Chapter 32
And here it was Tuesday, September 18th. Luke and Decky were awake now, sitting up in the car. I drove madly, focused like a weary runner on one of the last legs of a twenty-five-day race across beautiful America. We were nearing the end of the first half of our great expedition, I thought, the one I had dreamt about for weeks upon weeks back in Huntington Beach. I had no idea where it all would ever end, and that was okay.
Approaching Lowell from Route 495, I jumped onto the very familiar Lowell Connector, a four-lane highway that dumped right into Lowell, ending abruptly at a red light. There we were immediately thrust into the neighborhood where everything began for my family in America; we were a block away from the sacred ground where four generations of the Hogans had lived, an Irish-American lineage that started with my second great-grandfather Paddy. As we veered down South Street, right off of Gorham, I looked out at the bare grassy ground beside the back entrance to St. Peter’s Church. This was where the family’s old duplex tenement house had once stood. I had only seen the house in black-and-white pictures, of course, for it had been torn down long before I was ever born. I remembered that in those photographs, the house always appeared so tiny to me, for it was forever dwarfed by the huge St. Peter’s Church on its right. It was a mere blade of grass in the giant cathedral’s shadows. My father told me that the right half of the house was always rented to boarders, other immigrant families in the early days, while the Hogan clan all lived on the left side, three generations of them. I looked and saw that huge St. Peter’s stood alone now, all by itself out there. What had happened to her parish and their faith? No one came to Mass anymore. Sometime in the 1950s, the family house was sold and torn down, along with a whole line of other houses all the way down the street beside the church. They were replaced by a development of yellow brick apartment buildings that stretched along the South Common toward downtown. St Patrick’s Cemetery was behind us, just a few miles down Gorham Street in the other direction. This was where all of the family funeral processions ultimately ended.
The whole time that she lived beside the church, my grandmother Lillian Hogan attended the six a.m. Mass every morning at St. Peter’s. She always carried around a full set of rosary beads with her and sometimes could be seen whispering prayer after prayer as she moved her fingers from bead to bead. She prayed for us all. I don’t think I ever saw her without those worry beads wrapped around her hands, her calloused fingers running through them one by one as she recited her daily prayers. The simple repetition of her prayers seemed to help to wipe away the worry of the misfortune of generations. God and St. Peter had helped all of them get through their hardest times.
I knew their stories well. My great-grandparents Michael the baker and Mary the servant had purchased the original South Street house just a few years after they were married in the 1890s. Mary had left Ireland in the late 1880s to wait on the wealthy English of Boston. Michael came over a few years after her. Back in Ireland, they had lived amongst the rural farms of Carrownaclogh and Ballynahown, near the town of Ennistymon. They knew each other in childhood, but were never really close because of their five-year difference in age. But in America, like all of humanity who seeks to find the company of comfort, they met up again in blessed Lowell and soon married in St. Peter’s. Mary was older than Michael, but through decades of census takers knocking on her door, she had managed to become younger than him. In the late 1890s, Michael left Lavery’s Bakery (owned by the famous Brennan family) in order to open up his own bakery on Central Street. It was then that he sent over for his widowed father Paddy . . . Paddy who couldn’t read or write, Paddy the dying farmer. Paddy had wanted to die with his surviving children. But in order to do so, he had to leave his poor deceased wife (and all of the others) in the cold rocky earth of Ballynahown; they were all buried in unmarked graves next to a burned-down parish church near Ennistymon. Paddy had to leave them forever.
I wanted to someday tell their story and the stories of all the mill immigrants. I wanted it to be a movie. There were so many pages that I wanted to write; some happy, some sad, all of them screaming screenplays, moving pictures of the everlasting human struggle—the same struggle that transcends all of the races and all of the ages.
Michael the baker died of consumption at thirty-six, and my own grandfather, Michael’s eldest son Tom (who was just a young teenager at the time) was immediately thrown into a tougher life because of it. He had to drop out of the tenth grade in order to support his poor mother and his three siblings. His two sisters would eventually leave the house to become nuns. It’s funny; Luke and Decky thought that my father Frank looked exactly like one of his auntie nuns in an old picture that I showed them. Some even wondered if it was my father actually wearing a nun habit, trying to fool around, maybe a Halloween costume or something, but it wasn’t. Frank would have definitely thought that would be a sin to do such a thing.
