In The Days Of Kid Roscoe-With Every 1930s B-Film Gangster Movie In Mind  

 

 

By Lester Lannon

Yeah, Kid Roscoe was a piece of work, one of the best hitmen/body guards around back in the old days. The old rooty-toot-toot 1930s days when guys did what they had to do and asked questions later, much later. How do you think he got the name Kid Roscoe, it just didn’t fall out of the sky one day and get him proclaimed the number one gunslinger around. A guy smart guys, okay, okay wise guys were fighting over to get his services. Hey I just remembered some readers who either lived sheltered lives, have forgotten, or were just too young to know might not know a roscoe is. For those not in the know a roscoe back then was a heater, a rod, a piece, or whatever other soft phallic symbol you wanted to put on a serious weapon of choice when your business was to know every aspect of how to use, and not use that thing to fire away at somebody, somebody for a reason. The way every good professional plays the game.

It wasn’t always that way the Kid, real name Frankie Lane, had funny 1920s dreams of college, funny since that was an unusual ambition then when getting out of high school was all anybody expected from nowhere kids but then the Great Depression of the 1930s came and he hit the road in order not to be a bother to his mother who was raising six young kids all by herself once the old man up and died of one of those mysterious diseases guys died from years later who had been soldier boys in World War I. Hit the road at age sixteen, meaning that college dream got busted so bad he never finished high school although as long as he attended he was the bright boy around the school, knew the streets too, kept the punks out of his face okay from Mechanicsville in upstate New York, Dutch farming country way back when but mostly hard-scrabble truck farming barely surviving by the time you got into the 1930s. So the Kid took the Albany& Illinois heading west to Chicago to seek his fame and fortune. Took that A&L by the way in one of the freight cars with a bunch of old hoboes a couple of them who tried to make him their “girl” but he wasn’t having any of that and he learned one of the first big lessons of the road, trust nobody and stay sober enough to hold off the bull winos and alkies, not the diners’ club special with the Mayfair swells so you know the Kid was from hunger.

Not only that but the road to Chicago was not one straight line once the Kid (remember this is before he was the Kid and still had schoolboy dreams and lots of naïve if he was learning fast after that episode on the freight train) heard that Jim Baxter’s Wild West Carnival was playing in Toledo. That carnival had played the Fairgrounds in Mechanicsville ever since the Kid was a youngster and he had secretly thrilled to the idea back when he was knee-high of running away with Big Jim’s operation each year when they pulled up stakes. Nothing ever came of it so instead of him running off with them as a kid as a teenager he came to them. The Kid took the detour, made a good impression of Big Jim or rather on Smiley Short the guy who ran the ubiquitous win-a-prize-tents for Big Jim, found some work in the carney, liked the moving from town to town without having to ride the blinds or hitchhike the hostile road, liked the three squares a day and the dough he made roping the rubes in, and so he stayed put for a while. Couple of years as it turned out and never hit Chi town in that whole stretch. Reason: the suckers were plentiful out in the hinterlands where the rubes were asking to be taken but in the big cities bullets might fly with some of the raw stuff that was being pulled. So no Chicago. 

What the Kid did was work the duck shooting gag, you know the air pistol or rifle “hit enough of them dead on and win your lady a prize, a kewpie doll or stuffed teddy bear she had been crazy about all night.” Sucker’s stuff if you hadn’t had practice for a while, or ever. (The Kid didn’t know this but Smiley had the gag rigged, had all the games rigged if anybody was asking, so that the rows of ducks were just slightly off-center so if you tried to aim straight for all your shots no way could you win even a freaking rabbit’s foot. That was one of the reasons, although not the main one, why the Kid quit Big Jim’s operation figuring you should at least give the suckers an even chance since as he would find out in own practice hitting the requisite number was a tough dollar anyway you looked at it unless you worked at it.) Overall until the falling out the shooting gallery was an easy grift and he was able to lay a few dollars aside for Chicago.  Quite a few as time moved on.

More importantly in those dead zone times in the carnival life you know weekday afternoons, around supper time, the Kid would practice shooting at the ducks. Got good at it, very good as you might expect after a couple of years. Toward the end he would direct the suckers toward the right way to aim and that is when he found out one inquisitive morning that the damn thing was tilted. One time when they were in Peoria he met Janie, a young girl of fourteen not fully formed into young womanhood but getting there, getting there very nicely with farm-fresh blonde hair, corn-blue eyes, a nice starting to fill out figure and well-turned legs and ankles to die for, a classic Midwestern corn-fed girl, who passed by one day when the Kid was practicing. She had asked him a million questions about what he was doing and how somebody, not her since even when he held her arm couldn’t hit the side of her father’s barn, and he answered them although usually that was not his style.

