***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.