“Impersonating a nun? That is such a sin!”
Not long after Michael the baker died, my great-uncle Johnnie was the victim of a terrible accident. He was only sixteen years old. On Friday, October 23, 1914, the Lowell Sun nightly headlines read: “Men Frightfully Injured in Gas Tank Explosion—Welding Gas at Vocational School Exploded with Terrific Force.”
In the Fairlane, Luke, Decky, and I were back on Gorham Street, and I continued to absorb the past. I looked out at a city of ghosts now, generations and generations of them; a paperboy on the curb, a beat cop with his London-like bob hat walking amidst horses and buggy whips on cobblestone streets, people riding on a crowded cable car, and the sacred heart of Jesus there amongst them all, in the rosary beads of my grandmother’s hands, never leaving their side, just walking there with them.
These old cobblestone streets carried the constant traffic from our endless worrying minds; cars carrying different thoughts from different time periods that passed our family’s DNA down throughout the generations, from Merrimack River footpaths, to horse drawn carriages, to my grandfather’s Hudson, to Frank’s Indian motorcycle, and now to the Ford Fairlane that I was sitting in.
All of humanity always traveled the same roadways, I figured. And those rounded polished stones that still showed on some of those streets, laid there by what are now buried hands, were a constant reminder to me that death was certainly for real. No matter what, there was no escaping it, and I would have to sit one last time in the dark confessional booth sooner or later. God would eventually take us all in the end, and there was little comfort in trying to believe that getting to heaven (if you were a believer) would be easy, because the dying part of it really scared me so.
Luke, Decky, and I went all of the way down Gorham Street. Over to the right I looked out at the old neighborhoods of the Portuguese, the Italians, and the Greeks. Just beyond these neighborhoods were the choppy banks of the Concord River, where the Colburn School sat, the red brick elementary school where John Nance punched Miss Murphy in the stomach before running down the old wooden stairs and out into the cold truant streets of spring. Miss Murphy, with her strong around-the-corner perfume scent and her inch-thick caked-on makeup gave poor Nance ten hard whacks of the ruler that had pushed him over the edge that fateful day in 1966.
Beyond the neighborhoods and the river I looked up toward the hills of old Andover Street, the old land of the Wamesit that seemed to stretch back to forever. They were still there somewhere; I wanted to believe it.
We doglegged left onto Central Street. I looked up at the empty windowpanes of what once was Bob Noonan’s Music Studio, up over the old Rialto Bowling Lanes. Noonan’s name was still all in stencils in a semicircle on the windows in 1984, even though that floor of the building had been vacant for many years. Bob Noonan had the thickest gray hair I had ever seen on a human being. As his student, I had to learn “Flight of the Bumblebee” on the clarinet, sitting in the lesson chair through it all as the metronome ticked behind me; the ticktock of it always reminded me of eternity. Would the lesson ever be over? The lesson lasted from the third grade all of the way into high school, but then I got in deep with Ray Champeaux and his gang, where playing in the marching band wasn’t cool anymore, so I quit it all. It seemed like it was just a few months after that when Bob Noonan and all of that gray hair dropped dead of a heart attack. I wondered if at suppertime he ate those big hunks of butter like my grandfather had on the night that he died. I wondered if his wife had to run to the cupboard to get him a shot of whiskey, so that it might make him feel better.
The excitement of being home rushed within me. I took a right at the light at Prescott Street now where I pointed out to the guys the Lowell Sun building where I had worked in 1980. That was my last Lowell job before sweet California. The truck alley that we used to line up on was around the back, running the length of a somber canal that cut under Merrimack Street and continued on toward the large cotton mill complexes. These beautiful man-made canal waterways ran everywhere in our city; they had once powered the wheels of progress.
Passing through Kearney Square, I looked to the left up Merrimack Street all the way to city hall and took it all in again. In the Pollard Library during the 1970s, I would pore over many of the old Lowell Sun microfiche films from 1914. It was in the library that I had first learned the exact details of the fateful gas explosion that my father’s uncle had been in. I built it all back up in my storyboard mind, brick by brick, adding imaginary dialogue to the fantastic story, adding to the words that had already been quoted where I needed to, in order to fill the gaps. The series of articles from the Lowell Sun laid it all out for me. All I had to do was to bring it to life . . .
