Two
Burning Down The House
I have a yellowed cartoon cut out from The Dorchester Reporter titled “The Power of Perception,” by an artist named Gus D’Angelo that characterizes Dorchester well. It shows a clean cut guy in a suit and tie extending his hand in greeting, saying, “Hi! I’m from Dorchester.” Beside him a wide-eyed guy with his hair standing on end has dropped his paper and has his hands in the air, yelling, “Don’t shoot! Don’t Shoot!”
In nineteen-sixty, before I turned six, we moved into a five room apartment on the second and third floors of a big green house in Dorchester. Soon after moving, my mother gave birth to my younger sister. Shortly after that she had a surprise visit from two cops who came to question her. My father had “tipped them off” that she took bets and ran a bookmaking operation out of the house. Seeing my newborn little sister and my mother’s demeanor, the cops quickly saw through my father’s lie.
In less than a year we moved two houses up the street to number seven, the first house on the block at the top of a small hill. There we settled into a first floor five room flat in a traditional Dorchester three-decker, wooden frame house sided with cracked and broken gray slate siding and topped with a gabled slate roof. Dorchester has miles of these three decker apartment houses running up and down street after street. My mother worked hard, with an artistic flair, painting, wallpapering, and doing whatever else she could to create a nice home for us. She made a work of art out of the apartment’s ancient raised bathtub when she painted it gold with a huge elegant red rose on its side. She knew how to sew too, making everything from clothes to curtains.
The outside world looked quite different from our cozy nest because we lived in the first house at the top of a hill. Our side and tiny backyards bordered the back lots of an L-shaped line of connected storefronts that ran along two main streets that intersected with other commercial blocks, making up an area known as Four Corners.
Across the street from our house stood a Texaco station. Looking at the front of our house from the gas station, you could see a line of houses going down the hill to the left. In the narrow passage to the right of our house, the dry cleaners vented their steam pipes every Monday through Saturday morning at six.
Walking down the alley, past the dry cleaners on our right, ran a line of connected storefronts enclosed in a long red brick building. Past the dry cleaners, a Chinese laundry bordered with a broken down wooden fence hid the dreaded Chinese dog; a hairy beast that bit me thirteen times. One time he chased me to the top of a fire escape before sinking his teeth into my calf. We never knew if he would be out and could never see him lurking behind the fence because of his mottled brown fur, but when he attacked, he lunged through the broken fence with demonic fury.
Beside the Chinese laundry, the sound of clicking billiards came all hours of the day and night from a pool hall that I was never old enough to go into. Next in line came a Laundromat, and on the end of the block on the corner beside our back yard stood a drugstore that connected the line of businesses beside our house with another line that ran the length of the block along the backyards of all the houses on our street.
A delicatessen with a second floor apartment above it, directly behind our house, joined the drugstore on the corner. Beside it going down the block in order were a meat market/liquor store, a five and dime, a real estate office, a dentist’s office with apartments above it, and on the far end, a Christian Science Reading...
