All The Junkies Were Valiant-Crying Out For Repentance And God Save Us Sinners-The Junkies Have Always Been With Us-The Fixer Man Too- Let Me Count The Ways

All The Junkies Were Valiant-Crying Out For Repentance And God Save Us Sinners-The Junkies Have Always Been With Us-The Fixer Man Too- Let Me Count The Ways

By Fritz Taylor

I have calmed down a little, come off my high horse a little about the subject of a piece I did a couple of articles back. The article supposedly about famed crime novel (and friend of young Rav Wilson who has caught on at this publication recently) Lem Kane’s switch over to police procedurals from the previous slam bang of private detection he had built his solid no non-sense but also take no prisoners reputation on but really about the hard reality of what the public coppers in places like Fort Point Estates down in Fulton County Georgia did, or did  not do about crime and criminals. Fort Point Estates being not some arbitrary example but the place where me and my kin going back a couple of generations grew up and lived. A place where northerners like Seth Garth and Ralph Morris who grew up in the same kind of places maybe more properly call “the projects.” Not the fucking pretty picture by-the numbers- squeeze a clue a page out police procedural where the coppers actually don’t grab every freebie coffee and cruller not nailed down if you can believe that but follow the leads to their logical conclusions providing some closure to the case, and maybe to some desperate redemption seeking family. And not the pretty boy and girl television bull either where in something like forty-two minutes they are calling whatever the case is “a wrap.”

The reality. The Fort Point Estates reality was basically nothing but the public coppers from top to bottom as I found out much too late in the case of Captain Dorian who ran the police substation on site before he wound up being run into the state pen not for the high crimes he let get by, let his men get by with but for stealing some city materials like copper tubing and selling the stuff on the black market except maybe hold their grubby little hands out for whatever pocket change they can scoop up from the fixer man, grifters, and pimps. In the priority of things copper the fixer man was king, followed by the pimps and then the grifters with their ten-percent dreams and discount prices.  

I mentioned in the previous two pieces in what appears seems to be a short series brewing that the public coppers worked hand in hand with the local owner of the only variety store, the only place in the area to get provisions especially if like lots of residents including my family at times you had no automobile to get to other places. That guy, Jimmy Bob Carter (and his wife always called Lady Vivian but I am not sure why) not only sold milk and bread but ran the local “book,” ran the whores out of his upstairs space and was the fixer man for the junkies and hopeless who needed a little something for the head, a little something to get through the day, days really. (As far as I know the stuff was mainly opiums, morphines, maybe cocaine although that seemed a stretch for the time since a lot of the fathers in the Estates had been veterans from World War II and had grievous injuries for which they had been doped up with say morphine before they had been discharged ready or not and needed a little something besides corn liquor to clear their heads, to ease the fucking pain.) In any case sitting there with hands at the ready and not accepting cheapjack crap like free coffee and crullers were the local public coppers who freely placed their bets in the “book” left right out on the open counter,  grabbed a whore or two and fled upstairs and looked the other way when Jimmy Bob did up his bindles, eight balls, and grams.        

Those remembrances, seemingly forgotten memories from a time when I, and all the kids I grew up with down there, learned way too early about the hard side of life how some stuff comes up to the surface. Like the time I was standing at Carter’s Variety, at Jimmy Bob’s front really for all the overpriced provisions he actually had in the store, trying to decide on what kind of cheapjack candy I wanted when a couple of coppers came in straight from their patrol car, in uniform picked up Jimmy Bob’s “book” and put down their bets and nobody said nothing. Or the time that Captain Dorian grabbed Jimmy Bob’s lead whore, Lula, and ran her up the stairs to do what of course then I didn’t know but it wasn’t to pray to the Lord like the Captain did on Sunday morning with his wife and five children at 7^th Street Baptist. Here’s a last example, a couple of coppers sitting in their squad car when a couple of known local junkies (they were notorious even among us kids who didn’t know squat about drugs or the seamy side of life for going “on the nod” at the little beach front about fifty yards down from Carter’s) walked into Jimmy Bob’s  looking like hell and coming out like they had just found Jesus (and maybe they had). Got “well” in any case.

Once you start dredging though who knows. I have had plenty of reasons not to trust, and at times to hate the public coppers no matter how nice and pretty they make them appear to be on cop television shows (although usually not on the daily news where they get the old see-saw). As mentioned in the last piece I had almost forgotten about the most notorious case that came out of the Fort Point Estates no good copper racket, the case of Tara Lee Parker. The murder most foul of Tara Lee Parker, which was never solved, maybe they never wanted solved. Tara Lee had been a classmate of my oldest brother, Lester, so he knew more about what happened than I did as a twelve-year old boy hardly up to date on sex and sexual depravity and sheer craziness. Tara Lee was maybe sixteen when she dropped out of school, according to Lester who had her in some of his classes.

I guess Tara Lee, was never much of a student, was known to the older crowd as a girl who liked to walk on the wild side, who ran away from home who knows how many times. Got a reputation for all kinds of depraved doings but that stuff I learned later for the word around the Estates when her name came up was slut, whore, pig and cocksucker, stuff like that. Eventually she got into Jimmy Bob’s stable, his good time girls, his girls who would go to the “game room” which is what he called his upstairs operation to do whatever. It was well-known to be frequently by richer guys from the Cherokee Hills section of town, the old money cotton and textile mills money that kept that section afloat. You would see cars, American cars, expensive American cars like Cadillacs and Lincolns, definitely not Estate cars like a Nash Rambler, in front of Carter’s Variety day and night. And young stuff like Tara Lee was there to service their needs.                

Now I didn’t know, still don’t, know all the arrangements that Jimmy Bob had had with his clients, but I guess for an extra price guys could take their whores elsewhere to do what they were going to do. That turned to be the downfall for one Tara Lee Parker. One morning some early morning fisherman found her body against a sullen tree truck along the swollen Dam River cut up bad I heard, cut up in a very sexually depraved way when I understood such things better later. The last guy seen with her was Gary Lyons, the son of the major mill operator in town in those days who employed a number of Estate fathers in his works for cheap pay, who had a serious reputation as a wild boy with the women.   

