***Tales From The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood-The Paycheck

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

“John Dillon where have you been at all hours of the night?  I have been waiting for you since six o’clock so that I could fill the envelopes for the bill collectors tomorrow,” shrieked Mary Dillon, Mrs. John Dillon (nee Riley). Mary Dillon may have shrieked at John Dillon (it would not have been the first, or even close to the first time in their eighteen year marriage that she had done so but the occasion always brought out the shriek in her and thus shriek) that night (really early morning about 1:30 AM) but she already knew, knew in her troubled heart what John’s answer would be. And then John Dillon in his cups (drunk, for those not from Irish neighborhoods or who may not know that old-fashioned polite term for inebriation, especially among the womenfolk, the “shawlies” as they placed their washings out on the triple –decker back porch clothes lines to dry and “network”) gave his inevitable answer-“none of your business,” and that would start the usual barrage of talk. That banter would last for a while, a while until John declared that he had had enough of talk and that he needed to get some sleep if he was to get to work in the morning over at the South Boston docks on time.

(John Dillon was a third generation longshoreman, a dock job on the East Coast unlike on the West Coast which had a hiring hall to select workers by seniority, etc., that although unionized tended to be family affairs in those days, handed down from father to son. Handed down by mainly Italian and Irish father if you needed to ask. John, Senior had been a beefy no-holds-barred man who bulled ahead, drunk or sober, but our John, Junior had a wiry build and could pull his weight with the tougher guys, except after a night of being “in his cups” and then his friend, Eddie Sullivan also from the neighborhood knew he would be hauling ass that day to cover for John. John with guys was a guys’ guy and that counted for a lot on the docks, and in the barrooms.)  

That conversation went something like this, at least this is the way my old friend Timmy Dillon would explain the gist of it to me when I arrived at his house after one of those “none of your business, Mary” mornings in order to walk over to North Adamsville Junior High where we were classmates in seventh grade at that time. You see Timmy (and brothers Matthew, Joseph, and Edward as well) would have been privy to those conversations between Mother and Father Dillon heard though the paper-thin walls that separated the two shared bedrooms the boys occupied next to the kitchen where the conversation took place (better to say shouting match and be done with it) in the third floor of the triple-decker that the family rented on Sagamore Street. I lived two streets over then on Prospect so I had to pass the Dillon house on my way to school anyway which is how Timmy and I started walking to school together.

The other Dillon boys were already in various grades at North Adamsville High and so were gone by the time I arrived as was Mr. Dillon having grabbed the early Eastern Mass bus to get over to Southie and away from Mary’s ire and scorn. When I knocked on the door of the Dillon apartment I knew from Timmy’s sleepy look when he opened the door that it had been one of those shouting match nights and that Timmy had been aroused by the noise and had not gotten his sleep after that. I knew as well what had happened since I had had my own “none of your business, Delores,” nights at my house as well with my father, Jim Jackman, although not on the night in question.

This is something that Timmy never told me as close as were at that time and I only found about it later from his brother Matthew after some other stuff hit the fan. Sometimes that late night banter that wrecked Timmy’s sleep would end up with John taking a whack at Mary if she was getting on his nerves or he thought what she had to say hit too close to home for him to take sitting down. I asked Mrs. Dillon one time about her eye when it was all swollen up and she said she hit a door the wrong way. I, naïve as to such abuses then and what would I do about it anyway, let that answer stand. When other times, maybe two or three times, I asked Timmy about various injuries that I could see his mother had sustained when I  went over to his house he would either plead ignorance or make up some thin excuse but never bring it up on his own if he did not have to. Of course those were the days before restraining orders and other legal remedies but then the courts were either hostile or indifferent to this abuse and women did not make their situations public then like now. It came with the marriage bed and that was that.

