When Big Bad Chevys Stoked Our Dream- An Encore Presentation By Lance Lawrence With A Help From Josh Breslin With The Classic Corner Boy Film "Diner" In Mind
For The Late Peter Paul Markin
Scene: Brought to mind by the cover artwork that graces the front of the booklet that accompanied an album I had been reviewing. The artwork contained, in full James Dean-imitation pout, one good-looking, DA-quaffed, white muscle-shirted young man, an alienated young man, no question, leaning, leaning gently, very gently, arms folded, on the hood of his 1950’s classic automobile, clearly not his father’s car, but also clearly for our purposes let us call it his “baby.”
And that car, that extension of his young manhood, his young alienated manhood, is Friday night, Saturday night, or maybe a weekday night if it is summer, parked, priority parked, meaning nobody with some Nash Rambler, nobody with some foreign Volkswagen, no biker even , in short, nobody except somebody who is tougher, a lot tougher, than our alienated young man better breathe on the spot while he is within fifty miles of the place, directly in front of the local teenage (alienated or not) "hot spot." And in 1950s America, a teenage America with some disposal income (allowance, okay), that hot spot was likely to be, as here, the all-night Mel’s (or Joe’s, Adventure Car-Hop, whatever) drive-in restaurant opened to cater to the hot dog, hamburger, French fries, barbecued chicken cravings of exhausted youth. Youth exhausted after a hard night, well, let’s just call it a hard night and leave the rest to your knowing imagination, or their parents’ evil imaginations.
And in front of the restaurant, in front of that leaned-on “boss” automobile stands one teenage girl vision. One blondish, pony-tailed, midnight sun-glassed, must be a California great American West night teeny-bopper girl holding an ice cream soda after her night’s work. The work that we are leaving to fertile (or evil, as the case may be) imaginations. Although from the pout on Johnny’s (of course he has to be a Johnny, with that car) face maybe he “flunked out” but that is a story for somebody else to tell. Here is mine.
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Not everybody, not everybody by a long-shot, who had a “boss” ’57 cherry red Chevy was some kind of god’s gift to the earth; good-looking, good clothes, dough in his pocket, money for gas and extras, money for the inevitable end of the night stop at Jimmy John’s Drive-In restaurant for burgers and fries (and Coke, with ice, of course) before taking the date home after a hard night of tumbling and stumbling (mainly stumbling). At least that is what one Joshua Breslin, Josh, told me, he a freshly minted fifteen- year old roadside philosopher thought as for the umpteenth time “Stewball” Stu left him by Albemarle Road off Route One and rode off into the Olde Saco night with his latest “hot” honey, fifteen year old teen queen Sally Sullivan. Here is the skinny as we used to say as per one Joshua Breslin:
Yah, Stewball Stu was nothing but an old rum-dum, a nineteen year old rum-dum, except he had that “boss” girl-magnet ’57 cherry red and white two-toned Chevy (painted those colors by Stu himself) and he had his pick of the litter in the Olde Saco, maybe all of Maine, night. By the way Stu’s official name, was Stuart Stewart, go figure, but don’t call him Stuart and definitely do not call him “Stewball” not if you want to live long enough not to have the word teen as part of your age. The Stewball thing was strictly for local boys, jealous local boys like Josh, who when around Stu always could detect a whiff of liquor, usually cheap jack Southern Comfort, on his breathe, day or night.
Figure this too. How does a guy who lives out on Tobacco Road in an old run-down trailer, half-trailer really, from about World War I that looked like something out of some old-time Great Depression Hoover-ville scene, complete with scrawny dog, and tires and cannibalized car leavings every which way have girls, and nothing but good-looking girls from twelve to twenty (nothing older because as Stu says, anything older was a woman and he wants nothing to do with women, and their women’s needs, whatever they are). And the rest of us got his leavings, or like tonight left on the side of the road on Route One. And get this, they, the girls from twelve to twenty actually walk over to Tobacco Road from nice across the other side of the tracks homes like on Atlantic Avenue and Fifth Street, sometimes by themselves and sometime in packs just to smell the grease, booze, burnt rubber, and assorted other odd-ball smells that come for free at Stu’s so-called garage/trailer.
