Aint Got No Time For Corner Boys Down In The Streets Making All That Noise -With the 1983 Film “Diner” In Mind
By Lance Lawrence
[Seemingly 2019, the fiftieth anniversary year for many things important in my life and the lives of the still standing corner boys from in front of Tonio’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” in the Acre section of North Adamsville like Sam Lowell, Frank Jackman, Seth Garth and Josh Breslin are being bombarded with sad-eyed remembrances, and a few glad ones too (that latter named individual by the way not really an Acre corner boy but we “adopted” him after we ran into him out in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, 1967 since the “Bottoms” where he grew up in Olde Saco up in Maine was just a French-Canadian version of Tonio’s corner boys’ Acre)
It probably started when Sam Lowell decided that he would try to put a committee together from his Veterans Peace Action group, a group that I had been a member of for many years but have now given some serios medical problems reduced myself to supporter status, who would help compile what is projected to be an archival effort to gather remembrances from the many members of that organization who did some or all of their military service in 1969 during the Vietnam War like he did. Put those writings in some kind of book form (as Alex James had had his youngest brother Zack, who writes here occasionally, edit and publish around remembrances of the later lamented Pete Markin, more about him below). And for the less literary types maybe a video to gather in their thoughts as oral history. (That fact, hard fact now that many members of VPA from World War II and Korea have passed on finally making the committee realize that the Vietnam-era veterans were heavily concentrated after 1968, after even the lousy government knew the war was lost. Those who served earlier, like their World War II fathers and uncles, had a different take, a more patriotic view of their service.)
According to Sam there seemed as had happened on other such occasions, as the committee gathered steam to be a strange confluence of other, seeming unrelated events which further triggered those 1969 thoughts. The obvious one if only as a counterexample, to me at least, was the totally different world represented by Woodstock (an event that I was slated to go to attend since a friend of mine had both an automobile and some line on tickets, but we couldn’t get through. Couldn’t get within fifteen or twenty miles of the old farm the roads were so clogged and by the time the rains came we were glad we shifted to Saratoga Springs and a lively night of heavy dope and some folk music at Caffe Lena’s which is still operating in that town. For those wondering why I was not among the military class of 1969 I had done my naval service directly out of high school after I graduated in 1964, so I was done with that by 1968).
Adding to the stockpile of events although less obvious but more critical to what Sam was attempting to do with this memory archival program was being promoted by a professor from Yale who was running a touring exhibition complete with displays and a book about the anti-war GI Resistance that sprung up and became more public in 1969 and did a great deal to slow down, a little, the war machine. That exhibit, endorsed by VPA, actually had been put together by a collective of academics who in their pre-doctoral youths, or maybe while they were pursuing those careers had been activists and counsellors as the GI Resistance gained a head of steam. In any case the link-up between Sam’s project and that cohort of professors is still an open question.
Finally, and this may be more to the point when the deal goes down, Sam had heard on NPR a segment about the famous Life magazine issue that featured photographs of all the military men killed in Vietnam in one week in June 1969. One of the guys featured was a kid from a town near us, maybe twenty or thirty miles to the east of us Quincy, Massachusetts, who had with his buddies dropped out of high school, joined the Marines and he had laid his head down there in that fateful summer. Very different from the stuff my corner boy guys were thinking, very much closer to the core of feelings of the average guy who found himself in the military whatever he might have though of the war.
All that was so much in the background but for me, for my remembrances what triggered my sad ass thoughts was when Sam in that article mentioned the names of the late Pete Markin and the still standing Frank Jackman. Pete (whose name brings a tear to my eye every time I say or write it) was this whirling dervish who kept bugging us about a new day coming, a new breeze coming across the land. Yeah, a guy with big fat dreams, a guy who saw if we beat the bastards back maybe, just maybe, desperately poor people like those of us who grew up in the Acre back in the 1950s and 1960s might get a break. Had us believing all that stuff. Forcing us to coffeehouses in Cambridge, poetry sessions on Joy Street on Beacon Hill (and on lonesome Friday nights reciting, reciting if you can believe this, Allan Ginsberg’s Howl a poem we dismissed then, and here I am using the term of art of the times, as nothing but a fag joke when all we cared about was girls, cars, and sex, heterosexual sex), and more willingly drove us crazy until we agreed to join him out in San Francisco during the Summer of Love in 1967.
