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
Sunday, November 24, 2013
***Once Again Out In The Raymond
Chandler Night- The Late Crime Novels
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Book Review
Raymond
Chandler: Later Novels And Other Writings, Raymond Chandler, The Library Of
America, New York, 1995
I can
remember a number of years ago trying, desperately trying, to find a copy of
Raymond Chandler’s Lady In The Lake
(Amazon did not have it) and having to go through many hoops to find a copy at
an oasis bookstore when I was travelling out in high desert around Joshua Tree out in California.
Normally I don’t feel compelled discuss my book-buying activities, and I hope
nobody but bibliophile Larry McMurtry feels compelled to regale one and all
with their truly tragic stories. He will draw a pass in these quarters, all
others step back. However in reviewing the volume under discussion, the
Library Of America’s compilation of Raymond Chandler’s late novels, including
the aforementioned Lady In The Lake I
have to pay homage to the work this publishing house has done both to make some
hard to find works readily available in one location and to get some past writers of
note their due. And in the category of the crime novel, and I would argue the
novel in general, Raymond Chandler, along with Dashiell Hammett, turned the
ho-hum detective story in a serious literary genre.
Of course when speaking of Chandler’s
reputation as a crime novelists one cannot do so unless one speaks of the seven
novels (four of them complied here) of the Philip Marlowe, Private Detective
series (operative, shamus, gumshoe, keyhole-peeper, private dick, or whatever
you call guys working for too little dough and too many hits in your
neighborhood) which anchors the work in this volume. (The other major piece,
Chandler’s screenplay for the film adaptation of master crime novelist in his
own right James M. Cain’s noir classic Double
Indemnity is worth the price of admission itself.)
Marlowe, Marlowe tough, no-nonsense,
driven by a fierce desire to see some rough- hewn justice in this wicked old
world done, not afraid to chase a few windmills, a few dames, attached or
otherwise, and take a few shots of bottom drawer whiskey, apunch or two, even an occasional wayward slug
for the good of the cause. Yes, that Marlowe who over his book-strewn career
has seen it all, done it all out in the, what did one reviewer call them, oh
yeah, the slumming sunny streets of Los Angeles back before the town became
really crazy. When a man like Marlowe could work his work without the looneys,
Okies, sodbuster and wannabe starlets and stringers pushing him out of the
limelight.
Oh yah, about Raymond Chandler,
about the guy who wrote this series Marlowe stories. Like I said in earlier he,
along with Brother Dashiell Hammett turned the dreary gentile drawing-room
sleuth by-the-numbers crime novels that dominated the reading market back in
the day (the late 1920s-1930s-1940s) on its head and gave us tough guy blood
and guts detectives we could admire, could get behind, warts and all. Thanks,
guys.
[Hammett, for those who don’t know
and should, the author of The Thin Man, and creator of The
Maltese Falcon’s Sam Spade, maybe the most famous tough guy detective of
them all. Sam, who come to think of it like Marlowe, also had a judgment
problem when it came to women, women wearing that damn perfume that stops a
man, even a hard-boiled detective man cold, although not an assortment of
Hollywood women who breezed by Marlowe but one up north in Frisco town.]
In Chandler’s case he drew strength
from his startling use of language to describe Marlowe’s environment much in
the way a detective would use his heightened powers of observation during an
investigation, missing nothing. Marlowe was able to size up, let’s say, a
sizzling blonde, as a statuesque, full-bodied and ravishing dame and then pick her
apart as nothing but a low-rent gold-digger. Of course that never stopped him
from taking a run at one or two of them himself and then sending them off into
the night, or to the clink, to fend for themselves. He also knew how to blow
off a small time chiseler, a grifter, as so much flamboyance and hot air not
neglecting to notice that said grifter had moisture above his upper lip
indicating that he stood in fear of something if only his shadow as he
attempted to pull some caper, or tried to pull the wool over Marlowe’s eyes. Or
noticing a frayed collar or a misshapen dress that indicated that a guy or gal
was on cheap street and just maybe not on the level, maybe scratching like
crazy for his or her coffee and cakes.
At the same time Chandler was a
master of setting the details of the space Marlowe had to work in- the high
hill mansions and the back alley rooming houses (although usually not the burgeoning
ranchero middle class locales since apparently that segment of society has not
need of his services and therefore no need of a description of their endless
sameness and faux gentility). He had a fix on the museum-like quality of
the big houses, the places like General Sternwood’s in The Big Sleep or
Mrs. Murdock’s in The High Window reflecting old wealth California. And
he has a razor sharp sense of the arrivisite, the new blood all splash and
glitter, all high-ceiling bungalow, swimming pools, and landscaped gardens.
But where Chandler made his mark was
in his descriptions of the gentile seedy places, the mansions of old time Los
Angeles Bunker Hill turned to rooming houses with that faint smell of urine,
that strong smell of liquor, that loud noise that comes with people living too
close together, too close to breath their simple dreams. Or the descriptions of
the back alley offices in the rundown buildings that had seen better days
populated by the failed dentists, the sly repo men, the penny- ante insurance
brokers, the con artists, the flotsam and jetsam of the losers in the great
American West night just trying to hang on from rent payment to rent payment.
Those denizens of these quarters usually had a walk on role, or wound up with
two slugs to the head, but Chandler knew the type, had the type down solid.
Nor was Chandler above putting a
little social commentary into Marlowe’s mouth. Reflections on such topics as
that very real change after World War II in the kind of swarms that were
heading west to populate the American Western shore night (check The Long Goodbye Little Sister and Playback here for plenty of that). The
rise of the corner boys hanging, just hanging, around blasted storefronts, a
few breaking off into the cranked up hot rod hell’s highway night. The restless
mobsters for broken back east looking to bake out in the southern California
sun while taking over the vast crime markets. The wannabe starlets ready to
settle for less than stardom for the right price. The old California money (the
gold rush, gold coast, golden era money) befuddled by the all new waves coming
in. And above all a strong sense of the rootlessness, the living in the moment,
the grabbing while the grabbing was good mentality that offended old Marlowe’s
code of honor.
And of course over a series of books Chandler expanded the
Marlowe character, expanded his range of emotions, detailed his growing
world-weariness, his growing wariness, and his small compromises with that code
of honor that he had honed back in the 1930s. Yes, Marlowe the loner, the
avenging angel , the righter of wrongs, maybe little wrongs but wrongs in this
wicked old world. The guy who sometimes had to dig deep in his office desk
drawer to grab a shot or six of whiskey to help him think things through.
Marlowe the guy of a thousand punches, the guy of a hundred knocks on the head,
the guy who had taken a more than one slug for the cause, the guy who was every
insurance company’s nightmare and a guy who could have used some serious
Obamacare health insurance no questions asked . Yah, Marlowe.
From The Marxist Archives- In Honor Of The 96th Anniversary Of The Russian October Revolution-Class, Race and the Black Struggle in the U.S.-Claude McKay, 1922
Leon Trotsky On The Lessons Of The Russian Revolution
Workers Vanguard No. 968 5 November 2010
In Honor of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution
For New October Revolutions!
