The Not So Pretty Finish-With Etta James’ “Please, No More” in Mind

The Not So Pretty Finish-With Etta James’ “Please, No More” in Mind

By Hank Jones

“No more, no more,” had become Shep Wilson’s new mantra once he go over his rage against his long-time companion, Sarah Long, after she had set him adrift, had as she said “moved on” to fine herself whatever that might have meant when she uttered the ugly words of separation one night and then the next day was gone, leaving no forwarding address and only the thin reed of a cellphone number and e-mail address to remember her by. It had not been like Shep had not known it was coming, or could see it come since Sarah had been making noises about leaving, and under what conditions for a couple of years prior to that sneaking out the next day door. It seemed that every few years she had to lay down the law, her law about what was good or bad about what was happening in their as she called it “relationship.”  The last two times had been shortened up though a couple years before it had been a week, only a week after they had arrived home from a great week of museums, good dining and mad walks along the Seine and the previous year a week, only a week after they had had a great and nostalgic time in Maine going to the old Saco Drive-In and a record hop like they were kids again.

Maybe she had been right to lay the law down (his expression but she never disagreed with that characterization, never either when he was joking or serious) had been right to make her anguish knew after those vacations which contrasted in her mind with what they had had in their early relationship. Maybe she had been right to make a clean break, to go out some forlorn unadorned door without a lonesome good-by which had been as hard to as if she had gone in the middle of the day bidding him a personal, upfront fond adieu. Hell, in his heart of hearts Shep knew he was only fooling himself, only acting out of his version of male alleged indifference to her, to his fate which had been part of the problem between the pair for the past several years. They had gone to couples counselling over that indifference a few years back when he really was indifferent under the throes of a small, unknown to her, cocaine, snow, cousin whatever you want to call it which he had been able to break without further destroying their relationship, although that was a close thing, was not as easy as it sounded. Especially when he thought about going back to the stuff lately to get rid of the never-ending depression he felt each day as he had trodden through his absent life.  

Shep kept trying to think through what he could have done differently, where he had fallen down bad enough to make her leave. And make him take up her chant of “no more” (not  really put that way by her since she would have used more gentile language that fit her persona but that was the way that it rang through this latest fire in his head and that was the way he was trying to think the matter through). He knew that he shared the blame, shared in the debacle of their love, had lost that magic that held them together for so many years, and that the little saying that she had in sunnier times about how they had been so much in love in those early years and though it would continue forever. (The actual way she put it was “when he had loved her so”)  And in the early days, hell, up until the last few years that love had been as genuine as any emotion that he had ever held dear. Then a whole series of events, a whole personal deluge of troubles laid him low, and had made him a grumpy old man. The last month or so, maybe two months he had tried to take stock of himself (and of her role in their decline after all as she admitted she could have signaled him more concretely about what was ailing her, what make her say her own “no more” however she might have actually put the matter). Had tried to put as he constantly told her to put his best foot forward. Unfortunately it had been too late.      

After Shep thought about those early days when they were so in love, were so sympathetic to each other, fed off each other’s needs, faced the wicked old world as a pair of waifs, soul-mate waifs was the way she put it one time early, sipping on a little light wine to numb himself a bit against the emptiness in his heart (and to keep the cocaine blues at bay-even singing the lines from the old song-“cocaine, cocaine running up and down my brain, cocaine’s for horses not for men they say its’ going to kill you but they don’t say when” to ward off the evil spirits gathering in his mind), he tried to retrace where he had fallen down (her shortcomings were her business now and so he looked at the lonely world through his future path and  how he could become the “new” Shep, get rid of that mantra of “no more” into a better place. 

Shep had never been much for reflection, never much to think how his actions, or better his omissions, would affect Sarah, would make her withdraw, make her close her heart to him. Had dismissed at least in his “put out the fire” head much of what she would speak of when she was seriously trying to signal him that things had dramatically drifted downhill. Would not take the signals about getting help, psychiatric help foremost, that she first gently and then more insistently tried to get him to undertake. He has seen that formula as her New Age Cambridge background thing that she was forever trying out (and to his mind without much success but he kept that to himself especially as she seemed more and more to withdraw into that world as she got more distraught about them and as well about her place in the sun, about who she was).

