C H A P T E R   5

L O O K I N G   F O R   W H I T E Y

ANOTHER ONE TO MAKE YOU A SLAVE.” THAT’S WHAT Nana said to Ma, looking at Seamus in the nursery at St. Margaret’s Hospital. Ma just laughed at her. She’d never gotten along with her mother—Ma said she was old-fashioned—and there was no sense in trying to relate now. Nana and Grandpa hadn’t even known Ma was pregnant until she went into labor. Ma kept it from them, knowing they’d judge her and her baby since she wasn’t married to Coley. She just wore big coats and held her big leather pocketbook in front of her stomach whenever she went to their house, among those lace curtain Irish neighbors in West Roxbury. Nana and Grandpa knew about me being illegitimate, but they never mentioned it, since most of their friends from Ireland thought that I’d come from Ma’s marriage to Mac—“a bad marriage but a marriage before God nonetheless,” as Father Murphy said. I was close to Nana; she was my godmother and had been Patrick’s godmother too, so she took a special liking to me. I just had to brush off the bad things she said about Ma, and now I had to ignore her frowning gaze at Seamus. To make things more confusing for Nana and Grandpa’s Irish friends, Ma gave Seamus the last name King, from her short marriage to Bob King, whom they’d barely met. She had to put some name on the birth certificate; she knew welfare would never find Bob King, since he was probably homeless; and even though she’d gotten back together with Coley, we couldn’t be sure he’d stick around for too long. Ma was looking out for us again, making sure our welfare check wouldn’t be cut.

All I knew was that I was thrilled to come straight home from St. Augustine’s every day to see my little brother. I remember how clean and fresh he smelled even when he spit up on my shoulder. I was tired of all the battles, the rock throwing and the protests, and I was excited to be around something so new as Seamus. I just wanted to protect him, to keep him as fresh as the day he was born; and I became aware of how hard that might be when I started to take him out for a push around the front courtyard of Patterson Way, with all the buckled-up concrete catching the carriage wheels.

Ma liked me to take him outside every day after school. She always complained that the air in our apartment was bad for kids, with the smell of cockroach exterminator and the radiators going full blast even on a warm Indian summer afternoon. It seemed as if all the kids in the neighborhood had asthma. I’d walk Seamus in circles, around and around, on the beaten-up cement out front. The women on the stoop followed me with their eyes. I kept count so I could tell Ma how many times I’d pushed him around. “That’s twenty-nine times already!” I’d yell up to Ma. “Keep going,” she’d say from the window, “the air’s good for him.” I liked minding Seamus, but everyone wanted to come and look at him and smile in his face. Chickie was friendly to us now, and one time she came up to us, fixing Seamus’s blanket in a motherly way, and yelling up to Ma that all Ma’s kids looked like movie stars. Then she started talking baby talk. “Hiyaaa, hiyeee sweetie,” she sang, in the sweetest softest voice I’d ever heard coming out of her mouth. I started to see how babies did that to people, changed their voices and everything, no matter how mean or tough they seemed right before they’d laid eyes on the baby. Skoochie came by to show me the baby clothes she’d stolen downtown, taking them out of bags and sizing them up against Seamus, lying in his carriage. I sent her up to Ma, and she soon came back downstairs, folding up her empty bags. With Ma’s money in her hand; she called over to some teenagers I’d heard were selling pills. I just kept walking in circles, watching the action in the streets. Kids my age would ask if they could push the carriage, and when I let them they’d start running fast right off the curb toward the traffic—for some excitement, I guess. That kind of stuff made me frantic and nearly got me into a few fistfights, but everyone usually backed down from me, since the kids in the neighborhood were still afraid of my big brothers.

The worst thing about minding Seamus was when I’d hear a neighbor down the street calling someone a douchebag or a cunt. I couldn’t believe they’d say those words in front of a baby. Of course, they didn’t think they were doing it in front of a baby—they were down the street. I half realized that since Seamus was only a few weeks old anyway, it probably didn’t matter what he heard; and when they’d come up to the carriage the same people who’d just called someone a douchebag would start talking baby talk to him and tucking in his blanket. But I couldn’t help worrying for Seamus, with his fresh clean baby smell and brand-new terry cloth baby suits, in the middle of all this anger and confusion and drug dealing and fighting. I still loved our world of Old Colony, but I wasn’t always so sure about that now that I had a little brother to wheel around the broken-up courtyards.

After Seamus was born, the Boston Housing Authority broke down one of our walls for us, adding a second apartment. Only three families in Old Colony had a “breakthrough” apartment. Ma had pulled a few strings with the local politicians she’d met by volunteering for the South Boston Information Center and by playing the accordion at political fundraisers. We were the envy of the neighborhood now, with ten rooms in all, including two kitchens and two bathrooms. We had so much space that Ma had to start collecting furniture from the dumpster to fill up the house. I’d yell out the window to Ma, begging her to stop going through the dumpster, pulling out chairs. I didn’t want anyone to see her. My friends all bragged about their expensive living room sets stolen from the backs of trucks. But she’d just play it up, dragging some contraption behind her up three flights of stairs, “Look at this beautiful recliner!” It was really a lawn chair that one of the ladies on the stoop had left outside, expecting it to still be there when she got back. I was always afraid to let friends in the house, because they might find something that they’d thrown in the trash or just left outside.

We had it made now. Most of us had our own bedroom, and I had a feeling we would be in Old Colony forever. Ten fully furnished rooms with wall-to-wall green, blue, and orange shag rugs; free heat, light, and gas; Skoochie’s designer-label clothes for a quarter the price; all the excitement right out our front windows—“Scenes better than anything on the TV,” Ma said—and the thrill of being on the inside of the exclusive world of Old Colony. We were privileged. And even though I was still a little worried for Seamus, I could convince myself, like everyone else, that we were in a superior kingdom.