(From the Archives of Marxism)
November 7 (October 25 by the calendar used in Russia at the time) marks the 93rd anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Led by the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the workers’ seizure of power in Russia gave flesh and blood reality to the Marxist understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Despite the subsequent Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet workers state, culminating in its counterrevolutionary destruction in 1991-92, the October Revolution was and is the international proletariat’s greatest victory; its final undoing, a world-historic defeat. The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) fought to the bitter end in defense of the Soviet Union and the bureaucratically deformed workers states of East Europe, while calling for workers political revolutions to oust the parasitic nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies that ruled these states. This is the same program we uphold today for the remaining workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba.
Having been expelled from the USSR in 1929 by Stalin, Trotsky spent the remainder of his life in exile. In November 1932, he gave a speech to a Danish social-democratic student group in Copenhagen. He outlined the political conditions and the social forces that drove the Russian Revolution, stressing the decisive role of the Bolshevik Party. Illuminating the worldwide impact of the Russian Revolution and its place in history, Trotsky underlined the necessity of sweeping away the decaying capitalist order and replacing it with a scientifically planned international socialist economy that will lay the material basis for human freedom.
The ICL fights to forge workers parties modeled on Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks to lead the struggle for new October Revolutions around the globe.
* * *
Revolution means a change of the social order. It transfers the power from the hands of a class which has exhausted itself into those of another class, which is on the rise....
Without the armed insurrection of November 7, 1917, the Soviet state would not be in existence. But the insurrection itself did not drop from Heaven. A series of historical prerequisites was necessary for the October revolution.
1. The rotting away of the old ruling classes—the nobility, the monarchy, the bureaucracy.
2. The political weakness of the bourgeoisie, which had no roots in the masses of the people.
3. The revolutionary character of the peasant question.
4. The revolutionary character of the problem of the oppressed nations.
5. The significant social weight of the proletariat.
To these organic pre-conditions we must add certain conjunctural conditions of the highest importance:
6. The Revolution of 1905 was the great school, or in Lenin’s words, the “dress rehearsal” of the Revolution of 1917. The Soviets, as the irreplaceable organizational form of the proletarian united front in the revolution, were created for the first time in the year 1905.
7. The imperialist war sharpened all the contradictions, tore the backward masses out of their immobility and thereby prepared the grandiose scale of the catastrophe.
But all these conditions, which fully sufficed for the outbreak of the Revolution, were insufficient to assure the victory of the proletariat in the Revolution. For this victory one condition more was needed:
8. The Bolshevik Party....
In the year 1883 there arose among the emigres the first Marxist group. In the year 1898, at a secret meeting, the foundation of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party was proclaimed (we all called ourselves Social-Democrats in those days). In the year 1903 occurred the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. In the year 1912 the Bolshevist fraction finally became an independent Party.
It learned to recognize the class mechanics of society in struggle, in the grandiose events of twelve years (1905-1917). It educated cadres equally capable of initiative and of subordination. The discipline of its revolutionary action was based on the unity of its doctrine, on the tradition of common struggles and on confidence in its tested leadership.
Thus stood the Party in the year 1917. Despised by the official “public opinion” and the paper thunder of the intelligentsia press, it adapted itself to the movement of the masses. Firmly it kept in hand the control of factories and regiments. More and more the peasant masses turned toward it. If we understand by “nation,” not the privileged heads, but the majority of the people, that is, the workers and peasants, then Bolshevism became in the course of the year 1917 a truly national Russian Party.
In September 1917, Lenin, who was compelled to keep in hiding, gave the signal, “The crisis is ripe, the hour of the insurrection has approached.” He was right. The ruling classes had landed in a blind alley before the problems of the war, the land and national liberation. The bourgeoisie finally lost its head. The democratic parties, the Mensheviks and social-revolutionaries, wasted the remains of the confidence of the masses in them by their support of the imperialist war, by their policy of ineffectual compromise and concession to the bourgeois and feudal property-owners. The awakened army no longer wanted to fight for the alien aims of imperialism. Disregarding democratic advice, the peasantry smoked the landowners out of their estates. The oppressed nationalities at the periphery rose up against the bureaucracy of Petrograd. In the most important workers’ and soldiers’ Soviets the Bolsheviki were dominant. The workers and soldiers demanded action. The ulcer was ripe. It needed a cut of the lancet.
Only under these social and political conditions was the insurrection possible. And thus it also became inevitable. But there is no playing around with the insurrection. Woe to the surgeon who is careless in the use of the lancet! Insurrection is an art. It has its laws and its rules.
The Party carried through the October insurrection with cold calculation and with flaming determination. Thanks to this, it conquered almost without victims. Through the victorious Soviets the Bolsheviki placed themselves at the head of a country which occupies one sixth of the surface of the globe....
Let us now in closing attempt to ascertain the place of the October Revolution, not only in the history of Russia but in the history of the world. During the year 1917, in a period of eight months, two historical curves intersect. The February upheaval—that belated echo of the great struggles which had been carried out in past centuries on the territories of Holland, England, France, almost all of Continental Europe—takes its place in the series of bourgeois revolutions. The October Revolution proclaims and opens the domination of the proletariat. It was world capitalism that suffered its first great defeat on the territory of Russia. The chain broke at its weakest link. But it was the chain that broke, and not only the link.
Capitalism has outlived itself as a world system. It has ceased to fulfill its essential mission, the increase of human power and human wealth. Humanity cannot stand still at the level which it has reached. Only a powerful increase in productive force and a sound, planned, that is, Socialist organization of production and distribution can assure humanity—all humanity—of a decent standard of life and at the same time give it the precious feeling of freedom with respect to its own economy. Freedom in two senses—first of all, man will no longer be compelled to devote the greater part of his life to physical labor. Second, he will no longer be dependent on the laws of the market, that is, on the blind and dark forces which have grown up behind his back. He will build up his economy freely, that is, according to a plan, with compass in hand. This time it is a question of subjecting the anatomy of society to the X-ray through and through, of disclosing all its secrets and subjecting all its functions to the reason and the will of collective humanity. In this sense, Socialism must become a new step in the historical advance of mankind. Before our ancestor, who first armed himself with a stone axe, the whole of nature represented a conspiracy of secret and hostile forces. Since then, the natural sciences, hand in hand with practical technology, have illuminated nature down to its most secret depths. By means of electrical energy, the physicist passes judgment on the nucleus of the atom. The hour is not far when science will easily solve the task of the alchemists, and turn manure into gold and gold into manure. Where the demons and furies of nature once raged, now rules ever more courageously the industrial will of man.
But while he wrestled victoriously with nature, man built up his relations to other men blindly, almost like the bee or the ant. Belatedly and most undecidedly he approached the problems of human society. He began with religion, and passed on to politics. The Reformation represented the first victory of bourgeois individualism and rationalism in a domain which had been ruled by dead tradition. From the church, critical thought went on to the state. Born in the struggle with absolutism and the medieval estates, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people and of the rights of man and the citizen grew stronger. Thus arose the system of parliamentarism. Critical thought penetrated into the domain of government administration. The political rationalism of democracy was the highest achievement of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.
