For Ti Jean Kerouac On The 50th Anniversary Of His Death And The “Assistant King Of The Beats” Allan Ginsberg-Hard Rain’s A Going To Fall With Kudos To Bob Dylan “King Of The Folkies" -Out In The Be-Bop Night- Scenes From Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night-The Ballad Of Captain Cob And The S.S. Blue-Pink Night

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*Writer's Corner- Raymond Chandler's "Little Sister"

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Anglo-American detective novelist Raymond Chandler.

Book Review

Little Sister, Raymond Chandler, 1958

Phillip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's classic noir hard-boiled, fundamentally honest private detective forever literarily associated with Los Angeles and its means streets is a bit off course here in his search for the inevitable exotic/diabolical `missing woman' (`dame' for the non-politically correct types) in trouble in the Hollywood film glitter mill. Old Marlowe is going uptown here, or so he is led to believe. But it seems to me that it is more than the geography that off Marlowe's beaten path here. I love Chandler as a great writer with a good ear for the West Coast American scene in the 1940's but hasn't Marlowe followed that woman, or her "sister", before in a previous novel? Except that she wasn't an actress, or had some little devilish sister from Kansas. You get my drift. Old Chandler's Marlowe is starting to run out of steam in the theme department. By the way, beware of those Kansas women; they are hell on your average California rough-and-tumble shamus.

Sure there is plenty of sparse but functional dialogue, physical action and a couple of plot twists but Marlowe needs to think about that rest home for worn-out indigent gumshoes (since he never made enough money). He has taken one too many hits on the head for the latest worthy cause. Give me those background oil derricks that sound like money churning out the wealth while looking for General Sternwood's Rusty Regan in The Big Sleep or the run down stucco flats in pursue of Moose's Velma in Farewell, My Lovely any day. However, even on his uppers, as always with Chandler you get high literature in a plebeian package. Read on.

Those Oldies But Goodies-Folk Branch-Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row”-In The Summer of Love

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Bob Dylan performing Desolation Row. Desolation Row Lyrics

Bob Dylan

They're selling postcards of the hanging
They're painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner
They've got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants
And the riot squad they're restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row.

Cinderella, she seems so easy
"It takes one to know one," she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style
And in comes Romeo, he's moaning
"You belong to Me I Believe"
And someone says, "You're in the wrong place, my friend
You better leave"
And the only sound that's left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row.

Now the moon is almost hidden
The stars are beginning to hide
The fortunetelling lady
Has even taken all her things inside
All except for Cain and Abel
And the hunchback of Notre Dame
Everybody is making love
Or else expecting rain
And the Good Samaritan, he's dressing
He's getting ready for the show
He's going to the carnival tonight
On Desolation Row.
Now Ophelia, she's 'neath the window
For her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday
She already is an old maid
To her, death is quite romantic
She wears an iron vest
Her profession's her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness
And though her eyes are fixed upon
Noah's great rainbow
She spends her time peeking
Into Desolation Row.

Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood
With his memories in a trunk
Passed this way an hour ago
With his friend, a jealous monk
He looked so immaculately frightful
As he bummed a cigarette
Then he went off sniffing drainpipes
And reciting the alphabet
You would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row.

Dr. Filth, he keeps his world
Inside of a leather cup
But all his sexless patients
They're trying to blow it up
Now his nurse, some local loser
She's in charge of the cyanide hole
And she also keeps the cards that read
"Have Mercy on His Soul"
They all play on penny whistles
You can hear them blow
If you lean your head out far enough
From Desolation Row.
Across the street they've nailed the curtains
They're getting ready for the feast
The Phantom of the Opera
In a perfect image of a priest
They're spoonfeeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they'll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words
And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls
"Get outa here if you don't know"
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row.

At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row.

Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody's shouting
"Which side are you on ?"
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row.
Yes, I received your letter yesterday
About the time the door knob broke
When you asked me how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke ?
All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they're quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name
Right now I can't read too good
Dont send me no more letters no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row.
********

This is the way it started with Gypsy Love and me. “Hey Mister, do you want to buy some flowers for your girlfriend?” And just then, girlfriend-less, I started to say no but something, something from deep inside me, or maybe her, made me said this, “Sure, but since I don’t have a girlfriend why don’t you just keep them and wear them in your hair.” Something about that sentiment struck a cord in her so we continued to talk, talk a lot for the next several minutes even though many people, many customer people were walking by this moonless night, this moonless Boylston Street 1966 Friday summer night. And that is the way it started, I swear.

Of course Gypsy Love was just the pet name that I gave her a little later, and it is better for all concerned that we just leave it like that, although not for any particular privacy, things better left unsaid, or let sleeping dogs lie reason, it wasn’t like that with us in our time, the time of our time, other than Gypsy Love says more about her, about me, and about what happened to us in those last year days that I want to tell you about than her real name. Naturally, naturally unless you might want to think otherwise, she was no more of a gypsy than I am. Long, flowing blonde hair, fair almost alabaster white skin, flashing blue eyes, bedroom eyes we called them around my old neighborhood, in my old high school days corner boy-sizing up the girls days a few years back, kind of thin, kind of hadn’t had a good meal in a while thin, and wearing no make-up, as is the fashion these days is not my picture, and I am sure not yours either, of a dark-skinned, dark-haired, dancing-eyed gypsy girl with a rose in her teeth doing the tarantella, or something like that.

No, the gypsy part came in because of the flowers. Now, right this 1967 minute, you cannot go down any city street, any decent-sized city street on a Friday night, a boy and girl-filled Friday night, and not have some enterprising real-live gypsy girl, maybe twelve or twenty who knows, trying to sell you some woe-begotten, faded, wilted, or worst, plastic, christ, plastic rose, singular rose, by the way, for your girlfriend. All the while cheapskate embarrassing you when you sheepishly bluster out "no thanks." Or directing you, no steering you, to some Madame LaRue ancient gypsy-mother in the window fortune-telling lady. An ancient gypsy mother woman who will, for small, very small, change, and knowing whom to pitch her spiel to, start running life’s wheel of fortune. But wouldn’t the lady also like to know love’s fortune for an extra thin coin at you. And then, always, always looking into her crystal ball, or the cards, T.S. Eliot’s dread tarot cards, and, whee, thankfully predict love’s delights. And that is the long and short of it for the gypsy part. The love part is self-explanatory or should be, and if it is not you will catch the drift as I go along.

