From The A Dimmed Elegy For The Late Peter Paul Markin Series- Bowling Alone In America?- For Chrissie M., Class Of 1967

 

 

A New Introduction From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 

A while back, a few months ago although the project had been percolating in his brain for the previous year or so after an incident reminded him how much he missed his old corner boy from the 1960s North Adamsville night, the late Peter Paul Markin, Bart Webber wrote up what he called, and rightly so I think, an elegy for him, A Dimmed Elegy For The Late Peter Paul Markin. That reminder had been triggered one night the year before when Bart took the visiting grandchildren of his son Lenny who now lived in New Haven, Connecticut and worked at Yale to Salducci’s ’ Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” in North Adamsville for some pizza and soda (that “up the Downs” not some quirky thing Bart made up but the actual name of the shopping area known by  that name to one and all not far from the high school although nobody ever knew exactly how it got that moniker). Of course that Salducci’s Pizza Parlor had been the local corner boy hang-out for Bart, Frankie Riley, Jimmy Jenkins, Johnny Callahan, Fran Rizzo, Markin, me and a roving cast of sometime corner boys depending on who we picked up (or who had ditched or been ditched by some faithless girl and thus had time to hang rather than spent endless hours prepping for dates, or going through “the work-out” down at Adamsville Beach in some car) before Tonio who treated Frankie Riley like a son sold the place to moved back to Italy and the new owners did not see “no account” (their description) corner boys as an asset to their family-friendly pizza dreams. The corner boys subsequently “hung” at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys, the ones on Thornton Street near the beach not the ones in Adamsville Center which was strictly for people who actually bowled, liked to anyway although that latter information is strictly on the side since what got Bart Webber in a lather was from Salducci times.

Although Bart had not been in the place in years and it had changed hands several times since Tonio ran the place back in the early 1960 the décor, the pizza processing area complete with what looked like the same pizza ovens and most importantly the jukebox, the jukebox, man, were still intact (that jukebox selections composed of many “oldies but goodies” from that time not found on nostalgia compilations for the local clientele who bring their kids and grandkids in for pizza and soda, what else, although not three for a quarter like in the old days but a quarter a pop). That night a young guy, a high school kid really, was sitting with three guys and a couple of girls all also with the look of high school about them, was if not loudly then animatedly talking a mile a minute complete with about one thousand arcane facts to back him up about “a new breeze coming through the land,” about how he, they were going to save the planet, stop the wars, make the world a decent place to live in by people like him, them who had not made the mess but who had a chance now to clean things up (he, the kid didn’t say that “new breeze” thing but that is what he meant, meant in all sincerity). Like Markin he went on for the time that Bart and his grand-kids entered until they left (and he still might be taking if he was really the ghost of Markin). And of course that talk, that mile a minute talk complete with those ersatz facts reminded Bart of the night (make that nights) when Markin held forth about the “new breeze coming” (his actual term) based on the iceberg tip of events like the fight for nuclear disarmament, the fight for black civil rights down south, the fight against the big bad brewing war happening in Southeast Asia, and the first trappings of the counter-culture with the shift-up in music to a disbelieving group of fellow corner boys who were just trying finish high school without winding up in jail for the midnight capers they pulled off to keep themselves in dough(engineered by that same Markin and pulled off by Frankie Riley’s magic). Yeah, so as the kids today say Bart was “stoked” to do something to bring back Markin’s memory, warts and all.                 

Bart had thereafter approached me about doing the chore, about writing some big book memory thing  since we now live in the same town, the same suburban town which represents a small step up from our growing up in strictly working-class North Adamsville (and still is), Carver about thirty miles south of that town (and a town which had its own working-class history with its seasonal “boggers” who worked the cranberry bogs which originally made the town famous but is now a bedroom community for the high-tech firms on U.S. 495). Bart figured that since he had retired from the day to day operations of his print shop which was now being run by his oldest son, Jeff, and I was winding down my part in the law practice I had established long ago I would have plenty of time to write and he to “edit” and give suggestions. He said he was not a writer although he had plenty of ideas to contribute but that I who had spent a life-time writing as part of my job would have an easy time of it. Bart under the illusion that writing dry as dust legal briefs for some equally dry as dust judge to read is the same as nailing down a righteous piece about an old time corner boy mad man relic of a by-gone era, with his mad talk, his mad dreams, his mad visions, who was as crooked as they come, who was as righteously for the “little guy” as a man could be, who had some Zen under the gun magic which made our nights easier and who I would not trust (and did not have to trust since we had the truly larcenous Frankie Riley to lead the way) to open a door sainted bastard. I turned him down flat which I will explain in a moment.

The way Bart presented that proposal deserves a little mention since he made the case one night when the remnant of Markin’s old comrades still alive and who still reside in the area, Frankie, Josh, Jack Callahan, Jimmy Jenkins, Bart and me were drinking now affordable high-shelf liquors at “Jack’s” in Cambridge near where Jimmy lives (that high-shelf liquor distinction important for old corner boys who survived and moved upa peg in the world who drank cheap Southern Comfort by the fistful pints and later rotgut maybe just processed whiskies from the very low-shelves). During the conversation, not for the first time, Bart mentioned that he was still haunted by the thought  he had had a few years before about the time that Markin had us in thrall one night out in Joshua Tree in 1972 when we were all high as kites on various drugs of choices and he, Markin, at first alone, and then with Josh began some strange Apache-like dance and they began to feel (at least according to Josh’s recollection) like those ancient warriors who tried to avenge their loses when white settlers had come to take their lands and we all for one moment that long ago night were able to sense what it was like to be warrior-avengers, righters of the world’s wrongs that Markin was always harping on. Markin had that effect on the rest of us, was always tweaking us on some idea from small scale larcenies to drug-induced flame-outs. Yeah, that miserable, beautiful, so crooked he could not get his legs in his pants, son of a bitch, sainted bastard still is missed, still has guys from the old days moaning to high heaven about that lost. Bart insisted there was a story there, a story if only for us and someone (all eyes on me) should write it up.             

I can say all of that and say at the same time that I can say I couldn’t write the piece. See while at times Markin was like a brother to me and we treated each other as such he also could have his “pure evil” moments which the other corner boys either didn’t see, or didn’t want to see. These may be small things now on reflection but he was the guy who almost got me locked up one night, one summer night in 1966 before our senior year when Frankie who usually was the “on-site” manager of our small larcenies was out of town with his girlfriend. Markin figured since he was the “brains” behind the various capers that he could do one on his own but he needed a look-out, me. The caper involved a small heist of a home in the Mayfair swells part of North Adamsville whose owners were “summering” somewhere in the Caribbean. Markin had “cased” or thought he had cased the place fully except he didn’t factor in that the owners had a house-sitter during that time, some college girl doing the task for a place to stay near Boston that summer from what we figured later. Markin startled her as he entered a side door, she screamed, Markin panicked, as she headed for the telephone to call the police and he fled out the door. But see Markin came running out that door toward me just when the cops were coming down the street in their squad car directly toward us where we met up. They stopped us, told to get in the car and headed back to that Mayfair house. As it turned out the house-sitter couldn’t identify either of us, couldn’t identify Markin and the cops had to let us go. No question Markin panicked and no question he made a serious mistake by heading my way knowing what he knew had happened with the sitter and her response to the invasion. I had, and have always had, the sneaking suspicion that he might have rolled me over as the B&E guy if it had been possible. I have a few other stories like that as well but that gives you a better insight into what Markin could turn into when cornered.

A couple of other incidents involved women, one my sister, the other an old flame or rather someone I wanted to be my flame. One of the reasons that I, unlike Markin who did serve in Vietnam which I think kind of turned him over the edge to the “dark side” once his dream about a “newer world” as he called it started to evaporate in the early 1970s, did not do military duty since I was the sole support, working almost full time after school during high school, of my mother and four very younger sisters after my old-fashioned Irish drunken half-dead-beat father died of a massive heart attack in 1965. My oldest sister, Clara, only thirteen at the time while we were in high school, was smitten by Markin from early on and I could see that he was willing to take advantage of her naiveté as well although I warned him off more than once. Now I could never prove it, and Clara would not say word one about it to me, but I believe he took her virginity from her. I do know during that period I found a carton of Trojans, you know “rubbers,” in her bureau drawer when I was looking for something I thought she had of mine and she was not around to ask. I didn’t confront him directly since among corner boys such things would have been “square” to discuss even about sisters but I continued to keep warning him off like I didn’t know anything had happened and before long I saw Clara had taken up with a boy her own age so I let it drop.

