From The Archives Of The Carter’s Variety Store Corner Boys- The Night They Burned Snug Harbor Elementary School Down-Almost

From The Archives Of The Carter’s Variety Store Corner Boys- The Night They Burned Snug Harbor Elementary School Down-Almost  

By Sam Lowell

Of all the corner boys (read: juvenile delinquents in some quarters, sullen schoolboys in some, and misunderstood youth in others all three probably true in some senses) who hung around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor while we were going to North Adamsville High in the early 1960s I am the only one still standing who started his corner boy career at Carter’s Variety Store across town in the Adamsville Housing Authority apartments (read: “the projects”). That experience started when I was a student at the Snug Harbor Elementary School located just outside the projects. The school had been built to meet the needs of the burgeoning school age population of both the young families who found themselves in need of cheap housing at the recently built projects and the influx of families who were filling in the extensive 1950s-style new ranch houses up the road. That should do for background for now.

I mentioned that I am the only Carter’s boy still standing but I was not the only one. There was one other one Peter Paul Markin who at Tonio’s was always known as the Scribe and I will use that here rather than that pretension-filled moniker his mother laid on him. Now much ink (and many tears, many tears still) has been spilled in this publication about his latter exploits and craziness of the Scribe when he was in high dudgeon at Tonio’s and a little later but little has been noted about the early days, the early corner boy days in elementary school when most of the Tonio’s boys were clueless about the value of desperately poor kids joining together, hanging out to do, well to do the best they could.             

I am not quite sure how the Carter corner boys started since it was already formed when I started hanging out along with the Scribe. Let’s leave it that this store was the only one in the whole projects area (and sadly still is) where residents without cars, including my family many times, or in need of some quick item could shop. That it has penny candy (yeah, I know inflation) and other sweets galore probably added to the allure. That and Mister Carter did not mind us hanging out as long as we didn’t block anything and didn’t do anything crazy (we never did-there).        

I met the Scribe the first day of school in fourth grade after my family had moved to the projects from another project in Riverdale west of Boston when my father’s company moved to the area and he needed the work. That was in Miss Sullivan’s class, an old biddy who trucked no nonsense and who made it her profession to keep us after school for detention-even that first day which was supposed to be easy stuff. The Scribe was looking at some book, forgotten now, and I commented that it looked interesting to start a conversation. That was all the Scribe needed as he wowed me with the contents. And didn’t wow Miss Sullivan who kept us after for the continuous talking. After that after school detention business we went to Carter’s to see what was up once he told me fourth and fifth grade guys hung out there and it was okay.

Later and elsewhere the Scribe, and to some extent me, would be the leaders of various corner boy combinations, would plan whatever needed to be planned, legal or illegal but then we were frankly naïve and really just foot soldiers. The deal was already set for leadership with Ronnie, George, Rodger, Lenny running the operations (all would later do various stretches of time in county and state prisons I think except Lenny who laid his head down in Vietnam during that war). We had no problem with that since we were in thrall to the whole aura of the thing.      

Now they say, maybe they said is better, that juvenile delinquents are born not made. Have some genetic kink missing which throws everything off. That was true of Ronnie I believe for he had a really devious and sadistic bent (his idea of initiation, for example, was to kick each new corner boy in the scrotum which almost killed the Scribe and I for we never saw it coming-what pain) Somehow Ronnie had gotten into a beef with his teacher and was going to be suspended or some such thing. He was livid about it. One Sunday night shortly after the beef he gathered us together to seek his revenge. He planned to burn the school down-with our help. Whether we thought about it or not we were in. So we started gathering wood from small forest behind the darkest part of the school where we would not be seen by traffic from the road and stacked it against a back pair of doors.

Ronnie had some gas, not much but enough to douse the wood and then took a match from a matchbook and lit the stuff. We ran like hell. Before long though we heard the fire engines come. A neighbor apparently had seen the fire and called. There really wasn’t much damage as we found out later since those doors were flame-resistant. Joke on us, right. My understanding was that the coppers, firemen and the headmaster too though it was some rummies from the forest trying to break in for whatever reason. That Monday night though while I was home with the Scribe watching television Ronnie went berserk and broke about twenty windows in the school. We were all called in on that one although nothing came of it since we all had alibis (and gave Ronnie one too). Yeah, that Ronnie was a piece of work.        
   
