AS THE WORLD TURNS -- THE CASTRO

In the Fifties in Portland, OR, when I first began to be old enough to travel around the city alone via bus, I was always careful to sit on the side of the bus where I could see the old warehouses where gypsies lived.  The doorways were draped so it was impossible to see in, but the women often sat on chairs along the sidewalk.  Darkly beautiful, wearing bright flowing gowns, they might have been up to something nefarious since they were in the shady part of town, but to me they only represented glamour in the original sense of magic.

Our house was near the corners of NE 15th and Alberta.  In my childhood it was a European immigrant neighborhood: Swedish bakery, Scots doctor, Greek grocery store, and so on.  Alberta, of course, was named for Queen Victoria’s daughter.  After I had grown up and left, the neighborhood turned black and the street I had walked to elementary school, Sumner, was considered a gang street where cops went carefully.  At night there was shooting.  The shops and the apartments on top of them deteriorated.  

Then gays and hispanics moved in.  Now Alberta is an arts and bodega street.  My mother lived in the same house until 1999.  A cousin of mine lives up 15th a few blocks, across the street from the doctor’s house my paternal grandparents bought when they came back to the States from Manitoba.

So when doing research for another project, I came across the history of the Castro District in San Francisco, less well-known than the “hippie” Haight-Asbury, I was intrigued.  I’ve always been interested in enclaves and bubbles of culture, where they come from, how they morph, and where they go.  This applies to both Valier and the Blackfeet Rez — it’s part of their charm, their historical flavor.

All-male Miners' Ball

I was surprised to learn that in the 18th century the area was Russian.  In 1809-1917 Finland, then a satellite of Russia, used the settlement to serve merchant and naval fleets with a heavy Finnish participation.  Finns are tough, practical, and free-thinking, with the liberal wing of the Lutheran church overlapping enough with Unitarians that the clergy serving Montana’s Finn communities hired Unitarian ministers.  Many Finns settled in SF during the Gold Rush.  Finnish Club No. 1 was established in the Castro District in 1882.  A bathhouse was built about 1910.  After the disastrous 1906 earthquake and fire, many Finns moved to Berkeley.

A decade or so after WWII when many families had left because of prosperity that produced suburbs, two new concentrations formed.  I’ll directly quote from Wikipedia:  “The U.S. military dishonorably discharged thousands of gay servicemen from the Pacific theater in San Francisco during World War II (early 1940s) because of their sexuality. Many settled in the bay area, San Francisco and Sausalito. In San Francisco an established gay community had begun in numerous areas including Polk Street, the Tenderloin and south of Market Street. The 1950s saw large amounts of families moving out of the Castro to the suburbs in what became known as the "White flight", leaving open large amounts of real estate and creating attractive locations for gay purchasers. By 1963, the Castro's first gay bar was opened called the "Missouri Mule”.

This is one of the unintended and rather unacknowledged consequences of WWII, another attempt on the part of government to control the nature of populations.  The Navy’s failure to understand that gays can be tough enlisted men meant that when were surprised by individual examples, the gay men were pushed out.  Since they were clustered on the mid-California coast, they magnetized into a functional community.  

A parallel example might be the Native Americans who formed communities along the coast in order to work in the factories that supported the war effort.  A second set of Native Americans arrived in cities when Eisenhower tried to extinguish the reservations by sending the people to cities, but not supporting them there, so that they ended up in ghettos, making common cause with blacks and hispanics who had also come to build ships and planes, but were at loose ends when the war ended.  The groups had been mostly rural, which made them sympathetic to each other.  And they were all stigmatized.  Black Power taught Red Power.

“Beat culture erupted in San Francisco in the 1950s with a rebellion against middle class values and thus became aligned with homosexuality and other lifestyles not part of mainstream culture. The beat poets who relocated to San Francisco from New York flourished in San Francisco's permissive atmosphere, and some like Allen Ginsberg were openly gay.”  This literary dimension easily merged with academic study of gays, called “queer studies”.

Being gay was neither rural nor urban, and not related to skin color, but, in addition to natural sexual preference, came out of military background, working-class.  Not so much the officer elites.  Wikipedia:  “Some of the culture of the late 1970s included what was termed the "Castro clone", a mode of dress and personal grooming that exemplified butchness and masculinity of the working-class men in construction—tight denim jeans, black or sand combat boots, tight T-shirt or, often, an Izod crocodile shirt, possibly a red plaid flannel outer shirt, and usually sporting a mustache or full beard—in vogue with the gay male population at the time. . .”

Cross-dressing exploded into a show biz performance art that might or might not signal trans-sexuality.  Presentation as advertising was the idea, in the sense of big birds with splendid plumage.  Today people can change physical gender.

