Philadelphia ? On the day Allen Iverson turned himself in, the wife he allegedly kicked to the streets, stone-cold naked, was said to be back where she belonged, in the couple’s $2.4 million mansion on Monk Road.

Who knows how Tawanna spent the nearly 12 hours it took to process Iverson? Maybe she was in the kitchen that’s the size of some basketball courts, baking her man some welcome-home brownies.

Thirty miles and a complete galaxy away from the Iverson’s luxuriant spread in Gladwyne, a suburban jewel where the incomes on one block exceed the per capita of several small nations, Iverson was being fingerprinted and arraigned on a number of charges. Outside the Center City courthouse, sweet-faced urchins sold lemonade for $2 a glass (as the temperatures hit the high 80s, the price also escalated), while a vociferous, camera-friendly group of grovelers chanted “Free A.I.! Free A.I!” through a bullhorn.

On the streets of West Philly, across from the Cobbs Creek Court apartments where Iverson and his sidekick Uncle Greg allegedly acted like common thugs in their search for Iverson’s property also known as his wife and began this precipitous slide into the absurd, one phrase was bandied around, until it started to sound like something written in the Constitution.

“It’s all about keepin’ it real,” said a teenager named Teisha, as she mimicked Iverson’s crossover dribble while wearing Iverson’s No. 3 Sixers jersey. “That’s all A.I. doin’. Keepin’ it real.”

The juxtaposition of Iverson’s two worlds could not be more jarring. Philadelphia’s Main Line was originally developed by obscenely rich robber barons and Mayflower descendents whose lone contact with blacks was to show them how to dust the chandeliers. The manors are still surrounded by thick evergreens, to keep out the riffraff. Many of the estates have cute, horsey names, and the mailboxes are decorated with pictures of golden Labradors.

Bentleys, Benzes and SUVs with thick, black tinted windows litter the circular driveways. This is the ‘hood where Iverson keeps it real. “I don’t feel like being real is picking up a gun to shoot somebody. Or smoking weed, or hanging with your boys all night, or messing around with a bunch of women. That ain’t real to me,” he told a reporter, shortly after moving his brood and Rottweiler to Gladwyne two years ago.

“Real is taking care of my family. That’s what being a real man is to me … taking care of your responsibilities. Living, staying alive, and trying to do something positive for yourself and the people around you.”

Before placing Iverson in a secluded holding facility, where nobody could pester him for an autograph, Philadelphia cops did a complete inventory that supposedly included counting his tattoos. Perhaps they thought that’s where Iverson was hiding the gun he allegedly brandished July 3, when he couldn’t find Tawanna. It’s the absence of this gun and the dubious actions of the alleged victims that will likely get Iverson off, and allow his many enablers to continue laying palm leaves under his overpriced sneakers.

Reebok, the Sixers, his teammates, Larry Brown, John Thompson, the NBA I understand their sycophantic attachment to Iverson: He has lined their pockets with gold. I’m beyond caring about Iverson’s problems with authority, or the psychobabble that justifies his constant truancy and brushes with the law.

It’s the words spoken by children like Teisha that break my heart, because even at 14 she truly believes this is how life works, whether it’s behind the cracked plaster in West Philly, or in the marbled halls of Gladwyne.