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Wednesday, May 06, 2015
Sitting On The Rim Of The World- With The Son Of The Neon Wilderness Nelson Algren In Mind-Take Four
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
He wrote of small-voiced people, mostly people who had started out in the world with small voices, small voices which never got louder, never were heard over the rumble of the subway, working stiffs and their women, sometimes their kids, their kids growing up like weeds, who turned out to be disappointments but what could expect more from the progeny of small-voiced people, guys who sat around gin mills all night (maybe all day too I knew a few who inhabited the Dublin Grille in my old hometown of North Adamsville, another town filled with small-voice people). Never wrote, or wrote much, about big-voiced people who tumbled down to the sound of rumble subway stops out their doors, people who fell off the rim of the world from some high place due to their hubris, their addictions, their outrageous wanting habits never sated before the fall (not some edenic fall but just a worldly fall that once it happened the world moved on and ignored). Wrote of the desperately lonely, a man talking to himself on some forsaken park bench the only voice, not a big voice but a voice that had to be reckoned with, of the stuffed cop swaggering his billy club menacingly to him move on, or else, a woman, unhappy in love, hell maybe jilted at the altar, sitting alone like some Apple Annie in that one Ladies Invited tavern on the corner, the one just off Division where she had met that man the first time and meets all men now, all men with the price of a drink, no more. Yeah, a big old world filled with the lonely hearing only their own heartbeats, heard no other heartbeats as they waited out their days. What did Eliot call it, oh yeah, measured out their lives in coffee spoons. Wrote of alienated people too, not the Chicago intellectuals who were forever belly-aching about the de-humanization of man, about how we had built a mechanical world from which we had to run but the common clay, the ones who manned the conveyor belts, ran the damn rumbling subways, shoveled the snow, hell, shoveled shit day and night. Wrote of the night people, of the ones who would show up after midnight in some police precinct line-up, the winos, the jack-rollers, the drifters, the grifters, the midnight sifters, maybe a hooker who had not paid the paddy and thus was subject to the grill. Wrote of the people who inhabit the Nighthawk Diner (artist Edward Hopper’s all shape angles, all dim lights outside, bright fluorescent no privacy, no hiding lights inside, all the lonely people eating their midnight hamburgers fresh off the greased grill, another grill that forlorn hooker knew well, or Tom Waits’ rummies, bummies, stumblers, street-walkers looking for respect all shadows left behind, take your pick), the restless, the sleepless, the shiftless, those who worked the late shift, those who drew the late shift of life, those who worked better under the cover of night in the dark alleyways and sullen doorways.
He wrote big time, big words, about the small-voiced people, big words for people who spoke in small words, spoke small words about small dreams, or no dreams, spoke only of the moment, the eternal moment. The next fix, how to get it, the next drink, how to get it, the next bet, how to con the barkeeper to put him on the sheet, the next john, how to take him, the next rent due, how to avoid the dun and who after all had time for anything beyond that one moment. Waiting eternally waiting to get well, waiting for the fixer man to walk up the stairs and get you well, well beyond what any doctor could prescript, better than any priest could absolve, to get some kicks. (Needle, whiskey, sex although that was far down the list by the time that needle was needed or that shot of low-shelf whiskey drove you to your need, again.) Waiting for the fixer man, waiting for the fixer man to fix what ailed them. Not for him the small voice pleasant Midwestern farmers providing breadbaskets to the world talking to kindred about prices of wheat and corn, the prosperous small town drugstore owners filling official drug prescriptions and selling the under-aged liquor as medicine or whatever the traffic would bear, or of Miss Millie’s beauty salon where the blue-haired ladies get ready for battle and gossip about how Mister so and so had an affair with Miss so and so from the office and how will Mildred who of course they would never tell do when the whole thing goes public (although one suspects that he could have written that stuff, written and hacked away his talent)who in the pull and push of the writing profession they had (have) their muses. Nor was he inclined to push the air out of the small town banker seeking a bigger voice (calling in checks at a moment’s notice), the newspaper publisher seeking to control the voices or the alderman or his or her equivalent who had their own apparatuses for getting their small voices heard (although again one suspects he could have, if so inclined, shilled for that set). No, he, Nelson Algren, he, to give him a name took dead aim at the refuge of society, the lumpen as he put it in the title of one short story, those sitting on the rim of the world.
And he did good, did good by his art, did good by his honest snarly look at the underside of society, and, damn, by making us think about that quarter turn of fate that separated the prosperous farmer (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not short-weighting the world), the drugstore owner (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not dispensing his wares, his potent drugs, out the back door to a craving market) , Miss Millie (assuming as we must that she, secretly, was not running a call girl service on the side), the banker (assuming as we must that he, maybe secretly maybe not, was not gouging rack rents and usurious interest), the newspaper editor (assuming as we must that he, very publicly, in fact was printing all the news fit to print), and the politician (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not bought and paid for by all of the above, or others) from the denizens of his mean streets. The mean city streets, mainly of Chicago, but that is just detail, just names of streets and sections of town to balance his work where his characters eked out an existence, well, anyway they could, some to turn up face down in some muddy ravine, under some railroad trestle, in some dime flop house, other to sort of amble along in the urban wilderness purgatory.
Brother Algren gave us characters to chew on, plenty of characters, mostly men, mostly desperate (in the very broadest sense of that word), mostly with some jones to work off, mostly with some fixer man in the background to wreak havoc too. He gave us two classics of the seamy side genre, one, the misbegotten Frankie Machine, the man with the golden arm, the man with the chip on his shoulder, the mid-century(20th century, okay) man ill at ease in his world, ill at ease with the world and looking, looking for some relief, some kicks in that mid-century parlance, and, two, that hungry boy, that denizen of the great white trash night, Dove Linkhorn, who, perhaps more than Frankie spoke to that mid-century angst, spoke to that world gone wrong, for those who had just come up, come up for some place where time stood still to gain succor in the urban swirl, to feast at the table, come up from the back forty lots, the prairie golden harvest wheat fields, the Ozarks, all swamps and ooze, mountain wind hills and hollows, the infested bayous and were ready to howl, howl at the moon to get attention.
I remember reading somewhere, and I have forgotten where now, that someone had noted that Nelson Algren’s writing on Dove Linkhorn’s roots was the most evocative piece on the meaning of the okie–arkie out migration segment of that mid-century America ever written, the tale of the wandering boys, the railroad riders, the jungle camp jumpers, the skid row derelicts. Hell, call it by its right name, the white trash, that lumpen mush. And he or she was right, of course, after I went back and re-read that first section of Walk On The Wild Side where the Linkhorn genealogy back unto the transport ships that brought the first crop of that ilk from thrown out Europe are explored. All the pig thieves, cattle-rustlers, poachers, highwaymen, the -what did some sociologist call them?, oh yeah, “the master-less men,” those who could not or would not be tamed by the on-rushing wheels of free-form capitalism as the system relentlessly picked up steam, the whole damn lot transported. And good riddance.
