Blow (7 page)

While George failed to become the school's chief football star, he more than made up for that by his lordship over the social life. “George always managed to have the action rotating around himself; he was the hub, the manipulator of the social scene,” says Jack McSheffrey, who grew up on the Circle. “He was the one you called to find out who was going to drink beer at the sand pit or who was going into Quincy or to the beach. If you weren't with him, you had the feeling of being left out.” After George's mother changed her sales job from Ann Taylor's in Braintree to Remick's Department Store in Quincy, more or less the Neiman Marcus of the South Shore, George became one of the few kids to have his own charge card and a wardrobe that stayed center-front in the style of the day—herringbone jacket, khaki pants, button-down shirt, crewneck sweater, penny loafers, Jack Purcell tennis sneakers with the blue stripe across the toe. “I would kind of emulate the way George dressed,” recalls Barry Damon. “He always bought whatever was happening, Harris-tweed coats, saddle shoes; everything always had to come from Remick's. He'd look at what I was wearing and say, ‘What are you buying that shit for?'”

On the rare Saturday night when they had no dates, George and Barry would lead a foray up to Great Hill and try to disrupt whatever activities were going on by treating the other guys and their girlfriends to moonshots under the stars. In chemistry class his junior year, George not only tortured the nerdy kid with the thick glasses next to him, violating his experiment with alien chemicals while the boy had gone to the bathroom, but also went after the teacher himself, a little old man with a cheap set of false teeth, whose jacket George would burn with acid and whose examinations he'd get a girlfriend in the mimeograph office to run off for him and his friends. To be sure, the teacher sensed that something was amiss when the class screw-ups all scored A's on the test, so he arbitrarily issued them D's in the course.

For date purposes, George had access to his father's 1956 Mercury Phaeton. White on top with aqua-blue on the sides, it was one of the sharper cars in the group, and George washed it so often the paint almost came off. He also had sophisticated taste where music was concerned, which made him stand out in sharp relief from his contemporaries. He liked rock and roll okay, but his real penchant ran to Cole Porter, a taste he acquired from his mother. He also raved to his friends about Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, and Ella Fitzgerald, about Tommy Dorsey and other bands of the 1940s, along with Ahmad Jamal and the other progressive jazz artists. He went in to Boston to listen to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in the late 1950s, before they'd even started producing records. “George was years ahead of everyone else in Weymouth,” recalls one of his girlfriends. “I'll never forget it, we were juniors in high school, and he took me in to see Erroll Garner at Storyville in Boston—George loved him; he played his records all the time—and here we are having cocktails, seventeen years old, doing the things that people did when they were twenty-three or twenty-four.”

Jack Kerouac's
On the Road
was published in 1957, to little fanfare in Weymouth, but George read it as soon as he heard about it, along with
The Dharma Bums.
He talked endlessly to his best friend, Malcolm MacGregor, about Dean Moriarty and the adventures he and his bunch had stumbling around the country, drinking wine out of jugs, always seeming to be passing through Denver. George and Malcolm and Jack Leahy read Ernest Hemingway and idolized Jack London, the oyster pirate, the gold rusher, the master of the
Snark.
They talked of riding freight trains, hitchhiking around America, going to Alaska and Spain. He and Malcolm sat up nights plotting about the trimaran they were going to build and sail around the world on. “George had this thing about him that made people just want to be around him; they liked to tell their friends they'd been with George,” says Malcolm. “George was always bolder than anyone, always doing things that were out of the ordinary. He'd do just about anything if it would make him different from everybody else.”

Ever since his early teenage years George had exhibited a preference for playing it close to the edge, sometimes literally. At age thirteen, he and his friends swam regularly in a quarry not far from his house, where a forty-foot cliff loomed above two jagged rocks sticking out of the water, one close to the cliff face, the other about ten feet out toward the middle of the quarry. To do the jump you had to land exactly between the rocks; a little too short or too far and you had a hard landing. Not many boys besides George tried that one very often.

