A View From The Left-Arkansas Legal Lynching Machine Abolish the Racist U.S. Death Penalty!

Frank Jackman comment: Usually when I post something from some other source, mostly articles and other materials that may be of interest to the radical public that I am trying to address I place the words “ A View From The Left” in the headline and let the subject of the article speak for itself, or let the writer speak for him or herself without further comment whether I agree with the gist of what is said or not. After all I can write my own piece if some pressing issue is at hand. Occasionally, and the sentiments expressed in this article is one of them, I can stand in solidarity with the remarks made. I do so here.       Workers Vanguard No. 1112

19 May 2017

Arkansas Legal Lynching Machine

Abolish the Racist U.S. Death Penalty!

In just eight days—from April 20 to 27—the state of Arkansas executed three black men, Ledell Lee, Marcel Williams and Kenneth Williams, and one white man, Jack Jones. Governor Asa Hutchinson had originally ordered eight men to die in the span of eleven days, which would have set a record pace since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. The four men who received stays of execution remain on death row. The pretext for the executions was to beat the clock on the April 30 expiration of midazolam, a component of the lethal injection cocktail for which no alternative is readily available. The real point, however, was to kick-start the machinery of death in a state that had last held an execution in 2005.

The assembly line of death in Arkansas has thrown a spotlight on the depravity of capital punishment—and the racist U.S. ruling class that wields it. Witnesses to Kenneth Williams’s execution reported that after injection he lurched forward as many as 20 times; he was observed convulsing, jerking and making sounds that were audible in an adjacent room. The scene recalled the 2014 Oklahoma execution of Clayton Lockett, who writhed in agony for over 40 minutes before succumbing.

Ledell Lee’s 1993 conviction for the murder of a white woman had all the hallmarks of a racist frame-up. From a crime scene covered in blood, the only physical evidence linking Lee to the murder was the phony “forensic” identification of three hairs that supposedly came from a black man. The trial judge and the assistant prosecutor were sleeping together. Lee’s court-appointed trial attorney presented no alibi, and the attorney at his post-conviction hearing was so drunk, he was taken away for drug testing. From death row Lee told a BBC journalist: “My dying words will always be as it has been ‘I am an innocent man’.” The Innocence Project and the ACLU fought to get DNA testing of the crime scene’s physical evidence. The state refused. Ledell Lee is no more.

Joining an April 14 protest outside the Arkansas Capitol was Damien Echols of the West Memphis Three, who served his own time on Arkansas’s death row. Targeted in a “satanic abuse” witchhunt, Echols and his friends were falsely convicted for the 1993 murder of three eight-year-old boys. Echols won his release in 2011 following a huge campaign in his defense, including DNA evidence that confirmed his innocence. On the day of Lee’s execution Echols pointed out: “Local politicians maintain they have never made a mistake, that the system is infallible, and that they have never sentenced an innocent man to die. I know this is false, because for 18 years I sat on Arkansas’ death row and waited on the state to murder me for something I didn’t do.”

As Marxists, we oppose the death penalty on principle—for the guilty as well as the innocent. We do not accord the state the right to determine who lives and who dies. A barbaric legacy of medieval torture, its longevity in the United States is rooted in the origins of American capitalism, which was built on the hideously brutalized labor of black slaves. More than 40 percent of those on death row are black (and another 13 percent Latino). As opposed to the liberals, we do not seek to advise the bourgeoisie on the more “humane” administration of its decrepit rule. Whether it is the death penalty, life in prison without parole or imprisonment in general, we oppose the entire machinery of violence that is the capitalist state.

Nearly 250,000 signed a petition urging Arkansas governor Hutchinson to stay Kenneth Williams’s execution. Though a majority of the public still favor the death penalty, support has diminished significantly over the past two decades—a product of the growing number of exonerations of innocent men and women, often the result of DNA testing of evidence. Finding jurors more reluctant to impose capital punishment and frustrated at what they view as the slow pace of executions, prosecutors, lawmakers and judges have calculated life without parole to be cheaper than the millions of dollars consumed by capital prosecutions and years of appeals. Today, the Trump administration, as part of a broader enhancement of the repressive powers of the state, is seeking to reverse this trend.

Donald Trump rode to the presidency on a “law and order” platform targeting black people and immigrants. An ardent proponent of the death penalty, Trump has called for the execution of “pedophiles.” His openly racist attorney general, Jefferson Sessions, has called for lifting formal restraints on the cops, re-igniting the “war on drugs,” which promises to throw more black and Latino youth into America’s dungeons, and ordered federal prosecutors to seek the maximum sentences for those facing trial.

The first act of Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, was to cast the decisive vote against a stay of execution for the men facing execution in Arkansas. Meanwhile, a Republican state senator in Arkansas is calling for the impeachment of a black judge, Wendell Griffen, who issued a temporary restraining order to block the April executions and then took part in an anti-death-penalty vigil outside the governor’s mansion on Good Friday. Similarly in Florida, Governor Rick Scott promptly removed all death penalty cases from Aramis Ayala, a black female state’s attorney for the Orlando area, who announced on March 16 that she would not seek the death penalty, including for a man accused of killing a policewoman. After announcing her opposition to the death penalty, Ayala received a noose in the mail.

For its part, the capitalist Democratic Party is no less committed to the death penalty than the brazenly racist Republicans. Under the Obama administration, the number of federal prisoners on death row increased, while the cops wantonly carried out summary executions of black people on the streets.

In Arkansas itself, there were no executions between 1976, when the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment, and 1990, when legal lynching was reintroduced to the state by William Jefferson Clinton. Since then, 30 men and one woman have been executed in the state. During his run for president in 1992, Clinton left the campaign trail to personally preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a black man so brain-damaged from a gunshot to the head that he wanted to save the pecan pie from his last meal for later. Clinton’s “dog whistle” to racist white voters propelled him into the White House, where he ended “welfare as we know it” and presided over the gutting of affirmative action in education and the mass incarceration of black and Latino youth. As president, he accelerated the racist death penalty with his 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which gutted habeas corpus appeals for death row inmates—a model for state laws across the country intended to streamline the road from courthouse to death house.

A Legacy of Slavery

The death penalty stands at the pinnacle of the state’s arsenal of repression—an apparatus consisting of the army, cops, courts and prisons that protects the class rule, property and profits of the capitalist class. While the face of death row is now primarily black and Latino, fighters for labor’s cause have also been targeted for death by the capitalist state: the Haymarket anarchists, labor organizers who fought for the eight-hour day and were put to death in 1877; IWW organizer Joe Hill, executed in 1915; anarchist workers Sacco and Vanzetti, who died in the electric chair in 1927.

While nearly every other advanced industrialized capitalist country has abolished capital punishment (with the notable exception of Japan), its persistence in the U.S. is a legacy of black chattel slavery and the continued oppression of black people. The 20 executions carried out last year, and the ten thus far this year, took place in just seven states. All of them were in the South and most in the former Confederacy, where slaves could be killed with impunity for “crimes” ranging from insolence toward whites to rebellion against the slave masters.

It took a bloody Civil War to smash slavery. But the promise of black freedom was betrayed when the Northern capitalists ended the period of Radical Reconstruction by withdrawing federal troops, leaving black people impoverished and largely defenseless. With the Ku Klux Klan and other race-terrorist outfits as the spearhead, the white propertied classes subjected black people to legally enforced racial segregation, stripped them of all democratic rights and held them down through terror, especially lynching. The black population was consolidated anew—and remains to this day—as a specially oppressed race-color caste.

