The Ghost Of Evangeline-With Jolie Blond The Cajun Queen In Mind

The Ghost Of Evangeline-With Jolie Blond The Cajun Queen In Mind

By Lester Lannon

“Where is my Jolie blond, where is my Jolie blond,” the fading voice of the fading Rene Dubois cried out in the darkened night of his sad end hospital bed. That sad end Veterans Administration hospital bed courtesy of a wound he had suffered back in his Vietnam day when “Charlie,” the name that the U.S. troops had bestowed on North Vietnamese regular army soldiers and South Vietnamese civilian guerillas which had never really healed properly since he had been left out in the field too long before the necessary operation could be performed and now was the frontal cause of his final decline. Yeah, the frontal cause but the wound that was really laying him and which he received even earlier in his youth was the one that never healed.     

“I’m right here, here next to your side, Mon Cherie, my love, and will be forever,” Louise Perot whispered barely containing a mass of built-up tears as she wiped the sweat from his forehead with her clenched handkerchief. Those endless tears the result of not finding her beloved until the previous week after searching for almost forty years by various means including private detectives, long journeys and just misses and only by chance had she by the virtues of the Internet been able to find him.

But more on that eternal search and its results later. For now we have to go back something more than forty years, closer to fifty really, and the night when against all reason the two lovers, lovers who had declared from their respective childhoods their eternal knot, had a knockdown drag out fight over some supposed belief, supposed on Rene’s part, that Louise was responding to the advances of Ben Smith. Ben, a guy from New Orleans who had arrived shortly before that night to run the Lafayette part of a family business and who was not even a Cajun, not one drop of Cajun blood. Bloody British as Rene found out when he did the research and Rene as a true son of the diaspora held the plight of his, and Louise’ s forbears from ancient Arcadie up by Nova Scotia, against every son and daughter of that equally ancient enemy.

For the volatile Rene, known far and wide in the wilds of Southwest Louisiana, around Lafayette mostly, as a tough, as a guy who was as likely to wield a whipsaw chain against an adversary as listen to reason was in no mood to see his ancient stock diluted by some tryst between his woman (and down in that part of Louisiana that was the word, that was the stark term of relationship which every red-blooded Cajun man used to define his nest) and the bloody historic oppressor. Louise was the only one who could reason with him when he got in whipsaw chain mood but this night her entreaties would go for naught against the sacred blood. Grandpa Dubois had taught his grandson well the ancient sorrows and the ancient wounds meted out in olden times forcing his people southward to hardscrabble Louisiana.           

Of course that supposed tryst between Louise and Ben was all in Rene’s rather weak-willed imagination since as Louise tried to tell him repeatedly that night when he confronted her with the “evidence” on the basis of hearsay put up from Pierre LeBlanc, a so-called friend who in the end turned out to have had his own very serious un-British designs on Louise. Louise since she had graduated from Lafayette High the previous summer had worked in the business offices of the Lafayette branch of Smith, Johnson & Sons out of New Orleans. Ben had been sent there by his father to learn the business and so since Louise even in the short time that she had worked there being an extremely intelligent girl who in a later age and place would have been prime college material was assigned the task of filling young Smith in on what went on in the offices. That was the sum total of their exchanges. But Rene, a true Cajun in that way too would having formed his opinion bolstered by the lying Pierre, not believed her story, her very reasonable explanation. That night all hell had broken loose in Rene’s head and Louise would later tell friends she for a moment feared that he might if she had not been a women been subject to one of Rene’s notorious whipsaw chain beatings.     

That night several hours after their heated exchange, really early that next morning Rene Dubois who had loved Louise since childhood (and she him) in the dead of night packed up his small bag of belongings and headed out to the Greyhound bus station for the trip to Baton Rouge to join the Army. That previous night would be the last that either Rene or Louise would see each other for over forty almost fifty years. Although not for Louise’s lack of looking, looking everywhere after she had gone over the Dubois trailer on Montmartre Street that next morning and was told by Mama Dubois that Rene had not come downstairs for his usual breakfast and that when she went up to knock on the door not hearing any stirrings at the knock opened the door to find Rene gone.  

Rene’s story is simpler to tell so it can be told first. After getting off the bus in Baton Rouge Rene headed directly to the Army Recruitment Station on Lamar Street and signed up on the dotted line. Signed up in effect for hell since the year he signed up, 1965, all hell was breaking loose in Vietnam and Uncle Sam was looking without question for anybody who would don the uniform and fight the hated commies. Rene, a good if not practicing Catholic boy had been bought up, as many others had who were not necessarily Cajun or Catholic into that script, had bought into the need to fight the commies, to eliminate the dominoes or something like that. “Push their faces into the ground and make them eat dirt” was the way Rene had put it to Pierre when they discussed in passing the fate of the Vietnamese Catholics one night after hearing about a commie massacre of one Catholic village by the commie rats. An event that never happened and which had been the orchestrated result of the South Vietnamese government’s very deliberate media blitz, just one of a stockpile of lies and deceptions by all sides in that civil war. But mainly young Rene was interested in “kicking ass” from Ben Smith messing with his girl to some enlisted men one Saturday night in a brawl after too much to drink to Charlie and his evil ways.     

Rene it turned out once he got some discipline via boot camp and Advanced Infantry Training was a born soldier notwithstanding that Saturday night melee act of indiscipline just mentioned and so he rapidly became a member of the elite 82^nd Airborne Division, a division which would take serious beatings in the battles again Mister Charlie. Of course depending on the day the fight could go either way but somewhere down in the Delta, the Mekong Delta, the rice paddles that produced the bulk of the country’s food supplies one Sergeant Rene Dubois’ luck ran out and he was severely wounded in three places, the shoulder, the right leg and very close to the heart, the latter a wound that never properly healed because despite the advanced medical rescue operation which saved his life Rene had been out in the field too long to have the operation he needed right away to be effective. Several month later he was discharged to ultimately receive 60% disability compensation for his physical wounds and from there he disappeared from any radar. Everybody knew from the reports by the Army officer in charge of notifications that Rene had slipped away to the Army after the fight with Louise, had gone to Vietnam and had been wounded. But Rene never even went back to Lafayette to see Pierre, his family, and certainly not Louise, that latter continued stubbornness was a Cajun trait too despite his continual love for her.

