This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
If You Want The Stuff Senator Bernie Sanders Has Been Talking About For A Million Years Including Out In The Wilderness When It Was Not Fashionable About Medicare For All, Eliminating Student Debt, The Fight For $15 (Hell Now More Than That) To Happen Accept No Substitutes-Fight For Bernie 2020 Not Come Lately Elizabeth Warren
Click on title to link to 1964 (pre-Gonzo) "The Nation" article by Hunter Thompson on the beat scene in San Francisco, "When The Beatniks Were Social Lions". This and other earlier articles compiled in "The Great Shark Hunt", Volume One, demonstrate for the millionth time that great talents that head in new directions(in Thompson's case, as a 'gonzo' journalist in the early days, if not later)must pay their dues by learning the basics of their craft. This article shows that he knew how to work the newspaper human interest story beat, even if a little off-beat. He mined that milieu his whole working career with varying amounts of success. Hell, this is just a good story about an interesting slice of bohemian Americana. Period.
The Girl With The Bette
Davis Eyes-With Lowell’s Bette Davis And Jack Kerouac In Mind
By Special Guest Writer
Greg Green
[Greg Green, a writer
well known to me in this space for his articles on his and others experiences
in the devil’s war, the Vietnam War, that carved a nation in two, maybe more
and from which at least culturally it has never recovered mentioned to me one day
when he was getting ready to review an old time black and white movie Of Human Bondage for the American Film Gazette for which he
writes occasionally that the female star Bette Davis had been born in Lowell,
Massachusetts. Something that he did not know although he grew up a few towns
over in leafy suburban Westford. Greg has been a longtime admirer of another
Lowell native Jack Kerouac who torched a placid post-World War II world with
his On The Road some sixty years ago
(and which we have as Seth Garth mentioned “seemingly endlessly” and he may be
right commemorated in this space recently on the sixtieth anniversary of its
publication). That got Greg thinking that there must be some connection that he
could draw between two such iconic celebrities from an old dying mill-town
(dying even back then as the mills headed cheap textile labor south and then
cheaper foreign shorts worldwide-in their respective birth times 1908 and 1922)
that had seen better days beside the inevitable “there must be something in the
water” theory. So he asked me to let him do a little piece trying to make some
cosmic connection between the two icons and the town. Pete Markin]
A river runs through it.
The great rushing from the New Hampshire mountains, at least that is what I
have been told is source ground zero of the broken down millwheel towns to the
seas and unto the great cold wash Atlantic and there to homeland (homeland
before Lowell migration and Quebec flee failing farms up north looking for
factory river work) Europe left behind from desolation days Merrimack.
Merrimack some potent Indian signifier (excuse me Indian when Indian was the
name spoken and not the correct Native American or even better indigenous
peoples who can stake serious and
legitimate claim to sacred ground now ill-trodden over by umpteen generations
and no reparations in sight) long before the devils came in their blasted
wooden hull ships from across that briny North Atlantic no high note in sight
unlike the great big blow out in Frisco town when a skinny black kid blew that
one to perdition. Great rushing river dividing the town between the remember “fake
natives” and the on-coming foreigners come to pick up the slack in the
bottomless spinning wheel pits (the noise drowning out sing-song voices and
whiskey hoarse alike and maybe that is where the sober siren sought his Jack strange
mystifying voice and he his throbbing pace that in the end wound up like
whiskey breath).
River, two forked river
come flowing from the great ices of New Hampshire hills laying down sediments
(and sentiments) along a path unto the great turn and rock formation by
Pawtucketville Bridge-dividing that town even further (or is it farther)
pushing out Highland visions of august majesty. Then a poor besotted girl
emerges, emerges out of the dust hitting the high trail west landing forlorn
and mystified in some fallen angel diner and a gas station town near the
Petrified Forest (trees so ancient, think about it, that they have turned to
stone some kind of metaphor there-something about staying in one place too
long) in the Arizonas, out off of Route 66 heavy-travelled in the next
generation by hungry guys tired of diner and gas stations at home drift to the
cities but need to catch some dust and grit although what they thought of
benighted stone trees who knows in
between those expansive cities). There some Papa generation before her came out
looking for El Dorado or gold something different and landed in two bit desert
stretches and kind of got stuck, got good and stuck there. (Not everybody made
it as the skeletons along the way of cattle, horse, and human set among the
bramble and down some aching arroyo tell every daredevil passer-by and every
sensational dime store penny a word novelist in the days when that “contract”
ruled writers on “spec” too.)
And there abandoned by a
big city dream mother and an ill-defined no account wimp father she came of age
dreaming the dreams, funny city girl dreams of faraway places away from the
dust and those fucking stoned trees when the wind howls through the crevices
(making one think of other social howls and wolves and Molochs and
white-dressed nurses in mental wards and of cool jazz man hipsters and Times
Square con artists working the rubes), her father the king of the species all
dressed up and cowardly when it came right down to it. Dreaming book dreams,
small printed page books sent from far away by those who could not take the
dust, the heat, those howls and once again those fucking night-blinding stone
trees which tourists would pay a pretty penny for a clip, a sliver. Jesus.
Dreamed fourteenth century or was fifteenth dreams of mad man con man rabble
Villon out of some Balzac French novel but real enough speaking about how he
could not stay with civil people but sought solace among the petty thieves, the
cut throats, the man murderers (little did she know who would come through door
to marvel at her bug-eyes and blinkers making sorry Villon nothing but a
second-rate Time Square hustler, hey, pacifist even) , the flotsam and jetsam
among the people who lived outside the moat, who did not dream but
planned.
“Hey there stranger” she
spoke quickly to that stranger with the strange pale voice and the paler skin
despite walking the sun-drenched walk of the tramp no better than Villon’s men
outside the moat and who looked like he had not had three squares in many a
moon so that is what she thought when he first came in, came in and recognized
in that small book, that funny thought poem by mad monk gone astray Villon and
thus was kindred against the Papa silliness and some gas station jockey who
tried to make love to her before her time. So they talked, he called it
conversation, and told her that the night-takers descending on the flat land
earth, out even in the freaking (his term not hers) stone tree desert filled
with arroyo-seized skeletons that the day for conversation was quickly coming
to froth, was dangerous beyond whatever small thoughts she had ever had out in
that vast night sky thunder-blazed desert. She thought him the new Messiah come
that she has heard about over the blaring radio that made the diner hours go by
more quickly so she could retreat into Villon’s manly dreams without
distraction. He, the stranger he, laughed and said no vagabond who was out
filching (cadging in what he meant she thought) free eats in dust-bitten rocks
could claim Messiah-hood, could survive the new age coming and coming quickly
right through her door. Her bug-eyes blinkered at that, at her silly illusions
when she thought about it later after he was gone, gone to who knows what
savior-driven place.
