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Oh you didn’t know? Yes I used to be a vigilante. Well a bad vigilante. Alright more like a neighborhood terrorist. From the ages of 13-15 every Saturday night my cousin and I would terrorize a 2 block radius in our neighborhood of East Boston. My cousin would sleep over his grandparents’ house and my parents would go over every Saturday night to have coffee with the family. They would sit around and talk all damn night while my cousin and I were allowed to go outside and play from like 8:00PM to like 2:00AM! I swear. We would fill our backpacks with all types of weapons, knives, mini-baseball bats, ropes, fake mountain climbing hooks that our parents got us with Marlboro Miles from smoking cigarettes. We would leave the house and throw on our black hoodies, gloves and masks and start our night of terror. Don’t ask why. We were fucking nuts. Here is some of the shit we did.
Oscar Winning Fight Scenes
My cousin and I would go to the corner of the street. This street in Eastie was a dangerous street that always had a ton of cars on it. This was also a weird area. It was under an Airport underpass that had a light that would cause traffic going into the tunnel that brought you into the city of Boston. And under this underpass was Eastie’s most famous restaurant Santarpio’s and a shitload of people looking for parking spots and just driving through. Still with me? So this was a great spot for two punk kids to fake fight each other and entertain people. Local Eastie people let us kill each other. Yuppies passing by or going to get pizza tried to stop us or threatened to call the police on us. I guess we were putting on Oscar worthy performances. The best was when we decided to beat the shit out of some random kid, one of our own pals or little cousins for fun and leave them for dead. The looks on people’s faces sitting in their cars made them think twice about passing through Eastie again!
Mmmm…Steak
This kid Geno lived around the corner. Geno wasn’t a bad kid. But for some reason my cousin and I used to always fight him. One time I beat the shit out of him at the boy’s club and he told on us and got us kicked out. So naturally we wanted revenge. He was riding his bike around the corner and my cousin and I had our blades. My cousin tried to stick the knife into Geno’s tire while I held him down. He escaped my Kung-Fu grip, hopped on his bike and as he pedaled off the tire moved and caused my cousin to cut his hand pretty bad. We gave chase but the blood was pouring. After debating whether this was a “I think I need to go to the free clinic for stitches” wound, we went back to the house. We just walked in. My cousin grabbed a steak off the table. Slapped it on the counter. Grabbed a steak knife and said “Ow. I just cut myself while cutting this steak. I think I need stitches.” Everyone called him an idiot but for some reason believed that this was an actual steak cutting wound. Suckers.
Older Kids Will Kill You
During this era now gone, kids like us used to play on beeper phone lines. What the hell is a beeper phone line?! Well before cell phones and texting were all the rage, kids had beepers. Some of these beepers had phone numbers that you could leave messages on. In the 90s bad kids like my cousin and I would get our hands on a bunch of these numbers and takeover people’s beeper phone lines. A lot of other kids did too. Older kids. So my cousin and I created codenames. We were known as 3-D and Cover. Our trademark closer after threatening people was “This is 3-D and Cover. Leave a message after the beep! Peeeaaaccceee.” Well one time we pissed off some older kids from Dorchester. Fuck them! Eastie kids fear nothing! We told them on the lines to meet us around the corner from the house to fight us. Sure enough, these kids showed up. Like 10 of them. 19-20 years old. In a mini-van and they all had weapons! They came running out with machetes, big bats not mini-bats, chains! We thought about fighting them for a split second but we were clearly outmatched! So we ran for our lives. They ran after us but didn’t see us run into my cousin’s grandparents’ house scared shitless. We slammed the door and everyone stopped talking and just looked at us. I said “NO ONE can go outside for the next 2 to 3 hours!” They paused for a brief second and started back up with their talking, smoking and coffee. That was a close one.
Mr. Highway
There was a little footbridge above the Airport underpass that emptied out into the tunnel tolls. Cars would sit in traffic or roll slowly under the footbridge as they waited to pay tolls. Now again, this was the early 90s. There wasn’t any fancy “Fast Passes” that allowed you to zip through tolls. You had to do it the old fashioned way. Stop to pay cash to the toll booth guy or throw in exact change into the basket. So there were always cars below the footbridge waiting to go through the tunnel. We would go onto the bridge above the cars and drop change, rocks, water, food, even pee sometimes onto the cars below. And there was no way the people could get out of their cars and chase us above them. They were so angry! It was awesome. If it weren’t for the fence stopping us from dropping large objects like safes, anvils & pianos, we definitely would’ve thrown a live body onto the cars. We thought about it every damn time up there.
“Hide the booty!”
