When Pretty James Preston Ruled The 1960s Night-A North Adamsville Corner Boy Story-With Nelson Algren’s Walk On The Wild Side In Mind
By Bart Webber
[You never know what will trigger a long held back of the brain reflex once the power of suggestion rears its mighty head. Recently Seth Garth, a writer whom I have known for a long time and have over that time shared some odd-ball experiences (some may say foolhardy or maybe closer to the nub illegal), wrote what can only be described as an elegy for famous bank robbers with whom he is still in thrall, and has been since he was a kid. You know the obvious ones, the philosopher-king of the profession Willie Sutton, bad ass Pretty Boy Floyd who I really think just had a good press agent or publicity department working to build his legend but it was Seth’s piece so I will let my opinion float in the ether, notorious junkie Bonnie and her dear man Clyde, the quixotic Forest Tucker, Long John Williams and a stack of others.
The one whose name drew my attention, brought back those old-time back of the brain reflexes was when he mentioned the bandit robber hero of our youth, Pretty James Preston. Yeah, in many ways Pretty James (others can go into why he was always called Pretty James in his adult life or would put their own lives in danger by not recognizing him by that moniker, including a clumsy neighborhood copper who attempted to show some disrespect and all he got was several months in the hospital and a permanent limp) was pound for pound the king of the hill, had those names previously mentioned beaten six ways to Sunday when skill and bravado were called for. As often it was since Pretty James rode to his quarry, to some lustful bank, on his Vincent motorcycle, a British product which was extremely fast in those days, had Harleys for lunch, in daylight and by himself (except later when his Molly Murphy would play look-out including that last fateful ride down in Braintree.
I mentioned above that a guy like Pretty Boy Floyd has a pretty good publicity apparatus to hang his exploits on. Pretty James could have cared less, could have in the term of the times, given a fuck about who knew what he had done except maybe the coppers and that was merely out of professional cunning. What Pretty James did not know was that around the Greater Boston area in the early 1960s when he, motorcycle-bound, pulling a couple of robberies a day it seemed, that a devoted core of young kids, young men were following his exploits, were wishing him well in his struggle to win fame and fortune even if he didn’t seek any silly boy fan club adoration. (Molly Murphy’s adoration was a far different question as we knew quite well since Molly had grown up a few streets from one of our corner boys.) The proof? Some fifty years later guys who have acquired their own fame with big literary and journalistic reputations are still singing his praises.
Of course none of us were fools, or at least fools in this regard, so we knew that at some point Pretty James was going to go to ground under the weight of his reputation and elan. As far as I recall not one of us cried a tear when we heard the news that Pretty James had cashed his check (I will use that old expression rather than the one I like best, “caught the Westbound freight” since it makes more sense here). The details were sketchy as they always were with police reports but one day Pretty James decided to take a step up, a step on the wild side and grab some dough from the Granite National Bank branch in Braintree which had never been robbed before. Was assumed to be robber-proof. Pretty James had things pretty well scoped out (including have Molly as a look-out who after what happened fled and was never heard from again, at least by our crowd). What Pretty James had not figured on was some rent-a-cop, some old duffer who though the dough was his started blasting away with his revolver nicking Pretty James. Pretty James in turn wasted this clown but the shoot-out, the turmoil threw the timing off and by the time Pretty James hit the streets with his bagful of loot half the Braintree Police Department was in the square. Pretty James gave as good as he got but he was outnumbered and outgunned. Nothing is left to be said except Pretty James Preston wherever your resting place may it be in the peace you never had while alive.
Below is a story, a older story written by me which kind of ties our feelings about Pretty James together with the contacts some of our guys had with him before he fell down, before he laid his head down. Bart Webber]
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Josh Breslin as he settled into post-workaday world retirement, having over his years as a writer written his fair share of drivel and star-quality material, had been spending his time these days trying to figure out what he was trying to say to a candid world by his musings, what he was trying to get at by putting pen to paper. He knew he had, like every other journalist, good or bad, written his full share of drivel to pay the bills, to get a leg up in the business, or as in the case of writing about American presidential campaigns had to run screaming in the night more than once, unlike the stalwart late Hunter S. Thompson, Doctor Gonzo who thrived on such fare, when he realized that it was not his writing that fell short but the subject matter. Josh also knew that he had written some excellent work, had been up for awards for his personal histories of growing up poor in the 1950s golden age of the American way, on the rise of rock and roll among the working poor, on the folk minute of the 1960s, and on the search for the great American West night that he along with a whole generation in the 1960s took aim at before the tide ebbed.
Yeah, Josh had had to chuckle to himself when he thought about how long he had been at the grind, had been writing in good weathers and bad, and that he had seen many changes over the years in the technology of writing. Had been at it a while since he actually did write using a pen in the old days starting out his first drafts in long hand on yellow legal pads using Bic pens information that he had startled a group of younger writers with who could not comprehend doing such an arduous task in the age of computers, spell checks, cut and paste and whatever else a word processor could produce with each added updated software feature. Josh had not surrendered to the charms of the new technology until the last possible moment, having some old time vision of a guy like Ernest Hemingway tommy-gunning on some worn out rusted standard brand typewriter down in the Keys as the proper course for literary lights in his head.
But under the gun of providing funds for his seemingly endless brood of children from three failed marriages, failed for an assortment of reasons, including his constant absences from home, wife number one, infidelity, wife number two, boredom, his and hers, wife number three, he needed to make dough fast and furiously and had had to write, mostly drivel or stuff that he could have given a rat’s ass about like American presidential campaigns, to grab a quick pay check. That campaign business really was tough to handle once, usually about April or May of the election year, he realized he could have taken and written the stuff from the previous presidential cycle and just changed names and dates and nobody would have bothered to check the stuff as long as it came in at a steady pace and was cutting enough, his trademark on politics. But he did his duty, did make provision for alimonies, child support and college educations for the lot. Hell that brood provisioning almost killed him, at least he was ready to walk the plank before it was over. The kids turned out okay so he could wax more philosophical about that whole period these days.
But maybe his current condition, his settling in to retirement, were not the right words although they will do since his mental state these days is not at issue. What Josh had been thinking about deeply lately had been how he of all the crowd in old North Adamsville, excepting always the late long departed Pete Markin who led the way and who was always close to the surface of his thoughts about writing, had spent his entire adult life working the mightier than the sword pen. How he had written himself into such a wretched state, had frankly gone stale, that in the previous few years before he knew it was time to retire from the public prints he realized he needed to do so because he had been in danger of repeating himself like some senile old hag, some old hack glued to a desk and keyboard with no new ideas except to fake it on some old ideas. That had been why it was important to think through what he had written, about the reasons for his overweening desire to give his, and his kind, voice in a crowded world that only cared about polished things and bright thoughts.
Josh had written one time fairly recently that in his youth all roads led back to Markin, the old-time high school corner boy comrade Pete Markin mentioned above. That had been yet another one of those times of late when he was stuck for an idea, and then out of nowhere a yellow brick road converted “hippie flower child 1960s school bus” appeared on the Maine ghost highway, the same kind of bus as the Captain Crunch-led yellow brick road bus that he and Markin had travelled up and down the West Coast on for a couple of years back then, and had given him about six short sketches to work out, he was always kind of lucky that way when the serious subject matter canals seemed closed off. If these days, the past several years if truth be told, a lot of his material seemed same old, same old, a thin soup rehash of really good stuff from about ten or fifteen years before, he had never had anything near a writer’s block, had always scrambled for some small item to flesh out into a few thousand words of printable material, stuff that wouldn’t make him cringe at the sight.
Markin, who whatever bad end he came to when the deal went down after the 1960s ebb tide when he could not hold himself back from his outrageous wanting habits, had been the guy who encouraged Josh to write. Had, almost to fists, not Markin’s the other guys’, encouraged every guy on the corner to do so, to tell their sidewinder stories to a candid world as he always called the world outside the North Adamsville corner, but it had only stuck a chord with Josh. Even then it was a close thing since it would take several years, a few women who passed by in transit who had tried to encourage him to write, write pretty about them, a few bouts with sister cocaine, bouts shared with Markin who used those bouts to finally succumb to whatever evil instincts he had been able to hold in check when the flood tide was upon them, and a few bouts with his own wanting habits, outrageous or not, for him to take that pen to paper.
Yeah, Markin, who was beginning to get some small but important recognition on the West Coast as a writer, especially after he got back from Vietnam in the early 1970s and wrote for and about guys, fellow soldiers, out in the “jungle” of Southern California where they had made a “home” for themselves along the arroyos, the riverbeds, the railroad trestles and under the bridges who had come back to the “real” world and couldn’t, or wouldn’t adjust, had been the guy who told him he had promise. Had helped him get his first article, an article about a Jefferson Airplane concert where Markin, Josh and a whole coterie from Captain Crunch’s yellow brick road bus had “celebrated” the “honeymoon” of Prince Love (Josh’s moniker out on the West Coast road) and Butterfly Swirl, a young woman surfer girl from down in Carlsbad with a batch of acid, LSD, into print in the old now defunct alternative newspaper, the East Bay Other, his first paying piece, if only a pittance, when they lived out in the Bay area in the early 1970s.
