Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of The Dubs performing their 1950s classic, Could This Be Magic?.
CD Review
The Golden Age Of American Rock ‘n’ Roll; Volume 4, various artists, Ace Records, 1994
Scene: Prompted by the cover photograph, the memory cover photograph, which grace each CD in this The Golden Age Of American Rock ‘n’ Roll series. The photo on this CD, as might be expected, shows a girl, a pony-tailed, starch-bloused, woolen-sweatered, wide, flouncy skirt-wearing, Penny Parker, all grown up almost, as the good teen D.J., a.k.a. hostess, that she is, doing her chore of spinning platters, okay, okay, putting records on her portable 45s record player for the guests at her sweet sixteen party, her very first house teen be-bop hop.
We all wish her well, right? And hope she plays a couple of Elvis, Chuck, and Jerry Lee things and not too many slow dances since some of the guys still have not got the hang of that yet. Oh yes, for the clueless, a record player was a machine to put records on in order to hear those guys just mentioned. And records, for the really clueless, were grooved, vinyl plate-like objects that kept the blues away in the 1950s teen night. Just like iPOD, texting, yahoo messaging, etc. keep the blues away from the hip-hop nation teen night.
******
“Don’t come back before one,” Penny Parker, now sweet sixteen party-crowned Penny Parker, as she shouted to her parents leaving out the breezeway door to the garage to take off to places unknown, maybe unknowable, until at least that one o‘clock hour. Peter Parker, Penny proud without showing it, muttered under his breath that he damn well would not be back before one, come hell or high water, while that rock and roll music was infesting, and that was the word that he used, his house. Or at least the downstairs part, rock and roll previously being limited to the Penny upstairs netherworld, and kept away from his ears, well, mainly away form his ears. “Now, Peter,” was all that Delores Parker at first could come up with, and that was usually enough. Tonight however she added, and told him so in no uncertain terms, that her husband was being an old fogy seeing that this was Penny’s sweet sixteen party, she had baby-sat to perdition in order to fund the party (with a little Parker parent help, Delores mainly), had done mostly what they had asked of her, as much as one could expect from a rock-addled post World War II teenager from what she had read in the women’s magazines that she was addicted to reading.
Most importantly tonight was, and here is where woman-girl- female whatever solidarity came in, Penny was going to “coax” Zack Smith into giving her his class ring, the universal teen sign of “going steady,” hands off, and a 180 degree turn in their sometimes stormy relationship since back in about junior high school. If he showed. At least, Delores, thought, she had given that Jimmy Kelly the air, although he was invited, invited tonight for old times sake since Jimmy had been there the night Penny played her first record, Could This Be Magic by the Dubs on her brand new, slave wages-bought record player. But enough of Parker parents, tonight is Penny's night.
Penny night or not, Miss Parker is already starting to fret that Zack will be a no-show. See they had had an argument last week about that “going steady” thing, that eternal love class ring- signifying thing, and Zack for the twenty-third, at least, time stormed off. And Penny for the twenty-second time made peace over the telephone, the midnight blues telephone. But you never knew with Zack. All Penny knew was she wanted him, wanted him bad, and wanted him here tonight to share her sweet sixteen-ness.
So as the couples, maybe a dozen or so of their close friends, started filling up the Parker living room Penny, knowing that she was not the only rock-addled teen in the room, played D.J. And revved up the old Sear& Roebuck recorder player with a stack of platters (records, 45 RPM records okay); Ray Sharpe ‘s Linda Lu; Nappy Brown’s Little by Little; Maybe by the Chantels although she always wondered how they could get their voices that high on that one; a tear-jerker but a slow one by request from Pammy and Sue who had boyfriend troubles of their own, Little Anthony and the Imperials’ Tears On My Pillow which got even hardened corner boys a little weepy as she found out once when Zack and she were “finished” and king corner boy Frankie Riley had asked her out, and she had accepted. Well, she thought that should last this crowd for a while, for a while until Zack gets here, hopefully.
Later, around ten, ten-thirty, just as she was about to give up the thought of Zack’s coming that night, and had resigned herself to playing D.J. putting Buddy Knox’s Party Doll on(although she wasn’t feeling like any party doll then) for this rock-addled crowd Zack came in kind of sneakily through the side door. And instead of coming over to say thanks to Penny for inviting him or any other kind of social graces recognition he began to get into an animated conversation with Jimmy Kelly. Nothing serious but as Penny found out later Zack was miffed at Jimmy, one of his best friends now that the Zack-Jimmy girl wars, or rather Penny wars were over in Zack’s favor, because Jimmy had not told Penny that he was going to be a little late. But that miffed-ness turned into nothing once Zack told the reason for his lateness. See, Penny performing, as it turned out, her last D.J duty for the evening putting on that much requested previously mentioned Could This Be Magic was finally called over by Zack and as the strains of the song echoed through the house he presented her with his class ring, just a while ago engraved with To P.P. Always 10/7/59. Magic.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night-"What 1960s Folk Revival Folksinger Dave Van Ronk Stole"
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Dave Van Ronk performing Fair and Tender Ladies.
What Folksinger Dave Van Ronk Stole
“Hey Joyell, good news Dave Van Ronk is playing at the Club Morocco over in Harvard Square next Friday night, do you want to go?” Phil Kiley asked over the telephone, the late night telephone as was his habit in dealing with Joyell, Joyell Davidson. While he waited for an answer he thought about how he had started making these late night calls. Reason: well two reasons really, Joyell worked at the Eden Café in Kenmore Square as a waitress most week nights for a few hours for pocket change to be among what she sardonically called the “proles,” and what she called part of a proper education, a sociology degree-driven education, about how the other half lived. Of course, the so-called proles were other girls from the university, some whom Joyell knew from her classes, who were also seeing how the other half lived, more or less, although some may have actually needed the pocket change.
This Eden Café, by the way, catered to nothing but university students, mainly university students who had fathers who had dough like Joyell’s (her father was some rich stockbroker in New York City and, from what Phil gathered, she hardly needed to work), so the whole bourgeois-prole combination running its commentary through every 1960s college was rather comical every time Phil, a real prole, a real son of the working poor at university on a partial scholarship, went into the place. Went in to see or pick up Joyell, not to eat. Too expensive for him, he tended to eat at Timmy’s Irish Pub down near Fenway Park where the “eats” was cheap, and plentiful.
But that Eden Café “experience,” or more the idea behind it, is what drove Phil toward Joyell in the first place. That "bourgeois slumming" make him desire her even more ever since they met last month at the beginning of school in Professor Sharpe’s Modern Social Theory seminar. And one thing led to another and now they were at the talking stage, talking over the phone or after work as he walked her to her apartment that she shared with another girl, a decidedly bourgeois non-slumming girl, down Commonwealth Avenue toward the Boston Common. And that was the second reason that Phil made his late night calls. He was just flat-out scared that anything he said to Joyell, a New York City girl, a Hunter College High girl, and a Jewish girl (or mostly Jewish according to the way that she described her family’s genealogy, but enough Jewish to satisfy the Israelis is the way she put it) might be taken the wrong way.
Sure Phil had plenty of girls, plenty of kind of interesting girls back at North Adamsville High a couple of years back, but they were all cookie-cutter Irish Catholic girls of varying degrees of virtue who mainly thought about marriage, white picket fences, and more than he would like to admit, girls who wanted to have many kids to honor Jesus, jesus. But Joyell talked of thing that he had not heard of like the ballet, the opera, the opera for christ sakes, and Broadway (and, more often, off-Broadway off-beat plays). Phil had read a ton of modern plays, O’Neill, Brecht, Tennessee Williams, and so on but he had never actually seen a Broadway play, just some hokey high school production of Chekov’s Cherry Orchard and stuff like that. But the saving grace was Joyell’s fantastic interest in the burgeoning folk scene-the one that had developed right down the street from her (so to speak) in the Village (Greenwich Village in New York City for the greenhorns).
This interest mirrored Phil’s own fascination with roots music, first with rockabilly before rock ‘n’ roll got stale, country blues, then city blues, and now going through folk traditional and protest songs, especially the protest songs. Joyell actually knew people who knew the likes of Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez and other folk names the reader might not recognize but that Phil spent many a Sunday radio night listening to for hours on the local folk station. And, back in North Adamsville High days, he developed an intense interest in the music of folksinger Dave Van Ronk. Not just of his vast knowledge of the American songbook but his very gritty-voiced (and professional) renditions of those songs. He heard Van Ronk's version of Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies first and flipped out. That is the one that he, timidly, sang to Joyell when they were comparing notes about folksingers. Strangely, as important as Van Ronk was to the behind- the-scenes New York (and general) folk scene that was working west to San Francisco and north to Boston (although Boston, with the Club 47 in Harvard Square and the like, of starting out Joan Baez and whiz Eric Von Schmidt, could stake its own secondary claims to importance) he was not that well-known. So when he heard that Van Ronk was coming to town he was beside himself fretting away the hours to ask Joyell for their first "date."
“Sure,” answered Joyell, “I hope he is all that you have cracked him up to be. If I don’t see you before then come by around seven o’clock and we can walk over if it is a nice night and save the cab fare. And if you get a chance come by Thursday to the ‘Eden’ and you can walk me home, okay?”
(Another funny Joyell "prole" thing, she thought taxis were too, too bourgeois although she didn’t say it exactly that way, Phil thought afterwards. She never mentioned taking the bus, the bus from Dudley that almost passed her apartment. He also found out later that everybody, everybody with the price of the fare, and tip of course, took cabs in New York City).
“Okay,” was all Phil could say, "and I will try to come by Thursday but I have to work that night myself." (Phil, no prole status -craving student looking for pocket change had a job driving a truck around the city delivering boxes, of this and that, to stores and factories a few nights a week depending on demand.)
As it turned out Phil had to work that Thursday night and so did not see Joyell until he showed up at her door around seven o’clock that Dave Van Ronk Friday night. Melissa (the non-slumming bourgeois roommate) opened the door and pretty much ignored his existence after that, although freshman year they had had a couple of classes together and she sat a few seats away from him then. But Phil hardly noticed the snub, if it was a snub, and not just Melissa’s problem with men, or something like that because he was hopped-up, not drug hopped-up if that’s what you think, but maybe more sexual promise hopped-up if anything but mainly just excited to have a date with such an exotic flower as Joyell.
Then she came out of her room looking, well, looking fetching with a peasant blouse (expensive peasant blouse if that is not an oxymoron), the de rigueur jeans of the folk scene, sweater on her arm against a possible cool weather night, black hair gleaning, eyes flashing, laughing eyes he thought. God’s own gypsy princess. On seeing her then he got even more hopped-up, if that was possible.
And his luck had held, that night was a clear, fall-ish October night, big moon, big promise, and perfect for walking over the Massachusetts Avenue bridge (pavement smoots and all) through Central Square to the edge of Harvard Square where the Club Morocco’s lights beckoned all to come and eat, drink and be merry. Of course Phil was also hopped-up on talking about Dave Van Ronk, like somehow keeping the talk on him was a magic mantra to ward off their social differences (although pro-prole Joyell seemed to like him well enough his insecurities as well as his lack of social lacks some times got the best of him, especially with her). As he analyzed the situation later this over-hype was probably decisive in what happened later.
But, except for that nervousness, things went along okay, maybe better than okay as Joyell suddenly displayed a great deal of knowledge about mountain music, a staple of Van Ronks’s play list. She rattled off some stuff about the British musicologist, Cecil Shape, who had “discovered” that Fair and Tender Ladies song that Phil was always harping on down in the hills and hollows of Kentucky in 1916 He was impressed (and was still impressed later, but for another reason) when he found out that trying to impress him she had gone, as he had and many others as well, to Sandy’s Records on Mass Ave where she got the “skinny” on lots of folk information).
You knew, if you have been to Harvard Square anytime between the landing of the Mayflower and 1963, that the Club Morocco was not so much a coffeehouse, the vital core of the folk revival existence, as a be-bop jazz club. Moreover they sold liquor, liquor by the glass, as Phil’s Irish-born grandmother used to say when his father and his cronies hightailed it over to North Adamsville’s Dublin Grille to toss down a few (well, more than a few) rather than a sober (lesser, really) amount at home, so naturally Phil and Joyell were carded at the door to make sure they were twenty-one. No problem, no problem either in finding some seats near the front to hear Mr. Van Ronk better. While getting seated, they half, or maybe quarter-listened to the front performer twanging away on some sing-along thing that was suppose to get everybody in the spirit of the thing. (Why, Phil wondered, did they always have some lame, half on, half off-key local “coming folk star” to warm up the audience when you came to see, see exclusively that night, the main performer. And the front guy, and it was usually guys, was never heard from again, usually.)
More importantly, Phil noticed Dave at the bar drinking a couple of shots (whiskey shots, he assumed) straight-up. Well anything to fortify you Phil thought. Probably will help to get that gravelly voice razor-edged. Then Dave tossed another as Phil turned to give his undivided attention to his gypsy princess. Damn she looked, well, fetching was the word that came to his mind, at least for public consumption, although if Phil was was honest with himself he was just hopped-up, sexually hopped up.
The front man finished up to lackluster applause, as he should have expected except for his sing-along rendition of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land always a crowd-pleaser, especially late in the night. The MC announced Dave to hearty applause; aficionados were clearly in the house for this performance. Phil noticed that as he came away from the bar Dave tossed another straight-up whisky down. He got slightly nervous never having heard any rumors about a drinking problem but also knowing, first hand-knowing, or rather observing, that several straight-up drinks were not a good sign. Moreover Dave had what Phil thought at first was a water bottle (or soda, although he had always been taught at home to call it tonic) but on closer inspection looked much more like a flask on his hip. Dave took to the impromptu stage, taking the steps steadily enough, introduced himself, and after the applause died down, started in right away on his Fair and Tender Ladies version, sounding a little tinny in the process. And sipping from the flask.
Another song, Cocaine Blues, followed. And then the axe. Well the axe for Phil, anyway. Dave literally mumbled the old time traditional song Railroad Boy. Joyell had had enough by then. As she explained while they were walking out the door she was no “purist” but she wasn’t going to spend the night listening to a drunk, a drunk that she could have listened to on the street outside to better effect. Out the door she spied an MTA bus, the one to Dudley that went right by her apartment, and told Phi that she was going to take it home. Home alone. And that was what Dave Van Ronk stole from one heart-broken Phillip Francis Kiley.
What Folksinger Dave Van Ronk Stole
“Hey Joyell, good news Dave Van Ronk is playing at the Club Morocco over in Harvard Square next Friday night, do you want to go?” Phil Kiley asked over the telephone, the late night telephone as was his habit in dealing with Joyell, Joyell Davidson. While he waited for an answer he thought about how he had started making these late night calls. Reason: well two reasons really, Joyell worked at the Eden Café in Kenmore Square as a waitress most week nights for a few hours for pocket change to be among what she sardonically called the “proles,” and what she called part of a proper education, a sociology degree-driven education, about how the other half lived. Of course, the so-called proles were other girls from the university, some whom Joyell knew from her classes, who were also seeing how the other half lived, more or less, although some may have actually needed the pocket change.
This Eden Café, by the way, catered to nothing but university students, mainly university students who had fathers who had dough like Joyell’s (her father was some rich stockbroker in New York City and, from what Phil gathered, she hardly needed to work), so the whole bourgeois-prole combination running its commentary through every 1960s college was rather comical every time Phil, a real prole, a real son of the working poor at university on a partial scholarship, went into the place. Went in to see or pick up Joyell, not to eat. Too expensive for him, he tended to eat at Timmy’s Irish Pub down near Fenway Park where the “eats” was cheap, and plentiful.
But that Eden Café “experience,” or more the idea behind it, is what drove Phil toward Joyell in the first place. That "bourgeois slumming" make him desire her even more ever since they met last month at the beginning of school in Professor Sharpe’s Modern Social Theory seminar. And one thing led to another and now they were at the talking stage, talking over the phone or after work as he walked her to her apartment that she shared with another girl, a decidedly bourgeois non-slumming girl, down Commonwealth Avenue toward the Boston Common. And that was the second reason that Phil made his late night calls. He was just flat-out scared that anything he said to Joyell, a New York City girl, a Hunter College High girl, and a Jewish girl (or mostly Jewish according to the way that she described her family’s genealogy, but enough Jewish to satisfy the Israelis is the way she put it) might be taken the wrong way.
Sure Phil had plenty of girls, plenty of kind of interesting girls back at North Adamsville High a couple of years back, but they were all cookie-cutter Irish Catholic girls of varying degrees of virtue who mainly thought about marriage, white picket fences, and more than he would like to admit, girls who wanted to have many kids to honor Jesus, jesus. But Joyell talked of thing that he had not heard of like the ballet, the opera, the opera for christ sakes, and Broadway (and, more often, off-Broadway off-beat plays). Phil had read a ton of modern plays, O’Neill, Brecht, Tennessee Williams, and so on but he had never actually seen a Broadway play, just some hokey high school production of Chekov’s Cherry Orchard and stuff like that. But the saving grace was Joyell’s fantastic interest in the burgeoning folk scene-the one that had developed right down the street from her (so to speak) in the Village (Greenwich Village in New York City for the greenhorns).
This interest mirrored Phil’s own fascination with roots music, first with rockabilly before rock ‘n’ roll got stale, country blues, then city blues, and now going through folk traditional and protest songs, especially the protest songs. Joyell actually knew people who knew the likes of Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez and other folk names the reader might not recognize but that Phil spent many a Sunday radio night listening to for hours on the local folk station. And, back in North Adamsville High days, he developed an intense interest in the music of folksinger Dave Van Ronk. Not just of his vast knowledge of the American songbook but his very gritty-voiced (and professional) renditions of those songs. He heard Van Ronk's version of Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies first and flipped out. That is the one that he, timidly, sang to Joyell when they were comparing notes about folksingers. Strangely, as important as Van Ronk was to the behind- the-scenes New York (and general) folk scene that was working west to San Francisco and north to Boston (although Boston, with the Club 47 in Harvard Square and the like, of starting out Joan Baez and whiz Eric Von Schmidt, could stake its own secondary claims to importance) he was not that well-known. So when he heard that Van Ronk was coming to town he was beside himself fretting away the hours to ask Joyell for their first "date."
“Sure,” answered Joyell, “I hope he is all that you have cracked him up to be. If I don’t see you before then come by around seven o’clock and we can walk over if it is a nice night and save the cab fare. And if you get a chance come by Thursday to the ‘Eden’ and you can walk me home, okay?”
(Another funny Joyell "prole" thing, she thought taxis were too, too bourgeois although she didn’t say it exactly that way, Phil thought afterwards. She never mentioned taking the bus, the bus from Dudley that almost passed her apartment. He also found out later that everybody, everybody with the price of the fare, and tip of course, took cabs in New York City).
“Okay,” was all Phil could say, "and I will try to come by Thursday but I have to work that night myself." (Phil, no prole status -craving student looking for pocket change had a job driving a truck around the city delivering boxes, of this and that, to stores and factories a few nights a week depending on demand.)
As it turned out Phil had to work that Thursday night and so did not see Joyell until he showed up at her door around seven o’clock that Dave Van Ronk Friday night. Melissa (the non-slumming bourgeois roommate) opened the door and pretty much ignored his existence after that, although freshman year they had had a couple of classes together and she sat a few seats away from him then. But Phil hardly noticed the snub, if it was a snub, and not just Melissa’s problem with men, or something like that because he was hopped-up, not drug hopped-up if that’s what you think, but maybe more sexual promise hopped-up if anything but mainly just excited to have a date with such an exotic flower as Joyell.
Then she came out of her room looking, well, looking fetching with a peasant blouse (expensive peasant blouse if that is not an oxymoron), the de rigueur jeans of the folk scene, sweater on her arm against a possible cool weather night, black hair gleaning, eyes flashing, laughing eyes he thought. God’s own gypsy princess. On seeing her then he got even more hopped-up, if that was possible.
And his luck had held, that night was a clear, fall-ish October night, big moon, big promise, and perfect for walking over the Massachusetts Avenue bridge (pavement smoots and all) through Central Square to the edge of Harvard Square where the Club Morocco’s lights beckoned all to come and eat, drink and be merry. Of course Phil was also hopped-up on talking about Dave Van Ronk, like somehow keeping the talk on him was a magic mantra to ward off their social differences (although pro-prole Joyell seemed to like him well enough his insecurities as well as his lack of social lacks some times got the best of him, especially with her). As he analyzed the situation later this over-hype was probably decisive in what happened later.