Capital punishment in America is a direct descendent of and replacement for the lynch rope. In the 1890s, black people were lynched at a rate of one every other day; in the 1930s, executions took place at the rate of one every other day. A 2015 study by the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative noted, “By 1915, court-ordered executions outpaced lynchings in the former slave states for the first time.” In the period between 1910 and 1950, black people made up 75 percent of those executed across the country.

In 1967, amid the mass struggles of the civil rights movement, a de facto moratorium on capital punishment was temporarily imposed. In 1972 the Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional as practiced and ordered states to rewrite their laws. A mere four years later, the Court gave the green light for the killing machines to resume their grisly work. Eighty-one percent of the 1,452 executions in the last 40 years have been in the South.

The racist application of the death penalty was sanctified by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1987 case of Warren McCleskey, a black prisoner executed in Georgia in 1991. McCleskey’s attorneys presented an authoritative study detailing that black people in Georgia convicted of killing whites were sentenced to death 22 times more frequently than those convicted of killing blacks. In rejecting McCleskey’s appeal, the Supreme Court explicitly acknowledged that to accept this premise would throw “into serious question the principles that underlie our entire criminal justice system.” In its callous pronouncement, the Court expressed a basic truth: McCleskey was a victim of the racism that pervades the criminal justice system and the entire American capitalist order.

For a Multiracial Revolutionary Workers Party!

Little expresses the cruelty of capital punishment better in the U.S. than the legislative and judicial contortions to give state murder a humane gloss. The adoption of lethal injection, beginning in the early 1980s, was promoted as a supposedly more humane way of killing prisoners than electrocution. In fact, lethal injection was implemented by Nazi Germany as part of its Aktion T4 “euthanasia” program to dispose of lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”).

In 2007, the Supreme Court prohibited the execution of a psychotic person unless the prisoner was lucid enough to have a “rational understanding” of the punishment he was about to receive. This is what the courts refer to as “evolving standards of decency.” When capital punishment was reintroduced in the U.S. amid anti-crime hysteria, we noted in “Abolish the Death Penalty!” (WV No. 117, 9 July 1976): “The Marxist attitude toward crime and punishment is that we are against it.... Socialists do not proceed from the standpoint of punishing the offender. Such a vindictive penal attitude is fundamentally a religious rather than a materialist conception of social relations.” Indeed, a humane and rational society may find a need to isolate certain dangerous individuals. This would be done without stigma or cruelty, and with education, medical care, rehabilitation and the goal of reintegration as a productive member of society. This was the approach of the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky that led the October 1917 Russian socialist revolution.

As Marxists, we fight for the abolition of the death penalty. But we also understand that ending capital punishment will not fundamentally change the violently racist and oppressive nature of capitalist class rule. Our aim is to complete the unfinished tasks of the Civil War by fighting for black liberation through socialist revolution. What is necessary is the forging of a class-struggle workers party with a significant black leadership component. Such a party will be built in opposition to both parties of capital and will be dedicated to mobilizing the social power of labor in defense of the interests of all working people and the oppressed. When those who labor rule, the entire apparatus of capitalist state repression will be smashed as part of sweeping away this barbaric system and opening the door to an egalitarian socialist future.

He Gave It All Away-With Tom Paxton’s Song “She Is My Reason To Be” In Mind

He Gave It All Away-With Tom Paxton’s Song “She Is My Reason To Be” In Mind 

By Freeman Steel

He had it all. Jeffrey Davis had it all although until he lost it, until he gave it away, he did not realize that he had had it all. By the way for the curious who thing that they recognize the named party to this piece Jeffrey Davis is not the real name of our protagonist but like the Jeffrey Davis that you do think you know from his various screen exploits our Jeffrey Davis has his own similar reasons for using an alias here. Part of the reason is that he although not connected in any way with the screen, with movies or television is well-known in the literary field for his work and works of criticism. Part of the reason to be completely candid is that he was not sure that the statute of limitations might not have run out of various small crimes and legal evasions in his past so that publishing his real name might not bring to notice in the circles that he formerly ran in to haul his ass into court, especially the ex-wives he left high and dry. And part of the reason was that he just plain asked me as a long-time friend (and one time victim of his youthful cons) to not use his name as a test of my loyalty after all these years if I wanted the story. I did and so Jeffrey Davis it is.

But enough of subterfuges and diversions around identity confidentiality and on to the reason why our boy, my old corner boy from, well, I had better not say from when, what times or where since his beginnings are well known to part of the public and that would defeat his purpose in forcing me at virtual reality gunpoint to guard like a sacred temple his real name, had lost what he had, had given it all away. Jeffrey Davis’ wife, Lorraine Daley not her real name either since if you knew that name you, you the literary sort would figure out who that old corner boy from wherever he was from back in the day was and I would be out a “think piece” story about the pitfalls of statutory neglect (not a crime, a legal crime anyway, and not the reason that Jeffrey was worried about statute of limitation run outs), had recently left Jeffrey high and dry. Had left him for her own reasons mostly according to Jeffrey’s frail understandings in the matter to “find” herself whatever that might have meant to her.

Left in the middle of the night one night a few months back bag and baggage as they use to say around the old neighborhood when some married partner high-tailed it out of town with no explanation (in those unenlightened days either male leaving female or female leaving male but not one leaving one of the same gender just so you know we are talking about it has been a while back since that phrase had fresh currency). NO public explanation but it did not take much to figure out that some stay married forever woman had had enough of the abuse, physical and mental, from some bastard of a drunken husband (and father which is how we began to figure such abnormal leavings, abnormal for the old neighborhood), or that some husband had done the high-tailing with some barroom floozy. In any case Lorraine left and left no forwarding address-none. Had discontinued her previous cellphone and presumably gotten a new one although Jeffrey speculated that in the process of “finding” herself Lorraine may have decided to forgo the modern conveniences if she had wound up in some ashram as she had talked about, had threatened to do in previous versions of the downward slide of their relationship.                  

Despite the several month time lapse Jeff had not really reconciled himself as to what had caused him to forget that he had had it all with Lorraine, had given it all away. Then one night he called me on his cellphone, called me Sid Lawrence if I have not introduced myself before and looking over the previous paragraphs it appears that I have not although the important information, Jeff and my connection for the old neighborhood I did give you and wanted me to come over to his house in, well it is a big city so I can say it and he will proof this piece anyway, Los Angeles, over in the hills and canyons and sit with him while he tried to tell me how he had by his own freaking hand, his term, lost it all. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to hear what he had to say but in the interest of old corner boy friendship I agreed.            

We met at his well-appointed bungalow a few nights later and after a couple of stiff belts of well-preserved scotch he sat me down in one of his comfortable (and expensive) easy chairs and sat himself down on his long couch to speak about what ailed him about what was on his mind. Jeff whatever his literary skills, whatever line of pure, unmitigated bullshit he could throw at male or female, but mostly female and whatever the gods had granted him in the wisdom department was not a reflective man, did not dwell on the past, conveniently forgot the past (as in the big time con for several thousand hard-luck earned dollars he ran by me back in the days when for what he called “literary” purposes he ran tens of thousands of somebody else’s dollars up his snowman nose) and lived in the moment. I could tell though by his demeanor (and his willingness to sit me down after only two stiff scotches) that he had been thinking about some past stuff, about his character which was so explosive, so unstable at times that giving it all away in the past was coming back to haunt his dreams-or his desires.

When he began talking about Annie Dubois, his first real love, his, well, I had better not mentioned marriages and leave everything as affairs so the smart reader will not figure out who Jeff really is and we would have wasted good time and cyberspace creating a ruse, I knew he been in a sullen introspective mood. That sullen part no literary device on my part Jeff really did get sullen which showed up remarkably clearly on his face when he had to think through some ramification of some off-the-wall thing he had done. He just hid that trait these days better in public than when I first noticed his reaction back in sophomore year in high school. 

