The Face Of Old Irish Working-Class
North Adamsville- In Honor Of Kenny Kelly, Class Of 1958
From The Pen Of Late Peter Paul
Markin
Another
Moment In History- A Guest Post, Of Sorts
Kenny
Kelly, Class of 1958? comment:
A word.
I, Kenneth Francis Xavier Kelly, around Jimmy’s warehouses they just call me Kenny, although my friends
call me “FX”, am a map of Ireland, or at least I used to be when I was younger
and had a full head of very wavy red hair. I was never called “Red” since that
moniker was taken by my mother’s brother and I never liked that name anyway, or
maybe I never liked him, or red-heads, inevitably Irish, and inevitably running
me ragged with their “do this, do that” every time they wanted something in or
out of bed like they were the flames of life, like they had come out of some
druid moon, as women friends, or wives like my first one who thought she was
some gift from the gods with her mass of red hair and dew-like skin but who
proved to be a bigger bitch than Shakespeare’s witches and good riddance. Yeah,
had a mass of freckles to go with that hair and which came like out the plague
in the sunny weather instead of a whiskey and beer chaser-driven mass of very
high-proof wrinkles. Had too my own, rather than store-bought, rattlers, teeth
I mean, bad teeth being the genetically inherited curse of the Irish, or maybe
just from the diet or lack of dentist dough, especially when the old man
slipped and cashed his paycheck at the Dublin Grille before he got home on
payday.
That
whiskey-wrinkled business is no joke since I started drinking Johnny Walker Red
when I was about twelve, the nectar made only a few miles away in Boston so
maybe it was in the air provoking me with its siren call or more truthfully
just easier to obtain than most others like Canadian Club or Seagram’s my
choices now except when somebody is buying them I’ll grab a Chivas. See the
guys I hung around with dared me to take a dram, maybe seven, or else make me
seem “light on my feet,” you know, a fag [gay] sneaking a thimbleful at a time
and then putting a splash of water into the bottle to maintain the same level
in my grandmother’s, Grandma Curran, Anna, from my mother Dorothy’s side of the
family, quart of whiskey that she kept out of sight in her china closet. Boys,
the stuff was nasty tasted like some awful, hold your nose childhood medicine
and gulp that first time and I think I almost threw up after the first gulp but
I acquired the habit, and did hold my nose a couple of times to break that
noxious feeling as I swallowed the liquid down and it took, mostly.
By the
way that hidden whiskey thing of my grandmother’s was not to keep the devil’s
brew away from childish harms, from me and my four younger brothers but from
Grandpa Curran, Daniel, who, having been abandoned by a drunken father who
would beat his mother until he took off one day for parts unknown with her
sister with whom he had been keeping time apparently since shortly after their
wedding, was a tee-totaler, a “dry” they called them in his day, his coming of
age time in the time of Prohibition, who hated even the idea of liquor around
the house. So that was Grandma’s secret cache, her sacred blessed medicine to
keep her spirits up when he hit the roof over whatever was on his mind,
whatever slight he took personally out in the world, whatever inflamed him to
the point of turning red-faced and bilious and she had to take it. What else
was she to do, where could she go, who would take her part in those days when
men and women, stolid working-class Irish Catholic men and women since this is
what I am telling you about, about how they kept themselves together then in
the diaspora. Hell the way I remember him, and this idea was not original with
me since my mother no knowing that I was taking my nips would always say that
to us when she heard from her mother than the old man was in one of his rages
again, she could have had gallons hidden to ward off that angry bastard’s rants.
