When Big Bad Chevys Stoked Our Dream- An Encore Presentation By Lance Lawrence With A Help From Josh Breslin  With The Classic Corner Boy Film "Diner" In Mind  

For The Late Peter Paul Markin   

Scene: Brought to mind by the cover artwork that graces the front of the booklet that accompanied an album I had been reviewing. The artwork contained, in full James Dean-imitation pout, one good-looking, DA-quaffed, white muscle-shirted young man, an alienated young man, no question, leaning, leaning gently, very gently, arms folded, on the hood of his 1950’s classic automobile, clearly not his father’s car, but also clearly for our purposes let us call it his “baby.”

And that car, that extension of his young manhood, his young alienated manhood, is Friday night, Saturday night, or maybe a weekday night if it is summer, parked, priority parked, meaning nobody with some Nash Rambler, nobody with some foreign Volkswagen, no biker even , in short, nobody except somebody who is tougher, a lot tougher, than our alienated young man better breathe on the spot while he is within fifty miles of the place, directly in front of the local teenage (alienated or not) "hot spot." And in 1950s America, a teenage America with some disposal income (allowance, okay), that hot spot was likely to be, as here, the all-night Mel’s (or Joe’s, Adventure Car-Hop, whatever) drive-in restaurant opened to cater to the hot dog, hamburger, French fries, barbecued chicken cravings of exhausted youth. Youth exhausted after a hard night, well, let’s just call it a hard night and leave the rest to your knowing imagination, or their parents’ evil imaginations.

And in front of the restaurant, in front of that leaned-on “boss” automobile stands one teenage girl vision. One blondish, pony-tailed, midnight sun-glassed, must be a California great American West night teeny-bopper girl holding an ice cream soda after her night’s work. The work that we are leaving to fertile (or evil, as the case may be) imaginations. Although from the pout on Johnny’s (of course he has to be a Johnny, with that car) face maybe he “flunked out” but that is a story for somebody else to tell. Here is mine.

********

Not everybody, not everybody by a long-shot, who had a “boss” ’57 cherry red Chevy was some kind of god’s gift to the earth; good-looking, good clothes, dough in his pocket, money for gas and extras, money for the inevitable end of the night stop at Jimmy John’s Drive-In restaurant for burgers and fries (and Coke, with ice, of course) before taking the date home after a hard night of tumbling and stumbling (mainly stumbling). At least that is what one Joshua Breslin, Josh, told me, he a freshly minted fifteen- year old roadside philosopher thought as for the umpteenth time “Stewball” Stu left him  by Albemarle Road off Route One and rode off into the Olde Saco night with his latest “hot” honey, fifteen year old teen queen Sally Sullivan. Here is the skinny as we used to say as per one Joshua Breslin:

Yah, Stewball Stu was nothing but an old rum-dum, a nineteen year old rum-dum, except he had that “boss” girl-magnet ’57 cherry red and white two-toned Chevy (painted those colors by Stu himself) and he had his pick of the litter in the Olde Saco, maybe all of Maine, night. By the way Stu’s official name, was Stuart Stewart, go figure, but don’t call him Stuart and definitely do not call him “Stewball” not if you want to live long enough not to have the word teen as part of your age. The Stewball thing was strictly for local boys, jealous local boys like Josh,  who when around Stu always could detect a whiff of liquor, usually cheap jack Southern Comfort, on his breathe, day or night.

Figure this too. How does a guy who lives out on Tobacco Road in an old run-down trailer, half-trailer really, from about World War I that looked like something out of some old-time Great Depression Hoover-ville scene, complete with scrawny dog, and tires and cannibalized car leavings every which way have girls, and nothing but good-looking girls from twelve to twenty (nothing older because as Stu says, anything older was a woman and he wants nothing to do with women, and their women’s needs, whatever they are). And the rest of us got his leavings, or like tonight left on the side of the road on Route One. And get this, they, the girls from twelve to twenty actually walk over to Tobacco Road from nice across the other side of the tracks homes like on Atlantic Avenue and Fifth Street, sometimes by themselves and sometime in packs just to smell the grease, booze, burnt rubber, and assorted other odd-ball smells that come for free at Stu’s so-called garage/trailer.

Let me tell you about Stu, Sally, and me tonight and this will definitely clue you in to the Stu-madness of the be-bop Olde Saco girl night. First of all, as usual, it is strictly Stu and me starting out. Usually, like today, I hang around his garage on Saturdays to get away from my own hell-house up the road on Ames Street, meaning almost as poor as Stu except they are not trailers but, well, shacks, all that the working poor like my people could afford in the golden age and I am kind of Stu’s unofficial mascot. Now Stu had been working all day on his dual-exhaust carburetor or something, so his denims are greasy, his white tee-shirt (sic) is nothing but wet with perspiration and oil stains, he hasn’t taken a bath since Tuesday (he told me that himself with some sense of pride) and he was not planning to do so this night, and of course, drinking all day from his silver Southern Comfort flask he reeked of alcohol (but don’t tell him that if you read this and are from Olde Saco because, honestly, I want to live to have twenty–something as my age). About 7:00 PM he bellows out to me, cigarette hanging from his mouth, an unfiltered Lucky of course (filtered cigarettes are for girls in Stu world), let’s go cruising.

Well, cruising means nothing but taking that be-bop ’57 cherry red and white two-toned Chevy out on East Grand and look. Look for girls, look for boys from the hicks with bad-ass cars who want to take a chance on beating Stu at the “chicken run” down at the flats on the far end of Sagamore Beach, look for something to take the edge off the hunger to be somebody number one. At least that last is what I figured after a few of these cruises with Stu. Tonight it looks like girls from the way he put some of that grease (no not car grease, hair-oil stuff) on his nappy hair. Yes, I am definitely looking forward to cruising tonight once I have that sign because, usually whatever girl Stu might not want, or maybe there are a couple of extras, or something I get first dibs. Yah, Stu is righteous like that.

So off we go, stopping at my house first so I can get a little cleaned up and put on a new shirt and tell my brother to tell our mother that I will be back later, maybe much later, if she ever gets home herself before I do. The cruising routine in Olde Saco means up and down Route One (okay, okay Main Street), checking out the lesser spots (Darby’s Pizza Palace, Hank’s Ice Cream joint, the Colonial Donut Shoppe where I hang during the week after school and which serves a lot more stuff than donuts and coffee, sandwiches and stuff, and so on). Nothing much this Saturday. So we head right away for the mecca, Jimmy John’s. As we hit Stu’s “saved” parking spot just in front I can see that several stray girls are eyeing the old car, eyeing it like tonight is the night, tonight is the night Stu, kind of, sort of, maybe notices them (and I, my heart starting to race a little in anticipation and glad that I stopped off at my house, got a clean shirt, and put some deodorant on and guzzled some mouthwash, am feeling tonight is the night too).

But tonight is not the night, no way. Not for me, not for those knees-trembling girls. Why? No sooner did we park than Sally Sullivan came strolling out (okay I don’t know if she was strolling or doo-wopping but she was swaying in such a sexy way that I knew she meant business, that she was looking for something in the Olde Saco night and that she had “found” it) to Stu’s Chevy and with no ifs, ands, or buts asked, asked Stu straight if he was doing anything this night. Let me explain before I tell you what Stu’s answer was that this Sally Sullivan is nothing but a sex kitten, maybe innocent-looking, but definitely has half the boys, hell maybe all the boys at Olde Saco High, including a lot of the guys on the football team drooling over her. I know, because I have had more than one sleepless night over her myself.

See, she is in my English class and because Mr. Murphy lets us sit where we want I usually sit with a good view of her. So Stu says, kind of off-handedly, like having the town teen fox come hinter on him was a daily occurrence, kind of lewdly, “Well, baby I am if you want to go down Sagamore Rocks right now and look for dolphins?” See, Sagamore Rocks is nothing but the local lovers’ lane here and “looking for dolphins” is the way everybody, every teenage everybody in town says “going all the way,” having sex for the clueless. And Sally, as you can guess if you have been following my story said, “Yes” just like that. At that is why I was dumped, unceremoniously dumped, while they roared off into the night. So like I said not every “boss” car owner is god’s gift to women, not by a long shot. Or maybe they are.

