When At First You Practice To Deceive- Once Again, He’s Been A Bad Boy-John Heard And Goldie Hawn’s “Deceived” (1991)-A Film Review

When At First You Practice To Deceive- Once Again, He’s Been A Bad Boy-John Heard And Goldie Hawn’s “Deceived” (1991)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Laura Perkins

Deceived, starring Goldie Hawn, John Heard, 1991

I believe every woman when she gets married, or these days becomes part of a “significant other” relationship, wonders deep in her mind whether the man she is marrying is who he says he is.  Has not been if it came right down to it a psycho murderer like the hubby in the film under review Deceived.  (Men can make their own judgments going the other way, but I am talking specifically about women here.) This is not normally how I would start a film review but the subject matter in this one strikes close to home so I felt compelled to open up with this line of inquiry.  When Greg Green assigned this film to me, a film I did not see when it was first released in 1991 and so did not know what it was about, who or what was being deceived, and I mentioned how I wanted to start the review he balked, although finally he let it pass through under some kind of catharsis theory, mine. Even my long-time companion Sam Lowell balked at my strong statement against the whole male half of the human race perversely interested in marriage or its facsimile. But I prevailed.

The reason for my strong reaction to the plotline of this film was that long before Sam and I got together I had been married, mercifully for a short time, to an American pyscho type like Jack Saunders, Frank Sullivan, Daniel Sherman or whoever he was, played by seemingly rationale John Heard, although he didn’t have a predilection for murder if he didn’t get his way in the world. (That was my first marriage my subsequent one although not successful was more a matter of a parting of the ways, of two ships passing in the night too long.) I had met a man through a close friend, who in the end would be almost as shattered at I by the experience as I was, back in the 1960s during the Vietnam War when many weird things were happening not all of them fitting into the “newer world” we were seeking. We fell in love, he, Francis, his real name, and me, at least I did, and we were married shortly after we met and subsequently moved to Washington, D.C where he claimed he had a job offer from a high ranking governmental official.  (I won’t give specific details and names since this is not about them and they were totally unaware of what was happening.). This after Francis allegedly had been honorably discharged from the military through these connections since he had otherwise been scheduled in that hated year 1969 to go to Vietnam as an infantryman (as I would later learn through Vietnam veteran Sam really “cannon-fodder).

We went to Washington where I had assumed he was working for that governmental agency and while times were tough as they can be for newly marrieds I thought things were going okay. Then we had a burglary in our small apartment and almost all our items of value were “stolen.” We filed a police report but nothing ever came of it, burglary then, maybe now too, a fact of life in big cities and small, mostly unsolved. Then a few weeks later the other shoe dropped when I got a call from a collection agency in Silver Springs up on the border in Maryland telling me that Francis had forged a company check while he was working for them and that they were going to prosecute if they were not made whole in the matter (their legally-based expression). Which we did pay back after Francis came home and told me that the government job had fallen through and he was afraid to tell me. Had gotten the collection agency job on the fly in order to have money coming since we were just scraping by since I was only working in a department store at the time. Having no particular reason to be in Washington where neither of us had roots we headed back to Albany and stayed with my parents for a while.      

That was when the final straw broke. During all those several months down in D.C. Francis’ mother was getting calls from the FBI looking for Francis who they claimed was AWOL (as part of his lies he had told me that he had to go to Fort Dix to be discharged after his connections pulled their “strings”). Francis said nothing to me about it until one day his mother called up and told him that she had given them our address so he could straighten things out with them. That is when he told me that he indeed was AWOL, had been all along since he did not want to go to Vietnam (and weirdly had worried that he would die if he went over there and had never been married). Francis in a moment of candor also told me that he had staged the Washington burglary to get money for us to live on since he was broke and the collection agency job didn’t pay much. He also admitted to many other lies about his life and achievements. On the advice, solid advice, of my pious parents I filed quickly for divorce on mental cruelty grounds and started a long and expensive process to have the marriage annulled by the Catholic Church so I could marry again without flak from the Church (in those days I was a serious practicing Catholic). After the FBI came to my family’s house and took Francis away I never saw him again although he called several times trying to get back together. Jesus. I would go a number of years without male companionship due to that horrible series of deceptions so don’t tell me I don’t know about such men. That I am being crazy for stating that every woman also harbors such deep concerns when she starts a serious relationship.        

As dear sweet Sam says in his reviews here’s the story-line. Young artsy Adrianne, played by Goldie Hawn, meets and marries Jack Saunders in New York City (as already telegraphed he had other aliases but let’s stick with this name), an art curator played by John Heard and they have a child. They go along for several years until the wheels begin to fall off for reasons never made clear except greed and avarice on Jack’s part when forgeries and missing items start happening in his department with him as a prime suspect after a curator had been murdered for no known reason. To get out from under he tells Adrianne he needs to go to Boston for an auction. That is a turning point since a fellow worker of Adrianne’s on hearing from her that Jack was in Boston mentioned that she thought she had seen him entering a hotel bar. He talks his way out of that even when Adrianne finds out things that place him in the city during that period. Shortly after this Jack “dies” in a car accident.

That is a tripping point for when Adrianne goes to try to collect on Jack’s Social Security contribution she is shocked to find he was not really Jack Saunders who had died a number of years before but his closest friend Frank Sullivan. Then Adrianne becomes a snoop, a detective tracking down the real deal including finding Frank’s mother who tells her that Frank was a bad son (an understatement under the circumstances). Presto Jack/Frank pops up at his mother’s   New York apartment after luring Adrianne there. Tells her some cock and bull story about being blackmailed by a guy named Daniel Sherman and he needed to “die” to get out from under but this Sherman was looking for a very valuable ancient necklace to make things go away.

This is all bullshit since Jack/Frank is also Daniel with another family out in the suburbs to boot. He wants that damn necklace for whatever reason and he will kill if he has to even though allegedly he doesn’t want to hurt Adrianne or their daughter. Given his murderous track record, the curator, the hitchhiker who took his place in that car accident, his mother, and who knows maybe even beloved Jack Saunders Frank is a sure bet to kill Adrianne for that freaking amulet. And he almost does except by an interesting and inevitable sleight of hand Adrianne does him in by her own deception. This film has too many moving and unresolved moving parts to be a highly recommended thriller but is first-rate evidence for my contention that every woman worries about what kind of hell she might be getting into when she goes down the aisle. Remember my story if not this one.        

