How Little We Know- With The Film Adaptation Of Ernest Hemingway’s “To Have And Have Not” In Mind

How Little We Know- With The Film Adaptation Of Ernest Hemingway’s “To Have And Have Not” In Mind

By Henri “Frenchie” Gerard As Told Jasper Jackson

[Henri “Frenchie” Gerard had owned the well-known pre-World War II Gerard’s Café in Fort-de-France, Martinique, the French colony in the Caribbean first under the Third Republic and then when France felt to the Germans in 1940 to collaborationist Vichy-control. Frenchie ran the place all through the Occupation at some cost to himself as a local Resistance leader and after the war until 1960 when he retired to his native Nantes in France. That same year he had found out through some old Resistance contacts that his old American friend Captain Harry Morgan, a fishing boat owner whom he had given work to, had had more than his fair share of drinks with in the old times, had passed away in New York City after a long bout with cancer. According to his obituary Harry left a wife, Marie, nee Browning and three children, all teenagers.          

I had heard through a different source that Captain Morgan had although an American been active in the French Resistance in Martinique and eventually other places in the Caribbean. I had also heard that Monsieur Gerard was the last link to knowledge about Captain Morgan’s exploits and more importantly about how Harry and Marie Browning known affectionately as “Slim” in those days met and got out of Fort-de-France by the skin of their teeth. I contacted Gerard in Nantes and he agreed to tell me what he knew about the affair, about the skin of their teeth and about anything else he might know around that initial meeting since “Slim” had gone on to be an editor of a high-end fashion magazine after she married Harry. Harry had become an agent-ambassador for Cunard out of New York. Below is in his own words the way Frenchie described the meeting and match-up between Harry and Slim. He did stipulate that I was only to use most of the information after Slim passed on. She did a few months ago and so here for the first time is Frenchie’s long ago take that torrid war-time romance which seemed the stuff of legends. Jasper Jackson]

“I had seen Marie first, had seen her as she came off the plane from I think that day Cuba, don’t quote me on stuff before the match-up between Harry and Slim, with a sort of threadbare tailored suit a little out of fashion that year and a small bag which told me she was on, how you Americans say her “uppers.” By the way that Slim and she called him Steve thing was some intimate bed-time talk thing that I don’t know how it started since I wasn’t there when they messed up the silky sheets that first time. She was sure slim no question so maybe that is where Harry got his pet name from. I was an agent for Air Martinique then so I grabbed her bag and offered to put her up at my hotel. She accepted. My idea was after she settled in and I had bought her few drinks I could coax her into helping me out as an exotic flower bar girl for the American tourist who were flooding Fort-de-France looking for women, kicks, dope, gambling, and some fine deep sea fishing. I had her all lined up, had my own ideas about jumping under the satin sheets with although I was married at the time. Yeah, she was that kind of looker, that kind of dame who guys would take great risks for, would go to the mat for if it went like that.       

    

“Then Harry entered the scene and my day dreams were over. He had been out on a fishing expedient with a client named Johnson, one of those Americans looking for women, dope and some deep sea fishing, some kind of deep sea fishing if you get my drift. This Johnson guy had had a shot at grabbing a big swordfish according to Harry but all he did was lose Harry’s fishing tackle in the bargain. So Harry wasn’t in a good mood when I asked to go to his room to inquire about using his boat for some Resistance work that was coming up-bringing in some agents to get the great freedom-fighter Renoir off of Devil’s Island where he was being held by the Vichy bastards. He turned me down cold. Wouldn’t touch the thing then, didn’t give a damn who was fighting who but wanted to keep clear of any controversy, keep his boat, his livelihood for one thing. So whatever he did for us later which was a lot didn’t get a leg up until Marie came in view.

“While we Harry and I were talking a rap came on the door and when Harry opened up the door there was Marie all dolled up and showered asking if anybody had a match. Harry flipped her his box of matches. Then she asked if anybody had a cigarette and said it in such a come hither way in Harry’s direction that I knew I was sunk. Harry threw her his pack of Luckies (unfiltered in those days) which I got for him on the black market since they were hard to come by after Vichy took over the black market trade. She left and after Harry asked me who the hell she was I left knowing that I was out of luck making a play for Slim. The only benefit I got was that she did do some very good work for a few days as a bar girl and I got many dollars as my cut of her action. I swear I could have been a millionaire if she had stayed on the island. As a cover I also had her singing at night with Cricket my junkie piano player whose habit was getting him off-track once I found out in passing Cricket and her that afternoon that she could sing and look good doing it. That Cricket was a story in himself since he was on the run from some dope-dealers in the States and laying low in cheap dope Martinique for a while. He wrote that song that was a hit after the war when all the G.I.s headed back to America, How Little We Know.

“But enough of Cricket. Slim went to work after that meeting with Harry. Like I said she was good, grabbed eight hundred bucks off of that stupid fisherman Johnson, and gave me my four hundred without a murmur. Harry saw her in action and was sore from what he told me the next day. Was very sore when that night Marie grabbed some Vichy naval officer for half the liquor on the island. Called her a tramp, a young pretty smart tramp but a tramp nevertheless. Here’s how you can never figure dames though see she was, having seen him for about two minutes asking for that match and cigarette foreplay, trying to make him jealous. And he was trying to pretend to be sore. That interchange was if you can understand this psychology solidified their relationship. That night without so much as a by your leave they snuck under Harry’s sheets (or was it Slim’s, no, it must have been Slim’s because I had left a set of silk sheets for her bed when I had my own ideas about what I would do with her.)               

     

“Of course that affair business played directly into Harry coming over to work with us. That Vichy naval officer bitched to Renard, a bastard who was an official in the Third Republic colonial administration on the island and the day Vichy took over without missing a beat went to work for them as their hatchet man, and he had me, Harry and Slim down at police headquarters for a few hours. Took my money, my four hundred from the Johnson con, Slim’s cut and for good measure Harry’s who had nothing to do with it. That pissed Harry off. Also helped me rope in Harry to the deal for his boat since he had no other dough.     

“That job should have been a piece of cake. Meet the agents who were going to get Renoir off of Devil’s Island in a quiet spot about twenty miles from Fort-de-France, bring them to town and then transfer them to other agents who would work out the details of the tough Devil’s Island caper. Of course in those days you took whoever was not a secret Vichy agent, anybody who had the guts to stick their necks out for the glory of France but it turned out the guys, or rather guy and his fucking wife, the Dubois, what was he thinking, that they recruited for the job had feet of clay, had too much trouble worrying about his fretful wife. So Harry had run into a Vichy patrol out in the harbor. That patrol shot up Harry’s boat, shot up this Dubois guy and made things tough for all of us. Harry, no doctor, had to patch up the guy while holding off his wife from jumping on his bones. And holding Slim back from scratching Madame’s eyes out.  