Of course ultimately the thing that yoked the guys around Tonio’s was what to do, or not do, collectively and individually as the case came up with girls. (And not just in our generation but at least the couple before ours and a couple after before Tonio retired and the next owners were not enthralled with corner boys hanging around their family-oriented place with their “Mom’s night out” Friday night agenda and called “copper” to clear out the “ruffians” the term they actually used according to what I heard from Frannie Lacey who stayed in town for the duration since he had inherited his mother’s house after she passed. In any by then the corner was giving way to guys (and gals) hanging around malls of the world, the “mall rats” we have all come to dread in our dotage. Mall rats are not even in the same world as corner boys but just suburban kids looking for some place to identify with. These days you see them collected in a space-all looking down at their smartphones and they might have well been in their living rooms as there. Too bad.) Like I said I didn’t start hanging the corners until junior high when my family moved from early growing up North Adamsville about thirty miles away but one of the big thing driving us hormonally-charged boys to head to Doc’s Drugstore was to catch what was what after school at first when everybody, when the girls okay, would drop in on their way home to spent some of their discretionary dough on listening to something dreamy on Doc’s to die for jukebox (dough which we corner boys did not have and had to cadge spare change off of some of the girls). It was at Doc’s I “learned” how to scope a girl to play what I wanted to hear but that is a story for another time because talking about Doc’s and the frenzy of trying to score with some girl started in earnest even for “slow” guys like me. Funny how a year or two before those girls were nothing but “sticks” and nuisances and all of a sudden there they were kind of “interesting”    

In those days as far as I know and even the chronic liars that all we guys were about “scoring” with a girl-meaning have some kind of sexual activity with them and that fact was accepted whatever a guy said even when we knew they guy was lying about scoring some “ice queen” that nobody except maybe Paul Newman or Bobby Vee could score we never heard (or knew personally) about any junior high girl who was “putting out” (and if they were “confessing” to such conduct come Monday morning before school “lav” talk they were lying just as hard as we were so who the hell knows who was doing, or not doing, what). That naturally would change considerably by high school especially junior and senior years when “boss” cars were in the air and Squaw Rock beckoned for adventurous. Then on any given Friday or Saturday night, or almost any night in the summer, dated up or not, the talk was almost exclusively except maybe a passing reference to some sports moment about girls and what they would and would not do. Do sexually in case you were wondering what “do the do” meant, a common expression around our way after somebody heard bluesman Howlin’ Wolf utter those words heard on the local rock station.

I already pointed out the chronic lying about the subject including by me of course but the real subject was about “getting something,” getting some sugar we called it without getting caught. That “caught” not referring to actually doing the act if you were lucky enough to have a halfway willing girl even if you had to get her drunk to get in the mood. (Yeah, I know, I know as well as the reader that we were all under age in our state but if anybody wanted booze “Jimmy the Tramp,” one of the town drunks would gladly cooperate and get whatever you wanted as long as he got his couple of bottles of Thunderbird with your order. We learned the “anthem” from him-“what’s the word-Thunderbird, what’s the price-forty twice” from him. Little did I know that several years later when I was disturbed by alcohol I would be down in Jimmy’s ditch expressing the same thing to the high school kids I was buying for). Caught here meant get some poor girl “in the family way.” Our expression for the condition was “going to see Aunt Emma” although don’t ask me where it came from probably from generation to generation by older brothers to younger brothers and everything got lost in the shuffle about genesis. What would happen is that we would not see a girl for a while although we knew her family was still in town, was still in the same house or apartment but the girl was missing. The excuse when asked was that she had gone to see an aunt for a few months on some family business. All I know is that you would almost never see the girl in school again or if you did you would not like now see her with a baby. One girl did, Candy Lee, came back twice but we all counted her as nothing but a “slut,” someone to avoid because you know there was nothing but trouble there as foxy looking as she was in her cashmere sweaters and tight skirts    

No guy wanted to have that “going to aunt” hanging over his head at fifteen or sixteen, probably no girl either be we were just ordinary teenagers who were sexually curious and didn’t know a damn thing about what the real consequences of sex were. And how would we then, probably almost as much now too, since nobody in authority, not parents, priests, principals or policemen were telling anything that could help. Growing up and hanging with guys who had a least some Irish in them it was worse since Sacred Heart the Catholic Church almost all of us attended (except Allan Davis, a Jewish kid who was a math whizz so we let him hand and Steve Tabor who had a “boss” ’57 Chevy who was some kind of Protestant who we let hang around for obvious reasons) we only knew what we got from older siblings or more usually “on the street” including stuff we made up-most of it wrong and not a small contributing factor to the “aunt” epidemic. Most of us survived although Peter Paul Markin had a close call when Jeannie Murphy told him she was pregnant. We all huddled together to tell him to tell her to take a test to see who the father was. As it turned out she was lying because she didn’t want Markin to see Laura Callahan, Jack’s sister whom he was getting big eyes over. Jesus we were on the cusp of the “Pill” but what they hell did we know about half of this stuff. We were just hungry.

There were certain traditions associated with corner boy life, certain rites of passage which each generation of corner boys had to pass through to keep his place in pecking order (by the way my use of generations is not say twenty years when people pass from kid-dom to adulthood forming a generation along the way but more like the six or seven years from late elementary school to the end of high school, maybe a couple of years beyond). This for “from hunger” kids who were the main denizens of the corners starting as far back as local corner boy legend “Red” Riley during World War II who was admired even by later generations who lived off the crumbs of his “midnight creep” exploits (and a cautionary tale about a guy who “snitched” to the coppers when he was caught coming out of a house at midnight not his own who Red chain-whipped to the emergency room and the guy needed about a hundred stitches and didn’t look so pretty any that episode-he did learn his lesson and never said who did that deed to him-smart guy).                                   

Usually, and Frankie Riley, was the king of this kind of action before he “graduated” to the midnight creep, was the “clip” in elementary school. That is going up to the central shopping area in town (now the mall-but the mall rats don’t seem hungry enough for this kind of action) to a jewelry store or department store (Kendall’s Jewelry was the toughest one to do the clip in so that was recognized as being superior to just some junk rip-off from Woolworth’s or some place like that) and grab some rings or other such items-usually connected with trying to empress so girl or get her a “present” for some occasion. Kid’s stuff though when you think about it and probably not worth the risk of getting caught.

The midnight creep was something else though-a real source of dough if you hit a place right. The legendary Red Riley got a lot of his reputation as a king hell king of the midnight creep ripping off not the cheapjack places that most of us out of laziness or lack of class consciousness about where the good stuff was grabbed but to the places over in the “Mount” where the rich people, rich to us, lived and had stuff worth stealing. He was also a master at planning the capers and never got caught, not for that stuff but later for armed robberies he was not so lucky and did a couple of stretches in the state pen before getting himself killed down South in a shoot-out with cops while he was robbing a White Hen store but by then the dope had taken his good judgment away. Frankie Riley, not as tough as Red, not tough at all after he dunked some kid’s head who was bothering him down the toilet at school and almost drown the kid so nobody messed with him after that, was the master planner in our crowd. Or he was after Markin hatched some plan which he couldn’t possibly carry out without Frankie running the operation. This one I was in on so I know it was a beauty. There were a couple of houses on the edge of our neighborhood which were recently constructed for some guys who involved in the emerging high technology industry that was beginning to bloom around Boston then. These guys were working on R&D for Polaroid if you remember that name. Somehow Markin got close to one of their daughters, nothing ever came of it because the girl was not interested in a guy “from hunger” was the way he told it. She told him her father had a million cameras around, you know those old Polaroid self-developing cameras every family was crazy for to take instant picture just like no with cellphones and “selfies.” They were located in the basement where her father would work on stuff. Markin smelled money, money found on the ground is what his expression was when there was an easy score. And it was we practically just walked into the place (now there would be about seven layers of security even in a residential home) after Frankie figured out how to use a piece of plastic to open the door. We walked away with about twenty cameras between us. That is what the guy, and what the newspapers reported. Frankie had a way to sell them and we had serious dough for weeks. (I won’t say how since I think the statute of limitations has run out but who knows and besides Frankie is a big deal lawyer now.)               

Yeah, corner boy life was something else. Hail corner boys!

Yes that all looked very, very familiar to these old eyes. The difference? These guys stuck together well into their twenties. By twenty most of my guys were in the military, married, in jail, or on the run. The fate of plenty of real-life corner boys making all that noise. See this one.              

Aint Got No Time For Corner Boys Down In The Streets Making All That Noise-With the 1983 Film “Diner” In Mind

By Lance Lawrence

Recently I was watching a DVD from 1982, Diner, a film about a bunch of guys in 1959 Baltimore who hung out at, well, a diner and hence the title of the film. The cast of the film was a veritable who’s who of male stars (and one female Ellen Barkin) who came of cinematic age in the 1980s, guys like Mickey Rourke and Kevin Bacon who are still putting their shoulders to the wheel in the film industry. What had attracted me about the film from the blurb you get on each film these days from Amazon, Netflix, hell, even blogs from citizen film reviewers strutting their stuff in a democratic age  was beside the diner motif which is always attractive to me and which I will discuss in more detail below was the idea that these guys were still hanging together in their early twenties when the old corner boy high school days when hanging for guy like them were well past (and a few years later for me and my guys). Well past compared to nine to five work ethos, marriage, marry young ethos, kids, not too many like their parents but also done at a young age and that ever present sickle hanging over your head-“how the fuck did I get into this action.”          