She came by a couple of days, maybe three in a row and kept asking those damn questions until a little slow around the women Kid figured out she had eyes for him, and as it turned out he for her. During the rest of the time the carnival was in Peoria Janie and the Kid were like glue. As the stay was running down he asked her to run away with the carnival, run away from home like he had done but Janie couldn’t see it that way. Had an idea about marriage, white picket fences and kids. On the night before the carnival left town though the Kid proved that he was not so backward at that. Or Janie either as she let him have his way with her, let him take her maidenhead. Both agreed whatever happened in their futures that night of passion was the right thing to do. They smiled when the smile of innocent youth when they said that.     

Eventually, after taking the Janie thing kind of hard the Kid drifted away for all of the reasons already mentioned including a big dust up with Max the Knife, Big Jim’s heavy-lifting man for all occasions, which almost came to guns  and so he left for Chicago once the season was over when he was about eighteen. Now the Kid had picked up that shooting skill, that carny blarney two bit stuff but that would be of no avail when he hit the windy city. But there he was in a small room in a big rooming house off of Division trying to break in, break in somehow but with his money dwindling he was up against it until night he was in Casey’s nothing but a gin mill for drifters, grafters and grifters but was the known hang-out of a smalltime Chi mobster, Benny The Buzz, (Benjamin Bowers). Guys got had to drinking and as guys will do getting nasty when there were no women around things to keep thing calm or to fight over before closing turned ugly, turned ugly with guns. One dropped on the floor and as if by instinct the Kid picked it up and winged a guy, Jimmy the Lug, a guy who it turned out Benny the Buzz had a beef with. The guy fled but Frankie Lane soon to be Kid Roscoe had a job, a job with a future as Benny the Buzz’s bodyguard.             

You know back then anyway the mobsters in Chi town like everywhere else were looking for prime talent just like with professional sports these days. To get the cream maybe trade up or down. Stuff like that. Except in the food chain of organized crime things get resolved very differently from pro sports and every gunsel, every professional bodyguard/hitman has to know which way the wind was blowing. So when Big Sid a little further up the food chain than Benny wanted Benny’s numbers racket he also wanted Benny’s boy the Kid. Maybe more than the numbers. And the Kid at twenty no longer so sticks farm boy knew which way the wind was blowing. One day they buried Benny the Buzz shot clean with one bullet in the heart by a person, or persons unknown, and the next day the Kid was following behind Big Sid. That upward mobility went on for a while until the Kid became the main torpedo for the boss of the bosses in Chic town, Phil the Knife (with plenty of weight in other towns as well the way things were being organized as the early 1930s shoot-outs over illegal beer were being replaced one beer was legal again but more organization than gunplay, although in the end gunplay, or the threat of gunplay was always just below the surfaces).    

By the time the Kid was twenty-two maybe twenty-three he was pretty fed up with the rackets, couldn’t see where it was leading to anything but an early grave when some new kid decided to try his luck on the Kid and maybe being a little faster on the draw, maybe smarter, or maybe the Kid slowing down that would be that. That thought, those retirement thoughts got a big push when one day on Division Street when he spied Janie. A little thinner, a little paler and with a lot more sorrow around the eyes but he recognized her pretty quickly and as she approached him she knew who he was. She gave him a wan smile.  Janie’s story hadn’t been pretty once the Kid left her in Peoria. She got in with a bad egg, some bigtime farmer’s rotten spawn on the rebound over the Kid and he turned her onto doing dope, cocaine, and later to keep her habit up into doing tricks on the streets or in the bars in Peoria. That the Kid thought explained the sorrow around the eyes he sensed although they still had for him their corn-blue sparkle in a certain light.  

One night a few months before she met the Kid in the street she told herself she had had enough of Peoria and that dirty bastard that made her a whore, made her go down on guys for nickels practically. Got herself half-sober and left for Chi town, finished the sobering up and after a few weeks of turning tricks to get a stake was working serving them off the arm at Mindy’s Café on the lower end of Division. The Kid almost wept over that story. He took for a cup of coffee, they talked about that night of passion like noting bad had happened in their lives afterward. Don’t be surprised one thing led to another though and after shacking up together for a while, and after some furious fights about whether to leave or not once Phil the Knife threatened to cut the Kid’s balls off if he left, the Kid won the argument and one cold Chicago wind and snow night they leave town on a Greyhound bus, and that is the last anybody in Mechanicsville, Chi Town or Peoria, heard of Frankie Lane, known as Kid Roscoe, and his Janie.