Mexico: Lessons of the Maquiladora Strike Wave For a Class-Struggle Leadership of the Unions! The following article is an edited translation of a presentation by a comrade of the Grupo Espartaquista de México at Spartacist League/U.S. forums in Los Angeles and Oakland in June. It was delivered in Spanish and translated into English at the events.

Workers Vanguard No. 1160	6 September 2019

Mexico: Lessons of the Maquiladora Strike Wave

For a Class-Struggle Leadership of the Unions!

The following article is an edited translation of a presentation by a comrade of the Grupo Espartaquista de México at Spartacist League/U.S. forums in Los Angeles and Oakland in June. It was delivered in Spanish and translated into English at the events.

The 20/32 strike movement in Matamoros from January to April was the most important working-class rebellion in decades in Mexico. Its name comes from its demands for a 20 percent wage increase and a bonus of 32,000 pesos [about $1,600]. Matamoros is a municipality of Tamaulipas, a state that shares a 230-mile border with the United States, one of the most important borders in Latin America for trade with the U.S.

In Matamoros, which is across from Brownsville, Texas, the maquiladoras represent 70 percent of the city’s economy. There are around 110 maquiladora plants, grouped in four gigantic industrial parks. Outrageously, more than 70 percent of its residents live in poverty.

Before the 20/32 Movement, Mexican president Andres Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) had issued a decree doubling the daily minimum wage in the border zone, to about 180 pesos. The decree did not benefit these workers, since many already earned that amount. But the bosses used it as a way to avoid paying a bonus and negotiating an annual wage raise. This dirty maneuver by the bosses had the support of Juan Villafuerte, the leader of the Sindicato de Jornaleros y Obreros Industriales de la Industria Maquiladora (SJOIIM), part of the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM).

On January 12, the workers began wildcat strikes in 45 maquiladoras organized by the SJOIIM as well as three other unions, all part of the CTM. These strikes were in defiance of bourgeois legality and the union leaderships.

The victorious 20/32 strike wave brought the bosses to their knees. It spread to around 70 plants, to the workers of Coca-Cola, to retail stores, to garbage collectors and even to three steel mills whose workers are part of the miners and metal workers union. Demonstrating their social power by stopping production, the workers not only brought to a standstill a section of the Mexican economy but also threatened the profits of U.S. imperialist titans. They forced the owners of the maquiladoras to accept their demands in the majority of the factories, despite the mobilization of scabs by the bosses. In the case of the miners and metal workers union, its members won a bonus of 40,000 pesos in addition to a wage increase.

Nevertheless, the bourgeois parasites have not let this proletarian victory pass without consequences: the state government under the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) unleashed repression against four ongoing strikes. In addition, close to 5,000 workers have been fired and blacklisted. We say: Rehire all those fired now! We stand for union control of hiring and training, for a sliding scale of wages proportional to prices and for a sliding scale of work hours to distribute the available work. Similarly, we call for an extensive program of public works to combat massive chronic unemployment.

The GEM sent a team to intervene in the strikes in Matamoros with the revolutionary program of the International Communist League, insisting on the need for the political independence of the working class from the capitalist state and all capitalist parties—the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), PAN, Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) and Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (Morena). This perspective is counterposed to that of our reformist opponents, the union bureaucracy and Susana Prieto Terrazas, a lawyer from Ciudad Juárez who emerged as an alternative to the reviled CTM leadership. We seek to dispel any illusions among workers and the oppressed that the bourgeois regime of López Obrador will serve their interests.

Permanent Revolution vs. Bourgeois Populism

The illusions in AMLO and the capitalist state headed by him are linked to the ideology of nationalism and are obstacles to raising the consciousness of the working class. The workers of Matamoros see AMLO as an ally in the fight against the bosses, but he is a bourgeois politician and his Morena party is a capitalist party like the PRI, PAN and PRD. Some even thought that AMLO had decreed the 20 percent wage increase won by the strikers. They told us, “It is a presidential order that has to be fulfilled.” Others argued that AMLO was combating “corruption,” helping the workers or at least “would not repress the strikes.” But AMLO upholds and defends private property and the bourgeois order. He is an enemy of the working class: as mayor of Mexico City, he went after the public workers union and the metro workers.

Another example of illusions in the state is to conceive of it as a neutral arbiter between social classes. In fact, the bourgeois state is the machinery of repression to defend capitalist rule and private property. The cops, the courts, the military and prisons are at its core. The state cannot be reformed; it must be smashed through socialist revolution. Whose interests are served by the state was demonstrated not only by the repression suffered by the strikers but also by the fact that various strikes were declared illegal by the state’s arbitration board.

