***Tales From The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood- The Ghost Classmate

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

A few years ago, I guess it is about five years ago, yes, it has to be about five years now because I was writing about the old days at North Adamsville High School in the early 1960s when I went to school there and I noted that we had passed the forty-five year milestone and since this year of our lord, 2014, marks the fiftieth anniversary of my graduation from that hallowed, now hallowed, institution that must be about right. By the way I don’t usually comment on such odd-ball anniversaries as the forty-fifth but as time is precious for our graduation generation I made an exception in that case. Moreover that forty-fifth represented a personal milestone in my life since I had for many years been extremely alienated, alienated to the point of distraction, from the old school, from the old Irish-soaked neighborhoods where I grew up, and from the town which after graduation I could not get away from quickly enough.

The details of that alienation need not detain us here although as I tell my tale some of that will come out and give the reader an idea of why I had to get the dust of that old town off my shoes. The main point then though was that I had finally come to a calm with that old alienated past and was ready to write some short sketches about the old days. That idea had been additionally prompted by some questions that a member of the Class of 1964 who had set up a website to aid in communication among former classmates had asked me about my impressions of the old school, of the old town, and of any fellow classmates that I might have remembered. Among the latter I thought (and wrote) about a guy, one of the very few from North Adamsville after graduation, who I had run across as I wandered this land and who I had run with for a while.      

So today I am mercifully not interested in the minutia of the details of one Frank Jackman’s teenage alienations. No, I am driven once again by thoughts of that fellow classmate, a classmate who did not graduate from high school with us back in 1964 but who followed a very different path, a path that I for one came close to following, the path of the ghost classmate.        

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Not everyone who went through our old high school survived to tell the tale, and by this I do not mean the ravishes of mortality that has cut short too many lives from our class according to the grim reaper statistics provide on our class website as we come to commemorative our fiftieth anniversary of graduation from the place. That old high school that today from a recent trip back in its façade anyway looks as daunting as the first day that I strode two steps at a time up those grey granite-etched stairs to enter North as a freshman in 1960. Those grey granite steps representing not just an old time notion about stability and grandeur like the way banks used to be built of stone so as to project solidness before the one-size-fits-all of ATMs and supermarket banking but also reflecting the old time and forgotten granite quarries that was the main industry of the town before they were depleted and before shipbuilding subsequently dominated the town economy.

No, what I mean is that in those days it was as likely as not that one, or more, members of a family who started out in the freshman class would not make it through to graduation, would drop out, drop out for a hundred different reasons. (Early pregnancy for young women, then called “going to Aunt Sally’s” around our town, getting a full time job to help support the family economy, and just plain not interested in being a student come quickly to mind.) And while the notion today of dropping out of high school seems suicidal back then the percentages of drop outs were pretty high although the graduations rates in the 1960s still represented a dramatic increase over our parents’ generation where the need for high school diplomas in a factory-driven world had not been as great. So some classmates, like the ghost classmate here, would never be able to tell the full tale of their survival of the rigors of high school.         

So would not be able to tell the tale the way it was supposed to be told anyway coming out of the 1960s scene. A scene that went roughly something like this. In freshman year you would gravitate toward certain classmates who would stick with you more or less in your niche in the pecking order until graduation (you would go everywhere, do everything, be everything within that cliché and only foray out among the other clichés at your peril), you would lean toward learning a trade or a further schooling as the case may be and settle in to the rigors of either routine fretting over some hot automobile motor or a book that seemed to be sealed with seven seals). More importantly, you would have access to high school sports, clubs, those occasional school dances and proms, plays and the million other things that high schools then and now provide to keep the young occupied and out of trouble. Of course you could also find trouble, Saturday night down at the beach trouble, girl and boy trouble, he said, she said trouble by the gallons and totally righteously teenage angst and alienation trouble but you needed to stay the course to get the full effect of that program. Get that dust off your shoes get out of town and don’t look prize for carrying through until the end. (And I will add here get to throw your precious yearbook, the Magnet, out into the Neptune River as you blow the burg.)

Or maybe, and these are legion, how they wanted it told. Told not by the numbers on the school transcript, not by the resume-in-waiting under your class photograph in the Magnet, but rather simply to be recognized as having gone through some process, gone through the accumulated messes that were high school and came out not too badly, thank you. But to have that story told, told as honestly as could be. 

 

Of course the number is also legion who had some relationship to the Class of 1964 at North and as I continually find now that we are long enough in the tooth to have accumulated a growing list of causalities, of the wounded and broken, of the beaten down and disheveled and who did not get their stories told, good or bad. Got lost in the shuffle in school like the ghost classmate, after he or she left school in the tenth grade, and in life. This sketch is going to be about one of our classmates who got lost in the shuffle somehow and it only here, and only by me, that he gets his life-long struggles voiced. And by that, my friends I will think that I have done some good in this wicked old world.

