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
The Perfect Crime Busted-With Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s “Dial M
For Murder In Mind
By Lionel Adderley
Ray Milland, the great English tennis star from the 1940s
and 1950s not the famed Oscar-winning actor with the commanding voice and
dapper manners, played his projected crime, his murder of his wife too cute.
Did what every amateur criminal has done and had a plan, not a bad plan by any
means, but a plan that just had too many moving parts. The kiss of death for
any such venture. And the man who spoke those words Reginald Marsh, “Reggie” was
a man who should know since he had spent almost half his life as a professional
“hit man” for whoever had the dough and wherewithal to hire his services.
Reggie used to laugh anytime he read a crime detection book where the perfect
crime got snagged up in some not thought out item like forgetting to close a
door which did the felon in. Did the same anytime he saw a movie where the
suspect would build up and build up until that decisive climax where the
villain of the piece would be nabbed for having his or her underwear on the
wrong way or something.
Had had to laugh as well in contrast about his own
experiences where he flitted in and out of airports (this before such events as
9/11 made getting through security more onerous if not impossible). He had
gotten through a couple of times with a weapon so disassembled that even when the
courteous airport security agents asked him what it was he was able to say it
was a new invention he was going to a convention in hopes of getting venture
capital to mass produce the item. Had passed through bus stations, and train
depots without much trouble at all. Had had no problem keeping his freedom for
so long by observing that one simple notion-keep it simple.
So one night when he mentioned to the guy sitting beside
him, a guy he knew slightly, that the great English tennis star of yesteryear,
of the war years and the early 1950s, Ray Milland had just been picked up for
murder he figured that once again the plan was way over the top for what Ray
was trying to accomplish. Simply in the end murder his wife through the legal
process. The guy sitting next to Reggie, a mild-mannered sort, Henry Higgins, responded
to Reggie’s comment by asking him about the known details of the Milland
murder. That was all Reggie needed to hear as he went almost apoplectic to once
again show how his “perfect crime” theory gone wrong by over-planning had been
verified.
Of course a guy like Ray Milland had certain expenses, had
developed certain expensive habits while cavorting with the Mayfair swells who
supported tennis in those days. And among the ladies provided the money and
sexual favors that allowed Ray to prosper once his serious professional tour
playing days were over. That was the bitch though. A guy like Ray, brought up
on the British public school tradition and its finale, Cambridge or Oxford just
couldn’t get used to living on high society hand-outs. That was when the no
question handsome and surface debonair Ray took dead aim at Margo Kelly, yes the
Margo Kelly whose father had all the dough in Philadelphia locked up in his
vaults, and after some serious wooing took her hand.
The marriage might not have been made in heaven but for a
few years Ray held off his temptation to bed every female Mayfair swell that
crossed his path in the interest of keeping the money spigot running. Besides
Margo was nothing to throw out of bed, at least at first before her (and his)
ardor wore off. Then one day Ray found a letter from Margo to a guy in America,
some kind of writer whom she had known back in the states, Robert Cummings. The
letter contained explicit suggestions that this secret love affair was going to
explode in his face as soon as this Cummings bastard hit the cliffs of Dover.
The thought that after all the years of surface faithfulness he had been cuckolded
by his wife and more importantly to place his financial future in doubt got him
to the drawing board. Didn’t think twice, or for two minutes, about not doing
the deed. Maybe it was depending too much on his Cambridge heritage, maybe it
was his anger at Margo but he immediately went into overdrive in planning the
caper. Made mistake number one right away by putting together an elaborate
scheme based on anonymously blackmailing Margo over the love letter. Went way
over the top there was no other way to explain it. Had stolen a Margo
pocketbook some time before which contained a love letter and had been
blackmailing her on that basis figuring she would come across with the dough
rather than be exposed as an adulteress. Reggie speculated that Ray should have
killed her, or better, had her killed by a professional like him outright then.
Could have claimed some bogus over-heated blood-boiling bullshit that a
friendly court might buy into.
No, Ray let the whole thing fester until what he thought was
an opportune moment when he made his worst mistake. Brought an amateur into the
operation. Or if not an amateur not a professional killer. Seems Ray had been
in his overheated condition looking for a “fall guy” to take the rap if
necessary. Had been “channeling” an old rummy of a college acquaintance who had
taken up small-time con jobs and midnight creeps, a guy who went under about
six aliases but Reggie said he would just call him Smythe-Jones and that would
do. Never ask a rummy to do anything, period. Ray’s idea was to blackmail this
Smythe-Jones into murdering Margo in order not to be turned in by Ray to the
peelers. Of course a rummy thinking about stir and having to dry out will fall
to any scheme especially if there is some cash involved. And as Ray laid out
the plan to Smythe-Jones he became all ears. Figured a big time guy like Ray
would not leave him in the lurch.
The whole fucking plan hinged on a key. See the idea was that
Smythe-Jones was to strangle Margo in what was to look like a rummy doing a
midnight creep burglary. But you can’t leave being able to jimmy open a window
or a door to chance so Ray placed a key above the door to the flat for
Smythe-Jones to use to enter, open a window from the garden to make the
burglary idea plausible and hide behind a curtain in the study where the
telephone was located when Ray made a call to the flat awakening Margo late at
night. Then our rummy would pounce. One less beautiful Mayfair swell in the
world. End of story.
No way, no fucking way. The whole thing went south. First
Ray called late then, then half-drunk rum brave Smythe-Jones couldn’t subdue
Margo and she killed him with a blow to his soft-boiled head. Christ what a
mess. Ray was on the line while all this fiasco was going as Margo asked for
bloody help. That is when Ray went into Plan B (Higgins mentioned to an
associate after Reggie was long gone that he had never seem such a look of
contempt on a man’s face when he uttered the words “Plan B” like there was no
more heinous activity that a man could promote). He would set Margo up for the
“murder” of Smythe-Jones using his, Ray’s, blackmail of his wife the past
several months as the reason that Margo had had to kill the rummy. It worked,
worked so well that Margo got railroaded right up to the hang-man’s noose.