The Battle Of The Titians-Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” Vs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “This Side Of Paradise”

The Battle Of The Titians-Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” Vs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “This Side Of Paradise” 

By Zack James

No question as Josh Breslin has seemingly gracelessly aged he has become more perverse in his greedy little mind. That trait has exploded more recently as he has finally hung up his pen and paper if one can do such a feat and stopped writing free-lance articles for half the small press, small publishing house, small artsy journal nation. All this hubbub boiled over recently when he told his old friend from his growing up in Riverdale days, Sam Lowell, about his “coup,” his term, in upsetting the applecart of the American literary pantheon by claiming on very flimsy evidence that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early work, the one that gave him his first fame, This Side Of Paradise, could be compared with his masterwork The Great Gatsby. The perverse part came when he told Sam that he had only  written the article as a send-up of all the literary set’s fretting about who and what works belong in, or don’t belong in, the pantheon also based on as very little evidence.       

The whole faux dust-up came up because now that he was retired he could write a little more freely since he had neither the pressure of some midnight deadline from some nervous nelly editor waiting impatiently for him to dot that last i before rushing off to the printer nor the imperative of reining in his horns to insure that he could keep up with the gathering payments for alimony, child support and college educations for a three ex-wives and a slew of well-behaved kids. The latter being a close thing that almost broke his spirit. He had accepted a free-lance at-your-leisure assignment from Ben Gold, the editor of the Literary Gazette, who told him he could write a monthly column on some topic that interested him. As long as it was about three thousand words and not the usual five or six thousand that had to be edited with scalpel in hand and arguments every other line about its worthiness as part of the article.         

Josh admitted to Sam that he was intrigued by the idea and after thinking about the matter for a while decided that he would concentrate on reviewing for a 21^st century audience some of the American masterworks of the 20^th century. The beauty of this idea was that he would no longer have to face the dagger-eyed living authors, their hangers-on and acolytes every time he noted that said authors couldn’t write themselves a proper thank you note never mind such a huge task as writing a well-thought out novel that they had forced him mercilessly to review the relatively few times he entered the literary fray. He had made his mark in the cultural field by reviewing music and film mostly but would when hard up for dollars for those aforementioned three wives and slew of hungry kids take on anything including writing bogus reviews of various products like dish detergent and mouthwash although more recently a spade of reviews on technical gadgets like things for computers which he frankly didn’t know or give a fuck about. Couldn’t even figure out how to attach the damn things to the computer. Now he could leisurely delve back into the past and cherry-pick a few bright objects, write a few thousand words and move onto the next selection.

Or so he thought. Josh had made Sam laugh, had made himself laugh as well, one night when they were at Sam’s favorite watering hole, Teddy Green’s Grille over Lyons Street in their old hometown after he had finished and Ben had published his first “thought” article in the Gazette. He had admitted that his take on the issue was perverse, was a low-intensity tweaking of all those in the literary racket who labored long, hard, and winded to specialize in “deconstructing” some famous author in order to make hay in their own bailiwicks, making their own cramped careers out of the literary mass of real writers. He had stirred up the hornet’s nest by his “innocent” comparison of the two Fitzgerald works.                 

Josh told Sam that he had been rather naïve to think that the literary gurus would take his little heresy as mere grumbling of an old man and pass it off as so much blather. He had reasoned that one could get passionate about who would win the World Series or the Super Bowl, one political candidate over another, some worthy cause but that the almost one hundred year old vintage of a couple of books set in the Jazz Age 1920s by a now unfashionable “dead white man” author long since, very long    since, dead should be passed in silence. Not so. No sooner had the Gazette come out than some silly undergraduate English major had e-mailed Josh about how wrong he was to compare the “juvenile antics,” her term, of privileged white college boy Amory Blaine over up from nowhere strivings after fame and fortune of one Jay Gatsby when all the old-time money and position was against him. Of course he had had to defend his position and sent her a return e-mail summarily dismissing her championship as so much sophomoric half-thinking “politically correct” classist claptrap that has overrun the college campuses over the past decades, mostly not for the better.  

End of debate. No way since thereafter a couple of academic heavyweights, known Fitzgerald scholars, had to put their two cents worth in since an intruder was invading their turf, an odd-ball free-lance music and film critic well past his prime according to one of their kind as if he himself had not been pan-handling the same half dozen admitted good ideas for the previous forty years since he had gotten tenure. In any case no sooner had that undergraduate student dust-up settled down than Professor Lord, the big-time retired English teacher from Harvard whose books of literary criticism set many a wannabe writers’ hearts a-flutter took up the cudgels in defense of Gatsby.

Pointed out to ignorant Josh that  the novel was an authentic slice of life about the American scene in the scattershot post-World War I scene and that Paradise was nothing but the well-written but almost non-literary effort of an aspiring young author telling, retailing was the word the good professor used, his rather pedestrian and totally conventional youth-based comments. Those sentiments in turn got Professor Jamison, the well-known Fitzgerald scholar from Princeton, Scott’s old school, in a huff about how the novel represented the Jazz Age from a younger more innocent perspective as well as Gatsby had done for the older free-falling set who had graduated from proms and social dances to country club and New York Plaza Hotel intrigues. So the battle raged.   

Josh laughed loudest as the heavy-weights from the academy went slamming into the night and into each other’s bailiwicks and stepped right to the sidelines once he had started his little fireball rolling. Laughed harder when he, having had a few too many scotches at his own  favorite watering hole, Jack’s outside Harvard Square, thought about the uproar he would create when he tweaked a few noses declaring Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as the definite Jazz Age novel and put Gatsby in the bereft dime store novel category by comparison.

