This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Saturday, August 02, 2014
The Latest From The Cindy Sheehan Blog
http://www.cindysheehanssoapbox.com/
A link to Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox blog for the latest from her site.
Markin comment: I find Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox rather a mishmash of eclectic politics and basic old time left-liberal/radical thinking. Not enough, not nearly enough, in our troubled times but enough to take the time to read about and get a sense of the pulse (if any) of that segment of the left to which she is appealing. One though should always remember, despite our political differences, her heroic action in going down to hell-hole Texas to confront one President George W. Bush in 2005 when many others were resigned to accepting the lies of that administration or who “folded” their tents when the expected end to the Iraq War did not materialize. Hats off on that one, Cindy Sheehan. *************
Additional Markin comment: I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. ********
**The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II…The Inkspots If I Didn't Care
For Prentice John Markin and Delores Maude Markin (nee Riley) who lived through it all, survived it all, and never drew a blessed break…
He spied her or she spied him they never did quite agree on who did the first peeking but both agreed that their earliest encounter proved both fruitless and frustrating. Fruitless and frustrating but would turn out not to be quite the "that was that" and never more of the first meeting. Let's pick up their story from there...
…Well not quite that was that. The very next Friday night, a night she had for some reason not volunteered to do refreshment service, she Agnes, Dorothy, and a couple of other young women from the office pool found their way to that weekly USO dance. And guess who was there in his dress blues doing a double-take when she came into the ballroom lobby (she had not been sure at first that it was a double-take but when he looked her way again a second later she knew). Of course that look did not make him stop his world, his pretty young thing he was talking to world. And did not stop him from taking that pretty young thing out onto the dance floor when that week’s cover band, Dick Glover and The Rovers, played the upbeat Andrews Sister’s tune Rum and Coca-Cola whilethey danced. She was glad, mostly glad, that she had not succumbed to his charms the previous week.
Then the “not quite that was that ” started as a few dances later he swayed his wiry frame over to her and her crowd to say “hi” and to ask her for a dance (as “their song, ” or what would become their song, If I Didn’t Care, came on). She said yes, and so they danced, danced a couple of dances in a row. Then the rules of the USO dance for hostesses to mix closed in on them and another soldier requested a dance. Later at intermission he again spoke to her, asked her once again if he could wait for her at the end of the dance. Again she said no. Same thing when he asked her for a date. No. He couldn’t figure her out, couldn’t figure why she seemed to reject him out of hand when he sensed she liked him. What he did not know, could not know then was that besides her feeling that he was strictly a love them and leave them guy, that Sheik designation whatever his story to the contrary told it all, and that she should not succumb to his charms there was another reason. After mentioning him to her mother, mentioning that he was from the south, her mother warned her off. Reason: Tyrant father, tyrant Irish Catholic father (although barely observant) would raise holy hell, would go crazy if she brought some redneck Protestant around. And so whatever she felt, they would be doomed before they started. Still he…
…Yes, still he disturbed her sleep that week, made her a little cuckoo at work and around the house if you asked anyone within fifty feet of her. Was made more cuckoo when she talked to that non- observant Irish Catholic tyrant father about his opinion (theoretically, of course) of southerners, American southerners, Protestants, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, the British kind, and Marines (she did not add the love them and leave them kind). His response was horrific. Yes, he had opinions of all three categories, none good, and not just none good. He sensed what she was getting at (her mother had vaguely posed the question to him earlier in the week) and said in no uncertain terms that he would not, his word, abide, an ignorant, uneducated (this before she even knew her Marine’s lack of formal education), whiskey-drinking (despite his rages her father was a tee-totaller having survived a drunken besotted father), redneck southern Protestant (or northern Protestant for that matter) ne’er –do-well Marine, or any other military man from that part of the country in his house. End of conversation, forever.
Still she thought of him, wondered whether he would be at the dance that week. Maybe he had shipped out, maybe he was off with some pretty young thing (although those fierce brown eyes when he spoke to her should have told her otherwise). In any case she was going to make her case, despite her father (or who knows maybe because of the old tyrant) and despite her qualms about his intentions. So come that Friday she prepared herself, put on her best party dress (which had first served as her graduation dress but with the war efforts eating up textiles at a prodigious rate serious dresses were not be had), make herself up special with a little rouge and some ruby red lipstick and, and, put on nylons, nylons, even more than special dresses not to be had then. Her best come hither soldier boy look.
And you know that he was there, the Sheik was there that night all in dress blues, as she walked while Jimmy Mack and the Pack back again warmed up on Til The End Of Time.She did not know where it would all lead but when he asked her after they had danced a couple of numbers if maybe they could go down to Hullsville Beach and talk instead of staying for the dance she said yes…
On The 70th Anniversary Of The Warsaw Uprising-Honor The Heroic Anti-Fascist Fighters Markin comment: Whatever one's political differences with the Polish government in exile in 1944 one can always admire courage against great odd in the anti-fascist struggle. A witness to the uprising on the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p023fdwh
Defend The Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel -Rally In Boston August 2nd In Solidarity With Gaza And Rally In Washington D.C.
***Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-The Doors
Peter Paul Markin comment December 2013:
A while back, maybe a few years ago, I started a series presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By where I posted some songs that I thought would get us through the “dog days” of the struggle for our socialist future. Posted at a time, 2009, when it was touch and go whether there would be some kind of uprising against the economic royalists (chastised under the popular sobriquet “the one-percent”) who had just dealt the world a blow to the head through their economic machinations. Subsequently, while there were momentary uprisings, the response from the American and world working classes has if anything entrenched those interests. So as the dog days continue I have resumed the series. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs selected; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this kind of formation would mean political death for any serious revolutionary upheaval and would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
**********
WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW!
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin
My old friend from the summer of love 1967 days, Peter Paul Markin, always used to make a point of answering, or rather arguing with anybody who tried to tell him back in the day that “music was the revolution.” Meaning, of course that contrary to the proponents (including many mutual friends who acted out on that idea and got burned by the flame) that eight or ten Give Peace A Chance, Kumbaya, Woodstock songs would not do the trick, would not change this nasty, brutish, old short-life world into the garden, into some pre-lapsian Eden. Meaning that the gathering of youth nation unto itself out in places like Woodstock, Golden Gate Park, Monterrey, hell, the Boston Common, or even once word trickled down, Olde Saco Park, would not feed on itself and grow to such a critical mass that the enemies of good, kindness, and leave us alone would sulk off somewhere, defeated or at least defanged.
Many a night, many a dope-blistered night before some seawall ocean front Pacific Coast campfire I would listen to Markin blast forth against that stuff, against that silliness. As for me, I was too into the moment, too into finding weed, hemp, mary jane and some fetching women to share it with to get caught up in some nebulous ideological struggle. It was only later, after the music died, after rock and roll turned in on itself, turned into some exotic fad of the exiles on Main Street that I began to think through the implications of what Markin, and the guys on the other side, were arguing about.
Now it makes perfect sense that music or any mere cultural expression would be unable to carry enough weight to turn us back to the garden. Although I guess that I would err on the side of the angels and at least wish they could have carried the day against the monsters of the American imperium we confronted back in the day.
Thinking about what a big deal was made of such arguments recently (arguments carried deep into the night, deep in smoke dream nights, and sometimes as the blue–pink dawn came rising to smite our dreams) I thought back to my own musical appreciations. In my jaded youth I developed an ear for roots music, whether I was conscious of that fact or not. Perhaps it initially started as a reaction to my parents’ music, the music that got them through the Great Depression of the 1930s and later waiting for other shoe to drop (either in Normandy or at home waiting in Olde Saco), and that became a habit, a wafting through the radio of my childhood home habit. You know who I mean Frank (Sinatra for the heathens), Harry James, the Andrews Sisters, Peggy Lee, Doris Day and the like. Or, maybe, and this is something that I have come closer to believing was the catalyst, my father’s very real roots in the Saturday night mountain barn dance, fiddles blazing, music of his growing up poor down in Appalachia.
The origin of my emergence into roots music first centered on the blues, country and city with the likes of Son House , Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James, then early rock and roll, you know the rockabillies and R&B crowd, Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Roy, Big Joe and Ike, and later, with the folk revival of the early 1960’s, folk music, especially the protest to high heaven sort, Bob Dylan, Dave Von Ronk, Joan Baez, etc. As I said I have often wondered about the source of this interest.
I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Meaning rootless or not meaningfully or consciously rooted in any of the niches mentioned above. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. Cajun, Tex-Mex, old time dust bowl ballads a la Woody Guthrie, cowboy stuff with the likes of Bob Wills and Milton Brown, Carter Family-etched mountain music (paying final conscious tribute to the mountain DNA in my bone) and so on.
And all those genres are easily classified as roots music but I recall one time driving Markin crazy, driving him to closet me with the “music is the revolution” heads when I mentioned in passing that The Doors, then in their high holy mantra shamanic phase epitomized roots music. That hurt, a momentary hurt then, but thinking about it more recently Markin was totally off base in his remarks.
The Doors are roots music? Well, yes, in the sense that one of the branches of rock and roll derived from early rhythm and blues and in the special case of Jim Morrison, leader of The Doors, the attempt to musically explore the shamanic elements in the Western American Native- American culture that drove the beat of many of his trance-like songs like The End. More than one rock critic, professional rock critic, has argued that on their good nights when the dope and booze were flowing, Morrison was in high trance, and they were fired up The Doors were the best rock and roll band ever created. Those critics will get no argument here, and it is not a far stretch to classify their efforts as in the great American roots tradition. I argued then and will argue here almost fifty years later when that original statement of mine was more prophetic the Doors put together all the stuff rock critics in one hundred years will be dusting off when they want to examine what it was like when men (and women, think Bonnie Raitt, Wanda Jackson, et. al) played rock and roll for keeps.
So where does Jim Morrison fit in an icon of the 1960s if he was not some new age latter day cultural Lenin/Trotsky. Jim was part of the trinity – Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix who lived fast, lived way too fast, and died young. The slogan of the day (or hour) - Drugs, sex, and rock and roll. And we liked that idea however you wanted to mix it up. Then.
Their deaths were part of the price we felt we had to pay if we were going to be free. And be creative. Even the most political among us, including Markin in his higher moments, felt those cultural winds blowing across the continent and counted those who espoused this alternative vision as part of the chosen. The righteous headed to the “promise land.” Unfortunately those who believed that we could have a far-reaching positive cultural change via music or “dropping out” without a huge societal political change proved to be wrong long ago. But, these were still our people.
The atrocities committed by the Israeli regime keep piling up in Gaza. Over 70 people were murdered by relentless Israeli artillery fire in just one neighborhood alone, al-Shujayeh, and bombings of hospitals and schools take place on a daily basis.