“Made Harry something like persona non grata with Vichy, with Renard too once he figured the previously don’t give a damn had part in the caper. Renard , the bastard, figured out a way to prove that Harry was involved in the Dubois caper. Harry had this old rummy, Eddie, whom must have been his father or something the way he protected. Renard had picked Eddie up and was holding him in the drunk tank until he crumbled and told what Harry’s role in the caper had been. Harry flipped out at this once Renard told him about where the missing Eddie was. With Slim’s aid he took on Renard and a couple of his henchmen, shot one dead as a doornail and made Renard after pistol-whipping him order Eddie back to my hotel. That is when Harry handed over Renard to me and decided that since Martinique was too hot for him and Slim, and Eddie that he would take Dubois and his wife to Devils’s Island to get Renoir out. I’ll never forget, have never forgotten how Slim shimmied her way out the door with Harry and Eddie carrying their bags behind them after Slim said good-bye to Cricket (and got  little stash of opium for the road).     

“You know that Harry did get Dubois to Devil’s Island and that he eventually got Renoir to Europe to work with Victor Lazlo coordinating the Resistance when it counted. Did lots of other jobs too with the resourceful Slim in tow before heading to New York after the war. 

“Here’s something Harry told me before he and Slim left town. That first night they hit the sheets Slim, with a few drinks in her, was being very sexually provocative, had mentioned that all Harry had to do to keep her in line was whistle. Then she said in a unmistakably salacious way that “he knew how to whistle, didn’t he. Just put lips together and blow.” Harry assumed that she was using a sexual double entendre. He found out that night just what he meant as she took him around the world. Damn, Harry.       

Oh, Rosalita-With Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable’s Film Adaptation Of Arthur Miller’s “The Misfits” In Mind

Oh, Rosalita-With Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable’s Film Adaptation Of Arthur Miller’s “The Misfits” In Mind     

By Zack James

Maybe it was something in the drinking water but Louis Lyons was beside himself one he figured out the real reason why he spent a couple of weekend nights watching a couple of old-time flicks, films which he had gathered in from his Netflix service. Lou had been on a long term kick about watching, or rather re-watching, films, mostly black and white from his checkered seedy random youth. In those days he would have viewed such films not on his HD television or via the stream of his computer but at his local theater, The Majestic, in his hometown of Oxford out in Western Massachusetts now long since closed where he would spent many an ungodly Saturday afternoon  viewing the current fare. The “ungodly’ part for real his parents were devout Sixth Day Anabaptists whose day of worship started midday Saturday and ended at dawn Sunday morning and although they were liberal enough to see that Lou would have snuck out anyway always cast that epitaph his way when he came sheepishly through the door after being hunkered with a box of made last popcorn and some candy bars purchased at Billy’s Variety and “snuck” in under the watch-less eyes of the ushers. Later in high school, having grown out of kids’ clothing and Saturday matinees about the same time, he let those epitaphs flow off his back like water off a duck after coming in late on Saturday nights. Reason: or one of the reasons, Lotty Larson who was the first girl who accepted his invitation when he asked her the locally famous, locally high school movie date night, question-balcony or orchestra? Orchestra meant maybe one date and out but balcony meant promise of anything from a “feel” inside or out of some girl’s cashmere sweater to a tight space blow job.            

This trip, this diversion down rural hills nostalgia road, has a purpose since it was on the same track that was bothering Lou’s old mind. The eternal, infernal, ways of sex which had one way or another bothered Lou’s mind since puberty, maybe before if Doctor Freud and his acolytes were right. The association played out this way. On Friday night he had watched for the umpteenth time one of his all-time favorite films the film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s To Have And Have Not starring Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. One of the reasons that he favored that film is that although he did not see it went it had come out since he was only a dream in his parents’ way of life in 1941 when the film had come out when he saw it in retrospective in college at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square he had told his date, name now long forgotten in memory, that some of the scenes in that classic were as hot, maybe hotter, between two people with their clothes fully on than half the porno being featured in the Combat Zone in downtown Boston. (Lou vaguely remembered that night was a hot date night with that unremembered young woman when they had gone back to her place on Commonwealth Avenue.) After that recent viewing though he had remarked to his wife, his third wife, Moira, that given the best of it Captain Morgan, Bogie’s role, a craggy sea salt, and Marie, the Bacall role, that he had to be at least twice her age, maybe more. (He had actually looked it up on Wikipedia and found Bogie was forty-five and Bacall nineteen at the time so the “maybe more” was definitely in play). That started a short discussion between them about younger women being attracted to older men (as a sign of some kind of distorted social norm older men being attracted to younger women never made it to the conversation table). No conclusions were drawn at the time by Lou.                   

Saturday night Moira was out attending her weekly bridge party with some of her girlfriends and Lou wound up watching the other film the film adaptation of Arthur Miller’s The Misfits starring Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable (with serious supporting roles by Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach, and Thelma Ritter). Once again maybe giving Clark, playing Gaye, a decided edge in the looks department over Bogie and the fact of being a real cowboy over a sea captain an older man was attractive to a younger woman, Rosalyn, played by Marilyn Monroe. Lou, a little younger than the older brothers and fathers who saw Ms. Monroe as the epitome of 1950s sexual allure and beauty, had seen the film when he was in high school, alone if he recalled.        

The question of younger women being attracted to older men would not have stuck out as much it had those nights on the first viewing of the films back in the day but since then there had been Rosalita, his second wife, the wife that Lou had left for Moira. The main reason, although not the only reason, had been the wide gap in age between them, Rosalita had been twenty-five and he almost fifty when he spied her one night in San Francisco at the City Lights Bookstore, the famous one run by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the big “beat” hang-out back in the 1950s when being “beat” mean something socially unlike later when he tried to emulate them and got nothing but laughs for digging something so passe. He was trolling the place, literally, since he had just got divorced back in Massachusetts from his first wife, Anna, and after the acrimonious settlement decided he needed to head west and make a new start. Needed the company of a woman as well and somebody he had run into at Ginny’s Bar in North Beach had told him that if you were looking for a certain type woman, intellectually curious, maybe a little off-kilter, maybe easy too then in San Francisco you hit the bookstores and City Lights was a magnet. (That “custom” was not confined to Frisco Town he had met Moira at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston under the same imperative).          

Lou had been looking for a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl (in a book which came with other poems as well) since that was one of

his favorite poems, if not his most favorite then. Then this thin, brown-eyed, black-haired good-looking young women whom he at first thought was Spanish, maybe from Mexico given where he was came up behind him and started going on and on about Ginsberg who had just died a few years before. (Rosalita was not Spanish at all but Irish her mother just liked the name.) He was shocked that anybody under the age of forty would know anything about Ginsberg and the important of his poem not only as a break in the kind of poem that was acceptable in polite society but the harsh social message Ginsberg was laying down. She, not he, asked if he would like to stop at the café and have a cup of coffee. He figured why not (he did not find out until after they had a couple of subsequent dates that women, women of all ages, also trolled the bookstores looking for men, men who say would be looking at something like Howl which told them the guy could at least read unlike some of the beasts they had run across in the bars or at some off-beat party).      