Clara, now a professor at a New York college and with a great husband and three great kids, a bright young woman with great promise even then except around Markin who had some spell on her, had that spell on her even later when she had a boyfriend her own age and would come into Salducci’s trying to make him jealous from the way she acted, cried to high heaven when I told her the news of his fate. Although I left out the more gruesome parts about the where and how   of his demise since I knew that would upset her more. Even recently after all these years when I told her of Bart’s piece she welled up.  I tried to ask her exactly what hold he had over her after all these years just to see if there was something I had missed about my own feelings about the man after all these years but all she said was that he was her “first love” and more cryptically that he was the first male whom she would have been willing to abandon everything for at the time, including her reputation as a good Catholic girl with the novena book in one hand and rosary beads in the other the way we put such things back then. Clara too said too something about those two million facts he had stored in his head and how he swooped her up with them, that and the look in his fierce blue eyes when he was spouting forth. Jesus, that bastard Markin had something going, some monstrous Zen-like hold when his contemporaries are still moaning to high heaven of him, moaning over something good he represented in his sunnier days when he carried us over more than a few rough spots)    

The flame thing involved Laura Perkins who I was “hot” for from the ninth grade on and who I had several dates with in the tenth grade and it looked like things were going well when she threw me over for Markin. Now that situation has happened eight million times in life but corner boys were supposed to keep “hands off” of other corner boys’ girls although I was not naïve enough to believe that was honored more in the breech than the observance having done a couple of end-around maneuvers myself but this Laura thing strained our relationship for a while. Here is the funny part though after a few weeks she threw Markin over for the captain of the football team (she was a cheerleader as well as bright student, school newspaper writer, on the dance committee and a bunch of other resume-building things) who we all hated. Funnier still at our fortieth reunion a few years back Laura and I got back together (after her two marriages and my two marriages had flamed out something we laughed about at the time of the reunion) and we have been an “item” ever since. But you can see where I would, unlike say Bart, have a hard time not letting those things I just mentioned get in my way of writing something objective about that bastard saint.                   

So Bart wrote the piece himself, wrote the “dimmed” elegy (the “dimmed” being something I suggested as part of the title) and did a great job for a guy who said he couldn’t write. Frankly any other kind of elegy but dimmed would fail to truly honor that bastard saint madman who kept us going in that big night called the early 1960s and drove us mad at the same time with his larcenous schemes and over-the-top half-baked brain storm ideas and endless recital of the eight billion facts he kept in his twisted brain (estimates vary on the exact number but I am using the big bang number to cover my ass, as he would). I need not go into all of the particulars of Bart’s piece except to say that the consensus among the still surviving corner boys was that Bart was spot on, caught all of Markin’s terrible contradictions pretty well. Contradiction that led him from the bright but brittle star of the Jack Slack’s bowling alleys corner boy back then to a bad end, a mucho mal end murdered down in Sonora, Mexico in 1976 or 1977 when some drug deal (involving several kilos of cocaine) he was brokering to help feed what Josh said was a serious “nose candy” habit went sour for reasons despite some investigation by Frankie Riley, myself and a private detective Frankie hired were never made clear. The private detective, not some cinema Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, but a good investigator from his scanty report was warned off the trail by everybody from the do-nothing Federales to the U.S. State Department consular officer in Sonora, and warned off very indirectly both down there and in Boston not to pursue the thing further, the implication being or else. What was clear was that he was found face down on some dusty back road of that town with two slugs in his head and is buried in the town’s forlorn potter’s field in some unmarked grave. That is about all we know for sure about his fate and that is all that is needed to be mentioned here.

That foul end might have been the end of it, might have been the end of the small legend of Markin. Even he would in his candid moments accept that “small” designation. Yes, been the end of the legend except the moaning to high heaven every time his name comes up. Except this too. Part of Bart’s elegy referenced the fact that in Markin’s sunnier days before the nose candy got the best of him, brought out those formerly under control outrageous “wanting habits,” in the early 1970s when he was still holding onto that “newer world” dream that he (and many others, including me and Bart for varying periods) did a series of articles about the old days and his old corner boys in North Adamsville. Markin before we lost contact, or rather I lost contact with him since Josh Breslin his friend from Maine (and eventually our friend as well whom we consider an honorary Jack Slack’s corner boy) met out in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, 1967 knew his whereabouts outside of San Francisco in Daly City until about 1974 wrote some pretty good stuff, stuff up for awards, and short-listed for the Globe prize.

Pushed on by Bart’s desire to tell Markin’s story as best he could who must have been driven by some fierce ghost of Markin over his shoulder to do such yeoman’s work, he, Frankie (as you know our corner boy leader back then who had Markin as his scribe and who coined the moniker “the Scribe” for him that we used to bait or honor him depending on circumstances and now is a big time lawyer in Boston), Josh, and I agreed that a few of the articles were worth publishing if only for ourselves and the small circle of people whom Markin wrote for and about. (Markin’s oldest friend from back in third grade, Allan Johnson, who would have had plenty to say about the early days had passed away  after a long-term losing fight with cancer before this plan was hatched, RIP, brother.) So that is exactly what we did. We had a commemorative small book of articles and any old time photographs we could gather put together and had it printed up in the print shop that Bart’s oldest son, Jeff, is now running for him since his retirement from the day to day operations last year.

Since not all of us had everything that Markin wrote, as Bart said in his piece, what the hell they were newspaper or magazine articles to be used to wrap up the fish in or something after we were done reading them, we decided to print what was available. Bart was able to find copies of a bunch of sketches up in the attic of his parents’ home which he was cleaning up for them when they were putting their house up for sale since they were in the process of downsizing. Josh, apparently not using his copies for wrapping fish purposes, had plenty of the later magazine pieces. I had a few things, later things from when we went on the quest for the blue-pink Great American West hitchhike road night as Markin called it. Unfortunately, we could not find any copies of the long defunct East Bay Eye and so could not include anything from the important Going To The Jungle series about some of his fellow Vietnam veterans who could not adjust to the “real” world coming back from ‘Nam and wound up in the arroyos, canyons, railroad sidings and under the bridges of Southern California. He was their voice on that one then, if silent now when those aging vets desperately a voice.  So Markin can speak to us still. Yeah, like Bart said, that’s about right for that sorry ass blessed bastard saint with his eight billion words.  

Below is the short introduction that I wrote for that book which we all agreed should be put in here trying to put what Markin was about in content from a guy who knew him about as well as anybody from the old neighborhood, knew his dark side back like I mentioned  then and when that side came out later too:  

“The late Peter Paul Markin, also known as “the Scribe, ” so anointed by Frankie Riley the unchallenged self-designated king hell king of the schoolboy night among the corner boys who hung around the pizza parlors, pool halls, and bowling alleys of the town, in telling somebody else’s story in his own voice about life in the old days in the working class neighborhoods of North Adamsville where he grew up, or when others, threating murder and mayhem,  wanted him to tell their stories usually gave each and every one of that crew enough rope to hang themselves without additional comment. He would take down, just like he would do later with the hard-pressed Vietnam veterans trying to do the best they could out in the arroyos, crevices, railroad sidings and under the bridges when they couldn’t deal with the “real” world after Vietnam in the Going To The Jungle series that won a couple of awards and was short-listed for the Globe award, what they wanted the world to hear, spilled their guts out as he one time uncharitably termed their actions. Not the veterans, not his fellows who had their troubles down in L.A. and needed to righteously get it out and he was the conduit, their voice, but the zanies from our old town, and then lightly, very lightly if the guy was bigger, stronger than him, or in the case of girls if they were foxy, and mainly just clean up the language for a candid world to read.

