This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
What Is In A Name-Plenty
When You Are Taking An Ill-Advised Trip Down Memory Lane With No Direction
Home, Alone And Some Damn Headlights Gather You In
By Allan Jackson
Sometimes a nostalgia piece
gets out of hand, goes way beyond the original intent. Often brought on by some
side issue that had been buried so long you had forgotten that way back when that
thing counted for plenty. Of course when you apply the getting out of hand
theory to the work of any of the older writers here who literally came out of
the same school then the frame of reference can only be about the various
corner boy gradation experiences from about fourth grade on to maybe our early
twenties. Thus I was able to forthrightly state in a recent article on what
essentially amounted to a tough drill in the class dynamics of American society,
North Adamsville section that one of the standard reasons given for many of the
articles produced in this publication is that they relate to a certain demographic
that many of the writers here are still standing members of-what is loosely called
the Generation of ’68. The Generation of ’68 as reflected in 1960s life in the
Acre section of North Adamsville where I, we, grew up as much as the great upheaval
some of us were part of later that decadeknown various as the counter-culture, the descend into hell and a
resulting cultural war without end, and without reason. Some aspects looked at
from the old days in the neighborhood, as here, frankly have no rhyme or reason
except as they pertain to the life of the Acre, and its environs. Today we are
about unpleasant memories of being stiffed by forces we had no control over. About
the class issue that would later haunt a number of us, but which went by the
name-as always back then-girl trouble.
Seth Garth, Sam Lowell,
maybe Bart Webber, don’t quote me or him on this one, have gone endlessly over
the nuts and bolts of what our corner boy existences were in the old Acre
section. That desperate poverty which affected every aspect of life in the town
and which we became painfully aware of as we grew older and the beast could not
be contained any longer. But the Acre which actually protected us for a while
from the harsh realities of what “our betters,” my mother’s ragged term for non-Acre
people, those who were dead ass aimed at the fruits such as they were of the
1950s golden age that missed us, not kissed us, as only one section of the town,
representing one segment of the high school life although the most desperately poor
section and therefore with its own challenges. There was as the case usually is
a “better” section, the Hills, where the up and coming families lived in the
new ranch houses which were all the craze back then among the upwardly mobile.
The Hills were actually
set on a peninsula across from Adamsville Beach and separated from the immediate
Atlantic section, slightly better than the adjacent Acre by a long causeway that
practically speaking might as well have served as a Berlin Wall, a Mexican Border
Wall, a free fire zone to keep the ruffian hordes out. Thus unless you were
very inquisitive about the place you had no real reason in early youth to go
there, or to know anybody there. They had their own Seal Rock Elementary School
which I would not actually see until sometime in high school. The flow of kids,
the mixing of school-age populations to reflect a broader social fabric (nice,
right) did not begin in earnest until junior high school. If anybody has paid
attention Bart Webber spent a fair amount of ink describing how the post-World
War II baby boom created the need to break down the previously six grade high
school into a four- year school by the addition of a separate junior high
school for seventh and eighth grades. This is the real melting pot if you will
of the Hills, Atlantic, and Acre Rock student populations. My oldest brother Rex
who played sports and other activities and who went through the former six-year
regime at North Adamsville High told me that he had zero friends from the Hills
during his time there. Had exactly one date, or maybe it was one girlfriend from
the Hills and he was a very handsome looking guy.
After running through all that
chatter I got to the heart of the matter. Small town, yes, but certain social norms
were not generally broken prior to the creation of that junior high school and
even then it was a close thing. We in the Acre, we who were defined by our
being corner boys, had no particular set of expectations except nobody snitched
to nobody for no reason-or else. The social whirl in the Hills was something else.
Maybe it was parents, maybe ministers, maybe who knows misbegotten teachers but
those in the Acre were cursed with a stigmata, with the sign. See the Hills
were something like the last stronghold in town for the devotees of the
Protestant Reformation who originally landed in the town held the reins for at
least a couple of centuries before the “bloody” Irish Roman Catholic and Italian
dittos came crashing in to fill up the working class jobs at the granite quarries
or the shipyards.
It is hard today having
been through eight million relationships with all kinds of different people
from all kinds of backgrounds to have heard that we of the Acre were some kind
of cretins, some social refuse. This was not some fiat from above but, I hope
the reader was being attentive, those very girls with whom we had the everlasting
“girl trouble.” As we corner boys budded into young hormonally charged teenagers
we had had our fill of those Irish Catholic girls from the neighborhood who had
as we called it-rosary beads in their hands and a Bible between their knees.
Mixing, or so we thought, with the Hills girls whom we knew were not Catholics since
there were many Protestant churches in the Hills but no Catholic church although
I am not sure what we thought they were would give us more opportunities or so
we thought.
After that mouthful I
aimed my arrows at one Jill Hoffman (see the dreaded rollcall list below taken
from the membership roll of the Protestant youth group over in the Hills with
her name listed right along with the others). Jill was this delicate flower who
I (and plenty of other Acre, Atlantic and Hills guys too) dreamed dreams about.
She and I would actually talk in class and afterward too since we both loved literature.
One day I decided to make my big move and ask her to the school dance that next
weekend, that next Friday I think is when they held them. Now this is eighth
grade not grad school or something like that so I was innocent enough to ask.
Here is her reply-Girls from the Hills don’t go anyplace, anytime or under any conditions
with heathen (her word gotten from who knows where) boys from the Acre. In
short we Hill girls stick with our Protestant boys.
End of story. A tough way to
grow up but that is the facts. Well not quite the end and this has caused some
rancor among the old corner boys who think that while I had Jill’s ass nailed correctly
to the cross I had conveniently forgotten about another girl from the Hills who
while as rabidly connected to some Protestant ethic (she told me once that her
minister would go fire and brimstone over the “Catholic” problem in the town, warning,
forewarning really all the young Luthers to steer clear). This girl, Ginny
Garland, (see that same rollcall for her name) would actually talk to us, would
talk to me and be friendly in the way almost any civilized girl was friendly back
then. Ginny was a big rangy girl, for the times, not beautiful in any conventional
sense but her bright eyes and sweet smile were worth fighting over. Here’s the big
break-through Ginny, when asked, accepted corner boy Donald White’s invitation
to the senior prom. Said sure. So some ice was broken in the mid-20th
century. From what I hear they had a good time. So there. (Well not “so there”
since I would be very remiss if I didn’t say that Donald White would later lay
down his beautiful head in some hellhole battlefield in Vietnam and whose name is
now enshrined in granite on town hall memorial and down in black granite in
Washington. Somebody told me once that Ginny would occasionally go to that town
memorial but I don’t know that for a fact.