The population of California after World War II was filled to the brim with such types, the feckless “hot rod” boys, boys mostly too young to have been though the bloodbaths of Europe and Asia building some powerful road machines out of baling wire and not much else, speeding up and down those ocean-flecked highways looking for the heart of Saturday night, looking for kicks just like those Chicago free-flow junkies, those twisted New Orleans whoremasters. Wandering hells angels riding two by two (four by four if they felt like it and who was to stop them) creating havoc for the good citizens of those small towns they descended on, descended on unannounced (and unwelcomed by those same good citizens). In and out of jail, Q, Folsom, not for stealing pigs now, but armed robberies or some egregious felony, but kindred to those lost boys kicked out of Europe long ago. Corner boys, tee-shirted, black leather jacket against cold nights, hanging out with time on their hands and permanent smirks, permanent hurts, permanent hatreds, paid to that Algren observation. All the kindred of the cutthroat world, or better “cut your throat” world, that Dove drifted into was just a microcosm of that small-voiced world.
He spoke of cities, even when his characters came fresh off the farm, abandoned for the bright lights of the city and useless to that short-weighting farmer who now is a prosperous sort, making serious dough as the breadbasket to the world. They, the off-hand hot rod king, the easy hell rider, the shiftless corner boy, had no existence, no outlets for their anger and angst, in small towns and hamlets for their vices, or their virtues, too small, too small for the kicks they were looking for. They needed the anonymous city rooming house, the cold-water flat, the skid- row flop house, the ten- cent beer hall, hell, the railroad jungle, any place where they could just let go with their addictions, their anxieties, and their hunger without having to explain, endlessly explain themselves, always, always a tough task for the small-voiced of this wicked old world. They identified with cities, with city 24/7/365 lights, with Algren’s blessed neon lights, city traffic (of all kinds), squalor, cops on the take, cops not on the take, plebeian entertainments, sweat, a little dried blood, marked veins, reefer madness, swilled drinks, white towers, all night diners (see it always comes back to that lonely, alienated Nighthawk Diner just ask Waits), the early editions (for race results, the number, who got dead that day, the stuff of that world), a true vision of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawk for a candid world.
He spoke of jazz and the blues, as if all the hell in this wicked old world could be held off for a minute while that sound sifted thought the night fog air reaching the rooming house, the flop, the ravine, the beer hall as it drifted out to the river and drowned. Music not upfront but as a backdrop to while the steamy summer nights away, and maybe the frigid lake front winter too. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, he spoke of a small-voiced white world, residents of white slums and pursuers of white- etched dreams and only stick character blacks but his beat, his writing rhythm made no sense without the heat of Trouble In Mind or that cool blast of Charlie Parker, Miles, Dizzie be-bopping, made absolutely no sense, and so it went.
He spoke of love too. Not big flamed love, big heroes taking big falls for some hopeless romance like in olden times but squeezed love, love squeezed out of a spoon, maybe, but love in all its raw places. A guy turning his woman into a whore to feed his endless habit love, and her into a junkie love. A woman taking her man through cold turkey love. A man letting his woman go love, ditto woman her man when the deal went wrong. When the next best thing came by. Not pretty love all wrapped in a bow, but love nevertheless. And sometimes in this perverse old world the love a man has for a woman when, failing cold turkey, he goes to get the fixer man and that fixer man get his woman well, almost saintly and sacramental. Brothers and sisters just read The Last Carousel if you want to know about love. Hard, hard love. Yah, Nelson Algren knew how to give voice, no holds barred, to the small-voiced people.
Tuesday, May 05, 2015
In Honor Of International Workers’ Day- May Day 2015
-Ancient dreams, dreamed-The Risen People?-Frank Jackman’s War-Take Four
From The American Left History Blog Archives –May
Day 1971
Endless, dusty, truck heavy, asphalt steaming
hitchhike roads travelled, Route 6, 66, maybe 666 and perdition for all I know,
every back road, every Connecticut highway avoiding back road from
Massachusetts south to the capital for one last winner-take-all, no prisoners
taken show-down to end all show-downs. And maybe, just maybe, finally some
peace and a new world a-borning, a world we had been talking about for at least
a decade (clueless, as all youth nations are clueless, that that road was
well-travelled, very well- travelled, before us). No Jack Kerouac dharma bum
easy road (although there were dharma bums, or at least faux dharma bums,
aplenty on those 1971 roads south, and west too) let- her-rip cosmic brakeman
Neal Cassady at the wheel flying through some Iowa/Kansas wheat field night
fantasy this trip.
No this trip was not about securing some cultural
enclave in post-war America (post-World War II so as not to confuse the reader)
in break-out factory town Lowell or cold water tenement Greenwich Village/Soho
New Jack City or Shangri-La West out in the Bay area, east or west, but about
mucking up the works, the whole freaking
governmental/societal/economic/cultural/personal/godhead world (that last one,
the godhead one, not thrown in just for show, no way) and maybe, just maybe
sneaking away with the prize. But a total absolute, absolutist, big karma sky
fight out, no question. And we, I, am ready. On that dusty road ready.
More. See all roads head south as we, my girlfriend of
the day, maybe more, maybe more than a day, Joyell, but along this time more
for ease of travelling for those blessed truck driver eye rides, than lust or
dream wish and my sainted wise-guy amigo (and shades of Gregory Corso, sainted,
okay), Matty, who had more than a passing love or dream wish in her and if you
had seen her you would not have wondered why. Not have wondered why if your
“type” was Botticelli painted and thoughts of butterfly swirls just then or were
all-type sleepy-eyed benny-addled teamster half-visioned out of some forlorn
rear view mirror.
Yah, head south, in ones, twos, and threes (no more,
too menacing even for hefty ex-crack back truckers to stop for) travelling down
to D.C. for what many of us figure will be the last, finally, push back against
the war, the Vietnam War, for those who have forgotten, or stopped watching
television and the news, but THEY, and you knew (know) who they were (are), had
their antennae out too, they KNEW we were coming, even high-ball fixed (or
whiskey neat she had the face for them) looking out from lonely balconies
Martha Mitchell knew that much. They were, especially in mad max robot-cop
Connecticut, out to pick off the stray or seven who got into their mitts as a contribution
to law and order, law and order one Richard Milhous Nixon-style (and in front
of him, leading some off-key, off-human key chorus some banshee guy from
Maryland, another watch out hitchhike trail spot, although not as bad as Ct,
nothing except Arizona is). And thus those dusty, steamy, truck heavy (remind
me to tell you about hitchhiking stuff, and the good guy truckers you wanted,
desperately wanted, to ride with in those days, if I ever get a chance
sometime).
