Once Again, The Trials and Tribulations of Lance Lawrence-The Senior Set On-Line Dating Woes

Once Again, The Trials and Tribulations of Lance Lawrence-The Senior Set On-Line Dating Woes

...yeah, one night of sin is what I am praying for-Lance Lawrence 

By Seth Garth

Sam Lowell had to laugh about his old college roommate and lifelong friend Lance Lawrence as he walked home after another bout with Lance’s problem as described by him sitting at the bar at Joe Daley’s Grille in Cambridge. The problem: Lance Lawrence was running on empty in his latest quest to get a new female companion through this on-line dating service, Seniors Please, a service he had joined a few weeks after he had been issued his walking papers by his long-time companion, Minnie Murphy, who had to get out from under Lance’s jackboot and find herself, or whatever it was that had made them drift apart. Lance was never very reflective about why some women would even think of leaving him despite three, count them, three divorces and a million affairs (some of them during those marriages and grounds for divorce) and this latest serious boot from Minnie who persevered much longer than most, too long according to Sam who had always been at least half in love with her. Lance, whatever else his good qualities and they were plentiful as Sam always recognized had throughout his life always thought of himself as something on the order of god’s gift to women. Had the looks, charm, talk, and pure bullshit swagger to pull it off. More than once Sam had been jealous of those abilities, although not as much recently as Lance and he had gotten much closer after several years absence from each other’s lives.

Sam had to confess that the first time that Lance had mentioned his dilemma since Minnie had left for parts unknown one night a few weeks previously after another drinking bout at Joe’s that he was pretty non-plussed about it. Part of it was that Sam had been half in love with Minnie to no avail as he learned to his regret one drunken night when he had made his intentions clear and she had told him that she had feelings that way too but she was Lance’s woman. That was that. Part of it was that he figured it was just a momentary glitch in the legendary Lance’s prowess for charming and bedding women, a phenomenon that Sam had witnessed many times since the first time when they were assigned to be roommates freshman year and they had not gotten out of the Boston University Bookstore before Lance had some pretty freshman co-ed coaxed up into their Bay State Road dorm room “doing the do” as he called the act taking the term from the legendary bluesman Howlin’ Wolf that he had latched onto one night at a coffeehouse where the Wolf’s song was on the jukebox and the gal he was will got all horny when he repeated the words (by the way leaving Sam to wait around the bookstore killing time). 

The way Lance had figured his drought that night had been that this on-line dating business did not play to his up front and personal charm and chemistry when everything on-line depended on profiles and answers foolish non-descript questions that told nobody nothing. That night Lance had ended the evening giving Sam a blow by blow description of the odd-ball way these “mature” women that he might have the slightest interest in presented themselves on their profiles.

That was then though. Those were the days when Lance was just getting used to having to sweat to even get a response from the women on the site, at least any he would be interested in- others contacted him by the score. Now Lance was getting desperate since he not made one conquest, conquest meaning as it had been since he was probably about six getting into bed with some woman and having his way with her. Not from a lack of trying as the now seemingly defeated Lance told his tales of woe. Sam couldn’t decide whether he should, secretly, laugh or cry, laugh because the old bastard finally was getting his comeuppance after all the times he had left Sam in the lurch following the scent of some woman, cry because if the legendary Lance Lawrence was having trouble meeting women where would that leave the much shyer and less aggressive Sam (who had two divorces under his belt, one fairly recently, and was now “single” himself).     

Here is the litany as Lance played it out. The way this on-line dating game worked was that you put in your profile, photograph, answered some questions, inane or not, to give some unsuspecting woman a change to see if you were somebody she might be interested in. Additionally you put in your zip code, distance you would be willing to travel to see the lovely, and age range. Lance, now on the high side of 60 had made his range 50 to 65 although he tended to favor the younger side (his second and third wives were about ten years younger than him). Through all that “work” Lance first “connected” with a late 50s woman from Jamaica Plain, an up and coming neighborhood in Boston. Connected here meaning that he had sent her a message via the site that he was interested in “chatting” with her. And so they did almost constantly over a couple of days. Lance figured this was “pay-dirt,” the old guy still had it. That notion was further cemented in his head when she out of the blue invited him to go to Museum of Fine Arts with her since a new exhibit was opening up. Frankly Lance could have cared a rat’s ass about art (that expression Sam first heard Lance him use back in those freshman days, a carryover from his neighborhood days hanging out with the guys so you know what king of guys those guys were) but figured she was just looking for a neutral spot for them to meet.

So he went along, found the exhibit, and her, interesting and bought her dinner. A pleasant day in which he figured he would play it cool and not try his end-around play to get her in bed that day. They easily agreed to meet again soon. The second date wound up being at a bar where she wanted to watch a Patriot’s football game (he would find out later after many other searches that an amazing number of older women were interested in this sport and this team for god knows what reason). Fair enough although he had long ago given up watching sports on television, watch anything on television and could have given a rat’s ass about watching the game that day. That day also turned out to be pretty good once they got through the game. They agreed to stay in contact and plan for another date. He had asked her if she had wanted to go to his house for a drink but she deferred saying that they should go slow and easy not a good sign for the always impatient Lance. Slow and easy indeed since after that football date he did not hear from her again. Lance would not “lower himself,” his term, to call or e-mail her so that one went off into the sunset.              

Lance then spent a week or so busily sending messages to a scad of other women but nothing panned out mostly because the most interesting looking women had no qualms about leading their profiles with endless photographs of them with their grandchildren, pets, or projects. One had a lead photograph of her with her football player-sized son whose pose spoke of serious mayhem if anybody was unkind to his Mom. So no sale. A couple of weeks later he did go on another date with a fifty-something woman who had never been married and although she had her charms Lance had then vowed never to message any more never married women since they were never married probably because they were frigid or something, or at least beyond his charms. 

Of course in the “mature” searching for love racket everybody unlike the wistful and naïve young carries a ton of baggage, carries every possible quirk and idiosyncrasy and the next date proved that to be the case. Very seldom in his life had Lance when he saw the slightest chance of bedding some women whatever her looks, personality, or karma never missed an opportunity to play the game until the end. This next date though he threw in the towel after a quick hour in which he kept looking at his watch and trying to figure out how to escape once he realized this one was a bit crazed, had some social issues and would not, maybe could not stop blabbing about the signs of the Zodiac and how when she divined them for her and Lance all the stars were aligned or something like that. Jesus, Lance had looked at Sam with a stare like he was very glad to have escaped with his manhood intact. That was not the last of the goofs though, there would be one more, this one who claimed to be a spiritualist and some kind of Zen Buddhist freak who though everything that had happened, worse would happen in the future was perfect, was immutable. Yes, Lance said he would screen his “women” much more carefully as he expressed a longing for the good old days when there were in the flesh meetings and the glint in a woman’s eye would tell him to go forward or back off.

