The Night Murray Pulled The Plug-With Pete Seeger In Mind 

 

 

Danny Ross was a born contrarian, young as he was to take on such burden along with his studies as a college student, or what would pass for such a person until a more contentious one came along. You know the kind of person who if you say an orange he has to say an apple if you ask for a preference even if all his life he had oranges and hated the very sound of apple. Better and this was pure since he was enrolled as a biology major if you said some scientific study had shown that pomegranates helped stop lesions he would site some obscure study by some half-baked researcher, a study that had been proven to be bunk, about how that same fruit caused cancerous growths. Yeah, pure Danny.

And that contrariness extended beyond purely personal preferences and scientific niceties. Listen to this. Danny, despite his obtuseness showing that he had the minimal social skills to survive in this wicked old world when he would let them shine, had this very pretty, smart, sympathetic and convivial girlfriend, Dora Denny whom he had met in Washington Square Park on one afternoon while listening to folk music of which he, she, they were very interested in at the time when it was beginning to blossom out of some Greenwich Village exotica in the early 1960s. Dora had just picked up the interest through listening to WMNC, a station which was beginning to mix up some folk programs along with its basic rock and roll formal but Danny as was his wont when he got enthusiastic about anything had become something of an aficionado. Aficionado meaning for Danny that if you say you liked the Weavers version of Goodnight, Irene as Dora did then Danny would almost compulsively tell you that Leadbelly’s version was infinitely better, cleaner, more nuanced, more mournful or whatever he was feeling at that time to oppose your proposition. But you can never tell about the influences of romance because Dora, remember she is the sympathetic, convivial type, thought Danny was being cute when he said that to her that first afternoon.

Dora at the time of this story had graduated a couple of years before from high school in New York City, the esteemed Hunter College School in Manhattan where she had gone to school along with her friend Josie Davis who would then go as an undergraduate to Wisconsin while Dora stayed in the city to attend NYU. Dora couldn’t remember whether Josie was a sophomore or a junior at Wisconsin since she had taken some time off to “find herself” read; get over an affair with a budding folk singer, Todd Whiting, whom she had met when she had gone to Washington Square one summer vacation Saturday afternoon. You might you might have heard of Todd Whiting, you can still get his records on Amazon or at places like Sandy’s in Cambridge, since he was something of a hot coffeehouse act out in the Frisco scene before the acid-etched rock of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and the Doors took the town over by a storm in the summer of love, 1967. Josie had met Todd, had met and fallen for hard for him while she was still in high school, hell, he was only nineteen but things moved fast in the 1960s, after he had dedicated a song, Angel In The Mercy Night, to her after another friend, Frida Hoffman had introduced her to him one Saturday afternoon. Todd eventually left Manhattan for the West Coast after the on and off long distance affair with Josie had run its course to in turn “find himself” which he had apparently done with that local success he achieved out west. (Josie had selected, if you are interested about the why of that long distance romance that was bound to expire, Wisconsin like a lot of other New York City and Long Island kids just because it was not either of those locales, that it was far from the homes which were driving them, and not just them, crazy.)     

This is where Danny and his odd-ball ways came in. Josie who had been close close friends with Dora, closer than with Frida at one point, since they both were seriously into English Literature, complete  with capitalization of the L to show how serious they were. One day after she had been seeing Todd a few times Josie took Dora over to Todd’s apartment to hear him do his rendition of Angel In The Mercy Night that song which he had dedicated to her that fatal day at Washington Square and which he was to perform that next Saturday night when he was the feature at Murry’s Coffeehouse across for the Gaslight in the Village. (Everybody was almost forced to use that “Murry’s Coffeehouse across from the Gaslight” designation for Murry’s or he got his feelings hurt since his business, his coffeehouse success depended for a long time on grabbing the overflow from sold-out shows at the Gaslight to come in and listen to the new talent that performed three songs and out at the “open mics” he presented at his place).

Dora after hearing the song deemed it very good, very good as an example of what the new folksingers she had been hearing of late should be doing instead of just covering old traditional songs from God knows where about people who seemed to be clueless about doing anything but killing, boozing, and having worthless romantic relationships. Todd’s song she said spoke to the new wave folk listeners like her. And she told Todd so, and he told her to come hear him Saturday at Murry’s with Josie. She said she would try except she had a date with a guy, Danny, who she wasn’t sure had enough money to cover expenses. Jesus, Todd thought then and as he mentioned to Josie later, the guy couldn’t cover a couple of coffees and a shared pastry, and a couple of bucks for the “basket” to keep him and his date in Murry’s seats, the cheapest of cheap dates none cheaper that just hanging around the Hayes-Bickford across from the Square watching the weird mixture of winos, rummies, con men, drifters, low profile poets, mad monk writers and flipped-out singers buzz around.           

As it turned out Danny, a financially struggling student at New York University since his father worked for the railroads dying then and so not many weeks with fulltime work, and hence the reason behind the “no dough” status somehow pulled enough money to take Dora to the show. (He had borrowed the money from his older sister who had forced him to baby-sit her two children while she and hubby went to the movies downtown for a few hours relief in return.)

The way the show, the “open mic” nights worked at Murry’s Coffeehouse (I will dispense with the “across from the Gaslight” since you already know the reason for that designation), the way they still work now if you are near any of the fading remaining folk centers still around and kicking with the greying population who have not heard the news that the folk minute had passed a while ago, was that performers would sign up as they came in to sing one, maybe two depending on the number of performers, for an hour or so and then the featured performer (the person those two coffee and a shared pastry people were really there for) would come out to do two sets and close the joint. Things went well enough for the “open mic” section and then Todd came on to do the first of his two sets. This first set was all the classics, the old time traditional stuff folk audiences expected to hear. Tom Dooley, East Virginia, Cuckoo Bird stuff like that. Pretty well received. The second set Todd came out and sat on the stool placed on the small stage which some performers used and began to fiddle with his guitar. What he was doing was plugging his guitar into an amplifier in order to get more sound out of the instrument although nobody could see the amplifier from the front of the house. Then he started playing Angel In The Mercy Night with the amplifier on. Sounded good from what both Josie and Dora said later, later after the new world was crushed.

See Murry went crazy when he heard what he thought was going to be some rock and roll song when the decibel level went way up as Todd started Angel, was some rock and roll song what with the amplification, and had gone in back of Todd and pulled the plug so he never finished his song in that manner. Murry made it clear that Todd, or any entertainer, had to play acoustic or else forget Murry’s, go to Coney Island and weep sounds on the corners or something. So Todd finished up that night playing his usual acoustic guitar. Weird night. Here is the not so weird part though Danny born like all of them to the sound of the rock and roll night sided with Murry, sided with old time impresario maybe grew up with Duke Ellington or Frank Sinatra bop Murry against Dora, Josie and from the startled applause after Todd finished  Angel most of the rest of the audience. Said folk music was only worthy of that designation when the juice was off. Jesus.      

 

The Day They Pulled The Plug-With Pete Seeger In Mind 

 

Danny Ross was a born contrarian, or what would pass for such a person until a more contentious one came along. You don’t believe me then listen to this. Danny had this very pretty, smart, sympathetic and convivial girlfriend, Dora Denny. Dora at the time of this story had gone to school in New York City, the esteemed Hunter College School in Manhattan and had graduated the same year, 1966, as her friend Josie Davis who was then an undergraduate at Wisconsin. Danny couldn’t remember whether Josie was a sophomore or a junior at Wisconsin since she had taken some time off to “find herself” read; get over an affair with a buffing folk singer, Todd Whiting, you might have heard of him since he was something of a hot coffeehouse act out in the Frisco scene before the acid-etched rock took the town over by a storm in the summer of love, 1967. Josie had met Todd during one summer break at Washington Square Park near New York University. Had met and fallen for hard while she was still in high school, hell he was only nineteen but things moved fast in the 1960s, after he dedicated a song, Angel In The Mercy Night, to her after another friend, Frida Hoffman had introduced her to him one Saturday afternoon. Todd left Manhattan for the West Coast to in turn “find himself” which he had apparently done with that local success he achieved out west.   

