“To Be Young Was Very
Heaven”-With The 50th Anniversary Of The “Summer Of Love, 1967” In
Mind
Revised Introduction by Zack James
[I was about a decade or so too young to have been washed,
washed clean to hear guys like Peter Paul Markin, more on him below, tell the
tale, by the huge counter-cultural explosion that burst upon the land (and by
extension and a million youth culture ties internationally before the bubble
burst) in the mid to late 1960s and maybe extending a few year into the 1970s
depending on whose ebb tide event you adhere to. (Markin’s for very personal reasons
having to do with participating in the events on May Day 1971 when the most
radical forces tried to stop the Vietnam War by shutting down the government
and got kicked in the teeth for their efforts. Doctor Gonzo, the late writer
Hunter Thompson who was knee-deep in the experiences called it 1968 around the
Democratic Party convention disaster in Chicago. I, reviewing the material published
on the subject mostly and on the very fringe of what was what back then would
argue for 1969 between Altamont and the Days of Rage everything looked bleak then
and after.)
Over the next fifty years that explosion has been inspected,
selected, dissected, inflected, infected and detected by every social science
academic who had the stamina to hold up under the pressure and even by
politicians, mostly to put the curse of “bad example” and “never again” on the
outlier experimentation that went on in those days. Plenty has been written
about the sea-change in mores among the young attributed to the breakdown of
the Cold War red scare freeze, the righteous black civil rights struggles
rights early in the decade and the forsaken huge anti-Vietnam War movement
later. Part of the mix too and my oldest brother Alex, one of Markin’s fellow
corner boys from the old neighborhood is a prime example, was just as reaction
like in many generations coming of age, just the tweaking of the older
generations inured to change by the Cold War red scare psychosis they bought
into. The event being celebrated or at least reflected on in this series under
the headline “To Be Very Young-With The Summer of Love 1967 In Mind” now turned
fifty was by many accounts a pivotal point in that explosion especially among
the kids from out in the hinterlands, like Markin an Alex, away from elite
colleges and anything goes urban centers.
The kids, who as later analysis would show, were caught up one way or
another in the Vietnam War, were scheduled to fight the damn thing, the young
men anyway, and were beginning, late beginning, to break hard from the well-established
norms from whence they came in reaction to that dread.
This series came about because my already mentioned oldest
brother, Alex James, had in the spring of 2017 taken a trip to San Francisco on
business and noticed on a passing Muni bus that the famed deYoung Museum
located in the heart of Golden Gate Park, a central location for the activities
of the Summer of Love as it exploded on the scene in that town, was holding an
exhibition about that whole experience. That jarred many a half forgotten
memory in Alex’s head. Alex and his “corner boys” back in the day from the old
Acre neighborhood in North Adamsville, a suburb of Boston where we all came of
age, had gotten their immersion into counter-cultural activities by going to
San Francisco in the wake of that summer of 1967 to “see what it was all
about.”
When Alex got back from his business trip he gathered the
few “corner boys” still standing, Frankie Riley, the acknowledged leader of the
corner boys, Jimmy Jenkins, Si Lannon, Jack Callahan, Bart Webber, Ralph Kelly,
and Josh Breslin (not an actual North Adamsville corner boy but a corner boy
nevertheless from Olde Sacco up in Maine whom the tribe “adopted” as one of
their own) at Jimmy’s Grille in North Adamsville, their still favorite drinking
hole as they call it, to tell what he had seen in Frisco town and to reminisce.
From that first “discussion” they decided to “commission” me as the writer for
a small book of reflections by the group to be attached alongside a number of
sketches I had done previously based on their experiences in the old
neighborhood and in the world related to those times. So I interviewed the
crew, wrote or rather compiled the notes used in the sketches below but believe
this task was mostly my doing the physical writing and getting the hell out of
the way once they got going. This slender book is dedicated to the memory of
the guy who got them all on the road west-Peter Paul Markin whom I don’t have
to mention more about here for he, his still present “ghost” will be amply
discussed below. Zack James]
To the
memory of the late Peter Paul Markin on the occasion of the 50th
anniversary year of the Summer of Love, San Francisco, 1967
[Although this small tribute book is dedicated to the memory
of Peter Paul Markin from the corner boys days of the old Acre neighborhood of
North Adamsville and will have contributions from all the surviving member of
that tribe there are other corner boys who have passed away, a couple early on
in that bloody hell called Vietnam, Ricky Russo and Ralph Morse, RIP brothers,
you did good in a bad war, Allan Jackson, Allan Stein, “Bugger” Shea and
Markin’s old comrade, Billy Bradley. You guys RIP too.]
