Searching For Todo El Mundo –With Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur In Mind

Searching For Todo El Mundo –With Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur In Mind 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

Sam Lowell, a man long known among his friends and in the small and dwindling Cambridge bookstore circles where he had been a fixture for some years to be interested in such historical literary concerns, had when he had thought about the matter when a friend’s request brought it to mind, found it hard to believe that it had already been seven years since the literary world, and not just the literary world, commemorated the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s 1957 classic coming-of-age road saga, On The Road. Sam’s memory of that event, which was commemorated with great fanfare in now Jack-proud then skeptical Lowell, his hometown about thirty miles up the road from Cambridge, with a week-long festival, had been triggered by a piece of writing send to him by his recently reconnected corner boy from his high school hang out days in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alleys, Josh Breslin.

Josh, a corner boy back from in the days back in growing up North Adamsville, a town near Boston, when that term meant somebody that you would go through some shades of hell for and he you and not just a guy who you casually hung around on Friday or Saturday night, maybe more nights in the summer depending on this and that, no money in your pocket, no girl dated up, no car if you were in such a condition, dated up that is, and thus reduced to walking to the ancient tattered crumbling seawall at Adamsville Beach precluding any serious sexual activity, and helped hold up the brick wall in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alleys up in North Adamsville Center, although in the course of things a corner boy did all that as well. What made corner boys though was the code, not exactly the Omerta code that everybody who has watched any modern gangster films, or read Dennis Lehane novels would be led to believe, although on some corners one could see that played idea out and even among the Jack Slack corner boys a few guys worked under that premise. The code was simplicity itself, that go through seven shades of hell for a fellow corner boy naturally first of all, but also no snitching under severe penalty best left unsaid and which only had to be invoked once, take care of a down and out brother (usually broken up over some lost flame if memory served), don’t mess with a guy’s girl (although that was on occasion honored in the breech, not the observance and might have been the cause of more than one down and out brother episode and a fistful of fists), share your worldly goods when possible although the old communist idea of such sharing was not on display, not in those red scare Cold War times, but just an old-fashion working-class solidarity among the downtrodden which permeated the ethos of the town, and defend the “turf “ to the death although that had never gone more than to the theoretical stage at Jack Slack’s. Oh yes, when somebody, since this was a corner boy group made of smart, “street smart,” and regular smart guys who hovered together against the biker, bad ass, and midnight sifter gangs, asked for a literary critique ( Sam said he was being high-blown in that description here) you gave it up, no holes barred. So the Sam-Josh reconnection worked at that level as well, although in sunnier times Josh usually was the one being asked. Such is life.         

While time and tide had diminished that corner boy ethos dramatically, like most aging things, as part of their reconnection Josh had “go through hell”-like asked Sam to look his manuscript over, make some comments, and say truthfully what he thought of the work like he used to do in the old days when Josh had written short pieces to get a small name for himself in the local literary milieu. This manuscript, this piece of writing, Josh had started back in the 1980s when he was trying to unsuccessfully fight his demon addictions, cocaine at that time mainly and its interconnected con artist larcenies and lies to keep his nose full, had left the writing dead for a long time and had a only couple of months before begun to work on it again. So Sam was to read something somewhere between a first rough draft and a more polished although not final draft.

So Sam read. The work itself, with a working title of Searching for Todo El Mundo, first of all impressed Sam with how much Josh had been influenced by Kerouac, and his ocean-etched writing in Big Sur written at a time when Jack himself was trying to alcohol dry out around 1960. Strangely Josh said that he had not read that classis dry out sketch until he began his piece again. Sam nevertheless found it ironic that an American “dead white man,” a “Neanderthal with a typewriter” as some like novelist Truman Capote called him, “a social misfit world- class fellahin” would over fifty years later cast his sardonic spell over an old former corner boy devotee and fellow world- class sufferer for humankind. And also what did Jack call his avocation, oh yeah, a fellow “moaner for man.”     

The read through made Sam think back to that On The Road commemoration time in 2007 when there had been a plethora of books and articles about the meaning of it all, about the place of the book, and of the author, in the American literary pantheon. Sam, like many another baby boomer who came of age in the 1960s, had also found it hard to think about the passing of his time too as he thought about his own “on the road” dreams from that time. Dreams influenced by that book and by the “beats,” although really only the vaguest echo of those pioneers as their adventures passed through to him and his old friends from high school, North Adamsville High, in the early 1960s, Frankie Riley, the leader of the corner boy pack at Jack Slack’s, his acknowledged leader in the old Irish working class neighborhoods where every guy, every smart guy, every “street smart” guy committed himself to some corner, and some leader, and Josh both of whom he had travelled with on the roads west under Jack’s book’s influence.

At the time of the anniversary any number of writers, including the dwindling few who knew Jack, or, what was more likely, the great number almost two generations later who had been influenced by him chimed in about subjects related to the book from the story behind the story real origins of each individual episode in that “beat” travelogue to the various literary tropes that Jack used in his writing (you know “the holy fool,” the goof, the zen master wisdom king, Catholic notions of salvation, urban rootlessness, perennial wanderlust, and so on). Others took a different tact and spoke to the meaning of the book for their psychological well-being by having emulated the trappings of what Sal/Jack, Dean/Neal, Carlo/Allen, Bull/William did, or did not, do for them on their individual searches for the blue-pink great American West night.

Yeah, guys (and gals too on the 1960s roads, if not so much on the 1940s “beat” road except as while away the time company) took some lonesome longing lost dreams time now well past to express what it meant to be out on the open road that first time, that first time when they broke, maybe for an eternity or maybe for just that moment when everybody thought the world was going to turn upside down, from that predestined path everybody else had set for them and tried to find out, tried to come of age, and to find out if they had the stuff of the road, had the stuff  to take the road not taken. So, sure, they told of the hassles of being left in some woe-begotten spot to wait hours in heat or darkness for a ride, about the time they did not have two quarters to rub together out in some Iowa cornfield left off by a kindly Farmer Brown heading north and they wanted west, about the time too when luscious Sally Ann accompanied him and hell you almost had half the truckers on U.S. 80 jack-knifing to the break-down lane to pick you two up just to have some eye-candy to leer at doing seventy-five miles per hour, fed you too, just for the company. Other times, though, single times, lost in some slough plastic chair, yesterday’s newspaper a pillow for your laid-down head, or when truck-worthy by some guy who said you reminded him of his wayward son, and talked non-stop, high on benny, sucking down coffee to make Truckee by daybreak. Of the hassles too from the local cops, hungry mean-spirited cops who had seen what their brethren could do down south to your like, had seen what guys like you had put them through in the big city New York/ Washington demonstration riots as the brethren wailed with mace, gas and the beloved billy-club against a passive mass, cops looking for that one granule of grass to put your ass on the county farm, cops always willing to “vag” strangers in long hair and jeans to meet their monthly quotas.

But spoke too of the delights of getting picked up by kindred in the then plentiful minivans and converted school buses, there had been times on the corridor from Boston to Washington and all along the Pacific Coast Highway from San Diego to Mendocino when you barely had time enough to put your thumb out before some long-haired brother stopped, somebody opened the door and in you went, grabbed a passed joint, maybe had some off-hand stew, maybe some ripped wine   and you would spent a few days going north or south or west or east wherever they were going just for the company. Too speak nothing of the incredible vistas going across, once you crossed the holy father Mississippi, got passed the long sad ears of corn and chaffed wheat blowing in the wind and hit the Rockies, fell back to primal times in stone age death places Utah and Nevada, caught that first whiff of ocean around high desert Joshua Tree (site of a strange midnight drug-high re-groupment with ancient Apache warriors) and then strolling up the coast highways with jagged canyons, crevices, and hairpin turns every other minute.     

Reflecting too on smoking their first dope smoke (and usually coughing the rookie cough that hit even cigarette smokers from the harsh smoke if the dope was righteous and not some rip-off oregano or something), and unlike in Jack/Neal/Allen times no be-bopping off the high to some cold breeze seeking the high white note sexy sax jazz but cranked-up guitar-strung rock, trying to see the faces of the gods, trying to keep in time with that wicked back-beat the drummer was flailing out. Making the dope pray, making heads twist when somebody scored some acid/mescaline/peyote. So more high holy dope more than Jack million word work high, or Neal cruising at one hundred and ten miles per hour  head high/or Allen negro streets, holy moloch screaming against the machine poem high. And the dope flashing into sex dreams, about having their first bouts with loose take-what- you-want- happy-go-lucky sex when the old rules were broken about who was exclusively with whom like some chattel, where women could initiate the mating ritual without rancor or slur, where the adventuresome trotted out the hidden desire secrets of the Kama Sutra and expanded the universe beyond the missionary position. No Jack/Neal road women as adornments, woman as housewives to pick up slatternly messes for sex-exhausted guys, women as sex toys paying their way in trade, the times, the Pill freedom times, would not stand for such behavior, nor would women but it was a close thing for a long time, and for a lot of Jack/Neal-fed guys, guys like Frankie Riley, Sam Lowell and Josh Breslin who grew up in Jack/Neal ways a tough habit to break. 

Those others, like Sam Lowell, Frankie Riley, and Josh Breslin, maybe also telling the blasted  world as well about their travails of the road, the dusty back road Neola/Moline/Prestonsburg Junction/Eureka/Durango/Virginia City/Fresno (that is enough for to name those few is to name all bus stations with their papers strewn over for the bus-waiting seats used for pillows against the hard plastic, the sugar-laden vending machines, the smell of some kind of lava washing soap and always, always that men’s room Lysol smell trying to cover up missed piss urinals and flatulence). Sam reflecting back on that time when he and Josh were stuck in Winnemucca in the Nevadas for a couple of days when the winds blew through the canyons and any traffic going through was either not stopping for road warrior bravos or could not see far enough ahead to stop and they all dusty cadging sleep and getting out of the dusts times in the half-baked bus station which also served as a gas station and so they never got serious sleep on the hard wooden benches with the every ready newspapers for pillows, a trick learned early on taught by an old hobo who seemed to know every little trick to survive on the road. That hobo-learned knowledge included serious tips on evading the local law-remembering that time  sleeping, better half-sleeping like the hobo wisdom taught him, guarding against some errant cop ready to put you in the local pokey as a “vag,” out along the side of road of some wayward Iowa cornfield waiting for dawn to start again on the hitchhike road, two dollars in his pocket, hoping as the sun came  up that he would be left off at some Aunt Betty’s diner (there are a surprising number of Aunt somebody diners out there on the back roads, out on Route 20, Route 66 ) to catch the ninety-nine cent breakfast special with unlimited coffee refills. Of being left off in the middle of nowhere which happened plenty of times by some sex-starved trucker who was heading south when you were heading west if he decided that he needed to see his girlfriend in Louisville while you were trying to make Chicago before dark. Of the endlessly poor diet either from “on the run” quick meal foods bought at some Mom and Pop pre-7/11 variety store, truckers’ steamed to perdition diner fare, some charity handout Sally (Salvation Army) soup line, or worst, heading for the railroad trestles and some hobo “jungle” stew made of who knows what.

Spoke too of the endless talkings, midnight dust-laden, dream-smeared, hung head, about that angst and alienation that drove all of them to the road looking, hell, just looking for something, something different, some kicks somebody simply said one time and it stuck, “get your kicks on Route 66” (now a historic highway, so designated). Of, speaking more soberly, talking about that addiction you picked up along with the “on the road” life (dope, booze, sex, gambling, you name it) that you could not quite break the first time, or the second. That second  the one that broke up your home, your life whatever it was that held you together in the dark night, losing some she who called it quits when you messed up one too many times for her to put up with. All taken in stride now, all missed now, all nostalgia missed now, all “wouldn’t it be great to do again” now except the universal crying in the rain that you have grown long of tooth now, have that house now, that spouse now (after letting that good thing go, that woman who almost saw you through but left, you more in love with that damn addiction before you went “cold turkey” than her-every night still wondering where she is tonight, yeah, wondering if she ever thinks of you in her new world, wondering silently as you think your thoughts), those kids now, that looming college tuition crisis to content with now and so the frenzied search for that great blue-pink American West night which you’re your youth worthwhile dropped off the radar.              

Still others, and this had been why Sam Lowell has been especially attuned to the passing of time lately, the passing of his time, rather than writing about what On The Road meant personally, socially, or as flat out literature wrote their own quirky little pieces that reflected the heat from Jack’s sun. Josh Breslin, now far removed from the road and from his hundred addictions, not really one hundred but it seemed like it back then, was a guy who had decided that he liked to write as he  fought off his “romance of the road” addictions, although his main professions were elsewhere. That youthful “romance of the road,” a road which Sam had gotten off of by the early 1970s had led Josh by the early 1980s to a distorted view of life as a victim po’ boy whom the world owed something,  as a “grab what you could grab and keep moving no matter what” guy, and included a certain confused, no, hell-bent and evil, notions about what road comradeship meant when he let his wanting habits get the best of him (all of which he freely admitted to Sam later, who had also fallen victim to his needs lending his much unpaid back money). Let his whole freaking life from “from hunger” childhood on get the best of him on the road in the early 1980s when he would sneak thief stuff from the communal stash (rent money, gas money, bus fares, food money, drugs), would lie to others about working, or rather getting paid and saying he didn’t, in order not to put in the communal kitty, would old corner boy con, mostly women, into giving him money or buying him stuff which he would then sell after he had bedded them (he had about five girlfriends at the time, and at least one wife, maybe two when the smoke cleared). All to feed his growing drug addictions          

Josh said he that it helped to write as he fought off his addictions, about six variations of dope, mostly heavily and insidiously cocaine, although not crack, and booze, mostly whisky drunks. Fought off unsuccessfully for a long time, including bouts of not “on the road” type homelessness and “jungle” campfires with the lost fellahin hobos, bums, and tramps mainly on the West Coast, not once or twice but about five times all though the early 1980s and not finally fully contained until near the end of that decade. Fought unsuccessfully, which had been the central theme of the piece Josh sent Sam, that first time Jack K. (no full last name given even now since Josh claimed that since he has passed on there was no reason to invoke that brother’s full-hearted name) lent Josh his cabin shack at Todo El Mundo when Jack K. expected him to dry out through isolation and reflection after Jack K., exasperated,  had carried out the booking-binding and print shop business they operated over on Market Street in Frisco essentially by himself for several years.

 

The mere mention of Todo El Mundo in Josh’s working title had brought back better memories to Sam of a time and place when he, Josh, and the late Frankie Riley had headed west that second time in the very early 1970s and found “Eden.” And thoughts of that trip triggered his thinking back to earlier times to the first time going west just after the summer of love 1967 when they were all crazy to break out from small town, small house, small dreams and see what it was all about, see what the flamed-out western rebellion was all about. Josh, from what Sam could tell on his initial glance-through, had written his own version of the “beat” travelogue, although Josh agreed later after Sam had read the rough draft that the sketches were in the end more influenced by Jack’s 1960 addiction dry out book, Big Sur, rather than Road.  Thinking about it after Josh had said that Sam thought that was true but also thought that short novel, with its Road-like list of characters and adventures only confined to the West Coast, was really a last extension of the road saga so Josh’s little sketches could have squeezed in under the anniversary wire when people were hopped up to write something. 

Josh said he had written that “damn thing” (his words), his plainsong, to the tune of his generation, the generation after Kerouac’s “beats,” the generation of ‘68, the “hippies” in their flower, their dope-soaked musical flower, to give them a known name if not entirely accurate to describe the whole scene. Reflecting that it had been a scene filled with good-hearted intentions to fight the monsters, to “turn the world upside down” and not just youthful self-indulgence if anybody was asking. Trying to change the way they lived to a more communal existence complete, to break from the binds of the nuclear family, trying to  change the way they loved, broader than that laid out in film, magazines, novels, and their parents’ examples, trying too to break from dog eat dog, cutthroats stuff that he knew very well from the corners. By the 1980s that had been forgotten except by some small remnant, forgotten by him too as he delved to the depths. But it had started out so beautifully, with so much promise, and he thought he would be carried along by the tide. Josh thought too that that ‘hippie” experience had been more than colors, music and dope just as “beat,” chain-smoking, wine and coffee drinking cafes with small platforms filled with minor poets crying out for the new dispensation did not reflect that whole “beat” scene as it had been filtered through to him via the television, what he read in magazines and his eternal wandering around Harvard Square early on trying to see what “best” was all about. Josh’s sketches, that word signifying to him that these were small patches of words reflecting moods and events not short stories with some over-arching point, played to his nostalgic mood when he began to re-write his piece. 

Sam thought later as well, after he had finished reading that rough final draft, that it was hard to not be overcome by the fact that Josh’s efforts to try to find some life lessons in writing Searching For Todo El Mundo were driven by his oversized wanting habits, wanting habits that small town, small house, small dreams could not satisfy, could not douse the flames in his wicked soul, driven by his addictions, one, two, three whatever he got into. Driven too, except when the drugs got the better of him (and which had strained their relationship for several years through the mid-1990s after Josh got in over his head and borrowed a ton of money from Sam that he could not pay back), destroyed the better angel of his nature to say it simply, Abe Lincoln simple, by sex, or really what to do about the opposite sex in his life. Sam, having just shortly before Josh’s request finished a flame-out affair with an old high school classmate of theirs, Melinda Loring, whom he had met via a class website although neither he nor Josh knew her in high school since she had hung around with the social butterfly set. The flame out was set up when she could not understand why he could not stay with her despite both acknowledging that their thing was “written in the stars,” which made Sam pause thinking about Josh’s wanting habits. Thinking that everybody could use a primer, any help at all, male or female, in that sex struggle but anyone who would read his piece would have been struck by how early on that male-female thing as the core of existence played a role in Josh’s sketches.

What Josh told Sam got him started though, got him to see going back to re-writing some of the small sketches that he had started back in the 1980s as a mission on behalf of his generation’s ebbs and flows had been a trip with his lady friend, his companion, Laura, that they had taken back to Todo El Mundo. (In the interest of full disclosure that apparently is necessary to state today for anybody to be half-believed about their intentions, any intentions, Sam had always been interested in Laura since he had met her when Josh and he reconciled in the mid- 1990s and would have pursued her if she had ever fallen off of Josh’s boat, a fact that Josh knew, she never had but now you know.) Todo El Mundo, a little south of Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur on a secluded stretch off the Pacific Coast Highway was a place loaded with memories for him, from that first time he and Sam had “discovered” it on their second trip west   and a place where he returned to for a while several times after Sam and his road days there were over. Josh however had not been back there since that time in the 1980s, the time when Jack K. lent him his cabin in order to dry him out, had not been there since his first unsuccessful fight against his demons. (Sam had not been back there since the late 1970s when he took his first wife there to try to sort things out after a bad stretch.)

 

 

 

He told Sam about that trip with Laura one long night in the bar at Jimmy’s Grille over in Cambridge, Sam’s drinking hole these days, while they were drinking high-shelf whiskies. That trip had led Josh to revise his original sketches  which he had begun re-writing in the winter of 2013  a little not so much in the content of the eternal sketches he was always ready to write but he said let’s say to bring out a certain tribal spirit about those long gone days. Sam, a guy who liked to write too although he as well had had his professions elsewhere, wrote down what Josh said that night and later put the notes in some order to “celebrate” his friend’s remembrances. Here is what Sam had to say:

Recently my old friend from North Adamsville high school days Josh Breslin (full name Joshua Lawrence Breslin but nobody ever called him anything but Josh except his mother, what do you expect, and some old time WASP girlfriend who tried like hell to make him, him of “the projects” born, more presentable to her leafy suburbs parents), told me about a trip that he and his longtime companion Laura took to ocean spray Todo El  Mondo just south of Big Sur out in California and a place that when he mentioned the name brought memories of parties, dope, the splash of the ocean and a fetching girl named “Moon-glow” I half-loved for a while in the early 1970s (don’t laugh such monikers were common then as we tried to re-invent ourselves, lose our “slave” bourgeois names. I went by the moniker “Flash Dash” and Josh by the name “Prince Love” for a while). Josh had not been out there in that part of California for many years (and neither have I although I have been to California many times since then but with not enough time to get there and chill out for a few days) but he had earlier in the year been under the spell of old “beat” king of the West Coast ocean night, Jack Kerouac, after re-reading his Big Sur, a book about his unsuccessful attempts to dry out in Big Sur after the notoriety of his classic On The Road literally drove him to drink (or drink more is a better way to put it).

That “under the spell of” got an added boost by viewing a film based on Kerouac’s work, Big Sur, after reading the book. While the film was not nearly as evocative as the book it did provide vivid shots of Jack and company on one of the Big Sur beaches, the one off of Sycamore Canyon Road. That scene enflamed Josh making him think of the even more foreboding and dangerous ocean riptides at very secluded Todo El  Mundo where we had spent time frolicking and later he alone, well kind of alone, while trying to dry out of a “snow” addiction (cocaine for the unknowing) that had gotten the better of him. That beach at Todo El  Mundo, as Josh reminded me, is as hard to get to now and the surrounding area is as sparsely populated with a few hardy solitude-seeking cabin dwellers, some with cars, some without, as back in the days since you still are better off to leave your car up on the Pacific Coast Highway and walk the couple of miles down a mainly dirt single lane winding and overgrown road, not hard miles going down but tough coming back up, at least that is what I remember but that hardness may have been the drugs/booze/sleepiness/sex exhaustion working in overdrive after a night of revelry. And so Josh and Laura went, went to retrace the meaning that Todo El Mundo had had for him in his youth in the long gone days when he had his break-out wanting habits on and later the first fight to curb the nasty parts of those wanting habits.

Josh’s wishes for Laura, since she had never been to Todo El Mundo, or for that matter that part of coastal California before and only to Los Angeles down a couple of hundred miles south of that spot a couple of times once with her ex-husband on a business trip and once with her daughter to go to Disneyland, had been for her to try understand how he was before she met him in the early 1990s. For him to tell her some stuff in that spot, that meditative, that human suffering, that at one with the homeland the sea, that night of revels and sweet fucks spot that he had fudged on discussing over the years since they had been together.

Laura, a few years younger that Josh’s six plus decades although she looked no more than about forty-five or so, although perhaps I should not mention her age since that fact may be a national security top secret matter to her, a not uncommon stance for our generation, not uncommon for women of a certain age, in case she reads this. I have told her that she had always seemed to me to look too young for the now craggy-faced Josh, that line- etched face reflecting his defeats in his fights against his addictions. In any case she had been something of a homebody in her own youth, had never travelled or liked to travel much. Had not been a member in good standing of the generation of ’68, now generically called baby-boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964, putting the ‘68ers in with kids who were barely born when the seas changed, and ebbed too. So Laura only knew the stories that Josh would tell her about the old Frisco hell-raising “hippie” days, about he and his corner boys heading west days (me and Frankie Riley, and one time Jimmy Jenkins), about the serenity and meditative pull of that section of the California coast, and vaguely about the unexplained evil spirits that had existed within him back then as well. All she knew, all Josh had told her about those evil spirits in that mumbled way guys have when they don’t want to lie but don’t want to drag that devil’s truth from the deep recesses of their minds, was that during the 1980s he had been part of a book-binding and print shop collaborative, along with Jack K. and others to begin with and then just with Jack K. and that business arrangement had not worked out due to lots of things, some of them which he told her he was responsible for. He did not include talk of the addictions as a reason for the break-up, or rather downplayed the drugs to an over-indulgence of marijuana and a little coke and left it at that. And no talk of the one wife, Betty, maybe two, married during that period although he always claimed to me that the second wife, Miranda, was strictly a common law arrangement he married during those frenzied times (he had long before, back in the 1970s, divorced his first wife, Martha, whom he only lived with for a short time before he left to head West again, alone, after she turned out not to be pregnant as she had told him as a way to keep him in up in Maine, Portland if I remember correctly ). He did say he had been married, the thing had not worked out and was too painful to discuss and left it at that. And Laura, sweet innocent trusting Laura let it go at that. Teflon, pure Teflon when Josh put his charm hat on.

When Laura had met him, as a customer on the recommendation of a mutual friend looking to have some work done, wedding invitations and the like for her daughter’s wedding, in the small print shop that Josh ran in Worchester all she knew was that he had been out West, had struggled and failed at marriage and everything else, had succumbed to his addictions, had fought them, gotten clean and had moved back east first to Boston where he had worked in a print shop downtown and then, through a contact had bought the place where she had met him when the owner decided to retire. So she was very curious about the mystery of Todo El Mundo, about what the place had to do with her man, how it had help screw him up or whatever it had done to him. Yeah, Laura is like that. Damn.                

Whatever Todo El Mundo had to do with Josh’s troubles they had begun long before, went back to childhood times. But that is a story for another time. See, like I said, Josh and I go back to North Adamsville High days here in Massachusetts, but more importantly later on the American West hitchhike highway where in the summer of love 1960s we were searching for, well, searching for something that we did not find then at least. But the time he told me of his journey with Laura when we met over at Jimmy’s Grille in Boston we both agreed that the search was the important thing and we had no regrets about trekking out to the coast many times looking for Eden, “looking for the garden” as we used to call it. We also agreed that we both were still looking, still had those ancient wanting habits on, and that we probably would until the end. Josh noted as he told of his time out there with Laura that while he was thrilled to “channel” the ghost of Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allan Ginsberg and the rest of the “beat” gang who held forth on that sacred Big Sur beach up the road and of our times at Todo El Mundo in the time before we even had any real idea that we too wanted to be rebels against our part of society he was almost more taken by Cannery Row in Monterey, the ancient site of John Steinbeck’s classic Cannery Row although today only small fragments of that area exist unsullied by a tourist hungry theme park.

He and Laura had stayed in Monterey so Josh was able to get a better grasp of that ancient ground that he had not investigated much before, mostly the vagrant beaches and skid row haunts. He had been there last in the late 1980s toward the end of his time in California before the theme park explosion when that ocean front was run down with closed canning factories and derelict housing.  He wanted to talk about Cannery Row, the fellahin cannery rows of the world that he had found himself once again fatally attracted to, wanted me to see that the Todo El Mundo scene had been a package that we had only grasped part of, that the ghosts of what we were looking for in Todo El Mundo dwelled in Monterrey as well. And here is what he impressed on me after he told me this part of his story:       

Josh Breslin was no question the illegitimate son of the kindred that John Steinbeck wrote about in his book Cannery Row and maybe if you dug down deep enough, grabbed some genealogy chart, went back enough generations, kindred of those Okie/Arkies he wrote about in The Grapes Of Wrath that migrated west in the dustbowl 1930s and landed in sunny Southern California and whose progeny would go on to fill up the surfer boy, hot rod Lincoln, biker angels, casting couch starlet blanks in the blue-pink western sky night. But maybe we should not press the relationship too stronger since his people on his mother’s side were hearty French-Canadians from up in upper Saint Lawrence River Quebec who came south to the mills along the rivers, Nashua, Saco, Merrimack mainly, looking for precious work before  in her father’s generation giving up in the Depression and heading farther south looking for work in the shipyards and his father from hillbilly mountain, coal mountain Kentucky. Those brethren, his father’s forbears, thrown out of Europe for every possible reason stayed put in the hills and hollows and did not have the energy to move west. Josh, ocean grown himself, felt in Monterey the kinship that one feels for those who society threw on the scape heap with the decline of the fishing industry out there and the decline of shipbuilding in our old hometown of North Adamsville which left his father, and his family, on the same scape heap in the “golden age of America” 1950s. (And mine too although my father had a semi-skill as a machinist that kept the wolves from the door for a while.)       

By that Illegitimate mentioned above by the way I had not meant by some fallen birth, although I insist that he was born under some ill-meant star, but because these days Josh no longer, nor do I, like in the old days travel west, travel to California using just his thumb, or maybe if he had a little dough taking the bus some of the way, or, one time, going east to west hopping on the old freight trains (which I never did). That last a nasty way to travel and he told me once that after that experience he would no longer berate tramps, bums, and hoboes for enduring such a method of getting west. But enough of “old days” transportation for Josh now flies to California when he feels that periodic urge to head west. Flies and has always marveled (and was thankful that he now had the wherewithal) that he could start out on the East Coast Atlantic Ocean, usually Boston, and be on the West Coast Pacific Ocean a few hours later a trip that used to take anywhere from about five days (if he, we, grabbed a fast run to the coast trucker looking for company, even “hippie boy” company) to a couple of weeks if he got unlucky and was left in some place like Winnemucca in Nevada where he had to sleep on the side of the road when it got too dark while waiting for a ride after being left there by a Native American trucker who lived up in the mountains near there. (I had once been left on a side road in Moline in a rain storm and waited almost two days while Middle America, a term of derision back then, passed by in self-satisfied distain so I knew exactly what he meant although that never happened when we were together).   

This latest trip west had been spurred by a recent re-reading of Jack Kerouac’s “trying to dry out from a drunk” book Big Sur so Josh had that destination, that secluded section of the coast, on his mind when the urge hit him again. Of course along with the “don’t thumb anymore” days he no longer sleeps on the side of the road in some crusted piss- smelling, sweat-smelling, newspaper- strewn bus station, or in some make-do lean-to tent but now seeks refuge in hotels and motels which he also does not mind doing. The problem this trip was that he could find no place listed in Big Sur for he and Laura to stay so they had to stay in Monterey which led to that earlier illegitimate Okie/Arkie fellahin reference because the last time he had stayed in that town he had slept on the beach, slept on the vagrant “jungle beach,” no money in his pocket trying yet again to shake off a jones, slept on the beach to the sound of the sea lions barking or whatever they call the sound sea lions make. Slept near the wharf where iterant fishermen brought their goods to market from the troublesome seas (and explained why the lazy sea lions like lazy humankind hovered near that landing area not having to work too hard for a hand-out meal). Slept the ragged sleep of the tramps, bums, and hoboes, feeding off their ragged stews, and drinking their rotgut Ripple. And feeling at home there even though out in the “jungle,” especially for the younger iterant, you were as likely to face a knife from some half-crazed rummy as a friendly “hello brother” career road man.   

But means of travel and methods of accommodation, hell, the eating habits of sea lions, were not what was bothering Josh of late but rather that almost never-ending sense he always had that he shared plenty with the ghost of those old time denizens of the cannery rows of the world, the skid rows. So all thoughts of flights, of rental car drives, and hotels drifted from his horizon as he got off of Exit 402B on the Pacific Coast Highway and headed into downtown Monterey. He needed to stop at the CVS on Lighthouse Road in what passes for Main Street in the town for a few provisions and while there he noticed that that street had not changed that much since the last time he had seen it maybe twenty-five odd years before. Downtown Monterey is really just an adjunct to the Cannery Row dress-up theme park which attracts the tourists and still has that hard-scramble feel of having missed something. Josh knew he was home, was among kindred he thought when a relic from the 1960s, a guy, who knows a rummy or a dope-head it was hard to tell, with a ZZ Top beard (long in other words), a tie-dyed tee shirt and a Hawaiian hat came up to him as he was leaving the CVS and asked him for a cigarette. Since Josh no longer smoked he had to say “no” but gave the guy a buck toward his efforts.

As the relic passed on Josh said he thought in a flash about all the corner boys from his  youth (starting out behind the elementary school gym in fifth grade, Doc’s Drugstore in junior high, Jack Slack’s bowling alleys in high school where we hung together after having met in class and where he introduced me to Frankie Riley the king of the corner boy night (and later our fellow road companion) a goodly number of them who slipped through the cracks and wound up on some skid row somewhere. Or wound up like his best friend from elementary school, Pete Markin, face down in some dusty Mexican town, Sonora, with two bullets in his heart after a drug deal went awry, went bad when he decided to go “independent” with a two kilo brick of the hermanos’ cocaine. Thought too about the “brothers under the bridge,” guys, fellow veterans, who did not make it back to the “real world” from Vietnam days who set up an alternative world in the arroyos, along the riverbanks, along the railroad trestles of Southern California. And of guys, tramps, bums, and hoboes whom he wandered with when he had his own addictions to fight, his own lost “real world.” That got him thinking that he should take a walk along the street, see whether any more ghosts showed up. He would not go to the Cannery Row façade since after reading brochures and seeing how everything pointed to that destination that place was strictly for touristas but rather walk Lighthouse after leaving Laura off at the motel to freshen up.           

And he was not mistaken. In a few blocks, maybe ten, he passed the usual Goodwill, Salvation Army (the Sallies had saved his skin more than one time with a hot meal, some clothes, a bunk bed for a few days at a time all for the price of having to listen to their version of the “good book” a small price to pay then for what ailed him, what addiction he was trying to go “cold turkey” on and he had always afterward, after he “got well,” put a few bucks in their buckets at Christmas time), and assorted used clothing stores (back in the day in places like Harvard Square, Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, Soho in New York City, such stores along with the ubiquitous Army and Navy used surplus outlets were prized places to “re-invent” yourself to go along with your new moniker as a dreamlike fantasy soldier, a swarthy pirate,  a Victorian gentleman or lady, a prairie pioneer complete with gingham dress  or buckskin jacket, or some 1930s movie actress but now such places are for those a step below Wal-Mart in the bustling world), run down cafes (dark lights to hide the dirt, rough food, poor service  unlike even the most poorly run Hayes-Bickford where the food was rough, aged before your eyes, and the coffee unspeakable but the company was worth the price of admission), the barely surviving pizza parlors (one on every corner it seemed run by someone in the latest wave of immigrants hungry to make it in America and willing to work long hours but coming up short on the art of pizza-making unlike back in the North Adamsville corner boy night when Tonio Rizzo, the owner and pizza chef of Salducci’s, twirled the dough and made your senses come alive with the smell of freshly baked tomato and cheese slathered doughs), the ubiquitous tattoo parlors (despite the current craze for identity tattoos some of them quite elaborate and comment-worthy by everybody from high-end  celebrities to low-end hoodlum bikers these places still looked like you had better check with your doctor, maybe show up in the emergency room, after leaving), the used book and record stores all looking like they were ready to close their doors forever with the next ill economic wind that came through the town (those old used books with their musty smells and broken bindings hiding many treasures which may not survive the digital age  and the records scratched and wobbly but again holding many treasures which may not survive the age of download YouTube or whatever comes next). Even what passed for one of the “upscale” places, a 1950s and 1960s retro-hamburger place where he stopped for a light lunch was barely making it although the food, the service, the posters of the usual suspects James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Elvis and the like, and the be-bop music spinning some stuff from early Motown to doo wop to Beatles from that period told him that in another locale like Harvard Square or maybe in Frisco they would be standing in line out around the block to get in. Such is the fate of cannery row towns when the main industry goes south and all that is left is the relics, buildings and people.        

A Cannery Row flashback: As Josh turned around after a few blocks to head back to the motel to do his own freshening up some of the ghosts of the past passed by in his head; tramps, bums, and hoboes met on Monterey pebbled beaches (and remembrances of some old time hobo, Lightning Shorty, telling him and all who would listen the differences between those three categories of wayfarers, taking the gaff from a couple of guys whom he called bums who stood just below his royal hobo status, yeah Shorty, a guy who was later was found on the beach newspapers for a pillow dead as a doornail, heart attack at forty-three when he looked about eighty to youthful eyes), sweet sand interrupted by belches and sea lion barks (we agreed “or whatever they call that sound” and that the buggers were lazy just waiting on the rocks for the trawlers to come in and throw their refuge into the sea), smoke fire at night to ward off the chill burning down to embers as dawn came up, maybe make an olio mishmash from the meat and vegetable leavings found behind  some grocery store (no food pantries or heroic soup line kitchens peopled by kindly church people then, not that he remembered anyway), drinking Ripple wine (or worse –“what’s the word, Thunderbird, what’s the price, forty twice”), smoking old Bull Durham rolled [really nasty smoke and what the hell Josh had never learned how to roll right, always left too much paper unrolled or did not twist the ends right, same with mary jane rolls despite his many experiences]. Where had that brethren gone, gone with the tide maybe, gone after “catching some westbound freight” (going to be with Father Death for those who are clueless about what that expression means), or to some push-out Southern Pacific trestle for a new home. Adios, pals.

Next night, a Friday night, a trip that he did not want to take, a Laura-urged trip, to Cannery Row proper. And even before he could sulk his sulk as they walked along bang, bang, kindred appeared, maybe the long lost progeny of those long gone brethren showed up on the streets. Most of the old wayfarers that he had had met in the 1980s “jungle” on the beach, those blessed hobos, tramps and bums, had kids strewn across the land mainly still in California from what they had said although how they would know is anybody’s guess since they left no forwarding addresses or telephone numbers. When the brethren high-tailed it they were moving fast, moving away from anchored life, from bills and mortgages, from the damn nagging wife and whining children. Some men are not built for such things, not built for much but that wandering gene deeply embedded in their DNAs, a gene that could have been easily passed on to that Friday night’s refugees. All the father-less children looking for their moment in the sun, for somebody to look their way and for them to show the world that they had made it without the wandering old men.

Yeah, Josh saw generational kindred seeking momentary immortality cruising Cannery Row in hopped-up (and loud hopped-up to boot) canary yellow Camaros, two-toned ’57 Chevys, chrome-infested Harleys, sporty Triumphs, sportier MGs, sleek Plymouths from back in the 1950s when such cars were sleek also two-toned, Mustangs invoking memories of other Sallys, Sallys to ride in the freshen air Adamsville Beach summer nights coming up for air after a hard night’s exertions, Jags that looked like Jags and not like one of twelve other cars, hell, the works showing off their sense of the past, their mechanical abilities, their desire, and their showmanship.

