The Legends Of The West-With Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Hardy In Mind

 

 

 

By Zack James

Phil Jackson had his high hat on that night. The night he regaled Josh Breslin with some of his odd-ball and seemingly far-fetched stories as they sat in the Anchor Steam Grille overlooking San Francisco Bay with old time prison Alcatraz lighted up in front of them in the distance. That “high hat” by the way was not Phil wearing a real high hat, he generally as a child of the Kennedy brothers, Jack and Bobby anyway, times wore no hat at all, or trying to high hat Josh, as the old crowd would do somebody but a term that Phil (and Josh) had used when they wanted to talk history. Usually nothing more cosmic than their family histories since neither man unlike the late Peter Markin whom they had both met out here on the West Coast back in the 1960s, in their “hippie days” they liked to call the times, were history buffs. That reference to Markin was not accidental (that is what everybody had called him and had since childhood and it stuck even in hippie days when everybody was changing their names to monikers like Be-Bop Benny and Butterfly Swirl to break with their old lives as the new dispensations hit their generation). They had both met the mad man sainted bastard through travelling on Captain Crunch’s merry prankster yellow brick road converted school bus turned to travelling communal circus/ride/dope den back in that mist of time (“merry prankster” in lower case to distinguish that crowd from the more famous and ground-breaking Ken Kesey-led Merry Pranksters written about by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test).

Josh had been in the summer of 1967, what they called the summer of love in San Francisco when every kind of flower child madness laid over that land by the bay, rather restless and curious as the same time under the influence of having re-read Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, before going to State U after graduation from high school up in Olde Saco, Maine. He had hitchhiked out to see what was what. Josh had met Markin first. Markin himself, under a less august purpose than Josh having had number twenty-seven blowout over some aspect of his life with his hard-bitten mother, had hitchhiked West a couple of months earlier right after the spring session at Boston University was completed from North Adamsville, Massachusetts and picked up the Captain Crunch caravan in Golden Gate Park a few days after he arrived. Josh thereafter in turn had sighted the yellow brick psychedelically-painted bus when it was parked near a small park on Russian Hill and had asked a guy in long hair and beard, Markin, for a joint (marijuana) and he had handed him a huge blunt (another name for a joint, marijuana). And so Josh had joined the caravan (and would take the moniker Prince of Love, reflecting his success with the stray women who also traveled on the bus or who hung out at Golden Gate Park as he travelled along with the brethren).

They had picked up Phil (who would travel under the name Popeye the Sailor for he was forever trying to pick up this long tall thin girl fellow prankster named Olive who always wore a granny dress and sandals and who was always half-stoned on the Captain’s dope or on her medications) just outside of Carmel hitchhiking heading south as they were heading to Big Sur for a big encampment of “youth nation” at Pfeiffer Beach. Phil was a native Californian, having grown up in Richmond on the other side, the East side of San Francisco Bay. He was travelling to San Diego just for the hell of it after school got out for the summer at San Francisco State and decided that the merry prankster bus seemed like as good a place as any to spend his time.

Olde Saco, North Adamsville and Richmond, all working-class towns and they all sons of working class people, was the glue that tied this threesome together, that and the fact of wanting to break out of the rut like a lot of middle class kids, elite college kids, kids who made up the majority of people who would be travelling on the Jade Arrow, the name given to the bus by the Captain, that summer. The Captain, for example, real name Stanley Stevens, Yale Class of 1957 and his girlfriend (or whatever she was since the Captain was always fretting when she ran off on a tryst with some guy, including one time Josh), Mustang Sally, real name Susan Stein, Michigan Class of 1960, were both from upper-middle class families and were on the Coast to “find themselves.”         

That fact about Phil though, that growing up in California as opposed to Maine or Massachusetts, was important for it was the reason that Phil was on his high hat that night with Josh. Back in the 1960s neither Phil nor Josh could have given a “rat’s ass” (Markin’s expression picked up by them) about their family histories, how they got where they were but as they got older, as they headed toward their middle ages they got more interested in how they fit into whatever had made this big old melting pot of a county tick. They were not into going back forever in their family trees to find that they were in the seventh degree related to the King of England and hence had a touch of royal blood but how their forebears scratched the earth on the new continent, what Josh said F. Scott Fitzgerald called that “fresh green breast of land” that was Long Island when the old Dutch sailors came exploring for whatever they were looking for.   

Josh’s family story had been pretty straight forward. His people on his mother’s side, the LeBlancs, had come down in the early twentieth century from Quebec up in Canada when there wasn’t a damn thing going on except extreme poverty on the dinky farms that bordered the Saint Lawrence River for several generations, since they had left France under an unrecorded cloud. They had come down in his grandfather’s time to work in the textile mills in Olde Saco along with streams of other no farm to work farmworkers to create French-American communities in the area-and stay, stay anyway until the mills headed south after World War II, and many to stay until this day. His father’s people, the Breslins, had come over from England sometime in the 1800s also under a cloud. Josh had heard through his father Prescott that the original Breslin had been a poacher and had a choice of exile or the hangman’s noose. He/they had not prospered in the cities and so headed to the wilderness, the wilderness then being the Kentucky territory, down along the Ohio River in the hills and hollows of Eastern Kentucky. Had not prospered there either and some had headed ever westward and others, his father’s branch, had stayed put and lived shabbily in the shacks that dotted the countryside and which have provided many a stirring photograph of samples of Appalachian hill country poverty, white trash mostly. Josh’s paternal grandfather and after him his father when he came of age worked the coalmines when there was work.