When Anna wanted to entertain her sisters, her four sisters, May, Bernice,
Lizzy, and Alice, hearty drinkers all if I recall who had their own man sorrows
as well with divorces, abandonments, and drunks in the mix although since the
rule of thumb was to not “air dirty linen,” I wasn’t privy to most of the
information about their personal lives and after I got old enough I didn’t want
to know since I had begun my own sorrows, red-headed lovely sorrows if you want
to know, I didn’t care to know, they would have to repair to the “Ladies
Invited” Galway Grille by taxi about a mile up the road in “the Square”
[Adamsville Center] to toss down a few (and smoke some cigarettes since Grandpa
didn’t like that vice either although he wantonly smoked a stinking corncob pipe
filled with rank brown tobacco strips which smelled up the piazza [front porch]
where he liked to smoke and have conversations with his cronies if he was not
mad at them for some total bizarre reason, usually involving money). When I
came of age to drive they, no, Grandma, would give me five dollars for the task
and when I would pick them up after their libations they would appear be
pickled, maybe had guys hanging around them, but such is the fate of Irish
ladies after they have lost their bloom, lost whatever they had dreamed of in
their youth about what their world would be like. Grandma would always be
smiling then, and not just from the drink as far as I could tell. I am not
ashamed to say that I felt glad that she did her little escape now and then even
if her sisters sometimes got sloppy and wanted to hug me and all that “auntie”
stuff.
Later,
after Grandpa Curran had to be put in a nursing home when he had his stroke, a
stroke everybody from his doctor to his cronies to Grandma to my own mother said
was brought on by his rants, his angers at the world, his feeling slighted by
the ways of the world, I would pick up Grandma’s medicine at Doc’s Drugstore up
on Newbury Street across from the old Josiah Adams Elementary School where I
gave the teachers all the hell they could use, or take. By that time Grandma
Curran, who everybody had called a saint for putting up with Daniel all those
fifty some odd years had her own medical problems which kept her increasingly
housebound and I became her runner, the guy who would do the odd chores. You
know, get her groceries from O’Shea’s Market over on Emmet Street, pay her
bills at the telephone, electric, and gas offices “up the Downs [the shopping
area of North Adamsville] when you used to do that to save money since they
gave you a discount for in-person payment, do the yard work and simple house
maintenance and the like. I guess it fell to me as the oldest son of her oldest
daughter which from what Grandma told me one time when she was feeling
well-disposed toward me (which later would not always be the case) was some
kind of family tradition, maybe going back generations in the old country. All
I know is when I moved on to do my thing, started working for Jimmy the Mutt,
Eddie, the next oldest brother took over, and my cousin Sean who was older than
Eddie and the oldest son of my mother’s younger sister did so as well so there
was probably some old hoary truth to that going back to the mist of time.
Sorry
about that, about cutting off the story I was telling you but I just was
thinking about doing all that stuff for Grandma, nice stuff for a nice old
lady, and glad to do it, before I got wrapped up in lots of stuff I don’t feel
good about. Maybe Grandma Curran will put a word in for me when my time comes.
So when I did her medicine order every few weeks or once a month sometimes when
her pills ran out the order would include a pint of the usual Johnny Walker Red
that I told you I was taking swipes out as a kid as part of the delivery. In
those days, maybe now too, druggists could dispense small bottles of liquor for
medicinal purposes, no joke, like when people say that is the reason they are
drinking themselves under the table to chase away the blues or some other
demons, so there was nothing wrong with that, nothing illegal. What was wrong,
my wrong, happened one day when I was fourteen or so when I decided to grab a
bottle for myself, making that two bottles, as part of the order and Doc didn’t
blink an eye filling it for me since Grandma’s credit was good with him for whatever
she wanted (and she would give me a dollar for running the errand so the dough
I gave back to her would be right since if you can believe this what with the
price of hard liquor now the price for a pint was a buck and a quarter).
Later
that day Harry Johnson, the late Harry Johnson who joined the Army just out of
high school when he got into some trouble with the law, serious trouble, like
for robbery of a gas station and when he went to court the judge gave him the
“Irish penance, the rosary” three to five in the county jail or enlist in the
service and who was among the first American soldiers to die in Vietnam when
that war was raging in the world and whose name is now etched forever down in
Washington and on the memorial plinth for the guys from that war over on the
Commons in Adamsville Square, and I went down the far end of Adamsville Beach,
the Squaw Rock end, and drank the thing straight up and fast. Boy we were sick
that day and for a few days after. But like I said I acquired the “taste” so maybe
I really should blame old Grandma, rest her soul, for my lifetime of
debauchery, although that red-headed first wife, Kathleen wouldn’t you know,
was the one who “drove me to drink.”
