Dark Side of the 60's Moon - Mike Marino (best novels to read in english .txt) 📗

and yes, this journalism student would venture to and spend the day, sharing the sunshine discussing music, the war,  Civil Rights, politics, and the draft while the sweet smell of marijuana would fill the air as pamphleteers would pass out mini manifesto’s produced on beat up Gestentner machines. They were from various groups from the SDS of which I was a member to that weeks copy of The Guardian, a radical leftist independent weekly newspaper published  in the city. They were  attacked by the hardhat generation for having Communist sympathies or worse.

At the time I was also writing about the music scene and the musicians who would perform in the clubs for the Bleecker Street Free Press. It didn’t pay much, but for Myrika and myself it helped pay for the apartment, (mice and cockroaches were free), our bags of Basmati rice (We could stretch rice meals from the artist lofts of  NYC to the slums of Delhi on the Yamuna River). Rice with vegetables, rice with cheap grade hamburger, and of course rice with more rice, to go along with a cheap bottle of Night Train or Boone’s Farm wine to go with the seeds and stems in our bag of marijuana.

It was a great scene for two young radicalized lovers. The Sixties were  a plain brown bag holding a cheap bottle of wine that spilled out onto the streets of the south as the Civil Rights movement went on the march and opposition to the war in Vietnam was exploding  there was no turning back...the point of no return had been crossed. In Greenwich Village in hard concrete gray New York, folkies were sounding the alarm through thought provoking lyrics set against an acoustic background soon amplified.


Folk music was not about flowers and clouds anymore..now they were laced with doses of lyrical protest. The Eve of Destruction dawned across the land, you know, the land that is my land, your land, made for you and me.. Folk music blended with poetry in the coffeehouse circuit of the East Village in New York to North Beach in San Francisco.

Folk music was now making statements with music and lyrics. Tame at first in the Fifties, by the Sixties, the merely pleasing vocal harmonies of folk groups were changing, The bards and the poets of peace, love and understanding were on the march for civil rights in the south, against American involvement in Vietnam, wanting to ban the bomb and nix the nukes. Women’s Liberation was in full bloom and bras were burned joining the raging bonfire of draft cards and American flags.

Myrika was frightened I would end up in Vietnam. I was scared shitless. We didn’t want to lose each other.  So that night we made a fateful decision...if we had to we would head as far as we could from Detroit’s induction center at old Ft. Wayne and New York where they would be sure to find me eventually. We had an old VW car that was given to us by a friend and musician who was drafted and answered the call. Hopefully it would take us out of the vortex where my options were to wear the green and pick up a gun and join the fun in Vietnam; go to prison or get our asses north to war resister friendly Canada, or even out west to get lost in San Francisco’s post Beat solar system.  

I wrote to Joey and told him our plans weren’t set in stone as fixed as the sword of Arthur’s Excalibur nor was I Merlin. I could however, make myself disappear. That night Myrika and I  sat down,  and over our bowls of rice and a bowl of hashish, set about planning our grand getaway….beat up VW, writing journals, Myrika’s two guitars, and enough internal  fear to fuel our journey to hell and back...or at least to San Francisco or Toronto! Chapter 2 - Motor City Mayhem

 

The Motor City Mayhem

Joey and I grew up fast & hard on Detroit’s eastside. We were all  just 11-years-old and the last thing on our  minds was the nightmare of a blood soaked Vietnam that lurked camouflaged in the booby trapped bushes of our future, The Motor City. A blue-collar landfill of socialism and sludge. Home to alien beings in time warp coveralls from the Planet Heavy Metal entered the auto plants, like so many inanimate and lobotomized rag dolls with their heads torn off. Eye sockets, just holes to let in the light and let out the dark. The mondo monotony of the assembly line . . . parts of product, gleaming, laid out in perfect symmetrical rhythm, like long white lines of cocaine.

 

The U.A.W. and Teamsters—Maestros of the Masses and Minions—conducted a surreal symphony of industrial-strength dung as the blue collar-ballet and dance of the drones played to a riveted audience of riveters and riveteers.
The Detroit River, which ran the length of the city, was a melange of "lakers," frighteningly huge freighters that were home to cargo-ladened holds. The lakers kept the life of commerce flowing and breathing freely from steel mill to manufacturing plant, bows slicing through the waters with the ease of a welder's torch in the hands of an artisan cutting through metal. Duluth to Cleveland, and back again, back and forth, to and fro, heave and ho!

 

The Emerald City of the Working Class also had a veneer of pollution, haze, dust and rust: a statically charged steely forest, thick with belching smokestacks, red hot extruded steel and sunset orange iron . . . The collars of the card-carrying blue, proud of the red, white and blue  emptied their black lunch boxes of five-hour-old sandwiches, hard cheese, tomatoes and proscuitto . . . grabbed a quick drink from a silver thermos and waited.

