Bill fucking Buckner! I saw a clip of him throwing out the first pitch in ’08 and it damn near brought a tear to my eye. Every Sox fan remembers that night in ’86 as a nightmare, but they have no fucking idea how bad it really was. Only you know and I know, as the song goes. I wouldn’t blame you for hating me, but I’m relieved to hear you don’t.
I feel like I’d be tempting fate to ever set foot in Charlesgate again, but as it turns out, I have to be in the States next month anyway. A little legal loose end I have to take care of, but no need to go into that. If I can get that straightened out, I may be able to make the reunion, but PLEASE don’t tell a soul you heard from me. Let’s keep it our little secret for now. I’d definitely love to see you again, and if I get drunk enough, maybe I’ll tell you all about the huge crush I had on you back then. (Remember the night with the Ouija board and the fire alarm? It comes back on me just about every time I hear an alarm going off.) And if I get REALLY drunk, maybe I’ll tell you the whole truth about what happened that night in ’86. And I don’t mean Mookie Wilson’s ground ball rolling through Buckner’s legs.
JUNE 13, 1946
Dave T sat at his desk on the eighth floor of Charlesgate, the telephone receiver pressed to his ear. To Joey Cahill’s trained eye, he didn’t look happy.
“Uh-huh…right…Jesus, I can’t believe it. I just fuckin’ saw him a couple nights ago. It ain’t gonna be the same without him. No one could make a Manhattan like Fat Dave…Yeah… Well, you hear anything, you let me know. Whoever did this, they’re not getting away with it. All right. Take care, Jimmy.”
Dave T hung up. Cahill raised his eyebrows.
“Fat Dave. Shot dead in his own bar. When he didn’t open up this afternoon, a couple of his rummy regulars jimmied his office window and found him there on the floor, half his fuckin’ head blown off.”
“Shame,” said Cahill.
“You’re goddam right it is. And I got a pretty good idea what happened. One of those two knuckleheads knocked him off. Probably the older one.”
“How do you figure?”
“The kid’s not as dumb as he looks. He knows his loudmouth friend was shooting his mouth off in the Red Room. He puts two and two together, he figures Fat Dave’s the reason his cousin ain’t around no more. Figures he’s got nothing to lose at this point, so blammo! Revenge, pure and simple.”
“And so?”
“ ‘And so’ what?”
“The job. Maybe we go with the Casey boys after all.”
“Can’t do it,” said Dave T. “We do that, we’ve gotta cut in our Providence friends, and that creates problems with our friends in the North End. Especially now, all that’s going on with Marko, that’s no good. Right now only you and I know exactly what we’re doing, and I want to keep it that way. The other two guys have to be expendable. And they’re more expendable now than ever. Nothing changes.”
“What about the fence?”
“What about him? Right now, he only knows the general picture. The type of merchandise. Yeah, once it hits the news, he’ll know it was us, but he’s getting a solid cut anyway, right off the top. And he’s down in Florida. No connections up here aside from me. He moves the stuff overseas, we get our share and split it with no one else. No one ever knows we did this, and if they figure it out, who cares? We’re long gone. Look, you know I don’t believe in the perfect crime, but this is as close as we’re gonna get in this world. And once it’s done, we’re gonna be set for life. A thousand lifetimes. But you got anyone you need to tell goodbye, better do it tonight. After tomorrow, you’ll never see them again.”
“I got no one to tell goodbye. You know that.”
“And that’s why I picked you.”
“But these kids. They’re onto you. You don’t think they’ll take a whack at us?”
“I think they very well might do that. In a way, Fat Dave, God rest his soul, that might have been a good thing for us.”
“How’s that?”
“Now we know not to underestimate these little shits. Everything’s in place, but now I’ve got one thing left to do. An insurance policy. These guys aren’t gonna get the drop on us, but if somehow they do, I’m gonna make sure they never make it out of Boston alive.”
“Comforting.”
“Don’t worry about it. I just gotta make a run down to that garage I got in Quincy and pick up a couple items I put in cold storage. All you have to worry about is whether we’re absolutely set for tomorrow night. Our guy is on duty? Not the other guy, the big guy who might actually put up a fight?”
