C H A P T E R 2
MY OLDEST MEMORIES ARE OF MY MOTHER CRYING. I don’t know how old I was, but I remember looking up from the floor and seeing her sitting on the old trunk that her father had carried from Ireland when he was eighteen in search of some good luck in America. She was only crying a little, and tried to hide it from me when she saw that I’d noticed. I climbed onto her lap and asked her why she was sad. She told me then about her baby who’d died and gone to heaven. She said his name was Patrick Michael, but that it was all going to be okay now because we had someone watching over us, praying for us every day. She told me that I’d taken Patrick Michael’s place, and that she’d switched the name around, calling me Michael Patrick, because the Irish always said it was bad luck to name a child after another who had died.
She showed me the light green knit hat that someone had given Patrick—she couldn’t remember who. He wore that hat home from the hospital when he was born, and he was baptized in it. It still smelled like a baby and had yellowing food stains on it. It was all we had of Patrick. There was no picture ever taken of the three-week-old baby. Throughout my whole life, whenever I saw her putting out very different emotions for the people around her, I have thought of my mother crying that time when she thought no one would see. And I could never really get mad at her the way most kids did at their parents. I could never judge her or blame her for anything in our lives. After I saw her cry for Patrick Michael, I only wanted to protect her.
I was born in Columbia Point Housing Project, at 104 Monticello Ave., on the South Boston/Dorchester waterfront. Actually, I was born in a hospital across the city. But most children in Columbia Point who were born around the same time I was were delivered in their project apartments, since back in the sixties ambulances wouldn’t enter the development without a police escort. Many of these children were born before the ambulance arrived, long after it was called. And many of this generation had birth defects. I was lucky. I was two weeks late, and my mother had planned ahead and arranged through Catholic Charities for the other kids to be placed in foster homes during her stay in the hospital. As soon as they were placed, she called the police to pick her up. She was told she’d have to meet them a mile down the road, outside of Columbia Point. She didn’t mind, so off she went. And it’s a good thing she had the extra time to make arrangements, because when I was born I was almost thirteen pounds, and had given my mother twenty hours of labor.
I held the record for birth weights in Boston, and Ma always told everyone how the doctors and patients came from all parts of Beth Israel Hospital to see me in the nursery. She said I was twice the size of the other infants, and while they all cried, kicking their legs with eyes sealed closed, I was quiet with two big spooky eyes staring around the room and observing all who had come to observe me from behind the glass window.
I was my mother’s ninth child, with two sisters and six brothers before me, including Patrick. And we always did include Patrick in the count. The family had settled into Columbia Point three years before I was born. My mother was still married to Dave MacDonald, but he was nowhere to be seen. According to Grandpa, Ma’s father, the marriage of his oldest daughter had fulfilled everything he’d expected of it. On the day of her wedding, Grandpa woke Ma up, and told her to “get up for the market.” Soon into the marriage Dave MacDonald beat my mother, fractured her skull on two occasions, and broke her ribs on another. To this day, though, Ma will remind you of that one time she knocked out his teeth with one good kick.
Dave MacDonald was an entertainer like Ma. He played country-western music on the guitar in barrooms throughout Boston. They’d met each other in a Valentine’s Day minstrel show at the parish hall. Ma had entered the show and played her Irish accordion while her four younger sisters step danced. Ma always told us that when she first laid eyes on Dave MacDonald, playing Davy Crockett, she immediately remembered that she’d had a terrible dream about him, a nightmare about a bad marriage. Nonetheless, Ma married him at the age of nineteen, and before long they became a musical duo. But the good times were few. He was an alcoholic, and further along in their marriage he would disappear on his wife and kids. A “womanizer,” Ma called him. My older brothers and sisters don’t remember seeing him around much. Occasionally they’d hear him back in the house, and learned to expect the yelling and things breaking. Ma always said there was “no such thing” as divorcing your husband back then. You lived with whatever you had married, even if it was all turning to hell. When she went to Father Murphy about the cheating and abuse, he told her, “You’re a Catholic, make the best of it.”
For her, drinking too much was one thing, disappearing and going out with other women was another, and the beatings were bad. But not showing up for your own baby son’s funeral? When Ma confronted Dave MacDonald about being down at the local bar while his son’s tiny casket was carried through St. Thomas’s Church, he said that he’d seen too many buddies go down in Korea to give a shit about one baby dying. That was the official end of the marriage.
Ma had already started to take care of the kids on her own, with financial help from welfare. Ma says that at the time the welfare policy actually encouraged you not to have a man, as you could receive a stipend only if there was no man around. So even when Dave MacDonald had been at home sometimes, Ma started to tell welfare that he wasn’t there with them anymore. It was the truth really—he wasn’t “there” for his kids like a real father. The family was living with cheap rent in the project—sixty-five dollars a month. The project wasn’t a safe place, but it was all we could afford with the sixty-five dollars we got from welfare every two weeks. And with the boxes of surplus cheese, butter, and powdered milk Ma dragged home from the maintenance office, we could survive there.
It was while living in Columbia Point that Ma realized she and her kids were surviving without any help from her husband anyway, money or anything else. She was alone when she had to shove three of her kids into a bush to hide from a shoot-out between two speeding cars. She was alone when she had to confront a drunk mother about her teenage son trying to strangle my sister Mary to death when she was five. She was alone when her kids came home with stories of being chased down and beaten for being white in a mostly black neighborhood. And she was alone when she ran through the project banging on neighbors’ doors, frantically trying to breathe life back into the mouth of her baby, already dead in her arms.
Grandpa was the one Ma turned to when she did need a man, and she’d have to be desperate for help because the two of them didn’t get along. Grandpa always said, “Didn’t I tell you?” or else, “You made your bed, now lie in it.” Ma and Grandpa had brought Patrick to the emergency room of Children’s Hospital the night before his death. Patrick was having trouble breathing and Ma thought he had a croup. Ma had no health insurance, and Medicaid was a year away. The hospital turned the baby away. Ma says that the hospital had filled its quota of what were called “charity cases,” and didn’t need to take any more that night. They said it wasn’t an emergency case. The next day Davey, the oldest in the family, found Patrick not moving in the crib, lying still and blue. The coroner said he’d died of pneumonia and should have been in a hospital. Ma later asked a lawyer about suing the hospital for neglect, but the lawyer said there was no case—the hospitals weren’t required to admit welfare babies with no insurance.
Ma says that when you lose a baby, it’s the worst feeling in the world because a baby depends on its mother for everything, and so ultimately it’s always the mother’s fault. I suppose that’s why she ran around with a dead baby in her arms—a baby that hadn’t been allowed into the hospital, in a housing project that ambulances wouldn’t come to. It was her baby, her fault, and she was going to do whatever she could do as a mother, which at that point wasn’t much.
