From The Brothers Under The Bridge Series- Jamal Pratt’s Personal Peace Treaty

 

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. 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. Jamal Pratt’s story fit that description, the couldn’t handle part. He just kind of drifted around the West Coast (after spending a minute back home in the East) after he got out of the service, got caught up with some wrong geeks, did too much dope and a little time and landed in the “jungle,” the one they set up in Westminster after being herded out of Compton by the cops. What makes his story different from others, almost uniquely different, is that he was one of the very few black guys who drifted into the camps. Maybe it was a racial thing like the rest of society although nobody messed with Jamal or did any but welcome a fellow broken spirit but black guys just didn’t show up in the jungles as a rule. Now that I think of it the race card probably did have something to do with it but more about where guys, veterans, would hang, and how they would hear about some brothers under the bridges where they were. I like to finish up these introductions by placing these sketches under a particular sign; no question Fritz’s sign was that of his personal peace treaty with the world.
*******
Jamal Pratt, Boy’s English High School Class of 1965, was crazy to go into the military right after high school come June, a plan that he had been mulling in the back of his mind for the previous couple of years. In addition to that intense desire to prove his manhood, his righteous black manhood, to prove that he had what it took to step off with the tough guys, the tough guys when and where it counted, he was having troubles with Ma at home (rolling stone Pa, a blur when young, was long gone, gone with some other woman in some other town as far as his mother and his paternal grandmother knew).

You know the steady drumbeat of what are you going to do with your life (he had only vaguely alluded to that service career which she might have freaked at if he explained it in too much detail), why were you hanging out with who you were hanging out with, don't you know those corner boys of yours will just get you in trouble (in fact she was only about half right about that since Junior was headed for college and Roy the Boy had military ideas too, although Jesse and Preston were slated to do time, black time, for some cheap jack robberies) , the universal mother drill. Moreover he had no steady girlfriend since Sheila had moved back down south with her grandmother after her parents split up and he was just keeping his head above water when it came to that corner boy midnight shifter stuff his mother kept harping on (he was under Jesse’s spell in particular just then). He was desperately in need of a change of scenery, no question.

Besides he wanted, English High proud wanted (the glass case in the front lobby exhibited many of the servicemen and others who had distinguished themselves in service to the country in the long line of campaigns this country has conducted as befitted the oldest public high school in the country, both fact drummed in the boys from day one of grade nine), to do his duty for his country against the communist menace that it was facing, besides big dog Red Russia, from a place called Vietnam, a place where, from all the reports, the citizenry was growing wild, and getting wilder and would take down the whole region with it. That, of course was part of it, part of what any red-blooded American, black or white, feared and Jamal thought rightfully so, although he was loose, pretty loose, on exactly what the hell was happening there. The big part though was that Jamal Pratt was smitten by a John Wayne Army Special Forces action film, The Green Berets, having seen it several times and having bored, bored there was no other word for it, his corner boys as they hung around nights in front of his apartment house over on the corner of Washington Street and Geneva Avenue in the high Roxbury neighborhood of Boston.

What got to Jamal was how smooth these guys were, these Special Forces guys (and how they he heard also got plenty of action from the girls around North Carolina and places like that who were ready to do just about anything to get their kicks with a Green Beret), how they were able to take on about ten gooks (yes, that was the term he used for them and a term of common usage, Charlie only came later when the deal went down in –country, and the more respectful Mr. Charlie even later) and whip their sorry asses before they knew what hit them, about how they saved little rice-growing peasant village after little rice-growing peasant village when those crummy cowardly commie bastards tried to stake out their claim, and about how cool their weapons were that made quick victories possible (especially that quick-action M-16 that every guy got to carry, later he would pray, pray to high heaven for a sweet AK-47 that Mr. Charlie had at his disposal when his goddam M-16 would jam at the wrong freaking time ).He wanted in, wanted in bad on that action, and since he had not planned to go to college anyway for lack of money and interest he figured that when he signed up down at the recruiting station on Tremont Street he would try his luck as a Green Beret recruit even though his physical aspect (thin and short) was just inside the stiff Special Forces regulations. He figured if that didn’t work out, although he was pretty sure he had the stuff that the Green Berets were made of, he would pick a skill school, maybe carpentry or plumbing like his uncle, and be all set for when after he got out.