Matthew told me that time he told me about his father’s brutality that he had asked his mother one time when he was about sixteen and big enough to take a stand against the old man if she gave him the word she did not leave his father. He said she never did give him the word.  Matthew, an adult at the time we talked, could barely get what she responded out. She said with a tear in her eye “how can I leave him, we were married in the church, married forever.  Where would I go, what could I do, he didn’t mean it, he was drunk, he will change once things settle down, I just have to see this out my way.’’ Then she sighed, “my lord, how we loved each other so when we were young.” Jesus I was ready to cry myself when I heard that. My father probably drank up the same lake that Mr. Dillon did but he never beat my mother, not that I know of and we lived in those same kind of paper-thin walled apartments as the Dillons so I would have heard about that. Damn    

Well I might as well get to Timmy’s story, or try to, but just remember that Timmy’s story is not so different from my own, except easier to tell, or for that matter not so different from about twenty other stories in our old North Adamsville neighborhood which I did not find out about until years later when I would run into this guy or that gal and once they got out of the house, or out of the neighborhood, felt that could break the solemn oath, break the code of silence, about what went on in their households then when we all thought (except Timmy and me since we knew the ropes although not that father mother abuse stuff) we were the only ones with what they now call dysfunctional families but what the parish priest my mother would consult when things went whiggy with my father, maybe he had been drinking too much or had lost his job for  some off-hand remark, called “troubled.”

Of course the priest’s resolution, old pre-Vatican II Father Lilly up at Sacred Heart, to that “troubled” which he could have saved himself some lung power on by just having cards printed up since this was his universal message to his desperate parishioners was to “go home and be a better wife, go home and not make waves, go home and bow like some ancient slave before thy lord and master husband and don’t even dare think of separation or divorce. Oh yes, and remember the children.” Even my mother (nee Kelly) who was as pious as they came, and as forever possessive of her husband as any other “shawlie” questioned that wisdom after the tenth time my father drank his paycheck away or did not get a paycheck because of some problem with some boss at work and got fired. Damn, double damn.  

That Father Lilly “troubled” included the above mentioned wife-beating like mothers (or children) were private punching bags for guys who didn’t get all their wanting habits sated and so carried the “chip” on their shoulders like a badge of honor. There certainly were enough reasons for chips back then when it seemed like the old neighborhood was floating down the abyss while we saw everybody from Castle Hill with new cars and livable single family houses as we took public transportation and lived as I already mentioned in those cramped, damp, no room to move triple deckers. I first came face to face with the “chip” when I would go to Harry’s Variety on Coe Street where I would grab a Robb’s Root Beer (a local brand) and had to pass the corner boys who held up the brick wall in front of the store. If they were feeling like displaying the “chip” would not let me pass by to make my purchase. Harry would have to come to the door and tell the guys to “cut it out.” Harry was the local “bookie” and so “connected” and had for some time been using the store as a front and so when he said something they listened. Of course once they “cut it out” that was not the end of it since I had to give some corner boy a “swig” and he would drink about half my bottle of root beer. Yeah, that is how it is down at the base, down in the mean streets of society.         

 

 

See we down at the mouth denizens were mainly living on Sagamore, Prospect, Young and a few other streets in the area working-class Irish families, some like mine having been there for three or four generations and among the Irish, at least in those days, and maybe now too, the word was you did not “air your dirty linen in public.” So all this stuff was happening, stuff to screw us up, to give us a very sour outlook on life but nobody was doing anything (except between Timmy and me) to let others know their family situations were fucked up too.  So chips is what you saw and if something was inexplicable then that was the cause. 

Sorry for the language but it still burns me up so let me get to the story. And you might as well know if you haven’t figured it out a little that it involves liquor, plenty of it when the funds were available (and sometimes even when they were not since most fathers in the neighborhood were working so they would usually have some credit line at the local barrooms but I am getting ahead of myself a little). The way you probably figured and you might have been right in the old days if not now is that Irish guys, Irish working-class fathers after a hard day’s work, liked to stop in and toss down a few before heading home to the “ball and chain” and edging the night away. Now there probably is no truth to the old notion that all the Irish were drunk and disorderly as a profession of their faith or something like that but in the old Atlantic section, the Irish section of old North Adamsville, it would be hard to argue with that proposition, hard to argue with Timmy Dillon and Frank Jackman about it anyway. And part of the proof of that notion was that in that little square footage there were four, count them, four bars. Four bars, pubs really, for men, for guys to have their drinks in peace, although a couple of them had Ladies Invited signs hanging in neon on their front windows. That Ladies Invited sign meant that women, our mothers or older sisters, could not go in there by themselves but only escorted by a man. Needless to say no fathers were escorting mothers or older sisters to the joints and the only women who showed up there were what we called in the old days “loose women” although we did not find out about what that meant until later that meant they were sluts and whores, according to mother lore. At least I didn’t find out about it until later when that is what my mother called my uncle, her brother, who was married but would bring his girlfriend there, a girlfriend that he met there when some friend of his brought her there and they hit it off. Thinking about it now I don’t know whether she really was a slut or a whore she could have just been good company for a lonely guy like my uncle but that’s what my mother called her.  And my cousin Maude, his daughter, too when she stood in front of the Dublin Grille one night to confront them and that is what she called her.                       

