Category Archives: Culture

Getting a living and throwing stones over a wall

CULTURE.THROWING STONES IILet us consider the way in which we spend our lives

by Stacey Warde

If getting a living, said Henry David Thoreau, makes you miserable, that’s not living.

Yet, some 160 years after Thoreau’s essay, “Life without principle,” Americans suffer more than ever from “not living,” despite the promise of American dreams about prosperity, getting ahead and building a life of one’s own.

We live in a culture obsessed with work, industry and busyness, making money and getting rich, hurling contempt at idlers and slackers, those who wish to spend their lives, as Thoreau might have, passing their days in the woods, gazing into the depths of a pond, reflecting on the passage of time and eternity, marking the change of seasons, writing poetry, actually living.

Thoreau says there’s more to life than working our fingers to the bone, breaking our backs, and spending our short lives by the sweat of our brows merely to earn a buck. Yet, almost everyone I know does just that, working, working, working, as if that’s all there is to life, as if that’s all that matters in a world that does just fine without our frantic labors for money.

He opens his argument by suggesting that we “consider the way in which we spend our lives.” Will we lower ourselves by seeking merely to get a living, or to go deeper into our being by devoting ourselves to “certain labors which yield more real profit, though but little money”?

He then launches into a lament: The United States is little more than an infinite bustle of business, with no rest in sight, and it is “nothing but work, work, work.”

“I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business,” he adds.

Little has changed since Thoreau’s time when states kept slaves, justified in the name of commerce and industry.

In fact, it could be argued that, while not slaves, millions of Americans suffer from a different kind of servitude, and are worse off today than when Thoreau lobbied for a life whose value is measured by depth and character rather than by the machinations and manipulations of getting rich. Opportunities for workers have decreased, and workers themselves devalued and used as tools and pawns.

Labor, the nitty gritty workforce, has never been held in high esteem in the U.S., with the exception perhaps when working men and women organized and fought for their share of the commonwealth. Slavery takes many forms and the U.S. has mastered the art of it, where men and women are esteemed less for their humanity and more for their worth as slaves in the marketplace.

We still see it in the form of lower wages, reduced benefits, enormous wealth inequalities, lack of opportunities and work that is little more than throwing stones over a wall.

“Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to them in throwing stones over a wall and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages,” Thoreau wrote. “But many are no more worthily employed now.”

Isn’t that still the truth for millions of Americans today? Perhaps even more so as jobs that once provided a decent living continue to vanish and more laborers find themselves working not just one job, but often two or three jobs, and still they are unable to make ends meet.

Wealth inequality will only make things worse, fostering more of the wage slave economy emerging in the U.S. today.

Little in our culture promotes the value of activities that don’t make us rich or financially independent. We don’t get paid to dawdle, meditate, ride a bicycle, take a walk through the woods, pass an entire day at the edge of a pond, bake a pie, or write poetry, for example, but these at least make life rich in a way that money can’t.

If I show an interest in writing poetry while neglecting an opportunity to earn a few bucks digging trenches, Thoreau offers, I will be considered an idler, a no-good lazy bum, which is something my dad used to say about those who seemed to be doing nothing constructive with their time, such as getting ahead, making money—the end-all and be-all of enterprise in the U.S., where utility and industry reign supreme over all other endeavors.

A person’s value is measured only in what he might earn for his labors, or more importantly what he might earn for those who employ him for his services. But if that is all, he is diminished, less than a man and merely a tool for those who stand most to gain from his efforts.

“If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself,” said Thoreau, who argues that the true idler is the one who merely earns money.

“The aim of the laborer,” Thoreau opined, “should be, not to get his living, to get ‘a good job,’ but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.”

Always, whether we like it or not, as Thoreau suggests, there remains the question of gains obtained beyond the pecuniary. What do we get for our labors beyond the security of a paycheck? Increased purchasing power? A home, or a place to call our own? Two weeks paid vacation? A defense against poverty? What life beyond the money we take home? And if our paychecks offer no security at all, what then?

And, living in the U.S., how can one “spend” a life without money?

My parents taught me that if you worked hard, made the right choices and did as you were told, you could earn a good living, and not only that, but create a lifestyle that suits you, makes you feel as if you’ve done something worthwhile with your life. Thoreau called it, “getting a living,” whereby through “honest, manly toil,” which makes our “bread taste sweet and keeps society sweet,” we perform “the needful but irksome drudgery” of our labors.

Thoreau didn’t begrudge work but kept it in the perspective of what in life was most important to him, to live well and to live independently, with a higher purpose than merely getting a paycheck.

If you worked honestly, gave your best effort, and stayed out of trouble, you’d get ahead in life, my parents would say, and maybe own your own home one day, keep a few toys in the driveway or garage, build a pool in the backyard, and there’d be money in the bank, as if these were the only measure of doing well and living well.

Mostly, that’s true, I guess, when opportunities and options for choosing well are available, but I’ve done all those things and I’m earning less, not more, than the previous generation that believed in getting ahead, even for blue collar workers who, for a time, could count on building something to call their own, and actually got, a living.

These days the prospects for getting a living, for better and more engaging employment, don’t look promising. The American economy isn’t anything close to what it was when I was growing up. The industries that helped build a thriving middle class—aerospace, steel and autos, for example—have all but disappeared. In their place, we’ve created service jobs in big box retail outlets, fast food chains and tourism that pay half to a third of what my parents earned during their productive years.

There’s less focus on getting ahead and more on simply getting by. It’s hard to give ourselves over to the nurture of our hearts and minds, as Thoreau would have advised, when our time is taken up with mere survival.

And now, I’ve reached the age of early retirement, the period of life when Americans allow themselves the rare luxury of “idle” amusements such as traveling across country, going fishing and cobbling together a few hobbies to stay active and interested. But for many, like myself, that option sank into the abyss of greed where, to increase their profits and pad their accounts with more luxuries, the captains of industry shipped American jobs overseas, reducing opportunities for the millions of hardworking Americans who made this country what it is.

Instead, aging boomers like myself face the very real prospect of working until the day we die, earning a pittance for our labors, valued only as a means, much the way slaves were, for the wealthy to increase their obscene wealth, with little or nothing left over to show for our efforts but poverty and oppression.

Back in the day, if you didn’t like what you were doing, you’d just go get another job, find something more suitable to your skillset and experience.

That possibility seems to have vanished. There are no jobs, none with the security and perks of my parents’ generation. Today we work two or three jobs, go to night school to improve ourselves, and…for what? Less and less of the pie that gets swallowed up by the filthy rich, who have put little of what they earn back into the system, hoarding their wealth and mocking or blaming the poor for being lazy and unproductive.

Life for millions of Americans is less an adventure in gains and opportunity and more like indentured servitude, laboring incessantly, never having quite enough, unable to relax and celebrate life and doing what they do “for love of it,” as Thoreau suggested.

The physical exhaustion that accompanies constant labor without reward or respite would be enough to trouble anyone’s mind but tack on the mental and emotional frustration of lack, of working so hard for so little, and you have a recipe for personal and social breakdown and disaster, collapse, total dismay, discouragement, a disheartening sense of failure and doom, and perhaps, eventually, revolt.

Early on, I developed the notion, like Thoreau, that there’s more to life than being a wage slave, that there’s a place for poetry and philosophy, which may not feed the body but more importantly give sustenance to one’s deeper passions, to that thing called “soul.”

It’s much easier to navigate this American life when there are options; without these options, life becomes a prison, where at a minimum, I suppose, we might more passionately consider the ways in which we spend our lives. §

Stacey Warde works as a farmhand and is publisher of The Rogue Voice.com.

TRYING TO GET LAID IN AMERICA, Part I

Images by Stacey Warde

‘I want to be out front in informing you, you have absolutely nothing to offer me in any way—not as good company, not as a future companion, and least of all as somebody I’d fuck.’

CLUELESS IN LONG BEACH

by Dell Franklin

1967 September

The sexual revolution was going full bore in America, free love rampaging everywhere as pipsqueaks with pipe-stem arms and droopy mustaches stuck their wieners in pretty suburban girls with hair under their arms. I couldn’t get laid and my only comfort was that my roomie, Marshak, a best friend since high school who was going for his master’s in microbiology at Long Beach State after a three-year Army hitch in Patton’s old outfit in Germany, couldn’t either. I, too, had completed my three-year Army hitch and worked for my dad in Compton, driving my ’54 Chevy wagon to that hellhole five mornings a week, stocking, waiting on trade, writing orders, making deliveries. We lived upstairs in a shabby two-storey apartment complex on the corner of Magnolia and Pacific Coast Highway, our window facing the highway and a no-frills wooden shack of a beer bar directly below called The Hull—an establishment of rarified debauchery.

Marshak, a Polack from Pittsburg, felt we wouldn’t get laid until we partook in LSD or weed sharing, both of which we were against, being rare liberals from day one who despised hippies and their movement as protesting dilettantes certain to someday drive luxury cars and live behind the same white picket fences their parents built as they reveled in the luxurious trappings of the American Dream they now scorned.

