The Singing Cowboy from Brooklyn

In 1963, my first wife and I uprooted our lives from Berkeley and moved to New York City where we found a cozy garret apartment at the corner of Christopher and Gay streets in Greenwich Village.  We situated ourselves on the fringes of the folk music scene portrayed more gloomy than it was in the Coen brothers film, "Inside Llewyn Davis."

In the evenings after boring day jobs, we went to hear performances at Gerde's Folk City or to the Bitter End where I saw Woody Allen open for the Terriers.  And on Sundays we paraded around the fountain in Washington Square Park where the amateur folkies gather to display their talents.

bar next door to the Gaslight

I'm not sure where we met Jack Elliott, whether at the Gaslight or the Kettle of Fish next door where Phil Ochs presided over a folk salon.  But one night he needed a place to sleep and we offered our couch.  The next day he left before we got up, leaving behind his big Martin guitar. Later he returned on his motorcycle and took me on a odyssey to see the big sailing ships that had gathered in the harbor that season.

I last saw Jack backstage at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival.  I'd been working for a radio-TV trade publication and wrote a series of articles about folk music on TV, the hootenanny craze and the banning of Pete Seeger for his political views.  It got me press passes and a front row seat for the headliners, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, along with Seeger and Peter, Paul and Mary.  It was the year before Dylan caused a scandal by bringing an electric guitar.

We moved to London in the fall.  I wrote about American television programs shown in England for a magazine guide, but I wanted to expand my writing horizons.  Learning that Jack had made it big in England before return to the U.S., I pitched a story about his European experience to Sing Out! Magazine, the Bible of the folk scene.  They bought the idea and I spent the next few months research Jack's footprint in London and on the continent with his friends.  I was pleased when the story came out, and reading it over now 49 years later I think it holds up.

Ramblin' Jack Elliott, by Bill Yaryan, Sing Out!, Nov. 1965, pps 25-28

Walk down any railroad track these days and you may well find a rambling folksinger bound for some unknown glory.  Unlike the earlier rambler who traveled by necessity in search of work and food, this wanderer is searching by choice for hunger.

Greenwich Village

The new ramblers, usually some of respectable urban families, glorify the life of "hard traveling" lived by Wood Guthrie.  Moved by Woody's fame, they see the same experiences that Woody suffered and sang about.

The new rambler is usually an imitation, and an inadequate one at that.  He cries hunger with a full stomach, pleads poor with money in the bank.  If he becomes an entertainer, and this is usually his motivation, his aimless wandering leads to hypocrisy and exhibitionalism.

There is only one Woody Guthrie, a solitary genius, and the new ramblers would do well to follow the example of the one folksinger0rambler who, because of and in spire of his outright Guthrie imitation, manages to create his own identity.  A carbon copy of the fabled Oakie did not appear, because the man was sensitive to Woody's real message.  The man's name is Jack Elliott.

"Where we see Jack on the stage now," said Pete Seeger, "he is Jack and no longer an imitation of Woody.  He's proven that it's possible to learn an idiom and a style one was not born in, but came to love later in life, and he's proven also that you can emerge from this period of imitation into being genuinely creative on your own, something that needs proving in this modern world where there's so much confusion among young people as to the value of imitating between the value of just being yourself."

Alan Lomax believes Jack "has become one of the few young urban singers who can realistically claim to be a folksinger in the sense that he belongs to a clear-cut and well-defined tradition which he handles in the manner of a true folk artist."

Eric Von Schmidt

Eric Von Schmidt was perceptive enough to see Jack's personal development in 1955 six years before it was recognized by the American public.  "The word had gone around for some time that he had actually become Woody," Eric said.  But when he heard Jack sing Blind Lemo Jefferson's "Black Snake Moan," -- "it was magnificent, perfect, and Jack Elliott.  I felt somewhere Oakie had met Negro and he was the fruit of the coupling.  Jesse Fuller had something to do with it, and God knows what all else, but the Guthrie imitator was dead and Jack was born."

