The Fate Of Eddie “Fingers”-With The Film Adaptation Of George V. Higgins’ “The Friends Of Eddie Coyle” In Mind                 

By Fritz Taylor

[One night a few weeks back “Boyo” Connor and I along with “Pet”  Hughes were sitting in Jimmy and Jakes Lounge over in Lancaster when the name Eddie Mars came up in conversation I think from Pet. Eddie for those not in the know was the main fixer man, enforcer of the Los Angeles rackets in the 1930s and 1940s before the big ethnic boys from the East decided that the sunshine and the heat from the coppers in the East would make the West Coast easy pickings. Guys like Bugsy and Meyer, Gino, Lorenzo, you know the bad boys who ran things tightly until they didn’t. Eddie Mars though didn’t get to be king of the hill in LA by being a creampuff despite his Hollywood leading man good looks. Had killed his fair share of guys and later had others do his work as he worked his way up the rackets food chain. In the end though Eddie Mars fell down just like a lot of other guys when one of his boys turned on him, a guy named Humphrey Bogart who was sweet on Eddie’s wife wasted him and went to work for Gino, Gino Leone who had ordered the hit.     

That reference to Eddie Mars got me thinking that drunken night about a few other guys who went big and then fell down like some silly house of cards. A guy like Johnny Rocco who used to run the rackets in Chi town before the Feds decided to deport him as an unwanted alien. Had him hit the bricks to the friendly shores of Batista’s Cuba where he planned night and day to get back to the “bigs” and that quest for “more” that every gangster, every two-bit hood has in his blood. Johnny too fell down when some rum-brave soldier boy who got miffed when Johnny went smelling around his woman laid him low and without a tear in the house. Of course everybody knows that Johnny Rocco will forever be associated with this expression made by some guy who had been shaken down by one of Johnny’s boys and did squat about it- “One Johnny Rocco, more or less, in the world is no skin off my nose.” That woman-hungry  soldier boy though different.     

The part the Johnny Rocco patsy had right though was that guys like Johnny Rocco, Eddie Mars always want more, more of whatever they don’t have what keeps them up at night. Inevitably I knew as the whisky flowed and the conversation got more slurred that Boyo would bring up the name Eddie “Fingers,” Eddie Coyle from the old neighborhood who certainly wanted more but never got beyond being somebody’s shield-bearer and go-fer before he too fell down long before he could even get half way up the food chain.

See Eddie Fingers was part of our gang hanging around Doc’s Drugstore when we were teenagers with wet dreams and more illegal plans that we knew how to consummate. Most of us would move on but Eddie hitched up with Whitey Devine and that kind of sealed his fate. Eddie started out fast, did a couple of quick armed robberies and a couple of shootings although let’s keep that under our hats. Looked promising but Eddie wasn’t any too bright, was made for heavy lifting and not much else. Took a couple of falls and made a couple of wrong turn enemies. One fall in the right direction for his employer who would have hung sheets for many years and one where he was essentially set up by a guy named Pete who ran a barroom under another name over in City Square. This Pete, a piece of work, was a stoolie for some hyper-active fed Assistant DA who was looking yo move up his own ladder and had this Pete by the balls since he had him cold for the Winters gang killings. But he was also the hit man for “Long-Arm” La Russo who was worried that Fingers would fold up on a nickel beef for transporting, oh who knows, transporting something illegal. So Eddie “Fingers” Coyle fell down fell down hard.  

One night the coppers acting on some anonymous tip found his slug-filled body in a late model Chevy in some bowling alley parking lot over in the Acre. End of story, except when he was young Eddie looked like he was a world-beater. Christ at one point we all wanted to be Fingers, wanted to wear some naked girl tattoo, wanted to shoot and ask questions later. Like I said most of us moved one, or guys like Rick Rizzo and Donny White fell down in some hellhole in Vietnam and stopped thinking of Fingers as our role model, especially when he started collecting time. Yeah, but at one time he looked like a world-beater.]       

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“Did yah hear about Eddie “Fingers,” Eddie Coyle who used to come in here all the time to do his drinking and his business if you know what I mean. That found him, his body, in some Impala, a damn Chevy for Christ sakes, over in Dorchester, over at that all- night bowling alley, Timmy’s Lanes I think it is called off of Gallivan Boulevard. Found him the cops did on a routine run when they saw the car there for a few hours just before dawn with two slugs to the head, to his brains it probably was not a pretty sight,” Dillon, John Dillon but everybody called him Dillon, yelled to Joe Ricco, Joey “Bangs” who was approaching the far end of the bar to do his drinking-and his business if anybody was asking (and nobody should except the parties involved or you were as likely as not  to find out why Joe Ricco was called Joey “Bangs” by friend and foe alike).      

Joey “Bangs” took the news with something less than full blown interest since Eddie “Fingers” and he worked different sides of the street in their various “transactions” although he looked at Dillon with a little side glance when he told the story since Eddie had obviously been taken out for some indiscretion, got on somebody’s wrong gee list, somebody high up in the food chain and had paid the price. The funny thing was that Dillon who gave the appearance to the world of being a chatty kind of hare-brained bartender, of being a guy who had taken a couple of rides to stir when he was young and so had an undisclosed interest in the bar since he was a convicted felon, was a “hit” man for hire, for hire mostly by the Rizzo mob out of Providence. Knew that about Dillon since one of the guys who he had “scragged” had been a guy that he was supposed to “hit” himself except he was on another “job” and the guy who wanted to hire him let it out that he would get Dillon to do what needed to be done. Since they found the guy who was supposed to be “hit,” Johnny Shine, washed up on the banks of the Neponset River he knew Dillon had taken the job.             

Joey, as a matter of professional interest despite given no fucking consideration to Eddie’s fate, Eddie was a guy pretty low in the his organization, “Butter” Carney’s tribe, the Irish tribe, over in Southie, decided to pump the talkative bartender to see which way he would go with his story, see what lies he could make up since Dillon always was most talkative when he had something on his mind, when he talked the talk about some guy being scragged. “Hey, Dillon while you are getting me a Jack Daniels Red neat what is your take on Eddie “Fingers” going down. He was so low in Butter’s organization I figure that he would not be worth offing, would maybe just get his other hand put in a drawer and slammed like the last time he fucked up when he said a guy was okay and he wasn’t and Jimmy “Scrambles” got a ticket for a dime at Walpole.”           

Dillon, sweating a little by the heat of the day even though the air conditioning was on, came up to Joey’s end of the bar with his finger glass of Jack’s Red for Joey and whispered, although at that time of day Joey and a couple of others sitting at far corner tables were the only ones in the place, “I heard that Eddie had turned “stoolie,” had gone to work for “Uncle” in order to get out from under some federal stolen goods charge he was facing up in New Hampshire. I know for a fact that he was scared to do any more time, said he was too old for that, and what would happen to his wife and kids. Said some shit about how his kids would get laughed at because their father was in stir. Like that was a reason to cry to “Uncle.”

I heard he was the guy who set Jimmy “Scags” up for the fall when they had that rash of robberies a few weeks ago and one of the jobs got botched up and some bank employee got killed in a crossfire. Heard too that he set some other guy up, a young kid who was selling guys to anybody who wanted them as long as they had the dough. Heard that this kid, Jacko something was selling machine guns and Eddie had brought him down to save his ass from doing time. How do you figure a stand- up guy, stand-up because he had to who took the fall a couple of times and caught a couple of years a couple of times and didn’t cry about it went ‘soft.’”      

Joey, usually pretty stone-faced especially when he knew a guy was lying or at least was skirting the truth, just sat there with that same expression waiting for Dillon to go on. The fact that he knew as much as he did convinced Joey that he had been part of Eddie’s execution for whatever reason. Dillon continued, “ Yeah, Eddie was in here the last several weeks like this was his home using the back room telephone I had put in for guys, hell, for you to take care of your business without a lot of daytime drunks listening in to your private conversations. Always asking if this guy or that guy had left a message for him here like I was some fucking answering service. Drinking hard too a few shots in a row just for warm-ups so I knew he was feeling some kind of pressure like when guys have something serious in front of them. Asking if Jimmy “Scags” had called so I knew there was some connection. What I heard was that Jimmy had asked Eddie to get him some guys for some job and somehow Eddie had found the kid who had a source for weapons as they were coming off the line, unused, and not traceable. Heard that some Army kids were grabbing half the weapons up at Devens and selling them to the kid to feed their cocaine habit, or their girlfriends’ habits something like that.”       

