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
When Lady Day Chased The Blues Away, Again And Again-“The
Quintessential Billie Holiday (Volume 1-1933-1935)”-A CD Review
CD Review
By Seth Garth
The Quintessential Billie Holiday, Volume 1, 1933-1935,
[Sometimes I get in a Nelson Algren moment as here. But that
I mean I want to get down in the mud, get back to the roots, talk about the
days when it was not clear which way I was heading-a life of crime or its
cousin reading and writing to try to make sense of the world (just kidding on
the cousin part, okay so avoid a tweet storm please). Want to talk about the
blues since I am here reviewing a Lady Day, Billie Holiday of the orchid-ripped
hair. Want to talk about the people like Billie who lived on the edge, who fell
down, who got back up and fell down again. Yeah, the ones Nelson Algren he of
the Walk On The Wild Side, Man With The
Golden Arm talked about, the Frank Machines, the Dove Linkhorns, the people
I came from if the truth be told.
I swear I don’t to this day understand what those people I
talked to several years ago that I noted below who wrote Billie off as some
long-gone junkie of no account. Not after she saved many a day for me when I
was blue, maybe beyond blue, maybe ready to meet the dawn turned into night, if
you really want to know. See even a stone-cold junkie has the capacity to give
something-if she or he has some talent. But here is what the squares and by
that I include those dunces who dismissed Billie out of hand, didn’t want to
hear how she “saved” me on many a misbegotten tough day or estimate, fathom
what pain she had to endure to give what she could give. Maybe some people have
become so sanitized, so vanilla they know not of what I speak when I talks
about Lester Young blowing that seldom attained high white note every
instrumentalist seeks out to the damn China Seas. Don’t know what it took even
on good days for Billie to run the rack, to pick up her head long enough to do
what she had to. Who gives a fuck, the old corner boy from the hard-pressed
Acre section of downtrodden North Adamsville coming out with that fuck word,
whether she needed the fixer man to come and get her well when you think about
it for a minute. Yeah, no wait let me go and listen to about two hours of
Billie rather than slip into a blue funk and forget that Nelson Algren spoke
for the little voiceless people who knew their Billie backward and forward.
Knew her junkie pain, needed their own fixer man to get well.
For the record I will say it here again today-if I had had
the capacity to do so I would have provided Billie with all the dope she
needed-be her every loving fixer man just so she could chase my weary blues
away. That’s the ticket. The hell with the squares. S.G.]
Everybody, that meaning everybody who knows anything about the
blues knows of legendary blue singer Billie Holiday. Knew she was tied up hard
with junkie fever, knee deep in junk. Knew that information either from having
read her biography, the liner notes on her records (vinyl for those who have
not become hip to the beauties of that old-fashion way to produce recordings in
the recent retro revival of that method), newspaper obituaries, or from the
1970s film starring Diana Ross (lead singer of Motown’s Supremes). So everybody
knew that Lady Day had come up the hard way, had had a hard time with men in
her life and had plenty of trouble with junk, with heroin. Had turned her into
some hustling gal with dark lights out of a Nelson Algren story about her daddy
making her blues go away, had the “fixer” man making the pain going away for a
moment.
Yeah, that is the sad part, the life and times part. But if
you listen to this CD under review like the other ones in this series and other
compilations that I am reviewing at this time while I am in a “from hunger”
wanting habits mood about Lady Day’s work like I get into every once in a while
about music that moved me, spoke to me. In this second volume in the series you
will also know why in the first part of the 21st century guys like
me are still reviewing her work, still haunted by that voice, by that
meaningful pause between notes that carried you to a different place, by that
slight hush as she envelopes a song which kept your own blues at bay. I repeat
kept your blues away whatever she suffered to bring that sentiment forward.
That last statement, those last two sentences are really
what I want to hone in on here since Billie Holiday is an acquired taste, and a
taste which grows on you as you settle in to listen to whole albums rather than
a single selection spending half the night turning over vinyl, flipping tapes,
changing CDs if you don’t have a multiple CD recorder, or grabbing the dial on
an MP3 player. Here is my god’s honest truth though. Many a blue night when I
was young, hell, now too, I would play Billie for hours, tune that vinyl over
in my case, and my own silly blues would kind of evaporate. Nice right.
Here is the not nice part, maybe better the not respectful
part for a sanctified woman’s voice and spirit. Once a few years ago I was talking to some
young people about Billie and, maybe under the influence of the Diana Ross film
or from their disapproving parents, kind of wrote her off as just another
junkie gone to seed. I shocked them, I think, when I said if I had had the
opportunity I would have given Billie all the dope she wanted just for taking
my own bluesaway. That is why we still
listen to that sultry, slinky, sexy voice today.