There in a gloomy October day in 1914, poor Johnnie Hogan hovered between life and death in a bed at St. John’s Hospital. At the Lowell Hospital on the other side of town, the boy’s teacher, Clarence Letourneau, merely twenty-six years old, was also near death.
“What negligence! The teacher should have known better!” my great-grandmother Mary cried, lamenting in that thick Irish brogue to her eldest son, my grandfather Tom, who, at seventeen, was the man of the house. Mary was one to hardly ever show emotion, but what had just happened to her fourteen-year-old son had really broken her.
It happened on a fall afternoon in a bustling mill city. A conscientious and eager student, Johnnie Hogan had stayed after school to work with his teacher on one of those beautiful machines, an automobile, but just in a few split seconds, everything went crazy, changing the path that they both were on forever. It happened right there in the basement of the Mann School on Broadway Street beyond city hall. Johnnie and Clarence tried to make sense of something they actually knew very little about.
The Lowell Sun said that from his dying hospital bed, Clarence the teacher told the investigators in a fog, “I am not sure if it was due to ignition or concussion.” And as he came in and out of the ether, the teacher asked his own wailing mother, “Whatever happened to the boy, Mother? Is he going to make it?” Clarence lay there, with no penicillin discovered yet, delirious, trying to surmise in a dreamy painful stupor what had ever happened to them.
“These are the streets where four generations of my family lived,” I said to Decky and Luke as I drove on. “When we were young, my father Frank often cruised these neighborhoods, holding all of us captive in his Plymouth station wagon, telling all kinds of stories about his altar-boy days at St. Peter’s School, his cherished Uncle Johnnie, his beloved Indian Motorcycle, and the beautiful girl he met right up there at the five-and-dime soda fountain after the war.”
“On my knees in front of the acetylene tank, I don’t know if after turning the valve on, I had ever turned it off.” Johnnie came briefly out of his hospital delirium in 1914 to tell the police investigators who questioned him.
“Load the newer oxygen tank to sixty pounds of pressure, Johnnie,” Mr. Letourneau told him in the basement of the school.
Putting the match to the welding gun, Johnnie tried to regulate the flame. He went to the 250-pound acetylene tank and turned the valve wide open. But the flow of acetylene was stifled and could not find a way to vent in the small pinhole at the end of the welding gun. So it followed the path of least resistance and went straight into the oxygen tank. It turns out that the welding gun was missing its fine wire screen, so a mad flame followed the acetylene and flashed back with it all the way to the oxygen tank. Rats in a tunnel.
“Kaaaa-blam!!!!!!!!”
The loud blast was heard for at least a mile, past the Old Worthen, past city hall, all the way out to the Boot Mill yards. And with that, people immediately filled the surrounding streets, all curious, anxious, all of them trying to see what had happened and willing to help in whatever way they could. Luckily, all of the students had been dismissed from the Mann School earlier in the day. The force of the explosion shattered all of the windows of the school and blew out the cellar stairs. Everything in the basement was demolished. When the janitor on the first floor saw the first sheets of flames shoot up from the cellar and heard the screams of the injured teacher, he immediately jumped down the hole in the floor where the stairway had been. The janitor saw Clarence the teacher, his right hand hung to the wrist by strings of flesh, escaping up the back stairway and ran to him where he was able to help him to the street. An ambulance rushed poor Clarence away as everyone looked in horror at the burns about the poor man’s face and remaining hand.
The fixture on the building supporting the electric light wires caught fire as the fire in the cellar raged. But no one knew that Johnnie still lay downstairs under the rubble. When the fire department got there, Fire Chief Sullivan jumped into the pit and over to the demolished brick wall that once supported the welding machine, for he thought that he heard a faint sound, a murmur of faint please-help-me life. Sullivan frantically began pulling off bricks from the fallen wall and all of the fallen debris. He dug at the source of the covered moans and found young Johnnie lying there, Johnnie-come-lately, Johnnie-left-for-dead.
