When Big Bad Chevys Stoked Our Dream- An Encore Presentation By Lance Lawrence With A Help From Josh Breslin  With The Classic Corner Boy Film "Diner" In Mind  

For The Late Peter Paul Markin   

Scene: Brought to mind by the cover artwork that graces the front of the booklet that accompanied an album I had been reviewing. The artwork contained, in full James Dean-imitation pout, one good-looking, DA-quaffed, white muscle-shirted young man, an alienated young man, no question, leaning, leaning gently, very gently, arms folded, on the hood of his 1950’s classic automobile, clearly not his father’s car, but also clearly for our purposes let us call it his “baby.”

And that car, that extension of his young manhood, his young alienated manhood, is Friday night, Saturday night, or maybe a weekday night if it is summer, parked, priority parked, meaning nobody with some Nash Rambler, nobody with some foreign Volkswagen, no biker even , in short, nobody except somebody who is tougher, a lot tougher, than our alienated young man better breathe on the spot while he is within fifty miles of the place, directly in front of the local teenage (alienated or not) "hot spot." And in 1950s America, a teenage America with some disposal income (allowance, okay), that hot spot was likely to be, as here, the all-night Mel’s (or Joe’s, Adventure Car-Hop, whatever) drive-in restaurant opened to cater to the hot dog, hamburger, French fries, barbecued chicken cravings of exhausted youth. Youth exhausted after a hard night, well, let’s just call it a hard night and leave the rest to your knowing imagination, or their parents’ evil imaginations.

And in front of the restaurant, in front of that leaned-on “boss” automobile stands one teenage girl vision. One blondish, pony-tailed, midnight sun-glassed, must be a California great American West night teeny-bopper girl holding an ice cream soda after her night’s work. The work that we are leaving to fertile (or evil, as the case may be) imaginations. Although from the pout on Johnny’s (of course he has to be a Johnny, with that car) face maybe he “flunked out” but that is a story for somebody else to tell. Here is mine.

********

Not everybody, not everybody by a long-shot, who had a “boss” ’57 cherry red Chevy was some kind of god’s gift to the earth; good-looking, good clothes, dough in his pocket, money for gas and extras, money for the inevitable end of the night stop at Jimmy John’s Drive-In restaurant for burgers and fries (and Coke, with ice, of course) before taking the date home after a hard night of tumbling and stumbling (mainly stumbling). At least that is what one Joshua Breslin, Josh, told me, he a freshly minted fifteen- year old roadside philosopher thought as for the umpteenth time “Stewball” Stu left him  by Albemarle Road off Route One and rode off into the Olde Saco night with his latest “hot” honey, fifteen year old teen queen Sally Sullivan. Here is the skinny as we used to say as per one Joshua Breslin:

Yah, Stewball Stu was nothing but an old rum-dum, a nineteen year old rum-dum, except he had that “boss” girl-magnet ’57 cherry red and white two-toned Chevy (painted those colors by Stu himself) and he had his pick of the litter in the Olde Saco, maybe all of Maine, night. By the way Stu’s official name, was Stuart Stewart, go figure, but don’t call him Stuart and definitely do not call him “Stewball” not if you want to live long enough not to have the word teen as part of your age. The Stewball thing was strictly for local boys, jealous local boys like Josh,  who when around Stu always could detect a whiff of liquor, usually cheap jack Southern Comfort, on his breathe, day or night.

Figure this too. How does a guy who lives out on Tobacco Road in an old run-down trailer, half-trailer really, from about World War I that looked like something out of some old-time Great Depression Hoover-ville scene, complete with scrawny dog, and tires and cannibalized car leavings every which way have girls, and nothing but good-looking girls from twelve to twenty (nothing older because as Stu says, anything older was a woman and he wants nothing to do with women, and their women’s needs, whatever they are). And the rest of us got his leavings, or like tonight left on the side of the road on Route One. And get this, they, the girls from twelve to twenty actually walk over to Tobacco Road from nice across the other side of the tracks homes like on Atlantic Avenue and Fifth Street, sometimes by themselves and sometime in packs just to smell the grease, booze, burnt rubber, and assorted other odd-ball smells that come for free at Stu’s so-called garage/trailer.

Let me tell you about Stu, Sally, and me tonight and this will definitely clue you in to the Stu-madness of the be-bop Olde Saco girl night. First of all, as usual, it is strictly Stu and me starting out. Usually, like today, I hang around his garage on Saturdays to get away from my own hell-house up the road on Ames Street, meaning almost as poor as Stu except they are not trailers but, well, shacks, all that the working poor like my people could afford in the golden age and I am kind of Stu’s unofficial mascot. Now Stu had been working all day on his dual-exhaust carburetor or something, so his denims are greasy, his white tee-shirt (sic) is nothing but wet with perspiration and oil stains, he hasn’t taken a bath since Tuesday (he told me that himself with some sense of pride) and he was not planning to do so this night, and of course, drinking all day from his silver Southern Comfort flask he reeked of alcohol (but don’t tell him that if you read this and are from Olde Saco because, honestly, I want to live to have twenty–something as my age). About 7:00 PM he bellows out to me, cigarette hanging from his mouth, an unfiltered Lucky of course (filtered cigarettes are for girls in Stu world), let’s go cruising.

Well, cruising means nothing but taking that be-bop ’57 cherry red and white two-toned Chevy out on East Grand and look. Look for girls, look for boys from the hicks with bad-ass cars who want to take a chance on beating Stu at the “chicken run” down at the flats on the far end of Sagamore Beach, look for something to take the edge off the hunger to be somebody number one. At least that last is what I figured after a few of these cruises with Stu. Tonight it looks like girls from the way he put some of that grease (no not car grease, hair-oil stuff) on his nappy hair. Yes, I am definitely looking forward to cruising tonight once I have that sign because, usually whatever girl Stu might not want, or maybe there are a couple of extras, or something I get first dibs. Yah, Stu is righteous like that.

So off we go, stopping at my house first so I can get a little cleaned up and put on a new shirt and tell my brother to tell our mother that I will be back later, maybe much later, if she ever gets home herself before I do. The cruising routine in Olde Saco means up and down Route One (okay, okay Main Street), checking out the lesser spots (Darby’s Pizza Palace, Hank’s Ice Cream joint, the Colonial Donut Shoppe where I hang during the week after school and which serves a lot more stuff than donuts and coffee, sandwiches and stuff, and so on). Nothing much this Saturday. So we head right away for the mecca, Jimmy John’s. As we hit Stu’s “saved” parking spot just in front I can see that several stray girls are eyeing the old car, eyeing it like tonight is the night, tonight is the night Stu, kind of, sort of, maybe notices them (and I, my heart starting to race a little in anticipation and glad that I stopped off at my house, got a clean shirt, and put some deodorant on and guzzled some mouthwash, am feeling tonight is the night too).