See Ray worked some great moves to push Margo toward the
gallows. Told Margo not to call the police until he got home. Got home to do some nifty work like disappearing
that guilty key from Smythe-Jones’s pocket into her handbag, putting that
dastardly love letter that had burned a hole in his brain into the rummy’s
pocket and best of all, an inspired move, getting rid of that so-called murder
scarf Smythe-Jones was to use and replacing it with one of her
stockings like she was sick unto to death of paying the bloody beast blackmail
and was to finish it the only way possible with the sullen death of the
blackmailer.
Some beautiful stuff, stuff guys will study for years trying
to perfect. But the whole sorry thing unraveled in the end. That fucking key
bothered the peelers and bothered this Cummings lover guy who fancied himself
something of an amateur sleuth. So the day before Margo was to swing, the
freaking day before Ray would have had it made, could have lived in splendor
with every woman he could get his hands this Cummings decided to test the key
theory. Found out that no way could Margo have had the key that Smythe-Jones
was supposed to use to get into the flat to kill her. The coppers came into
play too since one of their officers was not fully convinced that Margo had
done the murder. Had been bothered by the key angle and Margo’s seeming
inability to explain it away. So between the two forces opposed to him Ray had
to cry “uncle.” That was all that Reggie knew about the case after what had
come out after they picked Ray up in that high-end flat. Reggie told Higgins
before he left a few weeks later that Ray would have been better off just
slitting Margo’s throat after finding her and that American in bed together. He
probably would not have swung for it in the heat of passion.
That “left a few weeks later” should be explained. Reggie
had been telling Higgins his simple art of murder theories while they were
“bunk-mates” at Reading Gaol where the pair were awaiting execution. Reggie’s
number had come up first. See, Reggie did not follow his own advice in the end
and had only been enthralled by the Milland case out of a latent professional
interest. Reggie had found his own wife in the arms of another man and like Ray
had been outraged that he had been cuckolded. So he had hired a “hit man” to
waste his wife and her lover. Except, acting in rage and not good sense he
wanted to watch as the deed was done. Had planned it so that he would surprise
the entangled couple in bed (in his own damn house which further enraged him) feign
outrage, real enough as it was, then have the “hit man” come in and waste the
guy, then her. While the “hit man” got away Reggie was spotted by a neighbor
coming out of his own apartment right after the murders. He took the fall. Took
the big-step off. Jesus. Keep it simple.
The Search For The Great Blue-Pink American West Night-Part 32-With Western Artist Ed Ruscha In Mind
By Art Critic Si Landon
Just then Bart Webber was in a California state of mind, was ready to chuck everything and go back on the road, the road to perdition to hear his wife, of thirty plus years, Betty Salmon, tell it when he went off on his tirade about the old days, and worse, the old guys, guys like Markin who had dragged him out West kicking and screaming. Now to hear him tell it Bart was the guy who propelled the sluggish Markin westward. We will get to the why of Bart’s new found interest in retracing his youthful fling in the bramble-filled West, out there where the states are square and you had better be as well on the way to the edge of the continent and the dreaded Japans sea for failure but first the what.
It seemed that Bart had jumped the gun somewhat because he found himself out in San Francisco, the place where he met up with Markin and some of the other North Adamsville corner boys in that fateful year of 1968 when he rode for a few months with the guys on Captain Crunch’s yellow brick road converted school bus come travelling caravan home, at a printing and media conference, what would be his final conference since he was putting his printing business in the capable hands of his youngest son who truth be told had been handling the day to day operations of the shop anyway and was itchy to run the operation himself. While riding on the BART into the city he noticed on a billboard that the deYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park was featuring a retrospective by the Western artist Ed Ruschua, an artist that Bart had always admire ever since he had seen his series on gas stations and their role in the great post-World War II golden age of the American automobile, the wide open highways and cheap gas.
Taking an afternoon off he went over to Golden Gate and viewed the exhibit, a show that had well over one hundred paintings, photographs, prints and petro-maps. One set of photographs taken on one of Ruscha’s trips from his native Oklahoma to Los Angeles via the southern desert-etched route drove Bart to distraction as there he saw gas stations in places like Needles, on the California-Arizona border, Kingman, Flagstaff, Gallup, and a few other places he had passed through on one of his hitchhike or car-sharing trips to California. Saw too coyotes, Native American reservations, buffalos roam. Saw a series of prints and paintings of the famous Hollywood sign that told him the first time that he had seen the sign up in the hills that he had arrived in the land of sun and fantasy. Saw a darkly troubling painting all done in dark somber colors of the death of the Joshua trees in the high desert, a place where he had performed under the influence of serious dope inhalation the “ghost” dance with Markin, Jack Callahan, Josh Breslin and Frankie Riley. Saw plenty of photographs and paintings detailing the degradation of that part of California Ruscha had travelled through on those golden age trips. He was, well-known as a man not to show much public emotion, shaken almost to tears at the vistas that he witnessed. Could not get the thoughts of his old “hippie” minute out of his mind. (That “minute” then signifying that he finally came to a realization after a few months that unlike Markin, Josh, or Sam Lowell another late arrival in California from the corner boys who stayed on the road for a few years that he was a stationary person, missed old North Adamsville and missed old ball and chain Betty Salmon.)
Here’s how the whole thing played out back then and maybe, just maybe you will begin to understand why Bart was shaken almost to tears for visions of his long lost youth. Despite the urban legend Bart tried to create lately around his role in sending Markin westward Markin, and only Markin was the guy who led the charge west. Had been the guy of all the guys on the corner who predicted, predicted almost weekly from about 1962 on that a big sea-change was coming and they had better be ready to ride the wave. They all, Bart included blew Markin’s predictions off out of hand because frankly if the subject around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor come Friday night wasn’t about girls, cars, money, getting drunk or any combination of those subjects they didn’t give a rat’s ass as Frankie Riley would say about some seaweed change.
Things pretty much stayed that way all through high school although that didn’t stop Markin from his predictions especially when the blacks down south got all uppity (signifying that the corner boys except Markin didn’t give a rat’s ass about that subject either and maybe worse-around use of the common “n” word) and folk music, the urban folk revival minute as Markin called it, took off. All that meant and this was stretching it was cheap dates with girls who might “put out.” Bart was even less interested in the latter since Betty was still stuck in some Bobby Rydell crush and did not like folk music (and still didn’t so Bart only played it when she was out of the house). Stayed that way for a couple of years after high school as they went their separate ways except the Friday night reunions at Tonio’s to, well, kill time. Then the Vietnam War came on strong which they did give a rat’s ass about, wanted to see the commies bite the dust although except for Sal Russo and Jimmy Jenkins who laid down his head over there and whose name now is on black granite down in Washington and in granite in North Adamsville, they did not volunteer. (Those who were called eventually all went including Markin who lost a lot over there, had serious troubles with the “real” world coming back and in the end couldn’t shake whatever it was that took the life out of him.)