Then World War II came or rather the Japanese bombed the hell out of Pearl Harbor, the bastards, and Prescott Breslin decided to take his chances against the Nips (Prescott’s term of abuse) as against wasting away of lung cancer at a young age and joined the Marines with both hands. By war’s end he was stationed at the Portsmouth Naval Base after fighting his share of fighting in the famous Marine-led battles of the Pacific War where he met Josh’s mother at a USO dance in Portland. That was that once they met and soon after got married. They stayed in Olde Saco for no better reason than it was not coal country, Prescott worked in the textile mills when there was work before the mills headed south, raised four boys, and did not prosper.                               

Phil’s story was a little more complicated and a little more interesting since his forbears had come to this country as indentured servants in Boston from England on his mother’s side, the Stuarts, and no there was no relationship to the kingly Stuarts some who had lost their heads, literally, and once freed from their contractual servitude headed South where there was skilled work in the small towns adjoining the cotton plantations. They mainly prospered in a small town way until the American Civil War when between Lincoln freeing the slaves who worked for them and the destruction of the Union armies as they burned and pillaged their way across the south uprooted that whole way of life. Shortly after Appomattox was when Jedidiah Stuart, who had fought under the hard luck, hard-boiled, hard-headed  General Johnston in all his campaigns and survived to tell the tale started the family trek west. He first headed to Louisville, tried his hand at raising horses but couldn’t make a go of it for lack of capital and poor judgment of horse flesh. There he married Mary Lane, and had three children, all boys, by her before she passed on. He left the three boys in the care of his dead wife’s sister and headed west to Missouri then pretty wild country on the edge of the West. He then remarried, this time to Sarah Goode, and had two sons by her. Eventually he sent for the three boys and all five were thereafter raised Sarah. He had tried his hand at running a small salon in Joplin but by the 1880s had busted out again for lack of capital and no way to get any in the general poor economic climate of the times.              

Then one day old Jedidiah snapped, nobody quite knew why but maybe it was just the years of doing the right thing in his eyes and getting nothing for it. He had had his fill of losing propositions, of having no dough and single-handedly robbed the Second National Bank of Joplin in broad daylight. (That would however be the last time that he did such a deed alone.) That was the start of the second trek that would eventually lead to California. It turned out that old Jedidiah was finally good at a profession and over the next several years he robbed many a bank in Missouri, the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Colorado. And he was not alone for as his sons came of age they joined him, started getting known as the Diamond Aces gang since he or one of the boys would leave the ace of diamonds on the teller’s shelf as a calling card. Then one day they tried to rob the First National Bank in Laramie. Jedidiah had been a minute too slow in leaving and was shot dead by some civilian deputy sheriff.

Thereafter two things important to the Stuart westward trek occurred. Randolph Stuart, the eldest son took over the gang, brought in other fast guns and kept to the west side of Laramie, started working the Denver area. He also married Louella Parrish, Phil’s maternal great-grandmother. By around 1900 the Diamond Aces gang was working the other side of the Rocky Mountains, working Reno, Mormon Salt Lake City with its treasures, and the Arizona territory. Then one day Randolph got “religion,” decided to “retire” and he did so disbanding the gang, his brothers going off to find other gangs to join while he bought a cattle ranch on the California border with Nevada. He prospered for a time but a sudden heart attack took him at fifty.           

The other brothers found “work” with the Dalton gang, The Two City gang and other such ventures. The important one here was Damon since he would eventually after being caught in a shoot-out in Gallup, New Mexico trying to rob the hard to rob Southern Pacific train and serving a five year sentence settle in what is now Bakersfield. There he met Laura Lawrence and had a daughter by her before he, maybe restless, maybe just trying to get to the ocean, maybe feeling what that professor from Harvard was talking about, Professor Turner and his thesis about the frontier ending, about the bad boys becoming scarce and mostly filling up the prisons, wound up being shot down in a cross-fire trying to rob the Glendale Bank.

That daughter Lanny would marry Seymour Jackson, a card shark and when he died in a gunfight over cards in Fresno she would marry his brother, Leonard. And Leonard of course would marry Phil’s grandmother. Leonard was a bastard to Lanny by all accounts and eventually took to the China Seas as a sailor on a tramp steamer abandoning her and her son, Marvin, Phil’s father. Phil’s father who was too young to get into World War II must have had that original gene that old Jedidiah cursed the family with, the wandering, restless gene because in the 1950s Marvin ran off with another woman, ran off to Spokane the last anybody had heard and left his mother in the lurch. Phil was raised by her, and eventually she remarried and his step-father, Jeff Hamilton, really raised him.

After reciting his story about his desperado forbears Phil said to Josh that maybe he too had had old Jedidiah’s gene back in the 1960s when he had had that wanderlust that he never really got rid of until he met up again with that long tall Olive in the mid-1970s up in Mendocino and married her. Yeah, Phil Jackson had his high hat on that night with Josh. Josh agreed to.