The Junkies Were Valiant-Crying Out For Repentance And God Save Us Sinners-The Junkies Have Always Been With Us-The Fixer Man Too

By Fritz Taylor

The one thing I hate, and maybe the biggest reason I only read police procedurals under duress or when hot summer comes, is how fake the scenarios are, how so very competent the coppers are, the public coppers in any case. (This will be blasphemy to guys like Rav Wilson, Seth Garth and Sam Lowell but in my book the private dicks are almost as unreal except they draw something of a pass since at least they are willing to draw some fire their way, take a fist or a slug for the employer if it comes to that wrapping it around their dailies and expense something the coffee and cruller coppers would never do, not in real life anyway.) The reason all this comes up is that after I read Rav Wilson’s review of a Lem Kane police procedural Hotel New Yorker I got tired of his belly-aching about how silly the stuff displayed was against his “heroic” private coppers like Phil Larkin and Danny Collins and early hard-boiled detectives like Miles Archer and Phil Marlowe. Like I said the private dicks aren’t anything to write home about, but the public coppers portrayed are truly unreal.

What is real is what happened every day down in Fulton County, down in Georgia where I grew up in deeply segregated Mister James Crow country in the 1950s although that factor does not really enter into my story. What does enter is the Fort Point Estates, yes, that is really what they called them which were as many older readers will almost automatically recognize were “the projects” the government subsidized housing set up after World War II for mostly veterans, white veterans exclusively so Mister James  Crow does as always at least make cameo appearance, and their young families as a spring board to better housing later but necessary then after the housing crunch caused by the war.

The Fort Point Estates were the southern version of what guys like fellow Vietnam veteran Seth Garth were talking about in growing up in the north in North Adamsville and ditto the veteran status Ralph Morris out on Tappan Street in Troy, New York. In short places where the most vulnerable and desperate denizens of society found themselves or else they would have been reduced to the really dreaded county farm or utter homelessness (which according to family legend my family was in right after World War II when we lived out of a car, a clunker car before hitting the Estates).  

Desperates, desperadoes probably are as good as any operative words to describe life in those conditions (and Seth wrote about more eloquently than I ever could, and a guy named Pete Markin who they all still venerate who had the pulse of that existence down pat before his own early death partially attributed to the emotional ravages of growing up in the projects). But to the point, the anti-belly-aching point about the public coppers and what they did or did not do in real life. In a place like the Estates which like many such projects were established on what amounted to wasteland and isolated away from the good citizens public services were minimal and private services depended on how much risk some private parties were willing to take to eke out a massive profit from the misery of the poor denizens of such places. Enter Jimmy Bob Carter, the Carter family name if you can believe it either somehow related through marriage to the famed Carter classic country music family based out of Clinch Mountain in Virginia or Judge Jacob “Death Penalty” Carter who would go on to become some high state official in Georgia spawning a political dynasty before he was through.

This Jimmy Bob had a few bucks I guess and decided that since there no serious supermarket for several miles around that he would open up what amounted to a Mom and Pop Variety Store. Would provide the unwashed with small amounts of goods, this before food stamps bailed people of few resources out of the worse of their situations, for too much money. Except and who knows what drove him, or his wife Vivian who had been some kind of degree daughter of the Confederacy in her maidenhood to some small kindnesses there would always be very, very cheap candy to keep us coming in (and probably mother in tow as well).

Of course, that was all so much bull, so much eye wash. What Jimmy Bob and Lady Vivian (she picked that moniker up somewhere along the line but don’t ask me how or why) really were up to was using that funny little storefront at the entrance to the Estates (everybody with or without an automobile had to pass the place on the way in or out) to “make book,” illegal betting, to run a bunch of the neighborhood girls (some young mothers under duress too with say a husband who spent the weekly paycheck on liquor maybe some other woman having to put out to keep the bill collector wolves from the door) out of the upstairs rooms, called the game rooms, Vivian’s operation from what I later came to understand when I stopped thinking candy was all that was sweet in the world. Worse of all in the long haul I guess was Jimmy Bob proved to be the “fixer man,” the drug dealer of choice with whatever drugs could heal some broken down spirits.

Like I said most of this stuff I had no clue about until I was maybe ten, way too young to know about the seamy side of life but we knew it, and in the end probably just assumed that bookies, whores, pimps, fixers, and junkies were an ordinary part of every town. Here is where the stuff gets sick though, the copper stuff. The guys who ran and operated out of the police substation were “on the take” from Jimmy Bob and nobody thought anything of it. I remember a few incidents. Once Jimmy Bob had his “book” laying right out on the counter and Officers Hamilton and Dixon came in saw the book and proceeded to write  down their bets in that leather-bound book. Another time Captain Dorian laughed when Vivian said she had a nice piece (of ass) for him and to head upstairs. Naturally the coppers grabbed their fair share of free drugs (then mainly opium and morphine, not heroin as far as I know) for their little parties, or for their honeys. Yeah, so lay off me about coppers and solving crimes and if anybody asks just point them to the still standing Fort Point Estates filled to this day with junkies, whores, fixer men… and coppers who look the other way.