But tonight is not the night, no way. Not for me, not for those knees-trembling girls. Why? No sooner did we park than Sally Sullivan came strolling out (okay I don’t know if she was strolling or doo-wopping but she was swaying in such a sexy way that I knew she meant business, that she was looking for something in the Olde Saco night and that she had “found” it) to Stu’s Chevy and with no ifs, ands, or buts asked, asked Stu straight if he was doing anything this night. Let me explain before I tell you what Stu’s answer was that this Sally Sullivan is nothing but a sex kitten, maybe innocent-looking, but definitely has half the boys, hell maybe all the boys at Olde Saco High, including a lot of the guys on the football team drooling over her. I know, because I have had more than one sleepless night over her myself.

See, she is in my English class and because Mr. Murphy lets us sit where we want I usually sit with a good view of her. So Stu says, kind of off-handedly, like having the town teen fox come hinter on him was a daily occurrence, kind of lewdly, “Well, baby I am if you want to go down Sagamore Rocks right now and look for dolphins?” See, Sagamore Rocks is nothing but the local lovers’ lane here and “looking for dolphins” is the way everybody, every teenage everybody in town says “going all the way,” having sex for the clueless. And Sally, as you can guess if you have been following my story said, “Yes” just like that. At that is why I was dumped, unceremoniously dumped, while they roared off into the night. So like I said not every “boss” car owner is god’s gift to women, not by a long shot. Or maybe they are.

Of course ultimately the thing that yoked the guys around Tonio’s was what to do, or not do, collectively and individually as the case came up with girls. (And not just in our generation but at least the couple before ours and a couple after before Tonio retired and the next owners were not enthralled with corner boys hanging around their family-oriented place with their “Mom’s night out” Friday night agenda and called “copper” to clear out the “ruffians” the term they actually used according to what I heard from Frannie Lacey who stayed in town for the duration since he had inherited his mother’s house after she passed. In any by then the corner was giving way to guys (and gals) hanging around malls of the world, the “mall rats” we have all come to dread in our dotage. Mall rats are not even in the same world as corner boys but just suburban kids looking for some place to identify with. These days you see them collected in a space-all looking down at their smartphones and they might have well been in their living rooms as there. Too bad.) Like I said I didn’t start hanging the corners until junior high when my family moved from early growing up North Adamsville about thirty miles away but one of the big thing driving us hormonally-charged boys to head to Doc’s Drugstore was to catch what was what after school at first when everybody, when the girls okay, would drop in on their way home to spent some of their discretionary dough on listening to something dreamy on Doc’s to die for jukebox (dough which we corner boys did not have and had to cadge spare change off of some of the girls). It was at Doc’s I “learned” how to scope a girl to play what I wanted to hear but that is a story for another time because talking about Doc’s and the frenzy of trying to score with some girl started in earnest even for “slow” guys like me. Funny how a year or two before those girls were nothing but “sticks” and nuisances and all of a sudden there they were kind of “interesting”    

In those days as far as I know and even the chronic liars that all we guys were about “scoring” with a girl-meaning have some kind of sexual activity with them and that fact was accepted whatever a guy said even when we knew they guy was lying about scoring some “ice queen” that nobody except maybe Paul Newman or Bobby Vee could score we never heard (or knew personally) about any junior high girl who was “putting out” (and if they were “confessing” to such conduct come Monday morning before school “lav” talk they were lying just as hard as we were so who the hell knows who was doing, or not doing, what). That naturally would change considerably by high school especially junior and senior years when “boss” cars were in the air and Squaw Rock beckoned for adventurous. Then on any given Friday or Saturday night, or almost any night in the summer, dated up or not, the talk was almost exclusively except maybe a passing reference to some sports moment about girls and what they would and would not do. Do sexually in case you were wondering what “do the do” meant, a common expression around our way after somebody heard bluesman Howlin’ Wolf utter those words heard on the local rock station.

I already pointed out the chronic lying about the subject including by me of course but the real subject was about “getting something,” getting some sugar we called it without getting caught. That “caught” not referring to actually doing the act if you were lucky enough to have a halfway willing girl even if you had to get her drunk to get in the mood. (Yeah, I know, I know as well as the reader that we were all under age in our state but if anybody wanted booze “Jimmy the Tramp,” one of the town drunks would gladly cooperate and get whatever you wanted as long as he got his couple of bottles of Thunderbird with your order. We learned the “anthem” from him-“what’s the word-Thunderbird, what’s the price-forty twice” from him. Little did I know that several years later when I was disturbed by alcohol I would be down in Jimmy’s ditch expressing the same thing to the high school kids I was buying for). Caught here meant get some poor girl “in the family way.” Our expression for the condition was “going to see Aunt Emma” although don’t ask me where it came from probably from generation to generation by older brothers to younger brothers and everything got lost in the shuffle about genesis. What would happen is that we would not see a girl for a while although we knew her family was still in town, was still in the same house or apartment but the girl was missing. The excuse when asked was that she had gone to see an aunt for a few months on some family business. All I know is that you would almost never see the girl in school again or if you did you would not like now see her with a baby. One girl did, Candy Lee, came back twice but we all counted her as nothing but a “slut,” someone to avoid because you know there was nothing but trouble there as foxy looking as she was in her cashmere sweaters and tight skirts    

No guy wanted to have that “going to aunt” hanging over his head at fifteen or sixteen, probably no girl either be we were just ordinary teenagers who were sexually curious and didn’t know a damn thing about what the real consequences of sex were. And how would we then, probably almost as much now too, since nobody in authority, not parents, priests, principals or policemen were telling anything that could help. Growing up and hanging with guys who had a least some Irish in them it was worse since Sacred Heart the Catholic Church almost all of us attended (except Allan Davis, a Jewish kid who was a math whizz so we let him hand and Steve Tabor who had a “boss” ’57 Chevy who was some kind of Protestant who we let hang around for obvious reasons) we only knew what we got from older siblings or more usually “on the street” including stuff we made up-most of it wrong and not a small contributing factor to the “aunt” epidemic. Most of us survived although Peter Paul Markin had a close call when Jeannie Murphy told him she was pregnant. We all huddled together to tell him to tell her to take a test to see who the father was. As it turned out she was lying because she didn’t want Markin to see Laura Callahan, Jack’s sister whom he was getting big eyes over. Jesus we were on the cusp of the “Pill” but what they hell did we know about half of this stuff. We were just hungry.

