Those Oldies But Goodies- Folk Branch- Bob Dylan’s Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues-With Juana In Mind 

 

From The Pen Of The Late Peter Paul Markin

 

With A 2015 Introduction By Sam Lowell

 

If you did not know what happened to the late Peter Paul Markin who used to write for some of the alternative newspaper and magazine publications that proliferated in the wake of the 1960s circus-war/bloodbath/all world together festival/new age aborning cloud puff dream, won a few awards too and was short-listed for the Globe Prize this is what is what. What is what before the ebb tide kind of knocked the wind out of everybody’s sails, everybody who was what I called “seeking a newer world,” a line I stole from some English poet (Robert Kennedy, Jack’s brother, or his writer “cribbed” the line too for some pre-1968 vision book before he ran for President in 1968 so I am in good company.) I will tell you in a minute what expression “the Scribe,” a named coined by our leader, Frankie Riley, which is what we always called him around the corner we hung out in together in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor in our hometown of North Adamsville, used to describe that change he had sensed coming in the early 1960s long before any of the rest of us did, or gave a rat’s ass about in our serious worries about girls, dough and cars. All I know is that ebb tide that caught Markin flat-footed is still with us. Here is a quick run-down about the fate of our boyhood corner boy bastard saint and about why stuff that he wrote forty or fifty years ago now is seeing the light of day.

 

After Markin got out of the Army in late 1970 he did two things that are important here. First, he continued on that journey that he had started before he was inducted in the Army in 1968 in search of what he called the Great Blue-Pink American West Night (he put the search in capitals when he wrote about the experiences so I will do so here), the search really for the promise that the “fresh breeze” he was always carping about was going to bring. That breeze which was going to get him out from under his baser instincts developed (in self-defense I think) in his grinding poverty childhood, get out from under the constant preoccupation with satisfying his “wanting habits” which would eventually do him in. Markin had made a foolish decision, foolish in retrospect although he when asked always was ambivalent about the matter, to drop out of college (Boston University), after his sophomore year in 1967 in order to pursue his dream, a dream which by that time had him carrying us along with him on the hitchhike west in the summer of love, 1967, and beyond. Of course 1967, 1968, 1969 and other years as well were the “hot” years of the war in Vietnam and all Uncle Sam and his local draft boards wanted, including in North Adamsville, was warm bodies to kill commies, kill them for good. As he would say to us after he had been inducted and had served his tour in ‘Nam as he called it (he and the other military personnel who fought it but was off-bounds for civilians to shorten)  and came back to the “real” world he did what he did, wished he had not done so, wished that he had not gone, and most of all wished that the American government which made nothing but animals out of him and his war buddies would come tumbling down for what it had done to its sons for no good reasons.

 

And so Markin continued his search, maybe a little wiser, continued as well to drag some of his old corner boys like me on that hitchhike road dream of his before the wheels fell off. I stayed with him longest I think before even I could see we had been defeated by the night-takers and I left the road to go to law school and “normalcy.” Markin stuck it out longer until at some point in 1974, 1975 when I had lost touch with him when even he could see the dreams of the 1960s had turned to dust (Josh Breslin, another corner boy who left the road earlier was in contact until pretty near the end since he lived out in California where Markin was living at the time).            

 

Markin had a lot invested emotionally and psychological in the success of the 1960s “fresh breeze coming across the land” as he called it early on. Maybe it was that ebb tide, maybe it was the damage that military service in hell-hole Vietnam did to his psychic, maybe it was a whole bunch of bad karma things from his awful early childhood that he held in check when there were still sunnier days ahead but by the mid-1970s he had snapped. Got involved in using and dealing cocaine just starting to be a big time profitable drug of choice among rich gringos (and junkies ready to steal anything, anytime. anywhere in order to keep the habit going). Somehow down in Mexico, Sonora, we don’t know all the details to this day a big deal Markin brokered (kilos from what we heard so big then) went awry (his old time term for something that went horribly wrong) and he wound up face down in a dusty back road with two slugs to the head and now resides in the town’s potter’s field in an unmarked grave. But the bastard is still moaned over, moaned to high heaven.

 

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

 

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

 

This story is from that third category, the Going to the Jungle series, or at least had been intended for that series since it was in draft form up in Josh Breslin’s attic in Olde Saco, Maine where he had lived before meeting Markin in the great summer of love night in 1967 and where he had later stored his stuff in his parents’ house and which he had subsequently inherited. We have decided whatever we had to publish would be published as is, either published story or in draft form. Otherwise, moaning over our brother or not, Markin is liable to come after us from that forlorn unmarked grave and give us hell for touching a single word of the eight billion facts in his fallen head.      