Is everything in this CD or in her overall work the cat’s
meow. No, toward the end in the 1950s you can tell her voice was hanging by a
thread under the strain of all her troubles, legal and medical. But in the
1930s, the time of her time, covering Cole Porter, Gershwin and Jerome Kern
songs with a little Johnny Mercer thrown in, the time of Tin Pan Alley songs
which seem to have almost been written just for her she had that certain “it”
which cannot be defined but only accepted, accepted gratefully. This first may
be a little more uneven that her later work when she teamed up with serious
jazz and blues players like the aforementioned Lester Young blowing out high
white notes to the China seas while she basked in the glow of the lyrics. But just
check out Miss Brown To You, What a
Little Moonlight Can Do, and the classic Sunbonnet Blue and you will get an idea of what I am talking about.
And maybe get your own blues chased away
The 50th Anniversary Of The Anti-Vietnam War March On The Pentagon (1967)-With Norman Mailer’s “Armies Of The Night” In Mind (1968)
By Political Commentator Frank Jackman
Earlier this year driven by my old corner boys, Alex James and Sam Lowell, I had begun to write some pieces in this space about things that happened in a key 1960s year, 1967. The genesis of this work has been based on of all things a business trip that Alex took to San Francisco early this spring. While there he noted on one of the ubiquitous mass transit buses that crisscross the city an advertisement for an exhibition at the de Young Art Museum located in Golden Gate Park. That exhibition The Summer of Love, 1967 had him cutting short a meeting one afternoon in order to see what it was all about. See if he was just having a “flashback” (not uncommon back the day for those who did not take their Kool-Aid straight but laced with mysterious chemical imbalances). What it was all about aside the nostalgia effect for members of the now ragtag Generation of ‘68 (an AARP-worthy generation but I prefer the less commercial Generation of ’68 to tag that crowd, my crowd) an entire floor’s worth of concert poster art, hippy fashion, music and photographs of that noteworthy year in the lives of some of those who came of age in the turbulent 1960s. The reason for Alex playing hooky from his important business meeting was that he had actually been out there that year, had been out in Haight-Ashbury-etched 1967) and had stayed and imbibed deeply of the counter-culture for a couple of years after that. (Imbibed not in running out of steam fast Frisco but on a magical mystery tour yellow brick road former school bus courtesy of Captain Crunch which went up and down the West Coast searching, hell, just searching.)
Alex had not been the only one who had been smitten by the Summer of Love revival bug because when he returned to Riverdale outside of Boston where he now lives he gathered up all of the corner boys from growing up North Adamsville still standing to talk about, and do something about, commemorating the event. His first contact was with Sam Lowell the old film critic who also happened to have gone out there and spent I think about a year, maybe a little more. As had most of the old corner boys for various lengths of time usually a few months. Except me which I will explain in a minute. Alex’s idea when he gathered all of us together was to put up a small commemoration book in honor of the late Peter Paul Markin with memory pieces by each of us. See Markin, always known as “Scribe” after he was dubbed that by our leader Frankie Riley (now a big time lawyer with a swanky office in downtown Boston but then poor as a church mouse and nothing but a serious con artist), was the first guy to go out there when he sensed that the winds of change he kept yakking about around the corner on desolate Friday and Saturday nights when we had no dough, no girls, no cars and no chance of getting any of those quickly were coming west to east.
Once everybody agreed to do the book Alex contacted his youngest brother Zack, the fairly well known writer, to edit and organize the project. I had agreed to help as well. The reason I had refused to go to San Francisco then had been that I was in the throes of trying to put together a career as a political operative by attempting to get Robert Kennedy to run against that naked sneak thief of a sitting President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had us neck deep in the big muddy of Vietnam and so I had no truck with hippies, druggies or “music is the revolution” types like those who filled the desperate streets around Haight-Ashbury. Then. Zack did a very good job and we are proud of tribute to the not forgotten still lamented late Scribe who really was a mad man character and maybe if he had not got caught up in the Army, in being drafted, in being sent to Vietnam which threw him off kilter when he got back to the real world he might still be around to tell us what the next big trend will be.
