***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 hotel 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, sat within earshot of a conversation between two younger men, not kids but also not some senior citizens of his recent experience on a similar subject who could draw back on ancient memories of 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, heavily tattooed as is the fashion these days among certain hard guys, or hard guy want-to-bes, woman too (long gone the simple Mother tattoo or some long forsaken woman who name sits inside a rose or a snake mid-arm. Or when a woman had a simple flower or butterfly on the back of her shoulder. Now 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.) not noticing the older man, nor attempting to hide their old time appetites freely discussed 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. 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 .

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, had come from good family, had had plenty of breaks, had plenty of educational chances, summer vacations 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, Summertown 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 Summertown was the headquarters for the famous corner boy Summer 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 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 , and besides the old geezer said “he ain’t no snitch even indirectly,” worked the middle man drug trade, the trade when the drug of choice was cocaine, sister, snow 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 (not knowing that top is fixed, had been fixed 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 is to know that fact and accept whatever position he winds up with and deal with easy street from that perch).

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 night, 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 than outside per capita and that hard time can be easier in some 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. A guy getting older, a guy who was not moving up the food chain (the slammer put a big dent in his value since he was on ice), a guy who had to look over his shoulders and maybe start putting newspaper around his bed so nobody snuck up on him was as likely to find himself being dragged out of the Mystic River one find morning as to collect his Social Security check. So he went straight, straight as an ex-con can. And so after he told his 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 Summer 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 Summer 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 Summer 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, Billie Bradley, 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. 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...