Out In The 1960s Be-Bop Corner Boy Night-Dimmed Elegy For Peter Paul Markin-Take Three

 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber   

My old friend and corner boy from the working-class streets of North Adamville the late Peter Paul Markin got as caught up in what he called the jailbreak of the 1960s counter-cultural movement as any man I knew from that time.  You know, and if you don’t know you can look up the information on Wikipedia or take a chance that somebody has put something about the times on some 1960s related website so I will just give a little shorthand, the “hippie”-tie-dye-far out, man-drugs, sex, rock and roll-live fast and stay out of the fast lane-angry, gentle people-seek a newer world-turn the world upside down-we want the world and we want it now-Nirvana crash-out thing. That’s as good as I can put it in under about fifty thousand words but that will splash you a little.

While everybody in those times did not go through all the connected hyphens, and as I have found out more recently in some places and in some social groupings there had never been a beat skipped from the placid 1950s-etched place set out for everybody by a fairly large number of people whose only association with the “hyphens” was through the third-hand lens of the media, and that with distain. But enough did enough of most of the ideas described to form a significant mass movement in the cities, on the campuses, and to make some inroads in the inner suburbs, for a while. That “for a while is” is important because Peter Paul, Markin, who had much more invested in a good outcome that I did, or Sam, Frankie, Jack, Jimmy, “Thunder,” and a few less frequent corner boys did, stuck it out through thick and thin a lot longer than most, stuck with the “new age” ideas for a while after the ebb tide having caught him sort of flat-footed could no longer hold back those “wanting” hungers that flashed through his life (and the rest of us his corner boys too). That tension between the new world that he invested his “angel-heart” in when he threw the dice of his life against the back alley boards and the “satan-demon” he suppressed temporarily in the high tide of the 1960s, early 1970s just could not stay inside that fragile man for too long and in the end he went under, and those of us who have survived still moan over that loss, moan high and hard.

I was there through some of it, the early part mostly when Peter Paul, hell, let me just call him Markin like we all did going back to sixth grade (or earlier for guys like Allan Johnson and Frankie Riley), was driven more by the “better angel of his nature.” I had been there when he sensed long before the rest of us that the fresh breeze coming through the 1960s land might wash him clean, might give him some breathing room, been there during the school part from late elementary school on through our first couple of years out of high school when a lot of the 1960s stuff was getting into high gear, when we went hitchhiking across the country about ten times looking for what Markin called the great blue-pink American West night. Then I drifted away with a little junior college time at Carver Junior College near our town, an early marriage to a young woman, Betsy Binstock, from Carver, about thirty miles from North Adamsville,  whom I had left hanging for a couple of years while I sowed my wild oats and she was still waiting for me when I came back (and is still my wife), a quick first child (later two more and now seven grandchildren, all loved, and all clueless about the 1960s, about my part in it, and about my/our still moaning for the long gone daddy Markin, including Betsy about the Markin part since she never cared for him even before he and I headed west together), some responsibilities starting up a small print shop which I had dreamed of owning since I had read about Benjamin Franklin’s start in the business in the 1700s but, frankly, because I was never as invested in the successful outcome of what was going on then as Markin. Got wearisomely tired of the constant on the road hitchhiking, sleeping on some off-beat converted bus home, somebody’s, some stranger’s, some churchly people’s kindly floor, or curled up in a sleeping bag against the wide oceans, and tired of the drugs, sex, and rock and roll run through although for about two years I was with Markin almost every step of the way. Some people, and thinking about those days over the years since I am one of them, were not built to be merry pranksters, to “be on the bus” as some guy used to say, some guy met on the Captain Crunch converted bus we spent much time on as our “home” who made Markin laugh once when he said “buy the ticket, take the ride.” Markin picked up on those saying and would say it every time somebody like me jumped off the bus.

I might have drifted away, got caught up with the family ways but until a few years before the end Markin and I would stay in contact, or I would get messages from him through other old time corner boys like Frankie Riley, Sam Lowell, and Jack Dawson. Just so you know what I am talking about in case you were not washed, washed clean I hope, by that tide Markin got caught up in the anti-establishment/anti-Vietnam War/don’t trust anybody over thirty/live free and communally on greens and love/hippie/drugs, the more the better/louder the better acid rock/strobe light dreams/seeking a newer world/turn the world upside down and see what shakes out scene and if you didn’t know I have laid out the briefest of outlines here.

Some of those trends, stuff we called “beatnik” in disbelief, ignorance and scorn around prim Catholic “keep your eyes on God and look neither left or right, look not unto “newer worlds” in this lifetime but later, later after the dust has choked your grave” North Adamsville down by the shore about twenty miles south of Boston. So close enough to get news on the grapevine about what was going on in the city, Markin, or he and Frankie once Frankie stopped harassing him, baiting him really, kind of fag-baiting him at times I think now although then it was part of the macho thing to do a little fag-baiting even of guys who loved women as well all did (and some of us, although not me, have the accumulated divorce settlements as mementos) just to keep them in line, keep them from “going light on their feet” as we used to say among ourselves when some limp-wristed guy came into view, about the beatnik business and began to be swept up by the tide too.

Especially when the dope started flowing, dope, Frankie the first in the neighborhood to “connect” got his first ounce from a cousin over in South Boston far away in culture if not miles from Beacon Hill in Boston or Harvard Square hip scenes but a place like many edgy places where flophouses, day labor, chronic unemployment and the “wanting habits” meet, started or heard about from that “youth nation” grapevine forming and started. Stuff like longer hair and beards which we didn’t pick up from the Beatles or anything like that but through Markin’s look after he spent some time in Harvard Square and started wearing his hair a little longer because if you look at our high school yearbook you will see nothing but short “boy’s regular” clean shaven guys page after page (that hair thing driving his mother, Delores, a stern, un-relenting type filled with sorrows about her downwardly mobile place in the town pecking order where she had grown up, crazy and later other mothers, including mine, adding to the chorus, Jesus, Ma). Jack Dawson was the first on the beard stuff and he looked pretty good, looked like something out of an old sepia photograph of our great-grandfathers, all stately and Brahmin-like after Markin tried to grow some wispy thing that never grew more than stubble and got nothing but laughs fromus for his efforts. Stuff too like folk music that Markin would drive us crazy about, would ask us what we thought of Dylan endlessly, Woody Guthrie endlessly, Joan Baez endlessly and a whole bunch of others endlessly that he either heard in Harvard Square or on WBZ, a Boston station that had a Sunday night folk music show. Me, then, now too, could take it or leave, mostly the latter, but come Monday morning during the school year I would “yes, yes” old Markin to death just to keep him from going on and on about the damn thing when what we wanted to hear about is whether a guy did the “do the do” with some honey over the weekend (mostly not, not, “do the do” but guys lied, hell I lied, like crazy and said they did). Stuff like dope, just marijuana mostly that Frankie, like I said was always on the leading edge when it came to highs (hell, he even had us sniffing airplane glue in junior high well before that became a minute fad later). But you have to know this, and I didn’t really get the full weight of what this meant until recently when I felt compelled to write a little something about that Markin bastard and had to think about all the things I knew about him directly and what I picked up from other sources that he was a man of profound contradictions.

