On The Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love 1967-Riverdale Blues-For Allen Ginsburg On The 60th Anniversary Of “Howl” (1956)

On The Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love 1967-Riverdale Blues-For Allen Ginsburg On The 60^th Anniversary Of “Howl” (1956)

By Lance Lawrence

A sad-eyed dope hung around the back of the old-fashioned framed schoolhouse lazily drawing the summer breeze (he lied since the school had only recently been constructed in the big post World II baby boom and he had gone to school here since the place opened-he lied for the sake of lying,  lying to himself mostly especially about his sexual longing just then as he hoped to get some chick who was hanging out by the bushes to give him a hand job, give him one like Lucinda had given him that time at the movies when sitting up in the balcony she had unzipped his pants and let her hand move so fast he jerked off after about a minute he was so excited and she only twelve imagine what she will be like when she gives it all up but fat chance he would have to grab that piece since his quick spurt, his sperm, his cum,  had gotten all over her dress and she was pissed off at him when it dried and got all crusty on the way home so some other guy would grab her cherry-that  was only a matter of time), wished he could get “washed clean,” washed clean real clean which is what the guys around school called it when their Lucindas moved their hands fast, get his sperm count down, his hot flash temperature, whatever that was.

Cock sore, cock was what the guys called their hanging things, their pulsating penises, so he followed although he got flushed when some guy maybe Billy, Billy Bradley the guy who always seemed to be the first guy with the sex knowledge, first said the word and he had asked what that was-damn. Cock and cocksuckers, waiting on his corner boy, waiting on Billy, waiting on his secret comrade in arms the hazy night as he looked around over heaven’s nightshade (and the guy who would probably be the first to get into Lucinda’s panties since she had already given him her fast hand action and according to Billy something more although Billy wouldn’t  specify but at least that action which is why he had, on Billy’s solemn advise taken Lucinda to the movies in the first place, had asked if she wanted to go to the balcony and when she said yes he knew he was going to get his clock cleaned-he just wished he hadn’t gotten off so fast with Lucinda since Billy’s older brother, Max, had given them a vivid description of what was what when you got a girl all wet and then stuck your stick in her and listened to her moan, moan like humankind had been doing for a million years, and he sure could have put his stick wherever she wanted it-probably laugh at him if he got off too fast-again).

Billy at first nowhere to be found, nowhere to be found that is if he did not want to be found and then the next thing you knew Billy, secret comrade in arms, came sauntering, his style just then before puberty would turn his feet around and he would thereafter walk like some Western movie cowboy would now sing his life-song, what did the poet, the old Solomonic poet call to the high heaven’s, oh yes, plainsong for a candid world, a world before massive bombings, massive unacknowledged deaths for shady ladies and other figment s of his imagination. Come sauntering in the bejesus night looking both ways to see some straggling ungainly girls, some young Lucinda who knew the score, knew if they had hung around that back of the school just then that they had heard about Lucinda, had maybe asked their older sisters or brothers what a hand job was and how to do that. They were eager if they were hanging in the shadows and the dope was hoping that some innocent would get moved by the Billy plainsong (he would learn later that plainsong was more religious that any old rock song even big bop doo wop song but by then rock and roll was his religion anyway) hovering around the fence waiting for something, anything to happen and then a word, a sullen word came off his tongue and the night’s work had begun, maybe a generation was on its way to immortality, was ready to break out of the quiet of the 1950s night without shame and without confession.

Tripping over “she’s so fine, so fine, wish she were mine doo lang doo lang” or the corner boys, the male version of He’s So Fine by the Chiffons, the big bopping song of 1956, the guys, including the dope, backing Billy up in the doo wop frenzy that had swept tween and teen just then and the scent of the jasmine coming from the girl-shadows by the harbor, the marsh’s fetid mephitic smell giving way to the night’s splendor, maybe stolen perfumes from mother’s dresser or some girlish bath-soap all fresh and dewy. Doo lang, doo lang  along with Eddie, Jason, Frank and beloved Peter Paul slapping time and those wanderlust girls along the fences came drifting to the scent of Old Spice that the boys had splashed on father’s bureau, father’s time, father’s sweat but not to  be thought of in the hazy summer night. And as the moon hovered against the sun the girls got closer and closer, one Lucinda’s younger sister, Laura, all the sisters in that family playing off mother Lottie having “L” –encrusted first letter names,  aimed his way and he waved her over to head toward old dead sailors’ graveyard down the far corner of the school lot (oh what those sailors could have told those young bucks from their rotted graves and pock-marked burial stones about hand jobs and blow jobs too when the ante was up about what a girl had to come across with-and if out to sea some young sailor boy plaything but that latter knowledge would not click until later).  A few minutes later the dope came back out of the sailor shadows looking like the king of the hill and Laura wiping her hand with a handkerchief with a faint smile (they had already agreed to meet that next night down at that sailors’ last rest, down among the mortal stone forsaking the last ship out  and by-past the foreplay plainsong-the young learn fast so maybe those sailors would have been stating the obvious when the poured forth in their dank, damp waterfront taverns about blow jobs and hand jobs). 

But hell all that was coming of age, coming of age in a time when things were moving too fast even for quick learners and the corner boys got further and further along in their primitive sex lessons and no more stupid thoughts of red scares, Uncle Joe’s scourge in Moscow town, and Cold War down in the basement hide your ass under some oaken desk and somebody said that was real, that was okay but that scent lingered against the jimson in the jeans from Satan’s tower, look homeward, look homeward angels. Ecstasy-pure ecstasy in the hazy night of some youthful dream. 

Billy would declare (and the dope would secretly agree and write every word down to be passed around later like some latter day glad tiding-like some Mount Sinai-filched grainy stone tablet) that they were in a spin, the world was changing and although he had no empirical evidence, when did the king of the hill need hard-boiled evidence going back to Adam’s time, facts,  he had heard from his oldest brother who already had graduated from high school that not only was the music changing, not only were people, and not just kids, starting to laugh at the idea that going down some rat hole of a basement and hiding under some rotten oaken desk when the big one came [the bomb] would do anybody any good. Started to challenge everything from the whole idea of the red scare night, the whole idea that everybody needed to live their ticky-tacky lives in dread of the reds, having a big ass finned gas-eating car and not “keeping up with the Jones.” Especially day to day the latter.

Billy didn’t get most of what that oldest brother said (and neither did the dope who dutifully wrote it all down anyway which he had “contracted” with his secret comrade Billy to do, to act as scribe which became his nickname at first resented as part of the price of Billy letting a dope hang around with him and his boys and through that circumstance to get to the girls already mentioned above) but he did get that the way things were couldn’t be the future, couldn’t be the way they would have to operate in the world. Couldn’t be the down at the heel existence that he, his family and all the poor bedraggled families that resided in the Five Points “wrong side of the tracks” neighborhood. His oldest brother, Jack to give him a name, the guy telling him all this stuff with the idea of making him wise to the world he was about to face in the not too distant future, had been something of the family rebel.

Jack was always heading to Harvard Square even in high school which was no mean task by bus and later by car when he came of age for a driver’s license, since that place was about forty miles from Riverdale to soak up whatever rebellion was going down (that family rebel designation would fall on Billy later in a very different way when it came his turn to figure out the freaking world and after a short attempt at a break-out rock and roll musical career turned to armed robberies and such eventually getting killed in a shoot- out with cops down in North Carolina trying to all doped up rob a White Hen convenience store). Jack was always talking about “beat” this, “beat” that, some kind of fraternity of rebels who wanted to turn the world upside down (and it was mostly a fraternity the women were mainly around for decoration and whatever sex they wanted to provide). Or maybe better resign from the “square” world and find a little breathing space to do their thing-to write, drink, travel, do dope, have sex but mostly to write for a candid world, a world where the rules didn’t make sense-no way.      

