a little cocaine, more exotic and hard to get then than it became later) or ingested (a tab of mescaline) that day, I was “wasted.” Hell I am getting “high” now just thinking about how high I was that day. By nightfall I was ready for almost anything as that weird music that crept up your spine got hold of me. I just, as somebody put a match to the wood to start the cooking of the night’s pot of stew to keep us from malnutrition, started dancing by myself. Phil Larkin, formerly foul-mouthed Phil, a cagey, edgy guy from deep in corner boy, wise guy, hang-out guy, never ask a girl to dance but just kind of mosey up world, started dancing by himself. But not for long because then he, me, took that dance to some other level, some level that I can only explain by example. Have you ever seen Oliver Stone’s film, The Doors, the one that traced the max-daddy rocker of the late 1960s night Jim Morrison’s career from garage band leader to guru? One of the scenes at one of the concerts, an outdoor, maybe desert outdoor one, had him, head full of dope, practically transformed into a shaman. Yeah, one of those Indian (Sam: Native American, Phil] religious leaders who did a trance-dance. That was me in late May of 1967, if you can believe that.

And see, although I wasn’t conscious of it first I was being joined by one of the women on the bus, Luscious Lois, whom I had met, in passing the night before. This Lois, not her real name, as you can tell not only were we re-inventing ourselves physically and spiritually but in our public personas shedding our “slave names” much as some blacks were doing for more serious reasons than we had at the time. [Sam: Nice point, Phil, although I already ‘stole’ that point from you in my CD review.] Her real name was Sandra Sharp, a college girl from Vassar who, taking some time off from school, was “on the bus” trying to find herself. She was like some delicate flower, a dahlia maybe, like I had never encountered before. I won’t bore you with the forever have to tell what she looked like stuff because that is not what made her, well, intriguing, maddeningly intriguing, like some femme fatale in a crime noir film that Markin was, Raymond Chandler this, Dashiell Hammett that, always running on about.

She was pretty, no question, maybe even a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty if it came to a fair description in the light of day but what made her fetching, enchanting, if that is a different way to say it, was the changes in her facial expressions as she danced, and danced provocatively, dance half-nakedly, around my desire. And I danced, shedding my shirt although I do not remember doing so, danced half-naked around her desire. Then, faintly like a buzz from some hovering insect, maybe a bee, and then more loudly I kept hearing the on-lookers, half-mad with dope and with desire themselves, yelling far out, far out. And Far-Out Phil was born.

Oh, as for Luscious Lois and her desire, well, you figure it out. I might not have been as wise to the ways of the Vassar world in those days when such places were bastions to place the young women of the elite and keep them away from clawing upstarts from the corner boy night as I should have been but the rest of my time on the bus was spend hovering around Lois, and keeping other guys away. I even worked some plebeian “magic” on her one night when I started using certain swear words in her ear that worked for me every Sunday after 8:00 AM Mass at Sacred Heart Catholic Church with foxy Millie Callahan, back in the day. Far-Out Phil got a little something extra that night, proper Vassar girl or not.

No offense against Iowa, well only a little offense for not being near an ocean, I think. No offense against the university there, well only a little offense for not being Berkeley but after about a week of that campsite and its environs I was ready to move on and it did not matter if it was with Flip-Flop and his crowd or with Charming Billy (the guy who “led” his clot of merry pranksters, real name, Samuel Jackman, Columbia Class of 1958, who long ago gave up searching, searching for anything, and just hooked into the idea of taking the ride). Charming Billy, as befitted his dignity (and since it was “his” bus paid for out of some murky deal, probably a youthful drug deal, from what I heard), was merely the “leader” here. The driving was left to another, older guy. This driver was not your mother-sent, mother-agent, old Mrs. Henderson, who prattled on about keep in your seats and be quiet while she is driving (maybe that, subconsciously, is why the seats were ripped out long ago on the very first “voyage” west) but a very, very close imitation of the god-like prince-driver of the road, the "on the road” pioneer, Neal Cassady, shifting those gears very gently but also very sure-handedly so no one noticed those bumps (or else was so stoned, drug or music-stoned, that those things passed like so much wind). His name: Cruising Casey (real name, Charles Kendall, Haverford College Class of ’62, but just this minute, Cruising Casey, mad man searching for the great American be-bop night under the extreme influence of one Ken Kesey, the max-daddy mad man of the great search just then). And Cruising was, being just a little older, and about one hundred years more experienced, also weary, very weary of co-eds, copping dope and, frankly, staying in one place for so long. He also wanted to see his girlfriend, or his wife, I am not sure which in Denver so I knew where we were heading. So off we go, let’s get going.

And the passengers. Nobody from the Flip-Flop Express (although Flip-Flop, as usual, lived up to his name and hemmed and hawed about it), they were heading back east, back into the dark Mechanicsville night. I tried, tried like hell, to get Sweet Pea to come along just in case the thing with Lois fell apart or she took some other whim into her head. See, re-invented or not, I still had some all-the-angles boyhood rust hanging on me. We did know for sure that Casey was driving, and still driving effortlessly so the harsh realities of his massive drug intake had not hit yet, or maybe he really was superman. Other whose names I remember: Mustang Sally (Susan Stein, Michigan, Class of 1959, ditto on the searching thing), Charming Billy’s girlfriend, (although not exclusively, not exclusively by her choice, not his, and he was not happy about it for lots of reasons which need not detain us here). Most of the rest of the “passengers” have monikers like Silver City Slim, Penny Pot (guess why), Moon Man, Flash Gordon (from out in space somewhere, literally, as he told it), Dallas Dennis (from New York City, go figure), and the like. They also had real names that indicated that they were from somewhere that had nothing to do with public housing projects, ghettos or barrios. And they were also, or almost all were, twenty-somethings that had some highly-rated college years after their names, graduated or not). And they were all either searching or, like the Charming Billy, were at a stage where they are just hooked into taking the ride.

As for the rest. Well, no one could be exactly sure, as the bus approached the outskirts of Denver, as this was strictly a revolving cast of characters depending on who was hitchhiking on that desolate back road State Route 5 in Iowa, or County Road 16 in Wyoming, and desperately needed to be picked up, or face time, and not nice time with a buzz on, in some small town poky. Or it might depend on who decided to pull up stakes at some outback campsite and get on the bus for a spell, and decide if they were, or were not, on the bus. After all even all-day highs, all-night sex, and 24/7 just hanging around listening to the music is not for everyone. And while we had plenty of adventures, thinking back on it now, they all came down to drugs, sex, and rock and roll with a little food on the side. If you want to hear about them just ask Sam to contact me. The real thing though, the thing that everybody should remember is that dance night in Ames, Iowa when Phil Larkin got “religion,” 1960s secular religion. He slid back some later, like everybody does, but when he was “on the bus” he was in very heaven.

Sam Lowell note: No question that this story, except perhaps for hormonal adolescents, is better than those dreary old geezer searching for young love tales that he ran by us before. By the way Phil, you don’t happen to have Luscious Lois’, ah, Sandra Sharp’s, cell phone number or e-mail address. And don’t lie and say you don’t have it. You never crossed off a woman’s name from your book in your life. Give it up.

Sam Lowell: Now you know how Phil Larkin got his first moniker although he left out a few parts about how a couple of novena rosary bead bible between their knees “nice: Catholic girls thrilled when Foul-Mouth Phil got going which turned them on and I will leave to the readers imagination what those “nice” girls gave Phil for his efforts-and it wasn’t a reading from that Bible which dropped to the ground. I also should mention that a few gals on the yellow brick road bus out in California who knew nothing of Bibles between their knees got turned on in the same manner although that is only rumor on my part. And also how he got his latter one so it is time to give a little sketch, for this is all that it is worth about Phil’s battle of the sex sites which would not seem to be such a big deal but when you are (a) lying about your age and everything else on the sites (b) forced to pay dollars to send messages on most sites in order to even have a chance at one good shot, and (c) have to navigate through all the fake profiles, silly offers and off-the-wall come-ons it is not as easy as one would think, at least according to Phil. I wouldn’t know since I am happily involved with Laura, including the intimacy factor. A bonus for me is that Laura knows what my real age is and all of that. But let me tell you what Phil told me in his own words about his adventures one rainy night in Cambridge at Jack’s, our favorite hang-out over serious whiskey drinks:     

On Intergenerational Sex “…And Keep Me Young As I Grow Old”-

Sam Lowell comment on this skectch:

This space, fundamentally, is devoted to political struggles, the big picture communist future political struggles that reflect the hard fact, as noted by Leon Trotsky's definitive biographer, Isaac Deutscher, that we leftist have in the past, and continue now, to devote the bulk of our energies to the most immediately pressing of the three great tragedies of life, the struggle against hunger. The other two, sex and death, have gotten short shrift other than to be dealt with in broad brush stokes, basically arguing that in our communist future those two acknowledged mysterious passages will be dealt with more thoughtfully, less traumatically, and with deeper insight.