For work,
yah, I’m still rolling the barrels uphill, I work, well, let’s just say I do a
little of “this and a little of that” for Jimmy the Mutt and leave it at that.
I met Jimmy when I was in high school before I dropped out which I will tell
you about later and he, a little older, maybe four years older had also dropped
out school at sixteen and has been going at the “this and that” business
full-time ever since, when he and his corner boys were hanging around holding
up the brick wall at their hang-out place in front of Harry’s Variety over on
Sagamore Street. Harry’s had everything Jimmy needed, a cool jukebox, a cooler
filled with sodas and beers, although the beers were illegal since Harry’s was
not licensed to sell liquor, particularly to under-aged corner boys but that
didn’t stop the brisk trade, nor did anything happen to Harry for this
transgression the “why” of which I will tell you in a second, a couple of
pin-ball machines, you know like the ones you would see down at the arcades,
the ones with the busty, buxom babes showing plenty of cleavage calling you
forth to play their game and win, well, win something, and Harry’s friendship
with half the cops in town which washed over Jimmy and his operations. See
Harry, Harry O’Toole, was “connected,” connected with the cops since he was
openly using the store as a front for his book-making operation and you would
see cops coming in day after day in their cops cars to make their bets in the
“book” Harry kept right on the counter, and connected too with the big boys in
South Boston, the Irish Mafia if you want to give it a name, not Whitey’s and
his guys then but the guys who made big in illegal liquor back after World War
I and branched out, because nobody, no town cops anyway were going to touch
that “goose that laid the golden egg” operation. (If any cops had any squawks,
or scruples, they could see the Captain, in my time that was Captain Murphy, a
friend and relative by marriage of Harry’s who lived up on Atlantic Avenue near
where the town Mayfair swells, and either be walking the midnight beat rousting
drunks and riffraff or getting cut off from the pie, or both. So no cop
squawked, not and live (one cop, Franny Larkin, the father of a friend of my
brother Eddie, who died under mysterious circumstances sometime after he had a
run-in with Murphy, said he was going to talk to the DA or something was enough
to scare any other do-gooders or snitches).Harry, a single guy, although he had
this busty, blue-eyed blonde Irish woman who wore tight cashmere sweaters and
got the double-take, and no more, by every breathing guy from about six to
sixty who saw her, or better smelled that jasmine perfume as she passed who
kept him company, treated Jimmy like a long lost son.
Yeah, and
Jimmy treated me like a long lost brother, which automatically gave me the nod
from Harry. Jimmy from the beginning,
from when I, bored, started to hang around the pin ball machines and he would
give me his “free” games when he had other business to attend to, his
girlfriend or Harry business, always liked me, always knew that I had a little
larceny in my heart, had some serious “wanting habits” as one of the guys
called what I had and so I did a little of
“this and that” then and am still at the business since those wanting
habits have not flickered out. When I am not doing this and that for Jimmy I
work in one of his warehouses moving material around, and don’t ask what kind
of materials or where it goes since I told you that it was this and that,
barrels too so I wasn’t joking about that barrel thing if you think I was.
