The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-You Can’t Go Home Again, Damn It, You Can’t- With Thomas Wolfe’s Novel In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-You Can’t Go Home Again, Damn It, You Can’t- With Thomas Wolfe’s Novel In Mind

By Allan Jackson

A story as told to Josh Breslin

[I don’t know Larry Larkin the subject of this piece but I do “know” Larry, his story and his plight part. This is one of the few sketches that I didn’t do more than a little light editing and a lot of conversation with Josh Breslin about where to head with the thing. See this is one of the few pieces that don’t necessarily have to do with classic rock and roll days and those like Larry, Josh and I who were washed clean by that experience so I let Josh go where he wanted on this once he completed his interviews with Larry. Still the subject is as intense today as it was back in those 1960s days when anything was possible.

Normally I would have taken a pass on doing an introduction to a piece like this because between Larry and Josh’s comments and stories they tell all that needs telling and I would add nothing. This one is different mainly because Larry’s not being able to go home again when the deal went down resonates well beyond the specifics of his story. More than a fair share of corner boys from the old working class, working poor Acre neighborhood in North Adamsville found they couldn’t go home again either just like Larry up in Olde Saco (and Josh too and someday I hope he will write up his story which will share some of the same angst that Larry faced as he explained to me one whiskey night after his long estranged mother had passed away). 

Strangely, actually maybe not so strangely, the stories Larry and Josh have to tell did not surface until late adulthood. The same with the stories of corner boys like Frankie Riley, Johnny Callahan, Jimmy Jenkins and a fistful of others I have interrogated about the matter over the past few years. And me too. All of them, us have tales of estrangement and woes that never got resolved. Of course we know Markin’s, Scribe’s alienation and angst because we all think that contributed to his early and frankly weird demise but the rest of us worked under the working principle of the times, of the mostly Irish enclave of “not airing the family’s dirty linen in public.” That extended to talking out loud even to fellow corner boys about what was happening at home. Even Scribe seldom mentioned anything about anything except you could tell he was always brooding about something or was in a dither that you could tell automatically because he would suddenly say he had to go run off his anger (which made him a great high school trackman if nothing else).

I think we have enough material in the piece so that I don’t have to go on and on here about my own circumstances and maybe someday I will write a little something up but know this. I too was estranged from my family, never went to my father’s funeral, which was a mistake, or my mother’s which was not so line up. (Mothers by the way back then in that neighborhood and maybe elsewhere as well were the main adult harassers and despots fathers were too busy earning not enough money to come up for breathe except on some major thing and hence that father mistake which I regret to this day.) Allan Jackson]

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Larry Larkin wondered, wondered that night as 2012 turned into New Year’s Day 2013 why he had been fixated on that title from the long ago American novelist Thomas Wolfe and his damn book, You Can’t Go Home Again. Wondered too why over the previous five years, the five years since he initially tried to “go home, again” he had not realized the truth of that simple expression, had caused himself more grief that wisdom choking over every misstep in the effort. All of this wondering, aided perhaps by a few sips of white wine that he was sharing with his companion, Laura Hoppe, as the new year came in had been triggered by remembrances of the past year’s final (he hoped final) beating about the head over the matter when he had tried to attend his 50^th anniversary high school class reunion of the Class of 1962 at Olde Saco High in the early fall at the Laurent Hotel , a place that back in the day had meant nothing but trouble including the location of his first marriage wedding reception. He had in the end wound traipsing with Laura into Big Sur canyons clear across the country on the weekend of the scheduled event. After churning it over in his head Larry thought, before the wine flowed too freely to his brain that he had better go back to the beginning, better go back to look how each step taken on that “go home, again ” trail had been fraught with portents of eventual failure. And that ebbing New Year’s Eve he at least knew that that road was now mercifully closed to him.        

Sure Larry knew, knew way before 2007 when he caught the “go home” bug that he could not go back to the time of his youth in Olde Saco when even when things were tough, tough meaning the constant war between he and his mother, Delores (nee LeBlanc, descended from a long line of French-Canadian peasants he guessed they would be called, fellahin a friend of his, Josh Breslin also with French-Canadian blood in him on his mother’s side also LeBlanc although not related, trying to be smart called them, who came down from barren Quebec to look for work in the mills and never looked back), there were memories, maybe good memories, that sustained him in bad times.

So Larry did not believe that year he was going to go back to that “go home” but he did believe that he could at least settle on an “armed truce” with that past. A past which included a very long period of alienation and lost contact with his people back in Olde Saco, a period of no contact by his own finally frustrated choice. One day in the mid-1970s he just decided that he could no longer take the punishing contact with the family, that it was better all around to cut his losses  and so went his own way. But humankind is funny, or at least Larry thought it was funny that one day in 2007, one fateful day as it turned out, he had an intense hankering to settle with his past, find out what happened to his family, who was left and maybe try to reconnect. That one day was ordinary enough since what had triggered his hankering (his word) was the fact that he had had to return to Olde Saco to obtain a copy of his birth certificate in order to begin the retirement process from his job as a middle-level civil servant up in Augusta. So down to old town town hall Olde Saco he went. Of course since he had spent the time and energy to travel down there he knew that he would just had to stop off at Olde Saco Beach after he had completed his task.

As Larry once again began walking Olde Saco Beach from the Pine Point far end he thought this stretch of ocean front held many memories for a man who loved the sea, had declared at one time or another that his homeland was the sea, was the mother, snarly and holy vengeance one moment, tepidly ripple running to shore and gentle splashes the next, who never abandoned him, draw what conclusions you will from that. Mainly that cold early April day in 2007 he thought about how many times when he had had some “unresolvable” beef (unresolvable then although now, having gone through the same set of experiences with his own kids he chuckled over that word) he would walk the mile to the beach from his shack of a growing up house over on Atlantic Avenue and endlessly walk until he calmed himself down (later in high school where he was a track athlete he would run that distance but the brooding walking followed, followed as day to night). The beefs always over wants, wants of one or sort or another usually over him wanting something, clothes, date money, tickets to something, could have been anything, and she, Delores, pulling the hammer down with the definite “no.” His hard-working hard-pressed shadow figure father in the background backing her up, backing her up without question. Other times the beefs were of a more serious nature, trouble nature, trouble at school, trouble after school hanging around with his corner boys, mostly thieving Irish kids, trouble with the law, mostly small unarmed felonies, trouble, trouble as he squandered half his young life gnashing his teeth against grabbing those from hunger want. It had been a close thing, a very close thing, indeed that he had taken the judge’s, old Judge Matthews over in the Arundel District Court, choice of enlisting in the Army over time at Shawshank, seeing afterward what had happened to a few of his corner boys, Clipper Johnson, George Kelly and the late Jimmy Dubois, as they edged their own paths to the big house.         

No question, and here he was not giving into any false nostalgia, or at least he did not think that was but there had been some good times too, mostly early on, but still good times. Yeah, those trips to the beach with the family and the inevitable barbecues as his father gave his mother (and maybe himself) a break from cooking, her an indifferent cook at best harried by short father pay check money to feed five growing kids, he could still smell those smells now all charcoal and warmth. Those runs down to York Beach and the amusement park when he was fascinated by his first run-in with the corner boy pinball wizards who populated the arcades during the summer. Trips to Boston, trips to lots places in the area which made up, a little, for a nerve-wracking home life. Yeah, those early days held much promise before he came of age and the Delores wars started, started him out the door to hang around with the guys at Lebreque’s Drugstore (and later Jimmy Laurent’s bar where Jimmy did not ask questions about age but only the color of your money). So after walking the length of the beach for the umpteenth time in his life Larry got a small hankering. That hankering enlarged when he surreptiously drove pass the old growing up shack of a house on Atlantic Street and found that the house was no longer there but had been replaced by a high end three-unit condo complex. He did not bother to check to see if any unit belonged to Delores and Paul Larkin since no way could they have afforded such digs. Besides he was too afraid to go near the premises in that neighborhood in the unlikely case that some old neighbors might recognize him. Yeah, it was like that.               

Then one day a few week later, out of the blue, he began a Google search of the old town newspaper, The Olde Saco Tribune, to see if any of his people other than the one outlaw older brother he was still in contact (and that relationship too had stormy no contact periods), William were still around. William then in assisted living quarters in Wells after a long career of petty armed robberies in Massachusetts and New Hampshire which produced a long career in various state penal institutions nixed any involvement in the search having his own dank memories and beefs. Yeah, Larry developed a hankering to see who was still around (including the extended family many of whom on his mother’s side had lived in the Olde Saco area after the huge migration out of the Quebec farms to work the mills and on his father’s side too, working the mills that is, including him). There the beauty of the Internet, even the now outdated capacities of the 2007 Internet came to the rescue. That search brought forth information from the on-line Obituary section that an uncle, Lawrence Larkin who he was named after, had died in 2005 after serving many years on the Kennebunk police force. That was his uncle, no question. More importantly, among those in attendance at the funeral was one Delores Larkin, although no mention was made of his father, Paul. Delores was listed as being from South Portland and so on a whim he checked on-line to see if a land-line telephone was listed in her name. Bingo, there was one listed under her name. Larry thought this whole exercise had been way too easy, he had been prepared to go to a detective agency if necessary and here without two hours he had located his mother.                

Then the real crush began. Should or should he not made the call to confirm that identity. Larry literally held his breathe for a moment and dialed. An older woman’s voice (his mother would have been in her late 80s by then) answered and he made his identity known. As he found out later from a sister his mother had thought that he (and that brother in Wells) were dead and so she had been confused, not sure who she was talking to and told him to call back later when his sisters Maureen and Cecelia would be home. A couple of hours later even before he had a chance to call back his sister Maureen called him (another virtue of modern communications technology-caller identification) and in no uncertain terms asked him what the hell he wanted after all these years. The conversation, which lasted about an hour, or he thought it seemed that long, provided information about his father’s death in the 1980s and the deaths of other close and extended family members, including his other brother Prescott in 2003.

Beyond the family information Maureen expressed bitterness that Larry who had been able-bodied, had after all made something of himself up in Augusta (after he provided his own life information to her), and who had no good reason not to have been in contact should trouble (her word) their mother now. She and Cecelia had spent the time since their father’s death providing for their mother’s welfare, including the previous several years her living with Maureen and her husband. When Larry expressed an interest in seeing his mother Maureen cut him off at the knees. She, they, left the situation like this. She and Cecelia would explain the situation to their mother and if she wanted to see him then they would think about giving their consent. They would contact him if they did so. The old “don’t call us, we’ll call you” brush-off gave Larry a knot in the pit of his stomach, and a feeling, the first of what would be a long line of such similar feelings, that he would not be able to “go home” again.                