Alfred Laliberté's "Les petits Baigneurs," 1915 restored 1992 at Maisonneuve public baths, Montreal, Quebec

“Public” baths exist where people have no bathrooms at home, as in immigrant tenements, and were meant as a public health measure.  Urchins were made to bath naked to so they could be checked for sores and bugs.  With an all-male gay community used to communal showers, baths were a natural venue.

Then came HIV/AIDS and a new kind of war, just as deadly as combat.  The men rallied to comfort each other, but despair and terror crept through lives.  Still, it didn’t extinguish the identity of the area as a special community that has now expanded to LGBTX, people who are in solidarity to defend their right to be different.  But then they had to defend their right to be the same, as in marriage and raising children.

The next challenge is upon them now: a form of “gentrification” which is not focused on reclaiming the graciousness of the housing, but rather on crowding in tech workers for the cyber-industry.  The world is based on change, each new phase displacing the old.

I watch all this from my celibate redoubt much in the way that I watched the gypsies from the bus, a kind of sympathetic outsider.  Unitarian congregations often share buildings with the Metropolitan Church.  They are not monsters to me.  But they do have a bit of a dark edge.  Like military people.  Or rez folks.

TOM SHEEHAN WRITES ABOUT WAR among other things

Tom Sheehan

I might be the only person in Montana who knows Tom Sheehan, so I feel obligated to fill in this blank.    He’s very American, a veteran of the Korean War, and a long-time employee of Raytheon in Saugus, Massachusetts.  He wins all sorts of prizes but the Big Five publishers take no notice.  Somehow he manages to write in an old-fashioned plot vs. character way while all the time being curiously modern.  Hard to explain.  He writes about shooting, horses and bad guys -- all with extraordinary names and detail -- but he also manages a poetic grasp of detail and landscape.  He doesn’t stay in categories very well, but once he chooses his “method,” he knows what he’s doing.

So here’s what he did with one short story.  The title is “Aces and Eights” which is the hand of cards that the frontier gambler Will Bill Hickok was holding at the time of his death.  Bob Scriver did a sculpture and so have others. It’s kind of an American folk tale.

by Gib Singleton

In this version the main character is Sergeant Charlie Twohig who so loves to gamble that the cards are like an extension of his hands.  Hear the word echoes?  I think they’re rooted in Sheehan’s brain.  Some people don’t like the Hickok/Twohig reminder.  Writing workshop people sometimes classify alliteration with comma errors -- to be extirpated at once!  (I think it’s part of the Hemingway obsession.)  Nor do they appreciate the metaphor joke about hands of cards in hands who play cards so much that the cards becomes extensions of hands.  But this story is woven out of “tells,” the little giveaways of tick and gesture that a gambler can’t help happening but which are very helpful to a really “ace” player.

Tom Sheehan

The plot points come along like cards coming down.  The men are in a convoy of LST’s, frying under the sun, trying not to think about Ceylon, their ultimate destination.  An early scene is Twohig manipulating Corporal Tally Biggs into cutting cards for stakes.  His hands literally itch and he has a kind of “high” that he attributes to the heat but also to the prospect of a winning streak.  The heat is so intense that when a sweat-soaked soldier leans forward, there is a little explosion of steam from his back.  Biggs asks Private Jake Breda whether he has ever felt so intensely excited that he was sick from it.  Breda ("breed her") says only on his wedding night.  (This is an old-fashioned story.)  A little thread of sex weaves in.

Corporal Tally Biggs comes to sit by Charlie, who calls him “Twig”.  Twig suggests that without his ever-present cards, Charlie would seem naked.  Twohig agrees and gets him to cut cards though Biggs has already lost a lot of money to him.  Biggs is obsessing about sharks in the Red Sea but doesn’t twig to card sharps.

Having had enough fun with Biggs, Charlie moves to Captain Redmond.  The gambler has nothing but contempt for every one -- they’re all losers.  Redmond is ugly, stuffy, wearing a tie in the heat.  Twohig “accidentally” kicks his “box.”  But Redmond has aces in his pocket, letters from Twohig’s wife.  She clearly loves her mad gambler husband in spite of being much superior to him, but out of concern for him, she has betrayed him.  Redmond “has never had, owned or partaken of a woman for any extended period of time, though he knew how deep the hooks of a good, true love went.”  And he falls in love with his fancy of what Twohig’s wife is like:  “big of bust and hip, blond hair, bue eyes, skin like buttermilk, and tremendously good in bed.”  

Korean Graveyard Registration

Gradually we realize these men are not going into combat.  They are a “Graveyard Registration” company meant to find and ceremonially bury the dead, even the ones of their own company who die in the course of performing the task of search and burial.  Victims of ghastly torture need to be buried and the sight of them sticks to the insides of one’s eye, even in sleep.  Another writer might have gone into detail about rot and so on, but Sheehan only gives a few nasty little anecdotes.

