Recognizing Talent And Lack Of It

Lots of talent goes unrecognized. After Tom Brady played what was probably his last game as a Patriot last Saturday, most believe he is (was?) the best quarterback ever, but few saw that talent early in his college career. Coach Belichick saw it though, and it has paid off handsomely for football fans all over New England. It’s been quite a run for Patriots, but it couldn’t last forever.

Maine's Dave Mallett

Often I’ve observed musicians playing locally who are very talented, but had to continue struggling with small gigs here and there while working other jobs to support themselves. I’d see others on television with great notoriety but lacking the talent locals demonstrated. How did they gain widespread fame when the locals were unknown beyond a fifty-mile radius? Marketing? I suppose it’s all good so long as the performers and those listening are enjoying themselves. 

Museum of Fine Art Boston

There are those to whom talent is ascribed but who seem totally lacking in it. Wandering through art museums, for example, one must question the judgement of curators who display absurd objects purported to be “art.” As a boy, my mother would take my siblings and me into Boston to the Forsyth Dental Clinic where fillings and braces were free. Some days I’d have hours to kill and I’d spend it at the Museum of Fine Arts just across the Fens. Most of what I saw was amazing work but in other stuff I could discern no artistic merit. At only eight or ten years old, I knew it was junk.

Alleged Art at MFA Boston

It’s been a half century, but I see about the same proportion of art and junk hanging at the Portland Museum of Art today. A fine museum, it has collections by truly great artists including Winslow Homer, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and many others. And then there’s alleged art by others whose names I cannot recall because I am profoundly unimpressed when viewing their stuff. I felt they were trying to con me. As a kid I trusted my instincts — never thinking, as some others did, that there must be something there I just wasn’t bright enough to see.

Are art “experts” only pretending when they claim to see talent others cannot? Are they like the adults who pretended to see beautiful clothes on the emperor? In that iconic children’s story, the tailor who created the emperor’s “clothes” knew he was a con artist, but the emperor and his subjects on the street who watched him process in the nude didn’t trust their instincts. When they pretended to see beauty, it was out of fear of being seen as stupid because they couldn’t see what they believed everyone else could.

And then there are poets. No doubt there are many talented ones out there, but I’m not sure they comprise a majority. All through elementary school, high school, and college I was encouraged to “appreciate” many different poets. Some I actually did appreciate, but not many. As an undergraduate I had a leftist professor of English who declared Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” the best poem of the age. Drifting leftward myself in those days, I tried hard to see the genius he insisted was there, but never could.

My parents sent me to a Catholic prep school in Lowell, Massachusetts when Lowell native and writer Jack Kerouac was at the height of his fame. Several times I tried to read his books, but just couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. I quit reading after about forty pages into three or four of them. Seeing a drunken Kerouac in 1968 on William F. Buckley’s PBS program “Firing Line,” didn’t impress me either. That Allen Ginsberg and he were close friends only made it worse.

Ginsberg and Kerouac

Very recently, however, I got another insight into Kerouac from an unlikely source. On the 50th anniversary of his death, The American Spectator did a tribute to him. A quote: “On the Road was really an autobiographical expression of Kerouac’s longing and searching for something — that something was God. Historian Douglas Brinkley, the editor of Kerouac’s diary, reported that nearly every page carried a prayer, an appeal to Christ for mercy, or a sketched crucifix. ‘Kerouac was trying to make everything holy,’ said Brinkley.

In its obituary, the New York Times quoted Kerouac from one of his last interviews in which he declared: “I’m not a Beatnik, I’m a Catholic.” Uncomfortable with his literary fame and its cooption by sixties leftists, his drinking got worse. It killed him in 1969 at 47. Lately I’m seeing Kerouac as a conflicted soul who, if he had been able to reconcile his tortured life with his understanding of God and achieve sobriety, might have displayed a more authentic genius than the world had hitherto witnessed.

Half Century of Change

There were a hundred guys in my high school class. At the 50th reunion last Saturday, I learned that a third of them are dead. Keith Academy was a private, Catholic prep school for boys in Lowell, Massachusetts that closed in 1970. Also at the reunion were survivors of a similar-sized class from Keith Hall, the Catholic prep school for girls across town. They, however, had lost only eight. On a screen, reunion organizers from both schools displayed graduation pictures of the men first, one at a time. I recognized them all and wondered what killed them, but I’d been in Maine for forty-two years and out of touch with all those people.

Keith Academy

A former classmate looked me up and left a voicemail with a pronounced Boston accent months ago but I was ambivalent about going. I sent in the $50 to keep my options open and put the date in the calendar on my smartphone. My parents sent me to Keith Academy but I had wanted to go to Tewksbury High with my childhood friends. For four years I felt out of place there.

This had been a small ranch. It has quadrupled.

I drove down early so I could visit the Tewksbury, Massachusetts neighborhood in which I had grown up. The dead-end street I remembered with thirty small capes and ranches on quarter-acre lots, seemed shorter. I’d walked up and down it thousands of times during my childhood — to the bus stop and back every day, then again on my afternoon paper route. Almost every house had doubled in size although there were far fewer children living in them.

At least the woods were pretty much the same

It was a sunny, Saturday afternoon in November. Sixty years ago there would have been a sandlot football game going on and dozens of other kids would be engaged in various playful activities on the street, but all I saw last weekend were two mothers teaching their toddlers to ride tricycles. No other children were visible.

Our old house

Not knowing who lived in our old house, I drove past it to the end of the street and parked. What I really wanted to check out were the nearby woods where I had spent most of my boyhood. About a dozen houses occupied what had been part of the old woods, but most of the white pine forest was still there. In the deepest part of it, I startled two boys beside a small campfire. About eleven or twelve, they reminded me of myself and my best friend Philip when we habituated the area. We chatted a while before I hiked back to my car.

