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

A YouTube film clip of the Falcons performing You're So Fine.

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

No question that Jimmy Callahan and his corner boy comrades from the old Frankie Riley-led Salducci’s Pizza Parlor hang-out and he from the day high school got out for the summer in the early 1960s drew a bee-line straight to the old-time Adamsville Beach of blessed memory. Although from what Red Rowley told Jimmy a while back when touched base for a minute in the old neighborhood after the death of a family member the old beach had seen serious erosion, serious stinks and serious decay of the already in their day ancient seawalls and no longer held the fancy of the young who wanted to go parking there at night to “watch the submarine races.” Hell the young guys in the neighborhood didn’t know what he was talking about when he mentioned that old code word for getting in the back seat with a girl and seeing what was what, coming up for air to check for any midnight submarine sightings. Red by the way was one of those ancient corner boys who stayed in town, stayed partially to stay near the ocean too, but mainly stayed to watch the town change from an old way station for the Irish and Italians to the South Shore upward mobile digs to a stay put to an immigrant community which he was not particularly happy about since he could not speak any of the new languages (frankly in high school he had serious trouble with the English language) or understand the cultural differences when they, the collective mix of immigrants none from European homelands, did not bend at the knees in homage on Saint Patrick’s Day. But Red’s trouble with the new world of America (not really so new since these shores had seen wave after wave of immigrants just back then they were from Europe, or Africa bonded), or the real condition of Adamsville Beach is not what exercised Jimmy on that trip but about the old beach days, the now fantastic beach days.

Jimmy chuckled to himself when he asked- Did we go to said beach to be “one” with our homeland, the sea? You know to connect with old King Neptune, our father, the father that we did not know, who would work his mysterious furies in good times and bad. Or to connect as one with denizens of the deep, stuff like that. No. Then he went down the litany of other possible motives just as a little good-humored exercise. Did we go to admire the boats and other things floating by? The fleet of small sailboats that dotted the horizon in the seemingly never-ending tacking to the wind or the fewer big boats, big ocean-worthy boats that took their passenger far out to sea, maybe to search for whales or other sea creatures. No. Did we go to get a little breeze across our sun-burned and battered bodies on a hot and sultry August summer day. Jimmy, a blushed red lobster in short sunlight who was sensitive about that red skin business declared a loud No, although Red, Frankie, Peter, and Josh less sensitive to the sun would have answered, well, maybe a little.

Jimmy soon tired of those non-reasons, this little badger game,  and got to the heart of the matter, laughed to himself as he thought-come on now we are talking about sixteen, maybe seventeen, year old guys. They, every self-respecting corner boy who could put towel and trunks together, which menat everybody except Johnny Kelly who had to work during the day to help support his mother and fatherless younger brothers and sisters , were there, of course, because there were shapely teeny-weeny bikini-clad girls (young women, okay, let’s not get technical about that pre-woman’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. Had been sunning themselves in such a manner since bikinis and less replaced those old-time bathing suits that were slightly less cumbersome that the street clothes you saw in your old grandmother’s scrapbook. And guys had been hormonally-charged looking at them that long as well.

Here is the catch thought. They, and they could be anywhere from about junior high to the first couple of years in college although they tended to separate themselves out by age bracket 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, Jimmy, of course, Frankie Riley (when he was not working early mornings at the old A&P Supermarket and did not show until later), his faithful scribe, Peter Markin (who seemingly wrote down for posterity every word Frankie uttered and some he did not, and other including the, then anyway, “runt of the litter,” Johnny Silver. It is Johnny’s sad beach blanket bingo tale that Jimmy suddenly thought about when he drove pass the old beach to confirm Red’s judgment If it all sounds kind of familiar, too familiar even to non-corner boys, those who do not live near the oceans of the world, the younger set who may have a different view of life then back then, it is because, with the exception of the musical selections, it is.

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“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. (For the clueless the corner boy world in North Adamsville, hell, maybe every corner boy world meant that you had certain “turf” issues not all of them settled with fists, in fact mostly it was a matter of traditions, traditional spots which the “unwritten law” held for certain groups and spot between the boat clubs was theirs, and had been the “property of successive generations of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor corner boys since at least the end of World War II.)       

Johnny fumed as the sounds of Elvis Presley’s Loving You came 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 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, nunca, nothing. 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, another standard brand fox in the teenage girl be-bop night, his way Johnny poured out the details of 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 Everyday, 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 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.

Katy answered quickly and rather curtly (although Johnny did not pick up on that signal) 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 to the strains of Robert and Johnny’s We Belong Together 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 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 “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 Million for 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. After that Johnny started to re-evaluate his attitude toward beach sand and thought maybe, after all, it was just a girl being playful. In any case, Johnny grew quite a bit that summer and it turned out that 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.

After stopping his car toward the middle of Adamsville Beach, the place between the two yacht clubs where he and the corner boys hung out, the two clubs whose appearance then spoke to a need of paint and other fixing up, the place that had stirred his memoires that day Jimmy Callahan thought Red had it all wrong, all wrong indeed, it had nothing to do with the condition of the beach, the sand, the waves or the boats. Mr. and Mrs. John Silver, now of Naples, Florida, are proof of that statement.