In Honor Of The Fallen Vietnam War Brothers Of North Adamsville Whose Names Are Now Eternally Etched In Stone At Town Hall And Down In Washington

In Honor Of The Fallen Vietnam War Brothers Of North Adamsville Whose Names Are Now Eternally Etched In Stone At Town Hall And Down In Washington

By Frank Jackman  

You know I don’t think I really have given the reader the hard edge of how the deaths of our corner boy comrades Rick Rizzo and Donald White who laid down their heads in muddy fields of faraway Vietnam back in the 1960s and are now forever remembered at Town Hall and in black granite in Washington affected all of us when we heard the news. By then, by 1966 and 1967 when they passed, the corner boy crowd from the North Adamsville High Class of 1964, their and our class mostly had passed through seven winds, were scattered to and fro although mostly still Acre connected by parents and siblings. Some still in town like Bart Webber or nearby colleges like Pete Markin, forever known as the Scribe. So the hard solidarity we had accumulated, most of us, the core, from those junior high school days at Atlantic (now renamed North Adamsville Middle School since a couple of schools were combined) at start-out Doc’s Drugstore corner holding the bricks up and racketed up in front of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor in high school might had dissipated some but it was hard to shake off that a couple of our number had passed so young in the days when we all, including Rick and Donald, thought we would live forever. Writing over fifty years later has some of that same dissipated quality, that time has done its job to make us forget enough to keep back most of the tears.

But that is just plain wrong, wrong enough to need some additional thought and words to speak of the deaths of guys who we thought then, 1966, 1967 then were doing the right thing even if later we mostly changed our minds when we in our turns had to do military service. Maybe not so much on Rich who really was a mad man to beat commie ass, to wipe away whole countries if necessary so we in the Acre could have some, well, whatever we had, peace I guess. Donald (nobody ever called him anything but Donald from as far back as I remember) who really did get a snow job from the Army recruiter who promised the world and brought only the death that Donald’s mother never got over, drew her to an early grave. There I said it, said stuff that should have been mentioned in the previous tributes, the stuff about broken-hearted mothers, and broken-hearted corner boys. Maybe for the first time I will admit, despite my long years as an anti-war activist and peace crusader, that I privately went to Adamsville Beach one night after hearing the news and wept copious tears over poor Donald’s demise. Hopefully that will give the reader a much better sense of how we took our fallen comrades’ deaths.           

When I wrote the first couple of tributes I mentioned that I was probably the surprise choice to take up an  assignment honoring a couple of my Tonio’s Pizza Parlor corner boys, Rick Rizzo and Donald White, from the early 1960s who grow up in the desperately poor Acre section of North Adamsville and laid down their young heads in some now forgotten battlefields of Vietnam.  A key reason for that judgment when the other guys asked me to put a little tribute together that this year is the 50^th anniversary of my struggle as a military resister to that same war. A very, very different storyline from Rick and Donald’s. I was the only one from our crowd who at that time joined the internal Army resistance. I had refused orders to Vietnam, did stockade time and that was that. I have, and others have too, gone through the particulars of my experience elsewhere so that need not detain us here. Besides this is about Rick and Donald. Now the choice seems right, seems righter than rain. So let’s run with the thoughts about these brethren a little bit.

    

Rick was a gung-ho guy, a tough little bastard who imbibed all the anti-communist red scare stuff that we were being force-fed but he was a true believer, a guy who really did want to eliminate every enemy of America. In the early 1960s during what was still the deep Cold War even if there had been some abatement in the national red scare epidemic I had been almost as firm in my beliefs about the “commie menace” as the next guy although maybe not as much as Rick. When Rick blasted us about the latest atrocities by the Communists somewhere we all went ho-hum, even the Scribe who was the most political of all of us. There were a few other guys, maybe Frankie Riley whose parents were rabid Irish Catholics and serious archenemies of the commies, who hung around Tonio’s like Rick but most of us just wanted to get laid and have some booze, stuff like that. Regular high school guy stuff then, and almost mandatory for life among the corner boys.

Rick signed on the dotted line right after high school in 1964 I think with the idea of making the military a career, a choice of many not going to college guys looking to grab a skill while serving their country. In those days in the Acre, the serious working- class section of North Adamsville and home to all the corner boys, not many of the guys expected to, wanted to, or were smart enough to seek the college path. Life was -graduate high school, get a job where you might pick up a skill, get married, have kids, and after a billion years retire and nobody would have been surprised if some young man decided to go into the military rather than be drafted to have some choice in learning a skill. That was Rick to a tee.    

When Rick came home from basic or maybe it was AIT he was all spit and polish and frankly we looked up to him whether we ourselves would enlist or not. (With maybe a couple of exceptions for guys with some kind of medical problems or sole support of the family every guy in the roving Tonio’s corner boy crowd served in the military.) Sometime in late 1965 he got orders for Vietnam and we had a big party for him, as it turned out the last time we would see him. In August of 1966 somewhere in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam during a major confrontation Rick got blown away. The news when it came to us was a shock and each one of the corner boys whatever our subsequent views on that Vietnam War, or wars in general, probably to this day has a little sorrow in his heart for Rick’s too young fate.

Donald White was slightly different. He had gone to college for a year but just couldn’t cut it, was not his thing. Donald never was much of a student, could not bear to listen when the Scribe would start reading stuff out loud, something by a freaking faggot(then) named Allan Ginsberg whom he was all hot and bothered over after reading the explosive poem Howl.  (Some recruiter from North Adamsville Junior College came through the school senior year and grabbed a bunch of kids including Donald who were not qualified to get into a four- year college to enroll in their two-year program with the idea of eventually going to some other school). That drop-out subjected him to the getting very familiar notice to report for induction from his “friends and neighbors” at the local draft board. Instead of waiting for the other shoe to drop Donald decided to enlist and grab a clerk’s job, maybe as typist, as his MOS. Two unfortunate things befell him. One the war in Vietnam was raging out of control with call-ups of addition manpower every few months and so despite his clerical training he was assigned to an infantry unit in-country when he got orders in 1967. Two, there were really no battle-lines in that damn war like in Europe in World War II and so even lowly clerks had to act as infantrymen, build perimeters, lay mines, dig foxholes and do sentry duty, or get blown away. He, from what one of his Army buddies told us later, was in the thick of the firefights when unit positions were under attack. One night when “Charlie” came over the top Donald fell down, laid his golden blonde hair down in some muddy field.           

All of us guys still standing, pro-war, anti-war, Vietnam vets or “era” (like me) still around agree that there was a very big difference between what got Rick and Donald to join the war effort without qualms before 1968 and what TET and the endless calls for escalation, more bodies chewed up did to the morale of the American forces and the possibilities of winning. The no longer possibilities of winning. Most of us who did our military service did so in the post-1968 and that reflected the chance in spirit even among those who had not the slightest desire to resist (by the way not one of our Tonio’s guys was a draft resister and like I said before I was the only military resister).

All this to say whatever our personal attitudes then or now we had no wish for the death of any individual soldier. Certainly not Rick and Donald. So maybe that is why I was the guy selected to give this late eulogy for our Tonio’s fallen. Now included with tears for my fallen corner boy brethren.

      

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac-Out In The Corner Boy Night- Rock “Em Daddy, Be My Be-Bop Daddy

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Elvis Presley performing a sassy, sexy, alternate version of One Night, One Night Of Sin.

CD Review

Rockin’ Bones, Four CD set with booklet, various artists, Rhino Records, 2006

This is the way Betsy McGee, an old time, very old time Clintondale Elementary School flame (locally known as the Acre school, and everybody knew what you were talking about, everybody around Clintondale anyway), and now (1961, in case anybody reads this later) a fellow sophomore classmate at North Clintondale High, wanted the story told, the story of her ill-fated brother, twenty-two year old John “Black Jack” McGee so this is the way it will be told. Why she wanted me to tell the story is beyond me, except that she knows, knows even in her sorrows, that I hang around with corner boys, Harry’s Variety Store corner boys, although I am more like a “pet,” or a “gofer,” than a real corner boy. But that story has already been told, told seven ways to Sunday, so let’s get to Black Jack’s story.

John “Black Jack” McGee like a million guys who came out of the post-World War II Cold war night and came out of the no prospect projects, in his case the Clintondale Housing Project (the Acre, okay, and hell’s little acre at that to save a lot of fancy sociological talk stuff), looking for kicks. Kicks anyway he could get them to take the pain away, the pain of edge city living if he was asked, by the way, politely asked or you might get your head handed to you on a platter asked. Needless to say Black Jack was rough stuff, rough stuff even when he was nothing but another Acre teenage kid, with a chip, no, about seven chips, on his wide shoulders. Needless to say, as well, there was nothing that school could teach him and he dropped out the very day that he turned sixteen. As a sign of respect for what little North Clintondale High taught him threw a rock through the headmaster’s window and then just stood there. The headmaster did not made peep one about it (he was probably hiding under his desk, he is that kind of guy) and Black Jack just walked away laughing. Yes, Black Jack was rough stuff, rough stuff all the way around. That story made him a legend all the way down to the Acre school, and so much so that every boy, every red-blooded boy, in her class made his pitch to get along with Betsy.

The problem with legends though is unless you keep pace other legends crowd you out, or somebody does some crazy prank and your legend gets lost in the shuffle. That’s the way the rules are, make of them what you will. And Black Jack, wide shouldered, tall, pretty muscular, long brown hair, and a couple of upper shoulder tattoos with two different girls’ names on them was very meticulous about his legend. So every once in a while you would hear a rumor about how Black Jack had “hit” this liquor store or that mom and pop variety store, small stuff when you think about it but enough to stir any red-blooded Acre elementary schoolboy’s already hungry imagination.

And then all of sudden, just after a nighttime armed gas station robbery that was never solved, Black Jack stepped up in society, well, corner boy society anyway. This part everyone who hung around Harry’s Variety knew about, or knew parts of the story. Black Jack had picked up a bike (motorcycle, for the squares), and not some suburban special Harley-Davidson chrome glitter thing either but a real bike, an Indian. The only better bike, the Vincent Black Lightning, nobody had ever seen around, only in motorcycle magazines. And as a result of having possession of the “boss” bike (or maybe reflecting who they thought committed that armed robbery) he was “asked” (if that is the proper word, rather than commissioned, elected, or ordained) to join the Acre Low-Riders.

And the Acre Low-Riders didn’t care if you were young or old, innocent or guilty, smart or dumb, or had about a million other qualities, good or bad, just stay out of their way when they came busting through town on their way to some hell-raising. The cops, the cops who loved to tell kids, young kids, to move along when it started to get dark or got surly when some old lady jaywalked caught the headmaster’s 'no peep' when the Low Riders showed their colors. Even “Red” Doyle who was the max daddy king corner boy at Harry’s Variety made a very big point that his boys, and he himself, wanted no part of the Low-Riders, good or bad. And Red was a guy who though nothing, nothing at all, of chain-whipping a guy mercilessly half to death just because he was from another corner. Yes, Black Jack had certainly stepped it up.

Here’s where the legend, or believing in the legend, or better working on the legend full-time part comes in. You can only notch up so many robberies, armed or otherwise, assaults, and other forms of hell-raising before your act turns stale, nobody, nobody except hungry imagination twelve-year old schoolboys, is paying attention. The magic is gone. And that is what happened with Black Jack. Of course, the Low-Riders were not the only outlaw motorcycle “club” around. And when there is more than one of anything, or maybe on some things just one, there is bound to be a "rumble" (a fight, for the squares) about it. Especially among guys, guys too smart for school, guys who have either graduated from, or are working on, their degrees from the school of hard knocks, the state pen. But enough of that blather because the real story was that the Groversville High-Riders were looking for one Black Jack McGee. And, of course, the Acre Low-Riders had Black Jack’s back.

Apparently, and Betsy was a little confused about this part because she did not know the “etiquette” of biker-dom, brother John had stepped into High-Rider territory, a definite no-no in the biker etiquette department without some kind of truce, or peace offering, or whatever. But see Black Jack was “trespassing” for a reason. He had seen this doll, this fox of a doll, this Lola heart-breaker, all blonde hair, soft curves, turned-up nose, and tight, short-sleeved cashmere sweater down at the Adamsville Beach one afternoon a while back and he made his bid for her. Now Black Jack was pretty good looking, okay, although nothing special from what anybody would tell you but this doll took to him, for some reason. What she did not tell him, and there is a big question still being asked around Harry’s about why not except that she was some hell-cat looking for her own strange kicks, was that she had a boyfriend, a Groversville guy doing time up the state pen. And what she also didn’t tell him was that the reason her boyfriend, “Sonny” Russo, was in stir was for attempted manslaughter and about to get out in August. And what she also did not tell him was that Sonny was a charter member of the High-Riders.

Forget dramatic tension, forget suspense, this situation, once Sonny found out, and he would, sooner or later, turned into “rumble city," all banners waving, all colors showing. And so it came to pass that on August 23, 1961, at eight o’clock in the evening the massed armies of Acre Low-Riders and Groverville High-Riders gathered for battle. And the rules of engagement for such transgressions, if there is such a thing, rules of engagement that is rather than just made up, was that Sonny and Black Jack were to fight it out in a circle, switchblades flashing, until one guy was cut too badly to continue, or gave up, or… So they went back and forth for a while Black Jack getting the worst of it with several cuts across his skin-tight white tee-shirt, a couple of rips in his blue jeans, bleeding but not enough to give up. Meanwhile true-blue Lola is egging Sonny on, egging him on something fierce, like some devil-woman, to cut the love-bug John every which way. But then Black Jack drew a break. Sonny slipped and John cut him, cuts him bad near the neck. Sonny was nothing but bleeding, bleeding bad, real bad. Sonny called it quits. Everybody quickly got the hell out of the field of honor, double-quick, Sonny’s comrades helping him along. That is not the end of the story, by no means. Sonny didn't make it, and in the cop dust-up Lola, sweet Lola, told them that none other than lover-boy Black Jack did the deed. And now Black Jack is earning his hard knock credits up in stir, state stir, for manslaughter (reduced from murder two).