But as Sam said in his recent musings about 1969 Pete could talk the talk but in the end despite his enormous cloud puff dreams he could not walk the walk. Without going into detail after Pete was drafted, went to Vietnam, saw and did stuff he seldom talked about all the stuffing kind of went out of him. He drifted, got into drugs, sobered up for a while and then falling down again wound up in Southern California with what would later be called “brothers under the bridge,” guys who couldn’t relate to the “real world” after Vietnam and created their own alternative communities under bridges and near railroad tracks, places like that. Leave it to Pete though as in tough shape as he was in to gather in the stories of these guys and win some literary award for doing so. In the end though he never lost that hunger he knew from about day one of his life, the hunger of not having enough, of not being on easy street. That hunger would drive him to Mexico and some ill-thought out deal to jump on easy street through some busted drug deal. All he got for his efforts was a lonesome place in some potter’s field in Sonora, and a million tears of what might have been from his distraught corner boys.
Yeah, Pete fell down, fell down hard and once the glow of the 1960s began to fade, guys like Sam and a few others who wish not to be named went to drugs and booze to take the pain away and which I can say took Sam and the rest several attempts and many years to get sober from. Still we had, what we now call our bright shining light, we had Frank Jackman who Sam mentioned in that article about Life magazine’s somber photo array who had travelled a different course from those guys who laid down their precious heads in the summer of 1969.
That “now” part with Frank Jackman coming from our not understanding then what he did in the summer of 1969 in agonizingly deciding to refuse the orders to Vietnam the Army laid on him. No, that is not right either it was not some misunderstanding of Frank’s way but as Sam pointed out a visceral hatred for what he was doing. I would be the first to see what Frank had done and accepted responsibility for after he got out of the stockade (read Sam’s article to get some details of how Frank wound up in the stockade, courted that result in fact) But other guys, guys like Sam, took several years to reconcile with our quiet corner boy. See whether we liked it or not once you were in the military you did as ordered even when you knew it was dead ass wrong. Maybe if Frank had resisted, been a draft resister we would have thought better of him and his work but probably not since we didn’t like the draft resisters centered around Arlington Street Church in Boston any better however right they turned out to be in the end.
Realistically the only corner boy who could have gotten away at the time with what Frank did was Pete Markin, on some theory that he was a flake and it made sense for him to resist. But see he didn’t resist, didn’t think much of what Frank did either until he found himself among the “lost boys” down in the arroyos and canyons of Sothern California and realized how brave Frank had been to take on the monster almost alone.
Below is a review of a very different earlier group of forever corner boys. I wonder if they would shed a tear even today for a fallen comrade like Pete, Pete Markin was fell down in the big mess of history.]
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Recently I was watching a DVD from 1982, Diner, a film about a bunch of guys in 1959 Baltimore who hung out at, well, a diner and hence the title of the film. The cast of the film was a veritable who’s who of male stars (and one female Ellen Barkin) who came of cinematic age in the 1980s, guys like Mickey Rourke and Kevin Bacon who are still putting their shoulders to the wheel in the film industry. What had attracted me about the film from the blurb you get on each film these days from Amazon, Netflix, hell, even blogs from citizen film reviewers strutting their stuff in a democratic age trying to sniff the life out of professional reviewers who despite their better grasp of cinematic history are still in thrall to their subjective tastes, was beside the diner motif which is always attractive to me and which I will discuss in more detail below was the idea that these guys were still hanging together in their early twenties when the old corner boy high school days were long past and when by rights hanging for guys like them were well past (and a few years later for me and my guys). Sure high school drop-outs, usually having been confined to industrial arts class when they were looking for something speedier like fast cars and occasional armed robbery hung the corners forever, shepherded the next generation of corner boys as some wizened old men who were usually laughed at (behind their backs) as losers and “lost boys.” Once in a while a guy, a stay in town guy, maybe if from and Irish family and the youngest son would stay home and take care of widowed mother and to blow off steam, to get out of the fucking house and stop being treated like twelve year would hold a wall up (and because of some unspoken “seniority” system or just because he had held that wall up in his time would be left alone).
So a clot or maybe cohort is better of corner boys well past hanging out holy goof time compared to nine to five work ethos, marriage, marry young ethos, kids, not too many like their parents but also done at a young age and that ever present sickle hanging over your head-“how the fuck did I get into this action.” Maybe started drinking a little heavier or hit the sniff box, checked a few roving eyes, started thinking about lottery numbers but mainly feeling that those old corner boys might have been on to something, maybe had a cure.