Rene when he came back to the “real world” which is what more and more returning veterans back then called coming back from Vietnam after his recuperation landed and had stayed in California, stayed for no other reason at first that it was not wounded, never healed Lafayette but the direct wounds of war left him helpless, left him with a sea change of heart about what he had done to people with whom he had no quarrel. That angst left him drifting from small job to small job as a mechanic, a skill which he had picked up enough down home working on every one of Jerry Jeff’s super-duper car to get jobs at service stations and small garages up and down the coast until a few years later when his drug habit (and occasional binge drinking, a habit easily picked up in Vietnam although back in youth Lafayette he hated to even hear of anybody using drink) got the better of him, couldn’t put out the fire in his head he found himself in the “brothers under the bridge” railroad “jungle” encampment near Westminster and he stayed with his fellow drifting Vietnam War brothers.

What had happened along the way was that between ‘Nam, the recuperation hospital and then out on the streets Rene had picked up a drug habit, mostly cocaine but later heroin because it made whatever suffering he endured easier to handle. He was able to work and do his share of drugs together for a while but then he just lost whatever motivation he had to move on and moved down instead, moved down with guys who knew his pain and who had created a haphazard raggedly old world for themselves along the riverbeds, arroyos, and under railroad bridges of Southern California. It wasn’t a good life, wasn’t any life really but it got him by for a while, a few years before those encampments kind of fell in on themselves and he wound up heading north to San Francisco and the flops of the Embarcadero. There he stayed for many years doing “pearl-diver,” day labor, bracero kind of work to feed his new alcohol habit after sobering up from the heroin which almost killed him one night. As he aged he became a sad sight around Market and Third, places like that a little raggedy, mumbling, never having any real friends except the occasional stew-bums who gathered together to buy quarts of rotgut wine, Thunderbird and Ripple the bottom of the barrel and swig away. No woman, no woman after Louise and that would have been that, another lost soul out of the ashes of war. Then one morning he had the DTs so bad he could hardly stand and some kindly cop got him into the police van and instead of bringing him to the station after seeing he was a veteran through his VA card brought him over to the Smiley VA hospital over near Seal Rock. And that is where he was and in what condition when Louise Perot finally found him after her long search. 

We already know why Rene left, why his massive Cajun pride got the best of him when he thought, as we know erroneously, that Ben Smith was stealing his time, stealing his girl and she was letting him. When Rene left, left without a word, left for the Army was all she heard from that bastard Pierre she started to succumb to Ben’s advances for a while. But it was not to be because she was still in love with her Mon Cherie, her Rene. That love would take her many places and many wrong turns before she wound up at the Smiley VA hospital. Once she knew she could not love or marry Ben she left Lafayette, strangely enough left for Baton Rouge which seemed to be then the gateway out of Cajun country. She stayed there for a while but eventually headed for Chicago. Chicago one of the main points, Old Town anyway, of connection to the new cultural happenings which would become known as the”1960s,” the counter-culture, the hippies.

While in Baton Rouge she had met up with some “freaks” who were heading west and they turned her on to some drugs, not an uncommon occurrence then either in Vietnam or the streets of America. Not hard drugs like parents used to dread would come unto their children, morphine, opium, or heroin but stuff like grass, bennies and mescaline. “Trip” stuff, magical mystery tour trip stuff when all the non-military, non-square world was getting high on life, high on whatever was new in the world. In Baton Rouge she also lost her virginity one night to a Buffalo Bill kind of guy complete with buckskin jacket, moccasins and cowboy hat from Wyoming and they settled in together in a house, a commune they dubbed it as was the style then, with a revolving cast of residents, about par for the course then. But soon Baton Rouge and that life was not big enough for her and one night she split with just her knapsack and a small handbag and headed to the Greyhound bus station for up-river Chicago. A part, a big part of her leaving the communal scene and her buckskin cowboy who took her virtue although she was pleased to do have him do so, as it would be in the future was that she still couldn’t get Rene out of her mind, couldn’t get over the idea that she would never go to bed with him. And it would be in Chicago in the late 1960s where she would decide that she had to find Rene one way or another. Find out if he still cared for her, or was still holding that Cajun blood grudge.

Louise as the years passed by was mainly true to that idea, to that quest, but as with lots of things in life not everything goes onward and upward the way you like it. Louise, no question, ever since she first got “turned on” in Baton Rouge by those freaks and later by that doped-out silver glass cowboy loved her drugs, loved bennies best of all for they would give her a great deal of energy but after a while that intensity, those three day rushes, wore her down and that was when she, after meeting a girl at a bar on Division Street when she was looking for work as a waitress, got into cocaine, developed a serious attachment to the stuff (they said it was not addictive unlike heroin but don’t ever tell Louise that, not after she got sober). That cocaine madness took her pretty far down into the mean streets before she got up on her feet again. Obviously a young woman with a habit like that, no real resources, no real job skills, and no interest in men, men to be used as sugar daddies, or protectors until she found her Rene needed to find work that would pay the freight for getting high.

Once night she was sitting in Benny’s, the one off of Division, not the one up by the Loop wondering where she was going to get the money for rent from when this big brawny guy came up to her and whispered in her ear that he would give her one hundred dollars if she went with him to his hotel room. He said he had some coke too. Now a few years before she might had thought that advance was kind of raw, such talk she thought would have had Rene shooting from the hip if he had heard about it but just then she took about five seconds to grab her coat and go out the door with him. That first “trick” would not be the last as she thereafter used Benny’s (giving owner Benny his cut and his occasional piece of her which was nice, everybody agreed nice as she earned her dough the hard way) as her place of business for a number of years. Too many.

But the drugs, the hard life on the bed, the hard life on your back took a lot out of Louise, and she did not age well so her clientele since she could not be as choosy dropped down in class too. Some nights she would go down on guy out in Benny’s back alley for a few lines of coke, not much more. Then one day she heard a guy, a Vietnam veteran named Phil who had been through it all as he was willing to tell anybody who listened, talking about a bunch of guys down in Southern California who didn’t belong back in the “real world,” didn’t fit in after ‘Nam (she did not know what that meant then but she soon found out) and who were hanging under a railroad bridge. When Phil was out there, having sobered up himself beforehand, he had stopped by to see if he could help his brothers out, see if he could bring them back to the real world. He mentioned one guy, a crazy Cajun guy from Lafayette who was so surly that nobody wanted to mess with him. Something out of a Nelson Algren novel, a real bad boy especially when he got that cheapjack wine down his throat. While nobody wanted to mess with him nobody was going to throw him out either since he was a “brother.” Louise immediately thought Rene. After asking Phil what the Cajun looked like and finding the description could have been of Rene she asked where the encampment was and he told her Westminster down below Los Angeles.

