Read’s Written Matter

Afterparty

Without a father to guide him, a boy who would be free must make his own path in life. By my father’s early death, fate prematurely transformed a subordinant boy into an emancipated man. As if in compensation, I gained that degree of freedom to follow my own path that others must earn by liberating themselves from paternal, or parental, authority.

Of course, there’s no shortage of perfectly acceptable paths for un- and non-fathered people to follow. Whether it was my father’s charisma or my own character defect, I’ve never been inspired to follow anybody else, even if I co-piloted a few nefarious plots that led me astray, back in the proverbial day!

Such is my fortune. Heartbroken as I was at fourteen, today I call myself a lucky man. Ample evidence of the harm bad fathers do to sons is all around us today. That the paternal relationship gets such scant attention, in the public’s selection of candidates for high office, reflects their uneasiness about paternal relationships.

When I was a boy, the American family was intact; rare was the child housed in a one-parent home. What is memoir for me may seem like historical fiction for readers born into homes containing televisions. Until I was five or six, radio, newspapers, and magazines were the only way commercial messages and pop culture could penetrate the walls of my father’s castle.

What follows is a poem begun years ago, one of several whose purpose is to give form to formless memories of childhood and boyhood. These letters, which report what I’ve heard and seen, and where I’ve been, will include several poems. Caveat emptor, dear reader!

A day in January, 1963, two months and two days past my fourteenth birthday, was the last day of my father’s life, and the first day of my premature manhood. Today, that icy Saturday remains acute in memory; I could tell you enough about it – the wake, funeral, and burial, to make you weep, but to what end? Every father is bound to die, and death shall have no dominion.

Have a good cry, but bury death along with the dead, your dearly departed. Grieve, grieve deeply enough to squeeze every tear out of you, but then grab life by the throat and choke it to death. Now, irony has been introduced, which rides an open car in life’s parade of days.

Daughters of time, the hypocritic days,
Muffled and dumb, like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file…

Ralph Waldo Emerson is the author of “Days.” Already introduced above is Dylan Thomas, who’s own father’s death moved him to pray that death shall have no dominion, even if it hastened his own soon after.

Of all the good people whose affection for my father made them want to help me, as well as the nuns and monks at school, and professors at college, not one of them told me to read Dylan Thomas or Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nor was it ever even hinted that literature may be what it takes to reignite the polar star extinguished with my father’s death.

Fate may not always get the credit she deserves, least of all in a timely fashion, but her record is an impressive one. Regardless how unaware of it I was at the time, my father’s death transformed me into a practical, persistent, philosopher. From that particular day, as if to fill an unfillable void, an insatiable need to know Why? has kept me within the wake of days, as mine have continued to arrive every morning since.

None of the people who embraced and consoled me at fourteen told me that Why? is a sentence more than sixty years long. Or maybe one of them did, but it wouldn’t have mattered because, already, I was on my own.

At any rate, poems by Dylan Thomas fell into the circuitous path of my life, like magical singing bones, soon after Bob Dylan had reached through the radio and kidnapped my teenage ears.

Arriving in 1965, his song Desolation Row slammed shut the playroom door of bubblegum pop, and busted open the door to the Captain’s Tower, where calypso singers laugh at Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, found fighting there for no apparent reason.

A mere seven years older than me, with less than a full semester at college, how much must Bob Dylan have to know about T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, before he would include them in a song?

Good luck trying to wring a straight answer out of someone unknown to a public now content to be informed via screens held in the palms of hands, which both he and I know nature made for people to thumb through books, play pianos, strum guitars, paint, sculpt scrap-iron gates, and do so much more.

But, before he donned his protective veil, when he still needed the press to help sell records and fill seats in concert halls, Bob Dylan dubbed himself a song and dance man. That can be taken as a joke, or it can be seen as an honest attemp to escape the pigeonhole of protest that the public and the press still want to squeeze him into.

So much power was released by him in lyric and performance, however, that he escaped their clutch; he still defies the cult of popularity, even if an errant Dylan fandom thrives. Today an army of freelances keep track of every utterance he’s made since before he fled Dinky Town to meet his muse in New York town.

Bob Dylan knows as well as anyone the role prize is given to play in the parade and procession of hypocritic days. The lessons we find in books, or marked in chalk on giant classroom walls, have their value, but they pale alongside the lessons that smack us upside the head. He learned such a lesson when he showed up to recieve the 6th annual Tom Paine Award of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee.

Three weeks after JFK had been killed in Dallas, Dylan was used like ckickbait by the old warriors of New York city’s anti-establishment establishment. They knew their coffers would ring with the music of new coins if they lured Bob Dylan to their annual publicity and fundraising event. Armed with the thin wisdom and fat appetite of a 22 year old songwriting singer, he took the bait, but paid dearly for it.

He drank too much and talked too much and said things he’d never say again. He was man enough to apologize in writing and wish his errant benefactors good luck with their good works. He went back to work, and he seldom looks backwards.

The lesson he learned then may be why, in 2016, he sent Patti Smith to collect the Nobel committee’s literature prize, whereas, in 2000, he showed up in tie and tails to collect the music world’s Polar Prize. After all, he makes his living in music, not literature.

Even though high school English teachers and Oxford dons regard his songs as poems, they’re still songs. He tells us as much in his valedictory album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, where we find Mother of Muses wherein he professes devotion to Calliope, muse of music and song. Erato is one of her sisters, muse of poetry and literature.

The simple fact that he writes and has published poems, should settle the matter, but it never will, at least until American poetry finds a way to liberate itself from the university, into whose service it was impressed fifty years ago. It was impressed the way sailors on American ships once were impressed into the service of the British navy, which reminds us what a bad dad mad King George really was.

So mad was George lll, that he overruled his more humane and liberal Lords and commoners whose own kin peopled New England and who had great affection for the American colonies. His red-clad hired men obeyed his command and marched into the suburbs, and started the Revolutionary War no American wanted, but from which no patriotic colonist ran or fled after “the shot heard round the word,”

We know that line from Concord Hymn, Emerson’s poem that immortalizes events witnessed by his own grandfather.

Funny how these things work out – it was the bellicose behavior of America’s British father that put my hometown on the world map.

The name Oswego, my hometown, is an aglicization of a Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) word, Oswegatchee, which refers to the mouth of a river. Their ancestral lands were bounded by the eastern shore of Lake Ontario; their council fire, kept by the Onondaga nation, is near the source of the river that runs less than thirty miles to “deposit its tribute into Lake Ontario.”

That quote is found in The Pathfinder, by James Fenimore Cooper, who was sent to Oswego in 1808, after securing a commission in the U.S. Navy, then preparing for a second war with King George, man-handler, enemy of free trade, and the freedom of the seas.

Such historical perspective is given to tether my parade of days to where and when they began, but also to indulge a strong impulse to share what news I’ve heard along the way. As Ezra Pound said – Literature is news that stays news.

My career as a freelance writter began during the winter of 1960-61, when I began to hammer out brief summaries of televised hockey games on a giant typewriter in the family rec room, for my father to read after his usual Saturday night out with my mother.

By the time I got to high school, my style had become so florid that my ninth grade English teacher accused me of plaigiarism, for handing in a composition that described the gridiron in Syracuse University’s football stadium as appearing “emerald green.” However qualified that teacher was for the convent, she was singularly unsuited to assist the muse! Cliche, not plagiarism, was my literary offense.

Had I a plaigiarist’s intent to decieve, I would have repurposed what had been published by Grantland Rice, the dean of sportswriters, and written this: “Outlined against a gray-blue September sky rode the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; famine, pestilence, death, and destruction are their biblical monikers, but sports fans know them as Floyd Little, Jim Nance, and the other two guys in the Syracuse backfield.”

Since no detention or corporal punishment ensued, I let the matter pass. But my already low opinion of school was further deepened. Ten years into it, and still nobody has taken the time to outline the purpose of compulsory, communal instruction. Being shown no examples of how obedience to arbitrary rules may prove beneficial, the people-pleaser in me never matriculated from the potential into the kinetic state.

Three years later, after my first year of boarding school, a letter was sent to my mother pleading with her not to send me back. They told her it “would be folly,” because they had decided that I am “a non-conformist.” I’d only seen folly used to describe the purchase of Alaska, at two cents an acre, and the digging of the Erie Canal, which was done on time and under budget, which made me proud to qualify as folly.