Johnnie, missing an arm and a leg, was picked up out of the rubble by the fearless chief who hurried him out to a Good Samaritan, Mr. O’Donnell, in the crowd outside. Mr. O’Donnell had a brand-new automobile.
“Please get this boy to the hospital!” Sullivan begged him. Therein I pondered the coincidences and ironies in all of life.
After O’Donnell sped off, Chief Sullivan went back into the fire and debris to retrieve poor Johnnie’s missing arm and leg beneath the still moaning rubble. When he found them, Sullivan took the bloody left arm and left leg to the hospital, the loose parts of Johnnie all wrapped up in rags, the limbs of life that would never live again.
In an early November morning in 1914, Professor Letourneau died. His parents were devastated at losing their only child, for he had lived at home with them and supported them, giving them six bucks a week. Clarence had supported the three of them with his salary of five hundred dollars a year. And just like that, he was gone. The Sun said that the parents of Clarence Letourneau were left with nothing. There was an undertaker’s bill for $152.50 and a hospital bill for $12.80 that someone would have to pay.
In the ensuing weeks, Mary Hogan’s son Johnnie slowly recovered, cheerful in his hospital bed, talkative, passing his time reading and sometimes even singing out loud, his voice bellowing everywhere throughout all of St. John’s.
“When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, sure ’tis like a morn in spring.
In the lilt of Irish laughter, you can hear the angels sing.”
In the aftermath of it all, my great-grandmother, Mary Hogan, sued the city of Lowell for $50,000. The great trial of Johnnie Hogan vs. The City of Lowell went on for years.
From the front of the courtroom, Johnnie’s lead council, Mr. Donahue, proclaimed, “I don’t propose to go into the gruesome details of the accident, but will ask that young Johnnie take the stand.”
I could see young Johnnie, armless and legless in the days of 1916 as he struggled to attain his balance, unassisted by any prosthesis or crutches, bouncing like he was on a pogo stick, balancing one side to another in the silent courtroom, with ladies in the gallery sobbing and wearing big floppy-colored hats and all of those nineteen sixteen crazy costumes, with World War I still raging out in the Atlantic and the Boston Red Sox still winning the World Series, and Council Donahue, so Jimmy Stewart-like in his poise, saying in a loud, booming voice, “Go ahead! Stand up, Johnnie!”
And as Johnnie jumped toward the stand, Donahue announced to them all, “The pain and suffering that this boy has had to go through would move the stoutest heart! He became the victim of an accident that took the sunshine from his life and wrecked the castle he had built for the future!”
I wondered if Donahue’s visions of a castle looked anything like the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, the one that was right next to the giant Marlboro Man cutout. Or maybe a giant abandoned plastic castle boat marina on the lonely floodplain outside of Salt Lake City or the fairy-tale fiefdoms that rose up from the plateau badlands of Utah. The buttes themselves looking much like the interstellar drawings that were illustrated amidst clouds. Maybe it was a centuries-old Irish castle where kings had once lived. Maybe Johnnie himself envisioned the castlelike homes of the mill owners up on Andover Street when he heard those words, homes high on the bluff set against the pink and stacked sunset backdrop of the glimmering Merrimack River.
In the end, Johnnie was awarded $5,000, but because Johnnie was still a minor, the money had to be signed over to my great-grandmother, Mary Hogan.
“On his eighteenth birthday, it will be my intention to make it over to my son John, so that in the event of anything happening to me, his rights will be secure,” my great-grandmother proclaimed in the Lowell Sun. And then she took the money and added another tenement to the South Street home. That is where my screenplay would end.
Johnnie went on to live another thirty years, of course, driving the stick and the clutch of the very machines that begat his path, with his one arm and one leg moving from the steering wheel to the stick shift, from the clutch to the break to the gas, so quickly, so smoothly, for Johnnie was born to drive. He’d drive the country roads of Dracut in his 1938 Chevrolet Rumble Seat with the top down, his nephew Frank (my father) bouncing beside him, while Frank the dreamer thought about the soda fountain and a beautiful girl he would marry someday. The yarn of four generations made this great quilt of my life.