The idea behind this hitchhiked road, or maybe,
better, the why. Simple, too simple when you, I, thought about it later in
lonely celled night but those were hard trying times, desperate times really,
and just free, free from another set of steel-barred rooms this jailbird was
ready to bring down heaven, hell, hell if it came down to it to stop that
furious war (Vietnam, for the later reader) and start creating something
recognizable for humans to live in. So youth nation, then somewhat long in the
tooth, and long on bad karma-driven bloody defeats too, decided to risk all
with the throw of the dice and bring a massive presence to D.C. on May Day
1971.
And not just any massed presence like the then
familiar seasonal peace crawl that nobody paid attention too anymore except the
organizers, although the May Day action was wrapped around that year’s spring
peace crawl, (wrapped up, cozily wrapped up, in their utopian reformist dream
that more and more passive masses, more and more suburban housewives from New
Jersey, okay, okay not just Jersey, more and more high school freshman, more
and more barbers, more and more truck driver stop waitresses, for that matter,
would bring the b-o-u-r-g-e-o-i-s-i-e (just in case there are sensitive souls
in the room) to their knees. No, we were going to stop the government, flat.
Big scheme, big scheme no question and if anybody, any “real” youth nation
refugee, excepting, of course, always infernal always, those cozy peace crawl
organizers, tried to interject that perhaps there were wiser courses nobody mentioned
them out loud in my presence and I was at every meeting, high or low. Moreover
I had my ears closed, flapped shut closed, to any lesser argument. I, rightly
or wrongly, silly me thought “cop.”
So onward anti-war soldiers from late night too little
sleep Sunday night before Monday May Day dawn in some vagrant student apartment
around DuPont Circle (I think) but it may have been further up off 14th Street,
Christ after eight million marches for seven million causes who can remember
that much. No question though on the student ghetto apartment locale; bed
helter-skelter on the floor, telephone wire spool for a table, orange crates
for book shelves, unmistakably, and the clincher, seventeen posters, mainly
Che, Mao, Ho, Malcolm etc., the first name only necessary for identification
pantheon just then, a smattering of Lenin and Trotsky but they were old guys
from old revolutions and so, well, discounted to early rise (or early stay up
cigarette chain-smoking and coffee slurping to keep the juices flowing). Out
into the streets, out into the small collectives coming out of other vagrant
apartments streets (filled with other posters of Huey Newton , George Jackson,
Frantz Fanon, etc. from the two names needed pantheon) joining up to make a
cohorted mass (nice way to put it, right?). And then dawn darkness surrounded,
coffee spilled out, cigarette bogarted, AND out of nowhere, or everywhere,
bang, bang, bang of governmental steel, of baton, of chemical dust, of whatever
latest technology they had come up with they came at us (pre-tested in Vietnam,
naturally, as I found out later). Jesus, bedlam, mad house, insane asylum,
beat, beat like gongs, defeated.
Through bloodless bloodied streets (this, after all,
was not Chicago, hog butcher to the world), may day tear down the government
days, tears, tear-gas exploding, people running this way and that coming out of
a half-induced daze, a crazed half-induced daze that mere good- will, mere
righteousness would right the wrongs of this wicked old world. One arrested, two,
three, many, endless thousands as if there was an endless capacity to arrest,
and be arrested, arrest the world, and put it all in one great big Robert F.
Kennedy stadium home to autumn gladiators on Sunday and sacrificial lambs this
spring maypole may day basket druid day.
And, as I was being led away by one of D.C.’s finest,
I turned around and saw that some early Sunday morning voice, some “cop” voice
who advised caution and went on and on about getting some workers out to join
us before we perished in an isolated blast of arrests and bad hubris also being
led away all trussed up, metal hand-cuffs seemingly entwined around her whole
slight body. She said she would stick with us even though she disagreed with
the strategy that day and I had scoffed, less than twenty-four hours before,
that she made it sound like she had to protect her erring children from
themselves. And she, maybe, the only hero of the day. Righteous anonymous
sister, forgive me. (Not so anonymous actually since I saw her many times later
in Boston, almost would have traded in lust for her but I was still painted
Botticelli-bewitched and so I, we, let the moment passed, and worked on about
six million marches for about five millions causes with her but that was later.
I saw no more of her in D.C. that week.)
Stop. Brain start. Out of the bloodless fury, out of
the miscalculated night a strange bird, no peace dove, these were not such
times even with all our unforced errors, and no flame-flecked phoenix raising
but a bird, maybe the owl of Minerva came a better sense that this new world
a-bornin’ would take some doing, some serious doing. More serious that some
wispy-bearded, pony-tailed beat, beat down, beat around, beat up young stalwart
road tramp acting in god’s place could even dream of. But that was later. Just
then, just that screwed-up martyr moment, I was longing for the hot, dusty,
truck driver stop meat loaf special, dishwater coffee on the side, road back
home even ready to chance Connecticut highway dragnets to get there.
**************
After Frank Jackman was
discharged from the Army in 1971 he, for a short time, had a certain notoriety
in the local anti-war movement around Cambridge, In those heady day before May
Day he had his pick of anti-war women who were interested in hanging around
with an ex-soldier resister (well not pick but there was some serious interest)
this is the story of the most serious relationship prior to May Day. This
Joyell he spoke of below and he had hitchhiked to Washington, D.C that last
weekend in April. She to stay only for the Saturday mass march since she was
opposed to the actions to “shut down the government” planned for May Day Monday
morning.
As this story unfolds,
Elizabeth Cotten’ s Freight Train, in an upbeat Peter, Paul and Mary-style
version complete with Bleecker Street reference, is being covered just then
near the well firewood- stocked, well-stoked fireplace of the great room in a
hard winter, February version, snow-covered rural New Hampshire old time
religious order assembly hall by some upstart urban folkie a long way from his
home and a long way from that 1960s folk revival minute that then had had even
jaded aficionados from the generation of ’68 clamoring for more.