That said, where does that leave my old North Adamsville High School Class of 1964 corner boy class mate, Phil Larkin, and his twin sex and death dilemmas-growing old and still having a yearning for sexual adventure, sexual adventure with younger, much younger women. Other than calling him, rightly I think, a “dirty old man” for even thinking about having sex with a young, curvaceous, nubile woman, to speak nothing of what it might do to his physical condition, we have no immediate leftist program to alleviate his problem. Sorry Phil. No question though under such a now seemingly utopian regime inter-generational sex will be no more the subject of scandalous gossip that various other homo and heterosexual variations of sexual activity that are the norm now.

Now, if one has been attentive, I have, with the exception of Leon Trotsky’s brief fling with Mexican painter Frida Kahlo in the late 1930s during his Mexican exile, not spent much time on the personal sex lives of our revolutionary forbears. That has been in keeping with the traditional reticence of revolutionaries to discuss their personal sexual lives. And with my own preferences in the uses of this space. I, however, feel that Phil Larkin’s case can be instructive for those of us who are going into our “golden years” and are still as randy as middle schoolers. Therefore I have posted Phil Larkin’s story, non-leftist, non-political, Phil Larkin’s story here for your perusal. The weak of heart, those under a doctor’s care, and assorted outraged moral philistines should avoid reading this for the good of your lives and/or souls. Note, and note carefully that other than a little editorial work this is strictly Phil’s responsibility although I will admit my temperature and pulse were vicariously rising somewhat while performing this onerous task.

Phil Larkin’s comment:

I always liked younger girls when I was just a kid and I never got out of that habit, that sweet young thing habit. I used to take a lot guff from Frankie Riley, Peter Paul, Sam and the other corner boys “up the Downs” at our hang-out, Salducci’s Pizza Parlor, when at sixteen I dated up twelve-year old “Luscious” Linda Lorraine (but “hot,” hot way beyond her years as I found out, have mercy, when she practically “raped” me, raped me if you can believe that, on our first date down at the North Adamsville Beach one summer night. I won’t say more because Sam, who is editing this thing, might take a heart attack when he reads this since he never got to first base with her, and he tried, at least that is what she said, and they had all tried). They would yell “jail bait,” “baby-snatcher,” “cradle-robber,” and all that stuff that has been said by people, guys especially, since about the time Adam tried to date up Eve (who was a lot younger than he was and must have been pretty “hot” herself to get Adam off the straight and narrow) but she was fine, some sweet soap-smelling fine, and just getting some nice curves and stuff. Maybe that is where I got the habit.

[Lowell: All we ever said was “watch out” Phil. Linda, who lived the next street over from me then, was nothing but a “man trap,” a serious man-trap and Phil was only one of several who enjoyed her “favors” in those days. Despite Phil’s obvious lapse of memory I never tried to get to first base, or any base with her. As for the others, the corner boy others, I would not be surprised if on some “horny” girl- friend-less nights they didn’t take a shot at it. It wasn’t hard. Last we heard of Linda she had had several kids by her early twenties and died of a heroin overdose in her mid-thirties so it wasn’t the age thing at all about Linda whatever Phil might say now.]

And it's always pretty much was that way going forward. My first wife, Laurie, whom I met and who Sam knows, was nothing but a fox when I was in graduate school and she was in high school and whom I met when I came back for a North Adamsville –Adamsville high school Thanksgiving Day football game. She was captain of the Red Raider cheer-leaders and I took dead aim at her [Lowell: I agree Laurie was a fox, no question, but again we told Phil to “watch out” on her as well because she was nothing but a man-eater as he found out a few kids, and a lot of alimony payments, later. I admit I took a “run” at her myself when they split up but I am still grinding my teeth over the way she treated me during our short “affair,” if that’s what you could call it.] When I met my second wife, Alicia, she was just in graduate school and I was in my late thirties. [Lowell: Phil and I started drifting apart then, mainly different parts of the country, so I don’t know about Alicia’s qualities but Phil says that she treated him “good,” which to Phil always meant good at giving him oral sex, you know a blow joe, head, skull, whatever you called it in your neighborhood when he was a good boy and stuff like that. Ask any guy, me included whatever a guy likes a little oral sex for being good, or bad, is icing on the sex night cake. Okay, get used to it we are adults and more explicit sexual details will be coming up so be forewarned. And take your heart medicine for god’s sake.] My third wife, Becky, was barely out of college and I was in my forties when we met but she was in that “good” category.

After that I stopped marrying them and just settled into a steady diet of “dating” seemingly ever younger women that I met through my work contacts or other social situations. [Lowell: Phil was, and is, a very good construction site consulting engineer.] And then, after Carrie left to pursue her screen-writing “dream” in California things dried up, dried up hard for this older man [Lowell: Carrie was Phil’s last serious live-in girlfriend, emphasis on the girl part, barely legal]. Well, first, damn the computer age for one thing, since it meant I could do more of my consulting work from home. And get more work done (and charge more as well). But it meant that the social situations also dried up. And no 50-something guy, no 50-something guy in his right mind, is going to the “meat market” singles bars around town trying to pick up the young ones when they have plenty of young guys around to moon over and get worked up about. [Lowell: I am trying to be gentle with Brother Larkin here but he “forgot” to mention getting laughed at, ridiculed and told to go “back to the nursing home” by those self-same younger women. He also “forgot” to mention that he was not a 50-something guy but a 60-something guy when the “heat” came on him.]. And second, damn, whatever that Adam “spreading his seed” thing was because even if things dried up socially this old man wasn’t dried up, if you get my meaning. [Lowell: Translation; he was still as randy as a middle- schooler] So I did whatever any “on the information super-highway” guy would do, I went online looking for sex sites, younger women-centered sex sites. [Lowell: Phil didn’t have to work up a sweat finding them they practically come at you from your homepage onward. Just Google “sex” and you will get whatever you want.]

Of course “dating” services have been going on since just after Adam and Eve got it on. (Eve, by the way, a younger woman, a much younger woman and probably pretty “hot,” with a firm, curvaceous, naked body hot from what I heard, if I didn’t mention it before). Nowadays though (thank god, and thank god I took my medicine beforehand) the sexually explicit stuff women are putting online for your perusal is “over the top,” especially the younger ones, thank god. So naturally I filled out my “profile” page, paid my dough (via credit card but be careful), and “joined” all the other guys, horny guys waiting, wanting to “get laid” tonight.

Well things were kind of slow for a while since I blocked off returning messages to any women over thirty, and rightly so as they started looking kind of sad sack by then (although there were plenty of them around, around with kid baggage, if that is where your tastes run go see them and their hard luck stories). I thought at first it might be because there was a prejudice against 50-something guys in this hellish youth-drive universe. [Lowell: See note above on the age question, the Phil age question.] And then Tracy, sweet eighteen-year old Tracy, answered my plea.

Now Tracy was not your average young woman (girl really but let’s leave it at that). She was eighteen, bright, intelligent, ambitious, resourceful, and looking for a “sugar daddy,” whatever that might mean. Yes dear, Phil Larkin is just your meat. [Lowell: After some research this old-fashioned term “sugar daddy” could mean, like in the old days, someone, some man, who paid the freight to today’s “hook-up” or “friends-with benefits," or something entirely innocuous.] But here is where the problem came in. We sent many message back and forth and we were making some headway. She stated clearly that she was not into “mere boys,” but older men who had been around, and knew a thing or two (or three). Yes Tracy, Phil is very, very just your meat.

Eventually she agreed to meet me in a public place to discuss, discuss our “the exact meaning of sugar daddy" business, and the like. But here is where the wheels started to come off, almost. She wanted some pictures of me, presumably recently up-loaded digital camera-produced photos, before we met. Her idea, innocent enough, and actually reasonable enough, was to make sure I was not some three-headed monster or, perhaps, someone recently released from parole for any number of charges from sexual offenses to murder and mayhem [Lowell: Smart girl. As for any possible sexual offenses, as far as I know, they were all consensual and not in the least bit criminal although a few irate fathers might differ. The murder and mayhem I would advise that Phil plead the Fifth on that one.]

And that was the first stumbling block. See, old guys like Sam, Frankie and me, were not suckled on computer technology practically from birth like today’s kids. We survive on the “information super-highway” but just barely and while I know, as Sam does, enough to get by let’s just call us “primitives.” In short, I confess, bitterly confess, any pictures I had were not digital, and even if they were I did not know how to up-load them onto any site, sex site or not. Truth. However Tracy did not believe me, and it made sense in her iPhone, iPad, texting, Facebook world that everybody knew how to do such an easy eight year old can do it simple task. I only avoided total defeat by producing some older photos and reading every manual for up-loading that came with the printer. I finally did it but it was a near thing.