[I should mention here for the young or clueless something about corner boy culture since you no longer see guys hanging around corners at variety stores, pizza parlors, bowling alleys and the like as that scene has successively been replaced by mall “rat-dom” and now “don’t look up from the fucking phone” social media. (Don’t see gals either for the same reasons although back in the day the gals hanging around corners were with guys, glued to guys, otherwise they generally were inside say Doc’s Drugstore soda fountain or the pizza parlor spending their who knows where they got it discretionary money throwing dimes and quarters into the jukebox to play the latest heartthrob tunes). Corner boy-dom was a rite of passage in working class neighborhoods like the Acre section of North Adamsville where we grew up having certain corners passed on to you as you grew older like our progression from Harry’s Variety in elementary school to Doc’s Drugstore in junior high to Tonio Pizza Parlor in high school and beyond.
You, we, I hung on the corner for a very simple reason in those days- no dough. No serious dough although everybody had some scam from roughing up younger siblings for coin or a back door sneak at mother’s pocketbook to the midnight creep which best be left at that since who knows if the statute of limitations has run out on those high crimes and misdemeanors. No dough meant no car, meant nowhere in golden age of the automobile America where any guy with a car, handsome or ugly, had some young thing sitting very close in the front seat of his Chevy something. Meant even if you could find a girl who didn’t mind taking the bus or walking you had no money for dates even for a cheapjack movie date much less say hitting a drive-n restaurant. And no dates meant no girls hovering around which meant the corner with that cohort of guys in the same condition as you. Meant having a bunch of sullen surly guys with time on their hands, lust and larceny in their hearts, and an overweening desire to fall outside the law. That most of us survived is amazing but it was a close thing, very close.]
That initial impetus to think about 1967 at a time when I was in love with Robert Kennedy and that kind of grass-roots progressive politics of which we see very little now led me to do a piece about the first Monterrey International Pops Festival held at the beginning of that summer and where revered names for the Generation of ’68 like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Ravi Shankar (he, additionally the papa of today’s Norah Jones) had made their first big splashes. I always loved the music, always loved to go to concerts, generally free or cheap concerts if you can believe that in these days of nostalgia high-priced tickets for groups and singles well beyond their primes on Boston Common and elsewhere and hear what was what. Those were the days when I heard the first stirrings, and maybe half wanted to believe it was true, that “the music was the revolution.” That somehow new sounds and the emerging lifestyle, the hippie lifestyle of communal sharing, good vibes and easy going would be the impetus for a new ethos. That some idea of “dropping out” of bourgeois society (not a term I would have used then but which now kind of fits what I am getting at) would bring the new utopia onto our doorsteps. The Scribe and the others at the time having been through the initial stages of the Summer of Love out in the West were filled with such ideas to the extent that they could articulate such a vision. (The Scribe was able to and did at the time and carried the others with him.) I was having none of it, or very little, since at that time I neither believed in any kind of revolution nor did I think that society needed anything more than tweaking (with me helping the throw the tweak switch.) I argued against and I believe, unfortunately, that those who professed the “music is the revolution” idea have been shown to have been totally over their heads and left no serious mark on the social fabric.
There was another trend, another 50th anniversary trend which I would argue was counter-posed to the above mentioned theory. This event is the 50th anniversary of the famous, or infamous, March on the Pentagon in October of that year. The one that the late writer Norman Mailer wrote about in his well-received and highly honored The Armies Of The Night a review of which I have reposted elsewhere on this blog. That event was not the first massive Washington anti-Vietnam War demonstration (the first had been in New York in 1965) nor the first to feature acts of civil disobedience but it was the first threshing out, the first understanding that something big was going to be needed to stop the fucking war. That the government was not going to stop the madness on its own hook. Moreover that despite whatever residue remained from the intoxicating Summer of Love “dropping out” under the rubric of the “music is the revolution” mantra was not going to create the “newer world” in the words of the English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson those of us from supporters of Robert Kennedy to the left were seeking.
Of course as described in detail including an overabundance of detail about his own part, his own arrest in the melee by Mailer this effort was very much a helter-skelter thing with mixed results. The key idea to be taken by any serious anti-war militants that the government (run by either major party as it later turned) was going to viciously thwart any such people’s efforts to bring an end to the damn thing. There would be a parting of the ways essentially not only between “drop out” and “confrontation” partisans but within the confrontationists camp a split over peaceful mass marches and more vigorous actions. The March on the Pentagon was the laboratory for all those ideas from “levitating” the place to a guerilla warfare-type actions to shut the place down.
