A Stand-Up Guy-With John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle In Mind  

 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

“My man Dixie was the straightest stand-up guy I ever had. He had dreams bigger than his pants, dreams about that big score and then easy street and he was going to take me with him, said that at the end so I know it was true. I‘ll never have another like him. I‘m sorry I had to leave him by the side of road like that, dead as a doornail, but kind of peaceful looking like I never saw him before in life when he had that snarly look that “from hunger” guys get when their wanting habits aren’t satisfied, when there is something inside eating at them. I couldn’t get mixed up with the law trying to explain why I was with the guy, why I was with a fugitive from the law, why I didn’t turn over the man I loved when I didn’t have a blessed thing  to do with his capers, yeah, not with my record. Besides Dixie knew he was a goner by then, knew the life was fading out of him as he drove into the night like a maniac but he just wanted to get away, couldn’t face another stretch, would have wanted me to flee the scene and go on to have a good life,” Doll, with a couple of tears in her eyes, said to Laura her fellow “hostess” at Diamond Jim’s Dance Hall in the locker room all the hostesses shared after work where they put on their street clothes and washed the grime of the night away after blurry two o’clock in the morning.

The customers, and not a few of the hostesses, calling the place Diamond Gyp’s for the brutal amounts Jim Jameson charged for liquor just so a guy, mostly G.I.s on leave from Fort Dix down in New Jersey and sailors just on shore with a liberty pass from ships docked along the Hudson River looking for a good time in what was probably their first time in New York, could have a dance with the over the edge girls who acted as their escorts for the evening. The place a classic “clip joint” was what Doll, Doll used to working higher up the food chain joints like the place where she met Dixie, yes that was what she was reduced to since that night a couple of years before when Dixie bought the farm leaving her as blue as blue could be this two year anniversary night.

Doll who in her younger days was a doll, all curves and in the right places, wavy hair as was the style then, big brown eyes and make-up applied just right to show off her lips and cheeks, had not aged well after the shock of Dixie’s death and travelling helter-skelter east, always east away from whatever Midwestern memories she was running. Had been called Doll for so long at whatever work she was doing that it stuck, stuck best when Dixie with his smooth Southern drawl would stretch it out to Daawwl.

Doll, who had been a stand-up dame herself when it came to Dixie, forgave him those few romps in the hay with other women, her friends or co-workers usually, as long as he came back to her, felt she had to unburden herself and her sorrows to someone and Laura seemed to be someone who would listen, someone who had seen some sorrow too unlike a lot of the younger girls who were just doing the clip for the money, for the sex, or for kicks, listen to the tale of what happened to her stand-up guy, the guy with the dreams bigger than his pants. 

Doll had met Dixie at the Club Fianna, a hotspot in Chi town, maybe not “the” hot spot that would probably have been the Café Nana but the Fianna was right up there and Doll, fresh of the farm and filled with Iowa naiveté before she wised up belonged there since the place was overgrown with farm-fresh very good-looking women, “hostesses” they called them then, like her with those curves in the right places who all the guys back from the wars, or just locals looking for a good time were hung up on back then.  So yeah Doll had met Dixie a few years back when the war was on and the place filled up every night with all kinds of characters, good and bad, good and bad as long as they behaved themselves according to Mindy, the “connected” owner of the place.

She had been sitting at the bar drinking a scotch and soda, sipping really which Mindy and Laura the head hostess encouraged the girls to do so that when a guy came up and have his line ready “how about a refill” or “can I buy you a drink” then the drinks would come blasting away so a guy might spent a hundred bucks and not even noticed it which wasn’t too bad if he got to take her home but a little pricey for rotgut gin or whiskey, when this big rangy jut-jawed guy in a brown suit that hung on him a little off-kilter and a big brimmed soft hat tilled just so which made him look bigger and tougher than he probably was and who looked like he just came off some farm or ranch himself but would be a quick learner of city ways came up to her seat and shyly asked if buy could buy her a drink. His accent sounded like Indiana, maybe Kentucky but she knew at a glance who she was going home with that night.  

Thinking about the matter later Doll thought the kicker was his eyes all brown and liquid what had bedroom romps written all over them and Doll could tell by the trembling in her hands that he wouldn’t have to push her to hard that way. In those days, not like now where every drink and plenty of them went down painlessly, she would have a couple and that was it because she was working as a model then during the day at La Rue’s Department store and Mr. La Rue did not want his models looking like they had just fallen out of bed even if they had just done so. She for that unspoken sexual reason said yes and so they talked, he telling her about how he had come to Chi town to make a big score and then head back to wherever he was from, Kentucky it sounded like as she picked up the soft drawl as the evening progressed, and live the easy life of a gentleman farmer. Sometimes later after they were living together, off and on depending on Dixie’s mood or her rages over his sleeping with one of her girlfriends or another, when Dixie was drunk he would get confused and say he would go back to the ranch and become a gentleman rancher but by then Doll was so hung up on the guy it didn’t matter if he was a paper-hanger as long as he gave her some loving.  Besides if she pushed every guy away for telling lies she would have wound up an old maid.