One night when Jack was home for minute during summer semester break from college-he went on a scholarship, how else would the family get the money to send the first in the family to go to college, to Boston University, Class of 1959- he decided to tell Billy and his boys in an excited manner his latest tale “what was what,” the expression all the guys used then to signify, well, they had an idea of what was what. Tell them what it was to be a “beat daddy” (not literally a daddy okay but Jack had had to make the distinction because you never knew when somebody in the neighborhood might be a daddy having knocked up some older Lucinda and had to head out of town or get hitched under the sign of the paternal shotgun). Said it was all summed up, everything that was pushing the world forward in a poem, a “beat” poem not like those rhyming simon poems Mister Riley, the old-time Jazz Age English teacher at Riverdale High  a would spout forth from some old Englishman’s pen, Alfred Lord Tennyson or Byron or Browning, guys like that, a guy named Ginsburg, Allen Ginsburg, a smart Jewish guy who was the chief propagandist for the beat-ness thing in a poem, Howl,  that was making the rounds in Harvard Square and would have its fair share of legal problems but that was later. (Jack was not exactly right about who had been the “real” max daddy of the beats-influence wise it was probably Jack Kerouac when he boiled the 1950s youth nation with his wild men travelogue On The Road, the immediate post-war whirlwind adventures of him and his buddy, Adonis personified Neal Cassady with Ginsburg playing a bit role in that one. But Ginsburg was right in the mix with that fucking long mad monk poem-Brother Jack’s exact words remembered by the Scribe-written down).              

Jack said that Ginsburg had had it right-had seen in the great American blue-pink western night stuff that would drive a guy crazy with what was happening to the world as the machine was getting the upper-hand. Ginsburg had had some kind of vision, one of the guys who hung around the Hayes-Bickford in Harvard claiming that it was dope, marijuana favored by the down-trodden cold fields braceros from old Mexico, or peyote buttons, the stuff favored by the Hopis and the “ghost dancers” out where the states are square that fueled the visions. Visions of an unkempt, unruly world where the philosopher-king was a guy named Carlo Solomon who had the whole thing down cold. Knew the West had been saturated, that there was nowhere else to go but the China seas and so he hammered home the idea that out in the Coast was where humankind had to make a last stand against the Molochs, against the fucking night-takers who have been with us forever. Only the righteous warrior-poets would enter the garden. That Hayes-Bickford clarion calling claimed Ginsburg was talking about the Garden of Eden before the Fall.   

The madness, the sheer madness making everybody from the hunger days of the 1930s and the rat rationing days of World War II hustle to the sound of steel and iron and not the freaking sound of waves slashing timidly to shore. Started ripping up words a minute not all complete phrases and without some kind of formal pacing sense, although if you heard the thing out loud it would have its own jazz-like cadence somebody who was at the recital in Frisco town had been quoted in a newspaper as saying, jazz cadence and stoned on dope or liquor was all you needed that same source ventured. Ginsburg was not hung up on form, like those old fart Englishman who were totally hung up on form almost as bad as those sonnet bastards Riley made the class memorize but talking about post-war modern minds beaten down by the sound of industry humming away talking about a meltdown, talking crazy stuff about angel hipsters (portraying a sentence of 1940s pre-beat daddies hanging around Times Square hustling and conning an unsuspecting world), talking about Negro streets which they all knew as “n----r streets” over in the Acre section of Boston, a place to stay away from, talking about taking on the monster in the mist Moloch mano y mano, talking about the new heroes of the American night all-American swordsman Jack and secret love that dare not speak its name crush on Adonis of the New Western night courtesy of Laramie Street in mile-high Denver Neal Cassady to be exact the new model of the  last cowboy standing. Neal some amazing cocksman to be envied and emulated screwing every honey who was not tied down to a chastity belt on farms, in the restrooms of diners and out in the back alley if the restroom was occupied. Damn. 

Ginsburg had actually been in the nut house in New York someplace, had dedicated the poem to some fellow inmate who was crazier that he was or dedicated to all the crazies, the looney bin Jack had called the place like the place all the guys in Riverdale did when they talked about where screwballs and goofs, even Kerouac’s holy goofs learned about later, should have landed, so he knew what deal was going down, knew that America had turned into a cesspool even if nobody else saw the drain coming. Jack had made Billy and the dope laugh when he told them the reason Ginsburg was in the looney bin was he had been sent there by some judge after he got into legal trouble, committed or was present at some unknown crime, an event which made the pair respect this Ginsburg more since cons in the old Riverdale neighborhood were looked up to with respect and admiration, to try to get rid of his faggot-ness, his homosexuality, his liking boys and not girls. (They laughed not because they knew that Jack hated fags and queers which he did and had put paid to that idea having gone down to Provincetown where all the fags and queers hung out all dressed up and all leering at anybody who came off the Provincetown boat from Boston with his own boys and raised hell with them-more than once. Beat a couple up who were eyeing him too closely and one in drag whom he thought was a girl until he got close enough to see some slight stubble on “her” face. Seems that Jack was giving Ginsburg a pass on his sexual preference just because he was a beat guy-Billy and the dope wouldn’t have given the fucker the time of day even if the guy was a prophet if he hadn’t been a con when they talked about it later since they shared Jack’s hatred of fags-and dykes like every red-blooded guy did then.)     

Jack knew what the unholy kid goofs were laughing about, about his seeing literary merit even if the guy was a faggot. The minute he said “faggot” he knew they would goof but he thought they should know what else the guy had to say. He told them a lot of good writers and poets were “light on their feet” and that was something you had to deal with if you wanted to read anything worth reading and let the faggot stuff slide, you don’t have to meet them in person anyway. So he told Billy and the dope to forget the stuff he said about Ginsburg’s queer as a three dollar bill situation and “dig” (that was the word Jack used) what he had to say to the world, to the young really. The stuff about machines devouring humankind and making the world crazier than it already was. That maybe the guys in mental hospitals like the ones who were his comrades at the time were the sane ones-that what they knew was too powerful to let them stay out on the mean streets for long. That the Molochs were in charge (“what the fuck is a Moloch,” Billy asked, interrupting, not comprehending what Jack was talking about as he droned on about stuff that seemed weird). Tried to tell the kids that this thing was Ginsburg plainsong, his way of putting in raw language his spiritual trip, his karma on the world. (the dope would run into Ginsburg later at an anti-war rally in New York City in his later incantation as a Buddhist so karma was the right word even though they were clueless about what it really meant in Buddhist traditions).

After about fifteen minutes Jack could see his audience’s eyes glazing over and so he stopped, stopped and told them that when they got his age they would be thinking about all the stuff Ginsburg laid out in that not-fit-for-public-school-classrooms poem. They laughed, snickered really and wondered what Lucinda and Laura were up to just then. The hell with Jack and his fucking homo poem.            

In Honor Of International Workers’ Day- May Day 2017 -Ancient dreams, dreamed-The Risen People?-Frank Jackman’s War-Take Five

In Honor Of International Workers’ Day- May Day 2016 -Ancient dreams, dreamed-The Risen People?-Frank Jackman’s War-Take Five  

From The American Left History Blog Archives –May Day 1971

Endless, dusty, truck heavy, asphalt steaming hitchhike roads travelled, Route 6, 66, maybe 666 and perdition for all I know, every back road, every Connecticut highway avoiding back road from Massachusetts south to the capital for one last winner-take-all, no prisoners taken show-down to end all show-downs. And maybe, just maybe, finally some peace and a new world a-borning, a world we had been talking about for at least a decade (clueless, as all youth nations are clueless, that that road was well-travelled, very well- travelled, before us). No Jack Kerouac dharma bum easy road (although there were dharma bums, or at least faux dharma bums, aplenty on those 1971 roads south, and west too) let- her-rip cosmic brakeman Neal Cassady at the wheel flying through some Iowa/Kansas wheat field night fantasy this trip.

