The Ghost Of Tom Joad, Indeed

 

   

 

A Sketch From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

A while back, maybe a year or so ago, early in 2014, Josh Breslin, the old-time writer for some of the alternative presses and publishing houses that started up in the throes of the 1960s counter-cultural explosion did a book review of John Steinbeck’s skid row classic, Cannery Row. Back in the 1960s there had been a plethora of both which had surfaced and flowered in order to give out a different view of the world, different cultural takes, and different activist politics than the ones that were presented by mainstream media and Josh’s book and record reviews had a certain following in those alternative oases around the country. Yes, I can see the scratching of heads about the rationale for this recent effort as readers are unable for the life of them to figure out why anybody would review such a book now, even such a classic book, which was published in 1945. As if the book had not been thoroughly reviewed unto death at the time, a timely time in any case, unlike his belated project, but Josh, as usual and I have known him long enough to be able to say the words, had a certain method to his madness.

See, Josh, although theoretically and quite reasonably retired, still writes occasionally for the dwindling remnant of alternatives presses and publishing houses which produce many of the radical and progressive magazines, newspapers, and books, which lay around today on some hipster’s coffee table, unread, as a show that, well, the owner is hip. Or had been back in the day when names like the Village Voice, City Lights, Rolling Stone, New Directions, and Free Press meant sometime to anybody with any pretenses to hip-dom. Fair enough though, since Josh still has things to write that are worth reading, especially by the younger set who seem to studiously avoid to their regret, as we did in our time a subject we continually return to over a drink or two on a cold night, learning any lessons provided by, well, older folk. Besides you cannot teach an old dog new tricks, or Josh anyway, and a guy who writes is like some old general who refuses to fade away and so he still writes for some of those outlets. But in addition to his writerly habits this Cannery Row review that he did was not done by happenstance but had followed shortly thereafter as a result of Josh having a vision, a vision of Tom Joad, or shades of the ghost of Tom Joad, out on the California highway, out on the Pacific Coast Highway, no lie.

Needless to say nobody, certainly no reader who does not know or remember Josh when he was in the full flower of his youth, has to believe that an old man, now in his turn an old time writer himself, actually saw Tom Joad, actually saw a fictional character on that coast highway road (or even a Henry Fonda trance who played Joad in the original film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath). Nor does one have to believe in some legend of Tom Joad even though folksinger Woody Guthrie wrote songs about the man back in the dust bowl back-breaking 1930s. Nor for modern sensibilities even though rocker Bruce Springsteen wrote about Joad’s ghost in the 1990s. Hear me out though, or rather hear Josh out as he presents his case like he presented it to me one night a couple of weeks ago in the bar at the Sunnyville Grille in Cambridge where he lives mostly lives now, Cambridge that is not the bar, although he still maintains the old family house where he grew up in Olde Saco, Maine.

Let me set the context first to enlighten those who do not the Josh history which led to this “vision.” Josh, having lived out in California back in the 1970s and 1980s off and on, in some good times and bad, now likes to go back out there every once in a while. Usually when he has time to spent a week or two, more importantly, when he has some extra dough in his pockets to fly out since the old hitchhiking days when he thought nothing of holding out his thumb, a small green rucksack on one shoulder and bedroll, complete with canvass groundcover to guard against wet blanket sleepless night, on the other and head across the country holds no appeal these days. Besides the roads are now dangerous with all kinds of off-hand weirdoes that provide the 24/7/365 news outlets with plenty of copy; American psychos who have always been with us but who seem now to be more visible and vicious, malcontents of every description and pleading, grifters always on the hustle, and beady-eyed cops, looking to fill their monthly quotas, ready to pounce on you if you breathe wrong. He had lived mostly in Oakland (then as now infinitely cheaper than Frisco) while doing some political work, some political writing, usually involving as well raising dough for things like the Black Panther Defense Fund, although do not ask Josh even today the manner in which he raised the dough just in case the statute of limitations has not run out. Just say that the Panthers were under murderous assault then by every itchy law enforcement agency from some Podunk deputy sheriff to J. Edgar Hoover and his G-men, needed money for legal defense constantly as the governmental agencies honed in on them, and nobody was too particular, nobody could afford to be too particular, about how the money was raised when the deal went down.

