***Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘50s Song Night- Billie’s Lament-Elvis’ “One Night”

 

 

From The Pen Of The Late Peter Paul Markin

 

With A 2015 Introduction By Sam Lowell

 

If you did not know what happened to the late Peter Paul Markin who used to write for some of the alternative newspaper and magazine publications that proliferated in the wake of the 1960s circus-war/bloodbath/all world together festival/new age aborning cloud puff dream, won a few awards too and was short-listed for the Globe Prize this is what is what. What is what before the ebb tide kind of knocked the wind out of everybody’s sails, everybody who was what I called “seeking a newer world,” a line I stole from some English poet (Robert Kennedy, Jack’s brother, or his writer “cribbed” the line too for some pre-1968 vision book before he ran for President in 1968 so I am in good company.) I will tell you in a minute what expression “the Scribe,” a named coined by our leader, Frankie Riley, which is what we always called Markin around the corner we hung out in together in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor in our hometown of North Adamsville, used to describe that change he had sensed coming in the early 1960s. Saw coming long before any of the rest of us did, or gave a rat’s ass about in our serious pressing concerns of the moment, worries about girls (all of the existential problems angst including about bedding them, or rather getting them in back seats of cars mainly), dough (ditto the girl existential thing to keep them interested in you and not run off with the next guy who had ten bucks to spend freely on them to your deuce, Jesus) and cars (double ditto since that whole “bedding” thing usually hinged on having a car, or having a corner boy with some non-family car to as we used to say, again courtesy of the Scribe via scat bluesman Howlin’ Wolf, “doing the do.” The Scribe though wanted to give it, give what we were felling, you know our existential angst moment although we did not call it that until later when the Scribe went off to college and tried to impress us with his new found facts, his two thousand new found facts about guys like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Like I said we could give a rat’s ass about all that.

 

All I know is that ebb tide that caught Markin kind of flat-footed, kind of made him gravitate back toward his baser instincts honed by every breathe he took as a kid down in the projects where he learned the facts of life, the facts of fellaheen life which is what one of our junior high school teachers called us, called us peasants, called it right too although we were the urban versions of the downtrodden shanty peasants but they were kindred no doubt, is still with us. So maybe being, having been a “prophet, ” being a guy who worried about that social stuff while we were hung up on girls,  dough and cars (him too in his more sober moments especially around one Rosemond Goode), wasn’t so good after all. Maybe the late Markin was that kind of Catholic “martyr saint” that we all had drilled into us in those nasty nun run Sunday catechism classes, maybe he really was some doomed “n----r” to use a phrase he grabbed from some Black Panther guys he used to run around with when he (and Josh Breslin) lived in Oakland and the “shit was hitting the fan” from every law enforcement agency that could put two bullets in some greasy chamber to mow down anybody even remotely associated with the brothers and the ten point program (who am I kidding anybody who favored armed self-defense for black men and women that’s the part that had the coppers screaming for blood, and bullets).

 

Here is a quick run-down about the fate of our boy corner boy bastard saint and about why stuff that he wrote forty or fifty years ago now is seeing the light of day. I won’t bore you with the beginnings, the projects stuff because frankly I too came out of the projects, not the same one as he did but just as hopeless down in Carver where I grew up before heading to North Adamsville and Josh who was as close as anybody to Markin toward the end was raised in the Olde Saco projects up in Maine and we are both still here to tell the tale. The real start as far as what happened to unravel the Scribe happened after he, Markin, got out of the Army in late 1970 when he did two things that are important here. First, he continued, “re-connected” to use the word he used, on that journey that he had started before he was inducted in the Army in 1968 in search of what he called the Great Blue-Pink American West Night (he put the search in capitals when he wrote about the experiences so I will do so here), the search really for the promise that the “fresh breeze” he was always carping about was going to bring. That breeze which was going to get him out from under his baser instincts developed (in self-defense against the punks that were always bothering him something I too knew about and in self- defense against his mother who was truly a dinosaur tyrant unlike my mother who tended to roll with the punches and maybe that helped break my own fall from heading straight down that Markin fate ladder) in his grinding poverty childhood, get out from under the constant preoccupation with satisfying his “wanting habits” which would eventually do him in.