My family hated Columbia Point Project, and hated living in our apartment even worse after Patrick’s death. In the mid-1960s it was one of the higher crime areas in the city, a neighborhood of tall yellow brick buildings with elevators that often didn’t work. Even when they were working, Ma says you’d take the stairs up seven flights to avoid being beaten and robbed on the elevator. And rats infested the hallways.
Davey always told me how he used his lunch box as a weapon to and from school, ready to smash anyone in the head who’d attack him or his younger brothers and sisters. Johnnie, the second oldest, tells me he’d be sent down to the Beehive corner store for milk and bread, only to be robbed repeatedly of the money Ma had given him for groceries. When Frankie was five, a gang of teenagers circled him and turned him upside down to shake all the coins bulging from his pockets for penny candy. Mary and Joe, the twins, used to pass one teenage girl in the courtyard who made them pull down their pants in order to get by. Drug dealings and shootings were becoming more common on hot summer evenings, so Ma started to call the kids into the house early in the afternoon.
Besides the usual fights and bullying in the project, the whole family remembers the tension of being part of a white minority in a mostly black development. Ma was always being called “that crazy white bitch” after going after some of the black mothers who’d watched their teenagers chase down and beat my brothers. While most of the project was made up of black families, Monticello Ave. was still about half white. The white teenagers organized gangs to protect their turf from the black gangs, and were admired by the white adults for their ability to “stand their ground,” as my mother said. Like us, most of those white teens eventually moved to the all-white housing projects of South Boston. Many are now the parents of today’s teens “standing their ground” in the Southie projects, now undergoing integration through what locals are calling “forced housing,” after “forced busing.”
My older brothers and sisters looked forward to the weekends, when there were free buses out of Columbia Point, to Broadway, the main shopping street in white South Boston. The white families of Columbia Point would all go on excursions to the toy stores and supermarkets there. Many recall seeing my mother getting on the bus, with her long, red country-western hair, leopard coat, fishnet stockings, and eight kids wrapped around her. Everyone talked about her ability to look so good after having all those kids, and even though she had to be both mother and father. Ma wouldn’t be seen in public except in spike heels. To keep her figure, she went jogging around Columbus Park, down the road in Southie. She’d walk over to the park in her jeans and spike heels, carrying flat sneakers in a brown paper bag. It was only when she got to the park, where no one could see her, that she changed into the sneakers, putting the spike heels into a bag and throwing them behind some bushes. She might have had to be the man of the house but, as she always said, she wasn’t about to start looking like one. Ma liked the praise she got for her looks, and she would remind people, “Imagine, after having nine kids!”
After a day of shopping on Broadway, Ma would sit for a cup of coffee at the Donut Chef and talk to everyone in the room. She was a great talker, and whether you were on a stool right next to her or on the far end of the room, you were part of her audience. While Ma did her storytelling, the kids stood lined up against the wall in descending order, each one hugging a bundle of groceries, watching for the free bus to take them back to Columbia Point. On one snowy day, as my brothers and sisters waited and watched for the free bus, the jukebox began to play the country-western hit that Dave MacDonald had written, sung by Doug LaVelle. Ma jumped up and told everyone in the Donut Chef that that very song playing had been written by the kids’ father, a no-good bastard if there ever was one. The song was titled “Two Years for Non-Support.”
Ma loved the chorus because she could knock twice on the coffee counter, like a judge banging her gavel. “And I gotta go-oh-oh / Because I owe. / Order in the court (knock knock) / Two years for nonsupport.” She told everyone in the shop how the song was about her getting her husband locked up. That years ago the kids’ father had been sentenced to two years for nonsupport after being brought to court by her, pregnant with their fifth child. She pointed to Frankie in the lineup. He was four now, and was watching Kathy and Kevin, the three-year-old and two-year-old, to keep them in the line. Ma told how Dave MacDonald ended up getting out after two months, broke down the door at Monticello Ave., and tried to strangle her. That’s when she kicked him in the mouth and knocked out a couple of his teeth. The next day she had him right back before the judge. Ma says he looked worse from the fight than she did. And when he was allowed to speak before the court he said, “Your honor, she may be a little woman, but she’s as strong as any man.”
My mother cherished those words and got everyone at the Donut Chef laughing while she made a few of them feel her biceps and showed her leg muscles. My brothers and sisters laughed too. We were on Ma’s side when it came to stories about the no-good bastard. We always felt a rush of pride with Ma’s favorite line, “I was always a fighter.” Grandpa had told her that when she was born she’d had to be brought into the world with forceps, and out she came with two black eyes, clenching the two fists in front of her. She bragged that her life was a battle from the start, and she was proud to show that she could take anything. “Feel that muscle,” she’d tell the guys at the Donut Chef.
The free bus came to take them all back to Columbia Point before dark, when it was dangerous to walk even a few blocks. All the other white families from Columbia Point were glad to see Ma and the kids climb onto the bus. They knew she’d be telling stories from one end of the bus to the other, keeping everyone laughing. As the bus approached Columbia Point though, things turned somber, and Ma says that’s when the white families would start telling their stories of being attacked and of being scared to be in a black project. If only we could get into Old Colony Project in Southie, they’d say. Many were counting their days on the waiting lists for the white projects. Ma says that a few on the bus would call the blacks that word that we were never allowed to say in our home. Others on the free bus just said they would feel more comfortable around their own, where the kids wouldn’t be threatened and attacked for being different.
Before long, we were one of the last white families holding out in Columbia Point. The white neighbors on the free bus were getting few. Many of them had fled to the Southie projects. And my family was beginning to stick out like a sore thumb on those scary walks back to our apartment at nightfall.
At the time, waterfront areas in Boston were still reserved for the ghettos because of the pollution and rodents. But Monticello Ave. is gone now. The streets have been changed around. Today, waterfront properties are some of the most sought-after areas in Boston, and are being developed for people with money. What was once Columbia Point is now a development primarily made up of white urban professionals. The buildings have been renovated, the rats are gone, and the stigma of the past has been erased with a new name—Harbor Point. But one-third of the neighborhood is still occupied by poor black families paying rent according to their income. And a few of the poorer black families say they’re feeling they might eventually be squeezed out by the single white tenants who live such separate lives and don’t want to pay high rents to live near poor people with kids and the problems that come with all that.
I don’t actually remember anything about our days in Columbia Point; I was only a baby when we finally fled. But those stories from my family, repeated like legend, have always been with me. Ma liked to say there was “no time for feeling sorry for yourself,” but I knew the blows she received must have hurt. Her fractured skull and broken ribs and the everyday threats made her want more for us than to be living in an unsafe project. I knew that even if he was in heaven praying for us, Ma would have given anything to have Patrick back with us. And I knew she never wanted her kids to be called “charity cases” again.
Ma had only one way out of Columbia Point—to take her parents’ offer and move us into their triple-decker in Jamaica Plain, which she did in 1967, less than a year after I was born. The apartment was on a tree-lined street in a neighborhood of working-class Irish families. We’d now have a yard for the first time, much more room, and freedom in more ways than one. My brothers and sisters could go outside whenever they wanted without getting jumped. Plus, it was just us and Ma now. Dave MacDonald was gone from our lives, and this was the greatest freedom of all.
