DAZED BY ZEPPELIN - 2014

Everyone in the world has a phone. I can call Fenway's mom in Thailand and Mam will pick up the phone on the other side of the world. This is a miracle, considering only twenty years ago phone service to foreign countries was a costly expenditure. Now international connections are linked by communication satellites circling the globe to transmit billions of cellular calls and SMS messages to their distant destinations, yet this Sunday no one has called me at the Fort Greene Observatory.

And it was not the advent of the Zombie Apocalypse.

Planes and helicopters flew over Brooklyn and cars hummed along Lafayette Street, so I'm not Mada, Adam's dead end, but twelve hours have passed since my last spoken word. That stretch of silence is not a record. I have gone longer, since Sundays have been my traditional day of silence.

Back in the last century I lived in the East Village. My apartment was small, but comfortable. My Sundays were spent watching football or basketball, reading a book, luxuriating in the bath or all of the above. Every once in a while I'd check the phone to see there was a dial tone.

The phone was in perfect working order.

No one wanted to speak with me, until I started dating Ms. Carolina. She liked talking. I couldn't blame her. Ms. Carolina lived in a redneck community south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Some of her neighbors entertained funny thoughts about the intermingling of races and religions.

Early Sunday service at her husband's church lasted two and a half hours. Baptists wasted the entire morning in prayer. Her congregation was very advanced for the area. They believed blacks had a soul.

Around 11am the telephone rang and Ms. Carolina recounted the preacher's ranting sermon in accent. I didn't have to say a word.

She was originally form New Jersey. Her family was Old Yankee same as half mine. We had more than those genes in common. I knew her husband. He was a good man. Ms. Carolina spoke low and ended with the wish, "Good luck with your vow of silence."

Luck had nothing to do with my Sunday's silence, because my mouth was silted with the residue of Saturday night drunk.

Wordlessly I hung up the phone with my vow intact. My function was to listen to a woman's yearning. I was good at it.

As a junior in 1968 my girlfriend Kyla suggested that we spent the weekend on a spiritual retreat at a suburban monastery. The buxom cheerleader felt guilty about the sexual stirring. Two weeks earlier Kyla had confessed to the parish priest that she and I had come close to sex.

Our pastor had convinced the 17 year-old cheerleader that our wanton behavior was Satan's work, even though dry-humping wasn't proscribed by the Bible.

"You sure this has nothing to do with your mother?" Kyla's mom was a devoted church goer same as mine.

"No, I feel something in my heart calling me to Jesus. I want you to feel it too."

"Okay." The weekend cost nothing and no priest could shake my lack of faith in God.

"I only want you to do this, because I love you."

"And I love you."

Kyla and I had never gone all the way. Our sex was blunted by her unwillingness to be naked. I respected her wishes. My hands were not so obedient.

"I want to be pure as snow." Her skin was whiter than baby powder.

"I'll do whatever you want."

I signed up for the retreat. Chuckie Manzi, feared losing me to the priesthood.

"They might drug you with LSD holy water."

"I'll be okay." I had been faking my belief in God since my best friend drowned in 1960. A weekend was not likely to test me.

My mother was ecstatic to hear of the weekend. Her uncle was an arch-bishop. She had been praying for one of her four sons to answer God's calling. She never thought it would be me and on Ascension Weekend a bus rolled down our street with Kyla and fifteen other couples. My mother kissed me on the cheek and said, "Open your heart."

"I'll do my best." I looked over her shoulder.

Chuckie stood on the lawn. His eyes said good-bye forever and I got on the bus to sit next to Kyla. The bus pulled away from my house and we drove ten minutes to a wooded monastery underneath Big Blue Hill.

We were met by priests and nuns; one for each couple.

"Purity is the one true love." The habited nun raised her hands with welcome.

"I know you are all virgins." The head priest was tall and bald. His smile beamed sanctity. "God knows you are pure and purity is the best way for young people to show your love for God and Jesus, so you are going to be separated by sex."

