***The Survival Of The Fittest-The Retreat Of The Intellectuals-Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis’ The Petrified Forest  

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

The Petrified Forest, starring Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Leslie Howard, MGM, 1936

Whether the film under review, The Petrified Forest, used that famous natural site in Arizona intentionally as a symbol for the malaise of the 1930s or not, especially the retreat of the intellectuals, viewing the film almost 80 years later brought that thought directly to mind as I followed the dialogue and the plotline. The 1930s overall was not a good decade for humankind with the defeats of many progressive organizations under the onslaught of the international reaction in the heart of the world-wide Depression. The rise of the Nazis in Germany and their adherents elsewhere and the defeat in Spain spelled out the problem for all who wished to see. The 1930s was also a decade when, partially in response to those defeats and partially as a desire to withdraw from the public square, from the hectic post-World War I modern world with it grinding mechanization and dehumanization, as vividly described in poetry, novels, painting and the like, saw the retreat of the intellectuals as well. That trend is fittingly portrayed here by Leslie Howard as Alan the wandering British ex-pat writer who in the past had shown some little talent which had not grown with time who had lost his intellectual moorings, had become if not cynical then fatalistic about his place in the world as he found himself out in the Arizona desert heading west.

Here is how it plays out as we get an opening shot of Alan, the wayward intellectual, against the vastness, the emptiness, and the beauty of the desert landscape particularly in the area of the Petrified Forest, a place where Mother Nature has turned something living into its opposite, wood into stone, as if to mock a modern world defying her powers. That struggle, that seemingly endless struggle against the furies of Mother Nature and what she spits up can stand as background, as a cautionary tale to modern humankind, to the action of the film.

Even out in the wilderness humankind, modern humankind, travelling by automobile (or by thumb, a second cousin to that automobile idea), needs services and a place to stop for a minute anyway, a place to brush of the dust of the trail west. So our man Alan finds himself at the last café and gas station that side of the desert. And finds himself in need of something to eat and although he is penniless he stops to cadge a meal. While there in that seen better days roadside diner he begins to meet the characters who will fill out the story. A football jock turned gas jockey in the hard pressed 1930s when even the college educated found work hard to come by whose main aim in love seems to be to woo the café waitress who we will meet in a moment, an old time prospector/pioneer, who followed X number of generations into America west, west to the next, well, the next possibility. That next possibility for Pappy was not to finally reach the coast, the Pacific coast and land’s end but right there in the hard scrabble desert, the place where survival depends on keeping your wits about you. Survived and was holding onto a small fortune that he was saving for his granddaughter when he died, and not before when it might do her some good. Well, Pappy made it, survived to tell some tales, mainly tall tales.

But above all Alan meets Gabby (played by Bette Davis). Gabby is Pappy’s granddaughter (or rather Gabrielle since she was born in France and had come west when her father returned from France after World War I with his bride, who however could not stay and went back to France pronto). Gabby of the youthful dreams, a pretty standard youthful dream but a dream nevertheless, of getting the hell out of where she is and going to Paris once Pappy passes on. Paris so she can find herself, Paris so she can reunite with her mother, Paris so she can write or paint or do something besides serving them off the arm in that dusty old café, Paris to get the grime and grit out of her month. She tells her dreams to Alan while he wolfs down a bowl of soup, speaks of what she wants in the world. Alan, world-wary, world-weary gathers together a momentary spark of interest and they do a little serious flirting. What else could it be out there in the wilderness. Flirting aided by Gabby’s interest in French poetry, her interest in the 15^th century French poet, Francois Villon, another man who sensed that he was caught in a foreign land although he was a native, sensed that he did not belong in proper society (and who acted out on that sense as a desperado as well as poet as Alan knew quite well).

So Alan and Gabby have their moment and while Gabby wanted him to stay (and become a gas jockey, she a child of the American western night and practical as desert people must be as well of her mother’s flights of fancy Paris) he was bound to drift to find, well, like all of us with that searching hunger, to find something. And so he left, left to keep heading west in the company of a Mayfair swell, his wife and chauffer who offer him a ride after Gabby’s pleading when they stopped for gas.      

Then the story gets interesting, gets to feel like the “real” Old West. See the notorious Duke Mantee (played by a young Humphrey Bogart in his break-through role on film) and his gang of “take no prisoners” outlaws who have been shooting up the West had been rumored to be in the vicinity and not to disappoint a candid world Duke and the boys run into that Mayfair swell, his wife, chauffer, and Alan and commandeer their vehicle. Alan, seeing this as some kind of sign that he has found his life’s work, has found the spot in the universe where he belongs heads back to the gas station, and his fate.

Of course to set up the clash of civilizations, Alan’s effete world gone to seed once the world became too industrialized, too impersonal, too heedless of Mother Nature and Duke, the elemental human force who will take what he wants when he wants it and not give it a second thought, and will give no quarter and ask for none, they have to meet up at the café, have to do their dance of death in the dusty outback. Duke is holed up there waiting for his girl and the rest of the gang who had split up after the last caper. Alan and Gabby resume their little flirtation, although Alan sees that the best way to “court” Gabby is to see that she has the wherewithal to get to Paris and her dreams. So he makes a deal with the devil, with Duke, after signing over his life-insurance policy with Gabby as the beneficiary. When Duke and the boys lam it out of the cafe Duke is to plug Alan. And Alan is serious. After the local posse gets wind that Duke is holed up in the café and there is a shoot-out Duke does exactly that to Alan. Leaving him in the arms of Gabby, Gabby reciting our brother outlaw Villon about how such deeds as Alan has done lead to new beginning for somebody.   Of course the grabbing, grasping, cutthroat Duke also gets taken down by that posse. But Alan death is the one that counts here, Alan’s “useless” intellectual in retreat.                                    

***Channeling John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Recently my old friend from high school days Josh Breslin (full name Joshua Lawrence Breslin but nobody ever called him anything but Josh except his mother, what do you expect, and some old time WASP girlfriend who tried like hell to make him, him of “the projects” born, more presentable to her leafy suburbs parents), told me about a trip that he and his longtime companion Laura took to ocean spray Big Sur out in California. He had not been on there in that part of California for many years (and neither have I although I have been to California many times since then but with not enough time to get there and chill out for a few days) but he had earlier in the year been under the spell of old “beat” king of the west coast ocean night, Jack Kerouac, after re-reading his Big Sur, a book about his unsuccessful attempts to dry out in Big Sur after the notoriety of his classic On The Road literally drove him to drink (or drink more is a better way to put it). That spell got an added boost by viewing a film based on Kerouac’s work, Big Sur, after reading the book. While the film was not nearly as evocative as the book it did provide vivid shots of Jack and company on one of the Big Sur beaches and that enflamed Josh. And so they went, went to retrace the meaning that Big Sur had had in his youth in the long gone days when he had his wanting habits on.    