There were only two bedrooms. The six boys slept in one, the two girls in the other, and Ma slept on the couch. We plopped our mattresses onto the hardwood floors and made ourselves at home. The floor of the boys’ room was mostly covered by mattresses. The remaining space was reserved for piles of clothes, clean but never folded. We slept side by side, with some lying across the bottoms of the mattresses; usually Kevin preferred this spot. He could fit there best, being the skinny runt we all called him. I always thought it strange at friends’ houses to see a high bed, perfectly made, with layers of sheets and blankets for different purposes: one sheet to hug the mattress, another to put over you, a light blanket coming out over the top of a matching quilt. It all seemed like such a big deal to make out of sleeping. I decided my mattress on the floor, covered with a tangled pile of blankets, was better than all that fuss. I felt bad for my mother, though, who had to sleep on the couch and was lucky if she got a blanket at all. Usually she’d cover herself in our winter coats. She said she liked them better than blankets. Even after some religious people came around with loads of army blankets for us, she’d still call out from her bed, asking me to get her a couple of coats to put over her. “Those blankets are scratchy old things I wouldn’t give to a dog,” she’d complain. The couches Ma slept on were also close to the floor, with their legs ripped off the bottoms. Once one leg broke, the rest of them had to go. In later years, we started to take the legs off our couches immediately after buying them from the Salvation Army. Why wait for the day when one of the wooden legs would crack and throw the couch lopsided while everyone was squeezed together watching Saturday morning cartoons or “Soul Train”?
Neighborhood kids were thrilled at the amount of freedom in our home. Most of them had couches covered in plastic, and had to eat at the dinner table and answer their parents’ questions about school and play. We could walk on top of mattresses and couches with our shoes on. Even jump up and down on them, and have pillow fights. We could take curtain rods down from the windows and have sword fights and scream “on guard.” We could eat food whenever we wanted and wherever we wanted. We never once sat down at a fixed time at the dinner table. There was no dinner table. Besides, there were just too many of us. Ma would make a big pot of something—usually an invention, mixing the last three days of leftovers into one big mush—and you’d slop some in a bowl, and find a corner of the house where no one would bother you.
Most of the families on Jamaica Street were Irish American, and some parents were actually from Ireland. My mother and her sisters spent a good part of their childhood years on this street, so we were familiar with many families who had been there for a couple of generations. The Sullivans and the Walshes lived across the street, the Rowans next door, Dick and Bridy Burns down the road, and Mrs. Carrol to the left of us. They were all part of a tight-knit Irish community that spanned Boston. The Irish in Boston all feared each other’s gossip, and Ma always said that certain news of her would be “all over Ireland.” As a kid I imagined that she meant this literally, and couldn’t believe that a whole country would care about things like the length of Ma’s miniskirts, which seemed to be a preoccupation of my grandparents and the other God-fearing Irish parents in the neighborhood.
My mother continued to play the Irish accordion for money at the local barrooms. The welfare office of course didn’t know this, and if they ever found out we’d be in worse shape than we’d ever been in before. We’d be out on the streets. But the welfare check certainly couldn’t support all of us, and so Ma made some money for the kids doing what she loved to do: entertaining people. She’d get about thirty dollars for groceries at the end of a night. We’d go to McBride’s down past the projects at the bottom of our hill, or else to the Galway House on Centre Street. Kevin would show he wasn’t such a runt by carrying her antique accordion, which she’d played since she was sixteen, and which was now held together with glue and electrical tape. It never lost its tuning or its booming volume, though, and she preferred it to any newer accordion. Then she started bringing her guitar to do country-western songs, songs like “Your Cheating Heart” by Hank Williams and “My D-I-V-O-R-C-E” by Tammy Wynette. These songs were often dedicated with a cackle of laughter to her “ex-husband, Dave MacDonald,” or “Mac,” as we’d all started to call him now that he was a thing of the past.
I’d listen to my mother from a barstool, along with all the old drinkers who were slouched over mouthing the lyrics between long cigarette drags. I’d wait until one of them would notice me and offer to buy me some chips or a pickled egg from the big jar I was staring at. Meanwhile, Kevin would be off scheming about how to get in on a little of the drinking money placed carefully under the noses of all these drunk people. Sometimes he’d put on a sad pauper’s face and pass a hat for our mother, as if she weren’t already getting paid by the bar. Kevin often got sympathy, being as bony as he was. The drinkers said he looked half starved and would give him a dollar sometimes. But Kevin wasn’t collecting for my mother at all. By the age of seven, he was already finding ways to “get over.” And since he always shared his spoils with me, I kept my mouth shut. A few times Ma found out and made him hand over the money to her. She was thrilled to get more than the thirty bucks the bar paid. In the end, Kevin didn’t mind because it would all be spent to stock our refrigerator anyway, and he was proud to show off that he was “a born provider.” Keeping the money from my mother was really just a game to see if he could play the player. Ma always told him that he should’ve lived during the Depression, that he would’ve been able to support a whole family back then.
Like my mother, Kevin was outgoing and would use his way with people to make more money. He played the spoons by taping two kitchen spoons together and banging them up and down his legs, arms, and back. He had great rhythm and could keep double-time. He was acrobatic, and could walk on his two hands, his skinny body straight upside-down. The teachers had called Kevin hyperactive, and he bragged about that to friends and strangers alike, as if he’d been given a title of importance. When he wasn’t entertaining for money, he was out shining shoes at the bars. He saved up for a shoe-shining box and took special care of it, hiding it in a safe spot every night before he went to bed. He had a sweet look about his face, and people were drawn to him. I spent a lot of time tagging along on Kevin’s exploits up and down Centre Street, the main drag in Jamaica Plain. As long as I could keep up with his speedy pace through the store aisles, I’d make out pretty well, getting my fill of candy or toys from Woolworth’s. Kevin was generous. Whenever I’d hear the expression “He’d give you the shirt off his back,” I’d picture Kevin. I always thought that the expression was made for him alone. He’d literally give you the shirt off his back, and had done so more than once. It might be a shirt swiped from the back of a truck, but that was beside the point.
Every spring we looked forward to the Irish Field Day, way out in the country, in Dedham. It was a day of Irish entertainment, games, rides, and food to raise money for the African Missions, which worked for some starving children far away in Africa—those children we always heard about when we weren’t hearing about the poor hungry children of Ireland who would walk miles to school with no shoes at all on their callused feet. It’s because of those kids so far away that we were never allowed to complain about our lot, and would get down on our knees to thank Christ for America and those orange blocks of government cheese from the welfare office. The Irish community came from all over Boston to support the African Missions. All our relatives would be there: my aunts, cousins, Nana and Grandpa. Our family usually piled into one of the souped-up cars my brother Joe was working on, with doors, hoods, and a roof that were all different colors. Joe was always fixing up big old cars that he could drive around while proudly smoking a cigar and checking out girls. Joe said he looked like a pimp, but my brother Davey called him Jethro and said that we looked more like the Beverly Hillbillies.