The hardhats of hard hearted Detroit, the unfeeling town without blue collar pity, purity or piety, were only interested in paychecks and parity, not parody, or even supremacy for that matter . . . in space, or anywhere else. The plebian philosophers who later espoused the love it or leave middle finger answer to dissent hadn't risen to the surface yet, like so much bubbling and dangerous volcanic gas.Who cared about one more pin the tail on the donkey commie red star on the Asian map?

The neighborhood of Mack Avenue was another small piece of the ethnic jigsaw puzzle of Detroit: dark, secretive Italians; big, hunkering Poles; oom-pah-pah Germans and enough drunken Irish to fill the ethnic cup to overflowing. "Give us your tired, your hungry and your poor. Your beat, your downtrodden, your drunks and your whores. Give us all you got. Why not?"

Mack Avenue ran the racial gauntlet from the inner core to the outer limits. All the way, eastward through the cacophony of the city's ethnicity. Neighborhoods. Corner BBQ's, soot, smoke and pork, beer and betting parlors, rhythm and blues, old Negro buses cranking along the tired old concrete of Gratiot Ave, Mack and Chene. Blue collars, black skin, white skin, brown skin.

 

The Melting Pot of the Kingdom of Detroit, but when Mack Avenue hit the Mediterranean flashpoint of Three Mile Drive, it was our  world.

An Eye-talian neighborhood to be sure. Fresh baked sweetbreads, fat plates of piled-high pasta and meats, blood-red and delicioso. It had enough bad ass badda-bing and badda-boom to ignite megatons of politically incorrect dynamite. A neighborhood full of vowel-ending names . . . Scalisi, Marino, Vitti, Russo, Cusamano and Bommarito. A raucous, vociferous hand waving Roman Catholic city-state of kids, families, hustlers and wise guys. The perfect backdrop to grow up in and hold onto for the rest of your life.
It had it all, especially the alleys, those damned alleys that were the perfect venue of play for urban kids to knock around and kick the can, or let loose at stickball.

 

We all liked Tommy, the lone Polish kid on the block, who was also one of my best friends. Alongside him was  the neighborhoods wild child, a strange but kid, Jimmy Russo, Joey’s brother  nicknamed Joey the Torch. Joey earned his nickname because of his morbid fascination for packs of matches, the flames they produced and the acrid smell of sulphur.

 

The Russo  brothers, who took great pleasure in holding spitting contests, generally on other people, and they engaged in other similar competitions that usually involved bodily noises and functions. The future held no hope of a Nobel Prize for either one, let alone a highschool diploma.

Jimmy  was destined for a long prison sentence later in life in a Michigan prison for trying to extort money from a downriver Hungarian bar owner, part gypsy, named Ziggy. When he refused to pay up, and started to reach under the bar for his bat, Jimmy  grabbed it from the poor unfortunate Ziggy beat him near to death with it, leaving him crippled and partially paralyzed for life. Ziggy recovered somewhat and testified against him, happy with their incarceration, although his own world would now be a prison of ongoing heart attacks and strokes inside the solitary confinement of a cellblock of paralysis.  Newspaper accounts finished the final chapter of Jimmy’s story in 1970.  He shot a cop cold blooded bang, dead, drop in Akron, Ohio. No reason nor rhyme ever given. Jimmy  wounded by another officer, was rushed waa-waa sirens to the hospital, got patched up, glucose life support, pain pills, lot's of 'em, Darvons and morphine, then stood stoic, as a remorseless hospital junkie at trial. He exited life and was executed in 1985.

We would all play war with toy guns and water balloon grenades, but In child war, there is only victory or defeat for one side or the other. No death camps, no Auschwitz, no atrocities and no real dead to lie there bleeding that have to be mended on the battlefield before being sent home, in pieces, to live out life lifelessly in a wheelchair as a reward for service—with a Purple Heart bedpan medal at the VA Hospital.

At the end of child-battle, the two sides would simply break rank and roles and retreat, armed not with bullets and grenades, but nickels clenched in tiny fists as they raced to the soda fountain for double dips. Vanilla Cokes. Cherry Cokes. Boston Coolers. Vernors and Faygo. It was a sweet toothed unconditional surrender!

Real war was  deep in the steamy, mosquito repellant, boot and flesh rotting jungles of Vietnam. Korea was at a standstill at the no-mans kill zone. Up North it was Pyongyang Poon-tang while down south the Broadway boys were belting out their rendition of "I'm a Seoul Man". Soon the strange sounding towns would shift from Korea to Vietnam...Hanoi...Da Nang...Saigon...Long Wang...Suc Muc Dik.

The year that Vietnam had pulled a rabbit from it's hat and had produced the first unofficial American casualties. Two dead, one wounded, officially. Officially, these were unofficial deaths, of course, off the record, but, real blood nonetheless, and real silence, and of course, real dead, officially unofficial...of course.

 

Joey was now deep in the shit in Vietnam and was not exactly the Draft Boards Poster Child for Patriot of year. Myrika and I contacted Olivia who was Joey’s off and on girl since high