Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
Jehovah Jukebox
by Joan Jobe Smith
WPA Press
March 2025, $14.00, 130 pages, ISBN: 979-8315299059
Joan Jobe Smith writes in “Megamorph Ka-pow,” one of the dozen new poems in the re-publication of Jehovah Jukebox:
I didn’t just megamorph
doo-dah diptera
I megamorphed, jumped over, pole-vaulted
from pupa stage to scutterfly
after that man left me with three kids and a fine-toothed comb and I
wearied into that go-go bar wearing my beige wedding suit just like
Doris Day wore in “Pillow Talk” and I
asked for a go-go girl job because I couldn’t take shorthand or type.
Originally published in 1993 by Event Horizon Press, Joan Jobe Smith’s Jehovah Jukebox is about her reinvention of herself as a woman in her mid-twenties. Or, as she puts it in “Maidens, Made in the Shade,” “a mere housewife / and stay-at-home mother just weeks ago, deracinated at / age 25 at Abner’s 5, a go-go bar owned by the mafia.”
Now in her mid-80s, living in Long Beach, two blocks away from the Pacific Ocean, Smith, the celebrated poet, writes in the final poem, “Bukowski Chugs Cheap Beer @ The No-No A Go-Go,” about her friendship with the poet Charles Bukowski, who encouraged her to write. By the time they became acquainted, Smith had quit dancing to pursue poetry. Bukowski would call her late at night and howl at her tales of being a go-go girl for seven years (“the bad luck time for / breaking a mirror, minimum sentence for a felony / conviction”). Bukowski, in his cheap L.A. apartment forty miles away “listened intently to my go-go girl tales.” Finally, one night, Bukowski told her: “You gotta write about all that madness, kid. So I did.” Jehovah Jukebox was conceived and born.
Smith’s poems about her times as a dancer in such venues as Daisy Mae’s (where all the girls had to dress like Daisy Mae, from Al Capp’s cartoon strip), The Fort, Abner’s 5, Shimmy Shack, The Playgal Club, and others, are fascinating, funny, tragic, full of colorful characters like Crazy Ted, rejected from the Navy and shunned by his family for being homosexual (“A Groovy Kind of Love,” “Because I Could Spell Einstein” “‘I’ Before ‘E’ Except After Einstein”), Smitty, the “scared shitless marine” who is awaiting his deployment to Vietnam (“Purple Hearts”), Bearded Bob, a dope dealer, Delaney who “still got horny” at the age of 80 (“Ralph Bellamy”), Spike the tyrannical boss, Dirty Dave, and at least a dozen different girls from Brandi Blue, who wanted big breasts and got silicone injections (“The Epidemiology of the Permanent Breast,” “Frying Pork Chops Topless”) to Delilah (“To His Coy Mistress”), Carlita, Jane Avril, Bobbie Jeen, Arayna (“They All Said Arayna Was a Narc”), Mary Kay, the “Midwest farmer’s daughter” (“California Dreamin’”), Suzie Q and Little Egypt and others, girls who wound up as go-go dancers because of “the men who betrayed them, beat them, left them high and dry / (the way mine did, too).”
By comparison with the topless dancers and live porn performers who would succeed them, the go-go girls, though they excited the lurid imaginations of the men who came to see them (engineers, astronauts, bikers, pool hustlers, businessmen, stevedores, sailors, salesmen and CEOs) were fairly modest in their bikinis, only displaying legs and cleavage. They’d dance for hours to the jukebox tunes and the cover bands, doing the Pony, the Jerk, Mashed Potato, the Swim, the Bugaloo, the Shing-a-Ling, the Monkey, the Funky Chicken, the Twist and all the rest. They wore bikinis, but at that time, not everything on display, as she writes in “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “bellybuttons / drove men crazy in 1965.” She tells the story of the man who offered her $20 to show him her bellybutton, but she refused. He yelled at her all afternoon:
Hey, Baby,
lemme see yer bellybutton baby but I kept on saying
No.
It’s all so silly nowadays.
I sure could’ve used the $20 back then in 1965.
I still could.
All that dancing would take its toll on the women. As she writes in “Heet,” an ode to the over-the-counter analgesic that she routinely used for the pain,
“those fossils of twisted
ligaments, bugalooed bones, so sore
some nights after 8 hours in the land
of 1,000 dances doing the pony and the
Mashed Potato I’d have to lift my own
legs into my VW to drive home, then
crawl like a dog up the stairs to my bed.
Joan Jobe Smith writes moving elegies to Otis Redding (“How I loved that man’s music”) and Aretha Franklin, who died August 16, 2018, forty-one years to the day Elvis died, whom she met in 1966 (“we talked men, my man long gone / who was still doing me wrong, your men who were doing you / wrong too”). She writes about Frank Sinatra and Mick Jagger, Ike and Tina Turner, Jose Feliciano and other performers of the era who were tangentially part of her life. She writes about the Watts riots that shook L.A. It adds up to a picture of a fast-paced, changing, chaotic world in which women were still second-class citizens and a working mom had to hustle to stay alive.
As she writes in “Whisky A Go-Go Slow Mo with Jim Morrison,” about the time she auditioned as a dancer at the trendy West Hollywood club that featured acts like the Doors, only to turn down the offer to dance elsewhere, “a beer bottle’s throw from the L.A. Harbor and oil refineries,”
that night she understood
the book of my life would never be titled The Good Old Days.
But at least I’d have slo-mo shadowy memories of dancing upon the
Whisky a Go Go stage with Jim Morrison, and though a dirty
dive, The Fort was close to home and the parking space was free.
These are quite some memories, indeed, related in the sometimes amused, sometimes wistful, but always wise voice of a gifted storyteller and poet.
About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? was recently published by Kelsay Books, and another collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was just published by BlazeVOX Books.