One year we barely made it, breaking down on the dirt roads twice. The backfiring and clouds of exhaust let everyone know that we’d arrived. And we made a scene climbing out of the car windows too, since as usual Joe’s doors didn’t open. Ma hurried through the crowds to the side of the stage, and hollered up to the emcee, pointing to the accordion over her shoulder to let him know she’d be next to entertain. My grandparents had to run and hide for the shame, but the crowds loved Ma. She made everyone feel they were at a real party back home. Some even dropped their American middle-class airs, to toss each other around, doing set dances on the dirt in front of the stage.
In the meantime, Kevin scouted out the scene for ways to leave with more than he’d come with, and I followed looking for my share. He played a game of darts with his only quarter, and in no time he’d won all kinds of stuffed animals. There was a dart table where you had to aim for the stars scattered across the backboard. What they didn’t realize was that Kevin had gone to Woolworth’s early that morning to snatch a whole box of those same stars to put on the ends of his darts.
Before long Kevin ended up getting a job at one of the game stands. They were probably sick of him winning and figured it would be cheaper to pay him a day’s wages. He ran the games with energy and wit that drew customers from all corners of the field, all the while pocketing quarters when no one was looking. The more customers he drew, the better he made out, and the less likely that anyone would notice a shortage of profits. I watched my brother wheel and deal as I heard my mother’s voice from across the field belting out “The Wild Colonial Boy.”
“Look, that’s Ma!” Kevin was proud of Ma and bragged to everyone around us that our mother was on stage. I was a little worried about it, though. I thought all the Irish would talk badly about Ma, as my grandparents said she was a shame to us all with her accordion, and her long hair and short skirts. “And that was how they captured him, the wild colonial boy.” Ma proudly stomped her foot through the last line of the song, and finished like she always did, with a loud “wo-ho!” Then Ma took another musician’s guitar away from him and finished up with her all-time favorite by Janis Joplin, putting on her country accent and really belting out “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, and nothin’ ain’t nothin’ honey if it ain’t free.”
Soon enough Kevin’s pockets were full and so were mine. We had plenty of quarters to play more games, as well as prizes and Irish flags to wave all the way home out the windows of Joe’s shitbox. Before leaving Kevin led Kathy and Frankie into the woods where he’d hid his spoils and gave them their equal share. When we came back into the field, Kevin saw that there was one table he hadn’t gotten to yet: the one that sold raffle tickets for the gallons of booze hidden underneath, behind a tablecloth. He had gifts for everyone and didn’t want to forget Ma’s cousin Nellie. Nellie had come from Ireland when she was sixteen to live with Nana and Grandpa. All our relatives thought she was too wild, but Ma considered her a sister. We called her our aunt. Kevin knew she loved the drink and that she had no money, raising five kids on her own with no father. Besides, she’d be sure to keep us all laughing on the way home with a few drinks in her. Kevin made us watch the rest of the goods while he slipped under the table when no one was looking. He waited for a signal from Frankie and slipped back out again with a whole case of Irish whiskey. And didn’t Nellie go home legless that day from the drink, doing her wild imitations of our relatives and keeping us all in stitches the whole ride home! Kevin once again had provided for everyone, an eight-year-old genius of scams.
Jamaica Street was my only experience living with families who had a father going off to work every day. We were probably the only family on welfare. Looking back I realize our Irish neighbors had some American middle-class pretensions that were at odds with the ways of my mother and us kids. And if we ever did anything considered lower class—like go to the corner store barefoot—in front of someone from Ireland, they might call us “fookin’ tinkers.” This was the worst you could be, according to Irish immigrants, especially once you’d already made it to the Promised Land.
While we were happy not to be living in the project for once, my family still spent a lot of time visiting the one nearby and hanging out with the other families on welfare. It was a pretty equally mixed project racially, and as a result the tensions weren’t as bad as in Columbia Point. This all changed when the Jamaica Plain development shifted toward a black majority and poor whites started to flee. That’s when the fights broke out. That’s when the chanting started:
Beep beep beep beep,
Walkin’ down the street,
Ten times a week.
Ungawa ungawa,
This is black power,
White boy destroyed.
I said it, I meant it,
I really represent it.
Takes a cool cool whitey from a cool cool town,
It takes a cool cool whitey to knock me down.
Don’t shake my apples, don’t shake my tree,
I’m a J.P. nigga, don’t mess with me.
The white kids started to say the same chant, switching “whitey” and “nigga.” But for a while, my older brothers and sisters hung out with mixed groups. Especially Mary, who by the mid-seventies had adopted a style that my grandfather criticized in a thick Irish brogue as an “African hairdo.” She was dressing too in platform shoes and doing the dances that only the black girls knew. She could do “the robot” like the dancers on “Soul Train.” Later, when Mary had two children “out of wedlock” in her late teens before finally marrying the father, my grandfather traced her alleged downfall back to the African hairdo.
There was never much traffic, so we were able to take over Jamaica Street with games of tag, dodgeball, and red rover. All the kids from the other Irish families would join in. Then they’d disappear, called in to dinner. But we stayed outside because we could eat whenever we wanted to. They’d come out again after dinner, but a couple of hours later we were again on our own, as all the other kids on the street had strict curfews, usually before dark.
The kids from the projects could stay out late too, so it was better to hang out with them. Sometimes we’d stay out really late telling ghost stories on the porch. Stories like the one about the hatchet lady, who carried a shopping bag full of little boys’ heads. As her bag was very heavy and she was very old, a polite youngster would offer to carry it for her. Before he got to her door with the heavy bag, he’d get curious and ask what was in it. The hatchet lady would let him look into the bag, and while he was bent over, she’d cut his head off with a hatchet, adding another head to her collection. I believed every word of these stories and was horrified when I saw Frankie or Kevin helping an older woman with groceries to her door. But they always got a quarter for their courtesy and still had their heads.
Kids from all over Jamaica Plain started to hang out with us, because they liked our house and could do what they wanted there. My older brothers and sisters set up a clubhouse in the basement, inviting friends over to smoke cigarettes and play spin the bottle. Friends would stay overnight in the cellar, especially when they weren’t getting along with their parents, or were running away from home. Most of them started calling my mother “Ma.”
On hot summer nights, we’d all sleep on mattresses on the front porch. The house was stifling and we didn’t have the air conditioners that others on the street had. Most families in the neighborhood seemed perplexed by our ways. Mrs. Schultz, an older woman from Germany who lived upstairs from us, used to wake us all up to send us inside the house. She was bothered by the idea of having to climb over loads of kids in their underwear, all wrapped in sheets like mummies. She seemed mean, speaking in German and shooing us into the house before we’d had a good night’s sleep. Our makeshift way of living seemed normal to us, but it opened us to harsh judgment, like gypsies.
