50 Years Gone The Father We Almost Knew One Jack Kerouac Out Of Merrimack River Nights-Searching For The Father We Never Knew-Scenes In Search Of The Blue-Pink Great American West Night- Down Sonora Way- The Ghost Of Bill Higgins

By Seth Garth, known as Charles River Blackie for no other reason than he slept along those banks, the Cambridge side and some raggedy ass wino who tried to cut him under the Anderson Bridge one night called him that and it stuck. Those wino-sapped bums, piss leaky tramps and poet-king hoboes all gone to some graven spot long ago from drink, drug, or their own hubris which they never understood gone and the moniker too.  

Frankie Riley was shocked, well maybe not shocked but stunned when he heard the news of Bill Higgins’ murder. Jesus, he had had just seen Bill in Los Angeles a couple of months before when Bill was passing through on his way south and he and Maria, his live-in mex girlfriend (immigration status fuzzy so Maria, okay), her of the sparkling laughing eyes and dark brown skin, had let Bill stay in their apartment for a couple of weeks while he worked on some plan that he had hatched, some vague plan connected with making a pile down in Mexico, down  Sonora way that would put he and Clara on easy street.

Bill Higgins and Frankie Riley had known each other from the hunger days in the old 1960s Olde Saco (Maine, okay) neighborhood, the old just barely working- class neighborhood where the chronically unemployed, under-employed and just plain ne’er-do-wells, mainly Irish and hence locally known as Irishtown (although more generically to outsiders, combined with the French-Canadian streets, as the Acre), mainly third or fourth generation Irish and thus firmly planted by the prior toil of forbears lived, where they had met, beyond Olde Saco Junior High corridor nod (the junior high, and come to think of it, high school nod too, a subject worthy of its own sketch but not here, not now when dope, guns, and girls, ah,  women, are central to what is what) met, while hugging the walls (literally according to both sources at the time) at the old Sacred Heart (Roman Catholic) Church at the weekly (except Lent, of course, and other odd-ball feast days like the Feast of the Immaculate Conception which even as ignorant, sex ignorant,  flat- out sex ignorant, as these boyos were drew a guffaw) “sock hop” held by the senior parish priest, Monsignor Lally.

Held to, well, “keep an eye, maybe more than one, on the younger portion of his flock,” as the good father expressed it each Sunday when making the announcement for the next hop in the line-up. The real reason, of course, whispered among the young, including wall-huggers Higgins and Riley, was to keep said young angel sheep, away from too much heathen devil’s music (read: ersatz Protestant music probably a Baptist or Unitarian conspiracy, the good priest spouted both theories); that rock and roll music that was just then epitomized by that hip-swaying, butt-flaying, making the girls “wet” (wet in the wrong places) praying false god praying Elvis Presley. And by all means to keep them, that unprotected angel flock to a person, but especially those with access to automobiles, from dark seawalls down at Olde Saco Beach listening to fogged-up car radios in the back seat and digging the beat while, well, just while and leave it at that. Or for those without golden automobile access or who were too young, to keep away from the Strand Theater, the exclusive upstairs balcony section of course, for the young set, the car-less healthy young interested in lightless dark night s-x (you know just in case the old bastard is still around).

Frankie still remembered the first song that they had heard upon meeting at that fateful junior high school time sock hop, Danny and the Juniors’ At The Hop. And the reason he remembered that song so vividly was one sparking blue-eyed, flaming red-haired Clara Murphy, just mentioned Clara, a girl who had given both of them her come hither twelve-year old look that night (and previously at school too) and they had been hooked, hooked as bad as men (okay, boys) could be hooked by a woman (okay, girl). So it was not surprising that they both had rushed over to ask her to dance when that number was being played at that fateful dance. And Clara in her Solomonic wisdom turned them both down. Or maybe not so Solomonic. Clara Murphy couldn’t, just that moment, decide whether she liked Bill or Frankie better, or whether she liked either of them, according to Frankie’s intelligence source, his younger sister Amy who was friends with Clara’s sister Bonnie and so gave in to her budding feminine wiles and had turned them both down.

