Ideas of Home

I just finished a memoir by Isaac Fitzgerald called Dirtbag, Massachusetts. At first I figured the guy was around my age. He talks about living the first eight years of his life in Boston’s South End. His was not the ultra posh, fashionable neighborhood that it is today. Nope, it’s the down at heel, pre-gentrification South End, back when it was affordable but definitely not known for being safe.

Fitzgerald’s South End was the one I met on moving here in 1980. It was in the extremely early stages of gentrification. Artists, musicians, gay men and other adventurous souls with bucks were moving in, buying up and rehabbing the old, once beautiful townhouses and brick factory buildings (for lofts)—turning the area into an ultra hip, expensive, safe neighborhood. By the mid ‘90s the place had become wholly unaffordable unless you had mondo spondulix or won the public housing lottery. For me, on both counts...no.

Neither had Fitzgerald (born in 1983) and his parents. They lived in a homeless shelter associated with the Cathedral of Holy Cross until his mother took him out to live in way rural north central Massachusetts—less than an hour’s drive from where my family had lived for one slim year in the late/mid ‘60s.

I could relate to so much of what he wrote, particularly how he never felt at home. His childhood home was fraught with violence both physical and emotional as well as neglect (me? Hard same). After he was off, living on his own, he found a sense of home in the dive bars he worked and hung out in—they felt safe. Similarly, when I was in my 20s and living in Kenmore Square, The Rat felt like—maybe not home but definitely a very comfortable, welcoming place to sit, have dinner and a beer before heading to my shithole basement apartment behind Fenway Park.

On Nov. 15, 1997, the Rat went down in a blaze of semi-glorious, gnarly self-destruction. Hardcore punk band Gang Green closed the night. Parts of the wall came down, torn off in pieces, tossed helter-skelter. Singer Chris Doherty exhorted the crowd to rip the place apart, barking "I can't tell anybody to calm the f--- down 'cause no one's gonna get banned for life!” (source)

Why wasn’t I there? For as much as The Rat felt like home to me, I hadn’t been there in years. By the time I was in my 30s, my second homes were in Cambridge’s Central Square—The MiddleEast and T.T. the Bear’s.

By the by, rent for a one bedroom apartment in the South End now runs anywhere from $2500 to $4500 per month. Christ almighty, who can afford to pay that kind of bread? Are they all bankers and engineers? Anesthesiologists and corporate lawyers? Airline pilots and CEOs? Where do the baristas, daycare workers, layout/design and press ops live?