And so it came to pass. In late 2007 he received a phone call from a cousin, Peter LeBlanc (or rather his companion Laura received a phone call because he was then down in Boston at a conference), telling him that his mother had passed away, had passed away a couple of days before in a Portland nursing home and that the funeral would be the following Saturday at Saint Anne in Olde Saco. (Peter had also used the Internet to find Larry since he too had been on the outs with his family, and with Maureen who refused to give him Larry’s telephone number. Hail Internet, for some things anyway.) Here was the hard part for Larry to take, he knew when neither Maureen nor Cecelia called back that time he would not get to see his mother alive but Peter made it clear that Maureen and the rest of the family under no circumstances wanted Larry or William at the funeral services. So the curse would extend to the grave, beyond the grave. Larry took that knowledge hard for a while, although he and William did visit the fresh grave of his mother (and the well-worn graves of their father and other brother) at the family plot in Scarborough and thought no more about it, or better, did no more, knew then he could not go that way home again.      

Truth. Larry, smart enough to know that chapter was over, closed, still had this empty spot, or as he told Laura, this world-historic need (he really does say stuff like that) to dust off, to salvage some part of the long ago past, to make sense of the shut-out that he had just faced and what that meant to him. That is when he got to thinking about his old close corner boy from back in the days, going back to elementary school times on Atlantic Street, Kenny Bradley. Funny one night in early 2008 when filled to the brim with melancholia he thought about those times when his mother who had worked at Mister Jiffy’s Donut Shoppe in Biddeford for a few years filling jelly donuts to help make ends meet when his father was having trouble finding work after the mills started closing down and heading south, or wherever they headed to get cheaper labor used to give Kenny a bagful of day-old donuts to take home when he came over to the house. Even in high school when all hell was breaking loose in Larry’s life and it was that close thing about a life of crime that drove the main wedge between him and his parents Delores Larkin could do no wrong in Kenny’s eyes based on that childhood kindness.

He had thought to himself that night that he had been thinking about Kenny for a while, about what had happened to him, where he was if he was alive, ever since he had received an invitation to attend his 40^th anniversary class reunion since graduation from Olde Saco High. He had hemmed and hawed about going to the event before backing off but that invitation had been the first time he thought seriously about getting in touch, although like a lot of things in Larry’s life he let it slide until the finality of his mother’s death brought lots of stuff to the surface. He would find himself softly singing a verse from old 1960s folk minute singer Tom Paxton’s song, I Can’t Help But Wonder, a song they both had loved back then, “I’ve got a buddy from back home but he started out to roam and I hear he’s out by Frisco Bay…and I’m going out to see him some old day, ” since Frisco had been the last place they had run into each other after Kenny had gotten out of the Navy and decided that he would start fresh in the West like lots of their kindred had.          

And here is where modern communications technology came in again after Larry had been unsuccessful in finding out Kenny’s whereabouts through a member of that 40^th anniversary reunion committee who had wound up as the secretary to the headmaster of Olde Saco High and privy to any information that might be easily accessible about him. He tried a straight Google search finding eventually that Kenny’s parents had both died and since he was an only child that kind of cut short some other possibilities. Along with the search for Kenny Larry was also in something of a memory writing mood putting together some small sketches remembered from his youth about high school dances, the lovers’ lane at Squaw Rock down at the isolated end of Pine Point, hanging out with corner boys, strange dating girls hassles, football rallies, all pretty much directed back to old high school days.

Frustrated Larry Googled Olde Saco High School Class of 1962 to see if he could get anything from that end. Eventually he got to a generic all-America, maybe all-world, although he never checked that far, commercial website which for a small fee would “connect” you with your class. Larry paid the freight and for his efforts found his class listed, and more importantly a list, a fairly current list of all the members from his class who had joined the site. And bingo once again there was the name Kenneth Bradley. The way this site worked is that you or whoever you were trying to contact needed to pay that damn fee to be able receive private e-mails and so Larry did pay and sent the e-mail with a short message to Kenny and a way to contact him. A couple of days later Kenny telephoned him from Boston where he was running his own contract painting company and doing quite well. They cut up old touches for a couple of hours agreeing to meet in Boston a week or so later when Larry would be in Boston for another of his endless conferences. They met at Joe’s American Café in the Back Bay and while they both had grown stouter, and had lost some hair, unlike many of Larry’s old acquaintances they easily recognized each other on meeting. 

They had a good night with good food, good drink (they had been notorious drinking partners even in high school which got them both into more than one of those “trouble trouble” situations that dotted Larry’s youth. The highlight was that Kenny had brought his very own copy of the Olde Saco Magnet, their high school yearbook, and had many a nostalgic laugh over this and that. Of course Larry had been so alienated upon graduation, as well as having a few grand larceny charges hanging over him which would be resolved only by his taking the Army part of old Judge Matthews Army or jail options, that  graduation night drunk as skunk he had thrown his copy in the Scarborough River and good riddance.             

Larry and Kenny had been from elementary school days until that last time Larry had seen Kenny in Frisco as close as two guys could be without being brothers. The had laughed when Kenny made a comment at Joe’s that they probably were the only heterosexual guys in the class (maybe the school or town even) who people wondered about whether they were gay (or to use the term used then in sublime ignorance, “fags”). That Boston night had been the highlight of their reunion although they met several times after that over the next several months for dinner, to watch sports which Kenny was still addicted to, and a couple of times Kenny had joined Larry and Laura at concerts (one a Bruce Springsteen concert down in New Haven) but the old comradeship seemed to be lost, lost like that closeness vanished in the bay out there in California.

During this time Larry began grinding his teeth when Kenny would endlessly talk about his painting business, about the stock market that he dabbled in, graphic detail about his sexual conquests, more endless talk about sports and frankly stuff that Larry had either lost interest like sports or never cared to talk about and from his end would be reduced to bringing up some old time flame, caper or incident from high school days to fill the time. Larry sensed that maybe Kenny realized too that they had gone very far away on their separate ways, and after dinner one night in York Beach in early 2009 they had parted saying they would give each other a call soon to get together again. They never did and that “go home” episode passed into dust.            

Although Larry felt the Kenny connection drifting away he still was producing those small sketches about life, mostly high school life, in the old days in Olde Saco and placing them on the appropriate section of the class website. Several of them, especially about the local custom of searching for “submarines” from the backseats of ’57 Chevys at Olde Saco Beach at night (the reader can be presumed to be able to be figure that one out), the infamous grapevine that provided much needed intelligence about who or who was no “going steady” centered in Monday morning before school talkfest, and the night life at the Olde Saco Drive-In and Jimmy Jack’s Diner on Main Street grabbed a great deal of comment and reply. Some of them so he heard later from a woman classmate who had read them at the time would become the talk of his class.

All done good-naturedly, all done with trying to fill some empty hole in him, and maybe them. Then the hammer fell. Misty Gordon, Class vice-president, head cheerleader, chair of the senior dance and prom committees, assistant editor of the school newspaper The Ocean’s Edge threw down a gauntlet, made a comment, very pointedly after  forty years later like she had been holding it in for that whole period of time to the effect that who did Larry think he was, a guy who got into nothing but trouble as everybody in town knew and tittered over and never did anything to help his class now wanted to  proclaim himself the quote “ bard of the class.” Now Larry knew this Misty, you could hardly avoid her and her well-publicized exploits in a small high school, vaguely but had never spoken two words to her and said so in his very public reply. But he also said that “yes” he was trying to be not THE bard but one and wrote a funny (some thought it funny in the comment section) sketch about how he  was perfect for the job, had all the qualifications of former ne’er-do-well, drunk, loner and non-participant so that some decades later he was qualified, over-qualified for the job. 

This created a firestorm for a while, a couple of months with the social butterflies, sports guys, and do-gooders siding with Misty and the misfits, nerds, loners, and outcasts giving Larry the nod. But he grew tired of an essentially useless argument with people he had not seen for many years and once again he had gotten that sinking feeling that this venture too was no way home and gave it up. For a while.                 

Larry let up, gave up trying to “go back home” for a while until near the end of 2011 with the 50^th anniversary reunion the next fall (according to information that he searched on the Internet when he found the reunion committee had set up a private class website for the event) when seemingly undaunted despite the previous track record of failure he got some curious “mystical” sense that he could turn the tide this time. He made contact with the members of the committee on the website and offered to/asked to be on the committee. This is how the last indignity unfolded as told to an old classmate friend of his, Josh Breslin, one night who will at least tell it straight:       

“This is the way Larry Larkin, my old friend and classmate from up Olde Saco way, told me his sad story over several meetings at one or another of our favorite watering holes a short while back where he felt he had to get something off his chest about his latest love interest gone sour, his, as he called it, last indignity about “going home” to the old home town, or rather making peace with his past. Through his activity on our high school 50^th anniversary reunion committee we had communicated and met each other several times recently and he had carried me along with his enthusiasm about the event. Got me interested in the old days, and possibly going to the reunion. And he in turn confided in me about this love problem, wanted me to write something up about it as a form of therapy for him or something. I am no expert on the issue of love, or maybe better having been married three times and having had numerous affairs and flings I am as clueless as he about how to deal with the subject. In any case here are my recollections of what he had to say on that sad whiskey-filled night:    

The last time Larry Larkin saw Merissa Pinot he was looking back at the headlights of her automobile veering off as dusk approached to go north on Route 133 just south of Amesbury along the New Hampshire border in the early spring of 2012.  He did not know that that glimpse would be the last, the last physical time he saw her, although given the all-out fight they had had earlier that evening including an enraged outburst by him he suspected as much. But like many things in this wicked old world of romantic relationships that would not be the last of it, although that indeed was the last physical time he saw her. There were some final shots, some last metaphysical kiss-offs before the real end. And so as Larry had muttered to himself at some point during the last not so metaphysical dust-up whether 16 or 68 years of age the romance game never gets easier. And so this story, or end of story.    

Let’s take a step back to figure out about the whys of that last headlight glance before we find out what happened after the subsequent fall and the last dust-up. Larry told me he had been thinking about his 50^th class reunion at Olde Saco High since he had received an invitation to go to his 40^th reunion back in 2002. At that time Larry had dismissed the invitation with much hubris because then he still thought that the bad luck that had followed him for much of his life had been caused by his growing up on “the wrong side of the tracks” in the old town. He told me, a number of times, that he had spent half a lifetime blaming that bad luck hometown affiliation on everything from acne to wormwood. 

Subsequently through some family-related deaths that took him back to the old town Larry had reconciled himself with his roots and had exhibited the first stirrings of a feeling that he might like to see some of his old classmates despite his dismal failure to connect with our old classmate and his best friend Kenny Bradley. In late 2012, around Thanksgiving he, at least marginally savvy on such user-friendly sites, created a Facebook  event page in order to see if anybody else on the planet knew of plans or was interested in making plans for a 50^th reunion. One day, a few days after setting up the page, he got an inquiry asking what he knew about any upcoming plans.  He answered in a short note his own limited knowledge at the time of any such plans but that his intention in setting up the page had been to seek others to help out with organizing an event if nothing had been established as yet. In that reply he had forgotten to give his name. And that is how the “girl with the pale blue eyes,” Merissa Pinot, came into view.  

