Ah, To Be Very Young-With Bob Dylan’s Farewell Angelina In Mind

 

By Zack James

 

Josh Breslin now that he is retired, well, not exactly retired since when do writers, you know guys who think that they have something to tell in three thousand words or more to a candid world, so let’s call it semi-retired had been more and more frequently thinking back to the days when he was young and free before the yoke of three failed marriages, a slew of kids along with a slew of bills weighted him down. (That “candid” in the first sentence Josh’s everlasting expression picked from the time he actually read the Declaration of Independence front to back in junior high school so you know right off what kind of guy we are dealing with.) Those memory thoughts some grim, some not were not just the meanderings of an old man regretting getting old but had been pushed upon him by a couple of things that had sparked his remembrances of late.

The first one, the good one, listening while working on his computer which had become of late his favorite way to listen to music to one of the never-ending bootleg series CDs of Bob Dylan where a version of his Farewell, Angelina came on. The second, the bad one, very bad for several days, an obituary in the New York Times which reported that the once well-known former 1970s and 1980s movie actress and commercial spoke-person Angelina Farrell had passed away at 70 after a long battle against cancer. That Angelina, his Angelina, Angelina Donnelly, when he knew her before she went into the movies and changed her name was that big affair from his youth that he was drifting back to in memory time. Sad days, very sad days.

 

Angelina, ah Angelina, how he had known her, known her intimately well before she because an actress and ad person. He had known her when he was seeking what a guy he met out in California called the search for the great blue-pink American West night, searching for a place in the sun but also a new way of doing things and so the news of her passing hit doubly hard since for a while, several months their relationship had a lot to do with whether that search was going to be successful or not. He, they were living proof that things had not worked out as they had planned.            

Of the face of it the meeting of Josh Breslin and Angelina Donnelly spoke both to the wild winds of the 1960s and to what a lot of people in what Josh had called in more than one article written in his small attempt to give voice to what had happened to what he called the “generation of ’68,” that ‘68 a very consequential year in the turmoil and upturns of the 1960s and so a useful term of art to designate the whole period. Josh had been restless in the spring of 1967 up in Olde Saco, Maine where he had grown up. He had just graduated from high school and was waiting for the fall to attend State U, the first in his working-class family to attend college so a source of some family pride. But he had been itchy all spring because he kept hearing about lots of stuff young people like him were doing in places like Cambridge, Greenwich Village, Ann Arbor, and above all California. Listening to new forms of music, or rather old folk forms brought up to date or discovered by avid archivists, trying every drug known to creation (collectively of course but some, including Josh, had on more than one occasion been “ripped” to the root from overindulgence if not quite overdose. Some of it just then was around the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam which was causing many to doubt what they learned from childhood about the virtues of the American way they all had been nurtured on. More of it though was about looking at things very differently than their parents’ vision of marriage, job, family and keeping your head down. That was what was bothering Josh just then. Something undefined but something gnawing at him which he could not quite shake. (Something that still gnawed at him when he summed up his life, his so-called legacy and the feeling that his old late friend, Pete Markin, had first articulated long ago on the hitchhike and yellow brick road bus caravans West, that the “wanting habits” of youth would   never be satisfied this side of the grave. Markin’s fate was grim testimony to that thought.)  

One day in early June of that year though he had run into a guy, Remmy Renoir, on Olde Saco Beach who had been out in California and had imbibed in the whole youth culture there, the “youth nation” he had called it as Josh vividly remembered the fresh wind up ocean swells rising day. Remmy had told Josh stories about how young people were trying to create an alternative universe out of all the craziness that was going on in regular uptight society. Some of it was the usual political stuff that had been going on for a long time, stuff that guys like Marcuse, Sartre, Whyte, Mills,  and a bunch of guys that he would read later and be surprised how they were able to articulate what he was feeling well before his own understandings (and even Markin’s who was way ahead of a lot of his own guys in that regard). Additionally there was music (more rock than gentle folk stuff which would later be given the name “acid” rock), drugs (that cornucopia which would have matched what was available in any drugstore in those times), lots of drugs, communal living in houses, parks and in vans and buses and a new spirit of cooperation among people to try to keep themselves together against the tidal wave that was washing against them.

