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Sunday, March 31, 2013


***Out In The 1950s Rockabilly Night- With Sonny Burgess’ Red-Headed Woman In Mind

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

As he tossed and turned on a Saturday night, no, early Sunday morning bed, alone, he thought that if he had played it just a little bit differently, just a little more smoothly he might not now be lying there alone, alone with his troubled tosses and turns. Yah, if he had just played it differently. So naturally you know, as anyone who has not played just right knows, or even if you played  it right once and know what a close thing that was, that it had to be about a woman, a red-headed woman to be exact, that had Sonny Smith all aflame, and all tossing and turning sleepless. And fretful to hell and back that he had not played it right. As the dawn approached he also knew, knew as sure as he was born, that she had played it her way, her own quirky way, and knew, knew just as sure as she was born, that the way she played it would have Sonny sleepless that night.         

Of course if it was a woman, it also, of course, had to be a woman he met at a bar, his only place in those days after his divorce, and lately what with the extra run on the truck to keep up with the alimony and child support payments, that he could meet women. It wasn’t exactly that Sonny was head over heels looking for a woman but if he had a choice between, say. drinking with the boys, drinking shots, whiskey shots and beer chasers, and playing a little “shoot pools” over at Lester’s or heading out to the Lazy Flamingo on a Saturday he didn’t have to think twice about it. He would put on his best shirt and pants, shine up the shoes, maybe throw a little aftershave on and head out, head out alone for he had long ago, long before he had met his ex-wife, not gone with the herd when he was seeking female companionship.

Then he would drive over to the Lazy Flamingo early in order to set up his kingdom on a corner stool at the bar and see what played out, if anything, as the night wore on. This sitting at the bar thing was also calculated, calculated just so, in case nothing came along,, or sensing nothing for the evening he could just leave Timmy the bartender his tip and slip out without any hassles. The Lazy Flamingo, for those who want to know, was strictly a pick-up bar and so certain strategies like his were useful to give a good impression to the thick clot of regulars who populated the place, especially on Saturday night, who had their own pecking order of “winners” and “losers.” And then she came in.

Yah, she, Tanya Fields by name, came in all satin and silky, a long tall, thin woman, small-breasted, maybe just a little too athletic in her build like she might have been a gymnast in high school, something like that, for his tastes but still something to grab onto, grab onto and hold onto if he was any judge. While she wasn’t beautiful, not magazine beautiful cover (just as he wasn’t handsome just sort of good-looking, a good roll in the hay his ex-wife and others as well would say) she had this massive flow of red hair all hither and yon that enflamed something in him right away. Strangely he had never had a red-headed woman before (and maybe he thought later that might have played a part in how things turned out, maybe you had to work the angles with them differently), running, like with his ex-wife to blondes and an occasional brunette.
She sat down, he was not sure whether consciously or not, a couple of seats away from him at the bar and ordered a scotch, straight up, from Timmy giving him a familiar wave as she did so. So she had been here before, maybe a regular although he did not recognize her from before and he surely would have if he had seen her in the joint before. After ordering she turned in his direction and gave him some kind of quizzical smile that he was not sure was meant for him to come hither or that she was just acknowledging a fellow bar-stool habituĂ©. And that smile, and its meaning, kept him frozen through at least two more drinks (he was drinking whiskey, high-shelf whiskey, no chasers since he was “on the prowl”) while he planned his strategy.           
As it turned out whatever strategies he had planned were quickly shelved when some guy came over to Tanya, some guy she knew anyway and he figured that was that, when they moved to the dance floor and started dancing to the latest rockabilly song out of  Memphis, Warren Jones’ Good-Time Rockin.’  And those same strategies proved unnecessary when she came back to her stool alone and gave Sonny another less quizzical smile. That smile signaled his time to move, and he did so, doing the standard intro thing, including the inevitable asking if the seat was taken and offering of a drink. She okayed both, and she also made it plain because she said so that she was not looking for a man’s company that evening, was not going home except alone but was looking for some interesting talk and maybe a couple of dances. Sonny bit, bit further inflamed by that soft voice and by that close –up view of her massive red-hair. It acted on him like a red cape must act on a bull, by instinct. And so he sat down as he had too.    

Tanya proved to be very good company, sipping her drinks slowly, asking and answering questions with abandon, and occasionally  going to the dance floor where she proved to be a very good rockabilly dancer with some nice moves (maybe picked up from that athletic past, she had been a gymnast in high school as he surmised) and as the evening wore on (and the whiskies started to kick in) he got a little bolder, and a little more hopeful that she would change her mind and go home with him. Tanya, in turn, seemed to loosen up, seemed to get a bit more coquettish, and one time on the dance floor during slow one had come very close, so close that he could feel the steam off her dress. As Timmy called “last call” Sonny decided to take a stab at it. He asked her home, she in turn, answered, answered gently but firmly that she had told him that she was going home alone that night.  But just as Sonny, alone now, was finishing up his drink and putting on his coat at the bar and as she was heading toward the door she mentioned that maybe some other night she might see him at the bar. And she gave him that same quizzical smile that had lured him in earlier. Redheads!...          

 

 
***Out In The 1950s Film Night- Burt Lancaster’s The Sweet Smell Of Success

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

DVD Review

The Sweet Smell Of Success, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis,

Apparently screenwriters, Hollywood screen-writers anyway, a bandit breed themselves taking perfectly good material like War and Peace and turning it into soap suds and cleavage, when characterizing Broadway theater critics (uh, the legitimate theater in the old time parlance) refuse to touch them with anything less than a cattle prod. Maybe a rather long cattle prod at that. At least that has been my recent film review experience after watching Bette Davis’ All About Eve and its totally cynical critic Addison played superbly by George Saunders. Here we are confronted with the weasel Broadway critic and man about town J.J played by Burt Lancaster ably assisted by press flak Sydney Falco played to a groveling tee by Tony Curtis. The story line is a little thin, mainly concerning J.J.’s overweening concern that his very much younger sister does not wind up with some ne’er- do- well.

In the red scare cold war 1950s that winding up included some weirdo ultra-communist parlor pink with a smooth line (party line of course) and fast hands. Or worse some dope-addled beatnik opium den jazz musician reeking of some Norman Mailer white negro madness (or worse, much worst some miscegenation real negro madness, Jesus, J.J. would definitely flip on that). Also, by the way, with fast hands. So brother/father scribe for the public prints moves heaven and earth to protect Sis and tears up half the great white way in the process, that and he ever present need to humiliate whoever and whatever he can along the way. Except, of course, maybe some chorine that he has his eyes on and can plug in his rag column.

The tricks, manipulations, and downright skullduggery, hardly invented by J.J., although he has made his bid for the heel hall of fame here, has a long pedigree and might seem all too real to a modern audience who know that fame is fleeting and one better grab it by the neck, fast. This tricks played in this film set in 1950’s Broadway, however, seem almost like kid’s stuff compared to the vicious action today, on any given day in Hollywood, Wall Street or Washington (the D.C. one). That, my friends, was something of a ‘golden age’ of gentile skullduggery by comparison.

A note on Tony Curtis who on the face of it seems in cinematic history to have been something of a ‘pretty’boy, a draw for the ladies and not much more. But then you think about the performance here as the groveling and morally confused Mister Falco and in Spartacus and in Some Like It Hot and one, including this reviewer, is compelled to start changing one’s opinion of the depth of Mr. Curtis’s talent. Change it upward and fast.





Saturday, March 30, 2013

***Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘60s Song Night- Betty Everett’s “It’s In His Kiss”



It’s In His Kiss- Betty Everett

Does he love me?

