Jessie Benton, the daughter of the famous artist, Thomas Hart Benton, believed the Fort Hill Community in Roxbury Massachussetts was from outer space. The famous musician, Mel Lyman had a cult following two blocks up the street from where I lived with two artists, and an LSD dealer who you could find in the Boston Commons. Joe would punch your ticket, and away you ride on the Jefferson Starship.
The year is 1970. Does Jessie and Mel know about the space odyssey Grace Slick and other famous rock musicians have in the works. Did they hear they tried to get Kurt Vonnegut onboard ‘Blow’s Against the Empire’ that is right out of Lyman’s philosophy.
Grace Slick and Jessie Benton. No one has put these two people together before, just as no one put Lucia Joyce and Antonin Artaud together. How about James Joyce and Mel Lyman? Mel instigated an American Renaissance in Boston, a city in New England that is said to be the most English city in America. He founded a newspaper with the monies his wife inherited from Thomas Benton. The Avatar began to invent a new language that Mel believed would transform America from coast to coast – and then the whole world. Mel had declared himself God, an Avatar, a term that comes from India.
Mel was born in Oregon and set out to capture the language and feel of American Folk Music that is a treasure trove of colloquialisms. Mel took from the greats and attempted to create a New Metamorphis. He knew some of Andy Warhol film makers. Here is born the American Avante Guard and Theatre of the Absurd steeped with American Tradition founded by European Rebels and Misfits. Joyce had to give an answer to Edgar Allen Poe, a Gothic Hand across the water – full of Irish Limericks – played on a Hillbillies banjo! For We are Clever Children of Words, and it took clever words and naughty Leperacons to declare We had founded a True Democracy.
One night, it began to snow. I had never walked in the snow, and I put on my black English Bobbies cape and headed up to the tower on Fort Hill. I had become jealous after I beheld Rena emerge from her dorm wearing a long velvet green cape. Why can’t I wear a cape? Wlaking around the campus of the University of Nebraska with Rena Victoria in her cape, was a highlight of my life, for I was famous for making costumes and parading around in public. Above is a photo of me in the cape my girlfriend Gloria made for me.
Yesterday, I spoke a silent truth to Rena Victoria, knowing she was reading my letter.
“Rena, I never stopped loving you. I could not because you were ‘The One’ I was meant to spend the rest of my life with. We had so much beautiful work together. I’m afraid we own a huge mistake. You see, I never asked for anything in my life, and looking down on the breaking waves, I asked for you, the love of my life. Where is she?”
“Here I am!”
When Rena Victoria walked out of that dark doorway, she wanted to say this; “Will you help me?”. However, because she was abused as a child by a selfish alcoholic, she quickly learned the primal rule in an alcoholic household; “Never ask you drunken parent for anything, because you are going to get it, the devious lesson and diatribe about all the things they didn’t get as children, teenagers, and adults. And, somehow this is all your fault – and you are only seven years old.”
“Can I walk with you?” Rena asked me. And, I knew exactly what she was asking me, and why she was disguising her cry for help. To this day I thanks Meher Baba, a Indian Avatar for helping me break my silence, because, here she was, Rena delivered unto me minutes after I summoned her.
“Of course. I was expecting you?”
That said, I felt for a reaction from this beautiful appiration that took steps in unison with my steps. Rena now took a step ahead of me, because she wanted to see my face, when she asked her next question.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I was looking down on the waves crashing on the shore. Yesterday I said goodbye to the woman I thought would be the Love of my Life, and wondered where she was, the true Love of my Life.”
Talk about moments to member. Here we were at three in the morning in LA. This beauty does not know me from Adam. Has she just made the biggest mistake in her life, and, now her life ends here and now?
“Don’t be afraid, I am a harmless romantic!” Again, I felt for this young woman’s fear level, her meeting with the Big Bad Wolf, or her beholding of her Knight in Shining armour.
“Oh!” se said, and I assumed correctly she knew what a romantic was, and, assessed I was harmless.
Just then, my sister Christine and her boyfriend Michel walked up to us. We were staying at our sister’s house, whose husband was Michael’s brother. We decided to take a walk to the Venice Pier, and I let these two lovers goto the end of the pier without me. That’s; when I looked down at the waves, and asked…..for something. And, not just anything. I will love Rena Victoria to my last day on earth, because she is my Gift, my Gift from God, in this case, Meher Baba, for I had become a devote of this Avatar in 1967. From here on I will describe my relationship with this goddess on terms an average citizen of India would understand. I will alas reveal the lessons I gave my Gift, and discrobe our two person Renaissance.
