Jimmy McGriff and Sociobiology

Death of a Fatback Groover
I just read on a Canadian jazz Website that Jimmy McGriff just kicked the bucket. Jimmy was one of the original "groovin'" organists who galloped along from out of Philly in the late fifties, along with Jimmy Smith (also from Philly), Richard "Groove" Holmes, John Patterson, Brother Jack McDuff--and Jimmy McGriff was really the chuggin'-swinging-est of the fatback groovers, when pumped up high and mighty on top of his B-3 with the Leslies going full fan, you couldn't chase Jimmy McGriff with a jet plane. Yeah, they were all blues players--Jimmy Smith, of course, took the organ over into pop land--especially with his "Walk on the Wild Side," from the movie of the same name, from the book of the same name written by Nelson Algren, featuring Dove Linkhorn a jack of all trades who ends up working in a New Orleans whorehouse as a "cherrybuster," a male who is given virgin daughters to break in by prominent fathers--a profession that becomes so degrading to old Dove, he starts drinkin' heavily and eventually tragically falls in love with the highest paid whore in New Orleans. Nelson Algren--not forgotten really, but almost, I'll bet. Walk on the Wild Side is a damn good book, by the bye--all about Nelson's time spent in southern Texas, on La Frontera, driftin' around lookin' for fame and glory.

Jimmy McGriff 1936-2008

I go on jazz sites and I know there's lots of jazz still being played out there, all around, in L.A., Canada, NYC, and I see a lot of names I recognize, like Joe Lovano, Scott Hamilton, Mike Stern, Ravi Coltrane--and a lot of guys with Latin names are playing jazz--but, I'm not familiar really with any of these people's work and I've totally lost track of what's now called mainstream jazz and have a feeling young up-and-coming musicians are mainly copycats--still trying to play faster than Bird or Bud or Dizzy or supercooler than Miles--and, yes, there are some slick babes out there wailin' jazz, especially some damn good-lookin' hot chicks who play jazz piano and sing jazz--I know these kids are slicker and more well-educated than any musician I ever admired and in whose footsteps I tried to follow but still...--like Parker learned to play jazz right straight out of his head--he didn't play "by ear"--well-musically-educated white musicians love to put down what they call "playing by ear"--New Orleans early white jazz guys called 'em "fakers"--Parker didn't play by ear--he played by feelings, by the urges he had coming from within, from his solar plexus, the seat of what we call "the soul," according to me and D.H. Lawrence--fuck the mind, D.H. said, that's Freud's toy, give me the source of all hunger, sexuality, and all the associative emotions and butterflies and pangs and tempers and the unflaring of music as well, the music you are born into (I think like a behaviorist still--I'm not yet up on Sociobiology yet--here let me let the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tell ya about it:

The term ‘sociobiology’ was introduced in E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) as the application of evolutionary theory to social behavior. Sociobiologists claim that many social behaviors have been shaped by natural selection for reproductive success, and they attempt to reconstruct the evolutionary histories of particular behaviors or behavioral strategies.

For example, evolutionary biologists have been long puzzled by cases of apparent altruism in certain animal societies: sterile workers in insect colonies, warning calls, resource sharing, and many others (see Darwin, 1859, pp. 235-242; 1871; 1872). Such behaviors appear to incur a cost to the cooperating or altruistic organisms, which would seem to make them impossible to evolve by natural selection. To explain the existence of altruism, sociobiologists first articulated the conditions under which altruistic behavior might be advantageous. In a series of theoretical papers in the 1960s and 70s, evolutionary biologists cleverly showed that natural selection would in fact favor behaviors that decrease the reproductive fitness of their actors, provided that close relatives sufficiently benefit (Hamilton, 1964; see also Trivers, 1974). Those models were later expanded to show how altruistic behaviors could evolve among unrelated organisms within social groups (Trivers, 1971; Hamilton, 1972; Maynard Smith, 1974). Further developments in the 1980s allowed evolutionary biologists to model more complex social dynamics (e.g., Axelrod and Hamilton, 1981; Maynard Smith, 1982; for a fuller treatment, see the entry on biological altruism). Sociobiologists then tested the explanatory adequacy of particular models for a given case by independently testing some of their parameter values and underlying assumptions.

That's old Ed Wilson (E. O. Wilson) and there's a pretty good little PBS show running currently about Ed--it's called The Lord of the Ants. Ed believes we are genetically programmed. Ed surely knows we are animals, monkeys?, yes, monkeys and apes--did you know there is a "Monkey Island" off Puerto Rico? Ed believes in instincts, too, but he also believes your instincts are the messages of your genes. Ah, Social Darwinism covered this, didn't it? Some critics sort of insinuate that Ed favors eugenics--selective breeding--which relates old Ed back to Dr. A. Hitler and his final-solution effort at controlling evolution.

Tribute to Jimmy McGriff
BIOGRAPHY

James Harrell McGriff was born on April 3, 1936, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, birthplace of many of jazz's greatest organists. He started playing piano at the age of five and by his teens, was also playing alto sax and upright bass. His first group was a piano trio, which found him playing bass in the band. When he joined the Army, McGriff served as an MP in Korea and settled in on a career as police officer for Philadelphia's finest, a gig which only lasted a little more than two years.

Music kept drawing McGriff's attention away from the police force. His childhood friend, organist Jimmy Smith, had begun earning a substantial reputation in jazz for his Blue Note records (the two played together once in 1967) and McGriff became entranced by the organ sound while Richard "Groove" Holmes played at his sister's wedding. Holmes went on to became McGriff's teacher, friend and, on two occasions in 1973, his sparring partner for two Groove Merchant records.

In April 1960, McGriff made the switch and started playing organ. He was greatly influenced by the energy and dynamics of organist Milt Buckner and the diplomatic aplomb of Count Basie. But such local pianists as Sonny Gatewood, Howard Whaley and Austin Mitchell held his favor too. McGriff formed a combo that played around Philadelphia and often featured upcoming tenor sax player, Charles Earland, who soon switched permanently to organ when he saw how much fun McGriff was having at the organ. During this time, McGriff also accompanied such artists as Don Gardner, Arthur Prysock, Candido and Carmen McRae who came through town for local club dates.

In 1961, McGriff's trio was offered the chance to record an instrumental version of Ray Charles's hit "I've Got A Woman" by Joe Lederman's Jell Records, a small independent label. When the record received substantial local airplay, Juggy Murray's Sue label picked it up and recorded a full album of McGriff's trio, released in 1962. The album also turned out another huge hit in McGriff's "All About My Girl," firmly establishing McGriff's credentials as a fiery blues-based organist, well-versed in gospel soul and fatback groove.

I used to have a Sue 45 rpm of Jimmy haulin' organ ass on "Broadway" and on Bird's "Jumpin' the Blues." And that album with Jimmy and Groove Holmes is a masterpiece, too; with Herman "Junior" Parker on it--supposedly recorded live in New Jersey.

For the moment:

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Decoration Day

Car Racing, an Almost Pure Honky Sport
Today, we and all the little Growlers sat around watching car racing--and truck racing. We marveled at the fascination for watching a gaggle of souped up machines that once resembled automobiles race (35 and 40 of them packed on a rather narrow oval/banked mile-and-a-half race track) and jockey-for-positions and swerve and lose control and crash and burn then put these races under yellow flag conditions for several interruptive times during a race--a morbid fascination that seems to mostly be held by yokels, rubes, hicks, hillbillies, white trashers, trailer-camp survivors, Holy Roller types, old moonshiners's sons and daughters, down-and-out auto mechanics, and fabby, gold-coated-lucky rich bastards, like ex-pro football coaches or the owner of a U-Haul business who became a successful racing sponsor or the same for the guy who invented STP (Studebaker Truck Products), a gasoline additive that was supposed to give you more miles to the gallon--but then who said it was supposed to work--it did work to make Andy Granatelli rich and car-racing famous. Oh sure there were tons of wretched wrecks all afternoon--at least 3 of the commercial channels had car racing running all day today from Formula 1s to MODIFIED stock cars (that's a joke) to small trucks (and the trucks (Toyota trucks dominated the truck race we watched) plough over muddy dirt tracks with humps throughout the course, humps that these tinny pieces-of-shit trucks hump up over, flying in the air (the rubes love that) to come down helter-skelter, banging into other trucks, ripping off fenders, whacking off doors, in some instances leaving an iron-bar skeleton of a truck still racing like goons for one of those huge purses these big-corps-sponsors put up--the winner of today's Indy 500, a New Zealander rich boy, won 12 million bucks, biggest purse ever in car racing--plus there was excitement in the air, the Indianapolis 500 was returned to prime-time status after the race car drivers themselves turned on the Indianapolis Race Track moons ago and moved the Memorial Day 500 to a track in Michigan, leaving Indianapolis as a practice track for spoiled-brat rich South American kids to learn how to wreck expensive race cars on--these cars are really made pretty cheaply except for the motors, which survive most wrecks no matter how fiery and colossally brutal the wreck may look--motors are easily rebuilt--as are the car bodies, too--they are made of special materials that disintegrate during a crash, though the chassis aren't really warped that much--really, these rich bastards wouldn't wreck several cars per race if it didn't pay off in millions for them--wrecks bring in more big-buck sponsors--and these inbred drivers who become the stars of the business are most of them sons and now daughters of wacky hillbilly car nuts, like the Foyts, the Pettys, the Unsers (mechanics and car body repairmen)--or like the Andretti Family, hillbilly car nuts out of the Appalachian Mountains around Nazareth, Pennsylvania; take the Petty Family--dad Petty (Lee Petty) was killed in a fiery crash at one of the first Daytona 500s, his son and his son carry on to this day trying to out-die their old daddy--Richard has since retired after a really horrible crash put him out of business--the Daytona, Florida, beach was originally the Daytona race track--the ex-bootlegger hillbillies from Gawjah, swampy northern Florida, the Carolinas, from pure white Alabama brought their souped up stock rods (they used them to haul moonshine during their regular jobs as moonshiners) to that beach and tore hell out of it--I mean Daytona is steeped in deep hillbilly car racing history--why you don't see many black drivers in car racing--you can count the number of black race car drivers over the past 55 years of NASCAR racing on the fingers of half-a-one-hand. The Rupert Fox Australian/American teevee network has car racing on at night now. There's nothin' inspires a hillbilly like a car wreck.

