Out In The 1950s Film Noir Night- With A Girl’s Confession In Mind

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Mary Shea knew, knew right from her early girlhood, that she had no moral compass, had no moral point of view, although she would have been hard pressed to use those exact terms being a woman whose thoughts were directed at the moment, or toward the grabbing future, and not upon reflection. She knew that she was different from the other girls at the orphanage where she lived back when she came of age. Back in the benighted 1940s when shortages were all around and wanting was fierce, Mary Shea fierce. Girls, the other girls, all God- mercifully thankful to the good Sisters of Mercy for providing them a space to live in like that dormitory bed with stiff starched sheets that irritated the skin, a single dump-in chest for personal belongings, and three square gruels a day was a reason to be thankful for anything.

She had to laugh though when the other girls, those God-mercy girls, were scrambling all over each other, ready to scratch each other’s eyes out, in order to be her best girlfriend after word got out that she liked girls, liked them that way, like them since she had been cursed with strong sexual feelings to be sated, and liked doing things, nasty things with girls, under those stiff sheets. And they did too the little hypocrites. But that was in the past, girl slave captivity past when there no men around, the good Sisters never found out or looked the other way, and not fit material to think of now, now that she had left the confines of the orphanage having come of leaving age and needed to spend her time figuring out her future, figuring out her dreams. Still she knew she had no moral compass, and knew sure as hell that she had better grab her chances fast and furious while she could.

Mary’s first thought was, as if to put paid to the point about that moral compass, to find a whorehouse to get some work in, get herself off the streets for a while, maybe meet some sugar daddy who would pay her freight, and maybe leave her alone enough for her to put her own plans together. At worse she figured she would save enough money to build her own business, maybe run her own bordello, a high class joint where only rich johns and their friends would go. But see in Los Rios, the little town a few miles from the orphanage there was only one little fly-by-night whorehouse filled with kicked out floozies strung out on weed or H and frequented by bracero wetbacks from the local fields on Saturday night, full of bad whiskey, bad breathe, and bad karma, bad for Mary karma since that place was the end of the line not the beginning.

So having no known skills, no known saleable skills in Los Rios Mary started serving them off the arm at Gregory’s Hash House on First Street down by the pier. And, except for having to fight off every off-hand sweaty bracero and every lusty sea dog, she found a home there for a while because room and board above the restaurant was part of the package (also so she would be at Gregory’s work beck and call when the regular town-grown waitresses had colicky kids to fret over or had gone unannounced somewhere with some guy on three day trip to paradise). While not beautiful she more that passed for a pretty blonde with a decent figure among unbridled men that came in and so the fighting off part was sometimes a ruse, although harking back to those stiff sheet orphan bed romps she was still ambivalent about men.

Nevertheless as she gathered in intelligence about what was going on, or not going on, down at the docks she saw and heard things that would be a big boost to her plans. So she was kind of happy that whorehouse didn’t work out especially since she kept coming back to that part, that still not sure about men, about whether she liked them enough to have one of them deflower her some sweaty sultry night (hopefully under satin sheets that she always dreamed about once she heard stiff starched white linens were not the only kind)

That big boost included knowledge that old time hood Gregory’s business was just a front, that Gregory was the middleman for all the illegal stuff coming in off the boats, stuff like cocaine, mary jane, hash, heroin, unbounded liquor, you name it. What Gregory also had was plenty of ready cash to make transactions with since, well since his business was strictly cash and carry. So she knew, knew as soon as she knew the score about Gregory, that she was going to get that ready cash for herself and then split town. And so one night, one night when Gregory had too much to drink , she slipped into his rooms so quickly and quietly that one would have thought she was a professional sneak thief , had done a thousand such capers, and grabbed his strong box. Grabbed the box with both grabbing hands, grabbed as it turned out twenty-five big ones.

Yes Mary hit the mother lode, or at least that amount of dough seemed that way to her having only scratched for nickels and dimes in her whole short sweet life. Naturally Gregory, connected Gregory, squawked to the coppers, got all irate over Mary’s heist since who else could have done it but her. Mary was no fool and so she asked to speak to Gregory alone when they went down to the stationhouse. And all she had to say to him was that she was hip to his whole operation and so if he just didn’t write it off as carrying costs of doing business she was going to sing, sing loud and clear. He didn’t like it, swore he would get even, but he saw her reasoning clear enough. Naturally she had to blow town, blow town fast or get scalded and so she flew the coop to Frisco town, a good town to get lost in.

And that is where things started to get interesting now that Mary was a woman of property, a woman on the run with property. She headed, headed like a lemming to the sea for the cover of the Embarcadero, Frisco town’s waterfront filled with old warehouses, sailor’s bars, and hash houses. Her idea was to keep submerged long enough to figure out how to investment her new found dough, keep low, and keep alive. So she took a job as a waitress at Dino’s Diner, a place where mainly Balkan nationals hung out when they were on dry land, a place too where she could see what was up in case she needed to make a fast get-away.

This Dino was a character, a guy out of some crime novel, full of the devil but basically harmless, harmless after Mary de-fanged him, or had his wife Olive de-fang him. (For her efforts with Dino Olive got Mary into her bed one night since she swung both ways and Mary hadn’t play hard to get). And so things went on like that for a while until Mary started to get restless about her future, about those satin sheets that haunted her dreams.

And that is when she met Steve, Steve Casper, a local small-time fishing boat owner with big ideas and no dough who supplied the fish to a lot of restaurants along the wharves. His first big idea was to try to sweep Mary off her feet. But Mary was too wise and still too unsure where she stood on the guy question although Steve stirred something in her, something about sex but she wasn’t sure what, so she was not to be swept away by some ill-thought out passion. His second big idea was to try to get a bank loan to buy a trawler and really make some dough. That idea Mary was unequivocally interested in since she thought that if the venture succeeded and she made that twenty five thou back on her investment she could slip Gregory his dough back and all would be square.

Well the venture did succeed, and she did make the dough back, more than that over the next couple of years but here is the funny part, well, maybe not funny, but ironic. When she went back to Los Rios to square things up it turned out that Gregory had split south, south to Mexico, and some other grift. So nobody was really looking for her, or hadn’t been for a while. She had nobody to give the dough back. For just a minute she thought that she had to make restitution somehow and thought to give the money to that long ago Sisters of Mercy orphanage. Then she thought about those damn stiff starched linen sheets and laughed that idea off. As for her partner Steve, well, they are partners under satin sheets now, although every once in a while when Steve is at sea Olive finds her way under them too.