The Great Blue-Pink American West Ghost Dance Night-With The Late Peter Paul Markin In Mind

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Sam Lowell had for the past twenty or so years regularly tuned to the local National Public Radio station on his car radio when one day recently when after he started his car up he heard a sound, a familiar sound from the past, the sound of the primordial chant of some Plains Indians, warriors, echoing off the walls of some canyon as they took part in a ghost dance  (Indians now called variously Native Americans or Native Peoples but when he told his story to several old high school acquaintances he preferred to call them Indians a term of usage the first time he encountered the experience back in the late 1960s before AIM and others changed the nomenclature). He had had to stop what he was doing, stop getting ready to head back to his law office, and just sit and listen in order to find out why that ancient sound was coming from his car speakers that day. As it turned out the program, a talk program whose segments were each day dedicated to some topical subject, had been on the subject of a recent extraordinary exhibition of Plains Indian art and crafts being held at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City and the ghost dance chants had been used as background to end one section of the program. As Sam put the car in gear once he knew what had transpired with the radio on in the background he began to think back to the days in the late 1960s and early 1970s when he and the late Peter Paul Markin (always called just Markin by everybody except his mother and a first wife who tried to impress her Mayfair swell parents with the old WASP-ish three name moniker to no avail) travelling the hitchhike road like many in their generation found themselves out into the New Mexico high desert, high as kites on drugs, performing their own version of the ghost dance, the dance that Sam believed united them, he, Markin and two other travelling male companions with the memories of ten thousand years of warriors who had roamed that ancient space.     

That high heavens chanting haunted Sam Lowell, usually these days an unassumingly lawyer getting ready to down-size his life, down-size along his life with that of his long-time companion, Laura Perkins, but those sounds brought back all kinds of memories of those youthful days when he and Markin had believed that they could turn the world upside down, and live to tell about it. Markin, unfortunately, had paid the price by his over-indulgence into everything from money to women to drugs he could get his hands on and like many over-reachers he got burned, burned badly later in the 1970s when a drug deal down in Sonora went bad and he wound up face down in some dusty back alley for reasons that were still murky some forty years later.

That unclaimed fate in some dusty unmarked wooden plank grave in potter’s field with the wolves baying in the background, haunted Sam for years, especially since he had been warned by others who were in the know not to attempt to go to Mexico and find out what the hell happened under penalty of finding himself too down in some dusty back alley with half his head blown off and left to simmer in an unmarked grave in potter’s field. Sam, unlike Markin, had seen the writing on the wall as he sensed well before Markin that the ebb tide of the search for a “newer world” had been marked by  early 1970, the bourgeois reaction (Markin’s term but rightly used  under those circumstances) was getting ready to pull the hammer down, pull it down hard and he had walked back to the “new normal” (law school, budding law practice, first marriage, kids, white picket fence, and settling down to that bourgeois lifestyle Markin was always railing against right up until the last time Sam had seem him in late 1975 before that fateful trip to Sonora.

Funny Sam thought as he thought back to the early days, the days when he and Markin and a six or seven other guy would hang around holding up the wall in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner on Main Street in their hometown of Carver about thirty miles south of Boston, Markin had been the “prophet,” the guy who sensed the flood tide of the 1960s well before any of them. They were mostly poor ass corner boys into small larcenies and scams to grab dough for “hot” dates with girls from other towns, cars and swilling up cheapjack liquor. Markin had practically invented the words angst and alienation to define what they were about and would spout forth on any dough-less, girl-less Friday night that the new breeze that he could palpably feel when he would sneak up to Harvard Square in Cambridge to see what was what and they would kid him, kid him mercilessly about being a “beatnik” or a fag (yeah, it was that kind of time among the hard-core working-class guys in a million towns like Carver when nobody thought anything of fag-baiting just as a test of manhood, thankfully done with, mostly).       