Marshack and I were both robust ex-athletes with good bodies and couldn’t be considered ugly, though we were starting to wonder, and planned a strategy of both of us hitting on one or two women with the possibility one of us would prove so loathsome and odious the other seemed acceptable and even palatable enough to secure a sincere phone number or a date and possibly get laid on the spot. But the fact was, as a team, we fed off each other’s negativity and ineptitude and so depressed or angered the wenches that they fled like a plague and left us stewing in the Hull, where the primarily older, scabrous clientele consisted of women who told the old fogies they were nothing but worthless drunken child two-timing wastrels and motherfuckers, while the fogies called these harridans whores, bitches, ball-busting witches and worthless cocksuckers.

It went back and forth, Marshak and I discussing Hemingway and Steinbeck and Kerouac or the LA Rams when we weren’t nodding to this crowd, the lot of whom envied our bachelorhood and counseled us on the treachery of womankind, as if we needed it. At this time I was stripped of all romantic inclinations and cared only in getting laid. I’d been out of the Army since February of ’67 and was still on a drought and fighting the urge to head south to Mexico for a hooker, a bottomlessly dismal proposition. A typical weekend evening involved either Marshak or me strolling around at two in the morning, one of us up and waiting with beer in hand, relieved he was not alone in another humiliating rejection.

“Where’d you go?”

“Down on Ocean? You?”

“Hit some clubs and bars clear over in Lakewood. I’m ranging farther and farther. I was thinking of Newport Beach. The O.C. has some prime stuff.”

“Yeh, but yah risk a drunk driving if you stray that far.”

“Well, there’s no use dealing with ‘em if you’re not loaded.”

***

There came a point, around Christmas, when I felt the desperate loneliness of a neglected woman of less than mediocre appearance might take mercy on me, but my downfall began with a gal around 35 in a club with a band and a female singer belting out a jazzy score. Marshak watched me approach her as she sat alone at a table a few rows down. I was just drunk enough to be brave and perhaps entertaining. I hovered over her, a lanky woman with short hair and sharp features that were not quite offensive. She peered up at me, her fingers around a martini glass. She wore baggy slacks and a sleeveless sweater and large dangling earrings.

“Can I buy you a drink?” I ventured.

“I’m fine.”

“Can I sit down?”

She appraised me up and down in my too machine dried chinos, ancient polo shirt and Army low-quarters. I suppose I needed a haircut. She sighed. “All right.” She wasn’t exactly excited as she lit up a menthol cigarette. I sat down.

“So…I’m Dell.”

She shook my clammy hand like a man. “I’m Florence.”

“I have an aunt named Florence. We call her Fluddy.”

“Oh how nice.” She seemed to smirk.

“Her kids are my cousins, perfect little gentlemen going into dad’s business, married, hatching beasties.”

“And you don’t approve?”

I shrugged as the cocktail waitress took my order—VO rocks—and hers—a martini—and said, “I’m on a different path.”

“And what path is that?”

I told her of my plan to thumb around the country and work at odd jobs after an Army hitch, told her I wanted to ‘walk around the world eating an orange.’ When she asked me what I did, I told her, and asked her what she did, and she told me she was an executive secretary. I asked her what the difference was between a regular secretary and an executive secretary and she leered at me like a lizard and said, “I’m in charge of everybody and everything.”

Somehow, when the drinks came and I paid, I told her of my desire to write. She wanted to know if I’d been in Vietnam. When I told her no, she said, “You’re trying SO hard to be interesting, so you can impress me, so you can get in my pants. You want to be different, but you’re trying too hard on that front, too. I want to be out front in informing you, you have absolutely nothing to offer me in any way—not as good company, not as a future companion, and least of all as somebody I’d fuck. You are so wrapped up in your pathetic little ego, and you’re really not going to be any good for any woman until you come to terms with that. So please go away, little boy, and thank you for the drink.”

I felt like belting her, but that was not in my arsenal. I was too shattered and stricken to rejoinder and skulked back to sit beside Marshak, who seemed to be gloating.

“How’d it go, lover-boy?”

“That rotten hard-hearted bitch stripped me bare, Marshak. She went for my balls.”

“Looks like she got ‘em.”

***

We decided to stay out of what were considered “pick-up mills” and “hot clubs” and frequent a slew of low-life dives around the corner on notorious Anaheim Street, the armpit of Long Beach. We trekked over there together, so as not to get pummeled by territorial bar thugs; and in hope of scrounging up shop-worn women so sleazy and neglected and blindly alcoholic they might fuck one of us while in the throes of a blackout stage.

We tried talking to these women. Marshak even lit their cigarettes with his Zippo. But they were attached to and preferred their middle-aged counter-parts, who, in tandem with the termagents, tongue-lashed us with bitter scorn, accused us of being nothings and lower than the lowest form of life, and threatened us while teetering in place. We gave up after a month of hitting at least 15 bars—and scaring up nary a nibble.

On Christmas Eve we struck out in the friendliest lounge in Lakewood, garnering only free drinks from an older couple who felt sorry for us. On New Year’s Eve it was worse, and as we drunkenly weaved along PCH toward the Hull around midnight, a svelte Japanese lady in a skin-tight dress and a buxom blond grabbed us and pulled us into a hot sweaty well-lit room of about fifty people listening to and hooting and wailing as a big blond German man around 40 ranted and raved on a stage. The throng immediately embraced us as potential converts, as it took us only a matter of seconds to realize he was a Jehovah’s Witness and these women took one peep at us and felt we needed Jesus more than we needed a piece of ass, and that the best way to get us to buy into Jesus was luring us in with the promise of a piece of ass.

They soon abandoned us and as we started to leave, the big German turned on us, called us “fish-eyed sinners and weaklings who would never find happiness OR a woman until we found Jesus!” The fucker was huge and turned red-faced and came unglued as he continued to berate us, waving his arms, nearly coming off the stage, and we scurried a few blocks to the Hull, where we found solace in our beers and the company of fellow losers who understood our abysmal plight and were happy to have us among them.

***

One Friday night I came home at 2 and Marshak was not there. I cracked open a beer and waited, and waited. Goddamn, the motherfucker finally got laid and one-upped me, the prick! I went to bed feeling I was the last man in America to get laid. How much more of this could I take? In the morning, as I nursed my coffee and the LA Times, Marshak shambled in. He tried not to gloat, but he was pretty smug.

“Well…?” I said anxiously as he took his sweet time getting coffee and lighting up a non-filtered Pall Mall.

“I was sitting in that moldy diner, down the highway, near Norm’s, around two thirty, just eating a damn donut, and this black hooker is at the other end, in a booth, staring at me. She’s fine. I watched her walk in, and she had an ass to die for, and pretty, but hard. She kept staring at me, and she smiled. Well, I didn’t have any money, so I just sat there, and she comes over, stands there, and she says, ‘White boy, you look like the loneliest, horniest honky motherfucker in America.’ Well, I told her I was. She said she’d fuck my brains out, all night, for twenty bucks. I told her I only had five, which was the truth. And she said, okay, you can pay me later, and she said she was sick of doing Johns and wanted to have a really great fuck with a guy who needed it and didn’t seem like a degenerate criminal or pervert. She said she looked at me and knew I was educated and intelligent and civilized. And she took me to her room, and it was a pretty nice room down the road, and man, she fucked me all goddamn night! She was clean and beautiful and the best fuck I’ve ever had. She sucked my dick and I ate her pussy and got off four times! Can you believe it? An angel of mercy. I’m changed, man, re-charged. As of this minute, I’m a new man!”

CULTURE.GETTING LAID IINow I HAD to get laid! That night I ranged far and wide, driving my croaking old wagon, sizing up bars, going in, sizing up the wenches, knowing immediately there was no chance, especially in busy bars in a trendy area—Belmont Shores—where the hippies mingled with the affluent. I knew now the odds of any of these places serving up a woman for me were about one percent. I finally ended up in a shabby bowling alley in Torrance. It had a small bar with a crowd similar to the Hull’s. A woman who was frowzy, around 45, with headband, and coal-black hair and a pocked complexion, was excoriating a white dude with a bulbous red nose. She could chew ass. She seemed as embattled and sad and bitter as any human I’d come in contact with yet. She finally drove off the red nose and I plunked down beside her. She reeked of alcohol. She sneered at me.

“Yah hate us Navahos, don’tcha, white trash loser, huh?”

“No,” I quickly said, and lit her cigarette with a bar match. “One of my best friends in the Army was an Indian named Dan Big Horse.”

“Big Horse, huh? He a Navaho?”

“Nah, he was Osage, from Oklahoma. We went on leave to Amsterdam together.” I didn’t tell her Big Horse, a dear friend, wanted to fight me or anybody after three beers, and was the toughest, most skilled fighter I’d ever known.

“Fuck Amsterdam!” the woman sneered.

I bought her a beer; we clinked bottles. She gazed at me, unfocused. “You wanna fuck me?” she said.

I nodded. “Yes I do.”

“Then let’s go, Mister Big Horse. We’ll see how big you are.”

She had a room in the seediest motel along PCH. We stripped. She had a decent body, except for her alcohol bloated stomach. She lay on her back and allowed me to paw and grovel. She began to thrash a bit as I rooted upon her, just drunk enough to not blow my wad too quickly, a preparation I always implemented when I went to hookers in the Army, so I’d last longer, always pissing them off and keeping them from making more money on other GIs. She began to berate me as she thrashed, calling me a stupid fucking asshole Osage piece of shit, urging me to finish, yelling at me to finish, but I kept right on ramming and pumping for all my life, until she literally bucked three times, scratched my back, screamed, and passed out.