I will not mention his name, this ghost classmate, for you may have sat across from him in class. Strangely he started out high school any way in the upper classes and as an honor student so it was not lack of intelligence that held him back or forced him to figure that he was wasting his time in a school house and that time could be better spend working some job, learning to fix automobiles, in a life of crime like my old friend Josh Breslin’s brother any other combinations. Such things happened and filled up the unacknowledged pages of any school registry. No, he, hell let’s call him, GC and made things easy, had a streak that just could not be satisfied in school, some wanderlust over the next hill thing that gnawed at him from inside and that wanting habit could not sit still four years, or maybe for four minutes.

Maybe, if you were a guy, you gave him what passed for the “nod” in those days, that slight tilt of the head forward with eyes straight at the intended party and then back quickly. The nod recognizing that a guy was okay, was cool except for some reason he was not in your social circle, or maybe you only knew him through sports (GC had been a good athlete in junior high and in ninth grade as well) and that automatically got a nod from fellow athletes, or maybe you knew him outside school from the corner (he hung around Harry’s over near the Young Field and so knew some tough boys for all his smarts). But he was a guy if you knew him then that one would “nod,” no question.  Maybe if you were a girl you had something of a 'crush' on him because from pictures of him taken back then that he showed me later he certainly had that “something” physically all the girls were swooning over.  A smidgen of Elvis all black-haired, slicked back as was the style among a certain group of guys as you can readily see if you looked at class photos in the Magnet (I tended toward vanilla boy’s regular from Tony the barber in contrast), a build somewhat like his too except not as rangy as Elvis. But what probably set the girls’ heart a-flutter was that sneer, that look that said you had better watch out because I am a dangerous man. And whole bevies of young women at school who had grown tired of Bobby Vee, Bobby Darin, Bobby Vinton and a million other safe, non-sneering Bobby vanilla heart-throbs were just waiting to be the one to take that sneer off his face, and knew how to keep it off too. So you can see why I will not use his real name, there is just a little too much memory rush and gush for that.           

Now I will surprise you, I think. I did not know GC in our school days; at least I have no recollection of him from that time. I did not play sports (although I tried football in seventh grade but easily grew tired of being pushed around like an old rag on every play and also tried track but gave that up when a girlfriend beat me in the 100 yard dash), I did not hang with the guys who cared overwhelming about young women (although I was secretly as obsessed with them as any heathen), and did not have him in any of my classes. I don’t recall him at North Adamsville Junior High either, although my brother later told me that he knew him, “nod” knew him, from track where he was a whizz (and so was my brother).  I met him, or rather he met me, when we were in our early thirties in the 1970s in front one of the skid row run-down "hotels" that dotted the low rent (then) streets of the waterfront of San Francisco near the Embarcadero (you know lower Mission, Third, Bay the places that a guy like Jack Kerouac hit when he was on the slide.  I was doing my own version of that slide in those days). My reason for being there is a tale for another day, after all this is GC's story, but rest assured I was not in that locale on vacation like some tourist slumming the sights around Fisherman’s Wharf, nor was he. Ironically, at our first meeting we were both in the process of pan-handling in the same area when the light of recognition hit him. He said at first he thought I was my brother, Lenny, since he had known him, had had a nodding acquaintance with him in junior high where they both ran track and my brother and I had a few common characteristics until he noticed I had brown hair as he drew closer and Lenny was a red-head. Then he said he had seen me around the school lunchroom where he told me that he hung for all three lunches to avoid some class (not for the bill of fare, Christ no, some Sally [Salvation Army] stuff was better, a lot better so no I will not disrespect GC that way). 

While we were both on the skids we were at the stage where we were well dressed enough, sober enough, and hungry enough to work the panhandle which is an art form not for stone cold bums (I always considered myself a hobo then, he just called himself a grifter, guy who was up for any hustle as long as he did not have to any heavy lifting, work that is). We exchanged the usual exchange of personal information, none too personal, and assorted other lies. At that time I told GC I had been running from a cocaine addiction that had me tied down and in its grip and left my story at that. The really was that I had also run out on every friend that I had after grabbing whatever cash they would give me, or I could steal, and was in up to my elbows to a dealer over in Oakland who gave me credit and was looking for me to pay up so the whole point of being on skid row aside from being broke was that the rich kid dealer(or rather his associates) would not look for me there (and he never did and I of course never went back to Oakland). GC say he was running from a dope deal as well, although he left it at that. (Later, once he trusted me a little years later he told me that the busted drug deal happened in Mexico when he and his partner who was sniffing the stuff more than selling it tried to free-lance a kilo of coke and somehow the partner flim-flammed something and wound up very dead on some Tia Juana back street. GC headed norte with the stolen kilo as fast as he could because, you see, those amigos down south are ready to look harder than some upscale drug dealer in Oakland when the deal goes down. A lot harder. 