Only recently would Jack admit he no longer need hide himself under a black Stetson.  The Stetson would stay -- it was now a part of him -- but the necessity for costumed escape was over.  "Jack Elliott started he in the States," he told an English interviewer.  "People over there are so cynical.  They'd just laugh their heads off at the idea of a kid from Brooklyn singing cowboy songs.  So I invented this Oklahoma thing to keep 'em quiet.  Said I was born on a ranch."

Although confessing his origins, Jack still could not believe he was no longer an imitation. "He remains unconvinced of his wonderful validity," said a worried friend, and unconvinced that Jack Elliott -- part mimic, part memory -- is an original blend.

Woody Guthrie

Jack was twenty, living by his wits in Greenwich Village, and Woody, at thirty-nine, was near the end of his working life, when they met in 1951.  The glamour and drama of Woody's experiences, compared with his own common upbringing, immediately appealed to Jack. Explained a friend: "Jack wanted to get the hell away from his folks, especially from the fact that his old man was an eminent physician instead of a horny-handed hell-raising Oakie." Said Jack's younger brother David, now a story editor Columbia Pictures in London: "He's self-destructive.  If you want to compare him to anybody, try T.E. Lawrence.

Jack was born Elliott Charles Adnopoz in Brooklyn in 1931.  As a boy, he lived in a Western fantasy, going to  Buck Jones and Wild Bill Elliott movies, playing like Gene Autry on the guitar, reading books by Will James, and drawing pictures of cowboys and horses.  GHe persuaded his friends to call him "Buck Elliott." When he was sixteen, he ran away with Colonel Jim Eskew's rodeo.  Dr. Abraham Adnopoz located him two months later, but parental discipline was no longer any use.  Mrs. Adnopoz said she wanted her son "to become a great humanitarian like his father.  But instead of ministering to people' bodies, he found it more congenial to commune with their souls."

After two abortive attempts at an academic education, at the University of Connecticut and at Adelphia College, Jack left school. Von Schmidt remembers hearing "of a curly-headed Greek called Xerxes who played one hell of a guitar." Finally meeting Jack, "or Zerk as he was called," Eric found him "very cowboy-oriented.  He played whanging his thumb up and down on as many strings as possible."

In the courser of his Village meanderings, Jack heard a record by Woody Guthrie.  Son they met and Jack was asked to come stay with Woody and Margie and their three children in their house in Brighton Beach.

Jack and Woody

Said Jack: "Every morning, I used to get up and play guitar with Woody for several hours.  I learned how to back up a fiddle with guitar.  Woody was a great fiddle-player.  That's still my favorite way of playing.

"At first, I was completely imitating Woody, although there were some things he tried to teach me that I never could get the hang of.  I was so under his spell that I couldn't think of any other way to play or sing.  I never started in to do it.  It's something that just happened."

The willing apprentice absorbed Woody's instrumental and singing style, and the influences which molded it.  On his own, he imited Woody's manner, his speech, and his personality.  Woody finally said: "Jack sounds more like me than I do."

Jack with London friends

They traveled to California and settled in "Pretty Polly Canyon," Woody's name for an area of Topanga Canyon, north of Los Angeles.  Among their neighbors were Bess and Butch Hawes, Will Geer, Guy Caraway, Frank Hamilton, and Derroll Adams, the banjo-player from Portland who was to take Woody's place as Jack's best friend and mentor.  On a trip to the South with Carawan and Hamilton, Jack met and sang with Bascom Lamar Lunsford and A.P. and Maybelle Carter.  In San Francisco, he leared from Jesse Fuller and stayed with Sam Charters.  among his drinking and traveling buddies were actor James Dean and poet Gregory Corso.

Jack's first professional job was at Knott's Berry Farm, a Southern California Western playground that absorbs the tourist overflow from nearby Disneyland.  Ed Pearl, owner of the Ash Grove, said "Jack was acting as Judge Roy Bean.  He would marry people for a dollar and also play guitar in the amphitheater formed y a semi-circle of covered wagons in front of a huge bonfire." Later, Jack worked for a faith-healing church as a cripple on crutches. "He would wobble up the aisle," said Derroll "and be saved." Throwing away his crutches, Jack would miraculously walk out, with a few dollars of collection plate cash in his pocket.

