"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa by Charles Brandt Read Free Book Online

way my father used to whenever I lost one of his beer bets for him. “You fat fuck,” I said and jumped up and decked him. I broke his jaw, and they expelled me permanently on the spot.
    Naturally, I knew what to expect when my father got home. I had a lot of time to think about it, but all I could think about was breaking the principal’s jaw with just one punch, a grown man.
    My father walked in the door steaming mad and threw the boxing gloves at me hard. I caught them, but this time I threw them back at him. I said, “You better take another look.” I was sixteen, almost seventeen, by then. “I won’t hit you,” I said. “You’re my father. But you better get yourself another punching bag.” ”

 
     
      chapter four  
     
     
    Little Egypt University
     
    “ And then I joined the carnival. The highlight of every spring in Philadelphia was the arrival of the Regent traveling carnival. They would set up their tents on Seventy-second Street near Island Avenue. There was absolutely nothing out there then but long stretches of grassland. It was just the way the Indians left it. Today it’s wall-to-wall car dealerships.
    As big a city as it was and as close as it was to New York City, Philadelphia had a small-town feel to it. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had blue laws that didn’t allow bars to be open on Sunday. No stores were open. It was the day of worship. Even later on when night baseball came in, the Philadelphia Phillies and the Philadelphia Athletics could play baseball at Shibe Park on Sunday only while there was daylight. They weren’t allowed to turn on the stadium lights on Sunday. Many a Sunday game was called on account of darkness. You never picked up a paper and read about Prohibition gangland killings or any of that stuff that went on in New York, just a couple of hours away on the Pennsylvania Railroad. So the carnival coming to Philadelphia was very big entertainment.
    After I got expelled from Darby High, I had been working at odd jobs, bagging groceries at Penn Fruit, and, depending on the weather, hitchhiking up to Paxon Hollow Golf Course to caddy. I was living at home, which still meant moving around a lot to beat the rent. Maybe all that moving around every time the rent came due gave me my restless streak, and that restless streak burst out like so many buds on a tree that spring when the carnival arrived.
    My best buddy at the time was Francis “Yank” Quinn. He was a year older than me and had finished high school. A few years later he went on to college and into the service as a second lieutenant. He saw plenty of combat in Europe. But I never ran into him over there. Later on after the war we played football together at Shanahan’s Catholic Club. Yank was the quarterback.
    One warm night Yank and I, with a dollar between us to spend but not a steady job between us, went to the carnival to look around, and the next thing you know we both had taken laborer jobs to travel with the show on their New England tour. All my young life I wanted to get out of Philadelphia and see the world, and now I was doing it and getting paid for it.
    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