As Sam and Lance once again departed out the front door of Joe’s to go to their respective homes Lance, as he had on their first meeting over the august question of Lance’s current love life Lance yelled across the street, “I have to go home and check if Illy23 and Hotmama234 (on-line monikers likes Lance’s loveman345) had left a message for me.” Yeah, some things never change.       

HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-Honor The Historic Leader Of The Bolshevik Revolution-Vladimir Lenin

HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-Honor The Historic Leader Of The Bolshevik Revolution-Vladimir Lenin  

Every January leftists honor three revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in 1924, Karl Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered after leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin. I made my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German war budget in World War I in this space earlier (see review in April 2006 archives). I made some special points here last year about the life of Rosa Luxemburg (see review in January 2006 archives). This year it is appropriate, at a time when the young needs to find a few good heroes, to highlight the early struggles of Vladimir Lenin, the third L, to define himself politically. Probably the best way to do that is to look at Lenin’s experiences through the prism of his fellow revolutionary, early political opponent and eventual co-leader of the Bolshevik Revolution Leon Trotsky.

A Look At The Young Lenin By A Fellow Revolutionary

The Young Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Doubleday and Co., New York, 1972

The now slightly receding figure of the 20^th century Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin founder and leader of the Bolshevik Party and guiding light of the October 1917 Russian Revolution and the first attempt at creating a socialist society has been the subject to many biographies. Some of those efforts undertaken during the time of the former Soviet government dismantled in 1991-92, especially under the Stalin regime, bordered on or were merely the hagiographic. Others, reflecting the ups and downs of the post- World War II Cold War, painted an obscene diabolical picture, excluding Lenin’s horns, and in some cases not even attempting to exclude those. In virtually all cases these effort centered on Lenin’s life from the period of the rise of the Bolshevik Social Democratic faction in 1903 until his early death in 1924. In short, the early formative period of his life in the backwaters of provincial Russia rate a gloss over. Lenin’s fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky, although some ten years younger than him, tries to trace that early stage of his life in order to draw certain lessons. It is in that context that Trotsky’s work contains some important insights about the development of revolutionary figures and their beginnings.

Although Trotsky’s little work, originally intended to be part of a full biography of Lenin, never served its purpose of educating the youth during his lifetime and the story of it discovery is rather interesting one should note that this is neither a scholarly work in the traditional sense nor is it completely free from certain fawning over Lenin by Trotsky. Part of this was determined by the vicissitudes of the furious Trotsky-Stalin fights for the soul of the Russian Revolution as Trotsky tried to uncover the layers of misinformation about Lenin’s early life. Part of it resulted from Trotsky’s status of junior partner to Lenin and also to his late coming over to Bolshevism. And part of it is, frankly, to indirectly contrast Lenin’s and his own road to Marxism. That said, this partial biography stands up very well as an analysis of the times that the young Lenin lived in, the events that affected his development and the idiosyncrasies of his own personality that drove him toward revolutionary conclusions. In short, Trotsky’s work is a case study in the proposition that revolutionaries are made not born.

To a greater extent than would be true today in a celebrity-conscious world many parts of Lenin’s early life are just not verifiable. Partially that is due to the nature of record keeping in the Russia of the 19^th century. Partially it is because of the necessity to rely on not always reliable police records. Another part is that the average youth, and here Lenin was in some ways no exception, really have a limited noteworthy record to present for public inspection. That despite the best efforts of Soviet hagiography to make it otherwise. Nevertheless Trotsky does an admirable job of detailing the high and low lights of agrarian Russian society and the vagaries of the land question in the second half of the 19^thcentury. One should note that Trotsky grew up on a Ukrainian farm and therefore is no stranger to many of the same kind of problems that Lenin had to work through concerning the solution to the agrarian crisis, the peasant question. Most notably, is that the fight for the Russian revolution that everyone knew was coming could only be worked out through the fight for influence over the small industrial working class and socialism.

I would note that for the modern young reader that two things Trotsky analyzes are relevant. The first is the relationship between Lenin and his older brother Alexander who, when he became politicized, joined a remnant of the populist People’s Will terrorist organization and attempted to assassinate the Tsar. For his efforts he and his co-conspirators were hanged. I have always been intrigued by the effect that this event had on Lenin’s development. On the one hand, as a budding young intellectual, would Lenin have attempted to avenge his brother’s fate with his same revolutionary intellectual political program? Or would Lenin go another way to intersect the coming revolutionary either through its agrarian component or the budding Marxist Social Democratic element? We know the answer but Trotsky provides a nicely reasoned analysis of the various influences that were at work in the young Lenin. That alone is worth the price of admission here.

The other point I have already alluded to above. Revolutionaries are made not born, although particular life circumstances may create certain more favorable conditions. Soviet historians in their voluntarist hay day tried to make of Lenin a superhuman phenomenon- a fully formed Marxist intellectual from his early youth. Trotsky once again distills the essence of Lenin’s struggle to make sense of the world, the Russian world in the first instance, as he tries to find a way out the Russian political impasse. Trotsky’s work only goes up to 1892-93, the Samara period, the period before Lenin took off for Petersburg and greener pastures. He left Samara a fully committed Marxist but it would be many years, with many polemics and by using many political techniques before he himself became a Bolshevik, as we know it. And that, young friends, is a cautionary tale that can be taken into the 21^st century. Read on.

  

From The A Dimmed Elegy For The Late Peter Paul Markin Series- Tell Me Utah Phillips Have You Seen “Starlight On The Rails?”

From The A Dimmed Elegy For The Late Peter Paul Markin Series- Tell Me Utah Phillips Have You Seen “Starlight On The Rails?”

A New Introduction From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

A while back, a few months ago although the project had been percolating in his brain for the previous year or so after an incident reminded him how much he missed his old corner boy from the 1960s North Adamsville night, the late Peter Paul Markin, Bart Webber wrote up what he called, and rightly so I think, an elegy for Markin, A Dimmed Elegy For The Late Peter Paul Markin. That reminder had been triggered one night the year before when Bart took the visiting grandchildren of his son Lenny who now lived in New Haven, Connecticut and worked at Yale to Salducci’s ’ Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” in North Adamsville for some pizza and soda (that “up the Downs” not some quirky thing Bart made up but the actual name of the shopping area known by  that name to one and all not far from the high school although nobody ever knew exactly how it got that moniker). Of course that Salducci’s Pizza Parlor had been the local corner boy hang-out for Bart, Frankie Riley, Jimmy Jenkins, Johnny Callahan, Fran Rizzo, Markin, me and a roving cast of sometime corner boys depending on who we picked up (or who had ditched or been ditched by some faithless girl and thus had time to hang rather than spent endless hours prepping for dates, or going through “the work-out” down at Adamsville Beach in some car) before Tonio who treated Frankie Riley like a son sold the place to moved back to Italy and the new owners did not see “no account” (their description) corner boys as an asset to their family-friendly pizza dreams. The corner boys subsequently “hung” at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys, the ones on Thornton Street near the beach not the ones in Adamsville Center which was strictly for people who actually bowled, liked to anyway although that latter information is strictly on the side since what got Bart Webber in a lather was from Salducci times. 

