***Out On The Mean Streets- “Brother,
Can You Spare A Dime?”-Take Two
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
“Hey, brother (or sister), can you
spare a dime?,” followed by “Got an extra cigarette, pal (or gal)?” Yah, Billy
Bailey, used-to-be brash corner boy William James Bailey, certainly had the
panhandler lingo down, down pat, after only a few days on the bum. Had his new “profession”
down as one might have expected from a Southie corner boy, the corner brick
wall in front of Ma’s Variety over on Broadway,
circa 1965 who had learned a few things in his time about the youthful clip (grabbing
stuff from jewelry and department stores without paying, okay), the jack-roll
(taking down a drunk or some poor wandering sap with a sap and leaving him penniless
for being at the wrong place at the wrong time) and the midnight grift (a step
up from the clip, taking stuff from houses not one’s own and selling it cheap through some shyster fence). This stuff
was easy compared to that, and the couple of three month sentences he received courtesy
of the county and state when he couldn’t explain why he had somebody’s stuff, somebody
who had reported that stuff as stolen. The overhead of the profession he called
in those days, those days when the world looked a lot rosier that it did just that
moment. Yah , he had never been on the bum then whatever else happened .
Worse though on the bum in his own
home town, his ever-loving’ roots, Boston. On the bum this time, this time a as
a result of a real fall from grace fall, and not just some a vagrant short
money, pick up some spare change, free campsite, Volkswagen bus pick-up sharing
stews, brews and dope hitchhike road looking for the great blue-pink American
West night with some honey, some Angelica honey, bum like a few years back
after he had caught that breeze blowing through his generation’s window. Had
given up as nothing but hubris and bad odor those old corner boy habits and had
taken up a new age aura, had gotten “religion” about that peace and love
stuff. For a while.
In those “for a while” days he
practically made a religion, yah a religion out of living “free,” living out of
the knapsack, living under a bridge in some makeshift reinforced cardboard hut,
or living out in the open, before roaring campfires and hell broth kitchen sink
stews, with some interesting railroad jungle camp brothers, no sweat, if
need be. But those “golden days” had dried up a few years back and now in 1976
he was facing a real skid row choice. How it happened that he came face to face
with such a decision after that new age aura had turned to ashes, had turned in
on itself, had turned nasty and greed-headed, if there was such a word, and
started looking very much like that hard-edged corner boy night that he had
grown up in we will get to along the way. First though let’s set the parameters
of what 1976 panhandling, to put an eloquent name on it for “bumming”,
shiftless bumming , looked like and how to survive in the new new age of
everybody me-ing themselves, even with people who were not on the bum. Christ,
lord the times were hard, hard times in old Babylon, no question.
See, a guy, a guy who called himself
“Shorty” McGee for obviously physical reasons but who knows what his real name
was, maybe he didn’t remember either after all the rum-dum sterno heat years
and the endless backsides of skid row haunts, that he had hitched up with for a
minute, an overnight minute at the Salvation Harbor Lights Center over in the
South End kind of hipped him to the obvious tricks of the new down-at the-heels
road. Like putting the two requests together deal when you were panhandling,
the request for dough and then for a cigarette or coffee or something, anything
to keep you moving, hustling, grabbing. Shorty said it was all a matter of psychology,
of working the crowd, the downtown crowd, the bustling Park Street Station
crowd, and the Copley Square sunning themselves crowd just right. The idea was
that to get you out of their sights and back to whatever sweet thing they were
doing that would piece you off with something and if not money then cigarettes
or something like that which could be parlayed into something else in trade. So
you endlessly put the two requests together, time after time after time, and
always. And what happened was that when they turned you down for the dough, or
maybe took you literally and pieced you off with just a dime or a quarter,
Christ a dime that wouldn’t even buy a cup of joe, they could feel good about
themselves, if they smoked, smoked cigarettes anyway, by passing you a butt.
Billy thought, nice, this Shorty
really does have it worked out just about right. Of course dimes and drags were
not going to get him out from under, not this time.
