“The Sox open the season in a few weeks,” Donny says. “It’ll be worse.”
Charlie taps Grayson’s arm. “You’re really quiet again. You all right?”
Grayson nods. “I’m fine.”
“Lucky you. Now we’re here, I’m afraid I’m going to piss my pants in there.”
“I have something that will make you feel like King Kong,” Donny says.
“I’ve got something,” Charlie says. “I can wait ‘til we get up there.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
He finds a place to park down the block on Kilmarnock St. They get out, look up at the windows of the turn of the century apartment buildings, four and five stories high, brick or stone and crammed together so tight you couldn’t get a knife blade between any two. They walk around the corner to Peterborough Street, and pass a VW bus parked under a street light. The original paint job is now a faded blue and the backdrop for a hand painted peace sign, a Black Power fist and other homemade touches like swirls, loopy lines, and a representation of a famous cartoon dog.
“Lotta hippie wagons around,” Donny says.
“I see one,” Grayson says.
“That’s right,” Charlie says. “Way too many.” Donny laughs, and pats Charlie on the back.
In some ways, this area is not a part of Boston. It is more like a far-flung suburb of New Jersey or New York. Locals often felt they were in hostile territory here or in another of Boston’s several student ghettos. For most of the year the streets and apartment buildings of this Fenway neighborhood teem with students from the local schools. The Fenway neighborhood is within walking distance of Wentworth, Boston State, Harvard Med School, Emmanuel, Simmons, B.U., Northeastern and Mass. College of Pharmacy. This part of Boston is occupied by people who laugh at your accent, right in front of you, but only once, and paid $1.50 to sit in the bleachers at Fenway Park and root for the Yankees. The newly educated who seemed to think that the ability to talk really, really, really fast meant that what they say is righteous.
Grayson, Charlie and Donny have family roots in the southern Boston neighborhoods. Dorchester, Roxbury and South Boston are the sections of the city where they and their parents were born. It is where their parents grew up, married and started a family. But in the 1950’s and early 60’s many of the young families headed by the men who’d made it home from the war, moved kin and kit to the nearby suburbs of Quincy, Braintree, or Weymouth. The reasons why they moved varied; a big yard, or child safe streets. For some, though not many, it was because they believed there were no “coloreds” in the suburbs. But the usual reason for about nineteen out of twenty of them was that a working man could now afford his own home, a single-family home, no less, if he was willing to sweat the mortgage. Coming up with the monthly payment would not be easy, but that was all right. A school teacher could make the payments on his own home in Weymouth, if he was willing to paint houses in the summer or drive an ice cream truck. A Teamster who put in a couple of hours of OT a day could have his own 200 square feet of soft suburban grass, not that city grass, that grew through a crack in the asphalt and had the texture of sandpaper. A shipyard worker who tended bar a couple of nights a week could say goodbye to the second-floor apartment in a triple-decker.
So, their offspring, these young men, born in this city, feel estranged from it. And yet, they believe that they know it better and love it more than those who came later or those who stayed. Who knows a love better than he who has regrets that he left?
“Listen,” Charlie says. “Don’t get into a beef with anyone. Not tonight.”
“Then tell the hippies to be nice,” Donny says.
Grayson often wondered why when they were back in the place where they were born, they were argumentative. In the blue-collar bars they were flaming liberals, in the student ghettos, raging conservatives. Maybe it was like an ex-lover trying to start a brawl with his replacement. Or maybe if they didn’t know you, they’d go to any lengths to piss you off. Or maybe they are just jerks who like to annoy everyone.
They all hate Nixon and the rest of the Republicans but they also despise the Democrats who started the war, got 55,000 American kids killed and then ran away from it and now call it Nixon’s War. Now, as opposed to a short while ago, when people talk about government and politics on TV or write columns in the newspapers, the talk of “the Left” and “the Right,” instead of Democrats and Republicans. So, in the new vernacular, the bombast and boosterism of the Right embarrassed them and the certainty and self-righteousness of the Left sickened them.
“I do not like hippies, not even a little bit,” Donny says.
