***“You Are On The Bus Or Off The
Bus”- The Transformation Of “Foul-Mouth”
Phil Into “Far-Out” Phil- With Mad Hatter Writer Ken Kesey And His Merry
Pranksters In Mind
Introduction to the series by Bart
Webber
My old
friend and corner boy the late Peter Paul Markin got as caught up in what he
called the jailbreak of the 1960s counter-cultural movement as any man I knew
from that time. Peter Paul, who we always called Markin and never that WASP-ish
three name thing like his forbears had come over on the Mayflower or something rather than he to the housing projects born,
or once Frankie Riley our leader anointed him we began calling him to get under
his skin “the Scribe” since he was basically Frankie’s flak, always writing
stuff about Frankie like it was scripture and Frankie did nothing to dissuade
anybody about its worthiness as such. You could always depend on the Scribe
with his infernal two thousand facts to make anything Frankie did seem like the
Second Coming, and maybe with his frenzied pen Markin actually believed that.
Markin,
Frankie, me and a bunch of other guys
basically came of age together in the early 1960s when we po’ boys used to hang
around the corner in high school, the corner right next to Jack Slack’s bowling
alley on Thornton Street where sometimes we would cadge a few free games if
Jack’s son, our fellow classmate in the North Adamsville Class of 1962, was
working and if not then just hanging, Frankie talking a mile a minute, Markin
taking notes at two miles a minute, maybe gathering in some girls if we had
money to head to Salducci’s Pizza Parlor near-by where Red Riley held forth
with his corner boys. Pretty early on Markin caught this fresh breeze idea,
influenced a little by some “beat” stuff he read which was just winding down as
a cool movement and was then being commercialized to hell, a fresh breeze he
said that was going put all our talking points dreams about schools, jobs,
marriage, kids, everything in the shade. We laughed at him, although as the
decade moved on the laughter subsided.
Markin was
the bell-weather, the first guy to head west to check out what was happening
after high school and while he was in college before he got drafted which
clipped his wings for a couple of years. Got caught up in the acid-etched music
from the Dead, the Airplane and a million other minute niche rock bands (that
acid being not “throw in your face” acid but LSD okay), the drugs from ganja to
peyote although not LSD he always claimed but with some of the stuff he did
toward the end I don’t know, the sex in about seventeen different variations
once he got the hang of the Kama Sutra and a couple of adventurous West Coast
women to indulge him, the madcap adventure of hitchhiking west, the bummer of
riding freight when he tired of the hitchhike road and which he often said was
not for the faint-hearted , not for those who didn’t breathe train smoke and
dreams the way he put it to me one time when he was in high dudgeon.
Markin not
only got caught up in all the commotion of the counter-culture that kids today
scratch their heads about the minute some old geezer like Josh Breslin, Jack
Dawson, Sam Lowell, or, hell, me starts going on about “wasn’t that a time” but
brought me, Frankie Riley, Jack, Jimmy Jenkins, Josh, Sam, Phil Ballard and a
few other guys from around our way (except Josh who was from Olde Saco up in
Maine although in the end he was as much a corner boy refugee as the rest of us
from North Adamsville) into the action as well. All of us (again except Josh
whom he had met out on Russian Hill in Frisco in the summer of love, 1968
version) at one time or another travelled west with the Scribe, and lived to
tell about it, although it was a close thing, a very close thing a couple of
times, drug times and wrong place at the wrong time times.
But as the
1960s decade closed, maybe a little into the early 1970s the luster faded, the
ebb came crashing in, and most of the old corner boys like Frankie and Sam who
took the lead back to the “normal” went back to the old grind (both of them to
the law). Josh went to writing for a lot of what he called advanced
publications (meaning low circulation, meaning no dough, meaning doing it for
the glory to hear him tell it now, now that he is out of the grind). And
Markin, well, Markin, as we all expected, once his Army time was up also took
up the pen, for a while. Wrote according to Josh some pretty good stuff that
big circulation publications were interested in publishing. Wrote lots of stuff
in the early 1970s once he settled down in Oakland (Josh lived out there with
him then and I know Sam and maybe Frankie visited him there) about his corner
boys, his old working class neighborhood, about being a screwed-up teen filled
with angst and alienation in the old days. Good stuff from what I read even if
I was a little miffed when he constantly referred to me as a guy with two left
feet, two left hands and too left out with the girls which wasn’t exactly true,
well a little.