But between nature and the state stands economic life. Technology liberated man from the tyranny of the old elements—earth, water, fire and air—only to subject him to its own tyranny. Man ceased to be a slave to nature, to become a slave to the machine, and, still worse, a slave to supply and demand. The present world crisis testifies in especially tragic fashion how man, who dives to the bottom of the ocean, who rises up to the stratosphere, who converses on invisible waves with the Antipodes, how this proud and daring ruler of nature remains a slave to the blind forces of his own economy. The historical task of our epoch consists in replacing the uncontrolled play of the market by reasonable planning, in disciplining the forces of production, compelling them to work together in harmony and obediently serve the needs of mankind. Only on this new social basis will man be able to stretch his weary limbs and—every man and every woman, not only a selected few—become a full citizen in the realm of thought.
—“Leon Trotsky Defends the October Revolution” (Militant, 21 January 1933)
************************
Workers Vanguard No. 1018
22 February 2013
Black History Month
Class, Race and the Black Struggle in the U.S.Claude McKay, 1922
Claude McKay, a Jamaican-born poet active on the left in the U.S.
and Britain, traveled to Soviet Russia for the Fourth Congress of the Communist
International in November 1922. In his presentation at the Congress (reprinted
in “Blacks and Bolsheviks,” Black History and the Class Struggle No. 5,
February 1988), McKay stressed the centrality of black oppression to American
capitalism and criticized American Communists for not adequately addressing this
issue. It took the intervention of the Comintern to get the American Communists
to begin to actively fight for black rights.
At the time of the Congress, he drafted notes about the situation
of black people in the United States, the Caribbean and Africa. The notes are
unsigned, but McKay referred to them in other correspondence. We print below
excerpts from the sections on the black struggle in the U.S., which we obtained
from Tamiment Library at New York University. The original is in the Russian
State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) in Moscow. In his notes, McKay
refers to the African Blood Brotherhood, a Harlem-based organization, mainly
comprising Caribbean immigrants, whose leadership had recently joined the
American Communist Party.
* * *
During the World War the economic status of the Negro Race in the
New World underwent a swift transition for the better. Especially was this the
case in the United States where, on account of the giant war industries and the
shutting down of immigration, the services of Negro workers were greatly in
demand in the northern industrial zone. During this period it is estimated that
over 500,000 Negro workers left the South for jobs in the less hostile
atmosphere of the North.
Along with the improvement in their economic status came a great
wave of emotional racialism, aroused in part by the wrongs suffered by the race
and the sacrifices it was called upon to make for “World Democracy,” as well as
by the fine democratic phrases with which the Entente statesmen were gassing the
credulous liberals of their own countries and misleading the peoples of the
colonies. This racialism among the Negro workers at first took the form of a
proletariat movement but has been to a great extent perverted by subsequent
activities of opportunists and charlatans with their cowardly compromises and
surrenders and their grafting of all sorts of stock schemes upon the mass
movement....
The prey of unscrupulous leaders who glibly promised everything but
accomplished nothing save the periodical emptying of the pockets of their
credulous followers, the Negro masses are discouraged and suspicious, yet there
are organizational possibilities on a wide scale for any organization that can,
first, win their confidence and, second, push energetically the campaign of
organizing and, third, keep up interest in the organization.
The Negro masses are leavened by an increasingly large body of
race radicals and class radicals. The former are
Negroes who, while roused to thought and action by the wrongs of the race, have
not yet recognized the essential class nature of the struggle, nor the exact
cause and source of their oppression, which they blame indiscriminately upon the
entire white race. They are, however, generally inclined to side with and follow
the leadership of the class radicals who, fully cognizant of the value of race
radicalism for rousing the masses and as a natural and necessary step toward
class radicalism, have not been slow in utilizing it and even in helping in its
development.
Comparatively few Negro workers are in the unions for the reason
that, until recently, they were almost universally barred from the ranks of
Organized Labor. However, several thousand are now unionized. Some in the
regular unions, but many in segregated unions which are generally affiliated
with the national bodies.
Most of the class radicals are to be found in the ranks of the
“African Blood Brotherhood” and the “Friends of Negro Freedom”—the latter an
organization backed by the Socialist Party of America; the former said to have
Communist tendencies.
A large group of race radicals are also in the African Blood
Brotherhood (which makes a race as well as a class appeal); and a larger group
in the so-called “Garvey Movement” of “Universal Negro Improvement Association
and African Communities League.” The true race radical should not be confused,
however, with the motley crowd of fanatics, emotionalists, title and tinsel
worshippers who make up the huge mass of the Garvey organization....
The petit-bourgeoisie, with whom the race is honeycombed, find
expression chiefly in the “National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People,” in which a group of bourgeois gentlemen (colored and white) and
gentlemen who, while lacking the bourgeois gold, carry around the bourgeois
psychology, dominate a large but not compactly organized or effectively
functioning body of workers and professionals. The domination of the bourgeoisie
is here more open and complete than in the Garvey Movement which, while cursed
with petit-bourgeoisie for leaders, has a rank and file wholly made up of
workers, and the bourgeoisie in the latter movement have been accordingly forced
to resort to camouflage tactics. The compact organization of the Garvey
Movement, together with the mighty enthusiasm and blind fanaticism of most of
its membership have made it in the past more of an obstacle to the proper
prosecution of the Negro Liberation Struggle than has been the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People....
As is well-known, the Negro workers are the most viciously
oppressed and poorly paid of any group of workers in the United States. No
matter what a Negro’s ability and fitness there are positions which he may not
fill and trades whose doors are closed to him. As a rule, only the most menial
jobs are open to him during normal times. Made to believe that the antagonistic
attitude of Organized Labor is wholly responsible for his exclusion from the
better-paid industries, he becomes a willing—and often a joyous—tool of the
Interests, and a scab in times of crisis for Organized Labor. He knows that in
numerous instances White Labor opposes his employment. He knows, too, of
frequent and widely heralded “philanthropies” to his race—by way of subsidies to
Negro colleges, etc.—on the part of the White Bourgeoisie and being at least as
backward as White Labor, which by its silly prejudices splits the ranks of
Labor, he is not able to see the facts as they really are.... His doubts are
further increased when he is shown that the white bourgeoisie controls the
press, the schools, the churches, the theatres, etc., in which race prejudice is
engendered and promoted....
And this leads naturally to a consideration of the present
aspirations of the Negro Race. The vast masses of the race in America have only
the very simplest aspirations, viz: to be permitted to live and eke out a mean
and miserable existence in peace. Of the various groups that rise above this low
level, the aspirations of some are confined to safety of life and property and
the protection of their women from insult and rape at the hands of white men.
Other groups would have political equality in addition; while the most
progressive groups demand nothing less than full equality: political, economic,
racial; and the abolition of human exploitation.