It was that idea that Josh wanted to use Sam as a sounding board for, a guy to tussle out the pieces with. After Josh had received the response that he did from well-paid hucksters in the academy to the first article in his monthly column he decided to change tack and actually act as a provocateur, a flame-thrower, and rather than placid kind of educational pieces he would go slightly off-the-wall dragging some of those in the literary pantheon through the mud. So that throwaway idea of pitting two titans like Hemingway and Fitzgerald together to fight mano a mano for kingpin of the Jazz Age literary set began to geminate as the fodder for the next article for his column. Hence, Sam, Sam as devils’ advocate, since Josh and he had had many go arounds over literary subjects ever since they were in high school English classes together. Watch for the bloodless blather from the literati on that one when he gets done.     

The Gang That Couldn’t Rob Straight-Owen Wilson’s “Masterminds

The Gang That Couldn’t Rob Straight-Owen Wilson’s “Masterminds

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

[Sometimes even a well-oiled, hard-bitten film critic or heck even somebody just into the cinema will get caught out by a big name star in a production or some actor that you really like for some personal reason. The “forget” part is that not everything these favorites do on screen is pure gold (except maybe in their pockets if they are bankable and the film really needs their name to float, or not go under). A whole separate branch of the criticism business could be devoted to some of the reasons why established stars wind up as in the film under review below playing in “turkeys.” Maybe it is just money, maybe the lure of their names always on the marquee, maybe after reading the script they really believe the thing can work. I am too close to retirement to figure the motivations out but some younger mind could make a nice career out of working that racket. S.L.]         

Masterminds, starring Owen Wilson, 2016

Sometimes when a friend recommends a film it turns out to be a dud, turns out to be less than expected and in the case of the film under review, Masterminds, make that much less than expected considering the cast. Makes one wonder why a great comedic actor like Owen Wilson took the job, took the chance to work on a funky film that had a chance to go in one of two directions, a straight line comic look at a true story or a farce that bombed. It took the latter. The direction toward the farcical led the vehicle astray when all is said and done.  

Here is the skinny, here is why the title of this piece can be called the gang that couldn’t shoot straight taking a page from an old Jimmy Breslin book. The story line based on a true incident about the doings around one of the great cash robberies in banking history, the Loomis heist in North Carolina in 1997 for seventeen big ones-17 mil, okay not chicken feed then nor now. David Scott Ghantt, a security guard on a Lommis armored truck was hook-winked, no make that bewitched and bewildered by his sexy armored truck partner, Kelly, who had walked  out on the job over some harassment. A while later she wound up working hand and hand with a low-life short end of the stick criminal Steve, played by Wilson, who wants her to con, I am being kind here since this is a family sensitive outlet, David into being the inside man on a big heist of the company’s loot. David balked at first but Kelly lured him with her charms despite the fact he was two minutes to midnight away from getting married to another woman.       

The heist was a piece of cake for an inside job and David was told to lay low in Mexico until the coast was clear. The false lure to get him to go minus the dough was Kelly joining him soon, yeah, soon. The idea Steve thought though was that David was to get the short end of the straw, was the odd man out as he, Steve, was not going to share the dough with anybody but his loving wife and two unlovable kids.

Meanwhile David was still forlornly expecting Kelly to join him in Mexico. Sucker. Double sucker because Steve threw the Feds onto him and he led them a merry chase before he got wise to what Steve, and Kelly, were up to. Steve in a panic, putting greed before good sense ordered a hit on David by a screwball hit man who couldn’t hit right-as was to be expected. They wind up switching their identities (it’s a long unfunny story so just go along with me) so that David wound up at Steve’s over-the-top mansion ready to get even. And he does in a way after the Feds got definitive proof that low-life greedy Steve and not pure-heart David was the evil mastermind behind the caper. Steve did 11 years, David pure-heart drew seven and Kelly a bunch too. With that enticing story-line it was a shame that the film was marred with so many unfunny slapstick jokes, some much low-rent bathroom humor and such a waste of an obviously talented cast. Yeah, what was Owen Wilson thinking. Some day when they do a retrospective of his work this one will not be included, I hope.      

Yeah, Cowgirl In The Sand-With Neil Young (and Crazy Horse) In Mind-Take Two

Yeah, Cowgirl In The Sand-With Neil Young (and Crazy Horse) In Mind-Take Two  

By Sam Lowell

[I come by this remembrance of Zack James not directly but through my friendship with his oldest brother, Alex, with whom I had been a corner boy in our old growing up hometown of North Adamsville south of Boston. A corner boy for those not in the know since you do not see such sights around small towns and urban neighborhoods anymore was a guy who hung around with other guys at some variety store, pizza parlor, bowling alley or some such place with a corner for a young man, young men, to stand against on weekend nights when cash, cars, and cuties were as sparse as hen’s teeth, maybe sparser. Alex and I had been brought together in ninth grade in high school by a mutual friend the late wild man Peter Paul Markin known as “The Scribe” back in the day and the three of us and a few others were bosom buddies for several years before we went our separate ways.     

I recently reconnected with Alex around the commemoration of the Summer of Love, 1967 which San Francisco and other places is making a big deal out of in its 50^th anniversary year after he had come back from a trip there, a business trip, and tried to get all the old corner boys still standing together to honor the Scribe. He had seen an exhibition at the de Young Museum there called the Summer of Love Experience and had flipped out. His idea was to put together a book of remembrances in honor of the Scribe and had contacted his youngest brother Zack, a writer, to edit and spruce the thing up.

The reason for the book of remembrances?  See the Scribe is the guy who went out to San Francisco during the early spring of 1967 and after a few months came back and got a bunch of us, Alex and I included to go back out with him. The Scribe wound up in the hellish Army the next year, and would serve in Vietnam which fucked up his sweet short life for the few years he had left after that experience but Alex and I stayed for a couple of years. While Alex and I were cutting up old touches he mentioned this story about Zack just so I would know a little about his youngest brother who way too young for me to even remember when we were corner boys. Sam Lowell]   

****** 

Zack James when he was younger, much younger back in the early 1960s younger, now too for that matter was, well, how can we put it, maybe women-addled would be best. Ever since the end of high school, the beginning of college except for one short period he had always had some kind of woman relationship to confuse his sweet ass life (he hadn’t been very successful in high school too shy and too poor to make a hit with any of his female fellow high-schoolers so the end of high school seems the right place to start his women-addledness [sic, I assume]). Of late that streak had taken a sudden stop his latest flame of the past few years, Loretta, had flown the coop, had given him his walking papers, had decided that they had drifted too far apart, that she wanted to find herself, see who she was and what she would do with the rest of her life. Fair enough although the pain of her departure for parts unknown left a big hole in his heart, left him bereft for a while. But had also given him time to see what he was about, where he wanted to head.   