Funny Josh mentioned to Laura, as the bonking cavalcade passed by for the third time, California back a generation before ours, ours the generation of ‘ 68 for those asking, the generation before ours that came of age after the blight of the Great Depression and who survived a slogging war looking for kicks, looking for something other than “from hunger” took to the great blue-pink American West night and in little back lot garages or in some permissive father’s garage put together their “hot rod” to seek kingdoms in the drive-in movies, drive-in restaurant, drive-in everything if you had that “boss” car that would get you noticed. Here the now long-toothed progeny, those who could not shake their youthful fantasies and why not, were hovering the air of the night remembering back to those ancient times when such horsepower meant you were king (or queen now too) of the road, the great edge city highway looking for the heart of Saturday night. Old Tom Wolfe, the guy who explored the western wild boy hot-rod valley boy scene (and the surfer scene Pacific coast highway scene too), would have surely gotten a  chuckle out seeing blonde-wigged grandmothers, grizzly-bearded old pappies, handkerchief-hatted greying bikers, riding in tandem reviving ancient thoughts (and gathering many flash photos from convenient tourista cellphone cameras). Josh knew he did.      

But enough of city scenes and on to the Todo El Mundo grail. On Sunday morning he and Laura got up early and after breakfast took off to trek the thirty odd miles to that day’s destination, the beach at Big Sur, the one that leads down from Sycamore Canyon Road, on the winding, curvaceous Pacific Coast Highway which Josh admitted he was always a little terrified of navigating (me too) on some spots what with impatient travelers up against the car bumper behind and sharp turns against guardrail-less slopes the seas beckoning below. Of course the trek that day had to be a stop at Big Sur, a stop at vagabond Jack’s errant sea (although Jack could have been a proper Cannery Row denizen as well, an East Coast Lowell mill town boy who would have no trouble with cannery kin, with the whole fellahin scene that he wrote about in the Road book except on the Row it would not have braceros and Spanish Johnnies like down in the Fresno fields or up here the Salinas farmlands but gringo guys, those long lost Okie descendants).

Big Sur, Jack’s great big walloping zen-om-splish-splash wash, bing bong swish splash against the great big white- crested sand blasting away rock waves from eternity sea making sounds like some big old Johnny Hodges tenor sexy sax blowing, reaching for that high white note, not once in an evening but every other crashing boom, and Jack’s dry out love sea. Each wave tearing into the hard granite like- stone (stone that looked as etched and scrolled as in old eastern fast river flow to the sea towns, towns like Josh grow up North Adamsville in the bay , not far from Jack’s river of life, Merrimac River of life and maybe haunted in the back of his mind that those torrents washing over his mill town river land and those torrents washing the craggy stone clean were kindred and speak, speak mighty torrents), endlessly searching for that soft spot, that place where the stone like some ancient New England grist mill mashes the rock to the shore, makes the rock humble before the great waves. And too before those rocks crumbled, turned to sand in ten thousand, hell, a million washings, turned to pebbles, they first turned to human- sized rocks, rocks, piles of rocks, piles of rocks spaced apart almost like some human cemetery, piled in such a totemic manner that some cranky anthropologist in ten thousand years will remark, remark to a candid world, if candor still holds some virtue, that weren’t those “primitives” crazy to worship the sea gods, that like old Pharaoh down among the rushes they craved that kind of immortality. And the wind provided the protection so that some future vandals would not scourge the grains of sand when they desired to pay homage to their own sense of immortality. Who needed to say more. Even dry land, born away from fetid marshlands, mephitic swamps and adjoining seas, Laura had been impressed by the fury of the wave action, the defenseless stone rubbed down over ten million washings (her number) and that wind that spoke of no tender mercies when Mother Nature got up on her teach them a lesson mood.

The long-trek down to Todo el Mundo the next day, after retracing the Pacific Coast Highway route but with several miles more of knuckle-gripping curves, swerves, and those non-guardrail stops luring one and all to the endless sea, echoed those previous day‘s thoughts in Josh’s mind. Just like in the old days Josh, old days after his final “cold turkey” for his cocaine addiction took hold before he headed back east for a new start in well-known quarters, when he would visit the place just to seek some serious solitude in an over-heated world he parked the rented car above the canyon on the Pacific Coast Highway and he and Laura made the jaunt down the hill.

[As I thought about what Josh had said had been triggered by that walk down the hill about freshly made memories of his first lost battle with coke I could not help but yell out, “Yeah, yeah ‘snow’ is not addictive, so they say, but just to set the record straight if you had seen Josh then, seen the desperate look when he needed money to get an eight-ball, needed to get money from me with daggers in his eyes, you know he was addicted even if the term technically didn’t  apply.”-Sam]

Although he had taken cars down the dirt road, including a couple of times grabbing Jack K.’s car which Jack K. had parked for use at his cabin, the cabin he had let Josh use when he first tried to dry out and at a time when no way in hell should he have been behind the wheel, usually it was easier and more “romantic” to just walk down to the beach since you had to leave the car behind for the last third of a mile or so anyway.

By the way the view from that canyon road, the place where you leave your car is spectacular, breathe-taking, a view you do not take in as well on the beach itself. (Laura took photos on her digital camera and e-mailed them as attachments to me, a nice gesture since I had forgotten how beautiful the area was.) You can see why some long ago Spanish explorers, conquistadores, some grandees from the Monterey outpost went there to claim the beauty for whoever was brave and hearty enough to keep it. Although the ancient Spanish influence was marked all along that section of the coast you hardly see any more recent influence except the sweated bracero laborers who tend the industrial size farm fields on the flatlands or in Monterrey doing the service work for the tourista trade. Josh and I always in the old days, having grown up by the ocean ourselves and thought about such things as kids, told each other midnight tales, maybe when we were high, maybe not, used to fantasize about those Spanish explorers and what they thought when they hit that stretch, what secret desire to break away (ancient jail-breakers just like us) from the outposts and hold up there taking on all comers, keeping the place pristine.                  

So Josh and Laura walked gingerly (his word so we will accept that although the night at Jimmy’s Grille he looked unsteady on his feet as a result of fairly recent knee replacement surgery which had affected his sense of balance at times as he entered the lounge area) and it seemed at each turn in that desolate road Josh would flash back to some remembrance, especially when they passed Jack K.’s cabin which back in the 1980s was little more than a lean-to, subject to whatever weathers Mother Nature’s furies commanded and now had become an expanded shingled, water-tight structure and some kind of second or third home to a big name real estate guy in Carmel. A walk a little farther down the road rekindled the time when Josh had “fallen off the wagon” the second time when he and a party of several guys and gals, all stoned one way or another, thought it would be “cool” to dance naked in a little clearing. The result: everybody suffered from gnat bites, bee stings, one wasp whatever they call what wasps do to make you suffer when angered. He chuckled that this stretch was still filled with little clearings, some freshly made, some like the area of that long ago  clearing now well overgrown with bushes and fairly large trees. The deeply rusted hand –painted “pull off for on-coming cars,” recently re-painted by some worthy denizen the only surviving sign that some serious descendants of Tommy Wollaston, his maypole revels, and his band of “wild boys and girls” soon to be exiled from Puritan settlements in proper 17^th century Boston had run amok there some thirty years before.     

Finally Laura and Josh reached the rutted dusty somewhat overgrown area to where the hearties who ventured down the road in a vehicle parked, only one car there that day meaning the beach would be theirs. (Laura, by the way, crazily taking pictures of every interesting thing along the path). The third of a mile flat road lay ahead and a few minutes later they were at the high tide sea beach. Josh immediately thought back to the times when he and whoever was around (sometimes me) would go down in the late afternoon, jugs of wine and whatever dope was handy and cavort until the next dawn before heading back up the hill. Josh also remembered some saucy sexual adventures in a couple of sea swirl dug-out caves with Lydia from Carmel when he wasn’t so stoned although he decided not to share that information with Laura. (Not that bee-stung revel described before either.) 

Josh spied a make-shift tee-pee made up of various tree limbs strewn along the shoreline either washed in from the turbulent sea or downed in some howling wind night which plagued the place on certain days that had been gathered to protect against the Japan sea winds that also kept the place cooler than most of the places along this stretch of shoreline. Josh, playing the gallant, or remembering those old time Spanish grandee swash-buckler tales we swapped as we swapped dope he was not sure, invited Laura into the tee-pee to sit and ponder the sea as the vast swirled around them, as the cavernous rocks which acted as something of a break-water took their beating, took their million poundings into sand dust. Once settled Josh started reciting various lines from the poem that Jack Kerouac attached to the end of his book, Big Sur. Soon Laura was picking up the ocean moaning groaning sounds as well and so they spent the afternoon at one with our homeland the sea.

 

 

Laura remarked later that that was the closest they have ever gotten to be as one and Josh agreed with a slight smile. This is when he gave some more details about his life before Laura, about the evil spirits that at one time had possessed his soul. Laura took the whole conversation in stride, said she suspected that he had more to say about his past that he let on but that she was happy with him, he treated much better than her ex-husband had and so she had let it ride. Damn. As the sun dipped they headed back up the road, the road up now not as tough as Josh remembered it.  

Although at it turned out Josh, kind of embarrassed at his age about his reticence, continued to fudge on some of those sweet fucks and revels part, had tried to speak about them but was unable to separate even now the sweet fucks parts from the hells and craziness he put those women through, especially Miranda, before she cried “uncle” after he had sold her car, her main possession in life, to feed his demons. He said when he tried to bring his hellish ways with  Miranda up he kept seeing images of their last meeting in Frisco, she looking back in sorrow, his head bent down, and began to think about where she was that night, not a good thought sitting as one with another woman. I could see his point, although when he mentioned Miranda and the sold car that brought up my own travails with Josh and the night he stole a rare set of old books from me and sold them for a pittance and never until this day said he was sorry about that one. So not ever the white-capped swirl of the ocean smashing to the waiting arms of the shore endlessly making ethereal sounds and soothing savage souls could ease some ancient hurts.       

And then back to Cannery Row. Next day sitting where some old sardine factory had stood unused and unloved after many years of service (including a copper-plated turned green searing memorial to deep-sea divers lost in the struggle against the sea, the struggle to bring the strange sardines in for canning), broken and torn down after years of bringing the fish in Josh looked up and saw a sculpture, a sculpture centered on the novelist John Steinbeck. Steinbeck who in his time made infamous Cannery Row famous (although the numbers who would be able to identify his name with the place or the great everyman and everywoman Joad Okie California migration classic that he wrote, The Grapes of Wrath, is probably a couple of generations later fairly slim except for English majors and an off-hand skid row aficionado like Josh who had spent time there before he got some of his addictions under control and abandoned the places where skid row and its inhabitants survived) and his friend, a marine biologist, immortalized in Cannery Row, a handful of skid row bums made so after the sardine industry went south, and they, unskilled in their time for other gainful employment went on the bum, made themselves local characters by the time Josh met them along the beachfronts and along the flop house and charity soup line circuit. He told me he would tell me about that later, some other time.

What Josh did tell me about that night was about “Madame” Fiona (and although she was British she was no noble figure so you know what kind of Madame she was) who ran the best, the fairest, and the easiest to enter if you had the money whorehouse on that section of the coast back in the day. Right across from the Monterey Police Station so you knew Madame was a sport and “connected.”  As Josh remembered Madame and her sweet place he had to also remember Thea, or at least that is what she called herself when he knew her, Madame’s best girl.

Thea had been caught up in the whole West Coast hippie thing (she had been in Frisco when the summer of love exploded in 1967 a couple of years before we got there), had later developed a serious cocaine habit (after going through the alphabet of lesser drugs, legal and illegal mostly illegal) and had taken to “muling” like a lot of snow freaks to feed the habit, got burned when her man decided that he was smarter that the damn Mexican braceros he was working for as a distributor and found himself face down in a back alley of Tia Juana with his face blown off when he thought ripping off a brick was an easy road to independence, and she then needed to make her own way. (Josh cringed when he related that part of the story since he knew I knew about Peter Markin and what had happened to him down in Sonora.) Her own way then being given a room at Madame’s who saw in Thea’s airy funny ways and still good looks a cash cow (good looks especially in dark rooms with guys with serious dough and serious and unusual wanting habits which Thea had the book on, the Kama Sutra book).

Josh said that in those days, the days of his struggling with his addictions, well after the days when we were carefree in California and thought the new world we were exploring would last forever rather than at the ebb where we caught the tide going out as we headed west Thea reminded him of Butterfly Swirl. That name, the moniker of a hippie princess from Carlsbad down in Southern California, whom we met (and fought over) in Frisco brought instant recognition. She after spending some time with Josh eventually went with me and we lived in Oakland for a while before she headed back south to her surfer boyfriend when it turned out that the hippie princess life was not for her. Butterfly Swirl was this vision out of some Botticelli painting all ethereal, all wispy and virginal although she knew how to make a man’s toes curl. No question Josh would be drawn to such a woman even if she was a faded version of some youthful lust.      

Thea proved to be resourceful at what she did, and so she had worked her way up to Madame’s best girl when Josh ran into her in Carmel a short time after his own struggle with a snow addiction had finally been conquered. He was working again with Jack K. in the print shop on a regular basis, was pulling his weight with the concern (and best of all making money sending me along some of what he had borrowed although I was still sore about the way he played me to get it), had been delivering a load of books that they had rebound to the Big Sur Library (whose main benefactor would turn out to be Henry Miller, not the writer but the sculptor whose work both Josh and I had liked when we saw it at some local exhibition on the Pacific Coast Highway) and had stopped on the way back up to Frisco in Carmel for dinner at a Greek place that he  had liked when he was with Miranda. Thea had stopped there in order to buy some jewelry and he had spotted her on the street looking lost (directions lost), asked her if she needed help with directions, and they struck up a conversation winding up sitting in a café drinking coffee and wine for a while. Once she told Josh her profession, which she was up front about and not bashful about describing, after they had talked for a while he told her as they parted that he might come to see her at Madame’s sometime. She smiled.  And he did. And Thea, a child of the 1960s and of some sense of sexual adventure, some sense that there was more than the missionary position to the sex act took him around the world.

He would run into her every once in a while and they would go out for a few drinks. But Josh always paid the freight when he saw her at Madame’s for his occasional trips around the world. Josh, a bit melancholy when describing her talents, said she was something else, not some hooker with a heart of gold but a smart intelligent woman who took what she could do best and rode with it. Then one night Josh went to Madame’s and she was gone, had left with some guy in a three-piece suit who Madame said had promised Thea the world.  Adios Thea, adios pal.                      

**********   

Josh got tired that night at Jimmy’s Grille (they had been drinking high-shelf scotch toward the end while Josh was telling his story), told Sam once again that whole trip with Laura had brought back memories of that little shack, Jack K.’s shack, he had lived in on that Todo El Mundo dirt road to the beach where he fought off his first “snow” addiction, and his first bout with going “cold turkey” a fight which proved unsuccessful until much later. Since Sam had not been there in the 1980s when this was going on, had been situated comfortably in Cambridge ready to finish up law school and make some money (and his peace with society) Josh wanted to give him that story, the unfinished story that he had recently picked up again. Josh said he had written some sketches, some writings to keep him from going stir crazy back then which he had kept and which he had found up in his attic when he was looking for some old North Adamsville High stuff, mostly his yearbook. So as the hour was late he told Sam to read it and tell him what he thought about it. Here is what Josh passed on to Sam, who has already described his take on the piece and who left most of the screed as he received it in that rough final draft, telling him about what he had to say about searching for Todo El Mundo dreams:      

The rain came tumbling down slashing against the cabin windows, came tumbling down like the “Rains of Ranchipur” that he had begun to called such rains after seeing Lana Turner going through her Lana Turner thing twisting old fake Indian Doc Richard Burton around her little finger in the movie of the same name. Those beastly rains that used to keep him indoors on childhood rainy days nose up against the window, him, Josh Breslin to give him a name and not leave him off in some anonymous cloud like he was just some stinking donkey work everyman for what was eating at him, eating the best of his heart, was no everyman problem, not even in the free-for-all atmosphere of the depressing 1980s that he was trying to get a grip on. In those days a fogged window against his nostril breathe wondering whether the south branch of the Adamsville River would overflow its banks and send the house afloat down the river, the shack of a house that he had grown up in on Walnut Street and the only house that he knew, although when he was too young to remember they had lived across town in Adamsville proper on Pond Street in another shack of a house that had been torn down. But on those long ago days he really was hoping that it would let up for the simple reason that he was going stir crazy in the house what with brother squabbles about loud music, theirs, or talking too loud, them, so he could not read the book in front of him, and mother yells, mother yells about anything that a hard-pressed mother of four closely-aged coming-of-age boys would yell about when the rains came and drove her charges indoors and to kid squabbles.

Yeah, those rains had been slashing down on Todo El Mundo like that with short periodic let-ups for a couple of days and it was starting to get the better of him, starting to make him feel just like he felt when brother squabbles erupted and mother yells raised a din to match any horrible sound you could think of, some sonic boom mother lode. A couple of rainy season days and Josh, having been in California for the past few years now off and on, around Pacific Coast Highway Central California and so subject to the Japan seas, had expected rain but the deluge was just a tad bit too symbolic for his pressing needs. His nerve quiet needs, his need to think, to write just as much as he could to keep the devil demons starting to form in his head, worse in shadows against the plastered wall, and the worst, the shaking trees outside looked devilish every time he poked his head out to see if the damn deluge had stopped, away, to keep them at bay for a while, and not have that stupid pitter-patter of rain going rapidly down the crusty drainpipes and driving him to distraction, just like those childhood times when he was stir crazy to get away from brother squabbles and mother yells, as he tried to go cold turkey on, well, let’s call it life, his going downhill fast life. That part.

Hell, let’s call it one of his seven different addictions also created by childhood wanting habits not abated since then that drove him rainy day stir crazy, starting in no particular order although this blasted rainy day he was breaking from his “nose candy” addiction, coke, snow, blizzard, cousin  or whatever you call it where you make your connections for the stuff, to the exclusion of the other six (come on now did he have to name them all, the other six, other than one was women, just then a woman, Miranda, Miranda from Xanadu his common-law wife but she had faded, had left him when she saw no way out, when she saw too that it was hopeless to stay with him after he sold her fucking car from under her just to get an ounce  of flake. And that last time (hell, you know there were other disputes, many other disputes, when Josh played his junkie hand out) he let her go without a whimper, let everything go except her memory, that memory stuff, the good times, the walks on the beaches, the innocent dope times, the sex (the way she “curled his toes” what he and all his youth time corner boys called it learned from an old blues number, some guy like Son House or Skip James, one of those guys), haunting him in sober moments, moments like this freaking rain-blasted minute. Yeah, his slightly overdone bout of sniffing stuff up his nose until it was clogged like some drainpipe just like the crusty one taking a rain beating outside his cabin door to the exclusion of everything else including his printing and bookbinding business, his going concern business with Jack K. whose cabin he was watching the rain in.

Had claimed his share of rolled one-dollar bill sniffing (although at one party in Pacifica just off the beach in some old hacienda owned, secretly owned, by the cartel as a transit point north but fronted by gringo bigtime distributors while he had been in the first days of this round with cousin that he was trying to break out of the well-heeled host insisted that everybody use the one-hundred dollar bills that he provided to inhale the damn stuff, and keep the bill as a souvenir). That binge had gone on for months and now that he was out of cash, out of coke, out of friends with cash (having done his own version of the pyramid scheme borrowing from friend B to pay back friend A and friend C to pay back friend B and so on you get the idea), having run out of women whom he had made a specialty of conning, coming up with so many improbable cock-eyed stories even he could not get them straight, conned them until they began to compare notes, the ones who knew each other, and froze him out, money out, bed out, out of credit with his usually laid-back dealer friend up in Marin City, who had not only shut him off but had been making noises about bringing in some “bracero labor,” that is what Marin City Slim (his moniker) called the hard boys available to high level distributors like him, to get the dough until he had had to sell most of his rare book collection to keep the wolves from his door, and out of Miranda (by choice, hers, and car-less).

So he needed no rain, no pouring rain dripping satanically off the roof top, off the freaking drainpipes, off the ancient 1965 Volkswagen bug car parked in the back up against the cabin, Jack’s car as he had no car. Had no car and still squirmed that he had sold Miranda’s out from under her every time he saw the damn thing out back, hers a 1982 Volkswagen that they had had many a kinky tryst in, in order to score some cousin which was the open cause of her leaving him although there were one hundred other possibilities over the past years beginning with those conned women beds that were now closed to him. Had no need to see and hear the rain purring off the damn trees when the swirling winds formed around the basin about one foot below where he was sitting trying to keep from crawling out of his skin as the urges began to settle down. He had to laugh, Alan, Bix, Muddy, Magic Slim, goddam Neal, goddam Dean, goddam Jack K., even Miranda in the days when they would do a few lines just for fun said that cousin, cousin to smack, the Big H, was not addictive. Like hell as he dove down to the depths again in the depression, some shrink one time when his wife Betsy forced him to go see him said that Josh was clinically depressed, probably had been from childhood, but what good did such knowledge do him just then as that funk would not quit him no matter how much strong black Chase & Sanborn black coffee he drank and how many Pall Mall cigarettes he smoked.

So he, to pass the time, started writing what is presented here among other things, writing to take the edge off,  writing in the third person as a convenience, a shamed convenience since writing in the “I” was too self-conscious and too capable of being fudged when it came to describing cons, women cons a specialty, stolen drugs, money taken from random purses, kited checks, bounced credit cards, figuring too by the time anybody read the stuff he would either be well writing that next one million words that he had been on the threshold of doing threatening one and all that he had a blockbuster to end all blockbusters inside him that would make that 1950s “beat” minute guys and their cross-country excursions and cavorting seem like some Henry James Boston Yankee WASP  Brahmin Beacon Hill séance.  Or, more likely, be in some locked funny farm, you know some place to cool out with no windows, maybe no bed if he got feisty, screaming to himself about the injustices of a rational man being locked up in place with no windows and some mattress strewn every which way on the floor, crying out for snow, for liquor, some sweet whiskies or wines, hell, just a goddam cigarette to cut the sound of the scraping fingernails against chalkboards that he would be fighting.

Maybe too, although very unlikely unless he came packaged with a new Toyota or something (some deal he could make with Johnny Callahan, Mr. Toyota down Hull way on Auto Mile about twenty from North Adamsville his old corner boy who had made good on the straight and narrow after high school, grabbed Mrs. Toyota, his high school sweetie for a wife too), said maybe one hundred non-Catholic-etched acts of  contrition and took it slow and easy, meaning  no catting around with stray women looking to curl his toes for a few lines, back under the shiny silky sheets with Miranda. Or, who knows, and Josh got the shivers thinking about this one, knowing damn well what had happened to old corner boy (and best friend from elementary school on), Pete Markin, who let his wanting habits, aided by a twist, by a woman, who wanted everything in the freaking world to satisfy her own wanting habits which he thought he could satisfy, get the better of him and wound up very dead down in sunny Mexico. Nobody to claim his body, no family, not that twist, no friends, and, hell, not him for sure, for fear that they/he would wind up beside poor Peter. Him thinking that he could steal a suitcase full of coke which he was “muling” and get away with it, and for his troubles turned up face down in some dusty forlorn and forgotten Mexican town around Sonora way after a drug deal fell through when the guys whom he was dealing with knew that the dope belonged to the hombres and told them about it and he got the short end of the stick. But those things were all future, all too murky right then to think through as he  looked out at the glimmer of the Pacific, all majestic swirls and death spirals, all crashing and moaning, moaning for a wave, and he moaning to get that idea about those finger-nailed blackboards out of his head,  that he could just make out (he had to laugh at that one about the swirls for the rain, for the ocean and for the turmoil in his fucked brain all meshed together) through the big picture windows.

Big picture windows all the rage now in rattail California seacoast cabins to make up for the old-timey rustic stuff that hadn’t worked for years, you know that oil-painted green door that won’t close right, the spaces between the logs that let in more wind that a politician’s speech,  clogged crusty gutters, clogged by the shedding trees that threaten to return the place to nature, a cold stove, clammy floors, all good enough for primitive man Jack K. but wearisome to a guy trying to keep himself together better than the fixtures, that window  facing out onto the swirling ocean gathering some unknown verve out in the Japan sea. Seeing that scene, seeing that he could not handle those damn chalkboard scratches, he thought maybe he could “score” from Freddy down the road. And just as he was about to put on that damn yellow fisherman’s gear (over-sized pants, swoshing black rubber boots, adequate jacket and damn garish yellow flop hat that made him look like an advertisement for that old  Gloucester fisherman who graced the front of the package of frozen fish sticks that his mother force-fed him and his brothers when he was growing up (and dosing the damn things all bread-crusted and soggy by the time they came out of the oven with blood red ketchup which made him ill just then thinking about them) some better angel of his nature, maybe some glimmer of hope channeled from Miranda (funny that he kept coming back to that Miranda reunion, kept  it front and center about how he would do this and that to change things between them if she came back yet when she was around he was sullen, distracted, distant, aloof, non-responsive and toward the end almost comatose), or of an act of God ( a vengeful God like some great Jehovah witness, all snarls and fury,  that he remembered thinking about one time that came from some old folk song book, or hymnal book, no, from a Harry Smith Anthology entry recorded from down in backwoods Tennessee singing some bleak Sunday morning praise to placate that damn rage of his, remembering too that maybe three hundred years ago when the song was fresh out of the Protestant Reformation struggles he might very well have been trying to placate that damn Jehovah himself with some lusty singing praises to his name) like his mother kept harping into him whenever all hell broke loose in the household and then magically got resolved without him having to spent his life in purgatory got hold of him and he went to bed instead after one last look out through those tell-no-tale big picture windows.     

Next morning Josh awoke, yeah the third day in a row of that slashing rain. Third day “resurrection” still caught up, despite formal disbelief honed by the depths of modern skepticism with the free-thinking guys he hung out with lately unlike those high holy day corner boys of youth, in childhood Catholic incensed myths maybe eternal myths, maybe all religious groupings had such foundational myths he would have to ask Allen who had made some studies of the matter. Somehow he thought but the idea made sense but that resurrection business was too pious for the thing he was thinking when that first blast of slashing rain hit that drainpipe and his nerve-endings were almost shattered, nervous system high-ended by the sight of those swirling oceans down below heedless of soft-core junkies and their frayed nerves. Heedless, hear me, of a man moaning for himself, moaning in search of that high white note that had stuck in his head for a while now, moan for that high white note, go on try to bring all humankind moan into it you faker, for all of the wicked things he was thinking, break out of this prison thoughts, getting well with Freddy down the road thoughts, maybe working a deal to mule for that Marin City dealer he was in hawk to up to his nose (not trying to make a pun there, no way), maybe working out some deal with Marin City Slim  to front dope for him to front dough to Mr. Toyota and work Miranda back  into his bleeding away life, too many thought s for all the soft felt-tipped angels whom he could use right then in his wake-up bed.

And, damn, damn, him stuck, stuck hard this time inside that slight cabin. He swore the place had gotten smaller in the night like the rain had sogged, wetted, soaked things up so much, he was getting a bit frayed as he thought his thoughts he could not remember what the right term for everything wet was, and that finally logged, logs set in the back bin for his comfort, fire stove had gathered enough heat that shrunk the place in drying out that wetness. Jack K.’s cabin, or was it Lawrence’s, he was all confused that second, no, it had to be Jack’s K.’s because Lawrence’s was several miles back up the road toward Big Sur, back around Sycamore Canyon Road, which might have been in Big Sur proper. Jack K. had just felt that he needed the time off from that dastardly project for the print shop, the book re-binding contract for the Harvard libraries which Lawrence, who had run one of the libraries before he headed west in the mid-1950s and set up that bookstore/restoration shop in North Beach, had gotten for them through some old-time contact, which required him going east for a time, drove him so crazy because the work had too many moving parts which always confused him. Jack K. usually took on those jobs, knew how to work magic on old books for cheap money, but he had been having, Jesus, at forty, mother problems, mother storming about him not being married (and he not wanting to be married since his was a practicing homosexual and refused like a lot of Frisco guys to get married as a cover for his activity), not providing her with grandchildren, and so had begged off). So Jack took that over, took it over in a huff once Josh met a guy in Harvard Square (a connection first made through Marin City Slim),  who had some blow and that was that, that had him bent out of shape, had taken the wind out of his sails. Funny how after Jack K. called wondering what the hell was going on after not hearing from him for a week, nothing, and what he was  hearing about Josh craziness from Allen, Dean, Greg, Hubby when they came out west, he had left the East in a swirling rainstorm, hitched in spots until the rains grabbed him in Moline like they always did that time of year, grabbed a bus in spots from Davenport to Reno and wound up in Frisco a week later in another swirling rainstorm getting off the last stop bus down by the Embarcadero and then went over to Third Street to see some guy that Jack K. knew who was supposed to lend him an apartment for him to work in for a month or so. Josh figuring that getting away from the East Coast, thought of Miranda, and cousin would push him forward.

Turned out the guy, no names here because by the time anybody reads this he will probably have gone up the ladder in the organization, the Mexican drug cartel, the braceros, los hermanos, those guys with the heavy artillery weaponry ready to spray said weapons in all directions just for kicks to keep the new drug of choice, snow, moving steadily up gringo and gabacho American noses. Well, or in a drug haze, Josh nevertheless made it a longstanding, well-thought out habit learned back in his corner boy days with Sam, Jimmy, Johnny Callahan (now big time Mr. Toyota and maybe he really could swing a deal to get Miranda a car once he got well), sometimes the late Pete Markin (now gone to his early rest having “caught the westbound train” after not making the right choices when he tried to go “independent” with a suitcase with a two kilo brick of the cartel’s goods inside that he was “muling” and got two slugs to the heart and face down in some dusty backdoor cantina in Sonora for his efforts), and king hell king leader, Frankie Riley who had made a few trips west with him and Sam back when the earth was fresh, of not offending up and coming “connected” guys, not only had no apartment for him but as a stone-cold drug dealer on the rise turned him on to a sweet ounce barely cut to make up for that no place to stay bit. Thanks brother maybe someday I can return the favor.

So for about four days, after he called few a friends in the city, Allen, Dean, Jasper, Hinck, Buck, but not Jack K. (who beside mother trouble had been drinking heavily to get over mother troubles and coke didn’t do it for Jack K. anyway),  who had a few women friends as well, especially Dean who practically had them conned out of  his eyes and they would roll over in the clover for him in a minute (his supposedly extra-large dong the key to their lusts, according to Dean), Josh did nothing but stay high in Jason’s rooming house over on Bay Street where no questions were asked as long as the rent was paid in advance in cash and not loud noise or gunfire was heard, listening to jazz albums and sweet be-bop talk he had not heard for a long time. Got laid by some good-looking gone chick friend of Allen’s, Linny,  (her and Allen just friends according to her although she suspected that he was more interested in Dean than her but whatever, whatever). Linny, gone yes, gone for her daddy Josh for a minute anyway, although she was strange retro woman, dressed all in black, black beret tilted on her head just so like in old films of Lizabeth Scott, including black bra and underwear saying that she was a “beat” chick looking for her way back home, looking for kicks, and looking to curl a guy’s toes for some of those kicks. Strange because she was maybe in her late twenties and just by rough arithmetic was not even born when Jack, Allan, Gregory, Gary and all their beat aficionados held forth in North Beach clubs, dives, cellars, and made new words sprint off the page, old Allan be-bopping about how he dreamed of negro streets and desolation angels, but like she said she curled his toes for a few lines and some be-bop patter. And so they went to the mats a few times, and, get this, Josh in a drug frenzy ill-advisedly drove Dean’s car off the road down by the Pacific Coast Highway near the Daly City line when he was taking her back to her sugar daddy or something in Pacifica. He had to call some errant tow truck to get him out and Linny just sat in the car listening to Dizzy be-bop about peanuts, staring out at the sea, dressed all in black (he told you about the black undergarments already).

After that four day blur, a couple of sober days along the shore in Pacifica with Linny where he stayed with her in her room (turned out the daddy was her real daddy and Pacifica was her home but it took Josh a while to absorb that information and so it had come out sugar daddy first in his twisted mind), the days back in Frisco turned into weeks in blurs and then Jack K. (or maybe it was Lawrence after all since Jack K. had had his own problems with the bottle, the scotch whiskey bottle, although he was a maniac working at the print shop, drunk or sober, and maybe too had had a ten thousandth falling out with his mother about not being married, about not giving her grandkids and all that stuff, stuff that Josh had heard the echo of in his own life so it probably was Lawrence) gave the marching orders to that rustic cabin he just awoke up in and still felt none too good if anybody, anybody but the damn seagulls, the occasional field mouse and about seventeen aggressive squirrels was asking.       

Oh yeah and ordered to try to break that cousin habit, that nose candy habit by Jack K. straight out (funny Jack K. had as many addictions as he had although not all the same, especially no women) and Lawrence too (who despite the crowd he hung around with including Jack K., Dean, Neal, and Irwin nevertheless tended to business in his own bookstore, got the contracts signed, the books in order and the guys in order- a regular worker bee as he was fond of calling himself) out there in the great moonless dark moody Pacific night. Night signifying his mood, day or night, when those coke-less nerves got frayed of late.    

And so here he was in the great white-capped Pacific night that many years before Josh had started reaching for when he had first come west, no, that was not right, when he first started dreaming up in his three brother shared bedroom on sultry summer nights and cold as hell winter ones too in the staid Eastern night in high school if not sooner about the great escape, the escape from know-nothing old North Adamsville where he was spinning his wheels , no project ever got completed, nobody took him under their wing except one English teacher senior year but by then he was already half way out the door in his head anyway, getting hell and damnation from his Puritan-bred mother (yes, Puritan-bred although she was nothing but a high holy day, high mass complete with incense as the priest fumigated the congregation Catholic and maybe that is where Josh first learned what high was all about, Roman Catholic high, but don’t let that fool you since they were brethren, brethren in close by Pilgrim lands which rubbed off on her, and him), could do no right. Found Frankie Riley, who would later become a well-known lawyer after he spent his wild minutes going west with him and Sam, and the corner boy life and its pranks, high crimes and misdemeanors which put him behind the eight ball with family and the law, nothing big but another good reason to clear out. Had been an indifferent student (except senior year when fearing some military draft coming down on him upon graduation and some God forsaken war flaring up in Southeast Asia and with the prudent guidance of that English teacher he blossomed well enough to get into a college. Had been cup runneth over so filled with teenage angst and alienation (you know nervous about his low-rent appearance, about his lowly social standing in the pecking order of the school, embarrassed by his wrong side of the track status and girl trouble, or really trying to get to first base and failing girl trouble) that he could have driven a truck (he laughed about a big old Mack truck) through it and escape too that cloying smugness of the red scare Cold War night that was driving him, and not just him, to distraction.

So he dreamed, dreamed, dreamed small dreams like having his own place, hell, his own room, his own car and not have to depend on Frankie Riley’s beat-down beat-around Nash Rambler (heck, they hadn’t made those since Hector was a pup and Frankie was always having trouble getting parts)or Sam Lowell’s  reliable and “boss” ‘59 Plymouth) and large wild world global dreams about a little social justice and a lot of justice, big literary heavy justice for Josh Breslin, and in between dreams would sneak, yes, literally sneak (and will tell you why in a minute after he finishes this thought) in the dead of night over to Harvard Square, sometimes with Sam, who had some of the same dreams although they both kept them in check around the other corner boys who were “square” about poetry, literature and the budding folk scene which they mushed together as “beat,” for lack of a better word although beat was getting lazy and grandmotherly among the corner boys of the world in place like North Adamsville, Cambridge, Manhattan, Detroit, Chicago, LA, and Frisco, sometimes alone, when he was in high school in the early 1960s just to be around what he thought was a new wave, a new way of thinking, writing, singing, acting, juggling that he sensed, and not just him either, was coming and would make his small “beat” corner boy group seem like a tea party.

Here is a good scenario of how he would get going out that Harvard Square scene. Usually it started with some mother “why did you do this when you should have done that-why did you do that when you should have done this,” you know the drill, beef (less frequently brother, three other brother, beefs about space and quiet) and he needed to get some fresh air, needed to shake the dust off the old town off his shoes, needed to be with kindred, even if only to moon over them and their sense of freedom. So late at night, usually around midnight he would stealthily slip down the back of the property and start walking a couple of miles in the sweet dark if foreboding mean streets to catch the all-night Redline subway over to the Square. Once there he automatically took the steps two at a time to get to, well, to get to the famous, or maybe infamous, Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria that was just outside the station. Now normally nobody, nobody in their right minds would give two cents worth a damn about some dispensary for rancid coffee, soggy muffins and un-nameable stews, but the Hayes in the Square was a fixture for every misshapen hobo, every urine-stained drunk, for every girl on the hustle, for every three for a quarter hustler, every down in the dumps hipster (or wanna-be), every crying for a fix junkie and, oh yeah, every guy or gal who sensed the same breeze blowing through the land as Josh who were writing like crazy, poems, stories, and songs, folk songs then mainly waiting the night away for the big wave to wash over them, give them their minute. And Josh hoped that he would be washed clean too. (Oh, that seemed so long ago when the world was new, before we tried to turn the world upside down, and we did not have to run away from the things we have built and run too from the things, Shiva-like, that we have destroyed.)           

So that was how he spent his time, how he got through those last minutes of high school, mainly being seen, maybe snapping his fingers when some budding Allan Ginsberg began some be-bop sentences and devoured the night, and taking everything in. Some people there took a shine to him, one a Harvard assistant dean’s daughter, another a guy who would go on to a long, if  not publicly well-known career as a folk artist who later used some of Josh’s material in his songs. Mostly those who took a shine to him did so a couple of years later when he was actually in college, having been pushed hard to go to school by that sainted angel English teacher senior year in high school to get off the dime, and they pushed him, especially Eva that assistant dean’s daughter who wanted to impress her father with her wise choice of boyfriend but he, the father, in the end, hated Josh worse that the anti-war protestors who were buggering his door every day, to write some stuff with the idea of having it published.  (Which had been one of the factors that had animated him to take up the printing profession so that he could publish his own works if necessary, although all that blew away like dust when his various addictions took on their own life).