St. William's School

Then I drove to St. William’s, my old elementary school about a mile and a half away, now also closed. I remembered the sandlot baseball games we played behind it but that field was gone. I looked at the entry door where we lined up to go back inside after recess. I could almost see the girls in one line and boys in the other, all of us dressed in our school uniforms with a nun supervising. I looked up at the classroom windows where I attended 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grades. Some of my classmates at St. William’s went on to Keith Academy as I did, and Keith Hall too, but I didn’t see any of them at the reunion later that evening. That disappointed me.

At 68 now, I wear glasses and use hearing aids. There were over a hundred people in the hall at Lowell’s Mt. Pleasant Golf Club, all talking at once and the acoustics were terrible, especially for me with my hearing impairment. A DJ played sixties music much too loudly for my liking. Not only was it difficult to understand what people were saying, but I also made myself hoarse trying to talk over the din. Twice I walked over and asked him to lower the volume until after dinner when people would start dancing. He did but turned it back up minutes later.

After dinner I found myself standing next to another former classmate from out of town and told him I live in Maine now. He said he had flown in from Washington, DC and I asked how he happened to move there. He said he’d started working for a Democrat political consulting firm in Boston which led to fundraising for the ACLU and Planned Parenthood in Washington. I almost said that put us at polar opposite ends of the political spectrum and then thought: “Nah.” I get enough of that with my column and Left & Right TV Show.

At about 9 pm I concluded that my effort to enjoy myself was unsuccessful and Michael Connelly’s newest novel was on the nightstand in my hotel room. I found my jacket and went out the door. I doubt anyone missed me.

Window On The Doors

Fifty years ago, I worked at the newly-built Holiday Inn at the intersection of Interstate 495 and Route 38 in Tewksbury, Massachusetts,  the town in which I grew up. I’d started in the summer of 1966 as a dishwasher, then a groundskeeper, and ultimately a porter carrying room service trays, vacuuming the lobby, setting up tables in function rooms, and emptying ashtrays. My father would often pick me up on his way home from work. I had my learner’s permit and he’d let me drive the rest of the way in our 1966 Chevrolet Biscayne.

Rock-and-roll groups like the Yardbirds, the Turtles, and others stayed there when playing concerts at the Commodore Ballroom in Lowell. One of my jobs was putting red plastic letters up on the marquee to welcome them. Sometimes my father couldn’t drive me home and I’d hitchhike. One such evening in 1967, a late-model Buick Riviera pulled over and I hopped in. Driving was the drummer of The Doors, John Densmore. I had never heard of The Doors or of Jim Morrison, who was crashed out and sprawled across the back seat. Though I’d just come from work, nobody told me The Doors were staying there because they weren’t that popular at the time. Nobody was excited enough to tell me they were in residence. Neither was I told to put up a greeting for them on the marquee.

Anyway, Densmore was miffed that he had picked up an American teenager who didn’t recognize him. “Do you know who I am?” he asked.

Densmore and Morrison

“No,” I said.

“Ever hear of ‘Light My Fire’?”

“Umm… yeah, I think so,” I said, feeling uncomfortable. It sounded vaguely familiar but I wasn’t sure. He didn’t look like a typical guy from Tewksbury and nobody I knew drove a brand-new Riviera. His hair was longish, his clothing was different, and he was driving with bare feet. The guy in the back seat had bare feet too and a small tattoo on his ankle. I think it was a flower.

“Ever hear of ‘The Doors’?” he asked, getting more peeved.

Morrison crashed at performance in Amsterdam

“No,” I said. He seemed to sense my nervousness then and eased up. I turned to look behind me at the unconscious guy, and Densmore said something about him. I don’t remember exactly what, but it had a tone of disapproval, disgust even. By this time we’d gone about four miles and I was relieved to tell him he could stop at the next crossroad and let me out. He pulled over and I thanked him before closing the door. “You’re welcome,” he said.

Not long after, I heard “Light My Fire” on the radio and I liked it. So did millions of others and The Doors were invited to perform it on The Ed Sullivan Show. Morrison had been asked to modify the lyric “…girl we couldn’t get much higher,” as the audience might consider it a reference to using drugs, but he sang it anyway and was banned from further appearances.

After that encounter, I paid closer attention to stories about The Doors as Morrison was becoming notorious for his hedonistic lifestyle. He was convicted of exposing himself onstage to an audience of mostly junior high and high school girls in Florida when evidently very drunk. Densmore wrote later that Morrison had a serious alcohol problem and he died in Paris at twenty-seven, only four years after our short ride together. There was no autopsy so his cause of death can’t be known for sure, but many believe it was alcohol-related. 

During his four years of fame, Morrison became a symbol of sixties alienation, of rebellion, and of “the counterculture.” Though I liked his music, I was put off by his behavior and that of so many other counterculture figures too numerous to mention who also died of lifestyle-related causes. I liked much of their music as well and all were heroes to baby boomers. To me, however, they were reverse barometers — examples of how not to act. Some posthumously diagnosed Morrison as bipolar. Such people are often highly creative, highly intelligent, highly sexual, and highly prone to substance abuse. Add his Irish genes to that and what happened to him wasn’t inevitable, but understandable. 

One Morrison biography claims he knocked on Jack Kerouac’s door while he was in Lowell, but was turned away by Kerouac’s wife and told to “get a haircut.” Kerouac died of alcoholism two years later in 1969. While Morrison’s music still appeals to me, Kerouac’s books never did.

Doors Drummer John Densmore who picked me up half a century ago, said in an interview for Huffington Post recently: “Jim was one of those kamikazes who had creativity and self-destruction in the same package, dammit.”

A fitting symbol of his generation? Maybe. What do you think?