Hell, like many things that sprang up from nowhere then and had to be dealt with like the Vietnam War, like your relationship with your parents, like your view of success and an interesting life, and the way events totally outside their control twisted many people, from that time he was nothing but a walking contradiction. Would go from talking kick ass about the heathen commies and taking them down a peg in Vietnam one minute when we were hanging around idly against the brick wall in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alley in high school, no, for longer than that until he had to face Charley a few years later on his own turf when he got dragged into the Army and had to actually fight the son of bitches to practically becoming an old-fashioned  red-front street fighter out of some Communist International propaganda film from Germany in the late 1920s with the NLF flag in his hands running through the streets of Cambridge, Washington, San Francisco the next. Really that street fighter stuff was after he got out of the service but it seemed strange to see him switch up like that. Maybe that experience, the whole panorama of Vietnam, the war that broke apart our generation, hell, broke the country apart is the prime example I can give about Markin’s contradictions or better those tussles that crammed his brain for almost as long as I had known him, although I will give you more.

See Markin  would yell and scream about the commie menace, like the rest of us caught up in the red scare Cold War are we going to last until next Wednesday or is the world going to go up in a puff. He had been furious at the Reds when that war got started up in earnest in the early 1960s when America pulled itself in while we were still in school and he practically wanted to join the Green Berets sight unseen although given his slender physique and lack of co-ordination (he really did have two left feet at least for dancing and girls, except one girl, Emma Walkins who came from some Podunk town and also had two left feet, refused to dance with him under any circumstances. Emma well Emma was Emma and only had eyes for Markin after one dance although she was so pretty, so smart and so nice we all took a run at her whether we had girlfriends or not and whether she had two-left feet or not) he would have washed out about the first day, and would tell one and all that we needed stop the bad guys in their tracks. At the same time he was very influenced by his grandmother who was loosely associated with the Catholic Workers movement, you know the social justice and peace people, Catholic version, who are still around, Catholic version, and actually would some nights rant about the Russkies and their nefarious doings around the world and in the next topic talk switch up about how we needed to make a more peaceful world, stop making bombs, nuclear bombs, and do something about it. If that doesn’t give you an idea of what he was about, maybe is too vague, I remember in 1960, the fall, when we were just starting high school, he would go door to door for hard anti-communist Jack Kennedy (one of our own Irish to boot) every weekend who was spouting in debates with Richard Nixon and where ever he could on the stump about the “missile gap” meaning the United States needed more bombs, more nuclear bombs. Except one weekend, one Saturday, to placate his grandmother, his high Easter 1916 Irish Catholic grandmother although she was a little less enamored of the “chandelier” Irish Kennedys doing any “bog shanty” Irish proud, he went to a  Catholic Worker-sponsored nuclear disarmament (along with the Quakers and a bunch of little old ladies in tennis shoes as we used to call the grandmotherly do-gooders who you would see in Adamsville Center passing out leaflets once in a while for some worthy cause, and maybe some Universalists and Unitarians before they joined forces together but don’t hold me to that last group, except they did join together for some reason, some doctrinal reason).

We all gave him hell about that not seeing, me as hard as anybody else since I was as anti-red as the next guy, being clueless, about how the events of the world were twisting him back and forth. The rest of us, except maybe Sam Lowell a little, were either not consciously conflicted about the big events in the world or never even though about them to be conflicted about. We  were so tied up in corner boy midnight creep small larcenies, turf wars with other corner boy cohorts (except for Red Radley and his biker boys who hung around Harry’s Variety Store, nobody, nobody still living, messed with those guys and their whip-chains and we never went within ten blocks of them even if we needed a soda desperately on a hot day, no way, Jesus, no way), getting girls to “do the do” or having many male fantasies about that idea, especially the ideas, read lies, come Monday morning before school cafeteria talkfest about who did or did not do what over the weekend, yes read mainly lies, getting winos or older brothers to get booze for us, no lie, although with the winos you had to make sure they got their bottle of Ripple or Thunderbird and watch them in and out of the liquor store to make sure that did not break on you, that the fate of the world or the vagaries and rages of our small town existence passed us by, then anyway.              

 

But see maybe it is best to give some other examples so that nobody gets the idea that I have overdrawn that Markin contradictions business. No question from early on, junior high anyway from what I remember since I only knew him beginning in sixth grade in elementary school having moved up to North Adamsville from Carver when my father changed jobs, Markin had an idea about seeing himself as a up and coming politician, a wheeler-dealer guy behind the scenes from what I could figure out when he started getting on his high horse about the subject. Not the out-front guy taking all the arrows but in the background setting things up, making policy, “greasing the rails” as he used to call it.  He really was a good organizer later but early on I would have rated him as poor since he did not know how to delegate tasks and also tended to like to do everything himself since that way as he explained it to me one time in a letter he sent me from California when he was helping to organize some anti-war march out there, he knew it would get done. As a policy wonk he started out much better as any guy would who had about two thousand off-the-wall facts stored in his brain for use anytime anybody wanted to argue with him about anything. I, Frankie too, although Sam usually like to test him, usually like to bait him a little to see if he had the stuff or it was just fluff, would just let him do his thing and try, try like hell, to keep out of the verbal cross-fire. He had surprised me later after he had shifted to that red front street fighter stance once he had been discharged from the Army when he called what he had wanted to be as a kid a “bourgeois politician,” saying it with the same distain as you would if you came up against some wino or other low-life since I knew a big part of his earlier desire at one point had been in order to satisfy some fierce childhood “wanting habit” as he called what ailed him. Here is the contradiction as if to tip the cart completely he turned into a fiery renegade street fighter facing down the cops, a surefire way to not catch the eye of some up and coming electoral candidate looking for a “fix-it” man. See after the Army, after he got what he called “hipped” by some fellow anti-war Vietnam veterans who had formed Vietnam Veterans Against The War, VVAW, at which point anybody could see the war was irretrievably lost once the guys who actually fought the thing were rising up against it, he got arrested more than a few times for acts of civil disobedience, you know at draft boards, trying to shut down federal buildings, blocking streets all in a desperate effort to end the damn war. The big arrest, the one that I remember he called me up about looking for bail money but also had said into the telephone that the tide of the 1960s was ebbing, ebbing fast as the bad guys were leading a counter-offensive to bring things back to about 1955, was the big bad mass arrests down in Washington on May Day in 1971 when they thought they could end the war by bringing down the government and end the damn war with a frontal attack. All they got was billy-clubs, tear-gas, beatings and the bastinado for their effort. Here’s another contradiction if the previous one doesn’t give you enough to go on. After reading Jack Kerouac’s, his saint’s, book Desolation Angels about his solitary drying out from the world time as a forest look-out up in Oregon or Washington state I forget which Markin became a desert-seeking latter day hermit for about one month slated for the slab or sainthood actually having gone out into the caves near Joshua Tree in California for a while and the next a king hell orgy satyr (he was not happy, despite his two short-lived failed marriages complete with two divorces, unless he had a few girlfriends at the same time to lie to so you know that hermit loner trip was a hard task).