I won’t bore the reader with the details of our first meeting, or our later meetings but she was certain fetching in person and wiser in age than some of the older young women that I have been with through the years. But the big thing was that she was wonderful in bed. And this is where the faint-hearted, or just plain perverted, can get off and find your own sex site. Well let’s start off as always with the firm, soft, wrinkle-free skin, breast, buttock, thighs, that has driven me wild since old-time Linda Lorraine (hell, I can still smell her Palmolive soap, or perfume or whatever she used to drive the boys wild even now). Then of course the school-girlish strip tease that always gets me going. And then placing her mouth, well, placing her mouth where it did some good. Hell though everybody who reads this knows what’s what. I don' t have to draw a diagram, do I? Yes, we did it did several times (not all in one day, Viagra is good but not that good). She was very inventive with positions and of course, I knew a thing or two (or three) that got her going (read: moaning and groaning for her sugar daddy and not the old –fashioned meaning of the word either whatever Sam’s research said it meant in the old days). She still smiles about those two (or three) things when I bring them up).

But the point is really about “… and keep me young while getting old” as the line from the Van Morrison song, The Beauty Of The Days Gone By. Some guys get it by pumping iron or other maniac strenuous exercising, and some by endless youth-enhancing operations. And some, like Sam, by writing endlessly about the old days like they were coming back, or could do anybody any good. [Lowell: Watch it, Phil, watch it brother.] Me, no, I want a young thing, a young firm thing, a young sex-crazed thing, a firm young thing that wants a lesson in those two (or three) things I could teach her (and have her sweaty-smiling a couple of days later over) right next to me right up until, and maybe past, judgment day. Can you blame me?

Sam Lowell postscript comment:

We had better get to that left-wing future in a hurry, a real hurry. In the meantime I’ll go off and take a shower, a very cold shower. Oh yes, Phil, by the way (BTW for the cyber-slang crowd) what is Tracy’s cell phone number? Or does she have a geezer-craving girlfriend? Whatever you do, Phil- “don’t watch out, not now.”

Sam Lowell comment again:

Naturally a guy like Phil who has played it close to the edge all of his life when it comes to women (you know of course I mean young women after all this is what this whole short cautionary tale is all about. Here comes the hammer: 

 

On “Sexless” Internet Sex Sites- Or How “Foul-Mouth” Phil Larkin Got His Comeuppance-Finally- With The North Adamsville Salducci's Pizza Parlor Corner Boys In Mind

By Sam Lowell

Normally I provide a link to some relevant topic in the headline on my posts. Do not click on the headline to link to an Internet sex site. Are you kidding? All you have to do is type in the word “sex” on any search engine and you will be inundated with every type of fetish you every wanted, or didn't want, to know about. We are all adults here-happy hunting-on your own.

*******

Sam Lowell comment:

Hey, everybody knows, or should be presumed to know to use some legal parlance which may become necessary before this latest “fire storm” is over, that this site is an exemplar of politics, mainly left-wing pro-labor propaganda politics. No way is it some way station for AARP-worthy sex-starved refugees and fidgety lonely-hearts from back in my corner boy youth days. Although apparently that fate, short of some drastic legal action on my part, is what looms before me after I, unwittingly I think, let an old corner boy from the North Adamsville Salducci’s Pizza Parlor high school hang-out night, Johnny Silver, have some space here to tell what turned out to be a pretty salacious story about how he “hooked-up” with some young, very young, barely legal woman that he met through a sex-oriented Internet site.

My permissive attitude on this not strictly politically-driven subject was to let Johnny hold forth on the basis that intergenerational sex is still, more or less, socially taboo in this society and that under a future left-wing society we will take a much more liberal attitude on the subject as well as on many other now sexually-repressed notions. Johnny’s story, which I admit had even my temperature going up a bit after reading it, however set off this current fire storm.

Not about the struggle against imperialism in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Not the struggle to make some headway against the bosses and their relentless drive for profits at the workers expense here in America, and internationally. Not even commentary on the death penalty, gay marriage, the perfidy of Barack Obama, or the lunacy of the tea-partiers. No, I have been deluged with e-mails by every AARP-type that I know who want to harass me in order to tell their misbegotten tales of missed sexual opportunities, the sexual discrimination against oldsters by younger, well, younger women okay, or whatever else is on their minds except those much more important subjects. Please, please stop. Tell it to Oprah, or whoever is working that street these days.

The worst of the lot was my old corner boy (part-time corner boy at Salducci’s but full-time at the Surf and Sea Club in summer and whatever and wherever in winter) “Foul-Mouth” Phil Larkin. Now Phil, who I actually met in junior high school (a.k.a. middle school) through my chieftain in those days, Frankie Riley, really did deserve that nickname. Even Frankie and I walked away from Phil when he got going with every swear known to the English language (and some in Gaelic too-at least that is what he said his grandfather taught him). So you can imagine what the girls felt when he went full-bore. Strangely Phil, unlike now as his story below will explain, never lacked for girlfriends, and not just wrong side of the tracks, low-life, slutty girls either but many girls who you could see, see and stare at, every Sunday at 8:00 AM Mass over at Sacred Heart Catholic Church. So, maybe, he touched off something basic in them with his language. Personally, while I could swear like a trooper when necessary, I didn’t around girls or in public that much.

In any case, as I have already telegraphed above Phil, still using that ill-bred language has threatened murder, mayhem, and, more importantly, legal action (something about gross denial of freedom of expression) if I don’t post his sad-ass story. Needless to say that approach by itself does not get one anywhere with me. However in line with my idea in posting Johnny Silver’s salacious little sex tale noted above I have agreed to post Phil’s saga if only to use it as an example of sexual repression under capitalism and why we need, desperately need, that socialist revolution that is the hallmark of the real purpose of this space. Needless to say I take no personal, political, social, linguistic, or, most importantly, legal responsibility for this story. I have edited it lightly for language and content but this is strictly “Foul-Mouth” Phil Larkin’s story. If you want to take legal action against him feel free to do so. Needless to say as well that Phil is in no way (thankfully) political, much less a leftist, although he desperately could use a shot, a big shot, of what our socialist future promises.

Phillip Larkin comment:

First of all before I get into my f--king hard luck story about my sexless life on the sex sites let me clear the air about something that that twerp Sam Lowell said about my “foul-mouth.” You know in junior high school (now known as middle school) young, f--king hormone-juggling guys (and girls I found out later) don’t always know how to deal with that hard fact of growing up and my way was to swear a little. Big deal, right? Big deal then, or now. But you also know, and even f- -king Lowell knows this, at that age you get a certain “rep” and it carries around with you like a lead balloon all through school, especially with guys that you hang around with. Like the late Peter Paul Markin was always from day one that I met him “The Scribe” (always capitalized, by the way) anointed by Frankie Riley and it stuck even though he hated to be called that. [Lowell: Okay Phil we get the point. Let’s move on.] And so my little swearing episodes, not much really, got me tagged as, well, foul-mouthed [Lowell: Phil must have a slight case of amnesia on this “little” thing. He was the world, well, at least the North Adamsville Junior High, champion swearer. He is the only kid, and Frankie Riley will back me up on this, who was able to make a sentence using only swear words. Some feat. Phil is, apparently, far too “humble” now to take a bow for that now.]

The thing about swearing though is that it never got me in much trouble with the girls. The Scribe, Sam, and Frankie were always (and Johnny Callahan too) very prim and proper in their language around girls although it never got them anywhere. And The Scribe (oops, Markin) could swear worse than me when he got his Irish up. But that is neither here nor there. Unless he wanted to if he were still around so we could mess with the missed bastard’s head to make something of it now. What it all ties in with though is that I have always used a certain amount of rough language around girls and they have either found it “cute” or, and here you have to take my word for it, kind of got “turned on” by it. I’ll give an example and Sam will be surprised. Millie Callahan the best, or one of the best, looking sixteen-year old girls in old North Adamsville was very prim and proper as well as hot-looking. She went to 8:00 AM Sunday Mass at Sacred Heart every week. And every week I would meet her after Mass and walk her to old Adamsville Beach. Sweating like a trooper. Maybe once in a while she would blush but mostly she got “turned on.” Turned on especially by one word that I used in many contexts on our walks. One Sunday, I swear, she got so aroused that, well let’s say we “did it” and you can figure out what the “did it” part was, right down on the beach near the old North Adamsville Yacht Club (there was a little secluded area that everybody knew about). And we were together through the rest of high school, “doing it” just fine. [Lowell: Yes, Phil, Millie was a fox, for sure. I used sit a couple of rows in back of her at Mass to look at her ass. By the way everybody knew you two were “doing it.” And I was jealous, no question. It was only because she went to St. Anne’s High and not North Adamsville High that it was not more widely known and commented on. Nice work, Phil.]