I had watched this film with a friend, Sam Lowell, whom I have known since our corner boy days in Riverdale about forty miles west of Boston back in the early 1960s. Sam Lowell is a fairly well-known, or used to be fairly well-known, free-lance music and film critic for lots of publications great and small, some lone gone and some still around like Rolling Stone before he consciously started slowing down as he has reached retirement age. In the interest of full disclosure he was the guy who said I would like the film and would I come over, watch with him, and compare notes with him after the film was over. He was writing what he called a “think” review for American Film Today about “buddy” films which had something like a heyday in the 1980s between the guys who starred collectively in this film, the Brat Pack and those who came of cinematic age through the various film adaptations of S.E. Hinton’s male-centered buddy” films, guys like Matt Dillon you know. So after the showing we compared notes the most important one which we both agreed and which he used in his review was how many of the actions of the corner boys were very much like ours although we were younger than them when we did them (in the film they weren’t called “corner boys” nor did they call themselves that but that my friends is what they were-no question as Sam likes to say)  

Here’s what Sam said about that key question:

“Hey, around my way, around my growing up working class neighborhood out in Riverdale about forty miles west of Boston in the early 1960s they called them, anybody who thought about the matter like some errant sociologists wondering about alienation among the lower classes or acted on the premise like the cops who kept a sharp eye on any possible criminal activity corner boys. We called ourselves corner boys with a certain amount of bravado and without guile since we hung, what the heck, we hung on the corners of our town. (Corner boys which would be immortalized in Bruce Springsteen’s song, Jersey Girl, with the line. “aint got no time for corner boys down in the street making all that noise” and that was the truth-the “making all that noise” part. Also the S.E. Hinton books which we did not know about, as least I did not know about and I was “the Bookworm” along with “the Scribe” so I knew about what was what with books. The other guys could have given a fuck about books except maybe porn stuff or comics).

A working Riverdale definition: corner boys: those without much dough, those without a weekend date and no money for a weekend date even if a guy got lucky enough to draw some female companionship, someone who didn’t care about a “boss” car, the ’57 two-toned preferable red and white Chevy the boss of “boss” to sit up front in and would accept the bus as a mode of transportation, thus seldom lucky since only nerdy girls or whatever we called girls with brains but no looks would descend to that level, hung around blessed Tonio’s Pizza Parlor “up the Down” (the corner of Adams and Jefferson Streets and don’t ask me why it was called that it just was as far back as anybody remembered including my maternal grandparents who were born there) and, well, hung out. Hung out trying to do the best we could which involved mostly the aforementioned girls and larcenies, or plans for larcenies. And if defeated in either endeavor any particular night then there was always a couple of slices of Tonio’s secret formula pizza sauce to die for delight and a small Coke. Just so you know really hung around in late high school planning larcenies great and small (great the theft of some young woman’s virtue, small the midnight creeps through back doors but maybe no more should be mentioned since perhaps the statute of limitations has not run out).      

So when I saw the film under review, Diner, with a cast of up and coming actors who all went on to other films and saw that they were five guys, count ‘em six, who in 1959 in the great city of Baltimore hung around a diner talking the talk in between bites of French fries and gravy (against our culinary choice of pizza slices) I knew that they were kindred spirits. Knew that despite the several years different in time since they were all twenty-something gathering together for a wedding of one of their members around Christmas time they were from the same species… “

That pretty much summed up the main point we discussed that night, and during subsequent nights as well, but there were others, other stories that were stirred up from that viewing. Some long forgotten, and maybe that was just as well but other which one or the both of us remembered out of some fog of war moment. Since Sam was writing a generic review a lot of what he and I talked was “left on the floor” as we used to call the bullshit stuff we would throw out without batting an eyelash on lonesome John weekend nights and in summer almost every night. Those stories, some of them anyway, the ones I was involved in I decided to write down in a journal, a diary if you like that word better, and present the next time the surviving members of our crowd got together to cut up old touches (an old-fashioned word we used all the time but when I used it once with the sister of corner boy the late Al Stein she claimed to have never heard the expression before). So here goes guys and although I was not like the Bookworm or the Scribe back in the day I later turned into a late-blooming voracious reading and I hope you picked up the habit too.               

Sam mentioned in passing in his review about how hanging around guys in Baltimore and Riverdale were totally committed to betting on almost anything. Part of that betting trait was the need to “make a score,” make some dough for immediate dates but a lot of it was a real idea that the roll of the dice was going to be the only way to get out from under. Sure a lot of it was betting on sports outcomes especially on the then lowly Red Sox and high-riding Celtics but nothing was off-limits from what, as happened in the film, you would or would not get from a girl in the way of sex (we had our fair share of “ice queens” and in high school I had more than my fair share unless the other guys, as usual, were lying like bastards about what they were “getting”) to the most famous, or infamous bet of all-the night Frankie bet Sam on how high Tonio could throw the pizza dough to soften it up before making the crust.

I should explain that while I would later be partial to diners in the days in the later part of the 1960s when I was a regular Jack Kerouac “on the road” hitch-hiker grab rides from lonely for company truck drivers and I learned almost every diner, good or bad, stop at or avoid, from Boston to Frisco town back then we hung around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor in high school. Located at the corner of Jefferson and Adams “up the Downs” which Sam mentioned in his review and I need not speculate here why that section of town was called that Tonio’s was where we spent our driftless after school hours. (The corner boy progression in town was Harry’s Variety Store across from Riverdale Elementary which I was not part of since my family did not move to the town Iwas in  junior high school then Doc’s Drugstore with his great jukebox in junior high and then onto Tonio’s. This progression was recognized by one and all as rights in the corner boy rites of passage.) So we knew lots about Tonio and his operation and while the cops and other merchants around didn’t care to see us coming Tonio, an immigrant from Italy and maybe something of a corner boy, or whatever they called them over there, was happy to see us. Said that we brought in business-the girls with plenty of dough to spent on food and the jukebox while “disdaining” the riffraff-us.

To make a long story short one Friday night our acknowledged leader, Frankie Riley, now a big-time lawyer in Boston was looking for dough and knew Sam had some from caddying at the Point Pond Golf Course the previous weekend. So he was in a betting mood. Here was his bet. High or low, and I forget, and Sam had too what the standard was, about where Tonio’s pizza dough would be flung when he was making his pizzas for the night. The thing was, and this was a hard and fast rule that I do not remember ever being broken, once a guy called a bet the other guy, or guys had to take the challenge. So the bet was on. Every time Sam called high Tonio would go low and visa versa. That night Sam lost five bucks and his chance to have a date that weekend. Frankie got to go on his first date with Johanna Murphy whom he would eventually marry (and divorce). The “hook’ that caught Sam that night-the “fix” was in. Frankie whom Tonio liked the best of all of us, treated almost like a son, had spoken to Tonio before Sam came in. You can figure out the rest. Corner boy, strictly corner boy stuff.                   

[A while back we, a bunch of us who knew Markin who wrote the sketch below back in sunnier days, in hang around corner boy high school days and afterward too when we young bravos imbibed in the West Coast dragon chase he led us on in the high hellish mid-1960s summers of love, got together and put out a little tribute compilation of his written sketches that we were able to cobble from whatever we collectively still had around. Those writings were from a time when Markin was gaining steam as a writer for many of the alternative magazines, journals and newspapers that were beginning to be the alternative network of media resources that we were reading once we knew the main media outlets were feeding us bullshit on a bun, were working hand in glove with big government, big corporations, big whatever that was putting their thumbs in our eyes.

On big series, a series that Markin was nominated for, or won, I don’t remember which an award for, which I will tell you about some other time was from a period toward the end of his life, a period when he was lucid enough to capture such stories. He had found himself out in Southern California with a bunch of homeless fellow Vietnam veterans, no homeless was not the right word, guys from ‘Nam, his, their word not mine since I did not serve in the military having been mercifully declared 4-F, unfit for military duty by our local draft board, who having come back to the “real” world just couldn’t, or wouldn’t adjust and started “creating” their own world, their own brethren circle, such as it was out along the railroad tracks, rivers and bridges. Bruce Springsteen would capture the pathos and pain of the situation in his classic tribute-Brothers Under The Bridge.  Markin’s series was called To The Jungle reflecting both the hard ass jungle of Vietnam from which they had come to the old-timey hobo railroad track jungle they found themselves in.     

Yeah, those were the great million word and ten thousand fact days, the mid to late 1960s, and after he had gotten back from Vietnam the early 1970s say up to 1974 or so when whatever Markin wrote seemed like pure gold, seemed like he had the pulse of what was disturbing our youth dreams, had been able to articulate in words we could understand the big jail-break out he was one of the first around our town to anticipate. Had gathered himself to cut the bullshit on a bun world out.