Well Jamal’s dream, like a lot of things, and not just black things, in this wicked old world, didn’t pan out, the Green Beret part (strangely he couldn't pass the hearing test, although, strangely too it did not disqualify him from the military as a whole), although he did gain a skill school, not exactly the one he had planned on, partly any way. He was assigned to be 11-Bravo, a grunt, a foot soldier, cannon fodder (although that thought term only came later, grunt was the word his used to his friends back on the block when he came home on leave the first time). He did take advantage of an opportunity to go to jump school, paratrooper school, down at Fort Benning in Georgia and was thereafter sent to Fort Bragg (where the Special Forces units were also located) down in North Carolina to be part of the 82^nd Airborne Division.

As luck would have it 1966 was a year that the action was getting hot and heavy in Vietnam and so units, including his unit, of the 82^nd were ordered to that hot spot as President Johnson acceded to every request from the general in charge, General Westmoreland, for more and more troops (that’s when he first heard the term cannon fodder but he did not connect it with himself then). As stories started coming back in about the actual fighting situation in Vietnam and as he gathered from the training he had received in how to kill gooks by the score (although that Mr. Charlie designation and constant rumors about how the night belonged to him was becoming more and more the term of usage among his fellow soldiers whatever  term was being used on the streets or in the barrooms) Jamal started getting more anxious, anxious for a very good reason since he had met a girl, Tonya, from Fayetteville, the town outside the fort, and they had plans to marry and all. (Apparently girls, girls around Fayetteville anyway, were just as happy to get their kicks with airborne guys as with Green Berets or any other elite military units but that attraction is a question for another time).

Jamal did his time in 'Nam, did his rotation (a year and a month’s R&R in Hawaii where Tonya met him on the quiet since she wasn’t supposed to do so), although he never did want to talk about it that much, about the killing (the constant firing part, the fields of fire part,  although he would go on and on about that damn jamming M-16 and when he complained about it being told by the sergeant that he must not have cleaned it properly, Jesus, he could clean it in his sleep), about the burning down of villages to save them (although he never asked the reason for doing so he just heard that some colonel from his brigade had said that was the reason), about having black sweats every night every single fucking night on the perimeter waiting for Mr. Charlie to come back and take his back (and some black sweat nights later in the “real world” too, for a while), and a few things he swore he would never tell anybody about what he had done there, about what he had seen done there, and about who these peasants really were anyway.

What he did want to talk about was the sea-change in his own attitude, him and some of the brothers (a few white guys too but not from the 82^nd they, the white guys anyway, were still gung-ho), about how Cassius Clay turned Mohammed Ali was right-“that no Viet Cong ever called him nigger,” that he had no quarrel with those yellow-skinned people, that this red scare thing was a white man’s idea, a white man’s war, taking down poor black, brown, yellow-skinned peoples and making them like it, or trying to make them like it. He read some stuff given to him by a guy, a fellow soldier, whose brother was what he called a Black Panther, a black hell-raiser out on the streets of Oakland in California, some stuff by a guy named Fanon, a West Indian guy, a doctor who had been all wrapped up helping bring down the French in Algeria (the same French had been kicked out of Vietnam by Mr. Charlie he found out when he started looking into stuff. Some of it made sense, some just flat-out didn’t (like the hokey black nation thing, he already knew about what that looked like, just walk down Washington Street and Geneva, Jesus.  