I had watched this film with a friend, Sam Lowell, whom I have known since our corner boy days in Riverdale about forty miles west of Boston back in the early 1960s. Sam Lowell is a fairly well-known, or used to be fairly well-known, free-lance music and film critic for lots of publications great and small, some long gone and some still around like Rolling Stone before he consciously started slowing down as he has reached retirement age. In the interest of full disclosure he was the guy who said I would like the film and would I come over, watch with him, and compare notes with him after the film was over. He was writing what he called a “think” review for American Film Today about “buddy” films which had something like a heyday in the 1980s between the guys who starred collectively in this film, the Brat Pack and those who came of cinematic age through the various film adaptations of S.E. Hinton’s male-centered “buddy” films, guys like Matt Dillon, the drugstore cowboy complete with sage mentor beat daddy William Burroughs, he of Naked Lunch fame.
So after the showing we compared notes the most important one which we both agreed and which he used in his review was how many of the actions of the corner boys in the film were very much like ours although we were younger than them when we did those things (in the film they weren’t called “corner boys” nor did they call themselves that but that my friends is what they were-no question as Sam likes to say)
Here’s what Sam said about that key question:
“Hey, around my way, around my growing up working class neighborhood out in Riverdale about forty miles west of Boston in the early 1960s they called them, anybody who thought about the matter like some errant wandering and digging down at the base of society not their usual abode sociologists wondering about alienation among the lower classes, or who acted on behalf of a half terrified society (who also worried about nuclear bombs and commies under every bed) on the premise like the cops who kept a sharp eye on any possible criminal activity- corner boys. Hell, we called ourselves corner boys with a certain amount of bravado and without guile since we hung, what the heck, we hung on the corners of our town. Above all hung around the corner of Jimmy Jake’s Diner over on Walnut and Main Streets (not the one down by the river that was strictly for tourists and parents).
(Corner boys which would be immortalized in Bruce Springsteen’s song, Jersey Girl, with the line. “aint got no time for corner boys down in the street making all that noise” and that was the truth-the “making all that noise” part anyway. Also through the S.E. Hinton books which we did not know about at the time, as least I did not know about and I was “the Bookworm” along with “the Scribe” so I knew about what was what with books. The other guys could have given a fuck about books except maybe porn stuff or comics. Best of all they loved comic books with soft-core porn underneath anchored by luscious young women scantily clothed leaving much to youthful imaginations available on the magazine rack at Dell’s Market).
A working Riverdale definition: corner boys, those without much dough, those without a weekend date and no money for a weekend date even if a guy got lucky enough to draw some female companionship, some girl and there were not that many who didn’t care about a “boss” car, say a ’57 two-toned preferable red and white Chevy the boss of “boss” to sit up front in and preen herself and would accept the bus as a mode of transportation, thus seldom lucky since only nerdy girls or whatever we called girls with brains but no looks would descend to that level, hung around blessed Jimmie Jake’s Parlor “up the Down” (and don’t ask me why it was called that it just was as far back as anybody remembered including my maternal grandparents who were born there although why nobody knows) and, well, hung out. Hung out trying to do the best we could which involved mostly the aforementioned girls and larcenies or plans for larcenies. And if defeated in either endeavor any particular night then there was always a couple of slices of Jimmy Jake’s secret formula pizza sauce to die for delight and a small Coke or if you had a few more coins the hamburger plate with French fries piled almost to the sky it seemed. Just so you know we really hung around in late high school planning larcenies great and small (great the theft of some young woman’s virtue, small the midnight creeps through back doors of certain houses but maybe no more should be mentioned since perhaps the statute of limitations has not run out).
So when I saw the film under review, Diner, with a cast of up and coming actors who all went on to other films and saw that they were five guys, count ‘em five, who in 1959 in the great city of Baltimore hung around a diner talking the talk in between bites of French fries and gravy (against our culinary choice of pizza slices or un-gravied fries, a sacrilege if we had known about the matter) I knew that they were kindred spirits. Knew that despite the several years different in time since they were all twenty-something gathering together for a wedding of one of their members around Christmas time they were from the same species… “
That pretty much summed up the main point we discussed that night, and during subsequent nights as well, but there were others, other stories that were stirred up from that viewing. Some long forgotten, and maybe that was just as well but other which one or the both of us remembered out of some fog of war moment. Since Sam was writing a generic review of buddy films a lot of what he and I talked was “left on the floor” as we used to call the bullshit stuff we would throw out without batting an eyelash on lonesome John weekend nights and in summer almost every night. Those stories, some of them anyway, the ones I was involved in I decided to write down in a journal, a diary if you like that word better, and present the next time the surviving members of our crowd got together to cut up old touches (an old-fashioned word we used all the time but when I used it once with the sister of corner boy the late Al Stein she claimed to have never heard the expression before). So here goes guys and although I was not the Bookworm early on or the Scribe who I swear was born with a book in hand or at least some silly dictionary back in the day I later turned into a late-blooming voracious reading and I hope you picked up the habit too.