I shot my stuff into a snoring mass of flesh, tried to get up and go to the shower, but passed out and woke up around dawn to the sounds of the lady puking in the john. With a head swollen like a melon dropped from a roof, I dressed; my body and clothes steeped in her sweat, booze and cheap perfume, and drove home in my heap. I was reading the Sunday paper and drinking coffee when Marshak, smudged with sleep, entered the kitchenette.

“Well…?” he said, sitting down, lighting up, pouring coffee.

“I got laid, Marshak.”

“How was it?”

“Fantastic!”

“Who was she?”

“Navaho woman—former tribal beauty queen, an angel of mercy.”

“Where’d you meet her?”

“A bowling alley in Torrance.”

“A bowling alley? Jesus Christ, what a desperate bastard.”

It was nearing April. I decided to leave my stop-gap job with dad and get the hell out of this miserable existence and spread my wings and head north, to Lake Tahoe, and secure a job in a casino behind the bar, where I’d have the inside track in picking up beautiful cocktail waitresses and female employees, whom I’d heard were the cream of the crop. §

Dell Franklin is the founding publisher of The Rogue Voice and writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif., where getting laid happens almost every day.

 

 

 

 

Life on the Mississippi, 1969

IMG_7414

The Delta Queen is a sister ship of the Delta King, which sits on the Sacramento River; both were shipped over here in parts from Scotland and reassembled. The Queen plies the Mississippi. Painting by Rose Franklin.

A RIVERBOAT JOURNAL

by Dell Franklin

February

The cheap whiskey and beer still in my gut after a week of nonstop partying during Mardi Gras, I stand on the quay just off the French Market in New Orleans gazing at the Delta Queen, majestic and freshly painted following two months in dry-dock repair. I am broke, having spent my last $100 on a fleabag hotel across from Lafayette Park and burgers from White Castle and shellfish in Martin’s bar in the French Quarter, where I ran into some Vietnam vet ex-Marines who still owned the 1,000-mile stare and informed me the Queen, last paddle-wheel passenger vessel to ply the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, was hiring.

On the bow of the Queen, a chalkboard is perched with chicken scratches: WANTED: DECK HANDS AND PORTERS. Several black deckhands in blue work shirts lounge or piddle with brooms and mops or chisel away rust on the bow and along railings. They pause to fix me with stares as I try and work up the courage to cross the gangway onto the bow, where a massive barrel of a man, perhaps 60, in black captain’s uniform and cap, his face broad and flat, narrows his already narrow squint on me.

It is mid-morning, breezy, clear, birds swooping and diving around the Jax Brewery like participants in an air war. At the French Market, above the seawall, a man in an apron drops bags of day-old pastries to hobos assembled below him near a deserted box car adjacent the murky sea of a river. A few days back I shared a pint of whiskey with these men but soon left when the whiskey was gone and it became evident they regarded me resentfully as not yet accomplished enough to share their company.

The deckhands pick up their pace from slow-motion to listless, still keeping an eye on me, possibly wondering where this white man came from—he wears his only remnant of a three-year Army hitch, a faded flimsy field jacket, baggy work pants, sneakers, a second-hand Army surplus backpack stuffed with a few changes of underwear, extra flannel shirt, two paperbacks, two pens, a pocket-size writing pad, and a second-hand sleeping bag attached to the pack.

Though broke, I do not fear starving and am exhilarated by my situation because I am free, trekking across the fractured and bleeding carcass of America with thumb out, unencumbered by wife, girlfriend, job, career, ambition. In a way, I feel a smug advantage over all those who possess these rewards, because there are no complications in my life, no burdens or pressures in a country addicted to striving, stress, security, and the stockpiling of what is to me junk.

From the start, I had no idea where I was going, still do not as the black deckhands slow down to a near standstill, keeping a closer eye on me as I try to work up my courage to face the formidable man whose narrow flinty eyes seem to take me in as an intruder. The deckhands are all glinting gold teeth and ropey arms with knots in the middle. One wears a watch cap. They begin to nod at each other and giggle and smirk as the big man folds his enormous arms across his chest and seems to challenge me with those eyes, which say, “Well, boy, you comin’ aboard, or you gonna stand there shittin’ your pants?” Like an old white cracker terrifying the slaves.

I take a deep breath and stride over the gangway as the big man unfolds his arms and stands planted on the bow like a 200-year-old oak. I stop directly before him and unstrap my pack as if I mean to stay.

“I see you need help,” I say. “I’m looking for work. Would you be the captain, sir?”

“Yessuh.” Gruff, guttural growl from deep within, the man seeming to spit the words at me likes he’s trying to dislodge tobacco from his tongue. “We need deckhands.”

“I’ll do that.”

The man refolds his arms across his chest, gazes briefly at the deckhands; then he scrutinizes me with a flicker of interest. He takes in everything, and I look him in the eye, almost grinning—like we’re in a movie. Then his voice suddenly booms at me. “What ah need is a gawdamn sto’keepah!”

Quickly I reply, “I’ll do that, too, captain.”

“What y’all know ‘bout sto’keepin’?” he challenges me.

“I’ve worked in warehouses as a stock boy and order writer, sir.”

“Where y’all work as a stock boy?” he demands to know.

“In Los Angeles, sir, that’s where I’m from.”

He takes in more of me, top to bottom. A sudden yellow-stained horsey grin rips across his meaty face. “Y’all har’d!” he announces and offers his enormous paw, and we shake. “Cap’n Ernest Wagnah.”

“Dell Franklin, sir.”

A spindly, bespectacled, old-time looking black man, whose been lurking in the background since I approached the captain, steps right up. He wears baggy check pants and a white smock and tall toque drooping ludicrously to his ear, lending him a buffoonish air; but then he smiles, and he is a handsome old guy, dark chocolate, not even five-and-a-half-feet tall, no more than 130 pounds, and in his incandescent puppy-friendly eyes is resolution, and when I look into those eyes I feel an instant rush of warmth and trust. I find myself exchanging smiles with the man, whose forearms could belong to a 200-pound blacksmith, his hands as big as those of the captain, who dwarfs him, and now addresses the old man.

“Chef Jawnah, look like we got us a sto’keepah. Say he run a warehouse.” He glances at me. “Chef Jawnah, he yore boss, son.”

His name tag says Henry Joyner. I offer my hand and the old man lunges at me and grips my hand with a vise-like manacle, veins bulging along those forearms. “Playshuh t’ shake yo’ hand,” he says in a slow, rich drawl, and a smile of false teeth blazes across his small oval face, those eyes shining with such genuine sincerity that I am disarmed. “Son, ah sho’ nuff hope y’all the man ah been lookin’ fo’. We gone troo a bunch-a sto’keepahs, and they drunk up mah cookin’ wines, an’ mah vanilla extrack…they sniffin’ up mah sterno, ‘bout druve Jawnah plum lowdown loco.”

Another black man, in uniform and cap, perhaps 35, tall, erect, with a neat mustache, ambles up. His name tag reads FRANKLIN MYLES, STEWARD.

“Franklin,” says the captain. “We got us a new sto’keepah name of Franklin.” He chortles at the coincidence.

The steward shakes my hand weakly, gazes past me. “Well, cap’n,” he says in a squeaky falsetto. “Ah sho nuff hope he work out better’n them jive turkeys been roonin’ the chef’s sto’rooms.”

The chef smiles at me in a manner indicating we’re already on amiable terms. “Franklin, ah ‘speck this young man be jes’ fine. Ah got a good feelin’ ‘bout him.” The trust in his eyes is fathomless. He nods. “He gwin be jes’ fine.”

I figure I got no choice not to be. Old Joyner, he’s hooked me like a trout.

+++

Myles, the steward, leads me through the Queen on a bit of a tour—a floating antique. An articulate man, he explains that the Queen is a sister ship of the Delta King, which sits on the Sacramento River; both were shipped over here in parts from Scotland and reassembled. The King passed through the Panama Canal. The stairway leading to the passenger dining room is composed of the finest woods, brass and chandeliers. He takes me below to the laundry room which is stacked with a mountain of linen and uniforms, and working atop it is a familiar looking person, a gangly fellow around my age with a hatchet face that seems to have been hastily reconstructed after severe damage. His dark hair sprouts straight up like a woodpecker’s mane. Where have I seen this character?

Then I remember—on Canal Street. The hood of a battered ’51 Ford coupe was up, and this guy was working on the engine. Later he was beneath the car, tinkering. Then the Ford was gone and I saw him wobbling drunkenly down Bourbon Street, Dixie beer in hand, clad in mismatching over-sized plaid attire, mere rags, grinning goofily. He now wears a blue work shirt and white checked kitchen pants.

Myles introduces him to me as Kachefski, Laundry Man. He issues me a tentative shake, looking sheepishly away, and he might be wall-eyed. He hands me linen, Army blanket, two blue short-sleeve work shirts. “That’s a nice jacket,” he says shyly. “You been in the Army?” When I nod, he says, “They wouldn’t take me. I got pins in my legs from a car wreck. Hit a tree going ninety miles an hour. Half the guys I went to school with are dead—from car crashes and Vietnam.”

