The Mayor of Pine Point

Last of a kind.



Recently I was sitting around the Woodstar, a Northampton coffeehouse, when some friends asked me whether I would be marching in the Gay Pride Parade this year. I told them absolutely not, and told them about the time many years ago when I first decided that I had no interest in gay activism. I was a student at UMass and went to check out the campus organization for gay students, then located on the second floor of the Student Union. Today it is located in this rainbow festooned office in Southwest.



Anyway, when I got there the place was closed, but I looked in the window. Inside I saw all kinds of posters and slogans and an environment that looked more like a political campaign headquarters than anything to do with sexuality. I said to myself, "I may like to suck cock, but that doesn't mean I want to march down the street waving a sign about it." And I never have.

However, talking about the Pride Parade reminded me of the time that the madcap lawyer J. Wesley Miller almost got arrested one year for public indecency after the march. Wesley had gone to the parade dressed only in a tiny pink thong, with balloons tied to his arms like feathers. He was also carrying a sign which read, "Save York Street Jail."

The sign was a reference to Wesley's latest economic development proposal. He had abandoned his earlier effort to get a shrine erected in Springfield for native son and LSD guru Dr. Timothy Leary. Instead he began crusading to turn the vacant York Street jail into a Leather Bar. He had heard about a place in San Francisco or somewhere in which an old jailhouse had been turned into a S&M nightclub where the old cells were used to stage bondage and humiliation sessions for clients who paid by the hour. Wesley couldn't understand why Springfield's economic development department showed no enthusiasm for his plan, so he was taking his proposal to the streets by marching in the Gay Pride Parade.

Unfortunately for Wesley, he ended up having to march behind Dykes On Bikes, who traveled the parade route with engines rumbling loudly as they crawled along in flying V formation. Behind those menacing bull-dyke lezzies poor Wesley in his pink thong and balloons simply couldn't attract any attention. He left the parade with the indignation of an ignored visionary, stripped off his balloons and drove home in his thong. On the way he stopped to pick up some photos he had dropped off at a pharmacy in a strip mall in Longmeadow. Someone called to complain that a nearly nude man was in the parking lot and the police arrived. Somehow Wesley talked himself out of getting arrested, but he was indignant over the incident for the rest of life.

Springfield used to have a lot of eccentric activists. When I was a boy in Pine Point there was an old man whom everyone used to call The Mayor of Pine Point. I don't remember his name, although it might have been "Manning" but in any case I don't remember why he was called Pine Point's mayor. I did however get to know the person who took the title after the Mayor's death, a guy by the name of Al Rivers.

Rivers was an older guy with a pencil thin moustache who attended all the public meetings. He would then stroll around Pine Point telling everyone about what he had observed, beginning at Peter's Drug and then working his way down Boston Road to Casey the Barber's, Doyle the Twig Painter, Nora's Variety and finally ending his day by holding court in a booth at Russell's Restaurant. He was always on and off the wagon, and when he was off he would complete his night by giving long drunken lectures on public affairs at the Pine Point Cafe.

Rivers came across in some ways as a nut. He talked in a sing-song voice and was always waving his arms as he spoke, like a conductor whose speech was transformed in his mind into music which only he could hear. I suspect he was secretly gay, but he was from a generation where the best response to that biological inclination was to totally repress it. In fact he seemed embarrassed by any expression of sexuality, and would usually depart with a blush from the Twig Painter's gallery, since Doyle was irrepressibly obscene.

Besides attending all public meetings, Rivers claim to special intellectual insight was based on the fact that he had read every book in the Pine Point Library. Nevermind that the library's collection consisted primarily of children's books, romance novels for bored housewives and adventure tales for their husbands. Yet there were also numerous reference books, which he alone had read every page of, and he spoke of this accomplishment as another man might have spoken of graduating from Harvard.

So you would see him walking all over the Point, and everyone greeted him and listened as he recounted what he had seen or heard at the City Council, or School Committee or Planning Board meeting, and he always gave you his opinion. In that sense he was a useful bearer of political news, but unfortunately his opinions were painfully predictable. In his view, the political world had reached its absolute zenith in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and no politician who had ever drawn breath since could possibly be judged by any other standard than how they resembled his hero. Everyone of course fell miserably short, all except one, the sainted John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who he said might have been another FDR if only he had lived.