June Hammerstein, the young actress Jack met and married two months later, started him on his European rambles, although he didn't particularly want to leave Topanga Canyon.  "I had been planning to go anyway," said June, "so why not the two of us, with his guitar to keep us in bread and wine?"

Woody provided a family tree for Jack Elliott and Jack inherited Woody's songbag.  England listened, and the people's praise gave Jack increasing confidence in his created character.  The British crazy in 1955 was skiffle, described as "folk music with a beat," and everyone, familiar with Guthrie's songs, welcomed Jack as his official ambassador.

Bill Leader, who supervised Jack's three albums and three singles for Topic Records, said, "Guthrie was Jack's introduction here, but it was his own personality that started the legend of Ramblin' Jack Elliott.  People loved him, and anything he did.  If he walked on stage and said, 'It's raining outside,' they would laugh.  If he added that he 'got wet,' they would roll in the aisles."

"Jack was the biggest influence on guiotar in this country," said Scottish singer Alex Campbell.  His flat-picking seduced skiffle musicians away from their three-chod, brush-the-strings technique.  And his traditional folk music, unheard before, was a "bridge from skiffle to real folk music," said Roy Guest.

A hero in England with the stature of Seeger in America, Jack sang at clubs there and on the continent. "he is one of the few to bring tears to my eyes," said Ewan MacColl.  His listeners loved Woody's "Massacre" songs, "1913" and "Ludlow," and "Pretty Boy Floyd," and the immediately learned and spread "San Francisco Bay Blues" and "Muleskinner Blues" around the country.

Jack and Derroll in Europe

Jack and June appeared in Alan Lomax's folk pantomime, In the Big Rock Candy Mountain; sailed on a yacht to Spain; toured Germany and Denmark with a skiffle group; and sent for Derroll.  Jack and Derroll played the posh Blue Angel club in London for three months; spent the summer singing in Portofino; recorded phonograph records in Milan; then went their separate ways.  After touring Greece on a scooter and Italy with the Platters, Jack and June met Derroll in Brussels to entertain at the World's Fair; Jack sang on TV in Scandinavia; and he and June returned to England where Jack sang at a party for Princess Margaret.

With enough rambles in England and Europe behind them to fulfill ten lifetimes, they returned to California in 1958, to "grow roots," Jack said.  But the soil was barren.  After adulation in England, he received nothing but criticism in his own country, despite the fact that his legend had preceded him across the Atlantic.

Banjo-player Stu Jamieson said, "Jack was aware that he didn't quite sound like Woody, and was concerned about continuing to try, but probably not too displeased to discover a difference.  He was upset only by the fact that others knew his goal and condemned him for it."

Jack had begun to drop his imitation of Woody on the continent, said Alex Campbell.  "Street singing and entertaining in the clubs there did it.  The French wanted variety and Jack wouldn't be just Woody Guthrie."

England invited him back in 1959 and he returned after meeting and singing with Cisco Houston for the first time at Manny Greenhill's house in Boston, to perform in concert with the Weavers and on tour with Pete Seeger.

This was the turning point, according to Jamieson. "Once in England, he was isolated from odious comparisons and could be less introspective.  I think Jack's present style grew out of his renewed confidence on returning to England the blues influence." Jck had been trying hard to play the blues, learning from Brownie McGhee in 1952 in New York and, later, from Big Bill Broonzy in London.

Alex Campbell

The returning hero, Jack was welcomed back everywhere.  He toured Europe, went to Israel with June, and returned to Paris.  In Campbell's songbook, Frae Glesga Toon, he said: "When Jack came back to Paris, I was working in a gypsy bar as an accompanist.  Jack, who was at a club near St. Germain des Pres, finished earlier than I did, and he would often pop around to sing us a few songs.  The yodel part on 'Muleskinner Blues' was always worth at least six glasses of wine from the customers, and, of course, the gypsy singers loved him as well."

After touring England with Jesse Fuller, Jack took a scooter across Europe to Turkery with author Herb Greer, a journey Herb fictionalized in his novel, The trip.

After a year and a half overseas, Jack came home again in 1961.  The time was ripe, and his debut at Gerde's Folk City in New York was lauded by Newsweek and The New York Times.  His apprenticeship was over.  Ever since then, Jack has been himself and no one else.