To have “non-conformist” added to my jacket, the permanent record the nuns began compiling in kindergarten, was as good as having shiny gold star stuck on it. Three years later, my failure to conform with rules of classroom attendance led to my withdrawal from Boston University, soon after the midway point of my fourth semester there, in April,1969.

I wouldn’t have even gotten into B.U. if I hadn’t returned to boarding school, then graduate near the top of my class. That final year, my fourteenth of Catholic school instruction, was easy and fun because I used it to make sure I wouldn’t wind up someplace as boring as my hometown state college, or – heaven forbid, at work in the world of grownups.

The grownups then were intent on re-making the people of Vietnam into a people who see the world the way America’s C.I.A. wants it to be seen. Despite begging B.U. to let me stay, because tuition had been paid and my grades were closer to Bs than Cs. But, rules are rules even when announced only in the unread terms of a tuition contract.

Good bye Hub of the Universe, hello Saigon? Nope, turns out, at least for me, the Vietnam draft was more bark than bite, more threat than promise.

I was drafted within weeks of dropping out of B.U., but I flunked the induction physical in July. Uncle Sam issued a temporary deferment, which required me to lie in response to form letters sent three and six months later. Ever after, I would be deemed permanently unfit for service in the armed forces of the USA.

My first victory over the leviathan – the totality of inhibiting forces arrayed against the flowering of the person nature designed me to be.

Even though I knew no more about the height and weight standards required for induction into the U.S. Army than I did about B.U.’s truancy policy, I had shown up to the pre-induction physical either a half inch too short for my weight, or a pound too heavy for my height. Even so, when I walked away from the South Boston Navy Yard that summer day, I thought I could fly.

“Who shall dare think he has come late into nature, or has missed anything excellent in the past, who see the the admirable stars of possibility, and the yet untouched continent of hope glittering with all its mountains in the vast West?…The entrance of this into his mind seems to be the birth of man.” Emerson, The Method of Nature.

Footloose and fancy free, out of college, tuition-money spent, I decided to go west, as young men long have been advised to do. On August 18, 1969, I stood at the entrance of the Massachusetts Turnpike, carrying a sleeping bag, a small suitcase, and a cardboard sign that announced San Francisco to be my destination.

As Vietnam-era draftees had begun to do, I had been out drinking all night before the physical, and I saw the sun rise up out of the Atlantic Ocean on draft day. May as well now go see how it looks as it drops into the Pacific Ocean.

The first form letter from the Selective Service caught up to me in October at Yosemite National Park, where I’d lost the beer belly that had saved my bacon in July. Even so, I told Uncle Sam I’d put on a few more pounds, because I was afraid he wouldn’t have believed me If I said I’d grown an inch taller.

A two month stint in Yosemite ended with the early arrival of winter in the Sierra Mountains, and soon enough I was back in Boston, where I took a short-term job at a downtown department store. That was when I committed my first acts of poetry, as both practitioner and evangelist of the art.

There were 4 or 5 college-age kids on the Thanksgiving-through-New Year crew in adjoining departments, each of whom had an urge to perform, or to entertain, or just make you laugh, and keep at bay the truth that, by sunset, another 3 or 4 kids like us would wind up dead in Vietnam.

So, we convened little variety shows whenever we thought the coast was clear. There was one guy, a percussion student at Berklee College of Music, who made amazing sounds with weird objects found in the necktie department, which was kitty-corner to socks, where I was at the beck and call of a man who had been in hosiery since the Great Depression.

Across the way from my area was the most beautiful person I had ever seen, a freshman at Mass College of Art. Her thing was to do quick, amazing sketches of anything or anyone you pointed at. My part was to riff on language. Start me up with a word or phrase and I’d improvise like a juggler of mis-matched objects.

Whatever sense of personal liberation I’d gotten via B.U. and the Selective Service System, was augmented by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Richard Brautigan, who I got turned on to at Yosemite. To the alpha of rigorous rhythm and rhyme found in Dylan Thomas, those west coast writers added a relaxed and fluid omega.

Between those poles, I’m at home, never homeless, never bereft or alone as a rolling stone. Speaking of which, how lucky was I to enjoy the vicarious companionship of the master juggler Bob Dylan, who had pitted Eliot against Pound for no more profound reason than that it sounded good and fit the needs of the song.

Bob Dylan, masked with a dead poet’s name, used the darlings of the literary establishment like marionettes in his own traveling circus. He imagines Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower, then informs us that calypso singers laugh at them.

Why wouldn’t they? I would – I’d identify with the calypso singers, what a hoot, to see poets duking it out! But, why the hell were they even in the captain’s tower?

“I asked the captain what his name was / And how come he didn’t drive a truck / He said his name was Columbus / I just said, “Good luck.” Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream, 1965.

While pondering infinity in Boston, as the 1960s flickered out, I read an article in the newspaper about a new drop-in center for kids called Project Place. My inner anthropologist/ neighborhood organizer had been awakened the previous semester by a book called “Talley’s Corner.” Even if they had neglected to tell the Globe, it sounded to me like they’d love to have an amateur poetry instructor.

Hours of operation ran something like 10 PM to 8 AM and the location was where Boston, Roxbury, and Jamaica Plain intersect. I showed up there one night with thin volumes of Thomas, Ferlinghetti, and Brautigan. They welcomed me with looks of astonishment that I misread as encouragement.

A professional staff member was kind enough to escort me to the streetcar stop at daybreak, when I realized how alien I must’ve looked to the teenagers I’d shared my literary enthusiasm with all night. If it’s true that the teacher appears when the student is ready, this was an instance when neither was ready.

A week or so later, I proved to be so naive, such a sap, that I fell for a scam that still is found in help wanted ads, which used to be found in ubiquitous newspapers, but now must be all over the Internet. Seeking publisher’s representatives free to travel the major cities of the United States, the ad promised two weeks paid training and round-trip airfare.

All that was required to get the job, after a twenty minute interview in the Statler Hilton, was to shave my beard, which is all I’d had to do for the job in Yosemite! For that pittance, I’d be flown to St. Louis to learn how to be a professional publisher’s representative. I was so stupid you’d think I did nothing but stare out the window every moment since entering kindergarten.

It was and is an elaborate magazine subscription scam. That it has survived so long proves the botomless gullibility of the public, as well as the lawmaker’s perpetual willingness to look the other way, as long as there’s a little vigorous for them, a little piece of the action.

At any rate, after an errant weeklong detour to St. Louis, after giving up my apartment in the North End of Boston, I licked my wounds for a few days back home in Oswego, before embarking on a southbound hitchhike, inspired as much by February on Lake Ontario as by anything else.

“I do not belong to the Poets, but only to a low department of reporters, suburban men.” R. W. Emerson to Thomas Carlyle, 1838.

“The original upside-down poet to the original sportswrter poet – in the fellowship of the craft.” Lewis Turco to me, 1972.

I bummed around the south from February 1970 until June, which was enough to convince me that life would be less a drag from the perspective of a job or profession that required at least a bachelor’s degree. All these decades later, I recall the place and time of that epiphany.

A fixture of itinerant life in those days was an outfit called Manpower, Inc., which maintained hiring halls near downtown bus depots. It was a sort of Harvard Club for eminences of the school of hard knocks; a place for dropouts and outsiders to network. One sidewalk sage in Miami tipped me off to the easy money available in trade for a pint of blood plasma.

With my meager resources almost gone, after several days of no day jobs, I made my way to a lab advertised on the bulletin board at Manpower. It required several transfers on the city bus, plus a walk of 20-30 blocks that may as well have been through an equatorial jungle to this hyperborean traveler. Each way!

The 90 minutes it took to produce a pint of plasma, under laboratory conditions no more sanitary than the rooming house I slept in for $20/week, left me with little more than enough for two more such round-trips! It was while sitting in the shade of a doorway, waiting for the return bus, that I made up my mind to get back on the merry go-round of Higher Ed, but this time to leap all the way through the brass ring into the grownup world.

Back home that summer, I convinced the admissions office at Oswego State to admit me; they also credited me for time served at B.U. Thus dawns a new morning in my life, while America exits a decade she may never get over.
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More than the simple accretion of time, or segue from one decade into another, 1970 bears an ominous odor. For all the fascination in the press and TV with pot-smoking Hippies, Civil Rights, Rock n’ Roll, and Women’s Lib, the assassinations of the 1960s moved the nation back toward its nadir in the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination. The failure of reconstruction retarded the attainment of America’s promise.