"All weekend?" I was holding Kyla's hand.

"Except for prayer meetings and Mass." A young priest with a guitar motioned for us to move apart.

The Nuns of Chastity escorted the girls from the monastery to a nunnery hidden by tall pines.

"See no evil." The Pastor led the boys inside a separate building. "Hear no evil."

I stifled a groan.

This was going to be a long weekend.

That evening we ate beef and mashed potatoes followed by a lengthy prayer session in the basement. The girls were on one side of the room and the boys the other, as we discussed our immortality of our souls and the temporal existence of our bodies and souls.

The head priest noticed my looking at Kyla.

"Saving her soul is more important than your desire. Do you understand that?"

"Yes, Father." I loved the girl with the green eyes more than physical pleasure or so I thought in this basement.

We hit the beds early. The lights went out at nine. I heard several boys masturbating under the blankets. Two of them went to the bathroom together. Without girls we left on our own.

The next morning started with Mass. I took Holy Communion for the first time in years and stuck the wafer in my pocket once I reached my pew. After the service we ate breakfast and the nuns led the girls to chapel. The boys sat under a tree with the guitar-playing priest.

The day was warm and the sky was free of clouds. The priest indoctrinated us with the ways of God. I couldn't stop thinking about Kyla. The priest strummed his guitar and said, "A woman will steal your precious fluids. Women were the handmaidens of Satan. Touch one outside of matrimony and you'll brut in Hell forever."

Some of the other boys confessed their sins of thought and deed. I wanted to run for the woods, but I wasn't leaving without Kyla. After dinner we listened to religious rock on the stereo. God was never far from us on this weekend.

That night I had spilled my seed twice. Other boys joined my one-handed prayer. Masturbation was our most holy sacrament.

On Sunday morning the priest and nuns celebrated the ancient mass and the head priest preached about the eternal satisfaction of serving the Church. The climax of the weekend was the grand one-on-one session with an older priest in the basement. He was the exorcist for the diocese.

"What do you have to say for yourself?" His rheumy eyes were skilled at searing into souls.

"My love for my girlfriend is untainted by penetration."

"But you have touched her?"

"Not the way you think?"

"Have you ever touched a man?"

"No."

"Have you ever thought about a naked man?"

"No."

"Are you asking everyone this, because the only other times I heard these questions were from drivers trying to pick me up hitchhiking. Do you do that? Isn't that a sin?"

"The Holy Trinity absolves our trespasses." He put his hand on my thigh. I pushed it away, then heard an electric guitar blast from the stereo in the meeting room. The priest looked up. This music was not on the program and I recognized the guitarist as Jimmy Page from the Yardbirds.

"I gotta go." I ran upstairs to find Chuckie by the stereo.

"I just got this from the record shop in Mattapan Square." He held up the cover of the Hindenburg crashing in flames. "It's Led Zeppelin. You got to hear this."

Chuckie turned the stereo up to 10 for DAZED AND CONFUSED.

Bass and guitar.

High-pitched vocals and then the avalanche of drums.

6 minutes and 25 seconds later I went upstairs and packed my bag. Chuckie put on HOW MANY MORE TIMES and the rest of the boys joined my flight.

The priests tried to stop Chuckie from playing the album. He had a Boy Scout knife, which was sharp enough to fend off the soft palms of the church. We stormed across the lawn to the nunnery. The girls had heard the music and were already to go. We walked to the road. Chuckie had somehow organized enough cars for escape. He was a good friend.

"I love that music." Kyla touched my hand.

"It is pretty cool." Her touch was nicer than that of the priest."

"Let's go to the beach." Chuckie shouted 'Nantasket' out the window.

It was a day fit for the gods.

None of us attended Mass after that weekend. We defied our parents' deity. Our Sundays were centered on breakfast at the local diner and I celebrated the Sabbath with simple words.