Although Bart had not been in the place in years and it had changed hands several times since Tonio ran the place back in the early 1960 the décor, the pizza processing area complete with what looked like the same pizza ovens and most importantly the jukebox, the jukebox, man, were still intact (that jukebox selections composed of many “oldies but goodies” from that time not found on nostalgia compilations for the local clientele who bring their kids and grandkids in for pizza and soda, what else, although not three for a quarter like in the old days but a quarter a pop). That night a young guy, a high school kid really, was sitting with three guys and a couple of girls all also with the look of high school about them, was if not loudly then animatedly talking a mile a minute complete with about one thousand arcane facts to back him up about “a new breeze coming through the land,” about how he, they were going to save the planet, stop the wars, make the world a decent place to live in by people like him, them who had not made the mess but who had a chance now to clean things up (he, the kid didn’t say that “new breeze” thing but that is what he meant, meant in all sincerity).

Like Markin he went on for the time that Bart and his grand-kids entered until they left (and he still might be taking if he was really the ghost of Markin). And of course that talk, that mile a minute talk complete with those ersatz facts reminded Bart of the night (make that nights) when Markin held forth about the “new breeze coming” (his actual term) based on the iceberg tip of events like the fight for nuclear disarmament, the fight for black civil rights down south, the fight against the big bad brewing war happening in Southeast Asia, and the first trappings of the counter-culture with the shift-up in music to a disbelieving group of fellow corner boys who were just trying finish high school without winding up in jail for the midnight capers they pulled off to keep themselves in dough(engineered by that same Markin and pulled off by Frankie Riley’s magic). Yeah, so as the kids today say Bart was “stoked” to do something to bring back Markin’s memory, warts and all.             

Bart had thereafter approached me about doing the chore, about writing some big book memory thing  since we now live in the same town, the same suburban town which represents a small step up from our growing up in strictly working-class North Adamsville (and still is), Carver about thirty miles south of that town (and a town which had its own working-class history with its seasonal “boggers” who worked the cranberry bogs which originally made the town famous but is now a bedroom community for the high-tech firms on U.S. 495). Bart figured that since he had retired from the day to day operations of his print shop which was now being run by his oldest son, Jeff, and I was winding down my part in the law practice I had established long ago I would have plenty of time to write and he to “edit” and give suggestions. He said he was not a writer although he had plenty of ideas to contribute but that I who had spent a life-time writing as part of my job would have an easy time of it.

Bart under the illusion that writing dry as dust legal briefs for some equally dry as dust judge to read is the same as nailing down a righteous piece about an old time corner boy mad man relic of a by-gone era, with his mad talk, his mad dreams, his mad visions, who was as crooked as they come, who was as righteously for the “little guy” as a man could be, who had some Zen under the gun magic which made our nights easier and who I would not trust (and did not have to trust since we had the truly larcenous Frankie Riley to lead the way) to open a door sainted bastard. I turned him down flat which I will explain in a moment.

The way Bart presented that proposal deserves a little mention since he made the case one night when the remnant of Markin’s old comrades still alive and who still reside in the area, Frankie, Josh, Jack Callahan, Jimmy Jenkins, Bart and me were drinking now affordable high-shelf liquors at “Jack’s” in Cambridge near where Jimmy lives (that high-shelf liquor distinction important for old corner boys who survived and moved upa peg in the world who drank cheap Southern Comfort by the fistful pints and later rotgut maybe just processed whiskies from the very low-shelves). During the conversation, not for the first time, Bart mentioned that he was still haunted by the thought  he had had a few years before about the time that Markin had us in thrall one night out in Joshua Tree in 1972 when we were all high as kites on various drugs of choices and he, Markin, at first alone, and then with Josh began some strange Apache-like dance and they began to feel (at least according to Josh’s recollection) like those ancient warriors who tried to avenge their loses when white settlers had come to take their lands and we all for one moment that long ago night were able to sense what it was like to be warrior-avengers, righters of the world’s wrongs that Markin was always harping on.

Markin had that effect on the rest of us, was always tweaking us on some idea from small scale larcenies to drug-induced flame-outs. Yeah, that miserable, beautiful, so crooked he could not get his legs in his pants, son of a bitch, sainted bastard still is missed, still has guys from the old days moaning to high heaven about that lost. Bart insisted there was a story there, a story if only for us and someone (all eyes on me) should write it up.             

I can say all of that and say at the same time that I can say I couldn’t write the piece. See while at times Markin was like a brother to me and we treated each other as such he also could have his “pure evil” moments which the other corner boys either didn’t see, or didn’t want to see. These may be small things now on reflection but he was the guy who almost got me locked up one night, one summer night in 1966 before our senior year when Frankie who usually was the “on-site” manager of our small larcenies was out of town with his girlfriend. Markin figured since he was the “brains” behind the various capers that he could do one on his own but he needed a look-out, me. The caper involved a small heist of a home in the Mayfair swells part of North Adamsville whose owners were “summering” somewhere in the Caribbean. Markin had “cased” or thought he had cased the place fully except he didn’t factor in that the owners had a house-sitter during that time, some college girl doing the task for a place to stay near Boston that summer from what we figured later. Markin startled her as he entered a side door, she screamed, Markin panicked, as she headed for the telephone to call the police and he fled out the door. But see Markin came running out that door toward me just when the cops were coming down the street in their squad car directly toward us where we met up. They stopped us, told to get in the car and headed back to that Mayfair house. As it turned out the house-sitter couldn’t identify either of us, couldn’t identify Markin and the cops had to let us go.

No question Markin panicked and no question he made a serious mistake by heading my way knowing what he knew had happened with the sitter and her response to the invasion. I had, and have always had, the sneaking suspicion that he might have rolled me over as the B&E guy if it had been possible. I have a few other stories like that as well but that gives you a better insight into what Markin could turn into when cornered.

A couple of other incidents involved women, one my sister, the other an old flame or rather someone I wanted to be my flame. One of the reasons that I, unlike Markin who did serve in Vietnam which I think kind of turned him over the edge to the “dark side” once his dream about a “newer world” as he called it started to evaporate in the early 1970s, did not do military duty since I was the sole support, working almost full time after school during high school, of my mother and four very younger sisters after my old-fashioned Irish drunken half-dead-beat father died of a massive heart attack in 1965. My oldest sister, Clara, only thirteen at the time while we were in high school, was smitten by Markin from early on and I could see that he was willing to take advantage of her naiveté as well although I warned him off more than once. Now I could never prove it, and Clara would not say word one about it to me, but I believe he took her virginity from her. I do know during that period I found a carton of Trojans, you know “rubbers,” in her bureau drawer when I was looking for something I thought she had of mine and she was not around to ask. I didn’t confront him directly since among corner boys such things would have been “square” to discuss even about sisters but I continued to keep warning him off like I didn’t know anything had happened and before long I saw Clara had taken up with a boy her own age so I let it drop. 

