Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [19]
Over a period of three years, from 1975 to 1978, I could see that he was watching how I conducted myself in fights and how I handled the door. There was no doubt I had a temper and was quick to react when someone bothered me, but for the most part, I remained pretty easygoing. My objective at the door, however, was simple: Stop trouble before it came in. It was important to quickly recognize people who would become belligerent. Maybe I’d had problems with them before, in which case I wouldn’t let them in again. Even though they might be mad when I turned them away, eventually they would leave. I wasn’t nasty, but I would explain calmly that they couldn’t come in if they were drunk or had been barred. I also kept them out if they had phony IDs, or if I just didn’t like their demeanor and could sense they were going to be trouble.
I made sure I was never a bully and never hit people just to hit them. But sometimes, when people deserved it, I hit them and I enjoyed it. Still, the only time I hit anyone was if they hit me first or hit or bothered someone else. Often strangers or out-of-towners who I’d never seen before would come in and start something. Then I had no choice but to get into the middle of the fight to stop it. I didn’t think about it; I just did my job. Even though some nights I was able to talk to people and calm them down, most often, I ended up physically throwing out the troublemaker. I tried to side with the regular customers, since they were the ones spending money, and toss out the person who had come in for the first time.
One night I was at the door with another bouncer when a couple of brothers started a fight with us, just a drunken barroom thing. We had taken the fight outside when a third guy jumped out of a car and came running at us with a hatchet. Furious, I grabbed an aluminum baseball bat back inside behind the door and, defending myself, slugged him with it. As he went down, he dropped the hatchet and I picked it up, determined to give it back to him, but in my own special way. A minute later, he took off and I ran after him with the hatchet in my hands, catching up with him at Cardinal Cushing High School. Still angry at his attacking me, I planted his weapon in his shoulder blade and watched as his shirt turned red with blood. He ran away, the handle of the hatchet flopping up and down in the wind. I’d never seen the guy before and never saw him again, but I was certain he ended up in an emergency room, trying to explain the huge wound in his back.
Some nights, I bartended and bounced. Before we were married, I brought in Pam, who started out as a waitress and then filled in at the bar. She made a terrific bartender, but because she was so beautiful, guys were always trying to hit on her. Knowing my temper, Pam never wanted me to get into fights, so she wouldn’t tell me if someone grabbed her. But still, whenever I saw anything, I ended up knocking the guys out, breaking their jaws and teeth or splitting their faces open. It wasn’t good for business to have her behind the bar and me at the door! Once she got pregnant with our first son, she stopped working.
Working on the T—Boston’s subway system—and still bouncing, I wasn’t making a lot of money, but I could see that Jimmy was getting more comfortable with me and was bringing me around to his world slowly and cautiously, having me meet the people in his circle, all the people he dealt with. I understood from the beginning that he wasn’t the kind of person who took a shine to someone overnight, that he would never just jump into something. If he was going to work with someone, he wanted to know exactly what he was getting before he moved even a small step forward.
But as he’d talk to