Sam would mention in passing in his review about how hanging around guys in Baltimore and Riverdale were totally committed to betting on almost anything. Part of that betting trait was the need to “make a score,” make some dough for immediate dates but a lot of it was a real idea that the roll of the dice was going to be the only way to get out from under. Sure a lot of it was betting on sports outcomes especially on the then lowly Red Sox and high-riding Celtics but nothing was off-limits from what, as happened in the film, from what you you would or would not get from a girl in the way of sex (we had our fair share of “ice queens” and in high school I had more than my fair share unless the other guys, as usual, were lying like bastards about what they were “getting”) to the most famous, or infamous bet of all-the night Frankie bet Sam on how high Jimmy Jake could throw the pizza dough to soften it up before making the crust.
I should explain that while I would later be particularly partial to diners in the days in the later part of the 1960s when I was a regular Jack Kerouac “on the road” hitch-hiker grab rides from lonely for company truck drivers and I learned almost every diner, good or bad, stop at or avoid, from Boston to Frisco town back then we hung around Jimmy Jakes out of tradition, at least three “generations,” meaning four year high school classes hung around there, probably before World War II as well but we never did find that out and because Jimmy Jake let us. Was happy, I guess, to see us because despite our poverty circumstances, girls might come in and buy stuff or rack up coinage on the jukebox. Located at the corner of Walnut and Main “up the Downs” which Sam mentioned in his review and I need not speculate here why that section of town was called that diner was where we spent our drift-less after school hours. The corner boy progression in town was Harry’s Variety Store across from Riverdale Elementary which I was not part of since my family did not move to the town until I was in junior high school then Doc’s Drugstore with his great jukebox in junior high and then onto Jimmy Jake’s (some guys tried to use Dell’s Market based on buying ten billion lewd comic books from their out in the open magazine racks but al they got for their efforts was some move along by the cops. This progression was recognized by one and all as rights in the corner boy rites of passage. We knew lots about Jimmy Jake and his operation and while the cops and other merchants around didn’t care to see us coming Jimmy Jake, actually an immigrant from Italy whose name was Antonio Lucia maybe had something of a corner boy, or whatever they called them over there, was happy to see us. Like I said that we brought in business-the girls with plenty of dough to spent on food and the jukebox while “disdaining” the riffraff-us.
To make a long story short one Friday night our acknowledged leader, Frankie Riley, now a big-time lawyer in Boston was looking for dough and knew Sam had some from caddying at the Point Pond Golf Course the previous weekend. He was in a betting mood. Here was his bet. High or low, and I forget and Sam had too what the standard was, about where Jimmy Jake’s pizza dough would be flung when he was making his pizzas for the night. The thing was, and this was a hard and fast rule that I do not remember ever being broken, once a guy called a bet the other guy, or guys had to take the challenge. So the bet was on. Every time Sam called high Jimmy Jake would go low and visa-versa. That night Sam lost five bucks and his chance to have a date that weekend. Frankie got to go on his first date with Johanna Murphy whom he would eventually marry (and divorce and divorce two others subsequently as well -the corner boys collectively including me with two before I started just living with women “in sin” according to my mother had something like maybe a two plus number of marries and divorces make of that what you will). The “hook’ that caught Sam that night-the “fix” was in. Frankie whom Jimmy Jake liked the best of all of us, treated almost like a son, so maybe he had been a corner boy back home spoken to Jimmy Jake before Sam came in. You can figure out the rest. Corner boy, strictly corner boy stuff.
I know I have written a lot before I got to what really is motivating me to write all this down, about Pete Markin mentioned above but here goes:
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 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, were working hand in glove with big government, big corporations, big whatever that was putting their thumbs in our eyes.