I wanna know!

How can I tell if he loves me so?

(Is it in his eyes?)

Oh no! You need to see!

(Is it in his size?)

Oh no! You make believe!

If you wanna know

If he loves you so

It’s in his kiss!



(That's where it is!)

(Oh yeah! Or is it in his face?)

no girls! It's just his charms!

(In his warm embrace?)

no girls! That's just his arms!

If you wanna know

If he loves you so

It's in his kiss!

(That's where it is!)

yeah!! It’s in his kiss!

(That's where it is!)

Oh, oh, oh, honey !

Squeeze him tight!

Find out what you wanna know!

promise love, and if it really is,

It's there in his kiss!



(How 'bout the way he acts?)

no no no! That's not the way!

You're not listenin' to all I'm sayin'!

If you wanna know

If he loves you so

It's in his kiss!

(That's where it is!)

Oh, yeah! It’s in his kiss!

(That's where it is!)

Oh, oh, oh, hold him !

Squeeze him tight!

Find out what you wanna know!

promise love, and if it really is,

well It's there in his kiss!

(How 'bout the way he acts?)

no no no! That's not the way!

You're not listenin' to all I'm sayin'!

If you wanna know

If he loves you so

It's in his kiss!

(That's where it is!)

Oh, yeah ! It’s in his kiss!

(That's where it is!)

mmmm ! It’s in his kiss!

(that's where it is)

mmmm is in his kiss


Well everyone knows by now that Jenny Dolan and John, John O’Connor, the running back gridiron hero of the North Adamsville football team, the one who almost single-handedly won them their state class championship are postponing their plans to be married now that John has been given a football scholarship to Boston College. See the love-bugs want to wait to see how that pans out, and besides they have each other through thick and thin so to wait is no big deal. But just in case that is not in the cards they are together more these days and so John is not to be seen around Salducci’s Pizza Parlor as much as in his old single days, or even as much as in his“married” days, the days since he and Jennie became an item a couple of years back.

For that matter Frankie Riley, the leader of the pack, hasn’t been seen lately either, ever since his 247th “break-up" with flame, Joanne, Joanne Doyle. That can only mean one thing; old Frankie is out catting around before Joanne reins him in again. And Chrissie knows, Chrissie McNamara knows damn well that Frankie is on the prowl because about twenty minutes after he got his “walking papers” from Joanne this time he was on the phone to Chrissie seeing if she was ‘available.’ “No dice,” said Chrissie and not because she wasn’t interested in Frankie. A lot of girls were, a little. Except “ball and chain” Joanne history meant that this was just Frankie lark time. Besides Chrissie and Joanne had been friends longer than Joanne had known Frankie and Chrissie liked Joanne, which is not what you could say about most girls who knew Joanne. But this is not about Joanne and so it need not be gotten into here.

What needs to be gotten into though is why Chrissie is ambling into Salducci’s Pizza Parlor at ten o’clock at night, a Thursday school night ten o’clock all by herself. Well, it ain’t for the pizza, although the way Tonio, the zen master pizza maker and owner of the parlor, makes those pizza slather and slither is worth coming in for almost any time. And it ain’t for Peter Paul Markin’s company, no way, not for a long time. Peter Paul is “holding down the fort” just now while his “boss” Frankie is, as is already known, out catting around. He probably already has made a note, a mental note, that Frankie for the 27th time has “struck out” with Chrissie and so maybe she wants his company. No way, no way that way, anyway. Peter Paul and Chrissie have gotten friendlier, or Chrissie has, ever since Peter Paul started getting into the be-bop folk music scene now growing by leaps and bounds in Boston. They actually went to some coffeehouse over on Joy Street in Boston one night with Frankie and Joanne. The latter pair couldn’t wait to leave (probably because Frankie’s calling card, flannel shirt, jeans, work boots, and yah, midnight sunglasses didn’t raise an eyebrow. Half the guys in the place looked just like him, except maybe the sunglasses). But Chrissie and Peter Paul thought it was fantastic. Just no romance, no way, got it.

What does have Chrissie’s attention is one James Joseph Kelly, Fingers Kelly, who is sitting right next to Peter Paul at the moment. Now Fingers Kelly used to have the moniker of "Five Fingers" Kelly and for the squares out there that meant he was a clip artist and for the real squarey squares that meant he took things from stores…without paying. In other words he swiped things. But a couple of juvenile court appearances and some manhandling by James Joseph Kelly, Sr. shorten his moniker to Fingers, fast. Now what Chrissie wants to talk to Fingers about is why, why just a couple of hours ago, did Fingers state to the best of his recollection that he did not want to see one Christine Anne McNamara on Saturday night. And on that night take her to the annual North Adamsville High School “Hi-Jinx”dance.

Now Fingers, Fingers Kelly, is wise enough to the ways of the world, to know that if he doesn’t grab Christine Anne McNamara with both arms when she is “after” him then some other guy (or guys) will be more than happy to do so. See Chrissie, besides being the head cheerleader at North is nothing but a fox. And Frankie, Fingers, hell even Peter Paul know this fact. Tall, brownish blonde hair, a few freckles, nice legs, and a very nice personality (has to be if Peter Paul thinks so) to go with that physical description. And she is interested in lots of things besides corn-ball cheer leading like that folk music stuff that was just mentioned. But Fingers has the freeze on for her.

Fingers is not bad looking, kind of tall, somewhat athletic (you had to be in his former career), not bad to talk to, but is nothing if not just an okay guy. So the number one question, well, really the number two question after how many days will it be before Joanne reins her lover boy, Frankie, in, is why Chrissie is after Fingers so bad. And why Fingers, knowing what he knows about North Adamsville high school guys, is not waiting with bells on to take Chrissie to the dance. Well, you have not been paying attention on that Finger’s part (Chrissie we will get to in a minute). Finger, when he was Five Fingers, always had kale (cash, money, dollars, okay) and was not afraid to spend it. But in his new life as just Fingers he is broke more often than not. And see, he cannot go back to the five fingers way of life because one Senior Kelly will bop him good. And old Senior, while we are at it, is not lending sonny boy any dough (kale, okay) after forking out a ton of money to keep one James Joseph Kelly, Junior out of reform school. So that is the skinny, pure and simple. So if you have any loose change hanging around ship it over Finger’s way, and thanks.

Now Chrissie is another matter. As already mentioned Fingers is okay but just okay so it has to be something else. And it ain’t dough (although she does not know that Fingers is broke, totally broke). And it ain’t the no car for a Saturday night date. She said that she would borrow her father’s car. Even Peter Paul is puzzled by this situation and usually he is clueless about such “high” romance. The only thing anybody has come up with is something that people noticed after Chrissie first’s heavy“parking” date (you know what that is right, nobody is that square) with Fingers (a double date because of Finger’s car-deprivation so it’s not what you think, not back seat all hands and twists sex stuff ). For a couple of days after that she was all dreamy-faced, all glowy and stuff. Humm.

Hint: For the serious squares, the clueless, and any parents, any generation think about the title here.

***From The Brothers Under The Bridge Series-The Stuff Of Dreams-Down Los Gatos Way


From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin:

In the first installment of this series of sketches space provided courtesy of my old 1960s yellow brick road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler, Peter Paul Markin, I mentioned, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod, that I had come across a song that stopped me in my tracks, Brothers Under The Bridge. I had not listened to or thought about that song for a long time but it brought back many memories from the late 1970s when I did a series of articles for the now defunct East Bay Eye (Frisco town, California East Bay, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam veterans who, for one reason or another, could not come to grips with “going back to the real world” and took, like those a Great Depression generation or two before them, to the “jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramp camps located along the abandoned railroad sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of California, mainly down in Los Angeles, and created their own “society.”