Let me tell you about Stu, Sally, and me tonight and this will definitely clue you in to the Stu-madness of the be-bop Olde Saco girl night. First of all, as usual, it is strictly Stu and me starting out. Usually, like today, I hang around his garage on Saturdays to get away from my own hell-house up the road on Ames Street, meaning almost as poor as Stu except they are not trailers but, well, shacks, all that the working poor like my people could afford in the golden age and I am kind of Stu’s unofficial mascot. Now Stu had been working all day on his dual-exhaust carburetor or something, so his denims are greasy, his white tee-shirt (sic) is nothing but wet with perspiration and oil stains, he hasn’t taken a bath since Tuesday (he told me that himself with some sense of pride) and he was not planning to do so this night, and of course, drinking all day from his silver Southern Comfort flask he reeked of alcohol (but don’t tell him that if you read this and are from Olde Saco because, honestly, I want to live to have twenty–something as my age). About 7:00 PM he bellows out to me, cigarette hanging from his mouth, an unfiltered Lucky of course (filtered cigarettes are for girls in Stu world), let’s go cruising.
Well, cruising means nothing but taking that be-bop ’57 cherry red and white two-toned Chevy out on East Grand and look. Look for girls, look for boys from the hicks with bad-ass cars who want to take a chance on beating Stu at the “chicken run” down at the flats on the far end of Sagamore Beach, look for something to take the edge off the hunger to be somebody number one. At least that last is what I figured after a few of these cruises with Stu. Tonight it looks like girls from the way he put some of that grease (no not car grease, hair-oil stuff) on his nappy hair. Yes, I am definitely looking forward to cruising tonight once I have that sign because, usually whatever girl Stu might not want, or maybe there are a couple of extras, or something I get first dibs. Yah, Stu is righteous like that.
So off we go, stopping at my house first so I can get a little cleaned up and put on a new shirt and tell my brother to tell our mother that I will be back later, maybe much later, if she ever gets home herself before I do. The cruising routine in Olde Saco means up and down Route One (okay, okay Main Street), checking out the lesser spots (Darby’s Pizza Palace, Hank’s Ice Cream joint, the Colonial Donut Shoppe where I hang during the week after school and which serves a lot more stuff than donuts and coffee, sandwiches and stuff, and so on). Nothing much this Saturday. So we head right away for the mecca, Jimmy John’s. As we hit Stu’s “saved” parking spot just in front I can see that several stray girls are eyeing the old car, eyeing it like tonight is the night, tonight is the night Stu, kind of, sort of, maybe notices them (and I, my heart starting to race a little in anticipation and glad that I stopped off at my house, got a clean shirt, and put some deodorant on and guzzled some mouthwash, am feeling tonight is the night too).
But tonight is not the night, no way. Not for me, not for those knees-trembling girls. Why? No sooner did we park than Sally Sullivan came strolling out (okay I don’t know if she was strolling or doo-wopping but she was swaying in such a sexy way that I knew she meant business, that she was looking for something in the Olde Saco night and that she had “found” it) to Stu’s Chevy and with no ifs, ands, or buts asked, asked Stu straight if he was doing anything this night. Let me explain before I tell you what Stu’s answer was that this Sally Sullivan is nothing but a sex kitten, maybe innocent-looking, but definitely has half the boys, hell maybe all the boys at Olde Saco High, including a lot of the guys on the football team drooling over her. I know, because I have had more than one sleepless night over her myself.
See, she is in my English class and because Mr. Murphy lets us sit where we want I usually sit with a good view of her. So Stu says, kind of off-handedly, like having the town teen fox come hinter on him was a daily occurrence, kind of lewdly, “Well, baby I am if you want to go down Sagamore Rocks right now and look for dolphins?” See, Sagamore Rocks is nothing but the local lovers’ lane here and “looking for dolphins” is the way everybody, every teenage everybody in town says “going all the way,” having sex for the clueless. And Sally, as you can guess if you have been following my story said, “Yes” just like that. At that is why I was dumped, unceremoniously dumped, while they roared off into the night. So like I said not every “boss” car owner is god’s gift to women, not by a long shot. Or maybe they are.
