From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can--The “Skinny” On The Demise Of One Award-Winning Journalist Peter Paul Markin, The Scribe

By Sam Lowell

Recently at the office water cooler I was comparing notes with Seth Garth old fellow corner boy from the Acre in North Adamsville where we grew up back in the 1960s about responses to our respective series of pieces, his on the old-time California private detective Lew Archer who just passed away at 104 out in some skid row dive in L.A. of an overdose and me on my earlier corner boy experiences at Carter’s Variety Store. But really about how I met and got involved in Peter Paul Markin’s world, always called the Scribe from about eight grade on and I will use that moniker here. About how as well, and I am not alone in this, we still shed a tear for that long-gone daddy.

The common theme we noted about reader responses is the spike in comments and notes concerning the demise, how both men fell down, went from kings of the hills to dust or something like that. Beyond the common theme of some off-the-wall Greek tragedy noise neither man fell the same way. For Lew it was sex, or rather taking the toss from his wife from their abode which whatever philandering by Lew had led to that decision by her caused sexual impotency in Lew and he just flat out lost his edge thereafter. Dropped from a serious challenger to the P.I. elite to repo man and key-hole peeper to go-fer. Had won, I think, Rookie of the Year for the Galton case fresh out of World War II, then P.I. of the Year a couple of times for respectively the Harlan case and the Billings case. Grabbed a few honorable mentions too then the wife Martha toss and all fall down. Worse winding up doing who knows what skullduggery with junkie P.I. Kenny Millar (who in turn turned Lew into a junkie right to the fucking end when he was found head down in some skid row rooming house in the Bunker Hill section of L.A). But enough of Lew’s story you can read about his rise and fall via Seth’s pieces. What I am interested in today since readers have been pounding about it is the demise of the Scribe, how he fell down hard to what I have called his “wanting habits.”

I kind of sensed in my last piece on the Scribe where I put the very real positive spin of what the Scribe was about in good weathers, when the tide of the 1960s was rising that would not be enough to satisfy those who wanted to know how a guy who could have been practically anything wound up face down in some dirty ditch in some back alley in Sonora down in Mexico when some “strike it rich” easy street drug deal went south on him. I mentioned and this is a distinct part of his fall, the part where nothing bad could touch him, that he was the original Teflon man that he made a fateful, hey, let’s call it fatal, decision to drop out of Boston University in the spring of 1967 just as we were getting the first waves eastward of the new dispensation, what he endlessly called the new breeze in the land he would bore us with on lonely Friday nights.            

As already mentioned the Scribe was the pioneer heading west in the Summer of Love and all that meant to his prospects and dreams and after feeling the situation he came back East to drag us out there for varying lengths of time. He decided as did the some of the rest of us to stay out for a while, not go back to school, calling that Frisco experience all he needed for schooling. Except dropping out of school in 1967 during the height of the bloody massacres in Vietnam was not the smartest idea in the world since that meant the loss of the critical student deferment setting himself up for being drafted by his friends and neighbors at the local draft board as they liked to say then. That is where his hubris got him in a bind since by January of 1969 he received a draft notice to report for induction. Not having any reason, any principled reason despite his anti-war views and with no support or sympathy on the home front he “allowed” himself to be drafted. (I with less hubris then, once I got my draft notice in mid-1969 hustled my ass back to Tufts although that only deferred me until 1970 when the grim reaper called with my low draft number after that has changed the system). Other guys like Seth, Bart Webber, Allan Jackson, Frank Jackman also were inducted. Everybody except the heroic military resister Frank did their time and survived some of it rocky for guys like me who had a very hard time coming back to the “real world” from Vietnam times.               

       

Nobody had a harder time than the Scribe though who somehow though he was going to wind up a clerk somewhere writing bullshit on a stick for some officers. The reality: although he never talked about it much, a problem maybe, at least to us he saw some very hard fighting in the Central Highlands before he was done. What the hell did he expect after the huge attrition rates of KIAs and wounded at a time when the Army only wanted cannon fodder to replace the thinned ranks. Like I said he never talked about it much but if you had to put an ebb tide time for the Scribe’s 1960s that 1969 date would serve.

Those back in the “real world” day  were the days when he, we actually, were living out in Oakland with Josh Breslin a guy we met out in Frisco in 1967 from Maine and doing mostly dope, mostly some free-lance writing for the ton of alternative newspapers and journals that were feeding the counterculture toward the end and mostly trying to figure out what was what. Those were the days when the Scribe was heading out for days and weeks from Oakland to be with “brothers,” a particular kind of brother who like him could not deal with the realities of coming home and so set up alternative communities I guess you would call them today along the railroad tracks, under bridges, near arroyos with kindred. He wrote a series of articles for one of the alternative newspapers in the Bay area that either won or was nominated for a big prize since he concentrated on having each man tell his own story. That year or two was probably the high point of the Scribe’s post-military time.

I guess Josh Breslin was the first to notice it and then I picked up on it when we were living out in Oakland when the Scribe started talking more and more about material things, things he wanted that he never was able to have as a kid. What we called, or have called since then, the wanting habits. Josh and I were no strangers to that feeling, that nagging feeling since he up in the Atlantic section of Maine and I in the utterly lowest part of the Acre, the Bottoms, had shared that experience. That was the glue that held all the corner boys together from my utter poverty to Frankie Riley’s genteel poor as church mice circumstances. The Scribe fell somewhere in between probably closer to my end than Frankie’s. Even today when we talk about it there is always a slight nudge about the effect those wanting habits had on all of us.

Like I said it hit the Scribe hardest and maybe with less reason since he was a guy who had plenty of great prospects, at least before the Vietnam War bogie haunted his dreams. Sometime in 1974 though he started doing cousin, started doing cocaine which was then just becoming a drug of the month choice among those who were seriously into drugs but who had previously sustained themselves mainly on marijuana or mescaline, maybe speed. It was also the time of that south of the United States border drug cartels were gearing up the cousin market. Those two factors would bring the Scribe low. He started getting seriously into the rather expensive drug and selling small amounts around town to keep his habit up. That could only last so long before he really was a cousin junkie. Then he started “muling” for some Frisco drug dealers meaning he would go to Mexico, get the product and bring it over the border. Not so hard then unlike now when you were a straight looking gabacho gringo.

We don’t know all the details, we were basically warned away, but sometime in 1976 the Scribe fell down. He either snatched some big shipment he was muling for his own profit or he was trying to work some crazy independent deal and cross-up the wrong cartel people. In any case he wound up face down in a dusty back street in Sonora with two slugs in his head and was buried in some potter’s field grave down there. Like I said we were warned off by the Federales to forget about what happened to the Scribe. That has not meant that we still do not shed some tears over that fallen brother.