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A few years later, when I was eleven, I was in the house playing cowboys and Indians with guns. My father was playing against us kids. Since I was still small, I could put my feet on both sides of the hallway wall and climb up to the ceiling. My father walked by and didn’t know I was there. I shot him with a toy pistol, yelling, “Bang, bang, you’re dead.”

He was using a baseball bat as a rifle, and when I jumped down, he flicked the bat at me. “Don’t ever shoot your father in the back,” he told me. When I walked into the bedroom, Johnny started yelling when he saw my face. My father’s bat had hit me above the left eye, as well as just below it. I ended up going to Boston City Hospital and getting thirty-one stitches, fourteen below the eye and seventeen above it. My sister Maureen was working as a nurse in the Emergency Room at the time. Johnny Woods, a black man who was Billy’s boxing trainer, was also at the hospital, working as a security officer. Johnny knew my father well and put me on a gurney and wheeled me right into the ER.

When the doctor came out to see me, he had to inject Novocain into the cut around my eye. It was painful and I yelled. When my father heard me scream and then saw my eye swell, he punched the doctor and knocked him right out. The next thing I know, I’m lying on one gurney being stitched up by a second doctor, and the first doctor is lying on the gurney and they’re bringing him to. Johnny Woods grabbed my father and rushed him out of the ER room so they could work on me. Afterward, my father took me out for an ice cream sundae.

When I was twelve, I got into a two-hour fight with one of my best friends, Mikey McCormick. By the end of the first hour, a crowd of about two hundred neighbors, including my father and my brother Johnny, had formed a circle around us. Mikey, who weighed about thirty pounds more than me, was bleeding from my punches. But neither one of us was going to quit. We’d fight for a while and I would keep on punching and then he’d get his hands on me and we’d wrestle to the ground. Then that would be broken up and we’d both get up and start fistfighting again. My brothers always said that I wouldn’t quit, no matter how much I got hurt. It was true, even though Mikey wasn’t hurting me as much as I was hurting him. That day I got the better of Mikey, but there were plenty of days when he got the better of me.

When one neighbor, Mrs. McCannell, whose daughters were the same age as me, started rooting for Mike in a loud, obnoxious way, I threw a punch on purpose that missed Mikey, but hit her in her stomach. She doubled over and my father yelled to her, “That’ll teach you to keep your mouth shut.”

Finally, the parents decided it was enough and the fight ended. Mikey never would have given up if our parents hadn’t stopped it. When I got home, my father gave me an open-handed slap across the mouth that hurt more than anything I’d suffered in the fight. “What’s that for?” I asked, holding back my tears.

“For hitting a woman,” he told me. “Don’t ever hit a woman again.” I didn’t cry, because if I did, my father would crack me again and say, “What are you crying for?” The next day Mikey and I were friends again, but our parents didn’t talk to one another for two weeks.

The only time I saw my father cry was the day Pee Wee died. Pee Wee was a beautiful black cocker spaniel given to me on my first birthday. The two of us grew up together. Even when she got old and had bad arthritis, she followed me everywhere. One morning before school, around seven, when Pee Wee and I were both thirteen, the two of us were heading to Argus Bakery on Mercer and East Eighth streets. A guy drove around the corner, but the sun got in his eyes and he didn’t see us and hit Pee Wee. Right away, he got out of the car and went over to pick up the dog. I was crying hard but I still cracked him, punching the man in the mouth and splitting his lip. He had killed my dog and I was so mad. But he was a decent person. He took a blanket out of his trunk, gently picked