chapter 4

JOHN

SOMETHING was wrapped around my neck—a collarlike pad—to hold up my head and apply pressure to my face. I was surrounded by ambulance and fire department paramedics. When did they get here? Time had slowed down to a heartbeat, now everything was fast: an IV was inserted in one arm, then another in the other arm. I was swiftly loaded onto a gurney sitting up—the way I was bleeding, I’d drown in my own blood if I laid down.

The guys carried me out into the yard. The area was lit with rotating blue, red, and white lights from all the emergency vehicles flashing off the quiet neighborhood houses. They carried me past my own car, the VW, driven up into the yard, close to the door of the house. It looked awkward there, parked sideways on their lawn. I tried to get someone’s attention to tell them to turn off my lights before the battery died. This was all I could think about as I was loaded into the ambulance.

Minutes later, we arrived at the Falmouth ER and were met by the attending physician and an oral surgeon they’d called in. I was in and out but somewhat aware of what was happening, and as they tried to examine my face, the pain was excruciating. ‘About an inch here,” one doctor said. “Lucky.” He wasn’t talking to me, but I followed the conversation. “Okay, we’ve got the left jawbone shattered, and right jawbone,” one of the doctors said. He had a pencil near my face and pointed something out to the other people in the room. “We’ve got something up in this sinus cavity below the right eye. Tissue, bone, bullets—maybe all three.”

The other doctor was taking notes. “Could be some teeth were pushed up there,” he said without taking his eyes off his pad.

“Close to the eye socket,” the nurse said.

“And brain,” the other doctor said. The way they were examining me made me nervous. They were talking about me like I was dead already—like this was an autopsy.

Both doctors quickly agreed that they couldn’t treat me in Falmouth; I’d have to be transported to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston ASAP. Another doctor entered my vision. He’d heard about the shooting over the police scanner, and although he wasn’t on duty tonight, he got to the hospital to see if he could help. “I was in a mobile army surgical hospital in Korea,” he told me confidently. “I’ve seen injuries like this before.”

The MASH doc, Dr. Gibbons, took over for the other two doctors and offered to ride in the ambulance to Boston. Everyone agreed. Dr. Gibbons was the only one who talked directly to me; the other doctors spoke as if I were a stump sitting between them to be examined. As he looked over my wounds, Dr. Gibbons leaned in close. “It’s all up to you whether you live or die tonight,” he told me, looking right in my eyes.

I motioned for pen and paper to write another note. This one I gave to Craig, pressing it into his hand. I told him who I thought shot me. I told him if I died he had to avenge me. He had to protect my family. This was laying it heavy on a good friend, but I could tell by the way the doctors were talking about me—around me—that they thought I was a goner.

Before they loaded me into the ambulance again, Polly arrived with Rick Smith. She was in her second year of nursing school, so the blood didn’t bother her—the fact that it was my blood did. The doctors were trying to get enough morphine into me to calm me down so they could insert a breathing tube. But the second I saw Polly, I had to let her know this wasn’t an accident. A nurse saw me motioning that I wanted to write something, and she brought me a clipboard.

“He wants to write,” she said to the doctor.

“He also wants to breathe.” The doctor brushed her off. “Not right now.”

But she found a way around him a minute later and gave me the board and a pen anyhow. I wrote, “Not an accident. Who is with kids?” Polly just looked at me, and I could tell she was in shock. She hadn’t said anything since she walked in. She couldn’t even read what I’d written down. I hadn’t seen myself yet, but I could tell by the look on her face that I must look bad. I hit the board three times with the pen, demanding an answer. Rick Smith looked over her shoulder at the note. “They’re covered; we’ve got someone at the house already,” he told me. Then I sat back and let the doctors slide a plastic tube down my throat and we headed for the ambulance. Polly got into the ambulance too, along with another nurse and two EMTs.