One big
series that Markin did, did as homage to his fellow Vietnam veterans, although
he never talked much about his own experiences, said he did what he did and
that was that just like our father’s would say when we tried to asked about
World War II with them, who had trouble getting back to the “real world” and
wound up under bridges and along railroad tracks mainly in Southern California
where he interviewed them and let them tell their stories their way called Going to the Jungle (a double-reference
to the jungle in ‘Nam and the railroad “jungle” of hobo legend) was
short-listed for some important award but I forget which one.
And then he
stopped. Fell off the earth. No, not really, but the way I got the story mostly
from Josh and Sam, with a little stuff from Frankie thrown in that is what the
thing amounted to. Markin had always been a little volatile in his appetites,
what he called in high school (and we started calling too) his “wanting habits”
coming out of the wretched of the earth North Adamsville deep down working poor
neighborhoods (me and Sam too). At some
point about 1976 or 1977 but probably the earlier date he started doing girl,
snow, you know, cocaine that was no big thing in the 1960s (I had never tried
it and has only heard about it from guys who went to Mexico for weed and would
pick up a couple of ounces to level out with when the pot got weary). Cocaine
then was pretty expensive and so if you got your “wanting habits” on with that
stuff, if you liked running it constantly up your nose until you always sounded
like you had a stuffed up nose then you had better have either started robbing
banks, a dicey thing, a very dicey thing the one time me and a couple of guys
tried to rob as little a thing as a variety store or start dealing the stuff to
keep the demons away. He choose the latter.
Once Markin
moved up the drug dealer food chain that is where things got weird, got so
weird that when I heard the story I thought he must have taken too much acid
back in the day no matter what he claimed. He was “muling” a lot for the boys
down south, meaning bringing the product over the border which was a lot easier
then as long as you were not a Mexican or a “hippie,” or looked like either.
From what Sam said things went okay for a while but see, and this I know from
my own story, those kid “wanting habits” play funny tricks on you, make you go
awry as Markin used to say. In the summer of 1977 (we are not sure which month)
Markin went south (Mexico) to pick a big (for him) two kilogram batch of coke
to bring back to the states. And that was the end of Markin, the end that we
can believe part. They found his body in a back alley down in Sonora face down
with two slugs in his head. Needless to say the Federales did next to nothing
to find out who murdered him. Frankie then a budding lawyer, once the news got
back to Boston, sent a private detective down there but all he was able to find
out from a shaky source was that Markin had either stolen the two kilogram
shipment and was going to go independent (not a good idea even then when the
cartels were nothing like the strong-arm kill outfits they are today, Jesus) or
the negotiations went bad, went off the track, and somebody got offended by the
gringo marauder. Life is cheap in that league. To this day that is all we know,
and old Markin is buried down there in some potter’s field unmarked grave still
mourned and missed.
That brings
me back to my purpose here. I mentioned above that in the early 1970s Markin
did a series of articles about the old days and his old corner boys in North
Adamsville and we, Frankie, Josh, Sam and I agreed that a few of them were
worth publishing if only for ourselves and the small circle of people whom
Markin wrote about. So that is exactly what we are doing here. Since not all of
us had everything that Markin wrote, 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. Since I was able to
find a copy of the following sketch (and a couple of others too) up in the
attic of my parents’ home I got “elected” to start things off.
[I have
added The Byrds Fillmore West-driven summer of love before the wave crested and
it all turned to ashes classic wa-wa song, So
You Want To Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star, from YouTube making this a multi-media
experience not possible back then when he wrote the piece but something Markin
would have jumped for joy to have included to set the mood. B.W.]
