From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can-When The Scribe Called The New Breeze Coming To The Land-And We Didn’t Give A Rat’s Ass
By Sam Lowell
Seth Garth from the old Tonio’s Pizza Parlor corner boys from the Acre section of North Adamsville back in the early 1960s probably said it best about Peter Paul Markin, the Scribe (that name used by me in earlier pieces was not his moniker until Tonio times when Frankie Riley bestowed it on him after writer some press agent bullshit about him for the high school newspaper. One night after the Scribe had gone on and on about some “fag” (then “fag” in our neighborhood, maybe worse) poem by a guy named Allen Ginsberg called Howl* and then switched gears on the turn of a dime about the plan for that night’s “midnight creep” (read: burglary of some Mayfair swell house, or what passed for such in North Adamsville) Seth called him a “walking contradiction.” I think that fit the Scribe perfectly and I have already given a classic example of my own earlier experience with the Janus-like Scribe personality (Seth did not meet the Scribe until eight- grade in junior high after his family had moved across town. That was when he, secretly, very secretly trusting on me with the secret, worked with some Jewish guy from Adamsville Center to send books to black children in Alabama in the late 1950s when they were trying break vicious Mister James Crow down there (the Scribes term). All the while acting as Carter corner boy leader Ronnie Mooney’s shill doing the big “clip” operations that started our illegal careers in sixth grade and seventh grades.
(* The breakthrough “beat” poem which made Ginsberg’s career and which, get this, the Scribe would later read sections of only lonely Friday nights in front of Toni’s when we had no dough. Did that until guys, guys including me, who could have given a rat’s ass about the “fag” poem threatened to throw him off the roof of the high school gratis if he did not stop. That would stop him for the night, but he would be back. Funny even now I go to YouTube every now and again when I need some poetic boost to listen to Ginsberg howling forth when the world was young, and we were warrior-kings.)
I have given some play to later versions of that contradiction but this day my mind is on that good angel part of the Scribe, or at least the part that saw some way out of the hole we were in down in the mud, down in what I call now (what the heck would I have known of such a word then) the totally destructive Hobbesian world of all against all down at the base of society where social solidarity is seen as a sign of weakness, or simple prey for the predators.
I am not sure when he first said the expression probably in early 1960, might have been late 1959 in case when we were still in the projects (my family would to the Bottoms, which is just what it was of the Acres, a year after the Scribe’s at the beginning of ninth grade) but whenever I was blue, or he was, he would say that he sensed “ a new breeze blowing in the land,” that we might after all get out from under. He didn’t exactly explain it in specific terms but I believe that it animated the better angel of his nature for as long as that projected breeze had some promise when it did finally fully unfold in the mid-1960s. He would at least through high school carry that larcenous heart around but it was more like baggage from the past than anything else as long as he felt the uptick.
I think I wrote one time about a bet that the Scribe made with our Tonio’s corner boy leader Frankie Riley about whether he, the Scribe, would have “the balls” (or some term like that) to go, as he intended, to the Boston Common in the fall of 1960, October I think before the elections which brought our own Jack Kennedy to the White House, to participate in a demonstration called by then famed baby doctor, Doctor Spock, and an organization called SANE to protest nuclear weapons proliferation. Frankie baited him mercilessly on that one since he saw guys like Spock, the Quakers and other bleeding hearts afraid to go toe to toe with the Russians as dupes, commies, and fairies. (That would be a fair estimate of the attitudes of the rest of us except I never took the Scribe as a dupe except maybe to those furious wanting habits that would lay him low over a decade later). The Scribe took the bait, took the bet, a five dollar bet big money in those tight Acre days, (had to take the bet in any case since to not do so meant you lost and had to pay anyway in the ethos of the corner days.) Frankie would have egg all over his face, the Scribe would have his five dollars (and money for a date) and would “win his spurs” in that event (one of the few times he would tell me later when he was really afraid that he would be wasted by a bunch of hoboes and rednecks from South Boston who were egging on the crowds to attack the small demonstration of Quakers, pacifists and other do-gooders in the world).
