HILADELPHIA - Curl your lower lip under the top row of teeth, then flip the lip out. It sometimes comes out sounding like some juiced-up cow town with attitude:
Philly.
It is home to a deep, rich brew of Americans, from all nations and backgrounds. It owns a huge chunk of the nation's history. It has a police department with a rollicking history of its own, plus visionaries, muckrakers, prophets, poets, and more Democrats than Republicans.
As thousands of politicians and a media horde of thousands more prepare to arrive next week for the GOP national convention, this old, soulful, and often insecure city sits and waits by the banks of the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers, both low and easy in the summer heat now.
Like most big cities, it has its own balm, its own curse.
''They let North Philly go,'' says Phillip Poindexter, a firefighter. ''You see a lot of homeless people walking. Everywhere you go, people asking for money. It's heartbreaking. Drugs are bad.''
Robert Waller, a 47-year-old lawyer - who once did anticorruption work in Boston - just loves this town. For him, it's the opera and orchestra and the jazzy downtown of Center City.
To him, it's a city survived, a city rising up.
''Frankly,'' says Waller, ''I think we're a dinosaur.''
The Republicans arrive Monday for four days. It'll be the beginning of the midsummer blitz of political conventioneering. Their challenge, as always, will be to connect with middle America, hoping the words and actions and imagery float out into the countryside, up and over farmhouses from this place, this backdrop. Souls must be touched. Every vote counts.
But what of Philadelphia, the host city? Who are the people here - mere background extras in a gigantic movie, to be drowned out by machinery of national politics and the unblinking eye of TV? After all, as lawyer Waller allows, the conventioneers will be moving in their own unreal zone, ''from air-conditioned place to air-conditioned place.''
Extras? Hardly. These are workaday Americans, toilers, intent to keep on working and breathing and holding on long after the last echoes of footsteps from the arriving army have disappeared like waves on the Schuylkill river.
In the cacophony that is urban America, sometimes a city can seem a sad and tricky place, its denizens made to feel puny.
Phillip Poindexter used to feel that way. The firefighter swears he's supposed to be dead, a dope fiend's end, just some bones over in a Germantown cemetery.
Instead, he walks through fires, saving lives.
So sometimes a city can seem a blessed place to live.
''By the grace of God I'm here,'' Poindexter is saying. ''The way I came up, I fell through the cracks. I'm not even supposed to be here. I came up around a lot of drugs, alcoholism. We didn't have money. I don't have a college degree. So, for me to have a good job like this, it's by the grace of God and determination. I couldn't ask for no better.''
He's wearing a gold cross on his chest, standing in front of his fire station on Broad Street.
When he got his release papers from the Army, he knew he wanted to come home. ''I been halfway around the world. My heart and soul is here in Philly.''
He's 43 years old. He and his wife are raising three daughters. Sometimes he'll look at his daughters and get choked up with joy the way they're growing, and learning. He'll feel fine as a city dweller can feel. And yet, he can get bluesy about the drugs, the crime. ''The people trapped in that drug culture. It's a lot of good people who want to get out, but are trapped. People trying to live good down there are being held in bondage,'' he says about the area here known as the Badlands.
So the curse seems fixed, nailed down, part of the grain of big-city life. But here's some balm, from a man who walks through fire: ''I'm not supposed to be making $40,000 a year. It's great with benefits. I couldn't ask for no better.''
Philadelphians say they have a lot of other reasons to feel that way - that they couldn't really ask for better.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art can hold its own with any museum in the country. No one sneezes at the Philadelphia Orchestra, or the Lyric Opera company. Both are esteemed. The institutions of higher learning - Temple University, the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, to name just three - attract the topflight.
There are myriad reasons to strut a bit. Here's one: the ballad of Marian Anderson, a onetime South Philadelphia High School student. She was a little Negro girl with a glorious singing voice even as a child. She became a leading contralto, traveled the world. In 1939 she was denied an opportunity to play Constitution Hall in the nation's capital; it was largely understood that the Daughters of the American Revolution orchestrated the snub. The Roosevelt administration arranged for Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial that year. She sang before 75,000. Old men and women got choked up. Little Marian Anderson's voice flew like birds. And there she was, a symbol, a civil right unto herself, a native of the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed.
You can chart the city's recent decades and witness rise and fall and rise again.
