***Out In The American Neon Wilderness-In The Beginning

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Introduction

Memory, or rather memories, are funny. A few weeks ago my old friend and yellow brick road 1960s on-the-road travelling companion, Josh Lawrence, and I were discussing a recent trip that he and his wife, Laura, had taken to ocean-splashed and verdant Pacifica out in California just south of San Francisco. That place name brought back memories of my own last visit to that town some thirty years ago there with Josie, Josie Little, whom I had a torrid affair with back then the details of which I will not bore the reader with, except as they pertain to Josie’s story that will be related below. Pacifica was the place, the paradise that we retreated to when we went on vacation in the sunnier days of our relationship. Although I have been in San Francisco and in California in general many, many times since those days I have avoided, consciously avoided, that town. Reason: Josie Little and our eventual sad parting of the ways which occurred there at the end.

But see this is where the proverbial “one memory leads to another” comes in. Later on the night of the day Josh and I had our discussion about Pacifica I started thinking about something Josh had mentioned earlier. About how Josie and I met, although not really how we met as much as what glue stuck us together back then. That “glue” was the story that Josie related to me one night about how if we were to proceed with our affair, if it was to grow that she was going to have to exorcise the ghost of her previous lover, Allan Murphy. She was going to have to  tell me about how he was still under her skin, about their time together or part of it and I was going to have to understand her by letting her talk it out. So one night in Cambridge while we were sitting at the bar of the Blue Parrot she told her story. But maybe I should backtrack a little to explain how we met and some of the events that led up to the talk that night.            

I had met Josie at another Cambridge bar, Jack’s (the place where Bonnie Raitt, and others, used to hang out before they became famous, and after too ), in late 1977, when she was sitting by herself kind of forlorn on a stool at the bar listening (she would tell me later half-listening) to the weekday house band and sipping her whiskey, neat. I was in town then trying to track down a story, or rather information for a story that a well-known Cambridge denizen had at his disposal and had just finished up a series of interviews with him. I decided to stop at Jack’s for a quick drink or two (mine whisky, water chaser, in those days) before heading back to my hotel when I spied her at the bar.

Forlorn looking yes but she had something about her, not girl next door, not femme fatale, not temptress, none of those exactly but something that spoke of stained satin sheets and good companionship if one were up for that. Pretty, maybe thirty years old, certainly not with that pallid look of a college student, even a graduate student in eternal student Cambridge, long legs, nicely dressed, short-ish brown hair, brown eyes (not identified until later, one of them slightly askew which made them sexier) and that was all I needed to take shot at her.

So I sat down at the stool beside, introduced myself, and she in turn introduced herself and we made small conversation for a while until I saw her drink was empty and offered to buy her one. She accepted. A little later she noticed that I was out and offered to buy me a drink. Taken. After a while I felt strong enough to mention that when I came in that she had looked rather forlorn. That is when she first  told me about Allan, Allan Murphy, the guy who she though would be the love of her life, and whom she had to, just had to (her words), let go of since their relationship had gone beyond repair a few months before and she was still in its grip.  We talked a while longer, had a couple more drinks (trading off on buying the rounds) and wound up in my hotel room over in Boston that night. Forlorn she might have been but as she told me later that night (really the next morning) but she liked sex, liked it a lot, liked to be inventive, liked to try things if they were not kinky and had long given up the silly “not on the first date” ritual that used to drive her sexual calendar and just went with guys who she felt safe with. She had come to the right guy.

I had to leave town for a week or so but promised to be in touch and did call her up about a week later and invited her to a house in Watertown that I was to stay in for about a month while I gathered material for a story and to write it up. She accepted and we ruffled the sheets that first night again. During my Watertown stay I got more and more interested in her, and I believed that she did in me as well although she held her cards close to the vest. When my Watertown time was up she asked me if I wanted to stay at her place over in Brighton (Allston, really) and I said yes if she thought we were going some place. She gave a smile, said maybe, and I accepted that answer as good enough at the time.

For the next couple of months things seemed okay but I was getting deeper into her and she seemed less so with me. I kept asking her what the problem was but she continually refused to elaborate. Then one night she said let’s go out to Jack’s again because she wanted to tell me a story that she thought I needed to hear if I wanted to understand her.  She had written it up in something like a draft form because she wanted me to have it in writing just in case something bad happened between us. And here is where memory comes in again because I went up into my attic where in the old pre-digital days I stored my notebooks and other written materials and retrieved her draft. The only thing that I noticed in re-reading the draft that startled me was how much information Josie gave about the various stages of her sex life until then. She liked sex, no question, and I liked that she liked sex, and we had tried many different techniques in our time together but I did not realize then that sharing the intimate details of her sexual profile were that important to her for me to understand along with that Allan forlornness. Of course that time was just the start up time of great women’s liberation awakening when women like Josie began to express themselves in more explicit sexual terms and the like but still in looking over the notes I, a little older and who had come up learning a different notion of women, blushed a few times. Sexual difficulties however were certainly not the reason we parted when our time together was up. The only thing I have done as far as the original draft goes is to make some clarifying comments which are bracketed throughout the manuscript.     

So this, according to the notes and my memory, is the way that I heard the story one bar stool night from Josie Little, a young woman in the troubled last throes of a dying love that would not quite quit. Yeah, this is the way I heard a story out in the American neon wilderness. Another one of those in a long line of stories of a still not quite finished love that nevertheless had nowhere to go, a story Josie felt needed to be told just then, just that one long sad, rainy, bluesy Cambridge bar stool night in late 1977, the Miller Hi-Life sign blinking off and on making strange shadows on Josie’s sad brown eyes world as she spoke: 

**********

…Hi my name is Josie Little, my last name Anglicized from Litvinov a couple of generations back, back around the turn of the 20^th century, by my paternal Jewish grandparents from Russia seeking Americanization as well as by the sleight-of- hand of immigration officials at Ellis Island who could not spell the old country name correctly. I want to tell a story about an unhappy love affair I had with a guy named Allan Murphy in the early 1970s so that I can try to exorcise the demons and move on to a budding relationship with a new guy, a reporter, Frank Jackman. This addressed mainly to him and some stuff only to him but if you read this then you will know why I had to leave my sweet walking daddy Allan behind, just couldn’t go on with him even though his scent lingers on. So here goes.      

I had been at my wit's end, or maybe that was too harsh a term to express my condition then given my need, but I had been unhappy in the early 1970s, a few years before I met Frank at that Miller-Hi-Life sign-etched bar stool conversation where he hit on me, caught me in a down Allan moment. Unhappy after years, my growing up years, of being the dutiful daughter, the New York Jewish middle-class gentile-emulating dutiful daughter. No JAP princess, no way, although I had dreamed of that exalted position when I was young and had hung out with some serious JAPs when I attended Hunter College High School in Manhattan where I had been an outstanding student, and they, well, they attended the school and that name looked good on the future husband-hunting resumes. Just that early 1970s moment though I had been unhappy, having just finished an internship (via Boston University) with Doctor Thaddeus Telly, yes that Telly, the big up and coming quantum sociologist who at the time was on the cutting edge of the next big thing in the field (now superseded by about twenty-seven newer cutting edges), and I was also exhausted from study, research and my go-fer existence on his team.

I might as well tell you, I was also having an affair with Professor Telly for strictly mercenary reasons so that I could get good grades and more importantly a good recommendation. Some of my girlfriends kind of looked sideways on that but funny I found out later they had done the same thing with professors to get good grades. For me it was a case of a mutual bargain but Telly always said he thought he got the better of it since I had given him the best oral sex, you know, blowjobs he had ever had. And he might have been right but I did not complain at all since he gave me a great recommendation, and I like oral sex so there. And you know I do Frank from that first time I surprised you coming out of the bathroom after you had taken a shower and I went down on you while you were all wet. Funny, funny about that oral sex stuff, okay, okay I will just call them blowjobs here so you will know what I mean, because the first few times I did it in high school I didn’t like it. Of course then it was done instead of vaginal intercourse to keep from getting pregnant that all the sexually- active girls like me and my JAP friends were deathly afraid of. I didn’t like the taste of the cum when a guy came in my mouth and I would spit it out. One guy, Andy, though told me to eat a mint or something while I was doing him because he made a big deal out of me swallowing his cum and I liked him a lot and wanted to please him. He said that it had a lot of protein and was good for me. So I did it one time with gum in my mouth and swallowed and it wasn’t bad. After that I actually liked to swallow the cum if I really liked a guy. I know they, and you, liked me to do that although maybe not with the gum part.                  

 

So having been the dutiful daughter, striving to please my parents as I accumulated each new degree and award, I had missed the turmoil on the campuses in the 1960s, my undergraduate campus the volatile radical hotbed University Of Wisconsin, although given my dogged attention to my studies I might as well have been at North Dakota State or some such Podunk school. I had only found out about half the anti-war, anti-establishment, anti, well, anti- everything, every not student thought of stuff that went on there when I had come to Boston, and my fellow doctoral program students kept quizzing me about this and that thing, the demonstrations, the shuts-downs, the music and dope, that had happened in Madison and had I been involved in it once they knew where I was from. I would deflect such talk with some sex exploits or something to show I was a little cool. More importantly though, I had missed that new wave breeze that had come through the land in those days, the palpable sense of jailbreak from what pleased (or didn’t please) parents, professors, police, employers , or anyone else who got in the way. I was ready, all twenty-five years of me ready, to break out, break out and check out what Allan had called the American neon wilderness.

As you know the he in question, that not quite finished love with nowhere to go, Allan Murphy, my boyfriend, companion, partner, lover whatever term of art, relationship art you wished to use in those topsy-turvy times, had told me about the search for the American neon wilderness one night after we had been together for while (not living together, that came later), the night when I first tried some mescaline with him. After that night I had been frantic to get out and see the American countryside and make my own estimate about what was going, or not going, on. As part of that mescaline dream night Allan had steadily tried to coax me into travelling with him on that journey, a journey that would probably last six months to a year depending, depending on what pleased us, what we wanted to see, what happened on that far-flung road and I had gotten rid of enough hesitations in order to get rid of that wit's end condition, or whatever it was that was eating at me to buy into his plan. But I am getting ahead of myself. I  haven’t explained to you how I had come to be entranced by Allan, how I had begun to smell those open roads wherever they might lead and to dream of them, and to begin to think of a defensive barrage against my parents’ seventy-seven wishes, expectations, and disappointments when explanation time came.

Sometime after I came to Boston in late 1970 I had settled into the student ghetto across the river in Brighton with my own little first- floor apartment off of Commonwealth Avenue, and after I had settled into my studies, those Telly-inspired studies that I eventually became exhausted from, I, new to town started to go to bars alone to pick up guys, usually one night stands. I had done the same kind of thing when I arrived as a freshman at Wisconsin trying to outdo some of other girls in my dorm who were having a little contest to see how many guys they could pick up in a week. I wanted both times to be known as smart but also that I was a good lay in bed if you approached me right. Most guys thought they were picking me up but that is another story.     

 

I also became interested in what was then to be the last stages of the anti-Vietnam war movement. That interest was sparked (along with some square-baiting by some fellow interns when I expressed my previous basically un-political nature) on a couple of dates with a guy whom I had met through a girl in my Advanced Quantum Sociology seminar, Lucy, who was something in the Socialist Workers Party or their youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance, organizations that at the time were involved in a last push to end the war in Southeast Asia before President Nixon blew the places to kingdom come. Those organizations were also involved (as were other groups) in trying to corral in or contribute to the burgeoning anti-war fever among the U.S. soldiers, both in America and in Vietnam. The rank and file soldiers of the Army, in particular, were half in mutiny over the pace of withdrawal and other issues related to their in- your- face cannon-fodder existence.

One night, one Monday night, I attended a meeting here in Cambridge, at the Harvard Divinity School, where there was to be planning for a retreat to help organize that anti-war G.I. movement. A lot of those in attendant were ex-servicemen, including Allan. Allan had just been released from an Army stockade after about a year for refusing to fight in Vietnam [or anywhere else for that matter, although Josie did not know that at the time] and as the meeting progressed and it was his turn to speak he was explaining the ins and outs of his struggle to get out of the clutches of the military, the complicated legal case that was waged to get him out, and the absolute (his word) necessity of continuing to directly cramp the military’s style by going right to the source, the soldier, the cannon fodder(his term that is where I got it from having had absolutely no experience or knowledge about the military). He said all of this in a slow, steady style with a wicked Boston accent, you know that “pahk the cah in Harvard Yahd” goof stuff that the slain President Kennedy had made everybody aware of a few years previously when we were growing up and coming of age, combined with a little working-class twist. While he was addressing the audience I, sitting not twenty feet away from him, noticed that he had some very fierce blue eyes. I, from a brown-eyed, brown hair, brown everything world (including all brown herself) had never seen such blue eyes, and fierce too. I was mesmerized.

