Out In The
Be-Bop Late 1950s Night- Boy Meets "Our Lady Of The Saint Patrick’s Day
Night" Girl- For Joanne-Class of 1964
Click on
link above for a Wikipedia entry for Saint Patrick's Day for those three
people in the North Adamsville universe who may not know what it is all about.
[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 just 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, excuse my English, no, don’t that will serve
today as then as good if earthy a description of the prostitute Fourth Estate
as any, were working hand in glove with big government, big corporations, big
whatever that was putting their thumbs in our eyes. Seeking revenge pure and
simple for the little niches we were trying to create in that small, very small
as it turned out, space we were claiming as a freedom zone (the politics of
that process are much too complex to be reduced to a couple of words bust this
introduction is about Markin not about my take on what went wrong, or right in
those lustrous days.
On
big series, a series that Markin was nominated, or won, I don’t remember which,
Sam Lowell the lawyer from our crowd would know better which one was the case, 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 a couple of years after his own Vietnam military had ended
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 song-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 from to the
old-timey hobo railroad track jungle they had found themselves coming to.
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 in 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 Markin put in local circulation 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 Markin
and through him 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.” Markin had turned us on to these steamy blues ideas 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, they 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 intruded 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. So he wound up dead, very mysteriously dead,
in a dusty back street down Sonora way in 1975, 1976 and 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 a free-lance editor for several well-known if also
small publishing houses around Boston. 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 in 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 between them.
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 you 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 Markin 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 around the neighborhood like
Stew-ball Stu, whom I still 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. Yeah wrote about guys like Stew-ball, who
we young boys, maybe girls too but then it was boys’ world mostly looked up to.
The actual Stew-ball Stu he used in his fourth sketch 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.
I
really believe in his heart Markin hated being a corner boy, hated being the
guy who like some gypsy fortuneteller called which way the social winds were
blowing, or going to blow. Hated being called the Scribe once king hell king
Frankie Riley our leader christened him with that moniker one night when he
started endlessly spouting some of the two thousand fact that he knew while
under “the influence of alcohol” as we used to describe the condition. Worse,
worst of all, was that he did that spouting while we have a few “hot” girls hanging
around who could have given a fuck about his foolish knowledge (although as
good Irish Catholic girls, or wanna-be good Irish Catholic girls they would not
have used that term of art). They just wanted to be kissed, or maybe more but
old Markin broke the mood, no question. Yeah I think in the end that Markin
would have been happier with his bookworms and his and their jabberings. But
here is the rub. They wouldn’t have had him as far as I could tell. He had been
nabbed as a corner boy very early and the “intellectuals” would have had
nothing to do with him even if he could have outtalked and outthought half of
them and had time for lunch. That is the gist of the story Markin told Josh one
frosty night on the road and which Josh remembered enough of to write about
recently using Markin’s persona.
When
Markin was on his game, when he was “walking with the king,” an old religious
expression that did double-duty as a local drug term out in the West Coast
ocean night, he could write about anything and it sounded like something like
the “second coming.” And maybe that “second coming” was what drove his work,
what pushed his buttons when he was walking with that king. I mentioned above
that Markin well before any of the rest of us corner boys could “give a fuck,”
a term we often used when he would bring up his idea that a new breeze was
coming that would change what was driving us like big jobs, a nice house, a
“boss” car, maybe a wife and kids down the road all upside down. A lot of what
he was driving at in the beginning was something like a cultural revolution,
you know first the emergence of rock and roll that loosened things up a little
before it was crushed beneath our feet by irate parents and gutless record
companies, then Markin’s discovery of the blues, folk music, wild wind poetry
which we all yawned at. But as he got older say about fourteen or fifteen he
started putting that cultural stuff together with what today would be called a
political revolution. Started to see the break-down of the red scare Cold War
night, yeah, that’s what the bastard called the thing, the escape from that
dead air, dead ass night. That’s what he wanted to lay on a candid world,
candid a word he said he got from Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence.
Jesus. No wonder there was no room for him, no air for him to breathe once the
1960s took a nosedive
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 watching the older guys playing pinball and planning various
midnight creeps which enflamed our telltale hearts, 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 when we finally figured out that girls were, well, okay, 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. That latter corner is where all the business about wanting habits got
played out, for good or evil.