Any time any programs about gypsies were on, Ma would call us all to the TV to watch. She had a great fascination with gypsies, and especially with the tinkers in Ireland. When she’d traveled to Ireland as a teenager, she’d run away from her relatives and hung out with caravans of tinkers, playing the accordion for them. Her aunts wrote back to my grandparents telling them that she was shaming them all over Ireland by joining up with “the tribes.” I grew up with a romantic picture of the tinkers from my mother’s stories, and always wondered if we had tinker blood in us, blood that my grandparents would never mention.
Looking back, it seems that early on I took over the job of trying to keep things looking whatever way they were supposed to look. I worried both about keeping up with the other families and their ways and about making sure that we looked poor enough for surprise visits by the social workers from welfare.
Ma would get an unexpected call early in the morning saying that the social worker was on her way. She’d wake us all up in a panic about the state of the house. The problem wasn’t that the house was a mess, but rather that it looked like we owned too many modern conveniences for our own good. Poor people weren’t supposed to have a color TV. We’d all have to get up right away on those days to pull a fast one. I actually loved devising strategies for outwitting the inspectors. In no time flat, we’d be running in all directions, getting rid of anything of any value. Out went the toaster. It didn’t work without using a steak knife to pull the bread out, at the risk of electrocution. But a toaster might mean that there’s a man living in the house, giving gifts or money to my mother. Welfare wouldn’t allow for that; God knows a woman with eight kids shouldn’t have a man living in the house! But who needs a man in the home, I always thought, when you have the welfare office? A man would only be abusive, tear at Ma’s self worth, and limit her mobility in life. Welfare could do all that and pay for the groceries. No man ever did that in our home. But our interrogators seemed to be obsessed with the notion of some phantom man sneaking in during the night and buying us appliances. So out went the blender too. Really poor people have no time for exotic milkshakes. We thought it would be enough to put things in the cabinets under the sink, but the social workers got keen to that hiding place. They were shameless about going through cabinets and drawers. We had to resort to the crawl space under the front porch.
But the new color TV was too big to hide. It was one of those huge wooden-cased televisions with fancy-looking cabinets on either side. So we pulled down a heavy green velvet drape from one of the windows and threw it over the television, turning it into a lovely table to serve the social worker a cup of tea on. We had to look as if we had some television-watching in a house with so many kids, so we pulled out the contraption we’d been using before we finally entered the modern age of Technicolor. It was two sets actually, one sitting on top of the other. One had only sound, and the other had a black-and-white picture that would get scrambled from time to time. You’d have to get someone to hold a butter knife to the place where the antenna used to be, in order to keep the picture straight. Usually that someone was me; everyone raved that I had some kind of magic power to set that TV straight. Ma said that I was the seventh son, and therefore had special powers that the others didn’t have. I was so proud of myself that I would sit for hours holding the butter knife to the back of the TV, forming a human antenna while my family watched its shows: cartoons, “Soul Train,” or stories about gypsies and gangsters. For a while this was all we had, and I often felt helpless when “The Brady Bunch” would proudly advertise “in color” at the beginning of the show, knowing there was no way that that butter knife would help on that score.
By the time the social worker arrived, everyone would’ve left for school except me, as I wasn’t yet school age. I got to walk through the house with her and my mother, proud that we looked like we owned nothing at all. Just a few mattresses and an awkward-looking table with an ugly green velvet tablecloth that reached well beyond the floor. And of course while the social worker had her tea on top of our well-draped color television, I sat holding the butter knife to the back of the other TV contraption, reaching my head around to the front to watch morning cartoons. I used to guess at what colors the characters on the set would be if I were watching the TV that the social worker was sitting at. And I couldn’t wait for her to leave so I could find out if I was right.
The interrogation lasted about an hour, and it usually focused on men. The social worker would take time out to ask if we had heard from “the father.” Ma always said she had no idea where he was. Of course she knew exactly where Mac lived, but didn’t want to let on, reminded as she was of the days of abuse with no groceries at all.
There had been times when “the father” had tried to come back. I’d always heard the story of the time he came over drunk, smashed the front door window, and started beating on my mother once he got inside. I was less than two years old, standing in a crib. Ma had stored her accordion on a shelf near the crib, and she always loved telling me how I picked it up and smashed it over Mac’s head. She said he was knocked for a loop, and quieted down after that. Of course I don’t remember any of it, but I was proud of the way Ma told the story of me putting up a fight.
But Ma didn’t tell the social worker any of that. There were a few things Ma didn’t mention. She never told the social worker that there were men living in our house from time to time. She never had a problem meeting men as she was very beautiful and played it up with her long red hair, spike heels, fishnet stockings, and penciled-on beauty mark on her right cheekbone. Whenever we passed construction sites in town, all the workers would stop everything and come running to the fence to gawk and catcall. Ma ignored them, strutting through the streets singing her country-western songs and holding my hand. She could have got us a father with a job on the construction site, but she didn’t, and I thought it was just as well because I was horrified to see them looking at Ma that way, like animals in a cage.
The trouble was, Ma was drawn to men who would end up living off us, rather than providing for us. Ma was always trying to save someone from the gutter, and that’s literally where she met some of her boyfriends. They were usually Irish or Irish American and often alcoholic and jobless. But before long she’d have them sober and scrubbed up, with hair slicked back, a clean collared shirt, and shiny shoes from the thrift shop on their feet. Off they’d go to get a day’s pay from Casey and Hayes Moving Company or some other job. But by then she’d be fed up with them and would send them off into the world to fend for themselves. Just when they were primed to bring some money into the home as an able-bodied working father figure. Within weeks we’d all wake up to some new scruffy soul off the street, lying on our legless couch watching the color TV that the social worker didn’t know we had. The men were always startled to see eight kids climbing out of the woodwork bright and early to inspect their new dad. We just gathered around and stared. And they stared back.
But these were not stories for the social worker’s docket. Before long Ma would offer to play the social worker a few tunes on the accordion. Of course she knew that would help to hurry our visitor off to the next inspection in her caseload, since most social workers had no hint of fun in them. So off each one went with Ma’s threats of jigs and reels. Finally I could get on with my day, eating toast, blending shakes, and watching TV programs in full color.
I was five, the youngest at the time, and my mother and I were often alone in the house. Kevin was eight and had gone off to school with the rest of them. I was close to my mother and was called a mama’s boy by all my brothers. I spent my mornings watching cartoons cross-legged on the floor, while Ma talked on the phone, sitting on the legless couch behind me. She talked for hours to her cousin Nellie. The two of them were born hell-raisers. They’d laugh hysterically, talking about their relatives or other people in the Irish circles. They had a nickname for everyone. Their Aunt Hannah was called “the neuro,” short for neurotic, and Grandpa was “Murphy.” Their boyfriends had nicknames too. In later years Ma’s boyfriend Coley, the father of my two little brothers, came to be called “the little man” because he was short, and the African American father of Nellie’s youngest daughter was called “Blackie.”