I am also the map, the Irish map part
anyway, of North Adamsville, from the Class of 1958 at the old high school, or
at least I should have been, except for, well, let’s leave that as at a little
of this and that, for now, as well. I’ll tell you that story another time, if
you want to hear it. Or talk to that old bastard, Headmaster Kerrigan,
“Black-Jack” Kerrigan, and he’ll give you his lying side of the story if he can
still talk the bastard. Hell, I started to tell you so I might as well tell you
all of the story now so you don’t get all huffy about it like I would lie to
you about it or something. As you probably can guess from what I already told
you I was restless, always restless, maybe bored too, a little but restless
from early on from elementary school where I gave those poor benighted teachers
all they could handle, and got boxed on the ears from Dorothy for my pains. Or
if it was really bad then my father Seamus, but it had to be really bad to get
him involved since he was working over on the Southie docks and didn’t have
time to bother with disciplining his five sons what with work, his drinking
buddies and his girlfriend, that last one not known to us until many years
later when Dorothy and Seamus divorced and I found out there was a sixth Kelly,
a bastard half-brother sired by Seamus out of Lucy Leahy, his girlfriend. See
what I mean about the “not airing dirty linen” business. The “shawlies” [the
women, young and old, some who actually wore shawls against the cold of their
cold-water triple-decker flats when the bastard absentee rack-rent landlord
kept the heat low, who ran the “back porch” hanging out the laundry “grapevine”
effective as any high tech digital communications today and fed the gossip
mills of the neighborhood] had a field day when that news came out since my
mother as a fourth generation denizen of the town put on certain airs against
the second or third generation “new arrivals” from Southie and they hated her
for that arrogance. It was only because the old man left town and left her high
and dry with five growing boys that allowed her to survive since she got
something like a sympathy vote for being abused by one Seamus Kelly whom they
didn’t much like since he was first generation and not from Southie but some Irish
outpost down in the South.
So you could say I was no student,
getting in trouble and behind in my studies all through elementary and junior
high school. I was probably what today would be called a “special needs”
student but they didn’t have that designation then so by the time high school
came around I was assigned to what everybody, teachers, administrators, parents
and most cruelly other kids publicly called the “slow” class, the shop kids if
you want to know. The kids who maybe if you taught them how to saw wood, weld
metal, fix a toilet or repair an automobile might not wind up in Walpole [Cedar
Junction], or on death row before their twenty-first birthday for their
troubles. So they assigned me to the auto body shop. But here is what they
didn’t know, or care to know, I was not mechanically inclined, I was restless,
like I said so I wound up pulling “guard duty” in front of the boys’ lavatory
most of the time once old man Pringle, the auto body teacher, saw I had two left hands. And it was doing
that job that got me in Kerrigan’s cross-hairs.
See the boys’ lavatory in the shop area
by tradition if not law was off-limits to everybody but shop guys. You could if
you had to take a leak and were a guy go to any other “lav” in the school but
not ours, although various lavs also by tradition were used by particular
groups like the “jocks” used the one in the gym and seniors used the second
floor lounge (which had windows you could open and grab a quick smoke and blow
the smoke out the window while you were in there). That “nobody but shop guys”
was on the shop master Mister Pringle’s orders too and enforced by having guys
like me pull guard duty. Pringle, an old Army guy before he took up teaching
shop didn’t want his “latrine” [his word] messed up by a bunch of wise-ass
regular students, especially college jerks and school jocks[his words again].
One day this guy, this college joe type
guy, Jimmy Jenkins, who I had seen around for years in junior high and in high
school although I never knew him personally and would never have given him the
nod (the “nod” a sign that you knew the guy, knew he was okay, had some
connection with him maybe sports but did not hang with him), not a bad guy but
you know full of himself, a student government type, a guy who thought every
word he uttered came down from the mountain (and maybe he really thought it
had) but maybe thinking that shop guys were below human or something the way
that the whole school social order made shop guys the “slow class” guys, maybe
too worried about his own manhood being a college-type guy, didn’t want to be
taken for a “fairy,” decided that he had to take a leak in our “lav” and was
headed in until I stopped him and told him “no go.” Told him Pringle didn’t
want anybody but shop guys using his lav. Jimmy though seemed to have decided
he wanted to make an issue of it, said some baloney about “not being able to
hold it” or some such bullshit and I told him to get lost. He still headed in,
or tried to, because for his disrespect I grabbed hold of his arm, spun him
around and threw him though the nearest window in the wood-working shop which
was adjacent to the bathroom. He was a mess by the time they got to him.
Bleeding little blobs and all although not needing hospitalization or anything
like that, minor cuts like maybe you get from shaving, if you shave. But I
taught him a lesson in any case. (I heard later that he had to see a shrink for
a while to steady himself, also that guys, his guys, the college joes wouldn’t
hang with him for a while since he had been taken down by a guy who was shorter
although more wiry than him so they were probably razzing the hell out of him,
maybe “fag-baiting” him like every other guy in the school would do to every
other guy just because that was how macho everybody was, and scared that like
the dink, a real sissy, Ellis Murray, they were “light on their feet.”