“I suppose you heard about that bunch of robberies down on the South Shore, a bunch of banks?” Joey nodded in the affirmative since everybody had heard about them at some point if not the first few then the last two where a bank employees was killed and the next one where Jimmy “Scags” and his boys were jolted by the Feds in some banker’s house as they were going for one last score. “You know Jimmy was master at robbing banks, no fooling, he would have the job cased out to perfection. The beautiful thing about these robberies was that it was like taking candy from a baby, see he knew who was vulnerable, who had something to lose, and he would take himself and the boys and grab the guy at his house and leave “Jerry The Lid” to keep watch over whatever hostages they had taken. Beautiful work. Except that one where “Fats” Malzone, probably full of dope, went crazy when he thought that bank employee had pulled the alarm. Then the last caper where the Feds were tipped off. Tipped off by Eddie the more you think about the matter since he was the “missing link,” the guy who provided the guns from what Lou Reilly told me since he had seen a grocery bag full of them one afternoon when Eddie had given him a ride to the supermarket and he saw the bags when Eddie opened the trunk of his car.”              

Joey, still sitting there stone-faced, knew that Dillon had been somehow involved in Eddie’s death since he knew far too much for a guy who was supposed to be on the outside on this stuff. In the closed-mouth world of doing this and that not always legal he just knew too much. Maybe he had “tipped” the coppers himself who knows, maybe he had something hanging over him and he needed to do something for “Uncle” to get well. “You know they, the Feds, grabbed that kid, that Jacko out at the Sharon commuter rail stop with a lot of machine guns in shopping bags so you know Eddie must have “snitched” trying to do himself some good since the kid was not connected, was a free-lancer from what Dougie the Dope told me after the kid was pinched and taken to the police station downtown to be held for arraignment before a federal judge. The kid was screaming bloody murder that somebody had turned him over. Yeah, Eddie fits the bill.”           

Joey sat there and ordered another drink, another Jack’s Red and thought hard about what Dillon had said and made certain conclusions about what he was to make his report about. Then Dillon, still sweating from his bald head said out loud that he wondered how Eddie had cashed his check. Joey had already pieced together that Dillon had probably got Eddie drunk, probably at some other place than this bar, probably had, since Dillon was notorious for not having a car, not having a driver’s license, his driver drive someplace and then dumped the body over at the fucking bowling alley. Yeah, this had Dillon’s fingerprints all over it.      

Joey figured out his report in his head as he got up from the bar, paid his bill and left a tip on the counter. As he exited the door he thought that Butter would be hiring him for a job pretty soon. See Joey Bangs knew, knew as well as he knew anything in his world that no matter how low the late Eddie Fingers was in Butter’s organization you had to take care of your own, avenge what needed to be avenged. Just another job for Joey though. 

When Natives Americans Were Indians- “Foxfire” With Jeff Chandler and Jane Russell (1955)

By Sam Lowell

Back in the black and white television days of the 1950s when I was growing up the local kids, maybe kids everywhere, worked under the motto that “the only good injun was a dead one.” We bought with all arms into the idea that the Indian, the Native American, the indigenous peoples, take your pick were savages who not only needed to be tamed and obliterated but such action was justified since they took scalps with glee, raped women and girls, white women and girls,  and took whoever they wanted as captives and slaves. Oh sure, there was an occasional good one like the Lone Ranger’s companion Tonto but he was really just a Native American equivalent of the black Uncle Tom. Mostly though we saw Indians as cigar store figures and beneath our own dignities. Then along comes a film like Foxfire from that same 1950s period and throws the stereotypes into a little disarray. We would have rejected had we been allowed to see the film the notion of the Indian, really a half-breed as having any positive qualities and certainly have rejected the Technicolor portrayal of such people who were better demons in black and white.

Of course Hollywood, 1950s Hollywood could get away with a half-baked story line and slight tip of the hat in multiculturalism which it could not today. In that sense the film like a lot of old-time films I review is a “slice of life” of the times, or of how Hollywood’s lenses saw the social times. More the latter than the former here since this storyline is “confused” by the ever present boy meets girl or better in this case girl meets boy angle which has anchored more films that any one person could shake a stick at.         

Amanda played by buxom Jane Russell is slumming in Arizona for her mother’s health in the days when people could breath the air there when her car developed a flat on the inevitable 1950s long stretch nowhere Arizona back roads. After some time along comes ruggedly handsome but the moody sullen type Jonathan played by Jeff Chandler who as far as I know did not have any Indian blood and “passed” based on those rugged good looks and a deep tan offset by that granite grey hair. He offers Amanda a ride to get help and that starts what would be an extremely fast Amanda-generated romance which ends up in a very quick marriage not usual in a time when shacking up without more, at least in films, was frowned upon.

That whirlwind marriage is where everything starts to fall apart. The biggest tension beyond Jeff’s taciturn nature is that he is extremely ambivalent about the Apache part of his heritage. Less so about his white father’s professorial leavings. Apparently Amanda had no serious problems going down in class to live in a dusty mining town which is where Jonathan makes his kale. What got her down eventually was that Johnny did not confide in her, didn’t let her help him in his dream of finding El Dorado or the local version of that old hoary tale where there was gold down in the earth just waiting to be found by an enterprising young mining engineer like Jonathan.

With a few glimpses of the antagonism and prejudices against Apache by the local white pillars of the community and Jonathan’s tough road of straddling two cultures the Amanda-Jonathan marriage begins to fall apart, begins to not be made in heaven. A miscarriage by Amanda though kind of brings things to a head and the two part. Not so fast though remember this is 1950s Hollywood and nice endings to romantic dramas and so in the end Jonathan lightens up a bit and shows a little emotional attachment to Amanda after treating her like some squaw for most of the film. That reconciliation made easier by Jonathan actually finding that pot of gold in those ancient Arizona hills. Like I said strictly a look at what Hollywood thought about the Indian question and interracial romance in the 1950s.    

Searching For The High White Note-With The 20^th Century Artist Stuart Davis In Mind

By Lance Lawrence

…..dazzled by the shapes, the colors, the angles and the combinations at the big retrospective of Stuart Davis’ work featured at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in January, 2017

The end of the American frontier formed by the splash of the Pacific Ocean kiddie-cornered his dream of catching that high white note that Johnny blowing that big sax to heaven, the Prez blowing a bigger sax to that same destination, Louie when he cared about such matters, the Duke always, always tweaking his mood poems in sound to eke out the thing he saw coming through Cotton Club jungle nights up in kingdom Harlem with all those Mayfair swells sucking the life out of whatever the touched and he/they had to wait until after hours, after the clubs closed, the tables washed down, the chairs stacked and the fucking front door shut against the swell night and blow amongst themselves tethered by a little Johnny Walker, the best friend an artist ever had if you believed the advertisements, tethered too by a little weed, watch out for your precious club license, letting it all hang out, letting the notes blow out the door, no, the window that fucking door is locked against all perdition, blow out to the China sea once it crossed to the frontier’s end in Frisco town and you could just see the thing float around the rust colored golden gate and in the mist then back again making another world of tobaccos, bull durham, fis it man papers to roll your own and dream of tall-masted ships sitting in the harbor after a day’s haul on in the high seas, out in the Banks, bringing in food for thought and hungers that those Mayfair swells would never know and then he had an idea, had an idea like a million other Americans with ideas and with no desire to trespass against the borders of the burgeoning American scene he started to blow his own white note, decided, no, was impelled by those Art League dreams to put speed, put the fast pony express, telegraph, telephone, television, telepathy, speed, the rust to the subway, to the highway ,the freeway, the railroad track the runway, the fast up and down of daily existence, the hurly-burly of Ritz cracker existences, of milk cow sorrows, of pretty cities with funny names and funnier storefronts with even funnier names and you could feel the restless energy behind the placard placid scene, and turn the bell into buoy into bell tower in light house into all kinds of exotic lines and angel angles for effect, for the visions of the gone world that he tried to address, address through clipped scissors like some modern day Matisse dancing figures superimposed on crescent moons, triangular prisms, squares squared before anybody even knew what square was in a candid world, threw a pentagon, no, not that Pentagon which was only a military thought back then, hexed a hexagon, didn’t touch heptagon how could he and axed an octagon just for effect while finally, finally putting those forms together on a big placard proclaiming to one and all, maybe to the candid world again that “artists must not starve” and other such idealistic ideas and you know what he was right except nobody told him that not starving did not mean drinking up an ocean of gin, an ocean of Johnny Walker Red, and ocean of, oh well you get the picture and if you don’t picture, picture a guy who if you met him on the street might have thought that he had come out of the nearest pool hall after successfully hustling Fast Eddie out of cigar and booze money, and maybe a few bucks for art supplies, yeah a character out of a Bogie movie except he could those shapes, those triangles, those squares, those pentagons and you know which one I don’t mean, those hexed hexagons, forget the hepts and curlicue the octagons and blow pretty blues, stark blacks, ruby red lipped reds, ocean, no, China seas, blues, that blue-green before the big blow and maybe just maybe capture that damn elusive high white note-hell he tried.                          

