The Atomic Hula by Mike Marino (novels in english txt) 📕

The Atomic Hula - 1959
By Mike Marino

The Atomic Hula covers the years from 1959 to 1968 in a fictionalized account of coming of age in an age when the race for space was rocketing out of Cold War Control and the Beats were going down in a sunset of poetry as the flower power generation was beginning to take root to replace them in the garden. It's the life and times as seen through the minds eye and experiences of author Mike Marino who left home at the age of 15 escaping the industrial boredom of the Midwest for the life of a runaway making his living and way through life anyway he could on the beaches and streets of Honolulu, Los Angeles, San Francisco and on the road in the great American west.
The characters are real...however, their names have been changed to protect the not so innocent...except for the author. He stands guilty as charged.....
The Atomic Hula concludes with an interview with Mike Marino about those purple hazed and double dazed days that appeared in an international magazine, Boomers International.

1959 - Detroit, Michigan
The Blue Collar Red, White & Screwed
Chapter One
When you're an only child, you only have the creations of your own imagination to shoot and kill. Unless, of course, a tree on your front lawn drops dead and keels over. Then the world is your childhood oyster.
1959. Detroit, Michigan.
The Motor City. While the rest of the world is engaged in the nuclear muscle-flexing of ice-Cold War machismo, modern era Greco-Roman action figures, high and crazed on a full metal jacket of political and atomic steroids, the Diego Rivera landscape of Detroit remained steadfast, unmoved, and unflappable. It remained a blue-collar landfill of socialism and sludge.
Alien beings in time warp coveralls from the Planet Heavy Metal entered the auto plants, like so many inanimate and lobotomized rag dolls with their heads torn off. Eye sockets, just holes to let in the light and let out the dark. The mondo monotony of the assembly line . . . parts of product, gleaming, laid out in perfect symmetrical rhythm, like long white lines of cocaine.
The impersonal noise of manufacturing was deafening, deadening and the union dues were simply a pay as you go, pay as you work and pay to work component of the vampiric business of daily life in the plants. The U.A.W. and Teamsters—Maestros of the Masses and Minions—conducted a surreal symphony of industrial-strength dung as the blue collar-ballet and dance of the drones played to a riveted audience of riveters and riveteers.
The Detroit River, which ran the length of the city, was a mélange of "lakers," frighteningly huge freighters that were home to cargo-ladened holds and manned by salty dog sailors, those jaunty Nauti-boys who ply the waters of the Great Lakes, just as blood courses along the long and winding arterial routes of the human body to give and maintain its life. The lakers kept the life of commerce flowing and breathing freely from steel mill to manufacturing plant, bows slicing through the waters with the ease of a welder's torch in the hands of an artisan cutting through metal. Duluth to Cleveland, and back again, back and forth, to and fro, heave and ho! Majestic and mighty and almost silent, except for a dull hum of the engines, as you watched, neck craning, the floating flotilla of freighters passed by from the docks and rat infested riverfront of the Port of Detroit.
Flags flapped in the breezes that came ashore from Canada across the river. Beer and breezes, the natural products of the Great White North; then, the ore and the steel transported upriver and downriver, destined for delivery to the smelting plants and auto factories, to be alchemized and transformed, magically it seemed, from raw material into Gross National Product. Henry Ford's version of a mechanical magician, magically pulling a rabbit out of the hat, or sawing a sequined girl in half, only this wasn't smoke and mirrors. It was pure unadulterated capitalism and industry.
The Emerald City of the Working Class also had a veneer of pollution, haze, dust and rust: a statically charged steely forest, thick with belching smokestacks, red hot extruded steel and sunset orange iron . . . the ménage a troit of De Troit. The high performance, torqued-up stallions of the highway charged off the assembly lines, a herd in heat, wild eyed, looking for asphalt pastures of plenty.
The collars of the card-carrying blue, proud of the red, white and blue product produced and comfortable in their roles as knights of the Union Table, Lancelot’s all. They emptied their black lunch boxes of five-hour-old sandwiches, hard cheese, tomatoes and prosciutto . . . grabbed a quick drink from a silver thermos and waited.
They waited for the blue collar burlesque to begin, the Dance of the Vehicular Veil performed by the wench of the wrench. Finally, she entered the banquet hall, her face a monochromatic gray industrial-age blank. The faceless one of the machine-age whore with caked on, way too thick layers of lipstick and racks and stacks of Rouge Plant rouge.
The Cold War was a crazed bitch in heat, teeth bared, growling and hungry, with an insatiable appetite for insanity . . . mouth foaming, frothing and wet. Caddy tailfins were reaching a post pubescent crescendo in ground-to-fin ratios: heaving hard-ons, leaping skyward with a blue collar bulge and the decade of innocence was about to plummet from its pedestal of Motor City marble and crash-land into a million tiny fragments onto the floor, falling gracelessly from grace into the abyss of space and time to make way for arrival of Holy Hell. The 1960's. The age of anarchy, assassination and Aquarius.
