On Passing Left-Wing Political “Wisdom” To The Next Generation-With The Lessons Of The 1960s In Mind

On Passing Left-Wing Political “Wisdom” To The Next Generation-With The Lessons Of The 1960s In Mind

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

One of the worst excesses, and there were many although made mostly from ignorance and immaturity and were moreover minuscule compared to the conscious policies of those in power who we were opposing, that we who came of political age in the 1960s were culpable of was our sense that we had to reinvent the wheel of left-wing political struggle. Mostly a very conscious denial and rejection of those thinkers, cadre and organization who had come before us and whom were disqualified from the discourse by having been worn out, old-timey, or just ideas and methods that we had not thought of and therefore irrelevant. The expression “throwing out the baby with the bath water” may seem a cliché but serves a purpose here. Most of the time back then until fairly late, maybe too late when the tide had begun to ebb toward the end of the 1960s and the then current and fashionable anticommunist theories proved to be ridiculously inadequate, we turned our noses up at Marxism, and at Marxist-Leninist ways of organizing the struggle against the American beast.

I can remember more than a few times when somebody identified him or herself as a Marxist that I and the others in the room would groan audibly. Occasionally, as well, taking part in some of the shouting down exercises when the political disputes became heated. Part of the problem was that those who organizationally claimed to be Marxists-the Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party and to some extent the Progressive Labor Party were following political lines that were far to the right (right being relative here in the context of the left-wing movement in this country) of the politics of those who considered themselves radical and revolutionary youth. Those organizations far too eager to traffic with what we called respectable bourgeois forces who were part of the problem since they helped control the governmental apparatus. (I won’t even mention the moribund Socialist/Social Democratic organizations that only old laborites and “old ladies in tennis sneakers,” although that might be a slander against those nice do-gooder ladies, followed as the expression went at the time.) I know, and I know that many others at the time,  had no time for a look at the history books, had nothing but a conscious disregard for the lessons of history, good and bad, that we thought was irrelevant in seeking to build the “newer world.” (Strangely, later after all our empirical experiment proved futile and counter-productive, quoting, quoting loudly and vehemently  from this or that book, by this or that thinker, this or that revolutionary or radical became the rage. Ah, the excesses of youth.)               

Of course not everybody who came through the 1960s passed through any left-wing political school. Despite the nostalgia, despite the now puffed-up claims that we had this or that decisive effect on history, especially these days with the commemoration of the 40^th anniversary of the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the trotting out once again of the overblew claims that the American anti-war movement stopped the Vietnam War rather than the heroic struggles of the people of Vietnam, the number of the young who got catch up more than marginally was significantly smaller that the photographs, videos, and remembrances of the times would suggest. A case in point is my old friend Sam Lowell, from my growing in Carver times whose longtime political trajectory I want to highlight in this sketch.

Highlight to provide something, I am not sure what, perhaps a cautionary tale, to what appears to be the makings of the next “fresh breeze” coming through the land that another Carver corner boy, the late Peter Paul Markin, would harangue us with on lonely Friday nights was coming. The big turn in the environmental movement, the fight for better conditions for young workers (and old) epitomized by the “Fight for $15” movement and above all, the bedrock struggle of the “Black Lives Matter” movement portends some new awakening and we old-timers who have kept the political faith have something about all of that early experience which may push those struggles forward. Here’s Sam’s story and see what you think:   

Sam Lowell when he was young, when he was coming of age in the 1960s along with his hang around guys at Jimmy Jack’s Diner on Main Street in Carver, did not give a “tinker’s damn” (Sam’s term which he would endlessly utter especially when the late Peter Paul Markin would start talking about what was going on outside of the Jimmy Jack corner world) about politics, about the fate of the world, about the burning and pressing issues of that day nuclear disarmament, black civil rights down South (he if anything had the Northern white working class prejudices inherited from his parents and relatives using the “n” word to refer to blacks for a very long time), and the exploding war in Vietnam. Sam’s world, like many guys of that time, like now too as far as anybody can see, was about girls or sex or name the gender combinations, above all about the music of the times, about what is now called the classic age of rock and roll (the folk music minute of that period which Bart Webber tried to get him interested in was, is, a book sealed with seven seals and he still grinds his teeth when any of us who hang with him still mention that genre).

Sam, declared by his local draft board exempt from military service as the sole support of his mother and four younger sisters after he father had passed away suddenly of a massive heart attack in 1965, had pretty much kept his head in the sand about the war, probably supported the war against demon communism as much as anybody in town who was not directly involved in the escalation of the war. That is until one of his hang around guys, Freddie Callahan, Jack’s younger brother, had lain down his head in some rotted jungle in some unpronounceable hamlet in the Central Highlands of Vietnam in late 1967 and who would later have his name placed on that black granite down in Washington, D.C. which would bring a tear to Sam eye every time he visited it despite his complete change of heart about the war.

The war, the hellish flare-up and destructiveness of the war had not been Freddie’s fault, it had not been Freddie’s war as Sam was at pains to explain when he did get active in the anti-war movement and people around town thought that he was being disrespectful of Freddie’s memory and of the flag, actually probably more the flag until very late, maybe about 1972 when even the American Legion types in town saw the writing on the wall, some of them anyway.

Bart Webber was the first to take his slightly held anti-war feelings to the holding up the wall in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner night but he was facing the draft himself in 1966 so Sam had not taken his plight to heart. It really had been Freddie’s death that got him thinking, Freddie whom he had known since fifth grade when his own family had moved to Carver from North Adamsville when the shipbuilding trade there bottomed out and his father sought work in the new electronics plant just built up the road from Carver. Got him thinking about lots of things that did not add up in the world, the world of people just trying to get by without being shot at, or shot up by friend or foe.

One day, maybe in early spring 1968 in any case sometime before summer of that year, Sam had gone to Boston about thirty miles up the road from Carver on some business when he was walking near the Park Street subway station and a young guy about his age in regulation long hair (Sam’s was short although long for Carver young adults just then and commented on at Jimmy Jack’s by the older crowd going in for the old-timers’ blue plate specials and gung-ho guys who had no truck with “fairies” and “hippies”), unkempt beard, blue jeans and sandals, a picture of heaven’s own high priest hippie who handed him a leaflet for an anti-war rally sponsored by Students for a Democratic Society that was going to take place on the Common later that afternoon. (That was the notorious SDS that every right-thinking American believed, including Sam a little before Freddie’s death, as they could not understand kids who seemed to have everything going for them including draft exemptions were so rebellious unless some unknown source was prodding them, as the agents, paid or unpaid, of Moscow or China or someplace antagonistic to the interests of the United States. Every time an SDS rally was broken up by the cops, or mass arrests occurred, those believers breathed a short sigh of relief).     

The guy in hippie garb pressed the issue, something Sam thought was odd since in his experience these hippie types were too laid back doing dope and sex and listening to acid rock to bother about politics usually saying that to get involved only “encouraged” those politicians who had depended on free-wheeling unpaid volunteer youth to campaign for them. That drug, sex and rock and roll were okay with him although he had not been into the dope scene then but rather the traditional Carver Friday and Saturday night down by the cranberry bogs drinking cheap whiskey scene, a scene that Carver guys had been doing since time immemorial at the bogs from what he had heard.

This dippy hippie started yelling at him that it that it was his “duty” to attend the rally and help “stop the fucking war.”  Something in that common language “speech” made Sam take notice and he asked the hippie where he was from. He answered from Lynn, a very working class town on the North Shore of Boston, and told Sam, who blushed a little at the information, that he had already been in the Army, had served in Vietnam and had had enough of seeing his buddies killed or otherwise “fucked up.” Sam then out of the blue mentioned the death of Freddie Callahan, something he had never talked about except with the guys at Jimmy Jack’s, and the hippie told him that he had better get his ass to the rally before half their generation went up in smoke.

Sam pleaded business but that afternoon and early evening as the sun went down in Boston Sam was no longer “not political.” And Lance Jones, the hippie who had “recruited” him was there that afternoon and many times later to make sure that he did not backslide, and to give him the “skinny” on what was really going on in Vietnam and whose interests that commitment was serving. Sam and Lance (and others) would do many things together, sit-in at draft boards (Sam uneasy about that given his own status as exempt but Lance said everybody counted in the struggle), rallies, blocking highways and every other kind of civil protest against the damn war.

The defining moment, the moment Sam saw that the movement was ebbing, was becoming ineffective as a way to stop the “fucking war” as even he was prone to express his outrage at the constant bombings and constant lies about the situation, was down in Washington D.C. on May Day 1971 where there was a separation in the movement between those who wanted to endlessly built, presumably, larger mass rallies to show the people’s war weariness and those who decided it was time for more militant in-your-face tactics when the proposal was to “stop the government, if the government did not stop the war.” Sam had gone with the militants, a decision he has since never regretted although not for the outcome of the event itself which was an unmitigated failure but because of the enormity of that failure he had to think through things a bit more carefully, think more strategically.

He had been manhandled and arrested by the cops the first day out as the governmental forces far outnumbered and were more effective in containing the mass than that mass of people had been in evading the waiting cops and troops. Sam had spent a week in detention in RFK Stadium, a goddam football field as he would always tell everybody afterward, for his troubles (although he tempered his remarks about the stadium after the coup in Chile in 1973 where those militants were not merely harassed and detained but jailed for long periods or shot death out of hand in many cases). 

