America, Where Are You Now...."- Steppenwolf’s The Monster-Take Four

America, Where Are You Now...."- Steppenwolf’s The Monster-Take Four

 

 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

America where are you now?

Don't you care about your sons and daughters?

Don't you know we need you now

We can't fight alone against the monster

Chorus Line From The Monster

 

Back in 2011 Frank Jackman’s friend from back in the old growing up hometown days in the late 1960s in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston toward the ocean, Sam Lowell, had written, under the influence of a rage he was feeling about the never-ending war in Afghanistan (still never-ending as of this 2015 writing), a review of an album of heavy-duty rock band they both loved to listen to back in the day, Steppenwolf. Sam’s impetus for writing that review had been a recent listening to the group’s song Monster on YouTube where he heard the words quoted above, the words that sent him reeling back to another never-ending war time in Vietnam. But here is the rub, back then Sam was probably the least political of the guys who hung out around Jimmy Jack’s Diner holding up the wall, checking the passing girls out, and occasionally putting a few quarters in the jukebox inside at the counter or in one the red vinyl-covered seats at a booth if they had eating money as well to hear what was what just then.

Back then those Steppenwolf lyrics about parents “abandoning” their kids leaving them alone and untutored in the ways of the harsh world to fight the monster machine that would devour them in a fit of consumer-culture death if not fought hit home not because of the raging war but because of his own difficulties with his parents, his own having to go it alone to find his own path, a path that took many wrong turns.  Frank a little more attuned to the swirl of the political maelstrom around him “got” the less personal aspect of fighting against the imperial government machine at all costs in the song and tried unsuccessfully to convey that understanding to Sam even though he too had had his own running battles mainly with his mother over what the hell he was to do in the world, about why he did not want to do the things his parents craved for him to do.       

Frank got “religion” earlier than Sam in another way since shortly after the unsuccessful attempts to “hip” Sam to the need to fight the monsters who were devouring their humanity he got a letter in late 1968, a very official letter, from his friends and neighbors (that is how they put the greeting in any case) at the Carver draft board telling him his number was up, that assuming that he was physically fit enough, he was subject to being called up (when he later went up to Boston to take his physical at the Army Base down near the harbor he found that if a guy was still breathing basically and did not fall over to the touch he was fit despite the slew of medical excuses other guys had tried to fake the doctors out with so he was found fit ). He freaked that letter-opening day, freaked the day he took his physical knowing he had passed and knowing too that the way Charley (although he would not know the significance of that name until later) was chewing up the American Army despite the beating he took during his Tet offensive that he would be called, no question, and he freaked the day the very early one morning he headed to the Boston Army Base to be inducted. That despite Frank’s immense hesitations about going, although stuck down in Carver he was unaware as he would later become aware of that there were ways to fight his induction. But see every other thing in his blessed life went the other way, there was nothing to guide him in his hesitations. Certainly not the super-patriotism of his parents, Christ, they would wind supporting the war effort until the very end and even wrote a letter to their Congressman telling him to tell President Ford to send troops to Vietnam in 1975 as all hell was breaking around Saigon and the North Vietnamese were rolling to cut off that town. Of course by that time he was in one of his frequent periods of not talking to them for years at a time. Nor did it help unlike in some places where middle class families fearful for their sons were at least listening to the options, that all the guys, all the guys he knew in old time working-class Carver, who had not jumped at the chance of enlisting but waited until they were given notice went, maybe kicking and screaming like Frank but went, and that while he had certain defined views about politics they were as he would figure out later pretty simple and not reason enough to go to jail or flee to Canada over, the choices that he had heard about but kind of dismissed out of hand. 

So Frank went to Boston and took the oath, went in and while not being the best of soldiers he was not the worse and guys in his unit would wind up saying of him that when he arrived in Vietnam and he settled in he got them out a few messes that did not look like they would get out of alive or in one piece when Charley came a-calling. Later, say late 1971 after he was discharged, early 1972 talking to a Quaker girl he was interested in over in Cambridge where he found himself hanging out after the few days that he spent in Carver convinced him that he had to flee that town, about what had happened to him in Vietnam he realized just how much he hated the monster government for doing what it did to him, about the slaughter of the innocence and about how he had to wash himself clean to get back his humanity. And so he joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and after that died down after a few years he joined that Quaker girl in her forthright efforts to bring a little peace in the world.       

Sam, and here is the funny way paths divert, had had a serious injury when he was a kid, a serious injury to his left arm which despite many severe and long-drawn-out procedures was about ninety percent useless and so was declared early on 4-F, not fit for military service, by those same friends and neighbors who had left Frank to hang out and dry. Thus while Sam tepidly held some of the same opinions that his fellow students who were causing holy hell on the campus at Boston University where it seemed every other day they were protesting or striking against something, sometimes to do with the war, other times about some grievance local or societal, he was rather outside of all of that.

Even when Frank had fruitlessly argued with him about what their parents were leaving them to fight against he had fluffed it off. Later after Frank got back for Vietnam he was a bit more thoughtful for a while, tried to listen when Frank talked about stuff, about the bloody madness going on in his name but Sam was too busy trying to survive law school and start a practice in Carver to listen much. So of course they drifted apart something that if either of them had been asked let’s say as they graduated from high school in 1967 they would have scoffed at. Frank headed west, went to California after that thing with the Quaker girl had run out, after he had let his “wanting habits” addictions get the best of him and that thread of the story is still murky (mostly drug-related and some small felonies from what Sam had heard from somebody who had run into Frank in San Francisco at a peace event in the late 1980s). Sam went on to thrive in his small town law practice, eventually taking on a partner, having a family including two sons, and generally having a good life.                

But then Sam got “religion,” got it not through anything he did, or did not do, but through the times, through another act of governmental hubris. After 9/11 (and like Pearl Harbor and a few other events in American history just saying the words stand by themselves, no explanation necessary) the bulk of the population in America was beside itself with unfocused rage, was out for some kind of vengeance, any target would do, convenient, distant, the bigger the better, but some kind of Moslem/ Arab payback was best. Like in a lot of time of emergency situations, military emergencies, some of the young get caught up in the crush of the action. Want to play the patriot game for keeps. The long and short of it was that Bradley Lowell, Sam’s older son, enlisted in Army, went to Officer Candidate School and came out a second lieutenant, came out just as all hell was breaking loose in Washington about Iraqi Saddem weapons of mass destruction and that the only way to make things right was to invade that benighted country, destroy it out of hand. Puff. Sam, beside himself when he heard that Bradley would be deployed, would be in the thick of it as an officer in an infantry unit, tried like hell to talk him out of going, talked to him about refusing to go, about going to jail, tried to talk to him about what had happened during war to guys like his old friend Frank Jackman. No soap, Brad Lowell was gung-ho. And as the fates would have it one Bradley Lowell was felled by an IED and laid his head down in Iraq on his second tour of duty in 2005.        

For a while Sam was inconsolable, as was his wife, Laura, and it took a lot of thinking to figure out what he was to do to keep Brad’s memory alive. As the situation in Iraq got more unstable and as the American casualties kept piling up Sam decided to go to an anti-war rally in Boston at the Commons one spring afternoon in 2006. (Laura taking the loss of Bradley hard in that way refused to go in public to such an event.) The crowd of a few hundred was not big like in the times of his youth during Vietnam when one day the whole Commons had been filled (he had not attended that rally since he was studying for an exam but he had heard about it from his roommate who had attended and believed that the war would be over shortly-in the event it lasted almost five years more) but he was fine with the idea of just protesting as best he could. As fate would have it Frank Jackman, back a few months before from the West Coast to attend to his wife’s mother care for a while up in Lynnfield, also was in attendance that day. That day he was wearing his dark blue embossed with the white dove of peace Veterans for Peace tee-shirt, an organization that Frank had joined just before the Iraq invasion in 2002 after many years of ad hoc work with a myriad of peace and social justice groups, and Sam thinking back to Frank’s VVAW days sort of recognized his old school boy friend, as he approached him (both men both thicker than in their slender youths, showing lots less hair, now grey-white, and lots more wrinkles and Frank sporting a longish beard and thus not unlike about half the male section of their generation so neither man could be blamed if they did not immediately recognize each other). Once the light of recognition hit they gathered to each other like in old times. Sam told Frank about his son Bradley and they both shed a tear for Brad, for their lost youth, and for the endless wars that have plagued their world.