And that name Dublin Grille can now be formally introduced since of the four bars in the area that got the most business from Irish fathers. Part of the reason was that establishment unlike the others which closed each night at midnight stayed open until one o’clock in the morning (and if you were “in the know” you could like the off-duty cops which frequented the place then drink until about three in the morning as long as you purchased your drinks before one). But a very big reason that the Dublin got so much play was that Paddy, a real old time Irishman who had been born in Ireland and who had some vague connection to the Irish Easter Uprising in 1916, an event which was held as the holy of the holies by one and all, gave his regulars credit if their thirst was great and their coin light. Coin light especially say on Monday when payday was Thursday and there was no money around after the weekend and after the Friday envelopes had been passed out by the neighborhood mothers. Now that credit was not endless, no way, but you can be sure that one of the envelopes each week contained a “little something for Paddy.”

But here is how one John Dillon got called on the carpet by one Mary Dillon on the night in question. John Dillon worked pretty steady over at the South Boston docks, got plenty of work as a longshoreman when the ships were coming into Boston more regularly than they do now what with other East Coast ports having better facilities and with less help needed with everything being held in containers and all. But as with the nature of that industry then and now he did not necessarily work every day although he would show for shape-up when called by the union business agent, a friend of his whom he had worked with before he became a union official. So John would while away some extra hours at the Dublin, and thus build up a bigger bill than some other fathers like mine who worked every day for less pay but didn’t have time off to have a few with the boyos in the afternoon.

Whatever number of hours John worked, and like most workers in those days his payday was Thursday (you could tell who got paid on Thursday by how crowded the local supermarket was on Friday morning and who was to be found among that crowd). One of the other things that Paddy did for his customers would be to cash their checks ( a smart move since almost every check-cashee probably also had a debt outstanding to Paddy) and he did so for John on a regular basic deducting whatever was owed him (and strangely, or maybe just dealing with reality Mary Dillon and Delores Jackman factored in Paddy’s bill as part of the weekly envelop distribution without a squawk or at least neither Timmy not I when we discussed the matter ever heard any squawk and we knew them all, the squawks, by heart before we were teenagers).        

Now most of the time John Dillon on payday would stop at the Dublin, cash his check, Paddy deducting his share (or part if the bill was big or a customer like John pleaded some unforeseen expense and Paddy would accommodate that to a point. Let’s put it this way Paddy had no problem cutting you off if you turned into a deadbeat but I never recall any father being cut off for non-payment so Paddy got his besides no father could take the gaff if exiled from the Dublin so the social pressure was in play as well), having a few and then go home and give Mary the rest of the money for the envelopes. But the night in question, an early May night was a night that the Dublin Grille softball team played Pete’s Pub as part of the city men’s softball league that played every Thursday from later April to late September (and later if you made the championship competition that year) and which played their home games at Young Field. And Young Field was directly across from the Dublin Grille. A lot of wives in the neighborhood from what I heard accused Paddy of sponsoring a team just so the guys, their husbands and on occasion their sons, for the guys still living at home with mother, did so for the sole purpose of having the team adjourn to his place after the games. Whether there was any truth to that I do not know.

Now a lot of fathers in the neighborhood had played some sport, mostly football, basketball, or baseball for one of the teams at North Adamsville High when they were in high school so despite the average age of about thirty or so for the Dublin team (and others as well) they all thought they were still hotshots. And hotshot of hotshots as the first baseman was John Dillon. And hotshot of hotshots when they adjourned, win or lose, to the Dublin figured that he had to buy the boys a few rounds. And that night he did so. But that night was also a night that John Dillon had bet a guy on Pete’s Pub team some dough that the Dublin’s would win, some serious dough for a working guy. See John had it all figured out that the Dublin’s couldn’t lose, couldn’t lose but they did, 11-3 in a blowout, and so unlike Paddy’s liberal credit system John had to pay out the bet straight-up (no one welshed, no way not in that neighborhood, just like no one stiffed Paddy on the bill no one could stand the gaff, could stand in that tightknit circle to be ostracized). And thus John knew, knew deep in his bones that Mary was going to give him hell about shorting the envelopes up even more. So John Dillon did the natural thing and drank until closing thus causing Mary shrieks and Timmy sleepy eyes.