The President Of Rock And Roll- Chuck Berry’s “Hail, Hail Rock and Roll” (1987)-A Music Film Review
DVD Review
By Associate Music Critic Lance Lawrence
Hail, Hail Rock and Roll, starring Chuck Berry with a big part for The Rolling Stone’s Keith Richard and appearances by a number of rock and roll legends like Linda Ronstadt, Eric Clapton, Etta James, directed by Taylor Hackford, 1987
Earlier this year (2017) when the legendary “first wave” rock and roller Chuck Berry passed away I startled a number of my colleagues by declaring Chuck Berry the first black president here in America. (That “first wave” meaning present at the creation 1950s times not the later 1960s revival with the British Invasion led by the Beatles and The Rolling Stones which also lifted Mr. Berry and others back to the limelight from those who worshipped that earlier sound in Europe after it had faded almost from view in America except among a few aficionados.) Of course my frame of reference was not directly political since we all know that Bill Clinton was the first “black” president but rather that Chuck Berry was the first president of rock and roll, the thing that counted for the young back in the 1950s.
At that time not only had I startled some colleagues with that little bombshell but I apparently nettled the regular music critic here (and at the on-line American Music Gazette) and my boss, Zack James, when I argued that while Elvis may have been the “king” back in the day Chuck was the Chief. Here is what I said there:
“I am one who, belatedly, has come to recognize that Elvis (I don’t think I need to mention a last name but if you need one just ask your parents or grandparents and you will get your answer in two seconds flat) was indeed the “king” of rock and roll. He took, as Sam Phillips the legendary founder of Sun Records and first finder of Elvis in old Memphis town who has been quoted many, many times as saying, the old black rhythm and blues songs and put a white, a white rockabilly, face on the genre and made the crossover in a big way. So I will not argue that point with Zack. Will not argue either that Elvis’ act, those swirling rotating off their axis hips make all the girls, hell, all the women sweat. Point Zack.
“But see I am a good republican (with a very purposeful small ‘r”) and as such I believe that the “divine right of kings,” the theory that Zack is apparently working under was discredited a few hundred years ago when Oliver Cromwell and his crowd took old Charles I’s head off his shoulders. And while I would have wished no such fate for the “king” his influence other than for purely sentimental reasons these days is pretty limited.
“A look at this CD selection will tell a more persuasive tale. Sure early Elvis, Good Rockin’ Tonight, Jailhouse Rock, It Alright, Mama spoke to 1950s teenage angst and alienation read: lovesickness, but beyond that he kind of missed the boat of what teenagers, teenagers around my way and around Zack’s older brother’s way, wanted to hear about. Guys wanted to hear about anyway. Cars, getting girls in cars, and hanging out at places like drive-in theaters and drive-in restaurants looking for girls. In short thoughts of sex and sexual adventure. This may seem kind of strange today. Not the sex and sexual adventure part but the car and drive-ins part.
“Those were the days of the “golden age” of the automobile when every guy, girls too, wanted to learn how to drive and get a car, or at least use the family car for those Friday and Saturday night cruising expeditions for which we lived. (I hear anecdotally all the time about 20 somethings who don’t have their driver’s license and are not worried by that horrendous fact. Could care less about car ownership in the age of Uber and Lift. Madness, sheer madness). Cars for running to the drive-in to check out who was at the refreshment stand, cars for hitting “lovers’ lane if you got lucky. For that kind of adventure you needed something more than safe Elvis, safe Elvis who made your own mother secretly sweat so you know where he was at. Say you found some sweet sixteen, found some sweet little rock and roller, say you found that your parents’ music that was driving you out of the house in search of, say you were in search of something and you really did want to tell Mister Beethoven to hit the road. Needed some help to figure out why that ever-loving gal was driving you crazy when all you really wanted to worry about was filling the gas tank and making sure that heap of your was running without major repairs to cramp your style.
“Take a look at the lyrics in the selections in this CD: Maybelline, Sweet Little Sixteen, Sweet Little Rock and Roller, Nadine, Johnny B. Goode, Roll over Beethoven. Then try to tell me that the man with the duck walk, the man with the guitar from hell, the man who dared to mess with Mister’s women (hell we have all been beaten down on that one since Adam’s time, maybe before) one Chuck Berry didn’t speak to us from the depth of the 1950s. Hail to the Chief.”
I made my case before I had watched or rather re-watched the music film under review the Keith Richards-inspired Hail, Hail Rock and Roll centered on the life and times of Chuck Berry (until 1986) and two concerts he gave in honor of his hometown Saint Louis from where he started out to change the music landscape of the young. This film I will force-feed if necessary to one Zack James, boss or no boss, to put paid to the “controversy” around who was who the “king” or the “president”
Naturally the film had to deal with the central question of the expansion of rock and roll from its rockabilly and rhythm and blues beginnings. So naturally as well the question of race in the beginning to heat up start of the black civil rights movement days came to the fore as it did in every aspect of social life in segregated America. As for music Sam Phillips thought he had one answer-get a white guy to swing and sway like a black guy and make all the women, white women now, sweat. And Sam was right. But as fully documented here one Chuck Berry had an idea that he could do the reverse slam-dunk cross-over with lyrics and a back beat that the sullen 1950s red scare Cold War benighted teens with discretionary money to spend would gravitate to. And Chuck was right. Right even as the black and white kids broke down the barriers between them in any given concert or dance hall. Once again hail to the Chief.
[That Saint Louis concert produced many great Chuck Berry performances of his greatest hits both by himself and by his guest artists. Beyond Chuck’s outstanding performances stand-out work was done by the guy who inspired the guy who thing Keith Richards being Keith Richards one of the greatest guitarists around and Etta James. But for my money Linda Ronstadt stole the show with her booming rendition of Chuck’s Back in the U.S.A.]
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
***********
Markin comment:
This is a continuation of entries for folksinger/songwriter Phil Ochs who back in the early 1960s stood right up there with Bob Dylan in the protest songwriting category. However, early on I sensed something special about Dylan and never really warmed up to Ochs. His singing style did not "move" me and that counted for a lot in those days. The rest, for the most part, just turned on preference.
********
Joe Hill Lyrics
F Fsus F C (open D string/then back on 2nd fret)
Joe Hill come over from Sweden shores
F Fsus F C
Looking for some work to do
F C Am
And the Statue of Liberty waved him by
C (Open D string/place finger on G st. 2nd fret/return)
As Joe come a sailing through, Joe Hill
C G7 C
As Joe come a sailing through.