The whole point of bringing this swearing thing up this many years later though is that, more often than not, the way I got entangled [Sam: Nice word, Phil] with women later on was that same basic approach. Sure I went through three marriages, and a several girlfriends, so maybe my “sticking” power wasn’t so great but it got short haul, short ashes hauled results. Anyway after the last one left a couple of years ago I started to notice that because of that lost and my changed work situation (working out of the house more with the luxury of the Internet age computer niceness) I wasn’t running into women to swear to, and maybe turn on.

Now I have read Johnny Silver’s wicked little story about his “trials and tribulations” with the young quail and how he was wasting away without it. [Sam: Young women, not quail Phil. Did you hear about the women’s liberation movement in your travels?] And how he finally “got lucky” with some teeny-bopper. Well we all knew Johnny was that way. In fact I had to f--king warn him off of my younger sister, Kate, one time. [Sam: Oh yeah, I remember that time. I think you had a baseball bat in hand at the time, right?] Me, I like women a little older, more my own fifty-ish age say twenty something and so I figured since nothing was happening elsewhere I would, like Johnny did, give one of the Internet sex sites a try. [Sam: Is every lonely-heart guy over the age of about thirty “running” to the sex sites for love and whatever? Am I missing some important sociological trend here? Also what is it with you old corner boy guys? Nobody expects you to tell the whole true to strangers, especially on the Internet, although it helps, but this age thing is weird. We are all sixty-something. That fifty-something was a while back but I never was a snitch, and I won’t be one now.]

I don’t know if you know how these sex sites work. Let’s just call the one I went on Get Laid Fast and you will get the flavor of the thing. [Sam: Phil, you don’t have to tell anybody over the age of about ten about Internet sex sites. All you have to do is Google the word sex on any search engine in the world and you will get more sex sites than you can possibly imagine, including, I assume, your Get Laid Fast site.] Naturally the lure (for an old-time heterosexual man) is sexy, semi-and unclothed women, young and middle- aged (nobody, nobody in their right minds that is, confesses to being, well, mature, hell, I will just say it straight here, old), just waiting to get their hands on you (where I will leave to the reader’s imagination but you get the point) and show you paradise, yes paradise. Just my cup of f-- king tea. Where do I sign up, and how quickly.

That signing up was the easy part. Well, almost easy. See, the hook is that everybody can sign up and put whatever they want on their very own personal profile page. The problem is that unless you pay up, pay up a fee, nobody in the known cyberspace world is going to know about your sex hunger, especially those alluring semi and unclothed young and middle-aged women. Hey, I am a man of the f -- king world so I know that I have to pony up, and gladly to get in on the action. And so I am off to the races for a few ducats.

Well, almost. Almost on two counts. First I have to figure out what my profile message will be and then my “message” to those women’s profiles that strike my fancy. So, naturally I go light on my personal profile. You know how I am looking for the love of my life (already had it). [Sam: I bet six, two, and even it was old time Millie Callahan, hands down. Hell, she might have been the love of my life too if I could have ever gotten beyond staring at her ass during Sunday Mass.] And companionship and all that other crap when everybody knows it a roll in the hay that is driving me, and about three billion (or whatever number of guys are in the world), to sites like this. And, maybe, women too. Or at least that is what I my worldly assumption would have been. The really, the Phil Larkin reality, is that I might have been better off on some mix and match dot com square dating service. Hell, I am willing to bet Sam his six, two and even I would have had more rolls in the hay by now that way than on this “hyper”- sex site.

Here is why. And don’t laugh at a f - - king fifty-something guy for being so silly. [Lowell: Phil, I know you, we went to school together, get real-sixty-something, okay.] I went back to my old tried and true strategy with my personal messages to various women who struck my fancy. Nothing like in kid time but still basically- “babe, do you want to f- - k tonight, don’t be a bitch, call me now, here is my cell phone number," and the like. Now the site is loaded with women within about fifty miles of my residence so I naturally click on all those thirty and forty something women as well as my twenty something honeys who have been around a little, are looking for a little sugar in their bowl, and are bound to go for rough and ready fifty-something guy. No sweat.

Actually my line, as I found out later, was kind of tame and “civilized” compared to some of the younger guys who were swinging their dicks in full view and stuff like that. Hell, it was tame and civilized compared to some of the women’s profile information and photos. I blushed, actually blushed, at some of the stuff they, theoretically, wanted to do, and do right this minute. Notice that word "theoretical" though. For example, first off I got a proposal from a thirty-something woman who wanted me to help her in her new career as a cosmetologist. She had, foolishly, gone to art school when she was younger and when the art-related job that she had didn’t survive the recent economic downturns she saw the light of working the women who are still working hair and nails racket. Still kind of artistic, right?

And I was willing to give the idea some consideration; although unlike Johnny Silver I did not play the older, wiser “sugar-daddy” angle. Or give any thought to such a notion with older women. If I was looking for Johnny’s teeny-boppers sure. But with older women, no way. Here is the hitch though. Said future hairdresser in return for my largesse was only willing to be a companion, a platonic, no sex companion for an “old geezer” (my term, hers was a man “old enough to be her father”).

And it went down from there. Although nobody, absolutely nobody that answered my messages was put off by my so-called lewd language. Case closed on that. What was also case closed though was my faulty understanding of the cyberspace “meat market.” I will not run down every click but just give some observation examples.

Many of the semi- and unclothed women whose profiles spoke of sexual adventure on personal contact wanted, desperately wanted in fact, not be a “one-night stand” and therefore put off any notion of sex with them to the Greek calends. That happened several times. Needless to say, other than the question of false advertising on their part here that I may speak to my lawyer about, I stopped communication very quickly. No sale, no way. Moreover, many women were carrying “baggage” of various sorts. Kids, broken marriages, bad-ass ex-boyfriends, you name it. That would not have put off old Phil but one or two messages was enough to indicate that their “get laid tonight” come-on was nothing more than getting some psychic comfort for their old wounds, and nothing more until the Greek calends. Again, no sale, no way.

So you can begin to see why I suggested the title “sexless” sex sites to Sam. And why he grabbed onto the idea right away (aside from my admittedly incessant badgering him after pure-as-gold Johnny Silver got his say). A couple of “conversations” warrant special attention though. One woman, an otherwise very interesting arty-type woman whom I actually met in person if you can believe that, did not believe that her “aging” twenty-something life would be complete unless she had a lip-enhancement operation so she could have those pouty Angela Jolie lips. Jesus, what the hell has the world come too. I admit I was tempted, sorely tempted, to help her out although her lips looked perfectly kissable to me. But again the notion of sex with her before I was placed in an assisted- living facility was out of the question. Yeah, you have got it by now. No sale, no way.

Another woman, and here she can serve as an example of other similar instances that happened, was fired-up to chat (as I was with her as well) and we e-mailed a blizzard of messages back and forth. She, more than many others, was someone I wanted to meet in person and I brought the subject up in one e-mail after we had been “cyber-chatting” for a few weeks. Kaput. She went off-site the day after that and left no forwarding address, no e-mail address, as they said in the old days. Maybe I have to change my line. Or better, and here I could get back at Sam as well for his silly “comeuppance” remark in the headline. Maybe, Mille Callahan is out there is cyberspace somewhere. Honey, I still remember that swear word that “turned” you on. Help.

Sam Lowell comment yet again:

Yes, I know. I know damn well that I should not indulge my seemingly endlessly sex-haunted old-time corner boys. After all this space is nothing but a high-tone “high communist” propaganda outlet on most days- the good days. I should, moreover, not indulge a “mere” part-timer at our old North Adamsville Salducci’s Pizza Parlor hang-out be-bop night “up the Downs” like one “Foul-Mouth” Phil Larkin. (For those who do not know what that reference refers to don’t worry you all had your own “up the Downs” and your own corner boys, or mall rats as the case may be, who hung out there.) Despite his well-known, almost automatic, foul mouth in the old days Phil had his fair share, more than his fair share given that mouth, of luck with the young women (girls, in the old days, okay). I am still mad at him for “stealing” my old-time neighborhood heartthrob, Millie Callahan, right from under my nose. (And right in the Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church after Mass to boot. If he is still a believer he stands condemned. No mercy. As for me, an old heathen, I was just glad that I stared at her ass during Mass. I stand condemned anyway, if things work out that way).

Well, that was then and now is now and if you read about “poor” Phil Larkin’s trials and tribulations with the ladies recently in a post here entitled -“Sexless” sex sites” (see above) you know that his old Irish blarney ( I am being kind to the old geezer here) had finally given out and that he was scoreless lately. That is he was scoreless as of that writing. As Phil pointed out to me personally as part of our conversations while I was editing his story he felt that he would have had better luck with finding a woman companion (for whatever purpose) by just randomly calling up names in the telephone directory than from that “hot” sex site that he found himself embroiled in. And, in an earlier time, he might have been right.