And, let’s say in 1962 or 1963, on some other moonless Boylston Street night, some high school moonless night looking for one of the latest, cheap date, coffeehouses that dotted the street and were the rage those few years back that real gypsy girl would have been left to ply her trade, her rose-pedaling trade (maybe an older sister might have been working some other, more adult, scheme, but in that boy and girl-filled night I was not noticing that scene since I was girl-ed up and working my charm on said girl) with no fair-haired gypsy love girl competition. But see in 1966 (or 1967 as I am writing this) all hell has broken loose in the land. There has been a jail-break among the young, among some of the more adventurous or alienated young, who have decided, and rightly so, that suburban, white picket-fence, college, then graduate school, then a respectable profession, and then, yes, then, then, then a straight line replication of dear mother and father is not in the cards. And one does not need a fortune-telling lady, ancient gypsy-mother or not, tarot cards read or not, to know that death street. So some, and Gypsy Love included herself among the some, decided that the jail-break was worth the risk, worth the risk for a little while anyway. And then see what happens.

But jail-break or not, picket-fence security or not, squaresville or edge city, you still need dough, dough to keep off the hairy, not woman friendly streets, dough to keep body and soul together, hell, dough for the yarn to start up that shawl-making business that was the direct reason that Gypsy Love was selling flowers (not suburban boy and girl in town for a weekend look at the hippies night roses, and certainly no plastic throw-aways, just cut flowers suitable for hair, and medieval garlands to prance around the Boston Common). And, like I said, obviously not getting enough business to keep her from being not enough to eat thin. Because, after all that was a summer of love, not this year’s “officially” proclaimed one, proclaimed from this shore to San Francisco and every unattached (and maybe some attached, who knows), fair-haired former alabaster white-skinned fairy princess is also selling flowers, or something, to keep the wolves from the door.

So, naturally, once I knew the score, that talking several minutes that I held Gypsy Love up (although, as it turned out, she was more than happy to be talking rather than selling flowers) made me feel guilty and I offered to spring for a little dinner for her. Either out of hunger, or some spark between us that she also felt, she said yes, an empathic yes, or at least that is how I am going to tell it. So, "old pro" Boylston Street denizen that I had become we went into the Olive, a cheap coffeehouse that also served light meals, light meals in the dark so I hoped. So we ate some supper, not too badly served that night, a not drunk chef must have been on duty, and then left satisfied. And headed for her garret over on Commonwealth Avenue.

Yes, it was certainly a garret no question. And I have been in such places before that, no problem, I am, if anything, no snob when it comes to living quarters . What I didn’t expect, didn’t expect when she invited me over was that she shared the place with about six others, boys and girls alike, some paired, some not. And that was also okay, or rather it turned out okay, because among the denizens of that place was a guy, no, a gallant, who knowing that he could not compete with the Gypsy Love flower-sellers of the Boston night sold dope instead. And good stuff too, primo Acapulco Gold and Columbia Red that he got from some Spanish girl, no that is not right, some Mexican girl, some sunflower sunshine Juanita girl connection that he had made over in Cambridge Common where he hung out during the day.

So that night, that moonless Commonwealth Avenue garret summer night, Gypsy Love and I got “high,” 1966 (or 1967) high, not old-time alcohol-induced twenty college generations before Saturday night fraternity row beer-kegged, not old-time alcohol-induced whiskey, whiskey with a beer chaser like my father and his working class cronies over at some local Dublin Pub, not rye whiskey with a water chaser like I used to like to drink and still do when there is no sweet weed, sweet tea as I like to nickname call it, not scotch neat, martini dry, manhattan on the rocks Mayfair swells high like the squares out there with the picket fences not oblivion, forget, remember to forget, raging against the day, against the night high, but mellow, insightful high. And this stuff was so strong, so laced with whatever chemist’s knowledge-laced, and with whatever nutrient rich volcanic ash grown side of some desolate latin mountain that we really couldn’t sleep. Maybe Gypsy Love couldn’t sleep because, like I noticed when I first started talking to her, she was so thin and the good non-drunken chef food earlier and then this laced-primo dope kept her up, and I because she was Gypsy Love and I was too busy drinking her in for the first time to waste time on sleep.

So we “split” (left the premises, or went out, for the squares, okay) the scene at the walk-up garret with it menagerie of humanity, also all laced- high as far as I could tell as we closed the door behind us, around two o’clock in the morning to “goof” on (not make fun of, not serious, hurtful make fun of anyway, but more like let’s let the dope take its course, observe the late hour night life, again for the squares, and again okay, okay) the Boylston Street scene. Strangely, most of my late, late night, improper Boston late night scene, really wasn’t spent in Boston, but rather in Cambridge, in Harvard Square, specifically since about 1962 at the all-night Hayes –Bickford right up from the subway station, kind of a budding literary hang-out place but in any case a long way refuge from bad high school home scenes, and later to soak in the night life, and catch a few ideas, if only by osmosis. All for the price of a refillable watery dregs cup of coffee and maybe a soggy Danish or stale three o’clock in the morning yesterday muffin.

But this Boylston Street scene was something else, 1966 something else. Something at once more alive, more viscerally alive than the, when you really thought about it, staid and now well-worn late night Bickford literary scene with its ritual low important conversation hum, its frantic writerliness, and its slow drum tattoo beat to define “cool.” And, at the same time more destructive, not Vietnam War nightly television waste destructive that the mad daddies in D.C. had already cornered the market on, and were not letting go of despite many anguished cries, but more the sense that this was the last chance for happiness, or sanity, or some such thing and we had better grab it now before it blows away with the winds, or we get tired of riding it and go back to the cocoons. A madness scene, and let’s leave it at that, leave it at that until the dope wears off.