The editor of the East Bay Eye, Owen Anderson, gave me that long ago assignment after I had done a smaller series for the paper on the treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam veterans by the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and in the course of that series had found out about this band of brothers roaming the countryside trying to do the best they could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one piece. My qualifications for the assignment other than empathy, since I had not been in the military during the Vietnam War period, were based simply on the fact that back East I had been involved, along with several other radicals, in running an anti-war GI coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and another down near Fort Dix in New Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of my 1960s generation who had clued me in on the psychic cost of the war so I had a running start.

After making connections with some Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys down in L.A. who knew where to point me I was on my way. I gathered many stories, published some of them in the Eye, and put the rest in my helter-skelter files. A while back, after having no success in retrieving the old Eye archives, I went up into my attic and rummaged through what was left of those early files. I could find no newsprint articles that I had written but I did find a batch of notes, specifically notes from stories that I didn’t file because the Eye went under before I could round them into shape.

The ground rules of those long ago stories was that I would basically let the guy I was talking to give his spiel, spill what he wanted the world to hear, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I, like with the others in this current series, have reconstructed this story as best I can although at this far remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said.

Not every guy I interviewed, came across, swapped lies with, or just snatched some midnight phrase out of the air from was from hunger. Most were, yes, in one way or another but some, and the one I am recalling in this sketch from 1979 fits this description, had no real desire to advertise their own hunger but just wanted to get something off their chest about some lost buddy, or some event they had witnessed, or some story that had stuck with them. I have presented enough of these sketches both back in the day and here to not make a generalization about what a guy might be hiding in the deep recesses of his mind.

Some wanted to give a blow by blow description of every firefight (and every hut torched) they were involved in, others wanted to blank out ‘Nam completely and talk of before or after times, or talk about the fate of some buddy, some ‘Nam buddy, who maybe made it back the “real world” but got catch up with stuff he couldn’t handle, or got caught up in some stuff himself that he couldn’t handle, couldn’t handle because his whole blessed life pointed the other way. Pete Allen’s life story fit that latter description, the couldn’t handle part. He just kind of drifted around the West Coast (after spending a little time back home in the East) after he got out of the service, got caught up with some wrong gees, did too much dope and a little time and landed in the “jungle,” the one they set up in Segundo near the arroyo where I met him.

What makes his story different from others, almost uniquely different in some respects, is that he wanted to tell a story that had haunted him for a while that was told to him when he first started frequenting the jungles back east a little in Gallup, New Mexico at the huge jungle camp (which got bigger, much bigger during Native American Inter-Tribals in August) near the old Southern Pacific sidings back in 1973. There he befriended (or was befriended by) an old Mex hobo, Felipe, who had been on the road for almost forty years after the events he related. Felipe had seen good times, bad times, and worse times but no matter what he told his story, the story of his encounter with the legendary Mexican bandit chief , El Lobo back in the 1930s (who even I had heard of when I went south of the border for various, ah, things, okay). Pete felt in respect for his friendship with Felipe that he had to relate the story, to continue Felipe’s work. Why it haunted him (and maybe haunted Felipe too, these things are hard to figure) was whether he too should think twice before pursuing any stuff of dreams that he might have had. Good point. I like to finish up these introductions by placing these sketches under a particular sign; no question Pete’s sign was that of the stuff that dreams are made of.

The Stuff Of Dreams-Down Los Gatos Way

It didn’t start out that way, the stuff of dreams, the search for gold that is, but it sure finished up that way, finished up that way with guys lying face down in some broken unnamed desert arroyo, nobody to mourn them, or cover them over except those fierce desert winds that would make short work of the matter, if that counted. Yah, it didn’t start out that way with pipe dream guys just buying into another guy’s dreams, catching their own fire dreams to get out from under whatever it was they were trying to get out from under from. Trying to brush off the dust of their own small dreams, maybe just trying to get back to square one, gringo Norte Americano square one from whence they came, came south for some reason, or no reason, came south to sunny Mexico. Maybe took up the dream, another man’s dream to get back to some long lost Molly, all bright blue eyes and straw blonde, and a fresh start, and, damn, to get away from that stinking brown-eyed world, that brown dust from the brown roads, those brown-skinned, fierce-looking brown-eyed braceros, and those brown senoritas with their sparkling, dancing brown eyes and their karma sutra tricks (although none of them, the senoritas, would have known that term or the book they came from , just the arts from handed- down cantina mother to daughter practice ), whores, really, who spoiled a man, a gringo man, for blond-haired Mollies if you didn’t get away fast enough. Or maybe they came south for the senoritas , for the brown-eyed senoritas, for the cheap and easy brown-eyed senoritas with the sparking dancing eyes looking for sugar daddy gringos with fierce blues eyes and strange hungers, strange hung-up sex hungers, to get out from under the bracero life. So yah it didn’t start out that way, no way.

Maybe I had better start at the beginning, or at the beginning where my just then road amigo Felipe, who saw the whole thing many years before and lived to tell about it, came into the story and told a bunch of us the story over a windy night camp fire in a jungle camp along the Southern Pacific Railroad just outside of Gallup, New Mexico one night, one 1973 night. Told us about how when he was young he had got caught up with a trio of guys, gringos of course, who were bitten by the stuff of dreams.
It started down in Vera Cruz, like I said down in sunny Mexico, and it started with this gringo, Burl, bumming a cigarette off Felipe who was driving a cab at the time down at the docks where this Burl’s ship, some tramp freighter that had seen better days, the S.S. Corcoran, had just landed. This Burl, after Felipe gave him the cigarette (and a pack of matches to light it with too, damn Felipe should have cross the gee off right there), asked him about hotels, and, more importantly about cantinas and senoritas, stuff like that, just like a million guys have done who have been guy ship bound for too long months since they invented ships. It seemed, contrary to his appearance, four or five days growth on his face, in a time when clean-shaven was the rule, ruffed-up clothes, non-descript worn-out shoes, really sneakers, and smelling, well smelling like he could use a bath, or something, that this guy has some dough coming, coming as back pay off his tramp steamer journey as a ship’s mate. Felipe brightened to this news because now he turned on his tourista guide niceness full blast, offering the guy another cigarette (keep the matches, amigo) and his services as someone who could safely get Mister Burl through the maze of Vera Cruz night life in one piece. Burl agreed and the game was on.

Two weeks later after drinking up half the high-shelf scotch in town, keeping company with half the brown-eyed senoritas at the La Paz whorehouse (nicely named although more hell got raised there, more fortunes got lost, more teeth got knocked out that in the rather placid other precincts of the town) and setting his favorite from the La Paz , Maria (hell, they are all named Maria or Lupe something in cantina- ville), up in an adjoining hotel room for serious pleasure, and after smoking just one too many joints of that high-spirited marijuana grown in some wilds outside of town Burl, Burl Jackson, from Baltimore, U.S.A. was flat broke again, flat broke with no ship heading out since the Corcoran had left the week before without him (and good riddance he said of that old tub in an alcoholic haze one night when Felipe informed him of the ship’s departure), no prospects, no money for the room rent, and by now probably no Maria as well.
While Burl pondered his choices he asked Felipe for a cigarette, and a loan. No dice, Felipe wasn’t born yesterday and was keeping his easily earned dough and so he just pleaded that he had already spent his dough trying to feed his family, gracias though. So Burl would have to bracero/gringo/downtrodden pan-handle the ricos Americanos for a while over at the Central Plaza where they hung out to get a stake up and find another ship if not in Vera Cruz then some other port.

