ATIT Reheated: Jerry Melin, Forger and Craftsman

By Jack Brummet, 70's Ed.

Two days ago, I wrote a piece detailing the summer of 1973 Scooter and $2 all you can drink beer day at the Sundowner circa 1973, and my friend's couch surfing and imbibing at the Sundowner. Now Scooter wrote back (See italicized text below), and brought up a fact I had forgotten.

Jerry Melin developed an almost foolproof system for forging Washington State ID's. I think the reason this slipped my mind is that I never actually had Mel make one for me. In his comments, Scooter pegs this to my having a girlfriend and being on a diet. However, it was something deeper than that I think. In those days I was never a particularly meticulous law-abider, but for some reason I don't ever remember going to a bar until I was 21. And I never attended a day at the Sundowner, as far as I remember. I don't know why, but it worked out OK in the end. I was able to spend plenty of nights in bars after I turned 21. However, to this day, I very rarely go to bars, and when I do, it almost always involves music. I always preferred a party at someone's crib to a bar. On the other hand, some of the craziest times I had in NYC were, naturally, in bars. Like the time we bumped into Allen Ginsberg at the Grass roots Bar on St. Mark's Place. We listened to a recitation of his latest poem and chatted, and he gave Mel a big, wet kiss on the forehead.

I remember Mel, sitting for literally, hours, working as Scooter details below, to alter a license. He was changing one digit in the birth year, and it took hours to get the perfect letter and get the registration just perfect. Even cops would miss the alteration. So, Phil, "Schubert," Spurge, Kevin, Mike Thies, et al, would have these nearly foolproof licenses. After I turned 21, I joined them in the bar wars. Still, we were college students, trying to live on $200 a month, so there were limits to how much we could even go out to bars at all, except for jazz night at Pete's, where you could bottles of wine for $4.99 and listen to jazz,

He would labor the same way to produce these fantastic Blake-ean drawings of ethereal winged, androgynous angels. . .none of which survives (at least I don't have any). We wrote a lot of poetry together in much the same fashion, taking hours to build up poems, usually focused on America, the police state, art, drugs, philosophy, sex, jazz, and rock and roll. And when he was serious about school it was the same thing: he would study for 12 hours straight, and whenever he decided he wanted to apply himself, he would pull straight A's. Jerry/Mel was the smartest person I ever knew who was constantly on academic probation (his first year...after that he became an A machine. There was nothing like seeing him engrossed in whatever project was at hand: art, poetry, forgery, calculus, economics. We would sometimes spend an entire night reading one of Blake's work's like America or Jerusalem, aloud, with endless bowls, digressions, and sidebars, and The Band, Lou Reed, Will the circle be unbroken?, or the Stones' Sticky Fingers on the turntable.  More often we would collaborate on writings...ten page free association poems on a manual Underwood typewriter.  All of these and probably fifty or sixty joint and solo drawings, other writings, mostly very short stories, sketches, and dozens of cassette tapes of us riffing, creating aural poems, improving playing fictional characters. . .these all formed The Archive.  And sometime in the mid 80's, The Archive disappeared.  It could have fallen off a truck, it could be still stashed somewhere in someone's parents's house, or somewhere.  It would be pretty cool to discover them, but I don't hold out much hope anymore.  But as an eternal optimist...you never know.

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Scooter here.  Usually I am happy just to sit back and enjoy the show at All This is That but Jack, we called him Johnny in 73, got me thinking. He says that I may have been depressed, maybe/maybe not, but I did have a lot of time to kill that summer and, as he points out, very few dólores to fund any meaningful diversions.

I had gone from tending dogs to the dogs in two summers and had nearly depleted my savings account after paying for freshman year at WWSC and my share of body work to repair Mel’s parent’s Pontiac Le Mans after Phil K, Kev & I put it into a ditch during a night of carousing while Mel prudently elected to ride shotgun.

Mel misdesignated drivers to his advantage on more than a few occasions in those years and when he didn’t the cops usually learned about it.