Sure, the jugglers, juggling all improbable combinations of materials from bowling pins to ninja sticks, and clowns, Charley Chaplin tramp clowns, claribel clowns, Disneyland clowns, squirting, spraying, belching, bellowing, bestriding bicycles, bouncing balls and baby cars, and whatever seven other things clowns do, were out in force. No hip town, no college night town from east to west, from Cambridge to Berkeley, Ann Arbor in between, no cultural oasis town from the Village to Venice Beach, Austin in between, America or Europe, continental Europe Paris the hub, London in between was “hip,” (not squares for the squares, got it) without a plethora of those brethren.

Or the one-trick pony Monte guys sitting at little tables or on benches “organizing” a game, cards, walnut shells, peas-in-a pod a specialty, acrobats, maybe some circus castoffs or Olympic failure cases, bouncing off each other, sparkling uniforms making an arc to off-set the trickiness of the action, and maybe in a couple of years Vegas in the big tent, into the dead air night. And anyone else with any talent, any mimic money, spare-change, put the dough in the hat right in front of you, please, talent to keep the wolves away from the door.

And sure a zillion guitar players, and some nights in Harvard Square a few years back that might have been a low-ball estimate, now electric, electrified in the post-Dylan night, and diehard acoustics, trads, trying to maintain but losing the battle in the sound night and have the empty hats to prove it. Plugged in or on the edge though, singing, crooning, bleeping, basheeing, bahai-ing, rama-ing, hari-ing, and just plain old-fashioned vanilla screaming, along with tambourines, kazoos, wash tubs, triangles, oboes, hautboy, water glasses of various sizes, anything that could, or would, or should, make music, enough music to keep those ravenous wolves away from that damn door.

And guys and gals, angel love guys and gals, hop-headed or harmless, bejeweled or buckskinned, selling every kind of dope from every arm, reaching into every pocket for a pill here, some tea leaves there, more rare, an eight ball of this, and rarer still then although now I hear about it more, maybe a girl-boy combination for a permanent float. And every kind of kid (mainly), some college preppie out on the Boylston Street night, maybe tired, too tired from that fraternity beer-keg and some lame three hundred freshman in a telephone booth, or a Volkswagen joke, some suburban high school break-out kid looking to forget the corner boy action, or the last dance, last high school dance failure, and didn’t want to go home, some car-full of girls (always a car-full, never less) from a different suburb, looking, well, looking for those “hippie” guys that look kind of cute now, now that mother and father don’t approve of hippie guys, and streams of boys and girls in all colors and shades and all uniforms just getting in from the long bus ride from Bangor, or Montpelier and intent, serious intent , on breaking out of that hayseed world, buying those fifty-seven flavors and smoking, dropping, or swallowing it right here on the premises, the street premises and wilding out (going crazy with joy, ecstasy, fear, freak-out) before hard dawn hits the streets

But also every hipster, dipster, grifter, drifter and midnight sifter who had enough sense to catch sleep during the day and come out at night and do his or her rube-taking madness. Some badass madness, some not from the suburbs, not now anyway, madness, police-worthy madness. The clash between the dope-infested madness and the lumpen-greed head madness, the known world’s madness in new form, would define that last summer, for good or evil. But right then for good, for the good Mexican night dope that was just beginning to wear off and let sleep take its course. And then dawn came, or just that few minutes before dawn, when heavy, lumpish human outline figures start to take distinctive shape, Gypsy Love and I could look over on Boston Common hill and see the outline forms of hundreds of sleeping bags, tent city resident pup-tent, oddly Army surplus, homemade lean-too dwellers, park bench newspaper-pillowed sleepers, whatever, sheltering the summer of love refugees against that moonless night. And just at that pre-dawn moment I knew that Gypsy Love and I were solid for that moment, and for some other moments, and for a while too but that when the colds came, when the skies turned granite grey in revenge, when the yellowish, brownish, orange-ish leaves started falling we would have had our moment.

The Intellectuals Or The Jocks?-For Fredda Cohen, North Adamsville High, Class Of 1964-Phil Larkin’s View

Click on the headline to link to a letter written by the late American writer, Norman Mailer, and printed in The New York Review Of Books, detailing his choices for "must reads" in the American literary canon. What would your ten choices be? See below.

Phil Larkin guest comment:

I did not then, nor do I now, know Fredda Cohen, a fellow classmate at North Adamsville High, Class of 1964. I don’t remember if old track buddy Markin, Peter Paul Markin, who prompted me to write some teary-eyed thing for him knew her or not, but it was with her in mind that I wrote the following. I, today, strongly believe that I could have learned a lot from her and maybe Markin does too but you will have to ask him that yourself. No way, no way on god’s good green earth in the year 2011 and while I am still breathing, old time “jock” buddies or not, am I going to vouch for that maniac. Here goes:

Every September, like clockwork, I am transported to a place called the beginning of the year. No, not New Year’s Day like any real person would expect, but the school year for most students, younger or older. That is a frame of reference that I have not changed in all these years. And every year, or many years anyway, my thoughts come back to the road not taken, or really not taken then, when I ask myself the following question that I am posing in such a way here so that you can ask it to yourself as well: What group(s) did you hang around with in high school?

This question is meant to be generic and more expansive that the two categories listed in the headline. These were hardly the only social groupings that existed at our high school (or any public high school, then or now, for that matter) but the ones that I am interested in personally for the purpose of this thing. Corner boy devotees and hoods, social butterflies, teases (actually that is covered that under social butterflies, girl social butterflies), school administration “brown noses,” science nuts, auto mechanics grease monkeys, bolsheviks, hippies, beats, hip-hop nation devotees, could-care-if-school-kept-or-not-ers, school skippers, drop-outs, and religious nuts can speak your own piece for your “community.”

