Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- Ain’t Got No Time For Corner Boys Down In The Street Making All That Noise- Doc’s Drugstore
From The Pen Of The Late Peter Paul Markin
With A 2015 Introduction By Sam Lowell
If you did not know what happened to the late Peter Paul Markin who used to write for some of the alternative newspaper and magazine publications that proliferated in the wake of the 1960s circus-war/bloodbath/all world together festival/new age aborning cloud puff dream, won a few awards too and was short-listed for the Globe Prize this is what is what. What is what before the ebb tide kind of knocked the wind out of everybody’s sails, everybody who was what I called “seeking a newer world,” a line I stole from some English poet (Robert Kennedy, Jack’s brother, or his writer “cribbed” the line too for some pre-1968 vision book before he ran for President in 1968 so I am in good company.) I will tell you in a minute what expression “the Scribe,” a named coined by our leader, Frankie Riley, which is what we always called Markin around the corner we hung out in together in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor in our hometown of North Adamsville, used to describe that change he had sensed coming in the early 1960s. Saw coming long before any of the rest of us did, or gave a rat’s ass about in our serious pressing of the moment, you know our existential angst moment although we did not call it that until later when the Scribe went off to college and tried to impress us with his new found facts, his two thousand new found facts about guys like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, worries about girls (all of the existential problems angst including about bedding them, or rather getting them in back seats of cars mainly), dough (ditto the girl existential thing to keep them interested in you and not run off with the next guy who had ten bucks to spend freely on them to your deuce, Jesus) and cars (double ditto since that whole “bedding” thing usually hinged on having a car, or having a corner boy with some non-family car to as we used to say, again courtesy of the Scribe via scat bluesman Howlin’ Wolf, “doing the do.”
All I know is that ebb tide that caught Markin kind of flat-footed, kind of made him gravitate back toward his baser instincts honed by every breathe he took as a kid down in the projects where he learned the facts of life, the facts of fellaheen life which is what one of our junior high school teachers called us, called it right too although we were the urban versions of the downtrodden shanty peasants but they were kindred no doubt, is still with us. So maybe being, having been a “prophet, ” being a guy who worried about that social stuff while we were hung up on girls, dough and cars (him too in his more sober moments especially around one Rosemond Goode), wasn’t so good after all. Maybe the late Markin was that kind of Catholic “martyr saint” that we all had drilled into us in those nasty nun run Sunday catechism classes, maybe he really was some doomed “n----r” to use a phrase he grabbed from some Black Panther guys he used to run around with when he (and Josh Breslin) lived in Oakland and the “shit was hitting the fan” from every law enforcement agency that could put two bullets in some greasy chamber to mow down anybody even remotely associated with the brothers and the ten point program (who am I kidding anybody who favored armed self-defense for black men and women).
Here is a quick run-down about the fate of our boy corner boy bastard saint and about why stuff that he wrote forty or fifty years ago now is seeing the light of day. I won’t bore you with the beginnings, the projects stuff because frankly I too came out of the projects, not the same one as he did but just as hopeless down in Carver where I grew up before heading to North Adamsville and Josh who was as close as anybody to Markin toward the end was raised in the Olde Saco projects up in Maine and we are both still here to tell the tale. The real start as far as what happened to unravel the Scribe happened after he, Markin, got out of the Army in late 1970 when he did two things that are important here. First, he continued, “re-connected” to use the word he used, on that journey that he had started before he was inducted in the Army in 1968 in search of what he called the Great Blue-Pink American West Night (he put the search in capitals when he wrote about the experiences so I will do so here), the search really for the promise that the “fresh breeze” he was always carping about was going to bring. That breeze which was going to get him out from under his baser instincts developed (in self-defense against the punks that were always bothering him something I too knew about and against his mother who was truly a dinosaur tyrant unlike my mother who tended to roll with the punches and maybe that helped break my own fall down that Markin fate ladder) in his grinding poverty childhood, get out from under the constant preoccupation with satisfying his “wanting habits” which would eventually do him in.
Markin had made a foolish decision, foolish in retrospect although he when I and others asked about whether he would have done things differently if he had known what the hell-hole of Vietnam was all about was ambivalent about the matter, to drop out of college (Boston University) after his sophomore year in 1967 in order to pursue his big cloud puff dream, a dream which by that time had him carrying us along with him on the hitchhike road west in the summer of love, 1967, and beyond. Of course 1967, 1968, 1969 and other years as well were the “hot” years of the war in Vietnam and all Uncle Sam and his local draft boards wanted, including in North Adamsville, was warm bodies to kill commies, kill them for good. As he would say to us after he had been inducted and had served his tour in ‘Nam as he called it (he and the other military personnel who fought the war could use the short-hand expression but the term was off-bounds for civilians in shortened form) and came back to the “real” world he did what he did, wished he had not done so, wished that he had not gone, and most of all wished that the American government which made nothing but animals out of him and his war buddies would come tumbling down for what it had done to its sons for no good reasons.
