We didn’t see Nellie for a couple more days, not until Ma had to go to court for beating up Coley. When we got to the courthouse, there was Nellie in a lineup of people who were being charged with inciting a riot at the Car Stop Cafe on St. Paddy’s Day. She looked like a raccoon, with two black eyes and a big purple nose. And some of her partners in crime in the lineup looked worse than she did for the beatings they took from the cops. “What in the Christ happened to you?” Ma said, covering her mouth in shock at the sight of Nellie. Nellie said the TPF had beaten the shit out of her. The two of them were laughing hysterically. “Well, isn’t this a great bit of luck,” Ma whispered to her. “When you get done with the arraignment come upstairs to my courtroom—you’ll be my prize witness against Coley. I’m gonna say he gave you a beating too.”
Nellie loved to play the actress in any real-life drama. She fell right into the victim role. She walked into Ma’s courtroom with her head down. The room was packed with people waiting to go before the judge for “drunk and disorderly,” wife-beating, writing phony checks, and so on. Everyone stopped to look at Nellie, as she shuffled her feet through the court to sit next to Ma on the front bench. Ma had to keep her own head down to keep the judge from seeing her laugh. Coley looked back at Nellie, and he knew the two of them were up to something. He got so nervous, the piece of paper he held in his hand, some kind of note from a doctor, started to rattle. When Ma got to speak before the judge she said, “Your honor, he punched me in the stomach where you can’t see any damage that could’ve been done, but look at what he did to my cousin who’s just off the boat from Ireland looking for a better life.” She paused, then yelled, “Two black eyes!” She pointed to Nellie behind her, who now stood up from her seat, a proud witness. Nellie piped up in her Kerry accent, “And a broken nose!”
The clerk who knew Ma told Coley he’d better drop the charges, and he did. Ma agreed to drop her charges too, but that didn’t stop Judge Concannon from letting into Coley about the coward that he was, hitting a pregnant woman, and that he should know better, being an Irish immigrant himself, about how hard it is for someone like Nellie to get accustomed to a new land without the likes of him showing off his manhood in America. Later the whole family was in stitches at the table, with Nellie still playing her role. “That’ll teach the little man to hit me again!” she said. I think she was starting to convince herself that Coley really had beat her—that’s the actress Nellie was. And there was no mention of the TPF at all; we’d forgotten all about them.
The buses were gone for the summer, and we were left with our frustrations and anger, with high school dropouts, alcoholism, and drugs galore. Ours was one of the worst buildings in Old Colony for trying to sleep on the humid nights. Not only were the lights on all night for the cockroaches, but the Duggans were always up late breaking things and beating each other. Moe Duggan, one of the few fathers I ever saw in Old Colony, came home drunk and beat on all six kids, while the mother screamed and tried to tear him off. She put up a pretty good fight most times, and he never seemed to beat her, just the kids. Then there was Molly next door. Her wall was against mine, and it was always banging with her head. She and her mother were always shrieking and chasing each other around the room, and I could never tell who was winning. They were both the same size, about four and a half feet, and everyone called them dwarfs. Al lived across the courtyard from us, and sat up all night drinking at his kitchen window. He’d invite the neighborhood teenagers up to join him, and they’d all get into a screaming fistfight by about four in the morning. He was always in his tank top, boxer shorts, and black socks pulled up to his knees. The mothers sat out on the front stoop until early morning, watching a TV that they’d carried outside. They’d talk about Al, looking up to his window occasionally, waiting for something to happen. On some mornings you’d see people who’d never gone to bed, chasing a good friend of theirs down the street with a baseball bat. “That’s what the booze will do to ya,” Ma said.