The reformists, the union bureaucrats and Susana Prieto feed those illusions. Prieto, who has begged AMLO to become the president she always dreamed of, announced she will sue the CTM and demands government audits of the unions—a grotesque call for the state to intervene in working-class organizations. When the state intervenes in the unions, it does not do so in order to make them more “transparent” or “democratic” but rather to tighten its control, or to destroy them outright. Workers must oppose any and every interference by the courts into the unions. We are opposed to binding arbitration, to the toma de nota by which the government validates new union officials and to state control of union dues collection. Similarly, we oppose AMLO’s new “labor reform,” which seeks to tighten the state’s grip on the unions, their leadership and their finances.

López Obrador’s establishment of a Guardia Nacional, a national police force under military command, reinforces the state and the militarization of the country. AMLO also continues the infamous “war on drugs,” a repressive assault pushed by the U.S. to increase control of its “backyard.” AMLO’s actions have further undermined the rights of the population and are a threat in particular against social activists and union militants.

We are for the decriminalization of drugs, which will eliminate the enormous profits derived from the illegal and clandestine nature of drug trafficking. It would reduce crime and other social pathologies associated with the drug trade. We are also opposed to gun control, which assures the state and criminals a monopoly on arms. Down with the militarization of Mexico!

In underdeveloped capitalist countries, such as Mexico, the weak national bourgeoisie is subordinated to imperialism and is unable to break free. Occasionally, the bourgeoisie leans on the proletariat when it seeks to renegotiate the terms of its subordination. However, they fear the proletariat most of all, because it is the only force that can end bourgeois rule and throw off the imperialist yoke. Thus, AMLO supports deepening the pillage of Mexico by the NAFTA/USMCA “free trade” agreement, and at the same time offers crumbs to keep the workers in line. Populists of his ilk alternate between the carrot and the stick. Bourgeois nationalism, whose rhetoric AMLO utilizes, is the notion that all citizens of a nation share common interests. However, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat have counterposed interests.

The only real allies of the Mexican proletariat are the workers of the rest of the world, in particular the multiracial U.S. working class. The Matamoros strikes demonstrated the need for joint struggle on both sides of the border. It would have given a powerful impetus to the labor movement in both countries if American workers in factories that belong to the same integrated production chains had struck in solidarity with the Mexican workers.

In countries of combined and uneven development like Mexico, we base ourselves on Trotsky’s perspective of permanent revolution, which was confirmed by the 1917 Russian Revolution. To achieve the democratic aspirations of the masses—like national emancipation and agrarian modernization—requires workers revolution that shatters the bourgeois state and establishes a workers and peasants government based on the collectivization of the means of production. A victorious revolution would have to extend internationally, specifically to economically advanced countries such as the U.S., to once and for all end the imperialist threat and open the road to socialism.

Matamoros, Imperialism and Exploitation

In Matamoros and along the entire Mexican border, NAFTA ushered in a paradise of superexploitation for the U.S. imperialists and their Canadian junior partners. It ensured cheap labor, corporate tax breaks and draconian work rules established by so-called “protection contracts” signed by the corrupt CTM leadership with the bosses behind the backs of the workers.

NAFTA was signed by the Democrat Bill Clinton. The Democratic Party is a party of U.S. imperialism just like the Republican Party. This agreement was part of a capitalist offensive on a world scale detonated by the counterrevolutionary destruction of the USSR in 1991-92, a gigantic defeat for the workers of the world. As Lenin taught us, imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, characterized by the formation of monopolies, the export of finance capital and the division and re-division of the world among a handful of powers with armies and navies to enforce their interests.

Some 98 million Mexicans (some three-quarters of Mexico’s population) live in poverty, including millions of peasants who lost their land and left their homes due to the devastation of the countryside. This immiseration is a direct result of NAFTA and decades of privatization and “structural reforms” like the privatization of oil extraction, electricity and railroads; the deregulation of gas prices; and the anti-union “education reform.” Such “reforms” implemented by the Mexican bourgeoisie were designed to hand over the country’s economy to the imperialists, primarily in the U.S., and to weaken and destroy the unions.

Together with our comrades of the SL/U.S. and the Ligue trotskyste/Trotskyist League in Quebec and Canada, the GEM has opposed NAFTA from the beginning, and we also oppose the USMCA, which Trump wants to use to increase imperialist plunder. Down with NAFTA/USMCA!

The working conditions of the workers of Matamoros are dirty and dangerous. One of the most dramatic stories that we heard was of a smelter where temperatures reach 140 degrees Fahrenheit in areas far from the furnace! Workers regularly become dehydrated and faint. During aluminum casting, red-hot drops of molten metal fall on their bodies, burning them. In addition, they handle toxic substances, and the hated bosses only give them dust masks. We say: For union control of safety!