Naturally that denial after those come hither looks inflamed the boyos. So for the next several weeks Bill and Frankie made every mad school boy mad attempt to win her favors. Both had recklessly, although determinedly, courted legal danger by “clipping” (five finger discount, oh, you know, petty larceny) onyx rings (Frankie’s had a diamond in the center) for her at Sam’s Jewelry Store in downtown Olde Saco (again intelligence, reliable intelligence, Clara sister Bonnie via Amy, had informed them separately that she liked those kinds of rings). She accepted both as tokens of friendship she called it. Ditto 45 RPM Elvis and Jerry Lee records from Chuck’s Record Shop over on Main Street (an easy “clip” for these adventurers, just place the record under your undershirt and walk out, or better slide into your underpants, no salesperson, no girl salesperson on duty at the time was going there, no way). Accepted, dispassionately accepted. Not ditto though, not ditto “clipped” flowers and candy (especially when Clara heard how the previous goods were “purchased” although she did not go so far as to give them back). They had each worked, really dragged their butts carrying doubles, as caddies as the local golf course to gather the dough necessary for those expenses. And on it went like that for several weeks.

To no avail for Frankie though because, also exhibiting another aspect of her budding wiles, Clara took up with Bill (and had really, according to other reliable intelligence sources, her eye on him all along. Girls, ah, women, go figure).   Reason: stated Clara reason. Bill had a head on his shoulders and, quote, was not so hung up on silly rock and roll that was just a passing thing like Frankie, unquote.

Frankie laughed at the recollection, a bittersweet recollection, since later Clara married Bill right out of high school, right out of the Class of 1964, maybe not the wisest thing to do for either of them in a lifetime sense but with war cries, real war cries on every horizon, out in the killing fields of Asia (and who knows where else in that red scare cold war good night) it had a certain logic, a way to keep Bill out of harm’s way with any luck. Although at the time it had much more to do with Bill being crazy for Clara, head on his shoulders or not, and since he had no plans to go to college he figured it was just as well to start family life early. Yes, he was that kind of guy then, and was not alone in that sentiment, not by any means. Clara, for her part, had schemed and plotted to get out of her shanty Irish-drunk father-cold mother house from about age fourteen. Whatever she thought about Bill, and Frankie was a little hesitant to take her undying love sentiments at face value (and miffed about his own Clara plight for a long time, every time he caddied up at that damn golf course), she had always had Clara and lace curtain Irish front and center even then.       

Frankie remembered just then too that he had been part of their wedding party, that June wedding over at the Starlight Ballroom, where the trio had spent many a Saturday night listening as the music changed from silly Danny and the Juniors to serious Beatles and Stones stuff. The wedding the last big event of his youth before he kicked the dust of Olde Saco off his shoes and headed out on the hitchhike highway and his own dreams. Headed out for what became for many years the wandering road turned into the hobo road, and then back, back a little, but this is Bill and Clara’s story, or Bill’s anyway, so let bygones be bygones. But too he remembered that wedding party night when Clara, out of the blue, while they were dancing the obligatory friend dance, dancing very close, very close her leaning into him, whispered in his ear that just in case Bill didn’t work out she still had some hot flash thoughts of him. That helped, if he needed any help, getting him out of that one-horse town just as fast as he could. Not for Bill’s sake, or Clara’s, but just because he might have taken her up on the offer.        