No one made us feel better about where we lived than Whitey Bulger. Whitey was the brother of our own Senator Billy Bulger, but on the streets of Southie he was even more powerful than Billy. He was the king of Southie, but not like the bad English kings who oppressed and killed the poor people of Ireland. No way would we put up with that. He had definite rules that we all learned to live by, not because we had to, but because we wanted to. And we had to have someone looking out for us, with the likes of Judge Garrity trying to take away what little we’d gotten for ourselves.

Whatever we had, we were going to keep. Whitey stepped up as our protector. They said he protected us from being overrun with the drugs and gangs we’d heard about in the black neighborhoods, as well as stopping the outsiders who wanted to turn the projects into expensive condominiums. I knew there were drugs and even gangs in my neighborhood, but like everyone else I kept my mouth shut about that one. Whitey and his boys didn’t like “rats.” And it was all worth it to look the other way as long as Whitey kept the neighborhood as is, and we kept our ten-room apartment for eighty dollars a month. We’d never be able to afford the high rents in other parts of Boston. We might have lost our schools, but we weren’t going to let the rich liberals win by doing what Ma said they always do: chase everyone out by bringing in the blacks, and then chasing the blacks out when it’s time to build high-rise condominiums. Columbia Point Project was already on its way to being mostly condos for white yuppies with no kids. Whitey Bulger was the only one left to turn to. He was our king, and everyone made like they were connected to him in some way.

I was always looking for Whitey Bulger. I never saw him, but I’d never admit that to my friends. Everyone bragged about how his uncle was tight with him, or his brother had been bailed out of jail by him, or how he’d bought them a new pair of sneakers, or his mother a modern kitchen set. All the neighbors said they went to Whitey when they were in trouble, whether they’d been sent eviction notices from the Boston Housing Authority or the cops were harassing their kid. Whitey was more accessible than the welfare office, the BHA, the courts, or the cops. If your life had been threatened, your mother could always visit Whitey and get him to squash a beef. That is, of course, if your family was playing by the rules of the neighborhood. If you’d received death threats for avoiding the boycotts and sending your kids to school or else for saying the wrong thing to the press, you were on your own.

My own brothers and sisters bragged of their links to Whitey. Frankie came home from sparring at McDonough’s Gym with stories of Whitey studying the boxers from the sidelines. Most of the guys Whitey surrounded himself with were boxers. Kevin was always making like Whitey was his father, and that he would grow up to inherit the kingdom. He said Whitey always patted him on the head whenever Kevin would go out of his way to say hi to him. And Kathy bragged that her boyfriends and their mothers worked for Whitey, selling drugs from the privacy of their modern furnished project apartment, and paying him “rent,” in addition to what they paid the BHA. She said she’d be rich someday when her boyfriends got a little older and started making real loot, robbing bank trucks with “the boys,” as we called our revered gangsters. I never knew if any of these stories were true, but at the age of nine I was envious of all the teenagers with their connection to so much power. Visible or not, we all had a hero, a powerful champion, in the midst of all the troubles that enemy forces were heaving on us since the busing. Whitey was even more powerful than our elected politicians. They worked for him, that’s what Ma always said. I wanted to see the face of Whitey Bulger, so that I too could feel that power that everyone else bragged they were so connected to.

No one had his eyes on Whitey more than Kevin. I’m sure he hardly ever saw him, but Kevin always had one up on the other kids in the neighborhood by knowing more about the workings of the Irish Mafia. The conversations on the corners of Southie were changing. From a distance I watched the teenagers who were still reenacting slow motion war stories, but instead of the blow-by-blow punches in the air, they’d started to draw invisible guns, imitating gangsters exchanging slow motion gunfire. And there was Kevin right in the middle of it, claiming to know more about Whitey than anyone.

For a while I was following Kevin to the Boys Club, joining the swim team, playing ping-pong, shooting pool, and basketball. Kevin was winning first place in every league at the club. He left every awards banquet with his arms full of trophies, and a proud face, even prouder than years ago when he’d bring home the spoils from the Irish Field Day or the local bars. But by the time he’d turned twelve, he’d lost interest in the trophies, and instead of following him to the Boys Club I was once again following him around on his trail to make some money.

During the fall of 1975, Kevin had gotten a job as a paperboy for the Herald American. He didn’t want to work for the Globe, because some guys in the neighborhood were hijacking Globe trucks and robbing them at gunpoint to protest busing. “I’m liable to get shot,” Kevin said; so he went to the Herald and carried on about how much he hated the Globe. The guys there got a kick out of that one, and hired him on the spot. That year was Phase Two of the plan to desegregate, when more Boston neighborhoods would be dragged into busing terror, so even more regiments of police stood guard over our streets to keep us from sparking a wider rebellion. But the streets were quiet when Kevin and I got up at the crack of dawn to deliver papers with our dog Sarge, and we felt pretty important to see all the troops looking so intimidating just for us.

It was on these long early morning journeys that Kevin told me wild stories about the heroic Whitey Bulger and the Irish Mafia. I’d never heard of the Irish Mafia until recently; I’d always thought the Mafia was Italian. Kevin seemed to know all the details, though. He said that Whitey had been in Alcatraz for robbing banks, but that they’d let him go after he took LSD for the government in some kind of experiments about the drug; that Whitey was part of the Winter Hill gang in Somerville and had taken Southie over from the Mullen gang here. He talked about wild shoot-outs years ago in the very streets we were walking down on our paper route, between the Killeen gang and the Mullen gang, but said that everyone was united now, especially with the busing and all. I couldn’t follow his stories about gangs, and shoot-outs and takeovers, and whenever I got confused and asked a question about Whitey or the Mullen gang, or about LSD, Kevin told me to shut my mouth, that I was talking too loud. He told me I had an “Irish whisper.” I’d heard Ma say that about people who thought they were telling a secret but couldn’t keep their voices down. The Irish made fun of each other for not being able to keep secrets, and for talking too loud when they shouldn’t. “Especially with all the bad guys around these days,” Kevin added. Then he just went about his business delivering papers, waving hi to the customers, who called him a hard worker, and walking with his head down past the cops on horses and motorcycles lining the streets for the buses of black kids coming from Roxbury. Before I could ask him in another Irish whisper who the bad guys were, Kevin jerked his head sideways toward the cops. “Them are the bad guys,” he muttered under his breath. “Well, I already knew that one,” I belted out, “Anyone living in Southie with the Gestapo everywhere could have told you that.”