The workers are conscious of the super-profits that the bosses make. It was a slap in the face when those bloodsuckers told the workers that there was no money to pay them the 20 percent wage increase and 32,000 pesos annual bonus.

For a Class-Struggle Union Leadership!

In Matamoros, we ran into many anti-union prejudices among the workers, which were engendered and reinforced by the gangsterism and betrayals of the venal CTM leaders. Some workers told us that these bureaucrats advised the employers not to grant wages and benefits above the average.

In addition, while the union bureaucrats were “negotiating,” they tried to persuade the workers to abandon the strike. In fact, they outright threatened the workers. However, the strikers, without hesitation, forced the false union leaders to present their demands to the bosses, and in some cases, even appointed committees to ensure they did so.

For decades, the major unions, especially those grouped in the CTM—together with associations of peasants and other “sectors” of society, or “corporations”—were integrated into the PRI. That party had governed Mexico for 71 years; thus, the unions have been tied directly to the bourgeois state. This setup is referred to as corporatism. For some time, though, it has been in decline, as the state has been less interested in co-opting unions and more interested in destroying them. Under corporatism, the government decides whether or not a given union is legal, imposing or removing union leaders at will. In exchange, these charros controlled the unions for the state, purging and frequently assassinating dissident workers while benefiting generously from corruption.

We oppose corporatism as one of the most open forms of subordination of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie. Mexican corporatist state control applies to all unions, not only those within the CTM and others backed by the PRI. The laws of the Mexican capitalist state affect both the corporatist unions and the so-called “independent” unions, that is, those tied to the PRD or Morena.

Some workers equate the company with the union, so they prefer not to be members. But trade unions are the defense organizations of the working class. They must not be thrown out because they have a sellout leadership. What is necessary is a political fight to forge class-struggle union leaderships that understand that the interests of the proletariat and of the bourgeoisie cannot be reconciled. The workers must clean their own house! Organize the unorganized!

The main crimes of the union bureaucrats—whether corporatist or “independent,” whether tied to the PRI, the PRD or Morena—are abject class collaboration and subordination of the working class to the capitalists. In order to break the corporatist shackles, it is necessary to fight against all measures that subordinate the unions to the bourgeois state.

The struggle for internal democracy in the unions and for their independence from the state and the bourgeois parties cannot be separated from the struggle for revolutionary leadership. As Trotsky himself explained: “In the epoch of imperialist decay the trade unions can be really independent only to the extent that they are conscious of being, in action, the organs of proletarian revolution.”

Internationalist Group: Pseudo-Trotskyist Union Busters

During the GEM’s intervention in Matamoros, we sought to raise the consciousness of workers. In contrast, the Internationalist Group (IG) stands on the side of the bosses, dismissing powerful unions because of the violent methods and party affiliation of their false leaderships. Sharing the union-busting line that is widespread among the pseudo-left, the IG considers corporatist unions to be state institutions and labor police agencies and has criminally refused to defend them when under state attack. Such was the case with the miners and metal workers union and its leader, Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, in 2006.

According to these opportunists, the PRI’s corporatist unions, such as the SJOIIM, are not workers organizations but the “class enemy.” The IG capitulates to nationalist populism through the “independent” union bureaucracies, as can clearly be seen in its years-long tailing of the CNTE teachers union leadership.

Denigrating the struggle of the Matamoros workers, the IG says that the owners “told the SJOIIM and its general secretary, Villafuerte, to call an official strike in order to better control it” (Internationalist, Winter 2019). It was the union members who imposed their will on the leadership, forcing it to declare a strike. If the union were a police agency, this turn of events would be unthinkable.

To justify its despicable union-busting line, this pseudo-Trotskyist outfit abuses the authority of Trotsky, quoting him: “In Mexico the trade unions have been transformed by law into semistate institutions and have, in the nature of things, assumed a semitotalitarian character.”

But it does not follow from the above that the unions have changed their class nature. On the contrary, the same article, “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay” (1940), states:

“From the foregoing it seems, at first sight, easy to draw the conclusion that the trade unions cease to be trade unions in the imperialist epoch. They leave almost no room at all for workers’ democracy.…

“In the absence of workers’ democracy there cannot be any free struggle for influence over the trade union membership. And because of this, the chief arena of work for revolutionists within the trade unions disappears. Such a position, however, would be false to the core.…

“The matter at issue is essentially the struggle for influence over the working class. Every organization, every party, every faction which permits itself an ultimatistic position in relation to the trade union, i.e., in essence turns its back upon the working class, merely because of displeasure with its organization, every such organization is destined to perish. And it must be said it deserves to perish.”