There were certain traditions associated with corner boy life, certain rites of passage which each generation of corner boys had to pass through to keep his place in pecking order (by the way my use of generations is not say twenty years when people pass from kid-dom to adulthood forming a generation along the way but more like the six or seven years from late elementary school to the end of high school, maybe a couple of years beyond). This for “from hunger” kids who were the main denizens of the corners starting as far back as local corner boy legend “Red” Riley during World War II who was admired even by later generations who lived off the crumbs of his “midnight creep” exploits (and a cautionary tale about a guy who “snitched” to the coppers when he was caught coming out of a house at midnight not his own who Red chain-whipped to the emergency room and the guy needed about a hundred stitches and didn’t look so pretty any that episode-he did learn his lesson and never said who did that deed to him-smart guy).                                   

Usually, and Frankie Riley, was the king of this kind of action before he “graduated” to the midnight creep, was the “clip” in elementary school. That is going up to the central shopping area in town (now the mall-but the mall rats don’t seem hungry enough for this kind of action) to a jewelry store or department store (Kendall’s Jewelry was the toughest one to do the clip in so that was recognized as being superior to just some junk rip-off from Woolworth’s or some place like that) and grab some rings or other such items-usually connected with trying to empress so girl or get her a “present” for some occasion. Kid’s stuff though when you think about it and probably not worth the risk of getting caught.

The midnight creep was something else though-a real source of dough if you hit a place right. The legendary Red Riley got a lot of his reputation as a king hell king of the midnight creep ripping off not the cheapjack places that most of us out of laziness or lack of class consciousness about where the good stuff was grabbed but to the places over in the “Mount” where the rich people, rich to us, lived and had stuff worth stealing. He was also a master at planning the capers and never got caught, not for that stuff but later for armed robberies he was not so lucky and did a couple of stretches in the state pen before getting himself killed down South in a shoot-out with cops while he was robbing a White Hen store but by then the dope had taken his good judgment away. Frankie Riley, not as tough as Red, not tough at all after he dunked some kid’s head who was bothering him down the toilet at school and almost drown the kid so nobody messed with him after that, was the master planner in our crowd. Or he was after Markin hatched some plan which he couldn’t possibly carry out without Frankie running the operation. This one I was in on so I know it was a beauty. There were a couple of houses on the edge of our neighborhood which were recently constructed for some guys who involved in the emerging high technology industry that was beginning to bloom around Boston then. These guys were working on R&D for Polaroid if you remember that name. Somehow Markin got close to one of their daughters, nothing ever came of it because the girl was not interested in a guy “from hunger” was the way he told it. She told him her father had a million cameras around, you know those old Polaroid self-developing cameras every family was crazy for to take instant picture just like no with cellphones and “selfies.” They were located in the basement where her father would work on stuff. Markin smelled money, money found on the ground is what his expression was when there was an easy score. And it was we practically just walked into the place (now there would be about seven layers of security even in a residential home) after Frankie figured out how to use a piece of plastic to open the door. We walked away with about twenty cameras between us. That is what the guy, and what the newspapers reported. Frankie had a way to sell them and we had serious dough for weeks. (I won’t say how since I think the statute of limitations has run out but who knows and besides Frankie is a big deal lawyer now.)               

Yeah, corner boy life was something else. Hail corner boys!

Yes that all looked very, very familiar to these old eyes. The difference? These guys stuck together well into their twenties. By twenty most of my guys were in the military, married, in jail, or on the run. The fate of plenty of real-life corner boys making all that noise. See this one.              

Aint Got No Time For Corner Boys Down In The Streets Making All That Noise-With the 1983 Film “Diner” In Mind

By Lance Lawrence

Recently I was watching a DVD from 1982, Diner, a film about a bunch of guys in 1959 Baltimore who hung out at, well, a diner and hence the title of the film. The cast of the film was a veritable who’s who of male stars (and one female Ellen Barkin) who came of cinematic age in the 1980s, guys like Mickey Rourke and Kevin Bacon who are still putting their shoulders to the wheel in the film industry. What had attracted me about the film from the blurb you get on each film these days from Amazon, Netflix, hell, even blogs from citizen film reviewers strutting their stuff in a democratic age  was beside the diner motif which is always attractive to me and which I will discuss in more detail below was the idea that these guys were still hanging together in their early twenties when the old corner boy high school days when hanging for guy like them were well past (and a few years later for me and my guys). Well past compared to nine to five work ethos, marriage, marry young ethos, kids, not too many like their parents but also done at a young age and that ever present sickle hanging over your head-“how the fuck did I get into this action.”          

I had watched this film with a friend, Sam Lowell, whom I have known since our corner boy days in Riverdale about forty miles west of Boston back in the early 1960s. Sam Lowell is a fairly well-known, or used to be fairly well-known, free-lance music and film critic for lots of publications great and small, some lone gone and some still around like Rolling Stone before he consciously started slowing down as he has reached retirement age. In the interest of full disclosure he was the guy who said I would like the film and would I come over, watch with him, and compare notes with him after the film was over. He was writing what he called a “think” review for American Film Today about “buddy” films which had something like a heyday in the 1980s between the guys who starred collectively in this film, the Brat Pack and those who came of cinematic age through the various film adaptations of S.E. Hinton’s male-centered buddy” films, guys like Matt Dillon you know. So after the showing we compared notes the most important one which we both agreed and which he used in his review was how many of the actions of the corner boys were very much like ours although we were younger than them when we did them (in the film they weren’t called “corner boys” nor did they call themselves that but that my friends is what they were-no question as Sam likes to say)  

Here’s what Sam said about that key question:

“Hey, around my way, around my growing up working class neighborhood out in Riverdale about forty miles west of Boston in the early 1960s they called them, anybody who thought about the matter like some errant sociologists wondering about alienation among the lower classes or acted on the premise like the cops who kept a sharp eye on any possible criminal activity corner boys. We called ourselves corner boys with a certain amount of bravado and without guile since we hung, what the heck, we hung on the corners of our town. (Corner boys which would be immortalized in Bruce Springsteen’s song, Jersey Girl, with the line. “aint got no time for corner boys down in the street making all that noise” and that was the truth-the “making all that noise” part. Also the S.E. Hinton books which we did not know about, as least I did not know about and I was “the Bookworm” along with “the Scribe” so I knew about what was what with books. The other guys could have given a fuck about books except maybe porn stuff or comics).

A working Riverdale definition: corner boys: those without much dough, those without a weekend date and no money for a weekend date even if a guy got lucky enough to draw some female companionship, someone who didn’t care about a “boss” car, the ’57 two-toned preferable red and white Chevy the boss of “boss” to sit up front in and would accept the bus as a mode of transportation, thus seldom lucky since only nerdy girls or whatever we called girls with brains but no looks would descend to that level, hung around blessed Tonio’s Pizza Parlor “up the Down” (the corner of Adams and Jefferson Streets and don’t ask me why it was called that it just was as far back as anybody remembered including my maternal grandparents who were born there) and, well, hung out. Hung out trying to do the best we could which involved mostly the aforementioned girls and larcenies, or plans for larcenies. And if defeated in either endeavor any particular night then there was always a couple of slices of Tonio’s secret formula pizza sauce to die for delight and a small Coke. Just so you know really hung around in late high school planning larcenies great and small (great the theft of some young woman’s virtue, small the midnight creeps through back doors but maybe no more should be mentioned since perhaps the statute of limitations has not run out).      

