Mimi Murphy knew two things,
she needed to keep moving, and she was tired, tired as hell of moving, of the
need, of the self-impose need, to keep moving ever since that incident five
years before, back in 1958, with her seems like an eternity ago sweet long gone
motorcycle boy, Pretty James Preston. I knew this information, knew this information
practically first hand because the usually polite but loner Mimi Murphy had told
me her thoughts and the story that went with it one night after she had
finished a tough on the feet night working as a cashier at the Olde Saco
Drive-In Theater out on Route One in Olde Saco, Maine.
That night she had passed me
with a bottle of high-end Scotch, maybe Haig &Haig, showing its label from
a brown bag in her hand while I was going down the stairs in the rooming house
we lived in on Water Street in Ocean City, a few miles from Olde Saco. A number
of people, including Mimi and me, were camped out there in temporary room
quarters after the last of the summer touristas had decamped and headed back to
New York, or wherever they came from.
The cheap off-season rent and the short stay until the next summer crowd
showed up requiring no lease drew us there. Most residents, mostly young and
seemingly unattached to any family or work life kept to themselves, private
drinkers or druggies, a couple of low profile hustling girls who didn’t bring
their work home, guys maybe just out of the service, or between jobs, and so
on. I had seen a couple of guys making passes at Mimi but thought nothing of it
since they also targeted the hustling girls too.
Since I had never bothered Mimi,
meaning made a pass at her (slender, no skinny, Irish red-heads with faraway
looks and no, no apparent warm bed desires, that year and in those days not
being my type after tumbledown broken-hearted youthful years of trying to coax
their favors to no avail over in the old Little Dublin neighborhood around the
Acre in Olde Saco), she must have sensed that being contemporaries, she was
twenty-one then and I twenty-two, that maybe she could unburden her travails on
a fellow wayward traveler. And she was right, and she did as she invited me up
into her room with no come hither look but no fear, no apparent fear, anyway.
After a couple of drinks, maybe three, of that dreamboat scotch that died easy
going down (I had been down on my uppers for a while and was drinking strictly
rotgut low shelf liquor store wines and barroom half empty glass left-overs but
that is my story and not Mimi’s so I will move on) she loosened up, taking her
shoes off before sitting down on the couch across from me. Here is the gist of
what she had to say as I remember it that night:
She started out giving her
facts of life facts like that she had grown up around this Podunk town outside
of Boston, Adamsville Junction, and had come from a pretty pious Roman Catholic
Irish family that had hopes that she (or one of her three sisters, but mainly
she) might “have the vocation,” meaning be willing, for the Lord, to prison
cloister herself up in some nunnery to ease the family’s way into heaven, or
some such idea. And she had bought into the idea from about age seven to about
fourteen by being the best student, boy or girl, in catechism class on Sunday,
queen of the novenas, and pure stuff like that in church and the smartest girl
in, successively, Adamsville South Elementary School, Adamsville Central Junior
High, and the sophomore class at Adamsville Junction High School.
As she unwound this part of
her story I could see where that part was not all that different from what I
had encountered in my French-Canadian (mother, nee LeBlanc) Roman Catholic
neighborhood over in the Acre in Olde Saco. I could also see, as she loosened
up further with an addition drink, that, although she wasn’t beautiful, certain
kinds of guys would find her very attractive and would want to get close to
her, if she let them. Just the kind of gal I used to go for before I took the
pledge.
About age fourteen thought
after she had gotten her “friend” (her period for those who may be befuddled by
this old time term) and started thinking, thinking hard about boys, or rather
seeing that they, some of them, were thinking about her and not novenas and
textbooks her either she started to get “the itch.” That itch that is the right
of passage for every guy on his way to manhood. And girl on her way to
womanhood as it turned out but which in the Irish Roman Catholic Adamsville
Junction Murphy family neighborhood was kept as a big, dark secret from boys
and girls alike.
Around that time, to the
consternation of her nun blessed family, she starting dating Jimmy Clancy, a
son of the neighborhood and a guy who was attracted to her because she was,
well, pure and smart. She never said whether Jimmy had the itch, or if he did
how bad, because what she made a point out of was that being Jimmy’s girl while
nice, especially when they would go over Adamsville Beach and do a little
off-hand petting and watching the ocean,
did not cure her itch, not even close. This went on for a couple of
years until she was sixteen and really frustrated, not by Jimmy so much as by
the taboos and restrictions that had been placed on her life in her straight jacket household, school and town. No
question she was ready to break out, she just didn’t know how.