After thinking about this story again I can also see where, if I played my cards right, I could be sitting right beside maybe not-so-old-flame Betsy, helping here through her brother hard times, down at the old Adamsville beach some night talking about the pitfalls of corner boy life while we are listening to One Night of Sin by Elvis Presley; Boppin’ High School Baby by Don Willis; Long Blonde Hair, Rose Red Lips by Johnny Powers (watch out Johnny); Sunglasses After Dark by Lo Lou Darrell Rhodes (Clintondale's pizza parlor max daddy Frankie Doyle’s favorite song); Red Hot by Bob Luman (yes, red hot); Long Gone Daddy by Pat Cupp; Put Your Cat Clothes On by Carl Perkins; Duck Tail by Joe Clay; Switch Blade Sam by Jeff Daniels (maybe not); Susie-Q by Dale Hawkins; Who Do You Love by Ronnie Hawkins; Summertime Blues by Eddie Cochran; Rumble Rock by Kip Taylor, Whole Lot Of Shakin’ Going On by Jerry Lee Lewis; and, Get Hot Or Go Home by John Kerby on the old car radio. What do you think?

From The North Adamsville Corner Boy Archives Before They Were Corner Boys Hey Were Corner s e le na

If you can believe this back in the 1950s, maybe the 1960s too but they did a different tact on the issues politicians, ministers, priests, school administrators and above all the cops were fretting over what they saw as a dangerous trend that could have threatened the very foundations of Western Civilization. They saw, particularly among young men, teenagers and early twenties a certain alienation from the main program laid out for everybody in society (the young women, fewer of them would get the microscopic look later) and dare I say it, a certain rebellion. That rebellion exhibited in various ways from total devotion to hot rods and midnight chicken runs, endless pursuit of the perfect wave by West Coast surfers, an epidemic of armed robberies and other acts of mayhem and murder among the outlaw motorcycle crowd and a serious surliness among the Time Square hipsters and their junkie brethren.        

Another manifestation of that same trend would be the sullen and maybe surly guys, mostly guys although some places had girls hanging around as eye candy who hung out on various corners of their respective towns. In the days before malls totally displaced these denizens it could have been a variety store, a drugstore, more likely a bowling alley or pizza parlor, the primo spot of primo spots. The, ah, corner boys had that same alienation and angst as those previously mentioned holy goofs except they had no dough, no money ad no way, no legal way starting out at least to make money and hence they hung and did the best they could.

But one look at this photograph of young boys who would in a few years, some of them anyway, become corner boys, read a sociologist’s juvenile delinquent nightmare and society’s too and you can prove to your own satisfaction that corner boys are made, not born.

  

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

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.

********

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.              

Aint Got No Time For Corner Boys Down In The Streets Making All That Noise-With the 1983 Film “Diner” In Mind

Aint Got No Time For Corner Boys Down In The Streets Making All That Noise-With the 1983 Film “Diner” In Mind

By Lance Lawrence

Recently I was watching a DVD from 1982, Diner, a film about a bunch of guys in 1959 Baltimore who hung out at, well, a diner and hence the title of the film. The cast of the film was a veritable who’s who of male stars (and one female Ellen Barkin) who came of cinematic age in the 1980s, guys like Mickey Rourke and Kevin Bacon who are still putting their shoulders to the wheel in the film industry. What had attracted me about the film from the blurb you get on each film these days from Amazon, Netflix, hell, even blogs from citizen film reviewers strutting their stuff in a democratic age  was beside the diner motif which is always attractive to me and which I will discuss in more detail below was the idea that these guys were still hanging together in their early twenties when the old corner boy high school days when hanging for guy like them were well past (and a few years later for me and my guys). Well past compared to nine to five work ethos, marriage, marry young ethos, kids, not too many like their parents but also done at a young age and that ever present sickle hanging over your head-“how the fuck did I get into this action.”          

I had watched this film with a friend, Sam Lowell, whom I have known since our corner boy days in Riverdale about forty miles west of Boston back in the early 1960s. Sam Lowell is a fairly well-known, or used to be fairly well-known, free-lance music and film critic for lots of publications great and small, some lone gone and some still around like Rolling Stone before he consciously started slowing down as he has reached retirement age. In the interest of full disclosure he was the guy who said I would like the film and would I come over, watch with him, and compare notes with him after the film was over. He was writing what he called a “think” review for American Film Today about “buddy” films which had something like a heyday in the 1980s between the guys who starred collectively in this film, the Brat Pack and those who came of cinematic age through the various film adaptations of S.E. Hinton’s male-centered buddy” films, guys like Matt Dillon you know. So after the showing we compared notes the most important one which we both agreed and which he used in his review was how many of the actions of the corner boys were very much like ours although we were younger than them when we did them (in the film they weren’t called “corner boys” nor did they call themselves that but that my friends is what they were-no question as Sam likes to say)  

Here’s what Sam said about that key question:

“Hey, around my way, around my growing up working class neighborhood out in Riverdale about forty miles west of Boston in the early 1960s they called them, anybody who thought about the matter like some errant sociologists wondering about alienation among the lower classes or acted on the premise like the cops who kept a sharp eye on any possible criminal activity corner boys. We called ourselves corner boys with a certain amount of bravado and without guile since we hung, what the heck, we hung on the corners of our town. (Corner boys which would be immortalized in Bruce Springsteen’s song, Jersey Girl, with the line. “aint got no time for corner boys down in the street making all that noise” and that was the truth-the “making all that noise” part. Also the S.E. Hinton books which we did not know about, as least I did not know about and I was “the Bookworm” along with “the Scribe” so I knew about what was what with books. The other guys could have given a fuck about books except maybe porn stuff or comics).

A working Riverdale definition: corner boys: those without much dough, those without a weekend date and no money for a weekend date even if a guy got lucky enough to draw some female companionship, someone who didn’t care about a “boss” car, the ’57 two-toned preferable red and white Chevy the boss of “boss” to sit up front in and would accept the bus as a mode of transportation, thus seldom lucky since only nerdy girls or whatever we called girls with brains but no looks would descend to that level, hung around blessed Tonio’s Pizza Parlor “up the Down” (the corner of Adams and Jefferson Streets and don’t ask me why it was called that it just was as far back as anybody remembered including my maternal grandparents who were born there) and, well, hung out. Hung out trying to do the best we could which involved mostly the aforementioned girls and larcenies, or plans for larcenies. And if defeated in either endeavor any particular night then there was always a couple of slices of Tonio’s secret formula pizza sauce to die for delight and a small Coke. Just so you know really hung around in late high school planning larcenies great and small (great the theft of some young woman’s virtue, small the midnight creeps through back doors but maybe no more should be mentioned since perhaps the statute of limitations has not run out).      

So when I saw the film under review, Diner, with a cast of up and coming actors who all went on to other films and saw that they were five guys, count ‘em six, who in 1959 in the great city of Baltimore hung around a diner talking the talk in between bites of French fries and gravy (against our culinary choice of pizza slices) I knew that they were kindred spirits. Knew that despite the several years different in time since they were all twenty-something gathering together for a wedding of one of their members around Christmas time they were from the same species… “

That pretty much summed up the main point we discussed that night, and during subsequent nights as well, but there were others, other stories that were stirred up from that viewing. Some long forgotten, and maybe that was just as well but other which one or the both of us remembered out of some fog of war moment. Since Sam was writing a generic review a lot of what he and I talked was “left on the floor” as we used to call the bullshit stuff we would throw out without batting an eyelash on lonesome John weekend nights and in summer almost every night. Those stories, some of them anyway, the ones I was involved in I decided to write down in a journal, a diary if you like that word better, and present the next time the surviving members of our crowd got together to cut up old touches (an old-fashioned word we used all the time but when I used it once with the sister of corner boy the late Al Stein she claimed to have never heard the expression before). So here goes guys and although I was not like the Bookworm or the Scribe back in the day I later turned into a late-blooming voracious reading and I hope you picked up the habit too.               

Sam mentioned in passing in his review about how hanging around guys in Baltimore and Riverdale were totally committed to betting on almost anything. Part of that betting trait was the need to “make a score,” make some dough for immediate dates but a lot of it was a real idea that the roll of the dice was going to be the only way to get out from under. Sure a lot of it was betting on sports outcomes especially on the then lowly Red Sox and high-riding Celtics but nothing was off-limits from what, as happened in the film, you would or would not get from a girl in the way of sex (we had our fair share of “ice queens” and in high school I had more than my fair share unless the other guys, as usual, were lying like bastards about what they were “getting”) to the most famous, or infamous bet of all-the night Frankie bet Sam on how high Tonio could throw the pizza dough to soften it up before making the crust.

I should explain that while I would later be partial to diners in the days in the later part of the 1960s when I was a regular Jack Kerouac “on the road” hitch-hiker grab rides from lonely for company truck drivers and I learned almost every diner, good or bad, stop at or avoid, from Boston to Frisco town back then we hung around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor in high school. Located at the corner of Jefferson and Adams “up the Downs” which Sam mentioned in his review and I need not speculate here why that section of town was called that Tonio’s was where we spent our driftless after school hours. (The corner boy progression in town was Harry’s Variety Store across from Riverdale Elementary which I was not part of since my family did not move to the town Iwas in  junior high school then Doc’s Drugstore with his great jukebox in junior high and then onto Tonio’s. This progression was recognized by one and all as rights in the corner boy rites of passage.) So we knew lots about Tonio and his operation and while the cops and other merchants around didn’t care to see us coming Tonio, an immigrant from Italy and maybe something of a corner boy, or whatever they called them over there, was happy to see us. Said that we brought in business-the girls with plenty of dough to spent on food and the jukebox while “disdaining” the riffraff-us.

To make a long story short one Friday night our acknowledged leader, Frankie Riley, now a big-time lawyer in Boston was looking for dough and knew Sam had some from caddying at the Point Pond Golf Course the previous weekend. So he was in a betting mood. Here was his bet. High or low, and I forget, and Sam had too what the standard was, about where Tonio’s pizza dough would be flung when he was making his pizzas for the night. The thing was, and this was a hard and fast rule that I do not remember ever being broken, once a guy called a bet the other guy, or guys had to take the challenge. So the bet was on. Every time Sam called high Tonio would go low and visa versa. That night Sam lost five bucks and his chance to have a date that weekend. Frankie got to go on his first date with Johanna Murphy whom he would eventually marry (and divorce). The “hook’ that caught Sam that night-the “fix” was in. Frankie whom Tonio liked the best of all of us, treated almost like a son, had spoken to Tonio before Sam came in. You can figure out the rest. Corner boy, strictly corner boy stuff.                   

[A while back we, a bunch of us who knew Markin who wrote the sketch below back in sunnier days, in hang around corner boy high school days and afterward too when we young bravos imbibed in the West Coast dragon chase he led us on in the high hellish mid-1960s summers of love, got together and put out a little tribute compilation of his written sketches that we were able to cobble from whatever we collectively still had around. Those writings were from a time when Markin was gaining steam as a writer for many of the alternative magazines, journals and newspapers that were beginning to be the alternative network of media resources that we were reading once we knew the main media outlets were feeding us bullshit on a bun, were working hand in glove with big government, big corporations, big whatever that was putting their thumbs in our eyes.

On big series, a series that Markin was nominated for, or won, I don’t remember which an award for, which I will tell you about some other time was from a period toward the end of his life, a period when he was lucid enough to capture such stories. He had found himself out in Southern California with a bunch of homeless fellow Vietnam veterans, no homeless was not the right word, guys from ‘Nam, his, their word not mine since I did not serve in the military having been mercifully declared 4-F, unfit for military duty by our local draft board, who having come back to the “real” world just couldn’t, or wouldn’t adjust and started “creating” their own world, their own brethren circle, such as it was out along the railroad tracks, rivers and bridges. Bruce Springsteen would capture the pathos and pain of the situation in his classic tribute-Brothers Under The Bridge.  Markin’s series was called To The Jungle reflecting both the hard ass jungle of Vietnam from which they had come to the old-timey hobo railroad track jungle they found themselves in.     

Yeah, those were the great million word and ten thousand fact days, the mid to late 1960s, and after he had gotten back from Vietnam the early 1970s say up to 1974 or so when whatever Markin wrote seemed like pure gold, seemed like he had the pulse of what was disturbing our youth dreams, had been able to articulate in words we could understand the big jail-break out he was one of the first around our town to anticipate. Had gathered himself to cut the bullshit on a bun world out.

That was before Markin took the big fall down in Mexico, let his wanting habits, a term that our acknowledged high school corner boy leader Frankie Riley used incessantly to describe the poor boy hunger we had for dough, girls, stimulants, life, whatever, get the best of him. Of course Frankie had “cribbed” the term from some old blues song, maybe Bessie Smith who had her habits on for some no good man cheating on her and spending all her hard-earned dough, maybe Howlin’ Wolf wanting every gal he saw in sight, skinny or big-legged to “do the do” with that Markin also had turned us onto although I admit in my own case that it took me many years, many years after Markin was long gone before I appreciated the blues that he kept trying to cram down our throats as the black-etched version of what hellish times were going through in the backwaters of North Adamsville while the rest of the world was getting ahead. Heading to leafy suburban golden dreams while we could barely rub two dimes together and hence made up the different with severe wanting habits-even me.  