A lot of what Loretta had said about the need for her to cut Zack loose was dead-on, was right as she had been usually right about what ailed Zack. He always found himself behind the curve when it came to what Loretta was thinking about, what he was able to reflect in the lonely hours that he had recently spent in the house they had shared together over the previous several years. Had had to agree that the last year of so as his health had declined with some fairly serious medical issues which had required that he take some medicines that seem to pile up on each other and had made him, well, grumpy and cranky, a grumpy cranky old man if the truth be known especially as those medical problems dove-tailed with his turning three score, turning sixty to not be cute about it. Had made him aware as never before of his own mortality and instead of taking it easy, instead of increasingly relaxing, instead of being at peace with himself, instead of trying to put out “the fire in his head” he was more driven than ever to find his place in the sun, to have his life have meaning at the end. As to his relationship with Loretta he had let himself drift apart, left her unattended, and okay left her to seek her own newer world.

During some of those lonely hours in that desolate house which creaked eerily to his ears Zack began to think through his whole life, who was he kidding his whole relationship with the women who had festooned his sweet ass life, had made life bearable for him. What he had found out, was trying to think through is that he really needed, very much needed the companionship of a woman, and if it was not going to be Loretta, hell, she essentially left no forwarding address all he had was her cellphone number so she could be anywhere, then it had to be somebody else. Rather than go right out and jump into the “meat market,” that is what they called it when he was younger and if they had a different name for the process it was still the same ordeal he decided that he had better take stock of himself and where he has been, and what he wanted out of a relationship now. Any reflection on his apart about failed relationships, and there were plenty, always, always, always led him back to the “cowgirl in the sand,” always led him back to Mariah Welsh, back when he decided  he wanted his first serious relationship.      

That “cowgirl in the sand” was no cute inside joke and it still pained Zack to even think about Mariah and how she led him a merry chase in that one summer, the summer of 1976, they had stayed together. See Mariah was actually from the West, had grown up on a big cattle ranch just outside of Cheyenne out in Wyoming country and had some certain set western ways for a young woman of twenty. He had met her down in Falmouth, down in the Cape Cod area of Massachusetts about fifty miles from where he lived, down near the beach in the summer of 1976 just after his sophomore year in college. He had been renting a place with several other fellow college students for the summer who were as dedicated to partying as he was and that was that. He had actually seen her a couple of times on the beach at Falmouth Heights near where they had rented the cottage and thought that she looked very fine in her skimpy bikini (then skimpy which today would be considered modest) but was not sure how to approach her. One day he decided to go up and invite her to the weekly weekend party that his cottage put on and see what happened. (That weekend party almost literally true as the party would start early Friday afternoon and end at some Happy Hour bar early Sunday evening inevitably a few people, including Zack, would carry over until Monday or Tuesday if the spirit moved them or they had some hot date that kept the fires burning that long).

As Zack approached her she had brought him up short when she saw him coming and shouted out “Here comes the boy who had been checking me out, checking out my shape as far as I could tell and who knows what else he was thinking about, but was afraid to come up and say hello.” Yeah, that was the kind of girl, young woman, Mariah was all through that hot summer relationship. She claimed one night when they had gotten better acquainted that unlike uptight people from the East Coast people from the West, from cattle country, were more plainspoken, less hung up about speaking out about what they wanted-or who they wanted. Needless to say Zack and Mariah spent the rest of that afternoon talking about this and that, mostly dreary college stuff since Mariah was also a student at the University of Wyoming studying art. (She was an exceptionally good artist, had drawn a couple of charcoal drawings of him which he had kept for years afterward even when he was married to Josie, his first wife, and Josie had asked who had done them and he had foolishly told her and he had to hide the damn things. Josie had later when they were separating torn the works up-yes, it was that kind of breakup).

As they talked Mariah made no bones about showing off her very fine body, slender, small but firm breasts which he was attracted in woman, well-turned long legs and thin ankles, blondish brown hair, sea blue eyes and a wicked smile that would melt butter on a cold day. They made that primal connection that said they had something to do together what it would be who knew but something.

Mariah had told Zack that she had come East with a couple of her college girlfriends since none of them had ever been east of the Mississippi and had been thrilled when they first saw the ocean, had frolicked in the waves and one girl had almost gone under when a sudden riptide which they were totally ignorant of started pulling her down. But that scare was soon over since the girl had allowed herself to drift until the current subsided. They were staying for the summer over on Maravista a few blocks away from the beach (and maybe half a dozen blocks away from Zack’s cottage) in a tiny cottage in back of the landlord’s yard which he usually let out to students who worked in the restaurants and such places for the summer. As the hot tanning sun began to fade a bit by four Zack then popped the question of whether she and her girlfriends were up for a party that weekend. All Mariah asked about though was would there be booze and dope there. When Zack answered yes Mariah said they would surely, her word, be there and she had better not see him talking to some other girl when she arrived. Bingo.

That booze and dope stuff needs a little explaining since Zack and his fellows were all under official drinking age (as were Mariah and her friends at least in Massachusetts) so they “hired” an older guy who was living with a bunch of his older friends up their street to “buy” for them and he would get a big bottle of liquor, usually scotch, as his service charge. The dope thing was a little more problematic since dope, marijuana, maybe some speed when a connection could be made, were not that widely used then by the youth fresh college generation he hung around with although that movement was beginning to build up a head of steam. At that time “booze heads,” representing a more working class ethos and “dopers” were at loggerheads something that would get settled out later. Jazz, one of his roommates at their cottage and at school, had connections in Cambridge and so they never lacked for dope although more than a few girls would back off once they smelled the dope and didn’t know what the hell they were in for. So Mariah already was ahead of that crowd.      