After rambunctious conversations with Nellie, my mother took on deeper discussions with me. She’d try to engage me in spiritual topics like God and nature. I knew she really did think that I had some kind of insight, being the seventh son to her. One day, while I was glued to the TV, she decided to tell me that I was “different” from the other kids for another reason. I ignored her and kept watching cartoons. She told me that I had a different father from the other kids. I turned and looked at her for a moment, then looked back at the TV. I’m not sure what the word “father” meant to me, and I remember thinking, Why’s she bothering me with this stuff? She said his name was George Fox, that she liked him because he was handsome, had a good job, and was much more intelligent and decent than the other kids’ father, Mac. I was suddenly relieved that I had nothing to do with that monster Mac, and I couldn’t wait to tell the other kids that I was special because I had a special father, and that he had a job. But I acted as if it all meant nothing to me, shrugging my shoulders and staring at the TV. All the while, though, I was thinking about how I might use my new special status in the world. I had a good father. Then I wondered where he was and what he looked like and why he wasn’t there if he was so decent.
I never asked these questions. I chose to work with the good news I’d received, and to elaborate on the fantasy that I had a great father. I soon told all my friends in the neighborhood, as well as their Irish parents, who told me in quick murmurs to hush up about it, that there was no such thing as one family having two fathers. My best friend Tony’s parents asked me to leave the house so their kids wouldn’t hear of such nonsense. I knew something was wrong then. But I kept bragging. I bragged to all of my brothers and sisters when I was mad at them or couldn’t get my way. Soon everyone knew, but what my friends said they all knew was that I was illegitimate, a bastard. The bastard part I didn’t take very kindly to, but “illegitimate” I had to have Kevin look up in the dictionary. Kevin said the dictionary also called me a bastard, and, he added, “unlawfully begotten.” I didn’t know for sure what begotten meant, but I didn’t want to go any further with it, especially if it was unlawful. I never again spoke of having a father at all. In fact, when people asked, I said I didn’t have one. This too raised a few eyebrows, especially when I started school, but at least I wasn’t called a bastard. The teachers just looked a little confused at first, and then changed the subject quickly. I was thrilled to hear at church that God was my father, and I started to imagine that probably something like the Immaculate Conception had created me, no sex at all, no unlawful filth, and no bastard was I.
I wasn’t technically the seventh son after all, since that would probably require one consistent father. And God knows we never had one of them. But my mother kept up her spiritual conversations with me. I used to draw pictures while I was home and the others were off at school. One day I asked Ma what I should draw. Looking up at our velvet glow-in-the-dark picture of the Last Supper, she said to draw a picture of God. What I gave to her vaguely resembled a face, but the features were made up of the elements of nature: the earth, the sun, the moon and stars, trees, birds, and other animals. She jumped to her feet and said she couldn’t believe the thinking of a five-year-old. She carried the picture around all day and in every conversation she had, she talked about my drawing and said that I must be some kind of genius. This gave me the biggest rush of pride that I’d ever known. She said she knew there was something different about me and that it must have something to do with my replacing Patrick Michael. She thought he must be very close to me, kind of like a guardian angel. She said that she’d had me to replace him in a way, and that when she was pregnant with me, she’d had a vision of exactly what I’d look like, and that a voice had told her I was a “child of light.” I thought then that God might truly be my real father, and the praise I got for deep thinking made me want to do more of it.
On Sundays, Ma sent us all off to St. Thomas’s Church at the bottom of our hill. She’d give us pennies for the poor box, which I thought must be called that because we were so poor we only gave pennies. I figured that this must be another way of keeping the social workers from thinking we had too much. Maybe they’d be watching from behind us in the pews to make sure we could only afford to give a few pennies. Actually, we usually ended up giving nothing at all, because Bob’s Spa was on the way to St. Thomas’s, and it had the greatest penny candy counter in Jamaica Plain. Most of the time we spent all our money there. When the poor box came around at mass, I’d feel so guilty with penny candy in my mouth that I’d motion my hand as if I was dropping a coin into the basket. When my invisible coin didn’t make the clinking sound that the other churchgoers’ coins made, the collector would look at me as if I was going straight to hell. Some of the families around us would look at us too, and knew exactly what we’d been up to, but I kept giving my invisible penny anyway and stared right back at them.
The other kids had their parents with them, and I wondered why Ma never came to church with us. When I asked her, she told me it was because she was divorced from Mac, and anyone who was divorced wasn’t allowed to receive Holy Communion. I thought the church was wrong for wanting my mother to stay with Mac, broken ribs and all. I often thought that my mother should come to church with us, and walk right up to receive the Host. But I knew that the other kids’ parents would whisper and stare, and news of it would be “all over Ireland.” I later found out that my mother had her own spiritual life, away from St. Thomas’s. While we were all off eating candy at mass, she was finding her own secluded spots down by the park, where she could be alone in nature and pray. She considered herself Catholic. She prayed through the Saints, and mostly through the Blessed Mother. But there was no point in going to mass if you couldn’t receive Our Lord. Naturally my mother’s beliefs shaped my own. Even as a kid I always felt torn between the Catholic Church and its rules for who’s in and who’s out with Jesus, and a deeper relationship with God that might be found anywhere.
We went to summer camp every year. The camps were run by Morgan Memorial and the Salvation Army, and were for city kids, who all seemed to have the same stories about bright orange blocks of cheese, social workers, and no fathers. The charitable organizations that ran the camp figured what we all needed was some fresh air, away from the city. Most of the kids in camp were black and would try to jump us, thinking we were like the white people they saw on TV programs like “The Brady Bunch.” Kevin would spend the first day proving himself all over camp, beating up anyone who looked at him wrong, and taking the canteen money that the kids’ mothers had given them. The grown men who ran the camp used to put us through all kinds of punishment when we broke the rules, like speaking out before being spoken to by an adult. We’d have to do fifty pushups or leg lifts, or when we were really bad, we’d have to go into a quiet dark cabin deeper in the woods. At first, Kevin would get all of these punishments. But he could do way more pushups and leg lifts than they imposed, and looked very much at ease at the end of them, offering to do more. He also loved the dark cabin, and would move right in, finding the light circuitry and making his own pad to settle into. In the end, they all loved him and put him in charge of doling out punishments for the others. Kevin ran the country paths like he did the city streets, and I was terrified the summer he took off from camp and found his way back to Ma’s doorstep. I was left to fend for myself, and had to keep promising the black kids that he’d be back any minute now to knock their heads off if they touched me or tried to get their canteen money back from me.
One summer we all came home from camp to find the house rearranged and very tidy. There was a stranger sitting on the couch. He was scrubbed and sober, but Ma hadn’t gotten rid of him yet. At first we thought we’d walked into the wrong house, and he thought we must have too. Ma came out and introduced us to the man she’d married while we were away. His name was Bob King, and she’d met him downtown while he was bumming spare change in the Boston Common. He seemed decent enough. We got used to him, and he got used to us. He was our new father.