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 Breslin 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 would be a part of
later if only in my case 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 happen 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 along
with Phil Larkin for our lifetime friendship with Josh.-Bart Webber]
From The Pen
Of The Later Peter Paul Markin
I am fuming but I will get to
that part in a minute. First, let me just point out the trouble I had figuring
out what I should use as a headline for this sketch. See, this is a Frankie
story, a Francis Xavier Riley story, maybe you already know the name, Frankie,
king of the old North Adamsville working class neighborhood schoolboy night in
the early 1960s. That part, the boy part is simple, the other part is less so
because this is a story, or is going to be a story, once again straight from
the horse’s mouth, the Frankie mouth.
I have been letting Frankie spew
forth whenever a subject comes up that is from “pre-markinian” times, the time
before we became fast friends in the seventh grade North Adamsville Middle
School (then junior high) days. And the subject here is how Frankie “courted”
his ever lovin’ sweetie, Joanne, a sweetie whom he “went steady with” from
middle school all the way through to the end of high school. And that
courtship, its twists and turns, is linked to the observance, the non-heathen
observance of Saint Patrick’s Day, March 17th (although any real Irish
partisan, heathen or non-heathen knows, or should know, that the observance of
Easter 1916 is the real Irish deal). So once again because he did okay, or at
least good enough, on his previous two endeavors (the weirdly interesting king
of the “skees” carnival story from his innocent dream pre-teen days and his
saga, christ that is the only word to describe it, of his “conversion” from no
name football wannabe to midnight sun-glassed king hell king of the late 1950s,
early 1960s be-bop North Adamsville schoolboy night) he gets to speak his piece
here.
Now for the fuming part. In that
just mentioned football conversion saga Frankie said, although it was not
strictly part of the story (or part of the deal in my letting him use this
space for his spewing), that he wanted one and all to have an example of how
his be-bop “beat” style worked magic on the, frankly, bewildered North
Adamsville Middle School girls (and whatever other stray frails he could corner
with his pitch). And the story he wanted to tell, the primo, numero uno, ace
example one story was how he captured (and kept) the elusive, ever lovin’
Joanne. So rather than just coming out in manly fashion, manly working-class
fashion, and asking for space he tried an "end around." Just to goad
me into another story he mentioned that somehow in that desperate late 1950s
night I was smitten with Joanne, and that she was smitten with me, before he
honed in on her and worked his magic. Needless to say once said Frankie magic
was applied that previous configuration was ancient history.
So just to set the record
straight before Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, spins his misbegotten yarn let
me say my piece:
In
order to set the background to this dispute up for those who don’t know I had
arrived from the Adamsville Middle School just at the beginning of 1959, about
half way through seventh grade. As a twelve year old boy, almost thirteen,
after some delay I had developed a very healthy interest in girls. In their
girlish charms, if not their giggles. Of course, as anybody who went through
the experience knows, which means just about everybody, the social pecking
order in middle school (and high school too, but maybe a little less so) is
etched in stone for the duration about the second or third week of school.
So I was nothing but an
"outsider," an outsider waiting to be an insider if I could hitch
onto somebody else’s star. That star, no question, was Frankie. But Frankie’s
“style” was different, not a football or sports thing, or an intellectual thing
(although that is what it was, it just didn’t look like it at the time), or a
best- looking thing (wiry Frankie did have pretty decent Steve McQueen-type
looks though). What he had, and what made him a magnet for me (and, strangely,
those girls with their girlish charms, not giggles that I was attracted to) was
this be-bop, “faux” beat thing. He will describe it better in his story but it
certainly caused a stir, especially the eternal “midnight sunglasses that he
wore” part.
Now what does all that have to do
with Joanne, my attraction to her (or her to me)? Well, everything. See Joanne
was the smartest person in the seventh grade class. Book smart for sure.
Answering teachers’ questions smart, definitely. She also was pretty, but no
more so, and maybe a little less so, than some of the other less bright girls.
And she had, had when she wanted to have it, a very winning smile. Moreover,
and here is when Frankie seems to have gotten his signals crossed for once, she
was friendly toward me, me, an outsider, friendly in a universal kindly way,
even before I started running around with Frankie (or she did either).
As any observant person could see
there was nothing to the whole thing but kid’s stuff and, as I thought about it
later (and just now as I am re-thinking about it) Joanne had a huge dose of
Roman Catholic fellowship and rectitude, meaning doing the right social thing.