 

Markin had made a foolish decision when he decided to drop out of college (Boston University) after his sophomore year in 1967 in order to pursue his big cloud puff dream, a dream which by that time had him carrying us along with him on the hitchhike road west in the summer of love, 1967, and beyond. Foolish in retrospect although he when I and others asked about whether he would have done things differently if he had known what the hell-hole of Vietnam was all about was ambivalent about the matter. Of course 1967, 1968, 1969 and other years as well were the “hot” years of the war in Vietnam and all Uncle Sam and his local draft boards wanted, including in North Adamsville, was warm bodies to kill commies, kill them for good. As he would say to us after he had been inducted and had served his tour in ‘Nam as he called it (he and the other military personnel who fought the war could use the short-hand expression but the term was off-bounds for civilians in shortened form)  and came back to the “real” world he did what he did, wished he had not done so, wished that he had not gone, and most of all wished that the American government which made nothing but animals out of him and his war buddies would come tumbling down for what it had done to its sons for no good reasons.

 

And so Markin continued his search, maybe a little wiser, continued as well to drag some of his old corner boys like me on that hitchhike road dream of his before the wheels fell off. I stayed with him longest I think before even I could see we had been defeated by the night-takers and I left the road to go to law school and “normalcy.” (The signposts: Malcolm X’s, Robert Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King’s assassinations, hell maybe JFK’s set the who thing on a bad spiral which kind of took the political winds out of any idea that there would not be blow-back for messing with the guys in power at the time, the real guys not their front-men, the politicians; the rising tide of “drop out, drug out, live fast and die young” which took a lot of the best of our generation off giving up without a fight; the endless death spiral of Vietnam; the plotted killings of Black Panthers and any other radical or revolutionary of any color or sex who “bothered” them; and, the election of one master criminal, Richard Milhous Nixon, to be President of the United States which was not only a cruel joke but put paid to the notion that that great unwashed mass of Americans were on our side.)

 

Markin stuck it out longer until at some point in 1974, 1975 a while after I had lost touch with him when even he could see the dreams of the 1960s had turned to dust, turned to ashes in his mouth and he took a wrong turn, or maybe not a wrong turn the way the wheel of his life had been set up but a back to his baser instincts turn which had been held in check when we were in the high tide of 1960s possibilities. (Josh Breslin, another corner boy, although from Olde Saco, Maine who had met Markin out in San Francisco in the summer of love in 1967 and who had also left the road earlier just before me was in contact until pretty near the end, pretty close to the last time in early 1975 anybody heard from Markin this side of the border, this side of paradise as it turned out since Josh who lived out in California where Markin was living at the time confirmed that Markin was in pretty ragged mental and physical condition by then).           

 

Markin had a lot invested emotionally and psychological in the success of the 1960s “fresh breeze coming across the land” as he called it early on. Maybe it was that ebb tide, maybe it was the damage that military service in hell-hole Vietnam did to his psyche, maybe it was a whole bunch of bad karma things from his awful early childhood that he held in check when there were still sunnier days ahead but by the mid-1970s he had snapped. Got involved in using and dealing cocaine just starting to be a big time profitable drug of choice among rich gringos (and junkies ready to steal anything, anytime, anywhere in order to keep the habit going).

 

Somehow down in Mexico, Sonora, we don’t know all the details to this day a big deal Markin brokered (kilos from what we heard so big then before the cartels organized everything and before the demand got so great they were shipping freighters full of cold cousin cocaine for the hipsters and the tricksters and big for Markin who had worked his way up the drug trade food chain probably the way he worked his way into everything by some “learned” dissertation about how his input could increase revenue, something along those lines) went awry, his old time term for something that went horribly wrong, and he wound up face down in a dusty back road with two slugs to the head and now resides in the town’s potter’s field in an unmarked grave. But know this; the bastard is still moaned over, moaned to high heaven.

 

The second thing Markin did, after he decided that going back to school after the shell-shock of Vietnam was out of the question, was to begin to write for many alternative publications (and I think if Josh is correct a couple of what he, Markin, called “bourgeois” publications for the dough). Wrote two kinds of stories, no three, first about his corner boy days with us at Salducci’s (and also some coming of age stories from his younger days growing up in the Adamsville Housing Authority “projects” with his best friend, Billie Bradley before he met us in junior high school). Second about that search for the Great Blue-Pink American Night which won him some prizes since he had a fair-sized audience who were either committed to the same vision, or who timidly wished they could have had that commitment (like a couple of our corner boys who could not make the leap to “drugs, sex, rock and roll, and raising bloody hell on the streets fighting the ‘monster’ government” and did the normal get a job, get married, get kids, get a house which made the world go round then). And thirdly, an award-winning series of stories under the by-line Going To The Jungle for the East Bay Other (published out of the other side of the bay San Francisco though) about his fellow Vietnam veterans who could not deal with the “real” world coming back and found themselves forming up in the arroyos, along the rivers, along the railroad tracks and under the bridges of Southern California around Los Angeles. Guys who needed their stories told and needed a voice to give life to those stories. Markin was their conduit.