Then in the spring of 1967 Markin did two things, one, the fateful decision to drop out of Boston University after his sophomore year to go “find himself,” a characteristic of the times, of the generation, of the best part of the generation and the other, the less fateful but still fraught with danger decision to head west, to hitchhike west to California after he had read Jack Kerouac’s On The Road about six times and declared that now was the moment that he had been talking about all those Friday nights in front of Tonio’s. So he headed west with no compulsion, wound up hooking up with a caravan out there. The Captain Crunch yellow brick road caravan that would eventually be composed of at least a half dozen North Adamsville corner boys turned “hippies” for varying lengths of time. Bart was pretty late on that “train” didn’t go out until the summer of 1968 after he found out that due to a childhood injury that left him with a pronounced limp despite a couple of surgeries was declared 4-F, unfit for military service by the friends and neighbors at his local draft board. That pretty late also meant that Markin who shortly after he got out to San Francisco received his own draft notice and was an additional reason why Bart left the road early since he knew the ropes.
Bart, despite whatever happened later, was happy to be heading out and once he decided to go he also decided that he would hitchhike out like all the other guys except Sam Lowell who to placate anxious parents, really an anxious mother went out by bus. Even Sam after five plus days on a stinking Greyhound bus with the usual screaming kids left to wander the aisles and the inevitable overweight seatmate who snored and despite a couple of pleasant days from New York to Chicago with a chick who caught his eye and whom he flirted like crazy with said later that he would have rather hitched than go through that again (and all his later trips would be done that way). Bart figured that although the road might be slow with the many false starts and being left in some strange places where grabbing a ride was not easy that it would be interesting once he got past the stifling East and Great Plains to see what was what in the West (that stifling Ruscha could attest to since he was nothing but a child of the Great Plains, hell, an Okie so he knew he had to head west in that big old Chevy Bart had heard he went out to L.A. in that fateful 1956 year when he entered art school out there).
Bart thinking about the experience, that first road out, that always served as a hallmark for every guy’s trip out remembered more or less vividly all those dusty side roads he got left on after his own trip through Oklahoma. Although the big Eisenhower-driven national security Interstate highway system made it easier in the mid-1960s to travel the hitchhike road than all the back roads and Route 66 that Bart had read about in Jack Kerouac’s travel the open road book On The Road that Markin made everybody read when they all were in high school even though he wasn’t much of a reader, didn’t think as much of the be-bop beats as Markin did who thought they were the max daddies he was waiting for even though by their time the “beat” thing was passe was old news, ancient history it was actually easier to get rides on the smaller roads where people could see you from down or up the road. In any case you were sure to be left off on more than one back road since that was just the way it was, nobody who was say going to Denver was going to let you off in the middle of Interstate 80 when you saw the sign for Cheyenne just ahead.
Funny all the strange signs he saw out on the open back roads like the mere fact of putting a sign up would draw people to your Podunk town , or your Podunk store. He had had to laugh when he saw Ruscha’s photograph of a town out in nowhere which probably had a population of less than one thousand but which had a sign documenting all the about ten church denominations that kept the good people of the town on their feet. He had seen more Jesus Save signs and the like than you could shake a stick at the further west he went until they stopped, stopped dead the closer you got to coastal California. Saw more signs for cigarettes, beer, whiskey, dry goods (quaint), no trespassing, no loitering, no anything than he ever noticed back home. He wondered if people travelling through North Adamsville had that same feeling about his own Podunk town. He knew for sure that there were not top-heavy signs about all the religious denominations of the town at least not in the Acre where all you saw was a fistful of Catholic churches, Roman Catholic for the unknowing about differences.
Had seen above all the signs that directed you to the nearest gas stations, almost a ritualistic sign that you were still in the golden age of the automobile, of the superhighway and of cheap gas. Hell even in North Adamsville right across from the high school he remembered the service station owners who had business right next to each other would have “gas wars,” would have signs out with prices like 30 cents per gallon versus say 29 cents. Yeah, cheap gas, and plenty of service too. Lots of guys, guys who needed to support their “boss” car habits worked as gas jockeys filling up tanks, checking oil and tires and wiping off windshields. Saw every kind of gas station from the one franchised out by Esso and Texaco to little fly-by-night operations with no name gas, a rundown coke machine that barely worked and bathrooms with stained sinks and broken plumbing and had not been cleaned since Hector was a pup. You had to use your own handkerchief to wipe your hands. Even some of the diners, diners like Jimmy Jack’s back home where all the guys hung out after leaving off their dates if they didn’t get lucky and wind up down at the far end of Squaw Road on Adamsville Beach fogging up some “boss” car into the wee hours of the morning had gas stations or at least pumps out on those long stretch deserted roads so nobody would get stranded on in the hot sun (and the owners probably figured that while stopping for gas the little family might as well have something to eat at the high carbohydrate steamed everything counters and booths).
Saw plenty of weird natural formations along the way getting twenty mile rides here from ranchers or farmers going up the road, fifty miles there from high-rollers taking the high side to Vegas, a few miles from high school kids joy-riding to while away the afternoon to avoid the dreaded chores that awaited them at home. Saw every kind dusty dried out tree seeking nourishment from the waterless ground. Saw rock formations hounded by the winds and sheered to perfection. Saw every color of brown, of beige, of grey. Saw too in Joshua Tree of a thousand tears, tears for the creeping civilization that was choking them away and tears one high doped up night when Markin and a few others channeled the shamans of the past in a ghost dance off the flickering canyon walls, hah, walls of brown, of beige, of grey. Bart never got over that experience, never saw what the white man, what his people had done so clearly even if he wasn’t about to do anything about it except load up on peyote buttons and ancient dreams of mock revenge.