In the Fairlane, driving in Lowell in 1984, I showed the guys the building on Bridge Street where the barbershop of another great-grandfather, Henry Hughes, had once been. It was a taxi stand now. Across the street was Fran’s Fruit Stand on the corner of an old complex that once housed a lot of the Boot Mill working girls. The complex had been converted in the forties to low-rent apartments, all just standing silently there in a row, looking back at us gauntly as we passed them by. Ghosts moved back and forth along Bridge Street. I saw Charles Dickens visiting in the mid-1800s. Edgar Allen Poe walked by us toward Merrimack Street; he was here as part of a lecture series and was set to give a poetry reading at the library. I saw Kerouac himself darting across Kearney Square toward Arthur’s Paradise Diner on the Boot Mill Canal. Ray Champeaux used to call the diner “Arthur’s by the Sea.” This place was famous for the Boot Mill Sandwich, made up of home fries, eggs, and sausage, all in between a big buttered bulkie roll. The Triple Boot Mill Sandwich was enormous; if you finished it, you would be so full, you’d feel sick. The old diner railcar sat there now and looked down upon its reflection on the shimmering green canal. There’d be days where Ray Champeaux would jump over that iron railing to crawl back into the canal and explore the locks and underground secret passageways; he’d disappear over those heavy gates that held back the great walls of water from the mighty Merrimack. Ray would call to me from the darkness to follow, but I was too afraid to follow, afraid that I’d slip and fall between the old rusty gears fifty feet below the gates, jamming up the wheels of progress forever.
Gordy Scott, Billy Caldwell, and I were cutting through the Boot Mills parking lot one morning back in high school when a high school teacher, Mr. Yawkey, fell right on his face in front of us. On the icy ground, his briefcase flew toward us, spilling everyone’s test papers as it spun out of control on the ground. Yawkey’s face and hands were all scratched up and bloody as he flapped there like a fish on the ice. The three of us ran over to pick him up, but we couldn’t get him to stand. Yawkey kept slipping and falling and mumbling incoherently, like the four of us were all part of some great vaudeville skit. Yawkey was a mess that day.
“I don’t understand,” I said to Gordy. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Don’t you see it?” Gordon said to me as he and Billy grabbed at the guy to hold him straight, “He’s freaking wasted!”
Gordy had me run to the school ahead of them to get Mrs. McMahon out of home room so I could tell her what was going on back in the parking lot.
“I’ll take care of it,” Mrs. McMahon assured me. “Don’t let him back in the car!”
But just as she said this, Gordon and Billy rounded the corner in the old high school annex.
“He wrestled free from us and high-tailed out of there in his stupid car,” Gordon told us. “He’s gone! The freaking drunk!”
From downtown Lowell, Luke, Decky, and I drove onto the Bridge Street Bridge and crossed into Centralville. I looked out at the Boot Cotton Mills on my left, just empty shells now. All of these old brick buildings were now a lifeless fortress that formed a battery around the inner city, lining the south banks of the murky and treacherous river like the walls of a one-time great kingdom. On the bridge itself, I looked up and saw a vision of my old friend Ray Champeaux. Back when we were kids, Ray used to run to the top of that old iron bridge for kicks; he was like one of those fearless native ledge walkers out on the cliffs of the Wild West, or an old skyscraper laborer, a worker in an old Life Magazine picture who ate his lunch out on the steel support beams of the World Trade Towers. The walkers and the workers were all nameless now, but nevertheless real people who once had real lives like the rest of us. Ray skipped as he ran those two-foot wide girders in my vision, running the whole length of the bridge, above all of the curious cars, while people looked up and pointed at him as they honked on their horns. Look at crazy Ray run the rafters! Has he gone mad? He’s going to fall and kill himself!
Heading north on Bridge Street we passed Nealon’s Package Store where Grady the clerk had worked all of those years. But like I told you before, Grady was brutally murdered. The door of the package store was now ajar; it appeared as if no one was inside at all. How tragically sad the murder of this nice man all seemed to me now. From Nealon’s, we went on to pass by St. Matthews where I first thought I had heard the voice of God. I had heard those magnificent rumblings of thunder when I was a child, the thunder that turned out to be mere people rising to their feet in the main church above us. I could still hear the priest high on the altar shouting, “Praise be to God!” as we passed by the church now. I secretly wished it really had been God back then making those sounds, for life would be all so easy now. And the pedophile Father Cunningham from St. Matthew’s was now locked away somewhere being reformed. They say that in the end, he finally asked God for forgiveness. All I could think about was that silly song that we had to sing to him during the CYO musical in 1975.