“Who are you?” asked Merissa returning his message, a name that Larry immediately remembered from his high school days although he did not know the woman personally. He shot back a blushed reply about being sorry for forgetting to include his name, gave it, and casually remarked that he had remembered from somewhere that she was a professor at a college in the Boston area. He asked if she was still there. She sent an immediate reply stating that no she was no longer there but that she had been and was still a professor at the University of New Hampshire, and had been for the previous twenty-five years. She also mentioned that, having access to her Ocean’s Edge, her class of 1962 yearbook, she had looked up his class photo, and said he was “very handsome.”

Naturally any guy from six to sixty would have to seriously consider anybody, any female in Larry’s case, who threw that unanticipated, unsolicited comment a man’s way especially since she sent her class photo back as well. That got them started on what would be a blizzard of e-mails over the next several weeks.  

Frankly, after the first few exchanges Larry had been more than a little intrigued with Merissa, intrigued enough to think about further discovery.  And as it turned out Merissa had been as well. They discovered they both had much in common academically, professionally, politically and personally. I won’t go into the specifics of those “things in common” because in looking over my notes from Larry that would take more time than necessary to make the point.

A point necessary to make though since it contributed to the fall  was Larry’s “relationship” status which he introduced to Merissa after that  initial blizzard of e-mails and phone calls. Here’s the gist of his response:

“…You know as well as I do that we both carry a lot of baggage, busted marriages, affairs, and so forth. On the other hand we are both old enough to have whatever level of friendship we want from just friends to an affair because we both as far as I know have no ties that would prohibit that, neither of us is married now. And even if we did in this day in age we could still have whatever relationship we wanted. As long as we both have our eyes open and know the score. That “know the score” part is what I want to talk about. It is nothing bad but it is a complication. And even if we decide to be just friends it is part of what is unfolding.

Up until a few weeks ago for the past ten years or so since the end of my last serious relationship I was just rolling along writing, doing legal work, doing politics, playing golf and all the rest. Doing all of that while living in the same house as the woman that was my last serious romantic relationship, Laura, who is still my closest woman friend. I have known her for over twenty- five years and about twenty years ago we bought this modest house in Bath together. As time went on though we had, as couples will, our problems until about ten years ago we decided that it wasn’t working. But we both wanted to keep the house and be friends. I won’t go into all of that now but you can ask me about it. So that is what we did. And there is nothing wrong with that people make such arrangements all the time….”

“…Then out of the blue you came along. You know how we “met” and all so I don’t need to go into that but what happened is that I was not sure where we were heading (at one point if anywhere) and so I made a point of keeping that “relationship” information to myself. Remember I made a point about just concentrating on us and not on other baggage stuff. Part of it obviously is that if we were not going anywhere then such information didn’t matter and if we were then that would just be an awkward situation that we would deal with. That is what a lot of my concern about expectations, the way we have met and all of that, has been about. I have told Laura about you in general terms (the only way to put it since we still have not met) and since this whole thing has been topsy-turvy that is where things stand right now.

If all of this seems like too much then so be it-but as for me I still say forward- if you don’t that is okay and we can work on some other way to be friends. I think we both strongly want to be friends and should be damn it if that is what we want. Later Larry.”         

A couple more cell-phone calls and another round of e-mails got this pair to setting up the meeting in person, having a “date” like some hormonally-driven teen-agers. (Larry could not remember who suggested the idea first but neither flinched at that possibility all he remembered was that he would finally have a date with an Olde Saco  High woman something that had eluded all through high school.) They both admitted to nervousness as they planned to meet in Portsmouth up in New Hampshire at a restaurant that she had selected (he was to be at a legal conference in Portland and that locale was the closest convenient city for both of them). Needless to say they hit it off remarkably well.

And Larry, with two divorces under his belt and that also untold number of liaisons, was also in his less lucid moments thinking along some just such lines as an affair with Merissa (who had also been divorced twice as well), maybe more. Except. Oh yeah, except here is where it got tricky, where Larry’s calculations sort of misfired. Larry was, as he learned as they went along, ah, still “married,” had been emotionally “married” for many years to Laura in his head although he was only beginning to realize that, although as mentioned in his e-mail to Merissa for a number of years past they had been living as “roommates.” Roommate meaning separate beds, mostly separate lives, and most definitely no sex. That hard little fact, that “marriage” fact, a fact that I kept mentioning to him as he got deeper into the human sink of Merissa. Naturally he would not listen at that point. 

That left Larry in a quandary. He knew, just like Merissa knew, that he desired her, wanted to have sex, make love to her. But he also knew that once that happened that a bridge would be crossed, or so that was his thinking at the time. Still Merissa was there, still he wanted her so one Friday afternoon he called her up out of the blue and told her to meet him at a hotel in Portsmouth. And that was their high point, the acme of their thing. That was also the point where Larry,  back-tracking, began to squirm a little both at what he had done, that bridge that he had crossed and that home he had left behind for a minute. The omens thereafter were not good, although he never spoke other than in general terms of those nights to me and I only knew that they had had sex from the notes he handed to me.     

But Merissa  was a fretter and a planner, not necessarily in that order so at some point between that Friday and their resumption of e-mail traffic the next day she, possessed of some dream future with Larry,  tried to find out more about Laura, about that “roommate” arrangement and what was to become of her. See Merissa had certain rules as we all more or less do in that she took pride in her serial monogamous relationships. She was with a man, and a man was with her, or no dice. Once she finished with a man that was that. She told Larry that in a set of e-mail exchanges on the subject. He in a little panic over her hard and fast position kept trying to calm her doubts, kept trying to pass over his longtime relationship as some platonic boy-scout trip, kept trying to keep his head above water with Merissa. That night, that restless Saturday night, he tossed and turned trying to mull things over in his head and came up empty. Came up with the only conclusion that made sense-end the flirtation and walk away. He, and this is characteristic of Larry, “wrote” the thing out in his head first and then at the crack of dawn gathered himself from his bed and went to the computer to compose an e-mail which he sent later that morning. Larry never gave Merissa a chance to respond since a few hours later, maybe two, he called her up and begged her to forget what he had written and that they should keep on going as best they could but that he planned to do right by her.

So they went along for a while, sometimes happy, sometimes on edge with all that future talk business in the background. Probably though the end started to crumble the month before the end when a few days after coming back from a fateful Washington trip together Merissa took a big spill, a serious fall at a pool in Portsmouth where she swam to get exercise, that broke her hip bone requiring surgery and their budding romance came to a crashing halt as she convalesced and Larry took on the unaccustomed role of care-giver- general. Not so much that incident itself since it was an accident but what it did to enforce her idleness which left her too much time to think about how she wanted him with her, wanted him to leave Laura, wanted to make those 208 plans (roughly) that Merissa spent her waking hours doing in order to have him come closer to her.

Not a meeting between them in that period went by without some variation of the on-going argument. Although there were some nice times, (one time he drove her to their Olde Saco the sites of their   youth homes both of which had been torn down since the old days and they had many laughs, and some sorrows, over that). Even when he had driven up in order to allow her to teach a seminar at UNH and then drove her the next day over to the Portsmouth General to get her cleared to be able to drive she/he/they argued over that same old, same old material.

The few days before the end had not been much better (really a few weeks Larry thought since that damn accident put her out of commission placed a damper on their affair as he became a care-giver and she a patient). The inevitable Merissa war cry of when was Larry going to leave his “wife,” when he was going to leave Laura, and what, get this, constructive steps he had taken to break with her had led to a series of arguments starting with the day that she was finally given the okay by the doctor in charge of her case at Portsmouth General to drive.

Naturally the e-mail and cell-phone traffic (actually the diminished traffic, significantly down from the days when they would sent blizzards of e-mails to each other when he thought about it later) reflected those unresolved tensions. She needed to spent that first week of liberation catching up on work, house, social chores and could only spare that next Thursday evening for them to get together and since she was going to be in the Salem (NH) area they decided to meet in Amesbury for dinner. Before that though Larry made what would be a mistake, a fatal mistake, of putting into writing some of his feelings about where they were at in their relationship. Thus he sent her an e-mail which was the final piece of evidence that things had gone drastically wrong.

They had a short acrimonious cell-phone exchange after she received that e-mail but again agreed to meet in Amesbury the next day to figure things out. That next evening things started well enough, after Merissa had ordered wine with her dinner. The net result of their discussions was that they would go on as friends for a while and see where that led. Of course to go beyond the friend stage Merissa gave no uncertain terms to the proposition that she could not go on, was “ashamed” to go on under the circumstances unless Larry got a place of his own, left Laura.

Merissa ordered another wine, unusual for her, and that must have given her courage to speak again of the e-mail. She said it read like a lawyer’s closing argument, that she had been hurt and that he was basically a bum of the month. He became incensed, yelled at her and threw money on the table for dinner and walked to the men’s room to fume. When he came back he tried to tell her his point of view but he was tired of arguing by then and just said “let it go for now.” They left, she put her hand in his arm as usual and he muttered that “they were in very bad place” as he walked her to her car. He looked at her shoes, the shoes she reminded him that she had worn in sunnier days down in Washington and he commented “that seems like a long time ago” as they arrived at her car. Rather than the usual kiss good-bye he yelled out “I’ll be in touch,” as he walked back to his own car.     

Since Merissa  was not good at directions (and the Google maps were helter-skelter on this one) Larry had consented to have her follow him out of Amesbury on Route 27 which she did until they got to the U.S. 495 South entrance. A couple of exits up she veered off onto Route 133 for home. As he shifted gears from fourth to fifth to push on up to speed in the U.S. 495 night after he saw her automobile veer off to the northern route home he breathed a sigh of relief, and of sadness. They never saw each other again.”

And the final nail, hopefully the final nail, had been driven into the idea that Larry Larkin could “go home” again. 

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Lost In The Rain-With The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Lost In The Rain-With The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter In Mind

By Allan Jackson

[All roads lead back to Markin, Peter Paul Markin, a guy from the old growing up neighborhood back in the working class, that fact is important, Acre section of North Adamsville. Lead back from my having taken his name as my moniker when I was the site manager of this publication all the way to his being an important bell weather for what went on in our generation our Generation of ’68 as it has been characterized here and elsewhere, the vaunted baby-boomer generation just now starting to pass the baton to younger generations hoping they are up to the tasks of this wonderful, weird, treacherous century as it gathers some steam. Markin whom we always called Scribe from very early on since he always had a pencil or pen and notebook at the ready in his shirt pocket to write something down and bore us with it later. Always had pen or pencil ready when our acknowledged leader of the corner Frankie Riley had something to say which I think is the original way Markin got the name. Yeah, Scribe was a piece of work and if I live to be one hundred something I am not sure now that a am on the short side of that possibility I want to make I will always think of something the bastard did or said in his short sweet sad life.