It didn’t last long. His cleanliness didn’t amount to much. He never went looking for work, and before long he was back on the booze. By November Ma started noticing money missing from her pocketbook. Then the stash of Christmas money she’d been saving for our toys disappeared. One day while I was watching morning cartoons, I heard a loud crash in the kitchen. When I ran in, Bob King was on the floor bleeding. Ma had smashed his head with the wine bottle he was drinking from, knocking him off his seat. I started shaking, and she told me to go grab the Kotex pads from the bathroom so he could sop up the blood. She sat him back on his seat and tore into him about stealing her Christmas money. When she was through, she sent him on his way, and off he went down Jamaica Street holding the Kotex pad to his head. That was the end of Bob King, except that Ma liked the name Helen King and has kept it to this day.
I started attending college with Ma when I was five years old. She was going to Suffolk University on financial aid from the government, but didn’t have a babysitter. I would sit in the university library with comic books. The librarian kept an eye on me. She was a black woman who said she had four kids herself, and had gone back to school and had been able to get off of welfare. I felt safe with her, and had never been anywhere so quiet in my life. I loved finding something to whisper about to her, so that I could show that I knew just how to behave in a library. So I kept whispering that I had to go to the toilet—every ten minutes. She finally realized that I didn’t have to go to the bathroom at all, and would divert my attention by bringing me gifts of books, paper, and Magic Markers. I loved my days at Suffolk University, and was sad to stop going.
My Aunt Theresa had agreed to take me in while my mother was at college. Theresa had two kids—Sean and Kathleen—who were home days. It was hard to get used to being away from my mother. I had an overwhelming fear that while I was away my family would be plotting to leave me for good. I learned to love being at Theresa’s, but my fears never really went away. I knew my family would be leaving me someday, and sometimes I’d cry about the day it would happen. They’d leave because of some fault of mine, which I couldn’t put my finger on. Whatever it was, I figured it must be the same reason my real father wasn’t around.
But there was more freedom than fear for me in those days. Itseemed the traumas were in the past, coming out only in Ma’s stories that made people laugh, or else wonder at her strength. I wouldn’t trade my family for all the fathers in the world, I thought. I was learning from Ma’s example to ignore what other people thought. Ma had told me that when she was fifteen, she’d thrown open all the windows and screamed “Fuck the neighbors,” working her parents into a panic. Every night I was surrounded by a huge family. I’d play Kevin on the new pool table that became yet another draped table when the social worker came over. I’d sneak downstairs to hide and watch the older kids smoking cigarettes without Ma knowing. And I’d sit with Davey and Johnnie, who were good artists, to draw more pictures that made Ma proud. Ma was looking happy too, working toward her college degree, and bragging to the neighbors, “Imagine, with all those kids.” Those were happy times, until Davey ran away from home.
Davey was the oldest in the family. He excelled in school, so it was no surprise when after taking the exam he was accepted in the ninth grade to the prestigious Boston Latin School. As the oldest, though, he had borne the brunt of his father’s abuses, getting beatings when Mac came home drunk. Sensitive and deep thinking, he carried the weight of all the havoc he’d seen at home. It had been Davey who discovered baby Patrick dead in the crib. And one day on his way to Boston Latin, Davey dumped his heavy stack of books into a trash can and ran away.
For months I watched my mother on the telephone talking to police to find out if her boy had been found, fearing he’d turn up dead. One morning Ma hung up the phone in tears. They’d found Davey. He’d gone to California and was stealing to get by. He’d been arrested after breaking into a house, and was being held by the police out there. The authorities agreed to release him to be sent back to his mother in Boston. When he got home, he continued to get into trouble and wasn’t easy to have around. Ma figured what he needed was a change of environment, fresh air, and hard work on a farm in Ireland. She sent him off to her cousin Danny Murphy in Kerry, and Grandpa gave Danny Murphy a little money to look after Davey for the summer.
When Davey came home from Ireland, he seemed different, shaking and edgy. He started to fight a lot with Ma. One morning I awoke to my mother’s screams. She was lying face up on the floor, crying and pleading, with a look of pain. Davey was on top of her, beating her up, and all of the other kids were trying to drag him off. Very soon afterward Davey went to Massachusetts Mental Institution for observation.
At first the doctors said Davey would be out after the weekend. In fact, he didn’t get out for another three years. They later told Ma that he was in bad shape, that he’d had a nervous breakdown. The doctors at Mass Mental convinced Ma and Grandpa that what Davey needed was shock treatment, to eliminate his aggressive and potentially criminal tendencies. At age fourteen Davey received shock treatment, and he was never the same again.
I went with Ma every day to Mass Mental. She again had no one to babysit me, and I never wanted to leave her side anyway. The first time I went was terrifying. We walked into the big brick institution on Fenwood Road in Mission Hill, and immediately I was overtaken by an unnatural smell that I would forevermore associate as “institution smell.” Hospital, juvenile corrections facility, prison, or morgue—all would smell the same to me from here on. It wasn’t a putrid smell. It was almost hygienic but nonetheless sickening. It smelled like This is not where you want to be, and you’ll never go out the way you came in; that’s one thing we’ll make sure of. The steel elevator doors slammed behind us, and up we went to the ward. I looked up at the others on the elevator and started my newly invented game of trying to figure out which ones were the inmates and which ones the attendants. I was usually wrong. I’d have my answer once the patient became fixated on me and went out of control with laughter, sadness, or rage. I seemed to trigger emotions for the patients, and Ma said it was because I was a kid and that they were being brought back to whatever happened to them in their own childhoods. I thought it was because I was the seventh son and had special powers that only they could read. Most responded to me with a sad fondness, and often one would seem to be pleading with me from across the elevator.
We got off, and the hygienic institutional smell was now mixed with the stink of piss; the heat blasted from radiators under barred windows that were locked down; and a layer of cigarette smoke hovered just above my head. I held onto my mother’s hand as howls, shrieks, and fits of laughter echoed down empty corridors. This was like the haunted house at the carnival, but it was far worse because all of the lights were on, we could see the spring sun shining brightly outside, and there was no doubt that the suffering in this place was real.
We walked into the TV room where the air was blue with cigarette smoke, blowing in all directions. Everyone we saw there had a favorite body motion that they would repeat over and over again while muttering some monologue. We saw Davey, who let out a big happy “Ma!” when we walked into the room. One or two of the people in the room continued their movements oblivious to our presence, but most of them acknowledged us with only a short pause. Then they all went back to whatever the hell it was that they were doing: pacing, rocking, jerking, and chain-smoking. It was almost as if they were disappointed when they realized it was only us, and that things would be just the same as they ever were, with or without me and Ma.