Oh his clothes were coarse and his hopes were high
As he headed for the promised land
And it took a few weeks on the out-of-work streets
Before he began to understand
Before he began to understand
And Joe got hired by a bowery bar
sweeping up the saloon
As his rag would sail over the baroom rail
Sounded like he whistled on a tune
You could almost hear him whistling on a tune
And Joe rolled on from job to job
From the docks to the railroad line
And no matter how hungry the hand that wrote
In his letters he was always doing fine
In his letters he was always doing fine
Oh, the years went by like the sun goin' down
slowly turn the page
And when Joe looked back at the sweat upon his tracks
He had nothing to show but his age
He had nothing to show but his age
So he headed out for the California shore
There things were just as bad
So he joined the industrial workers of the world
'Cause, The union was the only friend he had
'Cause, The union was the only friend he had
Now the strikes were bloody and the strikes were black
as hard as they were long
In the dark of night Joe would stay awake and write
In the morning he would raise them with a song
In the morning he would raise them with a song
And he wrote his words to the tunes of the day
To be passed along the union vine
And the strikes were led and the songs were spread
And Joe Hill was always on the line
Yes Joe Hill was always on the line
Now in Salt Lake City a murder was made
There was hardly a clue to find
Oh, the proof was poor, but the sheriff was sure
Joe was the killer of the crime
That Joe was the killer of the crime
Joe raised his hands but they shot him down
he had nothing but guilt to give
It's a doctor I need and they left him to bleed
He made it 'cause he had the will to live
Yes, He made it 'cause he had the will to live
Then the trial was held in a building of wood
And there the killer would be named
And the days weighed more than the cold copper ore
Cause he feared that he was being framed
Cause he found out that he was being framed
Oh, strange are the ways of western law
Strange are the ways of fate
For the government crawled to the mine owner's call
That the judge was appointed by the state
Yes, The judge was appointed by the state
Oh, Utah justice can be had
But not for a union man
And Joe was warned by summer early morn
That there'd be one less singer in the land
There'd be one less singer in the land
Now William Spry was Governor Spry
And a life was his to hold
On the last appeal, fell a governor's tear
May the lord have mercy on your soul
May the lord have mercy on your soul
Even President Wilson held up the day
But even he would fail
For nobody heard the soul searching words
Of the soul in the Salt Lake City jail
Of the soul in the Salt Lake City jail
For 36 years he lived out his days
And he more than played his part
For his songs that he made, he was carefully paid
With a rifle bullet buried in his heart
With a rifle bullet buried in his heart
Yes, they lined Joe Hill up against the wall
Blindfold over his eyes
It's the life of a rebel that he chose to live
It's the death of a rebel that he died
It's the death of a rebel that he died
Now some say Joe was guilty as charged
And some say he wasn't even there
And I guess nobody will ever know
'Cause the court records all disappeared
'Cause the court records all disappeared
Say wherever you go in this fair land
In every union hall
In the dusty dark these words are marked
In between all the cracks upon the wall
In between all the cracks upon the wall
It's the very last line that Joe Will wrote
When he knew that his days were through
"Boys, this is my last and final will
Good luck to all of you
Good luck to all of you"
For The Late Rosalie Sorrels-A Working Class Anthem For Labor Day- " Solidarity Forever"
A YouTube's film clip of Pete Seeger, appropriately enough, performing old Wobblie songwriter Ralph Chaplin's labor anthem, Solidarity Forever. A good song to hear on our real labor holiday, the holiday of the international working class movement, May Day, but even today on this country's consciously competing holiday.
If I Could Be The Rain I
Would Be Rosalie Sorrels-The Legendary Folksinger-Songwriter Has Her Last Go-Round
At 83
Those urban locales were
certainly the high white note spots but there was another important strand that
hovered around Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, up around Skidmore and
some of the other upstate colleges. That was Caffe Lena’s, run by the late Lena
Spenser, a true folk legend and a folkie character in her own right, where some
of those names played previously mentioned but also where some upstarts from
the West got a chance to play the small crowds who gathered at that famed (and
still existing) coffeehouse. Upstarts like the late Bruce “Utah” Phillips
(although he could call several places home Utah was key to what he would sing
about and rounded out his personality). And out of Idaho one Rosalie Sorrels
who just joined her long-time friend Utah in that last go-round at the age of
83.
Yeah, came barreling
like seven demons out there in the West, not the West Coast west that is a
different proposition. The West I am talking about is where what the novelist
Thomas Wolfe called the place where the states were square and you had better
be as well if you didn’t want to starve or be found in some empty arroyo
un-mourned and unloved. A tough life when the original pioneers drifted
westward from Eastern nowhere looking for that pot of gold or at least some
fresh air and a new start away from crowded cities and sweet breathe vices. A
tough life worthy of song and homage. Tough going too for guys like Joe
Hill who tried to organize the working people against the sweated robber barons
of his day (they are still with us as we are all now very painfully and
maybe more vicious than their in your face forbear). Struggles, fierce
down at the bone struggles also worthy of song and homage. Tough too when
your people landed in rugged beautiful two-hearted river Idaho, tried to make a
go of it in Boise, maybe stopped short in Helena but you get the drift. A
different place and a different type of subject matter for your themes than
lost loves and longings.
Rosalie Sorrels could
write those songs as well, as well as anybody but she was as interested in the
social struggles of her time (one of the links that united her with Utah) and
gave no quarter when she turned the screw on a lyric. The last time I saw
Rosalie perform in person was back in 2002 when she performed at the majestic
Saunders Theater at Harvard University out in Cambridge America at what was
billed as her last go-round, her hanging up her shoes from the dusty travel
road. (That theater complex contained within the Memorial Hall dedicated to the
memory of the gallants from the college who laid down their heads in that great
civil war that sundered the country. The Harvards did themselves proud at
collectively laying down their heads at seemingly every key battle that I am
aware of when I look up at the names and places. A deep pride runs through me
at those moments)
Rosalie Sorrels as one
would expect on such an occasion was on fire that night except the then recent
death of another folk legend, Dave Von Ronk, who was supposed to be on the bill
(and who was replaced by David Bromberg who did a great job banging out the
blues unto the heavens) cast a pall over the proceedings. I will always
remember the crystal clarity and irony of her cover of her classic Old
Devil Time that night-yeah, give me one more chance, one
more breathe. But I will always think of If I Could Be The Rain and
thoughts of washing herself down to the sea whenever I hear her name. RIP
Rosalie Sorrels
Solidarity Forever Solidarity forever! Solidarity forever! Solidarity forever! For the union makes us strong When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run, There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun. Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one? But the union makes us strong. They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn, But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn. We can break their haughty power; gain our freedom when we learn That the Union makes us strong. In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold; Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold. We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old For the Union makes us strong. This labor anthem was written in 1915 by IWW songwriter and union organizer Ralph Chaplin using the music of Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic. These song lyrics are those sung by Joe Glazer, Educational Director of the United Rubber Workers, from the recording Songs of Work and Freedom, (Washington Records WR460)
A YouTube's film clip of Pete Seeger appropriately enough, performing old Wobblie songwriter Ralph Chaplin's labor anthem, "Solidarity Forever". Good to hear on our real labor holiday, May Day, and even on this country's competing holiday.