The Scribe was no generational Everyman, no way, but he did represent a certain aspect of that generation, a certain aspect of what went into making the 1960s a wasn’t that a time moment and the scourge of the night-takers who to this day have been fighting a frontal assault on whatever dreams we thought we could create. Of course certain things lead you to think about the old days when you are old enough  to have old days and for me it had been a haunting and hollow feeling in the back of my brain ever since the Fall of 2017 when I was watching Ken Burns ten part-eighteen hour Vietnam War series on Public Television. What has got me thinking about that series is how many of the experiences mainly by guys just like the guys in our Acre neighborhood paralleled Scribe’s (and my own). How we got patriotically bamboozled into serving in the military in that war. I especially related to Tim O’Brian, a guy who has written many good pieces of literature about those times, about how he too got snookered into the service by everything that he knew or felt. Every minute I watched I couldn’t help but think of Scribe, help think that if not Everyman his life story-better his dreams-were part of the mix and not the worst part either.

I don’t know about “red diaper’ babies, sons and daughters of radicals and communists when that was okay in the 1930s and early 1940s before the hammer came down and everybody had to put their heads down-or else-in that red scare Cold War night that forms part of the title to this series. I don’t know about kids from our generation who grew up in the leafy suburbs and mother had a Volkswagen or some such car to talk the kids to and fro (we, and this included Scribe’s family as well only have private transportation when there was enough money for a car otherwise we were captives of the slow-death public transportation). For that matter I don’t know about what were then called the ghettos where black people, people who later would be kindred, were huddled and abused. Didn’t know about the barrio a much lesser ethnic group then or about how the Indians, Native Americans, indigenous peoples now, survived. Or what went on, except at second hand, down in the hills and hollows of poor white Appalachia. Neither did Scribe although lightning rod that he was he actually studied up on such stuff, took an interest when all the rest of us cared about was cars, girls, and having sex with the same, with the girls. He did too but not with our desperate intensity.

What Scribe knew about, what we corner boys knew about was white working poor Northern stuff, although we probably unlike to day when identity politics of all types and were are in a cold civil war according to writer Frank Jackman shared plenty of common customs, dreams, commitments and myths with the other aforementioned groupings. What Scribe knew about was “from hunger,” our from hunger world (funny I remember he told me once he did not realize that he and his family was poor because in “the projects” where he grew up, grew up early in, everybody was poor, white poor in the golden age of up and coming for whites after World War II and it was not until sixth or seventh grade in school when kids outside the projects attended the same school that he was painfully and thoughtlessly made very aware that he was poor-from girls who scorned him for his poverty as well as other indignities. So “from hunger” fits.

That is one part Scribe but the part the part that made him that bell weather was some kind of instinct, maybe dream instinct, that something new was coming along in our times and we had better grab it with all hands since it might not last (later as it faded with the ebbing of the 1960s cultural shifts he refused to believe the fury of the times was fading, the newer world was dying, which I believe, and not just me believe, was part of his untethering, of his early death down in fucking dust-strewn back streets Sonora, Mexico dead by his own overweening from hunger appetites). I didn’t, nobody did except maybe Frankie Riley and he only because he thought it would provide him with the main chance, realize that a “new breeze” was blowing through the land. Scribe was on it from the sense he had that beatnik thing that we were just too young to have sensed was our thing although that didn’t stop Scribe from on lonely Friday nights on the corner spouting forth with verses from “fag” Allen Ginsberg’s “faggy” negro streets avenging angels Howl  which we couldn’t get him to stop yakking about.   

More of our time the time which none of us patriotic working stuff boys understood when he went with the freaking Quakers and other commies to call for nuclear disarmament or walk the sidewalks in front of Woolworth’s on Washington Street in Boston for the “n----rs” (you figure it out but that was what we called then in the Acre including Scribe early on) down South who wanted to eat lunch in the place but couldn’t by custom and threat. More sensible (to me) since he took me there were the trips to Harvard Square when beatnik turned to folkie which would turn to hippie to listen to songs and poems which were totally different from our heaven-sent rock and roll that had sustained us in the dark days of the 1950s when we didn’t know we were from hunger but knew something was missing-at least I hope we did.

But the biggest thing and it was epidemic so I don’t know how we missed it especially since Scribe endlessly harped on was when he got all of us, almost all of us except a couple of guys from the corner Ricky Rizzo and Jimmy James who had already enlisted and would perish in Vietnam and have a place of honor down on black granite in Washington, D.C., to head out to California after he came back from there and got us in the Summer of Love, 1967. That set us on a different course, set me on a different course for sure. Then the “shit hit the fan.” Scribe had decided that fateful 1967 to drop out of college, a bad mistake since was drafted the next year and sent to Vietnam. I went there too but later after I finished college and was drafted. This is where our white working class beginnings and ethos left us without a compass. Where, as Tim O’Brian in that Ken Burns series eloquently put it, was there space in small town, neighborhood but it might as well have been a small town since the ethos was the same to rebel against induction. Who including patriotic World War II serving parents would have supported us. And so Scribe’s fate was cast, cast in a very different way than we would have expected earlier in the decade. After ‘Nam he never was the same although he wrote some great stuff, did some great politic work but the “real” world was getting nastier and nastier and not where he expected it to go. So a “lost boy.” Still fifty years later all roads lead back to Markin. Allan Jackson]    

*********

Peter Paul Markin, but after this introduction just Markin, at least that is what I have always called him ever since we first met down in my hometown of Hullsville in the summer of 1964 was for a long time out of step with his generation. Or at least I, Jimmy Jenkins, have always liked to think that he was out of step with the best part of our generation, the generation of ’68 name so by me and others later to reflect that ebb-tide year when all hell broke loose and many things were possible, the part of our generation that tried to turn the world upside down, tried the great decade boxed in jail-break out. It was not that Markin did not have appetites, in fact after many talks with him I found like many working-class kids from hunger like the two of us he had huge appetites, for changing the world, a world that neither he nor I created but which we each on our own way had wanted to spin on a different axis. To include us in the day to day calculations. My story was rather simple as I simply went with the flow as it drifted toward a counter-cultural expression but Markin, well, Markin’s is something else again.   

But enough of trying to tease out an explanation and let’s get to the skinny, the story.  Hullsville is about twenty miles south of Markin’s hometown of North Adamsville which meant that ordinarily the chances of us meeting were slim seeing that after graduation from high school he was going off to college in Boston and I was getting ready to go to work in Jim Snyder’s Auto Body Shop over on Route 3A on the Hingham line to make some money and maybe after a while go into the service and then to college on the GI Bill since our family did not have dollar one to send me to college. Moreover while the teachers in school called me smart, some said too smart and one old-time History teacher who looked like he might have participated on the White side in the Russia civil wars after the revolution in 1917 called me a “Bolshevik” once for giving a snarly answer to one of his silly questions about some date in history, I was too much into being a corner boy to keep up my grades enough to get some scholarship help like Markin got. Nobody called him a Bolshevik then as far as I know and he never mentioned anything like that after I told him one time the History teacher story, and how he had kept me after school a few days running when I did not give him what he considered an appropriate answer to why I was acting like Bolshevik in his class. 

What is remarkable, remarkable when you think about how possessive and cut-throats guys were in those days about girls and girlfriends and we were no exceptions, was the way we met one night shortly after we had graduated from our respective high schools at the Sea ‘n’ Surf Ballroom in my hometown.  This locally famous dance hall, now long gone to condominiums, had been located right at the start of the ocean end of Hullsville, an oceanfront which extended the length of the town right up to the Daley Point Lighthouse. The place catered to those from eighteen to twenty-one who could not legally drink liquor and only served soft drinks and snacks. That oceanfront had been a draw in its own right for those moments during dance hall intermission when guys and gals went out to for smoke, a cigarette smoke then as far as I know although I had heard rumors that in California people were smoking other stuff, marijuana, and Markin had told me that he had read about the “beats” who came a little before us, you know Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, guys like that in the Village, out in North Beach places like that who were high all the time on bennies and marijuana so there could have been some of that going on too. Maybe the guys and gals, and this I know from my own frayed nerves especially around girls then, girls who I might try to pick up, fed up with the soda inside stepped out to gain “liquid courage” with some cheapjack low-end Johnny Walker whiskey to calm the nerves, and later in the evening, those midnight hours, that oceanfront acted as a local lovers’ lane complete with some car window-fogging action for those who got lucky, or were horny.

The Sea ‘n’ Surf in those days held a weekly rock ‘n’ roll dance in the main ballroom all year-round on Friday and Saturday nights, Sunday afternoons were left to real ballroom dancing by those like our parents who did not know fast-dancing or anything like that and the rest of the week the place stood empty. Back then the main ballroom featured a live cover band, the famous Rockin’ Ramrods, locally famous anyway, who went on to front at many concerts like when the Stones and Grateful Dead were in Boston although they never quite had enough of whatever it took to make it big on their own.

See that night we both, Markin and I, had our eyes set on the same girl, same young woman, if we were talking about her now, Laura McCarthy, who was nothing but a heart-breaker. Heart-breaker in a lot of ways but mainly, which both of us were clueless about at the time since we had been nothing but grinds and narrowly- focused guys, because she, an absolutely ethereal beauty all wispy and dreamy like some Botticelli model  was maybe a step ahead of her time in her sense of sexual liberation (or at least wanting to break the mold of that prevalent mores of working one’s way steadily toward the marriage altar), of being her own woman and of being into the very closed “new dope” scene, meaning LSD, mescaline, peyote buttons, and the like not the junkie nose candy or H stuff like some Nelson Algren junkie man with a golden arm Frank Sinatra thing in the movies and he trying go cold turkey all for Kim Novak and making a mess of it. (I did not know until a few years later that a Botticelli model is what Laura should have been compared too since I had never been to an art museum and Markin only mentioned it later after he had taken some required Art Appreciation course and I had seen a photograph of one of his paintings, and after he had showed it to me and we both immediately thought of that little long gone heart-breaker)

So yes we became friends out of trying to make the same girl who played us like we were on yo-yo strings, and subsequently dumped both of us in succession, me last, and left plenty of lovelorn scars on our psyches. We had heard back then that Laura had subsequently drifted to a commune out in Taos, New Mexico and she might still be there for all we know as improbable as that sounds. But in the ins and outs of that competition for her favors is a whole other story, a boy-girl story that has been told since Adam and Eve time, maybe before, and not knowing that information does not add to the story I want to tell you about what was taking place with Markin in the mid-1960s. A time when we were trying to figure out all the implications of that new wave blowing across America, a generic youth wave which included Markin and me too, a wave away from almost everything our parents, all those in charge, and other interested parties were into as we sought the newer world that we expected was just around the corner where we would finally be free to express ourselves in a world that we had created, or at least had a say in. But I will fill you in on the general outlines of that big picture quest as I go along. Right now this is about Markin’s long journey on that road, longer that one would have thought when the dust finally settled later but once you knew everything that drove him back then it makes sense that it would be nothing but a long journey, and a close thing in the making at that when all is said and done. 