But we are now in the age of so-called “social networking” (of which this space, as an Internet-driven format is a part) and so, by hook or by crook, someone placed his story (or rather, more correctly, my post from this blog) on his Facebook wall. As a result of that “click” Phil is now “talking” to a young (twenty-something) woman graduate student from Penn State (that is why just a few minutes ago he was yelling “Go, Nittany Lions” in my ear over the cell phone) and is preparing to head to the rolling Appalachian hills of Pennsylvania for a “date” with said twenty-something. Go figure, right? So my placement of this saga, or rather part two of the saga (mercifully there will be no more), is really being done in the interest of my obscure sense of completeness rather than “mere” indulgence of an old-time corner boy. As always I disclaim, and disclaim loudly for the world to hear, that while I have helped edit this story this is the work of one “Foul-Mouth” Phil Larkin, formerly of North Adamsville and now on some twisted, windy road heading to central Pennsylvania.

Phil Larkin comment:

Jesus, that Sam Lowell is a piece of work. Always rubbing in that “foul-mouth” thing. But I guess I did get the better of him on that Millie Callahan thing back in the day and he did provide me a “life-line” just now with his posting of my story on his damn communist-addled blog. It is a good thing we go back to “up the Downs” time and that I am not a “snitch” because some of the stuff that I have read from him here should, by rights, be reported directly to J. Edgar Hoover, or whoever is running the F.B.I., if anybody is. We can discuss that another time because I don’t have time to be bothered by any such small stuff. Not today. Not since I hit “pay-dirt” with my little Amy. Yes, an old-fashioned name, at least I haven’t heard the name used much lately for girls, but very new-fashioned in her ideas. She is a twenty-five graduate student from Penn State and I am, as I speak, getting ready to roll out down the highway for our first “in person” meet.

You all know, or should be presumed to know to use a Markin-ism (Christ, we still call his silly little terms that name even forty years later), that I was having a little temporary trouble finding my life’s companion through sex sites. I told that story before and it is not worth going into here. [Lowell: Fifty years Phil, and every other guy (or gal) from the Class of 1964. Do the math. I hope you didn’t try to con Amy with that “youthful” fifty-something gag-christ, right back to you, Phil.] Let me tell you this one though because it had done nothing but restore my faith in modern technology.

Little weird communist propaganda front or not, Sam’s blog goes out into the wilds of cyberspace almost daily (and it really should be reported to the proper authorities now that I have read his recent screeds on a Russian Bolshevik guy named Trotsky who is some kind of messiah to Sam and his crowd). So a few weeks ago somebody, somehow ( I am foggy, just like Sam, on the mechanics of the thing, although I know it wasn’t some Internet god making “good” cyberspace vibes or anything like that) picked it up and place it (linked it) on his Facebook wall ( I think that is the proper word). Let’s call him Bill Riley (not his real name and that is not important anyway) Now I don’t know if you know how this Facebook thing works, although if you don’t then you are among the three, maybe four, people over the age of five that doesn’t.

Here’s what I have gathered. Bill Riley set up an account with his e-mail address, provided some information about himself and his interests and waited for the deluge of fan responses and “social-connectedness” (Sam’s three dollar word). Well, not exactly wait. Every day in every way you are inundated with photos of people you may know, may not know, or may or may not want to know and you can add them to your “friends” pile (assuming they “confirm” your request for friendship). Easy, right?

Well, yes easy is right because many people will, as I subsequently found out, confirm you as a friend for no other reason than that you “asked” them to include you. Click- confirm. Boom. This, apparently, is what happened when Bill “saw” Amy’s photo. (I found out later, after “talking” to Amy for a while, that she did not know Bill Riley or much about him except that he has a wall on Facebook. So the weird part is that Bill “introduced” us, although neither Amy nor I know Bill. This has something Greek comedic, or maybe a Shakespeare idea, about it, for sure.). In any case Amy, as a sociology graduate student at Penn State, took an interest in the “sexless” sex site angle for some study she was doing around her thesis and, by the fates, got hooked into the idea that she wanted to interview me about my experiences, and other related matters.

Without going into all the details that you probably know already I “joined” Bill Riley’s Facebook friends cabal and through him his “friend” Amy contacted me about an interview. Well, we “chatted” for a while one day and she asked some questions and I asked others in my most civilized manner. What I didn’t know, and call me stupid for not knowing, was that Amy not only was a “friend” of Bill’s but, unlike me (or so I thought), had her own Facebook page with photos. Now her photo on Bill’s wall was okay but, frankly, she looked just like about ten thousand other earnest female twenty-something graduate students. You know, from hunger. But not quite because daddy or mommy or somebody was paying the freight to let their son or daughter not face reality for a couple more years in some graduate program where they can “discover” themselves. Of course, naturally old cavalier that I am said, while we were chatting, that she was attractive, and looked energetic and smart and all that stuff. You know the embedded male thing with any woman, young or old, that looks the least bit “hit-worthy.” (Embedded is Sam’s word, sorry.)That photo still is on Bill’s wall and if I had only seen that one I would still be sitting in some lounge whiskey sipping my life away.

Amy’s “real” photos, taken at some Florida beach during Spring break, showed a very fetching (look it up in the dictionary if you don’t know that old-time word means) young woman that in her bikini had me going. Let’s put it this way I wrote her the following little “note” after I got an eyeful:

“Hi Amy- Recently I made a comment, after I first glanced at your photo wall, that you looked fetching (read, attractive, enchanting, hot, and so on). On that first glance I, like any red-blooded male under the age of one hundred, and maybe over that for all I know, got a little heated up. Now I have had a change to cool down, well a little anyway, and on second peek I would have to say you are kind of, sort of, in a way, well, okay looking. Now that I can be an objective observer I noticed that one of your right side eyelashes is one mm, or maybe two, off-balance from the left side. Fortunately I have the “medicine” to cure you. If you don’t mind living with your hideous asymmetrical deformation that is up to you. I will still be your friend. But if you were wondering, deep in the night, the sleepless night, why you have so few male Facebook friends or why guys in droves are passing your page by there you have it. Later-Phil.”

The famous old reverse play that has been around for a million years, right? Strictly the blarney, right? [Lowell: Right, Phil, right as ever]. That little literary gem however started something in her, some need for an older man to tell her troubles to or something. And from there we started to “talk” more personally and more seriously. See I had it all wrong about her being sheltered out there in the mountains by mom and dad keeping her out of harm’s way until she “found” herself. No, Amy was working, and working hard, to make ends meet and working on her doctorate at the same time. Her story, really, without the North Adamsville corner boy thing, would be something any of us Salducci’s guys would understand without question. (I was not a part-time corner boy by the way, except by Frankie Riley’s 24/7/365 standards and The Scribe’s).  I will tell you her story sometime depending on how things work but right now I am getting ready to go get a tank full of gas and think a little about those photos that launched a thousand clicks.

Yet another Sam comment:

Phil, like I said to Johnny Silver about what people might say about his little teeny-bopper love. Go for it. Don’t watch out. And like I said before we had better get to that socialist future we all need pretty damn quick if for no other reason than to get some sexual breathes of fresh air that such a society promises.

Once Again Phil Larkin On The Prowl-“To Keep Me Young As I Grow Old”

Sam Lowell comment:

As everybody knows by now that fling with Amy that graduate student from Penn State, now Doctor Amy from what I heard, that Phil Larkin ditched because she was too busy to give him her undivided attention led to a “dry spell” for him. Ever itchy though when it comes to sex, to young women and to the desperate losing fight again mortally he went back into the trenches recently, went back on the “sex sites” that have succored his old age (almost seventy in real time, almost sixty in Phil time. Like all these sites as mentioned in some of the sketches above the going is very hit or miss. So naturally Phil as a veteran was philosophical about the less than promising prospects but as in the past was determined like they say about a lots of things to keep plugging away for that one jump at the brass ring. Here is how it played out this time as Phil related the tale to me one sunny afternoon at Bessy’s down in the North Adamsville Marina:   

Old Phil said he had latched onto he did not know exactly from what source since he had placed himself on several sites figuring that the more places he was entered the better shots he would have of grabbing some sweet young thing that was looking for a father-figure. Or as likely was tired of hopped-up testosterone-driven guys who just wanted to send photos of their member expecting any young women on the site to be so hard up that they would jump at the chance to grab any member they could get their hands on. (Member being a family-friendly expression for a man’s penis, okay.)

One day Phil received two replies from young women who said they were responding to his profile messages since they also lived in Riverdale where Phil had resided since breaking it off with Doctor Amy. And sent photographs as well, tasteful although slightly revealing photos showing nice figures in scanty clothes. Not nude selfies like a number of seemingly uninhibited but also somewhat reckless young women had done in the past (if they were on the up and up who knows who might have seen the photos and the context and would continue to see forever unless they were deleted) Had done out of the blue on his e-mail alert although they tended to from places like California and Alaska and so were just “teasing” or had other purposes in mind.