Louise decided that very night to sober up and head out there to find her man. But like the man said not everything is forever onward and upward so sobering up was not easy for Louise and she fell down a few times before she kicked the jams out of the habit. Took a couple of years to get the kinks out. Stopped giving blow-jobs in back alleys and other indignities as well for lines of coke. But eventually after that couple of years she was ready to go to Westminster. Problem was when she got there the encampment had been busted up by the cops and most of the guys had headed north. So Louise headed north working her way slowly up the coast asking around for the local “railroad jungles” and wound up in San Francisco, working in a bar for tips and not much else. Along the way up the coast Louise would always when she hit a town check the VA hospitals to see if they might have a line on Rene. In Monterey near old run-down Cannery Row made famous by John Steinbeck she got a lead that a Cajun crazy speaking patois (although the person who gave that information did not know what that meant when she asked if he spoke corrupted French) had been there but had moved on a couple of months before.

By the time she got to Frisco town, got a room, got that bar job for tips she had an idea that she was close to the end of her journey. By chance she had stopped at the library off Market Street to check on various locations where a street guy might wind up in the town. She asked the librarian on duty to help her and that librarian directed her to a computer, the Internet and the wonders of Google. After showing Louise what to do she went to town getting a ton of information which she started to use the next day. There were, unfortunately a million places where bums, hoboes, tramps and crazy Cajuns might hang out. It was not until two weeks later that she found pay dirt, found that Rene had been staying at the Cider Inn, a place for homeless veterans no questions asked. Once there a staff social worker told her Rene was at the Smiley VA hospital near Seal Harbor. And that was how Louise wound up forty almost fifty years later sitting next to Rene in that fading hospital bed.      

In Honor Of Women’s History Month- “Big Bill” Haywood’s Nevada Jane

In Honor Of Women’s History Month- “Big Bill” Haywood’s Nevada Jane    

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Nevada Jane-Utah Phillips 

Are the linens turned down in folds of glowing white?
Are you lying there alone again tonight?
He’s marching with the men through the cold November rain,
But you know he’ll come back home, Nevada Jane.

(Chorus)
Have you seen the way he holds her as thought she was a bride,
Children riding on shoulders strong & wide?
She never thought to scold him or even to com-plain,
&Big Bill always loved Nevada Jane.

And when he stumbles in with blood upon his shirt,
Washing up alone, just to hide the hurt,
He will lie down by your side and wake you with your name,
You’ll hold him in your arms, Nevada Jane. (Chorus)

Nevada Jane went riding, her pony took a fall,
The doctor said she never would walk again at all;
But Big Bill could lift her lightly, the big hands rough and plain
Would gently carry home Nevada Jane.

The storms of Colorado rained for ten long years,
The mines of old Montana were filled with blood and tears,
Utah, Arizona, California hear the name
Of the man who always loved Nevada Jane. (Chorus)

Although the ranks are scattered like leaves upon the breeze,
And with them go the memory of harder times than these,
Some things never change, but always stay the same,
Just like the way Bill loved Nevada Jane. (Chorus)

*******

Nevada Jane

I've been told that I'm wrong about this song. I don't know whether I am or not, since Bill Haywood, who was with the Western Federation of Miners and was the first Secretary-Treasurer of the Industrial Workers of the World, never mentioned his wife in his autobiography except very briefly, so I can't tell whether he really loved his wife or not.

I do have stories from old-timers who tell me about when Bill Haywood was working in a mine camp, basically doing a job of de-horning. His wife, Nevada Jane, had been crippled by a fall from her pony, so she couldn't walk. Bill had a house on the edge of town, and he would carry his wife down to the railroad station every morning. She would sit there and talk to the women of the town about what they could do to help organize the town, while Bill was brawling at the bars. He'd come back at the end of the day, pick Nevada Jane up, hang one of their kids off of each shoulder, and every night you'd see him carrying the wife and kids up to the house.

Most of the songs about labor struggles are full of loud shouting and arm-waving and thunder and rhetoric. It's good for me, every now and then, to try to take a look at the human side of it, right or wrong.

The tune is by one of my favorite songwriters, Stephen Foster. I first heard "Gentle Annie" from Kate McGarrigle of Canada. The tune has too many wide-apart changes in it for me to sing the way Stephen Foster wrote it, so I changed it some –Utah Phillips

… and I will follow Utah’s lead

She knew she wanted him, knew she wanted “Big Bill” Haywood (nobody ever called him just Bill, not even his drinking companions, and certainly not his legion of lady friends who had a different take of that Big Bill notion, so Big Bill it was)  from the first time she set eyes on him. First set eyes on him in front of those Virginia City miners all hungry, sweaty, and dirty from the thankless work-a-day toil, listening intently at that meeting where he boomed out his message-his message that working men had to stick together against the damn (he used less elegant language but that conveyed the idea) bosses and their agents in and out of the government, that all working men were brothers (brothers in a time when that designation sat in for all humankind without I think showing disrespect just narrowness after all remember the heroic Lawrence strikers of 1912 who had many women textile workers out there fighting for their bread and roses) and that a better system, a system where the working man had a say in what the hell (again he used more salty language, language that the poor workers understood better than some intellectual mumbo-jumbo but that needed that too just didn’t need to be told they were the fucking wretched of the earth they knew that, knew that in triplicate) was going on and how to keep from starving for starters to boot.

He had more to say, spent the better part of an hour saying it with all those sweaty bodies filled with haggard eyes still following him, but she, Nevada Jane (although just Jane then, he gave her the Nevada part later, later after he had “conquered” her or that was the way he told the story) was more, uh, interested in the look of him, that big rugged man look, that take no prisoners look, that man of the West look, that had her entranced from that first moment. She had to have him, have him come hell or high water.

And she did, she did snare that man of the West by being a woman of the West, and just aiming straight for him. Oh, she used her feminine wiles for part of it, no question, but what Big Bill found interesting in her was that pioneer stock woman who asked for no more than he could give, and gave no less than she could give. Now everybody heard, hell, everybody knew, that Big Bill liked the ladies, had to have them, but even before her accident, her damn accident on that favored mare which crippled her up, she knew that when the deal went down he would always come back to her if he could. And after the accident he did, did more often than not come back, pleased to be with her back, back to his Nevada Jane.