No sooner had the
stranger taken his filched food (she still insisted it was cadged and would
whenever anybody asked her if she had actually seen the savior, had maybe slept
with him for good measure) when the night-takers stormed in (stormed in more
than one way bringing half the desert hell with them as boon companion) and
made her savior stranger sit on his ass on the floor. Made hell come to pass before
the night was through. (He, the stranger, would comment that the night-takers
took their sweet-ass time whenever they descended and that those descended on
took their sweet-ass time figuring out how to get rid of the bastards). Sweet
manna. Then that forlorn stranger had an idea, a good one if somebody beside
her thought about it later that he would go mano a mano with the night-takers,
would play the gallant when all was said and done (giving lie to the idea that
he didn’t have any ideas about the night-takers except their time had come).
Naturally he lost, better won/lost and left her with her book, her small Villon
book, a guy from the fourteenth century or was it the fifteenth and her dreams
kind of intact. A few years later some guys in a 1949 Hudson (or was it
Studebaker) tired of the Route 66 road came by looking for grub, looking for
free eats and some whiskey but by then she was long gone to some city that Papa
and father could not fathom
[On in the frozen
Western night the no longer girlish girl hung up on old time French
bandit-poets, con men, desolation angels, and holy fools, and lost in thought
time of the intellectuals far from the blessed stone trees, as far away as she
could get to Southern California and so “frozen” ironic she picks up a book, a
paperback left on the counter by a forgetful customer who after paying for his
Woolworth-quality lunch must have given up all hope. She flips it into her
pocketbook to either wait on his owner’s return or for something to read that night,
that lonesome stone tree wilderness night that never left her thoughts. That
guy, or whoever it was, never returned and so that night she read, read until
the early morning hours and then read some more.
Read about a guy,
although in her mind it could have be a girl, who had the same wanderlust that
drove her west, drove her to the great blue-pink American western night he
called it looking for some father that he had never known, looking forlornly,
for that father from some oil-spilled New Jersey shore river to the wind-swept China
seas before the Golden Gate Bridge. Looked high and low for the missing
brethren who long ago had crossed her path out in the hard stone tree night
when everything was possible but the intellectuals then flabby and ill-disposed
to fight the night-takers even to a draw abandoned all hope, decided that
primitive man would take the day and crush any free spirits. This guy though
flush with the expectations of many new adventures once the night-takers were
put to the sword took to the road, took a chance that he could find that father
some fucking place-maybe Latimer Street in Denver, maybe Neola, Grand Island,
Reno, Winnemucca, Tulsa, Fargo (although give up all hope if you wind up in
that locale). She wondered that maybe he had stolen her dreams. Maybe he had
stared at the same rivers that drove her desires, yes, just maybe that was the
case.]
A young boy only spoke
patois until he went to school played hooky one day and sat in the lost souls
library hoping to find something that would challenge his fevered brain and
slip-slopped over to the poetry section and found this guy Villon, a poet of
the fourteenth or was it the fifteenth century, who spoke of dreams and
crashing out (spoke too of ruffian petty larcenies outside the moat but the boy
let it pass because he knew all about that, knew that poet kings only spoke of
such to work up a sweat, to deal better with hipsters, con men, sullen fallen
women, junkies and assorted felons riding on the railroad jungle tracks. Knew
he had kindred in that long ago poet king and sought out fellows who could
understand such dreams, could understand too the patois that he thought in.
Would find plenty of hipsters, cons, con men, Molochs, holy goofs, cowboy
angels, a teenage Adonis is spar with his brethren soul. Find Moloch, insanity,
the clap, jungle fever, whiskey shakes, penniless forsaken highways, lost boys,
sullen youth, Zen, chicken shit and on some days, but only some days, he wished
he never left that fucking river, that holy of holies Merrimack and those
wistful eyes that he remembered out in cold Winnemucca, Neola, Grand Island,
Big Sur nights
[Weird thoughts along
the Merrimack lifeline (remember like bodies make-up filled with arteries and
canals) a fervent solemnly disciplined fourteen year old boy armed with
Woolworth’s ten cent notepads and chewed raw No. 2 pencils, sits arms akimbo,
strange gangling not yet athletic fourteen year old position like some latter
day saint Buddha seeing all knowing all with hashish pipe tucked into some
secret place sitting out with cans of beans and rat shit on desolation row
waiting for fires and damnation, in a silent black back row orchestra seat (no
red dress girl singing swinging Benny Goodman songs that night to come hither
him to perdition and have to ask the eternal boy-girl question-orchestra or
balcony-and he would know the answer always know the answer balcony of course
she silly why else would I come into the shadows with you) of the of long gone
to condos or cute shops Majestic Theater off of Bridge Street staring intensely
at the big white screen suddenly turned to magic motion pictures with a dust
storm brewing out in some fucking petrified forest and some girl not his
holding off some ragged sweater gas jockey, and dreams too.
Waiting, eternally
waiting like that fervent fourteen year old boy for something to happen, for
some kicks, for something better than listening to the average swill the
customers brought in the door, waiting she thought for culture, or her idea or
culture anyway. What grabbed that poor boy boy though was that scene out of
some latter day great American West night when he thought he would be able to
choke the Eastern dust from off his shoes and live-and write, always write. So
kindred, kindred too when some holy goof hobo, tramp, bum angel Buddha comes
traipsing down the road looking for hand-outs and God Jesus that would be the
life. He, she, they make small kindred talk and speak of that damn poet, that
Villon who knew more than he should about the human condition, more than any
fourteen year old boy anyway.