This is where Danny and his odd-ball ways comes in. Josie who had been close close friends with Dora, closer than with Frida at one point, since they both were seriously into English Literature, complete  with capitalization of the L to show how serious they were. One day after she had been seeing Todd a few times Josie took Dora over to Todd’s apartment to hear him do his rendition of Angel In The Mercy Night that song which he had dedicated to her that fatal day at Washington Square and which he was to perform that night at Murry’s Coffeehouse across for the Gaslight in the Village. (Everybody was almost forced to use that “Murry’s Coffeehouse across from the Gaslight” designation for Murry’s or he got his feeling hurt since his business, his coffeehouse success depended for a long time on grabbing the overflow from sold-out shows at the Gaslight to come in and listen to the new talent that performed three songs and out at the “open mics” he presented at his place).

Dora after hearing the song deemed it very good, very good as an example of what the new folksingers should be doing instead of just covering old traditional songs from God knows where about people who seemed to be clueless about doing anything but killing, boozing, and having worthless romantic relationships. Todd’s song spoke to the new wave folk listeners. And she told Todd so, and he told her to come hear him Saturday at Murry’s with Josie. She said she would try except she had a date with a guy, Danny, who she wasn’t sure had enough money to cover expenses. Jesus, Todd thought then and as he mentioned to Josie later, the guy couldn’t cover a couple of coffees and a shared pastry, and a couple of bucks for the “basket” to keep he and his date in the seats, the cheapest of cheap dates none cheaper that just hanging around the Hayes-Bickford watching the weird mixture of winos, rummies, con men, drifters, low profile poets, mad monk writers and flipped-out singers.          

As it turned out Danny, who was a struggling New York University student and hence the reason behind the “no dough” status somehow pulled enough money to take Dora to the show. Things went well enough for the “open mic” section and then Todd came on to do the first of his two sets. This first set was all the classics, the old time traditional stuff folk audiences expected to hear. Tom Dooley, East Virginia, Cuckoo Bird stuff like that. Pretty well received. The second set Todd came out and sat on the stool placed on the small stage which some performers used and began to fiddle with his guitar. What he was doing was plugging his guitar into an amplifier in order to get more sound out of the instrument although nobody could see the amplifier from the front of the house. Then he started playing Angel In The Mercy Night with the amplifier on. Sounded good from what both Josie and Dora said later, later after the new world was crushed.

See Murry went crazy when he heard what he thought was going to be some rock and roll song, was some rock and roll song what with the amplification, and had gone in back of Todd and pulled the plug so he never finished his song in that style. Murry made it clear that Todd, or any entertainer had to play acoustic or else forget Murry’s, go to Coney Island and weep sounds on the corners or something. So Todd finished up that night playing his usual acoustic guitar. Here is the weird thing Danny born like all of them to the sound of the rock and roll night sided with Murry, sided with Murry against Dora, Josie and from the startled applause most of the rest of the audience. Said folk music was only worthy of that designation when the juice was off. Jesus.      

 

 

 

 

 

 

To Seek A Newer World –With The Dead Poets’ Society In Mind

 

 

 

Ethan Hawser did not know when he first dreamed the dream, the dream of being an outlaw poet (in his thinking any poet worth his or her salt like the madman American wild west seeking visions of some impossible democratic furor after all the blood he saw Walt Whitman, the clairvoyant beat hipster max daddy howling in the night seeing visions of the living dead of the new industrial  society from which we had to run, the sweet negro street angels anyway Allen Ginsberg and the free spirit mother of pearl drawing a wagon load women’s choice words Joyce Levin was by definition, by definition do you hear, except the academic poets who of course have ruined the whole profession, the prissy little Eliots and Stevens, Wallace that is, gave both poetry and outlawry a bad name).

Maybe it had been that first time, that first feverish night after he had run through the poetry of Francois Villon who expressed it so well that he was as stranger in a straight land, exiled in his own country (we will not stop to think through the implications of whether that nasty crowd he ran around with, the larcenies, big and small, which he and his gang were alleged to have committed which might have contributed to that feeling of isolation from his kindred after all this is Ethan’s dream), spoke endlessly that he was willing  to pay the price of exile to be able to write as he pleased, and not as the court ladies for whom most poetry was written wanted him to do to tout their beauty and their virtue, particularly the former (they would let the latter take care of itself in due course by bedding whatever stallion came to their portal).

Maybe it had been when Ethan he first stole over to the adult section of the Cliftondale library where he had grown to maturity and read, hell, re-read Walt Whitman and his vagabond words which spoke of a more democratic vista, spoke of the common clay (he was not as enamored of his stuff about Lincoln, that Captain, My Captain stuff that seemed way to flowery for the other stuff that he wrote in Leaves Of Grass. And maybe it was that first breathless night when he heard Allen Ginsberg doing his Howl on YouTube and he flipped out at the mad monk speaking of the best minds of his generation being atomic blasted into submission, about the lively negro streets groaning up the horror of their urban hipster existences, of the eternal conundrum of Ginsburg’s own homosexuality in an age when the crime against nature, the crime that dare not speak its name was illegal and prosecuted and shunned like witchcraft and other examples of high fagottry, of the angel of death calling out amount the fumes and the dust, of wicked clouded smoke reefer dreams, of endless wars against Moloch and his henchmen.       

And there he Etan Hawser, Junior. son of a stone crazy business executive who had pulled himself up by the bootstraps to give his son what he never had like many an average Joe, stuck in Saint Elmo’s Academy, all of seventeen and stuck, damn stuck with the grind before him. With the desperate fight against losing his mind, his mind that could have been and maybe would have been one of the best minds of his generation, might have made that big breakthrough to the hard rock candy mountain that some elementary school teacher put in his head and it stuck .

There was the rub though. He was about eighteen ways stuck because his father, Ethan, Senior, had placed every ever loving hope that he ever had on his son’s making a place for himself in the richness of life world, a world that he had had no opportunity to experience. So sweet dreams of outlaw poetry, hell, of any poetry seemed to be some much dry dust blown away with the sea.

That is where Mr. Byron, his senior year English teacher, came in and put ideas into his head. Told him first about Villon and bandit poets. Put ideas of bucking that father love, of escaping the dragnet that was furiously surrounding his escape routes. Mr. Byron had graduated from Saint El, had gone on to become a teacher then after the requisite time of his own education and apprenticeship had come back home to partake of glory and give back as he in his turn had received from Mr. Donne his senior year  English teacher. Had come back highly recommended (although that apprenticeship had been at Summerdale, a known hideout for those who were acolytes of Ivan Illich the scourge of any kind of Saint Elmo expectations but the headmaster of Saint El, Mister Regan had been classmates with the current “head teacher” there and so did Mr. Byron a favor) and Ethan when he began his senior years had the good luck to draw the whirlwind of his class.

The guy (always Mr. Byron in person, school rules, maybe number two after reporting on any untoward behavior by fellow classmates and by Byron’s rule too although at freer Summerdale he was known as Dick by students and staff alike) was as mad about poetry as Ethan was, read all kinds of meaning into the material. Preached Yeats the bloody Anglo-Irish mystic saint to the high heavens and banged heads with anybody who thought the lovely Ezra Pound’s words the utterings of a mad man. Drew all kinds of seemingly odd-ball connections between the poems and life. Saw lots of cautionary tales in the seemingly simple language of poetry. Saw say Robert Frost’s Two Roads Taken and he took the less travelled one as the clarion call for independent thinking, words to live and die by even if the old man put on the dog with his swamp Yankee persona.  Saw Tennyson and his “seeking a newer world,” his not standing pat against the encroaching dark night that was descending on the world when the machine went wild, as a way of living a new way, a not his father’s way.