But, except for that nervousness, things went along okay, maybe better than okay as Joyell suddenly displayed a great deal of knowledge about mountain music, a staple of Van Ronks’s play list. She rattled off some stuff about the British musicologist, Cecil Shape, who had “discovered” that Fair and Tender Ladies song that Phil was always harping on down in the hills and hollows of Kentucky in 1916 He was impressed (and was still impressed later, but for another reason) when he found out that trying to impress him she had gone, as he had and many others as well, to Sandy’s Records on Mass Ave where she got the “skinny” on lots of folk information).
You knew, if you have been to Harvard Square anytime between the landing of the Mayflower and 1963, that the Club Morocco was not so much a coffeehouse, the vital core of the folk revival existence, as a be-bop jazz club. Moreover they sold liquor, liquor by the glass, as Phil’s Irish-born grandmother used to say when his father and his cronies hightailed it over to North Adamsville’s Dublin Grille to toss down a few (well, more than a few) rather than a sober (lesser, really) amount at home, so naturally Phil and Joyell were carded at the door to make sure they were twenty-one. No problem, no problem either in finding some seats near the front to hear Mr. Van Ronk better. While getting seated, they half, or maybe quarter-listened to the front performer twanging away on some sing-along thing that was suppose to get everybody in the spirit of the thing. (Why, Phil wondered, did they always have some lame, half on, half off-key local “coming folk star” to warm up the audience when you came to see, see exclusively that night, the main performer. And the front guy, and it was usually guys, was never heard from again, usually.)
More importantly, Phil noticed Dave at the bar drinking a couple of shots (whiskey shots, he assumed) straight-up. Well anything to fortify you Phil thought. Probably will help to get that gravelly voice razor-edged. Then Dave tossed another as Phil turned to give his undivided attention to his gypsy princess. Damn she looked, well, fetching was the word that came to his mind, at least for public consumption, although if Phil was was honest with himself he was just hopped-up, sexually hopped up.
The front man finished up to lackluster applause, as he should have expected except for his sing-along rendition of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land always a crowd-pleaser, especially late in the night. The MC announced Dave to hearty applause; aficionados were clearly in the house for this performance. Phil noticed that as he came away from the bar Dave tossed another straight-up whisky down. He got slightly nervous never having heard any rumors about a drinking problem but also knowing, first hand-knowing, or rather observing, that several straight-up drinks were not a good sign. Moreover Dave had what Phil thought at first was a water bottle (or soda, although he had always been taught at home to call it tonic) but on closer inspection looked much more like a flask on his hip. Dave took to the impromptu stage, taking the steps steadily enough, introduced himself, and after the applause died down, started in right away on his Fair and Tender Ladies version, sounding a little tinny in the process. And sipping from the flask.
Another song, Cocaine Blues, followed. And then the axe. Well the axe for Phil, anyway. Dave literally mumbled the old time traditional song Railroad Boy. Joyell had had enough by then. As she explained while they were walking out the door she was no “purist” but she wasn’t going to spend the night listening to a drunk, a drunk that she could have listened to on the street outside to better effect. Out the door she spied an MTA bus, the one to Dudley that went right by her apartment, and told Phi that she was going to take it home. Home alone. And that was what Dave Van Ronk stole from one heart-broken Phillip Francis Kiley.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Out In The 1940s Crime Noir Night-Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake’s “This Gun For Hire”-A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for This Gun For Hire.
DVD Review
This Gun For Hire, Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, based on a novel by Graham Greene, Paramount Pictures, 1942
No question I am a film noir, especially a crime film noir, aficionado. Recently I have been on a tear reviewing various crime noir efforts and drawing comparisons between the ones that “speak” to me and those that, perhaps, should have been better left on the cutting room floor. The classics are easy and need no additional comment from me as their plot lines stand on their own merits. Others, because they have a fetching, or wicked, for that matter, femme fatale to muddy the waters also get a pass. Some, such as the film under review from 1942, This Gun For Hire, offers parts of both. The plot line maybe less so, although because it is set in World War II America and indirectly part of the fight to defeat the nefarious (in this case Japanese) enemy it has a certain intrigue factor. As for femme fatale energy, or rather quasi-femme fatale energy, although I have always considered Veronica Lake (and her classic air over her eye look) fetching here she is cross between that type and the girl next door.
As for the plot. Alan Ladd, a gun for hire to the highest bidder does his job as expected and is paid off for doing so. Unfortunately those that hired Ladd to silence an employee of a chemical company whose president was ready to sell poison gas to the highest bidder (Japan)were not on the level. They tried, might and main, to set Brother Ladd up as the fall guy. But one does not get to be, or rather one does not survive in the hired gun business, by being a chump for some nefarious scheme. Needless to say the plot is partially driven by his well-earned revenge.
However, a second plot line is brought in by Ms. Lake. America was at war and selling poison gas to the bidder, Japan, was, well, not right so she is “hired” to get the goods on the chemical operation through a weak-link, one of the company executives. Naturally in the course of these two plots unwinding the Ladd-Lake combination is brought to a boil, well, almost a boil. Through twists and turns the pair get the bad guys, although Ladd as a bad guy himself, or maybe just misunderstood, has to take a bullet for the cause because as we all know- “crime, especially murder, does not pay.” Not as good a pairing of Ladd and Lake as in The Glass Key but okay. But you can see what I mean about this one being sort of a semi-classic noir, right?
DVD Review
This Gun For Hire, Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, based on a novel by Graham Greene, Paramount Pictures, 1942
No question I am a film noir, especially a crime film noir, aficionado. Recently I have been on a tear reviewing various crime noir efforts and drawing comparisons between the ones that “speak” to me and those that, perhaps, should have been better left on the cutting room floor. The classics are easy and need no additional comment from me as their plot lines stand on their own merits. Others, because they have a fetching, or wicked, for that matter, femme fatale to muddy the waters also get a pass. Some, such as the film under review from 1942, This Gun For Hire, offers parts of both. The plot line maybe less so, although because it is set in World War II America and indirectly part of the fight to defeat the nefarious (in this case Japanese) enemy it has a certain intrigue factor. As for femme fatale energy, or rather quasi-femme fatale energy, although I have always considered Veronica Lake (and her classic air over her eye look) fetching here she is cross between that type and the girl next door.
As for the plot. Alan Ladd, a gun for hire to the highest bidder does his job as expected and is paid off for doing so. Unfortunately those that hired Ladd to silence an employee of a chemical company whose president was ready to sell poison gas to the highest bidder (Japan)were not on the level. They tried, might and main, to set Brother Ladd up as the fall guy. But one does not get to be, or rather one does not survive in the hired gun business, by being a chump for some nefarious scheme. Needless to say the plot is partially driven by his well-earned revenge.
However, a second plot line is brought in by Ms. Lake. America was at war and selling poison gas to the bidder, Japan, was, well, not right so she is “hired” to get the goods on the chemical operation through a weak-link, one of the company executives. Naturally in the course of these two plots unwinding the Ladd-Lake combination is brought to a boil, well, almost a boil. Through twists and turns the pair get the bad guys, although Ladd as a bad guy himself, or maybe just misunderstood, has to take a bullet for the cause because as we all know- “crime, especially murder, does not pay.” Not as good a pairing of Ladd and Lake as in The Glass Key but okay. But you can see what I mean about this one being sort of a semi-classic noir, right?
Sunday, August 28, 2011
On Intergenerational Sex-“…And Keep Me Young As I Grow Old”- With A Tip Of The Stetson To The “Belfast Cowboy,” Van Morrison
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Van Morrison performing The Beauty Of The Days Gone By which has the "... and keep me young as I grow old" line in it.
Markin comment:
This space, fundamentally, is devoted to political struggles, the big picture communist future political struggles that reflect the hard fact, as noted by Leon Trotsky's definitive biographer, Isaac Deutscher, that we communists have in the past, and continue now, to devote the bulk of our energies to the most immediately pressing of the three great tragedies of life, the struggle against hunger. The other two, sex and death, have gotten short shrift other than to be dealt with in broad brush stokes, basically arguing that in our communist future those two acknowledged mysterious passages will be dealt with more thoughtfully, less traumatically, and with deeper insight.
That said, where does that leave my old North Adamsville High School Class of 1964 corner boy class mate, Johnny Silver, and his twin sex and death dilemmas-growing old and still having a yearning for sexual adventure, sexual adventure with younger, much younger women. Other than calling him, rightly I think, a “ dirty old man” for even thinking about having sex with a young, curvaceous, nubile woman, to speak nothing of what it might do to his physical condition, we have no immediate communist program to alleviate his problem. Sorry Johnny. No question though under such a now seemingly utopian regime inter-generational sex will be no more the subject of scandalous gossip that various other homo and heterosexual variations of sexual activity that are the norm now.
Now, if one has been attentive, I have, with the exception of Leon Trotsky’s brief fling with Mexican painter Frida Kahlo in the late 1930s during his Mexican exile, not spent much time on the personal sex lives of our revolutionary forbears. That has been in keeping with the traditional reticence of revolutionaries to discuss their personal sexual lives. And with my own preferences in the uses of this space. I, however, feel that Johnny Silver’s case can be instructive for those of us who are going into our “golden years” and are still as randy as middle schoolers. Therefore I have posted Johnny Silver’s story, non-communist, non-political, Johnny Silver’s story, here for your perusal. The weak of heart, those under a doctor’s care, and assorted outraged moral philistines should avoid reading this for the good of your lives and/or souls. Note, and note carefully that other than a little editorial work this is strictly Johnny’s responsibility although I will admit my temperature and pulse were vicariously rising somewhat while performing this onerous task.
Johnny Silver’s comment:
I always liked younger girls when I was just a kid and I never got out of that habit, that sweet young thing habit. I used to take a lot guff from Frankie Riley, Peter Paul, and the other corner boys “up the Downs” at our hang-out, Salducci’s Pizza Parlor, when at sixteen I dated up twelve-year old “Luscious” Linda Lorraine (but “hot,” hot way beyond her years as I found out, have mercy, when she practically “raped” me, raped me if you can believe that, on our first date down at the North Adamsville Beach one summer night. I won’t say more because Peter Paul, who is editing this thing, might take a heart attack when he reads this since he never got to first base with her, and he tried, at least that is what she said, they all tried). They would yell “jail bait,” “baby-snatcher,” “cradle-robber,” and all that stuff that has been said by people, guys especially, since about the time Adam tried to date up Eve (who was a lot younger than he was and must have been pretty “hot” herself to get Adam off the straight and narrow) but she was fine, some sweet soap-smelling fine, and just getting some nice curves and stuff. Maybe that is where I go the habit. [Markin: All we ever said was “watch out” Johnny. Linda, who lived the next street over from me then, was nothing but a “man trap,” a serious man-trap and Johnny was only one of several who enjoyed her “favors” in those days. Despite Johnny’s obvious lapse of memory I never tried to get to first base, or any base with her. As for the others, the corner boy others, I would not be surprised if on some “horny” girl friend-less nights they didn’t take a shot at it. It wasn’t hard. Last we heard of Linda she had had several kids by her early twenties and died of a heroin overdose in her mid-thirties so it wasn’t the age thing at all about Linda whatever Johnny might say now.]
And it's always pretty much was that way going forward. My first wife, Laurie, whom I met and who Peter Paul knows, was nothing but a fox when I was in graduate school and she was in high school and whom I met when I came back for a North Adamsville –Adamsville high school Thanksgiving Day football game. She was captain of the Red Raider cheer-leaders and I took dead aim at her [Markin: I agree Laurie was a fox, no question, but again we told Johnny to “watch out” on her as well because she was nothing but a man-eater as he found out a few kids, and a lot of alimony payments, later. I admit I took a “run” at her myself when they split up but I am still grinding my teeth over the way she treated me during our short “affair,” if that’s what you could call it.] When I met my second wife, Alicia, she was just in graduate school and I was in my late thirties. [Markin: Johnny and I started drifting apart then, mainly different parts of the country, so I don’t know about Alicia’s qualities but Johnny says that she treated him “good,” which to Johnny always meant good at giving him oral sex and stuff like that. Okay, get used to it we are adults and more explicit sexual details will be coming up so be forewarned. And take your heart medicine for god’s sake.] My third wife, Becky, was barely out of college and I was in my forties when we met but she was “good.”
After that I stopped marrying them and just settled into a steady diet of “dating” seemingly ever younger women that I met through my work contacts or other social situations. [Markin: Johnny was, and is, a very good construction site consulting engineer.] And then, after Carrie left to pursue her screen-writing “dream” in California things dried up, dried up hard for this older man [Markin: Carrie was Johnny’s last serious live-in girlfriend, emphasis on the girl part, barely legal]. Well, first, damn the computer age for one thing, since it meant I could do more of my consulting work from home. And get more work done (and charge more as well). But it meant that the social situations also dried up. And no 50-something guy, no 50-something guy in his right mind, is going to the “meat market” singles bars around town trying to pick up the young ones when they have plenty of young guys around to moon over and get worked up about. [Markin: I am trying to be gentle with Brother Silver here but he “forgot” to mention getting laughed at, ridiculed and told to go “back to the nursing home” by those self-same younger women. He also “forgot” to mention that he was not a 50-something guy but a 60-something guy when the “heat” came on him.]. And second, damn, whatever that Adam “spreading his seed” thing was because even if things dried up socially this old man wasn’t dried up, if you get my meaning. [Markin: Translation; he was still as randy as a middle- schooler] So I did whatever any “on the information super-highway” guy would do, I went online looking for sex sites, younger women-centered sex sites. [Markin: Johnny didn’t have to work up a sweat finding them they practically come at you from the homepage onward.]
Of course “dating” services have been going on since just after Adam and Eve got it on. (Eve, by the way, a younger woman, a much younger woman and probably pretty “hot,” with a firm, curvaceous, naked body hot from what I heard, if I didn’t mention it before). Nowadays though (thank god, and thank god I took my medicine beforehand) the sexually explicit stuff women are putting online for your perusal is “over the top,” especially the younger ones, thank god. So naturally I filled out my “profile” page, paid my dough (via credit card but be careful), and “joined” all the other guys, horny guys waiting, wanting to “get laid” tonight.
Well things were kind of slow for a while since I blocked off returning messages to any women over thirty, and rightly so as they started looking kind of sad sack by then (although there were plenty of them around, around with kid baggage, if that is where your tastes run go see). I though at first it might be because there was a prejudice against 50-something guys in this hellish youth-drive universe. [Markin: See note above on the age question, the Johnny Silver age question.] And then Tracy, sweet eighteen-year old Tracy, answered my plea.
Now Tracy was not your average young woman (girl really but let’s leave it at that). She was eighteen, bright, intelligent, ambitious, resourceful, and looking for a “sugar daddy,” whatever that might mean. Yes dear, Johnny Silver is just your meat. [Markin: After some research this old-fashioned term “sugar daddy” could mean, like in the old days, someone, some man, who paid the freight to today’s “hook-up” or “friends-with benefits," or something entirely innocuous.] But here is where the problem came in. We sent many message back and forth and we were making some headway. She stated clearly that she was not into “mere boys,” but older men who had been around, and knew a thing or two (or three). Yes Tracy, Johnny is very, very just your meat.
Eventually she agreed to meet me in a public place to discuss, discuss our “the exact meaning of sugar daddy" business, and the like. But here is where the wheels started to come off, almost. She wanted some pictures of me, presumably recently up-loaded digital camera-produced photos, before we met. Her idea, innocent enough, and actually reasonable enough, was to make sure I was not some three-headed monster or, perhaps, someone recently released from parole for any number of charges from sexual offenses to murder and mayhem [Markin: Smart girl. As for any possible sexual offenses, as far as I know, they were all consensual and not in the least bit criminal although a few irate fathers might differ. The murder and mayhem I would advise that Johnny plead the Fifth on that one.]
And that was the first stumbling block. See, old guys like Peter Paul and me, were not suckled on computer technology practically from birth like today’s kids. We survive on the “information super-highway” but juts barely and while I know, as Markin does, enough to get by let’s just call us “primitives.” In short, I confess, bitterly confess, any pictures I had were not digital, and even if they were I did not know how to up-load them onto any site, sex site or not. Truth. However Tracy did not believe me, and it made sense in her iPhone, iPad, texting, Facebook world that everybody knew how to do such an eight year old simple task. I only avoided total defeat by producing some older photos and reading every manual for up-loading that came with the printer. But it was a near thing.
I won’t bore the reader with the details of our first meeting, or our later meetings but she was certain fetching in person and wiser in age than some of the older young women that I have been with through the years. But the big thing was that she was wonderful in bed. And this is where the faint-hearted, or just plain perverted, can get off and find your own sex site. Well let’s start off as always with the firm, soft, wrinkle-free skin, breast, buttock, thighs, that has driven me wild since old-time Linda Lorraine (hell, I can still smell her Palmolive soap, or perfume or whatever she used to drive the boys wild even now). Then of course the school-girlish strip tease that always gets me going. And then placing her mouth, well, placing her mouth where it did some good. Hell though everybody who reads this knows what’s what. I don' t have to draw a diagram, do I? Yes, we did it did several times (not all in one day, Viagra is good but no that good). She was very inventive with positions and of course, I knew a thing or two (or three) that got her going (read: moaning and groaning for her sugar daddy and not the old –fashioned meaning of the word either whatever Markin’s research said it meant in the old days). She still smiles about those two (or three things when I bring it up).
But the point is really about “… and keep me young while getting old” as the line from the Van Morrison song, The Beauty Of The Days Gone By. Some guys get it by pumping iron or other maniac strenuous exercising, and some by endless youth-enhancing operations. And some, like Markin, by writing endlessly about the old days like they were coming back, or could do anybody any good. [Markin: Watch it, Johnny, watch it brother.] Me, no, I want a young thing, a young firm thing, a young sex-crazed thing, a firm young thing that wants a lesson in those two (or three) things I could teach her (and have her sweaty-smiling a couple of days later over) right next to me right up until, and maybe past, judgment day. Can you blame me?
Markin postscript comment:
We had better get to that communist future in a hurry, a real hurry. In the meantime I’ll go off and take a shower, a very cold shower. Oh yes, Johnny, by the way (BTW for the cyber-slang crowd) what is Tracy’s cell phone number? Or does she have a geezer-craving girlfriend? Whatever you do, Johnny- “don’t watch out, not now.”
Markin comment:
This space, fundamentally, is devoted to political struggles, the big picture communist future political struggles that reflect the hard fact, as noted by Leon Trotsky's definitive biographer, Isaac Deutscher, that we communists have in the past, and continue now, to devote the bulk of our energies to the most immediately pressing of the three great tragedies of life, the struggle against hunger. The other two, sex and death, have gotten short shrift other than to be dealt with in broad brush stokes, basically arguing that in our communist future those two acknowledged mysterious passages will be dealt with more thoughtfully, less traumatically, and with deeper insight.
That said, where does that leave my old North Adamsville High School Class of 1964 corner boy class mate, Johnny Silver, and his twin sex and death dilemmas-growing old and still having a yearning for sexual adventure, sexual adventure with younger, much younger women. Other than calling him, rightly I think, a “ dirty old man” for even thinking about having sex with a young, curvaceous, nubile woman, to speak nothing of what it might do to his physical condition, we have no immediate communist program to alleviate his problem. Sorry Johnny. No question though under such a now seemingly utopian regime inter-generational sex will be no more the subject of scandalous gossip that various other homo and heterosexual variations of sexual activity that are the norm now.
Now, if one has been attentive, I have, with the exception of Leon Trotsky’s brief fling with Mexican painter Frida Kahlo in the late 1930s during his Mexican exile, not spent much time on the personal sex lives of our revolutionary forbears. That has been in keeping with the traditional reticence of revolutionaries to discuss their personal sexual lives. And with my own preferences in the uses of this space. I, however, feel that Johnny Silver’s case can be instructive for those of us who are going into our “golden years” and are still as randy as middle schoolers. Therefore I have posted Johnny Silver’s story, non-communist, non-political, Johnny Silver’s story, here for your perusal. The weak of heart, those under a doctor’s care, and assorted outraged moral philistines should avoid reading this for the good of your lives and/or souls. Note, and note carefully that other than a little editorial work this is strictly Johnny’s responsibility although I will admit my temperature and pulse were vicariously rising somewhat while performing this onerous task.
