Earl the Pearl

by Earl Monroe

  We never really thought about dying or what would happen if one of those bullets ever hit us. But the sound of those bullets whizzing by our heads and ricocheting bang! bang! bang! off walls and concrete did scare us! No question about it. But only for that moment. Plus, we were having fun. Just like all young kids, we knew better than to get in the way of those passing trains or bullets because we could have gotten ourselves killed. Our parents had warned us about those trains, and every kid in the neighborhood knew better, though we still did it.

  For most of the time when I was real young, I didn’t have a lot of close friends. My sister Theresa hadn’t been born yet. So I created this imaginary friend named Tommy, who was my sidekick. Tommy would come along with me when I rode my broomstick pony. Like I said, I saw myself as a cowboy, and every cowboy needs a sidekick. Like the Lone Ranger had Tonto, I had Tommy. He was also my friend, even though he was invisible, and I used to do everything with him. I’d talk to him.

  “Hey, Tommy,” I’d say. “What do you think we should do here? Let’s go in the other room.” Or I’d say, “Let’s ride up on Cowboy Hill and see what’s up there.” Things like that. I invented Tommy when I was three or four years old and he stayed with me for a long while.

  I outgrew Tommy’s usefulness and probably stopped talking to him and riding with him about the time Theresa was born, because then I had somebody else around. Maybe it was a couple of years after she was born that Tommy disappeared from my life. But while he was there, Tommy and I would play horsey on my broomstick pony and have great conversations.

  Around this time, besides riding my broomstick pony, I was also learning how to ride the bicycle my mother had bought me. But I kept falling off it and cutting up my legs, arms, and hands until my cousin Jimmy showed me how to ride it. Then, after that—I must have been about seven or eight—I had no problem riding it.

  I remember one time in the winter, when I was around that same age, I went on up Cowboy Hill with some friends to ride our sleds down the hill. Anyway, I was belly flopping down on my sled when some older guys started throwing snowballs at us from the trestle. One of them hit me in the eye and I couldn’t see. So I crashed into a wall and the back of the sled cut through my pants into my leg. Now, at first I didn’t know I was injured because my leg wasn’t hurting and I couldn’t see where I was hurt. But then when I started walking home I began to limp and I felt a pain in my leg. When I got home I told Ma what had happened and she took down my pants and we saw this big hole in my leg, all the way to the bone, with little pieces of flesh hanging to the sides and whatnot. Anyway, my mother screamed and I started crying. She bundled me up and immediately took me to the hospital—I think it was Philadelphia General, or the University of Pennsylvania Hospital—to get my leg fixed.

  After we arrived at the hospital, we just sat there for two hours. Nobody came out to deal with us. Because my leg was hurting really bad by now, I started whimpering from the pain. When Ma heard me whimpering she became enraged and started screaming at people behind the counter, telling them off. Then I remember looking around and seeing this heavyset older black lady, who was probably homeless, with bandages wrapped around her huge legs and feet, just sitting there in a chair. I guess I started looking at her because she looked kind of strange, you know, and had a look on her face I couldn’t quite comprehend.

  After a while a nurse came over and unwrapped her feet and legs. Maggots started crawling out of her feet, and the nurse jumped back with a look of horror in her eyes. Maggots! I couldn’t believe it! I almost threw up! When the nurses saw the maggots they immediately started talking about amputating the lady’s feet and legs because they were gangrenous. To this day I don’t know how she was walking around. But she was.

  Finally, after Ma’s ranting and raving, a doctor came over to see me. When he saw the big hole in my leg, he said, “Oh, we didn’t think it was this bad!”

  Then they rushed me into a room and stitched me up. But I still, to this day, have a V-shaped scar on my leg.