I  played softball for a local men’s team in Kent that summer but Mel always joined me at the Downer on Thursdays. Phil K would come by regularly too but Johnny less frequently because he had a job and a girl friend and I believe adhered to a fitness regimen then that frowned on 12 hours of brews guzzling. Anyway, all of us, with the exception of David Fuller (RIP) were still underage in 1973 but we never, I mean never, had a problem gaining entrance to drinking establishments.

In the early 70’s WA had begun to roll out a new state photo ID that replaced the bifurcated WSDL and State Liquor Photo ID cards that folks had to carry previously. The new ID/DL used a process that impregnated a dense fibrous paper backing with the licensee’s vitals and photo and then sealed the face with a fine but durable laminate overlay. This new photo DL quickly made the State Liquor Card obsolete. While some youngsters purchased faked up generic out-of-state IDs from shops along Seattle’s 2nd Avenue they would only pass muster at skid row dives, so we relied on Mel’s obsessive compulsivity to create nearly perfect WA State issued DL’s with modified birth years.

For a few years Mel would periodically cook up some tea and then patiently scour magazines, novels, textbooks, trade and professional journals, telephone directories, and newspapers in search of the perfect pica/font to match the DOB stat on the WADL. He had assembled an impressive file of matches by 1973.

His strategy was simple. He instructed us to make a claim to the DMV that we had lost our license so that if we had a real run in with the heat we could always present a valid DL. Once the replacement DL was in hand he would set up shop. He worked at a brightly lit table fitted with a square of picture frame matting. He always used medical implements instead of paste up tools. I had had access to scalpels and hemostats from my year at the veterinary clinic and Mel had built a fairly extensive kit of medical supplies for this and other endeavors.

He affixed the license to the matting with two hemostats and set about altering the last figure in the birth year. He was a master in this procedure by the summer of the Downer. He would cut a tiny square around tiny figure, taking exquisite care not to pierce the backing of the card. He extracted the character and a slight layer of backing leaving a void that read 195 . He then embedded a perfectly matched “”0”, “1” or “2” into the void. Once the card was relaminated even we had trouble detecting the alteration. By the time we reached majority age most bartenders had learned that shining a flashlight through the back of the card would highlight the incision around the altered birth year so the jig was up by 74 or 75 but I don’t remember the cards failing any of us, ever. How about you, Jack?Oh, it's important to note that none of us could grow a respectable moustache until our thirties and most of us could have passed for high school students until our mid 20's. That's a fact and it proves the mettle of these IDs. To watch a bartender or bouncer go from scowling disbelief to incredulous befuddlement whenever we presented the ID for the first few times was priceless. Nobody believed to see us that we were of age but the cards didn't lie. And after we were established in the bar Downer and they never asked again.

Ed's note: A few other random ATIT stories about Mel (there have been quite a few):

Photograph: Jerry Melin At Mud Bay, Bainbridge Island, Washington
Jerry Melin, still missing, still missed
Mel, Part 1
Audioblogger Post::::Kevin Curran And Jerry Melin Meet The Poet Allen Ginsberg At The Grass Roots Tavern On NYC's Lower East Side
Senator Jerry Melin Speaks Out About 1979

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The Day I Went Bald

By Jack Brummet, Hair, Fur, and Feather Ed.

Photoshop simulation of a balding Jack

It started one day—or, rather, I noticed it one day—right after I received a really bad haircut...you know, a haircut so bad that you fix it yourself with whatever crude scissors are around. So, I left the barbershop, went home and looked in the mirror. Most of my left eyebrow was gone! Just a few scraggly hairs remained. . .up to then, I had thick eyebrows. All of a sudden—pffffft! I was really steamed at that barber, but there was no way I was going to let him touch up my hair, and the eyebrow would just have to grow back. How did he butcher my eyebrow?  Well, he did take a "smoke break" in the middle of the cut, and it wasn't cigarettes, I'm pretty sure.  But that's a sidebar. 

A week or so later, Keelin said "Turn around, Johnnie. What's that on the back of your head?" I turned around and she pulled aside some tendrils of hair. Gleaming in the light was a 

GIGANTIC 

bald spot!! It was about the size of a softball. And it happened literally overnight! I was going bald!!!!! I spent about five hours a day looking at that spot in the mirror. I could feel the wind on it. It always felt cold. And I was sure everyone was always staring at it. It wasn't in the center, but off to the left side. It just flat looked weird. Naturally, I obsessed about it night and day. I found out from some fellow sufferers that I was experiencing Alopecia Areata [1].  It happens more often than you might think.  I've probably met at least ten people who have experienced it once, and a handful that suffer it fairly regularly. 