If I Could Be The Rain I
Would Be Rosalie Sorrels-The Legendary Folksinger-Songwriter Has Her Last Go-Round
At 83
Those urban locales were
certainly the high white note spots but there was another important strand that
hovered around Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, up around Skidmore and
some of the other upstate colleges. That was Caffe Lena’s, run by the late Lena
Spenser, a true folk legend and a folkie character in her own right, where some
of those names played previously mentioned but also where some upstarts from
the West got a chance to play the small crowds who gathered at that famed (and
still existing) coffeehouse. Upstarts like the late Bruce “Utah” Phillips
(although he could call several places home Utah was key to what he would sing
about and rounded out his personality). And out of Idaho one Rosalie Sorrels
who just joined her long-time friend Utah in that last go-round at the age of
83.
Yeah, came barreling
like seven demons out there in the West, not the West Coast west that is a
different proposition. The West I am talking about is where what the novelist
Thomas Wolfe called the place where the states were square and you had better
be as well if you didn’t want to starve or be found in some empty arroyo
un-mourned and unloved. A tough life when the original pioneers drifted
westward from Eastern nowhere looking for that pot of gold or at least some
fresh air and a new start away from crowded cities and sweet breathe vices. A
tough life worthy of song and homage. Tough going too for guys like Joe
Hill who tried to organize the working people against the sweated robber barons
of his day (they are still with us as we are all now very painfully and
maybe more vicious than their in your face forbear). Struggles, fierce
down at the bone struggles also worthy of song and homage. Tough too when
your people landed in rugged beautiful two-hearted river Idaho, tried to make a
go of it in Boise, maybe stopped short in Helena but you get the drift. A
different place and a different type of subject matter for your themes than
lost loves and longings.
Rosalie Sorrels could
write those songs as well, as well as anybody but she was as interested in the
social struggles of her time (one of the links that united her with Utah) and
gave no quarter when she turned the screw on a lyric. The last time I saw
Rosalie perform in person was back in 2002 when she performed at the majestic
Saunders Theater at Harvard University out in Cambridge America at what was
billed as her last go-round, her hanging up her shoes from the dusty travel
road. (That theater complex contained within the Memorial Hall dedicated to the
memory of the gallants from the college who laid down their heads in that great
civil war that sundered the country. The Harvards did themselves proud at
collectively laying down their heads at seemingly every key battle that I am
aware of when I look up at the names and places. A deep pride runs through me
at those moments)
Rosalie Sorrels as one
would expect on such an occasion was on fire that night except the then recent
death of another folk legend, Dave Von Ronk, who was supposed to be on the bill
(and who was replaced by David Bromberg who did a great job banging out the
blues unto the heavens) cast a pall over the proceedings. I will always
remember the crystal clarity and irony of her cover of her classic Old
Devil Time that night-yeah, give me one more chance, one
more breathe. But I will always think of If I Could Be The Rain and
thoughts of washing herself down to the sea whenever I hear her name. RIP
Rosalie Sorrels
Solidarity Forever
Solidarity forever!
Solidarity forever!
Solidarity forever!
For the union makes us strong
When the union's inspiration
through the workers' blood shall run,
There can be no power greater
anywhere beneath the sun.
Yet what force on earth is weaker
than the feeble strength of one?
But the union makes us strong.
They have taken untold millions
that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle
not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power;
gain our freedom when we learn
That the Union makes us strong.
In our hands is placed a power
greater than their hoarded gold;
Greater than the might of armies,
magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world
from the ashes of the old
For the Union makes us strong.
This labor anthem was written in 1915 by IWW songwriter and union organizer Ralph Chaplin using the music of Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic. These song lyrics are those sung by Joe Glazer, Educational Director of the United Rubber Workers, from the recording Songs of Work and Freedom, (Washington Records WR460)
Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac-Four Dreams-Finding Whistler’s Mother-Gazing On The Girl With The Bette Davis Eyes-Following Allan Ginsberg’s Flowers-Searching For The Father We Never Knew
By Lance Lawrence
[Apparently, although site manager Greg Green, the guy who gives out the assignments, has never said so in so many words, I am the “go to” person this year as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the passing of the most well-known, some say “King” of the Beats who flourished mainly in the 1940s and 1950s, mill town Lowell’s own Ti Jean (Jack) Kerouac. Although there has been a fair amount of speculation around the collective water cooler about why I am now doing my fourth different introduction to various archival writings by others over the forty some year history of this publication both as hard copy and now for the past decade or so on-line nobody has a clue to why that is so. Part of that is that they too wanted to write some introductory material giving their slants on fifty years without two-million-word Jack or to update pieces, mainly book reviews and “how Jack influenced me” stuff.
Part, and this is the part I do know about and am telling here for the first time to fend off the charges of favoritism, I actually met Jack a few times when he was living down in Saint Petersburg with his third wife Stella and his beloved (and hated too it was that kind of relationship) toward the end of his life. In those days he was drinking heavily, and I was too, that before the twelve-step program saved my sobriety and my life. We met, quite by accident, in Jimmy Jack’s Tavern which I do not believe is still there at least I couldn’t find it under that name when I Google d it, since I had stepped in for my early day drinking and there he was getting ready to do his serious early day drinking. Since it was early and since there was some kind of unspoken and assumed bond between early day drinkers we started to chat. Got animated when he found out that I had grown up in Chelmsford the next town over from Lowell and were able to identify places we had mutually been to and other local news. Above all we spoke almost in reverence about various youthful exploits along the mighty Merrimac River which drove our imaginations then and later, especially for him, as writers. In those days I was not writing for any publication or had any assignments along those lines, was actually doing a short-hand version of what Jack had done in the late 1940s and chronicled in his famous On The Road but mainly drinking my blues away stumbling and tumbling down the road to some next place where I might stick, might make myself feel better. After a few days I left Saint Pete and drifted, I think, to Key West or maybe Miami. Later when I heard that Jack had cashed his check I, not knowing and probably not caring if I had known, that the cause of death was from complications from that lifelong drinking I lifted a shot of Johnny Walker Red whiskey in his memory.
How Greg Green found out that I had met Jack Kerouac and from there assumed that I had profound things to say or that having met him should be the “go to” guy based on that flimsy premise I don’t know. Now that I have spilled the beans maybe Greg can speak to that. I am happy to do these introductions whatever the reason but over the past several months that I have been working and reviewing pieces I have had to think through how Jack Kerouac has influenced me. Certainly not as a drinking buddy, the short time we passed our time but maybe style of writing or dropping certain verbal bombshells which he had a habit of doing. That remains to be seen as we go through the year-long commemoration.