Just below
is the introduction that Sam Lowell wrote for this article trying to put what
Markin was about in content and the article itself The Transformation Of
“Foul-Mouth” Phil Into “Far-Out” Phil is below that:
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 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 LA
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, mainly
clean up the language for a candid world to read. Well I have said enough
except I like Bart still miss and mourn the bastard. Here is what he had to
say:
The Transformation Of
“Foul-Mouth” Phil Into “Far-Out” Phil
From The Pen Of [The Late] Peter Paul
Markin
Everybody,
well everybody who checks things out here, check out what I have to say here, or
in other publications dedicated to the retrieval of retro-1950s and 1960s
memories know that I am dedicated to swapping a few lies with other denizens
from back in the old days. The two by the way are not always the same since the
former sensibility involved an undying love for all things classic rock and
roll and could have a perfectly sane man doing something like back street Elvis
imitations of One Night With You or
one of the fifty songs that are worthy of imitation at some lounge lizard on
“open mic” night out in some inner suburban shopping mall or if female throwing
your panties at said imitator in a déjà vu moment or getting ready to make your
twenty-seventh pilgrimage, and that is the right word, to Graceland and the
other involved drugs, sex, acid rock and an undying fondness for tie-died
apparel and that receding manly hairline fading ponytail or womanly ironed
straight now greying hair while attending the one hundred plus reunion concert
of the Buffalo Wings, the Rocking Ramrods or the Monterey Airplane this time
without the acid/peyote buttons/mescalin/LSD or whatever turned your daydreams
into amoebic forms before your eyes, so yes too very different things which
depending on the vagaries of a few years age difference set the two on two very
different trajectories. Guys like the Phil of the title of this sketch under
either of his monikers, Jack Dawson, Josh Breslin, Frankie Riley, Bart
Webber, Sam Lowell, Jimmy Jenkins, and me, corner boys all, guys who under
normal conditions would probably be out
right now buying Elvis wigs to cover up the non-ponytail receding hairlines for
Thursday’s open mic at the Dew Drop Inn, guys born in 1946 or 1947 kind of
caught the edges of both waves, and lived to tell about it, lived to see both
tides ebb as well and thus my various literary contributions if you like to
publications dedicated to the whole mix of aging baby-boomer growing up times.
In case you
didn’t know the geographic location of the corner boy old days they were spent
initially in late elementary school across the street from the school at Doc’s
Drugstore on River Street for the very simple reason that Doc would let us hang
around after school and on weekend nights as long as we did not scare away the
people who needed whatever drug he was dispensing to get them through the night
and, a very big and, gave him some business. That business early on before we
were corner boys was buying sodas and assorted candies which was nothing to him
for dough but later, but later in the fifth and sixth grades did amount to
something since Doc had the “max daddy” of all the latest rock and roll stuff,
stuff that drove some of those who listened back then to the Dew Drop Inn and
Graceland but was forever associated with the first blush of girls, girls
changing from nuisances to people you actually talk to, could dance wit if it
came to it. And not only did Doc make a pile off of us at the jukebox but since
none of the older kids ever came in we would stay around and by ice cream
sundaes and other stuff from the fountain Doc had installed as he saw the tide
rising. Later in junior high when, as is
inevitable in the course of such things,
we moved on to Gino’s Sub Shop and would have no truck with Doc and the
kids from elementary school who hung out there and although he had no jukebox
he made great sandwiches and just liked us around as long as hung around with
his son Rico who hung with us for a while before he went to live with his
grandmother. But the place where we got our corner boy seasoning, the place
where we defended our honor by claiming that space as against other corner boy
contenders before the owner sold out and the new owners did not corner boys hanging
out and make “police take notice” hell about it was Salducci’s Pizza Parlor up
in the Square. After that, basically from senior year until a couple of years
later when everybody started heading in about seven different directions at
Jack Slack’s bowling alleys over on Thornton Street on the way to Adamsville
Beach, since Timmy Slack was in our class, hung around with us for a while and
would when he worked at the alleys let us bowl for free which when, as was more
usual than not, we had no dough and a hot date bailed us out more than once.
Thanks Timmy.
Of course,
if one wants to swap lies about those old days, or any days, for that matter, then
one needs a, well, foil, or foils. Needless to say via the “miracle” of having
enough money to do so and enough ability to make the words enticing, all one
has to do is take a fair-sized ad in the Adamsville
Daily Times inquiring about the whereabouts of such and such corner boys,
naming names, mentioning the locations cited above, give the time frame of ten
to fifteen years before when the guys hung around together, giving a get in
touch address and some stay in town parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, irate
neighbors, will spread the grapevine news and before you know it a bunch of
thirtyish guys, like lemmings from the sea, our home land the sea, every
surviving corner boy with enough energy to lift his stubby little fingers will
be at your door before you can say, well, say, be-bop night.
Frankie
Riley, our lord and chieftain was the first, although he has lost much speed in
his pitch since the old days. I won’t bore you with the details of his
“exploits.” You can fumble through the back copies of the East Bay Other or Boston
Rising at the library for that. Nor will I speak of fast-talking Johnny
Silver, except to point out that he is the culprit, there is no other way to
put it, who started the sexual revolution. No, not the real one that started
with “the pill” in the early 1960s and continues through the counter-culture
free nights to today with the struggle for women’s liberation, liberation from
all kinds of second-class citizen stuff from jobs and wages to help with
childcare and housework. No, Johnny, very married to the former Kitty Callahan,
his high school sweetheart started the North Adamsville-version of the sexual
revolution-very married guys with wanderlust eyes looking for love, looking for
love in all the wrong places, if you ask me but nobody is, asking that is.
