Doug Draime, US

 

 

Free Verse   from Rock 'n Roll Jizz" (Propaganda Press)   Molly’s Place   Back when bebop had overcome me and rockabilly was not that far behind, in the summer of my 15th year on this earth, Charlie and I spent most of our afternoons down at Molly’s place: a “colored” whore house on the other side of the B&O railroad tracks in Vincennes, Indiana. We’d sit under her big sycamore tree listening to the jukebox sounds of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Billie Holiday, and Lead Belly coming from her screened in porch, where her johns waited for the pretty young black girls. Oh, what soul jarring sounds they were! But at school, we both cringed under the desks after films on the H-bomb, that were shown between films on dental hygiene. What tooth decay had to do with total annihilation of the human race, I have yet to understand. I would much rather have been down at Molly’s with Charlie listening to the throbbing sounds of real life. Molly spoke to us only twice, though she must’ve passed us a 100 times. We were always trying to melt into the tree. “What you boys doin’ out here?”, she asked. I told her we were just listening to the music. She laughed. Her laugh was strong and open. The only other time she spoke, was when she was fuming at one of the girls inside. She stormed down the steps of the house and down the walk passing us behind the tree. “Hope music is all you boys hearin’.” One day that 15th summer, Charlie died in a fall from his bike, head first, onto a concrete slab, that his mother hung the clothes out to dry over. His brother, a few days before, had found Charlie and I sitting under that sycamore tree. He yelled at us about “niggers” and disease. Charlie just blinked and followed him home. My dad, drunk one day, asked me where I was spending my afternoons. I could do nothing but lie. A few days later at the funeral, I helped carry Charlie’s casket; a pallbearer for a weird white kid like me, who liked music and young black girls. The next day after the funeral, I was back at Molly’s sitting under the tree. She came out smiling sadly and handed me a plate of the best peanut butter cookies I’ve ever eaten. I ate four of the ten cookies in honor of Charlie much later that night, as I listened to Little Richard over the radio from Nashville. I rocked out, moving into my darkened room in a frenzy ... with tears I am not ashamed of, and with laughter that was like the tooth decay and the bomb, something else I will never understand.     On Elvis Presley’s Birthday   Snow is falling heavy in Oregon, right now, as it was doing in Indiana that day when I was 13, when I first heard Elvis sing “That’s All Right, Mama” at Joe’s Record Shop on 2nd street. The snow then was in near blizzard portions, as I stood inside the store listening, and watching through the storefront window, enormous flakes falling and covering the sidewalk, street and cars like a thick blanket being weaved. . But Presley disappointed me when I saw his picture on the sleeve that the record was in. I had heard him singing before over the radio from a station in Nashville and he sounded like a black man to me. Elvis ain’t no name for a white man! Though, as I continued to listen to him, a certain kind of pride grew in me, for all of the mixed breeds of southern and southern mid-western white boys like ourselves, locked-up in one form or another of grey and dingy poverty, living and dying in all of our ‘heartbreak hotels’. Now, 20 years after his death it seems like the whole world, like the Colonel, is selling him like a whore, pimping him in the lobbies of crass, cheap merchandise. But back then it wasn’t like that. I carried that 45 RPM record home, like it was a rare and priceless treasure. Knowing within me it was a sign, a signal of change in me, in music, in the world at large, in the universe of perpetual movement and uncertainty. I knew it was real revolution. Something was established that would change everything forever. Today, when I walked to my mailbox in the snow, I saw my footrpints there, but on that day when I was 13, I wouldn’t have been surprised to have looked and seen only snow.   Featured in the Current Book Fair:  Rock 'n Roll Jizz (Propaganda Press)   About Doug Draime, US   Doug Draime has been a presence in the 'underground' literary movement since the late 1960's. His most recent books in print are: For A Dream Ended  (Kendra Steiner Editions), Los Angeles Terminal: Poems 1971-1980  (Covert Press), and Rock 'n Roll Jizz  (Propaganda Press). Draime was awarded PEN grants in 1987 and 1991. He was nominated for five Pushcart Prizes in the last three years. He currently lives and writes in Ashland, Oregon.