So when I saw the film under review, Diner, with a cast of up and coming actors who all went on to other films and saw that they were five guys, count ‘em six, who in 1959 in the great city of Baltimore hung around a diner talking the talk in between bites of French fries and gravy (against our culinary choice of pizza slices) I knew that they were kindred spirits. Knew that despite the several years different in time since they were all twenty-something gathering together for a wedding of one of their members around Christmas time they were from the same species… “

That pretty much summed up the main point we discussed that night, and during subsequent nights as well, but there were others, other stories that were stirred up from that viewing. Some long forgotten, and maybe that was just as well but other which one or the both of us remembered out of some fog of war moment. Since Sam was writing a generic review a lot of what he and I talked was “left on the floor” as we used to call the bullshit stuff we would throw out without batting an eyelash on lonesome John weekend nights and in summer almost every night. Those stories, some of them anyway, the ones I was involved in I decided to write down in a journal, a diary if you like that word better, and present the next time the surviving members of our crowd got together to cut up old touches (an old-fashioned word we used all the time but when I used it once with the sister of corner boy the late Al Stein she claimed to have never heard the expression before). So here goes guys and although I was not like the Bookworm or the Scribe back in the day I later turned into a late-blooming voracious reading and I hope you picked up the habit too.               

Sam mentioned in passing in his review about how hanging around guys in Baltimore and Riverdale were totally committed to betting on almost anything. Part of that betting trait was the need to “make a score,” make some dough for immediate dates but a lot of it was a real idea that the roll of the dice was going to be the only way to get out from under. Sure a lot of it was betting on sports outcomes especially on the then lowly Red Sox and high-riding Celtics but nothing was off-limits from what, as happened in the film, you would or would not get from a girl in the way of sex (we had our fair share of “ice queens” and in high school I had more than my fair share unless the other guys, as usual, were lying like bastards about what they were “getting”) to the most famous, or infamous bet of all-the night Frankie bet Sam on how high Tonio could throw the pizza dough to soften it up before making the crust.

I should explain that while I would later be partial to diners in the days in the later part of the 1960s when I was a regular Jack Kerouac “on the road” hitch-hiker grab rides from lonely for company truck drivers and I learned almost every diner, good or bad, stop at or avoid, from Boston to Frisco town back then we hung around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor in high school. Located at the corner of Jefferson and Adams “up the Downs” which Sam mentioned in his review and I need not speculate here why that section of town was called that Tonio’s was where we spent our driftless after school hours. (The corner boy progression in town was Harry’s Variety Store across from Riverdale Elementary which I was not part of since my family did not move to the town Iwas in  junior high school then Doc’s Drugstore with his great jukebox in junior high and then onto Tonio’s. This progression was recognized by one and all as rights in the corner boy rites of passage.) So we knew lots about Tonio and his operation and while the cops and other merchants around didn’t care to see us coming Tonio, an immigrant from Italy and maybe something of a corner boy, or whatever they called them over there, was happy to see us. Said that we brought in business-the girls with plenty of dough to spent on food and the jukebox while “disdaining” the riffraff-us.

To make a long story short one Friday night our acknowledged leader, Frankie Riley, now a big-time lawyer in Boston was looking for dough and knew Sam had some from caddying at the Point Pond Golf Course the previous weekend. So he was in a betting mood. Here was his bet. High or low, and I forget, and Sam had too what the standard was, about where Tonio’s pizza dough would be flung when he was making his pizzas for the night. The thing was, and this was a hard and fast rule that I do not remember ever being broken, once a guy called a bet the other guy, or guys had to take the challenge. So the bet was on. Every time Sam called high Tonio would go low and visa versa. That night Sam lost five bucks and his chance to have a date that weekend. Frankie got to go on his first date with Johanna Murphy whom he would eventually marry (and divorce). The “hook’ that caught Sam that night-the “fix” was in. Frankie whom Tonio liked the best of all of us, treated almost like a son, had spoken to Tonio before Sam came in. You can figure out the rest. Corner boy, strictly corner boy stuff.                   

[A while back we, a bunch of us who knew Markin who wrote the sketch below back in sunnier days, in hang around corner boy high school days and afterward too when we young bravos imbibed in the West Coast dragon chase he led us on in the high hellish mid-1960s summers of love, got together and put out a little tribute compilation of his written sketches that we were able to cobble from whatever we collectively still had around. Those writings were from a time when Markin was gaining steam as a writer for many of the alternative magazines, journals and newspapers that were beginning to be the alternative network of media resources that we were reading once we knew the main media outlets were feeding us bullshit on a bun, were working hand in glove with big government, big corporations, big whatever that was putting their thumbs in our eyes.

On big series, a series that Markin was nominated for, or won, I don’t remember which an award for, which I will tell you about some other time was from a period toward the end of his life, a period when he was lucid enough to capture such stories. He had found himself out in Southern California with a bunch of homeless fellow Vietnam veterans, no homeless was not the right word, guys from ‘Nam, his, their word not mine since I did not serve in the military having been mercifully declared 4-F, unfit for military duty by our local draft board, who having come back to the “real” world just couldn’t, or wouldn’t adjust and started “creating” their own world, their own brethren circle, such as it was out along the railroad tracks, rivers and bridges. Bruce Springsteen would capture the pathos and pain of the situation in his classic tribute-Brothers Under The Bridge.  Markin’s series was called To The Jungle reflecting both the hard ass jungle of Vietnam from which they had come to the old-timey hobo railroad track jungle they found themselves in.     

Yeah, those were the great million word and ten thousand fact days, the mid to late 1960s, and after he had gotten back from Vietnam the early 1970s say up to 1974 or so when whatever Markin wrote seemed like pure gold, seemed like he had the pulse of what was disturbing our youth dreams, had been able to articulate in words we could understand the big jail-break out he was one of the first around our town to anticipate. Had gathered himself to cut the bullshit on a bun world out.

That was before Markin took the big fall down in Mexico, let his wanting habits, a term that our acknowledged high school corner boy leader Frankie Riley used incessantly to describe the poor boy hunger we had for dough, girls, stimulants, life, whatever, get the best of him. Of course Frankie had “cribbed” the term from some old blues song, maybe Bessie Smith who had her habits on for some no good man cheating on her and spending all her hard-earned dough, maybe Howlin’ Wolf wanting every gal he saw in sight, skinny or big-legged to “do the do” with that Markin also had turned us onto although I admit in my own case that it took me many years, many years after Markin was long gone before I appreciated the blues that he kept trying to cram down our throats as the black-etched version of what hellish times were going through in the backwaters of North Adamsville while the rest of the world was getting ahead. Heading to leafy suburban golden dreams while we could barely rub two dimes together and hence made up the different with severe wanting habits-even me.  

