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
At 18, drafted into the Austrian Army After having spent time in London As an apprentice waiter, he would tell a Christmas story That I always thought was just him spinning a charming fairy tale. Only much later, did I learn That he was part of that 1914 Christmas Truce and was telling the truth
Kevin Cooper, a black man framed up for the 1983 murder of a white family, has spent 33 years on death row in San Quentin prison. In 2004, Cooper was less than four hours away from being murdered by the State of California when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a stay of execution issued by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. That stay was granted after questions were raised over the prosecution’s evidence against Cooper in his 1985 trial. As one of the appeals court judges, William Fletcher, later wrote: “Kevin Cooper, the man now sitting on death row, may well be—and in my view probably is—innocent. And he is on death row because the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department framed him.”
Cooper’s case returned to the public spotlight earlier this year after the New York Times published a May 17 op-ed column by Nicholas Kristof that compellingly detailed the police frame-up. It began almost immediately after the brutally mutilated bodies of Douglas and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old neighbor were found in the Ryens’ house in Chino Hills, California, on 5 June 1983. Incredibly, the Ryens’ 8-year-old son Joshua, whose throat was slit and skull fractured, survived.
At the hospital, Joshua communicated to a social worker that the killers were three or four white men. This matched the coroner’s initial conclusion that there had been several killers who had used a hatchet, an ice pick and knives. But this and other evidence was thrown out by the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department as soon as they realized they could pin the murders on Cooper. A 25-year-old black man with a criminal record, he more than fit the police profile of a wanted suspect in racist, capitalist America.
Three days before the murders, Cooper had escaped from a nearby minimum-security prison, where he was serving a four-year sentence for burglary. He had then hidden out in a house next door to the Ryens before fleeing to Mexico. Evidence shows that Cooper checked into a Tijuana hotel on June 5. The next day, cops looked through the house where Cooper had hidden and found nothing. But as soon as Cooper became their prime suspect, “evidence” suddenly turned up, including a bloodstained button from a green prison uniform. Cooper’s was brown. A hatchet sheath was all of a sudden found in the house. Cigarette butts that the cops claimed were Cooper’s were likewise suddenly discovered in the ashtray of the Ryens’ station wagon, which had been stolen the night of the murders.
Buried was the testimony of local residents who reported seeing three white men driving the station wagon, as well as the accounts of witnesses who had seen three white men in bloody clothing in a nearby bar. Two bloody shirts were later found down the street from the bar. On June 9, a call was made to the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department by a woman saying that her boyfriend, a convicted murderer, had come home on the night of the Ryen murders in an unfamiliar station wagon, wearing bloody coveralls but not the T-shirt he had on earlier in the day. She turned the coveralls over to the police, who threw them away!
Cooper, who has maintained his innocence from the beginning, fought to have a DNA test done on a bloody T-shirt that had been found near the Ryens’ house. When the test, which was conducted in 2002, showed his blood on the shirt, Cooper insisted that it had been planted by the police. Further testing after the 2004 stay of execution revealed that the blood on the shirt included a chemical that the police use to preserve blood samples. When a vial of the blood taken from Cooper was tested, it was found to contain the DNA of Cooper and another person. In short, it’s likely that the police planted blood from the vial on the shirt and then topped it off with someone else’s blood to make it look like the vial hadn’t been tampered with. Nonetheless, the court upheld Cooper’s conviction and death sentence.
In his op-ed, Kristof noted that the defense attorney’s repeated requests for advanced DNA testing had been refused by California’s Democratic Party governor Jerry Brown, as well as by Kamala Harris, who was the state’s attorney general from 2011-17. Now a U.S. Senator and hopeful contender for the top slot on the Democrats’ presidential ticket in 2020, Harris immediately responded to Kristof’s column, declaring: “As a firm believer in DNA testing, I hope the governor and the state will allow for such testing.” The cynicism is breathtaking.
For his part, Governor Brown, who leaves office in January, has refused to grant Cooper’s request for DNA testing. When Kristof suggested that every day matters “for an innocent man on death row,” Brown simply shrugged that “California has 130,000 prisoners.” He should know. For years, Brown openly defied a Supreme Court ruling that conditions in California’s overcrowded prisons were so atrocious that they violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.” In his previous stint as attorney general of California, which has the most death row inmates in the U.S., Brown similarly shrugged off the notion that anyone on death row could be innocent.
Kristof presents the case of Kevin Cooper as “the story of a broken justice system.” Far from it. The police frame-up of Cooper is an object lesson in how the racist injustice system of American capitalism actually works. As Cooper himself observed: “I’m frameable, because I’m an uneducated black man in America. Sometimes it’s race, and sometimes it’s class.” The cops, courts, prisons and military are at the core of a state apparatus whose purpose is the defense of the profits, property and rule of the bourgeoisie against the working class and oppressed.
The death penalty stands at the pinnacle of the state’s machinery of violence. In the U.S., legal lynching is rooted in the very foundation of American capitalism, which was built on black chattel slavery and continues to be maintained through the forcible segregation of the majority of the black population at the bottom of this society. Those condemned to death row have always been disproportionately black.
The fight for Cooper’s freedom is a cause that is in the interest of the multiracial working class and all opponents of the brutal racism, exploitation and oppression enforced by the capitalist state. Free Kevin Cooper now! Abolish the racist death penalty!
For 48 years, Ed Poindexter has been locked behind bars for the “crime” of being an unbending fighter for black freedom. Along with his codefendant Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa, then known as David Rice, Poindexter was framed up on bogus charges of killing Omaha, Nebraska, police officer Larry Minard in an August 1970 bomb explosion. Without a shred of physical evidence and based on the perjured testimony of teenager Duane Peak at their 1971 trial, Poindexter and Mondo, leaders of the National Committee to Combat Fascism (NCCF), a Black Panther Party (BPP) affiliate, were sentenced to life. Mondo died in prison in 2016. The racist capitalist rulers have made it clear that is the only way they will let Poindexter leave his prison hell.
A July 2018 book by Michael Richardson, Framed: J. Edgar Hoover, COINTELPRO & the Omaha Two Story, lays bare the racist conspiracy by the FBI and Omaha police to frame up Poindexter and Mondo as part of the murderous FBI COINTELPRO vendetta against the Panthers. Based on a decade of meticulous research, the book exposes the lies of cops, prosecutors and FBI agents. It details collusion at the highest levels of the FBI with the Omaha police to suppress evidence, as well as prosecutorial intimidation and coaching of Duane Peak to concoct a scenario that tied Poindexter and Mondo to Minard’s killing.
Like the Panthers, the NCCF rejected the turn-the-other-cheek pacifism of Martin Luther King Jr., advocating armed self-defense in the face of racist cop terror. The avowedly revolutionary and anti-capitalist BPP crystallized the best of a generation of black militants. But the program of the Panthers was disdainful of the multiracial working class, which has real social power based on its role in production. This isolation from the proletariat left the Panthers especially vulnerable to government repression.
FBI head J. Edgar Hoover declared the Panthers to be the “greatest threat to the internal security of the U.S.” He said of an expanded COINTELPRO: “The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalists.” Hoover spelled out what he meant in 1968, when he stated: “The Negro youth and moderates must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries.”
This was no idle threat. Thirty-eight Panthers were killed and hundreds more arrested on bogus charges. Richardson describes the 4 December 1969 FBI-orchestrated raid by Chicago cops on the apartment of 20-year-old Panther leader Fred Hampton, who was assassinated together with Mark Clark as they slept in their beds. Four days later, a SWAT team laid siege to the Panther office in Los Angeles, firing thousands of rounds of ammunition. The primary target was L.A. BPP leader Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), a Vietnam War vet whose military knowledge was crucial that day to saving his own life and those of his comrades. Geronimo was subsequently framed up for a 1968 murder and spent 27 years in prison (eight of them in solitary) before his conviction was overturned and he was freed in 1997; he died in 2011. Those the authorities couldn’t kill were railroaded to prison hell. Among them is class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was falsely convicted of the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.
The sinister motivation for the frame-up of Poindexter and Mondo was made clear two decades later by Jack Swanson, the Omaha Police Intelligence Division liaison with the FBI. In a 1991 documentary by George Case, Black Panthers, Swanson boasted: “I think we did the right thing at the time, because the Black Panther Party...completely disappeared from the city of Omaha.” For his role in the frame-up, Swanson was promoted to lieutenant and later became Omaha’s chief of police.
By the time he joined the BPP, Mondo was known as a performance artist and anti-poverty worker. Like many military veterans, Poindexter was radicalized by the Vietnam War and sought in the BPP the vehicle to place his military experience in the service of the black freedom struggle. The two joined with the BPP in response to relentless racist police brutality—which brought Omaha to a boil with the killing of black 14-year-old Vivian Strong, who was shot in the back of the head by a cop in the summer of 1969. Strong’s killer was acquitted by an all-white jury. A year earlier, a black high school student had been shot dead by the cops during protests against arch-segregationist George Wallace, who held a rally in the city during his presidential election campaign.