I knew there’d be trouble that hot day in August, when the neighbors all came out to get a good seat on the stoop. I heard the ladies on the stoop talking about how Chickie was pissed because Kevin had broken her window playing stickball. Chickie slammed the steel door to our building behind her. She was drinking. She swayed her skinny hips right past me down a couple of steps. She put her long fingers to the side of her mouth to send a message up to Ma: “Helen MacDonald’s a fuckin’ douchebaaaag!” she sang. I looked at her with big eyes, in shock. She didn’t even take notice of me. She walked further down the front steps, holding onto the railing. “Helen MacDonald’s a dickie puller!” she was singing, looking up to our window for a reaction. I ran up to the apartment. Ma was limping over to the parlor window, hands to her back, to help support her stomach. She was eight months pregnant and carrying huge. “What in the Christ!” she said to herself, looking down at Chickie, whose two eyes were magnified and distorted by the thick glasses on her tiny head. Chickie yelled some more swears up to the window. Just then Mary came around the corner into the front courtyard, and Ma told her to wait down there. When Ma got downstairs, one hand to the railing, the other to her back, she told Mary to cover her in case Chickie’s boyfriend jumped in. Chickie was going out with this guy, Jerry. He was like a real father to Chickie’s son, my friend Danny. He took Danny and me to see the Red Sox, the only time either one of us had ever been to Fenway Park. I knew he wouldn’t touch Ma—he was a nice guy who didn’t fit in with the scene under my window.
“Ma,” I yelled from the third floor. I didn’t want her to get in a fight. I knew Chickie was crazy. I was terrified of her. Ma marched over to Chickie. “Come over here,” Ma said with her finger. Chickie walked over to Ma, hands on hips, all attitude, getting closer to Ma’s face and saying more things about Ma and dicks. She called Ma a whore. Pow! Ma sucker punched Chickie, knocking her to the ground. Ma couldn’t bend over with her stomach and all, so she let Chickie get up and then grabbed her by the hair and slammed her head against the brick wall. Chickie’s thick glasses fell to the ground and Ma jumped up and down on them, then twisted and ground her wooden heel into the glass, crushing them to small bits. Ma walked slowly and triumphantly, holding her back, past the ladies on the stoop, who now cleared the way for her, never saying a word. That was that.
I was glad Ma was okay, with her being pregnant and all. I just didn’t know what to say to Danny. He was my best friend. Then I thought maybe he’d be glad that his mother got her ass kicked. I figured if anyone thought she’d deserved it, he would, even though he only said good things about her. I sat on the stoop with the ladies. They weren’t talking much around me, though. They were probably afraid they’d say the wrong thing, and I’d run up and tell Ma. Teens were now hanging out on the corners and reenacting Ma’s blows in slow motion. I knew they were talking about her because one motioned a round belly with his two hands. When Danny came out all he said was, “Wanna go to the store?” It was as if it never happened. Still, I could feel his embarrassment. But I never found out whether he was embarrassed because his mother had one of the filthiest mouths in Old Colony, or because she got her ass kicked by a pregnant lady.
“This is worse than Mass Mental,” Davey laughed. He said he’d be better off staying on the inside, at the hospital. Davey always talked about “the inside” and “the outside,” two separate worlds divided by the brick walls of Mass Mental. He’d seemed glad to be free until a stream of speeding police motorcycles almost ran him down while he was doing his bouncy walk across Patterson Way, in deep meditation. I’d cracked up at the window when I’d seen him forced out of his private world long enough to give them the finger. Then he’d bounced a little faster, looking back at them, as if they would’ve even noticed. They were probably off to some riot or something. Anyway, Davey was serious about it sucking on the outside. “Everyone’s nuts,” he said. Before deinstitutionalization, he’d only been out on the weekends, when there’d been plenty of drinking, but not so many people runn
ing across rooftops or hiding out in alleys, or squadrons of troopers appearing out of nowhere to march right over you, breaking into your concentration. Davey said he couldn’t think with all the “espionage” going on in Old Colony. “For Chrissake, I’m a paranoid schizophrenic and look where they dumped me, the KGB looking in our windows while I’m taking a shit!”
Davey started telling jokes that he’d made up. He was getting a kick out of Southie people. He couldn’t believe the craziness. “What’s the only parade bigger than St. Paddy’s Day in Southie?” he’d ask. “The lines going into J.J.’s Liquors on welfare check day!” It seemed he always arrived at his words of wisdom right after a long pacing session. One day after pacing the kitchen floor he asked me what Judge Garrity looked like. I didn’t know. “But he’s the enemy, everyone in Southie should know what he looks like—they should have WANTED posters up everywhere with his face on them.” I laughed. He took on this look he got when he was paranoid. “Hey, that’s pretty good!” he said. “They don’t want you to know what the enemy looks like, so you can end up killing each other, or yourself, in the frenzy. You become your own worst enemy!”