That was before Markin took the big fall down in Mexico, let his wanting habits, a term that our acknowledged high school corner boy leader Frankie Riley used incessantly to describe the poor boy hunger we had for dough, girls, stimulants, life, whatever, get the best of him. Of course Frankie had “cribbed” the term from some old blues song, maybe Bessie Smith who had her habits on for some no good man cheating on her and spending all her hard-earned dough, maybe Howlin’ Wolf wanting every gal he saw in sight, skinny or big-legged to “do the do” with that Markin also had turned us onto although I admit in my own case that it took me many years, many years after Markin was long gone before I appreciated the blues that he kept trying to cram down our throats as the black-etched version of what hellish times were going through in the backwaters of North Adamsville while the rest of the world was getting ahead. Heading to leafy suburban golden dreams while we could barely rub two dimes together and hence made up the different with severe wanting habits-even me.  

From what little we could gather about Markin’s fate from Josh Breslin, a guy from Maine, a corner boy himself, who I will talk about more in a minute and who saw Markin just before he hit the lower depths, before he let sweet girl cousin cocaine “run all around his brain, the say it is going to kill you but they won’t say when” let the stuff alter his judgment, he went off to Mexico to “cover” the beginnings of the cartel action there. Somewhere along the line the down there Markin decided that dealing high heaven dope was the way that he would gather in his pot of gold, would get the dough he never had as a kid, and get himself well. “Well” meaning nothing but his nose so full of “candy” all the time that the real world would no longer intrude on his life. Somehow in all that mixed up world he had tried his usual end-around, tried to do either an independent deal outside the cartel, a no-no, or stole some “product” to start his own operation, a very big no-no. Either scenario was possible when Markin got his wanting habits on and wound up dead, very mysteriously dead, in a dusty back street down Sonora way in 1975, 1976 we don’t even have the comfort of knowing that actual date of his passing.

Those were the bad end days, the days out in Oakland where they were both staying before Markin headed south when according to Josh he said “fuck you” to writing for squally newspapers and journals and headed for the sweet dream hills. But he left plenty of material behind that had been published or at the apartment that he shared with Josh in Oakland before the nose candy got in the way. That material wound up in several locations as Josh in his turn took up the pen, spent his career writing for lots of unread small journals and newspapers in search of high-impact stories and drifted around the country before he settled down in Cambridge working as an free-lance editor for several well-known if also small publishing houses around Boston. So when the idea was proposed by Jack Callahan to pay a final written tribute to our fallen comrade we went looking for whatever was left wherever it might be found. You know from cleaning out the attics, garages, cellars looking for boxes where an old newspaper article or journal piece might still be found after being forgotten for the past forty or so years.

The first piece we found, found by Jack Callahan, one of the guys who hung around with us corner boys although he had a larger circle since as a handsome guy he had all the social butterfly girls around him and as a star football player for North Adamsville High he had the girls and all the “jock” hangers-on bumming on his tail, was a story by Markin for the East Bay Other about the transformation of Phil Larkin from “foul-mouth” Phil to “far-out’ Phil as a result of the big top social turmoil events which grabbed many of us who came of political, social, and cultural age in the roaring 1960s. Markin like I said before had been the lead guy in sensing the changes coming, had us following in his wake not only in our heads but his gold rush run in the great western trek to California where a lot of the trends got their start.

That is where we met the subject of the second piece, or rather Phil did and we did subsequently too as we made our various ways west, Josh Breslin, Josh from up in Podunk Maine, actually Olde Saco fast by the sea, and he became in the end one of the corner boys, one of the North Adamsville corner boys. But before those subsequent meetings he had first become part of Phil’s “family,” and as that second story documented also in the East Bay Other described it how Josh, working his new life under the moniker Prince Love, “married” one of the Phil’s girlfriends, Butterfly Swirl. The third one in the series dealt with the reality of Phil’s giving up that girlfriend to Prince Love and the “marriage” and “honeymoon,” 1960s alternative-style that cemented that relationship.

Yeah, those were wild times and if a lot of the social conventions accepted today without too much rancor like people living together as a couple without the benefit of marriage, same-sex marriage, and maybe even friends with benefits let me clue in to where they all started, or if not started got a big time work-out to make things acceptable. But that was not all he wrote about, just the easy to figure a good story about 1960s. Markin also wrote about those wanting habits days, our growing up poor in the 1950s days which while we had no dough, not enough to be rich was rich in odd-ball stuff we seemingly were forced to do to keep ourselves just a little left of the law, very little sometimes. Naturally he wrote about the characters like the one here, Stew-ball Stu, whom I hope doesn’t read this sketch if he is still alive because he might still take umbrage and without Markin around he might come after me with a wrench or jackknife, who we young boys, maybe girls too but then it was boys’ world mostly looked up to. The actual Stew-ball Stu he sued here was from a story told to him by Josh Breslin long after he shed his 1960s moniker of Prince Love when Markin was looking for corner boy stories. But believe me while the names might have been different old North Adamsville had its own full complement of Stus.        

For those not in the know, for those who didn’t read the first Phil Larkin piece where I mentioned what corner boy society in old North Adamsville was all about Phil was one of a number of guys, some say wise guys but we will let that pass who hung around successively Harry’s Variety Store over on Sagamore Street in elementary school,  Doc’s Drugstore complete with soda fountain and more importantly his bad ass jukebox complete with all the latest rock and roll hits as they came off the turntable on Newport Avenue in junior high school and Salducci’s Pizza “up the Downs” in high school, don’t worry nobody in the town could figure that designation out either, as their respective corners as the older guys in the neighborhood in their turn moved up and eventually out of corner boy life.

More importantly Phil was one of the guys who latter followed in “pioneer” Markin’s wake when he, Markin, headed west in 1966 after he had finished up his sophomore year in college and made a fateful decision to drop out of school in Boston in order to “find himself.” Fateful in that without a student deferment that “find himself” would eventually lead him to induction into the U.S. Army at the height of the Vietnam War, an experience which he never really recovered from for a lot of reasons that had nothing to do directly with that war but which honed his “wanting habits” for a different life than he had projected when he naively dropped out of college to see “what was happening” out on the West Coast.

Phil had met, or I should say that Josh had met Phil, out on Russian Hill in San Francisco when Josh, after hitchhiking all the way from Maine in the early summer of 1967, had come up to the yellow brick road converted school bus (Markin’s term for the travelling caravan that he and Phil were then part of and which the rest of us, including even stay-at-home me for a few months ) he and a bunch of others were travelling up and down the West Coast on and had asked for some dope. Phil was the guy he had asked, and who had passed him a big old joint, and their eternal friendship formed from there. (Most of us would meet Josh later that summer as we in our turns headed out. Sam Lowell, Frankie Riley, Jack Callahan, Jimmy Jenkins and me all headed out after Markin who had “gone native” pleaded with us to not miss this big moment that he had been predicting was going to sea-change happens for a few years.) Although Markin met a tragic end murdered down in Mexico several years later over a still not well understood broken drug deal with some small cartel down there as a result of an ill-thought out pursuit of those wanting habits mentioned earlier he can take full credit for our lifetime friendship with Josh.-Bart Webber]

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- It Ain’t About The Pool, Fast Eddie- Paul Newman’s “The Hustler”- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Paul Newman’s “The Hustler.”

DVD Review

The Hustler, starring Paul Newman, Piper Laurie, George C. Scott, Jackie Gleason, 20th Century-Fox, 1961

Shoot pool, Fast Eddie, shoot pool. Yes, Fast Eddie shoot pool like your life depended on it, and it probably will in the end. Fast Eddie, coming like hellfire out of the west, out of the wild boy, okie, arkie dust shaking be-bop west night looking, looking for something in the go-go post- World War II night. Some cureless thing to take the curse off of not having made that okie trek with everything you owned in the Great Depression or not having gotten your fill of blood, action and danger in the “big one.” Something to take the pain, the angst, the alienation or whatever the sociologists and psychologists wanted to call it, away.

Put it plain. Some Neal Cassady/Jack Kerouac/Allen Ginsberg howl against the fates moment all gassed up to run the tables on the red scare cold war night. And like those sainted brothers, beat down, beat around, beatitude beat, beat six ways to Sunday beat looking for the hook to show the world your wares, your blue-eyed , if you had blue-eyes and okie look said you did, Adonis wares ready to take on six kings before supper. Hell it was easy, wasn’t it. Just ask king Neal riding the clutch, and nothing but the clutch around some dead man’s curve, riding easy, like some Spanish dancer, or matador flaying the cape gently before the kill. Ask million word king Jack, writing those log roll be-bop words for a hungry world to hear in the deadened go-go night, no hero he, but some Frankish Adonis kindred flaying at typewriters, and taking notes on small Woolworth pads. Ask king Allen who proclaimed the empty night, who heralded the empty night, who sang Kaddish to the empty night to those who sought fame instead of truth. And, in the end, ask Fast Eddie, ask Fast Eddie what he proclaimed, what he heralded, what empty night he raised his sword against.

