From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- When The Corner Boys Grow Up- Ben Affleck’s –“The Town”

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Ben Affleck’s The Town.

DVD Review

The Town, starring Ben Affleck, Rebecca Hall, from the novel by Chuck Hogan, Legendary Pictures, 2010

I have spilled much ink talking about the corner boy society that I grew up in 1950s Olde Saco (that’s up in Maine for those interested) where some hard-ass (and soft-ass too) corner boys ripped up the imaginations of wanna-bes like me and my corner boys  who hung around, soft-ass hung around, Mama’s Pizza Parlor over on Atlantic Avenue, waiting, well, waiting for some  breathe of fresh air, maybe coming in from the nearby ocean to wash over us and take out of that red scare cold war night. In the meantime we hung out, doing a little of this and a little of that, some stuff legal other stuff well, let’s just leave it as other stuff.

So on any given night, mostly weekends, from about junior high school on you could find us in those environs playing pinball on Mama’s back room machine, the Madame LaRue busty ladies pictured on the scoreboard begging you to play for their favors, play fiercely although empty-handedly (except those seventeen free games you racked up in your, ah, frenzy to please Madame). Or when rock and roll threw its fresh breathe over us we tossed many quarters in Mama’s jukebox to hear the latest songs like the Chiffon’s He’s So Fine about twelve times straight and hoped that certain shes came in to listen and maybe help make us those selections. Or, on some dark moonless night, maybe a little drunk, maybe a little dough hunger, or needing dough girl hungry, we might just be found doing our midnight creep around the neighborhood in order to make ends meet, that little of this and that stuff mentioned early.           

As high school turned to work world, or maybe college world as things opened up even for working- class kids, the old corner boy society, or our generation’s chapter of it, went in several difference directions, some good some not so good, including those like the legendary Big Red Dubonnet who graduated to armed robberies of gas stations, liquor stores and Shawshank. Yah, Big Red was tough (I once saw him chain-whip, mercilessly chain-whip, a guy for the simple error of being on the wrong corner, Red’s, while breathing), was pretty smart, in a street smart way, knew a couple of things about the world and, and, be still my heart, let me have some free Madame LaRue games after he had racked up a ton and needed to take care of some ever present girl business. And I was the beneficiary of Big Red’s (not Red, Big Red, don’t ever make that mistake, remember what I said about that chain-whipping) largess on many occasions because Big Red attracted girls, and not just slutty girls like you’d expect, but girls who had their Saint Brigitte’s Church (Roman Catholic in that French-Canadian heavy old town) novena book recitals in one part of their brains and lust, bad boy lust, in the other, on more occasions that you would think.     

And that is where memories of Big Red and the characters that inhabit The Town intersect in my mind. See Big Red, the late Big Red Dubonnet now, never could find anything better in this whole wide world than to be the  king hell king of the corner boy night. But that, just like any kingship, takes dough, and so you either work the work-a-day world with the squares or go where the dough is- for Big Red in Podunk gas stations and liquors stores, maybe an off-hand truck heist, and the guys like Doug and Jem who lead their peoples, their Charlestown corner boy peoples, banks, and other high-stakes projects. They are driven by that same first glance, last chance, imperative though, and by the same need to hone their respective skills on a regular basis before a hostile and unforgiving world.    

Thus this film held me, held me in the thought that for a minute back in the 1950s, hell, more than a minute, I could have been lured to the life, no sweat, no looking back. Jesus I was the “holder” on more than one occasion when the great (locally Olde Saco and Portland great) “clip artist” Ronny Bleu had the local merchants in a frenzy anytime he was in the down town area, or maybe even thought about being there.  And later in gratitude to Big Red for his favors (no, jesus, no not that lame free pinball game stuff, but when he “gave” me one of his “reject” girls, a college girl he said he couldn’t understand and thought I might be able to) I did a couple of favors for him in return too. And while The Town gets wound up in a little bizarre love interest between Doug and one of the bank female victims and some serious literary license on what was what in that old time Boston Irish neighborhood, Charlestown (where the guys were so tough that even tough guys from Southie, South Boston, had second thoughts about tangling with them), these grown-up corner boys were very recognizable. I’ll never forget the thrill the first time we saw Big Red pull out his gun, some old .32 automatic I think, or when we heard that the Esso gas station over on Gorham Road in Scarborough was hit one dark night by a guy aiming a .32 at the gas jockey attendant. So you can see the pull was strong, real strong.     

Oh yah, I don’t know how true the code of omerta (silence) still is in Charlestown (or Southie, or about seventeen other places where corner boys, some corner boys anyway, go on to the life) but I am willing to believe that it is honored more in the breech than the observance. At least it was in Podunk.  How do you think they (and you know who the they is just like in film, the cops from the locals to the feds), got the lead that got Big Red after he knocked over the biggest liquor store in Portland that last time before they clipped his wings?