What I know is that he had not mentioned her name in front of me for years, hell, decades so I knew that sullen look was real. I should mentioned here before I tell you how Jeff related his feelings about how he had loved and lost that young woman, had given it all away, that I was half, maybe more, in love with her myself, had seen her first at a college mixer but she after looking me over on a few dates had decided that my roommate Jeff was more to her liking (they called them the now rightly taboo “smokers” in those days for some unknown to me reason but probably because since everybody was hopped up to find some companion the air was filled with anxious smoke, anxious Marlboro, Salem, Newport, Winston smoke). So I was not disappointed those many years when he did not mention her name. That night my heart raced at the mention of her name just like it had when I was some smitten schoolboy. Damn, Jeff.                        

I never, because I did not want to know and you can understand why now, knew the details of the break-up between Jeff and Annie. Painfully I listened as Jeff went through the litany. He and Annie stuck like glue together all through college. They essentially lived together for much of that time after freshman year in an apartment in Cambridge (not the real location but close-what I do for Jeff in the interest of a story) during the school year and at various seaside resorts in the summer. A classic 1960s romance with the sword of Damocles hanging over it. That sword –the raging crazy and unjust Vietnam War that we were all very aware of, we males anyway, since its’ seemingly endless travails put despite huge and growing protests and calls from even many governmental quarters to stop the damn thing placed us all at risk of being drafted. Eventually as the reader can probably figure out by now Jeff’s number came up with no further student exemption and no serious reason not to accept induction he allowed himself to be drafted. That “allowed” his term later for what had happened to him. (Although he and Annie were prominent anti-war rally attendees he did not consider himself under the rules for such status and under his Catholic upbringing a conscientious objector and under no circumstances was he going to jail or to Canada the other options that faced almost every young male then. I was 4-F, unfit for military duty, because of a crippling knee accident as a kid and the Army may overlook lots of disabilities but they want their charges to be able to march- and march great distances- as necessary)                

Once he got his draft notice Jeff began to panic. Started worrying about things like never having been married if he was killed in Vietnam. Not having any family to mourn him (he had been estranged from his parents for many years, had lived with his grandmother who just before senior year had passed away). Stuff like that that if the times were different he would have not given a fuck about, my term. So he and Annie tied the knot, got married. A bad move, a “war-time marriage” bad move that they could have seen coming if they had watched just a few old time movies like I did although even that might not have helped.    

He eventually like some horrible nightmare coming to pass as things developed against him was trained as an infantryman, the only thing in the late 1960s the Army cared about training since the attrition rate with one year deployments in Vietnam was eating up personnel at a fast clip.  And at just that time the only place in the great wide world that a U.S. infantryman was heading for was that hell hole Vietnam. So after his training and month’s leave Jeff had orders issued to him report to Fort Lewis in the state of Washington for transfer to Vietnam. He panicked, or maybe if not panicked then reverted back to his corner boy ways-or part of the corner boy ethos-lie like a bastard and hope things worked out    

After his leave was up he suddenly told Annie that he had through political connections had had his orders changed and he was to report to Fort Dix in New Jersey where he was to be discharged under some administrative regulation so that he could go work on the staff of a Congressman in Washington, D.C. Annie was elated (and relieved) by the news and ready to run to D.C. with him for their new future. The whole scenario seemed very reasonable since Jeff had worked like seven dervishes for the late Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign and even as he was telling me this over forty years later I could see where if he had told me the same story then I would have bought it hook, line and sinker.    

The problem though, and I would have been harassed like crazy for believing one word of the story back in corner boy days when he (and we) thought nothing of lying about everything from having sex with hot girls to how much we paid for a shirt (usually nothing since we stole stuff like that), it was all bullshit. He had just unilaterally taken himself AWOL for that whole time, the whole few months. The way the whole thing exploded was that the FBI had come to Annie’s parents’ house (he had used their address with their permission on his Army information file) looking for him, AWOL him. He did turn himself in and faced the music. That however was the last straw for Annie and her parents. Especially Annie since as it turned out he had done a number of unsavory or illegal things unknown then to me during their courtship. She left him to go back to her parents’ home. Eventually Annie got a civil divorce and as a Catholic member of a church who at the time, maybe now too, had very strict rules about remarriage after a divorce finally got a church annulment from Jeff. As for Jeff he on his return to the Army did the honorable thing and refused to go to Vietnam and wound up in the stockade for his efforts. But the details of that story are for his next serious giving it all away and besides this is about his first serious love life, his giving it all away when the deal went down. Typical Jeff though a heel one day a hero the next.          

 As Jeff started to explain why he had never forgotten about Annie I urged him to change the subject and something in my tone told him that I meant it, meant that I too had not forgotten Annie and what she had meant to me back then. So he went on about his thunder-struck whirlwind relationship with Josie, Josie Stein, a woman who I had never met because I had stayed on the West Coast while Jeff after a wild man run with me and a few others from the old neighborhood at various times there returned to the East. Josie would be the first, and most serious, of a string of young Jewish women that would checkerboard through his later relationships. Fine women who he never fully understood either. This meeting up with Josie had come about because like half of the things that Jeff did in his life he was on a vengeance roll to obliterate all the stupid things he had done by letting himself be inducted in the Army.

As I mentioned before after blowing up the world, the Annie world, with his fears Jeff when he went back into the Army made up his mind not to go to Vietnam, not to be complicit. He paid the price with two special court-martials for disobeying orders and did altogether something over a year in an Army stockade (partly broken up by what amounted to house arrest in between times). He wound up though getting out of the Army with an honorable discharge to boot as a conscientious objector through a writ of habeas corpus which his civilian lawyer had managed to convince a federal court judge was due him. As part of his struggle, his righteous struggle okay, a number of anti-war activists and Quaker-types came to his defense, publicized what he was doing and held vigils and other events in and around the Army base where he was being held. This was a time when some elements of the anti-war movement began, after the war was dragging out to what seemed like eternity, to pay attention to the soldiers, the “grunts” who were carrying out the war on the ground. So Jeff became for a while before he and I left for California and some mad but harmless dope-enhanced adventures up and down the Pacific Coast Highway something of a poster child for the local anti-war G.I. resistance. Some of that reputation would stick for a while as the war finally wound down.                

Josie had been born in Manhattan but had gone in order to get away from the city, her parents, her Jewish roots you name the reason to the University of Wisconsin which the way Jeff told it was a magnet for New York City and Long Island Jewish kids looking to break out back then, maybe now too. While there she had become radicalized, had become somewhat prominent in the campus anti-war, anti-imperialist and the beginnings of the women’s liberation movement. After graduating from Wisconsin she had decided to go to graduate school in Boston (at BU for the School of Social Work). While in Boston she again took up her political causes in the red-hot milieu there. Jeff had met her a couple of months after he had returned East at an anti-war conference, no, I have that wrong, at a meeting to discuss having another in the long line of anti-war conferences. This one to take place in a rural conference center which had been converted from being a farmhouse about fifty miles from Boston and had donated by some movement “angels” for such purposes. Such things happened with some frequency then.