Others in the Hayes-Bickford mist, mostly guys who would give him the nod, the nod then signally some ultimate kinship, some oneness with cool and not just thrown for the sake of recognition, and pass him by silently to go back to their dorms or garrets write the great American novel that they couldn’t stock enough of, dreams of book tours and being put up in swanky hotels, or cut the next big folk song that would have everybody flooding the jukeboxes for a listen and bring in gold albums, saw him for what he was then just a confused kid wet-behind-the-ears kid. Ever the con artist whatever else Josh held sacred and dear he would make that confused stance work to his benefit that he successfully played out with certain Harvard Square young women, Eva in particular, with what then would have been called motherly instincts but which he saw as working out them working out their own lonelinesses in a turn your back to angst world who wanted to help him end his confusion. Like he said he played that out, always played that out. But either budding “new find” or confused nerd he hung tenaciously to his secret high school Hayes-Bickford routine through college waiting many a weekend night for the big break-out to happen.

Josh wrote about that experience in high school, wrote about his sense that big new things were coming for him and his generation, and saw glimmers of that fresh new land in the flesh on any given Friday or Saturday night in Harvard Square and even in Kenmore Square where some Boston University students not to be outdone by the Harvards were creating their own post-beat wave, but no one he knew listened to him (except Sam, who had all the right instincts then, had a sense that things needed to be turned upside down , knew in his bones how to navigate “the road,” but who would only be washed for a while by that breeze until the early 1970s when the tide ebbed and law school and making peace with bourgeois society beckoned). Nobody heard Josh’s anguished cry, calling him rogue, devil saint, sad sack idealist or, and remember the red scare Cold War times, “commie,” Bolshevik, and Joe Stalin’s illegitimate son. (One teacher, an old battle-scarred  football coach who probably was a hundred years old, or acted it, had kept him after school three days running for not liking the way he answered some silly history question, Josh playing with the answer since he knew it although he was not a real history junkie, and called him Bolshevik just like that. Jesus, and he wasn’t, he was just a kid trying to work out in his head the new wave he thought was coming and that he might have a place in the damn thing.) Yeah, so nobody listened then thinking that he was a wanna-be “beat,” some third-rate retro beat, out of synch with his time by the early 1960s when television determined “beat” and not circumstances of life beat but he had been too young to have understood what that “beat” minute was, although he knew the echos, had had his wearing a slanted back black beret and un-cuffed black  pants period to give the look of some beat denizen, some beatified brother.

Get this, even corner boy king, his acknowledged leader, Frankie Riley cut him to the quick more than once making fun of him and his hanging around with winos and derelicts, faded sisters, and local hoods, nickel and dime hoods, at the Waldorf Cafeteria up in Adamsville Square when he couldn’t sneak over to Harvard Square or didn’t have enough dough to buy coffee and crullers, and so just hung out picking up the folk wisdom that every hipster had at the tip of their tongue. Sure there was plenty of cutting each other up verbally even among sworn corner boys, especially by the king because that ability was how he got to be king. That corner boy thing had been a necessary protection for Josh in the rough neighborhoods of the “Acre” section of North Adamsville where anybody, any guy, running solo was subject to serious problems including beatings for scoffing at the corner boy traditions but to call a guy out for being slightly off-center meant you would always be looked at with a very jaded eye. Of course later Frankie got “religion” but back then he could be merciless on any given weekend night when he felt he had to act the “king.”

Some girls that he was interested in, one Melinda Loring, who had dismissed Josh’s interest in her out of hand in that haughty way of hers, said he should worry more about the draft (Melinda’s brother had been then recently drafted and had already been sent to Vietnam) and getting his ass in college (Josh’s expression) and less about guys like Jack, Allen, Gregory, Tom, Mario, who already were making the big breezes that were getting ready to stir the generation and had already made their mark. (Sam Lowell would fifty years later have a torrid if short and fruitless affair with which, according to Sam, did not have enough strength to survive a couple of tough blows, which didn’t make sense after a while, which like some things had no room to grow. So maybe Josh had been better off having been dismissed out of queenly hand by her.) Even that English teacher, Miss Soros, who he had secretly thought must have been some kind of hipster in her time because she was always talking about the New York literary crowd this and that, looked askance at him when he told he had been doing that Hayes-Bickford  midnight creep for a couple of years.

He said to himself then that he would show them, showed them big, showed them at great cost to his brain, to his body and to whatever sweet angels were ordered to cushion his fall that he was on the edge of something grand, something you would remember fifty years later. That first written piece from high school, submitted to that English teacher who had it placed in some small high school literary publication (after she did her usual no-holds barred editing job) a now sought after relic that he had not been able to find among his papers, a paper sketch which he treated like some Catholic shrine thing, some venerated thing, like his mother and grandmother were always telling him to get wise to before it was too late in order to get himself some kind of absolution for his sins. Jesus.

So yeah Josh got the urge, when he came of age (okay, okay when he got out of college), when he first left Harvard Square back in Cambridge where he was staying with a campus bigwig’s daughter, the assistant dean’s daughter, Eva, previously mentioned for chrissake, who went for him and whose father went crazy when he found out that some raggedy-ass boy had been staying with her, ordered him out of her apartment and gave him some dough to head west, head somewhere, head anyway and he was just hungry enough to grab the dough with every fist. Eva had wanted to go with him, had had her head turned by the idea of the road, of striking out to find adventure, to check out that fellahin world Josh was always talking about, talking about the utterly doomed, the shadow forgotten, the whiskey-soaked panhandlers, the flotsam and jetsam night-hangers that she was totally unaware of except every once in a while at the Hayes-Bickford when he had no dough and they wound up there at one in the morning. She knew though Josh meant more than those obvious down-trodden and that  he was speaking of the sweat-back braceros doing their stoop labor, the small-time hustler spending more time figuring the con than just straight working, the midnight cravers, those looking for shadows to shelter their misdeeds.

And Eva was curious also about that great blue-pink American West night that Josh talked about constantly, about the road west that generations of his (and hers too although mostly they stayed put to fill the Brahmin East and Ivy League schools) kept pushing toward until there was no more land, until the Pacific swales ate up their dreams, about the Okie/Arkie stuff that Woody Guthire wrote songs about, that John Steinbeck wrote books about, and Nelson Algren described he old world genesis of, about setting up a new life, about instead of corner boys there were smiling cowboys, awkward sheep-herders, bad ass guys too, and more modern, oil-stained hot- rodders in the valleys, water-soaked  surfer boys waiting for the perfect wave, and their suntanned blonde girlfriends waiting for them while they waited for the perfect wave (she, Eva, of brown hair, brown eyes and a brown world and so jealous of sun-flecked yellows and blue eyes too, Josh’s fierce blue eyes included), and new, a new sound coming from out in Frisco about breaking out of the confines of what parents, teachers, authority figures (like Mr. Assistant Dean father) and their hangers-on and trying to be free. Josh had taken her one night to the retro-1930s and 1940s black and white film Brattle Theater to see High Sierra, to see Humphrey Bogart, Bogie, as the dangerous stone-cold killer Roy Earle, and his round-heels sweetie Marie, played by Ida Lupino, (and, dog Pard) who kept talking about “getting free, ” about a great personal jail break-out ,and that vision stuck with him, and he made it stick with her when they would get stoned and talk of what the road meant.

Yeah, getting free just like that tear-stained Marie at the end when Roy takes the big step-off. So yes she was thrilled by the idea of going on his   road with him, had gotten a friend ready to sublet her apartment, had grabbed some dough from her grandfather for the trip (he thought it was for airfare, hotels, and such not the hitchhike thumb, sleep by the roadside, grab peanut butter sandwiches on the fly), and had gathered in some camping equipment/road supplies like a knapsack. Her father heard about the whole trip idea and freaked out (which also would have required her to drop out of school, Radcliffe, for a while which really freaked him out) and her wound up locking her up in her apartment bedroom, giving Josh money in the living room (after threatening him with some legal actions about co-habitation laws then in effect to sweeten the pot) and he, a couple of days later, headed to the truck terminal near the Coca-Cola sign near the Mass Turnpike in order to try to pick up a truck out of town. A friend had given him the terminal tip because a lot of times the truckers were going long distances and wanted company to talk to at seventy miles an hour, even strange hippie boys. That began the first trip west, the one before that real one with Sam where they really had fun when some girls picked them up in Cleveland and it took about three weeks to get to Frisco and you can figure out why on your own time, a trip west that would not be the last of its kind. 

He had set out with a rucksack on one shoulder (a few grooming items, a couple of pairs of sock, underwear, a Swiss Army knife which turned out to be usable in many circumstances not all of them of a benevolent nature) and a bedroll on the other (a couple of sheets, an old bedspread and, wisely, a canvas sheet as ground-cover which came in handy on a few rainy nights sleeping by the side of the road when no cars were coming by), a few bucks in his pocket (he figured not to take all the dean’s money with him so he got a money order and mailed it to Eva since he might get jack-rolled). He had called Eva, had explained what her father had threatened to do to him, and had talked her into going west on her own by plane and she would bring the money with her then. She never did, did go west, but when he came back to the East she was waiting for him with the money and a few sweet tricks to whet his appetite that she had picked up from a serious read of the Kama Sutra while he was gone. They stayed together for a while but he had the wanderlust bug then and she had backed off from that western adventure idea and eventually, a couple of years later, wound up marrying one of her own kind, a Yankee stockbroker from Yale. Josh wondered what would have happened if that damn father hadn’t choked her off, if they had gone west together. He still wondered every once in a while whether wherever she was she too was in her deep sleep thinking that she should have gone-wondered what she was doing the nights he wondered about her fate. As for the assistant dean who later became a notorious dean at another Ivy League school he was too busy by then fending off irate anti-war, anti-everything students to worry about a fallen daughter.

Yeah the times were out of joint, no question, and Josh had a well-worn thumb, a blessed beaten down thumb, a hitchhike thumb that had done yeoman’s service in the search for the blue-pink great American West night.  He had searched and searched for the damn thing and now all he had to show for it was a stuffed-up nose, the miseries, two lost friends, one lost girlfriend and so much angst that somebody might think that he was still a teenager. (That search for the American West night was a serious venture in his mind because Josh, although no serious student of history, bought into this old Harvard professor’s idea, a guy named Turner, who said some strange stuff was going to happen once everybody realized the American frontier was gone, that there was no place left on the continent for the “wild ones” to move on to. That eternal wanderlust of those whose forbears came to these shores on the transport ships, or worse the prison ships and picked up stakes when the soil wore out, or the neighbors were to close by or maybe they just got tired on tilling the soil and moved on. Moved on and then hit ocean. That hard fact was going to create a mess, a mess for guys like Josh who were really rolling stones, had no sense of settling down, had to keep moving just to keep moving, driving that hot-rod on midnight “chicken runs,” revving up that bike on the Pacific Coast Highway (he swore on a clear cold night he could hear that thunderous roar from a couple of miles away), wading out surf board in hand to take on the nearest wave, who didn’t fit in and who did not want to go to Nepal or some such place but plant themselves in America out in the moonless night search whether in the desert, the Rockies, up along the Hood River, or just tramping like some latter-day John Garfield down the Pacific Coast Highway looking for that thrill that would either kill him or cure him.

In Garfield’s case kill, they hung him high if you want the truth, that time he played the alley cat wanderlust hobo Frank in the 1946 film The Postman Always Rings Twice when his wanting habits were for another man’s wife who was looking for a stepping-stone, who had murder in her long-legged curvaceous blonde-haired heart, and would be eternally grateful in just the right way such a creature could be grateful if she had an playmate to do the foul deed, but he did go to the big step off with a smile. Funny Josh had a recurring dream about Frank, about the film, about her, since it was filmed in the year that he was born, the dream always having him in his mother’s womb sitting with his father in  the now retro- Strand Theater, or some such dark place, screaming his lungs out at the screen for Frank to clear out, clear out fast, the minute he saw her, that blonde dish, coming through the door from the back of the house to the two-bit diner asking for a fresh-out girl cigarette and he licking his chops, looked her over like the daily special. Josh always yelled for all the good it did Frank. All he had at the end was that smile, maybe a half smile, and that ever present jasmine scent, that damn scent.

Josh had had less angst back in his youth, less teenage angst, but he also did not have a problem with stuffed up noses then either. His immediate problem. Yeah, so Jack K., let’s just say it was Jack K. who sent him to Todo El Mundo and if it was with Lawrence’s blessing or not let’s leave it at that. Jack K. told him to make himself at home once he got there, told him to make sure that he stopped off at Billy Joe’s in Daly City to get his groceries and a ride out to the place from Bill Joe son who was heading to San Diego. (Billy Joe by the way one of those Oakies progeny who by then had populated half of California who still had that wanderlust, still wanted to pick up and leave, except there was that damn ocean and so except for a very fast Vincent Black Lightning, a British import he kept his wanting habits in check.)  

While fretting through the first few hours of his “cold turkey” Josh suddenly thought that he had forgotten to tell anybody back East, not Miranda who was not speaking to him and who would not accept his collect calls, but whom he could sent a letter to marked “Emergency,” or something like that and she would answer, that was the way she was, or at least she would know where he was, not Biggie his dealer friend of recent vintage and the only one he did not owe money to and who might give him a line of credit if he knew where to send the dough and how, not Jimmy Jones who was the superintendent at his building over in Brighton where all his worldly possessions were stored in the basement pending some back rent received, nor anybody else to tell that he was back in California, back in Todo El Mundo where he haven’t been in years.

The last time had been with Angelica, Angelica of the old time hitchhike road met in Steubenville, Ohio where she was slumming one summer as a waitress, had spied him, had been vaguely looking for a wandering man to break out with, had bought his line of chatter and they were off to the coast. Miranda knowing that he had taken Angelica to Todo El Mundo had refused to go there with him and so they usually stayed in Pacifca a few miles south of Frisco town when they flew out to the coast. Yeah, Miranda was that kind of woman that way too. He had flown out from Boston on a whim, on a whim that a change of coasts would do wonders for him and move him away from the increasingly nasty drug scene and his own jones where he was finishing up a couple of “mood pieces,” mood pieces being his way  of saying that he couldn’t get a big upper case idea, or rather a big enough idea to sustain a book-length story, hell, or even a reasonable short story and so he had scraped together some small case ideas like what it was like growing up around Boston in the early 1960s and what it was like to escape over to Harvard Square late at night and what it was like to  sit in the all-night Hayes-Bickford cafeteria (he thought that was what that establishment was supposed to be, a food and drink place but he knew that he never went near the food if he could help it although he usually grabbed a cup of joe to prove he was a paying customer and not some drip-dry wino or down-on his-luck panhandler) and soak in the sights, soak in the people, soak in the notion that he was fixated on about the big new breeze that he sensed was blowing over the land, the big blow that would wash everybody  clean, would give everybody, hell, give him, a new start. Oh what characters you would see from winos and skid row bums cadging leftovers, bumming change for coffee, really though for the Thunderbird wine -“what’s the price-forty twice” to be had in blue law Massachusetts over by Charley’s Kitchen from a guy who bought about twenty bottles for just such after hours’ business, ah, free enterprise, taking some used coffee cup sitting on a table before the busboy got to it and going to refill the thing with the tepid dishwater coffee burned over about seven times (refills were on the house),but also guys, guys like Eric and Tom, a couple of off-beat beat poets waiting like him for that new wave everybody knew was coming (even the winos and bums were going to rise on that great day) and  who helped make that folk minute that old Bob Dylan and a couple of others are still kicking around today .

But thinking about those halcyon days got Josh all mixed up, feeling like he had missed the best part of it (he had been in the military for a couple of key years, years when the ebb was starting to churn things up, the edge was coming off of drug highs, the war was seemingly endless and ruthlessly pursued no matter who was in charge, guys were ripping off their friends for spare change to get high, Hunter Thompson who was knee deep in the thing called it the ebb of the high-water mark, called that the point where “the chosen” knew they were not winning and not winning meant a very long wait for the next wave and a huge fight just to keep what little was achieved against the greed heads of the world), feeling kind of melancholy and so against all good judgment he told himself he needed to take a little something for the head if he was going to continue since those tumbling rains were making his head spin, spin badly out of control if he didn’t settle them down with some elixir. He did a couple of quick lines with an old dollar bill (laughed again about that party with the hundred dollar bill blow) figuring that would hold him for a while, get him well, get him so he could then begin to taper off.

He then continued- continued on about the mood pieces that had kept body and soul together, doing those mood pieces to keep body and soul together no question and to keep Jack K. happy since he was the only one privy to the hard fact that mood pieces were the only thing that Josh could produce in those days. Some small idea like the time he  was hitchhiking down in Ohio, yeah down in Steubenville, Ohio on his way  west maybe the first time, no, the second when he learned enough about the road, about the fine art of hitchhiking, and knew that a long ride a little off course was better than waiting around for hours (maybe overnight, that had happened more than once and that is when he got hip to having that canvas ground-cover as a part of his bed-roll) and that was the way the truck driver who he hitched a ride from out of Greenwich, Connecticut was going and you always took whatever ride a trucker gave you because he probably was going a far enough distance to get you on your way pretty well .

Yeah truckers were the life-blood of the road, guys who were driving way too many hours, carrying way too much weight (of whatever they were carrying and sometimes it was best not to know), smoking way too many cigarettes, gulping way too many bennies, eating way too many trucker diner meals, carrying way too many family responsibilities for what they were doing who were glad for the company at seventy miles an hour to get off stuff off their chests. One guy, Denver Slim (they all had monikers within the brotherhood and after a while you got to know that many knew each other, at least diner knew each other and would call ahead to see if anybody was heading your way after they left you off). This Denver Slim moniker was hard to figure since he lived in Evanston and by no stretch of the imagination was his slim but rather a big beefy guy who would be handy to have around if you got in a hassle picked him up, him then with long beard, long hair, bell-bottomed jeans, army jacket, some classic hippie he look, just because in that outfit he looked like his son, Jack, whom he was having trouble understanding, understanding about why he was drifting away from home, why they couldn’t talk anymore. A real good guy with a wife in Evanston and a girlfriend in Steubenville  just to give you a flavor of what was going in the other America of that day which did not hit the headlines. Yeah truckers, except for the ones who had a habit of leaving you off somewhere in a two-bit town rather than on the Interstate where you could at least get a fast ride before the “staties” could grab a chunk of you, were good guys. Most of the time they would set you up for a meal (a truckers’ diner meal of which they all knew which ones to stop at and which ones to move on pass and while a steady diet of such food would probably kill you a two-days-since-you-last-ate situation made that prospect look very inviting, even the ubiquitous bread pudding for dessert), and always with a few cigarettes just for keeping them company out on the white lines in the highway.

Anyway this Denver Slim trucker gave Josh a ride to Steubenville, where his girlfriend lived (by the way more than one guy had that concubine set-up although unlike sailors he had never heard of trucker guys with a girl in every port) and left him off at Katy’s Diner. Katy’s, at the truck stop just out there on the outside of town, one of the best trucker diners between the East Coast and the Mississippi always with a bevy of trucks idling away while their drivers feasted of Katy’s pot roast, and, of course, that bread pudding, heated, with whipped cream to cut the taste. Gave Josh a dinner too before he left (probably the meat loaf which was both hearty and filling in addition to the bread pudding). That was where he met Angelica, a waitress at Katy’s slumming for the summer while school was out, who had wanderlust in her eyes and who had an eye for him the minute he came through the door, an eye when he came through the door not because he was great looking but because he looked like a hippie and just then, she a small town girl who had not much experience in the world, the hippie world starting to form a cohort in the American night, was looking for such an adventure. The times were such that that scenario was being repeated in many out of the way spots among those who were yearning for, well, for something different, although not always waitresses slumming in Steubenville. Had heard some things that she was curious about and once he gave a sly smile her way she was intrigued and so they hitchhiked for a while across the country (there is more introduction to their story than that, the part about her taking him to her cabin which was provided by the diner for employees as part of the job and where they “made the roof tremble” one night before they got on the road but the main thing is they hit the road together, an unlikely combination if the times had not been out of joint).

He often wondered what had happened to her, what had happened to darling Angelica, after she had left him on the road that first time in Moline. Damn Moline of the cheapjack paper walls motel, one of the many, of the too many “hotel, motel, no tell” places he had found himself shacked up in which at that time was the wrong place with the wrong young woman, wrong because he had no dough to get a better place for them to stay, it had rained for about five days straight forcing them off the mud-caked roads filled with indifferent drivers and their Midwestern suspicions and wrong because while she might have been slumming for the summer in Podunk Steubensville holed up in some transient lowdown employer-provided cabin, serving them off the arm, and getting propositioned by every trucker under about seventy, hell, maybe  every trucker that still drew breathe but she was made for satin sheets and white picket fences and he, well…everybody knows what happened to him.

They had met again after the Moline meltdown (she had returned to Muncie, Indiana, famed as Middletown in a long ago sociological study by the Lynds and he by a very circuitous route to southern California down by La Jolla) out here in California, out in an ocean campground up near Point Magoo a few months later when she flew out to see him. They had frolicked on her first time ocean see her almost getting caught in a riptide she was so excited to see that deep blue sea (that had been her first time on the coast, the coast which had been their original goal before, what did he call it, oh yeah, the Moline meltdown).  She had wanted, had desperately wanted, him to settle down with her almost anywhere but he was still in his rolling stone phase and so they had parted never to meet again after a few weeks. Except more than a decade later he still wondered about her fate, wondered whether she got whatever dream she dreamed and hopefully had not settled for some parent-inspired routine like a lot of other people, guys like Brad Badger who smoked more dope, drank more wine, fucked more woman and got into more fixes than anybody else he knew from back then who was now thumping bibles for dough on the cable television networks telling people swill and calling for eternal repentance for his youthful sins. Jesus, he had known a ton of guys like that back then who slipped back into society once the price of staying outside got too high or the call to home warmths was too great to pass up.

Yeah, they had had a few great weeks that almost had him going for the white picket fences, almost had him fixed into making some little white house roof tremble but no. Funny thing was that three marriages, a few affairs, a few flings later he had finally realized him could have saved himself heartaches, hassles, and money if he had had the sense that God gave geese back then and grabbed Angelica with both arms and held on tight.  As Josh thought back to that time he  knew then that she was fine, fine company, especially after her ding-dong-daddy, him, turned her on to some weed, you know hemp, you know grass, you know marijuana out here in California. On the road they had played it cool with dope. She had never tried the stuff since she was square enough to just like a wine buzz, especially while making love, and Josh never pressed the issue. With only a few days left before Angelica was heading back home to Muncie she, get this, she said she wanted to try some marijuana not having any other name for it, not having been emerged in the lingo-driven drug culture shorthand. Just wanted to make love after smoking some weed.

Since Josh had been on the California roads before they met up again he wasn’t holding. But the seaside campgrounds where they were staying at Magoo, you know right off of the Pacific Coast Highway about twenty miles above Malibu, in those days was loaded down with car-loads and van-loads of young stoned highway warriors with plenty of dope and Josh was able to cadge a couple of joints, big ones, from a long-haired hippie troubadour guy in a psychedelically-day-glo-painted van who had just brought it back from Mexico, Acapulco Gold no less (those were the days when you could bring freaking bricks of the stuff across with just a little caution).

So one night just before the sun went down they smoked a joint. Angelica, of course like almost every other grass novice including Josh (Sam who had done grass earlier than he had laughed the knowing laugh Josh’s first time too) coughed the first few puffs but then settled into a great night of enjoying her first high. Somehow they connected on a very high level that night, saw something in the sky that would have been called “written in the stars” in the old days but the die was cast elsewhere for them. (He had vaguely heard somewhere that she eventually headed back to Southern California a couple of years later, done some modelling and some B-movie extra acting and had married some second-level new wave director but he never had a chance to follow up since he was East Coast bound then, and had been East for a long time. And besides by then that die was cast, cast around his neck in the matter of that first wife who took him for plenty before she was done.)              

But enough of Angelica youth diversions, longings, maybe better said half-longing for the road, and for a road not taken because that would not put dent number one in the long overdue novel everybody expected from him.

 

Yeah, so he had been writing stuff like those fluff pieces but million word Jack K. and he really had written or seen a million words maybe more in his time, yes, maybe more if you counted the errors, the typos, the false starts, the doodles of any writer or editor, editors like him who usually re-wrote stuff so that it only had about fifty percent of what a guy or gal wrote originally but Josh was not going to get into that, not going to rake Jack K. of all people over the coals when Jack K. had given him about seventeen chances to come out with a breakthrough novel like the world had never seen was the way Jack K. put it and that idea secretly pleased Josh when he was sullen, sullen with some candy up his nose or blocked, writing blocked not nasal passage blacked if anyone was asking. No question Jack K., old million word Jack K., hated the idea that Josh would scramble up a half-baked idea for a five- thousand word mood piece and not give him more. [Hell Josh told me he tried, almost broke his will and health tried as told me over many a cold summer beer or a winter whiskey over at Jimmy’s Grille near the Boston waters when he was in town recently when I asked about it but Josh said he got the blues or something, couldn’t finish a longer story that he was doing on a ghost dance vision that he and a couple of other hitchhikers had one time out in Red Rock out in the New Mexicos, where they almost became warrior-kings after a heavy bout with queen peyote-Sam].

Josh when he told me the particulars of that Red Rock story laughed. In truth he had told different guys he knew, Jack K., Markin, Jimmy Jenkins, old Frankie Riley and Sam, that story about six different times with six different combinations of thoughts about the meaning of that experience. Frankly as he found out later everybody had been non-plussed by that one, wrote it off as just another Josh busted ass run off about some high-dope ancient ghost warrior vision, wrote it off and one more stick in the infamous legend of Josh when he was a “bad boy” like about eight million other guys and gushing on about the subject told more about what it said about Josh that anything else. The story about smoking dope with Angelica out on the great pacific ocean, and making the tent tremble with their love offerings, they said told them more about the real Josh that some “cowboy and injun” fantasy out in the desert where those guys were probably just as spooked, desert-addled and thirsty as being on some higher warrior-avenger plane. Still he had to give one and all, especially Frankie Riley who still was a practicing Catholic or at least he went to church, if only to placate his wife who wanted him to set a good example for their three children, chapter and verse about how he was not a spiritual man. Except for that little problem of being the most spiritual man around, according to Sam who thought back then he took his dope rations as some communion wafer surrogate, as some holy grail experience, going back to his old time Roman Catholic roots which while not formally driving his life for a long time has given him the mark of Cain no question.

Josh said, emphatically said, he was not a guy who went for the mumbo-jumbo ( despite the hard fact that for a while he had actually dated some gypsy fortune-teller, at least that was what she said she was whom he had met at the state fair in Ventura one late summer coming up to Frisco from Long Beach, a woman calling herself Madame LaRue like in the old pinball days and doing a thriving business for a while until her father sent some low-rent gumshoe to bring her back home to her Wall Street stockbroker husband who had a different fortune to give her). But that Red Rock ghost dance night he says he started to think about believing, started to think that the world had some design, maybe somebody did put it altogether, maybe got some parts wrong so some people could disapprove, got some parts right so there might be some design, had some thought to it. Yeah, so Josh flew out to the coast from Boston having long ago given up the hitchhike road that formed the basis for a whole bunch of stories that he have written over the years but which now seemed overblown (although well-paid for and in the running for various short story awards including a finalist one year to be placed in a best of the year American anthology of short stories production). Worse, worse by far, that compilation seemed like a pale imitation of Jack Kerouac who did it first and did it best because he made a buddy story out of it, made it kind of sexy too, not in an overt way, like sex sex but more like the romance of the road intersecting some then current angst than the generation after his, the guys who came of age in the 1940s and whose who lives were shaped by the Great Depression and the traumas of World War II and were looking for their own personal new breeze coming through grabbed onto for dear life.

The worst thing you could tell Josh was that something, good, bad, or indifferent, was like Kerouac’s. He would go crazy, saying to all who would listen (or be forced to listen once he got on his hobby horse) that he was a third-rate hack next to Jack Kerouac. That all that was fresh, new and better thought out in post-World War II literature up to the 1960s was branded under the imprimatur of the working-class kid from Lowell who made big literature out of his crazed boozed up, drugged up, sexed up, fucked up life (those feeling of insecurity, that inability to commit to much of anything except cats and memiere). Jack K. almost got his headed handed to him on a platter one night (Josh is six-two, Jack K. about five six or seven)) when he said his short story about his first hitchhike road ride and meeting of a couple of guys who he would travel south with was Keroauc-esque. Jesus when Sam Lowell heard about that happening later he thought the walls of Jericho were going to come tumbling down, and was surprised they did not.          

So yeah Josh who at least had been able to write some fluff after months of nothing was feeling like the king of the hill, feeling like he had conquered the block, had turned a corner, with little pieces about Angelica loves, fierce warrior ghost dances, and the like but mainly he knew he had to get away from this love business that had had him all blocked up. Most of his previous blockages had revolved around love interests, getting into, getting out of, or not having anything to get into or out of one way or another so his feeling that he had to get away from love was both old hat and the beginning of wisdom. Although that wisdom never kicked in until like now he had made a few wrong decisions, decisions like going back to cousin girl (and seriously thinking about boy, about smack after reading some Nelson Algren short stories and thinking he would not mind being a ding-dong daddy for all to see but that moment passed). See how that love thing had twisted old Josh around, had done so ever since he learned about women, okay, girls and their charms, this latest chapter of the love business, the Laura business, the love that drove him back to cousin (and me up a wall what with him calling me about six times a day at one point) to stop disturbing his sleep, stop kicking his head with what went wrong.

Christ, the truth is the whole thing was wrong ( that was my opinion from day one since I was apprised of everything via e-mail, cellphone, or in person at Jimmy’s Grille more than I wanted), wrong from day one, maybe hour one and I don’t mean that in a  mean-spirited way because Josh in the end, in the end after he had made a fool  of himself, had almost lost several friends, had been humiliated by her and would not take that as a sign to let the whole damn thing go,  agreed with me, agreed  at least that he had handled the whole thing about as wrong as a love-sick man could do a thing wrong. That was just how it was, wrong, that was how it had to be given his situation and hers, and he should have done his usual step away which he had learned to do a little as he got older. Younger he had played things for keeps, played them hard whether he was married, or had five girlfriends, asked for no quarter and gave none, had no back off in him when he got his wanting habits on, but he had been intrigued (that was always the way it started, always some little quirk that a woman had that got his head spinning).  Intrigued by the fact that she had come from our hometown (I did not know her back  then although I may have run into her the summer after high school down in Hullsville where a local dance hall ran weekend rock and roll concerts for teenagers which when we compared notes after I met her at Jimmy’s Grille with Josh one night she said she also had gone to), old fogy North Adamsville, right close to Lowell, to the Merrimac river of life, the father of rivers to get us roving. See Josh was for all his six million words, all his now well- known bravado, all the flimflam around him was, with me I admit, the co-winner of the strike out king of the Class of 1964. So the intrigued hook on this one was the mere fact they had been in the same graduating class together (and given that weak reason why I thought the whole thing was wrong from the beginning since I still had painful memories of the “stuck-up” girls who like her who would not give us raggedy ass boys from the wrong side of the tracks the time of day then, or now either, at least that was my feeling.)  

So Josh had been intrigued by the idea that that he would finally have a North Adamsville woman and that conquest would challenge, would put paid, would exorcize, the bad tides of his youth. And it was nice for a while, clandestine meetings, out of the way places dinners arguing over what and what not to eat, yeah, it was nice, nice too to hit the sheets when the time came for that. Josh told me a funny story about the first time they thought about hitting the sack, or at least her feelings that it was their time. Josh invited her over to his hotel room one night after he had been at some all-day conference up in Portland, Maine and made some kind of remark about sex or something, something kind of off the cuff. She took this to mean that she was to stay the night. Josh still a bit unsure about where he wanted to go with the relationship after he had actually wrote to, talked to, had dates with a North Adamsville classmate was confused about the future. So she arrived at his room bearing wine and food, she got frisky but Josh was flabbergasted. He figured the night for a dinner, some drinks and then sent her off home. That is what happened but she was not happy about the situation because she had packed an overnight bag and had fed the cats. That’s not the funny part though. The next week Josh had another conference up in Portland and he had originally decided to go up and back without staying at a hotel. At some point during that day he had decided that they should hit the sheets. He called her up, asked her if she was busy, and when she said “no” he told her to pack an overnight bag and to make sure to feed those cats. Josh said they had a great evening.       

But then it began to unravel, got to be a squeeze on Josh’s goodwill, got to be her (understand “they” when you say she on this one) dwelling on the need for them to make plans , have a future, have that future blueprinted and spec’d out. He flipped out one night when she began talking about a retirement place out in Bordega Bay in California even though he had no current resources to do so and she had three years before she could retire and he could not figure out why under those circumstances that they had to have a plan. So sure he got mad, sure he, as he told me at Jimmy’s one night, he raged against the night (I think Josh was trying to channel some Dylan Thomas poem about going gentle into that goodnight although Thomas was talking about raging against the inevitable lost battle against death but maybe he was onto something but don’t make too much of that since Josh was in his cups when he was throwing down that gauntlet, sure she had her own set of rages, raging against that same night, raged herself into breaking things up and  that’s when the Josh hurt came in, that when as the song goes, “that’s when the heartache begins.” See Josh finally figured out well after it was too late that she had been good for him, he knew she was good for him, she knew she was good for him but he had that rage, had that wanderlust thing about keeping distances, about appearances and so at the end, his end when she closed the door on the affair it ended with a bang not a whimper. He said he wished that he had said that little nugget in reverse but some high Anglican poet-king, Eliot I think he said, beat him to it, beat him to writing the phrase although that didn’t change the hard fact that the thing ended with a bang, a banging of shut-out doors.

And so to aggravate matters in the aftermath he connected with his old time “cousin” connections. Guys like Marin City Mitch. Connections that had  started in the early 1970s when he spend some time running dope from Mexico to California to  raise money for various political defense funds that were starving for cash when the hammer when down on the 1960s but guys were still in jail for being on the right side of the angels when it counted. It had been easier coming across in those days if you were not stupid or greedy trying to get over the border with an over-sided load. Later he would make the connections to keep body and soul together, him and his old friend Peter Markin who had been stupid and greedy and had wound up face down in some dusty dirt back alley in Sonora when a drug deal went bust, his righteous brothers Josh called them and after that, after he could hardly keep his nasal passages clear he was eating so much coke, that is when Jack K. told him that maybe the shack in Todo El Mundo would stir the cure, would get him out of his funk, and get him well enough to write more than some simple-simon idea that he was recycling from old time North Adamsville stories. Hell the last mood piece he submitted to Jack K. (Jack K. by the way along with Lawrence ran a small but prestigious press that had started Josh and many others on the road to literary promise and Josh always gave Jack K. and Larry first nibble at anything he wrote as pay back for the breaks they had given him (and had continued to give him during his lean times whether he would acknowledge it or not) was about visions of high school, old North Adamsville High days back in the 1960s which he had been thinking about because of her, had been  thinking about whether those youthful dreams that we all had, those humongous appetite dreams, those fistful of cloud dust dreams ever came true like he was some fairy godfather granting wishes in absentia.

And people were supposed to buy in that, buy into Josh’s fantasy that he could change the past just by writing a new script about what went on back then ( I already mentioned about our hard times with the girls and that is enough on that issue.) Hold on a minute, okay. So there he was, here he was going to use some ancient King Neptune sea breeze to talk his way through. Josh said this to me one night at Jimmy’s Grille to give you an idea of how empty his tank was and I quote “Jesus why doesn’t Jack K. just leave it go for a while and let me go belly to belly with some girl with faraway eyes. I wrote about her once, who am I kidding I have spent my whole life writing about the various far away eyes, hers, as they have come up. First maybe that Rosalind all fair- skinned and blue-eyed and unapproachable down in North Adamsville childhood projects days and on and on until the one I should have been kinder too, took for granted could not love could not protect against the outside storms or the inside Japan seas swirling around her heart. Could not as they say, as the sociologists of the modern angst say, as the psychiatrists say, “commit,” could not provide her the emotional comfort, sureness that would have let her grow, would have let us grow but no I had to test the waters, had to snub for that short tryst that wound up, or could have wound up busting us, or maybe still will and so I sit here with my mirror, my razor blade and my handkerchief waiting for the swirling winds inside my heart to settle and then tell dear Jack K. I am well. Not well enough to fight my inner demons for new words, for some big humankind idea, for some godhead love, some maidenhead love, for some marked truth the world has not known at least not known like that other Jack, Lowell Merrimac Jack wrote to ease his own pains, wrote about his Maggie, his alter ego Jack, his pussy cat sadness Jack in some hunkered down cabin just like the fugitive one that I am in now.” I could not have paraphrased or written it any better so you know my brother can work his magic if he gets a handle on something.  

And thus to Todo El Mundo and that rainy night cabin to go cold turkey on some dope flame out.  It got so bad at that cabin that Josh somehow drifted up the road to a cabin where the elderly couple had a telephone and he called me (collect of course although that is not as mean as it sounds since plenty of times I had to reverse the changes myself when I was down in the ditch) in order to tell me the following. I need to quote again not to avoid litigation Josh is not built that way but to avoid never hearing the end of it if I paraphrased because I did not get the essence of what he meant, Christ.

