State by State

by Matt Weiland

  UNDER 18 23.6%

  65 AND OVER 13.5%

  MEDIAN AGE 36.5

  MASSACHUSETTS

  John Hodgman

  In the west, the state is as straight and uncomplicated as a flag, its little valleys sheltering what passes for our farm belt. The center gives way to the semicircle of former paper mill towns and textile mill towns crowding up to the capital. And then we are on the eastern shores, ragged and tangled in history, the Maine-like hump of the North Shore stretching down and curving up into the weird withered arm of Cape Cod, where the Pilgrims landed and started the whole thing.

  The effect is such that, if you look at a map of Massachusetts and squint your eyes, you might imagine you are looking at the nation itself, only with no Texas, and a horribly deformed Florida. You might be tempted to believe that the whole country shaped itself in Massachusetts’s honor. Certainly many in Massachusetts have believed so.

  From its beginning, Massachusetts was self-importantly aware of its own self-importance, its special place in the history of our country. Outlining the divine mission of the colony he helped to found, Puritan John Endicott would call it the “Bulwark Against the Kingdom of the Anti-Christ.” I still call it that today—it’s better than the “Bay State.”

  Liberty, as they say, was cradled here, largely in the Green Dragon Tavern, where Sam Adams (Brewer, Patriot) roused his friends to dump East India tea into Boston harbor and blame it on the Indians. The first shot of the Revolution was fired in Concord, and the first American Army was raised in Cambridge. Massachusetts offered the first state constitution, and it served as model for the rest of the country. And in my own lifetime, it was Massachusetts that gave birth to the first gourmet food shop that served only pudding, and, yes, it was called “Pudding It First.”

  After independence, however, something changed. Massachusetts became unnecessary. Its farming population left for the newly opened west. Its trading fortunes foundered, giving way to textile and paper mills and small factories. For a while we were making half the nation’s shoes—and many of those were made by children! So don’t say we couldn’t compete!

  But as the mills were shuttered throughout the twentieth century, so Massachusetts’s influence on the nation waned. Quincy was once known as the City of Presidents. Specifically, the City of Two Presidents: John Adams, and then, by astonishing coincidence, John Quincy Adams. Later, the Massachusetts Presidential Spawning tanks would also produce Calvin Coolidge, a Vermonter who took up residence in the great lesbian town of Northampton; and then, of course, JFK would arise from Brookline. But now the very idea that a national leader might come from Massachusetts is routinely and cruelly rebuffed. No matter how absurdly patrician, nebbishy, or Mormon they may seem.

  So when you are growing up there it is difficult to escape the impression that you are lingering too long in a story that has long been over.

  The Pilgrims came in 1620, of course, but they were looking for Virginia. Tired of dying on the open sea, they decided to settle Plymouth and die on land for a while. A Native American named Samoset welcomed them to what was, like it or not, their new home. And with the aid and friendship of the Wampanoags, and their chief, Massasoit, they stopped dying, started farming, and invented Thanksgiving.

  But this new land was not any kind of melting pot.

  By 1630, the Puritans had come and settled the lumpy isthmus we now call Boston. As you know, the Puritans left England, angrily, because (a) they were dissatisfied with Elizabethan accommodation of Catholicism, and (b) they thought they knew everything. Dissent was not tolerated within the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and that is why Roger Williams, who thought the Puritans should actually compensate the Indians for their land, had to leave, and founded Rhode Island; and that is why Thomas Hooker, who thought even those people who didn’t go to church should be able to vote, had to leave, and founded Connecticut. You could do that sort of thing then: just go ahead and form a new state. And so all of New England was built on the long-lasting foundation of an absolute inability to be near anyone different.*

  It continued this way in Massachusetts, over many long and lonely winters. Towns would gather by necessity around a central green and turn their backs on one another. We would sit by the fire and brood and make brooms and bridles and such, and since familiarity among neighbors was scarce, we would instead, through sheer Yankee ingenuity, breed contempt from unfamiliarity. The result of this contempt: an ironic “commonwealth” of closely knit groups of isolationists.