Sam, Lance, Jack Callahan, Frankie Riley, me, maybe a couple of other guys did other things too, things like taking those continent-wide hitchhikes to the West Coast, the rock concerts, all of the stuff that those who had broken from the old expected cookie-cutter, if in Sam’s case only partially and slowly since he was not sure that the whole thing had not been a dream, and he had those family responsibilities although they lessened as his sisters came of age and left the house and his mother re-married to a good guy who ran a tool and die shop in town and had government contracts for high precision machine work. But it was funny thing about Sam, a thing that was not apparent when he hung around Carver in high school but once he was convinced that he needed to do something he stuck with it (he would later tell anybody who would listen that “sticking with it” included his two drawn out failed marriages beyond repair).

Sam, after that debacle in Washington, had settled in for the long haul, had listened to what Lance had to say about needing to organize better, get more substantial allies. Gave a glance at Marx and some other thinkers who knew what they were talking about if you wanted to  effect real change and not just play at the thing for kicks, or for something to do while you are in school or on the loose, had read some and while for a long time he had his misgivings about taking his political cues from around the edges of rational politics, politics that he and his family, his neighbors, his corner boys had dismissed or worse stigmatized as “commie” talk which still hovered over his thinking. But Sam had been the first in the group to sense in the mid-1970s, particularly after the fall of Saigon and the close of the Vietnam era which had almost split the country in two, that the Garden of Eden was going to be postponed for a long time, that the tide had ebbed just as Bart Webber had sensed the rising tide in the mid-1960s.

But Sam stayed with the commitment to serious political change, to right some wrongs, to be a stand-up guy when some egregious governmental decision reared its ugly head. Stayed with it far longer that Lance who wound up going to school and becoming a CPA, longer than Bart who decided writing law briefs was easier than sitting around with about twelve people dedicated to changing the world and projecting when the next great mass upsurge would occur. Stayed with longer than Frankie Riley who also was drawn to writing legal briefs although he made a comeback in the lead-up to the first Iraq war in 1991. Longer than even the late Peter Paul Markin who had totally lost his moorings, let that “wanting habits” hunger that all the Jimmy Jack’s hang out guys had near the surface of their lives get the best of him and got caught up in the down side of the dope trade and wound up in a back alley face down under mysterious conditions in Sonora down in Mexico after a dope deal went bad. Yeah, those were not good years

So Sam faced the next few decades doing his best to keep up the good fight, working mainly with ad hoc committees that would rise and fall over specific issues like the effects of the “Reagan revolution” in this country, the struggles in Central America throughout the 1980s, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, that first Iraq war in 1991, and a laundry list of other causes great and small which filled his political life in hard times. But always kept his eyes open and ears to the ground to see if some new version of that 1960s experience would get some wind in its sails as new generations got caught up in the whirlwind of trying to right the world’s wrongs. He knew that the 1960s experience could never be exactly replicated, that each new generation would come to understandings in its own ways and forms, did not believe that a lot of 1960s stuff should be replicated but he did believe that another wave would come, believed in that vision for a long time. But when, damn it.

One of Sam’s worries as he got older and got more concerned about the future, especially in the post 9/11 world of the early 2000s, got much more concerned about the possibilities of a socialist future if not for him then for later generations as the American body politic took one of its prolonged turning in and against itself was that there would be no one to pass on whatever accumulated political wisdom he and his dwindling band of aging 1960s sisters and brothers had been through. No one to make sense of the political battles won and lost, no one to pick up the skills necessary to organize any effective opposition to the fierce predatory appetites of the American imperium, or maybe better said, any opposition at all as the post-2003 anti-war landscape demonstrated. Most importantly no one to learn how to avoid the mistakes of the past, mistakes made, unlike the American government, mostly out of willful ignorance, foolhardiness and hubris but certainly avoidable. Avoidable since a great if fairly obvious lesson from his own experiences had been that uprisings against the government, against the social norms of the day are short and precious opportunities not to be squandered by willful ignorance, foolhardiness and hubris.       

Sam’s youthfully derived certitudes had taken a hammering in the process of the reactionary counter-offensive that erupting in the mid-1970s as the spirit of the 1960s rapidly dissipated, and took a decisive turn right under the auspices of the Reagan Revolution. The self-serving, self-promoting, social Darwinist view of society systematically laid out in that period has held a full head of steam since then as everyone almost daily has his or her nose rubbed in the hard fact that most people are not getting ahead while the bourgeoisie, the economic royalists, what did one wag call them, oh yeah, “the one-percent” with all the guns, prosper with no sweat.  That ethos had never really abated despite a couple of promising uprising blips around opposition to the second Iraq war in 2003 which evaporated after the hellish bombs began to fall in earnest in Baghdad and after the world financial meltdown in 2008 and the subsequent short-lived and anarchistic Occupy movement of late 2011.

So Sam had more recently begun to feel that feeling in the extreme,   the fear that there would be nobody to pass the torch to, nobody in the American body politic to learn a couple of things about past left-wing struggles and organizational efforts to attempt to “tame the monster.” Began to wonder if what he believed had not been an idle thought or some kind of self-induced paranoia.

Over the previous several years he had given the immediate reasons some thought as he began to realize that the generation after his which was the logical place to have passed that information onto never in the aggregate cared much about his kind of politics, had turn tail and gotten caught up in the “Reagan revolution” or after witnessing what happened to the ‘60s crowd ducked their heads, seriously ducked their heads when the deal went down. He had also become pretty sanguine about prospects for the generation after that, the grandkids, who seemed preoccupied with “Me” and with looking down toward the ground with their technological gadgetry and their ethereal “social networking” tweeter. But of late he was not so sure he should have been ready to throw in the towel but a new gathering storm, or what old Bart Webber, who he had run into recently in town for the funeral of a brother, had called “the fresh breeze” was still in its embryonic stage.

Sam had had to laugh at one point after a small demonstration of few hundred in Boston’s Park Street on the Common, the historic spot for such activities, against the escalation of the war in Afghanistan in the early days of the Obama administration  (one of the “surges” that was supposed to secure “victory” and which in the final analysis led to more doors in more villages being kicked in and the United States’ action acting, once again,  as a “recruiting sergeant” for ISIS-type organizations). That demonstration drew a cohort young people, people who had not previously been out in the public square but who were bewildered by a “peace” American President, a Nobel Peace Prize winner to boot, sending more boots on the ground after he had told the nation that the best American course was to withdraw from that benighted country. Of course the usual dwindling crew of AARP-worthy older types, the ones that his old friend Pete Markin had called when they were young the “little old ladies in tennis sneakers, Quakers up-tights, and assorted harmless do-gooders” back in the Carver days when he didn’t give a damn about politics and now here he was a “little old man in tennis sneakers” carrying on their seemingly utopian struggle.

An unusual combination indeed. The sly laugh part though was his realization that if there was any new action, any seeking of the “newer world” as that same Markin liked to called it comparable to the 1960s, that it would be the grandpas and grandmas and the grandkids linked up against the world. He was okay with that if that ever happened but after that initial burst of young energy faded he got increasingly more morose about that prospect, and the handing of that goddam torch.

Like with a lot of things in the world of politics, particularly left-wing politics where due to the smallness and isolation of those forces there is tendency to have to react to events not of your own making, the reaction by governments, particularly the United States, following 9/11 with its attempt to institutionalize the national security state and to seek vengeance at any target foreign or domestic that it considered dangerous. No question the scariest time of his political life, the only time he felt the full heat of physical threat from the average citizen whom he assumed usually view people demonstrating about anything as mere cranks and weirdoes was in the aftermath of the frenzied American bombing campaign and troop occupation in Afghanistan in 2001 right after 9/11 when he had with very few others had organized a small, a very small demonstration in opposition to the bombing campaign at Park Street and took more menacing guff from passers-by than he had ever encountered before. Those were dark days when some locally well-known committed peaceniks dependable in fair weather favored folding up the tent rather than face the hostile streets, and no question they were hostile, were suddenly not available to rally.

Like Sam said he hoped the later Occupy movement which arose phoenix-like out of the ashes of the world financial crisis but that fizzled fairly quickly and that sent Sam into another bout with what the hell, no who the hell was going to lead the struggle, who among the young who of necessity with their energy and sense of wonder drive all the great movements, was going to step forward. He felt at that time that he would have no problem taking a back sit in the struggle if the new blood came along.   

Here is a funny thing, a quirk of politics. Everybody Sam talked to, young and old, understood that the social tinder underlying American society only needed a little push to go wild. Knew that as a result of the vast increase in income inequality, knew the weight of the endless wars on the budget and human resources   was at a breaking point, knew that people, a lot of people, did not feel they were getting ahead in life always something that will steadily enflame people. So Sam, and they, the ones he talked to and talked to him knew something had to flare up. But didn’t, for a long time didn’t. Then in a rather quick succession the environment, the fight for a living wage and the fight against police brutality and the fight against the hard racism against black people were taken up by the young, or rather sections of the young from say late 2013 to now.

Not everything that has been proposed, not every action has made political sense but there is some motion toward upping the struggle, getting back into the street politics that Sam had been pushing for some time in various committee meetings since the portals of government seemed to be tone-deaf to what was going on down at the base of society. Here is the kicker though. The kicker for now as things are still in flux, still have a way to go before they are sifted out. Things may be in flux and need sifting out but Sam is starting to get and uneasy feeling already. Sam went to a meeting of those who wanted to respond to the various egregious police shootings of the past years around the country and tried to make some points, give some perspectives. He was rather unceremoniously dismissed by the young leaders there, both the young black and white leaders, as an old-timey too talkative guy.