Now that we have it straight on the Markin moniker part, the name part which I said before I have always called him and not just me since that is what everybody in old North Adamsville except his dear mother, Delores, well, maybe not so dear but his mother anyway, and later his first frenetic ex-wife, Joyce, which explains a lot about why she was an ex-wife called him we can try to fit the pieces together that made up Markin then (strangely Joyce had been  another woman that we both lusted after but I did mine in secret, or a little subtly, since she always had eyes for Markin from the first and my only hope was that she would fall off his train but she never did, damn, she never did, and when they split she headed to Frisco so I never had a proper shot at her. Markin when we talked about it much later after many other affairs fell through for both of us gave me plenty of reason to be glad that she never got her hooks into me, although I still think I would not have minded taking the ticket, taking the ride back then). Markin never could figure out then what the attraction was for all those desperate children of the light camped out, rain or shine, on the Boston Common in that summer of love year, 1967. (That desperate part strictly in Markin’s head, maybe the “children of light” part too but the “desperate” part tells a lot about the way that Markin saw the new wave coming, knew it was coming but was totally out of synch with what was coming down like I say driven by his own life’s trajectory and his outsized dreams). This was not some abstract question since a number of his old time friends, his corner boys, a couple of whom I met before they headed west, headed west physically and in their minds to a very different place than they had talked about on those lonely Friday nights in front of their bowling alley hang-out.

A lot of what went on back then, a lot of the questioning, a lot of things that were pulling people every which way was associated with the west just like out forbears, including our immediate spiritual forbears, the “beats” who through their writing, through their life-style and through the sheer fact that they themselves were always physically heading west in those broken-down, stolen, or hitch-hiked cars and trucks drove us that way. (Strangely as far removed from the “beat” scene as Markin was he was fascinated by their writings, especially Kerouac’s, a working-class former football hero who he said “spoke” to him in some literary way. What he hated was the dope, “fag,” hey that’s the word we used, midnight sunglasses part tied in with a little plebian anti-intellectualism carried over from those North Adamsville streets where “street smart” trumped “book smart.”) Those old corner boys from the old town had “gone over to the other side” as Markin saw the matter when he heard where they had gone, gone to ground on that very Common with the other desperate children, saw them turning seemingly in a minute from stolid old corner boys holding up walls in front of Doc’s Drugstore, Salducci’s Pizza Parlor or the Jack Slack’s Bowling Alleys (along with him) to drug addicts, ne’er do wells and vagabonds. No question in those days no matter what else was going through his mind Markin was a man out of sorts with his generation, out of sorts with the wave, out of sorts about what I thought although I had been a little slow to pick up on the wave myself being stuck in that garage job in Podunk.

Funny that “drug addict” business, Markin actually used that word when talking about all the new smells in the air when we went to rock concerts and dances in those days say in 1965, 1966, reflected Markin’s old-timey notion picked up from some black and white 1930s morality play film or cautionary tale about those who went off the straight and narrow that “smokin’ a bone,” having a marijuana joint, a few puffs to ease the burdens of life would inevitably lead to life of crime, rapine, debauchery and about sixteen other social evils. Or maybe he got it from reading Nelson Algren’s Man With The Golden Arm (which he told me about after he had read the book, filled in the story for me since my take had been based on the film adaptation with Sinatra and Novak which I vaguely remembered my parents had taken us in tow to see since there was no money for baby-sitters and young kids got in free with an adult) or from one of Algren’s haunting short stories about people on the edge, doper-related short stories where the parties were led into the rude life of junkies and spiraled down from there.

A lasting image of the time for me, an image picked up now in retro-1960s “hippie” nostalgia exhibitions, movies, memoirs and from folk tales sputtered out by the now aging remnant, was of dazed kids in all kinds of exotic regalia, some carefully crafted to give a certain look for the cameras that were swirling around at the time when everybody, every journalist too, was looking to see what the “scene” was about.  Others just thrown together haphazardly with whatever was at hand, at hand being from the nearest “free” box, the latest offering from some skid row Army and Navy store or whatever somebody straight people had donated for resale at the Sally’s (Salvation Army), who obviously had been at the hash pipe, the joint or had swallowed something not on Doc’s Drugstore list. 

All harmless, mostly. That ne’er-do-well business reflected, including the use of the term, the moral pounding that Markin had taken as a child and teenager from Grandmother Riley about the dangers of drink, about laying around and becoming a wastrel, worse a charge on the state like her own brother before they found him in a dark alley in Boston’s South End and put him in a potter’s grave before the family could find out about what happened. (Markin’s first drink had come via that same grandmother who having had a crippling accident at some time earlier in her life had been house-bound for years and would ask him to go get her prescriptions from Doc’s Drugstore, real name of the place, and so Doc got used to seeing him for her orders. On occasion she would also order a small flask, a pint of whiskey, to have when her sisters came to visit. Although underage Doc would just place the bottle in the same bag as the pills and lotions. One time when he was about sixteen he decided that he wanted to taste what liquor was like and so when he went to Doc’s for the order he added a bottle in. No questions asked. He said that when he drank the stuff, drank the whole bottle with a friend down at Adamsville Beach he was sick for days after). But that was the start of the ne’r-do-well campaign for him although many nights including the night not long along when we were talking about the “1960s wave” that he was befuddled by at first we were sitting in Rummy Jacks’ over in Cambridge sipping whiskeys and scotches. That vagabond thing was something he thought about, maybe more when he saw photographs  which looked like something out of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath with rootless people, old Okie tramps, toothless hags, not well put together, just picking up stakes and heading west. So no Markin was not at all sympathetic to the new migration, to the new consciousness, to that new wave that was sneaking up on us.

Where did it all come from, why was he so adamant about hating that whole scene with a vengeance, of seeing it as a threat even, more importantly, going out of his way to belittle those who were seeking a different way of doing their life’s business, of chilling out before being burned out, including more than one go around with me causing a rift between us for certain short periods. A lot of it had to do with his grandmother, Grandmother Riley (the one who he used to get the medications at Doc’s for) and her worldview. See Markin’s home life was hell (as was mine as well), his mother always on his case, always trying to cramp his style, always saying no to any project he expressed interest in, any request for a couple of bucks, anything, okay and so he sought refuge at grandmother’s house a few blocks away (although he told me once it was more like ten thousand miles away with the quiet and the food that she would provide him, well-made food unlike at home where his hard-pressed  mother was an indifferent cook serving indifferent food). The price he paid for that refuge though was an indoctrination in the small-minded house-bound views of his grandmother. So as the hippie movement surfaced in the media old grandmother would go into her take on the matter for his edification, his edification about drug addicts, ne’er-do-wells, and vagabonds.        

In short as his sainted grandmother, sainted for putting up with a crotchety old grandfather if nothing else, would say the “queer people” and not for their sexual orientation as now because everybody in the old neighborhood knew those kind of queers as “fags,” “light on their feet” or “different” but in the old Irish sense, the sense in which the playwright Brendan Behan used it in one of his plays, the sense instilled in him as well by his mother (nee Riley), she too of the “different” usage passed on from grandmother (to give a true case of that being “different” a guy from the house across from his own, Johnny was “different” since, although thirty-five years old, he still lives with his mother, does not have a girlfriend, expresses no interest in having a girlfriend much less marriage, drinks his drinks at the all men’s tavern across the road and is always when not in the pub going into the South End in Boston to the clubs there. It did not take much even for naïve Markin when told these facts how Johnny was different, the “fag”) Meaning more broadly that those who did not profess their faith as often as possible (that faith being the true church Roman Catholic faith and not some heathen Protestant or worse Christ-killer Jewish faith which formed something like the cycle of life around which Markins and Rileys did their daily business. The Sunday masses, the holy days loaded with sweet-smelling incense, the dreaded Saturday confessions, the first communion/confirmation/six other sacraments and a damper around anything that smacked of idolatry), those who did not stay away from the drink, keep clear of the ever-present taverns that dotted the neighborhood landscape more numerous in number than the churches that dotted the neighborhood tempting many a man to part with his hard-earned paycheck  before he got home to his wife and her weekly bill-paying envelopes. (Many a wife stood guard at many a tavern door on payday, usually Thursday when the shipyard was running strong provided many jobs in the area, in order to fill those desperate envelopes although many a husband got wise and would head out of town to do his Thursday night drinking until many a wife got wise and stood guard at the bank to cut many a husband off at the pass. Some husbands though nevertheless spent the paycheck and so every once in a while you would see a neighbor’s apartment in a triple-decker tenement vacated in the middle of the night with everything packed up and gone, including some Jimmy who had become your best friend now gone with no forwarding address.)

Drugs, marijuana or whatever you called it in your neighborhood, cocaine, you know cousin, junk, you know heroin, were beyond mother and grandmother comprehension, were so far from their home tragedies that bringing that up as something to “stay away from” in order to live the good life never would have occurred to them in a thousand years then. That scourge would come later and hit them and the neighborhood with full force, as night time robberies, jack-rolling, and auto theft became rampart as the need for a “fix” moved from the movie screen or a clever book by the likes of Nelson Algren to next door and all subject to some God forsaken whim of some dope feign, those who did not work hard (and often, unlike some transient skid row bums working for daily pay and be quick about it in order to get their hands on a vagrant bottle of booze, taking whatever brainless damn work was available if necessary especially po’boy father’s like Markin’s to the coals mines of Kentucky born and thus in the razzle-dazzle of the greater Boston labor market reduced to last hired, first fired work where he could get it mainly in some outfit loosely affiliated with the old town’s declining shipbuilding industry), or did not  sanctify their lusts with marriage were odd, were outsiders in their own community (and lustful girls too although every boy, every man wanted to touch their satin sheets, hell, their good Catholic linen sheets damned to hell and called whore, whore of Babylon for those who had read their scripture and lustful boys called perverts, called Onan, call seed-spillers and succumbers to wretched linen sheets after some rabid priest called them calamites from the pulpit on high).