And that is where Burl Jackson met Tim Conway, Tim Conway of Laredo, Texas and also with no dough, no prospects and no place to stay just then but with big dreams, big dreams of easy and cheap brown-eyed mex whorehouse girls, and plenty of them, who would take you around the world for a dollar and a little tip. Jesus, Burl said at this news. He wised the kid up about the cheap part, forget that once those laughing Spanish eyes got under your skin and you set up a one for your easy rider, easy rider woman like he had with Maria, although he left the easy part for the kid to figure for himself. In fact Tim, after some conversation, had sized Burl up as a gringo rico and was ready to put the bite on him. Jesus, again. They talked for a while and kind of got along.
While they were standing on that good Mexican soil trying to figure out if two gringos were better than one this old geezer, this old ancient geezer with a beard like Jehovah, the stink of a guy who had been out in the desert or someplace without a bathtub, long straggly hair, and about six missing teeth drawing a couple of pack mules behind him came by and asked if they were American in some low-down English.“Of course they were Americans, jesus, what did he think they were some brown-eyed braceros,” Tim had wailed out. He then asked them if they were looking for work. “Of course they were looking for work, and what of it.” Burl had shouted out. The old geezer (real name Walter Simons but nobody ever called him anything but Old Geezer according to Felipe who had seen him off and on around town when he came in from the hills for the previous four or five years) had a proposition for the boys if they would trouble themselves to show their faces at the Imperial Hotel about six o’clock that evening after he had cleaned up and had supper. Burl looked at Tim and shrugged his shoulders in disbelieve at the Old Geezer’s address but were non-committal on the appointment.

Needless to say they were, after a fruitless afternoon of not finding anything worthwhile, knocking on the door of Room 216 of the Imperial Hotel at six that evening. And here was the now regal Old Geezer’s proposition. He was an old time prospector (believable) and had hit some pay-dirt, some gold dust pay-dirt, out in the arroyos and foothills around Los Gatos about one hundred and fifty miles away from there toward the interior of sunny Mexico. He needed help to dig for and pan the stuff on an equal basis, each a third share. He didn’t trust the Mex, the dirty braceros that would cut his throat for a dollar and change if he turned his back on them but with gringos he could feel that at least they wouldn’t cut his throat and he had size dup Burl and Tim as okay, okay for what he was offering. No soap though, not that night and not for a few nights more until Burl and Tim were forced into some stinking bracero rooming house with about fifty stinking braceros in a space for twenty when a rain squall forced them indoors. Then they were back at Room 216, hats in hands.

A couple of days later they took off, Tim, Burl, the Old Geezer, four pack mules loaded with supplies and tools for a couple of months work, and Felipe who Burl persuaded the Old Geezer to take along for wages to “keep house” for them. (They kept Felipe in the dark about what they were up to until they got close to Los Gatos but he had kind of figured it out when Tim and Burl kept talking about registering their claim in Tampico. He knew the area as well and the history of a million gringos going for the gold but he just let them play out their hand, like he always did with gringos, because they were kind of trigger-happy when it came right down to it.) Needless to say a couple of gringos one more at home in the seas of the world, the seven seas, and whorehouses like Burl and a raw kid like Tim, who dreamed of whorehouses and keeping his hands lily-white in the bargain sweated, cursed, wanted to turn back about six times, got a little sunstroke, maybe a little desert- addled, maybe snake-bit and insect- bit and twelve other kind of bits for the seven days it took to get to Los Gatos after stumbling, tumbling, mumbling over some rocky arroyos, some saline desert and some ragged foothills. But damn they made it, made camp and prepared for el dorado, yah, big time el dorado if the Old Geezer wasn’t cracked.

Do you need to know the work, the twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day work these tres hombres went through for about a month before they even clawed, scratched, culled a small assay of gold for their troubles, work sleep, eat and not too much to preserve the supplies. No, you can figure that part of the story out, and if you can’t Felipe said even he had helped out just to past the time. Finally that small assay traced down into a bigger lode, yah, they had hit pay dirt. Not big, according to the Old Geezer, who over midnight camp fires would tell them about how many times he had hit pay-dirt, jumped on easy street for a while, then busted out and hit the road again looking for that really big mother lode. This one, also according to his estimates, was not the mother lode but a month’s work would let them ride easy street for a while. Burl and Tim bought the ticket and took the ride, especially Tim, a smart young guy who figured that with his share he would just buy a whorehouse and then he would get his loving free. The Old Geezer laughed, hell, even Burl laughed at the kid’s moxie (and naivetĂ©).
So they worked, worked the lode, worked it good, and plied their takings together one for all, at least at the beginning. Burl, Felipe guessed was the first to get the fever, gold fever, checking each night for an hour, maybe more the weight, and calculating his share, and maybe more than his share after a while when Felipe noticed that fevered look he had seen before when a man had been out in the desert, had suffered privations, and, hell, hadn’t been around the gentle influence of a woman, even a brown-eyed Mex whore, for a while. The he started staying in his tent more, avoiding the nightly gabfest camp fire except to eat, eat quickly and return to his tent. Tim caught it too, caught it as bad, so most nights before they headed out back to Tampico and then Vera Cruz it was only the Old Geezer, sometimes muttering to himself like he had the fever too and Felipe although Felipe had caught a certain look from the geezer that made him realize the old man was playing with his younger companions. Not a good sign.

After a couple of small incidents, incidents that if left to fester would have led to gun play between Burl and Tim no question in their then current state, nothing in the real world really something about the food and how it tasted funny ( a reflection of Felipe, and his culinary skill, if nothing else but fuel for their feud) magnified out in the hills the Old Geezer declared they had been out long enough and it would be best to go back to civilization, divvy up the profits and each head their separate ways. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, Burl and Tim bucked the idea at first wanting pan forever, when the geezer mentioned stray banditos out in the hills who if they found out some gringos were afoot might come and do them all in. That got the boys’ attention and so they broke camp, started heading back. A couple of days out they ran into a couple of stray banditos, fought them off, and began to hunker down on security. Three or four days later coming out of a narrow canyon they were confronted by a bandito force of about twenty desperados, some with they look of career bandits about them, others who looked like the remnants of Pancho Villa’s various armies now free-lancing with whoever paid and fed them.

The leader, a serious guy named El Lobo, a legend in the Mexico night just behind Villa and Zapata in the local hill pantheon and a name known even in places like Tampico and Vera Cruz, known and dreaded by Felipe one he spoke his name, who between spits, told the gringo trio (he did not direct anything, in anger or calm, toward Felipe) that he knew, knew so don’t lie to him, that they had gold and that he wanted half of it to let them go. The three parlayed. Tim and Burl, strung out on gold like men strung out on some unattainable woman, were for fighting it out and moving on quickly, the old man wiser and ready to take half of something, gold something, rather than a hail of lead was ready for compromise. He finally talked them into it, although the arguments were heated and the vagrant smell of gun powder was just below the surface. He called over to El Lobo, rendered the collective decision, went to the pack mule saddle bags, got the goods, passed El Lobo his share, and then went back and joined up with Tim and Burl.

Just then a fusillade of gun fire rang out from the bandito side. Tim fell first, then Burl, and finally the Old Geezer cursing El Lobo’s name. As the bandito army took everything not tied down away, gold, mules, supplies, El Lobo shouted to Felipe, now su companero, and asked if he wanted to join the gang. Felipe said no. To that El Lobo, the blood rising in his face and the thought that tonight at least his men would be fed and bedded indoors in some back road cantina , said-“Tell everyone you see what happened here today, and what will happen to them if they come looking for the oro in El Lobo’s backyard.” And he did.