Those gripping tales can also be found in those library archives.
All of this,
foreplay, or at least that is what the corner boys would taunt me with when I
got on my “soap box” and started on about some pressing subject to while away
the lonely Friday no dough, no girl nights when I would hold forth trying to
tell them something besides sex, music or how we were going to get some dough
fast and with no hevay lifting, of course, is prelude to the real subject here.
Phil Larkin’s transformation from corner boy “Foul-Mouth” Phil (and he really
was, as he would tell you in that moment of candor that he is occasionally
capable of) in early 1960s North Adamsville to “Far-Out” Phil on one of the
ubiquitous “Merry Prankster-” inspired converted yellow brick road school buses
that dotted the highways and by-ways of the American be-bop heading west night
from about the mid-1960s to the first couple of years of the 1970s (maybe a
little earlier than that in the ‘70s). When last we hear from Phil lately in
response to that ad I placed in the Daily
News he was heading to Pennsylvania to meet up with
some doctoral program research addict whom he “met” on in the “personal”
section at the back of the Boston Phoenix.
That tale, ah, can also be found in the library archives if they have not
discarded it in the interest of protecting the morals of the youth in order to
avoid Socrates’ fate. However, unlike these seemingly endless
“haunting the personals” school boy antics from guys old enough, well I am no
snitch, so let’s say old enough to know better, looking for the fountain of
youth, or whatever this Phil transformation story, the one from the 1960s which
when I think about it was not that long ago although some ten years later it
seems like ancient history , actually interests me. And so here it is. As usual
I edited it lightly but it is Phil’s story, and I am pleased to say a good
one.
*********
Phil Larkin
here. Jesus, The Scribe [Markin: Like I warned the other guys, Phil, watch that scribe, or The Scribe thing] actually
liked this idea of me telling about riding the, what did he call it, oh yah,
the yellow brick road bus, back in my prankster days [Markin: Just to keep
things straight, since Phil still likes to play a little rough with the truth,
not the famous Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters bus made famous through Tom
Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,
but certainly inspired by it]. I barely got by his prudish “censorship” with my
stories about real stuff that people want to read like the trials and
tribulations of a slightly older guy trying to “hook-up” with the ladies on
what amounted to the sexless sex pages
of the Phoenix and my rendezvous with
Amy (and she is not a research addict, Markin, no way, although she is an
addict another way but you don’t want to hear that real stuff story), my lovely
sociology doctoral student down at Penn State (Go, Nittany Lions!). But he is
all over, all f—king over, some little bit of “cultural history” stuff that
nobody, except faded hippies-stiff guys (and dolls) would do anything but yawn
over, even stuff that guys like Frankie, Sam, Markin and me actually lived
through. And those hippie -guys (and
dolls) are too busy trying to “hook-up,” to grab some sex before is too late to
spent more than two seconds on ancient history. So this one is strictly for
The, oops, Peter Paul Markin.
What got the
whole memory lane thing started was that somewhere Markin picked up, probably
second-hand off at Sandy’s Record Store over
in Cambridge when he was here last if I know him, a record from some commercial
music compilation with a title something like Shakin’ It Up: 1966. Now the music on the compilation, the music in
the post-British invasion, heart of acid rock night, was strictly for laughs.
But the artwork on the cover (as Markin told me was true on other records in
the expansive rock era series) featured nothing more, or nothing less, than a Day-Glo
bus right out of my prankster days, complete with some very odd residents (odd
now, not then, then they were righteous, and maybe, just maybe still are). That
scene gave us a couple of hours of conversation one night and jogged my memory
about a lot of things. Especially about what Markin, hell, me too, called the
search of the great American freedom night. (He put some colors, blue-pink like
just before the night turns dark, dark out West anyway, in his but we, for
once. were on the same page.)
Naturally,
Markin as is his wont [Markin: “wont” is my word not Phil’s. His, I prefer,
strongly prefer, not to mention in polite society], once he played the record and
plied me for information (I know this guy, remember) ran off like a bunny and
wrote his version as part of a review of the record for some silly alternative
newspaper that will probably be out of business by the time they get around to
thinking about printing the screed. Of course, being, well, being Markin he got
it about half-right. So let me tell the story true and you can judge who plays
“rough” with the truth.