After Allan finished his talk and the audience broke into groups that were split up according to what task one wished to participant in to help organize that upcoming anti-war G.I. retreat I gravitated toward the group where he was sitting, the contacting GIs group. When the members introduced themselves I noticed that he was kind of staring, well, not staring but he kept looking in my direction, and gave a little smile my way. I responded with little smiles too, and a little confusion too because while I considered myself nice, and maybe pretty, I was not some “movement” heavy or anything like that, as were some of the other women in the room. I tried to see if he was smiling at anybody else, at any other woman there. I did not think so.

At the close of the meeting Allan went up to me and softly, very softly, shook my hand and said that he hoped that I  would be able to make the retreat to be held at a site, a well-known retreat site, just over the New Hampshire border that had been donated to the cause by some anonymous people who wanted to make sure that “the movement” had a place to put on such events. People, according to Allan and others were always doing stuff like that then. It was part of that wave that I had missed most of by being the dutiful daughter. That was all that happened that night though. A hand-shake. Damn, that was it.

The retreat was to be held two weekends after that meeting and I had originally planned to attend the event even before the talk with Allan, if I got my studies completed by then. After “meeting” Allan I knew I would be going and as it turned out I would be going up in the same car as him. That retreat Friday night as we met in Harvard Square with those who would drive them up on the trip north I noticed Allan looking at me in that same way he had looked at me at that first meeting with that little smile when we greeted. After arriving at our destination in New Hampshire (Brookline)  and while waiting in line to register he asked me, expressing a hope, a fervent hope he said later, that I would spare some time to talk to him if I had a chance.

This comment disarmed me a little, most of the guys I had dated (and slept with, while I may have been dutiful daughter I was no prude, not since back in Hunter College High days when those Jewish princesses told me, and showed me, what was what with guys), mostly Jewish guys from Long Island or places like that, not the city, when I went to Wisconsin, had been, maybe sensing something in me, kind of pushy, kind of bossy and took the lead, like it was a manly right. And in the boy and girl wars then those were kind of the rules, at least that is what I thought and everybody else did too, new breeze coming through or not. Here though was a guy who was asking me if I had time for him, like he didn’t take that local poster boy of the anti-war GI struggle role assigned to him all that seriously. At least with me. With a dry throat and barely getting what I had to say out I remembered I said I hoped that he might have some time to talk to me. I blushed, red-brown blushed, and he, sensing the oddness of the moment just squeezed my hand, squeezed it almost as softly as at our first meeting.

Then he said with those blue eyes sparkling, not fierce but devilishly sparkling , showing his little blarney Irish side (his term, explained later), he would not have bothered to come up if he hadn’t expected to talk to me. And then he blushed, and out of nowhere I squeezed his hand. Whether it was softly done or not I could not remember but it was a squeeze. Just then someone yelled out the first call for the meeting to start and we parted, him turning back to me with that quizzical smile as we did so. And that was how we had started and maybe why I was ready later to chance things, to chuck everything to travel with him wherever the winds might take us.

[Josie kept coming back to that first mescaline-edged night when Allan laid out his puff dream scenario, scenarios really, since they were, drug-induced, up all night and half the next day. Allan had said all along, or from pretty early on in their affair, that he had a childhood dream that he wished to tell her about, wished to bring her in on, wished her to make part of her dreams too but that he felt that he should wait until the proper moment to discuss it. The proper moment being understood as a time when they were comfortable with each other, comfortable enough that he could spill what he had to say and not be dismissed out of hand. And also, to be in some drug –induced state, not weed but mescaline which she had never tried, that they could feel totally honest with each other and then he changed his mind and said she could dismiss the thing out of hand if the whole enterprise felt too crazy to her.]

I had not experimented with drugs while I was at drudge Wisconsin although I (or anybody else ) could not walk into a dorm or most any place on campus, or its immediate environs like the Rathskeller, the big hip local drink, drug, and  rock and roll hang-out, without getting at least a second-hand high (I did not know what that meant then but only learned what it meant subsequently) from some pungent mary jane, weed, herb or whatever somebody called those substances on any given day or reflecting any given local moniker for the stuff. I had heard, as well, that peyote buttons, mescaline, a little LSD (for the advanced heads but not as widely used as on the East and West coasts), and more and more, cocaine were becoming favored recreational drugs de jus but no, I had not partaken of those pleasures.

When I came to Boston some people in one of her classes, Advanced Quantum Sociology (a seminar taught by Professor Telly himself), organized a party and that was where I had my first drug encounter as a big old joint was passed around and I felt I had to be cool and so took a few hits and coughed, coughed like crazy for a while when the harsh smoke hit my throat and everybody laughed. [Join the club, sister.] I liked it, like the way it relaxed me, liked the odd feeling and strange moods that I felt while high but had seldom imbibed in while I was in my drudge phase before Allan.

Strangely sometime after that first experience I had kept some hash, given as a gift from some guy who took my fancy one night at the Kasbah Grille in Harvard Square when I was “on the hunt” with my girlfriends. He had spent the night with her at my apartment after he had introduced me to the bong of hashish (and its far less harsh throat-tickling and more vivid sweet dreams than weed) that next morning, since he was heading out of the hitchhike road to D.C. for some anti-war demonstration and knew, especially in Connecticut knew, that if he did not want to spend some hard time, some very hard time, in the pokey that he better not be “holding.” And thus the gift (fired up when Allan and I were looking for a different kick when he said he had never tried the stuff).

Allan and I, started, discreetly, to smoke more weed (his term, I always had called it “pot” from what I heard it called in my Wisconsin days but I picked up his more street-wise term for some reason) both to relax, relax while having sex, and just to kind of catch up with my generation and its predilections. The discreet part was necessary because he, and to a lesser extent me, had a high political profile doing that anti-war G.I. work that placed us square in the sights of the state, its military, and the federal cops. Once he had been hauled in for questioning by the feds in Boston and that clinched the discreet part. So no smoking in the Wild West streets of Boston, or at parties, and such. Our connection was through an interesting  third party, Sam Stevens, who had a millions connections for dope, mostly weed, going all the way down to high-grade Mexico and back, although he, himself was not a dealer but an angel of mercy, a guy who passed the stuff on to his friends. He lived like a lot of Boston student ghetto denizens off a very hefty trust fund and so not only did he have the capacity to show largesse, but did so.  A real cool guy.

Allan admitted to me that he had not previously been much of a drug user; he said maybe he would do a little speed on exam prep nights to catch up on that reading he had put off until the last minute at school, before his army stint, before he got “religion” on what the American state was all about. Until then he  had been, as an official member in good-standing of the working-class, of the Irish working-class, a heavy drinker, whisky mainly, with a beer chaser when he was frisky, water chaser when he was broke, and had done just a little dope in the service, some passed joints.  He said that he didn’t like the taste of the stuff, the way the smoke bothered his throat, although he was a tobacco smoker, or the way it made him feel, feel out of control, in another place without kicks. And that was how we got to the idea of trying mescaline and other drugs, but mainly mescaline to help express eternal truths or whatever we thought would come from such experimentation. Naturally Sam was the friendly provider for the stuff, and also to insure that it was righteous since in that period of time lots of awful stuff was being put into drugs by street dealers who were looking to make quick scores and blow town, and let the rubes figure out the stuff of dreams, or of dream puffs.

So that first mescaline night Allan told me of his child dream, his dream to escape the damn world that he was born into and hadn’t any say in creating, or being asked about. I could see when Allan talked like that, in that Jehovah righteous tone why he would be a prime candidate for some foreboding army stockade or the bastinado when the deal went down, although his decision to confront the Army head-on was a closer thing than one might think as he explained one night, one non drug-induced night. Allan mentioned that “had not being asked about stuff” had bothered him since about age ten or eleven. He related some stuff about his family, as I did about mine but that was later, about how he was in a constant civil war with his mother from as early as he could remember. His poor, hard-working when he could find work father, with no breaks in the world, straight from the hard scrabble world of coal mine Appalachia, was a shadow figure somewhere in the background. The main bouts were with “Ma,” over money, over going, or not going here or there, of breathing, breathing too much to hear him tell it. Kids’ stuff but big on some kid horizon. So that around ten or eleven he started dreaming, first started dreaming about escaping from his tumble- down working poor boy fate, starting dreaming about the big jail breakout from the old ways.

Where Allan lived growing up was near the water in Hull, about fifteen or twenty miles from Boston. He said he could see across to Castle Island on a good day and so he could see the tankers and other ships coming into the bay to leave off their product or pick up stuff. That is where he then got the idea to build a raft and go out to join a ship moored in the channel and flee to the big wide world parts unknown. In the end it didn’t work out since his reach exceeded his grasp, he could not, not being very good mechanically even then, even with brother help get a sea-worthy, a channel-worthy raft together. But that escape idea, that idea of seeing the great big world, of seeing in person the places and persons that he had heard about, from teachers and others heard about, read about, big sassy book poured over and thumbed over until he was exhausted read about, and seen too on that old black and white television screen we all were glued to which crowded his brain.

That failed raft experiment, in any case, was not the end of his strivings although it ended his physical break-out end for a while. He spoke one night of sneaking out the back of the family house (he called it a shack and when he took me there on one ill-advised meet with his mother I had to agree with him although I was always too polite to say anything bad about the place) on midnight runs to Harvard Square at sixteen. Of walking a couple of miles to catch a local all-night bus to then catch the subway at Fields Corner in Dorchester and to rumble, tumble, amble his way over to Cambridge, to the all-night open Hayes-Bickford. Being there just to feel the air of the place when things were beginning to happen in 1962, to just be around the new thing, the jailbreak out thing that he sensed was coming. And then rumble, tumble, amble back on that subway before dawn to avoid mother worries, mother hassles and mother penalties. And then one thing led to another and he put the dream on hold, put it on hold through college, through whisky nights, through some personal political dream etched out in Kennedy days splendor, in short  “to get his” while helping others to get theirs. And so his horizon narrowed, his fervent desire to see, hear, read, be with everything, everybody, to see how things ticked is what he said he called it faded, childhood, young manhood faded.

And then came the Army. Allan didn’t like to talk about it, talk about it all that much, especially when early on I would go on and on about what the experience was like in order to get a feel for who I was getting tied up with, about what happened while he was in the military, the Army. He would cut me short with this- “he did what he had to do, did it, and he was not sorry, nor sorry for a minute, that he did what he did.” He added, chuckling, the worst of it was when they threw him in solitary for a while and wouldn’t let him smoke cigarettes in those days when he was a fairly heavy smoker (although the system worked out among solitary prisoners allowed him to cadge a few puffs while in the rest room, oh no what did he call it, oh yeah, the latrine). He had begun to smoke more after he was inducted when there was so much dead time that the trainees would just stand around smoking one cigarette after another to kill time until some jackass (his word) sergeant sadistically decided he wanted his charges to double- time with full backpack somewhere for some reason known only to that self-same sergeant, for some odd national or personal security reason.

Mainly though Allan said he would go back and forth in his mind about whether before he went in he should have decided differently and not allowed himself to be inducted. The back and forth really centered on that faded dream, that faded break out dream that he let fall on the back burner at a time when having it front and center would have counted . See, he came from working-class people, no, working poor, a notch below that, his poor be-draggled father, from down in Podunk (his term) Kentucky, down in white hillbilly Appalachia, down among the poor white trash of literature. The just poor that I knew needed help from when I read Michael Harrington’s The Other America for a sociology class that I took as an under-graduate where he described the white folks left behind in the go-go America of the 1950s.

Allan had turned red one time when I mentioned that book and that I knew, book knew, of what his father, and his people were all about, “the wretched of the earth” in America. He related a story, a school story, about how his high school,  Hull High, was going to reach out to the victims in Appalachia by sending food, clothing and money down there, down to Hazard, Kentucky. Jesus, he said when the headmaster announced the program over the loudspeaker, that was where his father was born (Allan had shown her that fact listed on his birth certificate one day). In any case his father was always out of work, out of luck, and out of Allan’s frame of reference especially when he got older and started drifting away from the family and started to develop his own political perspective and his own jailbreak way out of the scene he grew up with.