“What happened to your ‘51 Ford?”

He’s surprised. “How’d you know about my Ford?”

“Saw you working on it on Canal.”

“Yeh, that was my all-time favorite jalopy. It really had guts. It’s dead now. They towed it away and I woke up in the back seat in the junk yard. I had to sell the jalopy and my tools to pay for towing, or they were gonna put me in jail for vagrancy. I had just enough money left to do some drinking, but I sure am glad I got this job. What’s your job?”

“Sto’keepah.” Myles is looking back and forth at us like, what we got HERE? These white folks! I do declare! “Where you from, Kachefski?”

“Hart, Michigan. Where you from?”

“L.A. Where the hell’s Hart, Michigan?”

“Near Lake Michigan, by the giant dunes, south of Luddington, north of Muskegon. We’re pretty small.”

Myles has me by the arm. “Come on, Mr. Sto’keepah, I show you where you gonna live.”

+++

Myles leads me to a warren of rooms below deck—cramped, four to a room, a faint whiff of musk reminiscent of barracks life. My quarters are at the end of the hallway directly under the bow, farthest from the shower area. There is a porthole and two Army-like cots, and the one away from the door is covered neatly with a colorful comforter. A simple wooden dresser is in a far corner, and atop it, lined up in perfect juxtaposition beside a toilet kit are brush, hair pick, baby powder, witch hazel, bicarbonate of soda, peroxide, tiny scissors. Above the dresser, tacked to the wall, is a small, gleaming mirror. No dust anywhere. Three rows of leather shoes, variously colored, stuffed with trees, polished to a high gloss, are arranged under the cot beside foot powder. Two flawlessly pressed white shirts and black waiter jackets rest on wooden hangers on pegs in the wall. Beside the cot is a single plastic milk crate on which stands an alarm clock, goose-neck reading lamp, and a book—“The Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison. Name tags on the waiter jackets read, JEROME DAVIS. I drop my bedding and shirts on the narrow mattress. A fresh fragrance and slight breeze from the porthole offsets the mustiness of the hallway.

The steward says, “Most-a these rooms are noisy, four to a room. Davis, he likes to be alone. He won’t like this. Most waiters are two to a room. Now Davis, he’s quiet, and he won’t stand for no jive. You seem like a mature young man. I think you’ll like Davis.” He flashes an uncertain and mischievous smile. “Once y’all get to know him.”

+++

Myles takes me down to the storeroom, which borders the crew dining room, where the chef awaits me, ants in his pants, raring to go. He opens the main storeroom—the size of a large bedroom and looking like a tornado swept through it. I stand outside the doorway while he confides how a steady stream of no-accounts wrecked the storeroom, the meat locker, bakery, cold storage, and produce room. He had to come down and scavenge through the mess for items to send up to the galley on the dumbwaiter in the crew dining room so they could cook.

“Day’uhl, it hard t’ find a good man nowadays. Young men, they ain’t hongry. When ah’z a young man wuzn’t nobody keep up with Jawnah, an’ ‘at’s why ah got har’d. These young folks, they don’t wanna work.”

Two men stand near the serving counter in the dining room and observe me. There are three long tables parallel to one another, a small card table off by itself, a smaller condiment table, all on a linoleum floor. One of the observers, slender, charcoal-colored and sleepy-looking, sporting a crushed, shapeless hat, slouches against a wall as if he has no spine, cigarette dangling from his lips, broom in hand. Behind the serving table, busying himself in a noisy huff, is a black man around 40 with a huge solid belly, broad shoulders, square head, and a short neck with a hump at the base. His face and nose are flat, nostrils like holes in a double-barrel shotgun, lips pursed in a severe pout, hooded eyes lifting to appraise me with unmasked suspicion and disapproval, as if I am a stray dog in HIS backyard. The chef introduces him to me as Jessie, the man in charge of the crew dining room. The other, low-key man is his assistant, Emmet. While Jessie continues scowling at me, Emmet nods, almost smirking, like he knows something I don’t know that will not turn out well.

“Ain’t nothin’ but no-accounts and thieves been in these sto’rooms, boy,” Jessie snaps at me in a nasal singsong. “I done stick-whupped ‘em til they bleedin’ half t’ death. Y’all don’t take good care mah chef, y’all git the same, boy.”

The chef sags. “Jess, ah got a good feelin’ ‘bout this young man.”

Jessie huffs while Emmet smiles to himself. The chef and I enter the storeroom. I shed my field jacket. There is hardly an item on the unmarked shelves. Boxes and sacks are strewn about, cans, large and small, in scattered heaps. It is hard to move through the mess. I hoist a case and hurl it out into the dining room, where a snooping Jessie jumps out of the way. He and the chef exchange glances. Emmet puts down his broom, pours himself a cup of coffee, sits down at one of the tables and turns on a small transistor radio to some scratchy blues and watches me heave more cases and sacks out into the dining room as the chef and Jessie back away. The chef says he has work in the galley and moves up the winding stairway to the galley like he’s in a race, arms pumping, cap flopping back and forth.

Sweating, I clear the floor, sweep and mop it, and ask Jessie for masking tape. He hands me some as Emmet rolls a cigarette and lights up. After taping and marking shelves I begin stacking cases and sacks against a wall, open certain cases and stack shelves, finding room for every small and gallon can in the room. The chef scampers in, skids to a halt, does a double-take, and grins. “Why, y’all one workin’ sonofagun.”

“I’ve put in a system, chef, simplified the inventory. I’ll need my own key.”

He nods quickly. “Ain’t nobody gwin have a key but y’all and me.” He peers around. “Ah’m so pleased, son. Y’all sho is the man ah been lookin’ fo.’”

Then he shows me my other storerooms down the hall from the dining room, near quarters for waiters, cooks and engineers. Jessie stands in the doorway of the main storeroom, hands on hips, peering in. The other rooms are in disarray. I vow to the chef I will have them ship-shape by evening. He smacks my arm, grins, scampers up the stairway. Jessie steps out of my way as I return to my storerooms. Suddenly, the captain tramps up, halts abruptly at the doorway, peers around.

“Look pretty good,” he concedes with a grunt.

Jessie says, “He done worked like no man, cap’n.”

The captain continues appraising; then walks to a corner where I’ve stacked empty boxes. “No room fo’ these,” he snaps. There is a half-door opening and he grabs a box and flings it through the opening into the Mississippi. He starts to grab another and I snatch it away from him as Jessie recoils in mock-horror.

“What the hell you think you doin’?” snaps the captain, flustered.

“I need those boxes, sir. They’re part of my new system.”

“Part-a yore system? Hell!”

“I use ‘em to send supplies up to the galley, and I need ‘em for inventory, ordering, stocking. Everything in this room has a purpose, sir, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t pitch my boxes into the river.”

Jessie backs away from the door. Emmet perks up as the captain’s face and neck flush. Uh oh. His squinty eyes flash. “This mah gawdamn ship!” he bellows. “Y’all been on this yere ship two hours and you tellin’ me how t’ run mah sto’rooms!”

“Cap’n, sir, I’m the storekeeper. These are MY storerooms. I gotta run things my way, or you’ll have to find more worthless no-accounts to make a mess like I found here, if that’s what you want.”

Jessie shakes his head at me and rolls his eyes. Emmet grins. The captain sputters. “This mah goddam ship! Ev-a thing on this ship mine! These sto’rooms, they mine…”

“Then why’d you hire me if YOU wanna run ‘em? I’m busy, sir, tryna get things ship-shape for the chef, and you’re in here interfering with my system.”

He looks around for help, but Jessie and Emmet turn away. “Now he kickin’ me out mah sto’rooms,” he growls at them. “Ah jes’ har’d the sumbitch…ah’m talkin’ to mah chef ‘bout this crazy sumbitch.”

He tromps out, huffing up the stairs. I gaze at Jessie and Emmet with my best imitation of the ghetto-glare. “Sometimes,” I tell them, “these white folks jes’ gotta be put in their proper place.” I turn and re-stack my empty boxes, then feel Jessie in the doorway.

“Mistah sto’keepah,” he oozes, very polite. “May ah puh-leeeeze have fo’ cans a sterno, so’s we-all can keep the chef’s vittles warm fo’ mah boys?”

I find four cans of sterno and hand them over.

“Thank Y’ALL, mistah sto’keepah.” He half bows and returns to his area behind the serving table, beaming a smile at me, as if he’s seen the light, while Emmet hums to his radio, nodding at me. I go back into my storerooms.

+++

A few minutes later the chef storms into my storeroom, eyes ablaze. “Ah done kick the cap’n out mah kitchen,” he announces. “Y’all done good, kickin’ him out. He got no bizness meddlin’…ah got t’ kick him out mah kitchen half the time.” He flashes a smile. “Don’t let him meddle no mo’. Y’all a good man. Ah gwin talk to that ole cap’n an’ git y’all a raise. Ah got me a good man, an ah don’t aim t’ lose him nohow!”

He turns and scampers up those stairs. Jessie and Emmet are unloading steaming pots of food from the dumbwaiter and setting them up under sterno on the serving table. Jessie catches my eye.