All this memory business was too much for Sam to handle on his own, had him preoccupied for days and Laura who had not known Markin having entered Sam’s life after his two hard-bitten failed marriages (hers too, two failed marriages) except by Sam harping on his legend whenever he got a drunk or melancholy. Laura made it clear on several occasions that she did not want Sam to talk about those times, the times of Sam’s two unsuccessful marriages which intersected with Markin’s time, and so she was no help in this matter. So Sam did what he had begun to do more frequently since he had been leaving more of the legal business in his office he had built up in Carver to his two younger partners and since he had a couple of years before had been involved with his 50^th anniversary class reunion committee and got in contact with his fellow still living corner boys. Guys like Frankie Riley, a fellow lawyer who had migrated to Boston and a large law firm, the guy who had been the unquestioned leader of the corner boys and one of the great midnight creep sneak thieves who ever lived in Carver, Jack Dawson, the now widowed print shop owner in town who had made a ton of money back in the day by expanding his business to include silk-screening posters and tee-shirts when that was all the rage, Jack “Mr. Toyota” Callahan, the great Carver High running back who subsequently became the owner of the biggest Toyota dealership in the area, Jimmy Jenkins, a pretty good car mechanic, and before he very recently had passed away, Allan Johnson, the great naval draftsman who designed several big ships.            

Since that reunion committee time, a committee which Sam had been active in around the edges and which had permitted him to connect with the old corner boys who had not been together since they had scattered to the winds a couple of years after high school, the guys would periodically get together at Frankie Riley’s favorite Boston bar, the Sunnyville Grille, over near Copley Square. (Although all the other guys had attended the reunion Sam had not attended the event since he had had a “run-in” with old high school flame Melinda Loring, run-in meaning serious steps leading to an affair which she called off before it got to that stage since he was balking over leaving Laura, which precluded his attendance under penalty of endless embarrassment and baiting by the guys). This “ghost dance” memory, no question, required a meeting in order for Sam to talk about that long ago event that some of the guys knew about vaguely when they too had headed west with Markin on different hitchhike road trips. So one Friday night, a spring Friday night, Sam gathered everybody n around a small side room table that they frequently used once Frankie became friendly with Johnny O’Connor the owner of the grille and told his story.  Frankie, who had an old habit of writing notes going back to law school days so he would not forget something, took notes of this session and gave the notes to me after he told me the story and I have tried to recreate what Sam told the group here, with just a little flourish:

The last time Sam went out on the road with Markin, or maybe the time before that, they had had some pretty tough luck after they got a ride to Chicago from a forlorn trucker who picked them up at the old Coca-Cola bottling plant right next to the Boston side of the Charles River but more importantly right at the entrance to the Mass Turnpike which led all road west. Sam thought he was pretty sure the guys knew where that now long gone spot had been (Frankie had nodded his head in the affirmative) once a professional drifter he had run into out in Springfield as he was heading to Albany to see some woman told Markin that was the place to start hitching west out of Boston proper. Most of the guys who had headed out from Carver with Markin had left from there and picked up the Pike closer to Sturbridge. (Heads nodded in the affirmative.) But in those days there was a truck depot in back of that Coca-Cola plant spot and you could go and ask guys, truck drivers mostly but once in a while a guy in a big old sedan (maybe with a girl, maybe not, but never a woman, or women, without guys, not until you got to California anyway) on where they were heading. Your best bet was older guys, older truck drivers, who were tough enough for the life and  who didn’t mind “hippies, ” guys like Sam and Markin then with long hair, wispy beards, the whole regalia (laughter), since maybe his son or daughter had caught the “bug” and he wanted to get your take on what was with young people in those days so when he got home, if he ever did so he could “relate” to the kids he hardly ever saw since those kids, that wife, and those house mortgage and credit card payments had him glued to the road. Some guys just liked to have somebody in the cabin to “yeah” them while they were chewing bennies like jelly beans with black coffee chasers and yakking away about the federal regulators, what they were carrying running overweight on the scales, their no good ex-wives bleeding them for alimony, their no-good girlfriends running around with every Johnny in town while they were humping out in white line night, taxes, and the country going to hell in handbasket right before their eyes into a sullen breeze at seventy-five miles an hour.