But before long the
dream shattered, the night-takers released from their caves come swooping down
like hell’s avenging angels, avenging the lost paradise that he had read a guy
by the name of Milton, half-blind had gone on and on about in some heaven’s
battle and they the losers-and what of it. But when you take on the
night-takers you better realize that you will take some casualties, take some
holy sacred blood from the holy earth returned and that ain’t fair, ain’t fair
at all but who knows maybe Buddha, Rama. Zoroaster, Jehovah, the unnamed one,
planned it out that way. Out the door of that no longer silent black back row
orchestra seat he was glad that he had not had some red dress come hither girl
to bother him. For he wondered, wondered as he sank his eyes into the white
froth of the mighty Merrimack below whether she, that Western tableau girl
would ever acknowledge him, ever read his mind like he read hers.]
Ha, as he tried to climb
Bear Mountain with a dollar and a quarter in his stained dungarees (not called
jeans then, not around him anyway) splattered flannel shirt and broken toe
boots looking for that father he never knew (although his own father had passed
on before he knew that he was looking for another father somewhere along the
wino camp tracks, some arroyo bush or in some county jail working out a
scheme). Had Route 66 cold because if he could search that highway he would
miss some connection, some angst the shrinks called it among the hot rod car,
surf board, motorcycle lost winding in stir and some rough trade honey to some
beast, boys he would meet out in the great blue-pink American Western night. As
he pulled his thumb out of his back pocket he finally relaxed and dug the
scene. Hit long rides and short, mostly lonely truckers looking for company and
searching for the sons they had never known, tramp diner stops, railroad stews
on nights so cold his broken toe boots seized up on him, grabbed a couple of big
rides with big blondes looking for some max daddy to be-bop with and leave in
Doc’s drugstore while they waited to be “found” by some Hollywood agent. Took
tokay swigs with the best of them, met up with rabid New Jersey poets, New York
City Times Square gangster dope peddlers and sainted poets (funny always the
poets driving him forward he would have to write that down, Ivy League junkies
on the nod, and finally the Adonis of the western night whom he would be-bop
with unto the San Francisco Bay dropped that high white note out in the China
seas. Yeah, he had it all except maybe those bug eyes from childhood lost in
some flophouse. Still on some days, and only on some days, he wished he never
had left that fucking river, never that sacred ground river. He wondered if she
though that same thought.
On The 60th Anniversary Of Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" (1957)- "Beat" Poet's Corner- Allen Ginsberg's "America"
YouTube's film clip of Allen Ginsberg reading in 1956 from his famous poem "America"
In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th
Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)
By Book Critic Zack James
To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for
something, maybe the truth, maybe just for kicks, for stuff, important stuff that
had happened down in the base of society where nobody in authority was looking or
some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a
name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet
Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a
junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in
flea-bit hotels, all-night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on
every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation. (Yes, I know that the actual term “beat” was first
used by Kerouac writer friend John Clemmon Holmes in an article in some arcane
journal but the “feel” had to have come from a less academic source so I will
crown the bandit prince Corso as genesis) Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line
backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody told
me, maybe my older brother Alex they called “blowing to the China seas” out in
West Coast jazz and blues circles, that high white note he heard achieved one
skinny night by famed sax man Sonny Johns, dead beat, run out on money, women,
life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate
repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get
caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home
parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell,
let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all high holy
Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a
dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast
on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the
club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the mean
streets of New York, Chi town, North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five
cents a night flea-bag sleeps, half stirred left on corner diners’ coffees and
cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).
I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing
reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling
out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my
brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about
that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at
a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory
two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an
event whose 50th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well
and so very appropriate to mention since there were a million threads, fibers,
connections between “beat” and “hippie” despite dour grandpa Jack’s attempts to
trash those connection when they acolytes came calling looking for the “word.”
So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the
beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings
of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s
travel book of a different kind (not found on the AAA, Traveler’s Aid, Youth
Hostel brochure circuit if you please although Jack and the crowd, my brother
and his crowd later would use such services when up against it in let’s say a
place like Winnemucca in the Nevadas or Neola in the heartlands). Literary
stuff for sure but the kind of stuff that moves generations, or I like to think
the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter of
which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life as
a high-road lawyer (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back).
Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then
add my brother’s Alex name into the mix that automatically brings up memories
of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex
and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Frankie, Jack, Jimmy, Si,
Josh (he a separate story from up in Olde Saco, Maine), Bart, and a few others still alive recently
had me put together a tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love,
1967, their birthright event, just mentioned.
Markin was the vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk
seeker who got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see
what there was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a
number of years before (and which nobody in the crowd paid any attention to, or
dismissed out of hand what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the
local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural
days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of
Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran
wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major
towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie and a bunch of other guys who took a very
different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of
a very different world.
But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s book which had
caused a big splash in 1957(after an incredible publishing travail since the
story line actually related to events in the late 1940s and which would cause
Jack no end of trauma when the kids showed up at his door looking to hitch a
ride on the motherlode star, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s (and even
now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for
their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part).
Made the young, some of them anyway, like I say I think the best part, have to
spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant
dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high
through the ocean, plains, mountain desert night but staying unsettled for a
while anyway.
Like I said above Alex was out on the road two years and
other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that
was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not
always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first
back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into
the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more
years upon his return before his untimely and semi-tragic end. With maybe this
difference from today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what
is frankly bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except
commies and pinkos called it that for fear of being tarred with those brushes.
Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin
included, were strictly “from hunger” working class kids who when they hung
around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money
fast any way they could or of getting into some hot chick’s pants any way they could as
anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s
goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little bit “from hunger”
takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not
the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law, it was a close
thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But
back then dough and sex after all was what was what for corner boys, maybe now
too although you don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners
anymore.
What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor
corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley the “Scribe”
from the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high
school and that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although
Markin was as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for
books and poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most
of the “midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds
would have the inept Markin actually execute the plan. That was for smooth as
silk Frankie now also a high-road lawyer to lead. That operational sense was
why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous lawyer
later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against him).
Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would confide
in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the social
pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise. That
sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about ten
billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked him
about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.
The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy
life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae
for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get
out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to
folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still
doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny
Bob Dylan above all else) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and
his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956
which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less
Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that
they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road.
