All Souls

by Michael Patrick MacDonald

  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 h
eard Whitey hiss. Everyone knew Whitey hated drugs—that’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.

  C H A P T E R 6

  A U G U S T

  I ALMOST GOT SHOT LAST NIGHT,” JOE LAUGHED, CRAWLING out of bed for another Saturday morning of tales from Southie’s disco nightlife. Joe had a big head from drinking the night before. He, Mary, and Frankie had been partying at the Lith Club on Broadway, which had become the place to be for Southie’s older teenagers. Joe said he was outside the club trying to talk this girl from the suburbs he’d picked up into going home with him, “when all the sudden, this guy with a bloody head ran by.” He said the bullets flew past him and the girl, who said she wasn’t used to this kind of stuff. When they saw the gunman crouched between two cars, the girl held Joe in front of her as a human shield. “ ‘Fuck this,’ I said.” Joe said he reversed positions, making his date into his own shield from the bullets. Joe was pissed off that the date didn’t work out; she jumped into a cab and said she’d never come back to Southie again.

  Joe’s stories didn’t faze me. I was used to them. Even the times I’d come close to the violence, I still felt comforted by the popular line that Southie was the one place “where everyone looks out for each other.” One morning on my way to St. Augustine’s, I found three fingers. They were at the bottom of one of the tunnels, the outdoor passages that cut through our buildings from courtyard to courtyard. The one downstairs from us was on a slope, so the pouring rain that morning had formed a lake at the bottom, and there on the edge were the fingers. I remembered hearing some guy screaming the night before, but it sounded normal to me. And even after finding the fingers, I wasn’t bothered. It was nothing, really—just another story to tell the kids at school.

  We all laughed at Joe, looking for the telephone number the girl had given him before the shoot-out. Frankie said Joe was exaggerating the whole thing, that it wasn’t that bad, just another shoot-out among rival gangs from the D Street Project. Davey looked reassured by Frankie’s words and joined the laughter after some nervous hesitation. Mary, Joe, and Frankie often had stories about stabbings, with the popular broken bottle or “nigger knife,” and occasional gunfire. And before long they’d be making plans once again with their friends for another night out “at the O.K. Corral,” as they called it.

  Davey sat on the mattress in the parlor and stared at the palms of his hands, crying. He was in agony. I watched him helplessly from across the room, sitting at the old-fashioned school desk that Ma had dragged up from the dumpster. I’d been daydreaming in the stiff wooden seat, imagining the old schoolrooms, like I’d seen on “The Waltons.” It was too hot to move; the weatherman had called the day “oppressive.” I’d stopped daydreaming when I’d realized Davey was in pain. I couldn’t see anything wrong with his hands, so I figured that he was hurting because it was August again. He’d been taking his medication and staying off the Coca-Cola because he said it made him too jumpy. But here he was, falling apart anyway. He asked me if I could see it. “See what?” I asked. “My bleeding fucking wounds,” he screamed at me. I squeezed out of the cramped desk ready to run for the front door, because when Davey got like this there was no telling what he’d do. He’d never laid a hand on me, but I was scared to be alone with him when he had “the sickness in his eyes,” as Ma called it. Ma said that she could always tell if Davey was getting sick by looking in his eyes. Davey begged me not to leave him by himself now, with the stigmata of Christ and all the blood dripping from his palms. I wanted to tell him that he wasn’t bleeding at all, but I knew that would just piss him off.

  He got up from the mattress and started pacing the floors with his long strides and a high bounce to every step. Now that we had the breakthrough apartment, he had a long walk to make: from the end of the hallway in one apartment to the far reaches of the second apartment, then back again, over and over. He started singing “Ding dong, the Witch Is Dead” from The Wizard of Oz; except he changed the words. “Ding dong, the wicked stick is dead,” he sang. “Ding dong and merry-o / Sing it high, sing it low,” and he made his voice go really high and really low when he sang those words. Davey’s T-shirt was wet with all his moving around, and as still as I was, I started sweating too.