From what little we could gather about Markin’s fate from Josh Breslin, a guy from Maine, a corner boy himself, who I will talk about more in a minute and who saw Markin just before he hit the lower depths, before he let sweet girl cousin cocaine “run all around his brain, the say it is going to kill you but they won’t say when” let the stuff alter his judgment, he went off to Mexico to “cover” the beginnings of the cartel action there. Somewhere along the line the down there Markin decided that dealing high heaven dope was the way that he would gather in his pot of gold, would get the dough he never had as a kid, and get himself well. “Well” meaning nothing but his nose so full of “candy” all the time that the real world would no longer intrude on his life. Somehow in all that mixed up world he had tried his usual end-around, tried to do either an independent deal outside the cartel, a no-no, or stole some “product” to start his own operation, a very big no-no. Either scenario was possible when Markin got his wanting habits on and wound up dead, very mysteriously dead, in a dusty back street down Sonora way in 1975, 1976 we don’t even have the comfort of knowing that actual date of his passing.

Those were the bad end days, the days out in Oakland where they were both staying before Markin headed south when according to Josh he said “fuck you” to writing for squally newspapers and journals and headed for the sweet dream hills. But he left plenty of material behind that had been published or at the apartment that he shared with Josh in Oakland before the nose candy got in the way. That material wound up in several locations as Josh in his turn took up the pen, spent his career writing for lots of unread small journals and newspapers in search of high-impact stories and drifted around the country before he settled down in Cambridge working as an free-lance editor for several well-known if also small publishing houses around Boston. So when the idea was proposed by Jack Callahan to pay a final written tribute to our fallen comrade we went looking for whatever was left wherever it might be found. You know from cleaning out the attics, garages, cellars looking for boxes where an old newspaper article or journal piece might still be found after being forgotten for the past forty or so years.

The first piece we found, found by Jack Callahan, one of the guys who hung around with us corner boys although he had a larger circle since as a handsome guy he had all the social butterfly girls around him and as a star football player for North Adamsville High he had the girls and all the “jock” hangers-on bumming on his tail, was a story by Markin for the East Bay Other about the transformation of Phil Larkin from “foul-mouth” Phil to “far-out’ Phil as a result of the big top social turmoil events which grabbed many of us who came of political, social, and cultural age in the roaring 1960s. Markin like I said before had been the lead guy in sensing the changes coming, had us following in his wake not only in our heads but his gold rush run in the great western trek to California where a lot of the trends got their start.

That is where we met the subject of the second piece, or rather Phil did and we did subsequently too as we made our various ways west, Josh Breslin, Josh from up in Podunk Maine, actually Olde Saco fast by the sea, and he became in the end one of the corner boys, one of the North Adamsville corner boys. But before those subsequent meetings he had first become part of Phil’s “family,” and as that second story documented also in the East Bay Other described it how Josh, working his new life under the moniker Prince Love, “married” one of the Phil’s girlfriends, Butterfly Swirl. The third one in the series dealt with the reality of Phil’s giving up that girlfriend to Prince Love and the “marriage” and “honeymoon,” 1960s alternative-style that cemented that relationship.

Yeah, those were wild times and if a lot of the social conventions accepted today without too much rancor like people living together as a couple without the benefit of marriage, same-sex marriage, and maybe even friends with benefits let me clue in to where they all started, or if not started got a big time work-out to make things acceptable. But that was not all he wrote about, just the easy to figure a good story about 1960s. Markin also wrote about those wanting habits days, our growing up poor in the 1950s days which while we had no dough, not enough to be rich was rich in odd-ball stuff we seemingly were forced to do to keep ourselves just a little left of the law, very little sometimes. Naturally he wrote about the characters like the one here, Stew-ball Stu, whom I hope doesn’t read this sketch if he is still alive because he might still take umbrage and without Markin around he might come after me with a wrench or jackknife, who we young boys, maybe girls too but then it was boys’ world mostly looked up to. The actual Stew-ball Stu he sued here was from a story told to him by Josh Breslin long after he shed his 1960s moniker of Prince Love when Markin was looking for corner boy stories. But believe me while the names might have been different old North Adamsville had its own full complement of Stus.        

For those not in the know, for those who didn’t read the first Phil Larkin piece where I mentioned what corner boy society in old North Adamsville was all about Phil was one of a number of guys, some say wise guys but we will let that pass who hung around successively Harry’s Variety Store over on Sagamore Street in elementary school,  Doc’s Drugstore complete with soda fountain and more importantly his bad ass jukebox complete with all the latest rock and roll hits as they came off the turntable on Newport Avenue in junior high school and Salducci’s Pizza “up the Downs” in high school, don’t worry nobody in the town could figure that designation out either, as their respective corners as the older guys in the neighborhood in their turn moved up and eventually out of corner boy life.

More importantly Phil was one of the guys who latter followed in “pioneer” Markin’s wake when he, Markin, headed west in 1966 after he had finished up his sophomore year in college and made a fateful decision to drop out of school in Boston in order to “find himself.” Fateful in that without a student deferment that “find himself” would eventually lead him to induction into the U.S. Army at the height of the Vietnam War, an experience which he never really recovered from for a lot of reasons that had nothing to do directly with that war but which honed his “wanting habits” for a different life than he had projected when he naively dropped out of college to see “what was happening” out on the West Coast.

Phil had met, or I should say that Josh had met Phil, out on Russian Hill in San Francisco when Josh, after hitchhiking all the way from Maine in the early summer of 1967, had come up to the yellow brick road converted school bus (Markin’s term for the travelling caravan that he and Phil were then part of and which the rest of us, including even stay-at-home me for a few months ) he and a bunch of others were travelling up and down the West Coast on and had asked for some dope. Phil was the guy he had asked, and who had passed him a big old joint, and their eternal friendship formed from there. (Most of us would meet Josh later that summer as we in our turns headed out. Sam Lowell, Frankie Riley, Jack Callahan, Jimmy Jenkins and me all headed out after Markin who had “gone native” pleaded with us to not miss this big moment that he had been predicting was going to sea-change happens for a few years.) Although Markin met a tragic end murdered down in Mexico several years later over a still not well understood broken drug deal with some small cartel down there as a result of an ill-thought out pursuit of those wanting habits mentioned earlier he can take full credit for our lifetime friendship with Josh.-Bart Webber]

Sitting On Top Of The World-“Everest” (2015)- A Short Film Review

DVD Review

By Seth Garth 

Everest, starring Jason Clarke, 2015  

I am still scratching my head (as was the person I saw this film with) about why seemingly rational people would go to the expense, take the time, and put themselves in harm’s way fighting injury or death in order to place some kind of flag on the summit of Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain. The source of that bafflement is the film under review titled appropriately Everest since in the end as all participants recognized it was about the mountain whether you personally made it or not.

