Burning Down The House
Two
Burning Down The House
I have a yellowed cartoon cut out from The Dorchester Reporter titled “The Power of Perception,” by an artist named Gus D’Angelo that characterizes Dorchester well. It shows a clean cut guy in a suit and tie extending his hand in greeting, saying, “Hi! I’m from Dorchester.” Beside him a wide-eyed guy with his hair standing on end has dropped his paper and has his hands in the air, yelling, “Don’t shoot! Don’t Shoot!”
In nineteen-sixty, before I turned six, we moved into a five room apartment on the second and third floors of a big green house in Dorchester. Soon after moving, my mother gave birth to my younger sister. Shortly after that she had a surprise visit from two cops who came to question her. My father had “tipped them off” that she took bets and ran a bookmaking operation out of the house. Seeing my newborn little sister and my mother’s demeanor, the cops quickly saw through my father’s lie.
In less than a year we moved two houses up the street to number seven, the first house on the block at the top of a small hill. There we settled into a first floor five room flat in a traditional Dorchester three-decker, wooden frame house sided with cracked and broken gray slate siding and topped with a gabled slate roof. Dorchester has miles of these three decker apartment houses running up and down street after street. My mother worked hard, with an artistic flair, painting, wallpapering, and doing whatever else she could to create a nice home for us. She made a work of art out of the apartment’s ancient raised bathtub when she painted it gold with a huge elegant red rose on its side. She knew how to sew too, making everything from clothes to curtains.
The outside world looked quite different from our cozy nest because we lived in the first house at the top of a hill. Our side and tiny backyards bordered the back lots of an L-shaped line of connected storefronts that ran along two main streets that intersected with other commercial blocks, making up an area known as Four Corners.
Across the street from our house stood a Texaco station. Looking at the front of our house from the gas station, you could see a line of houses going down the hill to the left. In the narrow passage to the right of our house, the dry cleaners vented their steam pipes every Monday through Saturday morning at six.
Walking down the alley, past the dry cleaners on our right, ran a line of connected storefronts enclosed in a long red brick building. Past the dry cleaners, a Chinese laundry bordered with a broken down wooden fence hid the dreaded Chinese dog; a hairy beast that bit me thirteen times. One time he chased me to the top of a fire escape before sinking his teeth into my calf. We never knew if he would be out and could never see him lurking behind the fence because of his mottled brown fur, but when he attacked, he lunged through the broken fence with demonic fury.
Beside the Chinese laundry, the sound of clicking billiards came all hours of the day and night from a pool hall that I was never old enough to go into. Next in line came a Laundromat, and on the end of the block on the corner beside our back yard stood a drugstore that connected the line of businesses beside our house with another line that ran the length of the block along the backyards of all the houses on our street.
A delicatessen with a second floor apartment above it, directly behind our house, joined the drugstore on the corner. Beside it going down the block in order were a meat market/liquor store, a five and dime, a real estate office, a dentist’s office with apartments above it, and on the far end, a Christian Science Reading Room.
In a short period of time I knew every rooftop and billboard, all the trees, fire escapes, and drainpipes that led up and down from the roof. I loved to climb everything, especially trees. I often climbed high into them until their branches barely held me, then swayed in the breeze looking down at the ground, driving myself to the edge of panic, imagining what it would be like to fall. When I reached the point of shivering terror I pulled it back in and calmed myself, loosening my white-knuckled grip until I reached equilibrium.
Once there I did it again, taking myself back to the edge of terror where I pushed past the previous point before pulling back again, repeating the cycle. I did this over and over, going from trees, to roof tops, to third floor porches, later graduating to towers, bridges, cliffs, and other precipices. I felt compelled to explore my fear and its dynamics. Sometimes the urge to jump arose, and I explored that too, but I only pushed past that one when I had water below to break my fall. My fear of heights and the swiftness of its onset fascinated me, making its boundaries something I felt driven to test again and again.