When Jeff was introduced to speak about his G.I resistance experiences he spied Josie in the audience. During a break he, she, maybe both at the same time Jeff had forgotten that detail took dead aim at each other (that part he remembered) although nothing occurred that night. Their big moment came when both had showed up at the rural site for the conference and they were almost inseparable for the rest of the weekend. So started the torrid off and on again five year love affair between Jeff and Josie. According to Jeff they had their ups and downs, mostly toward the end downs over Josie’s increasingly incessant desire to settle down, to have a family, to be “at peace” with herself as the turbulent ‘60s shuttered down around them. Jeff in an uncharacteristic denial of some kind of realty thought that the whole experiment would go on forever and he could ride that wave into old age.

Funny about that, funny that he would still remember that he had felt that way those many years ago since I remember that we had both distinctly understood that after May Day, 1971 when we foolhardily thought we could close down the U.S. government if they would not close down the war and had been militarily defeated, had taken tens of thousands of arrests, we had reached an ebb tide of the movement, had passed the high water mark.               

That however was not what laid the relationship between Jeff and Josie low but yet another of the contradictions of the angel-devil Jeffrey Davis. Jeff, and I could see where this came from since I had thoughts along those lines a little myself, had a hard-edged chip on his shoulder, thought that because he (and I) had come up “from hunger,”  from utter poverty, from the old projects ethos that the world owed him a living, or something like that. I got over it by high school, maybe a little later but Jeff took much longer, maybe still hasn’t gotten over it even now but if you want to understand why he periodically would give it all away you have to know that hard sad fact. The particulars this time were that he had gotten seriously into dope, first speed and mescaline and later as it became more popular and more available cocaine. Now we all did our fair share of dope during the 1960s, usually marijuana and other light-headed drugs like hashish and peyote buttons. This cocaine thing though was something else, had Jeff by the balls. Had laid him low. This is where all his past kind of came up and bit him. He couldn’t or wouldn’t stop. Kept it from Josie mostly although at the end she asked him point blank if he was on heroin or something. Of course a young guy with no dough, or not much, not working much with a habit that called out to him needed dough. So he ran though everybody, everybody including leaving me high and dry out on the Coast broke as well, who he knew for dough using every lame excuse in the book to get the dough-and of course would pay it back just as soon as he could.

He didn’t hit Josie until the end, or near the end. That was when he was seeing some hopped-up Judy on the side who kept him company in his wanting habits. Once he started asking Josie for money for this and that after a while she started getting wise, found out about the Judy from some friend and that was that. She broke off with him in a minute once she knew the score (prodded he said by her parents who were not happy that she was serious about a non-Jewish guy). She got an unlisted number, moved from their sometimes shared apartment which she paid for, or rather her parents paid for. The end. Gave it all away for a razor, mirror and a rolled up dollar line.                     

Which brings us back to Lorraine and Jeff’s newly discovered troubled mind and why he gave it all away once again when she left to find herself.  Or whatever had driven her away from him. After a number of years out in the West Coast trying to “find” myself I finally headed back to the East, back to Boston via Riverdale after my last stormy marriage that ended not well. Not well enough that despite being broken as a smashed soda bottle, splintered if you like that better, I desperately hitchhiked across the country to get away from that last horrible scene (which was partly, a big partly, due to my own “from hunger” thinking that the world owed me a living from getting deeply in debt to the gambling gods). But enough of that this is Jeff’s story and my travails can wait another day. I just wanted to point that out since this return to the East meant that I was back in touch after several year’s absence with Jeff which was deep in the throes of his stormy relationship with Lorraine. So unlike Josie whom I had to take Jeff’s word on I knew Lorraine although unlike Annie of blessed memory I had no half in love thoughts about her.        

Jeff quickly went through how he had met Lorraine since I knew most of the details of the story. He had been half in and half out of a bunch of relationships which had not worked out for several Jeff reasons when one night he happened to be in a bar in Harvard Square, a country bar if you can believe that, when there had been outlaw country music minute around the East after people tired once again of the way rock was heading. That “if you can believe that” reflecting the hard fact that Jeff, whose father hailed from the South, having been inundated with that stuff around the house hated that music with a passion growing up. One night by accident he had heard the late Townes Van Zandt at a local club and something in his mournful lyrics and presence “spoke” to Jeff. So for a while he was hopped up on the outlaws, took in the scene. You know it had to be some kind of fad if in high Brahmin Harvard Square a couple of country music bars had sprung up and so he headed to one of them, Jackie Speed’s, it is no longer there, to hear some local country band which was making some noise about breaking out and heading to the bright lights of Nashville and stardom.  He sat at the bar as was his habit when he was “single” in order to survey the scene and maybe an hour in and a couple of Anchor Steam beers put away, a beer we had both developed a habit for in Frisco town, he spied Lorraine all in white sitting at a far corner table with a couple of girlfriends. When one of those girls came pass the bar he mentioned to her that he thought her friend in white was cute, pretty, something like that and to tell her his message. And she was. A delicate flower, thin, longest black hair and a nice smile that he could see even across the room. His type no question. That girlfriend not knowing what else to say told him to go over and tell her himself. For some reason Jeff usually only a little shy about meeting a young women for the first time definitely did not like to approach a table full of women to make his play. His play was one on one, in a barroom scene maybe sitting on a stool at the bar. While they took peep-a-boo meaningful glances at each other nothing happened that night.                 

A few weeks later Jeff was sitting at that same bar one night getting ready to listen to what somebody had told him previously was the “next best thing” band coming along the pipeline to break-out Nashville this young woman who he had not recognized came and sat down at the stool next to his and ordered a drink, an exotic one if he remembered correctly. She was thin, pretty, had longish black hair and a nice smile. When it came time for her to order another one Jeff offered to buy her a drink. She accepted and that kind of broke the ice as they found that they had several interests in common around art, literature and folk music which was in a serious hiatus then and the reason that she, Lorraine, was taking in the insurgent country scene that was beginning to take root around town. She had been brought up in the country, on a farm in upstate New York so she had heard country music, a different old-timey Grand Old Opry kind of music, and also hated it growing up. Toward the end of evening as they were chatting like two jaybirds Lorraine asked Jeff if had ever seen her before. He said no he did not think so. Lorraine then reminded him of the night several weeks before when they had done their peek-a-boos. She also told him that she had looked for him a couple of times later when she had been at the bar. Funny Jeff said he had done the same. Fate and an exchange of telephones numbers got them on the start of their torrid romance.       

For a while, a fairly long while by Jeff’s standards things went along pretty well. They had plenty in common not only in the like to do things department but a commonality in the ways they grew up, the hard family lives they had faced as kids. Especially around holidays when under normal circumstances there was to be a shared joy they shared a “get through the day” kinship. Like a lot of Jeff things though known to me or not something in his inner life, something in his vacant soul, his term, would not leave him alone. Would not let him break from his youthful defensiveness inherited from years of mother harassment and ill-will when dealing with Lorraine. In the end, or rather toward the end, the last few years anyway for a whole assortment of reasons from health to intimations of immortality to use the phrase from the poet’s brain he shut down, became unresponsive to Lorraine’s needs. They lived together but were in his words two ships passing in the night (and hers as well as they tried to figure out what had gone wrong before she had had to flee for her own sanity). Both tried to do the right thing, sought various forms of help but in the end she had to flee, had to find herself and what she wanted to be in this wicked old world. Jeff didn’t like the idea, actually hated it but he grudgingly respected her for her bravery in striking out on her own. Had to admit that rather than his lying, cheating, stealing destruction of his companionships he could be accused of statutory neglect-a more serious social crime, much more serious.       