***Out In The Film Noir Night - The Stuff Of Dreams, Part Two-Down Los Gatos Way-Take Two

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin
It didn’t start out that way, the stuff of dreams, the search for gold that is, but it sure finished up that way, finished up that way with guys lying face down in some broken unnamed desert arroyo, nobody to mourn them, or cover them over except those fierce desert winds that would make short work of the matter, if that counted. Yah, it didn’t start out that way with pipe dream guys just buying into another guy’s dreams, catching their own fire dreams to get out from under whatever it was they were trying to get out from under from. Trying to brush off the dust of their own small dreams, maybe just trying to get back to square one, gringo Norte Americano square one from whence they came, came south for some reason, or no reason, came south to sunny Mexico. Maybe took up the dream, another man’s dream to get back to some long lost Molly, all bright blue eyes and straw blonde, and a fresh start, and, damn, to get away from that stinking brown-eyed world, that brown dust from the brown roads, those brown-skinned, fierce- looking brown-eyed braceros, and those brown senoritas with their sparkling, dancing brown eyes and their karma sutra tricks (although none of them, the senoritas, would have known that term or the book they came from , just the arts from handed- down cantina mother to daughter practice ), whores, really, who spoiled a man, a gringo man, for blond-haired Mollies if you didn’t get away fast enough. Or maybe they came south for the senoritas , for the brown-eyed senoritas, for the cheap and easy brown-eyed senoritas with the sparking dancing eyes looking for sugar daddy gringos with fierce blues eyes and strange hungers, strange hung-up sex hungers, to get out from under the bracero life. So yah it didn’t start out that way, no way.

Maybe I had better start at the beginning, or at the beginning where my just then road amigo Felipe, who saw the whole thing many years before and lived to tell about it, came into the story and told a bunch of us the story over a windy night camp fire in a jungle camp along the Southern Pacific Railroad just outside of Gallup, New Mexico one night, one 1973 night. Told us about how when he was young he had got caught up with a trio of guys, gringos of course, who were bitten by the stuff of dreams.
It started down in Vera Cruz, like I said down in sunny Mexico, and it started with this gringo, Burl, bumming a cigarette off Felipe who was driving a cab at the time down at the docks where this Burl’s ship, some tramp freighter that had seen better days, the S.S. Corcoran, had just landed. This Burl, after Felipe gave him the cigarette (and a pack of matches to light it with too, damn Felipe should have cross the gee off right there), asked him about hotels, and, more importantly about cantinas and senoritas, stuff like that, just like a million guys have done who have been guy ship bound for too long since they invented ships. It seemed, contrary to his appearance, four or five days growth on his face, in a time when clean-shaven was the rule, ruffed-up clothes, non-descript worn-out shoes, really sneakers, and smelling, well smelling like he could use a bath, or something, that this guy has some dough coming, coming as back pay off his tramp steamer journey as a ship’s mate. Felipe brightened to this news because now he turned on his tourista guide niceness full blast, offering the guy another cigarette (keep the matches, amigo) and his services as someone who could safely get Mister Burl through the maze of Vera Cruz night life in one piece. Burl agreed and the game was on.

Two weeks later after drinking up half the high-shelf scotch in town, keeping company with half the brown-eyed senoritas at the La Paz whorehouse (nicely named although more hell got raised there, more fortunes got lost, more teeth got knocked out that in the rather placid other precincts of the town) and setting his favorite from the La Paz , Maria (hell, they are all named Maria or Lupe something in cantina- ville), up in an adjoining hotel room for serious pleasure, and after smoking just one too many joints of that high-spirited marijuana grown in some wilds outside of town Burl, Burl Jackson, from Baltimore, U.S.A. was flat broke again, flat broke with no ship heading out since the Corcoran had left the week before without him (and good riddance he said of that old tub in an alcoholic haze one night when Felipe informed him of the ship’s departure), no prospects, no money for the room rent, and by now probably no Maria as well.
While Burl pondered his choices he asked Felipe for a cigarette, and a loan. No dice, Felipe wasn’t born yesterday and was keeping his easily earned dough and so he just pleaded that he had already spent his dough trying to feed his family, gracias though. So he would have to bracero/gringo/downtrodden pan-handle the ricos Americanos for a while over at the Central Plaza where they hung out to get a stake up and find another ship if not in Vera Cruz then some other port.

And that is where Burl Jackson met Tim Conway, Tim Conway of Laredo, Texas and also with no dough, no prospects and no place to stay just then but with big dreams, big dreams of easy and cheap brown-eyed mex whorehouse girls, and plenty of them, who would take you around the world for a dollar and a little tip. Jesus, Burl said at this news. He wised the kid up about the cheap part, forget that once those laughing Spanish eyes got under your skin and you set up a one for your easy rider, easy rider woman like he had with Maria, although he left the easy part for the kid to figure for himself. In fact Tim, after some conversation, had sized Burl up as a gringo rico and was ready to put the bite on him. Jesus, again. They talked for a while and kind of got along.
While they were standing on that good Mexican soil trying to figure out if two gringos were better than one this old geezer, this old ancient geezer with a beard like Jehovah, the stink of a guy who had been out in the desert or someplace without a bathtub, long straggly hair, and about six missing teeth drawing a couple of pack mules behind him came by and asked if they were American in some low-down English. “Of course they were Americans, jesus, what did he think they were some brown-eyed braceros,” Tim had wailed out. He then asked them if they were looking for work. “Of course they were looking for work, and what of it.” Burl had shouted out. The old geezer (real name Walter Simons but nobody ever called him anything but Old Geezer according to Felipe who had seen him off and on around town when he came in from the hills for the previous four or five years) had a proposition for the boys if they would trouble themselves to show their faces at the Imperial Hotel about six o’clock that evening after he had cleaned up and had supper. Burl looked at Tim and shrugged his shoulders in disbelieve at the Old Geezer’s address but were non-committal on the appointment.

Needless to say they were, after a fruitless afternoon of not finding anything worthwhile, knocking on the door of Room 216 of the Imperial Hotel at six that evening. And here was the now regal Old Geezer’s proposition. He was an old time prospector (believable) and had hit some pay-dirt, some gold dust pay-dirt, out in the arroyos and foothills around Los Gatos about one hundred and fifty miles away from there toward the interior of sunny Mexico. He needed help to dig for and pan the stuff on an equal basis, each a third share. He didn’t trust the Mex, the dirty braceros that would cut his throat for a dollar and change if he turned his back on them but with gringos he could feel that at least they wouldn’t cut his throat and he had size dup Burl and Tim as okay, okay for what he was offering. No soap though, not that night and not for a few nights more until Burl and Tim were forced into some stinking bracero rooming house with about fifty stinking braceros in space for twenty when a rain squall forced them indoors. Then they were back at Room 216, hats in hands.
A couple of days later they took off, Tim, Burl, the Old Geezer, four pack mules loaded with supplies and tools for a couple of months work, and Felipe who Burl persuaded the Old Geezer to take along for wages to “keep house” for them. (They kept Felipe in the dark about what they were up to until they got close to Los Gatos but he had kind of figured it out when Tim and Burl kept talking about registering their claim in Tampico. He knew the area as well and the history of a million gringos going for the gold but he just let them play out their hand, like he always did with gringos, because they were kind of trigger-happy when it came right down to it.) Needless to say a couple of gringos one more at home in the seas of the world, the seven seas, and whorehouses like Burl and a raw kid like Tim, who dreamed of whorehouses and keeping his hands lily-white in the bargain sweated, cursed, wanted to turn back about six times, got a little sunstrokes, maybe a little desert- addled, maybe snake-bit and insect- bit and twelve other kind of bits for the seven days it took to get to Los Gatos after stumbling, tumbling, mumbling over some rocky arroyos, some saline desert and some ragged foothills. But damn they made it, made camp and prepared for el dorado, yah, big time el dorado if the Old Geezer wasn’t cracked.