You, fellow alumni from Anyway U.S.A. High, can also feel free to present your own extra categories in case I missed anything above like S&M or B&D devotees or stamp club members or both intertwined, if your you were aware of such types. However, for this writer, and perhaps some of you, here were my choices. The intellectuals, formerly known as the "smart kids.” You know, the ones that your mother was always, usually unfavorably, comparing you to come report card time in order to embarrass you or get you to buckle down in the great getting out from under the graying nowhere working class night and make something of yourself that she (and dad) could be proud of. Yes, those kids at the library after school, and even on Saturday, Saturdays if you can believe that, and endlessly trudging, trudging like some Promethean wanderers about forty six pounds of books, books large and small, books in all colors, mainly, and here is the kicker, well-thumbed, very well-thumbed. Or, on the other hand the jocks, the guys and in those days it was almost exclusively guys (girls came in as cheer-leaders or, well, girlfriends-sometimes the same thing). You know, mainly, the Goliaths of the gridiron, their hangers-on, wannabes and "slaves." The guys who were not carrying any forty-six pounds of books, although maybe were wearing that much poundage in gear. And any books that needed carrying was done by either girlfriends or the previously mentioned slaves. Other sports may have had some shine but the “big men” on campus were the fall classic guys. Some sports such as the old buddies, Markin and Larkin, track and field events didn’t usually rate even honorable mention compared to say a senior bake sale or high school confidential school dance.

Frankly, although I was drawn to both groupings in high school I was mainly a "loner" for reasons that are beyond what I want to discuss here except it very definitely had to do with confusion about the way to get out from under that graying working class nowhere night. And about “fitting” in somewhere in the school social order that had little room for guys (or girls for that matter) who didn’t fit into some classifiable niche. And for guys, 1960s shorts-wearing track guys, running the streets of old North Adamsville to the honks of automobiles trying to scare us off the road (no share the road with a runner then) and jeers, the awful jeers of girls, that space was very small. The most one could hope for was a “nod” from the football guys (or basketball in winter) in recognition that you were a fellow athlete, of sorts. Ya, times were tough but we survived.

But now I can come out of the closet, at last. I read books. Yes, I read them, no devoured them endlessly (and still do), and as frequently as I could. Did you see me carrying tons of books over my shoulder in public. Be serious, please. Here is the long held secret (even from Markin). I used to go over to the library on the other side of town, the Adamsville side where no one, no one who counted anyway (meaning no jock, of course), would know me. One summer I did that almost every day. So there you have it. Well, not quite.

In recent perusals of my class yearbook I have been drawn continually to the page where the description of the Great Books Club is presented. I believe that I was hardly aware of this club at the time but, apparently, it met after school and discussed Plato, John Stuart Mill, Max Weber, Karl Marx and others. Fredda Cohen ran that operation. Hell, that sounded like great fun. One of the defining characteristics of my life has been, not always to my benefit, an overweening attachment to books and ideas. So what was the problem? What didn't I hang with that group?

Well, uh..., you know, they were, uh, nerds, dweebs, squares, not cool (although we did not use those exact terms in those days). That, at least, was the public reason, but here are some other more valid possibilities. Coming from my 'shanty' background, where the corner boys had a certain cachet, I was somewhat afraid of mixing with the "smart kids." The corner boys counted, after school anyway, and if they didn’t count then it was better to keep a wide, down low berth from anything that looked like a book reader in their eyes. I, moreover, feared that I wouldn't measure up, that the intellectuals seemed more virtuous somehow. I might also add that a little religiously-driven plebeian Irish Catholic anti-intellectualism (you know, be 'street' smart but not too 'book' smart in order to get ahead in one version of that graying working class nowhere night) might have entered into the mix as well.

But, damn, I sure could have used the discussions and fighting for ideas that such groups would have provided. I had to do it the hard way later. As for the jocks one should notice, by the way, that in the last few paragraphs that I have not mentioned a thing about their virtues. And, in the scheme of things, that is about right. So now you know my choice, except to steal a phrase from something that madman Markin wrote honoring his senior English teacher, Ms. Lenora Sonos- "Literature matters. Words matter." (I wish now that I had had her as well). I would only add here that ideas matter, as well. Hats Off to the North Adamsville Class of 1964 intellectuals!
*****

Norman Mailer

Ten Favorite American Novels

U.S.A. John Dos Passos
Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
Studs Lonigan James T. Farrell
Look Homeward, Angel Thomas Wolfe
The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald-1st A.J.
The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway
Appointment in Samarra John O'Hara
The Postman Always Rings Twice James M. Cain
Moby-Dick Herman Melville

This would be my list, as well, except instead of Moby Dick I would put Jack Kerouac's On The Road

The Stuff Of Dreams- Harry Madden, “The Grifter,” R.I.P.

“Hey, Peter Paul, long time no see,” yelled Harry Madden, seemingly forever known as “The Grifter” in North Adamsville childhood lore, from across Commonwealth Avenue near Kenmore Square, or better for those who do not know Boston, near Fenway Park, the home of the Red Sox, on a hot summer’s day in 1967. Peter Paul Markin, a little high and in a funk thinking about his latest also seemingly endless problems with Joyell, took a couple flashes to recognized the Grifter, not having seen him in a couple of years. A couple of youth-changing 1960s years so that the Grifter’s eternal sharkskin suit, white shirt, thin, really almost stringy brown tie, and pattern leather black shoes, shined to a mirror look see, short 1950s style hair, short, with no facial hair showing anywhere, seemed strange in the new faded blue jeans, ratty tee-shirt, long-haired, bearded, scraggly or not, hard rock night.

What was not strange was the Grifter’s request, or rather demand, as he crossed the street and met up with Peter Paul, “Markin, lend me a hundred dollars, I’ve got a hot deal, a hot grass (marijuana, for the innocent, or unworldly) deal going down coming in straight from Mexico where I can make a score, a big score, and be on easy street, finally on easy street just like I said I would be back in those North Adamsville days when we dreamed our dreams. I‘ll pay you back double, hey, why don’t you give me two hundred and we can be partners and split down the right down the middle.”