For Fast Eddie it was, or it started out as, just creeping out from under that old East Oakland, Haywood, Richmond, you name the town they were all the same, all filled with restless boys wishing to break out from that corner boy existence. Hanging out in white tee shirt, cigarette pack rolled up one sleeve, wide bucket belt, whipsaw ready, holding up blue denims, black engineer boots hitched up against some drugstore , mom and pop variety store , some bowling alley, hell, some glass-fronted pool hall wall to break- out, jail-break out but just then waiting , yeh, waiting.

So it was hell’s angels big hog cycles and whipsaw chains beating down terrified citizens (or each other) for pocket change and a three to five stretch courtesy of the California penal system, or break of dawn at some smoke-filled factory making widgets with after dinner corner boy nights holding up storefront walls, or going on the hustle. And it started early. Maybe it was hunger started stealing milky way candy bars at mom and pop’s, or maybe just a soft touch from some mislaid mother’s purse. Easy pickings.

But hunger, gnawed hunger, festering hunger is a tyrant, a hard and cruel tyrant, when you have Fast Eddie appetites. So maybe a round of jewelry store “clips” for some teenage tart with visions of femme fatale and you are the practice. Later, older later, some midnight auto takedown for whiskey shots. Easy stuff but with tight margins and guys, cops, hoods, and hard boys ready, willing and able to cramp your style. Yes, Fast Eddie, join the drifters, grifters, and midnight sifters and make a name, a small name for yourself, in the fifteen minutes of fame world and then fade. Small dreams fade.

Not our boy Fast Eddie though he wanted more, he wanted way more, he was hungry, really too hungry. He wanted to be the king hell king of the pool hall night, small dream in a big dream world but it was his dream and he was sticking to it, come hell or high water. Jesus was he going to stick to it. See Fast Eddie besides his dream (and enough intelligence to see clips, stolen hubcaps and armed robberies would eventually put a crimp, a very big crimp, in his Adonis wares), had something else, he had some talent.

After dismissing from his mind those big hog wild boys from across the Sonny Barger street as nowhere and after wiping up the poolroom floor with half the half-smart blond, blue-eyed faux hard guy surfer boys in California he wanted a chance to beat down pharaoh like a lot of okie, arkie guys had been trying to do since Egypt time (although their names were different then that is what they were and Fast Eddie had the eternal DNA connection genes to prove it). And, mainly, they had gotten busted up by pharaoh’s boys for their troubles. Still Fast Eddie had talent and that is worth something in this wicked old world, something okay.

To watch Fast Eddie when he was fast and loose was a sight to behold, shifting those hips just this way and that, a wayward shoulder here or there, eyeing, careful eyeing the best angle for the shot like he and the balls were one, and maybe they were, beating up angels to get at the chalk to fatten up his cue stick, and then go on those runs. Hell some nights he would run the table just to show some punk that he should get back to hanging off that wall at the mom and pop variety store corner that he crawled out from under. Rich guys too, rich guys looking for cocaine kicks, maybe some off-hand roughhouse sex with some hard-pressed corner boy in some back alley, and getting kicks out of smelling the sweat, the special criminal metallic sweat of guys who had done time while they were at Saint Mark’s, or someplace like that, hanging around reading Nelson Algren or Jean Genet, with their boyfriends. Hell, Fast Eddie would relentlessly faggot tease them (even if they weren’t) and they would lap it up. Jesus. Still he wanted pharaoh.

And he got Pharaoh, got pharaoh in spades. Got more of Pharaoh that most men, even hard corner boys, would ever want. Got Pharaoh with his blood up, with his king hell king no prisoners blood up. Jesus Fast Eddie looked good for about ten rounds though all loose and Fast Eddie-like, making juke moves like some fancy dan pro football player, cocky, hell, cocky, calling strange shot combinations and drinking high-bench bourbon to steady his nerves. Beautiful.

Pharaoh about that time, about round ten, took his measure though, writing him off as a fly-by-night seven- day wonder boy, making some fast and Fast Eddie –like moves of his own and some ballet-like combinations that had Fast Eddie reeling. Pharaoh- by a knock-out. The boys who watched most of the play, and they had watched Pharaoh up against some pretty good corner boys, all agreed that Fast Eddie was good, but that his talent could only get him so far and that his dreams maybe should be played out in Hoboken, or Jersey City not in the bigs. One guy, who didn’t want to be quoted just in case, called Fast Eddie just another okie sodbuster loser.

But that guy, that no quote nine to five guy, had never nursed a dream, never was haunted by being there at the end hearing the other guy, the pharaoh, cry to the high heavens “uncle.” Yeh, he had never heard that sweet music, and never would. And so Fast Eddie nursed his wounds, nursed his dream along too. He still had that too much hunger that comes from a rationed world, his world, his okie world, to carry. Fast Eddie was dumped back on cheap street, on the street of broken dreams.

And then she showed up, showed up to pick up the pieces, the Fast Eddie too much hunger pieces. To curb his hunger a little, maybe, and also to disturb his sleep. Some called her a tramp, an easy lay, a place to hang your hat while you were nursing your fresh wounds but Fast Eddie never, even from minute one, at the bus station diner saw her that way. And even wild corner boy sullen guys like Eddie who couldn’t say the right words knew she was no whore, no dish rag to dirty and move on.

She wasn’t beautiful, not that way beautiful, not Fast Eddie blue-eyed Greek Adonis beautiful with flashy moves, more like our lady of the lord Madonna drink her in like fine wine beautiful. More like those women you see, hear or read about that make you say to yourself that you had better hold on to her Mr. Blue-eyed Adonis man searching for that elusive fame.

Funny how it all started, all started like with most Fast Eddie girls, with a few drinks, a few words, and some animal, not wild but not gentle either, connection that drove them to her bed. Polite society had called her a tramp, hanging on to a succession of beat down corner boys for dear life, maybe for her life. What could they know about a girl who wrote be-bop beat stuff, read a million books, and drank an ocean of whiskey before noon to chase away her own demons. She was Fast Eddie’s girl from the minute he sat down next to her, he knew it, she knew it, and that thought got her through some stuff. And Fast Eddie too.

Some dreams though are monstrous and Fast Eddie’s was just that way. And she, Sarah to give her a name now that he had shared her bed, could do nothing, nothing at all to slay that monster. It gnawed at him. And like most dreams, most modern dreams, there was a need for money, serious money to run at pharaoh again. Now if the world was just made up of mad dream men and clinging women it would not be such a hard place at that. But there are in this wicked old world, especially down in the darkened lamp-less corners, down in the alleys, down in the gutters when even dreaming is against the law, outlawed no questions asked, guys, ten percent guys let’s call them, hang out. Hang out waiting for broken dream cheap street has beens with talent (those without just keep moving, moving down) to come to their door. And with nothing to lose (or so Fast Eddie thought) he bought in, bought into the bargain with the devil, and with no looking back.

Sarah, Fast Eddie’s lifeline Sarah out of some biblical prophecy, out of those million books read, out of her own dark street past, knew the ten percent men, knew their clawing and scratching away at a man’s soul, at a woman’s soul too when they got their blood up. She knew, back streets knowledge knew at a heavy price, and a couple of off-hand bought drinks, that their price was too much to pay for fifteen minute fame dreams. Knew from her own much abused bed they had no pure Fast Eddie dreams, no Fast Eddie soul, just clawing away at more than their ten-percent cut. But would Fast Eddie listen, hell, not our boy, and so the dice were cast.

But see too some women (maybe some men too but I am thinking about a woman just now), no, forget some formless woman, let’s call her Sarah Packard, Fast Eddie’s lifeline, can’t live in the real world. Can’t live in the world of dirt and dust, and blood and still take breathe. And can’t live in the world of big dreams. Big monstrous dreams. So Sarah could not save Fast Eddie from his too much hunger, or in the end save herself from her own hungers. Fast Eddie not knowing what he had lost, or only half-knowing, had to nevertheless even the score, even the score the only way he knew how. Take on the Pharaoh or die.

As it turned out Fast Eddie danced that night of the re-match, all loose and fast like old Fast Eddie when I first saw him work his magic against some scrub surfer guy down in some southern California pool hall way out of his element in the 1950s be-bop night. The pockets were like manholes that night and I thought Fast Eddie was going to run the table on old tired Pharaoh. He didn’t but old pharaoh, wise enough to know his play, cried “uncle” to the high heavens. That “victory,” that Sarah Packard –paid for victory however only tasted like ashes in Fast Eddie’s mouth. Still shoot pool, Fast Eddie, shoot pool like your life depended on it.

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- It Ain’t About The Pool, Eddie- Paul Newman’s “The Hustler”- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Paul Newman’s “The Hustler.”

DVD Review

The Hustler, starring Paul New Man, Piper Laurie, George C. Scott, Jackie Gleason, 20th Century-Fox, 1961

Shoot pool, Fast Eddie, shoot pool. Yes, Fast Eddie shoot pool like your life depended on it, and it probably will in the end. Fast Eddie, coming like hellfire out of the west, out of the wild boy, okie, arkie dust shaking be-bop west night looking, looking for something in the go-go post World War II night. Some cureless thing to take the curse off of not having made that okie trek in the great depression or gotten your fill of action and danger in the “big one.” Something to take the pain, the angst, the alienation or whatever the sociologists and psychologists wanted to call it, away. Some Neal Cassady/Jack Kerouac/Allen Ginsberg Howl against the fates moment all gassed up to run the tables on the red scare cold war night.

