My folks got married very late in life for those days. My mother was forty-two when they had me, their first kid, and my father was forty-three. They had us a year apart. My brother was thirteen months younger than me, and my sister was thirteen months younger than him. We were what they used to call Irish twins because the Catholic Irish popped those babies out so close together.
Even though my mother was Swedish my father raised us Irish. His people were from outside of Dublin, and I never met any of my grandparents on either side. People in those days didn’t display affection like they do today. I’m still learning how to be affectionate to my grandchildren. I don’t ever remember getting a kiss from my mother. I never even saw her kiss my kid brother, or my kid sister, Margaret. Not that anyone meant to play favorites, but Tom was my father’s favorite and Peggy was my mother’s. I guess I was so big, and being the oldest, they expected me to be more grown up than the two younger ones. I even got that in school from teachers who talked to me like I was an older kid and expected me to understand what they were talking about.
My folks did the best they could with what they had. Every Easter, Tom and Peggy would get some new clothing to wear, but my parents would never have any money to get me anything. Getting a new outfit for Easter was big in the Catholic neighborhoods I grew up in. I can remember one Easter when I complained to my father about never getting anything for Easter and he told me, “Take Tom’s new hat and put it on your head and stand in front of the window and the neighbors will think you got a new hat, too.”
I can’t remember any of us Sheeran kids ever having a toy of our own. One Christmas we got a pair of roller skates to share. They were metal skates, and you could adjust the size. We learned to go without. And if we wanted something we had to fend for ourselves. I had my first job when I was seven, helping a guy clean out the ashes from cellars. And if I managed to get some work cutting somebody’s grass for spending money and my father found out about it, he’d wait up the block until I got paid, and then he’d come down and take the big coins and leave me maybe a dime.
We lived in a lot of different Catholic neighborhoods, but mostly in the same parish. We’d spend a few months somewhere, and then my father would get behind in the rent, and we’d sneak out in a hurry and move to another apartment. Then we’d do it again when that rent came due. When he got work my father worked as a steel worker, high up on tall buildings, walking on beams like those Mohawk Indians. It was dangerous work. People were always falling to their death. He worked on the building of the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia and on the few high-rise buildings they could afford to build in the Depression. He was about two inches shorter than my mother, maybe 5'8", and weighed about 145 pounds. For a long time the only work my father could get was as the sexton and the school janitor at the Blessed Virgin Mary Church and School in Darby, Pennsylvania.
The Catholic religion was an important part of our lives. It was mandatory. If I had to say what my mother’s hobby was, I’d say she was very religious. I spent a lot of time inside Catholic churches. My father had studied for five years at a seminary to be a priest before he dropped out. His two sisters were nuns. I learned all about confession as a way to get absolution for your sins. If you died on your way to confession before you could tell the priest what you had done wrong you would burn in hell for all eternity. If you died on your way home from confession after confessing your sins you would go straight to heaven.
I was an altar boy at Mother of Sorrows Church until I got kicked off for trying the sacramental wine. I don’t blame the other altar boy who snitched on me. He wasn’t really a rat. Father O’Malley—believe it or not that was his name, just like the priest Bing Crosby always played—saw the wine was missing and told the boy that whoever took the wine wouldn’t go to heaven. I guess the other kid figured he had a shot to go to heaven so he squealed on me. And the worst part about it is I didn’t even like the wine they used.
My father did like his beer. My father used to bet on me a lot in the speakeasies. We’d be in a new section of Philadelphia where they didn’t know us too well yet and he’d go in a speakeasy and bet somebody that he had a ten-year-old kid who could lick any fourteen-or fifteen-year-old boy. He’d bet some kid’s father a quarter for beer, and us kids would have to fight it out in front of all the grown men. If I won, which was almost always the case, he’d toss me a dime. If I lost he’d cuff me hard on the back of the head.