C H A P T E R 5
L O O K I N G F O R W H I T E Y
ANOTHER ONE TO MAKE YOU A SLAVE.” THAT’S WHAT Nana said to Ma, looking at Seamus in the nursery at St. Margaret’s Hospital. Ma just laughed at her. She’d never gotten along with her mother—Ma said she was old-fashioned—and there was no sense in trying to relate now. Nana and Grandpa hadn’t even known Ma was pregnant until she went into labor. Ma kept it from them, knowing they’d judge her and her baby since she wasn’t married to Coley. She just wore big coats and held her big leather pocketbook in front of her stomach whenever she went to their house, among those lace curtain Irish neighbors in West Roxbury. Nana and Grandpa knew about me being illegitimate, but they never mentioned it, since most of their friends from Ireland thought that I’d come from Ma’s marriage to Mac—“a bad marriage but a marriage before God nonetheless,” as Father Murphy said. I was close to Nana; she was my godmother and had been Patrick’s godmother too, so she took a special liking to me. I just had to brush off the bad things she said about Ma, and now I had to ignore her frowning gaze at Seamus. To make things more confusing for Nana and Grandpa’s Irish friends, Ma gave Seamus the last name King, from her short marriage to Bob King, whom they’d barely met. She had to put some name on the birth certificate; she knew welfare would never find Bob King, since he was probably homeless; and even though she’d gotten back together with Coley, we couldn’t be sure he’d stick around for too long. Ma was looking out for us again, making sure our welfare check wouldn’t be cut.
All I knew was that I was thrilled to come straight home from St. Augustine’s every day to see my little brother. I remember how clean and fresh he smelled even when he spit up on my shoulder. I was tired of all the battles, the rock throwing and the protests, and I was excited to be around something so new as Seamus. I just wanted to protect him, to keep him as fresh as the day he was born; and I became aware of how hard that might be when I started to take him out for a push around the front courtyard of Patterson Way, with all the buckled-up concrete catching the carriage wheels.
Ma liked me to take him outside every day after school. She always complained that the air in our apartment was bad for kids, with the smell of cockroach exterminator and the radiators going full blast even on a warm Indian summer afternoon. It seemed as if all the kids in the neighborhood had asthma. I’d walk Seamus in circles, around and around, on the beaten-up cement out front. The women on the stoop followed me with their eyes. I kept count so I could tell Ma how many times I’d pushed him around. “That’s twenty-nine times already!” I’d yell up to Ma. “Keep going,” she’d say from the window, “the air’s good for him.” I liked minding Seamus, but everyone wanted to come and look at him and smile in his face. Chickie was friendly to us now, and one time she came up to us, fixing Seamus’s blanket in a motherly way, and yelling up to Ma that all Ma’s kids looked like movie stars. Then she started talking baby talk. “Hiyaaa, hiyeee sweetie,” she sang, in the sweetest softest voice I’d ever heard coming out of her mouth. I started to see how babies did that to people, changed their voices and everything, no matter how mean or tough they seemed right before they’d laid eyes on the baby. Skoochie came by to show me the baby clothes she’d stolen downtown, taking them out of bags and sizing them up against Seamus, lying in his carriage. I sent her up to Ma, and she soon came back downstairs, folding up her empty bags. With Ma’s money in her hand; she called over to some teenagers I’d heard were selling pills. I just kept walking in circles, watching the action in the streets. Kids my age would ask if they could push the carriage, and when I let them they’d start running fast right off the curb toward the traffic—for some excitement, I guess. That kind of stuff made me frantic and nearly got me into a few fistfights, but everyone usually backed down from me, since the kids in the neighborhood were still afraid of my big brothers.