The late lamented Markin back in the corner days then and forever after known as “the Scribe” for his crazy desire, according to Josh and the other corner boys in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor off of Main Street in what they all called, for nobody knows what reason, “the Downs,” the working class section of hometown North Adamsville, to write down every word corner boy leader Frankie Riley uttered. Had been knighted with that moniker by Frankie, the natural leader of the corner boys, once Markin got into high gear about Frankie’s exploits, some of the stuff probably made up, no, definitely made up, although Frankie never disabused anybody about any of those exploits, and maybe Markin half believed them himself. That was the beginning for him of his literary career such as it was. Markin would eventually do the P.R., be the “flak” for all the corner boy exploits, all the legal ones, okay, since who knew who would read his stuff some of it which he would fictionalize like the “looking for Saturday” night drives along the Adamsville Boulevard filled with allusions of torrid if sanitized sex, drink and other teenage fantasies, for the school newspaper, The Magnet, or if he was lazy or pressed for time, for some English class assignment.
Markin had been the first to bring forth the idea that guys like the guys who hung out at the corners of the American universal night needed to have a voice, needed to have their left behind stories told. (Gals too but mainly in this period in history, local, American, international history they were “window dressing,” and treated as such, so the material was mostly about guys, and what they thought and did.) Mostly then Markin was blowing air into the fetid night, was preaching to the stars, to Moloch, to the dark holes in the universe that nobody knew nothing about then, or something because nobody, no righteous corner boy, smart or a dunce and there were plenty of both on the corner, including Josh at the time, gave “a rat’s ass,” an overworked expression on the corner once Frankie put it in play after hearing his older brother use the expression after he, the older brother, heard some Devil’s Disciples biker say that when ordering a hamburger after the waitress had asked if he wanted ketchup and that was his reply. Yeah rat’s ass which however exactly fit their collective thoughts at the time, their thoughts about having a voice in the fucking world from which they were being left behind, telling their two bit stories about petty larcenies and utter boredom.
It wasn’t, at least in Josh’s case, for lack of trying on Markin’s part. Markin, a natural bookworm despite, or maybe because of his corner boy status as scribe, as flak and flak-catcher combined, and, well, as just a natural corner boy as well given his hatred for staying at home where he was subject to seven kinds of hell from a totally frustrated mother and would step out into the night in all weathers to keep his sanity, tried several times to get Josh to read a book, a novel, by an American writer, a guy named Nelson Algren. Algren who had won a big book award for another book of his, The Man With The Golden Arm, about Frankie Machine out in Chicago, a long gone daddy hustler done in by dope, serious dope, heroin which on the corner was subject to ban, to ban on any junkies who were plentiful in Boston where people were into strange kicks but kept out of sight in that small town, had written a book Walk on the Wild Side all about the North Adamsville corner boys and their troubled fates. Not directly about the Salducci Pizza Parlor corner boys but about a character named Dove Linkhorn, a drifter and misfit whose every move to get ahead in the world, a young man of small dreams who failed in even getting them in focus when Josh thought about it later, turned to ashes in his mouth. The corner, and Salducci’s Pizza Parlor was the prime corner for high school corner boys had already had a few guys, guys who burned with some small ambitions, small short-cut to success ambitions like Dove, get their asses kicked for them, grabbed some jail time in a couple of cases when a few scams they were running went south on them. (Doc’s Drugstore over on Newbury Street with his jumping jukebox was for junior high corner boys and Harry’s Variety, Harry’s with the pinball machines, out back illegal liquor and gambling den was for the older guys, high school dropouts or guys who worked a little in the social gradation peaking order of local corner boy society.)
The important part of the book thought, the part that connected the Doves of the world with the Markins (and Joshes) of the world was that left behind feeling, that they were really being left behind, that there was no place for guys who only had tenuous roots to the new post-World War II order. No place for guys coming up in the projects like weeds like Markin and Josh before Josh’s parents got their American dream shack of a tidy house down in the Acre, the swampy wrong side of the tracks part of town. No place for guys coming up in small cramped houses with no yards, and with no space to think things through, if they cared too. No place for guys who hungered to be drifters, small change con artists, hang around guys, to emulate guys like Red Riley over at Harry’s Variety, guys with time and no money on their hands. Waiting, waiting one foot on the brick corner wall the other on the ground, for something to happen, maybe just anything to move off of square one.
Algren had been talking about an earlier time, about the time before the World Wars when this country had kind of filled up, kind of divided up in those who were going places and those who were going around spinning their wheels. (Markin went crazy when he was a freshman in college in Boston, he would drop out after sophomore year, a serious mistake which cost him two years in the Army in Vietnam in the heat time of that war which took a very deep cut out of him although he did not talk about it much, after hearing in a history class that a professor from Harvard, Frederick something Turner had made up a whole proposition about the effects of the closing of the frontier in a America on those who headed west and ran smack dab into the ocean, and the end of prospects. He had tried to interest Josh in the argument but then Josh could have given a rat’s ass about such bullshit he was trying to get into some girl from Boston University pants.) Algren speculated in some very nice prose about the rough-hewn immigrants, mostly peasants and displaced yeomen, being pushed out of their countries of origin for usually some nefarious activity, some crime or one sort or another, the status of almost all Americans, and the push west across the continent once the East Coast started filling up that a whole stratum of society, of guys and gals who couldn’t adjust, couldn’t make the cut began to make strange noises, to creep along in the undergrowth of society.
Dove the drifter, the son of the barren southern sharecropper night, none too book learning bright, but what in North Adamsville among his progeny brethren would have been called “street smart,” small town street smart, in the shiftless lay-about night, was the classic profile for those who in a static society would have been fine but in go-go America even during the Great Depression, or maybe because of it, became the classic outlaw, modern outlaw who instead of being hailed as a hero of the individual spirit was as likely to go on some vicious crime spree, was as likely to find himself on the gallows. Or snuffed out by his own hubris, his own small dreams writ large in his brainless fertile mind. Every guy who survived the corner in North Adamsville, including smart guys like Markin and Josh, maybe especially smart guys like them willing to cut about six corners had the mark of the Dove upon them. An indelible mark, something in the genes, the helter-skelter of the gene mix when the immigrants mixed and the land ran out.
Of course Josh wasn’t interested in listening to what Markin had to say then, much less read the Algren book while he was in high school, while there were still girls, parties, booze (not drugs then that would come later all the way from low-rent pot to high end cocaine and whatever else came along except that still corner taboo smack, heroin), sex, thoughts of sex, promises of sex, around to fill the desires, the wanting habits as Frankie would say stealing the words from some old blues song sung by some old husky black women his father would play on the record player at home. Didn’t want to listen even when Markin pointed out that the North Adamsville corner boys were not alone in being left behind in the great crush. Hell Markin wanted to make an outraged crusade out of the hard fact that people get left behind, his people, and Josh’s like he could actually do a goddam thing about the matter.
Here’s the reality check. Josh for a time was crazy to ride in Harry’s, his older brother’s souped-up 1949 Hudson hot rod which Harry had refitted almost from scratch with money he made working at Jimmy’s Esso service station (a place where Harry would wind up working as a gas jockey for what seemed like half of his life talking about being left behind, whether he wanted to or not). Markin had told Josh to his disbelief until Markin was able to produce a magazine from Jimmy’s Newsstand downtown which dealt with the hot rods that on the West Coast there were a million guys like Harry. A million guys, rootless, with nothing better to do than “sex up” some long gone daddy of a car maybe a forlorn Hudson like Harry or Studebaker and identify their worth that way. A million guys pumping gas for Mr. Esso, Getty, Shell, a million guys maybe washing cars at a 24/7 car wash, flipping burgers in some greasy spoon, a million gals serving them off the arm in some roadside diner waiting for Marlon Brando to come in so they could tame him. Nowhere, man, nowhere. Alienated from regular work, alienated from the land that did not need them, out on the great green breast of the world, shackled with nowhere to go but to the East and defeat, or to drown in the Japan seas.
The thought about some dime store clerk or sweated stained whited uniform waitress “taming” Marlon Brando got Josh to thinking about the other lost boys Markin tried to talk to him about back in the day. The great motorcycle caravan swarming like locust unto the seventh generation. This was whole different order of meanness, the same genes as the hot-rodders who basically only gave a damn about dual exhausts whereas the bikers took their fall from grace personally, wanted to make the square world pay for their troubles. Pay with brass knuckles, a tire iron, or a whip chain and an occasional burning of some town to the ground for sport. What did one writer, one sympathetic writer who nevertheless wisely treated the lot like vipers, yes, the Huns come running amok making ordinary citizens fear they what they had built would come asunder, that they would have to run screaming in the night from what they had built.
