The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of
’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Lost In The Rain-With The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter In Mind
By Allan Jackson
[All roads lead back to Markin, Peter Paul Markin, a guy
from the old growing up neighborhood back in the working class, that fact is
important, Acre section of North Adamsville. Lead back from my having taken his
name as my moniker when I was the site manager of this publication all the way
to his being an important bell weather for what went on in our generation our
Generation of ’68 as it has been characterized here and elsewhere, the vaunted
baby-boomer generation just now starting to pass the baton to younger
generations hoping they are up to the tasks of this wonderful, weird,
treacherous century as it gathers some steam. Markin whom we always called
Scribe from very early on since he always had a pencil or pen and notebook at
the ready in his shirt pocket to write something down and bore us with it
later. Always had pen or pencil ready when our acknowledged leader of the
corner Frankie Riley had something to say which I think is the original way
Markin got the name. Yeah, Scribe was a piece of work and if I live to be one
hundred something I am not sure now that a am on the short side of that
possibility I want to make I will always think of something the bastard did or
said in his short sweet sad life.
The Scribe was no generational Everyman, no way, but he did
represent a certain aspect of that generation, a certain aspect of what went
into making the 1960s a wasn’t that a time moment and the scourge of the
night-takers who to this day have been fighting a frontal assault on whatever
dreams we thought we could create. Of course certain things lead you to think
about the old days when you are old enough
to have old days and for me it had been a haunting and hollow feeling in
the back of my brain ever since the Fall of 2017 when I was watching Ken Burns ten
part-eighteen hour Vietnam War series
on Public Television. What has got me thinking about that series is how many of
the experiences mainly by guys just like the guys in our Acre neighborhood
paralleled Scribe’s (and my own). How we got patriotically bamboozled into
serving in the military in that war. I especially related to Tim O’Brian, a guy
who has written many good pieces of literature about those times, about how he
too got snookered into the service by everything that he knew or felt. Every
minute I watched I couldn’t help but think of Scribe, help think that if not
Everyman his life story-better his dreams-were part of the mix and not the
worst part either.
I don’t know about “red diaper’ babies, sons and daughters
of radicals and communists when that was okay in the 1930s and early 1940s
before the hammer came down and everybody had to put their heads down-or
else-in that red scare Cold War night that forms part of the title to this
series. I don’t know about kids from our generation who grew up in the leafy
suburbs and mother had a Volkswagen or some such car to talk the kids to and
fro (we, and this included Scribe’s family as well only have private
transportation when there was enough money for a car otherwise we were captives
of the slow-death public transportation). For that matter I don’t know about
what were then called the ghettos where black people, people who later would be
kindred, were huddled and abused. Didn’t know about the barrio a much lesser
ethnic group then or about how the Indians, Native Americans, indigenous
peoples now, survived. Or what went on, except at second hand, down in the
hills and hollows of poor white Appalachia. Neither did Scribe although lightning
rod that he was he actually studied up on such stuff, took an interest when all
the rest of us cared about was cars, girls, and having sex with the same, with
the girls. He did too but not with our desperate intensity.
What Scribe knew about, what we corner boys knew about was
white working poor Northern stuff, although we probably unlike to day when
identity politics of all types and were are in a cold civil war according to
writer Frank Jackman shared plenty of common customs, dreams, commitments and
myths with the other aforementioned groupings. What Scribe knew about was “from
hunger,” our from hunger world (funny I remember he told me once he did not
realize that he and his family was poor because in “the projects” where he grew
up, grew up early in, everybody was poor, white poor in the golden age of up
and coming for whites after World War II and it was not until sixth or seventh
grade in school when kids outside the projects attended the same school that he
was painfully and thoughtlessly made very aware that he was poor-from girls who
scorned him for his poverty as well as other indignities. So “from hunger”
fits.
That is one part Scribe but the part the part that made him
that bell weather was some kind of instinct, maybe dream instinct, that
something new was coming along in our times and we had better grab it with all
hands since it might not last (later as it faded with the ebbing of the 1960s
cultural shifts he refused to believe the fury of the times was fading, the
newer world was dying, which I believe, and not just me believe, was part of
his untethering, of his early death down in fucking dust-strewn back streets
Sonora, Mexico dead by his own overweening from hunger appetites). I didn’t,
nobody did except maybe Frankie Riley and he only because he thought it would
provide him with the main chance, realize that a “new breeze” was blowing
through the land. Scribe was on it from the sense he had that beatnik thing
that we were just too young to have sensed was our thing although that didn’t
stop Scribe from on lonely Friday nights on the corner spouting forth with
verses from “fag” Allen Ginsberg’s “faggy” negro streets avenging angels Howl
which we couldn’t get him to stop yakking about.
More of our time the time which none of us patriotic working
stuff boys understood when he went with the freaking Quakers and other commies
to call for nuclear disarmament or walk the sidewalks in front of Woolworth’s
on Washington Street in Boston for the “n----rs” (you figure it out but that was
what we called then in the Acre including Scribe early on) down South who
wanted to eat lunch in the place but couldn’t by custom and threat. More
sensible (to me) since he took me there were the trips to Harvard Square when
beatnik turned to folkie which would turn to hippie to listen to songs and
poems which were totally different from our heaven-sent rock and roll that had
sustained us in the dark days of the 1950s when we didn’t know we were from
hunger but knew something was missing-at least I hope we did.
But the biggest thing and it was epidemic so I don’t know
how we missed it especially since Scribe endlessly harped on was when he got
all of us, almost all of us except a couple of guys from the corner Ricky Rizzo
and Jimmy James who had already enlisted and would perish in Vietnam and have a
place of honor down on black granite in Washington, D.C., to head out to
California after he came back from there and got us in the Summer of Love,
1967. That set us on a different course, set me on a different course for sure.
Then the “shit hit the fan.” Scribe had decided that fateful 1967 to drop out
of college, a bad mistake since was drafted the next year and sent to Vietnam.