Well, when he got back to the "real world" he and a few brothers decided, after hearing their unit might be going back to take on Mr. Charlie again , that they didn’t like it, didn’t like it enough to say something about it, say it out loud, and say it in public. At that point, that 1968 point, especially after Charlie went wild during his Tet earlier in the year, a number of guys, dog soldiers like him, were raising hell, white guys too, but mainly brothers because wouldn't you know the brothers were taking an immense amount of the burden in all those hellish fire-fights that was burning up the dreaded Vietnamese countryside. And so they wound up, fistfuls of service combat decorations and all, in that dreaded Fort Bragg stockade for a while before some publicity-conscious general decided that the best thing to do was to get him and the brothers out, give them undesirable discharges and be done with it. He didn’t like the deal but he took it (he would later fight to change it, get it upgraded when that was possible). He had had enough of Mister’s war, enough of killing, and enough of losing everything he held dear (his Fayetteville girl heeding her army father left him in the lurch too) but he had made his peace, his personal peace treaty with the world…

 

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin -From The “Brothers Under The Bridge” Series-“ Buddy’s War”

Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:

As I mentioned in the first installment of this series, provided courtesy of my old yellow brick road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler, Peter Paul Markin, who seemed to think I still had a few things to say about this wicked old world, recently, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod I came 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 (California, 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.”

These sketches have been done on an ad hoc basis, although the format of this story here follows those of the “Brothers Under The Bridge” series previously posted .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 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 heard, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I, like with the others in this series, have reconstructed this story here 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 1978 sketch 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. 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), others wanted to blank out ‘Nam completely and talk of before or after times, and as here some, many actually, wanted to mourn some comrade lost in the fog of memory. This is Rick Atwood’s story, or actually, Gerald (Jerry) Jenkins’ story. We know that it ends in some black marble tear-filled inscription down in Washington, D.C. but it didn’t start that way. I like to finish up these introductions by placing these sketches under a particular sign; no question Jerry Jenkins’ sign was that of the “buddy’s war”:

Jerry and I had grown up in Steubenville, that’s in Ohio right along the Ohio River, okay. We lived over in the Five Points neighborhood near the river, not a bad place to grow up with plenty of stuff to do on the river where we went whenever we had a chance. We built rafts and stuff in summer and dreamed of going to the ocean one time except we got caught on a river bend snag and never did get all that far. Yes, Jerry and I were thick as thieves (including an occasional clip of stuff from Ben Franklin’s, the big store in town that had plenty of stuff we needed). From about third grade on at Anderson Elementary all the way through to high school at Baron Von Steuben High we were together. Guys we hung out with in front Of Molly’s Variety, our local corner hang out, used to kind of fag-bait us, nothing serious like with real fags but still it bothered us. People were surprised when we showed up at our high school prom with two the hottest honeys in our class, the class of 1966.

Neither Jerry nor I were really students so we figured we would go to work right out of high school over at London’s Tool and Die, the biggest employer around, make some money and head out west, or somewhere not Steubenville. We weren’t political or anything like that, hippies, but just wanted to get the dust of Steubenville off us. We really didn’t pay too much attention to what was going on in the world. Yah, we knew there was a war on in Vietnam, Christ who didn’t with it blasting the airwaves every night but it was like not something we thought about that much. Until Jerry got his draft notice in early1967. Then panic set in. Not about going or not going into the service but about what that would do to our plans for going west.

So here is how crazy we were. I figured being just slightly younger than Jerry that my draft notice would come pretty soon so we called up the lady at the draft board and asked if we could go in the Army together. She solemnly told us that this situation was the luck of the draw and that if we wanted to
insure that we could join together we would have to enlist and take part in the “buddy system” being offered by the Army as an inducement for enlistments. Of course, as you know, the draft meant two years but enlisting meant three. We talked it over for days and finally after figuring out that we could learn a skill, go to school later maybe on the G.I. Bill, and that anyway that war was likely to be over soon we decided to enlist. And so in early March 1967 we went the recruiting station and signed up.

Now I am not saying that the Army misled us, although they did, but we had signed up for mechanic’s school and that is what we thought we were going to be doing after we finished basic training at Fort Gordon (that’s in Georgia near Augusta where they have the Masters’ golf tournament every year). But see 1967 instead of the war being over was just heating up to a new level and the war was churning up guys and materials at a fast rate so we wound up as 11 Bravos, infantrymen, cannon fodder, training down in Fort McClellan in sweaty Alabama (near Anniston). So it will come as no surprise to anyone that once we finished that training and with a little time at home before we left we were heading for ‘Nam in October 1967.