As I made my way up to the tower, I began to get romantic with the sound my boots were making in the freshly fallen snow. I stopped and looked back from where I came. At home is my first painting of Rena. She is walking in the freshly fallen snow in Nebraska – in her green cape. I have taken great care in rendering the dry prairie grass peeking through the snow in a bright wintry landscape. There is a purity here, a continuation of our lessons Rena is receiving on her own, she no longer walking with me. And this is what must be, for, one of the happiest days of my life when I took the train to Boston and stopped in Lincoln to see Rena once again. This was also the unhappiest day of my life, because we said goodbye. This far, and no further.
I stood below the monument to a battle we americans won against the Brits in the our War of Independence. I am looking into the sky and watching the snowflakes fall. Suddenly I hear footsteps approaching, and hear this question.
“What are you doing here. You are not supposed to me here. Get going!”
I can not believe what I am hearing, and size up this little man with his hands in his pocket. I asked him why I must leave a public park and he tells me he is a guard, and, he is guarding Mel and Jessie Lyman who are in my family tree thanks to Christine beholding photo of my painting of Rena Victoria in her green cape. If Christine had not become a famous art, then I doubt Garth Benton would have married my sister. My ex-brother-in law had a daughter named Jessie from her married to the actress, Ali McBride. This name is a family tradition.
“Are you carrying a gun I asked Paul Williams.
“Yes I am.” was the reply.
“And you are prepared to shoot me, if you don’t get your way?”
“Yes!”
From Rena’s letter come these words, to my rescue. For since the day I met her, she has saved my life a thousand times. The love I will always have for her is my resolve, to go forward no matter how dark and afraid you might feel. And I was fearless because the worst thing in my life had already happened to me. I lost her.
“Here I am!”
“My day walks are beautiful, winter is beautiful. Life can be beautiful, sometimes. The winter here is my friend. Out with my dogs I spotted wolf tracks!”
The Summer of Love ended in disaster. The Gathering of the Tribes, is now a dispersion. Free Love is now a Long Goodbye. This was the main lesson we shared in our little Renaissance as we went our way in different directions.
“I am no longer young and pretty.” My Muse informs me. Then she give me a profound apology. No one has ever appigzed to me for anything, least for something that happened forty-four years ago. And this apology is as fresh as new snow.
“Greg, I want you to know & listen. I apologize for being an abusive girl who our paths crossed in 1970. I had come out of a dark and dangerous place, and you helped me.”
There it is! Do you see it? “Help me!”
We are not immortals. If you poke us, we bleed. And we grow old. And we die. Then, comes the end of our story. And if we are lucky, we will be remembered. If we are innocent, we will be forgiven as we lie on our death-bed. But surely death is coming. And death leaves no tracks in the snow. But, what of Love? Does it last………forever?
Rena and Greg! Have we come together to give the world an answer? Have we come to dance, the last dance? Do we dare attend our own Wake, from a safe distance, or very near. Will I be with Rena Victoria watching her did in her death-bed?
Rena sent me a poem she wrote in 1971. ‘All Winter Long’ She is eighteen.
“All winter long I watched the world through silver splinters
But now……
The warm-weather workmen come;
bearing the final strategem on their backs.”
This beautiful snow maiden loves the winter for its solitude. For dreams of owning a perfect love, fall upon a lonely heart. And never is this love like any other love.
Like snow flakes, we descend to earth. And in the spring, we melt away. I am but one pall-bearer come to bear beauty on my back, and mourn for our secret conspiracy, that can not be told, until, it is over. And it is never over.
The three artist that God put on this earth to accompany my Gift, are gone. Alone, I alone, get a glimpse of her, our beloved Star Spangled Muse, her gossamer wings, whispering, as she comes to bear our creative collective heart, to a finer place.
Jon Presco
Williams created the first national US magazine of rock music criticism Crawdaddy![1] in January 1966[2] on the campus of Swarthmore College with the help of some of his fellow science fiction fans (he had previously put out some science fiction fanzines).[3] The first issue was ten mimeographed pages written entirely by Williams.[4][5] He left the magazine in 1968 and reclaimed the title in 1993, but had to end it in 2003 due to financial difficulties.
He was also the author of more than 25 books, of which the best-known are Outlaw Blues, Das Energi, and Bob Dylan: Performing Artist, the acclaimed three-part series. Williams was a leading authority on the works of musicians Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, and Neil Young, and science fiction writers Philip K. Dick (serving as the executor of his literary estate)[6] and Theodore Sturgeon. His last book was The 20th Century’s Greatest Hits (a “Top 40” list that includes movies, books & other documents).[7]
In 1981 he edited and published, with David G. Hartwell, the first book edition of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with a foreword by Jimmy Carter
Rosamond Press 
Leave a comment