Closer to home, closer to something I actually saw he consumed tanks-full of Irish working class kick ass (kick ass the commies I guess but mainly kick ass to help me when I got into an occasional fistfight when somebody crossed me) low-shelf Johnny Walker whiskies on sleepy Cape Cod beach strewn nights and an ascetic warrior avenging angel “walking with the king” peyote button visions on electric Joshua Tree days. Was as truthful as God one minute and the devil’s own hell and fire liar the next. Got as sentimental over women as any Romantic poet like Shelley, Keats, or Lord Byron one day and despite needing those women friends then proceeded to cold-heartedly betray about four women in two hours the next. Peter Paul, oops, Markin, by his whole being, just by his very existence, was twisted up with each new social convulsion, twisted by who he was, twisted by who he wanted to be but most of all twisted by his over-sized  puffball dreams of his own future, and the world’s. No wonder Sam Lowell who knew him as well as any guy used to say he was a man not of his times but of some earlier time when the world was small enough that the weight and fire of one man’s rages could set the world right, or blast it all to hell. (Only Allan Johnston probably knew Markin better than Sam, knew him from about third grade when they had lived in the same four unit housing project complex together and formed an eternal friendship one summer day after they met when Markin in a fit of pique at something Allan had said threw his sneakers away when they were down at the beach getting ready to go swimming and when the sneakers drifted out to sea and were lost Markin gave up  his own sneakers and caught hell from his mother when he said that his sneakers had drifted out to sea for some unexplained reason. Markin and Allan drifted apart after Markin went to California the last time but know this before Allan passed away a couple of years ago he used to write on various blogs and websites for a few years before that using Peter Paul Markin as his moniker as a sign of respect, still moaning for his long lost memory.)

Let me get back to that corner boy designation that I started out with, a designation let’s be very clear, which was separate from friendships, a distinction which every corner boy knew, every corner boy who hung out on our corner. At the end senior year in high school and for a couple of years after that before the group started going its own separate ways that corner was in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alleys, the ones over on Thornton Street where the girls would pass by on their way to the beach not the one on Adams Avenue just outside of Adamsville Center where old people who actually bowled would go. Before that starting out at Doc’s Drugstore in late elementary school, maybe fifth grade according to Frankie Riley, Gino’s Sub Shop in junior high (when Frankie, a character worth writing about in his own right back in those days if not later, became the acknowledged and undisputed leader of our corner boy cohort) and before the place changed ownership in high school and the new owners did not want corner boys hanging around their place, Salducci’s Pizza Parlor, up in North Adamsville Square. Serious business. Serious corner boys hanging out most of the time, especially early on, because we were flat out busted, no dough, no way to get dough, except our little midnight creep petty larcenies, some not so petty like the time we hit it big on a big full jewelry box in one house we crept into,  and maybe hitting Ma’s pocketbook for change when times were tough and most of us just couldn’t stand being cooped up all the time with no space to breathe brothers and sisters (me four sisters) coming out of the rafters. So weekend nights mainly and almost any night during the summer you could find at least a few of us holding up whatever age-appropriate wall we were holding up. And many nights Markin was the guy who glued us together, the guy talking a mile a minute (or if he wasn’t talking writing something two miles a minute) about everything under the sun that he had read that day, or sometime.

Of course Markin was also the glue guy when our larcenous hearts were on fire, he had a few contradictions even then to work out. I don’t want to get into those larcenies but I will give one example from our early days, kids’ stuff days, when we figured the “clip,” you know, the five-finger discount up the Square where in those days all the stores were not in the malls like now in most places, especially the jewelry stores and department stores. Here was the beauty of Markin, he worked out the “clips,” who to hit, how and where, although Frankie was the “on-site” organizer I guess you would call him. Funny the way Markin got started doing “clips” as he told us one night a few years later when we were at wits’ end about dough to get a car and be mobile for once and we were ready to go back to the kids’ stuff clip if something didn’t come up soon. In fifth grade he said he was trying to impress some girls, having recently found out that they were no longer nuisances but, well, he said in his usual understated way, interesting and didn’t have dollar one and so he and some kid who left the neighborhood before I got there went to Kay’s Jewelry and grabbed an onyx ring with a diamond set in the middle, cheap stuff but all the rage then for boy-girl “going steady” purposes and the girl loved it. I don’t know what happened after that with those “clips,” before I got into town, how many and for what purpose, but that probably gave Markin just the larcenous flame he needed whenever he was in a tight corner. The basics of the clip were simple, have one guy clip and another lookout (which I did mostly since I was kind of nervous and would get sweaty palms) and then clear out slowly like nothing happened. Markin was beautiful in his planning (although as Frankie said no way could Markin run the operation then or we all would have been in reform school or prison) but the really beautiful part was how we made money off the stuff. Obviously we couldn’t go to a pawn shop or something like that so Markin would sell the stuff to high school kids who had dough at a nice discount. Really beautiful, and here is where we might have been unconscious socialists at that, we pooled all our monies together for whatever entertainment we were going to use the money for.  

Here’s the difference between corner boys and friends though, okay. Friends could be anything from some “nod” thing where you were cool with another guy (sometime I am going to write something up about the meaning of the “nod,” in the hierarchy of the gestures of the time because you would never nod a fellow corner boy, no way, that would be a sign of disrespect like the guy was just somebody around town or something, and no way, no way in hell, would you nod a girl, Jesus, they wouldn’t know what it meant, wouldn’t know you though they were “cool,” you dealt with them with “furtive glances,” yes, I really should write something about gestures then but I will leave this “cool” between guys for now), maybe played sports together, worked together, but corner boys were expected to be more than that, were expected to be willing to go to the mat for the other guy, and did, and although we did not have anything as corny as some ceremonial blood oath like some corners had that we had heard about and had dismissed out of hand we were tight.