What is clear already is that the Beat beat was only tangential to me growing up for I was just a little too young to be influenced directly by the movement. The hipsters, grifters, grafters, wanderers, pyschos, holy goofs and that crowd were not around our town (by the way the just listed crowd if truth be known have had progeny who still exist on the far margins of society down where the hipsters and their ilk hold forth on high holy days and remember). Beat, hard non-commercial Beat flourished that is to say before my own growing up, coming of age time, the 1960s and hence the devotion to rock and roll rather than be-bop jazz, folk music lyrics rather than the immense output of poetry put out by the likes of mad monk Allan Ginsberg and the crowd. But enough of this for this is about Ti Jean Kerouac and what might have been not me. Although I do wonder how Greg Green will respond to my finding out he knew I met Jack in sullen days for both of us. Larry Lawrence]
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Ti Jean wondered sitting on Pawtucketville silts listening to the rushing rock-strewn Merrimack coming by, wondered like maybe those old-time Dutch sailors sighting that green fresh breast of land that would become Long Island as they entered the sound, another waterway a metaphor for Jack life, and found a new world unspoiled for that fifteen minutes before they laid anchor and claim on the cheap. That wonder drove Jack boy, all fourteen- year old Jack boy so not worried by red dress Paula Cole coming hither Friday night dates or that damn Maggie down by the almost Chelmsford dream side of the river, damn already the river is in play with her Irish braids and that god damn Bible between her knees to wonder if James was it MacNeil Abbott or Abbott MacNeil Whistler sat beside this same river thinking about his own Mere, his mother and how he could do justice to that forlorn Puritan face which razzled him with blacks, browns and greys, as if to mock the very idea of mother. Hell, James, he would never be called Jimmy like the other boys once he “did” his mother in those woe begotten colors decided he would use the old dame, and she was an old dame to star in his various studies of colors and only philistines would dare to call the work some mother lode draught.
This is where the story gets interesting, although we know that Jack was not bothered just then by come hither girls in red dresses or Bible-kneed Irish girls since he had, playing hooky, crept into his holy of holy spots in the cubicle at the school library gone beyond the wonder of those muddy splat riverbanks where he first wondered the wonder akin to those Dutch sailors seeking his own fresh green breast of land, the land of the mind. Wondering how to stop wondering Jack picked up a biography of James Whistler complete with mother on the front except she was painting title called some study in black and white, something like that by one Lancelot Grey who Jack would later find out was the central figure in what he would wind up calling the pre-war art cabal that was attempting to “dress up,” read, protect American art and artists from the onslaught of European critics who basically call that art “folk art” meaning show the bastards the door and maybe get them shown in Peoria or better Grand Island but stay away from European shores.
Grey’s take on Whistler, taking the American born but life-long ex-patriate in was that he never left the American shores and stuff like that. What interested Jack though was not that art cabal stuff (art cabal a term he would not know until later when landing in New York he came face to face with the denizens of that cabal through various Student Art League girlfriends and others met in Village garrets when garrets were there and not in Soho). But that was after the war (World War II in case a younger reader has happened on this piece) when New York told cheapjack art Europe to fuck off, to step back and various abstraction movements were all the rage. Just then Grey delved into Whistler’s various non-mother pieces (than mother painting an iconic come on since back then only the art cabal knew other paintings and the publisher insisted that that painting be on the front).
Jack popcorn for eyeballs sitting in the last row of the orchestra section of the old Majestic Theater off of Bridge Street across from the offices of the Lowell Sun waiting as the screen heated up after some very ordinary news of the week reels and an off-color cartoon which he never did get even after watching several times over the next few Saturday matinee double-feature week. The films changed every Friday but Mr. Le Blanc cheapened up his operation by re-running those silly cartons built for ten-years olds with no brains but silly to a strapping boy of sixteen who actually took girls to the shows. (Le Blanc also sold stale popcorn with so much salt laid in it would make your eyelids curl and watered down the tonic, old-fashioned New England word for soda, so much it might as well have been water and even made boys like Jack with strong kidneys ran to restrooms frequently.) Of course, that was a totally different proposition, that messing with girls stuff that he had pretty much figured out by sixteen with plenty of street advise some of it recklessly dangerous and no, zero, parent advise but that was when you asked a girl if she wanted to sit in the orchestra section or go up to the heavy-breathing pitch dark moaning balcony. If the former that would be a last date (one time he left the girl in the front lobby to fend her herself on the way home while he went off to Renoir’s Ice Cream Shop with Even Stephen and Dizzy Izzy). This day, this Thursday afternoon first show skipping afternoon classes was different when Jack was all business trying to figure some stuff out that was going to appear on the satin silk screen.
Then it, no, she started. All fresh as a new born daisy fending off some sidewalk Lothario, if only in Jack’s imagination, really only some lug like a million lugs he knew in Lowell High School and who if he hadn’t been on a mission this afternoon could have stood in front of the high school at close of day and counted the number of lugs from the class of 1939 carousing out the door some he could name by name. So, no this lug was going nowhere, was getting nothing except the desert breezes from this girl. Jack swore the girl with the Bette Davis eyes after beating the clown off with a car jack sat in her dust-filled private reading spot reading some French poet from the fourteenth century. Jack pressed his popcorn eyeballs to see book jacket cover and his heart beat a mile a minute once he saw that she, Gabby let’s give her a name, was reading his hero prince bandit poet Francois Villon, like him a Breton when that meant something before the wave of diasporas which led angelized angel-headed Kerouacs to the shores of the Saint Lawrence River and downwardly mobile fates stripped the clan of their respective dignities.
Yes, Villon the prince of thieves who Jack had discovered in that broken- down school library where he hid out when he could not deal with bullshit chemistry classes or some such subject around the time that he read that book by Lancelot Grey about that pimp daddy, holy goof (first use of the term “holy goof” came from reading Grey) James Whistler the artist who kept himself from the Thames and watery graves by selling his paintings or more usually “selling” his mistresses to make the rent money when times were tough. He still loved Whistler (although he could only mock a guy who had to practically handcuff his mother to the chair to get her to stand still for what he called a study in black and white, something like that) if only because he was Lowell, was a native son and that counted a lot for Jack then even if James was not a Breton. (Funny later he would go through seven kinds of hell with his own mother before telling her to kiss off.) But Villon was a legitimate bandit-prince who hung with the lumpen outside the guarded moats ready to pounce one minute on the next jackroll victim (some historians have speculated that Villon and his scumbags invented the jackroll, taking a bag of nails or coins if they had any wrapping them in a small cloth and under cover of darkness bopping some old lady or drunken sot for their dough). A lost art that Jack would use more than once in Times Square when some pansy hipster tried to do tricks on him and he bopped him for hot dog money at Howard Johnson’s stuff like that, yes, a lost but helpful art for those who lived outside the law, for those whose only road was the road.