Of course today I am commemorating an event, not for the first time, that at the time I was adamantly opposed to, saw as very disruptive to the attempts by first Senator Eugene McCarthy and his insurgent run at Lyndon Baines Johnson and later after Johnson’s withdrawal from candidacy by Robert Kennedy to solve this problem through parliamentary means. In short while I was vaguely anti-war, or thought I was only at that level, I did not participate in or honor such efforts. The turning point would be later, the next year as it turned out, when I was drafted by my “friends and neighbors” at the Draft Board in North Adamsville (that greeting was how the letter of induction actually started) and accepted induction even if half-heartedly in the U.S. Army. I have written, and others have written as well, about my complete turnaround once I was inducted and of my two year struggle including serious stockade time for refusing to go to Vietnam. One of the books I read during that time was Mailer’s The Armies Of The Night taking to heart some of the lessons from that experience (although still a bit put off by the centrality of Mailer’s ego in the whole process).
Here is the payoff though. In the spring of 1971 shortly after I had been released from the Army I started hanging around with a bunch of Cambridge radicals. The big idea at the time was to have a massive May Day civil disobedience action in Washington around the theme-“if the government does not shut down the war, we will shut down the government.” I did not even think twice about not going, of not getting arrested and of thinking that such as action was desperately necessary. Although I drew some other conclusions about how to end war from that aborted experience I saw it as a continuation of that struggle at the Pentagon in 1967. And whatever else I never regretted my actions in 1971 and I hope those who were at the Pentagon in 1967 have not either, not in these desperate times.
Friday, October 01, 2021
An
Encore Salute To The Untold Stories Of The Working- Class 1960s Radicals-“The
Sam And Ralph Stories”-
Hard Times Come Again No More -From The Sam
Eaton-Ralph Morris Series-From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
Allan Jackson, editor The Sam And Ralph Stories -New General Introduction
[As my replacement Greg Green, whom
I brought in from American Film Gazette
originally to handle the day to day site operations while I concentrated on
editing but who led a successful revolt against my regime based on the wishes
of the younger writers to as they said at the time not be slaves to the 1960s
upheavals a time which they only knew second or third hand, mentioned in his
general introduction above some of the series I initiated were/are worth an
encore presentation. The Sam and Ralph
Stories are one such series and as we go along I will try to describe why
this series was an important testament to an unheralded segment of the mass
movements of the 1960s-the radicalized white working- class kids who certainly
made up a significant component of the Vietnam War soldiery, some of who were
like Sam and Ralph forever after suspicious of every governmental war cry. Who also
somewhat belatedly got caught up in the second wave rock and roll revival which
emerged under the general slogan of “drug, sex and rock and roll” which
represented a vast sea change for attitudes about a lot of things that under
ordinary circumstances would have had them merely replicating their parents’
ethos and fate.
As I said I will describe that
transformation in future segment introductions but today since it is my “dime”
I want to once again clear up some misapprehensions about what has gone on over
the past year or so in the interest of informing the readership, as Greg Green
has staked his standing at this publication on doing to insure his own survival,
about what goes on behind the scenes in the publishing business. This would not
have been necessary after the big flap when Greg tried an “end around”
something that I and every other editor worth her or his salt have tried as
well and have somebody else, here commentator and my old high school friend
Frank Jackman, act as general introducer of The
Roots Is The Tootsrock and roll
coming of age series that I believe is one of the best productions I have ever
worked on. That got writers, young and old, with me or against me, led by Sam
Lowell, another of my old high school friends, who had been the decisive vote
against me in the “vote of no confidence” which ended my regime up in arms. I
have forgiven Sam, and others, as I knew full well from the time I entered into
the business that at best it was a cutthroat survival of the fittest racket.
(Not only have I forgiven Sam but I am in his corner in his recent struggles
with young up and coming by-line writer Sarah Lemoyne who is being guided
through the shoals by another old high school friend Seth Garth as she attempts
to make her way up the film critic food chain, probably the most vicious
segment of the business where a thousand knives wait the unwary from so-called
fellow reviewers.) The upshot of that controversy was that Greg had to back off
and let me finish the introducing the series for which after all I had been
present at the creation.
That would have been the end of it
but once we successfully, and thankfully by Greg who gave me not only kudos
around the water cooler but a nice honorarium, concluded that series encore in
the early summer of 2018 he found another way to cut me. Going through the
archives of this publication to try to stabilize the readership after doing
some “holy goof” stuff like having serious writers, young and old, reviewing
films based on comic book characters, the latest in video games and graphic
novels with no success forgetting the cardinal rule of the post-Internet world
that the younger set get their information from other sources than old line
academic- driven websites and don’t read beyond their techie tools Greg found
another series, the one highlighted here, that intrigued him for an encore
presentation. This is where Greg proved only too human since he once again
attempted an “end around,” by having Josh Breslin, another old friend whom I
meet in the Summer of Love, 1967 out in San Francisco, introduce the series
citing my unavailability as the reason although paying attention to the fact
that I had sweated bullets over that one as well.