Markin was a key guy in the great firmament of the different configurations that we morphed into (I had only caught the sixth grade at Doc’s to start my corner time but Markin, Allan and, I think, Sam all started to hang out at Doc’s in the fifth grade when they “discovered” rock and roll and Doc’s big ass play everything, five, can you believe it five, selections for a quarter jukebox on their way home from the elementary school that was just down the block). He was as stand-up a corner boy as the next guy, probably more so than me, since his whole blessed life depended on that link to the world then. He took more than a few punches and kicks defending his brethren, including me one time when Frannie Desoto was after my ass, when he could have looked the other way. He really never was much of a fighter then, too runty and awkward but game. They say he did okay in Vietnam, kept a few guys from going over the deep end, got a couple of medals for something,  when the Viet Cong (Charley they called those guys, the enemy) decided that they owned the night just like they said they did. Thing was Markin could never be the leader, he was far too bookish for that with his eight billion facts ready to drown out any argument with the light of pounding reason when other skills were more necessary like how to get money fast for whatever enterprise was at hand from date money to car money. Skills which required somebody like the truly larcenous Frankie Riley and his midnight creep operations which were done with style, however everybody especially Frankie appreciated him, called him the “Scribe,” mostly a high honor in our corner.                   

This is where those eight billion, maybe before the end nine billion, facts did come in handy. See Peter Paul had out of some almost mystic sense, or maybe just through his overweening desire to see the thing happen, called the breeze that was palpably running through the country beginning with the election of our own practically neighbors but Irish in any case even if chandelier Irish “new thinking” President Kennedy in 1960 and that fresh breeze got translated by many of us in lots of ways from social activism to outrageous self-indulgence, not all of them in the end worthy of remembering, not all of them thought back on with fondness. But remember we were fighting what Markin  later on termed a rear-guard action in a cold civil war that I can feel goes on to this day and if Markin were around he would be sure to remind us not only of his call on the breeze but of who we were up against and why, and name names for the forgetful, so good or bad that breeze is part of the chronicle of our time.

It is funny here as I write that every time I write Markin’s name I start typing Peter Paul Markin and have to change it and I am not sure why I am doing that now. We always called him Markin from early on and never that WASP-ish three name thing like his forbears had come over on the Mayflower or something rather than he to the low-end housing projects born, or once Frankie Riley our leader anointed him in high school we began calling him, sometimes by me just to get under his skin, “the Scribe” since he was basically Frankie’s flak, always writing stuff about Frankie like it was scripture and Frankie did nothing to dissuade anybody about its worthiness as such. You could always depend on the Scribe with his infernal facts to make anything Frankie did seem like the Second Coming, and maybe with his frenzied pen Markin actually believed that.

Markin, Frankie, Allan, Sam, me  and a bunch of other guys basically came of age together, the fresh breeze trying to figure out the world and our place, if any, in it in the early 1960s when we po’ boys used to hang around the corner in high school, the corner right next to Jack Slack’s bowling alley on Thornton Street where sometimes we would cadge a few free games if Jack’s son, our fellow classmate in the North Adamsville Class of 1964, was working and if not then just hanging out, Frankie talking a mile a minute, Markin taking notes at two miles a minute, maybe gathering in some girls if we had money to head to Jimmy Jack’s Dinner up on Atlantic Avenue near-by where Jimmy Jenkins who would later join with us held forth with his corner boys and on most nights would welcome us there if there was no beef brewing between our respective corners. Jimmy Jack’s after Doc retired and closed his drugstore was the place to be if you wanted the best jukebox in town (although only three selections for a quarter there unlike Doc’s). Markin, big idea Markin, figured out a way in tenth grade to take some slugs the size of a quarter that he got from an older brother who worked in a metal stamping shop and play for free, how about that, as long as we didn’t get too greedy and have Jimmy Jack pull the plug on the jukebox after collecting too many slugs. Of course, Markin’s really big idea for playing the jukebox for no dough was to single out some girl that had just broken up with her boyfriend, or had had a fight with him, or didn’t have a boyfriend just then, information that he also knew somehow along with those two billion useless facts that he got from the Monday morning girls’ lav talkfest. Then he would go up to her all concerned and sympathetic, not to “hit” on her but to “guide” her selections, you know, maybe something sentimental like I’m Sorry or vengeful like Whose Sorry Now or just feel good like Dancin’ in the Streets all stuff he wanted to hear. He was beautiful at it, I tried it once and never got selection one, even Frankie who was nothing but catnip to the girls got nada nunca nada with that play. Maybe they sensed we were trying to hit on them and the whole thing fell to dust. Yeah, those were Markin’s good nights.      

Most nights though no dough, no girls, we would endlessly banter back and forth about whatever was on our minds, maybe girls, girls who did or did not “do the do” and you can figure that out on your own without further description, whether some Markin masterminded Frankie midnight creep thing would work out or whether we would wind up in the clink, maybe somebody’s take on sports or politics the latter mostly when some big event shook even our corner complacency. A lot of times it would be Markin spouting something, maybe, to give you an example, how religion was a joke, especially our Roman Catholic religion that didn’t make sense to us a lot of the time and we lots of times skipped Mass as we got older. Except of course going to Mass was just fine with Markin when he got the “hots” for Minnie Callahan and he would sit a few rows behind her at eight o’clock Mass and watch her ass the whole time, and she knew he was watching her that way as she told him later when he asked her for a date. Nobody jumped on him for that contradiction after all it was about a girl and that was fair enough. But get this, and the more I write about the guy the more I see the terrible contradictions that he was always bouncing around in his head and I keep coming back to that one day, that one fall day, that October day, the October before the 1960 elections, he had heard that the Catholic Worker movement, Dorothy Day’s social justice operation out of New York City, was going to be part of a nuclear disarmament demonstration on the Boston Common with some Quakers and other little old ladies in tennis sneakers and he was going to march with them. Jesus did he take a razzing from the rest of us, Catholic do-gooders, Quakers and quirky old grandmothers for Chrissakes. Classic Markin though.