Women and Maquiladoras

In many maquiladoras in Matamoros, courageous women workers were the vanguard of the leadership and defense of the strikes. Like all other proletarian women, they suffer double oppression, because of their class and their sex. After exhausting shifts in the factory, they have to take care of their kids and complete domestic chores. Women’s wages are 30 percent lower than men’s, which are already meager.

To get hired, women are asked for pregnancy tests; and to keep the job, they have to undergo humiliating checkups. If they become pregnant, doctors lie about the due date in order to make them work as long as possible. As a result, some women end up giving birth in the factories. Harassment and sexual abuse by the bosses and their minions are the rule.

We Spartacists fight for full equality for women, for their total integration into the workforce and for equal pay for equal work. Also, for free abortion on demand for those who request it and for quality medical services for all. We oppose the threats made by AMLO to hold a referendum on the right to an abortion. In deeply male chauvinist and Catholic Mexico, such a referendum would result in a ban on this medical procedure.

As Marxists, we understand that the special oppression of women developed with class-divided society and the patriarchal monogamous family as a means of ensuring the inheritance of private property. Under capitalism, the family functions as the economic unit of society and is the basis for women’s oppression, along with the bourgeois state and religion. The fight for women’s emancipation is strategic to proletarian revolution. The family cannot be abolished, it must be replaced under socialism.

A society of material abundance, with an internationally planned and collectivized economy, would make possible the socialization of childcare and domestic tasks, including by providing childcare centers, public kitchens and collective laundries. Women would be able to participate fully in social and political life.

The liberation of women and of all the exploited and oppressed requires a socialist revolution and its international extension. To this end, the proletariat must cease to be a class in itself—one defined simply by its relation to the means of production—and instead become a class for itself, conscious that it must take power and begin to create a socialist society. The indispensable instrument to instill this consciousness within the working class is a Leninist-Trotskyist party. The objective of the GEM, the SL/U.S. and the rest of the ICL, is to build revolutionary parties, the national sections of a reforged Fourth International, that are capable of leading the working class to power.

In Honor Of The King Of The Folk-Singing Hard-Living Hobos The Late Utah Phillips -From The Archives- *For The Late Rosalie Sorrels- Another Rosalie Sorrels Potpourri-Idaho, Cafe Lena, Childhood Dreams and Such

*For The Late Rosalie Sorrels- Another Rosalie Sorrels Potpourri-Idaho, Cafe Lena, Childhood Dreams and Such

CD Review

Walking, Talking, Singing Storytelling-The Old Traditions

What Does It Mean To Love, Rosalie Sorrels, Green Linnet, 1994

The first paragraph here has been used in reviewing other Rosalie Sorrels CDs in this space.

“My first association of the name Rosalie Sorrels with folk music came, many years ago now, from hearing the recently departed folk singer/storyteller/ songwriter and unrepentant Wobblie (IWW) Utah Phillips mention his long time friendship with her going back before he became known as a folksinger. I also recall that combination of Sorrels and Phillips as he performed his classic “Starlight On The Rails” and Rosalie his also classic “If I Could Be The Rain” on a PBS documentary honoring the Café Lena in Saratoga, New York, a place that I am also very familiar with for many personal and musical reasons. Of note here: it should be remembered that Rosalie saved, literally, many of the compositions that Utah left helter-skelter around the country in his “bumming” days.”

I am on something of a Rosalie Sorrels streak after getting, as a Christmas gift, a copy of “Strangers In Another Country”, her heart-felt tribute to her recently deceased long time friend and old working class warrior Utah Phillips. Thus, in the interest of completeness as this is the ‘last’ Rosalie Sorrels CD in my possession to be reviewed I will make some a couple of comments. I need not mention Rosalie’s singing and storytelling abilities. Those are, as always, a given. I have noted elsewhere that Rosalie and the old curmudgeon Phillips did more than their fate share of work in order to keep these traditions alive. Old Utah handled the more overtly political phase and Rosalie, for lack of a better expression, the political side as it intersected the personal phase.

That informal division of labor is on full display on this CD as Rosalie sings and tells stories of her childhood, her children’s childhoods, stories of other family members and some wisdom that you can take or leave, but at least consider. Fair enough. Of course this reviewer, as a man who loves the oceans, got hooked by this woman of the Rocky Mountain West, by her snippets of stories on a child’s eye view of that first ocean experience (“I have watched and respected the solitude of a child”). So I had to listen to the rest. And so we hear about waltzing with bears, apples and pears, cats and scats, broken tokens and a few other of her observations about growing up to be sane in a seemingly irrational world. And not doing to badly by it as well. Not Rosalie’s most interesting work but worth a listen.