“Jesus if I don’t get out of here now I will scream, will set this valley aflame with huge noises that will have the timid tenants who live their silly lives out here among the canyons and the pure water creeks, fearing mountain lions, fearing moaning beached whales, fearing some rain-soaked wash fearing some mad monk daddy has come to do them to do them in. And, laugh, the salesman, the real estate agent from civilized Carmel had said, had almost guaranteed that Todo El Mundo would be a quiet way to end their days, with swishing tides and gentle wind canyons keeping civilization out, or at least at arm’s length. Well they bought into the proposition and as another stone-cold junkie one said “in for a dime, in for a dollar,” no, my brain is creaking, that was some Russian guy who wanted to build the new world on the ashes of World War I (to give each worldwide war its’ now proper name), some guy who wound up in the Vorkuta when the head man [Stalin] pulled the hammer down, no, that stone-cold junkie said “buy the ticket, take the ride.” And that is what they got but Jesus I swear I have to get out of here, get to hear some human voices overriding the ripped rain, sharing and breaking bread, maybe some soft-felt wine and sugared loaves of bread, a warm woman to replace the empty spaces now even though I will only be looking at place-holders, maybe not even that. The rain looks like it is letting up maybe some sun will come through. I will read a little from this book of life left here by somebody who was San Francisco City Lights bookstore- crazed, beat writer-crazed, stone-drunk crazed because it is that small drunk book Big Sur that Lowell Jack K. wrote when he was coming off, or going into another bender, poor big-heated Jack, Jack of the two-million words even when the bastard was stone-ass drunk and me here with just a couple of short ideas, a few mood pieces of third-rate quality to quench the days. Damn.”                       

The rain eventually stopped after Josh called this in. The snow in his brain continued to fall. Jimmy from Frisco showed up along with his girlfriend, Sarah, Sarah of the long legs, lithe body and who had those faraway eyes that have nurtured his whole life, nurtured his whole “woman who I can’t figure out” life. They have stopped by because Jack K. has asked them look in on Josh on their way to Santa Barbara where Sarah’s parents live and where some second cousin was to be married. Sarah looks at Josh in mock disapproval, or he assumed mock disapproval, since she hated Josh stories, thought they were male ego, male one-ups-man ship, male envy, male well just about everything that is wrong in the male condition in the 20^th century. See the way Josh put the matter later Sarah was too young to have known what male buddy-bonding was when men actually ruled the roost, for good or evil, too young to have known that certain guys held out to certain women (a woman like Sarah went though Josh’s mind but Jimmy was not the kind of guy who liked to, unlike say Lowell Jack K., share his women friends if that is where the action seems to be heading). His mind travelled back to Joyell, Joyell of the many sleepless night dreams who was the first woman to tell him that certain women, and she fancied herself as such a woman, were attracted to break-your-heart-dangerous men, that the potential for adventure turned them on no matter what the outcome might eventually be. Yeah, Joyell rode that dangerous wave for a while, tried to tame Josh (and later me but that is another story for another time), tried to get him off liquor (high-end whisky just like now when he was in the dough with a chaser, low-end stuff when he was broke, no chaser except maybe water) then when that was what he had a habit for.

Then she got “religion,” found out that Josh could be, was by the way he treated her just like the other four women he was involved at the time, just another bum-of-the-month but found out more about herself, found that she was built for sunny days, for white picket fences, and for calm nerves. And so she followed that cluttered trail of those women with faraway eyes who found that there were other prospects more to their liking. One woman, a woman whom he had a brief fling with, although it did not start out that way, started out like maybe what they  had, or were going to have, was written in the wind, called Josh an “acquired taste,” no kidding he said when he told me the remark, and later one sad ass drug-filled night he thought about that idea and figured she was probably right, still it hurt, hurt knowing that everything written in the wind or not was going to blow away like so much dust and that he would have to find solace in borrowed cabins, flop house floors, vacant studio apartments (hell, not even a refrigerator) and the handouts of strangers.

That Sarah though no question disturbed his dreams so let’s let him tell what he was thinking (aside for how he was going to get Jimmy out of the picture without being bald-faced about it and without letting it get back to Jack K. who would go crazy thinking he was tramping out another woman adventure just when he was on the cusp of some decent work). Here is what he wrote:

“But as I sit here thinking, talking a blue streak after being left out here in the damn wilderness to dry out I sense that Sarah might have a touch of that dangerous man syndrome if she put her mind to it. She was one of those foxy Brahmin intellectuals, or was at Vassar or Barnard in the old days, before she heard about the post-beat thing that was getting a hearing in some quarters after about a thirty year cultural drought and so although I know she was far too young for me, would probably do intellectual somersaults over my head when I was in some drug-induced funk the idea had some objective merits. She reminds me of a WASP version of this poet girl that I knew, a Chicago Jewish girl who wanted to break out of the brown-eyed, brown-haired, brown-skinned (she meaning swarthy, not black or anything like that, like many of the guys she grew up with and knew from her whole damn life) world and into the pale blued-eyed world that she thought Josh represented. Like he was some flamed-out hobo king that she had to try, has to taste (whether to see if that became an “acquired taste” I do not know. So while Josh was daydream talking and Sarah was fixing things up a little (whether out of some ancient genetic code mantra or because Jack K. told her that he was on a toot and therefore the place would be a mess and Jack K. did not like messes she would not say when he asked her why she was doing the housewifely thing). The things fixed up, everything that could be placed in its rightful place, or at least in some hidden stack or cubbyhole Jimmy maybe sensing some connection between them, sensing that Sarah might want to try a dangerous man before she settled down to some holy dream of domestic stability called her outside, out into the enclosed front porch where he, loud enough for Josh to hear but not loud enough to bring the fear to the neighbors that any sound from him evoked decided that they should move on, should make sure they have plenty of time to mossy down the coast at their leisure. And although he could not hear what was said between them he sensed when they came back to say their good-byes that she wanted to stay a bit longer. Josh gave her one long look as they departed and she looked back when the car that Jimmy was driving pulled out of the muddy driveway. He made a mental note though and maybe a real note to be sure to check her out in the city and maybe flame her up by giving her a presentation copy of one of his stories. That might have been the drugs talking or thinking though.”

So Josh was left alone again, left alone to dip into the white flash on the mirror in front of him, left alone to face the coming next storm which he could see forming a couple of miles out in the Pacific. He yelled some cry of the banshee that he needed to get out of the rain, needed to get back to rain on the roof cities, get back to Frisco town and his friends, or those friends who still abided by that honorific. He could see  the lights going on in the far hill cabins that get the darkest part of the loss of light first and whose residents were probably right that minute latching doors, making sure the locks were locked and hoping, fear-driven hoping that the cry of the banshee stayed down in the lower valley. Hell Josh hoped so too. He tried to get on an even keel with a few lines of cousin up his nose, to get back to a book left by some mad monk that Jack K. lent the place out to in some previous life and while the thing is a little testy, a little tipsy for a serious read Josh sense that that Jack author if he had been there with him would have imbibed some serious cousin or else would have murdered him in his sleep as a goodwill gesture.

 

 

 

The way that book went, the story-line when Josh told me about it later in Harvard Square where he was looking in the Harvard Book Store for  other works by that same author later, sounded very like what was happening to Josh. See the guy there, a guy named Dubois or some French name not French French but from Quebec like a lot of others  who came down to work the mills around Lowell, Lawrence, Nashua, Manchester and those others along the river banks of New England,    was strung out from success (he had written the big generational book and the young would not leave him alone to sulk in his middle age-hood driving him crazy with their asking for advice like he was some advice columnist  for the lost cats of the post- World War II generation, something Josh said tongue in cheek I assume since he had his own minor successes to live down, had to worry about. Success coming from a craze that he started, about the lonely ass road in America (that part  Josh got as I have explained previously having done his own share of the road travel which formed the basis for many of his early short stories although never cogent enough to work into a novel, certainly not a generational novel).

But between the liquor and the sudden fame he got lost, the guy lost in what he was trying to write about and so tried to drink himself silly, tried to write stuff, tried to be at one with sea (had actually written a fair sound sonnet based on just sitting on some Big Sur beach sand just up the road from where Josh was in Todo El Mundo and grooving unto infinity  on the sound of waves, on the sounds of the sands, of the sounds in his head from that experience. Yeah, that made sense to Josh since he remembered once again that one time, one time with dream Angelica after he met her, after they had travelled the middle American road together for a while, after they had a meltdown in Moline (Jesus, Moline of all places), after she left the road in forsaken cornfield Iowa and after going home to rest had afterward come  out to see him in California, down at Point Magoo about a couple of hundred miles from where he was right then and after a couple of days of dope and love-making they sat one stoned day on the beach there (they were actually camped out in a tent like they had done in their  tramping days several months before) and they sat most of the afternoon and late into the evening silent, not highway traffic, planes overhead, fellow beach-dwellers dwelling silent but silent between themselves as they made their own sonnet to the sea (as she parted for the last time to go home to normalcy she said she would never forget that they had made the sea “rumble” that night). He had written that sound poem out one time but threw it somewhere because it sounded when spoken like just another Village/North Beach café throwaway gag.

The moon was down as Josh stood  there inside the front door of this freaking cabin for the fifth day Jimmy and his lovely Sarah (a whiff of some au natural fragrance she wore or emitted, something out of fresh mowed and trimmed Elysian field of lilac bluster, some picturesque Walt Whitman idyllic scene, some mix of bee-stung grasses and flowers still hovered around the rooms, the thought of that scent, those thoughts of those long-legged thighs dabbed with that fragrance maddened his sleep the previous night). Hence his extreme desire to vacant those digs and head back in Frisco, back to bright lights, back to faraway ocean sounds and ships ahoy blaring horns warning of fogbound dangers, back to Golden Gate views from some North Beach digs, wine, women, dope, poetry flowing freely and him the center of oohs and ahhs as it was now his forlorn station and maybe to write a few lines about that stinking sty of a place, the lush green abyss, this canyon echo depth, this bridge too far and neighbor too close place where crazy in his head Jack K. sent crazy in Josh’s head in order to chill out, black out, freeze out, wash out, dry out or whatever was in his head. So Josh was leaving, leaving not the three or four week leaving that Jack K. expected, hell that he expected when Jack K. presented the idea and he just had to get away. Yeah, that was a story of Josh’s life into itself, the leavings of the last urban man as he shirked all duties, abandoned all hope, dwelled in the human sink and then he remembered  the first time, the first shirk, the first childhood shirk that started the train rolling. Let’s let Josh tell this one, okay:

“Funny it was meant as punishment, no, that is not right, that was the result that led to the newly formed characteristic, this shirking everything that it was possible to shirk (later homes left with no explanation, apartments vacated in the dead of night for lack of funds or some reason not remembered, wives abandoned for no reason, or for the next best thing that came along and intrigued him like she, the last one whom he was recovering from had intrigued him, and friends left in the lurch for any of about seven reasons but mainly some honest treachery). It is hard to believe even now how that one event could have twisted the great mandela around like that and it had taken me many years and quite a few shrink sessions to work that out, or at least get a small handle on the situation (that shrink idea brought forth as a last gasp bid by wife number two to understand what made him tick. That effort was in vain to save the marriage for there were other problems that could not be surmounted but I stuck with the therapy for a while to get a grip on that shirking thing of mine).

What had happened back then, back in sixth grade elementary school, back when I had the first understanding that girls were not just bothersome but interesting, yes, it was about the time in our working- class neighborhood when boys began to distinguish between “sticks (those girls who had not gotten their womanly shape)” and shapes (those who had) was that I had to  show myself off in a dance, a square dance of all things and the partner in that dance was a damsel, a twelve-year old damsel,  a girl that I had my first serious crush on and so to impress her like young guys will do who have not been around the block with women yet I did something to my clothes, altered them, cut them in such a way that I would carry out the motif of the dance better. Make me look like a Farmer Brown (she, Rosalie of my enflamed heart and disturbed sleep had commented that I looked like a real farmer and said it with a smile as a compliment). The dance routine as all  such things then was done in order to show our parents (mainly mothers since fathers were busy working hard to provide for their kids in those one parent working days) that we were not just wasting our days away at school and that we were trainable. Now in those days, all through school we, our family, was dirt poor barely above what today would be welfare people (my parents would have been far too proud to accept such “charity”  although we were threatened with the county farm more than once). My mother flipped out right there in the auditorium as she should have seeing that I only had two or three pairs of pants and we had no resources to replace a silly boyish mistake that need not have happened (I understood that part even then and did not need therapy to figure that out), and hence the punishment (a week grounded and my father brought in to berate me for one of the few times that he was called in to do such duty). Then though all I could think of was not being able to pursue that fair maid twelve- year old damsel even though I had done nothing wrong toward her. I was the laughing stock of the class and she avoided me like the plague the rest of the school year, and that followed me into junior high as well for a while. So shirk and skulk became a way of life to avoid life’s embarrassments and hard edges. Funny how some thirty years later that kind of stuff comes up when you are desperate to leave some stinking hellhole behind.”

So Josh needed  a plan, a plan how to get out of there, get out of damn Todo El Mundo, but also a plan on what to do when he got  back to Frisco besides replenish his cousin supply then dwindling and he said if Jack K. knew that he had taken a small stash with him, about an eight-ball he would freak, would go crazy calling Josh every name in the book but in his condition when leaving Frisco he figured that he had to taper off not go cold turkey, not out there in the damn wilderness, not out in the tree-lined canyons that he had not explored since about  boy scout time and he had, had tapered off having husbanded his supply and only taken hits when he really needed them or when Jimmy and Sarah were there and he figured that he could “make” Sarah if she was a little high and grateful. Yeah, he still thought she could have been had by a dangerous man, a dangerous man like him before she tumbled to some sharp tech guy or some silly stockbroker. He knew that was her fate, it was in her old time WASP blood, in her DNA-etched code, that they go back to the tribe once they have tried the edge, lived dangerous for a minute, and needed to have a safe place to land.

The Frisco plan was kind of forming in his head, see Jack K., see if he will buy into Josh’s idea that he write say some one hundred pages maybe less but he didn’t think more because he did not think that the subject of his drying out in the squalid oceans before some zen magic transformed him into a sainted mystic or Saint Francis do-gooder would take the ink and so maybe a long short story or slight novella to be placed in some magazine under Jack K.’s imprimatur and then hit the road for another look at the road from the advantage of years, and wisdom or whatever you get when you realize (and have for about twenty years) that the road is no longer a sanctified place but filled with obviously dangers and pitfalls which only have gotten worse since the world is no longer hung up with guys pulling thumbs out on vacant stretches of Pacific Coast highways, trucks or cars, usually some old refurbished painted  yellow brick road school bus or some VW bus stopping and then some honey of the moment stepping out along with you and she looks so fresh and like dewy flower that the trucker is licking his chops and the van driver is starting  to roll a joint-for her.

Yeah so that was the plan and that plan included stopping off at Miranda’s and grab the stuff he had stored there. (In the interest of the truth when Josh told me he had planned to stop at Joyell’s I saw red. I have been interested, disturbed my sleep interested in her since Josh first introduced us some thirty years ago and have always wished that if she fell off of Josh’s train she would give me a tumble but, damn, she never fell off, never despite all the break-ups. Josh knows my feelings for Joyell but unlike other women we have shared one way or another, starting way back  when we met and fought over Butterfly Swirl out in the California merry pranksters highway yellow brick road bus, but Joyell was always “private.” Damn again.) He was going to Joyell’s , maybe staying at her place for a couple of nights and although they had not been together for a long time in the biblical sense, or the boy-girl sense either he had been thinking about her down there in hell’s backdoor and remembered back to when they met way back when he was just a struggling, struggling something in Harvard Square in some semi-exotic (for the Square) gin joint and she all dressed in white, all black hair and brown eyes, with dancing slippers on and those fatal far away eyes and he could not take his eyes off of her and they met and drank a couple of drinks and he shook her hand softly at the end and that won her heart. Later that night when he thought about her as he went home alone (it was not clear whether Josh although never adverse to a sexual first date when he felt that the thing was a fling thought twice about the question and decided to play it cool or she gave off scent that you had not better trifle with me or more probable he made a couple of moves and she said wait and thus the home alone and the disturbed sleep) he thought “written in the stars” kind of thoughts and those were the thoughts he thought down there in Todo El Mundo as he prepared his escape (mingled in with Sarah lust thoughts after doing a couple of lines).

Yeah Josh thought maybe a few days with sweet baby Joyell the only woman who took enough time to try to understand him, tried to shake him out of his sulky moods, tried to curb his depressed thoughts, tried to be his “sweet baby” if that was what he wanted and when she did give it up after a while (and he with her but they had about thirty re-couplings along the way, damn) and that was just the way it was-and is, he thought. Hey, maybe a week this time, maybe more.

But getting out of there, getting out of hell hole Todo El Mundo with no easy way to get out first was the ticket he needed. Hey Josh admitted to himself that once he got into a place, Joyell’s, some flash and crash minute flame’s, some forsaken hotel, some  arroyo down south complete with cardboard box home, he had a hard time leaving. He knew he had to get out of there, get out of there quick but he still had some lassitude about moving, start thinking that that old shack maybe could stand him for another week or so since Jack K. went to the trouble of fixing him up there and said stay put for as long as it took, the bastard but even if he did stay he was going to pack his bags (light work, not much different from the old hitchhike days despite the passage of time), put that unfinished Big Sur book in his rucksack to finish and maybe steal a few ideas from a guy before his time but who spoke of his (our) time, of his hour of need, spoke of spiritual dryness, spoke of endless running creeks and thrashing waters against hard found rocks crumbling as we speak. (Josh once explained to me, trimming a little closely on the copyright laws, that every author, great or small, “borrowed” ideas from other authors and prettied them up for the next set to borrow, or so that was his theory). So, yeah, pack up his spoons, his forks, his knives that he took everywhere not knowing whether he would be in some arroyo some tonight or sitting in some leafy suburban villa feted and lionized by some well- heeled matron. Packed up his  floss (mother said never leave home without the floss because otherwise mucho dental bills and unlike some other advice that one worked out), packed his extra pairs of socks, shirts, underwear, flippers, a rucksack full of stuff to journey at a moment’s notice. Been doing that basic routine so long that drinks, drugs, dilemmas, darlings, damn anything can’t change the format-ready at the minute, ready to head west  on the old hitchhike trail, ready today, maybe to head north to Frisco, head north to figure out what was eating at him, to figure what words would not come today that needed to come, to figure out why that deathless canyon walled pyre was driving him crazy, to figure out why about fifty-seven varieties of good-hearted, good-healing women could not go the distance with him, to figure out too why he could not go the distance with them, and to figure out why Todo El Mundo suck waters and  craven creeks held no mystery for him. Just then he saw a light, headlights, hey, a light, a car’s headlights coming up the road from some lonesome cabin below, maybe he could grab a ride.                                

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

Sam Lowell, a man long known among his friends and in the small and dwindling Cambridge bookstore circles where he had been a fixture for some years to be interested in such historical literary concerns, had when he had thought about the matter when a friend’s request brought it to mind, found it hard to believe that it had already been seven years since the literary world, and not just the literary world, commemorated the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s 1957 classic coming-of-age road saga, On The Road. Sam’s memory of that event, which was commemorated with great fanfare in now Jack-proud then skeptical Lowell, his hometown about thirty miles up the road from Cambridge, with a week-long festival, had been triggered by a piece of writing send to him by his recently reconnected corner boy from his high school hang out days in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alleys, Josh Breslin.

Josh, a corner boy back from in the days back in growing up North Adamsville, a town near Boston, when that term meant somebody that you would go through some shades of hell for and he you and not just a guy who you casually hung around on Friday or Saturday night, maybe more nights in the summer depending on this and that, no money in your pocket, no girl dated up, no car if you were in such a condition, dated up that is, and thus reduced to walking to the ancient tattered crumbling seawall at Adamsville Beach precluding any serious sexual activity, and helped hold up the brick wall in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alleys up in North Adamsville Center, although in the course of things a corner boy did all that as well. What made corner boys though was the code, not exactly the Omerta code that everybody who has watched any modern gangster films, or read Dennis Lehane novels would be led to believe, although on some corners one could see that played idea out and even among the Jack Slack corner boys a few guys worked under that premise. The code was simplicity itself, that go through seven shades of hell for a fellow corner boy naturally first of all, but also no snitching under severe penalty best left unsaid and which only had to be invoked once, take care of a down and out brother (usually broken up over some lost flame if memory served), don’t mess with a guy’s girl (although that was on occasion honored in the breech, not the observance and might have been the cause of more than one down and out brother episode and a fistful of fists), share your worldly goods when possible although the old communist idea of such sharing was not on display, not in those red scare Cold War times, but just an old-fashion working-class solidarity among the downtrodden which permeated the ethos of the town, and defend the “turf “ to the death although that had never gone more than to the theoretical stage at Jack Slack’s. Oh yes, when somebody, since this was a corner boy group made of smart, “street smart,” and regular smart guys who hovered together against the biker, bad ass, and midnight sifter gangs, asked for a literary critique ( Sam said he was being high-blown in that description here) you gave it up, no holes barred. So the Sam-Josh reconnection worked at that level as well, although in sunnier times Josh usually was the one being asked. Such is life.         

While time and tide had diminished that corner boy ethos dramatically, like most aging things, as part of their reconnection Josh had “go through hell”-like asked Sam to look his manuscript over, make some comments, and say truthfully what he thought of the work like he used to do in the old days when Josh had written short pieces to get a small name for himself in the local literary milieu. This manuscript, this piece of writing, Josh had started back in the 1980s when he was trying to unsuccessfully fight his demon addictions, cocaine at that time mainly and its interconnected con artist larcenies and lies to keep his nose full, had left the writing dead for a long time and had a only couple of months before begun to work on it again. So Sam was to read something somewhere between a first rough draft and a more polished although not final draft.

So Sam read. The work itself, with a working title of Searching for Todo El Mundo, first of all impressed Sam with how much Josh had been influenced by Kerouac, and his ocean-etched writing in Big Sur written at a time when Jack himself was trying to alcohol dry out around 1960. Strangely Josh said that he had not read that classis dry out sketch until he began his piece again. Sam nevertheless found it ironic that an American “dead white man,” a “Neanderthal with a typewriter” as some like novelist Truman Capote called him, “a social misfit world- class fellahin” would over fifty years later cast his sardonic spell over an old former corner boy devotee and fellow world- class sufferer for humankind. And also what did Jack call his avocation, oh yeah, a fellow “moaner for man.”     

The read through made Sam think back to that On The Road commemoration time in 2007 when there had been a plethora of books and articles about the meaning of it all, about the place of the book, and of the author, in the American literary pantheon. Sam, like many another baby boomer who came of age in the 1960s, had also found it hard to think about the passing of his time too as he thought about his own “on the road” dreams from that time. Dreams influenced by that book and by the “beats,” although really only the vaguest echo of those pioneers as their adventures passed through to him and his old friends from high school, North Adamsville High, in the early 1960s, Frankie Riley, the leader of the corner boy pack at Jack Slack’s, his acknowledged leader in the old Irish working class neighborhoods where every guy, every smart guy, every “street smart” guy committed himself to some corner, and some leader, and Josh both of whom he had travelled with on the roads west under Jack’s book’s influence.

At the time of the anniversary any number of writers, including the dwindling few who knew Jack, or, what was more likely, the great number almost two generations later who had been influenced by him chimed in about subjects related to the book from the story behind the story real origins of each individual episode in that “beat” travelogue to the various literary tropes that Jack used in his writing (you know “the holy fool,” the goof, the zen master wisdom king, Catholic notions of salvation, urban rootlessness, perennial wanderlust, and so on). Others took a different tact and spoke to the meaning of the book for their psychological well-being by having emulated the trappings of what Sal/Jack, Dean/Neal, Carlo/Allen, Bull/William did, or did not, do for them on their individual searches for the blue-pink great American West night.

Yeah, guys (and gals too on the 1960s roads, if not so much on the 1940s “beat” road except as while away the time company) took some lonesome longing lost dreams time now well past to express what it meant to be out on the open road that first time, that first time when they broke, maybe for an eternity or maybe for just that moment when everybody thought the world was going to turn upside down, from that predestined path everybody else had set for them and tried to find out, tried to come of age, and to find out if they had the stuff of the road, had the stuff  to take the road not taken. So, sure, they told of the hassles of being left in some woe-begotten spot to wait hours in heat or darkness for a ride, about the time they did not have two quarters to rub together out in some Iowa cornfield left off by a kindly Farmer Brown heading north and they wanted west, about the time too when luscious Sally Ann accompanied him and hell you almost had half the truckers on U.S. 80 jack-knifing to the break-down lane to pick you two up just to have some eye-candy to leer at doing seventy-five miles per hour, fed you too, just for the company. Other times, though, single times, lost in some slough plastic chair, yesterday’s newspaper a pillow for your laid-down head, or when truck-worthy by some guy who said you reminded him of his wayward son, and talked non-stop, high on benny, sucking down coffee to make Truckee by daybreak. Of the hassles too from the local cops, hungry mean-spirited cops who had seen what their brethren could do down south to your like, had seen what guys like you had put them through in the big city New York/ Washington demonstration riots as the brethren wailed with mace, gas and the beloved billy-club against a passive mass, cops looking for that one granule of grass to put your ass on the county farm, cops always willing to “vag” strangers in long hair and jeans to meet their monthly quotas.

But spoke too of the delights of getting picked up by kindred in the then plentiful minivans and converted school buses, there had been times on the corridor from Boston to Washington and all along the Pacific Coast Highway from San Diego to Mendocino when you barely had time enough to put your thumb out before some long-haired brother stopped, somebody opened the door and in you went, grabbed a passed joint, maybe had some off-hand stew, maybe some ripped wine   and you would spent a few days going north or south or west or east wherever they were going just for the company. Too speak nothing of the incredible vistas going across, once you crossed the holy father Mississippi, got passed the long sad ears of corn and chaffed wheat blowing in the wind and hit the Rockies, fell back to primal times in stone age death places Utah and Nevada, caught that first whiff of ocean around high desert Joshua Tree (site of a strange midnight drug-high re-groupment with ancient Apache warriors) and then strolling up the coast highways with jagged canyons, crevices, and hairpin turns every other minute.     

Reflecting too on smoking their first dope smoke (and usually coughing the rookie cough that hit even cigarette smokers from the harsh smoke if the dope was righteous and not some rip-off oregano or something), and unlike in Jack/Neal/Allen times no be-bopping off the high to some cold breeze seeking the high white note sexy sax jazz but cranked-up guitar-strung rock, trying to see the faces of the gods, trying to keep in time with that wicked back-beat the drummer was flailing out. Making the dope pray, making heads twist when somebody scored some acid/mescaline/peyote. So more high holy dope more than Jack million word work high, or Neal cruising at one hundred and ten miles per hour  head high/or Allen negro streets, holy moloch screaming against the machine poem high. And the dope flashing into sex dreams, about having their first bouts with loose take-what- you-want- happy-go-lucky sex when the old rules were broken about who was exclusively with whom like some chattel, where women could initiate the mating ritual without rancor or slur, where the adventuresome trotted out the hidden desire secrets of the Kama Sutra and expanded the universe beyond the missionary position. No Jack/Neal road women as adornments, woman as housewives to pick up slatternly messes for sex-exhausted guys, women as sex toys paying their way in trade, the times, the Pill freedom times, would not stand for such behavior, nor would women but it was a close thing for a long time, and for a lot of Jack/Neal-fed guys, guys like Frankie Riley, Sam Lowell and Josh Breslin who grew up in Jack/Neal ways a tough habit to break. 

Those others, like Sam Lowell, Frankie Riley, and Josh Breslin, maybe also telling the blasted  world as well about their travails of the road, the dusty back road Neola/Moline/Prestonsburg Junction/Eureka/Durango/Virginia City/Fresno (that is enough for to name those few is to name all bus stations with their papers strewn over for the bus-waiting seats used for pillows against the hard plastic, the sugar-laden vending machines, the smell of some kind of lava washing soap and always, always that men’s room Lysol smell trying to cover up missed piss urinals and flatulence). Sam reflecting back on that time when he and Josh were stuck in Winnemucca in the Nevadas for a couple of days when the winds blew through the canyons and any traffic going through was either not stopping for road warrior bravos or could not see far enough ahead to stop and they all dusty cadging sleep and getting out of the dusts times in the half-baked bus station which also served as a gas station and so they never got serious sleep on the hard wooden benches with the every ready newspapers for pillows, a trick learned early on taught by an old hobo who seemed to know every little trick to survive on the road. That hobo-learned knowledge included serious tips on evading the local law-remembering that time  sleeping, better half-sleeping like the hobo wisdom taught him, guarding against some errant cop ready to put you in the local pokey as a “vag,” out along the side of road of some wayward Iowa cornfield waiting for dawn to start again on the hitchhike road, two dollars in his pocket, hoping as the sun came  up that he would be left off at some Aunt Betty’s diner (there are a surprising number of Aunt somebody diners out there on the back roads, out on Route 20, Route 66 ) to catch the ninety-nine cent breakfast special with unlimited coffee refills. Of being left off in the middle of nowhere which happened plenty of times by some sex-starved trucker who was heading south when you were heading west if he decided that he needed to see his girlfriend in Louisville while you were trying to make Chicago before dark. Of the endlessly poor diet either from “on the run” quick meal foods bought at some Mom and Pop pre-7/11 variety store, truckers’ steamed to perdition diner fare, some charity handout Sally (Salvation Army) soup line, or worst, heading for the railroad trestles and some hobo “jungle” stew made of who knows what.

Spoke too of the endless talkings, midnight dust-laden, dream-smeared, hung head, about that angst and alienation that drove all of them to the road looking, hell, just looking for something, something different, some kicks somebody simply said one time and it stuck, “get your kicks on Route 66” (now a historic highway, so designated). Of, speaking more soberly, talking about that addiction you picked up along with the “on the road” life (dope, booze, sex, gambling, you name it) that you could not quite break the first time, or the second. That second  the one that broke up your home, your life whatever it was that held you together in the dark night, losing some she who called it quits when you messed up one too many times for her to put up with. All taken in stride now, all missed now, all nostalgia missed now, all “wouldn’t it be great to do again” now except the universal crying in the rain that you have grown long of tooth now, have that house now, that spouse now (after letting that good thing go, that woman who almost saw you through but left, you more in love with that damn addiction before you went “cold turkey” than her-every night still wondering where she is tonight, yeah, wondering if she ever thinks of you in her new world, wondering silently as you think your thoughts), those kids now, that looming college tuition crisis to content with now and so the frenzied search for that great blue-pink American West night which you’re your youth worthwhile dropped off the radar.              

Still others, and this had been why Sam Lowell has been especially attuned to the passing of time lately, the passing of his time, rather than writing about what On The Road meant personally, socially, or as flat out literature wrote their own quirky little pieces that reflected the heat from Jack’s sun. Josh Breslin, now far removed from the road and from his hundred addictions, not really one hundred but it seemed like it back then, was a guy who had decided that he liked to write as he  fought off his “romance of the road” addictions, although his main professions were elsewhere. That youthful “romance of the road,” a road which Sam had gotten off of by the early 1970s had led Josh by the early 1980s to a distorted view of life as a victim po’ boy whom the world owed something,  as a “grab what you could grab and keep moving no matter what” guy, and included a certain confused, no, hell-bent and evil, notions about what road comradeship meant when he let his wanting habits get the best of him (all of which he freely admitted to Sam later, who had also fallen victim to his needs lending his much unpaid back money). Let his whole freaking life from “from hunger” childhood on get the best of him on the road in the early 1980s when he would sneak thief stuff from the communal stash (rent money, gas money, bus fares, food money, drugs), would lie to others about working, or rather getting paid and saying he didn’t, in order not to put in the communal kitty, would old corner boy con, mostly women, into giving him money or buying him stuff which he would then sell after he had bedded them (he had about five girlfriends at the time, and at least one wife, maybe two when the smoke cleared). All to feed his growing drug addictions          

Josh said he that it helped to write as he fought off his addictions, about six variations of dope, mostly heavily and insidiously cocaine, although not crack, and booze, mostly whisky drunks. Fought off unsuccessfully for a long time, including bouts of not “on the road” type homelessness and “jungle” campfires with the lost fellahin hobos, bums, and tramps mainly on the West Coast, not once or twice but about five times all though the early 1980s and not finally fully contained until near the end of that decade. Fought unsuccessfully, which had been the central theme of the piece Josh sent Sam, that first time Jack K. (no full last name given even now since Josh claimed that since he has passed on there was no reason to invoke that brother’s full-hearted name) lent Josh his cabin shack at Todo El Mundo when Jack K. expected him to dry out through isolation and reflection after Jack K., exasperated,  had carried out the booking-binding and print shop business they operated over on Market Street in Frisco essentially by himself for several years.

 

The mere mention of Todo El Mundo in Josh’s working title had brought back better memories to Sam of a time and place when he, Josh, and the late Frankie Riley had headed west that second time in the very early 1970s and found “Eden.” And thoughts of that trip triggered his thinking back to earlier times to the first time going west just after the summer of love 1967 when they were all crazy to break out from small town, small house, small dreams and see what it was all about, see what the flamed-out western rebellion was all about. Josh, from what Sam could tell on his initial glance-through, had written his own version of the “beat” travelogue, although Josh agreed later after Sam had read the rough draft that the sketches were in the end more influenced by Jack’s 1960 addiction dry out book, Big Sur, rather than Road.  Thinking about it after Josh had said that Sam thought that was true but also thought that short novel, with its Road-like list of characters and adventures only confined to the West Coast, was really a last extension of the road saga so Josh’s little sketches could have squeezed in under the anniversary wire when people were hopped up to write something. 

Josh said he had written that “damn thing” (his words), his plainsong, to the tune of his generation, the generation after Kerouac’s “beats,” the generation of ‘68, the “hippies” in their flower, their dope-soaked musical flower, to give them a known name if not entirely accurate to describe the whole scene. Reflecting that it had been a scene filled with good-hearted intentions to fight the monsters, to “turn the world upside down” and not just youthful self-indulgence if anybody was asking. Trying to change the way they lived to a more communal existence complete, to break from the binds of the nuclear family, trying to  change the way they loved, broader than that laid out in film, magazines, novels, and their parents’ examples, trying too to break from dog eat dog, cutthroats stuff that he knew very well from the corners. By the 1980s that had been forgotten except by some small remnant, forgotten by him too as he delved to the depths. But it had started out so beautifully, with so much promise, and he thought he would be carried along by the tide. Josh thought too that that ‘hippie” experience had been more than colors, music and dope just as “beat,” chain-smoking, wine and coffee drinking cafes with small platforms filled with minor poets crying out for the new dispensation did not reflect that whole “beat” scene as it had been filtered through to him via the television, what he read in magazines and his eternal wandering around Harvard Square early on trying to see what “best” was all about. Josh’s sketches, that word signifying to him that these were small patches of words reflecting moods and events not short stories with some over-arching point, played to his nostalgic mood when he began to re-write his piece. 

Sam thought later as well, after he had finished reading that rough final draft, that it was hard to not be overcome by the fact that Josh’s efforts to try to find some life lessons in writing Searching For Todo El Mundo were driven by his oversized wanting habits, wanting habits that small town, small house, small dreams could not satisfy, could not douse the flames in his wicked soul, driven by his addictions, one, two, three whatever he got into. Driven too, except when the drugs got the better of him (and which had strained their relationship for several years through the mid-1990s after Josh got in over his head and borrowed a ton of money from Sam that he could not pay back), destroyed the better angel of his nature to say it simply, Abe Lincoln simple, by sex, or really what to do about the opposite sex in his life. Sam, having just shortly before Josh’s request finished a flame-out affair with an old high school classmate of theirs, Melinda Loring, whom he had met via a class website although neither he nor Josh knew her in high school since she had hung around with the social butterfly set. The flame out was set up when she could not understand why he could not stay with her despite both acknowledging that their thing was “written in the stars,” which made Sam pause thinking about Josh’s wanting habits. Thinking that everybody could use a primer, any help at all, male or female, in that sex struggle but anyone who would read his piece would have been struck by how early on that male-female thing as the core of existence played a role in Josh’s sketches.

What Josh told Sam got him started though, got him to see going back to re-writing some of the small sketches that he had started back in the 1980s as a mission on behalf of his generation’s ebbs and flows had been a trip with his lady friend, his companion, Laura, that they had taken back to Todo El Mundo. (In the interest of full disclosure that apparently is necessary to state today for anybody to be half-believed about their intentions, any intentions, Sam had always been interested in Laura since he had met her when Josh and he reconciled in the mid- 1990s and would have pursued her if she had ever fallen off of Josh’s boat, a fact that Josh knew, she never had but now you know.) Todo El Mundo, a little south of Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur on a secluded stretch off the Pacific Coast Highway was a place loaded with memories for him, from that first time he and Sam had “discovered” it on their second trip west   and a place where he returned to for a while several times after Sam and his road days there were over. Josh however had not been back there since that time in the 1980s, the time when Jack K. lent him his cabin in order to dry him out, had not been there since his first unsuccessful fight against his demons. (Sam had not been back there since the late 1970s when he took his first wife there to try to sort things out after a bad stretch.)