Clara, now a professor at a New York college and with a great husband and three great kids, a bright young woman with great promise even then except around Markin who had some spell on her, had that spell on her even later when she had a boyfriend her own age and would come into Salducci’s trying to make him jealous from the way she acted, cried to high heaven when I told her the news of his fate. Although I left out the more gruesome parts about the where and how   of his demise since I knew that would upset her more. Even recently after all these years when I told her of Bart’s piece she welled up.  I tried to ask her exactly what hold he had over her after all these years just to see if there was something I had missed about my own feelings about the man after all these years but all she said was that he was her “first love” and more cryptically that he was the first male whom she would have been willing to abandon everything for at the time, including her reputation as a good Catholic girl with the novena book in one hand and rosary beads in the other the way we put such things back then. Clara too said too something about those two million facts he had stored in his head and how he swooped her up with them, that and the look in his fierce blue eyes when he was spouting forth. Jesus, that bastard Markin had something going, some monstrous Zen-like hold when his contemporaries are still moaning to high heaven of him, moaning over something good he represented in his sunnier days when he carried us over more than a few rough spots.    

The flame thing involved Laura Perkins who I was “hot” for from the ninth grade on and who I had several dates with in the tenth grade and it looked like things were going well when she threw me over for Markin. Now that situation has happened eight million times in life but corner boys were supposed to keep “hands off” of other corner boys’ girls although I was not naïve enough to believe that was honored more in the breech than the observance having done a couple of end-around maneuvers myself but this Laura thing strained our relationship for a while. Here is the funny part though after a few weeks she threw Markin over for the captain of the football team (she was a cheerleader as well as bright student, school newspaper writer, on the dance committee and a bunch of other resume-building things) who we all hated. Funnier still at our fortieth reunion a few years back Laura and I got back together (after her two marriages and my two marriages had flamed out something we laughed about at the time of the reunion) and we have been an “item” ever since. But you can see where I would, unlike say Bart, have a hard time not letting those things I just mentioned get in my way of writing something objective about that bastard saint.                   

So Bart wrote the piece himself, wrote the “dimmed” elegy (the “dimmed” being something I suggested as part of the title) and did a great job for a guy who said he couldn’t write. Frankly any other kind of elegy but dimmed would fail to truly honor that bastard saint madman who kept us going in that big night called the early 1960s and drove us mad at the same time with his larcenous schemes and over-the-top half-baked brain storm ideas and endless recital of the eight billion facts he kept in his twisted brain (estimates vary on the exact number but I am using the big bang number to cover my ass, as he would). I need not go into all of the particulars of Bart’s piece except to say that the consensus among the still surviving corner boys was that Bart was spot on, caught all of Markin’s terrible contradictions pretty well. Contradiction that led him from the bright but brittle star of the Jack Slack’s bowling alleys corner boy back then to a bad end, a mucho mal end murdered down in Sonora, Mexico in 1976 or 1977 when some drug deal (involving several kilos of cocaine) he was brokering to help feed what Josh said was a serious “nose candy” habit went sour for reasons despite some investigation by Frankie Riley, myself and a private detective Frankie hired were never made clear.

The private detective, not some cinema Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, but a good investigator from his scanty report was warned off the trail by everybody from the do-nothing Federales to the U.S. State Department consular officer in Sonora, and warned off very indirectly both down there and in Boston not to pursue the thing further, the implication being or else. What was clear was that he was found face down on some dusty back road of that town with two slugs in his head and is buried in the town’s forlorn potter’s field in some unmarked grave. That is about all we know for sure about his fate and that is all that is needed to be mentioned here. 

That foul end might have been the end of it, might have been the end of the small legend of Markin. Even he would in his candid moments accept that “small” designation. Yes, been the end of the legend except the moaning to high heaven every time his name comes up. Except this too. Part of Bart’s elegy referenced the fact that in Markin’s sunnier days before the nose candy got the best of him, brought out those formerly under control outrageous “wanting habits,” in the early 1970s when he was still holding onto that “newer world” dream that he (and many others, including me and Bart for varying periods) did a series of articles about the old days and his old corner boys in North Adamsville. Markin before we lost contact, or rather I lost contact with him since Josh Breslin his friend from Maine (and eventually our friend as well whom we consider an honorary Jack Slack’s corner boy) met out in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, 1967 knew his whereabouts outside of San Francisco in Daly City until about 1974 wrote some pretty good stuff, stuff up for awards, and short-listed for the Globe prize.

Pushed on by Bart’s desire to tell Markin’s story as best he could who must have been driven by some fierce ghost of Markin over his shoulder to do such yeoman’s work, he, Frankie (as you know our corner boy leader back then who had Markin as his scribe and who coined the moniker “the Scribe” for him that we used to bait or honor him depending on circumstances and now is a big time lawyer in Boston), Josh, and I agreed that a few of the articles were worth publishing if only for ourselves and the small circle of people whom Markin wrote for and about. (Markin’s oldest friend from back in third grade, Allan Johnson, who would have had plenty to say about the early days had passed away  after a long-term losing fight with cancer before this plan was hatched, RIP, brother.) So that is exactly what we did. We had a commemorative small book of articles and any old time photographs we could gather put together and had it printed up in the print shop that Bart’s oldest son, Jeff, is now running for him since his retirement from the day to day operations last year. 

Since not all of us had everything that Markin wrote, as Bart said in his piece, what the hell they were newspaper or magazine articles to be used to wrap up the fish in or something after we were done reading them, we decided to print what was available. Bart was able to find copies of a bunch of sketches up in the attic of his parents’ home which he was cleaning up for them when they were putting their house up for sale since they were in the process of downsizing. Josh, apparently not using his copies for wrapping fish purposes, had plenty of the later magazine pieces. I had a few things, later things from when we went on the quest for the blue-pink Great American West hitchhike road night as Markin called it. Unfortunately, we could not find any copies of the long defunct East Bay Eye and so could not include anything from the important Going To The Jungle series about some of his fellow Vietnam veterans who could not adjust to the “real” world coming back from ‘Nam and wound up in the arroyos, canyons, railroad sidings and under the bridges of Southern California. He was their voice on that one then, if silent now when those aging vets desperately a voice.  So Markin can speak to us still. Yeah, like Bart said, that’s about right for that sorry ass blessed bastard saint with his eight billion words.   

