Authors: Michael Patrick MacDonald
When Nana died, I was sad. I was the only one in the house who was close to her, even though I had to ignore her frowns when my mother was brought up for discussion. She and Grandpa always made me feel a connection to Ireland and to a world bigger than what I had in Old Colony. I started to feel alone, especially since no one else in the family was talking about Nana's death. Kevin and Kathy had gone their own ways; Frankie was off at the gym; Joe always had his head under the hood of a car; Johnnie was off at Tufts Universityâthe only one “making it out” as Grandpa said about himâand at eighteen, Mary was now pregnant and moving into Old Harbor Project with Jimmy the Greek. I stayed around the house a lot, minding Seamus and Stevieâand studying Davey.
Davey was walking in circles again out in the front courtyard. I went downstairs to watch him, going in opposite circles with Stevie in the baby carriage. I just stared at Davey when our circles crossed. It broke his concentration a few times, and he jerked his head to look at me, startled, as if I'd interrupted something. “Whatâare you fuckin' trying to torment me?” he said. When Davey got mean, I'd make it worse, trying to turn it into something funny. I'd tease and “torment” him, hoping to bring him out of the trap he was in. It was August, and every August when his doctor at Mass Mental went away for two weeks' vacation, Davey lost it. When our circles crossed the next time, I aimed right for him with the baby carriage. I'd only wanted to help, but now I felt frustrated and angry at the sickness and suffering taking him over. I needed to attack Daveyâto attack whatever demons were overpowering him. That's when he ran down the street, looking back at me as if I was the enemy.
None of us knew Davey when it was August. Normally, he would pace the streets and come up to the women on the stoops, or to the kids on the corners, and tell a joke, getting everyone laughing. They loved him. The little kids all wanted him to do his famous impersonation of the Incredible Hulk, right at the moment he transforms into a huge superhero. But in August, Davey's transformations were too scary, and too religious, for anyone to relate to. One time he said he was an ordained priest, and was going to save the “poor souls” of Old Colony Project. He went around in a black shirt, repeating, “The first shall be last and the last shall be first.” No one really got that one, I suppose because most of us would not imagine ourselves, ever, as among “the last.”
After chasing Davey away, I lugged the carriage, with Steven in it, backwards up the three flights of stairs, one step at a time, as I'd learned to do by now, coming and going every day for my walks in circles. When I burst into the house, I was out of breath and excited to tell Ma what I'd just figured out. “Ma, I think I know what mental illness is!” Ma was lying on the couch, with Seamus asleep on top of her so she could feel that he was still breathing. “Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” she said. “Are you at it again? Will you just go out and play or something?” I told her I thought the reason the doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with Davey or find a cure was because they were focusing too much on his brain, in a physical way. “I think it's his spirit that's sick,” I said. “And the spirit is just too much of a mystery for them to figure out.” I added that the spirit and the brain are somehow connected, and that the spirit must be located more up there, rather than somewhere in our chests, which was what the nuns at St. Augustine's motioned to when they talked about the soul. “It's just that the spirit is invisible, and the doctors are all confused, focusing on what they can see: the brain.” I wasn't really making sense, I thought, but I knew what I was talking about. The brain took things in, analyzing them, “all the shit in the world,” as Davey said; but it was the soul that carried the sickness, since the brain had to move on and think about other things. Ma made a face like she couldn't believe what was going through my head. She told me I was smart, and that I should be a psychiatrist when I grow up so that I could help people; but in the meantime she wanted me to go outside and play with the other kids my age, like an eleven-year-old. “And stop being such a goddam worrywart!”
In the spring of 1978, it seemed that busing was all in the past, and disco opened up a whole new era for me and my friends. Everyone was going into downtown Boston now, to hit the clubs and dance to Chic, A Taste of Honey, Chaka Khan, and Taka Boom. The older teenagers snuck into the adult clubs, while we twelve-year-olds were sneaking into Illusions, the new disco for teenagers fourteen and up. I used Kevin's birth certificate to get in, claiming to be fifteen. Kevin wasn't going anyway. He was too busy making deals to sell his stuff to the older kids, who needed to get high for the adult clubs.
