Page 1 of Southie
Liam
It was another long night for me, locked in the tiny bedroom of my parents' apartment. The baby blue walls of my childhood room closed in on me while headphones blasted the sounds of my favorite band in my ears, drowning out the screams and pleas of my Ma. Every grunt, every curse word, and every sob traveled through the thin walls of the tiny apartment, but I’d become immune to them all.
Just another typical day or night in the Daugherty household, although tonight was a little calmer than most days.
They argued every day. It ended the same way every time, him beating the shit out of her, her begging him to stop, and her taking a ride to the hospital by ambulance. Regardless of what they were doing, I tried to block them out and not be distracted by the chaos in the other room.
A sigh left my lips.
I lay back against the wooden headboard of my bed and shut my eyes, attempting to block out the surrounding noise. While I needed to get in the right mindset before I stepped into the octagon tonight, living here trapped me in thoughts of how things should be different for me. Then my feelings of hate and despair always ended up imprisoning me in my childhood memories full of hurt and pain. As an adult, the shit I endured as a kid, I found hard to escape, even now.
My home, this tiny apartment in the housing projects, was no place for anyone to live, much less a place for a child to grow up. The many holes that decorated the thin, dingy wallpapered walls, the liquor bottles that were thrown all over the place, and the pill bottles that littered the kitchen counters showed the toxicity of my childhood. My home life was poisonous as hell, but what could I do about it?
At twenty-six, I had no steadylegaljob and no prospects of anything better coming along anytime soon. Like most kids my age in Southie, my neighborhood of South Boston, we lived day to day on a hope and a prayer. Today, like any other day, I hoped I made it out of Southie and prayed I didn’t die in the process.
The limited job opportunities around Southie for a high school dropout like me kept me involved in illegal activities around Boston. Legitimate jobs became hard to keep because I always had to take care of my Pops and his never-ending problems. That’s the only reason I dropped out of school at sixteen.
I’d needed to handle real-world problems. Problems no kid should have had to deal with, and which school interfered with.
At fifteen, the chances of getting out of Southie by getting an excellent education became impossible. I’d lost countless jobs because I’d been unable to work a full shift. A day didn’t go by where I didn’t have to leave work early to pick my Pops up from some dive bar, whore house, or gambling joint.
To be honest, the shitty twelve-hour shift jobs at the manufacturing plants or the warehouses down by the docks didn’t provide the amount of cash needed to satisfy the people he dealt with. On the bright side of things, at least living with my parents I had a roof over my head, although it leaked, and food in my stomach, albeit crisp sandwiches.
As the banging and shouting in the living room amplified, I turned the music louder to drown out the constant noise. A long time ago, I’d learned not to get between my parents when they were at each other's throats, no matter how bad it got.
My bedroom had always been my sanctuary and my prison. It provided separation from my parents, but it kept me secluded from everything and everyone who would have had a positive influence in my life before I became a street kid. The only thing that had changed in this room since my childhood, other than the size of my bed, was no more tears leaked from my eyes while I listened to her wails.
They stopped a long time ago.
Donie and Laura Daugherty had one of the most destructive relationships I’d ever seen. Their relationship was the major reason I stayed clear of any females who wanted to tie me down. My outlook on love, marriage, and everything that came along with that wasn’t the best because I didn’t have the best role models in that department.
Countless women tried to change my mind.
For me, long-term relationships or any relationship beyond a casual fuck wouldn’t work. Women served one purpose and nothing else.
My grandmother swore one day the right woman would come along, take my breath away, and change my mind about love.
I doubted it.
I wasn’t falling for that love shit. Love didn’t exist in my world and it never would, if I had anything to say about it. And, if love infiltrated my life, from experience, it would be poisonous.
Anything involving love, problems followed. There wasn’t a woman on Earth whose issues I’d be willing to deal with because I had enough on my own.
Even though my childhood experiences weren’t normal, they were my normal.
Sure, to the outside world my parents had a picture-perfect relationship. The Boston Police Department lieutenant and the elementary school teacher’s marriage had lasted over twenty-five years, and they had been together much longer. The high school sweethearts had grown up together in Southie, both from middle-class homes.
To everyone on the outside, their relationship was flawless. However, what they showed to the outside world wasn’t their reality. It wasn’t my reality.
The image of the marriage they portrayed to the outside world remained intact as long as my mother recognized her place like a good Irish Catholic wife and mother, kept her bruises hidden from prying eyes, and had a textbook explanation for why the wife of one of Boston’s finest landed herself in the emergency room more times than anyone cared to count.
Despite how they portrayed themselves to those on the outside, I knew the truth. So did my family, the neighborhood, and some hospital staff who were on a first-name basis with my parents. It wasn’t possible for them not to know. Everyone just ignored it. No one cared enough to wonder why two individuals with upstanding jobs were raising their only child in the rundown projects of Southie.
Never blind to who my parents were and not who they portrayed, I vowed to never become them.
A drunken bastard, my Pops drained the life from my Ma a long time ago. As soon as I could fend for myself, the loving and devoted mother I’d had, died. Nowadays, she tried to escape her shit life in Southie by downing pills every time she got her hands on them. It didn’t matter what kind as long as she was out of it by the time my Pops made it home inwhatevercondition.
Nine times out of ten, he was sloppy drunk, and she was high as a kite. How either of them functioned daily was beyond my understanding. I longed for the day I got the phone call most normal individuals dreaded saying she overdosed, or they found him dead. Knowing that phone call would come one day caused a black cloud of dread and relief to hang over my life every single day.