But see Big Bill was a man of action and she knew, knew deep in her pioneer stock womanhood, that he had to do what he had to do. And so along with the joy at his sight when he showed up she had days and nights of anguish. Days and nights when he was on a miners’ organizing drive in some hellhole place like Bisbee, out in Arizona copper country, or over in the rapidly vanishing Nevada silver mines or up in Butte, up in Big Sky country where the mines stretched out over the high prairies  and hills. All places where the bosses’ had a bounty out on Big Bill’s hide.  Days and nights of worry about his health, especially that big heart that might break at any time, or that dead eye that might flare up and cause some hell. Days and nights of worry that he might drink that river of liquor, hard liquor, hard old whiskey, that he kept saying he needed to keep him fit for the work (except when he wanted to call a meeting and would literally close down every bar in some town, forcibly if he had to, to insure a proper attendance).

Mostly though she worried about the women, about some young thing, maybe a pioneer woman who was not crippled up, or maybe one of those New York society women who were all agog over him when he went East to raise money and support for the miners and for the IWW (Wobblies, Industrial Workers Of The World), but she worried. She worried and she kept his home clean and nice, pioneer simple but clean and neat, for his return. And he did return for as long as he could…

And hence this Women’s History Month contribution   

On The 50th Anniversary Of The Passing Of The “King Of The Beats” -Ti Jean Kerouac-A Series Of Appreciations- In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957The Latest Jack Kerouac Film (And CD)Sighting- "One Fast Move Or I'm Gone: Jack Kerouac's "Big Sur"- An Interview

Click on title to link to an interview about the latest effort to bring the literary work of Jack Kerouac up to date with the film (and CD), "One Fast Move Or I'm Gone:Jack Kerouac's "Big Sur", on the program "Here and Now" on Boston's NPR station, WBUR.

On The 50^th Anniversary Of The Passing Of The “King Of The Beats” -Ti Jean Kerouac-A Series Of Appreciations-  

By Contributing Editor Allan Jackson

By Lance Lawrence

Sometimes you just cannot win. Sometimes you just let it pass and other times as now anything less than incarceration or the bastinado will not permit me to say some words on a subject that I care about. Attentive readers of Growing Up Absurd In The 1950s or its sister publication where such material is something like syndicated know that I, and most of the older writers here and for that matter other publications who grew up in the 1950s have some relationship to “the Beats” to Jack Kerouac and Allan Ginsberg above but lesser lights stationed in North Beach, San Francisco and Greenwich Village, New York City and other sullen outposts. Know that although we were way too young or too interested in our generation’s salvation-rock and roll music-to be washed clean by the Beats that by some process of osmosis we picked up some of the ideas, words, be-bop, lust, homosexual slang, road terminology. Courtesy of Jack Kerouac and the crowd whether he accepted the honorific “King of the Beats” or like Bob Dylan dubbed by the mass media always looking for a hook “King of the Folkies” for the next generation, the folkie-hippie counterculture abdicated.        

Personally, and I have the scars and restless writerly nights to prove it, I was very second-wave influenced by Kerouac and not only by his most famous book, bible really when the time for such things was ripe, On The Road. Maybe less that books like Big Sur which got me to Todo el Mundo just south of Big Sur and some wild escapades and near fatal escapes toked to the gills on weed or whatever came through the very open door. Influences which have made it natural to recount some of those adventures in print of one sort or another. Natural as well this 50^th anniversary year since Jack Kerouac’s death in 1969 to make a big deal out of that milestone. To write some fresh material as below or to republish some older material. And not just memories of Kerouac’s influence but what I called in one article the “assistant king of the beats” Allan Ginsburg.    

That is where the sometimes you can’t win comes in and the have to “speak to the issue” rears its head as well. Recently both to acknowledge the 50^th anniversary of Kerouac’s passing and to honor Allan Ginsburg’s as well I had an article Hard Rain’s A Going To Fall originally published in Poetry Today in 1997 republished in several publications under the title For Ti Jean Kerouac On The 50^th Anniversary Of His Death And The “Assistant King Of The Beats” Allan Ginsberg-Hard Rain’s A Going To Fall With Kudos To Bob Dylan “King Of The Folkies."   

In a new introduction to the piece I mentioned that in the interest of today’s endless pursue of transparency which in many cases covers up the real deal with a few fake pieces of fluff admitted that I knew Jack Kerouac’s daughter, his now late daughter whom he never recognized for whatever cramped reason and which took its toll on her with an also early death, met out in Todo el Mundo south of Big Sur off the famous Pacific Coast Highway. Those were the fast and loose days when everybody wanted to be out somewhere around Big Sur and one day I happened to be in The Lost Way restaurant (now still open under another name serving wholesome food unlike the burgers and fries and beer that sustained us then) and somebody mentioned that Jack’s daughter, unacknowledged daughter as I said, Jan was sitting a few tables away having as I learned later from her had just come from  Pfeiffer Beach which played a role in a few of Jacks’ books. One thing led to another and we wound up taking Jan with us to our digs (house) in Todo el Mundo several miles away.    

That simple fact has now led in 2019 to some fool, a fool with a name very familiar in the age of the Internet of Anonymous, to assume without proof that Jan and I, or Jan and somebody in the house were having an affair, and most probably me. The only “proof” given, maybe asserted is better was that a guy by the name of Johnny Spain told him that he had been there at our house when Jan came tumbling and that we had a party for about four days when booze, sex, and drugs flowed freely. I knew Johnny Spain back in those days so that part is real. He was on the run from the coppers for either drug possession or for assault I forget which since we had a few such characters some our way and as we were not fond of the coppers then, maybe not now either we gave him shelter. Johnny probably saw many things as he imbibed in whatever was around the place, but he would not have seen me hanging with Jan. Simple reason: one Carol Riley forever known as Butterfly Swirl in those times when many of us, including me the Duke of Earl (yes from the 1950s hit single), were carrying monikers to reflect our new-found freedoms was slumming from her perfect wave boyfriend existence down in Carlsbad in the days before young women took to the surf themselves and had come north to see what was happening. Butterfly was very possessive which I didn’t mind but would have ditched me and/or has it out with Jan if we had been having an affair. End of story, well, not quite the end Butterfly returned to Carol and her perfect wave surfer before long after finding out “what was what.”          