One of the most poignant moments in the film was when a journalist who was on the expedition covering it for a hiking magazine asked point blank the question “Why?.” Lots of individual answers were given from person goals to some kind of testing of the soul. The first collective answer seemed at the conclusion of the film to be the right one-“because it is there.”

By the time of the expedition, the ill-fated expedition which I do not believe is giving anything away, in 1996 thousands of people had been led up to the summit by the Sherpa guides mandatory on such trips. And several hundred had died from causes like oxygen debt, slippage, exhaustion and faltering mental toughness. In the film there were so many separate expeditions trying to take advantage of the “window” to climb to the summit that it looked like a small city. All jockeying for position, including the expedition out of New Zealand led by Rob (played by Jason Clarke) and his hiking operation.  

As far as the action of the film goes unlike a documentary where the footage would be about the climb here we got to know the characters, got to care that they got up and back whatever we might think about that goal. There were various styles displayed among the various expedition leaders Rob and his team were “hand-holders” which in the end would be fatal to him. Partly because he gave in to one climber who had failed the year before and who he stayed behind to make sure got to the summit and down. The exhausting down part combined with a horrendous wind storm is what did both men and a couple of others. One man was saved by a heroic effort from Nepalese helicopter pilot. At the conclusion photographs of those who actually perished were shown which added to the sense of danger involved. Yeah, in the end it was all about the mountain. A fast-paced riveting film.   

In Honor Of Women’s History Month – Poet Jesse Baxter’s In Pharaoh Times

In Pharaoh Times

Isis, daughter of Isis major, mother- wife-sister of the human sun god

Awoke, awoke with a start weary from brother couplings; and stray poppy laden abandoned copulations

Configurations only a deacon priest filled with signs and amulets could fathom, or some racked court astrologer

To face the stone-breaking day, a day filled to the brim, overflowing, with portents

Arisen, washed, fragranced, headed to the balcony to observe unseen and to be observed seen beneath the cloudless skies      

Out in the ocean sea of whirling sand, out in the endless chiseled stone sun blazing day; her sea visage on down heads, eyes averted

Hittites, Gilts, Samians, Cretans, Nubians, Babylonians all conquered all down heads and averted eyes

Out on the ocean see, a lone sable warrior defeated, defeated with down head and upward eye disturbed the blistering heat day

Isis, daughter of Isis major, mother-wife-sister-child of the human sun king    shrinks back in fear, fear time has come

That black will devour Nubian and rise, rise

Yes, rise in Pharaoh times       

Jesse Baxter had never been so angry in his black young life as he had been at his, well, let’s call her his lady friend, Louise Crawford, since he was not sure whether girlfriend in the intricate relationship networks of the1960s in quirky old Greenwich Village in the depths of trail-blazing New Jack City was an appropriate designation for their newly flowered relationship. Jesse a budding poet, a very hopeful poet who had just begun to get noticed in that rarified Village air had become one of Louise Crawford ‘s, ah, “conquests” on her way to tasting  all that the Bohemian night offered (not quite “beat,”  that had become passé by then and not quite “hip” as in hippie that would become the fashion later in the decade so bohemian, meaning out on the cultural outer edge, would do, would do as long as Jesse thought such a term was appropriate).

Jesse had seen Louise around the Village several times at the trendy art shows, upbeat coffeehouses beginning to emerge from “beat” poetry and jazz scenes to retro folk revival stuff, and at a few loft parties large enough to get lost in without having met everybody or anyone, if that was what one wanted. He had heard of her “exploits,” exploits tramping through the budding literati but had only become acquainted with Louise through her “old” lover, Jose, Jose Guzman, the surrealist-influenced painter who was beginning to make a splash for himself in the up and coming art galleries emerging over in nearby Soho. And either she had tired of him (possible) or he had tired of her (more probable since Jose was thrown off right from the beginning by her “bourgeois “command manner and her overweening need to seem like a white hipster under every circumstance although she was quote, Jose, quote, square, unquote but a good tumble, a very good tumble under the sheets) and so one night she had hit on Jesse at a coffeehouse where he was reading and that was that.

But enough of small talk and back to Jesse’s rage. At one up-scale party held on Riverside Drive among the culturati, or what passed for such in downtrodden New York,  as they had become an “item” Louise had introduced Jesse as the “greatest Negro poet since Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance.” Jesse was not put off by the comparison with the great Hughes, no way, he accepted that designation with a certain sense of honor, although qualified a bit by the different rhythm that motivated Langston’s words, be-bop jazz, and his own Bo Diddley /Chuck Berry-etched  “child of rock and roll” beat running in his head. What he was put off by was that “negro”  designation, a term of derision just then in his universe as young blacks, especially young black men, were moving away from the negro Doctor King thing and toward that Malcolm freedom term, black, black as night, black is beautiful. Jesus, hadn’t she read his To Malcolm –Black Warrior Prince. (Apparently one of the virtues of tramping through the literati was an understanding that there was no actual need to read, look, hear, anything that your new “conquest” had written, drawn or sung. In the case of Louise she had made something of an art form out of that fact once confessing to Jesse that she had only actually read (and re-read) his Louise Love In Quiet Time written by him after some silly spat since she was the subject. His other work she had somebody summarize for her. Jesus, again.)  

And it was not like Louise Crawford, yes, that Crawford, the scion-ess [sic] of the Wall Street Crawfords who had (have) been piling up dough and gouging profits since the start of the republic, was not attuned to the changes going on underneath bourgeois society just then but was her way to “own” him, own him like in olden times. While he was too much the gentile son of W.E.B. Dubois’ “talented tenth” (his parents both school teachers down in hometown Trenton who however needed to scrimp and safe to put him through Howard University) to make a scene at that party latter in the cab home to her place in the Village (as the well-tipped taxi driver could testify to, if necessary) Jesse lashed into her with all the fury a budding poet and belittled black man could muster. In short, he would not be “owned” by some white bread women who was just “cruising” the cultural and ethnic out-riggings before going back to marry some son of some sorry family friend stockbroker and live on Riverside Drive and summer in the Hamptons and all the rest while he struggled to create his words, his black soul-saturated words.