Jack, June, Pete

"He made a strenuous and difficult effort," said Alan Lomax, "to learn to sing and play within the complex stylistic limits of modern Western American folk song style, as set forth by Woody Guthrie.  He was perceptive enough to realize that he had to work long and hard in order to catch the subtleties of the singers in this tradition.  He is now a mastter of this style and can use it freely in singing all of his songs."

Jack's interests are a maze of wheels within the major wheel of his music.  His friends are legion and each has a fund of stories to tell about the real Jack Elliott, no two tales being alike.

He is an actor: he can impersonate either Barry Fitzgerald or Goldwater at any hour of the day or night.  He is an artist: His sailing ships, usually drawn on bar napkins, are meticulously detailed.  He is a motorcyclist: a new A.J.S. was recently shipped to him from England.  And he is a truck driver: a mechanical fugitive from the telephone company, one of a succession of trucks, was his pride.

All of Jack's pet occupations make food for conersation, and he loves to talk about them, and talk about them, and talk about them.

Jack and Pete, Newport 2011

Next to his music, Jack loves square-rigged sailing ships.  Last summer's "Operation Sail" in New York, when two dozen square-riggers gathered in the harbor, was a momentous even for him.  He rode his motorcycle from mooring to mooring, sang for the crews, brought them as his guests to the Gaslight, and sailed aboard on ship from Providsence to Boston and would have gone all the way to Norway if they had let him.

"What he should do," said English singer Rory McEwen, "is get a sailing lugger and take off around the world for the rest of his life, like Captain Slocum, stopping here he feels like it for as long as he wants.  One of these days, he'll disappear and that's what will have happened."

Making Out in the '50's

There is entirely too little sex in this blog despite its title.  My reticence has been mostly out of consideration for the feelings of my Thai wife who might find these teenage antics of mine unfathomable. 

This piece was written for Colman Andrews' Coast FM & Fine Arts Magazine and published in the February, 1973, issue.  The headline was "High School Confidential" with the subtitle of "Love in the '50's." I was only 34 at the time and looking back nostalgically on what seemed then to be a lost age. The subtitles are take from my junior high school yearbooks which are now long gone. The original photos are gone so I've added new ones to suggest the times. It's all true.  Only the names have been shortened to protect these now senior citizens from embarrassment.

To a cute necker. Good luck in 9th grade.

Jim B

Jim was the best "necker" in the eighth grade.  His succinct entry in my 1953 junior high school annual told me I'd made the grade.  Make out in the '50's was our religion and Jim was my guru. 

Twenty years ago this month I migrated with my parents and younger brother in a new Ford, west to Southern California. I was 13 1/2 years old and a social Neanderthal. My puberty began and ended with songs; "Oh Happy Day" by Lawrence Welk and His Orchestra heard on our car radio traveling along Route 66 towards the land of orange groves started it all; and, four years later, there was Buddy Holly's "Peggy Sue" on the radio in my hospital room where I lay with a broken thigh bone after driving drunk into a candy store following a college fraternity rush party.

To a very wonderful guy.

Love.

Laurie

Laurie was my first steady girl (remember that phrase?) in the spring of our eighth grade. Jim's yearbook compliment resulted from his witnessing of my first fumbling attempts at passion with Laurie at a party. It was at that same party that Charlie P heard me emit a loud fart, during a comer embrace and humiliated me for weeks afterward by spreading the nasty rumor that my love-making was excessively noisy. Only the good Dr. Freud could have guessed what future havoc that trauma may have wrought.

I danced with Laurie at parties and at the eighth grade prom to "Song from Moulin Rouge." She was taller than me, classically beautiful in my memory, and I never laid hands on the forbidden areas of her body. I was a nice boy. My lust was confined to wet dreams. Several years ago I ran into Laurie at a coffee shop. She had married an undertaker and was dressed in the uniform of a middle-aged, middle-class matron. Only wide-open eyes and a giggly laugh remained of the girl I held hands with in her parents' living room.