Johnny Silver’s comment:
I always liked younger girls when I was just a kid and I never got out of that habit, that sweet young thing habit. I used to take a lot guff from Frankie Riley, Peter Paul, and the other corner boys “up the Downs” at our hang-out, Salducci’s Pizza Parlor, when at sixteen I dated up twelve-year old “Luscious” Linda Lorraine (but “hot,” hot way beyond her years as I found out, have mercy, when she practically “raped” me, raped me if you can believe that, on our first date down at the North Adamsville Beach one summer night. I won’t say more because Peter Paul, who is editing this thing, might take a heart attack when he reads this since he never got to first base with her, and he tried, at least that is what she said, they all tried). They would yell “jail bait,” “baby-snatcher,” “cradle-robber,” and all that stuff that has been said by people, guys especially, since about the time Adam tried to date up Eve (who was a lot younger than he was and must have been pretty “hot” herself to get Adam off the straight and narrow) but she was fine, some sweet soap-smelling fine, and just getting some nice curves and stuff. Maybe that is where I go the habit. [Markin: All we ever said was “watch out” Johnny. Linda, who lived the next street over from me then, was nothing but a “man trap,” a serious man-trap and Johnny was only one of several who enjoyed her “favors” in those days. Despite Johnny’s obvious lapse of memory I never tried to get to first base, or any base with her. As for the others, the corner boy others, I would not be surprised if on some “horny” girl friend-less nights they didn’t take a shot at it. It wasn’t hard. Last we heard of Linda she had had several kids by her early twenties and died of a heroin overdose in her mid-thirties so it wasn’t the age thing at all about Linda whatever Johnny might say now.]
And it's always pretty much was that way going forward. My first wife, Laurie, whom I met and who Peter Paul knows, was nothing but a fox when I was in graduate school and she was in high school and whom I met when I came back for a North Adamsville –Adamsville high school Thanksgiving Day football game. She was captain of the Red Raider cheer-leaders and I took dead aim at her [Markin: I agree Laurie was a fox, no question, but again we told Johnny to “watch out” on her as well because she was nothing but a man-eater as he found out a few kids, and a lot of alimony payments, later. I admit I took a “run” at her myself when they split up but I am still grinding my teeth over the way she treated me during our short “affair,” if that’s what you could call it.] When I met my second wife, Alicia, she was just in graduate school and I was in my late thirties. [Markin: Johnny and I started drifting apart then, mainly different parts of the country, so I don’t know about Alicia’s qualities but Johnny says that she treated him “good,” which to Johnny always meant good at giving him oral sex and stuff like that. Okay, get used to it we are adults and more explicit sexual details will be coming up so be forewarned. And take your heart medicine for god’s sake.] My third wife, Becky, was barely out of college and I was in my forties when we met but she was “good.”
After that I stopped marrying them and just settled into a steady diet of “dating” seemingly ever younger women that I met through my work contacts or other social situations. [Markin: Johnny was, and is, a very good construction site consulting engineer.] And then, after Carrie left to pursue her screen-writing “dream” in California things dried up, dried up hard for this older man [Markin: Carrie was Johnny’s last serious live-in girlfriend, emphasis on the girl part, barely legal]. Well, first, damn the computer age for one thing, since it meant I could do more of my consulting work from home. And get more work done (and charge more as well). But it meant that the social situations also dried up. And no 50-something guy, no 50-something guy in his right mind, is going to the “meat market” singles bars around town trying to pick up the young ones when they have plenty of young guys around to moon over and get worked up about. [Markin: I am trying to be gentle with Brother Silver here but he “forgot” to mention getting laughed at, ridiculed and told to go “back to the nursing home” by those self-same younger women. He also “forgot” to mention that he was not a 50-something guy but a 60-something guy when the “heat” came on him.]. And second, damn, whatever that Adam “spreading his seed” thing was because even if things dried up socially this old man wasn’t dried up, if you get my meaning. [Markin: Translation; he was still as randy as a middle- schooler] So I did whatever any “on the information super-highway” guy would do, I went online looking for sex sites, younger women-centered sex sites. [Markin: Johnny didn’t have to work up a sweat finding them they practically come at you from the homepage onward.]
Of course “dating” services have been going on since just after Adam and Eve got it on. (Eve, by the way, a younger woman, a much younger woman and probably pretty “hot,” with a firm, curvaceous, naked body hot from what I heard, if I didn’t mention it before). Nowadays though (thank god, and thank god I took my medicine beforehand) the sexually explicit stuff women are putting online for your perusal is “over the top,” especially the younger ones, thank god. So naturally I filled out my “profile” page, paid my dough (via credit card but be careful), and “joined” all the other guys, horny guys waiting, wanting to “get laid” tonight.
Well things were kind of slow for a while since I blocked off returning messages to any women over thirty, and rightly so as they started looking kind of sad sack by then (although there were plenty of them around, around with kid baggage, if that is where your tastes run go see). I though at first it might be because there was a prejudice against 50-something guys in this hellish youth-drive universe. [Markin: See note above on the age question, the Johnny Silver age question.] And then Tracy, sweet eighteen-year old Tracy, answered my plea.
Now Tracy was not your average young woman (girl really but let’s leave it at that). She was eighteen, bright, intelligent, ambitious, resourceful, and looking for a “sugar daddy,” whatever that might mean. Yes dear, Johnny Silver is just your meat. [Markin: After some research this old-fashioned term “sugar daddy” could mean, like in the old days, someone, some man, who paid the freight to today’s “hook-up” or “friends-with benefits," or something entirely innocuous.] But here is where the problem came in. We sent many message back and forth and we were making some headway. She stated clearly that she was not into “mere boys,” but older men who had been around, and knew a thing or two (or three). Yes Tracy, Johnny is very, very just your meat.
Eventually she agreed to meet me in a public place to discuss, discuss our “the exact meaning of sugar daddy" business, and the like. But here is where the wheels started to come off, almost. She wanted some pictures of me, presumably recently up-loaded digital camera-produced photos, before we met. Her idea, innocent enough, and actually reasonable enough, was to make sure I was not some three-headed monster or, perhaps, someone recently released from parole for any number of charges from sexual offenses to murder and mayhem [Markin: Smart girl. As for any possible sexual offenses, as far as I know, they were all consensual and not in the least bit criminal although a few irate fathers might differ. The murder and mayhem I would advise that Johnny plead the Fifth on that one.]
And that was the first stumbling block. See, old guys like Peter Paul and me, were not suckled on computer technology practically from birth like today’s kids. We survive on the “information super-highway” but juts barely and while I know, as Markin does, enough to get by let’s just call us “primitives.” In short, I confess, bitterly confess, any pictures I had were not digital, and even if they were I did not know how to up-load them onto any site, sex site or not. Truth. However Tracy did not believe me, and it made sense in her iPhone, iPad, texting, Facebook world that everybody knew how to do such an eight year old simple task. I only avoided total defeat by producing some older photos and reading every manual for up-loading that came with the printer. But it was a near thing.
I won’t bore the reader with the details of our first meeting, or our later meetings but she was certain fetching in person and wiser in age than some of the older young women that I have been with through the years. But the big thing was that she was wonderful in bed. And this is where the faint-hearted, or just plain perverted, can get off and find your own sex site. Well let’s start off as always with the firm, soft, wrinkle-free skin, breast, buttock, thighs, that has driven me wild since old-time Linda Lorraine (hell, I can still smell her Palmolive soap, or perfume or whatever she used to drive the boys wild even now). Then of course the school-girlish strip tease that always gets me going. And then placing her mouth, well, placing her mouth where it did some good. Hell though everybody who reads this knows what’s what. I don' t have to draw a diagram, do I? Yes, we did it did several times (not all in one day, Viagra is good but no that good). She was very inventive with positions and of course, I knew a thing or two (or three) that got her going (read: moaning and groaning for her sugar daddy and not the old –fashioned meaning of the word either whatever Markin’s research said it meant in the old days). She still smiles about those two (or three things when I bring it up).
But the point is really about “… and keep me young while getting old” as the line from the Van Morrison song, The Beauty Of The Days Gone By. Some guys get it by pumping iron or other maniac strenuous exercising, and some by endless youth-enhancing operations. And some, like Markin, by writing endlessly about the old days like they were coming back, or could do anybody any good. [Markin: Watch it, Johnny, watch it brother.] Me, no, I want a young thing, a young firm thing, a young sex-crazed thing, a firm young thing that wants a lesson in those two (or three) things I could teach her (and have her sweaty-smiling a couple of days later over) right next to me right up until, and maybe past, judgment day. Can you blame me?
Markin postscript comment:
We had better get to that communist future in a hurry, a real hurry. In the meantime I’ll go off and take a shower, a very cold shower. Oh yes, Johnny, by the way (BTW for the cyber-slang crowd) what is Tracy’s cell phone number? Or does she have a geezer-craving girlfriend? Whatever you do, Johnny- “don’t watch out, not now.”
Out In The Be-Bop Night- The Baby-Boomer Birth Of The Search For The Blue-Pink American Western Night- “American Graffiti”-Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of a segment of American Graffiti, featuring the lead-up to the hot rod duel.
DVD Review
American Graffiti, starring Richard Dreyfus, Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, Harrison Ford, Paul LeMat, directed by George Lucas, 1973
Recently in this space I have been deep in remembrances of the influences, great and small, of the 1950s “beats” on my own sorry teen-aged alienation and teen-aged angst (sometimes they were separate anguishes, sometimes tied together like inseparable twins, mostly the later) and the struggle to find my place in the sun, to write in bright lights my own beat plainsong. Of course, that influence was blown over me second-hand as I was just a little too young, or too wide-world unconscious, to be there at the creation, on those first roads west, those first fitfully car-driven, gas-fuelled, thumb hanging-out, sore-footed, free exploration west, in body and mind. That first great rush of the adrenal in trying to discover, eternally discover as it has turned out, the search for the meaning of the great blue-pink American West night. Ah, pioneer-boys, thanks.
I just got a whiff, a passing whiff of that electric-charged air, the sweet “be-bop”, bop-bop, real gone daddy, cooled-out, pipe-filled with whatever, jazz-sexed, high white note blown, howling in the wind plainsong afterglow. Moreover, somewhat tarnished, a little sullen and withdrawn, and media-used up by my time. More than one faux black chino-wearing, black beret’d, stringy-bearded, nightshade sun-glassed, pseudo-poetic-pounding, television-derived fakir crossed my path in Harvard Square in those high stakes early 1960s high school days. And a few real ones, as well. (A couple, whom I still pass occasionally, giving a quick nod to, have never given up the ghost and still haunt the old square looking for the long-gone, storied Hayes-Bickford, a place where the serious and the fakirs gathered in the late night before dawn hour to pour out their souls, via mouth or on paper). More to the point, I came to late to be able to settle comfortably into that anti-political world that the “beats” thrived in. Great political and social events were unfolding and I wanted in, feverishly wanted in, with both hands.
You know some of the beat leaders, the real ones, don’t you? Remembered, seemingly profusely remembered now, by every passing acquaintance with some specimen to present. Now merely photo-plastered, book wrote, college english department deconstruction’d , academic journal-debated, but then in full glory plaid shirt, white shirt, tee shirt, dungarees, chinos, sturdy foot-sore cosmic traveler shoes, visuals of heaven’s own angel bums, if there was a heaven and there were angels and if that locale needed bums.
Jack, million hungry word man-child sanctified, Lowell mills-etched and trapped and mother-fed, Jack Kerouac. Allen, om-om-om, bop, bop, mantra-man, mad Paterson-trapped, modern plainsong-poet-in-chief, Allen Ginsberg. William, sweet opium dream (or, maybe, not so sweet when the supply ran out), needle-driven, sardonic, ironic, chronic, Tangiers-trapped, Harvard man (finally, a useful one, oops, sorry), Williams S. Burroughs. Neal, wild word, wild gesture, out of ashcan all-America dream man, tire-kicking, oil-checking, gas-filling, zen master wheelman gluing the enterprise together, Neal Cassady. And a whirling crowd of others, including mad, street-wise, saint-gunsel, Gregory Corso. I am a little fuzzy these days on the genesis of my relationship to this crowd (although a reading of Ginsberg’s Howl was probably first in those frantic, high school, Harvard Square, poetry-pounding, guitar-strummed, existential word space, coffee, no sugar, I’ll have a refill, please, fugitive dream’d, coffeehouse-anchored days). This I know. I qualified, in triplicate, teen angst, teen alienation, teen luddite as a card-carrying member in those days.
That brings us to the film under review, American Graffiti, and its relationship to the birth of the search for the blue-pink great American West night promised to be discussed in the headline. Well, let me run through the plot line for those who are not familiar with idea behind the film, or are too young to have a clue as to such goings-on but might want to know what the old fogies, their parents or (ouch) grandparents were up to (or thought they were up to) back in the days, or are the peers of those 1960s baby-boomers enshrined in the film, but have forgotten a thing or two since they watched the thing in 1973 (another ouch).
The opening scene sets the whole film up. A very spiffy, well-dressed, well-scrubbed, well-mannered (mostly), middle class crew of 1962-era Southern California suburban valley kids with plenty of disposable income at hands, are gathering for one last tribal meeting before they go their separate ways in the great adult grind-it-out, eyes-straight-forward, shoulder-to-the-wheel, little boxes world at their main club house, Mel’s fast food drive-in (already I have lost the younger set on that last point, on the non-mall food court, drive-in thing, right?). How did they get to said gathering spot, you might ask? Come on now, this is wide open-spaced California suburban valley how else would they get there other that in their own personal “teen mobiles.” Jesus, do I have to tell you everything.
They come in one and twos, mainly, in some of the best-looking “boss” car (excuse my reversion to an old-time term for excellence, automobile division) that you will see these days outside of an automobile museum. And besides that, many of them, the cars that is, are “souped-up” (look that one up yourself), especially valley hot-rod-king of the hill, John (played by Paul LeMat), and his yellow (mustard yellow, wow, can you believe that?) little deuce coup (ditto on the look up). Here is the point though, the main point even in this pre-1960s rebellion period, none of the cars look anything like any parent would drive, or could drive (except the few dweeby cars borrowed for the evening from some plaint, or beaten-down, beaten down by teen argument parent). Yes indeed, this is a gathering of the California branch of “youth nation” in all their tribal finery.
As is to be expected of a teen-centered (amazingly teen-centered, adults get merely cameo appearances in this one, and that seems about right) drama the plot line thins out considerably after the flash at Mel’s. Mainly, it is about a single night’s search for the 1962 version of the California blue-pink night (more on this below). And what drives that search? Cruising, natch. Why spend the time and expense involved in a “boss” car (you know that word now, right?) if you don’t create a stir up and down the main drag boulevard looking for…. , you can easily fill in that blank yourself. The rest of the plot centers on such eternal questions as the young leaving home and hearth to face the great wide world (here to be or not to be a college freshman by stars Ron Howard, as Steve, and Richard Dreyfus, as Curt), the usual boy looking for girl thing (including by oldster hot-rod king, Johnny) that I have endlessly reported on elsewhere in this space and that is not worthy of comment in a teen film. What else could such a film be about? Teen break-ups (Howard and Cindy Williams, as Laurie), cruising, stopping at Mel’s for some car-hopped fast food, cruising, a little hot- rod duel ( between Johnny and, ah, one Harrison Ford) on those open California highways (what else are they for?), and then daylight and the rude old work-a-day world intrudes, even on sanctified teen life.
This is one time though that I do not do justice to a film with a summary because this thing is well-directed, well-produced, and well-acted by a crew of then very young unknowns (mostly) that would go on to all kinds of other cinematic successes (including hot-rod runner-up, ah, Ford). The sense of déjà vu for this Eastern U.S.-born baby-boomer, including a great high school dance segment and a soundtrack that reads out of every classic Oldies But Goodies compilation that I have ever reviewed, was palpable, without being maudlin. Kudos
So what connection can be drawn, one might rightly ask in a review of American Graffiti, a film that depicts a snapshot of a then respectable early 1960s coming-of-age teen-driven culture. With, by then, a respectable post-birth of rock and roll (cleaned up of the “bad boys” like Jerry Lee Lewis) soundtrack. That also pays homage to a then very respectable post-Great Depression Okie-Akie invasion middle class-driven suburban valley life-style, and its respectable (mostly) California teen “boss” car culture. And highlights a then respectable superficial teen angst (“do you like my finger nails painted in crimson red or rose red?”, “do you want Pepsi or Coke with your hamburger, hold the onions?”, or something along those lines) and the search for now respectably beatified “beat” culture great blue-pink American West night? A film which, moreover, has not the slightest reference to, nor can in any way be taken to have been produced under the under the sign of, the “beats.” Hell, not even a Maynard G. Krebs (from the old time media image of beatniks television show, Dobey Gillis) beatnik caricature in the lot. Nada.
The closest that any character comes is my boy John, “greaser”, deuce coup, hot rod-king-of- the-hill, and working class poet (limited lyric car poet, okay)/ existential philosopher. And he doesn’t count because he has been around since Hector was a pup, is seen as an eternal “townie” by his middle class brethren, and is a throwback to James Dean and Marlon Brando 1950s California cool. And those guys (I mean the characters they played in Rebel Without A Cause and The Wild One not them as personalities, they were cool, no question) weren’t beat, no way. Beside John’s angst, important but kind of universal as it is, for some dewy-eyed female teeny-bopper to sit next to him in that old jalopy as he cruises those great California valley night highways is not the stuff of tragedy. Not in my book anyway, and I also had more than my share of that kind of teen angst.
No, what this film connects to, and connects to visually in the first instance, is that great big old search for that pink-blue American Western night that the “beats”, at least what I think the beats were searching for when they were doing their breakout from the post- World War II American crank-out death machine night. The shift from the Eastern American dark night westward (mainly, although some of beats were already vanguard- hovering around San Francisco waiting for the boys to come off the roads from the east and establish what was what) serves as a metaphor for much of what they were up to, if only to breakout, a little, from the nine-to-five, waiting for the bomb (atomic bomb) to drop world. That visual sense is most dramatically highlighted in the very first opening shots of this film where the pink-blue sky forms the backdrop to the activity starting up at California teen-hang-out (and elsewhere as well, even stuffy old Boston), fast food drive-in, Mel’s drive-in (A&W, Adventure Car-Hop, Diary Queen, fill in your own named spot), central committee headquarters for valley California teen night. .
Wait, let me detail this a little more so there is no mistake. The film opens with the first few anxious California “boss” cars (you remember what that word means, right?), almost tear-provoking in this reviewer, because I rode in teen cars just like those, rolling into neon-sign lighted Mel’s(lights just turned on against the kitchen-backdrop dark night) just as the sun is going down. There is a big old sun-devouring red devil of a cloud flaming up in the background. That is NOT the part of the pink-blue night I am talking about. Below, just below, nearer the horizon is the one I am talking about, the symbol of the search, and the stuff of dreams, the great American blue-pink dream escape.
I can hear great yawns and see rolled eyes piercing through cyberspace as you say so what is the big deal about some foolish ephemeral passing cloud, blue-pink, pink-blue, or hell, blue-blue. Philistines! Go back now to Mel’s, or wherever the blue-pink sky announces the nights doings, the night’s promises or disappointments. Those promises or those disappointments, great or small, went to make up the birth of the search for the great American Western night, the night of our own circumscribed teen, kiddish break-outs, great or small.
Make no mistake it was not the morning, the morning of school or toil, paid or unpaid. It was not the lazy afternoon, the time of study or of the self-same toil, paid or unpaid (the unpaid kind thanked for or not, or to quote the universal parent god of the time done because we keep a roof over your head). It was the night, no the approach, the blue-pink approach of night that drove our maddened dreams, hopefully signaling good omen for the night’s work. The day was mere preclude to that tiny feverishly sought breakout (now a small thing seen, but not then). The telephoned arrangements, the groomed preparations, the gathering of the odd dollar here or there, in order to first cruise that teen empty highway and then on second pass the filling teen night.
Now do you see how the “beats”, those unnamed, unnamable, sub-consciously-embedded beats drove our bust-out dreams for travel, for adventure, for wine (later, dope),for women (or men) and for song, for shaking off the dust of the old town, great or small, as long as it moving elsewhere, and on a thumb pulled-out, hard-driven, shoe leather-beaten shod foot if need be.
American Graffiti is a snapshot of just exactly that minute, just that historic minute before the great shake-out of the 1960s for the baby-boomer generation, after that minute some of us went left politically and became social activists. We made just about every political, social, and cultural mistake along the way and lost, no, were defeated, no again, were mauled, in the end in our dreams of “seeking that newer world.” (And have spent the past forty or so years having to fight a rear-guard against the straightjacket, death machine-loving yahoos and their consorts). Ya, but hear me out. The search for the blue-pink Great American Western night was not one of those mistakes.