The harangue continued up into her loft and then Jesse ran out of steam a little (he had had a little too much of high-shelf liquors and of hits on the bong pipe to last forever in that state). Louise called for a truce, said she was sorry, sorry for being a square, and called him to her bed, pretty please to her bed. He, between the buzz in his head from the stimulants and the realization that she was good in bed, if nothing else, followed. And that night they made those sheets sweat with their juices. After they were depleted Jesse thought to himself that Louise might be just slumming but he would take a ticket and stay for the ride and felt asleep. Louise on the other hand, got up and went to the window to look out at her city, lit a cigarette and pondered some of Jesse’s words, pondered them for a while and got just a little bit fearful for her future as she would back to her bed and lay down next to the sleeping Jesse.

 Later when he awakened just before dawn Jesse wrote his edgy poem In Pharaoh Times partially to contain the edges of his left-over rage and partially to take his distance from a daughter of Isis…

And hence this Women’s History Month contribution.                      

• T For Texas, Texas Blues-Willie Nelson’s Milk Cow Blues (2000)-A CD Review

• CD Review
• 
  
• By Zack James
• 
  
• Milk Cow Blues, Willie Nelson and others, 2000
• 
  
• 
  
• My old high school friend Seth Garth whom I am still in close touch with reminded me the other day when he was over at my house and I had the CD under review playing in the background, Willie Nelson’s Milk Cow Blues, that back in the early 1980s he recalled that I had had what he called my “outlaw country cowboy moment.” I didn’t recall that I uttered that particular expression although I did recall that I had for a brief period been drawn to the likes of Willie, Waylon Jennings, Townes Van Zandt and a number of other singer-songwriters who broke out of the traditional stylized Nashville formula mold epitomized then by guys like George Jones and gals like Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. Just then rock and roll was taking one of its various detours which I could not follow, folk music, the social protest kind anyway that had attracted me in my youth was fading fast even among aficionados and the blues was losing its star performers by the day and the younger crowd was heading to what would become hip-hop tradition so I was up for listening to something different. Willie, not clean-shaven, pony-tailed, not shining sparkly suit Willie filled the bill.            
• 
  
• Yeah, Willie filled the bill with songs about two-timing men, women too, lost love, the heartache of love relationships, getting out from under some rock that was weighting him down but down in soulful, thoughtful way with a bit of a gravelly voice, a kind of voice that always had the ability to draw me in, to make me stop what I was doing and listen up. Of course I had remembered back then that Willie had written a song that Patsy Cline whom I had always liked had made famous in the late 1950s, Crazy, which I had learned about when I was at Cheapo Records over in Cambridge looking for some bluesy stuff back in the 1960s. 
• 
  
• Fast forward to 2000 and this CD. I had expected that Willie, now ancient Willie if he had written Crazy back in the 1950s, would still be grinding out in his twangy way the old classics which fill out this album. Would put his Texas touch on these standards. Guess what-he switched up on me, made an album of well-known covers made hits by some very famous like Cline, Bessie Smith, B.B. King (who is featured on a couple of songs here), Jerry Lee but changed the tempo. Put everything in a bluesy frame, and let the beat go on. Let the music carry the day with whoever was singing along with him on each cut. Not a recognizable cowboy sound in the house. Now part of that switch-up represented the hard fact that age had like with Bob Dylan rusted up his voice and so he no longer tried, or was capable of hitting the high white notes. Part of it was to let the other singers or the musicians carry the force of the songs. But guess what if you, and Seth agreed with me on this, need some nice jazzy, bluesy background music this one fills the bill. Yeah, we all have come a long way from that old “outlaw country cowboy moment” Seth claimed I was in thrall to. Enough said.     

Miss Jane Austen’s “Emma” A Quickie Film Review

DVD Review

By Leslie Dumont

Whatever her personal situation concerning her love life or lack of love life Jane Austen was the queen of the romantic novel, maybe the gothic romantic novel as well. Everybody else today on the pot-boiler, harlequin romance best-seller list owns a debt of gratitude to Jane for seriously, great literature seriously bringing the genre to the light of day. Of course, Hollywood and other locales has had a field day making cinematic hay out of her novels. That is the case here as well with this made-for-television rendition of his classic busy-body tale, Emma.

Needless to say, the whole plot revolves around Miss (Ms. today but let’s not be anachronistic so Miss) Emma Wodehouse, she of the landed estate and of extreme class, social and etiquette consciousness-for others in need of serious romance leading well leading to the altar of course. Naturally our Emma is personally impervious to love’s call-it does not suit her character as she gladly tells one and all. So she goes through her passes first getting her governess to the altar (to the distress of her crotchety father) and then her friend (whom she almost drops the ball on with her distressingly high sense of class-gentleman farmers acceptable but real in the dirt farmers go to the back of the line.  To be sure she had own, unacceptable, suitors and had taken an interest in one Mister Churchill who in the end turned the tables on Emma having all along been secretly engaged to a gal who she though beneath her. 

Don’t worry despite her scatter-brained efforts and her own lack of any serious accomplishments (or desire for such deeds) she will one day have an epiphany and realize that he was head over heels in love with a gentleman farmer who she had known forever. Thanks Jane-and all you romance novelists who have feasted off her ideas should be doing so as well. Not Jane’s best for story line but okay to watch if not to read.

Hard Times Please Come Again No More-When The Old Man Of The Sea Drowned His Sorrows In Whiskey And Weed-Another Side Of The Legendary Bart Webber-A Short Biography Of Sorts 

By Will Bradley

[When Greg Green tagged me to do this sketch taking me away from some serious investigative journalism which has put me on the shelf as far as doing reviews I balked. And not only because I was weaving my way past all the nonsense around the legend of Sherlock Holmes, the so-called max daddy of the private detection world. (As I have done in every article I have written about this fraud Holmes, real name according to Scotland Yard when they finally caught up with him Larry Lawrence the kingpin of the London underworld, I make sure I mention this alias business to drag some of his fans back to sanity.) I am a young writer in this publication and although I am the youngest writer with a permanent by-line I have hardly ever run into the legendary Bart Webber.

Moreover, there are several writers here, Si Lannon, Seth Garth, Fritz Taylor and others who have known Bart for many, many years and one of them should have been chosen for the task. Greg took me up short and said if he wanted some hagiographic piece that would be the right place to look. He said he wanted Bart, warts and all, and that would not happen with any of the guys who have known him for a long time. So that clinched it.  After reviewing the materials and talking to those long- time friends and others I have decided to try to capture the man in his own voice, in the first person which is tricky, but I hope it works. Will Bradley]       

**********

I am a driven man. I am a driven man, imprisoned, six by twelve room driven, but more by a mental six by twelve internal, eternal, infernal almost paternal quest, and that is the only word that fits for the elusive high white note, or the high white something, that I have spent a lifetime searching for. Certainly as long as that other search, that more physical search for the blue-pink great American West that disturbed my youth, and beyond, and pushed me through many a long, lonesome highway hitchhike mile. But you know that story already now that you have read the previous scenes. [Check the Archives under “great American West blue-pink night” for the whole series by Bart.]