On big series, a series that Markin was nominated for, or won, I don’t remember which 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 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 war although did four years in the Navy earlier on, 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-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 to the old-timey hobo railroad track jungle they found themselves in just like a million other drifters did from building western railroad times to hard Great Depression times to post-World War II having a hard time coming back times. Today, except by some off-hand luck you don’t see hobo camps or hobos, only desperate poor folk who are homeless without wanting to be.
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 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 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 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” with that Markin also had turned us onto 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 Riverdale 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 intrude 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 and wound up dead, very mysteriously dead, in a dusty back street down Sonora way in 1975, 1976 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 squirrelly 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 an free-lance editor for several well-known if also small publishing houses around Boston. So 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 Riverdale 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 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 Riverdale 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.
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 he 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 like the one here, Stew-ball Stu, whom I 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, who we young boys, maybe girls too but then it was boys’ world mostly looked up to. The actual Stew-ball Stu he sued here 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 Riverdale had its own full complement of Stus.
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 Riverdale 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, 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 and of course Jimmy Jake’s which bonded most of us, of us still standing forever, 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.
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 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 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 for our lifetime friendship with Josh.
From The Pen Of The Late Peter Paul Markin
Scene: Brought to mind by the cover artwork that graces the front of the booklet that accompanied an album I had been reviewing. The artwork contained, in full James Dean-imitation pout, one good-looking, DA-quaffed, white muscle-shirted young man, an alienated young man, no question, leaning, leaning gently, very gently, arms folded, on the hood of his 1950’s classic automobile, clearly not his father’s car, but also clearly for our purposes let us call it his “baby.”
And that car, that extension of his young manhood, his young alienated manhood, is Friday night, Saturday night, or maybe a weekday night if it is summer, parked, priority parked, meaning nobody with some Nash Rambler, nobody with some foreign Volkswagen, no biker even , in short, nobody except somebody who is tougher, a lot tougher, than our alienated young man better breathe on the spot while he is within fifty miles of the place, directly in front of the local teenage (alienated or not) "hot spot." And in 1950s America, a teenage America with some disposal income (allowance, okay), that hot spot was likely to be, as here, the all-night Mel’s (or Joe’s, Adventure Car-Hop, whatever) drive-in restaurant opened to cater to the hot dog, hamburger, French fries, barbecued chicken cravings of exhausted youth. Youth exhausted after a hard night, well, let’s just call it a hard night and leave the rest to your knowing imagination, or their parents’ evil imaginations.
And in front of the restaurant, in front of that leaned-on “boss” automobile stands one teenage girl vision. One blondish, pony-tailed, midnight sun-glassed, must be a California great American West night teeny-bopper girl holding an ice cream soda after her night’s work. The work that we are leaving to fertile (or evil, as the case may be) imaginations. Although from the pout on Johnny’s (of course he has to be a Johnny, with that car) face maybe he “flunked out” but that is a story for somebody else to tell. Here is mine.
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Not everybody, not everybody by a long-shot, who had a “boss” ’57 cherry red Chevy was some kind of god’s gift to the earth; good-looking, good clothes, dough in his pocket, money for gas and extras, money for the inevitable end of the night stop at Jimmy John’s Drive-In restaurant for burgers and fries (and Coke, with ice, of course) before taking the date home after a hard night of tumbling and stumbling (mainly stumbling). At least that is what one Joshua Breslin, Josh, told me, he a freshly minted fifteen- year old roadside philosopher thought as for the umpteenth time “Stewball” Stu left him by Albemarle Road off Route One and rode off into the Olde Saco night with his latest “hot” honey, fifteen year old teen queen Sally Sullivan. Here is the skinny as we used to say as per one Joshua Breslin:
Yah, Stewball Stu was nothing but an old rum-dum, a nineteen year old rum-dum, except he had that “boss” girl-magnet ’57 cherry red and white two-toned Chevy (painted those colors by Stu himself) and he had his pick of the litter in the Olde Saco, maybe all of Maine, night. By the way Stu’s official name, was Stuart Stewart, go figure, but don’t call him Stuart and definitely do not call him “Stewball” not if you want to live long enough not to have the word teen as part of your age. The Stewball thing was strictly for local boys, jealous local boys like Josh, who when around Stu always could detect a whiff of liquor, usually cheap-jack Southern Comfort, on his breathe, day or night.