….and, and then he started to do the whole thing over again, and again and again each time haunted by the search for that high white note that Duke, Johnny, the Prez, Charlie and even Louie when he cared about such thing spent restless after hour nights behind fucking closed doors full of bad whiskey and seedy herb blowing out to the great big mist-filled night without rest. Thanks, brother, thanks.

When Johnny Rocco Was King Of The Whole Wide World-With Lauren Bacall, Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart’s “Key Largo” In Mind

By Fritz Taylor 

[Johnny Rocco will always be with us, or at least for the foreseeable future as far as I can tell. Yeah, the Johnny Roccos of the world, the guys who always want “more” and are bad enough, ruthless enough and just smart enough to figure out how to organize to get those wants fulfilled are a scourge to the rest of us. Hey you know Johnny Rocco, not maybe the guy who rose to the heavens in the 1920s on a highway of bones or the guy who went they cut him down a bit tried to make a big comeback out of summer Batista Cuba in the 1940s but you know somebody like him, maybe even this minute he has his thumb on your neck for some reason but we already figured it out as “more.” Maybe names like Johnny Too Bad, Death Rizzo, Toeless Tony DeMarco are more familiar, but they are all Johnnys.

Around our neighborhood, a tough very tough neighborhood in hardass segregated Fulton County down in Georgia his name was Johnny Blade. 

That “Blade” earned from his niftiness with a long Bowie knife. Fortunately Johnny Blade lived on my street and covered my ass a few times, brought me under his way for a while. A classic poor but kind of street bright guy who started out extorting milk money from his elementary school fellow students, rich or poor. Worked his way up the food chain to Jimmy Jack Lord’s second tier doing “this and that” but always with the idea of getting to be top dog, getting that “more” he always talked about. But Johnny Blade was a funny guy, a passive patriot I guess you would call him so when the Vietnam War got fiery he answered the call. I am not sure whether he was drafted or volunteered or “volunteered” through some judge’s ultimatum to go in the military or to jail since he had dropped out of school, had started living in Atlanta by then.

What I do know is that Johnny Blade laid his head down, got himself mowed down in some godforsaken ambush in the Central Highlands near Pleiku and never got further up the food chain. Here’s the kicker though, the thing that makes my little statement above make sense once Johnny left Jimmy Jack’s ranks Whitey Blake moved in and eventually had one of his boys put two slugs in the head of one Jimmy Jack Lord just because Whitey wanted that elusive “more.”

A guy named I think Humphrey Bogart once said to some Johnny Rocco he was dealing with that one Johnny Rocco more or less in the world was not enough to get your feathers up about. Maybe he had heard about the Whitey Blake story. But he was also the guy who tricked one Eddie Mars, the big-time Los Angeles gangster who ran the rackets there before the big boys from the East were looking for cover and sunshine  into an ambush which got him killed by his own men in the crossfire. Also this cynical Bogart took the real Johnny Rocco down when Johnny decided to mess with his woman, took him down hard out in some rickety boat when Johnny was trying to hightail it for Cuba with a bag full of dough and dope for his big comeback. So maybe just maybe cutting a few Johnnys down does make a difference. You can tell everybody Fritz Taylor tipped you to that possible truth.

You can also tell everybody I am not talking about guys like Pretty James Preston, a loner, a motorcycle king, who robbed banks around Massachusetts according to Sam Lowell in broad daylight by himself and as far as Sam knew just because he could do it and probably except for expenses and buying Minnie Murphy things could have cared less about “more” or working some food chain madness. Yeah, tell them about Pretty James too, okay.]  

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“Hey Curly one of guys, one of the old cons Smiley if you know him, who works with me in the laundry told me that you used to be the mouth piece for the legendary Johnny Rocco out of Chi town back in the day,” Johnny “Fingers” softly mentioned from his lower bunk to “Curly” Hoff in the upper bunk as the call for lights out was running through the cell-block. That cell-block in sweet home Joliet where Fingers had just come for his first “vacation” after grabbing a dime’s worth for an armed robbery of a liquor store off of Division Street in sweet home Chicago and had been assigned the lower bunk (the upper one gotten based on seniority or toughness) in the old time hood’s cell where he had been sitting on his hands for murder and about six other crimes and given a full jolt since he had been nabbed and extradited down in Florida in 1948.

 “Sure I knew Johnny Rocco, the larger than life Johnny Rocco, king of the streets, when he was riding high in Chi town in the old days and later before he met his end down in Florida where I got nabbed as a result when he worked out of Cuba, out of Havana when that town was wild and wide open after the “Feds” busted him and shipped him out, deported him as an undesirable alien. Johnny always took a certain pride in the fact that no local or state coppers could lay a hand on him, he owned them one way or another and it took the “Feds” to close down his operations. But kid you are wrong when you say your understanding is that I was a “mouthpiece” for Johnny Rocco. First off in those days a mouthpiece was a lawyer, the “fix it” man when things got hot and you needed him. Anyway, nobody was a mouthpiece for Johnny Rocco he was loud enough and hard enough to make his own news. What I was if you want to know was his go-to guy, the guy that held the operation together, maybe too his advisor on this and that although in the end, at the end he didn’t listen to me a damn nickel’s worth. So, no kid, I wasn’t his mouthpiece. If you keep quiet since lights just went out I will tell you about how the great Johnny Rocco met his end, fell down and tomorrow you can ask me questions about stuff if you are still interested.         

“Johnny came over from Italy back around World War I, maybe he was trying to avoid the war over there like a lot of guys were maybe he just heard that there were easy pickings in America and grabbed a ticket for the next tub. Johnny wasn’t much for going into the details of early life and I knew him for thirty years so don’t ask me about that. He hit Division Street running pulling an armed robbery of Jimmy’s Gas Station in broad daylight a couple of days after he landed in Chi town from New York. The fucking gas jockey was so scared of Johnny that he told the coppers he couldn’t identify the guy who had robbed him. Made it plain from jump street he was the new guy in town and if you didn’t like it well you would like it. I ran into him one night at Stan’s Tavern deep in Division Street where he made his headquarters then before he moved up to the Club Nana. I was looking for the guy who made the news with his unmasked armed robbery in daylight. I wanted in on a guy who was that tough on day one. One thing about Johnny Rocco he wasn’t like a lot of those wops who just stayed with each other-you know Cosa Nostra-our thing- which meant everybody not Italian stay away. Johnny looked for guys as tough and mean as him that was all that counted. Guys like the guys who went down to Cuba with him and back to Florida. Me, an old German, Toots, a limey, Angel a spic, Feeney a Mick.

"Had his choice of women too but usually went with Irish girls (said he liked the way they had the rosary in one hand and their hand down your pants with the other). Went big for Mary Maloney, stage name Crystal Dawn, Johnny gave her that name when he bought the Club Nana for her to sing at, she was pretty good too until the booze got to her-and Johnny started grabbing whatever ass he could elsewhere. Johnny would have killed me if he had ever found out but I had banged Mary when she was about fourteen and I didn’t have to coax her one little bit. Yeah funny when Johnny cashed his check in America, had to leave he wanted Crystal there with him.

“The twenties were a good time, a great time for guys whose motto was “more,” and more is what Johnny and the rest of us wanted. We started to make a little name for ourselves for running liquor, then the numbers, then women, any women you wanted, any age, Johnny would let me take the young ones and break them in since I always liked the young pussy, the younger the better. Down in Cuba, Jesus, they get ripe about twelve and most of the times you didn’t have to do a lot to coax them out of their dresses. But the thing that made Johnny, made him a little ahead of his time in rackets was the dope, marijuana, opium, cocaine, heroin, you name it. Most of the battles among us was over dope forget booze, even illegal booze, there was a ton of money in dope if you knew how to control the product. And a mountain of dead bodies followed that struggle. Funny because that is what would do Johnny in, a chicken shit rap by some young punk Assistant Attorney-General, a Fed, thirty years as an upstanding member of the community and Johnny had to go bye-bye to Havana.                 