DVD Review
American Graffiti, starring Richard Dreyfus, Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, Harrison Ford, Paul LeMat, directed by George Lucas, 1973
Recently in this space I have been deep in remembrances of the influences, great and small, of the 1950s “beats” on my own sorry teen-aged alienation and teen-aged angst (sometimes they were separate anguishes, sometimes tied together like inseparable twins, mostly the later) and the struggle to find my place in the sun, to write in bright lights my own beat plainsong. Of course, that influence was blown over me second-hand as I was just a little too young, or too wide-world unconscious, to be there at the creation, on those first roads west, those first fitfully car-driven, gas-fuelled, thumb hanging-out, sore-footed, free exploration west, in body and mind. That first great rush of the adrenal in trying to discover, eternally discover as it has turned out, the search for the meaning of the great blue-pink American West night. Ah, pioneer-boys, thanks.
I just got a whiff, a passing whiff of that electric-charged air, the sweet “be-bop”, bop-bop, real gone daddy, cooled-out, pipe-filled with whatever, jazz-sexed, high white note blown, howling in the wind plainsong afterglow. Moreover, somewhat tarnished, a little sullen and withdrawn, and media-used up by my time. More than one faux black chino-wearing, black beret’d, stringy-bearded, nightshade sun-glassed, pseudo-poetic-pounding, television-derived fakir crossed my path in Harvard Square in those high stakes early 1960s high school days. And a few real ones, as well. (A couple, whom I still pass occasionally, giving a quick nod to, have never given up the ghost and still haunt the old square looking for the long-gone, storied Hayes-Bickford, a place where the serious and the fakirs gathered in the late night before dawn hour to pour out their souls, via mouth or on paper). More to the point, I came to late to be able to settle comfortably into that anti-political world that the “beats” thrived in. Great political and social events were unfolding and I wanted in, feverishly wanted in, with both hands.
You know some of the beat leaders, the real ones, don’t you? Remembered, seemingly profusely remembered now, by every passing acquaintance with some specimen to present. Now merely photo-plastered, book wrote, college english department deconstruction’d , academic journal-debated, but then in full glory plaid shirt, white shirt, tee shirt, dungarees, chinos, sturdy foot-sore cosmic traveler shoes, visuals of heaven’s own angel bums, if there was a heaven and there were angels and if that locale needed bums.
Jack, million hungry word man-child sanctified, Lowell mills-etched and trapped and mother-fed, Jack Kerouac. Allen, om-om-om, bop, bop, mantra-man, mad Paterson-trapped, modern plainsong-poet-in-chief, Allen Ginsberg. William, sweet opium dream (or, maybe, not so sweet when the supply ran out), needle-driven, sardonic, ironic, chronic, Tangiers-trapped, Harvard man (finally, a useful one, oops, sorry), Williams S. Burroughs. Neal, wild word, wild gesture, out of ashcan all-America dream man, tire-kicking, oil-checking, gas-filling, zen master wheelman gluing the enterprise together, Neal Cassady. And a whirling crowd of others, including mad, street-wise, saint-gunsel, Gregory Corso. I am a little fuzzy these days on the genesis of my relationship to this crowd (although a reading of Ginsberg’s Howl was probably first in those frantic, high school, Harvard Square, poetry-pounding, guitar-strummed, existential word space, coffee, no sugar, I’ll have a refill, please, fugitive dream’d, coffeehouse-anchored days). This I know. I qualified, in triplicate, teen angst, teen alienation, teen luddite as a card-carrying member in those days.
That brings us to the film under review, American Graffiti, and its relationship to the birth of the search for the blue-pink great American West night promised to be discussed in the headline. Well, let me run through the plot line for those who are not familiar with idea behind the film, or are too young to have a clue as to such goings-on but might want to know what the old fogies, their parents or (ouch) grandparents were up to (or thought they were up to) back in the days, or are the peers of those 1960s baby-boomers enshrined in the film, but have forgotten a thing or two since they watched the thing in 1973 (another ouch).
The opening scene sets the whole film up. A very spiffy, well-dressed, well-scrubbed, well-mannered (mostly), middle class crew of 1962-era Southern California suburban valley kids with plenty of disposable income at hands, are gathering for one last tribal meeting before they go their separate ways in the great adult grind-it-out, eyes-straight-forward, shoulder-to-the-wheel, little boxes world at their main club house, Mel’s fast food drive-in (already I have lost the younger set on that last point, on the non-mall food court, drive-in thing, right?). How did they get to said gathering spot, you might ask? Come on now, this is wide open-spaced California suburban valley how else would they get there other that in their own personal “teen mobiles.” Jesus, do I have to tell you everything.
They come in one and twos, mainly, in some of the best-looking “boss” car (excuse my reversion to an old-time term for excellence, automobile division) that you will see these days outside of an automobile museum. And besides that, many of them, the cars that is, are “souped-up” (look that one up yourself), especially valley hot-rod-king of the hill, John (played by Paul LeMat), and his yellow (mustard yellow, wow, can you believe that?) little deuce coup (ditto on the look up). Here is the point though, the main point even in this pre-1960s rebellion period, none of the cars look anything like any parent would drive, or could drive (except the few dweeby cars borrowed for the evening from some plaint, or beaten-down, beaten down by teen argument parent). Yes indeed, this is a gathering of the California branch of “youth nation” in all their tribal finery.
As is to be expected of a teen-centered (amazingly teen-centered, adults get merely cameo appearances in this one, and that seems about right) drama the plot line thins out considerably after the flash at Mel’s. Mainly, it is about a single night’s search for the 1962 version of the California blue-pink night (more on this below). And what drives that search? Cruising, natch. Why spend the time and expense involved in a “boss” car (you know that word now, right?) if you don’t create a stir up and down the main drag boulevard looking for…. , you can easily fill in that blank yourself. The rest of the plot centers on such eternal questions as the young leaving home and hearth to face the great wide world (here to be or not to be a college freshman by stars Ron Howard, as Steve, and Richard Dreyfus, as Curt), the usual boy looking for girl thing (including by oldster hot-rod king, Johnny) that I have endlessly reported on elsewhere in this space and that is not worthy of comment in a teen film. What else could such a film be about? Teen break-ups (Howard and Cindy Williams, as Laurie), cruising, stopping at Mel’s for some car-hopped fast food, cruising, a little hot- rod duel ( between Johnny and, ah, one Harrison Ford) on those open California highways (what else are they for?), and then daylight and the rude old work-a-day world intrudes, even on sanctified teen life.
This is one time though that I do not do justice to a film with a summary because this thing is well-directed, well-produced, and well-acted by a crew of then very young unknowns (mostly) that would go on to all kinds of other cinematic successes (including hot-rod runner-up, ah, Ford). The sense of déjà vu for this Eastern U.S.-born baby-boomer, including a great high school dance segment and a soundtrack that reads out of every classic Oldies But Goodies compilation that I have ever reviewed, was palpable, without being maudlin. Kudos
So what connection can be drawn, one might rightly ask in a review of American Graffiti, a film that depicts a snapshot of a then respectable early 1960s coming-of-age teen-driven culture. With, by then, a respectable post-birth of rock and roll (cleaned up of the “bad boys” like Jerry Lee Lewis) soundtrack. That also pays homage to a then very respectable post-Great Depression Okie-Akie invasion middle class-driven suburban valley life-style, and its respectable (mostly) California teen “boss” car culture. And highlights a then respectable superficial teen angst (“do you like my finger nails painted in crimson red or rose red?”, “do you want Pepsi or Coke with your hamburger, hold the onions?”, or something along those lines) and the search for now respectably beatified “beat” culture great blue-pink American West night? A film which, moreover, has not the slightest reference to, nor can in any way be taken to have been produced under the under the sign of, the “beats.” Hell, not even a Maynard G. Krebs (from the old time media image of beatniks television show, Dobey Gillis) beatnik caricature in the lot. Nada.
The closest that any character comes is my boy John, “greaser”, deuce coup, hot rod-king-of- the-hill, and working class poet (limited lyric car poet, okay)/ existential philosopher. And he doesn’t count because he has been around since Hector was a pup, is seen as an eternal “townie” by his middle class brethren, and is a throwback to James Dean and Marlon Brando 1950s California cool. And those guys (I mean the characters they played in Rebel Without A Cause and The Wild One not them as personalities, they were cool, no question) weren’t beat, no way. Beside John’s angst, important but kind of universal as it is, for some dewy-eyed female teeny-bopper to sit next to him in that old jalopy as he cruises those great California valley night highways is not the stuff of tragedy. Not in my book anyway, and I also had more than my share of that kind of teen angst.
No, what this film connects to, and connects to visually in the first instance, is that great big old search for that pink-blue American Western night that the “beats”, at least what I think the beats were searching for when they were doing their breakout from the post- World War II American crank-out death machine night. The shift from the Eastern American dark night westward (mainly, although some of beats were already vanguard- hovering around San Francisco waiting for the boys to come off the roads from the east and establish what was what) serves as a metaphor for much of what they were up to, if only to breakout, a little, from the nine-to-five, waiting for the bomb (atomic bomb) to drop world. That visual sense is most dramatically highlighted in the very first opening shots of this film where the pink-blue sky forms the backdrop to the activity starting up at California teen-hang-out (and elsewhere as well, even stuffy old Boston), fast food drive-in, Mel’s drive-in (A&W, Adventure Car-Hop, Diary Queen, fill in your own named spot), central committee headquarters for valley California teen night. .
Wait, let me detail this a little more so there is no mistake. The film opens with the first few anxious California “boss” cars (you remember what that word means, right?), almost tear-provoking in this reviewer, because I rode in teen cars just like those, rolling into neon-sign lighted Mel’s(lights just turned on against the kitchen-backdrop dark night) just as the sun is going down. There is a big old sun-devouring red devil of a cloud flaming up in the background. That is NOT the part of the pink-blue night I am talking about. Below, just below, nearer the horizon is the one I am talking about, the symbol of the search, and the stuff of dreams, the great American blue-pink dream escape.
I can hear great yawns and see rolled eyes piercing through cyberspace as you say so what is the big deal about some foolish ephemeral passing cloud, blue-pink, pink-blue, or hell, blue-blue. Philistines! Go back now to Mel’s, or wherever the blue-pink sky announces the nights doings, the night’s promises or disappointments. Those promises or those disappointments, great or small, went to make up the birth of the search for the great American Western night, the night of our own circumscribed teen, kiddish break-outs, great or small.
Make no mistake it was not the morning, the morning of school or toil, paid or unpaid. It was not the lazy afternoon, the time of study or of the self-same toil, paid or unpaid (the unpaid kind thanked for or not, or to quote the universal parent god of the time done because we keep a roof over your head). It was the night, no the approach, the blue-pink approach of night that drove our maddened dreams, hopefully signaling good omen for the night’s work. The day was mere preclude to that tiny feverishly sought breakout (now a small thing seen, but not then). The telephoned arrangements, the groomed preparations, the gathering of the odd dollar here or there, in order to first cruise that teen empty highway and then on second pass the filling teen night.
Now do you see how the “beats”, those unnamed, unnamable, sub-consciously-embedded beats drove our bust-out dreams for travel, for adventure, for wine (later, dope),for women (or men) and for song, for shaking off the dust of the old town, great or small, as long as it moving elsewhere, and on a thumb pulled-out, hard-driven, shoe leather-beaten shod foot if need be.
American Graffiti is a snapshot of just exactly that minute, just that historic minute before the great shake-out of the 1960s for the baby-boomer generation, after that minute some of us went left politically and became social activists. We made just about every political, social, and cultural mistake along the way and lost, no, were defeated, no again, were mauled, in the end in our dreams of “seeking that newer world.” (And have spent the past forty or so years having to fight a rear-guard against the straightjacket, death machine-loving yahoos and their consorts). Ya, but hear me out. The search for the blue-pink Great American Western night was not one of those mistakes.
Out In The Be-Bop Night- In The Time Of The High School Hop, Circa 1960-With Jerry Lee Lewis In Mind
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of The Cadillacs performing She's So Fine.
Recently I have been in something of 1960s high school remembrance mode, mainly as a result of evaluating the influence of the “beats” (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady and the usual suspects), on my youthful political (not much), social (a fair amount), and cultural (lots) development, but also as a result of re-watching George Lucas’ American Graffiti, a 1960s coming-of-age film that fits comfortably in my own high school mode. I have reviewed the film as a whole elsewhere in this space but I wish to make a special point about the high school dance segment of the film (The Baby-Boomer Birth Of The Search For The Blue-Pink American Western Night- “American Graffiti”-A Film Review, dated September, 8, 2010).
George Lucas’s inclusion of a local high school dance segment in this film was inspired. The segment is not central to the action, such as it is, of the film, but it certainly is calculated to evoke almost universal nostalgia for anyone (meaning almost everyone these days) who has ever had to deal, in one way or another, with the question of this time-honored (if hoary) high school tradition. Each generation probably has its own take on what this experience was like, but most of the real action was behind the scenes. And in that sense the film caught the three high points. Women can fill in own blanks in reverse, but here are some of them from a man’s perspective.
First of all stag (single no way, with the guys, or not at all, although how many and who was always up for grabs, especially on the important “shotgun” question) or on a date (double-date, somebody’s left out sister, your sister, anything to not be a wallflower, a sickly wallflower among the ‘losers’ to boot, as those dance moments ticked slowly, so slowly by). Many an ungodly hour was spent on that date question mulling over, no, not what you think, who to invite, no that was usually the easy part, but rather getting up enough nerve to make the call to make the invitation. And check this out, on more than one occasion, and I am sure the same was true for you, somehow your intelligence network had failed and it turns out that the certain she, your dreamy certain she, damn, her, had a “steady.” Christ, what a waste of time.
Secondly, grooming preparations- I will propose here, in best scientific method form (or at least quasi-scientific form for that is all this thing will hold) that there was an inverse relationship to the amount of time that one spent on this work, you know, shower, shave (in those days you had to, if you could), comb always at the ready, a little something for the underarms and some men’s fragrance to give the smell of being the least bit civilized, and the answer to the stag/date question. In this sense the inverse is the extra time spent in order to attract that certain she (remember women just reverse the gender, or today everyone fill in your own preference experience) so when the next goddam dance or mixed social event came up you were dated up with that certain she and you could just throw a little fatal after-shave on and fly out the door. Oh, by the way, I refuse, I totally refuse to go over the number of time that I cooled my heels while that occasional captured “she” made her grooming preparations, first date or any date, even if it was just to make preparations to go to the drugstore soda fountain. Mercifully, on that score I did not have a sister to scream at or else I might not be writing this screed today, at least this side of a cell block.
Thirdly, the gathering of the dough, the always short of dough problem that plagued our poor working class household and that I noticed did not seem to be any kind of problem in that California suburban valley locale of American Graffiti. Money for exotic appearing (hey, it was California, remember, even the fast food drive-ins had to be retro-fine) double-dip hamburgers (with fries), cherry cokes, for two, for two, my god, plus some gas money, plus, plus, plus, you know a guy has got expenses in this world. The real problem was whether to borrow from parents, or pick up some chattel slave job. Getting it from the parents always came with some awful terms, usually worthy of some international diplomatic accord, and more grief than it was worth, unless I was desperate, or girl-hungry. Oh ya, and you had to hear the obligatory we do this and that to keep a roof over your head along with the bucks. You know the drill, probably.
And while we are on the subject of parents the inevitable question comes up about what time one should be home by. They say X, and make that loan, that hard-scrabble hideous loan that has more conditions and enforcements than a loan shark, contingent on the observance of a “reasonable” (parent reasonable) hour. I say Y, because in the back of my mind I, if I get lucky (no further discussion necessary, right?) then I need plenty of time and can’t be worried about curfews, or reasonable times. Come to think of it, even fifty years later, come on Ma you be reasonable (and it was always Ma on this one in our old working class neighborhoods, and maybe yours too. Dad was brought in, if he was brought in at all, at this point in our lives only for the heavy artillery stuff).
Once these preparations and battles have been settled then, and here is where American Graffiti is like from a dream, the question of transportation to the dance comes into play. Here I mean a car, and if you’ve read my review of American Graffiti you know I mean a “boss” car. You would have to go to an automobile museum to see such treasures these days. By the way don’t even utter the words public transportation for this occasion or I will think that you grew up in New York City or some place like that and that you have not really been paying attention after all my paeans to the California endless highways and the search of the elusive blue-pink great American Western night.
In any case, this car-less writer, this foot-sore, shoe leather-beaten, car-less writer, depended, sometimes cynically so, on cultivating friendships with guys who had such “boss” cars, particularly the renowned ’57 Chevy that still makes me quiver at the thought of. Needless to say, in expectation at least, of the night’s successes a stop at the local gas station for a fill-up (a couple of bucks then) check the oil and water, kick the tires and so on preceded our big entrance at the dance.
Part of the charm of the American Graffiti segment on the local high school dance is, as I have noted previously, once you get indoors it could have been any place U.S.A. (and I am willing to bet any time U.S.A., as well. For this baby-boomer, that particular high school dance, could have taken place at my high school when I was a student in the early 1960s). From the throwaway crepe paper decorations that festooned the place to the ever-present gym bleachers to the chaperones to the platform the local band (a band that if it did not hit it big would go on to greater glory at our future weddings, birthday parties, and other important occasion) covering the top hits of the day performed on it was a perfect replica.
Also perfect replica were the classic boys’ attire for a casual dance, plaid or white sports shirt, chinos, stolid shoes, and short-trimmed hair (no beards, beads, bell-bottoms, its much to early in the decade for that) and for the girls blouses (or maybe sweaters, cashmere, if I recall being in fashion at the time, at least in the colder East), full swirling dresses, and, I think beehive hair-dos. Wow! Of course, perfect replica were the infinite variety of dances (frug, watusi, twist, stroll, etc) that blessed, no, twice blessed, rock and roll let us do in order to not to have to dance too waltz close. Mercy. And I cannot finish up this part without saying perfect replica hes looking at certain shes (if stag, of course, eyes straight forward if dated up, or else bloody hell) and also perfect replica wallflowers, as well.
Not filmed in American Graffiti, although a solo slow one highlighted the tensions between Steve and Laurie (Ron Howard and Cindy Williams) but ever present and certainly the subject of some comment in this space was that end of the night dance. I’ll just repeat what I have repeated elsewhere. This last dance was always one of those slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, as I have noted before, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your sexual preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
And after the dance? Well, I am the soul of discretion, and you should be too. Let’s put it this way. Sometimes I got home earlier than the Ma agreed time, but sometimes, not enough now that I think about it, I saw huge red suns rising up over the blue waters. Either way, my friends, worth every blessed minute of anguish, right?
Recently I have been in something of 1960s high school remembrance mode, mainly as a result of evaluating the influence of the “beats” (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady and the usual suspects), on my youthful political (not much), social (a fair amount), and cultural (lots) development, but also as a result of re-watching George Lucas’ American Graffiti, a 1960s coming-of-age film that fits comfortably in my own high school mode. I have reviewed the film as a whole elsewhere in this space but I wish to make a special point about the high school dance segment of the film (The Baby-Boomer Birth Of The Search For The Blue-Pink American Western Night- “American Graffiti”-A Film Review, dated September, 8, 2010).
George Lucas’s inclusion of a local high school dance segment in this film was inspired. The segment is not central to the action, such as it is, of the film, but it certainly is calculated to evoke almost universal nostalgia for anyone (meaning almost everyone these days) who has ever had to deal, in one way or another, with the question of this time-honored (if hoary) high school tradition. Each generation probably has its own take on what this experience was like, but most of the real action was behind the scenes. And in that sense the film caught the three high points. Women can fill in own blanks in reverse, but here are some of them from a man’s perspective.
First of all stag (single no way, with the guys, or not at all, although how many and who was always up for grabs, especially on the important “shotgun” question) or on a date (double-date, somebody’s left out sister, your sister, anything to not be a wallflower, a sickly wallflower among the ‘losers’ to boot, as those dance moments ticked slowly, so slowly by). Many an ungodly hour was spent on that date question mulling over, no, not what you think, who to invite, no that was usually the easy part, but rather getting up enough nerve to make the call to make the invitation. And check this out, on more than one occasion, and I am sure the same was true for you, somehow your intelligence network had failed and it turns out that the certain she, your dreamy certain she, damn, her, had a “steady.” Christ, what a waste of time.