I went there too but later after I finished college and was drafted. This is
where our white working class beginnings and ethos left us without a compass.
Where, as Tim O’Brian in that Ken Burns series eloquently put it, was there
space in small town, neighborhood but it might as well have been a small town
since the ethos was the same to rebel against induction. Who including
patriotic World War II serving parents would have supported us. And so Scribe’s
fate was cast, cast in a very different way than we would have expected earlier
in the decade. After ‘Nam he never was the same although he wrote some great
stuff, did some great politic work but the “real” world was getting nastier and
nastier and not where he expected it to go. So a “lost boy.” Still fifty years
later all roads lead back to Markin. Allan Jackson]
*********
Peter Paul Markin, but after this
introduction just Markin, at least that is what I have always called him ever
since we first met down in my hometown of Hullsville in the summer of 1964 was
for a long time out of step with his generation. Or at least I, Jimmy Jenkins,
have always liked to think that he was out of step with the best part of our
generation, the generation of ’68 name so by me and others later to reflect
that ebb-tide year when all hell broke loose and many things were possible, the
part of our generation that tried to turn the world upside down, tried the
great decade boxed in jail-break out. It was not that Markin did not have
appetites, in fact after many talks with him I found like many working-class
kids from hunger like the two of us he had huge appetites, for changing the
world, a world that neither he nor I created but which we each on our own way
had wanted to spin on a different axis. To include us in the day to day
calculations. My story was rather simple as I simply went with the flow as it
drifted toward a counter-cultural expression but Markin, well, Markin’s is
something else again.
But enough of trying to tease out an
explanation and let’s get to the skinny, the story. Hullsville is about twenty miles south of
Markin’s hometown of North Adamsville which meant that ordinarily the chances
of us meeting were slim seeing that after graduation from high school he was
going off to college in Boston and I was getting ready to go to work in Jim
Snyder’s Auto Body Shop over on Route 3A on the Hingham line to make some money
and maybe after a while go into the service and then to college on the GI Bill
since our family did not have dollar one to send me to college. Moreover while
the teachers in school called me smart, some said too smart and one old-time
History teacher who looked like he might have participated on the White side in
the Russia civil wars after the revolution in 1917 called me a “Bolshevik” once
for giving a snarly answer to one of his silly questions about some date in
history, I was too much into being a corner boy to keep up my grades enough to
get some scholarship help like Markin got. Nobody called him a Bolshevik then
as far as I know and he never mentioned anything like that after I told him one
time the History teacher story, and how he had kept me after school a few days
running when I did not give him what he considered an appropriate answer to why
I was acting like Bolshevik in his class.
What is remarkable, remarkable when you
think about how possessive and cut-throats guys were in those days about girls
and girlfriends and we were no exceptions, was the way we met one night shortly
after we had graduated from our respective high schools at the Sea ‘n’ Surf
Ballroom in my hometown. This locally
famous dance hall, now long gone to condominiums, had been located right at the
start of the ocean end of Hullsville, an oceanfront which extended the length
of the town right up to the Daley Point Lighthouse. The place catered to those
from eighteen to twenty-one who could not legally drink liquor and only served
soft drinks and snacks. That oceanfront had been a draw in its own right for
those moments during dance hall intermission when guys and gals went out to for
smoke, a cigarette smoke then as far as I know although I had heard rumors that
in California people were smoking other stuff, marijuana, and Markin had told
me that he had read about the “beats” who came a little before us, you know
Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, guys like that in the Village, out in
North Beach places like that who were high all the time on bennies and
marijuana so there could have been some of that going on too. Maybe the guys
and gals, and this I know from my own frayed nerves especially around girls
then, girls who I might try to pick up, fed up with the soda inside stepped out
to gain “liquid courage” with some cheapjack low-end Johnny Walker whiskey to
calm the nerves, and later in the evening, those midnight hours, that
oceanfront acted as a local lovers’ lane complete with some car window-fogging
action for those who got lucky, or were horny.
The Sea ‘n’ Surf in those days held a
weekly rock ‘n’ roll dance in the main ballroom all year-round on Friday and
Saturday nights, Sunday afternoons were left to real ballroom dancing by those
like our parents who did not know fast-dancing or anything like that and the
rest of the week the place stood empty. Back then the main ballroom featured a
live cover band, the famous Rockin’ Ramrods, locally famous anyway, who went on
to front at many concerts like when the Stones and Grateful Dead were in Boston
although they never quite had enough of whatever it took to make it big on
their own.
