Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- The Drifter Of No Known Trade

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

As the drifter of no known trade (that is the moniker that he gave himself although if you look for a birth certificate, driver’s license or, more importantly, through the police files you will no such name. You will however find William James Bradley, Willie Brads, William Lee, Billie Wills and at least one half dozen other aliases depending on where you look and the town but “drifter” and keep in mind the add on “of no known trade” will do here.) sat down on the windy day Boston Common park bench he eyed a beat cop eyeing him. A copper ready, willing, and able to add him to his resume, to his weekly quota. The drifter had that look about him, the look, hell too these days maybe the smell of con. Funny the park was filled with people, mothers or nursemaids with little children, a couple of young lovebirds, a wino singing to himself , a couple of girls, with the look of strictly trade about them, whom he sensed were walking the streets looking for tricks and who were just then gathering themselves for the next push.

All that going on and that copper only had eyes for him. He didn’t know the cop from Adam and since he was new in town the cop didn’t know him either. But it was always the same story, the same story since childhood, but more recently since he had been on the nod it seemed every cop in every city had his number. Maybe they were right to take that stare what with him in a “seen better days” trench coat, soiled and spattered pants a size or two too big these days, worn-out shoes (worn from many miles of hobo wandering and hitchhike standing on desolate two in the morning no traffic side roads, needing a shave and a haircut and topped off with a soft fedora hat, fairly new and of a Kelly green color ,that did not in any way, shape or form, go with the rest of the outfit. But such are the ways of the nod, and maybe such are the cop antenna that they sense the nod, or at least in a park sense that some connection is about to be made and they should keep on their toes. And as the cop started heading his way slowly, feeling his way, the drifter started working his way back in his mind about how it all had gone awry. When he thought such thoughts and they had not been often that indicated that he was in need of some fix, some connection, although he was only sitting on this bench just then to rest, to rest the rest of the weary. And think.

He swore as a kid back in those North Adamsville projects (the town located a short way from Boston and the Common he was sitting in just then) to his corner boy gang that he would never do a lick of work in his life, nine to five work, back-breaking work like many fathers, including his, did and had the damn tumbledown project life to show for their efforts. No that scene was not for him. He figured, figured almost right back then, back in the mid-1950s that he could take his good looks (all the girls were crazy for him then and he would give his “leavings,” his rejects, to his corner boys after he was done with them), his good singing voice, and his, well, style and make it as a rock and roll star with plenty of dough, girls and everything. And he almost made it except a funny thing happened his voice changed, changed to a gruff if manly voice that might have later made it as some sissy boy folk singer but not as a rock star. So he had to hustle, hustle like crazy to keep up with expenses and the like.

That is where he started presenting himself under the moniker of the “drifter with no known trade.” One day a guy came up to him, a guy who was interested (not a cop) to find out how a guy with no known trade had such a “boss” car, some nice duds, a couple of foxy chicks and plenty of dough. He replied that he was doing a little of this and a little of that. End of story. Well not quite the end. See he was robbing everything that was not tied down, first around North Adamsville then in Boston and latter in Philly. And he was good at it, made some dough and planned big heists, some that came off, a couple you might have read about that were never solved, until she came along.

No, not a woman she, sister, cocaine, snow, girl, although a woman was part of it. A young girl from Philly, a society girl that he was trying to ply her for her society connections as well as trying to ply her, Ellen, took him up as partner in snorting every line put in front of her. She said she was bored with tea (grass, herb, marijuana whatever you call it in your neighborhood) and wanted to branch out. He liked it after trying it, liked that she liked it, liked that they got all sexy (for a while before the hunt to keep connected, always connected, took the edge off) and made endless bed time. Then the other shoe dropped. Her habit, and then his, got him to take more risks, get “rum” brave and plan a big heist, heist that went awry and which cost him to two to five (she, society girl she, got off with five years’ probation, but he wasn’t squawking).

When he got out, the world had changed a little, the dough wasn’t around, he had not been around, the cops started looking his way more closely everywhere he went. So he moved again. This time to New Orleans, New Orleans and graduation day. Cocaine, coke, was not doing it for him anymore, he needed more of a kick and then some whore he ran into on the street turned him on to boy, H, heroin. And the nod. A couple more years in stir, give or take, for this and that, mostly drug dealing now and then to keep even with his habit. And now a park bench, a cop heading his way and maybe thirty days “vag.” Hell, maybe this time he would go cold turkey and get well, real well, maybe even get a job, get a trade. Nah, he wasn’t built for that stuff …

***A Word -Pinky Foley And The Early Boston Corner Boys

From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin

Paul Kiley walked the refresher streets of North Adamsville, his 1960s working- class neighborhood growing up streets, on a whim, well, maybe not a whim so much as a chance to reflect on the vagaries of corner boy existence after reading a story in his local newspaper, The Daily News, about the unheralded and un-mourned death of the famous Boston corner boy leader, Pinky Foley, in prison. Pinky Foley had been for Markin’s corner boy generation in dinky North Adamsville something of a hero, a model to be emulated, from the tough coming out of the Great Depression corner boy world existence the generation before his against the cops, the church, and society at large and anybody else who wanted to cramp his style. Pinky’s organization, based on hanging around some Dorchester Avenue store fronts, a variety store here, a pizza parlor there, had run every kind of racket from book, drugs, extortion, and women, to strong arm, and, in the end, hired guns all the while giving the finger to the world, the non-Pinky Foley world. They had finally caught with him in some flea-bitten entrapment operation involving moving a whole ship load of cocaine from down Mexico way to Boston and he and his boys had been in a shoot-out where a cop or two got killed. They threw the book at Pinky (and a couple of other of his corner boy survivors) and while he would later be occasionally mentioned in some newspaper article which wanted to scare children away from a life of corner boy crime that was about all Paul had heard about Pinky for years until he read of his death

When Paul heard that news he reflected that a quarter turn the other way might very well have led him to his own Pinky Foley fate, it certainly was a close thing, and hence the need for a reflective walk down the old neighborhood streets. First stop as always was the corner of Sagamore and Young Streets where he was to first become enthralled to the corner boy life by the denizens in front of Harry’s Variety Store, now long gone, enthralled by leader Red Riley’s corner boy lifestyle. Of course then, as Paul chuckled to himself as he walked across the street to the ball field bleachers that had been there since he was a kid to have a good think, he had been only something of a mascot, being only about twelve- years old, to the older, harder boys like his two older brothers, Prescott and Kenny, who were Red’s major accomplices, his lieutenants, in his midnight creeps around the neighborhood houses, his stolen car ring, his extortion ring, and later the graduation to the armed robberies that eventually did all three in.

