Short Stories: The Free Show

I knew Jack from Christopher Columbus Park in the North End of Boston near the harbor. He was a big, imposing man in his late forties, stocky and well over six feet tall, but he was usually on the receiving end when it came to a fight, which he always started. He had a house and family somewhere south of the city, but every few months or so he’d hit the streets of Boston and stay drunk for a few weeks. Sooner or later he’d wind up in a detox.  He’d stay home for a few months after that, and then he’d do it all over again. He looked like Fred Flintstone with graying hair. Whenever I ran across him, he usually had some kind of bandage wrapped around his head or an arm in a sling. He was a loud, boisterous drunk, and at times, Jack could be extremely obnoxious. Never with me though. We were good friends.

I ran into Jack early one summer evening near the Charles Street T station. He was with Spike and Tramp, two younger guys I drank with a lot. Spike and Tramp had temporary jobs doing demolition work, so they had some bucks for booze. They had given me a sleeping bag and I’d been spending the nights with them in the grass by the steps of the bridge. Some of the street people called it Longfellow Bridge. It crosses the Charles River over to Kendall Square. They have NO CAMPING signs all over the place there now. I spent a lot of time hanging around drinking on the steps of each side of the bridge in the mid-Eighties.

Spike was a few years younger than me, and he and Tramp were best friends. Tramp, in his early thirties, came from somewhere in the mid-west. He’d been living on the streets of Boston on and off for a long time.  One time, we brought a pint of Jim Beam to Spike when he was in the hospital for blood poisoning. They liked to fight with each other a lot, and Tramp had thrown him into the corner of a table head first. Spike lost his ear lobe.

I was waiting for them when they showed up, to my surprise, with Jack. They had a couple of six packs of pints of beer and a half gallon of Macy’s vodka. It was the cheap house brand of a store that used to be on Charles Street a short distance away. We always drank that by the steps.

We were sitting there passing the half gallon around and watching people headed toward the Half-Shell on the other side of Storrow Drive. Apparently, there was going to be some type of show there that night. We decided to go to it.

Once we got there, we saw a large banner hanging across the Half-Shell that read “Up with People.”  There were happy couples sipping wine and a lot of families with young kids on blankets waiting for the show to start. We found a spot to sit down and just kept passing the half gallon of vodka around, chasing it down with the beer.

The show started, and it was a troupe of people holding hands, dancing around and singing, “Up with people,” over and over again. Jack was drunk by then. Me, Spike and Tramp were just laughing at the whole spectacle. All of a sudden, Jack stood up and started screaming, “UP YOUR ASS – PEOPLE SUCK!”  We tried to get him to sit down and shut up, but he wouldn’t have it. We were laughing hysterically. He just kept yelling, “UP YOUR ASS – PEOPLE SUCK!”  We knew he would attract the cops, so we grabbed the beer and vodka and moved to another spot.

We watched Jack from a distance, and once he realized we were gone, the situation got worse. He grabbed a young couple’s bottle of wine and started guzzling it. Then he started trampling over people and charging toward the stage. The cops finally saw him, and it took five of them to get him into the paddy wagon.

I didn’t see Jack for a while after that. We finally ran into each other on a Sunday morning near North Station. I was broke. Sundays in Boston were always the worst because you couldn’t get a drink unless you went to a bar or a bootlegger, and they charged a lot. It was a big hassle to get to the bootleggers as well. One was in Chelsea and there was another in South Boston. Jack had a bunch of money, so we waited for a bar he liked to open, and he treated me to beer and shots of whiskey for the entire day. We even got something to eat. Jack was wrong about people. Most don’t suck. He sure didn’t.