  I guess that I am from Massachusetts. But I never felt at home there, and, really, no one ever does.

  There are Texans and there are Minnesotans and even Californians, though that is a state as geographically and culturally motley as the entire eastern seaboard. But no one calls himself a “Massachusettsean,” in part because it is impossible to say, and in part because ours is a tradition of exclusion.

  Often, now, when I tell people I am from Massachusetts, they ask me: Why don’t you have an accent? This happens especially when I tell them, as I often do, that I park my car in Harvard Yard.

  That is when I have to explain to them that that accent—the one they know from Cheers and The Departed, with its flinty dropped r’s and inexplicably fancy-pants long a’s, is specifically a Boston Irish accent, primarily South Boston, but ranging throughout the working class suburbs where things were once built or made.

  And then I must explain that even though my father came from the paper mill town of Fitchburg and still says “ahhnt” for “aunt,” he switched vocal gears into a kind of upper middle-class neutral when he left to go to college, just like my mom did when she left her working class neighborhood in Philadelphia.

  I cannot even imitate that accent, I tell them.

  But by then, they are looking at me doubtfully, like I am lying about being from Massachusetts. They are looking at me as though I come from no place at all.

  Another reason I did not feel at home was because I do not like sports. As I write this, the New England Patriots have just lost the Super Bowl. I am very glad of this development. (I can write this, because I am now in New York. And I am wearing a suit of armor.)

  Boston has much to offer any visitor. There is of course a fine symphony orchestra, world-famous universities, and the Mother Church of Christian Science, which has a truly boss reflecting pool. However, if you do not like sports, Boston does not have much to offer you. The local sports teams—which I am told are the Baseball Red Sox, the Football Patriots, the Basket-ball Celtics, the Hockey Bears, and of course the famous Boston Lobsters of the World Team Tennis League—are an obsession.

  When a game is on, it will be broadcast in every bar, home, and taxi cab. I once frequented an eccentric coffeehouse in a small town in western Massachusetts. It hosted literary readings and served vegetarian food and a small selection of wines. I loved it. It had a small TV that showed only a closed circuit feed of the baby eagles that had recently been hatched at a local bird sanctuary (which seemed perfectly reasonable to me). Unless there was a Red Sox game on, in which case, sports would actually preempt baby eagles.

  In the finest restaurant the waiter will be checking the scores and passing news of the game between the busboy in the kitchen and the Harvard professor at the table. The professor will tell you that, in a city largely stratified by class, race, and ethnicity, sports erases all those distinctions and reminds us of our common humanity and re-ties, season by season, the frayed threads that hold our community together. He will probably be wearing a baseball hat as he says it, one of those good-quality, fitted jobs. He will be an ass. And if you tell this professor that you don’t happen to like sports, he will ask what is wrong with you. And then he will punch you in the face.

  For most of my growing up, I could tolerate this, for, despite the occasional basketball championship, the sports teams were all losers. Famously, cursedly, the Boston Red Sox would lose again and again and again, and this made sense to me.

  For sadness, grievan
ce, anger, and frustration: This is what really pleases the Bostonian and inspires him. When Oliver Wendell Holmes dubbed Boston the “Hub of the Universe” in the mid-nineteenth century, it was already a mean joke. Boston’s cultural and financial dominance of the country had long since fled to the wheel’s new center, hated New York. And the Boston I grew up in reveled in its first-class status as a second-class city. Even someone who does not like sports (me) must appreciate the poetry of it: what better expression of self-loathing than to hate The Yankees.

  But oh, there was a time when we were at the center of things.

  Consider the Seven Years’ War. I know you often do. 1756–1763. Unable to properly farm its own rocky land or manufacture its own goods, Boston built a merchant empire of clipper ships. We bought sugar and molasses from the French Caribbean, completely ignoring the fact that our own mother country was in the midst of a great naval war with France. Completely ignoring the fact that by our commerce we were funding the French army that was, in fact, raiding our own little towns in the western hills. Because who cares about them? We made that sugar into rum, and we aged it in Medford and we traded that in turn to Africa for slaves, which we then sold to the South for money to buy more sugar and molasses.