*A "Republic Of Virtue" Or A "Republic Of Lunatics"?- Musings On Late Bourgeois Electoral Politics-The 2010 Elections

Markin comment:

A few years ago, in the lead-up to the 2008 presidential elections in America, I started to(and I emphasize the words started to) try to write periodic commentary about the trials and tribulations of the bourgeois political process, mainly to contrast that process to communist politics as the path to solutions to the current overwhelming problems of humankind. Frankly, after several months I had to give it up as one of the most futile political tasks that I have tried to do since I was a kid politico and loved, really loved, to get down and dirty with the intricacies of playing the bourgeois political horse races. (You know questions like who would win the Texas 23rd Congressional race, or the 12th California and how those races would affect the balance in Congress. Whoa!) Just that few months was enough to convince me that I would rather have an honest high-grade heroin addiction than to be that kind of political junkie again. There is no cure, no known cure anyway, for that ailment. I’ll just stick to my “high communist” political junkie routine, thank you very much.

That said, I must confess to a certain bewilderment over the current crop of, mainly although not exclusively, tea bag party, or tea cup party, or whatever they call themselves, candidates who have captured a wing of the Republican Party (with some spillover to the Democrats as well, or at least some of their candidates are starting to talk that way) and are holding it hostage to any sense of living, and breathing,in the 21st century. Frankly, I long for the days of a genuinely rational irrational candidate like the late Arizona Senator and 1964 Republican Party presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater. At least that man had some connection to the ideas of the Enlightenment that animated the dreams of the founders of this woe begotten immigrant country.

And I guess that is really my point in this commentary. Something is very, very wrong when a candidate, in this case the recently nominated Republican Party Senatorial candidate from Delaware, Tea-ster Christine O’Donnell, had in public, come out at some point (I heard this statement on the radio and did not get the full context) against masturbation , male masturbation in any case. Now whether offenders on the first offense are to be hung or drawn and quartered, or both, is not clear but this is a women with a very, very solid 14th century agenda. And, of course, it is easy to pick on Ms.(I guess it is okay to use that honorific) O’Donnell as a convenient target but the point is that there is a whole rash of them, Democrat and Republican alike, who are spewing this same swill, mostly about cutting government to the size of their salaries and the cost of the military, the police and, of course, the inquisition, I mean, the courts. This at a time when the outmoded bourgeois system could use, and stands in need of, a few rational defenders.

That brings up my last point that I have already telegraphed in the headline to this comment. In the early days of the American republic, right after the victory over Great Britain, there was quite a lot of controversy (never fully resolved) about who should govern society, the men (and in those days it was all about men, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, et. al) of disinterested public virtue or the rabble (or those who were more than willing to play to the rabble, the rabble, by the way, then as now being you and me dear reader). A then important argument about the way American society would be run. Now remember those were the days when the democratic experiment on this continent was an isolated light in the wilderness of world politics. A real step forward in human progress. What does this current crop of sadists, masochists, sado-masochists, maso-sadists, unreconstructed foot-fetishists, unemployed court jesters, punishment freaks, chain-whippers, chattel slavery worshippers, and their allies have to do with all that. I repeat-I’ll just stick to my “high communist” political junkie routine, thank you very much. The fight for a workers party that fights for a workers government could hardly be timelier.

The Centennial Of Pete Seeger’s Birthday (1919-2014)- *The 1960s Folk Revival Loses One Of Its Own- Mary Travers Of "Peter, Paul and Mary" Has Passed Away

Click on title to link to the “New York Times” obituary for the late Mary Travers of the 1960s folk revival trio, “Peter Paul and Mary”.

Markin comment:

Of late I have been placing entries in space, too many it seems, concerning the deaths of various iconic figures from the folk revival milieu of the 1960s’, the time of my introduction as a youth to that form of music that I have over the past year or so spent a great deal of time commenting on in this space. Today’s news brings the announcement of the death of Mary Travers, the female member of the folk trio “Peter, Paul and Mary” that had a number of cross-over hits from reworking more traditional folk songs like “If I Had A Hammer” and helped popularize a number of Bob Dylan’s early songs, especially “Blowin’ In The Wind”.

Just a few days ago I was working on an entry concerning the “beat” generation of the 1950s, especially about the role of Allen Ginsberg as the poet laureate of that movement. One of the notes that I made in that entry was that I was then, and am now, “…very indulgent toward the poetic spirits, the protest song singers, and the other cultural figures who “rage against the monster”, whether they are “politically correct” or not.” Unless some such figure wants to argue that music is, or whatever their particular cultural endeavor, the revolution rather than the hard political struggle to wrest the power from the capitalists’ hands then I am willing to leave them to their own devises. That is especially the case with musicians; after all every tribe, including our generic anti-war and social justice tribe, need their muses to bind themselves together for the common struggle.