Usually in those days accompanying that political work was some complicated adventure in Josh’s topsy-turvy relationship with women. In Oakland, at least when I visited him in those days he almost always had some woman friend living with him (or a wife, having been married three times, one of them during the California days but that marriage trance doesn’t have anything to do, or little to do, with this story so we will move on) because he said he had to have a stable place to reside. Those days, those early 1970s days when will all knew, or most all of us knew the ebb tide of the 1960s was swooping down on us were still good times, good times to write about then, and now, especially about the mad monk happenings in California.

But there was another side to the Josh living in California story which will help better explain his how he came to his Tom Joad vision. That side was about living  out in the air in the mid-1970s, out for a while with the “brothers under bridge” along the railroad tracks, down in the arroyos, and wherever else he could find kindred , to steal a phrase from a later Bruce Springsteen song about Vietnam veterans who for their own reasons could not make it in the “real” world after ‘Nam. The times that due to his own hubris, to his own “from hunger” genetic code, to his own outlandish “wanting” habits he found himself when he ran out of money, women, or luck. Previously those hardtack times in places like Big Sur beach south of Monterey, Todo el Mundo just south of Big Sur, Point Magoo above Malibu, and down near the caves in La Jolla meant living “free,” free meaning camping out for weeks at a time, some old army tent (World War II surplus, not the ‘Nam stuff which was not fashionable then, for ex-soldiers or renegade writers), an old Coleman stove (and sometimes just sterno cups) for cooking and a few toilet articles. Then when his world crashed in the mid-1970s, when his school boy days wanting habits got the best of him, a later side after the hubbub had died down from the 1960s jail break-out which had ebbed before its rightful time and which he could not accept gracefully then he found himself in the hobo “jungle.” Under the same impetus in the early 1980s when his addictions, mainly but not exclusively drugs, had gotten the better of him he had wound up living out in Jack K.’s cabin rent free in that same Todo el Mundo where they earlier had all thought they had found the paradise they had been California looking for when they had headed West, trying to dry out, trying to unsuccessfully go “cold turkey.”  Hell he could not recount the infinite number of times in those days that he cadged floor space in too many locales to mention, mostly in Frisco though, laying down low in flophouses all over the coast, and finally, when the bottom totally fell out, when he had cynically and dishonestly called in every favor he could and had run out of friends to con (including me when he was really desperate), a few tours in skid row, Cannery Row skid row, in Monterey. He had also written about those experiences recently in a short piece in the East Bay Eye under the title In Search Of Todo el Mundo.                 

So as luck would have it Josh had been out in Monterey this recent time that we are talking about in order to retrace some ancient steps about what had happened to him in those dreaded 1980s before he got sober in the 1990s after another unsuccessful love affair had run its course (a little more germane to the story than the three divorced wives but it should not hog the space since it had become somewhat faded and somewhat weird on reflection by the time of this adventure although earlier it caused many sword thrusts to his heart). He had not been in Monterey since the late 1980s, since just before he finally got his dope addictions mercifully under control with the help of Melissa, Melissa of the straight talk and straight arrow life which held him together for a while before she moved on when another guy, a less “dramatic” guy as she called him upon breaking up with Josh swept her away, adios mi corazon. And Monterey had automatically brought Big Sur and Todo el Mundo into mind as places to go to and reflect on those ancient times and how they had formed him, and formed his life. Hell, it’s his story let him tell you what he was up to instead of me trying to remember every tidbit that Sunnyville night when I was filled with too many high-shelf scotches. Let him tell about his vision:         

“A blonde long-haired and long unkempt bearded young man was standing on the side of the highway in a light rain, the Pacific Coast Highway to be exact, in the dead heart of Big Sur out in ocean California with his thumb out heading north toward Monterey. I noticed as I drove by heading south that the young guy had a trusty old rucksack and bedroll stacked a bit away from his person (that bedroll looked to be in proper order from a quick look, sheet, blanket and most important of all learned from more than one wet night’s sleep, or rather half-sleep, a sturdy ground cover against those nights, the inevitable nights on the road when such support is necessary). That placing your gear away from the road is important too, shows career hitchhiker savvy since an average driver, usually a guy back in the day and probably more so now with all the news of weirdoes and psychos out there bothering average drivers foolish enough to pick them up, will more likely take a chance on stopping for a guy who looks like he is just stranded for the moment a few miles from home rather than a notorious fully-life’s possessions road bum, or worse.

