HIAWATHA ROCKS, by Peter Magliocco, Airleaf Publishing, paperback novel, 254 pages, 2005, $12.95......                   

 It's the early 1970's and Richard Nem is lost. Recently returned from a hitch in the Army that had led to a tour of duty in Germany instead of Vietnam as he had expected, this rootless young man cannot find a direction home. What he does find is a succession of low paying, unsatisfactory jobs, a brief, non-productive stint at a local university, and confinement in an institution for a complete mental breakdown. What causes the breakdown isn't exactly clear. What is clear, Richard Nem is suffering from an excess of ideals and dreams for which there are no clear outlet.

He fancies himself a performer, a rock star under the alter ego of Hiawatha Jones. The assumed name is as much a separate identity as it is pseudonymous self-created as an outlet for expression currently stifled in his own, confused state of mind; a mind that yearns to create but cannot cope with the world outside of a structured environment.

Following his confinement in the institution, Nem finds himself forced to move in with his parents. He has neither the financial wherewithal nor the emotional stability to cope on his own. Relationships with women are doomed either by unrealistic expectations or by Romantic idealizations. His one true love, with Linda, an Indian girl, proves to be largely a figment of his fervid imagination. Another potentially more productive relationship with a fellow student, the hippie chick Irene, descends into obsessive stalking once she fails to live up to his expectations. A later confrontation with a woman, who may or may not be a prostitute, culminates in a disastrous, demeaning manner.

Relationships with men are unproductive also. His one close relationship with a Yob, Tucker, who temporarily lets him a room, effectively ends after a trip to the former's Santa Maria stomping grounds. This trip, for Nem, is a long drunken descent into a maelstrom. The outcome is an inevitable distancing that leads to further isolation and immobility ending with the institutional stay.

The home front is no better. Nem perceives his blue collar family as no better than the one satirized on "All in the Family." His father is a jaded, beer drinking moron and his mother is a complacent, subservient wife. Their shallow way of life is fueled by the false images of television sitcoms, drunken tirades and testosterone driven broken dreams. Nem's parents view his rootlessness, his constant playing of the guitar as activities that make him no better than the lowest forms of life; the love children, hippies of the 60's. It is more than rootlessness, it is a pathology, a generational gulf.

Oddly, the only place Nem felt comfortable was in the Army, where everything and everyone had a place and a duty. Besides the security this kind of anonymous existence provided, the availability of whores and legal recreational drugs provided an outlet unavailable stateside. A frustrated, hopeless Romantic, Nem doesn't so much fall between the cracks as disappear into an abyss.

Before that fall comes a strange odyssey through the belly of the beast that is Hollywood. After falling in with a quasi-Buddhist cult, Nem finds himself in communal living situation. These chanters rely on a street hustle to provide the means for their survival much like Moonies did when they first became prevalent about this time. Nem, however, has lust in his heart, in particular for a raven haired beauty named Nancy he desires in his doomed, obsessional way. As with all of his other imagined loves, Nem must find a way to alienate her beyond any possible redemption. The return of the newly married Tucker into this life provides such an opportunity.

Nem's complete collapse and fall will be orchestrated by Tucker and his Valkyrie-like wife and former bar maid, Sara Lee. The precipitous descent of Nem at the hands of Tucker is one long drunken spiral as the seemingly inexhaustible, hollow legged Tucker drags Nem and sometimes, Sara Lee, on a no sleep, bar hopping extravaganza worthy of the drug addled, booze fueled, Hunter S. Thompson and his 300 pound Samoan Lawyer. When Sara Lee finally loses it, becoming sick on the walk of the stars, the party is over. All that remains is a date with demons from Nem's past, a final irony, to complete his fated journey through darkness into a greater darkness.

This was the seventies: the coming downside of the sixties, the cultural crash and with it came a time of considerable confusion, of misdirection, of upheaval and disillusion, the time of HIAWATHA ROCKS. Magliocco takes you there.

............................................................. -- ALAN CATLIN