The hardhats of hard hearted Detroit, the unfeeling town without blue collar pity, purity or piety, were only interested in paychecks and parity, not parody, or even supremacy for that matter . . . in space, or anywhere else. The plebian philosophers who later espoused the love it or leave middle finger answer to dissent hadn't risen to the surface yet, like so much bubbling and dangerous volcanic gas. Christ, we won the big one didn't we? WWII, yeah, the Big One, the one that counted. Who cared about one more pin the tail on the donkey commie red star on the Asian map? Little slant-eyed mud hole nobody ever heard of anyway, "Exceptin' for those freakin' fag French, spinning their colonial steel belts in the mud and rice paddies, getting creamed-cheesed like a French pastry on the battlefield . . . waitin' for Uncle Sam to help them out, again, and again, and kick some ass." Ah . . . Lafayette, we are here!
Mickey, the Dago kid, was just 11-years-old and the last thing on his mind was the nightmare of a blood soaked Vietnam that lurked camouflaged in the booby trapped bushes of his future, or in the wah-wah days of purple haze in San Francisco that would entertain, change and alter him in the intervening years of maturation. The cold nights and vacant days of train hoppers and pill poppers, facedown junkies and drunks and the vortex of feather boa boys and double-breasted dykes.
Right now, he had more important matters to attend to. "Gunsmoke" was on TV tonight and yesterday, his second cousin had given him his first hard-on and he had made a mess.
Mickey's Mack Avenue was another small piece of the ethnic jigsaw puzzle of Detroit: dark, secretive Italians; big, hunkering Poles; oom-pah-pah Germans and enough drunken Irish to fill the ethnic cup to overflowing. "Give us your tired, your hungry and your poor. Your beat, your downtrodden, your drunks and your whores. Give us all you got. Why not?"
Mack Avenue ran the racial gauntlet from the inner core to the outer limits. All the way, eastward through the cacophony of the city's ethnicity. Neighborhoods. Corner BBQ's, soot, smoke and pork, beer and betting parlors, rhythm and blues, old Negro buses cranking along the tired old concrete of Gratiot Ave, Mack and Chene. Blue collars, black skin, white skin, brown skin. The Melting Pot of the Kingdom of Detroit, but when Mack Avenue hit the Mediterranean flashpoint of Three Mile Drive, it was Mickey's world, an 11-year-old private preserve of only child make-believe world, as only an only child could fashion.
An Eye-talian neighborhood to be sure. Fresh baked sweetbreads, fat plates of piled-high pasta and meats, blood-red and delicioso. It had enough bad ass badda-bing and badda-boom to ignite megatons of politically incorrect dynamite. A neighborhood full of vowel-ending names . . . Scalisi, Marino, Vitti, Russo, Cusamano and Bommarito. A raucous, vociferous hand waving Roman Catholic city-state of old world/new world peasants . . . kids, families, hustlers and wise guys. The perfect backdrop to grow up in and hold onto for the rest of your life.
It had it all, especially the alleys, those damned alleys that were the perfect venue of play for urban kids to knock around and kick the can, or let loose at stick ball. Sometimes, the alleys were transformed from concrete and broken glass into deep, old-west Hopalong Cassidy canyons of twisted boulder formations—giant red rock, complete with raging, heart-pounding rushing whitewater rivers and steep watchful cliffs. A mystical 1800's Geronimo setting where cowboys, cavalry and Indians fought and killed each other daily: one side in the name of "get the fuck out of my way," American politically sanctioned westward expansion and the other side strictly trying to hold on to dear life and to preserve an ancient heritage.
The same Mack Avenue valley listened intently as the hoof beats and war whoops disappeared into the mist, fog and shroud of imagination, only to be replaced by the sounds of many mechanized divisions creaking and roaring into the forests outside of Bastogne. This time, the horses were replaced by the armored cavalry of General Patton and they would defeat Nazi Germany once again, this time with pop guns and Daisy Air Rifles.
In child war, there is only victory or defeat for one side or the other. No death camps, no Auschwitz, no atrocities. No tyranny, no tyrants. No geo-politics at play, and no real dead to lie there bleeding that have to be mended on the battlefield before being sent home, in pieces, to live out life lifelessly in a wheelchair as a reward for service—with a Purple Heart bedpan medal at the VA Hospital.
At the end of child-battle, the two sides would simply break rank and roles and retreat, armed not with bullets and grenades, but nickels clenched in tiny fists as they raced to the soda fountain for double dips. Vanilla Cokes. Cherry Cokes. Boston Coolers. Vernors and Faygo. It was a sweet toothed unconditional surrender!
As they sat at the counter, big frothy, frosty, Boston Coolers in front of them, Raymond, one of the non-Italian, yet budding Polish philosopher kids Mickey hung out with, scratched his head and thought, "Think dyin' hurts, Mickey? You know, real hurt, I mean?" Mickey had to think hard about that one. He had only seen fake TV death, rich in black and white drama, not ruby red blood. Not real life death. Ever. Yet.
"Dunno. Maybe a little bit. Ain't had no one die yet that I know personally. I know when the Lone Ranger shoots someone on TV, they just fall off a horse, clutch their chest and moan a little. Never see no blood or nuthin', but it probably does hurt a