***“The Next Girl Who Throws Sand In My Face Is…” Johnny Silver’s Sad 1950s Be-Bop Beach Blanket Saga

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

No question that my corner boy comrades from the old Frankie Riley-led Salducci’s Pizza Parlor hang-out back in the day and me from the first day high school got out for the summer drew a bee-line straight to the old-time Adamsville Beach of blessed memory. Did we go to said beach to be “one” with our homeland, the sea? No. Did we go to admire the boats and other things floating by? No. Did we go to get a little breeze across our sun-burned and battered bodies on a hot and sultry August summer day. No. Well, maybe a little. But come on now we are talking about sixteen, maybe seventeen, year old guys. We were there, of course, because there were shapely teeny-weeny bikini-clad girls (young women, okay, let’s not get technical about that pre-women’s liberation time) sunning themselves like peacocks for all the world, all the male teenage North Adamsville world, the only world that mattered to guys and gals alike, to see.

And they were sunning themselves and otherwise looking very desirable and, well, fetching, in not just any old spot wherever they could place a blanket but strictly, as tradition dictated, tradition seemingly going back before memory, between the North Adamsville and Adamsville Yacht Clubs. So, naturally, every testosterone-driven teenage lad who owned a bathing suit, and some who didn’t, were hanging off the floating dock right in front of said yacht clubs showing off, well, showing off their prowess to the flower of North Adamsville maidenhood. And said show-offs included, of course, Frankie Riley (when he was not working drudge hours at the old A&P Supermarket), his faithful scribe, Peter Paul Markin, and other including the, then anyway, “runt of the litter,” Johnny Silver. It is Johnny’s sad beach blanket bingo tale that gets a hearing today. If it all sounds kind of familiar despite the passage of time, even to the younger set, it is because, with the exception of the musical selections, it is.

*********

“The next girl who throws sand in my face is going get it,” yelled Johnny Silver to no one in particular as he came back the Salducci’s Pizza Parlor corner boy beach front acreage just in front of the seawall facing, squarely facing, midpoint between the North Adamsville and Adamsville Yacht Clubs. As the sounds of Elvis Presley’s Loving Youcame over Frankie Riley’s transistor radio and wafted down to the sea, almost like a siren call to teenage love, one of those no one in particulars, Peter Paul Markin replied, “What did you expect, Johnny? That Katy Larkin is too tall, too pretty, and just flat-out too foxy for a runt like you. I am surprised you are still in one piece. And I would mention, as well, that her brother, “Jimmy Jukes,” does not like guys, especially runt guys with no muscles bothering his sister.”

Johnny came back quickly with the usual, “Hey, I am not that small and I am growing, growing fast so Jimmy Jukes can eat my… “But Johnny halted just in time as one Jimmy Jukes, James Allen Larkin, halfback hero of many a North Adamsville fall football game came perilously close to Johnny and then veered off like Johnny was nothing, nada, not a thing. And after Jimmy Jukes was safely out of sight, and Frankie flipped the volume dial on his radio louder as the Falcons’ You’re So Fine came on heralding Frankie’s attempt by osmosis to lure a certain Betty Ann McCarthy his way, another standard brand fox in the teenage girl be-bop night, Johnny poured out his sad saga.

Seems that Katy Larkin was in one of Johnny’s classes, biology he said, and one day, one late spring day Katy, out of the blue, asked him what he thought about Buddy Holly who had passed away in crash several years before, well before he reached his potential as the new king of the be-bop rock night. Johnny answered that Buddy was “boss,” especially his Every Day, and that got them talking, but only talking, almost every day until the end of school. Of course, Johnny, runt Johnny, didn’t have the nerve, not nearly enough nerve to ask a serious fox like Katy out, big brother or not. Not until that very day that is when he got up the nerve to go over to her blanket, a blanket that also had Sara Bigelow and Tammy Kelly on board, and as a starter asked her if she liked Elvis’ That’s When The Heartache Begins.She answered quickly and rather curtly (although Johnny did not pick up on that signal at the time) that it was “dreamy.” Then Johnny’s big moment came and he blurted out, “Do you want to go to the Surf Dance Hall with me Saturday night? Crazy Lazy is the DJ and the Rockin’ Ramrods are playing. And as the reader knows, or should be presumed to know, Johnny’s answer was a face full of sand. And that sad, sad beach saga is the end of another teen angst moment. So the to the strains of Robert and Johnny’s We Belong Together blasting out of Frankie’s radio we will move along.

Well, not quite. It also seems that Katy Larkin, tall (too tall for Johnny, really), shapely (no question of really about that), and don’t forget foxy, Katy Larkin had a “crush” on one John Raymond Silver if you can believe that. She was miffed, apparently more than somewhat, that Johnny had not asked her out before school got out for the summer. That miffed more than somewhat entailed throwing sand in Johnny’s face when he did get up the nerve to ask. So on the first day of school, while Johnny was turning his radio off and putting it in his locker just before school started, after having just listened to the Platters One In a Millionfor the umpteenth time, Katy Larkin “cornered” (Johnny’s term) Johnny and said in a clear, if excited voice, “I’m sorry about that day at the beach last summer.”And then in the teenage girl imperative, hell maybe all women imperative, “You are taking me to the Fall All-Class Mixer and I will not take no for an answer.” Well, what is a guy to do when that teenage girl imperative, hell maybe all women imperative, voice commands. So Johnny re-evaluated his attitude toward beach sand and maybe, after all, it was just a girl being playful. In any case, Johnny grew quite a bit that summer and then Katy Larkin was not too tall, not too tall at all, for Johnny Silver to take to the mixer, or anywhere else she decided she wanted to go.