In the early morning hours of 17 August 1970, Omaha police received a 911 call from a man speaking with a deep gravelly voice, reporting that a woman was screaming from a vacant house. When the cops arrived, the house was empty except for a suitcase inside the doorway. That suitcase exploded, killing Minard. Afterward, Omaha police rounded up dozens of black people in a racist dragnet. Richardson points out that within hours, the FBI knew from its informants that Mondo and Poindexter were not involved in Minard’s death—but it is the two of them that the cops and FBI targeted.
Among those picked up was 15-year-old Duane Peak, who confessed to placing the bomb. Peak told the cops at least six versions of what happened. Initially, he stated that he acted alone, and that Poindexter and Mondo were not involved. Threatened with the death penalty and promised a deal, Peak agreed to implicate them.
At a preliminary hearing, he effectively recanted his accusations against Poindexter and Mondo. The prosecution asked for a break. Two hours later, Peak returned to court wearing sunglasses, which when removed revealed swollen eyes. He then repeated his earlier fabrication that Poindexter had built the bomb using dynamite that was stored in Mondo’s basement. The next day, Peak confided in a letter from jail to a family friend, Olivia Norris: “From now on I refuse to call myself a man, or anything close to a man, because I did what I did.” He added, “I not only turned against those two bloods, but I turned against myself and my own people.” That letter, which prosecutors knew about, was suppressed along with other evidence.
Peak testified that he carried the suitcase bomb around North Omaha from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m., taking it into three different cars and two residences. Four witnesses, including two cousins of Peak, testified that Peak was never together with Poindexter and Mondo at the times and places that Peak claimed. Peak also testified that it was he who made the 911 call. A recording of the 911 call was never played for the jury. Omaha police had sent a copy of the tape to FBI headquarters for analysis but later asked that no written report be issued, putting a stop to the search for the identity of the caller. An FBI memo pointed to a warning by the Omaha assistant chief of police that use of the tapes “might be prejudicial to the police murder trial.” Hoover himself signed off on this suppression of evidence. Testifying at a 2007 hearing on Poindexter’s petition for a new trial, vocal analyst Tom Owen confirmed that Peak could not have made that phone call.
Peak testified that he never entered into a deal with the prosecution, and the prosecutor denied that any bargain was struck. After testifying against Mondo and Poindexter, Peak pleaded guilty to juvenile delinquency in juvenile court.
The cops’ claim that they had recovered dynamite from the basement of Mondo’s house was transparently false. Of the more than two dozen police photos of the basement, not one shows any dynamite—which only appears in photos of the trunk of a police cruiser. Jack Swanson testified at the 1971 trial that he found the dynamite in a coal bin but changed his story in a 1974 federal appeal hearing, saying he saw it by the furnace. In the 2007 hearing, another cop who at trial had backed up Swanson’s story claimed that he, not Swanson, discovered the dynamite. The court ruled these contradictions “immaterial.” Neither Mondo’s nor Poindexter’s fingerprints were found on the dynamite. In the George Case documentary, Marvin McClarty, a former Omaha policeman present at the search, said he knew that the cops “were out to get those two,” adding: “To this day I still believe that it [the dynamite] was planted in that house.”
The cops also claimed that residue recovered from Mondo’s pants and Poindexter’s pockets tested positive for dynamite. A photo of Mondo taken moments before he surrendered his pants showed him with his hands deeply thrust in his pockets, yet swabs from their hands tested negative. In 1999, a retired top FBI explosives expert, Fred Whitehurst, submitted an analysis. “I still find that suspicious. The dynamite is in cartridges that don’t need to be opened ever except to punch a hole in them and stick a blasting cap in them. But there are dynamite particles in many places. This is not right.” He concluded: “Something doesn’t add up here unless that evidence was salted.” Many of those initially rounded up tested positive for dynamite, only to be released with charges dropped immediately after Poindexter and Mondo were convicted.
Mondo remained an unbroken fighter against racial oppression until his last breath. Poindexter, who just turned 74, remains unbowed despite numerous health conditions, including recent triple-bypass heart surgery, no doubt exacerbated by nearly five decades of vindictive and inhumane treatment. He has earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees and is recognized as a caring mentor for fellow prisoners.
COINTELPRO was formally terminated two weeks after the conviction of the Omaha Two in the early 1970s. But it lives today not only in the ongoing imprisonment of a generation of Panthers and other fighters for black freedom but also in the surveillance, harassment and state terror directed against those who oppose depredations of racist American capitalism.
In 1974, a federal district court overturned Mondo’s conviction based on the illegal search of his house, a decision affirmed by a federal appellate court a year later. But in 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the case returned to Nebraska state court. The Nebraska Supreme Court then ruled that Mondo’s time to appeal had lapsed. Since 1993, Nebraska’s Parole Board has voted for the release of Poindexter and Mondo. However, the Nebraska Board of Pardons, made up of the governor, the attorney general and secretary of state, has refused to commute the life sentences to a term of years—a prerequisite to a grant of parole.
The FBI, cops and courts are core components of the capitalist state, whose purpose is to safeguard the bosses’ profit system through breaking strikes, terrorizing ghetto and barrio youth and repressing social protest. There will be no end to cop terror and racist frame-ups without getting rid of the capitalist system and its state through workers revolution. Ed Poindexter is an innocent man—Free him now!
* * *
Ed Poindexter is among the 11 class-war prisoners receiving stipends from the Partisan Defense Committee, which is preparing to hold its 33rd annual Holiday Appeal fundraiser in support of this program. We first started providing stipends to Poindexter and Mondo in 1986. For more information about the PDC and its class-war prisoners fund, see www.partisandefense.org. You can write to Poindexter at: Ed Poindexter, 27767, 1-A-09, Nebraska State Penitentiary, P.O. Box 22500, Lincoln, NE 68542-2500.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 was the last heroic chapter of Poland’s combative Jewish proletariat during World War II. Some 40,000 men, women and children held off elite Nazi troops for 42 days before they were nearly all dragged off to the gas chambers. We reprint below an excerpt from Czerwony Sztandar (Red Flag), the newspaper of the Jewish Trotskyists in the Warsaw Ghetto, hailing the Red Army shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. This selection originally appeared in WV No. 573 (9 April 1993). In the intervening period, we have misplaced the source material.
The first workers state is fighting for its existence. The fate of the Russian Revolution and—to a considerable degree—the fate of the international revolution weigh in the balance. The workers of the whole world follow with bated breath the course of the greatest class war in the world, and their hearts and souls are with the Red Army…. Under which slogans will the Soviet bureaucracy lead the war? Under patriotic or revolutionary ones, “democratic” or class?
The history of the last 17 years, beginning from the foundation of the theory of “socialism in one country,” and especially the “gains” of the last six years—the “people’s front,” betrayal of the Spanish revolution, the Moscow trials, the pogrom against the Bolshevik elite, the restoration of the officer caste in the Red Army, triumphant reaction in all spheres of Soviet life, the propagation of the cult of [tsarist generals] Suvorov, Kutuzov and similar “heroes,” the assassination of Trotsky and the friendship with Hitler, all Stalin’s crimes—the whole Soviet Thermidor would have had no sense if the Soviet bureaucracy were to show itself suddenly willing and capable to conduct revolutionary war….
We defend the workers state regardless of the Stalinist regime, as we defend every workers organization from the blows of the class enemy regardless of the reformist regime ruling it…. The war of the USSR against Hitler—is the war of the international proletariat, it is our war!
“We accept the workers’ state as it is and we assert, ‘This is our state.’ Despite its heritage of backwardness, despite starvation and sluggishness, despite the bureaucratic mistakes and even abominations, the workers of the entire world must defend tooth and nail their future socialist fatherland which this state represents” (Trotsky, 1932).
One Last Time On The 50th Anniversary Of The Beatle's "Sgt. Pepper" Album (2017)-The Class of 1964-Stones or Beatles?
By Phil Larkin
[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers solely to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment by Green designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]
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Today I choose not to go on and on about the recent internal disputes on this site which has led to the canny and “exile” of the former site administrator, Allan Jackman who used the moniker Peter Paul Markin when posting, etc., because I have bigger fish to fry as they used to say in the old days in my Irish Catholic growing up Acre section of North Adamsville south of Boston. (Allan in a retro piece written well before all the controversies has given his take on this dispute in a posting dated December 15, 2014.) Those “fish” meaning in this 50th anniversary year of the Beatle’s world record bestselling album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band the world-historic dispute of that Acre growing up time about whether the Beatles or the Stones (Rolling Stones) were the band that fit our moods. “Spoke” to us although we would have torn each other’s hearts out, or did a huge amount of “fag” baiting (yeah, we were way behind the curve then on sexual identity issues even though one of our hang-around guys, the biggest “fag-baiter” ultimately to our collective shock “came out” a couple of years after the Stonewall Riots of 1969 in New York City and for a while “shunned” him until we wised up a bit mainly through our own chances in politics and ways of looking at the world) if anybody had dared to use such an expression in the year of our Lord 1960 something.