One night many weeks later after I had written up this piece from the notes I had taken over the course of time we were sitting in Jimmy’s Grille, symbolically enough only a couple of blocks from where Jeff and Lorraine had met at the now defunct Jackie Speed’s, when he was feeling kind of melancholy since her birthday was approaching, something they both made a big deal over he mentioned a song he had heard recently. A song by the old-time folksinger Tom Paxton whom he had liked to hear in the old folk minute days and whom the local college folk station was playing to honor his birthday (forget his age), She Is My Reason To Be. Yeah, too late Jeff figured that hard truth out. But maybe he should have also checked out Bob Dylan’s I Threw It All Away because once again he had thrown it all away.  

The Magnificent Seven- Potshot-A Spenser Crime Novel by Robert B. Parker-A Review

The Magnificent Seven- Potshot-A Spenser Crime Novel by Robert B. Parker-A Review 

Book Review

By Sam Lowell

Potshot, Robert B. Parker, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 2001 

Of late I have been on something of a Spenser crime detection novel run, you know those sagas of the Boston-based P.I. with the big burly  physique and the no nonsense grit and determination to see a case through to the end, the bitter end if necessary, written by the late Robert B. Parker. I started out several reviews of those books by explaining that most of the year when I review books I review high-toned literary masterpieces or squirrelly little historical books fit for the academy. I also said that come summer time you never know will turn up on your summer reading list and why. So blame this run on the summer heat if you must.  I confessed that like any other heated, roasted urban dweller I was looking for a little light reading to while away the summer doldrums. Then I went into genesis about how I wound up running the rack, or part of the rack, after all there were some forty Spenser books in the series before Parker passed away in 2010.  I will get to the review of his 2001 effort Potshot in a minute after I explain how I came to read  for crying out loud yet another Parker crime novel.

See, as I have mentioned elsewhere of late in reviewing some of the other Parker-etched books every year when the doldrums come I automatically reach for a little classic crime detection from the max daddy masters of the genre Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett from my library to see the real deal, to see how the masters worked their magic, in order to spruce up (and parse, if possible) my own writing. This past summer when I did so I noticed a book Poodle Spring by Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker. This final Philip Marlowe series book was never finished by Chandler before he died in 1959. Parker finished it up in 1989.

Robert B. Parker, of course, had been a name known to me as the crime novel writer of the Spenser series of which I had read several of the earlier ones before moving on to others interests. That loss of interest centered on the increasingly formulistic way Parker packaged the Spenser character with his chalk board scratching to my mind repetition of his eating habits, his culinary likes and dislikes, his off-hand racial solidarity banter with his black compadre Hawk, his continually touting Spenser’s physical and mental “street cred” toughness and his so-called monogamous and almost teenage-like love affair with his flame, Susan. They collectively did not grow as characters but became stick figures serving increasingly less interesting plots.

Checking up on what Parker had subsequently written in the series to see if I had been rash in my judgment I noticed and grabbed another Chandler-Parker collaboration or sorts reviewed in this space previously  Perchance To Dream: Robert B. Parker’s Sequel To Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Since I was on a roll, was being guided by the ghost of Raymond Chandler maybe, I decided to check out Spenser again. And because we still had several weeks left of summer and crime novels have the virtue of not only being easy on the brain in the summer heat but quick reads I figured to play out my hand a little and read a few other Parker works. Now we are all caught up on genesis.

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Smells, Ah, The Smells Of Childhood- Ida's Bakery Redux-With The Doors’ The End In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Smells, Ah, The Smells Of Childhood- Ida's Bakery Redux-With The Doors’ The End In Mind

Introduction by Allan Jackson

[I have gotten away a little from the way that the music of our generation, the generation of ’68 which came of age in the 1950s in the classic age of rock and roll to look at what some would call the sociology of poverty that also played an important part in the way we viewed the world. I keep referring back to that key corner boy high school experience bonded us together for a lifetime witness Sam Lowell, Frank Jackman, Si Lannon and Bart Webber who are all veterans of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor hang-out and who write occasionally in this publication. Not all of us were as full-formed, fully-engulfed as Peter Paul Markin, Scribe as we always called him in whatever poverty, by what I have called here the eternal wanting habits which is the fate of those down in the mud, down in the bottom of the social pecking order but we were nevertheless etched by the experience some way.

I keep thinking about Red Riley (no relation to Frankie who led our corner by acclamation Riley was a very common name in the Irish Catholic-etched Acre neighborhood where we grew up). Red was older, a few years older, and he and his corner boys, corner toughs really, who hung out at Harry Variety Store and raised seven kinds of hell to strangers and committed more than one celebrated  robbery none of which at the time drew him any jail time. I have mentioned before that Red was the roughest, meanest guy I ever ran across and that included the tough guys in the Army of which there were plenty. I know I was in awe of Red and his confederates, maybe six or seven guys with some turnover due to jail time. Like I said Red drew no jail time then but would later. Red Riley never got out of being a corner boy, never wanted to unless the Tonio corner boys who were really just glued together to survive and draw succor from each other. At fourteen I was in thrall of him though, dreamed of being in his corner since at that time I was no threat to him and so I was able to go into Harry’s without problems. Red was a pin ball wizard that may have something to do with since he would give me some free games when he had to go elsewhere or was getting ready for a caper. Later I don’t know what happened to Red although I had heard he did various sentences for armed robbery when his luck began to change. A while back when I had to go to the old neighborhood for something I asked somebody about Red’s fate. He had wound up a junkie of some sort and had died in a hail of bullets down in North Carolina while trying to rob a White Hen store for whatever reason he had. I was saddened no question when I had heard that Red had cashed his check.  

And that brings up my real point in this introduction. I came from that same place as Red (and the Scribe as well), that wanting habits place and was ready when young to do whatever was necessary to take that hurt away. I got caught up in one of Scribe’s well-planned but in this case not well executed burglaries when it turned out that Scribe had not factored in that the neighbors were watching the house for their neighbors and had called the coppers. The coppers looked for us for hours as we sidled home. Somebody said they had guns drawn at one point. So see it was a very close thing, a very close thing indeed about which way I would have fallen on this good green earth. Allan Jackman]    

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In memory of Peter Paul Markin, 1946-1976 (?), North Adamsville High School Class of 1964:

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This is the way the late Peter Paul Markin, although he never stood on ceremony and everybody in the corner boy night at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys down near Adamsville Beach called him plain old ordinary vanilla Markin, would have wanted to put his response to the question of what smell most distinctly came to his mind from the old neighborhoods if he were still around. Many a night, a late night around midnight usually, in the days and weeks after we got out of high school but before we went on to other stuff, maybe some of those nights having had trouble with some girl, either one of us, since we both came from all boy families and didn’t understand girls, or maybe were afraid of them, unlike guys who had sisters, who maybe didn’t understand them either but were around them enough to have figured a few things out about them we would stand holding up the wall in front of Jack Slack’s and talk our talk, talk truth as we saw it although we never really dignified the jive with the word truth.

Or maybe dateless some nights like happened a lot more than either of us, hell, any of us if it came right down to it, would admit to (I won’t even discuss the shroud we placed over the truth when talking, big talking, about “making it” when we were lucky to get a freaking kiss on the cheek from a girl half the time) we would talk. Sometimes with several guys around but mainly Markin and me, since we were the closest of the half dozen or ten guys who considered themselves Frankie Riley-led Jack Slack’s corner boys we would talk about lots of things.