This time though the Editorial
Board, now headed by Sam Lowell, intervened even before Greg could approach
Josh for the assignment. This Ed Board was instituted after my departure to
insure the operation would not descend, Sam’s word actually, into the so-called
autocratic one-person rule that had been the norm under my regime. They told
Greg to call me back in on the encore project or to forget it. I would not have
put up with such a suggestion from an overriding Ed Board and would have
willingly bowed out if anybody had tried to undermine me that way. I can
understand fully Greg’s desire to cast me to the deeps, have done with me as in
my time I did as well knowing others in the food chain would see this as their
opportunity to move up.
That part I had no problem with,
told Greg exactly that. What bothered me was the continuing “urban legend”
about what I had done, where I had gone after that decisive vote of no
confidence. Greg continued, may continue today, to fuel the rumors that not only
after my initial demise but after finishing up the Roots Is The Toots series I had gone back out West to Utah of all
places to work for the Mormons, or to Frisco to hook up with my old flame
Madame La Rue running that high-end whorehouse I had staked her to in the old days,
or was running around with another old high school pal, Miss Judy Garland, aka
Timmy Riley the high priestess of the drag queen set out in that same town whom
I also helped stake tohis high-end
tourist attraction cabaret. All nonsense, I was working on my memoir up in
Maine, up in Olde Saco where Josh grew up and which I fell in love with when he
first showed me his hometown and its ocean views.
If the reader can bear the weight of
this final reckoning let me clear the air on all three subjects on the
so-called Western trail. Before that though I admit, admit freely that despite
all the money I have made, editing, doing a million pieces under various
aliases and monikers, ballooning up 3000 word articles to 10,000 and having the
publishers fully pay despite the need for editing for the latter in the days
before the Guild when you worked by the word, accepting articles which I
clearly knew were just ripped of the AP feed and sending them along as gold I
had no dough, none when I was dethroned. Reason, perfectly sane reason,
although maybe not, three ex-wives with alimony blues and a parcel of kids, a
brood if you like who were in thrall to the college tuition vultures.
Tapped out in the East for a lot of
reasons I did head west the first time looking for work. Landed in Utah when I
ran out of dough, and did, DID, try to get a job on the Salt Lake Star and would have had it too except two things somebody
there, some friend of Mitt Romney, heard I was looking for work and nixed the
whole thing once they read the articles I had written mocking Mitt and his
white underwear world as Massachusetts governor and 2012 presidential candidate.
So it was with bitter irony when I heard that Greg had retailed the
preposterous idea that I would now seek a job shilling for dear white undie
Mitt as press agent in his run for the open Utah United States Senate seat.
Here is where everybody should gasp though at the whole Utah fantasy-these
Mormons stick close together, probably ingrained in them from Joseph Smith
days, and don’t hire goddam atheists and radicals, don’t hire outside the
religion if they can help it. You probably had to have slept with one of Joseph
Smith’s or Brigham Young’s wives to even get one foot in the door. Done.
The helping Madame La Rue, real name
of no interest or need to mention,running her high-end exclusive whorehouse out in Half Moon Bay at least
had some credence since I had staked her to some dough to get started after the
downfall of the 1960s sent her back to her real world, the world of a high
class hooker who was slumming with “hippies” for a while when it looked like our
dreams were going to be deterred in in the ebbtide. We had been hot and heavy
lovers, although never married except on some hazed drug-fogged concert night
when I think Josh Breslin “married” us and sent us on a “honeymoon” with a
fistful of cocaine. Down on dough I hit her up for some which she gave gladly,
said it was interest on the “loan: she never repaid and let me stay at her place
for a while until I had to move on. Done
The whole drag queen idea tells me
that whoever started this damn lie knew nothing about my growing up days and
had either seen me in The Totem, Timmy Riley’s aka Miss Judy Garland’s drinking
with a few drag queen who worked and drew the wrong conclusions or was out to
slander and libel me for some other nefarious reason. See Miss Judy Garland is
the very successful drag queen and gay man Timmy Riley from the old
neighborhood who fled to Frisco when he could no longer hide his sexual
identity and preferences. To our great shock since Timmy had been the out-front
gay-basher of our crowd, our working-class corner boy gay-bashing crowd. I had
lent, after getting religion rather late on the LGBTQ question, Timmy the money
to buy his first drag queen cabaret on Bay Street and Timmy was kind enough to
stake me to some money and a roof before I decided I had to head back East.
Done.