See, like I said, Josh and I go back to North Adamsville High days here in Massachusetts, but more importantly later on the American West hitchhike highway where in the summer of love 1960s we were searching for, well, searching for something that we did not find then at least. But the time he told me of his journey when we met over at Jimmy’s Grille in Boston we both agreed that the search was the important thing and we had no regrets about trekking out to the coast many times looking for Eden, “looking for the garden” as we used to call it. We also agreed that we both were still looking, still had those ancient wanting habits on, and that we probably would until the end. Josh noted that strangely as he told of his time out there that while he was thrilled to “channel” the ghost of Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allan Ginsberg and the rest of the “beat” gang who held forth on that sacred Big Sur beach in the time before we even had any real idea that we too wanted to be rebels against out part of society he was almost more taken by Cannery Row in Monterey, the ancient site of John Steinbeck’s classic Cannery Row although only small fragments of that area exist unsullied by a tourist hungry theme park. He and Laura had stayed in Monterey so he was able to get a better grasp of that ancient ground that he had not investigated much before. He had been there last before the theme park exploded when that ocean front was run down with closed canning factories and derelict housing.         

******

Josh Breslin was no question the illegitimate son of the kindred that John Steinbeck wrote about in his book Cannery Row and maybe if you dug down deep enough, grabbed some genealogy chart, went back enough generations, kindred of those Okie/Arkies he wrote about in The Grapes Of Wrath that migrated west in the dustbowl 1930s and landed in sunny Southern California and whose progeny would go on to fill up the surfer boy, hot rod Lincoln, biker angels, casting couch starlet blanks in the blue-pink western sky night. But maybe we should not press the relationship too stronger since his people on his mother’s side were hearty French-Canadians from up in upper Saint Lawrence River Quebec and his father from hillbilly mountain, coal mountain Kentucky and those brethren thrown out of Europe for every possible reason stayed put in the hills and hollows and did not have the energy to move west. Josh, ocean grown himself, felt the kinship that one feels for those who society threw on the scape heap with the decline of the fishing industry out there and the decline of shipbuilding in his old hometown of North Adamsville which left his father, and his family, on the same scape heap in the “golden age of America” 1950s.         

Illegitimate by the way not by some fallen birth, although I insist that he was born under some ill-meant star, but because these days Josh no longer, like in the old days travels west, travels to California using just his thumb, maybe if he had a little dough taking the bus some of the way, and one time going east to west hopping on the old freight trains, a nasty way to travel and he told me once that after that experience he would no longer berate tramps, bums, and hoboes for enduring such a method of getting west. But enough of “old days” transportation for Josh now flies to California when he feels that periodic urge to head west. Flies and has always marveled (and was thankful that he now had the wherewithal) that he could start out on the East Coast Atlantic Ocean, usually Boston, and be on the West Coast Pacific Ocean a few hours later a trip that used to take anywhere from about five days (if he grabbed a fast run to the coast trucker looking for company, even hippie boy company) to a couple of weeks if he got unlucky and was left in some place like Winnemucca in Nevada where he had to sleep on the side of the road when it got too dark while waiting for a ride after being left there by a Native American trucker who lived up in the mountains near there.   

This last trip west had been spurred by a recent re-reading of Jack Kerouac’s trying to dry out from a drunk book Big Sur so Josh had that destination on his mind when the urge hit him again. Of course along with the “don’t thumb anymore” days he no longer sleeps on the side of the road in some urine smelling, sweat-smelling paper strewn bus station, or in some make-do lean-to tent but now seeks refuge in hotels and motels which he also does not mind doing. The problem was that he could find no place listed in Big Sur for he and his lady friend, Laura, to stay so they had to stay in Monterey which led to that earlier illegitimate son reference because the last time he had been in that town he had slept on the beach, slept on the beach to the sound of the sea lions barking or whatever they call the sound sea lions make. Slept near the wharf where iterant fisherman brought their goods to market from the troublesome seas (and explained why the lazy seals like lazy humankind hovered near that landing area not having to work too hard for a hand-out meal). Slept the ragged sleep of the tramps, bums, and hoboes, feeding off their ragged stews, and drinking their rotgut Ripple. And feeling at home even though out in the “jungle,” especially for the young iterant, you were as likely to face a knife from some half-crazed rummy as a friendly “hello brother” road man.   

But means of travel and methods of accommodation, hell, the eating habits of sea lions, were not what was bothering Josh but rather that almost never-ending sense he always had that he shared plenty with the ghost of those old time denizens of the cannery rows of the world, the skid rows. So all thoughts of flights, of rental car drives, and hotels drifted from his horizon as he got off of Exit 402B on the Pacific Coast Highway and headed to downtown Monterey. He needed to stop at the CVS on Lighthouse Road in what passes for Main Street in the town for a few provisions and while there he noticed that the street had not changed that much since the last time he had seen it maybe twenty years before. Downtown Monterey is really just an adjunct to the Cannery Row dress-up theme park which attracts the tourists and still has that hard-scramble feel of having missed something. Josh knew he was home, was among kindred he though when a relic from the 1960s, a guy, who knows a rummy or a dope-head it was hard to tell, with a ZZ Top beard (long in other words), a tie-dye tee shirt and a Hawaiian hat came up to his as he was leaving the CVS and asked him for a cigarette. Since Josh no longer smoked he had to say no but gave the guy a buck toward his efforts.

As the relic passed on Josh thought in a flash about all the corner boys from his youth (behind the elementary school, Doc’s Drugstore in junior high, Salducci’s Pizza Parlor in high school where we hung together having met in class and he introduced me to Frankie Riley the king of the corner boy night) a goodly number of them who slipped through the cracks and wound up on some skid row somewhere, or like his best friend Peter Markin from elementary school face down in some dusty Mexican town, Sonora, with two bullets in his heart after a drug deal went awry). Thought about the “brothers under the bridge,” guys who did not make it back to the “real world” from Vietnam days who set up an alternative world in the arroyos, along the riverbanks, along the railroad trestles of Southern California, and guys, tramps, bums, and hoboes whom he wandered with when he had his own addictions to fight, his own lost “real world.” That got him thinking that he should take a walk along the street, see whether any more ghosts showed up. He would not go to the Cannery Row façade since after reading brochures and seeing how everything pointed to that destination that was strictly for touristas but walk Lighthouse after leaving Laura at the motel to freshen up.           

And he was not mistaken. In a few blocks, maybe ten, he passed the usual Goodwill, Salvation Army (the Sallies had saved his skin more than one time with a hot meal, some clothes, a bunk bed for a few days at a time all for the price of having to listen to their version of the “good book” a small price to pay then for what ailed him, what addiction he was trying to go “cold turkey” on and he had always afterward put a few bucks in their buckets at Christmas time), and assorted used clothing stores (back in the day in places like Harvard Square, Telegraph in Berkeley, Soho in New York City, such stores along with the ubiquitous Army and Navy outlets were prized places to “re-invent” yourself as a dreamlike fantasy soldier, a swarthy pirate,  a Victorian gentleman or lady, a prairie pioneer complete with gingham dress  or buckskin jacket, some 1930s movie actress but now such places are for those a step below Wal-mart in the bustling world), run down cafes (dark lights to hide the dirt, rough food, poor service  unlike even the most poorly run Hayes-Bickford where the food was rough, aged before your, eyes and the coffee unspeakable but the company was worth the price of admission), the barely surviving pizza parlors (one on every corner it seemed run by the someone in the latest wave of immigrants hungry to make it in America and willing to work long hours but coming up short on the art of pizza-making unlike back in North Adamsville corner boy night when Tonio twirled the dough and made your senses come alive with the smell of freshly baked doughs), the ubiquitous tattoo parlors (despite the current craze for identity tattoos some of them quite elaborate and comment-worthy for everybody from high-end  celebrities to low-end hoodlum bikers these places still looked like you had better check with your doctor after leaving), the used book and record stores all looking like they were ready to close their doors forever with the next ill economic wind that came through the town (those old used books with their musty smells and broken bindings hiding many treasures which may not survive the digital age  and the records scratched and wobbly but again holding many treasures). Even what passed for one of the “upscale” places, a 1950s and 1960s retro-hamburger place where he stopped for a light lunch was barely making it although the food, the service, the posters of the usual suspects James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Elvis and the like, and the be-bop music spinning some stuff from early Motown to doo wop to Beatles from that period told him that in another locale like Harvard Square or maybe in Frisco they would be standing in line out around the block to get in. Such is the fate of cannery row towns when the main industry goes south and all that is left is the relics, buildings and people.        