Markin, warily and wearily in equal parts, replied quickly that he did not have two hundred dollars but that he could see his way clear to lending the hundred, for old times sake, and because, frankly, although not every word of their conversation is being restated here, the Grifter held a spell over the usually rational Markin, and everybody else whom he had ever encountered for more than two minutes. That was the Grifter’s charm, and his claim to North Adamsville fame. So the pair made their way a few blocks over to Markin’s tiny student ghetto apartment on Westland Avenue to get the money, share a little something for the head(that aforementioned grass, okay) from Markin’s stash, and talk over old times. That was the last time Markin saw Harry Madden, blessed childhood Harry Madden, alive.

Who knows when Harry became the Grifter. Maybe it was when they, along with a couple of other Adamsville South Elementary School classmates, decided that they would sell Kool-Aid one hot summer’s day in the early 1950s, Markin was not exactly sure of the year but it was when they were very young, in order to raise enough of a stake to go down to Carter’s Variety Store and load up on penny candy. Penny candy being the po’ boy’s (and girl’s too) way of satisfying their sweet tooth by buying it by the piece. Things like tootsie rolls, necco wafers, mary janes (no, not dope), chunkies, and so on. Stuff that dear mothers would not throw by the bagful into shopping carts on shopping days.

Well, the boys set up the Kool-Aid stand without much of a problem, using an old wooden crate for a stand, placing cups, and pitchers of Orange and Grape Kool-Aid on display for thirsty customers to dare to walk by at two cents a glass. And that day was a very hot one, and the neighborhood kids had a great thirst, a great thirst for those pitchers of Kool-Aid coming off the playing fields behind the old school. Harry, and he was just Harry then, came up with the bright idea that they could increase their profits and make enough money to get ice cream cones rather than just cheapjack penny candy if they added water, and, well, really just diluted the product a little. And that night, as they licked their chocolate, strawberry or vanilla cones amid satisfied chuckles, Harry had a band of brother that would follow him through hell.

Maybe it was when the band of brothers was twelve, perhaps thirteen, Markin again was not sure, when Harry, now already called the Grifter, came up with the idea that they should pool their lunch money together and buy a lottery ticket. And to hear the Grifter give his spiel they would thereafter all be on easy street, and maybe have so much money that they could leave dreary old school for the has-beens (the Grifter’s term for anybody who did not get in on one his schemes, without questions). Sold, idea sold as usual, when the Grifter put on the press for one of his “hot” ideas.

And the idea was sold solidly when they “hit,” for twenty dollars a few days later. What the others, Markin included, did not know was that the Grifter had just said they had made that hit, what after all did they know of lotteries except as the road to easy street. The Grifter had used his own money as the first prize, and all the later funds collected from his boys that whole school year went into his pocket for his real scheme- working some shell game that he lost the money on when a couple of rough customers stole his dough after telling him the facts of life. The facts of life being in this case that Lefty Looney held the exclusive rights to who and who did not promote shell games in Adamsville. It was only by accident that one of the band, Bizarre Benny not Markin, found out from a cousin the details of the Grifter’s game, having lost a few bucks at it.

Or maybe it was just from the womb that the Grifter had some gene, some grifter X or Y or G gene, embedded in his life system that made him an such an easy mark for the lure of easy street, for the bright lights of “being somebody,” some easy way somebody. In any case, in the end it was not pretty, as Markin heard the story a couple of years after that Kenmore Square chance meeting (or was it), while the Grifter’s friends and family were standing around the funeral home talking about his various schemes over the years, and about how he could have been somebody, somebody no question, if he had spent just a little less time worrying about easy street.

Apparently Harry, Markin says let’s call him Harry now at least to show a little respect for what he could have been and to kind of wash the grifter thing away from his memory, actually did use Markin’s hundred dollars to finance a wholesale drug purchase (marijuana, ganja, herb, weed, whatever you may have called it then, or call it now), sold the stuff on the street, making enough of a profit to make a bigger purchase, and more profit. Things looked very much like easy street just then. And in those early days selling dope to students, young working class kids, and even adults who hated their day jobs was as easy as hanging around the Boston Common, whispering a few words, and having people flock to you like lemmings to the sea. Especially if you had the good stuff, stuff like Acapulco Gold and Columbian Red, and Harry had it.

Then, as usual, Harry had to go one step beyond, although if you follow a certain logic Harry’s idea was not that crazy, starting out anyway. See the streets were okay for a while, but the legal questions, the surfeit of dealers and the decline of quality was killing the street market, or driving it indoors. Harry, sensing this, decided that he would take his tidy profits and buy into distributorship, a free lance distributorship. In short, sell to the street dealers and go indoors himself. And for a while he was again successful but the two things happened. The drug cartels at the higher levels were squeezing the Harrys out and putting their own people in the distribution system, and were moreover beginning to push high profit cocaine more than weed, and the profit margins at Harry’s level for the good stuff (that Gold and Red) were declining. Harry could daily see himself sinking, sinking back into Adamsville oblivion.

Harry though was never short of ideas, especially ideas on the fly. Harry came up with an idea, actually two inter-related ideas. First, to raise more capital he would cut his dope, cut it with oregano, twigs, whatever, to his street dealers. Second, he would, cut through the system and bring his own dope out of Mexico. Now cutting dope was generally something street punks did, did for the weekend “hippies” who were glad, glad as hell, to even have the idea, the essence of dope. However for a distributor this was poison. Now a lot of people have the image that your average street dealer, dealing out of his or her pocket, is just a mellow head spreading the good news.

But see Harry was dealing with street dealers from the ghetto and barrio then and cutting product on them was well, death. And before long Harry was forced to leave town or face the unknown wrath of several important street dealers who would just as soon cut up a skinny white hustler like Harry as look at him. According to one report, one unconfirmed report but with the ring of truth about it, Harry was within a day or two of “as look at him.”