In response to this ongoing massacre, a broad coalition of anti-war, Muslim and Arab-American groups have joined together to organize a national march on the White House on August 2. Co-sponsors: - ANSWER Coalition - American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) - Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) - American Muslim Alliance (AMA) - Al-Awda: Palestine Right to Return Coalition - Al-Awda: Palestine Right to Return Coalition - New York - CODEPINK - Muslim Legal Fund of America- Palestinian American Women's Association (PAWA) - World Can't Wait - Partership for Civil Justice - MAS Immigrant Justice Center - UNAC - United National Antiwar Coalition - Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA)- House of Latin America (HOLA)- SI Solidarity Iran- Labor Fightback Network - Al-Awda, Palestine Right to Return Coalition, Cleveland Chapter - Al Quds Committee - Washington D.C. al-Quds Committee - Veterans For Peace- AF3IRM - Methodist Federation for Social Action - The National Muslim Council for Justice (NMCJ) - Islamic Shura Council of Southern California - Coalition to Stop $30 Billion to Israel - Free Palestine Movement International Solidarity Movement - Northern California - Defenders for Freedom, Justice & Equality - Virginia - The Phil Berrigan Institute for Nonviolence and Occupy the Dream, Reading, PA - LA Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild - The Green Party of New Jersey- International Action Center - Jews for Palestinian Right of Return - Labor for Palestine - New York City Labor Against the War- Socialist Action - Damayan Migrant Workers Association - Palestinian American Council-Chicago (PAC) - Malcolm X Center for Self Determination - San Diego Coalition for Peace & Justice - National Black United Front - National Committee to Free the Cuban Five - Existence is Resistance- US Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI)- KmB Pro-People Youth - Defence for Children International - Palestine
Every day, people across the United States are pouring into the streets to show their outrage at the ongoing Israeli massacre in Gaza. In many cities, these demonstrations are taking place on a near-daily basis – and are growing. Just last weekend, protests attended by many thousands took place in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and San Francisco. While the U.S. government continues to shamefully offer unqualified support for the brutal Israeli regime, the people of the United States are making it clear that public opinion is sharply turning against this long-standing policy.
The emerging movement that has brought so many people into the streets in local actions will now converge to illustrate the massive opposition among the American public to Israel’s new war and U.S. support for their atrocities. Join us!
Please make an urgently needed donation to help us cover the many expenses associated with a national mass mobilization. We can do this only with your support.
Download and circulate flyers for the demonstration (local versions in Transportation Center section)
Transportation Centers New Haven, Conn. Contact: ct@answercoalition.org or 203-903-4480 Details: Buses depart 6:00 a.m. on Aug 2 from downtown New Haven and return the same night. The cost is $40 per person. Download the poster here Tampa, Fla. Contact: sueylmm@hotmail.com Details: Depart Tampa Friday, August 1 at 6:00 p.m.; Arrive in D.C. Saturday, August 2 at 11:00 a.m. Depart D.C. on Saturday, August 2 at 6:00 p.m.; arrive in Tampa on Sunday, August 3 at 1:00 p.m. Tickets are $100. Chicago, Ill. Contact: ANSWER Chicago at 773-463-0311 Details: Buses depart Friday, Aug. 1 at 6 pm from the ANSWER Office at 4802 N. Broadway (You can also meet the buses at 87th and Harlem in Bridgeview, IL at 8 pm). The bus will return to Chicago Sunday morning. Tickets are $100, plus a $5 processing fee. PURCHASE YOUR TICKET HERE Bridgeview, Ill. Contact: Dr. Ghassan Barakat, Humanitarian Relief Foundation - yazzoun@aol.com or 312-671-4787 Or contact Nesreen Ballut, Palestinian American Council-Chicago - nesreen.ballut@gmail.com or 708-802-1129 Bus registration will close Wednesday at 5:00 pm. Buses will leave August 1st at 9:00 pm from 87th and Harlem (Plaza). ATTENDEES ARE REQUIRED TO ARRIVE NO LATER THAN 8:00 PM. We will be back in Chicago on Sunday (early afternoon). Registration prices: Regular: $100; (Discounted fee for students) Baltimore, Md. Contact: baltimore@answercoalition.org or 443-759-9968
Philadelphia, Penn. Contact: philly@answercoalition.org or 267-281-3859 Details: The bus departs from Philadelphia at 9:00 a.m. from 1755 N. 13th Street (outside the student center at Temple University). We will return to the same location at approximately 9:00 p.m. Tickets cost $30. Download the poster here PURCHASE YOUR TICKET HERE
Defend The Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel
END the MASSACRE in GAZA!
National March in Washington
#FreePalestine
#2DC4Gaza Sat. Aug. 2, 1pmat the White HouseBUSES LEAVING FROM BOSTON!ANSWERcoalition.org H boston@ANSWERcoalition.org H 857-334-5084
Sponsors: ANSWER Coalition, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), American Muslim Alliance (AMA), Al-Awda: Palestine Right to Return Coalition, CODEPINK, Muslim Legal Fund of America, World Can’t Wait, Partership for Civil Justice, MAS Immigrant Justice Center, UNAC - United National Antiwar Coalition, Islamic Circle of North America
Defend The Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel
Defend The Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel
Defend The
Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel
Firsthand report from Jerusalem and analysis of Iraq and Syria
The US and turmoil in the Middle
East An update on the latest crises
When: Thursday, August 7, 2014, 7:00 pm
Where: Cambridge • 5 Longfellow Park • off Brattle St -
Harvard T • Cambridge
Firsthand report from Jerusalem and analysis of Iraq and
Syria
Raed Jarrar, policy impact coordinator for
AFSC, was in Jerusalem July 10-17 as Israel launched the attack on Gaza. Raed
will report on his experiences and also focus on analysis of the current
situation in Iraq. The presentation will describe overarching US policy in the
Middle East including Syria and Egypt, and how the peace movement can take
action.
Jarrar was born and educated in Baghdad and currently lives in
Washington D.C. He has been a leading commentator on the US in Iraq since the
invasion of 2003.
Sponsored by United for Justice with Peace
Defend The
Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel
The US and turmoil in the
Middle East: Update on Palestine, Iraq, Syria
Thursday, August 7, 7:00 pm Cambridge Friends
Meeting, 5 Longfellow Park, off Brattle St
Raed Jarrar, policy impact
coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee, was in Jerusalem July
10-17 as Israel launched the attack on Gaza. Raed will report on his experiences
and also analyze the current situation in Iraq. The presentation will describe
overarching US policy in the Middle East including Syria and Egypt, and how the
peace movement can take action.
Jarrar
was born and educated in Baghdad and currently lives in Washington D.C. He has
been a leading commentator on the US in Iraq since the invasion of
2003.
Congress, Stop Arming Israel! Israel has created a massive humanitarian
disaster in Gaza. 1380 Palestinians have been killed and thousands more injured.
According to the UN, three-quarters of the dead are civilians, including
hundreds of children and women. Hundreds of thousands have been made homeless.
Israel has destroyed Gaza’s only power plant, potable water is largely
unavailable and food is scarce. The US provides over 20% of Israel's military budget, and is
resupplying Israel even as these atrocities go on. Call your member
of Congress today (202) 224-3121 and ask that the U.S. stop supplying
Israel with weapons! Our Congress has unanimously passed resolutions blaming only the victims and calling the firing of
comparatively crude mortars and rockets from Gaza “an unprovoked attack” on
Israel. This ignores decades of Israeli Occupation and a brutal 8-year Israeli
siege of Gaza that has left 1.8 million Palestinians penned up and blockaded in
an area smaller than Greater Boston, with no place to run, no place to hide from
high-tech Israeli bombs. Call your
Representative - and Senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren - to say that
this is unacceptable! Israel must be held accountable and our government should
stop supplying the $ billions, the planes and the bombs it is using to destroy
Gaza. Congressional Switchboard: (202) 224-3121 (Find your Representative here) Tell Senators Markey and Warren you are angry
at their support for the "US-Israel Strategic Partnership Act", which they
announced this week.
An Israeli sniper has admitted to killing 13 children in the Gaza
Strip in one day, as Tel Aviv continues its aerial and ground attacks in the
besieged enclave.
Posting on an Instagram account, David Ovadia released a photo of himself
holding a sniper rifle.
The image with his post, however, was deleted entirely by hackers from an
anonymous group. The group has launched hundreds of attacks on Israeli websites
over the past two years.
The move was reportedly followed by the group’s cyber attacks on Israel's
Mossad and Ministry of Military Affairs.
The development comes as Tel Aviv claims that its military has been targeting
Palestinian fighters from resistance group Hamas and described the growing death
toll in the enclave as collateral damage.
Israel has been pounding the Gaza Strip since July 8. Israeli forces also
began a ground offensive against the impoverished Palestinian land on July 17.
More than 300 children have so far been killed.
More than 1,370 Palestinians have been killed and thousands of others injured
by Israel’s offensive.
Defend The
Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel
So, I am seeing an awful lot of hopeful signs that maybe finally the
international community is going to do something about the genocide that
Israel is conducting with the US backing - at US direction most
likely"
"War crimes. Three weeks of
Israeli war crimes, with more on the way. A nation of killers, that is what
Israel has become."
American peace activist Don DeBar says people all over the world are
finally standing up for the oppressed people of Palestine, and are opposing the
US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza.
“Around the world people, not necessarily governments but the people, have
been standing up against the Israeli genocide that’s being conducted against the
Palestinians in Gaza -- and in the West Bank, by the way,” DeBar, an anti-war
activist and radio host in New York, said in a phone interview with Press TV on
Thursday.
“But in Latin America particularly over the past few days we have seen some
huge developments,” he said.
“On Wednesday, the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, termed/listed the
Israeli government as terrorists based on their occupation, on their operation,
rather. Brazil, Ecuador, Chile, Peru and El Salvador recalled their ambassadors,
and Costa Ricca is studying that measure also. Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay,
Venezuela and Paraguay issued a statement Wednesday during the Mercosur
conference: they called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and they extended
their support for the Palestinians,” DeBar stated.
“All this has been developing very quickly. And it’s an interesting mixture
of Latin American countries because they are not all socialist or left-leaning
governments. We are seeing, for example, Peru - and Paraguay, which actually is
a rightwing government - taking that position,” the senior journalist noted.
“The United States suspects, of course, that Venezuela is at the heart of
this, and yesterday decided that they were going to suspend several members of
the Venezuelan delegation and they were taking other measures against Venezuela
yesterday... the US took a preemptive action against Venezuela over this,” DeBar
said.
“Meanwhile, while all this happened, it comes finally with a presentation at
the UN yesterday of the fact that Israel has been targeting UN facilities in
Gaza,” he stated.
“So, I am seeing an awful lot of hopeful signs that maybe finally the
international community is going to do something about the genocide that Israel
is conducting with the US backing - at US direction most likely - and
hopefully that will bring some pressure on it to stop,” the activist concluded.
Israeli warplanes have been carrying out incessant airstrikes against the
blockaded coastal territory since July 8. On July 17, thousands of Israeli
soldiers launched a ground invasion into the densely-populated strip.
***Out In The American Neon
Wilderness-In The Beginning
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Introduction
Memory, or rather memories, are funny.
A few weeks ago my old friend and yellow brick road 1960s on-the-road
travelling companion, Josh Lawrence, and I were discussing a recent trip that
he and his wife, Laura, had taken to ocean-splashed and verdant Pacifica out in
California just south of San Francisco. That place name brought back memories
of my own last visit to that town some thirty years ago there with Josie, Josie
Little, whom I had a torrid affair with back then the details of which I will
not bore the reader with, except as they pertain to Josie’s story that will be
related below. Pacifica was the place, the paradise that we retreated to when
we went on vacation in the sunnier days of our relationship. Although I have
been in San Francisco and in California in general many, many times since those
days I have avoided, consciously avoided, that town. Reason: Josie Little and
our eventual sad parting of the ways which occurred there at the end.