See that night we both, Markin and I,
had our eyes set on the same girl, same young woman, if we were talking about
her now, Laura McCarthy, who was nothing but a heart-breaker. Heart-breaker in
a lot of ways but mainly, which both of us were clueless about at the time
since we had been nothing but grinds and narrowly- focused guys, because she,
an absolutely ethereal beauty all wispy and dreamy like some Botticelli
model was maybe a step ahead of her time
in her sense of sexual liberation (or at least wanting to break the mold of
that prevalent mores of working one’s way steadily toward the marriage altar),
of being her own woman and of being into the very closed “new dope” scene,
meaning LSD, mescaline, peyote buttons, and the like not the junkie nose candy
or H stuff like some Nelson Algren junkie man with a golden arm Frank Sinatra
thing in the movies and he trying go cold turkey all for Kim Novak and making a
mess of it. (I did not know until a few years later that a Botticelli model is
what Laura should have been compared too since I had never been to an art
museum and Markin only mentioned it later after he had taken some required Art
Appreciation course and I had seen a photograph of one of his paintings, and
after he had showed it to me and we both immediately thought of that little
long gone heart-breaker)
So yes we became friends out of trying
to make the same girl who played us like we were on yo-yo strings, and
subsequently dumped both of us in succession, me last, and left plenty of
lovelorn scars on our psyches. We had heard back then that Laura had
subsequently drifted to a commune out in Taos, New Mexico and she might still
be there for all we know as improbable as that sounds. But in the ins and outs
of that competition for her favors is a whole other story, a boy-girl story
that has been told since Adam and Eve time, maybe before, and not knowing that
information does not add to the story I want to tell you about what was taking
place with Markin in the mid-1960s. A time when we were trying to figure out
all the implications of that new wave blowing across America, a generic youth
wave which included Markin and me too, a wave away from almost everything our
parents, all those in charge, and other interested parties were into as we
sought the newer world that we expected was just around the corner where we
would finally be free to express ourselves in a world that we had created, or
at least had a say in. But I will fill you in on the general outlines of that
big picture quest as I go along. Right now this is about Markin’s long journey
on that road, longer that one would have thought when the dust finally settled
later but once you knew everything that drove him back then it makes sense that
it would be nothing but a long journey, and a close thing in the making at that
when all is said and done.
Now that we have it straight on the
Markin moniker part, the name part which I said before I have always called him
and not just me since that is what everybody in old North Adamsville except his
dear mother, Delores, well, maybe not so dear but his mother anyway, and later
his first frenetic ex-wife, Joyce, which explains a lot about why she was an
ex-wife called him we can try to fit the pieces together that made up Markin
then (strangely Joyce had been another
woman that we both lusted after but I did mine in secret, or a little subtly,
since she always had eyes for Markin from the first and my only hope was that
she would fall off his train but she never did, damn, she never did, and when
they split she headed to Frisco so I never had a proper shot at her. Markin
when we talked about it much later after many other affairs fell through for
both of us gave me plenty of reason to be glad that she never got her hooks
into me, although I still think I would not have minded taking the ticket,
taking the ride back then). Markin never could figure out then what the
attraction was for all those desperate children of the light camped out, rain
or shine, on the Boston Common in that summer of love year, 1967. (That
desperate part strictly in Markin’s head, maybe the “children of light” part
too but the “desperate” part tells a lot about the way that Markin saw the new
wave coming, knew it was coming but was totally out of synch with what was
coming down like I say driven by his own life’s trajectory and his outsized
dreams). This was not some abstract question since a number of his old time
friends, his corner boys, a couple of whom I met before they headed west,
headed west physically and in their minds to a very different place than they
had talked about on those lonely Friday nights in front of their bowling alley
hang-out.
A lot of what went on back then, a lot
of the questioning, a lot of things that were pulling people every which way
was associated with the west just like out forbears, including our immediate
spiritual forbears, the “beats” who through their writing, through their
life-style and through the sheer fact that they themselves were always
physically heading west in those broken-down, stolen, or hitch-hiked cars and
trucks drove us that way. (Strangely as far removed from the “beat” scene as
Markin was he was fascinated by their writings, especially Kerouac’s, a
working-class former football hero who he said “spoke” to him in some literary
way. What he hated was the dope, “fag,” hey that’s the word we used, midnight
sunglasses part tied in with a little plebian anti-intellectualism carried over
from those North Adamsville streets where “street smart” trumped “book smart.”)
Those old corner boys from the old town had “gone over to the other side” as
Markin saw the matter when he heard where they had gone, gone to ground on that
very Common with the other desperate children, saw them turning seemingly in a
minute from stolid old corner boys holding up walls in front of Doc’s
Drugstore, Salducci’s Pizza Parlor or the Jack Slack’s Bowling Alleys (along with
him) to drug addicts, ne’er do wells and vagabonds. No question in those days
no matter what else was going through his mind Markin was a man out of sorts
with his generation, out of sorts with the wave, out of sorts about what I
thought although I had been a little slow to pick up on the wave myself being
stuck in that garage job in Podunk.
Funny that “drug addict” business,
Markin actually used that word when talking about all the new smells in the air
when we went to rock concerts and dances in those days say in 1965, 1966,
reflected Markin’s old-timey notion picked up from some black and white 1930s
morality play film or cautionary tale about those who went off the straight and
narrow that “smokin’ a bone,” having a marijuana joint, a few puffs to ease the
burdens of life would inevitably lead to life of crime, rapine, debauchery and
about sixteen other social evils. Or maybe he got it from reading Nelson
Algren’s Man With The Golden Arm
(which he told me about after he had read the book, filled in the story for me
since my take had been based on the film adaptation with Sinatra and Novak
which I vaguely remembered my parents had taken us in tow to see since there
was no money for baby-sitters and young kids got in free with an adult) or from
one of Algren’s haunting short stories about people on the edge, doper-related
short stories where the parties were led into the rude life of junkies and
spiraled down from there.
A lasting image of the time for me, an
image picked up now in retro-1960s “hippie” nostalgia exhibitions, movies,
memoirs and from folk tales sputtered out by the now aging remnant, was of
dazed kids in all kinds of exotic regalia, some carefully crafted to give a
certain look for the cameras that were swirling around at the time when everybody,
every journalist too, was looking to see what the “scene” was about. Others just thrown together haphazardly with
whatever was at hand, at hand being from the nearest “free” box, the latest
offering from some skid row Army and Navy store or whatever somebody straight
people had donated for resale at the Sally’s (Salvation Army), who obviously
had been at the hash pipe, the joint or had swallowed something not on Doc’s
Drugstore list.
All harmless, mostly. That ne’er-do-well business reflected,
including the use of the term, the moral pounding that Markin had taken as a
child and teenager from Grandmother Riley about the dangers of drink, about
laying around and becoming a wastrel, worse a charge on the state like her own
brother before they found him in a dark alley in Boston’s South End and put him
in a potter’s grave before the family could find out about what happened.