“Nobody does,” Charlie says. “Because they’re all assholes.”
Donny nods. “Amen, brother.”
“I’d still fuck a good-looking hippie chick, though,” Charlie says.
“Goes without saying,” Donny says.
“Men of strong convictions,” Grayson says.
“My father thinks they’re still called beatniks,” Charlie says. “He sees them on TV, he says,” and here Charlie growls in an older man’s voice, “‘Beatnik bastards are always protesting some stupid shit like starchy food in the cafeteria. Too much macaroni and cheese. Close down the campus. They’re always squawking over something goofy.’”
When Grayson, Donny, Charlie and their friends are in their own haunts and certain they can’t be heard by outsiders, they argued amongst themselves about things. Charlie says the anti-war hippie Left was comprised of a bunch of spoiled college kids with rich parents. Donny believed the anti-war geek’s main goal was self-promotion. They have a sick need to be seen cavorting in the mass media. They are mostly freaks and hysterics, self-important, silly dinks. It pisses Grayson off that ten percent of his generation is made up of these drips, but the mass media makes it seem as if the ten percent is the majority. To the world, the mangy losers shown lurching around and gyrating in Woodstock in muddy assed bellbottoms are the icons of the generation; to their working class contemporaries they are posers; posers with posters of Che; they are sheep, dreaming they are rebels, unaware that should the revolt they wished for succeed, they would be counted among the rich, and escorted to a perch on the lip of a ditch, and given a personal demonstration of the one shot solution to a potential counter revolution.
“We’re close,” Grayson says.
He points up at a double winged stucco apartment building, where someone has opened a window and stuck a stereo speaker in it, facing out.
“Sylvester Stewart is coming out that second floor window.”
“What?” Charlie asks. He looked up, then heard the music, too. “Oh, Sly.”
“It’s a family affair,” Donny croaks, in a piss poor imitation of Sly and The Family Stone.
Donny executes a couple of James Brown spins, and a few dance moves he had mastered and felt compelled to perform whenever he heard the blues or soul music, or merely came across a black entertainer’s name. Grayson and Charlie ignore him, as Donny whirls on the sidewalk in his oversized blue bowling team shirt, with the “Kandlepin Killers” logo on the back and the name Maurice stitched over the pocket.
Charlie nods his head toward the wide brownstone, with five floors and probably about forty units.
“Yeah, this is the one we’re looking for,” Charlie says.
They go up the block granite steps to a vestibule and get inside to eyeball a bank of buzzer buttons beside the apartment numbers. Scattered around the floor of the vestibule are take-out menus, flyers for stereo equipment, and sections of the free weekly tabloid newspaper. The air stinks of pot, piss, puke, wet paper, and warm pizza box.
Shortly after Donny presses the right button a female voice crashes over the tinny speaker and says something that ends in a question mark.
Donny presses a hand over his mouth and speaks in a badly muffled but decidedly mellow, exaggerated hippie drawl. “Hey, man. We’re here for the party.” He punctuates his words with an idiotic cackle.
A loud noise
snaps and buzzes, and seems to fill the vestibule with static electricity. Charlie jumps and shouts for Jesus. Donny laughs, and pulls the now unlocked glass door open.
“Man, you could electrocute a cow with that buzzer,” Charlie says.
Grayson resists the urge to make a remark, knowing they are all nervous now, and will be until it all was long over.
As they start up the wide interior staircase in the middle of the big foyer, the apartment door closest to the vestibule opened and an elderly woman leans out and looks around. The old gal looks like she’d just gotten out of bed. She inhabits a large housecoat and has her hair up in bobby pins.
“You people better hurry up and have your fun,” she says, “because I’m calling the police. You tell that fat Judith that the noise is unbearable! I’m not going to put up with it.”
“We are the police, mam,” Donny says. Frowning, he takes out his wallet, holds it up for a second and then put it back in his pocket. “We’re here to quiet them down.”
