Bad To The Bone- With The Film Badlands In Mind  

 

By Sam Lowell

Recently after watching the 1973 film Badlands starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek I commented in a short review I did of the movie that the film made me thing back to the days when my own surly sullen corner boys and I were taking our various turns toward life decisions which led some of us to plenty of time in various state pens and others of us into white collar professional life. One guy from the old corner in particular reminded me of Kit, the sullen, cranky, whacko, maybe even just greatly misunderstood youth played by Martin Sheen kept creeping into my thoughts. A guy named Pretty James Preston whom I met in fourth grade in elementary school after he had come up with his family from nowhere in coal country in Kentucky and landed in our working poor neighborhood because his mother had grown up in our town, North Adamsville, an old shipbuilding town in Massachusetts after they had busted out down south where his father had grown up. (James got the name Pretty from all the girls who swarmed around him from junior high on and the name stuck after he finally accepted the moniker but not before crashing a few heads of guys who had mocked him for the moniker.) I might as well tell you right now Pretty James at age twenty-one ended face down in a hail of police bullets after killing a security guard in a botched lone wolf bank holdup a few towns over.

That’s not what crept into my thoughts though. See Pretty, seemingly like Kit, although we never got much of Kit’s pre-story in the film and at the beginning he seemed like a million other awkward guys who came up like the weeds in the be-bop 1950s where we all tried to look and act sullen like Elvis, better James Dean, had not started out as a desperado but everywhere he turned he got bumped around by society, got bumped around by his own inner hurts and outrageous wanting habits. Other than having great looks even when Pretty was a young schoolboy which caused him as much trouble as it did to benefit him he seemed bedeviled by some kind of expectation that he was made for great things.

Almost from day one in elementary school when he tried to steal my milk money to see if I would let him do it, I didn’t but I also did not know that he was testing me as he would do periodically later when I would also be the beneficiary of his thefts, he was always reaching for something, what would later be called his “fifteen minutes of fame.” All I knew was that he was driven by the idea of not winding up like his poor downtrodden father, no way he said. Tried a lot of things before the fall. Had a very good voice and learned how to dance so that girls would notice and dream. Entered a couple of talent shows, a few dance contests, and an audition process that would have gotten him a record contract. But everything always fell a little short, he didn’t have despite his incredible wanting habits, that last closer of the deal for some reason.  

With each “straight” defeat Pretty became more and more sullen so by the time my own family moved across town I had begun a long process of moving away from his  orbit (although not the corner boy ethos I just picked it up with guys on that other side of town). Of course before that long process of separation was over I have been deeply immersed in the petty criminal life that he began to get a hankering for, a way to feel better maybe. I was right there with him as “look-out” on the first “clip” jobs he did grabbing jewelry and whatnot from various shops and stores for his legion of girlfriends. (I also got his girl “rejects” so I was more than happy to accompany him on his sojourns). Was with him on the “midnight sifts” breaking into empty houses and grabbing whatever we could pawn. I was there when he committed a few “jack-rolls” of drunks but I don’t want to discuss that too much. And I was almost there the first time, at age fourteen, Pretty attempted to do an armed robbery of a local gas station in broad daylight. Only a serious sickness kept me off “having his back” that day. He didn’t succeed that day although the Bowie knife he wielded at the scared rabbit gas jockey almost succeeded since the guy had the money already to give Pretty except a cop car came by. That scared rabbit who knew who knew who Pretty was never squawked, not even later when Pretty hit the place again and grabbed five hundred bucks from the same guy who told the cops he could not identify the robber. That later robbery was done when he had his motorcycle for getting around. He would later, would become known as the motorcycle bandito once he dropped out of school and began his life as a career, short career, felon.

At that point, the point when he was doing his robberies off of the bike though I was well out of his orbit and would only hear about his exploits from guys on the corner who knew stuff. When he made that last run before he was gunned down after the botched lone wolf robbery I had only heard about it by reading the Boston newspapers. Of course those newspapers played the whole set-up for all it was worth, as an example of a bad apple getting his just due. In those day, the 1950s, the same time frame of Kit’s murder spree and Pretty’s time too such sullen youth, called juvenile delinquents, JDs, were seen as almost as much as a threat to the good social order as the Cold War Red Menace that made every self-respecting person nervous (and so thought maybe the Reds had put those guys up to their wicked ways). So yeah good riddance. But some fifty years later I know a little about what made the guy tick, knew him when a few breaks the other way might have turned him around. Had turned me around.                      

