***Out In The Be-Bop 2010s Night -The Wise Guys Cometh

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

An old geezer, heating himself up in some gentle hot tub provided courtesy of the swanky hotel, swanky for him who in the distant past had slept on discarded chairs in midnight bus stations rolled newspaper for a pillow, had slept by the side of some misfit state road listening to cows mooing in the dark after being left off of some hitchhike trail, had slept under the Golden Gate Bridge when some con artist larcenies and cocaine addictions got the better of him so, yes, swanky, on the beach, room service, catered breakfast, four  o’clock high tea swanky, that he was staying in down in late season Naples (Florida that is) trying to loosen some ancient ankle injury that has recently plagued his walking moments. Since nobody wants to, or should want to, hear one more tale of woe from an aging guy who did not lead a pure life, he sat in that tub within earshot of the subject of this sketch, a quiet  conversation between two younger men, not kids but also not some senior citizens. The conversation perked his ears since he had, after rekindling some old time corner boy high school friendships, recently discussed a similar subject with those guys who could draw back on ancient memories of a time “when men were men” and “a man’s word was his bond” and there was “honor among thieves” and not just in the breech, well mainly not in the breech.

The younger men, splashing away while yakking away in the spa, heavily upper arm and shoulder tattooed telling some arcane story in ink as is the fashion these days among certain hard guys, or hard guy want-to-bes, among high-bred celebrity and low-rider biker women too (long gone the simple Mother tattoo or some long forsaken woman who name sits inside a rose or a snake mid-arm. Gone as well the days when a woman had a simple flower or butterfly on the back of her shoulder. Now all sported full-length arms, shoulders and chests to speak nothing of legs and other places tattoos must tell a story, a “to be continued” story or be filled with cryptic symbolic designs to even be noticed. Certainly as the younger men talked they were not noticing the older man, nor attempting to hide their old time appetites freely discussed about what hard knocks they had learned from the streets, the hard mean streets of drug-dealing Boston, and so the old man perked up, perked up to their tales of prior mischief. A tale of progeny corner boys. The gist of their stories were of young men gone wrong, gone wrong and able to come back from the edge and therefore provide some cautionary tale, a fate not very different from that of the old man’s.

One man’s story, the one that was representative of the two tales and so will stand for the completed conversation, call him Mike, maybe Mickey , but Mike fits here (the other guy, well, let’s call him Jimmy, yeah, Jimmy seems just about right), had come from good family, a good Italian family with strong values, serious religion, Roman Catholic of course if he had been asked, had moved out of the rough and tumble North End in Boston to a vanilla an up and coming suburb north of Boston where the Italian migration tended to drift after that first landing in the North End,  had had plenty of breaks, breaks coming easier in low-density trouble suburbs, and greased hands, had plenty of educational chances since he was pretty smart under that “street smart” exterior that every Italian kid who wanted to survive had to maintain (Mike’s comment but the old geezer knew from his own old Irish neighborhoods upbringing that same ethos applied in his case), summer vacations in a town where “to summer” had been an assumed condition of life, and such, but when it counted, when he came of manhood age, had gotten involved with some hard- time corner boys. Some corner boys from the wrong side of the tracks, Sumnertown version (a town just outside of Boston that the old man was very familiar from his own drug days a generation or so before the younger men), and for those not in the know Sumnertown was the headquarters for the famous corner boy Sumner Hill gang that wreaked havoc on Boston, its criminal justice system, its drug streets (you name the drug, and name it in quantity), its heist streets, and maybe its art treasures. Yes, guys, whether you honor thieves in the breech or the observance or not, not to be messed with, not if you wanted to live to be the old geezer’s age.

So Mike worked his way up the food chain a little, enough to handle some interesting things, things not necessary to describe here just in case the statute of limitations has not run out on that brand of interesting things, and besides the old geezer had said when he retailed the story “he ain’t no snitch, not even indirectly,” observed that rule in the observance at all times to his benefit since once a man became a snitch he was not slated to move up in the world, or maybe be of this world for long. Mike worked the middle-man drug trade, the trade when the drug of choice was cocaine, sister, snow, lots of it to fill rolled one hundred dollar bill eager noses and the route from South America was free and open to meet the high-end demand for quality coke from yuppies and other discretionary-spending types. But the “life” is full of pitfalls, full of guys who want to rise to the top, guys not knowing that the top is fixed, filled up, guys not knowing who is, and who is not, “connected” which had been fixed, been etched in blood since about 1898, and will not change, will not be un-fixed, until, until doomsday maybe and that a wise move for an up and coming soldier, a pretty smart guy and “street smart,” is to know that fact and accept whatever position he winds up with and deal with easy street from that perch. Mike knew enough to have figured that out, and if he didn’t his father took him aside one day and gave him the one-two.