Frankie is right about the part that we, Joanne and I, were civil to each other
in his presence later but that is after a whole bunch of other things happened
to sour our relationship. But enough of this because this is stuff that Frankie
will, I am sure, tell you about. Let me just finish with something I wrote in
another Frankie story, one that I told so I know it’s true. I will swear on a
book with seven seals the following- when it came to Joanne, and this was true
even before Frankie whiz kid moved in, she was okay, but not someone that I
would jump off a bridge over. There were girls, some of those other less bright
girls, whom I would have jumped off that bridge for, and gladly. But not her.
That should put paid to this subject.
Francis
Xavier Riley comment:
See, I told you I still had the
kingly touch. I knew, and know now, just how to get to Markin, Peter Paul
Markin, get him where he has to defer, humbly defer, to my "goading"
as he called it. Of course, and here is the beauty of the king’s touch, I knew,
and I damn well should know even fifty years later, that old Markin never
carried the torch for Joanne. But see I just threw that little doubt in his
direction and he jumped at it. And then that “social” thing, that Peter Paul
Markin sense of fair play, that overweening sense of his about giving the other
side a chance to speak their minds (if only, as he used to say, to hang
themselves) came into play. A piece of cake. And for those who don’t know, or
don’t understand, how old Markin could have got bested for the kingship of the
old neighborhood in the old schoolboy nights this is a prime example. His
failed attempt was so utterly a failure that we all, everybody except Markin
that is, spent more than a few off moments, a few nothing dull moments, giving
it a big laugh every now and again when we needed a laugh. But enough of that I
have a story to tell, and by hook or by crook, I’m going to tell it.
See, as anyone can see from the
last paragraph, it is about knowing human psychology. No, not some book,
Sigmund or Anna Freud, Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein, Carl Jung, christ, even
R.D. Laing goof thing. Hell no, it is about observing people and what they like
and don’t like, what makes them pay attention to your patter and what doesn’t.
Now the big thing about this is, let’s face it, for a red-blooded boy like me,
not just to inspect people in general but girls, girls with girlish charms, all
the way back to middle school girlish charms. I already told you before about
my short-lived football scrawny kid career and how through perseverance,
perversity, and perdition I figured out my place in the sun by my wits(a thing
Markin was always yakking about, but you've probably figured that out by
now)and by knowing what Markin insists was "arcane" knowledge. But
see it was just that arcane knowledge part, weak as it was, and it really was
looking back on it, and the way the knowledge was presented both by style and
by fit that made the difference. On behalf of the interest of that honey you
were aiming your stuff at.
Markin never really got it, got
how the knowledge and presentation worked together, and probably still doesn’t
from what I can see. Let me give you the wrong example before I tell how this
thing worked to bring me and my ever lovin’ Joanne together back in the day.
Markin, after he started hanging around with me for a while, decided that he
would try my method out after he saw that the foxiest girls, the cutest girls,
and well, as always in a pinch, those just girls with their girlish charms
(giggles and all, see, that is where Markin and I had big differences always-the
giggles go with the charms-get it Peter Paul) who were hanging around me before
school, during passing time, lunch time and, a little, at least in middle
school, after school.
So, and so help me this is true,
even he won’t forget this one, Markin decided that he will go up to this cute
girl with a French name, Barbette or something like that, and start in on every
known fact about the French revolution, the French revolution of the 18th
century, you know the Jacobins, Girondins, Marat, Robespierre and those guys-
the "liberty, equality, fraternity" guys. See, this is something he
is interested in, interested in like crazy if I remember. Yah, I know you know,
no dice. But here is the thing-a couple of weeks later as Barbette started to
hang around the outer edges of our circle she confided in me (no secret here as
I told Markin at the time to try to straighten him out) that she thought Markin
was okay but that she was afraid, get this, afraid of him because of his
flipping out (my term) over something she knew nothing about. I admit that I
never got too far with old Barbette myself, but at least I didn’t scare her
half to death.
Hey, I actually have a better
example now that I think about it. A lot of this arcane knowledge thing was, as
you can figure, playing the percentages. Probably Barbette was a “no sale”
anyway. But Evelyn, Evelyn Smythe, was a different matter. Yah, now that I
think about it forget Barbette as an example and pay attention to this one.