No this trip was not about securing some cultural enclave in post-war America (post-World War II so as not to confuse the reader) in break-out factory town Lowell or cold water tenement Greenwich Village/Soho New Jack City or Shangri-La West out in the Bay area, east or west, but about mucking up the works, the whole freaking governmental/societal/economic/cultural/personal/godhead world (that last one, the godhead one, not thrown in just for show, no way) and maybe, just maybe sneaking away with the prize. But a total absolute, absolutist, big karma sky fight out, no question. And we, I, am ready. On that dusty road ready.

More. See all roads head south as we, my girlfriend of the day, maybe more, maybe more than a day, Joyell, but along this time more for ease of travelling for those blessed truck driver eye rides, than lust or dream wish and my sainted wise-guy amigo (and shades of Gregory Corso, sainted, okay), Matty, who had more than a passing love or dream wish in her and if you had seen her you would not have wondered why. Not have wondered why if your “type” was Botticelli painted and thoughts of butterfly swirls just then or were all-type sleepy-eyed benny-addled teamster half-visioned out of some forlorn rear view mirror.

Yah, head south, in ones, twos, and threes (no more, too menacing even for hefty ex-crack back truckers to stop for) travelling down to D.C. for what many of us figure will be the last, finally, push back against the war, the Vietnam War, for those who have forgotten, or stopped watching television and the news, but THEY, and you knew (know) who they were (are), had their antennae out too, they KNEW we were coming, even high-ball fixed (or whiskey neat she had the face for them) looking out from lonely balconies Martha Mitchell knew that much. They were, especially in mad max robot-cop Connecticut, out to pick off the stray or seven who got into their mitts as a contribution to law and order, law and order one Richard Milhous Nixon-style (and in front of him, leading some off-key, off-human key chorus some banshee guy from Maryland, another watch out hitchhike trail spot, although not as bad as Ct, nothing except Arizona is). And thus those dusty, steamy, truck heavy (remind me to tell you about hitchhiking stuff, and the good guy truckers you wanted, desperately wanted, to ride with in those days, if I ever get a chance sometime).

The idea behind this hitchhiked road, or maybe, better, the why. Simple, too simple when you, I, thought about it later in lonely celled night but those were hard trying times, desperate times really, and just free, free from another set of steel-barred rooms this jailbird was ready to bring down heaven, hell, hell if it came down to it to stop that furious war (Vietnam, for the later reader) and start creating something recognizable for humans to live in. So youth nation, then somewhat long in the tooth, and long on bad karma-driven bloody defeats too, decided to risk all with the throw of the dice and bring a massive presence to D.C. on May Day 1971.

And not just any massed presence like the then familiar seasonal peace crawl that nobody paid attention too anymore except the organizers, although the May Day action was wrapped around that year’s spring peace crawl, (wrapped up, cozily wrapped up, in their utopian reformist dream that more and more passive masses, more and more suburban housewives from New Jersey, okay, okay not just Jersey, more and more high school freshman, more and more barbers, more and more truck driver stop waitresses, for that matter, would bring the b-o-u-r-g-e-o-i-s-i-e (just in case there are sensitive souls in the room) to their knees. No, we were going to stop the government, flat. Big scheme, big scheme no question and if anybody, any “real” youth nation refugee, excepting, of course, always infernal always, those cozy peace crawl organizers, tried to interject that perhaps there were wiser courses nobody mentioned them out loud in my presence and I was at every meeting, high or low. Moreover I had my ears closed, flapped shut closed, to any lesser argument. I, rightly or wrongly, silly me thought “cop.”

So onward anti-war soldiers from late night too little sleep Sunday night before Monday May Day dawn in some vagrant student apartment around DuPont Circle (I think) but it may have been further up off 14th Street, Christ after eight million marches for seven million causes who can remember that much. No question though on the student ghetto apartment locale; bed helter-skelter on the floor, telephone wire spool for a table, orange crates for book shelves, unmistakably, and the clincher, seventeen posters, mainly Che, Mao, Ho, Malcolm etc., the first name only necessary for identification pantheon just then, a smattering of Lenin and Trotsky but they were old guys from old revolutions and so, well, discounted to early rise (or early stay up cigarette chain-smoking and coffee slurping to keep the juices flowing). Out into the streets, out into the small collectives coming out of other vagrant apartments streets (filled with other posters of Huey Newton , George Jackson, Frantz Fanon, etc. from the two names needed pantheon) joining up to make a cohorted mass (nice way to put it, right?). And then dawn darkness surrounded, coffee spilled out, cigarette bogarted, AND out of nowhere, or everywhere, bang, bang, bang of governmental steel, of baton, of chemical dust, of whatever latest technology they had come up with they came at us (pre-tested in Vietnam, naturally, as I found out later). Jesus, bedlam, mad house, insane asylum, beat, beat like gongs, defeated.

Through bloodless bloodied streets (this, after all, was not Chicago, hog butcher to the world), may day tear down the government days, tears, tear-gas exploding, people running this way and that coming out of a half-induced daze, a crazed half-induced daze that mere good- will, mere righteousness would right the wrongs of this wicked old world. One arrested, two, three, many, endless thousands as if there was an endless capacity to arrest, and be arrested, arrest the world, and put it all in one great big Robert F. Kennedy stadium home to autumn gladiators on Sunday and sacrificial lambs this spring maypole may day basket druid day.

And, as I was being led away by one of D.C.’s finest, I turned around and saw that some early Sunday morning voice, some “cop” voice who advised caution and went on and on about getting some workers out to join us before we perished in an isolated blast of arrests and bad hubris also being led away all trussed up, metal hand-cuffs seemingly entwined around her whole slight body. She said she would stick with us even though she disagreed with the strategy that day and I had scoffed, less than twenty-four hours before, that she made it sound like she had to protect her erring children from themselves. And she, maybe, the only hero of the day. Righteous anonymous sister, forgive me. (Not so anonymous actually since I saw her many times later in Boston, almost would have traded in lust for her but I was still painted Botticelli-bewitched and so I, we, let the moment passed, and worked on about six million marches for about five millions causes with her but that was later. I saw no more of her in D.C. that week.)

Stop. Brain start. Out of the bloodless fury, out of the miscalculated night a strange bird, no peace dove, these were not such times even with all our unforced errors, and no flame-flecked phoenix raising but a bird, maybe the owl of Minerva came a better sense that this new world a-bornin’ would take some doing, some serious doing. More serious that some wispy-bearded, pony-tailed beat, beat down, beat around, beat up young stalwart road tramp acting in god’s place could even dream of. But that was later. Just then, just that screwed-up martyr moment, I was longing for the hot, dusty, truck driver stop meat loaf special, dishwater coffee on the side, road back home even ready to chance Connecticut highway dragnets to get there.

*********

The spring of 1971 had been like the previous couple of years in the escalating anti-Vietnam War struggle. There was the inevitable massive peaceful protest planned for late April in Washington, D.C. as the mainline organizers of these now semi-annual events (others took place in the fall) put on the word in the media and on the street. The expectation of the organizers, the strategy, at least the public strategy, was driven by the idea that ever-increasing numbers on the National Mall would in short order whip the war-mongers. In short more housewives and mothers from Jersey taking the trek south would do the trick. There were at this time, as usual when the commonplace strategies to make political change do not work, others, mainly students and young unaffiliated radicals who had other ideas about stopping the madness of the Vietnam War. In little collectives, known as May Day collectives for the day of action, small clots of like-minded brethren were committed to major acts of civil disobedience. In their parlance-‘if the government does not shut down the war, we will shut down the government.” It was with these different concepts in mind that Frank Jackman, his girlfriend Joyell, and a couple of other of her friends from Cambridge hitchhiked to Washington, D.C. that spring.           

Frank, having only a couple of months previously had been discharged from the U.S. Army as a conscientious objector after serving almost a year in the Fort Devens, Massachusetts stockade, was intrigued by the thought of massive direct action to stop the war. His own evolution on the subject of effective political action had started from his perception that more than mass marches were necessary to stop the slaughter. His own actions in the Army while individualistic were done with the thought of spurring fellow soldiers into active opposition to the war. In time he saw that more than acting as a model was necessary and was therefore intrigued by the idea of mass civil disobedience to shut down the war machine.