Funny at the time, that early time, Red was nothing but a hero to Paul, bigger than life, even when, or especially when, one night he witnessed Red chain whip a corner boy from another corner just because he was from another corner and left him in a bloody pile for the ambulance and just walked away. Yes, Red was tough, but Paul remembered him more kindly as the guy who would give him his left-over free games on the Madame LaRue pinball machine that Harry had in the back of his store. Yes too, Red’s fate was none too noteworthy since he was shot down one night in a police shoot-out after he had robbed a White Hen convenience store down south trying to get dough to keep himself and some wayward honey from the cold.

That Harry’s recollection too got him to thinking about his two older brothers and how they tried to “wise him up” about the world and thought like their leader Red, take what you could when you could, and don’t look back. They had been four and five years older than Paul and so, for a while, they held sway over him, a big sway, as he mulled over his options in the world. See the way Prescott and Kenny looked at it they had come up dirt poor, had somehow gotten the short end of the stick in the getting of life’s goods and unlike their father who did not bust out against his fate they were not going to wind up like him, a broken man with nothing to show for his life except nothing. Yes, the world owed the Kiley boys a living, an easy street living and they lived for that expectation. And the older boys were broken by it.

Paul remembered the day Kenny went down. This was after Prescott and Kenny had broken off with Red, or maybe Red had decided to head south and try his luck elsewhere or something and they decided not to go. Such details were always a little murky in the telling. In any case they started free-lancing on their own. A midnight heist here, a dope deal there, maybe the old stand-by extortion someplace, the small beer of the world. Then one day they ran into some guy who needed some heavy muscle for a big heist over in Brookline, a heist of an estate with paintings, jewelry, silverware, the works. And the plan seemed sound when Paul heard the details later, on paper it seemed solid anyway. In the execution less so since either Kenny or another guy had forgotten some detail and set off the alarm system. A couple of minutes later the place was swarming with cops as they tried to make their getaway. The inevitable shoot-out occurred and Kenny was laid low in the cross fire. Before he died he told Prescott to tell Paul “not to forget that the world was a tough place and that he had better take what he could when he could.”

And Kenny probably got the better of the deal, an early death and some martyr’s halo in some secret corner boy world. That busted heist though started Prescott on his almost endless incarcerations, first a dime (two off for good behavior) for the Brookline caper, and then a series of other shorter sentences for low-rent armed robberies, and assorted other acts of mayhem. Until Prescott turned into an old man, into at the end an old con, an old con who was afraid of the shadows of the real world when he got out the last time, the time that he finally figured out that he couldn’t do any more time having been a virtual ward of the state since he was about twenty-two. It was then that he took a lonely room over in some run-down rooming house in the South End of Boston for drifters, grifters and ne’er-do-wells trying to figure the next dollar and reduced his world even further be sticking there as a recluse of sorts, until the end. The end came one morning when they found him on his bed with a needle in his arm and more junk in him that any normal human could take. Yes, in the end the fix was in, but a very different fix from what Prescott figured out was due him those many years before when the world was fresh and everything was possible. Somehow to get through the jail time, and apparently later that lonely freedom time out on the mean streets he had picked up that smack habit, a habit that would have required some serious dough to keep maintained and he finally played the percentages his way. When Paul eventually found out about Prescott’s fate he had already been buried in some lonesome potter’s field over in Long Island. He decided to leave his brother buried there as a fitting and proper resting place for a friendless and broken man after all his lifetime of woes.

Those brotherly recollections disturbed Paul and he had to move on from those desolate bleachers for he had already come to believe long before that there was nothing he could have done, or could do now to change the Mandela of his brothers’ lives. So he walked a few blocks over to Doc’s Drugstore, over on the corner of Norfolk and Newbury Streets, the place where he came of his own corner boy age. The place where he would begin to take that first turn in the path that his brothers had set for him. By that time Red and his brothers had moved on and so Harry’s was kind of passé (except as the be-bop place to play those pinball wizard games with the now ageing Madame LaRue staring you in the face urging you on, urging you on to win to free games.) The action for the younger brothers of those of Red’s generation was at Doc’s (and also the place where, unlike Harry’s, there was a jukebox to while away the time and to go through the whole girl-boy thing but that was a separate story because this one is about corner boy fates, not about honeys and that love travails stuff).

It was here that he first met Frankie Riley, Frankie the king hell king of the early 1960s corner boy night. Frankie was the guy who first showed Paul the “clip (how to heist from stores everything from records under your shirt to rings, tons of rings for quick and easy resale),” first showed him how to jimmy a door (and left no telltale marks), first showed him how to get do some dope (harmless grass, weed, you know, marijuana, but in those days a very wicked and evil thing, devil-like), and to sell it. Sell it to kids eager to try something to break out from the jail of early 1960s cold war red scare working- class life, to get some kicks in life before the world blew up in their faces. Yes, Paul was on his way, on his way to the easy street life. That was the time when he became familiar with the exploits of the late Pinky Foley (although he had heard the name before at Harry’s kind of whispered in hushed reverence by the corner boys there he didn’t connect with his exploits then). He figured he was just smart enough to pull it off, working with Frankie and a couple of other guys. Break out of that small time stuff and work North Adamsville like Pinky worked Boston.

Of course sixteen year old boys, or maybe any year old teenage boys, wise beyond their years or not, were not going to make a splash in the corner boy world at that age, just hanging around some two- bit drugstore listening to Elvis or Buddy Holly on some jammed up jukebox. So as Paul got older he moved onto the orbit of Billy Bradley (Frankie did too, once he also saw the writing on the wall that selling joints and small time clipped hot stuff was not going to be the road to easy street) and his corner boy hang-out at Balducci’s Pizza Parlor at the corner of Main and First Street. That was where the action was, that is where Paul (and Frankie) spent their high school apprenticeship years under the tutelage of Billy Bradley, a fellow classmate and well known throughout the town with those who counted, high school boys and girls, as the king hell king of the corner boy night now that Red had moved on.

It wasn’t so much, like with Red, that Billy was tough although he was tough enough, but Billy had great plans, great ideas of how to make that one big score that would put him, and his confederates, on easy street. Of course dope, coke, bennies, marijuana was part of it but that was mostly to raise seed money. And that old stand-by for every corner boy, extortion, was always in play. A little jack-rolling too. But the big thing was to move cars, cars that guys were crazy to buy (or have their fathers buy ) to be‘cool” cool for the honeys Saturday night, And for a couple of years, maybe Paul’s senior year in high school and the year after that, they were rolling in dough, had more orders than they could fill. All boss cars too.