So when Markin heard the news, presumably from mother and grandmother, that old junior high school fellow corner boy Timmy Kiley (the star quarterback on the black and red Red Raider high school football team although not considered bright enough to do much more than toss balls, well or poorly, and so reduced to clerkship in his uncle’s downtown North Adamsville clothing store after his high school heroics went silently to some local newspaper grave), high school corner boy Red Kelly (fresh from two years with Uncle seeing hazardous duty in red scare Cold War Germany and not in hellhole hot war Vietnam but the service broke him from that knee-jerk patriotism,  that easy-going Fourth of July and salute the flag that had been handed down from generation to generation since sometime before the Spanish-American war, Teddy’s splendid war, and so when the wave broke, broke in New York City and out in Frisco town first he grabbed onto the damn thing, the wave as we are calling it now and a guy, well, a journalist like Hunter Thompson called it then, called it, sadly, when he saw its ebb and flow hit the ebb tide, damn, like a man struggling for a life-preserver), ditto corner boy Sean Murphy (the pretty boy on the stoop, out in the corner boy night, who got married right out of  high school to the belle of the ball, Sarah Bennett, the senior prom queen until she, and then they, discovered that their projected parent-trap endorsed by Good Housekeeping and expectant grandparents went to an all-night party and got stoned and liked it , liked the idea that they could be close but free of bourgeois convention, a term that was beginning to make the rounds as a sign of disenchantment) and sometime corner boy Bob Stone (heady Bob who had gone out to California in the summer of 1965 after dropping out of college and fully partaking of what was out there after finding a waif woman named Magic Sunshine, high as a kite on mary jane but also high on life, high on folk wisdom that would later turn into a huge industry when the new age turned into the New Age, on Fillmore Street one late night who had actually been to one of Ken Kesey’s acid blow-outs in La Honda, knew the long-running sagas of the magical mystery tour yellow brick road school bus that Tom Wolfe would eulogize in his sociological treasure-trove The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and turned him around, or better as I resurrect the language of the time “turned him on”) had taken up the “queer” life he could not understand why, or what made such things attractive to them.

Couldn’t understand why the discontent, why the infernal searching, why the need to blast the church, and remember which church in case you forgot, and remember too that blasphemous Markin even then had quietly slipped away from church, had taken to spending his Sunday mornings with some heathen for a night woman, thankfully, messing up the sheets and causing any number of hers, since he was still hell-bent on Irish Catholic women, to miss Mass. Forget confession or anything exotic like that but he still hung to the basic feeling of the faith, the basic square-ness of the faith in a faithless world even if only because his future plans, his political plans required at least lip service to the old pieties, could understand why blast the education system for allegedly making them helpless against the big modern current that was ready to crash down on their heads, their parents who did not understand why they were rebelling against the golden American age, against the steel, iron, aluminum world that had bequeathed to them, why it had turned to ashes in their mouths, and worse, worse because he represented the social glue that held the society together, the President of the United States. And for Markin, Markin the born in the manger rising from the ashes guy who expected to ride the political rails to his own worthy future drew the line in the sand at that proposition. Could not see the point, whatever one thought of the war in Vietnam that was also causing his generation to kick up some dust, and he was not quite sure what he thought about that war although he knew when his time came if he was drafted and the war was still on as appeared more and more likely that he would to go just like generations before had done since Markins and Rileys had come to the American shores from the old countries.

See just then worthy college student Markin had it all mapped out, had it figured that he would ride the political whirlwind to get as he said to anything who would listen to him on the corner “get his while doing good in the world,” that first coming from his from hunger existence, from his huge unabated, unquenched wanting habits, the second from some home-spun god Catholic Worker stuff he had read about in school and that his Aunt May  would talk to him about when he went over her house (her house more of a journey and so used less frequently as a refuge since she lived across town in Adamsville proper and that required taking the damn private line bus which never seemed to come when he needed it and so the less frequently) when the whirlwind at home was too fierce for him to combat (and when Grandmother Riley was firmly taking her daughter’s side on those few occasions when that event occurred). So, truth to tell he would rock no boats, would not try to turn over the fig leaf that was holding society together, and decidedly would not call the President of the United States a whoremonger, a baby-killer or oversized baboon with the brain of an amoeba who needed to be castrated, or worse. No, up and coming junior politicians on the make just did not do that in 1965, 1966 maybe forever. Markin already had his mind made up in the summer of love of 1967 when all the social glues were coming undone, when kids his age were shedding good sense, good taste, good lives to become vagabonds in some ill-defined lustful night he fully intended to support the President against the main scourge of the age, one Richard Milhous Nixon who was beginning to rear his ugly head once again. Once again Nixon acting like the beast with five claws ready to do muck to everything it touched. So Markin had no time for fallen corner boys, for dreaming guys who used to have their heads on right, who wanted to say “fuck you” to all that he liked about his America.              

And it was not for lack of asking that Markin could not understand his old-time corner boys (who at some down-the-road point he expected to form the initial cadre for any political operation he was going to run but he was damned if he was going to have dope-addled, long-haired unwashed, what were they starting to call them, oh yeah, hippies and their caravans and love trains ruin his beautiful dream, no sir). A dutiful son of the working-class (and just plain street smart hustler if you thought about the matter), working his way through college by driving a truck on a route through downtown Boston he would after making a delivery at one of his stops on Beacon Street walk across to the tent-festooned Common to search his old corner boys out when possible and try to reason with them (those attempts to reach them, not the reason for doing it part, were done always assuming that he could get a parking spot rather than double-park as was his usual habit but was considered ,well, not good form for  longer than the time it took to deliver his goods and he had a couple of traffic citations to verify the truth of that “not good form”). 

Their arguments however seemed ridiculous to him, or at least did not seem worth the effort, the effort they called “creating the counter-culture” or that was the expression that Sean Murphy, the most intelligent of the tribe and the one that Markin respected the most used to defend the new life-style that Sean and the others and their brethren were embarked upon. The life-style including a new-found disinterest in keeping their hair groomed (which would have shocked Tonio, the barber “up the Downs,” who specialized in one cut, boys’ regular, and had even looked askew at Markin when he, in order not to be completely outside the new generational norm wore his sideburns a little longer like some second-coming of Elvis), growing mustaches and beards (Timmy looking nothing but a scraggly muppet with his chin whiskers which he kept solely because some chick had told him he looked cool that way), wearing what Markin could  only describe as second-hand “Bargie” (a pre-Wal-Mart-type store that sold low-priced, and odd-ball merchandise out of fashion at best), stuff that he, and formerly they, were required out of poverty to wear when they got, or rather their mothers got them their twice-yearly new clothing at the beginning of school and at Easter). The “in” wardrobe stripped pants, frilly-cuffed shirts, holey bell-bottom blue jeans, threadbare sandals, all guaranteed not to hold up for the length of time it would take to become hand-me-downs for younger brothers and outer garments from Jay’s Army and Navy Store, things like World War II army jackets (Markin had to laugh at that one since all his old corner boys with the exception of Red who had already done his military service and so could justifiably wear such garb were committed to opposition to LBJ’s war front, were instinctively anti-military, although all their now befuddled fathers had been through hellhole World War II and yet reached out in desperation to be part of an army, if only Gideon’s), Eisenhower, Jesus, Eisenhower jackets, used (Markin, and they did too, used to run home at noon break in elementary school to watch Big Brother salute old man Ike with a glass of milk, didn’t these guys remember or were the drugs and the life so corrosive that they had lost their memory banks), navy skullcaps (last used one night when they were hungry for dough and had heard about a big house with nobody home had taken what they wanted under such cover), dog soldier army black leather boots (with some poor GIs’  shine so sarge could see himself reflected in the boot’s glory long gone, long gone to rain-pelted muds, wore-out heels from walking as much as hitching out on the great American highway west, long-gone to kicking out the jams if it came to that come some midnight fire festival with magic elixirs, magic bongos, magic kazoos in a pinch, the works).

But the clothing regalia would not end there for everything in the new dispensation had to reflex the new color world explosion, the mauves, violet purples, magentas, tangerines, white blacks, you name it, and in Day-Glo the pigment for the new age a-dawning. The exploded world seen through LSD or mescaline lenses if one could explain to the square or hip alike the colors bleeding in their chemical heads. The mushroom cloud of the new reality splintering visions about twelve different ways (hey, only an estimate could have been fifty or a hundred who knows) so exploding purple apples, orange bananas, magenta pears, and that was just the fruits and even Markin knew they were not fruits like you though just like they were not queer like you and your Irish South Boston/Dorchester/North Adamsville brethren kept harping on but that didn’t save Timmy, Sean and the boys from going under it spell. After a few months, he stopped going over to the national encampment (the guys were tired too of his noise they had once collectively said to him half in jest half in rancor).  See he had met down in Falmouth during that summer of love July a young woman, Jewel Diamond. (Jesus he was tired of all the name changes like changing a name would do the trick to produce a new identity. He respected, at least he thought he respected, those blacks who during this time, those who came out of the extreme end of the black liberation struggle, called the black civil rights movement then but they are both the same thing, who wanted no part of their old slave names and so were X this and X that but white- breads had no such history to eradicate)  Jewel wanted to show her new boy a trip around the world in her bedroom, wanted in too on his soft-shell political dreams (thinking she would be some latter day Jackie O, some White House princess) wanted just like him to have that white picket fence complete with white shingled house, couple of kids, and a dog and wanted to be a step or two ahead of where their parents had left off and so she dreamed with him, while taking her daddy around the world (yeah, she was that kind of girl half-virgin mary, half-whore and half her mother’s daughter), yes, dreaming that dream.    

Now Markin was not so square, or better to say in those days, un-cool, as not to  appreciate that young guys might want to get high, get laid (he could certainly understand that since half, no, nine-tenth of corner boy life was about getting some easy sex from some fox and if not some fox then some young thing who wanted no commitments just like him, better yet get some head, you know, the “toot the root” that a guy could talk a chick into in lieu of having vaginal intercourse with all its dangers, some head like that Jewel from down the Cape could be talked into if you gave her a couple of drinks or if she had taken her medication and had those same drinks which made her speedy), and lay around all day philosophizing about the world and never get beyond cleaning up their tents, if that. (Not that Markin was above a marathon philosophy talk spending many a night talking of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill like they were second cousins but would give the air to Baba Ram Dass, Timothy Leary or even Eric Hoffer when those names came up, pure hippie words in the night madness)

Also Markin could appreciate guys getting out from under mother’s and/or grandmother’s apron strings as he himself had done just the previous year since he and his mother had had their twelve-hundredth argument about when he got home, who he was hanging with, what he was intending to do with this or that girl (no, not the sex thing, Jesus, no, the word was obliterated from the Markin household vocabulary and he had learned whatever he had learned about sex in the streets and on the corners just like his former corner boys who were boffing every girl in sight, and, get this, them, the girls starting things up, starting with that come hither look and their own sexual vocabulary learned in their streets), was he going to settle down and get married  right after college, stuff like that. So no he was no square like that and truth be known, although not to mother or grandmother who would have flipped out, gone wiggy if they knew that he had been with a heathen women, a bloody Protestant girl who he had run into one night at Jack’s, Jacks’ over in Cambridge where some musical infusions were starting to roar up and take the sails out of stogy old folk music that had died years before but if you went into some of the coffeehouses still existed there (although only in that town in homage to some worthy past) you would still get twenty-seven varieties of Bob Dylan covers done off-key (if that was possible with that gravelly voice) or Joan Baez ironing-board haired princesses calling for the world to kumbaya, kumbaya until the next century from what the scene looked like.