The young, like in his generation, appear ready to seek to reinvent the wheel. Appear too as well to be as naïve about the enemies they are facing as they were in his generation. But what bothered Sam most of late has been that the young in their identity political way are “ageist” if such a term makes sense, are disrespectful of his right to have his say since when the deal goes down he will be on the barricades right beside them. Sam thought that even with the slights he could still say-“Ah, to young was very heaven” though as old Wordsworth had said in his sunnier days.    

Out In The Be-Bop Drive-In Theater Night-Circa 2015-With Laura Perkins In Mind

Out In The Be-Bop Drive-In Theater Night-Circa 2015-With Laura Perkins In Mind 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Josh Breslin was a man, is a man of institutionalized memories. Part of that came, comes from his long ago minute career as a budding journalist in the alternative media world of the late 1960s and early 1970s when anyone with access to pen and press could, and did, print plenty of interesting material before the hammer fell down and that whole universe fell under the ebb tide of the big bad movement, the counter-revolution as one political wag called it, when the other side, symbolized by the master criminal Richard Milhous Nixon who also happened to be President of the United States, let the whirlwinds of reaction have a field day on our heads. (A couple of the journals that had weathered the storm that he had written for like Rolling Stone which is today just a glossy reprint of Vogue or Vanity Fair for the quasi-hip audience it appeals to in its articles and the consumer-driven advertisements it displays which pay the bill, hence the tiller’s placid reward, and the local Boston Phoenix which went belly up a few years ago after subsisting as a “hook-up” venue do not undermine that ebb tide understanding on the media front.)

Part of Josh’s respect for memory also came from his association with the long gone, long moaned over Pete Markin whom he had met out in San Francisco in the high tide summer of love, 1967 and who came to a bad end in the mid-1970s down in Sonora, Mexico after a high-end drug deal went down the wrong way and he wound up face down in a dusty back alley with a couple of slugs in the back of his head who always, always lived to have about two thousand juicy memory references handy on the off chance that, for example, somebody might quickly need to know Millard Fillmore’s standing among  American Presidents (just above Richard Nixon at last check) and the practice had rubbed off on him.

On a recent night that memory business got a full workout as Josh went back deep into his youth (and the youth of his lady friend, Laura Perkins, who is key to this particular memory flash) returning to the scene of many a youthful misadventure-the still functioning Olde Saco Drive-In up in Maine.              

Drive-In? Well, yes, for those who have only heard about this institution of the high golden age 1950s and 1960s automobile and have no personal knowledge that they really still exist in spots except in “generation of ’68’’ nostalgia movies like American Graffiti  the drive-in. Here’s the skinny (or if you are still in disbelief then go to Wikipedia and check the information out). Back when everybody was dying to have a car from old grand-pappies to barely sixteen year old boys (and it was mainly boys, girls were usually okay grabbing the family car for a night out with the girls, a night “cruising’ the boulevards looking for the heart of Saturday, looking for boys just as Josh and his crowd were “cruising” looking for girls or sitting, sitting in the front close to some hunk with a “boss” car and glad to be the subject of some salacious  Monday morning girls’ lav gossip) the whole axis of night-life changed once everybody realized that you were no longer tied to the house (or at most the neighborhood), were not tied to constantly eating at home, sleeping at home or watching the new-fangled television or go to the local box movie house. In a car-fixated time you could travel and stay in a motel overnight, you could eat, if you dared, at a drive-in restaurant or while away the evening in the snugness of your automobile at the drive-in theater. Hail god car.   

Of course while anybody, child or adult, could do all those things the drive-in movies became along with the drive-in restaurant one of the moments of the teen ritual, although we were all back then brought up on parents taking their children to the drive-in as an easy way to get out of the house what with a double-feature, a snack bar and a playground to entertain the kiddies. That kids’ stuff is just that. The teen drive-in movie scene is the stuff of nostalgia. Josh wasn’t sure when he stopped going to the drive-in except sometime in the 1970s, wasn’t sure when drive-ins kind of folded up and died away of hubris or indifference at some point that he did not remember (after in some cases serving up some soft-core porn to keep an audience) and wasn’t sure if they even existed anymore. Wasn’t sure that is until he was heading to Portland, Maine for a conference and decided to take Route One instead of U.S. 95 up from his home in Boston.

Now that was no random decision since  Josh had grown up in Olde Saco a few miles south of Portland and had been for a lot of reasons of late in an Olde Saco frame of mind after the passing of Rene Dubois his old high school classmate and runaround corner boy back then. As he worked his way up Route One when he got to Olde Saco he happened to look to the right and there kind of hidden from view was an ancient dilapidated crude handmade sign for the Olde Saco Drive-In and moreover that the place was still open for business. He did not have time to stop but that sign, that memory kind of festered in his mind for a few weeks until he decided to go spent a few days (along with Laura) up at an old friend’s house in Wells (an old friend of Markin’s really from North Adamsville down in Massachusetts where they had grown up which is how he had met Jimmy Jenkins the owner of the place back after the summer of love, 1967). One day Josh fervently asked Laura to “take the ticket, take the ride,” an expression that he used when he wanted them to do something out of the ordinary. And going to a drive-in, the Olde Saco Drive-In was not something that he had done in about forty years so he was really doing a memory stretch. Laura at first didn’t want to go, said she had no history and hence no memory for drive-ins since between her shoulder-to-the-wheel no-nonsense parents not being the drive-in movie types and living out in Podunk in upstate New York where she could not remember if there were drive-ins in the area Josh’s big deal was a deflated balloon to her. But she eventually relented after he promised her to do about fourteen different things from taking her to dinner, cleaning up a laundry list (her laundry list) of stuff, to cooking in return which he took as a fair bargain under the circumstances, so they were off.

Now this drive-in thing back in the day had a certain ritual to it, a Josh and his gang ritual anyway. He had already thought after seeing the old place about the travails of childhood when after a long shift at the MacAdams Textile Mill where his father, Prescott,  worked as a machinist before the mills that sustained the town headed south (first to American South then the world South to places like Indonesia and Singapore in search of that greedy increased profit wrought by cheaper wage packets), and Delores (nee LeBlanc and hence her hometown of Olde Saco one of the work stopping points heading south from native Quebec a generation or two before her own), his mother, both work weary would bundle up he and his four sisters and head to the “Olde Saco” for the night’s double feature, some illicit snacks (you were not supposed to bring your own foods in but what was to stop you and it would not be, despite five Breslin children howls, until he went there with his gang that he would learn of the delights at the snack bar-the buttered drenched slightly stale, maybe popped from the night before, popcorn, the fizz-less sodas sickenly sweetly syrup and caffeine clogged, the desiccated cardboard-like pizza light on cheese, sauce and flavor, the greasy grimy hamburgers only saved by slathered ketchups and mustard, no onions, no, onions if you wanted to go in to that good night with a certain she but more of that later, and the food-free, calorie free hot dogs in their grave-like mushy white flour enriched buns that would become his staple on drive-in nights, his sisters too from what they said, from what they said on their date nights if the guy wanted to get anywhere, anywhere at all with them, no cheapskates need apply their motto), and the playground conveniently located at the  end just below the movie screen where he and his sisters would climb the jungle jim, slide the slide, mangle the see-saw and seek heaven on the swings. Kindly childhood thoughts as almost all children would think (and later measured, nicely measured in his parents favor since they really did not have the surplus dough to spent on such “frills” when the rent was always behind and his mother made something of a secular rosary out of her weekly white envelopes on the kitchen table bill-paying chores always short, always damn short although that remembrance too late to do him, or them, any good since they had been estranged so long).

No, what drove Josh these days were the teenage drive-in movies where he had come of age in the Olde Saco night. Of course it started with larcenous intent (nice legal term courtesy of Sam Lowell, the lawyer friend of Markin also met after they headed back East together in the summer of love year 1967) when the late Rene Dubois, a year older than the rest of the guys since he had just come down from Quebec and was in a special language immersion class (although they didn’t call it that then but something like special needs, or for dumb kids or something) for a year before joining the regular class who got his driver’s license first and more importantly since he worked at La Croix’s Garage over on Main Street after school and on weekends his first car an old beat up ‘53 Chevy that he worked on to bring back to life (as he would do with a succession of cars up to a “boss” ’57 two-toned white and cherry red naturally Chevy that was nothing but a “babe” magnet and not just for teeny-bopper girls either). But before the girls started cluttering up Rene’s life (as they would through four freaking marriages, a bushel of kids, and a bevy of grandkids) he was the “max daddy” of the road taking his corner boys like Josh to the Olde Saco Drive-In.

Here is where the larceny comes in though. In those days admission was something like three dollars a head for the nightly double-feature (Josh urged that he not be quoted on that price for like lots of things these days that number seems to have come out of the mist of time and may be totally wrong but the price cheap anyway although not cheap enough for “from hunger” working class projects kids like him) so what they would do is pig-pile three or four guys in the big ass trunk (occasional sightings of 1950s automobile models still on the road and a recent visit to an automobile museum out in San Diego only confirmed to Josh what he remembered about how big the trunks were then, and how big bad ass the engines were too, and although today’s are quite a bit more efficient there was some psychological lift then in being seen in those big ass cars, certainly the girls would turn their heads something he had not seen anybody with today’s zip cars and minis), maybe depending on size a couple of guys in the rear seat wells so for about  six bucks (remember the guess-aspect please), the admission Rene and whoever was riding shot-gun paid (later correctly split up among the total number admitted since that was the whole point) half the freaking neighborhood got into the show for less than a dollar.