And then it stopped. No, not the various illegal operations but Paul's desire to find the easy street ways, the corner boy way. Did Red Riley’s untimely demise which occurred around that time have anything to do with it? Perhaps. Did he fear for his brothers fast and un-thought out ways have anything to do with it (this before that busted heist that got Kenny killed and Prescott hard time). Sure, although they had already drawn their lines in the sand. But that was just stuff he thought about afterwards, stuff that might have contributed to his decision. Mainly thought it was because he had in those heady times seen what was happening to Billy (and Frankie too who he was personally closer to) as they got wilder and wilder in their easy street plotting. Paul still thought, and would for a long time think, that the world owed him a living, his brothers after all did hold a heavy sway, but he sensed somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind that this was not his way. Eventually Frankie too slipped away from the life. Unfortunately Billy, Billy of the big score dreams, never made the turn, and wound up a few years later face down in some Sonora, Mexico, dusty back street with two bullets in his head after some drug deal with awry on him.

As Paul walked away from the last corner boy memory station of the cross he thought about the picture of Pinky Foley that accompanied his obituary, taken in the old days in front of a drugstore on Dorchester Avenue showing him and a couple of his corner boys smiling some devilish hell-raising smile. More importantly, if one looked closely at that picture it could have been a picture of Paul, his corner boy pal Billy Bradley and his other corner boy pal Frankie Riley growing up.

Fortunately for him and Frankie (although it was a close thing in both cases) they followed the line from the Bruce Springsteen Jersey Girl lyrics- "ain't got no time for the corner boys down in the streets making all that noise." Billy (and his two brothers), unfortunately, didn't listen so well.

Boston Private Bradley Manning Stand-Out As Part Of An International Day Of Solidarity -Saturday June 1^stPark Street Station – 1 PM

Let’s Redouble Our Efforts To Free Private Bradley Manning-President Obama Pardon Bradley Manning -Make Every Town Square In America (And The World) A Bradley Manning Square From Boston To Berkeley to Berlin-Join Us At Park Street Station In Boston On June 1st At 1 PM For A Stand-Out In Solidarity Before Bradley’s June 3^rd Trial

Plan to go to Fort Meade outside of Washington, D.C. on June 1^st for an international day of solidarity with Bradley before his scheduled June 3^rd trial. Check with the Bradley Manning Support Network http://www.bradleymanning.org/for information about going to Fort Meade from your area.

If you can’t make it to Fort Meade come to Park Street Station on June 1^st in support of this brave whistle-blower.

*** Gypsy Love In The Summer of Love, Circa 1966

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

This was the way it started with Gypsy Love and me. “Hey Mister, do you want to buy some flowers for your girlfriend?” And just then, girlfriend-less and walking alone, I started to say no but something, something from deep inside me, or maybe in my reaction to her, made me say this, “Sure, but since I don’t have a girlfriend I will just buy them and why don’t you just keep them and wear them in your hair.” Something about that sentiment struck a chord in her as well, as she flashed that beguiling smile of hers that I can still see in the mind’s eye all this time later. So we continued to talk, talk a lot for the next several minutes even though many people, many potential customer people, lots of young men and women in every type of garment, from square madras Bermuda shorts to buckskin jackets and bell-bottom trousers to wispy billowy long dresses, and nobody thought anything of one particular costume over another, as befit the times, out on dates or just goofing, were walking by on this moonless night, this moonless Boylston Street 1966 Friday summer night that I am thinking about.

We talked the usual “who are you?, where are you from?, why is a delicate flower like you selling flowers on the streets on nice summer night?” talk (as she put my flower gift in her hair making her even more beguiling). We talked some more, maybe about the weather, or about the latest Rolling Stones album or about the huge influx of young people coming from hither and yon to encamp in Boston and try do a version of their own jailbreak from suburban square life. She mentioned that in her own case she was trying to break out on her own to from her Nashua, New Hampshire home and pursue some kind of art career. She was taking classes part-time at the Museum School and was working the flower- strewn streets to make rent money and maybe a little food. I mentioned that I was finishing school but was in no hurry since “uncle”was ready to call my draft number to go fight his nasty little war in Southeast Asia anytime I decided that school was a drag. We talked, as I got slightly panicky that she would drift away to sell her flowers, to make her rent money. We talked until we ran out of strangers in the night generic talk, and, as we laughed about it later, stuttered some stuff out at times to have reason not to part ways just then. After a while I told her that I would sit on the steps of the Public Library until she finished selling her flowers and then maybe we could go up to the Unicorn coffeehouse and talk some more. She didn’t say yes, she didn’t say no so I apparently had to take my chances. So I sat on those steps hoping, hoping for about a half hour and then she came up behind me and placed the last couple of unsold flowers in my getting longish hair. And that is the way it started, I swear.

Of course Gypsy Love was just the pet name that I gave her a little later, and it is better for all concerned that we just leave it like that, although not for any particular privacy, things better left unsaid, or let sleeping dogs lie reason. It wasn’t like that with us in our time, the time of our time together, other than Gypsy Love says more about her, about me, and about what happened to us in those days that I want to tell you about than her real name. Naturally, naturally unless you might want to think otherwise, she was no more of a gypsy than I am. Long, flowing blonde hair, fair almost alabaster white skin, flashing blue eyes, bedroom eyes we called them around my old neighborhood, my old Hullstown neighborhood in my old high school days corner boy-sizing up the girls days a few years previously, kind of thin, kind of hadn’t had a good meal in a while thin, and wearing no make-up, as was the fashion in those days was not my picture, and I am sure not yours either, of a dark-skinned, dark-haired, dancing-eyed gypsy girl with a rose in her teeth doing the tarantella, or something like that.

No, the gypsy part came in because of the flowers. Right that 1966 minute you could not go down any city street, any decent-sized city street on a Friday night, a boy and girl-filled Friday night, and not have some enterprising real-live gypsy girl, maybe twelve or twenty, who knows, trying to sell you some woe-begotten, faded, wilted, or worst, plastic, Christ, plastic rose, a single rose, by the way, for your girlfriend. All the while she cheapskate embarrassed you when you sheepishly blustered out "no thanks." Or she would direct you, no steer you, to some Madame LaRue ancient gypsy-mother in the window fortune-telling lady. An ancient gypsy mother woman who would, for small, very small, change, and knowing whom to pitch her spiel to, start running life’s wheel of fortune, to tell you of just ahead glad tidings. And then having exhausted her magic, would add “But wouldn’t the lady also like to know love’s fortune?’ for an extra thin coin at you. And then, always, always looking into her crystal ball, or the cards, T.S. Eliot’s dread tarot cards, and, whee, thankfully predict love’s delights. And that is the long and short of it for the gypsy part. The love part is self-explanatory, is stuff that has been going on so long it need not detain us, or should not, and if it is not you will catch the drift as I go along.

Let’s say in 1962 or 1963, on some other moonless Boylston Street night, some high school moonless night looking for one of the latest, cheap date, coffeehouses that dotted the street and were the rage those few years back that real gypsy girl would have been left by me to ply her trade, her rose-pedaling trade (maybe an older sister might have been working some other, more adult, scheme, but in that boy and girl-filled night I was not noticing that scene since I was girl-ed up and working, or trying to work, my charm on said girl) and would have had no fair-haired gypsy love girl competition.