Saw above all as he grabbed that last one hundred, maybe one hundred and fifty mile stretch to Frisco town the refuge of the high speed road, the broken glass, the road kill, the busted fences where some fool had gone off the highway drunk or doped up so he didn’t feel a thing, saw stripped off bare truck tires blocking easy passage on the road ahead. Saw the bramble, the flotsam and jetsam of modern day life. Saw too though as he got closer to Frisco, as he could almost smell the ocean, the land’s end, the Japan seas or back home that the West was very different, that those who had make the trek, maybe were forced to make the trek were very different from the East that he knew. But maybe too they would have to run from a thing which they had built.
Later. after he arrived in San Francisco, met Markin, Josh and Frankie on Russian Hill and then joined them on the journey south for a few months (with a couple of trips back home in between) he would see Ruscha’s L.A. would see those luscious Hollywood signs, and would like any tourist from Podunk image that he had the wherewithal to make it as a star, or something like that name in lights. Got to know L.A. too well, couldn’t handle the freeway craziness, couldn’t handle the sameness of the endless strip malls, the endless rows of tickey-tack houses, couldn’t handle the sprawl that was turning a small town into a mega-town. Yeah he knew exactly what Ruscha was driving at, was trying to chronicle. Bot still he missed the opportunity to see if he did have what it took to survive in California, to have drunk in the scenes.
And you wonder why Bart just then as he approached retirement as he approached his seventh decade was in a frenzy to repeat his past.
Josh Breslin, as he drove in the pitch black night up California Highway 156 to connect with U.S. 101 and the San Francisco Airport back to Boston was thinking furious thought, fugitive thoughts about what had happened on this his umpteenth trip to California. Thoughts that would carry him to the airport road and car rental return on arrival there and then after the swift airbus to his terminal the flight home to Logan and then up to his old hometown of Olde Saco to which he had recently returned. Returned after long years of what he called “shaking the dust of the old town” off his shoes like many a guy before him, and after too. But now along the road to the airport he had thought that it had been a long time since he had gotten up this early to head, well, to head anywhere. He had in an excess of caution decided to leave at three o’clock in the morning from the hotel he had been staying at in downtown Monterrey near famous Cannery Row (romantically and literarily famous as a scene in some of John Steinbeck’s novels from the 1920s and 1930s, as a site of some of the stop-off 1950s “beat” stuff if for no other reason than the bus stopped there before you took a taxi to Big Sur or thumbed depending on your finances and as famed 1960s Pops musical locale where the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin rose to the cream on top although now just another tourist magnet complete with Steinbeck this and that for sullen shoppers and diners who found their way east of Eden) and head up to the airport in order to avoid the traffic jams that he had inevitably encountered on previous trips around farm country Gilroy (the garlic or onion capital of the world, maybe both, but you got that strong smell in any case), and high tech Silicon Valley where the workers are as wedded to their automobiles as any other place in America which he too would pass on the way up.
This excess of caution not a mere expression of an old man who is mired in a whole cycle of cautions from doctors to lawyers to ex-wives to current flame (Lana Malloy by name) since his flight was not to leave to fly Boston until about noon and even giving the most unusual hold-ups and delays in processings at the airport he would not need to arrive there to return his rented car until about ten. So getting up some seven hours plus early on a trip of about one hundred miles or so and normally without traffic snarls about a two hour drive did seem an excess of caution.
But something else was going on in Josh’s mind that pitch black night (complete with a period of dense fog about thirty miles up as he hit a seashore belt and the fog just rolled in without warnings) for he had had the opportunity to have avoided both getting up early and getting snarled in hideous California highway traffic by the expedient of heading to the airport the previous day and taken refuge in a motel that was within a short distance of the airport, maybe five miles when he checked on his loyalty program hotel site. Josh though had gone down to Monterey after a writers’ conference in San Francisco which had ended a couple of days before in order travel to Big Sur and some ancient memories there had stirred something in him that he did not want to leave the area until the last possible moment so he had decided to stay in Monterrey and leave early in the morning for the airport.
That scheduled departure plan set Josh then got an idea in his head, an idea that had driven him many times before when he had first gone out to California in the summer of love, 1967 version, that he would dash to San Francisco to see the Golden Gate Bridge as the sun came up and then head to the airport. He had to laugh, as he threw an aspirin down his throat and then some water to wash the tablet down in order to ward off a coming migraine headache that the trip, that this little trip to Big Sur that he had finished the day before, the first time in maybe forty years he had been there had him acting like a young wild kid again.
Funny as well that only a few days before he had been tired, very tired a condition that came on him more often of late as one of the six billion “growing old sucks” symptoms of that process, after the conference. Now he was blazing trails again, at least in his mind. The conference on the fate of post-modern writing in the age of the Internet with the usual crowd of literary critics and other hangers-on in tow to drink the free liquor and eat the free food had been sponsored by a major publishing company, The Globe Group. He had written articles for The Blazing Sun when the original operation had started out as a shoestring alternative magazine in the Village in about 1968, had started out as an alternative to Time, Life, Newsweek, Look, an alternative to all the safe subscription magazines delivered to leafy suburban homes and available at urban newsstands for the nine to fivers of the old world for those who, by choice, had no home, leafy or otherwise, and no serious work history.
Or rather the audience pitched to had no fixed abode, since the brethren were living some vicarious existences out of a knapsack just like Josh and his friends whom he collected along the way had been doing when he joined Captain Crunch’s merry pranksters (small case to distinguish them from the more famous Ken Kesey mad monk Merry Pranksters written about in their time by Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson) the first time he came out and found himself on Russian Hill in Frisco town looking for dope and finding this giant old time yellow brick road converted school bus parked in a small park there and made himself at home, after they made him welcome (including providing some sweet baby James dope that he had been searching for since the minute he hit town).