One day when I didn’t go with Kevin on his paper route, he came home and shouted to Ma that he’d been robbed of all his collection money. He didn’t know what to tell the guys at the Herald who were expecting all the cash. Ma told Kevin just to tell the truth. But Kevin stopped going to work instead, and when his supervisor called him, he finally confessed to being robbed on his paper route “by some big guys that looked like weight lifters.… They put a knife to my throat.” He said he’d told the robbers that they had the wrong newspaper, that it was the Globe they wanted to rob, but that they’d told him to empty his pockets anyway. He told the supervisor he wouldn’t be coming back to work, that it was just too dangerous these days. Then he hung up the telephone. Later on he was laughing with Kathy in his bedroom at the very back of the apartment. She’d brought her friends up to the house to buy some pot from him. They didn’t know that I knew Kevin was selling pot, and when I walked in on them rolling a joint, they told me to screw. They weren’t letting me in on anything anymore, with my Irish whisper and all. I listened through the walls, though, and heard Kevin tell how he’d fooled the guys at the Herald into believing he’d been robbed, and that that was how he could afford to buy a half-pound of pot and some mescaline to start selling and make some real money. At the age of twelve, Kevin was now a player in the drug trade in South Boston. He said he’d have to keep it quiet, though, so he wouldn’t have to pay Whitey Bulger any of the money. He said that his “connection” paid up to Whitey, so he wasn’t really doing anything wrong.

In the coming weeks, I started answering the door every five or ten minutes. People I had never seen before in my life were knocking and asking for Kevin. “Is Mini Mac there?” It seemed as if the most popular people in the neighborhood got the nicknames, like “Whitey” or “Skoochie.” Sometimes the knocks on the door started early in the morning, before any of us had even gotten up with the sound of helicopters and police motorcycles. Ma couldn’t believe how popular Kevin was. Kevin would step outside to the hallway for a few minutes, and I’d look through the peephole to see Kevin and some other teenager huddled in a corner. Then Kevin would come back inside, and I would be turning the channels of the TV, as if I was looking for something particular to watch, and minding my own business.

Then adults started knocking, people in their twenties and thirties. Ma thought it was kind of weird, but would only comment on how retarded some of these people were, hanging out with little kids. “They need to get a life,” she said. Ma got sick of the knocks and told Kevin he’d better do something about it. That’s when we started to see less of Kevin. He started coming and going through his bedroom window. There was a tall oak tree that brushed up against the window, looking as if it would’ve grown right inside if it hadn’t taken an upward turn toward the roof. Kevin kept the upper half of his window open at all times and just climbed in and out from the roof. He could be in that back room all day long, and none of us would know it, except Kathy, who sometimes brought him clients so she could get a free joint for herself. Customers now just went up to the roof, lay face down near the edge, and poked their heads upside-down into Kevin’s window, saying pssst. My own room was next to Kevin’s, and one day Marty McGrail lay down in the wrong spot and poked his head into my window by accident. I was taking a nap and woke up to an upside-down head psssting me, and scared Marty away when I yelled for Ma. After that I knew why we weren’t getting so many knocks at the door anymore.

Phase Two of the busing brought Charlestown into the battle. And Charlestown was ready for nothing less than war. Back in the early days of busing, groups had formed with names like ROAR, or Restore Our Alienated Rights. The new group of mothers starting up in Charlestown was called Powder Keg, and their slogan was “Don’t Tread on Me.” We’d always heard Charlestown was a lot like Southie, with housing projects and people with shamrocks tattooed to their arms. They had an Irish Mafia too, but we always liked to think that our Whitey Bulger was smarter and more powerful. Whitey was so smart he’d convinced us that the addicts we were starting to see more and more weren’t really there. Whatever we were seeing, we figured it wasn’t half as bad as what the blacks over in Roxbury had. Or Charlestown, for that matter, where the gangsters and the politicians weren’t as organized as ours. Whitey kept a low profile during the riots in Southie, but everyone said he had something to do with the South Boston Marshalls, vigilantes who were supposedly passing out guns in Southie, getting everyone ready to protect the town. Kevin said that “the boys” in Charlestown were even crazier than ours, though, and that busing over there would make Southie look like Bethlehem on the first Christmas morning.

During Phase One, Joe had gotten out of being sent to Roxbury by attending the trade school at Charlestown High. The trade school was separate from the regular high school, and attracted kids from all over the city. He said there were blacks in the trade school but that everyone got along because they weren’t being brought in on yellow buses yet. They chose to go there. But the peace ended in Charlestown when the buses rolled down the same streets where the Battle of Bunker Hill had been fought two hundred years earlier. The Charlestown kids started chanting the same chants we did in Southie: “Hell No, We Won’t Go!” Many of their teenagers got involved in boycotts and sit-ins, but many more ended up lining the streets to give the finger to the buses, to throw Molotov cocktails off project rooftops, and to stick hockey sticks into the spokes of speeding cop motorcycles. They said on the news that one Charlestown gang had filled glass bottles with acid and thrown them at the horses, burning their legs and sending cops crashing to the street. “They got balls over there!” That’s what Frankie said when he heard about that one.

Joe had to start being careful hanging around with some of the black friends he’d made the year before. One afternoon he came home shaking. He said he was playing basketball in the high school gym with some black kids, when a group of townies challenged them to a game. The game started off innocently enough, but when Joe’s team from the trade school started winning, the townies started calling them niggers and jigaboos, and throwing punches instead of passes. The fight turned into a brawl, with Joe nearly knocking out one townie who’d called him a nigger lover and blindsided him. “That’s when the Gestapo came into the school and stopped all the fighting by cracking some heads with their batons,” Joe told us. The townies taunted Joe, saying they’d give him a beating after school, along with one of the black kids who’d also gotten the best of them in the fight.