Pretty early on Markin caught this fresh breeze idea, caught and wouldn’t let it go, influenced a little by some “beat” stuff he read, you know big Jack Kerouac and his on the road travels along with some other New York guys in what sounded like great stuff, great guy stuff really with some frails mixed in to give the thing a little be-bop play that intrigued us when he told us about its beginnings in the late 1940s but which was just winding down as a cool movement in our time and was then being commercialized to holy hell, speaking of holy was a holy goof on television and subject to silly jokes about guys with long beards, berets, and bongos and girls dressed head to toe in black, maybe underneath too something for erotic fantasy in those days. He would tell us too on those nights when no corner boys were around like sometimes happened in the summer with dopey family vacations and he had had it with his mother’s endless harping on him or his three brothers doing stuff to disturb his reading or something he would fly out the back door and walk to the bus stop which took him to the subway which took him to Harvard Square where he would hang out in the Hayes-Bickford and just observe stuff. Stuff like goofy guys singing songs, folk songs as it turned out when he got brave enough to ask, that he had never heard of or guys reading poets or stories to a few people in front of them, mostly girls. Stuff that the first time he told us about it sounded weird, Frankie made jokes for days about Markin winding up like some lonesome hobo, being some Harvard goof’s mascot, being some kind of a court jester to the winos, drunks, hipsters and con artists ready to make him jump. Markin got mad, said it was not like that, refused to write stuff about Frankie for a while but kept pushing the point that maybe this was what we were spending all those lonely ass nights yakking about, that we might get swept up in it too. A fresh breeze he said that was going put all our talking points dreams about schools, jobs, marriage, kids, everything in the shade. We laughed at him, although as the decade moved on the laughter subsided.

This fresh breeze thing was not just goof talk although there was plenty of that toward the end of the night if we had been drinking some Southern Comfort purchased by Allan’s older brother or maybe like we did more than a few times by getting one of the town winos to go to the liquor for us and who could care less about our ages as long as he got his bottle of Thunderbird, Ripple or some such rat poison wine. Markin was an intense reader of the news, of what was going on in the world and maybe the rest of us should have been a little more world-wise then too but I think what we got caught up in then was the notion that we were born into a world that was already fixed, that somebody else had the all the strings too. That down among the fellahin, a great word, like one of our history teachers called us peasants, including himself, that deal was done. (By the way that history teacher’s use was the first time I heard the word fellahin and was surprised later when Markin had almost forced marched me to read Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, he a fellow working-class guy from up in Lowell and the proclaimed “max daddy” of beatness, used the word too). We, maybe Allan and Sam most of all, were what Markin called alienated although he did not use that word then but rather called us hung up on the James Dean sullen nobody cares thing. Hell, Allan, a big lumbering guy, used to do his James Dean tee shirt, rolled up sleeve cigarette pack, blue jeans, engineer boots complete with buckles and a whip-chain hanging out of his back pocket sulk all the time, and had used that whip-chain for more than ceremony as Frankie could tell you when we got into a few scrapes with Leo Russo and his corners in front of the Waldorf Cafeteria up in the Square.

So maybe we were but like Markin said, who could be as sullen as the rest of us especially when he had his battle royals with his mother, a lot of young people around the country were feeling the same way and were trying to break out of the Cold War we-are-going-to-die-tomorrow thing what with nuclear bomb threats being thrown around every other day by one side or the other. Stuff like that Markin was hip to, stuff like the fight for civil rights in the South where young white people were joining in the fight although Frankie Riley would say some very derogatory things about black people, and about how they better not show up in North Adamsville looking for anything and some guys, me too for a while, felt the same then, felt we didn’t want n----rs around our way. That was the hard reality fed to us by parents and everything else in our cramped little lives. Of course the big thing for Markin was the music, the rock and roll we came of age to but also this new folk stuff that he would hear in Harvard Square. Most of it I hated, still do, but that music was another move away from the old stuff that Markin kept saying had to change. Yeah, later we each in our own way grabbed some of what that madman speaking about forty miles an hour would run by us but when he presented it at first he might as well have been on the moon.       

Markin really was the bell-weather, the first guy to head west to check out what was happening in the summer after high school. He had been accepted into Boston University on a wing and a pray since as bright as he was he was slightly indifferent to grades preferring to wrap himself around the eight million facts knowledge of what interested him, mainly literature, history, and math and neglected the rest. Neglected it too because at least for public consumption we corner boys were not supposed to be too “book smart” but needed to be “street smart,” a very big different especially when the deal was coming down.  (Strangely, although I personally was never much of a student and only went to junior college for a couple of years to learn business administration in order to help me understand that aspect of the printing business, guys like Markin, Frankie and Sam, Jack Dawson, went to four year colleges in a time when that was unusual around our way and they all were the first in their families to do so, hell, Frankie and Sam went on to be lawyers, Frankie mine until this day.). That first trip out in the summer of 1964 Markin did not hitchhike whatever he may have told the girls around Adamsville, Boston, and Harvard Square trying to cash in in the “romance of the road” residue from the Jack Kerouac-induced fervor which fired all our imaginations after Markin force-fed us to read his big “beat” book On The Road. Markin and some of the rest of us did the hitchhike road later to save money and just to do it but the first time out he took the Greyhound bus which he said was horrible going out over several days of being squeezed in by some fat ass snorer, some mother who let her child on her lap wail to the high heavens, and some wino who along with his dank urine smell was drifting west. He said though despite his feeling like some unwashed hobo as he got off the bus it had been worth it once he got to ‘Frisco and saw right in front of him the wild west show stuff at places like Golden Gate Park that put the “hip” action in dingy staid Harvard Square in the shades. Had his first taste of dope other than marijuana which we had all tried that graduation summer when a cousin of Frankie’s made a “connection” for us, several kinds, mescaline, peyote buttons that some wild man had gotten out in Arizona from one of the tribes whose whole existence centered on use of the drug to enhance their spiritual lives, some hash another guy brought in from Morocco or some place like that in North Africa, had a few quick, easy and non-committal affairs (that was his term, okay, like he was a guy out of a Fitzgerald novel), and that non-committal was on the girls’ parts unlike in old North Adamsville where every girl in those days, especially the “do the do” girls expected marriage and kids and white pickets fences and everything that Markin said we would leave behind, and gladly. 

He also went west the first couple of years when he was in college, a few times with me along until I tired of it and by then we were all pretty much going our separate ways and I was starting up my first small print shop in the Gloversville Mall. So I missed a bunch of what Markin was about before he announced to the world one night at Jimmy Jack’s where we were grabbing something to eat and trying to find some non-Beatles tunes on the jukebox that he was tired of college, that he wanted to pursue the fresh breeze that was starting to build a head of steam while he could and he would probably catch up with college later, later when we had won, when the “newer world” as he called it after some English poet whom he had read called the search, was the implication. Unfortunately poor old Markin had made his what might have previously been reasonable decision just as all hell was breaking loose in Vietnam and every non-college guy was being grabbed to fill the ranks of the army and he got drafted which clipped his wings for a couple of years (I was exempt as the sole support of my mother and younger sisters after my father died in 1965).