That afternoon started their affair but Lou was from the start apprehensive about their differences in ages which came up often along the way, for example, when he mentioned that he had been in Washington on May Day, 1971 and had been arrested in the dragnet that the cops and military had set up that day she didn’t understand, could not get around the idea that people would try to shut down the government if it did not stop the Vietnam War. At times they could work through it like that first day with Ginsberg (she turned out to have been an English major at Berkeley) but other times, times when she tried to coax him into jogging which she was crazy about they would fight civil war worthy battles. He always had the sneaking suspicion that Rosalita was not telling the truth when she mentioned that she had had trouble with her male peers, boys she called them, and had been attracted to older men ever since her father had abandoned her family when she was twelve. She had told him repeatedly that she was looking for the maturity and security that an older man would bring. Lou could never really get that through his head and eventually his tilted his behavior toward giving dear Rosalita reason to boot him out the door. (On top of meeting Moira closer in age to him at the museum when for one last effect to reconcile they had moved to Boston).

That night Lou though maybe Rosalita had been just like Marie and Rosalyn needing a safe harbor. Damn.       

Ruth’s Remembrances-With Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture” Show In Mind

Ruth’s Remembrances-With Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture” Show In Mind

Ruth Snyder had all the prejudices of any West Texas girl growing up in the hard-scrabble Great Depression of the 1930s when money had been scarcer, maybe more so, than hen’s teeth. Had all the so-called secrets of such girls as well. She had been Anchor City born and raised out in the places where the oilfields out-numbered the number of residents. As part of that Anchor City (silly nautical name for a town out in the middle of Blue Norther country but there you have it. Legend had it that some restless Yankee sea captain who had had enough of the sea had founded the place and in a fit of nostalgia named the town that rather than after himself like half the foolish towns in the state). Prejudice number one, aside from not allowing the “colored” to get a toehold in the town but that was usual all over the South and not Anchor City-bound, was drilled into her by her hard-shell Pentecostal parents who had gotten religion when West Texas was burned over in the Third Awakening, third Texas Awakening and that was marriage was forever. Forever meaning until one or the other of the two contracted parties kick-off. Not before.      

So Ruth Snyder, not the prettiest girl in town, not by a long shot, in fact rather plain like some Grant Wood painting, pure prairie plain which was in man-short West Texas (marrying man-short West Texas the other kind as everywhere were plentiful enough) good enough with proper household training to get a man. But get this Ruth Snyder, Plain Jane Ruth Snyder snagged herself a football player, Tom Snyder, who starred for the Anchor City Hawks before heading to Texas A&M and a short career made shorter by a crippling knee injury. Who would have figured that Tom in those brave football days would court Ruth Snyder. Ruth would come to try to figure that one out herself. Tried to figure out that all Tom wanted from a woman, no, a wife, was too just keep his house clean, his socks darned and his rifles well-oiled. While Tom in very West Texas good old boys fashion would head out with his fellow good old boys and proceed to get well-oiled in another way or too.     

Married at just short of twenty years of age Ruth was now reaching that funny quirky time, forty. Things had only gotten worse as time went by and after several serious campaigns by alumni Tom had cornered himself into being both the football and basketball coach at old Anchor City High. Thus not only did Ruth suffer the pangs of loneliness during his weekly hunting and fishing trips but for well over half the year he would be too busy with his coaching to pay even minimal attention to Ruth. Not a good thing, not a good thing at all for somebody who was entering funny quirky time.  

One of the things that was required of a coach’s wife in those days, those early 1950s days when all the way from kid sandlot football to University of Texas University all Texas was aflutter in football was to attend the Friday night games. Ruth unlike other mothers and wives rather enjoyed watching the game which had been part of the reason that she had grabbed onto Tom with both hands when he first asked her out those many years before. Of late, this season, this season of her reaching forty she found herself looking rather longingly at the young men on the field and thinking of those days when her own heart had been all aflutter when she spied Tom Snyder doing his pre-game warm-ups. In particular this year, this 1951 year when the team was pretty poor even by Anchor City standards she was drawn to two players, Duane, Duane Wilson, and Sonny, Sonny Burgess. Not because they were any great shakes as football players, they seemed to be in way over their heads when matched up against any decent teams but because they had similar physiques to her Tom’s when he was a star (the years of good old boy-dom had not been kind to Tom and he was now a certified member of the pot-bellied, sloughing forty something guys who could not have gotten out of their own ways if something had come up to startle them). Here’ the point though our Ruth started to have certain “improper” fantasies about those two young men. Yeah, that funny quirky forty thing.     

Ruth also knew that Duane had this thing, this crush on Jackie, Jackie Germaine, the head cheer leader who in that day, in her day when she was younger, and her now was nothing but a cock-teaser, a femme or whatever they called such “come hither” to be sliced and diced girls. She would lead him a merry chase, make him cry “Uncle,” literally since in the end he volunteered like a good West Texas young man back then to join the Army to get the taste of Jackie out of his system (as he told Sonny in one of his more candid and reflective moments was that he would never totally short of the grave get her out of his system and years later would say the same thing even when by that time she had been married three times, had a parcel of kids and even at the high side of forty was making guys make sophomoric fools out of themselves). As he told Sonny he would rather just then face the red hordes in Korea than to see her with another man. That “another man” in the space of a few short months between the end of high school and going off to college entail screwing Duane, screwing rich boy Randy, his friend Tom, who wanted to marry her, Adonis one of her father’s wild-call oil riggers, hell, even Sonny which is where Duane and Sonny’s friendship since elementary school was sorely tested. Yeah, thought Ruth who would get her information about the younger set, older set, every set from Jennie who ran the Last Chance Café one of the few reasons to stop in the pass through town. 

      

So Ruth almost by default kept her eye of Sonny Burgess, looking for a way to get to him in a proper manner, at least for public consumption. As it turned out Ton, her no bullshit husband who was the vehicle for bringing Ruth and Sonny together. Out of pure laziness or cussedness, take your pick. One day Tom asked Sonny to take Ruth to the nearest hospital in Waverly some fifty miles away in order for her to check up on some “female” problem she was having. Tom’s reason for not taking her himself was that he was too busy with basketball practice to do so. The lure for Sonny was that Coach would get him out of classes for the remainder of the day. The trip started out uneventfully enough with Sonny doing chauffer duty-and acting that way. After getting Ruth home safe and sound though she asked him if he would like something to eat. Sure, like any growing kid, and teenage kid. Noting happened that day but between whatever mother hunger mother-less Sonny had and whatever real man hunger Ruth had a few weeks later they would me at the annual town Christmas Party (the same party where the perfidious Jackie blew Duane off for some party with Randy) and gave each other such looks that when Ruth asked Sonny if he would take her to her doctor’s appointment the next he answered with yes without hesitation. And so Ruth and Sonny would start an affair, an affair of the heart which would last on and off again for several years. That open secret would keep the customers at the Last Chance Café going for many months once Jennie retailed the story. Funny nobody took umbrage that Ruth was bedding a young man half her age. But here is where we get into Ruth’s knowledge of the West Texas girl-woman prejudices. The reason that the Ruth-Sonny affair was the hot topic for only a few months was that Ellie, Jackie’s mother had started an affair with a young oil well driller employed by her husband. So Ruth was just following West Texas girl prejudice. What do think about that.       