Meanwhile, the front hall
entrance adjacent to that great room where that old-time folkie and his
old-time tune are being heard by a small early-bird arrival gathering crowd who
never tire of the song, and who this night certainly do not tire of being close
by the huge well stocked, well-stoked fireplace where the old brother, hell,
let’s give him a name, Eric, Eric from Vermont, okay, is holding forth is
starting to fill with more arrivals to be checked in and button-holed. The
place, for the curious: the Shaker Farms Peace Pavilion (formerly just plain
vanilla Shaker Farms Assembly Hall but the “trust fund babies” who bought and
donated the site, ah, insisted in their, of course, anonymous way on the added
signature) the scene of umpteen peace conferences, anti-war parlays,
alternative world vision seminars, non-violent role-playing skits, and personal
witness actions worked out. A handy hospice for worn-out ideas, ditto
frustrations, and an off-hand small victory or two.
That very last part, that
desperate victory last part, is what keeps the place afloat, afloat in this
oddball of a hellish anti-war year 1971 when even hardened and steeled old-time
peace activists against the Vietnam War are starting to believe they will be
entitled to Social Security for their efforts before this bloody war is over.
Hence the urgency behind this particular great room fireplace warm, complete
with booked-in urban folkie singer, umpteenth anti-war conference. But onward
brothers and sisters and let us listen in to the following conversation
overheard in that now crowded front hall:
“Hi, Joyell, glad you could
make it to the conference. Are you by yourself or did you bring Steve with
you?” asked Jim Sweeney, one of the big honchos, one of the big organizational
honchos and that is what matters these dog days when all hope appears to have
been abandoned, these now fading days of the antiwar movement trying yet again
to conference jump start the opposition to Nixon’s bloody escalations and
stealthy tricky maneuvers.
“Good to see you too, Jim,”
answered Joyell, who said it in such a singsong way that she and Jim Sweeney,
obviously, had been in some mystic time, maybe some summer of love time before
everything and everybody needed twelve coats of armor, emotional armor, just to
move from point A to point B, more than fellows at one of those umpteen peace
things. Joyell knew, knew from some serious reflection last summer, that she
had put on a few more armor coats herself and, hell, she was just a
self-confessed rank and filer. Their “thing” had just faded though for lack of
energy, lack of high “ism” politics on Joyell’s part unlike frenetic Jim, and
for the cold, hard fact that Jim at the time wanted to devote himself totally
to the “movement” and could not “commit” to a personal relationship. The
ensuing followed-
“Who is that guy over in the corner, that
green corner coach, the guy with the kind of wispy just starting to fill out
brown beard, and those fierce piercing goy blue eyes, that I just passed? I’ve
not seen him around before,” Joyell asked herself and then Marge Goodwin, expecting
Marge the crackerjack organizer of everything from antiwar marches to save the,
and you can fill in the blank, to know all the players. Moreover Marge and
Joyell got along well enough for Joyell to ask such a question, “girl talk,”
they called it between themselves although to the “men” this was a book sealed
with seven seals since the “correct” thing was to put such girlish things back
in prehistoric times, four or five years ago okay. Joyell also sensed that
since Marge’s “thing” with Jim hadn’t worked out they had something in common,
although nothing was ever said. Nor would it be.
“Oh, that’s Frank Jackman,
the anti-war GI who just got out of the stockade over at Fort Shaw last week
and he is ready to do some work with us,” volunteered Marge. Later that evening
Joyell would hear from a reliable source that Marge had gotten, or had tried to
get, very familiar with the ex-army soldier resister. Marge had a thing for
“heroic” guys. Heroic guys being guys like Jim, Joan Baez’s hubby, David Harris,
who had refused draft induction, the Berrigan Brothers who were getting ready
to do time for draft board record destruction (although she, Marge, couldn’t
get that damn Catholic trick part that drove their actions) and now this Frank
Jackman who had done a year, a tough soldier non-soldier year, some of it in
solidarity, in the stockade for refusing go to Vietnam (and refusing to wear
the military uniform at one point). Joyell also heard from another source that
evening that it was no dice between Marge and Frank.
This source thought it was
that Marge, always getting what Marge wanted when it came to “movement men,”
figured this guy would just cave in and take the ride. Not this guy, no way,
not after taking on the “big boys” over at Fort Shaw. No dice, huh. That’s a
point in his favor. But that was later fuel.
“Oh, that’s why his beard is
so wispy and he is wearing those silly high top polished black boots and that
size too big Army jacket with those bell-bottomed jeans. He certainly has the
idea of what it takes to fit in here,” Joyell figured out, figured out loud.
Marge just nodded, nodded kind of dismissively that she was right. And then
left to do some organization business setting up the evening’s work.
And then suddenly, she,
Joyell Davin (suitably Americanized, naturally, a couple of generations back),
freshly-damaged in love’s unequal battles but apparently not ready to throw in
the towel, got very quiet, very quiet like she always did when some guy caught
her eye, well, more than her eye tonight, now that Steve was so much train
smoke out in the cornfields somewhere. Maybe it was the New York City
armor-coated brashness, hell Manhattan grow-up hard and necessary brashness
required in a too many people universe, and learned from her very opinionated
father, that her quietness tried to rein in at times like this so guys, guys
like this Frank, wouldn’t be thrown off. But whatever it was that drove her
quietness she was taking her peeks, her quiet half- peeks really, at this guy.
With Steve, and a few other guys, it was mostly full steam ahead and let the
devil take the hinter- post. This time her clock said take it easy, jesus, take
it easy.
And as she found herself
catching herself taking more and more of those telltale peeks she noticed,
noticed almost by instinct, almost by some mystical sense that he was
“checking” her out, although their dueling eyes had not met. Then, after Jim
had finished giving the opening address about what the conferees were trying to
do, this Frank Jackman stood up quickly without introduction and started
talking, in a firm voice, about the need to up the ante, to create havoc in the
streets, and in the army camps. And do it now, and with some sense of urgency.
But he said it all in such way that everybody in the room, all forty or fifty
of them, knew, or should have known, that this was not some ragtag
wispy–bearded fly-by-night “days of rage” kid spirit, freshly bell-bottom pants
minted, but some kind of revolutionary, some kind of radical anyway, who had
thought about things a lot and wasn’t just a flame-thrower like she had seen
too many of lately, including Steve, before he went to find himself.
When Frank was done he
looked, half-looked really, quickly in her direction like he was seeking her,
and just her, approval. And like he needed to know and know right this minute
that she approved. She blushed, and hoped it did not show. And hoped that she
had read his look in her direction correctly. But before that blush could
subside she blushed again when out of nowhere this Frank gave her a another
look, a serious checking out look if she knew her “movement” men, not a leer
like some drunken barroom guy, or “come on, honey,” like a schoolboy but a
let’s talk high “ism” talk later, and see what happens later, later. Maybe this
umpteenth conference would work out after all.