(Markin’s first drink had come via that same grandmother who having had a
crippling accident at some time earlier in her life had been house-bound for
years and would ask him to go get her prescriptions from Doc’s Drugstore, real
name of the place, and so Doc got used to seeing him for her orders. On
occasion she would also order a small flask, a pint of whiskey, to have when
her sisters came to visit. Although underage Doc would just place the bottle in
the same bag as the pills and lotions. One time when he was about sixteen he
decided that he wanted to taste what liquor was like and so when he went to
Doc’s for the order he added a bottle in. No questions asked. He said that when
he drank the stuff, drank the whole bottle with a friend down at Adamsville
Beach he was sick for days after). But that was the start of the ne’r-do-well
campaign for him although many nights including the night not long along when
we were talking about the “1960s wave” that he was befuddled by at first we
were sitting in Rummy Jacks’ over in Cambridge sipping whiskeys and scotches.
That vagabond thing was something he thought about, maybe more when he saw photographs which looked like something out of John
Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath with
rootless people, old Okie tramps, toothless hags, not well put together, just
picking up stakes and heading west. So no Markin was not at all sympathetic to
the new migration, to the new consciousness, to that new wave that was sneaking
up on us.
Where did it all come from, why was he
so adamant about hating that whole scene with a vengeance, of seeing it as a
threat even, more importantly, going out of his way to belittle those who were
seeking a different way of doing their life’s business, of chilling out before
being burned out, including more than one go around with me causing a rift
between us for certain short periods. A lot of it had to do with his
grandmother, Grandmother Riley (the one who he used to get the medications at
Doc’s for) and her worldview. See Markin’s home life was hell (as was mine as
well), his mother always on his case, always trying to cramp his style, always
saying no to any project he expressed interest in, any request for a couple of
bucks, anything, okay and so he sought refuge at grandmother’s house a few
blocks away (although he told me once it was more like ten thousand miles away
with the quiet and the food that she would provide him, well-made food unlike
at home where his hard-pressed mother
was an indifferent cook serving indifferent food). The price he paid for that
refuge though was an indoctrination in the small-minded house-bound views of
his grandmother. So as the hippie movement surfaced in the media old
grandmother would go into her take on the matter for his edification, his
edification about drug addicts, ne’er-do-wells, and vagabonds.
In short as his sainted grandmother,
sainted for putting up with a crotchety old grandfather if nothing else, would
say the “queer people” and not for their sexual orientation as now because
everybody in the old neighborhood knew those kind of queers as “fags,” “light
on their feet” or “different” but in the old Irish sense, the sense in which
the playwright Brendan Behan used it in one of his plays, the sense instilled
in him as well by his mother (nee Riley), she too of the “different” usage
passed on from grandmother (to give a true case of that being “different” a guy
from the house across from his own, Johnny was “different” since, although
thirty-five years old, he still lives with his mother, does not have a
girlfriend, expresses no interest in having a girlfriend much less marriage,
drinks his drinks at the all men’s tavern across the road and is always when
not in the pub going into the South End in Boston to the clubs there. It did
not take much even for naïve Markin when told these facts how Johnny was
different, the “fag”) Meaning more broadly that those who did not profess their
faith as often as possible (that faith being the true church Roman Catholic
faith and not some heathen Protestant or worse Christ-killer Jewish faith which
formed something like the cycle of life around which Markins and Rileys did
their daily business. The Sunday masses, the holy days loaded with
sweet-smelling incense, the dreaded Saturday confessions, the first
communion/confirmation/six other sacraments and a damper around anything that
smacked of idolatry), those who did not stay away from the drink, keep clear of
the ever-present taverns that dotted the neighborhood landscape more numerous
in number than the churches that dotted the neighborhood tempting many a man to
part with his hard-earned paycheck
before he got home to his wife and her weekly bill-paying envelopes.
(Many a wife stood guard at many a tavern door on payday, usually Thursday when
the shipyard was running strong provided many jobs in the area, in order to
fill those desperate envelopes although many a husband got wise and would head
out of town to do his Thursday night drinking until many a wife got wise and stood
guard at the bank to cut many a husband off at the pass. Some husbands though
nevertheless spent the paycheck and so every once in a while you would see a
neighbor’s apartment in a triple-decker tenement vacated in the middle of the
night with everything packed up and gone, including some Jimmy who had become
your best friend now gone with no forwarding address.)
Drugs, marijuana or whatever you called
it in your neighborhood, cocaine, you know cousin, junk, you know heroin, were
beyond mother and grandmother comprehension, were so far from their home
tragedies that bringing that up as something to “stay away from” in order to
live the good life never would have occurred to them in a thousand years then.
That scourge would come later and hit them and the neighborhood with full
force, as night time robberies, jack-rolling, and auto theft became rampart as
the need for a “fix” moved from the movie screen or a clever book by the likes
of Nelson Algren to next door and all subject to some God forsaken whim of some
dope feign, those who did not work hard (and often, unlike some transient skid
row bums working for daily pay and be quick about it in order to get their
hands on a vagrant bottle of booze, taking whatever brainless damn work was
available if necessary especially po’boy father’s like Markin’s to the coals
mines of Kentucky born and thus in the razzle-dazzle of the greater Boston
labor market reduced to last hired, first fired work where he could get it
mainly in some outfit loosely affiliated with the old town’s declining
shipbuilding industry), or did not
sanctify their lusts with marriage were odd, were outsiders in their own
community (and lustful girls too although every boy, every man wanted to touch
their satin sheets, hell, their good Catholic linen sheets damned to hell and
called whore, whore of Babylon for those who had read their scripture and
lustful boys called perverts, called Onan, call seed-spillers and succumbers to
wretched linen sheets after some rabid priest called them calamites from the
pulpit on high).
