Once Again, When Bop-Bop Bopped In The Doo Wop Night- When Teen Angst Rules The Airwaves

 

 

 

From The Pen Of The Late Peter Paul Markin

 

With A 2015 Introduction By Sam Lowell

 

If you did not know what happened to the late Peter Paul Markin who used to write for some of the alternative newspaper and magazine publications that proliferated in the wake of the 1960s circus-war/bloodbath/all world together festival/new age aborning cloud puff dream, won a few awards too and was short-listed for the Globe Prize this is what is what. What is what before the ebb tide kind of knocked the wind out of everybody’s sails, everybody who was what I called “seeking a newer world,” a line I stole from some English poet (Robert Kennedy, Jack’s brother, or his writer “cribbed” the line too for some pre-1968 vision book before he ran for President in 1968 so I am in good company.) I will tell you in a minute what expression “the Scribe,” a named coined by our leader, Frankie Riley, which is what we always called Markin around the corner we hung out in together in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor in our hometown of North Adamsville, used to describe that change he had sensed coming in the early 1960s. Saw coming long before any of the rest of us did, or gave a rat’s ass about in our serious pressing of the moment, you know our existential angst moment although we did not call it that until later when the Scribe went off to college and tried to impress us with his new found facts, his two thousand new found facts about guys like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, worries about girls (all of the existential problems angst including about bedding them, or rather getting them in back seats of cars mainly), dough (ditto the girl existential thing to keep them interested in you and not run off with the next guy who had ten bucks to spend freely on them to your deuce, Jesus) and cars (double ditto since that whole “bedding” thing usually hinged on having a car, or having a corner boy with some non-family car to as we used to say, again courtesy of the Scribe via scat bluesman Howlin’ Wolf, “doing the do.”

 

All I know is that ebb tide that caught Markin kind of flat-footed, kind of made him gravitate back toward his baser instincts honed by every breathe he took as a kid down in the projects where he learned the facts of life, the facts of fellaheen life which is what one of our junior high school teachers called us, called it right too although we were the urban versions of the downtrodden shanty peasants but they were kindred no doubt, is still with us. So maybe being, having been a “prophet, ” being a guy who worried about that social stuff while we were hung up on girls,  dough and cars (him too in his more sober moments especially around one Rosemond Goode), wasn’t so good after all. Maybe the late Markin was that kind of Catholic “martyr saint” that we all had drilled into us in those nasty nun run Sunday catechism classes, maybe he really was some doomed “n----r” to use a phrase he grabbed from some Black Panther guys he used to run around with when he (and Josh Breslin) lived in Oakland and the “shit was hitting the fan” from every law enforcement agency that could put two bullets in some greasy chamber to mow down anybody even remotely associated with the brothers and the ten point program (who am I kidding anybody who favored armed self-defense for black men and women).

 

Here is a quick run-down about the fate of our boy corner boy bastard saint and about why stuff that he wrote forty or fifty years ago now is seeing the light of day. I won’t bore you with the beginnings, the projects stuff because frankly I too came out of the projects, not the same one as he did but just as hopeless down in Carver where I grew up before heading to North Adamsville and Josh who was as close as anybody to Markin toward the end was raised in the Olde Saco projects up in Maine and we are both still here to tell the tale. The real start as far as what happened to unravel the Scribe happened after he, Markin, got out of the Army in late 1970 when he did two things that are important here. First, he continued, “re-connected” to use the word he used, on that journey that he had started before he was inducted in the Army in 1968 in search of what he called the Great Blue-Pink American West Night (he put the search in capitals when he wrote about the experiences so I will do so here), the search really for the promise that the “fresh breeze” he was always carping about was going to bring. That breeze which was going to get him out from under his baser instincts developed (in self-defense against the punks that were always bothering him something I too knew about and against his mother who was truly a dinosaur tyrant unlike my mother who tended to roll with the punches and maybe that helped break my own fall down that Markin fate ladder) in his grinding poverty childhood, get out from under the constant preoccupation with satisfying his “wanting habits” which would eventually do him in.