So the guys had had the usual good luck out of Boston, getting a ride from that forlorn Yale Freight truck driver named Denver Slim carrying a big load of motors to the Windy City who was neither from Denver (Baltimore, with alimony wife, kids who didn’t know him, and the eternal mortgage and assorted debts which were going to he said drive him to an early grave) nor slim (maybe two hundred and fifty pounds of  softness although neither of them would have wanted to tackle him if got his dander up) but after Chicago it was tough going, about three rides or four to Denver, maybe a couple more outside to Steamboat Junction and then a guy in a big black Cadillac stopped them on the road out of the Junction and asked them if going to New Mexico would help, Gallup, he said. Markin in those days didn’t care how or where he landed in California as long as he got to his precious Pacific Ocean so he could talk about that old flame of his, Angelica, whom he had met after he got out of the Army while he was on the road one time down in Steubenville, Ohio, who went on the road with him for a couple of months before deciding she was not built for the nomadic road life, and whom Sam thought he never got over despite two subsequent short marriages.

Angelica had come out to see him in California when he was living in a tent up at Point Magoo a few month later to see if they could go on together and she had flipped out the first time that she, a Midwestern girl from some Podunk town in Indiana, had ever seen the ocean and almost drown in a riptide around Malibu. Markin had had to pull her out just as she was going under. Things didn’t work out but he had a great story to tell about some big thing sex thing that had when she got stoned for the first time out there and they had some Zen experience as the sun went down on the ocean out to the Japan seas. Sam could always tell when they were within about fifty miles of the Pacific, maybe more, maybe out in Reno someplace, because Markin would start on his Angelica story. Jesus, what a mad man then (and Jesus they all agreed they still missed the bastard now too).

He thought that saving Angelica was the greatest thing because as the guys knew, especially Allan, who had known Markin the longest having known him back in the third grade down in the Carver housing projects where they had both grown up. Allan had been on the beach the day Markin almost drowned himself when he was eight or nine over in Plymouth when he did some bone-head thing, grabbed a log and sailed out sea and then let go when he was too far out and some lifeguard had to go save him. Markin had that mysterious furious love-hate thing about the ocean his whole misbegotten life, and hated the idea of being too far away from the ocean always making everybody laugh about not letting him be buried in Kansas or someplace like that. (The guys had all gotten melancholy more than a few times since they reconnection that there he was buried down in some sullen grave in some old dusty Mex town far from ocean breezes.)

Sam apologized for getting off track about Angelica and the old days in the great blue-pink great American West night that Markin always called what he was searching for but Markin really didn’t care which end of the state he landed in so they had taken that big old Cadillac ride, the first time either of them had been in a Caddy, down to Gallup. It seemed to take forever though since the guy, Billy Bob somebody Sam could not remember his last name from Odessa out in the Texas night, was an insurance salesman and he stopped in about twenty towns along the way to check out the local agents and their activities. That trip, or rather that part of the trip kind of made Sam realize that deep down he was not cut out for the eternal hitchhike road, was basically a small town boy rooted to home and no longer ready to take on the monsters who were holding the young,” youth nation” Markin used to call it trying to put some glue to the ten million things everybody young was doing, sometimes at cross purposes, back from that “newer world” Markin loved to talk about. Yeah, Sam had had enough of the road by then so there was a certain tension between them as they drifted toward Gallup.