The doctor told me to raise my hand when I needed suctioning, when the blood blocked my airway. We moved fast, it was late and we had a blue light escort by the state police up Route 3, where they handed us over to the Norwell staties, who took us to the Southeast Expressway, where the MDC—Metropolitan District Commission—took us to Mass General. A trip that usually takes an hour and a half done in about forty minutes. Fastest ride to Boston I’ve ever had.

I needed suctioning several times—the fluid they were putting into me through the IV was just pumping out of my face and down my throat. In the IV was something called ringer lactate fluid to prevent me from going into shock from the blood loss. Everyone was trying to keep me aware, breathing, and stable until we reached the hospital. But I had swallowed so much blood that I started throwing up. I threw up my airway tube a couple of times; the doctor had to keep reinserting it so I could breathe. Once we got to MGH, I entered as a trauma case, so things moved at lightning speed. They had been warned that I was on the way, and even though they were ready for me, the outlook wasn’t so good.

“We’ve got a shooting injury to the head, neck, face,” someone was yelling. “It’s a police officer.” The last thing I heard was a man’s voice saying, “We’re losing him, let’s go!”

Then the pain stopped at once.

It’s dark and I hear this beautiful music playing. My eyes are closed, but there is light, like a calm blueness. More a sensation than a light. And the sensation is good; I want for nothing. It’s warm and calm and peaceful. All I can think is that I want to stay here. Everything is okay now. The worry and fear I’ve been feeling about my family—Are they safe? Am I safe?—the anger about being shot, it all melts away. I just want to stay here.

Then suddenly I’m whacked in the face. And I’m not in the hospital anymore.

I’m in the Hyde Park Police Station.

It’s 1961. I’m eighteen.

I’ve just been punched in the face by the station chief. We’d been brought in for questioning, but he came in swinging. It was my good fortune to be the closest to the door, and the first one hit. He smacked a couple of the other guys, too, but by now they were ready and blocking. He couldn’t punch for shit, it was just a surprise to get whacked in the face by this big cop.

I rub the side of my face, my jaw aches. Why does it hurt so bad?

The chief starts yelling, “How many points do I get? How many?” This is not good—it means he knows all about the points system.

At my high school, we had a loosely associated gang, with a core of maybe twenty members. No name, no dues, no colors, just East Dedham guys—the neighborhood just south of Boston where I grew up. Dedham was then—and still is—a slum. I didn’t know it until years later, after I’d already moved away, when I read a Boston Globe article about the East Dedham Square slums being torn down. Slums in the ghetto of Boston. News to me.

East Dedhams were white, Irish Catholic, and dirt poor. And we thought we were bad. Sharpened Garrison belt buckles and chain dog collars—you could swing these or wrap them around your fist for punching, also snap the chain quick on an opponent’s head. We’d fight with just about anybody who wasn’t from Dedham, and had set to with guys from Natick, Norwood (our archenemies), and Malden. The Malden fight happened during a hockey game and that was where I acquired the nickname “Strangler” for choking some loser. He passed out and we took off before he came to. I read the paper the next day, fearing I’d killed him, but there wasn’t anything about it—a great relief to me. We’d also invaded a house party in an upper-class section of town—we left the birthday cake spinning around on the phono and a couple of pretty college boys with lumps and abrasions.

Every time you got into a fight, you got a “point” for each guy you punched. It was strictly honor system because you were too busy defending yourself to observe anything else. Word of our point system got around. Maybe it made other guys more afraid, or maybe it just made them hate us more. One night I was riding around with my car full of friends when we saw another friend, Mike, with his car full of guys and decided to trail them. Turns out they’re going to Sunnyside, a section of Hyde Park. The Sunnyside boys and the group from East Dedham didn’t get along. We’d ride through their turf yelling insults at them, and they’d return the favor.