Markin had
it just about right when he described that old bus:
“A rickety,
ticky-tack, bounce over every bump in the road to high heaven, gear-shrieking
school bus. But not just any yellow brick road school bus that you rode to
various educationally good for you locations like movie houses, half yawn,
science museums, yawn, art museums, yawn, yawn, or wind-swept picnic areas
for some fool weenie roast, two yawns
there too, when you were a school kid. And certainly not your hour to get home
daily grind school bus, complete with surly driver (male or female, although
truth to tell the females were worst since they acted just like your mother,
and maybe were acting on orders from her) that got you through K-12 in one
piece, and you even got to not notice the bounces to high heaven over every
bump of burp in the road. No, my friends, my comrades, my brethren this is
god’s own bus commandeered to navigate the highways and by-ways of the 1960s
come flame or flash-out. Yes, it is rickety, and all those other descriptive
words mentioned above in regard to school day buses. That is the nature of such
ill-meant mechanical contraptions after all. But this one is custom-ordered,
no, maybe that is the wrong way to put it, this is “karma” ordered to take a
motley crew of free-spirits on the roads to seek a “newer world,” to seek the
meaning of what one persistent blogger on the subject has described as the
search for the great blue-pink American Western night.”
“Naturally
to keep its first purpose intact this heaven-bound vehicle is left its mustard
yellow body surface underneath but over that primer the surface has been
transformed by generations (generations here signifying not twenty-year cycles
but trips west, and east) of, well, folk art, said folk art being heavily
weighted toward graffiti, toward the psychedelic day-glo splashes and
zodiacally meaningful symbols. And the
interior. Most of those hardback seats that captured every bounce of childhood
have been ripped out and discarded who knows where and replaced by mattresses,
many layers of mattresses for this bus is not merely for travel but for home.
To complete the “homey” effect there are stored, helter-skelter, in the back
coolers, assorted pots and pans, mismatched dishware and nobody’s idea of the
family heirloom china, boxes of dried foods and condiments, duffle bags full of
clothes, clean and unclean, blankets, sheets, and pillows, again clean and
unclean. Let’s put it this way, if someone wants to make a family hell-broth
stew there is nothing in the way to stop them. But also know this, and know it
now, as we start to focus on this journey that food, the preparation of food,
and the desire, except in the wee hours when the body craves something inside,
is a very distant concern for these “campers.” If food is what you desired in
the foreboding 1960s be-bop night take a cruise ship to nowhere or a train (if
you can find one), some southern pacific, great northern, union pacific, and
work out your dilemma in the dining car. Of course, no heaven-send, merry
prankster-ish yellow brick road school bus would be complete without a high-
grade stereo system to blast the now obligatory “acid rock” coming through the
radiator practically.”
That says it
all pretty much about the physical characteristics of the bus but not much
about how I got on the damn thing. Frankly, things were pretty tough around my
house, things like no having much of a job after high school just working as a
retail clerk up at Raymond’s Department Store in Adamsville Plaza. Not really,
according to dear mother, with dear old dad chiming in every once in a while
especially when I didn’t come up with a little room and board money, being
motivated to “better myself,” and being kind of drift-less with my Salducci’s
Pizza Parlor and Jack Slack’s corner boys long gone off to college, the
service, or married, stuff like that. Then too I was having some girl trouble,
no, not what you think juts regular the battle of the sexes stuff when my
honey, Ginny McCabe, practically shut me off because I didn’t want to get
married just then. But I knew something was in the air, something was coming
like “the Scribe” was always predicting. I wanted in on that. But the specific
reason that I split in the dead of the North Adamsville night was that I was
trying to avoid the military draft, now that the war in Vietnam was escalating
with nowhere else to go. I knew my days were numbered and while I was as
patriotic (and am, unlike that former gung-ho crazed anti-commie Markin turned parlor
pinko, commie, after he did his time in the service) as the next guy. I was not
ready to lay down my life out in the boondocks right then. So I headed out on
the lam.
[Markin:
Phil, as he related this part of the story that night, had me all choked up
about his military plight and I was ready to say brother, welcome to the
anti-imperialist resistance. Then I realized, wait a minute, Phil was 4-F
(meaning he was not eligible for drafting due to some medical or psychological
condition in those days for those who do not know the reference. A prima facie example, I might add, of
that playing rough with the truth that I warned you about before.]