"Bacon and eggs over easy."

Kyla and I never went all the way. Led Zeppelin was a huge hit. My older brother and I saw them at the Newport Jazz Festival. Kyla and I broke up a week before the Senior Prom and she married a boy from our hometown. They made a good couple. She would never have been a groupie for Led Zeppelin.

My present vow of silence endured into the darkness of night. I didn't have to be anywhere until tomorrow, but felt like a beer in the company of others and there's no where better in Fort Greene to have a beer than Frank's Lounge with the lovely bartender, Rosa. She's a girl who doesn't like silence, then again most women like the sound of voices. It's part of their nature and no one knows that better than a man.

TO HEAR JAKE HOLMES ~ Dazed and confused

Pressing Flesh

In the summer of 1966 I was standing with my father at the Lower Mills station outside of Boston. We were headed to work. Him for New England Tel and Tel. Me at a restaurant dishwashing. A Mattapan-bound trolley stopped to let off a crowd. My father and I were mystified by the hubbub, until the trolley pulled away from the platform and we spotted Robert F. Kennedy.

The forty year-old politician was campaigning for his brother Ted.

My father was a staunch Republican from the State of Maine, but sensed an opportunity to meet the future president of the USA and rushed me across the track to RFK, where the young NY senator was pressing flesh with his admirers. He shook my hand and I wished him good luck. Our trolley was approaching and my father and I ran to the other side. Once seated on the trolley, a passenger asked us, "Who was that.

My father said, "The next president."

We prayed for that future, but two years later after winning the California primary a gunman shot RFK dead in LA.

It's been over fifty-three years since his death and every day of this presidential election it what becomes clear is that America and the world lost a great deal more than a man's life.

I cried that day and I cried recently watching Ted Kennedy's eulogy in St. Patrick's Cathedral.

"Some men see thing as they are and ask why, my brother dreams things that never were and asked why not."

No one in politics talks like that today

In 1989 I was vacationing in LA. My friend Adriana Kaegi of Kid Creole and the Coconuts was working on a video for the LAMBADA at the then-deserted Ambassador Hotel. I was a little hung-over and didn't think much about the significance of the location until I wandered into the Embassy ballroom and said to myself, "I've been here before."

Not in person, but I climbed onto the stage where RFK announced his victory. I stood at the dusty podium. His hands might have touched the wood and I looked to the left.

The kitchen door was open.

Rosie Grier was RFK's bodyguard. The enormous black ex-LA Rams linebacker was supposed to protect the candidate from the crowds. Later he said that the candidate's security plans called for an exit through the audience, however someone yelled, "No, Bobbie this way.

And RFK entered the kitchen. 

The film portrays the exuberant chaos and then a man sticks a .22 in the face of RFK and pulls the trigger.

Standing in that empty kitchen I realized this was a killer's killing zone. There was nowhere for the victim to run.

I cried once more for the loss of RFK

We are not the same as we were in 1968, although the trolley into Ashmont from Lower Mills is still free as it was on that day in 1966 and that is a good thing.

We miss you Bobby.

  And Martin and Malcolm Biggie and Tupac and thousands more murdered by the powers that be aand they are still murdering. Resist. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ8rxSYMi-c&feature=related

BBC Moon Landing

On July 20, 1969 over 600 million people around the world watched Apollo 11 landing on the moon. 10:56 p.m. EDT. I was not one of them. I was laying on my girlfriend's couch on the South Shore of Boston. Her divorcee mother was out with her Chilean pianist byfriend. Her younger brother was asleep upstairs. The TV was off and the fan was on. The outside temperature was in the mid-80s. Sweat swelled on our young bodies. WBCN was the hippie FM radio station. Playing the Velvet Underground's ROCK AND ROLL. Both of us trying to achieve satisfaction by dry humping ie fanatic rubbing of the lower reaches of the human sexual organs. Janet was a cheerleader at the town high school and I attended Xaverian, an all boys Catholic high school. She was very religious and planned of saving her virginity until her wedding night. I so wanted her and she so wanted me. We almost went all the way. No pentration. A little before 11pm I left and Janet turned on the TV. smelling of teenage lust. The hour before midnight. Hot with a light rain. I smelled my fingers. Janet. Teenage lust. The road was devoid of cars. It was late and everyone had watched the moon landing. Not me. I was walking into the rain.