Flashback: A few years out of college, Laurie and Carolyn lived in a hillside apartment in San Francisco, career secretaries by day, beatniks by night. I came over from Berkeley one evening for a party with Dick, who dated Laurie after me. Dick and Laurie and Carolyn and I fucked most of the night away and in the morning I went into Laurie's room and gave her a brotherly hug and kiss.

Lots of luck to a real cute guy.

Nancy R

A month after writing that, Nancy and I sat next to each other in a pew at the Church of the Lighted Window. Prompted by my guru, Jim, I passed her a note asking if she'd go steady with me. She accepted, and that evening I gave her a ring I'd bought at Woolworth's, a heavy 25-cent ring with the skull's head removed and replaced with my initials. Our affair lasted three weeks, three Saturdays at Jim's house where, while his parents worked, Jim and Judy and Nancy and I "made out" for eight straight hours, stopping only to get a Coke, to go to the bathroom, or to change the stack of 45's on Jim's RCA phonograph ("All Night Long" by Joe Houston, "One Mint Julep" by the Clovers, and more). "Making out" was hot and sweaty work but we were driven teenagers (that label, teenagers - an epithet or a badge of pride?). I hardly even minded Nancy's braces, which frequently sliced up my lips. And she never noticed that my Levis failed to fold the proper way in my crotch, a source of 'heartrending embarrassment to me. And my hands never touched the forbidden areas of her body.

Lest you think my hands remained virginal throughout junior high school, let me retell the events of New Year's Eve, 1953-54. Jerry and Addie and Melanie and I sat in the back of Jack's lowered Chevy during an aimless round-trip drive from Pasadena to Long Beach during which I managed to slip my shaking right hand into Melanie's pedal pushers, underneath the silky front line, and right onto the end-all and be-all for a 14-year-old boy/man. I hope the experience was as instructive to Melanie as it was to me. Not to be left out, Addie and Jerry enacted the same scenario besides us while Jack delicately tried to watch the road and the rear-view mirror (from which hung an enormous pair of angora dice) at the same time.

Your '40 is going to drag my '41 Chevy someday. Your (sic) going to have your (ass wiped). I'll have a G.M.C

Gary L  (Lip)

Bill,

We have only had a ball together since 8th grade. Especially this past few weeks. I hope we only have a ball Wed. night and Graduation nite. I hope the fun we are having can last through the summer and even longer. I hope that you get your chance to be in that combo. Lots of luck next year.

My Love always,
Judy

Judy, bless her often-available bare breasts, had forgiven me for that night the summer before when Jim had lured her into the darkened school hall from the dance at the community Youth House next door, right into the waiting arms of three scared but eager teenaged boys who plotted to punish her for being a "P.T." (prick tease). (Those breasts were only available to a select few then.) Two of us held her arms, another put his hands over her mouth, someone ripped her pants off and Jim lit a match. For no more than a second we stared at a thatch of genuine female pubic hair (blonde), and then fled in separate directions while Judy screamed for help, While several teachers on duty at the dance searched through the school for us, I hid under a bush and then ran home over back roads. Judy told on everyone but Jim (he was a charmer) and I was "grounded" (restricted to home base in the evenings) for a month by my parents.

Jim was our leader. He wore his wavy brown hair (bleached blond in the summer sun with liberal applications of lemon juice) in a duck tail (also "D.A." [duck's ass]), was the first to get a pair of black "pegged" (A-1) pants, had brown loafers with pennies in the front as well as the (mandatory) black 'cycle boots, and was the first (he said, we believed) to actually sleep with a girl. It happened, so the story went, the summer before I arrived in California, one night at the home of his girl friend while her parents were out (our middle, upper-middle-class suburb had a high percentage of party-going parent alcoholics). Mark corroborated the story. He was feigning sleep in the living room in front of the T.V. while Jim and ... (her name is lost in the fog of history) went at it in the bedroom. Stealing a glimpse, Mark witnessed moving white limbs and buttocks and heard decidedly gooey sounds. "Yep," said Jim, "we went all the way." Later, she allegedly got pregnant by another, went to live with relatives, and disappeared into a private girls' school some miles away. Sitting at our permanent table in the cafeteria, Jim told and retold his story and reaped the glory, and later Mickey would pull out a plug of chewing tobacco and we were off into another voyage toward adulthood.