They both also sent messages that had old Phil thinking very horny thoughts and so he replied not really expecting anything to come of the matter since a lot of times on these sites there is a lot of crazy BS and just come-on nonsense as he began to realize from that first episode back in 2011 when he snagged Amy that sadly missed graduate student from Penn State who did him just right and who he would still occasionally get heated up about on lonely nights.  

One respondent fell by the wayside and didn’t respond and the other was Sofia who the rest of this piece will be about. Phil was still suspicious of her intend since her answer had the unmistakable mark of being computer generated (or that the whole thing was as had been true of other sites just a big scam where some old maid or guy in need of a job was typing sexy salacious e-mails like in the old days with telephone sex who knew who or what the other party looked like or was into). But Phil is nothing if not game and despite his increasing unease he returned a number of her frankly vacuous although sexy e-mails on the off chance that something was on the level. He would write as was his (our) wont long screeds filled with sexy replies and with some details about them “hooking up” (her term but Phil knew what it meant having read his Tom Wolfe on the subject) and got continuous vacuous replies back. He determined if for no other reason than he was desperate that he would play his hand out although after a week to ten days of this even he gave nothing but perfunctory replies.

Then one day, several days after he had asked for some more photos she sent him a couple of real nude selfies which revealed a very attractive thin young woman that he would certainly like to meet in person. Moreover her messages got more personal (although still in abstract sex mode which could have been directed at any male under one hundred years old, and maybe older) and he began to think that things might get interesting although he was still doubtful about the whole thing. Then one e-mail she expressed how much she liked to do oral (give blow jobs, head, whatever, including an interest in trying deep throat like in the old porno movie of the same name starring Linda Loveless taking a guy’s “member” all the way down to the root)     and anal sex (doing it Italian-style as it was expressed in the old days when like with oral sex those were alternatives for women to avoid getting pregnant, especially prominent acts among nice Catholic girls in the old days in North Adamsville as Phil well remembered) and was getting horny just thinking about it. She also challenged him tell her how HE was going to alleviate her “problem” in some detail.

Unfortunately that day he was busy with some projects and so wrote only a short reply. He felt bad about it that night since he began see that she got “turned on” by the sex chat. So he wrote up a scenario that he thought she might like to read. In the meantime she had sent him an e-mail that he did not read until the next morning expressing her nervousness about meeting in person and what could he do to alleviate that fear. So he added an addition to the message that he originally intended to send         

Here is what got old Foul-Mouth Phil in the door if you can believe this: 

 

Sofia- Believe me I am as nervous about this whole arrangement as you are so don’t think you are alone. Two strangers meeting for great sex though is what keeps me going. I would point out to you that I have already said that we should meet in a hotel or motel which I will pay for using my credit card so they will know who I am. Also once we meet at the door after I give you the room number you/I can always back off. Moreover there is no reason for you to have money on you as I will pay for everything.  I don’t want to play games or deal with BS either so this is what I offer to you to help you relax about the whole thing. But remember we both want to have sex and so we have to have a certain amount of trust here.

Here is something to maybe make you feel better.

In your last e-mail you mentioned how you liked to do oral and anal and you asked me to describe how we would get it on when we meet. I was a little busy so I gave you a quick run-down on what we would do in that situation but since I think it turns you on to read about sexy stuff so I have written something longer to get you in the mood, a fantasy but not that far off if you think about it. 

Here goes:

“After a few more e-mails we decide that we will meet. I suggest and you go along with the idea that we meet at a hotel or motel not too far away. We decide that the “night time is the right time” for what we are dying to do and so we agree to meet at about six o’clock in the evening just as it is getting dark these days. I sent you an e-mail with the room number and you come by and knock on the door. I open the door and while we are both nervous we agree that things are cool and we will give it a go. We are both nervous obviously because we have been sending sexy e-mails back and forth and so our expectations are high. We have a couple of glasses of wine to settle us down and do some idle chit-chat but we both know what we are there for and so we are a bit anxious to get it on.  

After getting a little mellow from the wine I say that we will flip a coin to see who takes their clothes off first. I win so you have to take them off first while I watch. You do so slowly taking off your dress showing just your sexy lingerie. This arouses me and I pull out my cock from my pants which is visibly getting hard. You take off your bra showing your beautiful little breasts and I can see your nipples are getting harder. You turn around so I can see them from all angles and I can hardly wait to feel them up and suck on those hard nipples with my teeth to get you going a little. Then you take off your panties showing your nice little pussy and you make some grinding motions like in a dance to show that beauty off. It is my turn so you sit on the bed while I pull my pants off and then my underwear. You start to finger yourself while I take off my shirt and I can see that like me you are aroused.

I come over to the bed and turn down the sheets and then move you to the side of the bed so that your legs are dandling over the side as I prepare to open your thighs so I can get to my work. I start by playing with your nipples and sucking on them then I move my tongue down to your belly slowly and eventually get to that sweet spot pussy that I can tell already is a little wet. I start licking your pussy with my tongue and I can hear you start moaning and moving your hips a little. I put my tongue in deeper and you moan some more. I then reach on the bed-stand to get some Vaseline to put on my finger and while I am still licking you put my nicely greased finger up your bunghole which makes your hips move faster. After a while I can hear your breathe getting harder and I go faster until all of a sudden you yell out something. I know you have had an organism because I can feel your wetness on my tongue and it feels good.      

I ask you if you want me to go inside your pussy while you are all wet and I am as hard as a rock but you say no you want me to try to get you off again since you think you want me to take you up the ass that night, take you anally like you mentioned in your e-mails that you were dying to have done to you. So I go to work again a little harder this time because you have already exploded once. I put my tongue on your pussy but I also take one of my fingers and put it on your cunt and start rubbing fast. A few minutes later I hear you moaning loudly again and I know you will explode again. When you do you tell me that you want me to take you from behind on your luscious little ass.

Who am I to deny Sofia’s command and so I turn you over. Before I enter you I put on a condom and to make sure I go gently into your butt I add some Vaseline so it will go smoothly. I decide that since this is our first time to have you go on your hands and knees doggie style while I am on my knees as I put my cock inside you. You gasp at first but the as I am going back and forth you relax a little and start moaning again. You tell me to go deeper and I do so but not too long after that you cum again and shortly after that I explode too. We both laugh after finally getting it on since we both had wanted and needed this badly.

You help me take of the condom and we laughed as we take our towels and wiped each other off. I asked you a little while later when we had rested a bit to give me a blow-job which would make my night. I asked you if you did deep throat but you said another time once you figured out how to get my thick cock all the way down your throat. You gave me a great blow-job though sucking away like crazy and making little bites on my cockhead with your teeth which turned me on. I exploded and you swallowed my cum and kept sucking me until I was dry. We rested so more and then got up. You put your clothes on and I put mine on. You said you had to go and I asked if we would meet again. You said you would e-mail me after you thought about it and we agreed to do that.”      

How’s that for a scenario. While it didn’t go exactly like that when we met it was damn close.

Sam Lowell comment: Get my damn heart medicine-and so it goes. 

   

Black History Month- Remember Attica Blood in the Water The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson (Pantheon, 2016) A Review

Workers Vanguard No. 1103	13 January 2017

Remember Attica

Blood in the Water

The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

by Heather Ann Thompson

(Pantheon, 2016)

A Review

On the morning of 9 September 1971, nearly 1,300 inmates—predominantly black and Puerto Rican—took over the state prison at Attica, New York. Four days later 29 of them lay dead, cut down in a hail of bullets fired by New York State Police, sheriffs and corrections officers. Governor Nelson Rockefeller gave the order. President Richard Nixon cheered them on. In the aftermath, the surviving prisoners were subjected to hideous torture and later charged with a total of 1,300 crimes. Among these were kidnapping and, most obscenely, unlawful imprisonment based on taking prison guards hostage, ten of whom were gunned down by Rockefeller’s stormtroopers when they retook the prison.

For many years, Democratic and Republican administrations in Albany, along with the courts, have covered up much of the truth of what took place at Attica, assisted by the same capitalist press that peddled the lie that the prisoners shot the guards. A significant part of that shroud has been peeled back by Heather Ann Thompson in her recent book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. Thompson’s book brings to life the dignity and humanity of the prisoners who were treated as little more than dirt by Rockefeller and his ilk. She describes in vivid detail the dehumanizing conditions that gave rise to the rebellion and the racist venom that ran from the governor’s mansion down to the cops and prison guards who hunted down the uprising’s leaders. Thompson got her own sampling of that venom for naming the prison guards who carried out assassinations and torture.

Thompson’s comprehensive history is a result of her many years of diligent archival research and a bit of good fortune in uncovering key sources that had been suppressed. As she notes, “The most important details of this story have been deliberately kept from the public. Literally thousands of boxes of documents relating to these events are sealed or next to impossible to access.” Regarding the most explosive documents she uncovered, Thompson says, “All of the Attica files that I saw in that dark room of the Erie County courthouse have now vanished.”