Janet and I broke up the following spring. I had read Heinrich Boll's BILLIARDS AT HALF PAST NINE in which a young man after getting his first architecture job sees his future. All of it. Janet asked me to her senior prom. At that moment I saw my life. All of it, if I said yes. I said no and I have never landed on the moon, but I believe we were there.

RUN MOTHERFUCKERS RUN

Throughout the 60s the Eastern High School hockey tournament was held at the old Boston Arena. Games between bitter rivals packed the stands over the legal capacity of 4600.

In the 1968 ECAC semi-finals BC High was pitted Somerville High. Fans from the public high school filled the rinkside seats, while BC High's following crammed into the steep upper deck. My older brother attended BC High as a junior. I was a sophomore at Xaverian, but his friends accepted my support for this game, since we had smuggled in beer as had many of the Eagles' supporters.

By the end of the 1st period our section was a roiling maelstrom of drunken teenage boys and several seniors amused the under-classmen by dropping M-80 firecrackers on Somerville fans. We laughed at their scurrying away from our bombing tactics and their cheerleading squad climbed the stairs to beseech us to stop the bombardment. Our rebuke of this offer was ungentlemanly and the Somerville football team attempted to quell our boisterous behavior, however we held the upper ground and beat the squad down the stairs with our fists.

BC High scored an upset victory and at the end of the game hordes of cops separated the two groups of supporters, letting Somerville leave first. Their fans were furious at their loss and our behavior. We shouted out parting epithets. Most of them began with the letter F. Once the lower section of the arena was clear, the police allowed BC High fans to file onto the street.

Hundreds of Somerville fans lined the sidewalks. They were big boys and it seemed like all the entire town was waiting in the alley. We had beaten them in the arena and on the ice. They were hundreds of us. Our friends gave the Somerville fans the finger. I shouted out obscenities. My brother nudged my ribs and pointed over his shoulder. The police were shutting the doors to prevent a general melee.

Clang.

Our retreat to safety was cut off.

I rapidly counted our numbers.

We were about forty.

We stood in a gauntlet of teenage thugs.

We were on our own.

The Somerville fans were slow to react to this advantage.

A clear path ran up the middle of the alley to Mass Ave. and one of my brother's friends shouted out, "Run, motherfuckers, run."

We didn't need to be told twice.

I ran the 440 for my high school.

My older brother the 880.

Our best times for a dash were that night, as we outraced our enemies to the safety of Mass. Avenue and Kelly's Bar at the bridge.

Like the wind we ran with fear on our heels. I reached Kelly's first. The 6-8 bouncer with Winter Hill connections saw us ahead of the approaching horde. My grand-uncle was the head detective with the BPD. He drank at this bar sometimes.

Jimmy pulled open the door and said, "Get inside quick."

Twenty of piled into the bar. Jimmy slammed the door shut and threw the bolts.

Curses and kicks rained on the steel barrier. "Yes, Jimmy."

And the fight?"

"That too."

"And the race,."

"It was a matter of life or a beating."

The pounding at the door had died down.

Jimmy looked out the spyhole.

I bought him two beers as thanks.

"Go Eagles." Jimmy was class of 62.

I ordered two 'Gansetts." He clinked my glass. I had been drinking there since I was twelve and said, "Run, motherfuckers, run."

We all toasted those word and the phrase served as a joke for years to come, however to this day whenever someone says that they are from Somerville I never mention the word 'hockey' or run motherfuckers run.

It was better than way.