But that was exactly the problem, that from hunger bringing up, that hand-me-down-where-is-the-rent-money-coming-from-keep-your-eyes-to-the-ground-shame and sorry combined with three thousand pounds of plain ordinary vanilla 1950s all ships rising teen angst and teen alienation, that came between Allan and all his decisions in those days. Along with some very standard American idiotic patriotic my-country-right-or- wrong local mores and customary Roman Catholic subservience to authority, Rome or D.C.(in this life he said, all was to be milk and honey in the next) in that Irish neighborhood that he grew up in. That and his very real appetite for going for the main chance in politics. That was what he had been aiming for, a career, a regular career in politics, “helping his people while helping himself,” is the way he put it.

Allan told me that he had spent most of 1968 working that main chance idea as he was getting ready to graduate from school and had some time to “build his resume.” He started out that fateful year holding his nose and committed to backing Lyndon Johnson for re-election until Eugene McCarthy (Irish Gene he mentioned, a poet and a dreamer and thus worthy of support) pushed the envelope and Johnson backed out. He went wild for Robert Kennedy, his idea of a beau political animal then, ruthless to political enemies, young or old, and not forgetful about old wounds either, and this beautiful patrician vision of “seeking a newer world.” When Bobby was assassinated he went over to Humphrey and would up there under the principal that Richard Noxious, uh, Nixon was the main enemy of the people of the world (and of his political advancement). So not the profile of a guy who was going to chance charging windmills, or crush dreams of bourgeois break-outs, no way.

So Allan went, sullenly went when drafted. After about three days he realized that he had made a mistake, a serious mistake and that he should have chanced draft- dodger jail instead. But see, it was hard for a guy hard-wired for a political career to shift gears like that, so he fumbled and bumbled with the problem for a while. He had always been anti-war in kind of an abstract way; kind of an “all men are brothers” way. He told me that he had first expressed that opinion on the Boston Common back in the fall of 1960 when he attended a small demonstration at the Park Street Station with a bunch of little old angel ladies in tennis sneakers and stern-faced Jehovah-etched Quakers who were calling for nuclear disarmament. He also told her as if to express the Janus nature of the times, of himself, that the next week he was working the streets of Hull passing out Jack Kennedy presidential literature. Jack who was crying out loud about the “missile gap,” nuclear missiles to be sure. So he stumbled and mumbled fitfully through the problem.

Of course if you were part of the military, down in some boondock (Allan’s term) southern town out in nowhere far from northern gentility, even rough-edged northern working- class gentility, you were up the creek without a paddle (Josie’s expression), and also surrounded by guys, maybe sullen, maybe gung-ho, but mainly who like you were kind of committed to their fate (and afraid, afraid like hell of that constant threat, Fort Leavenworth, the main Army penal threat) then stumbling and mumbling is what you did, and did it for a while. But the military fates were not kind, not wartime kind, not 1969 wartime kind, when the Vietnam war was eating up men and material at prestigious rates, while the world clamored for shut-down and so Allan’s fate was to be a grunt, a foot soldier, and the only place that foot soldiers were being gainfully employed in those days was in sweaty, sullen Southeast Asia. And in the normal course of events after training he was so ordered there.

And still he mumbled, stumbled, and tumbled. He, political animal he, tried to work around it administratively, pulling some chips dues in with his cronies, no go. He tried to do an end- around by claiming conscientious objector status, although he was uneasy about it since he believed that there were some just wars and that position was not a ground for discharge then, no go. Then one night, one night, a Sunday night, a hot and sweaty Sunday night, sitting in the base PX after the library had closed he decided, decided that some form of resistance was the only way out. Personal resistance since he saw no other kindred.

He went out in the sultry night and started walking and planning, and half-hesitating. He would make a public display; he would go AWOL and then make a splash at some public civilian anti-war. (That AWOL, absent without leave part was important for him, and later me, since he stayed away just long enough from the Replacement Center at Fort Lewis in Washington state to be  “dropped for the rolls,” meaning that he could turn himself in at Fort Devens about forty miles from Boston and stay there pending new orders. The importance for me was, unknowingly, or half knowingly, that I had been one of the demonstrators clamoring for his release in a rally in front of the fort after he was incarcerated.) Other soldiers he had heard had done such stunts prodded on by those same Jehovah Quakers who formed the backdrop of his political coming of age in Boston Common as a boy. No. As his resolve firmed up, and as he got courage, some well-spring of Appalachia hunker- down father genes- bought courage he thought later when he had plenty of time to think, he decided that he would make a showing in front of his fellow soldiers.

So one Monday morning as the base gathered for its weekly gathering of troops on the parade ground for inspection (and to see who was missing, if anybody) he walked out, walked out of his nearby barracks in civilian clothes, carrying a simple homemade sign “Bring The Troops Home.” He was immediately seized and man-handled by some what he called ‘lifer’ sergeants (who, when he thought about it later probably didn’t know if he was soldier or just a damn hippie protester trespasser and he therefore should have been in uniform with his sign). And the rest was mainly legal proceedings, and doing the time, doing that almost a year in the base stockade. (Under the outside civilian parallel legal proceedings on his behalf then in effect they couldn’t sent him to Fort Leavenworth without violating a civilian judge’s order.) Like I said, he didn’t like it talk about it all that much, except he had plenty of time to think, think those ancient break-out thoughts that had him (and me as he told his story) in its thrall.

[I realized that the way she told the story, told Allan’s childhood dream story, all cold sober, no sweet dream drug haze, no colors, no pizzazz, sounded as straight narration like a good description for why he wanted to see the world, or at least the continent which was what his preliminary plan had entailed, but did not half-explain how she was inflamed by his fire that night, or thereafter. Or why he was either. That night as she remembered it Allan was in what he called (and she started to get a drift sense of it more and more after that drift snowdrift night they connected up in New Hampshire) his high blarney Irish lost land poet and prophet mood, a mood for him enhanced not by the color dream sequences going through his mescaline-fueled brain but ancient memory longing to understand the world, the fellahin world that she associated, via her fervent Zionist parents, with the Palestinian refugee camps but he associated with his own bog Irish, his mill town Lowell, Nashua, Lawrence, Saco, his Iowa farmhands, his Nova Scotia Grand Banks hearty and hellish fisherman, his Woody Guthrie okie and arkie dust- blown refugees, his bracero mex, or flip (Filipino) grape-picking field hands, and mex dark home land village runaways when the land gave out or the federales got too close. And that was just on this continent. He wanted to understand, as well, what made people tick, why they worked so hard to keep in one place, in order to keep from going backwards.

And why too in certain spots, in certain cultural oases she called them (and he yelled at her, faux yelled at her although as she thought back on the moment he probably was serious, to stop with the “soc” jargon that was destroying the common language of explanation, almost like a damn church that has spent too much time in the wilderness and developed a secret coda among the elect but had only generals, no corporals, no followers), new forms of expression, new words to explain life’s struggles were developed and nowhere else. Places like Frisco town (his always usage for that place after he heard Memphis Minnie’s song of the same name) with its beat down, beat around, beat beatitude beat scene and later its summer of love, like L.A. and its characters out of central casting, cast really on the beaches of Santa Monica, Venice Beach, and surfer- ready Malibu, like New Jack City (although that locale, her hometown and his place of a thousand times, was not scheduled except to end at and to dump whatever was to be dumped at her parents’ place when they finished up), like Boston even to some extent. So that was what was on his mind but that was just the outline, they talked for hours (and other days after that first extended outline they continues talking about it, about what was remembered, tip of tongue remembered since color, and other less ancient dreams also snuck into that night).]

Strangely as Allan started talking to me about stone cold jetties, the ones up in Hampton, up in New Hampshire (not their first bonding New Hampshire old converted farmland homestead night but the seacoast, by the water, that drove a lot of his imaginings) and how a man could sit for hours and watch the seas come and go, crashing against that rock-strewn jetty, ripping the face of the stone and shipping it express back to the shoreline sands. He had actually done such sitting one time when they first started going together, before they lived together, and he ran up there to see some old anti-war G.I. buddy, a kooky guy, a wild monk guy all caped up, for real, named Magic Mick, who was transforming himself into some kind of groupie zen master. He had heard from Magic Mick that up in mill town Saco, up in Maine there was a jetty that made Hampton look like dry land slumbers, stretching out to Motherland Sea, the homeland, the place where we started from. Allan said we could check that out as we headed up the coast. See the vague outline of the trip was to head north before it got too cool, head west before the cold Denvers hit, California about November and then south to Mexico for the winter and then back east. There was no need to stop at Hampton though as those stones were, as he said, passé, we needed new adventures, new sittings for hours druid Stonehenge by the sea stones.

I did not learn until later, later when the trip was well under way, that while Allan was addicted to ocean edges, tepid waters running to shore, fetid marshes to feed mother oceans’ starving denizens, and mephitic smucks at low tide fetching earthbound clams for human hungers, he feared, deathly feared, and rightly so mother sea’s fury. Feared since childhood being on the water, being boat-stirred or swim- stirred since he had logged drifted out to sea and almost three dip drowned and so he searched, searched longingly for succor from the ocean depths by getting landward as far out as possible.

He expected to see from that Saco jetty vantage point as well the fellaheen lobster boatmen plying the waters off the coast, plying their lobster trap trade. Fierce men fiercely defending their flash- colored pots against all-comers, all comers except King Neptune with his quirky habit of dumping a certain percentage of them on land as tribute to his generous nature at other times. Allan knew, childhood knew, the mucky gypsy clam muckers down at Hull’s Hell’s End (real gypsies who worked the carnivals by night, their women the old  wilting rose for the lady trick, and maybe the night sweat trick as well for a lonely carnival fortune wheel losers, pay up, pay up twice, brother). Swarthy, dark heathens, gruff, gruff even to homeland ocean boys and gruff about who could and could not ply the mudflats seeking clam bits to spice up some off-hand spur-of-the-moment family barbecue before it all, the family, fell apart and went about six different ways.

So he wanted to know their brethren, their swamp yankee down east brethren brought up in small seacoast villages harsh learning life against the Atlantic gales, out in the creeping boats, seaworthy or not, fully-equipped or not, at dawn, if not before, coffee-filled, some stone cold breakfast so they could get a little extra sleep, maybe rum brave when all was said and done. Knowing fair shares of “oh yah jim, he fell overboard a few years back, they have his name over on the seamen’s memorial in town if you want to know, a fine lobster man, Sam well, Sam never, was right after that boom hit him, hit him square on the noggin, maybe his name should go up there too,” and such.

When Allan got his fill of sitting and viewing, and viewing and sitting we would move on up the coast, maybe picking blueberries along the way for fresh fire- side breakfast pancakes, or just pop it in with the oatmeal, and head to Bar Harbor and the swells, and some Arcadian delight. And of sweetening it up with thoughts of midnight love-makings on the secluded rocks all naked and free and away from prying eyes and with the sea playing some kind of sea symphony to the rhythm of their love. [Yes, I could see what she meant about his blarney, myself full of blarney, although she smiled when she mentioned the rocks, mentioned the love-making on the rocks and maybe thought back to nights of risings and falling of the sea and of them, or as she related another time, when she told me a story about them in Perkin’s Cove also up in Maine, that she had started that whole idea of nakedness and fucking  with her delight at the sea that day and had suggested that very idea.]

I had to laugh as I thought of telling you about Allan’s dream, Allan’s get out in the wide world dream for he was, like me, strictly a city dweller even if he grew up in the working-class suburbs. When he started going on and on about being some mountain man I cut him short. It must have been the honesty brought forth by the drugs that I chirped up that I at least had been to camp when I was a kid and remembered how to pitch a tent, work camp fires, and hike a freaking trail without needing first aid or a bevy of hospital services. He stopped for a moment, for a candid moment. He confessed, confessed that come the first night of camp, that he would be fearful when he was away from city lights, lamp posts, when the only light was from some blinking star (I shared part of that fear, not for dark nights, but what lurked, lurked for a woman, in an untamed world), and that while he was the ocean’s own nature boy, some son of Neptune his oceans always bordered land, sighted land. That was all prelude he confessed to pre-excuses for any difficulties when they traversed (what the heck was traverse he asked) some small trail headed up to the summit of Cadillac Mountain in Arcadia National Park.