 

[The subject matter of this one is a bit eerily reminiscent of  what might have been some stuff Markin was into so the undated draft may have been written later just before his fall. SM]

 

Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues Lyrics

 

When you're lost in the rain in Juarez

And it's Eastertime too

And your gravity fails

And negativity don't pull you through

Don't put on any airs

When you're down on Rue Morgue Avenue

They got some hungry women there

And they really make a mess outa you.

 

Now if you see Saint Annie

Please tell her thanks a lot

I cannot move

My fingers are all in a knot

I don't have the strength

To get up and take another shot

And my best friend, my doctor

Won't even say what it is I've got.

 

Sweet Melinda

The peasants call her the goddess of gloom

She speaks good English

And she invites you up into her room

And you're so kind

And careful not to go to her too soon

And she takes your voice

And leaves you howling at the moon.

 

Up on Housing Project Hill

It's either fortune or fame

You must pick up one or the other

Though neither of them are to be what they claim

If you're lookin' to get silly

You better go back to from where you came

Because the cops don't need you

And man they expect the same.

 

Now all the authorities

They just stand around and boast

How they blackmailed the sergeant-at-arms

Into leaving his post

And picking up Angel who

Just arrived here from the coast

Who looked so fine at first

But left looking just like a ghost.

 

I started out on burgundy

But soon hit the harder stuff

Everybody said they'd stand behind me

When the game got rough

But the joke was on me

There was nobody even there to bluff

I'm going back to New York City

I do believe I've had enough.

******

“United States," answered Fritz Taylor to the burly “la migra” U.S. border guard who was whip-lashing the question of nationality a mile a minute at the steady stream of border-entering people, and giving a cursory nod to all but the very most suspect looking characters, the most illegal Mexican- looking if you want to know. Yes, American, Fritz thought, Fritz John Taylor if they looked at his passport, his real passport, although he had other identification with names like John Fitzgerald, Taylor Fitzgerald, and John Tyler on them, as he passed the huge "la migra” U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint at El Paso on the American side across from old-time Cuidad Juarez, Mexico. Juarez, a city in passing that March, 1972 day that looked very much like something out of Orson Welles’ 1950s Touch of Evil, except the automobiles were smaller and less flashy and the graft now more expensive, and no longer guaranteed to grease the rails, the illegal rails; drugs, women, illegals, gambling, fenced goods, you name it. But just then he didn’t want to think about greasing any rails, or anything else illegal for that matter.

 

Fritz thought again, this time with easier breathing, whether "la migra” had looked at his passport or not, he was glad, glad as hell, to be saying his nationality, his American, gringo, Estados Unidos, call it what you will citizenship, something he never thought possible, not after Vietnam, not after all the shooting and killing of his thirteen month tour of hell except these last three weeks down south of the border had been almost as bad, and no more profitable, Fritz profitable. By the way that ‘Nam tour one month R&R included, a month in Hawaii where he thought he must have set the world record for boozing, mostly scotch, low-shelf scotch to make his dough last, dope-sniffing from opium to cocaine to brother and sister, reefer was the least of it, whoring, some paid, some free what did it matter when a man had  his wanting habits on, whoring running through the Kama Sutra and a couple of other tricks not listed in that volume that one of the girls, a white girl too from respectable parents back on the mainland who was looking for kicks, odd-ball kicks and found a partner, for a while, willing to indulge her, Angelina her name, ask her how she got that tattoo on her upper inner thigh and why, if you ever run across her in Lima, Ohio.

 

Now that he breathed gringo air, American air he could tell his story, or tell parts of it because he was not quite sure that parts might not still be inside the statute of limitations, for him or his former confederates. So some stuff was better left unsaid.

 

Yah, it started in ‘Nam really, Fritz thought, as he traced his life-sized movements back in time while he started for a bus, a gringo bright yellow and green El Paso Transit bus that would take him to a downtown hotel where he could wash the dust of Mexico, wash that clotting dust of the twenty hour bus ride from Cuernavaca off his body, if not his soul. Hell, he confessed to himself, a thing he would be very reluctant to mention to others, others impressed by his publicly impervious persona, if it hadn’t been 'Nam, it could have been any one of a thousand places, or hundred situation a few years back, back when he first caught the mary jane, ganga, herb, weed, call your name joy stick, delight habit, tea was his favorite term of rite though. And then he graduated to girl, cousin cocaine when that became the drug of choice and then mainly cheaper that high-grade reefer.

 

Or, maybe, it really started in dead-end Clintondale when he graduated from high school and with nothing particular to do, allowed himself, chuckling a little to hear him call it that way now, allowed himself to be drafted when his number came up. And drafted, 1960s drafted, meant nothing but 'Nam, nothing but 'Nam and grunt-hood, and that thirteen months of hell, minus one, the boozing, doping, whoring one. And maybe, just maybe, it was even earlier than Clintondale high school days, days when he just hung around Sammy’s garage, watching him tool up some old Chevy or Dodge to make all the valley boys twist in the wind when early morning “chicken runs” beckoned down around the far end of Squaw Rock, took more days off from school than he should have and maybe spent too much time in the back seat of one of Sammy’s cars down the other end, the lovers’ end of Squaw Rock with older girls, Sammy’s “cast-offs,”  that only made him restless, restless to break out of one-horse Clintonville. Or reaching down deep the hard fact that he grew up, grew up desperately poor, in the Clintondale back alley projects and so had spent those precious few years of his life hungry, hungry for something, something easy, something sweet, and something to take the pain away.