Yeah Markin would bring out what they, we, couldn’t say, maybe didn’t want to say. That talent was what had made the stories he wrote about the now very old days growing up in North Adamsville in the 1960s when “the rose was on the bloom” as my fellow lawyer Frankie Riley used to say when Markin was ready to spout his stuff so interesting. Ready to make us laugh, cringe, get red in the face or head toward him to slap him down, to menace him, if he got too ungodly righteous. Here is the funny part though. In all the stories he mainly gave his “boys” the best of it. Yes, Bart is still belly-aching about a few slights, about his lack of social graces then that old Markin threw his way, and maybe he was a little off on the reasons why I gave up the hitchhike highway blue-pink Great American West night quest that he was pursuing (what he called sneeringly my getting “off the bus” which even he admitted was not for everyone) but mainly that crazy maniac with the heart of gold, the heart of lead, the heart that should have had a stake placed in its center long ago, that, ah, that’s enough I have said enough except I like Bart still miss and mourn the bastard.”

Here is something Markin wrote about bowling, Jesus about bowling which none of us gave a damn about, and could care have cared less about. Except of course in senior year after we were unceremoniously dumped from in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor by the new owners after Tonio left to go back to Italy (actually the police told us in no uncertain terms to “get lost” or get jail which they would not have minded in the least since while they never had anything concrete on us they “suspected” us of many of the unsolved larcenies and breaking and enterings in the nighttime from that time) and we found a new spot down at Jack Slack’s bowling alley on Thornton Street near the beach. Except of course on dough-less, girl-less, car-less weekend nights when Jack’s son, Ricky, a classmate of ours was on duty and would let us bowl for free (including furnishing a pair of wrong-sized smelly bowling shoes to work our way down the lanes) which got us some play from the clots of girls bowling boy-less which was a whole other matter. Except of course that Markin could have given a rat’s ass about the supposed “injury” done to boys and girls who had had to by some arcane school rule had to bowl separately and not as mixed teams since he had bigger fish to fry like world peace, the brotherhood of man (now just say “the oneness of humankind,” okay), and the absolute down and dirty fight against every kind of oppression. Except of course that “inequality” boo who business was just a screen to pursue Chrissie. And don’t let anybody kid you otherwise even though he used Jimmy Jenkins name as stodge to fill in for him since who knows when he wrote it in the early 1970s he might have still been holding the torch for her. Hell half the guys in the class, including me, were ready to bowl until eternity for one sweet ruby-red lipped kiss from that young woman.      

Bowling Alone In America?- For Chrissie M., Class Of 1967

 

 

From The Pen Of The Later Peter Paul Markin, Class Of 1964

 

Chrissie, Christine Anne McNamara, bowled. Chrissie McNamara, the “hottest” sweet sixteen quail in 1965 at North Adamsville High School bowled. Oh sure Chrissie did other things, things like cheer-leading for the raider red gridiron goliaths in the brisk, bright, leaf-filled fall with all the guys taking dead aim at her from the stands, including Jimmy Jenkins, and I hear that guys, plenty of guys attended cheer-leader practice held in the corner of the “dust bowl,” the place where they practiced, never heard of previously (oh yeah, and the football team practiced there too but only geeks and water-boys watched that saga). This will give you a flavor of how serious she was about bowling because Chrissie broke many hearts when she did not cheer-lead the basketball team for winter time is primo bowling time in this town, if anybody wants to know. To continue with her resume Chrissie also participated in the school play (had the lead as the ace female reporter in His Girl Friday sophomore year), wrote, get this, under her own by-line a column on current events for The Magnet, the school newspaper, and created quite a stir when she called on her fellow students to support the efforts of black people down South to get the vote when that was a big issue down there (and a cause for many thoughtless racial remarks up North, including in North Adamsville High which had zero, that’s right, zero black students at the time), had a sweet what-you-see-is-what-you get personality (and hopefully still does), and was off-handedly beautiful. Not your drop dead, remote ice queen, who will need plenty of cosmetic help as she frightens away the age lines coming, beautiful but whole package beautiful (looks, personality, intellect) that would have you, hell, had Jimmy Jenkins scratching his head.

 

Had Jimmy, one of my corner boys from around Salducci’s Pizza Parlor and a guy who lived a few blocks from my own shack of a growing up house, one day in school scratching and figuring as he watched her reading something while she was sitting about two rows over from where he was sitting in some dead-ass last period study class where silence was the rule but mostly kids rested their heads on their books and nodded out a little before heading out the goddam door to get to someplace where they could breathe and listen to the latest rock and roll releases. While Jimmy was looking at Chrissie he thought best of all, even if all the scratching and figuring didn’t work out that day, in not too many minutes he would get to go past her house, after he have made sure she was walking in front of him, on the way to his own house, and would probably get a big Chrissie smile as he did so. And maybe a “Hi, Jimmy Bimmy” from her as well. The Jimmy Bimmy thing was from the kids’ stuff back in middle school when the rhyming simon craze went through the school (maybe the country) for a minute and Jimmy didn’t like it, didn’t like it at all. Except from Chrissie it was, well, okay. Yeah, it was like that.

 

Yes, but here was Jimmy problem in a nutshell, the thing he was scratching and figuring out about in that dead-ass last period study class, Chrissie bowled, and if you wanted to get anywhere with Chrissie, as everybody knew, and had known since about fourth grade, way before Jimmy got to North Adamsville from some Podunk town in New Hampshire when his father’s company moved down here, was that you had better bowl too. You could be James Bond 007 (or Sean Connery back then) and have done all kinds of adventurous stuff but if you didn’t bowl go slump-shouldered to the back of the Chrissie line. You could have been the greatest running back in the history of football, breaking every record and every linebacker’s mean-spirited heart but no bowl-no go. Or get, heart-broken, in back of Sean in that just-mentioned line. If you were a nerdy guy (as Jimmy was, somewhat since that was how he got that Jimmy Bimmy moniker since he couldn’t do the shimmy when that dance was the craze and everybody would say “Jimmy Bimmy can’t do the Shimmy,” yeah, kids are cruel, and goofs) but if you bowled, well, theoretically you had a chance. Jimmy thought though that “let’s face it plenty of talented, good-looking guys, who under ordinary circumstances would give bowling the gaff, were, even as he was thinking up his plan, sharpening up their games to get a crack at those ruby-red lips. Jimmy had a moment of doubt and said “Damn” to himself.

 

See Jimmy had been in love, or half in love, or some percentage in love with Chrissie ever since she gave him an innocent kiss at her twelfth birthday back when he first came to North Adamsville in the seventh grade. Really, the kiss was nothing but a good wishes peck on the lips that wouldn’t count for anything for older guys (or girls, either) but for a shy twelve-year old new boy Jimmy was in very heaven. Every once in a while though he would think-“Call me crazy, call me a nutcase ready for the funny farm, but every once in a while when Chrissie calls me Jimmy Bimmy from her front door I swear she says it in such a way that maybe that kiss wasn’t so innocent after all.”  Such sentiments big cloud-puff dreams are made of, and plans hatched. In any case Jimmy had been plotting, maybe not every day, but plotting ever since to get a second, a real kiss from her ruby-red lips. And to hold that slender hour glass figure, to dance close to those well-formed legs, and to tussle with that flaming mass of red hair that goes with those ruby-red lips. And, and… well you get the idea.

 

But see Chrissie bowled and Jimmy I didn’t, although he had, lately anyway, been spending  a fair amount of time at Jake’s Bowl-a-World, the bowling alley located downstairs across from our real hang-out, our  corner boy hang-out, Salducci’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs.” (Don’t ask about how the main shopping area in that part of town got that moniker but everybody local from my grandmother who was born here down has always called it that name and nobody, nobody living knows why). Now Jake’s (now long torn down for condos) was not the kind of bowling alley that Chrissie or any other foxy girl would hang out in because, honestly, it was a creepy place where young junior high school wannabe hoods, real high school drop-outs, rejected no-go corner boys, and beer-swilling adults hung  out and made noise.  (For serious bowling you would go to Jack Slack’s bowling alleys not the one near the beach that was for other obvious purposes, obvious teen-age purposes but the one up in Adamsville Center where people actually bowled, and liked it.) But, see, it was the perfect place for a not bowling guy to hang out and “learn” bowls, on the quiet.