As they were getting ready to part company after Zack gave Mariah his address and had told her to come by anytime on Friday afternoon or later Mariah told him to wait a minute until she put her street clothes on and they could walk off the beach together toward her car (Zack had walked over to the beach since he unlike several of his roommates did not have a car and was driven down by Willy another roommate). Zack was shocked, mildly shocked anyway, when Mariah put on her blue jean shorts, a frilly lacy cowgirl-type blouse, and, get this, her cowboy boots, and her cowgirl hat what he would later find out was called a Ladies’ Stetson. She looked like she had just gotten ready to go to the rodeo, or the state fair. Something told Zack that this was going to be an interesting ride indeed. Mariah must have sensed that because as they approached her car for her to leave she asked Zack whether he liked her outfit, and then said in her plain spoken Western way, “Maybe you can play cowboy with me if things work out.” Giving Zack a soft sexy look like if things worked out she would give him a ride he would not forget. Whoa!                            

That Friday evening Mariah and her two girlfriends arrived, guess what, dressed up very similarly to the way Mariah had been dressed as she and Zack left the beach a few days before which caused a sensation, a sensation at the novelty of the garb in Falmouth in the summer and also that the two girlfriends were “hot” as well. Zack fortunately was alone when they entered (he had earlier been talking to Cissie, an old flame whom he figured to rekindle a flame with that night since he had frankly given up the idea that Mariah was going to show, it would not have been the first time, or the last, some young thing had promised the moon to him and never showed up. Mariah came right over and asked if he had a joint, a joint she said to calm her nerves, make her feel good among the party-goers all of whom were eying her the guys for obvious reasons the women also for obvious reasons if they were with a guy.

Zack called over to Jazz who delivered a huge joint from the bag of dope he had “connected” with only that afternoon which made Mariah eyes widen and after taking a few “hits” said to Zack “You may be playing cowboy tonight after all.” In that instance her statement proved not to be true because she got so “wasted” that she fell asleep but the next night’s party, or really a continuation of Friday’s party she and Zack got it on in one of the empty bedrooms upstairs (not his room, the room where he had all his possessions, but nobody was particular about such arrangements when a “hot” date needed a place to put her head down).                         

What struck Zack about Mariah (beside that Western plain-spokenness that he was not used to with the local girls, mostly Irish girls who descended on the Cape with as the saying went “ten dollars and their virtue” and left with both intact or standoffish WASPish girls from the better colleges who were sometimes more trouble than they were worth in trying to get next to them if you were not seriously looking to be upward mobile after your college hijinks) was how sexually experienced and into doing sex she was even that first night when she did a lot of stuff that most other girls he knew were not into, like giving a good blow job. When they talked about it later Mariah told him that those cowboys out in the West, the ones who worked for her father broke her in early at thirteen and she liked it, liked it enough to read books in high school about various sexual positions and practices from a manual. (It turned out to be the Kama Sutra, the ancient Indian bible of sex for those who are clueless).

So for several weeks that summer Zack and Mariah were what would be called an “item” today, were almost inseparable. Went to the beach, partied, had great sex (mostly based on her knowledge and Zack’s willingness as a subject) and Zack assumed would find some way to continue their relationship at summer’s end. When that time came though Mariah told him straight out that theirs was a summer fling and that she was heading back to school in Wyoming and back to her boyfriend. The night they parted though, despite Zack’s futile pleading that they stay together some way and then giving up when she cut him off which she said was also a Western way, she gave him a parting sexual bout that he still remember forty years later. Yeah, Zack was women-addled, always was being played by them. Praise be.         

Yeah, Cowgirl In The Sand-With Neil Young (and Crazy Horse) In Mind-Take Two

Yeah, Cowgirl In The Sand-With Neil Young (and Crazy Horse) In Mind-Take Two  

By Sam Lowell

[I come by this remembrance of Zack James not directly but through my friendship with his oldest brother, Alex, with whom I had been a corner boy in our old growing up hometown of North Adamsville south of Boston. A corner boy for those not in the know since you do not see such sights around small towns and urban neighborhoods anymore was a guy who hung around with other guys at some variety store, pizza parlor, bowling alley or some such place with a corner for a young man, young men, to stand against on weekend nights when cash, cars, and cuties were as sparse as hen’s teeth, maybe sparser. Alex and I had been brought together in ninth grade in high school by a mutual friend the late wild man Peter Paul Markin known as “The Scribe” back in the day and the three of us and a few others were bosom buddies for several years before we went our separate ways.     

I recently reconnected with Alex around the commemoration of the Summer of Love, 1967 which San Francisco and other places is making a big deal out of in its 50^th anniversary year after he had come back from a trip there, a business trip, and tried to get all the old corner boys still standing together to honor the Scribe. He had seen an exhibition at the de Young Museum there called the Summer of Love Experience and had flipped out. His idea was to put together a book of remembrances in honor of the Scribe and had contacted his youngest brother Zack, a writer, to edit and spruce the thing up.

The reason for the book of remembrances?  See the Scribe is the guy who went out to San Francisco during the early spring of 1967 and after a few months came back and got a bunch of us, Alex and I included to go back out with him. The Scribe wound up in the hellish Army the next year, and would serve in Vietnam which fucked up his sweet short life for the few years he had left after that experience but Alex and I stayed for a couple of years. While Alex and I were cutting up old touches he mentioned this story about Zack just so I would know a little about his youngest brother who way too young for me to even remember when we were corner boys. Sam Lowell]   

****** 

Zack James when he was younger, much younger back in the early 1960s younger, now too for that matter was, well, how can we put it, maybe women-addled would be best. Ever since the end of high school, the beginning of college except for one short period he had always had some kind of woman relationship to confuse his sweet ass life (he hadn’t been very successful in high school too shy and too poor to make a hit with any of his female fellow high-schoolers so the end of high school seems the right place to start his women-addledness [sic, I assume]). Of late that streak had taken a sudden stop his latest flame of the past few years, Loretta, had flown the coop, had given him his walking papers, had decided that they had drifted too far apart, that she wanted to find herself, see who she was and what she would do with the rest of her life. Fair enough although the pain of her departure for parts unknown left a big hole in his heart, left him bereft for a while. But had also given him time to see what he was about, where he wanted to head.   