But enough about me.This is about two other working- class guys,
Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris, met along life’s road one from Carver about fifty
miles away from where Seth, Sam, Timmy and a bunch of other guys grew up and
learned the “normal” working-class ethos-and broke, tentatively at times, from
that same straitjacket and from Troy, New York. Funny Troy, Carver, North
Adamsville, and Josh’s old mill town Olde Saco all down-in-the-mouth working
class towns still produced in exceptional times a clot of guys who got caught
up in the turmoil of their times-and lived to tell the tale. I am proud to
introduce this encore presentation and will have plenty more to say about Sam
and Ralph in future segments.]
***********
Hard Times Come Again
No More -From The Sam Eaton-Ralph Morris
Series
From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
As long as Sam Eaton
and Ralph Morris had known each other they never spent much time or effort
discussing their early lives, the events and happenstances of their coming of
age. Maybe it was because they shared many personal similarities. Like their
doggedness in pursuit when something important was on the line as it had been
when Sam had vowed to fight against the war in Vietnam after his best friend,
Jeff Mullins, who had been killed on the benighted battlefield there begged him
in letters home to tell people what was really going on if he did not get back
and Ralph having served in Vietnam had turned against the war that he had
fought and tried to stop it every way he knew how and both men now in their
sixties having put their lives on the line back then had stuck with the better
instincts of their natures and were still fighting the good fight against the
American government’s endless wars. Like their willingness to forgo life’s
simple pleasures in order to provide for their families, a trait they had picked
up from their own hard-working if distance fathers (they in turn if truth be
told, or if you asked the collective broods of Eaton and Morris kids, courtesy
respectively of two marriages and two divorces apiece, were hard-working and
distance as well, more than a couple of them mad as hell about it too and the
cause some periodic mutual estrangements). Like, to speak of the negative side,
to speak of the effects of their hard-scrabble existences and the pull of other
guys when they were young their delights in the small larcenies of their high
school corner boy existences in their respective growing up towns in order to
satisfy some hunger. Those “sins” (since both had been brought up in the Roman
Catholic religion, a religion known for categorizing sins, great and small),
made a close call, six, two and even, whether they would succeed or wind up in
some jail doing successive nickels and dimes in the “life” (really not so small
larcenies when one realizes that these were burglaries of homes, one of which
in Sam’s crowd had been committed with at least one gun, if in the pocket, at
least at the ready).
Maybe it was the
Catholic reticence to speak of personal matters, personal sexual manners with
another male (probably Catholic female too on that side but let’s stick to male
here) both having come up “old school” working-class Catholics when that meant
something before Vatican II in the 1960s when the “s” word was not used in
polite society, not used either, God no, from the pulpit (even when discussion
came up of the obligation to, unlike the bloody Protestants with their two
point three children, propagate the faith; have scads of children to bump up
the Catholic population of the world). Maybe closer to home, to domestic home
life, it was the “theory,” probably honored more in the breech that the
observance, of “not airing one’s dirty linen in public” drilled into them by
their respective maternal grandmothers, especially when the “s” word was
involved (certainly no parents gave the slightest clues on that subject
probably assuming that the birds and the bees story line would suffice and both
men learned like millions of their generation of ’68 kindred about sex on the
streets, most of it erroneous or damn right dangerous).
Maybe,
and this was probably closer to the core than the other possibilities, men of
their generation, men of the generation of ’68 as Sam, the more literary of the
two called their generation after the decisive year when all hell broke loose,
for good or evil, mostly evil, did not as a rule speak much about private
hurts, about personal issues unlike the subsequent generations who seemingly to
both men’samazement (and occasional
chagrin) kept their lives as open books in a more confessional time. That
“generation of ’68” designation by the way picked up from the hard fact that
that seminal year of 1968, a year when the Tet offensive by the Viet Cong and
their allies put in shambles the lie that we (meaning the United States
government) were winning that vicious bloodstained honor-less war, to the
results in New Hampshire which caused Lyndon Baines Johnson, the sitting
President to run for cover down in Texas somewhere after being beaten like a
gong by a quirky Irish poet from the Midwest and a band of wayward troubadours
from all over, mainly the seething college campuses, to the death of the
post-racial society dream as advertised by the slain Doctor Martin Luther King,
to the barricade days in Paris where for once and all the limits of what
wayward students could do without substantial allies in bringing down a
reactionary government, to the death of the search for a “newer world” as
advertised by the slain Robert F. Kennedy, to the war-circus of the Democratic
National Convention in Chicago which put paid to any notion that any newer world
would come without the spilling of rivers of blood, to the election of Richard
Milhous Nixon which meant that we had seen the high side go under, that the
promise of the flamboyant 1960s was veering toward an ebb tide.