And there she was the girl with the Bette Davis eyes all dewy even as a desert dust storm was brewing just outside the Gates of Eden reading Villon in French (her mother was French a catch for her woe begotten father during World War I service in France with the American Expeditionary Force who came back to Eden saw the dust and stone wood and left on the next train with some Singer sewing machine salesman with four quarters and a quart of wine). That Garden of Eden business a gag, a gag of sorts since the diner that he father owned, no, really her grandfather who was getting too old to run the place but too ornery to let his deadbeat son who couldn’t keep a French whore, Gramp’s words, in the middle of the desert from running away with the next time that came by with long pants on was just outside the main entrance to the Petrified Forest (couldn’t later a guy like Allan Ginsberg or even novice poet Dean Moriarty have a field day with that idea as the 1930s was tearing America, tearing the world apart, making the world turn in on itself). The gag was that Gramps an old Kentucky coalminer until he was thirteen and figured out that he would rather not die in Appalachia with the muskrats had headed out of the hills and hollows as fast as he could. Head out to California where he had heard had streets paved of gold and young girls ready to give whatever they had to give. But see Gramps and his forbears were sitting folk, were tied to the tired land so long that they would sit down anywhere where that didn’t have to pretend to seek prosperity. So Gramps stopped at the Petrified Forest once he ran into some Nevada Jane heading east after busting out heading west who worked at the diner and who played the flute for him until she too ran off with some calico salesman. Gramps just stayed put and married the first woman who smiled at him (Gabby’s grandma) and that ended the road west in that generation.
So poor rattled and pestered Gabby was torn between sweet perfume dreams of Left Bank Paris cafes and that endless rock-hard dust. Then out of the blue some pretty hobo came walking up the road to the diner all dusty and road worn, a hobo whose name turned out to be Leslie Howard (that would be important later to Gabby if meaningless to Jack when she inherited his life insurance policy but that was later long after Jack had gathered in the wanderlust that set that first Breton to Canadian shores and that fucking raging Saint Lawrence River of no returns) Listen up, Jack did, this Leslie Howard was no stumble bum like half the hoboes, tramps, bums, and there are social distinctions among the brethren who were running around the country stopping at railroad jungle camps or sleeping under unkempt bridges and arroyos but a real live itinerant intellectual who had when he had seen the first turnings of the world inward in those times got the hell out of Europe as fast as he could (he would be found later when Gabby looked for next of kin to see if anybody would contest the life insurance policy to have been Jewish not a good thing to be in Europe in those times to be a “rootless cosmopolitan”) This Howard, let’s call him that since it is as good as any other and who knows what he real name was if he was on the run bedazzled Gabby from minute one leaving that lug gas jockey out to dry with the trees. Knew his Villon cold, knew that he too was a bandit prince who hung outside the moats with the lumpen.
Right then Jack’s already strong flight of fantasy knew that he was kindred, here was guy who loved to read but could not settle down with at crazy-mixed up world pounding tattoos in his fevered brain. If anybody had been near Jack in that darkened orchestra section fit only for one-date girls and sullen adults they would have heard him gasp every time this Howard said anything of import to Gabby. Jack’s fevered mind started sketching things out, read like crazy, write like crazy and keep on the move, always on the move. What Jack would call later in one of his lesser but more philosophical books the quest, the grail hunt, the breaking from the holy goofs that keep you penned in and unfree, that holy goof a well-worn word in Jack talk. For now though just the germ of a plan.
They say that Bretons are not only are hearty but also headstrong and Jack sensed in Gabby just such characteristics even though she was nothing but some dirt farmer Okie, Arkie descendent. He would forever search for his Gabby but never find her, and frankly that search was just one among a number of searches later. This guy Leslie, what made him tick, why Jack was drawn to him like lemmings from the sea was more problematic. The Villon, hobo road warrior philosopher king part was straight up. He would have a million sleepless night visions of being out on some tramp road in say Winnemucca or Yuma facing no dough and no food or water and glad-tiding himself into soft spot, some soft bed if that was the way the thing played out. Pearl-diving, you know washing dishes for his meal in some such Garden of Eden diner somewhere if necessary just to stay on the road one more day. That part held romance, held him in thrall.
What Jack couldn’t figure out especially since the girl with the Bette Davis eyes was totally smitten by him and his wayward ways against the lugs, demented grandpas, jelly-fish fathers and abandoned down some Seine River mother not unlike the Merrimack always close to his dreams especially that rocky crest around the old Lowell Textile Institute why this modern day troubadour had so little regard for himself that he would let a bum like the notorious Duke Mantee, yes, that Duke who was the scourge of the West just then put two random slugs into his body. He tries, and would continue to try later to understand the idea of the retreat of the intellectuals, that the time of the caveman was making a reappearance after so much spent trying to come up from the mud and slime. Backwards. Damn, that bothered Jack, would bother him until his own dying breath when he turned on the intellectuals with a vengeance. The now dank dark movie hall left him utterly perplexed about what would happen to him when he had to face his own road west.
Outside the movie theater, actually he had been in the lobby when he spied her and then hailed her, Jack stopped that come hither Paula Cole and asked her if she would like to go to the movies that next Friday night when the films changed. When she answered yes Jack now a veteran of the ploy asked Paula -orchestra or balcony? Answer: “don’t be silly I would not have accepted if we weren’t going to the balcony.” With that he would put the fate of Howard in the back of his mind. First things first.
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Jack brought the Tokay, the cheap wine of the day that got him through the day and the only other wine beside kosher Mogen David mad monk (although just then demurely so) Allan Ginsberg, hereafter Monk, would drink to set himself up to read some sliver of a poem. This night expecting a bunch of people to of all things a North Beach (San Fran) converted garage gallery something the Monk would put an end to guys like T.S. Eliot, bum of the month Nazi-symp Ezra Pound and about fifty other guys and twenty other gals including his high school prose father. Would burn their old-fashioned words now of no account on a pile of burnt offerings, a pile of faggots (he would not learn until later that word’s common origins use to destroy brethren fellow homosexuals). Would get the world well, for a minute, in search of some fatherless compadre, in search of the father Jack claimed he had never known, and not he alone in the welter of great depressions and slogging through war. Maybe in the end they were searching for Father Death who knows. Jack passed the wine, passed all understanding before that search was consummated.
Some guy, some guy who claims that his mother had worked at City Lights Bookstore in those days and had had an affair with the poet Phillip Larkin and had brought the dago red and him to the reading. Claimed to know Jack, or maybe it was the Monk in the old days, in the days when they raged with so many words they couldn’t keep enough Woolworth 5 &10 notebooks in flannel shirts or golf scorecard pencils ready wrote this, second hand about being present at the creation, second hand. At this far remove it is hard to tell fact from fiction, tell who is bullshitting and who has the goods especially since virtually all the background characters are gone, some long gone. Make of that what you will.