 

But mainly he was looking for something easy. And that something easy pushed him, pushed him like the hard fates of growing up poor, down Mexico way, down Sonora way, mostly, as his liked to hum from a vaguely remembered song, some old time cowboy song, yeah, now he remembered, remembered the hum, Spanish Is The Loving Tongue about a long ago desperado who high-tailed it over the border just ahead of the Federales when the dust settled leaving his senorita high and dry behind with only the memory of that jasmine scent, her jasmine scent to carry him to old age, on any one of his twenty or so trips down sur. Until, that is, this last Cuernavaca madness, this time there was no humming, no sing-song Mexican brass band marching humming. But stop right there, Fritz said to himself, if he was ever going to figure what went wrong, desperately wrong on this last, ill-fated trip, he had to come clean and coming clean meant, you know, not only was it about the get to easy street, not only was it to get some tea (and later cousin cocaine like he said) delight to chase the soul pain away, but it was about a woman, and as every guy, every women-loving guy, even honest women-loving guy, will tell you, in the end it is always about a woman.

 

Always about a woman from hard-hearted Irish Catholic Cecilias like he knew, kid knew with their novena books in one hand and their red dress come hither flick with the other, yes, knew them backwards and forwards, to that Hawaii kicks-loving Angelina. Knew the score since from kid time or some other combinations foxed out later but a woman, no question. Although not always about a woman named Juana, his sweet Juana. Although, maybe the way she left him hanging by his thumbs in Mexico City before the fall, not knowing, or maybe caring, of his danger, he should be a little less forgiving. Yah, that’s easy to say, easy off the hellish now tongue, but this was Juana not just some hop-head floozy out for kicks.

 

Jesus, he could still smell that sweetness, that exotic Spanish sweetness, that rose something fragrance Juana always wore (and don’t tell her if you run into her down Sonora way, and you will if you are looking for grade A dope for sure, drove him as crazy as a loon), that smell of her freshly-washed black hair which got all wavy, naturally wavy, and big so that she looked like some old-time Goya senorita, all severe front but smoldering underneath. And those big laughing eyes, yeah, black eyes you won’t forget, or want to. Yes, his thoughts drifted back to Juana, treacherously warm-blooded Juana. And it seems almost sacrilegious thinking of her, sitting on this stinking, hit every bump, crowded, air-fouling bus filled with “wetbacks,” sorry, braceros, okay, going to work, or wherever they go when they are not on these stinking buses.

 

Yah, Juana, Juana whom he met in Harvard Square when he first got back to the world and was looking to deep-six the memories of that 'Nam thing, deep-six it with dope, mope, cope, and some woman to chase his blues away. And there she was sitting on a bench in Cambridge Common wearing some wild seventy-two colored ankle-length dress that had him mesmerized, that and that rose something fragrance. But that day, that spring 1970 day, what Juana-bonded him was the dope she was selling, selling right there in the open like it was some fresh produce (and it was). Cops no too far off but not bothering anyone except the raggedy drunks, or some kid who took too much acid and they needed to practically scrape him off the Civil War monument that centered the park and get him some medical attention, quick.

 

See Juana, daughter of fairly well-to-do Mexican “somebodies,” needed dough to keep her in style. He never did get the whole story straight but what was down in Sonora well-to-do was nada in the states. She needed dough, okay, just like any gringa dame. And all of that was just fine by him but Juana was also “connected,” connected through some cousin, to the good dope, the Acapulco Gold and Colombian Red that was primo stuff. Not the oregano-laced stuff that was making the rounds of the Eastern cities and was strictly for the touristas, for the week-end warrior hippies who flooded Harvard Square come Saturday night. So Juana was to good tea like Owsley was to the acid scene, the maestra.

 

Fitz thought back, as that rickety old bus moved along heading, twenty-seven-stop heading, downtown trying to be honest, honest through that dope-haze rose smell, that black hair and those laughing eyes (and that hard-loving midnight sex they both craved when they were high as kites) about whether it was all that or just the dope in the beginning. Yeah, it was the Columbia Red at first. He was just too shattered, 'Nam and Clintondale shattered, to know when he had a woman for the ages in his grasp. But he got “religion” fast. Like every religion though, godly or womanly, there is a price to pay, paid willingly or not, and that price was to become Juana’s “mule” on the Mexico drug runs.