Goofy stuff when you think about it but one night I don’t know if it was me or him that came up with the question about what smell did we remember from the old days, the old days being when we were in school, from around the neighborhood but I do remember we both automatically and with just a couple of minutes thought came up with our common choice- Ida’s Bakery. Ida’s over on Sagamore Street, just up the street from the old ball field and adjacent to the Parks and Recreations sheds where the stuff for the summer programs, you know, archery equipment, paints, sports equipment, craft-making stuff, how-to magazines and all were kept during the summer and after that, between seasons. Since both Markin and I when we went to Josiah Adams Elementary up the next block (named after some guy related to guys who ran the town way back when) would each summer participate in the program and as we grew older (and presumably more reliable) were put in charge of the daily storage of those materials during the summer and so got a preternatural whiff of whatever Ida was baking for sale for the next day. So yeah, we knew the smell of Ida’s place. And so too I can “speak” for old Markin just like if he was here today some fifty years later telling you his story himself.        

Unfortunately Markin laid down his head in a dusty back alley, arroyo, or cul-de-sac we never did really find out which with two slugs in his heart and nobody, not even his family, certainly not me and I loved the guy, wanted to go there to claim the body, worse, to start an investigation into what happened that day back in 1976 down Sonora way, that is in Mexico, for fear of being murdered in some back alley, arroyo, or cul-de-sac ourselves. See Markin had huge corner boy, “from hunger,” wanting habits back then, going back in the Jack Slack days. Hell I came up with him and had them too. But he also had a nose for drugs, had been among the first in our town as far as I know although I won’t swear to that now since some kids up the Point, some biker guys who always were on the cutting edge of some new kicks may have been doing smoke well before him to do, publicly do right out on Adamsville Common in broad daylight with some old beat cop sitting about two benches away, marijuana in the mid-1960s. That at a time, despite what we had heard was going on in the Boston Common and over in high Harvard Square,  when the rest of us were still getting our underage highs from illicit liquor (Southern Comfort, cheap gin, cheaper wine, Ripple, more than a few times, Thunderbird, when we were short on dough, nobody, including  our hobo knight in shining armor who “bought” for us as long as he got a bottle for his work, wanted to bother lugging cases of cheapjack beer, say Knickerbocker or Narragansett, out of a liquor store and pass it on to in obviously under-aged kids  so we all developed a taste for some kind of hard liquor or wine). Markin did too, liked his white wine. But he was always heading over to Harvard Square, early on sometimes with me but I didn’t really “get” the scene that he was so hopped up about and kind of dropped away when he wanted to go over, so later he would go alone late at night taking the all-night Redline subway over, late at night after things had exploded around his house with his mother, or occasionally, his three brother (and very, very rarely his father since he had to work like seven bandits to make ends meet for the grim reaper bill collectors, which they, the ends never did meet as far as I could tell and from what I knew about such activity from my own house, so he was left out of it except to back up Ma).

One night, one night some guy, Markin said some folk singer, Eric somebody, who made a name for himself around the Square, made a name around his “headquarters,” the Hayes-Bickford just a jump up from the subway entrance where all the night owl wanna-be hipsters, dead ass junkies, stoned-out winos, wizened con men and budding poets and songwriters hung out, turned him on to a joint, and he liked it, liked the feeling of how it settled him down he said (after that first hit, as he was trying to look cool, look like he had been doing joints since he was a baby, almost blew him away with the coughing that erupted from inhaling the harsh which he could never figure out (nor could I when my mary jane coughing spurt came) since he, like all of us, was a serious cigarette smoker, practically chain-smoking to while away the dead time and, oh yeah, to look cool to any passing chicks while we were hanging out in front of Jack Slack’s.

Of course that first few puffs stuff meant nothing really, was strictly for smooth-end kicks, and before long he had turned me, Frankie Riley, our corner boy leader, and Sam Lowell, another good guy, on and it was no big deal. And when the time came for us to do our “youth nation,” hippie, Jack Kerouac On The Road treks west the five of us, at one time or another, had grabbed all kinds of different dope, grabbed each new drug in turn like they were the flavor of the month, which they usually were. And nobody worried much about any consequences either since we all had studiously avoided acid in our drug cocktail mix.  Until Markin got stuck on cocaine, you know, snow, girl, cousin any of those names you might know that drug by where you live. No, that is not right, exactly right anyway. It wasn’t so much that Markin got stuck on cocaine as that his nose candy problem heightened his real needs, his huge wanting habits, needs that he had been grasping at since his ‘po boy childhood. And so to make some serious dough, and still have something left to “taste” the product as he used to call it when he offered some to me with the obligatory dollar bill as sniffing tool he began some low-level dealing,  to friends and acquaintances mainly and then to their friends and acquaintances and on and on.

Markin when he lived the West Coast, I think when he was in Oakland with Moon-Glow (don’t laugh we all had names, aliases, monikers like that back then to bury our crazy pasts, mine was Flash Dash for a while, and also don’t laugh because she had been my girlfriend before I headed back east to go to school after the high tide of the 1960s ebbed out around 1971 or so. And also don’t laugh because Moon-Glow liked to “curl my toes,” Markin’s too, and she did, did just fine), stepped up a notch, started “muling” product back and forth from Mexico for one of the early cartels. He didn’t say much about it, and I didn’t want to know much but for a while he was sending plane tickets for me to come visit him out there. Quite a step up from our hitchhike in all weathers heading west days. And of course join him in imbibing some product testing. That went on for a while, a couple of years, the last year or so I didn’t see him, didn’t go west because I was starting a job. Then one day I got a letter in the mail from him all Markin-y about his future plans, about how he was going to finally make a “big score,” with a case full of product that he had brought up Norte, he always said Norte like he was some hermano or something rather than just paid labor, cheap paid labor probably, and was too much the gringo to ever get far in the cartel when the deal went down. Maybe he sensed that and that ate at him with so much dough to be made, so much easy dough. Yeah, easy dough with those two slugs that Spanish Johnny, a guy who knew Markin in the Oakland days, had heard about when he was muling and passed on the information to us. RIP-Markin          

No RIP though for the old days, the old smells that I started telling you about before I got waylaid in my head about the fate of my missed old corner boy comrade poor old Markin. Here’s how he, we, no he, let’s let him take a bow on this one, figured it out one night when the world was new, when our dreams were still fresh:

“There are many smells, sounds, tastes, sights and touches stirred up on the memory’s eye trail in search of the old days in North Adamsville. Tonight though I am in thrall to smells, if one can be in thrall to smells and when I get a chance I will ask one of the guys about whether that is possible. The why of this thralldom is simply put. I had, a short while before, passed a neighborhood bakery on St. Brendan Street in a Boston neighborhood, a Boston Irish neighborhood to be clear, that reeked of the smell of sour-dough bread being baked on the premises. The bakery itself, designated as such by a plainly painted sign-Mrs. Kenney’s Bakery- was a simple extension of someone’s house like a lot of such operations by single old maid, widowed, divorced or abandoned women left for whatever reason to their own devises trying to make a living baking, sewing, tailoring, maybe running a beauty parlor, small change but enough to keep the wolves from the door, with living quarters above, and that brought me back to the hunger streets of the old home town and Ida’s holy-of-holies bakery over on Sagamore Street.