“I’ve checked every night for the past three weeks. Our guy is on tomorrow for sure. And if somehow he’s sick or gets fired, we just say, ‘Thank you for your assistance,’ and walk away and come up with some other crime of a lifetime.”
“Yeah, right. We’ll just wait for the World Series and rob all the beer stands at Fenway Park.”
Cahill didn’t smile often, but he did now. “World Series. You really think it’s gonna happen?”
“It’s early yet. Don’t buy no tickets, because we’re gonna be halfway around the world by then. Maybe we’ll read about it in the Sydney Daily Telegraph a couple weeks later.”
“Figures. They’ll finally win the Series and I’ll miss it.”
“Hey, if you want, you’ll be able to buy the team. Make Tom Yawkey an offer he can’t resist.”
Cahill smiled again. “I just might.”
Dave T reached into his bottom desk drawer and pulled out a pint of Jameson. He tossed it to Cahill, then pulled out a matching bottle, popped the cap off, and raised it.
“To Fat Dave, God rest his soul. He made one hell of a fucking Manhattan.”
“Slainte.”
They drank.
OCTOBER 9, 1986
In the morning I asked the Rev if he remembered anything about our visit with master of the occult Timothy Sprague.
“Yeah, man. I remember some mind-roasting Turkish hash.”
“Besides that. There was an untold tale of Charlesgate past, right?”
“Uh…yeah. That’s right. Some kind of Mob hit or heist gone wrong, I believe.”
“Do you remember any details? My notes from last night are kind of illegible.”
“Let’s see. I think…there were six guys. An ex-con, a bartender, a sniper, a couple others. They took down a racetrack. And all of them got killed except for the ex-con who organized it all. But when he got to the airport, his suitcase broke open and all the cash scattered to the wind.”
“Chief. That’s the plot of The Killing. The Kubrick movie? It was on The Movie Loft the other night.”
“Oh yeah. I guess I confused Timothy Sprague with Dana Hersey. That was some primo fucking hash, man.”
“Great. I guess I’ll call the guy and see if I can set up another meeting, sans hash this time.”
“Include me out.”
I found Sprague’s number and dialed. There was a click followed by a recording telling me the number I had dialed was not in service.
“Weird. His phone’s disconnected. I just called him yesterday, same number.”
The Rev whistled in approximation of the Theremin that Sprague had been playing the night before.
“Hardy fuckin’ har. Shit, I owe my editor the next part of my Charlesgate series and I’ve got nothing but the same old secondhand stories.”
“I got something for you. The other day I went down to do my laundry and this dead chick was in there folding her undies.”
“What makes you think she was dead?”
“She was all pale and shit, like a corpse. And she didn’t even look at me. It’s like I wasn’t even there.”
“Okay, so you got ignored by a Goth chick. I’ll tell my editor to hold the presses.”
“I’m telling you, it was spooky as hell.”
“Why would a dead girl need clean underwear?”
“Well…maybe she died with dirty skivvies on. And now her personal hell is to wash her underpants ov
er and over for all eternity.”
“Anyway, I’ve got to get to class.”
“All right, man. Sorry I couldn’t be more help.”
I did go to class, though it would be a stretch to say I was in attendance. It was Music Appreciation with Professor Pussyhound, who spent most of the class engaged in an intense argument with Jackie St. John’s roommate about whether or not John Cage’s 4’33” constituted a piece of music. (The subtext of this debate, obvious to one and all, was “Let’s fuck each other’s brains out after class.”) I tuned out and tried to work on my next article. Unfortunately, I’d already used up my supply of tried-and-true Charlesgate legends. I’d have to sit down with Mrs. Coolidge and hope she actually had something to say. I was essentially punting to Future Tommy, which, come to think of it, was a pretty good summation of my entire life strategy to that point.
After class I milled around by the Wall for a few minutes, shooting the shit with classmates who were just as sick of Professor Pussyhound as I was. I decided to hoof it back to Charlesgate in hopes some burst of inspiration would strike. I’d made it half a block when I heard a female voice behind me.
“My hero!”
I stopped in my tracks. Jackie St. John caught up to me.
