Richard Farrell - Whats Left of Us

T he Acre wasnt pretty. Youd never see it on the postcards sold at the corner drugstores in downtown Lowell, Massachusetts. The Acre wasnt big. Nobody had grass in their front yardsjust black tar that formed the alleys separating the houses. The Acre wasnt rich. Most families had only one set of good clothes set aside for Sundays Catholic Mass. The Acre was entirely segregated from the rest of my birth city. But it was still the best section of Lowell to grow up in if you were Irish.

The Acre was nothing more than a two-mile triangle of Irish who had formed a wall of self-protection. The homes were mostly triple-deckerscold-water flats. Irish families had settled in Lowell years before to work in mills or build canals. All of them had escaped the horror of starvation on the streets of Ireland and found their way to Massachusetts. Compared to the Irish Famine, Lowell offered a promise of prosperity.

Smack dab in the middle of the Acre stood St. Patricks Church where my uncle Joe Farrell had hoisted the steeple during the Roaring Twenties. It was the same St. Patricks Church that my grandfather, Richard Farrell, checked the doors of every evening at midnight as he walked his beat as a Lowell police officer, the same St. Patricks Church where my father and mother brought me and my brother every Sunday as kids, where Id received the blessed sacraments of Baptism, Confession, First Communion, and Holy Confirmation.

St. Patricks School was directly opposite the churchs parking lot. Two generations of the Acres children had been educated there, from poor to poorest. It didnt matter how much money you had. There were only two prerequisitesyou had to be Irish and Catholic. It was staffed by Notre Dame nuns who were known for their propensity to ask questions after theyd already used the ruler on your knuckles. The principal, St. Claire Joseph, expelled me in the seventh grade for entering after hours because my friends and I had to use the bathroom.

Adam Street cut a line down the center of the Acre and separated the school from the North Common. The North Common was the place where my father forced me to practice walking heel to toe so I wouldnt be a cripple. For the Irish elders whod sit for hours on a warm summer night talking about the old days, it was more than a giant park. It was their St. Stevens Green in Dublin. In the early days, the North Common hosted football games on Sundays in the fall. Two to three hundred people would show up to watch the Irish kids play the Greek kids who had settled in the lower Acre. It was always a bloodbath. There was no football, just full-contact tackle with an old gray sweat sock stuffed full of leaves.

But by March 1987, the Acre that I remember was no more. The Irish moved out in the seventies. Some became educated and wanted more for their families. The majority was swallowed up by white flight. They moved their families to predominantly white suburbs not more than a few miles from the Acre. Then Puerto Rico began importing their criminals to Lowell. The Acre was poor, old, and close to downtownthe perfect place for drug trafficking and prostitution.

I am a heroin addict. My life is limited to three concerns. The first thing I gotta figure out every morning is how to get a bag of heroin into my arm no more than ten minutes after I wake up. If I fail, Im dope-sick. The cramps inside my lower stomach go on a full-scale attack. I cant stand. I cant walk. The diarrhea squirts out like a water hose. But Im damn good at getting high now. I hardly ever stay dope-sick long.

The second issue is drawing a hot shot or a beat-bag. The majority of heroin in Lowell originates from New York City. Puerto Rican gangs bring it here by the kilo. The drug dealers on Adam Street who package the heroin from one-pound bricks into grams and half-grams are no Einsteins. They cut the heroin or add fake shit to stretch quantity for profit. Some dealers cut it in half and double their money. Most use quinine, which gives the bitter taste, and an Italian baby laxative called Manatol because its fine white granules have almost the identical weight of pure heroin.