Well, rather than leaving the reader
out in the dark, Billy Bailey that fair 1976 spring was not just on the bum,
but on the lam as well, keeping his head very far down, very far down indeed, just
in case there were some guys who were looking for him, including a few corner
boys who wanted a desperate word with him. Or worse, the cops, in case some
irate victim of one of his scams took a notion to “fry his ass.” and yelled for
the law. Of course he was counting on them, those victims, being mainly friends
and acquaintances, of the new age variety although in the end he tapped down to
those corner boy roots, of not putting “the heat” on him since he had already
promised through the grapevine that he would make restitution. But we are
getting a little ahead of the story, let’s step back.
The early 1970s were not kind to
“free spirits” the previous name for what in 1976 were “free-loaders,” strictly
drifters, grifters and midnight shifters, and Billy, well, got behind in his
expenses, and his bills, his ever expanding bills. You know keeping company
with some honeys over on Beacon Street who were getting their kicks from slumming
with jailbird corner boys before going off to marry some high-priced corporate lawyer
of stockbroker who known the family for years and keeping the lid one a growing
jones as result of sharing kicks with those Beacon Street swells. See the
transition, the fast transition, from free “s” to free “l” caught him
off-guard, moreover he was just then in the throes of a fit of “the world owes
me a living,” a serious fit. Why? Well see, he as a pauper son of the desperate
working poor, “felt” that since he missed out on the golden age benefits of his
youth that he was to make up the difference by putting the “touch” on the
richer (not really rich but richer than he knew of, no question) friends that
he had acquired through his doing this and that, mainly high-end drug
connections. And sampling the merchandise to, well, this is the way he put it, “get
him well.”
The long and short it was that he
would “borrow” money off Friend A under some scam pretext of putting it to good
use (yes, his good use, including several long airplane fight trips to
California and other points west-no more hitchhike roads for this moving up the
food chain lad once he hipped to the changed scene) and then borrow dough off
Friend B to cover some of his debt to Friend A. Something like an unconscious
classic Ponzi scheme, as it turned out. And then when he got to Friend X or somewhere
around there things got way too complicated and he started “kiting” checks, and
on and on as far deep into his white- collar crime mind as he could think. Frankly
though Billy was strictly muscle, strictly the hired gun, strictly the gofer and
so he got in way over his head. That Ponzi scheme could only go on a for a
short while and he calculated that "short while" almost to the day
when he would have to go “underground” and that day had sprung up a couple of
weeks before.
So it took no accountant or
smart-ass attorney to know that dimes and drags, whatever the virtues of Shorty’s
insights into the human psyche were not going to get him back on his feet. Nor
many of the schemes that Shorty had outlined over at Harbor Lights as ways to
grab quick cash. These were chicken feed for his needs, even his immediate
needs, although some of the scams would fill the bill for a rum-dum or
life-long skid row bum. But here was the secret, the deep secret that Billy
Bailey held in his heart, after a few nights on bus station benches, cold
spring night park benches, a night bout under the Andersen Bridge over by old
haunt Harvard Square, and a few nights that he would rather not discuss just in
case, he finally figured out, figured out kicking and screaming, that the world
did not owe him a living and that if he wanted to survive past thirty he had
better get the stardust and grit out of his eyes. But just this minute, just that
underground spring 1976 minute, he needed to work the Commons. “Hey, brother,
hey sister, can you spare a dime?” “Pal, have you got an extra cigarette?”
Postscript:
Not all wisdom found ends happily, no matter how preciously fought for, and not
all good intentions grow to fruition. Yes, Billy paid off his debts to his
friends, mostly. (Not by that damn Shorty diems and drags strategy but by
picking up a working relationship with a street hustler who turned him on to the
growing cocaine industry as the way to get well, well with those who wanted to “fry
his ass” first and foremost. Of course Billy could not leave well enough alone,
couldn’t see that the thing was fixed from the beginning and rather than work his
way up the food chain he got the bright idea that he would go independent. Billy
Bailey was killed, murdered under suspicious circumstances never really
investigated, left face down in some dusty back road while “muling” some product in a drug war
shoot-out in Juarez, Mexico in late 1979. That was the official Federales
report anyway, not much to hang a life on. Other sources, not narcs, said that
Billy tried to skim a little something off the top, maybe a couple of kilos of
cocaine, while he was doing that muling and took a couple of facedown slugs for
his efforts. Billy Baily’s life was apparently so inconsequential that it was
two years before his widowed mother found out what had happened to him through a
hired private eyes she sent to Mexico- Jesus, maybe Billy’s should have stuck
with dimes and drags-RIP Billy Bailey.
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