Secondly, grooming preparations- I will propose here, in best scientific method form (or at least quasi-scientific form for that is all this thing will hold) that there was an inverse relationship to the amount of time that one spent on this work, you know, shower, shave (in those days you had to, if you could), comb always at the ready, a little something for the underarms and some men’s fragrance to give the smell of being the least bit civilized, and the answer to the stag/date question. In this sense the inverse is the extra time spent in order to attract that certain she (remember women just reverse the gender, or today everyone fill in your own preference experience) so when the next goddam dance or mixed social event came up you were dated up with that certain she and you could just throw a little fatal after-shave on and fly out the door. Oh, by the way, I refuse, I totally refuse to go over the number of time that I cooled my heels while that occasional captured “she” made her grooming preparations, first date or any date, even if it was just to make preparations to go to the drugstore soda fountain. Mercifully, on that score I did not have a sister to scream at or else I might not be writing this screed today, at least this side of a cell block.
Thirdly, the gathering of the dough, the always short of dough problem that plagued our poor working class household and that I noticed did not seem to be any kind of problem in that California suburban valley locale of American Graffiti. Money for exotic appearing (hey, it was California, remember, even the fast food drive-ins had to be retro-fine) double-dip hamburgers (with fries), cherry cokes, for two, for two, my god, plus some gas money, plus, plus, plus, you know a guy has got expenses in this world. The real problem was whether to borrow from parents, or pick up some chattel slave job. Getting it from the parents always came with some awful terms, usually worthy of some international diplomatic accord, and more grief than it was worth, unless I was desperate, or girl-hungry. Oh ya, and you had to hear the obligatory we do this and that to keep a roof over your head along with the bucks. You know the drill, probably.
And while we are on the subject of parents the inevitable question comes up about what time one should be home by. They say X, and make that loan, that hard-scrabble hideous loan that has more conditions and enforcements than a loan shark, contingent on the observance of a “reasonable” (parent reasonable) hour. I say Y, because in the back of my mind I, if I get lucky (no further discussion necessary, right?) then I need plenty of time and can’t be worried about curfews, or reasonable times. Come to think of it, even fifty years later, come on Ma you be reasonable (and it was always Ma on this one in our old working class neighborhoods, and maybe yours too. Dad was brought in, if he was brought in at all, at this point in our lives only for the heavy artillery stuff).
Once these preparations and battles have been settled then, and here is where American Graffiti is like from a dream, the question of transportation to the dance comes into play. Here I mean a car, and if you’ve read my review of American Graffiti you know I mean a “boss” car. You would have to go to an automobile museum to see such treasures these days. By the way don’t even utter the words public transportation for this occasion or I will think that you grew up in New York City or some place like that and that you have not really been paying attention after all my paeans to the California endless highways and the search of the elusive blue-pink great American Western night.
In any case, this car-less writer, this foot-sore, shoe leather-beaten, car-less writer, depended, sometimes cynically so, on cultivating friendships with guys who had such “boss” cars, particularly the renowned ’57 Chevy that still makes me quiver at the thought of. Needless to say, in expectation at least, of the night’s successes a stop at the local gas station for a fill-up (a couple of bucks then) check the oil and water, kick the tires and so on preceded our big entrance at the dance.
Part of the charm of the American Graffiti segment on the local high school dance is, as I have noted previously, once you get indoors it could have been any place U.S.A. (and I am willing to bet any time U.S.A., as well. For this baby-boomer, that particular high school dance, could have taken place at my high school when I was a student in the early 1960s). From the throwaway crepe paper decorations that festooned the place to the ever-present gym bleachers to the chaperones to the platform the local band (a band that if it did not hit it big would go on to greater glory at our future weddings, birthday parties, and other important occasion) covering the top hits of the day performed on it was a perfect replica.
Also perfect replica were the classic boys’ attire for a casual dance, plaid or white sports shirt, chinos, stolid shoes, and short-trimmed hair (no beards, beads, bell-bottoms, its much to early in the decade for that) and for the girls blouses (or maybe sweaters, cashmere, if I recall being in fashion at the time, at least in the colder East), full swirling dresses, and, I think beehive hair-dos. Wow! Of course, perfect replica were the infinite variety of dances (frug, watusi, twist, stroll, etc) that blessed, no, twice blessed, rock and roll let us do in order to not to have to dance too waltz close. Mercy. And I cannot finish up this part without saying perfect replica hes looking at certain shes (if stag, of course, eyes straight forward if dated up, or else bloody hell) and also perfect replica wallflowers, as well.
Not filmed in American Graffiti, although a solo slow one highlighted the tensions between Steve and Laurie (Ron Howard and Cindy Williams) but ever present and certainly the subject of some comment in this space was that end of the night dance. I’ll just repeat what I have repeated elsewhere. This last dance was always one of those slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, as I have noted before, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your sexual preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
And after the dance? Well, I am the soul of discretion, and you should be too. Let’s put it this way. Sometimes I got home earlier than the Ma agreed time, but sometimes, not enough now that I think about it, I saw huge red suns rising up over the blue waters. Either way, my friends, worth every blessed minute of anguish, right?
Out In The Be-Bop Night-The Old "Beat" Town-2010-With Jack Kerouac In Mind
Click on the headline to link to a "WBZ" Website report on an up-coming construction project on the Neponset Bridge. This is merely for background on the old town bridge, the 'real' pre-1970 one mentioned below.
Markin comment:
Crossing the Neponset River Bridge from the Boston side these days, walking-sore-footed, ankle-ached, worn-out, scuffed leather shoes, rounded-heel shoes, soles thinned-out shoes walking-just as was almost always my mode of transportation, and maybe yours, in the old days, and sometimes for me in the not so old days-ain’t like it used to be. That new (1970s new, anyway), higher-standing , pot-holed patched, unevenly asphalt-paved even on good days, uninviting, if not just plain dangerous, walk-way, ugly slab-concreted, built by the lowest bidder, bridge that routes traffic, hither and yon, is not like the old one, “ walking to think things over friendly."
Not today, anyway, as I brace myself for a serious look see at our beat-up, beat-down, beaten-back, back-seat-taking, smudged-up, blood and sweat-stained, bitter-teared (very bitter-teared), life-drained, seen better days (although I do not, personally, remember having seen those better days, but people keep saying, even now, there was a such a time so let’s leave it at that), almost genetically memory embedded , character-building (yes, that old chestnut, as well), beautiful (yes, beautiful too, oddly, eerily beautiful, or as mad, shamanic poet Yeats, he of that that fine Anglo-Irish word edge, would put it, "terrible beauty a-borning" beautiful ), old working class home town.
It’s silly, I know, to get misty-eyed over it but I miss the old archaic pre-1970s drawbridge bridge with its ghastly-green gates to stop car traffic (how else could you describe that institutional color that no artist would have on his or her palette, and no serious professional business painter would stoop to brush on anything much less a gate) and the lonely stony-eyed concrete medieval fortress of a tower (and its poor, bored, had to be bored, keeper, or tender or whatever you call that “look out for the big boats coming and going” guy, and it was always some old guy who looked like he could swap stories, buddy to buddy, with King Neptune, and probably did) to let the bigger boats, courtesy of the law of the seas, make their way to dock.
Or, better, I hope, I fervently hope, for the boats to get clearance from that old codger, old Neptune’s brother, to race, to crawl, to put-put, to hoist sail or whatever such boats do to get to the open sea, the wide open blue-grey, swirling, mad, rushing, whirling dervish of a sea, out to beyond the breakwaters, out to beyond the harbor islands, to the land becoming mere speck, and then mere vanish, and more adventure than I could even dream of, or think of dreaming of. At least I hope those oil-stained, diesel-fuelled (including those awful faint-producing fumes), powerfully-engined, deep-drafted, fully–stocked boats that drove river traffic and stopped car traffic came back or went out in search of those adventures away from the placid wooden-lumbered doldrums docks up along the Quincy side of the river.
But, one thing is for sure, whatever happened to the boats, or on them, that old bridge, that old green-gate painted monster of a drawbridge, gave you a chance to pause mid-bridge, fright-free, not-having-to-watch-your-back-for-fast-cars-caroming-by free even, to look up and down midstream; to dream, perhaps, of tidal drifts and fair winds to the far reaches of this good, green planet, as far as you could carry yourself and your backpacked, bed-rolled belongings, or as long as the money held out; to bestir yourself afresh to think of oneness with the seventy-eight trillion life forms (hey, I didn’t count them, alright, this is just an estimate, a very rough estimate) that flow in the murky, and on some days very murky, depths right before your eyes down to our homeland, the sea; to dream vista dreams of far away picture postcard cooling ports-of-call in the sweaty, sultry summer day airs or churn madly with the flow of wild summer night airs that led from the old home town west, north, south, somewhere, anywhere; to dream the dream of dreams of misspent (no way, no way misspent), suggestive, very suggestive, radio-blared Lets Spend The Night Together or The Night Time Is The Right Time, whiskey-bottle in hand (or, maybe, beer-canned if dough was tight, or way back when and you were underage if your wino buyer didn't show that night), best-gal swinging (quaint, okay, but we are all adults and you know what I mean) Saturday nights; and, to think that one thought, that one midstream on the bridge-driven thought that would spring you from the woes of woe begotten, troubled-filled (for me, and, maybe, you) dear, (now dear, anyway) beat, ancient-ached, old timey, presidential graveyard of a growing-up home town.
This new one, this new bridge, as I stand mid-bridge and peek back to my left routes, if you can even call it that, traffic via a Daytona race track-worthy, curvy-swurvy ramp to the beach, Wollaston Beach, down the now, in places anyway, three lane-wide, freshly-paved and white-lined Quincy Shore Drive. That’s our old Wollaston Boulevard, down by shore everything’s alright, of sacred ashy memory. And as I watch the traffic flow, the car traffic I think not of vanilla, too bright, too light, too slight day time beach, for now, because I am flooded with visions of the “real” beach of my manic dreams- “the night time is the right time" beach. Enough of daytime, kiddish, bucket and shovel whines and childish butterfly daydreams, enough. Alright?
I just now, and you can follow along too, float dream of teenaged Saturday nights, or maybe even Friday nights, or both, cruising, nowhere, somewhere, anywhere, to the pink- blue, cloud-swollen, sun-devouring, Western nightdream skies, always just beyond our reach. Of you riding "shotgun" in your buddy’s car, a be-bop car, or, I hope, at least bop, late 1950s, and pray hard for a ’57 Chevy or something “cool” like that, borrowed from his old man, stopped at close by high school (remember), Merit gas station and filled, two-dollars-worth-of-gas-check the oil-please-filled. Or his own car, your buddy's, the old man's, leavings, given gratis, when that self-same old man stepped up to a new, bigger-finned, power-steered, rumble-engined, airplane of a car, a new sign that he had “made it” in hard dollar America. Of stolen sickly-sweet wines or breathe-soured whiskeys to ward off the night-forebodings, made sweeter or more sour by the stealing from that same old man’s, or maybe your old man's, liquor cabinet, if they had such an upscale thing, or else just from some dusty high cupboard shelf so the kids can’t get at it place. And, and, oh boy, visions of those moon-beamy, dreamy, seamy, steamy Saturday night beach parking, car-fogged, car-wrestled, “submarine races” watchings that were the subject of Monday morning boys’ rest room (okay, “lav”) roll call, recital and retailing (or, hell, probably in the girls’ room too, I bet, but the now women can tell their own tales). Whoa!
Beatified night-dreamed beach Quincy Shore Drive also routes, now that my blood pressure has returned to normal, to daydream summer sunbathing, or maybe even before summer sunbathing for early tans to drive away the fierce, ghost-like New England winter pales, in the real sun daytime down by the weather-beaten yacht clubs (tumbleweedy, seedy, paint-needy Wollaston and Squantum). Away, well a little away, from the early encountered mephitic sea grass marshes near the Causeway (you know where, right?-the old First National supermarket, now CVS drugs-for all occasions-store location), away from the deadened, fetid, scattered sea grasses and the muck, and in plain kid talk, away from the “stinks”, away from the tepid waves apologetically splashing on the ocean smooth-stoned dunes, away too from the jelly-fish (are they poisonous, or not?) spawning and spattered along the edges of the low tide line, and, most fervently, away, away from the oil-slicked mud flats of childish shovel and pail clam-digging adventures, clams squirting and screaming from their sand hovels that need not detain us here, that story has been told elsewhere by me, and often.
Once you have passed the fetid swamps, the mephitic marshes…, but wait a minute, who knows such un-childlike, or un-teenager-like, for that matter, words like fetid and mephitic and where, as a child, even if you knew the words, would you connect those words with pail and shovel digging to China, or some faraway place, beach; with tide-melting, furtive but fevered, sand castle-making, beach; with coolly and focused looking for treasure, somebody’s leavings, some body’s rich leavings so you think, beach; with learning about the fury of Mother Nature and the pull and push of tides first hand when old Mother (like womb mother) turns her fury on, beach; with later finger (or stick) sand-tracing of your name defying the tides to erase your brand as you fight, and fight hard, for your place in the sun (and maybe linking up your sweetie’s name, just for good measure, in that struggle with eternity), beach; with fellaheen digging for clams for fun or profit (or food for table, who knows) down at the Merrymount end, beach; with family barbecue outings, hot dogs and hamburgers, extra ketchup, please, beach. With, well, beach, beach. No, fetid and mephitic will not do, I like my dreams, my child remembrance dreams, cloud puffy and silky.
This bridge, this too far bridge, this man-standing memory bridge, or however you named it, or whatever you thought of it, or wherever you were heading, destiny-heading, heading to your growing-up-like-a-weed town, heading just like a-lemming-to-the-sea town pushes the brain in a couple of directions. Heading south anyway, shore drive south, south to the rivieras, south to the old time kid’s Paragon Park. Rickety, always needed, desperately needed, fresh paint coat, landlocked, off-limits showboat bar-entranced (gay place, before gay word existed as a social category, but what did we know then, or care, just quarters for skeets, please, ah, please), ocean-aired, between-the toes-sanded, sun glass-visioned against the furious midday sun Paragon Park. Roller coaster Paragon Park (hey, maybe sick, before you got the hang of it, right), wild mouse (kid's stuff, ya I know) Paragon Park, cheap, colorful skeet ball points trinket prize, sugar high, lips smacked cotton-candy, stuck to the roof of your mouth, roof of the world, salt water taffy-twisted, hot-dogged (hold the mustard, no onions), pin ball wizard’d, take your baby to the carnival feel the tunnel of love, Paragon Park.(Or later, coming of another age, the Surf, and a whole other memory bridge of dreams, not for now though.) Or south of that south to some old time, unnamed, misty adventure, some ancient Pilgrim-etched mayflower rocky shored adventure, some ancient forebear's praise Jehovah plainsong heard whistling through some weed-filled granite slate graveyards, not mine; mine is of shanty Irish "famine" ships and old kicked out of England convict labor, hell-hole, "hillbilly" Appalachia work the coal mines, boats. Down along that old slow as molasses, take your time, wait at every just barely red stoplight, watch out for side-glanced cop cars, two-laned, white stripped, no passing (hardly), ocean-touched (in places) road. Memory-washed, memory-etched, memory south youth road, ah.
Yes, that cotton-candy dream is enough to stir even a hardened soul, but as I shift, stiffly shift, weight on my tired old high-soled, age-qualified, age-necessary, bop-bop shoes(no more of "young" fashionista statement, skinny-soled, fire engine red Chuck Taylor’s, now of sturdy, new age, aero-flow, aero-glow, aero-know, aero-whatever, for this heavy work, this airy memory work, bop-bop shoes), I stand straight up in mid-bridge balance and veer my head to the right. That move makes me focus my mind’s eye to the heart, the soul, the guts of the old growing-up town via a narrow, straight and narrow, slit in the road, a road constructed in such a way as if to say no cuts-ups, fops (quaint, again), or oddballs wanted here, as it swerves to the edgings, the bare edgings, amidst the gathering flotsam and jetsam as it piles up on riverside old Hancock Street and as it meanders along like some far-removed river of its own, river of its own sorrows, river of its own pent-up angers, toward the Square.
But more than sorrows, ancient sorrows, more than angers, angers of whatever age, I am attacked, and not just in my mind’s eye either, by the myriad mirror-glassed buildings, mostly office buildings, maybe some apartments or condos but I hope not, that reflect off each other in some secret Bauhaus bright light, dead of night pact, post-post-modern architecture I am sure, functional I am sure, although when future, future generations dig up the artifacts I am also sure they will be as puzzled by the idea of such forms of shelter and commerce as I am. And beyond those future subjects of artifact a picture, a picture to feed the hungry buildings, of tactless, thoughtless pizza shop, take-out or eat-in, of whatever name, donut shop, take-out or eat-in, of whatever name, hamburger shop, take-out or eat-in, of whatever name, Applebee’s family-friendly food named, now you-name-it-for-me, please, fast-food shop, mini-mart shop, fill-up gas-station of many names, Hess named, that dot, no, deluge strip mall-heavy Hancock Street up pass our sanctified raider red-bled high school. And beyond to dowdy, drowsy, dusty–windowed (really, I actually touched one once, not a white glove inspection but it, the window that is, didn’t pass muster even by my liberal standards), how do they stay in business against the pull of the major chains (or their chains), small-stored, small-dreamed business ownership, Norfolk Downs.
Norfolk Downs, the good old “Downs” (although we just called it plain, old, ordinary, vanilla-flavored, one-horse Norfolk Downs back in the day) anchored still by named pizza shop, Balducci’s. Balducci’s of after school pizza slices or after nightime across the street hang-around underground bowling alley hungers. Plain, please, no one hundred and one choice toppings, thank you, and coke (bluish-green bottled Coca-Cola, okay, for the evil-minded): of nickels and dimes dropped in one-armed-bandit jukebox to hear the latest Stones (or Beatles) tune, or whatever struck a chord in those jumping-jack times, maybe some mopey thing if girl desire was high; yes, but also of weary, so weary, lonely, so lonely night time standings up against the front door wall, waiting, waiting for...(and, maybe, someone, some guy, some long side-burned, engineer-booted guy, cigarette pack, unfiltered, rolled in tee-shirt guy, some time machine guy, is still waiting, still holding up that wall today. Nobody told him the world, the world that counts, the teen world, had moved to the malls). And beyond Norfolk Downs, up that asphalt river, on to the fate of a million small city centers, ghost-towned, derelict, seen better days, for sure, no question, no question, Quincy Center.
But I find myself , just now, as a stream of cooling air, finally, finally crosses my bridge-stuck, bridge-dreamed path, not in thoughts of jumbled mist of time high school-hood Saturdays nights (nor Friday nights either) in Norfolk Downs pizza parlors or bowling alleys, but of whirling past anciently walked, shoe leather-beaten (always leather-beaten, crooked-heeled, thinning-soled shoes that could be the subject of their own separate bridge-like dream thoughts), oceaned-breezed (just like the breeze crossing over me now , ‘cause that is where it is coming from, it has to be), sharp-angled memories: some of hurt, some of high-hatted hurt, worse, a few, too few, of funny kiddish, ding-dong dumb done things (ever when too old to hide under that womb-like kiddish umbrella), the memories that is, of Atlantic streets, of breezing Quincy bays, of oceans-abutted streets etched deep, almost DNA deep.
Name names. Okay. Well-trodden Appleton Street sidewalks, drawn like a moth to flame to some now-forgotten she, by flickering, heart-quickening, unrequited, just barely teenage, but self-consciously teenage anyhow, romantic trance longings, doggedly working up non-courage, yes non-courage a very common thing in those days, to speak, or better, to write that one word, that one word still now not easily come by, that would spark interest (her interest), as I turned from boy to the buddings of manhood; of the close-quartered, no space, no space for anything but small pinched, tightly pinched, dreams , no room to breathe, no room to breathe anything but small breathe, hacked up, asphalted-up, lawn-free yards to quench driveway car thirsting, two and three-decked Atlantic Street houses passed on quick high school cross country practice runs; of family relative-burdened, just getting-started in adult life, small, cramped five room and tiny bath apartment dotted Walker and Webster Streets; of the closely-cornered, well-kept small manicured-lawn’d, busily repair-worked, no beach parking on the street in summertime, working class cottage-mansions of Bayfield Road (I always forget which is North and which is South, but no matter the description fits both as they feed to the endless sea stopped by that infernal stop light that keeps you waiting, waiting beyond impatience, to cross to the much repaired and replaced seawall and view of seaward homeland.); of Atlantic Junior High School’d (ya, I know, Middle School) teen angst (under either junior or middle school names), mad, hormonally mad, teen-brokered years, world wised-up with some twists, but also world sorry, straight-up, Hollis Avenue; and on and on, through to the beach-drained, tree-named streets. Sanctified beyond name streets all; beat, beatified streets all; mist-filled dream streets all; memory-soaked streets all; be-bop, then real gone daddy, now hip-hop, big old pie-in-the-sky looking for the universe somewhere, streets all.