In the 1970s Philadelphia seemed to be one big bopping Afro, leaning heavily into rhythm and blues. Two songwriters, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, wrote hit after hit. Their sound - popularized by a group known as Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes featuring Teddy Pendergrass - was known as TSOP (The Sounds of Philadelphia). Harold's dead. Teddy is in a wheelchair from a car accident. But Gamble has an office right here on Broad Street. The soul music lives on.
Frank Rizzo served as mayor from 1972 through 1980. The city had never seen anything like him. He called his police officers ''my army,'' and many minority citizens and gays felt targeted for harsh treatment. There were lawsuits and charges of police brutality - an ugly legacy that seemed echoed again this month as city police were videotaped beating and kicking a suspect. Some thought Rizzo a caricature with a permanent law-and-order scowl; others saluted him as a champion of blue-collar urban angst.
It's a famous photo, as startling in its way as the dogs and children in Birmingham: Frank Rizzo was once seen in a tuxedo, a nightstick poking from his cummerbund.
The 1980s were downright scary. Philadelphia nearly went broke. There were nasty union battles, a frighteningly low bond rating. There were more police brutality lawsuits, memories played out across the nation in the aftermath of the recent police shootout and beating of a suspect who had stolen a police car and shot at officers.
In 1985 - the city by then had its first black mayor - the police department, during a standoff, attacked a group of blacks over on Osage avenue, dropping a bomb. Eleven died. Four of them children. The nation recoiled.
The '90s saw a renaissance, a populist city and a populist mayor by the name of Ed Rendell. Buzz Bissinger, a onetime Philadelphia journalist, wrote a book about the city's survival.
''A Prayer for the City,'' it was gently titled.
Few would deny this city's artistic muscle. Certain sections of the city have a decidedly bohemian feel. The theater scene is lively. Writer and poetry workshops thrive.
One of America's finest, unsung poets resides here. Sonia Sanchez is wearing loopy earrings and headdress. ''The people who work on murals are amazing,'' she says.
Murals climb up buildings in this city: Sinatra rises at the corner of Broad and Wharton on the side of an old bingo building.
''The pulse of this city are people who are sometimes never seen,'' Sanchez says. ''They're not bigtime people.''
Toni Conti is not a bigtime person. But she can sound like she has the whole world in her mind. She's a housewife. And she's a staunch defender of Philly.
''Everybody thinks this is the house of the Mafia. It's not. Philadelphia's got a dirty rap,'' she says. She's getting riled up; the flesh on her arm is shaking. Toni Conti says she remembers when hoods would patrol area fruit markets, and if you stole an apple, orange, pear, anything, you got whupped. ''People had a grip.''
Toni Conti's either the real thing, or she's been watching a lot of ''The Sopranos.''
Her husband, a big man named Al, drives up, parks the big candy-cane red Lincoln Continental in front of the house. Al has a cane and wheezes bad. Climbing the steps, he stops on step number three to catch his wife in conversation. Toni has started talking about the end of things, Armageddon.
''My sister knows a kid who doesn't believe in God,'' she says in a tone both grave and astonished.
Al raises his head, his eyes wide. A grave look claims his face.
''There'll come a day when he believes in God,'' he intones.
Back in 1980 Toni Conti was a hockey mom for her son's hockey team at Central High School. One season the team desperately needed money. She was walking around an outdoor market. A man handed her an envelope, told her it was for the hockey team. She gets to her car and opens it. Inside, three thousand dollars.
She found out the money was from Chickie Narducci. ''He was mob,'' she says. ''He was killed.''
She shakes her head. Chickie Narducci. What a loss. (Chickie was gunned down outside the US courthouse here in 1982. He was on trial for racketeering.)
''That's the only thing I resent,'' she says. ''Young kids today don't hold their birthplace tight. And I wasn't raised prejudiced either. I'm not prejudiced against blacks, whites, Asians.''
Al goes inside, squeezing past the wife. Toni Conti goes back to that hockey team. She traveled with them for four years, carried a cowbell into every ice rink. When her son and his teammates heard that cowbell, they knew where she was sitting. Not that her voice didn't carry anyway. ''They told me in Harrisburg I couldn't ring the cowbell. Let me tell you something, babycakes. We walked away with the tournament.''
Babycakes.
Chickie Narducci.
Philly.
It wouldn't be a major metropolis without political corruption. Without the sometime-hubris that brings a politician into the clutches of the federal government after the familiar ritual of wiretaps, backstabbings, confessions, and denials.
Jimmy Tayoun hides in plain sight now.