 “Cuba was okay as a place to stay for a week or two but after you got tired of getting your ashes hauled or had enough of pina coladas Johnny and the rest of us got restless. The way the story went later was that Johnny had gotten a ton of counterfeit money and was going to head back to Florida and make a deal with some guys who wanted to buy it in Miami and Johnny would use that as seed money on the road back to being king of the rackets again. That is how legends get started and go wrong though. The stuff Johnny had was dope in case you heard otherwise, the stuff that had made him king. He couldn’t very well go to a wide-open town like Miami so he decided to lam out for Key Largo further south and quieter on his big yacht to make the deal. I told him that the Keys in the summer were too hot and he would wind up sweating his ass off (me too) but he wouldn’t listen, wanted to make the deal on the QT.                

“We needed a place once we got there and the only place that was open or wasn’t closed for season once the winter trade drifted back North was this Hotel Largo, kind of rundown and kind of too open. So I negotiated with this old guy in a wheelchair who owned the place, Lionel something, no, James Temple, and his daughter, Nora, a looker for an older dame if that was your thing, who I found out later was not his daughter but daughter-in-law who had come down after her husband, James’s son George had been killed in action over in Europe during the Second World War.  I gave this Temple enough money to make sure he kept the place open and enough so that he had better not ask questions. So the six of us (remember Crystal Dawn was along for the ride too, a mistake since she couldn’t keep her hands off the booze, or off a couple of Indian boys who she snuck out back with when Johnny was sleeping)    

“Then this Frank McCloud came in, came in on the bus so I figured him at first for just a cheapskate tourist looking for cheap lodging on the off-season. It turned out that Frank had been this Temple son’s commanding officer over in Italy I think it was and he had decided to come down and tell Temple and Nora how brave their guy had been. I didn’t like the look of him and told Johnny that this guy would be nothing but trouble. This guy knew who Johnny was since he had been some kind of newspaper guy before the war. I had that right. Johnny always quick to show anybody at all who was king of the hill challenged this McCloud to duel it out with him, threw him a gun, see what he was made of. This guy backed down, backed down saying ‘what difference did one Johnny Rocco more or less make in this sorry old world.’

"After that Johnny would always bait him with the term ‘soldier’ and say it in such a way that made the word seem like dog shit. I tried to tell Johnny to cool his heels this guy was more than he looked like, was made of something to back down when he was being watched by this Temple and that Nora who seemed to have eyes for him right off. I was right about that worry. Later when I came up for my trial this Frank showed up to testify against me for some reason and the news came out that he had won a Bronze Star and a couple of other medals, so he was no coward. Little good that did Johnny R.                        

“Maybe if the weather, the hurricane that was brewing after we arrived, hadn’t been so drastic we would have made the deal, gone back to Cuba for a while to figure out the next step and Johnny would be back in Chi town and me with him. But the weather had everybody off especially when the winds started to blow hard. Trouble was some nosey copper had been around looking for that pair of Indians that Crystal had given a tumble-they were wanted for some crumb bum crime. Here is where Johnny let the heat get to him but also showed that when the deal went down he was still the best stone-cold killer around even if he did farm out most of his work when he was on top. This copper who we had to cold-cock but when he got up all groggy he was all gung-ho, this was after Johnny had humiliated Frank, he took the gun off the floor where Frank had thrown it and tried to take Johnny in, arrest Johnny. Johnny shot him where he stood without blinking an eye. See that gun was unloaded. Beautiful play- a Johnny special.

“That was his last smart play though. After the guys from Miami came, gave the dough, and left Johnny found out that the captain of his yacht had moved the boat to safer harbors, so we needed to get the hell out to the boat some way. This Frank had helped Nora with the hotel boat earlier so I told Johnny that this guy could take us out in that craft. We made him agree to do so. The five of us, Crystal was excess baggage with her booze problem then, so Johnny was dumping her, and this Frank got into the hotel boat and started heading out. The seas were rough but we were doing okay until I noticed that Frank had made a strange move with the boat and Feeney had gone overboard. I took a shot at Frank, wounding him, and he shot at me wounding me. I fell down on my face. Everybody later thought I was dead but when we got to port, back to the hotel Frank noticed I was still breathing and they took me to the fucking hospital and then extradited me back to Illinois. Toots took a shot at Frank too and Frank felled him as well. That left Angel and Johnny to figure out how Frank got a gun. Johnny no hero when things were even told Angel to go up against Frank. He said no. Mistake for Angel-Johnny shot him like a mangy stray dog. It is now Johnny against Frank with Johnny trying to bargain with him. No go. Johnny then goes off his wheels-goes after Frank. Bang-Johnny boy is a goner. Frank, wounded twice, still gets us back to the hotel port.                  

"How did Frank get a gun? Crystal when Johnny turned her over had grabbed the thing from Johnny’s pocket when she was kissing him good-bye. The drunken bitch. Yeah, but the important thing to remember is that for a long time Johnny, Johnny Rocco and no other was king of the hill, maybe the last of his kind.”

Finished Curly could hear Johnny Fingers breathing softly in the bunk below. Fingers would certainly have questions in the morning for him.

The Front Pages From The Distaff Side-Rosalind Russell And Cary Grant’s “His Girl Friday”-(1940)-A Film Review     

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

His Girl Friday, starring Rosalind Russell, Cary Grant, Ralph Bellamy, directed by Howard Hawks, from a play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, 1940  

Recently in reviewing another later (1960) Cary Grant vehicle, The Grass Is Greener, where he plays a cuckolded English Earl whose wife’s affections were stolen by an arriviste American oil man (played by also hunk Robert Mitchum) I noted that as a rule Cary Grant, the epitome of maleness, handsomeness, suaveness and whatever else matters to the majority females that made up the 1940s and 1950s audiences did not lose the woman (and in that vehicle he didn’t either but it was a close call when the deal went down). In the film under review Howard Hawk’s adaptation of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s screwball comedy, The Front Page, he almost let another dame get away, let his ex-wife Hildy beat it to upstate New York. So maybe I was a little wrong about Cary’s ability to swoop women off their feet-and keep them swooped (is that the right past tense, oh well).                 

Here’s the play and it may be familiar to those who saw the play or the later screen version with Jack Lemon and Walter Matthau except, a very big except the ‘‘ace” reporter is a woman, a female Hildy, played by rough and tumble, give as well as he received, Rosalind Russell, which allows the male-female tussle that drives the film to go forward. Tussle because one, Hildy had given Walter, Walter Burns, the mad monk editor-in-chief/owner of a New York City newspaper, his walking papers, no go, done, and two, she is now engaged and ready to let the rough and tumble life of an ace reporter fall by the wayside. Engaged to Bruce Baldwin, a nice safe middle of the road insurance man, played by Ralph Bellamy.      

But see Walter, since the nasty divorce had gotten “religion,” well maybe had gotten religion, since he is remorseful about the bad way he treated Hildy and wants her back. The hook: the hook for any good and resourceful journalist- a big career-making or enhancing front page story. The bait for the hook- covering the execution of a small time grafter whose upcoming date with death is being played by the political establishment for the impending elections as the final nail in the coffin for the anarchist plague that had descended upon the city. The felon nothing but a snook and so Walter lures Hildy into looking into what the whole plan is all about. Gets her in so deep she can’t even think about poor ordinary nice guy Bruce and his very average life plans. In the end the snook gets a reprieve and the local politicos have egg all over their faces for their cover-ups. And Hildy and Walter go about their merry way. As for Bruce, well, he is on his way back to Albany-alone. You know Cary had this one in the bag from the beginning when you think about it. Just don’t let your good woman loose around him-okay.        

When Ernest Hemingway Trod The Earth With A Heavy Footprint And The Devil Took The Hinter Post Gladly Come Killing Field Time

By Si Landon

Sometimes things happen in the world, sometimes people rear up on their hind legs and throw you the biggest curve ball out of nowhere and that is what makes life interesting. Made life interesting one time for the now fully retired newspaperman Larry Larson who spent his entire career working by-lines for small-time (The Riverdale Gazette) and big time (The Post ) publications centered around the “slice of life” stories that people would tell him, or he would hear about or somebody would tip him to check out this or that person or situation. He always had plenty of material, great and small, to work his three columns a week magic on. One of the biggest stories that he had covered was the long trail aftermath of the big Tip Top Hat Company robbery which happened in 1946 and carted the robbers a quarter of a million dollars, a lot of money then, although now as Larry said in his article strictly walking around money. As one of the robbers was alleged to have said it was almost like money found on the ground the job went so smoothly. It was the aftermath though that made the story “slice of life” worthy. Actually, as will be detailed below, made two such stories that kind of worthy.