They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about
some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a
mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my
brother Alex’s memory bank.)
Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown
up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he
had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some
grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the
base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring.
So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure
on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several
times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was
having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping
almost like Jack wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper
scroll in about three weeks. So it was through Markin via Alex that I got the
Kerouac bug. And now on the 60th anniversary I am passing on the bug
to you.
America Allen Ginsberg America I've given you all and now I'm nothing. America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956. I can't stand my own mind. America when will we end the human war? Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb I don't feel good don't bother me. I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind. America when will you be angelic? When will you take off your clothes? When will you look at yourself through the grave? When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites? America why are your libraries full of tears? America when will you send your eggs to India? I'm sick of your insane demands. When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks? America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world. Your machinery is too much for me. You made me want to be a saint. There must be some other way to settle this argument. Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister. Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke? I'm trying to come to the point. I refuse to give up my obsession. America stop pushing I know what I'm doing. America the plum blossoms are falling. I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder. America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies. America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry. I smoke marijuana every chance I get. I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet. When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid. My mind is made up there's going to be trouble. You should have seen me reading Marx. My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right. I won't say the Lord's Prayer. I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations. America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia. I'm addressing you. Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine? I'm obsessed by Time Magazine. I read it every week. Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore. I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library. It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me. It occurs to me that I am America. I am talking to myself again. Asia is rising against me. I haven't got a chinaman's chance. I'd better consider my national resources. My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and twentyfivethousand mental institutions. I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns. I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go. My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic. America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they're all different sexes America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe America free Tom Mooney America save the Spanish Loyalists America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die America I am the Scottsboro boys. America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy. America you don're really want to go to war. America it's them bad Russians. Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians. The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages. Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations. That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help. America this is quite serious. America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set. America is this correct? I'd better get right down to the job. It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway. America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac-Four Dreams-Finding Whistler’s Mother-Gazing On The Girl With The Bette Davis Eyes-Following Allan Ginsberg’s Flowers-Searching For The Father We Never Knew
By Lance Lawrence
[Apparently, although site manager Greg Green, the guy who gives out the assignments, has never said so in so many words, I am the “go to” person this year as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the passing of the most well-known, some say “King” of the Beats who flourished mainly in the 1940s and 1950s, mill town Lowell’s own Ti Jean (Jack) Kerouac. Although there has been a fair amount of speculation around the collective water cooler about why I am now doing my fourth different introduction to various archival writings by others over the forty some year history of this publication both as hard copy and now for the past decade or so on-line nobody has a clue to why that is so. Part of that is that they too wanted to write some introductory material giving their slants on fifty years without two-million-word Jack or to update pieces, mainly book reviews and “how Jack influenced me” stuff.
Part, and this is the part I do know about and am telling here for the first time to fend off the charges of favoritism, I actually met Jack a few times when he was living down in Saint Petersburg with his third wife Stella and his beloved (and hated too it was that kind of relationship) toward the end of his life. In those days he was drinking heavily, and I was too, that before the twelve-step program saved my sobriety and my life. We met, quite by accident, in Jimmy Jack’s Tavern which I do not believe is still there at least I couldn’t find it under that name when I Google d it, since I had stepped in for my early day drinking and there he was getting ready to do his serious early day drinking. Since it was early and since there was some kind of unspoken and assumed bond between early day drinkers we started to chat. Got animated when he found out that I had grown up in Chelmsford the next town over from Lowell and were able to identify places we had mutually been to and other local news. Above all we spoke almost in reverence about various youthful exploits along the mighty Merrimac River which drove our imaginations then and later, especially for him, as writers. In those days I was not writing for any publication or had any assignments along those lines, was actually doing a short-hand version of what Jack had done in the late 1940s and chronicled in his famous On The Road but mainly drinking my blues away stumbling and tumbling down the road to some next place where I might stick, might make myself feel better. After a few days I left Saint Pete and drifted, I think, to Key West or maybe Miami. Later when I heard that Jack had cashed his check I, not knowing and probably not caring if I had known, that the cause of death was from complications from that lifelong drinking I lifted a shot of Johnny Walker Red whiskey in his memory.
How Greg Green found out that I had met Jack Kerouac and from there assumed that I had profound things to say or that having met him should be the “go to” guy based on that flimsy premise I don’t know. Now that I have spilled the beans maybe Greg can speak to that. I am happy to do these introductions whatever the reason but over the past several months that I have been working and reviewing pieces I have had to think through how Jack Kerouac has influenced me. Certainly not as a drinking buddy, the short time we passed our time but maybe style of writing or dropping certain verbal bombshells which he had a habit of doing. That remains to be seen as we go through the year-long commemoration.
What is clear already is that the Beat beat was only tangential to me growing up for I was just a little too young to be influenced directly by the movement. The hipsters, grifters, grafters, wanderers, pyschos, holy goofs and that crowd were not around our town (by the way the just listed crowd if truth be known have had progeny who still exist on the far margins of society down where the hipsters and their ilk hold forth on high holy days and remember). Beat, hard non-commercial Beat flourished that is to say before my own growing up, coming of age time, the 1960s and hence the devotion to rock and roll rather than be-bop jazz, folk music lyrics rather than the immense output of poetry put out by the likes of mad monk Allan Ginsberg and the crowd. But enough of this for this is about Ti Jean Kerouac and what might have been not me. Although I do wonder how Greg Green will respond to my finding out he knew I met Jack in sullen days for both of us. Larry Lawrence]
***********
Ti Jean wondered sitting on Pawtucketville silts listening to the rushing rock-strewn Merrimack coming by, wondered like maybe those old-time Dutch sailors sighting that green fresh breast of land that would become Long Island as they entered the sound, another waterway a metaphor for Jack life, and found a new world unspoiled for that fifteen minutes before they laid anchor and claim on the cheap. That wonder drove Jack boy, all fourteen- year old Jack boy so not worried by red dress Paula Cole coming hither Friday night dates or that damn Maggie down by the almost Chelmsford dream side of the river, damn already the river is in play with her Irish braids and that god damn Bible between her knees to wonder if James was it MacNeil Abbott or Abbott MacNeil Whistler sat beside this same river thinking about his own Mere, his mother and how he could do justice to that forlorn Puritan face which razzled him with blacks, browns and greys, as if to mock the very idea of mother. Hell, James, he would never be called Jimmy like the other boys once he “did” his mother in those woe begotten colors decided he would use the old dame, and she was an old dame to star in his various studies of colors and only philistines would dare to call the work some mother lode draught.