 

To keep the good dope in stock you had to be willing to make some runs down south of the border. If not, by the time it got to say some New York City middle man, it had been cut so much you might as well have been smoking tea leaves, you know Lipton tea leaves. He could hear himself laugh when she first said that tea leave thing in her efforts to enlist him. But by then he had religion, Juana religion, and he went off on that first trip eyes wide open. And that was probably the problem because it went off without a hitch. Hell, he brought a kilogram over the border in his little green knapsack acting just like any other tourist buying a cheap serape or something.

 

And like a lot of things done over and over again the trips turned into a routine, a routine though that did not take into consideration some of the greater not-knowing, maybe not knowable things, although he now had his suspicions, things going on, like the cartelization of the international drug trade, like the squeeze out of the small unaffiliated tea ladies, like Juana, and placing them as mere employees like some regular corporate structure bad trip. But the biggest thing was Juana, Juana wanted more and more dough, and that meant bigger shipments, which meant more Fritz risk, and later Fritz and Tommy risk (Tommy, ah, let’s just leave it at Tommy, rest his soul, face down in some Cuernavaca muddy craven back alley with two slugs in his back from when some cartel guy got jumpy when Tommy moved the wrong way, or maybe just moved when el jefe was present as thing went awry). And on this last trip it mean no more friendly Sonora lazy, hazy, getting high off some free AAA perfecto weed after the deal was made and then leisurely taking a plane (a plane for chrissakes) from some Mexican city to Los Angeles, or Dallas, depending on the connections. And then home.

 

This time, this time the deal was going down in Cuernavaca, in a church, or rather in some side room of a church, Santa Maria’s Chapel, in downtown Cuernavaca, maybe you know it if you have been there it's kind of famous. He didn’t like the switch, but only because it was out of the routine, sticking to habit he learned in ‘Nam and that saved him more than once. What he didn’t know, and what his connections on the other side should have known (and maybe did, but he was not thinking about that part right that minute) was that the Federales, instead of chasing Pancho Villa’s ghost like they should have been doing, were driving hard (prompted by the gringo DEA) to close down Cuernavaca, just then starting to become the axis of the cartels further south.

 

And what he also didn’t know, until too late, was that Juana, getting some kind of information from some well-connected source in the states, had fled to Mexico, first Mexico City where he had met her to make connections further south, and then back to her hometown of Sonora he heard later. So when the deal in Cuernavaca went sour, after he learned at the almost the last minute that the deal was “fixed,” he headed Norte on the first bus, first to Mexico City and then to El Paso. And there he was, now alighting from that yellow green bus, ready to walk into that fresh soap. As he got off he though he staggered for a minute, staggered in some kind of fog, as he “smelled,” smelled, that rose fragrance something in the air. He said to himself, yah, I guess it's still like that with Juana. If you read this and are down Sonora way and see her tell her Fritz said hello.

Sitting On The Rim Of The World- With The Son Of The Neon Wilderness Nelson Algren In Mind-Take Four

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

He, Nelson Algren, the poet-king of the midnight police line-up, night court shuffle, drug-infested jack-roller, dope-peddler, illicit crap game back alleys, Chicago-style, what did Carl Sandburg the old dusty poet call Chi, oh yeah, hog-butcher and steel-driver of the world, wrote of small-voiced people, mostly people who had started out in the world with small voices, small voices which never got louder. (Except that junkie wail when deep in the “cold turkey” fits, except that drunk dark tavern cheap low-shelf rye whiskey shrieking in the early morning high moon, except that stealthy jack-roller cry of delight once his victim wears that spot of blood on the back of his neck like some red badge of sap-dom, except that scream when some he-man decides that for a minute he would gain a big voice and smack his woman a few times to straighten her out, except that holler when some john decided to bust up his paid-up junkie whore just because he could, except, oh, hell, enough of exceptions in the neon-blazing small voice night.) 

Yeah, Nelson had it right, had that ear for the low moan, the silence in the face of ugly Division Street tenements not fit for the hogs much less the hog-butchers, had the ear for the dazed guys spilling their pitter-patter to Captain just like back in home sweet Mississippi, Georgia, wherever, had the ear for the, what did Jack Kerouac called them, yes, the fellahin, the lump mass peasants, except now they are hell-bound bunched up together on the urban spit, small voices never heard over the rumble of the subway, working stiffs (stinking hog-butchers, sweated steel-driving men, grease-stained tractor-builders, frayed-collared night clerks in some seedy flop, porters sweeper out Mister’s leaving from his executive bathroom, and their women (cold-water flat housewives, cheap Jimmy Jack’s Diner waitresses pencil in ear and steam-tray sweated too tight faded white uniform hustling for nickels and dimes, beaten down shoe factory workers work men did not do, working donut shops filling donuts to feed the tribe, the younger ones hitting Benny’s Tavern for a few quick ones and maybe a quick roll in the hay if some guy pays the freight, older woman doing tricks for extra no tell husband cash, for a fix if she is on the quiet jones), sometimes their kids (already street-wise watching older brothers working back alley jack-rolls, cons, hanging in front of Harry’s Variety doing, well, just doing until the midnight sifter time rolls around), their kids growing up like weeds, who turned out to be disappointments.