Okay, Evelyn through my intelligence network of sources (that’s part of the
secret to success too) was seriously into church, her church, her Episcopalian
church and its history. I found out, and its shows you an example of good
intelligence work, through my sources that she had given a class report on said
subject. Bingo. Now Evelyn is nice, Evelyn is cute, Evelyn is smart (although
not as smart as Joanne), and Evelyn has that winning smile we were always on
the lookout for in those days. But see, Evelyn was a, a, how should I say it,
Protestant so she was a “no go, no way” for one Francis Xavier Riley, one
Francis Xavier Riley to the cold-water tenements, the Irish Catholic, more
Roman than the Romans Catholic, tenements born. No way that, outside of the
gates of hell, that Patrick “Boyo” Riley, and on this issue one Maude Grace
Riley, nee O’Brian, were going to let their blessed son within twenty
non-school paces of said Evelyn Smythe.
Not seventh grade Frankie anyway
(later I had more Protestant girl friends that I care to remember, if for no
other reason than they weren’t so religion crazy, Roman Catholic religion
crazy, mainly) But see ecumenical Markin, Peter Paul Markin, Irish Catholic
brought up, and church mouse poor, but with a heathen Protestant father (except
for that he was a good man whom everybody liked, even Boyo) decided he will
take a shot at sweet Evelyn. Now his approach, since he knows from my
intelligence report that she’s also some kind of history nut, is to start
talking about the word "anti-disestablishmentarianism," then the
longest word in the English dictionary, and for all I know still is, and
related somehow, although don’t press me on this to Puritan stuff or English
stuff, because, again, he’s crazy, crazy as a loon for Puritan heritage English
colonial stuff. I mean really crazy. I think that he was born on Plymouth Rock
in another life, maybe. Now sweet Evelyn was, if nothing else, polite and she
heard him out. And since I was near the scene of this encounter I heard him say
as she drifted off, “and my father’s a protestant too.” Like the co-religionist
link is going to clinch the thing. Christ.
No sale, amigo. But here is the
kicker, a couple of years later, when Joanne and I had, uh, uh, one of our
“misunderstandings” I ran into Evelyn one night down at the seashore. Now by
this time she had blossomed into a certified twist, although I also knew that
she was still into religion because she belonged to some Protestant girls'
club, some religiously-oriented girls' club. But see she had that winning smile
still, that winning smile that we were on the lookout for in those days, and by
then after another earlier Joanne “misunderstanding” I had already sold my soul
to the devil and taken a Protestant girl out, and liked it. So, because in the
meantime I had started to get a little Puritan nutty like Markin I started on
my patter and mentioned that word anti-disestablishmentarianism and what it was
all about. We must have talked for about two hours about this and that on the
subject; two hours can you believe it.
But see here is where the lesson
is. Peter Paul got the context all balled up so bad he was arguing about the
beauties of Oliver Cromwell, or the Quakers or something. Those were not
Evelyn’s forebears. He had the wrong side, although, as usual, he had it right
for the side he liked. Evelyn couldn’t figure it out. What she could figure
out, and figure out fast, if not necessarily accurately in Markin’s case, was
that she was a minority in a heavily Irish Catholic working- class neighborhood
and so Markin was probably putting her down for being a Protestant. Christ,
again. As a postscript I will mention that sweet, smiling Evelyn and I had a
couple of nice weeks together before "ball and chain" Joanne and I
stopped our "misunderstandings." I won’t give the details of Evelyn's
and my tryst because, see, and especially Markin see, she is now an Episcopal
priest, or something like that and does not need that kind of publicity.
So you can see that the be-bop
pitter-patter was (or is) not for amateurs, or the faint-hearted, and requires
some skill. Especially for hormonally-charged twelve and thirteen year old boys
who are only vaguely, at best, aware that this thing requires skills,
finely-honed skills. All of this is to say that whatever skills I had in, let’s
say October and November of 1958, needed to be used in the hard nut to crack
case of one Joanne Marion Murphy, one lace curtain Irish Catholic, more Roman
than the Romans Catholic, Joanne Marion Murphy, to the lace curtain single
house working- class family born.