All of this information, all of this sullen knowledge, learned long ago when I hitched my own hitchhike road. I must say that I was startled to see that young man of the roads standing there since rarely, even in California, do I see anybody hitching anymore, certainly not on highways but not even on back roads like the one in Big Sur. The last time I had picked up hitchhikers I had been driving up U.S. 5 around Carlsbad from San Diego when I spotted a young guy and young gal on the entrance ramp and immediately jumped three lanes and pulled over. They were heading toward L.A. while I was heading to Laguna for some art show and as we talked, or rather as I talked about the old days on the road I decided to drive them up to L.A. probably motivated by the many rides I had accumulated back in the day and I was merely passing the torch.

That rainy day though I was heading toward Todo El Mundo just south of Big Sur to meet someone or I would have stopped, turned around, and driven the young bearded guy back to Carmel anyway since he didn’t appear to be having any luck with the drivers passing back, it was raining and I was gathering strength to do another good turn in memory of my old hitchhike days. All of this introduction of course to set up what I really wanted to talk about when I thought about that guy later, thought about seeing a vision of old Tom Joad.

My first thought later when I began to think about the old days after reaching the hard to find and extreme back road even now Todo el Mundo and the guy was to meet to get a story from was that I probably had hitched a ride from around that very spot where the younger hitchhiker stood on the side of the road which if you are familiar with that section of the Pacific Coast Highway was not that far from Big Sur beach. You know Jack Kerouac’s beach, featured in every retro “beat” film about the place, featured on every Big Sur photo shoot, featured on every hot spot places of California where he wrote a famous zen-like poem in honor of the sound of the ocean at that particular place when he was trying to dry out and when he wrote a book about the experience. That had been in the days before a bunch of us, including Jack K. the old small press publisher and bookstore owner from Mendocino who would eventually own a cabin there and Larry, another small press publisher who had owned a big bookstore in Frisco,  who then had a cabin in Big Sur found the even more remote and severe Todo El Mundo. I had my own addiction drying out experiences there later in the 1980s but the time I am talking about is not the 1980s when Jack K. saved my bacon, or tried to, and got nothing but heartache and rebuff for his trouble but back in the bright days, back in the 1960s days when everybody who roamed the highways had some stories to tell, owed some debt to Kerouac and the “beats” and who lived to tell about it.

Back then there was no way, no way on this good green earth that my blonde-haired young hitcher would have been out on the road for long not   when the roads were full of “heads” travelling up and down the coast just to travel, just to see what the world was all about and would have snagged that brother in a minute, hell, maybe before he even stuck his thumb out. I know a couple of time that happened to me when I was standing on the side of the road and once when I was standing there and not looking for a ride but took one anyway since the scene looked righteous. Oh yeah, I forgot that time too when I had Butterfly Swirl with me and the way she looked, all sunflower dress, all real California girl and some guy must have gotten a whiff of her jasmine scent because he stopped just past us and put the old Volkswagen bus in reverse and told us to climb in (Butterfly Swirl, we all used little monikers like that then, had been slumming away from her usual haunts, the Carlsbad surfer scene, looking to find out about what everybody was talking about in the great jail break-out, about what everybody was doing before going back to her perfect wave surfer boy and life, such were the times).                

Funny the first time I hit the California highway roads (first time starting in California not the east-west cross-country trips from New England) I didn’t think I would get a ride because some trucker, a real good guy who fed me at the trucker diner stops, gave me plenty of cigarettes, and some bennies that he practically lived on left me out in the lurch. He was going to see his girlfriend in Modesto and so that is where he left me off. But that is a tough spot to hitch from with traffic flying by (by the way also maybe a sign of the times then this Mr. America straight arrow by-the book-trucker had a wife and kids beside the gal, so there). A state trooper passed by, passed by twice, and then let it go but I wound up grabbing some sleep on the side of the road, a little off in some trees really, before I got a ride to Frisco from another lonely truck-driver the next morning.       