A Cannery row flashback as Josh turned around after a few blocks to head back to the motel to do his own freshening up as the ghosts of the past passed by in his head; tramps, bums, and hoboes met on Monterey pebbled beaches (and remembrances of some old time hobo, Lightning Shorty, telling him and all who would listen the differences between those three categories of wayfarers, taking the gaff from a couple of guys whom he called bums who stood just below his royal hobo status and a guy who was later was found on the beach newspapers for a pillow dead as a doornail, heart attack at forty-three when he looked about eighty to youthful eyes), sweet sand interrupted by belches and sea lion barks (we agreed “or whatever they call that sound” and that the buggers were lazy just waiting on the rocks for the trawlers to come in and throw their refuge into the sea), smoke fire at night to ward off the chill burning down to embers as dawn came up, maybe make an olio mishmash from the meat and vegetable leavings found behind  some grocery store (no food pantries or heroic soup line kitchens then by kindly church people, not that he remembered anyway), drinking Ripple wine (or worse –“what’s the word, Thunderbird, what’s the price, forty twice”), smoking old Bull Durham rolled [really nasty smoke and what the hell Josh had never learned how to roll right, always left too much paper unrolled or did not twist the ends right, same with mary jane rolls despite his many experiences]. Where had that brethren gone, gone with the tide maybe, gone after catching some westbound freight (going to be with Father Death for those who are clueless about what that expression means), or some Southern Pacific trestle for a new home. Adios, pals.

Next night, a Friday night, a trip, a Laura-urged trip, to Cannery Row proper and bang, bang, kindred, maybe the long lost progeny of those long gone brethren. Most of the wayfarers had kids strewn across the land mainly still in California from what they said although how they would know is anybody’s guess. When the brethren high-tailed it they were moving fast, moving away from anchored life, from bills and mortgages, from the damn nagging wife and whining children. Some men are not built for such things, not built for much but that wandering gene deeply embedded in their DNA, a gene that could have been easily passed on to that night’s refugees. All the father-less children looking for their moment in the sun, for somebody to look their way and show the world that they had made it without the wandering old men.

Josh generation kindred seeking momentary immortality cruising Cannery Row in hopped-up (and loud hopped up to boot) canary yellow Camaros, two-toned ’57 Chevys, chrome-infested Harleys, sporty Triumphs, sportier MGs, sleek Plymouths when such cars were sleek also two-toned, Mustangs invoking memories of other Sallys, Sallys to ride in the freshen air beach summer nights, Jags that looked like Jags and not like one of twelve other cars, hell, the works showing off their sense of the past, their mechanical abilities, their desire, and their showmanship.

Funny Josh mentioned to Laura California back a generation before ours, ours the generation of ‘ 68 for those asking, the generation that came of age after the blight of the Great Depression and surviving a slogging war looking for kicks, looking for something other than “from hunger” took to the great blue-pink American West night and in little back lot garages or in some permissive father’s garage put together the “hot rod” to seek kingdoms in the drive-in movies, drive-in restaurant, drive-in everything if you had that “boss” car that would get you noticed. Here the now long-toothed progeny, those who could not shake their youthful fantasies and why not, were hovering the air of the night remembering back to those ancient times when such horsepower meant you were king (or now queen too) of the road, the great edge city highway looking for the heart of Saturday night. Old Tom Wolfe, the guy who explored the western wild boy hot-rod valley boy scene (and the surfer scene Pacific coast scene too), would have surely gotten a  chuckle out seeing blonde- wigged grandmothers, grizzly-bearded old pappies, handkerchief-hatted  bikers, riding in tandem reviving ancient thoughts (and gathering many flash photos from convenient tourista cellphone cameras). Josh knew he did.      

But enough on to Big Sur, on to Jack’s sea, Jack’s great big walloping zen-om-splish-splash wash, splash again great big white crested sand blasting away rock from eternity, Jack’s love sea  (although Jack could have been a proper Cannery Row denizen as well, an East Coast mill town boy who would have no trouble with cannery kin). Each wave tearing into the hard granite like- stone (stone etched in old eastern towns, towns like Josh grow up North Adamsville, not far from Jack’s river of life, Merrimac river of life and maybe haunted in the back of his mind that those torrents washing over his mill town river land and those torrents washing the craggy stone clean were kindred and speak, speak mighty torrent), endlessly searching for that soft spot, that place where the stone like some ancient New England grist mill mashes the rock to the shore, makes the rock humble before the great waves. And too before those rocks crumble, turn to sand in ten thousand, hell, a million washings, turned to pebbles, turned to human size rocks, rocks, piles of rocks, piles of rocks spaced apart almost like some human cemetery, piled so that some cranky anthropologist in ten thousand years will remark, remark to a candid world, if candor still holds some virtue, that weren’t those “primitives” crazy to worship the sea gods, that like old Pharaoh they craved that kind of immortality. And the wind provided the protection so that some future vandals would not scourge the grains of sand when they desired to pay homage to their own sense of immortality. Who needs to say more.     

And then back to Cannery Row. Sitting where some old sardine factory stood unused and unloved after many years of service (including a copper-plated turned green searing memorial to deep-sea divers lost in the struggle against the sea, the struggle to bring the strange sardines in for canning), broken and torn down after years of bringing the fish in Josh looked up and saw a sculpture, a sculpture centered on the novelist John Steinbeck. Steinbeck who in his time made infamous Cannery Row famous (although the numbers who would be able to identify his name with the place or the great everyman and everywoman Joad Okie California migration classic that he wrote, The Grapes of Wrath, is probably a couple of generations later fairly slim except for English majors and an off-hand skid row aficionado like Josh who spent time there before he got some of his addictions under control and abandoned the places where skid row and its inhabitants survived) and his friend, a marine biologist, immortalized in Cannery Row, a handful of skid row bums made so after the sardine industry went south, and they, unskilled in their time for other gainful employment went on the bum, made themselves local characters by the time Josh met them along the beachfronts and along the flop house and charity soup line circuit. He told me he would tell me about that later, some other time.

What Josh did tell me about that night was about “Madame” Flora (and she was no British noble figure so you know what kind of Madame she was) who ran the best, the fairest, and the easiest to enter if you had the money whorehouse on that section of the coast back in the day. Right across from the Monterey Police Station so you knew Madame was a sport and “connected.”  As Josh remembered Madame and her sweet place he had to also remember Thea, or at least that is what she called herself when he knew her, Madame’s best girl.