Now one might ask, aside from the silly question of the morality if not the legality of such moves whether the admission booth attendant would not get wise to the whole scene. What are you kidding this poor cluck probably got about a dollar an hour for his or her work and was not worried about playing “copper,” not when that person probably was running the same scam when he or she was going to the drive-in. The important thing is that later, later when it wasn’t about “from hunger” guys but meeting carloads of girls from the neighborhoods who were using the same “technique” sometimes Josh and the boys would con some poor girls into the trunk and since it was tight quarters “cop” a quick feel wherever that stray hand landed (the only really acceptable kind of “copping” when you thought about it) a quick feel and maybe get them “in the mood” for the fogged up window scene every guy dream of.  (Later Josh would tell one and all out in California he blushed more than the girls when he pulled that maneuver although he caught more than his fair share of “in the mood” girls, he was not known by the moniker the “Prince of Love” in the great summer of love night, circa 1967, for nothing).  

Josh laughed when he thought about that silly larceny and that “copping” kids’ stuff but later, come junior and senior years of high school the ritual became much more serious when three was a crowd time, when it was important to be able to separate out a bit and go to what was named the “sweat box” by the local guys, the place where the single guy with a single girl placed their automobile away from the prying carload of younger teen guys or girls and better still from prying eyes of young parents, grown suddenly old and responsible once the kids started coming, shielding their kids from the fogged bound cars at the back of the lot. The “sweat box” was the section where if one asked a quick question about the plot of the film one would get some strange answers while the parties were straightening out their clothes. Josh said if you really thought about it no parent would go within fifty yards of that “passion pit.”

Not all of Josh’s memories of the Olde Saco Drive-In were great big cream puff dreams. Later after the big “cultural revolution” that was the 1960s lost steam guys like Josh (and more dramatically the moaned for late Pete Markin) were left stranded for a while, lost their moorings. Like the time Josh was down on his own luck and forced to sneak back to Olde Saco and stay low for reasons that best not detain us here. Here’s how he told the story:

“Mimi Murphy knew two things, she needed to keep moving, and she was tired, tired as hell of moving, of the need, of the self-imposed need, to keep moving ever since that incident five years ago with her seems like an eternity ago sweet long gone motorcycle boy, Pretty James Preston. Poor Pretty James and his needs, no, his obsessions with that silly motorcycle, that English devil’s machine, that Vincent Black Lightning that caused him more anguish than she did. And she gave him plenty to think about as well before the end. How she tried to get him to settle down a little, just a little, but what was a sixteen old girl, pretty new to the love game, totally new, but not complaining to the sex game, and his little tricks to get her in the mood for that, and forget the settle down thing. Until the next time.

Maybe, if you were from around North Adamsville way, or maybe just Boston, you had heard about Pretty James, Pretty James Preston and his daring exploits back in about 1967 and 1968. Those got a lot of play in the newspapers for months before the end. Before that bank job, the one where as Pretty James used to say all the time, he cashed his check. Yes, the big Granite City National Bank branch in Braintree heist that he tried to pull all by himself, with Mimi as stooge look-out. She had set him up for that heist, or so she thought. No, she didn’t ask him to do it but she got him thinking, thinking about settling down just a little and he needed a big score, not the penny ante gas station and mom and pop variety store robberies that kept them in, as he also said, coffee and cakes but a big payday and then off to Mexico, maybe Sonora, and a buy into the respectable and growing drug trade.

And he almost, almost, got away clean that fatal day, that day when she stood across the street, a forty-five in her purse just in case he needed it for a final getaway. But he never made it out the door. Some rum brave security guard tried to uphold the honor of his profession and started shooting nicking Pretty James in the shoulder. Pretty James responded with a few quick blasts and felled the copper. That action though slowed down the escape enough for the real coppers to respond and blow Pretty James away. Dead, DOA, done. Her sweet boy Pretty James.

According to the newspapers a tall, slender red-headed girl about sixteen had been seen across the street from the bank just waiting, waiting according to the witness, nervously. The witness had turned her head when she heard the shots from the bank and when she looked back the red-headed girl was gone. And Mimi was gone, and long gone before the day was out. She grabbed the first bus out of Braintree headed to Boston where eventually she wound up holed up in a high-end whorehouse doing tricks to make some moving dough. And she had been moving ever since, moving and eternally hate moving. Now, for the past few months, she had been working nights as a cashier in the refreshment stand at the Olde Saco Drive-In Theater to get another stake to keep moving. She had been tempted, a couple of times, to do a little moon-lighting in a Portland whorehouse that a woman she had worked with at her last job, Fenner’s Department Store where she modeled clothes for the rich ladies, had told her about to get a quick stake but she was almost as eternally tired at that prospect as in moving once again.

Then one night Josh came in. Came in for popcorn and a Sprite she remembered, although she did not remember on that busy summer night what the charge was. He kind of looked her over quickly, very quickly but she was aware that he looked her over and, moreover, he was aware that she knew that he had looked her over. The look though was not the usual baby, baby come on look, but a thoughtful look like he could see that she had seen some woes and, well, what of it. Like maybe he specialized in fixing busted-up red-heads, or wanted to. She knew she wasn’t beautiful but she had a certain way about her that certain guys, guys from motorcycle wild boy Pretty James Boy to kind of bookish college guys like this one, wanted to get next to. If she let them. And she hadn’t, hadn’t not since Pretty James. But she confessed to herself, not without a girlish blush, that she had in the universe of looks and peeks that make up human experience looked him over too. And then passed to the next customer and his family of four burgeoning tray-full order of hot dogs, candy, popcorn and about six zillion drinks.

A couple of nights later, a slow night for it was misting out keeping away the summer vacation families that kept the drive-in hopping before each show and at intermission, a Thursday night usually slow anyway before the Friday change of the double-feature, Josh came in again at intermission. This time out of nowhere, without a second’s hesitation, she gave him a big smile when he came to the register with his now familiar popcorn and Sprite. He didn’t respond, or rather he did not respond right away because right behind him there were a couple of high school couples who could hardly wait to get their provisions and get back to their fogged-up car and keep it fogged up. They passed by him and hurried out the door.

Just then over the refreshment stand loudspeaker that played records as background music to keep the unruly crowds a little quiet while they waited for their hamburgers and hot dogs came the voice of Doris Troy singing her greatest hit, Just One Look. Then he broke into a smile, a big smile like he was thinking just that thought that very minute, looked up at the clock, looked again, and looked a third time without saying a word, She gave him a slight flirty smile and said eleven o’clock and at exactly eleven o’clock he was there to meet her. Maybe she thought as they went out the refreshment stand door she would not have to keep moving, eternally moving after all.

A couple of fretful months later one nigh Mimi slipped out the back door of her rooming house over on Atlantic Avenue and Josh never heard from her again. Josh figured that after telling him about Pretty James one lonesome whiskey-drinking night she had to move, keep moving tired or not.”

So not all the old time Olde Saco Drive-In dreams worked out. And in the big scheme of things in Josh’s life, some ups, some downs stirred memories, good or bad, of drive-in movie times would usually rate pretty far down on the list. But these semi-retired days Josh has had time to think about old time things. Like a lot of guys, gals too but he wouldn’t speak for them since he had only talked to his guys about those old days he wished to have a re-run on such things knowing full well that you “can’t go home again,” the past is dead and gone. Hell, didn’t he know that when he tried to rekindle some old high school friendships and wound up giving it up after he realized that time had swept whatever they all had in common away. Know too when he tried that last reconciliation with his family that it was too late. Hell even a simple thing like planning to go to class reunion got all balled up when some old flame, or kind of old flame, wanted to start something up again now that she was “single” (after three divorces) and Josh too (ditto on the divorces, the number as well). So he had had to nix that plan.     

And that is where Laura came in, Laura who had “saved” him from some tiresome lonely old age when they finally got together, finally figured they were “soulmates” as she called it (and he agreed).  See Josh figured some things maybe can’t be worked out from the past but something simple like a trip down memory lane at the Olde Saco Drive-In might be a kick. Like was mentioned before Laura was very cool to the idea but since they were staying nearby, the weather was warm and the double-bill (yeah, they kept the double-bill tradition alive) while not her usual arty films were probably passable flicks she finally agreed. So on a Wednesday night they drove the twenty miles or so up to Olde Saco from Wells with a certain amount of excitement now that they had decided to do the thing (Laura with her drive-in-less youth was now curious about the whole ritual).

When Josh drove up to the admissions booth he noticed that the old standard per carload idea was also still in effect, verifying what he had already told Laura about the old time larcenies. (By the way he can confirm that times had changed, that inflation had worked its ways in the forty or fifty years that have passed since now a carload was twenty dollars and that is a number that he had no trouble remembering since it was his treat.) As he passed his money along he kiddingly mentioned to the attendant that he had twelve people in the trunk but instead of some incomprehension on his part the kid told Josh that he had a few nights before had to check a couple of trunks and found them filled with teenagers. The tradition lives! (Although Josh felt some chagrin later over the kid playing “copper” on the deal).         