Some called it acid rock, some called it flamingo for all he knew but that night high on his Irish whiskey sots she was sitting at the bar, all ethereal, all feathers and fandangos and no bra (no bra a victory for every shy boy who ever tried to unhook some strange virginal girl and get it all wrong and, damn, she had to unhook the damn thing herself), a tent-like dress worn just so, what did she call it when he asked about it, oh yeah, hippie chic. She just in from Fargo just out in the Dakotas having fled some scene that he was not privy to but which made Boston seem like Frisco town thought he, slightly side-burned, lean, with a wicked Boston accent (really filtered neighborhood North Adamsville Irish-flecked accent but to the rubes from Fargo wicked Boston), she having no experience bought his line of patter, gave him some speed and they stayed up all night at his place making love and talking like two magpies. But even Markin knew he was just slumming around the edges of the new dispensation that night since she was there, she was available and she thought he was nice so that hippie chic business should not be weighed heavily in the Markin argument. Who knows she could have, like a later Angelica, Angelica from out in Muncie just been tasting the wares before going back to whatever the Great Society was offering in its turn.                      

See that is where Markin was really at, really just another in a long line of Irish guys, Irish on the cookie-cutter machine guys, guys on the hustle except the hustle played out with him getting his while he was helping the brethren. (Old Aunt May invoked at every turn.) He would eat much crow, eat many words as each new treachery wended  its way around his brain but he was young, was committed to the easy life of an “on the make” politician who would not sell his mother to the highest bidder so he had his virtues since most of the previous generation’s “pols” had done just that. Yeah, the map was set, maybe not in every detail but set. He had already that summer of love although he heard war cry rumblings from the likes of Eugene McCarthy’s tribe and that of his own gangster saint Robert Kennedy hero that they might oppose the President on the war issue, make him pay hell at the polls if he listened to the never-ending requests for men and materials from the generals, committed to LBJ in that eternal fight against the impeding dirty nasty fight that was coming. Had lined up Jewel Diamond (she would have to get rid of that moniker and go back to being Joyell but he would humor her for now, especially since she was quite inventive in bed and had the heart of a princess-warrior then). All he needed as he headed into 1968, all he thought he had to do was get that degree, do his military service if he was drafted, get married (in the church of course, no one would countenance the simple civil ceremony he would have personally preferred) and ride LBJ’s wave into some cushy Washington job and that white picket fence was a sure thing.        

…And then came the notice from his friends and neighbors at the draft board in North Adamsville. Having exhausted his college deferment and with the recent withdrawal of exemptions for law students which would have been his obvious shelter had that route been available he was prime material for induction. Although Markin had softened somewhat on his stand of emphasizing the good parts of the Vietnam War in the fight against world-wide communism and his former adherence to the “domino” theory that if one nation in Southeast Asia fell all would fall which drove all thinking the death of Jack “Bone-Crusher” Maloney who lived down the at the end of his street, a guy with whom he had been a corner boy in junior high school with shook him a little. Still, although no way in hell had he intended to volunteer, enlist as regular Army, given his career plans that were tied up with doing one’s public duty would accept induction if drafted. In those days, now too probably although it no longer has the same cache, military service still counted for guys who aspire to public service careers. In early 1969 while all hell was going on in the country, while people including me were being “chicken shit” busted for opposing the war, or smoking dope, or other random acts of “being free” Markin headed south down to South Carolina for boot camp.  (As for me a couple of serious leg problems derived from childhood illnesses gave me a 4-F status, although it is still an open question whether I would have accepted induction or not since down in Hullsville whatever else they thought or cared about guy did their military service when called so despite the dope and counter-culture the pull of that would have been a factor.)       

Truth. About three or four days after he got down there I got a call from Markin, collect, at my girlfriend’s apartment in Allston where I was staying at the time which I accepted not knowing what the hell was going on. I thought poor clumsy Markin might have hurt himself or something. The gist of the call though had bene that Markin said he had made a mistake, that the whole military thing appalled him and that he, and I quote “was starting to get ‘religion’” about the war, was going back to some deep recess Aunt May Catholic Worker, social consciousness thing inherited through her from some forbears, or something. That night I thought he may have been sincere as far as he had thought it out to that point, although all those endless conversations pointed the other way.

If Markin was sincere what to do about it was another question since he was down south a long way from home and support (support he could have gotten in Boston, one of the true hotbeds of anti-war activity where many were willing to help entrapped GIs figure out a way out. But for the period of basic training and then when he was assigned to Advanced Infantry Training (AIT) he merely refined his sentiments in letters that he would sent to me every few days. That AIT designation meant only one thing-they were training him to be as he put it a “grunt,” or as I put it then “cannon-fodder” and the only place where that “skill” was needed just then was on the China Sea, in Vietnam.        

Among the things that Markin asked me to do in those long ago letters was to get in touch with some Quakers over in Cambridge to see what they thought he could do if he got orders for Vietnam. I did so, hoping against hope that he would not have to go. But at the end of AIT he did receive his orders to report to Fort Lewis out in Washington for transit to Southeast Asia. He was to have a month’s leave before then so he came home and I met him at the airport. He was leaner than when I had seen him last carrying that tell-tale duffle bag over his shoulder. But here is where I realized that he had done some serious thinking, had come part way, so I thought, over to the side of the angels. He was sporting a very busy mustache which Army regulations allowed then (although his unkempt one surely could not have passed muster) AND wearing a new pair of bell-bottomed jeans, a sign of the times.  

But that was the exterior, the look to fit in. Here was his plan. He was the next day going to Cambridge to get some advice from the Quakers about what to do, about how to forestall going to ‘Nam as he now called the place under the influence of those nasty drill sergeants he would tell me about. But that was the surface, the paper chase. Almost before we got out of the airport he made it very plain that he was not going to ‘Nam, no way. Although a look in his eyes told me he knew that there was a long road ahead.

Here is how that road unfolded. The Quakers at that meeting in their counselling center in Cambridge gave him several options, mainly about filing for conscientious objector status through the military. Although possible to apply for that was a very hard road then once you had actually been inducted and made doubly so because the basis of his objection would had to have been centered on his faith, his formal faith, Roman Catholicism which was mired in “just war theory,” and not a basis for discharge. (That “just war theory” was in fact his own position although without the Catholic trimmings, a position that he still holds today, sometimes there is no way around fighting the oppressor except by picking up the gun and that was that with all its contradictions.) But the application was merely a holding action, forlorn as that was. Another part of that option, advised informally, by one of the counsellors and not official policy was to go Absent Without Leave (AWOL) for more than thirty day, or until he had been “dropped from the rolls” at Fort Lewis and then turn himself in at Fort Devens out in central Massachusetts where he could make his CO application. Tactically, and here I admit I pushed him toward that idea, it made sense to work things out close to home and also where GI resistance support work was becoming a central focus to opposing the war. (He felt in tough moments that like those nasty drill instructors told him and his fellow recruits if you got out of line he was bound for some stockade anyway, or at least he recognized from other cases he had read and heard about that place was a possible endpoint) And so he did, did go AWOL for a while, turned himself in at Fort Devens and put in his application which held him there. Held him there until his application was denied, summarily denied on those above-mentioned grounds of not being an absolute objector to war like the Quakers, Mennonites and such. And given orders once again to report to Fort Lewis for transit to Vietnam.                

Even today the rest of the Markin Army story is a little hazy, and anytime it comes up as when the latest American war puts “grunts” at risk for some unknown, maybe unknowable reason, he will dismiss further talk with a simple “I did what I had to do, and I have no regrets about it.” Part of that haziness is that his case bent a little heavy on the legal side since I was not privy to those maneuvers but that decision to stay in the Boston area helped Markin since some people got him in touch with a lawyer and one way or another that lawyer’s work held him at Fort Devens until the legal proceedings in the civilian courts had worked its way to the end. Hazy too though because of the actions Markin had taken while those legal proceedings were working their slow way through the system. Actions done without counseling me but when I tell you what he did you will understand.

All during this period of waiting, and getting a foreboding feeling for where things would lead, lead to some stockade time that he had avoided by being contrite on the AWOL charges Markin was getting more and more serious about his anti-war position and about doing something about it. Something symbolic. Well, he sure did something, something out of the ordinary. The way I heard the story from him later went like this. One Monday morning in the late fall of 1969 when the whole fort, the whole of Fort Devens, was on the main parade grounds for what is called the morning report, basically to see who is and who is not present, not AWOL, after the weekend, Markin walked out onto the field in civilian clothes, those now not new bell-bottomed jeans included, carrying a fairly large hand-made sign-“Bring The Troops Home” for all to see. Needless to say he was quickly pounced on by some lifer-sergeants and eventually taken to the stockade for questioning and to await charges. To make a long story short, Markin spent the rest of time in the Army in that stockade, spent almost two years there, including some time in solitary (not for doing anything wrong but the Army officials were so freaked by his actions, so fearful his actions might spread, that they did not want him mixing in with the rest of the stockade population). He eventually did get out though those slow legal proceedings in civilian court otherwise as he always kids me, he might still be there.              

I was on the West Coast, in San Jose, when I heard that Markin had been released for the stockade in 1971. A couple of weeks later when I came back East and I went over to Cambridge where he was staying with some young Quaker gal whom had taken a fancy to him and he to her (and who I took a fancy to as well, living with her off and on for about a year after Markin left her for Joyce, who would be that frenetic first wife of his, since that Quaker gal was a different breathe of fresh air for both of us but in the end too good and kind for old- time rough and tumble corner boys no matter how we had changed) there he was, a little pale and smelling that faint indescribable smell of prison, growing the first remnants of a beard, letting his hair grow longer, wearing those now fading bell-bottomed denims and a leather jacket somebody had given him.       

As we talked one night a few weeks later about the future both sensing that the effect of trying to turn the world upside down had been ebbing of late I told him this when he tried to dismiss what he had done in the Army to slow the machine down. “But get this, and get it right, Peter Paul Markin has gotten in synch with his generation, in synch with the best of his generation, no, with the very best of that generation.” Enough said.      