“Oh. Hey, Jackie.”
“Hey yourself…”
“Tommy.”
“I know that. You think I’d forget the name of the third greatest album ever recorded?”
“Third? Oh, that’s right. We had this conversation. You have Who’s Next first, right?”
“Damn right.”
“And…wait, don’t tell me…second place is Quadrophenia?”
“Bzzt. Quadrophenia is top five, no doubt, but I’ve got The Who Sell Out at number two. I lent you that bootleg of the out-takes, right?”
“Yeah. ‘Sunday Morning, Cold Taxi.’ Good stuff.”
“Hell yeah. You think they’ll ever get back together?”
“The Who? Oh, I doubt it. They all hate each other, and Keith Moon’s always gonna be dead. Kenny Jones just doesn’t do it for me.”
“True. But that last album still had some good stuff on it. ‘Eminence Front.’ ‘Cry If You Want.’ ”
“Yeah, that’s true.” As our conversation hit a lull, I realized I was walking Jackie St. John back to Charlesgate. This was a good thing. I hoped everyone I knew would come walking the other way and see us.
“So you’re from around here, right?” she asked.
“Well, sort of. Maine.”
“That’s close, though.”
“Yeah, southern Maine is close. But my folks live way up the coast. Downeast, they call it. About five hours from here.”
“Acadia National Park, right? I hear it’s beautiful up there.”
“Yeah, I guess. But when you grow up there, you don’t really think about it that way. I couldn’t wait to get to civilization.”
“No indoor plumbing, huh?”
“Worse. No cable.” She laughed. My heart cranked like a jackhammer. “You’re from New Jersey, right?”
“Yup. Whippany, NJ. No reason you ever would have heard of it.”
“Ah, but I have heard of it. Guy’s Pizza, right?”
“Holy shit! How do you know about Guy’s?”
“We stopped there for dinner on a family road trip to Florida a few years ago. Totally random. Great fucking pizza.”
“Bet your ass.”
“I mean, Pizza Pad isn’t bad either.”
“True.”
“Are you hungry? Because I was thinking of maybe heading over there for a slice.”
“Oh, that would be cool, but…I better not. My boyfriend is taking me to dinner in the North End later, and we’ll probably end up getting pizza.”
I’m sure she said some things after that, but I didn’t hear them. Pretty much everything after “boyfriend” was white noise to me. In fact, I don’t even remember the rest of the walk back to Charlesgate. The next thing I remember is standing in front of Mrs. Coolidge’s room on the third floor, knocking on the door.
The door opened a crack. I could see the glow of her cigar.
“It’s me,” I said. “If you’re ready to tell your story now, I’m ready to hear it.”
The Berkeley Beacon
OCTOBER 17, 1986
Charlesgate Confidential, Part II: The Lost Years
TOMMY DONNELLY, BERKELEY BEACON STAFF
If you live in Charlesgate or visit it frequently, you’ve probably seen Mrs. Selma Coolidge, even if you don’t know her name. If so, you’ve no doubt wondered why this cigar-chomping woman in her sixties is sharing living space with 400 college students, especially if she’s yelled at you to keep it down. If you ever stopped to talk to her—and if you could manage to sift through her highly imaginative worldview—you’d know Mrs. Coolidge represents one of the few links to the darkest, most mysterious period in Charlesgate’s history.
In 1972, Boston University sold the Charlesgate to a private owner with little regard for Boston’s rental codes. As the building rapidly deteriorated, it became a rooming house for anyone willing to pay and even some who were not. By the mid-1970s, the Charlesgate was populated by the fringes of society: artists, junkies, criminals, prostitutes, cultists and anyone else looking to maintain a low profile and low rent, and willing to overlook issues of appearance and safety.
Mrs. Coolidge lost her husband, Raymond Coolidge, in early 1973 and was left homeless and nearly destitute. Scraping together what was left of her savings after paying off her husband’s creditors, Mrs. Coolidge moved into a room on the third floor of the Charlesgate—the same room she occupies to this day. She made her way as a collector and seller of rare books. She had a knack for finding undervalued items at estate sales and secondhand shops and reselling them to collectors and rare-book purveyors at many times her original purchase price. Then as now she was a loner, avoiding most of her neighbors whenever possible, with one notable exception.