That is just the clearest early example of what the Scribe got into. He would lead, try to lead some of us into the coffeehouse folk scene over in Cambridge when rock and roll had kind of gone into hiatus and folk seemed to give some evidence of that new breeze, and girls liked it too. There were other movements and such which the Scribe would bore us with on some desolate Friday night when we could have yet again given a rat’s ass about such things. The big turning point the biggest feather in the Scribe’s cap was his projection of the Summer of Love brewing out in the California sun in 1967 and him jumping into that craziness with all arms, all everything. More importantly dragged me, sensible me, rough and ready Frankie Riley and every other corner boy except Rick Rizzo and David White who had already laid down their heads in bloody Vietnam and now are remember in town square and black granite in Washington out to San Francisco when he came back to get us moving there to see what was what.
The Scribe had gotten lots of scholarship help when he was accepted to Boston University after graduation in 1964 (I had too at Tufts and Frankie at Boston College). In the spring of junior year though he decided that he had to see what was going on out in Frisco and dropped out of school right after finals I think. That would later prove to be a fateful decision since in the heart of the Vietnam War when the generals were screaming for foot soldiers a student deferment kept you away from the wolves for a while and no deferment leave you at the mercies of your friends and neighbors at the draft board which would snag him in 1969, sent him to Vietnam and create a situation in his head that he never really recovered from. But in the spring of 1967 he was in full blossom to his dream breeze coming true and got so tied up in it that he made special trip back to the Acre to get reinforcements.
We would all go for varying times (I stayed out there until 1970 when that devil draft board began to call my sweet number and I hightailed it back to Tufts, fast) and while series of adventures up and down the West Coast which Seth, Jack Callahan, hell, even straight-laced Frankie Riley have written about a while back when Alex James had his youngest brother Zack write and produce a small tribute booklet to the Scribe on the 50th anniversary of that Summer of Love. I went through many ups and downs with the Scribe (and on my own as well0 before he fell down in the end but I will always think kindly of the times we spent out West deep in that new breeze he saw coming way before the rest of us did (or gave a rat’s ass about, okay)
The constant reader already knows that I have been teasing the readers of this series with a promise to speak of one Billy Bradley who along with the now well-reported Ronnie Mooney led the Carter’s Variety Store corner boys for good or evil but I have to tell a few stories about the Scribe, about Peter Paul Markin. A guy who off and on for the next twenty years before he fell down, went down hard in Mexico trying to “cure” his eternal wanting habits with a quick score was my best friend, and on good days would acknowledge that on his part, whom I met on the first day of class at Snug Harbor Elementary School in Miss Sullivan’s fourth grade class after we had moved to Adamsville from Riverdale. The Markin stories will help set up the link to Billy Bradley, in fact I would argue that you cannot understand Billy without knowing more about the Scribe (and the tangled three-way relationship between us not always good).
Not so strangely the Scribe was a nerdish combination of mad hatter plans to get out from under the projects life which he was far more sensitive about than the rest of us (although I still feel marked heavily by those formative experiences) and bookish, serious bookish babble of ideas like some ill-regarded prophet related to nothing at all that was crushing our spirits in the projects. I learned that about him the very first day of school by my observing the Scribe the next row over reading a book on American revolutionary Samuel Adams which I said looked interesting. That set the frame rolling as we talked until battered down by old biddy Sullivan’s wrath. That cost us a first day, first day of school if you can believe it, after school detention, the first of many. The Scribe would blow that detention business off (and I would a little toward the end of the year) as some kind of overhead to finding interesting things to talk about in school since nothing like that existed in his household (nor mine either fore that matter. Over the years he would make many calculated decisions in the same holy goof manner (thanks Jack Kerouac) from which way the cultural winds were blowing to how to work the plan for the latest “midnight creep.”
As unbelievable as I thought it was at the time because I was somewhat shy and a little socially backward that first day the Scribe mentioned that he hung out with a bunch of guys, projects guys all, fourth and fifth grade guys, at Carter’s Variety Store which then (and if you can believe this now as well) was the only place in the whole area to shop for those without cars or who needed a quick item or two.
