Parlez-Vous Philly?

How an ex-gangland boss reminded me of the sounds of my old hometown

It’s only now, three years after moving to France, that I realize what I miss most about Philly. It’s not the hoagies; I gave up on them when my LDL reached 150. It’s not the Eagles; I still catch their games on tape delay.

No, the thing I really miss is the sound – the sound of the streets, the sound of everyday life, and above all, the sound of its people.

I realized this when I tuned into the new HBO cop show, “Task,” with Mark Ruffalo. It takes place in Delaware County, the suburb outside of Philadelphia where I grew up. The locals have a distinctive sound, with dropped consonants and swallowed vowels that you may have heard from Tina Fey on “Saturday Night Live.” Since the show was created by the same guy responsible for Delco-centric “Mare of Easttown,” I had high hopes that I’d be getting a taste of my old hometown.

To its credit, the show does contain an abundance of Philly-area call-outs. The Blue Route, the Llanerch Diner and the Roundhouse where I spent many overnight hours covering the police beat all make appearances. Even the schoolyard taunt, “smacked ass,” turns up.

The Llanerch Diner, the Blue Route, the Roundhouse

Unfortunately, if you ever saw Ruffalo’s bizarre take on French in “All the Light We Cannot See,” you know he’s not exactly a master of foreign tongues. It’s not just that, in “Task,” he fails to give the Acme supermarket its requisite third syllable. (It’s the Ack-A-Me, ya smacked ass.) Or that he pronounces Lancaster like he’s from merry, old England. His mortal sin is “water,” which I needn’t remind you is pronounced wooder.

Listening to him muff the accent only made me miss my hometown sound more.

Thankfully, I’ve stumbled upon Skinny Joey Merlino’s podcast. Merlino is the alleged former boss of a Philadelphia crime family with a string of convictions for racketeering, bookmaking, an armored truck heist, and other violent offenses. He’s a free man now and runs a cheesesteak shop, of all things. His podcast is priceless – a mix of betting advice, gangster philosophy (“Da good find da good”), vulgar recriminations about the bastards at the FBI and the rats who turned him in, and a host of shady guests he either met in prison or grew up with in “Lanic City.”

Granted, I have a weak spot for Mafia talk, having spent a long career at a tabloid newspaper that loved itself a bloody gangland hit.

But beyond the mob lingo, I was transfixed by the everyday musings of Merlino and his eager podcast sidekick, Lil Snuff. Their patter, with its rough edges and lost syllables, sounds like something I heard every day of my life before France. They grouse about basketball (“It’s all tree-pointers!”), former acquaintances (“ ‘E ain’ even wurf talkin’ ‘bout”) and old haunts (“ ‘member duh affer-hours place at Twelf ‘n Wharton?”).

You might call it subliterate, but that distinctive accent was the always-present harmony for the city’s soundtrack that played throughout my days in Philly – an orchestral symphony that opened with the squealing brakes of a trash truck rumbling down my street at 8 in the morning, and continued with the refrain of SEPTA’s monotonous warning that “bus is turning.” It was the crescendo of nightly booms that might’ve been fireworks or someone blowing up a MAC machine. It was the City Hall gong, and also the Rocky gong they played to psyche up crowds at the stadium.

It was the Beer Man’s call at Citizens Bank Park and “Fly Eagles Fly” at the Linc. It was the Action News theme song and, yes, it was The Sound of Philadelphia itself – the music of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, the O’Jays and the Spinners that you could barely spend a day without hearing.

Every place has its unique sound, naturally: The crashing waves you can hear through open windows at a Jersey shore house; a truck down-shifting on that steep hill at the end of your street; the crickets that chirp on quiet camping trips in the boonies; a basketball thunking off a metal backboard at the park.

In Rennes, I’m serenaded by the cheery four-tone sequence that precedes announcements on the Star public transit network and the bells of La Cathédrale Saint-Pierre that seemingly ring at random throughout the day. The wah-wah sirens of police cars and the sing-songy bonne journée of store clerks are straight out of a Truffaut film. The light chatter at an outdoor café – to my ears it’s so, so polite, compared to the noisy in-your-face conversation of a barroom back in Philly. And the raspy call of magpies? I’m a bird lover, yet I’d never heard or seen those cackling black-and-white-and-blue creatures before moving here.

It’s still a little disorienting, a reminder that this ain’t 9th and Passyunk no more. Yet, each day the sounds of Rennes are replacing those of my former home.

You will know I have completely integrated into French life when I no longer call it wooder.

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For a more thorough taste of Merlino and his Philly accent, check out the documentary “Mob War: Philadelphia Vs. the Mafia” airing later this month on Netflix.