Frank and Joyell had had many argument over the question of direct civil action, “street violence” she called it mentioning the wild and wooly radical types from Cambridge and elsewhere who were touting the May Day actions. Frank thought every such option was up for grabs with the never-ending war and so his objections were strictly personal. He was not sure that he wanted to go through another jail term, potentially long, so soon after his previously stint. The pair argued (along with those two friends) all the way do to Washington about the subject of the right strategy.  In any case Frank and Joyell “decided” before the trip that while Frank would stay for the May Day action as a witness at least Joyell would travel back to Boston once the large Saturday rally was over.

On the Saturday of the mass rally the National Mall was overflowing with people of every physical description, fashion statement, race, creed, and the rest. From the platform every self-interested politician and grouping got their moment in the sun. What Frank noticed and which only confirmed his suspicions about every greater masses of people gathering to force the war issue was the essentially festive nature of the event, This motley would not “storm heaven” and so as the day wore on, tired, almost exhausted he began to toy with the idea that, yes, come Monday morning he would be out in the streets. The ante had been upped.

That was why Frank Jackman, late of the U.S. Army, had been sitting on the National Mall around a blazing campfire, tired, a little hungry, and doing a little quiet thinking through his options on the Sunday night before May Day 1971...

  

It’s A Natural Born Thing- With Bluesman Taj Mahal In Mind-In Honor Of The Summer Of Love, 1967- For Laura

It’s A Natural Born Thing- With Bluesman Taj Mahal In Mind-For Laura

From The Pen Of Bart Webber   

Sam Lowell and his long-time companion, Laura Perkins, had something of a standing question between them concerning seeing musical performers these days whom they had originally seen and admired in their younger days, those who were still alive if aging, and who were still putting on performances in public. The question: did, or did not, the performer have anything left from the old days or were they, the performers, and this was not an abstract question after seeing the painful decline of some artists which even kindness could not save, banking on nostalgic post-World War II baby-boomers now also having lost a step or two ignoring reality and give them a pass for old time sake. Worse losing all critical judgment and calling for encores.

That particular question had had taken on more urgency as the years have gone by since the number of performers from back in the day, from back in the 1950s classic age of rock and roll where only a few like Jerry Lee and a very wobbly Chuck Berry are still standing, from the folk minute of the 1960s where stalwarts like Dylan, Baez Rush and Paxton still play but that list is getting shorter by the year, from the seemingly eternal blues filled days where Muddy/Howlin’ Wolf/Mississippi John/James Cotton/Koko Taylor/Etta James and almost all the old names known through flipping through the bins at Cheapo’s in Central Square, Cambridge have passed on, whose music had bailed Sam out of more than one funk. Yeah, many had hung up their instruments or had passed to the great beyond had been mounting with alarming frequency as Sam and Laura have reached old age themselves, oops, matured.

That passing from the scene, and that nagging question about who did or did not have it now, was no small thing to the music crazed pair so Sam and Laura had over the previous several years been attentive when any of the venues they frequented had booked old time rock, folk or blues performers (the latter like James Montgomery mostly now those who had sat at the feet of the 1960s legends). Every time they did go to concert they would make the same comment, and would reflect as well on previous concerts to give a roll call of who or who did not make the cut. Sam insisted this analysis was no academic matter as recent concerts have attested to (although members of the academy, budding members itching to write that big definitive dissertation about the important message about teen angst and alienation in Jerry High School Confidential, who Dylan wrote Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowland for, and the truth of whether the blues ain’t nothing but a good woman on your mind that knock the known world on its head with insightful nuggets about such speculation are probably even as I write running through the possibilities).

Take, for example, what for Sam and Laura is the classic case of Bob Dylan and his seemingly endless tour (and now endless production of bootleg material placed in appropriately numbered CD containers, some very good, others which should have been left on the editing floor), the man, no matter what number of tours he feels he has to perform each year can no longer sing, no way. He gets a thumbs down on this question, no question, although only a fool would throw away their treasure trove of Dylania from the golden days from about 1960 to a little after 1970 since that is what will have to sustain us all in the slow nights ahead. Same thing was true several years ago about the late Etta James who had stolen the show at the Newport Folk Festival in the mid-1990s (from none other than the headliner Chuck Berry who was ancient even then) but who when last seen was something of an embarrassment. Another thumbs down. Going the other way recent concerts by a couple of members of the old Jim Kweskin Jug Band, Jim Kweskin and Geoff Muldaur, at Club Passim in Cambridge (the former Club 47 of blessed folk minute memory where Sam fled to when times were tough at home in high school and he needed that spot or when without dough the Hayes-Bickford to keep him going) showed that they both had increased their knowledge and respect for the American songbook and that they still had it (a concert a few years ago, also in Cambridge, by another member of that jug band, Maria Muldaur, solo, and later when the three united for a 50^th anniversary of the band reunion showed she still had it as well). As did a concert a few years ago by the late Jesse Winchester.                 

Sam and Laura had jumped at the opportunity to see deep-voiced, kick ass bluesman Taj Mahal who was making one of his now less frequent stage appearances at the Rockport Music Hall up in that North Shore town by the Atlantic about forty miles from Boston, on the Sunday of the Patriot’s Day weekend (that Patriot’s Day, a Massachusetts state holiday of sorts, commemorating the time a bunch of determined American farmers and small tradesmen, many of whose forbears had been kicked out of Mother England under threat of the gallows, gave old John Bull all the hell he wanted out in Concord and Lexington).

On the afternoon of the concert as they were riding up the highway Sam kept thinking to himself the eternal question of whether old Taj still had the old magic that he had shown over a decade before when they had last seen him in Somerville where he had brought the house down. He mentioned that concern to Laura who added, having been through all the concert wars of the last decade or so with Sam and had observed the fit and halt going about their business, she hoped he was not too frail to hold the instruments. Of course once they got on the subject of who did and who did not still have it they had to run through the litany as well as acts that they hoped to see before the performers faded from view. That “game” got them through the hour’s ride as they hit the long one lane road into Rockport and the concert hall.         

Sam had wondered since this concert had been scheduled as a late afternoon concert (something that both he and Laura were happy about since as they joked the concert’s timing would not interrupt their normal bedtimes like most concerts, maybe not interrupt Taj’s sleep schedule either) whether the Shalin Liu Performance Center (the official name for the concert hall opened in an old converted and expanded storefront building in 2010) would have the ocean view windows in back of the stage open or closed. They had been to this venue a couple of times before so they knew that it was at the artist’s discretion whether that was done although with Sam’s personal maniacal love of the ocean he hoped that it would be open to give an appealing backdrop to the music inside. (Laura, generally indifferent to the ocean’s allure being a farm-bred woman, had no opinion on the matter.) As they entered the hall Sam noticed that the curtains were closed but since he and Laura had taken a short walk to the ocean before the show began he was not that bothered by the situation. (Later, as they were driving home, Sam laughed to himself that he was so transfixed by the performance that he hardly noticed the curtains were closed. Laughed too that old Taj had probably had the damn things closed because he intended some serious business not to be distracted by some silly ocean waves crashing tepidly to shore that day.)    

This Shalin Liu hall has many virtues beside the ocean view, small (about 300 seats), good views from all around, very good acoustics and lighting, and seats on the second floor that overlook the stage. For this concert Sam and Laura were seated in that overlook area and the first thing Sam noticed after sitting down was the bright shiny National Steel guitar, shades of old preacher/devil man Son House and his flailing away on Death Letter Blues and Bukka White, sweat pouring from every pore be-bopping away on Aberdeen, Mississippi Blues and Panama, Limited. He also noticed a slide guitar but did not remember that Taj played the slide as he racked his brain to try to remember any Taj songs he knew that included the slide. Noticed too that there was a banjo, piano, a couple of non-descript guitars, and a ukulele. Taj had come, armed and dangerous, a good sign.          