[My family had moved in a few weeks before school opened in September, so I knew what Carter’s was, had been there getting milk and stuff my mother but I think I only saw the corner boys hanging out maybe once as I scurried home. They looked about my age but I knew from a roughed up experience with the 12th Street corner boys in Riverdale when I tried to engage a couple of them that you do not talk to corner boys, do not join up on your own but need to be “sponsored” and so I kept my distance.]
That first day of school was the day I met Ronnie Mooney who I have spilled ink about in five previous installments of this series and who was at the time was becoming the recognized leader of the Carter corner boys. In some funny ways, the Scribe, and me a little less so, didn’t seem to fit the mold of these guys, thugs like Rodger the Dodger, Lenny who would later lay down his head in Vietnam, George, Tiny John and a revolving cast of guys for he was way too “intellectual” for what these guys were about or so I thought. The other side of the Scribe, the screwy gene side, the missing link side, was a truly larcenous heart. Using plenty of his “intellectual” energy to plan and plot, along with Ronnie, various capers, mostly small time but all illegal.
Even that first day the reason the Scribe was so hopped up to meet his corner boys was because he needed a look-out for a clip he was planning at Kaye’s Jewelry near Bert’s Market to grab some stuff and get it converted to cash (fencing it I guess we would call it today). Like I say small time stuff, small down at the base of society where there is never enough of anything and family-sized “no, we can’t afford it” coexist with some furious wanting habits.
He always had a million schemes going and always a mix between his good instincts like when he proposed to sent books to Alabama so some black children could read* and planning a “midnight creep” to rob some house of its worldly possessions, sell them and live on what he called, we called, easy street for a while.
(*The Scribe actually acted on that book proposal a little latter on the quiet since the white bread projects were a hotbed of racial animosity for the simple reason, no maybe not so simple reason, that no matter how bad things were in a place like the projects at least the denizens were white and the kids, us, imbibed that idea for the most part even if we did not understand it. Another situation where the Scribe committed me to silence although I have mentioned that episode many times over the years explaining the Scribe’s motions. Guys like Ronnie, Billy too would have crucified him if they had known probably about that project run him out of the projects.
The way the thing worked was that he actually put a small ad in the local newspaper asking for books (he also asked the local branch of the public library, but they turned him down cold). He got a response from a Jewish kid, also a no-no grouping in the projects life where anti-Semitism was more visceral than the black experience since a number of Jewish people lived in the new single-family houses up the road. That kid has some connections, so some books made their way south.)
At the same time, although I don’t remember if that was true with his working the books idea, he would be setting up a scheme to rob a house. Cool as a cucumber. This is where Adamsville Beach comes in again. The first time he proposed the idea to me (I was something like a sounding board for all he listened to me when he was hellbent on an idea) we were sitting at the seawall on the beach, what he called his office. It was in sixth grade, probably the spring, early summer when people would be away, would be away from those newly built single-family homes up the road.
This section, then anyway, was not well-policed (although the Scribe had the police patrol routine worked out) had some distance between houses ( a selling point for crammed in urban dwellers) and each as in all such developments in those days had similar set-ups, including bulkhead entry into the cellars and a breezeway between house and garage that was a joke to break into. The Scribe’s idea was to try the breezeway first, usually the easiest entry since as with many such quickly built structures the thing was flimsy (and probably no developer thought about corner boy midnight creep robbers. If that failed then the bulkhead was the target, an easy target since he had figured out a way to unlatch the doors with a device wedged between the doors, easy stuff really.
Here it is best to give another contradiction of the Scribe. He was a nerd, was clueless about how to organize such a plan, the working parts. Once he presented the idea to Ronnie and Billy, and then the rest of the guys and suggested he would lead the first raid they balked, were ready to hang his ass in the grass. Christ, he could hardly keep his hands steady doing the “clip” (as I was so we both were lookouts in that juvenile caper). So Ronnie, and then when Ronnie grew away from the crowd Billy, later at Doc’s Harry Devine and at Tonio’s Frankie Riley would be the operational chiefs of such projects.
The one time the Scribe had the bright idea to do a creep on his own he almost got us all arrested when he both miscalculated the police patrol schedule and that the house selected was not empty but had somebody baby-sitting a child inside. Jesus, but when he was “on” his ideas were on point. Hey, we never got caught for nothing he set up. Maybe it was that beach air that drove him on.
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