This one is more elusive, although I have caught a whisper of it here and there along the way. Now it looks like I’m stuck with it to the end. Here I sit in late 2018, in any case, quarantined, in desolate, high, hard wind-swept, sunless-sea-ed, busted sand-duned, green sea-grass-blown, icy white-capped waved, Atlantic–oceaned, ragged, rugged, jagged Maine-coasted shack of a room getting ready to search, and search hard this time, for that white devil of a thing that keeps disturbing my rest.

I will put up with an ill-lit stove, half broken from generations of use by others, passing strangers, maybe seeking their own high white notes, or high white something. Or, maybe, just passing sweaty, drunken nights in some foredoomed attempt to avoid oblivion. I will, moreover, put up with that high-pitched, annoying, buzzing refrigerator in back of me that means, at least, a touch of civilization. And the bubbly, perking, hard-hearted coffee-making machine, chipped plates, moldy-cushioned sofa, and this stuffy-aired place in order to make sense of what drove me here once again to place my shoulder against the wind, the whistling wind that signals that it is time to take note, and to seriously take note, of the demands of the quest.

And I came here for a purpose, always a purpose, to leave home and sweet-loved, sweet love. And to get away to clean a man’s mind from the humdrum, fairwayed, fresh-ponded, sun-walked, run-runned, walk-runned, city-maddened depths. Also while we are on the subject from the technological-driven, cell-phoned, personal computer-strapped like some third hand or second-brained, four-walled nightmare. Nightmare-evading Maine fits the bill, although truth to tell Maine figures, Maine always figures in the white note fight, although it is hardly the only place.

Hey, wait a minute, I can almost read your thoughts about my thoughts right now. It goes something like this- here he goes again, you say, on some incensed holy grail trip of the mind, or maybe he is for real, real time, real places but still a trip that would embarrass and shame any self-respecting errant knight of yore, searching for that perfect fair damsel in distress to bring home, or more likely, to carry off, kicking and screaming, to some cozy, stone-faced, thatched-roofed, smoke-filled, forested cottage for two. Or of old mad, maddened, maddening Captain Ahab and his foolish fish, or whatever woe begotten thing that he was really looking for in the Melville deep. Or, maybe, some fiendish, freakish, madman pioneer monkishly doing his own shouldering against the storms, against the snowstorms, against the storms of life of the white-peaked Western trek nights. Ah, the blue-pink Western sky. I wish you well pioneer brother, wherever you landed.

No, it is not like that at all. This is not some half-baked, half-bright, half-thought out, interior dialogue that I usually get myself tangled up into. Tangled so bad I have to break it up for a while. No, none of that this time. No intellectual gymnastics, no mental tepidity, no squarey circles or circley squares. No this is purely, or almost purely, a memory trip and that seems about right, you know, if you really want to know it has been painful at times, but no way, no way at all, that it is one of those ill-digested whims that you are thinking of. No way.

And, besides, I have the many pairs of worn out, worn-soled, worn-heeled, down at the heel shoe leather (now thick-soled, thick-heeled, logo-addled running sneakers); worn-thumbed, back-pack-laden, some forgotten town destination sign waving, hitch-hiked mile (that means bumming free rides on the road, the wide American highway, for those too young, or too proper to the know the long gone, way long gone, exotic word that sustained many a hobo, tramp or bum in his (or her) search for the Great American night) through every nowhere, no-name, no wanna know the name, bus-depoted, stranger-unfriendly town from here to Mendocino. Moreover, here I have marks, and here you can call it intellectual or spiritual or whatever, from every diesel-trailed, oil-slicked, mud-flatted, white-lined, white-broken-lined, two-laned, no passing , hard-bitten, steam-fooded truck stop from here to Frisco as well. So don’t tell me I haven’t paid my dues.

Or it could have been some smoke-filled, nicotine-plastered walls in some long defunct coffee house (when smoking was de rigueur), or some gin-sweated, smoke-fogged Cambridge bar (in the days when smoking was allowed), listening to some local group trying to make it out of town, one way or another. Or it could have been being chained-smoked cigarette (ditto above) writing like crazy, every soul thing, every non-soul thing, every anti-soul thing after passing on the last call train out to the sticks at that old reliable, don’t have the eggs scrambled, Hayes-Bickford where we all believed that if you just spent enough nights, enough hot, heavy-aired July nights, or enough snow-bound, frost-bitten January nights (this before Super Bowl suspense filled in January) maybe something major would come out, and maybe fame, big fame too, fame etched by the gods.

Hey, did I tell you how I got here, got here this time that is? Did I forget that in my frenzy to tell you what is? Ya, I guess I did reading back. Let me tell you of my dreams, or at least the story of my dreams to make it right, okay? One recent, sweat- drenched night I woke up, or was I woken up by one of the cats, in a start. I had a weird old dream, or maybe just a flash of a dream where I saw, in living, livid color a big old beautiful high white note floating, free and easy, as you might guess on a very stormy high white wave. After than flash, if that is what it was, I could not get back to sleep and lay there, soaking a little and trying to soak off that soaking with an old bedraggled railroad man’s roaring red handkerchief, or that is at least what I call them since I first saw a railroad guy walking down the line when I was a kid, carrying one in the left back pocket of his dirt-stained denims as he uncoupled one train from another, maybe sending it into the great western night.

But I will get into that great Western night, or what I think is my idea of the great Western night later on once I figure out the meaning of this dream. Hey, it is really bothering me, and it should because, lately, I have been thinking and thinking hard about that very subject. No, it did not just come out of the blue, come on now, you guys know better than that. Ain’t you read Freud, or his acolytes or renegades, these things all have secret meanings of their own. But no surprise if you think about it. I have been thinking about the high white note for a while, ever since I read poor old, black, gay, exiled against his will, writer James Baldwin and his infernal short story, Sonny’s Blues.

You know I really should make you read the whole thing, that whole short story, and then you could come back and get an idea about my dream, or the thought of what my dream was all about. And then the great Western trek in the night, hell in the day time even, would make a great deal more sense. But I am going to let you off the hook this time and just tell you that old “Sonny” is a story about brothers, and I have been thinking about that too lately, although not in the friendly, gee I should get back in touch with my own brother sense, but about brothers who drifted back and forth in each other’s lives until one day the reality set in hard and hard was that Sonny, a high white note-seeking jazz pianist really got high on the white note. Busted, busted hard, busted back to clean but busted and his brother, would you know that it was his big brother, had to help him put back the pieces, even though the pieces were what made Sonny interesting and alive. That's me, living on old sweet, sweet dream of that white note, and Angelica-ish-driven memories of that old time blue-pink night before I go.