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I have seen the best poet of the generation before mine, no, let me start over, I have seen a universal max daddy poet speaking some truths to put old Homer and freaking staid T.S. Eliot in the shade. Starting off by declaring that he had seen that the best minds of his generation, guys like brother in soul Kerouac, be-bop Charlie Parker, Phil Larkin when he was sober, Johnny Spain when off the needle and doing cold turkey and of course the daddy them all one Carl Solomon turn to mush. Turned out in the barren wilderness, not the friendly desert-scrapes heading west on lonely Greyhound buses or Tourist Bureau hang-ups wilderness out pass Butte or Boise but what a novelist named Nelson Algren who called the shots and gave many a troubled youth the keys to the fixer man and wellness called the neon wilderness, called that place where the bright lights of the city blinded a proper man (or woman) some junkie Frankie Machine haven with a wife he hated and a girlfriend who couldn’t stick with him when he was on the junk. That neon beast from which no one returned except for quick stays in safe haven mental asylums (called ironically funny farms but even the Monk, whose own mother had her share of sorrows in such places could find no humor in such designations).
Get this, no, let me start again against the cold nose of my sister filled heart. Saw, he the Monk okay in case I lose my train of thought passing through Salt Lake City and thoughts of Joseph Smith’s grand hustle taking a bunch of farmers from burned over lands to the searing sun of the western depot. Saw the same Negro streets Jack, and one time Jack and he when he, Jack was looking for some rough trade sailors just off the China Seas pierce earring trail saw around Blue Hill Avenue and Dudley Street blank, 125th Street blank, Dearborn Street blank, MacArthur Boulevard blank, Central Avenue blank, Cielo Street in Tijuana blank, Plaza del Mayo, Montezuma revenge Mexico blank, and wasted in the sweated fetid humid Thunderbird-lushed night dreaming of pink Cadillacs and stony-faced fixer men getting wise by the hour on Carl’s ancient fears. (And, this is funny or so the winos and every hobo, vagrant, escapee, drifter and grafter yelling out in unison thought so “what is the word-Thunderbird-what is the price forty twice.” Ready to jackroll some senior citizen lady for the price, for fucking eighty cents which any self-respecting junkie could cadge in two minutes even in Cielo Street, Tijuana and that is a hard peso to drill,-ready to commit mayhem at Park Street subway stations for their “boy,” to be tamped by girl but I will be discrete since the Feds might raid the place sometime looking for the ghost of Trigger Burke who eluded them for a very long time. (Trigger who captured Jack’s imagination and the Monk’s but here is the weird part Carl’s too who started strutting like him too after the prince of bandit-poets Corso showed him how to do that slinky swagger on the last visit before the blade at Sandhill).
Thought that those angel-headed hipsters hearing choruses of angels strumming their noiseless wings, those cold as ice in a man’s veins hep cats hanging around Times, Lafayette, Dupont, Harvard squares (you can fill in your own squares, square the Monk laughed and Jack hee-hawed) crying in pools of blood coming out of the wolves-stained sewers around the black corner would never stop bleating for their liquor. Would not stop until they got popular and headed for the sallow lights of Harvard Square where they, those angel-headed hipsters in case you (and Carl) forgot hustled young college students, young impressionable college students green as grass whose parents had had their best minds, those hallowed students’ mines, okay, wasted in the turbid streets of south Long Island (not the West Egg of Gatsby’s dream out of Fitzgerald’s fresh green breast of land to stir even sullen rough trade Dutch sailors looking for whips and cuts, conquering everything in sight like any other poor-boy arriviste with too much money and not enough imagination and not East Egg of the fervid elites but any-town, Levitt-town of those who would escape to Boston or Wisconsin to face the angel of death, that angel frightening even Monk when Carl was not around to anchor his brain. Up front and say no go, pass, under luminous moons which light up sparks and say to that candid world which could have given a fuck hard times please come again no more.
Here is the beauty of the green as grass hustle working fast to get enough to fix that jones. Dangle some college guy, maybe with a girl, shy, with dreams of hard-core liquor or a well-twisted joints to loosen her up and her fragile come hither virginity (reminding Jack of that Paula Coe who played the flute for him more than one time in that Majestic Theater balcony some hardcore Friday night and the Monk, searching for some blue-eyed Adonis, settling for some pimpled has been teenager seeking his own father dreams). Lay out the story-kid your booze and something for me. Done. Later, a big bottle wrapped tight in a paper bag. Trick, a very thin brew of whiskey split and cash for him to get himself well. Oh the hipster cons which would have made even the Monk laugh.
You already know about what you need to know about Protestant girls with their upfront Protestant lusts although they would not be caught dead, or alive, in Sally splendor although they certainly could play the penny whistle and damn those world historic fucks. Maybe tasty Jewish girls from the shtetl not in East or West Egg who flocked to the other side of the river and gave Irish guys who previously had dribbled their spunk behind dumpsters after losing out to ten bucks and virginity in tack tickey-tack Catholic girls who refused to give that head that would have brought some of the best minds some freaking relief (better not say fucking relief because that would be oxymoronic). Maybe some off-center sullen fair-skinned and blonded Quaker, Mennonite, Primitive Baptist or Brethren of the Common Life kind of Protestant girls, like I said off-center, who spouted something about one god and no trinities, no god and no trinities and just feel good stuff.
All three varieties and yes there were more off-centers but who even knew of Quakers, Mennonites, lusty Amish girls run away from home, Tantric card-wheelers, and fresh- faced red light district sluts who at least played the game straight-played the cash nexus for pure pleasure and maybe to even up some scores. All-Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, yeah, Quakers (fakirs, fakers and Shakers included), the sluts, Mennonites and yes those lusty red-faced Amish runaways all coming together after midnight far from the negro streets, the Monk’s beat and no anachronism like saying black or Afro-American back to those Mister James Crow days, but not far from the all night hustlers and dime store hipsters with their ten-cent cigar store rings and cheap Irish whiskeys bought on the installment plan who converged around the Hayes-Bickford just a seven league jump from the old end of the line dead of night Redline subway stop in order to keep the angel of death at arms’ length. The angel of death a tough bitch to break, and tougher to cross when they deal went down. There to listen until dawn to homosexuality- affixed hungry for the keyhole blast or the running sperm fakir poets, the Monk number one of all the number ones and slamming singsters (to keep up with the gangster, mobster, hipster theme, okay) fresh out of cheapjack coffeehouses where three chords and two-line rhymes repeated in call and response got you all the action you wanted although maybe a little light on the breadbasket sent around to show that you were appreciated. Yeah, now that I think about the matter more closely hard times please come again no more.
I have seen frosted lemon trees jammed against the ferrous night, the night of silly foolish childhood dreams and misunderstanding about the world, the world that that poet spoke of in a teenage dream of indefinite duration about who was to have and who was to have not once those minds were de-melted and made hip to the tragedies of life, the close call with the mental house that awaits us all. Yeah Monk was right even about Carl Solomon and all his sorrows before the knife.
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What the hell did sullen Carl Solomon start before he went under the knife with his pleading for his father, a father that he had never known since he had been left back in Poland to peddle his fruits and vegetables to his brethren and his mother and the four kids headed to the Americas on some tub of a boat and never looked back. Rumors abounded that he survived because he had a gentile mistress grabbed after his wife and kids left. That at least is the story Carl told, told endlessly which would not be so bad but the Monk picked it up in his own moment of despair.