 

Oh, did I mention Jimmy’s other problem, the problem beyond his not bowling, his not being (thus far) worthy of that second ruby-red lipped Chrissie kiss. I see that I haven’t now that I have read back. Well, here it is if you can believe it. Jimmy couldn’t get to bowl with Chrissie, couldn’t get to bowl with her that is unless he asked her for a date which was way ahead of where his current plans for her had unfolded, because at school, at foolish North, the boys and girls had separate bowling teams that didn’t even bowl at the same places. Yes, I thought you would see poor Jimmy’s dilemma. See the idea was that Jimmy would start bowling with one of the teams, Chrissie would notice him and notice that he could use a few pointers, would come over and give him those few pointers, and then when he walked by her house not only would she give Jimmy that big warm smile but would probably want to talk about this or that, bowling this or that, and that would be his opening to ask her to go bowling, bowling alone with him. Foolproof, right? It even sounded good to me and I was always skeptical of anything, any plan, any other corner boy plotted, except my own or our leader’s Frankie Riley. Foolproof, except for that stupid school rule thing.

 

Now here is how Jimmy heard the story when he explained his dilemma one girl-less, dough-less Friday night, although he might be off on a few points, of why there were two separate teams and why they bowled at different places. A few years before Jake’s used to be the place where everybody, boys and girls, bowled after school for practice a couple of days a week and for the home competitions with other schools. And that made sense because it only took about ten minutes to get there from school. Now, like I explained to you already, this Jake’s was nothing but a run-down place with about ten lanes, an ice cooler filled with tonic (that’s soda for you foreigners, you not from New England back then), a couple of food vending machines, a few pinball wizard machines, a rest room everybody avoided using, if possible, and that was about it. Small time stuff. Everything kind of dusty and seedy from the minute you headed down the darkened stairs right on through. Good enough, like I said before for hoods, corner boys, and rookie bowlers.

 

But then, back in the bowling team days, it was kept up better and was a magnet for kids, boys and girls alike, to come and bowl…and other things. Those other things being listening to the big oversized jukebox filled with a ton of records, rock and roll records to cry for, and three for only a quarter too, dancing, close dancing, on the small dance floor that was set up then (and that you could still see all scuffed up and scummy), and some off-hand hanky-panky, kids’ stuff really, from what Jimmy heard, the usual boys copping a “feel” and the girls letting them do so like has been going on since they invented teenagers, in a couple of small back rooms that Jake, sweet brother Jake, let the kids use.

You can see where this after school jukebox rock and roll, close dancing, back room thing was going, just like I could when I heard it. Murder and mayhem. No, not from the kids gone wild under the influence of communistic rock and roll, or libertine close dancing, or hell-bent back rooms but when the parent police heard about it. That part was foggy but it, as usual, involved a snitch by someone to his (or her) parents, or something overheard on the telephone by a parent, or something. And from there to the headmaster police, and from there to the real cops. Nothing ever came of it from the real cops, which tells you automatically that the parent and headmaster cops overreacted, as usual. But now you can see what a fix Jimmy was in. Jimmy in a rage over this injustice which he tried to enlist us into that night said he thought Chrissie right that minute was probably chalking up spares over at the North Adamsville Bowl-a-Drome and the guys were over the other side of town at Mr. Bowl’s place and never the twain shall meet. And get this bit of Jimmy philosophy-“you wonder why kids, including this kid, are ready to jump off the rails, and none too soon either. But I still hold my dream of bowling alone with those ruby-red lips. I’ll let you know if I work out another fool-proof plan, okay.”

 

From The A Dimmed Elegy For The Late Peter Paul Markin Series- A New Introduction

 

A New Introduction From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 

A while back, a few months ago although the project had been percolating in his brain for the previous year or so after an incident reminded him how much he missed his old corner boy from the 1960s North Adamsville night, the late Peter Paul Markin, Bart Webber wrote up what he called, and rightly so I think, an elegy for him, A Dimmed Elegy For The Late Peter Paul Markin. That reminder had been triggered one night the year before when Bart took the visiting grandchildren of his son Lenny who now lived in New Haven, Connecticut and worked at Yale to Salducci’s ’ Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” in North Adamsville for some pizza and soda (that “up the Downs” not some quirky thing Bart made up but the actual name of the shopping area known by  that name to one and all not far from the high school although nobody ever knew exactly how it got that moniker). Of course that Salducci’s Pizza Parlor had been the local corner boy hang-out for Bart, Frankie Riley, Jimmy Jenkins, Johnny Callahan, Fran Rizzo, Markin, me and a roving cast of sometime corner boys depending on who we picked up (or who had ditched or been ditched by some faithless girl and thus had time to hang rather than spent endless hours prepping for dates, or going through “the work-out” down at Adamsville Beach in some car) before Tonio who treated Frankie Riley like a son sold the place to moved back to Italy and the new owners did not see “no account” (their description) corner boys as an asset to their family-friendly pizza dreams. The corner boys subsequently “hung” at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys, the ones on Thornton Street near the beach not the ones in Adamsville Center which was strictly for people who actually bowled, liked to anyway although that latter information is strictly on the side since what got Bart Webber in a lather was from Salducci times.

Although Bart had not been in the place in years and it had changed hands several times since Tonio ran the place back in the early 1960 the décor, the pizza processing area complete with what looked like the same pizza ovens and most importantly the jukebox, the jukebox, man, were still intact (that jukebox selections composed of many “oldies but goodies” from that time not found on nostalgia compilations for the local clientele who bring their kids and grandkids in for pizza and soda, what else, although not three for a quarter like in the old days but a quarter a pop). That night a young guy, a high school kid really, was sitting with three guys and a couple of girls all also with the look of high school about them, was if not loudly then animatedly talking a mile a minute complete with about one thousand arcane facts to back him up about “a new breeze coming through the land,” about how he, they were going to save the planet, stop the wars, make the world a decent place to live in by people like him, them who had not made the mess but who had a chance now to clean things up (he, the kid didn’t say that “new breeze” thing but that is what he meant, meant in all sincerity). Like Markin he went on for the time that Bart and his grand-kids entered until they left (and he still might be taking if he was really the ghost of Markin). And of course that talk, that mile a minute talk complete with those ersatz facts reminded Bart of the night (make that nights) when Markin held forth about the “new breeze coming” (his actual term) based on the iceberg tip of events like the fight for nuclear disarmament, the fight for black civil rights down south, the fight against the big bad brewing war happening in Southeast Asia, and the first trappings of the counter-culture with the shift-up in music to a disbelieving group of fellow corner boys who were just trying finish high school without winding up in jail for the midnight capers they pulled off to keep themselves in dough(engineered by that same Markin and pulled off by Frankie Riley’s magic). Yeah, so as the kids today say Bart was “stoked” to do something to bring back Markin’s memory, warts and all.                 

Bart had thereafter approached me about doing the chore, about writing some big book memory thing  since we now live in the same town, the same suburban town which represents a small step up from our growing up in strictly working-class North Adamsville (and still is), Carver about thirty miles south of that town (and a town which had its own working-class history with its seasonal “boggers” who worked the cranberry bogs which originally made the town famous but is now a bedroom community for the high-tech firms on U.S. 495). Bart figured that since he had retired from the day to day operations of his print shop which was now being run by his oldest son, Jeff, and I was winding down my part in the law practice I had established long ago I would have plenty of time to write and he to “edit” and give suggestions. He said he was not a writer although he had plenty of ideas to contribute but that I who had spent a life-time writing as part of my job would have an easy time of it. Bart under the illusion that writing dry as dust legal briefs for some equally dry as dust judge to read is the same as nailing down a righteous piece about an old time corner boy mad man relic of a by-gone era, with his mad talk, his mad dreams, his mad visions, who was as crooked as they come, who was as righteously for the “little guy” as a man could be, who had some Zen under the gun magic which made our nights easier and who I would not trust (and did not have to trust since we had the truly larcenous Frankie Riley to lead the way) to open a door sainted bastard. I turned him down flat which I will explain in a moment.