 

Every once in a while somebody, in this case Bart Webber, from the old corner boy crowd of our youthful times, will see or hear something that will bring him thoughts about our long lost comrade who kept us going in high school times with his dreams and chatter (although Frankie Riley was our leader since he was an organizer-type whereas Markin could hardly organize his shoes, if that). Now with the speed and convenient of the Internet we can e-mail each other and get together at some convenient bar to talk over old times. And almost inevitably at some point in the evening the name of the Scribe will come up. Recently we decided, based on Bart’s idea, that we would, if only for ourselves, publish a collection of whatever we could find of old-time photographs and whatever stories Markin had written that were still sitting around somewhere to commemorate our old friend. We have done so with much help from Bart’s son Jeff who now runs the printing shop that Bart, now retired, started back in the 1960s.

 

This story is from that first category, the back in the day North Adamsville corner boy story, although this one is painted with a broader brush since it combines with his other great love to write about books, film and music. This one about music, about doo wop, women’s side which always both intrigued him and befuddled him since the distaff side lyrics (nice combination term that Markin would have appreciated especially that distaff thing for women who also as this piece will speak to, befuddled him, befuddled him straight up). It had been found in draft form up in Josh Breslin’s attic in Olde Saco, Maine where he had lived before meeting Markin in the great summer of love night in 1967 and where he had later off the road stored his loose hitchhike road stuff and his writerly notebooks and journals at his parents’ house which he had subsequently inherited on their passings. We have decided whatever we had to publish would be published as is, either published story or in draft form. Otherwise, moaning over our brother or not, Markin is liable to come after us from that forlorn unmarked grave in that Sonora potter’s field and give us hell for touching a single word of the eight billion facts in his fallen head.     

 

Here is what he had to say:                        

 

 

Billie, William James Bradley, comment:

 

Yah, I know I haven’t talked to you in a while like I was supposed to. I was supposed to tell you all about Markin’s, Peter Paul Markin's, my best friend over Adamsville Elementary School, ill-fated attempts to single-handedly close the space gap they keep talking about ever since the commies put that Sputnik satellite up in orbit last year. I will have to put that on hold for now, because I still kind of broken up about something. See I got caught up, well I might as well just come out with it, with woman trouble, alright girl trouble okay. Some of you may know about how old best buddy Peter Paul tried to used Jerry Lee Lewis to cut my time with Laura, Laura Doyle. Ya Laura, the hottest frill in school, and maybe in this dead old town if you just count twelve or thirteen year old girls. And for right now all that counts, anyway. Got it.

Oh you think that Peter Paul, old best pal but definitely strictly junior varsity when it comes to the women, ah, girls took Laura away from me. Jesus, are you kidding? Come on now, if you know the story then you know that’s a joke, and if you don’t you should still know it is a joke. Hell, I swept Laura back even before the next school dance. I just let, once I figured out that Laura was really dazzled more by Jerry Lee’s hopped-up piano on High School Confidential than Peter Paul’s book shuffle dancing, nature take its course and she was back in my arms before you knew it. Maybe I will tell you the details of that one sometime but unlike that space thing, that Markin single-handed space thing, don’t hold me to telling you that story. Just say that nature is one thing you can’t escape from, nature and the king of the rock night around here, me, putting on his charm, his high Elvis charm and it was all over. Markin’s white flag was flying all over the place almost before it began.

No, what has me down in the dumps, seriously down in the dumps is that Laura moved  away from the neighborhood a couple of weeks ago. Now I don’t know if Markin explained what this “projects” neighborhood thing is here down in Adamsville but it started out with guys like Markin’s father Prescott (a good guy although he is nothing but a Protestant, a Southern Baptist or something like that, but not a Roman Catholic like most of us here, and definitely not Irish like most of us too, but everybody likes him even William James Bradley Senior, my father, and he doesn’t like anybody usually, anybody without a beer bottle in his hand giving it to him anyway) and my father coming back from the war, World War II, and needing some housing, some cheap housing to hold them over until better times came along. And that’s how it worked for lots of people, well, except for Markin’s father and mine, who seem are going to be here forever and you can forget the better times. Well the ship finally came in for Laura’s father, a veteran like Prescott and mine, and so they moved to New Hampshire to some better place in the country or something. Laura showed me a picture of the place and it looked pretty good.