 

 

 

He told Sam about that trip with Laura one long night in the bar at Jimmy’s Grille over in Cambridge, Sam’s drinking hole these days, while they were drinking high-shelf whiskies. That trip had led Josh to revise his original sketches  which he had begun re-writing in the winter of 2013  a little not so much in the content of the eternal sketches he was always ready to write but he said let’s say to bring out a certain tribal spirit about those long gone days. Sam, a guy who liked to write too although he as well had had his professions elsewhere, wrote down what Josh said that night and later put the notes in some order to “celebrate” his friend’s remembrances. Here is what Sam had to say:

Recently my old friend from North Adamsville high school days Josh Breslin (full name Joshua Lawrence Breslin but nobody ever called him anything but Josh except his mother, what do you expect, and some old time WASP girlfriend who tried like hell to make him, him of “the projects” born, more presentable to her leafy suburbs parents), told me about a trip that he and his longtime companion Laura took to ocean spray Todo El  Mondo just south of Big Sur out in California and a place that when he mentioned the name brought memories of parties, dope, the splash of the ocean and a fetching girl named “Moon-glow” I half-loved for a while in the early 1970s (don’t laugh such monikers were common then as we tried to re-invent ourselves, lose our “slave” bourgeois names. I went by the moniker “Flash Dash” and Josh by the name “Prince Love” for a while). Josh had not been out there in that part of California for many years (and neither have I although I have been to California many times since then but with not enough time to get there and chill out for a few days) but he had earlier in the year been under the spell of old “beat” king of the West Coast ocean night, Jack Kerouac, after re-reading his Big Sur, a book about his unsuccessful attempts to dry out in Big Sur after the notoriety of his classic On The Road literally drove him to drink (or drink more is a better way to put it).

That “under the spell of” got an added boost by viewing a film based on Kerouac’s work, Big Sur, after reading the book. While the film was not nearly as evocative as the book it did provide vivid shots of Jack and company on one of the Big Sur beaches, the one off of Sycamore Canyon Road. That scene enflamed Josh making him think of the even more foreboding and dangerous ocean riptides at very secluded Todo El  Mundo where we had spent time frolicking and later he alone, well kind of alone, while trying to dry out of a “snow” addiction (cocaine for the unknowing) that had gotten the better of him. That beach at Todo El  Mundo, as Josh reminded me, is as hard to get to now and the surrounding area is as sparsely populated with a few hardy solitude-seeking cabin dwellers, some with cars, some without, as back in the days since you still are better off to leave your car up on the Pacific Coast Highway and walk the couple of miles down a mainly dirt single lane winding and overgrown road, not hard miles going down but tough coming back up, at least that is what I remember but that hardness may have been the drugs/booze/sleepiness/sex exhaustion working in overdrive after a night of revelry. And so Josh and Laura went, went to retrace the meaning that Todo El Mundo had had for him in his youth in the long gone days when he had his break-out wanting habits on and later the first fight to curb the nasty parts of those wanting habits.

Josh’s wishes for Laura, since she had never been to Todo El Mundo, or for that matter that part of coastal California before and only to Los Angeles down a couple of hundred miles south of that spot a couple of times once with her ex-husband on a business trip and once with her daughter to go to Disneyland, had been for her to try understand how he was before she met him in the early 1990s. For him to tell her some stuff in that spot, that meditative, that human suffering, that at one with the homeland the sea, that night of revels and sweet fucks spot that he had fudged on discussing over the years since they had been together.

Laura, a few years younger that Josh’s six plus decades although she looked no more than about forty-five or so, although perhaps I should not mention her age since that fact may be a national security top secret matter to her, a not uncommon stance for our generation, not uncommon for women of a certain age, in case she reads this. I have told her that she had always seemed to me to look too young for the now craggy-faced Josh, that line- etched face reflecting his defeats in his fights against his addictions. In any case she had been something of a homebody in her own youth, had never travelled or liked to travel much. Had not been a member in good standing of the generation of ’68, now generically called baby-boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964, putting the ‘68ers in with kids who were barely born when the seas changed, and ebbed too. So Laura only knew the stories that Josh would tell her about the old Frisco hell-raising “hippie” days, about he and his corner boys heading west days (me and Frankie Riley, and one time Jimmy Jenkins), about the serenity and meditative pull of that section of the California coast, and vaguely about the unexplained evil spirits that had existed within him back then as well. All she knew, all Josh had told her about those evil spirits in that mumbled way guys have when they don’t want to lie but don’t want to drag that devil’s truth from the deep recesses of their minds, was that during the 1980s he had been part of a book-binding and print shop collaborative, along with Jack K. and others to begin with and then just with Jack K. and that business arrangement had not worked out due to lots of things, some of them which he told her he was responsible for. He did not include talk of the addictions as a reason for the break-up, or rather downplayed the drugs to an over-indulgence of marijuana and a little coke and left it at that. And no talk of the one wife, Betty, maybe two, married during that period although he always claimed to me that the second wife, Miranda, was strictly a common law arrangement he married during those frenzied times (he had long before, back in the 1970s, divorced his first wife, Martha, whom he only lived with for a short time before he left to head West again, alone, after she turned out not to be pregnant as she had told him as a way to keep him in up in Maine, Portland if I remember correctly ). He did say he had been married, the thing had not worked out and was too painful to discuss and left it at that. And Laura, sweet innocent trusting Laura let it go at that. Teflon, pure Teflon when Josh put his charm hat on.

When Laura had met him, as a customer on the recommendation of a mutual friend looking to have some work done, wedding invitations and the like for her daughter’s wedding, in the small print shop that Josh ran in Worchester all she knew was that he had been out West, had struggled and failed at marriage and everything else, had succumbed to his addictions, had fought them, gotten clean and had moved back east first to Boston where he had worked in a print shop downtown and then, through a contact had bought the place where she had met him when the owner decided to retire. So she was very curious about the mystery of Todo El Mundo, about what the place had to do with her man, how it had help screw him up or whatever it had done to him. Yeah, Laura is like that. Damn.                

Whatever Todo El Mundo had to do with Josh’s troubles they had begun long before, went back to childhood times. But that is a story for another time. See, like I said, Josh and I go back to North Adamsville High days here in Massachusetts, but more importantly later on the American West hitchhike highway where in the summer of love 1960s we were searching for, well, searching for something that we did not find then at least. But the time he told me of his journey with Laura when we met over at Jimmy’s Grille in Boston we both agreed that the search was the important thing and we had no regrets about trekking out to the coast many times looking for Eden, “looking for the garden” as we used to call it. We also agreed that we both were still looking, still had those ancient wanting habits on, and that we probably would until the end. Josh noted as he told of his time out there with Laura that while he was thrilled to “channel” the ghost of Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allan Ginsberg and the rest of the “beat” gang who held forth on that sacred Big Sur beach up the road and of our times at Todo El Mundo in the time before we even had any real idea that we too wanted to be rebels against our part of society he was almost more taken by Cannery Row in Monterey, the ancient site of John Steinbeck’s classic Cannery Row although today only small fragments of that area exist unsullied by a tourist hungry theme park.

He and Laura had stayed in Monterey so Josh was able to get a better grasp of that ancient ground that he had not investigated much before, mostly the vagrant beaches and skid row haunts. He had been there last in the late 1980s toward the end of his time in California before the theme park explosion when that ocean front was run down with closed canning factories and derelict housing.  He wanted to talk about Cannery Row, the fellahin cannery rows of the world that he had found himself once again fatally attracted to, wanted me to see that the Todo El Mundo scene had been a package that we had only grasped part of, that the ghosts of what we were looking for in Todo El Mundo dwelled in Monterrey as well. And here is what he impressed on me after he told me this part of his story:       

Josh Breslin was no question the illegitimate son of the kindred that John Steinbeck wrote about in his book Cannery Row and maybe if you dug down deep enough, grabbed some genealogy chart, went back enough generations, kindred of those Okie/Arkies he wrote about in The Grapes Of Wrath that migrated west in the dustbowl 1930s and landed in sunny Southern California and whose progeny would go on to fill up the surfer boy, hot rod Lincoln, biker angels, casting couch starlet blanks in the blue-pink western sky night. But maybe we should not press the relationship too stronger since his people on his mother’s side were hearty French-Canadians from up in upper Saint Lawrence River Quebec who came south to the mills along the rivers, Nashua, Saco, Merrimack mainly, looking for precious work before  in her father’s generation giving up in the Depression and heading farther south looking for work in the shipyards and his father from hillbilly mountain, coal mountain Kentucky. Those brethren, his father’s forbears, thrown out of Europe for every possible reason stayed put in the hills and hollows and did not have the energy to move west. Josh, ocean grown himself, felt in Monterey the kinship that one feels for those who society threw on the scape heap with the decline of the fishing industry out there and the decline of shipbuilding in our old hometown of North Adamsville which left his father, and his family, on the same scape heap in the “golden age of America” 1950s. (And mine too although my father had a semi-skill as a machinist that kept the wolves from the door for a while.)       

By that Illegitimate mentioned above by the way I had not meant by some fallen birth, although I insist that he was born under some ill-meant star, but because these days Josh no longer, nor do I, like in the old days travel west, travel to California using just his thumb, or maybe if he had a little dough taking the bus some of the way, or, one time, going east to west hopping on the old freight trains (which I never did). That last a nasty way to travel and he told me once that after that experience he would no longer berate tramps, bums, and hoboes for enduring such a method of getting west. But enough of “old days” transportation for Josh now flies to California when he feels that periodic urge to head west. Flies and has always marveled (and was thankful that he now had the wherewithal) that he could start out on the East Coast Atlantic Ocean, usually Boston, and be on the West Coast Pacific Ocean a few hours later a trip that used to take anywhere from about five days (if he, we, grabbed a fast run to the coast trucker looking for company, even “hippie boy” company) to a couple of weeks if he got unlucky and was left in some place like Winnemucca in Nevada where he had to sleep on the side of the road when it got too dark while waiting for a ride after being left there by a Native American trucker who lived up in the mountains near there. (I had once been left on a side road in Moline in a rain storm and waited almost two days while Middle America, a term of derision back then, passed by in self-satisfied distain so I knew exactly what he meant although that never happened when we were together).   

This latest trip west had been spurred by a recent re-reading of Jack Kerouac’s “trying to dry out from a drunk” book Big Sur so Josh had that destination, that secluded section of the coast, on his mind when the urge hit him again. Of course along with the “don’t thumb anymore” days he no longer sleeps on the side of the road in some crusted piss- smelling, sweat-smelling, newspaper- strewn bus station, or in some make-do lean-to tent but now seeks refuge in hotels and motels which he also does not mind doing. The problem this trip was that he could find no place listed in Big Sur for he and Laura to stay so they had to stay in Monterey which led to that earlier illegitimate Okie/Arkie fellahin reference because the last time he had stayed in that town he had slept on the beach, slept on the vagrant “jungle beach,” no money in his pocket trying yet again to shake off a jones, slept on the beach to the sound of the sea lions barking or whatever they call the sound sea lions make. Slept near the wharf where iterant fishermen brought their goods to market from the troublesome seas (and explained why the lazy sea lions like lazy humankind hovered near that landing area not having to work too hard for a hand-out meal). Slept the ragged sleep of the tramps, bums, and hoboes, feeding off their ragged stews, and drinking their rotgut Ripple. And feeling at home there even though out in the “jungle,” especially for the younger iterant, you were as likely to face a knife from some half-crazed rummy as a friendly “hello brother” career road man.   

But means of travel and methods of accommodation, hell, the eating habits of sea lions, were not what was bothering Josh of late but rather that almost never-ending sense he always had that he shared plenty with the ghost of those old time denizens of the cannery rows of the world, the skid rows. So all thoughts of flights, of rental car drives, and hotels drifted from his horizon as he got off of Exit 402B on the Pacific Coast Highway and headed into downtown Monterey. He needed to stop at the CVS on Lighthouse Road in what passes for Main Street in the town for a few provisions and while there he noticed that that street had not changed that much since the last time he had seen it maybe twenty-five odd years before. Downtown Monterey is really just an adjunct to the Cannery Row dress-up theme park which attracts the tourists and still has that hard-scramble feel of having missed something. Josh knew he was home, was among kindred he thought when a relic from the 1960s, a guy, who knows a rummy or a dope-head it was hard to tell, with a ZZ Top beard (long in other words), a tie-dyed tee shirt and a Hawaiian hat came up to him as he was leaving the CVS and asked him for a cigarette. Since Josh no longer smoked he had to say “no” but gave the guy a buck toward his efforts.

As the relic passed on Josh said he thought in a flash about all the corner boys from his  youth (starting out behind the elementary school gym in fifth grade, Doc’s Drugstore in junior high, Jack Slack’s bowling alleys in high school where we hung together after having met in class and where he introduced me to Frankie Riley the king of the corner boy night (and later our fellow road companion) a goodly number of them who slipped through the cracks and wound up on some skid row somewhere. Or wound up like his best friend from elementary school, Pete Markin, face down in some dusty Mexican town, Sonora, with two bullets in his heart after a drug deal went awry, went bad when he decided to go “independent” with a two kilo brick of the hermanos’ cocaine. Thought too about the “brothers under the bridge,” guys, fellow veterans, who did not make it back to the “real world” from Vietnam days who set up an alternative world in the arroyos, along the riverbanks, along the railroad trestles of Southern California. And of guys, tramps, bums, and hoboes whom he wandered with when he had his own addictions to fight, his own lost “real world.” That got him thinking that he should take a walk along the street, see whether any more ghosts showed up. He would not go to the Cannery Row façade since after reading brochures and seeing how everything pointed to that destination that place was strictly for touristas but rather walk Lighthouse after leaving Laura off at the motel to freshen up.           

And he was not mistaken. In a few blocks, maybe ten, he passed the usual Goodwill, Salvation Army (the Sallies had saved his skin more than one time with a hot meal, some clothes, a bunk bed for a few days at a time all for the price of having to listen to their version of the “good book” a small price to pay then for what ailed him, what addiction he was trying to go “cold turkey” on and he had always afterward, after he “got well,” put a few bucks in their buckets at Christmas time), and assorted used clothing stores (back in the day in places like Harvard Square, Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, Soho in New York City, such stores along with the ubiquitous Army and Navy used surplus outlets were prized places to “re-invent” yourself to go along with your new moniker as a dreamlike fantasy soldier, a swarthy pirate,  a Victorian gentleman or lady, a prairie pioneer complete with gingham dress  or buckskin jacket, or some 1930s movie actress but now such places are for those a step below Wal-Mart in the bustling world), run down cafes (dark lights to hide the dirt, rough food, poor service  unlike even the most poorly run Hayes-Bickford where the food was rough, aged before your eyes, and the coffee unspeakable but the company was worth the price of admission), the barely surviving pizza parlors (one on every corner it seemed run by someone in the latest wave of immigrants hungry to make it in America and willing to work long hours but coming up short on the art of pizza-making unlike back in the North Adamsville corner boy night when Tonio Rizzo, the owner and pizza chef of Salducci’s, twirled the dough and made your senses come alive with the smell of freshly baked tomato and cheese slathered doughs), the ubiquitous tattoo parlors (despite the current craze for identity tattoos some of them quite elaborate and comment-worthy by everybody from high-end  celebrities to low-end hoodlum bikers these places still looked like you had better check with your doctor, maybe show up in the emergency room, after leaving), the used book and record stores all looking like they were ready to close their doors forever with the next ill economic wind that came through the town (those old used books with their musty smells and broken bindings hiding many treasures which may not survive the digital age  and the records scratched and wobbly but again holding many treasures which may not survive the age of download YouTube or whatever comes next). Even what passed for one of the “upscale” places, a 1950s and 1960s retro-hamburger place where he stopped for a light lunch was barely making it although the food, the service, the posters of the usual suspects James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Elvis and the like, and the be-bop music spinning some stuff from early Motown to doo wop to Beatles from that period told him that in another locale like Harvard Square or maybe in Frisco they would be standing in line out around the block to get in. Such is the fate of cannery row towns when the main industry goes south and all that is left is the relics, buildings and people.        

A Cannery Row flashback: As Josh turned around after a few blocks to head back to the motel to do his own freshening up some of the ghosts of the past passed by in his head; tramps, bums, and hoboes met on Monterey pebbled beaches (and remembrances of some old time hobo, Lightning Shorty, telling him and all who would listen the differences between those three categories of wayfarers, taking the gaff from a couple of guys whom he called bums who stood just below his royal hobo status, yeah Shorty, a guy who was later was found on the beach newspapers for a pillow dead as a doornail, heart attack at forty-three when he looked about eighty to youthful eyes), sweet sand interrupted by belches and sea lion barks (we agreed “or whatever they call that sound” and that the buggers were lazy just waiting on the rocks for the trawlers to come in and throw their refuge into the sea), smoke fire at night to ward off the chill burning down to embers as dawn came up, maybe make an olio mishmash from the meat and vegetable leavings found behind  some grocery store (no food pantries or heroic soup line kitchens peopled by kindly church people then, not that he remembered anyway), drinking Ripple wine (or worse –“what’s the word, Thunderbird, what’s the price, forty twice”), smoking old Bull Durham rolled [really nasty smoke and what the hell Josh had never learned how to roll right, always left too much paper unrolled or did not twist the ends right, same with mary jane rolls despite his many experiences]. Where had that brethren gone, gone with the tide maybe, gone after “catching some westbound freight” (going to be with Father Death for those who are clueless about what that expression means), or to some push-out Southern Pacific trestle for a new home. Adios, pals.

Next night, a Friday night, a trip that he did not want to take, a Laura-urged trip, to Cannery Row proper. And even before he could sulk his sulk as they walked along bang, bang, kindred appeared, maybe the long lost progeny of those long gone brethren showed up on the streets. Most of the old wayfarers that he had had met in the 1980s “jungle” on the beach, those blessed hobos, tramps and bums, had kids strewn across the land mainly still in California from what they had said although how they would know is anybody’s guess since they left no forwarding addresses or telephone numbers. When the brethren high-tailed it they were moving fast, moving away from anchored life, from bills and mortgages, from the damn nagging wife and whining children. Some men are not built for such things, not built for much but that wandering gene deeply embedded in their DNAs, a gene that could have been easily passed on to that Friday night’s refugees. All the father-less children looking for their moment in the sun, for somebody to look their way and for them to show the world that they had made it without the wandering old men.

Yeah, Josh saw generational kindred seeking momentary immortality cruising Cannery Row in hopped-up (and loud hopped-up to boot) canary yellow Camaros, two-toned ’57 Chevys, chrome-infested Harleys, sporty Triumphs, sportier MGs, sleek Plymouths from back in the 1950s when such cars were sleek also two-toned, Mustangs invoking memories of other Sallys, Sallys to ride in the freshen air Adamsville Beach summer nights coming up for air after a hard night’s exertions, Jags that looked like Jags and not like one of twelve other cars, hell, the works showing off their sense of the past, their mechanical abilities, their desire, and their showmanship.

Funny Josh mentioned to Laura, as the bonking cavalcade passed by for the third time, California back a generation before ours, ours the generation of ‘ 68 for those asking, the generation before ours that came of age after the blight of the Great Depression and who survived a slogging war looking for kicks, looking for something other than “from hunger” took to the great blue-pink American West night and in little back lot garages or in some permissive father’s garage put together their “hot rod” to seek kingdoms in the drive-in movies, drive-in restaurant, drive-in everything if you had that “boss” car that would get you noticed. Here the now long-toothed progeny, those who could not shake their youthful fantasies and why not, were hovering the air of the night remembering back to those ancient times when such horsepower meant you were king (or queen now too) of the road, the great edge city highway looking for the heart of Saturday night. Old Tom Wolfe, the guy who explored the western wild boy hot-rod valley boy scene (and the surfer scene Pacific coast highway scene too), would have surely gotten a  chuckle out seeing blonde-wigged grandmothers, grizzly-bearded old pappies, handkerchief-hatted greying bikers, riding in tandem reviving ancient thoughts (and gathering many flash photos from convenient tourista cellphone cameras). Josh knew he did.      

But enough of city scenes and on to the Todo El Mundo grail. On Sunday morning he and Laura got up early and after breakfast took off to trek the thirty odd miles to that day’s destination, the beach at Big Sur, the one that leads down from Sycamore Canyon Road, on the winding, curvaceous Pacific Coast Highway which Josh admitted he was always a little terrified of navigating (me too) on some spots what with impatient travelers up against the car bumper behind and sharp turns against guardrail-less slopes the seas beckoning below. Of course the trek that day had to be a stop at Big Sur, a stop at vagabond Jack’s errant sea (although Jack could have been a proper Cannery Row denizen as well, an East Coast Lowell mill town boy who would have no trouble with cannery kin, with the whole fellahin scene that he wrote about in the Road book except on the Row it would not have braceros and Spanish Johnnies like down in the Fresno fields or up here the Salinas farmlands but gringo guys, those long lost Okie descendants).

Big Sur, Jack’s great big walloping zen-om-splish-splash wash, bing bong swish splash against the great big white- crested sand blasting away rock waves from eternity sea making sounds like some big old Johnny Hodges tenor sexy sax blowing, reaching for that high white note, not once in an evening but every other crashing boom, and Jack’s dry out love sea. Each wave tearing into the hard granite like- stone (stone that looked as etched and scrolled as in old eastern fast river flow to the sea towns, towns like Josh grow up North Adamsville in the bay , not far from Jack’s river of life, Merrimac River of life and maybe haunted in the back of his mind that those torrents washing over his mill town river land and those torrents washing the craggy stone clean were kindred and speak, speak mighty torrents), endlessly searching for that soft spot, that place where the stone like some ancient New England grist mill mashes the rock to the shore, makes the rock humble before the great waves. And too before those rocks crumbled, turned to sand in ten thousand, hell, a million washings, turned to pebbles, they first turned to human- sized rocks, rocks, piles of rocks, piles of rocks spaced apart almost like some human cemetery, piled in such a totemic manner that some cranky anthropologist in ten thousand years will remark, remark to a candid world, if candor still holds some virtue, that weren’t those “primitives” crazy to worship the sea gods, that like old Pharaoh down among the rushes they craved that kind of immortality. And the wind provided the protection so that some future vandals would not scourge the grains of sand when they desired to pay homage to their own sense of immortality. Who needed to say more. Even dry land, born away from fetid marshlands, mephitic swamps and adjoining seas, Laura had been impressed by the fury of the wave action, the defenseless stone rubbed down over ten million washings (her number) and that wind that spoke of no tender mercies when Mother Nature got up on her teach them a lesson mood.

The long-trek down to Todo el Mundo the next day, after retracing the Pacific Coast Highway route but with several miles more of knuckle-gripping curves, swerves, and those non-guardrail stops luring one and all to the endless sea, echoed those previous day‘s thoughts in Josh’s mind. Just like in the old days Josh, old days after his final “cold turkey” for his cocaine addiction took hold before he headed back east for a new start in well-known quarters, when he would visit the place just to seek some serious solitude in an over-heated world he parked the rented car above the canyon on the Pacific Coast Highway and he and Laura made the jaunt down the hill.

[As I thought about what Josh had said had been triggered by that walk down the hill about freshly made memories of his first lost battle with coke I could not help but yell out, “Yeah, yeah ‘snow’ is not addictive, so they say, but just to set the record straight if you had seen Josh then, seen the desperate look when he needed money to get an eight-ball, needed to get money from me with daggers in his eyes, you know he was addicted even if the term technically didn’t  apply.”-Sam]

Although he had taken cars down the dirt road, including a couple of times grabbing Jack K.’s car which Jack K. had parked for use at his cabin, the cabin he had let Josh use when he first tried to dry out and at a time when no way in hell should he have been behind the wheel, usually it was easier and more “romantic” to just walk down to the beach since you had to leave the car behind for the last third of a mile or so anyway.

By the way the view from that canyon road, the place where you leave your car is spectacular, breathe-taking, a view you do not take in as well on the beach itself. (Laura took photos on her digital camera and e-mailed them as attachments to me, a nice gesture since I had forgotten how beautiful the area was.) You can see why some long ago Spanish explorers, conquistadores, some grandees from the Monterey outpost went there to claim the beauty for whoever was brave and hearty enough to keep it. Although the ancient Spanish influence was marked all along that section of the coast you hardly see any more recent influence except the sweated bracero laborers who tend the industrial size farm fields on the flatlands or in Monterrey doing the service work for the tourista trade. Josh and I always in the old days, having grown up by the ocean ourselves and thought about such things as kids, told each other midnight tales, maybe when we were high, maybe not, used to fantasize about those Spanish explorers and what they thought when they hit that stretch, what secret desire to break away (ancient jail-breakers just like us) from the outposts and hold up there taking on all comers, keeping the place pristine.                  

So Josh and Laura walked gingerly (his word so we will accept that although the night at Jimmy’s Grille he looked unsteady on his feet as a result of fairly recent knee replacement surgery which had affected his sense of balance at times as he entered the lounge area) and it seemed at each turn in that desolate road Josh would flash back to some remembrance, especially when they passed Jack K.’s cabin which back in the 1980s was little more than a lean-to, subject to whatever weathers Mother Nature’s furies commanded and now had become an expanded shingled, water-tight structure and some kind of second or third home to a big name real estate guy in Carmel. A walk a little farther down the road rekindled the time when Josh had “fallen off the wagon” the second time when he and a party of several guys and gals, all stoned one way or another, thought it would be “cool” to dance naked in a little clearing. The result: everybody suffered from gnat bites, bee stings, one wasp whatever they call what wasps do to make you suffer when angered. He chuckled that this stretch was still filled with little clearings, some freshly made, some like the area of that long ago  clearing now well overgrown with bushes and fairly large trees. The deeply rusted hand –painted “pull off for on-coming cars,” recently re-painted by some worthy denizen the only surviving sign that some serious descendants of Tommy Wollaston, his maypole revels, and his band of “wild boys and girls” soon to be exiled from Puritan settlements in proper 17^th century Boston had run amok there some thirty years before.     

Finally Laura and Josh reached the rutted dusty somewhat overgrown area to where the hearties who ventured down the road in a vehicle parked, only one car there that day meaning the beach would be theirs. (Laura, by the way, crazily taking pictures of every interesting thing along the path). The third of a mile flat road lay ahead and a few minutes later they were at the high tide sea beach. Josh immediately thought back to the times when he and whoever was around (sometimes me) would go down in the late afternoon, jugs of wine and whatever dope was handy and cavort until the next dawn before heading back up the hill. Josh also remembered some saucy sexual adventures in a couple of sea swirl dug-out caves with Lydia from Carmel when he wasn’t so stoned although he decided not to share that information with Laura. (Not that bee-stung revel described before either.) 

Josh spied a make-shift tee-pee made up of various tree limbs strewn along the shoreline either washed in from the turbulent sea or downed in some howling wind night which plagued the place on certain days that had been gathered to protect against the Japan sea winds that also kept the place cooler than most of the places along this stretch of shoreline. Josh, playing the gallant, or remembering those old time Spanish grandee swash-buckler tales we swapped as we swapped dope he was not sure, invited Laura into the tee-pee to sit and ponder the sea as the vast swirled around them, as the cavernous rocks which acted as something of a break-water took their beating, took their million poundings into sand dust. Once settled Josh started reciting various lines from the poem that Jack Kerouac attached to the end of his book, Big Sur. Soon Laura was picking up the ocean moaning groaning sounds as well and so they spent the afternoon at one with our homeland the sea.

 

 

Laura remarked later that that was the closest they have ever gotten to be as one and Josh agreed with a slight smile. This is when he gave some more details about his life before Laura, about the evil spirits that at one time had possessed his soul. Laura took the whole conversation in stride, said she suspected that he had more to say about his past that he let on but that she was happy with him, he treated much better than her ex-husband had and so she had let it ride. Damn. As the sun dipped they headed back up the road, the road up now not as tough as Josh remembered it.  

Although at it turned out Josh, kind of embarrassed at his age about his reticence, continued to fudge on some of those sweet fucks and revels part, had tried to speak about them but was unable to separate even now the sweet fucks parts from the hells and craziness he put those women through, especially Miranda, before she cried “uncle” after he had sold her car, her main possession in life, to feed his demons. He said when he tried to bring his hellish ways with  Miranda up he kept seeing images of their last meeting in Frisco, she looking back in sorrow, his head bent down, and began to think about where she was that night, not a good thought sitting as one with another woman. I could see his point, although when he mentioned Miranda and the sold car that brought up my own travails with Josh and the night he stole a rare set of old books from me and sold them for a pittance and never until this day said he was sorry about that one. So not ever the white-capped swirl of the ocean smashing to the waiting arms of the shore endlessly making ethereal sounds and soothing savage souls could ease some ancient hurts.       

And then back to Cannery Row. Next day sitting where some old sardine factory had stood unused and unloved after many years of service (including a copper-plated turned green searing memorial to deep-sea divers lost in the struggle against the sea, the struggle to bring the strange sardines in for canning), broken and torn down after years of bringing the fish in Josh looked up and saw a sculpture, a sculpture centered on the novelist John Steinbeck. Steinbeck who in his time made infamous Cannery Row famous (although the numbers who would be able to identify his name with the place or the great everyman and everywoman Joad Okie California migration classic that he wrote, The Grapes of Wrath, is probably a couple of generations later fairly slim except for English majors and an off-hand skid row aficionado like Josh who had spent time there before he got some of his addictions under control and abandoned the places where skid row and its inhabitants survived) and his friend, a marine biologist, immortalized in Cannery Row, a handful of skid row bums made so after the sardine industry went south, and they, unskilled in their time for other gainful employment went on the bum, made themselves local characters by the time Josh met them along the beachfronts and along the flop house and charity soup line circuit. He told me he would tell me about that later, some other time.

What Josh did tell me about that night was about “Madame” Fiona (and although she was British she was no noble figure so you know what kind of Madame she was) who ran the best, the fairest, and the easiest to enter if you had the money whorehouse on that section of the coast back in the day. Right across from the Monterey Police Station so you knew Madame was a sport and “connected.”  As Josh remembered Madame and her sweet place he had to also remember Thea, or at least that is what she called herself when he knew her, Madame’s best girl.

Thea had been caught up in the whole West Coast hippie thing (she had been in Frisco when the summer of love exploded in 1967 a couple of years before we got there), had later developed a serious cocaine habit (after going through the alphabet of lesser drugs, legal and illegal mostly illegal) and had taken to “muling” like a lot of snow freaks to feed the habit, got burned when her man decided that he was smarter that the damn Mexican braceros he was working for as a distributor and found himself face down in a back alley of Tia Juana with his face blown off when he thought ripping off a brick was an easy road to independence, and she then needed to make her own way. (Josh cringed when he related that part of the story since he knew I knew about Peter Markin and what had happened to him down in Sonora.) Her own way then being given a room at Madame’s who saw in Thea’s airy funny ways and still good looks a cash cow (good looks especially in dark rooms with guys with serious dough and serious and unusual wanting habits which Thea had the book on, the Kama Sutra book).

Josh said that in those days, the days of his struggling with his addictions, well after the days when we were carefree in California and thought the new world we were exploring would last forever rather than at the ebb where we caught the tide going out as we headed west Thea reminded him of Butterfly Swirl. That name, the moniker of a hippie princess from Carlsbad down in Southern California, whom we met (and fought over) in Frisco brought instant recognition. She after spending some time with Josh eventually went with me and we lived in Oakland for a while before she headed back south to her surfer boyfriend when it turned out that the hippie princess life was not for her. Butterfly Swirl was this vision out of some Botticelli painting all ethereal, all wispy and virginal although she knew how to make a man’s toes curl. No question Josh would be drawn to such a woman even if she was a faded version of some youthful lust.      

Thea proved to be resourceful at what she did, and so she had worked her way up to Madame’s best girl when Josh ran into her in Carmel a short time after his own struggle with a snow addiction had finally been conquered. He was working again with Jack K. in the print shop on a regular basis, was pulling his weight with the concern (and best of all making money sending me along some of what he had borrowed although I was still sore about the way he played me to get it), had been delivering a load of books that they had rebound to the Big Sur Library (whose main benefactor would turn out to be Henry Miller, not the writer but the sculptor whose work both Josh and I had liked when we saw it at some local exhibition on the Pacific Coast Highway) and had stopped on the way back up to Frisco in Carmel for dinner at a Greek place that he  had liked when he was with Miranda. Thea had stopped there in order to buy some jewelry and he had spotted her on the street looking lost (directions lost), asked her if she needed help with directions, and they struck up a conversation winding up sitting in a café drinking coffee and wine for a while. Once she told Josh her profession, which she was up front about and not bashful about describing, after they had talked for a while he told her as they parted that he might come to see her at Madame’s sometime. She smiled.  And he did. And Thea, a child of the 1960s and of some sense of sexual adventure, some sense that there was more than the missionary position to the sex act took him around the world.

He would run into her every once in a while and they would go out for a few drinks. But Josh always paid the freight when he saw her at Madame’s for his occasional trips around the world. Josh, a bit melancholy when describing her talents, said she was something else, not some hooker with a heart of gold but a smart intelligent woman who took what she could do best and rode with it. Then one night Josh went to Madame’s and she was gone, had left with some guy in a three-piece suit who Madame said had promised Thea the world.  Adios Thea, adios pal.                      

**********   

Josh got tired that night at Jimmy’s Grille (they had been drinking high-shelf scotch toward the end while Josh was telling his story), told Sam once again that whole trip with Laura had brought back memories of that little shack, Jack K.’s shack, he had lived in on that Todo El Mundo dirt road to the beach where he fought off his first “snow” addiction, and his first bout with going “cold turkey” a fight which proved unsuccessful until much later. Since Sam had not been there in the 1980s when this was going on, had been situated comfortably in Cambridge ready to finish up law school and make some money (and his peace with society) Josh wanted to give him that story, the unfinished story that he had recently picked up again. Josh said he had written some sketches, some writings to keep him from going stir crazy back then which he had kept and which he had found up in his attic when he was looking for some old North Adamsville High stuff, mostly his yearbook. So as the hour was late he told Sam to read it and tell him what he thought about it. Here is what Josh passed on to Sam, who has already described his take on the piece and who left most of the screed as he received it in that rough final draft, telling him about what he had to say about searching for Todo El Mundo dreams:      

The rain came tumbling down slashing against the cabin windows, came tumbling down like the “Rains of Ranchipur” that he had begun to called such rains after seeing Lana Turner going through her Lana Turner thing twisting old fake Indian Doc Richard Burton around her little finger in the movie of the same name. Those beastly rains that used to keep him indoors on childhood rainy days nose up against the window, him, Josh Breslin to give him a name and not leave him off in some anonymous cloud like he was just some stinking donkey work everyman for what was eating at him, eating the best of his heart, was no everyman problem, not even in the free-for-all atmosphere of the depressing 1980s that he was trying to get a grip on. In those days a fogged window against his nostril breathe wondering whether the south branch of the Adamsville River would overflow its banks and send the house afloat down the river, the shack of a house that he had grown up in on Walnut Street and the only house that he knew, although when he was too young to remember they had lived across town in Adamsville proper on Pond Street in another shack of a house that had been torn down. But on those long ago days he really was hoping that it would let up for the simple reason that he was going stir crazy in the house what with brother squabbles about loud music, theirs, or talking too loud, them, so he could not read the book in front of him, and mother yells, mother yells about anything that a hard-pressed mother of four closely-aged coming-of-age boys would yell about when the rains came and drove her charges indoors and to kid squabbles.

Yeah, those rains had been slashing down on Todo El Mundo like that with short periodic let-ups for a couple of days and it was starting to get the better of him, starting to make him feel just like he felt when brother squabbles erupted and mother yells raised a din to match any horrible sound you could think of, some sonic boom mother lode. A couple of rainy season days and Josh, having been in California for the past few years now off and on, around Pacific Coast Highway Central California and so subject to the Japan seas, had expected rain but the deluge was just a tad bit too symbolic for his pressing needs. His nerve quiet needs, his need to think, to write just as much as he could to keep the devil demons starting to form in his head, worse in shadows against the plastered wall, and the worst, the shaking trees outside looked devilish every time he poked his head out to see if the damn deluge had stopped, away, to keep them at bay for a while, and not have that stupid pitter-patter of rain going rapidly down the crusty drainpipes and driving him to distraction, just like those childhood times when he was stir crazy to get away from brother squabbles and mother yells, as he tried to go cold turkey on, well, let’s call it life, his going downhill fast life. That part.

Hell, let’s call it one of his seven different addictions also created by childhood wanting habits not abated since then that drove him rainy day stir crazy, starting in no particular order although this blasted rainy day he was breaking from his “nose candy” addiction, coke, snow, blizzard, cousin  or whatever you call it where you make your connections for the stuff, to the exclusion of the other six (come on now did he have to name them all, the other six, other than one was women, just then a woman, Miranda, Miranda from Xanadu his common-law wife but she had faded, had left him when she saw no way out, when she saw too that it was hopeless to stay with him after he sold her fucking car from under her just to get an ounce  of flake. And that last time (hell, you know there were other disputes, many other disputes, when Josh played his junkie hand out) he let her go without a whimper, let everything go except her memory, that memory stuff, the good times, the walks on the beaches, the innocent dope times, the sex (the way she “curled his toes” what he and all his youth time corner boys called it learned from an old blues number, some guy like Son House or Skip James, one of those guys), haunting him in sober moments, moments like this freaking rain-blasted minute. Yeah, his slightly overdone bout of sniffing stuff up his nose until it was clogged like some drainpipe just like the crusty one taking a rain beating outside his cabin door to the exclusion of everything else including his printing and bookbinding business, his going concern business with Jack K. whose cabin he was watching the rain in.

Had claimed his share of rolled one-dollar bill sniffing (although at one party in Pacifica just off the beach in some old hacienda owned, secretly owned, by the cartel as a transit point north but fronted by gringo bigtime distributors while he had been in the first days of this round with cousin that he was trying to break out of the well-heeled host insisted that everybody use the one-hundred dollar bills that he provided to inhale the damn stuff, and keep the bill as a souvenir). That binge had gone on for months and now that he was out of cash, out of coke, out of friends with cash (having done his own version of the pyramid scheme borrowing from friend B to pay back friend A and friend C to pay back friend B and so on you get the idea), having run out of women whom he had made a specialty of conning, coming up with so many improbable cock-eyed stories even he could not get them straight, conned them until they began to compare notes, the ones who knew each other, and froze him out, money out, bed out, out of credit with his usually laid-back dealer friend up in Marin City, who had not only shut him off but had been making noises about bringing in some “bracero labor,” that is what Marin City Slim (his moniker) called the hard boys available to high level distributors like him, to get the dough until he had had to sell most of his rare book collection to keep the wolves from his door, and out of Miranda (by choice, hers, and car-less).