The way Bart presented that proposal deserves a little mention since he made the case one night when the remnant of Markin’s old comrades still alive who still reside in the area, Frankie, Josh, Jack Callahan, Jimmy Jenkins, Bart and me were drinking now affordable high-shelf liquors at “Jack’s” in Cambridge near where Jimmy lives (that high-shelf liquor distinction important for old corner boys who survived and moved upa peg in the world who drank cheap Southern Comfort by the fistful pints and later rotgut maybe just processed whiskies from the very low-shelves). During the conversation, not for the first time, Bart mentioned that he was still haunted by the thought  he had had a few years before about the time that Markin had us in thrall one night out in Joshua Tree in 1972 when we were all high as kites on various drugs of choices and he, Markin, at first alone, and then with Josh began some strange Apache-like dance and they began to feel (at least according to Josh’s recollection) like those ancient warriors who tried to avenge their loses when white settlers had come to take their lands and we all for one moment that long ago night were able to sense what it was like to be warrior-avengers, righters of the world’s wrongs that Markin was always harping on. Markin had that effect on the rest of us, was always tweaking us on some idea from small scale larcenies to drug-induced flame-outs. Yeah, that miserable, beautiful, so crooked he could not get his legs in his pants, son of a bitch, sainted bastard still is missed, still has guys from the old days moaning to high heaven about that lost. Bart insisted there was a story there, a story if only for us and someone (all eyes on me) should write it up.             

I can say all of that and say at the same time that I can say I couldn’t write the piece. See while at times Markin was like a brother to me and we treated each other as such he also could have his “pure evil” moments which the other corner boys either didn’t see, or didn’t want to see. These may be small things now on reflection but he was the guy who almost got me locked up one night, one summer night in 1966 before our senior year when Frankie who usually was the “on-site” manager of our small larcenies was out of town with his girlfriend. Markin figured since he was the “brains” behind the various capers that he could do one on his own but he needed a look-out, me. The caper involved a small heist of a home in the Mayfair swells part of North Adamsville whose owners were “summering” somewhere in the Caribbean. Markin had “cased” or thought he had cased the place fully except he didn’t factor in that the owners had a house-sitter during that time, some college girl doing the task for a place to stay near Boston that summer from what we figured later. Markin startled her as he entered a side door, she screamed, Markin panicked, as she headed for the telephone to call the police and he fled out the door. But see Markin came running out that door toward me just when the cops were coming down the street in their squad car directly toward us where we met up. They stopped us, told to get in the car and headed back to that Mayfair house. As it turned out the house-sitter couldn’t identify either of us, couldn’t identify Markin and the cops had to let us go. No question Markin panicked and no question he made a serious mistake by heading my way knowing what he knew had happened with the sitter and her response to the invasion. I had, and have always had, the sneaking suspicion that he might have rolled me over as the B&E guy if it had been possible. I have a few other stories like that as well but that gives you a better insight into what Markin could turn into when cornered.

A couple of other incidents involved women, one my sister, the other an old flame or rather someone I wanted to be my flame. One of the reasons that I, unlike Markin who did serve in Vietnam which I think kind of turned him over the edge to the “dark side” once his dream about a “newer world” as he called it started to evaporate in the early 1970s, did not do military duty since I was the sole support, working almost full time after school during high school, of my mother and four very younger sisters after my old-fashioned Irish drunken half-dead-beat father died of a massive heart attack in 1965. My oldest sister, Clara, only thirteen at the time while we were in high school, was smitten by Markin from early on and I could see that he was willing to take advantage of her naiveté as well although I warned him off more than once. Now I could never prove it, and Clara would not say word one about it to me, but I believe he took her virginity from her. I do know during that period I found a carton of Trojans, you know “rubbers,” in her bureau drawer when I was looking for something I thought she had of mine and she was not around to ask. I didn’t confront him directly since among corner boys such things would have been “square” to discuss even about sisters but I continued to keep warning him off like I didn’t know anything had happened and before long I saw Clara had taken up with a boy her own age so I let it drop. (Clara, now a professor at a New York college and with a great husband and three great kids, a bright young woman even then except around Markin who had some spell on her, even later when she had a boyfriend and would come into Salducci’s trying to make him jealous from the way she acted, cried to high heaven when I told her the news of his fate.)    

The flame thing involved Laura Perkins who I was “hot” for from the ninth grade on and who I had several dates with in the tenth grade and it looked like things were going well when she threw me over for Markin. Now that situation has happened eight million times in life but corner boys were supposed to keep “hands off” of other corner boys’ girls although I was not naïve enough to believe that was honored more in the breech than the observance having done a couple of end-around maneuvers myself but this Laura thing strained our relationship for a while. Here is the funny part though after a few weeks she threw Markin over for the captain of the football team (she was a cheerleader as well as bright student, school newspaper writer, on the dance committee and a bunch of other resume-building things) who we all hated. Funnier still at our fortieth reunion a few years back Laura and I got back together (after her two marriages and my two marriages had flamed out something we laughed about at the time of the reunion) and we have been an “item” ever since. But you can see where I would, unlike say Bart, have a hard time not letting those things I just mentioned get in my way of writing something objective about that bastard saint.                   

So Bart wrote the piece himself, wrote the “dimmed” elegy (the “dimmed” being something I suggested as part of the title) and did a great job for a guy who said he couldn’t write. Frankly any other kind of elegy but dimmed would fail to truly honor that bastard saint madman who kept us going in that big night called the early 1960s and drove us mad at the same time with his larcenous schemes and over-the-top half-baked brain storm ideas and endless recital of the eight billion facts he kept in his twisted brain (estimates vary on the exact number but I am using the big bang number to cover my ass, as he would). I need not go into all of the particulars of Bart’s piece except to say that the consensus among the still surviving corner boys was that Bart was spot on, caught all of Markin’s terrible contradictions pretty well. Contradiction that led him from the bright but brittle star of the Jack Slack’s bowling alleys corner boy back then to a bad end, a mucho mal end murdered down in Sonora, Mexico in 1976 or 1977 when some drug deal (kilos of cocaine) he was brokering to help feed what Josh said was a serious “nose candy” habit went sour for reasons despite some investigation by Frankie Riley, myself and a private detective Frankie hired were never made clear. The private detective, not some cinema Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, but a good investigator from his scanty report was warned off the trail by everybody from the do-nothing Federales to the U.S. State Department consular officer in Sonora, and warned off very indirectly both down there and in Boston not to pursue the thing further, the implication being or else. What was clear was that he was found face down on some dusty back road of that town with two slugs in his head and is buried in the town’s forlorn potter’s field in some unmarked grave. That is about all we know for sure about his fate and that is all that is needed to be mentioned here.

That foul end might have been the end of it, might have been the end of the small legend of Markin. Even he would in his candid moments accept that “small” designation. Yes, been the end of the legend except the moaning to high heaven every time his name comes up. Except this too. Part of Bart’s elegy referenced the fact that in Markin’s sunnier days before the nose candy got the best of him, brought out those formerly under control outrageous “wanting habits,” in the early 1970s when he was still holding onto that “newer world” dream that he (and many others, including me and Bart for varying periods) did a series of articles about the old days and his old corner boys in North Adamsville. Markin before we lost contact, or rather I lost contact with him since Josh Breslin his friend from Maine (and eventually our friend as well whom we consider an honorary Jack Slack’s corner boy) met out in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, 1967 knew his whereabouts outside of San Francisco in Daly City until about 1974 wrote some pretty good stuff, stuff up for awards, and short-listed for the Globe prize.