All these ideas day after day in conversation and during long solitary walks got to Ethan, got to him heart and soul and he finally showed Mr. Byron some of his work. Mr. Byron approved, saw in a word here and idea there that his music might draw mighty gales, a saw lots of promise, was willing to go to bat for him to get into a good college to learn the great poetic works, get washed clean by them and then forget them and listen to his own heartbeats and not to go into business like his father wanted, demanded that he do. Got Ethan all excited, less obtusely teenage rebellious and more focused on bringing a new consciousness to his poetry. One weekend Mr. Byron brought Ethan to poetry reading in New York City, to the Gaslight then one of the hotspots of hipster coiling poetry, the poetry played to a be-bop tune. Ethan was getting it, getting to articulate that be-bop sound that was banging in his head, had been there all along maybe had been part of his DNA from birth, begging to get out. Life was good, everything was possible.          

Then the hammer came down, Ethan’s father adamantly refused to hear either his son’s or Mr. Byron’s pleas. Mr. Howser forthwith withdrew Ethan from Saint El and planned to send him to military school in the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, a place cold enough to “freeze the fucking poems out of his son (Mr. Hawser’s words).” Ethan freaked, fled the house that his father had him practically imprisoned in pending transfer to Siberia, and hit the road. Left no forwarding address, left no way to find him. Six months later Ethan Hawser was gunned down in North Carolina by an off-duty police officer as he attempted to rob a night cashier of twenty some dollars on hand to feed his new cocaine habit gathered on the road somewhere never disclosed  in a White Hen convenience store. Ethan had gotten the outlaw part of the outlaw poet, had got it straight up.  

 

 

 

He Came Through The Woods-With The Carter Family In Mind 

 

He wasn’t his father’s only son, not by a long shot. There was Isiah, Levi, Joshua, Samuel, David and Isaac but Preston was his favorite, his youngest son that he got around to naming after him when the smoke blew off of his “burned over” religious experience when the evangelical movement made it way south as it did periodically through the mountains by the early 1920s and he had been a previous sinner “reborn” and stopped naming his sons after some ancient high king in heaven Jehovah and his progeny. Preston also had a parcel of sisters, his father’s measurement term for the girls that he had called Missy, Little Peach or “hey you” when they were younger and almost nothing as they came of age, became womanly with their womanly needs most pressingly to be separated in sleeping quarters from the boys meaning  that the old man was forever building lean-to sheds for each newly minted young woman in the back of the cabin giving the whole property the look of so many  mismatched ticky-tack boxes, which they were.  As the parcel came of age he could not frankly understand them and their ways any more than he could understand his late wife, Sarah, bless her soul, when it came right down to it but they were kin and so the boxes and the not so secret wish that some young bucks would come and take them off his hands.

It had not been that young Preston (that is how we will call it here since you know who old Preston is) was so like his father in his old-fashioned ideas about women, about religion (although the old man had calmed down a bit about the matter after Sarah died but he still read his good book every evening and while he was lenient about many things he still would not abide [his term] swearing in his house and put one than one boy out for a time to prove his point) but that he had an independent streak that he had sensed that he had gotten from the old man. Like the time that young Preston at age twelve had run off with a couple of boys from up the road, Hobart Smith’s boys, going up to the Ohio River from their home in Hazard, Kentucky to see if they could hear John Newbury and his Appalachian Mountain Boys play on a riverboat sited at Paducah.

See young Preston had the music bug just like his father had before he was married and before he came to believe against all good reason that music was the devil’s work (although here too the old man had backed down a bit only refusing to personally be the devil’s servant, again his term), had been working on his guitar for since he was eleven singing old Jimmy Rodgers tunes, you know the Texas yodeler although he was actually born in Mississippi for some reason, and a few from A.P. Carter’s vast collection of simple songs guaranteed to get the girls to pay attention. (Carter would go around the countryside into the hillbilly hills and hallows, into the Nigger-towns and grab up every song he could, rework them a little, although keeping some monotonous same melody and then copyright them as his own like a few other guys would do later like Bob Dylan with traditional songs that were in the public domain.

He needn’t have worried about the girls since from early on the girls around Hazard, Prestonsburg, hell, even down to Haran County come Saturday night barn dance at Red Miller’s old homestead the girls had eyes for him, and not just the younger ones either. (It was a sixteen year old girl from over in Lewisburg who took away his virginity and hers at the same time when he was fourteen so yes he did not need to worry on the young girl front). But the way he figured the situation the guitar was his way out, his way out of the coal mines that dotted the countryside that turned everything within a few miles into black, and more  black on top of that until one sickened of the color ruining the natural beauty of the valley. So young Preston would practice constantly, got pretty good at it until it was his time at fourteen to go into the mines to help the family, and go like his older brothers down to the pits along with half the men in the town (the other half not working, nor not wanting to work, just sitting on their front porch tar paper shacks drinking homemade whiskey or just hanging out looking to be hanging out. The classic Tobacco Road white trash situation that more than one author has milked for all it was worth, not too much worth in the end but enough to hang that name on them). So he went, went to do coal separation work like all the boys did on day one in the mines, and then to the mines themselves when he grew too big for the separation work.

But he always thought about that guitar, about that possible way out of his freaking existence (my term). Then one night when he was sixteen he and a couple of boys stepped away from the pits, went to find out if they could get away first and then when they did they went their separate ways and good luck. Preston to Louisville and then over to try his luck in Nashville in the Tennessee night. Got himself into a small school that taught him how to really play the guitar, got him to be able to carry a tune with some precision. Got him noticed too when he entered a couple of talent search competitions one which had been judged by the most famous one of the famous Lally brothers, Shiloh, the master fiddler who kept the group lively, and although he did not win that competition he made an impression on Shiloh by doing a deep version of Anchored in Love, the old Carter Family standard. Preston got offered a job travelling with the Lally Brothers as second guitar and maybe some vocals (although Shiloh preferred to sing solo most of the time).  

That went along for a couple of good years with Preston playing back-up guitar but occasionally lead on some bass-ful songs. Got him plenty of come hither looks from the girls too, one of the things that Shiloh had noticed about Preston in that competition he had judged when the girls all crowded around close. Then December 7, 1941 came and blew a hole in a lot of dreams, a lot of expectations. Preston, as patriotic as the next man, and a couple of the younger Lally brothers went up to Louisville to enlist in the Marine, Semper Fi guys no question. When the Marine sergeant recruiter noticed that Preston had worked in the mines he told him that guys with mine experience could be exempted from military duty since many, many tons of coal would now be needed for all the ships and other vessels that would go against the Axis powers. Preston laughed, told that recruiter that between digging god awful coal and facing the “Nips” (a common term referring to the Japanese) he would take his chances against the latter.     

And he did facing off against the hated enemy on all of the big Marine Pacific Island operations that his division was called to perform. Before being discharged he was assigned to the Naval Depot in Hingham in Massachusetts where he met his future wife, stayed there and didn’t prosper but didn’t complain when in his turn he had five sons who were raised somehow. He would sing old Hank Williams songs when his oldest son, Preston III asked him to do so taking out that old woe begotten guitar that he salvaged from a trip back home. But he never got up on that big high stage again.  

Out In The Corner Boy Night- With S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders In Mind  

 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

The Outsiders, starring Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe, Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise and a billion brat pack guys, from the novel of the same by S.E. Hinton, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, 1983

Jack Callahan was not much into films, never had been, had always done the movie bit when he was dating Chrissie McNamara in high school because she had insisted before he had gotten his driver’s license that they could not always go to the seawall at the far end of Adamsville Beach to “make out” and needed the “privacy” of the balcony at the Strand Theater up on Beale Street once in a while (that Chrissie initial match-up whom he eventually married and is still married to is a story in its own right but for another time). Had insisted as well that they occasionally go to the drive-in theater, usually as a double date, to save her, their, reputations by not always being seen at that far end of Adamsville Beach, the local lovers’ lane with the fogged up car windshields and the discarded condoms on the ground, every freaking night. So he might have seen a bunch of films but he really did not pay attention all that much to plot or nuance. So it was odd that recently when Chrissie ordered the DVD of Francis Ford Coppola’s film adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s classic tale of teen alienation and angst, corner boy version, The Outsiders, through Netflix for them to watch one Saturday night when they were not minding the grandkids after she had read the blurb of what the film was about that he was totally mesmerized by what he saw from frame number one.  