Sheehan knows that the real story is in the uncomfortable relationships among the men, misunderstanding each other, keeping secrets, and building up hatreds and obsessions while somehow struggling forward with their assignment.  So the greedy gambler, who suddenly hits a period of good luck he would not be able to believe except that his health seems to be losing a long battle with tropical parasites and that interferes with his thinking.  He is so resented that his lethargy is interpreted as gold-bricking so he is pushed on and on.

This is genre writing -- for the people.  This is the sort of story that lends itself to telling around a campfire, oral literature.  But that would lose the little trills of poetry.  (“A licorice sensation ran through Charlie Twohig.”  I’m still thinking about that one!  Sweet, dark and a little funky -- twisted?)  But I’m thinking that all these hot-wire boundaries:  prose/poetry, written/oral, are just more academic distinctions from workshops.  When such fences are disregarded by writers with real skill and a strong sense of plot, they become powerful.

Part of the surprise in this story is how it all turns out in the end when all the little clues and tells pay off.  I won’t give it away, but in the end Charlie Twohig is no match for Redmond.

Tom Sheehan

From “Epic Cures: A Collection of Stories by Tom Sheehan.” (2005)  Press 53, PO Box 30314, Winston-Salem, NC  27130

I came to know Sheehan by reading his short stories on “Rope and Wire,” a website that refuses to give up the Westerns of the Fifties when the veterans were trying to find their feet.  Sheehan has almost 400 stories on this site: every one of them in the Western template.  Something unjust and terrible is happening, a hero with a clever name decides to do something about it, he faces impossible odds but wins in some improbable way.  The site owner doesn’t allow sex, which discouraged me, but Sheehan deftly leaves sex out.  I thought it was his taboo, but as I look at this collection, I see it was not.

http://www.ropeandwire.com/authors-spotlight:  Sheehan served in the 31st Infantry Regiment, Korea 1951 and graduated from Boston College in 1956. His print/eBooks are Epic Cures; Brief Cases, Short Spans (from Press 53); A Collection of Friends; From the Quickening (from Pocol Press).

Books from Milspeak Publishers include Korean Echoes, 2011, nominated for a Distinguished Military Award and The Westering, 2012, nominated for a National Book Award. 

His newest eBooks, from Danse Macabre/Lazarus/Anvil, are  Murder at the Forum, an NHL mystery novel, Death of a Lottery Foe, Death by Punishment and An Accountable Death. 

His work is in Rosebud (6 issues), The Linnet’s Wings (7 issues),Literary Orphans (4 issues including the Ireland issue), Ocean Magazine (8 issues), Frontier Tales (9 issues), Provo Canyon Review (2 issues), Western Online Magazine (9 issues).

His work has appeared in the following anthologies: Nazar Look, Eastlit, 3 A.M. Magazine, Appalachian Voices,  Jake’s Monthly Recollections, Lady Jane’s Miscellany, Loch Raven Review, Rusty Nail, Red Dirt Review, Erzahlungen, R&W Kindle #2 and; 4, Peripheral Sex, Storybrewhouse, Wheelhouse Magazine, Home of the Brave, Green Lantern Press, River Poets Journal , Writers Write and A Tall Ship, a Star, and Plunder.

He has 24 Pushcart nominations, and 375 stories on Rope and Wire Magazine. A new collection of short stories, In the Garden of Long Shadows, has gone to press with solid pre-release reviews and will be issued by Pocol Press this summer. 

Tom Sheehan, the family years

APOCALYPTIC ECO-THRILLER: "North Sister" by Barry Greer

So are you yearning for Ed Abbey?  I’ve got another writer for you.  He might also please fans of Martin Murie’s eco-mysteries, but Martin was a kinder, gentler guy.  This is tough stuff.  Good clean prose, Machiavellian plotting, and a bunch of dangerous women who speak Spanish.  Apocalyptic enviro stuff.  When reviewing previous work by Greer that he insists is satirical, I’ve complained that his satire is too realistic for me to see that he's mocking.  This is different.  It responds to the times, man, by going over the top.  

So why while I read do I keep hearing the theme from “Mash” ?  Wasn’t that Korea?  This is supposed to be post-Vietnam.  But the cutting edge now is Afghanistan and will soon be Syria, probably chemical warfare.  Maybe relating it to the chemical atrocities we are willingly doing to ourselves by contaminating our land and water with strange molecules meant to be medicine, pesticide or fertilizer. 

Tales like Greer’s “North Sister” depend on two factors:  the emotional force pushing the author -- he writes from his molten core -- and the competence of the detail and plot.  Both are here.  Many of the ecological or at least nature-based mysteries, like the series written by Nevada Barr, are sort of cool -- poised.  They know the territory, they solve the mystery, they overcome danger, but they don’t go ballistic.  J.J. Abrams had better get an option on this story.  Green screen would make it possible -- forget doing much more than panoramas on a Cascade mountain where the weather moves fast.  