When The Thin Man Was Fat -With The Original Film Adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man In Mind

When The Thin Man Was Fat -With The Original Film Adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man In Mind   

By Bartlett Webbert 

Recently in a review of the fourth in the famous Myrna Loy-William Powell seemingly never-ending The Thin Man series, Shadow Of The Thin Man, I mentioned that a long time ago, or it now seems a long time ago, I had a running argument with the late film critic Henry Dowd about the alleged decline in manly film detectives after the time of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe in the 1940s. By that Henry meant tough guy, no holds barred, non-filter cigarette smoking, Luckies or Camels, bottom of the desk drawer hard shell whiskey neat drinking, who didn’t mind taking or giving a punch, or taking or giving a  random slug for the cause detectives. He had based his opinion strictly on viewing the films of the famous detective couple Nick and Nora Charles.           

Henry Dowd believed that with the rise of The Thin Man series that previous characterization of a model detective, his previous characterization Henry was given to the imperative tone, switched from the hard whiskey drinking guy to a soft martini swigging suave guy with a soft manner and an aversion to taking risks, certainly to taking punches or slugs. Hell, in that film under review at the time not only had Nick been married to Nora but they had a kid, not to mention that damn dog Asta, a regular entourage to weigh a guy down. Back in the day what had surprised Henry in our public prints argument had been when I told him that the same guy, Dashiell Hammett, who had written the heroic tough guy detective Sam Spade had also written the dapper Nick and charming Nora characters. Henry did not believe me until I produced my tattered copy of Hammett’s The Thin Man which had started the whole film series. Thereafter he kept up the same argument except placing The Thin Man as an aberration probably do to Hammett’s known heavy drinking or that he was trying to soften his own Stalinist-etched persona with such an obvious bourgeois couple. Jesus.       

My objection to Henry’s “decline of the manly” detective theory back then had not been so much about the social manners or the social class of the couple in the series, a reversion to the parlor detective genre before Hammett and Chandler brought the genre out of the closet and onto the streets, as the thinness of the plots as they rolled out each new product. I continue to tout the original film in series The Thin Man as the one everybody should view and take in the rest if you have restless hour and one half or so to whittle away.  

I had held my viewing of Shadow up as a case in point. I mentioned above all that the affable Nick and Nora would get involved in the murder case of a jockey who allegedly threw a horse race. The very notion that anybody, much less a private eye, would give more than a passing glance to the demise an allegedly corrupt jockey was beyond me. After all the indignities those curs have thrown my way whenever I have had a “sure thing” has given me a very cynical view of these professionals. Has left me teary eyed at my bad luck-or ready to shot one myself. Of course if you are talking about throwing horse races then you have to deal with the question of the mob and all the connections to that organization from law enforcement to track officials. And in a roundabout way this is how Nick with a little timely intervention by Nora solved that one  thereby exonerating that fallen jockey (and a newspaper guy too). Bringing a high-born connected guy down to boot. Enough said.

Enough said except that I also mentioned that if one had just one film in the series then you had to opt for the original one based far more closely on that tattered copy of Hammett’s crime novel. Those were the days when Nick, still besotted by Nora, but not knocked over by her could work up the energy to do more than mix martinis. (Or to revive the old Dowd argument before Hammett let the bottle get to him or while working under the umbrella of Popular Front days directed from red Moscow).     

Of course even then Nick had been softened up a little by some time out in gentle, gentile Frisco town by once he hit New York he put on his stern working face when the daughter of an ex-client attempted to find out where her father had taken off too. Taken off after a couple of murders fouled up the scene. See that old man, that thin man, had been running around with a dizzy dame who was two-timing him and so all eyes pointed in his absent direction. Only got more heated when a guy who saw the murderer got wasted by same.  Looked like the old man would take the big step-off, take a last breathe that he would not like.

Except in those days although Nick was allegedly “retired” kicked out the jams long enough to find out that the whole thing was a scam, was all smoke and mirrors by somebody, not the thin man. Along the way Nick outsmarts the public coppers, not so hard to do when the put their two and two together and it came up five. Two murders and a missing boyfriend, the old man, and they had him all wrapped up and tied with a ribbon. One little problem: the old man, the thin man, this Wynant to give him a name was dead, very dead and had been so of a couple of months after Nick (okay, okay with a little sniffing help from Asta) so the public coppers had egg all over their faces. You might be surprised by who actually did the deed, did the three murders and would surely take the big step-off, be gasping for breathe at the end, but you can watch the film to see that  worked out. What is important is that Nick, drunk or sober, dapper or not, seemingly lazy or not, too laid back or not grabbed the right person, solved the damn mystery without working up serious sweat. And without getting bopped on the head, or taking some slugs. Enough said.    

Out In The Be-Bop Night- Langston Hughes’ Poetry- "A Dream Deferred "

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of performances of Langston Hughes’ poetry as described in the headline.

February Is Black History Month


Markin comment:


You know, and if you have been reading some of the writings in this space you should know, that clearly I am not the only one in the universe who has gone out searching for that be-bop, blue-pink great American night, or the high white note either. Thanks, Brother Hughes.

Out In The Be-Bop Night- Langston Hughes’ Poetry- "The Negro Speaks Of Rivers"

Out In The Be-Bop Night- Langston Hughes’ Poetry- "The Negro Speaks Of Rivers"


Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of performances of Langston Hughes’ poetry as described in the headline.


February Is Black History Month


Markin comment:


You know, and if you have been reading some of the writings in this space you should know, that clearly I am not the only one in the universe who has gone out searching for that be-bop, blue-pink great American night, or the high white note either. Thanks, Brother Hughes.

A Czech Psycho In London-When The Lust For Loot Leads A Guy To Gaslighting-Dame May Whitty’s Revenge-Ingrid Bergman’s “Gaslight” (1944)-A Film Review And More

A Czech Psycho In London-When The Lust For Loot Leads A Guy To Gaslighting-Dame May Whitty’s Revenge-Ingrid Bergman’s “Gaslight” (1944)-A Film Review And More

DVD Review

By Associate Film Reviewer Fritz Taylor

Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, Dame May Whitty, Joseph Cotton, 1944

The lust for valuables, for gold, silver, jewels can drive a person right over the edge or as in the film under review Gaslight to the big step-off, to that lonely trip up those lonely steps to face the lord high executioner. Witness what happened to Warren Devine in the classic case of gold lust The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre when he fought all contenders only to see his loot blow away in the winds once the banditos had their say. Better, better for the case before us, one Bridgit Hennessey, although don’t get hung up on names since she used about six as she left a mountain of human skulls on the road, mostly male although I am sure she would have put a few slugs into some female if the occasion called for it, in pursuit of what one wag ironically called “the stuff of dreams,” in pursuit of some freaking jewel-encrusted bird in The Maltese Falcon. That look of the eye, that patented glazed eye is what would do one Serge Broguis, a Czech national, but again don’t get hung up on monikers since Interpol had about six aliases this con man worked under, so there had to be more when he went after Prince George’s jewels. The ones he gave to Alicia Adams, the famed English opera singer whom he gave as a little expensive keepsake when she was away from him (and which he could look when she was on stage and he was up in his box-with that arranged marriage wife he was saddled with by the Czar, or Tsar, the spelling the Bolsheviks used when they put him to earth during the Russian Civil War).          

