Thugs

It was 1975 and an old high school friend was visiting from Boston, full of bluster and fear, rejected by graduate school and a girl named Michael. He slept on our couch and seemed to be counting on me for older brothering, even though we were the same age. I left him to go to work during the day and he holed up in our apartment, timidly stepping out for food or air. New York in the ‘70s was brittle, affordable, dirty, pre-Rudy and still a haven for starving artists and a winning group of grim Yankees, tough and unforgiving but willing to die for each other, Munson and Guidry, Jackson and Chambliss. The city was safe if you followed the rules. My friend came with tales of Boston, a city without rules. He had been mugged two weeks before, beaten badly near Harvard Square by a gang of roving thugs who simply wanted to rough up a college boy; he turned a corner, they surrounded him, mocked him, beat him with their fists, broke his glasses. Over the years our friendship cooled, as he had learned to be a thug himself of a kind, wealthy, smug, preachy, with a new bluster and a swagger of insecurity. And he never left Boston, married safe and unhappily so no one named Michael could hurt him again.