What US Soldiers Are Dying For in Iraq and Afghanistan

Lee makes a lot more than a goofball US soldier. We Amuricans love old patriotic Lee.

Good Ole Lee Raymond showing you what's most important to him & The Exxon-Mobil Board.

Chevron CEO Dave O'Reilly--he made 37 million last year; One of Dave's air-polluting refineries. Chevron is big time in Burma; Nigeria; Indonesia. Chevron owns Texaco now, too.

Chevron gas flares are killing kids in Nigeria & Brit Petroleum's CEO Lord Fop John Brown.

We are winning the War with Iraq--look at all those threatening dead Iraqis, those bastards!

It's been worth it, folks. There have not been anymore Al Queda attacks on the USA since our brave, though AWOL, commander in chief took us into this face-saving and Amurican-life-saving God-ordered War. Praise the Lard our Mighty God--oh, I'm sorry, OIL is our God, isn't it?

Hey, Buddy, we here at The Daily Growler are headin' for hillbilly heaven and some dag-gummit good car racin'--"We bet they's a lott'a wrecks today--heh-heh--look, that chick's drivin' in today's race--we'll bet she wrecks early--wonder if'n any of 'um u'll git kilt today? Hot damn we hope so."

thepatrioticstaff
for The Daily Growler

Our war heroes return to a Hero's Welcome! Better them dead than us forced to be Muslems.
Praise the Holy Lard and pass us some of them black-eyed peas and hamhocks overhere, please.

Speaking of the Dead, Keeping Up With the New York Yankees
Turns out Hank Steinbrenner knows more about baseball pitchers than amazin' new manager Joe Girardi--Jabo Chamberlain will be a starting pitcher now. The Yankees give up the best closing combo in baseball to try and win some games. They've won 5 in a row now, but the Toronto Blue Jays have won 4 in a row and the RedSox 3 in a row. What a close division!!!
American League

American League East
Team	W	L	Pct.	GB	Home	Road	East	Cent.	West	L10	Strk
Tampa Bay	30	20	.600	-	19-8	11-12	21-12	2-3	6-3	7-3	W 3
Boston	31	22	.585	½	21-5	10-17	8-11	12-5	8-6	7-3	L 3
Toronto	27	25	.519	4	14-11	13-14	7-10	14-7	4-7	7-3	W 4
N.Y. Yankees	25	25	.500	5	14-12	11-13	12-12	7-11	6-0	6-4	W 5
Baltimore	24	25	.490	5½	14-7	10-18	9-12	5-4	8-8	4-6	L 5

Unfortunately!
It's goodbye Willie as manager of the Mets. He's dead in the water. They'll hire some has-been who's available--Willie was fucked from the beginning again by a general manager who thinks he knows more about baseball than Willie Randolph. Yep, folks, after two rather amazin' seasons, Willie's been shot down by those forces who demand winning at all costs--which means Willie's replacement will do not better than he did--may as well give Frank Robinson another go at it. The Mets are solid-born losers--always have been except for that phenomenal 1969 season.

Trick of Shapes and Light and Movement

I'm Booked for At Least a Month
Got another batch of books in the mail today--god-dammit, I'm screamin' as I pull out a snatch of thin hair from my fevered head--of course the first book I unwrapped was a book I'd been wanting to read for years, Frederic Ramsey, Jr., and Charles Edward Smith's 1939 Jazzmen, which starts off with a "Letter to the Editor" from Willie G. "Bunk" Johnson--"Now here is the list about that Jazz Playing, King Bolden and myself were the first men that began playing Jazz in the city of dear old New Orleans and his band had the whole of New Orleans Real Crazy and Running Wild behind it."

Bunk blowing strong.

Oh, golly roaring horned Moses, I gotta read it and read it now--this after being in bed for the past two nights with Charlotte Bronte--she wrote Jane Eyre under the pseudonym of Currer Bell (which could refer to "church bell" or Recurring Bell or "ding-dong," as Lester Young would put it), a manish kind'a name, though, trust me, Charlotte's quiet a warm-bodied woman--and she's charming me with the constantly changing seasons of poor little rooked Jane Eyre--hey, come on, I love Charlotte and Jane both, though I know they're the same girl kids--though Charlotte didn't grow up really an orphan--she was half-an-orphan (like Lester Young called Peewee Marquette a half-a-motherfucker) since her mother died when Charlotte was quiet young--like 11 maybe--but Jane is certainly an orphan and what an orphan--I'd adopt her just because though she says she's dumb as a board she's not--in fact, I'm fascinated to the point of traveling on with Charlotte due to Jane's persistent "good" observations--I gotta see where the hell she's leading me--toward some kind of Calvinist moral--God, I hope not--Jane's already said she finds it hard to believe in a God--a "thing" she just doesn't understand--especially as she's in bed with her spiritual friend, Helen Burns, who's tragically dying in a typhus epidemic that hits Lowood School for Orphan Girls, though ironically Helen doesn't have typhus but is suffering from consumption--and Jane climbs into bed with fevered and coughing deeply Helen--and they converse, it's great, read: "'I am very happy, Jane; and when you hear that I am dead, you must be sure and not grieve: there is nothing to grieve about. We all must die one day, and the illness which is removing me is not painful; it is gentle and gradual; my mind is at rest....'" Jane responds by asking, "'But where are you going to, Helen? Can you see? Do you know?'" Helen answers, "'I believe; I have faith: I am going to God.'" And Jane asks, "'Where is God? What is God?'" That hooked me right there, anti-Christian that I am (anti-desert religion). Where and what. Good questions, and Helen Burns answers them like a good trusting orphan; God to her is "'My Maker and yours, who will never destroy what he created. I rely implicitly on his power, and confide wholly in his goodness: I count the hours till that eventful one arrives which shall restore me to him, reveal him to me.'" Jane though still not sure of it all, grills Helen some more: "'You are sure, then, Helen, that there is such a place as heaven; and that our souls can get to it when we die?'" Helen blabbers on about how she's sure there's "a future state" and God is good and love and bullshit like that. Jane asks after this God-is-love testimony, "'And shall I see you again, Helen, when I die?'" And I love Helen's answer (I spelled her name "Hell-en" and then I caught it): "'You will come to the same region of happiness: be received by the same mighty, universal Parent, no doubt, dear Jane.'" And, Jane, what a babe, is still not sure and thinks, "Again I questioned; but this time only in thought. 'Where is that region? Does it exist?'" Skeptic Jane. And she then cuddles up against the dying Helen; they kiss and then fall asleep. The next morning: "When I awoke it was day; an unusual movement roused me; I looked up; I was in somebody's arms; the nurse held me; she was carrying me through the passage back to the dormitory. I was not reprimanded for leaving my bed; people had something else to think about: no explanation was afforded then to my many questions; but a day or two afterwards I learned that Miss Temple, on returning to her own room at dawn, had found me laid in a little crib; my face against Helen Burns's shoulder, my arms round her neck. I was asleep, and Helen was--dead." In the last paragraph after that piece of slam-bang writing, Jane says, "Her [Helen's] grave is in Brocklebridge churchyard: for fifteen years after her death it was only covered by a grassy mound; but now a grey marble tablet marks the spot, inscribed with her name, and the word 'Resurgam.'" [Chapter Nine, Jane Eyre, 1950, Nelson Doubleday edition.]