  “Who’s the wicked stick?” I yelled to him from a good distance. I was getting ready to run in case I had asked the wrong question, sending him deeper into the madness. Then he turned around, holding up his two hands, and said, “Who’s the wicked stick? Who do you think? Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub!” As scared as I was, I couldn’t stop laughing at that word. I thought he’d made it up, or else was speaking in tongues like in the story he’d told me before about the apostles when they were filled with the Holy Spirit; with Davey I was ready for any kind of mysterious possession. “Beelzebub!” I laughed. “What the fuck is that? You made that up!” I said, trying to lighten things up a little. He told me that Beelzebub is just another name for the Devil. “Beelzebub! That’s a good one,” I said, laughing hysterically now and plopping myself backwards onto one of the couches. “The Devil has many names,” he said, not laughing with me. “And he comes in many forms: like the stick. But,” he added, “by the blood of Christ, the stick is dead.” He turned around again, marching on his way with “Ding dong, the wicked stick is dead.”

  I stopped laughing then, and I just prayed to every ancestor I’d ever heard of, and to my brother Patrick, and to the Blessed Mother, to intervene and not let Davey kill himself or anything like that. I’d found myself doing this often. I had to talk to someone about what I witnessed, and I never wanted to scare Ma or the rest of the family whenever they got home, so I just prayed.

  Davey had always prided himself in being “a little nutty,” since, as he said, none of the people he’d met since moving into Old Colony wanted to “admit to their confusion.” It often seemed Davey was working really hard to be well, coming into the house, exhausted after a long day of conversations on the street with people he said were way nuttier than he’d ever been, but who weren’t on any medication, not prescribed anyway. He was always jerking his head around toward the sound of commotion in the streets, and saying something that he thought was hilarious or wise about our lives in Old Colony. He was trying really hard to get a kick out of it all. But then in August it wasn’t funny anymore; the people in our neighborhood weren’t funny he said, no matter how many jokes they told or laughs they had or drinks they took. It was as if he took on all of the suffering he saw around us, suffering that so many in Old Colony tried to ignore with all the partying like there was no tomorrow. They were all “poor souls,” especially this time of year, and so was he.

  When Ma came home that afternoon, Davey made like everything was normal, closing his hands tightly, as if he was hiding the wounds, and trying not to let M
a look in his eyes. When she looked at him with her own worried eyes, he just jerked his face away from her, heading out into the streets, and I kept him in my prayers.

  Ma always looked down on the people who looked through their peepholes and then said they “didn’t want to get involved.” The Duggans downstairs were at it again. It was one of those hot summer nights when no one could sleep, so we’d all felt something coming. When Ma heard all the screaming in the hallway, she looked through the peephole and saw Moe Duggan with a knife in his hand, and his thirteen- and sixteen-year-old sons bleeding from their chests, running for the roof to get away. Ma opened the door and pulled Brian and Joey inside, and locked it on Moe.

  Brian collapsed onto the floor, and Joey ignored the blood spurting from his own chest to apply pressure to his little brother’s wound. Ma called the EMTs. Reenie, the nosy neighbor from next door, came out of her apartment when she saw through her peephole that Moe had left the scene. She said Brian looked cold, and she grabbed Kathy’s fur coat to throw on top of him. “Not my fuckin’ fur coat!” Kathy screamed, and she knocked Reenie aside and caught the fur coat before it fell onto Brian.

  We could see that Brian was turning an ash gray color and heard Ma say that he was dying, as she pressed her own fringed cowboy jacket onto the wound over Brian’s heart. Davey came out of one of the back rooms but didn’t say a word; he just paced back and forth past Brian and chain-smoked. Then he stopped pacing and looked at Brian and threw his two arms up like he finally knew what to offer. “Hey, Bri, you want a smoke?” When he got no response, he went back to his nervous pacing around the house, glancing at Brian from the corner of his eye whenever he happened to pass by.