Below is the short introduction that I wrote for that book which we all agreed should be put in here trying to put what Markin was about in content from a guy who knew him about as well as anybody from the old neighborhood, knew his dark side back like I mentioned  then and when that side came out later too:   

“The late Peter Paul Markin, also known as “the Scribe, ” so anointed by Frankie Riley the unchallenged self-designated king hell king of the schoolboy night among the corner boys who hung around the pizza parlors, pool halls, and bowling alleys of the town, in telling somebody else’s story in his own voice about life in the old days in the working class neighborhoods of North Adamsville where he grew up, or when others, threating murder and mayhem,  wanted him to tell their stories usually gave each and every one of that crew enough rope to hang themselves without additional comment. He would take down, just like he would do later with the hard-pressed Vietnam veterans trying to do the best they could out in the arroyos, crevices, railroad sidings and under the bridges when they couldn’t deal with the “real” world after Vietnam in the Going To The Jungle series that won a couple of awards and was short-listed for the Globe award, what they wanted the world to hear, spilled their guts out as he one time uncharitably termed their actions. Not the veterans, not his fellows who had their troubles down in L.A. and needed to righteously get it out and he was the conduit, their voice, but the zanies from our old town, and then lightly, very lightly if the guy was bigger, stronger than him, or in the case of girls if they were foxy, and mainly just clean up the language for a candid world to read. 

Yeah Markin would bring out what they, we, couldn’t say, maybe didn’t want to say. That talent was what had made the stories he wrote about the now very old days growing up in North Adamsville in the 1960s when “the rose was on the bloom” as my fellow lawyer Frankie Riley used to say when Markin was ready to spout his stuff so interesting. Ready to make us laugh, cringe, get red in the face or head toward him to slap him down, to menace him, if he got too ungodly righteous. Here is the funny part though. In all the stories he mainly gave his “boys” the best of it. Yes, Bart is still belly-aching about a few slights, about his lack of social graces then that old Markin threw his way, and maybe he was a little off on the reasons why I gave up the hitchhike highway blue-pink Great American West night quest that he was pursuing (what he called sneeringly my getting “off the bus” which even he admitted was not for everyone) but mainly that crazy maniac with the heart of gold, the heart of lead, the heart that should have had a stake placed in its center long ago, that, ah, that’s enough I have said enough except I like Bart still miss and mourn the bastard.” 

Tell Me Utah Phillips Have You Seen “Starlight On The Rails?”

From The Pen Of The Late Peter Paul Markin  

STARLIGHT ON THE RAILS(Bruce Phillips)

I can hear the whistle blowing

High and lonesome as can be

Outside the rain is softly falling

Tonight its falling just for me

 Looking back along the road I've traveled

The miles can tell a million tales

Each year is like some rolling freight train

And cold as starlight on the rails

I think about a wife and family

My home and all the things it means

The black smoke trailing out behind me

Is like a string of broken dreams

A man who lives out on the highway

Is like a clock that can't tell time

A man who spends his life just rambling

Is like a song without a rhyme

 
Copyright Strike Music

@train @lonesome

**********

“Hey, Boston Blarney, lend me a dollar so I can go into Gallup and get some Bull Durham and, and, a little something for the head,” yelled out San Antonio Slim over the din of the seemingly endless line of Southern Pacific freight trains running by just then, no more than a hundred yards from the arroyo “jungle” camp that Boston Blarney had stumbled into coming off the hitchhike highway, the Interstate 40 hitchhike highway, a few days before. Pretending that he could not hear over the din Boston Blarney feigned ignorance of the request and went about washing up the last of the dishes, really just tin pans to pile the food on, metal soup cans for washing it down, and “stolen” plastic utensils to put that food to mouth, stolen for those enthralled by the lore of the road, from the local McDonald’s hamburger joint. Like that corporation was going to put out an all- points bulletin for the thieves, although maybe they would if they knew it was headed to the confines of the local hobo jungle(bum, tramp, someone told him once of the hierarchical distinctions but they seemed to be distinctions without a difference when he heard them).

That washing up chore fell to Boston Blarney as the “new boy” in camp and before he had even gotten his bedroll off his sorely-tried back coming off that hard dust Interstate 40 hitchhike road, it was made abundantly clear by the lord of the manor, the mayor of the jungle, Juke Duke, that he was more than welcome to stay for a while, more than welcome to share a portion of the unnamable stew (unnamable, if for no other reason than there were so many unknown ingredients in the mix that to name it would require an Act of Congress, a regular hobo confab, to do so, so nameless it is), and more than welcome to spread his bedroll under the conforms of the jungle night sky but that he was now, officially, to hold the honorific; chief bottle washer, pearl-diver to the non-hobo brethren. 

So Boston Blarney washes away, and stacks, haphazardly stacks as befits the ramshackle nature of the place, the makeshift dinnerware in a cardboard box to await the next meal as a now slightly perturbed Slim comes closer, along with his bindle buddy, Bender Ben, to repeat the request in that same loud voice, although the last Southern Pacific train is a mere echo in the distant darkening Western night and a regular voiced-request would have been enough, enough for Boston Blarney. This though is the minute that Boston Blarney has been dreading ever since he got into camp, the touch for dough minute. Now see Boston Blarney, hell, William Bradley, Billy Bradley to his friends, on the road, and off. That Boston Blarney thing was put on him by Joe-Boy Jim the first night in camp when Joe-Boy, who was from Maine, from Maine about a million years ago from the look of him, noticed Billy’s Boston accent and his map of Ireland looks and, as is the simple course of things in the jungle that name is now Billy’s forever moniker to the moniker-obsessed residents of the Gallup, New Mexico, yah, that's one of those square states out in the West, jungle, although don’t go looking for a postal code for it, the camp may not be there by the time you figure that out. 

Now here are the Boston Blarney facts of life, jungled-up facts of life is that no way is he going to be able to beg off that requested dollar with some lame excuse about being broke, broke broke. (By the way I will use this Boston Blarney moniker throughout just in case anybody, anybody Billy does not want to have known of his whereabouts, is looking for him. In any case that moniker is better, much better, than the Silly Willy nickname that he carried with him through most of his public school career put on his by some now nameless girl when rhyming simon nicknames were all the rage back in seventh grade.) See everybody knows that San Antonio Slim, who belies his moniker by being about five feet, six inches tall and by weighing in at about two hundred and sixty, maybe, two-seventy so he either must have gotten that name a long time ago, or there is some other story behind its origins, has no dough, no way to get dough, and no way to be holding out on anyone for dough for the simple reason that he has not left the camp in a month so he is a brother in need. Boston Blarney is another case though, even if he is just off the hitchhike highway road, his clothes still look kind of fresh, his looks look kind of fresh (being young and not having dipped deeply in the alcohol bins, for one thing) and so no one, not Slim anyway, is going to buy a broke, broke story. 

The problem, the problem Boston Blarney already knows is going to be a problem is that if he gives Slim the dollar straight up every other ‘bo, bum, tramp, and maybe even some self-respecting citizens are going to put the touch on him. He learned, learned the hard way that it does not take long to be broke, broke on the road by freely giving dough to every roadster Tom, Dick, and Harry you run into. “Here, all I have is fifty cents, until my ship comes in,” says Boston Blarney and Slim, along with his “enforcer,” Bender Ben, seem pleased to get that, like that is how much they probably figured they could get anyway. Blarney also knows that he was not the first stop in the touch game otherwise old hard-hand veteran Slim would have bitten harder. 