Of course one could not dismiss, or could dismiss at one’s peril just ask Frank, that invigorating smell of the salt-crusted air blowing in from North Adamsville Bay when the wind was up hitting us in front of Jack Slack’s bowling lanes and making us long to walk that few blocks to the beach with some honey who would help us pass the night. A wind too once you took girls out of the picture, although you did that at your peril as well, that spoke of high-seas adventures, of escape, of jail break-out from landlocked spiritual destitutes, of, well, on some days just having been blown in from somewhere else for those who sought that great eastern other shoreline. Or how could one forget the still nostril-filling pungent fragrant almost sickening smell emanating from the Proctor &Gamble soap factory across the channel down in the old Adamsville Housing Authority project that defined many a muggy childhood summer night air instead of sweet dreams and puffy clouds. Or that never to be forgotten slightly oily, sulfuric smell at low- tide down at the far end of North Adamsville Beach, near the fetid swamps and mephitic marshes in the time of the clam diggers and their accomplices trying to eke a living or a feeding out of that slimy mass. [Sorry I put those smelly adjectives in, Markin would have cringed.] Or evade the funky smell [A Markin word.] of marsh weeds steaming up from the disfavored Squaw Rock end of the beach, the adult haunts with their broods of children in tow. Disfavored, disfavored when it counted in the high teenage dudgeon be-bop 1960s night, post-school dance or drive-in movie love slugfest, for those who took their “submarine races” dead of night viewing seriously and the space between the yacht clubs was the only “cool” place to hang with some honey. And I do not, or will not spell the significance of that teen lingo “submarine race” expression even for those who did their teenage “parking” in the throes of the wild high plains Kansas night. You can figure that out yourselves.

Or the smell sound of the ocean floor at twilight (or dawn, if you got lucky) on those days when the usually tepid waves aimlessly splashed against the shoreline stones, broken clam shells, and other fauna and flora or turned around and became a real roaring ocean, acting out Mother Nature’s high life and death drama, and in the process acted to calm a man’s (or a man-child’s) nerves in the frustrating struggle to understand a world not of one’s own making. Moreover, I know I do not have to stop very long to tell you guys, the crowd that will know what I am talking about, to speak about the smell taste of that then just locally famous HoJo’s ice cream back in the days. Jimmied up and frosted to take one’s breath away. Or those char-broiled hot dogs and hamburgers sizzling on your back-yard barbecue pit or, better, from one of the public pits down at the beach. But the smell that I am ghost-smelling today is closer to home as a result of a fellow classmate’s bringing this to my attention awhile back (although, strangely, if the truth be known I was already on the verge of “exploring" this very subject). Today, after passing that home front bakery, as if a portent, I bow down in humble submission to the smells from Ida’s Bakery.”

That’s good enough for the Markin part, the close up memory part. Here I am for the distant memory part: 

You, if you are of a certain age, at or close to AARP-eligible age, and neighborhood, Irish (or some other ethnic-clinging enclave) filled with those who maybe did not just get off the boat but maybe their parents did, remember Ida’s, right? Even if you have never set one foot in old North Adamsville, or even know where the place is. If you lived within a hair’s breathe of any Irish neighborhood and if you had grown up probably any time in the first half of the 20th century you “know” Ida’s. My Ida ran a bakery out of her living room, or maybe it was the downstairs and she lived upstairs, in the 1950s and early 1960s (before or beyond that period I do not know). An older grandmotherly woman when I knew her who had lost her husband, lost him to drink, or, as was rumored, persistently rumored although to a kid it was only so much adult air talk, to another woman. Probably it was the drink as was usual in our neighborhoods with the always full hang-out Dublin Grille just a couple of blocks up the street. She had, heroically in retrospect, raised a parcel of kids on the basis of her little bakery including some grandchildren that I played ball with over at Welcome Young Field also just up the street, and also adjacent to my grandparents’ house on Kendrick Street.

Now I do not remember all the particulars about her beyond the grandmotherly appearance I have just described, except that she still carried that hint of a brogue that told you she was from the “old sod” but that did not mean a thing in that neighborhood because at any given time when the brogues got wagging you could have been in Limerick just as easily as in North Adamsville. Also she always, veil of tears hiding maybe, had a smile for one and all coming through her door, and not just a commercial smile either. Nor do I know much about how she ran her operation, except that you could always tell when she was baking something in back because she had a door bell tinkle that alerted her when someone came in and she would come out from behind a curtained entrance, shaking flour from her hands, maybe, or from her apron-ed dress ready to take your two- cent order-with a smile, and not a commercial smile either but I already told you that.

Nor, just now, do I remember all of what she made or how she made it but I do just now, rekindled by Markin’s reference to that sour-dough yeasty smell, remember the smells of fresh oatmeal bread that filtered up to the playing fields just up the street from her store on Fridays when she made that delicacy. Fridays meant oatmeal bread, and, as good practicing Catholics like my family going back to the “famine ships,” and probably before, were obliged to not eat red meat on that sacred day, but fish, really tuna fish had that on Ida’s oatmeal bread. But, and perhaps this is where I started my climb to quarrelsome heathen-dom I balked at such a tuna fish desecration of holy bread. See, grandma would spring for a fresh loaf, a fresh right from the oven loaf, cut by a machine that automatically sliced the bread (the first time I had seen such a useful gadget). And I would get to have slathered peanut butter (Skippy, of course) and jelly (Welch’s Grape, also of course) on oatmeal and a glass of milk. Ah, heaven.

And just now I memory smell those white-flour dough, deeply- browned Lenten hot-cross buns white frosting dashed that signified that hellish deprived high holy catholic Lent was over, almost. Beyond that I have drawn blanks. Know this those. All that sweet sainted goddess (or should be) Ida created from flour, eggs, yeast, milk and whatever other secret devil’s ingredients she used to create her other simple baked goods may be unnamed-able now but they put my mother, my grandmother, your mother, your grandmother in the shade. And that is at least half the point. You went over to Ida’s to get high on those calorie-loaded goodies. And in those days with youth at your back, and some gnawing hunger that never quite got satisfied, back then that was okay. Believe me it was okay. I swear I will never forget those glass-enclosed delights that stared out at me in my sugar hunger. I may not remember much about the woman, her life, where she was from, or any of that. This I do know- in this time of frenzied interest in all things culinary Ida's simple recipes and her kid-maddening bakery smells still hold a place of honor. And with a tear in my eye as I say it fifty some years later my boy Markin did too.

The Ghost Of Lawrence Landon-With Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart” In Mind

The Ghost Of Lawrence Landon-With Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart” In Mind   

By Zack James

[The Pete Markin mentioned in the sketch below and in a previous one about Delores Landon, Lawrence Landon’s wife and Si’s mother, is the late Peter Paul Markin who despite a lot of serious work as a journalist back in the early 1970s fell off the edge of the world down south of the border and fell down shot dead with a couple of slugs in some desolate back alley in Sonora after a busted drug deal as far as anybody in America was able to find out (after being seriously warned off the case by the Federales and some guys who looked like they ate gorillas for breakfast). The Peter Markin who moderates this site is a pseudonym for a guy, Frank Jackman, who along with Si Landon, Jack Callahan, Frankie Riley, Josh Breslin and a bunch of other guys knew Markin in the old growing up days and has taken the pseudonym in honor of his fallen comrade who before his untimely end had taught him a lot about the world and its ways, quite a lot. “Peter Paul Markin”]         

Memory floods. Memory flows unstaunched down to the endless sea of time. Some people shut off that memory flow to preserve their sanity others, others like Si Landon from the old corner boy Acre neighborhood in North Adamsville make it their business, go a long way out of their way to make it their business to remember, to be known among their circle as great rememberers. Si Landon had recently had occasion to test that theory out in a sort of roundabout way. He had been driven to remember one set of memories and that exploded another set in his face almost by happenstance.    

The whole episode had started when due to irreconcilable differences with his third wife, Maria, he had been given “the boot,” had been given his walking papers by her after almost a decade together. We will not get bogged down with the particulars of the causes for the separation except to say that Maria’s complaints were centered on Si’s increased moodiness and distance (that was Maria’s polite way, as was her way, of putting the matter) as well as her own need to “find herself”. The long and short of the situation was that both had agreed that “rolling stone” Si would leave the house they had shared for the previous decade. He wound up for several months staying at various friends’ places and in a sublet from a friend’s daughter before he realized that he needed some rootedness, some familiar surroundings now that he was alone again with only his thoughts and memories.