I have gone round and round on this one and by overwhelming general consensus, excepting our leader Frankie Riley, who tough and smart as he was, couldn’t get us to buy into his view that the “boys for Liverpool,” meaning po’ boy working class guys like us were superior to the Stones. And here is the funny part some fifty plus years later those of us who are still around from that time and still speaking to each other, including that gay brother (a couple of guys are not for very long ago reasons but in the baby-boomer male psyche “forgive and forget” was, is, a tough dollar) having recently gathered together to listen to a ton of Beatles and Stones material still believe that our youthful opinions hold true. That truth despite most of us, having survived the “from hunger” neighborhood, wound up having decent and honorable careers. Even Frankie belatedly to be sure feels that the “angry young men” Stones still represent best our own anger at our situations in a world we did not make than the more wistful Beatles. Personal preferences, time, and whatever youthful angst and alienation obviously mixing up the pot when comparison time comes around but there you have my take on that still simmering controversy.
So the Stones “win” that battle but today I want give a “shout out” especially to those on the Beatles side about a program on NPR’s Terry Gross- hosted Fresh Air. One day she had, in an encore edition originally aired on June 1st, the son of George Martin, the guy who produced Sgt. Pepper who for the 50th anniversary remixed his father’s original album work. For an hour he spoke about many interesting things that occurred during the original production and the things that he had done to give the thing a 50th anniversary retooling.
Here’s the link but listen to Stones stuff before final judgment-okay:
On The 50th Anniversary Of Beatle's "Sgt Pepper" Album (2017) The Class of 1964-Stones or Beatles? Allan Jackson (using the moniker Peter Paul Markin on this site) commentary
Working Class Hero
Street Fighting Man The following is a response to a canned Q&A section from a committee of my high school Class of 1964 (a few edits here to delete personal information). I share it with the aging lefties and rock and roll aficionados in the audience. Okay, so Markin has come in from the cold and reunited with the Class of 1964 after over forty years of ignoring that fact. Big deal, right? For those interested in my profile you can read my comments in the My Story section. But today, since I have joined this work and it is my dime, I feel I might as well use it for the purpose that I joined, to network with some of the old crowd. I propose to use my bulletin board space to pose certain questions to my fellow classmates to which I am interested in getting answers. Thus I will be periodically throwing a question out and would appreciate an answer. No, I do not want to ask personal family questions. After forty years this space is hardly the place to air our dirty little secrets. No, I do not want to talk religion. That is everyone private affair. No, I do not want to talk politics, although those who might remember me know that I am a ‘political junkie’ from way back. In fact I mean to get myself into some 12 step rehab program as soon as this current campaign is over, if ever. What I want to do is ask questions like that posed below. Join me….. “Manchurian Candidate” McCain vs. The Huckster”? Boring. Ms. Hillary vs. Obama ‘The Charma”? Ho, hum. Three dollar gas at the pump? Oh, well. No, what has my blood boiling is a question that I am, after forty years, desperate to know about my classmates from 1964. In your callow youth, back in the mist of time, did you prefer the Rolling Stones or the Beatles? The question was posed in the canned Q&A section above but I feel the issue warrants a full airing out. I make no bones about my preference for the Rolling Stones and will motivate that below but here let me just set the parameters. I am talking about when we were in high school. I do not mean the later material like the Beatles "Sergeant Pepper" or the Stones' "Gimme Shelter". And no, I do not want to hear about how you really swooned over Bobby Darin or Bobby Dee. Answer the question asked, please. I am not sure exactly when I first hear a Stones song although it was probably “Satisfaction”. However, what really hooked me on them was when I hear them cover the old Willie Dixon blues classic “The Red Rooster”. If you will recall that song was banned, at first, from the radio stations of Boston. Later, I think, and someone can maybe help me out on this, WMEX broke the ban and played it. And no, the song was not about the doings of our barnyard friends. But, beyond that it was the fact that it was banned that made me, and perhaps you, want to hear it at any cost. That says as much about my personality then, and now, as any long-winded statement I could make. That event began my long love affair with the blues. And that is probably why, although American blues also influenced the Beatles, it is the Stones that I favor. Their cover still holds up, by the way. Not as good, as I found out later, as the legendary Howlin' Wolf’s version but good. I have also thought about The Stones influence recently as I have thought about the long ago past of my youth. Compare some works like John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” and The Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” (yes, I know these are later works) and I believe that you will find that something in the way The Stones’ presented that angry, defiant sound appealed to my working class alienation. But enough. I will close with this. I have put my money where my mouth is with my preference. When the Stones’ toured Boston at Fenway Park in the summer of 2005 I spend many (too many) dollars to get down near the stage and watch old Mick and friends rock. Beat that.
Ti
Jean wondered sitting on Pawtucketville silts listening to the rushing rock-strewn
Merrimack coming by, wondered like maybe those old-time Dutch sailors sighting
that green fresh breast of land that would become Long Island as they entered the sound, another
waterway a metaphor for Jack life, and found a new world unspoiled for that
fifteen minutes before they laid anchor and claim on the cheap. That wonder
drove Jack boy, all fourteen- year old Jack boy so not worried by red dress
Paula Cole coming hither Friday night dates or that damn Maggie down by the almost
Chelmsford dream side of the river, damn already the river is in play with her
Irish braids and that god damn Bible between her knees to wonder if James was
it MacNeil Abbott or Abbott MacNeil Whistler sat beside this same river
thinking about his own Mere, his mother and how he could do justice to that
forlorn Puritan face which razzled him with blacks, browns and greys, as if to
mock the very idea of mother. Hell, James, he would never be called Jimmy like
the other boys once he “did” his mother in those woe begotten colors decided he
would use the old dame, and she was an old dame to star in his various studies
of colors and only philistines would dare to call the work some mother lode
draught.
This
is where the story gets interesting, although we know that Jack was not
bothered just then by come hither girls in red dresses or Bible-kneed Irish
girls since he had, playing hooky, crept into his holy of holy spots in the
cubicle at the school library gone beyond the wonder of those muddy splat
riverbanks where he first wondered the wonder akin to those Dutch sailors
seeking his own fresh green breast of land, the land of the mind. Wondering how
to stop wondering Jack picked up a biography of James Whistler complete with
mother on the front except she was painting title called some study in black
and white, something like that by one Lancelot Grey who Jack would later find
out was the central figure in what he would wind up calling the pre-war art
cabal that was attempting to “dress up,” read, protect American art and artists
from the onslaught of European critics who basically call that art “folk art”
meaning show the bastards the door and maybe get them shown in Peoria or better
Grand Island but stay away from European shores.
Grey’s
take on Whistler, taking the American born but life-long ex-patriate in was
that he never left the American shores and stuff like that. What interested
Jack though was not that art cabal stuff (art cabal a term he would not know
until later when landing in New York he came face to face with the denizens of
that cabal through various Student Art League girlfriends and others met in
Village garrets when garrets were there and not in Soho). But that was after
the war (World War II in case a younger reader has happened on this piece) when
New York told cheapjack art Europe to fuck off, to step back and various
abstraction movements were all the rage. Just then Grey delved into Whistler’s
various non-mother pieces (than mother painting an iconic come on since back
then only the art cabal knew other paintings and the publisher insisted that
that painting be on the front).
Jack
popcorn for eyeballs sitting in the last row of the orchestra section of the
old Majestic Theater off of Bridge Street across from the offices of the Lowell Sun waiting as the screen heated
up after some very ordinary news of the week reels and an off-color cartoon
which he never did get even after watching several times over the next few Saturday
matinee double-feature week. The films changed every Friday but Mr. Le Blanc
cheapened up his operation by re-running those silly cartons built for
ten-years olds with no brains but silly to a strapping boy of sixteen who
actually took girls to the shows. (Le Blanc also sold stale popcorn with so
much salt laid in it would make your eyelids curl and watered down the tonic,
old-fashioned New England word for soda, so much it might as well have been
water and even made boys like Jack with strong kidneys ran to restrooms
frequently.) Of course, that was a totally different proposition, that messing
with girls stuff that he had pretty much figured out by sixteen with plenty of street advise some of it recklessly
dangerous and no, zero, parent advise but that was when you asked a girl if she
wanted to sit in the orchestra section or go up to the heavy-breathing pitch
dark moaning balcony. If the former that would be a last date (one time he left
the girl in the front lobby to fend her herself on the way home while he went
off to Renoir’s Ice Cream Shop with Even Stephen and Dizzy Izzy). This day,
this Thursday afternoon first show skipping afternoon classes was different when
Jack was all business trying to figure some stuff out that was going to appear
on the satin silk screen.