Hey, I am no
slave to convention, whatever the conventions are, but in those days I looked
like a lot of young guys. Longish hair, a beard, a light beard at the time,
blue jeans, an army jacket, sunglasses, a knapsack over my shoulder, and work
boots on my feet (sandals would not come until later when I got off the road
and was settled in a “pad” in San Francisco and anyway boots were not the kind
of footwear that would carry you through on those back road places you might
find yourself in, places like Deadwood, Nevada at three in the morning with a
ten mile walk to the nearest town in front of you). I mention all this because
that “look” gave me the cache to make it on the road when I headed out of the
house that Spring 1966 be-bop night after one final argument with dear mother
about where I was going, what was I going to do when I got there, and what was
I going to do for money. Standard mother fare then, and now I suppose.
So short on
dough, and long on nerve and fearlessness then I started to hitchhike with the
idea of heading west to California like about eight million people, for about
that same number of reasons have been heading there since the Spanish, or one
of those old time traveling by boat nations, heard about the place. Of course, nowadays I would think to do such
a thing in such a dangerous world after crazy guys like Charlie Manson wrecked
it for everybody else), unless I was armed to the teeth and that would take a
little edge off that “seeking the newer world” Markin has been blabbing about
since about 1960. But then, no problem. Especially no problem when a Volkswagen
mini-bus (not in the same league as the yellow brick road school bus but okay
for a long ride, and definitely okay when you are in some nowhere back road,
hostile territory dominate by squares, squares with guns and other evil
implements and they, stoned, stoned to the heavens stop to ask you directions
because they are “lost” and invite you on board) stops on Route 128, backs up,
and a guy who looks a lot like me, along with two pretty young girls says
“where are you heading?” West, just west.
(Okay, okay, Markin, young women, now that you are a pinko feminist or a
feminist pinko or whatever you call yourself, alright?)
Most of the
road until the Midwest, Iowa is the Midwest right, was filled with short little
adventures like that. A mini-van frolic for a few hours, or a few days. Maybe a
few short twenty miles non-descript rides in between but heading west by hook
or by crook. Did I like it? Sure I did although I was pretty much an up-tight
working-class guy (that was one of those pretty girls called me and , hell, she
was from Clintondale about ten miles down the road from Adamsville for
chrissakes) who liked his booze, a little sex, and just hanging around the old
town waiting for the other shoe to drop. But I could see, after a few drug
experiences, no, not LSD, that I was starting to dig the scene. And I felt
every day that I was out of North Adamsville that I was shaking off the dust
from that place. Then one night, sitting in the front seat of a big old Pontiac
(not everybody, not every “hip” everybody had the mini-bus, van or school bus
handy), Big Jane between us, the Flip-Flop Kid driving like god’s own mad
driver, smoking a joint, laughing with the couple in back, Bopper Billy and
Sweet Pea, we headed into a pay-as- you go roadside camp near Ames out in Iowa.
And at that campsite parked maybe five or six places over from where we planted
ourselves was god’s own copy of that Day-Glo merry prankster bus that Markin
described before. I flipped out because while I had hear about, and seen from a
distance, such contraptions I hadn’t been up close to one before. Wow!
After we
settled in, the Flip-Flop Kid (and the guy really could never make up his mind
about anything, anything except don’t go too close to Big Bang Jane, no kidding
around on that), Bopper Billy (who really thought he was king of the be-bop
night, but, hell in the North Adamsville corner boy night Frankie Riley, hell,
maybe even Markin, would have out be-bopped him for lunch and had time for a
nap), Big Bang Jane (guess what that referred to, and she gave herself that
nickname but, I never tried to make a move on her because she was just a little too wild, a
little too I would have to keeping looking over my shoulder for me then,
probably later too when things got even looser. And then there was the Flip-Flop
Kid’s warning ), and Sweet Pea (and she was a sweet pea, if Bopper Billy,
wasn’t around, well we both agreed that there was something there but in those
1966 days we were still half tied up with the old conventions of not breaking
in between a guy and his girl, well that was the convention anyway whether it
was generally honored or not, I did) we headed over once we heard the vibes
from the sound system churning out some weird sounds, something like we had
never heard before (weird then, little did we know that this was the wave of
the future, for a few years anyway.