So our Joyell was not
surprised, not surprised at all, when during the break, the blessed break after
two non-stop hours of waiting, Francis Alexander Jackman (that’s what he was
called from when he was a kid and it kind of stuck but he preferred simply
Frank) came up behind, tapped her gently on the shoulder to get her attention,
introduced himself without fanfare or with any heroic poses, and thanked her
for her work on his behalf.
“What do you mean, Frank?”
she asked, bewildered by the question. “Oh, when your Peace Action committee
came up to Fort Shaw and demonstrated for my freedom,” he replied in kind of a
whisper voice, very different from his public voice, a voice that had known
some tough times recently and maybe long ago too, but that soft whisper was
what she needed, needed to hear from a righteous man, just now. The shrill of
Steve’s voice, and a couple of others in her string of forgotten luck, still
echoed in her brain.
“That was you? I didn’t make
the connection. I didn’t know that was you, sorry, that was about a year ago
and I have been going non-stop with this antiwar march and that women’s lib
things. Were you in the stockade all that time?” she continued.
“Yah,” just a yah, not forlorn
or anything like that but just a simple statement of fact, of the fact that he
had needed to do what he did and that was that, next question, came that soft
reply like this Frank and she were on some same wave-length. She was confused,
confused more than a little that he had that strong effect on her after about
five minutes of just general conversation.
Just then Marge,
super-organizer but, as Joyell had already gathered intelligence on by then,
not above having the last say in her little romances with the newest heroes of
the movement, or trying to, called to Frank that Stanley Bloom, the big
national anti-war organizer, wanted his input into something. But before he
left soft -whispering still, calm still, unlike when he talked, talked peace
action talk, he mentioned kind of kid-like, bashful kid-like, and maybe they
could meet later. Joyell could barely contain herself, and although she usually
acted bashfully at these times, kind of a studied bashfulness starting out,
even with Steve and some of the movement guys, she just blurted out, “We’d
better.” He replied, a little stronger of voice than that previous whisper, “I
guess that is a command, right?” And they both laughed, laughed an adventure
ahead laugh.
Later came, evening session
complete, as they were sitting across from each other in the great room, the
great fireplace room where Eric was going through his second rendition of
Freight Train to get the room revved up for his big stuff. Frank came over and
asked, back to whisper asked, if Joyell would like to go outside for a breath
of fresh winter air. Or maybe somewhere else, another room inside perhaps if
she didn’t like the cold or snow. No second request was necessary, and no
coyness on her part either with this guy, as she quickly went to the coat rack
and put on her coat, scarf, and boots. And so it went.
They talked, or rather she
talked a blue streak, a soft-spoken blue streak like Frank’s manner was
contagious, and maybe it was. Then he would ask a question, and ask it in such
a way that he really wanted to know, know her for her answer and not just to
ask, polite ask. As they walked, and walked, and as the snow got deeper as they
moved away from the pavilion she kind of fell, kind of helpless on purpose
fell. On purpose fell expecting that he might kiss her. But all he did was pick
her up, gently but firmly, held her in his arms just a fraction of a second,
but a fraction of a second enough to let her know, and let her feel, that they
had not seen the last of each other. And just for that cold, snow-driven
February night, as war raged on in some distance land, and as she gathered in
her tangled emotions after many romantic stumbles and man disappointments, that
thought was enough.
Workers Vanguard No. 1066
|
17 April 2015
|
Medical Crisis
Mumia’s Life in Danger—Free Him Now!
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
The following statement was issued by the Partisan Defense Committee on April 13.
On March 30, class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal was rushed from the SCI Mahanoy, Pennsylvania state prison to the Schuylkill Medical Center Intensive Care Unit, verging on a diabetic coma. With consummate cruelty, prison authorities initially not only prevented his wife, Wadiya, and other family members from seeing Mumia but also refused to divulge information about his condition. Pam Africa, Mumia’s designated emergency contact, was denied visitation as well. When prison officials relented after numerous protests, Wadiya, Mumia’s son Jamal Hart and his older brother Keith were granted just 30 minutes with Mumia. They found him with an insulin drip in one arm and handcuffs on the other, barely able to sit up, shaking and in pain, his breathing labored. Wadiya described being “shocked at his condition.” On April 1, a frail Mumia was sent back to the same Mahanoy prison where the contempt and medical neglect of his jailers had brought him to the threshold of death.
It is no secret that leading government officials, not just in Pennsylvania but across the country, want Mumia dead. This latest emergency highlights that Mumia’s life is in danger every day he remains in the clutches of the state authorities that for 30 years sought his legal lynching. With the overturning of his frame-up death sentence in 2011, they are determined that Mumia’s prison cot be his deathbed.
Three months ago, Mumia reported a full-body outbreak of eczema with bloody sores and blisters. Mumia’s skin erupted in reaction to treatment by prison doctors. Since then, Mumia has lost over 50 pounds. Results of three blood tests performed in February were reportedly withheld from him. Even the most incompetent medical personnel would have recognized something was awry—but Mumia was left to waste away while his blood sugar hit the roof. Not passing up any opportunity, prison authorities disciplined Mumia for missing roll call in early January because he had fallen into a trance-like sleep induced by his condition.
The shroud that prison authorities placed over Mumia’s condition recalls the mysterious death of his comrade Phil Africa at the State Correctional Institution in Dallas, Pennsylvania, on January 10. Phil was held in total isolation in the hospital for five days, during which time his wife of 44 years, Janine, was denied the right to speak to him until two days before he died. To this day, prison officials have never revealed the cause of Phil’s death.
We have long championed freedom for Mumia, an innocent man. Now the elementary demand for adequate medical treatment requires his immediate release. Free Mumia now!
Mumia has been in the crosshairs of the capitalist state since his days as a teenage Black Panther Party spokesman in the 1960s. That enmity toward him grew in the 1970s when, as a journalist known as the “voice of the voiceless,” Mumia exposed the racist Philly police vendetta against MOVE, the largely black back-to-nature group he came to support. Mumia was framed up for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer, Daniel Faulkner. Police and prosecutors manufactured evidence to convict him, including by terrorizing witnesses and concocting a fake confession two months after his arrest. Following a 1982 trial in which Mumia was denied the right to represent himself and was repeatedly ejected from the courtroom, he was sentenced to death explicitly for his political views, primarily his Black Panther membership. Federal and state courts have time and again refused to consider evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, especially the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner.