Markin mentioned in his
“introduction” that Joanne was smart, check, pretty, check, had a winning
smile, check, and was, as he put it and rightly so I think, universally kind
out her religiously-derived social sense, check. What she was not, at least for
a long time, was very interested in one Francis Xavier Riley and his cohorts,
amigos, and “faux” beat aficionados. She had moved into the neighborhood,
neighborhood in the widest sense because no way did she live near my cold-water
flats district or Markin’s cottage-like (to be kind) dwelling on the wrong side
of the tracks, in sixth grade but went to Adamsville Central Elementary School
and so I did not pick up her scent until middle school, the first day of middle
school, no, the first hour of middle school, jesus, no, the first minute. Sure
she had all the checked things above but she also carried herself, her twelve
year old self, in a very intriguing way and so I took a note, literally, took a
note on her. But for a while nada, nothing, nowhere and partly because that
intriguing carriage included what to me, shanty boy me, was that lace curtain
Catholic by the rules thing despite smarts, pretties, winsome smile, and
kindliness I thought no way.
No way one Francis Xavier Riley
was going to get involved with that scene, not with that frail, no way I said,
did you hear me? Truth. Once I started to have a first little success with my
girl-directed be-bop pitter-patter Joanne kind of went off the radar even
though I saw her every day in class, every day. Truth again. I had no angle on
this girl, no angle at all. See the other less bright girls kind of got caught
up in the sunglasses, be-bop words, long-gone daddy, rock ‘n’ roll, heartthrob
thing. And I loved that, loved the idea that I could be the max daddy king of that
scene with a few breaks. So it was not until a couple of real frailly frails
came round my table, good-looking girls, maybe not beautiful, not twelve year
old beautiful anyway, but smart enough, whimsical enough, and daredevil enough
that I noticed Joanne starting to pay attention in my direction. You know that
look, that look a guy twelve or twelve hundred is ready to leap off bridges
for, and as Markin mentioned before, gladly. Well, if someone is giving old
Francis Xavier Riley the look well what is he going to do but look back, right?
This went on for a while, as such
things do. But you can't depend on the after-effects of "the look" to
determine your whole twelve-year old life so what you need, and need badly is
intelligence. Any king of the hill, any poor boy, boondocks, third-rate king,
hell, any king of the pizza parlor night (in-waiting at that point) needs all
kinds of intelligence from whatever source. In this case it was like manna from
heaven as my younger sister, Catherine Anne (not Kathy Anne, not Kate, straight
Catherine Anne with no bluster nicknames like with my older brothers Tommy and
Timmy), was friendly with Joanne's younger sister, Mary Margaret (there are
more Marys with various middle names, more Elizabeths, ditto with middle names,
and more Catherines, with or without Annes, in this early 1960s Irish working
class neighborhood than you can shake a stick at but that is another story, a
Markin sociology of the neighborhood story for another time, I am sure) over at
North Adamsville Elementary School. This intelligence was gold because it seems
that beyond that "look," that jump off the bridge look that I just
mentioned, Joanne liked me. But wait a minute no teen saga can just end like
that, a story goes with it. See, Joanne was put off by my
devil-make-care-attitude which seemed to her, pious girl that she was, kind of
sacrilegious, but on the other hand she liked the cool midnight blessed
sunglasses. Yah, women.
Let me get back to that pious
part for a minute because it will explain lots of things, lots of things that
even Markin didn't get. Like when Joanne and I would later have our
"misunderstandings" and break-ups which is usually when I looked
around for another girl. Not the slanderous way Markin made it seem like I was
24/7 on the hunt even when Joanne and I were in our glory days. See, and here
is where the intelligence from Mary Margaret (hereafter, Moe, which is a
reasonable nickname and she liked it as well) was invaluable, although if I
thought about it I should have after hearing the gist of it ran, ran like hell
to Africa or someplace like that. See, even worst that in mother Maude's
household the religion, the hard core Roman Catholic religion, the more Roman
than the Romans religion, its superstitions, its dogmas, and its graces were
pervasive via Joanne's mother (Doris). And while mother Maude, and to a lesser
extent mother Arlene (Markin's mother), bore down, and bore down hard, with
their religious tyrannies toward us boys the girls took the serious brunt of
the damage to their fragile psyches. No question.
See here is the set-up. Pious
mother (learning from pious mothers back to Stone Age Ireland, and elsewhere I
suppose) had a funny standard. They, with the boys, would give kind of a
sacramental dispensation for wayward behavior up to, and including, the
occasional armed robbery (I am not kidding that happened with one of Markin’s
brothers, and others, too many others in the old neighborhood) except, of
course, holy of holies, taking the lord’s name in vain and stuff like that.