Whereas the world of nations is a world of real estate, the truth of America is that, although it occupies real estate, much under questionable title, she remains the sum of the ideals that define her in the sacred documents of her birth. No matter how like alien nations various presidents make the USA resemble, until the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights are overthrown, we remain the last best hope of mankind, as Lincoln said.

It isn’t by accident that America’s first friend, the French, waited until after the Emancipation Proclamation, after the Union’s victory over the slave states, that they built and sent the Statue of Liberty to us. The sculpture itself lights the way into our new world harbor; with it’s lamp, it speaks the universal language of gesture.

Attached to the foundation, though, is an expression of humanity’s universal hunger “to breathe free,” along with the promise that America welcomes the world’s “wretched refuse” and “teeming masses.”

For all intents and purposes, that gift from France has been superceded and nullified by a vulgar grifter, who photobombs the world, replacing lady liberty’s great lantern with his tiny middle finger.

The nation’s failure to uncover the truth of the Kennedy assassinations, the GOP’s reconfiguration soon after JFK was killed, to make room for the southern racism of Senator Strom Thurmond, coupled with the exoneration of the uniformed killers of the four kids at Kent State and the two at Jackson State, hang like portentous clouds over America.

Not only must the dead be removed from where they had been killed, but the killers must be kept from killing again. Indifference leads to distraction, just as attention to detail leads us to take care of business. None but an indifferent, distracted people would ever elect and re-elect a demonstrated fraud and convicted felon to the presidency.

But hey, I’m a survivor, neither indifferent to truth, nor a dead man walking. If my father’s early death gave birth to the perpetual Why? of my life, then I’ll declare Philosophy to be my major at Oswego State.

As much as I enjoyed rapping with Socrates and his companions for two semesters, the likes of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Sarte left me cold. Instead of accepting life as it fell into their laps, they seemed intent on suspending the law of gravity, so they’d be able to devise ways to live it before it falls into their laps..

So, I switched majors and enrolled the Program in Writing Arts, which Lewis Turco had begun there a few years earlier. For someone born with persistent, stubborn muse, to become a student of creative writing is to be no student at all. Not only could I hang out on campus perfectly insulated from the sturm und drang of the work-a-day world, but I was given use of an office on campus when I became poetry editor of the college magazine!

Access to the warren of rooms in the student union had the unexpected consequence of making me Muhammed Ali’s greeter and escort when he arrived for a much anticipated speech. As I hurried across campus toward the loading dock to enter the already packed auditorium from behind the stage, a Winnebago came to a stop just as I got there.

The second person out the door was the most famous person in the world – the Champ, the Greatest of All Time, Muhammed Ali. When I extended my hand in greeting, Ali’s chief assistant, Drew Bundini Brown, asked me where the stage door is. “Why, I’m just heading there myself, let me show you the way.”

That was some thrill, even if almost everybody in the auditorium was better situated than me for Ali’s immensely entertaining performance. He drew his autograph diagonally across an empty leaf in my notebook, which I failed to preserve. That’s the way it is with me and autographs. I’ve gotten and lost enough to populate a very cool hall of fame.

“The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.” R.W. Emerson, Circles

From page one to here amounts to a string that ties together the circle of my life as a self-actuated poet, in a nation haunted by unexplained deaths, portioned into pools poisoned by political actors in red or blue hats, where dreamy youth are vulnerable to be lured into the Creative Writing Industry (CWI).

Both Dylan Thomas and Lewis Turco appear where the circle opens and draws near its close. The former is the property of the ages, his name safe from any harm I may do. Lewis Turco (1934-2024) is not; I mean no harm to his name. But since he introduced it into my story, it must stay there or my story won’t be told. We bid a sincere R.I.P. to the original upside-down poet.

Somehow, human civilization managed to get along without the CWI from Homer’s day until the early 1970s. As is so often the case with mortals, it is unforeseen consequences that Gang aft agley, as the immortal Robbie Burns laments after he un-houses a mouse with his plow.

The muse alone accounts for the sportswriter start of my writing life, while serendipity led Bob Dylan’s wordy music to inspire.my study of Dylan Thomas’s musical words.

After I’d completed, with As, all the courses in the catalogue, I asked Turco’s permission to do an independent study of Thomas, which he refused, saying he was too unfamiliar with the poetry to be any help. What could he have imagined his role in such an endeavor to be, except to check from time to time that I was learning, independently?

Almost fifty years later, I learned that his own undergraduate poetry teacher had been John Malcolm Brinnin, the Welsh poet’s close friend and chaperone during his three visits to the United States. When I asked, two years ago, why he hadn’t referred me to him instead of refusing my independent study request, he told me that he had never again spoken to Brinnin after Brinnin declined his invitation to address his creative writing students.

The failed relationship with Brinnin was a symptom that would recur throughout his career. Also on the faculty at Oswego State was Roger Dickinson-Brown, who had studied with the eminent Yvor Winters at Stanford. By the time I had looked him up as this story began to take shape, he was dead. But, I was amazed or amused to read that he had given up tenure at Oswego, where he considered his colleagues to be members of “an obscurantist cult.”

That sent me to Turco’s wikipedia page, where it said he was a committee member of an “artistic literary movement founded in Italy with the patronage of Dylan Thomas’s daughter.” There’s no way to know if that was the cult referenced by Professor Dickinson-Brown. But to learn that Turco wound up in a group under the patronage of Dylan Thomas’s daughter is psychedelic – it blew my mind.

But wait, there’s more! For someone who didn’t survive his own 30’s, Dylan Thomas left a ghost blessed by longevity. In 2012, I found my way into a casual relationship with Donald Hall (1938-2018), a poet who, not only had gone drinking with Dylan Thomas, but who had spent the night with Dylan and Caitlin in the legendary Boathouse at Laugharne, Wales.

Sorry to say, I didn’t know about this relationship until after his death. Not incidentally, Hall is the source for the coinage of Creative Writing Industry, which we’ll discuss in turn.

An essay Hall published in the New Yorker in 2012, led to an acquaintance and correspondence with the former U.S. Poet Laureate (2006-07). Chatting after dinner during a visit I sensed would be our last, I mentioned to Hall that I had been a student of Turco’s at Oswego

“O, Turco hates me!” he laughed, as the conversation turned a corner, which kept me from aksing him why. But the following year, a few months after Hall’s death, I asked Turco why he thought Hall would have made such a remark. Ten minutes later, his answer arrived in my inbox. It was a copy of an assault on Hall and his poetry published 10 years earlier in an academic journal. Fortunately it’s in as obscure a journal as any academic punching bag ever was.

That it pretends to be a critique of someone’s poetry didn’t fool me; it is an assault on a man of letters whose reputation is well-enough established that, even if Turco’s poison dart reached its target, it would do no harm. Thearticle revealed enough of Turco to show how betrayed he felt when Hall matured beyond the formal verse he began to write in adolescence and grew beyond the “formal” of youth.

Turco wrote that he was a high school graduate earning a living in the Navy where his job as a clerk left him plenty of time to read and write. The principle organ of the 1950s establishment, Time magazine, was delivered to him at sea. That is where, in 1955, he read a rare and rave review of Hall’s first collection, comprised primarily of “formal” poems. That Hall’s hometown was near Turco’s in Connecticut added to the attraction.

After his stint in the Navy, he went to the University of Connecticut on the G.I. Bill, where, he would meet John Malcolm Brinnin. Even as a professional poet, Turco’s primary devotion would remain to his muse, not to students he is contracted to be muse for semester after semester.

When we send vain, dishonest people into government, then vain, dishonest people will have control of our schools and colleges. We can pretend that is not true, but unless and until we re-engineer human nature, it is. I’m not so naive as to think this example alone will vaporize the CWI, given how well rooted it already is, but, as an Oswegonian, I know what happens when a snowball rolls downhill!

And I know that beleaguered admissions officers will stamp their feet in protest if told to forgo the tuition windfall from the promise of student years spent dreaming up new Bell Jars and Moby Dicks. More easily dismissed will be the unherdable cats already getting paid to do on campus what would starve them to death if made to do in the public marketplace.