About fifteen minutes later, while
Pringle who chuckled about the whole thing and I think would have patted me on
the back and said “well done” if it had been up to him had me sweeping up the
chards, who comes down but Black-Jack, all crazy about what happened, or what
he had heard happened like I killed the guy or something. So after identifying
me as the villain he took me to his office up on the second floor and had me
sit there in his waiting room or whatever you call it for about an hour until
school was over and then he brought me into his office. And laid down the law.
Said I was going to be expelled for the good of the school and that while what
I had done was serious no charges would be brought as long as I accepted my
expulsion with “grace” [Kerrigan’s word]. Otherwise he implied I would be
breaking rocks somewhere, or maybe doing the “Irish penance.” Frankly I freaked
out about that possibility since it had been drilled into me by my parents that
I needed to pass the shop class and get a certificate if I was to avoid the
county farm [the welfare solution in those days].
See what I didn’t know then was how
successful I was going to be without school, working that “this and that” for
Jimmy the Mutt so I was in a rage about what was going to happen to me. What
were Dorothy and Seamus going to say, or do. I guess too I was pissed off
because everybody knew what a suck-ass Kerrigan was and how he kept a lid on
all kinds of things like teachers beating on students when they couldn’t
control the situation, male teachers “hitting” on the girls for sex or else
down the back stairway when it was empty after school after they had the girls
serve some faked up detention, maybe threatening to flunk the poor girl so she
had to go to summer school or would not graduate or threatening to tell her
parents what she had done with her boyfriend down on Adamsville Beach Saturday
night that one of their “snitches” told them about to get out from under own
troubles.
I knew that last actually happened to
one of my girl cousins, Cookie [not her real name], who got in a mix mess with
her best girlfriend, Elizabeth, and in revenge she told a male teacher who was
“hitting” on her to lay off her and try my cousin who had shared with her like
girls do with best friends what she was doing with her boyfriend over at his
house when his parents were out and my poor cousin could hardly hold her head up
in school after some jock saw her giving “head” to that teacher down that back
hall (we called giving “head,” you know, oral sex, “Irish contraception” back
then since it was more likely an Irish girl would do that if you could coax her
to do anything other than regular sexual intercourse in order to keep
“virginal.” Many girls kept their novena and prayer book reputations intact by
doing that deed rather than “going all the way.”). Every guy in the school was
after her then, looking to get a little something since they thought she was
“easy.” Poor Cookie, poor Cookie later
when some guy left her in the lurch in senior year and she had to visit an “aunt
in Tulsa,” meaning she had gotten pregnant and had to leave town to have her
baby someplace else unlike now when such things while still frowned get a pass.
After that I don’t know what happened to her because she fell off the face of
the earth as far as I know.
So everybody knew, or everybody who
wanted to know, knew what was going on, all kinds of stuff like that including
Kerrigan so I took old Kerrigan and pushed him through his door and he fell
down, all crumbled up. One of the secretaries yelled was he okay and he said,
get this, that he had tripped, no big deal. The next day though everybody knew
that he had taken a beating from me, everybody that wasn’t a student
government-type, a snitch, or a suck-up brown nose. So I got the boot but you
got the real story in case you hear otherwise from that lying bastard. Got a
nice legend reputation too which helped me later, and a couple of hot dates
from girls you would never suspect would go for a guy like me, not Irish girls
and not Irish contraception either, but you would think would go for a guy like
Jimmy Jenkins. They said he was too tame for them. And they were “hot” too. Go
figure.