The reason Jack was fascinated was obvious, obvious if you knew Jack, or rather knew Jack back in his coming of age days in the early 1960s when despite his hard-fought status as a wild man running back for the championship Red Raiders high school football team and thus a hero on those lovely granite grey autumn Saturday afternoons at Veterans’ Stadium he was nothing but an in-your-face corner boy under the command of corner boy leader Frankie Riley, a true wild boy in his own right. While today Jack Callahan is Mister Toyota of Eastern Massachusetts (and Chrissie Mrs. Toyota) with his busy car dealership down in Hingham and a respectable and doting grandfather (don’t use that word with his children though they would laugh in your face) back then he was as likely to be doing a midnight creep to burgle some Mayfair swell home as to be running over awestruck on the field football defenders. After they had watched the film Jack, a drink of white wine in his hand (in the old days nothing by low-rent rotgut whiskies when he was poor and high-end Chivas when he started making money), he surprised Chrissie by wanting to unburden himself of what he saw. Chrissie, knowing this was important to Jack as she always did when on those rare occasions he felt like expanding on some subject sat there in smiling silence (and also was ready in listen in silence already knowing of Jack’s corner boy exploits with that damn Frankie Riley whom she never told Jack had made a million passes at her, a couple of those times when she almost took the ride, took Frankie’s ride, before she reined him in Senior year when that State U football scholarship was on the line).             

Jack started off waxing philosophical something he was organically incapable of in the old days by saying, “Hey, even corner boys need their fun, need an outlet for all that fury that they have inside them since they came into a world that they had no say in creating. Of course we all come into the world that way with no say but the difference is these guys, my guys if you want to know, came in with the short end of the stick, came in with small voices getting dimmer like that guy you made me read one time because you thought I would like what he had to say, Algren right [Chrissie: right], and that made all the difference. Take Pony Boy, a good looking kid, young, too young to be a corner boy just like I was at twelve when Frankie Riley first took me under his wing but what are you going to do when the deck is stacked against you and everything around you is divided into corner boys and the others. Pony Boy was trying to break out and the only way he had to do that was to write his brains out, putting it down on paper. You know me I could never do that writing stuff so before as you always say “took me in hand” I was putty in Frankie’s hands. No, I really wanted to do what I did because my wanting habits would have filled a stadium, maybe more.”

“Karl Marx was nothing but a creep and a damn red like that mad man Lenin and crazy Trotsky back then now too if anybody still pays the slightest attention to what those guys had to say and I hope they don’t  but he was a great guy for throwing class-based terms around when you think about it called Pony’s people, my people, my poor father going from pillar to post taking any job he could find to keep me and my four younger sisters from the poor house and my mother filling donuts, Jesus, filling donuts at Java Joe’s Coffee Shop to help out, the workers and the others, the capitalists, or their legion of hangers-on like your damn father, the damn bank executive, who hated me from day one because he felt I didn’t have any “prospects” before I rolled over opposing football teams, really the proletariat and the bourgeoisie if you wanted to get pretty about it.”

“This S.E. Hinton who wrote the book and I think I will go to the library and take it out when I take little Johnny and Jasmine there next week or whoever wrote the screenplay really cut it another way, the “greasers” coming hard out of hot rod cars and oil- stained gas stations all slicked up just like we were although they really did wear their hair way too long out in the sticks so maybe they didn’t have barber shops there where they lived and the “socs,” your people really you know from Beech Street like you.    The guys with the expensive sweaters and slacks not from Robert Hall or Walmart and the gals with their cashmere sweaters, starched white collar shirts, you know what I mean, and flouncy skirts just like you [Chrissie laughed.], oh yeah, and their no touch church books in hand just when thing got interesting on Friday night. [Chrissie laughs again then silently blushed thinking about that first time she let Jack “do the do,” have sex with her, as they used to call it in North Adamsville under the influence of a Howlin’ Wolf song when it was not clear who was jumping who or whom.]  Call it greaser and soc but it was all the same as Marx called it just a younger version waiting to take over. And there the lines still stand whether in our growing up hometown of North Adamsville, down in Carver with Sam Eaton, New York City, Chicago, Baton Rouge or Podunk, Oklahoma where Pony Boy and crowd were trying to breathe.”                                               

“You saw how it played out in Oklahoma but you know as well as I do it really could have been all of the other places mentioned in the hard-ass young and lost early 1960s when the whole world, or at least the whole American world, make that the whole American up-ward mobile middle class world was worried that their sons would wind up as corner boys and, more importantly that their virtuous daughters, you, would wind up in some back seat or down at some forlorn lovers’ lane with one of the refugees.” [Chrissie silently blushed again remembering that scene in Salducci’s Pizza Parlor where Frankie, Jack and the boys hung out on dough-less, girl-less Friday nights when she came clamoring in “no holds barred” and plopped herself on Jack’s lap daring him to kick her off after she got tired of him not responding to her come hither pleas.]

“Yeah, it played out every which way but here is where the whole thing tumbles. Do you remember the first scenes that take place in that nicely democratic Drive-In movie theater? [Chrissie nods.] They aren’t around much anymore except out in Podunk places like Olde Saco, Maine where my old friend Josh Breslin, an old corner boy himself hanging around with working class French-Canadian mill guys where he grew up recently checked out the remnants of that scene in that still operating venue up there although he said a lot like who was there, mostly families with kids, and the fact you had to tune into a radio station to hear the sound rather than the loudspeaker that you put on the side window of your car half the time especially if you were drunk or sleepy you would rip out when you went to drive off had changed, but back in the early 1960s as you know they along with drive-in restaurants were magnets for teens, all teens, earlier really but that was toddler time and I only want to talk about teenage coming of age time now since I am talking about corner boys.”

“Jesus, whoever figured it out either knew the scene personally or had it checked out pretty nicely, had the whole scene pegged, pegged right. Pony Boy, hey we all had monikers, all the guys, back then right, mine if you remember for a while was Running Bear after the song not because of my football prowess, Buzz, the Frankie Riley of the gang, and the ill-fated runt of the litter Johnny snuck under the fence in the back of the drive-in. Automatically that tells you if the “greaser” hair-dos and cut-off tee-shirts don’t that these guys are “from hunger” even if they had the dough for admission. One of the “perks” of being poor is that you don’t worry about the niceties of paying except when John Law is on your back because you figure the world owes you. I know I did when I first started doing the “clip” and later when we were hitting those Mayfair swell houses.

“So they walk in like they own the place, smoking cigarettes anxiously a mile a minute like we used to do. I remember that first time you smoked that Camel I offered you and you choked and almost turned blue. Although that didn’t stop us from lighting up a blade for years after and it took a civil war practically to get you, then me, to quit, quit for good. They go sit in the public seats that every drive-in had back then when the cars got too hot or your date wasn’t. [Chrissie smiles no blush this time.]  Along the way a classic drive-in scene developed remember when a bunch of kids popped out of the trunk of a big ass old car like they made back then. Some Ford or Chevy. Every group of kids pulled that trick at least once. You never let me do it when we double-dated though. Remember we used to pay separate admissions until the management got wise so everybody would pile kids in trunks and back seat wells and pay maybe two admissions then split everything later. Frankie Riley one time, this is before you landed on my lap in Salducci’s, drove into the freaking drive-in like he was by himself one time, the drive-in alone if you can believe that. The guy had balls, no question. [Chrissie: severe look.] Paid one admission and the taker didn’t blink. We had five guys and two girls in back that night. Beautiful. [Chrissie puts on her classic scorn look which after forty some years told Jack to move on quickly from that subject.] That was great until the balloon burst and you paid by the carload.”