It wasn’t until a veteran freelance writer, Jessica Mitford, got wind of the cynical fraud perpetuated by the Famous Writers School, that the public marketplace would be swept clean of an essentially dishonest enterprise. Soon after Let Us Now Appraise Famous Wrtiers was published in the July, 1970 edition of The Atlantic, the jig was up for the hired muse in the public marketplace.

Goodbye Main Street, hello Ivory Tower.

Before I drop another quote, dear reader, allow me to explain my purpose in weaving Emerson throughout my story. It reflects the truth that literature must be a cumulative, not a serial enterprise. Literature is not made new by the succeeding generations, but it is what flows in the wake of Homer.

To intersperse my work with Emerson’s is like riding a bicycle with training wheels attached. It keeps me on track, but with a suitably high aim that even when I miss the target, I haven’t wasted an arrow.

Reflection animates all writing; unless we know where we are and how we got here, we are frozen in place, with no source of the courage required to step into the unknown.

Regression, of course, is insanity. Just as you can never bathe in the same stream twice, nor will MAGA’s imaginary vahalla ever be returned to.

What do we do when we move the parturition of poets and writers out of the public marketplace into the cloister of college and university? We alienate citizens from their right to decide which written work matters. However important to the public our colleges and universities are, they are a mere fraction of the whole.

Since literature is the people’s property, not a thing subject to the whim of Higher Ed, literature is necessarily, inevitably diminished under Higher Ed’s stewardship. In America today, Higher Ed’s boss is a woman qualified for the job because she helped her husband run a rassling empire – a live action cartoon show! P.T. Barnum is her Apollo.

The increasingly odious nature of our politics, especially with Higher and Lower Ed being pushed and pulled like a child’s toy by illiberal, barely literate politicians at the local, state, and national level, argues against the the viability of the CWI.

In a 1991 interview in the Paris Review, Donald Hall was asked, “Do you think the institution of the creative writing program has helped the cause of poetry?”

Nobody ever will be as perfectly situated to articulate an honest assessment of the CWI than Hall was. For a reason as untransmissible as every reason that makes adult carreers grow from seeds rooted in childhood, Hall determined to be a poet when he was fourteen.

He went as deep as anyone can into the yawning maw of the academy to learn how to become a poet: Exeter, Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, a three year Harvard Fellowship, then a tenured professorship at the University of Michigan, which he abandoned in his 40s to make his living as a freelance writer!

Good for him and his 30 year apprenticeship in the academy. If he had apprenticed, instead, at the New Haven Register after high school or college, he never would have met the love of his life, the poet Jane Kenyon, who took his seminar on Yeats and Joyce at Michigan. Through his marriage to her, he learned more about poetry and life than any academic instruction ever taught anybody.

So patient is the muse. And true to form, when Hall was ready, she appeared.

Selective Systemic Servility, redux

The first American casualty of the Vietnam War to affect me involved a friend from boarding school, whose luck wasn’t as good as mine. He got caught with a bottle of wine he’d stashed in his room after Christmas vacation. They expelled him summarily, without letting him even say goodbye to his friends.

Within weeks, he was drafted, passed the physical, then enlisted in the Marine Corps on somebody’s tragically bad advice. That summer, I learned that on his first day in combat, his platoon was ambushed, hand grenades killed everybody but him. Tim’s wounds required psychiatric treatment; I don’t know that his wound ever healed.

While in Boston, I took part in anti-war rallies, marches, gatherings, and teach-ins all over town and across the Charles River in Cambridge. My deepest involvement was to serve as a marshall guarding an entrance to B.U.’s Marsh Chapel, for four of the five days in October 1968, when an army soldier went AWOL and sought sanctuary there.

The FBI must have noticed my absence as day 5 dawned, because that’s when they violated the sanctuary and stormed in to arrest him. Nobody else was arrested. Eighteen year old Raymond Kroll got three months at hard labor and was docked $225 pay. I don’t know if the fact had anything to do with it, but Marsh Chapel is where Martin Luther King preached his first sermon after graduation from B.U.’s School of Divinity the previous decade.

The slaughter continued in Vietnam for six more years. The most that was accomplished by that bi-partisan atrocity was to knock America off the high ground she held honorably, and alone, the day WWII ended.

That August, the month before the re-start of my academic journey, I was stricken by inspiration on the eve of another draft physical – of a childhood friend who’d had his own baccalaureate quest interrupted by misadventure.

In the midst of our ritual, pre-physical, invocation of the spirit, having achieved the fluidity of thought and concentration of purpose available through the delicate alchemy of Afghani hash and Mohawk Valley hops, we decided to lay prostrate in front of the Army bus that would come at 7 AM to collect the draftees at the Post Office.

That way, we’d be arrested for obstruction of federal business, which would afford me the platform required to inform Uncle Sam the fatal error of his logic, of why we were in Vietnam.

It was around 4AM when the plan hatched itself, in an apartment across the river, a dozen blocks from the P.O. As usual when feeling patriotic, my soon-to-be drafted buddy and I kept cadence along the way singing songs learned on Clancy Brothers records. As one of them pointed out somewhere, Ireland, where both our ancestors are from, is a land of happy war and sad love songs.

The rosy fingers of dawn were just rising over the horizon as we arrived at our destination, with enough time left for a wee nap under a tree on the lawn of the impressive federal building, which had been Oswego’s Customs House during its maritime heyday.

But, a pair of Oswego’s finest, having been alerted by a passer-by that there were two apparently dead men on the lawn in front of the P.O., arrested us at 6AM for public intoxication. We spent a couple hours in the slammer, then sent home with appearance tickets that became $25 fines two weeks later. My friend’s physical was re-scheduled and he wound up flunking because of a doctor’s note attesting to bone-spurs, or something as stupid as that

Now that we’ve reached the point where straight facts and common sense are rare as a bogey on a presidential scorecard, it seems time to lighten up by way of a few new poems. I wrote about one a year for decades before the dam burst and now need to write fast to keep up.

And, now for something entirely different. The novelization of an unmade major motion picture, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and James Dean.

Incident at Oswego, or The East Park Massacre

Preface

Oswego is a place with a setting both blessed and cursed – at the mouth of a short, swift river that pours into a great lake, which made it a place of critical importance to colonizers from across the Atlantic. Samuel de Champlain arrived in 1615 from New France (Canada), with orders from King Henry IV to find a port more temperate than those on the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Champlain’s expedition was enabled by Algonquin and Huron warriors, who were willing to make common cause with the Europeans because they were eager to attack their ancient enemy, the Haudenosaunee, who maintained their headquarters at the source of the river, twenty-five miles upstream.

The raiding party found the place vacant; but the following year, Champlain killed two Haudenosaunee leaders with a single shot from his blunderbuss during a battle near the southern end of the lake he had just named for himself. That deed ensured Haudenosaunee enmity toward France – the Algonquin v. Haudenosaunee rivalry would undergird the France v. England rivalry that would determine the fate of North America.

(Champlain’s expedition two years earlier brought him to the Massachusetts coast, where they were deterred by the presence of a large band of native people who made it plain that the foreigners were not welcome. History will note that those people were decimated by sickness soon thereafter, so that it was a much smaller and docile band that welcomed ashore the passengers of the Mayflower in 1620.)

The river would be described in great detail, effusively if not eloquently, in The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea, by James Fenimore Cooper, who came to know it as a sailor stationed in Oswego while the United States Navy prepared for the War of 1812. The name Oswego comes from the Haudenosaunee description for “pouring-out place” – Osweegatchee.

Whereas France was the first European nation to establish an outpost at Oswego, it had become so important to the English fur trade by the early 1700s, that they built a fortification there in 1722, adding two more by the middle of the century. In the park across the street from Lang’s house, marking the location of the third British fort, is a plaque commemorating the 1756 battle, affixed to a large boulder.

It was dedicated in 1913 by Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his capacity as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. In a speech entitled “Montcalm’s Victory And Its Lesson,” he makes the case that the actions England took in the wake of their ignominious defeat at Oswego, including implementation of the Intolerable Acts, set the stage for the American Revolution; an unintended consequence for the ages.

Bridget Lang and her friend Harriet Drummond were on the Lang’s front porch when Dennis came out to say he’d just spoken with Martin Farley, and that he was coming to Oswego the next day.

“I thought he was going to Vietnam,” said Bridget.

“He is, but not until Monday.”

“Your old roommate, from last year?” said Harriet.

“One and the same.”

