SOON AFTER BO AND MAUREEN HAD STARTED LIVING together, they went to a party at Roger “Booman” Tate’s. It was a kind of big, open warehouse space up over a law firm on Duckworth Street. Maureen was really chuffed to be there at that party with those guys—it felt like she was finally making it, becoming part of the happening, all the peace, love and groovy stuff she read about. If she wasn’t so self-conscious and if she’d had a tam, she would have thrown it into the air and sang out The Mary Tyler Moore Show theme.
Booman was part of DAFT, a company that started dealing drugs on a small, friendly basis and then got more serious and even started a legit business as a front for their dealing. DAFT stood for Dunne, Albert, Furlong and Tate. The boys were heroes to the local counterculture scene. To Maureen, at that time, they were the closest things to revolutionaries she’d ever seen. There they were, right in the middle of boring old St. John’s, living an alternative lifestyle, doing what everybody wanted to do but didn’t have the guts to do, setting up their own rules, sticking it to the man, living high off the hog. They were just selling marijuana and that was natural—it grew in the ground, for God’s sake, and it was good for you. They—the government and them—just didn’t want people to get high. They didn’t want people’s consciousness to expand, because then everyone would start seeing how foolish and stupid the whole big phony system was, everybody working nine to five, the war in Vietnam, all the oppression and all the vast structures of bullshit it took to keep everyone with their heads down, going into their shitty little offices every day, doing their shitty little stint of meaningless shitty labour, and driving home to the wifey, who was going around in a coma, out of her mind on Miltowns and boredom, and the two and a half kids they were brainwashing, crushing them until they were ready to step up and take their turn on the big treadmill of bullshit. The DAFT boys were boldly and courageously saying, “Fuck that shit!” and starting a new life, a different kind of life, a peace, love and groovy-acid-trips kind of life. It was a fucking shining city on the hill they were building, on marijuana and freedom and equality. Of course, now they were dealing a bit of cocaine, which, according to Time magazine that week, was really bad for you and dangerous and rotted out your brain on top of that. But, sure, that’s what they said about weed, and that was just lies, so they were probably lying about the coke too. Bo had just started working with them, doing carpentry work, building packing cases—not for dope, he assured Maureen, but to send legit stuff around the country.
The party was packed and loud, and it was the first time Maureen saw whole green garbage bags full of marijuana, and Nescafé jars of cocaine. There were gallons of liquor, and Maureen got drunk, of course. She couldn’t find Bo. She went reeling around the loft, but there weren’t that many places to look. Turned out he was holed up in the bathroom, necking with red-haired Marina Halley, a girl Maureen had gone to kindergarten with. Maureen physically pulled Bo out of the bathroom, and then there she was at the top of the stairs, punching him as hard as she could in the face.
“Just do that once more,” Bo warned her, and so she did. By the end of it, Maureen was at the bottom of two flights of stairs with an eye that was rapidly swelling, handfuls of hair missing from the side of her head and what was feeling like a broken rib. She was on her knees, sobbing, crying.
“Look . . . look what you did . . .”
Bo started to walk away from her, saying nothing. She stumbled after him, desperate for him to acknowledge what he’d done, to beg her forgiveness, to address this unbelievable, unbearable situation. Part of her hoped and prayed that he could change it somehow, make it better, make it go away. He shouldn’t be walking away from her, she shouldn’t be running after him, but she couldn’t just let him walk away, could she? Some attention had to be paid. She followed him back to their apartment on Livingstone Street.
That was the first time he hit her, and of course, it wouldn’t be the last. There were lots more black eyes and bruised ribs and rackets every weekend. For a while, foolishly, she thought she could take him, that she had the physical strength, that she could go punch for punch. She wouldn’t let herself be beaten down like this. But after a while, she stopped fighting back altogether, hoping, thinking, that would make a difference. It didn’t. She tried to give up drinking, but that failed miserably. She tried to control the amount she was drinking, the kind of liquor she was drinking. Beer was all right, but inevitably beer led to whisky, and whisky seemed to drive them into a frenzy of fists. Nothing she tried worked, and half the time she felt too useless to even try. She blamed herself and she kept it as secret as she could. Somebody, the Sarge probably, said, “Once it starts, my darling, it never stops. Why should it? Shure if he got away with it once, why wouldn’t he do it again the next time he got mad, even if it’s only to prove just how mad he is?”
Lots of times she ran away from him, back to Princess Street. But one night, Maureen’s father tried to push Bo out of the house. Bo started pushing back, and then there was Maureen’s father on the floor, fighting with Bo. The Sarge broke it up with the help of a broomstick. She called the cops and they hauled Bo down to the station. Maureen went with him, and the whole time she was there, she felt that’s where she belonged, and after that, she didn’t even have Princess Street to run away to.
The more she lost or cut off ties with her family and friends, the deeper she got into the violent mess with Bo, the more draw the mess seemed to hold for her: she’d spilled blood for this relationship, and she’d lost family—even Kathleen didn’t want to see her if she was with Bo. She was too ashamed to have friends and Bo didn’t want anyone in the apartment, so this was it: the big love they wrote about, giving up everything for love.
Secretly, Maureen knew she hated and feared Bo. He made her feel sick. More than one person asked Maureen, “The sex must be great though, is it?” That question left Maureen speechless. What were they thinking? Because she was so bloodied and bowed, because there was so much anger and instability, because the violence was so bad, the sex must be good? It was unfathomable to Maureen that the kind of shit-kicking she was getting could be, in some people’s minds, the door to pleasure.
Maureen could not think her way out of it, and she could not feel her way out of it. She just wanted to die, but at the same time, she wanted to make Bo pay in some way or at least admit how wrong he was, and she held on to that hope month after miserably unhappy month.