Beaten

Just to start things off, here is the original, by Richard Berry

And here is the version that actually had the FBI up nights trying to decipher the lyrics.

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of cover versions out there, making Louie, Louie one of the more durable arrows in the rock quiver. Sooooo … what’s your verdict? Read the article. It’s amusing but you won’t learn a thing that helps to clarify the issue.

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Here is a perfect point/counterpoint. Our president and his gang of thugs are rounding up latinos and latinas as fast as they can and sending them illegally to prison camps where they live under deplorable conditions. But what’s this? A group from Mexico (the land of rapists and drug lords according to Cluck), came northwards across the border to help Texas in rescue and recovery operations immediately after the Guadalupe River catastrophe.

Cluck and his newly created League of Incompetent Bastards would have trouble understanding something like this. It is the sort of unselfish and courageous thing that people do for other people when disaster strikes. Borders, languages, and politics are set aside as humans respond to tragedies. There are days when I despair of our species for many reasons, but stories like this … maybe we will make it after all.

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Our family home at the time I attended Warrington was on Second Avenue south and everybody on that street was white. Two blocks away, on Fourth Street, that color pattern was reversed. We all went to Warrington, however, and I have no recollection at all of any black/white tensions in the school, no sorting out according to color on the playground. I only had one playground fight in all those years and that was with the biggest girl in the fifth grade who trounced me, on the spot indicated by the arrow. I do not recall what my offense was, but her remedy was a doozy.

I do recall an African-American boy who was the best singer in the entire school, and his name was Plouis Moore. At an assembly one day he sang Danny Boy in the finest Irish tenor voice imaginable. Even a clot like myself could recognize his talent. Because of that one day, that one song, his is the only name that I remember from all those years in that school.

Except for Marjorie Heath, of course, my unspoken and thus unrequited love of the fourth and fifth grade. She never knew it but I would have been her slave and would have done anything she asked.

I have only a few memories of elementary school, but one that is still vivid involves adhesives. In many of the projects that we were assigned in class there was quite a bit of gluing of one piece of paper to another. This was done with the aid of a giant jar of white library paste. By the time we had finished any of those projects, I had been licking that paste from my fingers for at least an hour, just to keep them usable.

Over the years I developed a strange liking for the stuff. Fortunately for my health, in the junior high years the paste pot was no longer on the scene. Lord knows whether I would have made it out of seventh grade if that weren’t true, but instead might have been found under my desk, white paste smeared around my mouth and on my hands, moribund.

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