Funny in the end, or rather toward the end, in one of those previous downhill moments he had a few years back agreed to go with her to couples counselling (they had tried that route about twenty years before but both had been dissatisfied with the counsellor who seemed to be more interested in what she, the counsellor, had to say than what they had had to say). Funny as well that he, not she though, had gone into that counselling with some of that usual indifference, and if he had been wise enough to see what that meant he could have seen what was coming, he felt that the then current counselling, and the counsellor, was a worthwhile endeavor every week (Sarah, before they decided, or rather she decided, to discontinue the work, had told him that she thought the counsellor was “championing him” because, as a gregarious type in such situations he had the better of it against her more quiet and thoughtful responses which tended to be short, if to the point.)          

Shep’s troubles really had started with the advent of his medical troubles, with what he called “the poking and prodding” of the medicos, a few years before. Yeah, he knew growing older, getting to be an old grumpy man, meant that health issues would surface, would especially as he reached his seventh decade (he knew first-hand as well from his friends of similar ages that this was the “deal,” the real deal). Shep had prided himself on keeping a semblance of fitness, of keeping himself heathy as measured by very infrequent visits to the doctor’s office and of not feeling sick most of the time except for an occasional cold. Then the deluge, first trouble with breathing and eating necessitating an endoscopy which found some problems, and required medications. After that bladder problems associated with his smoking many years before according to the urologist, more medications, and then more recently the final nail in the coffin (his expression as stated to Sarah many times and a silly foolish thing to say), the early discovery of bladder cancer after a scope had shown unusual inflammations. More procedures and more medications.        

One day Shep just erupted, started yelling at Sarah, started to approach her for which she would later say she stood in fear of physical danger he seemed so out of control (not said anything at the time though as she thought that saying anything would only enflame him further). After a few minutes he settled down, because something of the old Shep, but then the line, some line in Sarah’s sand had been crossed. Shep swore he would stop taking the medications since they seemed to be making him more aggressive, more sullen, and angrier. As it turned out one of the medications was reacting poorly with another one and had aided in Shep’s angry responses to the world-and to Sarah.    

If the medications, if the health issues were all that there were bothering Sarah as pointed told Shep before she departed she could have worked around that. What she could not work around was what Shep called one night the “fire in his head” (not helping that inability to “work around” were long-time, long-held issues around Sarah’s own worth, around who she was, around what was she to do in the world now that she too was retired, issues about her place in the sun which had plagued her since childhood). In the end that “fire in his head,” that not being “at peace” with himself was the way she expressed her take on the situation was what made something snap in her psyche.

Shep, as he would admit to himself in a moment of candor several weeks after she had gone, had reacted to his health issues and graceless aging rather than getting more rest and taking it easier in life had in true Shep form driven himself even harder in order to leave what he told Sarah was his mark on the wicked old world. The snapping point for her was that he seemed indifferent to her needs, seemed to be in a world of his own, and had begun again to question every move that she made like he did not trust. In a final stab to his heart she had told him that her own increasing medical problems were being aggravated by his foul behavior(after being fearful of doing so since she still worried about his anger if she did tell him this hard truth).       

So this was Shep’s sad demise. Or could have been but one night a couple of months after Sarah left he woke up one night and said “no more.” No more acting like a crazed maniac, no more fruitless search for some netherworld place in the sun. He had read a book, a book on meditation that Sarah had left behind talking about the benefits of doing such a therapy, backed up by scientific evidence. (Shep was not sure that Sarah had not left the book behind on purpose since she, like in a lot of things around his well-being, had mentioned his doing meditation on numerous occasions in the past.) So Shep started practicing the art, had real trouble at the beginning in focusing away from his two million “pressing” forward that day issues and trying to live “in the moment.” But as with many things when he got “religion” Shep was still at it after a month. His mantra, his focus term, not surprisingly “no more.”    