Mumia’s unwavering dedication to the cause of the oppressed can be seen in his delivering, despite his debilitated condition, a radio commentary on April 10 about the cold-blooded racist cop killing of 50-year-old black man Walter Scott by a white cop in South Carolina six days earlier. In their vendetta against Mumia, the forces of racist “law and order,” led by the Fraternal Order of Police, have fought to silence Mumia and vilify just about anyone—from union and student activists to liberal celebrities and an occasional politician—who in any way expresses support for Mumia’s rights. The same day Mumia was rushed to the hospital, hearings opened in a Pennsylvania court on his lawsuit challenging the “Revictimization Relief Act” enacted last October with the express aim of shutting down Mumia’s prison commentaries and suppressing his books.
Following an outcry in the bourgeois press, Marilyn Zuniga, a third-grade teacher in Orange, New Jersey, was suspended on April 10 without pay for the honorable act of encouraging students to send “get well” messages to Mumia. The PDC has sent a protest letter demanding Zuniga’s immediate reinstatement with no loss in pay.
Medical neglect of those incarcerated in America’s dungeons is epidemic. While the absence of care for those suffering from severe psychiatric problems has drawn some attention, most recently thanks to the torture chambers of New York City’s Rikers Island detention center, the denial of necessary medical attention to those, largely black and Latino, behind bars has been overwhelmingly ignored.
The medical neglect of those in prison hell has been exacerbated by the privatization of prison health care to penny-pinching concerns such as Corizon Health Inc., which alone covers nearly 350,000 inmates in 27 states. Corizon is the subject of numerous lawsuits, including one filed by the family of Javon Frazier, who was an inmate in a county jail in Florida. After four months of complaints of left shoulder pain, which were answered only with Tylenol, Frazier was ultimately hospitalized and diagnosed with bone cancer and his arm amputated. Frazier died just months after his release, at the age of 21.
The grotesque treatment of prisoners is exacerbated many times over for those, like Mumia, locked away for fighting against this racist capitalist order. The PDC has contributed to Mumia’s medical care, and urges union militants, fighters for black freedom and student activists to demand freedom now for Mumia Abu-Jamal. Readers who want to help defray Mumia’s expenses can make contributions at www.indiegogo.com/projects/mumia-abu-jamal-needs-medical-care-now. To correspond with Mumia, write to: Mumia Abu-Jamal, AM 8335, SCI Mahanoy, 301 Morea Road, Frackville, PA 17932.
As The 100th Anniversary Of The First
Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some
Remembrances-Artists’ Corner-
In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the
beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war clouds got a
full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed their unmitigated
horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing business in the
world. Yes the artists of every school the
Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists/Constructivists, Surrealists or those who would come
to speak for those movements (hell even the hide-bound Academy filled with its
rules, or be damned, spoke the pious words of peace, brotherhood and the affinity
of all humankind when there was sunny weather), those who saw the disjointedness
of modern industrial society in its squalor, it creation of generations of short,
nasty, brutish lives just like the philosophers predicted and put the pieces to
paint, sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other saw
that building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems;
writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish
theory of progress, humankind had moved
beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty
would put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling
cousins; writers of serious and not so serious novels drenched in platitudes
and hidden gazebo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing
words that man and woman had too much to do, too much sex to harness to
denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin,
neat trick, maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose
muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress
and strife of the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; and poets,
ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing
on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before
touching the hair of another man, putting another man to ground or laying their
own heads down for some imperial mission.
They all professed loudly (and those
few who did not profess, could not profess because they were happily getting
their blood rising, kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war
drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish,
Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in
quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the
course.
And then the war drums intensified, the
people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they
made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets, beautiful poets like
Wilfred Owens who would sicken of war before he passed leaving a beautiful
damnation on war, its psychoses, and broken bones and dreams, and the idiots
who brought humankind to such a fate, like e. e. cummings who drove through
sheer hell in those rickety ambulances floors sprayed with blood, man blood,
angers, anguishes and more sets of broken bones, and broken dreams, like Rupert
Brooke all manly and old school give and go, as they marched in formation
leaving the ports and then mowed down like freshly mown grass in their
thousands as the charge call came and they rested, a lot of them, in those
freshly mown grasses, like Robert Graves all grave all sputtering in his words
confused about what had happened, suppressing, always suppressing that instinct
to cry out against the hatred night, like old school, old Thomas Hardy writing
beautiful old English pastoral sentiments before the war and then full-blown
into imperium’s service, no questions asked old England right or wrong, like
old stuffed shirt himself T.S. Eliot speaking of hollow loves, hollow men,
wastelands, and such in the high club rooms on the home front, and like old
brother Yeats speaking of terrible beauties born in the colonies and maybe at
the home front too as long as Eliot does not miss his high tea. Jesus what a
blasted night that Great War time was.
And as the war drums intensified, the
people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they
made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, artists, beautiful artists like
Fernand Leger who could no longer push the envelope of representative art
because it had been twisted by the rubble of war, by the crashing big guns, by
the hubris of commanders and commanded and he turned to new form, tubes, cubes,
prisms, anything but battered humankind in its every rusts and lusts, all
bright and intersecting once he got the mustard gas out of his system, once he
had done his patria duty, like speaking of mustard gas old worn out John Singer
Sargent of the three name WASPs forgetting Boston Brahmin society ladies in
decollage, forgetting ancient world religious murals hanging atop Boston museum
and spewing trench warfare and the blind leading the blind out of no man’s
land, out of the devil’s claws, like Umberto Boccioni, all swirls, curves,
dashes, and dangling guns as the endless charges endlessly charge, like Gustav
Klimt and his endlessly detailed gold dust opulent Asiatic dreams filled with
lovely matrons and high symbolism and blessed Eve women to fill the night,
Adam’s night after they fled the garden, like Joan Miro and his infernal boxes,
circles, spats, eyes, dibs, dabs, vaginas, and blots forever suspended in deep
space for a candid world to fret through, fret through a long career, and like
poor maddened rising like a phoenix in the Spartacist uprising George Grosz
puncturing the nasty bourgeoisie, the big bourgeoisie the ones with the real
dough and their overfed dreams stuffed with sausage, and from the bloated
military and their fat-assed generals stuff with howitzers and rocket shells,
like Picasso, yeah, Picasso taking the shape out of recognized human existence
and reconfiguring the forms, the mesh of form to fit the new hard order, like,
Braque, if only because if you put the yolk on Picasso you have to tie him to
the tether too.
And do not forget when the war drums
intensified, and the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their
lusts and they, they, other creative souls made of ordinary human clay as it
turned out sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went to the trenches
to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for humankind, of course,
their always fate ….