The school officials thought they were helping Joe and the black kid by letting them go home early, before the buses came. But the Charlestown mobs were already lining the streets, and teenagers from the projects were milling around on corners. “I turned around and there were about a hundred townies chasing after us with baseball bats and hockey sticks,” Joe told us, with big eyes. He said he ran for his life. “Hey, MacDonald, wait up!” the black kid had yelled, trying to catch up. Joe said he just screamed back to him, “You’re on your own,” and ran over the bridge out of Charlestown and into downtown Boston.

Joe still looked shaken after he told the story. After that day, he started making friends with some of the townies, and made sure that he joined in some of the boycotts and sit-ins happening over there. He still attended Charlestown High, even though he said it was getting harder and harder not to become “another dropout from Southie.” As Ma kept saying, it seemed as if Judge Garrity was using his power to make a whole generation of dropouts and jailbirds in our neighborhood.

“What a vicious son of a bitch,” Ma said, looking at the picture of a Southie neighbor from down the road on the front page of the Herald. He was aiming the pointed staff of an American flag and charging at a black lawyer in a suit. Ma said she’d just about had it. “Busing is a horror,” she said, “but this is no way to fight it. People like that are making us all look bad.” She said she was starting to think that some of the politicians in Southie were almost as bad as Judge Garrity himself. She thought they might be stirring things up in the drugged-out minds of people like the teenager in the Herald. “And the kids are the ones suffering,” she said. “Especially the ones who can’t get into the parochial schools with the seats filling up and the tuitions being raised.” She said she felt like she was kicked in the stomach every time she heard Jimmy Kelly talking about niggers this and niggers that at the Information Center where she’d been volunteering. She said she couldn’t get used to that word, no matter how much she hated the busing. Then there were the South Boston Marshalls, the militant group connected to the Information Center. We all wanted to stop the busing, but sometimes it was confusing. One day you’d be clapping and cheering the inspirational words of Louise Day Hicks and Senator Billy Bulger, and the next day you’d see the blood on the news, black and white people’s blood. And here was a black man being beaten with an American flag on the national news. We sat on a legless couch in the Old Colony Project and watched the violent pictures of another bloody protest. Ma said she didn’t know where to turn, what to belong to, and neither did I.

We all wanted to belong to something big, and the feeling of being part of the antibusing movement along with the rest of Southie had been the best feeling in the world. But it wasn’t feeling so good anymore; we were losing—to the liberals and to the racists. Even Frankie had to find something besides the crowds at Darius Court to be part of. Boxing at McDonough’s Gym made Frank a winner. He came home from bouts in a good mood. He said he felt pumped from all the winning. He was proud of his ability in the ring and bragged to us, showing Ma all his moves. Ma showed him some of her moves too. She always said that if she’d been a boy, she would’ve been a boxer. Coley agreed with her on that one. Frank was feeling good about himself. It got so he could knock out anyone he wanted to in the ring, black or white, when they fought in the statewide bouts.

Ma thanked God that Frank was hanging out at McDonough’s Gym every day, away from the buses. The gym was behind the courthouse, and attracted boxers from all over Southie. Many kids went from the courts right into the gym to get away from the trouble in the streets. They were safe there, especially with all the gangsters who watched over them in the boxing ring, cheering the kids on, and sometimes becoming their trainers. Boxing was becoming Southie’s prized sport, attracting some of the toughest kids in the neighborhood for bloody but regulated battles. It was better than fighting in the street, where you might get arrested by the bad guys. And it kept Frankie and other kids like him out of Old Colony Project for the day. Frankie said Whitey Bulger joked that someday Frank could be his bodyguard.

The whole country was celebrating America’s two hundredth birthday, and the nuns at St. Augustine’s kept trying to get us kids to draw American flags and eagles. I was the one in the class who could draw, so the other kids had me draw their pictures. Then they’d scrawl STOP FORCED BUSING with their crayons underneath the bald eagle. One kid even wrote GEORGE WALLACE FOR PRESIDENT underneath the American flag that I’d drawn for him. The Tall Ships were going to be pulling into the harbor right down the street from the Old Colony Project, and the Gestapo were watching over us heavily now, so that we didn’t make another bloody scene for all of America to see that we weren’t feeling free. But most people in the neighborhood were more excited that George Wallace was planning a trip to South Boston, to run for president and to promise to get the government off our backs.

In Southie all the talk now was about George Wallace, who would end forced busing for sure if he became president of the United States. The South Boston Information Center covered its trucks with his campaign signs, and yelled through their loudspeakers down Patterson Way that everyone should vote for Wallace. He was almost as popular in the neighborhood as Whitey Bulger. At first Ma said she wasn’t too sure about Wallace, with all the news reports about him wanting to go back to the days of black people being second-class citizens, and some even said he talked about sending the blacks back to Africa. But eventually she changed her mind and went with Wallace when she realized he was the only one out there who was paying attention to Southie, the only one who’d work to end forced busing forever. The national news focused on us once again, covering Wallace’s trip to Southie. And there was Ma one night on TV, with a George Wallace button pinned to her rabbit fur jacket. “Maybe then some of these kids in the streets could go back to school,” she said into the news cameras on Broadway.

All the adults were excited about George Wallace’s visit. Some of the little kids got excited with the parents, like the boy whose sign I’d help make at St. Augustine’s. Some of the older kids went to the fundraiser the local politicians held for Wallace on Broadway, but most of the teenagers couldn’t be bothered. The Lithuanian Club was all decked out in the usual banners: STOP FORCED BUSING and STICK TO YOUR GUNS SOUTHIE. Ma brought her guitar and accordion up to the Lith Club and took the stage to do her own antibusing anthems, and she said she never saw Jimmy Kelly so excited as when he finally got to meet George Wallace.