RESURGAM. Latin: "I shall rise again."

Charlotte caught me with this line: "She [Helen Burns] sat down on the ground near me, embraced her knees with her arms, and rested her head upon them; in that attitude she remained silent as an Indian...." "Silent as an Indian." What the hell did Charlotte think an Indian was? I'm curious. Another word she uses caught me eye: "Cuyp like groups of cattle." You know what a Cuyp-like group of cattle is? I didn't either, but, shit, seems Charlotte knew something about art, Albert Cuyp, a Dutchman she certainly could have learned about while studying French in Belgium.

"Cuyp like groups of cattle."

How about this use of the word "Canadian" by a 19th-century young woman isolated in the pits of Yorkshire, England, though like I said, she did venture over to Belgium for two years--where she fell madly and fatalistically in love with the man of the family she and Emily lived with while studying French--Emily not going back the second year--but Charlotte did, mad with love and direct intentions. Gutsy babe that Charlotte. I like her. "... the nights and mornings no longer by their Canadian temperature froze the very blood in our veins...." Her image of Canada was one of coldness--mine, too, and I've actually been to Canada a couple'a times.

And I started reading Ramsey and Smith's Jazzmen: "A FANTASTIC and wonderful city. A city with a hundred faces. The hard face for commerce and the soft face for making love. Scratching figures on the back of an envelope where the girl with the deep dark eyes waits on the counter. Smell of burnt coffee and sound of ships. The deep face for a sad life and pinched face for poverty. Marching, singing, laughing. The silver and copper laugh of the prostitute, and the toothless chuckle of the old man who remembers Buddy Bolden at Bogalusa." Oh shit. I'm reading yet another book--that means I'm reading Gunther Schuller's two books on the history and musical meanings of Jazz, Early Jazz and The Swing Era; and I'm reading Jane Eyre; and always my little Phillip Wylie bible is handy: An Essay on Morals; then there's two new books of Ez's poetry from City Lights--both collected poems--one collected Cantos; and Ted Joans's book of poems, BLACK POW-WOW--marathon reading while listening to all these new CDs I've gotten, listening now to Prez live at Birdland in 1951, with John Lewis, Gene Ramey, and Jo Jones--with an occasional appearance by Lester's trumpet-discovery Jesse Drakes--Jesse's trumpeting much more clever than history gave him credit. Ask a hundred people at random if they know who Jesse Drakes is and I'll bet you my car and dog all 100 won't know who the hell Jesse is--nor care who he is.

And then, god-dammit, in the mail yesterday came Toni Morrison's novel Jazz--and my girlfriend, a black chick, had told me I'd never be able to finish Jazz since it wasn't what I thought it was--she thinks I'm white dumb about everything black--and she's right about me and Toni Morrison, no, I'd never read her. I started reading Jazz--Toni pushed little orphan Jane out of my life for a whole afternoon--from Jazz: "Little of that makes for love, but it does pump desire. The woman who churned a man's blood as she leaned all alone on a fence by a country road might not expect even to catch his eye in the City. But if she is clipping quickly down the big-city street in heels, swinging her purse, or sitting on a stoop with a cool beer in her hand, dangling her shoe from the toes of her foot, the man, reacting to her posture, to soft skin on stone, the weight of the building stressing the delicate, dangling shoe, is captured. And he'd think it was the woman he wanted, and not some combination of curved stone, and a swinging, high-heeled shoe moving in and out of sunlight. He would know right away the deception, the trick of shapes and light and movement, but it wouldn't matter at all because the deception was part of it too. Anyway, he could feel his lungs going in and out. There is no air in the City but there is breath...." [p 34, Toni Morrison, Jazz, a Penquin Plume book, 1993.]

Jesus, good writing drives me into a crazy state of inward isolation. Does that make sense?

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

From My Eyrie Past

The Girl From the Orphan Home
I grew up in the far East End of Dallas, Texas, so far out east of downtown Big D it was like a whole other world out there, a whole series of villages of outlier-type people--and even the little village just up and over a little hill from my house had been the home to two famous outlaws (outliers) way back in Old West times--, none of these burgs big enough to be called "urban" except that they were within the Dallas, Texas, city limits, which made them suburban as quaint hell, one boasting the very first "shopping center" (now called a mall) in the whole of the Dallas area. Most of these far-east-of-Dallas (it thought it was an Eden) subdivisions had been pre-WWII developed. Then that Big War happened and the developments fell through thus leaving patches of development scattered about the whole of this immense area, some patches containing several streets of completed houses while other streets were lost among a wandering of hilly fields and patched here and far there by surveyed lots and some checkerboards of unpaved, partially paved, and paved streets with names already on their stellae-like concrete-pole blue-enameled nameplated street signs, names like Powers Drive; Fair Vista Lane; Hilltop Drive; Parkdale Avenue; Laska Drive; Longview Road--names really that had no meaning except to the men who developed these various patches, the whole united development of which was to have been known as Parkdale, though Parkdale ended up being contained in the lower southwest section of the whole area and those patches of semi-developed areas were located all up east between this Parkdale end and the next village east of Parkdale called Pleasant Mound, which is where I went to elementary school and which was on out further east and across the natural boundary of a creek from where our big house sat like it was floating alone on "our" hill in the big middle of all this semi-developed area, our command-central-like house with the huge big Arizona Cypress cedar tree growing overwhelmingly commanding at the western corner of that big brick and stucco (I guess it was a tudor) three-story house, the windswept tree giving the house a winged-Mercury look, like the head (obverse) on the dimes of the realm in those days.

And my school was a mile and a half o'er east of my house, up the old abandoned interurban railbed, across Cavalry Creek (the natural boundary), along Military Drive, to my school, a tan-brick and stone-hinged-sandstone building that had been built as the Peacock Military Academy in the 1930s, before I was born for sure, and the Texas & Pacific Railroad employee magazine dated the month and year this school opened called it the most modern and up-t0-date school facility in the US of A, in the T&P employee magazine because the Texas & Pacific railroad ran right along behind that school (very interrupting to say the least), its tracks and trains running smack-dab behind the military school's old formation area with its spire-like flagpole and the adjacent huge big bright and wide drilling field, which became our soccer/football field and baseball diamond--like I said, the school was one of the finest schools in the US of A before I was born--and the facade of the two-story building was an Olmec-baby-face-big-like stone peacock over the front door underscored by stone letters spelling out P M A--except when I went there it was a Dallas public school and a big wooden "S" had been placed over the A in P M A that made those letters read P M S--for Pleasant Mound School--though I am sure the PMS initials also applied to all my old-middle-aged-lady teachers and also the young right-out-of-college teachers who I am sure had terrible PMS the whole time I was growling up under their educational care--me and all the little urchins, nutjobs, and prodigies who went there with me, like that Mottweiler kid I wrote about a hundred or so posts back [Mr. Ed: unlike The Daily Howler proprietor, The Daily Growler staff is still illiterate in the ways of blogging and archiving and referencing past posts--they offer no excuses about it either]--and I'm sure I contributed to an even worsening of their PMS with my cutesy but meanish teasing attacks on most females I came in contact with the exception of my mother and her mother. For instance, I had a terrible crush on my fifth-grade art teacher. She was 22 years old right out of SMU and flighty and bouncy with girlish vigor and extra-swishy hair and when she walked she swung with swishy skirts, plus she had the right kind of freckled face that I, even at this stupid 5th-grade age, had already determined as the kind of woman face and facial actions that made me "birds & bees" hot for her, as hot for her as, too, was the loaded little pop gun always cocked and ready to shoot in my little boy slacks (my mother forbade me wearing blue jeans--"Only common kids wear blue jeans"--every kid in my school was common as hell except me, the little girly boy in the little boy slacks)--and NO, I hadn't learned how to shoot my little pop gun yet, but I did know how to quickly cock it to the ready when I gazed upon that young-babe art teacher. This was my first serious teacher-love and the first source of my first fit of jealousy over a woman's deceit, which came the day this art teacher brought her fiance to school with her and introduced him to her class with so many gushy squeaks of loving adoration accompanied with blushy, eye-battey bashfulness about how handsome and perfect he was--god-damn almighty I got so fiercely jealous that day this young teacher soon had to have a heart-to-heart talk with me (actually a "breast-to-heart" talk with me since, yes, so foul, by then I was noticing the prominence of young girls's breasts and had no idea what their hearts looked like or even where hearts were located on women) and this young robust teacher spoke to me about how she was a grown woman and I was still just a stupid little oversexed nutjob kid-O and I had to understand that and blah-blah and she appreciated how I had a crush on her, but she knew that I'd get over it and more blah-blah-blah, and that was it for that bitch in my life--and soon the year was over and then she didn't return the next year and by then I developed a crush on another young new teacher, my home room teacher, a woman I can still to this day clearly picture and hear her voice in my head--and not only did I notice this young teacher had really big breasts but that she also exposed a lot of her legs when she read books to us while sitting propped up on one hip on the edge of her desk.

