POST FOUR: YOU'RE UNDER ARREST

Lenny at Murray Court

My poor mother was so worn out with worry for me, that she just sat teary eyed, in our little kitchen, barely able to talk. My closest friend Lenny was there to. It was a cold windy late October day and I had just arrived back home at Murray Court in East Boston after two years military service to find all three floors of our house filled with neighbors and friends and music and so much good food. They had been celebrating my arrival since mid-afternoon and when I finally turned up around 5PM the party went into over-drive.

Within minutes, as the streetlights were just coming on, Lenny and I were outside and he was taking our old Wilson football out of his trunk.

I made an exaggerated pantomime of going out for a pass and Lenny flipped me the ball underhanded. He ran out in mock slow motion and I passed him a nice easy throw. In ten-minutes we were running at full speed, leading each other on with the ball.

This was what I missed the most while I was away. The ritual that Lenny and I maintained thru blizzards and broken hearts since we were 9 years old.

Two years away in the military seemed like two lifetimes to me.

Lenny ran deep towards the top of the Court and I over-threw him. The ball bounced out onto Orleans Street. Lenny jogged out to pick it up, just as a car pulled up and stopped. The man driving the car rolled down his window and yelled out “Get that fucking ball off the street.” Lenny called back, “fuck you” and threw the ball back to me.

The man slammed the car into park so hard that I could hear it all the way from where I stood. Then he pushed the door open with such violence that it sprung back and hit him.

Now, you need to know that in my neighborhood, even though we were wild, we had rules for everything. Not the kind of rules that you might expect. Rules for rush tag street football for instance. Such as “No hooding” that came about when Arthur O’neil caught a ball and ran past Maxie. Maxie grabbed him by the hood and yanked. Arthur fell back, hitting his head and getting knocked out. Everyone from both sides gathered around Arthur and someone in the crowd murmured “No hooding,” and without any more words “No hooding” was born.

We had rules for fighting to. So many that I won’t go into them except to mention the one about an aggressor getting out of a car. The concept was to get to the assailant while they were vulnerable, still in the car door.

Lenny WROTE this rule and closed the twenty feet between him and the man in a blink of an eye. He hit him three times and the man fell unconscious with his head laying in the street and his feet still in the car while it was running and in park.

And there it was.

I had been home for one hour, and all hell had already broken loose.

I looked past Lenny and could see the man getting to his feet and nodded for Lenny to turn around. That’s when the wind blew the man’s cotton rain-coat open to reveal a uniform with a badge and a gun. Fuck … it was a Boston Cop.

The policeman hollered “Halt, You’re under arrest.” Lenny called back “Fuck you, you gotta catch me,” and came running past me at full speed.

Three seconds later, the giant of a man came lumbering by, blind with rage without even seeing me.

Lenny hopped a six-foot fence and was gone. So-gone that even the FBI wouldn’t be able to track him.

I dropped the ball in Lenny’s trunk, closed the lid and casually walked up the stairs and into my house.

Once Lenny was over that fence he was in a familiar maze of locked and unlocked gates and alleyways, some open and others dead ended. Within two minutes he could be out the other side of the block and into the heart of the next block over. Two more minutes and he could be having dinner with friends that would swear he was there all day.

Five minutes later Lenny climbed up the drainpipe on the back of our house and was knocking on our second-floor kitchen window. We let him in, and thirty pairs of eyes peered out of three stories worth of venetian blind covered windows. Until the cop left.

(Hi Lenny, In my talk I mentioned Jim Curran and Eddie Contilli here so that the audience would know that this story was not a knock-on cops. Just another day down the point.)

More next time…