See in 1966 all hell had broken loose in the land. There had been a jail-break among the young, among some of the more adventurous or alienated young, who had decided, and rightly so, that suburban, white picket-fence, college, then graduate school, then a respectable profession, and then, yes, then, then, then a straight line replication of dear mother and father was not in the cards. And one did not need a fortune-telling lady, ancient gypsy-mother or not, tarot cards reading or not, to know that death-strewn street. So some, and Gypsy Love included herself among the some as I did, decided that the jail-break was worth the risk, worth the risk for a little while anyway. Then let’s see what happened. The stars were aligned or at least I, we, were going to grab the ticket, and ride the crest of that max daddy wave.

But jail-break or not, picket-fence security or not, squaresville or edge city, you still needed dough, dough to keep off the “hairy (term of art meaning scary),” not woman friendly streets, dough to keep body and soul together, hell, dough for the yarn to start up that shawl-making business she told me about later that was the direct reason that Gypsy Love was selling flowers to get some seed money to sell them in furtherance of her art career. She was not selling suburban boy and girl in town for a weekend to look at, maybe seek, the hippies night roses, and certainly no gypsy plastic throw-aways, just cut flowers suitable for hair from the wholesale Flower Exchange (Gypsy Love had some business sense too), and medieval garlands to prance around the Boston Common. Although like I said before when describing my first look at her, she was obviously not getting enough business to keep her from being not enough to eat thin. After all that was a summer of love, not the 1967 “officially” proclaimed one, proclaimed from this Atlantic shore to San Francisco but still a summer of love and every unattached (and maybe some attached, who knows), fair-haired, alabaster white-skinned fairy princess was also selling flowers, or something, to keep the wolves from the door.

So, naturally, once I knew the score, from that talking several minutes (and later) that I held Gypsy Love up (although, as it turned out, she was more than happy to be talking rather than selling flowers) made me feel guilty and I offered to spring for a little dinner for her rather than some cheap jack cup of coffeehouse coffee. Either out of hunger, or some spark between us that she also felt, she said yes, an empathic yes, or at least that is how I am going to tell it. So, "old pro" Boylston Street denizen that I had become we went into the Olive, a cheap old time caboose diner that served light meals, light meals in the dark, ambience they called it. So we ate some supper, not too badly served that night. A not drunk chef must have been on duty that night or something, and then left after Gypsy Love had had enough to eat (and asked to take the leavings home, something I never would have thought of and was not commonly done then). And then we headed, kind of ambling, stumbling and both a little shy about it, for her garret over on Commonwealth Avenue.

Yes, it was certainly a garret no question. I had been in enough such places before that, no problem, I was, if anything, no snob when it came to other people’s living quarters. I had my own roommate- shared small apartment over on Westland Avenue next Symphony Hall so I knew the drill. What I didn’t expect, didn’t expect when she invited me over was that she shared the place with about six others, boys and girls alike, some paired, some not. And that was also okay, or rather it turned out to be okay, because among the denizens of that place was a guy, no, a gallant, who knowing that he could not compete with the Gypsy Love flower-sellers of the Boston night sold dope instead. And good stuff too, primo Acapulco Gold and Columbia Red that he got from some Spanish girl, no that is not right, some Mexican girl, some sunflower sunshine Juanita girl connection that he had met over in Cambridge Common where he hung out during the day. And he was not averse to sharing some of his own stash with his roomies, and their friends. Yah, it was that kind of time, unlike later when guys would try to sell you oregano or something like you were some nowhere clown.

So that night, that moonless Commonwealth Avenue garret summer night, Gypsy Love and I got “high,” 1966 high, not old-time alcohol-induced twenty college generations before Saturday night fraternity row beer-kegged, not old-time alcohol-induced whiskey, whiskey with a beer chaser like my father and his working- class cronies over at some local Dublin Pub, not rye whiskey with a water chaser like I used to like to drink before that became passé, not scotch neat, martini dry, manhattan on the rocks Mayfair swells high like the squares out there with the picket fences, not oblivion, forget, remember to forget, raging against the day, against the night high, but mellow, insightful high. And this stuff was so strong, so laced with whatever chemist’s knowledge-laced, and with whatever nutrient rich volcanic ash grown side of some desolate latin mountain that we really couldn’t sleep. Maybe Gypsy Love couldn’t sleep because, like I noticed when I first started talking to her, she was so thin and the good non-drunken chef food earlier and then this laced-primo dope kept her up, and I was up because she was Gypsy Love and I was too busy drinking her in for the first time to waste time on sleep.

So we “split” (left the premises, or went out, for the squares, okay) the scene at the walk-up garret with its menagerie of humanity, also all laced- high as far as I could tell as we closed the door behind us, around two o’clock in the morning to “goof” on (not make fun of, not serious, hurtful make fun of anyway, but more like let’s let the dope take its course, observe the late hour night life, again for the squares who don’t know, and again okay, okay) the Boylston Street scene. Strangely, most of my late, late night, improper Boston late night scene really wasn’t spent in Boston, but rather in Cambridge, in Harvard Square, specifically since about 1962 at the all-night Hayes –Bickford right up from the subway station, kind of a budding literary hang-out place but in any case a long way refuge from bad high school home scenes, and later to soak in the night life, and catch a few ideas, if only by osmosis. All for the price of a refillable watery dregs cup of coffee and maybe a soggy Danish or stale three o’clock in the morning yesterday muffin.

But this Boylston Street scene was something else, 1966 something else. Something at once more alive, more viscerally alive than the, when you really thought about it, staid and now well-worn late night Bickford literary scene with its ritual low important conversation hum, its frantic writerliness, and its slow drum tattoo beat to define “cool.” And, at the same time more destructive, not Vietnam War nightly television waste destructive that the mad daddies in D.C. had already cornered the market on, and were not letting go of despite many anguished cries, but more the sense that this was the last chance for happiness, or sanity, or some such thing and we had better grab it now before it blows away with the winds, or we get tired of riding it and go back to the cocoons. A madness scene, and let’s leave it at that, leave it at that until the dope wears off.

Sure, there were the jugglers, juggling all improbable combinations of materials from bowling pins to ninja sticks, and clowns, Charley Chaplin tramp clowns, Clarabelle clowns, Disneyland clowns, squirting, spraying, belching, bellowing, bestriding bicycles, bouncing balls and baby cars, and whatever seven other things clowns do, were out in force. No hip town, no college night town from east to west, from Cambridge to Berkeley, Ann Arbor in between, no cultural oasis town from the Village to Venice Beach, Austin in between, America or Europe, continental Europe Paris the hub, London in between was “hip,” (not squares for the squares, got it) without a plethora of those brethren.