But see this is where the proverbial “one
memory leads to another” comes in. Later on the night of the day Josh and I had
our discussion about Pacifica I started thinking about something Josh had
mentioned earlier. About how Josie and I met, although not really how we met as
much as what glue stuck us together back then. That “glue” was the story that
Josie related to me one night about how if we were to proceed with our affair,
if it was to grow that she was going to have to exorcise the ghost of her
previous lover, Allan Murphy. She was going to have totell me about how he was still under her
skin, about their time together or part of it and I was going to have to
understand her by letting her talk it out. So one night in Cambridge while we
were sitting at the bar of the Blue Parrot she told her story. But maybe I
should backtrack a little to explain how we met and some of the events that led
up to the talk that night.
I had met Josie at another Cambridge
bar, Jack’s (the place where Bonnie Raitt, and others, used to hang out before
they became famous, and after too ), in late 1977, when she was sitting by
herself kind of forlorn on a stool at the bar listening (she would tell me
later half-listening) to the weekday house band and sipping her whiskey, neat.
I was in town then trying to track down a story, or rather information for a
story that a well-known Cambridge denizen had at his disposal and had just
finished up a series of interviews with him. I decided to stop at Jack’s for a
quick drink or two (mine whisky, water chaser, in those days) before heading
back to my hotel when I spied her at the bar.
Forlorn looking yes but she had
something about her, not girl next door, not femme fatale, not temptress, none of those exactly but something
that spoke of stained satin sheets and good companionship if one were up for
that. Pretty, maybe thirty years old, certainly not with that pallid look of a
college student, even a graduate student in eternal student Cambridge, long
legs, nicely dressed, short-ish brown hair, brown eyes (not identified until
later, one of them slightly askew which made them sexier) and that was all I
needed to take shot at her.
So I sat down at the stool beside,
introduced myself, and she in turn introduced herself and we made small
conversation for a while until I saw her drink was empty and offered to buy her
one. She accepted. A little later she noticed that I was out and offered to buy
me a drink. Taken. After a while I felt strong enough to mention that when I
came in that she had looked rather forlorn. That is when she firsttold me about Allan, Allan Murphy, the guy
who she though would be the love of her life, and whom she had to, just had to
(her words), let go of since their relationship had gone beyond repair a few
months before and she was still in its grip.We talked a while longer, had a couple more drinks (trading off on
buying the rounds) and wound up in my hotel room over in Boston that night.
Forlorn she might have been but as she told me later that night (really the
next morning) but she liked sex, liked it a lot, liked to be inventive, liked
to try things if they were not kinky and had long given up the silly “not on
the first date” ritual that used to drive her sexual calendar and just went
with guys who she felt safe with. She had come to the right guy.
I had to leave town for a week or so
but promised to be in touch and did call her up about a week later and invited
her to a house in Watertown that I was to stay in for about a month while I
gathered material for a story and to write it up. She accepted and we ruffled
the sheets that first night again. During my Watertown stay I got more and more
interested in her, and I believed that she did in me as well although she held
her cards close to the vest. When my Watertown time was up she asked me if I
wanted to stay at her place over in Brighton (Allston, really) and I said yes
if she thought we were going some place. She gave a smile, said maybe, and I
accepted that answer as good enough at the time.
For the next couple of months things
seemed okay but I was getting deeper into her and she seemed less so with me. I
kept asking her what the problem was but she continually refused to elaborate.
Then one night she said let’s go out to Jack’s again because she wanted to tell
me a story that she thought I needed to hear if I wanted to understand
her.She had written it up in something
like a draft form because she wanted me to have it in writing just in case
something bad happened between us. And here is where memory comes in again
because I went up into my attic where in the old pre-digital days I stored my
notebooks and other written materials and retrieved her draft. The only thing
that I noticed in re-reading the draft that startled me was how much
information Josie gave about the various stages of her sex life until then. She
liked sex, no question, and I liked that she liked sex, and we had tried many
different techniques in our time together but I did not realize then that
sharing the intimate details of her sexual profile were that important to her
for me to understand along with that Allan forlornness. Of course that time was
just the start up time of great women’s liberation awakening when women like
Josie began to express themselves in more explicit sexual terms and the like
but still in looking over the notes I, a little older and who had come up
learning a different notion of women, blushed a few times. Sexual difficulties however
were certainly not the reason we parted when our time together was up. The only
thing I have done as far as the original draft goes is to make some clarifying
comments which are bracketed throughout the manuscript.
So this, according to the notes and my
memory, is the way that I heard the story one bar stool night from Josie
Little, a young woman in the troubled last throes of a dying love that would
not quite quit. Yeah, this is the way I heard a story out in the American neon
wilderness. Another one of those in a long line of stories of a still not quite
finished love that nevertheless had nowhere to go, a story Josie felt needed to
be told just then, just that one long sad, rainy, bluesy Cambridge bar stool
night in late 1977, the Miller Hi-Life sign blinking off and on making strange
shadows on Josie’s sad brown eyes world as she spoke:
**********
…Hi
my name is Josie Little, my last name Anglicized from Litvinov a couple of
generations back, back around the turn of the 20th century, by my paternal
Jewish grandparents from Russia seeking Americanization as well as by the
sleight-of- hand of immigration officials at Ellis Island who could not spell
the old country name correctly. I want to tell a story about an unhappy love
affair I had with a guy named Allan Murphy in the early 1970s so that I can try
to exorcise the demons and move on to a budding relationship with a new guy, a
reporter, Frank Jackman. This addressed mainly to him and some stuff only to
him but if you read this then you will know why I had to leave my sweet walking
daddy Allan behind, just couldn’t go on with him even though his scent lingers
on. So here goes.
I
had been at my wit's end, or maybe that was too harsh a term to express my
condition then given my need, but I had been unhappy in the early 1970s, a few
years before I met Frank at that Miller-Hi-Life sign-etched bar stool
conversation where he hit on me, caught me in a down Allan moment. Unhappy
after years, my growing up years, of being the dutiful daughter, the New York
Jewish middle-class gentile-emulating dutiful daughter. No JAP princess, no
way, although I had dreamed of that exalted position when I was young and had
hung out with some serious JAPs when I attended Hunter College High School in
Manhattan where I had been an outstanding student, and they, well, they
attended the school and that name looked good on the future husband-hunting
resumes. Just that early 1970s moment though I had been unhappy, having just
finished an internship (via Boston University) with Doctor Thaddeus Telly, yes that
Telly, the big up and coming quantum sociologist who at the time was on the
cutting edge of the next big thing in the field (now superseded by about
twenty-seven newer cutting edges), and I was also exhausted from study,
research and my go-fer existence on his team.
I
might as well tell you, I was also having an affair with Professor Telly for
strictly mercenary reasons so that I could get good grades and more importantly
a good recommendation. Some of my girlfriends kind of looked sideways on that
but funny I found out later they had done the same thing with professors to get
good grades. For me it was a case of a mutual bargain but Telly always said he
thought he got the better of it since I had given him the best oral sex, you
know, blowjobs he had ever had. And he might have been right but I did not
complain at all since he gave me a great recommendation, and I like oral sex so
there. And you know I do Frank from that first time I surprised you coming out
of the bathroom after you had taken a shower and I went down on you while you
were all wet. Funny, funny about that oral sex stuff, okay, okay I will just
call them blowjobs here so you will know what I mean, because the first few
times I did it in high school I didn’t like it. Of course then it was done
instead of vaginal intercourse to keep from getting pregnant that all the
sexually- active girls like me and my JAP friends were deathly afraid of. I
didn’t like the taste of the cum when a guy came in my mouth and I would spit
it out. One guy, Andy, though told me to eat a mint or something while I was
doing him because he made a big deal out of me swallowing his cum and I liked
him a lot and wanted to please him. He said that it had a lot of protein and
was good for me. So I did it one time with gum in my mouth and swallowed and it
wasn’t bad. After that I actually liked to swallow the cum if I really liked a
guy. I know they, and you, liked me to do that although maybe not with the gum
part.
So
having been the dutiful daughter, striving to please my parents as I
accumulated each new degree and award, I had missed the turmoil on the campuses
in the 1960s, my undergraduate campus the volatile radical hotbed University Of
Wisconsin, although given my dogged attention to my studies I might as well
have been at North Dakota State or some such Podunk school. I had only found
out about half the anti-war, anti-establishment, anti, well, anti- everything,
every not student thought of stuff that went on there when I had come to
Boston, and my fellow doctoral program students kept quizzing me about this and
that thing, the demonstrations, the shuts-downs, the music and dope, that had
happened in Madison and had I been involved in it once they knew where I was
from. I would deflect such talk with some sex exploits or something to show I
was a little cool. More importantly though, I had missed that new wave breeze
that had come through the land in those days, the palpable sense of jailbreak
from what pleased (or didn’t please) parents, professors, police, employers ,
or anyone else who got in the way. I was ready, all twenty-five years of me
ready, to break out, break out and check out what Allan had called the American
neon wilderness.
As
you know the he in question, that not quite finished love with nowhere to go,
Allan Murphy, my boyfriend, companion, partner, lover whatever term of art,
relationship art you wished to use in those topsy-turvy times, had told me
about the search for the American neon wilderness one night after we had been
together for while (not living together, that came later), the night when I
first tried some mescaline with him. After that night I had been frantic to get
out and see the American countryside and make my own estimate about what was
going, or not going, on. As part of that mescaline dream night Allan had
steadily tried to coax me into travelling with him on that journey, a journey
that would probably last six months to a year depending, depending on what
pleased us, what we wanted to see, what happened on that far-flung road and I
had gotten rid of enough hesitations in order to get rid of that wit's end
condition, or whatever it was that was eating at me to buy into his plan. But I
am getting ahead of myself. I haven’t explained
to you how I had come to be entranced by Allan, how I had begun to smell those
open roads wherever they might lead and to dream of them, and to begin to think
of a defensive barrage against my parents’ seventy-seven wishes, expectations,
and disappointments when explanation time came.
Sometime
after I came to Boston in late 1970 I had settled into the student ghetto
across the river in Brighton with my own little first- floor apartment off of
Commonwealth Avenue, and after I had settled into my studies, those
Telly-inspired studies that I eventually became exhausted from, I, new to town
started to go to bars alone to pick up guys, usually one night stands. I had
done the same kind of thing when I arrived as a freshman at Wisconsin trying to
outdo some of other girls in my dorm who were having a little contest to see
how many guys they could pick up in a week. I wanted both times to be known as
smart but also that I was a good lay in bed if you approached me right. Most
guys thought they were picking me up but that is another story.
I
also became interested in what was then to be the last stages of the
anti-Vietnam war movement. That interest was sparked (along with some
square-baiting by some fellow interns when I expressed my previous basically
un-political nature) on a couple of dates with a guy whom I had met through a
girl in my Advanced Quantum Sociology seminar, Lucy, who was something in the
Socialist Workers Party or their youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance,
organizations that at the time were involved in a last push to end the war in
Southeast Asia before President Nixon blew the places to kingdom come. Those
organizations were also involved (as were other groups) in trying to corral in
or contribute to the burgeoning anti-war fever among the U.S. soldiers, both in
America and in Vietnam. The rank and file soldiers of the Army, in particular,
were half in mutiny over the pace of withdrawal and other issues related to
their in- your- face cannon-fodder existence.