You know I can still learn something in this wicked old life as old as I. For example, working on the back story for this review I found out that gaslight was not only the major form of illumination before the invention of the electric light which put that form in the shade so to speak but as a verb it meant to sow seeds of doubt in a person (I guess it could be a group too but that seems more problematic), to get them confused, to make them distrust memory and the like. The classic example is well in the film under review where Serge (remember don’t get hung on names) for his own greedy reasons tried to drive his newly wed wife crazy, bonkers, drive her to the loony bin, to the mental hospital.

This late Victorian thriller’s  plot is driven by the obsessive plan that Serge, played by a guy named Charles Boyer  goes into to make poor misbegotten Paula, played by Ingrid Bergman last seen in this space according to Josh Breslin who did the review (and a couple of subsequent pieces based on the fate of a few of the characters) taking that last flight to Lisbon arm and arm with her husband Victor Lazlo, yes, that Victor Lazlo who led the anti-Nazi struggle in Europe during World War II when it counted and the Nazis couldn’t seem to keep him penned in as hard as they tried. She, Ilsa leaving her lover Rick, no slouch himself in the anti-fascist struggle in Spain when that counted, to walk off arm and arm with his dear friend Lou, an ex-cop.

Here is how Serge fell down, how he joined Warren and his gold dust dreams and Brigid and her freaking jewel lust. While Alicia Adams was performing in Prague Serge had wound up filling in for her regular piano player who had caught a cold and Alicia insisted that he not play. Somehow at the party after the performance Serge got wind of the fact that Alicia was this Prince George’s mistress, his fancy woman really who to show his devotion (and piss on his wife’s parade) gave her the previously mentioned priceless jewels. That got him crazy, gave him that glazed eye. and he hatched a plan to grab the jewels when Alicia went back to her home in London. First screw-up. Serge with what must have been leaden shoes woke Alicia up and she came downstairs to confront Serge. End of Alicia but not end of story. Paula, her ward, had come down the stairs subsequently to find her body and as a sensitive young girl was traumatized enough to be sent away.

Fast forward a few years with Paula in splendid exile in Italy learning to become an opera singer like her late aunt. And at the piano. Yes, the ever-scheming Serge. His bright idea and it had some merit if too many moving parts to woo and marry Paula, get her to go back to London to the house on Thornton Place that her aunt had left her and then go to work on her, gaslight, now that you know what that means, the hell out of her. Figuring as far as anybody could tell to drive her crazy with his efforts at undermining her mental state OR better finding those freaking jewels he had already committed murder for. Like I said not bad if with too many moving parts.

The too many moving parts included being way to aggressive in his undermining of Paula’s mental state and his incessant going to the attic where he had had all of Alicia’s possession placed so he could look for the jewels at his leisure. That got a guy from Scotland Yard, a detective, played by Joseph Cotton last seen in this space playing an American psycho serial killer who went after young girls in the Midwest, suspicious. Aroused more than that since he had been an admirer, possibly a lover of Alicia, and had been working the case if only in his mind ever since her passing. Eventually the game of cat and mouse between Serge and Cameron led to Serge’s demise, to his being carried off to face his maker pretty soon. Cameron naturally took up the slack in Paula fragile life and possession of the confiscated jewels to be turned into Scotland Yard for disposal to whoever was the rightful owner, if one could be found.        

   

Postscript: I mentioned above when I was giving the reader information about the expression “to gaslight” that I had found out that information while I was researching the back story of what really happened around this famous jewelry lust case. Of course, the knowledgeable film-goer, reader, writer, artist and so on knows that there is always a back story that those who are producing the product either eliminate or refuse to tell a candid world for their own reasons. That is the case here as well.

On the face of it a two-bit piano player like Serge, lucky to get a gig every now and again when some regular real piano player was out sick or had some other reason not to perform especially in Prague could not have carried out this con on his own. A guy who moreover had a nagging wife at home in that old city and a ton of bills to be paid and as importantly had never been to London, had never been further that Vienna in the old days when there was an Austro-Hungarian Empire. And he was not alone, no way.   

Enter one Dame May Whitty (her real name as far at the authorities knew although they never made the connection between her and Serge until long after she was dead, and somebody was researching the case to write a play about what had happened. The Dame, a known widely travelled older woman who had never married, ran into Serge in Prague shortly after he had subbed for the regular piano for Alicia Adams, and during conversation they found they had mutual interests in Ms. Adams. The Dame burning with hatred for Alicia who lived across the street from her in Thornton Square, London after Alicia took Prince George away from her and Serge having that outsized lust for what he had heard were priceless jewels given to Alicia by Prince George. Maybe not a union in heaven, maybe not anything more than convenience but there you have it.

If you have read above then you know that this Serge was a holy goof, not my expression but from Jack Kerouac via Josh Breslin, couldn’t find those freaking jewels when he broke into Alicia’s house and had to kill her leaving Paula to fend for herself once she saw her aunt dead on the floor in front of the fireplace. You would have thought that let Dame Whitty out once Alicia was dead, but Serge had a certain amount of leverage both because he could implicate her and because the Dame had her own plans for Alicia’s house. She needed her cut, that ten percent commission, from the to be fenced jewels, to continue her masterplan to buy up all the properties in Thornton Square and build the equivalent of condos, then townhouses.

Once Serge’s gaslighting of poor misbegotten Paula failed and he was taken away by Scotland Yard to eventually face the lord high executioner and Detective Cameron had confiscated the priceless jewels you would have thought that would certainly be the end of it. No, one thousand times no, that was only really the beginning. The Dame had hedged her bets and made an agreement with the detective that if Serge fell down and he certainly looked like he was heading that way when he overplayed his hand and lowered that foolish gaslight gag one time too many and spent too much time in the attic that she would clear the way for Paula to keep her town house and more importantly clear the way for him to marry the bereft Paula. Plus ten percent of the take of the fenced jewels. He was in. He and Paula and good neighbor Dame Whitty enjoyed the benefits of Serge’s doomed work and their subsequently upscale neighborhood and left this good green earth without any suspicion cast their way. Nice.                   

[By the way the fencing of those priceless jewels which were not so priceless after all once the Dame took control of them was done as all illegal transactions in those were through Larry Lawrence. The reader may know once young writer Will Bradley exposed him was known under the public name of Sherlock Holmes who along with a guy named Nigel Bruce, please again don’t get hung up on names since Scotland Yard had about a dozen names he worked under ran half the illegal operations in London under cover of some private detective scam over on Baker Street. Larry took his ten percent, and a surcharge to keep quiet about where the jewels came from, which both Dame Whitty and Cameron agreed was fair enough to keep them from having to do any heavy lifting for the rest of their lives. Paula too once she got some very sound psychological help.]          

In Honor Of John Brown Late Of Harpers Ferry-1859- *Samuel Gridley Howe- Stiff-Necked Boston Abolitionist

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for stiff-necked abolitionist, Samuel Gridley Howe.