They agreed to meet at the Sunnyvale Grille in downtown Boston a few days later and go over how they were going to continue the anti-war struggle in the face of a great deal of indifference (not of the soldiers deaths, like Brad’s, but of the unchecked damn war policies of two consecutive governments) from the general public who opposed the war before it started but had gone along with it once the deal went down. That meeting was the first time that they both discussed the commonly remembered Steppenwolf song Monster which a few years later prompted Sam to write that album review, trying to sum up the hard fact that the now oldsters Frank Jackman and Sam Lowell had to lend the kids a helping hand, or pass the torch on to them. Here is what Sam had to say:               

 

The heavy rock band Steppenwolf (maybe acid rock is better signifying that the band started in the American dream gone awry 1960s night when the likes of the Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, The Byrds and groups like the transformed from muppet Beatles and Stones held forth, rather than in the ebb-tide 1970s when the harder sounds of groups like Aerosmith and Black Sabbath were  needed to drown out the fact that  we were in decisive retreat), one of many that was thrown up by the musical counter-culture of the mid to late 1960's was a cut above and apart from some of the others due to their scorching lyrics provided mainly, but not solely, by gravelly-voiced lead singer John Kay. That musical counter-culture not only put a premium on band-written materials, as against the old Tin Pan Alley somebody wrote the lyrics, somebody else sang the song division before Bob Dylan and the Beatles made singer-songwriters fashionable but also was a serious reaction to the vanilla-ization of rock and popular music in the earlier part of the decade that drove many of us from the AM radio dials and into “exotic” stuff like electric blues (country too, come to think of it) and the various strands of folk music.    

Some bands played, consciously played, to the “drop out” notion popular at the times. “Drop out” of rat-race bourgeois society and its money imperative, its “white picket fence with little white house attached” visions. (Those my own visions which I pursued as it turned out.) That is the place where many of the young, the post-World War II baby-boomer young, now sadly older, had grown up and were in the process of repudiating for a grander vision of the world, the “world turned upside down” as an old time British folk tune had it. Drop out and create a niche somewhere (a commune maybe out away from the rat-race places some of which did spring up in the likes of Taos, Oregon, Big Sur and the hills of old Vermont which if you care to see what hellish thing happened to that old vision once the seers got older you can go to and witness first hand these days), so some physical somewhere perhaps but certainly some other mental somewhere and the music reflected that disenchantment.

That mental somewhere involved liberal use of drugs to induce, well, who knows what it induced but it felt like a new state of consciousness so make of that what you will. The drugs used, in retrospect, to make you less “uptight” not a bad thing then, or today. The whole underlying premise though whether well thought out or not was that music, the music of the shamans of the youth tribe, was the revolution. (An idea, as a man who abhorred politics then and am only a little more enamored of now but have a greater purpose to be out in the streets than then when it was a pose if I showed up at all, I held to lightly for a while) An idea that for a short while before all hell broke loose with the criminal antics of Lyndon Johnson and one Richard M. Nixon, all hell broke loose with Tet, with May 1968, with Chicago 1968, with the “days of rage,” with Altamont and with a hundred other lesser downers I subscribed to. Those events, a draft notice, some hard time in Vietnam, made my old time school boy friend Frank Jackman get “religion” on the need for “in-their-face” political struggle. Me, though it took longer, took a generation longer to lose my innocence about American war policy.         

Musically much of that stuff was ephemeral, merely background music, and has not survived (except in lonely YouTube cyberspace). Yeah, Neal Young, the Airplane, the Doors, the Byrds still sound good but a lot of it is wha-wha music now you know Ten Years After, a lot of Rod Stewart, even the acid-etched albums by the Beatles and Stones, it is no wonder that the latter do not have any tunes from Their Satanic Majesties on their playlists out on the concert tours these days). Others, flash pan “music is the revolution,” period exclamation point, end of conversation bands assumed a few pithy lyrics would carry the day and dirty old bourgeois society would run and hide in horror leaving the field open, open for, uh, us. That music too, except for gems like The Ballad Of Easy Rider, is safely ensconced in vast cyberspace.

Steppenwolf was different, was political from the get-go taking on the deadliness of bourgeois culture, worse the chewing up of their young in unwinnable wars with no apologies or second thoughts, the pusher man, the draft resister and lots of other subjects (and a few traditional songs too about the love that got away, things like that).  Not all the lyrics worked, then or now. (See below for some that do). Not all the words are now some forty plus years later memorable. After all every song is written with some current audience in mind, and notions of immortality as the fate of most songs are displaced. Certainly some of the less political lyrics seem entirely forgettable. As does some of the heavy decibel rock sound that seems to wander at times like, as was the case more often than not, and more often that we, deep in some a then hermetic drug thrall, would have acknowledged, or worried about. But know this- when you think today about trying to escape from the rat-race of daily living then you have an enduring anthem Born To Be Wild that still stirs the young (and not so young). If Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone was one musical pillar of the youth revolt of the 1960's then Born To Be Wild was the other.

And if you needed (or need) a quick history lesson about the nature of American society in the 1960's, what it was doing to its young, where it had been and where it was heading (and seemingly still is as we finish up the Afghan wars and the war signals for deep intervention into the Syria civil war or another war in Iraq get louder, or both are beating the war drums fiercely) then the trilogy under the title "The Monster" said it all.

Then there were songs like The Pusher Man a song that could be usefully used as an argument in favor of decriminalization of drugs today and get our people the hell out of jail and moving on with their lives and others then more topical songs like Draft Resister to fill out their playlist. The group did not have the staying power of others like The Rolling Stones but if you want to know, approximately, what it was like for rock groups to seriously put rock and roll and a hard political edge together give a listen to the group sometime. And listen to how right my old friend Frank Jackman had been about their political messages

Words and music by John Kay, Jerry Edmonton, Nick St. Nicholas and Larry Byrom

(Monster)

Once the religious, the hunted and weary

Chasing the promise of freedom and hope

Came to this country to build a new vision

Far from the reaches of kingdom and pope

Like good Christians, some would burn the witches

Later some got slaves to gather riches

But still from near and far to seek America

They came by thousands to court the wild

And she just patiently smiled and bore a child

To be their spirit and guiding light

And once the ties with the crown had been broken

Westward in saddle and wagon it went

And 'til the railroad linked ocean to ocean

Many the lives which had come to an end

While we bullied, stole and bought our a homeland

We began the slaughter of the red man

But still from near and far to seek America

They came by thousands to court the wild

And she just patiently smiled and bore a child

To be their spirit and guiding light

The blue and grey they stomped it

They kicked it just like a dog

And when the war over

They stuffed it just like a hog

And though the past has it's share of injustice

Kind was the spirit in many a way

But it's protectors and friends have been sleeping

Now it's a monster and will not obey

(Suicide)

The spirit was freedom and justice

And it's keepers seem generous and kind

It's leaders were supposed to serve the country

But now they won't pay it no mind

'Cause the people grew fat and got lazy

And now their vote is a meaningless joke

They babble about law and order

But it's all just an echo of what they've been told

Yeah, there's a monster on the loose

It's got our heads into a noose

And it just sits there watchin'

Our cities have turned into jungles

And corruption is stranglin' the land

The police force is watching the people

And the people just can't understand

We don't know how to mind our own business

'Cause the whole worlds got to be just like us

Now we are fighting a war over there

No matter who's the winner

We can't pay the cost

'Cause there's a monster on the loose

It's got our heads into a noose

And it just sits there watching

(America)

America where are you now?

Don't you care about your sons and daughters?