“Chef Joyner, he cook the best peas ‘n ham in the South, mistah sto’keepah. Man work hard as y’all, he need to eat. Y’all lookin’ too skinny fo’ mah taste, though you got them man’s arms.” He winks. “Sit down now, chile, we goin’ feed y’all some soul food, put some meat on them bones.”

Crew members, mostly deck hands and porters, trickle in, line up at the serving counter, plates in hand, waiting for Jessie, who takes his time fussing over his pots of food, the aromas heady and heart-breaking. One of the bigger deckhands grouses at Jessie to hurry up, and Jessie fixes him with a stare of such chilling malevolence the man lowers his eyes, and now Jessie moves even slower, sulky. I drift to the rear of the room, and a few crew members glance at me as I lean arms-folded against a wall, trying to act comfortable with my newness.

When the line begins moving, Jessie appears rankled while he plops food on their plates, much like the surly, desultory Army cooks during basic training. “Do move along,” he chides in a whiny nasal voice rising to a strident singsong. “I say, DO move along.”

A tall, skinny, buck-toothed deckhand complains mildly about his portions, and Jessie stiffens, halts. “No sass from you-all, youngblood, or I stick-whup yo’ ugly black ass til it ain’t black no mo’.” There is grumbling among the men, but they are mostly resigned. “I say, DO move along. Y’all GIT seconds. Don’t wanna hear no cryin’ an’ whinin’ from no lazy ass niggers.”

The captain enters, followed by a small white-uniformed officer, perhaps 30, preppie, boyish-looking. Behind him is another officer, a thickset 40-year-old with a chiseled face and dark, engaging eyes; he smiles and nods at everybody, like an experienced social leader. The three men hang their hats on a rack and sit down. Jessie allows Emmet to take over the serving and flutters to these men, pouring ice teas as Franklin Myles joins them.

“How’s mah cap’n?” Jessie oozes.

“Jes’ fine, Jessuh.”

Jessie gushes over the officers, brings their food, then returns to wait on the last person in line, me, on whose plate he drops extra portions of rice, black-eyed peas, and collared greens, smiling at me as if we’re in cahoots. Emmet places a large wedge of cornbread on the mountain of food and the other crew members glance up to observe my outrageous bounty as I sit at the end of one of the deserted tables, away from the crowd.

I hear Jessie, “Cap’n…,” as he hands the officers linen napkins. “We got us a new sto’keepah, and he done OWN them sto’rooms, suh!”

The captain tucks his napkin at his throat. “Kick me out mah gawdamn sto’rooms!” he bleats, turning to his officers. “Been on the rivah all mah life, and nobody kick me out-a no sto’room befo’. Now this new sto’keepah tell me t’ git out his sto’rooms, cuz them sto’rooms HIS!”

The 40ish man smiles at me and winks. I taste my food, and an elixir moves immediately through my system like a natural high. I eat, and eat, mopping up gravy with cornbread. Jessie smiles at me like an adoring matriarch as deckhands straggle up for seconds. “Aint nobody cook peas ‘n ham like our chef,” he chirps, simpering.

“Now this new sto’keepah say he gon quit he don’t get a raise…after he kick me out HIS sto’rooms! He think this gawdamn ship HIS. Gawdammit, ah guess ah ain’t got a damn thing t’ say “bout nothin’ no mo’.”

Myles giggles and the officers grin as Jessie refills their glasses of tea, the steward last, of course. He moseys by and fills my glass and returns to his station in prim, mincing steps. The crew shuffles along for seconds, and Jessie suddenly seems resigned and too depleted to scowl and wheedle, just plops food into their plates as if he’s got a dirty job and sees no way out but to trudge on, long-suffering, sweat streaming down his molten face and dripping from his chin and nose, saturating his neck.

+++

My storerooms are squared away by mid-evening and I feel like celebrating my new job. Chef Joyner is only too happy to dig into his cigar box and loan me $20 when I ask for $10, a spot against my wage, which is to be $75 a week instead of $65 when the captain agrees to my raise. Damn, I found a home!

Kachefski comes along, and we manage to wedge into Martin’s, finding the Marines, who buy round after round of shots to toast my job. We get pretty smashed, say our goodbyes, and straggle back to the Queen. Kachefski eschews a cot in one of the rooms and rigs up a blanket/pallet atop the 15-foot-high mound of linen. It is dark in my quarters and I stand by my cot waiting for a little starlight to outline the room through the porthole. A long hump is under the covers of the other bunk. I’m sticky and rank, need a shower. I try to make my cot as quietly as possible so as not to awaken the sleeping hump, but bang around while doing so. I creep down to the shower room, where, alone, I soap up and rinse off and return to the room, where my room mate reads, his lamp shining.

Davis sits under his blanket, bifocals in place. He could be 50, hair neatly parted on one side and specked with gray. He is not as dark chocolate as the chef but with similar refined, handsome features, and his neatly clipped mustache is also graying. He glances at me with only his eyes, not moving his head as I stand like a lump, towel around my waist.

“If you’re going to get drunk,” Davis says, enunciating his words carefully like a college professor, which he resembles. “Please do not destroy the room.” His voice is strong, resonant, like a blues singer.

“Sorry. I couldn’t see. Didn’t mean to awaken you, sir.”

He shifts his eyes back to the book. I quickly rummage through my pack and change into briefs and climb under covers. I take out my current bible, Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and stare at a page.

After a silence, I ask, “Do you like the porthole open?”

“Always, unless there’s a hurricane.”

“Good. I like the fresh air.”

Davis continues reading.

“Listen,” I find myself saying. “I hate to interrupt your reading, but I’m the new storekeeper, Franklin.”

“Yes, so I’ve heard, Mr. Franklin.”

“Well, I know you’re Mr.Davis. Just wanted to introduce myself.”

“Very well, Mr. Franklin. We are now formally introduced. I will be reading for a short time, until I feel sleep return. Then I will turn off my lamp. If it is your desire to read at night, I suggest you find a low-wattage lamp. You can plug it in my outlet.”

“Thanks, Mr. Davis. I appreciate that. Glad to meet you.”

He keeps his eyes on his book, turns a page with exceptionally long fingers, nails immaculate. His wrists are thick, and, like the chef, there is a natural bulge to his forearms. I turn back to my book. Very softly, the river laps against the hull below our porthole, and I feel safe and secure and adrift from the turbulence of the outside world. I am so tired. The book falls out of my hand. I curl up, turn away; a delicious cool draft from the porthole wafts over me. The reveling down town is finally expiring in the distance. §

Dell Franklin writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif., where he lives with his chocolate lab, Wilbur, a rescue dog. He is the founding publisher of The Rogue Voice and is currently working on a book about his dad who played professionally in the early days of baseball, The Ball Player’s Son.

 

Obama and the ‘N’ word

I don’t know how we got on this subject on such a pleasant summer evening with the sun going down just over the pier. Photo by Stacey Warde

I don’t know how we got on this subject on such a pleasant summer evening with the sun going down just over the pier. Photo by Stacey Warde

by Dell Franklin

“I hate Obama. I can’t stomach that goddamn nigger as our president.”

These words are jolting, coming beside me as I sit on a stool in a restaurant bar talking to a man around 28, 29, whom I’ve seen grow up in Cayucos, Calif., a little beach town with less than one percent African American. He’s a good kid, a little rough around the edges, used to surf and brawl but got married and buckled down and has a good gig on a construction crew in San Luis Obispo County that is always busy. His reputation now is of a hard worker and family man with a job dog in the back of his pickup, a grown up—at last.

“You don’t mean that,” I say. “And you shouldn’t use the ‘N’ word.”

“I can use it any time I want. I live out in Paso Robles now and they got gangs, and those niggers fuck with my family; I’ll blow the motherfuckers away.”

What’s this got to do with Obama? I ask myself. I don’t know how we got on this subject on such a pleasant summer evening with the sun going down just over the pier and turning cloud cover into brilliant shards of copper/gold and crimson.CITY-LIFE.Obama_portrait_crop

“How many black folks do you know?” I ask him.

“What’s that got to do with it? I know how I feel.”

I thought about telling him how when I was about 8 or 9 and growing up in Compton, Calif., I used the word nigger unwittingly around my mother, and for the first and only time this gentle, educated, highly sensitive woman, described by my dad as a “bleeding-heart Eleanor Roosevelt liberal,” slapped my face so hard my ears rang. She dragged me into the bathroom and began washing my mouth out with soap. She was crying hysterically and then I began crying and when she was finished she sat me down and explained how the word nigger was the ugliest word in the English language, how it was about meanness and cruelty and ignorance and the oppression of a people, and how hearing that word from her son broke her heart and made her feel a pain so awful she could not bear it.

I thought about telling him how as a sophomore at Compton High, a huge school, I made varsity shortstop in baseball and my best friend on the team was a black second-baseman named Loman Young, a junior mature beyond his years and who calmed me down and humbled me when I lost my temper and kicked at things and swore maniacally, and who counseled me when I felt close to cracking up from the pressure of being an ex-major leaguer’s son. He seemed to always put other people’s concerns before his own—rare in a teenager.