Got Josh thinking about the times when the Devil’s Disciples ran a reign of terror around Adamsville Beach in the summer, ran a reign of terror around every good-looking girl in town who walked the streets around town day or night. Yeah, there was a universe of Hell’s bells angels angling in the West Coast night, mainly filling up the state pens in between rampages. Guys strangely with some skills, mechanics mainly, who couldn’t buckle down to a seven to three stretch without raising twelve kinds of hell, who took what was in front of them what they wanted and asked questions later, whose notion of good sex was a be-bop gang bang of some poor misguided star-struck waif who had barely lost her virginity but who would learn fast what was what if she survived the first wave. Yeah, the world, the post-World War II world was filled with misfits, grifters, drifters and twisted sisters. And of course thinking about motorcycle guys just then Josh had something of an epiphany. Had a thought run through his blistered brain about Pretty James Preston, his long gone daddy of a friend from elementary school.
Josh had to think it through a little, think back the time in the early 1970s when one night he was bored, had broken up with some girl, Markin was in Monterrey for some reason and he went to Markin’s room in the place they were living in Oakland at the time and grabbed Algren’s Walk on the Wild Side. He wound up reading what Algren had to say about Dove Linkhorn’s genetic forbears, about the restless drifters who headed west, really headed west or did so once they knew the score, once they knew the deck was stacked against them, would always be stacked against them, some sections several times over the next days as he finished up the book in a few sittings. Got him thinking about that time, the time he finally figured out what the hell Markin had been talking about in high school when he realized that he had been mistaken, had made a mistake when he thought that all roads led back to Markin. Sure, the road led through Markin whom he met when he was in high school and who had had plenty of influence on and over him but the hard fact was that all roads led back to Pretty James, Pretty James Preston.
Pretty James and Josh had met on the first day of school to start the fourth grade in September 1956 at the old Adamsville North Elementary School near the small North Adamsville Beach which could be seen from the lunch room windows, you know the school cafeteria where they tried seven ways to hell to poison your young life with sixteen variations of pizza served as anything from American chop suey to, well, pizza, which gave Josh many day-dreaming hours looking out at during his six year tenure there. Pretty James had moved to town with his family of four younger brothers and a sister from down south in Eastern Kentucky. They had come, the whole family in a broken down 1947 Hudson with their meager possessions in tow from down, down deep in coal country, down in Harlan of legend in song and story he would find out later, had come north when the mines in that area were starting to give out, or as Josh also figured out later oil and gas had become the new fuels of choice in the latter stages of the revved up industrialization of post-war America in what some sociologists and social commentators would call the “golden age” of the American economy where all boats would rise. (Josh would always give a shrill laugh, would always grit his teeth when there was such talk in the media or in the academy about that time since his own family, and Pretty James’ too, were left way behind, left among the desperate working poor in that so-called golden age which will be explained a little more in a minute.)
The move had been no accident, had been no let fortune take the wind since Mrs. Preston had been born and raised in Adamsville proper, had met Mr. Preston during World War II at a USO dance in Riverdale a few towns down the coast where she was a hostess and he had been stationed at a Naval Depot before being discharged from the Marines. He had been a good Marine, had seen his fair share of the bloody Pacific War battles and seemed to her a good catch, the “sheik” all the girls called him, and his fellow Marines in semi-mockery as well. After his discharge from the service they had decided, or rather Mr. Preston’s lack of any other skills except being a sharpshooting killer in battle and a coal-miner otherwise had decided, that they would go back to coal country so he could find suitable work. There they ran into a bunch of realties that they had no control over, or little control. First and foremost was that trend away from coal, then as the years passed and work got scarcer that brood expanded to six youngsters well beyond Pretty James’ father’s ability to provide, and finally Mrs. Preston had gotten homesick, gotten homesick by the shunning of other women with families since she was an outsider, and since there was more than one now married woman who still had eyes for Mr. Preston whom everybody, every lady according to Pretty James also called him “Sheik” for his dark good looks. Dark good looks that Pretty James would inherit with the same effect. So they arrived in the summer of 1956 with all their possession practically on their backs.
That arrival was not to bells and whistles by any means. As Pretty James would later explain one winter night when they were up in the room that Josh shared with one of his own brothers his father was not thrilled by the idea of being surrounded by a sea of Northerners who acted like the Civil War had never ended just like his mother had never gotten used to those Harlan women, and their shunning leering looks come red barn dance Saturday night. (In fact Mr. Preston suffered not only from many last hired, first fired jobs of little consequence as he grew older and more despondent about his ill-starred fate but the slings and arrows of anti-rebel taunts that he had hated just after the war which made him decide to head back south again followed him throughout his stay in Adamsville before his early death.)
More to the point Mrs. Preston’s family, she was nee Riley, over in Adamsville had been adamantly against the marriage on religious grounds, on Mr. Preston being a born and raised a Baptist if not a practicing one and she/they being high holy Irish Roman Catholics, when such considerations were more prevalent. Like the religious wars of a few centuries before had never been completely finished and resolved the issue. Pretty’s parents had been reduced to being married in the rectory of Sacred Heart because of the religious differences without her family in attendance. That did not stop Pretty James and Josh from being indoctrinated early on by that very same mother church. Had them get a few rulers on the palms from the nuns (sisters) who ran the Sunday school indoctrination camp for the parish. Had them confessing in some incense-blown confessional with a leering priest ready to absolve them with a the cheap-shots of a few Hail Marys and, get the, Acts of Contrition. Later in life it was best to not get Josh, hell Markin either started on that damn mother church and its insidious ways. Probably Pretty James too but he had already blown off the sacred teachings long before Josh or Markin whether he was a still a nominal believer or not.
Additionally Daniel Riley, Pretty James’ mother’s father, was a stern old blood red Irish bastard out of the Jehovah prophet school with flaming white hair and fiery eyes from the look of him according to Josh the few times their paths crossed took a dim view of his father’s prospects. Before his retirement old Riley had been a skilled lead specialty welder down at the Gloversville Shipyard the next town down the coast from North Adamsville and sensed that his father would not measure up to that standard, never would make anywhere near that kind of money. (Pretty James’ father wouldn’t, he got work eventually in the shipyard which was the main employer in the area, the main support of the town and area economy, no thanks to old man Riley who didn’t lift a finger to get him into an apprenticeship program, and his father would eventually be among the first lay-offs when the Gloversville owners decided that labor costs would be cheaper in Greece and began the long process of de-industrialization of the American commercial ship-building industry long before globalization talk hit the airwaves and slick journals which devastated the town and from which it still has not recovered.)
Of course all of this knowledge about Pretty’s family and its travails came later, came as Pretty James and his family settled into the Adamsville Housing Authority apartment they were assigned on Taffrail Road up the street from Josh’s family’s apartment on Quarterdeck Lane. Get this “apartment” business straight though this was the “projects” as they would come to be notoriously called when an earlier generation of sociologists and social commentators became alarmed to the hilt about the juvenile delinquency problem that got a big boost from the miseries of such places. The idea of the “projects,” the Adamsville Housing Authority idea anyway, and maybe other such places too, in the immediate post-war period was to provide cheap housing, provide needed housing since material used for normal housing creation had been commandeered for the war effort, had probably been left on Normandy Beach or the Rhine, maybe some island atoll in the Pacific or beneath the ice cold North Atlantic seas, and new housing had been stalled, for returning veterans and their new families.
The idea was also, as Josh checked out later when he was trying to figure out some stuff about whence he had come and what he had missed out on by growing up stark naked poor in such a place, had been that this was a short term solution to the problem That those up and coming vets using their G.I. Bill benefits would abandon such flimsy and cramped desolate housing for the leafy neighborhoods and suburbs of single family structures. Josh had known no other place but the “projects,” had taken on the patina of the place, as far back as he could remember. (The Breslins had actually lived their first year with Josh at Mr. Breslin’s family home over in Riverdale a few towns over but as the family grew that space became too cramped to fit a growing family and since Mrs. Breslin, nee Kelly, had been born and raised in Adamsville and Josh’s father was a veteran, a Marine like Pretty’s father, who had seen serious battles, also like Pretty’s father in the hell-hole Pacific wars they were “entitled” to apply and live in the Adamsville “projects.”)