Larry Larson was not even born in 1946 so he had no first-hand knowledge of the robbery. The way he got the story was from the son of the main planner of the robbery John Colfax. That name is important because when the deal went down it was his mother, Kitty Colfax, who had done the mastermind planning although his father, “Big Jim” Colfax, for many years got the public credit. The way John found out about the whole adventure was by accident. He had been sitting in a bar in Pottsville, Pennsylvania where his grandparents, Frank and Etta Collins, had raised him when some old-timer barfly hearing his name mentioned asked whether he was related to Kitty Colfax, nee Collins, who had been involved in the big Tip Top Hat Company robbery over in Gloversville. Figuring the old-timer was on his uppers, was looking to cadge a few drinks from a fresh face walk-in against the indifference of the sullen crowd of all-day drinkers John thought he was being worked for a few whiskies. Something about the guy though made him bite, maybe because he recently been thinking about those lost parents or maybe because he had always been semi-consciously curious about stuff his grandparents dismissed whenever he long ago brought the subject up. The old-timer gave him a few details and John, half-drunk thought no more of it that night. The next day though sobered up he went to his grandparents’ house and asked about Kitty Colfax, nee Collins. Frank and Etta went white knowing that the time had come to tell their grandson who his mother and father were and what they had done. Since he was only a year old when they took custody of him John had no memory of them, and his grandparents had told him they had died in a tragic car accident. End of story.

John wanted to know more, much more about who his parents were and what they had done but since Kitty had run away from home when she was sixteen to run around with whoever had dough in Philadelphia, whoever would buy her love for sale in what the whole thing really amounted too once Kitty knew how to get her claws into a man and keep them there, they were vague on what had occurred. The details of how after meeting Big Jim and planning the caper that would put them, really her on easy street Kitty had wound up spent the next twenty years of her life in prison dying of cancer shortly before she was to be released. Frank and Etta had thought it best to break off totally with their daughter to protect John and so the lie and the whitewashed walls on the subject on one Kitty Collins.

Once John pressed the issue his grandparents did tell John that the guy who broke the case, Jim Reardon, the ace claims investigator for the Allied Insurance Company, the company that had a small insurance policy which they had to honor taken out by one of the robbers, a guy named Ole Andreson known as the Swede, might still be around and check with him in Philadelphia. John did so working his way through the thickets finding out that Reardon had retired to Tom’s River over in New Jersey. He got the address and a few weeks later he was sitting in Reardon’s living room peppering him with a million questions. Reardon had done a million big time claims for Allied so although he remembered what had happened and how he had nabbed the last of the robbers alive, John’s mother and father, he had forgotten many of the details about Kitty and Big Jim. He did have boxes of material in his musty basement catalogued by the year so he invited John to go down and look.

John got a general idea about the caper from the various reports and newspaper clipping in Reardon’s Colfax dossier, but the most fascinating item was Kitty Colfax’s journal that she kept from her girlish days until a few days before she was nabbed by Reardon. Reardon confessed he had never read the journal after he had grabbed the item from the Colfax mansion where he had nabbed Kitty and Big Jim after a shoot-out. A shoot-out between Big Jim and Dum Dum one of the other robbers who was looking to find out why he had been left with egg on his face and nothing else when it came time to divvy up the robbery proceedings. Reardon had meant to do so to learn yet another lesson in the ways of human greed but the press of big cases didn’t give him time to see what made Kitty tick. That journal was the source of John (and Reardon as well) finding out that the demon planner behind the robbery and the betrayal of their confederates had been Kitty’s work and Big Jim was just the “front” man since the others would not have listened to her on her own hook.              

Here’s where the second story comes in. After John had satisfied himself that he probably would not have liked to meet his mother-or father -and that his grandparents were right to keep the knowledge of his bad ass parents from him he started on the trail of a reference early on in his mother’s journal about a daughter named Sheila who had been born in 1943 not long after she had left Pottsville and whom she had given up, had let be adopted by the Farr family from Scranton. This would be John’s half-sister of some sort even if she was illegitimate. He felt that if he had gone this far he might as well see the thing through and so he started a search for her. Unfortunately by the time he was able to catch up to her whereabouts he found out that she had been killed a couple of years before by a renegade “hit” man after taking part in the big U.S. Mail truck robbery out in Riverside, California. That had netted the robbers over a million dollars, once again a lot of money then if only walking around money now.

He dug into what the California newspapers had written about the case, written what they knew anyway and what he was able to pick up from a guy, a grease monkey, Claude Atkins, who worked with Eddie Stevens, a.k.a. Billy Baxter, a.k.a. Sam Lawrence and who knows what other names a has-been big time race car driver who was involved in the robbery in order to get enough for Sheila’s wanting habits once she got her claws into him. What he found out, and which he related to Larry who had known the particulars of her mother’s story was that Sheila had the same genes as her mother. Had the expensive wanting habits that drove Kitty from nowhere Pottsville. Had driven Sheila from hard-scrabble Scranton when she was old enough to escape. Larry was able to take what John had given him, which had been a lot less that he had been given about Kitty and whipped it into a story-line “like mother, like daughter.”     

Apparently Sheila had run away from the Farr home when she was fourteen with an older guy who promised her the moon. She had wound up originally in Chi town with him where he dumped her after a few months when the next best thing came along. After he had tired of her. Left her stranded at fifteen with nowhere to go, not back to Scranton anyway so she started whoring in a place over on the right side of Division Street. That is where she met Red Riley who also went under the moniker Dutch Reagan, another older guy, a big-time gambler who was her client one night and who came back several times to sample her wares before they took off together for Reno. For a couple of years, maybe three, she got about everything that she wanted from Red-except excitement which she craved ever since the day she high-tailed it out of Scranton and the strict Pentecostal Farr home.     

One day she heard that the Reno Classic, a car race was coming up. She asked Red to take her, but he backed out saying he didn’t give a damn about race cars and he needed to rest up for a big poker game that was starting that night. Sheila went alone and was thrilled by the speed and action, got her adrenal up. Got it up particularly when the winner, Billy Baxter later to be Eddie Stevens, turned out to be a good-looking guy. She went right up to him after his victory while he was surrounded by a bevy of young and beautiful girls and asked him if she could buy him a drink. He took one look at her and said “sure, baby, after I change into my street clothes.” Claude saw then that she was nothing but trouble and the volatile Billy was doomed to fall prey to her charms. That night and for about three nights after Billy went underground, Claude couldn’t find him to get himself and the car ready for next race in Riverside the next week. When he did show up he was non-committal about the next week’s race. Had that shit-eating grin that every guy who has been taken around the world had.

Two bad things, bad for the guys if not for Sheila, then happened. First Eddie took a horrible spin-out at Riverdale and wreaked the car when he tried a foolhardy inside move for position trying to impress Sheila with his skills. No fool after that incident Sheila dumped him as a guy who was going nowhere and would not have the dough necessary to keep her in fast action style. Second Red, after a three days and nights poker game tapped out, was busted and Sheila was ready to leave him when he told her about the plan. A plan to rob a U.S. Mail truck that would be carrying over a million in cash on a not well-travelled road through the high desert down in Southern California. That idea kept her in check, kept her in Red’s clutches.  They, Sheila and Rusty along with a couple of Red’s confederates kept working out the plan to ambush the truck on a deserted road once they were able to pass the truck on the one lane dirt road. Nobody’s reflexes and driving ability was good enough to do the task though. Then Sheila, half-thinking that she needed a safety valve in case the job went bust and half-thinking that Red’s plan didn’t mean a damn thing if they couldn’t get pass the mail truck told Red that she had a guy who could do the serious driving easily. If she could find him.                    

Sheila did find Billy now working the auto demolition circuit under the name of Eddie Stevens down in Riverdale after getting in contact with Claude who knew where Eddie was and what he was doing. Claude said she had that same hungry look on her face that he had seen that day when she first approached Eddie. He was fucked whatever she had in mind. After bullshitting Eddie about how he knew from the get-go that she was only interested in guys who were interested in fighting their asses off for a shot at the main chance she soft-pedalled him into a motel bedroom and went to work on him. A couple of days later she brought Eddie to see Red and see if he was the guy for the driver’s job. Done deal after Eddie beat the pajamas out of the timed clockings that were needed to successfully complete the job.   

In the event the robbery went off without a hitch-the actual robbery part anyway. There had been bad blood between Red and Eddie though over Sheila before the robbery over Red’s attitude toward her. That bad blood never abated when Eddie was left along with the other confederates looking stupid once Red and Sheila (Sheila’s idea here so like her mother ready to stiff any guy except she didn’t have whatever genes Kitty had to plan the heist) made their prearranged plans to keep all the dough under some principle that cutting dough two ways (really one way in the end) was a lot more profitable, that easy street would last a lot longer than splitting five ways.