  That woman with the maggots crawling out of her feet always stood out in my memory as being really weird. But I saw some other strange people on Alter Street, and some of them were really funny, like Mr. Sonny Man, who had the longest tongue I have ever seen! When I first started noticing him I was around seven or eight and he was maybe in his forties or early fifties—I don’t really know how old he was. I would see him around on weekends, sitting on somebody’s steps, licking his long, snakelike tongue out of his mouth, licking it up across his eyebrows, sticking it in one of his ears, or curling it to the back or top of his head. He was a really strange-looking person, kind of like Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch or one of the other characters Antonio Fargas played in the movies and on TV.

  Mr. Sonny Man would be dressed in khakis and a little shirt, with a vest on top of the shirt and a cap on his head. He was kind of thin and he would always be drunk when I saw him, making some unintelligible slurping sounds like blawo, blawo, blawo, blah, his mouth wide open as he did all kinds of weird things with that long, snakelike tongue of his. No one in the neighborhood was afraid of Mr. Sonny Man because he was harmless, wouldn’t hurt a fly. People just thought he was funny and weird, you know what I mean? People walking by would be looking at him amazed, shaking their heads and calling out his name: “Mr. Sonny Man, goddamn, Mr. Sonny Man, why you be doing your tongue like that!”

  Then they would laugh, shake their heads, and walk away. Sonny Man was there until he wasn’t there after I moved off Alter Street when I was 11. I never saw him again after I moved, never knew what happened to him, because no one I knew ever mentioned his name.

  My Aunt Mary, my mother’s sister, lived down on Manton Street, about five blocks from where we lived. The neighborhood where I grew up was on the borderline between Italian and Irish communities. At the time white people were white, and there were no distinctions made between Italians, Irish, or whatever else on my part. But we did know about the Jewish people, because Mr. Rosenberg, our insurance man, was Jewish, and he wore a yarmulke. So there was interaction between Jews, Irish, Italians, and African-Americans, even if it wasn’t that much.

  In 1952, when I was around eight years old, I remember my mother asking me to go get something from the store that the little Jewish man named Mr. Siegel—I don’t remember his first name—owned. (This happened before my parents bought the three-story house that had Mr. Siegel’s grocery store on the ground floor, which was down the street from Aunt Mary.)

  Anyway, his store was located at 1217 South 26th Street at Manton Street, a few blocks from where we lived on Alter Street. Now, I used to hear some of the older black people at our house and in the neighborhood say, when they sent someone to get some groceries from Mr. Siegel, “Go get me some bread from the dirty Jew.”

  They used to call him that name because a lot of people thought he was cheap and cheated black customers out of their money. At least that’s what I heard them say. So when my mother sent me to buy something from Mr. Siegel—I don’t remember if Ma called him “the dirty Jew” or not, but she generally didn’t use that kind of language—I just went. But since I had never been there before, when I walked into the store and saw him, I just called him by the name I had heard everyone else use when they talked about him.

  “Is this the dirty Jew’s store?” I said.

  He was a short old man, kind of feisty, and he looked at me real hard, then shook his head.

  “How would you like it if I called you a dirty nigger?” he asked.

  I looked at him dumbfounded because I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “Well, this must be the place then,” I said.

  He kind of laughed at that. Maybe he thought it was funny. I don’t know what he thought. But I did understand. I just didn’t realize what I was saying when I called him by that name (neither one of those slurs—“dirty Jew” or “dirty nigger”—registered with me, because I was too young to even know what they meant). So I just stood
there until he gave me whatever it was my mother had sent me to get. Then I paid him his money, got whatever change back he owed me, and left.

  That was the last time I ever used that term, though, or any derogatory expression like that. I think it was my first lesson in race relations, and it’s a realization that I soon came to truly understand. Like I said, growing up in South Philadelphia back in those days, there was no real distinction made between Jewish, Italian, and Irish people, because everyone of those groups were just white people to me. You were either white, black, or Puerto Rican, like Pedro, who lived two doors away from me. That’s the only thing I knew, and there weren’t too many Puerto Ricans or Chinese people around either, at least not down there where I lived. So for the most part it was black or white and that was that. But after the incident with Mr. Siegel, my mother explained the differences between the races to me. She told how what people say to each other and how they say it could be harmful in this regard. So I began to understand that words were important, that you could insult people from all different races if you used dirty, nasty words to call them by, whether you meant to hurt them or not. So I learned to think about what I said and called people after that; it was a very important lesson.