Don't you know we need you now

We can't fight alone against the monster

© Copyright MCA Music (BMI)
All rights for the USA controlled and administered by
MCA Corporation of America, INC

--Used with permission--

Born To Be Wild

Words and music by Mars Bonfire

Get your motor runnin'

Head out on the highway

Lookin' for adventure

And whatever comes our way

Yeah Darlin' go make it happen

Take the world in a love embrace

Fire all of your guns at once

And explode into space

I like smoke and lightning

Heavy metal thunder

Racin' with the wind

And the feelin' that I'm under

Yeah Darlin' go make it happen

Take the world in a love embrace

Fire all of your guns at once

And explode into space

Like a true nature's child

We were born, born to be wild

We can climb so high

I never wanna die

Born to be wild

Born to be wild

© MCA Music (BMI)
All rights for the USA controlled and administered by
MCA Corporation of America, INC

--Used with permission--

THE PUSHER

From the 1968 release "Steppenwolf"

Words and music by Hoyt Axton

You know I've smoked a lot of grass

O' Lord, I've popped a lot of pills

But I never touched nothin'

That my spirit could kill

You know, I've seen a lot of people walkin' 'round

With tombstones in their eyes

But the pusher don't care

Ah, if you live or if you die

God damn, The Pusher

God damn, I say The Pusher

I said God damn, God damn The Pusher man

You know the dealer, the dealer is a man

With the love grass in his hand

Oh but the pusher is a monster

Good God, he's not a natural man

The dealer for a nickel

Lord, will sell you lots of sweet dreams

Ah, but the pusher ruin your body

Lord, he'll leave your, he'll leave your mind to scream

God damn, The Pusher

God damn, God damn the Pusher

I said God damn, God, God damn The Pusher man

Well, now if I were the president of this land

You know, I'd declare total war on The Pusher man

I'd cut him if he stands, and I'd shoot him if he'd run

Yes I'd kill him with my Bible and my razor and my gun

God damn The Pusher

Gad damn The Pusher

I said God damn, God damn The Pusher man\

© Irving Music Inc. (BMI)

--Used with permission--

 

 

*****Fragments Of Sam Lowell’s Paris Notebooks- With Laura Perkins In Mind

*****Fragments Of Sam Lowell’s Paris Notebooks- With Laura Perkins In Mind

 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

 

Rummaging through my Sam Lowell files several months ago, files composed of frantic notes taken when he, me, we were high on life, liquor, dope, usually high-end marijuana from Mexico or Columbia in the days when that was the cartel crop of choice not the oregano-filled stuff street dealers were trying to hustle, not after the first few rookie buying errors when we made connections with guys who knew how to get good reefer and pass it along uncut or cocaine, then a rarer drug of choice and harder to depend on, I noticed a document, a rather tattered document, worn at the edges, turned slightly yellow although that could have been from the sunlight directly hitting it rather than claiming ancient origin, really about thirty pages of mimeograph paper (the old mimeo a hand-cranked messy way, messy with the carbon copy, messy with the smelly fluid used to reproduce leaflets, flyers, or any other type material in the days when copying was expensive or non-existent in the days before you could reproduce whatever you wanted at home via your printer attached to your computer, hail progress), sheets of white paper, that’s what we called it in the old days anyway, stapled together, with the title Sam Lowell’s Paris Notebooks written in pen on the front but with no name to indicate whether he or I had written the material.

In the minute before I actually inspected the material, thumbed through the pages to find out the origins, I thought it might have been some old material that I had laid aside and let go to pot (no pun intended, although the lassitude of pot-smoking may have created the environment to forget about such things) about my old friend’s trips to Paris in the 1970s that he told me about over many nights sitting in my smoky living room (from dastardly, dastardly now, tobacco cigarette smoke as well as weed smoke since we both we practically chain-smokers especially when drinking wine, or in the desperate hours before some demonstration when we were in a frenzy to get things organized and used the tobacco to keep us at a fine edge knowing full well that some ancient Surgeon-General had forced the cigarette companies to put a skull and cross –bones warning label on each and every pack speaking about the seventy-six ways the “coffin sticks,” a term we used to use around Jack Slack’s bowling alleys where we hung out in high school down in Carver) regaling me with his adventures abroad when he felt he needed to put a little distance between himself and America, become something in the mold of the American ex-pats like Hemingway, Bowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Buddha Stein (and Miss Toklas) the aftermath of World War I. Maybe not with quite the same literary conviction, certainly not with the intention of writing the great American novel which they aimed to do but certainly with the same sense that an ebb tide had been building in this country after the big bad ass fresh breeze (Sam’s term) that had come through the land in the 1960s and had evaporated without a trance.

Sam had, has, provided me with a wealth of information from the old days for my own little pieces, sketches really, since he went through a lot of the episodes related in them by me back in the day. Sam remembering things, wanting to remember things, in the tradition of the great literary rememberers who seem to have become something of a dying breed as insto-information, mostly accurate too, can be gleaned from the products of modern information technology saving hurt overstuff  heads filled with two thousand facts which may, or maybe not, have gotten them out of a jam (Sam, me too, mere acolytes to the Pete Markin when he was in his prime and had two thousand facts available just as an appetizer, had then at the tipoff his tongue so he did not even work up a sweat, who could rattle the stuff off to some unsuspecting young girl and wind up with a date more times than you might think, good-looking girls too, and smart while we were left with egg on our faces).

Sam remembering events from our old corner boy days down in Carver, down in Southeastern Massachusetts cranberry bog country for which the town was then famous and we tagged far and wide as boggers, and sons of boggers, down in front of Harry’s Variety when we were just kids about going to school dances with our full complement of two-left feet, about our social immaturities and our wicked “from hunger” wanting habits which perhaps we could not articulate, in fact I know we could not articulate then but which hung just below the surface of every action, legal or illegal that we did in those holy goof days (Jack Kerouac’s term and appropriate), about the awkwardness of growing up and dealing with girls and their funny ways which I turned into a small series about various guys, including him and me, and their two left feet, their clammy hands, their clumsiness, trying to fit into the fresh breeze world of rock and roll which freed us from having to dance close with a girl (except for that last chance last dance song where you hoped you were lucky enough, had had enough charm to wangle a chance to go on with the evening).

Remembering later when we were in high school corner boy times hanging around Jack Slack’s bowling alleys desperate to talk about, mostly talk about, the cars, girls, dough, dough a big thing on Friday and Saturday nights, that we “from hunger” boys didn’t have and used many ways, some midnight sifter ways included to get dough for our needs which I also turned into a short series about the pratfalls and pitfalls of growing up in the heat of the night at the edge of the fresh  breeze 1960s before the new dispensation took hold and changed the courses of our lives. Remembering too later times, times after high school when we all mostly went our separate ways, a few to the raging Vietnam War where we lost Jack Jenkins and Sonny Kelly from the crowd in some swampy battlefields now eternally etched in memory on black granite down in D.C., RIP, brothers, RIP.

On a happier note Sam dragging me, one time almost literally when he wanted to hear the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, to Cambridge and his beloved Harvard Square folk scene music which frankly put me on edge, makes my teeth grind to this day, and eventually after his own military service (I was exempt from the draft since I was the sole support of my mother and four younger sisters when my father, my alcoholic father if you want to know, did us the great favor of dying of a heart attack and releasing us from his grimy grip) on the hitchhike road west which he and I did a big series on under the title The Search For The  Blue-Pink Great American West Night, which was hell of a ride while it lasted, lasted until the bad guys got their guns ready, got the ebb tide rolling and I am not quite sure we are not still in its grip.

After that I didn’t think anymore more about it at the time, just threw the manuscript back into the sun-drenched pile to get yellow with other bits of paper gathering dust since I had no intention on my own of doing anything with the material whether it was Sam’s or mine since the notes were in tough shape and frankly I couldn’t figure out what half the short sharp sentences without punctuation meant, a sure sign that they were Sam’s, only in Sam’s special code unlike my own extended paragraphs explaining everything under the sun, except maybe the subject I was trying to wade through.

There it lay gathering its dusty layers and being turned by the sun a shadow of its own color until a few weeks ago when Sam, now semi-retired from his small two-man law office down in Carver, a town which he never left, never left in his mind, and never left after all the 1970s adventures except to move into a house on the Plymouth side of the Carver-Plymouth line when he got married the first time, free from over the top alimony payments after two unsuccessful marriages and four successful children, all adults, free from the burden of their collective college and graduate school (one law school, daughter Jenny) told me when we met at the Sunnyvale Grille over near the Financial District in downtown Boston that he had just gotten back from Paris, Paris, the “city of lights” as he used to always call it back when he went over fairly regularly, back in the early 1970s when still in thrall to whatever romance the 1960s still had left, whatever appeal the lore of guys, writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bowles, Winot, Breslin had on him and his vivid imagination by vagrant freighter before those two unsuccessful marriages and four successful children put a stop to that, put a stop pronto. Sam had gone over by jet with his latest flame live-in flame, Laura Perkins, who had never been there and had a life-long wish to go. (Don’t get me wrong about the flame thing, Laura and Sam have been together several years so it is not some fly-by-night romance).