I have hardly gotten that idea on the word processor and here I am already put to the test. Although I readily acknowledge the work that Peter, Paul and Mary did in helping raise funds and providing music for the black civil rights and anti-Vietnam War struggles they, as a musical entity, never captured my imagination. To their credit, they could always then, and later around the South Africa apartheid struggles and the fight for justice in Central America in the 1980s, be depended on to show up and sing. And to be sure, I, on more than one occasion, went to one of their concerts or was at some political rally where they sang. But they never “spoke” to me. A classic example of this is a comparison of their version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind” and theirs. Dylan’s got plenty of play on the old record player (for the younger set that is way music was played then-how primitive, right?) back in the days. I am not sure that I ever even owned a “Peter, Paul and Mary” album.

But here is the real “skinny”- P,P&M, like James Taylor just seemed too tame for the “rage” that drove, and drives, my political perspectives. It may just come down to this today- with a keen sense of the musical interests and demographics of their donor base- any time that the Public Television System has done one of their endless ‘once a year’ fund drives some old concert of those above named singers is bound to be the vehicle for the pitch. Another way to look at it is when the deal went down in the 1960s what was more necessary to bind the tribe together the lyrics to “Puff The Magic Dragon” or Steppenwolf’s “Monster”? Yes, that last is the point I am trying to neatly make.

"Puff Magic Dragon"

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee,
Little jackie paper loved that rascal puff,
And brought him strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff. oh

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee,
Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee.

Together they would travel on a boat with billowed sail
Jackie kept a lookout perched on puffs gigantic tail,
Noble kings and princes would bow wheneer they came,
Pirate ships would lower their flag when puff roared out his name. oh!

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee,
Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee.

A dragon lives forever but not so little boys
Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys.
One grey night it happened, jackie paper came no more
And puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.

His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain,
Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane.
Without his life-long friend, puff could not be brave,
So puff that mighty dragon sadly slipped into his cave. oh!

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee,
Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee.



Words and music by John Kay, Jerry Edmonton, Nick St. Nicholas and Larry Byrom

(Monster)

Once the religious, the hunted and weary
Chasing the promise of freedom and hope
Came to this country to build a new vision
Far from the reaches of kingdom and pope
Like good Christians, some would burn the witches
Later some got slaves to gather riches

But still from near and far to seek America
They came by thousands to court the wild
And she just patiently smiled and bore a child
To be their spirit and guiding light

And once the ties with the crown had been broken
Westward in saddle and wagon it went
And 'til the railroad linked ocean to ocean
Many the lives which had come to an end
While we bullied, stole and bought our a homeland
We began the slaughter of the red man

But still from near and far to seek America
They came by thousands to court the wild
And she just patiently smiled and bore a child
To be their spirit and guiding light

The blue and grey they stomped it
They kicked it just like a dog
And when the war over
They stuffed it just like a hog

And though the past has it's share of injustice
Kind was the spirit in many a way
But it's protectors and friends have been sleeping
Now it's a monster and will not obey

(Suicide)

The spirit was freedom and justice
And it's keepers seem generous and kind
It's leaders were supposed to serve the country
But now they won't pay it no mind
'Cause the people grew fat and got lazy
And now their vote is a meaningless joke
They babble about law and order
But it's all just an echo of what they've been told
Yeah, there's a monster on the loose
It's got our heads into a noose
And it just sits there watchin'

Our cities have turned into jungles
And corruption is stranglin' the land
The police force is watching the people
And the people just can't understand
We don't know how to mind our own business
'Cause the whole worlds got to be just like us
Now we are fighting a war over there
No matter who's the winner
We can't pay the cost
'Cause there's a monster on the loose
It's got our heads into a noose
And it just sits there watching

(America)

America where are you now?
Don't you care about your sons and daughters?
Don't you know we need you now
We can't fight alone against the monster

© Copyright MCA Music (BMI)
All rights for the USA controlled and administered by
MCA Corporation of America, INC

--Used with permission--

Grease Monkey’s Sonata-Mickey Rooney’s “Quicksand” (1950)-A Film Review

Grease Monkey’s Sonata-Mickey Rooney’s “Quicksand” (1950)-A Film Review

DVD Review 

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

[This is a DVD that I found of all places in a “for sale” bin of discontinued material at the Cambridge Public Library several weeks ago. This while my transition to emeritus and the ending of the grind of film reviewing under deadlines and Sandy Salmon my replacement on the day to day work was in progress. I had offered the film for Sandy to review knowing (and hoping) from long friendship and competition (mostly friendly as among most film reviewers outside of New York City) that he didn’t give what we called in the old neighborhood where I grew up a “rat’s ass” about reviewing a 1950s film noir. So here I am again in the saddle for a minute.) 