This is really where my real ire is hanging though. In that same introduction I mentioned that I also knew Allan Ginsburg in his om-ish days long before he became a professor when we fired up more than one blunt (marijuana cigarette for those who are clueless or use another term for the stick) to see what we could see out in the D.C. National Mall and later Greenwich Village night. Like I said that piece which formed the basis for republication first appeared in Poetry Today shortly after Allan Ginsburg’s Father Death death and caused a great deal of confusion among the readers. I gave a few examples of what went awry in the responses. Some readers thought because I mentioned the word “cat” I was paying homage to T.S. Eliot generally recognized in pre-Beat times as the ultimate modernist poet. That reference actually referred to “hep cats” as in a slang expression from the 1940s and 1950s before Beat went into high gear not a cat. In any case there was no way the staid and high Victorian sensibilities Eliot would know anything about the bohemia of his day except maybe knowing some bonkers Bloomsbury cadre. One would be totally remiss to call him the max daddy of anything as I did in my homage.

Some readers, and I really was scratching my head over this one since this was published in a poetry magazine for aficionados and not for some dinky survey freshman college English class, that because I mentioned the word “homosexual” and some jargon associated with that sexual orientation when everybody was “in the closet” except maybe Allan Ginsburg thought I was referring W.H. Auden. Jesus, Auden, a great poet no question if not a brave one slinking off to America when things got too hot in his beloved England in September 1939 and a self-confessed homosexual in the days when that was dangerous to declare in late Victorian public morality England especially after what happened to Oscar Wilde when they pulled down the hammer was hardly the only homosexual possibility despite his game of claiming every good-looking guy for what he called the Homintern. Frankly I didn’t personally think anybody even read him anymore once the Beats be-bopped.

There were a few others who were presented as the person I was championing. James Lawson because some of his exploits were similar to the ones I described but those events were hardly rare in the burned over 1950s down in the mud of society. The flight from downtrodden home life made worse by plodding square parents whose dreams for their off-spring were life-deadening civil servant jobs although admittedly a step up from the dregs down at the working poor base of society.  Jack Weir because of some West Coast references, the usual suspects North Beach, Big Sur, Todo el Mundo (where Allan Ginsburg never went or never went while I was there, Fillmore Street dreams and drugs, the inevitable Golden Gate reference. Jeffery Stein, the poet of the new age shtetl because of the dope and self-identification with the downtrodden and the caged inmates at the mental hospitals which he frequented more times than he liked to admit.

All wrong. That poet had a name an honored name Allan Ginsburg who howled in the night at the oddness and injustice of the world after saying Kaddish to his mother’s memory and not be confused with this bag of bones rough crowd readership who refused to learn from the silly bastard. This piece was, is for ALLAN GINSBURG who wrote for Carl Solomon in his hours of sorrow just before he went under the knife and I for him, for Allan the sad day when he went under the ground.

That all was twenty some years ago and while those readers responses were stone-cold crazy they at least had the virtue of ignorance since I did not mention the name Allan Ginsburg in the title nor in the piece. Frankly I did not think I had to do so. What, however, is to be made of readers in 2019 who I assume had read my introduction and its named poet in bold print who still believe that I am referring to some other poet, some of them pretty obscure and old school which makes me think these readers were maybe college freshman survey course takers. I won’t go through them all since unlike 1997 where one actually had to write and mail with proper postage whatever was on their minds today they can just flail away and done so many more responses showed up at my in-box.

Here are today’s scratching my head entries. What Sam Lowell a fellow writer here has seen it all in his forty plus years as a film critic calls trolls since they are tied to alternate facts and more importantly whatever they have on their minds, if that is what they have. Maybe they just don’t read introductions or are among the dwindling few who still take umbrage that someone would tout the virtuous of long-time known homosexual when everybody else has moved on, has bought into a very sensible idea that it is nobody else’s business who you love-and now wed. So a few of the rabid went along that line but rather than grab onto Ginsburg have assumed that I was writing about Walt Whitman, since I mentioned the grand civil war and the fate of boys and men including a semi-erotic paean to Abe Lincoln. Of course they got that wrong since Whitman’s ode to Lincoln Oh Captain, My Captain is one of the few truly chaste and un-coded poems he wrote. But that is a classic example of this troll contingent’s faking reality to suit some odd-ball political agenda from we should all run like hell.

It only got worse after Greg Green, site manager for the on-line publications here who in the old hard copy days would have been called the editor, started publishing some of the e-mails which only fueled the flames. Declared open season on reason until on advice of wise Sam Lowell mentioned above who chairs the Editorial Board that sits to clamp down on an editor’s more off-the-wall decisions. To continue a vague off-hand reference to the various Eggs off Long Island Sound got one F. Scott Fitzgerald the brass ring mainly so that Jay Gatsby could be extolled as the upwardly mobile paragon of American virtue for a new century (that is exactly what was said if you can believe that since in the unlamented Jazz Age except for the jazz Jay got himself shot and dumped in some coal bin.) A couple more to make my point since I suddenly realized that to even present these holy goofs, an expression learned at the feet of one Jack Kerouac who had I believe more talented types in mind, but the expression just popped out at me. Yeats, Yeats of all poets drew some fan-dom based on talk of Irish girls losing their virtues in sullen Cape Cod gin mills. How that goes with muse Maude Gonne escapes me. Finally, and at least this person had some literary sense he thought because I mentioned Time Square hipsters, drifters and grifters waking up in sullen midnight sweats looking for some savior not the Lord fixer man to get them well and ready to do an occasional soft-core armed robbery or jack-roll (I was impressed with the sue of that term since nobody uses that expression for a very old trick of taking a slender club or maybe a roll of fisted quarters and bopping some drunk or old lady for their ready cash I was speaking of one Gregory Corso the bandit-poet. Sorry I was reaching for the big Howl and Kaddish master and beautiful lumpen dream Corso was a secondary player back in those long-gone daddy days. Enough. Lance Lawrence]

[Back in 2007 and then in 2017 when we commemorated the 50^th and 60^th anniversaries respectively of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s landmark travel book of a different kind On The Road which ignited a generation maybe two to “hit the road” I was the site manager, then called general editor, a throw-back from the times when American Left History was a hard copy publication. At those times I had been re-reading a series of Ti Jean’s books after senior writer Sam Lowell had pointed out to me that the previous years had been the 50^th and 60^th anniversaries respectively of fellow Jack “beat” brother Allan Ginsberg’s landmark poem (really screed) Howl which for a while took poetry into a different direction which we had neglected to commemorate (and which we did belatedly). Now Sam has again reminded that we have come to a certain commemoration date, the 50^th anniversary of the death of Jack Kerouac and we are again in need of evaluation, no, re-evaluating the place of his work, his place as “king of the beats” whether than title fits or not and his place in the sun.    