Here is where I will rant, here is where even over fifty years later I cry out for some closure for Tara Lee Parker. The coppers, Captain Dorian in the lead knew that she had a few off-kilter clients, including Gary, from the Cherokee Hills. Knew she had been out with some guy from there that night of her death because she had taken off with him in a Lincoln, the Lyons favorite car. Did they ever do anything to check Gary out, to check where he had been, who he had been with. Do anything but close down the investigation after about two days. No, and I would hear from a shaken Lester once he heard what had happened to Tara Lee that some two-bit copper said that more than two days was too much time to spent on the murder of a bent whore, that she was doomed anyway so forget about it. Yeah, run that remark on cop television shows why don’t you.

On top of the indecent way that the public coppers handled the case which is worth its own rant I have been informed by a reliable source that Gary Lyons, who would take over the family mill operations before sending them off-shore to Mexico and living the life of some kind of playboy passed away a couple of years ago. According to my source among the effects found in his mansion when they cleared things out was a pair of very old, very soiled women’ underwear with the initials TLP on them, other pairs as well in various conditions and apparently from later times. Too late for some serious justice but at least my brother Lester who really was broken up about her horrible death now has an idea of what happened and who did the foul deed.   

The Junkies Were Valiant-Crying Out For Repentance And God Save Us Sinners-The Junkies Have Always Been With Us-The Fixer Man Too-Hell, No, I Don’t Want No Whores Out On 8th Avenue

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Give Me Headlights, Streetlights, Hell Even Gaslights, But Don’t Leave Me Here To Fend Off The Wolves And The Deadly Fishes By Myself

Give Me Headlights, Streetlights, Hell Even Gaslights, But Don’t Leave Me Here To Fend Off The Wolves And The Deadly Fishes By Myself

By Will Bradley, Junior

I don’t know if under the now couple of year old editorial management of Greg Green it is a requirement that you have to be what somebody, one of the old-timers, called a city-slicker, a denizen of the urban landscape to the exclusion of maybe heading to say the Grand Canyon for a vacation or the wiles of West Egg  in Long Island down the road. It sure looks and sounds like it though when you go around the water cooler to hear people talk about where they have been or where they are going. Plenty of talk about Paris, London, Berlin, Frisco town, LA but not a peep about say King’s Canyon or Yosemite, or even Hoboken down New Jersey way. Under normal circumstances that is fine with me since I was born and raised just a shade off of Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. So I appreciate the streetlights, the safe noise of automobiles (except maybe that incessant buzzing when a car alarm goes off forever), people walking, talking, maybe loudly   to and fro at all hours and the convenience of say all-night drugstores and supermarkets (to speak nothing of gin mills open until very early in the morning).     

Others seem to share my good sense, so it was rather weird, startling to find myself being assigned by that very same editor to go report on the doings in a place called Lake Dennison located near the New Hampshire border in Massachusetts. Not just any doings but the doings of his friends Jane Rugg-Hurley and David Hurley who have been going up to that locale every summer for something like twenty-five years to camp out, to do a thing called kayaking, another thing called canoeing, some bird-watching which I have previously heard that people do, some fishing also heard of (for supper no less) and, let me put this one in quotes “communing with nature” for a couple of weeks.

The genesis of this assignment is of some interest since apparently from what Greg told Seth Garth when he turned the assignment down flat Jane and David had been putting increasing pressure on him, Greg, to both come up and do that “communing with nature” business and to write a story about the place and them. Naturally Greg claimed “conflict of interest” in that he could not possibly do justice to a story where he knew the parties so well. That led to his first asking Seth to do the deed knowing full-well that if Seth ventured these days further than 125^th Street he would get a nosebleed or some other horrible injury. Also knowing that the senior staff the way things are set up now to a person have the right of first refusal on any assignment (the privilege does not go the other way with grabbing juicy ones that is done in some totally byzantine way as far as I know). Everybody, every senior person, suddenly aware of their physical well-being if they could not see a streetlight nearby, could not run to CVS at 2 AM or order take-out after midnight exercised that right. Leaving a junior person, me, Will Bradley to carry the spear on this one.       

  

Greg, who had originally wanted me to stay a week finally settled on three days once I balked and pointed out that I had done the hatchet job on hoary legend of so-called private detective Sherlock Holmes and his in-house lover Doc Watson for him when every senior person bailed on that one. I was off one sunny August morning heading north through Connecticut and up to the borderlands (meaning where the trees outnumbered the houses by a lot). Despite all the advances in modern technology, Google Maps, GPS, travailing, concerning putting together a simple directions package when push came to shove I got lost in a place called Gardner for the very simple reason that once you get out in the boondocks all the modern technology in the world will not help if you are not satellite-connected, if you fall out of range. To start the sojourn off on the wrong foot Jane and David had to come to some location, a couple of streets I could identify to meet me in order to follow them to their campsite.

This campsite needless to say was fairly primitive meaning you had to chop and cut firewood or I guess buy some in order to cook meals or whatever else you need a campfire for when no stove or microwave is available. Meaning that your bodily function needs were addressed by some compost, environmental commode I never could figure out but which smelled to high heaven. Meaning also that despite the real-world jobs and money that the Hurleys possessed, which I found out later was considerable, they were “roughing” it in a dinky camper/jerry-rigged tent setup they had been using for years. Meaning on the latter a place where I was also set up to sleep in.

I won’t even describe the ordinary function hassles of camp life except to say I am not quite sure how the Union Army did what they did based on their camp life doings that I have read up on. I really didn’t sleep much but I don’t want to dwell on that stuff or the hardcore problems with daily hygiene since this is a “mood” piece, a piece about my reaction to that “communing with nature” noise that Greg advised me to center the article on. Meaning how the Hurleys (and their assorted brethren of the camps) spent their days. Day number one centered on this kayaking business which they were all excited about since they were so close to the lake that all they had to do was to slip the boat, ship or whatever the hell it was from the nearby lakefront and they were waterborne. Yes, they had no problem maneuvering their two-person kayak but when they showed me how to deal with this object (including the thankfully obligatory lifejacket) and I was actually in the water I flipped over, capsized they called it. Same thing the next day with the canoe which was supposed to be a little more stable but despite lifejacket at the ready was as capsize-worthy as the freaking yellow day-glo kayak.   

But that is all in a day’s work for a “city-slicker,” to be expected I guess for somebody who is woods and lake clueless. What was truly weird, what was scary to these ears were the desperate ravenous howls of the wolves who kept their noise up all night and throughout the day as well and who sounded like they were about fifty feet away (which they were not but some kids spotted a couple within the camp grounds). Here’s the real madness, the reason I am glad as hell that we are in an increasing urban country complete with those beautiful streetlights and other civilized amenities like a local Whole Foods market to buy real food. David decided on that very last day of my “imprisonment” to take me along with him as he went fishing (for supper he said). That seemed simple enough at the time but when we got to his favorite bountiful location along the lake about fifteen minutes from their campsite and he set up his and my fishing poles somehow I snagged a fish, some fearsome looking fish that I swear bit me, had teeth although David claimed it was only a Lake Dennison bass and harmless.