The year 1956 on the face of it without having to tell anybody back then was both deep in the “golden age” of the American working-class which had had Josh later constantly gritting his teeth every time he heard the expression and a pretty long time to be mired in public housing when all around town, all around school, people were moving into those small but cherished single family houses, mostly ranch houses with breezeways and overhead garages that would show that the family had arrived. Had qualified to dream the American dream in the red scare Cold War night. The turnover even reached into the projects, around the edges where moving vans monthly signaled departures and arrival. The “projects” spoke to that American golden age arrival and what that meant for those imprisoned in the fetid night behind the walls as well as any sociologist or social commentator could do from outside the walls of the self-imposed “ghetto,” a term now out of favor and not used in those days for the lily-white Adamsville apartments but face it the physical, the geographic location of the place on a deserted peninsula with only one road in or out and no on-site supermarkets spoke to ghetto in all its ramifications.
Unlike Pretty James’ father, Prescott, let’s give the man a name even if he was a cypher not understood by Pretty or Josh but who in the end did what he could do and the best he could, who took whatever work, no matter how much below him, how much he was the last man in, first man out Josh’s father had not fared very well, had not adjusted to the “real” world, an expression Markin and his fellow veterans would use later in the Vietnam War that crushed his generation beneath its heel one way or another and is still a floating sore to this day. Josh’s father had received his honorable wounds, received two Purple Hearts for his efforts but had had problems with the nagging wounds, had resolved those problems by an increasing use of alcohol (and somebody had told him years later some bouts with heroin, something out of Frankie Machine, Nelson Algren’s main character in The Man With The Golden Arm although Josh never saw any tell-tale needles or other drug paraphernalia around and he would have remembered that vividly later when he had had his own bouts with sweet dream drugs).
He had before the war, before 1941 and his immediate enlistment in December of that year in the Marines after Pearl Harbor, been an apprentice in the electricians’ program at the Gloversville Shipyard but in a tell-tale sign that things were drifting away at the yard that program had been abandoned in the post-war period as too expensive (it was easier to hire veterans who learned their skills in the military service in the short time before the owners abandoned America for the cheaper labor foreign ports). By governmental policy he was entitled to a job at the shipyard, his last place of employment and so he worked as a general laborer, meaning he would fill whatever spot was necessary on a daily or weekly basis. Several times over the years he was fired for his drinking problem in the days when such problems were swept under the rug, when companies had no policy except firing. Then he would get called back through the union’s efforts.
As 1956 dawned though the writing was beginning to be written on the walls and Josh’s father was let go for good. He thereafter depended on work wherever and whenever he could get it when he was sober enough to show up and give a day’s work. That is the period when to keep the household together Josh’s mother had to go to work, a task well below her dignity as a daughter of a fire department captain, another one of those patriarchs like
Pretty’s mother’s father, today seemingly to be a dying breed, who cried to high heaven like some Jehovah prophet about the sanctity of the home and a married woman’s place in the scheme of things. Those were also the days when, despite a solid decade of adversity and shame appearances still meant something in the Breslin household and his mother was as sharp-witted about such slights as a divorcee forced to honest toil work to keep from the streets. Moreover fathers were expected, including by the fathers themselves, to be the single bread-winner, a norm that ruled the waves, celebrated on television, both family entertainment shows and in the drag of television commercials which took dead aim at the woman of the house, and the newspapers as the proper nature of the world.
Stay-at-home-mothers were the norm even in the “projects.” Even Mrs. Preston did not work outside the family home. Josh’s mother’s mothers’ hours’ job working had been filling a million variety of donuts in one of the first Dunkin Donut franchises in the country. Damn that still bit at Josh’s collar, still made him mad as hell about his father’s drinking which as far as he knew never stopped (“as far as he knew” because one day in 1964 the old man on another one of his three day drunks, out of work, just left the house, left the town, left with no forwarding address but by then Josh was saying “good riddance”). He would never forget the sullen barely contained enraged look on his mother’s face when she came home smelling of twelve donut fillings, seven kinds of greases, stale coffees, and carrying whatever day’s sugar confections she had rolled on her uniform. Damn, double damn.
Josh had to switch gears though away from creating his own long way back rage about his mother’s fate and get back to thoughts of Pretty. Josh had had to laugh as he thought about the way that he and Pretty James Preston had met in that first meeting in that long ago fourth grade class. Met in that ocean view lunch room that day since the class had under Miss (Ms. now, okay) Winot’s stern hand been silent all morning hearing about the six million rules of the class room, the twelve million rules of the school, and the passing out and registering of the books to be used for the year and the added task of covering the damn things with whatever was at hand, usually used paper bags cut to size, scotch-taped and name recorded on the cover for easy discovery in the careless world of kids and books. Mercifully 11:45 came and the class all scattered directly to the lunch room, the bathrooms or to their lockers if parents, mothers had packed a lunch for them. While both Josh and Pretty had relieved themselves in the bathrooms, strangely called Lavatories throughout their school days, “lav” for short, neither boy ever had to go to their lockers for lunch since neither mother had prepared such a repast. As “project” kids they were entitled to a free lunch provided by the city (and who knows with state or federal help but that if it was the case that outside aid was unacknowledged in the days before the 1960s when child hunger drew avid attention, attention to child hunger in the ghettos and down in Pretty’s mountainous Appalachia from which his family had fled mostly, from all sorts of anti-poverty-warriors including more than a few sociologists and social commentators who scorned on such a role for government in the “golden age”).
As in the case with plenty of so-called “hand-outs” those who received such largess had to stand in a separate line for all to see. Since the line went in helter-skelter order the vagaries of fate had Pretty standing right behind Josh. That would on any other day have been cause for no comment one way or the other except when Josh went to receive his lunch James Preston came around Josh’s arm and tried to grab the lunch from out of his hand. In those days Josh was, unlike of late, thin as a rail, kind of puny, and no fighter, no way so James must have figured that Josh’s lunch would be easy pickings. Here’s why James was in such a frenzy to grab Josh’s lunch though threatening to be the subject of murder and mayhem by the lunch ladies if Josh had pressed the issue, had taken step one to “snitch” on James. Simple. James, a growing boy then at least compared to Josh although he would later be classed more as wiry and muscular than any other description, had not eaten in two days and following some well-established law of the jungle learned in the Preston household or more probably in one of those hills and hollows schools down south where it was each kid for him or herself just grabbed out of instinct. Josh sensing menace if he did not give up his lunch accepted the inevitable and let James have his lunch. Except a chocolate chip cookie, and milk to wash it down. James had wolfed down Josh’s lunch and his own almost before they sat down.
(Josh would remember almost sixty years later the lunch menu- a bologna and cheese sandwich which despite its reputation as fit for only low-rent households and those given “hand-outs” Josh loved as against the desiccated peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or worse the deviled ham ones, a bag of Hunt’s potato chips and a small lettuce and tomato salad not sure of the dressing and that chocolate chip cookie. Heaven as against the culinary take at the Breslin residence especially once his mother started working her mother’s donut shop shifts when half the time breakfast or non-school day lunches would be whatever donuts had not been sold at the shop and his mother would be carrying the inevitable bag brown paper bag filled at her side as she opened the front door to their apartment late at night.)
That introduction should have put Josh on guard, should have told some inner voice that this was not going to work, that there would almost always automatically be some James Preston transgression. What Josh later, later when he as a young adult began to try to make sense of his childhood world under Markin’s promptings, would learn to call “wanting habits.” Markin, who had been as with many other expressions the original source for the expression although Frankie Riley always got credit for its introduction, had picked up the idea from an old blues singer he had heard on an old scratchy record, had used the term of art when they discussed what drove them in the old days to small-time criminal activity and an over-sized respect for the hoods, gangsters, and corner boys who populated their lives from early on. Josh spend many year, many more years that he needed to, using the expression as a rationalization for his anti-social behavior when they went big time. Much earlier as James Preston began to take his Pretty James Preston persona seriously that hunger became the driving source of his ambition, good and bad. Obviously though there was something about Pretty which drew Josh to him like a magnet, like some long awaited second coming old time biblical prophet in tee shirt, chinos and Keds sneakers who finally showed up at his “projects” door.
While they talked that first day during lunch (stern Ms. Winot brooked no unauthorized talking during her classes, a policy which both boys would eventually test, and lost spending many afternoons doing penance after school), Josh kept silent about Pretty’s soft southern drawl which he was not sure what to make of and which would be the butt of boy jokes. Jokes when Pretty was not around, when around though Josh noticed they were as quiet as church mice after one episode where Pretty did hear talk about his “speaking funny” and he waylaid the guy who made the wisecrack with a swift kick in the “balls.” A drawl which a year or so later when such things mattered would drive the girls crazy once they went from “sticks” to “shapes” and put that status as impressable young women together with his smooth talking voice which made the other Northern-bred boys sound like some silly honking illiterates.
