"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (7 page)

I worked for the barker in the girlie show. Regent had two girlie dancers, something like the old go-go dancers they came out with in the seventies. Only the carny dancers had more clothes on. They left a lot up to the imagination of the customers. The two girlie dancers were Little Egypt, the brunette who dressed as if she had oozed out of an Aladdin’s lamp, and Neptune of the Nile, the blond who wore a series of blue veils as if she had bubbled up out of the deep blue sea. They worked one at a time and did their exotic dances on a stage inside their own tent. The barker would promote the show, and I would collect fifty cents from the customers and give them their tickets.

The Regent shows were pure variety entertainment, like the old Ed Sullivan show on TV. They had jugglers, acrobats, games where people could win Kewpie dolls, a knife thrower, a sword swallower, and a band playing circus songs. There was no gambling going on. The customers didn’t really have any money to gamble. It was the height of the Depression. No matter what they say, the Depression didn’t end until the war came. And we laborers certainly didn’t have any money to gamble. The laborers were mostly runaways and people without roots. Everybody was very decent, though—no troublemakers.

Yank and I would help set up the tents and the seats for the customers and take it all down when we traveled on. If there was any trouble—maybe fighting going on among the customers—the local law would just tell us to pack up and leave town. If business was good and we were getting a good reception from the crowds we’d stay about ten days. Otherwise, if we weren’t making any money, we would pack up and move on in search of a better reception. We played a lot of small towns in places like Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and outside of Boston.

We moved around in run-down trucks and old beat-up cars, and we slept outdoors on blankets under the stars. This was no Ringling Brothers; it was a honky-tonk carnival. I guess you could say that my childhood of moving around with my family like nomads in the desert prepared me for the inconveniences of this life.

They didn’t pay us much, but they fed us and the food was good and solid. Lots of hearty beef stew that smelled wonderful in the outdoors. It couldn’t touch my mother’s cooking, but not much could. If it rained we’d sleep under the trucks. I got my first taste of moonshine on the road with that carnival under a truck in the rain. I really didn’t care for it. I actually didn’t develop the drinking habit until during the war. I did my first real drinking in Catania, Sicily. The first time I tasted red wine it became my drink of choice and stayed that way all my life.

One morning at a stop on the road in Brattleboro, Vermont, the rain came pouring down and didn’t let up all day. There was mud everywhere. And no customers, no fifty cents to collect, and no tickets to give out. Little Egypt saw me standing around breathing hot air into my hands trying to keep warm and took me aside and whispered in my ear. She asked me if I wanted to spend the night in her tent with her and Neptune. I knew they liked me and I said “yeah, sure.” Yank would have to sleep under a truck, but I was going to be nice and dry for the night.

After the show I took my blankets and went to their dressing room, which smelled like perfume the second you walked in. Their dressing room was in a tent that they also slept in. Little Egypt was resting on her bed with pillows fluffed up behind her and she said, “Why don’t you take your clothes off and get comfy? They must be wet.”

By this time I was seventeen. I hesitated a little bit, not sure if she was kidding, and she asked me: “Have you ever been with a woman?”

And I told her the truth, which was “no.”

“Well you’re going to be with one tonight,” Little Egypt said and laughed. She got up from the bed and lifted my shirt up over my head. I was standing there topless.

“Make that two women,” Neptune of the Nile chimed in from behind me, also laughing. Then she whistled at me. I must have turned red.

And that was the night I lost my cherry. I had been stored up for years before then. I didn’t believe in masturbation. The church was against it, but I was, too. There was something about it that I didn’t think was right.

After I had my first lovemaking session with Little Egypt in control, Neptune asked me to come over to her bed and Little Egypt gave me a little shove. When I got there, Neptune of the Nile asked me first to lick her. I stammered and said, “I waited long enough for this much, I can wait a little longer for that.” In those days, believe it or not, oral sex on a woman was considered a sin and a scandal. At least in Philadelphia.

When I got inside of Neptune of the Nile, she looked as if she was watching my face for a reaction. When she saw my eyes suddenly pop open real wide Neptune said, “Get all of this while you can, young fellow, it’ll make you a complete man. I’ve got a snapper. You won’t see a snapper too often.” And oh Mother of Mercy did she ever! I thought
I
had muscles.

All that night I made up for a lot of lost time, going from bed to bed with those two highly experienced grown women. Those two were wild women. I was young and strong then. The next morning I thought, how long has this been going on? What the hell have I been missing? Little Egypt and Neptune of the Nile gave me a college education in how to please a woman. There were no books in those days and around the neighborhood you got your sex education from your bragging friends who knew less than you did.

I spent a lot of nights in that tent, mostly with Little Egypt, falling asleep in her bed with her long brown hair all over us, smelling of perfume, and cuddling together. Poor Yank, sleeping out in the cold on the damp ground. I don’t think he ever forgave me. (Yank was a good man who lived a good life. He never did anything wrong. He died before his time, while I was still in jail. They wouldn’t let me come home on a pass for his funeral. Not even for my brother’s or sister’s funerals. Yank managed O’Malley’s Restaurant on the West Chester Pike, and he wrote me in jail that he was going to throw a great big welcome home party for me when I got out, but poor Yank got a heart attack and it killed him.)

When we reached Maine with the carnival the summer was mostly over. It was around September, and the Regent show always went south to Florida to spend the winter down there. We were in Camden, Maine, when the show closed. About forty miles away there was a logging camp that we heard was doing some hiring, so off Yank and I went on a dirt road into the woods on foot. I knew I was going to miss Little Egypt, but there was no more work for me with the carnival once we tore down camp for the last time and got the trucks loaded.