But that Army death trap was a little later because I know he got caught up in the summer of love in 1967, before they clipped his wings with that freaking draft notice. That was the summer that he met Josh, Josh Breslin from up in Podunk, Maine (Josh’s expression, but really Olde Saco by the ocean up near Portland ) who has his own million stories that he could tell about that summer, about being on some Captain Crunch-led merry prankster ex-school bus riding up and down the coast, getting high about thirteen different ways, playing high decibel music coming out a jerry-rigged stereo on the front top of the bus, picking up freaks (later called hippies, male and female), got “married” to one Butterfly Swirl and had a Captain-sanctioned acid-blessed “honeymoon,” and stayed on the bus for a long while after Markin headed back east to face the music. Yeah, Markin while out there got caught up in the acid-etched music from the Dead, the Airplane and a million other minute niche rock bands (I just realized I had better tell you that acid being not “throw in your face” acid but LSD, colors, man, colors, okay, just in case you were worrying), the drugs from ganja to peyote although he always claimed not LSD but with some of the stuff he did toward the end I don’t know, the sex in about seventeen different variations once he got the hang of the Kama Sutra and a couple of adventurous West Coast women to indulge him (although in the end I heard that he betrayed them as well, if that is not too strong a word for the loose but mainly sincere attachments of the time, left them high and dry with the rent due and their drug stash gone once he was ready to move onto some new woman, a woman he had met in La Jolla), the madcap adventure of hitchhiking west which the times we went out together could be a subject for more than a few pages of interest, the bummer of riding freight when he tired of the hitchhike road (and had sworn off cross-country buses as had I after one jaunt to Atlanta), which he often said when we would run into each other periodically later was not for the faint-hearted , not for those who didn’t breathe train smoke and dreams the way he put it to me one time when he was in high dudgeon.

Markin not only got caught up in all the commotion of the counter-culture that kids today scratch their heads about the minute some old geezer like Josh Breslin, Jack Dawson, Sam Lowell, Jimmy Jenkins, or, hell, me starts going on about “wasn’t that a time” but brought me, Frankie Riley, Jack, Allan, Jimmy Jenkins, Josh, Sam, Phil Ballard and a few other guys from around our way (except Josh who was from Olde Saco up in Maine although in the end he was as much a corner boy refugee as the rest of us from North Adamsville) into the action as well. All of us (again except Josh whom he had met out on Russian Hill in Frisco in the summer of love, 1967 version) at one time or another travelled west with the Scribe, and lived to tell about it, although it was a close thing, a very close thing a couple of times, drug times and wrong place at the wrong time times.

But as the 1960s decade closed, maybe a little into the early 1970s the luster faded, the ebb came crashing in, and most of the old corner boys like Frankie and Sam who took the lead back to the “normal” went back to the old grind (both of them to the law, lawyers if you can believe that, Frankie mine of course). Markin could have or Josh can tell more about what happened when the fresh breeze gave out about somewhere between 1971 and 1974, when the Generation of ’68 as both of them liked to call it for all the things that happened that year, although Markin was on the sidelines or rather he was trying to keep his ass from being blown away by  Charley (name for the enemy in Vietnam, usually in some guerilla unit) when he, Charley, decided to come up over the hill some dark moonless sweaty night (Charley, that’s what he called them too, the enemy, at first he said out of spite and disrespect but after Tet in 1968 he said it with respect, lots more respect). According to stuff Markin wrote later for some journal that was interested in such things (and I think Josh said he had “cribbed” some stuff from Markin’s article to fill out an article he was doing for Esquire and for once some big money) a lot had to do with political confusion, a lot believing that we were dealing with reasonable opponents when they didn’t give a damn about us, their sons and daughters, when they let us to hang out to dry when they decided to pull the hammer down. But he insisted we were also done in by our studious refusal almost on principal to listen to the old-timers the guys and gals who fought the social and labor battles in the 1930s and 1940s and could have helped figure out which way to go, how to defend ourselves when a fast freeze cold civil war was brewing in the land.

Some stuff, frankly had to do with the overweening self-indulgence that set in once we took a few hits to the head from the powers that be, drugs to the point of stupor, a half-baked “theory” that music is the revolution that even I balked at although Markin said he went through a stage where he thought that might do the trick, know thyself in one of a hundred forms, new age stuff, before you go out to slay the dragon while he or she in the meantime is arming to the hilt, and a whole segment just withdrew literally to the hills, abandoned any thought of confrontation, heavy, man, heavy. Josh told me a few years ago to go to the back roads of Maine, Vermont, Oregon, places like that to see what happened to the remnant of that crowd, he said it wasn’t pretty, not pretty at all. But Markin said after arguments about the hubris and defiance of any coherent political strategy settled down if you wanted to really understand what went wrong you could point to the fact that we never despite appearances, despite half a million strong Woodstock nation or million-massed marches in Washington, got to enough people to get seriously into the idea of turning the world upside down. Could not despite the baloney main media stories, turn all those who did not indulge in the counter-cultural life, did not have a clue where Vietnam was, did not jail-break out in any real sense when there was plenty of  cover and mobility into active allies. People like Josh’s friends up in Maine who went into the dying textile plants just like their fathers and mothers, or like ours in North Adamsville who also went on the traditional school-job-marriage-three kids-two dogs and that coveted white picket fence (which I wound up doing after the road tired me out). We were pariahs in some spots in town, seen as commies or some exotic wild life, and that attitude got repeated many places when the steam ran out, or people had their drug minute (or longer) and that was that, that was enough.

That last idea hit home with me. I had been, despite a few flings at the west with Markin or one of the guys and some weekend hippie warrior action around Harvard Square or on the then tent city new age Boston Common, grinding away at that printing shop I had built up from scratch after sowing my wild oats high school. That business was starting to take off especially when I made one smart move and hired a professional silk-screener out of the Massachusetts School of Art and grabbed a big chunk of the silk-screening trade which was starting to mushroom as everybody needed, just needed, to have some multi-colored silk-screen poster of Che, Mao, Lenin, Trotsky, the NLF, Ho, the Stone and Beatles, or something psychedelic and multi-colored hanging from their walls or have their tee-shirts, guys and gals, done up the same way. Or a guy like Allan who took the trips west too but who was just on the cusp of the new wave and had gone into the almost dying shipbuilding trade, as a draftsman if I recall, since although he was not much of a student he had been the ace of our drafting classes even in junior high, had been hard ass old Mister Fisher’s “pet” and took it up in high school as well. Even Josh, a late hold-out with Markin, went to writing for a lot of what he called advanced publications (meaning low circulation, meaning no dough, meaning doing it for the glory to hear him tell it now, now that he is out of the grind).