For millions around the world, Attica became a potent symbol of rebellion against brutal repression—and a stark emblem of racist state murder. To this day it continues to inspire struggles against the racist degradation of black people inside and outside of prison walls. The first issue of Workers Vanguard (October 1971) led with the headline “Massacre at Attica.” We stated bluntly: “The brutal, bloody murderers of Attica are none other than the ruling class of this society,” saying further:

“Rockefeller cut down the Attica prisoners in the manner of his father and grandfather before him—ruthlessly and to protect the system from which his profits spring. From the murder of the Ludlow miners to the present, this family has carried the policies of the armed fist over the entire globe.... The Rockefeller name and the Rockefeller practice symbolize, more than any other, the American capitalist class—a class that will stop at nothing to extend and protect its profitable holdings.”

Attica was an explosion waiting to happen. The 2,200 men warehoused in a facility built for 1,600 were routinely beaten by guards, locked in cells 16 hours a day, rationed one sheet of toilet paper daily, one bar of soap a month and one shower per week—even in the heat of summer. Among the main grievances was censorship of reading materials—no newspapers, very few books, and nothing at all to read in Spanish. It wasn’t an absolute ban—the prison authorities mocked the prisoners by supplying magazines such as Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, American Home and House Beautiful.

Hours after the revolt began, L.D. Barkley, a 21-year-old Black Panther Party member imprisoned for violating parole by driving without a license, read out the prisoners’ powerful declaration: “We are men! We are not beasts and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such.”

The prisoners called for the minimum wage for prison work (they were paid slave wages of between 20 cents and one dollar per day), accompanied by an end to censorship and restrictions on political activity, religious freedom, rehabilitation, education and decent medical care. They expressed solidarity with the Vietnamese workers and peasants as well as others fighting U.S. imperialism. The main demand was amnesty for participating in the rebellion, along with “speedy and safe transportation out of confinement, to a Non-Imperialist country.” Most likely in mind were Cuba, where the capitalist rulers had been overthrown and a bureaucratically deformed workers state led by Fidel Castro established, or Algeria, a capitalist state governed by left nationalists that had given refuge to Black Panthers in exile.

As Thompson points out, many of the prisoners at Attica were veterans of eruptions over similar conditions at Manhattan’s Tombs detention center and the prison in Auburn, New York, the prior year. The bitter anger that was about to explode at Attica was displayed 19 days earlier when word spread through the cells that prison authorities at California’s San Quentin prison had assassinated Black Panther Party member George Jackson on 21 August 1971. The next day, over 800 Attica inmates marched silently into breakfast wearing black armbands and held a fast in protest. California prison officials had targeted Jackson, along with W.L. Nolen and Hugo Pinell, for forging solidarity of black, Latino and white prisoners. New York officials were no less alarmed by the interracial unity growing among Attica’s inmates.

The prison revolt reflected the growing ferment and struggles taking place outside prison walls, not least the “black power” movement and radical protests against the war in Vietnam. Many of the black inmates identified with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) and Puerto Ricans looked to the Young Lords, which was inspired by the Panthers. Playing a leading role in the rebellion was Sam Melville, a white member of the Weather Underground who was serving 18 years for placing explosives in government buildings in protest against the war in Vietnam. As Thompson observes, the presence of such activists “offered Attica’s otherwise apolitical men—like [Frank] Big Black Smith—a new understanding of their discontents and a new language for articulating them.” Smith ended up leading the prisoners’ security force, made up largely of Black Muslims. His group treated the prison guards taken hostage with a humanity that the prisoners had been denied.

For a long time before Blood in the Water, the biggest window into what took place at Attica came from Tom Wicker’s A Time to Die. Wicker, a New York Times reporter, along with radical attorney William Kunstler, was among the outside observers whom the prisoners demanded to negotiate through rather than directly with prison and state authorities. Prison officials granted this one demand, intending to use the observers to convince the prisoners to release the hostages and surrender without amnesty. To his credit, BPP leader Bobby Seale, whom the prisoners also sought as an observer, uniquely refused to be involved in attempts to nudge the inmates toward surrender. Seale made clear the BPP position that “all political prisoners who want to be released to go to non-imperialistic countries should be complied with.”

The retaking of Attica began in the morning of September 13 with a cloud of CN and CS gas dropped from a helicopter that covered every prisoner with a nauseating, incapacitating powder and it ended with a bloodbath. The rebellion’s leadership paid dearly. Barkley, Melville and others were assassinated in the prison yard. Surviving prisoners, including the wounded, were stripped naked, made to crawl through the mud and the blood, then lined up to run a gantlet over broken glass and be beaten by cops and guards wielding what they called their “n----r sticks.” After being threatened with castration, Big Black Smith was forced to lie on a table for five hours with a football tucked under his chin, under threat of being shot if it rolled loose.

For the capitalist ruling class, Attica had to be crushed with particular vengeance because the rebels had begun to see their struggle in political and even revolutionary terms. One of Thompson’s discoveries is Nixon’s celebration of the bloodbath: “I think this is going to have a hell of a salutary effect on future prison riots.... Just like Kent State had a hell of a salutary effect” (referring to the 4 May 1970 National Guard killing of four students protesting the invasion of Cambodia—an extension of U.S. imperialism’s dirty war against the heroic Vietnamese workers and peasants). Nixon added, “They can talk all they want about force, but that is the purpose of force.”

Attica Nation

Thompson, a historian at the University of Michigan and expert on mass incarceration, is particularly motivated by prison reform. She notes that the immediate aftermath of the Attica revolt saw some improvements in food, medical care, clothing, mail censorship and number of showers permitted. However, as she points out, this was followed by an “unprecedented backlash against all efforts to humanize prison conditions in America.”

Inmates today continue to be used as slave labor, face censorship of political literature and conditions at least as dehumanizing and sadistic, including the increasing use of solitary confinement—universally recognized as a form of torture. Brutality by prison guards is a daily fact of life, especially for the black and Latino victims disproportionately singled out for discipline.

The backlash to which Thompson refers is one expression of the bipartisan rollback of the limited democratic gains for black people attained by the liberal-led civil rights movement. Its most glaring manifestation for the past three decades has been the mass incarceration of black people, largely a consequence of the “war on drugs.” This overt war on black people was accompanied by escalating cop terror against the ghettos and barrios.

Today’s plethora of drug laws is an outgrowth of the state repression under the “war on crime” kicked off by Democratic president Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 “Safe Streets Act” and Nixon’s 1970 “Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act” and carried on by Democratic and Republican administrations since. The number of people languishing in U.S. prisons and jails, 2.2 million, is six times what it was in 1971. The costs of maintaining this vast prison complex have led to calls for easing up on the war on drugs.

Prisons are the concentrated expression of the depravity of this society. They are a key instrument in coercing, torturing and brutalizing those who have been cast off as the useless residue of a system rooted in exploitation and racial oppression. The deindustrialization of much of the U.S. that began in the late 1960s drove millions of black people out of the workforce and into the ranks of the permanently outcast. In the calculations of the American bourgeoisie, a substantial part of the black population, who used to provide labor for the auto plants and steel mills, is simply written off as an expendable population. Having condemned black as well as Latino youth to desperate poverty, the rulers whipped up hysteria painting the ghettoized poor as criminal “superpredators,” whom cops can gun down with impunity, and for whom no sentence is too long, no prison conditions too harsh. This demonization of the black population has served to deepen the wedge between white and black workers in a period of virtually no class struggle.

Marxists support the struggle for any demand that meets the immediate needs of prisoners. But under capitalism no reforms can fundamentally alter the repressive nature of the prisons. Along with the cops, military and courts, prisons are a pillar of the capitalist state, whose basic function is to maintain, through force or threat of force, the rule of the capitalist class and its economic exploitation of the working class. In the U.S., where racial oppression is at the core of the capitalist system, any alleviation of prison conditions must be linked to the fight against black oppression in general. We fight to abolish the prison system, which will be done only when the capitalist order—with its barbaric state institutions—is shattered by a proletarian socialist revolution that establishes a planned, collectivized economy with jobs and quality, integrated housing and education for all.

Thompson’s sympathies clearly lie with the Attica prisoners. Yet she evinces a soft spot for the prison guards, whom she sees as victims as well. Her poster boy for humanizing the guards is Mike Smith, a 22-year-old former machinist apparently liked by the prisoners and sympathetic to their demands. Smith, after being taken hostage by the prisoners, was shot by the cops and grievously wounded. Thompson writes, “Like so many other small town boys who had grown up in rural New York Mike needed to make a living, and prisons were the going industry.” Thompson also gives voice to the guards taken hostage and the families of the ten of them whom Rockefeller’s assassins gunned down, who resent the fact that the surviving Attica prisoners won a paltry monetary settlement from the state after nearly three decades.

As Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky pointed out 85 years ago, the worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state is a bourgeois cop, not a worker, an admonition no less applicable to prison guards. As we noted at the time of the Attica massacre, “These despicable racist guards are despised even by the ruling class that cynically uses them. The governor not only served notice on the prisoners that rebellion does not pay, and rebellion linked with revolutionary ideas means certain death, but he had a message for the guards too: Keep the upper hand or else!”