Allan then, as if to change the subject, got back to his point about the beauty of seeking nature’s course like some latter day Thoreau rising with the dawn, rising with the sun, rising to the sound of birds, to keep faith with the handiwork of nature especially when we hit the summit and could see all of the ocean for miles around that he had seen in pictures.  (And Magic Mick had told him about one desperate hashish night when they were preparing for some protest, or something and needed new age “rum bravery” to see them through. They were going to distribute some anti-war material on an army base, Daniel Ellsberg’s The Pentagon Papers I think, and had been arrested and thrown off the base and told in no uncertain terms not to come back, sixty days in the some stinking federal pokey, if they did. So maybe that courage was necessary).

Allan got on his high-horse about natural wonders, which while he didn’t understand he could appreciate. Like that idea behind television and transistor radios when he was a kid, and the red scare cold war sputnik, about how did they do that stuff. That drove him mad (although when I explained a couple of things to him, things picked up at Hunter College High, to dispel his “heathen seeing silver flying birds” theory of the universe, he waved it off, “too heavy” waved it off, and I relented). What drove him crazier though was the idea of natural stuff, stuff like the reversing falls at Saint John’s up in New Brunswick, or craters come down to earth and then just sit there. Old Faithful out in Wyoming or someplace out there on the prairie was the end though, imagine something blowing off steam every ninety minutes or something like that, He had hoped they would get to see that on their way to Denver if the thing moved along okay and it was not too late to chance a detour if it looked like the snow squalls didn’t block them in late October or so. But the Bay of Fundy and its funny tides had him flipped, he said maybe that would be worth watching for hours like that Saco jetty (and coming back on me about that afternoon they rocked the rocks in old Perkin’s Cove, maybe we could start an international trend like some new edition of the Kama Sutra).

Then Allan got serious again, real serious, which meant that he was going to go onto some political thing, some political-etched thing. Then he started reciting from memory Longfellow’s Evangeline the one about the French in Arcadia being pushed out of their ancient land by the bloody British after the various world- wide battles those two European powers fought throughout the eighteenth century, and about love, land love, ocean love, love love being uprooted and they were exiled sent down to swamp Cajun country. Jesus he almost cried. He said he wanted to stand in solidarity with another victim of John Bull’s tyranny, to stand with the lost fellahin long suffering on another of history’s long marches to oblivion and the death of the Arcadian dream then, and now. I still remember the half-lilt in his voice when he did that recital (how the hell did he do that, I thought). I could see in the way that he spoke that he was thinking his own fellaheen thoughts, his old neighborhood thoughts about how his people had been displaced (like my own, although she did not identify as strongly with that diaspora sentiment as he did, after all her people, her parents, their kin too, had made the grade  in America, as had I) and about some nagging, festering sore that would not quit him, about those small dream days, about how everybody pushed hard to stay in the same place (some of the kindred had been in the neighborhood for four generations, a long time in go-go America), He named a spot, Grand Pre where he wanted to stop and express his solidarities and so that was plotted onto their ever- expanding itinerary.

Allan floored me after that recital and gabfest  with a thing he picked up from Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, which he said he had read again in the stockade along with a bunch of his other books, Desolation Angels, Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and a couple of others I don’t remember. I had read On The Road as an undergraduate although it didn’t make a big impact on me since I felt that it was mainly a man’s book, a book about guys doing what guys always do, try to screw women and then take off for some other adventure, or other women. I thought he was going to go on and on about the beauty of the relationship between Sal and Dean, about some mystical lost kindred spirit, about the wide open spaces, and of a man’s need (or woman’s, Allan was pretty good about including women in the road, and real worlds, without making a big deal about it although a couple of times she had to take him up quick on the subject of his old-fashioned notions of a women’s place ) to break-out of convention, to explore stuff, and to observe human nature in the raw, and do something about it, if only to write about it.

Instead he berated the characters of On The Road for not stopping at some youth hostels where they could have stayed for cheap, or little dough, in clean (you helped keep it that way as part of the fee), rooms or dorms instead of sleeping in the back seats of cars, on the side of the road, in some freaking corn field, or something like that. Besides they could have met better people, better ride-sharing and expenses people, and people with some dough, since there usually were people from Europe or places like there who had traveler’s cheques and such, than at the Traveler’s Bureaus or u-ride places. See when he was in the stockade there was a guy he used to talk to (before that guy got shipped to Leavenworth, he was doing some big time for the same kind of things Allan was in for but without his civilian legal backing), Bruce, from New York City who had done some on the road travelling and “hipped” him to that scene.

It sounded kind of hokey to me, since I expected that we would either tent or stop at an occasional bed and board. I also thought we were a little too old to be sitting in some dorm thing, like we were at college, with a million people who maybe didn’t speak English (or French, her college language) and we might not even, from the way he told it, depending on the hostel, be able to sleep together. I didn’t like that idea since I had gotten used to us sleeping in our double bed. He said the one in Halifax, the first one that he figured they would try was co-ed, and had private rooms so they should try it, try, he laughed to be more “progressive,” road progressive than Jack and his crowd. There would be time enough to sleep on the sides of roads, or in some lazy cottage, or with friends dotted at spots over the American landscape. And with that, after many fretful hours, we drifted off to sleep.    

[That next late afternoon at “breakfast” Allan started up again about the trip to end all trips. That breakfast Josie was at pains to point out had been made by Allan since he was then in, as a lot of young men were at the time, his women’s “lib” moment. While she and Allan had more than a few battles later over who was to do, and not do, what in sharing household chores she thought his initiative in requesting to feed her breakfast was, well, charming. In those days when a lot of what women, including Josie, were growling over had been the male king in his castle thing and so any slight effort to off-set that mystique was taken as good coin. Later when things got more political, when the question of real power came up a lot of guys went into the tank. So in those early days the easier way to show one’s male liberation from mother’s apron strings fetch-all was to make and serve meals to milady, Josie remember that menu, eggs, bagels and lox, some juice and coffee like it had come down from the mountain… ]    

…while Allan was cleaning up the dishes (added points if a man did the cooking and the cleaning up) he mentioned that he was crazy to go to Neil’s Harbor and Peggy’s Cove up in Cape Breton and could hardly wait to get on the road out of Halifax and push north unless we were somewhat behind in our schedule, our rough schedule, to try to head west and then south before the winter set in. He wanted to take in the beauty, the hills rising above the ocean along the road that encircled the whole place, and the separate circle that enveloped Cape Breton, Nova Scotia beyond that Arcadia notion. Moreover a friend had told him that the provincial parks, unlike the state parks in the states were cheap, were well kept-up, provided firework and hearths, and had decent showers facilities (except in the few “primitive” sites which we might be confronted with at certain points where you had to backpack in and take your chances, ugh) He had hoped to get his fill of ocean views to strengthen him against the mid-American continent bump where you might be lucky to see a lake or something.

They would head west when they were both heartily tired of endless seas, endless looking at seas, although not of walking them, sitting and listening to the ocean, or making love as the waves rolled in if they had the chance. His thing was to chart things like the furthest point in all directions they hit on the trip, how many of this and that they saw, how many that and this, things they did, you could tell he was a real numbers and geography guy. Not where those places were in the world so much, no, so he could said, sometimes brag, brag a little, but mostly say, well, he had been this far  in case somebody might think he was a rube if he hadn’t been far enough from home.

[Funny too because Josie said in his politics, his political moment that he would be  suppressing a little on the trip for her sake, he was always talking, and doing something about it which is where they were beginning to differ, about the struggle in against the American government in Vietnam, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the fate of the Palestinians (the one major point where she, a half-hearted Zionist, daughter of Zionists, and he would have a few blow-ups including one night in Boston before the trip when they, drunk and stoned, were at some party which was being attended by something like the central committee of the Zionist movement in Boston, although neither of them originally knew that was the case. They were raising money for something in Israel, and he started talking his liberation talk, talking about the Irgun gang, about the King David Hotel, about Deir Yessin, jesus, stuff Josie didn’t even know about. He got heated, got heated at her, most of all, for half-defending the infidels at the party, or just their right to support Israel, something like that.]

When we got back to my place, we weren’t living together then he was living in a commune down the road, I threw him out, after we had probably woken up half of the student ghetto in Allston. Then around four o’clock I said she was missing “my sweet walking daddy” [I blushed when she said that.] and called him up to come on back over. He didn’t want to, didn’t want to because he was sleepy, and we had another row over that. He, when I propositioned him, propositioned him with a little secret thing that that I did to him with her mouth [expecting me to know what that was without further description, which I did and made a mental note on], a thing that as he said, or as he had heard on some blues song, maybe David Bromberg, maybe Muddy Waters I don’t remember, that “curled his toes,” he came over, but it was not a good night, not a good omen at all.

It’s funny because Josie I, and Allan later admitted that he was too, very provincial, not in the sense of being some hayseed thing out in Iowa but provincial in the way we interpreted Saul Steinberg’s sardonic New Yorker cover, the one where his map of America started in Manhattan big and then the rest of America was about one inch of space. I related to that sense of the world and would tell him, at his request, endless things odd-ball things about growing up in Manhattan what I had seen, and did. He said he felt the same about Boston and maybe that is why he had to have charts and lists and a stuff like that, his stuff in the world.                             

[…A lot of what Josie said that sad rainy Cambridge night, after she had a few scotches, neat, got mixed-up, not purposefully mixed-up but mixed between the great Allan dream stretch and events that occurred when they actually did get out on the neon wilderness road. I confess too that I having had that same liquor concoctions that I was mixed-up prone. What follows is to the best of my recollection the real travelogue of the trip. Like I say it was a long rainy Cambridge night but she wanted to talk, and I wanted to listen. Let us continue]:   

…My feelings about Peggy’s Cove, Cape Breton, and the like when we got there though was (besides the great view and friendly huge immense rocks we could sit on and get splashed by the sea and feel clean although I was never an ocean freak like him) that since this was to be the eastern most point of our trip (and he thought at the time it would be the northernmost as well) we could stay in a bed and breakfast place. Indoors with an indoor shower, private, or not wait in line, or anything like that. Maybe something just off the main road, “Mrs. Miller’s Bed and Breakfast” or something like that. And if that name of the places and who ran them sounds like something out of about 1947 then you are right because that is exactly what it was like, and what Mrs. Miller was like when we  found ourselves looking for such a place. Of course out in the provinces, the gentle provinces, among the folk who live in the little off-the-road places, the places where times stands still, they depend on the travelling peoples of the world who want to see great natural beauty, and relax against the craziness of the world depend on making their, what did Allan call it, their harsh lonely winter tide-me-over money, in season. But these people, and Allan and I ran into many, on the outskirts of civilization, have their limits, and have their own mores, and good for them. Except not good for us, almost. Mrs. Miller wanted to know if we were married, and we, thinking we were in Boston or New York, said, well no, and, essentially, what of it. She kind of flipped out and did not want to let us stay in her “home.”  So we, tired for a long day on the road, sometime in the rock-bound sea sun, and not sure where the next B&B was, if  any started back-tracking, started  talking about our travels, about tires, about using this trip to see if we should get married. (That contribution was by me so you could see Allan’s blarney side rubbing off.) Mrs. Miller didn’t like it, but as a good Christian woman, she had to welcome us. It was close though, very close. See too though we had intended that this indoor scene would allow us to freshen up, have a shower, have a nice dinner, maybe some wine to get a little high (we had no intention of doing reefer, no way), and then some serious gentle sex. We were both tired of hard-scrabble dirt, of rocks, of fleas, gnats and every other bug taking the edge off of our love-making. So we had to debate whether to do this deed in this good Christian woman’s house. We did but did it so quietly that both of us thought afterwards that this is the way that they are forced to do it in Chinese villages and working- class neighborhood where everybody is packed in together. But here is the best part, the next morning Mrs. Miller made the best pancake-waffle-eggs-anyway you wanted them-ham-hash-home fries- muffins-juice- and whatever for us the best breakfast that we had ever had. And to top it off a big old fresh baked blueberry pie for us to eat on our travels. [Josie said this, smiling, a remembrance smile, a good Christian angel woman, indeed, she has her place reserved in heaven, if such a place was worthy of her.]