So when Markin heard the news,
presumably from mother and grandmother, that old junior high school fellow
corner boy Timmy Kiley (the star quarterback on the black and red Red Raider
high school football team although not considered bright enough to do much more
than toss balls, well or poorly, and so reduced to clerkship in his uncle’s
downtown North Adamsville clothing store after his high school heroics went silently
to some local newspaper grave), high school corner boy Red Kelly (fresh from
two years with Uncle seeing hazardous duty in red scare Cold War Germany and
not in hellhole hot war Vietnam but the service broke him from that knee-jerk
patriotism, that easy-going Fourth of
July and salute the flag that had been handed down from generation to
generation since sometime before the Spanish-American war, Teddy’s splendid
war, and so when the wave broke, broke in New York City and out in Frisco town
first he grabbed onto the damn thing, the wave as we are calling it now and a
guy, well, a journalist like Hunter Thompson called it then, called it, sadly,
when he saw its ebb and flow hit the ebb tide, damn, like a man struggling for
a life-preserver), ditto corner boy Sean Murphy (the pretty boy on the stoop,
out in the corner boy night, who got married right out of high school to the belle of the ball, Sarah
Bennett, the senior prom queen until she, and then they, discovered that their
projected parent-trap endorsed by Good
Housekeeping and expectant grandparents went to an all-night party and got
stoned and liked it , liked the idea that they could be close but free of
bourgeois convention, a term that was beginning to make the rounds as a sign of
disenchantment) and sometime corner boy Bob Stone (heady Bob who had gone out
to California in the summer of 1965 after dropping out of college and fully
partaking of what was out there after finding a waif woman named Magic
Sunshine, high as a kite on mary jane but also high on life, high on folk
wisdom that would later turn into a huge industry when the new age turned into
the New Age, on Fillmore Street one late night who had actually been to one of
Ken Kesey’s acid blow-outs in La Honda, knew the long-running sagas of the
magical mystery tour yellow brick road school bus that Tom Wolfe would eulogize
in his sociological treasure-trove The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and turned him around, or better as I resurrect
the language of the time “turned him on”) had taken up the “queer” life he
could not understand why, or what made such things attractive to them.
Couldn’t understand why the discontent,
why the infernal searching, why the need to blast the church, and remember
which church in case you forgot, and remember too that blasphemous Markin even
then had quietly slipped away from church, had taken to spending his Sunday
mornings with some heathen for a night woman, thankfully, messing up the sheets
and causing any number of hers, since he was still hell-bent on Irish Catholic
women, to miss Mass. Forget confession or anything exotic like that but he
still hung to the basic feeling of the faith, the basic square-ness of the
faith in a faithless world even if only because his future plans, his political
plans required at least lip service to the old pieties, could understand why
blast the education system for allegedly making them helpless against the big
modern current that was ready to crash down on their heads, their parents who
did not understand why they were rebelling against the golden American age,
against the steel, iron, aluminum world that had bequeathed to them, why it had
turned to ashes in their mouths, and worse, worse because he represented the
social glue that held the society together, the President of the United States.
And for Markin, Markin the born in the manger rising from the ashes guy who
expected to ride the political rails to his own worthy future drew the line in
the sand at that proposition. Could not see the point, whatever one thought of
the war in Vietnam that was also causing his generation to kick up some dust,
and he was not quite sure what he thought about that war although he knew when
his time came if he was drafted and the war was still on as appeared more and
more likely that he would to go just like generations before had done since
Markins and Rileys had come to the American shores from the old countries.
See just then worthy college student
Markin had it all mapped out, had it figured that he would ride the political
whirlwind to get as he said to anything who would listen to him on the corner
“get his while doing good in the world,” that first coming from his from hunger
existence, from his huge unabated, unquenched wanting habits, the second from
some home-spun god Catholic Worker stuff he had read about in school and that
his Aunt May would talk to him about
when he went over her house (her house more of a journey and so used less
frequently as a refuge since she lived across town in Adamsville proper and
that required taking the damn private line bus which never seemed to come when
he needed it and so the less frequently) when the whirlwind at home was too
fierce for him to combat (and when Grandmother Riley was firmly taking her
daughter’s side on those few occasions when that event occurred). So, truth to
tell he would rock no boats, would not try to turn over the fig leaf that was
holding society together, and decidedly would not call the President of the
United States a whoremonger, a baby-killer or oversized baboon with the brain
of an amoeba who needed to be castrated, or worse. No, up and coming junior
politicians on the make just did not do that in 1965, 1966 maybe forever.
Markin already had his mind made up in the summer of love of 1967 when all the
social glues were coming undone, when kids his age were shedding good sense,
good taste, good lives to become vagabonds in some ill-defined lustful night he
fully intended to support the President against the main scourge of the age,
one Richard Milhous Nixon who was beginning to rear his ugly head once again.
Once again Nixon acting like the beast with five claws ready to do muck to
everything it touched. So Markin had no time for fallen corner boys, for
dreaming guys who used to have their heads on right, who wanted to say “fuck
you” to all that he liked about his America.
And it was not for lack of asking that
Markin could not understand his old-time corner boys (who at some down-the-road
point he expected to form the initial cadre for any political operation he was
going to run but he was damned if he was going to have dope-addled, long-haired
unwashed, what were they starting to call them, oh yeah, hippies and their
caravans and love trains ruin his beautiful dream, no sir). A dutiful son of
the working-class (and just plain street smart hustler if you thought about the
matter), working his way through college by driving a truck on a route through
downtown Boston he would after making a delivery at one of his stops on Beacon
Street walk across to the tent-festooned Common to search his old corner boys
out when possible and try to reason with them (those attempts to reach them,
not the reason for doing it part, were done always assuming that he could get a
parking spot rather than double-park as was his usual habit but was considered
,well, not good form for longer than the
time it took to deliver his goods and he had a couple of traffic citations to
verify the truth of that “not good form”).