Yeah, Sam had enough of muddy, rutted, always bum-busting rutted, country back roads, enough of breathless scenic vistas and cows, enough of trees dripping sap, rain, and bugs, strange bugs, not city bugs, that was for sure, but biting frenzy worthy anyway. (Laughter.) Enough of all that to last a life-time, thank you. Enough too of Bunsen burners used to heat quicksilver coffee when they were camped out in some desolate campsite  (that instrument last seen in some explosive chemical flash-out flame out in high school chemistry class and, maybe, they have rebuilt the damn lab since then, maybe though they have left it “ as is” for an example), Coleman stoves (too small for big pots, stew worthy, simmering pots to feed hungry campers and hard, country willowing winds hard, to light) wrapped blankets (getting ever more mildewed with each wet ground experience), second-hand sweated army sleeping bags (which they had gotten not from Markin’s Vietnam army gear but as World War II surplus from Eddy’s Army and Navy store over in Plymouth and which Markin would slyly hint that his had last been in desperate need of washing after a couple of month of night exertions with Angelica, those ever laughing hands of his reaching out to her in those two to a bag days), and minute, small, no speed in throwing up, especially when rains came pouring down and they were caught out  without shelter from the storm, a metaphor maybe, pegged Army surplus pup tents too, also from Eddy’s. And enough too of granolas, oatmeals, desiccated eastern mountain stews, oregano weed, mushroomed delights, and nature in the raw. Cities, please. Large Atlantic or Pacific-splashed roar of ocean cities with life in sheltered caverns and be quick about it. Yeah, Sam had tired of the road after a couple of years running back and forth across the country, each trip seemingly with less purpose, less Sam purpose.

Sam told the others after that blast that he was sorry for ranting about all the stuff that they probably all remembered, or half-remembered about and how they all, after Markin insisted on making it his fashion statement, had the obligatory green Army surplus rucksack on one shoulder which Markin said contained all a man, “a new man,” or really an old Johnny Appleseed American primitive man needed to survive in the world of the road and  the bedroll, complete with ground cloth against the wetness and dampness if you found yourself alongside some cow pasture or some such unlikely place on the other shoulder. Lately though, as he had unburdened himself of the day to day running of his law office, Sam had been almost possessed by a certain line of thinking he was going through to take a whack at summing up a lifetime of activity. He thought in all fairness there were a million good lawyers out there, a goodly number better than he would ever be, and the world when he came through law school in the early 1970s would not have crumbled if he had not been the one million and first, had thought too that anybody of the billions of people in the world could have put two unsuccessful marriages together (although surviving that dual madness ultimately lead to Laura when she came his way in the later 1980s, a definite plus) but maybe if he had stuck it out with Markin and his dreams, hadn’t gotten tied up with those bourgeois dreams Markin kept putting holes in that had dragged at Sam’s heart back then, maybe kept that mad man in check a little, maybe had help try to turn the world upside down like Markin wanted when he got political, hell, got to be a street fighter after that Vietnam stint, he would be here with his old corner boys now, and he could tell this story that Sam was now bound to tell. Sam though also had thoughts mixed in that he did not know with Markin’s big, what did he call them (Frankie had shouted out “wanting habits,” adding Markin got it from a line in a Bessie Smith song), that’s right “wanting habits” snapped back maybe he was that doomed “half-Mick, half swamp hillbilly” that he was always talking about but that had been what Sam had been thinking about of late. [This is not the place to go about Markin’s genealogy but he had been raised by a half-crazed Irish mother who had been totally bewildered by motherhood and by the down cast of her life when she met up with certain good-looking po’ boy Marine from out into hill-billy hills of Appalachia and that division of the gene pool probably did give him reason to think he, like lot of political black guys at the time, that he was doomed.]  

After that insurance salesman left Sam and Markin off at Gallup, actually at a hobo “jungle” camp beside the Southern Pacific railroad tracks just outside of town they had stayed at that camp for a few days before heading west on Interstate 40 heading toward Los Angeles. They had had to leave that camp one night in a hurry once some ornery wino stew-bum, Blind Blinky, got an idea in his head that two good-looking (to him anyway) young boys (again to him) might make good bed companions and from what they had heard from other stew-bums if he wanted something like that he would get his way and nobody could stop him. Markin by the way always called them hobos telling Sam that some guy with the moniker Black River Blackie who was some kind of royalty in the stew-bum world of the Gallup camp told him there were three grades of stew-bums-tramps, bums, and hobos and that tramps and bums were not allowed in that camp since hobos were the kings of the drifter night. Someone else could figure out the “jungle” sociology they just wanted to get the hell out of there before they were both somebody’s sissies.   