A lot of what Loretta had said about the need for her to cut Zack loose was dead-on, was right as she had been usually right about what ailed Zack. He always found himself behind the curve when it came to what Loretta was thinking about, what he was able to reflect in the lonely hours that he had recently spent in the house they had shared together over the previous several years. Had had to agree that the last year of so as his health had declined with some fairly serious medical issues which had required that he take some medicines that seem to pile up on each other and had made him, well, grumpy and cranky, a grumpy cranky old man if the truth be known especially as those medical problems dove-tailed with his turning three score, turning sixty to not be cute about it. Had made him aware as never before of his own mortality and instead of taking it easy, instead of increasingly relaxing, instead of being at peace with himself, instead of trying to put out “the fire in his head” he was more driven than ever to find his place in the sun, to have his life have meaning at the end. As to his relationship with Loretta he had let himself drift apart, left her unattended, and okay left her to seek her own newer world.

During some of those lonely hours in that desolate house which creaked eerily to his ears Zack began to think through his whole life, who was he kidding his whole relationship with the women who had festooned his sweet ass life, had made life bearable for him. What he had found out, was trying to think through is that he really needed, very much needed the companionship of a woman, and if it was not going to be Loretta, hell, she essentially left no forwarding address all he had was her cellphone number so she could be anywhere, then it had to be somebody else. Rather than go right out and jump into the “meat market,” that is what they called it when he was younger and if they had a different name for the process it was still the same ordeal he decided that he had better take stock of himself and where he has been, and what he wanted out of a relationship now. Any reflection on his apart about failed relationships, and there were plenty, always, always, always led him back to the “cowgirl in the sand,” always led him back to Mariah Welsh, back when he decided  he wanted his first serious relationship.      

That “cowgirl in the sand” was no cute inside joke and it still pained Zack to even think about Mariah and how she led him a merry chase in that one summer, the summer of 1976, they had stayed together. See Mariah was actually from the West, had grown up on a big cattle ranch just outside of Cheyenne out in Wyoming country and had some certain set western ways for a young woman of twenty. He had met her down in Falmouth, down in the Cape Cod area of Massachusetts about fifty miles from where he lived, down near the beach in the summer of 1976 just after his sophomore year in college. He had been renting a place with several other fellow college students for the summer who were as dedicated to partying as he was and that was that. He had actually seen her a couple of times on the beach at Falmouth Heights near where they had rented the cottage and thought that she looked very fine in her skimpy bikini (then skimpy which today would be considered modest) but was not sure how to approach her. One day he decided to go up and invite her to the weekly weekend party that his cottage put on and see what happened. (That weekend party almost literally true as the party would start early Friday afternoon and end at some Happy Hour bar early Sunday evening inevitably a few people, including Zack, would carry over until Monday or Tuesday if the spirit moved them or they had some hot date that kept the fires burning that long).

As Zack approached her she had brought him up short when she saw him coming and shouted out “Here comes the boy who had been checking me out, checking out my shape as far as I could tell and who knows what else he was thinking about, but was afraid to come up and say hello.” Yeah, that was the kind of girl, young woman, Mariah was all through that hot summer relationship. She claimed one night when they had gotten better acquainted that unlike uptight people from the East Coast people from the West, from cattle country, were more plainspoken, less hung up about speaking out about what they wanted-or who they wanted. Needless to say Zack and Mariah spent the rest of that afternoon talking about this and that, mostly dreary college stuff since Mariah was also a student at the University of Wyoming studying art. (She was an exceptionally good artist, had drawn a couple of charcoal drawings of him which he had kept for years afterward even when he was married to Josie, his first wife, and Josie had asked who had done them and he had foolishly told her and he had to hide the damn things. Josie had later when they were separating torn the works up-yes, it was that kind of breakup).

As they talked Mariah made no bones about showing off her very fine body, slender, small but firm breasts which he was attracted in woman, well-turned long legs and thin ankles, blondish brown hair, sea blue eyes and a wicked smile that would melt butter on a cold day. They made that primal connection that said they had something to do together what it would be who knew but something.

Mariah had told Zack that she had come East with a couple of her college girlfriends since none of them had ever been east of the Mississippi and had been thrilled when they first saw the ocean, had frolicked in the waves and one girl had almost gone under when a sudden riptide which they were totally ignorant of started pulling her down. But that scare was soon over since the girl had allowed herself to drift until the current subsided. They were staying for the summer over on Maravista a few blocks away from the beach (and maybe half a dozen blocks away from Zack’s cottage) in a tiny cottage in back of the landlord’s yard which he usually let out to students who worked in the restaurants and such places for the summer. As the hot tanning sun began to fade a bit by four Zack then popped the question of whether she and her girlfriends were up for a party that weekend. All Mariah asked about though was would there be booze and dope there. When Zack answered yes Mariah said they would surely, her word, be there and she had better not see him talking to some other girl when she arrived. Bingo.

That booze and dope stuff needs a little explaining since Zack and his fellows were all under official drinking age (as were Mariah and her friends at least in Massachusetts) so they “hired” an older guy who was living with a bunch of his older friends up their street to “buy” for them and he would get a big bottle of liquor, usually scotch, as his service charge. The dope thing was a little more problematic since dope, marijuana, maybe some speed when a connection could be made, were not that widely used then by the youth fresh college generation he hung around with although that movement was beginning to build up a head of steam. At that time “booze heads,” representing a more working class ethos and “dopers” were at loggerheads something that would get settled out later. Jazz, one of his roommates at their cottage and at school, had connections in Cambridge and so they never lacked for dope although more than a few girls would back off once they smelled the dope and didn’t know what the hell they were in for. So Mariah already was ahead of that crowd.      