 

Markin had made a foolish decision, foolish in retrospect although he when I and others asked about whether he would have done things differently if he had known what the hell-hole of Vietnam was all about was ambivalent about the matter, to drop out of college (Boston University) after his sophomore year in 1967 in order to pursue his big cloud puff dream, a dream which by that time had him carrying us along with him on the hitchhike road west in the summer of love, 1967, and beyond. Of course 1967, 1968, 1969 and other years as well were the “hot” years of the war in Vietnam and all Uncle Sam and his local draft boards wanted, including in North Adamsville, was warm bodies to kill commies, kill them for good. As he would say to us after he had been inducted and had served his tour in ‘Nam as he called it (he and the other military personnel who fought the war could use the short-hand expression but the term was off-bounds for civilians in shortened form)  and came back to the “real” world he did what he did, wished he had not done so, wished that he had not gone, and most of all wished that the American government which made nothing but animals out of him and his war buddies would come tumbling down for what it had done to its sons for no good reasons.

 

And so Markin continued his search, maybe a little wiser, continued as well to drag some of his old corner boys like me on that hitchhike road dream of his before the wheels fell off. I stayed with him longest I think before even I could see we had been defeated by the night-takers and I left the road to go to law school and “normalcy.” (The signposts: Malcolm X’s, Robert Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King’s assassinations, hell maybe JFK’s set the who thing on a bad spiral which kind of took the political winds out of any idea that there would not be blow-back for messing with the guys in power at the time, the real guys not their front-men, the politicians; the rising tide of “drop out, drug out, live fast and die young” which took a lot of the best of our generation off giving up without a fight; the endless death spiral of Vietnam; the plotted killings of Black Panthers and any other radical or revolutionary of any color or sex who “bothered” them; and, the election of one master criminal, Richard Milhous Nixon, to be President of the United States which was not only a cruel joke but put paid to the notion that that great unwashed mass of Americans were on our side.) Markin stuck it out longer until at some point in 1974, 1975 a while after I had lost touch with him when even he could see the dreams of the 1960s had turned to dust, turned to ashes in his mouth and he took a wrong turn, or maybe not a wrong turn the way the wheel of his life had been set up but a back to his baser instincts turn which had been held in check when we were in the high tide of 1960s possibilities. (Josh Breslin, another corner boy, although from Olde Saco, Maine who had met Markin out in San Francisco in the summer of love in 1967 and who had also left the road earlier just before me was in contact until pretty near the end, pretty close to the last time in early 1975 anybody heard from Markin this side of the border, this side of paradise as it turned out since he lived out in California where Markin was living at the time confirmed that Markin was in pretty ragged mental and physical condition by then).           

 

Markin had a lot invested emotionally and psychological in the success of the 1960s “fresh breeze coming across the land” as he called it early on. Maybe it was that ebb tide, maybe it was the damage that military service in hell-hole Vietnam did to his psyche, maybe it was a whole bunch of bad karma things from his awful early childhood that he held in check when there were still sunnier days ahead but by the mid-1970s he had snapped. Got involved in using and dealing cocaine just starting to be a big time profitable drug of choice among rich gringos (and junkies ready to steal anything, anytime. anywhere in order to keep the habit going). Somehow down in Mexico, Sonora, we don’t know all the details to this day a big deal Markin brokered (kilos from what we heard so big then before the cartels organized everything and before the demand got so great they were shipping freighters full of cold cousin cocaine for the hipsters and the tricksters and big for Markin who had worked his way up the drug trade food chain probably the way he worked his way into everything by some “learned” dissertation about how his input could increase revenue, something along those lines) went awry, his old time term for something that went horribly wrong, and he wound up face down in a dusty back road with two slugs to the head and now resides in the town’s potter’s field in an unmarked grave. But know this; the bastard is still moaned over, moaned to high heaven.