One of the first consultations I had on transferring to this school, on being enrolled in this school, was with an older woman who looked like my mom. And this "old lady" ask me a bunch of simpleton questions about my interests and what made me mad and shit like that and about my home and where did I go to church and then she told me a couple of social things, like there were some "special" kids attending our school--to me "special" meant privileged--though she meant kids like Grinning Larry the Epileptic--and how we kids loved it when Grinning Larry had one of his seizures--why we laughed like cub hyenas over a steamy hot pile of freshly ripped out antelope guts at Larry's seizures--the teachers knew what to do and would tell the kids nearest to Larry to hold him down while the teacher kept him from swallowing his tongue and shit like that. One time one teacher even demonstrated to us how to block Larry's tongue with a pencil to keep him from swallowing it whole and choking himself to death. That's what this older-woman counselor meant by "special" children; like Muffin-faced Glenboy the Downs Syndrome kid or Witchy-Girl Pearl who was a bit "evilly" retarded and an orphan to boot. And that was the next thing this counselor brought up: how I, a perfect little white kid with lovely loving parents, would encounter kids from the Buckner Orphans Home--I knew it as the rather macabre darkened brick "mansion" that sat in a lonely field on east of the school on Buckner Boulevard, several miles over northeast of my house and the school and village of Pleasant Mound, where the school was located--so I was taught that the orphans were "special" kids, too--under the strict rules of the orphans home staff of do-gooders--and though we could become friends with them, we weren't supposed to get too homey with them--they were kids whose parents had been taken from them for some mysterious reason by God and we kids who had plenty of parents had to look down our noses in pity toward them, though this counselor lady intimated that these little brats had a pretty good life out there at that orphanage--they no longer called them orphan asylums, like Newtie Gingrich called them back when he was a hot shot in the Repugnican morals business with his Contract for America or whatever the hell it was called--remember, Newtie wanted to build "orphan asylums" to teach abandoned and orphaned kids good cleancut Christian principles. Yet, the kids from the orphans home were the toughest and meanness god-damn kids on my block.

And then I moved from Dallas and went to high school back out on the lone prairie where I was windswept born. Just out south of my original hometown, on a street we traveled quiet a bit since we had relatives and good friends who lived out that way, was this big-time sandstone and tan bricked "mansion" and, yes, it looked like a mansion to me, with its tall colonial front with a circular drive going up to the entrance, and, yes, it was our local orphans home, founded by the same rich man who'd given my hometown its hospital, and run by the Southern Baptist Convention, this man being a rich Baptist and his family also rich Baptists and the family had schools and hospitals named for it all through central and west Texas. And, yes, from the time I went from middle school into high school, damn right, I knew who the orphans home kids were, especially a pair of twin boys named Melvin and Elvin and their fascinatingly beautiful but god-damn-queen-double-bitch mean sister, Jerry.

My best friend in high school was, yes, a spoiled rich brat, his father being a millionaire country & western songwriter and radio station owner who also had an interest in a recording label and had a full recording studio in his back yard, just outside the private entrance to my high-school best friend's private apartment built on the back of the big house just off the kitchen. Since my friend's mother didn't allow him to wear blue jeans either, he wore girly-boy clothes just like me, but more of a problem for him because every kid in school jealous or not knew how rich this kid was. So he was picked on a lot, so much so, he began at the age of 14 pumping some serious mean-spirited iron--working out frenetically--determinedly so, his ulterior motive being to kick some bully ass, and soon, my man was one total hunk of real man, at 15, 16, and I was a year older than he was and a wimp compared to him--he became truly muscular in his top body especially with a vice-like strength in his python arms that I thought at the time could crack a grown man's skull--and soon he was rebelling against being picked on and it led to him becoming a whip-ass motherfucker from 15 on--and one day when he was 16 he got the ultimate challenge--Melvin the Orphan (Elvin's twin) challenged him by calling him a "Queer," the ultimate insult you could call a man in my high-school heydays. "Hey, Queer bait!" Them was fightin' words and soon I was promoting as my friend's PR man the big coming Melvin vs. My Friend fight, me the manager/promoter of the fight to be held in the fighting pit out behind Jack's Golden Eagle Hamburger Shack--Jack, a dimwitted, ex-WWII-soldier hamburger flipper, acting as the referee in these brawls--which always led to bloody noses and bleeding cuts and torn clothes and sometimes a broken bone--and as soon as a bone snapped or a blood vessel spewed forth Jack would step in, little ballsy Jack who was tough as nails, and break the fight up and send the crowd and participants a packin'--and if Jack couldn't handle it, tougher than Little Jack was his hamburger flippin' fool wife, Mildred, an ex-woman Marine, and Mildred was tougher than those junkyard dogs she actually looked like--I'm sure Jack's wife could have whipped all our kid wimpy asses in one huge round up should we have ignored Referee Jack's ending these fights and challenge Mildred to end them instead.

And my friend, the mighty one, whipped Melvin's orphaned ass--left him in a whimpering fetal position crying "Uncle" while under his breath saying, "I'll get your little sissy motherfucking ass--me and Elvin'll get yore ass--you cant' beat bros, man"--which eventually, yes, did bring on a challenge from Elvin: "Nobody whips my brother's ass and gets away with it." "Well, I did, jack-off," my friend said, and I immediately started negotiating this next fight extravaganza--I was the Don King of my high school fight scene.

In the meantime, I, and I was not a fighter, though I had had to fight at one time, when I first got to high school, and I luckily won two fights in a row and after that the tough boyz respected me as a sidekick willing to fight for myself, though they knew I wasn't a natural fighter and I wasn't a threat to the more developed fighters, like my best friend. These dudes knew I had charm and persuasive jive, too, and that's what they respected me for--so while I was settin' up the big fight between my man and Elvin the Evil Orphan Twin, I suddenly found myself driftin' ever closer and closer to Jerry the twins's sister--Jerry the orphan girl--and I finally one afternoon while sticking secret flyers in all the tough boyz lockers bumped into Jerry literally--"Damn, sorry, my dear," I said as I slammed her. I hit her full but she was big-leg solid and I hit and reeled back and she dropped her books helter-skelter on the floor. "Here, Sweetheart, let me get those," and I knelt down and picked her books up--I noticed on one of her books--it had a Coca-Cola book cover on it--we covered our books in those days with these paper book covers each student constructed with Elmer's Glue or lickable glue flies, these covers given to us by local businesses--and on her Coca-Cola book cover were the words, plainer than day, FUCK YOU. "God-damn you, peckerhead," she said while I was picking up her books and trying to look up her skirt. "I told you I'm sorry; I didn't do it on purpose," I honey-chiled her. "How do I know that?" she said. God she was pretty, but openly tough, tough-looking really, broad shoulders, big boned arms and legs, as tall as I was, with long brown hair she wore in a pony tail (limited to women in those days). "Shit, Jerry, hey, baby, hold it a minute. You just gotta know somethin'," I hollered after her. She was hurrying away; I had to bust a move. "Hey, wait a minute, Jerry," I was still hollering as I ran to catch up with her. "What the shit you want?" She knew who I was; she knew her brother Elvin was fighting my best bud, the guy I was always hanging with--everybody knew me anyway, too. "Jesus, woman...." "Don't take Jesus's name in vain or you'll get punished." "Shit, Jerry, I wanna go out with you!" I almost screamed it. Some other kids heard me say it. "What?" she said. "Yeah, dammit, I wanna date, take you to the drive in or somethin'." "You wanna date me?" "Yes, Jerry." "Fuck you," she said, and walked away.

That pissed me off. Now I was determined to date her. I talked it over with my friend. He said, "Damn, man, what a score if you could pull that off--especially right before the fight." A coup, man, a coup. I was thinking advertising at that young a dumb age, I was 17, and by then I'd had my first sex and was cocky male and Madison Avenue sharp and damn right, fightin' and fuckin' went together in my bald prairie Old West macho thinking.