One tough “exiled” day, that was the way Si described his various experiences since the breakup with Maria he had an epiphany which led to his decision to head back to the old neighborhood after an almost fifty year absence. After a certain amount of searching he was able to find a condo for rent (he was not ready to seek a permanent condo-type situation or quite sure that he was up for that experience since he had spent the previous forty or so years in single family housing so a rental was testing the waters). The condo was located a couple of blocks from his growing up family tumbled down shack of a house in a school which had been closed when the demographics in the area changed and converted to the condo complex. Although he had not gone to school there since his family had moved from “the projects” back into his mother’s old neighborhood when he was in junior high school three of his four younger brothers (no sisters to his mother’s dismay) had gone there and that memory had helped determine his move to location.                     

He had strong recollections of his brothers’ time there and that was a source of some solace once he got settled in. Then a couple of days after that moving in he noticed in the front foyer that the developers of the place had kept some of the historic aspects of the place by keeping a series of graduating class photographs on one wall. On another was the 1907 announcement in the North Adamsville Gazette of the opening of the school. That hard fact triggered a sudden re-emergent long suppressed fear in Si once he realized that that 1925 date meant that his mother had also gone to school there something that he probably know way back when but had forgotten about. Sure enough looking at those old graduating class photos there was Delores Landon (nee Riley) sitting in the front row. All the battles from early childhood until just a few years before her death came rushing back into his head.

[Their relationship as described in a previous sketch had consisted of longer and longer periods of withdrawal after recrimination until there was a point of no turning back reflected in the fact that Si had not even attended his mother’s funeral for a lot of reasons but that one primarily.-Markin]

One late night when he could not get to sleep a couple of weeks after he had moved in Si thought he heard his mother’s voice calling out to him from the foyer that he would never amount to anything her favorite taunting mantra for him whenever he got in trouble.  Si freaked out over the idea that he would have to re-fight all the old memory battles. Damn. (Si by the way turned out to have been a better than average lawyer so he put paid to that eternal standard Delores notion.)              

No question the dominant force in the Landon household, the five surly boys household, was one Delores Landon. That sad fact was no accident, or if it was accident it was so by virtue of the circumstances which befell Delores Riley and Si’s father, Lawrence Landon. Delores and Lawrence had met through the contingencies of World War II when Lawrence Landon had been stationed before being discharged from the Marines at the famous Riverdale Naval Depot, a place which had earned its fame then for producing something like one troop transport vessel per day on those manic twenty-four-even shifts throughout the war. Delores had worked in an office in the complex doing her bit for the war effort. They had met at a USO dance one Friday night and the rest was history for the next forty or so years until he passed away at 65. Part of that history was the production of a crop of five boys, five hungry boys as it turned out led by Si. The other part was that Lawrence had originally come from the south, had been born and raised in coal country, in Harlan County down in Kentucky in the heart of “white trash” poor Appalachia. Before the Marines broke the string he had been the latest in about five generations of Landons to work the coal mines.

Coming and staying in the Boston area with nothing but a tenth grade education and useless coalmining skills meant that Lawrence was always scrabbling for last hired, first fired work. It also meant that scrambling to do his best as a father to provide for his own that he was a very distant figure in the day to day Landon household which in practice meant that Si was from an early age the “surrogate” father a fate which almost destroyed him before he finally left the family house. It also meant that beyond the distant figure of his father he also knew next to nothing about him. Except, and this was a big except, Lawrence Landon never ever sided with Si against his mother whether she was right or wrong in whatever accusations she made against him. Tough work, tough work indeed although he never was as bitter against his father as he had been against Delores. (A lot of what Si would learn about his father would only come after Lawrence had passed on from his youngest brother Kenneth who made serious effort to try and understand what his father had gone through. So Kenneth had known, which will become important in a minute, that his father had been called “the Sheik” by his fellow Marines for his abilities with the women what with his soft Southern accent and black hair and eyes. Kenny had known as well that beyond a young coal-miner’s skills his father had some talent as a musician, as a better than average guitar player and singer who was locally known in the Saturday night “red barn” circuit throughout Appalachian Kentucky for his prowess in song and with the girls along with his band The Hills and Hollows Boys.)

That is perhaps why when Si was old enough and thoughtful enough to know better he recognized that Lawrence had done the best he could with what he had to offer. It had been a hard lesson to learn even with some leeway. So it was no accident that a few weeks after Si’s strange nocturnal “encounter” with his mother (being a man of science he had eventually dismissed, or half dismissed that “voice” as just some gusts of wind coming from outside his windows) he had an “encounter” with the ghost of his father. Si had for many years, going back to his college days been something of a folk music aficionado. Had breathed in the folk minute that passed through the world starting in the very early 1960s.

For some thirty years previously well after the folk minute had burst and the remnants were to be seen playing before small crowds in church basement monthly coffeehouses Si had dilly-dallied with playing the guitar and singing along some folk songs which he had picked up through a famous folk music book which had the imprimatur of the late folksinger extraordinaire Pete Seeger (and lately had picked up songs from another source-the Internet- which moreover provided the chordal arrangements for many of the songs requested). His attention to the guitar and to practice had always been a hit or miss thing through three marriages and an assortment of children and lots of work to keep them in clover (and alimony and child support when those times came). Still Si never completely abandoned either singing or playing. (For lots of reasons but mainly to keep out of the family’s hair during the Maria marriage he had done his sporadic efforts on the third floor of their house far away from other distractions. But also to be able to say when serious folksingers, including Maria, asked about his abilities that he was a “third floor” folksinger, meaning third-rate which seemed about right. That would draw a laugh from those, again including Maria, whom he considered “first floor” folksingers.)            

While he was in “exile” Si had had a fair amount of time on his hands not having to attend to family matters or the million and one other things that are required in a relationship. (Si had had to laugh, a  bitter laugh, one night when he was thinking about those million and one things that he had been about nine hundred thousand, maybe closer to a  million short on keeping the Maria relationship going.) He began one of the most consistent sustained efforts at playing and singing that he had ever done. He continued those efforts when he moved back to his hometown.

What he had begun to notice in exile was that the new material that he was picking up from the Internet or from song books were a lot of old time Hank Williams ballads. Now Si was a city boy, always made it clear when younger that he hated country music, the music of the Grand Ole Opry being his standard for what passed for country music except for one very brief period in the early 1980s when he was attracted to the music of “outlaw” country singers and songwriters like Willie Nelson and Townes Van Zandt. But he always had had something of a soft spot for the anguished Williams. Had done so ever since not knowing that it was country music at the time he would pester Lawrence to play Williams’ Cold, Cold Heart for him when he was a kid. (Lawrence always had a guitar around the house and always like Si would sporadically play when he had a few minutes from the never-ending toil of providing for the five hungry boys and the one overwhelmed wife.)                       

One night in his condo in North Adamsville he began to practice on the guitar when he suddenly thought about his father’s playing of that Williams’ song. He went on the Internet to get the lyrics and chords and began to play. As he played a few times he got a very strong feeling that something was pushing him to play that song far better than he played most songs. On a final attempt Si felt that he had played the song almost like he had heard his father cover the classic. That night he began to realize that the ghosts of his youth weren’t always going to haunt his dreams. That present in that old neighborhood former schoolhouse were lots of things that would surface. Mostly though that night he shed a tear as he finished up knowing that he had cursed his father more than he should have and he once again called out to the winds “Pa, you did the best you could, you really did.”