Then
it, no, she started. All fresh as a new born daisy fending off some sidewalk
Lothario, if only in Jack’s imagination, really only some lug like a million
lugs he knew in Lowell High School and who if he hadn’t been on a mission this
afternoon could have stood in front of the high school at close of day and
counted the number of lugs from the class of 1939 carousing out the door some
he could name by name. So, no this lug was going nowhere, was getting nothing
except the desert breezes from this girl. Jack swore the girl with the Bette
Davis eyes after beating the clown off with a car jack sat in her dust-filled
private reading spot reading some French poet from the fourteenth century. Jack
pressed his popcorn eyeballs to see book jacket cover and his heart beat a mile
a minute once he saw that she, Gabby let’s give her a name, was reading his
hero prince bandit poet Francois Villon, like him a Breton when that meant
something before the wave of diasporas which led angelized angel-headed
Kerouacs to the shores of the Saint Lawrence River and downwardly mobile fates
stripped the clan of their respective dignities.
Yes,
Villon the prince of thieves who Jack had discovered in that broken- down
school library where he hid out when he could not deal with bullshit chemistry
classes or some such subject around the time that he read that book by Lancelot
Grey about that pimp daddy, holy goof (first use of the term “holy goof” came
from reading Grey) James Whistler the artist who kept himself from the Thames
and watery graves by selling his paintings or more usually “selling” his
mistresses to make the rent money when times were tough. He still loved
Whistler (although he could only mock a guy who had to practically handcuff his
mother to the chair to get her to stand still for what he called a study in
black and white, something like that) if only because he was Lowell, was a
native son and that counted a lot for Jack then even if James was not a Breton.
(Funny later he would go through seven kinds of hell with his own mother before
telling her to kiss off.) But Villon was a legitimate bandit-prince who hung
with the lumpen outside the guarded moats ready to pounce one minute on the
next jackroll victim (some historians have speculated that Villon and his
scumbags invented the jackroll, taking a bag of nails or coins if they had any
wrapping them in a small cloth and under cover of darkness bopping some old
lady or drunken sot for their dough). A lost art that Jack would use more than
once in Times Square when some pansy hipster tried to do tricks on him and he
bopped him for hot dog money at Howard Johnson’s stuff like that, yes, a lost
but helpful art for those who lived outside the law, for those whose only road
was the road.
And
there she was the girl with the Bette Davis eyes all dewy even as a desert dust
storm was brewing just outside the Gates of Eden reading Villon in French (her
mother was French a catch for her woe begotten father during World War I
service in France with the American Expeditionary Force who came back to Eden
saw the dust and stone wood and left on the next train with some Singer sewing
machine salesman with four quarters and a quart of wine). That Garden of Eden
business a gag, a gag of sorts since the diner that he father owned, no, really
her grandfather who was getting too old to run the place but too ornery to let
his deadbeat son who couldn’t keep a French whore, Gramp’s words, in the middle
of the desert from running away with the next time that came by with long pants
on was just outside the main entrance to the Petrified Forest (couldn’t later a
guy like Allan Ginsberg or even novice poet Dean Moriarty have a field day with
that idea as the 1930s was tearing America, tearing the world apart, making the
world turn in on itself). The gag was that Gramps an old Kentucky coalminer
until he was thirteen and figured out that he would rather not die in
Appalachia with the muskrats had headed out of the hills and hollows as fast as
he could. Head out to California where he had heard had streets paved of gold
and young girls ready to give whatever they had to give. But see Gramps and his
forbears were sitting folk, were tied to the tired land so long that they would
sit down anywhere where that didn’t have to pretend to seek prosperity. So
Gramps stopped at the Petrified Forest once he ran into some Nevada Jane
heading east after busting out heading west who worked at the diner and who
played the flute for him until she too ran off with some calico salesman. Gramps
just stayed put and married the first woman who smiled at him (Gabby’s grandma)
and that ended the road west in that generation.
So
poor rattled and pestered Gabby was torn between sweet perfume dreams of Left
Bank Paris cafes and that endless rock-hard dust. Then out of the blue some
pretty hobo came walking up the road to the diner all dusty and road worn, a
hobo whose name turned out to be Leslie Howard (that would be important later
to Gabby if meaningless to Jack when she inherited his life insurance policy
but that was later long after Jack had gathered in the wanderlust that set that
first Breton to Canadian shores and that fucking raging Saint Lawrence River of
no returns) Listen up, Jack did, this Leslie Howard was no stumble bum like
half the hoboes, tramps, bums, and there are social distinctions among the
brethren who were running around the country stopping at railroad jungle camps
or sleeping under unkempt bridges and arroyos but a real live itinerant
intellectual who had when he had seen the first turnings of the world inward in
those times got the hell out of Europe
as fast as he could (he would be found later when Gabby looked for next of kin
to see if anybody would contest the life insurance policy to have been Jewish
not a good thing to be in Europe in those times to be a “rootless
cosmopolitan”) This Howard, let’s call him that since it is as good as any
other and who knows what he real name was if he was on the run bedazzled Gabby
from minute one leaving that lug gas jockey out to dry with the trees. Knew his
Villon cold, knew that he too was a bandit prince who hung outside the moats
with the lumpen.
Right
then Jack’s already strong flight of fantasy knew that he was kindred, here was
guy who loved to read but could not settle down with at crazy-mixed up world
pounding tattoos in his fevered brain. If anybody had been near Jack in that
darkened orchestra section fit only for one-date girls and sullen adults they
would have heard him gasp every time this Howard said anything of import to
Gabby. Jack’s fevered mind started sketching things out, read like crazy, write
like crazy and keep on the move, always on the move. What Jack would call later
in one of his lesser but more philosophical books the quest, the grail hunt,
the breaking from the holy goofs that keep you penned in and unfree, that holy
goof a well-worn word in Jack talk. For now though just the germ of a plan.
They
say that Bretons are not only are hearty but also headstrong and Jack sensed in
Gabby just such characteristics even though she was nothing but some dirt
farmer Okie, Arkie descendent. He would forever search for his Gabby but never
find her, and frankly that search was just one among a number of searches
later. This guy Leslie, what made him tick, why Jack was drawn to him like
lemmings from the sea was more problematic. The Villon, hobo road warrior
philosopher king part was straight up. He would have a million sleepless night
visions of being out on some tramp road in say Winnemucca or Yuma facing no
dough and no food or water and glad-tiding himself into soft spot, some soft
bed if that was the way the thing played out. Pearl-diving, you know washing
dishes for his meal in some such Garden of Eden diner somewhere if necessary
just to stay on the road one more day. That part held romance, held him in
thrall.
What
Jack couldn’t figure out especially since the girl with the Bette Davis eyes
was totally smitten by him and his wayward ways against the lugs, demented
grandpas, jelly-fish fathers and abandoned down some Seine River mother not
unlike the Merrimack always close to his dreams especially that rocky crest
around the old Lowell Textile Institute why this modern day troubadour had so
little regard for himself that he would let a bum like the notorious Duke
Mantee, yes, that Duke who was the scourge of the West just then put two random
slugs into his body. He tries, and would continue to try later to understand
the idea of the retreat of the intellectuals, that the time of the caveman was
making a reappearance after so much spent trying to come up from the mud and
slime. Backwards. Damn, that bothered Jack, would bother him until his own
dying breath when he turned on the intellectuals with a vengeance. The now dank
dark movie hall left him utterly perplexed about what would happen to him when
he had to face his own road west.
Outside
the movie theater, actually he had been in the lobby when he spied her and then
hailed her, Jack stopped that come hither Paula Cole and asked her if she would
like to go to the movies that next Friday night when the films changed. When
she answered yes Jack now a veteran of the ploy asked Paula -orchestra or
balcony? Answer: “don’t be silly I would not have accepted if we weren’t going
to the balcony.” With that he would put the fate of Howard in the back of his
mind. First things first.
********************
Jack
brought the Tokay, the cheap wine of the day that got him through the day and
the only other wine beside kosher Mogen David mad monk (although just then
demurely so) Allan Ginsberg, hereafter Monk, would drink to set himself up to
read some sliver of a poem. This night expecting a bunch of people to of all
things a North Beach (San Fran) converted garage gallery something the Monk
would put an end to guys like T.S. Eliot, bum of the month Nazi-symp Ezra Pound
and about fifty other guys and twenty other gals including his high school
prose father. Would burn their old-fashioned words now of no account on a pile
of burnt offerings, a pile of faggots (he would not learn until later that
word’s common origins use to destroy brethren fellow homosexuals). Would get
the world well, for a minute, in search of some fatherless compadre, in search
of the father Jack claimed he had never known, and not he alone in the welter
of great depressions and slogging through war. Maybe in the end they were
searching for Father Death who knows. Jack passed the wine, passed all
understanding before that search was consummated.