Still the iterant, the travelling nation hippie itinerants of the time to draw a big distinction from the winos, drunks, hoboes, bums and tramps who populated the “jungle” camps along railroad tracks, arroyos, river beds and under bridges who had no use for magazines or newspapers except as pillows against a hard night’s sleep along a river or on those unfriendly chairs at the Greyhound bus station needed, wanted to know what was going on in other parts of “youth nation,” wanted to know what new madness was up, wanted to know where to get decent dope, and who was performing and where in the acid-rock etched night (groups like the Dead, the Doors, the Airplane leading the pack then). That magazine had long ago turned the corner back to Time/Life/Look/Newsweek land but the publisher Mac McDowell who still sported mutton chop whiskers as he had in the old days although these days he has them trimmed by his stylist, Marcus, at a very steep price at his mansion up in Marin County always invited him out, and paid his expenses, whenever there was a conference about some facet of the 1960s that the younger “post-modernist” writers in his stable (guys like Kenny Johnson the author of the best-seller Thrillwere asking about as material for future books about the heady times they had been too young, in some cases way to young to know about personally or even second-hand). So Mac would bring out wiry, wily old veterans like Josh to spice up what after all would be just another academic conference and to make Mac look like some kind of hipster rather than the balding “sell-out" that he had become (which Josh had mentioned in his conference presentation but which Mac just laughed at, laughed at just as long as he can keep that Marin mansion. Still Josh felt he provided some useful background stuff now that you can find lots of information about that 1960s “golden age” (Mac’s term not his) to whet your appetite on Wikipedia or more fruitfully by going on YouTube where almost all the music of the time and other ephemera can be watched with some benefit.
Despite Josh’s tiredness, and a bit of crankiness as well when the young kid writers wanted to neglect the political side, the Vietnam War side, the rebellion against parents side of what the 1960s had been about for the lowdown on the rock festival, summer of love, Golden Gate Park at sunset loaded with dope and lack of hubris side, he decided to take a few days to go down to see Big Sur once again. He figured who knew when he would get another chance and at the age of seventy-two the actuarial tables were calling his number, or wanted to. He would have preferred to have taken the trip down with Lana, a hometown woman, whom he had finally settled in with up in Olde Saco after three, count them, failed marriages, a parcel of kids most of whom turned out okay, plenty of college tuitions and child support after living in Watertown just outside of Boston for many years.
Lana a bit younger than he and not having been “washed clean” as Josh liked to express the matter in the hectic 1960s and not wanting to wait around a hotel room reading a book or walking around Frisco alone while he attended the conference had begged off on the trip, probably wisely although once he determined to go to Big Sur and told her where he was heading she got sort of wistful. She had just recently read with extreme interest about Big Sur through her reading of Jack Kerouac’s 1960s book of the same name and had asked Josh several times before that if they went to California on a vacation other than San Diego they would go there. The long and short of that conversation was a promise by Josh to take her the next time, if there was a next time (although he did not put the proposition in exactly those terms).
Immediately after the conference Josh headed south along U.S. 101 toward Monterrey where he would stay and which would be his final destination that day since he would by then be tired and it would be nighttime coming early as the November days got shorter. He did not want to traverse the Pacific Coast Highway (California 1 for the natives) at night since he had forgotten his distance glasses, another one of those six billion reasons why getting old sucks. Had moreover not liked to do that trip along those hairpin turns which the section heading toward Big Sur entailed riding the guardrails even back in his youth since one time having been completely stoned on some high-grade Panama Red he had almost sent a Volkswagen bus over the top when he missed a second hairpin turn after traversing the first one successfully. So he would head to Monterrey and make the obligatory walk to Cannery Row for dinner and in order to channel John Steinbeck and the later “beats” who would stop there before heading to fallout Big Sur.
The next morning Josh left on the early side not being very hungry after an excellent fish dinner at Morley’s a place that had been nothing but a hash house diner in the old days where you could get serviceable food cheap because the place catered to the shore workers and sardine factory workers who made Cannery Row famous, or infamous, when it was a working Row. He had first gone there after reading about the place in something Jack Kerouac wrote and was surprised that the place actually existed, had liked the food and the prices and so had gone there a number of times when his merry pranksters and other road companions were making the obligatory Frisco-L.A. runs up and down the coast. These days Morley’s still had excellent food but perhaps you should bring a credit card with you to insure you can handle the payment and avoid “diving for pearls” as a dish-washer to pay off your debts.
As Josh started up the engine of his rented Acura, starting up on some of the newer cars these days being a matter of stepping on the brake and then pushing a button where the key used to go in this keyless age, keyless maybe a metaphor of the age as well, he had had to ask the attendant at the airport how to start the thing since his own car was a keyed-up Toyota of ancient age, he began to think back to the old days when he would make this upcoming run almost blind-folded. That term maybe a metaphor for that age. He headed south to catch the Pacific Coast Highway north of Carmel and thought he would stop at Point Lobos, the place he had first encountered the serious beauty of the Pacific Coast rocks and ocean wave splash reminding him of back East in Olde Saco, although more spectacular. Also the place when he had first met Moonbeam Sadie.
He had had to laugh when he thought about that name and that woman since a lot of what the old days, the 1960s had been about were tied up with his relationship to that woman, the first absolutely chemically pure version of a “hippie chick” that he had encountered. At that time Josh had been on the Captain Crunch merry prankster yellow brick road bus for a month or so and a couple of days before they had started heading south from Frisco to Los Angeles to meet up with a couple of other yellow brick road buses where Captain Crunch knew some kindred. As they meandered down the Pacific Coast Highway they would stop at various places to take in the beauty of the ocean since several of the “passengers” had never seen the ocean or like Josh had never seen the Pacific in all its splendor.
In those days, unlike now when the park closes at dusk as Josh found out, you could park your vehicle overnight and take in the sunset and endlessly listen to the surf splashing up to rocky shorelines until you fell asleep. So when their bus pulled into the lot reserved for larger vehicles there were a couple of other clearly “freak” buses already there. One of them had Moonbeam as a “passenger” whom he would meet later that evening when all of “youth nation” in the park decided to have a dope- strewn party. Half of the reason for joining up on bus was for a way to travel, for a place to hang your hat but it was also the easiest way to get on the dope trail since somebody, usually more than one somebody was “holding.” And so that night they partied, partied hard.