BOOK REVIEW

Samuel Gridley Howe, Social Reformer, Harold Swartz, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1956

Those readers who have followed the doings in this space know that I have placed the name of Captain John Brown, late of Harper's Ferry, the pre-American Civil War revolutionary abolitionist very high in my pantheon of political heroes. That remains so, but today I wish to add another, perhaps lesser figure to that pantheon from the same period and who ultimately is tied to John Brown by the same strong links of abhorrence to slavery- and, did something about it-even if not as courageously as old Brown himself.

There has always been a certain amount of talk among historians about John Brown’s financial and political backers, the so-called "Secret Six". Among those so designated is one Samuel Gridley Howe, the subject of this biography. The presently reviewed book represents an earlier (1950's) attempt to estimate the influence of Howe in the pre-Civil War anti-slavery struggle. The book details the wide range of Howe’s activities, including his early military service in aid of the Greek liberation struggle of the 1820’s. Also highlighted is his reforming zeal in his founding of the world famous Perkins School for the Blind in Boston and his somewhat less famous founding of the Fernald School for the Mentally-challenged (to use today’s kinder expression of the condition). I should also note his marriage to Julia Ward Howe of 'Battle Hymn of the Republic' fame. However the parts of his biography that remain of abiding interest concern his increasing involvement in the anti-slavery struggles of the 1840’s, particularly his opposition to the Mexican Wars, his latter fight against the Fugitive Slave Law and his aid to Brown.

A quick perusal of Howe’s early resume, as detailed above, places him squarely in the mold of the classic pre- Civil War Boston Brahmin school of social reformer. That circle included such men as Charles Sumner, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and later, as the struggle against slavery intensified a veritable who’s who of gentile Northern society. For our purposes, however, what is important is the way the slavery issue played out on the political field in this milieu, centrally through the splitting of the old national Whig party that left the stage without a whimper as the new Republican Party came to dominate a part of Northern politics in the mid 1850’s. However beyond that parliamentary expression of the anti-slavery fight Howe was among those ‘extremists’ who were looking for extra-parliamentary ways to force the issue. Samuel Gridley Howe, at that time, seemed an unlikely candidate for such a role but nevertheless represented the personification of a very important historical political trend –in times of social stress when the old political consensus no longer holds contradictory elements together some elements of the old elite move in the new direction.

The Boston milieu of which Howe was an intricate part is a classic case study of the above-mentioned phenomena. The tensions between the 'Conscience' Whigs (those who opposed slavery in some way) and 'Cotton' Whigs (both the Southern planters ands their Northern supporters) began to appear early. I previously mentioned the Mexican War. Opposition to that war, a war fought essentially to increase slavery’s domain, appears to have been a litmus test. It is only a short way from that to the establishment of the Free Soil Party (with the unlikely political hack/wizard Martin Van Buren as its presidential candidate in 1848), the break up of the national Whig Party in the early 1850’s and the establishment of the Republican Party as a catchall for those opposed to slavery and in favor of a unified national capitalist expansion.

However, for those like Howe, who were driven by religious conviction and righteous zeal the parliamentary field was too narrow a place to resolve this slavery issue. Hence the support of John Brown in his endeavors. I have dealt with the political and military implications of Brown’s actions elsewhere in this space so I do not wish to do so here. The only point I wish to make is a comment on Howe’s fleeing to Canada in the wake of the frenzy in the South and the halls of Congress over the Brown raid, an action that seems to be contrary to his character. Later generations, who have faced this same kind of persecution and its consequences, can relate to that tension. One can name the Palmer Raids after World War I and the 'red scare' after World War II. Frankly there is no general rule on how one is suppose to act. However, contradictory that flight was in this instance Howe for his forthright efforts in the struggle against slavery still warrants a lesser place in the pantheon of our political forbears.

*Honor John Brown, Late of Harper's Ferry

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the heroic revolutionary abolitionist, John Brown.

Markin comment:

I have added a link to the revolutionary abolitionist John Brown as listed on the "Wikipedia" site. As with all references to that site caution must be used but I found it a good source to get basic information on Brown and it provided a decent bibliography on the man. I would be happy to hear from any sites that are politically active that use the name John Brown to indicate their commitment to social change. See my book review dated February 5, 2008 for a commentary on this heroic figure in the American left pantheon.

Sonny James- Take Good Care of Her

*Poets' Corner- Langston Hughes' John Brown Tribute- "October 16"

*Poets' Corner- Langston Hughes' John Brown Tribute- "October 16"

Click on the title to link to an article about the relationship between Langston Hughes' forbears and Captain John Brown, late of Kansas on the anniversary of the Harpers Ferry raid.


October 16-Langston Hughes

Perhaps
You will remember
John Brown.

John Brown
Who took his gun,
Took twenty-one companions
White and black,
Went to shoot your way to freedom
Where two rivers meet
And the hills of the
North
And the hills of the
South
Look slow at one another-
And died
For your sake.

Now that you are
Many years free,
And the echo of the Civil War
Has passed away,
And Brown himself
Has long been tried at law,
Hanged by the neck,
And buried in the ground-
Since Harpers Ferry
Is alive with ghost today,
Immortal raiders
Come again to town-

Perhaps
You will recall
John Brown.

When All Hell Broke Out And The Army Half-Mutinied In The Heat Of The Vietnam War-One Generation of ’68 Story On The 50th Anniversary Of His Induction-And Maybe A Cautionary Tale-For The Army

When All Hell Broke Out And The Army Half-Mutinied In The Heat Of The Vietnam War-One Generation of ’68 Story On The 50th Anniversary Of His Induction-And Maybe A Cautionary Tale-For The Army    

By Frank Jackman

Some anniversaries like say the start of the French, American and Russian revolutions are world-historic events and should be given a nod to every five of ten years in a big way complete with updates on where they stand in the up and down of human history. (I remember being somewhat shocked when Zhou-En-Lai  the old Communist foreign minister under Mao who never was on the losing side of a faction fight remarking that the lessons of the French Revolution had not run their course in his time-today either.) Same with specific events related to decisive political events like the establishment (and demise) of the leftist historic Paris Commune of 1871 which gets commemorated in this publication every year hence such awkward designations as 144^th and so on. Then there is the purely personal political events commemoration like the one mentioned in the headline to this piece-the also decisive 50^th anniversary of my induction into the U.S. Army in January 1969 which in its own way has reverberated unto this day. (Strictly private personal events like birthdays, weddings, and new relationships are found in appropriate places in stories written for this and other publications by me and others some who like myself were “present at the creation” in 1974 when this whole business got started.)

I was, frankly, not going to make any effort to commemorate this personal event since the story has been told several times by various writers here who know what happened, and what by the same token, had happened to them in that unhappy youth time which ravaged this country to the core and we have been fighting a rearguard action ever since for not winning back then when the world was young and we were knee-deep in seeking a newer world.  That cohort of writers among those who I grew up with in the desperately poor Acre section of North Adamsville took different routes than I although we wound up in the same place after the dust was cleared-forevermore hostile to wars, and rumors of war which have plagued our existences since then.