Some
guy, some guy who claims that his mother had worked at City Lights Bookstore in
those days and had had an affair with the poet Phillip Larkin and had brought
the dago red and him to the reading. Claimed to know Jack, or maybe it was the
Monk in the old days, in the days when they raged with so many words they
couldn’t keep enough Woolworth 5 &10 notebooks in flannel shirts or golf
scorecard pencils ready wrote this, second hand about being present at the creation,
second hand. At this far remove it is hard to tell fact from fiction, tell who
is bullshitting and who has the goods especially since virtually all the
background characters are gone, some long gone. Make of that what you
will.
********
I have seen the best
poet of the generation before mine, no, let me start over, I have seen a
universal max daddy poet speaking some truths to put old Homer and freaking
staid T.S. Eliot in the shade. Starting off by
declaring that he had seen that the
best minds of his generation, guys like brother in soul Kerouac, be-bop Charlie
Parker, Phil Larkin when he was sober, Johnny Spain when off the needle and
doing cold turkey and of course the daddy them all one Carl Solomon turn to
mush. Turned out in the barren wilderness, not the friendly desert-scrapes
heading west on lonely Greyhound buses or Tourist Bureau hang-ups wilderness
out pass Butte or Boise but what a novelist named Nelson Algren who called the
shots and gave many a troubled youth the keys to the fixer man and
wellness called the neon wilderness,
called that place where the bright lights of the city blinded a proper man (or
woman) some junkie Frankie Machine haven with a wife he hated and a girlfriend
who couldn’t stick with him when he was on the junk. That neon beast from which
no one returned except for quick stays in safe haven mental asylums (called
ironically funny farms but even the Monk, whose own mother had her share of
sorrows in such places could find no humor in such designations).
Get this, no, let me
start again against the cold nose of my sister filled heart. Saw, he the Monk
okay in case I lose my train of thought passing through Salt Lake City and
thoughts of Joseph Smith’s grand hustle taking a bunch of farmers from burned
over lands to the searing sun of the western depot. Saw the same Negro streets Jack,
and one time Jack and he when he, Jack was looking for some rough trade sailors
just off the China Seas pierce earring trail saw around Blue Hill Avenue and
Dudley Street blank, 125th Street blank, Dearborn Street blank,
MacArthur Boulevard blank, Central Avenue blank, Cielo Street in Tijuana blank,
Plaza del Mayo, Montezuma revenge Mexico blank, and wasted in the sweated fetid
humid Thunderbird-lushed night dreaming of pink Cadillacs and stony-faced fixer
men getting wise by the hour on Carl’s ancient fears. (And, this is funny or so
the winos and every hobo, vagrant, escapee, drifter and grafter yelling out in
unison thought so “what is the word-Thunderbird-what is the price forty twice.”
Ready to jackroll some senior citizen lady for the price, for fucking eighty
cents which any self-respecting junkie could cadge in two minutes even in Cielo
Street, Tijuana and that is a hard peso to drill,-ready to commit mayhem at
Park Street subway stations for their “boy,” to be tamped by girl but I will be
discrete since the Feds might raid the place sometime looking for the ghost of
Trigger Burke who eluded them for a very long time. (Trigger who captured
Jack’s imagination and the Monk’s but here is the weird part Carl’s too who
started strutting like him too after the prince of bandit-poets Corso showed
him how to do that slinky swagger on the last visit before the blade at
Sandhill).
Thought that those
angel-headed hipsters hearing choruses of angels strumming their noiseless
wings, those cold as ice in a man’s veins hep cats hanging around Times,
Lafayette, Dupont, Harvard squares (you can fill in your own squares, square
the Monk laughed and Jack hee-hawed) crying in pools of blood coming out of the
wolves-stained sewers around the black corner would never stop bleating for
their liquor. Would not stop until they got popular and headed for the sallow
lights of Harvard Square where they, those angel-headed hipsters in case you (and Carl) forgot hustled young college students, young
impressionable college students green as grass whose parents had had their best
minds, those hallowed students’ mines, okay, wasted in the turbid streets of
south Long Island (not the West Egg of Gatsby’s dream out of Fitzgerald’s fresh
green breast of land to stir even sullen rough trade Dutch sailors looking for
whips and cuts, conquering everything in sight like any other poor-boy
arriviste with too much money and not enough imagination and not East Egg of
the fervid elites but any-town, Levitt-town of those who would escape to Boston
or Wisconsin to face the angel of death, that angel frightening even Monk when
Carl was not around to anchor his brain. Up front and say no go, pass, under
luminous moons which light up sparks and say to that candid world which could
have given a fuck hard times please come again no more.
Here is the beauty of
the green as grass hustle working fast to get enough to fix that jones. Dangle
some college guy, maybe with a girl, shy, with dreams of hard-core liquor or a
well-twisted joints to loosen her up and her fragile come hither virginity (reminding
Jack of that Paula Coe who played the flute for him more than one time in that
Majestic Theater balcony some hardcore Friday night and the Monk, searching for
some blue-eyed Adonis, settling for some
pimpled has been teenager seeking his own father dreams). Lay out the story-kid
your booze and something for me. Done. Later, a big bottle wrapped tight in a
paper bag. Trick, a very thin brew of whiskey split and cash for him to get
himself well. Oh the hipster cons which would have made even the Monk laugh.
You already know about
what you need to know about Protestant girls with their upfront Protestant
lusts although they would not be caught dead, or alive, in Sally splendor
although they certainly could play the penny whistle and damn those world
historic fucks. Maybe tasty Jewish girls from the shtetl not in East or West
Egg who flocked to the other side of the river and gave Irish guys who
previously had dribbled their spunk behind dumpsters after losing out to ten
bucks and virginity in tack tickey-tack Catholic girls who refused to give that
head that would have brought some of the best minds some freaking relief
(better not say fucking relief because that would be oxymoronic). Maybe some off-center
sullen fair-skinned and blonded Quaker, Mennonite, Primitive Baptist or
Brethren of the Common Life kind of Protestant girls, like I said off-center,
who spouted something about one god and no trinities, no god and no trinities
and just feel good stuff.
All three varieties and
yes there were more off-centers but who even knew of Quakers, Mennonites, lusty
Amish girls run away from home, Tantric card-wheelers, and fresh- faced red
light district sluts who at least played the game straight-played the cash
nexus for pure pleasure and maybe to even up some scores. All-Catholic, Jewish,
Protestant, yeah, Quakers (fakirs, fakers and Shakers included), the sluts,
Mennonites and yes those lusty red-faced Amish runaways all coming together
after midnight far from the negro streets, the Monk’s beat and no anachronism
like saying black or Afro-American back to those Mister James Crow days, but
not far from the all night hustlers and dime store hipsters with their ten-cent
cigar store rings and cheap Irish whiskeys bought on the installment plan who
converged around the Hayes-Bickford just a seven league jump from the old end
of the line dead of night Redline subway stop in order to keep the angel of
death at arms’ length. The angel of death a tough bitch to break, and tougher
to cross when they deal went down. There to listen until dawn to homosexuality-
affixed hungry for the keyhole blast or the running sperm fakir poets, the Monk
number one of all the number ones and
slamming singsters (to keep up with the gangster, mobster, hipster theme, okay)
fresh out of cheapjack coffeehouses where three chords and two-line rhymes repeated
in call and response got you all the action you wanted although maybe a little
light on the breadbasket sent around to show that you were appreciated. Yeah,
now that I think about the matter more closely hard times please come again no
more.
I have seen frosted
lemon trees jammed against the ferrous night, the night of silly foolish
childhood dreams and misunderstanding about the world, the world that that poet
spoke of in a teenage dream of indefinite duration about who was to have and who
was to have not once those minds were de-melted and made hip to the
tragedies of life, the close call with the mental house that awaits us all.
Yeah Monk was right even about Carl Solomon and all his sorrows before the
knife.
***********
What
the hell did sullen Carl Solomon start before he went under the knife with his
pleading for his father, a father that he had never known since he had been
left back in Poland to peddle his fruits and vegetables to his brethren and his
mother and the four kids headed to the Americas on some tub of a boat and never
looked back. Rumors abounded that he survived because he had a gentile mistress
grabbed after his wife and kids left. That at least is the story Carl told,
told endlessly which would not be so bad but the Monk picked it up in his own
moment of despair.