What follows is Mrs. Coolidge’s story in her own words. Again it should be noted for the record that Mrs. Coolidge is subject to extreme flights of fancy during conversation, and I have edited what follows in the interest of eliminating extraneous tangents. She is a conspiracy theorist of the first order, and much of her story is all but impossible to confirm. Even so, it has the ring of emotional truth, and given the sketchy information available about this building in the 1970s, I felt it was worth reproducing her words here as one possible history of Charlesgate’s lost years.
***
“In those days, my apartment was number 33. Across the hall was 34, and that’s where Johnny lived. Johnny Seven. I know that wasn’t his real name, but that’s what he called himself. He was a musician. He had a band in the ’60s called the Meat City Beatniks. They had a hit called ‘A Month of Mondays.’ It was a regional hit, only in New England, but I remembered it. He was shy, Johnny, and I didn’t talk much either, but we seemed to hit it off. Not in any kind of sex way or anything like that. I was at least twenty years older than him, and after Raymond died, I had no interest anyway. But we had some other interests in common, mainly the Kennedy assassination and the Manson family, and we would talk about those things into the wee hours.
“Johnny liked to drink. I did too, but not like him. He’d do odd jobs, mostly working for moving companies, but he could never do it more than a couple weeks at a time. He’d stay home and work on his music. I could hear it drifting across the hall. He’d come knocking on my door about two or three in the afternoon and ask if I wanted to go to the Fallout Shelter. This bar on the corner, it really had been a fallout shelter in the ’50s and ’60s, but now it was just a bar with that name. I’d go with him just to talk, but he would get so drunk I’d have to half-carry him home at the end of the night and put him to bed. One time he was drunk enough to try to kiss me but I put an end to that in a big hurry. He was embarrassed the next day, but I told him it wasn’t any big deal, just don’t do it again.
“Around about 19
75, things got real bad here at the Charlesgate. You’d hear screams in the middle of the night. I don’t mean ghosts or any of that crap, I never did believe in that nonsense. But this doomsday cult had taken over the whole sixth floor. The End Times Church of the Final Retribution or Revelation or something like that. Who knew what was going on up there? You’d hear chanting come drifting down the elevator shaft at all hours. You’d see bloodstains on the stairs, men in black robes leading girls up the back staircase, young girls, 15 or 16 years old. Well, there was so much shit going on here in those days, it just seemed like part of the Charlesgate experience. But then Johnny started spending time up there on the sixth floor. When we’d go down to the Fallout Shelter, he’d tell me about how they weren’t so bad and they helped him through some hard times. And he was drinking less, so that was a good thing. But I’d see less and less of him as time went on.
“It was the 4th of July, 1976. I’ll never forget because that was the Bicentennial. It was a big deal. The Boston Pops played on the Esplanade, they had the Tall Ships in Boston Harbor, all of that. I came back here that night and I saw Johnny’s door was wide open. I went in and saw the place had been totally ransacked. I knew he didn’t trust banks and he kept all his money in cash in a guitar case in his closet. But now that guitar case was wide open in the middle of the floor and it was empty. Well, my first thought was those freaks on the sixth floor, so I went right up there. I heard the chanting. I followed the sound.
“It was coming from the room in the far southeast corner. The door was open a crack. I leaned in close and peered inside. I saw them gathered there, all in their black robes, a circle of candles in the middle. And blood dripping down. I looked up and saw my friend Johnny hanging there, his wrists bound to two ropes heading in opposite directions, both ending at upsidedown crosses nailed to the ceiling. He was naked and he’d been slit from throat to belly. His guts hung from his body like he was a deer they’d slaughtered.
“I was scared for my life, but I called the police. They tried to tell me I was imagining things, because I’d called them a few times before on other matters and you know they had a special file on me. I finally talked them into sending an officer down, but it was almost two hours before he arrived. He checked the room out and found those people in their robes eating take-out pizza. Not a trace of Johnny Seven, but I know what I saw.
Charlesgate Confidential Page 11