Figure this too. How does a guy who lives out on Tobacco Road in an old run-down trailer, half-trailer really, from about World War I that looked like something out of some old-time Great Depression Hoover-ville scene, complete with scrawny dog, and tires and cannibalized car leavings every which way have girls, and nothing but good-looking girls from twelve to twenty (nothing older because as Stu says, anything older was a woman and he wants nothing to do with women, and their women’s needs, whatever they are). And the rest of us got his leavings, or like tonight left on the side of the road on Route One. And get this, they, the girls from twelve to twenty actually walked over to Tobacco Road from nice across the other side of the tracks homes like on Atlantic Avenue and Fifth Street, sometimes by themselves and sometime in packs just to smell the grease, booze, burnt rubber, and assorted other odd-ball smells that come for free at Stu’s so-called garage/trailer.
Let me tell you about Stu, Sally, and me tonight and this will definitely clue you in to the Stu-madness of the be-bop Olde Saco girl night. First of all, as usual, it is strictly Stu and me starting out. Usually, like today, I hang around his garage on Saturdays to get away from my own hell-house up the road on Ames Street, meaning almost as poor as Stu except they are not trailers but, well, shacks, all that the working poor like my people could afford in the golden age and I am kind of Stu’s unofficial mascot. Now Stu had been working all day on his dual-exhaust carburetor or something, so his denims are greasy, his white tee-shirt (sic) is nothing but wet with perspiration and oil stains, he hasn’t taken a bath since Tuesday (he told me that himself with some sense of pride) and he was not planning to do so this night, and of course, drinking all day from his silver Southern Comfort flask he reeked of alcohol (but don’t tell him that if you read this and are from Olde Saco because, honestly, I want to live to have twenty–something as my age). About 7:00 PM he bellows out to me, cigarette hanging from his mouth, an unfiltered Lucky of course (filtered cigarettes are for girls in Stu world), let’s go cruising.
Well, cruising means nothing but taking that be-bop ’57 cherry red and white two-toned Chevy out on East Grand and look. Look for girls, look for boys from the hicks with bad-ass cars who want to take a chance on beating Stu at the “chicken run” down at the flats on the far end of Sagamore Beach, look for something to take the edge off the hunger to be somebody number one. At least that last is what I figured after a few of these cruises with Stu. Tonight it looks like girls from the way he put some of that grease (no not car grease, hair-oil stuff) on his nappy hair. Yes, I am definitely looking forward to cruising tonight once I have that sign because, usually whatever girl Stu might not want, or maybe there are a couple of extras, or something I get first dibs. Yah, Stu is righteous like that.
So off we go, stopping at my house first so I can get a little cleaned up and put on a new shirt and tell my brother to tell our mother that I will be back later, maybe much later, if she ever gets home herself before I do. The cruising routine in Olde Saco means up and down Route One (okay, okay Main Street), checking out the lesser spots (Darby’s Pizza Palace, Hank’s Ice Cream joint, the Colonial Donut Shoppe where I hang during the week after school and which serves a lot more stuff than donuts and coffee, sandwiches and stuff, and so on). Nothing much this Saturday. So we head right away for the mecca, Jimmy John’s. As we hit Stu’s “saved” parking spot just in front I can see that several stray girls are eyeing the old car, eyeing it like tonight is the night, tonight is the night Stu, kind of, sort of, maybe notices them (and I, my heart starting to race a little in anticipation and glad that I stopped off at my house, got a clean shirt, and put some deodorant on and guzzled some mouthwash, am feeling tonight is the night too).
But tonight is not the night, no way. Not for me, not for those knees-trembling girls. Why? No sooner did we park than Sally Sullivan came strolling out (okay I don’t know if she was strolling or doo-wopping but she was swaying in such a sexy way that I knew she meant business, that she was looking for something in the Olde Saco night and that she had “found” it) to Stu’s Chevy and with no ifs, ands, or buts asked, asked Stu straight if he was doing anything this night. Let me explain before I tell you what Stu’s answer was that this Sally Sullivan is nothing but a sex kitten, maybe innocent-looking, but definitely has half the boys, hell maybe all the boys at Olde Saco High, including a lot of the guys on the football team drooling over her. I know, because I have had more than one sleepless night over her myself.
See, she is in my English class and because Mr. Murphy lets us sit where we want I usually sit with a good view of her. So Stu says, kind of off-handedly, like having the town teen fox come hinter on him was a daily occurrence, kind of lewdly, “Well, baby I am if you want to go down Sagamore Rocks right now and look for dolphins?” See, Sagamore Rocks is nothing but the local lovers’ lane here and “looking for dolphins” is the way everybody, every teenage everybody in town says “going all the way,” having sex for the clueless. And Sally, as you can guess if you have been following my story said, “Yes” just like that. At that is why I was dumped, unceremoniously dumped, while they roared off into the night. So like I said not every “boss” car owner is god’s gift to women, not by a long shot. Or maybe they are.