One
night, one Monday night, I attended a meeting here in Cambridge, at the Harvard
Divinity School, where there was to be planning for a retreat to help organize
that anti-war G.I. movement. A lot of those in attendant were ex-servicemen,
including Allan. Allan had just been released from an Army stockade after about
a year for refusing to fight in Vietnam [or anywhere else for that matter,
although Josie did not know that at the time] and as the meeting progressed and
it was his turn to speak he was explaining the ins and outs of his struggle to
get out of the clutches of the military, the complicated legal case that was
waged to get him out, and the absolute (his word) necessity of continuing to
directly cramp the military’s style by going right to the source, the soldier,
the cannon fodder(his term that is where I got it from having had absolutely no
experience or knowledge about the military). He said all of this in a slow,
steady style with a wicked Boston accent, you know that “pahk the cah in
Harvard Yahd” goof stuff that the slain President Kennedy had made everybody
aware of a few years previously when we were growing up and coming of age,
combined with a little working-class twist. While he was addressing the
audience I, sitting not twenty feet away from him, noticed that he had some
very fierce blue eyes. I, from a brown-eyed, brown hair, brown everything world
(including all brown herself) had never seen such blue eyes, and fierce too. I
was mesmerized.
After
Allan finished his talk and the audience broke into groups that were split up
according to what task one wished to participant in to help organize that
upcoming anti-war G.I. retreat I gravitated toward the group where he was
sitting, the contacting GIs group. When the members introduced themselves I
noticed that he was kind of staring, well, not staring but he kept looking in my
direction, and gave a little smile my way. I responded with little smiles too,
and a little confusion too because while I considered myself nice, and maybe
pretty, I was not some “movement” heavy or anything like that, as were some of
the other women in the room. I tried to see if he was smiling at anybody else,
at any other woman there. I did not think so.
At
the close of the meeting Allan went up to me and softly, very softly, shook my
hand and said that he hoped that I would
be able to make the retreat to be held at a site, a well-known retreat site,
just over the New Hampshire border that had been donated to the cause by some
anonymous people who wanted to make sure that “the movement” had a place to put
on such events. People, according to Allan and others were always doing stuff
like that then. It was part of that wave that I had missed most of by being the
dutiful daughter. That was all that happened that night though. A hand-shake.
Damn, that was it.
The
retreat was to be held two weekends after that meeting and I had originally
planned to attend the event even before the talk with Allan, if I got my
studies completed by then. After “meeting” Allan I knew I would be going and as
it turned out I would be going up in the same car as him. That retreat Friday
night as we met in Harvard Square with those who would drive them up on the
trip north I noticed Allan looking at me in that same way he had looked at me
at that first meeting with that little smile when we greeted. After arriving at
our destination in New Hampshire (Brookline)and while waiting in line to register he asked me, expressing a hope, a
fervent hope he said later, that I would spare some time to talk to him if I
had a chance.
This
comment disarmed me a little, most of the guys I had dated (and slept with,
while I may have been dutiful daughter I was no prude, not since back in Hunter
College High days when those Jewish princesses told me, and showed me, what was
what with guys), mostly Jewish guys from Long Island or places like that, not
the city, when I went to Wisconsin, had been, maybe sensing something in me,
kind of pushy, kind of bossy and took the lead, like it was a manly right. And
in the boy and girl wars then those were kind of the rules, at least that is
what I thought and everybody else did too, new breeze coming through or not.
Here though was a guy who was asking me if I had time for him, like he didn’t
take that local poster boy of the anti-war GI struggle role assigned to him all
that seriously. At least with me. With a dry throat and barely getting what I
had to say out I remembered I said I hoped that he might have some time to talk
to me. I blushed, red-brown blushed, and he, sensing the oddness of the moment
just squeezed my hand, squeezed it almost as softly as at our first meeting.
Then
he said with those blue eyes sparkling, not fierce but devilishly sparkling ,
showing his little blarney Irish side (his term, explained later), he would not
have bothered to come up if he hadn’t expected to talk to me. And then he
blushed, and out of nowhere I squeezed his hand. Whether it was softly done or
not I could not remember but it was a squeeze. Just then someone yelled out the
first call for the meeting to start and we parted, him turning back to me with
that quizzical smile as we did so. And that was how we had started and maybe
why I was ready later to chance things, to chuck everything to travel with him
wherever the winds might take us.
[Josie
kept coming back to that first mescaline-edged night when Allan laid out his
puff dream scenario, scenarios really, since they were, drug-induced, up all
night and half the next day. Allan had said all along, or from pretty early on
in their affair, that he had a childhood dream that he wished to tell her about,
wished to bring her in on, wished her to make part of her dreams too but that
he felt that he should wait until the proper moment to discuss it. The proper
moment being understood as a time when they were comfortable with each other,
comfortable enough that he could spill what he had to say and not be dismissed
out of hand. And also, to be in some drug –induced state, not weed but
mescaline which she had never tried, that they could feel totally honest with
each other and then he changed his mind and said she could dismiss the thing
out of hand if the whole enterprise felt too crazy to her.]
I
had not experimented with drugs while I was at drudge Wisconsin although I (or
anybody else ) could not walk into a dorm or most any place on campus, or its
immediate environs like the Rathskeller, the big hip local drink, drug,
androck and roll hang-out, without
getting at least a second-hand high (I did not know what that meant then but
only learned what it meant subsequently) from some pungent mary jane, weed,
herb or whatever somebody called those substances on any given day or
reflecting any given local moniker for the stuff. I had heard, as well, that
peyote buttons, mescaline, a little LSD (for the advanced heads but not as
widely used as on the East and West coasts), and more and more, cocaine were
becoming favored recreational drugs de
jus but no, I had not partaken of those pleasures.
When
I came to Boston some people in one of her classes, Advanced Quantum Sociology
(a seminar taught by Professor Telly himself), organized a party and that was
where I had my first drug encounter as a big old joint was passed around and I
felt I had to be cool and so took a few hits and coughed, coughed like crazy
for a while when the harsh smoke hit my throat and everybody laughed. [Join the
club, sister.] I liked it, like the way it relaxed me, liked the odd feeling
and strange moods that I felt while high but had seldom imbibed in while I was
in my drudge phase before Allan.
Strangely
sometime after that first experience I had kept some hash, given as a gift from
some guy who took my fancy one night at the Kasbah Grille in Harvard Square
when I was “on the hunt” with my girlfriends. He had spent the night with her
at my apartment after he had introduced me to the bong of hashish (and its far
less harsh throat-tickling and more vivid sweet dreams than weed) that next
morning, since he was heading out of the hitchhike road to D.C. for some
anti-war demonstration and knew, especially in Connecticut knew, that if he did
not want to spend some hard time, some very hard time, in the pokey that he
better not be “holding.” And thus the gift (fired up when Allan and I were
looking for a different kick when he said he had never tried the stuff).
Allan
and I, started, discreetly, to smoke more weed (his term, I always had called
it “pot” from what I heard it called in my Wisconsin days but I picked up his
more street-wise term for some reason) both to relax, relax while having sex,
and just to kind of catch up with my generation and its predilections. The
discreet part was necessary because he, and to a lesser extent me, had a high
political profile doing that anti-war G.I. work that placed us square in the
sights of the state, its military, and the federal cops. Once he had been hauled
in for questioning by the feds in Boston and that clinched the discreet part.
So no smoking in the Wild West streets of Boston, or at parties, and such. Our
connection was through an interestingthird party, Sam Stevens, who had a millions connections for dope,
mostly weed, going all the way down to high-grade Mexico and back, although he,
himself was not a dealer but an angel of mercy, a guy who passed the stuff on
to his friends. He lived like a lot of Boston student ghetto denizens off a
very hefty trust fund and so not only did he have the capacity to show
largesse, but did so.A real cool guy.
Allan
admitted to me that he had not previously been much of a drug user; he said
maybe he would do a little speed on exam prep nights to catch up on that
reading he had put off until the last minute at school, before his army stint,
before he got “religion” on what the American state was all about. Until then
hehad been, as an official member in
good-standing of the working-class, of the Irish working-class, a heavy
drinker, whisky mainly, with a beer chaser when he was frisky, water chaser
when he was broke, and had done just a little dope in the service, some passed
joints.He said that he didn’t like the
taste of the stuff, the way the smoke bothered his throat, although he was a
tobacco smoker, or the way it made him feel, feel out of control, in another
place without kicks. And that was how we got to the idea of trying mescaline
and other drugs, but mainly mescaline to help express eternal truths or
whatever we thought would come from such experimentation. Naturally Sam was the
friendly provider for the stuff, and also to insure that it was righteous since
in that period of time lots of awful stuff was being put into drugs by street
dealers who were looking to make quick scores and blow town, and let the rubes
figure out the stuff of dreams, or of dream puffs.
So
that first mescaline night Allan told me of his child dream, his dream to
escape the damn world that he was born into and hadn’t any say in creating, or
being asked about. I could see when Allan talked like that, in that Jehovah
righteous tone why he would be a prime candidate for some foreboding army
stockade or the bastinado when the deal went down, although his decision to
confront the Army head-on was a closer thing than one might think as he
explained one night, one non drug-induced night. Allan mentioned that “had not
being asked about stuff” had bothered him since about age ten or eleven. He
related some stuff about his family, as I did about mine but that was later,
about how he was in a constant civil war with his mother from as early as he
could remember. His poor, hard-working when he could find work father, with no
breaks in the world, straight from the hard scrabble world of coal mine
Appalachia, was a shadow figure somewhere in the background. The main bouts
were with “Ma,” over money, over going, or not going here or there, of
breathing, breathing too much to hear him tell it. Kids’ stuff but big on some
kid horizon. So that around ten or eleven he started dreaming, first started
dreaming about escaping from his tumble- down working poor boy fate, starting
dreaming about the big jail breakout from the old ways.
Where
Allan lived growing up was near the water in Hull, about fifteen or twenty
miles from Boston. He said he could see across to Castle Island on a good day
and so he could see the tankers and other ships coming into the bay to leave
off their product or pick up stuff. That is where he then got the idea to build
a raft and go out to join a ship moored in the channel and flee to the big wide
world parts unknown. In the end it didn’t work out since his reach exceeded his
grasp, he could not, not being very good mechanically even then, even with
brother help get a sea-worthy, a channel-worthy raft together. But that escape
idea, that idea of seeing the great big world, of seeing in person the places
and persons that he had heard about, from teachers and others heard about, read
about, big sassy book poured over and thumbed over until he was exhausted read
about, and seen too on that old black and white television screen we all were
glued to which crowded his brain.
That
failed raft experiment, in any case, was not the end of his strivings although
it ended his physical break-out end for a while. He spoke one night of sneaking
out the back of the family house (he called it a shack and when he took me
there on one ill-advised meet with his mother I had to agree with him although
I was always too polite to say anything bad about the place) on midnight runs
to Harvard Square at sixteen. Of walking a couple of miles to catch a local
all-night bus to then catch the subway at Fields Corner in Dorchester and to
rumble, tumble, amble his way over to Cambridge, to the all-night open Hayes-Bickford.
Being there just to feel the air of the place when things were beginning to
happen in 1962, to just be around the new thing, the jailbreak out thing that
he sensed was coming. And then rumble, tumble, amble back on that subway before
dawn to avoid mother worries, mother hassles and mother penalties. And then one
thing led to another and he put the dream on hold, put it on hold through
college, through whisky nights, through some personal political dream etched
out in Kennedy days splendor, in short“to get his” while helping others to get theirs. And so his horizon
narrowed, his fervent desire to see, hear, read, be with everything, everybody,
to see how things ticked is what he said he called it faded, childhood, young
manhood faded.