Out In The Corner Boy Be-Bop Night-With Jersey Boys In Mind
From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
Frank Jackman’s old friend Jack Dawson, his old friend from corner boy days starting in the fifth grade down in back of the Myles Standish Elementary School in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston in the 1950s, had a while back written a short review about seeing the film Jersey Boys. With the wizardry of modern technology Frank had had the review placed in a blog dedicated to all things retro 1950s and 1960s (two slightly different retros but guys like Frank and Jack squeeze both eras.) Prior to Jack’s viewing the film with his lovely wife, Anna, Frank had told him a summary of the plot-line (and the song playlist) one night when they were having one of their periodic “watering hole” get- togethers to cut up old touches at the Sunnyville Grille in Boston when Frank was in town for a conference. Based on that exchange Jack was determined to see the film. A few days later after seeing the film, seeing how a bunch of “from hunger” working class kids from Jersey (but given the plot-line it could have been lots of places including the “projects” down in Carver where he had come of age), how they made it big, made their fifteen minutes of fame and then some Jack started to think about those old days. About the days when chance had caused him to meet Frank at Myles Standish after his family had moved from Clintonville a few miles away in the summer before fifth grade and the two of them along with a couple of other corner boys, Red Radley and Jimmy Jenkins, in sixth grade created their own (imitative) doo-wop group in an attempt to break out of their youthful jails and gain their own fame (although their standard had not been fifteen minutes but infinity, or when the girls started gathering around, whichever came first).
What got Jack thinking along those lines was something Frank’s long-time companion, Laura, whom he had seen the film with, had told Frank. She said to him that she had had trouble “getting into” the story line at the beginning because as Frank told Jack before he gave him the details of the film the scenes were far too removed from her own strait-laced middle-class upbringing in Manhattan. Laura did said that she assumed that part of the film’s story line, the part about the furious growing up “from hunger” strivings of the guys who would become the Four Seasons out in the 1950s New Jersey night, had dovetailed with Frank’s experiences in his own youth and as well with the kind of things he have been writing about from that period of late. The kind of things that Frank wrote about after Jack and he discussed various incidents in growing up absurd in the 1950s at their “watering hole” sessions which they initiated after they had then recently rekindled their friendship after many years of going their own ways. Laura had been right about that part, about going back to the mist of time and grabbing some thoughts about how those days had formed Frank, for better or worse, no question. And that feeling got through to Jack as well.
Frank’s had told Jack when he asked why he was writing some many sketches about the past, also placed in retro blogs dedicated to such reflections, that his purpose in writing about the old days had not been to put paid to some ghosts of the past as a lot of guys they knew were interested in doing by physically revisiting growing up hometowns like Josh Breslin going back up to Olde Saco in Maine and getting the wits scared out of him that somebody might recognize him at every turn he made, like brawny Bart Webber going back to Carver to re-flame old sport’s dreams by attending the home football games with other old geezers from his high school, or like one of their other pals, Jimmy Jenkins, who had gone to his (their) fiftieth class reunion at Carver High and came away more depressed than anything since all the old gang, those still walking, talked about was various medical conditions and their grandchildren which left him cold. No, that part was done with this late in the game and the fates had called their shots on that saga already. Moreover Frank said he certainly had not intended to evaluate, Jesus, not to always evaluate, how this or that thing that happened back then turned the great Mandela wheel any particular way but merely to put together some interesting tidbits for Jack, Jimmy, and a couple of other of his later acquaintances Josh and Phil Larkin who were also from the same era when everybody got together at the Sunnyville, or at the Kennebunk Pub up in Maine where Josh lived when they all tired of the city and needed to be washed clean by the ocean spray off the fearsome blue-green Atlantic Ocean.
Of course lately Jack had begun, feeding off Frank’s tidbits as well as that film, writing sketches about his own musical coming of age time in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the time frame that the Four Seasons had blossomed. Strangely both Frank and Jack agreed that except for the classic doo wop be-bop song, Sherri, they were not fans of the Four Seasons although unlike other groups and singers of the time Jack did not hate their sound. What had perked Jack’s big interest in this film had been the almost chemically pure corner boy aspect, Jersey corner boy aspect, which was not at all unlike his (and Frank’s) Carver corner boy growing up saga.
In fact at certain points the early story of the guys who formed the core of the original group, Frankie, Tommy and Nick was so very, very similar to parts of Jack’s corner boy experiences that he had to laugh. The options for corner boys, guys who grew up “from hunger” in the working class neighborhoods, usually “the projects,” around the country had those same options mentioned early in the film once they came of age, the Army one way or another many times under some judge’s “trying to make a man out you” threat of the Army or jail, for those who rap sheets were too long to warrant options then just jail or for a guy they knew, Slammer Johnson, who was as tough as they come at age twelve and even older guys, serious corner boys who knew a thing or two about whipsaw chains and brass knuckles, the reformatory, or become famous. Jack knew that part, knew that “wanting habits” hunger that all the young guys in Carver were trying break from, break from when they saw Elvis or Jerry Lee burning stages up and so he and the boys had tried the latter, the fame game, at one point.
It all started in the summer before sixth grade when doo wop was all the craze after Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers had asked the magic question-why do fools fall in love- and drove the song by the same name to the top of the charts. There were other guys groups (doo wop girls’ groups too who were cruising to the top the charts but the Carver guys really weren’t interested in them because there was no way they could get anything to help them break-out from paying attention to girl groups, yeah, foolish guys) that hit it big, the Five Satins, The Dubs, The Chasers, The Be-Bop Boys and a bunch of others, mostly black guys (and an occasional girl mixed in) which they knew were hitting it big from watching American Bandstand in the afternoons after school. Dick Clark and that Bandstand was in elementary school anyway, in elementary school at the time when they were getting hipped to music was mandatory to see who was who in the teenage song firmament, see what guys were wearing, see what dances guys were expected to know how to do, sweaty palms and two left feet not withstanding, and, and what chicks looked cool on the show. That last maybe the biggest draw of all as everybody rushed home after school to catch the show.
Funny the black group thing was not a big deal, or Jack and the others didn’t think much about it since the only time they saw black people was on television. Jack would never really since a live black person until years later when he ran track and would run against black guys in the big meets up in Boston Garden. Other than grabbing tips, like having the lead singer off to the side, everybody having the same outfit, the harmony guys snapping their fingers to the beat, and staying on beat with the lead singer they had no racial options about the music and they, meaning mainly Jack at first, figured their niche would be as white guy doo-woppers so they would be working a different street. (Jack and Frank, later in high school, when the civil rights movement was on the television every night practically would get a very rude awaking both within their families and among their fellow students and neighbors when they expressed the slightest sympathy for the black liberation struggle but back in sixth grade there was nothing to it) That niche was not all thought out in such a refined manner as Jack was now recalling in retrospect but what was thought out was that fame part, thought out big time.