So the two men never
spoke of various romantic interests. Never spoke of little rendezvous or
trysts, never spoke of their two respective divorces much beyond recording the
facts of the disengagements, and the animosity of the settlements which made
nobody happy except the lawyers (although neither men were gripping since Sam’s
old corner boy leader Frankie Riley performed “miracles” to get both men out
from under the worse initial terms). Never spoke much about the difficulties of
fatherhood for men who were so driven by the “big picture” world around them
and, never spoke about the deep-seeded things that drove them both to
distraction. At least that stance was true in their younger days when they had
more than enough on their plates to try to keep the dwindling numbers committed
to an all-out fight against the American military behemoth that had in a
strange manner brought them together.
Maybe too it could
have been the way that they had “met,” that strange manner, a story that they
have endlessly repeated in one form or another and which had been told so many
times by Sam mostly in the old days in small alternative presses and magazines
and more recently in 1960s-related blogs that even they confessed that
everybody must be “bored” with the damn thing by now. So only the barest outline
will suffice here since their meeting is not particularly relevant to the story
except to help sort out this reticence about relationships business. Sam, an
active opponent of the Vietnam War, and Ralph an ex-soldier of that war who had
turned against the war after eighteen months of duty there and become an
anti-war activist in his turn with Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW)
after being discharged from the Army “met” in RFK Stadium in Washington on May
Day 1971 when they were down there with their respective groups trying to as
the slogan of the time went “shut down the government, if the government did
not shut down the war.”
For their ill-advised
efforts they and thousands of others were tear-gassed, billy-clubbed and sent
to the bastinado (ill-advised in that they did not have nearly enough people on
hand and were incredibly naĂŻve about the ability and willingness of the
government to do any dirty deed to keep their power including herding masses of
protestors into closed holding areas to be forgotten if possible although Ralph
always had a sneaking suspicion the government would not have been unhappy
seeing those bodies floating face down in the Potomac). Sam and Ralph met on
the floor of the stadium and since they had several days to get acquainted were
drawn to each other by their working-class background, their budding politics,
and their mutual desire to “seek a newer world” as some old English poet once
said. And so they had stuck together, almost like blood brothers although no
silly ceremony was involved,stuck
politically mostly, through work in various peace organizations and ad hoc anti-war committees fighting the
good fight along with dwindling numbers of fellow activists for the past forty
plus years.
There were thick and
thin times along the way as Ralph stayed close to home in Troy, New York
working in his father’s high-precision electrical shop which he eventually took
over and had just recently passed on to his youngest son and Sam had stayed in
the Greater Boston area having grown up in Carver about thirty miles south of
Boston building up a printing business that he had started from scratch and
from which he in turn had just turned over to his more modern tech savvy print-imaging
son, Jeff. The pair would periodically take turns visiting each other sometimes
with families in tow, sometimes not and were always available to back each
other up when some anti-war or other progressive action needed additional warm
bodies in Boston, New York or when a national call came from Washington. Lately
now that they were both retired from the day to day operations of their
respective businesses and also now both after their last respective divorces
“single” they have had more time to visit each other.
It had been on
Ralph’s last visit to Sam who now resided in Cambridge that he tentatively
broached to him his interest in the genesis of a term Sam had always used,
“wanting habits” as in “I had my wanting habits on” when he was talking about
wanting some maybe attainable, maybe not but which caused some ache, some pain,
created some hole in him by not having the damn thing just in the way he said
it. Of course maybe Ralph had been “rum brave” that night since he had asked
the question while he and Sam were cutting up old touches at “Jack’s” in
Cambridge a few blocks from Sam’s place and were drinking high-shelf whisky at
the time. That high shelf whisky detail is important to the story if only by
inference since in their younger days when they were down on their luck or
times were tight they would drink low-shelf rotgut whisky or worst to get them
through some frost-bitten night. Now they could afford the booze from the
top-shelf behind Jimmy the bartender’s back. Of course as well since both men
had been attached to music since childhood the reason besides being close to
home that Sam liked to hang at Jack’s was that it had a jukebox stacked full of
old time tunes that you could not find otherwise outside of maybe Googling
YouTube these days.