It could stay like this. Alopecia! The bald spots usually happened in twos and threes! Two more could sprout up! It could all grow back. It could also cause every single hair on my body, including my eyelashes and nose cilia, to disappear. I would look like a Grey! No one really knows much about Alopecia and there aren't any real treatments. My doctor said it was no big deal. She could refer me to someone. . .but they didn't really have any way to treat it. I wondered if she would have been so cavalier if I had been a woman?

I ranted and raved. My entire being was now focused on those few inches of bald real estate on the back of my head. I checked the spot dozens of times a day, My bald friends were fascinated and highly amused. A couple of months later, I was performing my obsessive scalp observations, and discovered it had now sprouted peach fuzz! Woohoo! All hail the mighty stem cell [see footnote 1]. Within a month, my skull had reforested itself. The eyebrow came back too; not so bushy as it once was. The hair coming back in my eyebrow was white! I dyed it a couple of times. And then my second growth eyebrow slowly darkened, and matched my other eyebrow.

There is nothing that says it won't come back with a vengeance. In fact, Keelin told me yesterday I was tempting fate by just writing about it.

Quite a few years later, there have been no further rogue white blood cell attacks. Excelsior!

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 [1] In alopecia areata, your immune system/white blood cells attack the growing cells in the hair follicles. They start thinking your hair is some sort of infection! The affected follicles become small and drastically slow down production. Thank the Lord that the stem cells that continually supply the follicle with new cells do not seem to be targeted and the follicles COULD regrow. But the hair may also fall out again. No one really knows how or why. Some people lose just a few patches of hair, then the hair regrows, and the condition never recurs. Other people continue to lose and regrow hair for many years. A few lose all the hair on their head; some lose all the hair on their head, face, and body.

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The mystery of Herman the Recluse and the Codex Gigas (Devil's Bible)

By Jack Brummet, Illuminated Manuscript Ed.

The most extensive surviving medieval manuscript, the Codex Gigas (Giant Book) is known as the Devil's Bible because of the illustration of the Satan inside and the bizarre legend surrounding its creation.

The codex was allegedly created by Herman the Recluse in a Benedictine monastery in what is now the Czech Republic.  The book was taken as swag by the Swedish army during the Thirty Years' War in 1648.  It is on public display in Sweden's National Library.

According to the legend, Herman The Recluse broke his vows and was sentenced to be walled up alive (ala Poe's Cask of Amontillado) . To save himself, the monk vowed to make  a book to glorify the monastery in one night. Late that night,  he realized he could not complete this task alone, and prayed to Lucifer for help finishing the book—in exchange for his soul. Herman added a painting of the devil out of gratitude. In later tests, it was found that recreating only the calligraphy would take one person five steady years of writing.

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Painting: The close-up

By Jack Brummet

click to enlarge

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Digital art: Leprechaun HQ

By Jack Brummet

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Middle finger of the month ( Lew Smith, Barbara Stanwyck, Clark Gable and Bill Hickman)

By Mona Goldwater, Gestures Ed.

"This photo was sent to the race car driver Johnnie Parsons, who played a driver in the film. Parsons had flipped the bird to his chief mechanic Harry Stephens as a reaction to the constant signals to slow down he kept giving him during a race. Smith and Gable had watched that race from John’s pit box and witnessed the whole thing and decided to mock him for it."

Via thisisnotporn.net.  I found two other instances of the image via TinEye, but none give the photographer's name. . .

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Faces No. 1011: The Buddha

By Jack Brummet

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The monument to Lieutenant William Slaughter on Auburn Way in Auburn, Washington

By Jack Brummet, Green River Valley History Ed.

A couple of slowly crumbling granite monuments on Auburn Way North in Auburn, Wash.,  memorialize victims of the Treaty War.  Lieutenant William Slaughter and other soldiers, died in 1855 in an attack by native Americans.  When I was a kid, this memorial was known as the Massacre.