Strangely or maybe not given his martial history and strike-outs Sam never went there after those vagrant runs with either wife, none of the kids, nor me although I was supposed to go one time but my girlfriend of the time, Betsy, said “no” and that finished it (that girlfriend now a wife of thirty-seven years and still counting). I mentioned to him that I had in my office a yellowing manuscript entitled Sam Lowell’s Paris Notebooks which I told him I had thumbed through quickly a few months before and that kind of forgot about since I was then writing about the horrible effect and drama that the damn, yes still damn Vietnam War had had on our generation and still does. 

Sam was surprised when I told him that information about the manuscript since he thought that it had been lost forever in one of those “move out of the house” situations with one of the wives (or later move out of one of his girlfriends’ places when he, the supposedly smart lawyer, finally figured out that it was cheaper for him to just shack up with women and avoid the “marriage penalty”). He had forgotten that after his second divorce (Joyell and two children, both girls, including budding successful lawyer Jenny who, out of loyalty to her mother according to one of his other children, will not speak to him these days despite paying through the nose for seven years of high-priced education which practically made him an indentured servant) he had wound up in our spare bedroom complete with whatever earthy possessions he was able to keep after his banishment from civil society, Joyell’s high-end civil society, which was all that mattered at the time. He had put some of his papers, this written stuff in my office when he was thinking that he would like to start writing about his old time Paris experiences and wanted to use my electric typewriter to frame his ideas (yeah, electric typewriter so it had been a while and that yellowing patina actually was with age). One thing or another came up as it will with lawyers who are hustling to earn every dollar so that they don’t wind up in front of some fiery Brahmin judge who will hold them in contempt or whatever they do when you don’t pay up your court-ordered expenses for alimony and child support (and don’t forget the college and beyond tuitions which nearly broke him, and did break his spirit for a while). So the material just got left there.

One day a few days later after our conversation at the Sunnyville Grille Sam showed up at our apartment in Cambridge (condo really for we had downsized from a house in Watertown after the kids fled the scene and we became “empty-nesters”) all red-faced, red-faced from having had a few too many high-shelf whiskies at Jack’s s down the street looking for that damn manuscript (the “damn” his expression). He had taken it into his flushed head that he wanted to write about Paris again, Laura’s Paris, to show Laura he could write about Paris like in the old days, that if nothing else they would “always have Paris” ( a line stolen by him and sixteen million other guys for reasons as varied as giving some dame the brush-off to some act of bravery from Humphrey Bogart, Bogie of the constant cigarette in hand and mouth, cigarettes 1930s and 1940s cinematic “cool” and plentiful before the that Surgeon-General lowered the boom, and the arched-eyebrow, as Rick of Rick’s American Café to Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa in the classic black and white film Casablanca as he is doing the noble thing in the struggle against the bloody Huns in letting her leave with her freedom-fighter husband Victor Lazlo after they had found each other again out in the Moroccan desert during World War II). So that night after sleeping it off a little in our spare room (feeling very spare even if smaller and more manageable than the house in Watertown now with the kids fled) Sam and I went into the office and read over the thirty odd handwritten pages of what would be the background skeleton, mainly of places and events that connected back then and now of the “travelogue” (Sam’s expression) that Sam would write. And write he did. Here is what he had to say:               

 

“Funny sitting here at Logan Airport with my sweetie, Laura Perkins, who has authorized me to call her sweetie, call her sweetie despite the fact that we are both well beyond the sweetie endearment stage to acknowledge our love, have been for years, call her sweetie even though today’s conventions, today’s women feminist conventions frown on such designations for women that term reflecting an certain old-time, hell, not so old time only forty or so years ago, a pittance in the male-female tightrope walk, male subjugation of the female by making her sound like some young child despite her womanly appearances, so there take that, a couple of hours to kill waiting for the Delta flight at 7: 35 PM, this will be the first time that I will have flown to Paris. First time too that I will have gone there since the early 1970s, since before I decided to go to law school after I felt that the fresh breathe of fresh air had held us together in the 1960s had gone to hell in fits of hubris and our own innocence and came back from California where I was trying to find the “Great Blue-Pink American West night along with Bart Webber (and the late Pete Markin who was the harbinger of the fresh breeze around Jack Slacks’ when we were in high school), since before the grind and, since before ex-wives Joyell and Ella got their claws into me.

In those days, no money, no cares in particular I would grab a cheap freighter heading to Europe, one that carried passengers although once on an oiler where they thought that I was somebody else, was one of the crew who had signed on and me near ocean-grown but totally ignorance of thing number one about boats and ships, where would I have got that kind of knowledge coming from the Carver projects and the only sea-worthy vehicle I had every had a chance to get on was a raft that me and a couple if my brothers built ,or tried to build, along the Carver River in order to head out to sea when our mother threw us out of the house at ages seven, eight, and nine for some reason that we were probably guilty of and we were going  to sail the ocean blue for adventure and blow the dust of Carver off of our shoes. Bu never again on an oiler the damn things stink worse than hell of seaweed and bilge and you have the smell of tarry oil in your nostrils forever. Although once I got my sea-legs on my first freighter, the S.S. Daniel Radley (flying a “flag of convenience out of Liberia), after a couple of days of barfing overboard or wherever I felt ill the trip wasn’t too bad but made me realize that flying in six or seven hours is surly easier that to spent several days at on the blue-green sea remembering that not too long before in human experience even the ides of crossing the rough-hewn Atlantic was an adventure fit only for the bravest, fittest, and luckiest.

Sitting too wondering what we will find about what is new in Paris since those by-gone days. Will it still have that certain charm that it had back then when the train arrived at the station from Le Havre (I had forgotten which one but it had these huge clocks with roman numerals on the top of the building which had a certain 19^th century age of progress charm about them) and I turned around and there was the Eiffel Tower seen in the mind’s eye in every half decent film set in Paris (along with the Arc de Triumph). Will it still have the ubiquitous cafes with their outdoor seemingly in all weathers tables bunched tight together filled with people-watching customers sipping wines and smoking cigarettes. Cafes, many of which I drank small whiskies neat at or expresso coffee as only the French can make with that weird coppery machinery they use to brew the stuff (many of those cafes which apparently Hemingway haunted as well at least they all boasted that he drank there, drank their wines, closed their joint down as well, for they all had at least one copy of a Hemingway novel, in English and French, as proof). The Seine with its miles of cobblestone walks and ever present barges trolling product up and down the river. Notre Dame in the mist. But mainly the feeling that as some long ago writer up in the Montmartre art colony once said “it was better to be poor in Paris than rich elsewhere.” Yeah that feeling that Sam had not felt with his self-imposed burdens of forty years rolling the rock up the hill.               

I, Laura too, had always lived busy lives, had jobs that required lots of fast-stepping and avoiding of bottle-neck situations so we did not have to wait for much of anything except perhaps an unexpected traffic delay that had always been part of the modern landscape ever since we were kids (she in North Adamsville) and our parents took us them down to Cape Cod and would always wind up starting too late in the day like lots of families with plenty of kids to be accounted for, their needs satisfied, the kids that is, and their considerations on the long trip (even a fifty mile trip with three screaming kids is a long trip-for the parents as I and Laura would learn for ourselves with our own respective families) and by the time they started all those other delayed similarly delayed families would be piled up at the Sagamore or Bourne bridges (the former if headed toward Provincetown the latter headed toward the ferry for Martha’s Vineyard) and there would be creepy crawl all the way down Route 6 or Route 24.

Once I had my own car and a desire to head to the Cape (either place) I would leave at 6 AM or not bother. I would later get up early to head to my law office early if I had a court date in say Boston and so while I never fully mastered the urban sprawl which seemed to grow exponentially each year I held it in check, rolled a little more with the punches as I aged although why there would be a twenty-five car line-up on Thornton Street when they put the traffic light there and a three light wait where previously you could breeze through using the old four-way-stop courtesies still observed in town because some drunk guy had had an accident there still makes me grind my teeth. Of course through trial and error Laura and I have  both picked up a few tricks to avoid the dreaded waiting like, this is before the age of E-Pass transmitter of course, keeping to the right lanes when traffic was heavy at tolls since everybody thought that the left lanes held some speed magic even when the lanes were clogged; avoiding express lines in supermarkets and heading to the lonely full-load grocery cashier down at the far end of the check-out lanes; using cash for small transactions everywhere; and, well, avoiding Thornton Street at certain twenty-five car back-up hours and taking North Main and a two second stop at an stop sign intersection. There were probably more things as well like using curbside service for a couple of bucks at airports where and when possible rather than face the monster lines when there was luggage to check, especially at JetBlue in Boston for some reason (of course print-out of boarding pass a beauty of modern technology but nothing can be done about that security check unless you grabbed a random Pre-TSA clearance tab and sailed through, well, almost since my knee replacement from several years ago requires the obligatory “hands up” scan and occasional pat-down to be expected in a rabid 9/11 world).          