As Josh and Laura found a spot, a little out of the way since they had passed a number of carloads of families with kids not sitting in the cars like the old days but spread out in front of their spots with lawn chairs so they could have a little quiet. Josh remarked that except for some overgrown grass the place looked pretty much the same as in the old days with a few exceptions. First off there were no speakers, you know, the ones on the posts that you clipped to your slightly opened front door window (and half the time in your rush to get out of the place in less than an hour as the traffic jam began at the exit you forgot the damn thing and not a few would be down on the ground after a night’s work). Nowadays, as Laura noticed on the screen, you tuned into a numbered station on your car radio. Okay, progress can’t be stopped and those silly speakers were really a nuisance. Another thing was that the old time playground that he and his sisters played in as kids were gone, replaced by a couple more rows of car spots. The most striking thing though was, probably as a matter of saving dough, the refreshment stand area looked almost exactly as it had, except maybe a new coat of paint about ten years ago, when he spied Mimi behind the counter back in the 1970s with the same “menu.” (Don’t tell Laura, please don’t tell Laura that Josh had some pangs about Mimi on seeing that stand, okay).

Actually the most striking thing about the evening though was not the same old stand but that there was not a speck of an indication that the old “sweat box” section was still around. And it made sense when he and Laura were talking about the subject during intermission. Kids have about twenty other ways of entertaining themselves, are more committed to mall-rat-dom and other locales these days so things do move on. Josh had not expected any such replication although it would have heartened him if it had. It was okay and they had a nice evening.

Hey, what about the double-feature, what about the movies. Well, Josh said he was not sure but he thought one was a spy movie, something out of the Cold War, and the other was a flipped out romance. And he said Laura agreed. When he named the two titles though when I checked they had nothing to do with spies or romances, one was a star-wars type movie, the other a gangster movie. Yeah, some things never change at the drive-in, well almost never except Josh complained about how hard it was to maneuver these days with these damn bucket car seats and the console in the middle, and about how they forgot to bring paper towels to wipe off the fog from the windshields.           

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons- *From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- On The Anniversary Of His Death- Ninety Years of the Communist Manifesto (1937)

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons-    *From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- On The Anniversary Of His Death- Ninety Years of the Communist Manifesto (1937)

Click on the headline to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archives for an online copy of the article mentioned in the headline.

Markin comment:

The name Leon Trotsky hardly needs added comment from this writer. After Marx, Engels and Lenin, and in his case it is just slightly after, Trotsky is our heroic leader of the international communist movement. I would argue, and have in the past, that if one were looking for a model of what a human being would be like in our communist future Leon Trotsky, warts and all, is the closest approximation that the bourgeois age has produced. No bad, right?

Note: For this 70th anniversary memorial I have decided to post articles written by Trotsky in the 1930s, the period of great defeats for the international working class with the rise of fascism and the disorientations of Stalinism beating down on it. This was a time when political clarity, above all, was necessary. Trotsky, as a simple review of his biographical sketch will demonstrate, wore many hats in his forty years of conscious political life: political propagandist and theoretician; revolutionary working class parliamentary leader; razor-sharp journalist (I, for one, would not have wanted to cross swords with him. I would still be bleeding.); organizer of the great October Bolshevik revolution of 1917; organizer of the heroic and victorious Red Army in the civil war against the Whites in the aftermath of that revolution; seemingly tireless Soviet official; literary and culture critic: leader of the Russian Left Opposition in the 1920s; and, hounded and exiled leader of the International Left Opposition in the 1930s.

I have decided to concentrate on some of his writings from the 1930s for another reason as well. Why, with such a resume to choose from? Because, when the deal went down Leon Trotsky’s work in the 1930s, when he could have taken a political dive, I believe was the most important of his long career. He, virtually alone of the original Bolshevik leadership (at least of that part that still wanted to fight for international revolution), had the capacity to think and lead. He harnessed himself to the hard, uphill work of that period (step back, step way back, if you think we are “tilting at windmills” now). In that sense the vile Stalinist assassination in 1940, when Trotsky could still project years of political work ahead, is not among the least of Stalin’s crimes against the international working class. Had Trotsky lived another ten years or so, while he could not have “sucked” revolutions out of the ground, he could have stabilized a disoriented post-World War communist movement and we would probably have a far greater living communist movement today. Thanks for what you did do though, Comrade Trotsky.

From The Gals And Guys Who Know The Face Of War Up Close And Personal-The Iraq And Afghan War Veterans

From The Gals And Guys Who Know The Face Of War Up Close And Personal-The Iraq And Afghan War Veterans

Frank Jackman comment:

In America there is an overweening respect for the military, for military officers mainly, the guys and gals who lead the bloody endless wars of this century. They look good on camera, all austere and all business as they lead the general population by the nose into the next ambush. But starting back in Vietnam, starting back in the war of my generation soldiers, sailors, air personnel, regular rank and file guys (almost all guys then) started balking at their fate. Started to talk back, to say stop the madness. And if they could not do it, or would not, since the choice or the stockade and/or opprobrium back home was a hard fact of life for most working class guys, when they were service-bound they certainly did after they got out. Formed an organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) that did a hell of a lot to bring the anti-war message home. See they had “street cred”,’ they had been in the hellholes and beyond, had come back to the “real world” a lot wiser than the kids who went in with dreams of glory and fistfuls of medals. The guys and gals who fought, and continue to fight don’t forget, the damn Iraq and Afghan wars have that same “street cred.” Listen up, please.   

Riverdale Blues-For Allen Ginsburg On The 60th Anniversary Of “Howl” (1956)

Riverdale Blues-For Allen Ginsburg On The 60^th Anniversary Of “Howl” (1956)

By Lance Lawrence

A sad-eyed dope hung around the back of the old-fashioned framed schoolhouse lazily drawing the summer breeze (he lied since the school had only recently been constructed in the big post World II baby boom and he had gone to school here since the place opened-he lied for the sake of lying,  lying to himself mostly especially about his sexual longing just then as he hoped to get some chick who was hanging out by the bushes to give him a hand job, give him one like Lucinda had given him that time at the movies when sitting up in the balcony she had unzipped his pants and let her hand move so fast he jerked off after about a minute he was so excited and she only twelve imagine what she will be like when she gives it all up but fat chance he would have to grab that piece since his quick spurt, his sperm, his cum,  had gotten all over her dress and she was pissed off at him when it dried and got all crusty on the way home so some other guy would grab her cherry-that  was only a matter of time), wished he could get “washed clean,” washed clean real clean which is what the guys around school called it when their Lucindas moved their hands fast, get his sperm count down, his hot flash temperature, whatever that was.

Cock sore, cock was what the guys called their hanging things, their pulsating penises, so he followed although he got flushed when some guy maybe Billy, Billy Bradley the guy who always seemed to be the first guy with the sex knowledge, first said the word and he had asked what that was-damn. Cock and cocksuckers, waiting on his corner boy, waiting on Billy, waiting on his secret comrade in arms the hazy night as he looked around over heaven’s nightshade (and the guy who would probably be the first to get into Lucinda’s panties since she had already given him her fast hand action and according to Billy something more although Billy wouldn’t  specify but at least that action which is why he had, on Billy’s solemn advise taken Lucinda to the movies in the first place, had asked if she wanted to go to the balcony and when she said yes he knew he was going to get his clock cleaned-he just wished he hadn’t gotten off so fast with Lucinda since Billy’s older brother, Max, had given them a vivid description of what was what when you got a girl all wet and then stuck your stick in her and listened to her moan, moan like humankind had been doing for a million years, and he sure could have put his stick wherever she wanted it-probably laugh at him if he got off too fast-again).

Billy at first nowhere to be found, nowhere to be found that is if he did not want to be found and then the next thing you knew Billy, secret comrade in arms, came sauntering, his style just then before puberty would turn his feet around and he would thereafter walk like some Western movie cowboy would now sing his life-song, what did the poet, the old Solomonic poet call to the high heaven’s, oh yes, plainsong for a candid world, a world before massive bombings, massive unacknowledged deaths for shady ladies and other figment s of his imagination. Come sauntering in the bejesus night looking both ways to see some straggling ungainly girls, some young Lucinda who knew the score, knew if they had hung around that back of the school just then that they had heard about Lucinda, had maybe asked their older sisters or brothers what a hand job was and how to do that. They were eager if they were hanging in the shadows and the dope was hoping that some innocent would get moved by the Billy plainsong (he would learn later that plainsong was more religious that any old rock song even big bop doo wop song but by then rock and roll was his religion anyway) hovering around the fence waiting for something, anything to happen and then a word, a sullen word came off his tongue and the night’s work had begun, maybe a generation was on its way to immortality, was ready to break out of the quiet of the 1950s night without shame and without confession.