George Wallace spoke against busing, against the government controlling the lives of the little guy, and against the media. That’s when I heard the loudest cheers as I listened outside the Lith Club. Everyone loved to hate the media. As I eavesdropped from the sidewalk out on Broadway, it seemed as if we were all feeling a little more power now that George Wallace was speaking up for us. But it didn’t last long. In the end, the newspaper reporters said Wallace didn’t have a chance, except maybe in places like Southie. And there weren’t too many places like Southie. But at least he would win in our neighborhood and maybe bring back the unity we’d felt when the buses first started to roll.

I turned ten the year of the bicentennial. And it was the first time I remember thinking I was depressed. The antibusing movement was disappearing on us kids. It was more of an adult thing now, with all the political events. I was also left out of the teenage wheeling and dealing on the streets, because I was too young. I couldn’t hang out with Kevin and Kathy anymore, because they were doing things they didn’t want me to know about, with my Irish whisper.

So on the day I turned ten, I decided to call my father. I was home alone minding Seamus, and Ma had told me that she’d seen my father at the Emerald Isle Pub in Dorchester, and that he’d said he’d like to hear from me. I was the one who’d have liked to hear from him, but I looked up his mother’s number in the telephone book anyway. I knew her name was Gertie Fox, and I knew he lived with her in Dorchester. I finally got up the guts to call, and Gertie answered the phone with a cranky voice. I asked to speak to George. I told her that I was his son Michael and that she was my grandmother, as if we’d all be in for some kind of happy reunion. “He doesn’t have a son!” She yelled so loud I had to pull the telephone away from my ear. “Who put you up to this,” she said, “your mother? Get your mother on the phone!” I told her my mother wasn’t even home, and that I’d just called because it was my birthday—hoping now that I might get some kindness, as mention of birthdays usually did. That’s when a man’s voice came on the phone. “Michael?” It was the first time I’d ever heard my father’s voice. I told him it was my birthday. “Who put you up to this, your mother?” I hung up the phone then, and went back to minding Seamus.

Later in the day, Ma came home with a birthday cake. We celebrated my birthday along with Patrick’s, because his was a week later. Kevin’s was a week earlier than mine, and ever since we were little we’d celebrated all three birthdays together. But Kevin was thirteen now, and hanging out in the streets too much to be involved in a birthday with me and our dead brother. Ma played “Happy Birthday” on her accordion, and brought all the neighborhood kids in who wanted some free cake.

Nana took me out later that night. I told her all about my telephone call to my other grandmother, my wicked one. She told me I didn’t need two grandmothers anyway, and that made me feel better. It was her way of saying that I was her grandson. I got along great with Nana—much better than Ma did. It was all right for me to talk about George Fox being my real father, as long as we didn’t mention Ma getting pregnant without being married. And I didn’t tell Nana that Ma was pregnant again—and her and Coley still not married, I thought to myself.

In the eighth grade, the nuns took Kevin out of classes—with all his wisecracks—and put him in the basement with Louie, the janitor, hoping he’d get some interest in a trade while working in the boiler room. But Kevin figured he’d outsmarted the nuns, getting them to send him downstairs where he’d never have to study again. He said Louie liked him so much that every day he’d order Kevin a “spuckie,” Southie talk for “submarine sandwich.” Whenever Sister Elizabeth came down the stairs in her noisy wooden clogs, Kevin said he’d start looking busy with his head under some pipes, and a wrench in his hand. As soon as she left, he said he’d go back to eating spuckies with his feet up on the table and telling Louie his wild stories about the legendary James Whitey Bulger. “Imagine all the loot he’s making!” Kevin said after telling me what he did all day at St. Augustine’s. “Betcha he never went to college.” Kevin often made fun of me for carrying so many books home from school.

Every day after school, Kevin and Kathy became part of something bigger than anything the politicians were going on about through their loudspeakers on trucks that came through Old Colony every night: “Attention South Boston Residents! Please attend a meeting at the Gavin School tomorrow night at 7 P.M. sharp. The lives of our children are at stake!” They were talking about the blacks taking over someday and changing our way of life.

Kathy belonged to a group of teenagers that always looked busy out on Patterson Way, walking up and down the streets, going into hallways, darting across rooftops, jumping into strangers’ cars, and settling down by nightfall on East 8th Street, at the end of Patterson. Ma called them “the 8th Street gang.” Kathy was in the ninth grade at Cardinal Cushing High School, along with most of the other Southie girls who’d fled the busing but were still going to school. But the general feeling in the neighborhood was that school was for suckers. The dropouts were the ones who said that the most, and of course they usually looked as if they were having the most fun, wearing the best clothes, and making the most loot from drugs and petty scams. Ma said Kathy was starting to get into the drugs, but I already knew that. She said she’d heard that the 8th Street gang was getting into angel dust. “That’s why they’re all as nutty as the day is long,” she said. Ma said she didn’t like the looks of that Frank McGirk, who led the group and was said to be selling the dust. Kathy’s best friends now were Frank McGirk and Julie Meaney, who all of us little kids in the neighborhood were afraid of because she and her mother were supposed to be into witchcraft.

Later in her freshman year at Cardinal Cushing, Kathy wasn’t going to school at all. She was fifteen, and sometimes she was staying out until three in the morning. Other times she wouldn’t come home at all. One night Ma came home, after walking down East 8th, bringing the groceries from Broadway. “You wouldn’t believe that fuckin’ place,” she said. She looked exhausted from the long walk.

“Mother of God, it’s like Las Vegas down there! The street’s dark as hell, and everyone’s lights are on, with speakers blasting out of the windows.” She said that she’d had to weave her way through people staggering around “all dusted out,” while others tried to disco dance on streets, sidewalks, and rooftops. She’d walked down East 8th looking for Kathy, who’d been missing for two days, and everyone said they didn’t know where she was, if they could talk at all. “For Chrissake, one of them was even dancing with a stop sign that’d come loose from the sidewalk.”

Ma told me to go up to East 8th and knock on Mrs. Meaney’s door. I’d never seen Julie’s mother, and I was scared. Everyone had stories about the strange things she’d done, levitating teenagers, and controlling the minds of her Doberman pinchers with ESP to attack anyone she didn’t like on East 8th Street. They said Julie Meaney could do that too, and that one day when the black kids were coming out of Southie High, she’d just looked into the eyes of her Doberman, and that he’d taken the signal and lunged right for a black kid’s throat.