From what little we could gather about Markin’s fate from Josh Breslin, a guy from Maine, a corner boy himself, who I will talk about more in a minute and who saw Markin just before he hit the lower depths, before he let sweet girl cousin cocaine “run all around his brain, the say it is going to kill you but they won’t say when” let the stuff alter his judgment, he went off to Mexico to “cover” the beginnings of the cartel action there. Somewhere along the line the down there Markin decided that dealing high heaven dope was the way that he would gather in his pot of gold, would get the dough he never had as a kid, and get himself well. “Well” meaning nothing but his nose so full of “candy” all the time that the real world would no longer intrude on his life. Somehow in all that mixed up world he had tried his usual end-around, tried to do either an independent deal outside the cartel, a no-no, or stole some “product” to start his own operation, a very big no-no. Either scenario was possible when Markin got his wanting habits on and wound up dead, very mysteriously dead, in a dusty back street down Sonora way in 1975, 1976 we don’t even have the comfort of knowing that actual date of his passing.

Those were the bad end days, the days out in Oakland where they were both staying before Markin headed south when according to Josh he said “fuck you” to writing for squally newspapers and journals and headed for the sweet dream hills. But he left plenty of material behind that had been published or at the apartment that he shared with Josh in Oakland before the nose candy got in the way. That material wound up in several locations as Josh in his turn took up the pen, spent his career writing for lots of unread small journals and newspapers in search of high-impact stories and drifted around the country before he settled down in Cambridge working as an free-lance editor for several well-known if also small publishing houses around Boston. So when the idea was proposed by Jack Callahan to pay a final written tribute to our fallen comrade we went looking for whatever was left wherever it might be found. You know from cleaning out the attics, garages, cellars looking for boxes where an old newspaper article or journal piece might still be found after being forgotten for the past forty or so years.

The first piece we found, found by Jack Callahan, one of the guys who hung around with us corner boys although he had a larger circle since as a handsome guy he had all the social butterfly girls around him and as a star football player for North Adamsville High he had the girls and all the “jock” hangers-on bumming on his tail, was a story by Markin for the East Bay Other about the transformation of Phil Larkin from “foul-mouth” Phil to “far-out’ Phil as a result of the big top social turmoil events which grabbed many of us who came of political, social, and cultural age in the roaring 1960s. Markin like I said before had been the lead guy in sensing the changes coming, had us following in his wake not only in our heads but his gold rush run in the great western trek to California where a lot of the trends got their start.

That is where we met the subject of the second piece, or rather Phil did and we did subsequently too as we made our various ways west, Josh Breslin, Josh from up in Podunk Maine, actually Olde Saco fast by the sea, and he became in the end one of the corner boys, one of the North Adamsville corner boys. But before those subsequent meetings he had first become part of Phil’s “family,” and as that second story documented also in the East Bay Other described it how Josh, working his new life under the moniker Prince Love, “married” one of the Phil’s girlfriends, Butterfly Swirl. The third one in the series dealt with the reality of Phil’s giving up that girlfriend to Prince Love and the “marriage” and “honeymoon,” 1960s alternative-style that cemented that relationship.

Yeah, those were wild times and if a lot of the social conventions accepted today without too much rancor like people living together as a couple without the benefit of marriage, same-sex marriage, and maybe even friends with benefits let me clue in to where they all started, or if not started got a big time work-out to make things acceptable. But that was not all he wrote about, just the easy to figure a good story about 1960s. Markin also wrote about those wanting habits days, our growing up poor in the 1950s days which while we had no dough, not enough to be rich was rich in odd-ball stuff we seemingly were forced to do to keep ourselves just a little left of the law, very little sometimes. Naturally he wrote about the characters like the one here, Stew-ball Stu, whom I hope doesn’t read this sketch if he is still alive because he might still take umbrage and without Markin around he might come after me with a wrench or jackknife, who we young boys, maybe girls too but then it was boys’ world mostly looked up to. The actual Stew-ball Stu he sued here was from a story told to him by Josh Breslin long after he shed his 1960s moniker of Prince Love when Markin was looking for corner boy stories. But believe me while the names might have been different old North Adamsville had its own full complement of Stus.        

For those not in the know, for those who didn’t read the first Phil Larkin piece where I mentioned what corner boy society in old North Adamsville was all about Phil was one of a number of guys, some say wise guys but we will let that pass who hung around successively Harry’s Variety Store over on Sagamore Street in elementary school,  Doc’s Drugstore complete with soda fountain and more importantly his bad ass jukebox complete with all the latest rock and roll hits as they came off the turntable on Newport Avenue in junior high school and Salducci’s Pizza “up the Downs” in high school, don’t worry nobody in the town could figure that designation out either, as their respective corners as the older guys in the neighborhood in their turn moved up and eventually out of corner boy life.

More importantly Phil was one of the guys who latter followed in “pioneer” Markin’s wake when he, Markin, headed west in 1966 after he had finished up his sophomore year in college and made a fateful decision to drop out of school in Boston in order to “find himself.” Fateful in that without a student deferment that “find himself” would eventually lead him to induction into the U.S. Army at the height of the Vietnam War, an experience which he never really recovered from for a lot of reasons that had nothing to do directly with that war but which honed his “wanting habits” for a different life than he had projected when he naively dropped out of college to see “what was happening” out on the West Coast.

Phil had met, or I should say that Josh had met Phil, out on Russian Hill in San Francisco when Josh, after hitchhiking all the way from Maine in the early summer of 1967, had come up to the yellow brick road converted school bus (Markin’s term for the travelling caravan that he and Phil were then part of and which the rest of us, including even stay-at-home me for a few months ) he and a bunch of others were travelling up and down the West Coast on and had asked for some dope. Phil was the guy he had asked, and who had passed him a big old joint, and their eternal friendship formed from there. (Most of us would meet Josh later that summer as we in our turns headed out. Sam Lowell, Frankie Riley, Jack Callahan, Jimmy Jenkins and me all headed out after Markin who had “gone native” pleaded with us to not miss this big moment that he had been predicting was going to sea-change happens for a few years.) Although Markin met a tragic end murdered down in Mexico several years later over a still not well understood broken drug deal with some small cartel down there as a result of an ill-thought out pursuit of those wanting habits mentioned earlier he can take full credit for our lifetime friendship with Josh.-Bart Webber]

An Encore Presentation-Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- Ain’t Got No Time For Corner Boys Down In The Street Making All That Noise-The Complete North Adamsville Corner Boy Stories-In Memory Of The Late Corner Boy Jimmy Higgins (1946-2018)

An Encore Presentation-Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- Ain’t Got No Time For Corner Boys Down In The Street Making All That Noise-The Complete North Adamsville Corner Boy Stories-In Memory Of The Late Corner Boy Jimmy Higgins (1946-2018)

A YouTube film clip of Tom Waits performing his cover of  Jersey Girl that formed part of the inspiration for this post.

By Seth Garth

[What goes around, comes around is an old tried and trite expression but sometimes it actually represents what has happened in certain circumstances. Like now. The original North Adamsville Corner Boy stories had been done under the guidance of then site manager Allan Jackson several years ago in what was something of a nostalgia trip for him and the rest of us who grew up in the Acre, the working poor section of old North Adamsville. That series, well-received at the time, was probably the beginning of some tipping point in the downfall of Allan as site manager in late 2017. From there he accelerated the nostalgia business culminating in the almost 24/7 coverage of the 50^th anniversary of the Summer of Love, 1967. That busted the dam among the younger writers who could have given a damn about stuff that they had to ask parents or other old-timers about and so the die was cast for a showdown. Allan lost that showdown, although he is now back as a contributing editor, which led to some very strange and frankly weird rumors about his exile whereabouts for a while.       

Here is the “comes around” part, the part about how this encore presentation saw the light of day again. Our old friend and corner boy Jimmy Higgins passed away in 2018 and after he passed on a number of us who write here and among the brethren sat around the Irish Pub in the old town and began talking about all the crazy, dangerous and illegal stuff we did with Jimmy in the thick of it. That got Allan thinking about resurrecting the Corner Boy series with some updates and current thoughts. Since I had written the series with plenty of help from the guys I was “elected” to approach current site manager Greg Green about an encore presentation. He kicked it “upstairs.” Upstairs meaning to Sam Lowell and the Editorial Board that the younger writers insisted on to keep the site manager in check a bit after the one-man-show Jackson regime. Since Sam is also an alumnus of the Acre corner boy scene Greg was just covering his ass with the younger writers. With Sam and the Board’s agreement here we are, with plenty of help from those surviving corner boys. RIP, Jimmy Higgins, RIP. Seth Garth]          

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Ah, corner boys down those mean streets, down in those mean Adamsville streets, making all their noise, producing all their hopeless hubris, swirling all around just to stay in one place. Yes, now fifty years later it is easy to dismiss those guys, write them off as losers, wannabe somethings, and guys to turn your back to but there was a time, a time day and night, when they, the corner boys, ruled, ruled my imagination, and, and almost caught me in their fix. Oh, for those who are clueless on the great stream corner boy night that probably no longer exists except in wayward urban ghetto/barrio corners, or some mall-less hick small town this was the mode of existence for guys, working -class guys, with no dough, no hopes of getting dough (getting dough legally anyway), or maybe, just plain not wanting to work for dough like drudge fathers, uncles and older brothers and hang out in the mom and pop variety store, drugstore, pizza parlor, bowling alley corner waiting,… yah, mainly waiting.

(That waiting seemingly harmless as I tell the tale some fifty plus years later was not as innocent, innocent when you dream, as I have made it out about a bunch of madcap footloose guys getting ready to conquer unknown worlds if only a few bucks came to hand. No, I have purposefully left out the larcenous part, the part where kids without gainful employment but dreams of girls and cars took matters into their own hands under the intellectual influence of one Peter Paul Markin, the midnight caper man and “General” Frankie Riley the operational leader after the time when under Markin’s leadership we almost ran into the cops as we left a vagabond house with our ill-gotten loot. The plan was beautiful except for his forgetting that the coppers patrolled that swank neighborhood on the hour.]

You will get it all wrong if you think though it was all waiting, sipping Coke waiting, smoking some endless cigarette smoke waiting, white tee-shirt, (a leather jacket against the wind on colder nights), jeans, engineer boots, wide black-buckled belts (useful in combat as well as holding up pants), maybe a chain hanging down. The uniform, or else.

[There was a uniform like that coming out of the juvenile delinquent world chronicled by The Wild One and James Dean’s epic Rebel Without A Cause and the spike in post-World War I hubris and alienation-teen and older version. Our uniform though was more subdued tending to plaid shirts and chinos maybe loafers or sneakers, yeah, sneakers even then. Talking about “comes around” since most of us for our footsore existence are back in sneaker harness although the quality and price are much different from the Chuck Taylor’s of our youth.]  

You will get it all wrong because you will have missed the patter, the constant patter, the dream patter that animated those sidewalk nights, those dreams, pipe-dreams maybe, of jail-break out working- class life, of moving “uptown” one way or another. You would have heard such talk if you walked by Harry’s Variety on any given night, some guy taking a pinball wizard break to tell how his luck is going to change any day now. Or leader Red, Red Hickey, mapping out the night’s midnight creep work, shortcut to the good life work, at least to keep the heap running and honey in clover. Of cars, stolen or refinished, mainly stolen. Yah, and talk of sex, of what this girl would do and that one wouldn’t, and why to go with those cars. A rough crowd not to be trifled with for certain, but from the edges fascinating to watch, and learn about some stuff, some stuff never mentioned at home.

[I was the beneficiary of more than one free Red-etched pinball game when he had some pressing business with some honey in a tight cashmere sweater with matching tight skirt showing a nice ass (okay, politically incorrect now but we are referring to then and so I will take any heat for speaking what we thought and said then)  who was ready to show him the world, ready to play the flute as we used to say. Red then could have cared less about leaving twelve free games on the board. I was something of a mascot around that store since my grandmother lived down the street and Red liked me. Red whose end was about what you would expect of a hard-living guy who sought no quarter and gave none down in North Carolina in an armed robbery of a White Hen store. By the way make no mistake, or if you do accept the mistake, not all of Red’s girls were round-heels, were what we called sluts. Some very high-toned young women looking for a walk on the wild side before settling into whatever golden niche they were expecting to settle into gave Red whatever he wanted just like the round heels and sluts. That included a very virginal-looking girl I was interested in during high school who would not give me the time of day once Red homed in on her which we didn’t know about until after we saw her with him one afternoon on his motorcycle.]     


Or, on other corners, the gang around Doc’s Drugstore, a place where all the neighborhood boys, all the sixteen- year old boys, and maybe some girls too, all the plaid-shirted, black-chinoed, “cool”, max daddies came of drinking age, for medicinal purposes of course. They could tell of magic elixirs from rums and raw whiskies, and confess, yes, confess that that whisky taste was nasty.