As the lights dimmed and the crowd hushed for the performance to start out came Taj, along with his drummer and lead guitarist, looking for all the world like the ghost of every bluesman than anybody could imagine coming out of Highway 61 in the Delta ready to make his bargain with the devil in order to be able to hit that high white note once in a while. Anybody who took his or her blues seriously that is. A big burly man (looking back at photographs from old albums at home later on the Internet Sam noticed that Taj, like a lot of us, had moved from the slender side to more robust as he aged), soft felt hat like a lot of Chicago blues guys wore, indoors or out, a big old blue flowered shirt and dangling from one ear the now obligatory pierced earring. Sam closed his eyes thinking about guys that had that same look, no, the ghost of guys now, guys like Little Walter, Magic, Slim, James Cotton, Sunnyland Slim, Big Joe Williams, legends all and maybe Taj by his appearance was putting in his application to join the guys.    

And for the next almost two hours without the usual  intermission to disturb the flow of the music Taj made good on two things, yeah, as you probably already figured, the brother still had it, and, yes, he was making serious application to the pantheon, move over guys. Right out of the block came the National Steel and Sam whispered to Laura that this was going to be serious stuff as he covered Henry Thomas’ classic Fishing Blues, Good Morning Miss Brown, Corrina, Going Up To The Country and Paint My Mailbox Blue, John Henry. Later Taj worked on the piano, the uke, the non-descript guitars, and the banjo before coming back to the encore with the National Steel on his signature Lovin’ In My Baby’s Arms. The treat for Sam though was when Taj strapped that big old slide guitar on and covered the legendary slide guitar man Elmore James’ Television Mama. Whoa!

But the songs were just filler really once it was clear from the very first song that Taj was on fire that late afternoon, once they knew that they were going to take the ticket, and take ride. It was more the mood that Taj put Sam in, put him into that swaying, foot-tapping, finger-snapping feeling when he and the music mesh and the outside world for that duration fades. The mood too that hit Laura as he would watch her, a very prim lady most of the time, swaying dreamily with the beat, tapping the bannister in front of her, tapping those feet just like him. Oh, very heaven.

Later as they walked down the stairs after the performance was over the both automatically stated the obvious in their understated way-“yeah, old Taj still has it.” Case closed. Oh well, almost closed because as they were driving back to Boston Sam mentioned that that concert was one of the top ten they had ever seen. Laura agreed.             

On The 50th Anniversary Of The “Summer Of Love”- “Hippie Modernism: The Struggle For Utopia” At The Berkeley Art Museum

On The 50^th Anniversary Of The “Summer Of Love”- “Hippie Modernism: The Struggle For Utopia” At The Berkeley Art Museum

By Special Guest Social Commentator Alex James 

[Recently, under the aegis of my oldest brother Alex, today’s special guest commentator, I have been “commissioned” to do a wide ranging series of writings, sketches really, around the theme of the “Summer of Love, 1967” to be made into a small tribute book in honor of his and his “corner boys” from the Acre section of North Adamsville long departed friend Peter Paul Markin. It was Markin who was the main connection between them and the events which transpired in the Bay Area that long ago and which arguably changed their lives forever. Of if not changed forever put a big kink in the way that they were originally heading. The impetus for the project had come about after Alex had gone on a business trip to San Francisco and almost by happenstance noticed an advertisement on a passing Muni bus for an exhibit at the de Young Art Museum on entitled The Summer of Love Experience. That perked his interest enough to take sneak time from his conference business to attend. And will be the subject of an up-coming sketch. Today’s commentary is along those same lines because not only was the de Young having its version of celebrating that event but over on the East Bay in Berkeley, another center of that summer’s “youth nation” surge, the University Art Museum had mounted an exhibition with the intriguing title-Hippie Modernism; the Struggle for Utopia. Alex jumped on the BART one day after his business was finished up for the day to check this display out. Zack James]               

*******

I am not usually much for writing outside of my business interests or I should say my law practice which is my business interest and leave the biting or witty social commentary to my youngest brother, there were six of us to divvy up the social chores, Zack, who has made a career out of such endeavors. Except events this spring around the almost half-forgotten Summer of Love, 1967 which I, and the rest of the guys I hung around with all through public school, were as Zack said one time “washed clean” by that extraordinary “new breeze” that got a big tailwind from that happening. “Happening” a word very closely associated with all the crazy, goofy, outlandish and in some sad instances pathetic things that went on when we were forced to head west and see what it was all about. Forced by one mad monk of a man, Peter Paul Markin, known as the “Scribe” from junior high school on. A small letter “prophet” unlike a capital letter prophet like Allan Ginsberg who blew Markin away with his Howl in high school which he would recite to us when he was half drunk (or later half-stoned) and which we could have given a fuck about at the time all we cared about was grabbing petty larceny dough, girls, and fast cars not always in that order, after all was said and done, what little good it ever did him in the long haul to “check out the new breeze coming over the land.”

All that will be, or already has been, detailed in the little tribute book we asked Zack to put together with his sketches on those times and our, the surviving corner boys’ remembrances, in honor of Markin. Like Zack said in his introduction I had been in San Francisco for a law conference and was walking up Geary Street and noticed an advertisement for the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park which was presenting an exhibition titled The Summer of Love Experience. I did attend that exhibition and will give my take on that emotional experience shortly. While at that exhibition one late afternoon after the conference was over for the day I overheard a conversation between two old geezers (yeah, like me, like me) about an exhibit over in Berkeley at the University art museum. They didn’t give the title of the exhibition at the time. Had just said it was about hippies. But when I went to look it up it had the title, the very interesting title-Hippie Modernism: the Struggle for Utopia I couldn’t resist before I left Frisco taking that exhibit in on two counts; it was an unusual way to describe a certain modernist artistic sensibility that I think we were trying to create and a very apt way to describe what the whole “seek a newer world” experience (a term Markin used incessantly via Robert Kennedy when it counted) was about, or what we thought we were trying to do. Zack has mentioned in a few of his sketches that we have faced more than forty years of blow-back from the Molochs (thanks Allan Ginsburg’s Howl for that) which show no signs of abating soon for not creating that utopia, or something close to it. He was right as rain on that score.                

I have already given Zack notes and paragraphs of information with my take on how we lost dog corner boys from the nowhere Acre section, the dirt poor working class section of North Adamsville, under the whip of one mad monk Markin wound up spending various amounts of time working through the implications of the Summer of Love which kind of brought all the tattered remnants of “youth nation,” and it really was that, at least it is no misnomer to call it that when the sons of working stiffs met up with the scions of the Mayfair swells to give the Molochs a run for their money for a while anyway. What came to mind viewing this Hippie Modern exhibit is how varied the ideas were that we were trying to get people, and frankly “people” then was just shorthand for youth nation for we were in a serious confrontational battle with our parents’ generation and their leaders over these proposed changes. A very unusual time in that respect since generations since have developed their own styles but have not come to blows with their parents’ generations in quite the same way. My three twenty somethings still living at home with seemingly no immediate prospects of leaving to fly on their own against my leaving home as a teenager tell the reader all he or she needs to know about that difference.      

Of course a University museum, especially at an elite school which was probably the overall cultural if not political epicenter of the times, is going to highlight some of the ideas and creations which its alumnus or those who hung around the school there produced. And there really was an amazing amount of printed material produced then detailing everything from how to build an environmentally sustainable house to the outer edges of rational social and political theory (think Marcuse, McLuhan, guys like that). The Chinese only half-seriously had called such a movement in their own country in the late 1950s “let one hundred flowers bloom” and in those naïve blessed hippie days there were many more than that number of ides floating around in the space we had created. Whoever could put pen to ink, or to the drawing board had space to work in. Frankly some of the ideas seem today, today when we are not under the influence of strong drugs, sexual desire, or some odd-ball background music which colored most of our thinking back then, crackpot but others are as fresh as whatever Silicon Valley is pressing on the public these days. I had a thought that maybe, just maybe if we had done more organizing around some simple things instead of creating full-blown manifestos for every occasion we might had struck a deeper chord. Maybe though that time, our print-driven time, was the last gasp of print, of literary means of effective persuasion.