After a couple of rides Sam and Markin had put many a mile between them and Gallup closing in on Phoenix before they stopped for a breather first getting a ride from a good old boy trucker from Alabama named Buck White who while chiding them on their Yankee-ness had been kindness itself with cigarettes, bennies, buying meals, good cheap meals too at the out of the way diners he frequented after a life-time of learning every good and bad truck stop from Boston to San Diego, but by then they really were well clear of that prairie fire nightmare and after that on to sweet winter high desert night California (still hot during the day, jesus, one hundred at Needles, although not humid, thank Christ otherwise Sam said he would have melted into the ground right there, Markin too who would sweat like a fiend the minute the weather got the least bit hot) not far from some old run down, crumbling Native American dwellings on Joshua Tree reservation that keep drawing their attention. Those sights, once Sam saw them, made him think of home for some reason, made him want to utter that oath, that Joyell fealty oath since in preparation for a previous trip she had tried to stop him saying did he want to be boy scout living in the wilderness forever. (Joyell, Sam’s first disastrous wife had threated to leave him and marry another guy, a guy from Plymouth who had a car, a steady job, and worked at the shipyard making “good money” as she would badger him with if he did not stop hitting the road every time Markin clanged his bell which helped to get him to kick the road habit. In the end she had waited for Sam but that whole set-up had been wrong about seven different ways as Markin would periodically warn him but on the trip he was fretting about her and that latest leaving threat). Buck has gone, and thanks, over to Twenty-nine Palms. (Marines watch out when guys like Buck and his tribe come through because no way did you want to tangle with him, or guys like him, young or old.)

Part of the reason for heading to Joshua Tree once they had taken the ride and the road south toward Gallup and Interstate 40 had been to connect up with a couple of guys that Markin had run into the year before, Jack and Mattie, whom Markin had told Sam about, both fellow ‘Nam vets although they were all “in country” at different times, good guys, on the hitchhike road out of Massachusetts heading to Washington, D.C. for a big anti-war Vietnam veterans action and whom he had continued to stay in contact afterward as they ambled their way across the country. Originally Markin had arranged to meet Jack and Mattie in Denver but they had already headed west to avoid the snow-blazed trails which could have occurred any time before real winter had set in. They had thereafter agreed to meet Markin in Joshua Tree if they all got there by the end of October otherwise in Los Angeles where they all were going to stay with an up and coming “new age” film director, the guy who made one of the definitive “hippie” films of the time Something Happened you can get on NetFlix now, who had a communal house set up in Topanga Canyon. (After Joshua Tree and a few misadventures around Indio they all did get to Topanga Canyon and stayed at that commune for the winter.) Markin and Sam arrived while Jack and Mattie, and a Volkswagen bus filled with the usual assortment of freaks and good-looking “chicks” (a term of art at the time, sorry), were still in a primitive campsite in Joshua Tree. For a few days the dope flowed freely, the wine maybe a little less so as in the battle between getting “high” on drugs and booze drugs usually won out, and the big kettle on the fireplace brew stew made up of who knows what that every member in good standing of “youth nation” survived on during that whole time even less, mostly eating just enough to keep the vultures away.

One of those nights, maybe the third, third night of grass, mescaline, hash, some low-grade opium, and for the first time, first time for Sam, peyote buttons Jack had gotten from some Navajos on the way out to Joshua Tree. Jack had traded a stash of grass for the buttons, bartering being one form of payment transfer during those days when the talk was rife about how once “youth nation” was in charge they were going to abolish money. Markin would rant for hours about the need to abolish money and just trade stuff you needed for stuff the other guy needed although that did not stop him from conning money out of everybody he met, especially women who gave it to him without a quarrel, that “wanting habit” thing never far from his benighted fellahin head. That night they were all sitting by this big Joshua night camp fire that somebody, “Jumping” Jones the owner of the Volkswagen bus Sam thought, kept blazing, casting weird ghost night-like shadows that just made Sam’s Joyell hunger worst. Got him thinking about how she never really did fit into the Markin-Lowell-Riley-Johnson et al campfire road trip scene even close to home. And old now well-traveled soldiers turned “hippies,” Jack (something out of a Pancho Villa recruitment poster wearing a huge sombrero and sporting a long handle-bar mustache and, in another age, the look of a good man to have beside you in a street fight) and Mattie (some Captain America easy rider poster boy brimming with all that old long gone Buck White found ugly in his America although Mattie had done two hard tours in ‘Nam), playing their new-found (at least to Sam) flute and penny whistle music mantra to set the tone.