We lived for a while in a mostly Italian neighborhood, and I had to fight to get home from school every day. I learned a lot of Italian words as a kid that helped me later on in the Sicilian and Italian campaigns during the war. While I was over there I learned to speak Italian pretty good. While I was learning it, mostly to get along with the Italian women, I didn’t realize that the people I would get involved with after the war would be very impressed with how well I spoke Italian. They took it as a sign of respect toward them. It made it a lot easier for them to confide in me and trust me and respect me.
My father, Thomas Sheeran, was an amateur boxer for Shanahan’s Catholic Club. He was a tough welterweight. Many years later after the war I would go on to play football for Shanahan’s. When I was a kid a lot of our activities were supplied by the church. This was way before television. Very few people had radios and the movies cost precious money. So people came and watched the church events or participated in them. My father competed a lot in the ring.
He also competed a lot at home. Whenever he thought I’d done something wrong, he’d toss me the boxing gloves. But I wasn’t allowed to hit back. My father was untouchable. He would jab my face and throw hooks and overhand rights. Being a steel worker, he could hit. I would bob and weave and try to block the blows with my own gloves. If I was foolish enough to try to punch him I’d really get hammered. I was the only one in the family he ever tossed the gloves to. No matter what Thomas Jr. (who was named after him) did wrong, he never got cuffed around.
But then Tom never played the pranks I did either. Nothing bad, but I was always a rebel. One time in the seventh grade, when I was attending the Blessed Virgin Mary elementary school, I took Limburger cheese out of the old ice-box tray at home and brought it to school. Schools were pretty cold when you first got there until the heat came up, and we all sat with our sweaters and jackets on in the winter. They had steam heat in the school. The heat came from radiators and we’d have to wait for them to warm up. I stuck the Limburger in the radiator. It heated up and got softer and softer and slowly stunk the whole room up. They called my father, who was the school janitor. He followed the smell and found the Limburger, and then some other kid ratted me out. My old man said he’d see me when he got home.
When I got home and waited for him I knew that as soon as he got home he was going to get the boxing gloves out and toss them to me. Sure enough, when he came through the door he calmly said, “What do you want to do, eat first or eat after I kick your ass?” I said, “I’ll eat first.” I knew I wouldn’t feel like eating dinner afterward. I got it pretty good that night, but at least I got some food in me.
I stammered a lot as a young fellow coming up, and I still do when I talk too fast, even today at eighty-three. Stammering as a kid will get you in a lot of fights. Boys who didn’t know how good I could fight would make fun of me, but they’d pay for it.
We kids fought a lot for fun, too. Every Friday night we would have boxing matches on the corner. Nobody got hurt too bad. It was all for the sport of it, and that’s how you learned how to fight, by getting your ass kicked once in a while. I thought about becoming a boxer, but I knew I could never be as good as Joe Louis, and if you couldn’t be the champ, boxing was no life. Kids today play soccer and Little League. I love to go to my grandchildren’s soccer games. But back then we had to amuse ourselves, and fighting seemed to be all we had. Looking back, it was good for us. You got a lot out of your system. And you learned a lot. And then when our country needed soldiers we were in shape. We already had a mental toughness.
I graduated from the eighth grade at Blessed Virgin Mary, where my father worked and where I had to watch my step. For high school I got switched to public school, which had a less restricted atmosphere. They enrolled me in the ninth grade at Darby High School. I didn’t get very far in the ninth grade, though. One morning in assembly the principal was on the stage singing and leading us in the old song “On the Road to Mandalay.” He would emphasize by winking after each line of the song like some vaudeville singer. Being so tall I stood out and he could look right at me. So every time he would wink I would imitate him and wink back at him.
When we got done with the assembly he told me to wait in his office for him. I went and sat there in the chair in front of his desk. He was a pretty big man, my height, only he outweighed me. He walked into the office, came up behind me, and cuffed me hard on the back of the head just the 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 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.
I Heard You Paint Houses Page 4