[Markin, that bastard intellectual guardian who couldn’t lead anything more than his dick, and maybe not that either, had a funny story about his experience at Doc’s, his coming of age alcohol story which every corner boy had to tell since nobody waited until 21 to learn the drinking trade. Doc who was a freebooter and mad monk in his own way was his grandmother’s druggist and Markin would on occasion go for her prescriptions since she was basically housebound. Most of the time Doc would include as Granny’s required medicine, a pint of whiskey. And Doc would give it to Markin as if nothing was the matter with a fourteen- year old kid getting a pint. One day he went to get the script without Granny giving the whiskey order part. He decided to add it since Granny’s bill came due monthly with her pension check and she probably wouldn’t notice the charge. Doc gave the pint without a thought. Later that day Markin and the late Jimmy Higgins, who would have his own personal hell fight for sobriety got so drunk down at the seawall on Adamsville Beach they were ill for days.]  
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Or on earlier, easier corners, really not corners, but the back of old Adamsville South Elementary School, when Billie Bradley would wind us up, a few wayward boys with dreams, musical dreams, Elvis riches dreams, and begin to sing in a low voice, then a little higher and we would back him up, drawing, drawing like lemmings from the sea, girls, stick girls and shapes, but girls and that was dream enough for twelve- year old boys with wanderlust, or maybe just lust in their hearts

[I could write pages and pages about both Billie and about that switch from not caring a damn about girls one year to seeing them as kind of interesting the next as puberty kicked in but Sam told me to keep the updated comments on the short side. Billie had some serious dreams about breaking out of his horrendous, worse than mine, family life and making a ton of money as a singer. When his voice changed all that fell apart and he would wind up doing various stretches of time for armed robberies and such before we lost all track of him around high school time when he dropped out to seek a different “career” path. But in the old neighborhood Billie was ahead of us, had a way with music which really did draw the girls in. All kinds. At one point I was something like his best friend and he would give me his “leavings,” girls he was bored with or were too plain for him. I, in turn, would give my “leavings” to Jimmy who despite his class clown reputation was really shy. Who Jimmy gave his “leaving” to I don’t recall.]           

Or, even holy of holies, Salducci’s Pizza Parlor up the Downs when Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, was king of the night (and a few days too) and I was his lord chamberlain. Maybe he'd tell us of some pizza dough secrets, or how to snag a girl with just the right jukebox combination. But no, no one has come forth to spew their whitewashed stories almost a half a century later so I must tell the tales. Probably, on some of the stuff, some of the kiddish schoolboy night stuff, those old corner boys don’t realize that the statute of limitations has run out and had ran out long ago. But that’s not my problem.

[I mentioned above, and Sam reminded me recently as well, that Markin could despite his larcenous magic had trouble tying his shoes so the operational command, the leader role fell almost naturally to Frankie Riley. He was smooth, very smooth which befits a guy who went on to become fairly well-known and important lawyer. The best example I can give, outside of  a few of the sexual escapades he was involved which I will not bother the reader with, was his ability to con some girl into playing songs on Tonio’s jukebox when he, we didn’t have money to do so. It seemed girls always had money for stuff like that. He took a stages approach, let the girl play her first choice and then he went to work, talking, talking and the next thing you know the air was filled with our beloved rock and roll. So you could see where he had little trouble usually talking some girl out of her virtue, or later a jury out of a conviction.]       

Ah, corner boys down those means streets, down in those mean Adamsville streets, making all their noise. Ah.
*******
Harry's Variety Store

Riding down the old neighborhood streets a while back, the old North Adamsville working- class streets, streets dotted with triple-deckers housing multiple families along with close-quarter, small cottage-sized single-family houses like the one of my own growing to manhood time. Houses, moreover, that reflected, no, exclaimed right to their tiny rooftops that seemingly eternal overweening desire to have, small or not, worth the trouble or not, something of one’s own against the otherwise endless servitude of days. Suddenly, coming to an intersection, I was startled, no, more than that I was forced into a double-take, by the sight of some guys, some teenage guys hanging, hanging hard, one foot on the ground the other bent holding up the infernal brick wall that spoke of practice and marking one’s territory, against the oncoming night in front of an old time variety store, a mom and pop variety from some extinct times before the 7/11 chain store, fast shop, no room for corner boys, police take notice, dark night. Memory called it Kelly’s, today Kim’s.

From the look of them, baggy-panted, latest fashion footwear name sneakered, baseball cap-headed, all items marked, marked with the insignia (secretly, and with no hope of outside decoding) signifying their "homeboy" associations (I would say gang, but that word is charged these days and this is not exactly what it looked like, at least to the public eye, my public eye) they could be the grandsons, probably not biological because these kids were almost all Asians speckled with a couple of Irish-lookers, shanty Irish-lookers, of the ghost be-bop night guys that held me in thrall in those misty early 1960s times.

Yah, that tableau, that time-etched scene, got me to thinking of some long lost comrades of the schoolboy night like the hang-around guys in front of Harry’s Variety, although comrades might not be the right word because I was just some punk young kid trying to be a wannabe, or half-wannabe, corner boy and they had no time for punk kids and later when I came of age, no left for college, I had no time for corner boys of the Harry’s Variety kind although I was knee-deep in another corner, Tonio’s Pizza Parlor corner holding up my share of the brick wall. Yah, that scene got me to thinking of the old-time corner boys who ruled the whole wide North Adamsville night (and day for those who didn’t work or go to school, which was quite a few on certain days, because most of these guys were between sixteen and their early twenties with very jittery school and work histories better left unspoken, or else).

Yah, got me thinking about where the white tee-shirted, blue-jeaned, engineer-booted, cigarette-smoking, unfiltered of course, sneering, soda-swilling, Coke, naturally, pinball wizards held forth daily and nightly, and let me cadge a few odd games when they had more important business, more important girl business, to attend to.

Yah, I got to thinking too about Harry’s, old Harry’s Variety over there near my grandmother’s house, over there in that block on Sagamore Street where the Irish workingman’s whiskey-drinking (with a beer chaser), fist-fighting, sports-betting after a hard day’s work Dublin Grille was. Harry’s was on the corner of that block. Now if you have some image, some quirky, sentimental image, of Harry’s as being run by an up-and-coming just arrived immigrant guy, maybe with a big family, trying to make this neighborhood store thing work so he can take in, take in vicariously anyway, the American dream like you see running such places now forget it. Harry’s was nothing but a “front.” Old Harry, Harry O’Toole, now long gone, was nothing but the neighborhood “bookie” known far and wide to one and all as such. Even the cops would pull up in their squad cars to place their bets, laughingly, with Harry in the days before the state became the bookie-of-choice with the lottery for most bettors. And he had his “book”, his precious penciled-notation book right out on the counter. But see punk kid me, even then just a little too book-unworldly didn’t pick up on that fact until, old grandmother, jesus, grandmother “hipped” me to it.

[I did not know until many years later that my grandmother made her two-dollar daily bet on the daily double on the cuff (pay later) for many years through Harry at Hialeah down in Florida of all places. Of course it didn’t matter what nag was running because she worked numbers or colors and not some racing form tout stuff.  I would unwittingly be the conduit for payment when she sent money over to Harry’s via me and on rare occasions I would be grabbing money from Harry when Granny’s ship came.  

Naturally Harry, whatever charmed life he led with the coppers would get “busted” by some of the same cops who were booking their bets with him. All show for her would be back in business a couple of days later with that precious book still out on the hardscrabble counter. The last I heard of Harry was when I was in college and my grandmother told me that Harry was “on the run,” had crossed up the South Boston Irish Mafia guys, although they were not called Mafia by any stretch of the imagination. Probably the late Whitey Bulger’s crowd when he was riding high in those days. Nobody ever saw Harry again at some point and the speculation ran that he was probably resting in the Quincy quarries the favorite resting place of Whitey’s victims. Sorry, Harry)    


Until then I didn’t think anything of the fact that Harry had about three dust-laden cans of soup, two dust-laden cans of beans, a couple of loaves of bread (Wonder Bread, if you want to know) on his dust-laden shelves, a few old quarts of milk and an ice chest full of tonic (now called soda, even by New Englanders) and a few other odds and ends that did not, under any theory of economics, capitalist or Marxist, add up to a thriving business ethos. Unless, of course, something else was going on. But what drew me to Harry’s was not that stuff anyway. What drew me to Harry’s was, one, his pin ball machine complete with corner boy players and their corner boy ways, and, two, his huge Coca Cola ice chest (now sold as antique curiosities for much money at big-time flea markets and other venues) filled with ice cold, cold tonics (see above), especially the local Robb’s Root Beer that I was practically addicted to in those days (and that Harry, kind-hearted Harry, stocked for me).

Many an afternoon, a summer’s afternoon for sure, or an occasional early night, I would sip, sip hard on my Robb’s and watch the corner boys play, no sway, sway just right, with that sweet pinball machine, that pinball machine with the bosomy, lusty-looking, cleavage-showing women pictured on the top glass frame of the machine practically inviting you, and only you, the player, on to some secret place if you just put in enough coins. Of course, like many dream-things what those lusty dames really gave you, only you the player, was maybe a few free games. Teasers, right. But I had to just watch at first because I was too young (you had to be sixteen to play), however, every once in a while, one of the corner boys who didn’t want to just gouge out my eyes for not being a corner boy, would let me cadge a game while Harry was not looking. When you think about it though, now anyway, Harry was so “connected” (and you know what I mean by that) what the hell did he care if some underage kid, punk kid, cadged a few games and looked at those bosomy babes in the frame.

(Harry was connected before the fall, his watery grave as mentioned above. The important thing was that the leader of the pack Red Riley would give me his leftover games when he had some honey on the line, also mentioned before. None of the other guys gave a rat’s ass if I got free games or not. All I know is Red is the only guy who ever left free games for me. For any reason whatsoever. That he was busy getting some luscious girl of the time playing the flute for him was not on my radar just then.)      


Yah, and thinking about Harry’s automatically got me thinking about Daniel (nobody ever called him that, ever) “Red” Hickey, the boss king of my schoolboy night at Harry’s. Red, the guy who set the rules, set the style, hell, set the breathing, allowed or not and when, of the place. I don’t know if he went to some corner boy school to learn his trade but he was the be-bop daddy (at least all the girls, all the hanging all over him girls, called him that) because he, except for one incident that I will relate below, ruled unchallenged with an iron fist. At least I never saw his regular corner boys Spike, Lenny, Shawn, Ward, Goof (yes, that was his name the only name I knew him by, and he liked it), Bop (real name William) or the Clipper (real name Kenny, the arch-petty Woolworth’s thief of the group hence the name) challenge him or want to.

(Clipper was my idol. While Red held my respect for his giving me free pin ball games and for talking to me once in a while it was Clipper who held my imagination. He is the one who taught me the clip, grabbing stuff from department stores and jewelry shops. That stuff was easy once you got the knack and once you had your nervousness under control that some copper, or some snitch trying to get out from under some charge would roll you over. I had a short tenure as a clip artist because I was just a little too nervous to keep it up solo. I did better with group heists where Markin planning worked its magic, except once. I can still today though see Theresa Wallace giving me a big ass kiss, maybe more when I gave her a “clipped” black onyx ring with diamond chips.)    


Yah, Red, old red-headed Red was tough alright, and had a pretty good-sized built but that was not what kept the others in line. It was a certain look he had, a certain look that if I went into describing it now, I would get way overboard into describing it as some stone-cold killer look, some psycho-killer look but that would be wrong because it didn’t show that way. But that was what it was. Maybe I had better put it this way. Tommy Thunder, older brother of my middle school and high school best friend and a corner boy king in his own right, Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, a big bruiser of a legendary North Adamsville football player and human wrecking machine who lived a few doors up from Harry’s went out of his way not to go near the place. Yah, Red was that tough.

(Toughness was at a premium in the old neighborhood from young guys to the “hoods” to fathers, uncles and older brothers getting drunk at the Dublin Pub or when they were in the chips the Irish Grille where “ladies were invited,” a long gone category in the barroom pantheon when of age women could go int the place without as escort, otherwise no go in the other places). Every night at closing you could heard some brawlers stinking up the air with their brash talk, including more than once my own father and I don’t know how many times my uncle when he lived with Granny after his wife threw him out of the house.)


See, he was like some general, or colonel or something, an officer at least, and besides being tough, he would “inspect” his troops to see that all and sundry had their “uniform” right. White tee-shirt, full-necked, no vee-neck sissy stuff, no muscle shirt half-naked stuff, straight 100% cotton, American-cottoned, American-textiled, American-produced, ironed, mother-ironed I am sure, crisp. One time Goof (sorry that’s all I knew him by, really) had a wrinkled shirt on and Red marched him up the street to his triple-decker cold-water walk-up flat and berated, berated out loud for all to hear, Goof’s mother for letting him out of the house like that. And Red, old Red like all Irish guys sanctified mothers, at least in public, so you can see he meant business on the keeping the uniform right question.

(One reason Red’s guys passed me by, kicked me around verbally many times never physically even though I could see a couple wanted to but were stopped by whatever they thought Red saw in me Red was I looked like a fucking ragamuffin, always dressed in hand-me-downs a little too large or small like some Salvation Army/Goodwill vagabond which was kind of true. True because Ma bought the whole collection of family outfits from the Bargain Center which was a local precursor of say Walmart, except even cheaper stuff from who knows where.)   

And like some James Dean or Marlon Brando tough guy photo, some motorcycle disdainful, sneering guy photo, each white tee-shirt, or the right sleeve of each white tee-shirt anyway, was rolled up to provide a place, a safe haven, for the ubiquitous package of cigarettes, matches inserted inside its cellophane outer wrapping, Luckies, Chesterfields, Camels, Pall Malls, all unfiltered in defiance of the then beginning incessant cancer drumbeat warnings, for the day’s show of manliness smoking pleasures.
And blue jeans, tight fit, no this scrub-washed, fake-worn stuff, but worn and then discarded worn. No chinos, no punk kid, maybe faux "beatnik," black chinos, un-cuffed, or cuffed like I wore, and Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, king of the faux beatnik middle school night, including among his devotees this little too bookish writer, who was as tough a general, colonel, or some officer anyway, as corner boy Red was with his guys. Frankie example: no cuffs on those black chinos, stay home, or go elsewhere, if you are cuffed. Same kingly manner, right? Corner boys blue-jeaned and wide black-belted, black always, black-belt used as a handy weapon for that off-hand street fight that might erupt out of nowhere, for no reason, or many. Maybe a heavy-duty watch chain, also war-worthy, dangly down from those jeans. Boots, engineer boots, black and buckled, worn summer or winter, heavy, heavy-heeled, spit-shined, another piece of the modern armor for street fight nights. Inspection completed the night’s work lies ahead.