Greer claims there is subtext and, of course, there is.  He notes that others may see more than he does, and, of course, we do.  It’s dark at the heart of a mountain.  Vulcan was a cripple with an unfaithful wife.

Here’s the plot:  “The religious nuts will kill the military nuts, and the military nuts will kill the religious nuts."  The tale is told skillfully, with tough, no-fat prose and convincing detail about equipment and climbing.  This is a worthy message and he nails it.  The exasperating question is why junk gets published by the mainstream, and why there is no reliable way for someone “unknown” to get their deserving work out.  Murie's novels weren't picked up by a publisher either.  What strategy -- since calling in National Guard and holding a gun everyone is not practical -- can an author pursue?  I mean, aside from attacking listservs.

Greer came to my attention -- and that of a lot of others -- when he suddenly started throwing grenades into the quiet academic library of environmental writing that is the listserv called “Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.”  ASLE, for short.  He was using the strategy of his novel -- confrontation -- on people who were not zealots, neither military or particularly religious, or even the spearhead of the current movements, which operate on the level of regulation, boundaries, and negotiation.  So many of the fierce tigers of yesterday have become pussycats.

I had a little sympathy.  As it turned out, he is in Corvallis where I have relatives and his story is somewhat like mine, in that he has folded a working class emergency response experience (firefighting) into a college education and writing.  We are both post-Christian, but he comes from a Baptist clergy family.  When he was recovering from cancer -- which was cured by nearly killing him with poison -- he relied on the mountain called the North Sister as a pin-up and “Mash” as an attitude.  

So ASLE threw him off the listserv.  By now they may have thrown me off as well.  Build the wall higher, make the firewall thicker, put your fingers in your ears.  When asked straight out what he wanted and why ASLE, Greer went silent. But he did send out pdf’s to selected people, me among them.  If I invest a lot of time and thought into reading someone else’s writing, I post reviews.  This is the third.  I doubt there will be more, though I enjoyed the books and will finish reading what I have.  It’s just that I have my own projects that never appear on this blog -- have no relevance.

The other reason I’m stopping the reviews is that I do not collaborate, I do not indulge, I do not do puffery.  I’m a tough grader.  And I’m not made curious by hints at secrets or scandals.  I hope Greer has success with his writing -- if that’s what he’s after -- but I’m not going to align myself with him or take directions from him.  It may be that ASLE throws me off the listserv as collateral damage but I saw that possibility in the beginning.  When people get embroiled in such internal squabbles, it confuses and weakens the larger movement.  If reviews are helpful, three are enough.

My own blog is a public voice, something like running a magazine or a writing a column.  I do it happily because it’s five-finger exercises, but my real life is something else.  Like Greer, I’ve been in many settings and borne similar disappointments, but my reaction is different.  I recognize the necessity and justice of his rage; I see it and don’t condemn it.  I don’t share it.

Archibald Macleish has Nickles say in “J.B.” :

"If God is God He is not good,
If God is good He is not God;
Take the even, take the odd,
I would not sleep here if I could
Except for the little green leaves in the wood
And the wind on the water."  

The human dilemma is that we dearly love this planet but seem only to be able to protect it through polarization and violence.   “God” does no better, an issue we call “theodicy.”   If He's GOD, why doesn't he FIX it????  The solution for me is to see the continuousness of all existence, that we are all interacting dynamic coded processes who somehow have the ability to know that it’s happening and create stories about it.  Therefore, I take it that a worthy enterprise is to expand one’s consciousness and to shape truthful words about what we see.  I take this as the core “higher” purpose of ASLE quite apart from creating careers and empires or reflecting on relevant writing.  

Well done, words (and images) can be intense enough to change the culture, the only real way to save the world.  You may remember that J.B.'s wife cannot kill herself because there is a forsythia blooming at the end of the bridge she was going to leap off.

Screaming about injustices is not enough.  There are too many of them and they are often in opposition to each other.  Liberal enclaves where people congratulate themselves on their irreproachable and terribly aesthetic opinions are no better.  Eco-mysteries are all the rage now and Greer was there early -- 24 years ahead of the pack.  But as the apostles said to Jesus after the reincarnation,  “What have you done for us LATELY?”  (Preacher’s joke.)  

"North Sister" is a young man's book.  What would you write about sowing dragon teeth now, Barry?

“There is no dusk to be, 

There is no dawn that was, 

Only there's now, and now, 

And the wind in the grass.” 

 -- Archibald MacLeish

“North Sister” is a first novel published in three 1990-1991 issues of The Climbing Art, printed by FreeSolo Press, owned by David Mazel, now chair of the Adams State College English Department in Alamosa, Colorado.  Greer served as contributing editor for a time. Now "North Sister" is on Amazon along with Greer's other work.