Fortunately I was able to get out of that locale alive without further damage but I swear despite all the good cheer of the Hurleys and how nice they must be when they get back to the city I think they have been out in the woods too long, too many years. Told Greg as much when he wanted to balk on printing this last paragraph. 

   

         The latest from Lake Woe Begone 

Down And Dirty In The Acre-North Adamsville Style-Circa 1960-When The Corner Boys Were Corner Boys For Real Back In The Day

By Bart Webber

No, by no stretch of the imagination as the ex-editor of this publication and now some kind of “of counsel” contributing editor Allan Jackson has speculated even if in some personal nightmarish dream am I sleeping with the fishes. (Contributing editor means that even hard-boiled current editor Greg Green will have a hard time reining Allan in since there is no word limit or apparently no slander or libel, depending on the source, that such special creatures can spew forth without correction, at least after reading that last piece of Allan’s which was nothing but a no-brain bunch of bullshit on a stick aimed at my head). My watery fate deemed appropriate by Mr. Jackson courtesy of the fact, if it is a fact this late in life, that after almost sixty years I have “spilled the beans,” hell snitched, finked, dropped a dime I think we used to call it on an episode where he almost drowned as a kid and I was sworn to secrecy as the sole witness to the event. At the time I believe, and I think he will agree as well, it was about keeping that knowledge from his mother who would probably have grounded him from the beaches and the ocean at least through high school.      

I won’t, no, I refuse to, bore the reader with a recap of the events which led up to Allan’s silly experiment which led him to be rescued before he went down the third time by the on-duty life guard, a young mother rather than the average muscle-bound college guy or buxom college co-ed who craved those jobs to wile away the summer days and pocket coin for nighttime expenses. The key to Allan’s anger and his strange elderly dreams is what this is all about, the so-called breaking of the Code of Omerta that we lived and died by back in the day and which made plenty of sense then when we were about some stuff that the public coppers and other authorities would not have approved of. But to get into a snit over some long-gone event (especially with his mother who passed away over a decade ago is no longer around), to “threaten” hit men and much else seems excessive at this point. So I will tell you the real point of why Allan in in a doldrums huff.

That day, that day which I think Allan is right about being somewhere when we were around eleven, possibly twelve not the eight of my original piece not only had that young mother life guard been on duty to save Allan’s ruddy ass but had brought as was her practice her young daughter Ginny along. This Ginny was a lanky kind of raw-boned tallish girl who I had a serious crush on at the time. So naturally when I saw her I went over to make “my moves,” those being some silly schoolboy talk about whatever eleven, maybe twelve- year olds would talk about. So in a way Allan is right when in his now infamous rebuttal is right that I was not observing every freaking action he was taking but I will state for the record, will swear on seven sealed Bibles that I am the guy who heard his faint cries for help and alerted that young mother life guard who saved his sorry life.      

The reader should know that the so-called crush on Ginny did not go anywhere at the time since she was a Squaw Rock girl. The Nollie Point assignment her mother drew was connected with the housing projects where Allan and I grew up (and Pete Markin and Sam Lowell too), the low rent end of town. Squaw Rock was, and I believe still is, the high-toned end of town where those who in the 1950s were living some aspect of the golden age, or at least had the wherewithal to buy the new ranch houses that were all the rage then as a sign that they had become the vaunted middle class. So no way was that young mother, for that matter was Ginny once the peer pressure was exerted if necessary, going to go for some projects boy. And she didn’t. I will admit that when Ginny and I got to high school (we went to different junior high schools) at North I tried again to see what was what but the code of the Squaw Rock girls (and maybe her mother too) was still in force.           

Here is where the rubber meets the road, the real reason that Allan has daggers in his eyes these days. Recently I went to an ad hoc class reunion (ad hoc because after the 50^th reunion all agreed that something every couple of years and less formal was more appropriate) where I ran into Ginny. We got to talking about this and that until we kind of worked our way back to the day when her mother had saved Allan down at Nollie Point. Ginny laughed when I told her that I had been sworn to secrecy by Allan not to mention the incident to anybody under our boyhood code and that speaking about it to her was the first time I had done so in that some sixty-year period. The laugh was because she was particularly aware of the incident and who was saved, had known that Allan had gone on to some kind of career in the publishing business. So, until I read his lame so-called rebuttal I thought not much about having mentioned it to Ginny.    

The reader can guess, or I hope should guess, that Ginny and I continued talking not only that class reunion night be thereafter and have had several dates (although her two marriages and my three make “date” a little passe) to see what is what. Her girlish Squaw Rock code now long gone, thankfully. If you want to really know why Allan is wishing me in the ocean depths, digging whatever in Neptune’s patch here is what Ginny told me. In high school as I was ardently pursuing her to no avail Allan also was trying to get to first base with her. Closer to the nub though, closer much closer to the truth Allan had met Ginny at a previous ad hoc class reunion I had not attended and had gotten nowhere with her. Strange doings, life.        

The Junkies Were Valiant-Crying Out For Repentance And God Save Us Sinners-The Junkies Have Always Been With Us-The Fixer Man Too

The Junkies Were Valiant-Crying Out For Repentance And God Save Us Sinners-The Junkies Have Always Been With Us-The Fixer Man Too

By Fritz Taylor

The one thing I hate, and maybe the biggest reason I only read police procedurals under duress or when hot summer comes, is how fake the scenarios are, how so very competent the coppers are, the public coppers in any case. (This will be blasphemy to guys like Rav Wilson, Seth Garth and Sam Lowell but in my book the private dicks are almost as unreal except they draw something of a pass since at least they are willing to draw some fire their way, take a fist or a slug for the employer if it comes to that wrapping it around their dailies and expense something the coffee and cruller coppers would never do, not in real life anyway.) The reason all this comes up is that after I read Rav Wilson’s review of a Lem Kane police procedural Hotel New Yorker I got tired of his belly-aching about how silly the stuff displayed was against his “heroic” private coppers like Phil Larkin and Danny Collins and early hard-boiled detectives like Miles Archer and Phil Marlowe. Like I said the private dicks aren’t anything to write home about, but the public coppers portrayed are truly unreal.