Or the one-trick pony Monte guys sitting at little tables or on benches “organizing” a game, cards, walnut shells, peas-in-a pod a specialty, acrobats, maybe some circus castoffs or Olympic failure cases, bouncing off each other, sparkling uniforms making an arc to off-set the trickiness of the action, and maybe in a couple of years Vegas in the big tent, into the dead air night. And anyone else with any talent, any mimic money, spare-change, put the dough in the hat right in front of you, please, talent to keep the wolves away from the door.

And sure too a zillion guitar players, and some nights in Harvard Square a few years previously that might have been a low-ball estimate, now electric, electrified in the post-Dylan night, and diehard acoustics, trads, trying to maintain but losing the battle in the sound night and have the empty hats to prove it. Plugged in or on the edge though, singing, crooning, bleeping, basheeing, bahai-ing, rama-ing, hari-ing, and just plain old-fashioned vanilla screaming, along with tambourines, kazoos, wash tubs, triangles, oboes, hautboys, water glasses of various sizes, anything that could, or would, or should, make music, enough music to keep those ravenous wolves away from that damn door.

Guys and gals, angel love guys and gals, hop-headed or harmless, bejeweled or buckskinned, selling every kind of dope from every arm, reaching into every pocket for a pill here, some tea leaves there, more rare, an eight ball of this, and rarer still then although after a while I heard about it more, maybe a girl-boy (coke, H) combination for a permanent float. And every kind of kid (mainly), some college preppie out on the Boylston Street night, maybe tired, too tired from that fraternity beer-keg and some lame three hundred freshman in a telephone booth, or a Volkswagen joke, some suburban high school break-out kid looking to forget the corner boy action, or the last dance, last high school dance failure, and didn’t want to go home, some car-full of girls (always a car-full, never less) from a different suburb, looking, well, looking for those “hippie” guys that look kind of cute now, now that mother and father don’t approve of hippie guys, and streams of boys and girls in all colors and shades and all uniforms just getting in from the long bus ride from Bangor, or Montpelier and intent, seriously intent , on breaking out of that hayseed world, buying those fifty-seven flavors and smoking, dropping, or swallowing it right there on the premises, the street premises and wilding out (going crazy with joy, ecstasy, fear, freak-out) before hard dawn hits the streets.

But also every 1950s hipster, dipster, grifter, drifter and midnight sifter who had enough sense to catch sleep during the day and come out at night and do his or her rube-taking madness. Some bad ass madness, some not from the suburbs, not now anyway, madness, police-worthy-of-notice madness. The clash between the dope-infested madness and the lumpen-greed head madness, the known world’s madness in new form, would define that summer, for good or evil. But right then for the good, for the good Mexican night dope that was just beginning to wear off and let sleep take its course. Then dawn came, or just that few minutes before dawn, when heavy, lumpish human outline figures started to take distinctive shape, and Gypsy Love and I could look over on Boston Common hill and see the outline forms of hundreds of sleeping bags, tent city resident pup-tent, oddly Army surplus, homemade lean-too dwellers, park bench newspaper-pillowed sleepers, whatever, sheltering the summer of love refugees against that moonless night. And just at that pre-dawn moment I knew that Gypsy Love and I were solid for that moment, and for some other moments, and for a while beyond that too but I began to wonder when the cold winds came, when the skies turned granite grey in revenge, when the yellowish, brownish, orange-ish leaves started falling would we have been done with our moment.

***For The Late Mad- Hatter Journalist Benny Sachem, Take Two

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

There was a time when I would read everything that the mad-hatter journalist Benny Sachem wrote just like I did with the late "Doctor Gonzo," Hunter S. Thompson. Benny’s passing, aged 76, after a short illness, represented the end of an era. An era of far-flung, shoot- from-the- hip journalism that coincided with the jail-break notions of my generation, the generation of ’68, when he first made his mark on the first draft of the history of that “sweet jesus, what the hell were we doing” time. He will be fondly remembered in these quarters, like Thompson, not because I agreed with his (or their) political perspectives, or his cultural critiques but because, as a guy I respect, Kevin Callahan, a columnist for The Portland Gazette, pointed out one time when doing a retrospective of 1960s countercultural journalists, he represented that little space in the bourgeois press reserved for those who could thumb their noses at the bosses, and walk away still standing. Thompson as everybody knows, everybody from the back pages of the 1960s and 1970s knows, gored more oxen that one would think possible. But Benny did too.

Benny, like Thompson, went after, viciously went after which was the only possible way to do the thing, and do it right, one Richard Milhous Nixon. Yah, the guy who lost to Jack Kennedy in 1960, went away bleeding over everybody who would stand for it and spilled that same blood on everything he could get his grabby little hands around and came roaring back as the second coming of Count Dracula. In short as a President of the United States and common criminal who will forever replace guys like James Buchanan and Warren Harding as the bad boy of the White House. Benny went mano y man almost instinctively from Nixon’s first day in office calling him, on his nice days, nothing but a two- bit whore, and a bloodsucker who should have been wearing dresses(no offense to the women meant ) since he was so crooked that he was unable to put a pair of pants on. Like I said that was on his nice days. For the not so nice days please look the stuff up in the archives if you have time, and need a laugh during today’s version of the daily bummer coming out of Washington.

But see here was the beauty of a guy like Sachem, and Thompson too, he went after the thug Nixon when he was riding high during his Teflon first term back in the late 1960s when he was like some Madonna figure (mother of Christ Madonna not the entertainer) and most journalists were finding ways, finding many ways, to take a dive for the duration and bury their heads in the sand. And while they really headed for cover when the Nixon cutthroat gang (and that is being kind) hammered down after he was almost sanctified in 1972 after he beat a bush league politician like George McGovern like a gong Benny kept up the attack, exposed that faker for less than a two-bit whore. Anybody who wants to place that man ahead of the aforementioned Jimmy Buchanan and Warren Harding better peruse the archives of Benny’s work (and Thompson’s too) before stepping out of doors in this wicked old world with their defenses. Sachem was merciless in dragging Nixon down in the pits, into the pits of what a famous politician, one of the Kennedy boys, maybe Bobby of blessed memory I think, called Nixon whom he said represented the “dark side “of the American experiment. And he never let up beating Nixon like a gong while he down in the gutter with the common crooks, dope dealers, and hookers. Benny treated him rightly as just another night court denizen in need of a bail bondsman.