And, of course, by then Harry had, straight-out had, to flee to Mexico to get right. Of course as well in Mexico, Sonora, Mexico as it turned out, Harry found out to his regret, while one could have all the money in the drug world if one was not connected, and more importantly as the structure of the cartels was getting in order, not part of the distribution system you were out of luck. Harry, naturally, believed he was born under a lucky star, he was still alive wasn’t he, and tried to arrange a large purchase to take out of Mexico, to make things right in Boston. But see in Sonora every drug deal went through Pablo Sanchez, or it didn’t go down.

When Senor Sanchez, or one of his agents, heard about it (through a guy who worked for the guy Harry was putting the deal together with from what was gathered) Harry was a marked man. The rest of the story is plain as day to see coming and, moreover, Markin got pretty shaky telling the rest of it but they found Harry looking very much like Swiss cheese in a back-alley Sonora street, face down. Yes, Harry, R.I.P.

Note: Markin wants one and all to know that Harry Madden was a grifter not a grafter. Harry was no ten-percent man taking some small piece of some other guy’s action, and practically on bended knees praying for that cut. No Harry, like a true grifter, small or large, made his own deals, big or small, good or bad, and he was the guy who gave the cuts, if that was his pleasure. Got it.

Out In The 1940s Crime Noir Night-The Stuff Of Dreams- Harry’s Dreams- Richard Widmark's “ Night And The City"

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film noir Night and the City.

DVD Review

Night And The City , Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney, Herbert Lom, directed by George Dassin, Paramount Studios, 1946

No question I am a film noir, especially a crime film noir, aficionado. Recently I have been on a tear reviewing various crime noir efforts and drawing comparisons between the ones that “speak” to me and those that, perhaps, should have been better left on the cutting room floor. The classics are easy: films like Out Of the Past, Gilda, The Lady From Shang-hai, and The Big Sleep need no additional comment from me as their plot lines stand on their own merits. Others, because they have a fetching, or wicked, for that matter, femme fatale to muddy the waters also get a pass, or as in Gilda a double nod for the plot and for the femme fatale. (Be still my heart, at the thought of Rita Hayworth, ah, dancing and singing, okay lip- synching, and looking, well, fetching while doing those difficult tasks.) Some, like the film reviewed here, Night and the City, while not strong on plot line or femme fatale-ness (ouch) get a nod for other reasons. Little reasons like having a young Harry Fabian, oops, Richard Widmark, practically scream out his grifter’s dreams with his expressive face. And have that face, the faces of other characters in the film, and places beautifully directed and captured on film. Not bad for a B-rated movie.

But now to the characterizations that make this such an interesting and well-acted (by Richard Widmark anyway) film. You know, know deep in your bones, if you were brought up in a working class or poor neighborhood, and maybe in other neighborhoods too, the grifter Harry Fabian played here by Widmark, The guy, and it was almost always a guy back in the days, who was smart, well smart enough, friendly, almost too friendly, always willing to accept a little dough, a little touch dough for his endeavor, always with a little larceny in his heart, always looking for easy street, always looking for the short cut to glory, and never quite getting there. And always, always, having to be fast of foot, and fast of sneak away to stay just the south side of the law when that surefire scheme also goes south. That’s our Harry.

And Harry was the guy that your mother warned you about from early on to not be like or you would "wind up just like him." And that was the magic mantra that held you in check, for a while anyway until you got your own Harry thoughts. And if I had to visualize my neighborhood Harrys then one Richard Widmark, a young Widmark would not be a bad way to do so. No question jut-jawed, slightly hazy wide-eyed, made for no heavy-lifting, light of foot and made to slip into small dark places Widmark would make the top of any crime noir aficionados idea of guy that fits the bill in this genre.

And grifter Harry had a dream which is central to the plot. The dream like those of a million other grifters, drifters and midnight sifters, hell just every poor guy looking to get out from under, to get out from under, and to, as Harry constantly put it, “be somebody.” Yes, that's the ticket, and that idea drives the story line (and Harry’s angst). See Harry’s dreams, Harry's immediate post World War II London-set dreams are not earth- shattering to say the least, at least on the face of it. Just to corner the wrestling racket market and become an important impresario to the plebeian masses that throng to such events. Problem is, as is always the grifter’s fate, the market s already cornered, already sewed up and already underworld muscle-protected.

So Harry tried an end-around using the head wrestling mobster’s (Herbert Lom) father to promote real wrestling, that is Greco-Roman wrestling which is said head mobster’s father’s specialty. Yes, I know already you can see Harry’s problem a mile away, even if he cannot. Other than about twelve hard-core Olympic Games aficionados nobody cares, wants to care, or will ever care about Greco-Roman wrestling. Certainly not against the masked marvel, bad boys, “real” wrestling that is (now) driven by teenage boys (and teenage girls, a little). But that is Harry’s opening and he is bound to take it, working his “magic” on the father who is some kind of Greco-roman aficionado maniac himself. The clash is on, including a stellar defense of Greco-Roman wrestling in the flesh by the old man.

Of course like all old men who try to do a young man’s work he overexerts himself and dies after the heat of battle. Such things happen, but for Harry this is the kiss of death because as it turns out head mobster was fond of his father, very fond. Harry’s number is therefore up. And watching the scenes and gritty faces of the actors in the process of that number being up drives the last portion of the film and makes this a true noir classic.

Note: No femme fatales here, obviously, but there are women who enter Harry’s life. One, an unhappy wife of a mid-level grafter, wants to use Harry to get out from under her own heavy burden of marriage to said grafter. More importantly, and a little incongruously, Harry has a straight girlfriend, of sorts, played by Gene Tierney, who loves/protects him through think and thin. And who Harry doesn’t have enough sense to stick by, except when he is in trouble- needing quick dough mainly. It was painful from my own knowledge of such things to see Harry rummaging through her pocketbook looking for dough to make some awry deal right, to allow him to “be somebody” for another five minutes. Whoa.

The Ghost Classmate-For P., North Adamsville Class Of 1964

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Arlo Guthrie singing a song made famous by his father, Woody, Hobo's Lullaby.