But see here is the bitch, excuse my language. No question Billie, William James Bradley, is strictly a love ‘em and leave guy. I have had plenty of girlfriends already, most of them sticks, no shapes, if you know what I mean, eleven and twelve year sticks, maybe one or two ten, sticks like Theresa, Karen and Donna (Cool Donna O’Toole, not my older sister Donna who is no stick but who I don’t talk to lately, if I can help it, what with her not liking anything in the world just because I like it). Laura though was my first step-up not stick girl, with a nice shape, a shape like a woman, or trying to be, and it showed, the trying part. Definitely something to invest some time in, some Billie time, and I did.

Here is where the bitch part comes in. Not only was Laura smart, and had those curves, that shape I just told you about. But as it turned out she had some great kind of kiss, long kisses, longer than any of the stick girls, way longer. And Laura was not afraid, once I put on the charm, to let me feel her up. I am not bragging and she is gone far away and so I am not talking behind her back but a few times, about four or five, she and I well, we acted like adults that way. And it wasn’t all me pushing either. See I knew that from my sister Donna, when we were talking more, that girls like this kind of stuff as well as guys do although they usually don’t let on. So, if you excuse me, I am kind of down in the dumps because I will now be left with just the sticks. And you know they don’t go for that sex stuff, or even think about it, or maybe even dream about it like it was a mortal sin. And maybe it is but don’t tell me that, or Laura.

And do you know how we set the mood for our fooling around once Laura got over that one-hit Jerry Lee thing? Well, I’ll give you a hint. A guy from Mississippi with long sideburns and a wicked sneer that made all the girls act crazy, and women too. Sure, Elvis. But not just any Elvis song. One Night. That was OUR song. And if you think about the lyrics a minute it talks about a guy being lonely, finding the right girl and making plans for the future. That guy was me, me with Laura because, and just ask Peter Paul, otherwise I am a love ‘em and leave ‘em guy. But now she’s gone, gone to some freaking farm country and will probably wind up showing some hayseed a good time, if you know what I mean. But, as my father s ays, says all the time-“that’s the breaks, kid.”

 

See, now that I am over my period of mourning, two weeks is enough for any girl, shape or no shape, and I am talking to Peter about different records I might as well tell you what I discovered in checking up on history, Elvis history, what else? That One Night thing was strictly kid’s stuff, goodie, goodie Ed Sullivan, and good parenting seal of approval kid’s stuff to make us act just like grown-ups. Find a girl or guy, make plans, settle down and maybe listen to Elvis all day and all night until we are old, like thirty maybe. Square, very square, if not just plain cube.

There is the real thing though and I can hardly wait to try it out on my next chick, my next love ‘em and leave ‘em chick. I found a recording up at Benny’s Record Shop in Adamsville Square that Elvis recorded that has the same beat as One Night but with different lyrics, One Night Of Sin. Yah, that’s more like it, more like real Elvis, more like Billie, William James Bradley, king of the rock night around here. And guess what? I have been noticing that Donna O’Toole, Cool Donna O’Toole is starting to have some shape, some woman’s shape, or trying to and maybe I‘ll give her another chance. Peter Paul, mad man Peter Paul Markin, heard that Donna cried no tears, no tears at all, when Laura headed north. I know one thing for sure I am going to make One Night Of Sin my song, and I don’t mind paying for my sins after. Got it.

*****

One Night Of Sin lyrics

One night of sin, yeah

Is what I'm now paying for

The things I did and I saw

Would make the earth stand still

Don't call my name

It makes me feel so ashamed

I lost my sweet helping hand

I got myself to blame

Always lived, very quiet life

Ain't never did no wrong

But now I know that very quiet life

Has cost me nothing but harm

One night of sin, yeah

Is what I'm now paying for

The things I did and I saw

Would make the earth stand still

Always lived, very quiet life

Ain't never did no wrong

But now I know that very quiet life

Has cost me nothing but harm

One night of sin, yeah

Is what I'm now paying for

The things I did and I saw

Would make the earth stand still