That wasn’t all though like Thompson Benny took on even bigger game in the American cultural night. (After all presidents, even Presidents of the United States, come and go.) Sacred mobbed up Las Vegas and its vengeful seeking of the American disposable dollar, the big hatted, bourbon-soaked untouchable Kentucky Derby from Thompson’s home state, and, Christ, this took real cojones, dismissing the football Super Bowl as just some drunken brawl and so much bad hubris. And Benny Sachem, maybe a little less famously than Thompson always did the same thing, always try to shed some light in dark places, with a little humor if possible, but with that damn flashlight nevertheless, on his various beats, mostly later at the Kansas City Herald Tribune.

Benny, from the same no holds barred school of journalism as Thompson, the notorious Gonzo school where a reporter actually reported stuff he thought about as well as the just the facts jack, not only took on old punching bag Nixon but he also skewered guys like Hubert Humphrey and that bush league George McGovern whom Thompson gave a pass to. See Benny, unlike Thompson, had no ill-defined, ill-advised political agenda to preserve so he didn’t have to give passes to those he was trying to influence, or in order to get some cozy one-on-one interview. One can hardly forget the time when Benny and the usually unflappable Senator McGovern almost went mano y mano on national television when Benny asked about his hidden young mistress living in some cheap out of the way motel back in Fargo, or one of those dank Dakota places. That was pure Benny, go for the jugular, and take no prisoners

Benny was even better as being the thorn in side of lesser politicians, the guys who wanted to make it to the top but didn’t, didn’t in more than one case because of some Benny expose. Like that time that Muskie, the guy from Maine who ran as Humphrey’s running mate in 1968 and who was riding high before Benny got to his doctor who was issuing him morphine prescriptions under an assumed name. Jesus, a stone-cold junkie as President. Thanks Benny on that one. Or like the time he stopped Jimmy Brown, yah, the California guy who has been running for some office ever since Hector was a pup, in his tracks when he exposed the Mexican cartel cocaine connection that was funding his presidential bids back in the 1980s. And who was caught sampling the merchandise as well, right in public, claiming it was just a snuff from his little snuff box that some girlfriend had given like it was about 1750 or something. Kudos Benny.

But Benny was best known to the general public for his sports columns, for his disassembling of the disassemblers who people that industry, including some of his fellow sports- writers. Who can forget that expose of the famed football writer, Grantland Stevens, who it turned out was stealing his copy straight from the publicity department of the Chicago Bears and claiming it was his stone-cold own work. Or the time he dismissed the New York Yankees, a team he loved from childhood having grown up in the shadow of the stadium in the Bronx, as nothing but candy asses and pretty boys, overpaid as well. The stuff he said about the owner at the time is unprintable here. He even out bad hubris-ed [sic] Thompson on the Super Bowl calling it a worse show than some low rent drag queen review in the Village. And went on for about fifteen pages of pure Benny vile about it. Funny how right he proved to be now that we have had an endless number of those mid-winter bummers to foul up the air. There were too many individual player stories that he wrote to mention here but as a measure of his power by the end of his career he was persona non gratain most American sports locker rooms, including that of the saintly PGA. That is to his credit.

And of course, as well, you had to read Benny for his love of language, language that curled around an idea. Not some academic-trained “use this word here and that word there and please, not too many syllables because someone might either not understand the word or become offended by use of the reference.” He took more heat than one could shake a stick at for calling George Stevens, the baseball owner, a troglodyte, which of course he was (and Benny tracing his habits proved that to be true but everybody thought it was some off-the-wall sexual reference). One could go on and on with such examples but that one sticks in my mind.

Of course some of Benny’s’ characterizations would not be politically correct, and probably rightly, so these days, days when the slightest untoward word or murmur might sent somebody over the edge, or into the law courts, as when he called one professional lady golfer a daughter of Sappho and another a daughter of Lesbos, or some pleasing and pleasant black ball player an Uncle Tom, or ditto some Latino player Tio Taco. This though from a guy who faced serious governmental investigations when he defended the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, and the Young Lords in the public prints and others journalist shied away from him like it might be contagious. Worse was when he would call about every guy not hunkered down with weight and muscle“light on his feet,” or a hermaphrodite. He was vicious, there is no other word for it, in that regard when it came to wide receivers in football. He was an old tough tight end guy in a world that had gone soft, soft in their dreams, soft in their expectations. Fortunately most people who read his stuff were clueless on his references but in those days you could say that stuff an and not get called on the carpet for it since nobody wanted to have to prove they were, or were not, the way he characterized them. Not in court anyway.

Those mad-hatter days are gone in the 24/7/365 minute news flash world. A world I miss, and am not afraid to say so. Adieu Benny, warts and all.

***For The Late Mad- Hatter Journalist Benny Sachem, Take Two

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

There was a time when I would read everything that the mad-hatter journalist Benny Sachem wrote just like I did with the late "Doctor Gonzo," Hunter S. Thompson. Benny’s passing, aged 76, after a short illness, represented the end of an era. An era of far-flung, shoot- from-the- hip journalism that coincided with the jail-break notions of my generation, the generation of ’68, when he first made his mark on the first draft of the history of that “sweet jesus, what the hell were we doing” time. He will be fondly remembered in these quarters, like Thompson, not because I agreed with his (or their) political perspectives, or his cultural critiques but because, as a guy I respect, Kevin Callahan, a columnist for The Portland Gazette, pointed out one time when doing a retrospective of 1960s countercultural journalists, he represented that little space in the bourgeois press reserved for those who could thumb their noses at the bosses, and walk away still standing. Thompson as everybody knows, everybody from the back pages of the 1960s and 1970s knows, gored more oxen that one would think possible. But Benny did too.

Benny, like Thompson, went after, viciously went after which was the only possible way to do the thing, and do it right, one Richard Milhous Nixon. Yah, the guy who lost to Jack Kennedy in 1960, went away bleeding over everybody who would stand for it and spilled that same blood on everything he could get his grabby little hands around and came roaring back as the second coming of Count Dracula. In short as a President of the United States and common criminal who will forever replace guys like James Buchanan and Warren Harding as the bad boy of the White House. Benny went mano y man almost instinctively from Nixon’s first day in office calling him, on his nice days, nothing but a two- bit whore, and a bloodsucker who should have been wearing dresses(no offense to the women meant ) since he was so crooked that he was unable to put a pair of pants on. Like I said that was on his nice days. For the not so nice days please look the stuff up in the archives if you have time, and need a laugh during today’s version of the daily bummer coming out of Washington.