Thea had been caught up in the whole West Coast hippie thing (she had been in Frisco when the summer of love exploded in 1967 a couple of years before we got there), had later developed a serious cocaine habit (after going through the alphabet of lesser drugs, legal and illegal mostly illegal) and had taken to “muling” like a lot of snow freaks to feed the habit, got burned when her man decided that he was smarter that the damn Mexican braceros he was working for as a distributor and found himself face down in a back alley of Tia Juana with his face blown off when he thought ripping off a brick was an easy road to independence, and she needed to make her own way. (Josh cringed when he related that part of the story since he knew I knew about Peter Markin and what had happened to him down in Sonora.) Her own way then being given a room at Madame’s who saw in Thea’s airy funny ways and still good looks a cash cow (good looks especially in dark rooms with guys with serious dough and serious and unusual wanting habits which Thea had the book on, the Kama Sutra book). Josh said that in those days, the days of his struggling with his addictions, well after the days when we were carefree in California and thought the new world we were exploring would last forever rather than the ebb where we caught the tide going as we headed west Thea reminded him of Butterfly Swirl. That name, the moniker of a hippie princess from Carlsbad down in Southern California, who we met (and fought over) in Frisco brought instant recognition. She after spending some time with Josh eventually went with me and we lived in Oakland for a while before she headed back south to her surfer boyfriend when it turned out that the hippie princess life was not for her. Butterfly Swirl was this vision out of some Botticelli painting all ethereal, all wispy and virginal although she knew how to make a man’s toes curl. No question Josh would be drawn to such a woman even if she was a faded version of some youthful lust.      

Thea proved to be resourceful at what she did, and so she had worked her way up to Madame’s best girl when Josh ran into her in Carmel a short time after his own struggle with a snow addiction had finally been conquered where she had stopped in order to buy some jewelry and he had spotted her on the street looking lost (directions lost) and they struck up a conversation winding up sitting in a café drinking coffee and wine for a while. Once she told Josh her profession, which she was up front and not bashful about describing, after they had talked for a while he told her as they parted that he might come to see her at Madame’s sometime. She smiled.  And he did. And Thea, a child of the 1960s and of some sense of sexual adventure, some sense that there was more than the missionary position to the sex act took him around the world. He would run into her every once in a while and they would go out for a few drinks. But Josh always paid the freight when he saw her at Madame’s for his occasional trips around the world. Josh, a bit melancholy when describing her talents, said she was something, not a hooker with a heart of gold but a smart intelligent women who took what she could do best and rode with it. Then one night Josh went to Madame’s and she was gone, had left with some guy in a three-piece suit who Madame said had promised Thea the world.  Adios Thea, adios pal.                          

When The World, Our World, Was Young- The Night of The Howl

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

Several years ago when the literary world, and not just the literary world, was commemorating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road  there were a plethora of books and articles about the meaning of it all, about the place of the book, and of the author, in the American literary pantheon. Any number of writers, who knew, or maybe had been influenced by Kerouac chimed in about subjects related to the book from the origins of each individual episode in that “beat” travelogue to the various literary tropes that Jack used in his writing (you know “the holy fool,” the goof, the zen master wisdom king, Catholic notions of salvation, urban rootlessness, perennial wanderlust, and so on). Others took a different tact and spoke to the meaning of the book for their psychological well-being by having emulated the trappings of what Sal/Jack, Dean/Neal, Irwin/Allen, Bull/William did, or did not, do for them on their individual searches for the blue-pink great American West night. Took time to express what being on the open road the first time, smoking their first dope smoke, having their first bouts with loose sex meant. Maybe telling about the travails of the road too, the dusty back road bus stations, sleeping out along the side of some wayward Iowa cornfield waiting for dawn to start again on the hitchhike road, being left off in the middle of nowhere by some trucker who was heading south when you were heading west, the endlessly poor diet either from on the run quick meal foods to truckers’ diner fare. All taken in stride, all missed, all nostalgia missed, wouldn’t it be great to do again except now I have that house, that spouse, those kids, that looming college tuition crisis to content with and so the search for that American night dropped off the radar.               

Others rather than writing about what On The Road meant personally, socially, as literature wrote their own quirky little pieces that reflected the heat from Jack’s sun. One such writer, or rather a guy who liked to write since his main professions in life were elsewhere, was Peter Paul Markin who wrote his own version of the beat travelogue to the tune of his generation, the generation after Kerouac’s “beats,” the generation of ‘68,  the “hippies” to give them a known name if not entirely accurate to describe the whole scene just as “beat” does not reflect that whole of that previous scene, obviously influenced by Kerouac entitled Ancient dreams, dreamed which met with some small success in 2009. In order to commemorate the 5^th anniversary of the publication of that effort, that series of sketches as Markin himself put it I here will give forth to all and sundry on the real meaning or that short work:   

It is hard to not be overcome by the hard fact that Peter Paul Markin’s  (hereafter Markin) efforts to try to find some life lessons in Ancient dreams, dreamed  were driven by sex, or really what to do about the opposite sex in his life. We can all use a primer, any help at all, male or female, in that struggle but one should be first be struck by how early on that male-female thing as the core  of existence played a role in his sketches. For example in the very first sketch Markin goes on and on about a certain Miss Cora from the film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice who twisted a drifter named Frank around her finger so bad he couldn’t see straight, went to his big step-off with a smile after he amateurishly helped her get rid of her low-rent, no go husband and botched it as bad as a man could, no, went to that big step-off after she set him up for the fall all by his lonesome with a half-smile on his face (Jesus, Markin has got me going now with that smile/ half-smile bull he kept yakking about). He absorbed those lessons unto he fifth degree. But get this he, Markin claims, claims as he said this to me on a stack of bibles or something that he had “seen” the movie while in his mother’s womb and tried to warn Frank off Miss Cora. Claims that in 1946 he learned all there was to learn about woman and their wanting habits by just “seeing” that film. Hey, rather than me getting all cranky and upset about being put on by him let Frank tell it his way, or the way he had his narrator tell it since that guy knew Frank before the end and you can decide:

Yah, sometimes, and maybe more than sometimes, a frail, a frill, a twist, a dame, oh hell, let’s cut out the goofy stuff and just call her a woman. That frail, frill business a throwback to my spending too much time in childhood reading those serious crime novels by the likes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler all curled up in some bed at night wondering, wondering in silence whether I had the stuff, the stuff of dreams. Maybe watching too many Saturday matinee 1930s gangster and slick Sam Spade hard-boiled detective movies at the revival Strand Theater where I used to sneak into from the back door up into the balcony.  Wondering watching those films whether I was going to be another joe on that lost highway Hank always talked about, just a guy who kept his nose clean and didn’t make waves. Well I sure as hell did make some waves and have paid the price but that is my story. Today I’ve got Frank’s story to tell, my buddy Frank Dawson who I met in here and was as white a guy as you could ever meet, except when he got on the scent of a woman. At least that is how the newspapers told the story before he told it to me nice and personal, the real story, that perfume scent that drove him over the edge.

