Kevin came to the hospital with Okie O’Connor. Kevin and Okie were best friends, and it was Okie who made sure the two took time out from their busy day to visit Kathy. Ma always raved about how polite Okie was, carrying her bundles and answering all her questions with a “Yes, Mrs. MacDonald” or a “No, Mrs. MacDonald.” Frankie and Kevin said that Okie was a comedian, keeping them laughing all the time. But Frank was worried about Okie’s coke use. Still, no one ever imagined he’d be found, two years after I saw him talking to Kathy in her coma, hanging from a rope in his parents’ basement, dead by the age of nineteen. Kevin and Frankie broke into Jackie O’Brien’s Funeral Parlor in the middle of the night to stay awake by Okie in his casket. Jackie O’Brien was going to press charges to get them to pay for the back door they broke, but Okie’s father had no problem with what the kids had done to show their loyalty, and said he would pay for the door himself.
Brian Biladow came all the way to the City Hospital in his wheelchair, with Michael Dizoglio pushing him. When Ma was studying at Suffolk University in the seventies, she’d gotten a social work internship at an alternative school for juvenile delinquents and kids who’d dropped out—mostly since busing began. That’s where Ma had met Brian and Michael and a gang of kids from the D Street Project. The teenagers were thrilled that “a Southie lady” was working at the school, rather than “another liberal snob,” as they told Ma. They thought Ma was pretty cool in her fringed cowboy coats and spike-heeled go-go boots. They opened up to her, and came by the house to tell her all their problems. Not long after Ma started working at the school, Brian got shot in the spine after getting high and breaking into a neighbor’s house for drug money. Ma had made the whole family visit Brian in the hospital, and now here he was, being wheeled into Boston City by Michael Dizoglio, brother to Dizzo, the ice cream man. “Hey, Kathy—how ya doin’, hon’,” Brian yelled in his nasal voice, like he was wheeling into a party in Old Colony. He brought her some flowers, and jokingly offered her some of the coke he always kept hidden under his ass while he wheeled around the projects, waving to the cops. Michael Dizzo was quiet while Brian did all the socializing in Kathy’s room. Some years later Michael was murdered, along with his nephew Stephen Dizzo, in an apartment in the three-decker where they lived in Andrew Square. According to the newspapers, their upstairs neighbor, a seventeen-year-old, shot the two of them with his rifle after Michael had broken down the apartment door in a fight over money. Michael had just gotten out of a detox a few months earlier. His nephew Stephen, a quiet kid getting his high school diploma from Boston High, ran upstairs after hearing the gunfire, and was shot in the head. Stephen’s thirteen-year-old sister found them both on the floor.
But then I only knew my own family’s pain. First Davey, and now Kathy. We were too closed in on ourselves to know that we were only part of a bigger bloodbath spilling into the streets of the neighborhood we’d thought was heaven on earth. Although we’d seen people like Brian Biladow wheeling around the neighborhood, they seemed more like upbeat survivors than victims of anything. No one took the time to make all the connections. Most of us were too busy picking up the broken pieces of our families. And those who hadn’t been hit yet protected themselves by seeing our young dead or wounded as somehow deserving their fate.
Frankie came in to the City Hospital and watched Kathy with anger in his eyes and fists clenched. One time he put a holy medal in her hands and left in tears. That day he walked up to Richie Amoroso on Dorchester Street and gave him a beating that landed Richie in the hospital. Frankie wasn’t usually a troublemaker now that he was winning titles in boxing rings all over New England. But he said he was tired of waiting on the cops to investigate Kathy’s fall. All the same neighbors who said they’d seen and heard the fight between Kathy and Richie that night, the coldest night of the year, never answered the door when Ma and Frankie showed up with detectives looking for a statement. Ma saw their peepholes go dark, though, from their eyes looking through, so we all knew they were just minding their own business. We knew that minding your own business was the rule in Southie, but it was different for us now that we wanted some answers about Kathy being in a coma. Frankie chose street justice, with no one talking and the cops giving up so easily. But Amoroso was back out on the streets in no time, and people were already starting to ask less often about how Kathy was doing in the hospital.