But enough of the Breslin hitchhike road. That road has been inspected, dissected, introspected, reflected enough so let’s get to what I was able to envision on that rainy day trip back from Todo el Mundo. As I headed back to Monterey later that day my hitchhiker was still there, a little wetter for the experience so I naturally had to stop and pick him up. As he entered the passenger side after placing  his gear in the back of the rental car I noticed that he looked considerably younger than I had thought passing him by on the way down to Todo. As he settled into the passenger seat and I got back on the road after telling me his name, Cliff Adams, he thanked me a couple of times for picking him up. He also told me how nobody would even look in his direction as the rain got thicker and I then mentioned that I had seen him on my way south and had assumed since he had rightly stored his gear away from the road and so looked like a guy who just needed a lift somewhere local and did not have the look of a career road bum who strikes fear in the hearts of even old time hippies he would have been picked up by then. Cliff laughed at that remark since he had only picked up that trick of the road the day before when a guy going in the other direction called over to him around Sam Simeon to put his gear out of sight if he wanted a ride on this road. The guy had looked like he knew what he was doing (he did) and so he had done so but had almost given up hope when I stopped.   

As we rode along he told me that he had headed west a few months before from Oklahoma, from some Podunk town outside of Topeka that I had never heard of although I had passed through that town a few times when I was working my thumb on the southern route west.  Cliff had hit the road after some fallout with parents over taking over the family grain business which he could have cared less about and hated every harvest he every had to participant in, fallout over some heartthrob girlfriend who found another boyfriend (or he had found another girlfriend who had found another boyfriend I did not follow the whole train of thought on that except to silently express solidarity over the woman question fallout), and fallout over with everybody else he knew of his desire, his instinctual desire, to get the dust (his term) of Oklahoma out of his nostrils, if not out of his blood. And so one moonless night (I assume it was a moonless night since the moon was missing when I had first hit the hitchhike road west he took down his rucksack from its peg, threw some utilitarian necessities, rolled his bedroll (forgetting to his dismay one rainy night when until he was on the road that he needed a waterproof ground cover to protect against a tough night’s half-sleep from being soaked to the bone) and headed out leaving a short note to his parents not to worry. (Thoughtful lad since I had left no note and only telephoned weeks later a definite wrong move on my part whatever the justice of my sulks.)

His running through those conversational points was when I noticed that his whole demeanor reminded me of those sons and daughters, hell, now grandsons and granddaughters of those Okies who came out to settle in California after the land played out back home in Muskogee, Tulsa, Norman or wherever it played out in the Great Depression dustbowl saga. So I asked him all kinds of questions about his kin and about his days in Oklahoma to compare notes with a previously generation of Okie/Arkie kids who had headed west in my time rather than going on and on about how in my day the pickings on the hitchhike road, especially along the Pacific Coast Highway, were like finding money on the ground. As he spoke in that bashful Okie drawl that some pretty sophisticated women find appealing and which is a relic from the old cowboy days I noticed that he had the same “from hunger” look of those by-gone highway travelers who I ran into back in the day.              

They are peculiarly an American lot those “from hunger” boys (and occasional young women), oh sure, they are all immigrant stock like almost everybody here now in America, Northwest Europe immigrant stock going back several generations, but still immigrant stock. More importantly they are still marked by the traces of the half- forgotten stories (or half-suppressed at this remove) that brought their forbears to this continent, mainly having been run out their countries of origin for cattle, horse, pig, deer stealing, or having run when the land ran out, or having to have to run when the lure of thriving thieving cities got to be too much and the high sheriff was hot on the trail, a few too having run for religious or political reasons but all with the wanderlust, the travelling gene. One academic guy I read, a Harvard professor if I recall, when talking about an early wave of this immigrants around the time of Andrew Jackson called them “master-less” men. Maybe, but here is my take which I think is closer to the nub. Jack Kerouac the previously mentioned great American writer of the travel road, physical and spiritual, from a couple of generations back startled me at first when in On The Road he spoke of the fellahin, those mired deep down in the base of society barely hanging on, and of his spiritual kinship for the wretched of the earth (being a Lowell mill town boy he knew of where he spoke). That designation however only makes sense if you don’t take the term literally and apply it to some eternal scratching welded to a lone piece of land but except for that the observation holds. They, the fellahin, settled in the East for a while, the landing point on the shorelines where working the rugged cross land was tough and many fell into the human sink, but once they heard there was land, lots of land beyond the outposts they moved, and moved fast, westward playing off the energy of that old country wanderlust gene. They kept stopping for a while, sometimes for a long while but they were born restless and their thing was movement, the push to leave when the helter-skelter not well-tended land played out. But like all things geographic there is a land’s end and that is where things got kind of squirrely, there was no more land to farm play out, no more moving westward unless you wanted to swim the Japan seas.

