Isaac Fitzgerald - Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional

For my family, both chosen and those who didnt have a choice

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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For Young Readers

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CONTENTS

When stray dogs finally catch you in the alley,

You dont consider their point of view

But when the wounds are healed, and the scars are shiny,

Sometimes, then, you do

John Darnielle, As Many Candles as Possible

My parents were married when they had me, just to different people.

Thats the way I open every story when Im asked about my childhood. I was a child of passion! A happy little accident. Or, put another way, I was born of sin: a mistake in human form, a bomb aimed perfectly to blow up both my parents lives.

My mother grew up in a big old red house in North Central Massachusetts: a hill town surrounded by river towns, all of them now emptied of hill people and river people, their main streets boarded up after most of the industrial jobs moved down south, before moving out of the country entirely.

The house dated back to the 1700s, set on a farm on an ancient turnpike. My mother grew up there among sheep and chickens and geese and even a few horses and a goat, her parents flinty and unforgiving people who loved the land. My mother worked hard, went to a respectable college in Maine, married a Unitarian minister. They had a little boy, Joel. Her life was idyllic, apart from the restlessness in her heart.

My father was born to mill workers in New Bedford, Massachusetts. In the 1800s the town had been one of the worlds largest and most important whaling ports. Melville mentioned it in the opening pages of Moby-Dick . You can still visit the Seamens Bethel today and admire its bow-shaped pulpit. You should know, however, that the church installed it only after Moby-Dick was publishedthe image an invention of Melvillesand that the novel itself was mostly written far from the sea, closer to where my mother grew up, in the whale-shaped hills of Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

My mothers family didnt have much, and my fathers family had less. New Bedford, like any good fishing port, was a rough town back then, and when he was growing up my father made trouble the way children in rough towns do, but he was also the first of his family to go to college, after which he got a job selling textbooks and eventually married his high school girlfriend. They had a daughter, Kerry.

My parents lives mirrored one anothers in many waysboth had married their high school sweethearts; both had kids already; both had nice lives that they could have kept on living until they died. Both were smart, itchy, unsteady people who had read too many books, if such a thing is possible, and Im pretty sure it is.

When the whaling industry began to fall apart, many of the whalers moved west to California, hoping to find their fortune. I mention this only because before they met each other, both of my parents did the same: moved to California, looking for a better life. But both returned to the East Coast without discovering whatever kind of gold it was that theyd been seeking. Years later, believing I was the first in my family to do so, I would do the same. Only to find that in an attempt to escape my parents shadows I had simply been following their stained and tattered map.

My parents met at divinity school, which is a pretty funny way to start an affair. I could add that to the story next time I tell it, although its also not funny, especially to my parents. Divinity school wasnt a joke to them. They entered as two separate people, both in their thirties, confused and lonely and searching for some kind of salvationbut they wanted to find it the hard way.

They met in an Old Testament class taught by an older professor named Dr. HolladayI called him Doc Holliday, like the cowboywith whom they would eventually end up living when I was a baby when they had no home to call their own and zero support from their familiesmy fathers having none to give and my mothers so disapproving that they chose to withhold it all.

I believe it was my mothers only affair. I know it wasnt my fathers. They would tell their spouses they were going on spiritual retreatsthen abscond to the White Mountains in New Hampshire to spend time with one another, camping to save money.

My mother would eventually break it off. She had a son and a husband with a good job and a house. A family. The beginnings of a life. This was just a panic fling, she told herself: one final push against the life that was expected of her before she settled down.

My father, not new to this game, talked my mother into one last trip to the mountains.

In what can only be described as the dictionary definition of TMI, I know that both my parents were using birth control during this trip and that despite their precautionary measures I was conceived on top of a mountain. Mount Carrigain. I know this because my mother told me. Telling a child at a very young age, whom youre raising in the Catholic Church, that he was a miracle conception is a choice. Messy parenting, maybe, but it makes for another good story.

My mother debated telling her husband that I was his. She didnt know what to doshe and my father had broken up, after all, and he was predominantly out of the picture.

On the cover of my baby book the name WILLIAM ISAAC HELLEN is lovingly embroidered in red cloth letters onto dark-blue patterned fabric. The first name for my father, the middle name for me, and the last my mothers maiden name. My whole life has been spent with teachers and officials asking, William do you prefer Bill? Or Will? Or Isaac, Id respond to their surprise. And then add breezily, My mother didnt understand first names.

Eventually my father came back on the scene, his wife having grown weary of his infidelities. After a year living with the kindly Dr. Holladay in his cramped apartment, our little trio finally landed at the Catholic Worker, a socialist Catholic charity that housed the homeless and fed the hungry. Soon my parents were a part of their community, and so was I. We were living in the South End of Boston, first on Dartmouth Street when I was a baby, then on Tremont Street as a toddler, and finally at John Leary Housea low-income apartment building run by the Catholic Worker on Massachusetts Avenue. It was called Mass Ave for short, and as a child, I used to think our street was named after a church service, not the state we lived in.

I loved those early years. I loved growing up in Boston. My father would go running along the Charles River, as I biked beside him, pumping my little legs in an attempt to keep up. Or hed take me to Fenway Park. This was the eighties, before the Sox were a winning team and before Fenway was almost constantly sold out. My dad would buy standing-room tickets, the cheapest you could get. Come the second or third inning, hed have us in seats down by the field, so close you could smell the grass. Sometimes the seats belonged to season ticket holders who hadnt shown up; sometimes they were just empty. But if the ticket holders ever did arrive, or security got curious, my pa would turn and say, Oh, Im very sorry. Its just that the seats were open and, well, its my sons first game. We almost always got to stay in our seats, or would sometimes be ushered to even better ones.