Their arguments however seemed
ridiculous to him, or at least did not seem worth the effort, the effort they
called “creating the counter-culture” or that was the expression that Sean
Murphy, the most intelligent of the tribe and the one that Markin respected the
most used to defend the new life-style that Sean and the others and their
brethren were embarked upon. The life-style including a new-found disinterest
in keeping their hair groomed (which would have shocked Tonio, the barber “up
the Downs,” who specialized in one cut, boys’ regular, and had even looked
askew at Markin when he, in order not to be completely outside the new
generational norm wore his sideburns a little longer like some second-coming of
Elvis), growing mustaches and beards (Timmy looking nothing but a scraggly
muppet with his chin whiskers which he kept solely because some chick had told
him he looked cool that way), wearing what Markin could only describe as second-hand “Bargie” (a
pre-Wal-Mart-type store that sold low-priced, and odd-ball merchandise out of
fashion at best), stuff that he, and formerly they, were required out of
poverty to wear when they got, or rather their mothers got them their
twice-yearly new clothing at the beginning of school and at Easter). The “in”
wardrobe stripped pants, frilly-cuffed shirts, holey bell-bottom blue jeans, threadbare
sandals, all guaranteed not to hold up for the length of time it would take to
become hand-me-downs for younger brothers and outer garments from Jay’s Army
and Navy Store, things like World War II army jackets (Markin had to laugh at
that one since all his old corner boys with the exception of Red who had
already done his military service and so could justifiably wear such garb were
committed to opposition to LBJ’s war front, were instinctively anti-military,
although all their now befuddled fathers had been through hellhole World War II
and yet reached out in desperation to be part of an army, if only Gideon’s),
Eisenhower, Jesus, Eisenhower jackets, used (Markin, and they did too, used to
run home at noon break in elementary school to watch Big Brother salute old man
Ike with a glass of milk, didn’t these guys remember or were the drugs and the
life so corrosive that they had lost their memory banks), navy skullcaps (last
used one night when they were hungry for dough and had heard about a big house
with nobody home had taken what they wanted under such cover), dog soldier army
black leather boots (with some poor GIs’
shine so sarge could see himself reflected in the boot’s glory long
gone, long gone to rain-pelted muds, wore-out heels from walking as much as
hitching out on the great American highway west, long-gone to kicking out the
jams if it came to that come some midnight fire festival with magic elixirs,
magic bongos, magic kazoos in a pinch, the works).
But the clothing regalia would not end
there for everything in the new dispensation had to reflex the new color world
explosion, the mauves, violet purples, magentas, tangerines, white blacks, you
name it, and in Day-Glo the pigment for the new age a-dawning. The exploded
world seen through LSD or mescaline lenses if one could explain to the square
or hip alike the colors bleeding in their chemical heads. The mushroom cloud of
the new reality splintering visions about twelve different ways (hey, only an
estimate could have been fifty or a hundred who knows) so exploding purple
apples, orange bananas, magenta pears, and that was just the fruits and even
Markin knew they were not fruits like you though just like they were not queer
like you and your Irish South Boston/Dorchester/North Adamsville brethren kept
harping on but that didn’t save Timmy, Sean and the boys from going under it
spell. After a few months, he stopped going over to the national encampment
(the guys were tired too of his noise they had once collectively said to him
half in jest half in rancor). See he had
met down in Falmouth during that summer of love July a young woman, Jewel
Diamond. (Jesus he was tired of all the name changes like changing a name would
do the trick to produce a new identity. He respected, at least he thought he
respected, those blacks who during this time, those who came out of the extreme
end of the black liberation struggle, called the black civil rights movement
then but they are both the same thing, who wanted no part of their old slave
names and so were X this and X that but white- breads had no such history to
eradicate) Jewel wanted to show her new
boy a trip around the world in her bedroom, wanted in too on his soft-shell
political dreams (thinking she would be some latter day Jackie O, some White
House princess) wanted just like him to have that white picket fence complete
with white shingled house, couple of kids, and a dog and wanted to be a step or
two ahead of where their parents had left off and so she dreamed with him,
while taking her daddy around the world (yeah, she was that kind of girl
half-virgin mary, half-whore and half her mother’s daughter), yes, dreaming
that dream.
Now Markin was not so square, or better
to say in those days, un-cool, as not to
appreciate that young guys might want to get high, get laid (he could
certainly understand that since half, no, nine-tenth of corner boy life was
about getting some easy sex from some fox and if not some fox then some young
thing who wanted no commitments just like him, better yet get some head, you
know, the “toot the root” that a guy could talk a chick into in lieu of having
vaginal intercourse with all its dangers, some head like that Jewel from down
the Cape could be talked into if you gave her a couple of drinks or if she had
taken her medication and had those same drinks which made her speedy), and lay
around all day philosophizing about the world and never get beyond cleaning up
their tents, if that. (Not that Markin was above a marathon philosophy talk
spending many a night talking of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill like they
were second cousins but would give the air to Baba Ram Dass, Timothy Leary or
even Eric Hoffer when those names came up, pure hippie words in the night
madness)
Also Markin could appreciate guys
getting out from under mother’s and/or grandmother’s apron strings as he
himself had done just the previous year since he and his mother had had their
twelve-hundredth argument about when he got home, who he was hanging with, what
he was intending to do with this or that girl (no, not the sex thing, Jesus,
no, the word was obliterated from the Markin household vocabulary and he had
learned whatever he had learned about sex in the streets and on the corners
just like his former corner boys who were boffing every girl in sight, and, get
this, them, the girls starting things up, starting with that come hither look
and their own sexual vocabulary learned in their streets), was he going to
settle down and get married right after
college, stuff like that. So no he was no square like that and truth be known,
although not to mother or grandmother who would have flipped out, gone wiggy if
they knew that he had been with a heathen women, a bloody Protestant girl who
he had run into one night at Jack’s, Jacks’ over in Cambridge where some
musical infusions were starting to roar up and take the sails out of stogy old
folk music that had died years before but if you went into some of the
coffeehouses still existed there (although only in that town in homage to some
worthy past) you would still get twenty-seven varieties of Bob Dylan covers
done off-key (if that was possible with that gravelly voice) or Joan Baez
ironing-board haired princesses calling for the world to kumbaya, kumbaya until
the next century from what the scene looked like.