  There were some really bad people around the neighborhood, like the guys in a gang called the Sharks, who were notorious. The same was true of some of the guys in my neighborhood who were members of a gang called The Road, which my cousin Jimmy was the leader of. Most of the folks that lived around there were scared to death of them. Added to the members of Sharks and The Road were hard-nosed neighborhood guys like Jasper, who went off to jail all the time, and when he came out nobody wanted to run up against him or get on his bad side. Jasper never seemed to be able to acclimate himself to living on the outside, so after a while he just stayed in jail and I never saw him again. Then there was a guy named Ostell who had the body of an Adonis. He played football and boxed, and after he went to jail for something—I don’t remember what—it became obvious that he was gay. But being gay didn’t stop him from being rough and tough; he just liked having sex with men.

  We used to go over to Aunt Mary’s house a lot, and she and her sons, Jimmy, Bobby, and Joe, would come over to our house often, too. Aunt Mary’s last name was Hill, and she had one of the nicest brick houses on Manton Street. She drove a yellow and white 1954 or ’55 Chevrolet Bel Air, and she was always dressed to the nines—real sharp. I remember her with furs around her neck, rings and necklaces, expensive dresses and shoes. She was a portly, dark woman, and because she was always so well dressed and seemed to have it all together, she reminded me of some of the women on the Amos ’n Andy Show that I later used to watch on TV.

  Aunt Mary was a feisty individual, traveled a lot, and always had money because she was the neighborhood’s biggest numbers person. Then she had a stroke, and that changed everything. Before the stroke, though, she was like a man, very tough, very competent, and a very strict lady, even though her sons were some of the meanest, most out of control people in the neighborhood. She had people working for her, and even her white male bosses who came by to collect the money respected her. My grandmother, her mother, used to play what seemed like a thousand numbers a day, you know, on the horse races, a penny on each bet. There were always these real long white sheets with numbers on them lying all around Aunt Mary’s house. These were the winning and losing numbers.

  Like I said, Aunt Mary had a lot of people working for her—men and women—who would run around collecting money and checking the numbers on the sheets to see who had won or lost. Then some people would come by with smiles if they won, or frowns when they didn’t. A lot of people played, though, each and every day. I never knew how much a penny won, because I never played. But there was a lot of money around Aunt Mary’s house, and no one ever thought to rob her because she had great protection.

  She was hooked up with these white guys who were the bosses of all the numbers rackets, the money people who bankrolled and protected her. Word had it they were part of the Italian Mafia, though I didn’t know if this was true. But those guys were serious and nobody messed with them. They would come around, wearing nice clothes—but not suits—and smoking big cigars, to pick up their money from Aunt Mary. But the funny thing about those guys was that they couldn’t smoke cigars in Aunt Mary’s house; they had to put their cigars out before going in her home because Aunt Mary didn’t like cigar smoke, didn’t like the way they smelled, felt the smell was too strong, so she didn’t allow it in her place.

  These white men drove nice, new, shiny big cars—Oldsmobiles, Cadillacs, Buicks—and they would park their cars up on the sidewalks because Philly streets were so small—still are. No one ever double-parked on the streets in the neighborhood because they were so narrow you couldn’t drive a car through if they did. So people parked on the sidewalk or halfway up on the sidewalk. Anyway, these white guys would come by, pick up their money, and leave, and nobody ever bothered them, nobody, even though a lot of people—real bad people, too—knew they were always carrying a lot of money!

  Sometimes when I would be around, some of the gamblers who hung out at Aunt Mary’s thought I was a good luck charm for some reason—I never knew why they thought this. So when they shot dice or played the numbers, some of them would ask me to blow on their dice or give them a number or some numbers they could bet on that day. Like I said, I don’t know why they felt this way, but a lot of people used to do that with me. Maybe they felt I was a good luck charm because some of the people won whenever I blew on their dice, or whenever I gave someone a number. But you know what? Not one of them ever gave me a penny when they won—never. Not one time did they give me anything, not even one thank-you.