See Frank, when it came right down to it was no different from me, maybe that’s why we got along alright in tight quarters, because he wanted to make a big splash, make waves unlike his old man who drained his life away working some dustbowl farm. Well Frank sure as hell did. Except for me it was always about the business first, you know getting a haul from some sweet virgin bank where all the kale, you know dough, was stashed away just waiting for guys like me to pounce on it. Frank whatever larceny he had in his heart though always mixed up that with some woman thing, some scent of a woman thing that will tie a guy’s insides up in knots so bad he doesn’t know what is what. Tied a guy up, a guy like Frank Dawson, a rolling stone from out in the sticks somewhere who headed, or maybe landed is better here in California and really thought he was going to make the garden of Eden out of his small life. Like I said he got twisted so bad, so bad that like some other guys I knew, not good guys like Frank but some mean bracero hombres who would cut you up with some hidden “shiv,” a blade, as easy as look at you, that he went to the chair without a murmur, the electric chair for those not in the know or those not wound up in the love game with a big old knot very tightly squeezing him. That is he would not murmur if there is such a merciful chair in his locale, otherwise whatever way they cut the life out of a guy who has been so twisted up he couldn’t think straight enough to tie his own shoes, or hers.

Here’s the funny part and you know as well as I do that I do not mean funny, laughing funny, Frank went to his great big reward smiling, okay half-smiling, just to have been around that frail, frill, twist, dame, oh hell, you know what I mean. Around her slightly shy, sly, come hither scents, around her, well, just around her. Or maybe just to be done with it, done with the speculation, the knots and all, six-two-and even he would go back for more, plenty more, and still have that smile, ah, half-smile as they led him away. Yah, guys just like Frank. Let me explain what I mean, okay.

 

Frank Dawson had it bad. [But you might as well fill in future signatures, the Peter Paul Markins, the Joshua Lawrence Breslins, guys who I hung around with and had dough dreams too, and every corner boy who ever kicked his heels against some drugstore store front wall, name your name, just kids, mere boys, when they started getting twisted up in knots, girl knots, and a million, more or less, other guys too, just as easily as Frank, real easy]. Yah, Frank had it as bad as a man could have from the minute Miss Cora walked through that café door. (He always called her Miss Cora although she was married, married as could be, I wonder if he called her Miss Cora when they were under the satin sheets naked as jaybirds and her showing him a trick or two to curl his toes, I never asked him though). That café door was the entrance from the back of the house, the door that separated the living quarters from the café, hell greasy spoon, a cup of joe in her hand. Frank said he vividly remembered just an off-hand plain plank door, cheaply made and amateurishly hinged, that spoke of no returns. That no returns is what I said after I heard the story and was writing stuff down like he asked me to when he wanted the world to know what really happened along the way to the big step-off. He never said such stuff, never put an evil, fateful, spin on things even toward the end. Even when he was ready to meet his maker. Damn.

She breezed in, breezed in like some trade winds, all sugary and sultry, Frank thought later when he tried to explain it to his lawyer, to the judge, to the jury, to some newspaper guy they let interview him who balled the whole thing up , yeah, even to the priest, a Catholic priest, Father Riley, although Frank said he was brought up a pre-destined Baptist and didn’t know half the stuff the priest had been talking about like penance and revelation, who visited him every day toward the end, and to me at night when the lights were out and we would talk and he wanted somebody, a guy like him, to know what drove him and why.

Yeah so he would try to explain everything that had happened and how to anyone who would listen about her breezing in, trade winds breezed he said having once in the service been down in Puerto Rico for bomb practice when he was on a Navy ship although this was the wrong coast for that kind of wind but I got what he meant, had had a couple of breezes like that myself but I like I said I didn’t mix business with pleasure. Made that a rule early on when I almost got clipped by a woman who had big wanting habits, I was daffy about, she tried to make me press my luck by trying to pull another robbery of the same place which was insane so she and I could go to Europe, or something like that. It was only by the skin of our necks that we pulled the job off but one of the guys on the job with got sent to the pearly gates when the security guard figured out quicker than the first time that the joint was going to be hit, hit hard and sang his rooty-toot-toot song. After that never again.

So there she was in her white summer frilly V-neck buttoned cotton blouse, white short shorts, tennis or beach ready, maybe just ready for whatever came along, with convenience pockets for a woman’s this-and-that, and showing plenty of well-turned, lightly-tanned bare leg, long legs at first glance, and the then de rigueur bandana holding back her hair, also white, the bandana that is. Yah, she came out of that crooked cheapjack door like some ill-favored Pacific wind now that Frank had the coast right, some Japan Current ready, ready for the next guy out. Jesus even I got weepy when he said that.  

I might as well tell you, just like he told it to me, incessantly told it to me toward the end like I was some father-confessor, and maybe I was, a real father confessor being a few years older, having been here longer, and not talking about penance and salvation but just trying to keep the story straight, before he moved on, it didn’t have to finish up like the way it did. Or start that way either, for that matter. The way it did play out. Not at all. No way. Frank could have just turned around anytime he said but I just took that as so much wind talking, or maybe some too late regret. I know and you now will know how I know that he would call out her name at night, maybe a two o’clock when it was real dark and the turnkey was off in the guard room sleeping some drunk off, call out her name and, giggly like a schoolboy, telling her to stop this and stop that, giggly like I said, and then called her sweetly, like she was some girl next door virgin all pure and all, his sweet baby whore. Yeah, now that I think about it he was blowing wind, maybe that trade wind stuff all sugary and sultry. Sure there are always choices, for some people. Unless you had some Catholic/Calvinist/Shiva whirl pre-destination Mandela wheel working your fates, working your fates into damn overdrive like our boy Frank.

Listen up a little and see if you think Frank was just blowing smoke, or something. He was just a half-hobo, maybe less, bumming around and stumbling up and down the West Coast, too itchy to settle down after four years of hard World War II Pacific battle fights on bloody atolls, on bloody coral reefs, and knee-deep bloody islands with names even he couldn’t remember, or want to remember after Cora came on the horizon.  (A lot of guys after the war had a hard time settling down just drifting around, coming out here from the East looking for something, finding land’s end and I don’t know surf boards, or hot rods, or drug smuggling I don’t know since I was born here and like I said my trade was robbing banks where the dough was, that was my kicks) He was just stumbling, like he said, from one half-ass mechanic’s job (a skill he had picked in the Marines working on everything from a bicycle to a battleship he would laugh) in some flop garage for a week here when the regular guy was on vacation or something, drifting, another city day laborer’s job shoveling something there, and picking fruits, hot sun fruits, maybe vegetables depending on the crop rotation, like some bracero whenever things got really tough, or the hobo jungle welcome ran out, ran out with the running out of wines and stubbed cigarette butts. He mentioned something about freight yard tramp knives, and cuts and wounds. Tough, no holds barred stuff, once tramp, bum, hobo solidarities broke down, and that easy and often. Frank just kind of flashed by me that part of the story because he was in a hurry for me to get it straight about him and Cora and the hobo jungle stuff was just stuff, and so much train smoke and maybe a bad dream.

Guys would show up later at trial trying to get in on the action and claim that they saw Frank cut a guy, maybe more than one guy, you never know with winos and jack-rollers, and leave him, or them, for dead but the deeds never involved women so I agreed with Frank they were just conning for something. The judge never let them get too far before tossing them off the stand. The prosecution was just pig-piling the evidence to see what would stick with the jury to show Frank was some hardened criminal from the get-go not a love-bit guy or just another hard luck story out of the Great Depression times.       