What is real is what happened every day down in Fulton County, down in Georgia where I grew up in deeply segregated Mister James Crow country in the 1950s although that factor does not really enter into my story. What does enter is the Fort Point Estates, yes, that is really what they called them which were as many older readers will almost automatically recognize were “the projects” the government subsidized housing set up after World War II for mostly veterans, white veterans exclusively so Mister James  Crow does as always at least make cameo appearance, and their young families as a spring board to better housing later but necessary then after the housing crunch caused by the war.

The Fort Point Estates were the southern version of what guys like fellow Vietnam veteran Seth Garth were talking about in growing up in the north in North Adamsville and ditto the veteran status Ralph Morris out on Tappan Street in Troy, New York. In short places where the most vulnerable and desperate denizens of society found themselves or else they would have been reduced to the really dreaded county farm or utter homelessness (which according to family legend my family was in right after World War II when we lived out of a car, a clunker car before hitting the Estates).  

Desperates, desperadoes probably are as good as any operative words to describe life in those conditions (and Seth wrote about more eloquently than I ever could, and a guy named Pete Markin who they all still venerate who had the pulse of that existence down pat before his own early death partially attributed to the emotional ravages of growing up in the projects). But to the point, the anti-belly-aching point about the public coppers and what they did or did not do in real life. In a place like the Estates which like many such projects were established on what amounted to wasteland and isolated away from the good citizens public services were minimal and private services depended on how much risk some private parties were willing to take to eke out a massive profit from the misery of the poor denizens of such places. Enter Jimmy Bob Carter, the Carter family name if you can believe it either somehow related through marriage to the famed Carter classic country music family based out of Clinch Mountain in Virginia or Judge Jacob “Death Penalty” Carter who would go on to become some high state official in Georgia spawning a political dynasty before he was through.

This Jimmy Bob had a few bucks I guess and decided that since there no serious supermarket for several miles around that he would open up what amounted to a Mom and Pop Variety Store. Would provide the unwashed with small amounts of goods, this before food stamps bailed people of few resources out of the worse of their situations, for too much money. Except and who knows what drove him, or his wife Vivian who had been some kind of degree daughter of the Confederacy in her maidenhood to some small kindnesses there would always be very, very cheap candy to keep us coming in (and probably mother in tow as well).

Of course, that was all so much bull, so much eye wash. What Jimmy Bob and Lady Vivian (she picked that moniker up somewhere along the line but don’t ask me how or why) really were up to was using that funny little storefront at the entrance to the Estates (everybody with or without an automobile had to pass the place on the way in or out) to “make book,” illegal betting, to run a bunch of the neighborhood girls (some young mothers under duress too with say a husband who spent the weekly paycheck on liquor maybe some other woman having to put out to keep the bill collector wolves from the door) out of the upstairs rooms, called the game rooms, Vivian’s operation from what I later came to understand when I stopped thinking candy was all that was sweet in the world. Worse of all in the long haul I guess was Jimmy Bob proved to be the “fixer man,” the drug dealer of choice with whatever drugs could heal some broken down spirits.

Like I said most of this stuff I had no clue about until I was maybe ten, way too young to know about the seamy side of life but we knew it, and in the end probably just assumed that bookies, whores, pimps, fixers, and junkies were an ordinary part of every town. Here is where the stuff gets sick though, the copper stuff. The guys who ran and operated out of the police substation were “on the take” from Jimmy Bob and nobody thought anything of it. I remember a few incidents. Once Jimmy Bob had his “book” laying right out on the counter and Officers Hamilton and Dixon came in saw the book and proceeded to write  down their bets in that leather-bound book. Another time Captain Dorian laughed when Vivian said she had a nice piece (of ass) for him and to head upstairs. Naturally the coppers grabbed their fair share of free drugs (then mainly opium and morphine, not heroin as far as I know) for their little parties, or for their honeys. Yeah, so lay off me about coppers and solving crimes and if anybody asks just point them to the still standing Fort Point Estates filled to this day with junkies, whores, fixer men… and coppers who look the other way.              

   

The Day The Son Of Man, Jesus, Saved A Wretch Like Me-I Once Was Lost But Now Am Found, Once Was Blind But Now I See- The “Fallen” Speaks-A Rebuttal

The Day The Son Of Man, Jesus, Saved A Wretch Like Me-I Once Was Lost But Now Am Found, Once Was Blind But Now I See- The “Fallen” Speaks-A Rebuttal

By Allan Jackson

     

I had a strange dream last night that my dear old friend whom I have spent many an hour planning some mischief although that mainly in the distant past, Bart Webber, a guy from the old neighborhood, the Acre down in North Adamsville south of Boston found himself in Neptune’s ditch, found himself sucking salty air searching for Davey Jones” locker, found himself like a million other tars, sailors you know gung ho sea guys, dreaming about voluminous rescuing mermaids coming to wipe away their sins as they lose all senses, about going home to our mother the sea. Yeah, I was dreaming the dream about old Bart going to sleep with the fishes. A strange dream granted under usual circumstances but even stranger since Bart had the ill-disposed idea that he would, what did he call it, oh yeah, snitch on me about the time that I almost drowned when I was eight, nine years old down at Nollie Point, the beach nearest the Acre. Decided to snitch, what the hell were the words we actually used, yes, drop a dime on me after I had sworn him to never tell of the incident, especially not to my mother who would have still had me grounded. And who knows what other hells.  

Bart forgetting for a minute the Code of Omerta (yes, in capitals) attached to all selected information deemed to be kept from the public, including coppers and “the authorities.” No, especially coppers and that ilk. Decided, perhaps unwisely given that dream and how vivid it was, to bleed all over the place about a very small incident. Decided to risk some feckless fate and all for, well, all for some momentarily inside track with some female classmate whom he (or I) hadn’t seen for some fifty years but who struck his fancy, especially at my expense. Under the norms of the ancient brotherhood feeding gossip, bullshit mostly if we gave it a real name, to interesting women would be a yawner, wouldn’t draw an hard breathe never mind strange portentous dreams but under the seal of the code something very different.                   

[Let’s use this bracketed space to get some “housekeeping” chores out of the way. First when I say “last night” it does not literally mean last night but merely serves as a frame of reference after I saw the scandalous and maybe libelous article by one Bartlett Webber, that Bartlett some kind of poor as church mice affectation from his people, people from the North, the North of Ireland for the geographically clueless so you know what awful things that brethren are capable of, concerning privileged information he had about a long ago incident at Nollie Point when we were mere kids.