And
then came the Army. Allan didn’t like to talk about it, talk about it all that
much, especially when early on I would go on and on about what the experience
was like in order to get a feel for who I was getting tied up with, about what
happened while he was in the military, the Army. He would cut me short with
this- “he did what he had to do, did it, and he was not sorry, nor sorry for a
minute, that he did what he did.” He added, chuckling, the worst of it was when
they threw him in solitary for a while and wouldn’t let him smoke cigarettes in
those days when he was a fairly heavy smoker (although the system worked out
among solitary prisoners allowed him to cadge a few puffs while in the rest
room, oh no what did he call it, oh yeah, the latrine). He had begun to smoke
more after he was inducted when there was so much dead time that the trainees
would just stand around smoking one cigarette after another to kill time until
some jackass (his word) sergeant sadistically decided he wanted his charges to
double- time with full backpack somewhere for some reason known only to that
self-same sergeant, for some odd national or personal security reason.
Mainly
though Allan said he would go back and forth in his mind about whether before
he went in he should have decided differently and not allowed himself to be
inducted. The back and forth really centered on that faded dream, that faded
break out dream that he let fall on the back burner at a time when having it
front and center would have counted . See, he came from working-class people,
no, working poor, a notch below that, his poor be-draggled father, from down in
Podunk (his term) Kentucky, down in white hillbilly Appalachia, down among the
poor white trash of literature. The just poor that I knew needed help from when
I read Michael Harrington’s The Other America for a sociology class that
I took as an under-graduate where he described the white folks left behind in
the go-go America of the 1950s.
Allan
had turned red one time when I mentioned that book and that I knew, book knew,
of what his father, and his people were all about, “the wretched of the earth”
in America. He related a story, a school story, about how his high school,Hull High, was going to reach out to the
victims in Appalachia by sending food, clothing and money down there, down to
Hazard, Kentucky. Jesus, he said when the headmaster announced the program over
the loudspeaker, that was where his father was born (Allan had shown her that
fact listed on his birth certificate one day). In any case his father was
always out of work, out of luck, and out of Allan’s frame of reference
especially when he got older and started drifting away from the family and
started to develop his own political perspective and his own jailbreak way out
of the scene he grew up with.
But
that was exactly the problem, that from hunger bringing up, that
hand-me-down-where-is-the-rent-money-coming-from-keep-your-eyes-to-the-ground-shame
and sorry combined with three thousand pounds of plain ordinary vanilla 1950s
all ships rising teen angst and teen alienation, that came between Allan and
all his decisions in those days. Along with some very standard American idiotic
patriotic my-country-right-or- wrong local mores and customary Roman Catholic
subservience to authority, Rome or D.C.(in this life he said, all was to be
milk and honey in the next) in that Irish neighborhood that he grew up in. That
and his very real appetite for going for the main chance in politics. That was
what he had been aiming for, a career, a regular career in politics, “helping
his people while helping himself,” is the way he put it.
Allan
told me that he had spent most of 1968 working that main chance idea as he was
getting ready to graduate from school and had some time to “build his resume.”
He started out that fateful year holding his nose and committed to backing
Lyndon Johnson for re-election until Eugene McCarthy (Irish Gene he mentioned,
a poet and a dreamer and thus worthy of support) pushed the envelope and
Johnson backed out. He went wild for Robert Kennedy, his idea of a beau
political animal then, ruthless to political enemies, young or old, and not
forgetful about old wounds either, and this beautiful patrician vision of
“seeking a newer world.” When Bobby was assassinated he went over to Humphrey and
would up there under the principal that Richard Noxious, uh, Nixon was the main
enemy of the people of the world (and of his political advancement). So not the
profile of a guy who was going to chance charging windmills, or crush dreams of
bourgeois break-outs, no way.
So
Allan went, sullenly went when drafted. After about three days he realized that
he had made a mistake, a serious mistake and that he should have chanced draft-
dodger jail instead. But see, it was hard for a guy hard-wired for a political
career to shift gears like that, so he fumbled and bumbled with the problem for
a while. He had always been anti-war in kind of an abstract way; kind of an
“all men are brothers” way. He told me that he had first expressed that opinion
on the Boston Common back in the fall of 1960 when he attended a small
demonstration at the Park Street Station with a bunch of little old angel
ladies in tennis sneakers and stern-faced Jehovah-etched Quakers who were
calling for nuclear disarmament. He also told her as if to express the Janus
nature of the times, of himself, that the next week he was working the streets
of Hull passing out Jack Kennedy presidential literature. Jack who was crying
out loud about the “missile gap,” nuclear missiles to be sure. So he stumbled
and mumbled fitfully through the problem.
Of
course if you were part of the military, down in some boondock (Allan’s term)
southern town out in nowhere far from northern gentility, even rough-edged
northern working- class gentility, you were up the creek without a paddle
(Josie’s expression), and also surrounded by guys, maybe sullen, maybe gung-ho,
but mainly who like you were kind of committed to their fate (and afraid,
afraid like hell of that constant threat, Fort Leavenworth, the main Army penal
threat) then stumbling and mumbling is what you did, and did it for a while.
But the military fates were not kind, not wartime kind, not 1969 wartime kind,
when the Vietnam war was eating up men and material at prestigious rates, while
the world clamored for shut-down and so Allan’s fate was to be a grunt, a foot
soldier, and the only place that foot soldiers were being gainfully employed in
those days was in sweaty, sullen Southeast Asia. And in the normal course of
events after training he was so ordered there.
And
still he mumbled, stumbled, and tumbled. He, political animal he, tried to work
around it administratively, pulling some chips dues in with his cronies, no go.
He tried to do an end- around by claiming conscientious objector status,
although he was uneasy about it since he believed that there were some just
wars and that position was not a ground for discharge then, no go. Then one
night, one night, a Sunday night, a hot and sweaty Sunday night, sitting in the
base PX after the library had closed he decided, decided that some form of
resistance was the only way out. Personal resistance since he saw no other
kindred.
He
went out in the sultry night and started walking and planning, and
half-hesitating. He would make a public display; he would go AWOL and then make
a splash at some public civilian anti-war. (That AWOL, absent without leave
part was important for him, and later me, since he stayed away just long enough
from the Replacement Center at Fort Lewis in Washington state to be“dropped for the rolls,” meaning that he
could turn himself in at Fort Devens about forty miles from Boston and stay
there pending new orders. The importance for me was, unknowingly, or half
knowingly, that I had been one of the demonstrators clamoring for his release
in a rally in front of the fort after he was incarcerated.) Other soldiers he
had heard had done such stunts prodded on by those same Jehovah Quakers who
formed the backdrop of his political coming of age in Boston Common as a boy.
No. As his resolve firmed up, and as he got courage, some well-spring of
Appalachia hunker- down father genes- bought courage he thought later when he
had plenty of time to think, he decided that he would make a showing in front
of his fellow soldiers.
So
one Monday morning as the base gathered for its weekly gathering of troops on
the parade ground for inspection (and to see who was missing, if anybody) he
walked out, walked out of his nearby barracks in civilian clothes, carrying a
simple homemade sign “Bring The Troops Home.” He was immediately seized and
man-handled by some what he called ‘lifer’ sergeants (who, when he thought
about it later probably didn’t know if he was soldier or just a damn hippie
protester trespasser and he therefore should have been in uniform with his sign).
And the rest was mainly legal proceedings, and doing the time, doing that
almost a year in the base stockade. (Under the outside civilian parallel legal
proceedings on his behalf then in effect they couldn’t sent him to Fort
Leavenworth without violating a civilian judge’s order.) Like I said, he didn’t
like it talk about it all that much, except he had plenty of time to think,
think those ancient break-out thoughts that had him (and me as he told his
story) in its thrall.
[I
realized that the way she told the story, told Allan’s childhood dream story,
all cold sober, no sweet dream drug haze, no colors, no pizzazz, sounded as
straight narration like a good description for why he wanted to see the world,
or at least the continent which was what his preliminary plan had entailed, but
did not half-explain how she was inflamed by his fire that night, or
thereafter. Or why he was either. That night as she remembered it Allan was in
what he called (and she started to get a drift sense of it more and more after
that drift snowdrift night they connected up in New Hampshire) his high blarney
Irish lost land poet and prophet mood, a mood for him enhanced not by the color
dream sequences going through his mescaline-fueled brain but ancient memory
longing to understand the world, the fellahin world that she associated, via
her fervent Zionist parents, with the Palestinian refugee camps but he
associated with his own bog Irish, his mill town Lowell, Nashua, Lawrence,
Saco, his Iowa farmhands, his Nova Scotia Grand Banks hearty and hellish
fisherman, his Woody Guthrie okie and arkie dust- blown refugees, his bracero
mex, or flip (Filipino) grape-picking field hands, and mex dark home land
village runaways when the land gave out or the federales got too close. And
that was just on this continent. He wanted to understand, as well, what made
people tick, why they worked so hard to keep in one place, in order to keep
from going backwards.
And
why too in certain spots, in certain cultural oases she called them (and he
yelled at her, faux yelled at her although as she thought back on the moment he
probably was serious, to stop with the “soc” jargon that was destroying the
common language of explanation, almost like a damn church that has spent too
much time in the wilderness and developed a secret coda among the elect but had
only generals, no corporals, no followers), new forms of expression, new words
to explain life’s struggles were developed and nowhere else. Places like Frisco
town (his always usage for that place after he heard Memphis Minnie’s song of
the same name) with its beat down, beat around, beat beatitude beat scene and
later its summer of love, like L.A. and its characters out of central casting,
cast really on the beaches of Santa Monica, Venice Beach, and surfer- ready
Malibu, like New Jack City (although that locale, her hometown and his place of
a thousand times, was not scheduled except to end at and to dump whatever was
to be dumped at her parents’ place when they finished up), like Boston even to
some extent. So that was what was on his mind but that was just the outline,
they talked for hours (and other days after that first extended outline they
continues talking about it, about what was remembered, tip of tongue remembered
since color, and other less ancient dreams also snuck into that night).]
I
did not learn until later, later when the trip was well under way, that while Allan
was addicted to ocean edges, tepid waters running to shore, fetid marshes to
feed mother oceans’ starving denizens, and mephitic smucks at low tide fetching
earthbound clams for human hungers, he feared, deathly feared, and rightly so
mother sea’s fury. Feared since childhood being on the water, being
boat-stirred or swim- stirred since he had logged drifted out to sea and almost
three dip drowned and so he searched, searched longingly for succor from the
ocean depths by getting landward as far out as possible.
He
expected to see from that Saco jetty vantage point as well the fellaheen
lobster boatmen plying the waters off the coast, plying their lobster trap
trade. Fierce men fiercely defending their flash- colored pots against
all-comers, all comers except King Neptune with his quirky habit of dumping a
certain percentage of them on land as tribute to his generous nature at other
times. Allan knew, childhood knew, the mucky gypsy clam muckers down at Hull’s
Hell’s End (real gypsies who worked the carnivals by night, their women the
oldwilting rose for the lady trick, and
maybe the night sweat trick as well for a lonely carnival fortune wheel losers,
pay up, pay up twice, brother). Swarthy, dark heathens, gruff, gruff even to
homeland ocean boys and gruff about who could and could not ply the mudflats
seeking clam bits to spice up some off-hand spur-of-the-moment family barbecue
before it all, the family, fell apart and went about six different ways.