I started to get to know who Kathy was while she was in the coma. I felt guilty because I knew it was a little late. One day when she went back on the critical list, I was sure she’d finally die. She was only nineteen, and she’d have to be buried in the extra spot we had next to Davey. I went into her bedroom to prepare. Kathy had never wanted me snooping in her room, so I thought I’d probably find drugs or maybe even evidence of witchcraft from her friendship with Julie Meaney. I was looking for any explanation for what had happened to her life. But instead I found out all the things Kathy felt about herself, all the photos and letters she’d saved through her teenage years, all the insecurities of a girl in poems that played up how “K-O-O-L” she was. She’d kept every one of her school pictures, even the ones of her as a chubby fourth grader with hand-me-down clothes, photographs over which she’d scrawled FAT, or else scribbled out the face completely. In her teenage years, Kathy had become thinner, prettier, and she wore sexy stolen designer clothes and put on faces that looked like she was the baddest. “K is for Kool,” Kathy wrote in a jingle that spelled out the meaning of the letters of her name. Her other poems were about her friends and how cool her whole crew was. In letters to herself, Kathy wrote about how worried she was about girlfriends like Julie Meaney and Doreen Riordan, and how much she loved Southie. Her doodles on paper said all the stuff we saw written on the walls of the neighborhood: SOUTHIE FOREVER, IRISH POWER, HELL NO WE WON’T GO, RESIST, NEVER, and KATHY # ONE.
Then there was the scrawl WHITEY RULES. I wasn’t sure if Kathy was talking about white people being the best, or about Whitey himself, who some said was bringing up the finest cocaine from Florida these days. I already felt myself missing Kathy, but I didn’t want to think about that. I gathered up all her secret belongings and got ready for another funeral.
The next day Grandpa met me at the City Hospital. He said he had some holy water from Fatima, where the Blessed Mother was said to have appeared before three children in 1917. He said I’d have to help him throw the water onto Kathy when the nurses weren’t looking. Kathy was on the danger list again. Infections were taking over her body, and she had pneumonia—there was no way the nurses would let us dump water on her. But this was holy water Ifigured, so I went along with him. I was willing to try anything at this point.
The nurses caught Grandpa after he’d managed to pull the jug from out of his baggy trousers and pour it all over Kathy’s head, hands, and feet. Grandpa was shaking and in tears, and he told one nurse to go fuck herself when she came in screaming and trying to pull the old-fashioned jug from his hands. More nurses came running in when they heard the fighting. They started to gang up on him, but Grandpa was too strong for them. He kept on reciting the Rosary and telling the nurses in his Irish brogue to shut their fucking mouths. The hospital johnny that they made him wear over his clothes into Kathy’s sanitized room was hanging now from his two wrists, and he kept pulling it up over his shoulders, in between throwing more holy water and fighting nurses. The shower cap they’d made him put on over his hair was now barely hanging onto the back of his head. “Kathy, if you can hear me now, move your arm!” Grandpa yelled. And she did. We both looked at each other. After that he just took a deep breath and relaxed. “Now,” he said, “are ye right so?” That’s what he said when he meant, “Are you ready?” I said I was, and we left the nurses still screaming.
We walked out into the first signs of spring after one of the coldest winters I remember, and the whole way home Grandpa had tears in his eyes, but the brightest smile. He said he had “a good feeling” now that Kathy would be coming out of it. He asked me if I
had a good feeling too, and I said I did. But I think I had a good feeling mostly because for the first time in my life I saw how much Grandpa really did care about us, and how much pain he felt for Ma. Even though he could never tell her that.
All winter long, we’d been yelling into Kathy’s ears, asking her to move a foot or an arm if she could hear us. Sometimes she twitched, but the day Grandpa threw the holy water on her was the first time she’d clearly heard us, and she’d slowly lifted her limp arm and held it there. The following week, on Easter Sunday morning, Ma got the call. “Kathy woke up!” she screamed, banging on the door to the bedroom where I was sleeping. When we all went in to see Kathy, she was lying there looking at us with her two eyes open, and she smiled. She tried to say “Ma.” Her lips said it but she still couldn’t talk. It just sounded like air.
