Bonnie And Clyde Were Lovers Right From The Very Start They Swore They Would Be True To Each Other True As The Stars Above-Dirty Kevin Costner And Alky Woody Harrelson’s “The Highwayman”  

Lance Lawrence

We were kind of funny about our heroes around the old neighborhood, around the now turned to ashes Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville where we eked out a growing and coming of age not with white-hatted cowboys and slinky goodie dads and moms spouting wisdom but guys and gals from the wrong side of the tracks. Outlaws, bad boys, whores (although we didn’t call them that but at first loose women and then when we got hip to what Mary Magdalene did plying her trade specializing in foot fetishes lewd women or finally whores), grifters, con artists, geeks, grafters, drifters and later when we got more literary flares, holy goofs.            

Blowhards like Roy Rogers and his honey Dale, Dale something, Ozzie Odd, some Howdy Doody junkie or Claribel hard honkers, the dumb bastard got short shrift come bad boy gathering night in front of Harry’s Variety and we wanted to steel ourselves for our midnight creep work around the richer precincts of the town. And who could blame us since between older brothers and uncles doing a nickel or a dime for anything from whacko armed robberies to cons up the ying-yang to neighborhood legend Saint Trigger Burke a key guy in the big Brinks armored car robbery that inflamed at least two generation of Acre bad asses who else could make the nighttime hall of fame (later hall of shame but that was much later when some of us sobered up enough to know that doing nickels and dimes from drugstore bullshit only got you old fast or to be somebody’s “girlfriend”)         

That was the local picture but then the late Pete Markin still missed who died with his boots on catching that Westbound train as they say in the hobo jungle camps from when he dived down Sonora way added to the shrine holy, holy relics when he got caught up in the folk music scene for a minute before he went under. Enflamed our hearts with the story in song by Woody Guthrie about a certified Okie gangster, bandito hombre who shot his way into more federally uninsured banks around the Dust Bowl than one could imagine. A guy named Pretty Boy Floyd, out of those hills who before he cashed his check, before he took the fall blazed a legend for himself in those godforsaken Great Depression 1930s. A guy who they say left dough for starving up against it farmers once he took a turn to the wild side, once he saw dying in the dust was nowhere, man, nowhere. A regular Robin Hood before we found out that the old-timey Robin Hood, real name Robert Lockwood was a rack-renter and serf beater who gave to the poor and left the rich a bit short of the kale. We would endlessly play that song to Pretty Boy adding verses about how he was a little sappy to share his gild but okay otherwise especially when taking out a few coppers in his dust. John Dillinger had that same kind of cache and forever more we would hate the name Hoover and the FBI for doing Johnny wrong.   

Bringing up names like Pretty Boy and Dillinger though immediate bring to bring to mind the legendary outlaw bad boy kick ass of our own generation, Pretty James Preston. A lot of people may say who, who was this guy but for a few years around the areas south of Boston he was the holy of holies. See Pretty James (nobody ever called him anything but that or faced some scowl that might end badly depending on Pretty James’ mood) robbed banks in the days when they made a certain sense before the techno-madness made white collar bank theft more lucrative and less dangerous. Not just robbed banks but did it in daylight shotgun or some heavy artillery in hand. By himself. (The actual robbery part although he had red-headed Irish beauty to cry for Molly Malone as look-out before the fall and we never heard from her again, at least I never did and she had lived the next street over from me on those wrong side of the tracks.) On a Vincent Black Lightening, a very fast, outrun the cops very fast British motorbike. Pretty James would fall down not for his audacity, his balls, his chutzpah but because some fucking rent-a-cop though the money Pretty James was grabbing from the bank was his personal stash or something. Pretty James had to waste the bastard but not before being winged to slow him down enough for the dirty coppers to lay that brother low. In certain lonely Friday night circles where young guys from hunger hang they still whisper of his exploits like some stylish cultists.           

All of this built-up to lead into the film under review The Highwaymen about the two dead-beat ex-Texas Rangers who led the huge expedition who laid a couple of other, let’s call them folk heroes, also from the 1930s, Bonnie and Clyde low. A tear wells up in my eye when I say their names, when I think what rotten stuff was done to them and yet their names shine to this day when anybody speaks of stone-cold killers and desperadoes who went off the tracks a bit. The worse thing about this film is that the two stars, Bonnie and Clyde, get nothing but a two-bit cameo appearance at the end when they are summarily executed in a hail of gunfire under the direction of these two has-been low rent Rangers who previously had been laid out to pasture.  Billy, who cares what their names are, played by Kevin Costner who must have been hard up for cash, for revenue flow, and Virgil, again who cares names, played by Woody Harrelson who used to serve them off the arm at  Cheers barroom on Beacon Street in Boston and who hasn’t been seen in films since he played some very real American psycho a while back get a reprieve from the harried Texas governor to grab Bonnie and Clyde before they rob every bank and shoot every cop in Texas.   

Billy and Virgil and little, no, a lot long in the tooth, hem and hew before getting down to average day police detection work. Hindering them is the whole state and federal law enforcement apparatus who were already unsuccessfully pursing the banditos. Further hindering the coppers was a pretty significant network of people, average Okies and Arkies who were thrilled by Bonnie and Clyde’s exploits   especially when they ran the coppers raggedy. This couple, as anybody knows, as even we knew back in that Harry’s Variety Store night, knew it in our bones were doomed, were built to take the fall. Get this though, Billy and Virgil or whatever their names were nobody remembers but the names Bonnie and Clyde, well, they might live in infamy, but everybody knows who they are, what they mean to the folk hero-deprived dusty people of the 1930s.