“So naturally Buzz the leader of the pack just like Frankie  started hitting on a couple of “soc” girls, you know the ones with the starched shirts like you then and not the ones with the form-fitting cashmere sweaters who are helping fog up some back seat windows far away from the open air seat crowd. [Chrissie silently blushed again thinking about that night when Jack was away at a college tour and she took up Frankie’s good friend offer to go to the Drive-In, the back end fogged up area, and after a couple of drinks she almost let him have his way with her but jumped out just like Scarlett or whatever her name was in the movie. Frankie could be very smooth when he wanted to be, when he wanted something especially when he knew she and Jack had already been “doing the do.”]

“No go, no go between greaser and soc even in the democratic Drive-In. Why? Because the social order in school would not permit such an outlandish arrangement. Even when Pony Boy, who played it cool, took that good-looking redheaded soc to the inevitable intermission stand with its stale popcorn, fizz-less sodas, cardboard hamburgers and sullen hot dogs [Chrissie laughed a knowing laugh.] he felt uncomfortable staying too long because people might talk, meaning the inevitable teenage “grapevine” would be hot off the wire. You know from just that scene they there are two different worlds working to a bad end.” [Chrissie knew because she had had to endure not only the “no prospects” noise from her parents which was bad enough but also from her soc girlfriends for a while, especially sophomore year when all social relationships are cemented for the life of the class until graduation. Only when Jack started ripping defenses apart on Saturday afternoons and a couple of those girlfriends wondered out loud what he would be like in bed did that noise die down, did Jack get some acceptance from her crowd but she always had to watch her step, watch out that they did not find out about the midnight creeps and the other stuff that let Jack have dough to take her out without snide comment.]    

“After that scene you can tell no matter what somebody, some greaser is going to take a fall.  That is the screen-writer part to make the story interesting so they build up the tensions between the soc and greaser guys, build it up into a war practically. Along the way ill-fated Johnny trying to save Pony Boy does in a soc, kills him and that part leads away from my experiences but back on the corner we heard about one gang doing in another, having rumbles and stuff but it was corner against corner, greaser against greaser okay, not one class against the other, it just didn’t happen. You know the soc guys at school were creampuffs, were afraid of their own shadows, would walk, hell, run across the street if they saw two corner boys walking their way. I had to laugh at that part. If you hadn’t landed on my lap that night I probably would have found some sexy cashmere sweater greaser girl famous for blowjobs and bitchiness, and that would have been that. I wasn’t looking for soc girls although you know I was looking for you all the times we talked in class and everything.” [Chrissie thought just then or Ellen or Marie, a couple of her more adventurous soc girlfriends, the wonderers, would have jumped on his lap no question.]

“You know though despite the differences in the story line from what you know was happening to me before you stepped in that lead character, that Buzz, really reminded me of Frankie Riley, reminded me of how that bloody son of bitch Irishman’s son tempted the fates, tempted his fates. [Chrissie turned pale. This is the moment she has dreaded all evening since very early on she could tell Jack was working in his mind the very real similarities between Buzz, played by Matt Dillon who looked very much like Frankie, too much.] Frankie early on, hell, in junior high started out to be the king hell corner boy, was the guy who started half the guys in school smoking because it was “cool,” started the “clip,” and was the mastermind behind the Mayfair swells midnight creeps although Peter Markin was the guy who carried the plans out because Frankie was usually too drunk to lead the expeditions.”

“You know how persuasive Frankie could be, how much of a cutting edge charmer he could be if he put his mind to it and it was in his interest. I know he was after you, or thought about it, thought about it for a second until I told him I would cut his heart out and hand it to him on a platter if he did so after that night you landed on my lap.” [Chrissie blushed her seventh blush thinking again about that Drive-In episode senior year when Frankie had half her clothes off and his hand moving up her thigh toward her vagina and if he had made it before she bailed out who knows what would have happened for she believed Jack really would have done murder and mayhem to Frankie no matter what binds tied them together.]

“Yeah, the Buzzes and Frankies of the world always try to go way outside their comfort zones, try to go outside the small pond they rule. Buzz pulled some hare-brained half thought out robbery and wound up very dead in the sullen stinking oil-soaked streets of Podunk, Oklahoma. Frankie, rest his soul, wound up face down in North Carolina, Ashville, after getting a serious cocaine habit a few years out of high school and after pulling a couple of small armed robberies when he “high as a kite” tried to rob a White Hen convenience store unarmed. [Chrissie sighed, yes, rest in peace, Frankie, rest in peace.]                                 

 

The Price Of Genius-The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson’s Love and Mercy

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Love and Mercy, starring Paul Dano, John Cusack, 2015

No question if you read enough stories about geniuses of all sorts from big-brained physicists like Newton and Einstein to big-be-bop musical guys like the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson who was the de facto impresario of that group you will find so very troubling stories along the way. That is the case here as Wilson’s tell all song from the 1980s when he was beginning to recover from his dark night got the nod as the title of the film, Love and Mercy. The film is a bit different from most biopics, especially of musicians since it concentrates, sometimes successfully at others in a confusing manner needing more detail, on two periods in Wilson’s life- the 1960s heyday of his biggest successes and height of his creative energies and the 1980s when he was fighting aided by the woman who would be his future wife, Melinda Ledbetter, to control his demons within.

Admittedly I was not a Beach Boys fan as a kid, found their music well too dishy when I was in thrall to blues and protest folk songs at a time when my true love rock and roll had turned to vanilla but that notwithstanding watching the sections of this film where Wilson was going, haltingly at times, full blast at others   and using every sound under the sun that made sense and of the now famous “wrecking crew” of sessions musicians I got the musical genius part. Of course that was an age when a lot of people, a lot of musicians as well, got as caught up in the whole live fast, die young and make a good corpse syndrome as anybody else. Some went under to drugs like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendricks and Jim Morrison, other faded after their moments in the sun, and still others like Wilson let their inner demons get the best of them.  

The reasons those demons took command was never really explained, if such things can be explained except an overbearing father, less that sympathetic brothers and an overwhelming to create the greatest album ever took their toll. Then we get to see Wilson in the 1980s when he is frankly a basket case although the direct causes for that decline are not sketched out. What is sketched out very clearly is that his shrink, his mad man over-the-top shrink who seemed to have imbibed every hare-brained psychological theory from the 1960s and put it on top of a control freak persona, was the problem not the solution. Also sketched out very clearly was that a determined woman is a very hard thing to beat when the love game is in play as when his future wife Melinda (played by Elizabeth Banks) digs in her heels to break the shrink’s spell over Wilson. I didn’t come away from this film any more a fan of the Beach Boys but for his struggles against adversity I did become a fan of the musical genius Brian Wilson. Watch this one. 

Sitting On The Rim Of The World- With The Son Of The Neon Wilderness Nelson Algren In Mind -Sam Eaton’s Take

From The Pen Of Bart Webber 

A number of years ago when I was in the midst of one of my periodic re-readings of the gritty Chicago-etched novelist Nelson Algren who worked the steamy, misbegotten streets of that town when it was like now an anything goes place down at the base of society if not up on Lake Shore Drive I wrote a rat-tat-tat rush of words and phrases extolling his work. My old friend from Carver in Massachusetts where I grew up, Sam Eaton, read the piece recently after he had read Walk On The Wild Side arguably one of the great novels chronicling the plight of the white trash in the last century who could not adjust, did not want to adjust when the deal went down and got nothing but knuckles and billy-clubs for breakfast for their efforts said he wanted to give his take one Algren, a more nuance  take. Sam said to me that he would take responsibility for what was written. He had better since I will not, no way.      

********

Yeah, Bart was right about Nelson Algren, right about how he had the misfits, the guys and gals who because of upbringing, hubris, fate didn’t cut the mustard, couldn’t go the distant in normal society and thus got burned up in the process, pegged. Had their number just like the midnight copper captain who got tired of their same old, same old in a story Bart had me read one time. That is what got me interested in reading Walk On The Wild Side, got me hopped up on one Dove Linkhorn, a guy born to lose so he might as well not have been born. Period. Here in this book or rather in the description of the origins of the Doves when they came to this green breast of American land, the origins of the Tobacco Road set, the “white trash” guys, is where I knew Algren was no fake, no fake at all no matter how good he might have had it growing up himself, no matter how far away from cheap street he might have actually been (and after Bart filled me in about a junkie girlfriend he tried to help go “cold turkey” I knew I was on to something).