A Not Very August Afternoon - The Beacon Street Union

Back in 1968 the two best Boston bands were Ultimate Spinach and Beacon Street Union. My best friend and I attended several of their psychedelic Saturday concerts on Cambridge Commons near Harvard. The longhaired coeds dressed like peasants. None of the hippie girls were fat and few wore bras.

Chuckie and I hadn't been to a barbershop since the beginning of the summer. We wore beaded vests, bellbottom jeans, and Frye boots, since we thought that they made us taller and therefore look older. We lied about our age. Neither of us were lucky with the older girls, but the Cambridge Catholic girls were easy, mostly because we were Catholic school boys.

1968 was a good time to be sixteen.

The world was in revolution.

This afternoon I played several song from BSU's 2nd LP THE CLOWN DIED IN MARVIN GARDENS. The best is A Not Very August Afternoon. It'll make you feel very hippish, which is not a bad thing of a sunny Sunday afternoon.

Click on this url to hear the song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-G9Rs0YmTI

Faster Than Light Beauty

I wish for a time machine to take me back to London.

1968.

Francoise Hardy on a motorbike.

I would have had a lot of competition and even though I would have only been 16, a good time would have been had by all.

Je l'adore.

In 1968 through eternity fast than speed itself.

To hear Francoise Hardy's version of the Kinks' WHO'LL BE THE NEXT IN LINE, please go to this URL;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S31Fe6BrFy8

Early Phone Sex

In the summer of 1968 I worked in a Boston phone exchange. There were hundreds of cable banks corresponding the working numbers. My friend and I would eavesdrop on thousands of conversations. Few people said anything of importance, but one couple practically invented phone sex and spoke at the same hour every day.

One afternoon my friend wrote down the address and we drove over to Dorchester to spy onto the woman. She was an attractive brunette. She hailed a taxi.

We followed her to a motel off the Southeast Expressway. She went into second-floor room.

We drank a beer.

Ten minutes later a Valiant pulled into the parking lot. A tall man in a suit climbed the stairs and knocked on the motel room door. She opened it and they went inside.

My friend turned to me and said, "I like it better on the phone." "Me too." We drove over to the Hi-Hat Lounge. They served anyone with money.

Even sixteen year-old boys.

I Want To See Peace

In 1968 Richard Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey by campaigning for the end of the Viet-Nam War. During his inaugural speech Nixon said, "The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker." The War lasted another seven years. As many troops died under his leadership as all the previous presidents going back to Eisenhower. Even worse millions of Vietnamese civilians died along with hundreds of thousands in Laos and Cambodia and secret recording between the president and his war-criminal Secretary of State Henry Kissinger revealed Nixon's true heart, when he said, "The only place where you and I disagree ... is with regard to the bombing. You're so goddamned concerned about civilians and I don't give a damn. I don't care." Two nights ago Mitt Romney announced at the presidential debate that he wanted peace for Iran and the USA, despite having repeatedly called for stronger measures than those provided by President Obama, thus flummocking a good percentage of those stupid as a bucket of mud undecided voters that he was not going to lead us into Armageddon to save Israel. "I want to see peace." Mitt is up in the polls. He's a peacenik. But he's the same slick haired motherfuckers as that Quaker Nixon. Say anything to get where he wants to go. In other words, "I don't care."

NOTHING TO SAY by Peter Nolan Smith

Everyone in the world has a phone. I can call Fenway's mom in Thailand and Mam will pick up the phone on the other side of the world. This is a miracle, considering only twenty years ago people had to use landlines and connections between countries depended on satellites circling the globe. Now millions of cellular calls and SMS messages are sent to billions of destinations every minute, yet this Sunday no one has called me.

And I know people are not there. I can see planes and helicopters flying over Manhattan across the river. I can hear cars on Lafayette Street and smell burning meat on backyard barbecues, so I'm not Mada, Adam's dead end. Just a man without a reason to speak.