I thought about telling how when I was a medic in the Army, I spent a year on the graveyard shift in an emergency room out in the boondocks with Alvin Callock, an 18-year-old from one of the toughest ghettos in the country, Hough, in Cleveland, and who had to join the army at 17 to stay out of jail. In that year, we learned everything about each other, good and bad. During a racial brawl in the Enlisted Man’s Club started by some rednecks, I got caught up in the middle and it was Alvin who stepped into the melee as I was getting pummeled by three men and dragged me down to the dispensary for medical care, grinning the whole time, complimenting me on my boxing skills. Uneducated, raw, he lay on his bunk laughing out loud at Joseph Heller’s humor, mesmerized by his narratives, reading a copy of Catch-22 that I’d given him. Some of our graveyard conversations went on for hours, and from Alvin I learned the street, while from me he learned the discovery of knowledge via literature.

After my discharge, and a few menial jobs, I hitchhiked across country for New Orleans and Mardi Gras in 1969, searching for what I did not know, during a time of great social upheaval and racial tension in the U.S. After spending my last dime, I managed to luck into a gig as storekeeper on the Delta Queen riverboat, last steamship to carry passengers up and down the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. And, besides the captain and his officers, engineers and pilots, I was the only white employee among deckhands, porters, waiters, the entire kitchen crew, bartenders and maids.

I worked immediately under the ship’s chef, a 69-year-old named Henry Joyner, who’d grown up the oldest in a family of eighteen sharecroppers outside Tupelo, Mississippi, and came to Memphis at 29 in his first pair of real shoes, dead broke, facing the Depression. He ended up working two jobs—head chef at the Jewish country club and at the veterans hospital—for forty years and raising eleven kids who eventually became splendid citizens, and moving his entire family to Memphis. During the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., he was one of the powerful figures who took the podium and kept the riots out of Memphis. He was a deeply religious man who had no problem with my being agnostic. His fierce work ethic and disdain for slackers was tempered by a shrewd and easy going sense of humor. He became my instant best friend and mentor and to this day the most extraordinary and beloved person I’ve ever had the privilege to know, a person I hark back to whenever I become disheartened or negative and begin to lose my sense of humor.

Another friend was Mr. Davis, a waiter, an ex-professional baseball player in the Negro Leagues, a renaissance man who could cook, build and repair just about anything, a ladies’ man who moved with an unmatched elegance and fluidity and could carry on a conversation with the aplomb and erudition of a college professor. He was hard on me, always testing me, expecting much. I had to ASK him for advice. He had lived in Paris for years to escape the racism in America and hitchhiked throughout Western Europe in a sport coat and slacks. He made sure to give me an excellent haircut and beard trim and loaned me his shirt, slacks and sport coat before taking me to blues joints and chicken-shacks in Memphis and along the Delta where I became educated in a music I had been previously ignorant of. One of the black maids came along, and when I danced with her, and asked how all these black people dancing around us could be so joyous in the face of such tragic, heartbreaking music, she told me, “Chile, that’s how us black folk forget our sorrow.”

It wasn’t all easy sailing on the Queen. My real trouble was with the porters and deckhands my age, who were bitterly resentful of my presence, and as a carefree white boy who automatically latched onto one of the best gigs aboard ship on a lark and seemed to be “the chef’s pet.”  It was a time of militant black power and combustible anger among young people and the burning down of our black ghettos in nearly every big city in America. Willie Hobdy, the top deckhand, a tireless, nonstop worker, a man around my size and built like a light heavyweight boxer, who wore a stocking cap and scowled continuously, stole blatantly from my pallets of stock on the bow while fellow deckhands looked on and snickered. He made comments demeaning my manhood. He snarled at me, goaded me. Davis told me I’d have to fight him eventually and warned me that Willie would try and get in the first punch, because I, too, was built like a light heavyweight boxer and posed a threat.

Sure enough, while finally having heated words when I confronted him on the bow, he hit me so hard I saw green and yellow flashes, my left eye immediately gushing blood as I retaliated with a right hand that crushed his nose and busted his lip. If the captain hadn’t come along we might have killed each other. Sad and shaken, I retreated to the bar at the King Cotton Hotel on the main drag in Memphis in my work shirt, eye swollen shut and bruised, a violent headache pulsing. A row of post-graduates from down the road at the U of Mississippi in Oxford, whom I’d run into before, lectured me on my stupidity in making friends with and trusting “nigras.” They lectured me very sternly about my “Yankee naivety,” explaining that nigras were an inferior species given to thievery, filthiness, laziness, a total lack of morals, all of whom not only belonged where they’d been for centuries, but that they WANTED it that way, because they had no initiative. While listening to this garbage, it dawned on me very slowly and with a bludgeon that because of my white skin, and only my white skin, I represented to Willie and his fellow deckhands everything they hated in this world.

I left. Back on the Queen, despondent, I ran into Willie, lurking in an alcove along the engine room, sitting alone. He was almost always noisy and with fellow deckhands. His face was pulpy and swollen. He wouldn’t look at me as I halted before him. I asked him if he still wanted to fight. He shook his head and told me, “It’s all outta me.”

“It’s all outta me, too,” I said, though there was nothing in me compared to what was in Willie. I’d merely defended myself against something I was beginning to understand.

I was starving, hadn’t eaten a thing. I had access to the galley through the chef. I asked Willie if he was hungry. He nodded. I invited him to join me in the galley. It was late, and dark, and I turned on the lights and the grill and slapped down two huge filet mignons that were reserved for our 100 percent white wealthy passengers and heated up a pot of black-eyed peas. We still hadn’t talked. Willie sat at the card table where cooks and the chef and our dishwasher and I liked to drink coffee and munch pastries and eat, and I plopped down a pitcher of ice cold milk. We ate silently, ravenously, two brutalized young men, and when we finished Willie said thank you in an almost inaudible voice, and the next day instead of stealing from my pallets he helped me stock, and he became my friend, telling me his life story of growing up in some tiny town on a river a few miles north of Mobile, Alabama, and explained why he never left the ship—all  of his pay ($65 a week) went to his mother and his wife and kid, whom he only saw when the Delta Queen dry-docked in winter and he returned to Alabama for two weeks.

Almost immediately the resentment among my former enemies evaporated. Willie shouted, “The Beard!” as a greeting. Other deckhands referred to me as “Moses,” and “Mistah Sto-keepah.” I became immersed in black culture to such an extent that the chef paused one day and accused me of being black in a former life and coming back the same way only with a white skin. I have never been happier. It was a joy to be among people who’d started life with nothing, or in some cases less than nothing, continued to get the short end of the stick, faced police harassment, served time, missed meals, and never even conceived of achieving dreams (I wanted to be a writer), yet seemed to celebrate what little was left of their lot and complained far less about the state of things than the old men I see  hanging around Cayucos listening to Rush Limbaugh and grousing with perennial scowls about that goddamn black bastard, or the men and women I overhear at the gym who, although far better off financially than they were in 2008, growl about Obama being “that black socialist giving those lazy welfare niggers their precious money.”

I’d like to explain a few things to this lad beside me, who was never, to me, a mean-spirited person, and who seems happy with HIS lot and his young family; I’d like to tell him how ugly it sounds to use the word nigger, and especially in reference to a man in the White House who is not corrupt, not a liar, not a born-rich economic boob or a draft-dodging war-mongering neo-con blowhard, is a good family man who seems to have a little compassion like all liberals for the underclasses. I’d like to ask him to try and step into a black person’s shoes and have to listen to the cruelty and ignorance spewing from his mouth.

Finally I say, “Kid, you expose yourself to be an ugly, mean-spirited person when you talk that way about black folks. You embarrass yourself.”

“I don’t give a shit,” he says. §

Dell Franklin writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif., where he lives with his mate, Wilbur, a very needy chocolate lab he rescued from the animal shelter. He is the founding publisher of The Rogue Voice and is currently working on a book about his dad, The Ball Player’s Son.

Blind love

Together they tap the ground, safely passing sign posts and cement benches, the blind lovingly leading the blind, in perfect tender unison. Photo By Stacey Warde

Together they tap the ground, safely passing sign posts and cement benches, the blind lovingly leading the blind, in perfect tender unison. Photo By Stacey Warde

I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees. —Pablo Neruda

by Stacey Warde

At the Camarillo Amtrak station a young blind couple, walking arm-in-arm, slide the red tips of their seeing-eye canes along the platform next to the train.

The tips of their canes make a parallel search of the ground, tapping out the echoes of potential obstacles, swinging this way and that. Between the sliding sticks the pair are joined at their elbows.

I watch them from my vantage point above, through the window where I’m sitting on Train 777, or “Triple Seven,” as the conductor says in his announcements.

They have just stepped off the train heading north and west where the sun is beginning its low descent over the Pacific Ocean.

The setting sun casts an orange glow on their faces. Together they tap the ground, safely passing sign posts and cement benches, the blind lovingly leading the blind, in perfect tender unison.

I’ve never seen a blind couple as this making their way together. When I’ve observed the blind, often they have been alone, or accompanied by a service dog or friend whose vision is not impaired.

The pair turns tentatively toward the road, scouting the audibles, as a yellow cab slowly passes by, and they pause momentarily as if to hail the driver but another couple flags the car for themselves. How do they know that it is a cab? What bit of information causes them to turn at the same time to pursue what they cannot see?