This is where the story gets interesting, although we know that Jack was not bothered just then by come hither girls in red dresses or Bible-kneed Irish girls since he had, playing hooky, crept into his holy of holy spots in the cubicle at the school library gone beyond the wonder of those muddy splat riverbanks where he first wondered the wonder akin to those Dutch sailors seeking his own fresh green breast of land, the land of the mind. Wondering how to stop wondering Jack picked up a biography of James Whistler complete with mother on the front except she was painting title called some study in black and white, something like that by one Lancelot Grey who Jack would later find out was the central figure in what he would wind up calling the pre-war art cabal that was attempting to “dress up,” read, protect American art and artists from the onslaught of European critics who basically call that art “folk art” meaning show the bastards the door and maybe get them shown in Peoria or better Grand Island but stay away from European shores.
Grey’s take on Whistler, taking the American born but life-long ex-patriate in was that he never left the American shores and stuff like that. What interested Jack though was not that art cabal stuff (art cabal a term he would not know until later when landing in New York he came face to face with the denizens of that cabal through various Student Art League girlfriends and others met in Village garrets when garrets were there and not in Soho). But that was after the war (World War II in case a younger reader has happened on this piece) when New York told cheapjack art Europe to fuck off, to step back and various abstraction movements were all the rage. Just then Grey delved into Whistler’s various non-mother pieces (than mother painting an iconic come on since back then only the art cabal knew other paintings and the publisher insisted that that painting be on the front).
Jack popcorn for eyeballs sitting in the last row of the orchestra section of the old Majestic Theater off of Bridge Street across from the offices of the Lowell Sun waiting as the screen heated up after some very ordinary news of the week reels and an off-color cartoon which he never did get even after watching several times over the next few Saturday matinee double-feature week. The films changed every Friday but Mr. Le Blanc cheapened up his operation by re-running those silly cartons built for ten-years olds with no brains but silly to a strapping boy of sixteen who actually took girls to the shows. (Le Blanc also sold stale popcorn with so much salt laid in it would make your eyelids curl and watered down the tonic, old-fashioned New England word for soda, so much it might as well have been water and even made boys like Jack with strong kidneys ran to restrooms frequently.) Of course, that was a totally different proposition, that messing with girls stuff that he had pretty much figured out by sixteen with plenty of street advise some of it recklessly dangerous and no, zero, parent advise but that was when you asked a girl if she wanted to sit in the orchestra section or go up to the heavy-breathing pitch dark moaning balcony. If the former that would be a last date (one time he left the girl in the front lobby to fend her herself on the way home while he went off to Renoir’s Ice Cream Shop with Even Stephen and Dizzy Izzy). This day, this Thursday afternoon first show skipping afternoon classes was different when Jack was all business trying to figure some stuff out that was going to appear on the satin silk screen.
Then it, no, she started. All fresh as a new born daisy fending off some sidewalk Lothario, if only in Jack’s imagination, really only some lug like a million lugs he knew in Lowell High School and who if he hadn’t been on a mission this afternoon could have stood in front of the high school at close of day and counted the number of lugs from the class of 1939 carousing out the door some he could name by name. So, no this lug was going nowhere, was getting nothing except the desert breezes from this girl. Jack swore the girl with the Bette Davis eyes after beating the clown off with a car jack sat in her dust-filled private reading spot reading some French poet from the fourteenth century. Jack pressed his popcorn eyeballs to see book jacket cover and his heart beat a mile a minute once he saw that she, Gabby let’s give her a name, was reading his hero prince bandit poet Francois Villon, like him a Breton when that meant something before the wave of diasporas which led angelized angel-headed Kerouacs to the shores of the Saint Lawrence River and downwardly mobile fates stripped the clan of their respective dignities.
Yes, Villon the prince of thieves who Jack had discovered in that broken- down school library where he hid out when he could not deal with bullshit chemistry classes or some such subject around the time that he read that book by Lancelot Grey about that pimp daddy, holy goof (first use of the term “holy goof” came from reading Grey) James Whistler the artist who kept himself from the Thames and watery graves by selling his paintings or more usually “selling” his mistresses to make the rent money when times were tough. He still loved Whistler (although he could only mock a guy who had to practically handcuff his mother to the chair to get her to stand still for what he called a study in black and white, something like that) if only because he was Lowell, was a native son and that counted a lot for Jack then even if James was not a Breton. (Funny later he would go through seven kinds of hell with his own mother before telling her to kiss off.) But Villon was a legitimate bandit-prince who hung with the lumpen outside the guarded moats ready to pounce one minute on the next jackroll victim (some historians have speculated that Villon and his scumbags invented the jackroll, taking a bag of nails or coins if they had any wrapping them in a small cloth and under cover of darkness bopping some old lady or drunken sot for their dough). A lost art that Jack would use more than once in Times Square when some pansy hipster tried to do tricks on him and he bopped him for hot dog money at Howard Johnson’s stuff like that, yes, a lost but helpful art for those who lived outside the law, for those whose only road was the road.
And there she was the girl with the Bette Davis eyes all dewy even as a desert dust storm was brewing just outside the Gates of Eden reading Villon in French (her mother was French a catch for her woe begotten father during World War I service in France with the American Expeditionary Force who came back to Eden saw the dust and stone wood and left on the next train with some Singer sewing machine salesman with four quarters and a quart of wine). That Garden of Eden business a gag, a gag of sorts since the diner that he father owned, no, really her grandfather who was getting too old to run the place but too ornery to let his deadbeat son who couldn’t keep a French whore, Gramp’s words, in the middle of the desert from running away with the next time that came by with long pants on was just outside the main entrance to the Petrified Forest (couldn’t later a guy like Allan Ginsberg or even novice poet Dean Moriarty have a field day with that idea as the 1930s was tearing America, tearing the world apart, making the world turn in on itself). The gag was that Gramps an old Kentucky coalminer until he was thirteen and figured out that he would rather not die in Appalachia with the muskrats had headed out of the hills and hollows as fast as he could. Head out to California where he had heard had streets paved of gold and young girls ready to give whatever they had to give. But see Gramps and his forbears were sitting folk, were tied to the tired land so long that they would sit down anywhere where that didn’t have to pretend to seek prosperity. So Gramps stopped at the Petrified Forest once he ran into some Nevada Jane heading east after busting out heading west who worked at the diner and who played the flute for him until she too ran off with some calico salesman. Gramps just stayed put and married the first woman who smiled at him (Gabby’s grandma) and that ended the road west in that generation.