Monk
searched his valium brain for his own prose-filled father but that was not
nearly good enough, kept him awake at night because he had strange dreams that
his father was not some fake high school teacher writing awful poems in broken
down post-war America. Was afraid that his real father was William Appleton
Williams who denied him three times, didn’t want to believe that his broken
words would mesh so well. Had better dreams that his real father was sexy Walt
Whitman (this remember in dialogue with Carl Solomon before the knife so it is
not clear whether Carl remembered) whose vagabond dreams matched his and his homosexual
desire beating out some Johnny Reb who could give Walt the ride he desired.
Here is the trick though the Monk had sweet dreams whenever he read Leaves of Grass (usually on grass) and
he passed that on to Jack in some secret moment in Denver when some screwball
Adonis was looking for his father.
Now
Jack, funny before Carl grabbed Monk with the father who we never knew
religion, always thought he knew his father, knew the con artist, poker
cheater, movie theater ticket taker great bear of a French-Canadian who came
down the Jackson, Maine road with five cents Canadian in his pocket and dreams
of printing up ads. But that was not the father that he knew but some skinny
stiff wino pissant who he sought out in greater Denver cattle yards. Always
deferred to everlasting Mere, Mere out of some fresh Breton conceit never
getting some whiplash from old father time who died before his time of
heartache and heartbeats. So Jack conned himself into some holy goof, his words
exactly, metaphysical search going up the Bear Mountain, Jackson, Wyoming
Jackson not that trail of tears from down in Maine Jackson where the red brick
and mortar spinning wheels beckoned and he spent and spilled his young manhood
trying to get the fuck out from under even if he couldn’t drive, made him
nervous, to save his life. Funny again that fame never stopped the bleeding
inside looking behind some bushes for some father death, some father time
pissing against that Tokay dream he figured out back in about 1946 but could
never get past. The Monk did him no service on that long trail drive from
Monument Creek to Sunnyvale and then drop off and outs at Big Sur where he got
sober for a week.
Damn
that stuff is contagious, will drive you crazy, when twice removed Lance, me,
went looking for the father he never knew too. Looked for him behind closed
doors to his heart. That distant slightly dim figure who brought home not
enough pay checks. Who never talked about but never got over the Pacific war
like a lot of guys who found themselves on tubs picking up stray comrades from
washed-up beaches, picking up too guys who got too close to chore, got wasted
in some windless fire and fell down into the green-gray-blue surf that gets us
all in the end. The old man, father, never talked much, much about anything
that Lance, me would understand and so Jack-like Ma, Mere, Mom, Mere whatever
you want to call her ran rough-shot over childish dreams and insecurities.
Here’s the worst of it though, Jack-like, he never got to say good-bye to that
father he never knew and crushed his days with regret, total regret that he
didn’t have the sense of a holy goof, Jack talk, to have called a truce, even
an armed truce to the madness that wracked his silly excuse for a family, and
now all his has is slate grey stone to place the remnants down in some unknown
holy place where he can never dwell, yes, Lawrence, me, got caught in the
Monk’s version of Carl’s plainsong, no, got stuck in the damn mire.
Silly
to think that the father time search would only apply to men, young men, holy
goofs like Lawrence, me, when the max daddy sin of all was the way Jack, in
Jack speak, abandoned his Jan, his spitting image Jan, denied like Christ was
denied three times by the count. Jan who would search like some strange Kenneth
Rexroth figure for the father we all knew, or thought we knew once he pointed
us toward the light, once we got the beat, the second-hand beat that washed us
clean in places like Big Sur and Todo el Mundo where Jan still searches in some
desperate wild water surf for some broken down guy who wasted away with drink,
and she with drink too. Jesus, funny he was searching for his father too out in
Middle Eastern wildernesses, will it never end.
Contagious
that is what Sam Lowell said about the freaking search for that lost father
world made up of pure sand and not much else. Some goof, the holy part excluded
was looking for his father, his famous private detective father, a guy named
Lew Archer, who back around Jack time in California ran the rack on few good
cases and then rested for forty years something like that. Tried to claim that
his father’s life death was due to his father’s overused whip, his sorrows that
he could not go the distance with his wife, this goof’s grandmother, his code
of honor that once he took a job he was in, totally in, for good or evil,
and
maybe
that he drank too much Tokay, Jack-like when he wound up behind some freaking
wino pissant dumpster saved but some sister of mercy who could not save him in
the end. Get this though that junkie weirdo so-called grandson, some modern-day
Carl Solomon without the sorrows before he went under the knife could not be
searching for Lew, Lew Archer since Lew never had a son, had no children. Sorry
goof,
Out
on the Jersey looking east first to see the great ocean that drove his forbears
to search for fresh green breasts of land then west to seek dungeon filled
fathers never known in Denver, Santa Fe, Salt Lake City Salvation Army hotels
or whatever they call those blessed places of rest the whole deal was to figure
out a way to look for some American cowboy past, looking for the Monk’s Adonis
if he couldn’t make it with sexy Walt Whitman with the furl of whiskers. There
sat Dean Moriarty, no, fuck that, one Neal Cassidy who would ride the freight
trains west looking for that father the others really did think they had found.
Neal’s old man was in some wino jailcell speaking in tongues to a candid world.
Maybe Carl was right, Monk too we should all cry to the high heavens looking
for the fathers we never knew.
Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of Lowell-Bred Writer Jack Kerouac-“The King Of The Beat”-The Ghost Of Tom Joad, Indeed
The Ghost Of Tom Joad, Indeed A Sketch From The Pen Of Frank Jackman A while back, maybe a year or so ago, early in 2014, Josh Breslin, the old-time writer for some of the alternative presses and houses that started up in the throes of the 1960s counter-cultural explosion did a book review of John Steinbeck’s skid row classic, Cannery Row. Back in the 1960s there had been a plethora of both which had surfaced and flowered in order to give out a different view of the world, different cultural takes, and different activist politics than the ones that were presented by mainstream media and Josh’s book and record reviews had a certain following in those alternative oases around the country. Yes, I can see the scratching of heads about the rationale for this recent effort as readers are unable for the life of them to figure out why anybody would review such a book now, even such a classic book, which was published in 1945. As if the book had not been thoroughly reviewed unto death at the time, a timely time in any case, unlike his belated project, but Josh, as usual and I have known him long enough to be able to say the words, had a certain method to his madness. See, Josh, although theoretically and quite reasonably retired, still writes occasionally for the dwindling remnant of alternatives presses and publishing houses which produce many of the radical and progressive magazines, newspapers, and books, which lay around today on some hipster’s coffee table, unread, as a show that, well, the owner is hip. Or had been back in the day when names like the Village Voice, City Lights, Rolling Stone, New Directions, and Free Press meant sometime to anybody with any pretenses to hip-dom. Fair enough though, since Josh still has things to write that are worth reading, especially by the younger set who seem to studiously avoid to their regret, as we did in our time a subject we continually return to over a drink or two on a cold night, learning any lessons provided by, well, older folk. Besides you cannot teach an old dog new tricks, or Josh anyway, and a guy who writes is like some old general who refuses to fade away and so he still writes for some of those outlets. Butin addition to his writerly habits this Cannery Row review that he did was not done by happenstance but had followed shortly thereafter as a result of Josh having a vision, a vision of Tom Joad, or shades of the ghost of Tom Joad, out on the California highway, out on the Pacific Coast Highway, no lie. Needless to say nobody, certainly no reader who does not know or remember Josh when he was in the full flower of his youth, has to believe that an old man, now in his turn an old time writer himself, actually saw Tom Joad, actually saw a fictional character on that coast highway road (or even a Henry Fonda trance who played Joad in the original film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath). Nor does one have to believe in some legend of Tom Joad even though folksinger Woody Guthrie wrote songs about the man back in the dust bowl back-breaking 1930s. Nor for modern sensibilities even though rocker Bruce Springsteen wrote about Joad’s ghost in the 1990s. Hear me out though, or rather hear Josh out as he presents his case like he presented it to me one night a couple of weeks ago in the bar at the Sunnyville Grille in Cambridge where he lives mostly lives now, Cambridge that is not the bar, although he still maintains the old family house where he grew up in Olde Saco, Maine. Let me set the context first to enlighten those who do not the Josh history which led to this “vision.” Josh, having lived out in California back in the 1970s and 1980s off and on, in some good times and bad, now likes to go back out there every once in a while. Usually when he has time to spent a week or two, more importantly, when he has some extra dough in his pockets to fly out since the old hitchhiking days when he thought nothing of holding out his thumb, a small green rucksack on one shoulder and bedroll, complete with canvass ground cover to guard against wet blanket sleepless night, on the other and head across the country holds no appeal these days. Besides the roads are now dangerous with all kinds of off-hand weirdos that provide the 24/7/365 news outlets with plenty of copy; American psychos who have always been with us but who seem now to be more visible and vicious, malcontents of every description and pleading, grifters always on the hustle, and beady-eyed cops, looking to fill their monthly quotas, ready to pounce on you if you breathe wrong. He had lived mostly in Oakland (then as now infinitely cheaper than Frisco) while doing some political work, some political writing, usually involving as well raising dough for things