 

Hell, the way he was going, after some bracero fruit days with some bad hombre gringo ass bosses standing over his sweat, the “skids” in Los Angeles, down by the tar pits and just off the old Southern Pacific line, were looking good, a good rest up. Real good after fourteen days running in some Imperial Valley fruit fields so he started heading south, south by the sea somewhere near Paseo Robles to catch some ocean sniff, and have himself washed clean by loud ocean sounds so he didn’t have to listen to the sounds coming from his head about getting off the road.

Here is where luck is kind of funny though, and maybe this is a place where it is laughing funny, because, for once, he had a few bucks, a few bracero fruit bucks, stuck in his socks. He was hungry, maybe not really food hungry, but that would do at the time for a reason, and once he hit the coast highway this Bayview Diner was staring him right in the face after the last truck ride had let him off a few hundred yards up the road. Some fugitive barbecued beef smell, or maybe strong onions getting a workout over some griddled stove top, reached him and turned him away from the gas station fill-up counter where he had planned, carefully planning to husband his dough to make the city of angels, to just fill up with a Coke and a moon pie. Instead he just grabbed a pack of Luckies, unfiltered cigarettes but a step up from the rolling Bull Durham that he had survived on before he got paid off on that bracero labor job and headed toward the café. That smell just got the better of him.  So he walked into that Bayview Diner, walked in with his eyes wide open. And then she walked through the damn cheapjack door.                 

She may have been just another blonde, a very blonde frail, maybe with a slight pair of round heels and heading toward a robust thirty or so just serving them off the arm in some seaside hash joint along with her husband as he found out a few minutes later, too late, but from second one when his eyes eyed her she was nothing but, well nothing but, a femme fatale. Frank femme fatale, fatal. Of course between eyeing, pillow-talk dreaming, and scheming up some “come on” line once she had her hooks into him, which was about thirty seconds after he laid eyes on her, he forgot, foolishly forgot, rule number one of the road, or even of being a man in go-go post-war America.

What he should have asked, and had in the past when he wasn’t this dame-addled, was a dish like this doing serving them off the arm in some rundown roadside café out in pacific coast Podunk, really just south of Santa Barbara, when she could be sunning herself in some be-bop daddy paid-up hillside bungalow or scratching some other dame’s eyes out to get a plum role in a B Hollywood film courtesy of some lonely rich producer. Never for a minute, not even during those thirty seconds that he wasn’t hooked did he figure, like some cagey guy would figure, that she had a story hanging behind that bandana hair.      

And she did. Story number one was the “serve them off the platter” hubby, Manny, short-ordering behind the grill in that tramp cafe. The guy who, to save dough, bought some wood down at the lumber yard and put up that crooked door that she had come through on first sight and who spent half his waking hours trying to figure how to short-change somebody, including his Cora. Wouldn’t buy her the trinkets that every woman loved so she, since he could hardly add for all his cheapness and she handled the books, just took what she wanted when she wanted it and he was never the wiser. (Guys, including Manny were like that with Cora, will always be like that with the Coras of the world so Frank wasn’t alone he just got skirt-addled more than most guys who maybe had better radar to avoid that trouble coming through the door.)  Story number two, and go figure,  said hubby didn’t care one way or the other about what she did, or didn’t do, as long as he had her around as a trophy to show the boys on card-playing in the back of the diner living rooms and Kiwanis Club down the road drunk as a skunk nights. She loathed Manny at those times, times when to get a laugh for the boys, maybe inflame them too, he would paw her like some dumb pet. Story number three was that she had many round-heeled down-at- the-heels stories too long to tell Frank before hubby came along to pick her out of some Los Angles arroyo gutter. Doped up to stop the pain of her life, tricked up to pay for the dope, and none too choosey about who did what to her as long as they brought a needle and a spoon. And they did until she crossed some low-life in Westminster and he threw her out to beg for herself. Story number four, the one that would in the end sent our boy Frankie smiling, sorry half-smiling, to his fate was she hated hubby, hell-broth murder hated her husband, and would be “grateful” in the right way to some guy who had the chutzpah to take her out of this misery. But those stories all came later, later when she didn’t need to use those hooks she had in him, didn’t need to use them at all.

Markin Interlude One:  “I swear, I swear on seven sealed bibles that I yelled, yelled from some womblike place, at the screen in the old Orpheum Theater up in Adamsville Square when my mother was “carrying” me once I saw her coming through that door for him, for Frank,  to get the hell out of there at that moment. I saw that come hither look that is embedded in their womanly DNA she threw at him and I saw him buckle, buckle under foot, with his eyes all glued to her walk also embedded in his manly DNA (what did we know of such things, embedded or not, then Frank just called it a breeze, some kind of breeze like he could have stopped the thing in its tracks).This dame was poison, no question. Frank stop looking at those long paid for legs and languid rented eyes for a minute, forget about ocean breezes or desert-addled and get the hell out of there to some safe hobo jungle. Hell, just walk out the diner, café or whatever it is door, run if you have to, get your hitchhike great blue-pink American West thumb out and head for it. There’s a hobo jungle just down the road near Santa Monica, get going, and tonight grab some stolid, fetid stews, and peace.”

But here is where fate works against some guys, hell, most guys. She turned around to do some dish rack thing or other with her lipstick-smeared coffee cup and then, slowly, turned back to look at Frank with those languid  eyes, what color who knows, it was the look not the color that doomed Frank and asked in a soft, kittenish voice  “Got a cigarette for a fresh out girl?” And wouldn’t you know, wouldn’t you just know that Frank, “flush” with bracero dough had bought that  fresh deck of Luckies at the cigarette machine out at that filling station just adjacent to the diner and they were sitting right in his left shirt pocket for the entire world to see. For her to see. And wouldn’t you know too that Frank could see plain as day, plain as a man could see if he wanted to see, that bulging out of one of the convenient pockets of those long-legged white short shorts was the sharply-etched outline of a package of cigarettes. Yah, still he plucked a Lucky cigarette into her waiting lips, kind of gently, gently for rough-edged Frank, lit her up, and dated her up with his eyes. Gone, long-gone daddy gone, except for two in the morning murmur dreams, and that final half-smile.   

Peter Paul Markin Interlude Two: “I screamed again, some vapid man-child scream, some kicking at the womb thump too, but do you think Frank would listen, no not our boy. You don’t need to know all the details if you are over twenty-one, hell over twelve and can keep a secret. She used her sex every way she could, and a few ways that Frank, not unfamiliar with the world’s whorehouses in lonely ports-of-call, was kind of shocked at, but only shocked. He was hooked, hook, line and sinker. Frank knew, knew what she was, knew what she wanted, and knew what he wanted so there was no crying there.”

Here is what is strange, and while I am writing this even I think it is strange. She told Frank her whole life’s story, the too familiar father crawling up into her barely teenage bed, the run-aways, returns, girls’ JD homes, some more streets, a few whorehouse tricks, some street tricks, a little luck with a Hollywood producer until his wife, who controlled the dough, put a stop to it, some drugs, some L.A. gutters, and then a couple of years back some refuge from those mean streets via husband Manny’s Bayview Diner.