When I got up to East 8th, I saw what Ma was talking about. Everyone was having a great time, dancing with whatever objects could hold them up. I saw the one with the stop sign. Like most of the stop signs in Southie, BUSING was spray painted under the word STOP, so it was a STOP BUSING sign. One guy about Ma’s age had his two hands stretched out onto the hood of a car while his knees did some bouncy thing to the beat of the Bee Gees. The teenagers were imitating the dances from Saturday Night Fever and mouthing the lyrics to “Staying Alive.” They were out of breath, and a few beats behind the song: “I’ve been kicked around since I was born / And now it’s alright, it’s ok, we’ll live to see another day.…”

I dodged some of the teens who were beckoning, calling me “little MacDonald.” I kept a distance and asked them where Julie Meaney lived. One of them took me to the door and then ran because she said she owed the mother “a fin,” Southie talk for five dollars. When I knocked on the door, a voice screamed “Come in,” and dogs started barking and throwing themselves against the door. When I heard the wicked voice and the Dobermans I wanted to run with the girl who owed the fin, but then the voice screamed again, “I said come in!” Whoever it was told the dogs to go fuck themselves and they shut right up. I poked my head in the door and saw the dogs lined up, sitting on the couch and staring at me, as if they were waiting for their orders from the witch, whose voice was shouting “Who’s that?” from the back room. Mrs. Meaney appeared before me, hunched over, wearing a bathrobe that was too big and long for her bony body, and with long raggedy white hair that looked just like a Halloween witch’s wig. I began to sweat; the apartment was hotter than the hottest project apartments I’d been in. I was stunned and just stared at Mrs. Meaney. I believed in witches, too, because Ma and Nellie had talked about a few people in Ireland who they said put curses on people. I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect Mrs. Meaney to look like a Halloween witch.

She screamed at me then, “Who the fuck are you?” I didn’t say anything, and that’s when the Dobermans pinned me into a corner, snapping their jaws at my face. I could hear the music blasting and people partying outside on East 8th Street: “Whether you’re a brother, or whether you’re a mother, you’re just stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.”

“I’m just looking for Kathy MacDonald,” I told the Dobermans, and then begged Mrs. Meaney not to let them bite me. She kicked the dogs away—she didn’t do the ESP thing—and said she didn’t know where Kathy was, but that she “must be out gallivanting with that whore of a daughter of mine.” I left the apartment pretty fast, my heart pounding as I raced home past all the people on angel dust singing along: “Life goin’ nowhere, somebody help me …”

When I got home Kathy was already there, sitting on the floor “dusted out,” as they said in Old Colony about the slow motion movements of those who were on the drug. Kathy was wearing short shorts and had her shirt tied above her stomach, her spike heels on the floor next to her. Ma had the scissors pointed at Kathy and was screaming and crying that she was going to cut off all Kathy’s long wavy hair. And then she surely wouldn’t be out all night sleeping with boys. Ma was afraid Kathy would get pregnant like the other girls in the neighborhood, and figured a bald head might keep guys from liking her. I butted in and reminded Ma that her own mother had done that to her when Ma was just sixteen and hanging out on the corners too much in her leopard dresses. Ma had told me that Nana was jealous of her long red hair and looks, one of the reasons why they’d never got along when she was growing up. She always bragged that she was a rebel back in the fifties. But things were different now, she said, with all the angel dust out on the streets and all the girls getting pregnant. When I tried to stop Ma from cutting Kathy’s hair, she told me to mind my own business. “You shouldn’t even be listening to this stuff,” she said. “Go out and play with the kids your age instead of being all ears.”

Ma never did cut Kathy’s hair. She asked the older boys to talk to Kathy, and told her she’d better not see her hanging around with Frank McGirk and the 8th Street gang again. But it didn’t work; no one could keep Kathy from doing what she wanted to do—her friends were everything. I never did get to tell Ma my wild story about Mrs. Meaney and her long white hair.

“They’ll be talking about me all over Ireland,” Ma said, as we all pulled up to the church a half hour late for Nana’s funeral. Stevie, our youngest brother, was four months old now, and Ma had him and Seamus on her lap. She’d fought with Joe the whole way about his shitboxes breaking down all the time. “Imagine, missing your own mother’s funeral.” By the time we got into the church in West Roxbury, all the lace curtain types were filing out. We just pretended we’d been there the whole time, and filed out with the rest of them. “Ah, ’twas a great send off, though, wasn’t it?” some of our old Irish neighbors from Jamaica Plain were saying to Ma. “It was,” Ma said. “She lived a good life.” Later on Ma complained about all the people who said Nana went so young. “For Chrissake, she was seventy-three!” Ma said that after losing a baby, anyone would think that seventy-three years was plenty. Ma only seemed sad that so many things weren’t understood between the two of them. She’d had a feeling Nana was going to die, though, ever since Nana had dreamt that a man wearing all black came in from the rain and stood in the corner of her bedroom. Nana woke up wondering where the man had gone. She told Leena and Sally that she’d given the man a place to rest for the night up in the attic. When Grandpa told Ma the story on the phone, that’s when I heard Ma say, “You know what that means don’t you?” Sure enough, two weeks later Nana went to bed, said her nightly Rosary, and never woke up again. “You couldn’t ask for a better death,” all the lace curtain Irish were saying now, “with the Rosary beads in her hands.”

When we went to Grandpa’s house after the funeral for the usual food and drink with all the guests, we got kicked out. Grandpa didn’t want Seamus and Steven in the house with all the Irish there, who would be asking where they came from. Grandpa and Nana had kept that story away from their friends, for the shame. And here was Ma carrying the two of them into Nana’s house, wearing her black miniskirt and fishnet stockings, with no husband and no shame at all. Before I could even eat one of the chicken salad sandwiches that were laid out, it was time to leave. We all piled into Joe’s souped-up shitbox and went back to Old Colony, where there were plenty of other kids whose mothers and fathers weren’t married.