The initial impetus for deciding to “tell all” about that military experience had been oddly in the response by several readers to a recent film review of the 2018 film The Post where I mentioned in passing my own way of opposing the Vietnam War when it counted as did heroic whistle-blower Dan Ellsberg in “leaking” what became The Pentagon Papers  to the public via the major newspapers. The gist of what these readers said is that they were unaware of my experience (a few related their own experiences at the time monotonously familiar) and that I should tell my story on my own hook, as a cautionary tale if nothing else.           

That readership urging would not have been enough though if on an assignment for another publication I had not landed in San Francisco to follow up on that story (and where I am writing this piece). As is not unusual these days San Francisco for me and other old time Acre corner boys like Alex James is flooded with memories of the late Pete Markin, another of the cohort I grew up with, who couldn’t go the distance, who fell down for a lot of reasons including sheer hubris and wound up with a couple of slugs in his head done in not so sunny Sonora, in Mexico when some outlandish drug deal which was going to put him on easy street went very wrong under circumstances which are still shrouded in mystery. Just the way the bastard would have liked it.  I was not thinking so much of Pete’s military service where he was fatefully in more ways than one drafted, also inducted into the U.S. Army about a year before I was but the halcyon days of the Summer of Love, 1967 which he was the first to partake in and dragged the rest of us, most of us I think except Brad Webber, out here to the Western end of the world, to the place where everything goes to the China Seas. 

I won’t go into detail on that 1967 experience, or on what amounted to Markin’s fateful decision to drop out of college to see what was happening out here which in turn led to that induction notice because I have, and others as well, especially when Allan Jackson, also one of the Markinp-dragged crowd was the site manager before being pushed out by the younger writers. The only thing I will say is that Pete was really a prophet when he somehow sensed early in the 1960s when the rest of us were worried about getting a car, getting laid, getting dough all mixed together he kept harping that a new breeze was coming-and then it came. Too bad the silly bastard that we still shed tears over every time we mention his name couldn’t have gotten out of his own way. Yeah, the silly beautiful bastard who has left us here to mourn him fifty years later.

Talking to the guys I am still in touch from back in the Acre as well as the few who write here on occasion, I have been taken aback by how much that whole period of the Vietnam War affected every guy who came of military age. I have mentioned the Acre already and the way the war devastated a lot of us. And not just in the Acre but our generation, our baby-boomer generation, what Sam Lowell was the first in our group to call the Generation of ’68 and that sticks out as the right way to put the matter now with some pride. Most of the stories though from the Acre are like Johnny Blade’s, Sergeant John Richard Rizzo, 1946-1967 whose name is forever on the North Adamsville town hall memorial and down in black granite in Washington. Johnny could hardly wait to get into the Army, wait to get at the commies the government was always talking about who needed some killing and win himself some glory.

Johnny along with the recently departed Jimmy Higgins, who we are still shedding a few tears for our long last youth over, was the “muscle” for our corner boy corner in front of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor a valuable asset when trouble was around. Johnny Blade got all he asked for in Vietnam, and then some. Laid his head down, fell down in the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta for no good reason. After I did what I did in the Army which will be described below it took a long time and the intervention of our old corner boy leader Frankie Riley to get Johnny’s parents to even talk to me, to stop disowning and disrespecting me in the neighborhood even after I long ago left the place.  

It is hard even now to overestimate how strong the ethos of the Cold War Red Scare night which gripped the childhoods and neighborhoods of the Generation of ’68 brethren. The Acre and as far as I can tell most neighborhoods in most cities we similarly smitten. We believed in whatever it was our government, mostly when it counted the WWII hero Grandpa Ike, POSTUS during the coldest periods of that freeze. Bought into some murky variation of the need to kill every Red under the bed, to turn in every mommy if she was a commie to keep the Russkies from our humble doors. To keep the satanic beasts from letting us breath the fresh air of so-called democracy and loveless capitalism. Even though we were literally the poorest of the poor with Markin’s family, no, I stand corrected Jimmy Higgin’s family down at the Bottoms section of the Acre near the river at the very bottom in a tiny shack of a house with five brothers and how they moved in the place after a recent visit for his funeral I don’t know.

This in the “golden age of the working man” we hear about now in retrospect, but it never came down to us, no way. Still we believed what we believed about whatever the civics and history books said and whatever our leaders worked out over us. If you don’t believe me ask your parents, grandparents but I hope not great-grandparents what it was like come air raid drill time during the present at the creation nuclear weapons time when we all huddled, worthlessly when you think about it, under desks, trash cans whatever would “protect” us from the blast. Yeah, we had powerful enemies and no quarter was to be given, none asked for either.         

This is the set-up for us, for the corner boys from Tonio’s Pizza Parlor and a million other locations like 125^th Street in Harlem, the working-class quarters of Toledo in Ohio, the wide swarths of the barrios of East LA, along the decimated and dishonored Hopi trail of tears out where the states are square. The guys, maybe not the smartest guys or the most well-read but at least not unpatriotic as we knew the term then. When the deal went down, whatever our sympathies, whatever we had intended to do- we went. My case was only slightly more problematic since I had a girlfriend who was adamantly and fervently against the war while I was more lukewarm in my opposition and needed the wake-up call of induction before I figured where I stood. I was in 1968 more interested in the real chance once Lyndon Johnson abandoned the field to get beautiful newer world ruthless Irish Bobby Kennedy elected POSTUS and I could proceed with my childhood dream of being a maker and shaker in the political world, what I would later call bourgeois politics but then my “meal ticket” out of that poverty I knew only too well.        

Things did not work out that way in that endlessly action-packed year where decisions had to be made on the fly or you would get left in the dust.  Sure, when that notice came to take my physical and then the notice to report for induction I had my doubts, had small, very small thoughts of not going like a lot of guys, the draft resisters but I couldn’t quite get there then. Besides, truth be told, where was I to get any support for such a bold step. Not from home, not from the blessed Acre, and not from the now mostly already in the military corner boys who were far from ready to bring down the government if necessary-then. Certainly not in the ethos of the neighborhood with a few guys, including Johnny Blade having already laid down their heads in some godforsaken jungle or rice paddy.

Certainly not in my family filled with veterans including my Marine Corps father having done their duty when called if they hadn’t volunteered out of hand like my father did come Pearl Harbor. It would be many years and much estrangement before my father, and by extension my mother, would finally see for me what I did was right-and honorable even if he, they believed in the war well pass anybody except may Senator Henry Jackson and AF of L-CIO President George Meany. So I went, went one cold winter morning in January very early and dark up to the Boston Army Base for induction.

Inducted and sent not as expected to Fort Dix in New Jersey where all the other corner boys did their basic training but to Fort Jackson down in South Carolina and from there to Fort Gordon in the red clay of Augusta, Georgia home of the Masters golf championship and ex-POSTUS Grandpa Ike’s favorite course, or at least that is where they let him play. That distance from home and some resources would make things harder in the end but let’s back up. Back up to that trip down to Fort Jackson where I stayed for about three days, three days when I realized two things, the obvious one that I had made a mistake by allowing myself to be inducted and there was no way I was going to Vietnam which even then had my name written in blood on it.  