(It is even now hard to believe Frankie survived to lawyer-hood after the crap he laid on us, even Jimmy Higgins who despite his shyness, despite his class clown couldn’t care less if school kept or not was football player rough, and tough although grades kept him off the bad ass Red Raiders, our high school team. Yet when Frankie commanded everybody even Johnny Blade (Richard Rizzo) who would later get into trouble and wind up in Vietnam when the judge gave him the “choice”-Army or jail. Laid his head down there as well and we all when we go back to the old town see his name etched on the town memorial to the fallen in war or go to the black granite memorial down in Washington shed a tear or two for our fallen brother.}      

And most nights work, seemingly glamorous to little too bookish eyes at the time, was holding up some corner of the brick wall in front or on the side of Harry’s Variety with those engineer boots, one firmly on the ground the other bent against the wall, small talk, small low-tone talk between comrades waiting, waiting for… Or just waiting for their turn at that Harry luscious ladies pictured pinball machine. Protocol, strictly observed, required “General Red” to have first coin in the machine. But see old Red was the master swayer with that damn machine and would rack up free games galore so, usually, he was on that thing for a while.
Hey, Red was so good, although this is not strictly part of the story, that he could have one of his several honeys right in front of him on the machine pressing some buttons and he behind pressing some other buttons Red swaying and his Capri-panted honey, usually some blond, real or imagined, swaying, and eyes glazing, but I better let off with that description right now, because like I said it was strictly speaking not part of the story. What is part of the story is that Red, when he was in the mood or just bored, or had some business, some girl business, maybe that blond, real or imagined, just mentioned business would after I had been hanging around a while, and he thought I was okay, give me his leftover free games.

Now that was the “innocent” part of Red, the swaying pinball wizard, girl-swaying, inspector general part. But see if you want to be king of the corner boy night you have to show your metal once in a while, if for no other reason than the corner boys, the old time North Adamsville corner boys might be just a little forgetful of who the king hell corner boy king was, or as I will describe, some other corner boy king of some other variety store night might show up to see what was what. Now I must have watched the Harry’s corner boy scene for a couple of years, maybe three, the last part just off and on, but I only remember once when I saw Red show “his colors.” Some guy from Adamsville, some tough-looking guy who, no question, was a corner boy just stopped at Harry’s after tipping a couple, or twenty, at the Dublin Grille. He must have said something to Red, or maybe Red just knew instinctively that he had to show his colors, but all of a sudden these two are chain-whipping each other. No, that’s not quite right, Red is wailing, flailing, nailing, chain-whipping this other guy mercilessly, worst, if that is possible. The guy, after a few minutes, was left in a pool of blood on the street, ambulance ready. And Red just walked way, just kind of sauntering away.
(When the ambulance came to pick up the human wreak and the coppers right behind asked the bleeding guy what happened, who did it he clammed up, said, I think so car ran over him. Never mentioned Red once. Neither did I or anybody else. And not just because of Red fear and retribution. In that neighborhood, among the guys anyway, from very, very early on you did not snitch, you did not say swat to cops about anything, ever. And they never pressed the issue knowing, some of them growing up right in the neighborhood like one of my uncles, the code of silence. Anybody who broke ranks from that code had better hit the road or find a good plastic surgeon.)        

Of course that is not the end of the Red story. Needless to say, no work, no wanna work Red had to have coin, dough, not just for the pinball machine, cigarettes, and soda, hell, that was nothing. But for the up-keep on his Chevy (Chevvies then being the “boss” car, and not just among corner boys either), and that stream of ever-loving blond honeys, real or imagined, he escorted into the seashore night. Said corner boys did their midnight creep around the area grabbing this and that to bring in a little dough. Eventually Red “graduated” to armed robberies when the overhead grew too much for little midnight creeps and graduated to one of the branches of the state pen, more than once. Strangely, his end came, although I only heard about this second hand, after a shoot-out with the cops down South after he tried to rob some White Hen convenience store. There is some kind of moral there, although I will be damned if I can figure it out. Red, thanks for those free games though.

(Thinking about all the tough guys, even marginally tough like Goof and Johnny Blade as far as I know none of them got very far from prison or like Johnny some isolated Army death. Still we idolized them, loved them in our strange growing to manhood way which probably explains why most of us wound up in Vietnam at some point when all hell was breaking loose there. Some of us learned a couple of things from that experience but not everybody did, too bad.)    

*************


Doc's Drugstore

It wasn’t all be-bop night, rock ‘n’ roll sock hop, midnight drifter, midnight sifter, low-rider, hard-boiled corner boy 1950s life in old down and out working-class dregs North Adamsville. Not at all. But a lot of it was, a lot that bespoke of the early phases of American deindustrialization, although we would not have called that then, if we had been aware of it even, with the demise of the local mainstay ship- building and its associated industries, great world war warship ship-building and then later gigantic oil tankers and then, then nothing, maybe a sailboat, or a row boat for all I know, I just don’t know more, or why.

[That deindustrialization hit the Garth family hard, very hard at times in the 1950s. Very hard meaning we were without an automobile, and when we did it was a serious clunker, not worthy of note, and a signal that we, the Garth family had not arrived in the golden age of the automobile. (An automobile in every garage an update on a “chicken in every pot.”) The norm then was to trade in your car every three years to show you had arrived which we never had to worry about. Very hard meaning that it was tough tight time some months for my father to put food on the table and to pay the bills. Very hard meaning that my father not well educated but a proud veteran of service in World War II on the European front, depended on his livelihood on machine work for companies that provided the ship-builders with specialized materials. As that dried up so did my father’s paychecks. A lot of this was not aided by his need of hard drink, of his brawling, of his betting on the next sure thing.

Ah, let me move on or Sam will have my ass in a sling since his family’s situation was even more desperate that mine. The only one lower on the down side of the totem pole was Markin, beautiful crazy Markin and his totally dysfunctional family. Not that is not right I think now that poor Jimmy Higgins’ family who lived at the Bottoms near the river had that unfortunate distinction of being at the bottom. Let me say this and be done with it. I watched my mother, my now realized sainted mother, put out the white envelopes each week on the dining room table in order to pay a “little something” to each party we owed money to keep the wolves as far from the door as possible.]        


All I know, or at least all that I know from what I heard my father, and other fathers say, was that that industry was the life’s blood of getting ahead, ahead in the 1950s life in that beat down, beat up, beat thirteen ways to Sunday town (yah, I know it is only six but it sure did seem like thirteen on some hard father unemployed days). And so low-rider, hard-boiled corner boy, the easy life of pinball wizardry, dime store lurid magazines, slow-drinking Cokes (or Pepsis, but make mine local Robb’s Root Beer), draped around mascara-eyed, heavy form-filled girls, and the occasional armed robbery to break up the day, and bring in some much needed dough held a higher place that it might have, and almost certainly would in some new town West.

But what was a guy to do if to get out of the house, get away from Ma’s nagging (and it was almost always Ma, every Ma house in those days), siblings heckling, and just breathe in some fresh air, some fresh be-bop rock corner boy air, if at all possible.
See, this is way before mall rat-dom came into fashion since the nearest mall was way too far away to drag yourself to, and it also meant traveling through other corner boy, other maybe not friendly corner boy lands. So if you didn’t want to tie yourself down to some heavy felony on some soft misty, foggy better, night by hanging around tough corner boy, Red Hickey-ruled Harry’s Variety, or your tastes did not run to trying to cadge some pinball games from those same toughs, or you were too young, too innocent, too poor, too car-less or too ragamuffiny for those form-filled, Capri-panted girls with their haunting black mascara eyes then you had to hang somewhere else, and Doc’s, yah, Doc’s Drugstore is where you hung out in the more innocent section of that be-bop 1950s night.

(Even talking about corner boys these days may seem totally anachronistic since my be-bop first out of the box post-World War II generation was probably the last serious corner boy one having had a proud history going back a couple of generations in the Acre, and elsewhere. Hell, now even that mall stuff that I used to see when I went to the malls had been eclipsed by various downtrodden text-messaging and other high tech stuff as ways to communicate but they are clearly not the same thing. Not the same as sharing in person those corner boy dreams of getting out from under Acre death sentence.   

By the way Doc, the druggist that most families patronized in the days before CVS and Walgreen’s chain swoop, was as mentioned earlier when I detailed Markin and Jimmy Higgins’ first bout with the bottle was a laid-back guy. He actually for some reason liked us hanging around as long as it was not too late since then he would catch hell from those previously mentioned mothers who ruled the day to day roost while fathers scrambled for work.)

Wait a minute I just realized that I had better explain, and do it fast before you get the wrong idea, that I am not talking about some CVS, Rite-Aid, or Osco chain-linked, no soliciting, no trespassing, no loitering, police take notice, run in and run out with your fistful of drugs, legal drugs, places. Or run in for some notions or sundries, whatever they are. No way, no way in hell would you want to hang out where old-timers like your mothers and fathers and grandparents went to help them get well.

No this was Doc’s, Doc-owned (yah, Doc, Doc Adams, I think, or I think somebody told me once that he was part of some branch of that Adams crowd, the presidential Adams crowd that used to be big wheels in a town about twenty miles up the road), Doc-operated, and Doc-ruled. And Doc let, unless it got too crazy, kids, ordinary kids, not hard-boiled white tee-shirted corner boys but plaid-shirted, chino pant-wearing (no I am not going to go on and on about the cuffs, no cuffs controversy, okay, so keep reading), maybe loafers (no, inserted pennies, please, and no, no, no, Thom McAn’s), a windbreaker against some ocean-blown windy night on such nights, put their mark on the side walls, the side brick walls of his establishment. And let the denizens of the Doc night (not a too late night either) put as well, every self-respecting corner boy, tee-shirted or plaid, make his mark by standing, one loafer-shod foot on the ground, and the other knee-bent against the brick wall holding Doc’s place together. True-corner boydom. Classic pose, classic memory pose.

And see, Doc, kindly, maybe slightly mad Doc, and now that I think about it slightly girl-crazy himself maybe, let girls, girls even hang against the wall. Old Harry’s Variety Red Hickey would have shot one of his girls in the foot if they had ever tried that stunt. Girls were to be draped, preferably draped around Red not around Harry’s wall, brick or not. Now, after what I just described you know that you’re into a new age night because no way Harry, and definitely not Red (Daniel, don’t ever call him that though) Hickey, king hell king of the low-rider night that I told you about before, just a couple minutes ago would let some blond, real or imagined, Capri-panted, cashmere swearing wearing (tight, very tight cashmere sweater-wearing, if you didn’t know), boffed, bimbo (ouch, but that is what we called them, so be it) stand around his corner even. Dames (better, right) were for hot-rod Chevy, hard-driving, low-riding sitting on the seat next to, and other stuff. You can figure the other stuff. But plaid-shirted guys (loafer-shod) liked, do you hear me Red and Harry, liked having girls hanging with them to while away the be-bop hard night corner boy lands.

(Maybe I had better explain right now the stages of the rites of passage which will give you a better idea about why in what was then called junior high and now middle school although I hear that some places are joining middle and high schools together to create even more mayhem Doc liked having girls hang around his place. In elementary school you hung out at Eddie’s Variety which really was what it said it was stocked with real food and no betting sheets unlike Harry’s and no girls. In junior high Doc’s and then in high school or when you were maybe sixteen things branched toward Harry’s and the criminal life or Tonio’s Pizza Parlor and plaid shirts, loafers and outrageous dreams if you followed Markin’s logic which most of us did even Jimmy Higgin’s who was a little behind the curve on a lot of things. Not on having girls around though as shy as he was around then maybe reflecting that there were six boys and no girls among his siblings since he was happy as a clam when Billie Bradley passed his cast-offs my way and I passed mine to Jimmy.)   

And before you even ask, Doc’s had not pinball machine and no pinball wizards (as far as I remember, although a couple of guys and a girl were crackerjack bowlers). But see, Doc’s had the things that mattered, mattered for plaid-shirted guys with a little dough (their allowances, no snickering please for any hard-boiled readers, or poor ones) in their pockets, and lust, chaste lust maybe, in their hearts. Doc’s had a soda fountain, one, and, two, had a juke box. Where the heck do you think we heard a zillion times all those songs from back then that I keep telling you about? Come on now, smarten up.

(Needless to say Doc’s jukebox machine was the start of larcenous Brian Pennington’s moving to the top of the heap in our crowd and Billie Bradley went his dumb ass way after elementary school. Went to the top via that girl con stuff already mentioned to get them to play songs we wanted to hear AND getting us to realize that those “sticks” from elementary school who we had not time for, none and were menaces to civilization had gotten some shapes and gotten kind of interesting. Nod to Brian despite the future fistful of divorces we collectively went through in male adulthood.)