Naturally, well naturally after the fact once we learned what the
inhabitants of the bus were about, they invited us for supper, or really to
have some stew from a big old pot cooking on a fireplace that came with the
place. And if you didn’t want the hell-broth stew then partake of some rarified
dope (no, again, no on the LDS thing. It was around, it was around on the bus
too, among its various denizens, but mainly it was a rumor, and more of a West
Coast thing just then, a year later, in the Summer of Love and after that is
when the acid hit, and when I tried it but not on this trip. This trip was strictly weed, hemp, joint, mary jane,
marijuana, herb, whatever you wanted to called that stuff that got you high,
got you out of yourself and got you away from what you were in North
Adamsville, Mechanicsville or whatever ville you were from, for a while.
So that
night was the introduction to the large economy size search for the freedom we
all, as it turned out were looking for. I remember saying to Sweet Pea as we
went back to our campsite (and wishing I wasn’t so square about messing with
another guy’s girl, and maybe she was too, maybe wishing I wasn’t square about
it.) that we had turned a corner that night and that we had best play it out
right then for the chance might not come again.
The next
day, no, the next night because I had spent the day working up to it, I became
“Far-Out” Phil, or the start of that Phil. Frankly, to not bore you with a pipe
by pipe description of the quantity of dope that I smoked (herb, hashish, a
little cocaine more exotic then than it became later) or ingested (a tab of
mescaline) that day, I was “wasted.” Hell I am getting “high” now just thinking
about how high I was that day. By nightfall I was ready for almost anything as
that weird music that crept up your spine got hold of me. I just, as somebody
put a match to the wood to start the cooking of the tonight pot of stew to keep
us from malnutrition, started dancing by myself. Phil Larkin, formerly
foul-mouthed Phil, a cagy, edgy guy from deep in corner boy, wise guy, hang-out
guy, never ask a girl to dance but just kind of mosey up world started dancing
by himself. But not for long because then he, me, took that dance to some other
level, some level that I can only explain by example. Have you ever seen any of
the Doors stuff on film, you know the one that highlights the max-daddy rocker
of the late 1960s night, the late Jim Morrison (of the sacrificed trinity-Janis
Joplin, Jimi Hendix, Jimmy Morrison who lived fast and died young and who went
way too early but that was the price we had to break free, the price we felt we
had to pay) Picture this if you haven’t-a scene at one of the concerts; head
for of dope, practically transformed into a shaman. Yah, one of those Indian
(Markin: Native American, Phil] religious leaders who did a trance-dance. That
was me in late May of 1966, if you can believe that.
And see,
although I wasn’t conscious of it first I was being joined by one of the women
on the bus, Luscious Lois, (and Markin had it right before describing her as
luscious, she really was), whom I had met, in passing the night before. This
Lois, not her real name, as you can tell not only were we re-inventing
ourselves physically and spiritually but in our public personas shedding our
“slave names” much as some blacks were doing for more serious reasons than we
had at the time. [Markin: nice point, Phil]
Her real name was Sandra Sharp, a college girl from Vassar who, taking
some time off from school, was “on the bus” trying to find herself. She was
like some delicate flower, a dahlia maybe, like I had never encountered before.
I won’t bore you with the forever have to tell what she looked like thing
because that is not what made her, well, intriguing, maddeningly intriguing,
like some femme fatale in a crime noir film that Markin, from what I can
gather, is also always running on about these days now that he has
re-discovered Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and seen a couple of tough
guy Bogie movies. She was pretty, no question, maybe even a dark-haired,
dark-eyed beauty if it came to a fair description in the light of day but what
made her fetching, enchanting, if that is a different way to say it, was the
changes in her facial expressions as she danced, and danced provocatively,
dance half-nakedly, around my desire. And I danced, shedding my shirt although
I do not remember doing so, and also danced half-naked around her desire. Then,
faintly like a buzz from some hovering insect, maybe a bee, and then more
loudly I kept hearing the on-lookers, half-mad with dope, and with desire
themselves, yelling “far out, far out.” And Far-Out Phil was born.
Oh, as for
Luscious Lois and her desire, well, you figure it out. I might not have been
wise to the ways of the Vassar world as I should have been in those days when
such places were bastions to place the young women of the elite by justifiable
worried wealthy families who feared unto death that their nice
stockbroker-worthy daughters might run off with some gritty biker on a Vincent
Black Lightning, and keep them too away from clawing upstarts from the corner
boy night but the rest of my time on the bus was spend hovering around Lois,
and keeping other guys away. I even
worked some plebeian magic on her one night when I started using certain
swear words in her ear that worked for
me with every Sunday at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, Millie Callahan, back in
the day. Far-Out Phil got a little something extra that night, proper Vassar
girl or not.