Tripping over “she’s so fine, so fine, wish she were mine doo lang doo lang” or the corner boys, the male version of He’s So Fine by the Chiffons, the big bopping song of 1956, the guys, including the dope, backing Billy up in the doo wop frenzy that had swept tween and teen just then and the scent of the jasmine coming from the girl-shadows by the harbor, the marsh’s fetid mephitic smell giving way to the night’s splendor, maybe stolen perfumes from mother’s dresser or some girlish bath-soap all fresh and dewy. Doo lang, doo lang  along with Eddie, Jason, Frank and beloved Peter Paul slapping time and those wanderlust girls along the fences came drifting to the scent of Old Spice that the boys had splashed on father’s bureau, father’s time, father’s sweat but not to  be thought of in the hazy summer night. And as the moon hovered against the sun the girls got closer and closer, one Lucinda’s younger sister, Laura, all the sisters in that family playing off mother Lottie having “L” –encrusted first letter names,  aimed his way and he waved her over to head toward old dead sailors’ graveyard down the far corner of the school lot (oh what those sailors could have told those young bucks from their rotted graves and pock-marked burial stones about hand jobs and blow jobs too when the ante was up about what a girl had to come across with-and if out to sea some young sailor boy plaything but that latter knowledge would not click until later).  A few minutes later the dope came back out of the sailor shadows looking like the king of the hill and Laura wiping her hand with a handkerchief with a faint smile (they had already agreed to meet that next night down at that sailors’ last rest, down among the mortal stone forsaking the last ship out  and by-past the foreplay plainsong-the young learn fast so maybe those sailors would have been stating the obvious when the poured forth in their dank, damp waterfront taverns about blow jobs and hand jobs). 

But hell all that was coming of age, coming of age in a time when things were moving too fast even for quick learners and the corner boys got further and further along in their primitive sex lessons and no more stupid thoughts of red scares, Uncle Joe’s scourge in Moscow town, and Cold War down in the basement hide your ass under some oaken desk and somebody said that was real, that was okay but that scent lingered against the jimson in the jeans from Satan’s tower, look homeward, look homeward angels. Ecstasy-pure ecstasy in the hazy night of some youthful dream. 

Billy would declare (and the dope would secretly agree and write every word down to be passed around later like some latter day glad tiding-like some Mount Sinai-filched grainy stone tablet) that they were in a spin, the world was changing and although he had no empirical evidence, when did the king of the hill need hard-boiled evidence going back to Adam’s time, facts,  he had heard from his oldest brother who already had graduated from high school that not only was the music changing, not only were people, and not just kids, starting to laugh at the idea that going down some rat hole of a basement and hiding under some rotten oaken desk when the big one came [the bomb] would do anybody any good. Started to challenge everything from the whole idea of the red scare night, the whole idea that everybody needed to live their ticky-tacky lives in dread of the reds, having a big ass finned gas-eating car and not “keeping up with the Jones.” Especially day to day the latter.

Billy didn’t get most of what that oldest brother said (and neither did the dope who dutifully wrote it all down anyway which he had “contracted” with his secret comrade Billy to do, to act as scribe which became his nickname at first resented as part of the price of Billy letting a dope hang around with him and his boys and through that circumstance to get to the girls already mentioned above) but he did get that the way things were couldn’t be the future, couldn’t be the way they would have to operate in the world. Couldn’t be the down at the heel existence that he, his family and all the poor bedraggled families that resided in the Five Points “wrong side of the tracks” neighborhood. His oldest brother, Jack to give him a name, the guy telling him all this stuff with the idea of making him wise to the world he was about to face in the not too distant future, had been something of the family rebel.

Jack was always heading to Harvard Square even in high school which was no mean task by bus and later by car when he came of age for a driver’s license, since that place was about forty miles from Riverdale to soak up whatever rebellion was going down (that family rebel designation would fall on Billy later in a very different way when it came his turn to figure out the freaking world and after a short attempt at a break-out rock and roll musical career turned to armed robberies and such eventually getting killed in a shoot- out with cops down in North Carolina trying to all doped up rob a White Hen convenience store). Jack was always talking about “beat” this, “beat” that, some kind of fraternity of rebels who wanted to turn the world upside down (and it was mostly a fraternity the women were mainly around for decoration and whatever sex they wanted to provide). Or maybe better resign from the “square” world and find a little breathing space to do their thing-to write, drink, travel, do dope, have sex but mostly to write for a candid world, a world where the rules didn’t make sense-no way.      

One night when Jack was home for minute during summer semester break from college-he went on a scholarship, how else would the family get the money to send the first in the family to go to college, to Boston University, Class of 1959- he decided to tell Billy and his boys in an excited manner his latest tale “what was what,” the expression all the guys used then to signify, well, they had an idea of what was what. Tell them what it was to be a “beat daddy” (not literally a daddy okay but Jack had had to make the distinction because you never knew when somebody in the neighborhood might be a daddy having knocked up some older Lucinda and had to head out of town or get hitched under the sign of the paternal shotgun). Said it was all summed up, everything that was pushing the world forward in a poem, a “beat” poem not like those rhyming simon poems Mister Riley, the old-time Jazz Age English teacher at Riverdale High  a would spout forth from some old Englishman’s pen, Alfred Lord Tennyson or Byron or Browning, guys like that, a guy named Ginsburg, Allen Ginsburg, a smart Jewish guy who was the chief propagandist for the beat-ness thing in a poem, Howl,  that was making the rounds in Harvard Square and would have its fair share of legal problems but that was later. (Jack was not exactly right about who had been the “real” max daddy of the beats-influence wise it was probably Jack Kerouac when he boiled the 1950s youth nation with his wild men travelogue On The Road, the immediate post-war whirlwind adventures of him and his buddy, Adonis personified Neal Cassady with Ginsburg playing a bit role in that one. But Ginsburg was right in the mix with that fucking long mad monk poem-Brother Jack’s exact words remembered by the Scribe-written down).              

Jack said that Ginsburg had had it right-had seen in the great American blue-pink western night stuff that would drive a guy crazy with what was happening to the world as the machine was getting the upper-hand. Ginsburg had had some kind of vision, one of the guys who hung around the Hayes-Bickford in Harvard claiming that it was dope, marijuana favored by the down-trodden cold fields braceros from old Mexico, or peyote buttons, the stuff favored by the Hopis and the “ghost dancers” out where the states are square that fueled the visions. Visions of an unkempt, unruly world where the philosopher-king was a guy named Carlo Solomon who had the whole thing down cold. Knew the West had been saturated, that there was nowhere else to go but the China seas and so he hammered home the idea that out in the Coast was where humankind had to make a last stand against the Molochs, against the fucking night-takers who have been with us forever. Only the righteous warrior-poets would enter the garden. That Hayes-Bickford clarion calling claimed Ginsburg was talking about the Garden of Eden before the Fall.   

The madness, the sheer madness making everybody from the hunger days of the 1930s and the rat rationing days of World War II hustle to the sound of steel and iron and not the freaking sound of waves slashing timidly to shore. Started ripping up words a minute not all complete phrases and without some kind of formal pacing sense, although if you heard the thing out loud it would have its own jazz-like cadence somebody who was at the recital in Frisco town had been quoted in a newspaper as saying, jazz cadence and stoned on dope or liquor was all you needed that same source ventured. Ginsburg was not hung up on form, like those old fart Englishman who were totally hung up on form almost as bad as those sonnet bastards Riley made the class memorize but talking about post-war modern minds beaten down by the sound of industry humming away talking about a meltdown, talking crazy stuff about angel hipsters (portraying a sentence of 1940s pre-beat daddies hanging around Times Square hustling and conning an unsuspecting world), talking about Negro streets which they all knew as “n----r streets” over in the Acre section of Boston, a place to stay away from, talking about taking on the monster in the mist Moloch mano y mano, talking about the new heroes of the American night all-American swordsman Jack and secret love that dare not speak its name crush on Adonis of the New Western night courtesy of Laramie Street in mile-high Denver Neal Cassady to be exact the new model of the  last cowboy standing. Neal some amazing cocksman to be envied and emulated screwing every honey who was not tied down to a chastity belt on farms, in the restrooms of diners and out in the back alley if the restroom was occupied. Damn. 

Ginsburg had actually been in the nut house in New York someplace, had dedicated the poem to some fellow inmate who was crazier that he was or dedicated to all the crazies, the looney bin Jack had called the place like the place all the guys in Riverdale did when they talked about where screwballs and goofs, even Kerouac’s holy goofs learned about later, should have landed, so he knew what deal was going down, knew that America had turned into a cesspool even if nobody else saw the drain coming. Jack had made Billy and the dope laugh when he told them the reason Ginsburg was in the looney bin was he had been sent there by some judge after he got into legal trouble, committed or was present at some unknown crime, an event which made the pair respect this Ginsburg more since cons in the old Riverdale neighborhood were looked up to with respect and admiration, to try to get rid of his faggot-ness, his homosexuality, his liking boys and not girls. (They laughed not because they knew that Jack hated fags and queers which he did and had put paid to that idea having gone down to Provincetown where all the fags and queers hung out all dressed up and all leering at anybody who came off the Provincetown boat from Boston with his own boys and raised hell with them-more than once. Beat a couple up who were eyeing him too closely and one in drag whom he thought was a girl until he got close enough to see some slight stubble on “her” face. Seems that Jack was giving Ginsburg a pass on his sexual preference just because he was a beat guy-Billy and the dope wouldn’t have given the fucker the time of day even if the guy was a prophet if he hadn’t been a con when they talked about it later since they shared Jack’s hatred of fags-and dykes like every red-blooded guy did then.)     