Obviously there was something more than vaguely ridiculous in comparing every Springfield politician to FDR, but everyone humored Rivers and sometimes even used to tell him that he should run for office himself. This was said only half seriously, since the thought of Rivers in the City Hall chambers giving the long winded speeches heretofore only heard by unlucky patrons of the Pine Point Cafe, as he waved his arms as if to a symphony, was simply impossible to imagine. But Rivers, despite missing the lack of seriousness and flattered by the suggestion that he run, never showed any actual interest in seeking public office. He seemed content to be known by his unofficial title of Mayor of Pine Point, as he was called by everyone, especially Pine Point's children, who knew him by no other name than "Mr. Mayor."

Then one day Al Rivers did something no one had ever expected. He took out nomination papers for City Council! The very thought was ridiculous, but of course everyone felt that they had to sign them. By now Rivers was quite elderly, and there was speculation that his campaign might be a manifestation of being not quite in his right mind. His campaign reminded people of another fellow, who was always running for mayor of Springfield, and who had a plate in his skull as a result of having been struck by a train. This odd candidate was a likeable sort, and sensible most of the time, but in certain moods he would talk in disturbingly serious tones about his communication with aliens. However, since the aliens never seemed to tell him to do anything bad, he harmlessly ran for office several times, always collecting a few hundred protest and joke votes.

But Rivers was not considered in that same degree of eccentricity, and everyone feared that he would get his feelings hurt when he went down to his inevitable defeat. One day when Father Shea, the pastor of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Church, paused to talk with a group gathered at the Twig Painter's gallery, it was resolved that Fr. Shea, whom Rivers respected, should say something to Rivers about quitting the race. The Pastor did his best, but nothing could dissuade Al Rivers from his goal of demonstrating to the City of Homes how Franklin Delano Roosevelt would have acted had he served on the Springfield City Council.

To no one's surprise, when the votes were counted Rivers went down to a humiliating defeat, not even carrying his home precinct in Pine Point. Just as everyone had feared, he was crushed. Rivers had never seriously considered the possibility that he might lose. The voters had spoken - God damn them! - and he felt they had made a fool of him.

Our neighborhood mayor was never the same. Rivers finally sensed the humor behind his title, and although it was always meant in good spirits, he now saw only the joke. I won't be so melodramatic as to claim that his death a few years later was the result of his electoral defeat, but it certainly didn't prolong his life. He felt he could no longer convincingly play his previous role, and so his life had less meaning. He had been happy as the play-mayor of Pine Point, but exposure to the reality of the political arena had broken his heart. Yet I'd like to think that he would have taken consolation in one thing which occurred, or rather which didn't occur, after his death. Where Rivers had inherited his title from a predecessor, it turned out that no one was ever declared to have replaced him.

Al Rivers was the last Mayor of Pine Point.



Howie Carr has a devastating column in the Boston Herald this morning about Tommy Petrolati of Ludlow (above with Mike Albano) and his ties to crime figures. As usual Carr wields his pen like a switchblade:

Who put the rocket in Petro’s pocket? That’s the question at the State House: Who dropped - not a dime, but a bomb - on the “Speaker pro tempore” of the House of Representatives?

It seems that Tommy Petrolati’s contributors’ list is larded with gangsters, bookies, extortionists, bank fraudsters, tax cheaters, cash-skimmers, witness-tamperers and embezzlers.

To which there are two responses at the State House: No. 1, “That’s Petro.” And No. 2, “That’s Springfield.”

Carr also can't resist bringing up Petrolati's close ties to Springfield's first family of crime, the infamous Asselins:

Things are starting to look up for his closest political allies and contributors, the Asselin family. His great friend, ex-Rep. Chris Asselin of Springfield, is getting out of prison on June 15. And Chris Asselin’s wife, Merylina, who was also indicted in the corruption case, just scored a massive Bulger-like hit on the public mammary.

She is grabbing $210,000 in back wages from her job at Chicopee High School as a “guidance counselor,” now that the federal charges against her have been dropped.

Before his incarceration, Rep. Asselin was working as, what else, a lobbyist. Convicted of bribery, theft and mail fraud, he’s at least as big a crook as his fellow lobbyists Felon Finneran or Good Time Charlie Flaherty - plus he actually did time. I think once he gets sprung from Club Fed, ex-Rep. Asselin should reopen his lobbying “office,” just like his fellow felon Finneran is doing.

And could there be . . . room for one more?

To read the whole hilarious article, click here.


Today those famous April showers that bring May flowers fell quite heavily, but yesterday by contrast was absolutely gorgeous. After my psych appointment a fuckbuddy and I hung out in downtown Northampton. Here's a picture my friend took of me.



Later we sat on the fire escape outside the Haymarket Cafe.



It was a peaceful, contemplative place to watch the world go by. Here's the doorway leading to the fire escape.



This is a video I made of Luke the street singer.