About ten o’clock Josh high as a kite from some primo hash saw a young woman, tall, sort of skinny (he would find out later she had not been so slim previously except the vagaries of the road food and a steady diet of “speed” had taken their toll), long, long brown hair, a straw hat on her head, a long “granny” dress and barefooted the very picture of what Time/Life/Look would have used as their female “hippie” poster child to titillate their middle-class audiences coming out of one of the buses. She had apparently just awoken, although that seemed impossible given the noise level from the collective sound systems and the surf, and was looking for some dope to level her off and headed straight to Josh. Josh had at that time long hair tied in a ponytail, at least that night, a full beard, wearing a cowboy hat on his head, a leather jacket against the night’s cold, denim blue jeans and a pair of moccasins not far from what Time/Life/Look would have used as their male “hippie” poster child to titillate their middle-class audiences so Moonbeam’s heading Josh’s way was not so strange. Moreover Josh was holding a nice stash of hashish. Without saying a word Josh passed the hash pipe to Moonbeam and by that mere action started a “hippie” romance that would last for the next several months until Moonbeam decided she was not cut out for the road, couldn’t take the life, and headed back to Lima, Ohio to sort out her life.
But while they were on their “fling” Moonbeam taught “Cowboy Jim,” her new name for him, many things. Josh thought it was funny thinking back how wedded to the idea of changing their lives they were back then including taking new names, monikers, as if doing so would create the new world by osmosis or something. He would have several other monikers like the “Prince of Love,” the Be-Bop Kid (for his love of jazz and blues), and Sidewalk Slim (for always writing something in chalk wherever he had sidewalk space to do so) before he left the road a few years later and stayed steady with his journalism after that high, wide, wild life lost it allure as the high tide of the 1960s ebbed and people drifted back to their old ways. But Cowboy Jim was what she called Josh and he never minded her saying that.
See Moonbeam really was trying to seek the newer age, trying to find herself as they all were more or less, but also let her better nature come forth. And she did in almost every way from her serious study of Buddhism, her yoga (well before that was fashionable among the young), and her poetry writing. But most of all in the kind, gentle almost Quaker way that she dealt with people, on or off drugs, the way she treated her Cowboy. Josh had never had such a gentle lover, never had such a woman who not only tried to understand herself but to understand him. More than once after she left the bus (she had joined the Captain Crunch when the bus left Point Lobos a few days later now that she was Cowboy’s sweetheart) he had thought about heading to Lima and try to work something out but he was still seeking something out on the Coast that held him back until her memory faded a bit and he lost the thread of her).
Yeah, Point Lobos held some ancient memories and that day the surf was up and Mother Nature was showing one and all who cared to watch just how relentless she could be against the defenseless rocks and shoreline. If he was to get to Big Sur though he could not dally since he did not want to be taking that hairpin stretch at night. So off he went. Nothing untoward happened on the road to Big Sur, naturally he had to stop at the Bixby Bridge to marvel at the vista but also at the man-made marvel of traversing that canyon below with this bridge in 1932. Josh though later that it was not exactly correct that nothing untoward happened on the road to Big Sur but that was not exactly true for he was white-knuckled driving for that several mile stretch where the road goes up mostly and there are many hairpin turns with no guardrail and the ocean is a long way down. He thought he really was becoming an old man in his driving so cautiously that he had veer off to the side of the road to let faster cars pass by. In the old days he would drive the freaking big ass yellow brick road school bus along that same path and think nothing of it except for a time after that Volkswagen almost mishap. Maybe he was dope-brave then but it was disconcerting to think how timid he had become.
Finally in Big Sur territory though nothing really untoward happen as he traversed those hairpin roads until they finally began to straighten out near Molera State Park and thereafter Pfeiffer Beach. Funny in the old days there had been no creek to ford at Molera but the river had done its work over forty years through drought and downpour so in order to get to the ocean about a mile’s walk away Josh had to take off his running shoes and socks to get across the thirty or forty feet of rocks and pebbles to the other side (and of course the same coming back a pain in the ass which he would have taken in stride back then when he shoe of the day was the sandal easily slipped off and on) but well worth the effort even if annoying since the majestic beauty of that rock-strewn beach was breath-taking a much used word and mostly inappropriate but not this day. Maybe global warming or maybe just the relentless crush of the seas on a timid waiting shoreline but most of the beach was un-walkable across the mountain of stones piled up and so he took the cliff trail part of the way before heading back the mile to his car in the parking lot to get to Pfeiffer Beach before too much longer.
Pfeiffer Beach is another one of those natural beauties that you have to do some work to get, almost as much work as getting to Todo El Mundo further up the road when he and his corner boys from Olde Saco had stayed for a month after they had come out to join him on the bus once he informed them that they needed to get to the West fast because all the world was changing out there. This work entailed not walking to the beach but by navigating a big car down the narrow one lane rutted dirt road two miles to the bottom of the canyon and the parking lot since now the place had been turned into a park site as well. The road was a white-knuckles experience although not as bad as the hairpins on the Pacific Coast Highway but as with Molera worth the effort, maybe more so since Josh could walk that wind-swept beach although some of the cross-currents were fierce when the ocean tide slammed the defenseless beach and rock formation. A couple of the rocks had been ground down so by the relentless oceans that donut holes had been carved in them.
Here Josh put down a blanket on a rock so that he could think back to the days when he had stayed here, really at Todo el Mundo but there was no beach there just some ancient eroded cliff dwellings where they had camped out and not be botheredso everybody would climb on the bus which they would park by the side of the road on Big Sur Highway and walk down to Pfeiffer Beach those easy then two miles bringing the day’s rations of food, alcohol and drugs (not necessarily in that order) in rucksacks and think thing nothing of the walk and if they were too “wasted” (meaning drunk or high) they would find a cave and sleep there. That was the way the times were, nothing unusual then although the sign at the park entrance like at Point Lobos (and Molera) said overnight parking and camping were prohibited. But that is the way these times are.
Josh had his full share of ancient dreams come back to him that afternoon. The life on the bus, the parties, the literary lights who came by who had known Jack Kerouac , Allan Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the remnant of beats who had put the place on the map as a cool stopping point close enough to Frisco to get to in a day but ten thousand miles from city cares and woes, the women whom he had loved and who maybe loved him back although he/they never stayed together long enough to form any close relationship except for Butterfly Swirl and that was a strange scene. Strange because Butterfly was a surfer girl who was “slumming” on the hippie scene for a while and they had connected on the bus except she finally decided that the road was not for her just like Moonbeam, as almost everybody including Josh figured out in the end, and went back to her perfect wave surfer boy down in La Jolla after a few months.