Then in late 1957 Pretty
James Preston came roaring into town. Pretty James, who despite the name, was a
tough motorcycle wild boy, man really about twenty-one, who had all, okay most
all, of the girls, good girls and bad, wishing and dreaming, maybe having more
than a few restless nights, about riding on back of that strange motorcycle he
rode (a Vincent Black Lightning stolen, not by Pretty James, from some English
guy and transported to America where he got it somehow, the details were very
vague) and being Pretty James’ girl. One day, as he passed by on his chopper
going full-throttle up Hancock Street, Mimi too got the Pretty James itch.
But see it was not like you
could just and throw yourself at Pretty James that was not the way he worked,
no way. One girl, one girl from a good family who had her sent away after the
episode, tried that and was left about thirty miles away, half-naked, after she
thought she had made the right moves and was laughed at by Pretty James as he
took off with her expensive blouse and skirt flying off his handle-bars as left
her there unmolested but unhinged. That episode went like wildfire through the
town, through the Monday morning before school girls’ lav what happened, or
didn’t happen, over the weekend talkfest first of all.
No Pretty James’ way was to
take, take what he saw, once he saw something worth taking and that was that.
Mimi figured she was no dice. Then one night when she and Jimmy Clancy were
sitting by the seawall down at the Seal Rock end of the beach starting to do
their little “light petting” routine Pretty James came roaring up on his
hellish machine and just sat there in front of the pair, saying nothing. But
saying everything. Mimi didn’t say a word to Jimmy but just started walking
over to the cycle, straddled her legs over back seat saddle and off they went
into the night. Later that night her itch was cured, or rather cured for the
first time.
Pouring another drink Mimi
sighed poor Pretty James and his needs, no his obsessions with that silly
motorcycle, that English devil’s machine, that Vincent Black Lightning that
caused him more anguish than she did. And she had given him plenty to think
about as well before the end. How she tried to get him to settle down a little,
just a little, but what was a sixteen old girl, pretty new to the love game,
totally new, but not complaining to the sex game, and his little tricks to get
her in the mood, and make her forget the settle down thing. Until the next time
she thought about it and brought it up.
Maybe, if you were from
around Adamsville way, or maybe just Boston, you had heard about Pretty James,
Pretty James Preston and his daring exploits back in about 1957 and 1958. Those
got a lot of play in the newspapers for months before the end. Before that bank
job, the one where as Mimi said Pretty James used to say all the time, he
cashed his check. Yes, the big Granite City National Bank branch in Braintree heist
that he tried to pull all by himself, with Mimi as stooge look-out. She had set
him up for that heist, or so she thought. No, she didn’t ask him to do it but
she got him thinking, thinking about settling down just a little and if that
was to happen he needed a big score, not the penny ante gas station and mom and
pop variety store robberies that kept them in, as he also used to say, coffee
and cakes but a big payday and then off to Mexico, maybe down Sonora way, and a
buy into the respectable and growing drug trade.
And he almost, almost, got
away clean that fatal day, that day when she stood across the street, an extra forty-five in her purse just in case he needed
it for a final getaway. But he never made it out the bank door. Some rum brave
security guard tried to uphold the honor of his profession and started shooting
nicking Pretty James in the shoulder. Pretty James responded with a few quick
blasts and felled the copper. That action though slowed down the escape enough
for the real coppers to respond and blow Pretty James away. Dead, DOA, done. Her,
with a tear, sweet boy Pretty James.
According to the newspapers a
tall, slender red-headed girl about sixteen had been seen across the street
from the bank just waiting, waiting according to the witness, nervously. The
witness had turned her head when she heard the shots from the bank and when she
looked back the red-headed girl was gone. And Mimi was gone, maybe an accessory
to felony murder or worst charge hanging over her young head, and long gone
before the day was out. She grabbed the first bus out of Braintree headed to
Boston where eventually she wound up holed up in a high-end whorehouse doing
tricks to make some moving on dough. (She mentioned some funny things about
that stay, which was not so bad at the time when she needed dough bad, and
about strange things guys, young and old, wanted her to do but I will leave
that stuff out here.)
And she had been moving ever
since, moving and eternally hate moving. Now, for the past few months, she had
been working nights as a cashier in the refreshment stand at Olde Saco Drive-In
to get another stake to keep moving. She had been tempted, a couple of times,
to do a little moon-lighting in a Portland whorehouse that a woman she had
worked with at her last job, Fenner’s Department Store where she modeled
clothes for the rich ladies, had told her about to get a quick stake but she
was almost as eternally tired at that prospect as in moving once again.
And so Mimi Murphy, a few
drinks of high-shelf scotch to fortify her told her story, told it true I
think, mostly. A couple of days later I saw her through my room’s window with a
suitcase in hand looking for all the world like someone getting ready to move
on, move on to be a loner again after maybe an indiscrete airing of her linen
in public. Thinking back on it now I wish, I truly wish, that I had been more
into slender, no skinny, red-headed Irish girls with faraway looks that season
and maybe she would not have had to keep moving, eternally moving.
No comments:
Post a Comment