Drag scene from "Rebel"

Jim cultivated a friend a year older than he who had a car and a driver's license. He lunged ahead of us into the world of drive-in movies and lovers' lanes. The magical age those days was 15 1/2; that was when one became eligible for a learner's permit and a chance to use the family car -- as long as a properly licensed 16-year-old was around. (Everyone's 16th birthday was a rite of passage held at the Department of Motor Vehicles.) I paid $50 around my 15 1/2 "birthday" for a four-door 1940 Ford with baby blue primer paint, which sat in my garage, an apprentice auto mechanic's laboratory, for six months. Unlike most of my other friends, I was totally unable to understand the workings of a six or eight-cylinder automobile engine, but I did manage to drive the thing out of the garage on my 16th birthday. Not long afterwards, Jack talked me into letting him drive it in a drag race on a side street and when he floored the throttle the speedometer sped up to 120 but the car just rolled slowly forward, its U-joint or differential or something threaded. Jack tried to put a new one in later but only succeeded in snapping the rear spring. I think I got $5 from the junkyard. About that same time, Jim' persuaded his father, a car salesman, to buy him a nearly-new Oldsmobile.. A year or more later in, high school, reportedly in the back seat of that car, Jim impregnated his girl friend and both were forced to drop out of school, marry and adjust to the stigma of being teenage parents. They failed and Jim ran off to Hawaii, married and failed again, finally returning to Southern California where he married the ex-wife of that same friend mentioned in the first sentence of this paragraph. (When last seen five years ago, Jim was selling office furniture and studying law at night school. His confident tone of voice had turned into a pitiful whine and he had sunk from being a leader to becoming a follower of conservative fashion, politically and socially.)

Marlon Brando in "The Wild One"

Jerry M  I was tall and funny, always the first to coin the latest password of slang, always clad in cycle boots and sloppily dressed, always dabbed with grime and grease from working on his '50 Ford (with his cutting torch he chopped the roof down to about 'a foot, so that he had to ' squint in order to see out of the windshield). In high school, Jerry got the girl I had desired in my dreams ever since the day she had appeared at an assembly in a variety show from a junior high school across town. My loss, and his good luck, were tempered by the eventual revelation that she only had one breast, the other having been permanently stunted when a shingle fell off her roof and hit her on the chest in childhood (the story always sounded a little preposterous to me, but I wanted to believe it to salve my wounded pride). I saw Jerry five years ago and he had gone through the changes Jim had missed. Jerry was an automotive parts salesman (not a mechanic as we and he had predicted), immaculately and modishly dressed, had a girl friend who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito, and even admitted to having tried the illegal weed.

Jerry R, that sexual experimenter who had been beside me on that long New Year's Eve drive from Pasadena, to Long Beach and back, took Jim's place as my guru during the waning days of junior high school. Jerry taught me how to buy liquor: we'd wait in his car outside a liquor store in the black ghetto until an obvious wino staggered along, whereupon we would offer him an extra dollar to buy us something alcoholic (we didn't care what). On our first try, we ended up with a pint of apricot brandy and that became our steady drink for a few months.

Ellis L was 16 but looked 35 with a heavy beard that required shaving twice daily. He was famed for walking into Olson's Grocery Store, where he would buy a quart of Olympia beer, and then sit outside on the curb and sip contentedly, old Ellis, from the bottle still wrapped in a paper bag. Ellis became a lawyer and is reportedly practicing somewhere in Ohio. ,

Flashforward: At midnight, when I turned 21, I was sitting in a bar I had frequented all summer long with a couple of friends who, knowingly, broke into a rousing rendition of "Happy Birthday." I treasure the expression on the bartender's face when I proved my masquerade of age by showing him my driver's license, the real one and not the fake one we all laboriously fabricated from expired learners' licenses.