We decided then after checking in at the Seamen’s flop we were better off together since we actually hit it off from the beginning (you don’t actually have to be a sailor to flop there by the way although as it turned out we had both done slave work on a merchant ship). So we went to working some quick grifts (grabbing dough from charities, a little three-card Monte with the rubes) and we spent some weeks together doing, as they say, the best we could. That “best we could” involved getting a stake via some intense pan-handling (I will tell you more about that art and its lore some other time and how it saved my life later when I hitched back to Boston and I worked the streets after I busted out in the West) and buying a small amount of cocaine to “step on” out in the streets. I was getting over that strong desire for coke, for my nose candy, although it would take a couple of later tumbles downward before I got clean.

But right then I was tired of skid row, worse of having had to spent some nights under the Golden Gate Bridge and so I sobered up for a bit. We were going along nicely keeping a very low profile mainly connecting with kids around Golden Gate Park with stuff we had stepped on so much you could hardly call it coke but the kids really wanted to try it then and if they got any high then they were happy. In any case they were not going to complain, complain to who. We were making enough for room rent, some food and liquor, a few bucks for cigarettes and odds and ends. We had also built up a small stash of dough because we both agreed that just then the West was not a good place to be and we decided that we would head back east, Boston probably. Then, one night, he split taking all his, and my, worldly possessions.

Fast forward.

A few years later, the early 1980s, when I was in significantly better circumstances (had dried out and was working and going to school a little), if not exactly in the clover, I was walking down Beacon Street in Boston when someone across the street on the Common side started to yell my name. Well, the long and short of it, was that it was old GC, looking significantly more disheveled than when I had last seen him. Like I said that time in Frisco when we ran together we were a shade above stone cold bums, meaning only that we kept our Sally clothes in not bad order, took showers regularly, not something serious down and outers worry about, and whatever inner demons were eating at us were kept well enough intact to pan-handle and not be dismissed out of hand and to be able to negotiate those drug deals without falling apart. To the workaday eye though bum or hobo would be the word used. So GC had gone down from that, meaning to me without having to say word one that times had been hard on him the previous few years. After an exchange of personal data and other details I bought him some dinner and afterward gave him a few bucks. The important thing to know, however, is that from that day until very recently I had always been in touch with the man as he has descended further and further into the depths of the skid row ethos. But enough of the rough out-line, let me get to the heart of the matter.

I have left GC's circumstances deliberated vague until now. The reader might assume, given the circumstances of our first meeting, GC to be a man driven to the edge by alcohol, or drugs or any of the other common maladies that break a man's body, or his spirit. Those we can relate to, if not fully understand. No, GC was broken by his own almost psychotically-driven need to succeed, and in the process constantly failing. (Remember I mentioned that he had been an honor student until he dropped out of school, dropped out in part because he kept pressuring himself to get on the high honor roll and could not take the pressure from the other smart kids to keep up with them.) He had been, a number of times, diagnosed as clinically depressed. (The first time in sixth grade, or so he said.) I am not sure I can convey, this side of a psychiatrist's couch that condition in language the reader could comprehend. All that I can say is this man was so inside himself with the need to do the right thing, the honorable thing, the “not bad” thing, that he never could do any of those. While we had never talked about how he left me high and dry in Frisco that time with not even room rent so I had to hit the Sallys (and eventually get back in the grip of the snow princess) when he explained all this depression business (and I would add a layman’s feeling that he suffered at least a little from what they today call a bipolar disorder) I could “understand” (although not forget or forgive) what drove him that night in question. What a terrible rock to have to keep rolling up the mountain.

Here, however, to my mind is the real tragic part of this story, and the one point that I hope you will take away from this narration. GC and I talked many times about our youthful dreams back in Frisco and later when I would run into him in the streets of Boston, about how we were going to conquer this or that "mountain" and go on to the next one, how we would right this or that grievous wrong in the world, and about the need, to borrow the English revolutionary and poet John Milton's words, to discover the "paradise within, happier far." Over the years though GC's dreams have gotten measurably smaller and smaller, and then smaller still until there are no more dreams, only existence. Only getting from one day to the next, one meal to the next. That, my friends, is the stuff of tragedy, not conjured up Shakespearean tragedy, but real tragedy.

Hobo's Lullaby
by Goebel Reeves

Go to sleep you weary hobo

Let the towns drift slowly by

Can't you hear the steel rail humming

That's a hobo's lullaby

Do not think about tomorrow

Let tomorrow come and go

Tonight you're in a nice warm boxcar

Safe from all the wind and snow

I know the police cause you trouble

They cause trouble everywhere

But when you die and go to heaven

You won't find no policemen there

I know your clothes are torn and ragged

And your hair is turning grey

Lift your head and smile at trouble

You'll find happiness some day

So go to sleep you weary hobo

Let the towns drift slowly by

Don't you feel the steel rail humming

That's a hobo's lullaby

©1961,1962 (Renewed) Fall River Music, Inc. (BMI)

All Rights Reserved.