 

The second thing Markin did, after he decided that going back to school after the shell-shock of Vietnam was out of the question, was to begin to write for many alternative publications (and I think if Josh is correct a couple of what he, Markin, called “bourgeois” publications for the dough). Wrote two kinds of stories, no three, first about his corner boy days with us at Salducci’s (and also some coming of age stories from his younger days growing up in the Adamsville Housing Authority “projects” with his best friend, Billie Bradley before he met us in junior high school). Second about that search for the Great Blue-Pink American Night which won him some prizes since he had a fair-sized audience who were either committed to the same vision, or who timidly wished they could have had that commitment (like a couple of our corner boys who could not make the leap to “drugs, sex, rock and roll, and raising bloody hell on the streets fighting the ‘monster’ government” and did the normal get a job, get married, get kids, get a house which made the world go round then). And thirdly, an award-winning series of stories under the by-line Going To The Jungle for the East Bay Other (published out of the other side of the bay San Francisco though) about his fellow Vietnam veterans who could not deal with the “real” world coming back and found themselves forming up in the arroyos, along the rivers, along the railroad tracks and under the bridges of Southern California around Los Angeles. Guys who needed their stories told and needed a voice to give life to those stories. Markin was their conduit.

 

Every once in a while somebody, in this case Bart Webber, from the old corner boy crowd of our youthful times, will see or hear something that will bring him thoughts about our long lost comrade who kept us going in high school times with his dreams and chatter (although Frankie Riley was our leader since he was an organizer-type whereas Markin could hardly organize his shoes, if that). Now with the speed and convenient of the Internet we can e-mail each other and get together at some convenient bar to talk over old times. And almost inevitably at some point in the evening the name of the Scribe will come up. Recently we decided, based on Bart’s idea, that we would, if only for ourselves, publish a collection of whatever we could find of old-time photographs and whatever stories Markin had written that were still sitting around somewhere to commemorate our old friend. We have done so with much help from Bart’s son Jeff who now runs the printing shop that Bart, now retired, started back in the 1960s.

 

This story is from that first category, the back in the day North Adamsville corner boy story, although this one is painting with a broader brush. It had been found in draft form up in Josh Breslin’s attic in Olde Saco, Maine where he had lived before meeting Markin in the great summer of love night in 1967 and where he had later stored his stuff in his parents’ house and which he had subsequently inherited. We have decided whatever we had to publish would be published as is, either published story or in draft form. Otherwise, moaning over our brother or not, Markin is liable to come after us from that forlorn unmarked grave and give us hell for touching a single word of the eight billion facts in his fallen head.     

 

Here is what he had to say:                         

 

Once Again, When Bop-Bop Bopped In The Doo Wop Night- When Teen Angst Rules The Airwaves

 

A while back I got caught up, and caught up bad, caught up like in some ragamuffin boyhood corner boy dream sequence forced to live over again forever say ages twelve to sixteen, those hard teen angst, teen alienation dark nights, hell, just say the word teen, teen ever since they started putting that grouping into its own separate category when whoever teenage-ness invented and let that stand for itself, in the girl group doo wop night (or that is what I prefer to call it anyway, the doo wop part can stand in any case) and mentioned that I had a hard time, a really hard time, relating to girl groups at that age. No, not that they could not doo wop with the guys, Christ, half the time, more than half the time, they were better than the guys. Think of those great Shirelles numbers, stuff like Baby, It’s You of blessed memory with that come hither bare shoulder slightly high-heeled red dress thing that they evoked and dreams too of satiny sheets and rumpled although just plain linen would have been fine if I could have found a girl who would say baby, it’s you to me and of other total recall lyrics remembrance that came exploding off the charts (unlike a lot of other stuff today that I hear, for example, depending on amplifiers and moochs, where did I put my glasses to re-read those blessed holy scripture things  that even now go doo-langing and she’s so fine in my head).

 