I sent Jerry a love letter, in my best prose. She tore it up and dropped it in front of my locker. I wrote her another more passionate love letter. I ended this one with, "Jerry, I can't help it. Like Ray Charles sings, 'I Can't Stop Loving You.'" And then one day I was in the gym and I looked up and here came Jerry wearing green Phys Ed shorts and a white shirt tucked in her shorts. She looked divine. I started smiling like a Cheshire cat. "Listen, you creep," she said, "why you keep pestering me with these damn stupid letters?" She loved the last letter. I could tell that from her calm eyes--I'd tamed at least her eyes, I thought proudly. "I'm gonna tell my brothers to cream your ass if you don't quit pestering me." "OK, Jerry. I meant no harm by it. I think you're a pretty, pretty girl and I'm curious about you and, yes, I know Melvin and Elvin can kick my ass but they can't kick my man's ass, just like they can't keep me from asking you for a date." "But the Home doesn't like us dating--they say we're too young." "Have you ever had a date?" "No." I had her. God-dammit, I had her. "Come on, Jerry, what'da I do to ask you out?" "You gotta come to the administration desk at the Home and get permission." "I'll do it. What do I do now?" "I have to give the Warden--that's what we call her...." And, by golly, Jerry smiled when she defined the Warden. I'd broken her. "...your name and where you want to take me." Then she started crying. Whoaaa. I didn't know how to handle crying girls! Jesus. I knew when my mother cried she was pissed at my father. "Hey, Jerry, I didn't mean to make you cry." "I'm not cryin'--shut your fuckin' mouth." "Start the ball'a rollin', Jerry, and I'll be your first date ever." With that I did an about face and trundled off down the hall to my algebra class.

The next day Jerry handed me a note in the hallway without saying a word. The note said that the Warden said she could go out with me for one hour--it would have to be Saturday and we'd have to tell them where we were going--sign out, then sign back in in one hour--if she didn't make it back in one hour, she got badly reprimanded and the privilege of dating would be taken away from her for god-knows how long.

I picked Jerry up at 3 in the afternoon of the very next Saturday. I drove my dad's big green Caddie up to the front door of the Orphans Home. I wasn't nervous; in fact, I was macho powerful sure of myself. I couldn't wait and I rushed into the lobby of the home, went up to the administration desk and said I was there to pick up Jerry Blah-Blah for a date. "Yes, Wolfie, we have you here. Miss Sregor will be down in a moment."

And then there was Jerry. Wearing a short-short blue skirt with a white shirt. No make up, I noticed. Penny loafers with pennies in them. Knee socks--Nehi socks we called them--Nehi the soda pop--knee-high, of course, the real adjective--except seeing a chick in knee-high socks drinking a big orange Nehi soda pop was pretty damn chic and sexy in those young days.

God-dammit, then I saw Elvin coming along behind her along with a matronly woman who looked like Johnny Carson's Aunt Blabby character to me. "Young man," the matron told me, "you are responsible for getting Miss Sregor back here in one hour--no excuses for being late--and if you don't, you will not only bring embarrassment to Miss Sregor but you will also be banned from seeing any of the Home girls for a probationary period. We here at the Home are against dating at too young an age, though we feel you and Miss Sregor are at ages now where we feel we can trust both of you for an hour's meeting. If you comply to this rule, then we'll see if we can allow Miss Sregor a longer time next time, if you care to see her again." Elvin didn't say a word but he looked at me directly in the eyes and I knew what was going on behind his furrowed brow--it was a sister-protecting meanest of his meanest looks. "Fuck you," I said under my breath to him.

"Oh, god-damn, it's sure good to be outta that dump," Jerry said after settling her fine ass in the fine seat of my dad's Caddie. "Nice car," she said, "is it yours?" "It's my dad's." I guess I'd goofed already mentioning my dad. I assumed her parents were dead or that maybe she didn't even know who her parents were though I was anxious to ask her--though my maturity kept me civilized about it--what it was like being an orphan.

"Where can we go--you want a Coke or a milk shake?--I know a drugstore down on Butternut that makes great shakes?" "Fuck that. Go up to Wylie. There's a back road up there this girl told me about where we can park and talk and shit."

It was easy to kiss her. She let me kiss her kiddie-like at first, smoochin', but then I got passionate as hell, as a King Bee, and started kissing her hard, once trying to put my tongue in her mouth. She pulled back. She was hot and so was I. "Have you had sex?" I dared ask her. I'd just lost my cherry my naive self--but I was macho bold in those days once I got some and knew I was OK at it--that's what the woman told me, "You're OK at this, kid." Jerry got bashful on me when I asked that question. She turned her back to me and hid her face against the doorpost on her side of the car. "I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to ask you that, it just came out, I mean, wow, you can kiss so good." She turned back toward me. She had a frightened look on her face. "God will punish us really bad if we have sex before we're of age, of consentual age. They are very strict about that at the Home." "But...Jerry...you let me kiss you." She leaned in and I kissed her again. "I want to," she said under her breath. I kissed her hard and she opened her mouth to me but the minute I stuck my tongue in it she back off again. "Don't do that, it's nasty." "It's called French kissing, like the Frenchmen do." "It's nasty. Like your tongue is fucking my mouth." I laughed. "Yeah, I never thought of that. So you know what fucking is?" "Sure. I got brothers, you know. I hear them talking. They're foul-mouthed--and I know one of the women in the kitchen...." She giggled. "Women in the kitchen?" "Yeah, I think they're fucking one of those women. Wild Wanton Wanda we girls call her." I kissed her again. She was relaxed now and got into it for a long five minutes at least--our mouths were blistered we kissed so hard, her tongue now coming in my mouth. I was excited as holy hell. "Jerry, you're wonderful." "You are, too, not at all like my brothers warned me. They said you were a flim-flammer, full of shit. I said I thought you were cute, cuter than your tough friend. His father's really famous isn't he?" "Yeah. His father wrote that song Perry Como does all the time on the teevee." "What does your father do?" "He's got a business down on North First, a glass, mirror, and picture-frame shop." "Your mother work?" "Yeah, she's a dietician with the air base schools. What about your parents?" That came out so easy. "No. I don't know who my parents were. We don't even know if our name's really Sregor--that's the name, according to Mr. Lamb, of the woman who was caring for us--we were babies--we don't know where we're from--we're not allowed to go into it with the Home staff--that's confidential information or something like that--it's all legal shit. We were adopted once but that didn't work out. I don't remember who adopted us but they didn't like us. They sent us back." She giggled again.

"Can I open your shirt?" I asked her while we were kissing again. "You want to feel my titties?" "I want all of you, Jerry...I think I'm in love with you." "Oh my God! What time is it? What time is it?" I'd gotten her shirt open and was just reaching in when she startled. "Don't worry, it's just 3:35." "Yeah, but come on, it'll take us that long to get back...." I shut her up kissing her again and reaching in this time and feeling one of her breasts. It felt so good. It was mostly bra but it felt so good. I felt it and massaged it a bit and it kept feeling so good and then it was over. She panicked again and that was that. We packed up, buttoned her up, but after I started the motor, we started kissing again. By now I was pulling back into the Orphans Home circular driveway. When I stopped the car I inadvertently tried to kiss her. "No. Don't. Stop it." "I'm sorry, Jerry, I'm sorry." She jumped out of the car and ran into the building.

I went home and was stunned. I loved this chick, dammit; I wanted to date her for real, but I had been rejected. I knew it. The orphan girl had tested me out and found out, yep, I was just like all the jerks with parents--I thought orphan girls were simply easy makes--which is not what I thought at all--hell, I'd only had sex once that counted--I was a better date than I was a fuck--but I knew Jerry had rejected me when she jumped out of the Caddie and lost herself from me back in the Orphans Home.

The fight went off as planned and as planned my man kicked the dogshit out of Elvin, too. My friend didn't get a scratch but he may have fractured Elvin's jaw. Jerry wasn't at the fight. I saw Jerry in the hallway after the fight a lot but she wouldn't speak to me. Once I stopped her and told her I loved her and thought about her all the time, but she said, "No you don't love me." "But I do, Jerry, come on, we had fun...Jerry." She walked away from me. I saw her after that but we never spoke again; and then I met Rena and Rena and I had a hell of a great one-summer love affair when I turned 18. I met Rena through Ronnie who worked in my brother's bookstore. Rena lived at the YWCA with Ronnie. You see, Rena was an orphan--her parents were air force persons who'd died in a car crash about a year before. Rena was 16 at the time; when I started dating Rena we were both 17 going on 18. Rena and I made wonderful comfortable love all that summer, most of the times in the backseat of that same daddy caddy I'd dated Jerry in--then I went away to college, met another girl, and lost track of Rena--though I did later have an affair with Ronnie--and never again saw Rena...and I never again saw Jerry the Orphan, though right this minute I feel a little mad that I didn't go after her and capture her for real--I did love her--I did--and because she was a pretty girl and not because she was an orphan.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Hebdomadal

Staring Up at Me
I love seeing words I've never seen before suddenly staring up at me from out of a book, in this case the word "hebdomadal," staring up at me from a page in Jane Eyre--just as you think Jane is safe, a new humiliation and hardship befalls her. I'm beginning to think how influential the Candide tale was on writers from a certain era of our ghostly pasts. Charlotte Bronte using "hebdomadal," and I felt like a fool trying to impress her with my no-problem-ever-with-words attitude--and I gulped deeply in shame and had to go prone of the floor of abstract ignorance and admit, "Thou hast befuddled me with so queer a word and to wit I must admit defeat, dear Charlotte..., and if I beg your permission to pun on the hebdomadal definition, I hope you're weeklies don't leave you WEEK like they do the lady-like hebdomaries..." and pushing my head deeply into her heavily skirted lap, I plead, "...all I ask is a brief moment of forgiveness in thou sainted virginal lap."