So he needed no rain, no pouring rain dripping satanically off the roof top, off the freaking drainpipes, off the ancient 1965 Volkswagen bug car parked in the back up against the cabin, Jack’s car as he had no car. Had no car and still squirmed that he had sold Miranda’s out from under her every time he saw the damn thing out back, hers a 1982 Volkswagen that they had had many a kinky tryst in, in order to score some cousin which was the open cause of her leaving him although there were one hundred other possibilities over the past years beginning with those conned women beds that were now closed to him. Had no need to see and hear the rain purring off the damn trees when the swirling winds formed around the basin about one foot below where he was sitting trying to keep from crawling out of his skin as the urges began to settle down. He had to laugh, Alan, Bix, Muddy, Magic Slim, goddam Neal, goddam Dean, goddam Jack K., even Miranda in the days when they would do a few lines just for fun said that cousin, cousin to smack, the Big H, was not addictive. Like hell as he dove down to the depths again in the depression, some shrink one time when his wife Betsy forced him to go see him said that Josh was clinically depressed, probably had been from childhood, but what good did such knowledge do him just then as that funk would not quit him no matter how much strong black Chase & Sanborn black coffee he drank and how many Pall Mall cigarettes he smoked.

So he, to pass the time, started writing what is presented here among other things, writing to take the edge off,  writing in the third person as a convenience, a shamed convenience since writing in the “I” was too self-conscious and too capable of being fudged when it came to describing cons, women cons a specialty, stolen drugs, money taken from random purses, kited checks, bounced credit cards, figuring too by the time anybody read the stuff he would either be well writing that next one million words that he had been on the threshold of doing threatening one and all that he had a blockbuster to end all blockbusters inside him that would make that 1950s “beat” minute guys and their cross-country excursions and cavorting seem like some Henry James Boston Yankee WASP  Brahmin Beacon Hill séance.  Or, more likely, be in some locked funny farm, you know some place to cool out with no windows, maybe no bed if he got feisty, screaming to himself about the injustices of a rational man being locked up in place with no windows and some mattress strewn every which way on the floor, crying out for snow, for liquor, some sweet whiskies or wines, hell, just a goddam cigarette to cut the sound of the scraping fingernails against chalkboards that he would be fighting.

Maybe too, although very unlikely unless he came packaged with a new Toyota or something (some deal he could make with Johnny Callahan, Mr. Toyota down Hull way on Auto Mile about twenty from North Adamsville his old corner boy who had made good on the straight and narrow after high school, grabbed Mrs. Toyota, his high school sweetie for a wife too), said maybe one hundred non-Catholic-etched acts of  contrition and took it slow and easy, meaning  no catting around with stray women looking to curl his toes for a few lines, back under the shiny silky sheets with Miranda. Or, who knows, and Josh got the shivers thinking about this one, knowing damn well what had happened to old corner boy (and best friend from elementary school on), Pete Markin, who let his wanting habits, aided by a twist, by a woman, who wanted everything in the freaking world to satisfy her own wanting habits which he thought he could satisfy, get the better of him and wound up very dead down in sunny Mexico. Nobody to claim his body, no family, not that twist, no friends, and, hell, not him for sure, for fear that they/he would wind up beside poor Peter. Him thinking that he could steal a suitcase full of coke which he was “muling” and get away with it, and for his troubles turned up face down in some dusty forlorn and forgotten Mexican town around Sonora way after a drug deal fell through when the guys whom he was dealing with knew that the dope belonged to the hombres and told them about it and he got the short end of the stick. But those things were all future, all too murky right then to think through as he  looked out at the glimmer of the Pacific, all majestic swirls and death spirals, all crashing and moaning, moaning for a wave, and he moaning to get that idea about those finger-nailed blackboards out of his head,  that he could just make out (he had to laugh at that one about the swirls for the rain, for the ocean and for the turmoil in his fucked brain all meshed together) through the big picture windows.

Big picture windows all the rage now in rattail California seacoast cabins to make up for the old-timey rustic stuff that hadn’t worked for years, you know that oil-painted green door that won’t close right, the spaces between the logs that let in more wind that a politician’s speech,  clogged crusty gutters, clogged by the shedding trees that threaten to return the place to nature, a cold stove, clammy floors, all good enough for primitive man Jack K. but wearisome to a guy trying to keep himself together better than the fixtures, that window  facing out onto the swirling ocean gathering some unknown verve out in the Japan sea. Seeing that scene, seeing that he could not handle those damn chalkboard scratches, he thought maybe he could “score” from Freddy down the road. And just as he was about to put on that damn yellow fisherman’s gear (over-sized pants, swoshing black rubber boots, adequate jacket and damn garish yellow flop hat that made him look like an advertisement for that old  Gloucester fisherman who graced the front of the package of frozen fish sticks that his mother force-fed him and his brothers when he was growing up (and dosing the damn things all bread-crusted and soggy by the time they came out of the oven with blood red ketchup which made him ill just then thinking about them) some better angel of his nature, maybe some glimmer of hope channeled from Miranda (funny that he kept coming back to that Miranda reunion, kept  it front and center about how he would do this and that to change things between them if she came back yet when she was around he was sullen, distracted, distant, aloof, non-responsive and toward the end almost comatose), or of an act of God ( a vengeful God like some great Jehovah witness, all snarls and fury,  that he remembered thinking about one time that came from some old folk song book, or hymnal book, no, from a Harry Smith Anthology entry recorded from down in backwoods Tennessee singing some bleak Sunday morning praise to placate that damn rage of his, remembering too that maybe three hundred years ago when the song was fresh out of the Protestant Reformation struggles he might very well have been trying to placate that damn Jehovah himself with some lusty singing praises to his name) like his mother kept harping into him whenever all hell broke loose in the household and then magically got resolved without him having to spent his life in purgatory got hold of him and he went to bed instead after one last look out through those tell-no-tale big picture windows.     

Next morning Josh awoke, yeah the third day in a row of that slashing rain. Third day “resurrection” still caught up, despite formal disbelief honed by the depths of modern skepticism with the free-thinking guys he hung out with lately unlike those high holy day corner boys of youth, in childhood Catholic incensed myths maybe eternal myths, maybe all religious groupings had such foundational myths he would have to ask Allen who had made some studies of the matter. Somehow he thought but the idea made sense but that resurrection business was too pious for the thing he was thinking when that first blast of slashing rain hit that drainpipe and his nerve-endings were almost shattered, nervous system high-ended by the sight of those swirling oceans down below heedless of soft-core junkies and their frayed nerves. Heedless, hear me, of a man moaning for himself, moaning in search of that high white note that had stuck in his head for a while now, moan for that high white note, go on try to bring all humankind moan into it you faker, for all of the wicked things he was thinking, break out of this prison thoughts, getting well with Freddy down the road thoughts, maybe working a deal to mule for that Marin City dealer he was in hawk to up to his nose (not trying to make a pun there, no way), maybe working out some deal with Marin City Slim  to front dope for him to front dough to Mr. Toyota and work Miranda back  into his bleeding away life, too many thought s for all the soft felt-tipped angels whom he could use right then in his wake-up bed.

And, damn, damn, him stuck, stuck hard this time inside that slight cabin. He swore the place had gotten smaller in the night like the rain had sogged, wetted, soaked things up so much, he was getting a bit frayed as he thought his thoughts he could not remember what the right term for everything wet was, and that finally logged, logs set in the back bin for his comfort, fire stove had gathered enough heat that shrunk the place in drying out that wetness. Jack K.’s cabin, or was it Lawrence’s, he was all confused that second, no, it had to be Jack’s K.’s because Lawrence’s was several miles back up the road toward Big Sur, back around Sycamore Canyon Road, which might have been in Big Sur proper. Jack K. had just felt that he needed the time off from that dastardly project for the print shop, the book re-binding contract for the Harvard libraries which Lawrence, who had run one of the libraries before he headed west in the mid-1950s and set up that bookstore/restoration shop in North Beach, had gotten for them through some old-time contact, which required him going east for a time, drove him so crazy because the work had too many moving parts which always confused him. Jack K. usually took on those jobs, knew how to work magic on old books for cheap money, but he had been having, Jesus, at forty, mother problems, mother storming about him not being married (and he not wanting to be married since his was a practicing homosexual and refused like a lot of Frisco guys to get married as a cover for his activity), not providing her with grandchildren, and so had begged off). So Jack took that over, took it over in a huff once Josh met a guy in Harvard Square (a connection first made through Marin City Slim),  who had some blow and that was that, that had him bent out of shape, had taken the wind out of his sails. Funny how after Jack K. called wondering what the hell was going on after not hearing from him for a week, nothing, and what he was  hearing about Josh craziness from Allen, Dean, Greg, Hubby when they came out west, he had left the East in a swirling rainstorm, hitched in spots until the rains grabbed him in Moline like they always did that time of year, grabbed a bus in spots from Davenport to Reno and wound up in Frisco a week later in another swirling rainstorm getting off the last stop bus down by the Embarcadero and then went over to Third Street to see some guy that Jack K. knew who was supposed to lend him an apartment for him to work in for a month or so. Josh figuring that getting away from the East Coast, thought of Miranda, and cousin would push him forward.

Turned out the guy, no names here because by the time anybody reads this he will probably have gone up the ladder in the organization, the Mexican drug cartel, the braceros, los hermanos, those guys with the heavy artillery weaponry ready to spray said weapons in all directions just for kicks to keep the new drug of choice, snow, moving steadily up gringo and gabacho American noses. Well, or in a drug haze, Josh nevertheless made it a longstanding, well-thought out habit learned back in his corner boy days with Sam, Jimmy, Johnny Callahan (now big time Mr. Toyota and maybe he really could swing a deal to get Miranda a car once he got well), sometimes the late Pete Markin (now gone to his early rest having “caught the westbound train” after not making the right choices when he tried to go “independent” with a suitcase with a two kilo brick of the cartel’s goods inside that he was “muling” and got two slugs to the heart and face down in some dusty backdoor cantina in Sonora for his efforts), and king hell king leader, Frankie Riley who had made a few trips west with him and Sam back when the earth was fresh, of not offending up and coming “connected” guys, not only had no apartment for him but as a stone-cold drug dealer on the rise turned him on to a sweet ounce barely cut to make up for that no place to stay bit. Thanks brother maybe someday I can return the favor.

So for about four days, after he called few a friends in the city, Allen, Dean, Jasper, Hinck, Buck, but not Jack K. (who beside mother trouble had been drinking heavily to get over mother troubles and coke didn’t do it for Jack K. anyway),  who had a few women friends as well, especially Dean who practically had them conned out of  his eyes and they would roll over in the clover for him in a minute (his supposedly extra-large dong the key to their lusts, according to Dean), Josh did nothing but stay high in Jason’s rooming house over on Bay Street where no questions were asked as long as the rent was paid in advance in cash and not loud noise or gunfire was heard, listening to jazz albums and sweet be-bop talk he had not heard for a long time. Got laid by some good-looking gone chick friend of Allen’s, Linny,  (her and Allen just friends according to her although she suspected that he was more interested in Dean than her but whatever, whatever). Linny, gone yes, gone for her daddy Josh for a minute anyway, although she was strange retro woman, dressed all in black, black beret tilted on her head just so like in old films of Lizabeth Scott, including black bra and underwear saying that she was a “beat” chick looking for her way back home, looking for kicks, and looking to curl a guy’s toes for some of those kicks. Strange because she was maybe in her late twenties and just by rough arithmetic was not even born when Jack, Allan, Gregory, Gary and all their beat aficionados held forth in North Beach clubs, dives, cellars, and made new words sprint off the page, old Allan be-bopping about how he dreamed of negro streets and desolation angels, but like she said she curled his toes for a few lines and some be-bop patter. And so they went to the mats a few times, and, get this, Josh in a drug frenzy ill-advisedly drove Dean’s car off the road down by the Pacific Coast Highway near the Daly City line when he was taking her back to her sugar daddy or something in Pacifica. He had to call some errant tow truck to get him out and Linny just sat in the car listening to Dizzy be-bop about peanuts, staring out at the sea, dressed all in black (he told you about the black undergarments already).

After that four day blur, a couple of sober days along the shore in Pacifica with Linny where he stayed with her in her room (turned out the daddy was her real daddy and Pacifica was her home but it took Josh a while to absorb that information and so it had come out sugar daddy first in his twisted mind), the days back in Frisco turned into weeks in blurs and then Jack K. (or maybe it was Lawrence after all since Jack K. had had his own problems with the bottle, the scotch whiskey bottle, although he was a maniac working at the print shop, drunk or sober, and maybe too had had a ten thousandth falling out with his mother about not being married, about not giving her grandkids and all that stuff, stuff that Josh had heard the echo of in his own life so it probably was Lawrence) gave the marching orders to that rustic cabin he just awoke up in and still felt none too good if anybody, anybody but the damn seagulls, the occasional field mouse and about seventeen aggressive squirrels was asking.       

Oh yeah and ordered to try to break that cousin habit, that nose candy habit by Jack K. straight out (funny Jack K. had as many addictions as he had although not all the same, especially no women) and Lawrence too (who despite the crowd he hung around with including Jack K., Dean, Neal, and Irwin nevertheless tended to business in his own bookstore, got the contracts signed, the books in order and the guys in order- a regular worker bee as he was fond of calling himself) out there in the great moonless dark moody Pacific night. Night signifying his mood, day or night, when those coke-less nerves got frayed of late.    

And so here he was in the great white-capped Pacific night that many years before Josh had started reaching for when he had first come west, no, that was not right, when he first started dreaming up in his three brother shared bedroom on sultry summer nights and cold as hell winter ones too in the staid Eastern night in high school if not sooner about the great escape, the escape from know-nothing old North Adamsville where he was spinning his wheels , no project ever got completed, nobody took him under their wing except one English teacher senior year but by then he was already half way out the door in his head anyway, getting hell and damnation from his Puritan-bred mother (yes, Puritan-bred although she was nothing but a high holy day, high mass complete with incense as the priest fumigated the congregation Catholic and maybe that is where Josh first learned what high was all about, Roman Catholic high, but don’t let that fool you since they were brethren, brethren in close by Pilgrim lands which rubbed off on her, and him), could do no right. Found Frankie Riley, who would later become a well-known lawyer after he spent his wild minutes going west with him and Sam, and the corner boy life and its pranks, high crimes and misdemeanors which put him behind the eight ball with family and the law, nothing big but another good reason to clear out. Had been an indifferent student (except senior year when fearing some military draft coming down on him upon graduation and some God forsaken war flaring up in Southeast Asia and with the prudent guidance of that English teacher he blossomed well enough to get into a college. Had been cup runneth over so filled with teenage angst and alienation (you know nervous about his low-rent appearance, about his lowly social standing in the pecking order of the school, embarrassed by his wrong side of the track status and girl trouble, or really trying to get to first base and failing girl trouble) that he could have driven a truck (he laughed about a big old Mack truck) through it and escape too that cloying smugness of the red scare Cold War night that was driving him, and not just him, to distraction.

So he dreamed, dreamed, dreamed small dreams like having his own place, hell, his own room, his own car and not have to depend on Frankie Riley’s beat-down beat-around Nash Rambler (heck, they hadn’t made those since Hector was a pup and Frankie was always having trouble getting parts)or Sam Lowell’s  reliable and “boss” ‘59 Plymouth) and large wild world global dreams about a little social justice and a lot of justice, big literary heavy justice for Josh Breslin, and in between dreams would sneak, yes, literally sneak (and will tell you why in a minute after he finishes this thought) in the dead of night over to Harvard Square, sometimes with Sam, who had some of the same dreams although they both kept them in check around the other corner boys who were “square” about poetry, literature and the budding folk scene which they mushed together as “beat,” for lack of a better word although beat was getting lazy and grandmotherly among the corner boys of the world in place like North Adamsville, Cambridge, Manhattan, Detroit, Chicago, LA, and Frisco, sometimes alone, when he was in high school in the early 1960s just to be around what he thought was a new wave, a new way of thinking, writing, singing, acting, juggling that he sensed, and not just him either, was coming and would make his small “beat” corner boy group seem like a tea party.

Here is a good scenario of how he would get going out that Harvard Square scene. Usually it started with some mother “why did you do this when you should have done that-why did you do that when you should have done this,” you know the drill, beef (less frequently brother, three other brother, beefs about space and quiet) and he needed to get some fresh air, needed to shake the dust off the old town off his shoes, needed to be with kindred, even if only to moon over them and their sense of freedom. So late at night, usually around midnight he would stealthily slip down the back of the property and start walking a couple of miles in the sweet dark if foreboding mean streets to catch the all-night Redline subway over to the Square. Once there he automatically took the steps two at a time to get to, well, to get to the famous, or maybe infamous, Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria that was just outside the station. Now normally nobody, nobody in their right minds would give two cents worth a damn about some dispensary for rancid coffee, soggy muffins and un-nameable stews, but the Hayes in the Square was a fixture for every misshapen hobo, every urine-stained drunk, for every girl on the hustle, for every three for a quarter hustler, every down in the dumps hipster (or wanna-be), every crying for a fix junkie and, oh yeah, every guy or gal who sensed the same breeze blowing through the land as Josh who were writing like crazy, poems, stories, and songs, folk songs then mainly waiting the night away for the big wave to wash over them, give them their minute. And Josh hoped that he would be washed clean too. (Oh, that seemed so long ago when the world was new, before we tried to turn the world upside down, and we did not have to run away from the things we have built and run too from the things, Shiva-like, that we have destroyed.)           

So that was how he spent his time, how he got through those last minutes of high school, mainly being seen, maybe snapping his fingers when some budding Allan Ginsberg began some be-bop sentences and devoured the night, and taking everything in. Some people there took a shine to him, one a Harvard assistant dean’s daughter, another a guy who would go on to a long, if  not publicly well-known career as a folk artist who later used some of Josh’s material in his songs. Mostly those who took a shine to him did so a couple of years later when he was actually in college, having been pushed hard to go to school by that sainted angel English teacher senior year in high school to get off the dime, and they pushed him, especially Eva that assistant dean’s daughter who wanted to impress her father with her wise choice of boyfriend but he, the father, in the end, hated Josh worse that the anti-war protestors who were buggering his door every day, to write some stuff with the idea of having it published.  (Which had been one of the factors that had animated him to take up the printing profession so that he could publish his own works if necessary, although all that blew away like dust when his various addictions took on their own life).

Others in the Hayes-Bickford mist, mostly guys who would give him the nod, the nod then signally some ultimate kinship, some oneness with cool and not just thrown for the sake of recognition, and pass him by silently to go back to their dorms or garrets write the great American novel that they couldn’t stock enough of, dreams of book tours and being put up in swanky hotels, or cut the next big folk song that would have everybody flooding the jukeboxes for a listen and bring in gold albums, saw him for what he was then just a confused kid wet-behind-the-ears kid. Ever the con artist whatever else Josh held sacred and dear he would make that confused stance work to his benefit that he successfully played out with certain Harvard Square young women, Eva in particular, with what then would have been called motherly instincts but which he saw as working out them working out their own lonelinesses in a turn your back to angst world who wanted to help him end his confusion. Like he said he played that out, always played that out. But either budding “new find” or confused nerd he hung tenaciously to his secret high school Hayes-Bickford routine through college waiting many a weekend night for the big break-out to happen.

Josh wrote about that experience in high school, wrote about his sense that big new things were coming for him and his generation, and saw glimmers of that fresh new land in the flesh on any given Friday or Saturday night in Harvard Square and even in Kenmore Square where some Boston University students not to be outdone by the Harvards were creating their own post-beat wave, but no one he knew listened to him (except Sam, who had all the right instincts then, had a sense that things needed to be turned upside down , knew in his bones how to navigate “the road,” but who would only be washed for a while by that breeze until the early 1970s when the tide ebbed and law school and making peace with bourgeois society beckoned). Nobody heard Josh’s anguished cry, calling him rogue, devil saint, sad sack idealist or, and remember the red scare Cold War times, “commie,” Bolshevik, and Joe Stalin’s illegitimate son. (One teacher, an old battle-scarred  football coach who probably was a hundred years old, or acted it, had kept him after school three days running for not liking the way he answered some silly history question, Josh playing with the answer since he knew it although he was not a real history junkie, and called him Bolshevik just like that. Jesus, and he wasn’t, he was just a kid trying to work out in his head the new wave he thought was coming and that he might have a place in the damn thing.) Yeah, so nobody listened then thinking that he was a wanna-be “beat,” some third-rate retro beat, out of synch with his time by the early 1960s when television determined “beat” and not circumstances of life beat but he had been too young to have understood what that “beat” minute was, although he knew the echos, had had his wearing a slanted back black beret and un-cuffed black  pants period to give the look of some beat denizen, some beatified brother.

Get this, even corner boy king, his acknowledged leader, Frankie Riley cut him to the quick more than once making fun of him and his hanging around with winos and derelicts, faded sisters, and local hoods, nickel and dime hoods, at the Waldorf Cafeteria up in Adamsville Square when he couldn’t sneak over to Harvard Square or didn’t have enough dough to buy coffee and crullers, and so just hung out picking up the folk wisdom that every hipster had at the tip of their tongue. Sure there was plenty of cutting each other up verbally even among sworn corner boys, especially by the king because that ability was how he got to be king. That corner boy thing had been a necessary protection for Josh in the rough neighborhoods of the “Acre” section of North Adamsville where anybody, any guy, running solo was subject to serious problems including beatings for scoffing at the corner boy traditions but to call a guy out for being slightly off-center meant you would always be looked at with a very jaded eye. Of course later Frankie got “religion” but back then he could be merciless on any given weekend night when he felt he had to act the “king.”

Some girls that he was interested in, one Melinda Loring, who had dismissed Josh’s interest in her out of hand in that haughty way of hers, said he should worry more about the draft (Melinda’s brother had been then recently drafted and had already been sent to Vietnam) and getting his ass in college (Josh’s expression) and less about guys like Jack, Allen, Gregory, Tom, Mario, who already were making the big breezes that were getting ready to stir the generation and had already made their mark. (Sam Lowell would fifty years later have a torrid if short and fruitless affair with which, according to Sam, did not have enough strength to survive a couple of tough blows, which didn’t make sense after a while, which like some things had no room to grow. So maybe Josh had been better off having been dismissed out of queenly hand by her.) Even that English teacher, Miss Soros, who he had secretly thought must have been some kind of hipster in her time because she was always talking about the New York literary crowd this and that, looked askance at him when he told he had been doing that Hayes-Bickford  midnight creep for a couple of years.

He said to himself then that he would show them, showed them big, showed them at great cost to his brain, to his body and to whatever sweet angels were ordered to cushion his fall that he was on the edge of something grand, something you would remember fifty years later. That first written piece from high school, submitted to that English teacher who had it placed in some small high school literary publication (after she did her usual no-holds barred editing job) a now sought after relic that he had not been able to find among his papers, a paper sketch which he treated like some Catholic shrine thing, some venerated thing, like his mother and grandmother were always telling him to get wise to before it was too late in order to get himself some kind of absolution for his sins. Jesus.

So yeah Josh got the urge, when he came of age (okay, okay when he got out of college), when he first left Harvard Square back in Cambridge where he was staying with a campus bigwig’s daughter, the assistant dean’s daughter, Eva, previously mentioned for chrissake, who went for him and whose father went crazy when he found out that some raggedy-ass boy had been staying with her, ordered him out of her apartment and gave him some dough to head west, head somewhere, head anyway and he was just hungry enough to grab the dough with every fist. Eva had wanted to go with him, had had her head turned by the idea of the road, of striking out to find adventure, to check out that fellahin world Josh was always talking about, talking about the utterly doomed, the shadow forgotten, the whiskey-soaked panhandlers, the flotsam and jetsam night-hangers that she was totally unaware of except every once in a while at the Hayes-Bickford when he had no dough and they wound up there at one in the morning. She knew though Josh meant more than those obvious down-trodden and that  he was speaking of the sweat-back braceros doing their stoop labor, the small-time hustler spending more time figuring the con than just straight working, the midnight cravers, those looking for shadows to shelter their misdeeds.

And Eva was curious also about that great blue-pink American West night that Josh talked about constantly, about the road west that generations of his (and hers too although mostly they stayed put to fill the Brahmin East and Ivy League schools) kept pushing toward until there was no more land, until the Pacific swales ate up their dreams, about the Okie/Arkie stuff that Woody Guthire wrote songs about, that John Steinbeck wrote books about, and Nelson Algren described he old world genesis of, about setting up a new life, about instead of corner boys there were smiling cowboys, awkward sheep-herders, bad ass guys too, and more modern, oil-stained hot- rodders in the valleys, water-soaked  surfer boys waiting for the perfect wave, and their suntanned blonde girlfriends waiting for them while they waited for the perfect wave (she, Eva, of brown hair, brown eyes and a brown world and so jealous of sun-flecked yellows and blue eyes too, Josh’s fierce blue eyes included), and new, a new sound coming from out in Frisco about breaking out of the confines of what parents, teachers, authority figures (like Mr. Assistant Dean father) and their hangers-on and trying to be free. Josh had taken her one night to the retro-1930s and 1940s black and white film Brattle Theater to see High Sierra, to see Humphrey Bogart, Bogie, as the dangerous stone-cold killer Roy Earle, and his round-heels sweetie Marie, played by Ida Lupino, (and, dog Pard) who kept talking about “getting free, ” about a great personal jail break-out ,and that vision stuck with him, and he made it stick with her when they would get stoned and talk of what the road meant.

Yeah, getting free just like that tear-stained Marie at the end when Roy takes the big step-off. So yes she was thrilled by the idea of going on his   road with him, had gotten a friend ready to sublet her apartment, had grabbed some dough from her grandfather for the trip (he thought it was for airfare, hotels, and such not the hitchhike thumb, sleep by the roadside, grab peanut butter sandwiches on the fly), and had gathered in some camping equipment/road supplies like a knapsack. Her father heard about the whole trip idea and freaked out (which also would have required her to drop out of school, Radcliffe, for a while which really freaked him out) and her wound up locking her up in her apartment bedroom, giving Josh money in the living room (after threatening him with some legal actions about co-habitation laws then in effect to sweeten the pot) and he, a couple of days later, headed to the truck terminal near the Coca-Cola sign near the Mass Turnpike in order to try to pick up a truck out of town. A friend had given him the terminal tip because a lot of times the truckers were going long distances and wanted company to talk to at seventy miles an hour, even strange hippie boys. That began the first trip west, the one before that real one with Sam where they really had fun when some girls picked them up in Cleveland and it took about three weeks to get to Frisco and you can figure out why on your own time, a trip west that would not be the last of its kind. 

He had set out with a rucksack on one shoulder (a few grooming items, a couple of pairs of sock, underwear, a Swiss Army knife which turned out to be usable in many circumstances not all of them of a benevolent nature) and a bedroll on the other (a couple of sheets, an old bedspread and, wisely, a canvas sheet as ground-cover which came in handy on a few rainy nights sleeping by the side of the road when no cars were coming by), a few bucks in his pocket (he figured not to take all the dean’s money with him so he got a money order and mailed it to Eva since he might get jack-rolled). He had called Eva, had explained what her father had threatened to do to him, and had talked her into going west on her own by plane and she would bring the money with her then. She never did, did go west, but when he came back to the East she was waiting for him with the money and a few sweet tricks to whet his appetite that she had picked up from a serious read of the Kama Sutra while he was gone. They stayed together for a while but he had the wanderlust bug then and she had backed off from that western adventure idea and eventually, a couple of years later, wound up marrying one of her own kind, a Yankee stockbroker from Yale. Josh wondered what would have happened if that damn father hadn’t choked her off, if they had gone west together. He still wondered every once in a while whether wherever she was she too was in her deep sleep thinking that she should have gone-wondered what she was doing the nights he wondered about her fate. As for the assistant dean who later became a notorious dean at another Ivy League school he was too busy by then fending off irate anti-war, anti-everything students to worry about a fallen daughter.

Yeah the times were out of joint, no question, and Josh had a well-worn thumb, a blessed beaten down thumb, a hitchhike thumb that had done yeoman’s service in the search for the blue-pink great American West night.  He had searched and searched for the damn thing and now all he had to show for it was a stuffed-up nose, the miseries, two lost friends, one lost girlfriend and so much angst that somebody might think that he was still a teenager. (That search for the American West night was a serious venture in his mind because Josh, although no serious student of history, bought into this old Harvard professor’s idea, a guy named Turner, who said some strange stuff was going to happen once everybody realized the American frontier was gone, that there was no place left on the continent for the “wild ones” to move on to. That eternal wanderlust of those whose forbears came to these shores on the transport ships, or worse the prison ships and picked up stakes when the soil wore out, or the neighbors were to close by or maybe they just got tired on tilling the soil and moved on. Moved on and then hit ocean. That hard fact was going to create a mess, a mess for guys like Josh who were really rolling stones, had no sense of settling down, had to keep moving just to keep moving, driving that hot-rod on midnight “chicken runs,” revving up that bike on the Pacific Coast Highway (he swore on a clear cold night he could hear that thunderous roar from a couple of miles away), wading out surf board in hand to take on the nearest wave, who didn’t fit in and who did not want to go to Nepal or some such place but plant themselves in America out in the moonless night search whether in the desert, the Rockies, up along the Hood River, or just tramping like some latter-day John Garfield down the Pacific Coast Highway looking for that thrill that would either kill him or cure him.

In Garfield’s case kill, they hung him high if you want the truth, that time he played the alley cat wanderlust hobo Frank in the 1946 film The Postman Always Rings Twice when his wanting habits were for another man’s wife who was looking for a stepping-stone, who had murder in her long-legged curvaceous blonde-haired heart, and would be eternally grateful in just the right way such a creature could be grateful if she had an playmate to do the foul deed, but he did go to the big step off with a smile. Funny Josh had a recurring dream about Frank, about the film, about her, since it was filmed in the year that he was born, the dream always having him in his mother’s womb sitting with his father in  the now retro- Strand Theater, or some such dark place, screaming his lungs out at the screen for Frank to clear out, clear out fast, the minute he saw her, that blonde dish, coming through the door from the back of the house to the two-bit diner asking for a fresh-out girl cigarette and he licking his chops, looked her over like the daily special. Josh always yelled for all the good it did Frank. All he had at the end was that smile, maybe a half smile, and that ever present jasmine scent, that damn scent.

Josh had had less angst back in his youth, less teenage angst, but he also did not have a problem with stuffed up noses then either. His immediate problem. Yeah, so Jack K., let’s just say it was Jack K. who sent him to Todo El Mundo and if it was with Lawrence’s blessing or not let’s leave it at that. Jack K. told him to make himself at home once he got there, told him to make sure that he stopped off at Billy Joe’s in Daly City to get his groceries and a ride out to the place from Bill Joe son who was heading to San Diego. (Billy Joe by the way one of those Oakies progeny who by then had populated half of California who still had that wanderlust, still wanted to pick up and leave, except there was that damn ocean and so except for a very fast Vincent Black Lightning, a British import he kept his wanting habits in check.)  

While fretting through the first few hours of his “cold turkey” Josh suddenly thought that he had forgotten to tell anybody back East, not Miranda who was not speaking to him and who would not accept his collect calls, but whom he could sent a letter to marked “Emergency,” or something like that and she would answer, that was the way she was, or at least she would know where he was, not Biggie his dealer friend of recent vintage and the only one he did not owe money to and who might give him a line of credit if he knew where to send the dough and how, not Jimmy Jones who was the superintendent at his building over in Brighton where all his worldly possessions were stored in the basement pending some back rent received, nor anybody else to tell that he was back in California, back in Todo El Mundo where he haven’t been in years.

The last time had been with Angelica, Angelica of the old time hitchhike road met in Steubenville, Ohio where she was slumming one summer as a waitress, had spied him, had been vaguely looking for a wandering man to break out with, had bought his line of chatter and they were off to the coast. Miranda knowing that he had taken Angelica to Todo El Mundo had refused to go there with him and so they usually stayed in Pacifca a few miles south of Frisco town when they flew out to the coast. Yeah, Miranda was that kind of woman that way too. He had flown out from Boston on a whim, on a whim that a change of coasts would do wonders for him and move him away from the increasingly nasty drug scene and his own jones where he was finishing up a couple of “mood pieces,” mood pieces being his way  of saying that he couldn’t get a big upper case idea, or rather a big enough idea to sustain a book-length story, hell, or even a reasonable short story and so he had scraped together some small case ideas like what it was like growing up around Boston in the early 1960s and what it was like to escape over to Harvard Square late at night and what it was like to  sit in the all-night Hayes-Bickford cafeteria (he thought that was what that establishment was supposed to be, a food and drink place but he knew that he never went near the food if he could help it although he usually grabbed a cup of joe to prove he was a paying customer and not some drip-dry wino or down-on his-luck panhandler) and soak in the sights, soak in the people, soak in the notion that he was fixated on about the big new breeze that he sensed was blowing over the land, the big blow that would wash everybody  clean, would give everybody, hell, give him, a new start. Oh what characters you would see from winos and skid row bums cadging leftovers, bumming change for coffee, really though for the Thunderbird wine -“what’s the price-forty twice” to be had in blue law Massachusetts over by Charley’s Kitchen from a guy who bought about twenty bottles for just such after hours’ business, ah, free enterprise, taking some used coffee cup sitting on a table before the busboy got to it and going to refill the thing with the tepid dishwater coffee burned over about seven times (refills were on the house),but also guys, guys like Eric and Tom, a couple of off-beat beat poets waiting like him for that new wave everybody knew was coming (even the winos and bums were going to rise on that great day) and  who helped make that folk minute that old Bob Dylan and a couple of others are still kicking around today .

But thinking about those halcyon days got Josh all mixed up, feeling like he had missed the best part of it (he had been in the military for a couple of key years, years when the ebb was starting to churn things up, the edge was coming off of drug highs, the war was seemingly endless and ruthlessly pursued no matter who was in charge, guys were ripping off their friends for spare change to get high, Hunter Thompson who was knee deep in the thing called it the ebb of the high-water mark, called that the point where “the chosen” knew they were not winning and not winning meant a very long wait for the next wave and a huge fight just to keep what little was achieved against the greed heads of the world), feeling kind of melancholy and so against all good judgment he told himself he needed to take a little something for the head if he was going to continue since those tumbling rains were making his head spin, spin badly out of control if he didn’t settle them down with some elixir. He did a couple of quick lines with an old dollar bill (laughed again about that party with the hundred dollar bill blow) figuring that would hold him for a while, get him well, get him so he could then begin to taper off.

He then continued- continued on about the mood pieces that had kept body and soul together, doing those mood pieces to keep body and soul together no question and to keep Jack K. happy since he was the only one privy to the hard fact that mood pieces were the only thing that Josh could produce in those days. Some small idea like the time he  was hitchhiking down in Ohio, yeah down in Steubenville, Ohio on his way  west maybe the first time, no, the second when he learned enough about the road, about the fine art of hitchhiking, and knew that a long ride a little off course was better than waiting around for hours (maybe overnight, that had happened more than once and that is when he got hip to having that canvas ground-cover as a part of his bed-roll) and that was the way the truck driver who he hitched a ride from out of Greenwich, Connecticut was going and you always took whatever ride a trucker gave you because he probably was going a far enough distance to get you on your way pretty well .

Yeah truckers were the life-blood of the road, guys who were driving way too many hours, carrying way too much weight (of whatever they were carrying and sometimes it was best not to know), smoking way too many cigarettes, gulping way too many bennies, eating way too many trucker diner meals, carrying way too many family responsibilities for what they were doing who were glad for the company at seventy miles an hour to get off stuff off their chests. One guy, Denver Slim (they all had monikers within the brotherhood and after a while you got to know that many knew each other, at least diner knew each other and would call ahead to see if anybody was heading your way after they left you off). This Denver Slim moniker was hard to figure since he lived in Evanston and by no stretch of the imagination was his slim but rather a big beefy guy who would be handy to have around if you got in a hassle picked him up, him then with long beard, long hair, bell-bottomed jeans, army jacket, some classic hippie he look, just because in that outfit he looked like his son, Jack, whom he was having trouble understanding, understanding about why he was drifting away from home, why they couldn’t talk anymore. A real good guy with a wife in Evanston and a girlfriend in Steubenville  just to give you a flavor of what was going in the other America of that day which did not hit the headlines. Yeah truckers, except for the ones who had a habit of leaving you off somewhere in a two-bit town rather than on the Interstate where you could at least get a fast ride before the “staties” could grab a chunk of you, were good guys. Most of the time they would set you up for a meal (a truckers’ diner meal of which they all knew which ones to stop at and which ones to move on pass and while a steady diet of such food would probably kill you a two-days-since-you-last-ate situation made that prospect look very inviting, even the ubiquitous bread pudding for dessert), and always with a few cigarettes just for keeping them company out on the white lines in the highway.