Moreover since Bart decided in that same piece the world needed to know that I am no longer the editor at this publication, and have not been for years, he had to go on and on about how I am now a contributing editor meaning I can write whatever I want, whenever I want without worry about nervous Nellie editors redlining every other sentence and such. The gist of the sentiment being that in the old days I would take forever on my own for publication assignments and this dagger at wayward Bartlett’s heart I have done in super-speed time of a couple of days. But back to the transgression]    

The attentive reader here may already know the outline of the tale Bartlett Webber thought he had to tell but let me go through a quick summary and a couple of necessary corrections. Yes, Bart had been at the beach that day with me as I faced my first uncertain confrontation with Father Death (see singsong Allan Ginsberg). He is also correct, and admits as much, that he was sworn to secrecy around the facts of the event under the long-held Code of Omerta standard. What he has failed to tell the candid world, the unsuspecting reader, is that while he was physically present at the beach that day he was busy with another more pressing task, more pressing to his mind which he freely admitted to me later.

Bart is what we today would be called an early bloomer in the boy-girl universe. Meaning for one thing I think we were closer to ten, eleven than his silly eight-year old bullshit that I truly believe he used just to deflect his real motives that hot as hell in Hades day. Meaning for another that he had seen a classmate, had seen a girl named Ginny Garland from our class whom he had a serious crush on and whom even before I hit the tepid waters with my newfound “canoe” (read: tree log) he was chatting with intensely. More about that later but for now any good lawyer like Frankie Riley our mutual corner boy from high school who did pretty well for his larcenous self would have Bart hanging by his thumbs as any kind of witness to the day’s events, to my dire situation.         

Of course, sixty years later old Bart claims some razor- sharp memory somewhat akin to his presidential favorite Sleepy Joe Biden. To set the scenario up, to set me up he has declared on the basis of no evidence that since that time I have been deathly afraid of the seas, have gone well beyond the rational fear than anybody, maybe even more so today when Mother seas are furious for some reason to do with climate change, to avoid contact beyond the beach with our dear homeland. Like a lot of corner boys over the years before we started losing them to sickness and that dreaded Father Death (you really should check Allan Ginsberg on that) Bart and I lost some contact as he went to his family life and I to my families lives so he did not know of my California island surf times. Had not seen the ten thousand photographs my first and second wives had taken in sunnier days (and less expensive in several ways). Now seen all young, long-bearded, long brown haired with some swimsuit deep in surf, deep in towed boats filled with collective wives and broods of children. Photos on request for the curious and family-dwelling.      

Then Bart compounded his error but stating that he could not vouch for whether before this incident I was much of a swimmer. That part was actually right although he seemed to think that reducing me to some life raft suck ass, to some lifesaver float bullshit hanger-on or no was a real state. Again time and elsewhere would have shown him with a very vivid photograph of me in college, NYU, swimming competitively against Hobart for glory and love. No question I would not have been an individual candidate for an Olympic berth unless like with the rowing eights, say that fantastic Yale club that blew them all away in Melbourne in 1956, in those days if the whole team would be represented in some relay and I would get tagged in.  

I will merely quote what Bart thinks happened because what he actually knew was what I reported to him later and what he has blabbed all over the Internet-“ Somehow he (me) got in his eight-year old mind that he would “ride the waves” on an old washed-up log as the tide was coming in to see how fast he could come ashore. I had seen the log and frankly to this day thought nothing of it, although I should have.  Should have realized that I would not have attempted such a feat and I was a pretty fair swimmer.

“To the plot though. Allan rolled the log into the wash and hung on for a while until the log was heading across the point to a place where he would be over his head. That decision is the key because somehow during that period when he was over his head he decided that he would let go of the log, would try to swim to shore. Fatal, or almost fatal. Somehow the surf started coming up, the water got green and edgy meaning that it would be serious work to get to shore. Allan (as he told me later) went down once, then he yelled out to me, told me to get somebody because he was drowning, couldn’t make it to shore. Fortunately in the height of summer there was a lifeguard there. Not some muscle-bound college guy or slinky college girl with connections to get some summer dough but a young mother who had her daughter in tow. In any case after I screamed bloody murder she swam out to Allan (who said he went down twice and did not think he was coming up the third time.) He did since she saved him.”  

A sad little childhood in America story mostly bullshit and filler if I had been the editor even today. Finally, Bart gets to the real point, what he called irony- “Here is a bit of irony, a bit of why I am spilling the beans, snitching as old as I am and as dedicated to the code of silence as anybody.  A few weeks ago I was at a class reunion and started talking to one of the fellow classmates whom I had not known in high school except she was a Squaw Rock girl and hence out of reach for Acre boys. I mentioned Allan Jackson’s name whom she remembered not for whatever publishing skills he possessed but because she had been on the beach that day when Allan almost drowned. Apparently Allan had given his name to the worthy young mother lifeguard in her hearing. She confessed to me that she had known all about Allan’s situation for as long as I had. See she was the little girl in tow while her mother did lifeguard duty on Nollie’s Point that day.”

What whistle-blower, truth-teller Bartlett Webber has failed to tell the candid world is that the girl whose mother had dragged her to the beach was one Ginny Garland, the same young thing he had had a crush on in elementary school and somehow had amnesia about that high school stuff which was true enough about hands off Squaw Rock girls for lots of reasons but which did not preclude him a few times from making some play for her. Finally, fifty years later at my expense he connects with a more chastised Ginny Garland with me as the bait. And you wonder why I had strange dreams about one Bartlett Webber sleeping with the fishes.      