Of course Eddie may not have been the brightest bulb on the planet but he soon figured when Sheila did not show at the spot that they had planned to meet and take all the dough for themselves that he had been put on the spot. Put on the spot big time when Red told his boys that Eddie had been the one, had stiffed them. Red knowing that Eddie would be hitting some low-rent race track to earn his kale had his boys work the circuits. They eventually found him doing “chicken runs” against high school drop-outs in Modesto, found out the shack rooming house where he hung his hat and went in for the kill. As far as the local sheriff could tell Eddie put up no struggle, had no obvious fear of death on his rigid face when the coroner came to do his report. Yeah, Sheila had done her work well.       

They say that no good turn should remain unpunished, the same with bad though when Judgement Day came for Red, using the name Dutch then and Sheila after those loose cannon killers found out that it had been Red who had stiffed them. After a big afternoon shoot-out the local sheriff and that over-worked coroner had four more stiffs to figure out the cause of death.

John Colfax knew one thing, no, two things. He was glad he had never met his mother and equally glad he had never met his sister.   

For Ti Jean Kerouac On The 50th Anniversary Of His Passing-Hard Rain’s A Going To Fall-Hard Times Please Come Again No More-With Kudos To Allan Ginsberg

By Lance Devine 

I have seen the best poet of the generation before mine declare that he had seen the best minds of his generation had turned to mush, turned out in the barren wilderness from which no one returned except for quick stays in safe haven mental asylums. Saw the same Negro streets he saw around Blue Hill Avenue and Dudley Street blank and wasted in the sweated fetid humid Thunderbird-lushed night (and every hobo, vagrant, escapee, drifter and grafter yelling out in unison ‘what is the word-Thunderbird-what is the price forty twice” and ready to jackroll some senior citizen lady for the price-ready to commit mayhem at Park Street subway stations for their boy). Thought that those angel-headed hipsters crying in pools of blood coming out of the wolves-stained sewers around the black corner would never stop bleating for their liquor, stop until they got popular and headed for the sallow lights of Harvard Square where they hustled young college students, young impressionable college students whose parents had had their best minds wasted in the turbid streets of south Long Island (not the West Egg of Gatsby’s dream of conquering everything in sight like any other poor-boy arriviste with too much money and not enough imagination and not East Egg of the fervid elites but anytown, Levitttown of those who would escape to Boston or Wisconsin to face the angel of death up front and say no go, pass, under luminous moons which light up sparks amd say to that candid world which could have given a fuck hard times please come again no more.

Saw hipsters cadging wine drinks from sullen co-eds staying out too late in the Harvard Square night who turned out to be slumming from some plebian colleges across the river maybe good Irish girls from frail Catholic parishes with rosaries in their fair-skinned hands and a novena book between their knees who nevertheless has Protestant lusts in their pallid hearts but unrequited (here’s how-they would arrive at the Café Lana with ten bucks and their virginity and leave with both and some guy with dreams of salty sucking blowjobs walking out the backdoor and doing the whack job behind the dumpster –a waste of precious fluids and according to Norman Mailer world-historic fucks which would product the best minds of the next generation all dribbled away). Maybe tasty Jewish girls from the shtetl in not East or West Egg who flocked to the other side of the river and gave Irish guys who previously had dribbled their spunk behind dumpsters after losing out to ten bucks and virginity in tack tickey-tack Catholic girls who refused to give that head that would have brought some of best mind some freaking relief (better no say fucking relief because that would be oxymoronic). Maybe some sullen fair-skinned and blonded Protestant girls who spouted something about one god and no trinities , no god and no trinities and just feel good stuff. All three varieties and yes there were more but who knew of Quakers, Mennonites, lusty Amish girls run away from home, Tantic card-wheelers, and fresh faced red light district sluts who at least played the game straight-played the cash nexus for pure pleasure and maybe to even up some scores. All-Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, yeah, Quakers (fakirs, fakers and Shakers included), the sluts, Mennonites and yes those lusty red-faced Amish runaways all coming together after midnight far from the negro streets but not far from the all night hustlers and dime store hipsters with their cigar store rings and cheap Irish whiskeys bought on the installment plan who converged around the Hayes-Bickford just a seven league jump from the old end of the line dead of night Redline subway stop in order to keep the angel of death at arms’ length. There to listen until dawm to fakir poets and slamming singsters fresh out of cheapjack coffeehouses where three chords and two line rhymes got you all the action you wanted although maybe a little light on the breadbasket sent around to show that you were appreciated. Yeah, now that I think about the matter more closely hard times please come again no more.                    

Saw the angel of death make her appearance one night at the Café Lana and then backstopped the Club Nana to fetch one young thing who warbled like heaven’s own angel. Hipster turned her on to a little sister and the some boy and she no longer warbled but did sweet candy cane tricks for high end businessmen with homely wives or fruitless ones who had given up that sort of “thing” after the third junior had been born and who were ready to make her his mistress if she would just stop singing kumbaya after every fuck like she was still a freaking warbler, a freaking virgin or something instead of “used” goods or maybe schoolboys whose older brothers took them to her for their first fling at going around the world, welcome to the brotherhood or maybe some old fart who just wanted to relive his dreams before the booze, the three wives and parcel of kids did him in and then the hustler sent her back to the Club Nana to “score” from the club owner who was connected with Nick the dream doper man, the Christ who would get him- and her well –on those mean angel-abandoned death watch streets but who knew that one night at the Hayes (everybody called it just that after they had been there one night, one after midnight night where they had that first cup of weak-kneed coffee replenished to keep a place in the scoreboarded night where hari-kara poets dreamed toke dreams and some Mister dreamed of fresh-faced singer girls looking for kicks. So please, please, hard times come again no more.              

I have seen frosted lemon trees jammed against the ferrous night, the night of silly foolish childhood dreams and misunderstanding about the world, the world that that poet spoke of in a teenage dream of indefinite duration about who was to have who was to have not once those minds were de-melted and made hip  to the tragedies of life, the close call with the mental house that awaits us all.

I am a driven man. I am a driven man, imprisoned, six by twelve room driven, but more by a mental six by twelve internal, eternal, infernal almost paternal quest, and that is the only word that fits for the elusive high white note, or the high white something, that I have spent a lifetime searching for. Certainly as long as that other search, that more physical search for the blue-pink great American West that disturbed my youth, and beyond, and pushed me through many a long, lonesome highway hitchhike mile. But you know that story already now that you have read the previous scenes.

This one is more elusive, although I have caught a whisper of it here and there along the way. Now it looks like I’m stuck with it to the end. Here I sit in late 2007, in any case, quarantined, in desolate, high, hard wind-swept, sunless-sea-ed, busted sand-duned, green sea-grass-blown, icy white-capped waved, Atlantic–oceaned, ragged, rugged, jagged Maine-coasted shack of a room getting ready to search, and search hard this time, for that white devil of a thing that keeps disturbing my rest.

I will put up with an ill-lit stove, half broken from generations of use by others, passing strangers, maybe seeking their own high white notes, or high white something. Or, maybe, just passing sweaty, drunken nights in some foredoomed attempt to avoid oblivion. I will, moreover, put up with that high-pitched, annoying, buzzing refrigerator in back of me that means, at least, a touch of civilization. And the bubbly, perking, hard-hearted coffee-making machine, chipped plates, moldy-cushioned sofa, and this stuffy-aired place in order to make sense of what drove me here once again to place my shoulder against the wind, the whistling wind that signals that it is time to take note, and to seriously take note, of the demands of the quest.

And I came here for a purpose, always a purpose, to leave home and sweet-loved, sweet love. And to get away to clean a man’s mind from the humdrum, fairwayed, fresh-ponded, sun-walked, run-runned, walk-runned, city-maddened depths. Also while we are on the subject from the technological-driven, cell-phoned, personal computer-strapped like some third hand or second-brained, four-walled nightmare. Nightmare-evading Maine fits the bill, although truth to tell Maine figures, Maine always figures in the white note fight, although it is hardly the only place.

Hey, wait a minute, I can almost read your thoughts about my thoughts right now. It goes something like this- here he goes again, you say, on some incensed holy grail trip of the mind, or maybe he is for real, real time, real places but still a trip that would embarrass and shame any self-respecting errant knight of yore, searching for that perfect fair damsel in distress to bring home, or more likely, to carry off, kicking and screaming, to some cozy, stone-faced, thatched-roofed, smoke-filled, forested cottage for two. Or of old mad, maddened, maddening Captain Ahab and his foolish fish, or whatever woe begotten thing that he was really looking for in the Melville deep. Or, maybe, some fiendish, freakish, madman pioneer monkishly doing his own shouldering against the storms, against the snowstorms, against the storms of life of the white-peaked Western trek nights. Ah, the blue-pink Western sky. I wish you well pioneer brother, wherever you landed.