Of course on those prior occasions I could assign whatever I wanted to whomever I wanted since I was the person who was handing out the assignments. Now after a prolonged internal fight in which I was deposed and sent into “exile” I am back but solely as a contributing editor, not as the person handing out assignments. That task is now in the capable hands of one Greg Green whom I knew over at American Film Gazette many years ago and had brought over a couple of years ago to run the day to day operation here. Greg and I have had our ups and downs especially after I was in desperate straits when I was sent into exile and had no current source of income and had to depend “on the kindnesses of strangers.” But that is past and since I was instrumental in the previous commemorations Greg decided that I should as with a couple of other major projects that I have done since my return oversee the Kerouac death watch this year.   

Needless to say, since this dark cloud anniversary is upon us I have to do a new introduction, a setting of the tone. One thing that I was not able to do when I was overseeing the previous commemorations was to write about something that has haunted me for a long time-how different Jack’s experiences were from those of my parents, from any Acre neighborhood parents despite some very strong similarities between the way he grew up and the way they did. In short they were near contemporaries having all been born and raised in the 1920s and forward. Nevertheless they could not have been more different in their lifestyles and life dreams. It would take their son, and their son’s generation to at least momentarily connect with the older man and what he brought to the table. Maybe the link between “beat” and “hippie” was tenuous, but it was there, and is there fifty years after his passing to the unsettled grave. That will be the thread that runs through this new series. Adieu, Ti Jean.     

*************

Jack fifty tears, fifty years gone in some bastard grave in holy, holy, holy Edson Merrimack River ground busted asunder by holy goofs looking for timely relics, looking for that one word which would spring them into some pantheon, some parity with the king (we will not even mention that other king that animated our dreams for we now speak of parent, parent of class of ’68 dream. Funny non-Catholic ground Lowell given his deep sea dive to right his ship around the beatitudes that the class of ’68 left in the shade if you wished to know. Mere turning in her old Quebec come down to the textile mills from desolate turn of the century farms which gave to the bloody English overlords, another common sticking point against heathen English overrunning the small patch farms with enclosures and encumbered debts devotion grave, with the times out of sorts the young passing before ancient hatreds mother. Not a stranger come the end on Hard Rock Mountain and no place but some stinking trailer benny and that fucking crucifix that never helped anybody that far gone into the haze.

Not strange for assuredly lapsed Catholic cum Buddha swings devotee coming out of Desolation Mountain, Dharma bum frills and assorted other spiritual trips, (won’t even think about that black boy, and he was just a boy, who against some grandmother dreads blew the high white note out to the China Seas, via, well, via Frisco Bay drove the writing, the what, the unvarnished truth  until it drove him into the ground. That and those endless whiskeys and cheap Thunderbird wines when dimes were scarce a few times down on his luck cadging wino bottles from buying for underaged kids, with his bottle the kicker and what the hell if he didn’t go it, didn’t get his some sterno junkie would dip into Salvation Army surplus and the thirst was great. Not “his” thirst but “the” thirst and don’t mix the two up buddy as he told that straggly bearded kid, some hippie bastard from Omaha clueless about the decadent night which lie ahead, the compromises too.

Strangely bisected, fuck finally my real point (another luxury of not having to be general editor with parsing and editing to make “nice” for the academic journals which thrive, which throttle on  Jack’s sputum and can get down in the mud with the real critics like Artie Shaw and Bugs Malone and not worry about half-ablaze in the head, half fire in the head Patti Griffin called it once),  through my own parents too who had no idea of hip, no idea of “beat,” except maybe mother in beatitude but that is a different story, a story about common roots high holy day Catholic stuff. Another common point, emerged in veiled tears, speaking of tears, to rear their ugly heads come feast days. (Wondering if her, their fairy sons would see the light, would submit to the calling that every grandmother hoped without saying leaving it to transient daughters to do their own parsing. Father no hipster born to the hills and hollows which hallowed by memory played no part in big boom beat-beat time coming out of World War II like houses on fire. No speedy cross-country by 1947 Hudson (hell no car a public transportation might as well say welfare crude bum and fuck that is all a guy like that deserved.) With big ideas of shaking things up, making merry with the always with us squares and other geometric forms. Jesus the worst part knowing that they knew not of square or any other geometric dreams. Too bad, too bad when they chance came around and the call went out looking for junkie hipsters, con men and queers hanging around public toilets on Seventh Avenue in New York City.  

No Dean Moriarty, hell call a thing by its right name, no Max Fame, no Allan Ginsberg, no Kenneth Rexforth, no Hank James, or his brother William speaking in tongues trying to figure what a guy named Freud meant when he wanted to go where his mother lived, after killing cosmic fathers and brothers, no Gregory Corso, no John three names somebody a throwback to ancient Boston Brahmin bouts with legitimacy speaking of bastards, trace the genealogy back to Mayfair swells days, nothing for the bastard who is bothering one Laura Perkins who I have been sweet on for an eternity but who only has eyes for Sam Lowell about her sexy takes on serious 19^th century artist who were as capable of going down into the mud, blowing some high white note out in the Japan seas for a change. Above all no Neal Cassidy, no fake Dean Moriarty to skirt the libel laws with wives and mistresses searching for vagrant unknown fathers in some dusty coal bins but a poor old good old boy and maybe in another time said Dean, Adonis Dean against Father Sheik, would have wandered out in the cowboy West night looking for drunken fathers with hip-ness but that was not the play, not at all. Father Sheik coming like a bat out of hell from those hazardous coal bins looking to break the eternal hills and hollows existence that plagued his fathers since the time the first clan were cast out of England for stealing pigs or consorting with them in any case with not unfamiliar family refrain of “leave, or the gallows,” such were the tempers of the times.

And Father Sheik, hell, Adonis Dean too, with no way out except that passport via some Nippon adventure over Pearl always Pearl nothing else needed and he off to Pacific battles and raiments. Jack to the North Seas and merchant marine bunks with odd-ball seasick sailors (and me wondering whether having looked of late at YouTube should attribute my borrowed words but the hell with it plenty of seasick sailors had nothing to do with YouTube or song lyrics). And forsaken Dean too young to know the face of battles hung up in reformatory secret vices which an earlier generation (and later ones too) would “dare not speak their names” (Catamite, Sodomite, homosexual, pug ugly, suck-head, your call.) How quaint.

Two years and two places do make a different no Bette Davis eyes in the hills and hollows but Jack-induced Merrimack adventures of boys seeking pleasures in riverside woods and hamming it up for all the world to see. If only the old man could have written out his dreams, if he could have written out anything. Jack to the library born to take his fill of whatever classics that river textile town had to offer and whiskey you’re the devil which should have given even a blinded son something to think about with dear Jack fifty years dead and the old man still trembling in his teeth. My God.