But see here was the beauty of a guy like Sachem, and Thompson too, he went after the thug Nixon when he was riding high during his Teflon first term back in the late 1960s when he was like some Madonna figure (mother of Christ Madonna not the entertainer) and most journalists were finding ways, finding many ways, to take a dive for the duration and bury their heads in the sand. And while they really headed for cover when the Nixon cutthroat gang (and that is being kind) hammered down after he was almost sanctified in 1972 after he beat a bush league politician like George McGovern like a gong Benny kept up the attack, exposed that faker for less than a two-bit whore. Anybody who wants to place that man ahead of the aforementioned Jimmy Buchanan and Warren Harding better peruse the archives of Benny’s work (and Thompson’s too) before stepping out of doors in this wicked old world with their defenses. Sachem was merciless in dragging Nixon down in the pits, into the pits of what a famous politician, one of the Kennedy boys, maybe Bobby of blessed memory I think, called Nixon whom he said represented the “dark side “of the American experiment. And he never let up beating Nixon like a gong while he down in the gutter with the common crooks, dope dealers, and hookers. Benny treated him rightly as just another night court denizen in need of a bail bondsman.

That wasn’t all though like Thompson Benny took on even bigger game in the American cultural night. (After all presidents, even Presidents of the United States, come and go.) Sacred mobbed up Las Vegas and its vengeful seeking of the American disposable dollar, the big hatted, bourbon-soaked untouchable Kentucky Derby from Thompson’s home state, and, Christ, this took real cojones, dismissing the football Super Bowl as just some drunken brawl and so much bad hubris. And Benny Sachem, maybe a little less famously than Thompson always did the same thing, always try to shed some light in dark places, with a little humor if possible, but with that damn flashlight nevertheless, on his various beats, mostly later at the Kansas City Herald Tribune.

Benny, from the same no holds barred school of journalism as Thompson, the notorious Gonzo school where a reporter actually reported stuff he thought about as well as the just the facts jack, not only took on old punching bag Nixon but he also skewered guys like Hubert Humphrey and that bush league George McGovern whom Thompson gave a pass to. See Benny, unlike Thompson, had no ill-defined, ill-advised political agenda to preserve so he didn’t have to give passes to those he was trying to influence, or in order to get some cozy one-on-one interview. One can hardly forget the time when Benny and the usually unflappable Senator McGovern almost went mano y mano on national television when Benny asked about his hidden young mistress living in some cheap out of the way motel back in Fargo, or one of those dank Dakota places. That was pure Benny, go for the jugular, and take no prisoners

Benny was even better as being the thorn in side of lesser politicians, the guys who wanted to make it to the top but didn’t, didn’t in more than one case because of some Benny expose. Like that time that Muskie, the guy from Maine who ran as Humphrey’s running mate in 1968 and who was riding high before Benny got to his doctor who was issuing him morphine prescriptions under an assumed name. Jesus, a stone-cold junkie as President. Thanks Benny on that one. Or like the time he stopped Jimmy Brown, yah, the California guy who has been running for some office ever since Hector was a pup, in his tracks when he exposed the Mexican cartel cocaine connection that was funding his presidential bids back in the 1980s. And who was caught sampling the merchandise as well, right in public, claiming it was just a snuff from his little snuff box that some girlfriend had given like it was about 1750 or something. Kudos Benny.

But Benny was best known to the general public for his sports columns, for his disassembling of the disassemblers who people that industry, including some of his fellow sports- writers. Who can forget that expose of the famed football writer, Grantland Stevens, who it turned out was stealing his copy straight from the publicity department of the Chicago Bears and claiming it was his stone-cold own work. Or the time he dismissed the New York Yankees, a team he loved from childhood having grown up in the shadow of the stadium in the Bronx, as nothing but candy asses and pretty boys, overpaid as well. The stuff he said about the owner at the time is unprintable here. He even out bad hubris-ed [sic] Thompson on the Super Bowl calling it a worse show than some low rent drag queen review in the Village. And went on for about fifteen pages of pure Benny vile about it. Funny how right he proved to be now that we have had an endless number of those mid-winter bummers to foul up the air. There were too many individual player stories that he wrote to mention here but as a measure of his power by the end of his career he was persona non gratain most American sports locker rooms, including that of the saintly PGA. That is to his credit.

And of course, as well, you had to read Benny for his love of language, language that curled around an idea. Not some academic-trained “use this word here and that word there and please, not too many syllables because someone might either not understand the word or become offended by use of the reference.” He took more heat than one could shake a stick at for calling George Stevens, the baseball owner, a troglodyte, which of course he was (and Benny tracing his habits proved that to be true but everybody thought it was some off-the-wall sexual reference). One could go on and on with such examples but that one sticks in my mind.

Of course some of Benny’s’ characterizations would not be politically correct, and probably rightly, so these days, days when the slightest untoward word or murmur might sent somebody over the edge, or into the law courts, as when he called one professional lady golfer a daughter of Sappho and another a daughter of Lesbos, or some pleasing and pleasant black ball player an Uncle Tom, or ditto some Latino player Tio Taco. This though from a guy who faced serious governmental investigations when he defended the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, and the Young Lords in the public prints and others journalist shied away from him like it might be contagious. Worse was when he would call about every guy not hunkered down with weight and muscle“light on his feet,” or a hermaphrodite. He was vicious, there is no other word for it, in that regard when it came to wide receivers in football. He was an old tough tight end guy in a world that had gone soft, soft in their dreams, soft in their expectations. Fortunately most people who read his stuff were clueless on his references but in those days you could say that stuff an and not get called on the carpet for it since nobody wanted to have to prove they were, or were not, the way he characterized them. Not in court anyway.

Those mad-hatter days are gone in the 24/7/365 minute news flash world. A world I miss, and am not afraid to say so. Adieu Benny, warts and all.

Memorial Day for Peace

May 27, 2013, 1:00 – 3:00 pm

Christopher Columbus Park

105 Atlantic Ave.

Boston, Massachusetts

Please join us

Please join Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade, Chapter 9 and Samantha Smith, Chapter 45, Military Families Speak Out, Mass Peace Action and United for Justice with Peace as we commemorate Memorial Day on Monday May 27, 2013

There will be no parade, no marching band, no military equipment, no guns and drums, no Air Force fly-overs.

There will be veterans and supporters who have lost friends and loved ones. There will be veterans who know the horrors of war and the pain and anguish of loss. There will be friends and families of soldiers, remembering their loved ones. There will be Iraqi Refugees who have suffered terrible losses and will join us as we remember and show respect for their loss.

There will be flowers dropped into the harbor for each fallen U.S. soldier from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Flowers will also be also be dropped into the harbor remembering the loss of Iraqi family and friends.

***Doll’s Story-With The Asphalt Jungle In Mind, Take Two

FromThe Pen Of Frank Jackman

Doll never had a guy who could go the whole distance, never once, never a guy who could think one step ahead, one step ahead of that next dollar, never a guy who could figure the percentages to his advantage, never. Not once since way back in her start out youth when her boy-man Johnny Rango, he with his big ideas of being king of the hill in the drag racing world up in the back wood of Maine where she came from, up past Auburn, who spun out of control in some drug frenzy driving his street vehicle on old Route One, and leaving her sixteen, pregnant and no dough. Not Benny Gold who had everything sewed up, was going to be the king hell king of Las Vegas, except he never go the message that the place was all sewed up and had been since about 1946 and so wound up in some dusty arroyo ravine on the road heading to California with a fistful of bullets for his efforts. There were some later other not guys too but she was too weary to think of them.

