Shine on you crazy diamond.

My sister, Mary, pictured above as Annette Funicello, died last week. We buried her today.

She was a great beauty, like some classic rose. She was funny and loyal and true.

I pray there is a god or at least some divine justice that compensates for mental illness. That you immediately move to another stage on the karmic wheel. A time when the diamond of the soul shines bright and clear, a time of clarity and brilliance and peace.

I love you, Mary. Godspeed.

Flotsam and Jetsam

In maritime law, flotsam applies to wreckage or cargo left floating on the sea after a shipwreck. Jetsam applies to cargo or equipment thrown overboard from a ship in distress and either sunk or washed ashore. The common phrase flotsam and jetsam is now used loosely to describe any objects found floating or washed ashore.

Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

Like anyone else who grew up in the area,
I have a history on or near the beach.

Lets start with the Nahant Beach House.
A huge Mediterranean like fixture on the
beach until the late 60's. It served as a
bathhouse with separate quarters for the sexes with changing booths, showers and tanning areas. It also served as a Metropolitan District Commission police station with a small lockup.

As kids we would come here and for a dime we would change in the booths and run through the tunnel under the street to the beach. It was a strange place with old duffers rambling around nude with a formality that was foreign to me. The showers were always a treat after the ocean. It was a habit I cultivated often swimming at the beach until 1 then riding up to the fresh water of the Lynn reservoir.

1963 July Richie, Gold and myself sample from
Gold's family liquor cabinet.
Gold was in the Sea Cadet Drill Team as were we, and lived
in Swampscott. I drank two tall glasses of scotch and milk.
A mistake. It ended on Kings Beach pictured below.

Gold was pretty pissed that he
might get in trouble because of me,
so he hustled us out of his house and


into Richie Dads 1961 Ford Galaxy.
Where I promptly puked.
Now, Rich was pissed too and he dumped me with Gold down by Doans at the Swampscott end of the beach. Gold was half drunk and pissed. I was thoroughly drunk. He started beating the shit out of me in righteous indignation. I remember him kneeling on me and choosing his shots. Eventually, he tired and left; I staggered around a bit annoying folks and then started calling the police on myself from a Call Box right on that pole there at the top of the staircase. They came and I had my first protective custody back at the bath house/jail.

I was there all afternoon, a Sunday. It was a family ritual to go en famile to some exotic destination, Kiddie Land on Route 1 or a "ride". My father came and collected me. I remember him knocking me out, or maybe I passed out. It is not clear. I made the paper. It was my first drunk.

But not my last. Bob C. and I spent my first night home from Nam on Lynn Beach, on the seawall with a quart of Vodka and many orange sodas. He was back from Nam also. We talked tons on how fucked up the Army/Marine Corps were. But not much about Nam. We both got shitfaced. I ended up crawling across the Lynnway to Bruce H's apartment and crashing. Bob did his Penguin imitation up and down the beach that night. We didn't have a clue.

It was right here, beneath the wall.

Down the far end by the ramp. We sat and drank and avoided what we had went through. I knew Bob forever. He was one of my first memories. He left Corbett Junior High in the 8th grade to work in a shoe shop. His brother had a Buick spray painted "Half Fast". Gloria , his sister, taught me how to ride a two wheeler. When I got out of the service I followed him into the GE. He nailed two of my girlfriends, that I know of, and probably a few more. I escorted him to get a lever action deer rifle once while he was tripping. I had to extracted him from being unable to explain, adequately, why he marked 'Alien' on the application. I had to act like his translator as he was babbling in Serbo-Croat, I think.

I got married in 1978 May. Bob was my Best Man. He was tripping.
I've lost track with him now. Maybe dead, maybe still in the GE.
Via Con Dios, Motherfucker.




Before I got married I rented what would be my finest bachelor pad. The above swank edifice, 285 Lynn Shore Drive, 2nd floor south corner. Right across from the Atlantic, on a clear day you could see Portugal. Well not quite. It was funky then, apartments not condos. I loved it. I biked to Nahant for exercise or floated in the surf right out my window. It was a great place, I sometime wish I were back there.

Hanoville

The Freeborne Blues Band was situated in Allston, MA on Hano Street. This band played local colleges and bars and occasionally the Cambridge Common in Cambridge, MA on Sunday afternoons in the late 60's , early 70's. There was some sort of magic, some white boy dues paying accomplished through copious drug use and, thus, entrance into the hallowed World of Blues without being Black. Nobody in this Band was 'down' so some did the best they could with what they could cop in Dudley Square. How could you possibly play the blues without knowing heroin? But I digress.

Hanoville as it was called was the home for a few of the band members. I went there with Bill M. who I met through Paul C, another musician, who I met through Lynne H. a Lynn English High hippie girl I picked up on the side of the road by Wonderland Station MTA. These were the creative and smart kids who I had nothing to do with in High School as I was stuck in St. Marys and stayed with the neighborhood guys. I had some cache as a vet, more as a anti-war poster boy than anything else, as a tangible reason not to go to Nam.

Hano was a place to get fucked up. I remember vividly leaving the 2nd staircase on Nahant Beach after dropping acid and piling into my VW for Hano. Johnny G. from Sicily, Joey L., Bill and Sherry I think. Things went spendidly until the toll at the Mystic River Bridge. The car stalled and I just wandered away in the rain. I wanted to look over the bridge and into the water below, so I just left the car and walked through traffic to the railing in the rain. It seemed like the 'right thing to do'. While I was on my nature walk, someone got the car started and I was collected and demoted from driver to shotgun and off we went. At Hano the boys had constructed a large space ship built of cardboard boxes complete with controls and crawl spaces and had a couple of levels. It was very detailed and a great place to wile away your hallucinations.

All manner of drug was consumed there. Johnny G. from Sicily, once chopped a hole through the basement wall to the adjoining house while smoking animal tranquilizer, PCP from an engineering student at Cornell U, because he could "hear" the women's desire for him through the walls. The HA from Lowell used it as a party spot when in town. ZZ Top partied there. A couple of Harvard Square girls, dubbed the Emco Foam Twins, showed up for festive occassions.

But he band broke up, as all bands are want to do. The members from Hano reconstituted themselves into Hot to Trot which owed more to glam bands and Bowie than Muddy Waters. The boys morphed into big hair. The lease dried up for Hano and things shifted back to Lynn and a practise space on lower Washington Street in a sign shop owned by a friend of the band.



Original paintings by Angelo Aversa