Let me tell you, Jerry and I, I don’t know if it was liked being soldiers, but we were good at it. Jerry especially. We aced all the training stuff. We marched like crazy in all weathers laughing (although I hated the heat in Alabama and ‘Nam too) and were made training company platoon guides. They wanted Jerry to go to Office Candidate School (OCS) but he nixed that because I hadn’t passed the exam as well. What we also knew after seeing some of the lamos, misfits, court-enforced enlistees, and the like that we were very glad that we had joined up together. We knew we had each other’s back if anything happened.

And it did. We were assigned to a unit of the 25th Division in the Mekong Delta after we arrived in country in mid-October. This was just before, and maybe if my history is right, could have been part of the build-up to Tet, the famous offensive that the North Vietnamese and their South Vietnamese supporters put together in early 1968. Hell, all I know is that we had our hands full just trying to keep that supply line from the north, the Ho Chi Minh trail, bottled up.

One day, after a few weeks in the field, we were crossing a river, hell they called it a river on the map but compared to real rivers it was maybe a brook or creek, when we took some heavy fire. We started crossing like crazy to get out of the line of fire. Just as we reached the embankment Jerry took one, more than one I later found out, near the heart. He slumped down as I rushed over to him crying out like a mad man for a medic to help him. I could see thought that he was fading, fading fast. Before he passed though he whispered to me that somehow being near a river like when we were kids made things easier. Then he started to mention the raft…

[Rick, according to my notes, could not continue on with his story as he welled up with tears. A little later he mentioned to me that he was sorry that he could not complete the story, that it was still several years later too hard to fathom. He did say that was the last time he saw Jerry as the company had to move out in pursuit and the job of taking care of the dead and wounded fell to the medics left behind. He also told me that he only went home to Steubenville after his time was up once to throw a flower in the Ohio River for his old comrade and then left. Like he said it was just too hard. Sometime in late 1985 I was passing through Steubenville on my way to some conference down south and stopped at the city hall. Not far away was the inevitable memorial to those from Steubenville who had served in Vietnam all polished and pretty. There I saw the name Gerald F. Jenkins-1948-1967 and thought of Rick and that flower he tossed into the nearby Ohio River to his buddy.-JLB]

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- From The “Brothers Under the Bridge” Series- Jeanbon Leclerc’s Thunder Road

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Bruce Springsteen performing his classic Thunder Road.

Thunder Road Lyrics

Artist: Bruce Springsteen
Album: Born To Run

The screen door slams, Mary's dress waves
Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays
Roy Orbison singing for the lonely
Hey, that's me and I want you only
Don't turn me home again, I just can't face myself alone again
Don't run back inside, darling, you know just what I'm here for
So you're scared and you're thinking that maybe we ain't that young anymore
Show a little faith, there's magic in the night
You ain't a beauty but, hey, you're alright
Oh, and that's alright with me

You can hide 'neath your covers and study your pain
Make crosses from your lovers, throw roses in the rain
Waste your summer praying in vain
For a savior to rise from these streets
Well now, I ain't no hero, that's understood
All the redemption I can offer, girl, is beneath this dirty hood
With a chance to make it good somehow
Hey, what else can we do now?
Except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair
Well, the night's busting open, these two lanes will take us anywhere
We got one last chance to make it real
To trade in these wings on some wheels
Climb in back, heaven's waiting on down the tracks

Oh oh, come take my hand
We're riding out tonight to case the promised land
Oh oh oh oh, Thunder Road
Oh, Thunder Road, oh, Thunder Road
Lying out there like a killer in the sun
Hey, I know it's late, we can make it if we run
Oh oh oh oh, Thunder Road
Sit tight, take hold, Thunder Road

Well, I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk
And my car's out back if you're ready to take that long walk
From your front porch to my front seat
The door's open but the ride ain't free
And I know you're lonely for words that I ain't spoken
But tonight we'll be free, all the promises'll be broken

There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away
They haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets
They scream your name at night in the street
Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet
And in the lonely cool before dawn
You hear their engines rolling on
But when you get to the porch, they're gone on the wind
So Mary, climb in
It's a town full of losers, I'm pulling out of here to win
*************
Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:

As I mentioned in an earlier entry in this series, courtesy of my old yellow brick road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler, Peter Paul Markin, who seems to think I still have a few things to say about this wicked old world, recently, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod I came 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 (California, 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, tramps 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.”

