Things were good for a while. A team made up of guys from Southie would play a team made up of guys from Charlestown—with a couple first-degree lifers from Chelsea or Malden thrown in to make things even. Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. Can’t you see Pinkhands Salerno? Nursing his eye with a frozen sausage and shouting from the sidelines, “Fuckers, this show’s gotta go on!” Like we were putting on Guys and Dolls, opening night, on Broadway.
This place used to be called just Walpole, but the people of Walpole got tired of being known only as the town with the prison, so the state of Massachusetts changed the gulag’s name to Cedar Junction, a mythical place, an intersection of horrors just off Route 47 North. Turn right at the Dairy Delight and keep going a mile and a half. Paint scabbed, looks like an abandoned factory but for the layers of razor wire loop-dilooped, glistening silver in the sun, and the warning signs and the guard towers and the machine gunners.
Denny Coughlin made the rules, and Salerno, his most faithful lieutenant, carried them out with the zeal of a convert. Denny Coughlin. Good old Boston Irish from an old Southie family. Some of the sons went into the racket, others into politics. When his brother Len got hitched, Mike Dukakis gave the bride away. Denny, though, was in the crime branch, and back then—he’d be the first to admit it—he was a few clowns short of a circus. He got lugged on a murder two for busting a former associate in the head with a tire iron behind the Shell station on Columbus Boulevard. Denny pled to manslaughter and landed twelve to fourteen at Walpole, where he rose to his true calling, undisputed king of prison floor hockey.
Time. We don’t measure it in years. We measure it in lunch, in soup, in the ache for those we’ll never touch again, but out there on the gym floor, twenty-eight minutes, three times a week, it did, it did move faster.
The game had two basic rules:
Rule 1: No injuries. If you got hurt enough so that you couldn’t play, you dragged yourself off to the sidelines, stuffed your elbow back in the socket or got a towel to stanch whatever was bleeding. But you were forbidden to go to the choke. The rule came about because Sergeant Whosafuck said the game was getting too expensive after Rent Meelhan got blunked by Fabain and Joey Norris and had to be carried off, blood gushing from his eyeballs, on a stretcher. Spent a week in the choke with five broken ribs and a knob on his head big as Uranus. Finally they had to send him to a real hospital. So Whosafuck said, “Next time somebody goes down like that, that’ll be it, and you useless hogs will suck each other’s dicks while the blacks get double gym time for basketball.”
“Sergeant Whosafuck, must you be so vulgar?” Salerno asked. “Think of the tender ears. We’ve got juveniles here tried as adults.”
“Hustoff, Salerno. Hustoff. It’s Slovenian.”
And so Coughlin decreed it: “The days of wine and pain are over.” Nobody would get hurt again—ever. Salerno was a trustee. He’d steal the frozen meat from the kitchen that we’d use for icepacks.
Rule 2, which was around before we needed Rule 1, was straightforward also: The puck is always live. No time-outs. Constant action. The game never stopped unless the puck went under the equipment cage on the far side of the gym. When this happened, one of the screws would have to get up off his lolling ass and open the metal gate to retrieve the puck. Now, the important thing to understand here was that the puck remained live even when it went under the wooden bench the officers sat on during games. The drill was that the screws covering the gym—usually Morton and Salazar—would leap up whenever the puck went under the bench so that the guys could fight over the puck until somebody dug it out. The screws—at least Morton and Salazar—knew the deal. They got a kick out of seeing us beat the living crap out of each other up close. But when the puck went under the bench (about three times a game), they ran for the hills.
(The only other rule, so minor it didn’t need a number, was that blacks didn’t play floor hockey. But this was less a rule than the simple fact that the blacks, according to Coughlin, were scared pissless to play us barbarians. Same reason they don’t come to Southie. We’re big and white and hairy, baby!)
Nobody ever got hurt, nobody went to the choke. So maybe it was surprising that it was Rule 2 that caused Whosafuck to finally ban hockey, after all the trouble we went through to enforce Rule 1.
It was a tight game, only four minutes left before count call. Charlestown up by one. Coughlin was having an off day; he hadn’t scored. For a big man he had a strange grace as he went after the puck. He moved with this real fluid motion, as if he really was on ice skates. I played for Southie, defense. I’m not that aggressive a guy. I’m in here on a murder one, crime of passion, my lawyer called it. And it was love, that much is true, but I’m not making excuses—anyway, too long a story. In the gym, I rarely moved much. I’m decently sized myself, and mostly I just stood there in front of our goal like those cement pots they use to block off a street. Sometimes my head wouldn’t even be that much in the game because I’d be too busy watching Coughlin. There isn’t any other way to say it. Out there on the floor he wasn’t inside, he was somewhere else. And he’d thread through a bunch of guys, twirl like a ballerina, and come out with the puck like it was glued to his stick. It was a beautiful thing to watch. Losing brought out the artist in him. He never wanted to crush Charlestown; he always wanted them to believe they could beat us. Coughlin always said you had to give Charlestown some reason to believe. Otherwise, why would they ever play?
That day I think Coughlin may have pulled something, because he was favoring his left side a bit, but as soon as he heard the first warning bell, five minutes to count, his body seemed to forget about it and he got the old hunger back. But Charlestown had some strong players and they were hanging in there; most of them dropped back to defend. They kept deflecting Coughlin’s shots—with not only their sticks but their shoes, their elbows, their necks, their teeth. It was getting bloody down there on their side of the gym. Charlestown was smelling it. And Coughlin, with only about two minutes to go, had decided enough was enough—
Another shot ricocheted off the goal, and this time the puck went under the officers’ bench. And, see, that day a brand-new screw was down in the gym and he didn’t know the rules. Morton, the lazy fuck, didn’t bother to tell him. Salazar would have told him. Salazar would have showed him the ropes. But Morton, never. It would have taken too much energy to open his mouth and say, Hey, listen, rook, when the puck goes under the bench, they’ll kill you if you don’t get out of the way, okay? What would it have taken? And so of course, when it happened, the twenty-year-old puny rookie screw didn’t have any sense. Even though Morton was practically in New Hampshire when that puck slid under the bench that day. But the kid didn’t move. I’m a guard, the kid thinking, I’m wearing a uniform. I have to move for these Neanderthals? Two hundred fifty-five pounds of Denny Coughlin barreling his way, and the kid sits there on a picnic. Coughlin couldn’t stop, and he popped the kid so hard his head mulched against the concrete wall like a kicked-in pumpkin. It was bad. Morton, who knew damn well Coughlin was only going for the puck, fucked him anyway. That’s your Rule 3: They will always fuck us anyway. He got on his radio and called in an emergency B single assault on an officer. It didn’t take more than ninety seconds for Whosafuck to burst in with six helmeted Nazi lunatics from the Special Operations Response Team, plastic shields in one hand, wombats in the other. And the SORTs went right for Coughlin. But hear this, Coughlin, even on the floor, even getting his teeth kicked in by the toes of the SORT screws’ boots—the man still spoke up for the game, for us:
“Puck’s always live. Puck’s only dead when it goes in the cage!”
And when they dragged him away by his pits and he was nearly unconscious, his blood across the gym floor, he kept sputtering that he didn’t need to go to the choke, that he was fine, absolutely fucking fine.
Salerno told us what happened after. He had contacts in the choke. They couldn’t save him, so they had him medivaced to Mass General. But that was only covering their asses. Denny Coughlin was brain dead before he rose up from Cedar Junction.