No it is not like that at all. This is not some half-baked, half-bright, half-thought out, interior dialogue that I usually get myself tangled up into. Tangled so bad I have to break it up for a while. No, none of that this time. No intellectual gymnastics, no mental tepidity, no squarey circles or circley squares. No this is purely, or almost purely, a memory trip and that seems about right, you know, if you really want to know it has been painful at times, but no way, no way at all, that it is one of those ill-digested whims that you are thinking of. No way.

And, besides, I have the many pairs of worn out, worn-soled, worn-heeled, down at the heel shoe leather (now thick-soled, thick-heeled, logo-addled running sneakers); worn-thumbed, back-pack-ladened, some forgotten town destination sign waving, hitch-hiked mile (that means bumming free rides on the road, the wide American highway, for those too young, or too proper to the know the long gone, way long gone, exotic word that sustained many a hobo, tramp or bum in his (or her) search for the Great American night) through every nowhere, no-name, no wanna know the name, bus-depoted, stranger-unfriendly town from here to Mendocino. Moreover, here I have marks, and here you can call it intellectual or spiritual or whatever, from every diesel-trailed, oil-slicked, mud-flatted, white-lined, white-broken-lined, two-laned, no passing , hard-bitten, steam-fooded truck stop from here to Frisco as well. So don’t tell me I haven’t paid my dues.

Or it could have been some smoke-filled, nicotine-plastered walls in some long defunct coffee house (when smoking was de rigueur), or some gin-sweated, smoke-fogged Cambridge bar (in the days when smoking was allowed), listening to some local group trying to make it out of town, one way or another. Or it could have been being chained-smoked cigarette (ditto above) writing like crazy, every soul thing, every non-soul thing, every anti-soul thing after passing on the last call train out to the sticks at that old reliable, don’t have the eggs scrambled, Hayes-Bickford where we all believed that if you just spent enough nights, enough hot, heavy-aired July nights, or enough snow-bound, frost-bitten January nights (this before Super Bowl suspense filled in January) maybe something major would come out, and maybe fame, big fame too, fame etched by the gods.

Hey did I tell you how I got here, got here this time that is? Did I forget that in my frenzy to tell you what is? Ya, I guess I did reading back. Let me tell you of my dreams, or at least the story of my dreams to make it right, okay? One recent, sweat- drenched night I woke up, or was I woken up by one of the cats, in a start. I had a weird old dream, or maybe just a flash of a dream where I saw, in living, livid color a big old beautiful high white note floating, free and easy, as you might guess on a very stormy high white wave. After than flash, if that is what it was, I could not get back to sleep and lay there, soaking a little and trying to soak off that soaking with an old bedraggled railroad man’s roaring red handkerchief, or that is at least what I call them since I first saw a railroad guy walking down the line when I was a kid, carrying one in the left back pocket of his dirt-stained denims as he uncoupled one train from another, maybe sending it into the great western night.

But I will get into that great Western night, or what I think is my idea of the great Western night later on once I figure out the meaning of this dream. Hey, it is really bothering me, and it should because, lately, I have been thinking and thinking hard about that very subject. No, it did not just come out of the blue, come on now, you guys know better than that. Ain’t you read Freud, or his acolytes or renegades, these things all have secret meanings of their own. But no surprise if you think about it. I have been thinking about the high white note for a while, ever since I read poor old, black, gay, exiled against his will, writer James Baldwin and his infernal short story, Sonny’s Blues.

You know I really should make you read the whole thing, that whole short story, and then you could come back and get an idea about my dream, or the thought of what my dream was all about. And then the great Western trek in the night, hell in the day time even, would make a great deal more sense. But I am going to let you off the hook this time and just tell you that old “Sonny” is a story about brothers, and I have been thinking about that too lately, although not in the friendly, gee I should get back in touch with my own brother sense, but about brothers who drifted back and forth in each others lives until one day the reality set in hard and hard was that Sonny, a high white note-seeking jazz pianist really got high on the white note. Busted, busted hard, busted back to clean but busted and his brother, would you know that it was his big brother, had to help him put back the pieces, even though the pieces were what made Sonny interesting and alive. That's me, living on old sweet, sweet dream of that white note, and Angelica-ish-driven memories of that old time blue-pink night before I go.

Kitty’s Tale-‘s With Ava Gardner and Burt Lancaster’s Film Adaptation Of Hemingway’s “The Killers” In Mind  

By Si Landon

[Kitty Collins was a knock-out, was a gal who guys would jump through hoops for and not think twice about it, who would lie, steal and double-cross for just to get a whiff of that jasmine, or whatever the hell that scent was that drove guys dizzy when they were in the same room with her. This the way that Jim Reardon, the high-priced investigator for Acme Insurance described her in a note that he left in his records of the Ole Andreson case, the case that would make him that high-priced investigator back in 1946. John Colfax was looking through Reardon’s files one day trying to figure out how his mother Kitty had wound up doing a long stretch in for her part in a murder and robbery scheme, the famous Tip Top Hat Company payroll job. They had grabbed $250,000 cash, not a lot now maybe just walking around money in but a big number then-a number worth cutting guys up for and cutting guys out of. When the cops picked up Kitty at her palatial home outside of Philadelphia after his father, Jim Colfax, had been killed by one of his confederates, a guy named Dum Dum who was looking for the dough that went missing she was frantic that the dying Jim (everybody had called him “Big Jim” then) exonerate her, get her off the hook for the murder of the hat company guard and the dough. No dice. Big Jim passed before he could say word one, one way or the other.

After Kitty had been convicted of the felony murder and sentenced to that twenty to thirty year stretch her parents had decided that it was better to raise John without him, only two at the time, knowing too much about what had happened to his mother and father. Had told him early on that they had died in some car crash. Later when he was an adult somebody recognizing the name “Big Jim” Colfax when John was “in his cups” at Jimmy’s Grille in Pottstown where he had been raised and had mentioned that his parents had died in a car crash a guy put him wise, told him that was all hogwash and filled him in on the real reason that Big Jim had died-and his mother had spent her life in stir (she died there in some kind of poetic justice just before she was to be released some twenty years later). That night he confronted his grandparents about the matter. They confessed to what they had done without giving many details since they had forgotten many of them in their dotage.

They did tell him that if he was interested in finding out more details about what really happened that he should check and see if Jim Reardon was still at Acme Insurance in Philadelphia. As it turned out Reardon had retired some years before after a successful career and was living in Tom’s River over in New Jersey. A couple of weeks later he went to Tom’s River and met up with Reardon. Reardon had told him that he had too forgotten many of the details of the case, although he remembered without guidance or guile that John’s mother was a beautiful woman, a woman to twist a guy up. He offered to let John look at the files, his personal files of the important cases he had worked on which he kept in his basement. John eagerly agreed that he wanted to see the files. The next day he came back to Reardon’s house and spent the entire afternoon going through the papers at a table Reardon had set up down in the musty basement.

The key document that John found was a diary, no more of a journal that Kitty apparently kept during her younger days, had kept for several years before the robbery, and during the time of the robbery ending just before his father was killed when Kitty had placed a notation in the book that she was off to meet Reardon and was fearful that he was getting too close to the truth of what happened back then to Ole Andreson, to the Swede as everybody called him. The most startling news he received from his perusal of the journal was that despite her protestations of innocence she, not his father Big Jim, had been the driving force behind the robbery. Had spent the better part of her young womanhood plotting to “hit the motherlode,” her expression and take a ride on easy street (John’s term for what she had been looking for). He confronted Reardon with that journal and asked what he knew about it. Reardon confessed that he had picked up the journal from Kitty’s bureau drawer after she had been marched off to the police station but that he had never bothered to look at it since the case was now closed and he had about ten other cases that his boss was driving him crazy to finish up. The journal made for chilling reading, made John unsure about whether he would have wanted to meet his mother if he knew where she was and knew what was in the journal. Reardon let him keep the journal and a few weeks later he gave it to his newspaper friend, Larry Larson, to make sense of what had really happened in the famous, maybe infamous, Tip Top Hat company case. Here’s what Larry was able to do with the material. Si Landon]                            

Kitty Colfax, nee Collins, had been brought up on the wrong side of the tracks, Irishtown, in Pottsville, Pa and from as young age she could remember she had dreamed about escaping lie among the coal slags, among the dirty, drunken shanty Irish too. She was aided considerably in her dreams by her startling good looks, her long black at those coal slags hair, a tidy body and big ruby red lips. Early on she figured that she could use that beauty to her advantage. That and a cold, calculated sense that every man was nothing but putty in her hands once they got a whiff of that scent she was wearing that said femme fatale (the jasmine she wore from early on only added to the effect). Almost naturally she used sex, the sex act, acts to get something from a man (boys at first, that was how she got her first bottle of jasmine perfume, her “trademark”) losing her virginity one night when she was fourteen. Everything later flowed from that understanding of the world, the man’s world that she was going to trample on.