Our house had the smallest back yard of all. The deli behind us had a bigger yard surrounded by a wooden fence. The meat market/liquor store and the five and dime in the middle of the block had no fences, making an open space behind the two houses beside us, giving the neighborhood kids a big lot to play in. We usually played what we called squash, which had the same rules as baseball, except you punched a soccer-sized ball and ran the bases. If someone on the defending team caught the ball or hit you with it while you were running, you were out.
Out in the street in front of our house we played stick ball or half ball using a broomstick for a bat to hit a cut in half pimple ball, which was a white hollow baseball-sized ball covered with small raised stars that had been punctured. It took a special skill to make the halves sail like Frisbees, and even more skill to hit such a small, fast flying hollow half ball with something as thin as a broom stick. If we had an inflated ball, or another small rubber ball that actually bounced, we played three-flies- out by throwing it against the front steps of a house, trying to bounce it over the defender’s head.
I started first grade in this neighborhood and soon learned that being a small kid made me an easy target for bullies. I experienced my second reluctant warrior’s initiation when two bigger kids took turns beating me over the head with their metal lunch boxes. Once more I bore the physical pain, followed by a deeper, more troubling emotional wound that begged the question of how people could inflict such violence in an unprovoked attack?
The last memorable time I had fun with my father, he took me, my older brother, and big sister to Nantasket Beach, an amusement park on Boston’s South Shore where my godfather “Hot Ticket” worked a game booth. I always thought my godfather’s name came from the fact that he gave us free tickets to the rides, especially this night when we rode them long after closing. I found out years later that he worked as a private investigator for my grandfather and took bets as a bookie for the mob. His game booth gave him a perfect front for his operation. We had the time of our lives staying out late that night with my father. My mother was nervous and upset when he finally brought us home. We didn’t know that the cops had left moments before. My father was supposed to have us home by six o’clock, but he had kept us out until midnight after telling my mother that he would drive us off a bridge if she called the cops on him.
He often waited for me in his car on the way home from school. If I went to the store for my mother he would be parked half way around the block, sometimes with a friend. He always asked questions about my mom, but I never had anything to say, except, “Where’s my allowance?”
I didn’t know that he never paid child support to my mother. He had been busy taking ten thousand dollars from some Chinese people, promising to get their relatives into the country. In typical style, he kept their money and didn’t deliver on his promise. Now the cops were closing in on him. I think this is what pushed him over the edge when he flipped out.
My mother had him in court for non-support until the cops asked her to stop the court action so they could prosecute him for embezzling from the Chinese people. She did as they asked; opening the door for them to send him to Walpole State Prison for three years, home of luminaries like The Boston Strangler. With no income or means of support, we had to go on welfare.
With a warrant out for his arrest, he came around the neighborhood trying to get to us kids, but my mother spotted him and pointed him out to the cops, who came and arrested him. Shortly after his arrest a neighbor knocked on the door one morning and asked my mother if the women’s underwear strewn across the front hedges belonged to her. To her horror, they had been taken from the clothesline on the back porch and put on display in the front of the house. Not long after that we awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of a neighbor pounding on the back door, yelling, “Fire!”
Flames engulfed the back porch, spreading to the porch above and the back of the house. Our neighbor threw buckets of water on the fire while my mother called the fire department. Within minutes, firemen and hoses ran down the hall and through the kitchen where our dog Tippy stayed curled up under the kitchen table. The firemen hustled us out of the house in our pajamas, onto the front porch where we waited for them to put the fire out.
In the seven years that we lived in the first floor apartment at number seven, three cars went up in flames in front of our house. One of them became fully engulfed in a blazing inferno. To this day I don’t know how the gas tank didn’t blow. We never knew who set the cars on fire because things like that happened in Dorchester, although ours seemed to be the only house on our street that it happened to. Though I will never know who torched the cars, I do know that my father was the one who lit the house on fire with us inside.