Pushed on by Bart’s desire to tell Markin’s story as best he could who must have been driven by some fierce ghost of Markin over his shoulder to do such yeoman’s work, he, Frankie (as you know our corner boy leader back then who had Markin as his scribe and who coined the moniker “the Scribe” for him that we used to bait or honor him depending on circumstances and now is a big time lawyer in Boston), Josh, and I agreed that a few of the articles were worth publishing if only for ourselves and the small circle of people whom Markin wrote for and about. (Markin’s oldest friend from back in third grade, Allan Johnson, who would have had plenty to say about the early days had passed away  after a long-term losing fight with cancer before this plan was hatched, RIP, brother.) So that is exactly what we did. We had a commemorative small book of articles and any old time photographs we could gather put together and had it printed up in the print shop that Bart’s oldest son, Jeff, is now running for him since his retirement from the day to day operations last year.

Since not all of us had everything that Markin wrote, as Bart said in his piece, what the hell they were newspaper or magazine articles to be used to wrap up the fish in or something after we were done reading them, we decided to print what was available. Bart was able to find copies of a bunch of sketches up in the attic of his parents’ home which he was cleaning up for them when they were putting their house up for sale since they were in the process of downsizing. Josh, apparently not using his copies for wrapping fish purposes, had plenty of the later magazine pieces. I had a few things, later things from when we went on the quest for the blue-pink Great American West hitchhike road night as Markin called it. Unfortunately, we could not find any copies of the long defunct East Bay Eye and so could not include anything from the important Going To The Jungle series about some of his fellow Vietnam veterans who could not adjust to the “real” world coming back from ‘Nam and wound up in the arroyos, canyons, railroad sidings and under the bridges of Southern California. He was their voice on that one then, if silent now when those aging vets desperately a voice.  So Markin can speak to us still. Yeah, like Bart said, that’s about right for that sorry ass blessed bastard saint with his eight billion words.  

Below is the short introduction that I wrote for that book which we all agreed should be put in here trying to put what Markin was about in content from a guy who knew him about as well as anybody from the old neighborhood, knew his dark side back like I mentioned  then and when that side came out later too:  

“The late Peter Paul Markin, also known as “the Scribe, ” so anointed by Frankie Riley the unchallenged self-designated king hell king of the schoolboy night among the corner boys who hung around the pizza parlors, pool halls, and bowling alleys of the town, in telling somebody else’s story in his own voice about life in the old days in the working class neighborhoods of North Adamsville where he grew up, or when others, threating murder and mayhem,  wanted him to tell their stories usually gave each and every one of that crew enough rope to hang themselves without additional comment. He would take down, just like he would do later with the hard-pressed Vietnam veterans trying to do the best they could out in the arroyos, crevices, railroad sidings and under the bridges when they couldn’t deal with the “real” world after Vietnam in the Going To The Jungle series that won a couple of awards and was short-listed for the Globe award, what they wanted the world to hear, spilled their guts out as he one time uncharitably termed their actions. Not the veterans, not his fellows who had their troubles down in L.A. and needed to righteously get it out and he was the conduit, their voice, but the zanies from our old town, and then lightly, very lightly if the guy was bigger, stronger than him, or in the case of girls if they were foxy, and mainly just clean up the language for a candid world to read.

Yeah Markin would bring out what they, we, couldn’t say, maybe didn’t want to say. That talent was what had made the stories he wrote about the now very old days growing up in North Adamsville in the 1960s when “the rose was on the bloom” as my fellow lawyer Frankie Riley used to say when Markin was ready to spout his stuff so interesting. Ready to make us laugh, cringe, get red in the face or head toward him to slap him down, to menace him, if he got too ungodly righteous. Here is the funny part though. In all the stories he mainly gave his “boys” the best of it. Yes, Bart is still belly-aching about a few slights, about his lack of social graces then that old Markin threw his way, and maybe he was a little off on the reasons why I gave up the hitchhike highway blue-pink Great American West night quest that he was pursuing (what he called sneeringly my getting “off the bus” which even he admitted was not for everyone) but mainly that crazy maniac with the heart of gold, the heart of lead, the heart that should have had a stake placed in its center long ago, that, ah, that’s enough I have said enough except I like Bart still miss and mourn the bastard.”

Hey, I’m Just Killing The Blues-With Rolly Sally’s Killing The Blues In Mind

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Sam Lowell never drew a break, never drew a blessed break with his woman relationships. Not flirtations; Christ, even in elementary school he had had his heart broken by some young thing in blonde hair and sun dress who asked him to kiss her, didn’t like it and with home to tell her mother and then she his mother that he had made an unwanted advance, took a beating for his mother another time when to impress some Mayfair swell new girl from the new all the rage ranch house development up the street at a school square dance he cut up his one of only two pairs of pants and afterward she laughed at him like some silly rube, he took the beating stoically though; not one-night-stands which usually cost him at least a hang-over and a lot of dough plying young women with liquor or dope or both before he or she snuck out the door, provide for free fear of a dose and if you don’t know what means then move, or more scarily one time pregnancy when the young woman didn’t like “rubbers” and though her cycle was okay and it had been a close thing and some sweated days; not flings, although started with light-hearted intentions neither party looking for anything but shelter from the storm and he became the fall guy when she decided that that temporary shelter should be permanent or he took the fall hard; and not upswing affairs (he liked to use that word “affair” since as a boy, a Catholic boy growing in the 1950s, around the house his mother rather than using the “s” word would said that so and so was having an “affair” and he thought it was just some boy and girl kissing thing, you know chaste, until he found out better when he entered the world of, well, affairs).

Certainly not in marriage or rather marriages, two, one of which had been something like a “shot-gun” wedding when he/she thought she was pregnant so he could avoid the Army as a father in the Vietnam War days at a time when they were not drafting fathers and she turned out to not be so (he got deferred on other grounds) but dear Catholic parents on her side insisted on the virginal ceremony but that one despite two kids, good kids too although he was always like his own father rather distant from both broods of children, was not made in heaven once she took up with the lawyer she worked for and the other had been a marriage of convenience which again despite two kids, ditto on the good and distant part, dissolved into the night when he had proven to be less a good provider than her high-roller dreams could handle. Two marriages and two divorces which he was still paying for.

So somebody, somebody like Jimmy Jenkins, who had grown up with Sam in the Acre section of Carver, the tough hard knocks section married to his high school sweetheart, Betsy, going on forty something years could not understand Sam’s tangled relationships with women, could not understand why he when they met occasionally for a few beers at Henning’s Bar and Grille in downtown Carver constantly said he was just “killing the blues.” (The Acre known by one and all locally as the place where the working poor, the “boggers” who worked in season in the cranberry bogs for which the town was famous met the dregs of society in the town “projects” and a place to be avoided at all costs by polite society, at least that is what Sam’s mother told him when he asked why his friends from school would not come to his house and he had to go to theirs to play)        

Maybe Sam was just born under an unlucky star but maybe a look at his most recent “affair” which ended up once again in the dumps might shed some light on why he lived under the star of that strange expression.

Jimmy and Sam, who now lived in an apartment in Plymouth the next town over from Carver and thus close-by (previously his second wife, Laura, the big high-roller dreamer gone bust had insisted that they live in high-end Cambridge away from the “boggers” as she sneeringly called them, she a daughter of a Andover cop for Christ sake) since his last divorce about three years before, had been getting together more frequently in the recent past since that had both been anticipating their fiftieth class reunion, the Carver High Class of 1963, coming up that fall. Bart, as a member in good standing of previous reunion committees and one of the few with Betsy standing who still resided in the town, was once again on the committee and having rekindled his relationship with Sam tried to recruit him to go to the reunion. Bart and Betsy were hardly new to such organizing operations since they met in ninth grade at the Freshman Mixer committee meeting which got that class acclimated to the big school after the shelter of junior high school and had fallen in love for eternity shortly thereafter. Somehow Bart and Betsy savored providing the party favors, mugs, nostalgia paraphernalia and oldies but goodies songs such greying class reunions entailed. He had succeeded since Sam, who had never gone to any previous reunions, was curious about the old crowd and what had happened to them. Previously, alienated and estranged from his own family for many years, he refused to go “back home” in case he ran into anybody from the clan but after a final brief reconciliation shortly before his parents died after the fortieth class reunion he was as ease on that question.