Me, for sure, and Laura perhaps a little less so were not used to delays, or the what amounted to the same thing- waiting for services. Welcome to Paris, the land of the line everywhere although that little surprise would not become manifest until later when I, with un-ground teeth which Laura knew meant I was only go to make a casual observation and not begin a civil war, a scene that would set Franco-American relations back about one hundred years, said that this line, this patient line business meant that Parisians must have different timeclocks in their heads. It all started at the huge modern Charles De Gaulle Airport “frontier” exit into France. This new airport (it was not there that last freighter trip over) named for the unlamented former head of the Free French forces in World War II after the French army went belly-up, again as in World War I, against the Germans and the six guys who had not abjectly surrender or run away when the tanks started rolling across the borders needed a leader, a leader who did not mind that France was to be liberated by outside forces despite a fig-leaf entry late after the key battles of Normandy were in the books  and despite the real fight by the Resistance on the ground during the war far from sedate London; named for the French President who was ready to kill every Algerian nationalist he could get his hands on until they fought back furiously  and he was forced to back off or face the bastards running amok in Paris; and, named for the returned President who was ready to commit another Paris Commune massacre if cooler heads had not prevailed when students and then workers got uppity in 1968, all first rate qualifications for having an airport or any other public building named after you but enough of political potshots as Laura and I are still waiting to get out of the damn airport, rather the border of France, technical border for the line to show passports was very, very long since about three flights from wherever (at least one with prosperous looking Germans coming peacefully to France, this time) were trying to pass through to France at that same time. Very different from landing on some French coastal port in a stinking freighter with about twelve people on it and a quick run through customs. I, to Laura’s relief, stayed calm and we survived the gauntlet on the way to get our cleared luggage.     

What got me, though not Laura since she was too excited to be in France, to be on her way to Paris and all the quaintness, charm, splendor and just plain cultural atmosphere to get unnerved by whatever small indignities that might befall us, was the interminable wait for a freaking taxi cab in order to ride into the place we were to stay at (via Airbnb another marvel of modern technology which produced an inexpensive place) near the Seine in Paris. Despite a never-ending array of taxis coming through a controlled point we waited about fifteen minutes before we grabbed the next available cab. After the cab-driver, who turned out to be an impatient Gallic brethren of mine since he fumed all the way to Paris about the damn traffic piled up going into the city, we were off in a light rain which turned heavier as we approached the city causing the aforementioned grousing by the cabbie. (That rain was no surprise to us again due to the beauties of modern weather technology and the Internet for we knew in advance it would be raining when we arrived and knew enough to bring umbrellas although after that rain it was dry the next several days of our stay a fact we had also expected since we, or rather tour director Laura, had had checked the ten day forecast from home-oh, techno-beauty thou are fine.)

So we arrived at their destination in the rain, bag and baggage in hand to wait for an hour until the owner of the Airbnb apartment we had rented would meet us. We had figured to be in Paris about the time we  had planned to meet Celine, the owner of the apartment we were renting, but somehow I had miscalculated the time zones between Boston and Paris at five rather than six hours. Rather than wait the rain out under a steel awning they decided to step right into the crepes shop next door to the apartment Celine lived in. And had the best crepes I had had since I was last in Paris. Oh beautiful start.

We rested and set up that day and walked around the neighborhood to get a feel for things, for the life, walked into the beautiful Luxemburg Gardens just an hour before they were ready to close (in Paris maybe elsewhere too but I tend to go to such places early in the day these days the guards will not let you in maybe forty-five minutes or an hour before closing. Some places it makes sense but at the Gardens that didn’t make sense to me. This is one place where I knew it had been a while since I know I had slept there more than one night back in the day when I was going to the nearby Sorbonne for lectures and demonstrations and there was no guard then. But mainly we rested for all out museum assault we had planned this trip around. To the Louvre first of all.”   

Here’s is what Sam told me about the tour one night at the Sunnyvale Grille:

“The crowd around the famous painting of  Mona Lisa by Leonardo Di Vinci posed all by itself (or is it herself) in the Louvre in a central room in one of the wings of that museum in Paris was ten deep in order for each and every viewer to get their very own digitally-contrived photograph of the bemused lady (that was Sam’s take on her quizzical look but he claimed no expertise in the matter and left it to the art critics who may very well have determined that she was merely being ironic before the master’s gaze). Everybody except Sam, and not excepting Laura who was all excited about being in the same room with the lady despite the hard fact that you could not get within ten feet of the portrait (held back first by a satiny red rope barricade, then by the surly looks of two museum guards whose only job was apparently to look surly and finally lurking unmentioned in the background although nobody tested this possibility out the combined forces of the Paris police, Interpol, the French Foreign Legion and NATO if you took a mad dash toward the wall in which the lady was encased. So Sam was content to “cool his heels” as Laura waited her turn to get that once-in-a-lifetime shot of the lady (that “cooling the heels” nothing new since he had perfected the art over the years waiting in the world’s shopping venues for his lady).         

That “cooling the heels” moreover allowed him to wander about the room where there were actually a fair number of Titians and other masters to gaze at closely (within a foot a distance he respected since other surly guards might set upon him and maybe the dreaded lurking second phalanx too if he got too close but close enough to see the brushstrokes that he was always interested in observing when he looked at a painting and which was emphatically not possible with milady Mona) and to wander out in the main hallway and look at some Di Vinci’s portraits that he thought were actually better than the famous lady’s.

And that was the point that he tried to make to Laura after she came down from her high of being within twenty feet of probably the most famous painting in the Western world. Here they were at the world famous Louvre, busily trying to maneuver through the endless crowds that filled every exhibition room (and worst the blazing lights underground mall that seemingly had more customers than the museum itself as well as the restaurant areas where they had wanted to grab a quick bite to eat to fortify them for the rigors of the day’s work but wound up fleeing the place for a nice little café on Rue Bonaparte), and its most famous product (except maybe sweet Venus De Milo) could easily have been purchased at the museum store with less work.

Sam didn’t want to generalize (and didn’t really want to burst Laura’s euphoric balloon) but it really was funny that the painting had sunk so deeply into Western consciousness that it was rather anti-climactic in actually viewing the thing even that twenty feet away. Laura naturally poured water on Sam’s “so-called theory” (her expression) until they were leaving for the day (the museum really was as advertised at least a two-day adventure so back on the morrow for a look at the Greek sculpture that fascinated them both and some 17^th century French art. For later paintings you need to go to the Musee D’ Orsay across the river which is both less crowded and in a more spacious venue where you can see a billion Impressionists, maybe more) after viewing plenty of great Rodins (more than they would see at the Musee Rodin itself since except for the works in the garden the main building was closed for restorations), a ton of interesting Greek and Roman statuary and some Asian art in the new wing extension when she noticed a small mini-shop which had this most exquisite photograph of Mona Lisa. Better she admitted than anything that her “dinky” (her term again) digital camera could produce. Sam silently turned his head and chuckled.  

“Okay so you are in Paris, the city of lights (no question on the merits of that question since from the well-lighted boulevards to the twinkle of the Eiffel Tower at about 9 PM you are inundated with light), you are not out in the provinces, maybe Bordeaux or Iowa in the states, there are more museums, Left Bank, Right Bank, uptown too, there are more romantic outdoor cafes filled with people watchers and chain-smokers drinking their daily quota of sweet wines making you realize that Rick of Rick’s American Café was not blowing smoke at Ilsa when he said that they would always have Paris, the traffic on the Seine filled with tour boats, shuttle ships and long drawn out barges are bringing product to anxious Parisians, the cobblestones along the river walkways filled with the grasping green book stalls selling trinkets and books (in French of course it is their country if you want English titles go like Hemingway and his fellow ex-pats did in the 1920s to what was then Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company book store and still there) are doing a horrible job on your ankles as advertised and what are the great lessons you take from a day, a Saturday when you and your honey are out and about sizing up the town? Don’t by any means go within a mile, make that two miles of the famous (make that infamous) Champs Elysee on the weekends, not unless you wish to be trampled by, whip-lashed by, squeezed in by all of Paris which seems to have descended on the place in order to make some kind of statement. And not just the upper crust, the hipsters and tricksters but poor-boy Moslems with their covered up wives, seedy looking waterfront types and everybody in between.