And Markin, the last guy standing, well, Markin, as we all expected, once his Army time was up, once after that he had crisscrossed the country in one caravan or another, indulged in more dope than you could shake a stick at, got into more in-your-face-street confrontations with the cops, soldiers, rednecks, never went back to college but also took up the pen, for a while. Wrote according to Josh some pretty good stuff that big circulation publications were interested in publishing. Wrote lots of stuff in the early 1970s once he settled down in Oakland (Josh lived out there with him then and I know Sam and maybe Frankie visited him there) about his corner boys, his old working class neighborhood, about being a screwed-up teen filled with angst and alienation in the old days. Good stuff from what I read even if I was a little miffed when he constantly referred to me as a guy with two left feet, two left hands and too left out with the girls which wasn’t exactly true, well a little.

One big series that Markin did, did as homage to his fellow Vietnam veterans, although he never talked much about his own experiences, said he did what he did and that was that just like our fathers would say when we tried to asked about World War II with them, Vietnam veterans who had trouble getting back to the “real world” and wound up under bridges and along railroad tracks mainly in Southern California where he interviewed them and let them tell their stories their way called Going to the Jungle (a double-reference to the jungle in ‘Nam and the railroad “jungle” of hobo legend where they then resided) was short-listed for some important award but I forget which one.                    

And then he stopped. Fell off the earth. No, not really, but the way I got the story mostly from Josh and Sam, with a little stuff from Frankie thrown after the dust settled is what the thing amounted to. Markin had always been a little volatile in his appetites, what he called in high school (and we started calling too) his “wanting habits” coming out of the wretched of the earth North Adamsville deep down working poor neighborhoods  (me and Sam too). At some point in about 1976 or 1977 but probably the earlier date he started doing girl, snow, you know, cocaine that was no big thing in the 1960s (I had never tried it and has only heard about it from guys who went to Mexico for weed and would pick up a couple of ounces to level out with when the pot got weary as it started to do when the demand was greater than the supply and street hipsters and junkies were cutting what they had with oregano or herbs like that, or maybe I heard one time all oregano and good-luck to your high, sucker). Cocaine then was pretty expensive so if you got your “wanting habits” on with that stuff, if you liked running it constantly up your nose using some freshly minted dollar bill like some guys did  until you always sounded like you had a stuffed up nose then you had better have either started robbing banks, a dicey thing, a very dicey thing the one time me and a couple of guys tried to rob as little a thing as a variety store or start dealing the stuff to keep the demons away. He choose the latter.           

Once Markin moved up the drug dealer food chain that is where things got weird, got so weird that when I heard the story I thought he must have taken too much acid back in the day no matter what he claimed. He was “muling” a lot for the boys down south, for what was then a far smaller and less professional drug cartel, meaning he was bringing the product over the border which was a lot easier then as long as you were not a Mexican or a “hippie,” or looked like either. (Josh said Markin had shaved his telltale beard and his ponytail long hair as part of his new career just like a lot of guys, like me, once the tide ebbed and people drew distinctions from the way you looked just like in the 1950s when Markin and Frankie did their faux “beat” thing. From what Sam said things went okay for a while but see, and this I know from my own story, those kid “wanting habits” play funny tricks on you, make you go “awry” as Markin used to say. In the summer of 1977 (we are not sure which month) Markin went south (Mexico) to pick a big (for him) two kilogram batch of coke to bring back to the states. And that was the end of Markin, the end that we can believe part. They found his body in a back alley down in Sonora face down with two slugs in his head. Needless to say the Federales did next to nothing to find out who had murdered him.

Frankie, then just a budding lawyer, once the news got back to Boston, sent a private detective down there but all he was able to find out from a shaky source, a junkie whom he met in a cantina where Markin would stop and drink who may or may have actually known him but who needed a “fix” before he would say word one, was that Markin had either stolen the two kilogram shipment and was going to go independent (not a good idea even then when the cartels were nothing like the strong-arm kill outfits they are today, Jesus) or the negotiations went bad, went off the track, and somebody got offended by the El Norte gringo marauder. Life is cheap in that league. To this day that is all we know, and old Markin is buried down there in some potter’s field unmarked grave still mourned and missed.        

I mentioned above that in the early 1970s Markin before we lost contact, or rather I lost contact since Josh knew his whereabouts outside of San Francisco in Daly City until about 1974, did a series of articles about the old days and his old corner boys in North Adamsville.  A couple of years ago we, Frankie, Josh, Sam (Allan had passed away before this) and I agreed that a few of them were worth publishing if only for ourselves and the small circle of people whom Markin wrote for and about. So that is exactly what we did having a commemorative small book of articles and any old time photographs we could gather and had it printed up in the print shop my oldest son is now running for me. Since not all of us had everything that Markin wrote, what the hell they were newspaper or magazine articles to be used to wrap up the fish in or something after we were done reading them, we decided to print what was available. I was able to find a copy of a bunch of sketches up in the attic of my parents’ home which I was cleaning up when they were putting their house up for sale since they were in the process of downsizing. Josh, apparently not using his copies for wrapping fish purposes, had plenty of the later magazine pieces. Unfortunately we could not find any copies of the long defunct East Bay Other and so could not include anything from that Going To Jungle series.   

Below is the introduction that Sam Lowell wrote for that book which we agreed should be put in here trying to put what Markin was about in content from the guy who knew him about as well as anybody from the old neighborhood:  

“The late Peter Paul Markin, also known as “the Scribe, ” so anointed by Frankie Riley the unchallenged self-designated king hell king of the schoolboy night among the corner boys who hung around the pizza parlors, pool halls, and bowling alleys of the town, in telling somebody else’s story in his own voice about life in the old days in the working class neighborhoods of North Adamsville where he grew up, or when others, threating murder and mayhem,  wanted him to tell their stories usually gave each and every one of that crew enough rope to hang themselves without additional comment. He would take down, just like he would do later with the Going To The Jungle series that won a couple of awards and was short-listed for the Globe award, what they wanted the world to hear, spilled their guts out as he one time uncharitably termed their actions (not the veterans, not his fellows who had their troubles down in L.A. and needed to righteously get it out and he was the conduit, their voice, but the zanies from our old town), and then lightly, very lightly if the guy was bigger, stronger than him, or in the case of girls if they were foxy, mainly clean up the language for a candid world to read. Well I have said enough except I like Bart still miss and mourn the bastard. Here is what he had to say:  