The pair talked after school that first day (and many other days as well) of this and that, nothing memorable but as they talked each boy sensed something, something like a kindred spirt, although Pretty was much more driven by the idea of getting out from under the rock of poverty, of getting those “wanting habits” satisfied than Josh could ever articulate then. Josh would always look up to Pretty even later when things turned sour, would look up to his native intelligence exhibited the very first day when they talked along with that larcenous intent with the lunch that colored all his actions. Pretty promised Josh that after that first day he would not “steal” Josh’s lunches, hungry or not, although he made no commitment and none was asked, about any other students, and as would become apparent as that fourth grade year went by Josh would knowingly benefit by more than one or more of Pretty’s schemes to grab lunches, and dough, from the other kids.
Always had some scheme brewing like the time he made up raffle tickets for a radio, a transistor radio that most kids had heard about but who didn’t possess and wanted once they knew that it could drown out their parents’ music from their existences, sold a bunch and then went out and bought one with the proceeds at Radio Shack after he collected the dough and made several bucks as a result. Or showing that more larcenous side “shaking” down fellow students for their milk money, daring them to squeal. Kids’ stuff, kids’ stuff you would usually grow out of like Josh but there it was if you were looking. Since Pretty shared his loot with Josh he never squawked about what he was up to, never said anything to anybody why would he.
1956 was a big year in the lives of post-World War II babies, now called baby-boomers to distinguish them from later generations, coming of radio and television age, coming of musical age, coming of age to appreciate, or half appreciate the new music, the thing called rock and roll that was sweeping through the burned over land like some great second awakening, like that second coming that Josh sensed Pretty had been planted down in the “projects” to stir up. Josh had actually been a little behind the wave since the only radio in his family’s apartment was the one in the kitchen that his mother listened to do her daily chores and that radio was invariably set to WJDA the station still playing the stuff that his parents had come of age to, had sloughed through World War II with, the old standards by the Inkspots, Vera Lynn, Peggie Lee, Bing Crosby, and of course Frank, Frank Sinatra which while they sounded tinny, very tinny, to his ear he didn’t have any recourse to hear things differently. Every once in a while some snappy thing would come on like maybe Rosemary Clooney be-bopping away but otherwise no go. Pretty opened a whole new world to Josh, the world of rock and roll which he had discovered through listening to one of his brother’s transistor radios and one night fiddling with the family radio down in Harlan a strange station had come over the airwaves from Chicago Be-Bop Benny’s Rock and Roll Revue from WKLM where this crazy ass sound was ripping up the airwaves.
Guys snapping be-bop fingers, guys playing some rhythm guitar chords that reached deep into Pretty’s psyche. By the way on that transistor radio Pretty had to explain what the damn thing was since Josh had never seen one, and was not sure if he ever had heard about the gismo but he could hardly believe his eyes when Pretty showed him his brother’s one afternoon after school. A pint-sized radio that did not need to be plugged in but ran on batteries. Best of all you could take it anywhere, take it away from prying parents or siblings and put it close to your ear and shut the world out and the music in. Josh made such a stink about getting one that next Christmas his parents, and who knows where they got the money since his father was on one of his periodic lay-offs for drunkenness, had to buy him one at the Radio Shack. Even today Josh considered that item the greatest Christmas gift he has ever received.
Pretty James was not only way ahead of Josh in knowing what was what in the new jail-break world of rock and roll despite his tender age but already had his future mapped out-he was going to be the next big thing after Elvis, after Elvis was sure to fade or die but in any case vanish from the scene once Pretty got his big break. Now everybody who knew him back then conceded that Pretty was well a good-looking boy, looks inherited from the old Sheik. As it turned out he also had a pretty good voice for a pre-teenager so maybe he wasn’t blowing smoke about that dream, Josh never took his idea as anything but good coin. Certainly a look at his section of the bedroom that he shared with a brother looked like a fan’s room, with photographs of Elvis all over (and an occasional notation that Elvis was passé written in ink over his face place there by Pretty when he was in high dudgeon).
Josh bought into Pretty’s dream no question, not as much as Pretty himself but quite a bit. Now this Pretty dream thing to get out from under what looked like his fate as a poor boy working stiff which he sensed was his fate early, a fate just like his father’s fate, drove him to more than dreaming. Pretty had plans, he always had plans, good or bad, he had plans. In those days a lot of churches and other organizations that dealt with kids, with young people, along with parents and the authorities, authorities meaning cops and judges, freaked out about what guys like Elvis were doing to the morals of the youth, what with all the screaming over every move guys like Elvis made. Were freaked out by the seemingly lascivious dancing wildly hips gyrating, that was coming into vogue. Some of the freaked out tried to stamp the thing out by banning every possible activity where rock and roll might break out.
Other, including the young pastor, Father Lally, of Sacred Heart Church where Pretty and Josh went to Mass, went with the idea that if you couldn’t fight them, join them. Or at least try to control what otherwise would get out of hand. So the parish would sponsor a monthly rock and roll talent show (the other weeks would be covered with dances with Father Lally acting as DJ, and general wet blanket filtering out the really good stuff that was being played even on the cautious Boston radio stations). The lure-a first prize of fifty dollars to the winner. Fifty dollars an unheard of sum which both Josh and Pretty agreed they had never seen in person (it was actually a United States Savings Bond so it wasn’t really fifty right away dollars but fifty in the fragile saving by and by in defense of that tattered American way everybody kept talking about, the stuff that even today makes Josh seize up). Naturally Pretty decided without question that he would enter, and win.
Pretty figured all the guys would probably do some Elvis cover, might shake their hips and swivel, make all the girls scream, make them boil up with whatever slight sexual stirrings they might be percolating in their mixed up young bodies. Pretty had another idea, an idea to set him apart, to make his mark. He kept hearing this crazy beat by a guy named Bo Diddley, a beat that spoke to him, that made Bo a different cat than Elvis. So Pretty decided to do a cover of Bo’s Bo Diddley, a big hit then.
The night, the Friday night of the talent show, that would be Pretty’s selection. The event was held in the church auditorium adjacent to the church proper and Father Lally had arranged with some local musicians who made their money doing covers of all fashionable rock and roll songs to back up each contestant. Josh had endlessly heard him practice the song, and after hearing some of the goofs sing and the off-key boloney, guys and girls alike, Josh figured Pretty who really did have a good voice was a shoo-in. When Pretty’s turn came he knocked the song for a loop. After he was done though a young guy not a parent, an older guy, maybe twenty yelled out, “Hey, James Preston is singing nigger songs.” And with that single sentence Pretty lost the contest to some goof guy who did a silly sloppy version of Love Me Tender. Whatever anybody thought of Pretty’s performance no way were those who made up the bulk of the audience who would decide the winner, hearty and bedraggled Irish Catholics, or at least Catholics, who were fearful, yes, fearful of some black invasion going to support a young boy who was covering a song by what in a quaint public version of what they thought called a “colored man.”
That is the way the deal went down, went down in such a way where Pretty might have just had an inkling that the cards of life were being stacked against him. Pretty, or Josh for that matter, did not know what Bo Diddley looked like, didn’t know he was a black man. How would they since neither the Breslin nor the James household had television like a rapidly increasing number of households in the days when a television was yet another sign of those who had arrived. The only way they knew any singer was from the radio. And the radio, the rock and roll radio stations anyway, were not telling the race of the singers in those days. So no way in all-white North Adamsville and in an all-white housing project which was beset by most of the same racial animosities as were being played out down south in the same period was a guy covering Bo Diddley going to win any damn talent show. After that Pretty went back to covering Elvis stuff for a while but he entered no more church-sponsored rock and roll talent competitions.
Pretty laid his head down for a while, no question, but his hunger or whatever it was driving him to get out from under what it looked like fate had in store for him was much stronger that whatever momentarily blips in the road were blocking his path. Hell, half of being a kid was falling down and then picking yourself again or else childhood, teenager-hood would be an unremittingly horror. So Pretty sulked for a while but one of the benefits of having been “on the stage” was that a lot of people, a lot of young girls really, who may or may not have shared the general racial animosity against blacks in whatever form that might take, started taking their peeps at him, started see him in their nighttime dream. It was shortly after that fiasco, maybe six months later, when James Preston got his nickname, his moniker that he would carry through the rest of his blasted life. As girls started getting their peeps at him, as those same girls began to turn from “sticks” and general nuisances to “shapes,” and, well, kind of interesting they would try to do a little primitive flirting with him.
James reacted like most boys, although he was aware that girls existed, knew that they would form an important part of any audience when he made his big move to stardom, he nevertheless would taunt them, would almost be ready to hit them during school and outside. One girl, Rosalind, Rosalind Borden, who had a huge crush on him and who was something of the class beauty if there was such a category then said some silly remark to him and he swore back at her, called her a “bitch.” Rosalind told the teacher. Told not the hoary old Miss (Ms.) Winot from fourth grade who would have had her ruler out to place upon his palm but soft-hearted and soft-headed fifth grade teacher Miss Devlin who would the next year get married to some businessman and leave teaching, and rather that scolding him told the whole class that nobody as pretty as James could have really meant that foul expression. Although he was forced to stay after school and apologize to Rosalind the name Pretty James began to stick. He fought guys if they said it at first just like he fought guys who made fun of his southern drawl, sneered at girls with fire in his eyes when they said it but eventually he accepted his fate, would not fight or sneer as long as everybody called him by the full moniker, Pretty James Preston. (Only later when he entered his short high school career would he allow the sole name Pretty to be used by anybody referring to him.)