To Fast Eddie it was, or it started out as, just creeping out from under that old East Oakland, Haywood, Richmond, you name the town they were all the same, all filled with restless boys wishing to break out from that corner boy existence. Wishing to, hanging out white tee shirt, cigarette pack rolled up one sleeve, wide belt bucket holding up blue denims, black engineer boots hitched up against some drugstore , mom and pop variety, some bowling alley, hell, some glass-fronted pool hall wall to break- out, jail-break out but just then waiting , yeh, waiting.

So it was hell’s angels big hog cycles and whipsaw chains beating down terrified citizens (or each other) for pocket change and a three to five stretch courtesy of the California penal system, break of dawn at some smoke-filled factory making widgets with after dinner corner boy nights holding up storefront walls or going on the hustle. Join the drifters, grifters, and midnight sifters and make a name, a small name for yourself, in the fifteen minutes of fame world and then fade. Small dreams fade.

Not our boy Fast Eddie though he wanted more, he wanted way more, he was hungry, really too hungry. He wanted to be the king hell king of the pool hall night, small dream in a big dream world but it was his dream and he was sticking to it, come hell or high water. Jesus was he going to stick to it. See Fast Eddie besides his dream had something else, he had some talent. After dismissing those big hog wild boys from across the Sonny Barger street as nowhere and after wiping up the poolroom floor with half the half-smart blond, blue-eyed faux hard guy surfer boys in California he wanted to beat down pharaoh like a lot of okie, arkie guys had been trying to do since Egypt time (although their names were different then that is what they were and Fast Eddie had the DNA connection genes to prove it). And, mainly, getting busted up by pharaoh’s boys for their troubles. Still Fast Eddie had talent and that is worth something in this wicked old world, something okay.

To watch Fast Eddie when he was fast and loose was a sight to behold, shifting those hips just this way and that, eyeing, careful eyeing the best angle for the shot, beating up angels to get at the chalk to fatten up his cue stick, and then the runs. Hell some nights he would run the table just to show some punk that he should get back to that mom and pop variety store corner that he crawled out from under. Rich guys too, rich guys looking for cocaine kicks, maybe some off-hand roughhouse sex, and smelling the sweat, the special criminal sweat of guys who had done time while they were at Saint Mark’s, or someplace like that hanging around reading Nelson Algren or Jean Genet , with their boyfriends. Hell, Fast Eddie would relentlessly faggot tease them (even if they weren’t) and they would lap it up. Jesus. Still he wanted pharaoh.

And he got Pharaoh, got pharaoh in spades. Got more of pharaoh that most men, even hard corner boys, would ever want. Jesus he looked good for about ten rounds though all loose and Fast Eddie-like, making juke moves like some fancy dan pro football player, cocky, hell, cocky, calling strange shot combinations and drinking high-bench bourbon to steady his nerves. Beautiful. Pharaoh about that time took his measure though, writing him off as a fly-by-night seven- day wonder boy, making some fast and Eddie –like moves of his own and some ballet-like combinations that had Fast Eddie reeling. Pharaoh- by a knock-out. The boys who watched most of the play, and they had watched Pharaoh up against some pretty good corner boys, all agreed that Fast Eddie was good, but that his talent could only get him so far and that his dreams maybe should be played out in Hoboken, or Jersey City not in the bigs. One guy, who didn’t want to be quoted just in case, called Fast Eddie just another okie sodbuster loser.

But that guy had never nursed a dream, never was haunted by being there at the end hearing the other guy, the pharaoh, cry to the high heavens “uncle.” Yeh, he never heard that sweet music, and never would. And so Fast Eddie nursed his wounds, nursed his dream along too. He still had that too much hunger that comes from a rationed world, his world, his okie world. Fast Eddie was dumped back on cheap street, on the street of broken dreams.

And then she showed up, showed up to pick up the pieces, the Fast Eddie pieces. To curb his hunger a little, and also to disturb his sleep. She wasn’t beautiful, not that way beautiful, more like our lady of the lord Madonna beautiful. More like you had better hold on Mr. Blue-eyed man searching for that elusive fame. Funny how it all started, all started like with most Fast Eddie girls, with a few drinks, a few words, and some animal, not wild but not gentle either, connection that drove them to some bed. Polite society would have called her a tramp, hanging onto some beat down corner boy for dear life, maybe for her life. Who could say about a girl who wrote be-bop beat stuff, read a million books, and drank an ocean of whiskey before noon to chase away her own demons. She was Fast Eddie’s girl from the minute he sat down next to her, and that thought got her through some stuff. And Fast Eddie too.

Some dreams though are monstrous and Fast Eddie’s was just that way. And she, Sarah to give her a name now that he had shared her bed, could do nothing, nothing at all to slay that monster. It gnawed at him. And like most dreams, most modern dreams, there was a need for money, serious money to run at pharaoh again. Now if the world was just made up of mad dream men and clinging women it would be such a hard place at that. But there are in this wicked old world, especially down in the darkened lamp-less corners, down in the alleys, down in the gutters when even dreaming is against the law, outlawed no questions asked, guys, ten percent guys let’s call them, hang out. Hang out waiting for broken dream cheap street has beens with talent (those without just keep moving, moving down) to come to their door. And with nothing to lose (or so Fast Eddie thought) he bought in, bought into the bargain with the devil, and no looking back.

But see too some women (maybe some men too but I am thinking about a woman just now), no, let’s call her Sarah Packard, Fast Eddie’s lifeline, can’t live in the real world. The world of dirt and dust, and blood. And the world of big dreams. Big monstrous dreams. And so Sarah could not save Fast Eddie from his too much hunger, or in the end save herself from her own hunger. And Fast Eddie not knowing what he had lost, or only half-knowing, had to even the score, even the score the only way he knew how. Take on the pharaoh or die.

As it turned out Fast Eddie danced that night of the re-match, all loose and fast like old Fast Eddie when I first saw him work his magic against some scrub surfer guy way out of his element. The pockets were like manholes that night and I thought Fast Eddie was going to run the table on old tired pharaoh. He didn’t but old pharaoh, wise enough to know his play, cried “uncle” to the high heavens. That “victory”, that Sarah Packard –etched victory however only tasted like ashes in Fast Eddie’s mouth. Still shoot pool, Fast Eddie, shoot pool.

As The 2012 Anti-War Season Gets Under Way- A Vietnam War Flashback Moment-Private First Class, United States Army, Jimmy Jacks, (1944-1965) R.I.P. - U.S. Troops Out Everywhere!

Markin comment:

Private First Class, United States Army (RA), Jimmy Jacks would have been sixty-seven, or perhaps, sixty-eight years old this fall. You do not see the point of bringing up this unknown stranger’s name? Well, here is another clue Jimmy J. (his local moniker), a few years older than I am, was the first kid from my growing-up working class neighborhood to see service in Vietnam. Still not enough? Then take a little trip down to Washington, D.C. and you will find his “fame” listed on that surreally and serenely beautiful black stone work dedicated to the fallen of that war. Yes, I thought that might get your attention. This is Jimmy J’s story, but is also my story around the edges, and come to think of it, yours too, if you want end these damn imperial military adventures that the American state insists on dragging its youth, and in disproportionate numbers its working-class and minority youth, into.

My first dozen years or so of life were spend in a public housing project (“the projects” that every self-respecting mother warned their sons and daughters drifting down into if they didn’t shape up like a previous generation spoke of “the county farm,” the place of dreamless dreams), a place where the desperately poor of the day, or the otherwise displaced and forgotten of the go-go American economy of the 1950s were shunted off to. So you can say I knew Jimmy Jacks all my life, really, although I did not physically meet him until we moved across town to my coming-of-age working class neighborhood, a neighborhood whose ethos was in no way superior to “the projects” except that, unlike the four to a box project, the tiny houses were, for the most part, single dwellings. And I really only knew Jimmy through my older brother, Prescott (street name, The Gat Kid, ya real original I know) which is to say not very well at all as I was, okay, just a wet-behind-the-ears kid. And Jimmy was the king hellion of the neighborhood and dragged my brother, and the brothers of others, in tow. So this ain’t going to be a story of moral uplift, which is for sure.

See Jimmy, when he was around the old neighborhood, was the very large target, that is to say the number one target, of the “shawlies.” Shawlies? In our mainly Irish working-class neighborhood, although I confess I only heard it used by more recent immigrants just off the boat (or plane) from the old country or older ones who refused to become vanilla Americans, it signified that circle, council if you will, unofficial of course, of mothers, young and old, who set the moral tone, at least the public moral tone, of the place. In short, the gossips, old hags, and rumor-mongers (I am being polite here) who had their own devious grapevine, and more importantly, were a constant source of information about you to your own mother. Usually nothing good either.