That summer before sixth grade right after school got out for the summer was when the Myles Standish corner boys’ natural leader, Red Radley, driven to distraction by the notion of fame, got them together around their corner every night to practice. Since there had not been any stores to stand in front of holding up the wall in the “projects” where they lived like in the pictures they had seen on music magazines they looked through up in the main library up in Carver Square their corner had been in back of the Myles Standish Elementary School. On hot summer nights the back was all lit up brightly since the night basketball leagues would be holding forth across the field from the gym entrance where they hung out. So under “the street lights” just like those New York City and Philly street corner guys they sang. Sang the doo-wop craze stuff which Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers had started and which Red following Jack’s lead about the white boy doo-wop niche figured they could cash in on.
For a couple of weeks they practiced like crazy each night, no paying much attention to much else except exchanging fantasies about what kind of suits they would by, how to act when the crush of the crowds came on, what to do with swooning girls, kids’ stuff dream stuff. But mainly the practiced, trying like hell to work a smooth harmonious sound on the material they covered, covered by Frank copying down the lyrics each time a song they wanted to cover came on WMEX the local rock station (fortunately the big hits got played endlessly each cycle so Frank mainly got the words but on few he missed a couple and so they just incorporated what was there) with Red in the lead. Red really did have the best voice, really could project his voice, and Jack thinking back thought Red with some work and breaks could have made a nice career maybe as a lounge act out of his talent.
That doo wop practice worked, well, worked for what their other purpose was, gathering interesting girls around them. See, a lot of this doo wop jail break out had to do with sexual stirrings, with this cohort of corner boys finally noticing that those shapeless girls from fifth grade class like Cindy, Linda, Bessie, Rosalind (Jack’s favorite), some of them, were starting to get shapes and who the year before had been noting but nuisances but now were, well, interesting. So each night all through that summer as day turned to night Red and the Roosters (nice name, right) crooned, kept working on their timing, and talking about their look, their niche.
At first they were left all by themselves, maybe the older serious basketball players would chuckle as they left the courts, but then one night a couple of girls, girls they knew from class were standing maybe fifty yards away up against a fence not hiding or anything but just kind of listening and swaying back and forth to the songs. (Jack thought the song they were working on was Little Antony and the Imperials Tears On My Pillows, although he would not swear to that. In any case that was the song that got him a dance with Rosalind so maybe he was confusing the two situations.)
A few nights later there would be several girls, including sixth grade girls and one from the other fifth grade class, Lorna who they called Lorna Doone for no particular reason but who was hot, standing at that fence. Jack thought that night if they did a song that all the girls could join in on they might come closer. So they switched up and did the Tune-Weavers’ tear-jerker Happy Birthday Baby everybody knew and was easy to sing. Sang it several times. The girls came running on the excuse that they thought it was somebody’s birthday, somebody who needed consoling. Yeah, it was like that in the innocence boy-girl thing then, probably still is. The summer passed that way with the boy-girl thing working its virginal way through the old neighborhood just like since Adam and Eve time, maybe before. Jack never got to Rosalind then only later after school started and then she moved to another town and that ended his first serious love affair. Frank even with his two left feet got a date for the movies with Bessie, and Jack thought Red (with that mass of red hair), the best looking guy of the bunch from what the girls said but maybe that was just because they wanted get near the lead singer, as always, had gone “steady” with Lorna for a while until Red kind of went off by himself.
See here is where things broke down. Sure Red and the Roosters could draw the local girls in, girls who, well, had sexual stirrings too but here is what had happened. Their problem was, unlike Frankie and the Four Seasons from the get-go, they really did not have any serious raw musical talent (except Red) and did not as Frankie and his guys did really have a new angle on the music of the times. Moreover Frank’s voice changed about mid-way through sixth and threw everything off (later Jack’s and then Jimmy’s did too but that was after the group broke up). So, sadly, this edition of the corner boys broke up in the summer before junior high. Red was bitter since he more than the rest of them was staking his life, his break-out from the ‘from hungers,” on musical fame.
Red would a little later after they moved on to junior high turn against any musical aspirations, get himself into a new career path, the life of crime, which had Jack and to a lesser extent Frank in its thrall for a while, remember they were from hunger too, before they backed off but it was a close thing, very close. Both of them had been “look-outs” when Red began his “clip” five-fingers discount rampage of the various stores up in Carver Center and Jack had worked with Red one night when they jack-rolled a drunk for fifty bucks. Frank and Jack soon moved away from that business though once they realized it was too much work and they felt too much anguish over what they were doing to make a career out of that life.
Red would go on to form another corner boy crowd with some older tougher boys who hung around Jimmy Jack’s Diner based on midnight creeps and some of those corner boys later wound up in the Army, a couple dead in Vietnam for their troubles names now etched in black marble down in Washington and on a granite monument on Carver Commons, or in jail (including Billy later who did a nickel’s worth for an armed robbery after he failed to make a half-hearted one more chance career singing alone and who in the end wound up on the short end of a shoot-out with the cops trying to rob a two-bit White Hen down in some godforsaken town in North Carolina after a second nickel stretch for another armed robbery).
Jack as he thought about Red as he had not done so in a long time, thought about those last parts of the Carver corner boy story, the parts about the fate of the Reds of the world as against the luck of the Four Seasons thought the difference was important because no matter how “from hunger” you are you need the talent and the quirky niche in order to survive in the musical world. Even then as Jack noted in that review he had written and as became apparent as the film unfolded fame is a very close thing. A couple of twists one way or another and the fifteen minutes of fame is up, gone. And fame as Frankie Valli and the boys found out the hard way despite their hard work doesn’t shield you from life’s woes as the break-up of the group, Frankie’s daughter’s death and the financial problems created by “from hunger” Tommy who thought the money would rain in their faces forever attest to. Not an unfamiliar fame story but one worth seeing once again. And telling the Carver corner boys story too.
[By the way as the film moved on to the performance parts the when the Four Seasons started getting some breaks, got a natural song-writer, and got tight and in synch both Laura and Anna said they did settle in and liked the rest of the film. And why wouldn’t they as children of that time as well the Carver corner boys when they were glued to their transistor radios up in some bedroom listening to the aforementioned Sherri, other like Dawn, Walk Like A Man, Rag Dog, Big Girls Don’t Cry and all the rest that drove the young girls wild back then.]
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