And so Markin continued his search, maybe a little wiser, continued as well to drag some of his old corner boys like me on that hitchhike road dream of his before the wheels fell off. I stayed with him longest I think before even I could see we had been defeated by the night-takers and I left the road to go to law school and “normalcy.” (The signposts: Malcolm X’s, Robert Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King’s assassinations, hell maybe JFK’s set the who thing on a bad spiral which kind of took the political winds out of any idea that there would not be blow-back for messing with the guys in power at the time, the real guys not their front-men, the politicians; the rising tide of “drop out, drug out, live fast and die young” which took a lot of the best of our generation off giving up without a fight; the endless death spiral of Vietnam; the plotted killings of Black Panthers and any other radical or revolutionary of any color or sex who “bothered” them; and, the election of one master criminal, Richard Milhous Nixon, to be President of the United States which was not only a cruel joke but put paid to the notion that that great unwashed mass of Americans were on our side.) Markin stuck it out longer until at some point in 1974, 1975 a while after I had lost touch with him when even he could see the dreams of the 1960s had turned to dust, turned to ashes in his mouth and he took a wrong turn, or maybe not a wrong turn the way the wheel of his life had been set up but a back to his baser instincts turn which had been held in check when we were in the high tide of 1960s possibilities. (Josh Breslin, another corner boy, although from Olde Saco, Maine who had met Markin out in San Francisco in the summer of love in 1967 and who had also left the road earlier just before me was in contact until pretty near the end, pretty close to the last time in early 1975 anybody heard from Markin this side of the border, this side of paradise as it turned out since he lived out in California where Markin was living at the time confirmed that Markin was in pretty ragged mental and physical condition by then).
Markin had a lot invested emotionally and psychological in the success of the 1960s “fresh breeze coming across the land” as he called it early on. Maybe it was that ebb tide, maybe it was the damage that military service in hell-hole Vietnam did to his psyche, maybe it was a whole bunch of bad karma things from his awful early childhood that he held in check when there were still sunnier days ahead but by the mid-1970s he had snapped. Got involved in using and dealing cocaine just starting to be a big time profitable drug of choice among rich gringos (and junkies ready to steal anything, anytime. anywhere in order to keep the habit going). Somehow down in Mexico, Sonora, we don’t know all the details to this day a big deal Markin brokered (kilos from what we heard so big then before the cartels organized everything and before the demand got so great they were shipping freighters full of cold cousin cocaine for the hipsters and the tricksters and big for Markin who had worked his way up the drug trade food chain probably the way he worked his way into everything by some “learned” dissertation about how his input could increase revenue, something along those lines) went awry, his old time term for something that went horribly wrong, and he wound up face down in a dusty back road with two slugs to the head and now resides in the town’s potter’s field in an unmarked grave. But know this; the bastard is still moaned over, moaned to high heaven.
The second thing Markin did, after he decided that going back to school after the shell-shock of Vietnam was out of the question, was to begin to write for many alternative publications (and I think if Josh is correct a couple of what he, Markin, called “bourgeois” publications for the dough). Wrote two kinds of stories, no three, first about his corner boy days with us at Salducci’s (and also some coming of age stories from his younger days growing up in the Adamsville Housing Authority “projects” with his best friend, Billie Bradley before he met us in junior high school). Second about that search for the Great Blue-Pink American Night which won him some prizes since he had a fair-sized audience who were either committed to the same vision, or who timidly wished they could have had that commitment (like a couple of our corner boys who could not make the leap to “drugs, sex, rock and roll, and raising bloody hell on the streets fighting the ‘monster’ government” and did the normal get a job, get married, get kids, get a house which made the world go round then). And thirdly, an award-winning series of stories under the by-line Going To The Jungle for the East Bay Other (published out of the other side of the bay San Francisco though) about his fellow Vietnam veterans who could not deal with the “real” world coming back and found themselves forming up in the arroyos, along the rivers, along the railroad tracks and under the bridges of Southern California around Los Angeles. Guys who needed their stories told and needed a voice to give life to those stories. Markin was their conduit.