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 1979 sketch had an off-beat story that brought him down to the ravines. But see he, Jeanbon Leclerc (the bon part after Jean is organic for those of us who trace some French-Canadian [ F-C] Downeast Maine heritage, mine via my mother Delores, nee LeBlanc), out of the lowland white clay back water potato road Calais night (north of my hometown Olde Saco, way north and don’t pronounce it Calay, not if you if you don’t want an argument) , did not want to talk about ‘Nam, about his war- weary troubles in the “real world” or about how he got himself hoboed up a continent away. No he wanted to talk about the time before Vietnam, 1966 time, the time when he was the max daddy of the Calais (Callus, and he drawled it out just that way) night down on Thunder Road (my term) and about how he “won” Diana Dubois away from all the Podunk corner boys. The story that accompanies the song to this little piece, Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road, is written under that same sign.

I should note again since these sketches are done on an ad hoc basis, that the format of the story here follows those of the “Brothers Under The Bridge” series previously posted .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 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 heard, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I, like with the others in this series, have reconstructed this story here as best I can although at this far remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said. This is Jeanbon Leclerc’s short, breathless story, the story of a soldier born under the sign of that blasted Thunder Road:

Hell, I don’t know when I first started fooling around with cars, putting parts together to make some heap that would run for a while and then daddy would sell it, or trade it for whiskey and I would have to put another one together. That happened five, six times anyway. I do know that I was running the back roads in some kind of car when I was maybe twelve or thirteen. And no I didn’t have a license, hell, which needed a license in the back country.

I know for sure though that I was a lot more interested in cars than girls for a long time until I got my ’64 green Mustang put together and I had to be interested in girls, or I couldn’t drive the streets of Calais. That’s way up in Maine right along the Canadian border and I am F-C and Mainaic proud too or was, before ‘Nam. But I already told you I don’t want to talk about that, that ‘Nam part. I want to talk, and you said I could talk about anything I wanted to, about when I was the king of the road, back roads anyway, and they called me; she called me her Rock and Roll Johnnie. And she, the she I am talking about was Diana Dubois, the girl who made me interested in girls more than cars, almost.

It really doesn’t take much these days, these old time memory L.A. smogged in days, to have some snippet come swirling out of the air, some caught phrase in a passing conversation, some half-glanced word mentioned on some media outlet, some fragrance smelled from long ago soaps, perfumes, downy billows, to get me into that frame of mind to speak of old time Calais and Diana now that she is long gone and I am stuck here under this f-----g ravine. That’s what happened to me when you mentioned about the “chicken runs” you used to go on with your corner boy down at Olde Saco Beach on Saturday nights. Yah, we had them too up in Calais and we hung out, when not all-out fixing up our cars, in front of Jake’s Pool Hall over on East Main Street. [Really Route 1, the end of U.S. Route 1-JLB.] That was the Calais of the 1960s dying textile mills, of various working- class rites of passage, of teenage this and that, and most of all of the French-Canadian ethos, pathos, and bathos that permeated the town. And of course, of F-C loves, lost and found.

That stuff brought to mind my mad passion for fast cars, fast Mustangs a specialty, and my fate. Strange to think of now since I haven’t even owned a car of any kind of a couple of years. What it really brought to mind though was about, Diana Dubois, who had been a class mate of mine at Calais High School (I never finished so don’t ask me my graduation year, it did not happen) who one Jeanbon Leclerc “stole” with his fast cars, and fast hands in 1966 (exact date and month unknown, Christ what day is it today? I have trouble enough with that.).