But who could expect more from the progeny of small-voiced people, guys who sat around gin mills all night (maybe all day too I knew a few who inhabited the Dublin Grille in my old hometown of Carver, a smaller version of Chi town, another town filled with small-voice people, just fewer, small tenements, cold-water flats, same seedy places not fit to hang in, genteel people hang in).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

I remember reading somewhere, and I have forgotten where now, that someone had noted that Nelson Algren’s writing on Dove Linkhorn’s roots was the most evocative piece on the meaning of the okie–arkie out migration segment of that mid-century America ever written, the tale of the wandering boys, the railroad riders, the jungle camp jumpers, the skid row derelicts. Hell, call it by its right name, the white trash, that lumpen mush. And he or she was right, of course, after I went back and re-read that first section of Walk On The Wild Side where the Linkhorn genealogy back unto the transport ships that brought the first crop of that ilk from thrown out Europe are explored. All the pig thieves, cattle-rustlers, poachers, highwaymen, the -what did some sociologist call them?, oh yeah, “the master-less men,” those who could not or would not be tamed by the on-rushing wheels of free-form capitalism as the system relentlessly picked up steam, the whole damn lot transported. And good riddance.

The population of California after World War II was filled to the brim with such types, the feckless “hot rod” boys, boys mostly too young to have been though the bloodbaths of Europe and Asia building some powerful road machines out of baling wire and not much else, speeding up and down those ocean-flecked highways looking for the heart of Saturday night, looking for kicks just like those Chicago free-flow junkies, those twisted New Orleans whoremasters. Wandering hells angels riding two by two (four by four if they felt like it and who was to stop them) creating havoc for the good citizens of those small towns they descended on, descended on unannounced (and unwelcomed by those same good citizens). In and out of jail, Q, Folsom, not for stealing pigs now, but armed robberies or some egregious felony, but kindred to those lost boys kicked out of Europe long ago. Corner boys, tee-shirted, black leather jacket against cold nights, hanging out with time on their hands and permanent smirks, permanent hurts, permanent hatreds, paid to that Algren observation. All the kindred of the cutthroat world, or better “cut your throat” world, that Dove drifted into was just a microcosm of that small-voiced world.

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

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

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

Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- We Want The World And We Want It Now 

 

 

Sam Lowell comment September 2014:

 

A while back, maybe a half a decade ago now, I started a series in this space that I presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By where I posted some songs, you know, The Internationale (reflecting the long-time need for international brother and sister solidarity sorely lacking these days), Which Side Are You On? (yeah, which side are you on when the deal goes down and you can’t hide and have to say yeah or nay), Viva La Quince Brigada (in homage to the heroic “pre-mature” anti-fascists from the United States who fought for the Republican side in the 1930s Spanish Civil War), Solidarity Forever(reflecting the desperate need to organize the  organized and reorganize the previously organized into unions) and others like Deportee ( in serious need of hearing these days where it is a toss-up between resident minorities here and the undocumented for who has gotten the rawest deal), Where Have All The Flowers Gone (reflecting the need to keep the fight for nuclear disarmament on the front burner with international tensions now approaching the Cold War of my youth levels), Blowin’ In The Wind (reflecting, well, reflecting that the new breeze a-borning for new generations has not happened), This Land Is Your Land (reflecting that this land is your land, that you or your forbears created the wealth, your land if you have the chutzpah to grab it back) while not as directly political had their hearts in the right place, that I thought would help get us through the “dog days” of the struggle for our socialist future.

Those “dog days” in America anyway, depending on what leftist political perspective drove your red-bannered, seek a newer world, turn the world upside down heart     imagination then or drives it now looking back in retrospect could have gone straight back as far as the late 1960s and early 1970s when all things were possible and the smell of revolution could be whiffed in the air for a while before we were defeated. Many have put their particular brand on when the whole thing ebbed, fell down of its own hubris but all agree from my inquiries no later than say 1975. I personally, having been on the streets of Washington that week, date the ebb from May Day 1971 when we attempted to shut down with numerically and politically inadequate forces the government if it did not shut down the war, the Vietnam War for those who need a name to their wars, and got nothing but teargas, police batons, and agonizingly huge numbers of arrests for our troubles.