And, of course if you have corner boys, even nice corner boys, you have to have a king hell king corner boy. Red, Red Hickey, understood that instinctively, and acted on it, whip chain in hand. Other boys in other corners acted on it in that same spirit, although not that crudely. And corner boy king, Doc’s Drugstore corner boy king, Brian Pennington, plaid-shirted king of the soft-core corner boy night acted on that same Red premise. How Brian (“Bri” to most of us) came to be king corner boy is a good story, a good story about how a nowhere guy (my characterization nowhere guy) used a little influence to get ahead in this wicked old world. Red did it by knocking heads around and was the last man standing, accepting his “crown” from his defeated cronies. Brian took a very different route.

Now I don’t know every detail of his conquest because I only touched the edges of his realm, and of his crowd, as I was moving out of the neighborhood thralldom on to other things, Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, scribe things during this time after Billie, my real home boy to use some more recent parlance although that seems faded too, got a little crazy when his voice changed). Apparently, Doc had a granddaughter, a nice but just then wild granddaughter whom Doc was very fond of as grandfathers will be. And of course he was concerned about the wildness, especially as she was coming of age, and nothing but catnip (and bait) for Red and his corner boys if Doc didn’t step in and bring Brian into the mix. Now, no question, Brian was a sharp dresser of the faux-collegiate type that was just starting to come into its own in that 1960s first minute. This time of the plaid shirts was a wave that spread, and spread quickly, among those kids from working- class families that were still pushing forward on the American dream, and maybe encouraging their kids to take college courses at North Adamsville High, and maybe wind up in that burgeoning college scene that everybody kept talking about as the way out.

(I have already mentioned how some nice girls, girls who went to Mass every Sunday and such, would wind up trying Red out for whatever reason and then head back to wherever soft cushion place where they would land. I remember one girl, already mentioned, who I was making a big play for in high school and got nowhere, had her Red moments. Went riding free as the breeze one summer day behind Red on his motorcycle on Adamsville Boulevard. Had been as virginal looking as any girl in town and only got my fervor up more after Red was done with her, or she him. I know because I actually had a few dates with her after college that she went to Wellesley and had a career as a professor at Smith from which she recently retired. And no I am not going after wife number four at this late date. So Doc had reason to be concerned about a wild child doing who knows what.)    

Brian was no scholar, christ he was no scholar, although he wasn’t a dunce either. At least he had enough sense to see which way things were going, for public consumption anyway, and put on this serious schoolboy look. That sold Doc, who had been having conversations with Brian when he came into the drugstore with books in one arm, and a girl on the other. I’ll give you the real low-down sometime about how book-worthy, book-worshipping Brian really was. Let me just relate to you this tidbit for now. One day, one school vacation day, Brian purposefully knocked the books out of my hands that I had borrowed when I was coming out of the Thomas Noble Public Library branch over on Atlantic Avenue (before it moved to the Downs) and yelled at me, “bookworm.” Like I didn’t know that already.

But enough about that because this is about Brian's rise, not mine. Somehow Brian and Lucy, Doc’s granddaughter came together, and without going into all the details that like I said I don’t really know anyway, they hit it off. And see, this is where Brian’s luck really held out, from that point on not only did Brian get to hang his loafer-ed (sic maybe) shoe on Doc’s brick wall but he was officially, no questions asked, the king of that corner boy night. That’s how I heard the story and that seems about right because nobody ever challenged him on it, not that I heard.

Now like I mentioned before, Doc’s was a magnet for his juke box-filled soda fountain and drew a big crowd at times, especially after school when any red-blooded kid, boy or girl, needed to unwind from the pressure-cooker of high school, especially we freshmen who not only had to put up with the carping teachers, but any upper classman who decided, he or she, to prank a frosh. That’s my big connection with Doc’s, that after school minute freshman year, but, and here I am getting my recollections second-hand, Doc’s was also a coming-of-age place for more than music, soft ice cream, and milk shakes. This is also the place where a whole generation of neighborhood boys, and through them, the girls as well had their first taste of alcohol.

How you say? Well, Brian, remember Brian, now no longer with Lucy (she went off to a private finishing school and drifted from the scene) but was still Doc’s boy, Doc’s savior boy, and somehow conned old Doc into giving him his first bottle of booze. After hearing about Markin and Jimmy Higgins’ escapade with Doc booze Bri got some big ideas about getting booze on his own. Not straight up, after all Brian was underage but Bri said it was, wink, wink, for his grandmother. Now let me explain, in those days in the old neighborhood, and maybe all over, a druggist could, as medicine, sell small bottles of hard liquor out of his shop legally. The standard for getting the prescription wasn’t too high apparently, and it was a neighborhood drugstore and so you could (and this I know from personal experience) tell Doc it was for dear old grandma, and there you have it. Known grandma tee-totalers and their grandkids would be out of the loop on this one but every self-respecting grandma had a “script” with Doc. Now Doc knew, had to know, about this con, no question, because he always had a chuckle on him when this came up. And he had his own Doc standards- no one under sixteen (and he was sharp on that) and no girls. So many a night the corner boys around Doc’s were probably more liquored up that Red and his boys ever were. Nice, right?

(That sixteen just mentioned was an add-on as the script for grandmother craze grew after Markin who was only fourteen and Bri led the way. The girl restriction was somehow related to their tolerance for alcohol, or rather what they might do, what they might give into when high. Doc wanted no girl going to see some “Aunt Emma” meaning she was pregnant at a time when such things were a matter of family shame. Funny though the girls were still getting their booze from the guys. As far as the correlation between that drinking and Aunt Emma I don’t remember.)    

********
When Billie Ruled The Roost- First Take

He was the first. A certified 1958 A-One prime custom model first. Yes, Billie was the first. Billie, William James Bradley that is if you did not know his full moniker, was the first. No question about it, no controversy, no alternate candidates, no hemming and hawing agonizing about this guy’s attributes or that guy’s style and how they lined up against Billie’s shine in order to pick a winner. No way get it. Billie, first in what anyway? Billie, first, see, first in line of the then ever sprouting young schoolboy king corner boy wannabes. Wannabes because the weres, the corner boy weres, the already king corner boy weres, the older, mainly not schoolboys or, christ, not for long schoolboys, mainly not working, jesus, mainly not working, mainly just hanging around (lying about was a name for it, a fit name at that) were already playing, really hip-swaying, lazily hip-swaying if you wanted to win games, wizard pinball machines in the sacred corner boy small town mom and pop variety night or cueing up in some smoke-filled big town pool hall.

(I have already detailed Red and his Harry’s Variety crowd, the max daddy model for one branch of the corner boy tree-not mine but guys on my street, guys like Clipper, named for being the max daddy of grabbing stuff gratis from department and jewelry stores. Thus I will move on.)  

Or working on hot souped-up cars, a touch of grease pressed, seemingly decaled pressed, into their uniform white tee-shirts (no vee-necks need apply) and always showed, showed an oily speck anyway, on their knuckles. But the cars were to die for, sleek tail-finned, pray to god cherry red if you put the finish on right (no going to some hack paint shop, no way, not for this baby, not for that ’57 Chevy), dual exhaust, big cubic engine numbers that no amateur had a clue to but just knew when sighted that thing would fly (well, almost fly) into the boulevard night, that sea air, sex-charged boulevard night. Tuned-up just right for that cheap gas to make her run, yah, that cheap City Service gas that was even cheaper than the stuff over at the Merit gas station, by two cents.

(No one today should underestimate the draw of sleek cars and fast night racing in the imagination of even plaid shirt and chino guys from the old neighborhood, from anyway USA come to think of it. Going back at least to the early post-war years, say 1948, 1949 young guys who didn’t get their fill of war being too young revved up the night seeking some other kinds of thrills running the “chicken runs” to see who was the king of the road (and who would take the prize, usually the losers girlfriend who probably was more than happy to change seats for the faster car around).

Strangely today’s young have no such admiration, have no big push desire to even get their drivers licenses the first possible minute to get mobile, to get on the road if anecdotal evidence that has come my way the past few years is any indication. They are happy to use Uber, Lyft, Ma and Pa in a pinch rather than dream our sullen dreams of “boss” cars. Not so strangely then, I, and I was not alone in this would pick friends in high school based on their having a car, wheels and for the price of 30 cents a gallon gas I could ride “shotgun” in some vehicle rather than depend on the foolish public service bus that always came late.)   


Or talking some boffo, usually blonde, although not always, maybe a cute rosy red-lipped and haired number or, in a pinch, a soft, sultry, svelte brunette, tight cashmere sweater-wearing, all, Capri pant-wearing, all, honey out of her virtue (or maybe into her virtue) down by the seashore after some carnival-filled night. A night that had been filled with arcade pinball wizardry, cotton candy, salt-water taffy, roller coaster rides, and a few trips into the tunnel of love, maybe win a prize from the wheel of fortune game too. A night capped with a few illicit drinks from some old tom, or johnny, Johnny Walker that is, rotgut to make that talking easier, and that virtue more questionable, into or out of. All while the ocean waves slap innocently against the shore, drowning out the night’s heavy breathed, hard-voiced sighs.

(Covered privacy by fog-filled windows come midnight. I have already described the boffo honeys and have as well the hard fact that “nice” every week at Sunday Mass girls that I was inevitably attracted to were as likely to be seen in some fast moving car as the bimbos seen on television or in the move is when movie land tried to depict ten alienation and angst. I am still miffed that my antennae were not as shape as Markin’s or for that matter Jimmy Higgins as he got older and somewhat less shy to realize that I was running the wrong track, was too easily discouraged by the cold freeze that most of those virginal girls put out. The name Theresa Wallace stands out even today as somebody I should have pursued more desperately, had thought to offer to take her down the beach to have a few drinks of Doc’s whiskey or that bought by the town wino who would buy for anybody as long as he got his bottle of wine, Thunderbird for the older folk who remember that cheapjack wine name.)_

Or, get this, because it tells a lot about the byways and highways of the high-style corner boy steamy black and white 1950s night, preparing, with his boys, his trusted unto death boys, his omerta-sworn boys, no less to do some midnight creep (waylaying some poor bedraggled sap, sidewalk drunk or wrong neighborhooded, with a sap to the head for dough, or going through some back door, and not gently, to grab somebody’s family heirlooms or fungibles, better yet cash on hand) in order to maintain that hot car, cheap gas or not, or hot honey, virtuous or not. Yah, things cost then, as now.

(I will let this one goes without comment since who knows maybe the statute of limitations has not run out on some of this stuff. I will check with our old leader and operations chief Frankie Riley now a high-priced “of counsel” lawyer for a bigtime Boston law firm on that matter and get back to you. (Markin by the way the “intellectual” genius who laid the plans and Jimmy Higgins the lead muscle.)

And, yah, in 1958, in hard look 1958, those king hell corner boy weres already sucked up the noteworthy, attention-getting black and white television, black and white newsprint night air. Still the lines were long with candidates and the mom and pop variety store-anchored, soda fountain drugstore-anchored, pizza parlor-anchored, pool hall-anchored corners, such as they were, were plentiful in those pre-dawn mall days. But see that is the point, the point of those long lines of candidates in every burg in the land or, at least became the point, because in 1948, or 1938, or maybe even 1928 nobody gave a rat’s ass, or a damn, about corner boys except to shuffle them out of town on the first Greyhound bus.

(You already know that Harry loved Red and the boys, had them around really to protect not only their turf but his just in case the coppers were on a tear or somebody was looking to take his bookie business somewhere. The majority, the adult majority opinion including tough fathers steeled by military service in hard ass war, was that they were an eyesore on the neighborhood and better run out of town-except nobody wanted a civil war. As for my Tonio’s Pizza Parlor corner boys Tonio loved us, no, loved Frankie Riley like a son for some reason which meant that we were okay too. We brought in the girls with some money, allowance money which we never came close to having for jukeboxes and pizza slices with soda which never heard. The majority, the adult majority opinion including tough fathers steeled by military service in hard ass war was we were an eyesore on the neighborhood and better run out of town-except nobody wanted a civil war.)   

Hell, in 1948 they were still in hiding from the war, whatever war it was that they wanted no part of, which might ruin their style, or their dough prospects. They were just getting into those old Nash jalopies, revving them up in the "chicken run" night out in the exotic west coast ocean night. In 1938 you did not need a Greyhound bus coming through your town because these guys were already on the hitchhike road, or were bindled-up in some railroad jungle, or getting cracked over the head by some “bull,” in the great depression whirlwind heading west for adventure, or hard-scrabble work. And in 1928 these hard boys were slugging it out, guns at the ready, in fast, prohibition liquor-load filled cars, and had no time for corners and silly corner pinball wizard games (although maybe they had time for running the rack at Gus’s pool hall, if they lived long enough).