Do you need to know the work, the twelve, fourteen, sixteen hour a day work these tres hombres went through for about a month before they even clawed, scratched, culled a small assay of gold for their troubles, work sleep, eat and not too much to preserve the supplies. No, you can figure that part of the story out, and if you can’t Felipe said even he had helped out just to past the time. Finally that small assay traced down into a bigger lode, yah, they had hit pay dirt. Not big, according to the Old Geezer, who over midnight camp fires would tell them about how many times he had hit pay-dirt, jumped on easy street for a while, then busted out and hit the road again looking for that really big mother lode. This one, also according to his estimates, was not the mother lode but a month’s work would let them ride easy street for a while. Burl and Tim bought the ticket and took the ride, especially Tim, a smart young guy who figured that with his share he would just buy a whorehouse and then he would get his loving free. The Old Geezer laughed, hell, even Burl laughed at the kid’s moxie (and naivetĂ©).
So they worked, worked the lode, worked it good, and plied their takings together one for all, at least at the beginning. Burl, Felipe guessed was the first to get the fever, gold fever, checking each night for an hour, maybe more the weight, and calculating his share, and maybe more than his share after a while when Felipe noticed a that fevered look he had seen before when a man had been out in the desert, had suffered privations, and hell hadn’t been around the gentle influence of a woman, even a brown-eyed Mex whore, for a while. The he started staying in his tent more, avoiding the nightly gabfest camp fire except to eat, eat quickly and return to his tent. Tim caught it too, caught it as bad, so most nights before they headed out back to Tampico and then Vera Cruz it was only the Old Geezer, sometimes muttering to himself like he had the fever too and Felipe although Felipe had caught a certain look from the geezer that made him realize the old man was playing with his younger companions. Not a good sign.

After a couple of small incidents, incidents that if left to fester would have led to gun play between Burl and Tim no question in their then current state, nothing in the real world really something about the food and how it tasted funny ( a reflection of Felipe, and his culinary skill, if nothing else but fuel for their feud) magnified out in the hills the Old Geezer declared they had been out long enough and it would be best to go back to civilization, divvy up the profits and each head their separate ways. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, Burl and Tim bucked the idea at first wanting pan forever, when the geezer mentioned stray banditos out in the hills who if they found out some gringos were afoot might come and do them all in. That got the boys’ attention and so they broke camp, started heading back. A couple of days out they ran into a couple of stray banditos, fought them off, and began to hunker down on security. Three or four days later coming out of a narrow canyon they were confronted by a bandito force of about twenty desperados, some with they look of career bandits about them, others who looked like the remnants of Pancho Villa’s various armies now free-lancing with whoever paid and fed them.
The leader, a serious guy named El Lobo, a legend in the Mexico night just behind Villa and Zapata in the local hill pantheon and a name known even in places like Tampico and Vera Cruz, known and dreaded by Felipe one he spoke his name, who between spits, told the gringo trio (he did not direct anything, in anger or calm, toward Felipe) that he knew, knew so don’t lie to him, that they had gold and that he wanted half of it to let them go. The three parlayed. Tim and Burl, strung out on gold like men strung out on some unattainable woman, were for fighting it out and moving on quickly, the old man wiser and ready to take half of something, gold something, rather than a hail of lead was ready for compromise. He finally talked them into it, although the arguments were heated and the vagrant smell of gun powder was just below the surface. He called over to El Lobo, rendered the collective decision, went to the pack mule saddle bags, got the goods, passed El Lobo his share, and then went back and joined up with Tim and Burl.

Just then a fusillade of gun fire rang out from the bandito side. Tim fell first, then Burl, and finally the Old Geezer cursing El Lobo’s name. As the bandito army took everything not tied down away, gold, mules, supplies, El Lobo shouted to Felipe, now su companero, and asked if he wanted to join the gang. Felipe said no. To that El Lobo, the blood rising in his face and the thought that tonight at least his men would be fed and bedded indoors in some back road cantina , said-“Tell everyone you see what happened here today, and what will happen to them if they come looking for the oro in El Lobo’s backyard.” And he did.

***Beat Poet’s Corner – The Gangster Poet Cometh – With Gregory Corso’s Destiny In Mind



From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
… a man came running down the stairs of some sad sack, no elevator, long gone, brownstone ready for the wrecker’s’ ball, wild-haired, throwing off devil brown hair that wouldn’t stay down, devil brown-eyed, swarthy brown skin fresh from some Adriatic Sea port dream sunning, smirks, half-dressed, shirt open, pants fly open like maybe he had just finished up some hurried sex with his best friend’s wife (she all alabaster white from an all alabaster white world and so fixated on some dark-skinned kicks to while away some lonely afternoons yet afraid to take on anything more exotic than a rarified specimen of the “white negro”), and that best friend was now walking up Canal Street in 1950s New Jack City ready to be greeted by that ever- loving wife (and maybe grab a little piece of her, a little something that night when he told her that he had seen a vision of Buddha on MacDougall Street and that might stir some kama sutra thoughts) once he walks up the six flights to their honeymoon-like cold water flat, cockroach friendly, the flat that is, not the best friend. Or maybe, a different take, the same wild-haired man, maybe open pants fly open having just come from some boyfriend (hey, it is the Village you know, okay), or stray pick-up back alley after being drip-dried. See , he had that wild-eyed look for that hunger too, that boy hunger, hell for all human hungers if you looked closely, he frantic, muttering, yes, muttering a mile a minute words, machine gun gangster muttering those words, ashes in the mouth words like truth, beauty, age, wisdom, the veda, the Buddha truth, the karma sutra, the act of contrition, six hail marys and this, throw them all out and start fresh, start fresh with the new beat down, beat around, beat six ways to Sunday, beatitude truth.

He, that selfsame man with the tricky zipper, muttering death of god truth, beat down old gringo man god truth, muttering against false prophets (a slew of them, check the Old Testament if you dare) truth, muttering quietly just then some new truth, a truth worth pondering. Making words sing a new way, making the starless night turn into some back alley episode complete with libretto (so maybe it was a boy and not some foreboding alabaster virgin queen in that scene), probably sexual but possibly just a sweet child jack-roll like his, his older corner boy, now home boy, now amigo, now long gone daddy, walking daddy showed him by the numbers, mark the mark, see his moves, seek a dark alley, hit just below the back of the knees, take the roll, and then flee, beautiful, a work of art like some old time three penny beggar’s opera. Then swig some wine, wino, beat juice of light, elixir of the gods, the juice that makes those golden-flecked words sing that new way, that new staccato beat, with a shade of discord between each beat to strike the new age tone, to break, jail-break from old time Eliot coffee spoons and Lowell ennui. And new blasphemy rock three chord beats that defy discord. But don’t tell the foundling starting to accumulate on the ground that. That’s the ticket, just tell them to take the ride.