Let’s also put it that I grew up, rough
and tumble, mostly rough, very rough, on the hard
drinking-father-sometimes-working, and the plumbing-or-something-don’t-work-
and-you-can’t- get- the-tight-fisted-landlord-to- fix-anything-for-love-nor-
money walk up triple decker just barely working class, mean streets around
Sagamore and Prospect Streets in one-horse Atlantic. At least my dear
grandmother, sainted Anna who had been born there as had her mother, and maybe
yours too, called it that because there was nothing there, nothing you needed
anyway. You know where I mean, those streets right over by the Welcome Young
Field, by Harry the Bookie’s variety store who I already gave you the skinny on
(you knew when you were in Harry’s, with the always almost empty shelves except
maybe a few dusty cans of soup, a couple of loaves of bread and a refrigerator
empty except maybe a quart of milk or two, those active pin-ball machines, and
like I said before his “book” right on the counter for all the world, including
his cop-customer world, to see), and the never empty, never empty as long as my
father was alive, Red Feather (excuse me I forgot it changed names, Dublin
Grille) bar room. Maybe you came up on those same kinds of streets and my hat
is off to you too but it was rough, it was Irish shanty rough with no hope,
maybe no desire or will to move up to “lace curtain,” and forget Kennedy-etched
“chandelier’ Irish which gives you the whole social structure of the diaspora.
We never saw “lace curtain” in that neighborhood and only read about the
“chandelier” in the newspapers. Maybe it was something in the Curran/Kelly
bloodline but after the Kelly clan with Seamus in tow came up from the South to
North Adamsville (the Currans were already here) that seems to have exhausted
the stock so for the next three generations including mine were nothing but
“shanty” living about the same way each generation just doing this and that and
nothing outstanding but we sure knew the ethos of the neighborhood, what you
could and could not do to keep up with the Joneses.
Let me
explain how I wound up as a “guest” here and see if that gives you a better
picture of what went on, what goes on in the old burg since it relates to all
these little Irish-flavored tidbits I have been enticing you with. Seems like
Peter Paul Markin, that’s the half-assed, oops, half-baked, Irishman whom I
first vaguely met when I was hanging around Harry’s with Jimmy the Mutt and the
boys and he, in his turn, had come around like almost every young kid in that
neighborhood to watch the pin ball wizards, including me, hoping to cadge a few
free games when the older guys had other things to attend to, wrote up some
story, some weepy cock and bull story, about the Irish-ness of the old town, A Moment In History… As March 17th
Approaches on the North Adamsville
Graduates Facebook page and my pride and joy daughter Clara(from my second
marriage, since divorced, that time a brunette who proved to be almost as
troublesome as that first enflamed red-head wife but whom I still see now and
then with her new husband over at Fast Eddie’s Bar and Grille in Carver where
she lives and where Jimmy the Mutt has one of his many warehouses), North
Adamsville Class of 1983 (and she actually graduated), saw it and recognized
the great-grandparent names Curran, Kelly and Welcome Young Field that I had
told her about and asked me to read it. I did and I sent Peter Paul, hell,
Markin an e-mail, Christ, where does he get off using three names like he was a
bloody heathen Boston Brahmin and him without a pot to piss in, as my dear
grandmother used to say, growing up on mean streets on the wrong side of the
tracks, over near the marshes which even the shanty Irish have always avoided
if possible since those triple-deckers and single family shacks, there is no
other word for them, for Chrissakes, wronger even than the Sagamore streets. Or
my baby Clara did, did sent the e-mail to him after I told her what to write.
I’m not much of hand at writing or using this hi-tech computer stuff, if you
want to know the truth. My skills are more old-fashioned and more reliable, get
things done quicker and done, finished.
I don’t
know what Markin did with that e-mail, and to be truthful again, I don’t really
care, but in that e-mail I told him something that he didn’t know, or rather
two things (except that cadging pin ball games but that didn’t count since a
lot of younger kids were onto that gag and he was mostly just a pesty face in
the crowd). The first was that I “knew” him long before he sent his reply
e-mail, or rather knew his grandmother (on his mother’s side) Mary O’Brian,
because her sister, Bernice, and my dear grandmother, Anna, also born an
O’Brien but with an “e.” who both lived in Southie (South Boston, in those days
the Irish Mecca, for the heathens or Protestants, or both, both heathen and
Protestant, that might read this) were as thick as thieves. When I was just a
teenager myself I used to drive his grandmother, like I did with my grandmother
and her sisters including Aunt Bernice up to the “Square” where they drank
themselves silly, over to her sister’s in Southie so that the three of them,
and maybe some other ladies joined them for all I know, could go to one of the
Broadway bars (don’t ask me to name which one, I don’t remember) that admitted
unescorted ladies in those days and have themselves a drunk. And smoke
cigarettes, unfiltered ones no less, Camels I think when I used cadge a few,
which his stern grandfather, Matthew, refused like my grandfather to allow in
the house over on Young Street.