Of course ultimately the thing that yoked the guys around Jimmy Jake’s was what to do, or not do, collectively and individually as the case came up with girls. (And not just in our generation but at least the couple before ours and a couple after before Tonio retired and the next owners were not enthralled with corner boys hanging around their family-oriented place with their “Mom’s night out” Friday night agenda and called “copper” to clear out the “ruffians” the term they actually used according to what I heard from Frannie Lacey who stayed in town for the duration since he had inherited his mother’s house after she passed. In any by then the corner was giving way to guys (and gals) hanging around malls of the world, the “mall rats” we have all come to dread in our dotage. Mall rats are not even in the same world as corner boys but just suburban kids looking for some place to identify with. These days you see them collected in a space-all looking down at their smartphones and they might have well been in their living rooms as there. Too bad.) Like I said I didn’t start hanging the corners until junior high when my family moved from early growing up North Adamsville about thirty miles away but one of the big thing driving us hormonally-charged boys to head to Doc’s Drugstore was to catch what was what after school at first when everybody, when the girls okay, would drop in on their way home to spent some of their discretionary dough on listening to something dreamy on Doc’s to die for jukebox (dough which we corner boys did not have and had to cadge spare change off of some of the girls). It was at Doc’s I “learned” how to scope a girl to play what I wanted to hear but that is a story for another time because talking about Doc’s and the frenzy of trying to score with some girl started in earnest even for “slow” guys like me. Funny how a year or two before those girls were nothing but “sticks” and nuisances and all of a sudden there they were kind of “interesting”
In those days as far as I know and even the chronic liars that all we guys were about “scoring” with a girl-meaning have some kind of sexual activity with them and that fact was accepted whatever a guy said even when we knew they guy was lying about scoring some “ice queen” that nobody except maybe Paul Newman or Bobby Vee could score we never heard (or knew personally) about any junior high girl who was “putting out” (and if they were “confessing” to such conduct come Monday morning before school “lav” talk they were lying just as hard as we were so who the hell knows who was doing, or not doing, what). That naturally would change considerably by high school especially junior and senior years when “boss” cars were in the air and Squaw Rock beckoned for adventurous. Then on any given Friday or Saturday night, or almost any night in the summer, dated up or not, the talk was almost exclusively except maybe a passing reference to some sports moment about girls and what they would and would not do. Do sexually in case you were wondering what “do the do” meant, a common expression around our way after somebody heard bluesman Howlin’ Wolf utter those words heard on the local rock station.
I already pointed out the chronic lying about the subject including by me of course but the real subject was about “getting something,” getting some sugar we called it without getting caught. That “caught” not referring to actually doing the act if you were lucky enough to have a halfway willing girl even if you had to get her drunk to get in the mood. (Yeah, I know, I know as well as the reader that we were all under age in our state but if anybody wanted booze “Jimmy the Tramp,” one of the town drunks would gladly cooperate and get whatever you wanted as long as he got his couple of bottles of Thunderbird with your order. We learned the “anthem” from him-“what’s the word-Thunderbird, what’s the price-forty twice” from him. Little did I know that several years later when I was disturbed by alcohol I would be down in Jimmy’s ditch expressing the same thing to the high school kids I was buying for). Caught here meant get some poor girl “in the family way.” Our expression for the condition was “going to see Aunt Emma” although don’t ask me where it came from probably from generation to generation by older brothers to younger brothers and everything got lost in the shuffle about genesis. What would happen is that we would not see a girl for a while although we knew her family was still in town, was still in the same house or apartment but the girl was missing. The excuse when asked was that she had gone to see an aunt for a few months on some family business. All I know is that you would almost never see the girl in school again or if you did you would not like now see her with a baby. One girl did, Candy Lee, came back twice but we all counted her as nothing but a “slut,” someone to avoid because you know there was nothing but trouble there as foxy looking as she was in her cashmere sweaters and tight skirts
No guy wanted to have that “going to aunt” hanging over his head at fifteen or sixteen, probably no girl either but we were just ordinary teenagers who were sexually curious and didn’t know a damn thing about what the real consequences of sex were. And how would we then, probably almost as much now too, since nobody in authority, not parents, priests, principals or policemen were telling anything that could help. Growing up and hanging with guys who had a least some Irish in them it was worse since Sacred Heart the Catholic Church almost all of us attended (except Allan Davis, a Jewish kid who was a math whizz so we let him hang and Steve Tabor who had a “boss” ’57 Chevy who was some kind of Protestant who we let hang around for obvious reasons) we only knew what we got from older siblings or more usually “on the street” including stuff we made up-most of it wrong and not a small contributing factor to the “aunt” epidemic. Most of us survived although Peter Paul Markin had a close call when Jeannie Murphy told him she was pregnant. We all huddled together to tell him to tell her to take a test to see who the father was. As it turned out she was lying because she didn’t want Markin to see Laura Callahan, Jack’s sister whom he was getting big eyes over. Jesus we were on the cusp of the “Pill” but what they hell did we know about half of this stuff. We were just hungry.