On one perfect storm night, my cousin and I managed to find his uncle’s starter pistol. It wasn’t a real gun but it sure looked it. We snuck it out of the house and went out. Around the corner we found a cab with the doors unlocked. Score! We stripped the inside of that cab in under 3 minutes flat. Our booty was a radio, new tools and a giant Crocodile Dundee knife. We knew these girls from school having a sleepover nearby. So we threw on our masks and scaled the fire escape Batman & Robin style and stormed in through the window scaring them all. We told them that we jacked a car at gunpoint and the po-po were after us so we had to stash our stolen booty in their place. The girl who lived there protested until my cousin pointed the gun at her and said “Hide this stuff or I will shoot you in the face!” The gun wasn’t real but they sure thought it was. And I’m sure a starter pistol blast to the face would still hurt a little. They hid the booty. We left and came back 3 hours later for the goods. We sold the radio and tools for a cool fifty and kept the giant knife for future missions.
Flip Off A Nun, Go To Hell
I went to public school. My cousin went to catholic school. Little Italian boys that went to public school had to go to CCD classes every Sunday and learn about baby Jesus. I didn’t like my CCD teacher. She was a miserable, angry nun. But I promised my mother I would go and not destroy the woman just for fun. Because I sure could’ve. After I received Confirmation I was done with CCD forever! That same nun went on to teach my cousin’s 8th grade class at his catholic school. One night we were running around the block and she was in her car at the light. She rolled down her window and told us that we looked like we were up to no good and to go home immediately. I didn’t like that. So I didn’t say a word. I just looked at her, smiled and gave her the finger. The look on her face was priceless as the light turned and she had to drive away. My cousin was all like “Are you nuts?! She’s still my teacher! Now I’m going to get in trouble at school Monday. And you’re going to hell for sure.” He got detention when he went to school that Monday. It remains to be seen if I’m going to hell yet.
“We should drown someone in it.”
At the corner of the street was “The Ice Factory.” It was exactly that. A giant warehouse that made ice for businesses. It was there for years. At some point they put in a spring water booth. And that was exactly that too. A booth that had 3 coin operated water dispensers that would fill up your empty water gallons for 50 cents. Eastie had shitty water because that booth always had people getting water. My cousin and I made it our personal vendetta to flood that booth. Preferably with one of our many enemies in it. We failed every time. We could only manage to jam the water dispensers so they would keep running while some illegal drunk immigrant was in there trying to get some free water and while holding the doors shut trying to drown him! But the place always filled up with only like 3 inches of water until we got tired and gave up and let him out. We’re still upset until this day that we never found a way to drown someone in that damn spring water booth.
God Bless America!
Speaking of trying to kill people. One kid we really hated was Rodney. He used to tell the guys that ran the boys club around the corner that we were being punks and we would get kicked out. Sure we were being punks but nobody likes a rat. Nobody! In Eastie it’s like the 4th of July every day the week of 4th of July. People come out and set off fireworks all over. The streets look like Iraq! So we figured it was time to get revenge on Rodney. His family lived on the same street as my great aunt & uncle/my cousin’s grandparents. We saw Rodney on the steps with his mother and grandmother one night watching fireworks. My cousin and I had one goal. Hit him hard, hit him fast. We threw our masks and black vigilante gear on. We ran down the street and tackled him in front of his mother and grandmother. We pummeled him with lightening fists of fury and ran the hell out of there. As we ran away I jumped up into the air and snatched their American flag as a token of our victory. It was awesome. USA! USA! USA! Years later in college we went to UNO’s with my cousin’s girlfriend and her friend. Rodney was our waiter. He didn’t want to take our order and told all the waitresses what we did that night. Because we could see him throwing punches in the air and then jumping up to grab an invisible flag telling the story of that epic night. My cousin’s girlfriend said “That story he’s telling right now to those waitresses is something you two did isn’t it?” It sure was. We smiled, got up and left. Because they were spitting in our food for sure.
The Accountant
Our greatest arch enemy during this era was a man my cousin and I simply called “The Accountant.” Around the corner was a small office where one man did the taxes of the people. He was old enough and he was our biggest target. Especially during tax season when he was there all hours into the night. He never did anything to us but we were assholes and had to entertain ourselves somehow. For those 3 years that we would go out around that area we would bother the shit out of that poor man. We would put our masks on and creep around the office banging on the windows with our mini-bats while popping our heads up scaring him into locking the door and calling the police. We would steal his mail so he didn’t get the checks from his clients. We found his power box and would cut his electricity causing him to lose all his work. One night “The Accountant” had enough. Our plan was simple. Get him out of the office to chase one of us while the other stole all his files. I know. Awful. But we were jerks. He stepped out to grab dinner and when he came back we tried to follow him into the office and he definitely saw us because he turned around in the doorway screaming like a mad man! We didn’t know what to do! That old man chased us like 5 blocks. He almost caught us too! Until he grabbed his chest and fell over. We almost killed him that night without really trying to kill him. He was in the street defeated. We walked over feeling really bad. “Are you taking a heart attack buddy? We’re sorry. Don’t die. We’ll stop driving you crazy now ok?” He looked up and only mustered “Thank you.” We went back to the house. After that tax season “The Accountant” never came back again. We retired our vigilante Saturday nights after that. Because then I got my license. New game bitches!!!
So those were my vigilante years. Again, this is the same guy who later went on to live in an Asshole Era. Don’t act surprised. Just enjoy the crazy show people.
Until next time. Always take it there.
T
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