[I should point out for future reference that the Scribe and I hung out together until he moved crosstown to his grandmother’s house after his grandfather died in seventh grade. There he joined up with the corner boys who hung around Doc’s Drugstore which I also joined when my family bought a little shack of house in the Bottoms section of the Acre, the working poor section of North Adamsville at the beginning of ninth grade.]         

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

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

By Reviewer Zack James

Maybe it was something in the drinking water but Louis Lyons was beside himself one he figured out the real reason why he spent a couple of weekend nights watching a couple of old-time flicks, films which he had gathered in from his Netflix service. Lou had been on a long term kick about watching, or rather re-watching, films, mostly black and white from his checkered seedy random youth. In those days he would have viewed such films not on his HD television or via the stream of his computer but at his local theater, The Majestic, in his hometown of Oxford out in Western Massachusetts now long since closed where he would spent many an ungodly Saturday afternoon  viewing the current fare. The “ungodly’ part for real his parents were devout Sixth Day Anabaptists whose day of worship started midday Saturday and ended at dawn Sunday morning and although they were liberal enough to see that Lou would have snuck out anyway always cast that epitaph his way when he came sheepishly through the door after being hunkered down with a box of made last popcorn and some candy bars purchased at Billy’s Variety and “snuck” in under the watch-less eyes of the ushers.

Later in high school, having grown out of kids’ clothing and Saturday matinees about the same time, he let those epitaphs flow off his back like water off a duck after coming in late on Saturday nights. Reason: or one of the reasons, Lotty Larson who was the first girl who accepted his invitation when he asked her the locally famous, locally famous high school movie date night, question-balcony or orchestra? Orchestra meant maybe one date and out but balcony meant promise of anything from a “feel” inside or out of some girl’s cashmere sweater to a tight space blow job.            

This trip, this diversion down rural hills nostalgia road, has a purpose since it was on the same track that was bothering Lou’s old mind. The eternal, infernal, ways of sex which had one way or another bothered Lou’s mind since puberty, maybe before if Doctor Freud and his acolytes were right. The association played out this way. On Friday night he had watched for the umpteenth time one of his all-time favorite films the film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s To Have And Have Not starring Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. One of the reasons that he favored that film is that although he did not see it when it had come out since he was only a dream in his parents’ way of life in 1941 when the film had come out when he did see the film in retrospective in college at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square he had told his date, name now long forgotten in memory, that some of the scenes in that classic were as hot, maybe hotter, between two people with their clothes fully on than half the porno being featured in the Combat Zone in downtown Boston. (Lou vaguely remembered that night was a hot date night with that unremembered young woman when they had gone back to her place on Commonwealth Avenue.)

After that recent viewing though he had remarked to his wife, his third wife, Moira, that given the best of it Captain Morgan, Bogie’s role, a craggy sea salt, and Marie, the Bacall role, that he had to be at least twice her age, maybe more. (He had actually looked it up on Wikipedia and found Bogie was forty-five and Bacall nineteen at the time so the “maybe more” was definitely in play). That started a short discussion between them about younger women being attracted to older men (as a sign of some kind of distorted social norm older men being attracted to younger women never made it to the conversation table). No conclusions were drawn at the time by Lou.                   

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

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

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

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

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

Once Again -When You Are Lost On The Great White Way, Broadway … And Don’t Know What To Do-Dick Powell’s “Dames” (1934)-A Film Review

Once Again -When You Are Lost On The Great White Way, Broadway … And Don’t Know What To Do-Dick Powell’s “Dames” (1934)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Sarah Lemoyne

Dames, starring Dick Powell, dances sequences by the legendary Bugby Berkeley, 1934

I might not have known coming into the profession, the film review profession, since they didn’t teach us this at graduate school although they should have but now I know that this is a cutthroat profession. Know that and can now give as good as I get thanks quite a bit to my attentive mentor Seth Garth who has shown me some of the pitfalls to avoid and how to handle the old wizened hunchback, maybe mountebank is a better term Sam Lowell who should have given up the film reviewing game ages ago. That according to good old boy Seth who is after all quite familiar with Sam’s schoolboy tricks and ruses since they grew up together in the same Acre neighborhood, so Seth knows the score, maybe taught Sam some of them himself as he admitted to me one night at dinner. Since Greg Green our beautiful site manager has encouraged his by-line writers of which I am now proud to say I am a member to let our readership know the ins and outs of this cutthroat business and because this film review of Dames is a lesser Dick Powell effort, in fact something of a turkey I will once against enter the lists to response to the latest Sam Lowell diatribe.  

