Echoes of Dean

By Calum Cumming

his is a book about the greatest fictional marriage of the 21st

Century in Scotland and the USA: June and

Blue McCallum. In outline it examines how true love conquers all. In essence love survives the slings and

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Universal Breakthrough
• Release date: Nov 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781956094626

Calum Cumming

Calum Cumming MA (Glasgow) Cert Lib Scot C Eng Dip Tefl was born in 1962. He was brought up in Scotland. BEAT is mainly the screen adaptation of Calum's 4th book; the novel: Jack Nicholson. Calum currently lives and works in Scotland.

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Echoes of Dean

Calum Cumming

Copyright © 2021 Calum Cumming.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without a prior written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review, and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by the copyright law.

ISBN: 978-1-956094-63-3 (PB)

ISBN: 978-1-956094-64-0 (HB)

ISBN: 978-1-956094-62-6 (E-book)

Some characters and events in this book are fictitious and products of the author’s imagination. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

The Universal Breakthrough

15 West 38th Street

New York, NY, 10018, USA

[e-mail]

www.theuniversalbreakthrough.com

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

1

2

3

4

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Dedicated to the memory of

Neil Cassady, who was Dean Moriarty:

the strength lent to the character of Sol Paradiso,

in Jack Kerouac’s novel ON THE ROAD.

Neil, a1926 Tiger of a man, to Jack’s 1922 Diamond Dog.

man-woman.jpgPearlGirl.jpg

1

BLUE.1965.

Do you know oranges make your teeth rotten?

Misinformed as always my small son.

Mouse ears round and flat

Rough brown hairstyle

Hard little hands but gentle,

A joy in your present state,

Extremes meet in you.

Betsy Gall

Setting out North East around 10AM on the Pacific Rim. Before the famous ‘THE TRIPLE KIRKS.’ Where Kris Kristofferson the Protofeminist, who I met in Hazlehead Aberdeen some 45 years ago, and the Uncle of Ziggi Kristofferson, had offered me up to the World. Aberdeen Scotland; Where the sons of Christ and the daughters of Mohammed co-existed hap pily.

The ‘egg and the chicken.’ Where Kris: ‘The Lone Star State’ had once eaten a meal on the road in the 60s’

Breakfast,

Sparrows with their cheerful chattering calls, the birth of the new day. The Four Elements of the Season: Rain, Cold, Sunlight and Wind. I went into the Diner, a ‘gut buster’ and I took a seat at a window table. The waitress came over with coffee and iced water, there was sugar and cream on the side. She started a Tab for me. I was grateful to her and I said, Thank you.

I look at the menu. I choose the blue plate special: Bacon, Hash browns, red beans, tomatoes, two eggs, Jalapeño sausage, butter & rye toast, juice, $9. It will have been good. To stop a while. After I had eaten my breakfast, I would head outside for a smoke. I turned to look at the Diner. There was a broken down scene: an old woman with her son, I wondered what kind of place they came from, but I had no idea. I looked at the pale yellow wall, and the picture I saw gave my heart courage. It was the pair Butch Cassidy& The Sun-dance Kid. Paul and Robert the two Heroes filmed taking off the mountain top in Arizona, into the green blue deep of the water on the stone river bed joined at the right and left hands by a leather bullet belt.

I ordered breakfast and waited for it to come. I was hungry. The Diner was quietly down beat as the waitress came with my food and juice, and she gave me a refill of coffee. I ate my food and then used one of the wooden cinnamon tooth picks, and paid the Tab, leaving a $2 tip. The nice girl said bye to me as I left the Diner and turned for the road.

What could possibly now go wrong? I had a full stomach, and I had slept. I had dreamt a recurring dream that a King Charles spaniel had sat and as I went to give it some cooked fat the little dog had bitten my hand and drawn blood.

Standing on the side walk smoking a Winston cigarette. Here on the corner of SE and Hawthorne. I would like to go back to the American Youth Hostel Association for some money but I always carried that and everything else that I hadn’t forgotten about. Black low riding. Generally, a facsimile: like show-business. Bare trees with their hands raised up towards heaven in prayer supplication, as an airliner climbing high up with it’s after burners, was scorching and scoring the sky. Cars, children with their parents, single adults, a dog moving on the street, and a Jake shrouded in a blanket. And the wizen, odd nature, of childhood imagination of the kids. I thought once more I am enjoying smoking, Afterwards I will go and get a drink in the Bar.

But no, not as yet.

Through out the night I had slept well in the cold airy basement male bunk house, It was late Winter out on the West Coast, in Portland, Oregon, (A USA STATE since 1859). The Rose City: The city of ‘unconditional love.’ Banks of snow were pushed into truncated heaps as the thaw continued and a white rock salt residual grit rime coated the asphalt, cement, and wooden, painted beige, and duck egg blue vertical and horizontal slatted structures. Where the cars stood outside the warm moist air and fragrant suds of the under pool. The Launderette further down the Avenue towards Down Town and the river that divided the North from the more prosperous South of the City; a natural ethnic and arterial border line, that was in material terms wrong, like Scotland’s border with richer England.