Bart, although these days he probably would not admit it, wouldn’t mention it, unless he was asked directly, and I came from Doveville, came from that “white trash” environment that Algren captured in the first couple of chapters about where guys like Dove got off the rails right from the start. We both grew up in the “projects” in Carver, you know the public housing every town and city has provided for a while to those who are down on their luck, can’t do better, or won’t. No matter how pretty a town tries to make the place look and the town of Carver didn’t bother much it is still the projects. It’s the projects because it is not so much the condition of the places, the lack of space and amenities people out in the leafy suburbs expect as a matter of course, or the sameness of everybody’s condition and thus poor material to jump up in the world in but because of the way it breaks your spirit, the way it grinds you down worrying about the basics of life and not having them, making your “wanting habits” larger than life.                 

Although Bart, whose father was just a poorly educated man who got caught up in World War II, got stationed for a while in Boston before being discharged, met Bart’s mother and decided to stay rather than going back up to rural Maine and his white trash kindred (I am not being unkind here to the old man, believe me, Bart said he could not believe a place was worse than the Carver projects when he saw the broken down shack, complete with rusted non-descript vehicles, the outhouse which served for relief of the bodily functions and the rat’s ass condition of the interior, the couple of times he went up there as a kid to see where his father grew up) and I, whose father was a drunk, a drunk straight up without the excuse of military service to explain his rotten ways escaped the worst the projects had to dish out it was a close thing, a very close thing. We saw Doves all around us, had some for friends, got tied up a little with their wanting habits which intersected our own.       

Let me give you one example, the one Bart would pick too if I had asked him to name the guy from the old neighborhood who could go toe to toe with the Doves of the world. “Red” Radley was the toughest hombre around (and that “red” moniker was not about his political affiliations, not in the red scare 1950s when we grew up under the cloud of the Cold War, he would have clobbered anybody who said that, clobbered anybody who claimed to be a red, or maybe even though about it too).  A couple of years older than us so his exploits worthy of our attention and admiration (and a couple of appearances in “juvie,” in kid’s court as a result ) Red didn’t look that tough but everybody knew that he was the guy who almost chain-whipped a guy from another neighborhood, another corner really which is the way “turf” was divided in those days to death leaving a bloody mass on the ground when he walked away just for being in Red’s corner (Harry’s Variety where even tough and connected Harry once told me long after Red went up to do his first armed robbery strength that he was afraid of Red when he was only sixteen and that was why he never made an issue of Red staking out his store as his corner).       

Red had the classic story, a drunken long gone father (if it was his father since the guy he knew as this father before the guy split always claimed Red was not his kid), a tramp of a mother whose claim to fame was that she could outdrink most guys and gave the best blowjobs in town. Didn’t care if school kept or not once he got the idea to start “clipping” stuff from department schools and selling it to us (or anybody else) cheap to keep himself in clover. Got himself a gang of corner boys (Harry’s Variety, remember) including Bart and me (that is where our “juvie” experiences came in) and ruled his ‘kingdom” with an iron fist until he graduated to armed robberies (the place where Bart and I jumped ship). Wound up pimping his younger sister, only thirteen, for a while in between robberies (we thought it was cool although we were far from knowing what that pimping really meant). There was some talk too of incest with her but we let that slide. Later, when he was between jail terms he would pimp whatever girlfriend he had to keep him in dough. Funny despite his outlaw status he could get some good-looking novena and rosary bead Catholic girls who you wouldn’t think would look at him once although he was a good-looking wiry guy and turn them into whores. And they didn’t think twice about it according to what Red told Bart one time about Cissie Gaffney whom Bart had had a crush on in his younger days. It takes no big brain to know that Red’s attitude toward women was about the same as his attitude about doormats.         

Naturally the Reds of the world just like their kindred Doves try to go further than their inner resources will take them. Begin to think the whole world is just a little larger than the small pond they are swimming in where they have all the other fishes terrified, Forget there are a ton of other tough hungry guys out there. Forget the coppers will throw you down if you do not own them. And so early on at about sixteen Red started getting taken down many pegs. The first time for a botched armed robbery of a gas station up on Palmer Street when a cop car was passing by and saw the action, the coppers put Red down to the ground and he stayed down as they handcuffed him, trussed him really. That began the cycle from which Red never broke until, from what we heard about twenty-five years later, Red fell to earth down South, North Carolina I think, strung out on junk, a habit which he picked up in one of his jail terms (and which made more than one girlfriend a whore to keep him from his horrors), fell down in a shoot-out with local cops when he was trying to rob a White Hen convenience store, unarmed. So when we say Algren knew the Reds, (and us) of the world, wrote about them true you can take that wisdom to the bank. Here’s why if you need a rounded out picture:       

He, Nelson Algren, the poet-king of the midnight police line-up, poet-king and true, no short-cuts, no pretty pictures, no lies leave that to the dopes in the line-up, leave that to the prosaic night watch captain who has heard it all, night court shuffle (not only whores, pimps, winos, and denizens of the all-night Hayes-Bickford weak coffee but cheap are out and about by a whole unknown to John and Jane Q Public justice system is grinding away relentlessly keeping John and Jane ignorant), drug-infested jack-roller (who likes the sound of a roll of nickels on bone, likes to work the dark streets around Jimmy the Polack’s Tavern on Friday nights when guys get paid and he gets “paid”), dope-peddler (mostly the guy who takes the fall, the guy who cuts the dope so tight that it makes Minnie squeal to high heaven but also the guy when that fifteen “cold turkey” time don’t make it is the sainted bastard savoir our lord “fixer-man” all hail), illicit crap game back alleys (watch the Doves, Reds, and Shortys for they will always tilt the game if not watched just like back in some Harry’s Variety time when the messed up Madame La Rue pinball wizard games and Harry caught hell from his connected boys, Chicago-style, what did Carl Sandburg the old dusty poet call Chi ( a very far stretch from old hosanna westward trek all men are brothers Walt Whitman although he too knew grime), oh yeah, hog-butcher and steel-driver of the world, wrote of small-voiced people(you know Joe regular guy this gas jockey smelling of greases and oils even with the Borax treatment, Jane regular gal waitress in the dead-end Pops’ Eats diner complete with stained tight white uniform and tired legs), mostly people who had started out in the world with small voices, small voices which never got louder.

Small-voiced except that solitary confinement in some locked room junkie wail when deep in the “cold turkey” fits screaming for sweet Jesus lord fixer man, except that drunk dark tavern cheap low-shelf rye whiskey shrieking in the early morning high moon can’t find the way home some blind and another shriek when Lenny works that roll of nickels on his bones, yeah, except that stealthy jack-roller cry of delight once his victim wears that spot of blood on the back of his neck like some red badge of sap-dom, except that scream when some he-man decides that for a minute he would gain a big voice and smack his woman a few times to straighten her out (and she sporting a bruised eye and crippled shoulder, nowhere to go, what about the kids, and oh how he used to love her so and maybe he will change some day, except that holler when some john decided to bust up his paid-up junkie whore just because he could  (hell, she tried to hold out on him her protector, tried to do a trick on her own hook, tried to take the night off, the reasons are endless), except, oh, hell, enough of exceptions in the neon-blazing small voice night. 

Yeah, Nelson had it right, had that ear to the ground for the low moan (more of a groan, not for him his contemporary Jack Kerouac’s moan for man, “beat” moan for man, all Catholic beat and rise, although they heard those same longings, that same rat’s ass despair of the midnight oil), the silence in the face of ugly Division Street tenements not fit for the hogs much less the hog-butchers (cold water flats, rooms so small so no space to breath, no private thoughts except that some guy next door knew what you were thinking and said cut it out, peeling wallpaper or paint it does not matter, dripping sinks that spoke of no recent plumbing and why should the landlord care but get this Division Street had kindred in Taffrail Road Carver, Columbia Point, south-side Racine, the Bronx, they are legend), had the ear for the dazed guys, drunk, disorderly, maybe on the nod so quiet (that nod not the nod of youth when you recognized some guy you sort of knew in passing as a sign he was cool with you but the low-down nod of somebody in a place that nobody can reach) spilling their pitter-patter to Captain just like back in home sweet Mississippi, Georgia, wherever ( and could never go back to face Mister James Crown and his do this, don’t do that, stay here, don’t stay there, keep your head down enough of that).