[Shep would wind up meeting Sarah in a Whole Foods grocery store in Cambridge several months later and remarked after telling him she had spent the previous several months in California that he seemed calmer, seemed to have lost some of that fire in his head, and seemed more at peace with himself. Had said also that they should keep in touch now that  she was back in town and that he wasn’t such a maniac (her term for his previous late innings conduct). So who knows. All Shep knows is that he wanted “no more” to do with the old Shep). 

A 1950s Atlantic Fourth Of July – With Cindy P., “The Girl With The Faraway Eyes” In Mind 

Cindy P., my best friend, was very helpful in preparing this sketch, especially one recent afternoon in her office when she related her own youthful Fourth of July experiences to me. I like to dedicate these things I write to various people or groups, but get this, she has insisted, do you hear me, insisted that I dedicate this piece to her. Get this too, she has insisted that I place a photo of her here as well so, and I paraphrase, all the boys can check her out just like they do all the women classmates. (Keep this between us I check them out too.) Well, when a woman doth command (is that the right tense?) what is a guy to do. [Sorry -No photo I could not reproduce it for this blog.]

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Probably like in your growing-up neighborhoods during the 1950s some group put together a Fourth of July event for kids and adults alike in order to righteously celebrate American independence in a festive form. That was true in the old Atlantic neighborhood at Welcome Young Field in the 1950s where my junior high school friend Frankie Riley held forth. And where I held forth, although indirectly. I did not know Frankie then since my family lived down in the Germantown projects for most of that decade but we would come up to Atlantic where my grandparents lived on Young Street on the Fourth from as early as I can remember. Once again, this is mainly a Frankie Riley story but it definitely could have been mine as well.  When Frankie thought back to those days he told me that he did not remember a lot of specific information and so he went on to a North Quincy-related site asking for information from others which he received and has been placed here as part of the sketch. Frankie did not ask permission to use the names of those who responded so I have fictionalized them here. If you have anything else to add please feel free to comment.     

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Frankie, Frankie Riley, couldn’t quite remember exactly when he had heard his first Fourth of July fire-cracker, or had seen and heard his first fireworks for that matter. He had gotten the two all mixed and confused together with his recollections of two-bit carnival times, which also included, at least sometimes, setting off fire-crackers or fireworks displays. But it must have been early, very early, in his life at a time when he, and his mother and father and two brothers, two brothers just then in the early 1950s, would visit his grandparents’ house on the Fourth coming down from Walker Street. And the beauty of where those grandparents lived was that it was a bee-line directly across the street from Welcome Young Field on Sagamore Street. Sagamore Street of now blessed memory.

One thing Frankie was sure of though as he thought about Sagamore Street days was that he was going to need help in relating the details of what happened because, frankly, he was confused and mixed up about more than just the time when he first saw and heard fire-crackers and fireworks displays. He would eventually ask for help but for just that moment he was going to fly on his own. And while depending on his own memories, such as they were, he also knew, knew, flat-out what he wasn’t going to be talking about. Nix to the tattoo of marching drums, some Yankee Doodle threesome all bed-sheet patched up from wounds suffered at the hands of the bloody British but still carrying, carrying proudly, the brand new American flag all aflutter, and tattooing that beat up drum and playing the fife to kingdom come. That was standard fare at these Fourth celebrations but that battered patriot thing was not his Fourth, although he had to admit it might have been somebody’s.

No also to an overblown description of some Hatch Shell Fourth, streams of humanity stretched out as far as the eye could see along the Charles River, sweating in the July suns, searching for cool, for water, for shade against the madness and waiting, patiently or impatiently as the case may have been, for the night cools, and the big boom symphony Overture of 1812 finale. Again, frankly, that was not his thing, although he knew just by the numbers that it was certainly somebody else’s. And while he was at it he would not go on and on about the too quickly over fireworks displays that directly succeeded that big boom overture on the Charles. All of that, collectively, was too much noise, sweat, heat, swelter, and just plain crowdedness for what he wanted to remember about the Fourth. Instead he wanted to lower the temperature a little, lower the noise level even more, and lessen the logistics, the picnic basket, cooler, blankets, umbrellas, child’s toys logistics, and return to those Sagamore streets of his 1950s youth when Welcome Young Field in North Quincy’s  Atlantic section was the center of the universe, and if not, it should have been. (Why it was called Atlantic he never really did get except Grandma Riley always called it “one-horse Atlantic” so it had to mean something)