Oh yeah and forty plus years of the short end of the stick of “cultural wars” still beating us down. Some have worked the defeats the other way not from the ebb of our experiments but the from high tide of reaction thinking of later when we all abandoned hope for the least bit of social justice in the lean, vicious, downtrodden Reagan years of unblessed memory or later still around the time of the great world- historic defeats of the international working class in East Europe and the former Soviet Union which left us with an unmatched arrogant unipolar imperialist world. That one pole being the United States, the “heart of the beast” the beast which we work within these days. Whatever your personal benchmark they were nevertheless if you had the least bit of political savvy clearly dog days.        

I began posting these songs at a time, 2009, when it was touch and go whether there would be some kind of massive uprising against the economic royalists who blew the economy, the freaking world economy, all to kingdom    come, who had just dealt the world a blow to the head through their economic machinations in what is now called the Great Recession of 2008 (those “royalists” later chastised under the popular sobriquet “the one-percent” come flash-in-the-pan Occupy movement that held out a flicker of hope before it died on the vine). Subsequently, while there were momentary uprisings, the Arab Spring which got its start in Tunisia and Egypt and enflamed most of the Middle East one way or another, here in America the defensive uprising of the public workers in Wisconsin and later as I said the quick-moving although ephemeral Occupy movement, and the uprisings in Greek, Spain and elsewhere in Europe in response to the “belt-tightening" demanded by international financial institutions to name a few, the response from the American and world working classes has for lots of reasons if anything further entrenched those interests.

So as the “dog days” continue here in 2014 I have resumed the series. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs selected; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, an old-time communist (you know guys like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson) although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground (and one would be truly hard-pressed to name one musical one today in America unless they are hiding somewhere). Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this kind of formation would mean political death for any serious revolutionary upheaval and would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

I like to invite others to make additional comments on certain pivotal songs, groups and artists and here is one by my old friend Josh Breslin, whom I met out in California during the heyday of the summer of love 1967, that reflects those many possibilities to “turn the world upside down” back in the 1960s and early 1970s mentioned earlier before the “night of the long knives” set in. Listen up:

WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW!

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

My old friend from the summer of love 1967 days, the late Peter Paul Markin always used to make a point then of answering, or rather arguing which tells a lot about the kind of guy he was when he got his political hind legs up with anybody who tried to tell him back in the day that “music is the revolution.” Markin whom I met along with Sam Lowell when I first arrived out in California, out on a nameless hill, or if it had a name in that hilly San Francisco night I never found out what it was, looking for some dope or a place to stay in that order was the most political guy I had ever met then (maybe ever) and I had known some guys who helped form SDS back East in so I knew some “heavies.” Strangely when I first met him in San Francisco that summer you would have been hard-pressed to tell him, under the influence of dope, the new acid rock musical dispensation, and the flowering of new liestyle  that had not been the case but after a few hits on the head by the coppers, a tour of duty in the military at the height of the Vietnam War, and what was happening to other political types trying to change the world for the better like the Black Panthers he got “religion,” or at least he got that music as the agency of social change idea out of his head.  Me, well, I was (and am not) as political as Markin had been so that I never got drowned in the counter-culture where music was a central cementing act. Nor did I have anything that happened to me subsequently that would have given me Markin’s epiphany, particularly that Army stint that gave him “religion” on the questions of war and peace but which I think, given his later fate, left something hollow inside him since I had been declared 4-F (unfit for military service) due to a childhood physical injury that had left one arm withered. (He is now buried in a nameless grave in a potter’s field down in Sonora, Mexico after he was found on a dusty back road with two slugs in him after what we had heard was some busted cocaine deal in either 1976 or 1977, probably the summer of the former from what a private detective hired by one of our friends to go down and find out what happened told him from the shaky information he had received down there from a guy, a doper, who claimed to know Markin.)  

I would listen half-attentively (a condition aided by being “stoned,” all doped up or in thrall to some ephemeral woman a lot of the time) when such conversations erupted and Markin with through his position for a candid world to hear (candid, his word). That position meaning, of course that contrary to the proponents, including many mutual friends of his, and ours, who acted out on that very idea and got burned by the flame, some dropping out, some going back to academia, some left by the wayside and who are maybe still wandering out in the Muir Woods, by some Big Sur tidal pool or, god forbid, out in rain-soaked Oregon) that eight or ten Give Peace A Chance, Kumbaya, Woodstock or even acid-etched Someone To Love songs would not do the trick, would not change this nasty, brutish, old short-lived world into the garden, into some pre-lapsarian Eden. (We all called it “looking for the garden” in short-hand meaning the lost Garden of Eden which we were hung up on seeking, and not always in our dope-flamed moments either.) Meaning that the gathering of youth nation unto itself out in places like million butterfly Woodstock, flying kites Golden Gate Park, pop bop Monterrey, hell, the Boston Common went things headed east, or even once word trickled down the way the word has always trickled down to the sticks once the next new thing gets a workout, Olde Saco Park, in the town up in Maine where I grew up would not feed on itself and grow to such a critical mass that the quite nameable enemies of goodness, kindness starting with one Lyndon Johnson and one Richard M. Nixon and working down to the go-fers and hangers-on, and leave us alone would sulk off somewhere, defeated or at least defanged.