Kathy had to start all over again, they told us. The doctors didn’t know if she would ever walk again; she had extensive nerve damage that couldn’t be repaired. Half her body was almost useless, the right side, which they said was controlled by the left side of her brain, which had hit the sidewalk. When she came home to Old Colony, a crowd had gathered to cheer her arrival out of a handicapped van. Kathy was in a wheelchair. Her mind seemed to be all there, though. She was having speech therapy, and getting a little bit of her voice back. She had chewed off a good bit of her tongue in the coma, so it was hard to make out what she was saying. But she could keep up a conversation and knew who everyone was.
Within a year Kathy took her first steps, at first with a walker, then with a cane. She dragged her right side when she walked. Before long she was dragging her right side around Old Colony, to all of her old haunts. But more and more her walks were up toward Jackie O’Brien’s to attend her friends’ wakes. More and more often I found myself sitting at the window, noticing how clean-cut all the teenagers in the neighborhood looked, with ties on and wet hair slicked back like Catholic school kids, gathering out on Patterson Way for the three-block journey up Dorchester Street to the funeral parlor. You wouldn’t even recognize some of the roughest ones among them. Kathy, Kevin, and Frankie put on their best clothes too. Kathy usually followed at the back of the crowd, with a few others who walked with canes or were wheeled in chairs. It was becoming another one of our Southie traditions, these groups of spiffed-up kids gathering to see their friends in a casket; and Ma found herself wondering which one would be next.
C H A P T E R 8
S T A N D - U P G U Y
UNDEFEATED FRANK MACDONALD
Hard hitting Frank MacDonald of South Boston met and defeated a very comparable Jose Miguel from Cranston, Rhode Island. Frank totally devastated his opponent with a series of crippling punches to the body which succeeded in incapacitating Miguel, who was of great courage but unable to fathom Frank’s awesome body attack—congratulations Frank, and corner men Paul “Pole Cat” Moore and Tommy “Stove Man” Cronin.
—SOUTH BOSTON TRIBUNE
FRANKIE WAS ONE OF THE FEW YOUNG PEOPLE IN THE neighborhood not being dragged down by drugs and crime in 1980. His boxing career was one of the only things that brought good news to the streets of Old Colony in those days. Frankie was fast becoming a neighborhood hero, not only in Old Colony, but all over Southie. Everyone knew who he was, and he had a nickname now, “Frank the Tank,” for his “hard hitting” style that was bringing him championship titles, from Junior Olympics bouts at Free-port Hall in Dorchester to the New England Golden Gloves tournament in Lowell.
Mary and Kathy said all their girlfriends talked about Frankie’s looks, and the guys who hadn’t yet got caught up in the world of drugs talked about getting a ripped body like Frank’s. He was working out seven days a week, running from Old Colony, through the Point, around Castle Island, and back to the project, always in his combat boots from his days in the Marines—and sometimes he ran backwards. Frank was welcome all over Southie. The little kids in the neighborhood would run after him, asking him questions about his bouts and begging him to show how he knocked out his opponents. That’s why Frankie was so intent on being what they called “a stand-up guy” in Southie. That’s what they called anyone who would never snitch, even if it meant doing a life bid because of it. But in Frankie’s case, it just meant he was clean-cut. Sure, he knew all the top gangsters in the neighborhood; anyone with Frankie’s status in the Southie boxing world would. But he never got involved in their rackets, stayed away from the dust and coke they were pumping into the streets, and refused to work for Whitey, telling Ma that he never wanted to be “owned.”
But still Frankie had “the boys,” as we called Whitey’s troops, working in his corner as he fought his way through four years of New England Golden Gloves championships, starting out as a two-time middleweight champ in the novice class, and ending up a light heavyweight champ for the whole region in 1982 and 1983. South Boston Tribune articles always pointed out the sound advice and leadership “the boys” were giving Frank in the ring:
Following closely the instructions of trainer Paul “Pole Cat” Moore and manager Tommy Cronin, Frank pursued his opponent most aggressively with a savage body attack which … wore down O’Han to the point of becoming a bit careless and somewhat frustrated … at being unable to figure out MacDonald’s technique. Frank, once again following the instructions for his corner, succeeded in landing a barrage of lefts and rights to the jaw and head of his adversary. This will prove to have been a most excellent victory for Frankie in the upcoming bouts he is to have.