Jack knew what the unholy kid goofs were laughing about, about his seeing literary merit even if the guy was a faggot. The minute he said “faggot” he knew they would goof but he thought they should know what else the guy had to say. He told them a lot of good writers and poets were “light on their feet” and that was something you had to deal with if you wanted to read anything worth reading and let the faggot stuff slide, you don’t have to meet them in person anyway. So he told Billy and the dope to forget the stuff he said about Ginsburg’s queer as a three dollar bill situation and “dig” (that was the word Jack used) what he had to say to the world, to the young really. The stuff about machines devouring humankind and making the world crazier than it already was. That maybe the guys in mental hospitals like the ones who were his comrades at the time were the sane ones-that what they knew was too powerful to let them stay out on the mean streets for long. That the Molochs were in charge (“what the fuck is a Moloch,” Billy asked, interrupting, not comprehending what Jack was talking about as he droned on about stuff that seemed weird). Tried to tell the kids that this thing was Ginsburg plainsong, his way of putting in raw language his spiritual trip, his karma on the world. (the dope would run into Ginsburg later at an anti-war rally in New York City in his later incantation as a Buddhist so karma was the right word even though they were clueless about what it really meant in Buddhist traditions).

After about fifteen minutes Jack could see his audience’s eyes glazing over and so he stopped, stopped and told them that when they got his age they would be thinking about all the stuff Ginsburg laid out in that not-fit-for-public-school-classrooms poem. They laughed, snickered really and wondered what Lucinda and Laura were up to just then. The hell with Jack and his fucking homo poem.            

An Encore Salute To The Untold Stories Of The Working- Class 1960s Radicals-“The Sam And Ralph Stories”- The Angel Of Mercy-From The Sam Eaton-Ralph Morris Series-From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

An Encore Salute To The Untold Stories Of The Working- Class 1960s Radicals-“The Sam And Ralph Stories”- The Angel Of Mercy-From The Sam Eaton-Ralph Morris Series-From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Allan Jackson, editor The Sam And Ralph Stories -New General Introduction

[As my replacement Greg Green, whom I brought in from American Film Gazette originally to handle the day to day site operations while I concentrated on editing but who led a successful revolt against my regime based on the wishes of the younger writers to as they said at the time not be slaves to the 1960s upheavals a time which they only knew second or third hand, mentioned in his general introduction above some of the series I initiated were/are worth an encore presentation. The Sam and Ralph Stories are one such series and as we go along I will try to describe why this series was an important testament to an unheralded segment of the mass movements of the 1960s-the radicalized white working- class kids who certainly made up a significant component of the Vietnam War soldiery, some of who were like Sam and Ralph forever after suspicious of every governmental war cry. Who also somewhat belatedly got caught up in the second wave rock and roll revival which emerged under the general slogan of “drug, sex and rock and roll” which represented a vast sea change for attitudes about a lot of things that under ordinary circumstances would have had them merely replicating their parents’ ethos and fate.        

As I said I will describe that transformation in future segment introductions but today since it is my “dime” I want to once again clear up some misapprehensions about what has gone on over the past year or so in the interest of informing the readership, as Greg Green has staked his standing at this publication on doing to insure his own survival, about what goes on behind the scenes in the publishing business. This would not have been necessary after the big flap when Greg tried an “end around” something that I and every other editor worth her or his salt have tried as well and have somebody else, here commentator and my old high school friend Frank Jackman, act as general introducer of The Roots Is The Toots  rock and roll coming of age series that I believe is one of the best productions I have ever worked on. That got writers, young and old, with me or against me, led by Sam Lowell, another of my old high school friends, who had been the decisive vote against me in the “vote of no confidence” which ended my regime up in arms. I have forgiven Sam, and others, as I knew full well from the time I entered into the business that at best it was a cutthroat survival of the fittest racket. (Not only have I forgiven Sam but I am in his corner in his recent struggles with young up and coming by-line writer Sarah Lemoyne who is being guided through the shoals by another old high school friend Seth Garth as she attempts to make her way up the film critic food chain, probably the most vicious segment of the business where a thousand knives wait the unwary from so-called fellow reviewers.) The upshot of that controversy was that Greg had to back off and let me finish the introducing the series for which after all I had been present at the creation.               

That would have been the end of it but once we successfully, and thankfully by Greg who gave me not only kudos around the water cooler but a nice honorarium, concluded that series encore in the early summer of 2018 he found another way to cut me. Going through the archives of this publication to try to stabilize the readership after doing some “holy goof” stuff like having serious writers, young and old, reviewing films based on comic book characters, the latest in video games and graphic novels with no success forgetting the cardinal rule of the post-Internet world that the younger set get their information from other sources than old line academic- driven websites and don’t read beyond their techie tools Greg found another series, the one highlighted here, that intrigued him for an encore presentation. This is where Greg proved only too human since he once again attempted an “end around,” by having Josh Breslin, another old friend whom I meet in the Summer of Love, 1967 out in San Francisco, introduce the series citing my unavailability as the reason although paying attention to the fact that I had sweated bullets over that one as well.      

This time though the Editorial Board, now headed by Sam Lowell, intervened even before Greg could approach Josh for the assignment. This Ed Board was instituted after my departure to insure the operation would not descend, Sam’s word actually, into the so-called autocratic one-person rule that had been the norm under my regime. They told Greg to call me back in on the encore project or to forget it. I would not have put up with such a suggestion from an overriding Ed Board and would have willingly bowed out if anybody had tried to undermine me that way. I can understand fully Greg’s desire to cast me to the deeps, have done with me as in my time I did as well knowing others in the food chain would see this as their opportunity to move up.  

That part I had no problem with, told Greg exactly that. What bothered me was the continuing “urban legend” about what I had done, where I had gone after that decisive vote of no confidence. Greg continued, may continue today, to fuel the rumors that not only after my initial demise but after finishing up the Roots Is The Toots series I had gone back out West to Utah of all places to work for the Mormons, or to Frisco to hook up with my old flame Madame La Rue running that high-end whorehouse I had staked her to in the old days, or was running around with another old high school pal, Miss Judy Garland, aka Timmy Riley the high priestess of the drag queen set out in that same town whom I also helped stake to  his high-end tourist attraction cabaret. All nonsense, I was working on my memoir up in Maine, up in Olde Saco where Josh grew up and which I fell in love with when he first showed me his hometown and its ocean views.          

If the reader can bear the weight of this final reckoning let me clear the air on all three subjects on the so-called Western trail. Before that though I admit, admit freely that despite all the money I have made, editing, doing a million pieces under various aliases and monikers, ballooning up 3000 word articles to 10,000 and having the publishers fully pay despite the need for editing for the latter in the days before the Guild when you worked by the word, accepting articles which I clearly knew were just ripped of the AP feed and sending them along as gold I had no dough, none when I was dethroned. Reason, perfectly sane reason, although maybe not, three ex-wives with alimony blues and a parcel of kids, a brood if you like who were in thrall to the college tuition vultures.

Tapped out in the East for a lot of reasons I did head west the first time looking for work. Landed in Utah when I ran out of dough, and did, DID, try to get a job on the Salt Lake Star and would have had it too except two things somebody there, some friend of Mitt Romney, heard I was looking for work and nixed the whole thing once they read the articles I had written mocking Mitt and his white underwear world as Massachusetts governor and 2012 presidential candidate. So it was with bitter irony when I heard that Greg had retailed the preposterous idea that I would now seek a job shilling for dear white undie Mitt as press agent in his run for the open Utah United States Senate seat. Here is where everybody should gasp though at the whole Utah fantasy-these Mormons stick close together, probably ingrained in them from Joseph Smith days, and don’t hire goddam atheists and radicals, don’t hire outside the religion if they can help it. You probably had to have slept with one of Joseph Smith’s or Brigham Young’s wives to even get one foot in the door. Done.              

The helping Madame La Rue, real name of no interest or need to mention,  running her high-end exclusive whorehouse out in Half Moon Bay at least had some credence since I had staked her to some dough to get started after the downfall of the 1960s sent her back to her real world, the world of a high class hooker who was slumming with “hippies” for a while when it looked like our dreams were going to be deterred in in the ebbtide. We had been hot and heavy lovers, although never married except on some hazed drug-fogged concert night when I think Josh Breslin “married” us and sent us on a “honeymoon” with a fistful of cocaine. Down on dough I hit her up for some which she gave gladly, said it was interest on the “loan: she never repaid and let me stay at her place for a while until I had to move on. Done

The whole drag queen idea tells me that whoever started this damn lie knew nothing about my growing up days and had either seen me in The Totem, Timmy Riley’s aka Miss Judy Garland’s drinking with a few drag queen who worked and drew the wrong conclusions or was out to slander and libel me for some other nefarious reason. See Miss Judy Garland is the very successful drag queen and gay man Timmy Riley from the old neighborhood who fled to Frisco when he could no longer hide his sexual identity and preferences. To our great shock since Timmy had been the out-front gay-basher of our crowd, our working-class corner boy gay-bashing crowd. I had lent, after getting religion rather late on the LGBTQ question, Timmy the money to buy his first drag queen cabaret on Bay Street and Timmy was kind enough to stake me to some money and a roof before I decided I had to head back East. Done.

But enough about me.  This is about two other working- class guys, Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris, met along life’s road one from Carver about fifty miles away from where Seth, Sam, Timmy and a bunch of other guys grew up and learned the “normal” working-class ethos-and broke, tentatively at times, from that same straitjacket and from Troy, New York. Funny Troy, Carver, North Adamsville, and Josh’s old mill town Olde Saco all down-in-the-mouth working class towns still produced in exceptional times a clot of guys who got caught up in the turmoil of their times-and lived to tell the tale. I am proud to introduce this encore presentation and will have plenty more to say about Sam and Ralph in future segments.]