Mike’s car stops and his guys pile out, grabbing three Sunnysider locals and laying some lumps on them. Before my crew can get into action, Mike’s running back to the car and we all leave the scene. We’re hanging out at Dave’s Sub Shop about an hour later when the Boston Police arrive in force, backed up by our local fuzz, and they grab us all. They search my car and find a huge butcher knife in the trunk that I’ve never seen before (it took me years to realize they’d dropped it on me). Possession of a deadly weapon. So we’re off to Hyde Park district station for questioning. It’s not my first time there.

After the chief gives us all a few knocks, he rants at us about the “point” system, assault and battery charges, the deadly weapon they found in my car. Turns out they don’t really care about the Sunnyside fight, they want to shake us for names of some guys in West Roxbury who may or may not have been involved in a more serious crime. We don’t even know the guys, and besides, we won’t talk. So it’s off to court we go.

We show up in suits and ties, the Sunnyside victims in engineer boots, jeans, and muscle shirts showing off their tattoos. The prosecutor takes a look at his little lambs and gets a continuance—moving the court date to another day so that he can get his clients in order. Next date, everybody shows up in their Sunday Mass duds and the tragic facts are presented by their side. Mike and his guys hire an attorney who will later become the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. I hire a guy who’s done some real estate law for my parents. Cost fifty dollars—my life savings at the time. He puts me on the stand to defend myself. I’m sweating bullets but somehow get through it. Swear the knife isn’t mine, and I mean it.

The judge finds Mike and his friends guilty, me and my crew not guilty. But the judge has seen me in here twice before and has something to say to me personally before we’re led out of the courtroom. “Join the service, boy,” he says. “Your next appearance before me, you’re headed to Village Avenue”—the address of the local jail. I go home that night and think about what he said. It wasn’t really a choice. I went down to enlist in the Air Force the next day.

When I woke up, I didn’t know what day it was. I knew I was in a hospital. Polly was there. Then I remembered being shot. I looked at all the tubes, IVs, hoses, and machines attached to me. There were tubes going in and out of my stomach and chest for some reason too. Was I shot there? I couldn’t remember, couldn’t figure it out. Polly started talking to me.

“You’re okay. You were in surgery for twelve hours, now you’re in the ICU.” I remembered seeing parts of my face and my teeth in the passenger seat of the car. I remembered the doctors talking about me at Falmouth. I motioned for paper and wrote Polly a note: “Don’t let me live like this.”

Polly just gave me this look and didn’t say a word. I knew she couldn’t pull the plug. Later I learned that when Rick Smith got to the house the previous evening to bring her to the Falmouth ER, he’d told her I’d been shot but not badly. He was trying to ease her into it. When she arrived at the hospital, she thought I would be wearing an eye patch or something. She couldn’t believe that my chin was hanging down onto my chest. The bones on both sides of the lower jaw had been discontinued—not broken or fractured; they were gone. Most of my teeth were gone, or broken off at the root. My tongue was nearly severed. I had metal fragments from the lead and from the car and glass fragments from the side and front windows in my face and eyes.

I’d been lucky to be hit where I was. Had the bullets passed an inch higher or an inch farther back, I would have bled to death or died from brain damage. It seemed the idiots who tried to kill me were pretty amateurish. First of all, it’s almost impossible to aim accurately from a moving vehicle, and this becomes a lot harder when you’re shooting at another moving vehicle. Second, they got too close. They used a shotgun loaded with double-O buckshot. Inside the casing for each shot are nine 32-caliber copper-plated lead pellets. The object of double-O buckshot is that, once fired, the nine pellets will spread out into an ever-widening pattern. If they’d been six feet away, the bullets would have spread sufficiently enough to literally blow my head apart. Instead, they pushed the gun almost to the window of my car and the nine bullets followed a two-inch-wide path through my face.

Had those rounds been an inch lower, I would have suffered from little more than a singed beard and a busted-up car. But then I guess the second blast that came through the top of the door and the roof might have hit me since I wouldn’t have been knocked over into the passenger seat. I could have gone around and around with these kinds of thoughts, but it wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere. I was still faced with the simple facts: Someone shot me. They wanted to kill me. And here I was, still alive.