Being in the South being far away from any support system, or advise I went through the basic training and then when I was given AIT as my military career assignment, AIT meaning Advanced Infantry Training down in Alabama I knew the die was cast, that I was up shit’s creek. Guys were being so chewed up and spit out in Vietnam that every AIT guy knew exactly where he was going once the training was completed. Vietnam just then was the only place in need of such services. Fortunately, as I would learn later when I met guys in the stockade, my orders allowed me thirty days leave before reporting to Fort Lewis out in Washington for transport to Vietnam.  Some guys were ordered immediately to Vietnam with not much time to do anything but kiss their asses good-bye, that is what one guy said. He had been sent under guard to Fort Lewis and left there only to go AWOL and a bunch of other stuff once he was released on the base. He went a different route for the same reason and would up as I in the same place-the only virtuous place in the military-the stockade.      

       

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was somewhat lucky that my number came up in 1969 rather than say 1966, 1967 since the anti-war movement in its radical activist end had expanded from supporting and making counselling available for draft-resisters to include military resisters as the war dragged on with no end in sight despite grand illusion lies by high military commanders that there was some kind of light at the end of the tunnel-and there was when the North Vietnamese pulled the hammer down in, well, 1975 long after what happened to the Acre corner boys happened. Between the citizen soldiers, the rough and tumble eyes at least half opened draftees less and less eager to go to the quagmire as the reports came back to the neighborhood, or as the funeral trains got longer who were being impressed into the military and guys who had come back disillusioned or fucked-up the Army was getting less and less reliable. The anti-war movement began to see that you needed to get to the GIs if the war was going to stop. The government, certainly the Nixon government, was not going to stop the damn thing, not with “peace with honor” their eternal mantra.

That shift helped me personally for when I got back to North Adamsville I immediately contacted the Quakers at the Friends Meeting House in Cambridge. Well not immediately since I still had enough corner boy in me to check up with whoever was around and have a few drinks to drown my sorrows, and theirs. Also, that pesky anti-war girlfriend turned out to have, and I quote, a new-found respect for me now that I had “gotten religion,” my term, on the war. Was ready to do something and so was very, well very and let’s leave it at that. No, let’s leave it at a variation of the famous photograph of three fetching young women, women dressed for the times with the slogan “girls say yes, to guys who say no-to the draft. So yes, not exactly immediately.)

Funny, being in the heavily student Boston area a hotbed of anti-war sentiment where you could go to an anti-war march, rally or something any day of the week I was not sure where to go, who to see, and my girlfriend while an activist was not sure either. By something like a default I turned to the Quakers since I knew they were historically anti-war and had a vague notion picked up from one of the ubiquitous anti-war posters plastered in Harvard Square that they were offering military counselling to distressed G.I.s., to my situation.       

I do not remember all the details of the first meeting with the counsellor (who was not a Quaker but knew enough about military procedure to be of great service to me and others). Here is the outline of the plan he suggested as to options (“suggested” an important word since other terms might have led to serious legal, and political, repercussions) which should be enough to satisfy those who want to know my military service story. Since I had orders to go to Fort Lewis and wanted to stay in the Boston area to get help and be with connections that mattered, I had to go AWOL, absent without leave, a military crime treated lightly or seriously depending on the length of absence and other factors. Go AWOL for at least thirty days, better given Army bureaucracy, hell, any bureaucracy, in order to be “dropped from the rolls” out in Fort Lewis. Meaning I was essentially a free agent, free for a minute from those orders hanging over me. Then I was to turn myself in for punishment and reassignment. That turning in place by design Fort Devens about forty miles west of Boston and so a good place to work out my plans from.             

After turning myself in I was, beyond whatever paperwork and punishment would accrue from the AWOL charge, to put in paper work for a conscientious objector discharge. That a hard dollar once you were in the military and not based just then on some historic religion training like with Peace Quakers or Mennonites but not impossible. 1969, ,and going forward also turned out to lucky for me since various federal lower court decisions and even an important Supreme Court one which basically set the same standard for military COs as civilian were beginning to force the military to be more serious about such applications. I put in the application although I was too sanguine to expect much since a number of guys who I had met at Devens in the same boat as I were being turned down. As I was, having based my argument on a slight Catholic/ethical axis not what the tight-assed Army standard would regard as a CO. Turned down despite, and this would be important later, being declared by all the line of interrogators to be “sincere” in my beliefs.  That negative result meant I was to prepare myself for a reissue of orders to Fort Lewis and then to Vietnam.

Here is where the Quakers, and I will always love Quakers whatever theological differences we have, came to the rescue-they provided me with a lawyer, a lawyer who was building a reputation for getting military guys out of one kind of trouble or another, a new category of lawyer, a civilian lawyer going up against the Army justice system.  (Rather than depend on some Army JAG, Army lawyer, who was strictly a company man.) Although it was a close thing, a very close thing since there were those in the Army at Devens, lifers who hated me and wanted to take me to Fort Lewis under armed guard that lawyer was able to get a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) from a federal judge in Boston which kept me under that court’s jurisdiction while the merits of the case were being heard. Whee! (Those lifers were literally searching the fort for me to handcuff me and sweep me away the very day the TRO was issued before it took effect.)         

That lifer hatred was not just happenstance. You see once I got “religion” I no longer feared what would happen to me, no longer was a soldier, was an anti-war fire-eater. Once the Army breaks its hold on you, that fear of the stockade that very basic training sergeant warned you against anything was possible. One day before that TRO took effect and while I was waiting for something to move on my case I decided to join a Quaker-organized anti-war rally outside the front gate at Fort Devens. In uniform and during duty hours. Result: Special Court-Martial-the max, six months. Since my case was working its way slowly through the federal court system, I actually served that six months minus some good time.

Once I got out of the stockade on that charge I decided to continue my personal resistance and refused to wear the uniform. Result: Special Court-Martial-the max, six months. Toward the end of that second six months (plus pre-trial time in the stockade this time) that writ of habeas corpus came through and a few weeks later I was discharged, honorably discharged if you can believe that since the judge had decided the Army had screwed up not granting my CO application. Otherwise, who knows I might still be doing an endless series of six month sentences. Tough, yes, tough for lots of reasons, political and personal. But know this I would probably not fifty years later still be fighting the good fight against the endless wars of our times if I hadn’t had that baptism of fire. That can be the cautionary tale if you like.           

*Poet's Corner- Langston Hughes' John Brown Tribute- "October 16"

*Poets' Corner- Langston Hughes' John Brown Tribute- "October 16"

Click on the title to link to an article about the relationship between Langston Hughes' forbears and Captain John Brown, late of Kansas on the anniversary of the Harpers Ferry raid.


October 16-Langston Hughes

Perhaps
You will remember
John Brown.

John Brown
Who took his gun,
Took twenty-one companions
White and black,
Went to shoot your way to freedom
Where two rivers meet
And the hills of the
North
And the hills of the
South
Look slow at one another-
And died
For your sake.

Now that you are
Many years free,
And the echo of the Civil War
Has passed away,
And Brown himself
Has long been tried at law,
Hanged by the neck,
And buried in the ground-
Since Harpers Ferry
Is alive with ghost today,
Immortal raiders
Come again to town-

Perhaps
You will recall
John Brown.