Of course ultimately the thing that yoked the guys around Tonio’s was what to do, or not do, collectively and individually as the case came up with girls. (And not just in our generation but at least the couple before ours and a couple after before Tonio retired and the next owners were not enthralled with corner boys hanging around their family-oriented place with their “Mom’s night out” Friday night agenda and called “copper” to clear out the “ruffians” the term they actually used according to what I heard from Frannie Lacey who stayed in town for the duration since he had inherited his mother’s house after she passed. In any by then the corner was giving way to guys (and gals) hanging around malls of the world, the “mall rats” we have all come to dread in our dotage. Mall rats are not even in the same world as corner boys but just suburban kids looking for some place to identify with. These days you see them collected in a space-all looking down at their smartphones and they might have well been in their living rooms as there. Too bad.) Like I said I didn’t start hanging the corners until junior high when my family moved from early growing up North Adamsville about thirty miles away but one of the big thing driving us hormonally-charged boys to head to Doc’s Drugstore was to catch what was what after school at first when everybody, when the girls okay, would drop in on their way home to spent some of their discretionary dough on listening to something dreamy on Doc’s to die for jukebox (dough which we corner boys did not have and had to cadge spare change off of some of the girls). It was at Doc’s I “learned” how to scope a girl to play what I wanted to hear but that is a story for another time because talking about Doc’s and the frenzy of trying to score with some girl started in earnest even for “slow” guys like me. Funny how a year or two before those girls were nothing but “sticks” and nuisances and all of a sudden there they were kind of “interesting”
In those days as far as I know and even the chronic liars that all we guys were about “scoring” with a girl-meaning have some kind of sexual activity with them and that fact was accepted whatever a guy said even when we knew they guy was lying about scoring some “ice queen” that nobody except maybe Paul Newman or Bobby Vee could score we never heard (or knew personally) about any junior high girl who was “putting out” (and if they were “confessing” to such conduct come Monday morning before school “lav” talk they were lying just as hard as we were so who the hell knows who was doing, or not doing, what). That naturally would change considerably by high school especially junior and senior years when “boss” cars were in the air and Squaw Rock beckoned for adventurous. Then on any given Friday or Saturday night, or almost any night in the summer, dated up or not, the talk was almost exclusively except maybe a passing reference to some sports moment about girls and what they would and would not do. Do sexually in case you were wondering what “do the do” meant, a common expression around our way after somebody heard bluesman Howlin’ Wolf utter those words heard on the local rock station.
I already pointed out the chronic lying about the subject including by me of course but the real subject was about “getting something,” getting some sugar we called it without getting caught. That “caught” not referring to actually doing the act if you were lucky enough to have a halfway willing girl even if you had to get her drunk to get in the mood. (Yeah, I know, I know as well as the reader that we were all under age in our state but if anybody wanted booze “Jimmy the Tramp,” one of the town drunks would gladly cooperate and get whatever you wanted as long as he got his couple of bottles of Thunderbird with your order. We learned the “anthem” from him-“what’s the word-Thunderbird, what’s the price-forty twice” from him. Little did I know that several years later when I was disturbed by alcohol I would be down in Jimmy’s ditch expressing the same thing to the high school kids I was buying for). Caught here meant get some poor girl “in the family way.” Our expression for the condition was “going to see Aunt Emma” although don’t ask me where it came from probably from generation to generation by older brothers to younger brothers and everything got lost in the shuffle about genesis. What would happen is that we would not see a girl for a while although we knew her family was still in town, was still in the same house or apartment but the girl was missing. The excuse when asked was that she had gone to see an aunt for a few months on some family business. All I know is that you would almost never see the girl in school again or if you did you would not like now see her with a baby. One girl did, Candy Lee, came back twice but we all counted her as nothing but a “slut,” someone to avoid because you know there was nothing but trouble there as foxy looking as she was in her cashmere sweaters and tight skirts
No guy wanted to have that “going to aunt” hanging over his head at fifteen or sixteen, probably no girl either be we were just ordinary teenagers who were sexually curious and didn’t know a damn thing about what the real consequences of sex were. And how would we then, probably almost as much now too, since nobody in authority, not parents, priests, principals or policemen were telling anything that could help. Growing up and hanging with guys who had a least some Irish in them it was worse since Sacred Heart the Catholic Church almost all of us attended (except Allan Davis, a Jewish kid who was a math whizz so we let him hand and Steve Tabor who had a “boss” ’57 Chevy who was some kind of Protestant who we let hang around for obvious reasons) we only knew what we got from older siblings or more usually “on the street” including stuff we made up-most of it wrong and not a small contributing factor to the “aunt” epidemic. Most of us survived although Peter Paul Markin had a close call when Jeannie Murphy told him she was pregnant. We all huddled together to tell him to tell her to take a test to see who the father was. As it turned out she was lying because she didn’t want Markin to see Laura Callahan, Jack’s sister whom he was getting big eyes over. Jesus we were on the cusp of the “Pill” but what they hell did we know about half of this stuff. We were just hungry.