Frankie knew that, probably like in your neighborhood in the old days, every year in late June the local older guys, mainly guys from the local bar, the Red Feather, and some scattered fathers, including Joseph Riley, Senior, Frankie's father and also a denizen of the Red Feather, would put together a kitty, collecting contributions and seeking donations from local merchants to put together a little “time” for the kids on the 4th of July. Now this Red Feather was the favored watering hole (and maybe the only one close enough to be able to “drop in for glass” and also be able to walk home afterwards when that glass turned into glasses) for all the working-class fathers in the neighborhood. And nothing but a regular hang-out for all the legions of single Irish guys who were still living at home with dear, sweet mother. Said mother who fed (and fed on time), clothed, darned socks, holey socks worn out from hard living on the Welcome Young softball field, and whatnot for her son (or, more rarely, sons) who was too afraid of a younger woman, or a younger woman’s scorn at late night Red Feather antics, to move out into the great big world. But come late June the singles, the fathers, and occasionally the older brothers, were kings among men as they strong-armed neighbors and merchants alike for dough and goods.

Frankie was thankful for what he did remember. When he thought things though he suddenly realized that as these things go the day was pretty straight forward, you know; foot races of varying lengths for various age groups, baby contests, beauty contests, some sort of parade, pony rides and so forth. But that was only the frame. Here is the real story of the day. Here is what any self-respecting kid like Frankie lived and died for on that day:

Tonic (you know, soda, pop) and ice cream. And not just one tonic or one ice cream but as much as you could hoard. Twice during the day (Frankie thought maybe about 10:00AM and 1:00PM) there would be what one can only describe as a free-for-all as everybody scrambled to get as many bottles of tonic (you know, soda) and cups of ice cream as they could handle from tables set up on Sagamore Street. Here is the secret to the success that Frankie’s older brothers, Joseph and Tommy, and he had in grabbing much more than their fair share of the bounty. Go back to that part about where Grandma and Grandpa lived. Yah, right on the corner of Welcome Young Field on Sagamore Street. So, the trio would sprint with one load of goods up to their house and then go back for more until they had filled up the back-door refrigerator.

Just thinking about it Frankie thought, “Boy that was work, as we panted away, bottles clanging in our pockets, ice cream cups clutched in every hand.” But then, work completed, they could savor their one tonic (read: soda) and one ice cream cup that they showed for public consumption just like the nice boys and girls. There were other sounds of the day too like the cheering for your friends in the foot races, or other contests, the panting and the hee-haws of the ponies but he would always remember the clang of the bottles. As the sun went down on the day it went down to the strains of some local pick-up band of the era in the tennis court as the dancing and talent show started. But that was adult time, a time for hazy adult-sized dreams. That time for him was to think back on his day's work, his hoard and the next day's and the next tonic and ice cream. Ah....

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What Frankie had not remembered clearly were the details of the organization of this extravaganza, how the money was gathered, what merchants provided what goods, and where did the lads get the various Fourth fixings. He called on help from a North Quincy-related website and gathered some interesting and informative responses:

Richard Mackey:

Frankie it was, like you said, organized by the guys at the Red Feather, guys like my father and yours, and my older brother, Jimmy, in his thirties at the time, who, as you also said, was afraid to go out in the world and lived at home forever with dear, sweet mother (and she was sweet, too sweet). He never married, never missed a softball game, never had a dirty, unsown sock, or missed a free glass of beer (Pabst Blue Ribbon, if you remember that brand). Jimmy and his buddies, his softball buddies, did a lot of the leg work collecting money when he was younger and then they kind of took over the show as the older guys, like my father and yours, had too much to do or something and handed it over to them.