like the Black Panther Defense Fund, although do not ask Josh even today the manner in which he raised the dough just in case the statute of limitations has not run out. Just say that the Panthers were under murderous assault then by every itchy law enforcement agency from some Podunk deputy sheriff to J. Edgar Hoover and his G-men, needed money for legal defense constantly as the governmental agencies honed in on them, and nobody was too particular, nobody could afford to be too particular, about how the money was raised when the deal went down. Usually in those days accompanying that political work was some complicated adventure in Josh’s topsy-turvy relationship with women. In Oakland, at least when I visited him in those days he almost always had some woman friend living with him (or a wife, having been married three times, one of them during the California days but that marriage trance doesn’t have anything to do, or little to do, with this story so we will move on) because he said he had to have a stable place to reside. Those days, those early 1970s days when will all knew, or most all of us knew the ebb tide of the 1960s was swooping down on us were still good times, good times to write about then, and now, especially about the mad monk happenings in California. But there was another side to the Josh living in California story which will help better explain his how he came to his Tom Joad vision. That side was about living out in the air in the mid-1970s, out for a while with the “brothers under bridge” along the railroad tracks, down in the arroyos, and wherever else he could find kindred , to steal a phrase from a later Bruce Springsteen song about Vietnam veterans who for their own reasons could not make it in the “real” world after ‘Nam. The times that due to his own hubris, to his own “from hunger” genetic code, to his own outlandish “wanting” habits he found himself when he ran out of money, women, or luck. Previously those hardtack times in places like Big Sur beach south of Monterey, Todo el Mundo just south of Big Sur, Point Magoo above Malibu, and down near the caves in La Jolla meant living “free,” free meaning camping out for weeks at a time, some old army tent (World War II surplus, not the ‘Nam stuff which was not fashionable then, for ex-soldiers or renegade writers), an old Coleman stove (and sometimes just sterno cups) for cooking and a few toilet articles. Then when his world crashed in the mid-1970s, when his school boy days wanting habits got the best of him, a later side after the hubbub had died down from the 1960s jail break-out which had ebbed before its rightful time and which he could not accept gracefully then he found himself in the hobo “jungle.” Under the same impetus in the early 1980s when his addictions, mainly but not exclusively drugs, had gotten the better of him he had wound up living out in Jack K.’s cabin rent free in that same Todo el Mundo where they earlier had all thought they had found the paradise they had been California looking for when they had headed West, trying to dry out, trying to unsuccessfully go “cold turkey.” Hell he could not recount the infinite number of times in those days that he cadged floor space in too many locales to mention, mostly in Frisco though, laying down low in flophouses all over the coast, and finally, when the bottom totally fell out, when he had cynically and dishonestly called in every favor he could and had run out of friends to con (including me when he was really desperate), a few tours in skid row, Cannery Row skid row, in Monterey. He had also written about those experiences recently in a short piece in the East Bay Eye under the title In Search Of Todo el Mundo. So as luck would have it Josh had been out in Monterey this recent time that we are talking about in order to retrace some ancient steps about what had happened to him in those dreaded 1980s before he got sober in the 1990s after another unsuccessful love affair had run its course (a little more germane to the story than the three divorced wives but it should not hog the space since it had become somewhat faded and somewhat weird on reflection by the time of this adventure although earlier it caused many sword thrusts to his heart). He had not been in Monterey since the late 1980s, since just before he finally got his dope addictions mercifully under control with the help of Melissa, Melissa of the straight talk and straight arrow life which held him together for a while before she moved on when another guy, a less “dramatic” guy as she called him upon breaking up with Josh swept her away, adios mi corazon. And Monterey had automatically brought Big Sur and Todo el Mundo into mind as places to go to and reflect on those ancient times and how they had formed him, and formed his life. Hell, it’s his story let him tell you what he was up to instead of me trying to remember every tidbit that Sunnyville night when I was filled with too many high-shelf scotches. Let him tell about his vision: “A blonde long-haired and long unkempt bearded young man was standing on the side of the highway in a light rain, the Pacific Coast Highway to be exact, in the dead heart of Big Sur out in ocean California with his thumb out heading north toward Monterey. I noticed as I drove by heading south that the young guy had a trusty old rucksack and bedroll stacked a bit away from his person (that bedroll looked to be in proper order from a quick look, sheet, blanket and most important of all learned from more than one wet night’s sleep, or rather half-sleep, a sturdy ground cover against those nights, the inevitable nights on the road when such support is necessary). That placing your gear away from the road is important too, shows career hitchhiker savvy since an average driver, usually a guy back in the day and probably more so now with all the news of weirdoes and psychos out there bothering average drivers foolish enough to pick them up, will more likely take a chance on stopping for a guy who looks like he is just stranded for the moment a few miles from home rather than a notorious fully-life’s possessions road bum, or worse. All of this information, all of this sullen knowledge, learned long ago when I hitched my own hitchhike road. I must say that I was startled to see that young man of the roads standing there since rarely, even in California, do I see anybody hitching anymore, certainly not on highways but not even on back roads like the one in Big Sur. The last time I had picked up hitchhikers I had been driving up U.S. 5 around Carlsbad from San Diego when I spotted a young guy and young gal on the entrance ramp and immediately jumped three lanes and pulled over. They were heading toward L.A. while I was heading to Laguna for some art show and as we talked, or rather as I talked about the old days on the road I decided to drive them up to L.A. probably motivated by the many rides I had accumulated back in the day and I was merely passing the torch. That rainy day though I was heading toward Todo el Mundo just south of Big Sur to meet someone or I would have stopped, turned around, and driven the young bearded guy back to Carmel anyway since he didn’t appear to be having any luck with the drivers passing back, it was raining and I was gathering strength to do another good turn in memory of my old hitchhike days. All of this introduction of course to set up what I really wanted to talk about when I thought about that guy later, thought about seeing a vision of old Tom Joad. My first thought later when I began to think about the old days after reaching the hard to find and extreme back road even now Todo el Mundo and the guy was to meet to get a story from was that I probably had hitched a ride from around that very spot where the younger hitchhiker stood on the side of the road which if you are familiar with that section of the Pacific Coast Highway was not that far from Big Sur beach. You know Jack Kerouac’s beach, featured in every retro “beat” film about the place, featured on every Big Sur photo shoot, featured on every hot spot places of California where he wrote a famous zen-like poem in honor of the sound of the ocean at that particular place when he was trying to dry out and when he wrote a book about the experience. That had been in the days before a bunch of us, including Jack K. the old small press publisher and bookstore owner from Mendocino who would eventually own a cabin there and Larry, another small press publisher who had owned a big bookstore in Frisco, who then had a cabin in Big Sur found the even more remote and severe Todo el Mundo. I had my own addiction drying out experiences there later in the 1980s but the time I am talking about is not the 1980s when Jack K. saved my bacon, or tried to, and got nothing but heartache and rebuff for his trouble but back in the bright days, back in the 1960s days when everybody who roamed the highways had some stories to tell, owed some debt to Kerouac and the “beats” and who lived to tell about it.
Back then there was no way, no way on this good green earth that my blonde-haired young hitcher would have been out on the road for long not when the roads were full of “heads” travelling up and down the coast just to travel, just to see what the world was all about and would have snagged that brother in a minute, hell, maybe before he even stuck his thumb out. I know a couple of time that happened to me when I was standing on the side of the road and once when I was standing there and not looking for a ride but took one anyway since the scene looked righteous. Oh yeah, I forgot that time too when I had Butterfly Swirl with me and the way she looked, all sunflower dress, all real California girl and some guy must have gotten a whiff of her jasmine scent because he stopped just past us and put the old Volkswagen bus in reverse and told us to climb in (Butterfly Swirl, we all used little monikers like that then, had been slumming away from her usual haunts, the Carlsbad surfer scene, looking to find out about what everybody was talking about in the great jail break-out, about what everybody was doing before going back to her perfect wave surfer boy and life, such were the times).
Funny the first time I hit the California highway roads (first time starting in California not the east-west cross-country trips from New England) I didn’t think I would get a ride because some trucker, a real good guy who fed me at the trucker diner stops, gave me plenty of cigarettes, and some bennies that he practically lived on left me out in the lurch. He was going to see his girlfriend in Modesto and so that is where he left me off. But that is a tough spot to hitch from with traffic flying by (by the way also maybe a sign of the times then this Mr. America straight arrow by-the book-trucker had a wife and kids beside the gal, so there). A state trooper passed by, passed by twice, and then let it go but I wound up grabbing some sleep on the side of the road, a little off in some trees really, before I got a ride to Frisco from another lonely truck-driver the next morning.