[Although Josie lived on the island of Manhattan growing up she never had an occasion to ride the Staten Island ferry which people who don’t come from Manhattan don’t understand, especially since it was only a nickel then. Allan said that his mother told him when she was a girl that she would take boat from Boston down to New York via the Cape Cod Canal and the two things that he remembered that he said she went on and on about were the cheap-jack Automat, the cafeteria where you inserted coins and got your food via the cubicles, a far out thing in the 1930s Josie guessed, and the ride on the cheap Staten Island (and the view of downtown Manhattan from the Staten Island side). So Allan told her that the first time they went down to New York City together to face the fireworks from her parents and they wouldn’t, no way, let them stay together in her room he actually spent the night riding the ferry back and forth, a very cheap way to keep out of the cold and away from harm and copper eyes. So when they made the turn past Neil’s Harbor and headed west, the first real west move they had made on the trip Allan said remembering the Staten Island Ferry experience “let’s take the ferry over to Prince Edward Island,” and so they did and while Josie thought it was interesting to be on the water with their funny old Datsun it wasn’t anything like the big deal Allan made of it. Josie said to me “Let’s put it this way I still haven’t taken the Staten Island Ferry.” Prince Edward Island certainly had its charm, small fishing and farming villages dotted the highway around the island but Josie was getting a little antsy about moving on to see some different scenery from the boats and cows.

The one thing that stuck out in her mind though was this incredible beach on the north side, this Brackley Beach which extended for miles jutting out into the Saint Lawrence, and which if you can believe this up that far north had no qualms about allowing nude bathing. They had it right on the sign, the sign that reserved the area for nude bathers. They were kind of shocked, or she was but Josie said to Allan that she was game, although she had a swim suit along. Allan was kind of funny about that though, some Irish Catholic working- class hang-up about public exposure, or something. He used to hang around the various water spots they landed on with a light- weight long sleeve shirt, his jeans and sandals, he refused to wear a bathing suit, and as it turned out didn’t even have one with him. This get-up thing he said he wore because of the bugs, bugs that really did seem to draw a bee-line to him.]

 That day though I coaxed him out of his jeans and all when I whispered in his ear that I was kind of horny, horny like down in Maine that time at Perkin’s Cover when I had given him the first blow job I had given him [she said to me that “thing she did with her mouth” but we all know what she meant] and I said maybe I was up for giving a little skull that day too. That perked him up as we headed to some private area of the dunes, put down a big towel, maybe a small blanket and I went to work on him. He was all smiles when I “curled his toes” for him.                                 

Down river flow that is what Allan kept practically chanting as we drifted down the Saint Lawrence River headed to Quebec City. But along the way we had stopped at seemingly twenty different towns, Trois this and that kind of towns, three river places, all the same place as far as I was concerned, but one town that we stopped in could stand for my little road story for that leg of the trip because it really could stand in for all of them. The story also can stand as testimony to the cool, kooky, kinky stuff that made our days go by nicely, and too fast with my sweet walking daddy. All of these river towns had like a lot of towns they had seen, a small main street, a few stores, maybe a library, a school showing here and there, and all had churches, but not the New England big steeple white simple church gathering in the pious brethren on Sunday to hear some big top theology from some learned Harvard-trained minister praise big bad Jehovah, or something like that.

What these towns had was heavy stone-etched imposing cathedral-like edifices with plenty of artwork, devotional stuff, and dank, dark, and smelling of death about them, or really the readiness for death that the Catholics are always hankering for. Really though just like the New England pine-box churches once you have seen one you have pretty much gotten all you need to know about the damn things. And I would have left it at that but something about the whole sanctified, sacred, scented scene, kind of took Allan off his moorings. I mentioned before that he was off the church thing but like he said such things when so intense die hard, die out only after some kind of sacred exorcism, and so that is how he schemed (schemed in the good sense of planning something out) to do a mock exorcism at the church in Trois Rivieres, a couple of hundred miles from Quebec City. Now this was not some churchy thing he was thinking of but rather as was his first thought thing then, a little sexual escapade. See his idea was that he and I would do some hanky-panky in that dark church (dark, because like the New England white steeple church brethren the parishioners were deep in work on the farms or in the cotton mill that provided some work for the town folk). So we snuck over to the chapel at least that is what I thought they called it, Allan did anyway (like maybe he knew that was the best place, although he swore, swore after we were done that he had never done it there, or even thought about it until the ride down the Saint Lawrence). I had been afraid to take my clothes off, and insisted that I wouldn’t so we settled on me giving him some head, but he said that for once they would use a condom and leave the residue there as a burnt offering for the sins of the world. I said that I did not usually like condoms (rubbers) in my mouth because they taste funky but this time I kind of didn’t notice it so much because frankly, as we got started I got so turned on by the idea we were doing it in church, a sacred place, that I just went about my work, and I could tell by his little moanings that Allan was appreciating  my efforts, although after a bit I started thinking about how maybe we should “do the do” (our little term for love-making courtesy of  a Howlin’ Wolf song) and I suggested that to him but once he got into her “giving head”  thing that usually was what he wanted. Well, Allan came, after I had given him the best blow job I thought I had ever given him until then, at least he had a big grin on his face after I took the condom off and we placed it carefully in front of the altar. I told him I was still turned on and so we went back to that secluded area and did “do the do”, twice. [Josie, the little tease, one of the reasons I was interested in her, said she would tell me more, a couple of little extra things that happened that day at that church but she said she could  tell I are getting turned on while she was talking and so she left it at that. I was too.]                

[After the farms, field and rivers coming down the Saint Lawrence all of a sudden out of the river mist, out of the river turn around Ile de Orleans there came into view the great fortress city of Quebec City, a city that Allan and Josie both confessed that they knew about mainly from the Plains of Abraham, bloody deaths of Montcalm and Wolfe in some 18^th century part of the world-wide battle for world supremacy, for the ports, the commercial ports of entry. Quebec to her though was mainly a matter of about ten million churches, Gallic Roman Catholic churches fit for the lame, halt, and crippled it seemed by their names or names associated with each parish, with all grey stone, all gothic, all forbidding, foreboding and frankly hostile, hostile to whatever Jewish identity she felt, felt being among those who not that long before (or maybe they still did) called her people Christ-killers and did stuff about it.

Allan, a long lapsed, lapsed  since about fourteen when he started reading some stuff , some stuff by Jews like Karl Marx and Sartre, Catholic, and feeling out of sorts and oppressed by the Catholic-ness of the place ,except for those bloody Plains of Abraham alongside the Saint Lawrence and really beautiful, for his own reasons, stated categorically that he would defend me, my honor, the bones of my forbears, even my fussy parents, if anybody, anybody under cloak of clerical authority, or just any lay person who got crazy, tried any rough stuff, and that kept her in check, and made her love him even more, and ready then to show some him decidedly non-Catholic loving out of wedlock, and out of procreation’s way too.]

Also despite the architectural beauty of the city, the gothic old time sense of some very much earlier age, some age when men and women were not afraid to come out and face the wilds, the hostile Indians, the even more hostile wildlife and stake their claim to new world riches and pay homage to the providence that spared those who survived put paid to that good wind by those incredible churches, nunnery and chapel (and the vast number of personal to service them), the current crop of  French-Canadians who just then dominated the very nationalistic times were short with Anglos, including sympathetic Anglos like Allan and me.  This was the heyday of Quebec independence movement and the tensions were still in the air against the Anglo government which had at one point before we came had declared martial law in the province. The way that edge came out was when we would go into restaurant in Old Town and try to order lunch or something (admittedly my high school and first year of college long past French and later Allan’s Spanish in Mexico were too Anglo to fake anybody out that they were anything but Norte Americanos) and be snubbed at every turn, deliberately snubbed by waiters, slumming while students like was almost universal then, maybe now too, who you could overhear speaking perfectly usable English among themselves when they wanted to make some obscure point. Allan would get on his high- horse about the heathens (his term for any high-hat snub anywhere usually followed by-“well, my people were creating great culture when their forbears were trying to figure out how to use a spoon, or what it was useful for)  While Allan wasn’t happy about snubs, or any other of the small change of people, people like his Irish forbears, who couldn’t respond to their oppression any other way he was more tolerate than I was toward what he called his fellahin brethren . 

I asked him, asked him seriously one time when they were driving out of Quebec City toward Montreal what he meant by fellahin, where he had heard or seen the word, was it in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road where I  had seen it as part of Jacks’  trip in southern California in describing the places, the night after hard day fields places the mex places, where he and his lady of the time, his little mex whore, landed on that famous trip, and the people and their mores, his kindreds. Allan said no he had learned it in seventh grade over at Hull Junior High School when some history teacher, a Jewish guy if he remembered correctly, held the class in awe with stories about the Jewish struggles in the Middle East with the Palestinians, including labor Zionists, and Allan had held the word like a lot of odd-ball words that interested him in his head since then. What Allan meant, maybe like Kerouac, and like that history teacher, was life’s dispossessed, those left behind in the dust who, until their judgment day (not that foolish religious one) when they were liberated, maybe generations, would forget that bondage times but until then he wanted to be very indulgence toward them, even if we got poor wait staff service, ouch. Yeah, the fetid fellaheen night was what was in store for, I wondered that night for the first time could I take it …             

…It started to go bad, not the bad bad of our being together bad, but trip bad, after Quebec City as we were heading down to Montreal. Allan began to doubt the whole purpose of the trip, expounding on the bourgeois nature of the thing, the dilettante thing we were doing while the people’s struggles was going on all around us. That night in Quebec City that I had mentioned before when we stood in solidarity with the students fighting the national liberation struggle kind of set things off in his head. He was going through something of an ocean change in his head, something more in line with his slightly changed political views as he moved away from peaceful rallies and sweet reason conferences and workshops like the one when we first met up in New Hampshire, something that had been gnawing at him since that time down in Washington, that May Day 1971 time when I had refused to stay with him to participant in a mass civil disobedience action on that day to try to shut down the government in order to shut down the Vietnam War.

We had had arguments over the correctness of that series of actions as we were hitch-hiking down with a couple of my work friends to attend a mass rally that I had helped organize the Boston part of and which Allan called hopelessly futile. He was staying for the civil disobedience and I and my friends were heading back to Boston directly after that rally. What bothered Allan after he came back about a week later after having been incarcerated in the RFK stadium for a few days was how futile that action was, how they, mainly students and young unaffiliated radicals, had been easily defeated militarily by the cops and guardsmen. Swept up like the rubbish and with less fuss it seemed to him. He got into a mood like it didn’t matter what they did, those brethren students and unaffiliated radicals, without some other force to help them out they would stay just as isolated and defeated as if they had just stayed with those like me who called for more massive peaceful marches as a strategy.

So Allan read, really read when he got off of whatever temporary job his was doing to help us get the dough to make the trip (he said he had not read so much, with so much purpose since the stockade days), and went to different political meetings to try to see if anybody else knew what the hell way that the wars could be stopped, or some rough economic and social justice could be brought into this wicked old world. After several months he finally gravitated toward some socialist stuff, some stuff by Marx, but the big thing was that massive three-volume set by Leon Trotsky the assassinated Bolshevik leader, History of the Russian Revolution. I knew enough about Trotsky, and about Allan, to get secretly stirred inside when he lost himself in that “project” (Allan’s term). In the span between that night when he laid out his dream trip and the actual start of the several months later he thus found “religion.”

[Now one of the things about Josie, one that she saw as a positive trait, and I did too, was that she was a drone when it came to research, that was why Professor Telly liked her, worked with her closely. It turned out that Allan was the same way about things, a drone when he got into something, not necessarily academic things but things that he thought important and so he began reading everything he could about the socialist movement, revolutions, the labor movements and all that. She had never told Allan this at the time because although it was before she had met him she was not sure how he would take it but a couple of times the Professor and her got high on dope and went over to his house on Commonwealth Avenue when his wife was out of town and did the “do the do.” Telly was looking for sex and she was looking for good grades and a nice recommendation so it was a fair trade-off. She still thought so, although a couple of her girlfriends had raised their eyebrows when she told them.]

 Allan would read his books as well on the trip, which was fine sometimes but a few times when I did not want him to when I was feeling kind of lonely and looking for attention from him. Looking for him to do stuff with and to me. Especially when we were in cities and not the long lost shadow campers. So that was what made Montreal, a perfectly beautiful city sitting there on the Saint Lawrence with nice clean, busy, happy streets and great scenery, kind of a bummer, kind of a turning point. We had rented a small room with a kitchenette near the student ghetto for a week and for that week he almost hibernated there reading, reading, reading one political book after another.