(Nice run through of corner boy history which I can add nothing to except if you don’t believe me about the 1930s guys check some history and check too what Whitey Bulger in the South Boston Irish ghetto from whence my people came was doing in the 1940s-okay)  

That rarified, formerly subterranean corner boy way of life, was getting inspected, dissected, rejected, everything but neglected once the teen angst, teen alienation wave hit 1950s America. You heard some of the names, or thought you heard some of the names that counted, but they were just showboat celebrities, celebrities inhabiting Cornerboy, Inc. complete with stainless tee-shirt, neatly pressed denim jeans, maybe a smart leather jacket against the weather’s winds, unsmoked, unfiltered cigarettes at the ready, and incurably photogenic faces that every girl mother could love/hate.
Forget that. Down in the trenches, yah, down in the trenches is where the real corner boys lived, and lived without publicity most days, thank you. Guys like Red Hickey, tee-shirted, sure, denim-jeaned, sure, leather-jacketed, sure, chain-smoking (Lucky Strikes, natch), sure, angelic-faced, sure, who waylaid a guy, put him in an ambulance waylaid, just because he was a corner boy king from another cross-town corner who Red thought was trying to move in, or something like that. Or guys like Bruce “The Goose” McNeil, ditto shirted, jeaned, jacketed, smoked (Camels), faced who sneak-thieved his way through half of the old Adamsville houses taking nothing but high-end stuff from the swells. Or No Name McGee, corner boy king of the liquor store clip. Yah, and a hundred other guys, a hundred no name guys, except maybe to the cops, and to their distressed mothers, mainly old-time Irish and Italian novena-praying Catholic mothers, praying against that publicity day, the police blotter publicity day.
But you did not, I say, you did not hear those Hickey, McNeil, No Name stories in the big town newspapers or in some university faculty room when those guys zeroed in on the corner boy game trying to explain, like it was not plain as the naked eye to see, and why, all that angst and alienation. And then tried to tell one and all that corner boy was a phase, a minute thing, that plentiful America had an edge, like every civilized world from time immemorial had, where those who could not adjust, who could not decode the new American night, the odorless American night, the pre-lapsarian American night shifted for themselves in the shadows. Not to worry though it was a phase, just a phase, and these guys too will soon be thinking about that ticky-tack little white house with the picket fence.

Yah, but see, see again, just the talk through the grapevine about such guys as Red, The Goose, No Name, the legendary jewelry store clip artist, Brother Johnson (who set himself apart because he made a point of the fact that he didn’t smoke, smoke cigarettes anyway), and a whole host of guys who made little big names for themselves on the corners was enough to get guys like Billie, and not just primo candidate Billie either, hopped-up on the corner boy game. Yah, the corner boys whose very name uttered, whose very idea of a name uttered, whose very idea of a name thought up in some think-tank academy brain-dust, and whose very existence made a splash later (after it was all over, at least the public, publicity all over, part), excited every project schoolboy, every wrong side of the tracks guy (and it was always guys, babes were just for tangle), every short-cut dreaming boy who could read the day’s newspaper or watch some distended television, or knew someone who did.

And Billie was the first. The star of the Adamsville elementary schoolboy corner boy galaxy. No first among equals, or any such combination like that either, if that is what you are thinking. Alone. Oh sure his right-hand man, Peter Paul Markin, weak-kneed, bookwormy, girl-confused but girl-addled, took a run at Billie but that was seen, except maybe by Peter Paul himself, as a joke. Something to have a warm chuckle over on dreary nights when a laugh could not be squeezed out any other way. See, Peter Paul, as usual, had it all wrong on his figuring stuff. He thought his two thousand facts knowledge about books, and history, and current events, and maybe an off-hand science thing or two entitled, get this, entitled him to the crown. Like merit, or heredity, or whatever drove him to those two thousand facts meant diddly squat against style and will.

Billie tried to straighten him out, gently at first, with a short comment that a guy who had no denim blue jeans, had no possibility of getting denim blue jeans, and was in any case addicted to black chinos, black- cuffed chinos, has no chance of leading anybody, at any time, in anything. Still Peter Paul argued some nonsense about his organizing abilities. Like being able to run a low-rent bake sale for some foolish school trip, or to refurbish the U.S.S. Constitution, counted when real dough, real heist dough, for real adventures was needed. Peter simmered in high-grade pre-teen anguish for a while over that one, more than a while.

Billie and Peter Paul, friends since the first days of first grade, improbably friends on the face of it although Billie’s take on it was that Peter Paul made him laugh with that basketful of facts that he held on to like a king’s ransom, protecting them like they were gold or something, finally had it out one night. No, not a fist fight, see that was not really Billie’s way, not then anyway or at least not in this case, and Peter Paul was useless at fighting, except maybe with feisty paper bags or those blessed facts. Billie, who not only was a king corner boy contender but a very decent budding singer, rock and roll singer, had just recently lost some local talent show competition to a trio of girls who were doing a doo wop thing. That part was okay, the losing part, such things happened in show biz and even Billie recognized, recognized later, that those girls had be-bopped him with their cover of Eddie, My Love fair and square. Billie, who for that contest was dressed up in a Bill Haley-style jacket made by his mother for the occasion, did the classic Bill Haley and the Comets Rock- Around-The-Clock as his number. About halfway through though one of the arms of his just made suit came flying off. A few seconds later the other arm came off. And the girls, the coterie of Adamsville girls in the audience especially, went crazy. See they thought it was part of the act.

After that, at school and elsewhere, Billie was besieged daily by girls, and not just stick-shaped girls either, who hung off all his arms, if you want to know. And sensitive soul Peter Paul didn’t like that. He didn’t care about the girl part, because as has already been noted, and can be safely placed on golden tablets Peter Paul was plenty girl-confused and girl-addled but girl-smitten in his funny way. What got him in a snit was that Billie was neglecting his corner boy king duty to be on hand with his boys at all available times. Well, this one night the words flew as Billie tired, easily tired, of Peter Paul’s ravings on the subject. And here is the beauty of the thing, the thing that made Billie the king corner boy contender. No fists, no fumings, no forget friendships. Not necessary. Billie just told Peter Paul this- “You can have my cast-offs.” Meaning, of course, the extra girls that Billie didn’t want, or were sticks, or just didn’t appeal to him. “Deal,” cried Peter Paul in a flash. Yah, that was corner boy magic. And you know what? After that Peter Paul became something like Johnson’s Boswell and really started building up Billie as the exemplar corner boy king. Nice work, Billie.

You know Freddie Jackson too took his shots but was strictly out of his league against the Billie. Here it was a question not of facts, or books, or some other cranky thing bought off, bought off easily, by dangling girls in front of a guy a la Peter Paul but of trying to out dance Billie. See Freddie, whatever else his shortcomings, mainly not being very bright and not being able to keep his hands out of his mother’s pocketbook when he needed dough so that he had to stay in many nights, worst many summer nights, could really dance. What Freddie didn’t know, and nobody was going to tell him, nobody, from Peter Paul on down if they wanted to hang out with Billie was that Billie had some great dance moves along with that good and growing singing voice. See, Freddie never got to go to the school or church dances and only knew that Billie was an ace singer. But while Freddie was tied to the house he became addicted to American Bandstand and so through osmosis, maybe, got some pretty good moves too.

So at one after-school dance, at a time when Freddie had kept his hands out of his mother’s pocketbook long enough not to be house-bound, he made his big move challenge. He called Billie out. Not loud, not overbearing, but everybody knew the score once they saw Freddie’s Eddie Cochran-style suit. The rest of the guys (except Billie, now wearing jeans and tee-shirt when not on stage in local talent contests where such attire got you nowhere) were in chinos (Peter Paul in black-cuffed chinos, as usual) and white shirts, or some combination like that, so Freddie definitely meant business. Freddie said, “If I beat you at dancing I’m running the gang, okay?” (See corner boys was what those professors and news hawks called them but every neighborhood guy, young or old, knew, knew without question, who led, and who was in, or not in, every, well, gang). Billie, always at the ready when backed up against the wall, said simply, “Deal.” Freddie came out with about five minutes of jitter- buggery, Danny and the Juniors At The Hop kind of moves. He got plenty of applause and some moony-eyedness from the younger girls (the stick girls who were always moony-eyed until they were not stick girls any more).

Billie came sauntering out, tee-shirt rolled up, tight jeans staying tight and just started to do the stroll as the song of the same name, The Stroll, came on. Now the stroll is a line dance kind of thing but Billie is out there all by himself and making moves, sexual-laden moves, although not everybody watching would have known to call them that. And those moves have all the girls, sticks and shapes, kind of glassy-eyed with that look like maybe Billie needed a partner, or something and why not me look. Even Freddie knew he was doomed and took his lost pretty well, although he still had that hankering for mom’s purse that kept him from being a real regular corner boy when Billie got the thing seriously organized.
Funny thing, Lefty Wright, who actually was on the dance floor the night of the Freddie-Billie dance-off, pushed Billie with the Freddie challenge. And Freddie was twenty times a better dancer than Lefty. Needless to say, join the ranks, Lefty. Canny Danny O’Toole (Cool Donna O’Toole’s, a stick flame of Billie’s, early Billie, brother) was a more serious matter but after a couple of actions (actions best left unspecified) he fell in line. Billie, kind of wiry, kind of quick-fisted as it turned out, and not a guy quick to take offense knew, like a lot of wiry guys, how to handle himself without lots of advertising of that fact. He was going to need that fist-skill when the most serious, more serious than the Canny Danny situation came up. And it did with Badass Bobby Riley, Badass was a known quality, but he was a year older than the others and everybody knew was a certified psychopath who eventually drifted out of sight. Although not before swearing his fealty to Billie. After taking a Billie, a wiry Billie, beating the details of which also need no going into now. And there were probably others who stepped up for a minute, or who didn’t stay long enough to test their metal. Loosey Goosey Hughes, Butternut Walsh, Jimmy Riley (no relation to Badass), Five Fingers Kelly, Kenny Ricco, Billy Bruno, and on and on.

But such was the way of Billie’s existence. He drew a fair share of breaks, for a project kid, got some notice for his singing although not enough to satisfy his huge hunger, his way out, he way out of the projects, projects that had his name written all over them(and the rest of his boys too). And then he didn’t draw some breaks after a while, got known as a hard boy, a hard corner boy when corner boy was going out of style and also his bluesy rockabilly singing style was getting crushed by clean-cut, no hassle, no hell-raising boy boys. And then he started drawing to an outside straight, first a couple frame juvenile clip busts, amid the dreaded publicity, the Roman Catholic mother novena dread publicity, police blottered. Then a couple of house break-ins, taking fall guy lumps for a couple of older, harder corner boys who could make him a fall guy then, as he would others when his turn came. All that was later, a couple of years later. But no question in 1958, especially the summer of 1958 when such things took on a decisive quality, Billie, and for one last time, that’s William James Bradley, in case anyone reading needs the name to look up for the historical record was Billie's time. Yah, 1958, Billie, ah, William James Bradley, and corner boy king.

Funny, as you know, or you should know, corner boys usually gain their fleeting fame from actually hanging around corners, corner mom and pop variety stores, corner pizza parlors, corner pool halls, corner bowling alleys, corner pinball wizard arcades, becoming fixtures at said corners and maybe passing on to old age and social security check collection at said corner. Or maybe not passing to old age but to memory, memory kid’s memory. But feature this, in Billie’s great domain, his great be-bop night kingship, and in his various defenses of his realm against smart guys and stups alike, he never saw so much as a corner corner to rest his laurels on. And not because he did not know that proper etiquette in such matters required some formal corner to hang at but for the sheer, unadulterated fact that no such corner existed in his old-fashioned housing project (now old-fashioned anyway because they make such places differently today), his home base.
See, the guys who made the projects “forgot” that, down and out or not, people need at least a mom and pop variety store to shop at, or nowadays maybe a strip mall, just like everybody else. But none was ever brought into the place and so the closest corner, mom and pop corner anyway, was a couple of miles away up the road. But that place was held by a crowd of older corner boys whose leader, from what was said, would have had Billie for lunch (and did in the end).

But see here is where a guy like Billie got his corner boy franchise anyway. In a place where there are no corners to be king of the corner boy night there needs to be a certain ingenuity and that is where “His Honor” held forth. Why not the back of the old schoolhouse? Well, not so old really because in that mad post-World War II boom night (no pun intended), schools, particularly convenient elementary schools even for projects kids were outracing the boomers. So the school itself was not old but the height of 1950s high-style, functional public building brick and glass. Boxed, of course, building-boxed, classroom-boxed, gym-boxed, library-ditto boxed. No cafeteria-boxed, none necessary reflecting, oddly, walk to school, walk home for lunch, stay-at-home mom childhood culture even in public assistance housing world. And this for women who could have, if they could have stood the gaff from neighbor wives, family wives, society wives screamed to high heaven for work, money work. That was Billie world too, Billie day world. Billie September to June world.
But come dusk, summer dusk best of all, Billie ruled the back end of the school, the quiet unobserved end of the school, the part near the old sailors’ graveyard, placed there to handle the tired old sailors who had finished up residing at the nearby but then no longer used Old Sailors’ Rest Home built for those who roamed the seven seas, the inlet bays, and whatever other water allowed you to hang in the ancient sailors’ world. There Billie held forth, Peter Paul almost always at hand, seeking, always seeking refuge from his hellfire home thrashings. Canny Danny, regularly, same with Lefty and Freddie (when not grounded), and Bobby while he was around. And other guys, other unnamed, maybe unnamable guys who spent a minute in the Billie night. Doing? Yah, just doing some low murmur talking, most nights, mostly some listening to Billie dreams, Billie plans, Billie escape route. All sounding probable, all wistful once you heard about it later. All very easy, all very respectful, in back of that old school unless some old nag of a neighbor, fearful that the low murmur spoke of unknown, unknowable conspiracies against person, against the day, hell, even against the night. Then the cops were summoned. But mainly not.