***The
Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And
World War II- Sultry and Sleek Lena Horne’s Stormy
Weather…
…
it wasn’t always about the fight to beat the rent-collector for another week to
keep a roof over your head, it wasn’t always about the indignity of standing in
soup-lines when one was willing and able to work, it wasn’t always about some
big world historic struggle to gain dignity, and it wasn’t always about a guy’s
number coming up, a girl seeing him off at the station before he was gathered
up in some god forsaken troop transport to face, to face whatever was coming,
and the waiting. Sure a lot of it was, most of it, but the multifarious
varieties of human experience, human experience close to the nub, did not take
a holiday just because the economy tanked or the world was facing the night of
the long knives. What did she know of class struggles and long knives all she
knew was her man was gone, gone away and she was blue, blue as a woman could be
and still stand. What did she know of too much production and not enough demand
when all she knew was that her man, her only man, had gone, gone and left her
with no dough, and no way to get dough. What did she know of world historic
monsters afoot when her man has beat it, left her flat, maybe gone back to his other
woman, or maybe some new young thing. Yeah, what did she know except the damn
man-wanting blues, the baddest blues around. Yeah, what did she know…
*******
Peter
Paul Markin comment on this series:
Whether we liked it or not, whether we even knew what it
meant to our parents or not, or frankly, during that hellish growing up absurd
teenager time in the 1950s trying to figure out our places, if any, in the cold
war red scare world, if there was to be a world, and that was a close thing at
times, or whether we cared, music was as
dear a thing to them as to us, their sons and daughters, who were in the throes
of finding our own very different musical identities. As well, whether we knew
it or not, knew what sacred place the music of the late 1930s and 1940s, swing,
be-bop swing, be-bop flat-out, show tunes, you know jitter-bug stuff, and the
like held in their youthful hearts that was the music, their getting through
the tough times music, that went wafting through the house on the radio, on
record player, or for some the television, of many of those of us who
constitute the now graying fading generation of ‘68. And some of us will pass
to the beyond clueless as to what our forebears were attuned to when they came
of age in a world, a very darkly-etched world, which they too had not created,
and had no say in creating.
Yes they were crazy for the swing and sway of bespectacled Benny
Goodman blowing that clarinet like some angel- herald letting the world
know,if it did know already, that it
did not mean a thing, could not possibly matter in the universe, if you did not
swing, with and without Miss (Ms.) Peggy Lee, better with, better with, swaying
slightly lips moistened, swirling every guy in the place on Why Don’t You Do Right vowing he would
do just that for a smile and a chance at those slightly swaying hips. Mr. Harry
James with or without the orchestra , better with, blowing Gabriel’s horn,
knocking down walls, maybe Jericho, maybe just some Starlight Ballroom in
Kansas City blasting the joint with his You
Made Me Love You to the top of the charts. Elegant Duke Ellington with or
without Mr. Johnny Hodges blowing that sexy sax out into the ocean air night in
some Frisco club, blowing out to the Japan seas, on Taking The ‘A’ Train. Tommy Dorsey all banded up if there is such a
word making eyes misty with I’ll Never
Smile Again. Jimmy Dorsey too with
his own aggregation wailing Tangerine that
had every high school girl throwing dreamy nickels and dimes into the jukebox, with
or without fanfare, Glenn Miller, with or without those damn glasses, taking
that Sentimental Journey before his
too soon last journey. Miss (Ms.) Billie Holiday, Lady Day, with or without the
blues, personal blues, strung out blues too, singing everybody else’s blues
away with that throaty thing she had, that meaningful pause, yeah, Lady Sings The Blues. Miss Lena Horne
with or without stormy weather making grown men cry (women too) when she
reached that high note fretting about her long gone man, Jesus. Miss (Ms.) Margaret Whiting going for that Old Black Magic. Mr. Vaughn Monroe with
or without goalposts. Mr. Billy Eckstine, too. Mr. Frank Sinatra doing a
million songs fronting for the Dorseys and anybody who wanted to rise in that
swinging world, with or without a horde of bobbysoxers breaking down his doors,
putting everybody else to shame (and later too). The Inkspots, always with that
spoken refrain catch that nobody seemed to tire of, doing teary I’ll Get By or If I Didn’tCare. The Mills Brothers with or without those paper
dolls. The Andrews Sisters with or without rum in their Coca-Cola, The Dewdrops
with or without whatever they were doing with or without. Mr. Cole Porter, with
or without the boys, writing the bejesus out ofTin Pan Alley and Broadway tunes. Mr. Irving Berlin with or without the
flag, ditto Mr. Porter. And Mr. George Gershwin with or without his brother,
creating Summertime and a thousand
other catchy tunes. Yeah, their survival music.
We the generation of ’68, baby-boomers, decidedly not what
Tom Brokaw dubbed rightly or wrongly “ the greatest generation,”decidedly not your parents’or grandparents’ (please, please do not say
great-grandparents’ even if it is true) generation could not bear to hear that
music, could not bear to think anybody in the whole universe would think that
stuff was cool. Those of us who came of age, biological, political and social
age kicking, screaming and full of the post-war new age teenage angst and
alienation in the time of Jack Kennedy’s Camelot were ready for a jail-break, a
jail-break on all fronts and that included from “their song” stuff. Their staid
Eisenhower red scare cold war stuff (he their organizer of victory, their
gentile father Ike), hell, we knew that the world was scary, knew it every time
we were forced to go down into some dank school basement and squat down, heads
down too, hoping to high heaven that the Russkies had not decided to go crazy
and set off “the bomb,” many bombs. And every righteous teenager had a
nightmare that they were trapped in some fashionable family bunker and those
loving parents had thoughtfully brought their records down into the abyss to
soothe their savage beasts for the duration. Please, please, please if we must
die then at least let’s go out to Jerry Lee’s High School Confidential.
We were moreover, some of us any way and I like to think the
best of us, driven by some makeshift dream, ready to cross our own swords with
the night-takers of our time, and who, in the words of Camelot brother Bobby,
sweet ruthless Bobby of more than one shed tear, quoting from Alfred Lord
Tennyson, were “seeking a new world.” Those who took up the call to action heralded
by the new dispensation and slogged through that decade whether it was in the civil
rights/black liberation struggle, the anti-Vietnam War struggle or the struggle
to find one’s own identity in the counter-culture swirl before the hammer came
down were kindred. To the disapproval, anger, and fury of more than one parent
who had gladly slept through the Eisenhower times. And that hammer came down
quickly as the decade ended and the high white note that we searched for,
desperately searched for, drifted out into the ebbing tide. Gone. But enough
about us this series is about our immediate forbears (but please, please not
great grandparents) their uphill struggles to make their vision of the their newer
world, their struggles to satisfy their
hunger a little, to stop that gnawing want, and the music that in their
youththey dreamed by on cold winter
nights and hot summer days.
This is emphatically the music, the get by the tough times
in the cities, on the farms, out in the wide spaces, of the hard born generation
that survived the dust bowl all farms blown away when the winds gathered like
some ancient locust curse to cleanse the earth and leave, leave nothing except
silt and coughs. All land worthless no crops could stand the beating, the
bankers fearful that the croppers would just leave taking whatever was left and
the dusted crowd heading west with whatever was movable. They drifted west,
west as far as California if the old buggy held up and they had enough gas in
the tank, not knowing what some old time professor, from Harvard I think, knew
about the frontier that it had been swallowed up, been staked out long ago and
too bad. Not knowing as well what some old time Okie balladeer knew that if you
did not have the dough California was just another Okie/Arkie bust.