It's been over twelve hours since I've said a word. I've gone longer, for Sundays have been my traditional day of silence. Back in the last century I lived in the East Village. My apartment was small, ut comfortable. My Sundays were spent watching football or basketball, reading a book, luxuriating in the bath or all of the above. Every once in a while I'd check the phone to see there was a dial tone.

The phone was in perfect working order.

No one wanted to speak with me, until I started dating Ms. Carolina. She liked talking. I couldn't blame her. Ms. Carolina lived in a redneck community way south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Some of her neighbors entertained funny thoughts about the intermingling of races and religions.

Early Sunday service at her husband's church lasted two and a half hours. Baptists wasted the entire morning trying to save their souls. Her congregation was very advanced for the area. They believed blacks had a soul.

Around 11am the telephone would ring and Ms. Carolina would recount the preacher's ranting sermon in accent. I didn't have to say a word.

She was originally form New Jersey. Her family was Old Yankee same as half mine. We had more than those genes in common. I knew her husband. He was a gun freak. Ms. Carolina kept the conversation low and ended with the wish, "Good luck with your vow of silence."

Luck had nothing to do with my Sunday's silence, for my mouth was silted with the residue of another Saturday night drunk.

I hung up the phone. My vow was intact. My function was to listen to a woman's yearning. I was good at it.

As a junior in 1968 my girlfriend Kyla suggested that we spent the weekend on a spiritual retreat at a suburban monastery. The buxom cheerleader was feeling guilty about the stirring of her sexual feelings.

"You sure this has nothing to do with your mother." Kyla's mom was a devoted church goer same as mine.

"No, I feel something in my heart calling me to Jesus. I want you to feel it too."

"Okay." The weekend cost nothing and I was certain that the priests couldn't shake my lack of faith in God.

"I only want you to do this, because I love you." Two weeks ago Kyla had confessed that she and I had come close to sex. Our pastor had convinced the 17 year-old cheerleader that our wanton behavior was Satan's work, even though dry-humping wasn't proscribed in the Bible

"And I love you." Kyla and I had never gone all the way. Our sex was blunted by her unwillingness to be naked. I respected her wishes. My hands were not so obedient.

"I want to be pure as snow." Her skin was whiter than baby powder.

"They might drug you with LSD holy water." My best friend, Chuckie Manzi, feared losing me to the priesthood.

"I'll be okay." I had been faking my belief in God since my best friend drowned in 1960.

My mother was ecstatic to hear of the weekend. Her uncle was an arch-bishop. She had been praying for one of her four sons to answer God's calling. She never thought it would be me and on Ascension Weekend a bus rolled down our street with Kyla and fifteen other couples. My mother kissed me on the cheek and said, "Open your heart."

"I'll do my best." I looked over her shoulder. Chuckie was standing on the lawn. His eyes said good-bye forever and I got on the bus to sit next to Kyla. The bus pulled away from my house and we drove ten minutes to a wooded monastery underneath Big Blue Hill.

We were met by an equal number of priests and nuns; one for each couple.

"Purity is the one true love." The habited nun raised her hands with welcome.

"I know you are all virgins." The head priest was tall and bald. His smile beamed sanctity. "God knows you are pure and purity is the best way for you young people to show your love for God and Jesus, so you are going to be separated by sex."

"All weekend?" I was holding Kyla's hand.

"Except for prayer meetings and Mass." A young priest with a guitar motioned for us to move apart. The Nuns of Chastity escorted the girls from the monastery to a nunnery hidden by tall pines.

"See no evil." The Pastor led the boys inside a separate building. "Hear no evil."

I stifled a groan. This was going to be a long weekend.

That evening we ate beef and mashed potatoes. The meal was followed by a lengthy prayer session in the basement. The girls were on one side of the room and the boys the other, as we discussed our immortality of our souls and the temporal existence of our bodies and souls. The pastor noticed my looking at Kyla.