And what conduct of Jimmy’s would bring him to the notice of that august body, other than the obvious one of corrupting the morals of the youth? Hey, as you will see this guy was no Socrates. Jimmy, it seems, or it seems to me now, was spoon-fed on old time gangster movies (and The Gat Kid too). No, not the George Raft-Jimmy Cagney-Edward G. Robinson vehicles of the 1930s in which the bad guy pepper-sprayed every one with his trusty machine-gun, everyone except dear old Ma (whom he would not touch a hair of the head of, and you better not either if you know what’s good for you). No, Jimmy was into being a proto-typical "wild one" a la Marlon Brando or the bad guys in Rebel Without A Cause. The ones who tried to cut James Dean up, cut him up bad. Without putting too fine a spin on it, he played out some kind of existential anti-hero. Something Jean Genet might have worked out character sketch on for one of his sullen plays.

So who was this Jimmy? No a bad looking guy with slicked-back black hair, long sideburns (even after they were early 1960s fashion-faded), sh-t kicking engineer boots, dungarees (before they were fashionista), tied together by a thick leather belt (which did service for other purposes, other better left unsaid purposes), tee-shirt in season (and out). Always smoking a cigarette (or getting ready too, and always unfiltered, natch, maybe Camels or Luckies, I really don’t remember), always carrying himself with a little swagger and lot of attitude. Oh ya, he was a tenth-grade high school drop-out (not really that unusual in those days in that neighborhood, drop-outs were a dime a dozen, including my own brother). And here is the draw, the final draw that drew slightly younger guys to him (and older girls, as well) he always had wheels, great wheels, wheels to die for, and kept them up to the nth degree. Employment (in order to get and keep those wheels, jesus, don't you guys know nothing): unknown

That last point is really the start of this story about how the ethos of the working poor and the demands of the American military linked up. Jimmy (and his associates, including my drop-out brother, and for a minute my younger brother, called “Stup” by Jimmy and The Gat Kid too, as look-out) was constantly the subject of local police attention. Every known offense, real or made-up, wound up at his door. Some of it rightly so, as it turned out. I might add that the irate shawlies had plenty to do with this police activity. And also plenty to do with setting up Jimmy as the prime example of what not to emulate. Well, as anyone, including me, in own my very small-bore, short-lived criminal career can testify to when you tempt the fates long enough those damn sisters will come out and get you. Get you bad. The long and short of it is was that eventually Jimmy’s luck ran out. The year that his luck ran out was 1963, not a good year to be nineteen and have your luck run out if there ever is one.

Nowadays we talk, and rightly so, about an “economic draft” that forces many working class and minority youth to sign up for military service even in ill-fated war time because they are up against the wall in their personal lives and the military offers some security. I want to talk about this “economic draft” in a different sense although I know that the same thing probably still goes on today. I just don’t have the data or anecdotal evidence to present on the issue. Jimmy, however, was a prima facie case of what I am talking about. When Jimmy’s luck ran out (and my brother’s as well) he faced several counts of armed robbery, and other assorted minor crimes. When he went to court he thus faced many years (I don’t remember his total, my brother’s was nine, I think). The judge, in his infinite mercy offered this deal- Cedar Junction (not the name then, but the state prison nevertheless) or the Army. Jimmy, fatefully, opted for the Army (as did my brother).

Here is the part that is important to understand though. Jimmy (and to a lesser extent, my brother), the minute that he opted for military service went from being “bum-of-the-month” in shawlie circles to a fine, if misunderstood and slightly errant, boy. Even the oldest hags had twinkles in their eyes for old Jimmy. Of course, his mother also came into high regard for raising such a fine boy committed to serve his country (and his god, and just so you understand that was a very Catholic god, don’t forget that part). Once in uniform, an airborne ranger’s uniform, and more importantly, once he had orders for Vietnam, then an exotic if dangerous place and a name little understood other than the United States was committed to its defense against the atheistic communists, his stock rose even further. I was not around the old neighborhood when the news of his death was announced in 1965 but my parents told me later than his funeral was treated something like a state function. The shawlies, weeping and moaning like their own sons were lost, in any case were out in force. Jimmy J, a belated R.I.P.

Private First Class, United States Army, Jimmy Jacks, (1944-1968) R.I.P.

Markin comment:

Private First Class, United States Army, Jimmy Jacks would have been sixty-seven, or perhaps, sixty-eight years old this fall. You do not see the point of bringing up this unknown stranger’s name? Well, here is another clue Jimmy J. (his local moniker), a few years older than I am, was the first kid from my growing-up working class neighborhood to see service in Vietnam. Still not enough? Then take a little trip down to Washington, D.C. and you will find his “fame” listed on that surreally and serenely beautiful black stone work dedicated to the fallen of that war. Yes, I thought that might get your attention. This is Jimmy J’s story, but is also my story around the edges, and come to think of it, yours too, if you want end these damn imperial military adventures that the American state insists on dragging its youth, and in disproportionate numbers its working-class and minority youth, into.

My first dozen years or so of life were spend in a public housing project, a place where the desperately poor of the day, or the otherwise displaced and forgotten of the go-go American economy of the 1950s were shunted off to. So you can say I knew Jimmy Jacks all my life, really, although I did not physically meet him until we moved across town to my coming-of-age working class neighborhood, a neighborhood whose ethos in no way was superior to “the projects” except that the tiny houses were, for the most part, single dwellings. And I really only knew Jimmy through my older brother which is to say not very well at all as I was, okay, just a wet-behind-the-ears kid. And Jimmy was the king hellion of the neighborhood and dragged my brother, and the brothers of others, in tow. So this ain’t going to be a story of moral uplift, which is for sure.

See Jimmy, when he was around the old neighborhood, was the very large target, that is to say the number one target, of the “shawlies.” Shawlies? In our mainly Irish working-class neighborhood, although I confess I only heard it used by more recent immigrants just off the boat (or plane) or older ones who refused to become vanilla Americans, it signified that circle, council if you will, unofficial of course, of mothers, young and old, who set the moral tone, at least the public moral tone, of the place. In short, the gossips, old hags, and rumor-mongers (I am being polite here) who had their own devious grapevine, and more importantly, were a constant source of information about you to your own mother. Usually nothing good either.

And what conduct of Jimmy’s would bring him to the notice of that august body, other than the obvious one of corrupting the morals of the youth? Hey, as you will see this guy was no Socrates. Jimmy, it seems, or it seems to me now, was spoon-fed on old time gangster movies. No, not the George Raft-Jimmy Cagney-Edward G. Robinson vehicles of the 1930s in which the bad guy pepper-sprayed every one with his trusty machine-gun, everyone except dear old Ma (whom he would not touch a hair of the head of, and you better not either if you know what’s good for you). No, Jimmy was into being a proto-typical "wild one" a la Marlon Brando or the bad guys in Rebel Without A Cause. Without putting too fine a spin on it, some kind of existential anti-hero.

So who was this Jimmy? No a bad looking guy with slicked-back black hair, long sideburns (even after they were fashion-faded), engineer boots, dungarees (before they were fashionista), tied together by a thick leather belt (which did service for other purposes, other better left unsaid purposes), tee-shirt in season (and out). Always smoking a cigarette (or getting ready too), always carrying himself with a little swagger and lot of attitude. Oh ya, he was a tenth-grade high school drop-out (not really that unusual in those days in that neighborhood, drop-outs were a dime a dozen, including my own brother). And here is the draw, the final draw that drew slightly younger guys to him (and older girls, as well) he always had wheels, great wheels, wheels to die for, and kept them up to the nth degree. Employment (in order to get those wheels, jesus, don't you guys know nothing): unknown

That last point is really the start of this story about how the ethos of the working poor and the demands of the American military linked up. Jimmy (and his associates, including my drop-out brother) was constantly the subject of local police attention. Every known offense, real or made-up, wound up at his door. Some of it rightly so, as it turned out. I might add that the irate shawlies had plenty to do with this police activity. And also plenty to do with setting up Jimmy as the prime example of what not to emulate. Well, as anyone, including me, in own my very small-bore, short-lived criminal career can testify to when you tempt the fates long enough those damn sisters will come out and get you. The long and short of it is was that eventually Jimmy’s luck ran out. The year that his luck ran out was 1963, not a good year to have your luck run out if there ever is one.

Nowadays we talk, and rightly so, about an “economic draft” that forces many working class and minority youth to sign up for military service even in ill-fated war time because they are up against the wall in their personal lives and the military offers some security. I want to talk about this “economic draft” in a different sense although I know that the same thing probably still goes on today. I just don’t have the data or anecdotal evidence to present on the issue. Jimmy, however, was a prima facie case of what I am talking about. When Jimmy’s luck ran out he faced several counts of armed robbery, and other assorted minor crimes. When he went to court he thus faced many years (I don’t remember his total, my brother’s was nine, I think). The judge, in his infinite mercy offered this deal- Cedar Junction (not the name then, but the state prison nevertheless) or the Army. Jimmy, fatefully, opted for the Army (as did my brother).