Here is the funny part though, Bill and Clara, just like Frankie at the beginning of the wave got caught up with their generation’s  new breeze coming through the land, the music, the drugs, the experimenting with everything under the sun, and maybe more, and had after a couple of years of married life drifted west to the coast, formed and unformed a couple of rock and roll bands in the strobe light dreams 1960s with Clara as a Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick –like lead singer and Bill on lead guitar. Yes, playing that no account rock and roll. Frankie, on the coast at the time too, trying to avoid the draft (Bill had turned out to be 4-F, unfit for military duty, due to nearsightedness), had run into to them several times, had stayed at their pad on Fillmore for months at a time, when they had operated out of Frisco town,  had helped console (among others) Clara when Bill ran off for a while with some surfer girl from La Jolla looking for groupie acid rock kicks and she was at wits end. Yes, he had slept with Clara as part of that consolation but by then Frankie’s road addiction had turned him away from any thoughts of Clara lace curtain Irish dreams. As far as he knew Clara never told Bill about the affair, or if she had he never let it interfere with his relationship with Frankie. When Bill got back from his fling with that surfer girl he and Frankie became closer than at any time since that long ago sock hop night. Then in the late 1960s, he back on the road, out in New Mexico back, they had lost touch. And then in 1973 Bill had been killed, face-down killed, down in some dusty back alley, Sonora, back alley, when that plan, that major drug deal went south on him.

According to the reports, the police reports when he went to check, Mexican police reports, so maybe a little off on the details, but on point on the face-down dead part, Bill and Clara had “muled” many times for one of the budding drug cartels. (Frankie had known this, hell, had taken delivery of some goods himself, and had, once, accompanied Bill and Clara, down there, down there the time he had met Maria, met her down in that Mexicali whorehouse and brought her norte but that was another story).  Bill, while he was working on his plan in L. A., the details of which were unknown to Frankie, had decided to go “independent” trying to take-off with one of his cartel deliveries to be used as seed money for his own operation to Panama (the ideas being to try to get to the Canal Zone and some Estados Unidos protection if things went awry, he obviously never made it) and wound up in a back alley with six slugs in the back for his efforts. End of story, just another number in the broken dreams world, the fast stuff of dreams world.   

End of blasé Mexican police report story, as usual, but not quite the end of Bill’s story, some of which Frankie knew a little about other stuff he got when he went full bore to find out what happened (including a low-profile trip, hair cut short, beard shaved, only a mustache left, wearing a light-weight suit down and around, to Sonora, alone). After the 1960s died (when, the date, a million people have written about, with about two millions dates and about three million reasons for their particular date, Frankie had May Day, 1971 as his date when they, he included, tried to shut down D. C. over the Vietnam war and got nothing but eight million busts and a ton of bad hubris for their efforts) Bill and Clara, having ridden the crest, were broke, not just broke but in hock broke to about twenty different guys for various musical, life-style and drug stuff, including a busted flat-out  last ill-fated concert in 1972. When the times were good Bill and Clara “walked with the king” but the music scene was changing and so acid rock, the thing that made them a thing, could not sustain a bunch of Airplane-look-a-likes. Familiar story ever since music started. That was when they started “muling.” (Frankie knew the details of the connections but was keeping mum about that).       

What Frankie didn’t know, although if he had thought about it for ten seconds he should have known, was that Clara, Clara with her lace curtain turned chandelier Irish dreams, was the driving force behind their new careers, and kept prodding Bill on that plan to step up to the “bigs” and build his own operation. Jesus, girls, ah, women, go figure. See here is what is finally strange though. Clara who had accompanied Bill on that fateful trip (and had been holding that delivery, ten kilos of coke just then becoming the drug of choice for the hipsters, and never cartel recovered as far as he knew) was never heard from again. Just that moment, that reflected moment, Frankie raised his finger to his head and nodded that old schoolboy nod to Bill’ s memory and raised his drink to Clara Murphy, Clara of the sparkling eyes and flaming red hair, and of his youth.

…Frankie, few years later, maybe 1976, received a report that someone, second-hand, had heard that Clara was running a whorehouse stocked with anglo girls serving the booming drug cartels down in Tampico but he just let it pass, just let the schoolboy nod and the drink stand.