One night, maybe our third night there, I said, “hey, we are in the city, if you don’t want to go out I do.” He said go ahead and returned to his book. So I left and walked down Saint Catherine’s Street which was only a few blocks from where our room was. Now since I was in the city I had dressed up a bit, wore a mini-skirt which Allan had said that he liked and that showed my legs to good effect. While I was walking a young guy, Jean Bon I called him, maybe a little older than me, asked me (in French) if I was looking for company. I said yes. We stepped into a café for a drink, maybe a couple and without too much coaxing by then he brought me to his studio apartment. He went to a bowl, rolled a couple of joints, passed me some of the dope and that got me going a little. Well maybe a lot, because he was pretty good- looking and I had always had a thing that turned her on about making it with a stranger who seemed okay the first night. [He had great technique but that she would tell me about that some other time since she had already told me enough about the specifics of her sex life back then.]  When we were done and I was ready to leave he handed me fifty-dollars (Canadian). I asked what that was for and he explained that he assumed that I was a prostitute (although he was more delicate than that) since I was on Saint Catherine Street and I was an easy pick up and that was the going rate for good hookers then. I started to protest but then stopped quickly and said to myself well why not keep the money. It made me a little wet thinking about it as I walked the streets back to our room although while I had that stranger fantasy thing I never before that night had a working street girl fantasy.

When I got back to the room I told Allan about my “date” (except the money part). He said, as he always said we weren’t tied up like some bourgeois parents nonsense, and then went back to reading. I was furious and to take my revenge I went to Jean Bon’s place a couple more times before we left Montreal. And, both of us smiling, took my fifty-dollar “fee” each time (and it really was the going rate as he said because I had asked a couple of streets girls on Saint Catherine’s about it after that first time, I didn’t want to be some cheap whore. They looked at her strangely when I asked in my Americanized French since to them I did not look like I was in the “trade,” strictly an amateur slumming, if anything). After those sessions then not so furious I also bought myself a nice dress with her “earnings” before we left Montreal. Allan did say I looked sexy in when I tried it on in front of him, and I did. He took the dress off of me fast enough when he saw me swaying gently (and suggestively) in that slinky thing. The wages of war.                  

[Josie said that really after Montreal a lot of the rest of the trip got kind of blurry, Allan blurry because what had started out for him as some fulfillment of a childhood quest turned to ashes, turned in on itself after he got “religion” and began to think more about how he was going to fit into the “new world” after the end of the trip. He and Josie had both agreed that they could see signs, definite signs that the big wave that had risen in the 1960s to smite the giants had lost steam, had begun to fade as the war in Vietnam, and America’s central role in the fiasco, diminished. Frankly Josie was less concerned about what to do in the post-revolt world since she had not been washed as much by the phenomenon but she knew the events piling up weighed on Allan’s mind. He after all had staked his political future on some kind of people’s victory in the ongoing struggles to right the world’s wrongs.

They would argue over that future a bit, more and more as time on the trip went on, and Allan kept thinking almost daily that the travels should be shortened and they should get back to the “real world.” The effect of all this was that after Montreal the former leisurely pace of a hundred or two hundred miles a day, max, went by the boards as they travelled from Montreal to Detroit, really Ann Arbor in one day (skipping right through Toronto, which had been part of the original trip plan but was scuttled since Allan s said they had been there the year before anyway. Josie did not mind the skip although she hated the fast pace that Allan pushed that day to hit Ann Arbor before dusk).       

Ann Arbor in 1972 represented all that Allan feared about what was happening to that big splash 1960s wave. Since Josie had gone to fellow Michigan Big Ten Wisconsin and had made connections on that campus that way and had also gone to high school with several women who went Michigan and had kept in touch they stayed at the house of one of those of high school friends. Or rather the house, the doctor’s house, outside of town, that her girlfriend (and her boyfriend) were house-sitting while the doctor’s family was in Europe. During their stay there were several parties, nothing too wild but enough to be entertaining, except for Allan.]

He was shocked by the lack of any political talk from people who I had assured him had been big wheels in the burgeoning Ann Arbor radical and anti-war movements of the late 1960s. He did make me laugh when he said we could have been in Tea Neck or Newburgh given that scene that night. Worse much, worse was when we went down to the Quad and around the streets surrounding the campus and Allan remarked (although I did not laugh this time) about the place turning into a den of “cockroach” capitalists. The week we expected to spend in friendly Ann Arbor (and that my friend expected as well) turned into four days and Allan got antsy. That quick departure was also the first time that I found Allan had done, or someone had done, some suspicious things in that doctors’ house. But that did not come out until much later, a couple of years later when I saw that high school girlfriend who told me some things, valuable things, had gone missing from the doctor’s house. But that latter information was not part of the trip story that night and I do not, in any case, want to go into those sordid Allan details.          

[After Ann Arbor there were mad spurs through big cities, small towns and plenty of prairie, rock formations, and dry desert as Josie and Allan had mapped out as at Allan’s insistence they had decided to get to the West Coast in a far shorter period than they had originally planned. That grasping between Chicago and the Coast, San Francisco was to take two month, with the proviso that if the weather in the Rockies got bad early they would push on faster. In any case the new plan called for them to be on the Coast in two week. Josie said most of it was kind of a blur between racing between points and ignoring many point that she wanted to see in the Western desert night. She did mention a couple of interesting stops and what happened, or almost happened in a couple of places. Some tinged with disputes others just signifying that the writing was on the wall.

That rainy Cambridge night she also felt comfortable enough with me to pass me a sheath of type-written pages that she wanted me to read over later since she was too tired then to speak about those blur days and nights. What she had done was she had converted her woes into short stories and fictionalized those adventures. Her name in the stories was Angelica and they were told in Allan’s voice although Josie insisted that the important point for me to take from the stories was not the facts, although the locales were true, but the feeling about how things had changed between her and Allan.

That neon wilderness travelling talk night (and the next day) and what followed on the trip, the ups and downs, and Josie  said the sideways too, was their beginning, Her and Allan’s real beginning, their love time with all the bumps, maybe despite all the bumps. She said she could no longer be with him, didn’t want to go beyond the details of their love and their failings that she had spoken of already, that he had gone to a place that she could not follow, had cut her too badly by his careless love actions with other women, by his waywardness, by his angers and hatreds, by his deceits and lies, so no way, there had been too much sorrow between them. She said that every once in a while though on wind-swept nights, or when she was near some ocean, or some raggedy scruffy guy selling some left-wing newspaper passed her by she would get all misty about her sweet walking daddy. Would try to reach out again for that love that had passed them by, that he, her be-bop sweet walking daddy when he was in the mood, had never known how to handle. Would wonder to herself when she was in that mood if he ever found that neon wilderness that he wandered after, and which they together had not found. She said I would have to know that, know that up front, on that rainy, sad, bluesy night. And that was our beginning…] 

 

 

 

 

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Beginning of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Starts ... Some Remembrances-Bertolt Brecht's To Those Born After

Although Brecht's To Those Born After is not directly related to the debacle of World War I one cannot understand the poem without that debacle in mind.

To Those Born After

I

To the cities I came in a time of disorder
That was ruled by hunger.
I sheltered with the people in a time of uproar
And then I joined in their rebellion.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

I ate my dinners between the battles,
I lay down to sleep among the murderers,
I didn't care for much for love
And for nature's beauties I had little patience.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

The city streets all led to foul swamps in my time,
My speech betrayed me to the butchers.
I could do only little
But without me those that ruled could not sleep so easily:
That's what I hoped.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

Our forces were slight and small,
Our goal lay in the far distance
Clearly in our sights,
If for me myself beyond my reaching.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

II

You who will come to the surface
From the flood that's overwhelmed us and drowned us all
Must think, when you speak of our weakness in times of darkness
That you've not had to face:

Days when we were used to changing countries
More often than shoes,
Through the war of the classes despairing
That there was only injustice and no outrage.

Even so we realised
Hatred of oppression still distorts the features,
Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly.
Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness,
Could never be friendly ourselves.

And in the future when no longer
Do human beings still treat themselves as animals,
Look back on us with indulgence.  

*****
To Those Who Come After

History in the conditional is always a funny tricky little thing. You can get wrapped up it in so bad that you begin to deny the hard reality of what really happened, what really bad happened usually. On the other hand you can do as most historians do and just plod along assuming because X, Y, or Z happened that was that. That’s the facts, jack and that’s it. Obviously to resolve this thing, or rather to get a real sense of the possibilities, some combination, some mix and matching needs to be placed in the maelstrom. And it is under that sign that I wish to understand Bertolt Brecht’s great poem, his great big tied-up with ribbons and bows valentine to future generations really, To Those Who Come After, that I have posted above.


Of course it is a matter of generations, no question. And what that generation could have, or could not have, done, and done differently to sway the funny little rhythms of history. For his, Bertolt’s generation, if they only could have held out against the imperialist imperative onslaught of World War I, or at least not gone alone like sheep until almost the very end. More germane, if they could have carried out to completion one of those big-time revolutionary possibilities in Germany that they had in the early 1920s. Or ceased their, Communists and Social-Democrats alike, willfully myopic view that the Weimar regime would hold out against the bootjack of Hitler’s storm streets without having to unite for an all-out fight to the death against the Nazi menace.


Moving forward to my parent’s generation, the generation that scarecrow survived the Great Depression of the 1930s and went on to survive, or wait on the survivors, of the D-Day and Pacific bloodbaths of World War II. If only they could have seen clearly enough that that Roosevelt guise was sheer deception to save his class in power (even if he had to fight them, the economic royalists, the one percent of his time, tooth and nail to do it) and create their own party, a workers party, after the tremendous class battles of the mid to late 1930s when they had the bosses on the run, a little anyway. Or hadn’t bought, bought hard into that white picket fence post-war dream and let the red scare dark night wash away whatever big (or little, but I think big) spark got them through the dustbowl miseries and war shellshock.


Once again moving forward to my generation, my disposable income record store soda fountain be-bop high school confidential night with some undiagnosed teen angst mixed with teen alienation generation, the generation of ’68, who didn’t want, well, didn’t start out wanting to anyway, buy into that red scare night white picket fence dream. If we could have just, a big “could have just” I agree, not thrown everything out with the bathwater and read some history we could have realized that it wasn’t just about us. Well, one way or the other, the Vietnamese taught us that lesson, that lesson about perseverance, about a sense of history and about using every tool around to get free. Or, closer to home, if we could have remembered where we had come from, most of us anyway, and dug our working class heels in sooner we could have left some kind of social movement worthy of the name instead of leaving future generations to start from scratch.


And moving on to our children’s generation. Oh, well, history records many retrogressions in the uphill struggle.


And now on to the generation that I am really directing this little “history” lesson to, the real subject of my “to those who come after,” those who roughly are students today, and are moreover the heart and soul of the Occupy movement that has suddenly jumped up onto the historic stage giving them a chance to change the course of history- on their terms. And, by the way incidentally giving to me (and others) from the generation of ’68 a second chance to make things right. Each generation I am firmly convinced must (and will) find its own ways to fight the monster. But know this, know this from first-hand experience, there is a monster on the loose out there, and that monster has a name, the American imperial state just now being captained by one Barack Obama. Whoever the captain is though the monster remains and that is where the “to the death” fight is.


And this is where Brother Brecht and I can share the same sentiments about being ill-equipped in our times to face those hard realities, to worry over half-measures, to not stay the course we knew we had to stay. So forgive us for not doing better, not doing a lot better. But forgive, or not, go slay that damn dragon.

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Beginning of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Starts ... Some Remembrances-Poet's Corner- Wilfred Owen's Anthem For Doomed Youth (1914) 

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; And bugles calling for them from sad shires. What candles may be held to speed them all? Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes. The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.                             

***An Old Geezer Sighting In North Quincy-Another 50^thAnniversary, Of Sorts –With A North Star-Gazer In Mind    

A YouTube clip of Johnny Cash’s I Still Miss Someone to set the mood for this sketch.

 

My old friend Peter Markin and I have over the years sat down in some locale, in the old days usually a bar, and told each other stories, some true, some stretched.  I first met Markin  down at the Surf Ballroom in Hull in the summer after we had graduated from high school (he from Hull High) when we chased the same girl on the dance floor (a girl who eventually dumped both of us, me first). One afternoon last fall over lunch I told him the story of my 50^th anniversary “jog” around the old North Quincy cross-country course which I had done a few weeks earlier. He insisted on writing something up about the event. He did so but left the piece in a folder and forgot about it until now.  Since this site was created to propagandize such events we both thought it would be an appropriate place to tell the gruesome tale. Here are Markin’s recollections from that afternoon:   

Writers, or at least people who like to write, know, know deep in their souls, or hell, maybe only know by instinct that some things should not be written. Or if written then discarded (and in the age of cyberspace one can just press the DELETE button, praise be). That was my initial response when my friend from the old days, Alfred Francis Johnson, hell just Al which is what everybody except nerdy girls called him, when he insisted that I write a little something for him. That “little something” that he was all exercised about was “jogging” in the fall of 2013 on the old North Quincy cross-country course in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the last time he ran it as a member of the team in 1963. Jesus.