There were certain traditions associated with corner boy life, certain rites of passage which each generation of corner boys had to pass through to keep his place in pecking order (by the way my use of generations is not say twenty years when people pass from kid-dom to adulthood forming a generation along the way but more like the six or seven years from late elementary school to the end of high school, maybe a couple of years beyond). This for “from hunger” kids who were the main denizens of the corners starting as far back as local corner boy legend “Red” Riley during World War II who was admired even by later generations who lived off the crumbs of his “midnight creep” exploits (and a cautionary tale about a guy who “snitched” to the coppers when he was caught coming out of a house at midnight not his own who Red chain-whipped to the emergency room and the guy needed about a hundred stitches and didn’t look so pretty any that episode-he did learn his lesson and never said who did that deed to him-smart guy).
Usually, and Frankie Riley, was the king of this kind of action before he “graduated” to the midnight creep, was the “clip” in elementary school. That is going up to the central shopping area in town (now the mall-but the mall rats don’t seem hungry enough for this kind of action) to a jewelry store or department store (Kendall’s Jewelry was the toughest one to do the clip in so that was recognized as being superior to just some junk rip-off from Woolworth’s or some place like that) and grab some rings or other such items-usually connected with trying to empress so girl or get her a “present” for some occasion. Kid’s stuff though when you think about it and probably not worth the risk of getting caught.
The midnight creep was something else though-a real source of dough if you hit a place right. The legendary Red Riley got a lot of his reputation as a king hell king of the midnight creep ripping off not the cheapjack places that most of us out of laziness or lack of class consciousness about where the good stuff was grabbed but to the places over in the “Mount” where the rich people, rich to us, lived and had stuff worth stealing. He was also a master at planning the capers and never got caught, not for that stuff but later for armed robberies he was not so lucky and did a couple of stretches in the state pen before getting himself killed down South in a shoot-out with cops while he was robbing a White Hen store but by then the dope had taken his good judgment away. Frankie Riley, not as tough as Red, not tough at all after he dunked some kid’s head who was bothering him down the toilet at school and almost drown the kid so nobody messed with him after that, was the master planner in our crowd. Or he was after Markin hatched some plan which he couldn’t possibly carry out without Frankie running the operation.
This one I was in on so I know it was a beauty. There were a couple of houses on the edge of our neighborhood which were recently constructed for some guys who involved in the emerging high technology industry that was beginning to bloom around Boston then. These guys were working on R&D for Polaroid if you remember that name. Somehow Markin got close to one of their daughters, nothing ever came of it because the girl was not interested in a guy “from hunger” was the way he told it. She told him her father had a million cameras around, you know those old Polaroid self-developing cameras every family was crazy for to take instant picture just like no with cellphones and “selfies.” They were located in the basement where her father would work on stuff. Markin smelled money, money found on the ground is what his expression was when there was an easy score. And it was we practically just walked into the place (now there would be about seven layers of security even in a residential home) after Frankie figured out how to use a piece of plastic to open the door. We walked away with about twenty cameras between us. That is what the guy, and what the newspapers reported. Frankie had a way to sell them and we had serious dough for weeks. (I won’t say how since I think the statute of limitations has run out but who knows and besides Frankie is a big deal lawyer now.)
Yeah, corner boy life was something else. Hail corner boys!
Yes, viewing that film looked very, very familiar to these old eyes. The difference? These guys stuck together well into their twenties. By twenty most of my guys were in the military, married, in jail, or on the run. The fate of plenty of real-life corner boys making all that noise. See this film. Enough said.