Here is the part that is important to understand though. Jimmy (and to a lesser extent, my brother), the minute that he opted for military service went from being “bum-of-the-month” in shawlie circles to a fine, if misunderstood and slightly errant, boy. Even the oldest hags had twinkles in their eyes for old Jimmy. Of course, his mother also came into high regard for raising such a fine boy committed to serve his country (and his god, don’t forget that part). Once in uniform, an airborne ranger’s uniform, and more importantly, once he had orders for Vietnam, then an exotic if dangerous place and a name little understood other than the United States was committed to its defense against the atheistic communists, his stock rose even further. I was not around the old neighborhood when the news of his death was announced in 1965 but my parents told me later than his funeral was treated something like a state function. The shawlies, in any case where out in force. Jimmy J, a belated R.I.P.

***Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- When "Stewball" Stu Stewart ’57 Chevy Ruled The “Chicken” Roads

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Chuck Berry performing his classic School Days to give a flavor of the times to this piece

CD Review

The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era: 1957, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1987

Scene: Brought to mind by the cover artwork that graces the front of the booklet that accompanies this CD. The artwork contains, in full James Dean-imitation pout, one good-looking, DA-quaffed, white muscle-shirted young man, an alienated young man, no question, leaning, leaning gently, very gently, arms folded, on the hood of his 1950’s classic automobile, clearly not his father’s car, but also clearly for our purposes let us call it his “baby.”

And that car, that extension of his young manhood, his young alienated manhood, is Friday night, Saturday night, or maybe a weekday night if it is summer, parked (priority parked, meaning nobody with some Nash Rambler, nobody with some foreign Volkswagen, no biker even , in short, nobody except somebody who is tougher, a lot tougher, than our alienated young man better breathe on the spot while he is within fifty miles of the place) directly in front of the local teenage (alienated or not) "hot spot." And in 1950s’ America, a teenage America with some disposal income (allowance, okay), that hot spot is likely to be, as here, the all-night Mel’s (or Joe’s, Adventure Car-Hop, whatever) drive-in restaurant opened to cater to the hot dog, hamburger, French fries, barbecued chicken cravings of exhausted youth. Youth exhausted after a hard night, well, let’s just call it a hard night and leave the rest to your knowing imagination, or their parents’ evil imaginations.

And in front of the restaurant, in front of that leaned-on “boss” automobile stands one teenage girl vision. One blondish, pony-tailed, midnight sun-glassed, must be a California great American West night teeny-bopper girl holding an ice cream soda after her night’s work. The work that we are leaving to fertile (or evil, as the case may be) imaginations. Although from the pout on Johnny’s (of course he has to be a Johnny, with that car) face maybe he “flunked out” but that is a story for somebody else to tell. Here’s mine.
********
Not everybody, not everybody by a long-shot, who had a “boss” ’57 cherry red Chevy was some kind of god’s gift to the earth; good-looking, good clothes, dough in his pocket, money for gas and extras, money for the inevitable end of the night stop at Jimmy John’s Drive-In restaurant for burgers and fries (and Coke, with ice, of course) before taking the date home after a hard night of tumbling and stumbling (mainly stumbling). At least that is what one Joshua Breslin, Josh, me, freshly minted fifteen- year old roadside philosopher thought as for the umpteenth time “Stewball” Stu left me by the side of Albemarle Road and rode off into the Olde Saco night with his latest “hot” honey, fifteen year old teen queen Sally Sullivan.

Ya, Stewball Stu was nothing but an old rum-dum, a nineteen year old rum-dum, except he had that “boss” girl-magnet ’57 cherry red Chevy (painted that color by Stu himself) and he had his pick of the litter in the Olde Saco, maybe all of Maine, night. By the way Stu’s official name, was Stuart Stewart, go figure, but don’t call him Stuart and definitely do not call him “Stewball” not if you want to live long enough not to have the word teen as part of your age. The Stewball thing was strictly for local boys, jealous local boys like me, who when around Stu always could detect a whiff of liquor, usually cheap jack Southern Comfort, on his breathe, day or night.

Figure this too. How does a guy who lives out on Tobacco Road in an old run-down trailer, half-trailer really, from about World War II that looked like something out of some old-time Hooverville scene, complete with scrawny dog, and tires and cannibalized car leavings every which way have girls, and nothing but good-looking girls from twelve to twenty (nothing older because as Stu says, anything older was a woman and he wants nothing to do with women, and their women’s needs, whatever they are)? And the rest of us get his leavings, or like tonight left on the side of Route One? And get this, they, the girls from twelve to twenty actually walk over to Tobacco Road from nice across the other side of the tracks homes like on Atlantic Avenue and Fifth Street, sometimes by themselves and sometime in packs just to smell the grease, booze, burnt rubber, and assorted other odd-ball smells that come for free at Stu’s so-called garage/trailer.

Let me tell you about Stu, Sally, and me tonight and this will definitely clue you in to the Stu-madness of the be-bop Olde Saco girl night. First of all, as usual, it is strictly Stu and me starting out. Usually, like today, I hang around his garage on Saturdays to get away from my own hell-house up the road and I am kind of Stu’s unofficial mascot. Now Stu had been working all day on his dual-exhaust carburetor or something, so his denims are greasy, his white tee-shirt (sic) is nothing but wet with perspiration and oil stains, he hasn’t taken a bath since Tuesday (he told me that himself with some sense of pride) and he was not planning to do so this night, and of course, drinking all day from his silver Southern Comfort flask he reeked of alcohol (but don’t tell him that if you read this and are from Olde Saco because, honestly, I want to live to have twenty–something as my age). About 7:00 PM he bellows out to me, cigarette hanging from his mouth, a Lucky, let’s go cruising.

Well, cruising means nothing but taking that be-bop ’57 cherry red Chevy out on East Grand and look. Look for girls, look for boys from the hicks with bad-ass cars who want to take a chance on beating Stu at the “chicken run” down at the flats on the far end of Sagamore Beach, look for something to take the edge off the hunger to be somebody number one. At least that last is what I figured after a few of these cruises with Stu. Tonight it looks like girls from the way he put some of that grease (no not car grease, hair-oil stuff) on his nappy hair. Yes, I am definitely looking forward to cruising tonight once I have that sign because, usually whatever girl Stu might not want, or maybe there are a couple of extras, or something I get first dibs. Ya, Stu is righteous like that.

So off we go, stopping at my house first so I can get a little cleaned up and put on a new shirt and tell my brother to tell our mother that I will be back later, maybe much later, if she ever gets home herself before I do. The cruising routine in Olde Saco means up and down Route One (okay, okay Main Street), checking out the lesser spots (Darby’s Pizza Palace, Hank’s Ice Cream joint, the Colonial Donut Shoppe where I hang during the week after school and which serves a lot more stuff than donuts and coffee, sandwiches and stuff, and so on). Nothing much this Saturday. So we head right away for the mecca, Jimmy John’s. As we hit Stu’s “saved” parking spot just in front I can see that several stray girls are eyeing the old car, eyeing it like tonight is the night, tonight is the night Stu, kind of, sort of, maybe notices them (and I, my heart starting to race a little in anticipation and glad that I stopped off at my house, got a clean shirt, and put some deodorant on and guzzled some mouthwash, am feeling tonight is the night too).

But tonight is not the night, no way. Not for me, not for those knees-trembling girls. Why? No sooner did we park than Sally Sullivan came strolling (okay I don’t know if she was strolling or doo-wopping but she was swaying in such a sexy way that I knew she meant business, that she was looking for something in the Olde Saco night and that she had “found” it) out to Stu’s Chevy and with no ifs, ands, or buts asked, asked Stu straight if he was doing anything this night. Let me explain before I tell you what Stu’s answer was that this Sally Sullivan is nothing but a sex kitten, maybe innocent-looking, but definitely has half the boys, hell maybe all the boys at Olde Saco High, including a lot of the guys on the football team drooling over her. I know, because I have had more than one sleepless night over her. See, she is in my English class and because Mr. Murphy let’s us sit where we want I usually sit with a good view of her. So Stu says, kind of off-handedly, like having the town teen fox come hinter on him was a daily occurrence, says kind of lewdly, “Well, baby I am if you want to go down Sagamore Rocks right now and look for dolphins?” See, Sagamore Rocks is nothing but the local lovers’ lane here and “looking for dolphins” is the way everybody, every teenage everybody in town says “going all the way,” having sex for the clueless. And Sally, as you can guess if you have been following my story said, “Yes” just like that. At that s why I was dumped, unceremoniously dumped, at my street while they roared off into the night. So like I said not every “boss” car owner is god’s gift to women, not by a long shot. Or maybe they are.