With the girls though, and maybe with some malice, I don’t know, but at least
in the family of Doris Anna Murphy, nee Mulvey, it seemed so. They, the girls
that is, were held to a higher standard of behavior and were supposed to act as
such, at least for public consumption. (I found out later that the public
consumption part was all that really mattered for some later flames who, as
Markin very succinctly pointed out, had twelve novena books in their hands and
lust in their hearts, great lust, praise be). This is the backdrop to my
struggle to win Joanne’s affections.
But see that was only part of it,
the religious part, the Roman Catholic religious part (I won’t say again the
more Roman than the… , ah, forget it) part of it. Let me show you how I got it
wrong at first though to show you how tough it was to get my signals straight.
Based on my intelligence service (My Catherine Anne-Moe intelligence) I took my
best shot at Joanne by going on and on about the Church (you know now what
church), about ritual, about various disputes, theological disputes, City of
God, Thomist, Counter-Reformation, Virgin Mary disputes, about the meaning of
the religious experience in one’s life, etc. Basically blarney, okay (I am also
being polite here as I, like Markin, prefer to be so in the public prints).
I swear I thought I was making
some headway when all of a sudden I started balling things up, balling them up
like I just learned them rather than had them down pat like I should. Now
remember this is before Pope John XXIII’s Vatican Council II thing and we were
all confronted with the mysteries of the Latin mass, a weird language that
confronted us kids like the bloody English language did when those heathens
stepped into (and over) the old sod Ireland, plebeian anti-Semitic hatred of
the Jews (hell, they killed our savior, didn’t they), and other doctrinal stuff
that didn’t mean much. I tried to be cute, meaning I tried to bail out as best
I could, by reciting what I knew (and knew haphazardly) about Christian doctrine.
Without boring everybody with how
I held forth on such esoteric things like how many angels can fit on the head
of a needle and other Thomisms the long and short of it is I busted flat,
busted flat hard. No sale, no wannabe sale, nada, nothing. Joanne stiffly
proud, stiffly piously proud, just kind of dismissed me out of hand, with the
flip of a wrist. Vanquished. Gone. In short, she just walked away. (Later, she
told me she actually liked my pitter-patter but that on Church matters, you
know what church matters, I should leave it to the priests, and guys like that.
Fine.)
But that little setback was
obviously not the end of my hopes, not even close, because, as I gathered from
my Catherine Anne-Moe CIA connections my approach was all wrong. How? Well,
Joanne, as it turned out, was pious, no question, pious for public consumption
anyway, but that her Catholicism was very much colored by the Irish aspect of
it. An Irish expression drilled into her by her grandmother, Anna, who
apparently was next to, or close by, when old Saint Patrick did his
demon-devouring tricks in the old country. Okay, no problem I will just be-bop
on John Bull’s tyranny, eight hundred years of oppression, the bastard Oliver
Cromwell (sorry Markin), and the heathen English at Wexford and Drogheda (and
in the North).
See here is where it gets tricky
again though, actually weird is a better word, because as Irish as the shamrock
as I am, I didn’t know a lot about the history of the old Catholic, blighted
(like the potatoes too often), priest-ridden (oops) Irish. And I didn’t want to
get all balled up like I did with Christian doctrine (or like Markin with
Evelyn and her Protestant ways). But I got well fast as I studied up on my own,
and again giving the devil his due, Markin filled me in on some stuff.
(Wouldn’t you know it took a half–arsed Irishman with a bloody protestant
father, although everybody liked old father Prescott, would be giving me, a
full-blooded son of the old sod Irishman chapter and verse, christ).
In any case one day after school
I was walking up Atlantic Street (or was it Appleton) and I noticed Joanne
coming out of the old Thomas Crane Public Library branch, the one that was
nothing but an old unused storefront that they used until they built a larger
one up in Norfolk Downs (by the way although the Irish and Italians build
modern Adamsville, or modern in those days, way back when back in Plymouth Rock
times every name was bloody English so all the streets names and section names
reflect either that or the Indian (oops), Native-American, influence). When
Joanne saw me walking her way she gave me the cursory, kindly (really kiss-off
okay, twelve year old kiss-off) nod to acknowledge my existence but no little
“the look” (discussed previously and the reader is presumed both to remember
such details and to “know” the look from his or her own life experiences).
Nevertheless this is my golden opportunity-out in the street-no crazy
classmates around, no Markin fouling the waters around, and no distractions.