Every once in a while somebody, in this case Bart Webber, from the old corner boy crowd of our youthful times, will see or hear something that will bring him thoughts about our long lost comrade who kept us going in high school times with his dreams and chatter (although Frankie Riley was our leader since he was an organizer-type whereas Markin could hardly organize his shoes, if that). Now with the speed and convenient of the Internet we can e-mail each other and get together at some convenient bar to talk over old times. And almost inevitably at some point in the evening the name of the Scribe will come up. Recently we decided, based on Bart’s idea, that we would, if only for ourselves, publish a collection of whatever we could find of old-time photographs and whatever stories Markin had written that were still sitting around somewhere to commemorate our old friend. We have done so with much help from Bart’s son Jeff who now runs the printing shop that Bart, now retired, started back in the 1960s.
This story is from that first category, the back in the day North Adamsville corner boy story, although this one is painting with a broader brush. It had been found in draft form up in Josh Breslin’s attic in Olde Saco, Maine where he had lived before meeting Markin in the great summer of love night in 1967 and where he had later stored his stuff in his parents’ house and which he had subsequently inherited. We have decided whatever we had to publish would be published as is, either published story or in draft form. Otherwise, moaning over our brother or not, Markin is liable to come after us from that forlorn unmarked grave and give us hell for touching a single word of the eight billion facts in his fallen head.
Here is what he had to say:
Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- Ain’t Got No Time For Corner Boys Down In The Street Making All That Noise- Doc’s Drugstore
From The Pen Of The Late Peter Paul Markin:
It wasn’t all be-bop night, rock ‘n’ roll sock hop, midnight drifter, midnight sifter, low-rider, hard-boiled corner boy 1950s life in old down and out working-class dregs North Adamsville. Not at all. But a lot of it was, a lot that working-class kid clamoring to find a place in the sun ethos bespoke of the early phases of American deindustrialization, although we would not have called that then, that came later, if we had been aware of it even, with the demise of the local mainstay ship- building and its associated industries (work, father work, father paycheck work, producing gears, machine tools, and tubes, endless tubes fitted out in some unexplained riggings), great world war ship a day warship shipbuilding and then later gigantic oil tankers that sail the known oceans, sailed with Popeye the skipper out in Frisco, China and some places in Asia and that came in low-riding, like some easy rider, and left sailing on top of the world, and then, then nothing, maybe a sailboat, or a row boat for all I know, I just don’t know more, or why so consult The Wall Street Journal archives to find out why the ships got built elsewhere when labor costs got too much for the shipping magnates and they took their flags of convenient and their dry-docks elsewhere, okay because I got corner boy remembrances on my mind not some damn coupon-clipping.
All I know, or at least all that I know from what I heard my father, and other fathers say, was that that industry was the life’s blood of getting ahead, getting ahead in the 1950s life in that beat down, beat up, beat thirteen ways to Sunday town (yah, I know it is only six but it sure did seem like thirteen on some hard father unemployed days with five hungry sons and a box of surly oatmeal to fill hungers). And so that demise produced low-riders of a different sort, hard-boiled corner boys who got by anyway they could starting early with the “clip” and then working their way to every drifter, grafter, midnight sifter action they could think of short of jail and if it came to jail, well it came to jail and that was part of the “life” too, the overhead for that awful “wanting habits” thing that gnawed deep inside every wayward corner boy. The easy life of pinball wizardry (hanging around mom and pop variety stores, hanging heels against walls learning of the first mystified sexual feelings from watching the older guys pseudo-“pump” old heavy breasted come hither Madame LaRue urging them on to get enough points to win, well, win a free game was the ploy but we knew what that really meant or the older boys did and half-assed passed it on to the younger boys a lot it wrong, almost fatally wrong), dime store lurid magazines (complete with deep-cleavage ravished blonde-headed women who got into trouble by being trouble for some young hormone-mad guys or else were hard party girls who gave no quarter and asked for none but a lot of decoding that difference came later, later when they, the party girls, would take you around the world, “do the do” and then grab your dough ah but what a ride when some Sally knew how to blow that whistle, knew how to do things that you would only find names for later when the Kama Sutra became your bible), slow-drinking Cokes (or Pepsis, but make mine local Robb’s Root Beer), draped around heavy mascara-eyed, sweater form-filled girls, cashmere the sweater material all sweet innocent curves-enhancing, and the occasional armed robbery to break up the day, and bring in some much needed dough which held a higher place that it might have, and almost certainly would in some new town West, some Flagstaff, Ogden, Irvine, Modesto town.