I had better start at the beginning otherwise you will accuse me of puffing stuff up, or something like that. Yes, she had to be a dizzy blonde (don’t make anything out of that I just had, and have, when I am sober enough to get cleaned up and have a yearning for women have a preference for non-dizzy brunettes as a rule) and yes, she looked good in an early 1960s cashmere high school sweater. And yes, she had nice legs and such. But mostly she had six gallons of personality and, well, a smiling interest in me, or rather what I had to ride in those high school days. And what I had to say. See I was what they called an alienated youth , a beatnik they called me in Podunk Calais just because I tried to be the spitting image of Jean Dean with maybe a The Wild Ones Marlon Brando thrown in.

And what I had to say in those days was almost every arcane fact I could find out about the “beats.” You know on the road Jack Kerouac, om-ing Allen Ginsburg, doped-up drugstore cowboy William S. Burroughs and most of all, mad monk, mad cosmic traveler Neal Cassady. [The real life model for Dean Moriarty in that on the road Kerouac search for the great American night-JLB]. But see that is all I cared about, except cars, so I never got hip to school or stuff like that until it was too late, until they called my number.

Yes, I know , I know now, in 1966 these guys, these beats, were “old news” in places like Greenwich Village and Harvard Square but in Podunk Maine talking about such things was “cool.” Especially if accompanied by the “look,” black chinos, work boots, flannel shirts, and mandatory midnight sunglasses worn 24/7/365. And don’t forget the French-Canadian connection, Jeanbon Kerouac was an F-C as were half the residents of that old working class mill town just like in your Olde Saco (we were just a northern, way northern, Kerouac hometown Lowell). More importantly so was Diana.

And that is exactly where the problem, my problem, began and ended, the midnight crying hour began and ended. See Diana was crazy for beat stuff but she wanted a guy, and an F-C guy, with a little more speed. Literally. She was looking, and looking hard, and I know this because she told me so straight out, for a guy with big wheels, maybe a 1964 Mustang (green, of course) like mine so she could be sitting high and wide on the front seat but with some dough, and some prospects. Not white picket fence, spotted dog, three kids, two boys and a girl, prospects but dough to take her places and see things. And she found him, Rene Genet, a little older, out of school, working at the Downeast Valley Textile Mill (like about a quarter of the town’s population in those long gone good-paying mill jobs days) and with some dough to spent . But I am getting slightly ahead of my story.

Diana and I went on a few dates, afternoon dates, after school, mainly down to Jimmy Jack’s Homemade Diner (the one on Main Street, not the one on East Main that is strictly for tourists and “summer guests”) to listen to some jazz, rock or other be-bop stuff on the big old jukebox that drew every half-hip kid in town. But mainly we talked, talked late on the telephone, about this and that, mainly dreams, and mainly abstract stuff. I was in seventh heaven and I thought she was too. What I didn’t know, and never thought to know (or really wanted to know thinking back) was that Diana was working her way out of my front seat into beau Rene’s front seat. Want to know, or not, one night, one Thursday night, when I rang her up about eleven o’clock (her sole provider mother worked the second shift at the mill so I could call then) her younger sister answered the phone. Answered that her sister, Diana, was out and about with Rene Genet and that she would not be taking any more midnight calls from me. Period.

After our unceremonious “break-up” I would see Diana around school and we would “nod” heads but that was about it. Then just before school got out that summer I heard that Diana and Rene were having some troubles. I decided to make my move and to challenge Rene to a “chicken run’ down Route 1 early one morning going south as fast and furious as we could. Winning prize: Diana Dubois. Rene was a little unsure about taking the bet because he knew, knew in his heart if he had a heart, he couldn’t beat me not with those stakes. Diana? Diana was sky high like any princess would be when two modern knights were ready to do battle to win her favors. One June Saturday night I left Rene Genet in a puddle of water in some side ditch about twenty miles south of Calais. Diana, cool as a cucumber, and very aware of the spoils of war rules stepped right into my waiting Mustang like we had never parted. Moreover that night, or really that morning, after she had been totally turned on by the joust, the thought of the joust, and everything else she was crazy, crazy like I had never seen her before, in bed. And, hell, I guess I was too.