"Saving her soul is more important than your desire. Do you understand that?"

"Yes, Father." I loved the girl with the green eyes more than physical pleasure or so I thought in this basement.

We hit the beds early. The lights went out at nine. I heard several boys masturbating under the blankets. Two of them went to the bathroom together. Without girls we left on our own.

The next morning started with Mass. I took Holy Communion for the first time in years. After the service we ate breakfast and the nuns led the girls to a chapel. The boys sat under a tree with the guitar-playing priest.

The day was warm and the sky was free of clouds. The priest indoctrinated us young with the ways of God. I couldn't stop thinking about Kyla. The priest strummed his guitar and said, "A woman will steal your precious fluids."

He told us that women were the handmaidens of Satan. I stopped listening and started wondering what we were having for lunch. Some of the other boys confessed their sins of thought and deed. I wanted to run for the woods, but I wasn't leaving without Kyla. After dinner we listened to religious rock on the stereo. God was never far from us on this weekend.

That night I had spilled my seed twice. Other boys joined my one-handed prayer. We were scared by the flames of sin forever.

On Sunday morning the priest and nuns celebrated the ancient mass and the pastor preached about the eternal satisfaction of serving the Church. The climax of the weekend was the grand one-on-one session with a priest in the basement. He was the exorcist for the diocese. I could say a word and admitted that the love between Kyla and me was untainted by penetration. He said that the Holy Trinity would absolved our trespasses. He put his hand on my thigh. I pushed it away, then heard an electric guitar blast from the stereo in the meeting room. The priest looked up. This music was not on the program and I recognized the guitarist as Jimmy Page from the Yardbirds.

"I gotta go." I ran upstairs to find Chuckie by the stereo.

"I just got this from the record shop in Mattapan Square." He held up the cover of the Hindenburg crashing in flames. "It's led Zeppelin. Listen to this."

Chuckie turned the stereo up to 10 for DAZED AND CONFUSED.

Bass and guitar. High-pitched vocals and then the avalanche of drums.

6 minutes and 25 seconds later I went upstairs and packed my bag. Chuckie put on HOW MANY MORE TIMES and the rest of the boys joined my flight.

The priests tried to stop Chuckie from playing the album. He had a Boy Scout knife. It was more than enough to fend off the soft palms of the church. The invitees stormed across the lawn to the nunnery. The girls had heard the music and were already to go. We walked to the road. Chuckie had somehow organized enough cars for escape. He was a good friend.

None of us attended Mass after that weekend. We defied our parents' deity. Our Sundays were centered on breakfast at the local diner and I celebrated the Sabbath with simple words.

"Bacon and eggs over easy."

Kyla and I made it as far at the week before the Senior Prom. Our love was a death sentence to my ambition to become a writer. We broke up and she married Chuckie. They made a good couple.

My present vow of silence has endured into the darkness of night. I don't have to be anywhere until tomorrow, but I feel like a beer and there's no where better to have a beer in Fort Greene than Frank's Lounge with the lovely bartender Rosa. She's a girl who doesn't like silence, then again most of them don't.

A Not Very August Afternoon - The Beacon Street Union

Back in 1968 the two best Boston bands were Ultimate Spinach and Beacon Street Union. My best friend and I attended several of their psychedelic Saturday concerts on Cambridge Commons near Harvard. The longhaired coeds dressed like peasants. None of the hippie girls were fat and few wore bras. Chuckie and I hadn't been to a barbershop since the beginning of the summer. We wore beaded vests, bellbottom jeans, and Frye boots, since we thought that they made us taller and therefore look older. We lied about our age. Neither of us were lucky with the older girls, but the Cambridge Catholic girls were easy, mostly because we were Catholic school boys. It was a good time to be sixteen.

This afternoon I played several song from BSU's 2nd LP THE CLOWN DIED IN MARVIN GARDENS. The best is A Not Very August Afternoon. It'll make you feel very hippish, which is not a bad thing of a sunny Sunday afternoon.

