Our Gypsy Blood
I am somewhere in season five of following the travails of Thomas Shelby and his family of Peaky Blinders. I recognize that I am a full decade behind in finding fascination in this series, but I am enjoying it nonetheless. The story covers the fifteen years after WWI in Birmingham, England and follows the rise of a larcenous and unscrupulous family as they work their way through the roaring twenties dealing with the fortune-building opportunities of prohibition and the concomitant rise of organized crime in England and America. They are just now heading into the early chapters of the Great Depression and the Wall Street crash of 1929 has just occurred. I am finding this a fascinating series less because of the violence and gangster aspects and more because of the times the family are going through and especially the heritage of the Shelby family, who are Romany Gypsies. Their itinerant and working class (with a high coefficient of petty larceny) upbringing becomes galvanized in the forge of the Somme as they fought in the trenches in France and learned the harshest lessons to be learned. Pragmatic and streetwise men hardened by the horrors of the war that started the trend in impersonal battle and ended with the anything-goes of chemical and biological warfare. There had been worse wars, but not more savage and brutal ones and the lessons learned by these boys of the Birmingham slums would not be forgotten. There could be no fiercer crucible to harden the metal of these boys turned men.
We have all heard of Gypsies, but how many of us have encountered them in our lives? It was the summer of 1972 and I had completed a year of college, during which I had pledged an obscure fraternity where I had met two brothers. They were not Gypsies, but rather the sort of Jewish family members similar to the character Alfie Solomons, played by Tom Hardy, that operate in the rough an tumble side of life. Their family owned three hotels in the best part of Atlantic City (North Carolina Avenue, if you remember your Monopoly board), but this was the post-apocalyptic, pre-gambling Atlantic City where the whole city had fallen into depravity and seediness. This was the equivalent of Small Heath at its worst. It lacked the coal grit of Small Heath, but was otherwise equally low. That first summer I took a summer job with this hospitality family and was assigned as the “house boy” of the three hotels. That means that I was responsible for cleaning up after the lowest of the low, and the transient ones at that. Without gambling, Atlantic City was a place which respectable people avoided. Can you imagine, a place which actually gained respectability by the introduction of mob-ruled legal gambling in a state like New Jersey, which was never known for its straight and narrow approach to life? Such was the Atlantic City of the summer of 1972. The prior summer I had been a research assistant in the Department of Sociology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, but in 1972 I was destined to learn about the real sociology of America.
I had planned to work in Atlantic City at the hotels for the entire summer, but after 69 straight days of work (hotels never close and house boy work just keeps on coming), that ten weeks was all I could take. I shared an un-air-conditioned room on New York Avenue (only halfway around the Monopoly board) in an old, old, old hotel (no elevator) where bathing was a literal affair since the bathroom had a claw-foot tub, but no shower. It was as primitive an existence in 1972 America as there was. I will spare my readers all of the gritty work that I had to do, but let us just way that hotel residents in a place like Atlantic City were not so tidy, especially with their bed linens, which I had the pleasure to count and sort each day before they went off to the laundry. I was also the unofficial “bouncer” for the hotel if it were ever required. Families would leave their recently graduated daughters and their friends with us for a “let-loose” weekend, and it was my job to roust the dozen or so guys those girls dragged up to their room when the hour got late and the respectability of those recent graduates was close to wasted. My size was my best weapon at those times since none of those boys were particularly inclined to take any physical abuse from a 6’5” 300+ pound unknown hotel brute. My guess was that their sense of the calculus was that those floozies were not worth the risk and there were more on the boardwalk where they came from.
One morning I arrived at the hotel at my normal hour of 7am and went to the office for any specific orders for the morning, as was my custom. My friends’ father was there reaming out the black night clerk for his lack of wisdom. Nothing seemed out of line, since such tirades were the normal course at these establishments. Hard cities in hard businesses at hard times make for hard men, and the owner was nothing if not a hard man. But that morning was different because the issue wasn’t about selling a room too cheaply or not selling enough rooms through late night discounts. That morning it was about the fact that the night man had rented two rooms on the third floor to some late night travelers that the owner suspected were Gypsies. He made that determination by looking at their cars, which were late-model Cadillacs in garish bright colors (I recall one was a lime green convertible) and that judging by the adornments (interior fringe along the windshield and back window) and bumper stickers on top of bumper stickers making the car look like it was fresh from the trailer park.
That’s when the owner noticed me in the lobby and his eyes lit up. “Richie, go up to rooms 306 and 308 and tell those people that they have to leave by 8am and that if they do, they will get a refund”. It seemed that the owner wanted the Gypsies out at all costs and he didn’t bother to explain why to the house boy. I went up and gently knocked on the door to room 306. A large, very harry man in a grimy undershirt and patterned boxer shorts answered the door with a three-day beard under a very large unkempt mustache. I carefully explained that the owner wanted his two rooms back right away. I did so with as much respect as I could and the man seemed to appreciate my approach. He was clearly not surprised by the request, and he did not seem terribly put off by it. He simply shrugged and yelled something in a foreign tongue back into the room, nodded to me and said they would leave as requested. Within twenty minutes of my going to room 306, the Cadillacs had left the parking lot in their modern day version of a caravan, with dogs, cats, children and God knows what else overcrowding the vehicles.
The owner told me and the night clerk to come with him up to the rooms. He was a man on a mission and he wanted both of us to learn a lesson about Gypsies. When we opened the doors to the rooms, it was a sight to behold. There was literally nothing in the room, including the bathroom, that was salvageable. Everything was ruined in both rooms, including the porcelain and all the sheetrock. The rooms were out of commission for several months I understand. That was a stark lesson to me about Gypsies and their view of the world. I suspect we all have some version of Gypsy blood running in our veins. Thankfully, it rarely comes through. That was the day I decided to end my summer experience in Atlantic City.