Survived empty bowls, empty plates, wondering where the next
meal would come from, many times, too many times from some Sally soup-line,
some praise the lord before thy shall eat soup-line. Survived that serious
hunger want that deprives a man, a woman, of dignity scratching for roots like
some porcine beast in some back alley lot, too weak to go on but too weak to
stop as well. Survived, if not west, then no sugar bowl city street urchin corner
boy hard times of the 1930s Great Depression, always with that vagrant foot up
against some brick-laid wall, killing time, killing some dreams,sleeping under soot-lined railroad trestles,
on splintered park benches newspapers for a pillow’s rest (one eye open for
swarming festering jack-rollers and club-wielding sadistic cops), and hard
bench bus stations (ditto jack-rollers and cops).Survive the time of the madness just then
beating the tom-toms of war and degradation coming from a hungry want-infested Europe
filled with venom, those drums heralding the time of the night-takers casting a
shadow over the darkened world, portending the plainsong of the time of the
long knives, outlawing dreams for the duration.
Building up a pretty list of those wants on cold nights ,
name them, food, shelter, sex, two- bits in the pocket, name those hungers,
success, dignity, not having to struggle against the want night. Building that
phantom list while among tree-lined Hudson River “hobo jungle” riverside fires
stoked by fugitives, brethren, the fellahin of the world, upstream from the
clogged city, upstream from clogged city prying eyes and prickly cops, cities clogged
with broken dreams, or worse of late no dreams, and not enough food to go
around, not enough work either and that ate at him, her more that the food
hungers. Down in dusty arroyos, parched, no water, no agua aqui senor, lo
siento, as they, the bracero brethren, passed the water jug between them and
pointed him west, west you cannot stay here gringo, no way. Under forsaken silver-plated
bridges, steel beams to rest a weary head, rolled blanket for his pillow,
trying to keep the winds at bay. Survived
god knows how by taking the nearest freight west, some smoke and dreams
freight, sleeping on some straw-scratched floor, plugging ears with napkins to
drown out the rattling rails and deep sleep snores. Taking Southern Pacific,
Union Pacific, B&O, Illinois Central, Penn Central, Empire State, Boston
and Maine, or one of a million trunk lines to go out, and young as he was,
desperate as he was, penniless as he was, search for, well, search for…
Searching for something that was not triple- decker bodies,
three to a room sharing some scraggly blanket, an old worn out pillow for rest,
the faint smell of oatmeal, twenty days in a row oatmeal, oatmeal with.., being
cooked in the next room meaning no Pa work, meaning one jump, maybe not even
that, ahead of the sullen dreaded bastard rent- collector (the landlords do not
dare come in person so they hire the task out), meaning the sheriff, his damn
auction, and the streets are closing in. (What did the Sheriff care that all
meager life-times possessions were street-ward bound he was paid by the item
tossed.) Bodies, brothers and sisters, enough to lose count, piled high,
cold-water flat high, that damn cold water splash signifying how low things
have gotten, not even hot water for the weekly bath, with a common commode for
the whole floor and brown-stained sink.
Later moving down the scale, down to the lower depths as some
Russian writer called them in a book of that name, a rooming house room for the
same number of bodies, smudged prison-paned window looking out onto the air-
shaft, dark, dark with despair, no air but some fetid foul breeze from the
basement furnace, the very, very faint odor of oatmeal, thinned out even
further, who knows how many days in a row, from Ma’s make-shift hot plate on
its last legs.Hell, call it what it was
a flop house stinking of perspiration and low-shelf whiskeys and wines. Stinking
of winos and riffraff in the hallways howling at the moon all night and
jack-rollers preying on whoever was witless enough to walk into his lair. All
around shadows, moonlight shadows, moonless night shadows the times when the
midnight sifters plied their trade and snuck in, snuck in these damn one room
hells looking for anything, anything to pawn, anything to feed that junk habit
that had them in its grip. Ma, yelling at the kids, jesus, at the kids, milling
around the room, that why didn’t they, the jack-rollers, the midnight sifters,
the junkies, and the twisted sister street tricks (whores she called them when
the kids got older and knew what that word meant) go uptown and bother the
Mayfair swells who had dough and leave respectable people alone.
Others had it worse, tumbled down shack, window pane-less
some wax paper taped to hold off the winds and rains coming from the north,
tarpaper siding leaving exposed wood to rot and provide homes for fugitive
termites and vermin, roof tiles falling leaving poorly patched spots where the
spring rains would wash through, wash through to the six buckets which were
placed beneath the patches to hold off collapse, a lean-to ready to fall to the
first wind, the first red wind, an ill wind, a land wind the old sailors, old
tars called it and maybe they were right, coming out of the mountains and
swooping down the hills and hollows, ready to fall to the first downpour rain,
washed away. Cold water flat, flop house room, tumbled-down shack, leave them
behind, get out on the open road, blow the stinks off, get that bindle stick
together, a cup, a plate, spoon, a comb just in case you are in a town, some
matches, keep dry matches, a pouch of Bull Durham and papers, maybe some change
all wrapped in a handkerchief, the worldly possessions of the fellahin, the
fugitive, the hobo, the tramp and the bum, grab that slow moving freight before
she picks up steam, watch out for the “bulls” and search for the great promised
American night that had been tattered by world events, and greed.
Survived the Hoovervilles, the world come down to the great
cardboard siding, tin can cartons, discarded boxes, found in some orphan
street, dilapidated, to serve as buffer against the hard winter winds, the
spring rains and that damn relentless summer heat. Tin can roof thundering
sounds at every light rain, slap-dash jerry-built camp explosions along rivers.
Mighty rivers like the Missouri and Mississippi and no account ones, trickle down
ones, like the Elko and the Dearborn that no longer gushed ramparts. Survived down
in hard rock- infested ravines filled with brambles, snakes, gnarly insects
ready to do battle once some fugitive arm or leg was exposed. Survived under
railroad trestles, the clanking freight trains above, what did Shakespeare call
it, yes, murdering sleep, and murdering dreams too. No wonder some guy, some
hobo philosopher-king, and don’t laugh there were such fellows, along with
broken-down stockbrokers, wreaked high financiers, ex-movie moguls, unemployed
cabbies, unemployable union organizers, out-of-work workers of all types,
families attached, and habitual malingerers trying to weather another day
without working, said that life, his life anyway, and maybe their lives, were
nothing but train smoke and wishful thinking. Hell, he didn’t know the half of
it, didn’t know that life could get much coarser out on the great Wilderness
Road.
Tossed, hither and yon, cold- water flats, flop-houses,
tarpaper shacks, then the great outdoors, what did that guy call it, that
writer guy, I forget his name, called it probably from his cozy fireplaced
study, fully nourished from the look of his pipe-smoking face on the back
jacket of his latest pot-boiler, oh yeah, the romance of the road. Tossed
around about six million different ways, name each one instead of counting
sheep at night, murdered sleep. But it all came down to this, to the rivers,
ravines, trestled-bridges, when the banks, yeah, the banks, the usual suspects,
and rightly so from all the evidence, robbed people of their shacks, their
cottages, their farm houses, their smokeless back forty dreams, and left them
with nothing but the romance of the road. Even that smug pipe-filled writer,
Jesus, what was his name, should pause to wonder. Yah, those bastards robbed
them, picked them clean, as an old-time balladeer, a free-wheeling,
song-writing red, a commie, hell, nothing but a Russkie-loving home-grown
Bolshevik in the days when in some quarters, say, Frisco town, Akron, Minneapolis,
blessed shut-down Flint, lion Detroit, hog-butcher to the world Chi town,
smelter to the world Pittsburgh, sailing under that banner was a badge of
honor, or just another fist in the struggle, welcome brother, welcome sister,
we need all the hands, no, all the clenched fists we can get, said at the time
not with a gun but with a fountain pen, but still robbed them. Cleaned them
out, to get lost on that Wilderness Road, that trail of one thousand tears
leading west.