But enough of old dog-eared memories let me get moving, after all with this bridge, this “new” bridge, one has to cross with purpose, serious purpose, and maybe a wing and a pray that one can get back to the old home town in one piece or, at least, be able to think that one precious thought that drove me, lemming-like, here in the first place. I walk down the broken hand-railed, dirt-piled , drift winds-sent littered steps to get off the bridge and immediately stretched before me ; one million water-logged, stubbed cigarette-butts; one thousand stray, crushed, empty, cellophaned cigarette-packages blown around seeking their rightful owners; one hundred infinite brand-named (ice cold something pictured Bud Lite seems like the winner), crushed (or at least dented) beer cans; assorted, unnumbered, brown whiskey(or were they gin) bottles, mainly cheap from the look of them, a drunkard’s feast at one time; high gloss advertisement mailings(endless CVS drugs to take your world’s pain away, Shaw’s food to curb that incurable hunger that gnaws away at your stomach, Wal-Mart back-to-school trinkets, gadgets and throw-aways when the kids find out, and find out fast, that this crap is not “cool”, K-Mart holiday bargains, three for a dollar); yellowing, dated, newspapers (local this-and-that news, distant war drum news, more war drum news from some other earth corner, bad news badder, and celebrity relief news, Lady GaGa, or some such doings, that’s the ticket for our times) strewn every which way, discarded fast food packages of all descriptions that I have no time to describe. On to the street I step, the hard-scrabble North Quincy street. Home.
Markin comment:
Crossing the Neponset River Bridge from the Boston side these days, walking-sore-footed, ankle-ached, worn-out, scuffed leather shoes, rounded-heel shoes, soles thinned-out shoes walking-just as was almost always my mode of transportation, and maybe yours, in the old days, and sometimes for me in the not so old days-ain’t like it used to be. That new (1970s new, anyway), higher-standing , pot-holed patched, unevenly asphalt-paved even on good days, uninviting, if not just plain dangerous, walk-way, ugly slab-concreted, built by the lowest bidder, bridge that routes traffic, hither and yon, is not like the old one, “ walking to think things over friendly."
Not today, anyway, as I brace myself for a serious look see at our beat-up, beat-down, beaten-back, back-seat-taking, smudged-up, blood and sweat-stained, bitter-teared (very bitter-teared), life-drained, seen better days (although I do not, personally, remember having seen those better days, but people keep saying, even now, there was a such a time so let’s leave it at that), almost genetically memory embedded , character-building (yes, that old chestnut, as well), beautiful (yes, beautiful too, oddly, eerily beautiful, or as mad, shamanic poet Yeats, he of that that fine Anglo-Irish word edge, would put it, "terrible beauty a-borning" beautiful ), old working class home town.
It’s silly, I know, to get misty-eyed over it but I miss the old archaic pre-1970s drawbridge bridge with its ghastly-green gates to stop car traffic (how else could you describe that institutional color that no artist would have on his or her palette, and no serious professional business painter would stoop to brush on anything much less a gate) and the lonely stony-eyed concrete medieval fortress of a tower (and its poor, bored, had to be bored, keeper, or tender or whatever you call that “look out for the big boats coming and going” guy, and it was always some old guy who looked like he could swap stories, buddy to buddy, with King Neptune, and probably did) to let the bigger boats, courtesy of the law of the seas, make their way to dock.
Or, better, I hope, I fervently hope, for the boats to get clearance from that old codger, old Neptune’s brother, to race, to crawl, to put-put, to hoist sail or whatever such boats do to get to the open sea, the wide open blue-grey, swirling, mad, rushing, whirling dervish of a sea, out to beyond the breakwaters, out to beyond the harbor islands, to the land becoming mere speck, and then mere vanish, and more adventure than I could even dream of, or think of dreaming of. At least I hope those oil-stained, diesel-fuelled (including those awful faint-producing fumes), powerfully-engined, deep-drafted, fully–stocked boats that drove river traffic and stopped car traffic came back or went out in search of those adventures away from the placid wooden-lumbered doldrums docks up along the Quincy side of the river.
But, one thing is for sure, whatever happened to the boats, or on them, that old bridge, that old green-gate painted monster of a drawbridge, gave you a chance to pause mid-bridge, fright-free, not-having-to-watch-your-back-for-fast-cars-caroming-by free even, to look up and down midstream; to dream, perhaps, of tidal drifts and fair winds to the far reaches of this good, green planet, as far as you could carry yourself and your backpacked, bed-rolled belongings, or as long as the money held out; to bestir yourself afresh to think of oneness with the seventy-eight trillion life forms (hey, I didn’t count them, alright, this is just an estimate, a very rough estimate) that flow in the murky, and on some days very murky, depths right before your eyes down to our homeland, the sea; to dream vista dreams of far away picture postcard cooling ports-of-call in the sweaty, sultry summer day airs or churn madly with the flow of wild summer night airs that led from the old home town west, north, south, somewhere, anywhere; to dream the dream of dreams of misspent (no way, no way misspent), suggestive, very suggestive, radio-blared Lets Spend The Night Together or The Night Time Is The Right Time, whiskey-bottle in hand (or, maybe, beer-canned if dough was tight, or way back when and you were underage if your wino buyer didn't show that night), best-gal swinging (quaint, okay, but we are all adults and you know what I mean) Saturday nights; and, to think that one thought, that one midstream on the bridge-driven thought that would spring you from the woes of woe begotten, troubled-filled (for me, and, maybe, you) dear, (now dear, anyway) beat, ancient-ached, old timey, presidential graveyard of a growing-up home town.
This new one, this new bridge, as I stand mid-bridge and peek back to my left routes, if you can even call it that, traffic via a Daytona race track-worthy, curvy-swurvy ramp to the beach, Wollaston Beach, down the now, in places anyway, three lane-wide, freshly-paved and white-lined Quincy Shore Drive. That’s our old Wollaston Boulevard, down by shore everything’s alright, of sacred ashy memory. And as I watch the traffic flow, the car traffic I think not of vanilla, too bright, too light, too slight day time beach, for now, because I am flooded with visions of the “real” beach of my manic dreams- “the night time is the right time" beach. Enough of daytime, kiddish, bucket and shovel whines and childish butterfly daydreams, enough. Alright?
I just now, and you can follow along too, float dream of teenaged Saturday nights, or maybe even Friday nights, or both, cruising, nowhere, somewhere, anywhere, to the pink- blue, cloud-swollen, sun-devouring, Western nightdream skies, always just beyond our reach. Of you riding "shotgun" in your buddy’s car, a be-bop car, or, I hope, at least bop, late 1950s, and pray hard for a ’57 Chevy or something “cool” like that, borrowed from his old man, stopped at close by high school (remember), Merit gas station and filled, two-dollars-worth-of-gas-check the oil-please-filled. Or his own car, your buddy's, the old man's, leavings, given gratis, when that self-same old man stepped up to a new, bigger-finned, power-steered, rumble-engined, airplane of a car, a new sign that he had “made it” in hard dollar America. Of stolen sickly-sweet wines or breathe-soured whiskeys to ward off the night-forebodings, made sweeter or more sour by the stealing from that same old man’s, or maybe your old man's, liquor cabinet, if they had such an upscale thing, or else just from some dusty high cupboard shelf so the kids can’t get at it place. And, and, oh boy, visions of those moon-beamy, dreamy, seamy, steamy Saturday night beach parking, car-fogged, car-wrestled, “submarine races” watchings that were the subject of Monday morning boys’ rest room (okay, “lav”) roll call, recital and retailing (or, hell, probably in the girls’ room too, I bet, but the now women can tell their own tales). Whoa!
Beatified night-dreamed beach Quincy Shore Drive also routes, now that my blood pressure has returned to normal, to daydream summer sunbathing, or maybe even before summer sunbathing for early tans to drive away the fierce, ghost-like New England winter pales, in the real sun daytime down by the weather-beaten yacht clubs (tumbleweedy, seedy, paint-needy Wollaston and Squantum). Away, well a little away, from the early encountered mephitic sea grass marshes near the Causeway (you know where, right?-the old First National supermarket, now CVS drugs-for all occasions-store location), away from the deadened, fetid, scattered sea grasses and the muck, and in plain kid talk, away from the “stinks”, away from the tepid waves apologetically splashing on the ocean smooth-stoned dunes, away too from the jelly-fish (are they poisonous, or not?) spawning and spattered along the edges of the low tide line, and, most fervently, away, away from the oil-slicked mud flats of childish shovel and pail clam-digging adventures, clams squirting and screaming from their sand hovels that need not detain us here, that story has been told elsewhere by me, and often.
Once you have passed the fetid swamps, the mephitic marshes…, but wait a minute, who knows such un-childlike, or un-teenager-like, for that matter, words like fetid and mephitic and where, as a child, even if you knew the words, would you connect those words with pail and shovel digging to China, or some faraway place, beach; with tide-melting, furtive but fevered, sand castle-making, beach; with coolly and focused looking for treasure, somebody’s leavings, some body’s rich leavings so you think, beach; with learning about the fury of Mother Nature and the pull and push of tides first hand when old Mother (like womb mother) turns her fury on, beach; with later finger (or stick) sand-tracing of your name defying the tides to erase your brand as you fight, and fight hard, for your place in the sun (and maybe linking up your sweetie’s name, just for good measure, in that struggle with eternity), beach; with fellaheen digging for clams for fun or profit (or food for table, who knows) down at the Merrymount end, beach; with family barbecue outings, hot dogs and hamburgers, extra ketchup, please, beach. With, well, beach, beach. No, fetid and mephitic will not do, I like my dreams, my child remembrance dreams, cloud puffy and silky.
This bridge, this too far bridge, this man-standing memory bridge, or however you named it, or whatever you thought of it, or wherever you were heading, destiny-heading, heading to your growing-up-like-a-weed town, heading just like a-lemming-to-the-sea town pushes the brain in a couple of directions. Heading south anyway, shore drive south, south to the rivieras, south to the old time kid’s Paragon Park. Rickety, always needed, desperately needed, fresh paint coat, landlocked, off-limits showboat bar-entranced (gay place, before gay word existed as a social category, but what did we know then, or care, just quarters for skeets, please, ah, please), ocean-aired, between-the toes-sanded, sun glass-visioned against the furious midday sun Paragon Park. Roller coaster Paragon Park (hey, maybe sick, before you got the hang of it, right), wild mouse (kid's stuff, ya I know) Paragon Park, cheap, colorful skeet ball points trinket prize, sugar high, lips smacked cotton-candy, stuck to the roof of your mouth, roof of the world, salt water taffy-twisted, hot-dogged (hold the mustard, no onions), pin ball wizard’d, take your baby to the carnival feel the tunnel of love, Paragon Park.(Or later, coming of another age, the Surf, and a whole other memory bridge of dreams, not for now though.) Or south of that south to some old time, unnamed, misty adventure, some ancient Pilgrim-etched mayflower rocky shored adventure, some ancient forebear's praise Jehovah plainsong heard whistling through some weed-filled granite slate graveyards, not mine; mine is of shanty Irish "famine" ships and old kicked out of England convict labor, hell-hole, "hillbilly" Appalachia work the coal mines, boats. Down along that old slow as molasses, take your time, wait at every just barely red stoplight, watch out for side-glanced cop cars, two-laned, white stripped, no passing (hardly), ocean-touched (in places) road. Memory-washed, memory-etched, memory south youth road, ah.
Yes, that cotton-candy dream is enough to stir even a hardened soul, but as I shift, stiffly shift, weight on my tired old high-soled, age-qualified, age-necessary, bop-bop shoes(no more of "young" fashionista statement, skinny-soled, fire engine red Chuck Taylor’s, now of sturdy, new age, aero-flow, aero-glow, aero-know, aero-whatever, for this heavy work, this airy memory work, bop-bop shoes), I stand straight up in mid-bridge balance and veer my head to the right. That move makes me focus my mind’s eye to the heart, the soul, the guts of the old growing-up town via a narrow, straight and narrow, slit in the road, a road constructed in such a way as if to say no cuts-ups, fops (quaint, again), or oddballs wanted here, as it swerves to the edgings, the bare edgings, amidst the gathering flotsam and jetsam as it piles up on riverside old Hancock Street and as it meanders along like some far-removed river of its own, river of its own sorrows, river of its own pent-up angers, toward the Square.
But more than sorrows, ancient sorrows, more than angers, angers of whatever age, I am attacked, and not just in my mind’s eye either, by the myriad mirror-glassed buildings, mostly office buildings, maybe some apartments or condos but I hope not, that reflect off each other in some secret Bauhaus bright light, dead of night pact, post-post-modern architecture I am sure, functional I am sure, although when future, future generations dig up the artifacts I am also sure they will be as puzzled by the idea of such forms of shelter and commerce as I am. And beyond those future subjects of artifact a picture, a picture to feed the hungry buildings, of tactless, thoughtless pizza shop, take-out or eat-in, of whatever name, donut shop, take-out or eat-in, of whatever name, hamburger shop, take-out or eat-in, of whatever name, Applebee’s family-friendly food named, now you-name-it-for-me, please, fast-food shop, mini-mart shop, fill-up gas-station of many names, Hess named, that dot, no, deluge strip mall-heavy Hancock Street up pass our sanctified raider red-bled high school. And beyond to dowdy, drowsy, dusty–windowed (really, I actually touched one once, not a white glove inspection but it, the window that is, didn’t pass muster even by my liberal standards), how do they stay in business against the pull of the major chains (or their chains), small-stored, small-dreamed business ownership, Norfolk Downs.
Norfolk Downs, the good old “Downs” (although we just called it plain, old, ordinary, vanilla-flavored, one-horse Norfolk Downs back in the day) anchored still by named pizza shop, Balducci’s. Balducci’s of after school pizza slices or after nightime across the street hang-around underground bowling alley hungers. Plain, please, no one hundred and one choice toppings, thank you, and coke (bluish-green bottled Coca-Cola, okay, for the evil-minded): of nickels and dimes dropped in one-armed-bandit jukebox to hear the latest Stones (or Beatles) tune, or whatever struck a chord in those jumping-jack times, maybe some mopey thing if girl desire was high; yes, but also of weary, so weary, lonely, so lonely night time standings up against the front door wall, waiting, waiting for...(and, maybe, someone, some guy, some long side-burned, engineer-booted guy, cigarette pack, unfiltered, rolled in tee-shirt guy, some time machine guy, is still waiting, still holding up that wall today. Nobody told him the world, the world that counts, the teen world, had moved to the malls). And beyond Norfolk Downs, up that asphalt river, on to the fate of a million small city centers, ghost-towned, derelict, seen better days, for sure, no question, no question, Quincy Center.
But I find myself , just now, as a stream of cooling air, finally, finally crosses my bridge-stuck, bridge-dreamed path, not in thoughts of jumbled mist of time high school-hood Saturdays nights (nor Friday nights either) in Norfolk Downs pizza parlors or bowling alleys, but of whirling past anciently walked, shoe leather-beaten (always leather-beaten, crooked-heeled, thinning-soled shoes that could be the subject of their own separate bridge-like dream thoughts), oceaned-breezed (just like the breeze crossing over me now , ‘cause that is where it is coming from, it has to be), sharp-angled memories: some of hurt, some of high-hatted hurt, worse, a few, too few, of funny kiddish, ding-dong dumb done things (ever when too old to hide under that womb-like kiddish umbrella), the memories that is, of Atlantic streets, of breezing Quincy bays, of oceans-abutted streets etched deep, almost DNA deep.
Name names. Okay. Well-trodden Appleton Street sidewalks, drawn like a moth to flame to some now-forgotten she, by flickering, heart-quickening, unrequited, just barely teenage, but self-consciously teenage anyhow, romantic trance longings, doggedly working up non-courage, yes non-courage a very common thing in those days, to speak, or better, to write that one word, that one word still now not easily come by, that would spark interest (her interest), as I turned from boy to the buddings of manhood; of the close-quartered, no space, no space for anything but small pinched, tightly pinched, dreams , no room to breathe, no room to breathe anything but small breathe, hacked up, asphalted-up, lawn-free yards to quench driveway car thirsting, two and three-decked Atlantic Street houses passed on quick high school cross country practice runs; of family relative-burdened, just getting-started in adult life, small, cramped five room and tiny bath apartment dotted Walker and Webster Streets; of the closely-cornered, well-kept small manicured-lawn’d, busily repair-worked, no beach parking on the street in summertime, working class cottage-mansions of Bayfield Road (I always forget which is North and which is South, but no matter the description fits both as they feed to the endless sea stopped by that infernal stop light that keeps you waiting, waiting beyond impatience, to cross to the much repaired and replaced seawall and view of seaward homeland.); of Atlantic Junior High School’d (ya, I know, Middle School) teen angst (under either junior or middle school names), mad, hormonally mad, teen-brokered years, world wised-up with some twists, but also world sorry, straight-up, Hollis Avenue; and on and on, through to the beach-drained, tree-named streets. Sanctified beyond name streets all; beat, beatified streets all; mist-filled dream streets all; memory-soaked streets all; be-bop, then real gone daddy, now hip-hop, big old pie-in-the-sky looking for the universe somewhere, streets all.
But enough of old dog-eared memories let me get moving, after all with this bridge, this “new” bridge, one has to cross with purpose, serious purpose, and maybe a wing and a pray that one can get back to the old home town in one piece or, at least, be able to think that one precious thought that drove me, lemming-like, here in the first place. I walk down the broken hand-railed, dirt-piled , drift winds-sent littered steps to get off the bridge and immediately stretched before me ; one million water-logged, stubbed cigarette-butts; one thousand stray, crushed, empty, cellophaned cigarette-packages blown around seeking their rightful owners; one hundred infinite brand-named (ice cold something pictured Bud Lite seems like the winner), crushed (or at least dented) beer cans; assorted, unnumbered, brown whiskey(or were they gin) bottles, mainly cheap from the look of them, a drunkard’s feast at one time; high gloss advertisement mailings(endless CVS drugs to take your world’s pain away, Shaw’s food to curb that incurable hunger that gnaws away at your stomach, Wal-Mart back-to-school trinkets, gadgets and throw-aways when the kids find out, and find out fast, that this crap is not “cool”, K-Mart holiday bargains, three for a dollar); yellowing, dated, newspapers (local this-and-that news, distant war drum news, more war drum news from some other earth corner, bad news badder, and celebrity relief news, Lady GaGa, or some such doings, that’s the ticket for our times) strewn every which way, discarded fast food packages of all descriptions that I have no time to describe. On to the street I step, the hard-scrabble North Quincy street. Home.
Out In The Be-Bop High School Night- Entering High School, 1960-With Mark Dinning's "Teen Angel" In Mind
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Mark Dinning performing his teen tear-jerker, Teen Angel, to set an "appropriate" mood for this post.
Markin comment:
Funny, here I am, finally, finally after what seemed like an endless heat-waved, eternal August dog day’d, book-devoured, summer, standing, nervously standing, waiting with one foot on the sturdy granite-chiseled steps, ready at a moment’s notice from any teacher’s beck and call, to climb up to the second floor main entrance of old North, an entrance flanked by huge concrete spheres on each side, that are made to order for me to think that I too have the weight of the world on my shoulders this sunny day. And those doors, by the way, as if the spheres are not portentous enough, are also flanked by two scroll-worked concrete columns, or maybe they are gargoyle-faced, my eyes are a little bleary right now, who give the place a more fearsome look than is really necessary but today, today of all days, every little omen has its evil meaning, evil for me that is.
Here I am anyway, pensive (giving myself the best of it, okay, nice wrap-around-your soul word too, okay), head hanging down, deep in thought, deep in scared, get the nurse fast, if necessary, nausea-provoking thought, standing around, a little impatiently surly as is my “style” (that “style” I picked up a few years back in elementary school down in the Germantown “projects”, after seeing James Dean or someone like that strike the pose, and it stuck). Anyway its now about 7:00 AM, maybe a little after, and like I say my eyes have been playing tricks on me all morning and I can’t seem to focus, as I wait for the first school bell to sound on this first Wednesday after Labor Day in the year of our lord, 1960.
