Free Brutal by Kevin Weeks Page B

thatJimmy was taking a bigger interest in me, talking more to me and watching me more intently, noticing everything I did or said the nights he was there.
    A few years later, in 1979, Billy O’Neil, who was twenty-nine at the time, locked himself out of his apartment and climbed up on a drainpipe to get inside. When the drainpipe broke away from the wall, he turned to jump and ended up hitting the back of his head on the fender of a car beneath him. I visited him every day at the New England Medical Center, but was told there was no hope of recovery. Six days after the accident, he died. A good person and a loyal friend, Billy had worked the door with me many nights, and I took his death hard.
    Kevin naturally took it much worse, spending less time at the bar. As a result, I ended up managing the bar, along with a cook named Mike Whitmarsh, settling the bar’s cash registers at the end of the night. Working nearly every night, often from seven till the place closed, and still laying track full-time for the MBTA, my schedule was pretty full then. In addition, I was spending time with Jimmy before I went to Triple O’s. Since I knew everybody there and liked being around the wiseguys and the music, I never felt like I was working that hard.
    The fact that I was always sober and didn’t drink on the job made things easier for me, because you never knew what was going to happen when you worked the door there. Or who was going to come walking through it. About a month after Billy died, when Kevin was still having a real tough time dealing with the loss, Ray Flynn, a Massachusetts state legislator and Boston city councillor, who later became a three-term mayor of Boston and U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, came into Triple O’s around midnight and immediately called Kevin “Billy.” I could see that Flynn had already been drinking that night, but he wasn’t drunk. I corrected him right away, but he kept on calling Kevin by his dead brother’s name. Naturally, Kevin was getting aggravated, so I told Flynn, “Come on. What are you doing? You used to go drinking with Billy. You knew him well.”
    â€œYeah, you’re right,” he said to me. Then he turned around and did it again. That night he was talking to anyone who would listen about Ireland and all the things he’d done for the Irish people. He’d come in alone and had settled himself at the same end of the bar near the door where Kevin and I were standing, along with a few of the regulars.
    Sure enough, while he was talking, he kept calling Kevin “Billy.” “Billy is dead,” I said after I’d corrected him three more times. “Don’t be an asshole.”
    And then he started on me. “Fuck you,” he said. I didn’t ask him to repeat that three more times. I knocked him out with one punch. He fell right out of the door, down the three stairs in front of the bar, and landed on the sidewalk.
    Kevin came out the door and told him, “You’re barred from here for life. And if you’re reincarnated, you’re still barred.”
    How many people can say they knocked out the mayor of Boston and the ambassador to the Vatican?
    A few nights later while I was working the door, two fellows in their mid-twenties and dressed in suits pulled up in a Mercedes and walked into the bar. Guys from Gillette’s corporate headquarters often came in dressed in suits, so that wasn’t that unusual. The two fellows went halfway down the bar and sat down at a table. A few minutes later, a waitress came up to me and said, “Kevin, you better go down and take a look at those two guys.”
    I walked down and saw they had a bag of cocaine out on their table. “Fellows, you can’t do that here,” I told them. “You have to put it away.”
    â€œNo problem,” they told me, and I walked back to the front of the bar.
    No more than ten minutes went by before the waitress