Some called it acid rock, some called
it flamingo for all he knew but that night high on his Irish whiskey sots she
was sitting at the bar, all ethereal, all feathers and fandangos and no bra (no
bra a victory for every shy boy who ever tried to unhook some strange virginal
girl and get it all wrong and, damn, she had to unhook the damn thing herself),
a tent-like dress worn just so, what did she call it when he asked about it, oh
yeah, hippie chic. She just in from Fargo just out in the Dakotas having fled
some scene that he was not privy to but which made Boston seem like Frisco town
thought he, slightly side-burned, lean, with a wicked Boston accent (really
filtered neighborhood North Adamsville Irish-flecked accent but to the rubes
from Fargo wicked Boston), she having no experience bought his line of patter,
gave him some speed and they stayed up all night at his place making love and
talking like two magpies. But even Markin knew he was just slumming around the
edges of the new dispensation that night since she was there, she was available
and she thought he was nice so that hippie chic business should not be weighed
heavily in the Markin argument. Who knows she could have, like a later
Angelica, Angelica from out in Muncie just been tasting the wares before going
back to whatever the Great Society was offering in its turn.
See that is where Markin was really at,
really just another in a long line of Irish guys, Irish on the cookie-cutter
machine guys, guys on the hustle except the hustle played out with him getting
his while he was helping the brethren. (Old Aunt May invoked at every turn.) He
would eat much crow, eat many words as each new treachery wended its way around his brain but he was young,
was committed to the easy life of an “on the make” politician who would not
sell his mother to the highest bidder so he had his virtues since most of the
previous generation’s “pols” had done just that. Yeah, the map was set, maybe
not in every detail but set. He had already that summer of love although he
heard war cry rumblings from the likes of Eugene McCarthy’s tribe and that of
his own gangster saint Robert Kennedy hero that they might oppose the President
on the war issue, make him pay hell at the polls if he listened to the never-ending
requests for men and materials from the generals, committed to LBJ in that
eternal fight against the impeding dirty nasty fight that was coming. Had lined
up Jewel Diamond (she would have to get rid of that moniker and go back to
being Joyell but he would humor her for now, especially since she was quite
inventive in bed and had the heart of a princess-warrior then). All he needed
as he headed into 1968, all he thought he had to do was get that degree, do his
military service if he was drafted, get married (in the church of course, no
one would countenance the simple civil ceremony he would have personally
preferred) and ride LBJ’s wave into some cushy Washington job and that white
picket fence was a sure thing.
…And then came the notice from his
friends and neighbors at the draft board in North Adamsville. Having exhausted
his college deferment and with the recent withdrawal of exemptions for law
students which would have been his obvious shelter had that route been
available he was prime material for induction. Although Markin had softened
somewhat on his stand of emphasizing the good parts of the Vietnam War in the
fight against world-wide communism and his former adherence to the “domino”
theory that if one nation in Southeast Asia fell all would fall which drove all
thinking the death of Jack “Bone-Crusher” Maloney who lived down the at the end
of his street, a guy with whom he had been a corner boy in junior high school
with shook him a little. Still, although no way in hell had he intended to
volunteer, enlist as regular Army, given his career plans that were tied up
with doing one’s public duty would accept induction if drafted. In those days,
now too probably although it no longer has the same cache, military service
still counted for guys who aspire to public service careers. In early 1969
while all hell was going on in the country, while people including me were
being “chicken shit” busted for opposing the war, or smoking dope, or other
random acts of “being free” Markin headed south down to South Carolina for boot
camp. (As for me a couple of serious leg
problems derived from childhood illnesses gave me a 4-F status, although it is
still an open question whether I would have accepted induction or not since
down in Hullsville whatever else they thought or cared about guy did their
military service when called so despite the dope and counter-culture the pull
of that would have been a factor.)
Truth. About three or four days after
he got down there I got a call from Markin, collect, at my girlfriend’s
apartment in Allston where I was staying at the time which I accepted not
knowing what the hell was going on. I thought poor clumsy Markin might have
hurt himself or something. The gist of the call though had bene that Markin said
he had made a mistake, that the whole military thing appalled him and that he,
and I quote “was starting to get ‘religion’” about the war, was going back to
some deep recess Aunt May Catholic Worker, social consciousness thing inherited
through her from some forbears, or something. That night I thought he may have
been sincere as far as he had thought it out to that point, although all those
endless conversations pointed the other way.
If Markin was sincere what to do about
it was another question since he was down south a long way from home and
support (support he could have gotten in Boston, one of the true hotbeds of
anti-war activity where many were willing to help entrapped GIs figure out a
way out. But for the period of basic training and then when he was assigned to
Advanced Infantry Training (AIT) he merely refined his sentiments in letters
that he would sent to me every few days. That AIT designation meant only one
thing-they were training him to be as he put it a “grunt,” or as I put it then
“cannon-fodder” and the only place where that “skill” was needed just then was
on the China Sea, in Vietnam.