Algren had the ear for the strange unrequited fates of what did that same Jack Kerouac of the “moan for man” call them, yes, the fellahin, the lump mass peasants (and what is the same thing once they get off the farms and the out of the country air, the urban peasants, for at least in America they are when you scratch underneath their surly looks and bitter end despair they are not that far removed from their roots, from all their old sack of potatoes lives), met coming out of men’s bars on fugitive mile long riverbank mill town Lowell streets loud and boisterous ready for a fight or a kiss with some waylaid back alley); broken-back Fresno fruit fields (stoop labor, bracero labor that only the Aztec bronzed “wetback” could stand picking cucumbers here, garlic there going norte); and, Mexican nights all night bumpy bus ride sweating and stinking coming of going someplace) except now they are hell-bound bunched up together on the urban spit ( a righteous word and it fits), small voices never heard over the rumble of the thundering subway build to drown out the cries of men), working stiffs (stinking hog-butchers with blood-stained hands hulking slabs of pork, sweated steel-driving men edging toward the melting point as they hurl their metals into the grinder to mesh and mix the great urban superstructure, grease-stained tractor-builders out at John Deere, frayed-collared night clerks in some seedy flop (frayed collar bot necessary for night work since the winos could have cared less about what some holy goof wore, the  con men are sneaking out the back door and the whores are trying to hold off their latest john until they see cash), porters sweeper out Mister’s leaving from his executive bathroom, and glad they have the work since it beats down home sweated fields).

And their women too, the fellahina [sic], cold-water flat housewives making do with busted up toasters, egg-shelled stained coffee pots (shaking their heads at some Anglo-American poet going on and on about measuring lives by coffee spoons), Bargain Center leftover drapes, frayed kitchen curtains; cheap Jimmy Jack’s Diner waitresses to earn the family daily bread their misters of the golden dream youth the world is our oyster promises couldn’t deliver surly pencil in ear and steam-tray sweated too tight faded white uniform with telltale leftover gravy stains hustling for nickels and dimes; beaten down shoe factory workers flipping soles and heels by the score at piece rate, piece rate if you can believe that, work men did not do, would not do; working back room donut shops filling donuts with jelly, cream, whatever, hairnet caked with debris, ditto her ill-fitted sugar encrusted uniform,     to feed the tribe that she had too close together and proved too much when the deal when down; the younger ones, pretty or plain, hitting Benny’s Tavern for a few quick ones and maybe a quick roll in the hay if some guy pays the freight (the plain ones depending on that); older women sitting alone at smoke-filled bars on early evening paydays looking that look, that come hither honey look, doing tricks for extra no tell husband cash to fill those weekly white envelopes when the rack-renter and the utilities bill collectors hammer at the door; other older women, younger ones too come to think of it, hustling for a fix if she is on the quiet jones).

Sometimes despite all their best wishes and fruitless rantings their kids (already street-wise watching older brothers working back alley jack-rolls, cons, hanging in front of Harry’s Variety doing, well, just doing until the midnight sifter time rolls around),  growing up like weeds with nobody at home in an age when mothers stayed at home, who turned out to be disappointments. But who could expect more from the progeny of small-voiced people, of guys who sat around gin mills all night (maybe all day too I knew a few who inhabited the Dublin Grille in my old hometown of Carver, a smaller version of Chi town, another town filled with small-voice people, just fewer, small tenements, cold-water flats, same seedy places not fit to hang in, genteel people hang in).

Nelson never wrote, or wrote much, about big-voiced people those who Greek tragedy played big but rather those who stumbled, tumbled down to the sound of rumble subway stops out their doors (that damn elevated shaking the damn apartment day and night, rattling the windows, so close passengers got an eyeful when some floozy readied herself for her night’s work or not bothering with modesty, high as a kite, just letting herself not feel anything). Never spoke of people who fell off the rim of the world from some high place due to their hubris, their addictions, their outrageous wanting habits never sated before the fall, not some Edenic fall, not some “searching for the garden” like Jack and Burroughs uptown tea-fed hipsters claimed they were seeking just ask them, but a silly little worldly fall that once it happened the world moved on and ignored.

Wrote instead of the desperately lonely, a shabby-clothed wino man talking to himself on some forsaken park bench the only voice, not a big voice but a voice that had to be reckoned with, of the donut and coffee stuffed cop swaggering his billy club menacingly to move him on, or else; a woman, unhappy in love, hell maybe jilted at the altar, sitting alone like some Apple Annie in that one Ladies Invited tavern on the corner, the one just off Division where she had met that man the first time and meets all men now, all men with the price of a drink, maybe two, no more, and that eternal price of a by-the-hour flop over on neon hotel, motel, no tell Mitchell Street.

Yeah, a big old world filled with the lonely hearing only their own heartbeats, heard no other heartbeats as they waited out their days. What did T.S. Eliot, the poet and a guy who if strait-laced and Victorian knew what he was talking about call it like I said before but it all fits, oh yeah, measured out their lives in coffee spoons. Nelson wrote of alienated people too, not the Chicago intellectuals who were forever belly-aching about the de-humanization of man  about how we had built a mechanical world from which we had to run but the common clay, the ones who manned the conveyor belts, ran the damn rumbling subways, shoveled the snow, hell, shoveled shit day and night. (Studs Terkel, a guy Algren knew, a guy who knew a thing or two about the fellahin and the dirty linen Chi streets, could quote chapter and verse on these guys and their eternal studies about the plight of man, and they merely made of the same clay.)

Wrote of the night people, not the all night champagne party set until dawn and sleep the day away but of the ones who would show up after midnight in some police precinct line-up, the winos, the jack-rollers, the drifters, the grifters, the midnight sifters, maybe a hooker who had not paid the paddy and thus was subject to the grill. Wrote of the  people who inhabit the Nighthawk Diner (artist Edward Hopper’s all sharp angles, all dim lights outside, bright fluorescent no privacy, no hiding lights inside, all the lonely people eating their midnight hamburgers with all the fixings from the look of it meaning a no go night and so that lonely burger and cup of joe, fresh off the greased grill, another grill that forlorn hooker knew well), or Tom Waits’ rummies, bummies, stumblers, street-walkers looking for respect all shadows left behind, take your pick), the restless, the sleepless, the shiftless, those who worked the late shift, those who drew the late shift of life, those who worked better under the cover of night in the dark alleyways and sullen sunken doorways.

He wrote big time, big words, about the small-voiced people, big words for people who spoke in small words, spoke small words about small dreams, or no dreams, spoke only of the moment, the eternal “only the moment.” The next fix, how to get it, worse, how to get the dough to pay the fixer man, he, sending his woman out on the cold damp streets standing under some streetlight waiting for Johnnie and his two minute pleasures, she if she needed a fix, well, she trading blow jobs for smack, so as not to face that “cold turkey” one more day. The next drink, low boy rotgut wines and cheap whiskies, how to get it, the next bet, how to con the barkeeper to put him on the sheet, the next john, how to take him, the next rent due, how to avoid the dun and who after all had time for anything beyond that one moment.

Waiting eternally waiting to get well, you in such bad shape you can’ t get down the stairs, waiting for the fixer man to walk up the stairs and get you well, well beyond what any medical doctor could prescript, better than any mumbo-jumbo priest could absolve, to get some kicks. (Needle, whiskey, sex although that was far down the list by the time that needle was needed or that shot of low-shelf whiskey drove you to your need, again.) Waiting for the fixer man, waiting for the fixer man to fix what ailed them.