By Alex James
Let’s get this whole, I will put it in capitals just like
the sociologists of the event and whoever puts anything about it on YouTube, Summer of Love.1967 thing
straight. This whole turning away for a while by most of us corner boys from
the Acre from the “square” nine to five, little white picket fence with kids
and dogs thing was totally and solely the work of one Peter Paul Markin. Markin
whom our acknowledged leader Frankie Riley dubbed the “Scribe” and I will call
him that hereafter was the first one of us to get a whiff of the fresh breeze
as he called it of something new and different coming down the road. Excuse my
language but while the rest of us on those strange and sometimes oddly eventful
Friday and Saturday were worrying about getting enough dough together for a
date, or if without a date getting one, or if with a date getting some action
from the chick, getting laid, “doing the do” as we called it the Scribe was
like some fucking prophet proclaiming the new day coming. And seriously all
through high school we could have given a fuck about what he was talking
about.
Don’t get me wrong the Scribe was a good guy to have a round
most days and while no way he could lead the guys, even now the idea is totally
preposterous, he, aside from that “new day coming” bullshit was a straight up
guy. Was the guy we looked to, including Frankie, to tell us what was going on
right then. That “right then” was whatever scheme he had figured out, okay,
what con or midnight sneak job he had figured out, legal or illegal mostly the
latter, for us to get money to have a shot at those dates and a shot at “doing
the do.” Moreover since behind that larcenous, grand larcenous if there is such
a term little head of his he was a conduit to the girls. See he was the
“sensitive” guy, the guy who liked poetry and literature which we could have
given a fuck about but which a lot of girls at school and around town were into
and they would flock around him and tell him stuff-like who they liked or
didn’t like. Liked and didn’t like among the corner boys especially and he
would pitch or not pitch for us. The funny part like with the larcenous schemes
which no way would he execute but left to Frankie’s fiendish organizing Markin
never had dates with those girls, none in town either. He would run over to
Harvard Square find some “folkie” chick he called them and some of them were
foxes, were bowled over by his knowledge of folk music and by his prophecy that
some new breeze was coming that girls like that went crazy for at the
time.
That is all stuff though while we were in high school mostly
although Markin’s Harvard Square rendezvous thing continued after we graduated
from old North Adamsville High in 1965. Of course like any group in high school
once everybody graduated (a couple of our guys didn’t until 1966 for some
reason not germane here) they went to a degree in their own directions mostly
to work, a few like Frankie and the Scribe to college. But we would gather,
whoever was around, several times a year for the next couple of years to keep
in touch and to “keep the flame” as the Scribe called it lit. Things just went
along for most of us like they had for our parents, start working, work your
way up some ladder, or get started anyway, get more steady in the girl
department (although no guy I knew, corner boy or not, passed on a stray
encounter whether they were seriously “going steady’, engaged or married for
that matter), began that uphill climb toward marriage, kids, pets and the
picket fence.
All of us except the late Ricky Russo who had volunteered
right out of high school and would become an Airborne Ranger in Vietnam before
being blown away in some stinking village in the Central Highlands were scared
as hell of the draft which lingered over our heads (a couple of other corner
boys beside Ricky would volunteer when the sense they were to be called up and
another guy, Allan Jackson, “volunteered” through the justice system after
being caught stealing six cars out of the local car dealership lot one drunken
night by having the option of five years in the can or go into the Army thrown
at him)
Then in the early spring of 1967 the Scribe shocked all of
us by telling us that he was quitting college, quitting Boston University to go
“find himself” out West, out in California, out in San Francisco although that
destination came later. Remember this is a working class kid whose folks had no
dough for college, none not with five boys to raise, who got a scholarship and
some other financial deal to go giving that all up to “find himself.” We all knew a girl, a wild
Irish girl, Mary Shea, had gotten into his head and had gone West already but
to give up that scholarship and to face the draft straight up with the loss of
his student exemption was crazy and we told him so. He just said to us the “new
day” was here and he did not want to miss the opportunity. He would take his
chances with the draft. A fateful, a very fateful, decision which would
eventually lead to his downfall.