No offense
against Iowa, well only a little offense for not being near an ocean, I think.
No offense against the university there, well only a little offense for not
being Berkeley but after about a week of that campsite and its environs I was
ready to move on and it did not matter if it was with Flip-Flop and his crowd
or with Captain Crunch (the guy who “led” his merry pranksters, real name,
Samuel Jackman, Columbia, Class of 1958 who had long before given up searching,
searching for anything, and just hooked into the idea of taking the ride).
Captain Crunch, as befitted his dignity (and since it was “his” bus paid for
out of some murky deal, probably a youthful drug deal, from what I heard), was
merely the “leader” here. The driving was left to another, older guy. Like
Markin said before this driver was not
your mother-sent, mother-agent, old Mrs.
Henderson, who prattled on about keep in your seats and be quiet while she is
driving (maybe that, subconsciously, is why the seats were ripped out long ago
on the very first “voyage” west) but a very, very close imitation of the
god-like prince-driver of the road, the “on the road” pioneer, Neal Cassady, from
the generation before us, the wayfaring “beats,” shifting those gears very gently but also
very sure-handedly so no one noticed
those bumps (or else was so stoned, drug or music stoned, that those things
pass like so much wind). His name: Cruising Casey (real name, Charles Kendall,
Haverford College Class of ’64, but just
this minute, Cruising Casey, mad man searching for the great American be-bop
night under the extreme influence of one Ken Kesey, the max-daddy mad man of
the great search just then). And Cruising was, being just a little older, and
about one hundred years more experienced, was also weary, very weary of co-eds,
copping dope and, frankly, staying in one place for so long. He, also, wanted
to see his girlfriend or his wife I am not sure which in Denver so I know where
we are heading. So off we go.
And the
passengers. Nobody from the Flip-Flop Express (although Flip-Flop, as usual
lived up to his name and hemmed and hawed about it), they were heading back
east, back into the dark Mechanicsville night. I tried, tried like hell, to get
Sweet Pea to come along just in case the thing with Lois fell apart or she took
some other whim into her head. See re-invented or not I still had some all-the
angles boyhood rust hanging on me. We did know for sure that Casey was driving,
and still driving effortlessly so the harsh realities of his massive drug
intake had not hit yet, or maybe he really was superman. Other whose names I remember: Mustang Sally (Susan
Stein, Michigan, Class of 1959, ditto on the searching thing), Captain Crunch’s
girlfriend, (although not exclusively, not exclusively by her choice, not his,
and he was not happy about it for lots of reasons which need not detain us
here). Most of the rest of the “passengers” have monikers like Silver City
Slim, Penny Pot (guess why), Moon Man, Flash Gordon (from out in space
somewhere, literally, as he told it), Denver Dennis (from New York City, go
figure), and the like. They also had real names that indicated that they were
from somewhere that has nothing to do with public housing projects, ghettos or
barrios. And they were also, or almost all were, twenty plus some number that
have some highly-rated college years after their names, graduated or not. And
they were all either searching or, like the Captain, at a stage where they were
just hooked on taking the ride.
As for the
rest. Well, no one could be exactly sure, as the bus approached the outskirts
of Denver, as this was strictly a revolving cast of characters depending on who
was hitchhiking on that desolate back road State Route 5 in Iowa, or County
Road 16 in Wyoming, and desperately needed to be picked up, or face time, and
not nice time with a buzz on, in some small town pokey. Or it might depend on
who decided to pull up stakes at some outback campsite and get on the bus for a
spell, and decide if they were, or were not, on the bus. After all even all-day
highs, all-night sex, and 24/7 just hanging around listening to the music is
not for everyone. And while we had plenty of adventures, thinking back on it
now, they all came down to drugs, sex, and rock and roll with a little food on
the side. If you want to hear about them just ask Markin to contact me. The
real thing though, the thing that everybody should remember is that dance night
in Ames, Iowa when Phil Larkin got “religion,” 1960s secular religion. He slid
back some later, like everybody does, but when he was on the bus he was in very
heaven.
Markin note:
No question that this story, except perhaps for hormonal adolescents, is better
than those dreary old hapless guy searching for young love tales that he ran by
us before. By the way Phil, you don’t happen to have Luscious Lois’s, ah,
Sandra Sharp’s phone number or address. And don’t lie and say you don’t have
it. You never crossed off a woman’s name from your book in your life. Give it
up.