So
he wanted to know their brethren, their swamp yankee down east brethren brought
up in small seacoast villages harsh learning life against the Atlantic gales,
out in the creeping boats, seaworthy or not, fully-equipped or not, at dawn, if
not before, coffee-filled, some stone cold breakfast so they could get a little
extra sleep, maybe rum brave when all was said and done. Knowing fair shares of
“oh yah jim, he fell overboard a few years back, they have his name over on the
seamen’s memorial in town if you want to know, a fine lobster man, Sam well,
Sam never, was right after that boom hit him, hit him square on the noggin,
maybe his name should go up there too,” and such.
When
Allan got his fill of sitting and viewing, and viewing and sitting we would
move on up the coast, maybe picking blueberries along the way for fresh fire-
side breakfast pancakes, or just pop it in with the oatmeal, and head to Bar
Harbor and the swells, and some Arcadian delight. And of sweetening it up with
thoughts of midnight love-makings on the secluded rocks all naked and free and
away from prying eyes and with the sea playing some kind of sea symphony to the
rhythm of their love. [Yes, I could see what she meant about his blarney,
myself full of blarney, although she smiled when she mentioned the rocks,
mentioned the love-making on the rocks and maybe thought back to nights of
risings and falling of the sea and of them, or as she related another time,
when she told me a story about them in Perkin’s Cove also up in Maine, that she
had started that whole idea of nakedness and fuckingwith her delight at the sea that day and had
suggested that very idea.]
I
had to laugh as I thought of telling you about Allan’s dream, Allan’s get out
in the wide world dream for he was, like me, strictly a city dweller even if he
grew up in the working-class suburbs. When he started going on and on about
being some mountain man I cut him short. It must have been the honesty brought
forth by the drugs that I chirped up that I at least had been to camp when I was
a kid and remembered how to pitch a tent, work camp fires, and hike a freaking
trail without needing first aid or a bevy of hospital services. He stopped for
a moment, for a candid moment. He confessed, confessed that come the first
night of camp, that he would be fearful when he was away from city lights, lamp
posts, when the only light was from some blinking star (I shared part of that
fear, not for dark nights, but what lurked, lurked for a woman, in an untamed
world), and that while he was the ocean’s own nature boy, some son of Neptune
his oceans always bordered land, sighted land. That was all prelude he
confessed to pre-excuses for any difficulties when they traversed (what the
heck was traverse he asked) some small trail headed up to the summit of
Cadillac Mountain in Arcadia National Park.
Allan
then, as if to change the subject, got back to his point about the beauty of
seeking nature’s course like some latter day Thoreau rising with the dawn,
rising with the sun, rising to the sound of birds, to keep faith with the
handiwork of nature especially when we hit the summit and could see all of the
ocean for miles around that he had seen in pictures.(And Magic Mick had told him about one
desperate hashish night when they were preparing for some protest, or something
and needed new age “rum bravery” to see them through. They were going to
distribute some anti-war material on an army base, Daniel Ellsberg’s The
Pentagon Papers I think, and had been arrested and thrown off the base and
told in no uncertain terms not to come back, sixty days in the some stinking
federal pokey, if they did. So maybe that courage was necessary).
Allan
got on his high-horse about natural wonders, which while he didn’t understand
he could appreciate. Like that idea behind television and transistor radios
when he was a kid, and the red scare cold war sputnik, about how did they do
that stuff. That drove him mad (although when I explained a couple of things to
him, things picked up at Hunter College High, to dispel his “heathen seeing
silver flying birds” theory of the universe, he waved it off, “too heavy” waved
it off, and I relented). What drove him crazier though was the idea of natural
stuff, stuff like the reversing falls at Saint John’s up in New Brunswick, or
craters come down to earth and then just sit there. Old Faithful out in Wyoming
or someplace out there on the prairie was the end though, imagine something
blowing off steam every ninety minutes or something like that, He had hoped
they would get to see that on their way to Denver if the thing moved along okay
and it was not too late to chance a detour if it looked like the snow squalls
didn’t block them in late October or so. But the Bay of Fundy and its funny
tides had him flipped, he said maybe that would be worth watching for hours
like that Saco jetty (and coming back on me about that afternoon they rocked
the rocks in old Perkin’s Cove, maybe we could start an international trend
like some new edition of the Kama Sutra).
Then
Allan got serious again, real serious, which meant that he was going to go onto
some political thing, some political-etched thing. Then he started reciting
from memory Longfellow’s Evangeline the one about the French in Arcadia
being pushed out of their ancient land by the bloody British after the various
world- wide battles those two European powers fought throughout the eighteenth
century, and about love, land love, ocean love, love love being uprooted and
they were exiled sent down to swamp Cajun country. Jesus he almost cried. He
said he wanted to stand in solidarity with another victim of John Bull’s
tyranny, to stand with the lost fellahin long suffering on another of history’s
long marches to oblivion and the death of the Arcadian dream then, and now. I
still remember the half-lilt in his voice when he did that recital (how the
hell did he do that, I thought). I could see in the way that he spoke that he
was thinking his own fellaheen thoughts, his old neighborhood thoughts about
how his people had been displaced (like my own, although she did not identify
as strongly with that diaspora sentiment as he did, after all her people, her
parents, their kin too, had made the gradein America, as had I) and about some nagging, festering sore that would
not quit him, about those small dream days, about how everybody pushed hard to
stay in the same place (some of the kindred had been in the neighborhood for
four generations, a long time in go-go America), He named a spot, Grand Pre
where he wanted to stop and express his solidarities and so that was plotted
onto their ever- expanding itinerary.
Allan
floored me after that recital and gabfestwith a thing he picked up from Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, which he said he had read again in the stockade along
with a bunch of his other books, Desolation
Angels, Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and a couple of others I don’t remember. I
had read On The Road as an undergraduate although it didn’t make a big
impact on me since I felt that it was mainly a man’s book, a book about guys
doing what guys always do, try to screw women and then take off for some other
adventure, or other women. I thought he was going to go on and on about the
beauty of the relationship between Sal and Dean, about some mystical lost
kindred spirit, about the wide open spaces, and of a man’s need (or woman’s,
Allan was pretty good about including women in the road, and real worlds,
without making a big deal about it although a couple of times she had to take
him up quick on the subject of his old-fashioned notions of a women’s place )
to break-out of convention, to explore stuff, and to observe human nature in
the raw, and do something about it, if only to write about it.
Instead
he berated the characters of On The Road
for not stopping at some youth hostels where they could have stayed for cheap,
or little dough, in clean (you helped keep it that way as part of the fee),
rooms or dorms instead of sleeping in the back seats of cars, on the side of
the road, in some freaking corn field, or something like that. Besides they
could have met better people, better ride-sharing and expenses people, and
people with some dough, since there usually were people from Europe or places
like there who had traveler’s cheques and such, than at the Traveler’s Bureaus
or u-ride places. See when he was in the stockade there was a guy he used to
talk to (before that guy got shipped to Leavenworth, he was doing some big time
for the same kind of things Allan was in for but without his civilian legal
backing), Bruce, from New York City who had done some on the road travelling
and “hipped” him to that scene.
It
sounded kind of hokey to me, since I expected that we would either tent or stop
at an occasional bed and board. I also thought we were a little too old to be
sitting in some dorm thing, like we were at college, with a million people who
maybe didn’t speak English (or French, her college language) and we might not
even, from the way he told it, depending on the hostel, be able to sleep
together. I didn’t like that idea since I had gotten used to us sleeping in our
double bed. He said the one in Halifax, the first one that he figured they
would try was co-ed, and had private rooms so they should try it, try, he
laughed to be more “progressive,” road progressive than Jack and his crowd.
There would be time enough to sleep on the sides of roads, or in some lazy
cottage, or with friends dotted at spots over the American landscape. And with
that, after many fretful hours, we drifted off to sleep.
[That next late afternoon at “breakfast” Allan started up
again about the trip to end all trips. That breakfast Josie was at pains to
point out had been made by Allan since he was then in, as a lot of young men
were at the time, his women’s “lib” moment. While she and Allan had more than a
few battles later over who was to do, and not do, what in sharing household
chores she thought his initiative in requesting to feed her breakfast was,
well, charming. In those days when a lot of what women, including Josie, were
growling over had been the male king in his castle thing and so any slight
effort to off-set that mystique was taken as good coin. Later when things got
more political, when the question of real power came up a lot of guys went into
the tank. So in those early days the easier way to show one’s male liberation
from mother’s apron strings fetch-all was to make and serve meals to milady,
Josie remember that menu, eggs, bagels and lox, some juice and coffee like it
had come down from the mountain… ]
…while Allan was cleaning up the dishes (added points if a
man did the cooking and the cleaning up) he mentioned that he was crazy to go
to Neil’s Harbor and Peggy’s Cove up in Cape Breton and could hardly wait to
get on the road out of Halifax and push north unless we were somewhat behind in
our schedule, our rough schedule, to try to head west and then south before the
winter set in. He wanted to take in the beauty, the hills rising above the
ocean along the road that encircled the whole place, and the separate circle
that enveloped Cape Breton, Nova Scotia beyond that Arcadia notion. Moreover a
friend had told him that the provincial parks, unlike the state parks in the
states were cheap, were well kept-up, provided firework and hearths, and had
decent showers facilities (except in the few “primitive” sites which we might
be confronted with at certain points where you had to backpack in and take your
chances, ugh) He had hoped to get his fill of ocean views to strengthen him
against the mid-American continent bump where you might be lucky to see a lake
or something.
They would head west when they were both heartily tired of
endless seas, endless looking at seas, although not of walking them, sitting
and listening to the ocean, or making love as the waves rolled in if they had
the chance. His thing was to chart things like the furthest point in all
directions they hit on the trip, how many of this and that they saw, how many
that and this, things they did, you could tell he was a real numbers and
geography guy. Not where those places were in the world so much, no, so he
could said, sometimes brag, brag a little, but mostly say, well, he had been
this farin case somebody might think he
was a rube if he hadn’t been far enough from home.
[Funny too because Josie said in his politics, his political
moment that he would besuppressing a
little on the trip for her sake, he was always talking, and doing something
about it which is where they were beginning to differ, about the struggle in
against the American government in Vietnam, the struggle against apartheid in
South Africa, the fate of the Palestinians (the one major point where she, a
half-hearted Zionist, daughter of Zionists, and he would have a few blow-ups
including one night in Boston before the trip when they, drunk and stoned, were
at some party which was being attended by something like the central committee
of the Zionist movement in Boston, although neither of them originally knew
that was the case. They were raising money for something in Israel, and he
started talking his liberation talk, talking about the Irgun gang, about the
King David Hotel, about Deir Yessin, jesus, stuff Josie didn’t even know about.
He got heated, got heated at her, most of all, for half-defending the infidels
at the party, or just their right to support Israel, something like that.]
When we got back to my place, we weren’t living together
then he was living in a commune down the road, I threw him out, after we had
probably woken up half of the student ghetto in Allston. Then around four
o’clock I said she was missing “my sweet walking daddy” [I blushed when she
said that.] and called him up to come on back over. He didn’t want to, didn’t
want to because he was sleepy, and we had another row over that. He, when I
propositioned him, propositioned him with a little secret thing that that I did
to him with her mouth [expecting me to know what that was without further
description, which I did and made a mental note on], a thing that as he said,
or as he had heard on some blues song, maybe David Bromberg, maybe Muddy Waters
I don’t remember, that “curled his toes,” he came over, but it was not a good
night, not a good omen at all.