The heart of the exhibit though, the part that along with the de Young exhibit pieces got me on the phone, the cellphone, to all the surviving corner boys who went West at Markin’s beck and call were the photographs and poster art that brought back so many memories. I might as well put in here that not everybody went, wanted to go, or could go like Ricky Russo who got wasted in some fucking rice paddle in Vietnam for no good reason and never even had a chance to have Markin work his words on him to go out like he did with the rest of us.

Memories of going with Markin on the road, yeah, the hitchhike road since I had no real dough, both of us with knapsacks and slim bedrolls, grabbing long and short haul rides, sleeping in ravines and in the back of trucks, getting rides all the way from every kind of traveler from hardened truck-drivers who thought we looked like their wayward sons back home who they did not understand any longer to welcome wagon Volkwagen minibuses filled with “freak” who pulled up and cried jump in and getting to the fresh smell of the bay in anywhere between six days and two weeks. What was time anyway once you were on that road. Sleeping in all kinds of communal flops in or near Haight-Ashbury, panhandling or working day labor for food, and smoking and ingesting every kind of drug except maybe booze which had been our natural “high” around the block but which seemed passe out in the new wilderness where we were to be “washed clean” as Markin when he was the beautified saint of our mission used to say. Most strikingly though were the posters and other artwork that at the time were just “commercial” efforts to let people know when a “happening” or a concert was coming up. I was surprised by how grand the artwork was for items that were just then advertisement but turned out to have been genuine works of art as seen as such by their creators. No one can argue against that point now, or should.

I freaked out when I saw a photograph of an old time school bus, what Markin used to call the yellow brick road magical mystery flying carpet, converted to a moving living communal set-up pioneered by max daddy Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters and which travelled up and down the Coast. We had travelled while on the Coast in a caravan like that with a guy named Captain Crunch that one of the guys will talk about in the tribute book who as well as personally knowing Kesey (we had gone to one of those famed be-ins at his La Honda digs) was nothing but the king hell king of our existence for a couple of years. That travelling caravan would be the way we would have gone to this or that concert by the Doors or the Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore or in Golden Gate Park. Playing for free or a couple of bucks. (I did a double take when I saw those ticket prices beyond the many free concerts by the big name Bay-based bands including one poster which advertised a three day concert for five dollars for the whole thing. Jesus, some things were righteous then when I think I have paid many hundreds of dollars in recent years to go to a Stones concert). Yeah, as Zack said, to be young was very heaven.

The only thing that did not ring true, or was outside our purview, was a section dedicated many photographs of a group of drag queens called the Cockettes (draw whatever conclusion you like about that moniker) and which later morphed into another such group with a different name which I don’t remember. Sure we would see drag queens, “dykes” and “faggots” around the concerts and festivals after all San Francisco even then was a safe haven for same-sex seekers (and other misfits like communists, beat poets, and runaways from North Adamsville and all such places in between). Nowadays in the new sensibility nobody gives a fuck who you love or why, how you want to dress yourself before the world or why but then we sons of the working class had very backward views about the sexually different and those who identified that way. I can remember one time when we went down to Provincetown, Markin included, just to bait the “fags” that made the place then notorious for us straights. But you know you can learn something in this wicked old world as Markin used to say and after “getting religion” as Markin also used to say when we got hip to the world a little better when my son came out of the closet I wish we had gotten to know those “dames” and their hangers-on better because from the photographs some of them looked kind of foxy and probably fun to be around. Yeah, I looked it up, looked up the full Wordsworth quote that Zack is using for the series-the other part applies too-“Twas bliss to be alive.”              

Memories Of Rick-With Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman’s “Casablanca” In Mind

Memories Of Rick-With Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman’s “Casablanca” In Mind

By Seth Garth

[Before he passed away in the late 1980s the long time French police officer, Commandant Louis Renault (everybody, everybody but the bad guys who crossed his path and there were plenty and not all of them Germans, called him “Louie” for his mild-mannered easy style when he was not in hot pursuit of some nefarious types)who had worked both in colonial Algeria and French Morocco before heading back home to work with the National Police in his hometown of Lyon, liked to sit in the Café Algiers there and reminisce about all his adventures as a cop. When asked about the most memorable person, friend or foe, he had been up against in his times he would without much hesitation blurt out the name of Rick Blaine.

Rick of Rick’s Café in Casablanca when Louie had worked in French Morocco early in World War II after the fall of the French Republic and the rise of the Vichy government which controlled that colony then. He as a police officer noted the changing of the guard and went about his business as usual-regimes come and go he had always said but the cops are forever. After investigation of Rick’s past, most of the early part as a tough guy out of Hell’s Kitchen in New York City a place where Rick would make people laugh when he said even the mighty Germans would think twice about occupying and had included some troubling adventurous activity for the “wrong” side in Ethiopia and Spain during the 1930s, he, after having had his palm “greased” issued the liquor and nightclub license for Rick to keep his Cafe Americian open under his prefecture.

For most of the time he knew Rick in Casablanca they had had a good working relationship. Rick would let him “win” at the roulette wheel as his pay-off for letting illegal gambling go on in full sight, “comp” him for drinks and dope, mostly hashish, and let him have his women “rejects” on the rebound. Then she came in, came in as Rick said one drunken night when she had her claws in him bad again “of all the gin joints in all the world she had to show up at his door.” From then on things got interesting, very interesting. The following is a translation by Jean Marais of what Louie had to say when he was asked by a National Police archivist for details of his relationship with one Rick Blaine (1920-1982)-SG]             

“That Rick Blaine was a piece of work, one of the last of the pre-war, pre-World War II if anybody is asking which war we are talking about, romantics tilting his lance at the windmills in the name of love-or the thrill of adventure, maybe even the thrill of tweaking somebody’s nose just for the hell of it, Louie Renault was reminiscing out loud to those who were attending his retirement party. Retirement from the National Police, [the French coppers although they are not national cops like the FBI in America but just like city and town cops there run through the central government], the guys who keep order in places like Paris and Lyon (since it was a governmental pension he was about to receive after much haggling his service during Vichy times first in Algiers and then in French-controlled Morocco, in Casablanca, was included as well as his Lyon assignments). He had been asked a question by one of the younger policer officers about what was his most memorable episode in a long and illustrious career. Of course Louie had to go back to those early war days when he ran the operation for Vichy in godforsaken Casablanca to find some events, some characters who could qualify for what that young officer was asking about. Had to go back to Rick Blaine without question.             

“Yes, Rick was the real thing, I wasn’t kidding when I mentioned his name,” Louie blurted out when the officer did not comprehend why a guy whom he had on other occasions called nothing but a saloon keeper, a guy out for himself whatever checkered past he might have had rated so high. “Let me fill you and see if I am not right about this whole matter.” He would say out of earshot that even De Gaulle would gladly take a back seat after hearing this story since he was safely in London being a pain in the ass to the British and American while “little guys” like Rick and a guy who looked pretty big even by De Gaulle standards Victor Lazlo were mercilessly tweaking the German’s tail.        

“Once the Germans marched into Paris they controlled the whole political situation but since they couldn’t handle a total occupation of France and wreak havoc on the rest of Europe at the same time they left part of the country to the French military, to General Petain who worked out of Vichy, the place where the specialized water comes from. Yeah, collaborators, liked they used to try to hang on me before Rick came to Casablanca, Lazlo too, and got everybody well. I had been in Algiers during that time but once the new political reality hit I was assigned to run the police operations in bloody Casablanca-a backwater where every odd-ball thing could and did happen as well as plenty of illegal stuff from dope to women to smuggling. Just my cup of tea. I figured that I could make more graft there in the Casbah than staying in Algiers once the British and Americans got serious about dislodging the Germans from Northern Africa.   