I was always fascinated and asked to stop whenever we passed by these memorials in our car.  There were the first "historical markers" I'd ever seen.  They are still there, but I haven't stopped by in at least 45 years. . .

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Eric Burdon and the Animals "Sky Pilot"

By Jack Brummet, '60's Ed.

This song came out in the middle of the Southeast Asian "conflict" ('68), not long before Dick Nixon took over LBJ's war. Sky Pilot: "a member of the clergy, especially a military chaplain." The war would go on another six years before the fall of Saigon to the hands of the People's Army and the NLF (a/k/a Vietcong).

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Drawing: Faces No. 1010

By Jack Brummet

click to enlarge

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The month they tried to kill me in Brooklyn

By Jack Brummet, NYC Metro Ed.

It wasn't they, so much as circumstance, my inexperience, the public hospital system, MedicAid, the New York Blackout and my poverty all colluding to nearly snuff me.

Son of Sam was on the loose in Brooklyn and Queens. The temperatures were in the upper 90s. I was on the job trail. On July 13, when I got back to our loft in Brooklyn, my back was killing me. I sat down and noticed it wasn't my back at all; it was my chest. My arm and back felt numb and I could barely breathe.

Was I having a heart attack? I called Keelin at the deli where she worked. "What should I do?" "Call 911!"

I called 911. I said I was having a heart attack. An hour later, no ambulance had arrived. I called again. Fifteen minutes later, a beat cop rang our buzzer. I let him in. I wasn't having a coronary, but something was really wrong. The friendly cop was able to raise an ambulance.

The ambulance brought me to the E.R. at Long Island College Hospital. It took the attending physician about five seconds to diagnose a spontaneous pneumothorax, or, a collapsed lung. People have collapsed lungs every day--usually athletes or people who've been jostled in an accident, or have been stabbed or shot.

A resident put a chest tube in, after giving me Novacaine to numb the scalpel's bite.

That night, the lights went out. From my window in the hospital I could see the World Trade Center. It was dark. The New York blackout of 1977 was on. Looting and fires broke out all over the city. Over 4,000 people were arrested. They re-opened The Tombs in downtown Manhattan, to warehouse all the arrestees.

At Long Island College Hospital, the backup generators fired up immediately. Alas, the air conditioning did not. It was around 104 degrees that day. It was at least 100 in the hospital by ten o'clock. The kitchen was closed, and they served us sandwiches and juice and fruit. It was the best food I would eat for three weeks.

It's not difficult to install a chest tube. I later learned how to do it advanced first aid. Yet, somehow, the hapless resident--Dr. Bucobo--f***ed it up. Normally, it takes a day or two for a collapsed lung to heal. It had been a week. Someone finally realized that the tube was in The Wrong Place. They chopped another hole in my chest and re-installed the tube. The resident and his intern came in once a day. If I survived these F-troop MDs, it would be a miracle.

Two days later, my new friend Jan Newberry, came to see me. I couldn't speak. I was in incredible pain. My fever was 104 and climbing. My breathing was shallow because it hurt to breathe. My blood gas was not promising. Jan called Keelin, who raced down and somehow convinced them they were killing me.

Things looked marginal for my continued existence. The pneumothorax was now complicated by double pneumonia. They hooked up a lung suctioning machine, put me on large doses of morphine, and pumped me full of vitamins, major antibiotics, stool softeners, sleeping pills every night, and other potions and elixirs. The morphine helped. When I was finally on antibiotics, the fever broke. After two grim days, I slowly began to recover. I was going to live. The only thing I cared about was the next dose of morphine.

After twenty days in LICH, the chest tube was removed. It felt great not to have to lug that box around (the chest tube ran into a box with water in it, which kept the lung pressurized as it repaired itself). The next day, they kicked me out. I was back on the streets of New York.

They caught Son of Sam the next month. He was our neighbor for a long time after that--we lived across the street from the Brooklyn House of Detention.

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A 1962 National Rifle Association cartoon campaign

By Jack Brummet, 2nd Amendment Ed.

In 1962, the #NRA wanted to improve their image by creating a cartoon spokesman who offered rhymed messages.  The campaign did not last long.

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