Taco party photograped for Sunset Magazine

Barbara had slumber parties for her girl friends and, because her parents were always either away or so drunk they didn't care, my friends and I were usually invited over. We would pop popcorn in the kitchen with the top off the pot, a dozen of us running around with bowls trying to catch the kernels before they hit the floor. Girls in pajamas, boys in peggers and T-shirts, we would turn the lights off and dance cheek-to-cheek in the dark to "Night Train" and "Be-Bop Wino," arms around arms for the slow dreamy songs and to the fast ones doing the Dirty Boogie (the "D.B.')  -- couples facing inches apart, feet planted firmly, right hands held, swaying back lasciviously until heads nearly touched the floor behind (the more daring guys allowed one knee to slip firmly between their partners' thighs).

Flashforward: Two years out of high school, Mark returned one summer from the University of Wisconsin to describe a "bad taste" party his fraternity had held. We organized a reasonable facsimile with wine served out of douche bags into urine specimen bottles, dildos fashioned from rubber-covered Kotex pads for favors, and costumes: loin cloths for the men, bra and panties for the women. Barbara, the Elsa Maxwell of the junior high school slumber party, ended up in my arms for a few hours of mutual regret at what we had failed to consumate years earlier. She ran off to Las Vegas for a quick marriage a few months later.

Making out in the '50's with Janet and, Sue and Pauline (when we kissed while lying on her couch listening to Jackie Gleason's "Music for Lovers Only" album she would blush beet red from her forehead to the top of her low-cut blouse; she too got pregnant by another and went away to a girls' boarding school) and Jackie (spurned for a ski instructor) and Sally and Gail and Cherry and ...

This bit of self-centered social history would probably be incomplete without a brief description of How I Lost My Virginity. It happened on the front seat of that same '53 Ford (by then repainted and engine overhauled) that had brought me and my family to California three years before. It was at a drive-in theatre and the movie was a re-release of "Bambi" which, no shit, was the first movie I had ever seen as a child. It wasn't exactly out of True Romance, but I was as proud that night as I'd been the year before when I'd won my letter in gymnastics by climbing the rope. And she didn't get pregnant.

We broke up four weeks later.

The article ended with my short biography until until the 1970's: Bill Yaryan went to high school in a suburb of Southern California, and was graduated "without honors" in 1957 He has written for a variety of newspapers, and has worked in record company publicity and public relations.

The author in the early 1950's

75 Years Down the Road

My happy parents, Homer and Peggy, perhaps on the night I was conceived.

I heard the koel bird this morning down in the clump of trees below my building. It's been absent for a couple of months and I missed it in the mornings.  I don't know the migration pattern of this common Asia bird but it was always around during my first visits to Thailand and the sound of its call makes me feel at home.  That and the heat, and now the cloudy skies and monsoon rains.

Time passes so quickly.  I first encountered the koel in India during my initial voyage to this part of the planet ten years ago.  Another pilgrim at the ashram where I was staying called it the "orgasm bird" because of its cry which rises and intensifies a couple of times.  When I heard it again from the window of the P.S. Guest House on Sukhumvit Soi 8, it was a fitting symbol for my initiation into Bangkok where an obliging friend introduced me to the notorious Nana bar scene.

Newly born

My life has been a series of comings and goings.  Quick movements, like slight of hand; now you see me, now you don't.  Yet each move seemed destined to last a lifetime.  Only one move lasted for very long, though, and that was to the left coast city by the bay under the redwoods, long enough to raise two kids and a passel of friends.  The pattern for other transitions was set by my father, a traveling salesman, who took his family from the north to the south and to the west.  The uprootings and resettlings were never easy when I was a child, and yet I've replicated them in my own way.

It's my 75th birthday today and I barely know how I got here.  My father once said to me, "The older I get, the less I know."  At the time I was a young man with a discontented wife and two small boys and I thought it an odd thing for him to say.  Now, with my dad gone over 30 years, I know its truth.  It's not a matter of forgetting, or early onset of dementia.  The young require certainties to survive the slings and arrows of chance. Without them they would never have left the cave.

The Naval reservist and gramps

Ageing is alien territory.  While the elderly may often send out messages to their inheritors, these observations and warnings are rarely heard or understood by the young.  My mother's father lived with us when I was a teenager and I found him to be extremely annoying (he thought the same of me).  My father, however, played cribbage nightly with his father-in-law, tolerated his pipe smoking and his Canadian witticisms, while I hated him for forcing me to share a bedroom with my younger brother.  My grandfather grew increasingly crotchety and was shuffled off to an old folks home when he started shitting on the floor.  I rejoiced in my new bedroom (after the floor was cleaned) and forgot about him.