So poor rattled and pestered Gabby was torn between sweet perfume dreams of Left Bank Paris cafes and that endless rock-hard dust. Then out of the blue some pretty hobo came walking up the road to the diner all dusty and road worn, a hobo whose name turned out to be Leslie Howard (that would be important later to Gabby if meaningless to Jack when she inherited his life insurance policy but that was later long after Jack had gathered in the wanderlust that set that first Breton to Canadian shores and that fucking raging Saint Lawrence River of no returns) Listen up, Jack did, this Leslie Howard was no stumble bum like half the hoboes, tramps, bums, and there are social distinctions among the brethren who were running around the country stopping at railroad jungle camps or sleeping under unkempt bridges and arroyos but a real live itinerant intellectual who had when he had seen the first turnings of the world inward in those times got the hell out of Europe as fast as he could (he would be found later when Gabby looked for next of kin to see if anybody would contest the life insurance policy to have been Jewish not a good thing to be in Europe in those times to be a “rootless cosmopolitan”) This Howard, let’s call him that since it is as good as any other and who knows what he real name was if he was on the run bedazzled Gabby from minute one leaving that lug gas jockey out to dry with the trees. Knew his Villon cold, knew that he too was a bandit prince who hung outside the moats with the lumpen.
Right then Jack’s already strong flight of fantasy knew that he was kindred, here was guy who loved to read but could not settle down with at crazy-mixed up world pounding tattoos in his fevered brain. If anybody had been near Jack in that darkened orchestra section fit only for one-date girls and sullen adults they would have heard him gasp every time this Howard said anything of import to Gabby. Jack’s fevered mind started sketching things out, read like crazy, write like crazy and keep on the move, always on the move. What Jack would call later in one of his lesser but more philosophical books the quest, the grail hunt, the breaking from the holy goofs that keep you penned in and unfree, that holy goof a well-worn word in Jack talk. For now though just the germ of a plan.
They say that Bretons are not only are hearty but also headstrong and Jack sensed in Gabby just such characteristics even though she was nothing but some dirt farmer Okie, Arkie descendent. He would forever search for his Gabby but never find her, and frankly that search was just one among a number of searches later. This guy Leslie, what made him tick, why Jack was drawn to him like lemmings from the sea was more problematic. The Villon, hobo road warrior philosopher king part was straight up. He would have a million sleepless night visions of being out on some tramp road in say Winnemucca or Yuma facing no dough and no food or water and glad-tiding himself into soft spot, some soft bed if that was the way the thing played out. Pearl-diving, you know washing dishes for his meal in some such Garden of Eden diner somewhere if necessary just to stay on the road one more day. That part held romance, held him in thrall.
What Jack couldn’t figure out especially since the girl with the Bette Davis eyes was totally smitten by him and his wayward ways against the lugs, demented grandpas, jelly-fish fathers and abandoned down some Seine River mother not unlike the Merrimack always close to his dreams especially that rocky crest around the old Lowell Textile Institute why this modern day troubadour had so little regard for himself that he would let a bum like the notorious Duke Mantee, yes, that Duke who was the scourge of the West just then put two random slugs into his body. He tries, and would continue to try later to understand the idea of the retreat of the intellectuals, that the time of the caveman was making a reappearance after so much spent trying to come up from the mud and slime. Backwards. Damn, that bothered Jack, would bother him until his own dying breath when he turned on the intellectuals with a vengeance. The now dank dark movie hall left him utterly perplexed about what would happen to him when he had to face his own road west.
Outside the movie theater, actually he had been in the lobby when he spied her and then hailed her, Jack stopped that come hither Paula Cole and asked her if she would like to go to the movies that next Friday night when the films changed. When she answered yes Jack now a veteran of the ploy asked Paula -orchestra or balcony? Answer: “don’t be silly I would not have accepted if we weren’t going to the balcony.” With that he would put the fate of Howard in the back of his mind. First things first.
********************
Jack brought the Tokay, the cheap wine of the day that got him through the day and the only other wine beside kosher Mogen David mad monk (although just then demurely so) Allan Ginsberg, hereafter Monk, would drink to set himself up to read some sliver of a poem. This night expecting a bunch of people to of all things a North Beach (San Fran) converted garage gallery something the Monk would put an end to guys like T.S. Eliot, bum of the month Nazi-symp Ezra Pound and about fifty other guys and twenty other gals including his high school prose father. Would burn their old-fashioned words now of no account on a pile of burnt offerings, a pile of faggots (he would not learn until later that word’s common origins use to destroy brethren fellow homosexuals). Would get the world well, for a minute, in search of some fatherless compadre, in search of the father Jack claimed he had never known, and not he alone in the welter of great depressions and slogging through war. Maybe in the end they were searching for Father Death who knows. Jack passed the wine, passed all understanding before that search was consummated.
Some guy, some guy who claims that his mother had worked at City Lights Bookstore in those days and had had an affair with the poet Phillip Larkin and had brought the dago red and him to the reading. Claimed to know Jack, or maybe it was the Monk in the old days, in the days when they raged with so many words they couldn’t keep enough Woolworth 5 &10 notebooks in flannel shirts or golf scorecard pencils ready wrote this, second hand about being present at the creation, second hand. At this far remove it is hard to tell fact from fiction, tell who is bullshitting and who has the goods especially since virtually all the background characters are gone, some long gone. Make of that what you will.