The worst thing about minding Seamus was when I’d hear a neighbor down the street calling someone a douchebag or a cunt. I couldn’t believe they’d say those words in front of a baby. Of course, they didn’t think they were doing it in front of a baby—they were down the street. I half realized that since Seamus was only a few weeks old anyway, it probably didn’t matter what he heard; and when they’d come up to the carriage the same people who’d just called someone a douchebag would start talking baby talk to him and tucking in his blanket. But I couldn’t help worrying for Seamus, with his fresh clean baby smell and brand-new terry cloth baby suits, in the middle of all this anger and confusion and drug dealing and fighting. I still loved our world of Old Colony, but I wasn’t always so sure about that now that I had a little brother to wheel around the broken-up courtyards.
After Seamus was born, the Boston Housing Authority broke down one of our walls for us, adding a second apartment. Only three families in Old Colony had a “breakthrough” apartment. Ma had pulled a few strings with the local politicians she’d met by volunteering for the South Boston Information Center and by playing the accordion at political fundraisers. We were the envy of the neighborhood now, with ten rooms in all, including two kitchens and two bathrooms. We had so much space that Ma had to start collecting furniture from the dumpster to fill up the house. I’d yell out the window to Ma, begging her to stop going through the dumpster, pulling out chairs. I didn’t want anyone to see her. My friends all bragged about their expensive living room sets stolen from the backs of trucks. But she’d just play it up, dragging some contraption behind her up three flights of stairs, “Look at this beautiful recliner!” It was really a lawn chair that one of the ladies on the stoop had left outside, expecting it to still be there when she got back. I was always afraid to let friends in the house, because they might find something that they’d thrown in the trash or just left outside.
We had it made now. Most of us had our own bedroom, and I had a feeling we would be in Old Colony forever. Ten fully furnished rooms with wall-to-wall green, blue, and orange shag rugs; free heat, light, and gas; Skoochie’s designer-label clothes for a quarter the price; all the excitement right out our front windows—“Scenes better than anything on the TV,” Ma said—and the thrill of being on the inside of the exclusive world of Old Colony. We were privileged. And even though I was still a little worried for Seamus, I could convince myself, like everyone else, that we were in a superior kingdom.
No one made us feel better about where we lived than Whitey Bulger. Whitey was the brother of our own Senator Billy Bulger, but on the streets of Southie he was even more powerful than Billy. He was the king of Southie, but not like the bad English kings who oppressed and killed the poor people of Ireland. No way would we put up with that. He had definite rules that we all learned to live by, not because we had to, but because we wanted to. And we had to have someone looking out for us, with the likes of Judge Garrity trying to take away what little we’d gotten fo
r ourselves.
Whatever we had, we were going to keep. Whitey stepped up as our protector. They said he protected us from being overrun with the drugs and gangs we’d heard about in the black neighborhoods, as well as stopping the outsiders who wanted to turn the projects into expensive condominiums. I knew there were drugs and even gangs in my neighborhood, but like everyone else I kept my mouth shut about that one. Whitey and his boys didn’t like “rats.” And it was all worth it to look the other way as long as Whitey kept the neighborhood as is, and we kept our ten-room apartment for eighty dollars a month. We’d never be able to afford the high rents in other parts of Boston. We might have lost our schools, but we weren’t going to let the rich liberals win by doing what Ma said they always do: chase everyone out by bringing in the blacks, and then chasing the blacks out when it’s time to build high-rise condominiums. Columbia Point Project was already on its way to being mostly condos for white yuppies with no kids. Whitey Bulger was the only one left to turn to. He was our king, and everyone made like they were connected to him in some way.
I was always looking for Whitey Bulger. I never saw him, but I’d never admit that to my friends. Everyone bragged about how his uncle was tight with him, or his brother had been bailed out of jail by him, or how he’d bought them a new pair of sneakers, or his mother a modern kitchen set. All the neighbors said they went to Whitey when they were in trouble, whether they’d been sent eviction notices from the Boston Housing Authority or the cops were harassing their kid. Whitey was more accessible than the welfare office, the BHA, the courts, or the cops. If your life had been threatened, your mother could always visit Whitey and get him to squash a beef. That is, of course, if your family was playing by the rules of the neighborhood. If you’d received death threats for avoiding the boycotts and sending your kids to school or else for saying the wrong thing to the press, you were on your own.
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