And then as dusk turned to dark and maybe a moon, an earth moon (who knew then, without telescope, maybe a man-made moon), that soft talk, that soft night talk, turned to a low song throat sound as Billie revved up his voice to some tune his maddened brain caught on his transistor radio (bought fair and square up at the Radio Shack so don’t get all huffy about it). Say maybe Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers Why Do Fools Fall In Love? and then the other ragamuffins would do harmony. Yah, that was twelve, maybe thirteen- year old night, most nights, the nights of no rough stuff, the nights of dreams, maybe. But like some ancient siren call that sound penetrated to the depths of the projects and soon a couple of girls, yes, girls, twelve and thirteen year old girls, what do you expect, stick girls and starting shape girls, would hover nearby, maybe fifty yards away but the electricity was in the air, and those hardly made out forms drove Billie and his choir corner boys on. Maybe Elvis’ One Night as a come on. Then a couple more girls, yes, twelve and thirteen- year old girls, have you been paying attention, sticks and starting shapes, join those others quietly swaying to the tempo. A few more songs, a few more girls, girls coming closer. Break time. Girl meet boy. Boy meet girl. Hell, even Peter Paul got lucky this night with one of Billie’s stick rejects. And as that moon turned its shades out and the air was fragrance with nature’s marshlands sea air smells and girls’ fresh soap smells and boys’ anxiety smells the Billie corner boy wannabe world seemed not so bad. Yah, 1958 was Billie’s year. Got it.
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When Frankie Was A Corner Boy King Of The North Adamsville Night
Pallid Peter Paul Markin, no way, two thousand facts bundled up and at hand or not. Nix "Fingers" Kelly (formerly known as "Five Fingers" Kelly but he gave that up and went respectable), "High Boy" McNamara (and no, not in the post-drug world that kind of high, the other older one), "Jumpin’ Johnny" O’Connor (and do not, please do not, ask what he was jumping, or trying to) as well. Hell, double nix no nickname Benny Brady, "Billy Bop" O’Brian (and do not, ditto Johnny O’Connor, ask what he bopped, or tried to), Ricardo Ricco, "Timid Timmy" McPartlin and a bunch of other, no name, guys who passed, passed fast, through the be-bop Salducci’s Pizza Parlor schoolboy night. No question, no question at all though that the king hell corner boy king of the early 1960s North Adamsville schoolboy night was one Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, and no other. And here is why.

In a recent series of entries that formed of scenes, scenes from the hitchhike road in search of the great American West night in the late 1960s, later than the time of Frankie’s early 1960s old working class neighborhood kingly time, it was noted that there had been about a thousand truck stop diner stories left over from those old hitchhike road days. On reflection though, this writer realized that there really had been about three diner stories with many variations. Not so with Frankie, Frankie from the old neighborhood, stories. I have got a thousand of them, or so it seems, all different. Hey, you already, if you have been attentive to this space, know a few Frankie, Frankie from the old neighborhood, stories (okay, I will stop, or try to, stop using that full designation and just call him plain, old, ordinary, vanilla Frankie just like everybody else alright).

Yah, you already know the Frankie (see I told you I could do it) story about how he lazily spent a hot late August 1960 summer before entering high school day working his way up the streets of the old neighborhood to get some potato salad (and other stuff too) for his family’s Labor Day picnic. And he got a cameo appearance in the tear-jerk, heart-rendering saga of my first day of high school in that same year where I, vicariously, attempted to overthrow his lordship with the nubiles (girls, for those not from the old neighborhood, although there were plenty of other terms of art to designate the fair sex then, most of them getting their start in local teenage social usage from Frankie’s mouth). That effort, that attempt at coping his “style”, like many things associated with one-of-a-kind Frankie, as it turned out, proved unsuccessful.

More recently I took you in a roundabout way to a Frankie story in a review of a 1985 Roy Orbison concert documentary, Black and White Nights. That story centered around my grinding my teeth whenever I heard Roy’s Running Scared because one of Frankie’s twists (see nubiles above) played the song endlessly to taint the love smitten but extremely jealous Frankie on the old jukebox at the pizza parlor, old Salducci's Pizza Shop, that we used to hang around in during our high school days. It’s that story, that drugstore soda fountain story, that brought forth a bunch of memories about those pizza parlor days and how Frankie, for most of his high school career, was king of the hill at that locale. And king, king arbiter, of the social doings of those around him as well.

And who was Frankie? Frankie of a thousand stories, Frankie of a thousand treacheries, Frankie of a thousand kindnesses, and, oh yah, Frankie, my bosom friend in high school. Well let me just steal some sentences from that old August summer walk story and that first day of school saga because really Frankie and I went back to perilous middle school days (a.k.a. junior high days for old-timers) when he saved my bacon more than one time, especially from making a fatal mistake with the frails (see nubiles and twists above). He was, maybe, just a prince then working his way up to kingship. But even he, as he endlessly told me that summer before high school, August humidity doldrums or not, was along with the sweat on his brow from the heat a little bit anxious about being “little fish in a big pond” freshmen come that 1960 September.
Especially, a pseudo-beatnik “little fish”. See, he had cultivated a certain, well, let’s call it "style" over there at the middle school.

That “style” involved a total disdain for everything, everything except trying to impress girls with his long-panted, flannel-shirted, work boot-shod, thick book-carrying knowledge of every arcane fact known to humankind. Like that really was the way to impress teenage girls, then or now. Well, as it turned out, yes it was. Frankie right. In any case he was worried, worried sick at times, that in such a big school his “style” needed upgrading. Let’s not even get into that story, the Frankie part of it now, or maybe, ever. We survived high school, okay.

But see, that is why, the Frankie why, the why of my push for the throne, the kingship throne, when I entered high school and that old Frankie was grooming himself for like it was his by divine right. When the deal went down and I knew I was going to the “bigs” (high school) I spent that summer, reading, big time booked-devoured reading. Hey, I'll say I did, The Communist Manifesto, that one just because old Willie Westhaven over at the middle school (junior high, okay) called me a Bolshevik when I answered one of his foolish math questions in a surly manner. I told you before that was my pose, my Frankie-engineered pose, what do you want, I just wanted to see what he, old Willie, was talking about when he used that word. How about Democracy in America (by a French guy), The Age of Jackson (by a Harvard professor who knew idol Jack Kennedy, personally, and was crazy for old-time guys like Jackson), and Catcher In The Rye (Holden was me, me to a tee). Okay, okay I won’t keep going on but that was just the reading on the hot days when I didn’t want to go out. There was more.

Here's what was behind the why. I intended, and I swear I intended to even on the first nothing doing day of that new school year in that new school in that new decade (1960) to beat old Frankie, old book-toting, mad monk, girl-chasing Frankie, who knew every arcane fact that mankind had produced and had told it to every girl who would listen for two minutes (maybe less) in that eternal struggle, the boy meets girl struggle, at his own game. Yes, Frankie, my buddy of buddies, prince among men (well, boys, anyhow) who kindly navigated me through the tough, murderous parts of junior high, mercifully concluded, finished and done with, praise be, and didn’t think twice about it. He, you see, despite, everything I said a minute ago he was “in.”; that arcane knowledge stuff worked with the “ins” who counted, worked, at least a little, and I got dragged in his wake. I always got dragged in his wake, including as lord chamberlain in his pizza parlor kingdom. What I didn’t know then, wet behind the ears about what was what in life's power struggles, was if you were going to overthrow the king you’d better do it all the way. But, see if I had done that, if I had overthrown him, I wouldn’t have had any Frankie stories to tell you, or help with the frills in the treacherous world of high school social life (see nubiles, frails and twists above. Why don’t we just leave it like this. If you see the name Frankie and a slangy word when you think I am talking about girls that's girls. Okay?)

As I told you in that Roy Orbison review, when Roy was big, big in our beat down around the edges, some days it seemed beat six ways to Sunday working class neighborhood in the early 1960s, we all used to hang around the town pizza parlor, or one of them anyway, that was also conveniently near our high school as well. Maybe this place was not the best one to sit down and have a family-sized pizza with salad and all the fixings in, complete with family, or if you were fussy about décor but the best tasting pizza, especially if you let it cool for a while and no eat it when it was piping hot right out of the oven.
Moreover, this was the one place where the teen-friendly owner, a big old balding Italian guy, Tonio Salducci, at least he said he was Italian and there were plenty of Italians in our town in those days so I believed him but he really looked Greek or Armenian to me, let us stay in the booths if it wasn’t busy, and we behaved like, well, like respectable teenagers. And this guy, this old Italian guy, blessed Leonardo-like master Tonio, could make us all laugh, even me, when he started to prepare a new pizza and he flour-powdered and rolled the dough out and flipped that sucker in the air about twelve times and about fifteen different ways to stretch it out. Sometimes people would just stand outside in front of the doubled-framed big picture window and watch his handiwork in utter fascination.

Jesus, Tonio could flip that thing. One time, and you know this is true because you probably have your own pizza dough on the ceiling stories, he flipped the sucker so high it stuck to the ceiling, right near the fan on the ceiling, and it might still be there for all I know (the place still is, although not him). But this is how he was cool; he just started up another without making a fuss. Let me tell you about him, Tonio, sometime but right now our business to get on with Frankie, alright.

So there is nothing unusual, and I don’t pretend there is, in just hanging out having a slice of pizza (no onions, please, in case I get might lucky tonight and that certain she comes in, the one that I have been eyeing in school all week until my eyes have become sore, that thin, long blondish-haired girl wearing those cashmere sweaters showing just the right shape, please, please, James Brown, please come in that door), some soft drink (which we called tonic in New England in those days but which you call, uh, soda), usually a locally bottled root beer, and, incessantly (and that "incessantly" allowed us to stay since we were paying customers with all the rights and dignities that status entailed, unless, of course, they needed our seats), dropping nickels, dimes and quarters in the jukebox.

But here is where it all comes together, Frankie and Tonio the pizza guy, from day one, got along like crazy. Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, map of Ireland, red-headed, fair-skinned, blue-eyed Frankie got along like crazy with Italian guy Tonio. That was remarkable in itself because, truth be told, there was more than one Irish/ Italian ethnic, let me be nice, dispute in those days. Usually over “turf”, like kids now, or some other foolish one minute thing or another. Moreover, and Frankie didn’t tell me this for a while, Frankie, my bosom buddy Frankie, like he was sworn to some Omerta oath, didn’t tell me that Tonio was “connected.” For those who have been in outer space, or led quiet lives, or don’t hang with the hoi polloi that means with the syndicate, the hard guys, the Mafia. If you don’t get it now go down and get the Godfather trilogy and learn a couple of things, anyway. This "connected" stemmed, innocently enough, from the jukebox concession which the hard guys controlled and was a lifeblood of Tonio's teenage-draped business, and not so innocently, from his role as master numbers man (pre-state lottery days, okay) and "bookie" (nobody should have to be told what that is, but just in case, he took bets on horses, dogs, whatever, from the guys around town, including, big time, Frankie's father, who went over the edge betting like some guys fathers' took to drink).

And what this “connected” also meant, this Frankie Tonio-connected meant, was that no Italian guys, no young black engineer-booted, no white rolled-up tee-shirted, no blue denim- dungareed, no wide black-belted, no switchblade-wielding, no-hot-breathed, garlicky young Italian studs were going to mess with one Francis Xavier Riley, his babes (you know what that means, right?), or his associates (that’s mainly me). Or else. Now, naturally, connected to "the connected" or not, not every young tough in any working class town, not having studied, and studied hard, the sociology of the town, is going to know that some young Irish punk, one kind of "beatnik' Irish punk with all that arcane knowledge in order to chase those skirts and a true vocation for the blarney is going to know that said pizza parlor owner and its “king”, king hell king, are tight. Especially at night, a weekend night, when the booze has flowed freely and that hard-bitten childhood abuse that turned those Italian guys (and Irish guys too) into toughs hits the fore. But they learn and learn fast.

Okay, you don’t believe me. One night, one Saturday night, one Tonio-working Saturday night (he didn’t always work at night, not Saturday night anyway, because he had a honey, a very good-looking honey too, dark hair, dark laughing eyes, dark secrets she wouldn’t mind sharing as well it looked like to me but I might have been wrong on that) two young toughs came in, Italian toughs from the look of them. This town then , by the way, if you haven’t been made aware of it before is strictly white, mainly Irish and Italian, so any dark guys, are Italian period, not black, Hispanic, Indian, Asian or anything else. Hell, I don’t think those groups even passed through; at least I don’t remember seeing any, except an Arab, once.

So Frankie, your humble observer (although I prefer the more intimate umbrella term "associate" under these circumstances) and one of his squeezes (not his main squeeze, Joanne) were sitting at the king’s table (blue vinyl-seated, white formica table-topped, paper place-setting, condiment-ladened center booth of five, front of double glass window, best jukebox and sound position, no question) splitting a Saturday night whole pizza with all the fixings (it’s getting late, about ten o’clock, and I have given up on that certain long blondish-haired she who said she might meet me so onions anchovies, garlic for all I know don’t matter right now) when these two ruffians come forth and petition (yah, right) for our table. Our filled with pizza, drinks, condiments, odds and ends papery, and the king, his consort (of the evening, I swear I forget which one) and his lord chamberlain.

Since there were at least two other prime front window seats available Frankie denied the petition out of hand. Now in a righteous world this should have been the end of it. But what these hard guys, these guys who looked like they might have had shivs (ya, knives, shape knives, for the squeamish out there) and only see two geeky "beatnik" guys and some unremarkable signora do was to start to get loud and menacing (nice word, huh?) toward the king and his court. Menacing enough that Tonio, old pizza dough-to-the-ceiling throwing Tonio, took umbrage (another nice word, right?) and came over to the table very calmly. He called the two gentlemen aside, and talking low and almost into their ears, said some things that we could not hear. All we knew was that about a minute later these two behemoths, these two future candidates for jailbird-dom, were walking, I want to say walking gingerly, but anyway quickly, out the door into the hard face of Saturday night.

We thereafter proceeded to finish our kingly meal, safe in the knowledge that Frankie was indeed king of the pizza parlor night. And also that we knew, now knew in our hearts because Frankie and I talked about it later, that behind every king there was an unseen power. Christ, and I wanted to overthrow Frankie. I must have been crazy like a loon.