The selection on the
juke when Ralph posed the question had been the Mississippi Sheiks’ Rent Day Blues, a personal favorite of
Sam’s, about how the narrator in the song had no chance in hell to make the
rent and the rent collector man was at the door. Ralph had mentioned to Sam that
at least his family had never had to worry about that problem, as tough as
money times were before his father landed some contracts to do electrical work
for the biggest concern in the area, General Electric. Ralph’s family had been
the epitome of 1950s “golden age” working-class attitudes buying into the Cold
War red scare every child under the desk in case the Russkies blow the big one,
the atomic bomb, keep the damn n----rs out of the neighborhood, get ahead but
not too far ahead and all the other aspects of that ethos but they also had
enough dough to not need to have every penny accounted for and begrudged. Sam
looked stunned for a moment as Ralph described his childhood existence and told
Ralph that while they were both working-class guys coming up that his family
lived much closer to the depths of society, closer to the place where the
working poor of Carver met the con men, rip-off artists, drifters, grifters, midnight
sifters and refuge of society, down in the projects, not a pretty place.
Ralph, at first,
could not see where Sam was going with the talk but then Sam let out some of
the details. See his father, Thornton, had been nothing but an uneducated
hillbilly from down in the coalmining country in Appalachia, Kentucky, had
worked the mines himself. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor he had jumped
in with both hands and feet as a Marine seeing action, seeing plenty of action
although Sam who had been off and on estranged from his family for many years
before they had passed away did not find this out until later after his father
died from an uncle, in all the big Pacific War battles they teach in high
school. Thornton never ever talked about his war that much but did say one time
when they were on speaking terms that between fighting the “Nips” (Thornton’s
term popular among American G.I.s who faced the Japanese on the islands) and
the coal barons he would take the former, the former gladly. Before Thornton
was demobilized he had been assigned to the big naval shipyard over in Hingham,
not far from Carver where his mother grew up. His mother, Delores, due to
wartime shortages of manpower had worked in the offices there. One USO dance
night they met, subsequently fell in love and were married and thereafter had a
brood of five boys close together. Maybe not a today story but not that
uncommon then.
But go back to that
part about Sam’s father’s heritage, about coal-mining country. Where the hell
in all the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was there room for a hard-working
coalminer, a coal miner’s son. Delores had made it clear she was not moving
down to the hills and hollows of Kentucky after one brief shocking humiliating
trip there to meet Thornton’s kin, his expression, and he had no feeling for
the place after being out in the big world so their fates hinged on Carver, or
Massachusetts anyway. They took a small apartment in the Tappan section of
Carver, the section on the edge of where the poor, the poor in Carver being the
“boggers,” those who worked the cranberry bogs in season that the town was
famous for, and the, what did Marx call them, the lumpen, the refuge of society
meet. As more boys came they doubled up on everything but there is no air to
breathe when seven people trample over each other in a small space. Moreover
Thornton in the throes of the 1950s “golden age of the American worker” got
left behind; was inevitably the last hired, first fired and was reduced to
whatever was left, including time served in the bogs ( a personal affront to
whatever dignities Delores had since she had been taught to despise the
“boggers” in her polite society home).
That hand-to-mouth
existence took its toll. At some point after repeatedly dodging the rent
collector man the Eaton family was evicted from their small private apartment and
they were reduced to the heap, the Carver public housing projects, the lowest
of the low and recognized by one and all as such. Here is where that view of
the world Sam assimilated got formed. The never having money, the battle of the
six nights straight of oatmeal for supper and no lunch (in those days before
the school lunch programs mercifully spared the worst of the hungers), some
daysof nothing to eat but patience, the
passing down of the too larger-sized older brothers’ clothing bought by a
desperate mother at the Bargain Center and which had been out of fashion for
many a year (causing baiting by the non-projects classmates who lived up the
road about shanty Irish and worse, about being a “bogger’s” son).
While Sam was talking
he suddenly remembered, as an example of how tough things were, one time to
impress some girl, a non-projects girl, a daughter of a middle class
professional man he thought, he had cut up his pants to seem like a real farmer
at some school square dance and Delores beat him with a belt buckle screaming
how dare he ruin the only other pair of pants that he owned. And that was not
the only beating Sam took as Delores, who handled discipline, to spare the ever
weary hard-pressed Thornton, became overwhelmed with the care of five strapping
boys. And so Sam graduated to the “clip” at first to get some spare dough and
later those larcenies that almost got him into the county clink doing nickels
and dimes. After that spiel Sam buttoned up, would say no more as if to say
that if he did then he would be far too exposed to the glare of the world’s
eyes even if only Ralph’s.
Ralph, ever being
Ralph, thought for a couple of minutes about what Sam had disclosed and then
simply said-“Sam, you earned your ‘wanting habits,’ earned them the hard way. I
don’t need to know any more” Enough said.