“Thank God,” she says. “I’m going to have her evicted. I’ve lived in this building for forty years and I’ve never been afraid like this, even when The Strangler was going around killing everyone. These dope fiends.”
“Shhh,” Donny says. “Don’t worry, it’ll be fine. We’re here now. We’ll get them to settle down, or there will be hell to pay.”
“I hope you have to beat them up!” the old woman says, eyes afire.
“Yes, mam,” Donny says. He nods. “We do, too.” Then he smiles, showing her a set of gleaming choppers.
“I shouldn’t have to live like this,” the woman cries out. She sobs and slams the door. The despair in her voice takes all the fun out of their Dragnet skit.
Grayson shakes his head. “She’s right. She shouldn’t have to live like this, with these jerks and their antics.”
“Yeah,” Donny says. “Let’s go beat the shit out of them and steal their money. And their drugs.”
They climb up the stairs, now pissed off at the partiers.
At the top of the steps, Grayson wishes there were more. A lot more. Steps he could keep going up and up and up and never get to where he is going.
The door to 32 is closed but seems to pulse and throb in its frame from the noise beating against it. This is the place.
Donny knocks on the door, and a fraction of a second later, knocks again, much harder.
“Oh, oh,” Charlie says. “The bennies got him amped way up.”
“Yeah. Simmer down,” Grayson says. “You’re so nervous you’re making me jumpy.”
“Fuck off,” Donny says. “You simmer down.”
A pretty young woman, who would have been described as voluptuous in Victorian era pornography, opens the door.
“Wow,” Donny says. “You must be Judith. Nobody said you were a fox.”
“What?” Judith asks, with a smile.
Donny looks her up and down, but says nothing more.
“My friend told us you’re having a party,” Charlie says.
She smiles again. “Oh, you’re Jack’s friends?”
They don’t know Jack, but play it out as if they do.
“Exactly right. Is he here?” Grayson asks.
“No, he couldn’t make it,” she says.
“Oh, too bad,” Grayson says. “Jack’s the best.”
“He said you might come. What’s your name again?”
“I’m Barry LaBreck,” Charlie says. “These two sad sacks aren’t with me.”
“Oh, heck. Don’t listen to him,” Donny says. “He’s whacked out on beans.”
The woman turns to Charlie.
“Well, that’s cool, Barry,” she says. She pronounced the name as ‘Beery.’
She looks up at Donny. “Jack didn’t tell me his friend was so handsome.”
Charlie looks over at Grayson, smiles indulgently and shakes his head. Here it is again, the expression says. She thinks this enormous screwball is handsome? It is absurd, and yet they’ve heard it more than a few times from different females of various ages.
“I haven’t seen Jack the last couple of weeks,” Judith says. She registers their blank faces. “At B.U.? I’m in one of his poly-sci classes.”
“Right,” Donny says. “He mentioned that.”
Judith nods and leads them inside, then excuses herself, turns left, pushes open a swinging door to give them a forty-five-degree angle peek into the kitchen. They had hoped to see the occupants, as part of their mission is to mingle and determine if there is any rogue muscle on site. Spot any tough guys who may want to give chase if the plan went awry. Some aggressive types who might get angry that their supplier has been ripped off. Judith heads into the kitchen and shuts the door leaving them none the wiser.
The air in the apartment is thick, spiced by cigarette and dope smoke plus beer and the tang of sweet, kiddie wine, sharp with its robust alcohol content. From the record player in another room comes the melancholy voice of John Lennon singing, No Reply. Sly has been played and now laid underneath an old Beatles album.
They head toward the music but are halted by a young man built like an upright piano, who is blocking the double doorway to the living room. The large lad has bushy black eyebrows and a head shaved close enough to clear him for a seat on the electric chair. He was a little over six feet tall, but he was wide, and bigger than Donny through the upper body. The guy was showing off his muscles in a tight black tee shirt. He nods toward another room, and makes a loud announcement in a honking New Jersey accent:
“Three bucks entitles you to help yourselves to your choice of Schlitz, Dawson Ale and Carling Black Label, which are placed in coolers sited strategically around the common areas. Drink all you want. But there is one rule. Stay out of the kitchen, that’s a private party.”