Here is the way this one played out in the 1950s North Adamsville night, played out not all that differently than a lot of other corner boy stories from back then except Pretty James went way over the edge like Kit had done. See the way I heard the real story much later was when the sister of the girl, Mimi Murphy, whom Pretty had been hanging with before the fall told me the details, as much as she knew. Pretty was just drifting around out there in the barren foothills near North Adamsville (the physical place and the place in his head), playing the motorcycle cowboy philosopher king all cool in leather after he had dropped out of high school under the principle that there was nothing else that he needed to learn in the public schools for his career.

In the summer before her senior year Pretty James saw Mimi one day walking and talking with a guy, a guy from the football team who was sweet on her, meaning trying to get into her pants as the expression went the and had been getting nowhere as far as anybody knew, down at Adamsville Beach when he decided he had to have her on his back seat. Now Mimi if she wasn’t the prettiest girl in school was close, long  natural blonde hair, slender, great legs, nice blue eyes, good lips, smart and perky I guess is the best way to describe her personality. I had a crush on her in junior high when every Sunday I would sit a few pews in back of her at 8 o’clock Mass and watch her ass the whole time but nothing ever came of it. All Pretty did was stop his bike in front of the couple, gave the guy some version of the evil look, the “don’t fuck with me, kid” look, nodded without a word spoken to Mimi to get on back, she hesitated for a minute thinking, and then quickly took her place at Pretty’s back. 

Wild story but wilder still was that Mimi dropped out of school even though she had been a very good student and only needed to finish senior year and go forward in life in order to follow Pretty. From what her sister said when she was still in contact she gave Pretty what he wanted, all he wanted that very night so maybe she was just waiting like we all were for the right moment, maybe the right guy or maybe she was ready for “kicks,” something we all were interested to relieve our dreary lives. In any Mimi went home a few days later, packed some bags and split without talking to her parents or anything. She wrote a letter to her sister later from some place over in Riverdale telling her the details, telling her that she would never leave Pretty.    

At one point Pretty, when he was maybe eighteen, nineteen, had been with a gang of older guys who dealt with various acts of armed robbery, mostly small banks and factory payrolls. That association died after a caper in which Pretty was not involved went awry when the manager of the factory the gang was trying to hold-up got rum brave and said no, said no and got shot dead for his efforts. His refusal though gave the cops time to get there and after a short shoot-out with one gang member, Frizzy, dead they were apprehended. All drew long sentences, very long in Walpole. That left Pretty high and dry, left him without a source of cash, cash necessary to keep up his bike and his own upkeep. Once Mimi came into the picture later that just added to the expenses so for a year or so everybody would hear of an occasional robbery, usually armed, of some grocery store or gas station, maybe a small supermarket, by a lone wolf biker. None other than Pretty.        

Then for a while nobody heard anything about Pretty like he and Mimi had drifted off the face of the earth. What Mimi’s sister had heard from the little contact she had with her before she really did seem to drift off the face of the earth was that Pretty had been working on a plan to rob the Granite National Bank, the bank that held all the payrolls for the various shipbuilding companies that dotted the south coast area and would put them on easy street. He planned to do it alone in broad daylight with lightning speed and daring not figuring that anybody would think a single guy could rob Granite National. And he almost succeeded, had a bagful of dough when a security guard who must have thought the money was his personal stash tried to stop Pretty with his gun, Pretty shot him dead, and ran out to his bike. The cops though were already out there approaching and in the inevitable shoot-out Pretty James Preston came up short, came up just a little short like he had all his life. Some witness across the street said she saw a young blonde girl, seemingly pregnant, standing there on her side of the street a few yards away who flee the scene when the cops came. Rumors flew that Mimi had gone to Maine, or someplace like that, but she never came back to North Adamsville so maybe she did drift off the good green earth.  

Yeah, Pretty James was something else but I still wonder what would have happened to me if I had stuck with him.