No, my problem, my mostly girl-less teenage alienation, teen angst, teen guy couldn’t figure out girls problem, was the lyrics of most of the songs. Songs filled with lines about longing for long gone (and never coming back) Eddie, Eddie who left with no forwarding address after having his way with some summer tryst Betty who took as real coin his promise to write, to come back and most of all do the right thing by her, but mainly that waiting, endlessly waiting by the midnight telephone for that non-call and by the front gate for the postman to come with the non-letter (she even asking one time whether the august Post Office would deliver unstamped mail, yeah, in case her Eddie had been short the three cent to get a silly postage stamp. Yeah, she had it bad alright and funny she is still waiting, waiting for that damn perfidious Eddie and would probably accept him lame excuse about not having an envelope or something. Songs, and this is important in an age before we got wise to the fact that the parents of America were as clueless about us their children as we were about what made them tick and refused to trust them to even sent a letter postage stamp or not,   about parents forcing young love out the door when it involved the leader of the pack, some motorcycle hero, and whole books were written by observant and witty sociologists and arcane criminologist about why Betty or Sue or some Janie was ready to give everything she had to give (and the leader wanted) in order to go karooming in that good night forgetting virtue, forgetting the law, forgetting everything but her Red Molly dreams, about being on the back of some free-wielding motorcycle, and damn those Devil’s Disciplines or whatever they called themselves. The wistfulness about whether true love would survive the night, a night when she, maybe a little drunk, maybe a lot drunk on that cheap rotgut Southern Comfort (no reefer madness then, not in my neighborhood anyway, maybe down the way with the low rider, easy rider motorcycle guys and their red hot mamas though) and let that Eddie, wild boy-man,  go just a little too far, and was worried about tomorrow night (and the talk in the girls’ “lav” come before school Monday morning). Or even such lowly concerns as the fact that one’s boyfriend was back, who did not like, no, hated the fact that you even thought for minute one that the quick look you gave his blonde dish LaVerne who swore on seven bibles maybe more that she would be true to him but just got lonely one night and was ready to cut you about seven ways to Sunday for your transgression (hers he would deal with in his own good time). Or how about this classic conundrum about the one that had reclaimed an old boyfriend and made some other teenage girl miserable, miserable waiting at the midnight phone, still waiting now maybe. You know, girlish concerns, girlish giggle concerns not fit for serious teenage boy angst ears. Does any of that sound like it would resonant for an all boy brothers family.

 

Not so though with the doo wop guys, slow moaning like they learned at some Papa Doc’s knee, or as what I have in mind here those up-tempo tunes. Here the reverse from my girl-no feel night is true, well, somewhat true. Although many times girl-less I could relate to such lyrical problems as two-timing mamas, fickle girls trying to decide between Johnny and Jimmy (and taking Timmy but you go figure that one), girls, conspiring, yes, conspiring, and I will provide notarized proof upon request, to break up Susie and Bobby so Laura can have a shot at the lad. Such were the treacheries of the teen life, the 1950s teen life American-style (although I suspect, without notarized proof here, that this stuff rings a bell for today’s teen X, Y, Z or whatever nation, via Facebook convenience, they hail from).

 

Now that I have told my bleeding tale of woe all that is left is to figure out the stick-outs from that up-tempo doo wop genre , and there were many, some verily classics of the genre of the up-tempo doo wop night: Get A Job (first, ma says it at about twelve or thirteen to help out with household expenses in working poor times, then girlfriend says it at about sixteen or seventeen times so you have some dough to spend on her, some drive-in movie, drive-in restaurant, amusement park, carnival dough and extra for those big sad floppy Christmas, birthday and Valentine’s day gifts, jesus, then wife says it at about twenty-five or six, for that little white cottage, complete with picket fence, dog and a stray child or two, okay we get it, yes, get a job): The Silhouettes; Gee (great harmonics, although the lyrics are, ah, gee, a little light), The Crows; Blue Moon (an old time Tin Pan Alley tune that cries out for this treatment, and a big old full moon to croon under and let love take its due course what the hell), The Marcels; Little Star (wistful, guy version), The Elegants; Step By Step (sensible approach to a relationship, if you can do it, most teens just forget it), The Crests; and, Come Go With Me (yes, please do), The Del-Vikings.

 

Note: I have to make a special pitch for Why Do Fools Fall In Love? by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the max daddy of the bop-doo wop night and the voice that basically made it all possible for all those groups, all those big city corner boy (and girl) groups, to partake of the rock scene and some fame. When my best elementary school friend, Billie, William James Bradley, king of the neighborhood rock night and a pretty good budding rock singer before he lost heart in the projects nights and figured that the world was against him and his granted talent and took a step off to the dangerous world and wound up dead, very dead one hot North Carolina nigh in a shot-out with the cops after  trying to rob a damn White Hen convenience store, damn, first heard this song I thought he was going to go crazy. He had us doo-wopping that thing all one summer when we were hanging out in back of the projects school. And guess what? That song (and a couple of others) had the girls, a couple at first, then a few more, then a bevy (nice word, right) all coming around and getting all moony and swoony. And kept this writer from being girl-less, for a while anyway. Thanks, Frankie.