But what was a guy to do if to get out of the house, get away from Ma’s nagging (and it was almost always Ma, every Ma house in those days Pa needing his rest or out early looking for short pay work to tide over until rent day or to earn enough to short up the rent and pay the oil bill or some damn bill entire stories could be etched from the plain white envelope on pay day dodge to try to keep the family from the “county farm” which threatened if the eviction notice came to the door), siblings heckling (Jesus never enough room to breathe and to face those hand-me-down out of fashion big brothers clothes), and just breathe in some fresh air, some fresh be-bop rock corner boy air, if at all possible. See, this was well before mall rat-dom came into fashion, and hanging around food courts and zipping in and out of random stores became a teen urban folk legend pastime, since the nearest mall was way too far away to drag yourself to, and it also meant traveling through other corner boy, other maybe not friendly corner boy lands.
So if you didn’t want to tie yourself down to some heavy felony on some soft misty, foggy better, night by hanging around tough corner boy, Red Hickey-ruled Harry’s Variety as he stealthily rampaged through the neighborhood properties (and you as look-out if too young to pull the caper yourself), or your tastes did not run to trying to cadge some pinball games from those same toughs, or you were too young, too innocent, too poor, too car-less or too ragamuffiny (I’ll put in the sic for you on that last one) for those form-filled, Capri-panted girls with their haunting black mascara eyes then you had to hang somewhere else, and Doc’s, yah, Doc’s Drugstore was where you hung out in the more innocent section of that be-bop 1950s night.
Wait a minute I just realized that I had better explain, and do it fast before you get the wrong idea, I am not talking about some CVS, Rite-Aid, or Osco chain-linked, no soliciting, no trespassing, no loitering, police take notice, run in and run out with your fistful of drugs, legal drugs, places. Or run in for some notions or sundries, whatever they are. No way, no way in hell would you want to hang out where old-timers like your mothers and fathers and grandparents went to help them get well.
No this was Doc’s, Doc-owned (yah, Doc, Doc Adams, I think, I think somebody told me once that he was part of some branch of that Adams crowd, the presidential Adams crowd that used to be big wheels in the town, and the country, America too I think ), Doc-operated, and Doc-ruled. And Doc let, unless it got too crazy, kids, ordinary kids, not hard-boiled white tee-shirted corner boys but plaid-shirted, chino pant-wearing (no I am not going to go on and on about the cuffs, no cuffs controversy that animated many a youthful night, okay, so keep reading), maybe loafers (no, no inserted pennies, please, and no, no, no, Thom McAn’s, no controversy on those points ), a windbreaker against some ocean-blown windy night on such nights, put their mark on the side walls, the side brick walls of his establishment. And let the denizens of the Doc night (not too late night either, he closed by eleven) put, as well, every self-respecting corner boy, tee-shirted or plaid, his mark by standing, one loafer-shod foot on the ground, and the other knee-bent against the brick wall holding Doc’s place together. True-corner boy-dom. Classic pose, classic memory pose.
And see, Doc, kindly, maybe slightly mad Doc, and now that I think about it slightly girl-crazy himself maybe, let girls, even girls hang against the wall. Old Harry’s Variety Red Hickey would have shot one of his girls in the foot if they ever tried that stunt. Girls were to be draped, preferably draped around Red not around Harry’s wall, brick or not. Now, after what I just described you know that you’re into a new age night because no way Harry, and definitely not Red (real name Daniel, but don’t ever call him that though, not if you want to finish your sweet short life in one piece) Hickey, king hell king of the low-rider night that I told you about before, just a couple minutes ago, would let some blond, real or imagined, Capri-panted, cashmere sweater-wearing (tight, very tight cashmere sweater-wearing, if you didn’t know), boffed, bimbo (ouch, but that is what we called them, so be it) even stand around his corner. Dames (better, right) were for his hot-rod Chevy, hard-driving, low-riding sitting on the seat next to, and other stuff. But plaid-shirted guys (loafer-shod, no pennies and un-cuffed black chinos, got it) liked, do you hear me Red and Harry, liked having girls hanging with them to while away the be-bop hard night corner boy lands.
Before you even ask, Doc’s had not pinball machine and no pinball wizards (as far as I remember, although a couple of guys and a girl were crackerjack bowlers). But see, Doc’s had the things that mattered, mattered for plaid-shirted guys with a little dough (their allowances, no snickering please for any hard-boiled readers, or poor ones) in their pockets, and lust, chaste lust maybe, in their hearts. Doc’s had a soda fountain, one, and, two, a juke box. Where the heck do you think we heard a zillion times all those songs from back then that I keep telling you about? Come on now, smarten up.