When Diana Nelson “Torched” The North Adamsville Night Away- With Peggy Lee In Mind

 

From The Pen Of [The Late]Peter Paul Markin (1972)  

 

Scene: Brought to mind by one of the songs in an old second-hand   compilation album found in a North Beach cheapo record store, Leslie Gore’s 1960s classic teen dream theme (girl division) song, That’s The Way Boys Are. The album itself, done in the plain pre-psychedelic style when the cover would be little more than an off-kilter photograph of the performer and the title of the album unlike later when the covers would be works of art in their own right, featured a young white female singer in front of a band, maybe a trio, guitar, bass, drums, microphone in hand looking for all the world like the second coming of Peggy Lee. All blonde and farm-fresh, ready to sway once the guys behind her come up to speed and maybe  getting ready to sing Cry Me A River, How Little We Know, Am I Blue, Salty Tears or some lust-filled song to wipe away some deep sorrows in the crowd or in her own heart. That singing taking sorrows away, maybe her sorrows too, for a while. Here is how the sorrows played out one time in our old town:

I, Diana Nelson, am going to be a big singing star just watch out, watch out and don’t blink because then you will miss it and have to go to the back of the line like all the others. Maybe a big time singer on Broadway starring in the musical hit “hot ticket” show of the season, if I feel like it, maybe for the movies with some Tin Pan Alley guys writing stuff with me in mind, just me although like lots of things everybody will want to cover the songs after I make hits out of them, have people on the streets humming on their way to work. Maybe in the swanky New York or Los Angeles nightclubs which I think would show my voice, my instrument to best effect, for weeks on end at big money and my own private dressing room to attend to my admirers.

Hey, don’t take my word for it, it is written in the stars, my stars and I don’t mean some fortune-teller’s crystal ball but whatever makes the universe go round and round. Proof? I have just this spring won the 1962 edition of the annual Adamsville Female Vocalist Contest. Hands down! There was no way that any of those other girls could match (and one guy who dressed up as a girl, weird right, although he did a good job on Mary Wells’ Two Lovers and I was a little worried until they found out he was a guy and gave him the boot). Even Emma Johns and her smoky version of old hat Peggy Lee’s Fever got left behind when I went deep, deep down almost to my soul on Brenda Lee’s I’m Sorry. See that is what the judges were looking for, not smoldering sexy stuff but act of contrition stuff. And the girls who filled up the audience seats and gave their thumbs up and down only wanted to hear stuff that they could listen to when they cry on their pillows around midnight after they have finally realized that their Johnny isn’t going to call, is out with what Timmy Riley, the star football player for the Red Raiders, our school, a guy I used to go out with, called the corner boys over at Jimmy Jack’s Diner. Goes cheap on some corny date at Rich’s Drive-In theater with that cardboard hamburger and acidic soda, or cheats on them, cheats on them with their best girlfriend, usually, or worse out with the next best thing girl who will give him what he wants. You can figure “the what he wants” part out. I’ve got it all figured out.

Sure, like I was telling my good friend, Peter Paul Markin, P.P. as he likes me to call him, although everybody but his mother calls him Markin and has since about third grade when I first met him and Allan Johnston in ninth grade and we have got along okay ever since, the other day during class I was glad to get the one thousand dollar scholarship money that was one of the prizes offered. I can use it if I decide to go to college after we graduate next year. But the big thing for me is to get to sing, sing featured, along with the guys from the Rockin’ Ramrods to back me up, at the Falling Leaves Dance to be held late in September. That dance is always sponsored by the senior class and it will give me a thrill to go out to please that crowd of fellow seniors, especially P.P. who shares my love of music (although he is not a very good singer, sings off-key and even I have a hard time covering up for that when we do harmonies, sorry if you see this P.P.) and likes to talk about politics and stuff like I do. The big, big thing though, and I haven’t even told P.P about this is that a recording agent, Jerry Rice, yes, that Jerry Rice, from Ducca Records, the one that signed Connie what’s-her name, has promised to be there and if he likes what he hears, well, like I say it in my stars. Don’t blink, okay.

 

By the way don’t get thrown off by that good friend P.P. thing, especially if you know my own true love boyfriend Bobby Swann. There’s nothing to it whatever he may kid the guys with Monday mornings when they compare notes and he lies that he was with me in that “what he wants” way when we just go to Adamsville Beach and talk when Bobby is not around (sorry again, P. P.). Bobby couldn’t be at the contest because he was studying for his finals at State University. He is finishing up his freshman year and so he had to study hard. P. P.  and I met like I said met in ninth grade and we have been good friends ever since. That’s it, no more. Oh, I suppose I can tell you now, now that I have my handsome blue-eyed Bobby, that if he wasn't such a “stup” P.P could have had his chances with me but all he ever did was stare at my ass in class, and in the corridors. If you don’t believe me ask Emma Johns, she’s the one that noticed him doing it first, although I had an idea. Better yet, ask P.P. he’ll tell you, maybe. The thing was that I couldn’t wait forever for him to get up the nerve to ask me out and then Bobby came along and swooped me up in tenth grade and then I didn’t care for younger guys anymore, except as good friends.

I guess I should tell you since I am telling you everything else that I had a dream when I was very young, maybe seven or eight, that I was going to be a singing star. Maybe it was my mother always playing women singers on the family record like that Peggy Lee when she was young and sprightly with Benny Goodman, Teresa Brewer, and Billie Holiday that got me going because I would sing along all day with the radio on. Later Ma had me take singing lessons and I have been going strong ever since. P. P. said he went crazy when he first heard me do Brenda’s I Want To Be Wanted and Patsy Cline’s Crazy, although she, Patsy, seemed a little to ah, shucks, countrified when I first heard her. She has gotten less so since she has started turning to more a more popular style. I sure wish I could hit her high notes but Miss French, my vocals teacher, says I will get there soon enough and then I will have to, get this word, “husband” my valuable resource. See, I am a cinch.

Did I tell you that I told, no ordered (and I can do that to him, and he jumps like a puppy dog, sorry again P.P.) to be at the Falling Leaves Dance solo, so we can talk between sets. It looks like Bobby won’t be coming. According to him no big time State University sophomore would be caught dead at a high school dance and also his cross-country team is having a big meet in New York City that weekend. You know, and I hope you won’t tell Bobby, if you know him, because I do love him so, every once in a while I wish P. P. would have done more than just look at my ass in ninth grade.

[Tell me, damn it, try to tell me this is not an elegy worthy of a fallen corner boy, yeah, go on and tell me. BW]