Look at Father Cunningham
Sitting in his chair
He’s grinning ’cause we’ve all sold out
This always happens every year!
Luke, Decky, and I were pushing deep into Centralville now. I headed toward Dracut. We passed Gage Field, a huge hill that led to playgrounds up on our right and McPherson’s, another playground down toward lower Centralville, on our left. Lots of my teenage beers had been consumed at Gage where we usually hung out in the evening hours. A little past Gage Field, I made a right on Eighteenth Street where I climbed the hill toward my childhood home. I pointed out what we always figured was Kerouac’s Dr. Sax’s castle to Decky and Luke; it was the Victorian-style house that sat atop the elbow of Whitney Avenue as Whitney took a turn eastward to run parallel to Eighteenth Street and alongside Gage Field. I imagined Kerouac’s Great World Snake eerily looking down on us from the tower windows as we slowly pushed up past him and on up Eighteenth Street.
Before long, I was pulling into my parents’ driveway.
“We are here!” I shouted aloud.
From the screened-in porch, my mother jumped up to greet me and delivered the sweetest words of freedom I had ever heard.
“Someone from the bank called to tell us that they received the payment check from the Subaru dealership and that your car was sold. You are all paid in full, they said!” She yelled down to me even before her kiss hello.
No more worries! No more earthly possessions! I was well on my way!
Nighttime descended upon us quickly. We talked anxiously around the dinner table, telling my parents all about where we had been. After supper, Luke, Decky, and I went downtown with my sisters Ciara and Kate and another friend Donny Dubois. We walked the length of cobblestoned Middle Street in search of old acquaintances. Here and there we pushed our way into crowded bars before finally ending up at trendy Pollards. Inside, the bar was packed for a Tuesday night. Everyone looked familiar to me, some I knew but didn’t really know, but nevertheless all my people; they grew up here like their fathers and grandfathers before them, and most of them would never leave. Decky recognized people in the bar too, he told me, even though he had never been to Lowell; they were all just a part of his theory that there were only so many faces to go around.
“You look like a nun who used to teach me piano in the fifth grade!” Decky yelled across the noise. He was invisible.
But the noise was too much. We decided to head back to Centralville to see my friend Liam who tended bar at The Tavern at the Bridge. The Tavern just sat there alone on the north side of the Merrimack River on the VFW Highway and Bridge Street, right at the doorstep to Centralville. It was the final stop on the usual crawl home from downtown for one last cold one. It was where all the locals drank quietly; one last drink before everyone entered the spin zone of sleep and said good night to the physical world. The Tavern was called The Spindle Pub in the seventies, but new ownership changed the name to The Tavern in the eighties. We all still called it The Spindle though, and as we walked around the side parking lot to enter through the front door, I looked across at the now quiet VFW-Bridge Street intersection where I noticed that someone had laid a fresh bouquet of cut flowers on the southeast side of the road, right at the curb where the old lady had died.
The only person I had ever seen killed with my own eyes was right there, right at the bridge. Gordy, Billy, and I had been walking home from high school one winter afternoon in 1976. From the bridge, we started to approach this poor old lady who waited there for the light to change; she was standing at the crosswalk when smack out of nowhere a mad car gone awry screamed across the boulevard and killed her. When the late-model car hit her, the impact alone sent her flying about twenty feet in the air and just like that, her lifeless body landed on the sidewalk before us. It was so sad, right in the dead of a Lowell winter, with the icy Merrimack just cutting along far below us, ice-sheeted shores breaking off to rushing ice-cold water at the river’s edge as her body lay on the sidewalk at our feet, lifeless on the dirty, slushy snow, old footprints packed about her. The poor old woman had gone somewhere else before she ever hit the ground. There was nothing we could do. We were frantic as more people arrived. The color of the car that had hit her was a blur, and