Quicksand, starring Mickey Rooney, Jeanne Cagney, Peter Lorre, Barbara Bates, directed by Irving Pichel yet another Hollywood figure blacklisted in the red scare Cold War night when the powers- to-be in Tinsel-town and their cowardly hangers-on took a dive on funny little things like constitutional rights-and peoples’ livelihoods, 1950  

Forgot the film noir aspect of the film under review, Mickey Rooney’s Quicksand, although only now is this minor classic noir and probably Mickey’s best performance against type (he spent his early career as the “ah, shucks” cinematic version of Andy Hardy of that classic series of young adult books) being recognized as such. This plotline is strictly from Sister Cecelia’s, maybe Sister Mary Rose’s, or maybe Sister Delores’, hell, maybe all of them, lessons from Sunday school at old Saint Stephen’s Roman Catholic Church in mu old home town. The lesson: once you go down the slippery slope of sin (and probably crime as here was the same thing in their imaginations) then there is a serious rollover effect, serious consequences. Yeah, and obviously Mickey’s character Danny, the lowly grease monkey, you know, auto mechanic either didn’t pay attention or was absent those Sundays when whoever was running the Sunday school operation where he worshipped was holding forth about that very prospect. No question, he uncorked every possible evil as he went down the road to perdition.        

Funny from a first look at Danny he didn’t look like a guy who would wind up doing from one to ten in some California penal colony once the dust settled. But then you didn’t know then what steered him down the garden path. Of course then we didn’t know that he would run smack daub into a low rent femme fatale, Vera, played by Jeanne Cagney, who was serving them off the arm at a hash house where the local grease monkeys filled their lunch buckets and he made the fatal mistake of dating her up (a mistake as well since she was too tall for him, maybe too blond as well). Once you know all he was doing was trying to move might and main to get her down among the downy billows then all his fevered actions made a kind of off-hand sense as every guy, including this reviewer, has had first-hand experience with if he goes for the femmes. (Frankly this Vera didn’t have the look of steam-infested career waitress, looked more like a bar girl or a roper on a scam but you never know what has a gal serving them off the arm).

Okay here is what the slippery slope looked like if you follow along (and suspense disbelief as well). It seemed after making that hot date for that very night Danny was cash-shy, needed some dough to carry some weight with Vera. Everybody was tapped out so, and remember, this is where he falls down, gets ready to take the big step-off if he doesn’t catch a break, he grabbed a measly twenty buck from the skinflint larcenous auto boss’s till. Just an overnight loan. No problem because some guy who owned him more than twenty would cover him the next day and that hot date would be worth it he could tell. Problem: the boss’s accountant showed up early the next day for some other reason so he would need to cover the twenty bucks fast. He can’t get the dough to cover so naturally he gets the fever-driven bright idea that if he goes and buys an expensive watch on credit for a hundred bucks (remember this is before cash-back credit cards could have saved his butt even they were charging usurious rates) and then hocked it for thirty bucks.

That idea worked well enough for Danny in the short term, got him a reprieve from the boss’s accountant although just barely and with a very jaundiced eye but then the next hurdle showed up at the garage-the dreaded “repo” man. Seems that in California in those days you didn’t actually own, couldn’t own, an item on credit until it was fully paid for, now too if I am not mistaken. The repo man gave him twenty four hours to ante up the C-note or he was going to stir for grand larceny. What to do, desperately what to do since a hundred bucks was way out of his league on such short notice. Simple, our Danny boy bops a drunk carrying plenty of dough on the head in darkened parking lot (let’s call that one assault and battery in the night time and armed robbery, okay and you get an idea that Danny’s wheels have gotten well off the track). He is in the clear now, his miseries are over as he handed the repo man his piece. Of course Danny is just a misbegotten grease monkey and not some kind of career criminal so when he flashes fifty dollar bills Vera’s way she knows he is the guy who bopped the well-known drunk. Worse, the guy she used to work for at the local penny arcade who seemingly still has a thing for her, Nick, a seedy guy no question, played by the lovely Peter Lorre, knows he grabbed the dough. Has the handkerchief he used as a mask doing the robbery. Nick’s price for keeping quiet-a new car from the auto shop. Or else.                

  

There’s more, believe there is more in this Dante-like descend into hell. Danny grabs the car alright and thinks he is back on easy street and can now enjoy his new honey in quiet, maybe get under the sheets with her finally. Nope, that larcenous auto shop boss has his own scam. He accused Danny of stealing the car (he also accused others in the shop of the same crime in order to blackmail them). His price for keeping quiet three thou for a two thousand blue book car. Jesus. That is where the quick-thinking hustling Vera comes in to save his bacon, maybe. Seems that Nick besides running that seaside arcade does some business in cashing checks for guys-a low rent operation that is still with us unfortunately. She knows where Nick keeps the dough and it is not in a bank. So Danny goes and grabs the dough, hey who would have thought, thirty-six hundred. Now he is only easy street and can get back to the serious business of running around with that femme Vera.