Anyway this Denver Slim trucker gave Josh a ride to Steubenville, where his girlfriend lived (by the way more than one guy had that concubine set-up although unlike sailors he had never heard of trucker guys with a girl in every port) and left him off at Katy’s Diner. Katy’s, at the truck stop just out there on the outside of town, one of the best trucker diners between the East Coast and the Mississippi always with a bevy of trucks idling away while their drivers feasted of Katy’s pot roast, and, of course, that bread pudding, heated, with whipped cream to cut the taste. Gave Josh a dinner too before he left (probably the meat loaf which was both hearty and filling in addition to the bread pudding). That was where he met Angelica, a waitress at Katy’s slumming for the summer while school was out, who had wanderlust in her eyes and who had an eye for him the minute he came through the door, an eye when he came through the door not because he was great looking but because he looked like a hippie and just then, she a small town girl who had not much experience in the world, the hippie world starting to form a cohort in the American night, was looking for such an adventure. The times were such that that scenario was being repeated in many out of the way spots among those who were yearning for, well, for something different, although not always waitresses slumming in Steubenville. Had heard some things that she was curious about and once he gave a sly smile her way she was intrigued and so they hitchhiked for a while across the country (there is more introduction to their story than that, the part about her taking him to her cabin which was provided by the diner for employees as part of the job and where they “made the roof tremble” one night before they got on the road but the main thing is they hit the road together, an unlikely combination if the times had not been out of joint).

He often wondered what had happened to her, what had happened to darling Angelica, after she had left him on the road that first time in Moline. Damn Moline of the cheapjack paper walls motel, one of the many, of the too many “hotel, motel, no tell” places he had found himself shacked up in which at that time was the wrong place with the wrong young woman, wrong because he had no dough to get a better place for them to stay, it had rained for about five days straight forcing them off the mud-caked roads filled with indifferent drivers and their Midwestern suspicions and wrong because while she might have been slumming for the summer in Podunk Steubensville holed up in some transient lowdown employer-provided cabin, serving them off the arm, and getting propositioned by every trucker under about seventy, hell, maybe  every trucker that still drew breathe but she was made for satin sheets and white picket fences and he, well…everybody knows what happened to him.

They had met again after the Moline meltdown (she had returned to Muncie, Indiana, famed as Middletown in a long ago sociological study by the Lynds and he by a very circuitous route to southern California down by La Jolla) out here in California, out in an ocean campground up near Point Magoo a few months later when she flew out to see him. They had frolicked on her first time ocean see her almost getting caught in a riptide she was so excited to see that deep blue sea (that had been her first time on the coast, the coast which had been their original goal before, what did he call it, oh yeah, the Moline meltdown).  She had wanted, had desperately wanted, him to settle down with her almost anywhere but he was still in his rolling stone phase and so they had parted never to meet again after a few weeks. Except more than a decade later he still wondered about her fate, wondered whether she got whatever dream she dreamed and hopefully had not settled for some parent-inspired routine like a lot of other people, guys like Brad Badger who smoked more dope, drank more wine, fucked more woman and got into more fixes than anybody else he knew from back then who was now thumping bibles for dough on the cable television networks telling people swill and calling for eternal repentance for his youthful sins. Jesus, he had known a ton of guys like that back then who slipped back into society once the price of staying outside got too high or the call to home warmths was too great to pass up.

Yeah, they had had a few great weeks that almost had him going for the white picket fences, almost had him fixed into making some little white house roof tremble but no. Funny thing was that three marriages, a few affairs, a few flings later he had finally realized him could have saved himself heartaches, hassles, and money if he had had the sense that God gave geese back then and grabbed Angelica with both arms and held on tight.  As Josh thought back to that time he  knew then that she was fine, fine company, especially after her ding-dong-daddy, him, turned her on to some weed, you know hemp, you know grass, you know marijuana out here in California. On the road they had played it cool with dope. She had never tried the stuff since she was square enough to just like a wine buzz, especially while making love, and Josh never pressed the issue. With only a few days left before Angelica was heading back home to Muncie she, get this, she said she wanted to try some marijuana not having any other name for it, not having been emerged in the lingo-driven drug culture shorthand. Just wanted to make love after smoking some weed.

Since Josh had been on the California roads before they met up again he wasn’t holding. But the seaside campgrounds where they were staying at Magoo, you know right off of the Pacific Coast Highway about twenty miles above Malibu, in those days was loaded down with car-loads and van-loads of young stoned highway warriors with plenty of dope and Josh was able to cadge a couple of joints, big ones, from a long-haired hippie troubadour guy in a psychedelically-day-glo-painted van who had just brought it back from Mexico, Acapulco Gold no less (those were the days when you could bring freaking bricks of the stuff across with just a little caution).

So one night just before the sun went down they smoked a joint. Angelica, of course like almost every other grass novice including Josh (Sam who had done grass earlier than he had laughed the knowing laugh Josh’s first time too) coughed the first few puffs but then settled into a great night of enjoying her first high. Somehow they connected on a very high level that night, saw something in the sky that would have been called “written in the stars” in the old days but the die was cast elsewhere for them. (He had vaguely heard somewhere that she eventually headed back to Southern California a couple of years later, done some modelling and some B-movie extra acting and had married some second-level new wave director but he never had a chance to follow up since he was East Coast bound then, and had been East for a long time. And besides by then that die was cast, cast around his neck in the matter of that first wife who took him for plenty before she was done.)              

But enough of Angelica youth diversions, longings, maybe better said half-longing for the road, and for a road not taken because that would not put dent number one in the long overdue novel everybody expected from him.

 

Yeah, so he had been writing stuff like those fluff pieces but million word Jack K. and he really had written or seen a million words maybe more in his time, yes, maybe more if you counted the errors, the typos, the false starts, the doodles of any writer or editor, editors like him who usually re-wrote stuff so that it only had about fifty percent of what a guy or gal wrote originally but Josh was not going to get into that, not going to rake Jack K. of all people over the coals when Jack K. had given him about seventeen chances to come out with a breakthrough novel like the world had never seen was the way Jack K. put it and that idea secretly pleased Josh when he was sullen, sullen with some candy up his nose or blocked, writing blocked not nasal passage blacked if anyone was asking. No question Jack K., old million word Jack K., hated the idea that Josh would scramble up a half-baked idea for a five- thousand word mood piece and not give him more. [Hell Josh told me he tried, almost broke his will and health tried as told me over many a cold summer beer or a winter whiskey over at Jimmy’s Grille near the Boston waters when he was in town recently when I asked about it but Josh said he got the blues or something, couldn’t finish a longer story that he was doing on a ghost dance vision that he and a couple of other hitchhikers had one time out in Red Rock out in the New Mexicos, where they almost became warrior-kings after a heavy bout with queen peyote-Sam].

Josh when he told me the particulars of that Red Rock story laughed. In truth he had told different guys he knew, Jack K., Markin, Jimmy Jenkins, old Frankie Riley and Sam, that story about six different times with six different combinations of thoughts about the meaning of that experience. Frankly as he found out later everybody had been non-plussed by that one, wrote it off as just another Josh busted ass run off about some high-dope ancient ghost warrior vision, wrote it off and one more stick in the infamous legend of Josh when he was a “bad boy” like about eight million other guys and gushing on about the subject told more about what it said about Josh that anything else. The story about smoking dope with Angelica out on the great pacific ocean, and making the tent tremble with their love offerings, they said told them more about the real Josh that some “cowboy and injun” fantasy out in the desert where those guys were probably just as spooked, desert-addled and thirsty as being on some higher warrior-avenger plane. Still he had to give one and all, especially Frankie Riley who still was a practicing Catholic or at least he went to church, if only to placate his wife who wanted him to set a good example for their three children, chapter and verse about how he was not a spiritual man. Except for that little problem of being the most spiritual man around, according to Sam who thought back then he took his dope rations as some communion wafer surrogate, as some holy grail experience, going back to his old time Roman Catholic roots which while not formally driving his life for a long time has given him the mark of Cain no question.

Josh said, emphatically said, he was not a guy who went for the mumbo-jumbo ( despite the hard fact that for a while he had actually dated some gypsy fortune-teller, at least that was what she said she was whom he had met at the state fair in Ventura one late summer coming up to Frisco from Long Beach, a woman calling herself Madame LaRue like in the old pinball days and doing a thriving business for a while until her father sent some low-rent gumshoe to bring her back home to her Wall Street stockbroker husband who had a different fortune to give her). But that Red Rock ghost dance night he says he started to think about believing, started to think that the world had some design, maybe somebody did put it altogether, maybe got some parts wrong so some people could disapprove, got some parts right so there might be some design, had some thought to it. Yeah, so Josh flew out to the coast from Boston having long ago given up the hitchhike road that formed the basis for a whole bunch of stories that he have written over the years but which now seemed overblown (although well-paid for and in the running for various short story awards including a finalist one year to be placed in a best of the year American anthology of short stories production). Worse, worse by far, that compilation seemed like a pale imitation of Jack Kerouac who did it first and did it best because he made a buddy story out of it, made it kind of sexy too, not in an overt way, like sex sex but more like the romance of the road intersecting some then current angst than the generation after his, the guys who came of age in the 1940s and whose who lives were shaped by the Great Depression and the traumas of World War II and were looking for their own personal new breeze coming through grabbed onto for dear life.

The worst thing you could tell Josh was that something, good, bad, or indifferent, was like Kerouac’s. He would go crazy, saying to all who would listen (or be forced to listen once he got on his hobby horse) that he was a third-rate hack next to Jack Kerouac. That all that was fresh, new and better thought out in post-World War II literature up to the 1960s was branded under the imprimatur of the working-class kid from Lowell who made big literature out of his crazed boozed up, drugged up, sexed up, fucked up life (those feeling of insecurity, that inability to commit to much of anything except cats and memiere). Jack K. almost got his headed handed to him on a platter one night (Josh is six-two, Jack K. about five six or seven)) when he said his short story about his first hitchhike road ride and meeting of a couple of guys who he would travel south with was Keroauc-esque. Jesus when Sam Lowell heard about that happening later he thought the walls of Jericho were going to come tumbling down, and was surprised they did not.          

So yeah Josh who at least had been able to write some fluff after months of nothing was feeling like the king of the hill, feeling like he had conquered the block, had turned a corner, with little pieces about Angelica loves, fierce warrior ghost dances, and the like but mainly he knew he had to get away from this love business that had had him all blocked up. Most of his previous blockages had revolved around love interests, getting into, getting out of, or not having anything to get into or out of one way or another so his feeling that he had to get away from love was both old hat and the beginning of wisdom. Although that wisdom never kicked in until like now he had made a few wrong decisions, decisions like going back to cousin girl (and seriously thinking about boy, about smack after reading some Nelson Algren short stories and thinking he would not mind being a ding-dong daddy for all to see but that moment passed). See how that love thing had twisted old Josh around, had done so ever since he learned about women, okay, girls and their charms, this latest chapter of the love business, the Laura business, the love that drove him back to cousin (and me up a wall what with him calling me about six times a day at one point) to stop disturbing his sleep, stop kicking his head with what went wrong.

Christ, the truth is the whole thing was wrong ( that was my opinion from day one since I was apprised of everything via e-mail, cellphone, or in person at Jimmy’s Grille more than I wanted), wrong from day one, maybe hour one and I don’t mean that in a  mean-spirited way because Josh in the end, in the end after he had made a fool  of himself, had almost lost several friends, had been humiliated by her and would not take that as a sign to let the whole damn thing go,  agreed with me, agreed  at least that he had handled the whole thing about as wrong as a love-sick man could do a thing wrong. That was just how it was, wrong, that was how it had to be given his situation and hers, and he should have done his usual step away which he had learned to do a little as he got older. Younger he had played things for keeps, played them hard whether he was married, or had five girlfriends, asked for no quarter and gave none, had no back off in him when he got his wanting habits on, but he had been intrigued (that was always the way it started, always some little quirk that a woman had that got his head spinning).  Intrigued by the fact that she had come from our hometown (I did not know her back  then although I may have run into her the summer after high school down in Hullsville where a local dance hall ran weekend rock and roll concerts for teenagers which when we compared notes after I met her at Jimmy’s Grille with Josh one night she said she also had gone to), old fogy North Adamsville, right close to Lowell, to the Merrimac river of life, the father of rivers to get us roving. See Josh was for all his six million words, all his now well- known bravado, all the flimflam around him was, with me I admit, the co-winner of the strike out king of the Class of 1964. So the intrigued hook on this one was the mere fact they had been in the same graduating class together (and given that weak reason why I thought the whole thing was wrong from the beginning since I still had painful memories of the “stuck-up” girls who like her who would not give us raggedy ass boys from the wrong side of the tracks the time of day then, or now either, at least that was my feeling.)  

So Josh had been intrigued by the idea that that he would finally have a North Adamsville woman and that conquest would challenge, would put paid, would exorcize, the bad tides of his youth. And it was nice for a while, clandestine meetings, out of the way places dinners arguing over what and what not to eat, yeah, it was nice, nice too to hit the sheets when the time came for that. Josh told me a funny story about the first time they thought about hitting the sack, or at least her feelings that it was their time. Josh invited her over to his hotel room one night after he had been at some all-day conference up in Portland, Maine and made some kind of remark about sex or something, something kind of off the cuff. She took this to mean that she was to stay the night. Josh still a bit unsure about where he wanted to go with the relationship after he had actually wrote to, talked to, had dates with a North Adamsville classmate was confused about the future. So she arrived at his room bearing wine and food, she got frisky but Josh was flabbergasted. He figured the night for a dinner, some drinks and then sent her off home. That is what happened but she was not happy about the situation because she had packed an overnight bag and had fed the cats. That’s not the funny part though. The next week Josh had another conference up in Portland and he had originally decided to go up and back without staying at a hotel. At some point during that day he had decided that they should hit the sheets. He called her up, asked her if she was busy, and when she said “no” he told her to pack an overnight bag and to make sure to feed those cats. Josh said they had a great evening.       

But then it began to unravel, got to be a squeeze on Josh’s goodwill, got to be her (understand “they” when you say she on this one) dwelling on the need for them to make plans , have a future, have that future blueprinted and spec’d out. He flipped out one night when she began talking about a retirement place out in Bordega Bay in California even though he had no current resources to do so and she had three years before she could retire and he could not figure out why under those circumstances that they had to have a plan. So sure he got mad, sure he, as he told me at Jimmy’s one night, he raged against the night (I think Josh was trying to channel some Dylan Thomas poem about going gentle into that goodnight although Thomas was talking about raging against the inevitable lost battle against death but maybe he was onto something but don’t make too much of that since Josh was in his cups when he was throwing down that gauntlet, sure she had her own set of rages, raging against that same night, raged herself into breaking things up and  that’s when the Josh hurt came in, that when as the song goes, “that’s when the heartache begins.” See Josh finally figured out well after it was too late that she had been good for him, he knew she was good for him, she knew she was good for him but he had that rage, had that wanderlust thing about keeping distances, about appearances and so at the end, his end when she closed the door on the affair it ended with a bang not a whimper. He said he wished that he had said that little nugget in reverse but some high Anglican poet-king, Eliot I think he said, beat him to it, beat him to writing the phrase although that didn’t change the hard fact that the thing ended with a bang, a banging of shut-out doors.

And so to aggravate matters in the aftermath he connected with his old time “cousin” connections. Guys like Marin City Mitch. Connections that had  started in the early 1970s when he spend some time running dope from Mexico to California to  raise money for various political defense funds that were starving for cash when the hammer when down on the 1960s but guys were still in jail for being on the right side of the angels when it counted. It had been easier coming across in those days if you were not stupid or greedy trying to get over the border with an over-sided load. Later he would make the connections to keep body and soul together, him and his old friend Peter Markin who had been stupid and greedy and had wound up face down in some dusty dirt back alley in Sonora when a drug deal went bust, his righteous brothers Josh called them and after that, after he could hardly keep his nasal passages clear he was eating so much coke, that is when Jack K. told him that maybe the shack in Todo El Mundo would stir the cure, would get him out of his funk, and get him well enough to write more than some simple-simon idea that he was recycling from old time North Adamsville stories. Hell the last mood piece he submitted to Jack K. (Jack K. by the way along with Lawrence ran a small but prestigious press that had started Josh and many others on the road to literary promise and Josh always gave Jack K. and Larry first nibble at anything he wrote as pay back for the breaks they had given him (and had continued to give him during his lean times whether he would acknowledge it or not) was about visions of high school, old North Adamsville High days back in the 1960s which he had been thinking about because of her, had been  thinking about whether those youthful dreams that we all had, those humongous appetite dreams, those fistful of cloud dust dreams ever came true like he was some fairy godfather granting wishes in absentia.

And people were supposed to buy in that, buy into Josh’s fantasy that he could change the past just by writing a new script about what went on back then ( I already mentioned about our hard times with the girls and that is enough on that issue.) Hold on a minute, okay. So there he was, here he was going to use some ancient King Neptune sea breeze to talk his way through. Josh said this to me one night at Jimmy’s Grille to give you an idea of how empty his tank was and I quote “Jesus why doesn’t Jack K. just leave it go for a while and let me go belly to belly with some girl with faraway eyes. I wrote about her once, who am I kidding I have spent my whole life writing about the various far away eyes, hers, as they have come up. First maybe that Rosalind all fair- skinned and blue-eyed and unapproachable down in North Adamsville childhood projects days and on and on until the one I should have been kinder too, took for granted could not love could not protect against the outside storms or the inside Japan seas swirling around her heart. Could not as they say, as the sociologists of the modern angst say, as the psychiatrists say, “commit,” could not provide her the emotional comfort, sureness that would have let her grow, would have let us grow but no I had to test the waters, had to snub for that short tryst that wound up, or could have wound up busting us, or maybe still will and so I sit here with my mirror, my razor blade and my handkerchief waiting for the swirling winds inside my heart to settle and then tell dear Jack K. I am well. Not well enough to fight my inner demons for new words, for some big humankind idea, for some godhead love, some maidenhead love, for some marked truth the world has not known at least not known like that other Jack, Lowell Merrimac Jack wrote to ease his own pains, wrote about his Maggie, his alter ego Jack, his pussy cat sadness Jack in some hunkered down cabin just like the fugitive one that I am in now.” I could not have paraphrased or written it any better so you know my brother can work his magic if he gets a handle on something.  

And thus to Todo El Mundo and that rainy night cabin to go cold turkey on some dope flame out.  It got so bad at that cabin that Josh somehow drifted up the road to a cabin where the elderly couple had a telephone and he called me (collect of course although that is not as mean as it sounds since plenty of times I had to reverse the changes myself when I was down in the ditch) in order to tell me the following. I need to quote again not to avoid litigation Josh is not built that way but to avoid never hearing the end of it if I paraphrased because I did not get the essence of what he meant, Christ.

“Jesus if I don’t get out of here now I will scream, will set this valley aflame with huge noises that will have the timid tenants who live their silly lives out here among the canyons and the pure water creeks, fearing mountain lions, fearing moaning beached whales, fearing some rain-soaked wash fearing some mad monk daddy has come to do them to do them in. And, laugh, the salesman, the real estate agent from civilized Carmel had said, had almost guaranteed that Todo El Mundo would be a quiet way to end their days, with swishing tides and gentle wind canyons keeping civilization out, or at least at arm’s length. Well they bought into the proposition and as another stone-cold junkie one said “in for a dime, in for a dollar,” no, my brain is creaking, that was some Russian guy who wanted to build the new world on the ashes of World War I (to give each worldwide war its’ now proper name), some guy who wound up in the Vorkuta when the head man [Stalin] pulled the hammer down, no, that stone-cold junkie said “buy the ticket, take the ride.” And that is what they got but Jesus I swear I have to get out of here, get to hear some human voices overriding the ripped rain, sharing and breaking bread, maybe some soft-felt wine and sugared loaves of bread, a warm woman to replace the empty spaces now even though I will only be looking at place-holders, maybe not even that. The rain looks like it is letting up maybe some sun will come through. I will read a little from this book of life left here by somebody who was San Francisco City Lights bookstore- crazed, beat writer-crazed, stone-drunk crazed because it is that small drunk book Big Sur that Lowell Jack K. wrote when he was coming off, or going into another bender, poor big-heated Jack, Jack of the two-million words even when the bastard was stone-ass drunk and me here with just a couple of short ideas, a few mood pieces of third-rate quality to quench the days. Damn.”                       

The rain eventually stopped after Josh called this in. The snow in his brain continued to fall. Jimmy from Frisco showed up along with his girlfriend, Sarah, Sarah of the long legs, lithe body and who had those faraway eyes that have nurtured his whole life, nurtured his whole “woman who I can’t figure out” life. They have stopped by because Jack K. has asked them look in on Josh on their way to Santa Barbara where Sarah’s parents live and where some second cousin was to be married. Sarah looks at Josh in mock disapproval, or he assumed mock disapproval, since she hated Josh stories, thought they were male ego, male one-ups-man ship, male envy, male well just about everything that is wrong in the male condition in the 20^th century. See the way Josh put the matter later Sarah was too young to have known what male buddy-bonding was when men actually ruled the roost, for good or evil, too young to have known that certain guys held out to certain women (a woman like Sarah went though Josh’s mind but Jimmy was not the kind of guy who liked to, unlike say Lowell Jack K., share his women friends if that is where the action seems to be heading). His mind travelled back to Joyell, Joyell of the many sleepless night dreams who was the first woman to tell him that certain women, and she fancied herself as such a woman, were attracted to break-your-heart-dangerous men, that the potential for adventure turned them on no matter what the outcome might eventually be. Yeah, Joyell rode that dangerous wave for a while, tried to tame Josh (and later me but that is another story for another time), tried to get him off liquor (high-end whisky just like now when he was in the dough with a chaser, low-end stuff when he was broke, no chaser except maybe water) then when that was what he had a habit for.

Then she got “religion,” found out that Josh could be, was by the way he treated her just like the other four women he was involved at the time, just another bum-of-the-month but found out more about herself, found that she was built for sunny days, for white picket fences, and for calm nerves. And so she followed that cluttered trail of those women with faraway eyes who found that there were other prospects more to their liking. One woman, a woman whom he had a brief fling with, although it did not start out that way, started out like maybe what they  had, or were going to have, was written in the wind, called Josh an “acquired taste,” no kidding he said when he told me the remark, and later one sad ass drug-filled night he thought about that idea and figured she was probably right, still it hurt, hurt knowing that everything written in the wind or not was going to blow away like so much dust and that he would have to find solace in borrowed cabins, flop house floors, vacant studio apartments (hell, not even a refrigerator) and the handouts of strangers.

That Sarah though no question disturbed his dreams so let’s let him tell what he was thinking (aside for how he was going to get Jimmy out of the picture without being bald-faced about it and without letting it get back to Jack K. who would go crazy thinking he was tramping out another woman adventure just when he was on the cusp of some decent work). Here is what he wrote:

“But as I sit here thinking, talking a blue streak after being left out here in the damn wilderness to dry out I sense that Sarah might have a touch of that dangerous man syndrome if she put her mind to it. She was one of those foxy Brahmin intellectuals, or was at Vassar or Barnard in the old days, before she heard about the post-beat thing that was getting a hearing in some quarters after about a thirty year cultural drought and so although I know she was far too young for me, would probably do intellectual somersaults over my head when I was in some drug-induced funk the idea had some objective merits. She reminds me of a WASP version of this poet girl that I knew, a Chicago Jewish girl who wanted to break out of the brown-eyed, brown-haired, brown-skinned (she meaning swarthy, not black or anything like that, like many of the guys she grew up with and knew from her whole damn life) world and into the pale blued-eyed world that she thought Josh represented. Like he was some flamed-out hobo king that she had to try, has to taste (whether to see if that became an “acquired taste” I do not know. So while Josh was daydream talking and Sarah was fixing things up a little (whether out of some ancient genetic code mantra or because Jack K. told her that he was on a toot and therefore the place would be a mess and Jack K. did not like messes she would not say when he asked her why she was doing the housewifely thing). The things fixed up, everything that could be placed in its rightful place, or at least in some hidden stack or cubbyhole Jimmy maybe sensing some connection between them, sensing that Sarah might want to try a dangerous man before she settled down to some holy dream of domestic stability called her outside, out into the enclosed front porch where he, loud enough for Josh to hear but not loud enough to bring the fear to the neighbors that any sound from him evoked decided that they should move on, should make sure they have plenty of time to mossy down the coast at their leisure. And although he could not hear what was said between them he sensed when they came back to say their good-byes that she wanted to stay a bit longer. Josh gave her one long look as they departed and she looked back when the car that Jimmy was driving pulled out of the muddy driveway. He made a mental note though and maybe a real note to be sure to check her out in the city and maybe flame her up by giving her a presentation copy of one of his stories. That might have been the drugs talking or thinking though.”

So Josh was left alone again, left alone to dip into the white flash on the mirror in front of him, left alone to face the coming next storm which he could see forming a couple of miles out in the Pacific. He yelled some cry of the banshee that he needed to get out of the rain, needed to get back to rain on the roof cities, get back to Frisco town and his friends, or those friends who still abided by that honorific. He could see  the lights going on in the far hill cabins that get the darkest part of the loss of light first and whose residents were probably right that minute latching doors, making sure the locks were locked and hoping, fear-driven hoping that the cry of the banshee stayed down in the lower valley. Hell Josh hoped so too. He tried to get on an even keel with a few lines of cousin up his nose, to get back to a book left by some mad monk that Jack K. lent the place out to in some previous life and while the thing is a little testy, a little tipsy for a serious read Josh sense that that Jack author if he had been there with him would have imbibed some serious cousin or else would have murdered him in his sleep as a goodwill gesture.

 

 

 

The way that book went, the story-line when Josh told me about it later in Harvard Square where he was looking in the Harvard Book Store for  other works by that same author later, sounded very like what was happening to Josh. See the guy there, a guy named Dubois or some French name not French French but from Quebec like a lot of others  who came down to work the mills around Lowell, Lawrence, Nashua, Manchester and those others along the river banks of New England,    was strung out from success (he had written the big generational book and the young would not leave him alone to sulk in his middle age-hood driving him crazy with their asking for advice like he was some advice columnist  for the lost cats of the post- World War II generation, something Josh said tongue in cheek I assume since he had his own minor successes to live down, had to worry about. Success coming from a craze that he started, about the lonely ass road in America (that part  Josh got as I have explained previously having done his own share of the road travel which formed the basis for many of his early short stories although never cogent enough to work into a novel, certainly not a generational novel).

But between the liquor and the sudden fame he got lost, the guy lost in what he was trying to write about and so tried to drink himself silly, tried to write stuff, tried to be at one with sea (had actually written a fair sound sonnet based on just sitting on some Big Sur beach sand just up the road from where Josh was in Todo El Mundo and grooving unto infinity  on the sound of waves, on the sounds of the sands, of the sounds in his head from that experience. Yeah, that made sense to Josh since he remembered once again that one time, one time with dream Angelica after he met her, after they had travelled the middle American road together for a while, after they had a meltdown in Moline (Jesus, Moline of all places), after she left the road in forsaken cornfield Iowa and after going home to rest had afterward come  out to see him in California, down at Point Magoo about a couple of hundred miles from where he was right then and after a couple of days of dope and love-making they sat one stoned day on the beach there (they were actually camped out in a tent like they had done in their  tramping days several months before) and they sat most of the afternoon and late into the evening silent, not highway traffic, planes overhead, fellow beach-dwellers dwelling silent but silent between themselves as they made their own sonnet to the sea (as she parted for the last time to go home to normalcy she said she would never forget that they had made the sea “rumble” that night). He had written that sound poem out one time but threw it somewhere because it sounded when spoken like just another Village/North Beach café throwaway gag.

The moon was down as Josh stood  there inside the front door of this freaking cabin for the fifth day Jimmy and his lovely Sarah (a whiff of some au natural fragrance she wore or emitted, something out of fresh mowed and trimmed Elysian field of lilac bluster, some picturesque Walt Whitman idyllic scene, some mix of bee-stung grasses and flowers still hovered around the rooms, the thought of that scent, those thoughts of those long-legged thighs dabbed with that fragrance maddened his sleep the previous night). Hence his extreme desire to vacant those digs and head back in Frisco, back to bright lights, back to faraway ocean sounds and ships ahoy blaring horns warning of fogbound dangers, back to Golden Gate views from some North Beach digs, wine, women, dope, poetry flowing freely and him the center of oohs and ahhs as it was now his forlorn station and maybe to write a few lines about that stinking sty of a place, the lush green abyss, this canyon echo depth, this bridge too far and neighbor too close place where crazy in his head Jack K. sent crazy in Josh’s head in order to chill out, black out, freeze out, wash out, dry out or whatever was in his head. So Josh was leaving, leaving not the three or four week leaving that Jack K. expected, hell that he expected when Jack K. presented the idea and he just had to get away. Yeah, that was a story of Josh’s life into itself, the leavings of the last urban man as he shirked all duties, abandoned all hope, dwelled in the human sink and then he remembered  the first time, the first shirk, the first childhood shirk that started the train rolling. Let’s let Josh tell this one, okay:

“Funny it was meant as punishment, no, that is not right, that was the result that led to the newly formed characteristic, this shirking everything that it was possible to shirk (later homes left with no explanation, apartments vacated in the dead of night for lack of funds or some reason not remembered, wives abandoned for no reason, or for the next best thing that came along and intrigued him like she, the last one whom he was recovering from had intrigued him, and friends left in the lurch for any of about seven reasons but mainly some honest treachery). It is hard to believe even now how that one event could have twisted the great mandela around like that and it had taken me many years and quite a few shrink sessions to work that out, or at least get a small handle on the situation (that shrink idea brought forth as a last gasp bid by wife number two to understand what made him tick. That effort was in vain to save the marriage for there were other problems that could not be surmounted but I stuck with the therapy for a while to get a grip on that shirking thing of mine).

What had happened back then, back in sixth grade elementary school, back when I had the first understanding that girls were not just bothersome but interesting, yes, it was about the time in our working- class neighborhood when boys began to distinguish between “sticks (those girls who had not gotten their womanly shape)” and shapes (those who had) was that I had to  show myself off in a dance, a square dance of all things and the partner in that dance was a damsel, a twelve-year old damsel,  a girl that I had my first serious crush on and so to impress her like young guys will do who have not been around the block with women yet I did something to my clothes, altered them, cut them in such a way that I would carry out the motif of the dance better. Make me look like a Farmer Brown (she, Rosalie of my enflamed heart and disturbed sleep had commented that I looked like a real farmer and said it with a smile as a compliment). The dance routine as all  such things then was done in order to show our parents (mainly mothers since fathers were busy working hard to provide for their kids in those one parent working days) that we were not just wasting our days away at school and that we were trainable. Now in those days, all through school we, our family, was dirt poor barely above what today would be welfare people (my parents would have been far too proud to accept such “charity”  although we were threatened with the county farm more than once). My mother flipped out right there in the auditorium as she should have seeing that I only had two or three pairs of pants and we had no resources to replace a silly boyish mistake that need not have happened (I understood that part even then and did not need therapy to figure that out), and hence the punishment (a week grounded and my father brought in to berate me for one of the few times that he was called in to do such duty). Then though all I could think of was not being able to pursue that fair maid twelve- year old damsel even though I had done nothing wrong toward her. I was the laughing stock of the class and she avoided me like the plague the rest of the school year, and that followed me into junior high as well for a while. So shirk and skulk became a way of life to avoid life’s embarrassments and hard edges. Funny how some thirty years later that kind of stuff comes up when you are desperate to leave some stinking hellhole behind.”

So Josh needed  a plan, a plan how to get out of there, get out of damn Todo El Mundo, but also a plan on what to do when he got  back to Frisco besides replenish his cousin supply then dwindling and he said if Jack K. knew that he had taken a small stash with him, about an eight-ball he would freak, would go crazy calling Josh every name in the book but in his condition when leaving Frisco he figured that he had to taper off not go cold turkey, not out there in the damn wilderness, not out in the tree-lined canyons that he had not explored since about  boy scout time and he had, had tapered off having husbanded his supply and only taken hits when he really needed them or when Jimmy and Sarah were there and he figured that he could “make” Sarah if she was a little high and grateful. Yeah, he still thought she could have been had by a dangerous man, a dangerous man like him before she tumbled to some sharp tech guy or some silly stockbroker. He knew that was her fate, it was in her old time WASP blood, in her DNA-etched code, that they go back to the tribe once they have tried the edge, lived dangerous for a minute, and needed to have a safe place to land.

The Frisco plan was kind of forming in his head, see Jack K., see if he will buy into Josh’s idea that he write say some one hundred pages maybe less but he didn’t think more because he did not think that the subject of his drying out in the squalid oceans before some zen magic transformed him into a sainted mystic or Saint Francis do-gooder would take the ink and so maybe a long short story or slight novella to be placed in some magazine under Jack K.’s imprimatur and then hit the road for another look at the road from the advantage of years, and wisdom or whatever you get when you realize (and have for about twenty years) that the road is no longer a sanctified place but filled with obviously dangers and pitfalls which only have gotten worse since the world is no longer hung up with guys pulling thumbs out on vacant stretches of Pacific Coast highways, trucks or cars, usually some old refurbished painted  yellow brick road school bus or some VW bus stopping and then some honey of the moment stepping out along with you and she looks so fresh and like dewy flower that the trucker is licking his chops and the van driver is starting  to roll a joint-for her.

Yeah so that was the plan and that plan included stopping off at Miranda’s and grab the stuff he had stored there. (In the interest of the truth when Josh told me he had planned to stop at Joyell’s I saw red. I have been interested, disturbed my sleep interested in her since Josh first introduced us some thirty years ago and have always wished that if she fell off of Josh’s train she would give me a tumble but, damn, she never fell off, never despite all the break-ups. Josh knows my feelings for Joyell but unlike other women we have shared one way or another, starting way back  when we met and fought over Butterfly Swirl out in the California merry pranksters highway yellow brick road bus, but Joyell was always “private.” Damn again.) He was going to Joyell’s , maybe staying at her place for a couple of nights and although they had not been together for a long time in the biblical sense, or the boy-girl sense either he had been thinking about her down there in hell’s backdoor and remembered back to when they met way back when he was just a struggling, struggling something in Harvard Square in some semi-exotic (for the Square) gin joint and she all dressed in white, all black hair and brown eyes, with dancing slippers on and those fatal far away eyes and he could not take his eyes off of her and they met and drank a couple of drinks and he shook her hand softly at the end and that won her heart. Later that night when he thought about her as he went home alone (it was not clear whether Josh although never adverse to a sexual first date when he felt that the thing was a fling thought twice about the question and decided to play it cool or she gave off scent that you had not better trifle with me or more probable he made a couple of moves and she said wait and thus the home alone and the disturbed sleep) he thought “written in the stars” kind of thoughts and those were the thoughts he thought down there in Todo El Mundo as he prepared his escape (mingled in with Sarah lust thoughts after doing a couple of lines).

Yeah Josh thought maybe a few days with sweet baby Joyell the only woman who took enough time to try to understand him, tried to shake him out of his sulky moods, tried to curb his depressed thoughts, tried to be his “sweet baby” if that was what he wanted and when she did give it up after a while (and he with her but they had about thirty re-couplings along the way, damn) and that was just the way it was-and is, he thought. Hey, maybe a week this time, maybe more.

But getting out of there, getting out of hell hole Todo El Mundo with no easy way to get out first was the ticket he needed. Hey Josh admitted to himself that once he got into a place, Joyell’s, some flash and crash minute flame’s, some forsaken hotel, some  arroyo down south complete with cardboard box home, he had a hard time leaving. He knew he had to get out of there, get out of there quick but he still had some lassitude about moving, start thinking that that old shack maybe could stand him for another week or so since Jack K. went to the trouble of fixing him up there and said stay put for as long as it took, the bastard but even if he did stay he was going to pack his bags (light work, not much different from the old hitchhike days despite the passage of time), put that unfinished Big Sur book in his rucksack to finish and maybe steal a few ideas from a guy before his time but who spoke of his (our) time, of his hour of need, spoke of spiritual dryness, spoke of endless running creeks and thrashing waters against hard found rocks crumbling as we speak. (Josh once explained to me, trimming a little closely on the copyright laws, that every author, great or small, “borrowed” ideas from other authors and prettied them up for the next set to borrow, or so that was his theory). So, yeah, pack up his spoons, his forks, his knives that he took everywhere not knowing whether he would be in some arroyo some tonight or sitting in some leafy suburban villa feted and lionized by some well- heeled matron. Packed up his  floss (mother said never leave home without the floss because otherwise mucho dental bills and unlike some other advice that one worked out), packed his extra pairs of socks, shirts, underwear, flippers, a rucksack full of stuff to journey at a moment’s notice. Been doing that basic routine so long that drinks, drugs, dilemmas, darlings, damn anything can’t change the format-ready at the minute, ready to head west  on the old hitchhike trail, ready today, maybe to head north to Frisco, head north to figure out what was eating at him, to figure what words would not come today that needed to come, to figure out why that deathless canyon walled pyre was driving him crazy, to figure out why about fifty-seven varieties of good-hearted, good-healing women could not go the distance with him, to figure out too why he could not go the distance with them, and to figure out why Todo El Mundo suck waters and  craven creeks held no mystery for him. Just then he saw a light, headlights, hey, a light, a car’s headlights coming up the road from some lonesome cabin below, maybe he could grab a ride.                                

 

 

 

Out In Waldo’s World-Every Man’s World-With The Film Laura In Mind

Out In Waldo’s World-Every Man’s World-With The Film  Laura In Mind

By Bart Webber

My old friend Sam Lowell, a guy married three times and who has struck out three time and now “single” (meaning he has had a long-time companion and has given up the idea of marriage although not the idea of love after three sets of alimony, child support and college tuitions, that latter category which almost broke him on the wheel) had been watching an old time film noir from the 1940s, Laura, with his own Laura, Laura Perkins, that long-time companion parenthetically mentioned above one night. A few days later after that viewing he called me up for our weekly session at Jack’s Grille and mentioned the film, knowing that I had seen it several times and consider it one of the great noirs along with Gilda, Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon and a few others. He said then, and we would get into more at Jack’s, a couple of nights later, that you could never figure what will drive a guy off the deep end but that six, two and even ninety-nine times out of one hundred it would be over a dame. I begged to differ with him figuring the odds more like sixty to forty on the dame reason but that only added fuel to his fire that night (that and a few too many high end scotches since he was not driving that night but staying at my place in Carver, our growing up home town down in Southeastern Massachusetts). The difference in our calculations I figured out later being that I have been with my one wife, the lovely Betsy Binstock, now for almost thirty-seven years.           