She replied with a wicked smile that her name was Morning Blossom, didn’t he like that name. [Yes.] She had been born and raised in Big Sur and planned to stay there because she couldn’t stand the hassles (her term) of the cities, places like San Francisco where she had gone to school for a while at San Francisco State. Josh thought to himself that he knew what was coming next although he let Morning Blossom have her say. Her parents had moved to Big Sur in 1969 and had started home-steading up in the hills. They have been part of a commune before she was born but that was all over with by the time she was born and so her parents struggled on the land alone. They never left, and never wanted to leave. Seldom left Big Sur and still did not.
Josh said to himself, after saying wow, he had finally found one of the lost tribes that wandered out into the wilderness back in the 1960s and were never heard from again. And here they were still plugging away at whatever dream drove them back then. He and others who had chronicled in some way the 1960s had finally found a clue to what had happened to the brethren. But as he got up from the counter, paid his bill, and left a hefty tip, he though he still had that trip out here next time with Lana to get through. He was looking forward to that adventure now though.
On The Occasion Of The Centennial Of John Fitzgerald
Kennedy’s Birthday-Frank Jackman’s Journey-Take Two
By Political Commentator Frank Jackman
[Recently in what I had assumed would be a one-time short
reminiscence on the centennial of John Fitzgerald Kennedys’ birth here in
Massachusetts about the effect that the election of the first Irish Catholic
President back in 1960 had on the bedraggled psyches of a bunch of Irish
Catholic working class (hell working poor and lower if the truth be known)
kids, corner boys, whom I hung around with and came of age with in that Camelot
time. Apparently in this age of instant social media feedback and quick
communications my simple plan has now turned into yet another screed.
The reason? These days there can only be one reason in my
universe. One Francis Xavier Riley, the acknowledged leader of the corner boys
of our times back in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the Acre section of
North Adamsville. Once again like in the old days Frankie has seen to it that
I, or anybody else who might venture some idea not cooked up by and authorized
by him, that proper homage be paid to the Scribe, to the late fallen comrade
Peter Paul Markin, who was our “intellectual” leader. Funny when Frankie was
running the show back then he treated the Scribe like a dog-except on those
occasions when he wanted the Scribe to write something up about him, to be his
“flak.” That was how Makin got his moniker in the first place after he had in order
to ingratiate himself with Frankie when he came from across town to live in the
Acre written some bullshit about how
Frankie was the “second coming,” something like for the school newspaper and
everybody bowed down to Frankie thereafter.
Now the bone that Frankie had to pick with me was that in
that rather simple remembrance about Jack Kennedy’s hold on us, one of our own
running the whole show, I didn’t emphasize enough how Markin, how the Scribe
got us off our collective girl hunger asses and out on the stump for Jack
around town. Didn’t speak enough of the Scribe’s “vision” that a new day was
coming, a “new breeze across the land” as Markin called it which drove a lot of
his thoughts then and for several years after before the ebb tide blew him away.
Funny again that if I recall correctly Frankie could not have given a rat’s ass
about all of that at the time. All he cared about was “doing the do” with
Minnie Murphy. But Frankie was not the acknowledged leader of the Acre corner
boys of our time for nothing because he was able to twist my tail about how
Markin had given us all a grand purpose and why soil his potter’s grave down in
dreaded Sonora, Mexico when a few kind words would be as welcome as the morning
breeze. So I had to re-write the whole freaking thing over. Jesus, Mary and
Joseph why did I ever start this small JFK tribute in the first place. Below is
the revised, final sketch. Scribe wherever you are I hope you are satisfied
with my few words. I am sure Frankie won’t be. Frank Jackman]
******
Sure now, today, as anybody who is familiar with the American Left History on-line site and The Progressive Journal print site that
I write for these days knows, or should be expected to know, I along with many
of my political kindred have long raked many of the policies and projects that
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President of the United States 1961-1963, initiated
over the coals. Most notable of those
nefarious exploits for those of us who were inspired, maybe inflamed is
a better word once we were actual witnesses on television as the rebels entered
Havana by the exploits of the revolutionaries (without being revolutionaries
ourselves but proper liberals and social democrats) in Cuba who overthrew the
Batista regime was the fumbled Bay of Pigs invasion in the spring of 1961 which
was our first point of serious differences with a generally positive attitude
toward Camelot.
More troublesome was the deep state escalation of American
involvement in Vietnam which led to the slippery slope that tore this society
asunder as we can as near to a cold civil war as we had in this country until
very recently. (Of course in the “revisionist” histories since JFK has come off
as something of a pacifist who would have hightailed it out of Vietnam the
minute things got out of hand and let the commies overrun the land. This from a
guy deeply enamored of counter-guerilla warfare, in love with Special Forces
and of manliness in person and politics). There were other generic differences
that came to the fore later when we were seeking, desperately seeking, for what
gangster saint brother Robert Kennedy called, “stealing” a page from Alfred
Lord Tennyson, “ a newer world.” Looking for more socialist-oriented solutions
to what ailed society.
All that however was later. Today I want to speak of the
promise that the election of JFK meant to a bunch of Irish Catholic corner boys
from the poverty-stricken Acre section of North Adamsville back in the fall of
1960 when we felt that first fresh breeze coming over the land from the icy
depths of the red scare Cold War night that we had come of political age in.
That “fresh breeze,” as I have noted many, many times elsewhere an expression
that fellow corner boy and our house “intellectual” the late Peter Paul Markin,
the Scribe, (the actual Markin, not the moderator of the ALH blog site who uses that moniker in honor of our fallen brother
long departed) would endlessly bore us with in those days when all we gave a
rat’s ass about (also an expression I have used many, many times concerning our
reaction to Markin’s “fresh breeze” statement) was girls, getting dough to deal
with girls and cars, “boss” cars not necessarily in that order. (To be fair to
Markin he was the king hell king of the midnight creep when we needed dough at
the times when his seamier side got ahead of the “better angel of his nature”).
None of us, me, Jack Callahan, the legendary football player
who for some reason liked hanging with the bad boys when he was not being
forlornly chased by defensive players or girls after Chrissie McNamara made her
feelings known to him, Frankie Riley, our esteemed corner boy leader and a
genius organizer, Phil Larkin, Jimmy Murphy, Ralph Kiley, Ricky Russo, Allan
Stein, the corner boys although the latter two were not full Irish, but only
half Irish got as carried away with Markin’s fresh breeze coming as he did. Back then when before he “taught”
us what it was like to on the cutting edge of the new day we could have,
ignorantly to be sure, could have given a rat’s ass about breezes or elections.
