Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [5]
Growing up, I never drank or did drugs. Nor did my friends. We’d known one another all our lives and had our fights and stuff, but we’d get over them quickly, even if our parents didn’t. They wouldn’t speak to each other for months after we’d solved our problem. If one of us did something wrong, all another parent needed to say was, “I’m going to tell your mother,” and immediately we’d say, “I’m sorry.” Today that same kid would say, “Go fuck yourself, lady.” And grab her purse at the same time.
But I knew from early on that there were a lot of tough kids in Southie. And I learned that you didn’t always have to win when you fought there, but you had to stand up and be counted. You didn’t have to be the toughest, but you needed to be able to protect yourself if you were challenged. We all fought. We never thought about it. We just did it. There were lots of nice kids out on the street who were tough with their hands. There were good people who worked hard and played sports and were happy-go-lucky, but that didn’t make them any less tough to fight.
There are tunnels that lead from one area of the project to the next. My father didn’t like kids to hang out in them and make noise, so whenever he heard them in the tunnel, he’d send one of us boys down. He’d always send the one closest in age to the kids making the noise. That way if there was a fight, it would be fair.
There was never a day, however, that my father would spare the rod. One day when I was seven, I talked back to him and then raced into the bedroom. In the room, Johnny and I had bunk beds, with me sleeping on the bottom bunk and Billy on a folding cot. When I dove under the bunk bed, my father went down on his knees and stuck his arm in to grab me. I was always doing things with my tool box, which I kept under my bed. I opened it, grabbed my small claw hammer, and smashed it hard on his hands. I broke two of his fingers and split them open. My father went berserk and threw over the entire bunk bed, both mattresses and box springs and all. He was a brute, with huge shoulders and arms. He dragged me out and beat me.
Afterward, my mother came in and said, “What were you thinking?”
“I knew he was going to beat me,” I told her. “So I got him first.” I knew even then that I didn’t have to win every fight, but I had to try.
For no reason, one Saturday afternoon when I was eight, my father told me to go into my room. “You ain’t going out,” he said.
“I didn’t feel like going out,” I told him, and went into the room. I was in there playing when my sister Patty, who was two years older, walked in.
“How come you don’t want to go out?” she said.
“I’m using child psychology on him,” I told her. I’m sure it didn’t work that day, but it was worth a try.
While my brother Billy was always calm in the way he handled things, I was more like our father. When something happened to me, the first thing I thought of was punching. Like with our parakeets, Salt and Pepper. One morning when I was nine, we found Pepper lying dead on the bottom of their cage. The two birds were always fighting, so we figured that Salt had killed Pepper during the night. The next morning I came walking out of the shower, and hadn’t realized that Salt had gotten out of the cage. All I knew was that an object was coming at my head. I threw a left hook and killed Salt in midair. My mother was bull because Salt was her pet. I felt bad because we had all liked the bird,