Now I'm older than my grandfather when he died and regret that I refused him the time of day. Here in Thailand the aged are treated with the utmost respect.  I've even been given a seat on the bus and Skytrain by younger riders who perhaps think grey hair a sign of wisdom.  The respect is often not merited as I well know.  Older expats, quite popular with the younger Thai ladies looking for a lift out of poverty, sometimes make me ashamed of my tribe.  They can be loud and obnoxious in public and unfairly critical of Thais on internet web sites.

With younger brother

Tourists who come to Thailand despite the ongoing political troubles can be roughly divided into two groups: the young looking for a beach or a beer on Khao San Road, and the old looking for bargains at the markets and interesting sites to check off on their bucket list.  I belong to neither tribe.  My people were seduced by something in Thailand -- the weather, the food, the women, or? -- and found a way to stay, sometimes for an annual extended visit and sometimes, like me, forever. I have met a considerable number of these intrepid adventurers, most of them men, and we share a curiosity and even passion about our adopted home, it's history, cultural and turbulent politics.

Many of them, like me, are happily married to Thais.  I swore off marriage after my second unhappy divorce.  Dating here was a different story.  One of the reasons I refused an operation for prostate cancer was the risk of neutering at a time when companionship had become very important.  But serial romance in the bars was unappealing to me.  Many expats become addicted to easy sex and fuel the bar scene for which Thailand has become infamous. Fortunately after two years I met the woman who has become my wife.  In two months we'll celebrate our 4th wedding anniversary.  Despite vast differences in age, language and culture, our relationship has grown into a deep and abiding love beyond what I ever would have dreamed.

Sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like if I'd remained in the California beach town where my life had been fairly content for nearly thirty years.  After my divorce I lived in a converted garage and walked or biked to the bookstores and coffee houses downtown.  I had plenty of friends, most of them my age or older, and occasionally I'd hear from one of my grown children.  I've never lacked for interests to engage my intellectual passions, and I've no doubt I would have been fairly satisfied as senility slowly set in.  One friend now is in an assisted living facility, and not a few have already died.

Me, Mom and her brother

Coming to Asia was a challenge.  It followed after several years of wandering to Europe, Central and South America. French and Spanish were a breeze compared to Thai which continues to resist all my attempts to understand and speak it. While superficially Bangkok appears to be a modern metropolis, there are layers upon layers to be found going back to antiquity. Urban and rural snuggle together in copacetic comfort on the city's streets and alleyways below skyscrapers and temple towers. I constantly find myself slightly off balance trying to reconcile what I see with the limited knowledge I possess. Whenever Thailand begins to seem as familiar as an old shoe, I open my eyes a bit wider because I know there is something I've missed. The surprises are exciting and invariably jolt me out of my septuagenarian slumber.

My fellow teachers and students at the Buddhist university where I teach English several days a week like to tell me, "You look so strong, ajahn!"  Most of them have rural roots and Thais who work on the farm age rapidly.  They're not used to seeing someone of my advanced years walking upright, and even, in the classroom, strutting and pontificating in an animated fashion.  I don't speak to them about my failing eyesight and faulty hearing, my tricky knee or arthritic fingers.  At the end of six hours of teaching, my feet ache and I'm utterly exhausted, and I usually fall asleep on the computer bus back to Bangkok.

In sum, a mysterious environment, a job where I play the standup comic to amused monks, and a loving young wife all keep me invigorated and -- dare I say it? -- youthful, more so than had I remained in a comfortable place back in the U.S.  It's not necessarily a prescription for avoiding the inevitable breakdown of the body.  But it will certainly refresh and rejuvenate the mind.  The down side to this expat's success story is the enmity of two of my three surviving children who are unhappy that their step-mother is younger than them, and the absence of so many friends apparently unable to use social media to maintain long-distance relationships.  I miss my old family and old friends. But I rejoice in my new life!