"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa by Charles Brandt Page A

to me, but I couldn’t take supervision and I quit after a couple of months.
    Many a morning I found myself waking up in America and being surprised to find myself in a bed. I had been having nightmares all night long, and I didn’t know where I was. It would take me awhile to adjust, because I couldn’t believe I was in a bed. What was I doing in a bed? After the war I never slept more than three or four hours a night.
    In those days you didn’t talk about stuff like that. There was no such thing as war syndrome, but you knew something was different. You tried not to remember anything from over there, but things came back to you. You had done every damn thing overseas, from killing in cold blood to destroying property to stealing whatever you wanted and to drinking as much wine and having as many women as you wanted. You lived every minute of every day in danger of your own life and limb. You couldn’t take chances. Many times you had a split second to decide to be judge, jury, and executioner. You had just two rules you had to obey. You had to be back in your outfit when you went back on the line. You had to obey a direct order in combat. Break one of those rules and you could be executed yourself, right on the spot even. Otherwise, you flaunted authority. You lost the moral skill you had built up in civilian life, and you replaced it with your own rules. You developed a hard covering, like being encased in lead. You were scared more than you’d ever been in your life. You did certain things, maybe against your will sometimes, but you did them, and if you stayed over there long enough you didn’t even think about them anymore. You did them like you might scratch your head if it itched.
    You had seen the damnedest things. Emaciated bodies stacked up like logs in a concentration camp; young kids barely shaving and lying about their ages to get into combat and then getting blown away; even your own buddies lying down dead in the mud. Imagine how you feel when you see only one body laid out in a funeral parlor; there you’re seeing body after body.
    I used to think a lot about dying when I got home. Everybody does. Then I thought, what are you worrying about? You have no control over it. I figured everybody is put here with two dates already determined for them; a date for when they’re born and a date for when they go. You don’t have any control over either one of those dates, so “what will be will be” became my motto. I got through the war, so what can happen to me? I didn’t care so much anymore about things. What will be will be.
    I did a lot of wine drinking overseas. I used the wine over there the way the jeeps used gasoline. And I kept it up when I got back home. Both of my wives complained about my drinking. I often said that when they put me in jail in 1981 it was not the FBI’s intent, but they saved my life. They only have seven days in a week, and by the time I went to jail I was drinking eight.
    That first year home I tried different jobs. I worked for Bennett Coal and Ice whenever they needed me. I hauled ice in the summer—two cakes in the icebox—lots of people didn’t have electric refrigerators after the war. In the winter I delivered coal for heating. It was funny that my first job at seven was cleaning out the ashes that the coal leaves behind and now I had made it all the way up to delivering the coal. I worked for a moving company for a month. I stacked cement bags at a cement plant all day long. I worked on construction as a laborer. Whatever I could get. I didn’t rob a bank. I was a bouncer and taught ballroom dancing at Wagner’s Dance Hall part time on Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday nights. I kept that job for about ten years.
    I had too many jobs to remember. One job I do remember was taking hot blueberry pie mix coming out of a cooker onto an ice-cold aluminum conveyor. The more I raked, the cooler the blueberries got before they went into the Tastykake pies. The job pusher kept