Josh found himself talking to Remmy for hours and it was mainly as a result of that conversation that he decided to forgo the summer job that his father had gotten for him at the textile factory he worked in and head west to see what the whole show was all about. That decision was met, as anyone from that time, maybe now too, could suspect by condemnation by Josh’s parents especially his father on the job issue. His mother on the first in the extended family, both sides, to go to college in a family where a significant number of members dropped out of high school to go work in the mills, mills that were beginning  to shut down and head south for cheaper labor and which would ultimately go off-shore. But he was determined to go and so that was that (there was more to that “that” but for our story that is enough said since it is what happened on the road and afterwards that matters here) 

Josh didn’t have much money for the trip most of his earnings from various jobs in high school being saved for college expenses since his parents with five boys had little extra money for anything but household expenses so he decided to hitchhike out. Of course he did not tell his parents that he was hitchhiking because they would have really freaked out so he said to them he was taking a bus out. But that hitching idea was more that for saving money. Remmy had told him that day at Olde Saco beach that he had hitched several times to California and had some wild times along the way (and a few tough times too, especially remembering being stranded in places like Moline, Deadwood, Hard Rock all real places, too real, and waiting for hours for some lonesome cross-country truck hauler to stop, remembering too a few close calls being picked up and let off in strange places by homosexuals after being rebuffed by him).

That information, fairly current along with having read Jack Kerouac’s dated information, dated since his travels occurred in the late 1940s before the superhighways, the Interstate made the backroads unnecessary, in On The Road.  That book above all others, a book by a fellow Franco-American (on his mother side LeBlanc) from a mill town like his made a powerful impression on him (and most of the rest of the generation of ’68 as well from mill-towns or the leafy suburbs) at a time when he was particularly fidgety about what he wanted his life to look like (the only thing that he was sure of was that he didn’t want to replicate his parents’ experience, no way).

With Remmy and Jack at his back he took off one June summer day heading west. Or rather trying to head west. He had to laugh to think that if it was not for the accident of grabbing a ride from a seasoned long haul truck-driver Denver Slim (who even today when he recounts that time to friends or whoever will listen he always points out that that his first long haul ride had been by a guy who was neither from Denver nor was he slim, more like about five feet eight and two hundred and forty pounds although his look when Josh entered the cab of the big sixteen-wheeler gave a clear message that nobody better fuck with him) that he would never have met Angelina. Denver Slim, who had picked Josh up at a then classic hitchhiking stop on Cambridge side of the Charles River where there was a truck depot at the entrance to the Massachusetts Turnpike was heading with west with a load. A load of what he did not know what nor care as long as it was a load to California via Chicago (he had told Josh it was better not to know because most time the load was overweight and who knows it could have been illegal goods being carried so a career driver’s best defense was to plead ignorance and pay the fines).

Somewhere short of Buffalo though Denver Slim got all misty eyed for his girlfriend who lived in Steubenville on the Ohio River and he decided that he would veer off in that direction first before heading west. Josh not very sure of his geography then, or now for that matter, and when Denver Slim asked if wanted to head that way Josh said sure, he was in no hurry. (By the way something Josh also told his listeners when he rolled out the hitchhike stories in order to show the nature of the times but also to show that in their own ways those who were not in the least influenced by the new mores that the “hippies” were bringing into the land Denver Slim had a wife and family in Toledo whom he said he loved but he had to have that Pamela he kept Josh clued in about for the duration of the trip).      

So that was exactly the reason that Josh found himself walking into Jimmy Jake’s Diner, a famous truck stop close by the Ohio River after Denver Slim had let him off to go chase the satin sheets with his Pamela. That is where Angelina was serving them off the arm for the summer before heading back to her second year at Barley’s Business School in Muncie Indiana in the fall. Angelina had been so straight, so out of touch with what was happening in her generation she had naturally thought it was quite an adventure to head east for her summer kicks while everybody else was heading west if not to California then New Mexico or Arizona, places like that. They had been immediately attracted to each other, her boss, Jake the cook had yelled at her when she spent more time talking to Josh at the counter where he landed when he entered the front door and refilling his coffee cup than serving the regular clientele. Later that very first night they made the roof of the small cabin that Angelina was staying in up the road from the diner “shake” to the foundation (something he generally left out when telling his Angelina stories later out of a sense of propriety, or something.) A few days later Josh having spent some time “diving for pearls” as a dishwasher at Jimmy Jakes’ to make a few extra dollars and Angelina who worked double shifts to grab a stake headed out of the parking lot at Jimmy Jakes and began their short, tempestuous love affair.    