Among the things that Markin asked me
to do in those long ago letters was to get in touch with some Quakers over in
Cambridge to see what they thought he could do if he got orders for Vietnam. I
did so, hoping against hope that he would not have to go. But at the end of AIT
he did receive his orders to report to Fort Lewis out in Washington for transit
to Southeast Asia. He was to have a month’s leave before then so he came home
and I met him at the airport. He was leaner than when I had seen him last
carrying that tell-tale duffle bag over his shoulder. But here is where I
realized that he had done some serious thinking, had come part way, so I thought,
over to the side of the angels. He was sporting a very busy mustache which Army
regulations allowed then (although his unkempt one surely could not have passed
muster) AND wearing a new pair of bell-bottomed jeans, a sign of the times.
But that was the exterior, the look to
fit in. Here was his plan. He was the next day going to Cambridge to get some
advice from the Quakers about what to do, about how to forestall going to ‘Nam
as he now called the place under the influence of those nasty drill sergeants
he would tell me about. But that was the surface, the paper chase. Almost
before we got out of the airport he made it very plain that he was not going to
‘Nam, no way. Although a look in his eyes told me he knew that there was a long
road ahead.
Here is how that road unfolded. The
Quakers at that meeting in their counselling center in Cambridge gave him
several options, mainly about filing for conscientious objector status through
the military. Although possible to apply for that was a very hard road then
once you had actually been inducted and made doubly so because the basis of his
objection would had to have been centered on his faith, his formal faith, Roman
Catholicism which was mired in “just war theory,” and not a basis for
discharge. (That “just war theory” was in fact his own position although
without the Catholic trimmings, a position that he still holds today, sometimes
there is no way around fighting the oppressor except by picking up the gun and
that was that with all its contradictions.) But the application was merely a
holding action, forlorn as that was. Another part of that option, advised
informally, by one of the counsellors and not official policy was to go Absent
Without Leave (AWOL) for more than thirty day, or until he had been “dropped
from the rolls” at Fort Lewis and then turn himself in at Fort Devens out in
central Massachusetts where he could make his CO application. Tactically, and
here I admit I pushed him toward that idea, it made sense to work things out
close to home and also where GI resistance support work was becoming a central
focus to opposing the war. (He felt in tough moments that like those nasty
drill instructors told him and his fellow recruits if you got out of line he
was bound for some stockade anyway, or at least he recognized from other cases
he had read and heard about that place was a possible endpoint) And so he did,
did go AWOL for a while, turned himself in at Fort Devens and put in his
application which held him there. Held him there until his application was
denied, summarily denied on those above-mentioned grounds of not being an
absolute objector to war like the Quakers, Mennonites and such. And given
orders once again to report to Fort Lewis for transit to Vietnam.
Even today the rest of the Markin Army
story is a little hazy, and anytime it comes up as when the latest American war
puts “grunts” at risk for some unknown, maybe unknowable reason, he will
dismiss further talk with a simple “I did what I had to do, and I have no regrets
about it.” Part of that haziness is that his case bent a little heavy on the
legal side since I was not privy to those maneuvers but that decision to stay
in the Boston area helped Markin since some people got him in touch with a
lawyer and one way or another that lawyer’s work held him at Fort Devens until
the legal proceedings in the civilian courts had worked its way to the end.
Hazy too though because of the actions Markin had taken while those legal
proceedings were working their slow way through the system. Actions done
without counseling me but when I tell you what he did you will understand.
All during this period of waiting, and
getting a foreboding feeling for where things would lead, lead to some stockade
time that he had avoided by being contrite on the AWOL charges Markin was
getting more and more serious about his anti-war position and about doing
something about it. Something symbolic. Well, he sure did something, something
out of the ordinary. The way I heard the story from him later went like this.
One Monday morning in the late fall of 1969 when the whole fort, the whole of
Fort Devens, was on the main parade grounds for what is called the morning
report, basically to see who is and who is not present, not AWOL, after the
weekend, Markin walked out onto the field in civilian clothes, those now not
new bell-bottomed jeans included, carrying a fairly large hand-made sign-“Bring
The Troops Home” for all to see. Needless to say he was quickly pounced on by
some lifer-sergeants and eventually taken to the stockade for questioning and
to await charges. To make a long story short, Markin spent the rest of time in
the Army in that stockade, spent almost two years there, including some time in
solitary (not for doing anything wrong but the Army officials were so freaked
by his actions, so fearful his actions might spread, that they did not want him
mixing in with the rest of the stockade population). He eventually did get out
though those slow legal proceedings in civilian court otherwise as he always
kids me, he might still be there.
I was on the West Coast, in San Jose,
when I heard that Markin had been released for the stockade in 1971. A couple
of weeks later when I came back East and I went over to Cambridge where he was
staying with some young Quaker gal whom had taken a fancy to him and he to her
(and who I took a fancy to as well, living with her off and on for about a year
after Markin left her for Joyce, who would be that frenetic first wife of his,
since that Quaker gal was a different breathe of fresh air for both of us but
in the end too good and kind for old- time rough and tumble corner boys no
matter how we had changed) there he was, a little pale and smelling that faint
indescribable smell of prison, growing the first remnants of a beard, letting
his hair grow longer, wearing those now fading bell-bottomed denims and a
leather jacket somebody had given him.
As we talked one night a few weeks
later about the future both sensing that the effect of trying to turn the world
upside down had been ebbing of late I told him this when he tried to dismiss
what he had done in the Army to slow the machine down. “But get this, and get
it right, Peter Paul Markin has gotten in synch with his generation, in synch
with the best of his generation, no, with the very best of that generation.”
Enough said.
