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Insult and Injury

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This is a repost from one year ago. It was originally titled "This is Gonna Hurt". It was posted a few days before the Tsarnaev brothers were caught/killed. Read it again for the first time.

 

  Sometime back in the mid 80’s, I would  sit in the Boston public library, on the second floor of the “new” section, my papers covering most of the surface of a large table. I was probably doing homework for some class I was struggling with. I would go there after my last class at UMass Boston was over. A change of scenery was always good to keep me from distraction. I was distracted though, by the view out the huge arched windows that looked out over Boylston street. I would watch people on the sidewalk and wonder what they did for a living. Were they going home ? Where did they live? I wished that I could be one of them and not a student who lived in a suburb and only visited Boston to do things like study and buy comic books and magazines. 

Only in the view that 25 years of hindsight brings into focus do I realize that I was one of them. Many of them didn’t live there either. They came in every day to work and eat and spend money and hang out just like me. I had worked there once myself, making sandwiches behind a deli counter in a food court. A really fun and shitty job, the memories of which still amuse me. I used to practice killing flies by snapping them with a wet towel when things were slow.

 

On the first really warm day of Spring I would take the shuttle bus from the UMass campus on a peninsula in Dorchester bay, site of a former land fill and current JFK memorial library, to the original UMass Boston campus in Park Square. It was a forgotten little corner of the back bay and the old building was a dump. There used to be an independent movie theatre across the street where I would go to watch Samurai movies during the Japanese film festival. It was a short walk, as many things are in Boston, to the more happening part of the back bay. Tulip trees would be in bloom and you could take your jacket off for the first time in months. I’d get a sandwich from Erewhon on Newberry street and then buy magazines from the Avenue Victor Hugo. I would usually walk back to Copley plaza to check out the news stand on the corner of Dartmouth and Boylston. It was old school even back then. Just stacks of newspapers held down by cast iron weights and a wooden magazine rack. across the street was the old section of the library, and diagonally was the plaza with Trinity church. When I hear the word “Boston” this is what I see.

 

I’m remembering all of this now because now more than ever I feel a part of that place. I grew up in a town on the South Shore but Boston is my city. My city is how I still think of it.

Just two days ago on a day like the ones when I used to walk in the back bay, some shit stain of a human being detonated two bombs in the presence of vulnerable, innocent people. It was right across the street from where I used to do my homework. The arched windows of the library look onto the sidewalk where the first bomb went off. That sidewalk was not spattered with blood, it was painted with it. People were on their hands and knees looking for their lower legs. I did not know anyone who was there that day but that didn’t matter. It made me cry to see it. Someone had fucked with my city! Someone had injured and insulted my fucking city and the insult was probably the worst of the two offenses! The marathon may be the most Bostonian of events. True, the pops concert on the esplanade comes close but the 4th of July is national. Patriots’ day and the marathon are unique. Someone had the goddamned stones to violate my city on that day?! Turning people into hamburger?! killing women and children?!

 

Kevin Cullen, a columnist for the Boston Globe recently brought up an old adage that Boston cares only about three things, sports, politics and revenge. I think he’s forgetting alcohol but at any rate, without revenge, sports and politics wouldn’t even matter. This is a town, a TOWN mind you, that despite being populated by some of the meanest, angriest, pieces of work ever spawned by man or beast, will come together like a nest of hornets when violated. Together it will help its own and together it will get revenge.

 

In an interview, I heard a runner from out of town say that when she realized that bombs had gone off in succession she thought to herself “this is gonna hurt”, expecting the next to be right where she was standing.  Mercifully, no more bombs went off, but she was right. This is going to hurt. It will hurt people trying to walk again without legs of their own. It will hurt families dealing with the loss of wives and children. But you better believe it will hurt the bastards that did this. Because if terror really is about intimidation then they really made a mistake in trying to intimidate this place. This city fears terrorists like it fears death, taxes, snow, and the Yankees: NOT AT ALL.  As they say back home “I sweah-ta-gawd this is gonna hurrt!”


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