The routine, the bare necessity routine was girls, cars, and dough and how to
get all three or any combination thereof. Markin would continue to spout forth on
that subject for another half decade before it did come in the form of the many
threads that led up to the Summer of Love, San Francisco, 1967 which Alex James
and others have written about in this the 50th anniversary year of
that “youth nation” explosion. By then
though we had all been “converted” to the wisdom of Markin’s ideas after he
came back to fetch us in the late summer of 1967.
But long before that breeze
came to fruition Markin made us thrill beyond words to be able to say “one of
own,” an Irish Catholic had done what Al Smith could not do a few decades
before and get elected president in a low-slung Protestant-controlled country.
(My grandfather never got over the dirty campaign waged by the “refined” WASPs,
the Brahmins, you know the people with the three-name monikers like Wesley
Stuart Gardner, names like that who used every Papal Plot lie in the book to
down the beleaguered Smith against the heathen Hebert Hoover of Hooverville
fame.) Markin made us see that it did not matter that JFK was the scion of
“chandelier” Irish unlike our own “shanty” Irish digs. He was ours in all its
glory.
Markin, like in many other such endeavors was the bell-weather
for our take on JFK. For getting enthusiastic about the guy, about getting out
the vote in our town for our man. I have mentioned above (in the brackets) my
belief that even Frankie Riley our leader could have given a rat’s ass about
the elections until Markin pulled the plug of our indifference. But once Markin
convinced him that the election was important then Frankie got all worked about
it. Got things organized. The Scribe was not the guy who would organize the
stuff though. Jesus no. He could not organize himself out of a paper bag much
less run a political campaign in a large neighborhood. The one time the Scribe
did try to organize one of our midnight creeps to get dough when Frankie was
out of town was almost a disaster. His plan was great (in fact Frankie would
later execute it to perfection) but he “forgot” you needed a few look-outs for
the cops when pulling a midnight creep and we almost wound up with a show-down
with the cops who were cruising the neighborhood at that hour. So once the
Scribe won Frankie over he organized the whole caper.
(By the way many local Acre urban legends have grown up
around how the Scribe got his moniker. Here’s the skinny. When he came across
town in junior high school to live in the Acre with his family, his mother had
grown up in the Acre, he latched onto Frankie the first day somehow. To seal
the deal though he wrote something for the school newspaper about a speech that
Frankie had given about President Eisenhower in some assembly after he beat
Adlai Stevenson the second time. Everybody, teachers especially, agreed that
the Scribe’s article was A-one. When I read the article I thought it sounded
like Frankie, thieving, scheming, conniving Frankie Riley, had just given the
Gettysburg Address or something. Here’s the real reason that Markin got the
moniker from that time forward from Frankie (all the way to San Francisco, 1967
when he subsequently “became” the Be-Bop Kid). Markin had written the whole
thing. Had written the speech and written the write-up. Pure Frankie
conniving).
Frankie won’t like this but that election of 1960 was also a
prime example of the contradictions that would a little over decade later do
Markin in and which for many of the rest of us was a close thing between
freedom and a dark dungeon. See Markin among his million other thoughts like
the fresh breeze and the like was all hopped up about getting rid of nuclear
weapons, was all hopped up for the United States to get rid of them
unilaterally if necessary. The rest of us, especially Frankie Riley, our esteemed
acknowledged leader, thought he was crazy, crazy with the Russian armed to the
teeth with similar such weapons. Frankie almost hit the Scribe in Civics class
from what I heard when he tried to present the idea in a class discussion.
Don’t forget though that we were still seriously hung up on the Cold War stuff
we read about and were taught was the real deal in school.
One thing about Markin though was he put his money where his
mouth was most of the time. He had heard about a rally, stand-out, vigil or
something in Boston, at the Boston Common near the Park Street subway station
against nuclear weapons in October of 1960 a few weeks before the election
sponsored by a group called SANE, Doctor Spock’s group, some Quakers and other
odd-balls. He was determined to go although he expressed some fears that he
might be harmed by pro-nuclear weapons people who would see red over the issue.
But he did go saying later to us that he had found some kindred spirits who
were not afraid unlike a fearful fourteen year old boy and that got him
through.
(This is not the place to digress too much about side stuff
but Markin’s fear was the subject of a bet between him and Frankie Riley that
he would not go. Markin was very proud of winning that bet and would bring it
up periodically long after we could have given a rat’s ass about the wager
since we were always betting on almost any propositions that struck our
fancies. The most infamous bet, a rigged job by Frankie, was when he needed
“date” money in high school and he bet the Scribe on how high Tonio at the
pizza place we hung out at would fling the pizza after having worked it out
with Tonio to fling low. Markin never knew what hit him except he was out about
six dollars and Frankie was out with Minnie Murphy doing whatever that night.)
Here’s where the Markin contradiction came in, maybe the
human condition contradiction when all is said and done after my own fifty plus
years of having gone through my own sets of contradictions. During the
television debates between JFK and his Republican opponent, then Vice President
Nixon who was later a president in his own right and a common criminal as well
Kennedy made a great deal out of some supposed “missile gap” between the United
States and Russia that had developed under the Eisenhower-Nixon regime. To our
disadvantage. That “gap” was among others things in the number and
effectiveness of the American nuclear arsenal. Kennedy’s solution: build more
and better such weapons. Totally against what the Scribe had tried do in
Boston. Nevertheless the very next weekend after that Boston anti-nuclear
weapons rally Markin rounded us up to go up to the North Adamsville Kennedy for
President headquarters located in a small shed-like building on the property of
the Knights of Columbus and grab a bunch of leaflets to go door to door putting
them in mail slots. Of course before the Scribe could take step one Frankie
intervened and told the guys to go to the supermarkets, the post office, a
couple of banks opened on Saturday in those days before ATMs, the bowling alley
and the football fields. That is where they could hand out eye to eye with the
receivers their materials. Frankie laughed at Markin and his hokey idea of
stuffing leaflets in mail boxes.
Such were the ups and downs of having “one of our own”
getting elected to the White House in sunnier days. And one of our own hipping
us to the idea.