“No sooner had I landed in Casablanca then I spied Rick’s place, Rick’s Café Americian he called it, a place where there was plenty of booze, women, gambling, dope and whatever else you wanted. Or wanted done-life was cheap there-dirt cheap. The bloody Arabs could barely keep themselves busy except when some silly “blood honor” thing came up and we had to pick up the mess after the killings. Some he said, the other guy said stuff and then bang-bang. Had to arrest about fifteen people, family members from both sides and show them a little baton to the head just to let them know we meant business. Nobody ever faulted me on that score. I walked in and introduced myself to Rick without saying anything further. He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye he said later after all the smoke had cleared and we could be honest with each other, sized me up and down and knowing that I would do “business” after that appraisal said would the previous arrangement with the Prefect I was replacing be okay- a cut of the profits, a slice of the gambling [paid out by his “winning at roulette” with lucky red 22], my pick of women, free liquor and dope, and deep discounts on anything else I needed. Also told me of his dealings, his working relationships for dope, booze and Moslem women which it seemed some of the Europeans were crazy for although I was strictly for the low-rent French tarts who found Casablanca easy on their virtue, with Sydney Greenstreet, an émigré merchant of sorts from England over in the Casbah. I immediately issued the necessary licenses that each new Prefect was entitled to issue as was my prerogative. Done.

“This Rick was a hard guy to figure though the more I ran into him on the street or more regularly in his place either to grab some young woman, to grab my cut, to “win” at roulette, or just to have some high shelf bonded whiskey that I became very fond of. Somebody said, I think it was Frenchie the main bartender, that Rick had had some kind of an adventurous past, had run some guns to Ethiopia when they were trying to hold off the Italians when Mussolini was flexing his muscles and later fought with the International Brigades, with the Communists in Spain when Franco was working up to flexing his muscles. I had already known that past from the files the previous Prefect had left and from a couple of snitches I had run through Rick’s place but the “grease” from Rick’s deal said otherwise in my eyes.   When I first met him he was all business like I said, if you said green he said okay what shade, that kind of thing.

“Somebody said, maybe it was Frenchie again since I sat at the bar of the joint many a night to “enforce” the no gambling regulation and to drink a few high shelf scotches, that Rick had been unlucky in love and that was why when he, Rick,  had his choice of any girl he wanted, two if he was feeling frisky, would take them up to his office and apartment upstairs from the club, do whatever it was that they did, some wild stuff I heard from a couple of them that I caught on the “rebound” especially from one who took him “around the world” which she would later do with me and the next night would not know them. Tell them to sell their wares in the Casbah, a low thing to say to a European woman if you knew anything at all about what went on in the Casbah. I never went there personally but would sent for this Greenstreet to deliver me my graft and whatever dope I was looking for at the time. Like I said mainly hashish from the pipe. In the end it would be that lost love that had been bothering Rick once she came to town but early on you couldn’t tell what was eating at him. Just knew that he had a chip on his shoulder which would not fall off.

“Jesus, in those days there were all kinds of people as you can imagine trying to get out of Europe for one reason or another and once France and the countries around it fell to the Germans that was doubled up. Homeless, stateless Jews, who we all knew were being savaged by the Germans and by Vichy too, International Brigaders who couldn’t go back to their occupied homelands, local Communists who didn’t get or who couldn’t get underground, anybody out of the ordinary, we even had a couple of kids, rich kids who had left Hamburg once Hitler said that jazz was a Negro-Jew conspiracy and banned the music. If you looked at a map of Europe in say 1941 you would notice that there was not much wiggle room to work with in order to get out of some occupied spot. The road out though however they got there led to Casablanca no matter what the individual reason for leaving Europe was. The link. The air flights to Lisbon and from there anyplace but the old canard Europe.

“So you know that there was plenty of money to be made by those daring enough to act as smugglers to get these desperate people out one way or another. I could have made plenty if I had decided to use my position to get real greedy but I didn’t want to deal with a bunch of desperate people bothering me about why they weren’t getting out fast enough. Rick and the Casbah made me plenty-for a while. All the action either went through that guy Sidney Greenstreet who ran his operation out of the Casbah where he mainly handled small fry, people of no account but with money, or at Rick’s for the higher class clientele. Mostly the wealthier Jews and previously high placed officials of democratic governments who the Germans were desperate to find and make an example out off for their compatriots under occupation. Some seriously shady characters, art forgers, crazed jazz aficionados, con artists, three card monte hustlers, independent dope dealers-mainly heroin out of the Afghan fields working their way West to the cities, jack-rollers, rapists and assorted slugs, characters who even we had to keep an eye on to keep any kind of order plopped themselves there.          

“Things though were going fine until some horse’s asses, as it turned out guys we had on our radar but couldn’t quite nab, decided they would murder a couple of German couriers and grab a couple of letters of transit they were travelling with. Now these letters of transit were like gold-would make their possessor a pot of gold. Maybe two pots if they worked it right. These were no questions asked documents which only had to have names filled in order to catch a flight to Lisbon and from there wherever else they wanted to go. This weasel, well known to us from a couple of rip-off jobs he did on unsuspecting travelers, a guy named Peter Lorre was part of the gang who took the couriers down. One night he showed up at Rick’s the natural place to start looking for high-end buyers and we nailed him-took him in “custody” but he didn’t have the letters of transit on him. He hanged himself in his cell before we could get much more out of him. Rick had been as cool as a cucumber when this weasel, this sweaty little nobody showed his ugly face there. This Lorre begged Rick to hide him. Rick just blew him off, told him to get lost. A couple of customers made noises when we grabbed and manhandled Lorre saying they wouldn’t patronize Rick’s again because of his attitude in the matter. Rick told them something that impressed me at the time-he wasn’t sticking his neck out for anybody. Those customers by the way were back the next night when I let Rick reopen the place and he sent them over a couple of drinks. They were his best buddies then.   

“That courier murder business though would lay us all low. See the Germans had sent over this hard-ass major, Major Veidt (sic) I think his name was if I remember the name correctly, to look into the matter. I was trying to impress him so he would put in a good word for me with Vichy. That was the whole idea behind making a big deal out of the Lorre arrest (and I was happy when he hung himself because he would have not stood up well under German methods and he might have spilled who knows what about what was going on in Casablanca at the time). That made Rick’s gesture at the time this guy Lorre begged him to save him from my men even more important. Rick just looked the other way and Lorre was a goner. We never did get the other guys in with Lorre when we rounded up, our what did we call them, oh yes,  “usual suspects”, Communists and con men and a few whores who we regularly rounded up to fill the jails full and make it look like we were doing our jobs. Some wound up out in a desert graveyard once we were done with them.                                                                                                                                                     

“Like I said in those days all kinds of people were coming through town. One of them a guy I mentioned before and said I would speak of again named Victor Lazlo had escaped from a German concentration camp and somehow he had worked his way through whatever network he had in Europe to Casablanca. This Lazlo was well-known as a leader of the resistance to the German occupations of half of Europe so a guy whom the Germans, especially this Major Veidt, were foaming at the mouth to get their hands on. But as long as he didn’t do anything illegal I had no reason to arrest him. I had half-figured when I heard he was in town to see who the highest bidder, strictly cash, was for his hide and take my cut that way.

“I really shouldn’t short-change this guy Lazlo, a lot of people even blasé don’t give a fuck Casablanca denizens full of booze, dopes and bad luck were ready to follow him, ready to help him give the Germans and Vichy a black eye. To me though he was just another guy who if he got what he wanted would still depend on guys like me to keep the mud of the earth off their shoes. Still he had a way about him even though he looked like some goddam professor from the Sorbonne who were a dime a dozen when it came to action on their ideas You had to respect a little anyway a man who could avoid the bloody talon clutches of the Gestapo when those guys were riding high, had agents, spies and snitches in every organization including the resistance. I know since I had a couple of my stoolies working for me on the local resistance which as I will tell you in a minute helped me, me go along Louie, the nice cop, grab him right from under the Germans’ noses.