Many a night, many a dope-blistered night before some seawall ocean front Pacific Coast campfire I would listen to Markin blast forth against that stuff, against that silliness. As for me, I was too “into the moment,” too into finding weed, hemp, mary jane and too into finding some fetching women to share it with to get caught up in some nebulous ideological struggle. It was only later, after the music died, after rock and roll turned in on itself, turned into some exotic fad of the exiles on Main Street that I began to think through the implications of what Markin, and the guys on the other side too, were arguing about.

Now, belated now, it makes perfect sense that music, or any mere cultural expression standing alone, would be unable to carry enough weight to turn us back to the garden (I won’t use that “pre-lapsarian" again to avoid showing my, and Markin’s, high Roman Catholic up-bringing and muddy what I want to say which is quite secular). I guess that I would err on the side of the “angels” and at least wish that we could have carried the day against the monsters of the American imperium we confronted back in the day. Although like I said I had a draft deferment due to a serious physical condition, not helped by the “street” dope I was consuming by the way, I supported, and sometimes vehemently and with some sense of organization, a lot of the political stuff Markin was knee deep into, especially the Black Panther defense when we lived in Oakland after he got out of the Army and all hell was raining down on the brothers and sisters.                  

Thinking about what a big deal was made of such arguments back then recently in preparing my remarks for this effort (arguments carried deep into the night, deep in smoke dream nights, and sometimes as the blue–pink dawn came rising up to smite our dreams) I thought back to my own musical appreciations. In my jaded youth (if one could be jaded in Podunk Olde Saco, although more than one parent and more than one teacher called me “beatnik” back then whatever that meant to them) I developed an ear for roots music, whether I was conscious of that fact or not. Perhaps it was some off-shoot DNA thing since my people on my mother’s side (nee LeBlanc) were French-Canadian which had a deep folk heritage both up north and in Maine although such music was not played in the house, a house like a lot of other ethnics where in the 1950s everybody wanted to be vanilla American (Markin had mentioned to me that same thing about his Irish-etched parents). So it initially started as a reaction to my parents’ music, the music that got them through the Great Depression of the 1930s and later waiting for other shoe to drop (either in Normandy where my father first went to Europe under some very trying conditions or at home waiting in Olde Saco like my mother), and that became a habit, a wafting through the radio of my childhood home habit.

You know who I mean Frank (Sinatra for the heathens), Harry James, the Andrews Sisters, Peggy Lee, Doris Day and the like. Or, maybe, and this is something that I have come closer to believing was the catalyst along with the DNA stuff I already mentioned, my father’s very real roots in the Saturday night mountain barn dance, fiddles blazing, music of his growing up poor down in Appalachia. (Again such music except every once in a while Hank Williams who I didn’t know about at the time was not played in the house either. Too “square” I guess.) 

The origin of my immersion into roots music first centered on the blues, country and city with the likes of Son House(and that raspy, boozy country voice on Death Letter Blues), Skip James ( I went nuts over that voice first heard after he had been “discovered” at the Newport Folk Festival I think in 1963 when he sang I’d Rather Be The Devil Than Be That Woman’s Man on the radio after I had just broken up with some devil woman, read girl and later caught hell, including recently, from later women companions when I mentioned the idea in a heated love argument), Mississippi John Hurt (that clear guitar, simple lyrics on Creole Belle and that sly salacious run through Candy Man), Muddy Waters (yes, Mannish-Boy and those manly appetites off-stage), Howlin’ Wolf ( I again went nuts when I heard his righteous Little Red Rooster  although I had heard the Stones version first, a version originally banned on Boston radio if you can believe that ) and Elmore James ( his Dust My Broom version of the old Robert Johnson tune I used to argue was the “beginning” of rock and roll to anybody who would listen but that later proved to be only marginally true even to me once I heard Ike Turner’s Rocket 88).

Then early rock and roll, you know the rockabillies and R&B crowd, Elvis (stuff like One Night With You, Jailhouse Rock and the like before he died in about 1958 or whatever happened to him when he started making stupid movies that mocked his great talent making him look foolish and which various girlfriends of the time forced me to go see at the old Majestic Theater in downtown Olde Saco), Jerry Lee (his High School Confidential, the film song, with him flailing away at the piano in the back of a flat-bed truck blew me away  although the film was a bust, as was the girl I saw it with), Chuck (yeah, when he declared to a candid  world that while we all gave due homage to classical music in school Mister Beethoven and his brethren better move on over with Roll Over Beethoven), Roy (Roy the boy with that big falsetto voice crooning out Running Scared, whoa), Big Joe (and that Shake, Rattle and Roll which I at one point also argued was the “beginning” of rock and roll, okay, I liked to argue those fine points)   and Ike Turner (who I ultimately settled on with his Rocket 88 as that mythical beginning of rock and roll).