The feds got him back in 1991. He served a little over three years for racketeering, mail fraud, obstruction of justice, and tax evasion.
Free again, he was a soon enough big man in this town, a city councilman, a state rep, a mover. He ran for Congress twice. Lost twice, but the legend didn't suffer.
He's got an office where he puts together a newsletter. There are old jazzy tunes crooning on the radio right now. Like a lot of people, Jimmy Tayoun misses Sinatra.
''We hustle,'' he says about his newsletter.
Friends - old allies, old enemies - keep dropping a little ad business his way. ''We cover everything below the radar screen of the dailies - and they copy us.'' He cackles.
He first got into politics in 1968. He charged right into crowds - blacks, whites, immigrant - shaking hands, slapping backs. He liked going into the housing projects. It got so folk would just see him coming and cry his name out. Jimmy Tiiiunnn!
He says the feds had it out to get him. ''I pleaded guilty to everything,'' he says. ''I didn't have the money to fight. They wanted to indict my wife and kids. ... If I had O.J.'s money, I'd of won. I'd be mayor.''
He's behind the wheel of his car now, offering a tour of his town. Driving through neighborhoods, the windows down, slowing, waving, letting the greetings float to him.
Hey Jimmy.
Hiya Jimmy. Tayoun!
Hiya doing Jimmy.
Councilman. How you doing?
A life gone bad, but hardly gone. No sir.
He points to some men sitting in front of a small building. ''This is a mob place,'' he says. ''Hey fellas.''
Heads turn. They squint, and squint some more. Do they recognize the great Jimmy Tayoun?
''It's Tayoun, you blind bastards!''
''Oh. Hey. Jimmy. Hiya doing Jimmy.''
He starts driving away. ''They can't see anymore,'' he laments. ''They don't wear glasses. It's vanity.''
Like so many who've done time and who have connections, Jimmy Tayoun wrote a book. ''Going to Jail,'' it's titled. An outfit out of Maine published it. ''It's in libraries,'' Jimmy Tayoun softly brags. ''Criminal lawyers have bought it.''
He turns down another street, looking and waving, human voices chattering at him like insects.
Another mob hangout. Pink arms rising and lowering like weak tree limbs. ''The mob is a skeleton of what it used to be,'' he offers. ''It used to be a second culture.''
He says something dark about politics and the mob. ''The mob sold me out,'' he says, eschewing elaboration.
He talks about his old district. ''I had the entire waterfront for approximately 13 miles. I had housing projects, blue collar workers. Everybody loved me.''
He's over near Indiana and 11th now. It's a tough neighborhood. Never mind the toughness. It's a Tayoun neighborhood.
''That's a senior citizens' building. I put that in.''
You ask the name of the building to jot it down.
''I don't remember.''
He's rolling on.
Three of his six children are doctors. While he was away in prison, his wife, Delores, steadfastly stood by him.
''The feds put me away for nothing,'' he says, curving around another street corner. ''I could deliver 10,000 votes at the top of my game. Guaranteed, like clockwork.''
A prayer for Jimmy Tayoun then.
The Republicans will come and go. They will leave a city behind.
The black man says he will indeed vote in the general election, even though he believes a lot about modern politics is ''a sham.''
The black man is alive to vote, you see, because the young white man died.
Robert Welton was walking home up Wharton street one day. He could hardly breathe. Doctors told him he needed another heart.
He worked his whole life here, a city traffic agent.
He grew up near an Italian neighborhood. ''Everybody took care of each other. We didn't have race fights.''
His wife, Norma - ''my sweetie'' - nearly lost it when he was diagnosed, he says. She went through as much pain as he did.
It was Dec. 12, 1992, when the transplant happened. A 20-year-old white man had died in a car accident.
''They just don't put this in you and say go home,'' he says, pointing to his chest, the hidden heart.
One life lost. Another life reborn.
''A psychiatrist asks you, `Why do you want to have this heart?' I said, `I want to see my oldest grandson graduate high school and go to college.'''
The grandson's name is Dustin Berke. He's just gone off to college orientation in New York. Welton says the need to see his grandson go to college willed him through surgery. ''This is why I'm living,'' he says. ''I'm one of the lucky people that came through this life. It's not always dollars and cents. It's the peace. If I should go today, or tomorrow, I wouldn't mind. Life don't owe me nothing now.''
Robert Welton has just dropped a tear.
He swivels his head, looks up the street into the sunshine of Philly. Norma, his sweetie, should be coming on home in a little bit.