[Mike also related a story that showed he knew that part of the program. A guy he grew up with, a friend and some kind of distant cousin, Guido, Mike called him had a small group of corner boys who hung around one of the suburban shopping malls since out in suburbia there are no accessible pizza parlors, drugstores, or convenience stores to put your knee against the wall of, was moving up the chain just like Mike, except he was a little greedy, wanted to move up too fast, or maybe go off on his own. So he cut some corners, who knows what, although the old geezer could not hear what Mike and Jimmy were saying at that point since Mike was whispering the tale, but he wound up very dead on the Chelsea side of the Mystic River Bridge so you know he had not taken some candy from a store or something like that. That bloated body of Guido kept everybody straight for a while, as it was meant to do, until the next fast-moving short-cut guy winds up on the Charlestown side of the bridge or someplace like that. The old geezer, once he heard that last part, which Mike spoke of in his normal voice, remembered back to his own corner boy days when his best friend from childhood, from the “projects,” Pete Markin made his own Guido decision, trying to go “independent” with two bricks of cocaine in a suitcase he was “muling” for the boys down in Sonora, Mexico and had gotten two slugs in the heart and face down in some dusty back street for his efforts.]          

Mike fell down on the hardest pitfall of all though, he sampled the merchandise, like what he sampled, and that started him on the slippery slope to many bad judgments and many nights, many nights of “walking with the king.” Until the other shoe dropped. And that is where the other pitfall came in, the one where the upwardly mobile guy stumbles, and about twelve guys are about to rat him out, rat him out to the next guy up in the food chain, but more likely to “uncle.” To “uncle” (used here generically but it could be the feds all the way down to some podunk cop on the beat) in order to clear the path for themselves, or to fix some “uncle” problem that they had to try to get out from under. A snitch in plain English.

And so Mike fell, fell hard, did a nickel’s worth for his troubles. But he made two smart moves during his stir time, one, he dried out (hard, very hard to do in stir where there is probably more dope per capita than outside and that hard time can be done easier in some 24/7/365 dope haze), dried out for good, and after he did his time, after he took the fall he looked at his percentages to see which way the winds blew for him. This is how it looked to him in the clear light of day. A guy getting older, a guy who was not moving up the food chain (the slammer had put a big dent in his value since he was on ice and by then twelve other hungry guys had been eying, and one had taken his spot), a guy who had to look over his shoulders and maybe start putting newspaper around his bed so nobody snuck up on him and was as likely to find himself being dragged out of the Mystic River one fine morning as to collect his Social Security check. So he went straight, straight as an ex-con can. And so after he told his Jimmy companion, his brawny beefy companion, his story and the brawny guy responded with his tale they both began to speak of family-friendly cars, of the virtues of buying houses in Florida, with or without swimming pools, and where they were headed that night with their families for a big beef-infested dinner. Main Street stuff, future Social Security check stuff.

The old geezer thought about that story, thought about how he knew Mike’s story line almost before he had finished his tale. See he had grown up, grown up hard in North Adamsville, a town with its own Sumner Hill-type gang moving everything that could be moved in the way of illegal materials, and were hooked into the Boston prostitution rackets as well (the Sumner Hill gang out of some Irish, or some Catholic, or some both thing would not traffic in women, at least, that was their reputation, although that might have been honored in the breech as well). He, when young, much younger than when Mike took his vows, had been in the junior division of a corner boy gang much like the Sumner Hill cadre and he had many corner boy friends who would wind up face down in some ditch, doing nickels and dimes in the slammer, or being uncle’s pet.

He had, around the age of twelve, done a fair share of kid’s stuff “clips” (petty theft at jewelry stores and department stores), a fair share of look-out work for some older boys who were doing midnight shifts (breaking and entering in the nighttime, burglary, armed robberies of gas stations), had been best friend with the corner boy king, junior division, that Pete Markin mentioned before, later, 1960s later, manhood time later, found face down in a dusty Sonora, Mexico street after a drug deal when south on him, and had for a minute that twelve- years old summer began to think about easy street. Then just as quickly he stopped, figured out what the percentages were, or were not, and moved on. Although he later had his fair share of lonesome hitchhike roads, skid- row dumps, scads of socially-induced addictions, and women troubles just like every guy. But for just one minute while Mike was speaking he remembered what a thrill it was to go for easy street, go for glory or broke, and maybe, just maybe, still have avoided Mike’s fate...