Even with all of that Frank still believed, believed somewhere from deep in his recessed mind, somewhere in his Oklahoma kid mud shack mind, that Cora was virginal. Some Madonna of the streets. Toward the end it was her scent, some slightly lilac scent, some lilac scent that combined with steamed vegetable sweat combined with sexual animal sweat combined with ancient Lydia MacAdams' bath soap fresh junior high school “crush” sweat drove him over the edge. Drove him to that smiling chair.            

He had to play with fire, and play with it to the end. Christ, just like his whole young stupid gummed up life he had to play with fire. And from that minute, the lit cigarette minute, although really from the minute that Frank saw those long legs protruding from those white shorts Manny was done for. And once Frank had sealed his fate (and hers too) on that midnight  roaring rock sandy beach night when the ocean depths smashing against the shore drowned out the sound of their passion everybody from Monterrey to Santa Monica knew he was done for, or said they knew the score after the fact. Everybody who came within a mile of the Bayview Diner anyway. Everybody except Manny and maybe somewhere in his cheap- jack little heart he too knew he was done for when Cora, in her own sensible Cora way, persuaded him that he needed an A-One grease monkey to run the filling station.  

The way Frank told it even I knew, knew that everybody had to have figured things out. Any itinerant trucker who went out of his way to take the Coast highway with his goods on board  in order to get a full glance at Cora and try his “line” on her knew it (Manny encouraged it, he said it was good for business and harmless, and maybe it was with them). Knew it the minute he sat at his favorite corner stool and saw a monkey wrench-toting Frank come in for something and watch the Frank-Cora- and cigar-chomping Manny in his whites behind the grille dance play out. He kept his eyes and his line to himself on that run.

Damn, any dated –up teen-age joy-riding kids up from Malibu looking for the perfect wave at Roaring Rock (and maybe some midnight passion drowned out by the ocean roar too) knew the minute they came in and smelled that lilac something coming like something out of the eden garden from Cora. The girls knowing instinctively that Cora lilac scent was meant for more than some half-drunk old short order cook. One girl, with a friendly look Frank’s way, and maybe with her own Frank Roaring Rock thoughts, asked Cora, while ordering a Coke and hamburger, whether she was married to him. And her date, blushing, not for what his date had just said but because he, fully under the lilac scent karma, wished that he was alone just then so he could take a shot at Cora himself.  

Hell even the California Highway Patrol motorcycle cop who cruised the coast near the diner (and had his own not so secret eyes and desires for Cora) knew once Frank was installed  in one of the rooms over the garage that things didn’t add up, add up to Manny’s benefit. And, more importantly, that if anything happened, anything at all, anything requiring more than a Band-Aid, to one Manny DeVito for the next fifty years the cops knew the first door to knock at.

Look I am strictly a money guy, going after loot wherever I could and so I never after that one time early on got messed up with some screwy dame on a caper. That was later, spending money time later. And maybe if I had gotten a whiff of that perfume things might have been different in my mind too but I told Frank right out why didn’t he and Cora take out a big old .44 in the middle of the diner and just shoot Manny straight out, and maybe while the cop was present too.  Then he /they could have at least put up an insanity or crime of passion defense. Not our boy though, no he had to play the angles, play Cora’s evil game.

I am almost too embarrassed, almost too embarrassed since Frank is not here to defend himself, maybe he could have given us an inkling of what he was thinking about at the time, if he was thinking of anything but those pillow dreams, to detail how badly these two amateurs gummed up the job every which way. (I already know what she, Miss Cora, was thinking, had her sized up the minute Frank mentioned who he was and who she was, mentioned those white shorts and that short order husband). Yeah, they gummed it up so that even a detective novel writer would turn blush red with shame. Yeah somebody like Dashiell Hammett, a guy who knew how to plot out the murders, how to raise holy hell in Red Harvest times would blush to think that they could do the “perfect” murder with their skinny sense of how to do criminal things. Hell, trying poison and the off the cliff with the car routine like a thousand guys have done before-and always got caught. The old brakes giving out and over the hill crashing and Frank an A-One mechanic even some silly skirt-addled highway motorcycle cop could figure given some time.      

I tried to tell Frank this but he was only half-listening, only wanted to tell his story mostly but I guess I am trying to make sense of the deal for anybody who might read this, maybe wise you up if you are thinking about doing away some Manny or other. Murder is, from guys that I know who specialize in such things, make a business out of taking guys out for dough, an art form and nothing for amateurs to mess around with. So they tried one thing, something with poison taken over a long time that couldn’t be traced but Manny was such a lush it didn’t take. Then another, they tried to get him drunk and drown him off of Roaring Rock but that night around two in the morning about sixty kids from down around Malibu decided to have a cook-out after their prom night. In the end they planned and wound up with the old gag that the cops have been wise to since about 1906, got him drunk, conked him, threw him in the car, drove to the Roaring Rock and pushed him and the car over the cliff after Frank messed with the brakes. Jesus, double jesus.  

Peter Paul Interlude Three: “Frank, one last time, get out, get on the road, this ain’t gonna work. That poison thing was crazy. That drunk at the ocean thing was worst. The cops wouldn’t even have had to bother to knock at your door. Frank on this latest caper she’s setting you up. Think-who drove the car, who got the whiskey at the liquor store down the road, who knew how to trip the brake lines, and who was big enough to carry Manny?  And she sitting at home waiting for her husband and his mechanic to come home after a toot. Why don’t you just paint a big target on your chest and be done with it. She just wants the diner for her own small dreams. You don’t count. Hell, I ain’t no squealer but she is probably talking to that skirt-crazy (her skirt) cop right now. Get out I say, get out.”  

If you want the details, want to see how she framed him but good and walked away with half the California legal system holding the door open for her, just look them up in the 1946 fall editions of the Los Angeles Gazette. They covered the story big time, and the trial too. See how on the stand she lied her ass off about the child she was carrying being Manny’s and what was she to do now with a child to bring up alone. Lied about how Frank made advances toward her which she rebuffed. Even had a couple of Manny’s drinking buddies get on the stand and tell how Manny encouraged them to go so far with Miss Cora, pinching her behind, maybe a kiss on the cheek but Manny made very clear no further. And Manny told them he told Frank that same thing. And the most beautiful part of the whole thing, the thing that made Miss Cora a real femme fatale in my book was that the whole affair at her urging was kept very secret no matter what customers, the good old boy truckers, the young college kids might think so there was not tangible evidence to proof they had been together all those weeks and months. That’s just the details though. I can give you the finish, the last moments now and save your eyes, maybe. Frank, yah, Frank was just kind of smiling that smile, what did I call it, half-smile, all the way to the end. Do you need to know more?      