It’s funny because Josie I, and Allan later admitted that he
was too, very provincial, not in the sense of being some hayseed thing out in
Iowa but provincial in the way we interpreted Saul Steinberg’s sardonic New Yorker cover, the one where his map
of America started in Manhattan big and then the rest of America was about one
inch of space. I related to that sense of the world and would tell him, at his
request, endless things odd-ball things about growing up in Manhattan what I had
seen, and did. He said he felt the same about Boston and maybe that is why he
had to have charts and lists and a stuff like that, his stuff in the
world.
[…A lot of what Josie said that sad rainy Cambridge night,
after she had a few scotches, neat, got mixed-up, not purposefully mixed-up but
mixed between the great Allan dream stretch and events that occurred when they
actually did get out on the neon wilderness road. I confess too that I having
had that same liquor concoctions that I was mixed-up prone. What follows is to
the best of my recollection the real travelogue of the trip. Like I say it was
a long rainy Cambridge night but she wanted to talk, and I wanted to listen.
Let us continue]:
…My feelings about Peggy’s Cove, Cape Breton, and the like
when we got there though was (besides the great view and friendly huge immense
rocks we could sit on and get splashed by the sea and feel clean although I was
never an ocean freak like him) that since this was to be the eastern most point
of our trip (and he thought at the time it would be the northernmost as well) we
could stay in a bed and breakfast place. Indoors with an indoor shower,
private, or not wait in line, or anything like that. Maybe something just off
the main road, “Mrs. Miller’s Bed and Breakfast” or something like that. And if
that name of the places and who ran them sounds like something out of about
1947 then you are right because that is exactly what it was like, and what Mrs.
Miller was like when we found ourselves
looking for such a place. Of course out in the provinces, the gentle provinces,
among the folk who live in the little off-the-road places, the places where
times stands still, they depend on the travelling peoples of the world who want
to see great natural beauty, and relax against the craziness of the world
depend on making their, what did Allan call it, their harsh lonely winter
tide-me-over money, in season. But these people, and Allan and I ran into many,
on the outskirts of civilization, have their limits, and have their own mores,
and good for them. Except not good for us, almost. Mrs. Miller wanted to know
if we were married, and we, thinking we were in Boston or New York, said, well
no, and, essentially, what of it. She kind of flipped out and did not want to
let us stay in her “home.”So we, tired
for a long day on the road, sometime in the rock-bound sea sun, and not sure
where the next B&B was, ifany
started back-tracking, startedtalking
about our travels, about tires, about using this trip to see if we should get
married. (That contribution was by me so you could see Allan’s blarney side
rubbing off.) Mrs. Miller didn’t like it, but as a good Christian woman, she
had to welcome us. It was close though, very close. See too though we had
intended that this indoor scene would allow us to freshen up, have a shower,
have a nice dinner, maybe some wine to get a little high (we had no intention
of doing reefer, no way), and then some serious gentle sex. We were both tired
of hard-scrabble dirt, of rocks, of fleas, gnats and every other bug taking the
edge off of our love-making. So we had to debate whether to do this deed in
this good Christian woman’s house. We did but did it so quietly that both of us
thought afterwards that this is the way that they are forced to do it in
Chinese villages and working- class neighborhood where everybody is packed in
together. But here is the best part, the next morning Mrs. Miller made the best
pancake-waffle-eggs-anyway you wanted them-ham-hash-home fries- muffins-juice-
and whatever for us the best breakfast that we had ever had. And to top it off
a big old fresh baked blueberry pie for us to eat on our travels. [Josie said
this, smiling, a remembrance smile, a good Christian angel woman, indeed, she
has her place reserved in heaven, if such a place was worthy of her.]
[Although Josie lived on the island of Manhattan growing up
she never had an occasion to ride the Staten Island ferry which people who
don’t come from Manhattan don’t understand, especially since it was only a
nickel then. Allan said that his mother told him when she was a girl that she
would take boat from Boston down to New York via the Cape Cod Canal and the two
things that he remembered that he said she went on and on about were the cheap-jack
Automat, the cafeteria where you inserted coins and got your food via the
cubicles, a far out thing in the 1930s Josie guessed, and the ride on the cheap
Staten Island (and the view of downtown Manhattan from the Staten Island side).
So Allan told her that the first time they went down to New York City together
to face the fireworks from her parents and they wouldn’t, no way, let them stay
together in her room he actually spent the night riding the ferry back and
forth, a very cheap way to keep out of the cold and away from harm and copper
eyes. So when they made the turn past Neil’s Harbor and headed west, the first
real west move they had made on the trip Allan said remembering the Staten
Island Ferry experience “let’s take the ferry over to Prince Edward Island,”
and so they did and while Josie thought it was interesting to be on the water
with their funny old Datsun it wasn’t anything like the big deal Allan made of
it. Josie said to me “Let’s put it this way I still haven’t taken the Staten
Island Ferry.” Prince Edward Island certainly had its charm, small fishing and
farming villages dotted the highway around the island but Josie was getting a
little antsy about moving on to see some different scenery from the boats and
cows.
The one thing that stuck out in her mind though was this
incredible beach on the north side, this Brackley Beach which extended for
miles jutting out into the Saint Lawrence, and which if you can believe this up
that far north had no qualms about allowing nude bathing. They had it right on
the sign, the sign that reserved the area for nude bathers. They were kind of
shocked, or she was but Josie said to Allan that she was game, although she had
a swim suit along. Allan was kind of funny about that though, some Irish
Catholic working- class hang-up about public exposure, or something. He used to
hang around the various water spots they landed on with a light- weight long
sleeve shirt, his jeans and sandals, he refused to wear a bathing suit, and as
it turned out didn’t even have one with him. This get-up thing he said he wore
because of the bugs, bugs that really did seem to draw a bee-line to him.]
That day though I coaxed
him out of his jeans and all when I whispered in his ear that I was kind of
horny, horny like down in Maine that time at Perkin’s Cover when I had given
him the first blow job I had given him [she said to me that “thing she did with
her mouth” but we all know what she meant] and I said maybe I was up for giving
a little skull that day too. That perked him up as we headed to some private
area of the dunes, put down a big towel, maybe a small blanket and I went to
work on him. He was all smiles when I “curled his toes” for him.
Down river flow that is what Allan kept practically chanting
as we drifted down the Saint Lawrence River headed to Quebec City. But along
the way we had stopped at seemingly twenty different towns, Trois this and that
kind of towns, three river places, all the same place as far as I was
concerned, but one town that we stopped in could stand for my little road story
for that leg of the trip because it really could stand in for all of them. The
story also can stand as testimony to the cool, kooky, kinky stuff that made our
days go by nicely, and too fast with my sweet walking daddy. All of these river
towns had like a lot of towns they had seen, a small main street, a few stores,
maybe a library, a school showing here and there, and all had churches, but not
the New England big steeple white simple church gathering in the pious brethren
on Sunday to hear some big top theology from some learned Harvard-trained
minister praise big bad Jehovah, or something like that.
What these towns had was heavy stone-etched imposing
cathedral-like edifices with plenty of artwork, devotional stuff, and dank,
dark, and smelling of death about them, or really the readiness for death that
the Catholics are always hankering for. Really though just like the New England
pine-box churches once you have seen one you have pretty much gotten all you
need to know about the damn things. And I would have left it at that but
something about the whole sanctified, sacred, scented scene, kind of took Allan
off his moorings. I mentioned before that he was off the church thing but like
he said such things when so intense die hard, die out only after some kind of
sacred exorcism, and so that is how he schemed (schemed in the good sense of
planning something out) to do a mock exorcism at the church in Trois Rivieres,
a couple of hundred miles from Quebec City. Now this was not some churchy thing
he was thinking of but rather as was his first thought thing then, a little
sexual escapade. See his idea was that he and I would do some hanky-panky in
that dark church (dark, because like the New England white steeple church
brethren the parishioners were deep in work on the farms or in the cotton mill
that provided some work for the town folk). So we snuck over to the chapel at
least that is what I thought they called it, Allan did anyway (like maybe he
knew that was the best place, although he swore, swore after we were done that
he had never done it there, or even thought about it until the ride down the
Saint Lawrence). I had been afraid to take my clothes off, and insisted that I wouldn’t
so we settled on me giving him some head, but he said that for once they would
use a condom and leave the residue there as a burnt offering for the sins of
the world. I said that I did not usually like condoms (rubbers) in my mouth
because they taste funky but this time I kind of didn’t notice it so much
because frankly, as we got started I got so turned on by the idea we were doing
it in church, a sacred place, that I just went about my work, and I could tell
by his little moanings that Allan was appreciatingmy efforts, although after a bit I started
thinking about how maybe we should “do the do” (our little term for love-making
courtesy ofa Howlin’ Wolf song) and I
suggested that to him but once he got into her “giving head”thing that usually was what he wanted. Well, Allan
came, after I had given him the best blow job I thought I had ever given him
until then, at least he had a big grin on his face after I took the condom off
and we placed it carefully in front of the altar. I told him I was still turned
on and so we went back to that secluded area and did “do the do”, twice. [Josie,
the little tease, one of the reasons I was interested in her, said she would
tell me more, a couple of little extra things that happened that day at that
church but she said she couldtell I are
getting turned on while she was talking and so she left it at that. I was too.]
[After the farms, field and rivers coming down the Saint
Lawrence all of a sudden out of the river mist, out of the river turn around
Ile de Orleans there came into view the great fortress city of Quebec City, a
city that Allan and Josie both confessed that they knew about mainly from the
Plains of Abraham, bloody deaths of Montcalm and Wolfe in some 18th
century part of the world-wide battle for world supremacy, for the ports, the
commercial ports of entry. Quebec to her though was mainly a matter of about
ten million churches, Gallic Roman Catholic churches fit for the lame, halt,
and crippled it seemed by their names or names associated with each parish,
with all grey stone, all gothic, all forbidding, foreboding and frankly
hostile, hostile to whatever Jewish identity she felt, felt being among those
who not that long before (or maybe they still did) called her people
Christ-killers and did stuff about it.
Allan, a long lapsed, lapsedsince about fourteen when he started reading some stuff , some stuff by
Jews like Karl Marx and Sartre, Catholic, and feeling out of sorts and
oppressed by the Catholic-ness of the place ,except for those bloody Plains of
Abraham alongside the Saint Lawrence and really beautiful, for his own reasons,
stated categorically that he would defend me, my honor, the bones of my
forbears, even my fussy parents, if anybody, anybody under cloak of clerical
authority, or just any lay person who got crazy, tried any rough stuff, and
that kept her in check, and made her love him even more, and ready then to show
some him decidedly non-Catholic loving out of wedlock, and out of procreation’s
way too.]
Also despite the architectural beauty of the city, the
gothic old time sense of some very much earlier age, some age when men and
women were not afraid to come out and face the wilds, the hostile Indians, the
even more hostile wildlife and stake their claim to new world riches and pay
homage to the providence that spared those who survived put paid to that good
wind by those incredible churches, nunnery and chapel (and the vast number of
personal to service them), the current crop ofFrench-Canadians who just then dominated the very nationalistic times
were short with Anglos, including sympathetic Anglos like Allan and me. This was the heyday of Quebec independence
movement and the tensions were still in the air against the Anglo government
which had at one point before we came had declared martial law in the province.