But Sam was on his high horse that night which meant that I was in for a regular slugfest, a regular barrage of chatter about Waldo, Waldo the guy who went over the edge for this dame, yeah, a dame, nice, pretty, smart, a go-getting but still a dame, this Laura, Laura Hunt in case you needed a last name. Here’s how Sam put the case, see Sam is nothing but a good country lawyer and so he saw the whole thing in terms of a case in a court of law like he was arguing for mercy for Waldo or something. Like maybe he was arguing the case for real like he would plea out Waldo on some diminished capacity foolishness just because the guy was skirt-addled.

As Sam was talking though I was putting my own two and two together about Waldo, Waldo Lydecker if you needed a last name for a skirt-addled guy although they are legion. Thinking back on the plot line that I knew well I found myself trying to figure out how did it figure that a high society guy, a well-known and syndicated newspaper columnist and radio personality, an older guy, an older single guy, an older single guy who seemed “light on his feet” if you asked me, you know seemed kind of “faggy” would tumble to this Laura from nowhere. Let this fresh breeze young thing of which there were about six million in New York City back in the day, break him. Make him do weird (unlawful things as Sam would put it) that would have him winding up facing downward on Laura’s apartment floor pledging his eternal love as the life was bleeding out of him from about six slugs of copper guns.

(Sam, by the way, who works in the court system and has to mind his Ps &Qs on sexual and ethnical stuff doesn’t like that term, those terms, faggy and light on his feet, but the old ways die hard with some of us old-time corner boys who grew up on the rough streets of the Acre in Carver and who used to while idly hanging out in front of  Jack Slack’s bowling alleys  fag bait each other just for kicks to enhance our own man-hoods, so faggy.)        

But maybe I should start at the beginning while Sam is drawing circles in the air with his hands just like if he was in the courtroom, just like he was trying the case of Waldo Lydecker vs. The State Of New York except not for murder, murder one, which what the bastard would be up for if he wasn’t lying face down in that pool of blood in that dame Laura’s apartment but for being a toy for some perfidious dame. See Waldo was like I said a big time newspaper and radio guy, knew everybody who counted in New York and Washington high society, had “drag” in all the right places as my old Irish grandfather would say. Also knew all the secret vices, and some not so secret, of those in the rarified air, knew that they had to treat him something like a rattlesnake with very proper kid gloves, knew they would be front and center in one of his columns, page one, if they didn’t play ball. Yes so Waldo Lydecker was not one of the world’s noblemen, was a bitch on wheels if anybody was asking around about him of late, not hopefully looking to give him a certified good conduct certificate. It was kind of funny because this guy had more dough than the King of Siam, had come from wealth, good school, good breeding the whole nine yards so you would think that being what really was a gossip columnist, a venomous one to boot would be beneath him. But guys, people are funny about their occupations and in any case the job, such as it was better than him sitting at home in palatial Westchester clipping coupons. 

Like I said before this Waldo as he aged, got to middle age, maybe a little older was nothing but a bachelor, hadn’t been seen with a real girlfriend, nothing serious anyway. So the talk around town, very discreetly around town out of his earshot, was that he was either asexual, which was Sam’s take on the matter, some guys are like that, maybe so hung up on their mothers that no young dame could ever be good enough for them. Maybe something got lost in the genes, something about attraction to any human relationship except to hit hard at weak points. So no women, except he obvious mixing at his lavish parties, you know ornaments. You know my take already, my position that he was gay, maybe unconsciously, maybe he was hiding some guy, some fag, out in some apartment far from the high end crowd you never know. Yeah, I liked that take although Sam in one of his more compromising moments wished I would just call him effete and let it go at that. Like effete didn’t mean in high tone language noting but fag. I’ll stick with my old time corner boy expression if you please, an expression that Sam was as likely to use in the old days as I was-if anybody is asking.                 

So everybody was surprised when Waldo started being seen around the clubs, the swanky clubs like the High Hat where the jazz was be-bop, the drinks expensive and exotic and the smoke thick and the White Note where the younger crowd hung out where the smoke was scented, was dope no question dope, tea, hemp, ganja, to appease this Laura twist. But you could tell he was out of his element there in that latter place, that Jimmy Jones’ be-bop band with Milt Rosen blowing heavenly high white notes off the cuff ruled the night not him. No question this Laura was a looker, a long tall brunette with those bright eyes and sulky lips that guys went big for then and guys while not going big for now looking for thin hipless dames with sneers these day could appreciate, could see even an effete guy taking a run at even if just to have as a trophy, or cover against that so-called discreet talk among the high society types about his sexual habits (like a snoop like Waldo wasn’t “connected” into that talk by a thousand snitches looking to keep their own hijinks out of the front page and off the air).        

The story Waldo told about their meeting, their fateful meeting, take it for what it was worth after all that really happened, after he wound up face down and very dead, was that Laura had purposely gone to his table at his favorite lunch place (and daytime watering hole), Matty’s on 54^th Street across from the newspaper, and “accosted” him, that was his word, had pestered him about endorsing some product, a pen. See this Laura was nothing but a runt one of thousands, no, what did I say before, millions, of young women trying to get ahead in the advertising racket, any New York City racket, which is why young women, smart young women went to New York City from Buffalo, Cleveland, Eire, hell, maybe the wheat fields of Kansas too, to grab fame and fortune in one of the few serious upward mobile jobs for aspiring college graduates. Or just gals with big dreams and some talents other than hitting the silky sheets.

This is the oddest part. He blew her off, treated less graciously than some six year old brat for disturbing milord’s solo lunch, but something about her got under his skin, some ancient memory of some young woman in that long gone time when he might have thought about an affair, that fatal disease that has taken all the gold of more than one man. The blood too.  Get this, get this for a guy who treated her like a wayward child Waldo eventually went to her advertising agency, signed on for the endorsement of that fucking pen. Laura’s career thereafter went through the roof, he had called in plenty of chips to get guys and gals he knew around town to throw business her way, or else.  Seeing her as a rough diamond, obviously not from his class, maybe even then as a tramp with big “wanting habits” you never know about the Waldos of the world and what drives them, although the smitten part is easy to explain, he taught her a few things about style and poise, style and poise as interpreted by high society just then. That was the fluff part, the public story.  

Who knows what the real deal was. Sam’s lamo theory about mother fixation, or mother dread is okay for okay country lawyers if they have to defend some geek in court but that angle seems to have been worked to death and I wouldn’t want to have to throw that to a jury but since I am merely a retired printer and not a lawyer I don’t have to worry about that. Hell, the obvious is that she was damn good-looking woman and that was that. Maybe it was the long hair that always made every hat she wore in the days when women went in for serious hats for fashion and not utility look just right, maybe it was those sullen lips showing slightly parted pearly white teeth, hell, maybe it, like a for a billion guys since Adam and maybe before, was the sandalwood scent she gave off, that latter would be the downfall of more than one man. But he was hooked on her, hooked as bad as a guy who couldn’t express such thoughts in public could be, it was just not done in high society, could be hooked on a dame (of course a guy like Waldo wouldn’t dream of calling a woman a dame, a frail, a frill, a twist, names we used back in the day but like I said before the old ways die hard with some guys like me). 

Here’s the funny thing, here’s where the old guy, young dame problem comes in, or maybe just Waldo’s whole freaking silly upbringing, he never had sex with her, never went under the downy billows with her which is the way Tom Wolfe put how the upper crust likes to call “hitting the satin sheets.” The thing was strictly platonic with the unspoken proviso (Sam’s word not mine) that she was his “property.” Waldo’s alone. 

That didn’t play very well with Laura. Didn’t play well with a young lustrous sexy woman like Laura who had big sexual appetites, liked men, and lots of them as any young pretty woman who was grabbing lots of attention from the young bucks would. (All the sex stuff as per usual in 1940s films was either off the film or just implied but even a goof like Sam could read between the lines that Laura was a sexual being. Hell, one night, no, one very early morning, wacko Waldo in a fit “stalked” her apartment on West 56^th Street as one young buck, Jack Jacobs the well-known painter came strolling out the front door of the building looking a little the worse for wear.) Waldo was forever shooing guys away and as quickly as Laura, on Waldo’s fatherly, to her, recommendation would ditch one guy another guy would pop up. That went on for a while and Waldo, for his own nefarious reasons, thought he was home free. That Laura was all his.         

Then the roof caved in. Laura got caught up with this guy Shelby, a ne’er do well, a guy from decayed Southern stock, meaning he was broke and living off of women, living off of Laura’s aunt who liked the idea of a “kept” man, liked a young stud around and could afford the freight. Problem was Shelby like many another guy wanted to be around some young tail (ass) and so despite his “kept” status with the aging and demanding aunt he made a run at Laura, got her to the stage where marriage might be in the air. Got her to give him a job at her ad agency where he actually flowered, brought some fresh light into the office. Bad move, bad move on Laura’s part even thinking about marriage to a gigolo like Shelby. That is when Waldo’s wheels started coming off, when his better judgment took a back seat to his unspoken lust for Laura. He tried to kill her, shoot her dead with a shotgun in her own apartment, the place which would be his final resting place if he had only been prophetic rather than blood-lustful. Problem though was Laura was not there that night of the murder, had been upstate at a cozy country retreat thinking things through about the possibilities of marriage to Shelby. When everything came out later, much later, the girl who was killed had been one of Laura’s models at the ad agency, a model whom Shelby was playing footsies with. Some guys, guys like Shelby, never change, never get off the wagon even when easy street beckons (and that silly aunt was still ready to move heaven and earth to get his silly ass back in her crib under the principle that birds of a feather flock together-he was a tramp and she was too so comingle their tainted blood.)         

Well murder most foul done by gigolos, deadbeats, mass murderers, ”hit” men or the lovelorn has to be investigated, especially in the high rent district. Most especially in the high rent district after all what the hell were they paying the public coppers for anyway. So they put crackerjack homicide detective Mark, Mark McPherson, on the case. Oh yeah a young, good-looking, didn’t miss a trick, knew the means streets as well as the leafy streets to look closely, very closely into the Laura Hunt murder. Naturally he got nothing but the backs of their hands from the Mayfair swells, got nothing but grief and snide remarks from old Waldo who I will say held himself together during the critical hours and days when McPherson was putting the screws to the case, was giving everybody his cool modern scientific detective shifting through all the evidence routine. Stayed cool enough and cagey enough to throw a big shadow over Shelby as the fall guy. And why not he had been playing footsies with that foxy model right in Laura’s apartment. Yeah, I admit I liked him for it, liked him a lot when McPherson turned the screws on. Didn’t like that he was two-three, who knows how many timing Laura, with the poor dead model even the old battle ax aunt and who knows who else. Such guys as Shelby in the old neighborhood as Sam would be the first to tell you would be tailor-made for the big step-off and nobody except some poor old bedraggled mother would shed tear one for such a guy. And that is a fact.                

Then to break up the monotony of the run-down murder case getting kind of cold by the minute and to ruin my theory about Shelby as the fall guy who pops back into the picture. Laura. That’s when everybody found out that the dead girl was the model at Laura’s agency (conveniently her face had been blown off by the shotgun blast so the initial identification of Laura as the victim had been based on the very important circumstantial evidence that late at night the woman opening the door to Laura’s apartment would be, well, Laura). Waldo held up even through all of that as Sam will admit if less than gladly for his bogus love-addled insanity bit. Like I said before Laura was upstate thinking stuff through around a possible marriage to Shelby and nobody thought anything of it once she resurfaced. Still there was a murder to be solved now that the true victim was known. McPherson was still on the case, still needed to close out the case even if it now was a run of the mill model that was making the case run and not some darling of the Mayfair swells.

Waldo might have held up pretty well through all of that, might have slide through to old manhood but he flipped out when he sensed that the tramp, Laura of his dreams, what else could you call her in his effete book, was once again falling ofr any young guy in a suit, falling for Mark (and he her). Yeah, Waldo again lost his judgment rather than moving on to the cocktail circuit and forgetting about what could never be. See, and Sam in his more sober moments would have to agree, Laura had gotten deep under his skin, as deep as woman can a man who spent his whole life dishing it out and not taking it. Shelby was a non-starter for Laura and Waldo could have pieced him off easily enough but this Mark McPherson, this guy from the mean streets, from Laura’s mean streets wasn’t going to be easy to dismiss.

Here is where Sam said Waldo made his mistake, the mistake that would have made even a pretty good country lawyer like him have a hard time selling a jury that Waldo was temporarily insane, needed to go to the sicko hospital and not the death house. Waldo tempted fate one time too often (that model murder would have hit the “cold” files soon enough now that Laura was alive). He tried to kill Laura-again. No soap this time for the poor sap-he was wasted in a hail of bullets by New York’s finest. Get this though-the guy is lying face down in a pool of his own corrupted blood and his last words were of undying devotion to Laura. What a sap. Leave it to Sam to get the last word though and even I couldn’t say it better, although he said it more in sorrow than anger. Waldo Lydecker was not the first guy nor will he be the last who got all twisted around by some frail’s sandalwood scent. Maybe Sam’s 99.9 % number was not so far off after all.                   

Scenes In Search Of The Blue-Pink Great American West Night-Setting The Mood

Scenes In Search Of The Blue-Pink Great American West Night-Setting The Mood


Setting The Mood


I, once a while back, was asked, in earnest, what I meant by the “blue-pink western skies” that has formed the backdrop for several entries in this space of late. Or rather the way I would prefer to formulate it, and have taken some pains to emphasize it this way, “the search for the blue-pink great American West night.” Well, of course, there was a literal part to the proposition since ocean-at-my back (sometimes right at my back) New England homestead meant unless I wanted to take an ill-advised turn at piracy or high-seas hijacking or some such thing east that the hitchhike road meant heading west.


So that night is clearly not in the vicinity of the local Blues Hills or of the Berkshires since early childhood ocean-fronted Massachusetts, those are too confined and short-distanced to even produce blues skies much less that west-glanced sweet shade just before heaven, if there was a heaven shade, blue-pink. And certainly not hog-butcher-to-the-world, sinewy Midwest Chicago night, Christ no, nor rarefied, deep-breathed, rockymountainhigh Denver night, although jaded sojourner-writer not known for breathe-taking, awe-bewilderment could have stopped there for choice of great western night. Second place, okay.


But no, onward, beyond, beyond pioneer, genetically-embedded pioneer America, past false god neon blue-pink glitter Las Vegas in the Nevada desert night to the place where, about fifty miles away from sanctified west coast, near some now nameless abandoned ghost town, nameless here for it is a mere speck on the map and you would not know the name, you begin, ocean man that you are, if you are, and organically ocean-bred says you are, to smell the dank, incense-like, seaweed-driven, ocean-seized air as it comes in from the Japanese stream, or out there somewhere in the unknown, some Hawaii or Guam or Tahiti of the mind, before the gates of holy city, city of a thousand, thousand land’s end dreams, San Francisco. That is where the blue-pink sky devours the sun just before the be-bop, the bop-bop, the do wang-doodle night, the great American Western star-spangled (small case) night I keep reaching for, like it was some physical thing and not the stuff of dreams.

*******

The scenes below stand (or fall) as moments in support of that eternal search.

Scene One: The Prequel- Germantown Monday, Summer 1957


I wake up early, with a sudden start like something hit me but it kind of missed, kind of just glanced off me, something that felt like a pebble, maybe thinner and a little lighter, but I don’t see anything out of my watery, half-closed eyes. And I don’t feel anything around me in this feeble excuse for a bed that my father lashed together out of old blankets when my previous mattress fell apart, something like you see down at the Plymouth Plantation when the Pilgrims, a few hundred years ago, made beds for their kids except not with the corn husking filler they used. See, Ma and Pa couldn’t see their way clear to getting me a new one since my younger brother, Kevin, really needed one for his “problem”. A “problem” that I don’t understand about, and that nobody ever talks about, even Grandma, and she talks about everything and will tell me anything, anything but that, at least when I am around they don’t.


Maybe, I wouldn’t understand it even if they blabbed about it all day, but here I am with this low-rent sleeping bag, our lord in the manger kind of a bed. And Kevin’s sleeping like a king in the room across the hall all by himself away from this midget-sized room that they must have thought of when kids were smaller than they are these days, what with us drinking more milk with “Big Brother” Bob Emery every school day when we go home at lunchtime. Ma says I should be thankful (including to the Lord, as she always says, without fail) that I have any bed at all as some kids in India don’t even have that. The reasons for that, I guess, are ‘cause those people don’t thank the Lord, or at least thank our “the Lord.”


Darn it, I now suddenly remember, whatever it was that hit me, maybe something from outer space, broke up a nice half-formed dream that was just starting to get somewhere and that was about being on some television show and winning something like a thousand dollars and me getting to buy stuff for me and my friends like serious bicycles or a big record player, and getting girls stuff too, like a box of candy from the Rexall drugstore up in Adamsville Square, and just like that its gone, gone, now long gone. Just like shutting off the television before the end and the good guys, or whoever has the right to be on the right side of the law like Maverick, wins; just like missing American Bandstand before Dick Clark gets to the big dance off thing at the end where everybody’s jumping and grooving and having a good time, the band is rocking, and the guys, especially the guys that get the cute girls and not the left-over ones that they must just put on to be nice, or something are smiling, smiling the smile of the just. Double darn it.


Ya, something’s out of whack, something’s definitely out of whack, or it’s gonna be. Every time I have one of these broken-up dreams something goes awry pretty soon only not today please, and I am scared, no, really scared about it this time. Wouldn’t you be? I suddenly notice something in a split-second that confirms this bad omen coming-Oh no, not again, for the hundredth hundredth time this ratty old summer, this boring never-ending summer that I wish would end so bad I am praying, and praying hard, that it will be over and we can go back to the cool air in Snug Harbor school that we left the last part of last month. I told you it was bad, bad as all that. I’m all sweaty, I feel under my arms, underarms sticky, underwear, all cottony, sticking to me like it’s part of my skin forever, eyes sticky and half shut from a nighttime’s worth of perspiration, and maybe more than a night at that. I don’t think I took a bath yesterday, did I? I sniff, no. Sticky, that me, that’s gonna be my middle name before long if this mind-numbing weather keeps up.


Heck, I’m tired, tired to hell and back, no, farther than that, of these half-sleep, restless nights; god awful humid, sultry, breathless summer’s nights, no relief and no air conditioning in sight. No air, no wind coming from the channel across the parking lot from our house, or I should say apartment. No air, less than no air, coming from Adamsville Bay, so still that throwing a rock on it would make ripples all the way to Merrymount. And certainly no air coming from god forsaken Hough’s Neck. I know that for sure, ‘cause I went over there, walked all the way up to Rock Island and down that dusty dirt road all the way to Nut Island almost before I realized that the air had died, or gone on vacation.


Ma, making fun of me and my sweating every second of every minute of every day for about a week now, the other day told me that this was my own personal preview of what it is gonna be like for me in hell, if I don’t change my ways. Yes, Ma. But that is just her con, she’s always conning me and my brothers, trying make us do good by bringing God, his son, his holy ghost, his mother, his father, his sisters and brothers and whoever else she can conjure up using to make us do good, to do as she’s says every chance she gets in order to do God’s work, but that’s impossible using her tried and true method. She must have learned that “method” from some priest over at Saint Boniface, or something. She sure didn’t learn it from that cool doctor, Doctor Spock, I think was his name, that I saw on TV the other day on that Mike Douglas, or one of them talk shows. He knows a lot about kids, they say, at least that’s what someone said. I wouldn’t know, I ‘m stuck with Ma, and that ain’t no nice to kids lady, nor does she want to be.

But saying all that ain’t doing me any good, lying here in a pool of sweat, thinking about getting up.

I’m getting mad, even though I know getting mad today is tempting fate, I guess I was born mad, or got that way early because even though I know its gonna get me in trouble , I’m mad . You would think that in the year 1957, in a year when everybody else seems to have money and is spending it, that even in this woe begotten tiny airless apartment filled to the brim with three growing boys and two grown, overgrown if you ask me, adults; in this woe begotten tiny airless room filled to the brim with two growing boys, one sleeping like a log, sleeping the sleep of the just, I guess, across from me right now; in this woe begotten no account housing project where you can’t get anything fixed without about twenty forms and a six month wait and even then you have to wait, nothing less. Even for a light fixture it takes a civil war. Christ, how long, in this woe begotten town before we could have this “necessity,” air conditioning. Ma says we can’t afford it, or whatever her excuse of the week is. “How about a fan, Ma?” Nope, can’t afford the extra electricity ‘cause Dad just got laid off, whatever that means. He’s always getting laid off so I can’t tell what is so different about this time so that we can’t get air conditioning. Johnny Jakes has it, and his father hasn’t ever worked. Can’t, for some reason.


Enough of this, I‘m getting up, if only to splash some water on my face and get my eyes unstuck, or get a cool drink of water to bring down what has got be about a 110 degrees of temperature running through my body, maybe 115. Nah, that can’t be right, we learned about body temperatures in class. I would have to be some alien from outer space maybe. But I’m feverish, that’s for sure. Just then I am stopped short by a sound, a familiar sound. A sound that if I had just one sound to hear in the whole universe of sounds that I have heard in my long eleven year old life it would be that one. The sound of fleeing this hellish, airless place for parts unknown, any unknown. Ya, that old, sweet, lonesome, high whistle sound that cuts me to the bone, that sweet old fog horn sound when the air is like pea soup down the channel ‘cause that means a big old firemen’s red, rubber tire-draped tugboat, or maybe two, is bringing a low-riding, rusty old tanker, or some ship to port across the channel to the Proctor & Gamble factory, the place of a thousand perfume smells, as we call it when the wind is up and all the world here smells like a bar of soap.


If I live to be a hundred, if I live to be a thousand, I’m always gonna watch, even if only in my mind, when that old tanker comes down the line, dragging or getting dragged by that old tug, whistling away, to keep river traffic away, and like it just as much then I bet. I know what I will be doing this morning, or the first part of the morning, heat or no heat, air conditioning or no air conditioning. I will be perched on my very own private, for invited guests only which means nobody, viewing stand at the little point along the shoreline that is my real home, or the home that I wish was my home except maybe in winter, just across from where the big boy boat will settle in.


“Hey, a boat’s coming in, I’m off,” I yell to no one in particular. And from not one of those no one in particulars do I get an answer. My brothers don’t suffer the sweats like I do, they have their own problems which I already sense will be their undoing later, but it ain’t the sweats and so they just sleep away. I rush, and I mean rush, to the bathroom, use the toilet, splash that life-saving water on my face, it always feels good, brush my teeth perfunctorily, and run down the stairs. “Ma, a ship’s coming in,” I say excitedly, even though its about the hundredth time I seen one come in, to my mother who is distracted by something, as usual, especially when my father is out of work, and especially today, Monday, when he goes off in search of new work with a lot of hope about getting some job that will keep the wolves from the doors, that is the constant phrase that he uses to deal with the situation. I’ll tell you about him sometime but today I ain’t got any time for nothing but my ship coming in, and that ain’t no lie either.


“Well, it is not our ship that is coming in so don’t worry about it and just eat your breakfast,” she, dear old Ma, blurred out, and then I know she is in a fit and even if my ship wasn’t coming in I know the ropes enough to know to keep low, very low and out of the range of fire that I know is coming from her direction. I go to the cabinet, grab a cracked, slightly cracked bowl, get a spoon and go over to the stove, take the cover off the pot, steam escaping, and without even looking start dishing out my Quaker Oats oatmeal. Rain, shine, sleet or snow, summer, winter, spring or fall that is my nectar of the gods. With a little milk, when we have it, and even if we don’t a little Karo syrup, I am fortified for the day. Ma, can be a pain, Ma and I have a thousand battles a week over two thousand different things, and I know that already things are never gonna be right between us, even if at times we have an armed truce but, mark this down I always got my oatmeal, and always when I wanted it. I guess that put her on the right side of the angels, a little.


A few gulps later, washed down with about a half glass of milk, I am out the door, hell, even my blessed oatmeal gets short shrift when the tankers blow in. Now going out the door most places that you know about means just going out the door straight. Bu in this urban planner’s nightmarish hangover not at 666 Taffrail Road. First you have the obstacle course of getting around the ten million poles and fences that are plucked right in the “courtyard” when my mother and the other housewives in the other three units that make up our complex they call it hang out their daily washing, or dry their curtains or whatever people like my mother do to keep places like this from reverting back to caveman times. Then I have to cross the parking lot, a lot filled with all kinds of cars, for those that have them. These days we don’t have one, in case I didn’t tell you before, because Dad is out of work so we are all reduced to waiting for an eternity for that slow-rolling, seems never to be here when you need it, Eastern Avenue bus that ambles on to Adamsville Square, making so many stops that I usually just walk it, if I am in a hurry to get something, even on a hot, sweltering summer day like this.


As I hit the already hot asphalt of the lot I look around longingly at the vast array of cars; Plymouths with fins that look like a fish; Chevies, my favorite, sleek and so, Timmy McDevitt tells me, go real fast when you get onto Route 128 and let her rip; Fords that look like something they want to use to go up into space with, and I don’t know what else, but there are plenty. Finally I get to the lower parking lot that’s for guests or people who don’t get a parking spot in front of their house, or maybe just run out of steam before making the turn into hell-bent Taffrail Road. I don’t know and I am now passed that spot on the move along the fence anyhow to get to the little opening that will take me to my grand viewing area. I’m okay though, I still hear the old tug whistle coming up the line so I have some time to wait.


I get to my little sliver of land, just a little jut out of the shoreline, covered with old, oil-slicked quarry rock probably from the ground around here about a million years ago, ‘cause this town is known for its granite rock, cause it’s a granite city, even though the real work done around here is over at the Five Rivers Shipyard that is just across the bridge from the Proctor & Gamble factory, and where even on this hot, god forsaken morning I can faintly hear the sounds of metal being banged by hammers or whatever they use to put the ship together, and the flashes of welders’ torches as they put that banged metal in seamless water-tight condition.

I also notice some empty beer cans, cigarette butts, chip bags left haphazardly all over my viewing stand, somebody last night, or the night before, must have said the hell with it and got out one of the sweltering houses and came over here to get whatever little, little breeze that could be eked out of the windless night. I rule the day here in this spot, especially when the boats come in, no question about that, but what others do at night I have no control over. I just wish they wouldn’t leave a mess on my sacred site.


But that is all so much made-up irritation, probably ‘cause I am so hot, for now I can see the first glimmer of the smokestack of a ship coming up the line. I wonder whose oil it is, Esso? Texaco? Shell? Esso has been in the lead this year, and they are bigger ships and ride real low in the water coming in, and real high going out. I can start to see specks on the bridge, human specks that are busy doing the work of preparing the ship for the dock.


I wonder, wonder a lot, about these guys and the work they do and whether they like it and like being on the sea and whether they ever have any trouble like in stories that I read down at the Thomas Crane Library attached to the school, and where they have been and what adventures they have had, and where, and with whom. Maybe that’s the life for me. And I wonder about the girls they know from all over and whether they are nicer than the girls in the "projects" who are beginning to get on my nerves, for some reason. At least I don’t know what to do or what to say around them, or what they want me to do, or want me to say. I hope this is just being a boy kid and that it goes away, and I hope it a lot.


Oh, there she is, an Esso. The tugs are in position, gently nudging her and getting her ready to go dockside, tie up and unload. Wonder how long she will stay? Usually its takes a couple of days and then they are gone, sometimes in the middle of the night and they are not there in the morning depending on the tides and the traffic on the roads, oh, ocean roads, that is. Hey, its almost lunchtime, guess I’ll go home and eat and go down the cellar, maybe to try to cool off. I know one thing now though that kind of had me worried and kind of bothered me for a while 'cause I am just a kid. I now know I will always take time to watch the boats as they blow in, any dream about catching a boat out, wherever I am. Maybe, that is an omen, a good omen, about my future. I'll let you know.

When The Deal Went Down December 7, 1941- Humphrey Bogart’s “Across The Pacific” (1942)-A Film Review

When The Deal Went Down December 7, 1941- Humphrey Bogart’s “Across The Pacific” (1942)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Phil Larkin

Across The Pacific, starring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, 1942

Free, free at last, good god in Heaven free at last-for the moment anyway. All readers, young and old, recent or longtime, interested or disinterested, movie aficionados or not, but at least breathing will note, or should be expected to note, that one Phillip Larkin did not start out his usually beautifully-etched film review with an expletive (which one for the young, recent, disinterested, not aficionado brethren although I assume still breathing is a book sealed with seven seals). Why? Finally, good God in heaven finally, the divinely-inspired site impresario Greg Green and he hard-working thoughtful minions on the recently established Editorial Board have by unanimous assent permitted me to go through my paces on a real movie review, an Bogie- aficionado drenched review of one of his lesser classics-Across the Pacific.  

For those who have been out of the country, have been hospitalized, have been up the Amazon with no means of transportation or communication here is a quick primer on why what should have been a routine past through quickie review by me is worthy of every hosanna in the book. Through inexperience, newness to this site, or bad advice from that hither-to-fore deadbeat Ed Board our esteemed guru Greg Green had the bizarre idea that I should do kiddie film reviews, you know things like Captain America, The Avengers, Batman. All that silliness that passes for film experiences among the younger set for the simple fact that the eight to maybe twenty-one audience they are geared to do not have the energy or ability to sit for twenty minutes and read a freaking comic book. Instead are popcorn-addled and soft drink-doped for a couple of hours to listen to grunts and two word sentences, physically violent action every thirty seconds warranted or not, and some silly mid-credit come-ons to the next so-called adventure film. The reasoning at the time and I am not sure reasoning is the right word is that unlike the old regime under the now fully deposed, some unkind older writer-types saying purged, and exiled former site manager, my old growing up friend Allan Jackson who let us do whatever interested us as long as we did it well, the whole writing staff should “broaden their horizons by random assignment. Sorry, bullshit, sorry. 

Moreover that whole policy, and I used that word advisedly, was to let the self-designated “Young Turks” who rebelled against the old Jackson regime and led the ugly purging process get to write some decent stuff and not a rehash of what the older writers threw away as drafts. Under Allan mostly stuff about that growing up in the 1960s during that paradise time to be living, Allan and the older writers time which they could have given a damn about. Couldn’t know things about like the Summer of Love, 1967 for the simple fact that were in swaddling clothes or not yet born. In my case I drew that kiddie stuff because Greg fell weak-kneed for the line this young kid, Jesus, twenty-five years old, Kenny Jacobs gave him about how his movie-addled film noir parents dragged his young ass to a bunch of film festival retrospectives when he was about eight. As against my spending real-time, real-time growing up teenager, young adult, adult, old adult time starting on those lonely Saturday afternoon matinees Strand Theater double-features to get out of my turbulent household haunting the retros every chance I got. Won my spurs on doing Bogie, Robert Mitchum, Glenn Ford Gloria Grahame, Lauren Bacall, Mary Astor, Jane Greer, background reviews under the old regime which loved to mix it up with the older material. (Allan Jackson frowned on most of the modern stuff saying that other more informed sources could provide those kind of reviews quite nicely in places like the American Film Gazette where he had started out and that our job was to do films, books, music, culture, etc. which reflected the broader history of the American experience which this site is committed too.)          

Without tooting my own horn too much I would be remiss if I didn’t mention how I got back on top. Maybe provide an object lesson in how to work through the increasing bureaucracy of even barebones on-line operations which supposedly don’t have the hassles of brick and mortar hard copy publications to slow things down and make everybody a speck. At first I resented being “demoted” via the Greg Green so-called democratic new regime from being a longtime Associate Film Critic to just another generic writer. I let that pass figuring eventually the bureaucratic mentality would catch up to the new crowd and they would be handing out titles like candy. What ate at me and I am not afraid to say so now that the situation has been permanently resolved was being pushed aside on my specialty (they wouldn’t dare sent me back to the comics they don’t need the seven kinds of hell I would bring down which would make beautiful super-hero Thor’s hammerings seem like some street junkie’s).

I already gave you what the kid tried to pull with his lame parent story. What I did in response was my classic belly-aching in print, okay in cyberspace, moaning and groaning leaving about three lines for the review (for films probably bam-bam kick worth about two) against that punk kid, Kenny Jacobs, you have seen his weird reviews I am sure. Did it enough to switch gears on the wily young bastard. Got my old route back and here I am ready to dig deep into this low-rent 1940s Bogie pic that will never make his top ten films list but who cares because given the actors lined up in this one I can hit a homerun with The Maltese Falcon and make everybody forget this clunker.            

**********

Everybody, at least everybody over the past few generations has certain touchstone events which affect, even if indirectly, their lives.   

Will know exactly where they were when they heard the news. For mine John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963 (informed over the high school PA system by a distraught headmaster). For younger generations 9/11 and you need not say more, need to throw a year date in. For my parents, the ones who came of age in the 1930s Great Depression and slogged through World War II on two oceans, December 7, 1941, the day of FDR’s famous infamy, the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor is that touchstone and sets the framework for this film. (And Greg Green, no many how many reviews he oversaw over at American Film Gazette before coming here, must have had blinders on when young Kenny Jacobs begged him to do this review. What possible frame of reference, other than he had seen the film when he was a kid with those film freak parents, could he bring to any such review.)          

That sets the plot-line frame. The other component is the cohort of actors here led by Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, and Sydney Greenstreet who the previous year under the original director here, John Huston, who signed on to the Army before the finish, starred in one of the great movies of all time, The Maltese Falcon. Although this veiled propaganda film does not come close the three artists work through the problems presented by such a film fairly well although as I mentioned this will not go down as one of Bogie’s best.  

As my old friend and former boss as Senior Film Critic now retired, Sam Lowell, would say at this point (and encourage us to do so as well) here’s the “skinny.” Captain Leland, Bogie’s role, has been cashiered out of the Coast Guard for some petty crime. All that a ruse so that he can work an operation as a secret agent against those who were working their asses off for the soon-to-be formal enemies, the Japanese, as the war clouds thicken in late 1941. Number one agent is a sociology professor, Doctor Lorenz, out of the Philippines (whose citizens will be treated very badly when Japanese invasion time comes), played by the nefarious slippery Sydney Greenstreet who admires the Japanese way of doing things. The joker in the deck is the good-looking footloose woman, Alberta, played by Mary Astor, not a femme fatale this time but eye candy to Leland’s eyes. The Captain is not sure where she fits in but he takes an under the sheets run at her anyway. Their meeting place, a Japanese freighter which is heading, well, across the Pacific via the short route Panama Canal in the days when that meant a considerably shorter trip than around the Cape, maybe now too since it had been upgraded for the super-tankers.       

Things go along as they do with Leland making it clear to Lorenz he is a hired gun, a mercenary, a soldier of fortune ready to throw lead for the highest bidder. Willing too to tell what he knows about gun emplacements when the time comes. Al the while playing footsie with Alberta and while trying to figure out what the good Doctor is up to. Things start getting dicey when the Japanese ship is not permitted to enter the canal locks and things get hairy with Lorenz and Alberta departing for whereabouts unknown. The day, December 6, 1941 telegraphed through a newspaper popped on screen, so you know something bad is going to happen when all trails lead Leland to a plantation. To a place where it turns out Alberta’s drunken father lives and where the damn Japanese were painfully constructing a torpedo plane piece by piece to blow the strategic canal locks to kingdom come (my father a Pacific War battle-tested Marine never until he died called them anything but Nips, with a snarl, never.)   

Of course you know that is never going to happen as Bogie pulls the plug in the plan blasting every Japanese in sight (not going to happen as it didn’t in history but the reason here one heroic Bogart saving the day). Just like in The Maltese Falcon the evil Greenstreet bites the dust on his dreams. Here though innocent Alberta is not subject to being sent-over, sent to face the big step-off. Hey, I did pretty well with this period piece loser. Yeah I’m back in the saddle.      

Support The Class-War Prisoners During The Holidays-Support The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal- Help Build The Resistance

Support The Class-War Prisoners During The Holidays-Support The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal- Help Build The Resistance  

By Josh Breslin  

My yearly comment on behalf of the Holiday Appeal

I like to think of myself as a long-time fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. Cases from early on in the 1970s when the organization was founded and the committee defended the Black Panthers who were being targeted by every police agency that had an say in the matter, the almost abandoned by the left Weather Underground (in its various incantations) and Chilean miners in the wake of the Pinochet coup there in 1973 up to more recent times with the Mumia death penalty case, defense of the Occupy movement and the NATO three, and defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley) and more recently the courageous anti-fascist fighters who have been rounded up for protesting the alt-right, Nazi, KKK, white supremacist bastards.      

Moreover the PDC is an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers like the late Lynne Stewart, articulate death-row prisoners like Mumia and the late Tookie Williams, the Anti-fa anti-fascist street fighters to black liberation fighters like the Assata Shakur, the Omaha Three and the Angola Three and who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters like the working-class based Ohio Seven and student-based Weather Underground who took Che Guevara’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Of course a couple of years ago  we lost Hugo Pinell, George Jackson’s comrade-in-arms from the San Quentin Six to a murderous vendetta. Others, other militant labor and social liberation fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.

Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. One year though, and it now bears repeating each year, after I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).

That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson’s present class-war prisoner the late Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers in their better days, the days when the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven,  as represented by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and the late wa Langa), in their younger days; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today (also Black Panther-connected); the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.

That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.

And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do the same now at the holidays and throughout the year. 

The class-war prisoners must not stand alone. 

                                                                                                

PDC    

Box 99 Canal Street Station                        

New York, N.Y. 10013

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