  Aunt Mary changed a lot after she had the stroke and lost the use of her left side, including her left arm; she even had to drag her left leg around. It was hard for me to watch her go through that, because she had been such a compelling individual. After the stroke, she became a bitter person. You could see the pain in her face all the time, because she just couldn’t get used to being incapacitated—I guess nobody could get used to being that way. She wasn’t outgoing anymore, seemed irritated all the time about any little thing. I used to love being around her because she’d take me for rides in her car and we’d wash it together. But after the stroke it was hard for her to do that anymore. Still, she never stopped running her numbers business. She always had money and made it available to our family to help us take care of each other, and that was something I always greatly admired her for.

  Aunt Mary’s boys, my cousins Jimmy, Joe, and Bobby Hill, were a lot older than me. They were all big and dark like me; in fact, I looked a lot like Jimmy, and as I grew older and bigger, people—especially the police—would mistake me for him. Jimmy was about six foot four or six foot five. He was the biggest. Bobby was about six three, six four, and Joe was the shortest at about six feet even. Joe was the oldest, maybe 12 years older than me; Bobby was in the middle and maybe 11 years older; and Jimmy was perhaps eight or nine years older than I was. I loved all my cousins and looked up to them, but Bobby was my favorite because he was always the coolest one of the three.

  Bobby, like his two brothers, wore a slicked-back, processed hairdo we called a “conk” back then, and he had all the girls. He was smart, could talk, was real smooth, dressed real nice, and seemed like he had it all together, so he was my guy. Bobby always went another way and was never into the gang thing. He never hung with Joe and Jimmy too much, because they were a part of what we in the neighborhood called “runners of the road,” which was a gang. The Road was the name of one of the gangs in our neighborhood, and Joe and Jimmy were big-time members—Jimmy was the leader—and I guess because they were so bad, that was another reason why nobody messed with Aunt Mary.

  When I was little, Joe, Bobby, and Jimmy would come over to my house—or I’d be over at theirs—for family gatherings. All the older folks would collect in the dining room, the kitchen, or the front
room to sit around and talk and eat. That’s when my cousins would call me out into the vestibule, away from the adults, and beat me up. They would punch me on my arms and legs, or slap me upside my head, that kind of stuff. Bobby wouldn’t do it, but Jimmy and Joe would because they were always mischievous guys. So they would be pinching me on my arms, punching me in my chest, or thumping me on my head with their thumbs and middle fingers. When I screamed in pain my mother would come out and chase them down the street.

  Later, as I grew older and understood things, I found out that many people were scared to death of them. I remember one time, early in the day, seeing Jimmy walk by our house with two girls that he took up on Cowboy Hill. Rumor had it that he ran a “train” on the girls—that meant a group of men would have sex with a woman or a girl—with members of his gang. Later that day, I thought I saw what seemed like a thousand other guys go up the hill where Jimmy had gone with the girls, but I don’t remember seeing any of them come down. It was almost like a dream, but I was awake and young. The whole neighborhood was in an uproar for about two days after that.

  Like I said, I was young, and although I knew what was going on, was street smart in some ways already, a lot of things just went right by me because I wasn’t old enough to understand exactly what was happening. I never really was a part of any gang scene because I wasn’t drawn to it, didn’t see anything cool about being in that kind of life. But I was protected in the neighborhood, maybe—and it’s only my guess, looking back—because I was Jimmy and Joe’s little cousin.

  They didn’t save me from everyone, though. There were bad guys around me all the way through elementary school who would take my money. So bigger, older guys would pick on me and take the money my mother gave me to take to school. I remember a real dumb guy named Whitey who went to elementary school with me (I must have been about 10 or 11, but he was already in his teens), and he used to take my money from me. He was dumb as a piece of wood, so I guess that’s why he was in elementary school, but he was mean.