Peter Paul Markin comment:

Every once in a while I am reminded that it has been more than 45 years since we, the Class of 1964, went though the hallowed halls of the old school, old North Adamsville High School. In 2010, when this is written, those of us that went to North Adamsville Junior High School (now Middle School) are facing our 50th anniversary since graduation. Those who went to Adamsville Central get a year's reprieve since your junior high school days extended into ninth grade for some reason, but your day is coming.

Next year will mark 50 years since we all merged together, or those of us on the river side of the Waterview Street border line that separated us from the unspeakable, unfathomable, unlamented, savages of Adamsville High School unlike the genteel intellectuals and their hangers-on who were privileged to go to North, to form the Class of 1964. To mark the occasion I have written a little something.

Or rather Frankie Riley (Francis Xavier Riley, officially), you remember Frankie, the king hell king of the North Adamsville school boy be-bop night and resident king corner boy at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” (no further explanation necessary on the phrase, I hope.) has told me a story that I have written down here. I wrote it but it is strictly Frankie’s take on the thing, just like in the old days when I was his unpaid, unappreciated “scribe” and “go-for.” Christ that mad man owes me big time, big time indeed, for “creating” his legend almost out of whole cloth and he has been soaking up the glory ever since. Some day if there is any justice in this sorry old world the real Frankie story will be told, no fiction, and no holds barred.

If you don’t, don’t remember Frankie that is, I have written a few stories that you can peruse at your leisure. Frankie, just to give a quick "thumbnail" sketch of his doing after high school did not wind up in Walpole State Correctional Institution (now Cedar Junction if you have been out of town for a while) as everybody in North Adamsville, except his corner boys, well except me anyway, expected, graduated from college, went to law school and became a successful lawyer and leading behind-the-scene bigwig in state Democratic Party politics. Go figure, right. There were a few “bumps” along the way but overall he came out of things, as per Frankie usual, without a scratch. That last part, that part about his politics, is important because as a good “politico,” a good bourgeois politico as I would call him (holding my nose while saying it but he knows my position so it’s okay to say that) Frankie always kept his ear to the ground about the doings in North Adamsville, and about his fellow 1964 classmates. The following tale, although not as light-heartedly written as some of my earlier screeds, my earlier Frankie-influenced tales, I believe, makes a point that is worth thinking about.

****
Not everyone who went through our old high school, our beloved, misbegotten North Adamsville High School, survived to tell the tale, or at least the way the tale was suppose to be told, or how they wanted it told. Moreover, we, as a class, after over 45 years, are long enough in the tooth to have accumulated a growing list of causalities, of the wounded and broken, of the beaten down and disheveled. This story, short note really, is going to be about one of our classmates who got lost in the shuffle somehow and it is only here, and only by me [meaning Frankie-PPM] that he will get his epochal struggles voiced. I will not mention his name for you may have sat across from him in class, or given him what passed for "the nod" in the hallway back in the day, or had something of a 'crush' on him because from pictures of him taken back then he certainly had that 'something' physically all the girls were swooning over. Let's just call him, as the title suggests- the ghost classmate (and in the interest of saving precious space in order to tell his story, shorten it to “GC”).

Now I will surprise you, I think. I did not know GC in our school days; at least I have no recollection of him from that time. And you know I knew, as a class officer and as resident king hell king of the Salducci’s Pizza parlor corner boy be-bop night as goofy Markin likes to describe me (and not half-badly at that, come to think of it) I met him, or rather he met me, when we were in our early twenties in front one of the skid row run-down "hotels" (okay flophouse) that dotted the low-rent (then) streets of the waterfront of San Francisco. My reason for being there is a tale for another day, after all this is GC's story, but rest assured I was not in that locale on vacation, nor was he. [Frankie, as he will freely admit now had a drinking/drug problem, a 12-step-sized problem-PPM] Ironically, at our first meeting we were both in the process of pan-handling the same area when the light of recognition hit him. After the usual exchange of personal information, and assorted other lies we spent some weeks together doing, as they say, “the best we could.” Then, one night, he split taking all his, and my, worldly possessions.

Fast forward. A few years later, when I was in significantly better circumstances, if not exactly in the clover, I was walking down Beacon Street in Boston when someone across the street on the Common started to yell my name. Yelled it out, to be honest, in a way that I would usually look down at my shoes, or elsewhere, to avoid having to make any sign of recognition. Well, the long and short of it, was that it was old GC, looking even more disheveled than when I had last seen him. After an exchange of personal data and other details, including a fair representation of lies on both sides, I bought him some dinner. At my starting to be “old haunt”, the Parker House, just to show the swells and ward-heelers I was still a “man of the people.” [PPM, don’t say a word- FXR] The important thing to know, however, is that from that day until very recently I have always been in touch with the man as he has descended further and further into the depths of the skid row ethos. But enough of the rough out-line, let me get to the heart of the matter.

I have left GC's circumstances deliberated vague until now. The reader might assume, given the circumstances of our first meeting, GC to be a man driven to the edge by alcohol, or drugs or any of the other common maladies that break a man's body, or his spirit. Those we can relate to, if not fully understand. No, GC was broken by his own almost psychotically-driven need to succeed, and in the process constantly failing. He had been, a number of times, diagnosed as clinically depressed. I am not sure I can convey, this side of a psychiatrist's couch, that condition in language the reader could comprehend. All that I can say is this man was so inside himself with the need to do the right thing, the honorable thing, and the 'not bad' thing, that he never could do any of those. What a terrible rock to have to keep rolling up the mountain.

Here, however, to my mind is the real tragic part of this story, and the one point that I hope you will take away from this narration. GC and I talked many times about our youthful dreams, about how we were going to conquer this or that "mountain" and go on to the next one, how we would right this or that grievous wrong in the world, and about the need, to borrow the English revolutionary and poet John Milton's words, to discover the "paradise within, happier far". [This last part is strictly PPM, I would not be caught dead reading poetry, not damn English poetry-FXR.] Over the years though GC's dreams got measurably smaller and smaller, and then smaller still until there were no more dreams, only existence. That, my friends, is the stuff of tragedy, not conjured up Shakespearean (blasted Englishman) tragedy, but real tragedy.