The affair proceeded famously for several weeks before thing started to go awry, started to show Josh that whatever else Angelina had going for her she was not built for the road. The showdown came in not so sweet dead-end Moline out in the Illinois plains, came when a several day rain and poor ride prospects among the farm folk who looked at the “new folk” with all the suspicion of their urban counterparts, forced them into a woe-begotten dead ass motel for a few days when their funds were low and it looked like California might have well have been the Japan seas.

They had barely resolved that crisis, Angelina a bit drawn from lack of on the road sleep and food that tended to disagree with her, but decided to keep going for a while longer although Angelina was complaining more each day about the weight of her backpack, the infrequent rides, her hungers and so on. Yeah, Josh prepared himself for an Angelina jail-break. (About the lack of rides out in the Midlands Josh had been somewhat wrong, or had been led by Remmy up the wrong path. See Remmy had told Josh that day at Olde Saco Beach that having a young woman, he had called her a girl in the indiscriminate talk of the times, alongside of you dramatically increased your chances of getting a ride by some normal people. Not fags, you know homosexuals in the parlance of the times among guys, even hippie guys, but ordinary Joes or truck-drivers who sensed less trouble that if some long-haired, long-bearded, who knows smelly hippie guy was standing there with his bedroll on one shoulder and knapsack on the other. Out in lots of farm country the gentile folk looked at any such pairings as Satan’s work and showed the proper distain as they either stared to perdition passing by or averted their eyes passing by, the operative words being passing by.)            

The big break-up came in Neola out in the Iowas at Aunt Betty’s Diner where Angelina had taken a job serving them off the arm after they had spent the previous couple of days sleeping just off the road outside of town in a cow pasture for crying out loud. Aunt Betty like all the Aunt Betty’s of the world took Angelina in tow a bit and told her that she should go home and finish school, give up the quest for the great blue-pink great American West night (neither Angelina nor Josh, who wound up working at Aunt Betty’s “diving for pearls” as a dishwasher ever mentioned that concept to anybody but some freaks whom they ran into in a recreational campsite outside of Louisville since they were carrying enough “baggage” trying to get to that great blue-pink American West night. In any case Aunt Betty’s encouragement was all Angelina needed to bail out. So after a few days of figuring out how they would meet in California since Angelina still had never seen the ocean, East or West, when she got her school winter break she headed back east to Indiana and he headed to Denver where he was to meet some guys they had met on the road earlier (that was the thin-layer way of the times, a few telephones numbers, a street address and welcome one and all).

As it turned out Angelina to Josh’s surprise did meet him out in LA during her winter break. They headed to the ocean campsite at Point Magoo about fifty miles up the coast. Both agreed they had a great time, especially Angelina’s frolicking in the new found ocean where she nearly went under in a riptide before gallant Josh “saved” her and having her first tokes of marihuana, but after a couple of weeks Josh knew she would head back home and he would be heading north to Alaska, maybe or at least Seattle, so that their time was done. Strangely Angelina would eventually settle in California a couple of years later after staying for a while at a director friend of Captain Crunch, the leader of the yellow brick road bus that Josh would wind up travelling  on for a few years and become something of a well-known screen actress and later commercial spokeswoman. Josh, who loved the West Coast, saw it as his homeland, would eventually after a few years head back East, and a nasty divorce, and settle in various East Coast towns but they never met again in person and Josh had lost track of her before he read of her passing in the Times. He shed a tear for his, their lost youth but also for the fact that if he could have bent a little, could have met her half-way as she had asked repeatedly, could have had the sense that God gave geese he could have saved himself much anguish in his life. All that day Dylan’s Farewell, Angelina kept bubbling through his brain. Sad day, very sad.