And, of course if you have corner boys, even nice corner boys, you have to have a king hell king corner boy. Red, Red Hickey understood that instinctively, and acted on it, whip chain in hand. Other boys in other corners acted on it in that same spirit, although not that crudely. And corner boy king, Doc’s Drugstore corner boy king, Brian Pennington, plaid-shirted king of the soft-core corner boy night acted on that same Red premise. How Brian (“Bri” to most of us) came to be king corner boy is a good story, a good story about how a nowhere guy (my characterization nowhere guy) used a little influence to get ahead in this wicked old world. Red did it by knocking heads around and was the last man standing, accepting his “crown” from his beaten, bashed and bloodied defeated cronies. Brian took a very different route.
Now I don’t know every detail of his conquest because I only touched the edges of his realm, and of his crowd, as I was moving out of the old neighborhood thralldom on to other things, heading uptown to Salducci’s Pizza Parlor, and Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, corner boy scribe things. Apparently Doc had a granddaughter, a nice but just then wild granddaughter whom Doc was very fond of as grandfathers will be. And of course he was concerned about the wildness, especially as she was coming of age, and would have been nothing but catnip (and bait) for Red and his corner boys if Doc didn’t step in and bring Brian into the mix. Now, no question, Brian was a sharp dresser of the faux-collegiate type that was just starting to come into its own in that 1960s first minute. This time of the plaid shirts was a wave that spread, and spread quickly, among those kids from working- class families that were still pushing forward on the American dream, and maybe encouraging their kids to take college courses at North Adamsville High, and maybe wind up in that burgeoning college scene that everybody kept talking about as the way out of dead ass working class existence.
Brian was no scholar, christ he was no scholar, although he wasn’t a dunce either. At least he had enough sense to see which way things were going, for public consumption anyway, and put on this serious schoolboy look. That look sold Doc, who had been having conversations with Brian every time he came into the drugstore with books in one arm, and a girl on the other. I’ll give you the real low-down sometime about how book-worthy, book-worshipping Brian really was. Let me just relate to you this tidbit for now. One day, one school vacation day, Brian purposefully knocked the books out of my hands that I had borrowed when I was coming out of the Thomas Crane Public Library branch over on Atlantic Avenue (before it moved to Norfolk Downs) and yelled all snarly at me, “bookworm.” Like I didn’t know that already.
But enough about that because this is about Brian's rise, not mine. Somehow Brian and Lucy, Doc’s granddaughter came together, and without going into all the details that like I said I don’t really know anyway, they hit it off. And see, this is where Brian’s luck really held out, from that point on not only did Brian get to hang his loafer-ed shoe on Doc’s brick wall but he was officially, no questions asked, the king of that corner boy night. That’s how I heard the story and that seems about right because nobody ever challenged Bri on it, not that I heard.
Here is the real Doc clincher though, the thing, that before our moving on to uptown pizza parlors made him a legend, and maybe one of the few sympathetic figures in that tough teen angst night. Now like I mentioned before, Doc’s was a magnet for his juke box-filled soda fountain and that drew a big crowd at times, especially after school when any red-blooded kid, boy or girl, needed to unwind from the pressure-cooker of high school, especially we freshmen who not only had to put up with the carping teachers, but any upper classman who decided, he or she, wanted to prank a frosh. That’s my big connection with Doc’s, that after school minute freshman year, but, and here I am getting my recollections second-hand, Doc’s was also a coming-of-age place for more than music, soft ice cream, and milk shakes. This is also the place where a whole generation of neighborhood boys, and through them, the girls as well had their first taste of alcohol.
How you say? Well, Brian, remember Brian, now no longer with Lucy (she was sent off to some private finishing school, Miss Woodward’s or something, and drifted from the scene) but was still Doc’s boy, Doc’s savior boy, and somehow conned old Doc into giving him his first bottle of booze. Not straight up, after all Brian was underage but Bri said it was, wink, wink, for his grandmother. Now let me explain, in those days in the old neighborhood, and maybe all over, a druggist could, as medicine, sell small bottles of hard liquor out of his shop legally. The standard for getting the prescription wasn’t too high apparently, and it was a neighborhood drugstore and so you could (and this I know from personal experience) tell Doc it was for dear old grandma, and there you have it. Known grandma tee-totalers and their grandkids would be out of the loop on this one but every self-respecting grandma had a “script” with Doc.
Now Doc knew, had to know, about this con, no question, because he always had a chuckle on him when this came up. And he had his own Doc standards- no one under sixteen (and he was sharp on that) and no girls. So many a night the corner boys around Doc’s were probably more liquored up that Red and his boys ever were. And so passed a hard freshman year. Nice, right?
