Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [4]
Our family was a close one, and every Sunday all six of us kids went to nine o’clock Mass at St. Augustine’s. Jack, whom we all called Johnny while we were growing up, is four years older than me. He was an altar boy. I wasn’t cut out for that. Back then, Mass was still in Latin, and that had no appeal for me. When we got home, we had to tell our father what the sermon was about and the color of the priest’s vestment. He wasn’t religious, but he made us go. My mother stayed home, and the priest used to come to the house once a week to give her communion.
But even more than books and religion, my father made sure that boxing ruled our family life. From as far back as I can remember, I boxed. Whether we wanted to or not, my brothers and I boxed. Every night we would move the furniture in the parlor and the three of us boys would box in the living room. My gloves were hand-me-downs from my brothers and were practically bigger than me. My brothers wouldn’t seriously bang on me till we were older, but Johnny and I always boxed in our bedroom, as well as in the parlor. From the time I was eight and he was twelve, right up until he left for Harvard, Johnny would be Muhammed Ali and I would be George Chuvalo. Chuvalo was the Canadian heavyweight champ who used to take a lot of punches but would never quit. That was why I liked him. And when I boxed with Johnny, I would take a lot of punches from Muhammed Ali, but like Chuvalo, I would never quit.
As a kid, when I wasn’t boxing, I was on the swim team, traveling to meets all over New England, or playing basketball or Ping-Pong. It was fun to get out of the house to travel to swim meets. In high school, I was a diver for the swim team. I enjoyed the exercise, but, like with every sport I did, I always tried to win.
Every summer, from ages seven to seventeen, I left the city and went to Boys Club camps down the Cape or all over New England. I was usually sent for two weeks, but most summers I wanted to stay for a longer period of time so I’d get some kind of a job there, teaching swimming, or working as a counselor or lifeguard, or whatever I could do to extend my time in the country. But I was also happy living in the city. Southie was a great community to grow up in. I had a nice group of friends in the Old Colony projects, and we all played street hockey, football, and baseball together. We always stuck up for one another. In the fall, we’d make huge piles of leaves and jump in them for hours at a time. In the winter, we made giant igloos out of snow and ice. Before forced busing and the integration of the housing projects, Southie was a safe, happy place to raise a family. We never locked our doors, and the most serious crime was a fistfight. Or a parking ticket, which most likely got thrown out when you went down to the courthouse. After all, they were all working people and a ticket was a day’s pay. The neighborhood police had walking beats and walked the streets and knew everyone. Families like the McCormicks, the Faiths, the Holmeses, the Naves, and the Kuzmichs all knew one another, too, and watched out for each others’ kids. It was a different world then. Everyone had two parents at home. Single parents were unheard of.
Sure, some kids had run-ins with the law, but in the end nearly all of them turned out to be legitimate people. I wouldn’t have traded my childhood in Southie for anything. I believe we got a better sense of life there than we would have received in the suburbs. We learned to appreciate the simple things in life, like a broomstick and a pimple ball, one with semiround bumps on it, for when we played what we called half-ball. There were few black kids at the