Yes I know, although these days the media and others on slow news days are prone to commemorate all kinds of anniversaries of events including odd-ball years like 30^thand 40^th, this was a weird request. But that afternoon Al argued his case as he does when he is exercised about something and I had to hear him out. He said that if he had actually run that course after 50 years of statutory neglect I should tout that fact to all who would listen.

Al had told me previously that he had taken up jogging a few years before to while the time away and keep the extra pounds off. I remember looking at him then like he had three-heads. I said that personally I would have a hard time running one hundred yards (or meters, whatever the short distance is they run these days) without crying out desperately for oxygen and many other medicals services.

Al then went into high gear. He mentioned that a few years back, it must have been about 2010, he had written a sketch about his current running prowess to commemorate the 50^thanniversary of when he began running as a sport. Yeah, it was 2010. He had run a mile over at some practice field, the “dust bowl” he called it which gives you an idea of the condition of the track to prove that he was not over the hill, or something like that. Yes, I know again, like this was some fleet-footed ancient marathon feat worthy of notice. His point was that the sketch which he wrote was well received by the AARP-worthy audience in need of elderly care he was addressing thus throwing down the gauntlet about my ability to match that result. No sale, brother, no sale.

That negative response on my part set him off, had him seeing red. He went into his classic “you owe me” rant. That “you owe me” stems from way back in the summer of 1964 when we first met down in my hometown of Hull which is about twenty miles south of North Quincy. We had met at the Surf Ballroom where there was a weekly live band dance (rock and roll, of course, now called classic rock, damn) and I “stole” a girl from him that we were both interested in. The girl eventually faded but our friendship began. And with that little tidbit he won his argument. Not on the merits of his case, and not even to shut him up, but because I told him that if I wrote something now about his silly anniversary then next year, next summer, I would get to write the real story about the 50th anniversary of the night that I supposedly “stole” that girl from him. And that will not be pretty, brother, it will not be pretty.

So here goes.

Al had mentioned to me before, maybe several years ago, that this North Quincy cross-country course had a storied past. The reason for that distinction was that his best friend, his running mate in both senses, running around the track and running around town, was Bill Cadger. Bill was a great runner who over his career won many races on the course and for many years held the course record. Al stood in his shadow, stood deep in his shadow. That fact is neither here nor there now, except that this course of two and one-half miles which they had run together in practice many times was laid out along the streets of old North Quincy in a way that Al had not noticed back in the day when he was seriously try to run the thing. There were many landmarks of his youth as he ran it this time, this time when he was running, oops, jogging slowly enough to see things. To reflect on things, to remember. And those recollections, that filler, is what I will finish this sketch with. Except to now tell anybody who will listen, anybody who wants to know, that yes Al finished the course, and did not, I repeat, did not need medical attention, none.

The first part of the course started on the side of the high school, the East Squantum Street side. Just seeing the old high school again reminded Al of the tough times he had getting through the place. Not academically, not even socially, except a little, a little shy and unknowing about girls, no knowledge shy with three boys and no girls in the family to ease the way. And a deep-crusted Catholic studied ignorance of things sexual, how to deal with the subject, okay. He was moreover, and Bill too, which is why they got along, filled with all kinds of teenage angst and alienation, feelings of being isolated, and feeling out of sorts with the world. He said he laughed as he thought about that, thought about how someday, now someday he might get over that angst and alienation. Yah, Al said he had to laugh about that, about how they all said back in the day he would get over it when he got older. The only thing better now was that he had a small handle on it, and some helpful medication.

The first leg continued down East Squantum onto Bayfield Road, the cross street before strewn with houses of relatives, some that he liked and some, who later when he joined, joined with abandon (as did I), the “youth nation” that was a-borning in the late 1960s shut their doors to him, called him renegade, called him in the parlance of the times, “red,” “commie,” and “monster.” Jesus. But those street also had houses filled with budding romances, or flirtations in that close- packed community, romances and flirtations. Flirtations that he, girl-shy, had trouble picking up on when the boys’ “lav” Monday morning before school bull- sessions (emphasis on the bull) and he came up on the radar as someone that Sally, Susie, or Marie “liked” on that preternatural teen grapevine that had Facebook beat six ways to Sunday. He wondered as he passed some cross streets after Bayfield what had happened to Sally, Susie, and Marie. Did they too fade from the town’s memory like he had, Had they, like many in their nomadic generation, shaken the dust off of the town unlike their parents, his parents, and definitely his grandparents who stayed anchored to the town and took a certain pride in that fact. He had to laugh again, why not, he was moving slow enough to laugh and look and feel something about things, that even now it always came down to girls, oops, women, even after two marriages and a million short- haul things. And he still was trying to figure them out. Jesus  

 

The second leg brought him along what is now Quincy Shore Boulevard, along the ocean, along the one piece of geography that has defined his life; the old days remembrances of running along in the beach sand, a task too tough now with those wobbly knees and aching ankles, with Bill running a mile ahead, and him, Al, getting all red from the sun; summer afternoons spent on the beach between the Squantum  Yacht Club and the Wollaston Boat Club the “spot” to hang in waiting around for, what else, that certain she you had had your eye on in school, or just what came in on the ocean; Saturday night parking steamed cars with the roar of the ocean drowning out love’s call; end of night stops at Joe’s for burgers and fries to placate a different hunger. Thoughts of  later walks (not runs, hell, no) along Pacific beaches, Malibu, Carlsbad, LaJolla, Magoo Point, with love Angelica, Angelica from Indiana and ocean-deprived, her almost drowning in some riptide not knowing the fierceness of Mother Nature, of Uncle Neptune when the furies were up; solo walks, lonely walks in the 1970s when the booze and dope almost broke him (and he called me, desperately called me for help, and I said “I’ll meet you in Malibu and we’ll get you dried out, brother”).

Much later solitary walks along endless Maine beaches trying to figure out what went wrong with that second marriage, and why his current relationship had run out of steam several years before. Simple stuff as the rush of the foam-flecked waves called out for serenity. As he made the third leg down Atlantic Boulevard  heading back toward  the school he laughed again, twice laughed, first that he was going to finish running the whole course and secondly that no matter what somebody better make sure that he was not buried in some ocean-less place like Kansas when his time came. He had come from the muck of the sea and let him lay his head down there.

As Al travelled that last leg, the leg that brought him to the corner of his old neighborhood he cringed, cringed at the thought of all the misbegotten things that had happened in that vanished shack of a cramped house that he came of age in and of his estrangement from his family, a shame, a crying shame (and I, Hull–born twenty miles away from the same kind of neighborhood, with the same family grievances will not go into detail about that here -see we do not “air our family linens in public,” got it). But he also had a certain nostalgia, a certain sadness as he remembered the various generations of cats that helped make life a little bit bearable when cursed mother got on her sway, father silent, silent as the grave. Joy Smokey, Snowball, Blackie, Big Boy, Sorrowful, Grey Boy, Calico, and many others. Making him think too of later manhood long gone beloved Mums who had helped him get through drugs, booze, depression, angst, a bad marriage and about seven other maladies. And just then recently gone and still filled with sorrows and sadnesses his companion shadow Willie Boy as he shed a tear for him, and them all.

Then past Atlantic Street onto Newbury Street and remembrances of many miles walked getting up the courage to talk to Lydia the first girl he fell hard for, and wonder, wonder too what happened to her, doing well he hoped. And last stop before the finishing hill and kick to the line Grandma’s Young Street house, savoir sainted (everybody agreed, sainted especially with devil Grandpa) Grandma who saved his tender teens from total despair, from starvation too and blessed memories. And regrets, regrets too that he had not been better at the end for her. Sorrows there, joys too.

Ah, streets, all known streets, all blessed streets (not church-blessed but still blessed), all ocean-breezed streets, all memory streets, as he chugged up that Newbury Street hill which led back on to East Squantum and the school. A hill where in memory time, fifty- years ago time, he would put a rush kick to the finish. This day he ambled across the ancient imaginary finish line, fist in the air like some Olympic champion. Done.

***Ain’t Got Not No Time For The Corner Boys-With George V. Higgins’ The Friends Of Eddie Coyle in Mind –Take Two

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Every kid, every “the projects” kid, a kid who would have to know this bit of urban legend wisdom sooner rather than later, know there was “no honor among thieves,” in order to survive out on the edge of society down there where the line between the lumpen and the downtrodden working poor (or can’t work poor) is blurred, very blurred. Know this by heart, by gut, in order to survive childhood in one piece unless he was “connected” or was tough enough, or had a brother or brothers tough enough to protect him. So would every triple-decker Southie/Dot/North Cambridge/Somerville/Revere and on and on Massachusetts Mom and Pop variety store holding up the wall looking for the heart of Saturday night corner boy, ditto on the “no honor among thieves” wisdom. Ditto too on the survival part. All knowing too that that principle though applies as well to “hit” men, stone-cold killers, grifters, drifters, midnight sifters, gunrunners, heist artists and every con man who walks the street going whatever his con is. Those young guys know deep in their hearts, and if not somebody better embed it there, just like Eddie Coyle knew, Eddie “Fingers” if you forgot his real name, and just knew him from his small reputation as a part-time stand-up guy, that despite all that stuff about the sanctified lumpen brotherhood down there in the grime of society, all that noise about keeping the faith as a stand-up guy if you want to stay in one piece, above about not being a “snitch” each of those projects boys or corner boys (could be the same depending on your town and its social structure) has to learn, and maybe the hard way, that down at the bottom of society, down there where the working poor meets the non-working poor meets the bottom feeder, what, Karl Marx, and not just him, called the lumpen that it is dog eat dog and the survivors move up the food chain.

And see the cops, the guys who deal with all of this one way or another as part of their jobs, who maybe lived in the projects coming up themselves or held up some corner storefront brick wall, work that knowledge to their benefit. Work each freaking guy up against it, each guy looking at some serious closed-up and forgotten time, each guy who comes up against their justice system and if you are a projects boy or a corner boy you will come up against that system if only for a search and frisk for being a po’ boy, to sell-out whoever and whatever he can to get right with whatever governmental agency has him by the cajoles. Not only do the cops know this but the guys who prosecute the cases for the government, you know the D.As. (really the Assistant D.A.s except in high profile cases),the judges, the jailers, and the constitutional law professors, most of whom did not come up that way, all know this. Laugh among themselves over drinks about how some poor snook could not figure out the fact that he was being used as an experiment in their “snitch” manipulations (mainly how to get those dockets cleared before noon day after day with ninety-five percent plea outs). The only ones who don’t know, or maybe do a little but don’t know the extent of it, are the average citizens who get bopped on the head, get their cars stolen, or get burgled.       

Hold on though there is another group, well, maybe not a group but a few guys anyway, smart guys in all ways, all important ways. Those of course are maybe guys who used to be in law enforcement now working as security for private businesses, maybe guys who used to try the cases for the government (or better get a negotiated plea out) now in lucrative private practices who make it their business to know so they could use that information when they went out and got real jobs, or maybe write about it, to wise the public up every once in a while.

That’s what this guy I knew once did, the late George V. Higgins, a guy who worked in the Attorney-General’s Office in Massachusetts and when he got tired of that moved up to the “bigs” in the federal district court in Massachusetts. Kind of a stand-up guy in his own way if anybody is asking although as far as I know he always had his nose in a book. He said one that he had done a little corner boy stuff and although he was a “projects” boy he gave up the thrill of the criminal life that beckoned to every corner boy early and from there went straight to the head of his class.

So George knew his stuff, had as they say “seen it all” and while he worked for chump change in the government he made a good living at writing the stuff up later because he knew his former low-rent “clientele” that wound up coming before him for a deal, looking for help, and ready to give up their acquaintances, their close friends, their relatives, hell, their mothers if it would get them out from under some long stretch in Cedar Junction, the old MCI-Walpole or you name your MCI, or down sunny “club fed” Danbury in Connecticut. Knew the Eddie Fingers of the world. Better, had a close ear to the way they talked, talked to each other, talked to the coppers, talked to the bench but most importantly knew how their minds worked, how they skittled the truth, on the job and off. Higgins knew too how to make a lot of guys at Sculler’s over in North Adamsville, guys like me who worked in that town and liked to stop off for a few after work, laugh that knowing laugh about that “honor among thieves” stuff.  (One time he said that North Adamsville was where he was originally from, or so I heard, and so he liked to go back to the old neighborhood taverns looking for “color.”)