Pronunciation: heb-dom-ê-dêl • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Adjective

Meaning: 1. Weekly, occurring or changing once every 7 days. 2. Fickle, changeable.

Notes: You might be surprised to know that today's word, however, useless it might seem, belongs to a large and strong family. It is the adjective of hebdomad "set of seven, week". Another adjective from it, hebdomadic, means "pertaining to the days of the week". Monks who take weekly turns in performing holy services are called hebdomaries. There are several others in the Oxford English Dictionary. [from the alpha on-line free dictionary: www.alphadictionary.com/

During the Past Hebdomadic Era
I learn that:

185,000 New York Citians have been randomly stopped and searched on the streets--the cops here have the right to do this if you look suspicious to them. "Land of the free," right? Not any more.

Down in the Southernmost area of Texas--Brownsville, Texas/Matamoros, Mexico--they have a new hurricane evacuation rule in place. This rule refers to the coming hurricane season down in that neck of the woods--G.W. Bush's big expensive shoddy-looking fence to keep filthy Messkins out of our precious pure-white country is up tall and flimsy looking dividing the town down there--brown refers to "shit" in the white vocabulary in Texas--"Little brown monkeys"--someone called them, was it Pappy Bush?--I know Barbara Bush refered to her half-Messkin grandkids as "little brown things"--maybe she's the one that called 'em monkeys--what a caring woman Babs Bush is--she was right about those New Orleans transplants--they were better off in the Astrodome than they were had they stayed in New Orleans at the Convention Center--what a wise woman--but anyway, I'm driving off the main road here--but what I'm driving at is this new hurricane evacuation rule down in Southernmost Texas as the powers that be down there ready for what may be a coming wild hurricane season in the Gulfo de Mexico this year--and this new rule comes directly from the New Orleans/Katrina FEMA farce when hundreds of operable school buses were left to sit and wallow in a wavy field of wind-fluttered floodwater while thousands of HUMAN BEINGS--OK, yes, they were mostly poor blacks--needing to be rescued were left to die at the New Orleans Convention Center--so this new hurricane evacuation rule down on the Mexican-Texican border there at the mouth of the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande River--it's a big full-bodied river at this point--it brings all that Rocky Mountain snow water down its gulley all the way from southern Colorado through New Mexico, then the wildest parts of Texas to dump what's left of its waters into the Gulf of Mexico at Brownsville/Matamoros. And here's what this new hurricane evacuation rule states: During a huge hurricane, one surely coming to smash into that part of the world this season, school buses will be used to evacuate folks--yessiree Bob, hop aboard and we'll rush you the high ground and safety in a slightly used FEMA trailer--but WHOOOAAAAA! Wait just a damn minuto here--you can hop aboard that school bus THAT IS if you can prove to the white authorities you're a Amurican citizen by Gawd--yep, you heard me, before they'll let you on the evacuating school buses, you'll have to prove you ain't no god-damn illegal Messkin looking for free handouts and stealin' jobs from our real Amuricans, forcing Amurican corporations, especially our food growers, fruit growers, meat packers, to hire them at low-low wages--yep, folks, the benevolent USA gooberment is gonna kick your slimy Messkin ass off those school buses and leave you sittin' ducks against the force of a wildass hurricane if you ain't got no papers (sound familiar, all you Conservative Jews?). "You dirty Messkins just swim yore wetback asses back over to yore own poor ass country--let yore own people rescue you, you filthy swine."

Another Texas Fact: There are now over 350 mostly blacks and Latinos awaiting execution on Texas Death Row. A big cheer went up down in Texas when the SupremeIdiot Court ruled lethal injections weren't cruel and unusual punishment afterall, another bullshit alarm coming from the Liberal press and that it was Amurican as apple pie and Mom to go ahead and kill all 350 of those mostly black and Latino scumbags ASAP.

He Spy: a poem by Ted Joans

cop concealed in our group
calling us brothers &
putting whitey down by
calling it mother
police plant on our scene
asking questions
listening to black plans
collecting data
only for the MAN
nappy fuzz infiltrator
skin color is grey
afro dressed trying
to disguise his white
affiliation he believes
in money/integration or
dropping on China the bomb
SICK NIGGER THIS UNCLE PEEPING TOM!

from BLACK POW-WOW Jazz Poems by Ted Joans, 1969.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

The Last of the Red Hot Kennedy Boyz

"Was That Ted Kennedy's Car I Just Saw Sail Off the Edge of That Bridge?"
I remember a time when I was much younger when Teddy Kennedy was being berated and perhaps arrested and taken to trial as a murderer. That was during one of those wild Kennedy party weekends at the Kennedys's fabulous Martha's Vineyard property--hey, a ton of booze, hittin' on some of the office gals, like that little Mary Jo Kopechne, for instance. Remember the Teddy Kennedy jokes?--"Hey, gals, do any of you need a ride home?" "No thank you, Teddy."

There they are: Bootlegger Joe's pride & joys: John Boy & Bobby--oh, and there's Teddy, too.

I mean, WOW, look at Teddy's life. The youngest and weakest of Bootlegger Joe's male heirs--his favorite Smilin' Joe Junior--had to sacrifice his life fightin' the Japs in the Pacific--Bootlegger Joe tried to get JFK killed, too, on PT-109--remember? Anyway, Bootlegger Joe got a war hero out of that war alive so then he could run him for a Massachusett's political office--Bootlegger Joe--and old filthy ass Honeyfitzsimmons, Joe's crooked-as-a-snake-at-night father in law, taught him well, thought of him highly enough to give him Mama Rose as his bedmate, that precious saint of a dumbass spoiled-ass little Catholic virgin girl who Bootlegger Joe got and kept her knocked up enough where he, a vim and vigorous man, had to take his pleasures with Hollywood starlets for threesomes and Gloria Swanson for his main fuck--Why little Teddy's sat at the big dining table in the Shanty East Bay Boston mansion while Bootlegger Joe was bangin' Gloria Swanson in his private den right above the dining table, and they said Gloria was quite a screamer, too. And saintly Mama Rose took it like the fine little Catholic virgin she remained even after having all those Kennedy special children--oops, we forgot about Bootlegger Joe's damaged-goods daughter--the one he put through several lobotomies. So that's what Teddy grew up in. I remember when they put Teddy down as the dumbest of the bunch. Remember the joke about how Teddy couldn't pass any bar, but he couldn't especially pass the State of Massachusetts bar? And one of Teddy's sons was damaged goods, too; a cripple, one leg; plus is his son Patrick, Patrick the drunk (remember, drove his BMW into a tree?)?; plus his ex-wife, Joanie, remember her?, was a stone alcoholic--but then, by then, so was Teddy.

And now Teddy, diagnosed with brain cancer (he ain't got long--my brother died of the same thing--found out he had it at the end of December and he was dead by the first of April), is getting the most sympathy he's ever gotten in his second-fiddle Kennedy boy life (I hate hyphenating, so excuse me my fractured and chop-liver-fied compound adjectives). Why the Dumbocrats are now trotting Teddy out as the "Liberal" darling of the Senate--the man on the move for progressive politics and government--whooooooooo, Nellie, can I take all the bullshit being shoveled out there into Teddy's rose garden of doing good for mankind. Remember when Teddy was bar hopping all over West Palm Beach with his worthless nephew who after a night of pub crawling with Uncle Teddy brought the stupid girl to the Kennedy mansion and then raped her out on the Kennedy private beachfront (only the best for Bootlegger Joe's heirs)?