No big deal right, we have all done it many times by now, it should be easy. Year after year, old August dog days turn into shorter, cooler September come hither young wanna-be learner days. Nothing to get nervous about, nothing to it.(Did I say that already?)Especially the first day, a half day, a “gimme” day, really, one of the few out of one hundred and eighty, count ‘em, and mainly used for filling out the one thousand and one pieces of paper about who you are, where you live, who you live with, and who to call in case you take some nasty fall in gym trying to do a double twist-something on the gym mat or a wrestled double-hammer lock grip on some poor, equally benighted fellow student that goes awry like actually happened to me last year in eighth grade. Hey, they were still talking about that one in the Atlantic locker rooms at the end of the year, I hear. Or, more ominously, they want that information so that if you cross-up one, or more, of your mean-spirited, ill-disposed, never-could have-been-young-and-troubled, ancient, Plato or Socrates ancient from the look of some of them, teachers and your parents (embarrassed, steaming, vengeful Ma really, in our neighborhoods) need to be called in to confer about “your problem,” your problem that you will grow out of with a few days of after school “help.” Please.
Or this “gimme” day (let’s just call it that okay, it will help settle me down) will be spent reading off, battered, monotone home room teacher-reading off, the also one thousand and one rules; no lateness to school under penalty of being placed in the stocks, Pilgrim-style, no illness absences short of the plague, if you have it, not a family member, and then only if you have a (presumably sanitized) doctor’s note, no cutting classes to explore the great American day streets at some nearby corner variety store, or mercy, Norfolk Downs, one-horse Norfolk Downs also under severe penalty, no (unauthorized) talking in class (but they will mark it down if you don't authorize talk, jesus), no giving guff (ya, no guff, right) to your teachers, fellow students, staff, the resident mouse or your kid brother, if you have a kid brother, no writing on walls, in books, and only on occasion on an (authorized) writing pad, no(get this one, I couldn’t believe this one over at Atlantic) cutting in line for the school lunch (the school lunch, Christ, as poor as we are in our family we at least have the dignity not to pine, much less cut in line for, those beauties: the American chop suey done several different ways to cover the week, including a stint as baloney and cheese sandwiches, I swear), no off-hand rough-necking (or just plain, ordinary necking, either), no excessive use of the “lav” (you know what that is, enough said), and certainly no smoking, drinking or using any other illegal (for kids) substances. Oh, ya, and don’t forget to follow, unquestioningly, those mean-spirited, ill-disposed teachers that I spoke of before, if there is a fire emergency. And here’s a better one, in case of an off-hand atomic bomb attack go, quickly and quietly, to the nearest fall-out shelter down in the bowels of the old school. That’s what we practiced over at Atlantic. At least, I hope they don’t try that old gag and have us practice getting under our desks in such an emergency like in elementary school. Christ, I would rather take my chances, above desk, thank you. And… need I go on, you can listen to the rest when you get to homeroom I am just giving you the highlights, the year after year, memory highlights.
And if that isn’t enough, the reading of the rules and the gathering of more intelligence about you than the FBI or the CIA would need we then proceed to the ritualistic passing out of your books, large and small. (placing book covers on each, naturally, name, year, subject and book number safety placed in insert). All of them covered against the elements, your own sloth, and the battlefield school lunch room, that humongous science book that has every known idea from the ancient four furies of the air to nuclear fission, that math book that has some Pythagorean properties of its own, the social studies books to chart out human progress (and back-sliding) from stone-cave times on up, and, precious, precious English book (I hope we do Shakespeare this year, I heard we do, that guy knew how to write a good story, same with that Salinger book I read during the summer). Still easy stuff though, for the first day.
Ya, but this will put a different spin on it for you, well, a little different spin anyway. Today I start in the “bigs”, at least the bigs of the handful-countable big events of my short, sweet life. Today I am starting my freshman year at hallowed old North and I am as nervous as a kitten. Don’t tell me you weren’t just a little, little, tiny bit scared when you went from the cocoon-like warmth (or so it seemed compared to the “bigs”) of junior high over to the high school, whatever high school it was. Come on now, I’m going to call you out on it. Particularly those Atlantics who, after all, have been here before, unlike me who came out of the "projects" and moved back to North Quincy after the "long march" move to Atlantic in 1958 so I don't know the ropes here at all. They, especially those sweet girl Atlantics, including a certain she that I am severely "crushed up" on, in their cashmere sweaters and jumpers or whatever you call them, are nevertheless standing on these same steps, as we exchange nods of recognition, and are here just as early as I am, fretting their own frets, fighting their own inner demons, and just hoping and praying or whatever kids do when they are “on the ropes” to survive the day, or just to not get rolled over on day one.
And see, here is what you also don’t know, know yet anyway. I’ve caught Frank’s disease. You never heard of it, probably, and don’t bother to go look it up in some medical dictionary at the Thomas Crane Public Library, or some other library, it’s not there. What it amount to is the old time high school, any high school, version of the anxiety-driven cold sweats. Now I know some of you know Frank, and some of you don’t, but I told his story to you before, the story about his big, hot, “dog day” August mission to get picnic fixings, including special stuff, like Kennedy’s potato salad, for his grandmother. That’s the Frank I’m talking about, my best junior high friend, Frank.
Part of that story, for those who don’t know it, mentioned what Frank was thinking when he got near battle-worn North on his journey to Norfolk Downs back in August. I’m repeating; repeating at least the important parts here, for those who are clueless:
“Frank (and I) had, just a couple of months before, graduated from Atlantic Junior High School and so along with the sweat on his brow from the heat a little bit of anxiety was starting to form in Frank’s head about being a “little fish in a big pond” freshman come September as he passed by. Especially, a proto-beatnik “little fish”. See, he had cultivated a certain, well, let’s call it “style” over there at Atlantic. That "style" involved a total disdain for everything, everything except trying to impress girls with his long chino-panted, plaid flannel-shirted, thick book-carrying knowledge of every arcane fact known to mankind. Like that really was the way to impress teenage girls. In any case he was worried, worried sick at times, that in such a big school his “style” needed upgrading…”
And that is why, when the deal went down and I knew I was going to the “bigs” I spent the summer this year, reading, big time booked-devoured reading. Hey, I'll say I did, The Communist Manifesto, that one just because old Willie Westhaven over at Atlantic called me a Bolshevik when I answered one of his foolish math questions in a surly manner. I told you that was my pose, what do you want, I just wanted to see what he was talking about. In any case, I ain’t no commie, although I don’t know what the big deal is, I ain't turning anybody in, and the stuff is hard reading anyway. How about Democracy in America (by a French guy), The Age of Jackson (by a Harvard professor who knows Jack Kennedy, and is crazy for old-time guys like Jackson),and Catcher In The Rye (Holden is me, me to a tee). Okay, okay I won’t keep going on but that was just the reading on the hot days when I didn’t want to go out, test me on it, I am ready. Here's why. I intend, and I swear I intend to even on this first nothing (what did I call it before?-"gimme", ya) day of this new school year in this new school in this new decade to beat old Frankie, old book-toting, girl-chasing Frankie, who knows every arcane fact that mankind has produced and has told it to every girl who will listen for two minutes (maybe less) in that eternal struggle, the boy meets girl struggle, at his own game. Frankie, my buddy of buddies, mad monk, prince among men (well, boys, anyhow) who navigated me through the tough, murderous parts of junior high, mercifully concluded, finished and done with, praise be, and didn’t think twice about it. He, you see, despite, everything I said a minute ago was “in.”; that arcane knowledge stuff worked with the “ins” who counted, worked, at least a little, and I got dragged in his wake. Now I want to try out my new “style”
See, that’s why on this Wednesday after Labor Day in the year of our lord, 1960, this 7:00 AM, or a little after, Wednesday after Labor Day, I have Frank’s disease. He harped on it so much before opening of school that I woke up about 5:00 AM this morning, maybe earlier, but I know it was still dark, with the cold sweats. I tossed and turned for a while about what my “style”, what my place in the sun was going to be, and I just had to get up. I’ll tell you about the opening day getting up ritual stuff later, some other time, but right now I am worried, worried as hell, about my “style”, or should I say lack of style over at Atlantic. That will tell you a lot about why I woke up this morning before the birds.
...Suddenly, a bell rings, a real bell, students, like lemmings to the sea, are on the move, especially those Atlantics that I had nodded to before as I take those steps, two at a time. Too late to worry about style, or anything else, now. We are off to the wars; I will make my place in the sun as I go along, on the fly.
********
....and a trip down memory lane.
MARK DINNING lyrics - Teen Angel
(Jean Surrey & Red Surrey)
Teen angel, teen angel, teen angel, ooh, ooh
That fateful night the car was stalled
upon the railroad track
I pulled you out and we were safe
but you went running back
Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love
What was it you were looking for
that took your life that night
They said they found my high school ring
clutched in your fingers tight
Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love
Just sweet sixteen, and now you're gone
They've taken you away.
I'll never kiss your lips again
They buried you today
Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love
Teen angel, teen angel, answer me, please
Markin comment:
Funny, here I am, finally, finally after what seemed like an endless heat-waved, eternal August dog day’d, book-devoured, summer, standing, nervously standing, waiting with one foot on the sturdy granite-chiseled steps, ready at a moment’s notice from any teacher’s beck and call, to climb up to the second floor main entrance of old North, an entrance flanked by huge concrete spheres on each side, that are made to order for me to think that I too have the weight of the world on my shoulders this sunny day. And those doors, by the way, as if the spheres are not portentous enough, are also flanked by two scroll-worked concrete columns, or maybe they are gargoyle-faced, my eyes are a little bleary right now, who give the place a more fearsome look than is really necessary but today, today of all days, every little omen has its evil meaning, evil for me that is.
Here I am anyway, pensive (giving myself the best of it, okay, nice wrap-around-your soul word too, okay), head hanging down, deep in thought, deep in scared, get the nurse fast, if necessary, nausea-provoking thought, standing around, a little impatiently surly as is my “style” (that “style” I picked up a few years back in elementary school down in the Germantown “projects”, after seeing James Dean or someone like that strike the pose, and it stuck). Anyway its now about 7:00 AM, maybe a little after, and like I say my eyes have been playing tricks on me all morning and I can’t seem to focus, as I wait for the first school bell to sound on this first Wednesday after Labor Day in the year of our lord, 1960.
No big deal right, we have all done it many times by now, it should be easy. Year after year, old August dog days turn into shorter, cooler September come hither young wanna-be learner days. Nothing to get nervous about, nothing to it.(Did I say that already?)Especially the first day, a half day, a “gimme” day, really, one of the few out of one hundred and eighty, count ‘em, and mainly used for filling out the one thousand and one pieces of paper about who you are, where you live, who you live with, and who to call in case you take some nasty fall in gym trying to do a double twist-something on the gym mat or a wrestled double-hammer lock grip on some poor, equally benighted fellow student that goes awry like actually happened to me last year in eighth grade. Hey, they were still talking about that one in the Atlantic locker rooms at the end of the year, I hear. Or, more ominously, they want that information so that if you cross-up one, or more, of your mean-spirited, ill-disposed, never-could have-been-young-and-troubled, ancient, Plato or Socrates ancient from the look of some of them, teachers and your parents (embarrassed, steaming, vengeful Ma really, in our neighborhoods) need to be called in to confer about “your problem,” your problem that you will grow out of with a few days of after school “help.” Please.
Or this “gimme” day (let’s just call it that okay, it will help settle me down) will be spent reading off, battered, monotone home room teacher-reading off, the also one thousand and one rules; no lateness to school under penalty of being placed in the stocks, Pilgrim-style, no illness absences short of the plague, if you have it, not a family member, and then only if you have a (presumably sanitized) doctor’s note, no cutting classes to explore the great American day streets at some nearby corner variety store, or mercy, Norfolk Downs, one-horse Norfolk Downs also under severe penalty, no (unauthorized) talking in class (but they will mark it down if you don't authorize talk, jesus), no giving guff (ya, no guff, right) to your teachers, fellow students, staff, the resident mouse or your kid brother, if you have a kid brother, no writing on walls, in books, and only on occasion on an (authorized) writing pad, no(get this one, I couldn’t believe this one over at Atlantic) cutting in line for the school lunch (the school lunch, Christ, as poor as we are in our family we at least have the dignity not to pine, much less cut in line for, those beauties: the American chop suey done several different ways to cover the week, including a stint as baloney and cheese sandwiches, I swear), no off-hand rough-necking (or just plain, ordinary necking, either), no excessive use of the “lav” (you know what that is, enough said), and certainly no smoking, drinking or using any other illegal (for kids) substances. Oh, ya, and don’t forget to follow, unquestioningly, those mean-spirited, ill-disposed teachers that I spoke of before, if there is a fire emergency. And here’s a better one, in case of an off-hand atomic bomb attack go, quickly and quietly, to the nearest fall-out shelter down in the bowels of the old school. That’s what we practiced over at Atlantic. At least, I hope they don’t try that old gag and have us practice getting under our desks in such an emergency like in elementary school. Christ, I would rather take my chances, above desk, thank you. And… need I go on, you can listen to the rest when you get to homeroom I am just giving you the highlights, the year after year, memory highlights.
And if that isn’t enough, the reading of the rules and the gathering of more intelligence about you than the FBI or the CIA would need we then proceed to the ritualistic passing out of your books, large and small. (placing book covers on each, naturally, name, year, subject and book number safety placed in insert). All of them covered against the elements, your own sloth, and the battlefield school lunch room, that humongous science book that has every known idea from the ancient four furies of the air to nuclear fission, that math book that has some Pythagorean properties of its own, the social studies books to chart out human progress (and back-sliding) from stone-cave times on up, and, precious, precious English book (I hope we do Shakespeare this year, I heard we do, that guy knew how to write a good story, same with that Salinger book I read during the summer). Still easy stuff though, for the first day.
Ya, but this will put a different spin on it for you, well, a little different spin anyway. Today I start in the “bigs”, at least the bigs of the handful-countable big events of my short, sweet life. Today I am starting my freshman year at hallowed old North and I am as nervous as a kitten. Don’t tell me you weren’t just a little, little, tiny bit scared when you went from the cocoon-like warmth (or so it seemed compared to the “bigs”) of junior high over to the high school, whatever high school it was. Come on now, I’m going to call you out on it. Particularly those Atlantics who, after all, have been here before, unlike me who came out of the "projects" and moved back to North Quincy after the "long march" move to Atlantic in 1958 so I don't know the ropes here at all. They, especially those sweet girl Atlantics, including a certain she that I am severely "crushed up" on, in their cashmere sweaters and jumpers or whatever you call them, are nevertheless standing on these same steps, as we exchange nods of recognition, and are here just as early as I am, fretting their own frets, fighting their own inner demons, and just hoping and praying or whatever kids do when they are “on the ropes” to survive the day, or just to not get rolled over on day one.
And see, here is what you also don’t know, know yet anyway. I’ve caught Frank’s disease. You never heard of it, probably, and don’t bother to go look it up in some medical dictionary at the Thomas Crane Public Library, or some other library, it’s not there. What it amount to is the old time high school, any high school, version of the anxiety-driven cold sweats. Now I know some of you know Frank, and some of you don’t, but I told his story to you before, the story about his big, hot, “dog day” August mission to get picnic fixings, including special stuff, like Kennedy’s potato salad, for his grandmother. That’s the Frank I’m talking about, my best junior high friend, Frank.
Part of that story, for those who don’t know it, mentioned what Frank was thinking when he got near battle-worn North on his journey to Norfolk Downs back in August. I’m repeating; repeating at least the important parts here, for those who are clueless:
“Frank (and I) had, just a couple of months before, graduated from Atlantic Junior High School and so along with the sweat on his brow from the heat a little bit of anxiety was starting to form in Frank’s head about being a “little fish in a big pond” freshman come September as he passed by. Especially, a proto-beatnik “little fish”. See, he had cultivated a certain, well, let’s call it “style” over there at Atlantic. That "style" involved a total disdain for everything, everything except trying to impress girls with his long chino-panted, plaid flannel-shirted, thick book-carrying knowledge of every arcane fact known to mankind. Like that really was the way to impress teenage girls. In any case he was worried, worried sick at times, that in such a big school his “style” needed upgrading…”
And that is why, when the deal went down and I knew I was going to the “bigs” I spent the summer this year, reading, big time booked-devoured reading. Hey, I'll say I did, The Communist Manifesto, that one just because old Willie Westhaven over at Atlantic called me a Bolshevik when I answered one of his foolish math questions in a surly manner. I told you that was my pose, what do you want, I just wanted to see what he was talking about. In any case, I ain’t no commie, although I don’t know what the big deal is, I ain't turning anybody in, and the stuff is hard reading anyway. How about Democracy in America (by a French guy), The Age of Jackson (by a Harvard professor who knows Jack Kennedy, and is crazy for old-time guys like Jackson),and Catcher In The Rye (Holden is me, me to a tee). Okay, okay I won’t keep going on but that was just the reading on the hot days when I didn’t want to go out, test me on it, I am ready. Here's why. I intend, and I swear I intend to even on this first nothing (what did I call it before?-"gimme", ya) day of this new school year in this new school in this new decade to beat old Frankie, old book-toting, girl-chasing Frankie, who knows every arcane fact that mankind has produced and has told it to every girl who will listen for two minutes (maybe less) in that eternal struggle, the boy meets girl struggle, at his own game. Frankie, my buddy of buddies, mad monk, prince among men (well, boys, anyhow) who navigated me through the tough, murderous parts of junior high, mercifully concluded, finished and done with, praise be, and didn’t think twice about it. He, you see, despite, everything I said a minute ago was “in.”; that arcane knowledge stuff worked with the “ins” who counted, worked, at least a little, and I got dragged in his wake. Now I want to try out my new “style”
See, that’s why on this Wednesday after Labor Day in the year of our lord, 1960, this 7:00 AM, or a little after, Wednesday after Labor Day, I have Frank’s disease. He harped on it so much before opening of school that I woke up about 5:00 AM this morning, maybe earlier, but I know it was still dark, with the cold sweats. I tossed and turned for a while about what my “style”, what my place in the sun was going to be, and I just had to get up. I’ll tell you about the opening day getting up ritual stuff later, some other time, but right now I am worried, worried as hell, about my “style”, or should I say lack of style over at Atlantic. That will tell you a lot about why I woke up this morning before the birds.
...Suddenly, a bell rings, a real bell, students, like lemmings to the sea, are on the move, especially those Atlantics that I had nodded to before as I take those steps, two at a time. Too late to worry about style, or anything else, now. We are off to the wars; I will make my place in the sun as I go along, on the fly.
********
....and a trip down memory lane.
MARK DINNING lyrics - Teen Angel
(Jean Surrey & Red Surrey)
Teen angel, teen angel, teen angel, ooh, ooh
That fateful night the car was stalled
upon the railroad track
I pulled you out and we were safe
but you went running back
Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love
What was it you were looking for
that took your life that night
They said they found my high school ring
clutched in your fingers tight
Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love
Just sweet sixteen, and now you're gone
They've taken you away.
I'll never kiss your lips again
They buried you today
Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love
Teen angel, teen angel, answer me, please
In Search Of Lost Time In The Be-Bop High School Night-With Marcel Proust In Mind
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the French writer Marcel Proust.
Markin comment:
....with apologies to the great early 20th century modernist French writer Marcel Proust whose most famous (and massive) work I am stealing the title from in my headline. Apparently I will steal any literary tidbit, from any source and from any time, just to round out an entry in this space. I had also better explain, before some besotted, hare-brained, pencil at the ever ready, school of novel deconstruction devotee, probably tragically childhood’d, post-modern literary-type jumps on me I know, and I know damn well, that an alternative translation for the title of Proust's six volume work is Remembrances Of Things Past. But isn't this In Search Of Lost Time a better title for the needs of this space? In any case I promise not to go on and on about French pastry at teatime (which, by the way, brother Proust did do, for about sixty pages in the volume Swann’s Way, so there is the trade-off. Okay?).
*********
As I, clumsily, pick up, or try to pick up some precious dirt to rub between my fingers from the oval in front of the old high school, on this bedraggled, prickly frigid, knife-like wind- gusting in my face, not fit for man nor beast, kind of a winter’s day as the shortly-setting sun begins it descent into night, I really do wonder what demons, what cast-out-of-the-inner-sanctums-of-hell demons, have driven me here, here to this worn-out patch of an oval, after so many years of statutory neglect. Moreover, picking up dirt from an oval that I have not walked on, much less picked up gravel from, in over forty-five years, although I have logged many a mile around a larger version (I believe) of this oval either practicing during track or cross country season, or, and this may jog reader memory, running the 600 yard dash as part of the old time President’s National Physical Fitness Test. Yes, I thought mention of that event might bring ring a bell, a bell of anguish for some, as they puffed and chortled their way to the finish line in their tennis shoes, or whatever knee-busting sneakers we wore in those days, in order to be cool. Hey, just like today.
