Dexter Moncrief
Dexter Moncrief was born just east of Little Rock at the very beginning of the Great Depression. Dex was to young to pick cotton when his family lived in the country, barefoot and unable to see over the highest of the plants- he didn’t like the look of it then and he doesn’t like it now. His father took a chance there was more work in the city and they moved across the border to Memphis, but things didn’t work out so well for him. He had to jump a freight like so many other men and boys, promising to send money back or send for the family when he found a job, and then the country just swallowed him up.
So Dex’s mother took in washing and sewed and sent the boys out in the winter to scrounge for coal or run errands for small change. Dex was one of the smallest but he was fast and furious and if you wanted to take a nickel off him you were going to damn well have to fight him for it. The best tips came from the Beale Street sports, the guys with the nice clothes who didn’t want to leave the crap game when the action was hot to run for cigarettes, the ones who called you “little man” and would watch, amused, if they saw you scrapping with someone, never breaking the fight up, but willing to give you some pointers when it was all over. There was nothing as exciting or as dangerous as that sporting life going on with his mother and five brothers and sisters in their little shack with the newspaper on the walls and the wind blowing through all winter and pretty soon he was spending every minute he could around the downtown scene, learning what was up, seeing the threats and the put-downs and the fights that turned bloody. He saw that if you ever backed down in public you were through, there would be no end of challenges, of shit you had to eat. But if you made it clear that messing with you, win or lose, was a whole world of trouble, you were given a little space at the table. Dex started running numbers when he was ten.
Numbers was pennies then and it was okay unless you were bold enough to run a little hustle and make it dimes and quarters, to not tell your banker about a new customer or a hunch bet from someone not a regular player and keep the whole thing in your pocket, praying please, number, don’t you dare hit me. All the runners, the smart ones, did it, and only a few got caught. Take that and organize a little crap game, hold the money yourself- the house always wins. Or you could sell the watches and tie pins and jewelry you got from Hot Gus to the sports who knew a bargain, literally a steal, when they saw one. The draft passed Dex over because he was in jail when the War broke out, six months for car theft though he was only a passenger and the guy said he’d just bought it that morning. Jail was just like the Beale Street joints only meaner, he had to brain another prisoner with a shovel the second day in and when he got out of solitary they pretty much left him alone. He made a connection inside and got on with the big time boys when he was released. Helping to run a gaming club, shilling sometimes, dealing, he learned how the whole machine worked and that unless you were very smart or very bold you never moved up. He started clipping a little here and there, not so much that they’d notice it gone with all the money running through the place, but something went wrong, maybe somebody ratted him out, and you mess with those people’s money and they catch you it’s not pretty. Dex went out the window of his hotel room with his pants in his hand and nothing in the pockets.
So here he is in exile, just taking some time out is all, planning his next move, and if any of these burr-headed, clodhopper-wearing, backwards country boys press him too close they gonna find out who they dealing with real fast. Cause Dexter Moncrief is not a man to be trifled with.