When George got his driver's license at age sixteen, he began treating the town as his own personal raceway. In one of his more spectacular accidents, George was motoring along in his father's Mercury with Barry Damon during his senior year when a car pulled up close behind him on the twisting two-lane road that ran by the football stadium at Legion Field. “I could hear his engine revving, and he starts to make a move for the outside,” says George. “We get up to seventy or eighty, and I'm straddling the white line and won't let him get by, and so he tries for the inside, and we're neck and neck going around a right-hand curve, and I'm trying to force my way back in our lane when suddenly this car comes around the corner right at me.” George jerked the wheel to the right, just in time to avoid a head-on collision with an elderly couple staring popeyed at what they must have seen as certain death. As it was, he sheared off only the whole side of their car, doors and fenders included, and sent the other dragster smashing into a fire hydrant. His father's Mercury was now also a total wreck and the road a howling litter of car parts, skid marks, gasoline fumes, and the smell of freshly burnt rubber.

“I've done a lot of thinking about George in recent years, and especially since I saw him on TV recently,” says his other best pal, Mike Grable, who as well as being the team quarterback was also president of the senior class. “And back when we were growing up, I can't think of anything that happened in that town you could point to now and say that's why he turned out the way he did. The only thing I can say is George just always had what I would call a casual attitude.”

“I think ‘risky' is kind of a good word for it,” says another girlfriend of that period. “He was different from everyone else, and I think that's what appealed to me. It did to a lot of the girls. They were fascinated with him. He was good-looking and popular and strong. And he was someone on the outs, like a James Dean, but preppy. He'd have all these loony ideas—he wanted to go to Tahiti, and he never wanted to, I absolutely remember him saying to me, ‘I am never going to work for a living.' I remember that as clear as a bell.”

Whatever image of himself George was projecting to his friends, his own life at home, from junior high on up, became progressively less happy as the wrangling between his parents grew more strident. Today his memories of that period flow like lava and appear as fresh as if it all had happened just the other day. “There were constant fights in that house. My sister would go into her bedroom and close the door and read books. At the time I was young and wasn't into reading, so I had to listen to it—the same argument, over and over, my mother saying, ‘I could have done better. It was my mother who wanted me to marry you.' But then, what was the matter? I think. My father took care of the family, he never betrayed them or left them. The old man was doing the best he could. He bought a new car every two or three years, he paid the bills, there were plenty of groceries in the house, he never owed anybody. He gave you anything he had on the face of the earth. But he just wasn't what she wanted him to be. Because she loved the violin—we had a Stradivarius in the house—and she loved the theater and the opera. Do you know my grandmother knew Sophie Tucker? That she once had a date with Cy Young? My father, his big day was to come home and read the newspaper and have a couple of drinks, smoke a cigar and watch television. He didn't know anything about the theater or classical music.”

For purposes of comparison, Ermine would bring up Uncle George, as well as her brother, Uncle Jack O'Neill, also fairly prosperous, who owned the music stores down in Baton Rouge. George recalls, “It was, My brother has this, and Uncle George—it was, Uncle George was better, he had a better house, the sword over his mantel. We had to go up there every goddamn Sunday. He was the god to everyone. At Christmas when Marie was going to college, he'd give her a present of a little Christmas tree with hundred-dollar bills tied on in bows all over it, for her tuition that year. Then it would get dark and we'd drive home and the car would be filled with boxes and ribbons and presents from Uncle George and my mother going on about wasn't it all so wonderful and how generous he was. What he did was always more than my father gave us on Christmas morning. And how did that make him feel? He never said anything. There was nothing to say. I'd be sitting in the back seat and that's when I began to hate Uncle George, and I decided in my mind I was going to get that son of a bitch. And I was just a kid.”

George's father was popular enough with his son's friends, could talk football and joke in a manner that didn't put them off, as adults can do sometimes when they try to be too chummy. He also struck his friends as fairly tolerant of his son when word came back that he'd gotten into another scrape. “His father was always very easygoing,” remembers Grable. “We'd be out late drinking beer, fooling around, and the next day he'd say, ‘You guys had a good time last night,' and give you a little wink, letting you know that he knew. But never any lecture. My father would have taken my head off, some of the things we did. I think George had a freer hand from his parents than the rest of us had.”