Survived the soup kitchens hungers, the gnawing can’t wait
in the endless waiting line for scraps, dreaming of some by-gone steak or dish
of ice cream, and always that hunger, not the stomach hunger although that was
ever present, but the hunger that hurts a man, hurts his pride, hurts a woman’s
too, hurts when he, they have to stick their hands out, stick them out and not
know why. Not know why a year before the sun was shining, they had dreams of
living in that little house, a cottage really, ending their patterned days
there, and now had shutter dreams of living in that cold-water flat, the
flop-house room, the tar-paper shack forever turning their mouths to ashes. Not
knowing why Bill up the street, Jack down the road, Leroy across the way was
working, worrying but working, while his two hands were idle, and a million
human things still needed to be fixed, to be built, to be created. And she
cried a tear on those hands to see how his ignorance of what made the world go
round ate at him, ate at his beautiful heart.
Planning the fruitless day, fruitless since he was born to
work, took pride in work, had worked since twelve to help a struggling family
even in good times,planning around dark
hour Sally breakfasts don’t be late, six to nine, but with sermon and song
attached, mission stuff in heat-soaked rooms, men smelling of unwashed men, and
drink (quick drink, an eye-opener they called it in the shelter,before entry and hence a strong smell of
cheap rotgut). Planning around city hall hand-out lunches eaten on park benches
or lawns, peanut butter sandwiches, slapped slap-dash together with a pint box
of milk and an apple, maybe. Worse, worse by far the nightly Saint Vincent
DePaul suppers, soup, bread, some canned vegetable, something they called meat
but was in dispute, lukewarm coffee. Such a feast had only, only if you could
prove you were truly destitute with a letter from some churchman, a Catholic
churchman, like Protestants, Jews, Seventh-Day Adventist, Quakers, Shakers,
Devil-worshippers, Jainists, Buddhists, Moslems, and every other kind of
fellahin religionists were not hungry just then, and, in addition to the
religious test, under some terrible penalty, you had to say that you had
searched for work that day. A hard dollar, hard dollar indeed.
Jesus, out of work for another day, another in a long line
of days, long line of Sally, City Hall, Saint Vincent DePaul hand-out days,with
three hungry growing kids to feed, boys, wouldn’t you know it,kids, boys, who, what did they call what
kids did then, oh yeah, eat them out of house and home. A wife, a precious
wife, sickly, sickly from boys too close together, sickly from her own delicate
frame,sick unto death of the not having,
not having for the boys, their boys, he thought. Making, she making, sick or
not, their meager savings, their dole hand -out, their occasional relative
money gift, stretch beyond endurance with the weekly bill envelopes always
shorting some irate collector. Damn, little work waiting for anybody that day,
that day when all hell broke loose and the economy tanked again, stocks
tumbled, again, and guys were jumping out high buildings left and right, guys
were trying to scrape every dime they could gather in order to not go under and
face the high building windows, guys were getting tossed out of work, other guys
who were thinking about buying guns and taking what they could take, and take
it fast at least that is what it said in the Boston Globe he found on the ground and read while he waited once
again in the damn soup line (ditto the reportage in The New York Times, Washington
Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Examiner if anybody
was asking). They, the newspapers, said that there was too much around, too
many cars, houses, too much wheat, cotton, oil, too many record-players,
whatever, Jesus, too much, too many, and he with nothing for those kids, those
eat them out of house and home boys, nothing and he was too proud just then to
ask for some damn letter to give to those Vincent DePaul hard-hearts.
And that day not him, not him yet, not him with a sickly
wife worrying unto death over bill envelopes, not him with three hungry boys
conceived too closely together, not him who was without steady work and glad
get what he got when he got it and could shake off the damn charity soup-lines
for a time, could thumb his nose at those Vincent DePaul hard-hearts, but
others. Others who read more that the Boston
Globe (and the dittos)and who were
dreaming of that full head of steam day to come, the day to even things up a
little for a mess that they had not made, in places like big auto Flint eyeing
those lines and thinking how to shut them down from the inside, out in waterfront
Frisco town thinking that in order to make the water bosses cry that they might
have to shut the whole place down, out in rubber Akron thinking of maybe even
bringing the unemployed, guys like him to stop the scabbing, guys,
steel-sweated guys out in hog butcher to the world prairie Chicago thinking of
onebig union, hell, even in boondock small trucker Minneapolis thinking of
bringing in the wives, sisters, and sweethearts, the whole sweated, misbegotten
fellahin world for one big push,
Yeah, they dreamed a lot, in places like bayside Frisco
town,mid-America Akron, trucker
Minneapolis, Chi town name your industry, clanky Flint and motor city Detroit,
places like Harlan, Birmingham, Los Angeles too, seemed like half the whole
fellahinwas dreaming then, and some
guys and gals, some stand-up guys and gals were scheming too, talking it up, were not going
quietly into the rubbish can of history, dreaming of that day when the score
would get evened, evened a little, and a man (and where I say man I say woman
too, women who like they used to say in China hold up half the sky), could hold
his head up a little, could at least bring bread, maybe some fruits and
vegetables, to those three hungry growing kids, those boys who were eating him
out of house and home, who didn’t understand the finer point of world economics,
just hunger. Stomach hunger not that hunger that gnawed at him, there would be
time enough for that for them. Until then, until he decides to not go quietly
into the rubbish can of history though, he is left shifting the scroungings of
the trash piles of the urban glut, the discard of the haves, the have- nots
throw nothing away. On other horizons, Omaha, Grand Junction, Topeka,
Davenport, Neola, Muskogee,places where
the corn and wheat grow tall, taller than a man, the brethren curse the rural
fallow fields, curse the jack-robber banks, and curse the weather, but curse
most of all having to pack up and head, head anywhere, but the here, and
search, search like that brother on that urban glut pile for a way to curbthat gnawinghungry that cried out in the night-want, want that is all.
Survived too the look, the look of those, the what did FDR
(Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the young, or forgetful) call them, oh yeah, the
economic royalists, today’s 1%, the rack-renters, the coupon-clippers, the
guys, as one of their number said, who hired one half of the working class to fight
the other, who in their fortified towers, their Xanadus, their Dearborns, their
Beacon Hills, their Upper East Sides, their Nob Hills, and a few other spots,
tittered that not everybody was built to survive to be the fittest. That crowd,
and let’s name names, a few anyway, Ford, General Motors, Firestone, U.S.
Steel, fought tooth and nail against the little guy trying to break bread.