The night of the reunion Sam ran into Melinda Loring, whom Sam had been after all through high school with no success. See Melinda, smart, pretty (and long and slender with well-turned legs and auburn hair as was his preference in those days) and ambitious would not give the “boggers” from the other side of town the time of day then. That turned out to be wrong, or the wrong reason that he got nowhere. As it turned out once they talked that reunion night she would not have given him the time of day since her hard-bitten Protestant parents would not allow her to date a Catholic boy, and she followed her parents’ wishes and in fact had agreed with that discussion. She knew that Sam was a Catholic having seen him coming out of the Sacred Heart church one Sunday morning on her way to her own church service. Sam back then had asked around, asked her friend John “Ducky” Drake who was her neighbor specifically, as guys and gals did back in the 1960s and maybe they still do to get “intelligence,” on the school grapevine network that was so up-to-date it would put the CIA and NSA to shame to see if she was “going steady” or had somebody’s class ring on a chain around her neck which amounted to the same thing. Ducky told him flat out that “boggers” need not apply. Final. As he was to find out shortly later that evening that reason was not true when Melinda told him the unsavory real reason, although Ducky, RIP, was not responsible for that error, in reality that “ice queen” demeanor Melinda put on in public back then was just a defense against an awful home life, worse than Sam’s in lots of ways but that hardy did him any good back then.

That night though perhaps having been through a few of life’s travails herself since then (she twice married and divorced twice with no children by her preference  that number two as Sam mentioned to Jimmy later seemed to be the fate of their generation, what he called the Generation of ’68 after the turbulent year that had a deep effect on many in their generation in the love department) Melinda and Sam struck up an interesting conversation. The pair in the process of some AARP-ten tips for meeting new plus sixties flirting while sitting at the bar, after more conversation seemingly having beside the two divorces apiece a lot in common, she an owner of a small high tech company and he owner of the town’s last remaining independent print shop (since sold to a large print imaging company once Sam realized that he could no longer keep up with the rapid changes in the industry and he was ready to retire in any case). They also had common musical interest since both had been smitten by the folk music revival minute that washed through the early 1960s after their high school days (particularly jug band music so esoteric a common interest that seemed to portent some “written in the stars” expectations) and kept their interests even after it then ebbed with the subsequent British invasion and the day of acid-etched rock, reading (historical novels), and movies (black and white film noir classics like Out Of The Past and The Big Sleep).  Both liked to travel although not too far and were emphatically not interested in getting married again (under something like the principle of “three strikes and you are out”).

So naturally based on these slender reeds they began what was a stormy if short affair. An affair that had Sam reeling behind the idea in his mind that 16 or 66 he could not do anything but sing the blues with women when the affair, or his part, began to unravel a couple of months later. Who knows how things began to turn down, to get Sam thinking he was “killing the blues” (a feeling that could work two ways, one while in the relationship when things got dicey and he was waiting for the ax to fall and the other when it was over whether of his doing or not, or of both when he would feel something like ennui).  Maybe it was when Melinda, who seemed to have been grasping for something in the relationship earlier that Sam, had their futures all mapped out unto the nth degree when they had only just began their affair (she hated that word, gave him more than his share of grief when he used it innocently to define what they had even after he had told her his sense of the term going back to ancient now abandoned Catholic mother sensibilities). She had them retiring to California, (Florida, Puerto Rico and Cancun were also in the mix as possibilities complete with well-researched brochures by here including costs about all those locations), had them living in her house until then, had them sharing expenses from the get-go, had trips in the meantime all planned out, stuff like that, woman stuff and not bad in itself but Sam was not even sure that he even liked Melinda all that much at that point, or enough to break up his own personal household such as it was. He just wanted to go slow, let things take their proper course. And maybe they would have if she had let up a bit.

All Sam knew, after the first few weeks of something like a welcome calmness in his life, when he finally came under the gun of Melinda’s “wants”’ he began getting a feeling a feeling that he had gotten before so it was not something that took him by surprise that he was “happy” whenever he left her house after a couple of days (she “refused” to stay at his apartment calling it small and dingy), but mixed in with that “happy” was the seemingly inevitable feeling that he was marking time, just killing the blues after a couple of months of calm before the storm. So as such things go at some point thereafter, after he got the “moving on” feeling he began a campaign to break up the relationship. Sent Melinda an unwise e-mail to that effect stating that he was not sure how he felt about her, about her plans and about what he wanted to do in the future. That slight questioning got him the “door.” She summarily wrote him off, wrote him out of her life. They had met at a restaurant one evening in Hingham to discuss the matter and the scene had been stormy with her walking out after he took offense at some remark that she made. As he watched from the parking lot as he headed to his own the rear lights of her car go off into the night Sam though now the “killing the blues” phase after losing her would set in. Set in for a long time since he had begun to doubt whether he had done the right thing, whether he didn’t have more feelings for her than he had expressed. 

Yeah, Jimmy thought to himself after hearing Sam’s sad tale old Sam never drew a blessed break with women.        

Road Song Blues-From The Sam Eaton-Ralph Morris Series 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 

“What your all-time favorite road album, Sam?” asked his old friend Ralph Morris as they were driving to Washington for the nth time in order to place their warm bodies on the line once again for some progressive cause, this time the struggle against escalating war in the Middle East by the Obama administration. They had been doing such anti-war duty since they had “met” each back on May Day 1971 when they, Sam a very activist anti-warrior and Ralph a returned Vietnam veteran who had turned on a war that he had fought, among the thousands arrested for trying to “shut down the government if it would not shut down the war (the Vietnam War then for those too young or those who have forgotten). By the way while it might have been the nth time they had driven down to D.C. on these missions of mercy that was not always the way they had got there. In their youths they were as likely to have thumbed from either Boston, Sam’s base in those days, or Albany, Ralph’s base picking up rides from others heading that way for the same purposes or friendly truckers looking for somebody, anybody to talk to at seventy miles an hour having been on the road probably sixteen straight and going stir crazy.  In any case Sam and Ralph making sure they cleared the vicious Connecticut State Police on U.S. 95 or else they could expect, at the least, some serious hassles. Maybe they had taken the dreaded Greyhound bus with its eight million stops and the inevitable winding up beside (a) some scatter-brained mother who let her child run wild on her lap and who then exploded into your space as well, (b) some severely over-weight snoring behemoth, male or female, (c), some lonely-heart girl who you could tell if you had given any thought at all to talking to her had some serious mental health issues or she would be sitting in some “boss” car with some max daddy and not travelling alone on some forlorn public transportation. Maybe worse riding down with a busload of activists aboard a “movement” rented bus and the other denizens wanted to stay up all night talking politics, not bad in itself, but talk politics like they just invented the profession and wanted to fill your empty vessel with every arcane fact they had gleaned from the latest alternative newspapers or from Professor so-and-so in some introductory political science class. Hell, the Marxists were the worst, some obvious products of the leafy suburbs and elite colleges always talking about the class struggle and working people which is exactly the roots that both men had come from and so knew from day one of their respective existences exactly what the class struggle was even if they could not have named the phenomenon as such back then.

Ralph reminded Sam that a couple of times they had gone “bourgeois,” (Sam’s expression since he actually did hang with some radicals and reds in Cambridge in the early 1970s when he was at his wits end about how to stop the “fucking,” also his word, Vietnam War before he met Ralph) when Sam had latched onto a Mayfair swell daughter from Radcliffe who insisted they all fly down to National Airport on poppa’s credit card (“poppa” her term of endearment). Her argument-they by flying rather than travelling the roads for ten hours up and then ten hours back would save time for other things, movement things of course since she was one of those leafy suburbs radicals that Sam was fatally attracted to at the time. Like then they didn’t have anything but time since they were that minute “full-time” activists. 