But enough of the Breslin hitchhike road. That road has been inspected, dissected, introspected, reflected enough so let’s get to what I was able to envision on that rainy day trip back from Todo el Mundo. As I headed back to Monterey later that day my hitchhiker was still there, a little wetter for the experience so I naturally had to stop and pick him up. As he entered the passenger side after placing his gear in the back of the rental car I noticed that he looked considerably younger than I had thought passing him by on the way down to Todo. As he settled into the passenger seat and I got back on the road after telling me his name, Cliff Adams, he thanked me a couple of times for picking him up. He also told me how nobody would even look in his direction as the rain got thicker and I then mentioned that I had seen him on my way south and had assumed since he had rightly stored his gear away from the road and so looked like a guy who just needed a lift somewhere local and did not have the look of a career road bum who strikes fear in the hearts of even old time hippies he would have been picked up by then. Cliff laughed at that remark since he had only picked up that trick of the road the day before when a guy going in the other direction called over to him around Sam Simeon to put his gear out of sight if he wanted a ride on this road. The guy had looked like he knew what he was doing (he did) and so he had done so but had almost given up hope when I stopped.
As we rode along he told me that he had headed west a few months before from Oklahoma, from some Podunk town outside of Topeka that I had never heard of although I had passed through that town a few times when I was working my thumb on the southern route west. Cliff had hit the road after some fallout with parents over taking over the family grain business which he could have cared less about and hated every harvest he every had to participant in, fallout over some heartthrob girlfriend who found another boyfriend (or he had found another girlfriend who had found another boyfriend I did not follow the whole train of thought on that except to silently express solidarity over the woman question fallout), and fallout over with everybody else he knew of his desire, his instinctual desire, to get the dust (his term) of Oklahoma out of his nostrils, if not out of his blood. And so one moonless night (I assume it was a moonless night since the moon was missing when I had first hit the hitchhike road west he took down his rucksack from its peg, threw some utilitarian necessities, rolled his bedroll (forgetting to his dismay one rainy night when until he was on the road that he needed a waterproof ground cover to protect against a tough night’s half-sleep from being soaked to the bone) and headed out leaving a short note to his parents not to worry. (Thoughtful lad since I had left no note and only telephoned weeks later a definite wrong move on my part whatever the justice of my sulks.)
His running through those conversational points was when I noticed that his whole demeanor reminded me of those sons and daughters, hell, now grandsons and granddaughters of those Okies who came out to settle in California after the land played out back home in Muskogee, Tulsa, Norman or wherever it played out in the Great Depression dustbowl saga. So I asked him all kinds of questions about his kin and about his days in Oklahoma to compare notes with a previously generation of Okie/Arkie kids who had headed west in my time rather than going on and on about how in my day the pickings on the hitchhike road, especially along the Pacific Coast Highway, were like finding money on the ground. As he spoke in that bashful Okie drawl that some pretty sophisticated women find appealing and which is a relic from the old cowboy days I noticed that he had the same “from hunger” look of those by-gone highway travelers who I ran into back in the day.
They are peculiarly an American lot those “from hunger” boys (and occasional young women), oh sure, they are all immigrant stock like almost everybody here now in America, Northwest Europe immigrant stock going back several generations, but still immigrant stock. More importantly they are still marked by the traces of the half- forgotten stories (or half-suppressed at this remove) that brought their forbears to this continent, mainly having been run out their countries of origin for cattle, horse, pig, deer stealing, or having run when the land ran out, or having to have to run when the lure of thriving thieving cities got to be too much and the high sheriff was hot on the trail, a few too having run for religious or political reasons but all with the wanderlust, the travelling gene. One academic guy I read, a Harvard professor if I recall, when talking about an early wave of this immigrants around the time of Andrew Jackson called them “master-less” men. Maybe, but here is my take which I think is closer to the nub. Jack Kerouac the previously mentioned great American writer of the travel road, physical and spiritual, from a couple of generations back startled me at first when in On The Road he spoke of the fellahin, those mired deep down in the base of society barely hanging on, and of his spiritual kinship for the wretched of the earth (being a Lowell mill town boy he knew of where he spoke). That designation however only makes sense if you don’t take the term literally and apply it to some eternal scratching welded to a lone piece of land but except for that the observation holds.
They, the fellahin, settled in the East for a while, the landing point on the shorelines where working the rugged cross land was tough and many fell into the human sink, but once they heard there was land, lots of land beyond the outposts they moved, and moved fast, westward playing off the energy of that old country wanderlust gene. They kept stopping for a while, sometimes for a long while but they were born restless and their thing was movement, the push to leave when the helter-skelter not well-tended land played out. But like all things geographic there is a land’s end and that is where things got kind of squirrely, there was no more land to farm play out, no more moving westward unless you wanted to swim the Japan seas.
So those Okie/Arkie/fellahin drifters turned inward, turned in the generation before mine to sullenly and languidly riding on the edge of the world movement after World War II with their souped-up coups built from old jalopies, junkyard stuff turned into expressions of that strange California fast lane syrup with sweat and fervor, raced after midnight in rural highway drag strips filled with “chicken run” bravado and some fast chase girl sitting jammed next to that stick-shift, turned to challenging the seas (if not the Japan seas by swimming out to them) in golden boy waxed surfboards seeking the perfect way complete then with waiting golden girl surfer girls on shore once the day’s search for the perfect wave ebbed with the night (and those pruned boys sought to have those golden girls “curl their toes” as my one surfer girl conquest explained the matter one night when stoned I had asked her about the ethos of surfer culture, turned to outlaw motorcycle-dom with the hog (a Harley or else proud patriots all although an Indian or a Vincent Black Shadow would leave them in the dust, no problem) complete with tough tight-sweatered “mamas” and the jailhouse alternating for attention. And a few wanderers caught the Eastern bug, caught the Howl in the night bug especially around Frisco. And that younger brother hitchhiker on that rainy Big Sur day whether he knew it or not, for the forbears after all left no coda to lure later generations to all of that spoke of that Tom Joad Great Depression need to break West. I could see it in his rain washed-out blue eyes and in that laconic pattern of speech that spoke of restlessness and wonder.
As we approached Monterey coming up over the hill at Carmel (oops, sorry Carmel-by-the-Sea where all the Mid-Coast swells congregate and show off their pedigree, pedigree dogs on sullen Sundays in June) I realized that the young brother could back about twenty, thirty years before, ah, maybe a few more than that, been my own boon companion. Been brethren just like in the days when the late Peter Markin and I whom I met out in California on Russian Hill in Frisco town raised holy hell with women, drugs, life and who subsequently because he never really could get off the road of his own “from hunger” wanting habits wound up face down in a Sonora dusty back alley when a drug deal he was trying to organize on his own went bell-up. Or when Sam Lowell before he got “square” and went back to law school and some success went west with me several times and we did things up right. Or Billy Bradley from even further back who wound up with his own wanting habit troubles from robbing too many stores and banks.
Yes, that young Okie brother would have fit in with my Eastern-etched corner boys in the days when I was riding the hobo “jungle,” when the railroad track (what did somebody call those tracks, oh yeah, “filled with train smoke and dreams,”), the cavern encampment (reminding me of the time when Peter and I stoned to the gills on peyote buttons found ourselves in a Joshua Tree canyon wall one night when we, dancing like whirling dervishes “saw” the ghosts of the Apache warriors who souls could never be appeased until future warriors came along, and we thought that was us), the ocean front tent complete with sweet all-Midwestern dish, Angelica, Saint Angelica of my boyhood dreams riding a borrowed Vincent Black Lightning roaring out in the Pacific Coast Highway not worrying about anything but being young, alive and splashed by ten thousand ocean waves like they were never going to end were what sustained my days.
I let Cliff off at Lighthouse Drive near the Sally soup kitchen spot. Sallies being the Salvation Army who if you could put up with a sermon and some good-natured but firm cajoling about changing your lifestyle, of searching for god or maybe the godhead I forget which, of getting “religion” and donning the uniform of the lord to beat drums out in the mission mean streets down in any hobo end of town would give you a bed for a few days and three squares with just a hard-hearted story of woe. I still tip my hat to that brethren for bailing me out a few times when things were very tough, very tough indeed. Yeah, I had my own “from hunger” wanting habits which for a while couldn’t be appeased, it was a close thing. As I drove off I wondered what was ahead for that young brother, would he break-down like Peter and Billy of yore, wondered whether he in his turn when he got older “see” a vision of Tom Joad on the side of a Big Sur highway and stop to move a fellow wanderer along.