I know, I
know this is not the way that blue-grey haired Irish grandmothers are supposed
to act, in public or private. And somebody, if I know my old North Adamsville
gossips, wags and nose-butters, and my North Adamsville Irish branch of that
same clan especially, is going say why am I airing that “dirty linen” in public
and against the dearly departed as well. That’s a good point that Markin talked
about in his story about Frank O’Brian and not airing the family business in
public in that foolish essay, or whatever he wrote that got me to having Clara
writing that e-mail.
So what
am I doing taking potshots as the blessed memories of those sainted ladies?
That is where my second thing comes in to set the record straight – Markin, and
I told him so in that e-mail (or Clara did) with no beating around the bush, is
to me just another one of those misty-eyed, half-breed March 17th Irish that
are our curse and who go on and on about the eight hundred years of English
tyranny like they lived it, actually lived each day of it. Yes half-breed, his
father, a good guy from what my father told me when they used to drink
together, so he must have had something going for him, was nothing but a Protestant
hillbilly from down in the mountain mists hills and hollows Kentucky although
his mother, Delores (nee Riley), was a good as gold Irish girl as the old town
produced.
Now don’t
get me wrong. I am as patriotic as the next Irishman in tipping my hat to our
Fenian dead like old Pearse did back in 1913 or so at the gravesite of some
ill-treated, ill-treated by the bloody British, member of the Irish Republican
Brotherhood, and the boys of ’16 fighting off the bastards in the General Post
Office in Dublin when the boyos put up the proclamation for the Republic under
old Jimmy Connolly who they later executed after the British had burned their
own colonial town down, what did they
care, and the lads on the right side in 1922, the guys who wanted to hold out
for a whole island-wide republic and the lads fighting in the North more
recently under General McGuiness and the boyos in Derry but Markin has got the
North Adamsville Irish weepy, blessed “old sod” thing all wrong. No doubt about
it. So, if you can believe this, he challenged me, to tell the real story. And
I am here as his “guest” to straighten him out, and maybe you too.
Sure, he
is helping me write this thing. I already told you I’m a low-tech guy. Jesus,
do you think I could write stuff like that half-arsed, oops, half- baked son of
an expletive with his silly, weepy half-Irish arse goings on? I will tell you
this though right now if I read this thing and it doesn’t sound right fists are
gonna be swinging, old as I am. But let’s get this thing moving for God’s sake.
Let me
tell you about the shabeen, I mean, The Red Feather, I mean the Dublin Grille,
bar room on Sagamore Street. That’s the one I know, and I am just using that as
an example. There were plenty of others in old North Adamsville, maybe not as
many as in Southie, but plenty. If you seriously wanted to talk about the
“Irish-ness” of North Adamsville that was the place, the community cultural
institution if you will, to start your journey. Many a boy got his first drink,
legal or illegal, at that, or another like it, watering hole. Hell, the “real”
reason they built that softball field at Welcome Young was so the guys, players
and spectators alike, had an excuse to stop in for a few (well, maybe more than
a few) after a tough battle on the base paths. That’s the light-hearted part of
the story, in a way. What went on when the “old man”, anybody’s “old man,” got
home at the, sometimes, wee hours is not so light-hearted (or like my father
didn’t show up at all trying to tell my mother that he was working the very
early ships at the docks shift and so headed to Southie to be ready for work.
Ready for work messing up the sheets with his Lucy Leahy lady friend, goddam
him as tough as it was to live under my mother’s tyranny in his frequent
absences).
See, that
is really where the straightening out job on our boy Markin needs to be done.