The way that edge came out was when we would go into restaurant in Old Town and
try to order lunch or something (admittedly my high school and first year of
college long past French and later Allan’s Spanish in Mexico were too Anglo to
fake anybody out that they were anything but Norte Americanos) and be snubbed
at every turn, deliberately snubbed by waiters, slumming while students like
was almost universal then, maybe now too, who you could overhear speaking
perfectly usable English among themselves when they wanted to make some obscure
point. Allan would get on his high- horse about the heathens (his term for any
high-hat snub anywhere usually followed by-“well, my people were creating great
culture when their forbears were trying to figure out how to use a spoon, or
what it was useful for)While Allan
wasn’t happy about snubs, or any other of the small change of people, people
like his Irish forbears, who couldn’t respond to their oppression any other way
he was more tolerate than I was toward what he called his fellahin brethren
.
I asked him, asked him seriously one time when they were
driving out of Quebec City toward Montreal what he meant by fellahin, where he
had heard or seen the word, was it in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road where I had seen
it as part of Jacks’trip in southern
California in describing the places, the night after hard day fields places the
mex places, where he and his lady of the time, his little mex whore, landed on
that famous trip, and the people and their mores, his kindreds. Allan said no
he had learned it in seventh grade over at Hull Junior High School when some
history teacher, a Jewish guy if he remembered correctly, held the class in awe
with stories about the Jewish struggles in the Middle East with the
Palestinians, including labor Zionists, and Allan had held the word like a lot
of odd-ball words that interested him in his head since then. What Allan meant,
maybe like Kerouac, and like that history teacher, was life’s dispossessed,
those left behind in the dust who, until their judgment day (not that foolish
religious one) when they were liberated, maybe generations, would forget that
bondage times but until then he wanted to be very indulgence toward them, even
if we got poor wait staff service, ouch. Yeah, the fetid fellaheen night was
what was in store for, I wondered that night for the first time could I take it
…
…It started to go bad, not the bad bad
of our being together bad, but trip bad, after Quebec City as we were heading
down to Montreal. Allan began to doubt the whole purpose of the trip,
expounding on the bourgeois nature of the thing, the dilettante thing we were
doing while the people’s struggles was going on all around us. That night in
Quebec City that I had mentioned before when we stood in solidarity with the
students fighting the national liberation struggle kind of set things off in
his head. He was going through something of an ocean change in his head,
something more in line with his slightly changed political views as he moved
away from peaceful rallies and sweet reason conferences and workshops like the
one when we first met up in New Hampshire, something that had been gnawing at
him since that time down in Washington, that May Day 1971 time when I had refused
to stay with him to participant in a mass civil disobedience action on that day
to try to shut down the government in order to shut down the Vietnam War.
We had had arguments over the
correctness of that series of actions as we were hitch-hiking down with a
couple of my work friends to attend a mass rally that I had helped organize the
Boston part of and which Allan called hopelessly futile. He was staying for the
civil disobedience and I and my friends were heading back to Boston directly
after that rally. What bothered Allan after he came back about a week later
after having been incarcerated in the RFK stadium for a few days was how futile
that action was, how they, mainly students and young unaffiliated radicals, had
been easily defeated militarily by the cops and guardsmen. Swept up like the
rubbish and with less fuss it seemed to him. He got into a mood like it didn’t
matter what they did, those brethren students and unaffiliated radicals,
without some other force to help them out they would stay just as isolated and
defeated as if they had just stayed with those like me who called for more
massive peaceful marches as a strategy.
So Allan read, really read when he got
off of whatever temporary job his was doing to help us get the dough to make
the trip (he said he had not read so much, with so much purpose since the
stockade days), and went to different political meetings to try to see if
anybody else knew what the hell way that the wars could be stopped, or some
rough economic and social justice could be brought into this wicked old world.
After several months he finally gravitated toward some socialist stuff, some
stuff by Marx, but the big thing was that massive three-volume set by Leon
Trotsky the assassinated Bolshevik leader, History
of the Russian Revolution. I knew enough about Trotsky, and about Allan, to
get secretly stirred inside when he lost himself in that “project” (Allan’s
term). In the span between that night when he laid out his dream trip and the
actual start of the several months later he thus found “religion.”
[Now one of the things about Josie, one
that she saw as a positive trait, and I did too, was that she was a drone when
it came to research, that was why Professor Telly liked her, worked with her
closely. It turned out that Allan was the same way about things, a drone when
he got into something, not necessarily academic things but things that he
thought important and so he began reading everything he could about the
socialist movement, revolutions, the labor movements and all that. She had
never told Allan this at the time because although it was before she had met
him she was not sure how he would take it but a couple of times the Professor
and her got high on dope and went over to his house on Commonwealth Avenue when
his wife was out of town and did the “do the do.” Telly was looking for sex and
she was looking for good grades and a nice recommendation so it was a fair
trade-off. She still thought so, although a couple of her girlfriends had
raised their eyebrows when she told them.]
Allan would read his books as well on the
trip, which was fine sometimes but a few times when I did not want him to when I
was feeling kind of lonely and looking for attention from him. Looking for him
to do stuff with and to me. Especially when we were in cities and not the long
lost shadow campers. So that was what made Montreal, a perfectly beautiful city
sitting there on the Saint Lawrence with nice clean, busy, happy streets and
great scenery, kind of a bummer, kind of a turning point. We had rented a small
room with a kitchenette near the student ghetto for a week and for that week he
almost hibernated there reading, reading, reading one political book after
another.
When I got back to the room I told
Allan about my “date” (except the money part). He said, as he always said we
weren’t tied up like some bourgeois parents nonsense, and then went back to
reading. I was furious and to take my revenge I went to Jean Bon’s place a
couple more times before we left Montreal. And, both of us smiling, took my
fifty-dollar “fee” each time (and it really was the going rate as he said
because I had asked a couple of streets girls on Saint Catherine’s about it
after that first time, I didn’t want to be some cheap whore. They looked at her
strangely when I asked in my Americanized French since to them I did not look
like I was in the “trade,” strictly an amateur slumming, if anything). After
those sessions then not so furious I also bought myself a nice dress with her
“earnings” before we left Montreal. Allan did say I looked sexy in when I tried
it on in front of him, and I did. He took the dress off of me fast enough when
he saw me swaying gently (and suggestively) in that slinky thing. The wages of
war.
[Josie said that really after Montreal
a lot of the rest of the trip got kind of blurry, Allan blurry because what had
started out for him as some fulfillment of a childhood quest turned to ashes,
turned in on itself after he got “religion” and began to think more about how
he was going to fit into the “new world” after the end of the trip. He and
Josie had both agreed that they could see signs, definite signs that the big
wave that had risen in the 1960s to smite the giants had lost steam, had begun
to fade as the war in Vietnam, and America’s central role in the fiasco,
diminished. Frankly Josie was less concerned about what to do in the
post-revolt world since she had not been washed as much by the phenomenon but
she knew the events piling up weighed on Allan’s mind. He after all had staked
his political future on some kind of people’s victory in the ongoing struggles
to right the world’s wrongs.
They would argue over that future a
bit, more and more as time on the trip went on, and Allan kept thinking almost
daily that the travels should be shortened and they should get back to the
“real world.” The effect of all this was that after Montreal the former
leisurely pace of a hundred or two hundred miles a day, max, went by the boards
as they travelled from Montreal to Detroit, really Ann Arbor in one day
(skipping right through Toronto, which had been part of the original trip plan
but was scuttled since Allan s said they had been there the year before anyway.
Josie did not mind the skip although she hated the fast pace that Allan pushed
that day to hit Ann Arbor before dusk).
Ann
Arbor in 1972 represented all that Allan feared about what was happening to
that big splash 1960s wave. Since Josie had gone to fellow Michigan Big Ten
Wisconsin and had made connections on that campus that way and had also gone to
high school with several women who went Michigan and had kept in touch they
stayed at the house of one of those of high school friends. Or rather the
house, the doctor’s house, outside of town, that her girlfriend (and her
boyfriend) were house-sitting while the doctor’s family was in Europe. During
their stay there were several parties, nothing too wild but enough to be
entertaining, except for Allan.]
He
was shocked by the lack of any political talk from people who I had assured him
had been big wheels in the burgeoning Ann Arbor radical and anti-war movements
of the late 1960s. He did make me laugh when he said we could have been in Tea
Neck or Newburgh given that scene that night. Worse much, worse was when we
went down to the Quad and around the streets surrounding the campus and Allan
remarked (although I did not laugh this time) about the place turning into a
den of “cockroach” capitalists. The week we expected to spend in friendly Ann
Arbor (and that my friend expected as well) turned into four days and Allan got
antsy. That quick departure was also the first time that I found Allan had
done, or someone had done, some suspicious things in that doctors’ house. But
that did not come out until much later, a couple of years later when I saw that
high school girlfriend who told me some things, valuable things, had gone
missing from the doctor’s house. But that latter information was not part of
the trip story that night and I do not, in any case, want to go into those
sordid Allan details.
[After
Ann Arbor there were mad spurs through big cities, small towns and plenty of
prairie, rock formations, and dry desert as Josie and Allan had mapped out as
at Allan’s insistence they had decided to get to the West Coast in a far
shorter period than they had originally planned. That grasping between Chicago
and the Coast, San Francisco was to take two month, with the proviso that if
the weather in the Rockies got bad early they would push on faster. In any case
the new plan called for them to be on the Coast in two week. Josie said most of
it was kind of a blur between racing between points and ignoring many point
that she wanted to see in the Western desert night. She did mention a couple of
interesting stops and what happened, or almost happened in a couple of places.
Some tinged with disputes others just signifying that the writing was on the
wall.
That
rainy Cambridge night she also felt comfortable enough with me to pass me a
sheath of type-written pages that she wanted me to read over later since she
was too tired then to speak about those blur days and nights. What she had done
was she had converted her woes into short stories and fictionalized those
adventures. Her name in the stories was Angelica and they were told in Allan’s
voice although Josie insisted that the important point for me to take from the
stories was not the facts, although the locales were true, but the feeling
about how things had changed between her and Allan.
That
neon wilderness travelling talk night (and the next day) and what followed on
the trip, the ups and downs, and Josiesaid the sideways too, was their beginning, Her and Allan’s real
beginning, their love time with all the bumps, maybe despite all the bumps. She
said she could no longer be with him, didn’t want to go beyond the details of
their love and their failings that she had spoken of already, that he had gone
to a place that she could not follow, had cut her too badly by his careless
love actions with other women, by his waywardness, by his angers and hatreds,
by his deceits and lies, so no way, there had been too much sorrow between
them. She said that every once in a while though on wind-swept nights, or when
she was near some ocean, or some raggedy scruffy guy selling some left-wing
newspaper passed her by she would get all misty about her sweet walking daddy.
Would try to reach out again for that love that had passed them by, that he,
her be-bop sweet walking daddy when he was in the mood, had never known how to
handle. Would wonder to herself when she was in that mood if he ever found that
neon wilderness that he wandered after, and which they together had not found.
She said I would have to know that, know that up front, on that rainy, sad,
bluesy night. And that was our beginning…]
The US provides over 20% of Israel's military budget, and is
resupplying Israel even as these atrocities go on.