Fought that brother too out pounding the mean streets to proud to ask for a
letter, Jesus, a letter for some leftover food, before he got “religion” about
what was what in the land of “milk and honey.”Wreaked havoc on that farmer out in the dust bowl not travelling some
road, some road west knowing that the East was barred up, egging him on to some
hot dusty bracero labor filed picking, maybe “hire” him on as a scab against
those uppity city boys. Yes, fought every guy trying to get out from under that
cardboard, tar paper, windowless soup kitchen world along with a hell of a lot
of comrades, yes, comrades, not Russkie comrades although reds were thick in
those battles, took their lumps in Frisco, Flint, Akron and Minneapolis, hell,
any place where a righteous people were rising, kindred in the struggle to put
that survival of the fittest on the back-burner of human history. To stand up
andtake collective action to put things
right, hell, made the bosses cry bloody murder when they shut down their
factories, shut them down cold until some puny penny justice was eked out. And
maybe just maybe make that poor unknowingly mean-street walking city brother
and that sweated farm boy thing twice about helping those Mayfair swells.
Survived but took time out too, time out if young perhaps,
as if such things were embedded in some secret teen coda, to stretch those
legs, to flash those legs, to sway those hips, to flash the new moves not, I
repeat, not the ones learned at sixth grade Miss Prissy’s Saturday dance
classes but the ones that every mother, every girl mother warned her Susie
against, to a new sound coming out of the mist, coming to take the sting out of
the want years nights, and the brewing night of the long knives. Coming out of
New York, always New York then, Minton’s, Jimmy’s, some other uptown
clubs,Chicago, Chicago of the big
horns and that stream, that black stream heading north, following the northern
star, again, for jobs and to get the hell away from one Mister James Crow, from
Detroit, with blessed Detroit Slim and automobile sounds, and Kansas City, the
Missouri K.C. okay, the Bird land hatchery, the Prez’s big sexy sax blow home.
Jesus no wonder that madman Hitler banned it, along with dreams.
The sound of blessed swing, all big horns, big reeds, big,
well big band, replacing the dour Brother,
Can You Spare a Dime and its brethren ,
no banishing such thoughts, casting them out with soup lines (and that
awful Friday Saint Vincent DePaul fish stew that even Jesus would have turned
down in favor of bread, wine and a listen to Benny’s Buddha Swings) casting that kind of hunger out for a moment, a
magical realistic moment, casting out ill-fitting, out of fashion, threadbare
(nice, huh) second-hand clothes (passed down from out- the- doorhobo brothers and sisters tramping this good
green earth looking for their place, or at least a job of work and money in
their newer threadbare [still nice] clothes), and casting aside from hunger
looks, that gaunt look of those who have their wanting habits on and no way to
do a thing about it.Banished, all such
things banished because after all it did not mean a thing, could not possibly
place you anywhere else but in squareville (my term, not theirs), if you did
not have that swing. To be as one with jitter-buggery if there was (is) such a
word (together, not buggery by itself, not in those days, not in the public
vocabulary anyway). And swing as it lost steam with all the boys, all the swing
boys, all oversea and the home fire girls tired of dancing two girl dancing, a
fade echo of the cool age be-bop that was a-borning, making everybody reach for
that high white note floating out of Minton’s, Big Bill’s Jimmie’s, hell, even
Olde Saco’s Starlight Ballroom before it breezed out in the ocean air night,
crashed into the tepid sea. Yeah.
Survived, as if there was no time to breathe in new fresh
airs, new be-bop tunes, new dance moves, to slog through the time of the gun in
World War II.A time when the
night-takers, those who craved the revenge night of the long knives took giant
steps in Europe and Asia trying to make that same little guy, Brit, Frenchie,
Chinaman, Filipino, God’s American, and half the races and nationalities on
this good green earth cry uncle and buckle under, take it, take their stuff
without a squawk. It took a bit, took a little shock, to get those war juices
flowing, to forget about the blood-letting that had gone on before when the
flower of Europe, when the older brothers and fathers the generation before,
had taken their number when they were called.And so after Pearl, after that other shoe dropped on a candid world
Johnnie, Jimmie, Paulie, Benny too, all the guys from the old neighborhood, the
corner boys, the guys who hung around Doc’s hands in their pockets, guys trying
to rub nickels together to play some jitter-buggery thing, guys who had it
tough growing up hard in those bad Depression days, took their numbers and fell
in line.
Guys too from the wheat fields, Kansas Iowa, you know places
where they grow wheat, guys fresh from some Saturday night dance, some country
square thing, all shy and with calloused hands, eyeing, eyeing to perdition
some virginal Betty or Sue, guys from the coal slags, deep down in hill
country, down in the hollows away from public notice, some rumble down shack to
rest their heads, full of backwoods home liquor, blackened fingernails, never
ever fully clean once the coal got on them, Saturday night front porch
fiddlings wound up carrying a M-1 on the shoulder in Europe or the Pacific.
Leaving all those Susies, Lauras, Betties, and dark-haired Rebeccas too waiting
at home hoping to high heaven that some wayward gun had not carried off
sweetheart Johnnie, Jimmy, Paulie, or young Benny.Jesus not young Benny. Not the runt of the
corner boy litter, not our Benny. Not carried off that sweet farm fresh boy with
the sly grin, not carried off that coal-dust young man with those jet-black
eyes, and fingers.
Survived the endless lines of boys heading off East and
West, heading off to right some wrongs, at least that is what the guys in
charge said, put a big dent in the style of the night-takers, the guys who
wanted to cut up the world into two to three pieces, and that was that, cutting
the little guy, making the little guys like it, making them take it or else.
Some of those little guys, after Pearl for sure, could hardly wait to get to
the recruiting office, hardly wait to go mano y mano with the night-takers and
their illicit dreams, went gladly from the farms, the factories and the mines,
many to never look back, never to farm, to run a production line, or to dig
from the earth but make new lives, or lay down their heads in some god forsaken
piece of dirt, or some watery abyss. Others, well, others were hanging back
waiting to be drafted by their friends and neighbors at the local draft board,
hanging back just a little to think things over, to see if maybe they could be
better used on the home front, scared okay (as if the quick-step volunteers
were not afraid, or should have been) but who gave a good accounting of
themselves when their number came up. Still others head over heels they were
exempt, 4-F, bad feet, you see. Somebody had to keep the home fires, keeping
the womenfolk happy.
All, all except that last crew, the dodgers found in every
war,who got to sit a home with Susie,
Laura, Betty and even odd-ball Rebecca were constantly waiting for the other
shoe to drop, for their ships to sail or their planes to fly. Hanging in some
old time corner boy drugstore, Doc’s, Rexall, name your drugstore name, just
like when they were kids (a mere few weeks before), talking the talk like they
used to do to kill time, maybe sitting two by two (two uniforms, two girls if
anybody was asking) at the soda fountain playing that newly installed jukebox
until the nickels ran out. Listened to funny banana boat songs, rum and coca
cola songs, siting under the apple tree songs, songs to forget about the work
abroad, and just some flat-out jitter-bugging stuff, frothy stuff in order to
get a minute’s reprieve from thoughts of the journey ahead.