The basic function of the prisons is lost on the liberal academic Thompson, whose call for prison reform envisions a commonality of interests between inmates and prison guards—a relationship akin to that of slave and overseer. In a 2011 paper, “Rethinking Working-Class Struggle Through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards,” she declares, “It is time once again for the American working class to pay attention to penal facilities as sites of productive labor and wage competition and to recognize that its destiny is tied in subtle but important ways to the ability of inmates as well as prison guards to demand fair pay and safe working conditions.” Thompson lauds the return of prison guards to municipal unions, such as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).

What, then, are “safe working conditions” for prison guards? In our 1971 article, we sharply criticized Jerry Wurf, the AFSCME president, as he threatened a “slowdown” by union guards after the Attica massacre:

“Wurf demanded more and better riot equipment—helmets, tear gas and masks, to be borrowed from police departments if necessary, and hiring of more guards. Yet he had the effrontery to maintain, ‘We’re not at war with the inmates; the state of New York is at war with them.’ What forces does the state of New York employ to make war on the inmates if not the cops and guards Wurf is happy to represent?... No union can represent both workers and the sworn servants of the capitalist class, the police and prison guards.”

The increasing prominence of cops and prison guards—workers’ class enemies—in the shrinking union movement underscores the need for ousting the pro-capitalist bureaucrats and forging a class-struggle leadership in the basic organs of workers struggle.

Three years before L.D. Barkley read out the Attica Brothers’ powerful declaration, striking black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, famously walked picket lines with signs declaring, “I am a man.” Today, the racist capitalist ruling class continues to treat black people as if they were less than human and their lives don’t matter. But there is a reservoir of social power in the organized working class, in which black workers, who make up the unions’ most loyal and militant sector, remain disproportionately represented. Under revolutionary leadership, black workers, who form an organic link to the anger of the oppressed ghetto poor, will play a vanguard role in the struggles of the entire U.S. working class. It is the purpose of the Spartacist League to build a workers party that links the fight for black freedom to the struggle for proletarian state power. Workers rule on a world scale will open the road to a communist future in which the modern instruments of incarceration and death will be discarded as relics of a decaying social order that deserved only to perish.

The 100th Anniversary Year Of The October Bolshevik Revolution In Russia-What The Resistance Looked Like Then

The 100^th Anniversary Year Of The October Bolshevik Revolution In Russia-What The Resistance Looked Like Then 

Workers Vanguard No. 1103	13 January 2017

TROTSKY

LENIN

Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution

(Quote of the Week)

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian October Revolution, which swept away the capitalist exploiters and landlords and established the working class in power. Key to the success of the Revolution was the Bolshevik Party and its leader V.I. Lenin. January is also the month in which communists honor the “Three Ls”: Lenin, who died on 21 January 1924, and German Communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who were assassinated on 15 January 1919 at the behest of the German Social Democratic government as part of its suppression of a mass working-class uprising.

What were the advantages of Bolshevism? A clear and thoroughly thought-out revolutionary conception at the beginning of the revolution was held only by Lenin. The Russian cadres of the party were scattered and to a considerable degree bewildered. But the party had authority among the advanced workers. Lenin had great authority with the party cadres. Lenin’s political conception corresponded to the actual development of the revolution and was reinforced by each new event. These advantages worked wonders in a revolutionary situation, that is, in conditions of bitter class struggle. The party quickly aligned its policy to correspond with Lenin’s conception; to correspond, that is, with the actual course of the revolution. Thanks to this, it met with firm support among tens of thousands of advanced workers. Within a few months, by basing itself upon the development of the revolution, the party was able to convince the majority of the workers of the correctness of its slogans. This majority, organized into soviets, was able in its turn to attract the soldiers and peasants.

How can this dynamic, dialectical process be exhausted by a formula of the maturity or immaturity of the proletariat? A colossal factor in the maturity of the Russian proletariat in February or March 1917 was Lenin. He did not fall from the skies. He personified the revolutionary tradition of the working class. For Lenin’s slogans to find their way to the masses, cadres had to exist, even though numerically small at the beginning; the cadres had to have confidence in the leadership, a confidence based on the entire experience of the past. To cancel these elements from one’s calculations is simply to ignore the living revolution, to substitute for it an abstraction, the “relationship of forces”; because the development of the revolution precisely consists of the incessant and rapid change in the relationship of forces under the impact of the changes in the consciousness of the proletariat, the attraction of the backward layers to the advanced, the growing assurance of the class in its own strength. The vital mainspring in this process is the party, just as the vital mainspring in the mechanism of the party is its leadership. The role and the responsibility of the leadership in a revolutionary epoch is colossal.

—Leon Trotsky, “The Class, the Party, and the Leadership,” August 1940, reprinted in The Spanish Revolution (1931-39) (Pathfinder, 1973)

From The Partisan Defense Committee- The Latest On Mumia Abu-Jamal-Mumia: Court Orders Hep C Treatment

From The Partisan Defense Committee- The Latest On Mumia Abu-Jamal-Mumia: Court Orders Hep C Treatment  

Workers Vanguard No. 1103	13 January 2017

The following article appeared under the Partisan Defense Committee's Class-Struggle Defense Notes masthead in the print version of this issue of Workers Vanguard. The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which champions cases and causes in the interest of the whole of the working people. This purpose is in accordance with the political views of the Spartacist League.

---

Mumia: Court Orders Hep C Treatment

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

On January 3, U.S. federal district judge Robert Mariani ordered the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) to administer life-saving hepatitis C treatment to Mumia Abu-Jamal. This ruling is the product of an urgent legal battle by Mumia after his active hepatitis C brought him close to death in March 2015. Pennsylvania’s prisons have refused to pay for the new, effective but expensive, treatments. While we welcome this ruling, we understand that the racist capitalist state has pursued a vendetta against Mumia and wanted to see him dead for over 35 years. Mumia’s lawyer Robert Boyle warned: “The struggle is far from over: The DOC will no doubt appeal this ruling.”

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” Framed up for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer, Mumia was sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Federal and state courts have repeatedly refused to consider evidence proving his innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed the policeman. In 2011, the Philadelphia district attorney’s office dropped its longstanding effort to legally lynch Mumia, but he remains condemned to life in prison with no chance of parole.

If Mumia is successful in his fight to receive treatment, it will set a precedent for tens of thousands of other prisoners. Medical care is urgent, but what is also necessary is to demand his release from the clutches of the racist capitalist state. Free Mumia now!

We encourage our readers to contribute to his legal expenses. Contributions can be sent to the Committee to Save Mumia Abu-Jamal, care of the National Lawyers Guild Foundation, 132 Nassau St., Room 922, New York, NY 10038, earmarked “Mumia legal expenses.”

In Boston-2/26 W. E. B. Du Bois Lecture:,with Edward Carson

2/26 W. E. B. Du Bois Lecture:,with Edward Carson

 

3:04 PM

Charlie WelchviaAct-MA

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*W. E. B. Du Bois Lecture: **with Edward Carson**
****
*
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.
W.E.B. Du Bois enshrined this iconic observation in 1900, while speaking
in London at the Pan African Congress. Du Bois repeated this phrase in
his 1903 work, Souls of Black Folk, as he challenged Negro oppression in
an undemocratic country. This lecture brings Du Bois’s political and
faith-based critique of suffering and the human condition to life, as it
draws from his biblical interpretations and ideological framing of the
color-line thesis.

Edward Carson is a residential faculty member in the history department
at Brooks School, in North Andover, Massachusetts. His current research
looks at race, religion, and society, particularly that of W.E.B. Du
Bois. He is working on a book titled W.E.B. Du Bois's Editorial
Influence on Western Negro Migration. He edits for The Christian Century
Magazine Then and Now, and sits on the Christian Scholars’ Conference
committee.

Music by CommUnity Voices

*The Community Church of Boston
<https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Community-Church-of-Boston/618038141604351>*

*565 Boylston St., Boston, Massachusetts 02116 **Show Map
<https://www.facebook.com/events/1778273402495143/#>*

Every Sunday Lunch served after the program.
All Programs are held on the second floor in the Lothrop Auditorium.
Handicap accessible. CCB is located near the Orange line-Back Bay or the
Green line-Copley T Stops. On Street Parking and at Back Bay Parking
Garage, 500 Boylston Street. Discount Vouchers available for parking in
the garage.

Guest speaker Shay Stewart-Bouley lecture on Sunday, Feb. 26 has been
postponed. We will keep you informed of the upcoming new date.

For more information about Community Church of Boston or our Sunday
programs go to our website at: www.communitychurchofboston.org
<http://www.communitychurchofboston.org/>or email us at
info@communitychurchofboston.org.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1778273402495143/

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