Well, that’s over, for now Blarney says to himself softly out loud, a habit of the single file hitchhike road time when one begins to talk, softly or loudly, to oneself to while away the long side of the road hours when you are stuck between exits in places like Omaha or Davenport on the long trek west. And just as softly to himself he starts to recount where his has been, where he hasn’t been, and the whys of each situation as he unrolls his bedroll to face another night out in the brisk, brisk even for a New England hearty and hale regular brisk boy, great west star-less October night. First things first though, no way would he have hit the road this time, this time after a couple of years off the road, if THAT man, that evil man, that devil deal-making man, one Richard Milhous Nixon, common criminal, had not just vacated, a couple of months back, the Presidency of the United States and had still been in office. After that event, after that hell-raising many months of hubris though, it seemed safe, safe as anything could be in these weird times, to get on with your life. Still, every once in a while, when he was in a city or town, big or small, large enough to have sidewalk newspaper vending machines he would check, no, double check to see if the monster had, perhaps, “risen” again. But Blarney’ luck had held since he took off from Boston in late August on his latest trip west in search of ...

Suddenly, he yelled out, no cried out, “Joyel.” Who was he kidding? Sure getting rid of “Tricky Dick” was part of it, but the pure truth was “woman trouble” like he didn’t know that from the minute he stepped on to the truck depot at the entrance to the Massachusetts Turnpike in Cambridge and hailed down his first truck. And you knew it too, if you knew Billy Bradley. And if it wasn’t woman trouble, it could have been, would have been, should have been, use the imperative is always woman trouble, unless it was just Billy hubris. Nah, it was woman trouble, chapter and verse. Chapter twenty-seven, verse one, always verse one. And that verse one for Joyel, lately, had been when are we going to settle down from this nomadic existence. And that Joyel drumbeat was getting more insistent since things like the end of the intense American involvement in Vietnam, the demise of one common criminal Richard Milhous Nixon, and the ebbing, yes, face it, the ebbing of the energy for that newer world everybody around them was starting to feel and had decided to scurry back to graduate school, to parents’ home, or to marriage just like in the old days, parent old days. 

 Blarney needed to think it through, or if not think it through then to at least see if he still had the hitchhike road in him. The plan was to get west (always west, always west, America west) to the Pacific Ocean and see if that old magic wanderlust still held him in its thrall. So with old time hitchhike bedroll washed, basics wrapped within, some dollars (fewer that old Slim would have suspected, if he had suspected much) in his pocket, some longing for Joyel in his heart, honestly, and some longing that he could not speak of, not right that minute anyway, he wandered to that Cambridge destiny point. His plan with the late start, late hitchhike start anyway, was to head to Chicago (a many times run, almost a no thought post-rookie run at one point) then head south fast from there to avoid the erratic rockymountainhigh early winter blast and white-out blocked-in problems. Once south he wanted to pick up Interstate 40 somewhere in Texas or New Mexico and then, basically because it mostly parallels that route “ride the rails,” the Southern Pacific rails into Los Angeles from wherever he could pick up a freight. Although he never previously had much luck with this blessed, folkloric, mystical, old-timey, Wobblie (Industrial Workers of the World, IWW) method of travel a couple of guys, gypsy davey kind of guys, not Wobblie guys, told him about it and that drove part of his manic west desire this time. 

As he eased himself down inside his homemade bedroll ready for the night, ready in case tomorrow is the day west, the day west that every jungle camp grapevine keeps yakking about until you get tired of hearing about it and are just happy to wait in non-knowledge, but ready, he started thinking things out like he always did before the sleep of the just knocked him out. Yes sir, chuckling, just waiting for the ride the rails west day that he had been waiting for the past several days and which the jungle denizens, with their years of arcane intricate knowledge, useful travel knowledge said “could be any day now,” caught him reminiscing about the past few weeks and, truth to tell, started to see, see a little where Joyel was coming from, the point that she was incessantly trying to make about there now being a sea-change in the way they (meaning him and her, as well as humanity in general) had to look at things if they were to survive. But, see if she had only, only not screamed about it in those twenty-seven different ways she had of analyzing everything, he might have listened, listened a little. Because whatever else she might have, or have not been, sweet old Joyel, was a lightning rod for every trend, every social and political trend that had come down the left-wing path over the past decade or so. 

Having grown up in New York City she had imbibed the folk protest music movement early in the Village, had been out front in the civil rights and anti-war struggle early, very early (long before Billy had). She had gone “street” left when others were still willing to go half-way (or more) with LBJ, or later, all the way with Bobby Kennedy (as Billy had). So if she was sounding some kind of retreat then it was not just that she was tired (although that might be part of it) but that she “sensed” an “evil” wind of hard times and apathy were ahead. She was signaling, and this is where they had their screaming matches, that the retreat was the prelude to recognition that we had been defeated, no mauled, as she put in one such match. 

So, as Billy got drowsier from having taken too many rays in the long hard sun day and was now fading nicely under the cooling western night he started connecting the dots, or at least some dots, as he thought about the hitchhike road of the past several weeks. He, worse, started to see omens where before he just took them as the luck of the road, the tough hitchhike roads. Like how hard it was to get that first ride out of Boston, Cambridge really, at the entrance to the Massachusetts Turnpike down by the Charles River where many trucks, many cross-country traveling trucks begin their journey from a huge depot after being loaded up from some railroad siding. A couple of years ago all you had to do was ask where the trucker was heading, whether he wanted company, and if yes you were off. Otherwise on to the next truck, and success. Now, on his very first speak to, the trucker told him, told him in no uncertain terms, that while he could sure use the “hippie” boy‘s company (made him think of his own son he said) on the road to Chicago the company (and, as Billy found out later, really the insurance company) had made it plain, adamantly plain that no “passengers” were allowed in the vehicle under penalty of immediate firing. And with that hefty mortgage, two kids in college, and a wife who liked to spent money that settled the issue. He left it at, “But good luck hippie boy, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” 

He finally got his ride, to Cleveland, but from there to Chicago it was nothing but short, suspicious rides by odd-ball guys, including one whose intent was sexual and who when rebuffed left Billy off in Podunk, Indiana, late at night and with no prospects of being seen by truck or car traffic until daybreak. Oh yah, and one guy, one serious guy, wanted to know if anybody had told him, told sweet-souled Billy Bradley, that he looked a lot like Charles Manson (and in fact there was a little resemblance as he himself noticed later after taking a well-deserved, and needed, bath, although about half the guys in America, and who knows maybe the world in those days, looked a little like Charles Manson, except for those eyes, those evil eyes of Manson’s that spoke of some singularity of purpose, not good). 