The other great lesson you had being think strategically if you are of a certain age and plan your nature needs accordingly because from painful personal experience there is only one, one as in one stall, public restroom along the whole stretch. Too late did Sam and Laura find out that the McDonald’s  along the Champs was a known place to take care of business otherwise (although the lines there from what was told to them were as furious as at that one public stall).                      

But not all the lessons were weekend negative after all most of the great cities of the world are crowded on weekends. Here is what you do though if you want to keep the peace and want to do as promised to Laura and be nice during the trip. Take the waterway shuttle to the Champs stop and then go left rather than right for some blocks over to the Rodin Museum on a little side street where the crowds were not dangerous and where, praise be, the public restroom facilities were plentiful and no waiting. Plus you get to see some great works by that mad man sculptor at various stages of his long and prolific career.

But that was post hoc, the reality was something different, so different no self-respecting tour book would fill you in enough to do what you should have done to begin with. The day started out for Sam and Laura like most days in Paris late, about noon, when they ambled down the Rue Bonaparte to the shuttle boat at Rue Saint Germain to go up the Seine two stops to the Champs Elysee. The boat unlike on Friday was crowded a sign of things to come if they had only known then. So they rode, got off and started to head to the two beautiful palaces, big and small, which led to the Champs and to what was Sam’s idea of a place to finish, the Arc de Triumph. Not to leave anybody in the least suspense needless to say once they realized that they would have to break the equivalent of a siege to get there they abandoned that idea. That is also where the nature problem began to rear its ugly head. They asked a friendly police officer where the toilette was and were told “in the park” across the way. Expecting a big facility they were shocked when they found the place with a small line in front. As already noted there was only one stall and while the operation was something like state of the art in restroom fare they decided, or rather Mother Nature decided, that they would not be able to hold out long enough to use that facility so they went scouting for another such restroom. Silly them and really a surreal moment when twice they asked for the nearest toilette and were directed by friendly cops to that same damn spot. Quick witted Laura said they should grab a cab and head to the Rodin where they were sure to have a restroom. And the place did, large, multi-stalled and pleasant. 

But you don’t go to the Rodin, or any museum to use the restroom but to see beautiful works of art. And they were there except not in the museum which was closed for restoration but in the park where a number of his sculptures were standing in various locations. Best of all were the various individual sculptures that made up one of Rodin’s most famous works (after The Thinker), the Burghers of Calais who brought to mind the heroic efforts of the town’s leaders to save the city’s starving population after defeat at the hands of the bloody British and put themselves forth for execution. They were spared but the spirit that entailed had an enduring effect in the days when the emerging merchant bourgeoisie was capable of such actions. So yeah well worth the cab fare and the earlier discomfort. Wine and café life followed for Sam and Laura that day. And the days that followed at Notre Dame and the artists’ hang-outs at Montmartre before the seize trip home. As they entered the cab for the long trip to DeGaulle Laura, not usually one to throw old-time lines around said to Sam, “Yes, we will always have Paris.” Yes they will.                                  

*****Eddie Daley’s Big Score –With Paul Newman and Robert Redford’s The Sting In Mind

*****Eddie Daley’s Big Score –With Paul Newman and Robert Redford’s The Sting In Mind

 

 

 

 

A Sketch From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

Eddie Daley, Edward James Daley, to the 1940s slapdash Dorchester triple-decker tenements within earshot of the rattling Redline subway born, dreamed, dreamed big dreams, ever since he was knee-high to a grasshopper as the old time used-up now corny expression had it, of making the big score, making easy street, and in the process leaving behind a legend that guys, corner boy guys and grifters would talk about long after he was gone. Talk about in reverent hushed whispers about the guy, Eddie Daley, thereafter to be dubbed the “king of the grifters” who pulled the biggest con that there ever was, and walked away from it free as a bird. Not all big scores, cons, even if consummated, had that final part, that walk away free part, just ask the shade of Frankie Finn who pulled the big Shiloh Fur scam worth two million easy (a lot of money back in the 1950s even when split four ways and a fifth cut for the fence plus his expenses although just walking around money today), pulled it off with just four guys, a good number for the haul, but who “forgot” that he was dealing with one “Rocket Kid,” Johnny Silver, in his entourage who after the heist put two between the eyes of his three confederates, figuring one is easier to count that three no matter than two of the guys were his long time corner boys. The Rocket Kid, Johnny, was subsequently “hit” by one of Buddy Boyle’s boys, everybody though Rolling Rex Buddy’s main contract man did the deed since he had not been seen around for a while, when he tried to fence the stuff since Buddy was the front money man on that caper and Frankie Finn’s cousin to boot. Buddy already rolling in dough had his own way of figuring one is easier to count when he was the one. So that walking away free part was no small part of the leaving a legend behind scenario.

Eddie’s dream might seem strange to the squares, to those who live life on the square, wake up and do the nine to five bit, or whatever the time bit these days with flexible hours, take two weeks’ vacation in Maine summer, raise and put three kids through college at great expense and get a gold watch or a pat on the back when they are turned out to pasture. Yeah, that dream definitely might seem odd to those who have never been from hunger, not just “wants” hunger like a million guys have, maybe more, but no food on the table hunger when the old man drank away the week’s paycheck at the Dublin Grille or hand-me-down clothes from older brothers in style or not hunger that ate deeply into every way that Eddie thought about things from very early on. Those who never worried about big scores, or cons since they had it coming in whatever they had to put out in expenses would never figure Eddie’s dreams out.

See Eddie was a what they called, called back in the old days, back in the 1930s, and still called them back in Eddie’s coming of age time in the 1960s when he came of age in that Dorchester section of Boston where he triple decker tenement grew up a natural-born grifter. When Eddie first heard that word used, strangely after he had already done his first con and somebody on the corner, that hang out corner being Mel’s Variety on Neponset Avenue near the Fields Corner subway stop, called him a born “grifter” he faked it and said yeah and then next day went to the library and looked it up in the dictionary and came up with this-“A grifter is someone who swindles you through deception or fraud. Synonyms include fraudster, con artist, cheater, confidence man, scammer, hustler, swindler, etc.”

Eddie smiled the smile of the just on that one. Yeah, a grifter, is a guy like him who figured some angles, any angles, a guy who did this and that, did the best he could without working some nine to five hump job. [Here is a practical corner boy, not Mel’s but Jack Slack’s bowling alleys corner down in Carver about thirty miles south of Dorchester but still in “from hunger” land definition- “A grifter to fill in the gaps for the unknowing and clueless was a guy, sometimes a dame, although usually where there was a dame involved she was a roper especially if the mark was hopped up on some sex thing, who spent his eternal life figuring how to go from point A to point B, and point A was wanting dough and point B was getting it by any means necessary but mainly by stealth. By the way do not discount women in the grifter society one of the best who ever lived was a gal who went by the name Delores Del Rio, named herself after the 1940s movie star, who took some duke over in Europe for a cool two million in jewelry after she got him all jammed up and picked him clean leaving him with some fake jewels worth about six dollars in Woolworth’s, beautiful.]

So Eddie started figuring the angles very early on, very early on indeed and would regale, if that is the right word for it, the corner boys in front of Mel’s Variety Store on Neponset Avenue with tales of his daring do once he started hanging out there when he began high school at Dot High. Of course that was all kids’ stuff, baubles and beads stuff, since nobody expected a kid to have the talents for grifting right out of the box (having the heart, the “from hunger” wanting habits heart was a separate and maybe more pressing question) but there are certain guys, certain Eddie guys, who cling to those dreams pretty hard and give themselves a workout getting in shape.

From what one guy, Southie Slim, one of the Mel’s corner boys before he moved on to other stuff told me Eddie started pretty early, started simply conning other kids out of their milk money in elementary school over at the Monroe Trotter School. Here is the skinny on that first round according to Slim who got caught out himself before he picked up the grifter life for a while until he found out dealing high-grade dope to the Beacon Hill crowd was a great deal more profitable, and socially smart too once you added in willing women. Eddie somehow had picked up some dice, yeah, a pair and he would bet other kids, boys or girls it did not matter, their milk money on the results. Of course he somehow had “loaded” them so he would win. Now that was a fairly easy thing but here is where Eddie learned his craft. To keep play going he would let the other kids win occasionally, just enough to keep them interested rather than be a greed-head like big bully Matty Dugan down at my elementary school, Myles Standish, down in Carver who just strong-armed a kid a day for his (or her, it did not matter) milk money. But the real tip he picked up young as he was that as long as kids, people, think they can  “pick you clean” you will always have a willing pool of suckers, of people to swindle, small or large but think large.            