Ah but Teddy lived the good life. Sailing lately with his new wife, his younger more refrained wife.... Where's Joanie these days? And the one-legged son, Teddy, Jr., isn't it, where's he?
I'm so out of the Kennedys these days--like Gore Vidal said about G.W. Bush being a nonsubject with him now--that's kind'a how I feel about Teddy Kennedy's rather sad I'll admit ending--though you notice, Teddy's getting the very best in health care--I mean, he got a helicopter to fly him off Cape Cod where they had no facilities for such a prob as Teddy had--so they flew him into Massachusetts General. Can you imagine if you'd'a had a seizure like Teddy--and with your health care--like maybe your HMO won't even pay for such diagnostics even--and then they'll say it was your fault--I mean look at Uncle Teddy--the pig jowls, the blubber hanging around his neck--I mean he's been looking ready for a slab for several months now. For some strange reason, I can't think of Uncle Teddy as a flaming bleeding-heart liberal. White Trash Irish Lucky Bastard--OK, maybe that.... I am so cruel, though I'm sure Teddy could be cruel, too, if you tried to exceed his name and power--God help you if Teddy Kennedy was your only hope at rescue. Mary Jo Kopechne can testify to that.


1969 wasn't such a good year for me either--I got myself involved in Uncle Teddy-type skullduggeries. That's the year that fall I took a little trip up to Cape Cod--passing through Hyannis on my way to a party up in Provincetown--I was staying with a good friend and his wife in South Wellfleet. "Did you hear about Teddy Kennedy?" my friend asked when he came in from clam digging with the newspapers. And what Teddy Kennedy did was in the news for the rest of my stay on Cape Cod, then going back through Hyannis and noticing the hubbub around the Kennedy compound and then as the bus went around Wood's Hole and the talk on the bus was all about how it was over there, pointing across the ferry dock over toward Martha's Vineyard sailing off the shore in the foggy distance, where it had all happened. "You know they were all drunk. You know how the Kennedys drink." And then back in New York City I remember the hearings on the matter and how dramatic and sorry Uncle Teddy was for his SINS, boo hoo hoo, and think of his reputation, and, shit, that son of a bitch ended up not even losing sleep over the incident--NOT GUILTY of any wrongdoing--Mary Jo had killed herself willingly. Case closed. Uncle Teddy's reelected with good cheer and more booze and Joanie, drunk and lonely, sticks by her man, though a few years later the good Uncle Teddy wouldn't stick by her--when she was getting drunk-driving arrested every other day, Teddy dumped her and was soon gallivanting around with a younger set of babes.

Now the Dead Kennedys can add another song to their repertoire. I once had a chance at love with a sister of a Dead Kennedy--she liked me a lot and she was cute as a bug in the pervertable rug, but, like the failed actor I am, I totally missed my cues on that one, blew my lines, and never got to try out for her leading man ever again.

1969, however, was a great year for rock 'n roll, for Slim Harpo, the New York Mets, and later, the New York Knicks. I cheated on my sweet wife at least three times in 1969--unlike Uncle Teddy Kennedy, I'm honest about it--once with my creative services boss (we were going to Woodstock together and the rains and traffic forced us to pull into a Harrison, New York, motel and have our own Woodstock); another time with one of my wife's best friends; and the third time up on Cape Cod with my good friend's wife--we'd just scrambled out our passionate clutches as we heard him coming in from clam digging with the newspapers and the news of Uncle Teddy's Chappaquiddick adventures.

When in Massachusetts, do as Uncle Teddy and the Kennedy boyz, I say.

theverycruelgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

How the Steinbrenners Are Dumbasses When It Comes to Baseball--Joe Girardi Is Currently Talking to a Beer Distributor in Northern New Jersey; It May Be His Next Job:
American League

American League East
Team	W	L	Pct.	GB	Home	Road	East	Cent.	West	L10	Strk
Boston	29	19	.604	-	19-5	10-14	8-11	10-5	8-3	6-4	W 5
Tampa Bay	27	19	.587	1	16-8	11-11	18-12	2-3	6-2	7-3	W 2
Baltimore	24	20	.545	3	14-7	10-13	9-7	5-4	8-8	8-2	W 1
Toronto	23	24	.489	5½	10-10	13-14	7-10	11-7	3-6	6-4	L 1
N.Y. Yankees	20	25	.444	7½	9-12	11-13	10-12	7-11	3-0	3-7	L 4

"Hey, Boss Man, Can You Hear Me When I Call?"

The Socializing Wolf Man
Listening to Jimmy Reed. One of his best, "Ain't That Loving You, Baby," with Eddie "Playboy" Taylor and Vernell Fournier, who was also Ahmad Jamal's drummer on that fine Pershing Room LP, and it plays on still and it still plays on with Jimmy still ridin' high and lonesome out in front of his various sidekicks, the most special of whom was Eddie Taylor--unfortunately for Eddie, who was one of the supreme blues guitarist in the world, he was Siamese-twinned to Jimmy--he tried to make it as Playboy Taylor but he always had to go back to Jimmy for his most fame. Eddie and Jimmy used to argue over who the hell invented that Jimmy Reed lug-a-lug-dub, little rockin' Jimmy beat, that pushin' beat, with Eddie claiming he invented it and Jimmy just laughin' and sayin' "That's OK, I know who invented it, I know it was me, and that's that, though I love Eddie."

Now, "Shoot My Baby" is playin' and I'm feelin' light and jumpy and doin' a little shakin' in my sacroiliac and then things are still and Jimmy starts unwinding a chanty whammer-jammer of an exotic winged tune that sings in my ear like a god-damn African-call-and-response melody, a reverberating cave-like thing Jimmy calls "Little Rain," and wow, how lost in the past of both the blues and rock and roll Jimmy has become.

I just finished reading Will Romano's biography of Jimmy, Big Boss Man, from Backbeat Books out of San Francisco. I didn't like the first part of it; it was too detailed and the details were filled with Will's own personal Jimmy-Reed reasoning and mimicky talkin', you know, tryin' to write Old South drawal, and, yes, Will loves Jimmy and I don't deny him that, but he took a little too much time trying to convince himself, I think, though he was acting like he was giving added sources in the Reed saga in his effort in trying to convince Reedites of how important Jimmy was to rock and roll and every damn kind of music that came after him, including the Rolling Bones (Stoneds), though, sorry, Will, old-timer Reed fans knew all along and ever since about Jimmy--and we didn't need a Long Island dude to understand Jimmy so particularly for us--even the info in the first part of Will's book is rehash, his interpretation gathered from a limited number of dudes who knew Jimmy, including Jimmy Reed, Jr. The second part of the book, about Jimmy's final years, is pretty neat and was certainly, some of it, news to me, especially about the unique sort of wandering in off the night way Jimmy "passed on" as we politely say--though "when you're dead you're dead." However, one punch in the gut against Will is that he never met Jimmy or Mama Reed--but anyway, the second part of the book is much better, much more straightly presented--especially the recount of Jimmy's last gig and death in Oakland--so the book is worth the money just for the second part alone.

I find New York City blues fans are a little overbearing in their need to show how hip they are to a blues evolution that started way back afore they were knee-high to grasshoppers. Like Will here; he means well, but, I laugh when he gets harmonica technical noting which positions on the harp Jimmy's blowin' in and how Jimmy's using his tongue on one spot in one tune--hey, Will, OK, pal, so you are technically hip to harmonica tunings and positions and shit--it's obvious Will has a knowledge of harmonicas and guitars and he's oh so purely technical when it comes to the various musicians who backed Jimmy over the years, but, hey, blah, blah, blah, Will.

Jimmy near the end; playing that cheap-ass Ariel guitar.

One night, it was early spring though still kind'a chilly, a frisky kind of chilly, you know, and I was a senior in college, sittin' around doin' nothin'--I was tryin' to write poems that year--trying desperately to get published, which I did, eventually, in the Piggott, Arkansas, newspaper, my first two poems ever published--shilly-shallying, wasting away the night, sipping on Cherry Kijafa and thinkin' about the girl I loved back home--in the arms of another man, it turned out--when from out of the evenin' blue came my old pal JDD rushin' up, I heard his Chevvy comin' up the street, recognized it easily because of the glass-pack muffler he'd customized it up with--customizing old USA heavy-metal cars was a big hobby among young Texas dudes in those days. And JDD comes running like a banshee up the stairs and then he's bangin' on my door and I let him in and he immediately starts babbling, "You're always braggin' about how you know the blues and you're a blues pianist and braggin' all the fuckin' time about it, so now's your chance to prove it." "What's'chu talkin' 'bout, Jay-Dee-Dee?" "Sonny Boy Williamson. We've got him over at the American Legion now--but he's got no back-up band but there's a piano there, so come on, I rushed my ass over here sayin' I knew a blues pianist." So I put my best duds on and hopped in JDD's Chevvy and off we went to the American Legion Hall where JDD's frat-rat fraternity was having a whing-ding. I walked in. The joint was packed. And there was Sonny Boy. Yep, it was him alright, not a fake, the real one, Number 2, Aleck "Rice" Miller (or Ford--or whatever the hell his real name was--it wasn't important, he was Sonny Boy Williamson, and that's all that mattered), and he was there drunk with his harmonica his bowler hat but just compin' away over in a corner by an old beat up low-boy piano.