********
I have seen the best poet of the generation before mine, no, let me start over, I have seen a universal max daddy poet speaking some truths to put old Homer and freaking staid T.S. Eliot in the shade. Starting off by declaring that he had seen that the best minds of his generation, guys like brother in soul Kerouac, be-bop Charlie Parker, Phil Larkin when he was sober, Johnny Spain when off the needle and doing cold turkey and of course the daddy them all one Carl Solomon turn to mush. Turned out in the barren wilderness, not the friendly desert-scrapes heading west on lonely Greyhound buses or Tourist Bureau hang-ups wilderness out pass Butte or Boise but what a novelist named Nelson Algren who called the shots and gave many a troubled youth the keys to the fixer man and wellness called the neon wilderness, called that place where the bright lights of the city blinded a proper man (or woman) some junkie Frankie Machine haven with a wife he hated and a girlfriend who couldn’t stick with him when he was on the junk. That neon beast from which no one returned except for quick stays in safe haven mental asylums (called ironically funny farms but even the Monk, whose own mother had her share of sorrows in such places could find no humor in such designations).
Get this, no, let me start again against the cold nose of my sister filled heart. Saw, he the Monk okay in case I lose my train of thought passing through Salt Lake City and thoughts of Joseph Smith’s grand hustle taking a bunch of farmers from burned over lands to the searing sun of the western depot. Saw the same Negro streets Jack, and one time Jack and he when he, Jack was looking for some rough trade sailors just off the China Seas pierce earring trail saw around Blue Hill Avenue and Dudley Street blank, 125th Street blank, Dearborn Street blank, MacArthur Boulevard blank, Central Avenue blank, Cielo Street in Tijuana blank, Plaza del Mayo, Montezuma revenge Mexico blank, and wasted in the sweated fetid humid Thunderbird-lushed night dreaming of pink Cadillacs and stony-faced fixer men getting wise by the hour on Carl’s ancient fears. (And, this is funny or so the winos and every hobo, vagrant, escapee, drifter and grafter yelling out in unison thought so “what is the word-Thunderbird-what is the price forty twice.” Ready to jackroll some senior citizen lady for the price, for fucking eighty cents which any self-respecting junkie could cadge in two minutes even in Cielo Street, Tijuana and that is a hard peso to drill,-ready to commit mayhem at Park Street subway stations for their “boy,” to be tamped by girl but I will be discrete since the Feds might raid the place sometime looking for the ghost of Trigger Burke who eluded them for a very long time. (Trigger who captured Jack’s imagination and the Monk’s but here is the weird part Carl’s too who started strutting like him too after the prince of bandit-poets Corso showed him how to do that slinky swagger on the last visit before the blade at Sandhill).
Thought that those angel-headed hipsters hearing choruses of angels strumming their noiseless wings, those cold as ice in a man’s veins hep cats hanging around Times, Lafayette, Dupont, Harvard squares (you can fill in your own squares, square the Monk laughed and Jack hee-hawed) crying in pools of blood coming out of the wolves-stained sewers around the black corner would never stop bleating for their liquor. Would not stop until they got popular and headed for the sallow lights of Harvard Square where they, those angel-headed hipsters in case you (and Carl) forgot hustled young college students, young impressionable college students green as grass whose parents had had their best minds, those hallowed students’ mines, okay, wasted in the turbid streets of south Long Island (not the West Egg of Gatsby’s dream out of Fitzgerald’s fresh green breast of land to stir even sullen rough trade Dutch sailors looking for whips and cuts, conquering everything in sight like any other poor-boy arriviste with too much money and not enough imagination and not East Egg of the fervid elites but any-town, Levitt-town of those who would escape to Boston or Wisconsin to face the angel of death, that angel frightening even Monk when Carl was not around to anchor his brain. Up front and say no go, pass, under luminous moons which light up sparks and say to that candid world which could have given a fuck hard times please come again no more.
Here is the beauty of the green as grass hustle working fast to get enough to fix that jones. Dangle some college guy, maybe with a girl, shy, with dreams of hard-core liquor or a well-twisted joints to loosen her up and her fragile come hither virginity (reminding Jack of that Paula Coe who played the flute for him more than one time in that Majestic Theater balcony some hardcore Friday night and the Monk, searching for some blue-eyed Adonis, settling for some pimpled has been teenager seeking his own father dreams). Lay out the story-kid your booze and something for me. Done. Later, a big bottle wrapped tight in a paper bag. Trick, a very thin brew of whiskey split and cash for him to get himself well. Oh the hipster cons which would have made even the Monk laugh.
You already know about what you need to know about Protestant girls with their upfront Protestant lusts although they would not be caught dead, or alive, in Sally splendor although they certainly could play the penny whistle and damn those world historic fucks. Maybe tasty Jewish girls from the shtetl not in East or West Egg who flocked to the other side of the river and gave Irish guys who previously had dribbled their spunk behind dumpsters after losing out to ten bucks and virginity in tack tickey-tack Catholic girls who refused to give that head that would have brought some of the best minds some freaking relief (better not say fucking relief because that would be oxymoronic). Maybe some off-center sullen fair-skinned and blonded Quaker, Mennonite, Primitive Baptist or Brethren of the Common Life kind of Protestant girls, like I said off-center, who spouted something about one god and no trinities, no god and no trinities and just feel good stuff.
All three varieties and yes there were more off-centers but who even knew of Quakers, Mennonites, lusty Amish girls run away from home, Tantric card-wheelers, and fresh- faced red light district sluts who at least played the game straight-played the cash nexus for pure pleasure and maybe to even up some scores. All-Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, yeah, Quakers (fakirs, fakers and Shakers included), the sluts, Mennonites and yes those lusty red-faced Amish runaways all coming together after midnight far from the negro streets, the Monk’s beat and no anachronism like saying black or Afro-American back to those Mister James Crow days, but not far from the all night hustlers and dime store hipsters with their ten-cent cigar store rings and cheap Irish whiskeys bought on the installment plan who converged around the Hayes-Bickford just a seven league jump from the old end of the line dead of night Redline subway stop in order to keep the angel of death at arms’ length. The angel of death a tough bitch to break, and tougher to cross when they deal went down. There to listen until dawn to homosexuality- affixed hungry for the keyhole blast or the running sperm fakir poets, the Monk number one of all the number ones and slamming singsters (to keep up with the gangster, mobster, hipster theme, okay) fresh out of cheapjack coffeehouses where three chords and two-line rhymes repeated in call and response got you all the action you wanted although maybe a little light on the breadbasket sent around to show that you were appreciated. Yeah, now that I think about the matter more closely hard times please come again no more.