But this early Saturday morning spring day Sam and Ralph were as they had the majority of times after the big gold rush of the 1960s uprising ebbed into nothing driving in a car, this time Sam’s, down to D.C.  A call had come out from the National Anti-War Network headquartered in that town for all peace-loving groups and individuals to make their voices heard against the very most recent escalation of the war situation in the Middle East, in Iraq, with the announcement by the Obama administration that the government was upping the ante on the number of “advisors,” read troops on the ground being sent in. The ostensible reason given by the administration was to help, once again, to stem the panic of the Baghdad government over the constitutional inability of its own armed forces to not flee the minute an enemy cannon (or maybe any cannon) was heard in the distance. The enemy de jus now a nasty Islamic fundamentalist outfit called ISIS, and called about seven variations of that designation including the “self-proclaimed Islamic State” depending on which news source you got your news from. The funny part, at least Sam when he mentioned the “self-proclaimed” moniker that the newscasters were using ever since ISIS starting coming out of the hills of Syria and Iraq like bats out of hell, to Ralph back in the summer of 2014, was that they actually controlled enough land in the area to be de facto rulers of those regions. To be the Islamic State they claimed to control. Nobody then could claim they were not a state, except maybe the government in Baghdad whose writ barely extended beyond the city limits. Ralph thought that was ironic as well, especially since the regime in Baghdad was barely even holding the city itself at that point.    

That gives the “why” of why they were on the road that early morning. Hell the sun had not even come up and Ralph had not even had time to grab a cup of coffee when Sam drove up to his house in Troy where he had been born and grew up, raised a family and all of that. Sam had stayed with a cousin whom he had not seen in a while that Friday night in Albany and they agreed to get an early start for the long ride south. The “why” of the question though needs a little further explanation. Both men had  been immersed in the music of their generation, the generation Sam, the more literary of the two, had called the Generation of ’68, in recognition that that seminal year was decisive in many ways, not all good, for the fate of a small but significant segment of their generation. Of course that musical bonding meant for both of them the classic rock of their coming of age in the mid-1950s. The time of Elvis, Carl, Chuck, Bo, Buddy, Wanda, Jerry Lee and a whole cast of lesser names and one-note johnnies and janies. For Ralph it had also meant a small appreciation of the blues, mostly Chicago blues of the Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Magic Slim, James Cotton strand and for Sam a very big appreciation of the folk music minute of the early 1960s. Folk, a genre that Ralph sneered at every time Sam, or anybody mentioned the word, or the times on trips like this when he hoped to high heaven that Sam would not go on and on about some folkie road songs when he had asked the question.

But coffee, or no coffee, as Ralph (who during the first stretch of the drive was the “co-pilot” and therefore in charge of the musical selections and the CDs in the car’s CD system) the question was on the floor. Was on the floor like it had been ever since they started driving down to D.C. some forty plus years before. It had become something like the rituals kids go through counting numbers of various states’ license plates on the road, or kinds of automobiles, or kinds of signs, you know to pass the time away. Although for Sam and Ralph it had more meaning since at any given point in their relationship the answer might have varied.     

Here are some examples. About ten years before, 2004,2005, when they were travelling down to protest the then “early” phase, another one of those escalations during the Bush administration of the now seemingly never-ending war in Iraq, Ralph had been in a second coming of Elvis phase. Somehow through YouTube or some Internet site he had heard Elvis’ One Night Of Sin and had flipped out(the original more sexually suggestive song not, One Night With You, the one released to the panicky parents public worried about the dreaded unnamed “s” word creeping up on their Jimmys and Marys). See while he was a child of the rock and roll 1950s he didn’t like Elvis or his music for the very simple reason that every girl in Troy (and probably America, if not the world) would have nothing to do with (a) guys who did not slick their hair back, (b) guys who could not swivel their hips, and, (c) who did not have Elvis’ patented sneer for them to take off their face. So it was personal (and Ralph was not alone as Sam mentioned one time about a schoolboy friend his, Bart Webber, who felt the same way at the time). But once Ralph heard that song he went out to Tower Records and got every Sun Recording Studio CD he could find (Sun, the recording studio of early Elvis, Elvis when he was lean and hungry and probably wore that sneer in earnest). So that trip was filled with Elvis, Elvis, Elvis all the way down including such classics as That’s Alright, Mama, Jailhouse Rock, and his version of Shake, Rattle and Roll. That turned out to be okay since Sam liked him too after not paying attention to his early music since about 1958, or whenever Elvis stopped being lean and hungry and started recording nondescript songs and ugly strictly for the dough movies.  So you know what Ralph’s answer would have been during his Elvis sighting.          

What had not been alright was during the first Gulf War (the one Bush I got heated about when Iraq went into Kuwait of all places) Sam had gotten back into a folk thing which Ralph though he had gotten over. Apparently Sam had, between marriages, he had been married and divorced twice (as had Ralph), gone on a “date” with some woman he met in a Harvard Square bar and she had wanted to go to the Club Passim (the then and current incarnation of the old Club 47 which spawned Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Tom Rush, Tom Paxton, The Jim Kweskin Jug Band and a million other one song folkies) to see, Jesus, to see Dave Von Ronk (Ralph’s expression). He had dated that woman, Leslie, for several months so he/they would cut up old touches about that folk minute of the 1960s. As a result when it was time to head to Washington in the early winter of 1991 Sam told Ralph that he had been saving the three CD set of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music he had just purchased (at a steep price for that was the early days of CDs and such “exotic” staples cost aficionados) for the trip down.  For those who do not know that compilation has over eighty songs from the hills and hollows, down in Appalachia and places like that. Ralph, an ex-Vietnam War soldier who had served eighteen months and as a result had turned drastically and dramatically against that war, and the American government’s endless wars ever since, was ready to lose his pacifistic feelings, ready to take up the gun again which he hadn’t shouldered since late 1969, as Sam told him that bit of news. And he, Ralph, would have to as co-pilot place the bloody things in the bloody CD player. That one is best left forgotten.             

Not to be forgotten though was the time when they went down to D.C. to protest Ronald Reagan’s merciless support for the Contras down in El Salvador (and Nicaragua when the American military spotlight hit that small nation) in the mid-1980s. Ralph had “re-discovered” the Doors a rock group which had provided the background music for a million midnight parties when the booze and drugs were being freely passed around. Sam was more than happy to have Ralph place those tapes in the tape-deck and blast away Light My Fire, L.A. Woman, The End, Spanish Caravan. And you know the time flew on that trip for some reason which need not detain us here.  

So you get the picture of the substance behind the “why” of Ralph’s question. And you might have also guessed although Ralph is not a lawyer by profession (he ran a high-skill electrical shop before he retired recently turning over the day to day operations to his son) that he had an answer to the question he was asking Sam on that trip. Just the week before he had been listening to WXKE, a country, a progressive country radio station according to Ralph when Sam asked about the kind of music played by the station, when he heard some lonesome cowboy voice singing a song called Colorado Girl. He liked it right away, liked it a lot and so waited for the DJ (a guy who called himself Sleepy LaGrange) to announce the song title and singer. Turned out to be a guy by the name of Townes Van Zandt, a guy who had had a disturbed life down in Texas and places like that and had died back in the mid-1990s from a heart attack probably brought on by heavy drug use but who had written a ton of songs that many other singers had covered. Ralph admitted (as did Sam) that he had never heard of the guy before. But he was the guy who wrote Pancho and Lefty that Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris and a bunch of other singers had covered and which both men knew about. But Ralph was intrigued enough to go on YouTube and find out what else he had written. There was a ton of stuff on the site by him (or covers by others). Some very good, most kind of lonesome prairie dog sad, mostly with a very close call with reality. But Ralph was hooked. He did not have time to run over to Albany to the last remaining brick and mortar record store in the area to get some CDs for the road so he went on line to Amazon and downloaded a bunch on his iPod and so you know Ralph’s answer to his own question.     

As Sam stops at a truck stop diner off of U.S. 87 South so Ralph could get that desperate cup of coffee he needed to keep him awake for the next several hours they were listening to Van Zandt’s If I Needed You. The road ahead is long so we will have to want for Sam’s answer…