The Southie kids took over Illusions, although there were also Italians from Eastie, townies from Charlestown, who looked just like the Southie kids, and some Puerto Rican kids from the South End and Jamaica Plain. Only one or two black kids came to Illusions. Everyone was getting along that summer, and I felt as if I really belonged somewhere in my own right, away from the streets of Old Colony. Every week, I bought a new pair of bellbottoms with money from the jobs program at ABCD, the antipoverty agency in Boston. At first I was stealing disco clothes to wear, going into a changing room and walking out with a whole new outfit underneath the one I'd come in with. But then, thanks to ABCD, I was able to get an even better thrill by spending my pay on things people like me weren't supposed to be able to afford. Some weeks I would spend a whole check on one pair of pants, getting Ma all worked up over the prices. But I wanted to look good. So did the other kids in my neighborhood, who stole their clothes so they could save the rest of their paycheck for some pills or pot before going out.
I loved whipping out cash in front of store clerks who looked at me as if I didn't belong in the expensive section of Filene's. I got a high from spending money. But I was spending so much money on clothes that I had to start finding ways to make more. Kevin asked me to take his mescaline pills with me to Illusions. I had no interest in using any myself, and he said that was why he could trust me. The tiny red pills went for three dollars a pop, and he gave me a jar with about a hundred inside. I was really popular now. I had the best disco clothes in Southie, better than anything my friends were stealing, and I was winning every dance contest at Illusions. The dance at the time was “the Freak,” made popular by Chic's song “Freak Out.” I would win fifty dollars every time there was a Freak contest. And now I had the pills that everyone wanted. Kids from all over Boston would seek me out at Illusions to buy the tiny red pills. I felt like a bona fide pimp.
One night, I made the mistake of taking out the jar of pills while I was still on the dance floor, instead of heading off to a corner for the transaction. Danny said a kid from Eastie wanted two, one for him and one for his girl. As I opened up the jar, someone did the Freak right into my elbow and sent about three hundred dollars' worth of tiny red pills flying. When word got out, every Southie kid at Illusions was pretending to help me recover my losses through strobe-lit disco confusion. Some did give me back a few, but later on when we were going home, kids I'd never sold any to were high as a kite. I had to hide out from Kevin for a week. In the end I couldn't believe how important a bunch of tiny red pills could be, making all my friends act differently and cheating me out of the few they'd found on the dance floor, and making my own brother want to kick my ass. By the age of twelve, I was finished with selling drugs.
But booze was okay in my book. Every Friday night before getting on the subway for Illusions, we stood in front of J.J.'s Liquors waiting for a runner. We usually didn't have to wait long before some adult would agree to buy us a couple six packs and a bottle of whiskey. And we didn't even have to wait around the corner for him. It was all out in the open. Usually we gave the runner a couple cans of beer as payment. That's what made it so easy to get someone to go in for us. Then we drank up on the rooftops of Old Colony.
Everyone at Illusions was getting messed up, even inside the club. We all snuck in whatever we didn't finish out on the streets. I was able to smuggle in everyone else's whiskey bottles by tucking them into my sweat socks. The bottles never showed through my pants because I had the biggest bellbottoms. Throughout that summer, the drinking seemed to be getting worse, and some people seemed to be drinking more than others. They were the ones who usually started the riots afterward in Kenmore Square, when mobs of drunk Southie kids would start beating on anyone who came in their path on the way home, especially if there was anything odd about him. I just followed the mob to watch and to pretend to be part of the whole thing. One guy was beaten because he was a “faggot college student.” Another guy got it because he was a “rock-and-roll pussy.”