They had a truck, maybe rented or maybe from one of the grocery stores, with a loud speaker that would go up and down the streets, Newbury, Atlantic, Walker, Young, Kendall, Chestnut, all the streets up to the high school and down to Wollaston Beach and had some of the older kid (15 or 16 year olds) going door to door for donations. I don’t know about the strong-arming part, but maybe. Probably not the neighborhood families so much as the merchants. Remember those were hard-nosed corner boys days and Jimmy was a serious corner boy when things got tight. I know Jimmy used to “set up” his buddies at the bar a lot during that collecting time and he never worked all that much.

The day [Fourth of July] started at around 8:00 am and ended with the talent show and dreamy adult dance stuff in the tennis court. I think Mr. Burke won every year that I can remember for his "crazy legs dancing.” Joe Gilliam, who worked at Estrella’s Market on Newbury Ave, was part of the group that set the whole celebration up. He was a friend of Jimmy’s as well so maybe that is where they got the tonic and ice cream from. The last one I remember was around 1975, because I had my oldest daughter with me there.

To which Frankie responded:

That Joe Gilliam Richard Mackey mentioned lived, with his dear sweet Irish-brogued mother, forever, never married, never missed a softball game, never had a dirty, unsown sock, and never missed a free beer (Knickerbocker, if you remember that brand) directly across the street from my grandparents, Daniel and Anna Riley, on Sagamore Street. That house is the place where we stashed our loot (the tonic and ice cream). Joe, when he worked for Estrella's, would also take my grandfather, disabled from a stroke and a retired Quincy fireman, riding around with him when he delivered orders. My grandfather was a, to be kind, difficult man to deal with so Joe must have had some charms.

And then onto old time Atlantic denizen Sticky Fingers McGee: 

The earliest recollection I have of the July 4th festivities at Young Field was when I returned to Atlantic in July 1945, when I was six, after being away for a couple years. I seem to remember that they had foot races and other activities. I remember running one of the races which was close between me and another kid, Spider Jones. They declared Spider the winner, but I threw a fit. Nothing big, just a little shoving, no fists or anything like that. It was just a race, okay. I still think that I won that race and if they had had proper equipment like a camera for photo finishes at the finish line I could have proved that I won. After writing that last thing I guess I still haven’t yet learned to take a loss gracefully but like I said the camera would not have lied.

Later, in the 50's maybe, I remember hearing a girl who sang like Theresa "Tessie" Brewer at the Young Field tennis courts. I think somebody said she was the sister of one Joseph “Babe” Murphy (Class of 1958) who later became one of North's best all-round athletes. That's all I remember of the Atlantic 4th celebrations, and I'm not totally sure of the accuracy of those memories. The years continue to cloud some memories.

To which Frankie replied:

 Sticky, glad to see you haven’t mellowed with age, at least according to your fellow class-mate Jimmy Callahan. Jimmy says hello and to tell you that Spider Jones had you by a mile in that race. He was right at the finish line when you exploded. (He says you did punch Spider, by the way). As for the forgotten memories part we all know that well-traveled path. Although you’re total memory recall for some flea-bitten thirty-yard dash for some crumb-bum dollar prize gives me pause on that one.

And then finally Irene Delaney chimed in:

Hi-Back in the 50's the first 9 1/2 years of my life was on the top floor of a three-decker on Sagamore St., and Welcome Young was where we spent every day. We all waited for the Fourth. Richard [Mackey] is right about the truck. My grandfather, George Kelley, and my uncles would ride on the back of the flatbed truck going up and down the streets playing their musical instruments while others collected donations. We would throw change to the people collecting. On the big day we would line up early in the morning with our costumes on. Buddy Dunne and Elliot Thompson had a lot to do with getting everything together along with a lot of the guys from the Red Feather. On our way down Sagamore Street from Newbury Ave heading to Welcome Young everyone would get a shiny quarter for marching in the parade.

The rest of the day would be filled with games and shows, and yes the tennis court would be converted to a stage for the day and night activities…

 

A YouTube film clip of Jimi Hendrix performing the Stars-Spangled Banner at Woodstock, circa 1969. Yeah, I know that event is way after the time of this sketch and of our graduation but is there any better evocation of the national anthem for our generation than sweet boy Jimi’s version?