  This is known as the “Triangle Trade,” though you may know it as “Massholism.”

  We were rescued from that prosperity by the Sugar Act of 1764. It was the first of many coercive taxes levied on us by England that sought to prevent Boston from making the enormous fortunes in enemy goods and human trafficking to which we had become accustomed. Naturally, this made us angry. It drove us to rebellion. It was not until we were oppressed, outnumbered, and, in 1770, massacred, that we were ourselves again: bitter, angry, and, accidentally, good.

  So that is why I am glad the Patriots lost. Not because of Schadenfreude.* Because I already feel an outsider in Boston when we’re losing. When we’re winning, I do not recognize it at all. I do not understand a Boston triumphant, for what city would that be? Dallas? Is that what we want?

  If you are looking for a place to eat in Boston, may I recommend the Downtown Café on LaGrange Street?* This is a restaurant I worked in one summer when I was in college.

  It was located near Boston’s “Combat Zone,” the small downtown cluster of adult bookstores and strip clubs where this once-Puritan town imprisoned its sin. But by the time I worked there, in the early nineties, sin had escaped. Video, and soon the Internet, would render the Combat Zone unneeded, and it was already largely abandoned.

  As far as I could tell we were the only operating business on our block of LaGrange, apart from a dusty looking haberdashery, which, by my guess, opened roughly once per decade. The Downtown was a small place—maybe six tables, with salmon-colored tablecloths—serving primarily a gay clientele.

  The owner and chef was an enormous Rasputin-looking gay man named Dan who cooked in the tiny open kitchen, usually while yelling. He always kept the back door open behind him as he worked. A little white ghost of a stray cat lived in the vacant lot there, and he would feed her every day. While prepping for an evening’s shift, once, he heard her yowling furiously. “That tom cat has got at her,” he said gleefully, while cutting up chicken. Another long, painful, coital scream echoed in. “She loves it!”

  The sole waiter was another gay man named Luigi, who was nicknamed “Wege.” I know it was spelled that way because he had each letter tattooed on the fingers of his right hand, between the first and second knuckles. He was short and tough. His day job was at the pawnshop a few blocks down, and he looked exactly like a gay, middle-aged man who worked in a pawnshop and was not about to take anything from anybody anymore.

  And then there was me, in the back, washing dishes. I was not gay, though I am sure they never believed it, because I did not like sports and why else would I be there?

  The answer: A friend of mine had worked there and had gotten me the job, and I liked being paid in cash, and I liked eating for free. And also, it was like a secret society. As far as I could tell, the restaurant had never advertised or been covered in the press, and there was no foot traffic on our deserted block. During the dinner hour the place would slowly fill with those in the know, calling to Dan as they entered, hugging him.

  Sometimes I had to make deliveries. Dan had gotten a concession to make bar snacks for a nearby comedy club in the theater district. And so, from time to time he’d make up a plate of extremely greasy chicken fingers and have me run across Boylston Street, through a parking lot, to the club. A waitress would take the chicken fingers out to the patrons. I’d wait there, and listen to the comic, and watch the young Bostonians laugh at the jokes. For some reason, I remember them all wearing pastel yellow polo shirts. Even the girls.

  After a few minutes, the waitress would bring the chicken fingers back on their now-soggy paper plate.

  “They thought they were gross,” she would tell me. And I would walk them back over to the Downtown, and present them to Dan, who would suggest different ways they could fuck themselves.

  As the night got later (and in Boston, the night never gets particularly late: the subway system, known as the “T,” stops running at 12:30 a.m., for why would anyone want to be out later than that?), the strippers would come in and so would the strange young men who manned the peepshow booths. They came to gossip and get a little foul-mouthed, Rasputiney love from Dan. I’d be told to get the industrial-size vat of intensely yellow vanilla ice cream down from the freezer shelf and he would make them all milkshakes. LaGrange Street was deathly quiet and barely lit.