I remember one time, it have to have been about thirty or forty years ago, Higgins came dragging his ass into the bar one night after some hardball case for the “feds” whom he was working for then had finished up, had become “case closed” and he was in an expansive mood so he just let it rip. Wanted to give out on about the 227^th version on the “no honor among thieves” thesis. So somebody bought him a high-end Scotch (I forget the brand but he always drank high-end liquor in those days).  See he had been (as had me and a few other guys there listening) a corner boy himself and so could see where going off track might lead, had been in thrall to the “life” for a while until he figured the percentage differently from those corner boys who he grew up with and who choose a different “career” path ending up doing plenty of collective “hard time.”  Yeah, that night he told us about old Eddie Coyle, old Eddie “Fingers” who the day before had wound up face down with about nine slugs in him in the front passenger side of a stolen 1970 two-toned Chevy over at the Fresh Pond Shopping Mall in Cambridge as the prime new example he could give about that honor among thieves stuff.

George didn’t know much about Eddie’s early life but he guessed that like a lot of guys who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s, guys from  Eddie’s “class” like Whitey Bulger who they just grabbed recently, a couple of years ago, grabbed good Eddie started early. Figure: probably a drunken father (like George’s had been, that was the first time I had heard that) who did, or did not beat, the kids (and wife) after a three day toot and who did, or did not, drink away his weekly wages leaving said wife with many empty envelopes for the “on time” bill collectors and repo men but who in whichever case applies was AWOL in bringing up sonny boy. Figure: a nagging mother (who despite the beating or short money would not leave her man, where would she go?) who kept sonny boy in tow for a while with “you do not want to be like your father” but who when he came of age turned more and more like his father-except he was in thrall to easy money, easy money “found on the ground” not whiskey. Figure too: too many kids in the family, too little space to breathe, always climbing over or under somebody, and the kicker- a serious wanting habit that never left him because there was too much to want and not enough to pay for it. Yeah, George did not know every detail, every Eddie detail but those of us on the stools kept nodding our heads as he spoke.

How to get that easy money though. Maybe Eddie started, you know probably with the “clip”, the “five-finger discount” at some cheap jewelry store downtown (and probably for some young girl that he was smitten with and had no dough to buy some harmless trinket. Little did he know then that there was not enough dough in the world when his women got their wanting habits on. That hard-bitten knowledge came later.). Kids’ stuff for kids’ eyes. Later when more serious dough was needed  maybe a quick Mom and Pop variety store robbery throwing a scare in the owners but no weapons (and not in the neighborhood either-funny about the “code” you did not hit the neighborhood stores but some other neighborhood stores with the same hard-working up against it small owners were fair game. Worse though was when the drugs came and distorted a lot so even locals were hit. But in Eddie’s time-stay away).Maybe some silly petty larceny thing finally graduating to more dough armed robberies, selling stolen goods, selling dope, maybe selling women who knows. The way George got to know Eddie though was as a gun-runner, one of the best in New England, and one of the surefire ways to get yourself before the “feds”-if you were looking for a way.

 What Eddie was though, and here he was and is legion, was a career “soldier,” a guy just trying to do a little of this, a little of that to keep the vultures from the door. George said looking at photographs of Eddie when he was younger he looked pretty tough, but also a good- looking guy that would be spending a lot of time buying trinkets for one frail or another. George said think of maybe a young Robert Mitchum, all cleft-chin, barrel-chest, a mass of dark hair, and a little sneer that women, some women anyway, usually make it their business to take off a guy when they have a different set of wanting habits on. They would never make a movie of Eddie’s short unsweet mournful life but if they did he would suggest Mitchum for the role hands down.     

Yeah, so Eddie was just a guy doing the best he could, not an educated guy but “street wise” enough to get noticed by guys who notice such things. (Eddie dropped out of high school over at Rindge Tech in Cambridge after his first successful armed robbery and after he nearly beat one of the teachers, a shop teacher, to death when he asked Eddie where he was going with all shop materials in the back of his car after school).  Most of the time whatever caper he was on worked, a few mishaps, thirty days here, six months there and then back to the streets, back to the “this and that.” But here is where he got dragged into the “code.” One time he was look-out on an armed robbery of a department store on payday. Something went wrong and the guys who actually were to pull the robbery off fled leaving Eddie holding the bag. Eddie was left “holding the bag” (had a weapon on him as he was approached by the called cops.) Eddie, knowing the guys he was working with were “connected’ did his first stand-up guy routine-got a year and served six months. He would stand-up some more later but what was important was after that time, after he proved to be a stand-up guy, was when he began his career as the “armorer” anytime somebody needed some “clean” guns.   

But see guys like Eddie are street smart, or better be if they expect a longest career, but not smart, smart, not covered with about eight layers of protection before they might have to take the big fall, not brain smart and so guys like Eddie make mistakes, and certain mistakes cost a guy. Then George yelled out no that is not right, guys like Eddie were born to take the fall, were born with that chip on their shoulders so they couldn’t see straight, born to have that bull’s-eye target on their backs for anybody to take aim at. George said that hard fact is how Eddie got his moniker. See mostly Eddie was after that youthful mishap stuff, that 30 days here, six months there stuff, a gun-runner, a job which means that he was “connected” if only by a “banker” to guys who mattered. Eddie was the guy who, if you were “connected,” could depend on to get guns for your caper and then you dump them in some river, any river and nobody was the wiser, no cops anyway. That was what Jimmy Smalls did, the case that later put Eddie face down, when he thought up his string of quick armed robberies and then fade out but needed a ton of hardware to pull them all off.

So there was always a demand, especially for guns that didn’t blow up on you when you used them, or blow up on you with a “history” (you know stolen, or from some government inventory storage, or used in some traceable criminal act if you got caught). Eddie made that mistake, once. See Eddie was supposed to give the good-housekeeping seal of approval on all the guns he sold, was to make sure that those guns had no history, had not been used before in some traceable criminal activity. That one time he got sloppy, dealt with a dealer who claimed the guns were clean (Eddie was always the “middle man” on these deals. Like George said where would Eddie get guns, clean guns on his own.). Billy Banks, the old-time bank-robber (who like the more illustrious forbear, Willy Sutton, said he did it because that was where the money was. Nice) depended on an Eddie gun, got into a squeeze with the “Feds” and found out the gun had been used in an unsolved murder. Well, Billy, who was connected from way back, was not going to be the guy who got the lesson. Our boy Eddie was. Here is how “connected” justice works though. They took Eddie’s hand (nicely giving him the choice of which one) and slammed it into a drawer-hard. So Eddie, now Eddie Fingers, had a grotesque set of knuckles on one hand ever after. Hence the moniker.                 

After that object lesson Eddie became cautious, much more cautious, for a long time. Like a lot of career guys, soldiers, he got married, had kids and so he needed a steady flow of cash and the gun trade was somewhat seasonal. So he branched out a little, worked a shipment of stolen goods up in Maine for a couple of guys, and got caught. That shipment turned out to be many, many cases of liquor, untaxed stolen liquor coming over the line from Canada. That is where George came into the story personally with Eddie. See an aging soldier with a wife and kids just can’t do the “time.” They had him solid on the heist, no question, and so Eddie seeing the writing on the wall, saw that being a stand-up guy was going to put him in nowhere land wanted to talk to one of George’s field guys, wanted to “talk to Uncle” George called the process.  And what “talking to Uncle” meant was that Eddie was ready to sell his mother to get out from under his expected two-to-five year sentence.

So Eddie made one of his life’s little compromises. Here is how that went. Eddie needing plenty of cash for family and lawyers got back into the gun-running trade while awaiting sentencing. Eddie was the broker for Jimmy Smalls’ caper like I said which needed much hardware in a short period. Eddie found his dealer, a young guy named Tiny Brown, who had serious connections to some small arms plant where they made the damn things, worked him hard, mercilessly in fact, to get the guns that were necessary for Jimmy’s series of quick bank robberies. Things went well for a while, Eddie got all the guns he needed at a decent price and plenty of dough for himself. The problem was the Feds were wired into the action (through the thoughtfulness of another snitch of course), wired in almost accidently.

In those days, back in the early 1970s, the Feds were up to their knees in trying to keep guns out of hand of black revolutionaries like the Panthers fearing some kind of race war with “whitey” getting the short end of the stick. Also as time went on and America got all crazy over Vietnam some white radicals figured they would start a “second front” in America to aid the Vietnamese revolutionaries over there and the black liberation fighters in America.  They too were looking for guns, heavy-duty M-16 kind of automatic weaponry. And Tiny was the man who could get such weaponry. So at one point on another Tiny dealt with some radicals looking for guns for the revolution at the same time as Eddie needed some quick gun turnaround. The Feds brought down Tiny, the gun-dealer with no problem. Oh yeah, with a little help from Eddie, something about machine-guns in the trunk of his car. George said Eddie’s logic was impeccable-he did not want to see his country overrun by n----rs and commies and why not throw a gun-dealer in the mix to lighten his sentence. Besides Tiny was kind of a snotty-nosed kid

Here is the funny thing about the “stoolie” business though, about when you stop being a stand-up guy. Once you give “Uncle” one thing he wants to put you on the “payroll.” Wants you to sing loud and clear in his choir. See George’s field guy went to bat for Eddie up in Maine but because he neglected to “dime” on the guys who ran the operation (“connected” guys and so you might as well cut your own throat if you brought them down as I am sure Eddie seriously thought about when he looked at his knuckles) the government guy in Maine wasn’t ready to do likewise. So our boy Eddie was going to have produce more than that one gun-dealer, like maybe give up who the guys were who organized that stolen goods shipment up in Maine. Here is where the “code of honor” goes to hell and back. The guy, or one of the guys who organized the stolen goods heist was a guy, Dixie, who ran a bar in Boston and was for his own purposes working for Uncle. And guess what Dixie was worried about. Yeah, Eddie’s problem, whether Eddie would be a stand-up guy when the deal went down.

Eddie became the classic victim of the squeeze. Jimmy’s bank robbery capers were a brilliant piece of work, a tribute to the smart side of the criminal mind (we will not discuss the morality or the sociology of the criminal actions that is for Sunday schools and seminars). Jimmy was always a quick artist guy-do a caper, or series of capers, fast then lay low for long time (meanwhile not letting the brain grow rusty by working on the mechanics of the next caper). Jimmy loved to do bank robberies, was a real pro, but he knew, or had enough  sense to know  that the old time go-in-with-guns-blazing routines from Bonnie and Clyde days would get you facedown fast. And Jimmy was looking to retire to Miami like every smart criminal who survived until retirement age.

So while Jimmy liked to be loaded up with armor he didn’t want to use the stuff, just wanted it for show unless it was necessary. So what Jimmy did first was case out say the bank manager’s house, found out the day to day workday pattern of the guy (mostly guys then) and then when he went for the jugular, went to hit the bank of choice, he held the bank manager’s family as hostages. That would keep the bank employees from getting too brave when Jimmy and his boys moved in and cleaned out the vaults.  Beautiful, except one time a bank clerk felt like a hero, foolishly pulled the bank alarm and took some slugs for his efforts and with that death the heat was on. And that is where Eddie took the fall. See Dixie put it in Uncle’s ear that Eddie was the guy who ratted out on the bank robberies, ratted out on Jimmy’s capers, that were spreading like wild-fire around Boston-using Eddie provided guns.

Here is what got Eddie doomed though, got him over to Fresh Pond. When the coppers, using information provided by a woman scorned girlfriend of Jimmy, a woman who Jimmy was using as a mule to make bank accounts, many accounts, who showed by that clever move that he was the real mastermind of those robberies, closed in for the arrests they killed one of his confederates.   A kid, a “wild boy” kid who would not have had a long career in any case, was like a young Eddie all brass and no brains, but a kid seriously connected to a local Mafia boss who treated the kid like a son. So the contract went out, the contract with one Edward Coyle’s, late of the Cambridge streets, name written all over it.

Here where things get dicey though George’s guy had told Dixie some information about Eddie that he wound up using when he “hit” Eddie, when he carried out the contract from the Mafia don. That had George scratching his head about Dixie for a while but he let it go as Eddie being one more bad guy off the streets. He would get Dixie later after he used him upon, after he squeeze like a lemon (all the guys on the stools laughed an uneasy laugh at that one). An injustice done to Eddie, sure. A bad end, sure. Honor among thieves? Ask Eddie with his face down in the well of some car seat. No, better, ask his widow. Jesus, that George sure could tell a story.