Lost In The Rain On The Carnival
Ride Called Desolation Row Complete With Hamlet’s Ophelia And Doctor Filth Who
Ruled That World-With Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited In Mind,
No, With 1966 On The Road Visions In Mind
By Jack Callahan (who lived
through it all and survived, barely, to tell the tale on the great big blue-pink
American West sky night-Greg Green, site manager)
“I’ve met Einstein
disguised as Robin Hood, I’ve been in the tower with Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot,
“declared Robert South to no one in particular although Jake Devine was the
only one in the room at the time. With those words Jake, Jake known as Jake
since childhood to distinguish him from John Devine, Senior although his father
a genial Irishman addicted to sports betting and drinking whiskey not always in
that order was more the slap on the back Jake type while Jake in the throes of
his high hippie moments was trying to shed that moniker for Be-Bop Benny but
old habits die hard and his old high school friends called him Jake and when he
went on the hitchhike road west with them in 1965,1966 the name stuck whether
he liked it or not, knew that Robert was two things-one, high as a kite on
either speed or LSD just then the drug of choice among the “hip” (not always
the same as Hippie but Jake did not want to argue the fine points on that one
since he himself had been on a two day speed high-low) on the mind-expanding
conscious West Coast cohort of the brethren and two, Robert had been listening
to the whole of Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row
at least once, probably more than once if he was high since he would not
have had the stamina to switch the sound system that Captain Crunch had
installed in their “digs” now that they were off the road for the winter an
settled into Diego’s mansion.
(Before we go further this
little sketch is about the road, the road west, get here and we will do the rest,
although Diego’s down in La Jolla where all the perfect wave guys then hung out
looking, well looking for something just like we were, and their foxy perfect
surfer girls then glistening in the sun, was a huge mansion to save weary souls
from the onslaught of the 24/7 highway come what passed for winter in Southern California.
They were, through Captain Crunch’s, at this late date you do not need to know his
real moniker except he would wind up after the ebbtide of the 1960s took it all
away as a professor of literature at Bard in New York City, “house-sitting”
this Diego’s massive mansion while he was down in home country Mexico. Rumor
had, and for every incident on the road there was always at least one rumor
almost never verified, that he was the “hombre,” the guy bringing in enough
righteous drugs to fill a battleship, and cheap too. When the wisely closed-mouth
Captain was asked, repeatedly asked where all the righteous dope came from, he
would always answer that he found it on the ground. After a while nobody asked him
anymore.)
By the way in
compensation for being called Jake by one and all on the bus, of
which more in a minute, he had gathered some sense of respect because his
latest flame, a serious “hippie chick” met on the road at Big Sur as they were
heading south, Frilly Jilly, called him Be-Bop Benny, called him a
few other things once they high on grass, you know marijuana, got
down to the “do the do,” a term the guys still carried with them from the
corner days in Riverdale after they had heard the bluesman Howlin’ Wolf do a
song with those words in it, those words meaning hitting the sheets, having
sex, what she called him in her high hormonal sweaty vaginal moments was left
to
them.
Yeah, Robert, Jimmy
Jenkins, Frank Riley, and a guy, a French-Canadian guy who is still with the
crowd, they met from a mill town in Maine on Russian Hill in San Francisco
where they were camped out in a small park when he stopped by the bus and asked
for a joint had been on quite a ride since coming West to see what it was all
about and were learning quickly it was all about “drugs, sex and rock and roll”
at its core but also about getting out from under the old ways of thinking and
living. (Nobody except maybe the undercover “narcs” was anything but no-plussed
if some total stranger, total young stranger with long hair and even a wisp of
a beard with some buckskin jacket and tired jeans came up and asked for dope,
and seldom got a negative answer.) So when they hit Frisco they headed like
lemmings to the sea to Golden Gate Park where all the hell was breaking loose
met a few guys who “turned them on,” got them invited to a few parties,
including one Captain Crunch was throwing around the new yellow brick road bus
that he had just purchased (allegedly in a trade for a big sack of dope but all
the time they were on the bus they never had that rumor confirmed by the
Captain or anybody else and mainly it didn’t matter by then). This bus was nothing
but an old school bus that had been turned into a moving commune after the
seats had been torn out, mattresses thrown down, a storage area for family
living material like utensils, dishes, and pots and pans, the thing had been
repainted in every Day-Glo psychedelic color under the sun and best
of all hooked up with a great sound system Dippy Mike, the guy who did the
sound system for Fillmore West and the Dead, put together for any trips they
would take.
And almost from the start
at Golden Gate Park the trips began once Captain had selected the Riverdale
boys as part of his crew to head south with him. The reason for that heading
south, the reason Robert was holding forth those lines from Desolation
Row was to “house-sit” here in La Jolla at this mansion that belonged
to Pablo Rios, always called Diego and maybe six other names, a friend of the
Captain’s and a serious south of the border drug dealer who was in Mexico for
the winter and the Captain had agreed to doing the sitting as we got into
“winter quarters.” Now that the bus was not being used, was being refitted with
a new engine and so not useable, the sound system had been transferred to the
house for the weekly parties the Captain threw for his friends (and whoever
happened to hear about the event and knew where to find the place, not as easy
as it sounds when stoned in hideaway between the cliffs in La Jolla).
Robert, once settled in,
once he got his own room with his lady-friend, Lavender Minnie, got heavily
into the dope, got heavily into listening to the amped up music and Jake
thought he had begun, like they had all heard about with kids who did too much
dope, to go over the edge.
Just as Jake thought that
thought Robert rang out again with “they’re selling postcards of the hanging, they’re
painting the passports brown,” and Jake knew that Robert had gone for the next
plus minutes to his own world. Eleven plus minutes if he was lucky, since more
than once Robert had decided that he needed to give his own take on what the
whole thing meant, what the various references meant to him. For example, that
business with Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, the two exile poets who almost
single-handedly broke from the old forms and created modern poetry and were
treated like gods among the hip at one point when Dylan was throwing down the
gauntlet, telling those guys a new sheriff was in town. Well, maybe, if you
think Dylan was a lyric poet rather than a song-writer, or maybe put the two
together. For example, that postcards of the hanging stuff had been his
political moment like Billie Holiday had with Strange Fruit about the scandalous open lynching of black men in
the South put together with a new sense of masculinity turned in on itself with
sailor boys caught out on the seven seas who transformed themselves in boy-girls
with those all male crews. For example, that stuff about Ophelia, you know
Hamlet’s chick and how she was giving up the ghost (committing suicide) not
because of some lost love but because she was pregnant and was not sure who the
father was.
For example,
…and then Robert stopped. Stopped to do some thing or other with his Lavender Minnie and so that “teachable moment” was over for now. But if you hear a guy yelling about Casanova, the so-called legendary lover getting his comeuppance you know who is holding sway just like in the old days. Okay
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