  And even though I didn’t belong there, I felt in good company there, among the non-sports fans in the gay restaurant that, despite Boston’s large and thriving gay community, still nestled up next to the Combat Zone as if out of some unconscious sense of shame.

  Then we’d close up, and Dan would hand me some extra money to give Wege a ride home. He lived in South Boston with his elderly mother. I don’t remember what we talked about on those rides. I remember thinking that South Boston seemed like an unusual place for a gay man with an Italian name to live, no matter how tough he was or how many tattoos he had on his fingers. I remember him opening the car door, 2 a.m. blinking on the dashboard clock, and looking carefully up and down the street before walking to his door.

  One night I sat with Dan and had a soda as he counted the night’s receipts. Another bunch of chicken fingers had come back, and business wasn’t good. He was in a bad mood. We got to talking about the woman who had worked there before me—the friend who had gotten me the job.

  “She’s got her head in the clouds,” he said.

  He told me that he had fired her, even though she had said she quit. I don’t know who was telling the truth.

  “She still lives at home,” he said. “She’s still a baby, still thinks daddy’s going to take care of her.” Then he looked at me seriously. “At some point, you have to throw your parents out of the house.”

  I have spent a lot of years trying to figure out what that weird, upside-down, sentence was supposed to mean. Now I appreciate it as the answer to an essentially Massachusettsean dilemma: It’s how you leave home when you just can’t bear to leave home.

  In the mid-1800s some other non-sports fans and fancy-pantses got together, mostly in Concord, MA, and called themselves the Transcendentalists.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson is perhaps the most famous of these freethinkers. Emerson said there is a “wise silence” inside all of us, and in it, a kind of divinity—an intuitive personal spirituality, that when we are attuned to it, makes all of reality an echo of our soul. Or something. No one really knew what he was talking about. But he enchanted a fairly large group of writers and intellectuals, among them Henry David Thoreau, a local Concordian school teacher and neck-bearded misanthrope and, occasionally, Emerson’s gardener. Disenchanted with civilization, Thoreau built a cabin in the woods to ponder nature and silence and to play the flute a lot (not a euphemism).

  But not every Tr
anscendentalist wanted to live alone in a cabin. And so the movement established special communities in which they could build a perfect world.

  The most famous of these was the agricultural commune of Brook Farm, in Roxbury, MA, where Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne dwelled for a time. But there was also Fruitlands in Cambridge, and outside our borders the Oneida community in New York. Emerson wrote, “not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket.”

  And while Brookline, founded 1705, predated all of these experiments by almost 150 years, by the time I was raised in it, it was clearly an exercise in Utopia.

  Brookline is a large, affluent town surrounded on three sides by Boston, but never quite a part of it. Here was a town of beautiful homes, graciously arranged on broad streets and dotted with green parks and little ponds and grand ideals … where the wealthy championed rent control; where the whites bussed blacks to Brookline High School (modestly known on its letterhead as “The High School”) and then offered them a ride home!; where indeed all of the children were well educated at good public schools that taught sex education and Marxist theories and One Hundred Years of Solitude.

  When, during the 1988 presidential debates, Michael Dukakis, a Brookliner, was asked how he would respond if his wife was raped, he surprised a nation by responding mildly that he actually wouldn’t take the rapist by the neck and strap him into the electric chair and stab forks into his eyes until he was dead. But Brookline was not surprised. We nodded, for he was our neighbor, and he had clearly transcended such base emotions as vengeance.

  In the mid-seventies, at least, Brookline was a place where a young married couple from working-class Fitchburg and working-class Philadelphia with one child could scrape together the money to buy not only a home, but a home with sixteen rooms, in a beautiful neighborhood, surrounded by doctors and heirs to department store fortunes. And there the three could wander in that gigantic house, sixteen gigantic rooms away from everything else in the world, the child completely unaware that this was in any way unusual.