In any case, here I stand, and now you know, or have a pretty good idea where I am. What you do not know, at least do not know yet, is that I am not here, rubbing some funky old town dirt through my fingers on a cold winter’s day just for the joy of it. For raider red oneness, either. Or some such old man’s quirks. Rather, I am here, and you can start calling 911 right now if you like, to evoke, evoke mind you so there is no fooling around about it, the spirit, the long past spirit of days gone by at the high school. The spirit of the time of my time. Probably not since old Tommy Wollaston went looking for a suitable site for his maypole debaucheries, and stumbled on Merrymount has this town seen such a land grab, in a manner of speaking. See, what I am thinking is that some dirt-rubbing, a little kabala-like, or druid-like, or keltic-like, or Navajo-like, or something-like, dirt-rubbing will give me a jump start on this “voyage”.
I will confess to this much , as this seemingly is a confessional age, or, maybe just as a vestige of that hard-crusted, family history-rooted, novena-saying, stations of the cross walking, ceremonial high mass incense-driven, mortal sin-fearing, you’ll get your reward in the next life so don’t expect it here, buster, fatalistic Catholic upbringing long abandoned but etched in, no, embedded in, some far recesses of memory that my returning to North Quincy High School did not just occur by happenstance. A couple of years before my mother, Doris Margaret Johnson (nee Radley) NQHS Class of 1943, passed away.
For a good part of her life my mother lived in locations a mere stone's throw from the school. You could, for example, see the back of the school from my grandparents' house on Young Street. As part of the grieving process, I suppose, I felt a need to come back to North Quincy. To my, and her, roots. In part, at least, for the feel of roots, but also to figure out, or try to figure out for the 584th time, what went wrong in our old, broken down, couldn't catch a break, working poor, North Quincy-historied, family. As part of that attempted figuring out, as I walked up Hancock Street from Walnut Street (the old, woe begotten, seen better days, ram-shackled homestead now standing guard above part of the Newport Avenue by-pass) and swung down East Squantum I passed by, intentionally passed by, the old high school. And here I stand, oval-stuck, dirty-handed, bundled up not to well against the day’s winds, or against the fickle, shifting winds of time either, to tell my tale.
Now I will also confess, but without the long strung-out stuff that I threw in above about my Catholic upbringing, that in figuring out why ill winds blew across my family’s fate I was unsuccessful. Why, after all, should the 584th time bring some sense of enlightenment, or of inner peace, when the other five hundred, more or less, did not do so. What this sojourn did do, however, was rekindle, and rekindle strongly, memories of sitting, without number, on the steps of the high school in the old days, in the high school days, and think about the future, if there was going to be a future.
I tried to write this story, or a part of it, a couple of years ago so a little background is in order so the thing makes some sense to others. That now seemingly benighted entry, originally simply titled,A Walk Down “Dream” Street, started life by merely asking an equally simple question posed to fellow classmates in the North Quincy High School Class of 1964 about whether their high school dreams had come true or not, as least for those who had thought about the issue, on the Classmates. com website. I had “discovered” the site that year after having been pushed and pulled in ways that drove me back to memories, hard, hard-bitten, hard-aching, hard-longing, mist of time, dream memories, of North schoolboy days and of the need to search for my old high school friend and running mate (literally, in track and cross country, as well as “running” around town doing boy high school things, doing the best we could, or trying to), Bill Cadger. I posed the question this way there:
“Today I am interested in the relationship between our youthful dreams and what actually happened in our lives; our dreams of glory out in the big old world that we did not make, and were not asked about making; of success whether of the pot of gold or less tangible, but just as valuable, goods, or better, ideas; of things or conditions, of himalayas, conquered, physically or mentally; of discoveries made, of self or the whole wide world, great or small. Or, perhaps, of just getting by, just putting one foot in the front of the other two days in a row, of keeping one’s head above water under the impact of young life’s woes, of not sinking down further into the human sink; of smaller, pinched, very pinched, existential dreams but dreams nevertheless. I hope, I fervently hope, that they were the former."
Naturally, the question was posed in its particular form, or so it seemed natural at the time for me to pose it that way, because those old, “real”, august, imposing, institutionally imposing, grey granite-quarried (from the Granite City, natch) main entrance steps (in those days serious steps, two steps at a time steps, especially if you missed first bell, flanked by globular orbs and, like some medieval church, gargoyle-like columns up to the second floor, hence “real”) is a place where Bill and I spent a lot of our time, talking of this and that.
Especially in summer night time: hot, sultry, sweaty, steam-drained, no money in pockets, no car to explore the great American teenage night; the be-bop, doo-wop, do doo do doo ,ding dong daddy, real gone daddy, rockin’ daddy, max daddy, let it be me, the night time is the right time, car window-fogged, honk if you love jesus (or whatever activity produced those incessant honks in ignition-turned-off cars), love-tinged, or at least sex-tinged, endless sea, Wollaston Beach night. Do I need to draw you the big picture, I think not. Or for the faint-hearted, or the merely good, denizens of that great American teenage night a Howard Johnson’s ice cream (make mine cherry vanilla, double scoop, no jimmies, please) or a trip to American Graffiti-like fast food drive-in, hamburger, hold the onions (just in case today is the night), fries and a frappe (I refuse to describe that taste treat at this far remove, look it up on Wikipedia, or one of those info-sites) Southern Artery night. Lost, all irretrievably lost, and no thousand, thousand (thanks, Sam Coleridge), no, no million later, greater experiences can ever replace that. And, add in, non-dated-up, and no possibility of sweet-smelling, soft, bare shoulder-showing summer sun-dressed (or wintry, bundled up, soft-furred, cashmere-bloused, I would not have been choosy), big-haired (hey, do you expect me to remember the name of the hair styles, too?), ruby red-lipped (see, I got the color right), dated-up in sight. So you can see what that “running around town, doing the best we could” of ours mainly consisted.
Mostly, we spoke of dreams of the future: small, soft, fluttery, airless, flightless, high school kid-sized, working class-sized, North Quincy-sized, non-world–beater-sized, no weight dreams really, no, that’s not right, they were weighty enough but only until 18 years old , or maybe 21, weighty. A future driven though, and driven hard, by the need to get out from under, to get away from, to put many miles between us and it, crazy family life (the details of which need not detain us here at all, as I now know, and I have some stories to prove it, that condition was epidemic in the old town then, and probably still is). And also of getting out of one-horse, teen life-stealing, soul-cramping, dream-stealing (small or large take your pick on dream size), even breathe-stealing, North Quincy. Of getting out into the far reaches, as far as desire and dough would carry, of the great wild, wanderlust, cosmic, American day and night hitch-hike if you have too, shoe leather-beating walking if you must, road (or European road, or wherever, Christ, even Revere in a crunch, but mainly putting some miles between).
We spoke, as well, of other dreams then. I do not remember some of the more personal aspects of the content of Bill's dreams. If you want the “skinny” on Bill’s dreams he’s around, ask him. However, a lot of what Bill and I talked about at the time was how we were going to do in the upcoming cross country and track seasons, girls, the desperate need to get away from the family trap, girls, no money in pockets for girls, cars, no money for cars, girls. (Remember those were the days when future expectations, and anguishes, were expressed in days and months, not years.) Of course we dreamed of being world-class runners, as every runner does. Bill went on to have an outstanding high school career. I, on the other hand, was, giving myself much the best of it, a below average runner. So much for some dreams.
And, maybe, on my part, I also expressed some sketchily-drawn utopian social dreams, some fellaheen justice dreams. Oh, you don’t know that word, "fellaheen", perhaps. To have oneness justice for the "wanters" of the world; for the “no got”, not the other kind, the greed-driven kind, want; fear-driven, fear to go left or right or to put two feet in front of you want; for the misjudgment-making from having too little of this world's goods want; for all the cramp-spaced in this great big planet want; for the too many people to a room, one disheveled sink, one stinking toilet want: for the bleary-eyed pee-smelled, dawn bus station paper bag holding all your possessions want; for the two and three decker house no space, asphalted, no green between want; for the reduced to looking through rubbish barrels, or worst, want; for the K-Mart, Wal-mart, Quincy Square Bargain-Center basement outfitted out of fashion, no fashionsista, no way, want,; for the got to have some Woolworth’s five and dime trinket to make a small brightness want; for the lottery, keno, bingo, bango, mega-bongo waiting for the ship to come in pay-out want; for the whiskey soaked, wine-dabbled, or name your poison, want; for the buddy, can you spare a dime want; for the cop hey you, keeping moving you can’t stay here, want; for the cigarette butt strewn pick-up streets want; for fixing, or fixings, to die want; and, for just plain, ordinary, everyday, non-descript want, the want from whence I, and, maybe, you came.
This is the sing-song of the fellaheen, the life-cycle of the fellaheen, the red masque dance of the fellaheen; the dance of the working, or not so working, poor, the day time dance. The dance that I will dance, at least it looks that way, until I draw my last breathe. For the night time, the "takers", stealth thief, jack-roller, pimp daddy, sweet-dark covering abandoned back alley streets, watch out behind you (and in front too), sweated, be-fogged, lumpen fellaheen night, the no justice wanted or given night, you will have to look to the French writers Genet, Celine, or one of those rough boys, the takers have no need of my breathe, or my tears. I have had my say now, and it was worth standing, as the night devours the sun, at this damn wintry oval to say it, alright.
Markin comment:
....with apologies to the great early 20th century modernist French writer Marcel Proust whose most famous (and massive) work I am stealing the title from in my headline. Apparently I will steal any literary tidbit, from any source and from any time, just to round out an entry in this space. I had also better explain, before some besotted, hare-brained, pencil at the ever ready, school of novel deconstruction devotee, probably tragically childhood’d, post-modern literary-type jumps on me I know, and I know damn well, that an alternative translation for the title of Proust's six volume work is Remembrances Of Things Past. But isn't this In Search Of Lost Time a better title for the needs of this space? In any case I promise not to go on and on about French pastry at teatime (which, by the way, brother Proust did do, for about sixty pages in the volume Swann’s Way, so there is the trade-off. Okay?).
*********
As I, clumsily, pick up, or try to pick up some precious dirt to rub between my fingers from the oval in front of the old high school, on this bedraggled, prickly frigid, knife-like wind- gusting in my face, not fit for man nor beast, kind of a winter’s day as the shortly-setting sun begins it descent into night, I really do wonder what demons, what cast-out-of-the-inner-sanctums-of-hell demons, have driven me here, here to this worn-out patch of an oval, after so many years of statutory neglect. Moreover, picking up dirt from an oval that I have not walked on, much less picked up gravel from, in over forty-five years, although I have logged many a mile around a larger version (I believe) of this oval either practicing during track or cross country season, or, and this may jog reader memory, running the 600 yard dash as part of the old time President’s National Physical Fitness Test. Yes, I thought mention of that event might bring ring a bell, a bell of anguish for some, as they puffed and chortled their way to the finish line in their tennis shoes, or whatever knee-busting sneakers we wore in those days, in order to be cool. Hey, just like today.
In any case, here I stand, and now you know, or have a pretty good idea where I am. What you do not know, at least do not know yet, is that I am not here, rubbing some funky old town dirt through my fingers on a cold winter’s day just for the joy of it. For raider red oneness, either. Or some such old man’s quirks. Rather, I am here, and you can start calling 911 right now if you like, to evoke, evoke mind you so there is no fooling around about it, the spirit, the long past spirit of days gone by at the high school. The spirit of the time of my time. Probably not since old Tommy Wollaston went looking for a suitable site for his maypole debaucheries, and stumbled on Merrymount has this town seen such a land grab, in a manner of speaking. See, what I am thinking is that some dirt-rubbing, a little kabala-like, or druid-like, or keltic-like, or Navajo-like, or something-like, dirt-rubbing will give me a jump start on this “voyage”.
I will confess to this much , as this seemingly is a confessional age, or, maybe just as a vestige of that hard-crusted, family history-rooted, novena-saying, stations of the cross walking, ceremonial high mass incense-driven, mortal sin-fearing, you’ll get your reward in the next life so don’t expect it here, buster, fatalistic Catholic upbringing long abandoned but etched in, no, embedded in, some far recesses of memory that my returning to North Quincy High School did not just occur by happenstance. A couple of years before my mother, Doris Margaret Johnson (nee Radley) NQHS Class of 1943, passed away.
For a good part of her life my mother lived in locations a mere stone's throw from the school. You could, for example, see the back of the school from my grandparents' house on Young Street. As part of the grieving process, I suppose, I felt a need to come back to North Quincy. To my, and her, roots. In part, at least, for the feel of roots, but also to figure out, or try to figure out for the 584th time, what went wrong in our old, broken down, couldn't catch a break, working poor, North Quincy-historied, family. As part of that attempted figuring out, as I walked up Hancock Street from Walnut Street (the old, woe begotten, seen better days, ram-shackled homestead now standing guard above part of the Newport Avenue by-pass) and swung down East Squantum I passed by, intentionally passed by, the old high school. And here I stand, oval-stuck, dirty-handed, bundled up not to well against the day’s winds, or against the fickle, shifting winds of time either, to tell my tale.
Now I will also confess, but without the long strung-out stuff that I threw in above about my Catholic upbringing, that in figuring out why ill winds blew across my family’s fate I was unsuccessful. Why, after all, should the 584th time bring some sense of enlightenment, or of inner peace, when the other five hundred, more or less, did not do so. What this sojourn did do, however, was rekindle, and rekindle strongly, memories of sitting, without number, on the steps of the high school in the old days, in the high school days, and think about the future, if there was going to be a future.
I tried to write this story, or a part of it, a couple of years ago so a little background is in order so the thing makes some sense to others. That now seemingly benighted entry, originally simply titled,A Walk Down “Dream” Street, started life by merely asking an equally simple question posed to fellow classmates in the North Quincy High School Class of 1964 about whether their high school dreams had come true or not, as least for those who had thought about the issue, on the Classmates. com website. I had “discovered” the site that year after having been pushed and pulled in ways that drove me back to memories, hard, hard-bitten, hard-aching, hard-longing, mist of time, dream memories, of North schoolboy days and of the need to search for my old high school friend and running mate (literally, in track and cross country, as well as “running” around town doing boy high school things, doing the best we could, or trying to), Bill Cadger. I posed the question this way there:
“Today I am interested in the relationship between our youthful dreams and what actually happened in our lives; our dreams of glory out in the big old world that we did not make, and were not asked about making; of success whether of the pot of gold or less tangible, but just as valuable, goods, or better, ideas; of things or conditions, of himalayas, conquered, physically or mentally; of discoveries made, of self or the whole wide world, great or small. Or, perhaps, of just getting by, just putting one foot in the front of the other two days in a row, of keeping one’s head above water under the impact of young life’s woes, of not sinking down further into the human sink; of smaller, pinched, very pinched, existential dreams but dreams nevertheless. I hope, I fervently hope, that they were the former."
Naturally, the question was posed in its particular form, or so it seemed natural at the time for me to pose it that way, because those old, “real”, august, imposing, institutionally imposing, grey granite-quarried (from the Granite City, natch) main entrance steps (in those days serious steps, two steps at a time steps, especially if you missed first bell, flanked by globular orbs and, like some medieval church, gargoyle-like columns up to the second floor, hence “real”) is a place where Bill and I spent a lot of our time, talking of this and that.
Especially in summer night time: hot, sultry, sweaty, steam-drained, no money in pockets, no car to explore the great American teenage night; the be-bop, doo-wop, do doo do doo ,ding dong daddy, real gone daddy, rockin’ daddy, max daddy, let it be me, the night time is the right time, car window-fogged, honk if you love jesus (or whatever activity produced those incessant honks in ignition-turned-off cars), love-tinged, or at least sex-tinged, endless sea, Wollaston Beach night. Do I need to draw you the big picture, I think not. Or for the faint-hearted, or the merely good, denizens of that great American teenage night a Howard Johnson’s ice cream (make mine cherry vanilla, double scoop, no jimmies, please) or a trip to American Graffiti-like fast food drive-in, hamburger, hold the onions (just in case today is the night), fries and a frappe (I refuse to describe that taste treat at this far remove, look it up on Wikipedia, or one of those info-sites) Southern Artery night. Lost, all irretrievably lost, and no thousand, thousand (thanks, Sam Coleridge), no, no million later, greater experiences can ever replace that. And, add in, non-dated-up, and no possibility of sweet-smelling, soft, bare shoulder-showing summer sun-dressed (or wintry, bundled up, soft-furred, cashmere-bloused, I would not have been choosy), big-haired (hey, do you expect me to remember the name of the hair styles, too?), ruby red-lipped (see, I got the color right), dated-up in sight. So you can see what that “running around town, doing the best we could” of ours mainly consisted.
Mostly, we spoke of dreams of the future: small, soft, fluttery, airless, flightless, high school kid-sized, working class-sized, North Quincy-sized, non-world–beater-sized, no weight dreams really, no, that’s not right, they were weighty enough but only until 18 years old , or maybe 21, weighty. A future driven though, and driven hard, by the need to get out from under, to get away from, to put many miles between us and it, crazy family life (the details of which need not detain us here at all, as I now know, and I have some stories to prove it, that condition was epidemic in the old town then, and probably still is). And also of getting out of one-horse, teen life-stealing, soul-cramping, dream-stealing (small or large take your pick on dream size), even breathe-stealing, North Quincy. Of getting out into the far reaches, as far as desire and dough would carry, of the great wild, wanderlust, cosmic, American day and night hitch-hike if you have too, shoe leather-beating walking if you must, road (or European road, or wherever, Christ, even Revere in a crunch, but mainly putting some miles between).
We spoke, as well, of other dreams then. I do not remember some of the more personal aspects of the content of Bill's dreams. If you want the “skinny” on Bill’s dreams he’s around, ask him. However, a lot of what Bill and I talked about at the time was how we were going to do in the upcoming cross country and track seasons, girls, the desperate need to get away from the family trap, girls, no money in pockets for girls, cars, no money for cars, girls. (Remember those were the days when future expectations, and anguishes, were expressed in days and months, not years.) Of course we dreamed of being world-class runners, as every runner does. Bill went on to have an outstanding high school career. I, on the other hand, was, giving myself much the best of it, a below average runner. So much for some dreams.
And, maybe, on my part, I also expressed some sketchily-drawn utopian social dreams, some fellaheen justice dreams. Oh, you don’t know that word, "fellaheen", perhaps. To have oneness justice for the "wanters" of the world; for the “no got”, not the other kind, the greed-driven kind, want; fear-driven, fear to go left or right or to put two feet in front of you want; for the misjudgment-making from having too little of this world's goods want; for all the cramp-spaced in this great big planet want; for the too many people to a room, one disheveled sink, one stinking toilet want: for the bleary-eyed pee-smelled, dawn bus station paper bag holding all your possessions want; for the two and three decker house no space, asphalted, no green between want; for the reduced to looking through rubbish barrels, or worst, want; for the K-Mart, Wal-mart, Quincy Square Bargain-Center basement outfitted out of fashion, no fashionsista, no way, want,; for the got to have some Woolworth’s five and dime trinket to make a small brightness want; for the lottery, keno, bingo, bango, mega-bongo waiting for the ship to come in pay-out want; for the whiskey soaked, wine-dabbled, or name your poison, want; for the buddy, can you spare a dime want; for the cop hey you, keeping moving you can’t stay here, want; for the cigarette butt strewn pick-up streets want; for fixing, or fixings, to die want; and, for just plain, ordinary, everyday, non-descript want, the want from whence I, and, maybe, you came.
This is the sing-song of the fellaheen, the life-cycle of the fellaheen, the red masque dance of the fellaheen; the dance of the working, or not so working, poor, the day time dance. The dance that I will dance, at least it looks that way, until I draw my last breathe. For the night time, the "takers", stealth thief, jack-roller, pimp daddy, sweet-dark covering abandoned back alley streets, watch out behind you (and in front too), sweated, be-fogged, lumpen fellaheen night, the no justice wanted or given night, you will have to look to the French writers Genet, Celine, or one of those rough boys, the takers have no need of my breathe, or my tears. I have had my say now, and it was worth standing, as the night devours the sun, at this damn wintry oval to say it, alright.
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