Click on this url to hear the song. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sm0EEZf3yg&feature=related

1968 Olympic Moment

In 1968 I ran the 440 and 220 for my high school. My best times of 54 seconds and 28 seconds weren't even close to my hero Tommie Smith and I dreamed that one day I might get below 50 seconds in the 440 and 26 in the 220. Tommie Smith ran a blistering 200 meter race in Mexico City to break the world record with a time of 19.83 seconds. Australia's Peter Norman came in second with the USA's John Carlos winning the bronze. At the medal ceremony the three medal winners stood on the podium. At the first bars of the national anthem Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised gloved fists to protest the treatment of blacks in America and Peter Norman wore an Olympic Project for Human Rights badges to criticize White Australia. The trio left the stadium to boos and Tommie Smith said afterward, "If I win, I am American, not a black American. But if I did something bad, then they would say I am a Negro. We are black and we are proud of being black. Black America will understand what we did tonight." Tommie Smith is my hero to this day and that moment sticks in my mind as strongly as the Tank man in Beijing. Smith and Carlos were casket bearers at Norman's funeral. There were three that day and one day we will be free. The painting is by Tristam of Paris' Steaming Musselemn. He is my hero too.

METHUSALAH'S MAD DASH by Peter Nolan Smith

My good friend Marge lived a long life. The nonagenarian attributed her good health to a rigid exercise regime and abstemious diet as well as her many decades of physical prowess as the athletic director for several all-women's collages in New England.

Even into her late-80s Marge's ping-pong game was unbeatable. Gravityless drop shots, wicked spin serves, and a power slam guaranteed her a winning streak against me that spanned decades and I thought I would never beat her, but at the age of 91 Madge suffered a stroke. Not so severe as to damage her thought process, yet she had lost a little off her game and I stopped over her house on Watchic Pond to challenged my friend one last time.

The game was to 15.

And I beat her by one.

My niece considered my gloating over Marge 'bush', then again my niece has never beaten me. Only problem is that I'm well over the half-century club and today I read off senior athletes are still competing against each other in a variety of track and field events. I had to ask myself, "Could I beat a 90 year-old in the 100 meter dash?"

Current record by a 95 year-old was 22 seconds .

Back in Brooklyn I went to the local track and paced out 100 meters. My friend AP had a stop watch. I talked him into officiating my race against time.

"You know that you have a thirty year advantage on 90 year-olds." AP was younger than me by ten years. He had refused my every challenge for a race.

"I have to start somewhere." The previous week I had beaten his eight year-old daughter in Fort Greene Park by ten yards. This was a much more serious enterprise.

I leaned forward in a racing crouch imitating Tommie Smith, who was my favorite runner in the 60s. He won a gold medal for the 400 meters at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. This race was infamous for his black power salute on the medal podium. The sprinter had to be about in his late 60s, but I was racing a clock and not my hero.

I called out to AP at the end of the track.

"Ready, set, go."

I dashed from the starting line with the finish in sight even without my glasses.

I counted the seconds. 50 yards in 8 seconds. 75 in 15. 100 in 20.

My friend checked the watch.

"21 seconds."

I hadn't beaten the best of the 90 year-olds and I was elated with my victory.

Next stop is against the 80 year-olds and for this contest I will train like a motherfucker, because some of those old geezers are cheating with steroids. I will use none, because I'm pure as the wind-driven slush. No asterisks will mar my bio or race record. At least not unless I lose and then it's every man for himself.

Perfection 1968

From1/10/2010

I was 16 in 1968. My favorite band was the Rolling Stones. The year they released BEGGARS BANQUET.

Rolling Stones - No expectations / You can't always get what you want

Live.

"I saw her at the reception. A glass of wine in her hand. I knew she was going to meet her connection."

Classic.

I'm nearing 60 now. The Stones are still #1 and this YouTube entry shows why.