There were certain traditions associated with corner boy life, certain rites of passage which each generation of corner boys had to pass through to keep his place in pecking order (by the way my use of generations is not say twenty years when people pass from kid-dom to adulthood forming a generation along the way but more like the six or seven years from late elementary school to the end of high school, maybe a couple of years beyond). This for “from hunger” kids who were the main denizens of the corners starting as far back as local corner boy legend “Red” Riley during World War II who was admired even by later generations who lived off the crumbs of his “midnight creep” exploits (and a cautionary tale about a guy who “snitched” to the coppers when he was caught coming out of a house at midnight not his own who Red chain-whipped to the emergency room and the guy needed about a hundred stitches and didn’t look so pretty any that episode-he did learn his lesson and never said who did that deed to him-smart guy).
Usually, and Frankie Riley, was the king of this kind of action before he “graduated” to the midnight creep, was the “clip” in elementary school. That is going up to the central shopping area in town (now the mall-but the mall rats don’t seem hungry enough for this kind of action) to a jewelry store or department store (Kendall’s Jewelry was the toughest one to do the clip in so that was recognized as being superior to just some junk rip-off from Woolworth’s or some place like that) and grab some rings or other such items-usually connected with trying to empress so girl or get her a “present” for some occasion. Kid’s stuff though when you think about it and probably not worth the risk of getting caught.
The midnight creep was something else though-a real source of dough if you hit a place right. The legendary Red Riley got a lot of his reputation as a king hell king of the midnight creep ripping off not the cheapjack places that most of us out of laziness or lack of class consciousness about where the good stuff was grabbed but to the places over in the “Mount” where the rich people, rich to us, lived and had stuff worth stealing. He was also a master at planning the capers and never got caught, not for that stuff but later for armed robberies he was not so lucky and did a couple of stretches in the state pen before getting himself killed down South in a shoot-out with cops while he was robbing a White Hen store but by then the dope had taken his good judgment away. Frankie Riley, not as tough as Red, not tough at all after he dunked some kid’s head who was bothering him down the toilet at school and almost drown the kid so nobody messed with him after that, was the master planner in our crowd. Or he was after Markin hatched some plan which he couldn’t possibly carry out without Frankie running the operation. This one I was in on so I know it was a beauty. There were a couple of houses on the edge of our neighborhood which were recently constructed for some guys who involved in the emerging high technology industry that was beginning to bloom around Boston then. These guys were working on R&D for Polaroid if you remember that name. Somehow Markin got close to one of their daughters, nothing ever came of it because the girl was not interested in a guy “from hunger” was the way he told it. She told him her father had a million cameras around, you know those old Polaroid self-developing cameras every family was crazy for to take instant picture just like no with cellphones and “selfies.” They were located in the basement where her father would work on stuff. Markin smelled money, money found on the ground is what his expression was when there was an easy score. And it was we practically just walked into the place (now there would be about seven layers of security even in a residential home) after Frankie figured out how to use a piece of plastic to open the door. We walked away with about twenty cameras between us. That is what the guy, and what the newspapers reported. Frankie had a way to sell them and we had serious dough for weeks. (I won’t say how since I think the statute of limitations has run out but who knows and besides Frankie is a big deal lawyer now.)
Yeah, corner boy life was something else. Hail corner boys!
Yes that all looked very, very familiar to these old eyes. The difference? These guys stuck together well into their twenties. By twenty most of my guys were in the military, married, in jail, or on the run. The fate of plenty of real-life corner boys making all that noise. See this one.