 

One would think that a writer like one Sam Lowell who prides himself on being what Seth calls the max daddy of film noir, has written a book which some consider the definite study of the genre, but which left me cold would have enough to do in his latest review of the film adaptation of British mystery writer Agatha Christie’s 1961 crime novel The Pale Rider to stick to the subject. The subject being, if you can believe this, that since the rise of hard-boiled fictional private detectives like Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe and Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade what he called “parlor pink amateur private dicks” was passe. Like there is no longer a market for such material. Sam, look at the best-seller lists past 1970 when you wrote your opus and then fell asleep thereafter. If he had just kept to that task he might have not jumbled up the review, left us with more questions than answers as to why an amateur sleuth under the gun couldn’t do as good a job as guys who are willing to take a slug or two (of bullets and whiskey it seems) and a few punches for what Sam calls a little rough justice in this wicked old world.

But no Sam had to again wallow in the so-called dispute between us retailing the same old nonsense about how I had libeled him, legally libeled him to boot although having some code of the Omerta from boyhood that he would not snitch to the courts or cops under some awful penalty he would not pursue the matter there. Thanks, Sam I was having sleepless nights worrying about some massive pending law suit for about one dollar which is all the so-called libel would be worth-if it was libel. I have, and I will do so again here, mentioned on several occasions that I have information in my possession that in the old days, the days after that so-called definitive film noir study Sam would use stringers, generally female stringers whom he was romantically involved with or who in those male- dominated days were desperate to get a by-line, write his reviews for him under his by-line. The proof. I need go no further than fellow journalist here Leslie Dumont who could go chapter and verse on the times she bailed Sam out. She was desperate to get ahead (which she did with a big by-line at Women Today before she came back here part time in her retirement) and moreover was not immune to his charms. That Sam maneuver despite the fact that in those days she was writer Josh Breslin’s companion. Case closed as the lawyers say when they have the thing in hand.                     

Sam is also pissed off with my mentioning that when he wasn’t hiring slave labor to do his handiwork say when he was on a toot with some stringer who therefore couldn’t write the reviews he would just use the studio press hand-outs, clip the tops off and sent them in under his by-line. In one response to this allegation he lamely mentioned that “everybody did it” when they had a dog of a review to put out. Yet if you go to the archives of the hard copy editions of this publication in the days before it had to go on-line to survive or to the archives of American Film Gazette you will find Sam’s review of say The Devil Is Down admittedly a real dog you will find through a further look at the archives of the press releases of Avatar Studios that they form almost a perfect match-except title and by-line. Seth says you can almost draw a perfect trajectory between when he was screwing some stringer and the cut-off press releases use as Sam by-lines. Case sealed with seven seals.          

Those points I can deal with easily but the continual references to some kind of budding affair between Seth and I have got me really ticked off and have gotten my companion Clara ready to throw knives at me-and Sam. Sam’s proof of some hanky-panky on the side between me and my good friend Seth is that Seth took me to dinner one night after work. What Sam conveniently “forgets” to mention is the night in question is Seth took Clara and me to dinner that night. I have mentioned before and the reader can figure out that I am the “B’ in LGBTQ since I have had both male and female lovers. Right now I am very attached to Clara who is an “L” and is quite sensitive to any assertions that I might be looking elsewhere, might switch, might find a man interesting. I have stated this before and will do so again I find Seth very interesting and helpful and he has been a doll helping me with this Sam monster. He also unlike Sam who seems like he is one hundred years old maybe more keeps in pretty good shape for his age. Very good shape but that is the rub he is old enough to be my grandfather and although he is a teddy bear I don’t think I would want to go there. Moreover, nobody including supposed old corner boy Sam, has bothered to ask Seth if he was interested in me. Which according to what he told Clara and me that night at dinner he is not, not me personally but after three ex-wives, a parcel of kids, his term, and too many affairs to count he is not looking for an affair or anything else except to get me up the food chain. He did say, and Clara laughed although a sullen laugh if he was interested despite the age different he would not be afraid to take dead aim at me like she had. If that is not enough to keep Sam from his snide insinuations then the hell with it, Seth’s expression.            

I guess I should be getting to the review of this dog although I have tried to avoid it. This is my third review of a Dick Powell early career song and dance man musical before he went for better acting roles, tough guy roles in vehicles like Murder, My Sweet and Cornered which Greg Green let Seth review rather than Sam who was pissed at not getting those assignments. I got the musical bug from my grandmother whose mother had taken her to them in the 1930s and who wondered why I didn’t review more early musicals. I asked Greg for the assignment and now I guess I am the resident Dick Powell musical specialist. Not all Dick Powell films are born equally though and this is number three of three on the like list.