Although Pretty had sworn off doing the church talent shows, began to call them the equivalent of a low-rent scene where no real talent could emerge (Josh thought as he remembered back, thinking about Pretty’s take on the matter of his talent show loss, that everybody has had their bouts of self-justification to break the hurt so let a child, a broken down child have his illusions) he became a fixture at those church dances which were held the Friday nights of the weeks when the talent show went dark. (Friday night by the way, get this, being the weekend night of choice by Father Lally with parental blessing since having the events on Saturday night would perhaps allow people to stay up too late and possibly miss Mass on Sunday in the days when they had not expanded the Mass schedule to include a late Saturday afternoon service. To avoid that possibility later when people started heading to Cape Cod or Maine early Sunday morning, or just party all night, rather than attend Mass and miss their weekly obligation. Smart, very smart.)
Once Pretty started drawing attention, attention from those young girls who agreed with Miss (Ms.) Delvin about his looks he started attending the dances. Dragged Josh along too although he, Josh, had not quite gotten to see girls as interesting rather than necessary nuisances. Pretty started attending the dances too so that he could try to dance with Rosalind Borden whom in the boy-girl mix-up and mismatches had grown cool on him, had gotten over her crush but in the reverse double-twist of youth Pretty had developed a crush on her.
Pretty may have had a crush on Rosalind as did most of the boys, even some older boys since she really was a budding beauty, the prettiest girl in fifth grade, the year she began to get her shape, maybe of the whole elementary school but he also had a secret plan for her. See Rosalind at those dances showed that she had some very good if entirely proper dance moves. (That “entirely proper” meaning not going wild like some of the older girls, the sixth grade girls, or heaven forbid the junior high school girls later, as seen on television, seen on American Bandstand , by those who had televisions, or had looked in the store window at Raymond’s downtown where they had the latest models in the windows turned on at all hours to entice sales to those who did not have one in the bosom of their homes, but with a little jiggle here a little swerve there, all innocent and watched over by the eagle-eyed Father Lally). Pretty had some moves that he had practiced with his sister for a purpose.
After a while the rock and roll talent show idea had lost steam, people were tired of, according to Pretty, the same old lame songs sung by the same old lame singers, squaresville and so Father Lally, probably also sensing that the worst of the rock craze was over now that Elvis was in the Army, or going in, or died or something closed the event down and replaced it with a yet another dance, a monthly dance talent show where first prize would also be that donkey fifty dollar United States Savings Bond (not worth that much until maturity years later which was the idea Father Lally or whoever donated the prize had in mind to encourage saving, saving for college or something not spending at Doc’s Drugstore or Salducci’s Pizza Parlor on immediate gratification). That announcement got Pretty’s interest up. Got him thinking that his day had come, finally, and that winning would lead to American Bandstand, or something where all the cool dancers were.
Pretty eventually talked Rosalind into being his partner for the first dance contest. As it turned out she still had had a “small crush” (her expression) on Pretty and between that spark and Pretty’s pretty advanced “sweet talk” that he would later develop into a science (and still later would abandon for more sullen expressions of his desires). That Friday night there were probably twenty couples on the dance floor doing small clean step shakes and rolls, all within the guide-lines. The idea was that Father Lally and a couple of his lay cronies, lame church guys with dour looks and penny-pinching pouts, would walk around the floor during whatever was being played on Father Lally’s old time record player floor and eliminate couples as being too corny or too awkward or whatever reason until after five or six songs they got down to two couples who would do a dance-off in the center of the floor for the fifty bucks. As expected Pretty and Rosalind were one of the last two pairs standing for the dance-off. After an intermission the two couples went to the center of the floor. The music which they had no prior knowledge started, the now old-fashioned version of Bill Haley’s cover of Shake, Rattle and Roll. The other couple, a little older, went through their motions as expected, safe stuff.
During intermission though in a frenzy of trying to win Pretty had talked Rosalind into “going wild,” lots of gyrations and what would be called sexually suggestive moves but that he called, innocently or not, just going all out. To please Pretty she agreed. After the first few beats when Bill started wailing so did our pair, making all kinds of wiggles and waggles with Pretty and Rosalind finishing up an almost sexual pose with him swerving over her as she bent her knees backward like they were going to do the sex act or something. They had seen that move on a show on television and Pretty had decided it was time to bring that to North Adamsville. Wrong. The kids went wild but needless to say Father Lally and his cronies gave the pair the boot. Told them they would have to go to confession. Worse, Rosalind’s parents forbade her from seeing Pretty, although she secretly did so until her family moved away at the end of the school year when her father got a promotion in his job.
It was never made clear but up and coming Rosalind’s father did not like the idea of his daughter hanging around with a hoodlum, a sex maniac from the projects, since they lived in one of new ranch houses that were being built at the other end of the school district. Pretty took it hard, took the loss pretty hard, took the loss of the dance contest as one more sign that the world was against him. Took Rosalind’s going away hard too since they had started the first ignorant groping of sex and he had told Josh he had her ready to do whatever he wanted, if he knew what he wanted in that department what with all the ignorance about sex around at the time, one night when they had their lips locked. See no parent told any kid what was what in the sex department like they should, and like they do nowadays although Josh had heard on a public radio talk show that there was still plenty of resistance to “doing the birds and bees”, stuff, especially among fathers with their daughters. So everything was learned on the streets from older brothers and sisters, or wise guys, all of whom were woefully ignorant about the facts as much as they might show some knowledge in public.
Pretty, despite a certain sullenness of mood that Josh noticed as becoming more prevalent when things did not go his way, continued to draw the girls to him after Rosalind left, after his second defeat for being what would later be called a “free spirit,” would later be called “doing your own thing.” The thing that held him up was a certain amount of ego, a certain sense which he mentioned to Josh more frequently as time when on that he would someday be famous, that he would shed the whole low-rent scene and make it big, make it in his own way. Those spurts of future grandeur usually were expressed at a time when his father was yet again being laid off of some crummy job and he would feel more keenly the many times expressed desire not to wind up like his father whom he now started call the “old man.” Josh was going through his own problems at the time from the small ones about what to do, if anything, about girls because since Pretty was attracting them in swarms he was giving Josh his “rejects” (Pretty’s term) and he had to figure out something fast and big ones like his father’s increased drinking. Which was at a new stage, he would go on three day toots (Josh’s expression picked up from his maternal grandmother who in her disapproval would call them that) without warning and without explaining where he was going, or worse, worse for Josh if he was coming back.
Pretty swore off the whole church social scene, the dances and all after that fiasco with Rosalind. Began long before Josh to miss Mass, to miss Sunday school and to forget about his obligation to confession when he did “bad” as Josh’s mother called it when Josh did so. His new plan was push him further outside the projects, and outside the church. In 1958 for all those who cared to see the initial rock and roll craze led by Elvis, Bo, Chuck Berry and Bill Haley had run its course. Had come to an impasse between parent outrage, parent outrage directed toward those sponsoring the devil’s music, school, church and town father’s outrage that youth was going to hell in a handbasket and they had to do something. Had to clamp down. Going the other direction though was this overwhelming desire of the kids to hear rock music. To hear some new stuff, to have some new teen idols. What a lot of record companies and radios stations were doing at the time was promoting talent searches, looking for the new “next Elvis” who would bring some life to their label or lift their ratings through the roof. Hell if an iterant truck driver from Tupelo down in goddam Mississippi could light up the stars then there must be some more talent out there. So all around in big towns and small talent search shows became a big thing.
That phenomenon hit North Adamsville in the winter of 1958 when WMEX the big rock station in Boston and Ducca Records sponsored a talent show there. What the radio station and record company were doing was putting on a series of local talent searches around Eastern Massachusetts with the local prize for the winner a trip to the regional finals in Boston where the prize to that winner would be a record contract. Beyond that Pretty was not sure what would happen when he told Josh about the event after reading about it in a rock magazine and seeing posters in downtown North Adamsville announcing the event.