Yeah Dixie was always talking about making a big score but until that last caper, that last big score he was strictly from cheap street, strictly and nickels and dimes guy but he was a stand-up guy to her even when he was borrowing money from her to put on some nag at Joliet racetrack who would inevitably finish out of the money and he would be back again looking for room rent (that word room exactly the right one, a room in a down and out rooming house over on Division which she hated to go into since Dixie kept it like a pigsty when he was working his numbers of the horses). So Dixie did a little of this and a little of that mainly using his size to be a strong-arm guy for Louie Larson, the biggest bookie in Chi town and “connected” in all the right places, a guy Dixie was into for a lot of dough so Louie took some of the sting out of the debt in trade when he needed muscle. The rest of the time Dixie who by then was pretty well known to Chicago’s finest had a list of suspected hold-ups of gas stations, diners, liquor stores, small time stuff and a few jack-rolls, yeah, nothing like the big score he kept promising her. Kept promising her while he was tossing the hay with a couple of her friends on the side telling her not to crowd him, that he would get that big score once a couple of Mister Big’s took notice of him.     

Well in the world of crime, at least in the old days, the days when a guy who was tough meant something everybody needed a guy who could do the heavy lifting, who could throw his weight around or not depending on cases, and Dixie filled the bill. Filled the bill when the Doctor, who wasn’t any doctor not of medicine anyway,    laid his plan on some Mister Big (Johnny Blake, a real Mister Big, as she found out later after the smoke had cleared) and as part of the play he would need a holder, a guy who could clear the way if there was trouble. A guy too who was looking for the big score so that he would move mountains to make sure the deal worked out. And so for once in his small cheap street life Dixie was in on a big score, was going to get the dough he needed to buy that farm he had dreamed about since he was a kid and take Doll along with him, and said he would make an honest woman out her too. She didn’t care about that part, wasn’t worried one way or the other about being an honest woman since she had lost her virginity to an Iowa football player at sixteen she just wanted to be with him.

“Laura, you might have heard about the Bigelow Jewelry caper a couple of years back it was in all the newspapers where the guys got away with a million in jewels (actually more like two million but the insurance company was trying to keep wraps on the thing). [Laura nods her head vaguely.] That’s the caper Dixie was working. The thing worked beautifully this Doctor, even if he wasn’t a real doctor but a con, a grifter, had spent a few years working out the details so smooth and they got away clean, got a briefcase full of high-value stones. Well almost clean since some rum brave night security guard making maybe two dollars and hour decided his life was worthless and tried to stop them when they left the Bigelow Building and in the scuffle Larry the Lizard the best safe cracker in town took a stray bullet. Funny except that they got a way clean and it was only later that everything got fouled up.

“Got fouled up big after they let Larry off at his house to be taken care of by a real doctor that his wife would have to send for. He later died but that was part of the breaks when you go for the big score, that was what Dixie said and I half-believed him when he let me in on the story later. See this Mister Big, this Johnny Blake saw the operators as small potatoes, saw the Doctor, Larry, Dixie and Jimmy the wheelman who I knew as the guy who ran diner where we girls would go after work to have dinner some nights and who was picked up by the coppers as they did their round-up after the burglary since Jimmy was the best wheelman around, as so much wind and if the Doc made the score well why bother splitting up serious dough with small potatoes.

“The idea after the heist was that the Doctor and Dixie would go to Johnny’s headquarters and exchange the jewelry for the dough (half a million in cash of which Dixie was to get a hundred thousand, so yeah a big score). So they showed up at Johnny’s and surprise, surprise Johnny had one of his torpedoes Jimmy the Fixer there with both guns at the ready as they enter the door.

“This is where my Dixie was a stand-up guy, where he proved the Doctor was right in picking him as the holder, where he knew somehow that Dixie damn well needed that score and would move mountains to make sure the deal went down cleanly. Dixie started blasting away like a madman nicked Johnny and killed Jimmy the Fixer. Dixie got nicked too but waved it off when the Doctor said he should see a doctor and they beat it out of the place each in one piece.

“Problem though was that they had no dough and nothing but hot rocks with nobody to fence the merchandise for them fast so they headed over to my apartment, came knocking at my door. Doc figured they had better split up and gave Dixie what he thought was his proper share of the loot. The idea was to meet up in Cleveland in a couple of weeks and see what was what. (The Doctor would later be picked up at a juke joint outside of Chi town when he stopped for a drink and a meal since his photograph had been plastered all over the newspapers after Johnny Blake squealed his brains out.)

“The Doctor left and I could see for the first time that Dixie was hurt, needed some medical attention. But a strange calm came over him. Said he had to get back south and so I took my last few dollars and bought us a car, nothing much but unidentified as a crime car. We drove all night but I could see he was fading, begged him to stop and see a doctor. No. Let me drive. No. A man on a mission. On a mission until just outside some dink town in Indiana he pulled over the side of the road, shut off the ignition and slumped over. Gone, my Dixie gone. I left him there with his big score, the wanting habits thing that was eating at him all behind him. Yeah, Dixie was the straightest stand-up guy I ever had, never will have another man like him.