  

Happy, Happy 100th Birthday Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti-Max Daddy Of Famed “City Lights Bookstore” In “Beat” San Francisco When It Counted And Muse Of His Generation’s Poets-Redux

Happy, Happy 100^th Birthday Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti-Max Daddy Of Famed “City Lights Bookstore” In “Beat” San Francisco When It Counted And Muse Of His Generation’s Poets-Redux

By Liam Leahy

When the deal went down the hell with street ruffian and gangster of words and thefts Gregory Corso spinning tall tales to Times Square hipsters willing to sell junkie dreams to Hoboken, New Jersey (where else would Hoboken be) runaways who wind up bed-sheeted in piss-wet rooming house flops, cold water flops; the hell when you think about it too with high Marin County guest house sandal-strewn Golden Gate golden boy Zen Buddha lotus flowers sulks of Portland pines and crater mountain fire ways Gary Snyder; and while we are at it the hell with bright lights in the headlights like some virgin Bambi up high on Sugar Mountain with max daddy Carol, yeah, Neal’s wife tugging her desire away from hopeless homosexual desire phase with college clean including sparkling white shirt and penny loafers Mike McClure; while I am on a roll  double the hell with clear the coffeehouses out (so some get rich junkie owners can fill the floor with those Hoboken, no need to say New Jersey, right, runaways caught out on Friday night banishments playing fucking folk music when the be-bop bad boy poets were asunder and jazz bars cried out to the new dispensation with his primal wailing to Keil, devil servant down in ancient Zoroastrian times along with simply homages to the whore of Babylon (small “w” before she got into the history book), Phil Larkin; ditto double the hell with trying to hit that high white note, that silky note even the Duke had trouble blasting and Charlie almost lost his junkie soul to that only jazz boys and girls can aspire to Billie’s hustling Dan man, the fixer, MaJohn Dupree; back to single hells (watch for the semi-colons)for Dante boys wishing they knew what the seven circles were all about before they were deflowered all choir practice glow bum-tucked like Kenneth Rexforth (and don’t forget Rexforth’s daughter who everybody took a run at and why not even gay boys like Ginsberg, maybe especially gay boys trying to figure out why they were different when different was except in havens like Frisco town not cool, subjected devotees to racks and faggots); and, I don’t care if I used this lead-in before to hell as well the flaming drag queen hiding out in Nantasket drag queen boats (who knew) artless (then) except strong knuckles and a quick jab Tim Riley before he fanned the flames of Miss Judy Garland’s hem in North Beach cellars and made bluegrass green in ocean spray to the China seas bays filled with oil tankers and sodomites sing his naughty boy praises. Close out, and note separation and no fucking semi-colon so something new in the world, in the end, the bookend when the town, no, let’s go back to New Jack town, three Howard Johnson hot dog fucks, with relish and mustard if you must know, like Miss Julie Johnson one of the few female beat hipsters although not one of the quick lays in some Joe and Nemo alley.

More retrospective, more circumspect after down-loading trash on lesser sinners comes the big boys time starting with a rumbling fullback out of some Merrimack estuary looking hot dog hungry (already knowing that Miss Julie awaits him in some Ho Jo hot spot a few years down the lane he was that good looking and hip too even if never getting that mill town dust off his boots. Looking cigarette in hand, hobo’s bindle sliding off his back like some holy goof displaced out of European DP camps and he only Icelandic run bound dropping to the titanic seas (after serious German encounters doing some Murmansk run).  Name him brother name him now or forever how your peace. So Jack, Jack, say it Kerouac, the fuck with that Jack stuff Ti Jean of ten million Allan Ginsberg homosexual dreams and Neal Cassidy, Adonis of the West found in some Larimer Street gin mill, lost father’s gets some play out in that fucking Jersey shore, okay  

Very much more circumspect now that we have entered the poetic pantheon leaving the Garys, Phils and Michaels behind to waterfront sailor joints headingout to China seas with small be-bop patter to seet hem on their ways, by speaking names beyond Kaddish ceremonials. There is no way around it this time Moloch destroyer of modern times stripping poor Tom Eliot (St. Lou’s Tommy boy okay) of everything but his shoddy bedding and his lost in the hills and trenches of Eastern France cursive language as wave after wave fell to complete one square yard Carl Solomon’s dear friend and his mother howler in the dust for all the good it did him, or her, Allan Ginsberg. Yeah, the beat down, beat around, beat sound, beatitude beat to hear holy goof Jack tell it in his Tanqueray, no, Tokay, even cheaper when times were tighter and the panhandling fell flat  funks, crowd that took up plenty of air come 1950s in the states come desolation row time. Spoke truth about the great nos, homosexuality, communism the Moloch, rationality in deep freeze Cold War America without blushing all in one massive half hour singsong (I have said plainsong elsewhere but let me amend that)

Hell all those guys were so light they couldn’t hold feathers without flying into spinoff Bay streams on some outbound freighter. Would have sold their zillion fucking books (if some editor could rein them in) and spoke their damn half hour half understood poems (although everybody in the room even underage high school students on the slum knew this was not their high school Tom and Robert noise). Then there was the glue, a sideman to the pretty boys although he could do Coney Island of the mind, or was it mine, Ferlinghetti, Lawrence some stray cat who had glue aplenty, the guy who kept the torch bright, the guy who had enough knowledge of business which almost to a man (or woman for that matter), beats heating squares up like toast, scorned except come poetry reading time some foggy and rainy nights, book signing when Random House said piss off, putting money in the bucket for the Thunderbird struck nights(Tokay as always a backup in case the day’s take was short), back room shacking up to keep from the coldest days in August world. Yeah, Happy Birthday Baby, Buddha in cowboy boots and tepid wrangler jeans Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the magic 100 years. Connection, you always had the connection brother.

The Day The Son Of Man, Jesus, Saved A Wretch Like Me-I Once Was Lost But Now Am Found, Once Was Blind But Now I See- The Strange Saga Of One “Fallen” Allan Jackson

The Day The Son Of Man, Jesus, Saved A Wretch Like Me-I Once Was Lost But Now Am Found, Once Was Blind But Now I See- The Strange Saga Of One “Fallen” Allan Jackson     

By Bart Webber

This is a story that Allan Jackson, the benighted young subject of this short piece, would not tell anyone in a million years especially to those old tars who lived and died by the barnacled seas. (It was not by accident that among his first homeland the sea thoughts landed him smack dab in the middle of an old sailors’ home long out of use since the kind of tars that wound up there were from the “men of iron and ships of wood” age and his first death memories were formed via the old sailors’ graveyard located several hundred yards down the sea road from the Snug Harbor Elementary School where he nestled first with such thoughts.) The only reason I know about it, about th story not the other stuf which every guy knew from six years on is that I was actually there on the beach at Nollie’s Point when all the action occurred and although I was sworn to secrecy some sixty years later I am taking the statute of limitation claim to hell, taking the veil off.   

First you have to know, and regular readers presumably do know, that Allan Jackson former editor here for many years and now a senior contributing editor (which means he can write whatever he pleases whenever it pleases him from fifty words to five thousand and nobody, maybe not even God would cut one precious word without his okay) has gone on and on mercilessly about his love of the sea, the ocean, what he calls our homeland, the mother of us all. What any discerning reader would note though is that while he has had some ravishing descriptions of the furies of the seas when unleashed by whatever demon gods’ angers stir them, and fury abated when tepidly coming to shore as well that he has to my knowledge never actually described being on say a boat, at least not some small sailing craft and I don’t know about steamships, or having dunked himself in the surf on a hotter than hell day. And there is a reason for that going back those sixty years just mentioned.    