“Let me give you an example about this Lazlo that I remember because I was in Rick’s the night it happened. This Major Veidt was having a party, a drunken officers and their damn collaborator bitches’ party, singing old German and Nazi songs at the top of their lungs. Lazlo came in, saw the play and fuming after a few cognacs decided very un-professor- like to tweak the Germans’ noses. He started up with some patriotic French and Czech songs, that was the place where he was from so he definitely had grievances against the Nazis, and the crowd went with him. Yeah, this was guy people would follow, people who ordinarily wouldn’t say boo. Such hungry men are dangerous. Lazlo was doomed from that night on and I have half-expected the Germans to take him out for the desert sights right then.      

“But here is where things got interesting. Interesting to me once I got bored with the play with Lazlo and the Germans. This Lazlo, besides what I said about his presence was a good-looking guy in the old-fashioned sense of the term with good manners, a proper bourgeois under normal circumstances but more noticeable once you knew he had escaped the German clutches, and a good tipper according to Frenchie, was not travelling alone. He had this beautiful woman with him, one of the most beautiful I have ever seen then or now, Ilsa something, I am not sure we ever knew her last name and it didn’t matter with a beauty like that. When she showed up our Rick went crazy, went crazy like a loon. See as we all found out later he had come to Casablanca just ahead of the German armies advancing on Paris with this black guy who was an entertainer, a singer and piano player named Sam and a sour look on his face. He had “known” Ilsa in Paris, had been her fancy man from what I could tell. No way that they had separate rooms in quaint old pre-war Paris. They were supposed to blow town together and meet at the train station one evening on the last train out of Paris before the Germans stopped the trains. She was a “no show.” She was in living color the reason that Rick had been so indifferent to everything. Why he turned over perfectly good women to me without batting an eyelash.            

“Of course the minute she showed up the old flames were re-kindled-for both of them. She had spied Sam at the piano through the heavily smoke-filled room, had forced him to play “their” song, If I Didn’t Care I think and when Rick heard that he went ballistic, was ready to come to blows with Sam since Sam had been ordered never to play the song. Then he spotted her across the piano and he melted down like an ice cube. It seems that in Paris she had assumed her husband, this Lazlo was dead, had been killed by the Germans. False report. That last day in Paris she found out through some underground source that Lazlo was still alive and she had gone to him. Leaving Rick standing in the rain at the fucking train station. Naturally all of this stuff I learned later but that “left standing in the rain” is what drove Rick to get up on his high horse and create nothing but trouble for me and my men once she came into view.  

“You know this Ilsa was no question a beauty, soft-spoken, had a scent of desert bloom or jasmine who knows something exotic coming off of her every time I came within three feet of her. Not my kind of woman not that I would have thrown her out of bed but she seemed a bit too ethereal for my tastes. Didn’t seem the slightest bit political (and Rick said she wasn’t which is why he was attracted to her in Paris the first place having just come over the Pyrenees from that losing fight in Spain and maybe why Lazlo kept her by his side too). Didn’t seem anything but beautiful and with good manners as well but figure two tough guys were attracted to her for keeps and she had sometimes that jangled their nerves if you get my drift. I figured her like this though some women, and by no means all of them, are meant for love. Are built up in such a way that guys have to get next to them or die trying. Outside of that very important trait they if seen walking by would fade from view after a few sighs. That was Ilsa, smart, yes, steady, yes, loyal, depends, but made for love, made to stand beside and steady a man of the world. Allow him to do those things he had to do to make himself complete. Christ, enough of that I am talking like some old washer woman. Back to the Rick end of things.               

“That long gone Lorre had given Rick the letters of transit to keep for him the night Rick looked the other way when we grabbed the weasel and made him squeal or whatever weasels do when they are caught. When with Rick’s help he fell down, wound up at the end of his checkered tie, Rick figured that he would use the letters to get himself out of hellhole Casablanca. He said that even Hell’s Kitchen in New York where he had grown up (and had “advised” the Germans to think twice about trying to occupy if you recall) was less dangerous than Casablanca so you get an idea how bad things were-how cheap life was on in the desert. Worse than the bloody wogs the British were always moaning about in the Raj, in India. He wasn’t going alone though. She, Ilsa, was going with him. She had snuck up into his apartment one night when Lazlo was out doing his organizing of the local resistance. As a result of that outlawed meeting I had Lazlo picked up when he surfaced, you couldn’t have such meetings and I knew that German major would be happy to hear that I had the great Victor Lazlo locked up like a caged animal.

“Whatever Rick and Ilsa did and from what Frenchie said Oscar the head waiter told him they had definitely gone under the sheets from his disheveled look and the blush on her face when Rick told Oscar to escort her home they were blowing town together. When Oscar told me that story a few days later I wondered about what had happened. What had made sour Rick decide to blow a good thing in Casablanca (my good thing too don’t forget). No question Ilsa was a beauty, an exceptional beauty but after the way she had left him high and dry in Paris I figured maybe a quick roll in the hay and then off alone. But you never know about beautiful women, sometimes they can be just as kinky as any whore or any low-rent tart. She didn’t look that way but maybe with a few drinks and an agenda of her own-like getting Lazlo out- alone- she took him around the world like that ex-flame Lisette had.      

“Somehow and I never could get him to tell me exactly what happened he had had an epiphany after that night some kind of turnaround. All he would say back then was the way the world was just then the troubles of three people, him, Ilsa and Lazlo weren’t worth a hill of beans compared what was going on. But whatever the source from then on he was on fire, was maybe thinking back to that old fight in Spain, thought about some payback for lost comrades, maybe what would happen if the Germans won, maybe he just didn’t like that Major Veidt and his arrogant ways closing up his café when the high rollers were coming in for their weekend beatings.

“So he gave Ilsa one story about how they should meet at the airport and blow town. She was all over that idea and had dropped any mention of Lazlo. He told me another. Talked me into a deal that when I thought about it later I should have figured was bullshit from minute number one. Confessed to me that he had the letters. Was blowing town with Ilsa and that was that. He said -let’s do this though. Let Lazlo out, let him get to the airport with the letters and grab him as an accessory for the courier murders. A feather in my cap was all I could think of. Would get that fucking Major Veidt off my back about picking up Lazlo and showing him the desert sights. When the deal went down though Rick was faking the whole thing. Maybe not about wanting to flee with Ilsa but about his attitude toward Lazlo. He had convinced me of his plan but when the deal went down I was the fall guy, well, one of the fall guys. That German major took the big fall when he tried to stop the plane to Lisbon as Lazlo and Ilsa got on the plane. Rick took him down without a murmur in one clean shot making me wonder how the Loyalists lost in Spain with a guy like that working with them.

         

“Needless to say when I was caught in a bind I stepped away from danger by refusing to arrest Rick. I went into the usual dodge-round up the usual suspects, double it up this time since a goddam German major was under the ground. I resolved the bind I was in pretty simply. I figured my days in Morocco were finished and so I saw the writing on the wall. I walked away with Rick (an action that I was successfully able to use in order to have my service time there count toward my retirement which I had many hassles over before I won). We made our way to Brazzaville with the dough Rick grabbed from Greenstreet when Rick sold him his interest in the café. I stayed there grabbing my graft until the end of the war and had worked various grifts with Rick until he went back to Europe a few months later where he joined up with the French resistance, worked with Samuel Beckett the exiled Irish playwright who was deeply into the organization from what I heard later. I heard from him a few times over the years before he passed away a few years ago. I guess Casablanca was in his blood because after the war he ran the Café Casablanca in New York City for some thirty years before he gave it up to retire. But what a guy that Rick was, giving up that luscious piece for unsung glory underground in France. Making that big gesture for love. Yeah, the last of the pre-war romantics.

It's a Beautiful Day-White Bird-In Honor Of The Summer Of Love-1967

Finding Progressive Events In The Boston Area-ACT-MA.

Finding Progressive Events In The Boston Area-ACT-MA.

ORG