This would be Martin’s second visit to Oswego. They wound up there over Memorial Day weekend the year earlier, after an event near Martin’s hometown in Massachusetts had been called off. Following the sort of reasoning typical of college kids, the addition of 500 miles to a three day road trip seemed like a good idea.

On that drive from Martin’s house in Springfield to Dennis’s in Oswego, the main topic of conversation was Dennis’s draft status, or more precisely, his seeming indifference to it. Having lost his student deferment after dropping out of school in March, it was only a matter of when, not if, he would be drafted. Martin was surprised at his buddy’s nonchalance at the imminent prospect of getting drafted and sent to Vietnam.

“First of all, I just got reclassified l-A last week; we’ll see what happens when they send a notice about the draft physical.”

“Still man, you’ve got to look ahead.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not worried. No way am I going to Vietnam, it’s just not going to happen.”

Dennis had a visceral feeling that he’d never wind up in Vietnam. He had an aversion to such terrain as he imagined in Vietnam – it seemed to him alien and repugnant, leaving him utterly unable to picture himself there, sunk to the ankle in a swamp or rice paddy. His imagination balked at the task. Combined with the idea of going to war against people he was not threatened by, and, especially, submitting to the whim of Uncle Sam, produced in Dennis a certainty that he would never be a soldier.

“You still need a plan, man.”

Martin resisted the temptation to remind his friend that if he had been more tuned-in to reality, then he wouldn’t even be in this situation. After all, he didn’t flunk out of school, but was made to withdraw because he skipped too many classes to qualify for course credit.

The year earlier, Harriet and Martin were along with Dennis and a group of friends at the state beach west of town. Late in the day, with many of the others paired off, they took a walk along the bluff overlooking the lake, practically telling each other their life stories.

By the time they sat on the grass, the sun was drawing near the horizon, catching their attention, and they grew silent as if hypnotized by the setting sun, which appeared to be creating a brilliant rippling line on the water, from where it would disappear below the horizon, running directly toward them, toward their legs now barely touching.

Practically their whole life stories meant that Harriet and Martin didn’t say much more than that each has been involved with someone since high school. Neither was hiding anything from the other, it just didn’t seem pertinent, or interesting, in the face of the attraction they felt for each other, which was novel and welcome to them both.

They presented each other with little monologues that amounted to sensible facades on small talk, the true purpose of which was to keep them facing one another. Then small talk dwindled to small sounds, and they embraced, holding each other at arm’s length for a moment, as if to see that they were where it felt they were, and the distance between them vanished, like the rippling tongue of the setting sun, and they kissed. They kissed until the flimsiness of dusk solidified in the dark of night, under a sky stippled with stars and an ovoid moon.

The impossibility of them carrying on weighed heavy as the moon and although they did the topography of each other’s bodies, they went no further, made no more than sand paintings of each other with their fingertips and palms – came only close enough to sense what was coming, and went no further than that.

Dennis Lang and Martin Farley were roommates at Boston University for the 1968-69 school year, having met the year before. They’d had a bonding moment in the student lounge after an orientation session when they noticed each smoked Camels, which set them apart from the pack in a Marlboro-dominated universe. Meager as it was, it was enough for a friendship to take root, despite their opposing tastes in so many other areas: Yankees v. Red Sox, Maple Leafs v. Bruins, Budweiser v. Pabst Blue Ribbon, Stones v. Beatles, bourbon v. scotch, blondes v. brunettes.

Nineteen sixty-seven was a particularly good year to show up for college in Boston – Cream, the ultimate rock n’ roll trio, was in residence for a week at the Psychedelic Supermarket, adjacent to BU on Commonwealth Avenue; and the Red Sox were in the throes of their Impossible Dream season around the corner at Fenway Park, where bleacher seats cost one dollar, and the outspoken Ken Harrelson had just taken up residence in right field.

Regardless the epoch, being in college means you are in the midst of exciting times, as the mysteries of life alternately reveal themselves and deepen on a daily basis. Being a college kid in Boston, the ultimate college town, in the late 1960s, a pivotal decade in the life of America, was like being a pig in mud.

But you wouldn’t say that then, because “pig” had become synonymous with policeman. “Off the Pigs” was a slogan seen on placards at anti-war demonstrations and peace rallies; Dennis shouted it out one afternoon while he and Martin were walking to class, having seen it in twenty-foot letters spray-painted on the side of a building.

“What the hell does that even mean?” Dennis asked his roommate, who was less impulsive and more studious. “Off” means “kill,” he said.

“Oh shit, that’s not cool.”

Dennis had nothing against cops – and certainly wouldn’t advocate killing them. It was the second vocabulary lesson from his roommate in a week. A couple days earlier, he had used the “n” word, carelessly, trying to make a joke. Martin told him that he was offended by it.

Springfield had a diverse population, and Martin had several African-American friends, including the son of Mike Crawford, the all-star Dodger right fielder. That was enough to made Martin aware of how offensive the “n” word is to people.

Knowing nobody who wasn’t Caucasian made the word an abstraction for Dennis – as if it were a sound with no semantics. Martin’s remark gave it meaning and his esteem for him led Dennis to be a little more thoughtful.

Neither of them had been politically-active as freshmen. Dennis, whose father died when he was twelve, had a sense of affection toward the U.S. Army because his father had been a decorated veteran of the Battle of the Bulge. His feelings did not transfer to what was happening with the war in Vietnam, however. For Martin, whose own father served in the Navy during WWll, the war wasn’t something he thought about at all, unless he had to.

The fall 1968 semester was less than a month old when BU’s Marsh Chapel became the center of the anti-war movement, when an Army private took sanctuary there, going A.W.O.L. It was a project of the university’s School of Divinity plus the New England Resistance, which one of Dennis’ friends was a card-carrying member of.

The plan was for the soldier to take up residence in the sanctuary, surrounded by a dozen or so student bodyguards, and then fill the rest of the chapel with students, including the aisles, in order to impede the inevitable bust.

His friend added him to the volunteer roster and Dennis wound up spending much of four days as a “marshall,” monitoring a door in the nave of the chapel, keeping an eye out for the bad guys, whatever that meant. Martin also came to the Chapel every day and helped out where needed, but he fit his anti-war efforts around his class schedule.

Despite this being a serious event in the life of a young soldier, the atmosphere in and around the chapel was less so. Dennis listened as speaker after speaker took to the pulpit to convey a sense of his or her own politics. He got the sense that they were auditioning to be leader of “the people.” Everybody also had an opportunity to listen to Howard Zinn, the most popular professor on campus, who convened his class in the chapel throughout the week.

Some speakers were all about the non-violence, aiming to channel the eloquence and passion of Martin Luther King, Jr., who got his PhD at BU a decade earlier. Instead, they sounded more like yoga teachers instructing how to achieve total limpness for when the Feds finally storm the place. Others were all about “Offing the Pigs” and kept warning people to remove jewelry, especially pierced-earrings, because the motherfuckers will be out for blood.

Dennis was happy to be involved in such an important activity, but had no intention of becoming a member of the New England Resistance, like his friends were. He was more comfortable as a free agent, free to make common cause wherever and whenever he wanted to.

As luck would have it, though, he was elsewhere when the Feds stormed the chapel before dawn Sunday morning, because the girls in the apartment next door had invited him and his roommates to dinner. Linda and Marlene were childhood friends from California; Linda at BU for a graduate degree, Marlene was along for the adventure, with a job at an insurance agency.

It was an elaborate event because they were pretending to be grown-ups, as opposed to partying as college kids usually do. That meant wardrobe upgrades from cutoffs and tee shirts and no profanity at table, but, as the evening worn on, adult beverages may have undermined their resolve.

While the others were saying their good nights, Dennis and Linda lingered in idle conversation, looking for all the world like they’d wind up in bed together that night. Instead, Dennis passed out on the couch, not long after his turn with a communal joint. The girls had served gin and tonics before dinner, chianti with it, and brandy afterward. For Dennis, to smoke pot, while under the influence of alcohol, always would result in a sudden, deep nap.

By the time he returned to Marsh Chapel around noon, it was all over. Several hundred federal marshals and assorted local and state police poured into the chapel at five a.m. and arrested the soldier, pretty much without incident. Nobody else was arrested and nobody got hurt.

Insignificant as those days were in the story of the war in Vietnam, they were pivotal ones for Dennis. Even though he didn’t realize it until much later, this was the point at which he left Boston University and matriculated into the school of hard knocks.