Sure, a lot of Irish fathers didn’t get drunk all the time. Although the deep
dark secret was that in almost every family, every shanty family for certain
and I know, and many “lace curtain” families they was at least one reprobate
drunk. Hell, the local city councilor’s brother, Healy I think it was, was
thrown in the drunk tank by the coppers more times than he was out. They could
have given him a pass-key and saved time and money on dragging him to the
caboose. But the king hell takes-the-cake was old “Black-Jack” Kerrigan’s
brother, Boyo (sorry, I forget his real name but everybody called him Boyo when
he was in his cups). Yah, the North Adamsville High headmaster’s brother, the
bastard that I had a run-in with and had to hightail it out of school, although
it was not over his brother.
See
Black-Jack’s family thought they were the Mayfair swells since Black-Jack had
gone to college, one of the first in the old neighborhood, and they had that
big single-family house over on Beach Street. But more than one night I found
Boyo lying face-down on Billings Road drunk as a skunk and had to carry him
home to his wife and family. And then head back to the other side of the
tracks, that wrong side I already told you about. Next day, or sometime later,
Boyo would give me a dollar for my services in his hour of need. Naturally when
I went to school after that I went out of my way to flash the dollar bill at
Black-Jack, saying “Look what Boyo gave me for helping him out of the gutter.”
That’s all I had to say. Black-Jack always turned fuming red, maybe flaming
red. Of course that was before that grab-ass tussle we had over the use of the
shop boys’ lavatory so maybe he held that taunt against me and saw expelling me
as his sweet-laced arsenic Irish revenge.
A lot of Irish fathers didn’t beat on
their wives all the time either. And a lot of Irish fathers didn’t physically
beat their kids for no reason. Plenty of kids go the “strap” though when the
old man was “feeling his oats.” I never heard of any sexual abuse, but that was
a book sealed with seven seals then and with all the exposes about the faggot
boy-loving priests the last few years maybe that went on too more than you
would think because almost every Irish guy, me too, was totally screwed up
about sex under the guidance of the Church and parents and probably did things
as bad as those black-hearted priests. It took a heathen Protestant girl, Laura
Perkins, to show me what was what about the beauties of sex but that was much
later. And more than one wife, more than one son’s mother didn’t show her face
to the “shawlie” world due to the simple fact that a black eye, a swollen face,
or some other wound disfigured her enough to lay low for a while. I had to
stop, or try to stop, my own father one time when I was about twelve and he was
on one of his three day Dublin Grille whiskey straight-up, no chaser toots and
Ma just got in his way. He swatted me down like a fly and I never tried to go
that route again. But he didn’t try to beat my mother again either, at least
not when I was a around or I would have heard about it on the “shawlie” wire.
And a lot
of Irish wives didn’t just let their husbands beat on them just because they
were the meal ticket, the precious difference between a home and the county
farm [like I said before the welfare deal of that time when you were down and
out] or, worse, the streets. And a lot of Irish wives didn’t make excuses (or
pray) for dear old dad when the paycheck didn’t show up and the creditors were
beating down the door. And a lot of Irish wives didn’t let those Irish fathers
beat on their kids. And a lot of Irish mothers didn’t tell their kids not to
“air the dirty linen in public.” But, don’t let anyone fool you, and maybe I am
touching on things too close to home, my home or yours, but that formed part of
the scene, the Irish scene.
Maybe, because down at the Atlantic
dregs end of North Adamsville the whole place was so desperately lower
working-class other ethnic groups, like the Italians, also had those same
pathologies. (I am letting Markin use that last word, although I still don’t
really know what it means, but it seemed right when he told me what it meant).
I don’t know. Figure it out though, plenty of fathers (and it was mainly
fathers only in those days who worked, when they could) with not much education
and dead-end jobs, plenty of rented apartments in triple-deckers as homes , no
space, no air, no privacy rented housing and plenty of dead time. Yah, sure, I
felt the “Irish-ness” of the place sometimes (mainly with the back of the
hand), I won’t say I didn’t but when Markin starts running on and on about the
“old sod” just remember what I told you. I’ll tell you all the truth, won’t you
take a word from me.