They walk so closely and intimately that their bodies and minds seem as one. It’s a stunning scene. It’s touching. How did two blind intimates find each other? What brought them together? Did they meet in school? At a support group for the blind?

Their closeness, their intimate knowing and safety in being together unseats me, penetrates the armor I’ve worn to avoid the history and hurt of broken intimacies. An aching, bleeding feeling, as if something has begun to melt, washes through me, beginning inside of my chest.

My eyes well up with tears and, like the couple below, I put on a pair of dark sunglasses. I don’t want anyone to see my eyes. I don’t want anyone to know that I’m having a breakdown on the train. I want to avoid the appearance of a touched middle-aged man.

As Triple Seven pulls away from the platform, I watch the pair in a final desperate attempt to see what happens to them, and feel the cauldron of losses bubbling inside of me, streams of tears burning down my face.

Perhaps I’m romanticizing the idea of a blind love that isn’t blind at all but sees everything, knows everything, and moves in unison with the melodious voices of departing passengers, the low hum of cars in the distance, the passing of a cab, and the shared need to find a safe passage home.

Perhaps I’m a fool for thinking that such passage gains more from the company of another who is willing to share the risks and responsibilities of navigating through the darkness, guided by some other light that cannot be seen.

This coupling desire to be joined at the elbows and to walk in unison with another in a different kind of blind trust doesn’t go away easily, not even after one has passed his prime and love can seem so cruel and foolish.

“When does it stop?” I asked a friend once. “When do you stop wanting the company of a woman? When do you stop feeling like there needs to be another?”

“A great love poet,” he responded, “once said that it wasn’t until he was 70 that he realized the feminine no longer had power over him.”

It’s not merely the feminine, however, that haunts and wields power over me. Something more than charms and pleasure has broken through the walls of my resistance to love.

What moves me now is the formidable intimate knowing that is built on trust, the eagerness to hold space with another, even when there is darkness all around, the willingness to traverse obstacles despite the handicaps, to do with that one what spring does with the cherry trees.

The dark sunglasses do not hide my tears. I remove them to pat my cheeks dry with the sleeve of my jacket. Amtrak Triple Seven roars into the night and my view outside the window is blurred from blinding tears. §

Stacey Warde is publisher of The Rogue Voice

Trampling the First Amendment in a small town by the sea

Even the chamber of commerce asked us to remove our rack from its vicinity. Images by Stacey Warde

Some readers felt we had crossed a line. Even the chamber of commerce asked us to remove our rack from its vicinity. Images by Stacey Warde

by Stacey Warde

In the early days of the Rogue Voice, when it was still merely a monthly newsprint journal, we published a story about what prisoners do when they get horny.

Tito David Valdez, Jr., doing 25-years-to-life for conspiracy to commit murder, wrote an essay about “Hittin’ it,” an intimate look at the secret ways inmates find opportunities to masturbate or get off without being observed in a well-guarded penal institution.

We also learned about lady boys in mini-skirts who look fabulous and would by all appearances seem to be real women, except for the fact they weren’t, and how most inmates, like David, avoided unnecessary drama and complications in prison, by not getting involved.

It was an informative and educational narrative. David’s column, a regular known to readers as “Life in the Cage,” and all his other subsequent columns, gave taxpayers a close-up, insider’s view of how their dollars were being spent to incarcerate convicted felons.

But one meddlesome mom from our fair village by the sea didn’t like his column. She felt we had stepped over the line, and offended the community standard for frank talk about prison sex in ‘06.

As any good moralist, she decided to take action. She meant to protect her teenage daughter and other impressionable youth in our town from the adult content, and unseemly influence of our magazine, which was then in 2006 only four months old.

Like an enormous huffing beast, she stormed into the coffee shop where I was talking with a friend and barreled into the rear of the shop where we kept stacks of our magazine. I felt her rage as she passed by me.

Seconds later, she came back our way, a full stack of Rogue Voices stuffed under her arm. “Hey, wait a minute!” I demanded. “Where do you think you’re going with those?”

“I’m going to make a barbecue out of these,” she fumed, heading for the door.

“No you’re not!” I answered. “I work my ass off to put out those damned magazines. Put them back, right now!”

She harrumphed, breathing loudly and laboriously through her nose. I felt as if she were about to punch me, but she turned away, with close to 100 of my magazines stuffed under her arm, and walked out the door of the coffee shop.

A sheriff’s deputy arrived. The barista, a contributor and editor and supporter of the magazine, had called for law enforcement to protect my First Amendment right to free speech.

The angry mom had stolen that right. She was violating state, federal and constitutional law.

The deputy dutifully questioned me, asked me what was the problem, and I told him that a woman had walked out of the coffee shop with a stack of my magazines and threatened to burn them.

“Well, why should I help you,” he said finally, “when you write negative stories about law enforcement?”

Dell Franklin had recently written a first-hand account of the City of San Luis Obispo’s fascist policing operation to intimidate Mardi Gras revelers by bringing in hundreds of police from around the state to control the unruly student mob.

By many accounts, including Dell’s, the police, called upon to keep order, were as likely to create disorder—randomly shooting bean-bag rounds into parties, freely harassing passersby on the street, detaining and questioning revelers—as students were to misbehave by celebrating the centuries old annual tradition of upending the conventions of culture.

Dell’s article offered graphic evidence of police going a bit too far, terrorizing college students who were minding their own business.

Tired of moralists trashing our publication, we ran a full-page ad reminding them of another standard.

Tired of moralists trashing our publication, we ran a full-page ad reminding them of another standard.

“Your job,” I reminded the deputy, “is to protect my First Amendment right to free speech. It doesn’t matter whether you like what I print.” I pointed my finger in the direction where I’d last seen the angry mom walking out the door with my property: “She’s violating my right to free speech. What she’s doing is illegal.”

He thought for a moment. “It’s a free magazine, isn’t it?”

“That doesn’t mean she can take the whole stack!”

In fact, state Assemblyman George Plescia, a Republican from San Diego, had recently authored, and the legislature passed, a bill, AB2612, protecting free newspapers and magazines from abusers lifting full stacks off the racks. Apparently, San Diego was having the same problem. The offense carried a sizable fine.

“We must work to ensure that no one is able to deprive others of their First Amendment rights,” then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said in a statement on AB2612. “The freedom of the press is one of the most precious freedoms that Americans enjoy.”

The deputy left, presumably to consult with the offending party, and asked me to wait. He returned and informed me that the woman had been reminded that it’s my right to publish what I want and that she didn’t have the right to refuse it.

“Where’re my magazines?” I asked.

“They’re gone,” he said.

I was too angry to press the matter about the fate of that stack of magazines. I did not want to be thrown in jail for harassing or assaulting an officer.

I wrote a letter to Plescia, thanking him for protecting my First Amendment rights, while local law enforcement and would-be protectors of community standards thought less of those rights than they should.

“I edit and publish a free monthly literary journal,” I noted after thanking him, “which has had its share of vandalism from those who object to its content.

“Until now, our only support [has come] from readers who do not want others deciding for them what they can or cannot read.

“Thanks for your support. We lift our hats to you, Mr. Plescia, for your defense of our First Amendment right to a free press.”

As regards community standards and federal guidelines for offensive material, we avowed again in our pages the value of reading, of determining for oneself whether there are any redeeming qualities in our content, which would then guarantee its full protection under the law.

Not content with literally trashing our magazine, the angry mom rounded up a herd of like-minded matrons to pester local businesses to cease advertising in our magazine or to quit displaying the Rogue Voice on their premises, which is their perfect right.

The Cayucos Chamber of Commerce, coerced, asked us to remove our rack from its vicinity. We lost one advertiser while another said: “Tell those gals to get a life!”

Those “gals,” I noted in a 2006 February column titled “Our naughty little rag,” were going about town, raging to this or that business owner, “to protest its unseemly content, and to protect our impressionable teens from words like ‘fuck’ and ‘titty.’”

We were amazed that our troublesome youth had given up the internet and cell phones to go in “search of colorful language in the pages of our…morally reprehensible rag. It’s hard to imagine youngsters,” I mused, “pulling themselves away from their computers to actually read a newspaper; more terrible to think they’re reading one with naughty words.”

Oddly, or perhaps not so odd, the small-town upheaval came on the heels of an earlier trashing of another publication in which it seemed everyone everywhere in the county felt they had a moral duty to censor content they didn’t like.

Local alternative weekly New Times had published a story about methamphetamine by Alice Moss that also included a recipe on how to make the stuff. Residents went berserk, lifting the rag off racks throughout San Luis Obispo County and sending them to the landfill.

An eery absence of the weekly could be seen on virtually every rack in the county. Not one New Times could be found any where. The article itself had been informative enough and may have actually had some redeeming social value, despite its loony and irresponsible instructions on how to make meth.

A better method for informing readers about the ease of making meth would have been to take a photo of and list the ingredients. Let some fool decide how to put it all together. Good citizens, meanwhile, took it upon themselves to protect hapless individuals from the dubious joys of meth-making by eliminating the newspaper’s presence from our community.

The hysteria broke national news.

Amid the frenzy of throwing newspapers into the trash, KVEC hometown radio host Dave Congalton asked me and Dell to go on the air to discuss the issue. Many callers agreed that while they may not like what our publication prints, it’s our legal right to publish as we see fit. In fact, despite our “liberal” label, as some claimed, our most vocal defenders were more often conservatives.