Pretty, who really did have a decent voice and if things had worked out differently might have made it to lounge lizard status filling up the air in hotel bars and other such outlets, went all out on this on. Had Mr. Lannon the music teacher at Adamsville Junior High give him some music lessons after he, Mister Lannon, saw that he had promise. Pretty’s idea was to do a cover of the Everly Brothers’ When Will I Be Loved a song that was kind of sweet and plaintive which was the way that rock seemed to be headed, headed away from the sexy saxes and sizzling guitar licks to a more subdued beat. Headed toward music parents might even like, or at least tolerate. The talent search was going to be held at the North Adamsville High auditorium so Pretty wanted to look good to fit in with the cleaner image that rock was trying to project. He did not own a suit, and his regular school clothes were bought cheaply at the Bargain Center and a mishmash at best, or were hand-me-downs from older brothers also purchased at the “Bargie.” He started a campaign in his house to get if not a suit then a sports jacket to wear at the audition. His mother told him flat out no way could they afford to go to Robert Hall’s and pick out a jacket, forget that. They compromised on her buying material, at the Bargie of course, and her making a jacket for him.
The night of the search Pretty was all fired up, sure he was going to win, despite the competition. Looked good, looked sharp in that sports jacket his mother had just finished sewing that afternoon. The James’, Josh, Josh’s mother (not father though) and their respective siblings were in the audience and were ready to cheer him on. A lot of girls from school were there as well since this was billed as the biggest rock event to hit the town, ever. Josh came down from backstage where the performers were forming up and told his family and fans that he was number five on the card and they should not go anyway.
The first couple of acts were nothing, cheap Elvis imitations which even the singers seemed ashamed of. The third act though had Josh worried. It was a three sisters’ act doing a doo-wop classic He’s So Fine. They nailed it, nailed it tight and certainly with doo-wop, doo-wop girl groups beginning to be a rage they were in the catbird’s seat to move on. If Pretty was fazed he didn’t show it when he came on and began his song. Then the roof fell in. About half way through the song as Pretty was making some moves with his arms one of the sleeves of his jacket came off and went into the audience. The young girls started screaming in delight and two girls fought each other for the cloth. No sooner had that occurred then the other sleeve went into audience. Pandemonium. See the girls saw that as part of his act. Later, after the show, it turned out that Mrs. James had been rushed to finish the garment and only lightly sewed the sleeves in place. Naturally the judges took Pretty’s performance as some kind of wise guy novelty act and awarded the advancement to Boston to those three sisters and their doo-wop song.
The next day and for weeks after all the girls at school were all over Pretty. Needless to say the now eager Josh was ready to grab any “rejects.” Although he didn’t say much about it at the time, or later Pretty kind of snapped after that defeat, didn’t talk about a big music career after that, didn’t try-out in later talent searches. That was kind of a watershed when Josh thought back on it. Pretty started talking more about there being other ways to “get back at the world” (his expression) and smiled and laughed much less. Although Josh was rooting for Pretty those sisters really were better than Pretty but he never mentioned that to him and the whole thing faded in a blur as time when on and Pretty made new plans in his head. (Those three sisters, the Marveltones would go on to win in Boston, get that Ducca Record contract, have a single, Baby, Be Mine, and then faded from the scene as “one hit” wonders. So who knows what would have happened if Pretty had won.)
Pretty, Josh, Zack, Sam, Johnny Jams, Jimmy “Clips” and a few other kids who hung around together through junior high and had come out of the projects were not above some petty larceny to meet their “wanting habits” needs. Were what the sociologists later would call “corner boys,” lost sullen boys, juvenile delinquents, JDs, kids who would have their inevitable first brush with the law, with the courts early, would make some move that would draw legal attention, sent them all to reform school and forget them, okay kids from poor neighborhoods, and the “projects” qualified for that designation big time. While Pretty still had hopes for his music career he held those wanting habits in check, sometimes. But the “art” of being a corner boy, of emulating the older corner boys who passed on the tradition involved grabbing what you could when you could. Not figuring the consequences or if figuring the consequences would shrug them off as overhead. Hell it was going to be a short not so sweet life so what difference did it make.
The start of any larcenous career in the projects, a tradition passed down from the older boys stuck there, stuck the same way Pretty and Josh were but longer, who took note of the younger boys to help fill their depleted ranks as they headed off to the prisons or working as gear monkeys somewhere, who in their turn had learned the trade through the grapevine of the corner life going back to legendary Red Riley’s time in the late 1930s was the “clip,” the five-finger discount. (Red who wound up spending half his life in the state pen, some state pen including a stretch in New Hampshire, mostly for armed robberies was an urban legend around North Adamsville as a native son and especially when rumors were around that he was part of the great Brink’s armored truck robbery of the 1950s although that rumor was never confirmed before he passed.)
The “clip” was simplicity itself and kind of separated out the amateurs from the aficionados, separated the potential future criminals from the wannabes. Strangely, given what happened later Pretty was not the first of the boys in his corner who did the clip. That honor belonged to Jimmy “the Clip” Jenkins who wound up in real estate (don’t laugh at that seemingly fluid trajectory, please). Jimmy had moreover worked the deal solo his first time out. Had gone, and this will serve as a prime example here of the art form, up to Kelly’s Jewelry Store and grabbed an onyx ring without getting caught.
Usually though the clip worked best when there were two involved like the time that Pretty was trying to impress some girl and to show his eternal “devotion” just had to get her a ruby ring. That was harder since the more expensive rings were on a board right where Mr. Kelly could see what was going on. That’s where the second guy, in this case one Josh Breslin, worked out as a diversion asking to be shown some goof rings. Bang, done. The girl was impressed, impressed enough to give Pretty what he wanted from her, although Pretty was beautiful enough to the girls and still had a soft line of patter then he might very well had had her anyway without the ring but you never know. Of course rings and jewelry were the high end of the clip, guys might grab anything from cheapjack food or cigarettes to clothes to almost anything that seemed clip worthy.
No question the clip was the rage among the poor boys of the projects but as Pretty got older, after he had taken a few beatings in his efforts to be the king of rock and roll he got more serious about grabbing stuff. Sometimes just for the dare of it but more frequently as some kind of compensation for whatever raw deal he thought the world had shackled him with. That would culminate in Pretty’s biggest caper during Josh’s time with him, stealing a motorcycle and running wild in the streets with the damn thing when he was thirteen. This occurred just before Josh and his family finally left the projects for a single shack of a house that his mother had dreamed about, the idea of her own home that had animated her since her own youth (and who would come to regret having dreamed such dreams when his father abandoned them later in 1964 and not being able to pay the mortgage had to sell the house and move into an apartment with her brood). There were certain signposts along the way of Pretty’s switchover from basically just an average poor kid with maybe exalted dreams and crazy ass schemes and something else, a guy with a certain chip on his shoulder although on any given day, especially if some girl had pledged her undying devotion, or scheme worked out well, you would see sparks of the old Pretty.
But increasingly Pretty talked, mostly to Josh among the corner boys at Doc’s Drugstore not far from Adamsville Junior High where they hung after school, played the jukebox, gave the girls the once over, of the raw deal he and his people got in the world, and as time went on the talk centered more on the specific indignations that befell him. Not political stuff but just a gnawing feeling in his gut. It started with some odd-ball impulse “clips,” the clip of a set of golf clubs from Raymond’s Department Store just prove he could do it (he just walked out of the front door of the store pass the security guard with the clubs on his shoulder nobody thinking that someone would steal the damn things). Beyond the dare of it he had intended to sell the clubs, which he did, to grab some dough for something else he wanted.
That became the classic Pretty pattern. The motorcycle steal was something else. Although Josh was slowly drifting away from Pretty once he figured that the life of the petty criminal was just too taxing for him, more work than figuring out some other way to grab dough, more taxing that reading the books which he loved to do he still hung out with Pretty as long as his family stayed in the projects. Something about the daring element in Pretty would always attract him, as it would later with Markin in high school and beyond, and still later with Benny Gold. So he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when Pretty proposed his idea of grabbing a motorcycle from Big Boxer Bellamy. Big Boxer meaning exactly that, he was some kind of champion at the Golden Gloves, maybe semi-pro level, you know filling local small venues like the National Guard Armory with people, even women, mother women, who couldn’t afford, or who couldn’t get to the bigger arenas, so they could watch a couple of guys beat themselves bloody and sweaty, who had parlayed some small fame into getting a motorcycle. An old used Indian which still blow away every hog Harley then being touted by guys from the West Coast like Blood Madden. Yeah those were the days when Harley was touted as the big ass bike but which an Indian could blow away and have time to cool off before the other rider finished.
Of course bikes and bad boy bikers were held to some kind of almost religious worship by the younger corner boys in the projects, including, or rather especially Josh who would write many, many articles about outlaw bikers and outlaw biker culture before his rested his pen after coming across some Angels on the coast and having reading the late Hunter Thompson on the subject. Pretty, who had turned into a wiry, hard muscled, lanky tough thirteen year old whom nobody in junior high messed with after he waylaid Frankie De Angelo the then-reigning tough guy in the school just went outside Dan’s Gym where Big Boxer trained during the week and somehow “hot-wired” the ignition, revved her up and took off. Was gone half the day down toward Cape Cod, having to stop occasionally when he couldn’t figure out how to maneuver the damn thing.