"Hey, Sonny Man, how'ya doin'?" "Fine, man, you the piano man?" "Yeah, I'll do my best--what say we try one quick--you call it." "You know any'a my tunes?" "Yeah, man, I know a lot of 'em, 'Decoration Day,' '9 Below Zero,' 'Your Funeral My Trial.'" Sonny started playin'--blowin' his harp. I was stuck--I didn't know what key he was in so I tried finding it and thought I found it in F but it wasn't F it was E but somehow I faked my way through it--and then Sonny Boy just went right on into the next tune still in E--I finally realized it was E and again I faked some E chords, I hate playing in E because of the 5 being B, too many sharps and flats for my young Middle-C-playin' self--but, who cared, we made it through about 10 tunes and then we all were pretty sloppy drunk and we trundled over to the frat house where they'd set up a game of poker, which Sonny Boy quickly got involved in, me sitting by him at the poker table and getting wiped out the first hand--Sonny threw a ten-dollar bill over at me. "Here, boy, you needs some more money and I got plenty." With that he took out a roll of bills big enough to choke down the meanest alligator as he's making one of his killing snaps for a gulp of dinner--certainly big enough to choke the proverbial horse. "You know what a Jewish bankroll is?" Sonny asked me. I didn't. "Look." With that he showed me that a five-hundred-dollar bill was wrapped around the top of his wad. "See that five-hun'durd dollah bill, boy? Then look here." He pulled the five-hundred-dollar bill back a bit and every bill under it was a one-dollar bill. "That's a Jewish bankroll. Five-hundred on top a whole mess'a ones."

That night ended up with me, another blues nutjob, and Sonny Boy in that frat house bathroom. Sonny Boy took us in there to show us some harp tricks--he said the acoustics were best in bathrooms--and that was my first and only harmonica lesson--Sonny Boy took me and this other white boy through all his "suckin' and blowin'" principles, how to hold the harp between your thumb and forefinger and then cup the other hand (Sonny Boy had very long slender hands) around in front where you can use it like a trumpet or trombone player uses a plunger--then on and on, playing as he taught us, going through making an O with your lips to get punchy jazz sounds and suckin' broad out the left side of your mouth to get the blue notes, to get the bends into the blue flatted 5ths and 7ths--but hell, I'm sounding like Will Romano now--and believe me, Sonny didn't teach no top or middle or bottom positions.

Anyway, I ended up stayin' with Sonny Boy Williamson #2, Aleck Rice Ford Miller, for the rest of that night, then over to my apartment house for a big breakfast of grits (Sonny Boy had a box of grits with him) (ain't groceries), fatback, bread fried in the bacon drippings with a fried egg on top of it. Then Sonny Boy's manager, Mr. Charles is all I knew him by, mentioned that Jimmy Reed was playing over in Arlington, Texas, that night and that Al (Jimmy's manager Al Smith) had invited Sonny Boy to drop by and say hi. "I ain't sittin' in, that's for sure." "No, Aleck, you're not sittin' in." "I ain't playin' for no free. I can't do that, man, and survive." "Don't worry, Aleck, you ain't gonna have to play?" "I don't even want'a go--can we sneak in?" "Yeah, don't worry, we'll just drop in and say hi to Al and the boys." "I wanna take this white boy here with us?" "OK, bring the white boy along." I was the white boy, and we piled into Miller's new Buick (there was a pistol in the divider by the driver's seat--I saw it plain as day--it was loaded, too, I could see it was loaded). "You better sheathed that thing, Aleck, put it under the seat." The pistol stayed right where it was.

We drove like bats out of hell down the freeway into Dallas then on the Turnpike over to Arlington, 'bout half way between Dallas and Fort Worth at the Hi-Hat Club on old Highway 80, a nightclub among a whole row of nightclubs that were in that area in those days, including Pappy's Showland and the Alhambra Club--old time strip clubs that had dancing between strip shows--Evelyn West and her Treasure Chest often appeared at these old highway nightclubs. The Hi-Hat was a white club that featured black music--they had black nights at the club but most of the time it was a white club. We drove up and Sonny Boy started driving straight for the back almost crashing into a Cox fence. "Where the hell's the alley, man?" "There ain't no alley, Aleck." He parked it right there. Bam. He turned off the motor, got out of the car, and that was that. I noticed as I got out of the back seat the pistol was no longer in the divider there. I assumed Sonny Boy was carrying it.

So we went around to the back door of the Hi Hat. I was pretty excited. I'd seen Jimmy years before out at the Casino Club on Lake Worth, but I'd never gotten to meet him.

We went in through the kitchen. Al Smith came out, decked out sweetly to the nines, as nattily attired as I'd ever seen a dude, and he was all glad-hand and he and Sonny's manager jived and then we all went down a hallway, past the kitchen, and into a small green room. There they were. My first sight of the world of the world's greatest blues groover--and certainly a musician who'd been my mentor since I'd first heard his records on the radio back as far as 1954 or maybe even a year or so earlier--I may have heard John Brim's "Gary Stomp" but I didn't know Jimmy Reed was playing the harp on it and Eddie Taylor was playing the guitar--on the Parrott label. And there was Jimmy. He was sitting in a chair wearing a red suit, wearing red shoes, and holding his Kay (Jimmy Reed model) guitar and playin' an occasional lick on it. Mama Reed was there. She was talkin' with the musicians, Al Duncan the drummer, and I suspect it was Eddie Taylor, though I think it was Lefty Bates--it was very confusing and my eyes were popped wide open and my brain was just clickin' on how the hell do I just fall in with these my blues heroes--holy shit, then I realized I was standin' in the presence of two of the greatest American bluesmen ever--inventors of the god-damn music. Sonny Boy stopped and wouldn't enter the room. "That motha'fucker drunk?" "Come on, Aleck, just say hello." "Fuck, man, that motha'fucker's drunk." And, yes, Jimmy was drunk--I don't think any of us white boys knew at that time about Jimmy's epilepsy--I may have read about it, but it slipped my mind until after he died and then I knew he was a serious epileptic--plus a serious alcoholic, too. I asked Al Smith if I could just run in and shake Jimmy's hand at least, and he hollered, "Hey, Jimmy, this white boy wants to shake your hand." "Sure," Jimmy said, "Where's a white boy, some white boys ain't bad, you know, I've known some white boys that was pure...." "Pure shit," somebody in the band said. "Naw, now come on, be nice. Jimmy likes to be a gentleman to everybody that likes his music, so hey, white boy, how you doin'?" His grasp was meanly firm--in fact, hurting firm--Jimmy had a powerful grip. His eyes were watery. He was unsteady as hell. He held my hand a long time, grinning at me, as if posing for a photo-op with me--then he suddenly just dropped my hand and almost fell off his chair. "Come on, let's get the fuck out'of here," Sonny Boy said and he was soon headin' back up the hall. Al Smith came runnin' out after him. "Sonny, Jimmy's alright." "The fuck he is, man, he's fucked totally up. I ain't. I wanna be fucked up, too--'sides, I'm gettin' me some white pussy tonight." With that we went back out to Sonny Boy's Buick and they took me into Dallas and dropped me off on the corner of Commerce and Ervay in the dead middle of a Dallas evening. They went on off into that night and that's the last time I ever saw either Sonny Boy or Jimmy Reed again. Next thing I knew Sonny Boy was dead--in the sixties--Jimmy lived on through trial and high and lonesome times and so many hush-hushes, but he traveled on down the blues highway until '76 when he went into to this white boy's apartment, fell back on the bed sayin' he was tired as hell, and that was it. The white boy he was staying with said he looked over at Jimmy lying there on the bed and he knew he was dead. He was dead just like that. He had played a gig that very night back in San Francisco.

Aleck "Rice" "Miller" Ford blowin' his harmonica.

thegrowlingblueswolf
for The Daily Growler

Keeping Track of the NEW Joe Girardi/Hank Steinbrenner Yankees--"Yeah, Joe Torre's getting too old fashioned, it's time for some young blood to take over--Joe Girardi will get us to the World Series this year--something Joe let us down on."
American League

American League East
Team	W	L	Pct.	GB	Home	Road	East	Cent.	West	L10	Strk
Boston	28	19	.596	-	18-5	10-14	8-11	9-5	8-3	5-5	W 4
Tampa Bay	26	19	.578	1	16-8	10-11	18-12	2-3	5-2	7-3	W 1
Baltimore	23	20	.535	3	14-7	9-13	8-7	5-4	8-8	7-3	L 1
Toronto	23	23	.500	4½	10-9	13-14	7-10	11-7	3-5	6-4	W 2
N.Y. Yankees	20	24	.455	6½	9-11	11-13	10-11	7-11	3-0	3-7	L 3