When Nana died, I was sad. I was the only one in the house who was close to her, even though I had to ignore her frowns when my mother was brought up for discussion. She and Grandpa always made me feel a connection to Ireland and to a world bigger than what I had in Old Colony. I started to feel alone, especially since no one else in the family was talking about Nana’s death. Kevin and Kathy had gone their own ways; Frankie was off at the gym; Joe always had his head under the hood of a car; Johnnie was off at Tufts University—the only one “making it out” as Grandpa said about him—and at eighteen, Mary was now pregnant and moving into Old Harbor Project with Jimmy the Greek. I stayed around the house a lot, minding Seamus and Stevie—and studying Davey.

Davey was walking in circles again out in the front courtyard. I went downstairs to watch him, going in opposite circles with Stevie in the baby carriage. I just stared at Davey when our circles crossed. It broke his concentration a few times, and he jerked his head to look at me, startled, as if I’d interrupted something. “What—are you fuckin’ trying to torment me?” he said. When Davey got mean, I’d make it worse, trying to turn it into something funny. I’d tease and “torment” him, hoping to bring him out of the trap he was in. It was August, and every August when his doctor at Mass Mental went away for two weeks’ vacation, Davey lost it. When our circles crossed the next time, I aimed right for him with the baby carriage. I’d only wanted to help, but now I felt frustrated and angry at the sickness and suffering taking him over. I needed to attack Davey—to attack whatever demons were overpowering him. That’s when he ran down the street, looking back at me as if I was the enemy.

None of us knew Davey when it was August. Normally, he would pace the streets and come up to the women on the stoops, or to the kids on the corners, and tell a joke, getting everyone laughing. They loved him. The little kids all wanted him to do his famous impersonation of the Incredible Hulk, right at the moment he transforms into a huge superhero. But in August, Davey’s transformations were too scary, and too religious, for anyone to relate to. One time he said he was an ordained priest, and was going to save the “poor souls” of Old Colony Project. He went around in a black shirt, repeating, “The first shall be last and the last shall be first.” No one really got that one, I suppose because most of us would not imagine ourselves, ever, as among “the last.”

After chasing Davey away, I lugged the carriage, with Steven in it, backwards up the three flights of stairs, one step at a time, as I’d learned to do by now, coming and going every day for my walks in circles. When I burst into the house, I was out of breath and excited to tell Ma what I’d just figured out. “Ma, I think I know what mental illness is!” Ma was lying on the couch, with Seamus asleep on top of her so she could feel that he was still breathing. “Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” she said. “Are you at it again? Will you just go out and play or something?” I told her I thought the reason the doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with Davey or find a cure was because they were focusing too much on his brain, in a physical way. “I think it’s his spirit that’s sick,” I said. “And the spirit is just too much of a mystery for them to figure out.” I added that the spirit and the brain are somehow connected, and that the spirit must be located more up there, rather than somewhere in our chests, which was what the nuns at St. Augustine’s motioned to when they talked about the soul. “It’s just that the spirit is invisible, and the doctors are all confused, focusing on what they can see: the brain.” I wasn’t really making sense, I thought, but I knew what I was talking about. The brain took things in, analyzing them, “all the shit in the world,” as Davey said; but it was the soul that carried the sickness, since the brain had to move on and think about other things. Ma made a face like she couldn’t believe what was going through my head. She told me I was smart, and that I should be a psychiatrist when I grow up so that I could help people; but in the meantime she wanted me to go outside and play with the other kids my age, like an eleven-year-old. “And stop being such a goddam worrywart!”

In the spring of 1978, it seemed that busing was all in the past, and disco opened up a whole new era for me and my friends. Everyone was going into downtown Boston now, to hit the clubs and dance to Chic, A Taste of Honey, Chaka Khan, and Taka Boom. The older teenagers snuck into the adult clubs, while we twelve-year-olds were sneaking into Illusions, the new disco for teenagers fourteen and up. I used Kevin’s birth certificate to get in, claiming to be fifteen. Kevin wasn’t going anyway. He was too busy making deals to sell his stuff to the older kids, who needed to get high for the adult clubs.

The Southie kids took over Illusions, although there were also Italians from Eastie, townies from Charlestown, who looked just like the Southie kids, and some Puerto Rican kids from the South End and Jamaica Plain. Only one or two black kids came to Illusions. Everyone was getting along that summer, and I felt as if I really belonged somewhere in my own right, away from the streets of Old Colony. Every week, I bought a new pair of bellbottoms with money from the jobs program at ABCD, the antipoverty agency in Boston. At first I was stealing disco clothes to wear, going into a changing room and walking out with a whole new outfit underneath the one I’d come in with. But then, thanks to ABCD, I was able to get an even better thrill by spending my pay on things people like me weren’t supposed to be able to afford. Some weeks I would spend a whole check on one pair of pants, getting Ma all worked up over the prices. But I wanted to look good. So did the other kids in my neighborhood, who stole their clothes so they could save the rest of their paycheck for some pills or pot before going out.

I loved whipping out cash in front of store clerks who looked at me as if I didn’t belong in the expensive section of Filene’s. I got a high from spending money. But I was spending so much money on clothes that I had to start finding ways to make more. Kevin asked me to take his mescaline pills with me to Illusions. I had no interest in using any myself, and he said that was why he could trust me. The tiny red pills went for three dollars a pop, and he gave me a jar with about a hundred inside. I was really popular now. I had the best disco clothes in Southie, better than anything my friends were stealing, and I was winning every dance contest at Illusions. The dance at the time was “the Freak,” made popular by Chic’s song “Freak Out.” I would win fifty dollars every time there was a Freak contest. And now I had the pills that everyone wanted. Kids from all over Boston would seek me out at Illusions to buy the tiny red pills. I felt like a bona fide pimp.