From The New Brothers Under The Bridge Series-The Iraq And Afghan War Brothers- Brother Jacob’s Last Stand  

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman:

A while back, maybe a couple of years ago now, I did a retrospective series of sketches about guys, about war veterans, Vietnam War veterans that I had started in the late 1970s and did not get a chance to complete since the publication that I was writing them for out in California, the East Bay Eye, like a lot of alternative media operations folded up as the 1960s went into a deep ebb tide and the audience went back to the professions, academia, and bourgeois politics. Those sketches centered on some groups of returning veterans who could not cope with the “real” world after Vietnam and build themselves an alternate “community” mostly down in Southern California and who by life’s circumstances got called the “brothers under the bridge.” Let me reproduce my motivation in part for that series because now for different reasons I am finding out stories about guys from the recent Iraq and Afghan occupations that also can’t cope with the “real” world and are forming, well, I don’t know exactly what they are forming but I damn well know it feels a lot like “brothers under the bridge.”:

“In the first installment of this series of sketches [Brothers Under The Bridge] space provided courtesy of my old 1960s yellow brick road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler, Peter Paul Markin, I mentioned, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod, that I had come across a song that stopped me in my tracks, Brothers Under The Bridge. I had not listened to or thought about that song for a long time but it brought back many memories from the late 1970s when I did a series of articles for the now defunct East Bay Eye (Frisco town, California East Bay, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam veterans who, for one reason or another, could not come to grips with “going back to the real world” and took, like those a Great Depression generation or two before them, to the “jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramp camps located along the abandoned railroad sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of California, mainly down in Los Angeles, and created their own “society.”

The editor of the East Bay Eye, Owen Anderson, gave me that long ago assignment after I had done a smaller series for the paper on the treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam veterans by the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and in the course of that series had found out about this band of brothers roaming the countryside trying to do the best they could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one piece. My qualifications for the assignment other than empathy for fellow veterans since I had been in the military, grudgingly, during the Vietnam War period although not in combat were based simply on the fact that back East I had been involved, along with several other radicals, in running an anti-war GI coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and another down near Fort Dix in New Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of my 1960s generation who had clued me in on the psychic cost of the war so I had a running start.

After making connections with some Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys down in L.A. who I had worked with after my own military service was over knew where to point me I was on my way. I gathered many stories, published some of them in the Eye, and put the rest in my helter-skelter files. A while back, after having no success in retrieving the old Eye archives on the Internet, I went up into my attic and rummaged through what was left of those early files. I could find no newsprint articles that I had written but I did find a batch of notes, specifically notes from stories that I didn’t file because the Eye went under before I could round them into shape.

The ground rules of those long ago stories was that I would basically let the guy I was talking to give his spiel, spill what he wanted the world to hear, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I, like with the others in this current series, have reconstructed this story as best I can although at this far remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said.

Not every guy I interviewed, came across, swapped lies with, or just snatched some midnight phrase out of the air from was from hunger. Most were, yes, in one way or another but some had no real desire to advertise their own hunger but just wanted to get something off their chest about some lost buddy, or some event they had witnessed. I have presented enough of these sketches both back in the day and here to not make a generalization about what a guy might be hiding in the deep recesses of his mind.

Some wanted to give a blow by blow description of every firefight (and every hut torched) they were involved in, others wanted to blank out ‘Nam completely and talk of before or after times, or talk about the fate of some buddy, some ‘Nam buddy, who maybe made it back the “real world” but got catch up with stuff he couldn’t handle, or got caught up in some stuff himself that he couldn’t handle, couldn’t handle because his whole blessed life pointed the other way…”

Now, after having recently as a favor to an old high school classmate tried to find his son, Jack, who served in both Afghanistan and Iraq and upon discharge got caught up in some stuff he could not handle, another generation of soldiers needs to be heard, need their stories told. In the old series I noted that I liked to finish up these introductions by placing the sketches under a particular sign; no question Brother Jacobs’s sign is the sign of the last stand.

This sketch is slightly different from the previous one about Private Jack Dawson’s private war where I knew many details about his life from his father, an old high school classmate of mine, and later Jack himself when I found him down in Southern California. In the case of Brother Jacob I only know what was presented in his memorial on the Chelsea Manning Support Network about his life. I do know this though that Brother Jacob automatically rates a nod (the old school days “nod” that signified that a guy who you did not know, was not one of your corner boys but who you maybe play some pick-up game against, maybe had in class was “cool”) for his early and fervent support for his fellow soldier, Chelsea Manning (formerly known as Bradley), who was in a heap of trouble with the American government and its military of which she was part for leaking lots of information about American atrocities in Iraq and other information that the government would rather not have us know about on the vital questions of war and peace.

Brother Jacob like many ex-soldiers, myself included, came to Chelsea’s aid once he got “religion” on what seven kinds of hell the American government was up to in Afghanistan (and Iraq). He was, as we in Veterans for Peace and other ex-soldier supporters, just following the old adage learned early on in basic training-you do not leave your buddy behind. And Brother Jacob and the rest of us will not leave Chelsea behind to face that thirty-five year sentence alone. Now we have his memory to honor as we continue our work. Let me place the comment from the Chelsea Manning Support Network here to fill in some of the information about Brother Jacob’s fate:                 

 Jacob David George (1982-2014)

 
September 22, 2014 by the Chelsea Manning Support Network

“I’m a bicycle ridin, banjo pickin, peace ramblin hillbilly from the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas!”



Jacob George at Fort Meade to protest to the court martial of Chelsea Manning, 6/1/13. Photo by Ward Reilly.

The Chelsea Manning Support Network is greatly saddened to learn the news of veteran and Manning supporter Jacob George’s passing.  Due to his years in service, Jacob suffered from various physical and mental injuries that he worked through with anti-war activism.  Jacob rallied for Chelsea Manning at Fort Meade, attended Chelsea’s court martial, and was one of the first people to rally to Chelsea’s defense in the days following her arrest in May 2010.

Jacob was a veteran of three combat tours in Afghanistan—Operation Enduring Freedom. To overcome those demons, Jacob cycled thousands of miles, “A Ride Till the End,” he called it, to promote peace and justice. He rallied fellow veterans to take political action. And he stood strong for military resisters–especially those who were prosecuted for refusing to do the things he himself had participated in.

Every day at least a dozen US military veterans take their own lives, with some estimates at over 22. In the end, these will far outnumber the fatalities on the far away battlefields. We are reminded that statistics are easy to live with, until the statistic strikes close to home.

We will likely never know why Jacob took his own life. He seemed to have done more than anyone to heal himself from the unseen physiological devastation of war. Today we simply remember an amazing individual whose contributions to our community go far beyond what words we can muster.

Donations to Jacob George’s Memorial Service:

https://www.everribbon.com/ribbon/view/18459

The Human Cost of War: IVAW Testimony

http://vimeo.com/66857895    

Many years ago, back in the 1970s, as I mentioned above I did a series of pieces for the now long defunct East Bay Eye on a group of Vietnam veterans who could not adjust to the “real world” after they got back from ‘Nam. They established what it would be fashionable to call today an “alternative community” adjacent to the railroad trestles, along the river beds, around the arroyos and under the bridges of Southern California. I had many more notes for sketches than were published before the paper went under which I found up in the attic of my garage a couple of years ago and which I have dusted off and have presented in this space under the title Brothers Under The Bridge, stealing the title from one of Bruce Springsteen’s songs that dealt with that same theme. The one thing that all the stories had in common was how hard it was for those guys to adjust to the “real world” and in the process of not doing so had exhibited all the pathologies that we have come to associate with guys who could not adjust. A few of those guys later when I investigated further had committed suicide, the great hush whisper of war-weariness from those who served. Now, as the notice and memorial piece above eloquently describes, in the case of Brother Jacob we have another generation of “brothers under the bridge” whose stories need to be told. If for no other reason today that to cry out to the heavens the demand on the part of anti-war veterans that should resonate loudly-Not Another War In Iraq or Syria! Free Chelsea Manning Now! Brother Jacob Presente!