And then I saw a girl and she was a cool cat. Coming towards me, like Nina did on Union Street in Aberdeen when I was eighteen, walking East towards Aberdeen beach. Now, this girl was walking Northern West. Towards the river Willamette and the view of the labour and machinery activity on the river. Towards the clean wash of the under pool. And I thought about the struggle with the sound of the dog’s back door, the dirty mess back home.

I reflected sagely; a Shipyard Coco- A Show business Lock out. I was a man who’s Gods had failed him. I, waiting for a way up and a way out.

The girl was wearing a blonde & red tint bobbed hairstyle and she had on tortoise shell arty horn rimmed glasses. And as the crow flies I estimated her age at about thirty as she set eyes on mine. She was beautiful. I looked at the cat again. she had green eyes or so I thought. Again, it was mutual. Was she just protesting, Was I progressing? Or did the girl and I have something to give worthwhile. What was to say? For the fire of attraction had intervened in her and my affairs as the winter Lowery frame of set sun did it’s best to thaw out the raw heat in my living bone marrow.

I was here in the North Western Portland Powell’s Book store City. She was looking for the Ami. I punctured the weight of the silence and I said, Hi, and got over my stone cold sobriety. The dopey natural inability to deliver one good line to say to a complete stranger and a member of the opposite sex. I said to her passing, Some day soon the spring is going to arrive, the cold weather is going to break, and I will be back in NE Scotland in the next couple of weeks.

What a bummer eh. she said, speaking confidently, taking her heart in her hands.

She stopped in front of me and she added, Did you tell that to the clouds in your coffee in the Diner?...I saw you coming out.

I stood still momentarily. Startled that someone had recognised me. In common with the humility of my lonely day I bowed.

She looked at my road salted black boots and then I raised my head and looked at her feet and ankles directly. She put down the North American cat in the cage she was carrying and she was standing pigeon toed. Her wearing magenta high heeled spun silk and black leather soled shoes, me, one size to big. A square robust heel and sparkly silver yellow socks that ran in crumples up and down her slender brown ankles. I looked upwards towards her risen face and saw into her eyes...aye aye… A Delhi delve. In that moment of mutual recognition I underwent a road to Damascus conversion; an Epiphany, when Saul turns to Paul. She was in her turn up blue Levis Chap 501s’ and was wearing a Bomber black belted leather jacket. Billy Jean who will be my Lover.

In antithesis to this coloured femininity, I said,

The clouds in my coffee, hey I’m going, it is about to rain.

It was not just a reflection of my mental state, the brains of a mixed up mind; and that dove has taken flight more often than most, I reflected. She was a hybrid like me. A Eurasian and me: a mixed up Scot, and a Girl like my dead cat Lady who had turned me into a big cat, the truth about big cats. Like Lady she spoke to my inner child, and sniffed at me, and said in an American accent,

Hey Jack just wait a minute my name’s June, June Dance. The male cats called...um, what’s your name Scotch man?

I replied,

Blue, Blue McCallum, nice to meet you.

We shook hands. There was pace between us. I touched her on her right shoulder. Hey call us Blue, she said, lighting up, and June smiled with a sweet successful look in her face.

June had reddish green brown eyes. The kind of home that questions the innate, the inside insight of the garage; the ramp, The strip light, the mechanic, and the smell of oil and gas. Night into the Human condition’s work endeavour. June had a straight back. Strong and curved like the War Poet Robert Graves. As for me I said, I think I got the same name Blue because I’m kinda hang dog Mongolian looking; the missing link: then made up to God, white sallow Hepatic liverish paste complexion of the sad clown... June took feminine pity on me and replied, So you do have a sense of humour, I can tell you are a joker like Jack. I frowned and then said, How did you get the cat June?

A STRAY GREY CAT GEORGE

I lost my home it was the move to Johns-haven that did it. I endured all sort of weather to return to Aberdeen.

I said.

The name of the game is making a little money.

June then said.

Do you like my cat Blue because Blue, we have only just met but I like you.

She looked down, down at her hands that I had noticed were sensitive. Then she, looking up into my eyes,

Said,

I have made some money, a lot, and I am Independent. But a home loving cat always keeps her warm.

I thought it was a shame for all three of us. We deserved each other. It was just about right on our trio, but also I thought about an allegorical experience in Edinburgh.