By the time he got back Big Boxer had come out of gym roaring mad. Pretty just brought the bike to a stop, gave Big Boxer a look and that was that. That began the real Pretty legend. Nobody could figure out why Big Boxer, who certainly could have waylaid Pretty if it came to that, didn’t waste him. Mostly Pretty’s corner boys thought it was one tough guy recognizing another, part of the brotherhood and that was that. Josh later after meeting Angels and the like sensed that Big Boxer saw something in that Pretty look that spoke of murder and mayhem and had thought twice about his upcoming career and backed off. Nobody was going to say anything one way or the other to either youth, not and live to tell the tale. In any case that was the start of the Pretty legend that would continue as long as he drew breathe.
Even after Josh’s family moved to that hovel across town Josh not knowing any other existence except the projects continued for a while to go back to the projects to visit his old corner boys, to visit Pretty mainly to see what new and exotic thing he was up to. Here is where there were plenty of contradictions in age thirteen Pretty. He had forsaken after that last debacle talent search with the runaway jacket sleeves any thought of being a rock and roll king but still kept up a lively interest in what was happening in the rock world, always had something to say about the latest big hits. Josh loved to walk or bicycle across town to hear what Pretty had to say about the new crop of clean-cut young men who were coming up after Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Bo and the rest had died or whatever happened to them as they existed the consciousness of the be-bop rockers. He did that for the better part of a year until he realized that he had moved on a bit, wasn’t one of the old gang anymore, wasn’t on that Doc’s corner so what was he doing on their corner. He would still keep up with Pretty’s exploits, would run into him once in a while before Pretty dropped out of high school as he turned sixteen saying that there was nothing school could teach him anymore that he could get by just taking what he wanted.
That “dropping out” was after the first series of police noticing episodes which culminated his getting his own first bike, his first Norton. The highlight of that early stretch had been a daylight armed robbery of Johnny’s Esso station over in Riverdale of several hundred dollars. Everybody knew Pretty had done the deed, had been drawn in by the coppers for investigation and identification by the scared out of his mind gas jockey who when confronted with Pretty in the room denied it was him. That despite the cold hard fact that Pretty gassed up his bike there regularly. Pretty walked, and his legend grew.
Over the next couple of years Josh would hear through the interconnected corner boy grapevine, or sometimes on the radio about other small armed robberies of gas stations, liquor stores, and small supermarkets by a “lone wolf” biker in the days when such things exited before the world of either big box supermarkets or convenience stores took the air out of such ventures. There were also rumors afloat that Pretty was mixed up with a gang of professionals who were robbing banks around the South Shore in the days when there were plenty of independent small mom and pop banks just waiting to be hit. All the rumors about the gang involvement pointed to a silent young guy who was not the boss of the operation but who made sure in no uncertain terms that whoever was being held up and whoever else was in the bank at that same time did not do anything foolish-like setting off an alarm. Josh also heard that plenty of girls, older girls too, women, were pleased as hell to ride behind Pretty James Preston, a couple from North Adamsville High too who let it be known through the infallible “lav” grapevine that they gave Pretty whatever Pretty wanted, and smiled when they said that.
Mostly though Josh was caught up in the drama of his own sex life, or lack of it, lack of dough too. In those days kids could hardly wait, unlike a lot of kids today, to get their driver’s licenses and get their first car, or if need be borrow a sedate father’s sedan. Josh’s situation tended to be desperate, having neither the resources to have a car of his own not a father in the critical junior and senior years of high school who owned a car, or finally even around (that family car, interspersed with not having a car was a constant through his whole youth contingent on whether his father cared to keep up the expense of a car or spent it on whiskey at the Dublin Grille come pay day. Along the way the grim “repo” man could be seen driving away cars from in front of the house or the Grille that were being repossessed for non-payment). That was the constant problem whenever he had a date with Mimi Murphy his enflamed love from school with whom he was having trouble getting pass first base.
Josh and Mimi had met in Miss (Ms.) Soros’ English class early in junior year and both loving literature kind of struck it up when they had to do a joint book report together with a couple of other classmates who had formed a panel and gave a presentation before the class with pair basically taking the lead and the others held back. Over the course of junior year they dated, seemed to be an item although Mimi was always unhappy they couldn’t go anywhere unless they double-dated with one of her or Josh’s friends, had to take the dreaded public bus with all the other car-less geeks to places. The toughest nut to crack though with Mimi, and a source of constant anguish and frustration was that she wouldn’t “put out,” “do the do” as the Salducci Pizza Parlor corner boys called it after hearing a wild bluesman, Howlin’ Wolf, sing a song by that name on WBLM, the blues and jazz station that they would listen to when thing started to get corny on WMEX the formerly legendary local rock station that was playing some awful stuff some nights (and wouldn’t play the sexual innuendo-filled Wolf classic, Little Red Rooster).
Yeah, Mimi Murphy, red-headed, green-eyed, slender, well-proportioned with great legs wouldn’t have sex with Josh for the perfectly good, to her, reason, that she was a true blue devout Irish Catholic girl who was saving herself for marriage. And wouldn’t budge from that position. (Of course Josh when among his corner boys was lying like crazy, as they probably were to, that he was getting his way with her. Whether they believed him or not, or he them when they told the “story” nobody ever called anybody out on the question.)
Things came to a head between Josh and Mimi in the summer between their junior and senior years, or came to a head maybe was not the right way to say it but Josh’s world changed that summer. One late afternoon they were walking, Mimi still not happy about all the walking they did to get wherever they were going, down toward Adamsville Beach when they heard the roar of a motorcycle come up from behind them and then stopped in front of them blocking their way, Pretty James Preston of course. He had grown a little since Josh had last seen him, seemed too much like an adult and not a kid of eighteen but naturally if those bank robbery rumors were true he would have had to have grown up very fast or fallen down. He gave Josh a nod, a nod that turned into “long time, no see,” but also a nod and look that he had known Josh and Mimi would be walking down toward that beach sometime and this was the day that he would make his move. Without any further talk he nodded to Mimi looking to the back seat of his bike, and with no words spoken Mimi got on the back of that bike and they rode off down the boulevard. That was the very last time Josh Breslin ever saw Mimi Murphy, or Pretty either.
Josh was thunderstruck by Pretty’s audacious move like he had planned it for years to get some revenge for some supposed slight but that seemed too far-fetched. That pure- bred Mimi would take off with him in the fresh day air seemed crazy too but that was that. Over the next couple of years while he finished up high school and started college he would heard rumors about Pretty and a red-headed girl being seen at various locations in places fifty or one hundred miles away. The rumor that cut him to the quick though was the one started by Mimi’s younger sister, Martha, about the time the very next day after Mimi and Josh had the run-in with Pretty that she had gone home to grab a suitcase and some personal effects to leave with Pretty wherever he wanted to go. Mimi had told her that she had let Pretty have his way with her, had done the “do the do” and she loved it. Damn, thought Josh at the time, he really not been aware that a little more aggressiveness might have paid off. It was not until years later, after many more experiences with women, women not afraid to speak of sexual desire for themselves, that Josh realized that it took a beautiful hard-assed “take no prisoners: guy like Pretty James Preston to get Mimi’s juices flowing, to be at one with the time of her time.
One day while Josh was in his sophomore year at Boston University he happened to be home when a report came over the television that a lone armed gunman identified as James Preston had been killed in a shoot-out after attempting to rob the Braintree branch of the Granite National Bank. The sketchy first details were that the bandit had entered the bank with his gun out and told the six people present including a guard to go to a corner and be quiet. He told the bank manager to fill up the satchel he was carrying with money. The manager did so and as Pretty was leaving the guard decided for some reason to be brave and pulled his gun to shoot Pretty. He got one round off which hit Pretty in the left shoulder before Pretty shot him dead. The delay, the commotion in busy downtown Braintree in daylight, alerted the police who cornered Pretty on the Commons. In the ensuing shoot-out Pretty was killed in a hail of bullets. During the investigation into the matter later a witness had come forward identifying a young thin red-headed woman, perhaps pregnant, who was standing across the street at the time of the robbery and who when the bandit exited the bank as the police approached vanished. She was never found. Rumors later of indeterminate reliability through Martha had Mimi working in a whorehouse up in Portland, Maine or in a department store in that same town. Josh had planned to go up there sometime but he never did and the whereabouts of old flame Mimi Murphy were never discovered by him.
So ended the short sweet life of Pretty James Preston. Yeah, Josh thought as he finished his remembrances all roads led back to Markin, no question. But if you think that was the end of it, think that all roads didn’t lead back to one Pretty James Preston too you are crazy .