The logging company hired us both. They put Yank in the kitchen helping the cook. On account of my size they put me on a two-man saw. I was too young to fell the big trees, but I sawed the branches off the trees and turned them into logs once they were on the ground. Then bulldozers would push the logs into the river and they’d float downstream to a point where trucks would load them. Sawing those trees all day was hard work. I was only about 6'1" then and weighed about 175 pounds, and after nine months of that work there wasn’t an ounce of fat on me.

We slept in little shacks they had set up with potbellied wood-burning stoves and we ate—you guessed it—stew and more stew. After a day of sawing logs by hand you never tasted food so good.

We saved what little money we made because there was no place to spend it. Neither Yank nor I played cards with the men or they’d have cleaned us out.

They had a wild form of rugby they played on Sundays. I played a lot of that. I never did catch on to the rules, if there were any. It was just a lot of knocking each other down.

It seemed like every night that it didn’t snow we had boxing matches in a roped-off section that was like a ring. They didn’t have any gloves up there, and so the fighters would wrap their fists in bandages. Everybody wanted to see the big kid fight the men who were in their late twenties and thirties, so by popular demand I participated a lot in those matches. It reminded me of my father pairing me up with older boys to win beer bets. Including my own father, it seemed like I was always matched against people older than me. Only these loggers could hit even harder than my father. I lost many a fight, but I could always hit, too, and I learned an awful lot of tricks.

I think you’re born with the ability to hit. Rocky Marciano didn’t start boxing until after the war when he was already twenty-six, but he was a natural hitter. You need leverage, but a lot of your power comes from your forearm down into your wrist. There’s a snap to your punch that comes from your wrist to your fist, and that’s what knocks the other guy out. You can actually hear that snap; it sounds like a pistol shot when it’s working to perfection. Joe Louis had that famous six-inch punch. He’d knock a guy out with a punch that only traveled six inches. His power came from the snap. It’s like snapping a towel at somebody’s butt. There’s no power in your arms.

Then if you learn a trick or two besides, you’re set for life. They say Jack Dempsey learned all the tricks of fighting as a thirteen-year-old working in the mining camps of Colorado. I can believe that about Dempsey after my nine months in the deep woods of Maine.

We hitchhiked back to Philly that next summer, and all of a sudden we found we had a new interest besides boxing—chasing girls. I worked two or three jobs, whenever I could find work, until I got an apprenticeship at the Pearlstein Glass Company at Fifth and Lombard. It was a commercial area then just off South Street; now it’s where the young kids go to shop. I was studying to be a glazier. I learned how to set windows in all the big buildings in town. Sometimes I worked in the shop grinding bevels on the glass. I learned a lot, and it was nowhere near as hard work as logging. At the end of a workday I still had plenty of energy left to compete against Yank for the neighborhood girls.

My secret weapon against Yank was my dancing. Most big men are clumsy and heavy-footed, but not me. I had a good sense of rhythm and I could move every part of my body. I had very fast hands, too, and good coordination. Swing music was sweeping the country and social dancing was all the rage. I went dancing six nights a week (never on a Sunday) to a different hall every night. That’s how you learned the dances. You learned by going dancing. They all had certain steps, unlike today where you just make it up as you go along. After the war, one of the jobs I had was a ballroom dance instructor.

In 1939, when I was nineteen, my dance partner, Roseanne De Angelis, and I took second place in the fox-trot competition against 5,000 other couples in Madison Square Garden in the Harvest Moon Ball dance contest. Roseanne was some graceful dancer. I met her up at the Garden before the contest when her partner got hurt on the dance floor during practice. My partner got tired and worn out, so Roseanne and I teamed up. The Harvest Moon was the biggest event in dancing in the whole country. It was sponsored every year by the
New York Daily News.
Many years later I taught my daughters how to dance, every kind of dance, even the tango and the rumba.

I made good money at Pearlstein’s, almost $45 a week. That was more than my father made at the Blessed Virgin Mary. Out of that money I paid room and board at home so we didn’t have to keep moving. My sister, Peggy, was still in school and worked after school at the A&P as a stocker. My brother, Tom, was out of the house. He had dropped out of school and joined the CCC, a youth conservation corps that Roosevelt had set up to provide jobs for the youth on account of the Depression. The young men would go to camps set up in rural areas around the country, and they’d work on conservation projects.

Most of the money I had leftover from paying my parents out of my Pearlstein’s pay was spent in the dance halls. There wasn’t a lot left over to spend on dates with the girls, but Yank and I found ways to have fun without money. One afternoon I took a pretty young Irish girl with freckles buck-bathing in the creek off Darby Road, where Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital is now. The creek was about a hundred yards from the road. Yank snuck up on us and swiped our clothes. Then he stood up at the top of the hill near the road and yelled down for the girl I was with to come out of the water, get dressed, and go with him or he’d leave with her clothes, too. So she came out and went off with him and he gave a kid a quarter to hold onto my clothes until Yank and the girl got out of sight and then drop them back down by the creek and run like hell.

I’m sure I played a trick back on him; I just don’t remember exactly which trick it was. Did I spread the rumor that a pregnant girl he didn’t even know was his responsibility? Probably. Did I give him a hot foot? No doubt. But that’s about all we did. Played jokes. Walked around and messed around. We were no longer boxers and fighters and road warriors; we were lovers and dancers. I had been to the Little Egypt University and the Neptune of the Nile Graduate School, and it was my duty to the young maidens of the City of Brotherly Love not to let all that good education go to waste.

I had the ideal carefree young man’s life—the Life of Riley—popular with the girls, good pals, no responsibilities; a life where your only real job is to build memories for the rest of your days. Except I couldn’t stay put. I was impatient. I had to move on. Pretty rapidly I found myself halfway around the world. But by then I no longer could have the luxury to be impatient. I had to do things the Army’s way: hurry up and wait.
”

 
chapter five