 

So not for Algren the small voice pleasant Midwestern farmers providing breadbaskets to the world talking to kindred about prices of wheat and corn walking the road to their proper Sunday white-clad church after a chaste Saturday red barn dance over at Fred Brown’s; not for him  the prosperous small town drugstore owners filling official drug prescriptions hot off some doctor’s pad and selling the under-aged liquor as medicine without prescription for whatever the traffic would bear; and ,not of Miss Millie’s beauty salon where the blue-haired ladies get ready for battle and gossip about how Mister so and so had an affair with Miss so and so from the office and how will Mildred whom of course they would never tell to keep the mills rolling do when the whole thing goes public.

Nor was Algren inclined to push the air out of the small town banker seeking a bigger voice (calling in checks at a moment’s notice), the newspaper publisher seeking to control the voices or the alderman or his or her equivalent who had their own apparatuses for getting their small voices heard. One suspects that he could have written that stuff, written and hacked away his talent like those who in the pull and push of the writing profession had (have) forsaken their muses for filthy lucre. No, he, Nelson Algren, he, to give him his due took dead aim at the refuge of society, the lumpen as he put it in the title of one short story, those sitting on the rim of the world.

 

And he did good, did good by his art, did good by his honest snarly look at the underside of society, and, damn, by making us think about that quarter turn of fate that separated the prosperous farmer (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not short-weighting the world), the drugstore owner (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not dispensing his wares, his potent drugs, out the back door to a craving market) , Miss Millie (assuming as we must that she, secretly, was not running a call girl service on the side), the banker (assuming as we must that he, maybe secretly, maybe not, was not gouging rack rents and usurious interest), the newspaper editor (assuming as we must that he, very publicly, in fact was printing all the news fit to print), and the politician (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not bought and paid for by all of the above, or others) from the denizens of his mean streets. The mean city streets, mainly of Chicago, but that is just detail, just names of streets and sections of town to balance his work where his characters eked out an existence, well, anyway they could, some to turn up face down in some muddy ravine, under some railroad trestle, in some dime flop house, others to sort of amble along in the urban wilderness purgatory.

Brother Algren gave us characters to chew on, plenty of characters, mostly men, mostly desperate (in the very broadest sense of that word), mostly with some jones to work off, mostly with some fixer man in the background to wreak havoc too. He gave us two classics of the seamy side genre, one, from The Man With The Golden Arm, the misbegotten Frankie Machine, the man with the golden needle arm, the man with the chip on his shoulder, the mid-century(20^th century, okay) man ill at ease in his world, ill at ease with the world and looking, looking for some relief, some kicks in that mid-century parlance, and, two, from Walk On The Wild Side, that hungry boy, that denizen of the great white trash night already mentioned, Dove Linkhorn, who, perhaps more than Frankie spoke to that mid-century angst, spoke to that world gone wrong, for those who had just come up, come up for some place where time stood still to gain succor in the urban swirl, to feast at the table, come up from the back forty lots, the prairie golden harvest wheat fields, the Ozarks, all swamps and ooze, mountain wind hills and hollows, the infested bayous and were ready to howl, howl at the moon to get attention.

Bart said he remembered reading somewhere, and I have forgotten where now, that someone had noted that Nelson Algren’s writing on Dove Linkhorn’s roots was the most evocative piece on the meaning of the okie–arkie out migration (but that is just a moniker to stick on those people they were legend all over the South and Southwest as the fields of gold went fallow) segment of that mid-century America ever written, the tale of the wandering boys, the railroad riders, the jungle camp jumpers, the skid row derelicts. Hell, call it by its right name, the white trash, that lumpen mush. And he or she was right, of course, after I went back and after Bart mentioned the idea re-read that first section of Walk On The Wild Side where the Linkhorn genealogy back unto the transport ships that brought the first crop of that ilk from thrown out Europe are explored. All the pig thieves, cattle-rustlers, poachers, highwaymen, the -what did some sociologist who looked at the in the Age of Jackson when they were coming over in swarms once the industrial wheels seriously kicked up in Great Britain, call them?, oh yeah, “the master-less men,” those who could not or would not be tamed by the on-rushing wheels of free-form capitalism as the system relentlessly picked up steam, the whole damn lot transported. And proper society said good riddance (and proper Eastern seaboard would later echo that sentiment).  

The population of California after World War II was filled to the brim with such types, the progeny, the feckless “hot rod” boys who took some wreck of car (sometimes literally) and made to “spec,” boys mostly too young to have been though the bloodbaths of Europe and Asia like their older brothers would be the vanguard of the “golden age of the 1950s” now spoken of with reverence, building some powerful road machines out of baling wire and not much else, speeding up and down those Pacific coast ocean-flecked highways can’t you just picture them now looking for the heart of Saturday night, looking for kicks just like those Chicago free-flow junkies, those twisted New Orleans whoremasters. Wandering hells angels riding two by two (four by four if they felt like it in Mill Valley or Pacifica and who was to stop them not the good citizens of the “golden age” and maybe not the cops, not when they were in a swarm anyway) creating havoc for the good citizens of those small towns they descended on, descended on unannounced (and unwelcomed by those same good citizens). In and out of jail, Q, Folsom, not for stealing pigs now, but armed robberies or some egregious gang bang felony, but kindred to those lost boys kicked out of Europe long ago. Corner boys, tee-shirted, black leather jacket against cold nights, hanging out with time on their hands and permanent smirks, permanent hurts, permanent hatreds, put paid to that Algren observation. All the kindred of the cutthroat world, or better “cut your throat” world, that Dove drifted into was just a microcosm of that small-voiced world.

Algren spoke of cities, even when his characters came fresh off the farm, abandoned for the bright lights of the city and useless to that short-weighting farmer who now is a prosperous sort, making serious dough as the breadbasket to the world. They, the off-hand hot rod king, the easy hell’s rider, the shiftless corner boy, had no existence, no outlets for their anger and angst, in small towns and hamlets for their vices, or their virtues, too small, too small for the kicks they were looking for. They needed the anonymous city rooming house, the cold-water flat, the skid- row flop house, the ten- cent beer hall, hell, the railroad jungle, any place where they could just let go with their addictions, their anxieties, and their hunger without having to explain, endlessly explain themselves, always, always a tough task for the small-voiced of this wicked old world. They identified with cities, with city 24/7/365 lights, with Algren’s blessed neon lights, city traffic (of all kinds), squalor, cops on the take, cops not on the take, plebeian entertainments, sweat, a little dried blood, marked veins, reefer madness, swilled drinks, white towers (the hamburger joint with cheap fast wares before Big Mac drowned out everybody else), all Pops’ Eats night diners (see it always comes back to that lonely, alienated Nighthawk Diner just ask Waits), the early editions (for race results, the number, who got dead that day, the stuff of that world), a true vision of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawk for a candid world.

He spoke of jazz and the blues, as if all the hell in this wicked old world could be held off for a minute while that sound sifted thought the night fog air reaching the rooming house, the flop, the ravine, the beer hall as it drifted out to the river and drowned. Music not upfront but as a backdrop to while the steamy summer nights away, and maybe the frigid lake front winter too. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, he spoke of a small-voiced white world, residents of white slums and pursuers of white- etched dreams and only stick character blacks but his beat, his writing rhythm made no sense without the heat of Trouble In Mind or that cool blast of Charlie Parker, Miles, Dizzie be-bopping, made absolutely no sense, and so it went.

 

He spoke of love too. Not big flamed love, big heroes taking big falls for some hopeless romance like in olden times but squeezed love, love squeezed out of a spoon, maybe, but love in all its raw places. A guy turning his woman into a whore to feed his endless habit love, and her into a junkie love. A woman taking her man through cold turkey love. A man letting his woman go love, ditto woman her man when the deal went wrong. When the next best thing came by. Not pretty love all wrapped in a bow, but love nevertheless. And sometimes in this perverse old world the love a man has for a woman when, failing cold turkey, he goes to get the fixer man and that fixer man get his woman well, almost saintly and sacramental. Brothers and sisters just read The Last Carousel if you want to know about love. Hard, hard love. Yah, Nelson Algren knew how to give voice, no holds barred, to the small-voiced people.