Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- The Fall Guy-Take Two

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

There is a fall guy born every minute, especially fall guys who will jump through hoops when they are down on their luck, or when a woman crosses their path, yeah particularly when a dame passes through. Take a guy like Dane Clark, a guy that used to hang around the old neighborhood, my old neighborhood, old Hullsville down by the sea, down by the ocean breezes south of Boston back in the early 1960s. You could always see him hanging in front of Bigelow’s Drug Store on any given night ready to tell his story, tell his story endlessly to whoever would listen.  We, my corner boys and me, got so we could recite it back to him point by point and he always was surprised that we remembered the details and wondered too how we knew the story since he did not recall telling it to us. 

Dane grew up in Hullsville, old run-down seen better days Huntsville , loss in some sea mist back when they used to build ships, great ocean ships in that town,   and like a lot of us blew the dust or the seaweed of the place off his shoes and headed out, out to the big world as fast as he could. As fast as he could and just as fast became a fall guy like a million other guys who tried to blow the dust of their growing up towns off their shoes. And learned to jump through hoops out in that world too, learned that hard task the hard way. Especially when said hoops were being held by foxy-looking young blonde dames (although they do not have to be blonde, okay, no way). Yes, old Dane learned the hard way something it took me a while to figure out too but this is old Dane’s moment in the sun and I can tell my story any old time.

Sure it was about a boy meets girl story just like in the movies, or rather man meets woman, but more to the point was the hard fact of life that the just rich, the very rich, and the super-rich are different, and in this case, very different, from you and me. Now here is the “skinny.”  Dane Clark, after a stint travelling by rail, hobo freight car rail not the deluxe Pullman sleepers in the Great Depression 1930s, shifting, drifting, midnight sifting in the great railroad jungles out west avoiding the bulls and avoiding hungers as best he could, got drafted like a lot of other guys, guys like my father, into the American army during World War II and did his service in Europe, serviceable service, mainly in France after Normandy. After he got out he tried this and that first for a minute in Hullsville, the place was too small for his big world appetites by then though,  that didn’t work and then he drifted to  New York City trying to make a dime out of nothing, and mainly stalling out. He made a few bucks though, enough to get him to London, a town that intrigued him when he was stationed near there at an American base before the D-Day invasion.

So Dane wound up like a lot of other guys as a down and out American looking, well, looking for something in the post-World War II night and he figured London was just as good a place as any to land, and cheaper too. Naturally a down and out guy had to figure things out once in a while, get his bearings, and what better place to do so than at a bar. A bar, a pub I guess you call them over there, that just happened to have a fetching and rich blonde damsel in distress, Phyllis Lee, if you are looking for a name but don’t hold on too long that that was her right name, looking to get married and willing to pay for that status for her own reasons. Maybe it was that If I Didn't Care that was playing in the background and they laughingly instantly called "their song that did it, maybe the high-shelf scotch he was drinking at her expense but he accepted, although as fate would have it he wound up with a case of blackout, really some dropout pills, a mickey for the crime noir fans, and was dumped in some doorway groggy for his efforts immediately after the ceremony. There he was befriended by a very independent starving woman artist who lived on the other side of that door, and who was only tangentially connected with the nefarious doings going on that led to his doorway stop. (And whom he would eventually have an affair with before she too got lost in the London fog, or just quit him, quit him for her own reasons and left him high and dry.)

And then the chase was on, the chase to put a big old frame on one Dane Clark late of Hullsville, late of the great Southern Pacific hobo, jungles, late of the 82^nd Airborne Division, late of cheap street New York City, and make it stick. Why? Phyllis’ rich, very rich, father had been murdered that very marriage night and guess who the prime suspect, the numero uno fall guy, was? Needless to say, patsy or not, this called for drastic action to recoup his honor (and to stay out of the slammer) by our boy Dane. But, as usual, everybody and their brother (or sister) had a motive to do harm to old man Lee, had an ax to grind including that fetching blonde who lured him in since that old man was no tone of nature’s noblemen. Who to trust (or not trust) while evading the coppers in the black and white dreary streets and cooped-up apartments of 1950s London got Dane all mixed up.

What drove the real villain, a guy, a guy okay, Philip Reed, yes of the old time British Reed steel fortune long since spent, and by the way not the blonde beauty Phyllis was not involved, no way, although she made Dane think twice about it a couple of times when she abandoned him to his fate and divorced him out of hand when she was done with him, was the need to have plenty of dough. Reed, an old MI5 hand, and a guy who knew people it was good to know when trying to flee, people who knew people for a price,  eventually escaped to the continent and the police never did find him, or the cool two million (pounds) he received, embezzled, from Phyllis’ father’s estate before he fled.

As for Dane, after a few months in gaol (jail, quaint right) the coppers released him for lack of evidence and a semi-confession, meaning guy couldn’t positively identify Dane as the guy who paid him to get rid of old Lee’s body, by a guy who worked with the villainous Reed and he scrambled his way back home, home to Hullsville. Home, never to leave again, seldom leaving the small area around Bigelow’s Drug, and never to stop telling his tale of woe in the ocean air night to whoever would listen. That is where that point about the rich being different, very different, comes in.