But he never made, he the old man never made New York ever as far as I could tell, knew none but obvious landmarks like tall Empire State Building or Lady Liberty. Mother Jacked on some Cape Cod Canal cutaway small steamer to the Big Apple (not Big Apple then but who knows) and Automats, evoking Laura’s Edward Hopper sad-assed dreams of a guy who couldn’t even draw smiling faces and hence the queen of 20^th century angst and alienation and five cent ferry rides to Staten Island. The Village, okay for me to call it Village as I was a denizen once for Jack too might as well have been on some planet’s moon for all she knew-him too, too rich for his blood but Jack’s meat, no problem. Even if strangely Times Square hipsters, grifters, drifters and Howard Johnson hot dog eaters were mixed into the new wave, then new wave against Big Band Duke, Artie, Lionel jazz boys coming up with their sullen lipped riffs to spring a new alienated be-bop on the square world. Jack knew square, knew father square, knew mother, Mere, square in large letters of unrequited love but shook it off long enough to cross the great desert America giving Lady Liberty the boot, the un-shod sole, or maybe taking a cue from Jack book lamming it out on Bear Mountain just for the hell of it. But this old mother, not Mere mother, never knew, never had an idea of even in her big Catholic, Irish Catholic dream of meeting the boy next door and finding steady white-collar civil servant heaven. Jesus is that what she was about when the deal went down and Jack split for Ohio with two bucks and six bologna sandwiches stale well before Toledo believe me I know.             

Life took a different tact though she never found that clever test-worthy boy next door (he was some greaser with a big hog of a bike which would have inflamed Dean, would have gotten his wanting habits on and maybe a run to the Coast). So she having had her fill of Coney Island dreams and Automat five cent pies took a chance on the Sheik (strange on looking at Jack photographs how sheik-like our boy was and father too like some lost tribe members) found guarding the country’s defense not far from her home but he of Pacific wars, many with manly Marines. Jack flopped the Navy but did dangerous merchant marine runs out in the North Atlantic, out to the Murmansk seas (that makes three China and Japan alongside) not honored even in Washington until much later down in front of Arlington National bravos resting places. And a not so funny twist of sagging fate brought her dish loads of kids and some undefined alienation from which she was excluded, and he too by association. They didn’t prosper far from it but they also didn’t have that run, no, those runs, to the West looking for lost fathers, looking for the Adonis of the West to shake up his love. Could two worlds be any more different and only about say forty miles apart. That not a question but maybe a quiet condemnation for some woe-begotten life of quiet desperation, her mantra for all the good it did her.

It would take a son, some son, some great girth of sons and daughters to jailbreak, to Jack their ways out of that parent, remember their parents’ contemporary, that snare set for those who didn’t get to Times Square, didn’t get to the Village but stuck it out in Hoboken, Elko, Oceanside. It would take some unsettled sense that all was not right with the world, that too many kids were stuck with Modesto hot-rod dreams, Hell’s Angels angers, Louisville thwarts, and many La Jolla searches for perfect waves to jumpstart what Jack, and not just Jack but he is fifty tears, fifty years gone. Oh, what might have been. 

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60^th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)

By Book Critic Zack James

To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for something, maybe the truth, maybe just for kicks, for stuff, important stuff that had happened down in the base of society where nobody in authority was looking or some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in flea-bit hotels, all-night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation. (Yes,  I know that the actual term “beat” was first used by Kerouac writer friend John Clemmon Holmes in an article in some arcane journal but the “feel” had to have come from a less academic source so I will crown the bandit prince Corso as genesis)

Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my oldest brother Alex who was washed clean in the Summer of Love, 1967 but must have known the edges of Jack’s time since he was in high school when real beat exploded on the scene in Jack-filled 1957, they called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, that high white note he heard achieved one skinny night by famed sax man Sonny Johns, dead beat, run out on money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all Jack’s kid stuff high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the poet princely mean streets of New York, Chi town, Mecca beckoning North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps (and the fleas were real no time for metaphor down in the bowels where the cowboy junkies drowse in endless sleeps, raggedy winos toothless suck dry the dregs and hipster con men prey on whoever floats down), half stirred left on corner diners’ coffees and groundling cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).

I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event whose 50^th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well and so very appropriate to mention since there were a million threads, fibers, connections between “beat” and “hippie” despite dour grandpa Jack’s attempts to trash those connection when the acolytes and bandit hangers-on  came calling looking for the “word.” So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel book of a different kind (not found on the AAA, Traveler’s Aid, Youth Hostel brochure circuit if you please although Jack and the crowd, my brother and his crowd later would use such services when up against it in let’s say a place like Winnemucca in the Nevadas or Neola in the heartlands).

Literary stuff for sure but the kind of stuff that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter of which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life as a high-road lawyer (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back which has caused more riffs and bad words than I want to yell about here).             

Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then add my brother’s Alex name into the mix that automatically brings up memories of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Frankie, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh (he a separate story from up in Olde Saco, Maine and so only an honorary corner boy after hitching up with the Scribe out on a Russian Hill dope-filled park), Bart, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967, their birthright event, just mentioned.  Markin was the vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker, what did Jack call his generation’s such, oh yeah, holy goofs,   who got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of years before 1967 (and which nobody in the crowd paid any attention to, or dismissed out of hand, what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie  and a bunch of other guys who took a very different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of a very different world.

But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s travel adventure book which had caused a big splash in 1957(after an incredible publishing travail since the story line actually related to events in the late 1940s and which would cause Jack no end of trauma when the kids showed up at his door looking to hitch a ride on the motherlode star, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway, like I say I think the best part, have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain, desert night but staying unsettled for a while anyway.    

Like I said above Alex was out on the road two years and other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more years upon his return before his untimely and semi-tragic end down some dusty Jack-strewn road in Mexico cocaine deal blues. With maybe this difference from today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and pinkos called it that for fear of being tarred with those brushes. Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin included, were strictly “from hunger” working class kids who when they hung around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money fast any way they could or of getting into some   hot chick’s pants any way they could as anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little bit “from hunger” takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law back then when the coppers were just waiting for corner boy capers to explode nay Friday or Saturday night, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was what for corner boys, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners anymore.

What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley “Scribe” from the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the “midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would have the inept Markin actually execute the plan. That was for smooth as silk Frankie now also like Alex a high-road lawyer to lead. That operational sense was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise. That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.