As they were getting ready to part company after Zack gave Mariah his address and had told her to come by anytime on Friday afternoon or later Mariah told him to wait a minute until she put her street clothes on and they could walk off the beach together toward her car (Zack had walked over to the beach since he unlike several of his roommates did not have a car and was driven down by Willy another roommate). Zack was shocked, mildly shocked anyway, when Mariah put on her blue jean shorts, a frilly lacy cowgirl-type blouse, and, get this, her cowboy boots, and her cowgirl hat what he would later find out was called a Ladies’ Stetson. She looked like she had just gotten ready to go to the rodeo, or the state fair. Something told Zack that this was going to be an interesting ride indeed. Mariah must have sensed that because as they approached her car for her to leave she asked Zack whether he liked her outfit, and then said in her plain spoken Western way, “Maybe you can play cowboy with me if things work out.” Giving Zack a soft sexy look like if things worked out she would give him a ride he would not forget. Whoa!                            

That Friday evening Mariah and her two girlfriends arrived, guess what, dressed up very similarly to the way Mariah had been dressed as she and Zack left the beach a few days before which caused a sensation, a sensation at the novelty of the garb in Falmouth in the summer and also that the two girlfriends were “hot” as well. Zack fortunately was alone when they entered (he had earlier been talking to Cissie, an old flame whom he figured to rekindle a flame with that night since he had frankly given up the idea that Mariah was going to show, it would not have been the first time, or the last, some young thing had promised the moon to him and never showed up. Mariah came right over and asked if he had a joint, a joint she said to calm her nerves, make her feel good among the party-goers all of whom were eying her the guys for obvious reasons the women also for obvious reasons if they were with a guy.

Zack called over to Jazz who delivered a huge joint from the bag of dope he had “connected” with only that afternoon which made Mariah eyes widen and after taking a few “hits” said to Zack “You may be playing cowboy tonight after all.” In that instance her statement proved not to be true because she got so “wasted” that she fell asleep but the next night’s party, or really a continuation of Friday’s party she and Zack got it on in one of the empty bedrooms upstairs (not his room, the room where he had all his possessions, but nobody was particular about such arrangements when a “hot” date needed a place to put her head down).                         

What struck Zack about Mariah (beside that Western plain-spokenness that he was not used to with the local girls, mostly Irish girls who descended on the Cape with as the saying went “ten dollars and their virtue” and left with both intact or standoffish WASPish girls from the better colleges who were sometimes more trouble than they were worth in trying to get next to them if you were not seriously looking to be upward mobile after your college hijinks) was how sexually experienced and into doing sex she was even that first night when she did a lot of stuff that most other girls he knew were not into, like giving a good blow job. When they talked about it later Mariah told him that those cowboys out in the West, the ones who worked for her father broke her in early at thirteen and she liked it, liked it enough to read books in high school about various sexual positions and practices from a manual. (It turned out to be the Kama Sutra, the ancient Indian bible of sex for those who are clueless).

So for several weeks that summer Zack and Mariah were what would be called an “item” today, were almost inseparable. Went to the beach, partied, had great sex (mostly based on her knowledge and Zack’s willingness as a subject) and Zack assumed would find some way to continue their relationship at summer’s end. When that time came though Mariah told him straight out that theirs was a summer fling and that she was heading back to school in Wyoming and back to her boyfriend. The night they parted though, despite Zack’s futile pleading that they stay together some way and then giving up when she cut him off which she said was also a Western way, she gave him a parting sexual bout that he still remember forty years later. Yeah, Zack was women-addled, always was being played by them. Praise be.         

Ruth’s Remembrances-With Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show” In Mind

Ruth’s Remembrances-With Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show” In Mind

By Guest Film Critic Lance Lawrence   

[Regular readers of this blog (and of the on-line American Film Gazette) can be excused if they are a little perplexed about this posting or at least the title of this posting since it appeared her in its original form a month or so ago. The reason that the piece is getting what I would call an encore performance is that the writer, Lance Lawrence, who has placed occasional pieces here in the past, felt that he had short-changed Ruth Snyder by writing her off as just another frustrated middle-aged dame going through an inevitable mid-life crisis down in nowhere Texas and had latched onto the first male than gives her a passing glance.  Here the glance was by a younger guy, hell, she was robbing the cradle since he was still in high school, still wet behind the ears. Wrote her off too as just another backwoods Texas gal doing what generations of Texas women have done before her and instead let the youngster, Sonny, the inevitable Sonny or Bubba or Mac of the Texas panhandle, steal her thunder. Lance hopes that this revised edition reflects better on the virtues of this hardy Texas woman who might have come up the hard-scrabble way in the West Texas night but who has some virtues in the clutch maybe formed out of that hard-scrabble existence. Peter Markin]      

Ruth Snyder had all the prejudices of any West Texas girl growing up in the hard-scrabble Great Depression of the 1930s when money had been scarcer, maybe more so, than hen’s teeth. Had all the so-called secrets of such girls as well. She had been Anchor City born and raised out in the places where the oilfields out-numbered the number of residents. As part of that Anchor City (silly nautical name for a town out in the middle of Blue Norther country but there you have it. Legend had it that some restless Yankee sea captain who had had enough of the sea had founded the place and in a fit of nostalgia named the town that rather than after himself like half the foolish towns like Houston, Austin, Johnson City, and Galveston in the state).

Prejudice number one, aside from not allowing the “colored” to get a toehold in the town but that was usual all over the South and not Anchor City-bound, was drilled into her by her hard-shell Pentecostal parents who had gotten religion when West Texas was “burned over” in the Third Awakening, third Texas Awakening and that was marriage was forever. Forever meaning until one or the other of the two contracted parties kick-off. Not before. (As to that “colored” prejudice Ruth had played with Ella Speed the daughter of a black woman who took in washing in the small Negro-town section which her mother resorted to when she was too sick to do it herself but that ended well before puberty when such race-mixing was frowned upon. She never in public or private expressed hostility to the black race although she stuck to the “code” like everybody else in town. There had in any case been few Negros in town since the days in the late 1920s when the KKK strung up a couple of Negro men allegedly for touching white women.)          