One night, one slow Friday night year later after he had settled deeply into the routine of the life, Eddie was cutting up touches about his old days while smoothing down high-shelf scotch (a no-no when you are on the hustle by the way save that for slow Friday nights when you are cutting up old touches Eddie said), about how he moved up after that dice thing ran its course as all such scams do if for no other reason that the grifter gets tired of the play, and he related what happened after that first scam when he got to the Curley Junior High School. Here is how it went, the basic outline since Eddie was kind of cagey about some of the details like the guys he was talking to that night were going to run right out and pull the scam themselves. Eddie basically ran a pyramid scheme on his fellow students. He conned the kids into giving him their money by saying he knew a guy, a friend of his older brother, Lawrence, who worked as a stable boy at the track and who knew when the fix was on in a race and who could place bets for him and get some bucks fast. Eddie convinced a couple of guys that if they put all their dough together they could buy a ticket and make some easy dough. And it worked for a while since Eddie in his devilish way paid off the guys with his own dough. Each guy getting maybe a buck which to a “from hunger” kid was a big deal. Word got out and soon plenty of kids, even girls were looking to get in on easy street. And so he would dole out some more dough. Then he pulled the plug, told everybody that he was going in for a big score that he was going to put twenty dollars on a sure thing that the stable boy had tipped him to. In the event he actually got about thirty five dollars collected altogether. Of course the horse ran out, never came close so all was lost. Hey, wait a minute have you been listening? Eddie didn’t know any stable boy, didn’t make any bet, so minus his seed money expenses he cleared twenty-five bucks. Here is what Eddie learned though know the “clients” (Eddie’s word) who you are dealing with and don’t be too greedy. He did that same small con for a couple of years and it worked like magic, got him his money for the jukebox at Jimmy Jack’s Diner on Gallivan Boulevard and movie money too. Small con wisdom but still wisdom.

Eddie as he got older, got into high school, got hanging around with his corner boys at Mel’s, got restless, always had that idea in back of his mind that he would pull a big score if he learned all the tricks of the trade, if he could get onto something big. For a while in high school it looked like he was on the fast track, he learned how to work the charity circuit for walking daddy (his term) walking around money using the old homeless but proud gag that those private charity donors love that he picked up one day when he was playing hooky from school and ran into an old con man, Railroad Bill, on a bench at Boston Common near the Park Street Station who gave him the tip. Eddie would laugh at how easy it was to pull off walking into let’s say the United Methodist Church Social Services office up on Beacon Street dressed in his very real hand-me- downs and unshaven making him look older but not too old (meaning the old telltale sign that the guy had been “on the bum” too long to be proud and work his way out of his current jam) going through his rough things but wanting to get back on track if he only had a the price of a week’s rent in one of the rooming houses that dotted the other side of the hill then (a few still there even today, significantly fewer though). That was good for ten or twenty at a time although the down side of that caper was that you could only use it once, maybe twice. The upside was that there were numerous private social service agencies like that looking for somebody “worthy” to give the dough to.  

 With that walking around money Eddie would work a variation of his kids’ stuff milk money run, he would sell lottery tickets (in the days before the state got its greasy hands into that racket), for different charities, say he was raising it for blind kids or to send kids to summer camp. Offer as prizes radios, televisions, maybe a record player, stuff like that which people wouldn’t mind spending a dollar or “three for five dollars” on to help some crippled-up kids, give them fresh air, or some other small break or something. So he would grab the dough and then have one or more of his corner boys rip off what was needed over at Lechmere Sales or someplace like that (usually using at first “Five Fingers” Riley or “Rat” Malone who started that racket early once they figured out that if you were fearless in grabbing stuff nobody was going to catch you, and that worked for a long time until they “graduated” to armed robberies and did consecutive nickels, dimes and quarters in various Massachusetts state pens).

See nobody gave a good damn if the charity he was hustling for ever got the dough all they knew was that for a buck, or three for five, they had a chance for their own television, radio, or record player important to hard-pressed high school kids who would not have those items otherwise. Needless to say the corner boys he used were good and he paid them off well like he should to keep them in line, another lesson learned, and so he honed his skills.

When Eddie graduated from high school and was to face the workaday world though he panicked a bit, decided that he needed to move up a step if he was going to avoid the fate of his belabored father, belabored by drink, yes, but also hard work on the docks, not always steady and with a brood of kids and a nagging wife to contend with. If the nine-to-five was not for Eddie neither was staying down in the depths either. (A history teacher had mentioned one time in class that all of her charges should seek to move up the latter of society at least one jump ahead of their parents and that kind of stuck with him.) So he started going into downtown Boston, started hanging around the Commons regularly unlike in high school where he would go just when playing hooky but really to blow off steam when something exploded at home in that damn crowded apartment, started to listen to guys to see if they had any ideas like that time “Railroad Bill” gave him the scoop on the private charity gag, had been on easy street at one time. He didn’t bother with the eternal winos and junkies for they had nothing to say that he could use but to guys and there always were guys who maybe had been on the hustle and got waylaid, or just got old in a young man’s racket and so maybe had some words to share. And before he knew it he met Sidewalk Sam and Bright Boy Benny a couple of guys who told him about old time scams, about how guys survived by their wits in the hard-ass Depression days. And come some old Friday night, a slow girl-less Friday usually, Eddie would hold forth about what he had learned in the world, learned from Sidewalk and Bright Boy.

Here, for example, is what he told the boys one Friday night, one “Five-Fingers” Malone-less Friday night marking the first time he got bagged for doing a robbery, unarmed that time, of a gas station and was doing a six month stretch at Deer Island, which will give you an idea of where Eddie was heading, a story of a scam that seemed impossible to pull off given what they were trying to do. Unless you knew how very greedy some guys, even smart guys were. Let’s call it the wallet switch, an old scam that Eddie would perform a couple of times later, successfully. You need two guys for this, at least. In this case two used to be “from hunger” Great Depression grifters Denver Slim and Gash Lavin. And you must know your mark’s movements pretty well and whether they have dough on them, a more usual circumstance than you might think back then than now that we are in this age of the ATM and cashable credit cards among those a shade to the left of the law (and a whole new Eddie-less generation tech- savvy grifters with their dreams, and stories they are telling their confederates on slow Friday nights). I won’t go into the preliminaries about setting the mark up, but they knew their guy, knew his movements and knew what he was carrying, so just rest assured that Denver and Gash had seeded their mark. Well actually Denver had seeded the mark, one Ricardo “Slice” Russo (you figure out the why of that moniker, okay), who was the bag man for Lou Thorpe’s numbers racket in New York City, yes the Lou Thorpe who ran wild back in the day and made a splash in Vegas to top off his career but this is earlier when he was greedier than Midas and so was particularly susceptible to any scheme that put money in his waiting hands.

Once a week Slice headed for Chicago on the midnight train to pay off Lou’s confederates there (at the high end of the rackets there are always confederates to pay off, cops too so it is just part of the overhead to keep on the streets. Guys down the bottom of the food chain don’t have such financial worries they are too busy keeping one eye out for looming John Law.)

Now bag men are pretty low in the food chain of any criminal enterprise but are like Eddie and every other Eddie-like dreamer also groomed on the con, on easy street dreams. What Denver did was to ask Slice, whom he cornered by evoking “Shark” Mahoney’s name, a mutual acquaintance, as he was heading to the station on the way to Chicago to drop off three thousand to a guy, “Bones” Kelly, also known to both men, on Division Street in that city for him. That money had been placed in a wallet, a black leather wallet similar to the one Slice was carrying the twenty thousand pay-off in, and when Slice got to Chi town he gave the wallet to the Division Street guy, to Kelly, the one with three thousand in it, three thousand in counterfeit money as Kelly later found out. See Slice had figured that doing Denver’s delivery was like finding money on the ground especially when he thought up the fake dough angle. So tough luck, Denver. Worse though, worse for Slice anyway, the mob’s wallet also had twenty thousand in counterfeit money when he delivered the wallet to an office in the Loop.