Yet Again On Bond, James Bond-Will The Real 007 Please Stand Up- Daniel Craig’s “Casino Royale” (2006)-A Film Review

Yet Again On Bond, James Bond-Will The Real 007 Please Stand Up- Daniel Craig’s “Casino Royale” (2006)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Seth Garth

Casino Royale , starring Daniel Craig, Judith Dench, 2006

[I am not a guy who endlessly speaks about how this and that was better in the old days although surely some stuff was and some stuff today is unquestionably better as well. After yet another firestorm around this freaking two bit 007 Bond, James Bond series which site manager, Greg Green, the guy who figures what films to review and by whom in an effort, a futile effort if you ask me, to reach the younger more action film-oriented crowd I am coming to believe that maybe in the old days when the Hollywood studios sent out the press releases on films they were releasing and you took it from there better. A film reviewer, critic, acrobat or whatever you want to call him or her only had to if he or she was in his or her cups, had snorted too much cocaine or was off on a tryst for a few days just snipped off the top, added a couple of synonyms, added his or her name and sent it along for payment to whatever publication was footing the fool’s bill. (Those the days when we were getting paid by the word and could depend on some 3000 word minimum on a press release especially when the writer when crazy describing the plot. Now I can’t even charge for this foolish in brackets introduction part of the review which maybe longer than the review itself and certainly to me at least more interesting.)

I could, and maybe someday will, tell you some tales about the profession, about big time film critics like Arthur Lemay, Heddy Harnett, and our own Sam Lowell which would make your hair stand on. The beauty of the scam was that the studio, or rather the screenwriter for the film who did double-duty writing up the press release since he or she at least had the story line down even if the film was based on a book and the author had disowned the film as being nothing like he or she had written hand, wasn’t going  to complain when the reviews were uniformly positive and the poor schmuck of a writer couldn’t claim any infringement since that would expose who wrote the damn thing so nobody kicked. Nobody except the audience who actually had to watch the ton of turkeys that had gotten undeserved thumbs up. Such is life.         

Now though in the age of alternate facts, fake news, extraordinary self-serving bullshit and a phalanx of flaks, flak-catchers and screwballs with monomania you have to at least pretend that you give a damn about most films on your own dime, have to actually watch or hire somebody to watch the damn things. And make pithy comment on such or risk the scorn of some, get this, cinematic studies freshman looking to make goodie points with some erstwhile professor who couldn’t make the real film industry cut. Get cut to pieces in some arty cinema journal which nobody reads, not any live audience, except maybe those kids whose parents paid out a ton of dough so their aspiring film critic could cast scorn on guys who have really done it for a living-and survived to tell the tale.

Of course having to actually look at the film and come up with some interesting slant comes with its own set of dangers as I learned when I made a few casual comments in my last 007 review neo-007 Danny Craig’s Skyfall. I mentioned Bond creator Ian Fleming’s affair with Queen Elizabeth back in the old days in the 1950s when her old man, Prince Phillip, yeah, the Duke of Earl, no, Edinburgh up in nowhere Scotland was off with his Protestant whore out in the moors, mentioned the Rolling Stones Mick Jagger’s, now Sir Mick Jagger, 1960s affair with the good queen immortalized in his tribute song Sister Morphine (and speculated that was how he got that vaunted knighthood), and orphan boy, stone-cold killer 007 Danny Craig’s later tryst with her majesty. None of this history, none as the old time actor Sydney Greenstreet was fond of repeatedly saying was schoolboy history nor Mr. Wells’ history but was history nevertheless. And unless you are that schoolboy which excuses you from knowing anything other than the Pablum they feed you in school then some kind of mock shock at the revelations seems extremely naïve. That is all I can take from the firestorm of criticism not from the usual suspects Phil Larkin and Will Bradley who were as surprised as I was that adults were clueless about the inner workings of the royal households of Europe. While it would take about a ten thousand page book to gather in all the infidelities and off-hand trysts of the incestuous and inbred European royalty shock over modern doings seems bizarre to me.

Let me go by the numbers. Look MI6 in the 1950s was not only the plaything of Soviet spy Kim Philby or of the so-called Homintern, the public schoolboys with a fondness for other boys in their youth carried over when they ran the spy organization and clubbed up with the likes of Auden, Spender, Isherwood and the Queen’s art collector Tony Blount but of serious if bureaucratic types like Fleming who were after the main chance. Fleming saw his road to upward mobility going through Windsor Castle so when he found out the Duke was playing footsie somewhere he took his shot. It was all over the papers at the time that the Virgin Queen, part two (that was a good one back in namesake Queen Elizabeth I times when everybody from the ill-fated Earl Of Essex to the stable boy was the subject of her “favors,” wink, wink) was seeing quite a bit of a junior MI5 officer and wondering whether he was giving her the high hat on Soviet intelligence-or what.

Sure the Fleming scandal was hush-hush in the days when you could count on the media to allude to goings-on and not spread every lurid photograph on the front page but the Jagger affair was much more public in the days when Mick, not the Queen, not Her Majesty was conning older women into his expansive bed. I think Charles said something about it (while he was mussing up his own pillows) but Phillip was pleased as punch since with the Queen shooting up with a known junkie he could run around with one of his Catholic whores for solace. I urge you to go back into the archives, especially the younger set not around when the Queen was eating magic mushrooms and such. I will say in her, their defense that I was appalled as anybody else when the rumor that Mick was cavorting with Queen Mother Mary went the rounds. Is there no decency in the world at all anymore.

The Danny Craig incident is a little more problematic since he was an orphan and was trained to be an old school stone-cold killer for God, Country and the Queen. I don’t know whether it was a mother fixation or his own version of that attraction to older women that Mick went through until he got older and started going the other bopping teenagers but Danny begged to be assigned to the Queen livery or whatever they call it in order to protect her from international terrorists, the IRA, Rupert Murdoch, the late Dennis Hopper whom she called her easy rider, or Prince Phillip once he got impotent and took up with some Quaker lass. That is all I can say for now and I hope that you don’t feel cheated by the film review after all the total truth information I have just laid at your doorsteps. Seth Garth]                  

*****

I really do feel these days that Big Brother is watching over me, and not the usual suspects NSA, CIA or FBI. And no I am not paranoid at least not in this instance where I know from whence my suspicions emanated. Big Brother has a name, two names, Phil Larkin and Will Bradley two fellow reviewers on this site who have also waded in on this seemingly never-ending 007 James Bond series which somehow site manager Greg Green thought might help boost readership among the spy thriller aficionados, especially the 24/7/367 action every minute tribe. Meaning of course that is the kids who those of us who knew better have had a big laugh over since the bastards don’t read toney reviews, don’t read at all as far as I can see. Phil and Will have, or had been having a running feud over who best portrayed the spirt of 007 on the screen the former a partisan of Sean Connery and the later Pierce Brosnan. No others need apply. How I got caught up in this madness was that I have been assigned the Daniel Craig 007 segment and off-handedly mentioned that their respective selections seemed to be the two best examples of the spirit of the Bond character if skewed away from Ian Fleming’s hard copy book hardball flame-throwers. That was like meat to the sharks, the great white probably, as both tried to use that benign comment to enlist me as a partisan on their respective sides.

Of course the reality has nothing to do with the merits of any individual Bond, James Bond actor, hell one of them could have taken Roger Moore if it came to that. It has everything to do though with turf, with moving up the food chain, in the profession which is done, no fooling, by blasting the inadequacies of your fellow’s review of some film or some character. I have characterized this as worse than the back-biting in the academy which is going some since those contenders as least have some intellectual position staked out and probably an array of learned papers and conferences at their beck and call. I have also mentioned that back in the old days, Phil would know this although twenty-something Will would not, we used to just grab our copy from whatever the studios put out, what they called press releases, and either worked from that or just put our names on it and sent it in.

Now it is all about “game,” about cutthroat competition anyway and in any place you can. Thus I was drawn into the abyss by these guys. The latest “play” on this game board was a passing remark I made about a recent Craig 007 review where I mentioned that the gratuitous and seemingly non-stop violence was over the top even for action-filled Bond vehicles. That unleashed a thunderclap of comment from both Phil and Will once again pointing out that their respective candidates got by with plenty of guile and charm and didn’t have to resort to over the top bang-bang and chase scenes to get the bad guys at bay.   

Which brings us to this Casino Royale segment of the Bond legend which was actually Daniel Craig’s first run at the role of the bulky muscled super-man spy. The problem for me was that somehow things got screwed up here in the assignment department and I was given the sequel to this episode first Quantum of Solace where they are many references back to the action and particular the Bond love interest, Vesper, who like a great many of the more serious Bond love interests from the very first film Doctor No has a fatal fate in store for her.  

Of course like all post-Cold War products in this series the obvious bad guys are no longer Cold War Russian enemies or their allies but vague but widespread international criminal cartels who don’t care who or what they fund as long as the rate of return makes the grade. This one involves a young neophyte Bond working his way up the 00 chain. MI6 in the person of M, played by Dame Judith Dench, has given Bond the task of connecting the dots between a well-known financier of international terrorist organizations and that murky cartel.

In the end it is all about Bond’s ability to play high stakes poker with the high rollers, with that financier who made a serious mistake with an African mercenary group who let him invest their money in a scheme to short stock on an airline bringing out a new model which he has hired help to destroy and which James saves from destruction just in the nick of time. Hence our financier’s need for serious dough, a hundred million anyway. Bond, with the aid of fetching but as I have mentioned doomed Vesper, played by Eve Green, his “banker” from the British Treasury and later love interest through several travails including being poisoned by the financier’s girlfriend wins “the pot.” Not good, not good at all by that loser financier’s light and so Bond and Vesper are kidnapped to fork up the dough won at the gambling tables. Bond won’t give up the password to the Swiss account even under torture so as we later find out Vesper, now Bond’s lover, bargained with the bad guys for his life in exchange for the money. That did not sit well with Bond as he thought she had sold the whole operation out. According to M Vesper bargained the dough for the bastard ingrate Jimmy’s life. But that was later long after Vesper had died during the big final scene where Jimmy is facing off against the bad guys in Venice. Like I said the Bond character is hell on women, eye candy love them and leave them as earlier in the series and of late when there is some intimacy and sharing of emotions reflecting a difference sensibility these days.

I noticed when looking at the Internet to see how at the time reviewers critiqued this one they were very favorable in their estimations. A good number thought the change to a more original Ian Fleming book-based stone cold killer even if for a good old cause take made the grade. That and the romance for more than two minute copulation end. I have already mentioned that I thought the plot was thin against other efforts and that the violence and mayhem was way over the top. I guess I have to add now this reversion to a more originally Fleming conceived character did not sit well with me after what Sean had built up from day one. Phil and Will make of that what you will.