Grayson figures they were chopping cocaine in the privacy of the kitchen. People at a party would thump up a vein and bang heroin with less reticence than they would light a Viceroy, but they got secretive around coke, especially good coke. The hippies love everyone, man, but not enough to give anyone a free taste. Love has its limits. Did the pharmacy college boys sell coke in addition to pills stolen from the VA? If the pharmacy student/drug dealers upstairs had a steady source of medical grade coke, they were probably baling their cash with metal straps, crating it and using a fork lift to move it around.
“We’re common folk,” Charlie says. “You’ll find us in the common areas, guvnor.” Perhaps inspired by the Beatles music, he was attempting some kind of mangled cockney accent. “No suh, we’ll not go into the kitchen. We know our place.”
Grayson chafes; someone from New Jersey forbidding him to go anywhere in Boston, private property or not, is annoying. Unhappily, annoying is not enough; what Grayson needs, in order break out of this funk is either booze or outrage. Beside him, Donny apparently didn’t hear the guy in the black tee-shirt; he stood there grinning, likely thinking about Judith. She is a lot of gal.
The big boy may take Donny’s vacant look as a signal of submission, because Billy leans into Donny’s personal space and looks at the name stitched over the pocket of Donny’s bowling shirt.
“Okay, Maurice, three bucks each to me. I’m Billy. The Bouncer.”
This Billy the Bouncer has a tone in his voice that Grayson doesn’t like. Grayson tilts his head, and looks Billy the Bouncer up and down.
“I don’t think you’d bounce. I bet you’d splatter,” Grayson says, standing beside Donny.
Billy seems to think about that, as Donny snaps awake.
Donny steps in front of Grayson, blocking Billy’s view of him, and speaks quietly to his cousin.
“What am I hearing in your voice?” Donny asks. “Do not start anything. You’re here to keep me in line, not vice versa.” He turns again to face Billy.
“Billy!” Donny shouts with brio. “What a kidder this kid is, say, you’re a big boy Bill. You must play football?”
“Yeah,” Billy says. “B. U., nose guard.”
Behind Billy’s back John Lennon loudly brays the opening line of, “I’m a Loser,”
Donny gives Billy a ten, and Billy fishes through some bills looking for a one.
Donny turns and grabs Grayson by the arm. “Don’t say anything.”
Grayson feels his arm go numb and yanks it free before it atrophies.
“Please,” Donny says.
An exuberant Judith bounces out of the kitchen, comes over and grabs Donny by the hand and tugs him into the living room, and the other two follow.
Alcohol, amphetamine, and anger are not working as hoped, and Grayson, neither drunk nor high, just badly wired, has a copper taste in his mouth. Nothing is working right tonight.
Donny breaks away and dances Judith into a corner, smiling what he calls his suave smile, and for some reason, he’s pointing at his feet.
Grayson and Charlie mill around looking for the cooler with the one potable beer of the three named. The ratty furniture is filled to overflowing and many of the guests are sitting on the floor, so they have to be careful not to trip over their fellow bon vivants. Those of the female persuasion are drinking wine from waxy, paper cups while some of the males manifest their machismo by downing their fruity Strawberry Hill straight from the bottle.
They see a cooler and sidle over to it. While Charlie, a bartender by trade, digs the beer out of the ice, Grayson catches a snatch of the conversation going on behind him.
A guy’s voice says, “Bunny says you were tripping last night. How was it?”
A girl’s voice says, “Not good. A real bummer. I could say it was because of my neuroses, but then what? Fuck that.”
Charlie came back with four beers. He hands two to Grayson and they work their escape from the crush of knee-high people, retreating to the long hallway that was the spine of the apartment.
“Most of these chicks are hoodsies,” Charlie says.
“Yeah, college girls used to be the older women. Now they’re the hoodsies. Oh, well,” Grayson says.
“Yeah, doesn’t matter anyway,” Charlie says. “I’m laying low.”
“Endings are tough. I should know.”
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