Hobo's Lullaby
by Goebel Reeves

Go to sleep you weary hobo
Let the towns drift slowly by
Can't you hear the steel rail humming
That's a hobo's lullaby

Do not think about tomorrow
Let tomorrow come and go
Tonight you're in a nice warm boxcar
Safe from all the wind and snow

I know the police cause you trouble
They cause trouble everywhere
But when you die and go to heaven
You won't find no policemen there

I know your clothes are torn and ragged
And your hair is turning grey
Lift your head and smile at trouble
You'll find happiness some day

So go to sleep you weary hobo
Let the towns drift slowly by
Don't you feel the steel rail humming
That's a hobo's lullaby

©1961,1962 (Renewed) Fall River Music, Inc. (BMI)
All Rights Reserved.

The Real Scoop Behind “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?”

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Tom Waits performing the classic Great Depression song, Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?.

“Hey, brother (or sister), can you spare a dime?,” followed by “Got an extra cigarette, pal (or gal)?” Ya, Billy Bailey, used-to-be brash corner boy William James Bailey, certainly had the panhandler lingo down, down pat, after only a few days on the bum. Worst though on the bum in his own home town, his ever-loving’ roots, Boston. On the bum this time, this time a real fall and not just some short money, pick up some spare change, free campsite, Volkswagen bus pick-up sharing stews, brews and dope hitchhike road looking for the great blue-pink American West night with some honey, some Angelica honey, bum like a few years back.

Those days he practically made a religion, ya a religion out of living “free,” living out of the knapsack, living under bridge, no sweat, if need be. But those “golden days” dried up a few years back and now here in 1976 he was facing a real skid row choice. How it happened he will get to along the way but first let’s set the parameters of what 1976 panhandling, to put an eloquent name on it for “bumming”, shiftless bumming , looked like and how to survive in the new age of everybody me-ing themselves, even with people who were not on the bum. Christ, lord the times were hard, hard times in old Babylon, no question.

See, a guy, a guy who called himself “Shorty” McGee for obviously physical reasons but who knows what his real name was, maybe he didn’t remember either after all the rum-dum sterno heat years and the endless backsides of skid row haunts, that he had hitched up with for a minute, an overnight minute at the Salvation Harbor Lights Center over in the South End kind of hipped him to the obvious tricks of the new down-at the-heels road. Like putting the two requests together when you were panhandling. See, Shorty said it was all a matter of psychology, of working the crowd, the downtown crowd, the bustling Park Street Station crowd, and the Copley Square sunning themselves crowd just right to get you out of their sights and back to whatever sweet thing they were doing. So you endlessly put the two requests together, time after time after time, and always. And what happened was that when they turned you down for the dough, or maybe took you literally and pieced you off with just a dime, Christ a dime that wouldn’t even buy a cup of joe, could feel good about themselves, if they smoked, smoked cigarettes anyway, by passing you a butt. Billy thought, nice, this Shorty really does have it worked out just about right. Of course dimes and drags were not going to get him out from under, not this time.

Well, rather than leaving the reader out in the dark, Billy Bailey this fair 1976 spring was not just on the bum, but on the lam as well, keeping his head very far down just in case there were some guys who were looking for him, or worst, the cops, in case some irate victim of one of his scams took a notion to “fry his ass.” Of course he was counting on them, those victims, being mainly friends and acquaintances, of not putting “the heat” on him since he had already promised through the grapevine that he would make restitution. But we are getting a little ahead of the story, let’s step back.

The early 1970s were not kind to “free spirits” the previous name for what on this day were “free-loaders” and Billy, well, got behind in his expenses, and his bills, his ever expanding bills. But see the transition from free “s” to free “l” caught him off-guard, moreover he was just then in the throes of a fit of “the world owes me a living,” a serious fit. Why? Well see, he as a pauper son of the desperate working poor, “felt” that since he missed out on the golden age benefits of his youth that he was to make up the difference by putting the “touch” on the richer (not really rich but richer, no question) friends that he had acquired through his doing this and that, mainly high-end drug connections.

The long and short it was that he would “borrow” money off Friend A under some scam pretext of putting it to good use (yes, his good use, including several long airplane fight trips to California and other points west-no more hitchhike roads for this moving up the food chain lad) and then borrow dough off Friend B to cover some of his debt to Friend A. Something like an unconscious classic Ponzi scheme, as it turned out. And then when he got to Friend X or somewhere around there things got way too complicated and he started “kiting” checks, and on and on as far deep into his white collar crime mind a he could think. That could only go on a for a short while and he calculated that "short while" almost to the day when he would have to go “underground” and that day had sprung up a couple of weeks ago.

So it took no accountant or smart-ass attorney to know that dimes and drags were not going to get him back on his feet. Nor many of the schemes that Shorty had outlined over at Harbor Lights as ways to grab quick cash were. These were chicken feed for his needs, even his immediate needs, although some of the scams would fill the bill for a rum-dum or life-long skid row bum. But here is the secret, the deep secret that Billy Bailey held in his heart, after a few nights on bus station benches, cold spring night park benches, a night bout under the Andersen Bridge over by old haunt Harvard Square, and a few nights that he would rather not discuss just in case, he finally figured out, figured out kicking and screaming, that the world did not owe him a living and that if he wanted to survive past thirty he had better get the stardust and grit out of his eyes. But just this minute, just this undercover spring 1976 minute, he needed to work the Commons. “Hey, brother, hey sister, can you spare a dime?” “Pal, have you got an extra cigarette?”

Postscript: Not all wisdom ends happily, and not all good intentions grow to fruition. Yes, Billy paid off his debts to his friends, mostly. However, Billy Bailey was killed while “muling” in a drug war shoot-out in Juarez, Mexico in late 1979.