And thinking about that guy’s comment, a good guy actually, who knew a lot about the old time “beats” (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and had met mad man saint Gregory Corso in New York City), and for old time’s sake had picked Billy up got Billy thinking about a strange event back in Cambridge about a year before. Although he and Joyel had lived together, off and on, for several years there were periods, one of those chapter twenty-seven, verse one periods when they needed to get away from each other for one reason or another. That had been one of those times. So, as was the usual routine, he looked in the Real Paper for some kind of opening in a communal setting (in short, cheap rent, divided chores, and plenty of partying, or whatever, especially that whatever part). One ad he noticed, one Cambridge-based ad looked very interesting. He called the number, spoke to one person who handed him off to the woman who was handling the roommate situation and after a description of the situation, of the house, and of the people then residing there was told, told nonchalantly, to send his resume for their inspection. Resume, Cambridge, a commune, a resume. Christ! He went crazy at first, but then realized that it was after all Cambridge and you never know about some of those types. He quickly found a very convivial communal situation, a non-resume-seeking communal situation thank you, in down and out Brighton just across the river from hallowed Cambridge but at more than one of those whatever parties that came with this commune he never failed to tell this story, and get gales of laughter in response. 

But that was then. And here is where connecting the dots and omens came together. On the road, as in politics, you make a lot of quick friends who give you numbers, telephones numbers, address numbers, whatever numbers, in case you are stuck, or need something, etc. A smart hitchhiker will keep those numbers safely and securely on him for an emergency, or just for a lark. One night Billy got stuck, stuck bad in Moline and called up a number, a number for a commune, he had been given, given just a few weeks before by a road friend, a young guy who gave his name as Injun Joe whom he had traveled with for a couple of days. He called the number, told of his plight and received the following answer- “What’s Injun Joe’s last name, where did you meet him, where do know him from?” Not thinking anything of it Billy said he didn’t know Injun Joe’s last name and described the circumstances that he met Injun Joe under. No sale, no soap, no-go came the reply. Apparently, according to the voice over the telephone, they knew Injun Joe, liked him, but the commune had been “ripped” off recently by “guests” and so unless you had been vetted by the FBI, or some other governmental agency, no dice. That voice did tell Billy to try the Salvation Army or Traveler’s Aid. Thanks, brother. Yah, so Joyel was not totally off the wall, not totally at all. 

And then in that micro-second before sound sleep set in Billy went on the counter-offensive. What about those few good days in Austin when a girl he met, an ordinary cheer-leader, two fingers raised Longhorn Texas girl, who was looking to break-out of that debutante Texas thing, let him crash on her floor (that is the way Billy wants that little story told anyway). Or when that Volkswagen bus, that blessed Volkswagen bus stopped for him just outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, in, as Thomas Wolfe called them, one of the square western states that he now still finds himself imprisoned in, and it was like old times until they got to Red Rock where they wanted to camp for a while (hell, they were probably still there but he needed to move on, move on ocean west). 

But Red Rock was more than some old time hippie community, including passing the dope freely. Red Rock was where he met Running Bear Smith, who claimed to be a full Apache but who knows (and where did the Smith part come in).

Now Running Bear was full of mystery, full of old-time stories about the pride of the dog soldiers, about his ancestors, about the fight against the ravages and greed of the white man. And about the shamanic ceremonial that he learned from his grandfather (his father had been killed, killed in some undisclosed manner when he was very young, about three), about dancing with the spirits of by-gone days, and dancing he added, or Billy added, under the influence of communion wafer peyote buttons. Several days ago, or rather nights, just a few days before he encamped in this broken down jungle Running Bear and he had “walked with the ‘Thunder Gods,’” as Running Bear described it. Billy described it somewhat differently, after the buttons took effect, and Running Bear stoked the camp fire with additional wood to make a great blazing flame that jumped off the wall of the cavern adjacent to where they were camping out. The shadows of the flames made “pictures” on the cavern walls, pictures that told a story, told Billy a story that one man could fight off many demons, could count later on many friends coming to his aid, and that the demons could be vanquished. Was that the flame story or the buttons, or Billy’s retort to Joyel? All he knew was that Running Bear’s “magic” was too strong for him and he began “smelling” the ocean some several hundred miles away. Time to leave, time to get to Gallup down the road, and the hobo jungle wait for the ride on the rails. 

Just then, just as he was closing accounts on the past several weeks by remembering his reactions on entering this ill-disposed jungle that was in no way like the friendly, brotherly, sisterly Volkswagen encampment at Red Rock, old-time stew ball “Wyoming Coyote” yelled, yelled almost in his ear, although Billy knew that he was not yelling at him personally, but that the Southern Pacific was coming through at 4:00AM. The Southern Pacific going clear through to Los Angeles. Billy’s heart pounded. Here he was on the last leg of his journey west, he would be in L.A. by tomorrow night, or early the next morning at the latest. But the heart-pounding was also caused by fear, fear of that run to catch that moving freight train boxcar just right or else maybe fall by the wayside. 

This was no abstract fear, some childhood mother-said-no fear, but real enough. On the way down from Chicago, after being enthralled by the gypsy davies talk of “riding the rails” he had decide that he needed to try it out first in order to make sure that he could do it, do it right when a train was moving. Sure he had caught a few trains before but that was always in the yards, with the trains stationary, and anyway as a child of the automobile age, unlike most of the denizens of the jungle he was more comfortable on the hitchhike road than the railroad. So, as practice, he had tried to catch an Illinois Central out of Decatur about a half-mile out just as the train started to pick up steam but before it got under full steam and was not catchable. He ran for it, almost didn’t make it, and cursed, cursed like hell those coffin nails that he smoked, and swore to give them up. So he was afraid, righteously afraid, as he fell asleep. 

At 3:30AM someone jolted Billy out of his sleep. He woke with a start fearing someone was trying to rob him, or worst, much worst in a grimy jungle camp trying to sexually assault him, some toothless, piss-panted old drunken geezer caught up in some memory fog. Damn, it was only San Antonio Slim shaking him to wake him up for the Southern Pacific coming, just in case it came a little early, although according to the jungle lore it came on time, with maybe a minute or so off either way. Billy asked for a cigarette and Slim rolled him a choice Bull Durham so smartly that Billy blinked before he realized what Slim had produced. He lit up, inhaled the harsh cigarette smoke deeply, and started to put his gear quickly in order, and give himself a little toilet as well. Suddenly Slim yelled out get ready, apparently he could hear the trains coming down the tracks from several miles away. Nice skill. 

The few men (maybe seven or eight) who were heading west that night (not, by the way, Slim he was waiting on a Phoenix local, or something like that maybe, thought Billy, a Valhalla local) started jogging toward the tracks, the tracks no more than one hundred yards from the jungle. The moon, hidden for most of the night under cloud cover, made an appearance as the sound of the trains clicking on the steel track got louder. Billy stopped for a second, pulled something from his back pocket, a small weather-beaten picture of Joyel and him taken in Malibu a few years before in sunnier days, and pressed it into his left hand. He could now see the long-lined train silhouetted against the moonlit desert sands. He started running a little more quickly as the train approached and as he looked for an open boxcar. He found one, grabbed on to its side for all he was worth with one hand then with the other and yanked himself onto the floor rolling over a couple of times as he did so. Once he settled in he again unclasped his left hand and looked, looked intensely and at length, at the now crumbled and weather-beaten picture focusing on Joyel’s image. And had Joyel thoughts, hard-headed Joyel thoughts in his head “riding the rails” on the way to the city of angels.