It was always a relief to see Amen. He was a baldheaded black boy who jumped up and down, clapping like a Hare Krishna, overjoyed by Davey’s excitement to see Ma. He’d memorized all my family’s names, and after doing his happy dance, he always greeted us with, “And how is John MacDonald?” We’d say, “John MacDonald’s fine, Amen.” “And how is Joseph MacDonald?” “He’s good, Amen.” “And Mary MacDonald, how’s she?” He’d ask about every one of us, all the way down the line to Michael MacDonald, even though I was right there in front of him. When he was finished, off he’d go, back to his daily business of clapping. I looked forward to seeing Amen every time we entered Mass Mental. Even if only for a moment, he took my mind off the heavy doors slamming behind us.
We soon became family to many of the inmates. Ma, her social self even in Mass Mental, was intrigued by the minds of the mentally ill. She would point to her own head and tell me that she liked to see what made people tick. So I always thought that was what patients were doing when they rocked, paced, jerked, and smoked: they were ticking. We brought Davey a carton of cigarettes every other day. He didn’t smoke that many in two days, but when all the patients saw his smokes, of course they all wanted one. We got to know Anna, who didn’t tick much. She just looked at me helplessly with tears running down her face, crouched forward with arms folded. I knew she wanted something from me, and there was nothing I could do to heal her or to save her from this place. I felt like telling her I wasn’t really the seventh son, that I would’ve had to have been the seventh son in a row from the same father, and I didn’t even have a father. I started stealing a few cigarettes from Davey’s carton so that at least I had something to offer when the patients’ pleading eyes overcame me with guilt. I would give them a smoke and they’d be delighted with me.
One morning we got to visit with Davey in our own private room, away from the TV and the ticking. An attendant who was so nice I thought he was a patient invited us in, telling us the room would be more “homey.” It had bare walls, painted a glaring institutional green. That combined with the smell of piss and ammonia made for anything but homey. There was no kidding ourselves—we were all exactly where none of us wanted to be, no homey about it. This was the haunted house, with the fluorescent lights and radiators on full blast, and the sun shining outside on a beautiful spring day. But it was nice of him anyway.
Davey and Ma talked. I stared out of the room’s doorway at an elderly woman lying in what looked like a crib, with iron bars going up the side of her bed. She rattled the bars and lifted her head, gasping in terror, as if it might be her last breath and she didn’t want it to be. There was something she still had to do before leaving us all. Like the rest of them, she looked at me like she was begging something of me. I reached in my pocket for a smoke to give to her, but was too scared to go near her. I felt helpless and wanted to cry, but I couldn’t because who knows what that would set off in this place.
I turned away from the old woman, looked outside beyond the barred windows, and saw birds gathered in a tree, chirping away. But I couldn’t hear a thing they were chirping. Just then “Joan the Hooker” ran into our room. She was wearing her blonde curly wig that day, and was decked out in a red miniskirt and white platform shoes. She screamed “rape” and started to barricade herself—and us—into the homey room. She blocked the doorway with couches and bureaus that seemed to have no other purpose than for times like this. Joan had been through this before: “Black Willey” was after her again. He started to bang down the door and push through the barricade of furniture, which was buttressed by Joan and Ma. Davey roared with laughter, but I was so nervous I shit my pants. Ma started to talk to Willey from behind the furniture. It worked. She got him to calm down, sit on the couch, and talk to us, while Joan sat on Ma’s other side and cried. Willey told Joan that he was sorry, that he was in love with her, that’s all. He apologized to me too.
Once everything seemed calm, the attendants finally showed up out of nowhere and tackled Willey to the ground. Willey fought them off and started to get the best of them, saying he would beat their white boy asses black and blue. Some of the other inmates took a break from the ticking and gathered around to cheer Willey on. It took six attendants to restrain Willey and take him off to “the quiet room.” We knew then that we wouldn’t see or hear from Willey for a good long time. Joan screamed as they took him away, Davey laughed and told Willey to keep fighting, and I could still feel my legs shaking as I looked out the window again, thinking visiting hour was almost over.
At least I could leave every day. Davey couldn’t, whether we wanted him to or not. The doctors said he was a danger to himself and to others. His imprisonment was made painfully clear to me one day when it was time for us to go, and he begged Ma not to leave him. “This is the fucking nuthouse,” he said, and he was starting not to feel so good, with all the medication they were forcing on him. There was no more laughing at the nuts. He didn’t belong in here. “These people are fucking nuts, and the fucking attendants are even nuttier.” He’d stopped swallowing his medication and was able to blow the pills up his nose, to hide them when they made patients drink a cup of water and show their tonsils to make sure the pills went down. Then he’d spit them out when no one was looking. He wanted to come home with us. He wasn’t crazy and didn’t want to get crazy from this hellhole. The attendants made us leave when they saw Davey getting worked up. As we went toward the steel elevator doors, Davey bellowed “Ma” and tackled my mother from behind, knocking her to the ground. About four attendants were on top of the two of them, pulling Davey off Ma. I hated every one of them and started pounding on their heads. One of them restrained me, and the rest dragged Davey down the long corridor toward the quiet room.
When we went to the offices downstairs, the doctors assured us that no one was going to hurt Davey, that what he was going through was a normal phase that many patients go through after deciding that they’re different from the rest and don’t belong there. They insisted that Davey was a danger to himself and to others. They’d diagnosed him as schizophrenic.
The next time we went to visit Davey, he was locked in the quiet room. We looked through the small glass window in the heavy door. The room had no other windows at all, and everything was padded—walls, ceiling, floor. And there was Davey restrained in the middle of the floor, pleading something we couldn’t hear through the thick glass. Ma pushed me away from the door, saying I shouldn’t see this. Sometimes Ma got this voice, and you could tell that she wanted to cry but she wouldn’t. That’s what she sounded like now. We found out that we wouldn’t be able to meet with Davey for a few days. So we gave out his carton of cigarettes and left. All the way home, Ma tried to reassure me, and probably herself, that Davey was okay, that the doctors were just getting him to calm down, and that he would be out of the quiet room and Mass Mental in no time. I thought that maybe all he needed was a cigarette, and he couldn’t even have one, and that not being able to smoke would make him worse.
I’d come to hate Mass Mental. It didn’t seem right. I knew the inmates weren’t bad people; and whatever was wrong with them, it seemed as if they’d been put away so that the outside world wouldn’t have to deal with their pain. I knew Davey’d been through bad things, growing up with a father like Mac and finding his baby brother dead. And to me, it seemed he was being punished for having gone through bad things. Ma said that Davey felt things more than others—the bad things in the world—because he was so smart, and I thought she was right.
Even at the age of six, I had to wonder what good it might do anyone to be at Mass Mental on a beautiful spring day, so cut off from anything that’s good about the world. I knew it wasn’t good for Davey, no matter what the psychiatrists said. For my family, freedom had become the rule above all others. But now I knew, having felt the locked-up pain of the people in Mass Mental, that for Davey, those days were gone.