The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny Bob Dylan above all else.) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956 which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road. They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my brother Alex’s memory bank.)

Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring. So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping almost like Jack wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper scroll in about three weeks. So it was through the Scribe via Alex that I got the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60^th anniversary I am passing on the bug to you.           

It Must Be Saint Patrick's Day Coming- The Dropkick Murphys, Natch

It Must Be Saint Patrick's Day Coming- The Dropkick Murphys, Natch 



Click on link below for WBUR interview with the boyos:   

http://www.wbur.org/artery/2017/03/13/dropkick-murphys-st-patricks-day

The Dropkick Murphys- On Saint Patrick's Day, Natch

The Dropkick Murphys- On Saint Patrick's Day, Natch

*********
DROPKICK MURPHYS LYRICS
"Peg O' My Heart"
Featuring Bruce Springsteen
Peg of my heart I love you
Don't let us part I love you
I always knew it would be you
Peg of my heart
Since I heard your lilting laughter
It's your Irish heart I'm after
Peg of my heart

Peg of my heart, oh your glances
Make my heart sing how's chances
Come be my own
Come make your home in my heart

Peg of my heart I love you
We'll never never part I love you
I always knew it would be you
Peg of my heart
Since I heard your lilting laughter
It's your Irish heart I'm after
It's your Irish heart I'm after
Peg of my heart

Peg of my heart I love you
Don't let us part I love you
I always knew it would be you
Peg of my heart
Since I heard your lilting laughter
It's your Irish heart I'm after
It's your Irish heart I'm after
Peg of my heart
Since I heard your lilting laughter
It's your Irish heart I'm after
It's your Irish heart I'm after
Peg of my heart

Peg of my heart
Peg of my heart
Peg of my heart
Peg of my heart
*****
DROPKICK MURPHYS LYRICS
"Deeds Not Words"
Where you gonna run to? Where you gonna hide?
Bodies on the floor no one's getting out alive
Death is in the air there's trouble all around
Now you got it coming This time you're going down
Deeds not words you should've told the truth
You're a liar and traitor and now we got the proof

Liar and a traitor
And now we got the proof

Hindsight's twenty twenty it's so easy looking back
You made all the wrong choices Now you gotta live with that
But living's not the problem I got better plans for you
Like a bug I'm gonna crush you and then scrape you off my shoe
You've been thinkin' that you're safe but you're too blind to see
You turned your best friends into mortal enemies

Where you gonna run to?
Where you gonna hide?
You're running for the door now
No one's getting out alive
Where you gonna run to?
Where you gonna hide?
You're running for the door now
No one's getting out alive

Better watch your back you'll never get away
No talkin' your way out there'll be nothing left to say
I knew you as a child I hate you as a man
You're a two faced rat that nobody can stand
Deeds not words you should've told the truth
You're a liar and traitor and now we got the proof

Liar and a traitor
And now we got the proof

Deeds not words you should've told the truth
You're a liar and traitor and now we got the proof

Where you gonna run to?
Where you gonna hide?
You're running for the door now
No one's getting out alive
Where you gonna run to?
Where you gonna hide?
You're running for the door now
No one's getting out alive
Where you gonna run to?
Where you gonna hide?
You're running for the door now
No one's getting out alive

[ www.plyrics.com ] All lyrics are property and copyright of their actual owners and provided for educational purposes and personal use only

Coming of Age In A Fractured World-The Film Adaptation Of Katherine Patterson’s “The Great Gilly Hopkins” (2015)-A Film Review

Coming of Age In A Fractured World-The Film Adaptation Of Katherine Patterson’s “The Great Gilly Hopkins” (2015)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Laura Perkins

The Great Gilly Hopkins, starring Kathy Bates, Sophia Nelisse, Glenn Close, 2015

I usually don’t do as my long-time companion and fellow writer in this space Sam Lowell is fond of doing of late and go chapter and verse on how or why he took or was given a particular assignment but this review of The Great Gilly Hopkins is a bit different. I wanted the review after viewing the film with Sam who was originally assigned to review it under current site manager Greg Green’s policy of having us “broaden our horizons.” Sam was more than glad to “trade” with me since broadening horizons or not he was not interested in yet another “coming of age” story-this time of a troubled young female as well although he did like the film on other grounds. But that “troubled young female” angle appealed to me. Appealed to me although I was not a foster child as the main character Gilly is but rather had a troubled youth growing up on a farm in upstate New York outside Albany and could relate to the way she struggled to gain some self-identity and self-worth against pretty big odds. In a movie, in this movie, those issues got pretty well resolved in Gilly’s favor unlike mine that never did get resolved short of leaving that farm environment and a few years of therapy, more than a few years actually.                     

Gilly Hopkins, played by Sophia Nelisse, has a well-placed, and to my mind a well thought through, chip on her shoulder for a coming of age thirteen year old girl. A girl who has been shunted to and fro through a series of foster homes having been abandoned by her birth mother whom she nevertheless believes will come for her one day. Or she will get to Frisco, her mother’s last known address, come hell or high water. Kids will think dreams like that and good luck to them. Back in the real world though Gilly is facing yet another foster home after having screwed up at the last one. This new one run by Trotter, played by Kathy Bates, looks to be about the same as all the others. A place to display her chip and the hell with the rest of it until she can blow the town.        

But this mad monk Trotter woman has her own ideas about taking in foster kids and seeing them through the tough spots and so there is a battle royal brewing between them over who will break whom. (Another battle at school where she is the brightest kid in the room but purposefully rebellious against the black teacher who tries to understand her is a sub-plot as well.) In the end, well not the end, but close the love that Trotter has for her charges outweighs those incredible hurts inside of Gilly.  

Before that can happen though Gilly screws up big time and writes a letter to the social agency claiming all kinds of mistreatment to get out from under Trotter’s influence. Just when things seemed to be breaking her way, she is adjusting to being cared about, she is snatched from the Trotter home by her wealthy unknown grandmother, Nonnie played by Glenn Close, a good woman but rather distant. That tension between going with Noonie or staying with Trotter is resolved in Nonnie’s favor when all parties realize that “in the best interest of the child” Gilly should be placed there for all the reasonable reasons except that love business. The mother? All those dreams of being together got blown up when she showed up through Nonnie’s efforts and it turned out she could have cared less for Gilly. Tough break. Still Gilly landed in a good spot and things look they might go her way a bit. I wish they had gone as well in my own case.