This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind.

This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind.                   

      

Some songs, no, let’s go a little wider, some music sticks with you from an early age which even fifty years later you can sing the words out chapter and verse. Like those church hymns that you were forced to sit through (when you would have rather been outside playing before you got that good dose of religion which made the hymns make sense), like the bits of music you picked up in school from silly children’s songs in elementary school to that latter time in junior high school when you got your first does of the survey of the American and world songbook once a week for the school year, or more pleasantly your coming of age music, maybe like me that 1950s classic age of rock and roll when certain songs were associated with certain rites of passage, mainly about boy-girl things. One such song from my youth, and maybe yours too, was Woody Guthrie surrogate “national anthem,” This Land is Your Land. (Surrogate in response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America in the throes of the Great Depression that came through America, came through his Oklahoma like a blazing dust ball wind.    

Although I had immersed myself in the folk minute scene of the early 1960s as it passed through the coffeehouses and clubs of Harvard Square (and got full program play complete with folk DJs and for a time on television via the Hootenanny show) that is not where I first heard or learned the song. No for that one song I think the time and place was in seventh grade in junior high school where Mr. Dasher would each week in Music Appreciation teach us a song and then the next week expect us to be able to sing it without looking at a paper. He was kind of a nut for this kind of thing, for making us learn songs from difference genres (except the loathed, his, rock and roll) like Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific, Stephen Foster’s My Old Kentucky Home, or Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade and stuff like that. So that is where I learned it.

Mr. Dasher might have mentioned some information about the songwriter on these things but I did not really pick up on Woody Guthrie’s importance to the American songbook until I got to that folk minute I mentioned where everybody revered him (including most prominently Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott) not so much for that song but for the million other songs that he produced seemingly at the drop of a hat before the dreaded Huntington’s disease got the better of him. Almost everybody covered him then, wrote poems and songs about him, sat at his feet in order to learn the simple way that he took song to entertain the people with.                 

It was not until sometime later that I got the drift of his early life, the life of a nomadic troubadour singing and writing his way across the land. That is what the serious folk singers were trying to emulate, that keep on moving thing that Woody perfected as he headed out of the played-out dustbowl Oklahoma night, wrote plenty of good dustbowl ballads about that too, evoking the ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s’ The Grapes Of Wrath  as he went along. Wrote of the hard life of the generations drifting West to scratch out some kind of existence on the land, tame that West a bit. Wrote too of political things going on, the need for working people to unionize, the need to take care of the desperate Mexico braceros brought in to bring in the harvest and then abused and left hanging, spoke too of true to power about some men robbing you with a gun others with a fountain pen, about the beauty of America if only the robber barons, the greedy, the spirit-destroyers would let it be. Wrote too about the wide continent called America and how this land was ours, if we knew how to keep it. No wonder I remembered that song chapter and verse.             

A Tale Of Two…Sisters- Down And Dirty Among The Mayfair Swells-Katharine Hepburn And Cary Grant’s “Holiday” (1938)-A Film Review

A Tale Of Two…Sisters- Down And Dirty Among The Mayfair Swells-Katharine Hepburn And Cary Grant’s “Holiday” (1938)-A Film Review

DVD Review

     

By Leslie Dumont

Holiday, starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, directed by George Cukor so you know it will be some kind of romantic comedy, 1938

Sam Lowell, the former Senior Film Editor in this space under the old regime where the situation had evolved that every writer had some kind of title now discarded, told me to start this little film review, Holiday, with an idea attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald who did know a thing or two about the species that the rich, no, the very rich, the don’t ask the price rich, are different from you and me. I was not familiar with that particular quote but after viewing this film there is a certain truth to that old saw. So thanks Sam for giving me a lead-in since this is really my first review of old time black and white movies of which I was never really a big fan. Never like it when college guys with no money would ask me if I wanted to see some feature in the latest campus film festival retrospective although I went if I liked the guy. Moreover I was, and the jury is still out for me on this earlier effort, not a big fan of Katharine Hepburn in her later 1960s and 1970s films. I was however quite enamored of Cary Grant in his later pictures although that may have taken a little beating in this film where he is not quite so dashingand decisive.

Sam, who was crazy for, was spoon-fed on these 1930s screwball romantic comedies, also told me to mention at least in passing that those were the golden days of the genre with the likes of the director here George Cukor, Preston Sturgis and Howard Hawks blazing the trail.  That while this film was in the genre it was not the best by either main star. But onward to the “why” of the difference between the very rich, those who owned “museum” mansions on exclusive streets in New York City then, or now. Seems poor little rich girl, silver spoon fed and bred, Julia, was on the prowl for a husband while she was slumming on the post-1932 Olympic ski slopes of Lake Placid in upstate New York. Bingo she finds up and coming up by the bootstraps Johnny, Johnny Case, played by Cary (who looks good in any kind of tie by the way if you wind up seeing this film you will get the reference)  and after a short whirlwind romance on the slopes they get engaged.

Of course whirlwind or not, among the upper set, maybe lower down the class ladder too, in those days at least a proper young man and woman would seek the blessing of the family. That is where the action starts for real when our boy Johnny shows up at that swanky museum mansion to face the inspection of Julia’s rich as Midas banker father. That is where things begin to unravel as well. The old man is dubious about young man Johnny’s wherewithal, clearly not sure of the boy’s bloodlines and so there is a round and round between father and daughter until she gets her way. As usual.       

Enter older sister Linda, played by Ms. Hepburn, who is something like the antithesis of Julia but who can see from minute one that Johnny is the real thing. Real whether he will fit the expectations of Julia and the old man or not. That is a dicey thing and Johnny’s determination/hesitancies somewhat out of character for dashing Cary is what makes me feel a little less kindly toward Cary’s abilities after viewing this one. So the whole circus of a family and Johnny go round and round until the decisive New Year’s Eve night when proud Papa gets to announce the engagement publicly to New York society, to the swells at a big bash at his house. That is kind of the tipping point for Johnny, for Linda who is madly in love with her free spirit side Johnny, and even Julia who begins to have doubts about whether her Johnny can toe the mark, can fit in high society. The answer, after going the extra mile to bring Julia to his side, no on the latter question. And Linda is there to help Johnny put up the Julia rejection pieces. Maybe Linda is just a little too dizzy, too ephemeral and other-worldly but she is ready to break out of the high society rat race which is a good sign. Not a great film but one which I could see myself cheering for Linda and Johnny if I had been in a 1938 movie seat.