What had happened was that Gash had been on that train, had in the course of bumping into Slice switched wallets and got off in Cleveland leaving Slice to his troubles. But here is what you have to know, know about the mob. They thought Slice, a troublesome bag man and so an easy fall guy was pulling a fast one on them when he explained what he thought had happened and he wound up in the Illinois River face down before anybody investigated anything. Beautiful work by Denver and Gash who headed out West for a while just to be on the safe side but also know this-if you are running on the high side expect some blow-back, nasty blow-back if you don’t walk away clean. Just ask Slice

One night, another of those aimless nights when there was no action, or maybe Eddie was cooling out from a con, a wise move since overdoing the con scene leads inevitably to trouble, usually fist, gun or John Law trouble, he told the guys a story, a story about the granddaddy of all the scores, a haul of almost half a million back in the 1930s when half a million was not just walking around money like it is today. A story that Nutsy Callahan, another one of the Great Depression guys he would listen to over on the Commons told him about one afternoon after he had played out some luscious honey over on Tremont Street who had “curled his toes” and he was a bit too restless to head home (Eddie wasn’t much for girlfriends or serious female company on his way up and maybe it was better for him to just catch a quick “curl the toes” on an off-afternoon with some passing fancy because no question women are far tougher to deal with that the hardest scam). The way Nutsy told the story implied that he might have been in on the caper, although like all good grifters, grafters, percentage guys, and midnight sifters, he would put the account in the third person just in case the statute of limitations had not run out on whatever the offenses were, or, more likely, some pissed off Capo or his descendants were still looking to take some shots at guys who pulled such scams.

Nutsy had told Eddie a few lesser scams that he had been involved in and Eddie told a few lies of his own but the important thing for Eddie, or rather Eddie’s future was that he was looking to break out of the penny-ante grifts and ride easy street so he was looking for ideas, long ago ideas really because just maybe with a duke here and a juke there the thing could be played again. Eddie didn’t bother to tell Nutsy that for Nutsy would probably not have told the story or as likely dismiss Eddie’s chances out of hand. So Nutsy told the story and Eddie’s eyes went bonkers over the whole set-up.

This one involved “Top Hat” Hogan so named for the simple fact that as long as anybody had known him, or could remember, he always wore a fancy day top hat although rarely, very rarely, with any accompanying evening clothes. Some of his girl friends said he wore the damn thing when he was in bed with them and that was just fine because Top Hat was a walking daddy when it came to loving his women. Top Hat had been widely assumed to have been the brains behind the Silver Smith Fur scam, the Morgan Bank scam and the Golden Gate Mine dust-up which people talked about almost until the war (World War II if you are counting). So Top Hat under any circumstances was a number one grifter who any guy with any dough, any serious dough, had better check up on to see if Top Hat had been in the vicinity if he wanted to keep said cash. The other key guy, and the reason Top Hat, who had been semi-retired at the time of this caper and rightfully so having run the rack already, was a raw kid, a kid with promise but not much else then, was “Jet” Jenkins. And the reason that Top Hat even considered teaming up with a raw kid like Jet, was that he was the son of Happy Heddy Jenkins, a fancy woman who had “curled his toes” back in his younger days. Heddy had had some good days and bad days but one of the bad days had been meeting up with the famous gambler, Black Bart Benson, one of the great flim-flam, flim-flam meaning simply a cheater without mercy and guys, leg-breakers if anybody had a problem with that, poker players of the day.

Old Bart had nevertheless had run into a streak of bad luck at cards which even cheaters face at times, had borrowed and lost almost a one hundred thousand dollars from Heddy (who ran on the best, friendliest, and easiest to enter if you had the money whorehouses in Chicago). Somehow things had taken a turn for the worst after Black Bart left Heddy high and dry and she was back on cheap street trying to raise a helter-skelter growing boy with short funds. Not so Black Bart who had cheated his way to a million dollar bonanza when his luck changed. (That cheating not known, obviously, to the guys taking the beating at the card table but Heddy knew her Bart and imparted that wisdom onto her son.) When Heddy sent Jet to see if Bart would ante up the cash he had borrowed from her he dismissed Jet with a flick of his hand, and after a serious beating by one of his leg-breakers had him dumped him in some back alley in Altoona one night. Bart had, with a laugh, as his boys administered that beating, told Jet that he should sue him in court to get his money back as he wasn’t in the mood to give some bent whore dough that she had gotten from her whorehouse dollies. So Heddy, so Jet, and after hearing about what Bart had called Heddy, so Top Hat were primed for revenge. But more than revenge because that is easy, kids’ stuff, but to send Bart back to cheap street hustling winos with three-card Monte tricks or stuff like that.

The key to understanding Black Bart was that like a lot of con artists, no, most con artists, no, make that all con artists, is that beside being easy prey to any scam especially a scam that plays to their greed they always assume that they are smarter than whoever is making the proposition and can double-back on it to their profit. Top Hat had easy pickings when he ran across guys like Bart. Here is the way that Top Hat worked his magic, although when Nutsy finished telling Eddie the lay Eddie thought the venture had too many moving parts, too many guys in on the score once Black Bart was brought down.

It went like this. “Buggy” Bannon knew Black Bart, knew he was always interested in an easy score so Buggy put the word in Bart’s ear about some silver and gold mining stock that was about to go through the roof once the worst parts of the Depression were over. So Buggy, who had worked with Top Hat on the Silver Smith scam and so was trustworthy, or as trustworthy as any guy working on a scam can be introduced Top Hat to Bart as a chief stockbroker for Merrill Lynch. Then Top Hat went through the traces, got Bart hooked in with the knowledge about the gold and silver stock. Of course Top Hat had had “Horseless” Harry sent up a nice brochure in color all about the various possibilities of the mining stock and Bart got interested, saw quick dollar signs. Of course even an over-the-top greedy guy like Bart had to see some real stuff, some real stockbroker operation, so Top Hat had rented out space in a building in the financial district and created out of sheer nothing a stock market room complete with ticker-tape, running around employees (all grifters from out west so that Bart would not recognize them) or and investors milling around.

That was the part that Eddie thought was over the top, the too many moving parts aspect, but in any case it all looked good to Bart. Here is the carrot Top Hat told Bart to invest a few thousand to see how it went. And so Bart did, bringing to the stock room five thousand in cash as all con artists did then in the days before working kited checks and credit cards and stuff like that opened out new ways to bilk people, including smart guys. A few days later Top Hat delivers ten thousand to Bart, all fresh dough, and so they are off to the races because now he sees that this thing could make him really rich. Of course Top Hat knowing that you have to bring a guy, a sucker along, knowing you needed to whet his appetite had just added five of his own money to Bart’s to bring in the bonanza (writing it off as overhead just like any other legal or illegal operation).

Bart, although no fool and who still had some suspicions, was no question hooked though as Top Hat fed him another stock tip and told him he should let the ten thousand ride, which he did. About a week later Top Hat delivers twenty-two thousand to Bart and he was really hooked, really wants to put more money down. Especially when that twenty-two went to fifty grand a few weeks later. Bart said to Top Hat that it was like finding money on the street. Then Top Hat really got to him, let him know that in South Africa, a known gold, silver and diamond mother lode to everybody in those days that a new field was within days of being explored and discovered and that Bart should be ready to go big and get in on the ground floor. Here is the beauty of the thing though. The financial pages were almost in a conspiracy with Top Hat because they were also projecting some speculation about new minefields. One day Top Hat told Bart to get all the cash he could gather because that South African stock, low, very low at the time would be going through the roof once the discovery was confirmed. So a few days later Bart brought a suitcase filled with cash, about a million maybe a little less, and pushed it over to Top Hat. Top Hat went to the cashier (“Hangman” Henry of all people) and brought back a receipt to Bart.

Now you can figure out the rest. A few days later news of that new minefield did come in and that stock did rise although in a world filled with gold and silver with nobody to buy stuff yet not as much as you would have expected but still a good take. Bart then called Top Hat to tell him to cash in. No answer at Top Hat’s number. Bart then went to the stock exchange room to find nothing but a “for rent” sign on the doors. As for Top Hat and Jet well they were on the train back to New York with that one hundred grand for Heddy and a twinkle came into Top Hat’s eyes about those old days when she “curled his toes,” and might again. Beautiful.

That story etched in his brain Eddie Daley started putting together a few ideas in his head, getting on the phone to a few guys (fewer than Top Hat had in his operation), and started making some dough connections for financing. Out in the grifter night they still talk about Eddie Daley, whereabouts unknown, “king of the grifters” after he took Vince Edwards the big book operator for about a million and a quarter in cold hard cash. You now know the back story on that one.