***Doll’s Story-With The Asphalt Jungle In Mind, Take Two

FromThe Pen Of Frank Jackman

Doll never had a guy who could go the whole distance, never once, never a guy who could think one step ahead, one step ahead of that next dollar, never a guy who could figure the percentages to his advantage, never. Not once since way back in her start out youth when her boy-man Johnny Rango, he with his big ideas of being king of the hill in the drag racing world up in the back wood of Maine where she came from, up past Auburn, who spun out of control in some drug frenzy driving his street vehicle on old Route One, and leaving her sixteen, pregnant and no dough. Not Benny Gold who had everything sewed up, was going to be the king hell king of Las Vegas, except he never go the message that the place was all sewed up and had been since about 1946 and so wound up in some dusty arroyo ravine on the road heading to California with a fistful of bullets for his efforts. There were some later other not guys too but she was too weary to think of them.

What she wanted to think about just then was not even her last man, Bix, the straightest guy she ever knew could go the distance. The man she was crazy for from first day when he came into the club, the Kit Kat Club where she was warbling for cheap change, and he just kind of country boy stared at her while she was singing, singing some torch number, Billie’s Am I Blue that she had done a thousand times but reached some high white note while he was staring and so she was hooked, hooked bad. Yah, Doll had had it bad for Bix, yah, real bad, and so the tensions between them, her loving him no matter what and he kind of casting her aside because he was always looking for the main chance, looking to get well, looking too for that foolish El Dorado were kind of the overhead she had to pay to keep him in her sights, keep him sitting at the bar every night hoping that he would look at her again like that first night. Hoping to hit that high white note. Even that didn’t matter so much after all while, didn’t matter as she played her hand out right to the end, right to the end of hope. Doll though never did figure out the ABCs of hard guys- hanging around wrong gees, even stand-up wrong gees, was nothing but heartbreak hotel. But sometimes that is the way dames are, thankfully.

Yah, as Doll thought back on it, Bix and his childhood dreams, his simple-minded dreams, his dream of recovering some Kentucky Podunk bluegrass dirt farm his father lost in the Great Depression like you could bring that back, or want to. That was the hard edge county boy about him, the thing that appealed to her, and the thing that had driven that magical high white note. That mixed in, mixed in with the wrong gee, the stand-up wrong gee stuff since she seemed to always draw that kind, and with some sense of honor, a sense that you had to see things through to the end, for good or evil. A funny mix anyway you look at it. Damn all Doll wanted was for him to do was pay her a little more attention, maybe set up housekeeping together, not get married, she was no blushing school girl but more a beaten flower so she would not play that card, not if he didn’t want to, not if it would crowd him too much But Bix couldn’t see it the way she wanted him to see it, he had to go and face his own music his own way and now he was down in some good earth Kentucky hay field face down to the wind pushing up flowers. Yah, he had to do it his way. Get involved way over his head with a bunch of guys looking for easy street and coming up empty. Damn, again.

Damn Doc and his big complicated plans, the heist of the century was the way he tried to sell it. That wizened, harden old con trying for one last chance at “easy street” with a big caper and Bix as, well, the “hooligan,” the “muscle”, the guy who has to clean up after. That was Bix’s forte, what guys relied on him for, trusted him to carry out his part. Bix was too simple-minded, too small dreamed to carry out a big job as the mastermind but as the hired help he was just fine. Still Bix, maybe after a few drinks, maybe after she got done loving him up, and he was more expansive would talk, talk big, and as she knew from his talk he was also looking for his own version of that easy street. So that was the lay.

Doll knew from the beginning the thing, that damn heist, was a “no go,” was way too complicated with too many moving parts the way Bix explained it, and he just a mug who might have robbed grocery stores or did some strong arm work was in way over his head and she tried to kind of telegraph the problem to Bix from the start; crime doesn’t pay, okay. But that “wisdom” has never stopped a million "from hunger" guys (and not a few dames) from taking the quick plunge to easy street since way back, way back in pharaoh’s times probably. Maybe back to the garden times.

See Doc, old time con that he was, had just got released from stir for having taken the fall for some previous big plan crime that went bust around the time that Doll fell for Bix, had had plenty of time on his hands up at the pen to work through his latest plan for easy street. A big plan involving knocking over a big downtown jewelry store, grabbing nothing but hard rocks not cheap jack wedding rings for runaways or soldiers but serious Mayfair swell jewelry, having the merchandise “fenced,” and then off he would go to get some sun and senoritas, young senoritas by the way, the dirty old man, down in Mexico. Mexico before the drug cartels blasted everything down there to hell and back. She never told Bix this because she was afraid that he would slap her around and tell her to keep her mouth out of it, or worst, leave her flat, but she knew from some of boys who worked at the club and knew Doc in the old days, that he loved the young stuff, very young, teenage stuff, and part of the reason he took that last fall was that he was shacked up with some young frail and her parents went to the cops looking for her. Doc was supposed to be lying low and so the boys in on that last heist cried to “uncle” on him. No, Bix wouldn’t listen to that kind of thing.

But such an effort as Doc proposed needed upfront cash for tools, plans and reliable men, and some major backing, to procure the master safe cracker, an expert wheelman and, just in case things get rough, the hooligan, her Bix, the guy who takes all the pot-shots for short money and also to secure a conduit to fence this high roller stuff after the heist. And that is where things started to go awry.

See, one of reasons Doll figured that crime doesn’t pay, pay in the long or short haul, was that not everybody is on the level. Sure the safe cracker, the wheel man, and the hooligan, the“proles, ” the short money guys, were on the level. Especially her farm boy Bix turned loose in the ugly, asphalt jungle city just looking for a stake to get back home to Kentucky and out of the city soils. The problem was the up-front dough guys, one way or the other, were not on the level.

One guy, Emmett, Doll thought his name was, Bix wouldn’t say, had no dough, was all front and bluster, a wash-out (although later when she put the pieces together it was easy to see why that was so since he was, well let’s just call it “keeping time” with a young honey, some budding starlet, Angela, and even Doll could see where keeping her "happy”from the way Bix described her would eat up a guy’s wallet). The other guy wilted under the slightest pressure, police pressure. He couldn’t stand up to the grilling and spilled his guts out. All it took was a few slap arounds and he sang like a bird, the rat. But who had time to check with the Better Business Bureau when you are in the rackets to check the “fence’s” references (and bank book). Or that a guy would rat you out. Needless to say that while the jewel heist was pulled off, although not without complications, deadly complications, a couple of coppers or security guards, same thing, went down in a hail of gun fire, some of it Bix’s. Bix took some gunfire too and was bleeding like a pig when he got to Doll’s place after the coppers cracked the case wide open.

So Doll, having been through some mills herself, could have told Bix a thing or two about that thin line between the bad guys and the good guys, and the good guys are not always the cops and respectable folks. But she knew she would just be some broken record if she pushed him hard on it. Thinking things over Doc, for instance, was cool customer, a good guy, even if he was nothing but a has-been moth-eaten old con; although he makes a few serious mistakes of judgment in whom to, and who not to, trust he was a likeable enough crook. If only he could have kept his big deal talk away from Bix. Bix, ditto, because he was a stand-up guy, gave one hundred per cent for what he was paid to do, and did not leave his buddies in the lurch. But that stand-up guy policy left Doll just one more time with a guy, the straightest guy she ever knew, who couldn’t go the distance. Damn.