And so he rode the el, rode it as far as he could out to Far Rockaway and some seamless seas, seven was it, flipped back and rode to the bridge, the GW, picked up the pike and began his merry adventure west, west of Seventh Avenue shadows, west of Village cop-outs, cope-out and stray errant alabaster white wives looking for afternoon kicks and best friends seeking nirvana, and west of sad old wines and cigarette stubs, early morning salvation stubs, relit, and greasy spoon half breakfasts (hold the eggs, hold the toast, hold the bacon, coffee strong, black as that starless back alley night, a small piece of English muffin slathered with marmalade, orange that’s all a wine stomach can hold in the search night), and breath in some fresh new scene, although he had made that trip a few times before, before he met up with some amigos, some kindred, also heading west, and all seeking beat, beat without that dissonance and without the high strung new wave guitar busting old time cool Dizzy jazz all to hell. So west, so Greeley west.
West through Jersey get-away portals, New Jack City get away, get away from nigras (although he himself a white negro, so watch out brother), spics, dagos, greeks, jews, all the them of the teeming city, banished to pure Whitesville, down on splash Jersey shores, then veer left to the Ohios, and that damn hammering of steel, of plate against plate, of meshes and mixes to make a toxic society filled with gewgaws, unrequited loves, and sweaty night miseries, and then move on like those intrepid pioneer wagon boy and girls did when the soil gave out, or the law came too close, or the neighbors too, juts pick up and run, run to cleaner soils, or new soils to damage anyway. West brother west to the Kansases and their wheat stacks and simply good manners. Don’t tarry long there though Aunt Betty has her eye on you, and on your wicked ways, and your obvious daughter lusts, but stop, stop please for homemade pie and beef stews that will put some old hobo olio to shame, Aunt Betty shame as she eyes you for herself out in the lonesome prairie wind night.

Westward to the Rockies and pure snow (no not that snow, heaven-sent snow or hell-bent blind snow) and craggy ridge fantasies in the snow-capped night. Westward more to dinosaur lament caverns and arroyos where the ghost, the no kidding ghost of ancient warrior princes cry out against the white bandito night, cry out vengeance for the stolen lands, the ranchero lands, spitting upon ancient ancestral right. West Winnemucca west better left unsaid standing almost sleep-walking in that downtown bus station at four in the morning trying to pick up some whore, or some dear miscreant Flossie to keep the night dry and a pillow under his head. Yah better left unsaid and in any case he was smelling, New York city boy smelling like some Far Rockaway dream, something that smelled of oceans, of seas, of blue-green flapping waves and be done with dry bone arroyos, rios, montes, and the whole Spanish land claim, Jesus. Then the heaven west, the span, the golden span, shimmering in the blue-grey pacific night (and that was how he was feeling too). Sweet Frisco town, a fresh beginning, fresh currents, fresh be-bop streets unexplored, virgin-like to his touch, Bay Street, Post, California , Geary, home from home as the fog drifted out into the bay. He could write one million gunsel sonnets, two million free verses about the place and still have room for more if he could avoid certain distractions, certain character defects some long ago mother, or mother superior had told him about and then…
… a man came running down the stairs of some sad sack, no elevator, long gone, adobe stone building ready for the wrecker’s’ ball, wild-haired, throwing off devil brown hair that wouldn’t stay down, devil brown-eyed, smirks, half-dressed, shirt open, pants fly open like maybe he had just finished up some hurried sex with his next best friend’s wife and that next best friend was now walking up Post Street in Frisco town ready to be greeted by that ever -loving wife once he walks up the four flights to their honeymoon-like cold water flat, cockroach friendly, the flat that is, not the friend. Or maybe, same wild-haired man, different take, maybe open pants fly open having just come from some boyfriend (hey, it’s Frisco town, okay, land’s end anything goes), or stray pick-up back alley after being drip-dried, he had that wild-eyed look for that hunger too, that boy hunger, hell for all human hungers if you looked closely, he frantic, muttering, yes, muttering a mile a minute words, machine gun gangster muttering those words, ashes in the mouth words like truth, beauty, age, wisdom, the veda, the Buddha truth, the karma sutra, the act of contrition, six hail marys and this, throw them all out and start fresh, start fresh with the new beat down, beat around, beat six ways to Sunday, beatitude truth.

…and hence Gregory Corso.

Friday, March 29, 2013

Out In The Film Noir Night - The Stuff Of Dreams, Part Two-Down Los Gatos Way

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin
It didn’t start out that way, the stuff of dreams, the search for gold that is, but it sure finished up that way, finished up that way with guys lying face down in some broken unnamed desert arroyo, nobody to mourn them, or cover them over except those fierce desert winds that would make short work of the matter, if that counted. Yah, it didn’t start out that way with pipe dream guys just buying into another guy’s dreams, catching their own fire dreams to get out from under whatever it was they were trying to get out from under from. Trying to brush off the dust of their own small dreams, maybe just trying to get back to square one, gringo Norte Americano square one from whence they came, came south for some reason, or no reason, came south to sunny Mexico. Maybe took up the dream, another man’s dream to get back to some long lost Molly, all bright blue eyes and straw blonde, and a fresh start, and, damn, to get away from that stinking brown-eyed world, that brown dust from the brown roads, those brown-skinned, fierce- looking brown-eyed braceros, and those brown senoritas with their sparkling, dancing brown eyes and their karma sutra tricks (although none of them, the senoritas, would have known that term or the book they came from , just the arts from handed- down cantina mother to daughter practice ), whores, really, who spoiled a man, a gringo man, for blond-haired Mollies if you didn’t get away fast enough. Or maybe they came south for the senoritas , for the brown-eyed senoritas, for the cheap and easy brown-eyed senoritas with the sparking dancing eyes looking for sugar daddy gringos with fierce blues eyes and strange hungers, strange hung-up sex hungers, to get out from under the bracero life. So yah it didn’t start out that way, no way.

Maybe I had better start at the beginning, or at the beginning where my just then road amigo Felipe, who saw the whole thing many years before and lived to tell about it, came into the story and told a bunch of us the story over a windy night camp fire in a jungle camp along the Southern Pacific Railroad just outside of Gallup, New Mexico one night, one 1973 night. Told us about how when he was young he had got caught up with a trio of guys, gringos of course, who were bitten by the stuff of dreams.
It started down in Vera Cruz, like I said down in sunny Mexico, and it started with this gringo, Burl, bumming a cigarette off Felipe who was driving a cab at the time down at the docks where this Burl’s ship, some tramp freighter that had seen better days, the S.S. Corcoran, had just landed. This Burl, after Felipe gave him the cigarette (and a pack of matches to light it with too, damn Felipe should have cross the gee off right there), asked him about hotels, and, more importantly about cantinas and senoritas, stuff like that, just like a million guys have done who have been guy ship bound for too long months since they invented ships. It seemed, contrary to his appearance, four or five days growth on his face, in a time when clean-shaven was the rule, ruffed-up clothes, non-descript worn-out shoes, really sneakers, and smelling, well smelling like he could use a bath, or something, that this guy has some dough coming, coming as back pay off his tramp steamer journey as a ship’s mate. Felipe brightened to this news because now he turned on his tourista guide niceness full blast, offering the guy another cigarette (keep the matches, amigo) and his services as someone who could safely get Mister Burl through the maze of Vera Cruz night life in one piece. Burl agreed and the game was on.