See all kidding aside, all fears aside as well Allan is deathly afraid of the seas, afraid for a very good reason although not a totally sane one. He almost drown at Nollie’s Point one fine day when he was eight (as I was). I can’t vouch for whether before this incident Allan was much of a swimmer, I would think not given the bone-headed way he dealt with the seas that day. But that hotter than hell sunny day was not a day for kings, or Allan. Somehow he got in his eight- year old mind that he would “ride the waves” on an old washed-up log as the tide was coming in to see how fast he could come ashore. I had seen the log and frankly to this day thought nothing of it, although I should have.  Should have realized that I would not have attempted such a feat and I was a pretty fair swimmer.

To the plot though. Allan rolled the log into the wash and hung on for a while until the log was heading across the point to a place where he would be over his head. That decision is the key because somehow during that period when he was over his head he decided that he would let go of the log, would try to swim to shore. Fatal, or almost fatal. Somehow the surf started coming up, the water got green and edgy meaning that it would be serious work to get to shore. Allan (as he told me later) went down once, then he yelled out to me, told me to get somebody because he was drowning, couldn’t make it to shore. Fortunately in the height of summer there was a lifeguard there. Not some muscle-bound college guy or slinky college girl with connections to get some summer dough but a young mother who had her daughter in tow. In any case after I screamed bloody murder she swam out to Allan (who said he went down twice and did not think he was coming up the third time. He did since she saved him.  

The minute he got to shore (I am not sure he needed to be pumped out I think not) he swore me to secrecy which I have kept until now. Here is a bit of irony, a bit of why I am spilling the beans, snitching as old as I am and as dedicated to the code of silence as anybody.  A few weeks ago I was at a class reunion and started talking to one of the fellow classmates whom I had not known in high school except she was a Squaw Rock girl and hence out of reach for Acre boys. I mentioned Allan Jackson’s name whom she remembered not for whatever publishing skills he possessed but because she had been on the beach that day when Allan almost drowned. Apparently Allan had given his name to the worthy young mother lifeguard in her hearing. She confessed to me that she had known all about Allan’s situation for as long as I had. See she was the little girl in tow while her mother did lifeguard duty on Nollie’s Point that day.  

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can-Déjà vu All Over Again-The Rise And Fall Of Singer Billy Bradley

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can-Déjà vu All Over Again-The Rise And Fall Of Singer Billy Bradley  

By Sam Lowell  
           
I have said it before but it bears repeating-as desperately poor and woe begotten the Carter corner boys were and that was pretty desperate in the projects in the days before the extension of certain social welfare benefits left those down in the dig pretty barren that these guys, us, had skills, had some talents. I have already mentioned a while back the case of Ronnie Mooney, early leader of the Carter corner boys and the one who started on our doo wop summer nights. That work a prep for his attempts to break out of the projects ethos when talent searches were in bloom. In his case, and as we shall see in Billy’s demise failure early on, failure compounded by “the fix” being in led him to make the Pretty James Preston-inspired armed robbery life look like a romantic alternative, or at least a place to grab some big dough if you had the guts to go after it with guns in every arm. As already mentioned Ronnie fell down hard after a shoot-out in Ohio with a bunch of Lima coppers.    

(By the way thinking about how desperate my own family situation was at the time, car-less most of the time when a car was needed to break out of the isolated projects located in the middle of nowhere, mother always short on the weekly envelopes to hold off the bill-collectors and the like we lived in fear of even a worse fate. The county farm, the place where you went when you knew all hope was abandoned. Needless to say, that good Irish Catholic mother hard-pressed on the weekly white envelopes used the idea of us winding up there as a whipping tool to keep us in line. In my own family’s case it never got much better even when we moved across town to the Bottoms section of the Acre, read-lowest of the low.)       

Maybe Billy’s case on top of Ronnie’s (remember these two were the leaders, were tough guys whatever else who I would when they turned pro not have wanted to meet up with in a dark alley, hell, maybe at noon on the Boston Common either) speaks to something grimy in life down at the bottom of the heap. Maybe full of hubris and hot air project boys, corner boys were less accepting on getting kicked to the ground, and yet getting up and dusting off your knees. Maybe that social gene was never strong even for guys like me, Seth, and for a while the Scribe to not feel “the fix was in” for somebody else and the cards were seriously stacked against us.

I have already mentioned in the last published piece that Billy was hot to trot to win a local talent search sponsored by radio station WMEX in Boston and the famous Darius Records. By his lights, by mine as well, he did an excellent job but lost, and I believe now rightfully so, to the doo wop-influenced Painter Sisters who are still holding forth in Vegas and the lounge at the Newark  Airport. We all know because it came out later that the fix had really been in when Ronnie Mooney made his leaf for fame but Billy couldn’t take that some silly “girl” act would beat him and so he had the same reaction as Ronnie-the deal was fixed.           

   

That realization would not immediately lead to his turn to the bright lights of armed robbery. Billy would through a little more pluck than Ronnie, a lot more skill and better voice than him in any case would cut a record on his own Me and My Rock and Roll Baby-Sitter promote it endlessly, get radio stations to play it and have it turn into one of those minor one-hit Johnnie classics. He expected pay dirt, pay day and easy street when that thrilled the girls one summer. Expected some record company would beg him to come to their stable. Nada, no go, forget it. That is when he made the turn, started talking big about how he would avenge Pretty James Preston’s death at the hands of some dumb coppers. (I was not around then, having moved over to the Bottoms but got this at the time from Go-Go Flynn).     
Billy Bradley was tough, was smart too, smarter and tougher than Ronnie so when he made the turn, when he became the ghost-avenger of Pretty James Preston (which hit us all hard at the time of his death since we worshipped him something like a living god) he lasted far longer than Ronnie. According to Go-Go spent some time in the county and state pens as well. Held together for something like twenty years doing “the trade.” But armed robbery is a tough trade, eats up its denizens and is filled with bad end stories. Bad end stories because you have to be fast in the trade or be swallowed up. That happened to Billy after he got out of Shawshank the last time. Headed south to new territory-with old ways-decided who knows why- to rob a fucking White Hen store in North Carolina for walking around money I guess. Didn’t figure that those wet highways that high robbery night would cause any trouble for him but they did. The coppers nailed him, nailed him good since he like any other good Carter’s corner boy swore he would not be taken alive, and in the end he was not.  