And so there they were making that last push to the coast but not before they absorbed these Native American lands that, as it turns out, Markin, Jack, Mattie and Sam all had been interested in ever since their kid days watching cowboys and Indians on the old black and white 1950s small screen television. You know Lone Ranger, Hop-A-long Cassidy, Roy Rogers and their sidekicks’ fake, distorted, prettified Old West stuff. Stuff where the rich Native American traditions got short shrift.

Earlier on this day Sam had been talking about they had been  over to Black Rock for an Intertribal celebration, a gathering of what was left of the great, ancient warrior nations that roamed freely across the West  not all that long ago but who were now mere “cigar store” Indian characters to the public eye. (This before the great AIM movement break-out and Wounded Knee/Pine Ridge/Leonard Peltier kick ass times later in the 1970s.) The sounds, the whispering shrill canyon sounds and all the others, the sights, the colors radiant as they pulled out all the stops to bring back the old days when they ruled this West, the spirit, ah, the spirit of their own warrior shaman trances were still in their heads in front of this now blazing camp fire night. Sam was still in some shamanic-induced trance from the healing dances, from warrior tom-tom dances, and from the primal scream-like sounds as they drove away the evil spirits that gathered around them (not hard enough to drive out marauding “white devil” who had broken their hearts, if not their spirits though). Not only that but they had all started in on those peyote buttons Jack had scored (scored from those wily Navajos who used it strictly for religious purposes, and as you so did they, kind of) and the buttons had started to kick in along with the occasional hit from the old bong hash pipe (everybody laughed that old time knowing laugh when Sam said that had been strictly for medicinal purposes as well).

Just then in this dark, abyss dark, darker than Sam had ever seen  the night sky in the citified East even though it is star-filled, million star-filled, in this spitting flame-roared campfire throwing shadow night along with tormented pipe-filled dreams of Joyell he was embedded with the ghosts of ten thousand past warrior- kings and their people. And his ears didn’t deceive him,  and they didn’t, beside Jack’s flute and Mattie’s penny whistle Sam heard, and heard plainly, the muted gathering war cries of ancient drums summoning paint-faced proud, bedecked warriors to avenge their not so ancient loses, and their sorrows as well.

After more pipe-fillings that sound got louder, louder so that even Jack and Mattie seem transfixed and begin to play their own instruments louder and stronger to keep pace with the drums. Then, magically, magically it seemed anyway, Sam swore, swore on anything holy or unholy, on some sodden forebear grave, on some unborn descendent that off the campfire- reflected red, red sandstone, grey, grey sandstone, beige (beige for lack of better color description), beige sandstone canyon echo walls he saw the vague outlines of old proud, feather-bedecked, slash mark-painted Apache warriors beginning, slowly at first, to go into their ghost dance trance that he had heard after so many defeats against the blue soldiers’ guns in the late 19^th century, got them revved up for a fight. Suddenly, the four of them, three of them having seen hard combat in ‘Nam first-hand (Sam had been deferred from the military draft as the sole support of his mother and four sisters after his father died in 1965), those four, those four television-sotted Indian warriors got up and started, slowly at first so they were actually out of synch with the wall action, to move to the rhythms of the ghosts. Ay ya, ay ya, ay ya, ay ya...until they sped up to catch the real pace. After what seemed an eternity they were, Sam too, were ready, ready as hell, to go seek revenge for those white injustices.

 

But then just as quickly the flickering camp fire flame went out, or went to ember, the shadow ghost dance warriors were gone and they crumbled in exhaustion to the ground. So much for vengeance and revenge. They, after regaining some strength, all decided that they had better push on, push on hard, to the ocean. These ancient desert nights, sweet winter desert nights or not, would do them in otherwise. But just for a moment, just for a weak modern moment they, or at least Sam knew, what it was like for those ancient warriors to seek their own blue-pink great American West night.