It wasn’t the last time hoodlums took it upon themselves to sabotage our publishing efforts. Throughout the county, we continually heard reports from our friends that individuals were helping themselves to stacks of our magazine and making them disappear.

Finally, we’d had enough and ran a full-page photo on the back cover of the Rogue Voice showing nothing but a bible sitting on our rack, no magazines, with the headline, “Thou shalt not steal.”

It may not have made any difference in whether people trashed our magazine but it made us feel better, and we got a good laugh out of it. More importantly, we continued to publish, 32 more editions in all, without apology, and with a commitment to give voice to those who don’t often have a voice, protected by the First Amendment. §

Stacey Warde is publisher of TheRogueVoice.com. 

WHITE COLLAR HELL

Wall art on Clarion in Street San Francisco

by Dell Franklin

Fall, 1968

I was dwelling like a mole in a subterranean garret in San Francisco and trying to land a bar-tending gig after working the past summer at Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe as a bar boy. But I soon found out San Fran was a union town and there was no chance for a 24-year-old newcomer to break in. In short order, my priorities were finding a good watering hole, a job, and a woman, or, better yet, getting laid, as I’d been on a brutal drought.

The city economy was booming and I went to an employment agency where a savvy lady felt since I was clean-cut and an army veteran and scored high on an aptitude test and cheated to pass a psychological evaluation, I was prime salesman material.

Meanwhile, after considerable searching in the meat-market bar scene, I found Danny’s in the Marina, a hallway size affair with a pool table in back, and a blue-collar, working-class crowd I instantly forged a rapport with. Danny himself was enthused I’d found a job as salesman with Graybar Electric, a huge corporate supply company in the industrial belt across Market Street.

I reported to work in the same cords and white short-sleeve shirt and snap-on tie I wore to the agency interview and with the man who hired me, Bernie, to whom I reported at the monstrous drab three-story building after a night of celebratory boozing in Danny’s. The level on which I was to be employed was lined with desks of typing secretaries and salesman talking on phones, scribbling on invoices, or paging through telephone-book size catalogues of items and prices. Everybody was terribly busy. They smoked and drank coffee. There was no conversing among employees. Alongside this hive were private offices where older, rather portly men in beautiful suits signed papers, talked on the phone and, from time to time, patrolled the room, visiting, asking and answering pertinent questions, attempting amiability to boost morale. Pictures of these men were displayed along walls above their offices. I was issued a corporate handbook in which there were capsule biographies of these men, along with an outline for success within the corporation.

“To begin with, Rick,” Bernie said. “This is not exciting work. It can be confining for a restless person. You are always at your desk, working the phone, consulting the catalogue. This can be tedious and demands patience and persistence.” He watched me stifle a yawn. “Of course, after a while, you can move from the desk to the road. You’ll have an expense account, travel. I’ve done both. At this point in my life, with wife and kids, I like it here. I see you’re not married.”

“Not yet, Bernie.”

“Okay. Well. I’m going to start you out with one of our top salesman—Bill Rogers. He started out like you, and last year he was employee-of-the year throughout the country!”

I sat next to Bill at his large steel desk that was a-sprawl with manuals, invoices, and the giant catalogue. He was pale, clean-cut, chipper. A framed picture of his wife and two children stood at the corner of his desk. His handshake was solid. He was busy, working his phone, calling on trade in all parts of America, displaying an easy familiarity and rapport with each person, like old friends.

After a while, I asked, “You ever meet any of these people?”

“Oh no.”

“Don’t you want to meet them?”

He paused. “If I go to a convention. But I’m not one for conventions. I’m not a drinker or a partier. I’m a family man.”

“So they’re just voices…without faces or bodies, huh?”

He seemed impatient with my questioning, wanted only to discuss my training. He was not one iota interested in me as a person, like I was not a face or body. I was just a project.

“Some of these secretaries are cute. Do you have company parties, where I could meet some of them?”

He sighed. “No. Now, Mr. Kelso, the first thing you might do is take home a copy of our catalogue and study it.”

He was actually too busy to train me the first day. I paged through the handbook, reading bios. A striking red-haired man around my age, swinging his ass, dropped Bill off a cup of coffee and appraised me with fleeting distaste before dropping off more cups to other salesmen.

“Who’s the haughty queen?” I asked Bill.

“Edward.”

“What’s his problem?”

He sighed. “Just read the catalogue, okay?” He returned to his phone. Time crept by slowly as I grew bored with the catalogue and handbook. I peered around in hope of finding an interesting face. There were no blacks, Latinos or white low-brows.The handbook contained no pictures of blacks or Latinos. I felt perhaps there were minorities in the packaging and shipping area downstairs.

At lunch I attended a room of long tables where dozens of secretaries and salesmen ate box lunches or food from the automat. Edward hung with the girls. The salesmen talked about clients, mortgages, their kids, vacation deals, the 49ers, etc. Bernie, among them, kept an occasional eyeball on me. From time to time he conferred with Bill. Some of the secretaries appeared uneasy and flashed me dirty looks when I stared at them too long, trying to keep my boner down as I fantasized fucking them in my miserable garret. Edward also shot me a look if disdain. So I polished off my sandwich and returned to the desk where Bill was still nonstop busy and I spent the next four hours watching the hands of the big clock on the wall inch toward 5. I was never so exhausted.

Afterwards I drank at Danny’s and later had a chili cheese dog at the Doggie Diner and passed out and reported to work at 8. Early on, I found myself closely studying not only the offices of the executives as I took little strolls to break up the monotony of studying the catalogue, but their smiling yet sober visages on the walls. One of these men caught me observing him, and I nodded as he peered up from his desk from paperwork, and he nodded back, but I could sense he was not impressed with me.

“Bill,” I said, after lunch the second day. “You like this job?”

He was very, very busy, since Christmas was near. “Of course.”

“Are you passionate about your work?”

He sighed, dropped his pen. “Listen, do YOU like the job?”

“I’m trying to.”

I kept drinking coffee, because there was nothing else to do. I became jittery, started sweating. I switched around a lot and cleared my throat and rubbed my itchy nose and made several trips to the water fountain and restroom to piss. After my second day I was so drained I could barely drag myself across the industrial blight and catch a bus to Danny’s, where I got drunk, forgetting to eat. Everybody wanted to know about my new job as I sat with tie in pocket, shirt open at the throat. Next morning I arrived at work an hour late with nicks on my face, some of which were clotted with dabs of toilet paper. I sat down beside Bill and he cringed at the sight and smell of me. I was sweating cold bullets. The red-headed queen flounced by me, sniffing sourly.

“Edward!” I called. “Get me some coffee!”

He halted in his tracks, hands on hips. “Pardon me?”

I flashed him a look of icy malevolence and he quickly slammed a cup of coffee on the desk and huffed off before I could thank him. Bill was on the phone and I blindly paged through the catalogue with quivering fingers when I was not staggering—on the verge of puking—to the drinking fountain to gulp copious spouts of water as salesmen and secretaries and Bernie at the big desk up front peered over. I finally visited the john to puke violently into a toilet. When I returned to the desk, Edward, to his credit, brought me another cup of coffee and appeared sympathetic. I had slept in my sweat-and-coffee-and-beer-stained shirt and now Bernie repeatedly glanced at me. I began to shake uncontrollably. My clothes were bathed in cold seat. My scalp itched and burned. I scratched at it like a man aflame with lice. My legs went numb. My heart beat like a parakeet’s and I gulped for breath.

San Francisco wall art on Clarion Street

Wall art on Clarion Street in San Francisco

“Bill!” I said, standing. “You’d better call the paramedics for me!”

He was on the phone, covering it. “Not now!”

“I need a fucking doctor, man.”

“Listen, jackass, what are you doing here?”

“I don’t know, Bill, but I gotta get the fuck outta here. I can’t breathe.” Sweat dripped off my face. A foul stench emanated from me—a toxic effluvium equivalent to a dead seal rotting on shore. I careened across the room, bouncing off desks like a runaway pinball while employees cringed and ducked for cover or stood to observe my demise. I arrived at Bernie’s desk gnashing my teeth.

“Bernie, I gotta get outta here!”

He stood. “Mr. Kelso, please calm down!”

“I can’t! I’m going nuts in here. I suffer claustrophobia.”

“Perhaps this is not the right job for you…”

“No job is right for me!” I ripped off my tie and hurled it at one of the walls. All the executives were out of their offices, stood at the doors. I reached out and shook Bernie’s hand with my clammy paw. “You’ve been more than fair.” I dashed to the door.

“We’ll send you a check in the mail,” Bernie called.

“You don’t have to. I did nothing but sit.”

“We have to.”

“Okay, okay.” I fled the place. Dashed across the industrial blight and caught a bus to Danny’s. The sweat dried up on me and I ceased shaking. Danny fed me two hotdogs and everybody bought me drinks and I told them I could not handle a white collar job and quit. Soon they were all advising me on finding a new job. I never found one I liked, and never got laid, and ended up thumbing across the country and working on a riverboat out of New Orleans. §

Dell Franklin tended bar and drove a cab for a living for many years before retiring to his hovel in Cayucos to write full time, and care for his very needy rescue dog, Wilbur.