Then later, with the folk revival of the early 1960’s, the folk music minute before the British invasion took a lot of the air out of that kind of music, especially the protest to high heaven sort, Bob Dylan (even a so-so political guy like me, maybe less than so-so then before all hell broke loose and we had to choose sides loved Blowin’ in the Wind), Dave Von Ronk (and that raspy old voice, although he was not that old then sing Fair And Tender Ladies  one of the first folk songs I remember hearing) Joan Baez (and that long ironed-hair singing that big soprano on those Child ballads), etc.

I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Meaning rootless or not meaningfully or consciously rooted in any of the niches mentioned above. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. Cajun, Tex-Mex, old time dust bowl ballads a la Woody Guthrie, cowboy stuff with the likes of Bob Wills and Milton Brown, Carter Family-etched mountain music (paying final conscious tribute to the mountain DNA in my bones) and so on.

All those genres are easily classified as roots music but I recall one time driving Markin crazy, driving him to closet me with the “music is the revolution” heads he fretfully argued against when I mentioned in passing that The Doors, then in their high holy mantra shamanic phase with The End and When The Music’s Over epitomized roots music. That hurt me to the quick, a momentary hurt then, but thinking about it more recently Markin had been  totally off base in his remarks.

The Doors are roots music? Well, yes, in the sense that one of the branches of rock and roll derived from early rhythm and blues and in the special case of Jim Morrison, leader of The Doors, the attempt to musically explore the shamanic elements in the Western American Native- American culture that drove the beat of many of his trance-like songs like The End. Add in heavy doses of peyotes or some other herbals known to produce that very effect and you have a pretty good case for what the group was trying to do out on those whirling dervish stages. More than one rock critic, professional rock critic, has argued that on their good nights when the dope and booze were flowing, Morrison was in high trance, and they were fired up The Doors were the best rock and roll band ever created. Those critics will get no argument here, and it is not a far stretch to go further and classify their efforts on those night as in the great American roots tradition.  I argued then and will argue here almost fifty years later when that original statement of mine was more prophetic The Doors put together all the stuff rock critics in one hundred years will be dusting off when they want to examine what it was like when men (and women, think Bonnie Raitt, Wanda Jackson, et. al) played rock and roll, played the people’s music, played to respond to a deep-seeded need of the people before them to hear such sounds, for keeps.

So where does Jim Morrison fit in an icon of the 1960s if he was not some new age latter day cultural Lenin/Trotsky. Some icon that Markin could have latched onto.  Jim was part of the trinity, the “J” trinity for the superstitious – Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix who lived fast, lived way too fast, and died young, way too young. The slogan of the day (or hour) – “Drugs, sex, and rock and roll.” And we liked that idea however you wanted to mix it up. Then.

Their deaths were part of the price we felt we had to pay if we were going to be free. And be creative. Even the most political among us, including Markin in his higher moments (you figure out what that “higher,” means since you are bright people) felt those cultural winds blowing across the continent and counted those who espoused this alternative vision as part of the chosen whatever he thought of their political perspective. The righteous headed to the “promise land,” yeah, back to the garden.  Unfortunately those who believed that we could have a far-reaching positive cultural change via music or “dropping out” without a huge societal political change proved to be wrong long ago. But, these were still our people.

Know this as well if you are keeping score. Whatever excesses were committed by our generation and there were many, many made some by sheer ignorance, some by willfully refusing to draw the lessons of the past and re-inventing the wheel yet again, by the generation that came of political and cultural age in the early 1960s, the generation I call the generation of ’68 to signify its important and decisive year internationally, but were mainly made out of inexperience and a foolish naiveté.  Our opponents, exemplified by outlaw big cowboy red neck President Lyndon B. Johnson and one weaseling Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal, and their minions like J. Edgar Hoover (a truly demonic figure and treated like a rattlesnake even by people who liked him, or kowtowed to him), Mayor Richard Daley (evil, pure evil in a business suit and a serious representative of what old-timey poet Carl Sandburg called his city, Chicago, hog-butcher to the world   ne) and Hubert Humphrey ( insidious because he was such a toothless hack sucking up to whoever was in front of him when he had his poor boy wanting habits on but on that  joyous face it took longer to see he was evil as the rest)  spent every day of their lives as a matter of conscious, deliberate policy raining hell down on the peoples of the world, the minorities in this country, and anyone else who got in their way. Forty plus years of “cultural wars” in revenge by their protégés, hangers-on and now their descendants has been a heavy price to pay for our youthful errors. And the sorely missed and mourned late Markin would surely have endorsed this sentiment. Enough.