Kitty also knew she had to get out of Pottsville, get out fast so at sixteen she told her parents she was going to Philly to make her life (she told them she wanted to get married but not to anybody in Pottsville as a pretext). In Philly she went through a bewildering series of men [to John] who picked the up tab, kept her, paid her rent although nobody who had hit the big time, who had serious don’t worry about the future money. Then one night at a party where she was slumming (and kind of singing for her supper since they guy who was hosting the party was also paying her rent, paying for her voice lessons as well) she met Ole Andreson, the “Swede,” who had come in with a date but blew her off once he got a look at Kitty. Once he told his story-that he had been a boxer, had broken his hand doing so and so was moving on, moving into some connections he had with guys in the rackets, probably act as muscle she sensed that he might come in handy. He certainly had the built for some tough action (although she also noted that his “member,” his cock wasn’t that big and he wasn’t much of a lover, couldn’t give her an orgasm). She had him all tied up though and she knew it, he knew it too. One night she had been in Joey’s, a restaurant when pugs and other bad boys hung out, mostly cons and clip artists wearing a stolen brooch, a very expensive stolen brooch when a copper, a friend of the Swede’s came in to pinch somebody, to pinch her. The Swede walked in, glammed to the situation and claimed he had stolen the brooch to the copper after she begged him to do something. Yeah, he took a fall for her, did three hard ones. She had him down forever if she needed anything.             

Of course a guy doing three hard ones, even if for her, wasn’t getting her ahead in the world and so she started stepping out again (she had made it a policy from early on, except for an off-hand blow job if a guy was giving her something, to only deal with one guy at a time-unless she needed to use another guy for some caper and that was his price). That was when she met and shacked up with “Big Jim” Colfax, a guy moving up in the rackets and a guy who seemed to have a “front” unlike the Swede who was just a pug, somebody to be used. Funny this Big Jim was seriously into sex, seriously into kinky action and so Kitty let him have his way-for a while. A guy like Big Jim though was a guy who liked to lay back and take it easy-have his boys take up the “collections” on the numbers rackets his was running on the North side. 

That is what Big Jim thought was the big time but Kitty knew that serious money was not through some middle-level push in the cheapjack numbers racket. She would keep hammering away at him to listen to her plans about making a big score and then ducking out and become “legit,” make some real easy street money from a business start-up. She would go after him particularly when she had him tied up on the bedposts and she was ready to down on him. He kept putting her off though.

Kept putting her off until she heard that the Swede was getting out of prison and then she went full- bore, wouldn’t do the kinky stuff that consumed Big Jim unless he listened to her plan. The plan was simplicity itself and she had been working on a variation of the scheme for some time. Where was there serious money almost laying on the ground. Banks-or the payroll at some big factory. Banks were too risky but a payroll with little security and no vaults was a cinch. In Philly then right after the war when hats for men and women were a big deal the factory had to the Tip Top Hat Company with a big payroll and nothing more than a door to go through. They, Kitty figured they needed three other guys besides them for muscle and firepower if necessary, would be dressed as workers going through the single guard gate when the shifts changed. Then to the payroll office and the dough on a Friday morning. Big Jim started to show some interest once Kitty laid out the scenario and before the day was out they were casing the place (and it didn’t hurt when she let him do his thing with whips with her). Big Jim was in.

Of course the Swede would be in once he saw that she was lined up with Big Jim just so he could get his hands on the dough to take her away from him (little did the Swede know then that Big Jim whom she would use to front the whole operation was claiming half of the take for figuring out the plan). Yeah, Swede was in when he heard the plan with Kitty sitting provocatively on the bed with that come hither look that meant she was “available.” The other two guys were more trouble. There had been a dearth of firepower talent in the town since the war with first-rate guys heading to Chi town and the Motor City where there was more action. So Big Jim contacted the best available, the second best, a guy named Dum Dum and a guy named Blinky. Then Kitty went to work. Took Dum Dum up to her room and let him have his way with her. Blinky, an old time junkie but a great wheel man when he was sober, could have cared less about sex but a few bindles of smack, of boy, of heroin brought him on board (and the promise of enough dough to stay junked up for a year or two). So that had the five ready to go.

In the event the robbery went as planned except at the end some guard thinking the money being robbed from the company was his personal stash or something had started shooting and Dum Dum had wasted him. An overhead cost. The plan was to meet at a cabin that night after they had split up in different direction when the robbery was completed and they headed for the cars they had parked across the street from the plant. This is where things got dicey-or seemed to. They were all to meet and divide the dough the next morning at another cabin when the coast was clear. What had happened was that, by design, Kitty had gone to Dum Dum and Blinky and told them the meeting cabin had burned down and the new meet place was at a farm a few miles away.

She told the Swede that he was being cut out, that the others wanted him out but that she loved him, had always loved him so why didn’t he foul the boys up by showing up at the farm and grabbing all the dough and head to Atlantic City. She would meet him there. She left her calling card to make sure he was in-she let him have his way with her (although she made another note that prison had done a job on his sex drive and she had to pretend to have an orgasm). The next morning the Swede came through, grabbed all the dough and hightailed it to Atlantic City with a sack full of dough. Kitty showed up later in the day. A couple of days later she blew town-with the dough-leaving the Swede holding the bag. Classic fall guy.

Here’s the deal. The Swede was set up not only by Kitty but through her by Big Jim. Kitty had bet the farm that Big Jim had enough smarts to put together a legit business-with her guiding him. But she wanted all the dough to get the thing rolling. That was why the Swede was left with egg all over his face. So everybody, everybody being Dum Dum and Blinky, thought that Swede had crossed them up.

Big Jim, with Kitty in tow, did wind up setting up a big time construction company and Kitty finally had all the dough that even her black heart could use. The Swede, well the Swede figuring the others had him down as the villain disappeared, went underground in some small town in Ohio working as a gas jockey, all a washed up pug and robber was good for. Then one day while driving through Ohio on company business Kitty stopped at a gas station for gas and water. There was the Swede with a stupid sheepish grin on his face. Kitty was able to hold him off with a promise to show up at his room after she convinced him that Big Jim had forced her to betray her man-him. Yeah, this Swede had it bad. Once Kitty got back to Philly though she implored Big Jim to hire a couple of gunsels and get rid of the Swede for good.

Big Jim, for once, didn’t argue the matter. He hired a couple of boys to do the job, and they did it as neat as any hit job had ever been done. They killed him right in his crummy boarding house room while he was sleeping, an easy hit. That is where Reardon came in. Seems that the gasoline company that employed the Swede had life insurance on its employees, Not much but enough to have Reardon smell a rat. So Kitty and Big Jim would go down for a$2500 life insurance policy. Jesus. Reardon was a bulldog on the case once he saw that the Swede,  mere gas jockey, had been waylaid for no apparent reason. By dogging it out, by retracing some footsteps he found that the Swede was no mere gas jockey but a pretty good boxer whose hands went south on him. He had gotten mixed up with the local branch of the Philly mob, met the mysterious to Reardon Kitty, taken the fall for her, and then had taken part in the Tip Top Hat robbery.

The important thing though was that Reardon figured out that the Swede had been the fall guy-the guy who was supposed to have skipped with all the dough. That got the pissed off Dum Dum and Blinky thinking once they read that the Swede had been wasted under suspicious circumstances. Then the trail led back to Big Jim and Kitty who were now married and had a son. Dum Dum finally not so dumb wasted Blinky figuring he was the bad guy. When that proved not to be true he then went after Big Jim. In the meantime Reardon had figured out that Kitty had betrayed everybody. He had it almost right except that she one last plea-and that was where the journal ended. Everybody knows though that Big Jim and Dum Dum had a shoot-out and had killed each other with Kitty begging Big Jim to get her off the hook as he lay dying in a pool of blood. We already know Kitty’s end.

Larry thought after finishing up his piece figured that Kitty’s parents had been right to keep John in the dark. And after reading this article he was also sure that John would be glad that he had not met his mother later.