In the fall of George's junior year in high school, Fred suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and fell down on the kitchen floor. For a year his speech was severely affected, and soon his oil business died. After that he was never really his old self, not kidding much anymore, prone to become easily emotional. He got part-time work as a superintendent in a cemetery, where he worked out of a little shack and could be seen trimming around the headstones with a lawn mower and now and then helping to set up a burial monument. He also worked occasionally sweeping out a laundromat. George's mother still had her job at Remick's, George remembers, but things got tight now. Uncle George had to begin helping the family out financially. Uncle George liked to help out members of the family. After his and Fred's father died in 1952, he'd send his mother on vacations to Boothbay Harbor in Maine. He'd helped his sister, Aunt Jenny, buy a house. When his nephew Bobby, George's cousin, came home from being in the army in Germany and started working in the banking business, Uncle George gave him the down payment for a house for his young family; young bankers, he felt, shouldn't have to live in an apartment. After Marie and Otis got married, and Otis started graduate school at Michigan State University, Marie came to Uncle George. She'd been supporting them with a teaching job, but now she was pregnant and had to quit; they needed help or Otis would have to leave school. “I remember him saying, ‘Otis has too good a mind to let it go to waste,'” says Auntie Gertrude. “And so he sent the money for tuition.”

*   *   *

By the end of his junior year George needed to confront the fact that he was in serious trouble as far as going to college was concerned. Athletic recruiters from both the University of Massachusetts and Springfield College, the sports school that he'd long dreamed of attending, had discussed offering him a scholarship on the basis of his discus prowess. But he still had to pass the admissions standards when it came to grades, and during his sophomore and junior years he'd accumulated a record of six D's and six C's. His only B was in mechanical drawing.

George wanted so desperately to go on to college that in his senior year he made a heroic effort to improve his academic standing. For one, he got himself into the “general” class in English, an all-boys unit that served as a refuge for students who had problems with Miss Toomey and other grammar hardballers. It was taught by Clem Horrigan, a retired naval commander like Uncle George, but there the similarity stopped short. Silver-haired, with the rosy nose of a hearty drinker, Horrigan was plain-spoken in ways not then common in public high schools. He was in the habit, for instance, of giving colleagues the finger when he wished to make a point during faculty meetings, and endearing himself to the guys in his class by referring to fellow teachers as “assholes” and “fairies.” “Horrigan was not your traditional-type teacher, but he was very effective,” says Buzzy Knight, who was on the faculty then. “He had a wonderful sense of humor, and in class he could butter up a story so you'd be living it rather than just reading about it.”

Horrigan lived in a sea captain's house overlooking Weymouth Landing, and he encouraged George and Malcolm and Mike Grable and Frank Shea and the other guys to come by on Friday nights, when he would sip his Scotch, tell them navy stories, and talk about Jack London and Ernest Hemingway. “He was really a wonderful man,” recalls George, who honors few of the adults he ever knew with a compliment. “He tried to give you knowledge without making you feel insecure about it.” In school, his assignments ran more toward Nordhoff and Hall than Shakespeare, and “if you wrote a composition,” says George, “he'd say you had great ideas here, but not much grammar. But that was okay, because when you grow up and become a writer, they had people to put the grammar in, secretaries, people like that.”

Whether or not it was Horrigan's approach that lifted George's spirits, certainly something made a difference that year, because his scholastic record took a big jump upward. Besides the not-too-unrespectable C he managed to get in physics, he ended up with a B in English, another B in economics, and an A in Problems of Democracy. In fact, that final spring he made it to the dean's list, truly a flabbergasting event for any of the faculty who'd encountered George in the other years. “I remember, Jack Fisher called me in and said, ‘What's this, George, a mistake?' Then he said, ‘You know, George, have you ever heard the expression a day late and a dollar short?'”