Now this envelope thing, this what to do with the always too short paycheck in the Dillon family, and not just the Dillon family, had some history in the neighborhood (and for all I know maybe still does in some neighborhoods but with the modern credit and banking systems they must be pretty isolated examples). I remember seeing my grandmother, who lived over on Young Street a couple of streets over from Sagamore, do the chore when I was a small boy and my grandfather, a very sage firefighter for the town, was still alive. She would have this stack of hand-labelled envelopes, rent, food, Paddy (unless my grandfather cashed the check at the Dublin), electric, telephone, gas, coal, and for the car when they had a car.

That car category, hard as it is to believe today, although the plight of those poor trying to get the hell out of desolate New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina only a few years back should give us all pause, was always iffy in the neighborhood since that was a luxury item even in the golden age of the American automobile 1950s. You would see many a father walking up to the bus stop lunch bucket in hand to get to work either at the shipyards or going the other way over to Boston to places like Mr. Dillon’s dock work in Southie. So there they were all laid out and my grandmother (and Timmy’s mother too from what he said when we discussed that matter) would start with rent putting five dollars in that well-worn envelop and work her way in descending order four, three, two, one dollar. Grandma, according to what she told me when I asked, never went below one dollar in any envelope. She said rather than suffer the indignity being dunned needlessly by some bill-collector over that small sum would rather brazen it out by asking for another week to make some payment. A smart and dignified woman from the old school. Some weeks only rent and food made the cut, others she would go back around again in that same cycle until the paper money gave out.

Of course on weeks like the one related above when John Dillon made his silly bet, spend most of the rest on drink for friends, and had nothing left that pile of envelopes usually did not get pulled out and the bill-collectors would get nothing but air for their troubles. And so my grandmother, and Mary Dillon (my mother had a different system without envelopes but it probably can to the same from hunger basket), counted away their years, kept the bloodhounds from the door as best they could with husbands who had a taste for the drink (and that counting away was not confined to the drinkers or those who used the envelop system for my mother counted just as well and my father did not drink, didn’t like the taste of liquor).                     

Of course that day when Timmy told me the story he left an important part out, a part involving airing the family’s business in public. Not only did John Dillon make and pay off that foolish bet, not only did he drink the night away, but he also started what would be a long term affair with Ester Leahy, Jim Leahy’s wife. Apparently Jim, who was on active duty over in Germany during one of those always occurring “hotspot” Cold War minutes in the 1950s, had been somewhat negligent toward Ester and her needs before he left (her sexual needs but what did we know then even if the dirty linen had been aired in public as nobody would use the s-x word to describe Ester’s wanderings).

Rather than staying at home brooding about it (the Leahy’s lived over on Coe Street) Ester would go out to the ball field when the Dublin Grille Hawks were playing sitting in the dank old wooden bleachers that really should have been replaced and rooting for the team. Rooting especially hard when John Dillon came to bat. See John and Ester had had something going in high school, something that for unknown reasons (unknown to me or Timmy) cooled off, and they went their separate ways and that was that. That was that until John noticed that Ester was cheering him on, was making eye contact, was showing just a little too much leg in her short shorts (that what guys said anyway). The night in question John asked Ester to have some drinks with the boys. And she said yes although when they got to the Dublin they sat in a booth sort of by themselves. Nothing happened that night except John got home very late and Mary shrieked. After that night Mary did not have any trouble making the envelopes work out okay for maybe a couple of years, as she counted her life away.

Then one night Matthew, Timmy’s slightly older brother stood outside the Dublin (Paddy was very strict about not letting minors in his place, not even news hawkers. Minors, if they wanted to drink on the quiet or get “baptized” into male-bonding society went to Lucky’s up the Downs). When his father and Ester came out he started yelling “whoremaster, pig, whore, slut,” and whatever else he could think of at them right there for all to hear. I didn’t hear anything about it for a while since Timmy was very sullen and would not talk for a while. The way I found out, well, really pieced it together was when my own mother started referring to “John Dillon and his whore” whenever that family’s name came up in conversation. All I know is that Mary kept putting those envelopes out each week and sometimes Timmy would go up to the Square in Adamsville proper where John and Ester finally wound up living and get his father’s paycheck for that eternal ritual.