Yes, just the right time to do my sing-song, pitter-patter be-bop night paean
to the plight of bloody, but not bowed, Ireland and its churchly concerns.
I will say I “stepped up to the
plate” on this one. I even brought in the Book of Kell,
for christ’s sake, and how the Irish Church, the blessed Irish church and the
monasteries were fountains of knowledge , wisdom, …faith (she said later she
loved that one) when the dirty-handed, unwashed English were eating their meals
off the hip in their dingy little hovels. Suddenly she said “Stop.” My heart
fell, oh my god, I’ve blown it. No, not this “scholarly” twelve year old. Well
maybe. Joanne said she knew I was up to something (she had intelligence,
exclusive intelligence, from, ah, Catherine Anne and Moe) and although I had
actually had a fair number of facts balled up (about bloody Oliver Cromwell and
Wexford and Drogheda for one, that damn Markin put his secular spin on the
thing and made the hated Cromwell the hero, although from this reference you
can see what kind of ammunition I was throwing out like this was a meeting of
the Central Committee of the Irish Republican Army, (IRA), or something). She
was “impressed”, impressed as hell (my term, okay) that I thought enough of her
to go to the bother. And then she gave me a winsome smile. (Hey, Markin is not
the only one susceptible to that smile.) Home run.
On the basis of that smile I
“asked her out.” Now twelve year old “asking out,” then anyway, and probably
now too, was usually something like going to a dance after school, or maybe
getting a bite to eat at the soda fountain (including listening to the jukebox,
coins in hand), bowling, yah, bowling, or a matinee movie thing. But see here
is where old Frankie knew how to segue into this proposition based on his recent
pitter-patter. I asked Joanne to go the upcoming March 17th Saint Patrick’s Day
Parade over in South Boston with me. Nice touch, right.
Now in those days, and you can
ask your parents and grandparents about it if you are too young to remember the
be-bop 1950s night, the parade was actually held on March 17th, whatever day of
the week it fell on so that meant “skipping” school that year. See in
Adamsville March 17th, unlike in Boston, was not a day off-a holiday and even
in Boston, officially, it was not a day off for blessed Saint Patrick. It was
to celebrate the bloody British defeat in Boston- Evacuation Day- a worthy
reason in its own right. Joanne “freaked” out at this idea at first. But then I
worked on her, and worked on her, with the notion that it was her patriotic
duty, her grandmother Anna memory honor duty, to go and pretend we were in the
old sod for the day. Yah, I know bringing in grandma was off base but, well,
but… As an added kicker, and to show my honorable intentions, I told her that Markin
was also going although I had not asked him at the time (and didn’t want him
around anyway). That day she said no, but over the next several days she
started to weaken.
In the meantime (although I guess
my intelligence network was on “vacation” or, like the current day CIA, “out of
the loop” because I didn’t know this) Joanne was working on her mother by
putting up an argument that it was her religious duty to stand up for the Irish
Church on that day (christ, she sounded like me after a while). Finally mother
Doris said yes and Joanne said yes. Of course, as this was going on, old Peter
Paul, old true-blooded, down with John Bull’s tyranny, Markin wimped out, yes,
wimped out, saying he did not want to miss school. As it turned out (and was
Joanne’s expression after she heard that Markin had wimped out) three was one
too many (and both Joanne and I agreed on this one, with a little snicker, many
times later).
And the reason that Joanne said
that, to make a long story short because you really don’t need me to go into
the details of the parade-marching bands, drill teams, bagpipes, twirlers,
drunken green-faced rowdies and all that- or the results of my efforts, was
that she figured (as she told me later) we would probably get around to kissing
(be still my heart on hearing this even now) and she didn’t want Markin to blab
it all over school. And guess what? We did kiss, kissed in honor of Saint
Patrick, the Irish Church, the Book of Kell, and I don’t know how many
other things, Irish things, naturally-hey, maybe even the blarney stone.
Now Markin in one of his foolish,
damn foolish, commentaries once asked a question to his fellow North Adamsville
high school classmates about whether, in the old days, anybody “skipped” school
to go over to Southie and see the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. We know he wimped
out, always. But note this, Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, has a very big A
(for absent) next to his name for March 17, 1959. And he is proud of it. I’ll
even get a notarized copy of the damn North Adamsville Middle School transcript
to prove it. So there.