Why? Well the whole premise is silly. Some rich as Midas and as foolish has it in his head to improve the morals of America and has the dough to run the rack. He also has relatives who he wants to leave money to if they are up-standing enough. That bar is pretty low since his main peeve is Broadway musicals with those scantily clad chorus girls and such. That low bars means no truck, none with musicals under penalty of disinheritance. Trouble is the daughter of the relatives have a daughter played by Ruby Keeler who is crazy to dance and crazy about a wannabe Broadway producer Jimmy Higgins played by Dick Powell. So naturally the family gets into backing a Broadway musical by stealth. The show goes into production with Jimmy in charge and despite some snafus things work out okay, as Dick and Ruby trill away the night. The only redeeming art is the elaborate Bugby Berkeley productions which as usual are way over the top with a million chorines and two million complicated dance steps and maneuvers. If doing so would not be in such bad odor I might have considered running back to the archives to see what the studio press release looked like for possible use. Sweet thoughtful Seth though said Sam would have ten thousand daggers aimed right at my heart if I did. Cutthroat profession is right.    

On Internment of Japanese Americans In World War II

Workers Vanguard No. 1137	27 July 2018

TROTSKY

LENIN

On Internment of Japanese Americans In World War II 

(Quote of the Week)

Amid widespread outrage over the incarceration of immigrants in detention centers, the Democrats cynically pretend that such barbarity is unique to the racist Trump administration. During World War II, some 120,000 people of Japanese descent, the vast majority U.S. citizens, were savagely uprooted and thrown into concentration camps in a calculated atrocity ordered by the Democratic administration of liberal icon Franklin Roosevelt.

The Stalinist Communist Party expelled all of their Japanese American members in a grotesque example of their support to the “democratic” imperialists in the war. The then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, facing persecution themselves for opposing U.S. imperialist war aims, were among the very few—including the Quakers—who courageously campaigned against the repression of Japanese Americans. We print below an excerpt from an article they wrote shortly after the roundups began.

A minority problem as acute as any in Europe is being created by the forced removal of Japanese-Americans from the Pacific Coast.

In a move unprecedented in U.S. history, American citizens are being taken from their homes and transported to hastily constructed concentration camps....

Evacuations are being enforced by army officials acting under a presidential decree empowering them to bar from certain areas any person they consider undesirable. The army command has power to declare any district a restricted area and to order the removal of any residents. No reason need be given for the evacuation, and American citizenship is no protection.

So far the measure has been applied only to Japanese-Americans and to enemy aliens: but militant workers, liberals or “uncooperative” citizens could be ousted similarly.

After Pearl Harbor, the press whipped up an hysterical picture of a West Coast invasion aided by Japanese-American residents. The administration had to make a decisive move to show West Coast residents it was alert to their danger. The FBI rounded up all suspected enemy agents in the first few days of the war, but this was not demonstrative enough to give the effect of energetic preparedness the administration was seeking to offset Pearl Harbor.

Considerable pressure for the ousting of Japanese-Americans came, however, from California Chambers of Commerce, the Bank of America, and the reactionary Associated Farmers. These groups see in the Japanese-American farmer not a military menace, but an obstacle to their complete domination of California agriculture. Taking advantage of the situation to demand their ousting in the name of “national defense,” California bankers hope to seize control of the truck gardening fields vacated by the Japanese-Americans....

And so the story of the Japanese-American evacuations stands today—a repressive measure, based purely on racial discrimination and motivated chiefly by the desire of Big Business for additional profits, which is presented as a necessary part of the “war for democracy.”

—“Behind the West Coast Evacuations: Bankers Profit from Driving Japanese-American Citizens into Concentration Camps,” Militant (30 May 1942)

On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" (1957)- "Beat" Poet's Corner- Allen Ginsberg's "America"

On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" (1957)- "Beat" Poet's Corner- Allen Ginsberg's "America"

YouTube's film clip of Allen Ginsberg reading in 1956 from his famous poem "America"

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 older brother Alex 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 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 mean streets of New York, Chi town, North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps, half stirred left on corner diners’ coffees and 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 they acolytes 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).             

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),   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 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 (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 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. 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, 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 the “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 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 Markin via Alex that I got the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60^th anniversary I am passing on the bug to you.           

America
Allen Ginsberg

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet. 
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the 
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.