Following a two-three week escalation, he and Linda went from being frolicsome to fucking. Two months later, after Christmas break, Linda told him she had broken off her engagement.

For Dennis, who had been fumbling around with girlfriends’ bra straps since tenth grade, this was new ground. For Linda, who had been on the pill as long, this was ground with treacherous footing.
Compared to her fiance home in California, Dennis seemed a breath of fresh air – or as different from the fiance as a bite from an apple is different from a mouthful of warm apple pie.

The second week in March Dennis got three form letters from BU, each saying the same thing – that he was disqualified from receiving credit for a course because of attendance. He had meetings with everybody he could the next week, three teachers, an administrator and a dean to no avail. If he had any intention of earning a BU degree, his only option then was to withdraw, and petition for re-admission in the fall.

By the middle of the next semester, he was out of school, withdrawing after being notified that he was disqualified for failing to attend a minimum of classes. If he knew Linda had lied about her break-up, he might not have helped her as much as he did writing her thesis. He would’ve kept sleeping with her but would have gotten to enough classes to remain in school. And so, by late March 1969, instead of nearing the end of his fourth semester in college, Dennis Lang had arrived at the beginning of the rest of his life, with Uncle Sam atop the agenda.

A few weeks later, he received Greetings from the President – “You are hereby ordered for induction into the Armed Forces of the United States, and to report…” It listed the date and time for him to appear at the Post Office back home, for transfer to the Armed Forces Induction Center in Syracuse. At the bottom of the form was a statement that caught his attention. It told him to “go immediately” to any local draft board if you are so far from your local board that compliance would be a serious hardship.

By then, he’d found a job near Kenmore Square, rent was paid-up through the summer, which made schlepping all the way home, just to get drafted, seem to him like a serious hardship. So he waited until the day before he was supposed to be in Oswego, went to a draft office on Beacon Street, and was reassigned and re-ordered for induction several weeks later.

When he and Linda paired off the previous autumn, it was primarily a sexual thing, to which they applied a veneer of romance, positioning their relationship within the the societal continuum. Nevertheless, what Dennis perceived to be Linda’s duplicity gave him a target for the free-floating anger, or resentment, he felt for the time he spent helping write her Master’s thesis, instead of attending to his own classwork.

But things have a funny way of working out; sometimes the universe reveals its fingerprints on a job of karmic adjustment.

The day before the physical, Linda and Marlene put on a lasagna party for Dennis, with Marlene chipping in a gift-wrapped fifth of bourbon to make amends for treating him like crap all year, because she thought Linda was ruining her life with him.

They went to the drive-in movie later and drank beer while Von Ryan’s Express exploded before them on the giant screen. Back at the apartment, they smoked pot and hollowed out a tub of ice cream. As usual, Dennis passed out but Linda was alert enough to set the alarm clock, and drove him to the draft board just before the bus left for the South Boston Navy Yard.

He flunked the physical, marked temporarily unfit for military service for being overweight. Later that week, a friend from the New England Resistance showed him a chart listing the Selective Service System’s height and weight regulations, which indicated that Dennis was one pound over the limit, or half an inch too short.

Three months later, and three months after that, the Selective Service System mailed him a form, ordering him to list his current weight. Dennis added a few pounds each time, even though, by the time the second form reached him, he had spent several weeks as a laborer in Yosemite National Park, and had lost about twenty pounds. Uncle Sam took him at his penciled-in word, though, upgraded his status to 4-F, and that was the end of their correspondence.

Even though he hadn’t been aware of an abundance of anxiety while the draft loomed on the horizon, now that it was behind him, he felt a boost of enthusiasm with the approach of summer in Boston – a summer that for the first time since he was five years old, would not segue into a new school year.

Martin Farley

Before winding up in Oswego, before Martin had met Harriet, he and Dennis headed out to Springfield, mainly intent on an outdoor concert, but also because he hadn’t been home in a while and felt his parents were owed a visit.

Throughout boyhood, Martin and his father would spend the Saturday before Memorial Day at the cemetery, tidying up the graves of veterans, beginning with the three generations of Farley’s interred there since Martin’s great grandfather had been.

This was where Martin learned about his ancestors, near the tombstone of his great grandfather, which bears this inscription: Edward Michael Farley, 1844 – 1915, Sgt Co E 27th Regt Mass Vol Inf. And it is where he learned about abbreviations and about hierarchy and how things fit together, generally.

Mr. Farley told Martin that “Sgt” was an abbreviation of sergeant, and their discussion led to him telling his son that a sergeant was your boss if you were a private or corporal, but that lieutenants, captains, majors, colonels, and generals all were bosses for sergeants.

He learned about the Civil War and the rudiments of immigration, if not entirely about the condition of the Irish peasantry during the Great Hunger and how they wound up in such numbers in Massachusetts.

Most of all, this was where Martin learned about his father – before he had the language to explain it to himself, it is where where he learned about his father’s unhappiness. He saw that, even though his father could be very pleasant, even fun to be with, there was a sadness never too far away – an unsettledness, an unspoken dissatisfaction.

After mustering out of the army, Martin’s great grandfather returned to Springfield, worked at Smith & Wesson where he was trained in pipe fitting and plumbing. His one son worked there for twenty years before going into business for himself, later bringing in his son, Martin’s father, and then dying young in the 1950s, during the post-war recession, so that Mr. Farley inherited a failing business.

He closed it and took a job working for boyhood friends who had built a successful restaurant business, becoming operations manager, with responsibility for maintenance and facilities operations.

He had just finished mowing the lawn when Martin and Dennis arrived.

After saying hello, giving his son a quick hug, and shaking hands with Dennis, Mr. Farley said, “I don’t suppose you peaceniks are here to help me at the cemetery tomorrow, but you’re welcome anyway.”

“Actually dad, we’re going to a concert at Mountain Park tomorrow afternoon.”

Mr. Farley answered in a mocking tone, “Right, sure…”

After dinner, they were watching the Red Sox on TV, when the announcer mentioned the recently traded Ken Harrelson, the outfielder notorious for sporting beads, bell bottoms, and Nehru jackets.

“Good riddance to that pinko,” said Mr. Farley, laying the newspaper on a side table.

“Why do you think he’s a communist, Dad – maybe he’s just a snazzy dresser?”

“Yeah, and he is a right-fielder anyway, ” Dennis added, aiming to lighten the mood, but only deepening the tension.

Mr. Farley’s view of the world was a simple duality – things either were right or wrong. There was no grey area apparent to him, and he needed to make plain where he stood during these fraught days when the tear in the fabric of society could be seen in the most innocent of situations. He wouldn’t be overlooked.

In Mr. Farley’s eyes, it was more than attire that branded Harrelson, it was his public insulting of the owner of his former team, which had gotten him cut and led to his signing by Boston in the first place. That was another fissure in the generation gap, the insidious consequence of the war in Vietnam.

The effect it had on the Farley’s father-son bond had countless corollaries all across the United States as the 1960s segued into the 1970s, as the unbounded hopefulness that marked the onset of the decade was replaced by the meanness and cynicism that marked the Nixon administration.

Neither Dennis nor Martin were especially radical in appearance, but their hair and sideburns were long and Dennis had a goatee, the true purpose of which was not to declare his politics, however, but to disguise the pimples on his chin. Afterwards, on the porch for a smoke, Martin said he was sorry for the tense atmosphere, but Dennis deflected the apology and tried to ease his pal’s discomfort.

“At least your old man is still around to argue with.”

Martin’s father walked through life gingerly; he appeared to step carefully, or at least with a measure of deliberation that depicted a man of thought. Initially, people would think him curt, dismissive, arrogant even, but he was doing his best to be pleasant. Without a real understanding for it, he saw himself in his son, and he was eager for him to take the steps upward to the top floor of American life two steps at a time.

Despite missing the degree of intimacy he wished to have with Martin, he was determined to be helpful, as an ever more astonishing America emerged, one that Mr. Farley first became aware of during the bleakness of the great depression and came to know firsthand as a landlocked sailor during World War ll.

Martin knew better than to engage and steered the conversation away from the minefield that his father seemed intent on drawing them toward. But the war in Vietnam was inescapable, everyday images of death and destruction on the evening news and in the photo spreads of the weekly news magazines. It demanded your attention.