Diana and I got married a short time after her graduation and set up household in Ellsworth (Maine) where I got a good paying job in a paper mill. Naturally, 1960s F-C naturally, a child came along, and that complicated things, complicated things for me.

See I was really a “homer,” a Calais guy to the bone and while I was in love with Diana I knew that with the baby (and presumably more babies in Gallic Roman Catholic F-C speak knowledge ) I wasn’t going to be able to go back to dying mill town Calais any time soon.

That meant I wasn’t going to be the king hell king (my term –JLB) of the northern Maine back roads. And that last sentiment was important to understanding what happened later. It wasn’t, by the way, just Calais lonesomeness that distracted me but that I had actually lost the title as king hell king of the back roads “chicken runs” to one Rene Genet by default. That was a title I had held since I first learned to drive and “soup up” any old automobile (a burned-out ’57 Chevy was my first reclamation project). Nobody around northern Maine challenged , or even thought of challenging me and my 1964 green Mustang now named “Diana” after I put Rene in that ditch. Another distraction was a slight flirtation with Laura Bleu, Diana’s second cousin back in Calais before we moved to Ellsworth. Hell I was a good looking guy then, and like I said I had that fast car and fast hands so I would never lack for “flirtations” for the always plentiful girls who wanted to sit in that green Mustang front seat of mine.

But still and all I was always thinking about Calais, figuring ways to get to Calais (to see, uh, Laura?), or yakking about it to one and all in Ellsworth. And when I was in high dudgeon (my term JLB) I would take it out on Diana. Not physically, not for anything, but I would pout, I would spend endless hours working on the “Diana,” and I would be gone for hours. With no explanation (but also with no whiskey breathe or woman’s fragrance on my clothes either). I would head over to Cadillac Mountain in the Arcadia National Park the other side of Bar Harbor wind out on the deserted curves and sit, just sit, and stare out at the homeland sea. I know that sea stare-out, I know it from my father, I might have invented it, at least for our generation up there, so I know that I was troubled in mind, no question.

Time passed this way, a few months, a year. Rumors though started to swirl around that Jimmy Jack’s’ son, Pierre, (Jimmy Jack was the owner of two teenage hang-out diners, one complete with an incredible jukebox where I had taken Diana a few times) had a super-souped up Chevy that would “blow” my Mustang away. Way down in Ellsworth I heard those rumors. Then one night, one kind of foggy October night, a night not uncommon in Maine almost any part of the year, I found myself, and not by accident, in Calais. And not just in any spot in Calais but down at the corner of Main and East Main where every chicken run started ,where every head-to-head car duel started since back before memory, ready, willing and able to take on one Pierre Jacques (Jimmy Jack’s real last name) in the “chicken run to end all chicken runs.”

I won’t bore you with the details of the run; you have probably if you have seen that film that came out a few years ago, American Graffiti, or Rebel Without A Cause, or about twelve other teen alienation /angst films seen the scenes. Fast souped-up cars. Pierre’s “Lonnie Jean” against my “Laura.” They are off. And the winner is… Pierre. End of story. No. Diana, when she found out what I had done (and my thing with Laura), left me. Left for parts unknown with the baby one night, one night when I was up in Calais with Laura. End of story.

[End of story? No. One more little detail needs to be brought up although the details around it are sketchy. Like how Jeanbon drifted back to Calais after our talk in L.A., how he got the old heap running and what was on his mind that fateful night. Was he thinking of some lost Diana? Laura? On October 14, 1980 (really the early morning of the 15th according to the police report) one Jeanbon Leclerc was D.O.A. at Bangor General Hospital after being pried out of a rusted out green 1964 Mustang that had still been in great running order and that had been clocked doing one hundred and twenty miles an hour on Route One by the police in pursuit. The car had spun out of control and crashed about one hundred yard inside of the Calais border. JLB]