So Ruth Snyder, not the prettiest girl in town, not by a long shot, in fact rather plain like some Grant Wood painting of some woe begotten up against it farmer and his drag on the household unmarried daughter with no prospects, pure prairie plain which was in man-short West Texas (marrying man-short West Texas the other kind, the women of easy virtue, the whorehouse kind in oil fields male Texas as everywhere were plentiful enough) good enough with proper household training to get a man. (She was a good-housekeeper and cook little good it did her in the end.) But get this Ruth Snyder, Plain Jane Ruth Snyder snagged herself a football player, Tom Snyder, who starred for the Anchor City Hawks before heading to Texas A&M and a short career made shorter by a crippling knee injury. Who would have figured that Tom in those brave football days would court Ruth Snyder. Ruth would soon after their marriage come to try to figure that one out herself. Tried to figure out that all Tom wanted from a woman, no, a wife, was to just keep his house clean, his socks darned and his rifles well-oiled. While Tom in very West Texas good old boys fashion would head out with his fellow good old boys and proceed to get well-oiled in another way or two.     

Married at just short of twenty years of age Ruth was now reaching that funny quirky time, forty. Things had only gotten worse between Tom and her as time went by and especially after several serious campaigns by alumni Tom had cornered himself into being both the football and basketball coach at old Anchor City High. Thus not only did Ruth suffer the pangs of loneliness during his weekly hunting and fishing trips but for well over half the year he would be too busy with his coaching to pay even minimal attention to Ruth. Not a good thing, not a good thing at all for somebody who was entering funny quirky time.  (Although she did not lack for female friends around the neighborhood something inside her made her keep her distance, keep things to herself which she committed only to her diary or expressed in her finely wrought poetry which kept her afloat on those lonely long weeks alone.)  

One of the things that was required of a coach’s wife in those days, those early 1950s days when all the way from kid sandlot football to University of Texas University all Texas was aflutter in football was to attend the Friday night games. Ruth unlike other mothers and wives rather enjoyed watching the game which had been part of the reason that she had grabbed onto Tom with both hands when he first asked her out those many years before. Of late, this season, this season of her reaching forty she found herself looking rather longingly at the young men on the field and thinking of those days when her own heart had been all aflutter when she spied Tom Snyder doing his pre-game warm-ups. In particular this year, this 1951 year when the team was pretty poor even by Anchor City standards she was drawn to two players, Duane, Duane Wilson, and Sonny, Sonny Burgess. Not because they were any great shakes as football players, they seemed to be in way over their heads when matched up against any decent teams but because they had similar physiques to her Tom’s when he was a star (the years of good old boy-dom had not been kind to Tom and he was now a certified member of the pot-bellied, sloughing forty something guys who could not have gotten out of their own ways if something had come up to startle them). Here’ the point though our Ruth started to have certain “improper” fantasies about those two young men. Yeah, that funny quirky forty thing.     

Ruth also knew that Duane had this thing, this crush on Jackie, Jackie Germaine, the head cheer leader who in that day, in her day when she was younger, and her now was nothing but a cock-teaser, a femme or whatever they called such “come hither” to be sliced and diced girls. She would lead him a merry chase, make him cry “Uncle,” literally since in the end he volunteered like a good West Texas young man back then to join the Army to get the taste of Jackie out of his system. Got his ass hauled to frozen Korea when hot war was afoot there to freeze his brain over to forget her. (As Duane told Sonny in one of his few, very few, candid and reflective moments before he shipped out for the unknown future he would never totally short of the grave get Jackie out of his system and years later would say the same thing even when by that time she had been married three times, had a parcel of kids and even at the high side of forty was making guys make sophomoric fools out of themselves). As he told Sonny he would rather just then face the red hordes in Korea than to see her with another man. That “another man” in the space of a few short months between the end of high school and going off to college entail screwing Duane, screwing rich boy Randy, his friend Tom, who wanted to marry her, Adonis one of her father’s wild-cat oil riggers, hell, even Sonny which is where Duane and Sonny’s friendship since elementary school was sorely tested. Yeah thought Ruth who would get her information about the younger set, older set, every set from Jennie who ran the Last Chance Café one of the few reasons to stop in the pass through town who had the dope on everything happening in town. 

      

So Ruth almost by default kept her eye on Sonny Burgess, looking for a way to get to him in a proper manner, at least for public consumption. As it turned out Tom, her no bullshit husband who was the vehicle for bringing Ruth and Sonny together. Out of pure laziness or cussedness, take your pick. One day Tom asked Sonny to take Ruth to the nearest hospital in Waverly some fifty miles away in order for her to check up on some “female” problem she was having. Tom’s reason for not taking her himself was that he was too busy with basketball practice to do so. The lure for Sonny was that Coach would get him out of classes for the remainder of the day. The trip started out uneventfully enough with Sonny doing chauffer duty-and acting strictly in that manner. After getting Ruth home safe and sound though she asked him if he would like something to eat. Sure, like any growing kid, any teenage kid. Nothing happened that day but between whatever mother hunger mother-less Sonny had and whatever real man hunger Ruth had a few weeks later they would met at the annual town Christmas Party (the same party where the perfidious Jackie blew Duane off for some party with Randy and reportedly “played the flute” with him the universal high expression for giving a blow job) and gave each other such looks that when Ruth asked Sonny if he would take her to her doctor’s appointment the next he answered with yes without hesitation. And so Ruth and Sonny would start an affair, an affair of the heart which would last on and off again for several years. Tom either never found out about it or didn’t care if he did know which hurt Ruth at first blush when she had been half doing that affair to make him jealous. That open secret though would keep the customers at the Last Chance Café going for many months once Jennie retailed the story. Funny nobody took umbrage that Ruth was bedding a young man half her age. But here is where we get into Ruth’s knowledge of the West Texas girl-woman prejudices. The reason that the Ruth-Sonny affair, was the hot topic for only a few months was that Ellie, Jackie’s mother had started an affair with a young oil well driller, Rufus Wright, employed by her husband. So Ruth was just following West Texas girl prejudice. What do think about that.