One night, I made the mistake of taking out the jar of pills while I was still on the dance floor, instead of heading off to a corner for the transaction. Danny said a kid from Eastie wanted two, one for him and one for his girl. As I opened up the jar, someone did the Freak right into my elbow and sent about three hundred dollars’ worth of tiny red pills flying. When word got out, every Southie kid at Illusions was pretending to help me recover my losses through strobe-lit disco confusion. Some did give me back a few, but later on when we were going home, kids I’d never sold any to were high as a kite. I had to hide out from Kevin for a week. In the end I couldn’t believe how important a bunch of tiny red pills could be, making all my friends act differently and cheating me out of the few they’d found on the dance floor, and making my own brother want to kick my ass. By the age of twelve, I was finished with selling drugs.

But booze was okay in my book. Every Friday night before getting on the subway for Illusions, we stood in front of J.J.’s Liquors waiting for a runner. We usually didn’t have to wait long before some adult would agree to buy us a couple six packs and a bottle of whiskey. And we didn’t even have to wait around the corner for him. It was all out in the open. Usually we gave the runner a couple cans of beer as payment. That’s what made it so easy to get someone to go in for us. Then we drank up on the rooftops of Old Colony.

Everyone at Illusions was getting messed up, even inside the club. We all snuck in whatever we didn’t finish out on the streets. I was able to smuggle in everyone else’s whiskey bottles by tucking them into my sweat socks. The bottles never showed through my pants because I had the biggest bellbottoms. Throughout that summer, the drinking seemed to be getting worse, and some people seemed to be drinking more than others. They were the ones who usually started the riots afterward in Kenmore Square, when mobs of drunk Southie kids would start beating on anyone who came in their path on the way home, especially if there was anything odd about him. I just followed the mob to watch and to pretend to be part of the whole thing. One guy was beaten because he was a “faggot college student.” Another guy got it because he was a “rock-and-roll pussy.”

Then the kids from different neighborhoods started rioting against each other. There’d always been tension between the Irish kids and the Italian kids at Illusions. Some people said that Irish Southie and Italian Eastie were united against busing, but I could feel the tension if I was the only Irish kid in a bathroom full of Italians from Eastie or Revere, or if there was one Italian kid alone with a group of Southies. It all broke out when two kids, one Italian and the other Irish, got in a fight on the dance floor. Their scuffle triggered an ethnic war that lasted the rest of the summer. Fights between Italians and Irish broke out every Friday night in Kenmore Square. Southie teenagers who hadn’t even gone to Illusions before started coming to Kenmore Square to get involved. And anyone in Kenmore Square who wasn’t from Southie got it.

That’s when I started hearing more people ask, “Where you from?” If they looked Irish, I said Southie. But if they looked Italian, I just ran to the nearest mob of Southie types. One night going home, my Southie mob all jumped onto the Red Line train at Park Street Station and the doors closed before I made it in. Just then about fifty teenagers came down the stairs onto the platform just across from me. They looked Italian and were wearing tight designer jeans and gold chains like the kids in Eastie usually wore. They spotted me across the track and started talking to each other, pointing me out.

“Where you from?” a short fat one yelled across the track, trying to pull up his pants, which were too tight to budge at all. “Who me?” I asked. I was the only one on my side of the track. A few of them laughed and the stout one asked if I wanted to end up on the third rail. Just then I heard my train pulling in, so I yelled “Southie!” across the track. The train stopped and I waited for the doors to open, and watched them all falling over each other to run up the stairs to cross the track and come after me. I knew the doors had to open soon. I waited, and waited, until finally they did open. I made it in just in time. One of the Italians threw a Heineken bottle at the train window and shattered it.

After we pulled out of the station, an older drunk guy who was the only other person on the train got up and asked me, “Where you from?” When I said Southie, he started giving me the handshake and hugging me as if we were long lost brothers. “Those guineas wouldn’t try that shit in Southie,” he said. “They know we got Whitey over there. And the Italian mob is scared shitless of him. They know he’d shoot ’em in the back as soon as look at ’em.”

So now I didn’t know what to say if Italians asked where I was from. I’d already learned to say “Jamaica Plain” or “Dorchester” or some other mixed part of the city, never “Southie,” to black people. Same thing with anyone who looked kind of intellectual or liberal, like the social worker types when we were applying for jobs through ABCD. But they always found out where we lived by looking up our names in the computer. “Um, the border of Southie and Dorchester,” is what I started to say then, so they wouldn’t judge me as a racist. There was still no place like home, though, in the safety and security of South Boston.

“Hey, Joe, check it out!” Kevin yelled, rolling down the tinted window in the backseat of Whitey Bulger’s car. He waved a large Baggie full of pot in front of Joe, who was working at Adams’ Garage outside Old Colony, where Whitey’s driver was having some work done on the car. Kevin knew Joe loved pot, and Joe’s eyes lit up. Then Whitey slapped the bag from Kevin. “Keep that fuckin’ shit down,” Joe heard Whitey hiss. Everyone knew Whitey hated drugs—that’s probably why he called it “fuckin’ shit.” He never touched the stuff; he just collected the money that was coming in. And boy was it coming in, by the looks of kids like Kathy, sixteen and walking around with black circles around her eyes. But that was their own fault, for getting into drugs. That’s what the ladies on the stoop always said. They said the big drug dealers were only making money selling the people what the people wanted.

When Joe came home and told me and Mary the story, I ran out of the house to see if I could get a glimpse of Southie’s king, or maybe even meet him, since it was my own brother he was chauffeuring around. Fat chance. They were long gone, and who knew when I would see Kevin again, never mind Whitey. Even when Kevin was home, he kept the back room locked and climbed in and out from the roof.

Ma couldn’t afford to send Kevin to a Catholic high school. Besides, he’d already wasted Ma’s money at St. Augustine’s. And forcing anyone to be bused to Roxbury to be the only white kid in the classroom was unthinkable. So Kevin dropped out, like most of his friends in the streets. Ma tried to get Johnnie to talk Kevin into learning a trade, but he laughed at that one. I guess he figured he had it made now, fifteen years old and riding high, in the backseat with the most powerful guy in Southie, James Whitey Bulger.