***********

Allan Jackson Encore Introduction

Most of the stories about Sam and Ralph center on politics or their freaking army time in the fucking Vietnam War (sorry for the sensitive but that “fucking” is the only way I can describe the war, the war that bled a generation dry, bled plenty of working-class kids like me  dry as hell and we are still not right about what the hell it all meant even fifty years later-except we have been on an eternal tour of ‘getting on the good side of the angels” after all the hell we brought on people we had not quarrel with). This one is about personal relationships which if you knew these guys, if you knew me, if you knew Josh from working-class Olde Saco in Maine or my boys from the working-class Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville was, is a subject sealed with seven seals. Meaning about dealing with women which given our collective divorce cohort, which young Sarah Lemoyne commented on and not to our benefit, we still have never figured out, had no guidance worth a damn about. But enough of my rant because Sam and Ralph speak in a way for a whole misbegotten generation of 1960s coming of age kids and I can add nothing essential to what they have to say.    

The Angel Of Mercy-From The Sam Eaton-Ralph Morris Series 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

As long as Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris had known each other they never spent much time or effort discussing their various romantic interests. Never spoke of little rendezvous or trysts, never spoke of their two divorces much beyond recording the facts of the disengagements even though Sam had been Ralph’s best man at his first wedding to Clara, his high school sweetheart from Troy, New York whom he married after the dust of the 1960s settled down and people, “movement people” too were going back to some of the old norms. (Sam had been not designated as ‘best man” but rather “truest friend and witness” or something like that designation since they were beyond bourgeois martial norms at the time but we will use that former designation here to signify that they were close enough for Sam to gladly take on that task).

Maybe it was the Catholic reticence to speak of personal matters, personal sexual manners with another male (probably female too but let’s stick to male here) both having come up “old school” working-class Catholics when that meant something before Vatican II in the 1960s when the “s” word was not used in polite society, not used, God no, from the pulpit (even when discussion came up of the obligation to, unlike the bloody Protestants with their two point three children, of propagating the faith; having scads of children to bump up the Catholic population of the world).

Maybe closer to home it was the “theory,” probably honored more in the breech that the observance, of “not airing one’s dirty linen in public” drilled into them by their respective maternal grandmothers, especially when the “s” word was involved (certainly no parents gave the slightest clues probably assuming that the birds and the bees story line would suffice and both men learned like millions of their Generation of ’68 kindred about sex on the streets, most of it erroneous or damn right dangerous). 

Maybe it was the times they met in “the liberated 1960s” where the Pill (and having capitalized that word no one should have to ask what pill) had made the whole subject somewhat bland to discuss (as opposed to doing the act, or as an old friend of Sam’s, Bart Webber, used to say taking his cue from the old bluesman Howlin’ Wolf “doing the do”) and that extended to the individuals they were involved with either through those collective four marriages and divorces or other relationships. It was not, as both were at pains to declare when the subject came up one recent night which will be discussed more fully below, that they were not friendly with those respective spouses, or when the spouses left then the one-night stands, the flings, the affairs to use an old-fashioned word for it and the flame dreams but their thing had been heavily weighted toward the male bonding that drew them close together back in the early 1970s.

And maybe it was the way that they had “met,” a story that they have endlessly repeated in one form or another and which had been told so many times by Sam mostly in the old days in small alternative presses and magazines and more recently in 1960s-related blogs that even they confessed that everybody must be “bored” with the damn thing by now. So only the barest outline will suffice here since their meeting is not particularly relevant to the story except to help sort out this reticence about relationships business. Sam, an active opponent of the Vietnam War, and Ralph an ex-soldier of that war who had turned against the war after eighteen months of duty there and become an anti-war activist in his turn with Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) after being discharged from the Army “met” in RFK Stadium in Washington on May Day 1971 when they were down there with their respective groups trying to as the slogan went “shut down the government, if the government did not shut down the war.”

For their ill-advised efforts they and thousands of others were tear-gassed, billy-clubbed and sent to the bastinado (ill-advised in that they did not have nearly enough people on hand and were incredibly naïve about the ability of the government to do any dirty deed to keep their power including herding masses of protestors into closed holding areas to be forgotten if possible although Ralph always had a sneaking suspicion the government would not have been unhappy seeing those bodies floating face down in the Potomac). Sam and Ralph met on the floor of the stadium and since they had several days to get acquainted were drawn to each other by working-class background, their budding politics, and their desire to “seek a newer world” as some old English poet once said. And so they stuck together, stuck politically mostly, through various peace organizations and ad hoc anti-war committees fighting the good fight along with dwindling numbers of fellow activists for the past forty plus years.                              

There were thick and thin times as Ralph stayed close to home in Troy, New York working in his father’s high-skilled electrical shop which he eventually took over and had just recently passed on to his youngest son and Sam had stayed in the Greater Boston area having grown up in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston working in a printing business that he had started from scratch and from which he in turn had just turned over to his more modern print-imaging tech savvy son, Jeff. The pair would periodically take turns visiting each other sometimes with families in tow, sometimes not and were always available to back each other up when some anti-war or other progressive action needed additional warm bodies in Boston, New York or a national call came from Washington. Lately now that they were both retired from the day to day operations of their respective businesses and also now both after their last respective divorces “single” they have had time to visit each other.

It had been on Ralph’s last visit to Sam who now resided in Cambridge that he tentatively broached the subject of whether Sam was “seeing” anybody. Sam had been somewhat struck by the question since he could not remember the last time that term had been used by either man. Sam wondered if Ralph was about to tell him that he was “seeing” somebody or, worse, a thought he kept to himself for the moment, that Ralph had heard something from somebody about him. Of course all of the wondering and “liberated” talk about relationships occurred one summer night at Jack’s, the well-known bar in Cambridge a few streets up from where Sam lived, while both men were drinking high-shelf whisky, and not sipping so perhaps neither man should have been surprised when Sam blurred out. “Well, yes I am, I am seeing an angel of mercy.” (Before we go on that high-shelf whisky reference should be noted since in the old days when they were “from hunger” working-class kids drinking rotgut low-shelf whiskies they could not afford to drink the stuff on Jimmy the bartender’s third shelf behind him on the back wall.)            

Ralph took a double-take and maybe the liquor getting to his brain a little said, “What are you dating an ex-nun or something, you old devil I thought you swore off those Catholic virgins with the big novena book in one hand and the well-worn rosary beads in the other.” Sam laughed and then explained that his “angel of mercy,” Sarah Parsons, had been no nun but had saved his soul anyway. Then Sam proceeded to tell his little story, tell it as best he could as both men were getting a little drowsy with the hour (another virtue of Jack’s being near-by Sam’s dwelling when last call came):

“You know I had a very hard time with that last divorce from Melinda, she tried to take me for all I had, all I will ever have although Frankie Riley as usual with his sharp lawyer’s wit eased the sting a little and I survived with the business intact which Jeff runs now under a trust arrangement that Frankie worked out. What you don’t know because I never told you and you never asked and if you had I probably wouldn’t have told you anyway was things had been bad with Melinda for several years before she left the house three years ago and moved into that apartment in Plymouth that cost me an arm and a leg to pay for although I did it gladly at some level.”

“What you also don’t know is that about seven, eight years ago when I went to my fortieth class reunion from Carver High I ran into an old flame, a minute old flame whom I ditched for some other faster girl at the time but whom I would occasionally think about, think I had been a horse’s ass to dump. We talked into the wee hours that night, Melinda as usual didn’t want to go to the reunion since she didn’t want to go to her own Olde Saco High reunion why should she go to mine. That’s the way Melinda was, particularly the last few years when I think we both realized we have been ships passing in the night for a long time. Sarah and I agreed to talk and e-mail each other more and we did. You know the routine as well as I do, we talked a lot for several weeks and e-mailed cute stuff or sent links to songs we liked from YouTube, told our life stories since high school. Sarah too had been married twice unhappily, that twice seems to be the norm for our “liberated” generation and eventually although she knew I was still married agreed to a “date.” A great date at a small out of the way restaurant I know in the North End where I took a woman I had a short fling with about twenty years ago. And we hit it off, hit it off like we were still fresh and starry-eyed as in high school. Naturally we went to bed together not long after that and while she was not happy (nor was I really) with our “arrangement” she “understood” what was what.”            

“And that “understood” is important because Laura was really an angel of mercy. Maybe Melinda sensed something was up, maybe she was having her own affair although she was always home when I called but Sarah kept my spirits up, kept me on keel and I knew before she did, well before, that I was falling in love with her even though things looked bleak at home. And even though she was naturally very hesitant to love me back. Still we knew something was there, some strong bond which may have been there since high school. I like to think that in my mushy moments. Well, there are some tender mercies in the world because one day Melinda said she couldn’t stand the marriage anymore, wanted out, wanted her own “space” and she got it for my arm and my leg. Like I said Melinda tried to grab everything and would have if she had known about Sarah but Melinda was just Melinda in trying to grab everything. Nothing new there. Sarah lives in Arlington since we still are figuring out about the future but maybe we will go tomorrow and see her. Okay.”

Ralph answered back, “Okay” as they exited Jack’s and walked up the street toward Sam’s apartment and then Ralph turned his head to Sam and said, “Does your Sarah have any spare ‘angels of mercy’ hanging around?” They both laughed as they walked along in silence after that.