So those Okie/Arkie/fellahin drifters turned inward, turned in the generation before mine to sullenly and languidly riding on the edge of the world movement after World War II with their souped-up coups built from old jalopies, junkyard stuff turned into expressions of that strange California fast lane syrup with sweat and fervor, raced after midnight in rural highway drag strips filled with “chicken run” bravado and some fast chase girl sitting jammed next to that stick-shift, turned to challenging the seas (if not the Japan seas by swimming out to them) in golden boy waxed surfboards seeking the perfect way complete then with waiting golden girl surfer girls on shore once the day’s search for the perfect wave ebbed with the night (and those pruned boys sought to have those golden girls “curl their toes” as my one surfer girl conquest explained the matter one night when stoned I had asked her about the ethos of surfer culture, turned to outlaw motorcycle-dom with the hog (a Harley or else proud patriots all although an Indian or a Vincent Black Shadow would leave them in the dust, no problem) complete with tough tight-sweatered “mamas” and the jailhouse alternating for attention. And a few wanderers caught the Eastern bug, caught the Howl in the night bug especially around Frisco. And that younger brother hitchhiker on that rainy Big Sur day whether he knew it or not, for the forbears after all left no coda to lure later generations to all of that spoke of that Tom Joad Great Depression need to break West. I could see it in his rain washed-out blue eyes and in that laconic pattern of speech that spoke of restlessness and wonder.                      

As we approached Monterey coming up over the hill at Carmel (oops, sorry  Carmel-by-the-Sea where all the Mid-Coast swells congregate and show off their pedigree, pedigree dogs on sullen Sundays in June) I realized that the young brother could back about twenty, thirty years before, ah, maybe a few more than that, been my own boon companion. Been brethren just like in the days when the late Peter Markin and I whom I met out in California on Russian Hill in Frisco town raised holy hell with women, drugs, life and who subsequently because he never really could get off the road of his own “from hunger” wanting habits wound up face down in a Sonora dusty back alley when a drug deal he was trying to organize on his own went bell-up. Or when Sam Lowell before he got “square” and went back to law school and some success went west with me several times and we did things up right. Or Billy Bradley from even further back who wound up with his own wanting habit troubles from robbing too many stores and banks.

Yes, that young Okie brother would have fit in with my Eastern-etched corner boys in the days when I was riding the hobo “jungle,” when the railroad track (what did somebody call those tracks, oh yeah, “filled with train smoke and dreams,”), the cavern encampment (reminding me of the time when Peter and I stoned to the gills on peyote buttons found ourselves in a Joshua Tree canyon wall one night when we, dancing like whirling dervishes “saw” the ghosts of the Apache warriors who souls could never be appeased until future warriors came along, and we thought that was us), the ocean front tent complete with sweet all-Midwestern dish, Angelica, Saint Angelica of my boyhood dreams riding a borrowed Vincent Black Lightning roaring out in the Pacific Coast Highway not worrying about anything but being young, alive and splashed by ten thousand ocean waves like they were never going to end were what sustained my days.

I let Cliff off at Lighthouse Drive near the Sally soup kitchen spot. Sallies being the Salvation Army who if you could put up with a sermon and some good-natured but firm cajoling about changing your lifestyle, of searching for god or maybe the godhead I forget which, of getting “religion” and donning the uniform of the lord to beat drums out in the mission mean streets down in any hobo end of town would give you a bed for a few days and three squares with just a hard-hearted story of woe. I still tip my hat to that brethren for bailing me out a few times when things were very tough, very tough indeed. Yeah, I had my own “from hunger” wanting habits which for a while couldn’t be appeased, it was a close thing. As I drove off I wondered what was ahead for that young brother, would he break-down like Peter and Billy of yore, wondered whether he in his turn when he got older “see” a vision of Tom Joad on the side of a Big Sur highway and stop to move a fellow wanderer along.