Listened too to dreamy, sentimental songs, Always, I Don’t
Want To Set The World On Fire, Sentimental Journey, songs that spoke of true
love, their true love that would out last the ages, would carrying them through
that life together if they could ever keep those damn night-takers at bay, songs
about faraway places, We’ll Meet Again, Til Then, songs that spoke of future
sorrows, future partings, future returnings (always implying though that maybe
there would be no return), future sacrifices, future morale-builders, songs about
keeping lamp- lights burning, songs to give meeting to that personal sacrifice,
to keep the womenfolk, to keep her from fretting her life away waiting for that
dreaded other drop, songs about making a better world out of the fire and
brimstone sacrifice before them.
Songs to make the best out of the situation about Johnnie,
Jimmie and the gang actually returning, returning whole, and putting a big dent
in their dreams, that small white house with the white picket fence (maybe
needing a little painting, maybe they could do that together), kids, maybe a
new car once in a while you know the stuff that keeps average joes alive in
sullen foxholes, sea-sick troop transports, freezing cargo planes, keeps them
good and alive. Hell, songs, White Cliffs
Of Dover songs, about maybe the damn wars would be over sooner rather than
later. Listened, drawing closer, getting all, uh, moony-eyed, and as old Doc,
or some woe-begotten soda jerk, some high school kid, wet behind the ears, with
that white paper service cap at some obscure angle and now smudged white jacket
implying that he was in the service too, told them to leave he was closing up
they held out for one last tune. Then, well-fortified with swoony feelings they
made for the beach, if near a beach, the pond, if near a pond, the back forty, if
near the back forty, the hills, you know, or whatever passed for a lovers’ lane
in their locale and with the echo of those songs as background, well, do I have
draw you a map, what do you think they did, why do you think they call us baby-boomers.
The music, this survival music, Harry James, Benny, the
Dorsey boys, Bing, Frank, the Mills Brothers, the Inkspots, and on and on wafted
(nice word, huh) through the air coming from a large console radio, the prized
possession centered in the small square living room of my growing up house amid
the squalor of falling roof tiles, a broken window or two patched up with
cardboard and tape, a front door that would not shut, rooms with second-hand
sofas, mattresses, chairs, desks, tables, mildewy towels, corroded sinks,
barely serviceable bathtubs, andwoe-begotten
stuffed pillows smelling of mothballs. My broken down, needs a new roof, random
shingles on the ground as proof, cracked windows stuffed with paper and held
with masking tape in need of panes, no proof needed, overgrown lawn in need of
cutting of a shack (there is literally no other way to describe it, then or in
its current condition) of a too small, much too small for four growing boys and
two parents, house. The no room to breathe, no space but shared space, the from
hunger look of all the denizens, the stink of my father’s war wounds that would
not heal, the stink of too many people in too small a house, excuse me shack.
The noise, damn the noise from the nearby railroad, putting paid to wrong side
of the tracks-dom worst of all. Jesus.
That wrong side of the tracks shack of a house surrounded by
other houses, shack houses, too small to fit big Irish Catholic- sized families
with stony-eyed dreams. Small dreams of Johnny or Jimmy getting on the force
(cops, okay), and Lorrie and Pamela getting those secure City Hall jobs in the
steno pool until some bright prospect came by and threw a ring at them but in
the meantime shack life, and small faded dreams. Funny, no, ironic but these
tumbled-down shacks which seemingly would fall with a first serious wind represented
in some frankly weird form (but what knew I of such unnamed weirdness then I
just cried out in some fit of angst, cried out against that railroad noise, and
that sour smell of sweat) the great good desire of those warriors, and almost
to a man they had served, and their war brides who had waited, had fretted
while waiting, to latch onto a piece of golden age America.
And take their struggle survival music from Doc’s jukebox,
from the Starlight Ballroom, from WDJA, with them as if to validate their sweet
memory dreams, their youthful innocence before the guys got caught up, caught
up close and personal, the ugliness of war, the things they would not speak of
unto the grave, and the gals not asking, not asking for all the money in the
world but sensing that he, they, had changed, had lost some youthful thing. That
radio, that priceless radio console taking pride of place, as if a lifesaver,
literally, tuned to local station WDJA in North Adamsville, the memory station
for those World War II warriors and their war brides, those who made it back.
Some wizard radio station manager knowing his, probably his in those days,
demographics, spinned those 1940s platters exclusively, as well as aimed the
ubiquitous advertisement at that crowd. Cars, sofas, beds, shaving gear, soap,
department store sales, all the basics for the growing families spawned (nice,
huh) by those warriors and brides.
My harried mother, harried like all the neighborhood large
brood mothers, harried by the bleak wanting prospects of the day with four
growing boys and not enough, nor enough food, not enough, well, just not enough
and leave it at that. Maybe bewildered is a better expression for her plight,
for her wartime young marriage adventure not wanting to be left with only a
memory of my father if things went wrong in the Pacific. As so she took to turning
the radio on to start her day, hoping that Paper
Dolls, I’ll Get By, or dreamy Tangerine
would chase her immediate sorrows away. Yea, a quick boost of their songs
was called for, their spring youth meeting at some USO dance songs before he
shipped out. Those songsembedded deep in memory, wistful young memory,
or so it seemed as she hummed away the day, used the music as background on her
appointed household rounds. And whether she won or lost the day’s bout with not
enough, with some ill-winded message from some bill due, seemingly always some
four boy hurt, some bad father work news, the list of her daily sorrows and
trepidations could have stretched to infinity she perked up, swayed even to
those tunes.
That stuff, that mother dream stuff, that piano/drum-driven
stuff with some torch-singer, Peggy Lee, Helen Morgan, Margaret Whiting, maybe
even a sneak Billie thrown in bleeding all over the floor drove me crazy
thenSome she bleeding with the pain
ofher thwarted loves, her man hurts,
her wanderings in search of something in this funny old world, her waitings,
waiting for the good times, waiting in line for the rations, waiting, waiting
alone mind you, for her man to come home, come home whole from some place whose
name she could not pronounce, they should have called it the waiting generation,
just flat-out drove me crazy then. Mush stuff at a time when I was craving the
big break-out rock and roll sounds I kept hearing every time I went and played
the jukebox at Doc’s Drugstore over on Walker Street down near the beach (not
the old torn down Doc’s of their generation over on Billings Road if that is
what you are thinking). As far as I know Doc (the son of their Doc), knowing
his demographics as well as that radio executive at WDJA, did not, I repeat,
did not, stock that stuff that, uh, mush for his rock-crazed after school soda
fountain crowd, probably stocked nothing, mercifully before about 1955. Funny
thing though while I am still a child of rock and roll this so-called mushy
stuff sounds pretty good to these ears now long after my parents and those who
performed this music have passed on. Go figure.
********
Stormy Weather
Songwriters: BELL,
DAVID A
Don't know why there's no sun up in the sky
Stormy weather
Since my man and I ain't together,
Keeps rainin' all the time
Life is bare, gloom and mis'ry everywhere
Stormy weather
Just can't get my poorself together,
I'm weary all the time
So weary all the time
When he went away the blues walked in and met me.
If he stays away old rockin' chair will get me.
All I do is pray the Lord above will let me walk in the sun once more.
Can't go on, ev'ry thing I had is gone
Stormy weather
Since my man and I ain't together,
Keeps rainin' all the time