Forget it. Vera, who was a drifter from hunger just like Danny, had her big eyes on a mink coat and while Danny was off doing something she bought the coat for the cash she was holding for him. Eighteen hundred bucks, her half of the heist according to her thinking, and not a bad price when you think about in the days when women craved mink and it wasn’t politically incorrect, very politically correct to wear fur. Danny went crazy and finally saw she was little more than a bent whore. But that left Danny short with his boss. He went to the boss with his eighteen hundred-take it or leave it. The boss took it naturally since he was a larcenous character. Except that was a stall-he was holding out for three thou and was calling the coppers when Danny freaked out and strangled him. Murder, one, the big step off at the Q no doubt. Grabbed his gun too on the way out knowing he was nothing but a desperado now, an outlaw. All for a twenty buck deal to go around with a floozy.            

Things looked grim, very grim as he was going on the lam to Mexico, or someplace very far away from California. This is where we get a little sneak redemption. See Danny had thrown over a nice girl, Helen, played by Barbara Bates, who would have been right up his alley if he was Andy Hardy but he had been in throes to that damn femme. The thing was this Helen was still carrying the torch for him, carrying that flame despite knowing that he was in a heck of a lot of trouble. Yeah, true love which he finally realizes he could have held onto for dear life. She would share his fate whatever happened. So people are like that, thankfully, thankfully for Danny. He tries to talk her out of going with hi but no use. As they try to blow town his damn automobile blows a gasket. So he is back in the bright idea business. He, they will, at gunpoint stop a car on the highway and force the driver to take them away to Mexico. So add on hijacking, kidnapping and who knows what else to the total. And who knows what Helen will get for being his sidekick on this part of the descent.

Then Danny, Helen draw a convenient little break. The guy they kidnapped was a non-plussed lawyer who asked for the whole story. Asked as well whether that auto shop boss was really dead which would have been a tough dollar to get around for what started out as a twenty dollar petty larceny case. As it turned out that auto shop boss was not dead but had just been unconscious. Free, free at last. Well not quite. There was too much of a mess to get him off scot free  so he would be doing that one to ten. Guess who will be waiting for him coming out stir? But wouldn’t Danny have been better off having listened to Sister Cecelia, Sister Mary Rose, Sister Delores, hell, maybe all three of them, about the slippery slope of sin. If you are a noir fan and can find this oen take a look.           

Happy, Happy 100th Birthday Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti-Max Daddy Of Famed “City Lights Bookstore” In “Beat” San Francisco When It Counted And Muse Of His Generation’s Poets

Happy, Happy 100^th Birthday Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti-Max Daddy Of Famed “City Lights Bookstore” In “Beat” San Francisco When It Counted And Muse Of His Generation’s Poets

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.           

In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)-Poet's Corner – Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s  “Coney Island Of The Mind”

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 kicks, stuff, important stuff has happened 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.  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 thy called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, 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 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. 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. The kind that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back).             

Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then add my brother Alex’s 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, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 “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 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 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 he wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper scroll. 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.           

Markin comment

When I think of Lowell, Massachusetts, and I do as I have some ancient connections with that old mill town, I think of mad man wordsmith Jack Kerouac and his “beat” buddies, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. And when I think of “drugstore cowboy” William Burroughs I think of his hometown, the gateway to Middle America, St. Louis. And when I think of “Om Man” Allen Ginsberg I think of San Francisco Howl (Yes, I know I should think New Jersey but that doesn’t jibe with my “travelogue” West.) And when I think of San Francisco I think of “poet dream” City Lights Bookstore. And when I think of City Lights Bookstore I think of “keeping the dim light burning” Lawrence Ferlinghetti. And so should you.

********

Coney Island Of The Mind-Number 20


The pennycandystore beyond the El
is where I first
fell in love
with unreality
Jellybeans glowed in the semi-gloom
of that september afternoon
A cat upon the counter moved among
the licorice sticks
and tootsie rolls
and Oh Boy Gum

Outside the leaves were falling as they died

A wind had blown away the sun

A girl ran in
Her hair was rainy
Her breasts were breathless in the little room

Outside the leaves were falling
and they cried
Too soon! too soon!

Lawrence Ferlinghetti


Number 8


It was a face which darkness could kill
in an instant
a face as easily hurt
by laughter or light

'We think differently at night'
she told me once
lying back languidly

And she would quote Cocteau

'I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say
'whom I am constantly shocking'

Then she would smile and look away
light a cigarette for me
sigh and rise

and stretch
her sweet anatomy

let fall a stocking