In Southie having the gangsters in your corner, in the ring or on the streets, meant that you had the ultimate protection and power. Grandpa didn’t believe that, though. He had warnings for all of us, from his own days as a longshoreman on the Southie docks, where he said he’d worked alongside some men who ended up in the Brinks robbery of 1950, “the big one.” Grandpa always told us how the rule on the docks was to keep your mouth shut about the rackets you saw. He said many a time the longshoremen were lined up by the cops and asked to step forward and speak about crimes. That’s how a waitress from the local diner got killed, after she stepped forward among the silent longshoremen. She was found murdered the next day, her blood scrawled into the letters SNITCH all over her cold-water flat. Grandpa had another rule of his own for the underworld: “Watch out whose hand you shake,” he told us. He said there was no such thing as a gangster giving something without wanting more in return. “They’ll give you a quarter for a dollar any day,” he said. Grandpa had been trying to get closer to us since Kathy’s coma and had even bought a condo in City Point. He got a closer look at the neighborhood, and he kept coming around the house cursing “that fuckin’ Whitey Bulger, a no-good bum if there ever was one,” and wondering if the Bulgers were even Irish at all, with Senate President Billy Bulger’s insulting Irish brogue imitations at drunken St. Paddy’s Day festivities. “They’re a shame to the Irish altogether,” he said, “and what respectable Irish person would name their kid William?” he asked. “That would be like a Jew naming a kid Adolf.”
We got a kick out of Grandpa’s ranting, but Frankie started to avoid him when he came knocking at his door to give more speeches. Frankie had as many admiring eyes on him now as any of the gangsters did, and he didn’t have to hijack trucks or sell poison in the streets to get that respect. He knew how to keep himself out of trouble. He was obsessed with the whole role model thing besides. One time Joe cracked open a can of beer while the two of them were walking down the street, and Frankie lashed out at him to “put that fuckin’ shit away. There are kids around,” he said. Frank called the booze “fuckin’ shit,” the same thing Whitey had called the pot Kevin was waving out the car window years earlier. But Frank meant it, not because it was illegal to be drinking in public, but because he knew that kids in Old Colony were watching his every move.
Kevin wasn’t selling drugs anymore; he’d gotten into the bigger stuff. By the time Kevin was sixteen, he hardly ever slept at our apartment, so I didn’t really know what exactly he was
into, but I picked up a few clues. He was still very generous, so whatever scores he was making, it seemed the whole project would get some of the spoils. Like the time Kevin knew Ma needed money, and he gave her a few twenties. Ma was glad to get anything she could in those days, as the lines for welfare food seemed to be getting longer. But the guy at “Dirty John’s” Sub Shop told Ma her twenty was a fake, counterfeit. He let her use it anyway. “What the hell,” he said, “they’re all over the neighborhood.” Ma played dumb and off she went with her sandwiches, but she cursed Kevin all the way home. Not long after, when Kevin got locked up for driving a stolen car—he wasn’t getting caught for the big stuff—Ma got a call from him at Charles Street Jail. I heard Ma tell him, “Jesus Christ, then you better keep your mouth shut.” When Ma hung up the phone, she told Frankie that Whitey had sent someone into the jail to visit Kevin, to give him a warning to keep quiet about where he was getting the counterfeit money if it should come up. Whitey knew that any Southie kids arrested for anything were likely to be worked on for information about his operations. And he made sure kids like Kevin, who were in and out of jail, understood that silence was the only way to stay alive in Southie.
After beating his stolen car rap, Kevin was back out on the streets, sharing more winnings with the neighborhood. One night there was a block party on Patterson Way, after Kevin gave out cases of beer and bottles of whiskey and vodka. I knew sometimes Whitey’s boys hijacked trucks out on suburban highways, and I figured that was where Kevin had gotten all the booze. All Ma knew was that everyone out front was shitfaced and having a ball, and that we hadn’t even seen the delivery man from J.J.’s Liquors making his usual Friday night rounds that hot summer night.
Then there were the clothes. That’s when I got in line to get my share of Kevin’s generosity. Kevin had what looked like a truckload of Calvin Klein jeans. I picked up four pairs for myself. I ripped the Calvin Klein label off the back pocket, though. Unlike everyone else in the neighborhood, I was going to punk rock clubs, where it wasn’t cool to have designer clothes. My punk friends and I were rebelling against the fashion industry. So was Kevin, you could say, but I didn’t want to explain to my friends from outside Southie the ideology behind my brother’s robbing a truck.
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