Then the kids from different neighborhoods started rioting against each other. There'd always been tension between the Irish kids and the Italian kids at Illusions. Some people said that Irish Southie and Italian Eastie were united against busing, but I could feel the tension if I was the only Irish kid in a bathroom full of Italians from Eastie or Revere, or if there was one Italian kid alone with a group of Southies. It all broke out when two kids, one Italian and the other Irish, got in a fight on the dance floor. Their scuffle triggered an ethnic war that lasted the rest of the summer. Fights between Italians and Irish broke out every Friday night in Kenmore Square. Southie teenagers who hadn't even gone to Illusions before started coming to Kenmore Square to get involved. And anyone in Kenmore Square who wasn't from Southie got it.
That's when I started hearing more people ask, “Where you from?” If they looked Irish, I said Southie. But if they looked Italian, I just ran to the nearest mob of Southie types. One night going home, my Southie mob all jumped onto the Red Line train at Park Street Station and the doors closed before I made it in. Just then about fifty teenagers came down the stairs onto the platform just across from me. They looked Italian and were wearing tight designer jeans and gold chains like the kids in Eastie usually wore. They spotted me across the track and started talking to each other, pointing me out.
“Where you from?” a short fat one yelled across the track, trying to pull up his pants, which were too tight to budge at all. “Who me?” I asked. I was the only one on my side of the track. A few of them laughed and the stout one asked if I wanted to end up on the third rail. Just then I heard my train pulling in, so I yelled “Southie!” across the track. The train stopped and I waited for the doors to open, and watched them all falling over each other to run up the stairs to cross the track and come after me. I knew the doors had to open soon. I waited, and waited, until finally they did open. I made it in just in time. One of the Italians threw a Heineken bottle at the train window and shattered it.
After we pulled out of the station, an older drunk guy who was the only other person on the train got up and asked me, “Where you from?” When I said Southie, he started giving me the handshake and hugging me as if we were long lost brothers. “Those guineas wouldn't try that shit in Southie,” he said. “They know we got Whitey over there. And the Italian mob is scared shitless of him. They know he'd shoot 'em in the back as soon as look at 'em.”
So now I didn't know what to say if Italians asked where I was from. I'd already learned to say “Jamaica Plain” or “Dorchester” or some other mixed part of the city, never “Southie,” to black people. Same thing with anyone who looked kind of intellectual or liberal, like the social worker types when we were applying for jobs through ABCD. But they always found out where we lived by looking up our names in the computer. “Um, the border of Southie and Dorchester,” is what I started to say then, so they wouldn't judge me as a racist. There was still no place like home, though, in the safety and security of South Boston.
“Hey, Joe, check it out!” Kevin yelled, rolling down the tinted window in the backseat of Whitey Bulger's car. He waved a large Baggie full of pot in front of Joe, who was working at Adams' Garage outside Old Colony, where Whitey's driver was having some work done on the car. Kevin knew Joe loved pot, and Joe's eyes lit up. Then Whitey slapped the bag from Kevin. “Keep that fuckin' shit down,” Joe heard Whitey hiss. Everyone knew Whitey hated drugsâthat's probably why he called it “fuckin' shit.” He never touched the stuff; he just collected the money that was coming in. And boy was it coming in, by the looks of kids like Kathy, sixteen and walking around with black circles around her eyes. But that was their own fault, for getting into drugs. That's what the ladies on the stoop always said. They said the big drug dealers were only making money selling the people what the people wanted.
When Joe came home and told me and Mary the story, I ran out of the house to see if I could get a glimpse of Southie's king, or maybe even meet him, since it was my own brother he was chauffeuring around. Fat chance. They were long gone, and who knew when I would see Kevin again, never mind Whitey. Even when Kevin was home, he kept the back room locked and climbed in and out from the roof.
Ma couldn't afford to send Kevin to a Catholic high school. Besides, he'd already wasted Ma's money at St. Augustine's. And forcing anyone to be bused to Roxbury to be the only white kid in the classroom was unthinkable. So Kevin dropped out, like most of his friends in the streets. Ma tried to get Johnnie to talk Kevin into learning a trade, but he laughed at that one. I guess he figured he had it made now, fifteen years old and riding high, in the backseat with the most powerful guy in Southie, James Whitey Bulger.