I have seen frosted lemon trees jammed against the ferrous night, the night of silly foolish childhood dreams and misunderstanding about the world, the world that that poet spoke of in a teenage dream of indefinite duration about who was to have and who was to have not once those minds were de-melted and made hip to the tragedies of life, the close call with the mental house that awaits us all. Yeah Monk was right even about Carl Solomon and all his sorrows before the knife.
***********
What the hell did sullen Carl Solomon start before he went under the knife with his pleading for his father, a father that he had never known since he had been left back in Poland to peddle his fruits and vegetables to his brethren and his mother and the four kids headed to the Americas on some tub of a boat and never looked back. Rumors abounded that he survived because he had a gentile mistress grabbed after his wife and kids left. That at least is the story Carl told, told endlessly which would not be so bad but the Monk picked it up in his own moment of despair.
Monk searched his valium brain for his own prose-filled father but that was not nearly good enough, kept him awake at night because he had strange dreams that his father was not some fake high school teacher writing awful poems in broken down post-war America. Was afraid that his real father was William Appleton Williams who denied him three times, didn’t want to believe that his broken words would mesh so well. Had better dreams that his real father was sexy Walt Whitman (this remember in dialogue with Carl Solomon before the knife so it is not clear whether Carl remembered) whose vagabond dreams matched his and his homosexual desire beating out some Johnny Reb who could give Walt the ride he desired. Here is the trick though the Monk had sweet dreams whenever he read Leaves of Grass (usually on grass) and he passed that on to Jack in some secret moment in Denver when some screwball Adonis was looking for his father.
Now Jack, funny before Carl grabbed Monk with the father who we never knew religion, always thought he knew his father, knew the con artist, poker cheater, movie theater ticket taker great bear of a French-Canadian who came down the Jackson, Maine road with five cents Canadian in his pocket and dreams of printing up ads. But that was not the father that he knew but some skinny stiff wino pissant who he sought out in greater Denver cattle yards. Always deferred to everlasting Mere, Mere out of some fresh Breton conceit never getting some whiplash from old father time who died before his time of heartache and heartbeats. So Jack conned himself into some holy goof, his words exactly, metaphysical search going up the Bear Mountain, Jackson, Wyoming Jackson not that trail of tears from down in Maine Jackson where the red brick and mortar spinning wheels beckoned and he spent and spilled his young manhood trying to get the fuck out from under even if he couldn’t drive, made him nervous, to save his life. Funny again that fame never stopped the bleeding inside looking behind some bushes for some father death, some father time pissing against that Tokay dream he figured out back in about 1946 but could never get past. The Monk did him no service on that long trail drive from Monument Creek to Sunnyvale and then drop off and outs at Big Sur where he got sober for a week.
Damn that stuff is contagious, will drive you crazy, when twice removed Lance, me, went looking for the father he never knew too. Looked for him behind closed doors to his heart. That distant slightly dim figure who brought home not enough pay checks. Who never talked about but never got over the Pacific war like a lot of guys who found themselves on tubs picking up stray comrades from washed-up beaches, picking up too guys who got too close to chore, got wasted in some windless fire and fell down into the green-gray-blue surf that gets us all in the end. The old man, father, never talked much, much about anything that Lance, me would understand and so Jack-like Ma, Mere, Mom, Mere whatever you want to call her ran rough-shot over childish dreams and insecurities. Here’s the worst of it though, Jack-like, he never got to say good-bye to that father he never knew and crushed his days with regret, total regret that he didn’t have the sense of a holy goof, Jack talk, to have called a truce, even an armed truce to the madness that wracked his silly excuse for a family, and now all his has is slate grey stone to place the remnants down in some unknown holy place where he can never dwell, yes, Lawrence, me, got caught in the Monk’s version of Carl’s plainsong, no, got stuck in the damn mire.
Silly to think that the father time search would only apply to men, young men, holy goofs like Lawrence, me, when the max daddy sin of all was the way Jack, in Jack speak, abandoned his Jan, his spitting image Jan, denied like Christ was denied three times by the count. Jan who would search like some strange Kenneth Rexroth figure for the father we all knew, or thought we knew once he pointed us toward the light, once we got the beat, the second-hand beat that washed us clean in places like Big Sur and Todo el Mundo where Jan still searches in some desperate wild water surf for some broken down guy who wasted away with drink, and she with drink too. Jesus, funny he was searching for his father too out in Middle Eastern wildernesses, will it never end.
Contagious that is what Sam Lowell said about the freaking search for that lost father world made up of pure sand and not much else. Some goof, the holy part excluded was looking for his father, his famous private detective father, a guy named Lew Archer, who back around Jack time in California ran the rack on few good cases and then rested for forty years something like that. Tried to claim that his father’s life death was due to his father’s overused whip, his sorrows that he could not go the distance with his wife, this goof’s grandmother, his code of honor that once he took a job he was in, totally in, for good or evil, and
maybe that he drank too much Tokay, Jack-like when he wound up behind some freaking wino pissant dumpster saved but some sister of mercy who could not save him in the end. Get this though that junkie weirdo so-called grandson, some modern-day Carl Solomon without the sorrows before he went under the knife could not be searching for Lew, Lew Archer since Lew never had a son, had no children. Sorry goof,
Out on the Jersey looking east first to see the great ocean that drove his forbears to search for fresh green breasts of land then west to seek dungeon filled fathers never known in Denver, Santa Fe, Salt Lake City Salvation Army hotels or whatever they call those blessed places of rest the whole deal was to figure out a way to look for some American cowboy past, looking for the Monk’s Adonis if he couldn’t make it with sexy Walt Whitman with the furl of whiskers. There sat Dean Moriarty, no, fuck that, one Neal Cassidy who would ride the freight trains west looking for that father the others really did think they had found. Neal’s old man was in some wino jailcell speaking in tongues to a candid world. Maybe Carl was right, Monk too we should all cry to the high heavens looking for the fathers we never knew.