What she wanted to think about just then was not even her last man, Bix, the straightest guy she ever knew could go the distance. The man she was crazy for from first day when he came into the club, the Kit Kat Club where she was warbling for cheap change, and he just kind of country boy stared at her while she was singing, singing some torch number, Billie’s Am I Blue that she had done a thousand times but reached some high white note while he was staring and so she was hooked, hooked bad. Yah, Doll had had it bad for Bix, yah, real bad, and so the tensions between them, her loving him no matter what and he kind of casting her aside because he was always looking for the main chance, looking to get well, looking too for that foolish El Dorado were kind of the overhead she had to pay to keep him in her sights, keep him sitting at the bar every night hoping that he would look at her again like that first night. Hoping to hit that high white note. Even that didn’t matter so much after all while, didn’t matter as she played her hand out right to the end, right to the end of hope. Doll though never did figure out the ABCs of hard guys- hanging around wrong gees, even stand-up wrong gees, was nothing but heartbreak hotel. But sometimes that is the way dames are, thankfully.

Yah, as Doll thought back on it, Bix and his childhood dreams, his simple-minded dreams, his dream of recovering some Kentucky Podunk bluegrass dirt farm his father lost in the Great Depression like you could bring that back, or want to. That was the hard edge county boy about him, the thing that appealed to her, and the thing that had driven that magical high white note. That mixed in, mixed in with the wrong gee, the stand-up wrong gee stuff since she seemed to always draw that kind, and with some sense of honor, a sense that you had to see things through to the end, for good or evil. A funny mix anyway you look at it. Damn all Doll wanted was for him to do was pay her a little more attention, maybe set up housekeeping together, not get married, she was no blushing school girl but more a beaten flower so she would not play that card, not if he didn’t want to, not if it would crowd him too much But Bix couldn’t see it the way she wanted him to see it, he had to go and face his own music his own way and now he was down in some good earth Kentucky hay field face down to the wind pushing up flowers. Yah, he had to do it his way. Get involved way over his head with a bunch of guys looking for easy street and coming up empty. Damn, again.

Damn Doc and his big complicated plans, the heist of the century was the way he tried to sell it. That wizened, harden old con trying for one last chance at “easy street” with a big caper and Bix as, well, the “hooligan,” the “muscle”, the guy who has to clean up after. That was Bix’s forte, what guys relied on him for, trusted him to carry out his part. Bix was too simple-minded, too small dreamed to carry out a big job as the mastermind but as the hired help he was just fine. Still Bix, maybe after a few drinks, maybe after she got done loving him up, and he was more expansive would talk, talk big, and as she knew from his talk he was also looking for his own version of that easy street. So that was the lay.

Doll knew from the beginning the thing, that damn heist, was a “no go,” was way too complicated with too many moving parts the way Bix explained it, and he just a mug who might have robbed grocery stores or did some strong arm work was in way over his head and she tried to kind of telegraph the problem to Bix from the start; crime doesn’t pay, okay. But that “wisdom” has never stopped a million "from hunger" guys (and not a few dames) from taking the quick plunge to easy street since way back, way back in pharaoh’s times probably. Maybe back to the garden times.

See Doc, old time con that he was, had just got released from stir for having taken the fall for some previous big plan crime that went bust around the time that Doll fell for Bix, had had plenty of time on his hands up at the pen to work through his latest plan for easy street. A big plan involving knocking over a big downtown jewelry store, grabbing nothing but hard rocks not cheap jack wedding rings for runaways or soldiers but serious Mayfair swell jewelry, having the merchandise “fenced,” and then off he would go to get some sun and senoritas, young senoritas by the way, the dirty old man, down in Mexico. Mexico before the drug cartels blasted everything down there to hell and back. She never told Bix this because she was afraid that he would slap her around and tell her to keep her mouth out of it, or worst, leave her flat, but she knew from some of boys who worked at the club and knew Doc in the old days, that he loved the young stuff, very young, teenage stuff, and part of the reason he took that last fall was that he was shacked up with some young frail and her parents went to the cops looking for her. Doc was supposed to be lying low and so the boys in on that last heist cried to “uncle” on him. No, Bix wouldn’t listen to that kind of thing.

But such an effort as Doc proposed needed upfront cash for tools, plans and reliable men, and some major backing, to procure the master safe cracker, an expert wheelman and, just in case things get rough, the hooligan, her Bix, the guy who takes all the pot-shots for short money and also to secure a conduit to fence this high roller stuff after the heist. And that is where things started to go awry.

See, one of reasons Doll figured that crime doesn’t pay, pay in the long or short haul, was that not everybody is on the level. Sure the safe cracker, the wheel man, and the hooligan, the“proles, ” the short money guys, were on the level. Especially her farm boy Bix turned loose in the ugly, asphalt jungle city just looking for a stake to get back home to Kentucky and out of the city soils. The problem was the up-front dough guys, one way or the other, were not on the level.

One guy, Emmett, Doll thought his name was, Bix wouldn’t say, had no dough, was all front and bluster, a wash-out (although later when she put the pieces together it was easy to see why that was so since he was, well let’s just call it “keeping time” with a young honey, some budding starlet, Angela, and even Doll could see where keeping her "happy”from the way Bix described her would eat up a guy’s wallet). The other guy wilted under the slightest pressure, police pressure. He couldn’t stand up to the grilling and spilled his guts out. All it took was a few slap arounds and he sang like a bird, the rat. But who had time to check with the Better Business Bureau when you are in the rackets to check the “fence’s” references (and bank book). Or that a guy would rat you out. Needless to say that while the jewel heist was pulled off, although not without complications, deadly complications, a couple of coppers or security guards, same thing, went down in a hail of gun fire, some of it Bix’s. Bix took some gunfire too and was bleeding like a pig when he got to Doll’s place after the coppers cracked the case wide open.

So Doll, having been through some mills herself, could have told Bix a thing or two about that thin line between the bad guys and the good guys, and the good guys are not always the cops and respectable folks. But she knew she would just be some broken record if she pushed him hard on it. Thinking things over Doc, for instance, was cool customer, a good guy, even if he was nothing but a has-been moth-eaten old con; although he makes a few serious mistakes of judgment in whom to, and who not to, trust he was a likeable enough crook. If only he could have kept his big deal talk away from Bix. Bix, ditto, because he was a stand-up guy, gave one hundred per cent for what he was paid to do, and did not leave his buddies in the lurch. But that stand-up guy policy left Doll just one more time with a guy, the straightest guy she ever knew, who couldn’t go the distance. Damn.