So simple an event as a major league baseball trade generates sufficient heat to ignite the arid underbrush of the father-son relationship; from balls and strikes to war and peace, just like that – you could get whiplash.

With the arrival of thunderstorms the next morning, the concert was canceled, and so Martin and Dennis decided to drive to Oswego, 250 miles to the west.

Pot Bust

The series of events that led to Martin being bound for Vietnam before his second Oswego visit began with plans by Martin and three BU classmates for an end-of-summer road trip. Their destination would be San Francisco, with side trips to Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon along the way out and back. Dennis was planning to attend something called the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair around the same time.

Everybody’s plans were jolted, however, the first week of August, when one of the guys on the road trip changed his mind, and Dennis was recruited to replace him, since they needed to divide the expenses and driving four ways to make the trip affordable. He was enticed by the offer – San Francisco, Big Sur, the Pacific – even if a California girl had done him wrong!

He told Martin that he’d be in for the westbound leg only, seeing no point in going all the way out to the west coast then coming right back, since he wouldn’t be returning to school like the others. They made it work, on paper at least, modifying the eastbound half by eliminating a side trip to the Grand Canyon.

A few days before the trip Martin drove home to collect his camping gear, and while there, ran into a friend home on leave from the Army. He had already spent a year in Vietnam, as an M.P. in Saigon, and had shipped home a kilo of marijuana, hidden in stereo speakers. After Martin told him about the upcoming road trip, he offered him a bag.

They drove out to his house, where he half-filled a baggie with Vietnamese pot, and then shared a joint while they caught each other up on news since high school.

“Go easy man, this is heavy shit”

Martin coughed after taking a deep hit, then took a shallow drag and was able to hold it in for a moment.

“Holy crap, that’s awesome.”

Martin’s friend told him how readily available pot was to American servicemen in Vietnam; for one dollar, they could buy 20 joints, packaged exactly like filtered cigarettes.

He was the only person Martin knew who’d been to Vietnam, having enlisted right after school. Except for a relatively short haircut, however, he didn’t look much like a soldier, wearing sandals, cut-off jeans, and a beaded necklace, with a rifle cartridge hanging from it. Martin asked about it, “Is that a war souvenir?”

Lew pulled it apart, to reveal tweezers – “Yeah, you could say that – a roach clip is my souvenir of the war in Vietnam!”

An hour later, three blocks from home, Martin was pulled over for driving after dark without headlights. He’d forgotten to turn them on, and he’d forgotten to hide the pot, too.

Martin’s carelessness was surprising, given his record of taking care of business, of being a steadfast friend who could be counted on. But a chance encounter with an old buddy and BOOM!, everybody’s plans go bust.

The immediate consequence was the cancellation of the road trip. The other guys decided instead on a drive up the coast to Acadia National Park, but Dennis had no interest in that. He wasn’t looking to fill the gap between the end of summer and the resumption of school – it was the whole of his life demanding attention.

Martin’s father hired a lawyer who was able to have the charges continued so he could return for the fall semester at BU, while he negotiated a plea deal with the District Attorney.

An alien sensation of being all alone overcame Dennis. His best friend was in big trouble; other friends and classmates would be back in school in a couple weeks; the thing at Woodstock was happening without him. He couldn’t sit still, so he decided to go to California anyway, right away, by himself, hitchhiking.

Dennis truly was footloose and fancy free that August 1969 morning when he arrived at the entrance to the Massachusetts Turnpike in downtown Boston, carrying a suitcase, sleeping bag, and a cardboard sign reading ‘San Francisco,’ with a couple hundred bucks in his wallet, along with phone numbers for Linda and Marlene.

One thing leads to another, and despite one bummer after another, Dennis was lucky enough to be heading west, young and healthy, if a little pudgy. He’d dodged the draft without even trying – without going through any of the crazy and dangerous things so many of his peers would do in order to flunk the draft physical. Nor did he have to refuse induction, or leave the country.

From his mother’s perspective, that turn of events had the providential aspect of freeing her from having to carry through on something she had said to Dennis at the end of his freshman year, which he himself had long forgotten. His grade point average hovered just above the 2.0 mark and she was aware that the minimum requirement for a student deferment was maintenance of a 2.0 grade point average.

When Dennis returned home at the end of freshman year, with a GPA barely over 2.0, she said to him, “If you flunk out and get drafted, I’ll break your thumbs so you can’t shoot a gun.”

Mrs. Lang wasn’t a particularly political person, and the echo of her husband’s voice had vanished after several years of widowhood. She would think from time to time, from situation to situation, how he may have handled a situation, but never became his surrogate – remaining mother solely.

Whereas following through on so abrupt a notion as hitchhiking across the country was inconceivable to her, it was equally clear that she’d not be able to change her son’s mind. Mrs. Lang’s final piece of advice to Dennis was, “Don’t buy chicken- or tuna-salad sandwiches on the road.” She didn’t trust diner personnel to be careful enough with mayonnaise to keep her only son safe.

Just as the widow undergoes a subtle transformation regarding the demands of sole parenthood, so too the semi-orphaned son stands on new ground, occupying space that would be alien to his pals. Being the only one among his group of classmates and friends whose father was dead gave Dennis an ineffable sense of apartness, a difference manifest in an extra beat of thought, a filter coloring conclusions he nevertheless would be likely to jump to.

Despite a generally blithe outlook, he recognised that some of the guys he grew up with were more intent on pissing off their fathers than on ending the war. One guy, whose father was Mr. Lang’s bowling league teammate, returned from freshman year at college looking and acting more outrageous than Abby Hoffman. But Dennis knew he he didn’t care about peace in Vietnam, he just wanted to annoy his father.

While the war began to engage the country’s consciousness, when Dennis was in high school, his inclination was to be gung-ho, mainly because of memories of his father being an Army guy. After WWII, Mr. Lang had re-enlisted in the Army Reserve and so all through boyhood, Dennis would see his father in uniform on a regular basis, every Wednesday night and two weeks of summer training at Camp Drum, when the family would rent a cabin on the lake near the base.

It was easy for Dennis to favorably identify the U. S. Army with his dear old man, but no amount of nostalgia could override the reality of the Vietnam war, as it began to dominate the nightly news.

His snap decision to hitchhike to California by himself was more a product of momentum, as if he were submitting to some physical law, rather than making a conscious and deliberate choice to explore new terrain, to check out how things were on the other side, on the fabled west coast.

The trip itself was more tedious than titillating, more annoying than adventurous; the only anecdote he’d take away from all that time on the Interstate involved a zealous member of the Colorado Highway Patrol who bore an uncanny resemblance to Barney Fife from The Andy Griffith Show.

After delivering a dramatic soliloquy pointing out the disparity between Dennis’ behavior and what was acceptable to the good citizens of the great state of Colorado, the trooper issued a written warning, then escorted Dennis to an all-night diner, which doubled as a filling station and bus depot. Instead of relying any further on hitchhiker’s luck, he spent the next 36 hours in a Greyhound bus, arriving in San Francisco the next day at dusk.

He got a room at the YMCA a few blocks from the bus station and following an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle, wound up with a job at Yosemite National Park, working on a crew that dismantles campsites in preparation for winter. The job lasted six weeks, but despite it being an exciting experience, it ultimately heightened in Dennis the feeling of apartness that first surfaced before leaving Boston.

The guys on his crew even called him “Boston,” since he had worn a BU tee shirt the first day of work, and paid no attention when he tried to explain that he was from Oswego, not Boston. He thought about taking a winter job at the Badger Pass ski resort nearby, but wound up catching a ride back to San Francisco.

Before leaving, he phoned Linda, her sister answered with the news that Linda had gotten married the week earlier and was on her honeymoon. He called Marlene and her mother said she had just moved and gave him her new number.

Marlene offered him a place to crash for a few days until he figured out what to do next. She had just moved into an apartment in Sunnyvale, near the Stanford campus where she had gotten a secretarial job. She told him Linda had a good job with the Santa Clara school district. All was right with their worlds, while Dennis was unsettled in his.

Thinking he’d scan the want-ads, Dennis picked up the morning paper that Marlene had left on the kitchen table before leaving for work. And he was struck by an image on the front page. It was an aerial photograph accompanying an article about the massive Moratorium rally in Boston Commons. He almost felt sick to his stomach that he hadn’t been there.

He determined that moment to figure out what exactly he believed. He needed to know why he felt so certain that the war in Vietnam was wrong, and began writing in the margins and white spaces of the October 16, 1969 edition of the San Jose Mercury-News, drafting his personal political philosophy.