Two weeks later after drinking up half the high-shelf scotch in town, keeping company with half the brown-eyed senoritas at the La Paz whorehouse (nicely named although more hell got raised there, more fortunes got lost, more teeth got knocked out that in the rather placid other precincts of the town) and setting his favorite from the La Paz , Maria (hell, they are all named Maria or Lupe something in cantina- ville), up in an adjoining hotel room for serious pleasure, and after smoking just one too many joints of that high-spirited marijuana grown in some wilds outside of town Burl, Burl Jackson, from Baltimore, U.S.A. was flat broke again, flat broke with no ship heading out since the Corcoran had left the week before without him (and good riddance he said of that old tub in an alcoholic haze one night when Felipe informed him of the ship’s departure), no prospects, no money for the room rent, and by now probably no Maria as well.
While Burl pondered his choices he asked Felipe for a cigarette, and a loan. No dice, Felipe wasn’t born yesterday and was keeping his easily earned dough and so he just pleaded that he had already spent his dough trying to feed his family, gracias though. So Burl would have to bracero/gringo/downtrodden pan-handle the ricos Americanos for a while over at the Central Plaza where they hung out to get a stake up and find another ship if not in Vera Cruz then some other port.

And that is where Burl Jackson met Tim Conway, Tim Conway of Laredo, Texas and also with no dough, no prospects and no place to stay just then but with big dreams, big dreams of easy and cheap brown-eyed mex whorehouse girls, and plenty of them, who would take you around the world for a dollar and a little tip. Jesus, Burl said at this news. He wised the kid up about the cheap part, forget that once those laughing Spanish eyes got under your skin and you set up a one for your easy rider, easy rider woman like he had with Maria, although he left the easy part for the kid to figure for himself. In fact Tim, after some conversation, had sized Burl up as a gringo rico and was ready to put the bite on him. Jesus, again. They talked for a while and kind of got along.
While they were standing on that good Mexican soil trying to figure out if two gringos were better than one this old geezer, this old ancient geezer with a beard like Jehovah, the stink of a guy who had been out in the desert or someplace without a bathtub, long straggly hair, and about six missing teeth drawing a couple of pack mules behind him came by and asked if they were American in some low-down English. “Of course they were Americans, jesus, what did he think they were some brown-eyed braceros,” Tim had wailed out. He then asked them if they were looking for work. “Of course they were looking for work, and what of it.” Burl hadshouted out. The old geezer (real name Walter Simons but nobody ever called him anything but Old Geezer according to Felipe who had seen him off and on around town when he came in from the hills for the previous four or five years) had a proposition for the boys if they would trouble themselves to show their faces at the Imperial Hotel about six o’clock that evening after he had cleaned up and had supper. Burl looked at Tim and shrugged his shoulders in disbelieve at the Old Geezer’s address but were non-committal on the appointment.

Needless to say they were, after a fruitless afternoon of not finding anything worthwhile, knocking on the door of Room 216 of the Imperial Hotel at six that evening. And here was the now regal Old Geezer’s proposition. He was an old time prospector (believable) and had hit some pay-dirt, some gold dust pay-dirt, out in the arroyos and foothills around Los Gatos about one hundred and fifty miles away from there toward the interior of sunny Mexico. He needed help to dig for and pan the stuff on an equal basis, each a third share. He didn’t trust the Mex, the dirty braceros thatwould cut his throat for a dollar and change if he turned his back on them but with gringos he could feel that at least they wouldn’t cut his throat and he had size dup Burl and Tim as okay, okay for what he was offering. No soap though, not that night and not for a few nights more until Burl and Tim were forced into some stinking bracero rooming house with about fifty stinking braceros in a space for twenty when a rain squall forced them indoors. Then they were back at Room 216, hats in hands.

A couple of days later they took off, Tim, Burl, the Old Geezer, four pack mules loaded with supplies and tools for a couple of months work, and Felipe who Burl persuaded the Old Geezer to take along for wages to “keep house” for them. (They kept Felipe in the dark about what they were up to until they got close to Los Gatos but he had kind of figured it out when Tim and Burl kept talking about registering their claim in Tampico. He knew the area as well and the history of a million gringos going for the gold but he just let them play out their hand, like he always did with gringos, because they were kind of trigger-happy when it came right down to it.) Needless to say a couple of gringos one more at home in the seas of the world, the seven seas, and whorehouses like Burl and a raw kid like Tim, who dreamed of whorehouses and keeping his hands lily-white in the bargain sweated, cursed, wanted to turn back about six times, got a little sunstroke, maybe a little desert- addled, maybe snake-bit and insect- bit and twelve other kind of bits for the seven days it took to get to Los Gatos after stumbling, tumbling, mumbling over some rocky arroyos, some saline desert and some ragged foothills. But damn they made it, made camp and prepared for el dorado, yah, big time el dorado if the Old Geezer wasn’t cracked.

Do you need to know the work, the twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day work these tres hombres went through for about a month before they even clawed, scratched, culled a small assay of gold for their troubles, work sleep, eat and not too much to preserve the supplies. No, you can figure that part of the story out, and if you can’t Felipe said even he had helped out just to past the time. Finally that small assay traced down into a bigger lode, yah, they had hit pay dirt. Not big, according to the Old Geezer, who over midnight camp fires would tell them about how many times he had hit pay-dirt, jumped on easy street for a while, then busted out and hit the road again looking for that really big mother lode. This one, also according to his estimates, was not the mother lode but a month’s work would let them ride easy street for a while. Burl and Tim bought the ticket and took the ride, especially Tim, a smart young guy who figured that with his share he would just buy a whorehouse and then he would get his loving free. The Old Geezer laughed, hell, even Burl laughed at the kid’s moxie (and naivetĂ©).
So they worked, worked the lode, worked it good, and plied their takings together one for all, at least at the beginning. Burl, Felipe guessed was the first to get the fever, gold fever, checking each night for an hour, maybe more the weight, and calculating his share, and maybe more than his share after a while when Felipe noticed that fevered look he had seen before when a man had been out in the desert, had suffered privations, and ,hell, hadn’t been around the gentle influence of a woman, even a brown-eyed Mex whore, for a while. The he started staying in his tent more, avoiding the nightly gabfest camp fire except to eat, eat quickly and return to his tent. Tim caught it too, caught it as bad, so most nights before they headed out back to Tampico and then Vera Cruz it was only the Old Geezer, sometimes muttering to himself like he had the fever too and Felipe although Felipe had caught a certain look from the geezer that made him realize the old man was playing with his younger companions. Not a good sign.

After a couple of small incidents, nothing in the real world but magnified out in the hills, the Old Geezer declared they had been out long enough and it would be best to go back to civilization, divvy up the profits and each head their separate ways. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, Burl and Tim bucked the idea at first but the geezer mentioned stray banditos out in the hills who if they found out some gringos were afoot might come and do them all in. That got the boys’ attention and so they broke camp, heading back. A couple of days out they ran into a couple of stray banditos, fought them off, and began to hunker down on security. Three or four days later coming out of a narrow canyon they were confronted by a bandito force of about twenty desperados, some with they look of career bandits about them, others who looked like the remnants of Pancho Villa’s various armies now free-lancing with whoever paid and fed them.
The leader, a serious guy named El Lobo, told the trio that he knew, knew so don’t lie, that they had gold and that he wanted half of it to let them go. The three parlayed. Tim and Burl, strung out on gold like a man on some unattainable woman, were for fighting, the old man wiser and ready to take half of something, gold something, rather than lead was ready for compromise. He finally talked them into it. He called over to El Lobo, rendered the collective decision, went to the pack mule saddle bags, got the goods, passed El Lobo his share, and joined up with Tim and Burl. Just then a fusillade of gun fire rang out from the bandito side. Tim fell first, then Burl, and finally the Old Geezer cursing El Lobo’s name. As they took everything away, gold, mules, supplies, El Lobo shouted to Felipe, su companero, and asked if he wanted to join the gang. Felipe said no. To that El Lobo said-“Tell everyone you see what happened here today, and what will happen to them if they come looking for the oro in El Lobo’s backyard.” And he did.