Monk searched his valium brain for his own prose-filled father but that was not nearly good enough, kept him awake at night because he had strange dreams that his father was not some fake high school teacher writing awful poems in broken down post-war America. Was afraid that his real father was William Appleton Williams who denied him three times, didn’t want to believe that his broken words would mesh so well. Had better dreams that his real father was sexy Walt Whitman (this remember in dialogue with Carl Solomon before the knife so it is not clear whether Carl remembered) whose vagabond dreams matched his and his homosexual desire beating out some Johnny Reb who could give Walt the ride he desired. Here is the trick though the Monk had sweet dreams whenever he read Leaves of Grass (usually on grass) and he passed that on to Jack in some secret moment in Denver when some screwball Adonis was looking for his father.
Now Jack, funny before Carl grabbed Monk with the father who we never knew religion, always thought he knew his father, knew the con artist, poker cheater, movie theater ticket taker great bear of a French-Canadian who came down the Jackson, Maine road with five cents Canadian in his pocket and dreams of printing up ads. But that was not the father that he knew but some skinny stiff wino pissant who he sought out in greater Denver cattle yards. Always deferred to everlasting Mere, Mere out of some fresh Breton conceit never getting some whiplash from old father time who died before his time of heartache and heartbeats. So Jack conned himself into some holy goof, his words exactly, metaphysical search going up the Bear Mountain, Jackson, Wyoming Jackson not that trail of tears from down in Maine Jackson where the red brick and mortar spinning wheels beckoned and he spent and spilled his young manhood trying to get the fuck out from under even if he couldn’t drive, made him nervous, to save his life. Funny again that fame never stopped the bleeding inside looking behind some bushes for some father death, some father time pissing against that Tokay dream he figured out back in about 1946 but could never get past. The Monk did him no service on that long trail drive from Monument Creek to Sunnyvale and then drop off and outs at Big Sur where he got sober for a week.
Damn that stuff is contagious, will drive you crazy, when twice removed Lance, me, went looking for the father he never knew too. Looked for him behind closed doors to his heart. That distant slightly dim figure who brought home not enough pay checks. Who never talked about but never got over the Pacific war like a lot of guys who found themselves on tubs picking up stray comrades from washed-up beaches, picking up too guys who got too close to chore, got wasted in some windless fire and fell down into the green-gray-blue surf that gets us all in the end. The old man, father, never talked much, much about anything that Lance, me would understand and so Jack-like Ma, Mere, Mom, Mere whatever you want to call her ran rough-shot over childish dreams and insecurities. Here’s the worst of it though, Jack-like, he never got to say good-bye to that father he never knew and crushed his days with regret, total regret that he didn’t have the sense of a holy goof, Jack talk, to have called a truce, even an armed truce to the madness that wracked his silly excuse for a family, and now all his has is slate grey stone to place the remnants down in some unknown holy place where he can never dwell, yes, Lawrence, me, got caught in the Monk’s version of Carl’s plainsong, no, got stuck in the damn mire.
Silly to think that the father time search would only apply to men, young men, holy goofs like Lawrence, me, when the max daddy sin of all was the way Jack, in Jack speak, abandoned his Jan, his spitting image Jan, denied like Christ was denied three times by the count. Jan who would search like some strange Kenneth Rexroth figure for the father we all knew, or thought we knew once he pointed us toward the light, once we got the beat, the second-hand beat that washed us clean in places like Big Sur and Todo el Mundo where Jan still searches in some desperate wild water surf for some broken down guy who wasted away with drink, and she with drink too. Jesus, funny he was searching for his father too out in Middle Eastern wildernesses, will it never end.
Contagious that is what Sam Lowell said about the freaking search for that lost father world made up of pure sand and not much else. Some goof, the holy part excluded was looking for his father, his famous private detective father, a guy named Lew Archer, who back around Jack time in California ran the rack on few good cases and then rested for forty years something like that. Tried to claim that his father’s life death was due to his father’s overused whip, his sorrows that he could not go the distance with his wife, this goof’s grandmother, his code of honor that once he took a job he was in, totally in, for good or evil, and
maybe that he drank too much Tokay, Jack-like when he wound up behind some freaking wino pissant dumpster saved but some sister of mercy who could not save him in the end. Get this though that junkie weirdo so-called grandson, some modern-day Carl Solomon without the sorrows before he went under the knife could not be searching for Lew, Lew Archer since Lew never had a son, had no children. Sorry goof,
Out on the Jersey looking east first to see the great ocean that drove his forbears to search for fresh green breasts of land then west to seek dungeon filled fathers never known in Denver, Santa Fe, Salt Lake City Salvation Army hotels or whatever they call those blessed places of rest the whole deal was to figure out a way to look for some American cowboy past, looking for the Monk’s Adonis if he couldn’t make it with sexy Walt Whitman with the furl of whiskers. There sat Dean Moriarty, no, fuck that, one Neal Cassidy who would ride the freight trains west looking for that father the others really did think they had found. Neal’s old man was in some wino jailcell speaking in tongues to a candid world. Maybe Carl was right, Monk too we should all cry to the high heavens looking for the fathers we never knew.
Sixty years ago, in January 1959, a petty-bourgeois guerrilla movement in Cuba overthrew the Batista capitalist regime and in 1960-61 expropriated the bourgeoisie, creating a bureaucratically deformed workers state. Revolutionaries in the U.S. have a special duty to defend the Cuban Revolution against capitalist restoration and U.S. imperialism. Integral to this defense is the Trotskyist call for proletarian political revolution to establish a regime based on workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism. The excerpt below is from a 1961 internal document submitted by our forebears in the Revolutionary Tendency, a minority in the now-reformist Socialist Workers Party. The SWP majority gave political support to the Castro-led Stalinist bureaucracy, rejecting the necessity of a Leninist-Trotskyist party and the centrality of the proletariat in the fight for socialist revolution.
14. The Cuban workers and peasants are today confronted with a twofold task: to defend their revolution from the attacks of the U.S. and native counterrevolutionaries, and to defeat and reverse the tendencies toward bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution. To confront this task they crucially need the establishment of workers democracy.
15. Workers democracy, for us, signifies that all state and administrative officials are elected by and responsible to the working people of city and country through representative institutions of democratic rule. The best historical models for such institutions were the Soviets of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Workers Councils of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956….
16. The full victory of every modern revolution, the Cuban revolution included, requires the emergence in a leading role of a mass revolutionary-Marxist party. The small Trotskyist groups, in Cuba and elsewhere, have a vital role as the nucleus of such parties. They can fill this role only if they continually preserve their political independence and ability to act, and if they avoid the peril of yielding to non-Marxist and non-proletarian leaderships their own ideological responsibilities and the historic mission of the working class.
— “The Cuban Revolution,” December 1961, printed in Spartacist No. 2 (July-August 1964)
