***The Real Scoop Behind “Brother,
Can You Spare A Dime?”
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. Worst though
on the bum in his own home town, his ever-loving’ roots, Boston. On the bum
this time, this time a real fall and not just some 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.
In those days he practically made a
religion, yah a religion out of living “free,” living out of the knapsack,
living under a bridge, or some railroad jungle camp, no sweat, if need be. But
those “golden days” dried up a few years back and now in 1976 he was facing a
real skid row choice. How it happened he will get to along the way but first
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
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. See, 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 to get
you out of their sights and back to whatever sweet thing they were doing. 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, 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 this fair 1976 spring was not just on the bum,
but on the lam as well, keeping his head very far down just in case there were
some guys who were looking for him, or worst, the cops, in case some irate
victim of one of his scams took a notion to “fry his ass.” Of course he was
counting on them, those victims, being mainly friends and acquaintances, 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 on this day were “free-loaders” and
Billy, well, got behind in his expenses, and his bills, his ever expanding
bills. But see the 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.
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) 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. That 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 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 were. 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 is 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
this 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 ends happily, and not all good intentions grow to fruition. Yes,
Billy paid off his debts to his friends, mostly. However, Billy Bailey was
killed, 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. Other sources 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-RIP Billy Bailey.
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