The Pakistani store worker that scans you in error twice, and you think he can get away with it, because you like to cheat him, yes, you with $1. 50 Cents in your pocket, and yes you could knock the living shit out of yourself if it were to cause a scene. But be patient. And impatient people behind your back welling up under the white omnipresent neon. Your implicit trust in the disreputable, the sharp knife. The dishonest seedy nature of all money lending. As it is he falsely thinks you have money and you don’t notice, but now, much later, when all is at rest, now, and you have noticed, now and alone, in your flat, you are rightly angry with yourself.

What would Jack do?

He would say, "Think of the Islamic savant big Joseph Butt from Lahore who boomed out to you when he worked in the store, ‘Callan! Naughty boy.’

Just don’t take life so seriously and learn to laugh at yourself."

A Trumpet or six keyed Saxophone man like Herb Hancock now plays distantly in the white inky midnight all day and night of late winter or so you would like to imagine in Portland. Yes. South East Edinburgh. Gilmerton; an import of musical tone, but not the muses.

Herself.

And as I used to look East and North East out of my living room there throughout the four seasons of 11 years, like welcome to my flat number in the Gillie and that is underground art: eleven, ‘007 at No. Eleven’: the number sign of the Dog, in Chinese Astrology: The Dog Collar. Now here in the USA to discover my deepest destiny undercover. I had reassured myself then in Edinburgh, but I was fearful and tearful to return home. Just enough so. And to go back to Aberdeen and the route where I had been brought up as a child, teenager, and also where I had lived as a working man.

Aberdeen, and the West by North East sunset song A Scots Quair by Leslie Mitchell for Betsy who had been a Gemini corn Queen like Chris Guthrie. Where the rosy glow of the crown of the setting Sun burned brightest in the sky, and my Scots Universe. Where the war had taken place some 16 years ago. Almost all war is over land or to use the common modernism The Beef. Turf war of drugs and dealing. And this is still. What are the criteria and self criticism for ending Drug abuse? Penultimately an immigration in the microcosm of Arab and Pan African refugees from the Kingdom of Salem.

Except in the macrocosm of Neolithic’s Beaker jars of Neanderthal inheritance. In Pict and Anglo Saxon culture we had plundered the gold, but the contemporary Aberdeen Beaker people have not had much Spiritual Faith in themselves: and are predominantly mean with their gold. As people to whom on SALT is pay; Vertical lines of brood, blood, and in breeding; running down slowly a whitewashed cement wall, or does water run uphill? Well specifically, defying gravity sometimes, piped by hydraulic pressure. And like the North East steadily rising against the gravitational fall. And even though oddly, the origin of species could walk away from that materialism, and mainland continental Europe in foundation, all those many thousands of years ago, I appealed to her once more, a supplicant in absorbed, capillary action. And suddenly I realised that June had in her a kindred honest sense and sensibility; and that all was going to be kindness and fine.

And June had realised that I needed her, and also differently, I wanted her.

I said to the woman.

"For June, I had once met in mid August a rising May Gemini Dog in 1993, Adrienne Baynes, 23, a Model and celebrity and with her teeth kissing infection of the boon I now had ‘The Dog’s Bollocks’ like Norman Gariock from Orkney, the Teacher, Poet and Goldsmith, who said Gold and Silver gives off a terrible reek when you try to alloy them in a molten state. For gold and silver are unalloyed to one another. I had once been in New-Battle Adult College with Norman. And he had been infected by a woman, ‘The Swan’. It affected the weather pattern; Blue McCallum is not unalike Norman from The Northern Isles; a Rain King, like the classical story of Leda and The Swan.

Like Norman, or Liam and Noel Gallagher I liked a Shire Country Pub Lock in. And like the kiss causes specific or viral Death and malnutrition for some of the living animals and Humans that are ready, willing, and even unwilling to die. A lock culture in is ultimately fatally intimate.

For the Lord moves in Mysterious ways, and only one tooth remains in the Sands of our Souls. That is all that physically endures in time."

As Bob Dylan had observed first. He was May like me, another Mayfly.

He would soon be eighty years old: a Gemini Satyr, and he said,

That was the mysteries of Ancient Greece. Secret Cults practised by initiates in honour of certain Gods e.g. Dionysus, Demeter and the Cabeiri. By far the most celebrated were the Eleusinian held in Honour of Demeter at Eleusia in the late Summer month of Boedrimion. A procession along the Sacred Way was followed the same evening by a performance of the solemn mystic rites of kissing. So closely was the related secret guarded that we know very little about the ceremonial. Today the initiates might be accused of hypocrisy in seeking ritual purification rather than moral perfection. But it must be remembered that the mysteries kept alive the ideal of a more perfect life hereafter, and no doubt made their contribution to the idea of union with the Godhead, and thus to the specifically Christian ideal of everlasting Life.

And as the starlings, the city birds of flocked universality of sudden flight and song sang in the eaves and high ridge lines June asked me for a draw of my cigarette. I passed her the Winston Light and the flock of birds took flight. I was curious, to discover why that act of random, constant kissing at a Gill Scot Heron