The east-west, capitalism-communism dichotomy seemed to him like a ruse, seeing each to be artificial sides to the same coin, mere people-organizing schemes. Dennis thought of them as elaborate fictions and rituals dreamt up, propagated, and inculcated for the sole purpose of imposing order.

It looked to him that the world had been portioned out to a few groups of bosses, who would enforce fealty to artificial rules of management that would be attractive only to the sort of people he regarded as assholes. This wasn’t the sort of analysis that would survive any degree of scrutiny for its review of history, religion, economics, or psychology, he knew that – but within a couple hours of scribbling and staring into space, Dennis Lang felt a sense of relief, he had a feeling that issues had been settled.

The setting would implant on his memory – the clean, spare kitchen of sparsely furnished apartment, in a two-story building set along a stretch of road amid a scattering of buildings that weren’t much older than he was. Compared to where he grew up, the neighborhood felt like an alien place.

He made a mental note to share the experience with Martin, along with the news that now he knew who he was – his rumination over the article in the morning paper, and all the unconscious work his mind had done since he’d entered college, produced an ungainly epithet, but one that he was happy to claim as his own: he thought of himself as an “anti-nationalistic pacifist.”

The pacifism had intellectual, rather than physical, or even spiritual roots. It derived from the William James essay, The Moral Equivalent of War, which he had read freshman year, and which decided for him the utter scam that “the man” had been getting away with. The real crime was the boundless propaganda and terror campaigns waged in the intervals between the actual, limited shooting wars.

There was some defect in the part of Dennis’ mind where dogma was able to assert itself and ensure that truisms had pride of place. It was like having a mischievous alter ego assert itself and speak in platitudes and absolute proclamations. In the matter of war, he decreed that the real war is the fraught interval of preparation for shooting wars. Warriors get glory and the colorful burials; civilians withstand unremitting anxiety and food rationing.

He hadn’t thought about that essay in the two years since, but now it seemed as if he’d been unconsciously collecting evidence in support of it.

The anti-nationalist part was because everything he recognized about national politics felt like an immense advertising campaign. Stories and movies like “The Longest Day” and “Von Ryan’s Express” were romances of propaganda. Even the Boy Scouts was probably cooked up to get boys eager to upgrade uniforms and camping gear and cultivate an appetite for merit badges and the hierarchy of rank.

And flags, they were the worst of all. As far as Dennis could see, nationalism was so odious that people value cloth American flags over flesh and bone Americans. Another awkward phrase echoed in his mind: fealty to flags can get you killed.

Whatever it was that brought about the Revolutionary War, and led to the birth of the United States, sure as hell wasn’t reverence for the American flag. You didn’t have to be a history major to see that. The more he thought about it, the more Dennis realized how ubiquitous flags are. He saw American flag decals on the hard hats at the construction site he passed that morning; anti-hippie construction workers were easy to easy for noxious Nixon to recruit into the Hard Hat army he sicced on dissenting students and others who abhor war.

That was a Thursday and by Sunday, Dennis was back in Boston, having flown standby for ninety nine bucks. It had been a mere two months since everybody’s end-of-summer plans fell apart; it only took two days for Dennis to see that he was still on his own.

It wasn’t that he was unwelcome, but by then everybody was deeply involved in his own thing – junior year is when college gets focused and serious. Martin was even taking an extra class, anticipating having to get caught up once he got beyond the ramifications of getting busted.

Late October was not a good time of year to be looking for work, much less an apartment, in Boston. After a week on the couch in his old apartment, Dennis headed home to Oswego, where he found a lousy job in a warehouse and then split right after Christmas, preferring to get through this interval in his life under sunny skies rather that waist-deep in Lake Ontario snow.

He had gotten a copy of Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago for Christmas and read it by New Years. Soon after, he decided to hitchhike to Miami, which Mailer had depicted in nearly Biblical terms.

It took about six hours to get from Oswego to a spot on Rt. 81 near Binghamton, this time his cardboard sign reading, Miami, when a guy pulled over and said “hop in, this is your lucky day.” He was en route to his his mother’s house in Miami Beach! Lucky day indeed, but as always, there’s a downside.

The driver had some weird obsession, manifest by the fact that there was a single tape for the 28 hour trip – 2001 A Space Odyssey, and besides pit stops for gas, burgers, and the bathroom, they stopped only once, for two hours, to watch planes take off and land at Dulles Airport.

Within weeks, Dennis had a renewed appreciation for Mailer’s gifts as a creative writer, because, while crashing in a twenty dollar a week room in a downtown flophouse, he found Miami to be a hot muggy shithole of a place. He had an epiphany one day, after riding a bus to the end of the line, then walking another twenty blocks to a blood bank where he’d make five dollars for a pint of blood.

Or maybe it was an hallucination, induced through the alchemy of tropical heat and fumes from the exhaust fan of the Cuban restaurant next door?

Epiphany, hallucination – maybe a combination of the two? Bottom line, he vowed then and there to go back to school, soon as possible. On the bus back into town, he recognized the chasm between the feeling of satisfaction that followed his philosophical fulminations five months earlier in California and the palpable despair generated by the current caper in the Sunshine State.

Three more weeks of day labor got him the bank roll he’d need to get home, determined to buckle down and get back in sync with the Class of 1967.

Little more than a year had elapsed since Martin Farley’s first visit to his friend Dennis Lang’s home in Oswego, but that was enough for their stations in life to be totally reordered. In May, 1968, Dennis was a recent, involuntary college drop-out, with the draft looming on the near horizon. Martin was a solid B+ student, four semesters away from a degree in mechanical engineering.

Now, in the last week of August 1970, having flunked the draft physical, Dennis was finishing up summer session at Oswego State, where he’d matriculate full-time the next month.

Martin also had become an involuntary drop-out, but instead of withdrawing to avoid being flunked-out, as Dennis had, he withdrew in order to serve a two year enlistment in the army, at the invitation of the Hampden County D.A., who otherwise would send him to prison for possession of pot.

Dennis wasn’t surprised by Martin’s phone call, but he didn’t expect that it would result in a visit the next day.

“It’s complicated, man, I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow, if that’s OK?”

“Sure thing Martin, you’re welcome anytime.”

Martin arrived late Thursday afternoon. Dennis and his sister Bridget had the house to themselves, Mrs. Lang was at her sister’s cottage in Canada.

After dinner, they walked to a bar downtown alongside the river, a shot and a beer joint where Dennis and his pals had been getting served since they were 16 or 17 – ahead of New York’s already early minimum of 18 years. A glass of Genesee on tap cost a quarter, a shot of Four Roses cost thirty five cents. A sign in the window read “Tables for Ladies,” but none had ever been seen there.

“Martin, what happened, man, I thought you were ready to go?”

“Nothing really happened, Dennis, but I started to get afraid of myself – that I might like to hurt people.”

“What – did they brainwash you?”

“No, it’s not about the enemy – the Viet Cong, or anything like that. It’s hard to explain. Instead of being afraid of getting shot and killed, like everybody else, I started to be afraid of becoming a killer – with or without an enemy.”

Martin went on to explain, or at least try to explain his sense that something in him snapped at Fort Dix. It started the second week of basic, during pugil stick exercises. He and his opponent were sort of locked in a shoving match when Martin suddenly threw down his pugil stick and punched the guy in the head, knocking him out.

He got punished for it, but afterwards everybody called him killer. Martin was no longer another anonymous grunt, and that disquieted him.

He began to wonder if he was missing some safety switch, some mental checklist that a normal person would have to go through before pulling the trigger, or knocking someone out.

“I almost got busted during hand-to-hand training – I went nuts on some guy and put him in the infirmary.”

“You did what?”

“I don’t know how it happened. I haven’t been in a fight since Boy Scouts. But I just went off on this guy – actually a guy I liked, kind of hung out with, shooting hoops and stuff – and he smokes Camels!”

“No shit – I always knew you were a little on the edge, Marty, but I had no idea you were wound that tight. So, what are you thinking about now, what can I do for you?”

“I don’t know, Dennis – maybe I just need to talk, consider my options.”

“OK?”

“Didn’t you tell me something once about the draft and your cousins in Canada?”

“Oh yeah, my cousin in Canada works for some group that helps guys avoid the draft.”

to be continued