In any case the Scribe dropped out put a knapsack or two
together, maybe that second thing was a bedroll and headed West, hitchhiking
like some Jack Kerouac On The Road character,
bum we called it. The Scribe in high school had made us all read the book, or
parts of it, or he would read parts of it to us but mostly we could have given
a fuck about hitchhiking and old timer adventurers and 1940s passe cars
although Dean Moriarty the king of the road seemed cool to me. We all wanted
cars, fast cars, and not sticking our thumbs out on some desolate road waiting
for some desperate pervert to pick us up. (The Scribe’s cross-country hitchhike
run would be the first of many that he, and all the rest of us who headed west
in his wake, would take before the ebb tide set in and you just couldn’t depend
on that mode of transportation to get you across town never mind across
country.) So the Scribe was in Frisco town when the whole thing exploded, when
drugs became a serious part of youth nation life, when the music got amped up
and the chains that held previous society, or the youth part anyway or maybe I
had better say part of the youth part since most young people as it turned out
went about their square lives being square (it would take the rest of us, or
most of the rest of us, a while, a few years anyway to get back in harness),
when consensual sex became a lovely experience rather than just hormonal hunger
(although that came into it too) and other ways of organizing your life were
explored (not all for the better but mostly if you could keep the pyschos and
crazies at bay).
The Scribe hitchhiked back to the Acre in late summer on a
mission. Get his square, hanging around mopping, nowhere corner boys to pack up
and head west on another run. I was between jobs, between girls and bored
enough to jump when the Scribe called the tune. (The dope he brought back for
us, we “liquor heads” to try helped once the initial fear and hassle of drugs and
the old junkie stigma evaporated in a haze). Frankie would also go out on that
trip although I think his first trip out like Josh’s was on the stinking five
or six day Greyhound bus out (that experience would get both men on the hitchhike
road thereafter after dealing with that craziness). And everything was in late
1967 for the most part as advertised. I went back and forth for the next couple
of years but mostly staying out there after we hooked up with mad man savior
helmsman Captain Crunch and his magical mystery tour bus but I think Josh will
deal with that episode so I will end here.
End here except to say I believe we all were, maybe still
are grateful that the Scribe put us on the road, had given us a few years of
breaking out, jail breaking out of our doomed Acre existences. Everybody who
went out after the Scribe survived for a long while except Ralph Morse who died
in the swampy stinking Mekong Delta and of course Ricky Russo who never got a
chance to go West with us before his death. And except sad to say the Scribe
whose decision back in the spring of 1967 to “find himself”’ would several
years later wind up costing him his precious life in a dirty dusty backroad
down in Sonora, Mexico with two slugs in his head after what apparently was a
busted drug deal since we never got conclusive information about exactly what
had happened before we were warned off by the Federales down there.
Fateful since the Scribe was eventually drafted in late 1968
and having then no serious reason not to accept induction did so and wound up
in Vietnam which changed him in many ways that he could not have imagined back
in 1967. He like a lot of guys who were in what they called ‘Nam had trouble
adjusting to the “ real” world coming back and he drifted into this and that
writing assignment out in the West Coast for a while, did the remarkable
“Brothers Under The Bridge” series about guys, veterans, like him living out
there in their alternative community under the bridges, along the railroad
tracks and aside the arroyos for the East
Bay Eye, long defunct, had a wife for a while and was living with our old
adopted corner boy Josh Breslin when he got seriously into a cocaine addiction.
Began “running” product back and forth to Mexico at a time when cocaine was
becoming the drug of choice and the beginning of the serious cartels. The last
Josh knew the Scribe was down south of the border doing a run or trying to put
a deal together. Something went wrong on one end or the other and the Scribe
now rests in a potter’s field down in Sonora and still missed, crazy missed as
we used to call it when we hadn’t seen somebody we loved for a while. Well he
is still crazy missed by this guy. Thanks for the fresh breeze Scribe,
thanks.
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