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can-The Night Billy Bradley Got His Talented Ass Handed To Him On A Platter-A Cautionary Tale, Maybe

From The Archives Of The Carter’ Variety Store 1950s Corner Boys-The “From Hunger” Boys Do, Well, Do The Best They Can-The Night Billy Bradley Got His Talented Ass Handed To Him On A Platter-A Cautionary Tale, Maybe   

By Sam Lowell

Make no mistake even desperately poor “the projects” corner boys have skills beyond those larcenous hearts that of necessity drive their existences in a world where “not enough” is the operative term. I have already noted that even among the young upstart corner boys around Carter’s Variety Store there were those like the Scribe who would go on to some success, however short term in his case, in the journalism field. And myself as a fairly successful film and music critic for a whole career. The classic case is that of later Tonio’s Pizza Parlor leader Frankie Riley who parlayed a law degree into a nice partnership with a big Boston law firm where he is now “of counsel” (meaning plenty of dough and no heavy lifting which is left to some luckless young younger lawyer)       

But getting back to the Carter corner boys I have already mentioned that Ronnie Mooney had he decided to stick with it a bit could have had a fair career maybe a lounge lizard Vegs-type career in rock and roll if he had not as a result of a “the fix is in” talent search show where he wowed the crowds but got crossed-up in internal record company/radio station politics and wound up with no record contract when he clearly deserved one. That was decisive in many ways not the least to give him a permanent “sneer” about the real world and drove him headlong into the arms of some older tougher guys who taught his some very different skills along the lines of the art of armed robbery which became his specialty, and would lead to his bloody downfall once night in a police shoot-out in Ohio from what Go-Go Larkin told me.

In my last piece in this series I went into the early musical career of Billy Bradley who actually got farther up the record company /radio station food chain that sustained early rock and roll. His minor classic Me and the Rock and Roll Baby-sitter could have, should have sent him on his way even though he had to self-promote the record from jump street before it caught on. But it did not and a lot of what happened to Billy later, what happened similarly to Ronnie Mooney colored his turn a away from rock and roll to those armed robberies which made him a very different kind of star.* Billy’s case, like Ronnie’s is why I have dubbed part of the headline to this piece a cautionary tale.

[*It is no accident that most of the corner boys, Carter’s, later at Doc’s Drugstore and at Tonio’s Pizza Parlor who carried too big of chips on their shoulders and succumbed to adversity turned to the surprising lucrative, then, crime of armed robberies. Seth Garth and others have written about the legendary Pretty James Preston, a loner wild west cowboy type who pulled bank robberies solo, and who do his work on a very fast English motorbike, the Black Lightening. Although Pretty James in his turn would fall down when some asshole bank guard thought the dough he was guarding was his and bang-banged Pretty James enough to slow him down for the real coppers to shoot him down into some mud all through my time as corner boy we revered Pretty James as a living god, as a hero. Even today we speak his name in hushed tones as a sign of respect, as brethren.]          

I have already mentioned but its bears repeating here that in the mid to late 1950s when there were a million mostly small record companies who were marginally connected to an array of local rock and roll stations there was a crazed search by those organizations to find the new Elvis, Chuck, Buddy, Jerry Lee, maybe Wanda Jackson, the Shirelles to set them on their ways. Moreover the teen nation demanded it, demanded that some new sounds come out of the now deadass transistor radios and records. Linked to that thought was a corollary-teen nation had a million kids who wanted to be the next Elvis, Chuck, Buddy, Jerry Lee, Wanda, or Shirelles. That is where Billy Bradley’s next logic step came in.         

    

In the winter of 1959 when the deep ass snow was on the ground and we were all freezing our butts off the hot rock and roll radio station WMEX along with Darius Records (yes, if you know your record company label history, the label which produced Lanky Devoe, The Chiffettes, Danny Mack and the Pack, soulful Lamar Le Bert and many others before being bought out by Columbia Records) was sponsoring yet another one of those ubiquitous talent search events. The local version to be held in the auditorium at Adamsville High on a Friday night in early February. The way this talent search gag worked was that there would be maybe a dozen local events where each winner would get to go to Boston, to the Park Plaza Hotel ballroom, to vie for a one record deal with Darius Records and see what happened from there. A pretty cheap way for WMEX and Darius to get down in the mud, get a hear of the talent down below. Of course Carter corner boys, our own Ronnie Mooney, had already been burned once when he entered the contest a year or so before and got nothing but air for his troubles. Nothing but air since the “fix was in” for Mona Levitt (yes the Mona Levitt of the now classic Blue Sunday Blue).

Billy Bradley knew the ropes on that one but two things had changed. Supposedly the judges were neutral and not affiliated with either outfit as before and Billy never one to not be full of himself though he had ten times more talent that the hapless Ronnie (he exaggerated as usual probably only five times as much talent as Ronnie). We tried to keep his feet on the ground, feet that when it came to the clip we or busting change machines at places like laundromats he was all business, or else. But he went wild grabbing a new white shirt from Filene’s (gratis, Billy, Carter corner boy gratis), ditto a sports jacket from Robert Hall (a shade too big but for free what the hell), uncuffed chino’s from Raymond’s and maybe a belt too. The tie and shoes were actually his).              

I will say Billy looked great in that 1950s music scene great where guys wore jackets and ties as par to of their acts. He would not tell us what he selected for his song wanting to surprise us when he went on stage. He was maybe eighth or ninth that night so you could see some jitters while he waited. There were several good acts before his, especially the Painter Sisters (yes, those sisters who had the hit Baby, Baby, Baby and are still bouncing away in venues like Vegas and the Newark Airport Lounge). Then Billy came on and did a Buddy Holly tune, a classic now, Peggy Sue. He gave it his all and left nothing on the stage.

Here is the problem, the Carter corner boy problem in a nutshell for those who could not scratch and claw their ways out of the mud settled down at the base of society. The Painter Sisters won that night and rightfully so (they would win the whole Boston region competition in Boston) as mightily as I wished Billy had won. You probably know the follow-up though. Billy never got over the idea that once again the “fix was in” based on no more than that he did not win. More to the point like with Ronnie something inside burned out that night or shortly thereafter and while he plugged away to some small successes he knew that music would not be his road to easy street.