Noble Prologue.

 

They say you only miss the golden days once they’re long gone, once the light starts fading from the photographs and the boys in them start to look less familiar. I suppose that’s true. The memories hit hardest when the world gets slower.  When I’m shaving before work and I see the scar above my lip and remember how Francie gave it to me with a rock, right before apologising with a melted ice cheesecake from the bakery dumpster. Or when I see a pigeon flapping across the power lines and feel my stomach turn over, instinctively, the way it always did when Scooter tried to make me hold his pet bird.

I don’t know what you believe in. Fate? God? Nothing?  But I believe we all believe in memory. And this story? It’s all I’ve got left of them.

Francie Allard, Lambert Lee, Scooter Moore even Gustavo Mendes, they were my brothers, even if we didn’t share a single drop of blood. We came from Maverick. A street, a code, a neighborhood in Boston that was built on concrete and statistical deaths.  Back then, in 1963 we thought we were untouchable. We were wrong.

Maverick was the kind of place where dreams got eaten alive.

You could see it in the broken glass on the sidewalks, the rusted bikes abandoned in alleyways, the tired women dragging their screaming kids home from church in wrinkled dresses and cheap heels. You could hear it in the drunken shouting at night or in the gasp between a slammed door and the first slap. It wasn’t pretty but it was home. And if you were lucky and I mean really lucky, you found people who made it bearable.

Francie Allard, Lambert Lee. Scooter Moore. 

Lambert Lee was the oldest of the group: seventeen and the leader of my friends. He was the realist among us, suspicious of other’s intentions, never trusting the words of those he didn’t know. It was Lambert who kept us grounded, who kept us safe. He never played practical jokes on those he perceived as weaker and he always rose to defend anyone he believed unable to defend themselves. It was harder to make Lambert laugh than the others. He was the eldest and as such had to maintain a degree of maturity. He was the first among us to kiss a girl, Donna White, a half Irish girl, yet he was the last in our crew to learn to ride a bike. It was Lambert who kept the older, aggressive boys of the neighbourhood at bay, often with nothing more than a stare or frown their way, that ability reinforced his position as our leader, a title he accepted but never acknowledged. It was simply his role, his place. He’d been a part of Thiago Martin’s gang since he was eleven, running drop offs and pickups. A future in crime seemed to loom over his head but Lambert always wanted more. He dreamed of becoming a newspaper writer, something thought to be  impossible. He smoked constantly and  and he never liked anyone outside our circle

If Lambert was the brains behind the group, Francie Allard was our soul. He was a gentle lover and he shared anything he had, he was never jealous of another’s gift or good luck. His nickname was Moon because he was born on the full moon, bounded together, which most would argue wasn’t a bad thing, however for many more years to come, I always wished he had been born any other night. The moon denied him eternity. A life of greatness to be cut short. He was extroverted and played dozens of street games: Basketball, Baseball, Football, a game many believed he would play professionally in. I could never think of Francie without a smile on his face, his eyes twinkling with mischief, even if it came at his expense. The only time I saw a hint of sadness to him was his dog Tony, named after the player Tony Romeo died. While Lambert seemed older than his years, Francie seemed far younger than seventeen with his weakness and his eagerness to please. He had a fast tongue, was swift with a comeback and never forgot a joke. Francie never wanted to be leader of the group, he left that to Lambert Lee despite being the glue that held us together and  most definitely he wouldn’t of wanted to be the first to die, I don’t think he would have  been comfortable with the burden. It was with his personality to go along, to watch, to listen, to comfort, to live and always, to laugh. He was the most handsome among us and often used a smile to remove himself from trouble. Francie’s laughter was infectious, his boyish charm irresistible but beneath that exterior, he had a vulnerable fragile aura that we didn’t quite understand, even though it would take him from us by the end of 1963. He was proof that a life time of love didn’t need evidence.

Even though he was only four months younger than Francie, he was the smallest of our group and was nicknamed Scooter, i never found out what his real name was. He was shy and quiet but had the sharpest sense of humour out of any of us. He loved Ballet and many girlish things such as broadway and country music. He was our heart, an innocent surrounded by a violence he could not prevent. He loved to draw, sketching dresses and suits onto thin pages of lined paper. He would spend afternoons down at the parks feeding pigeons, where he even befriended one. Scooter earned his anxious disciplined nature from the hands of his mother’s various suitors, an endless stream of men who knew only one way to handle a teenage boy. He rarely spoke about what happened but we all knew what took place, He concealed the ugliness of his home life behind smiles and laughs. He never set out to hurt, there was too much of that in his life. Scooter, more than any of us was always in need of someone else’ s smile. To live through other people’s joy. During the late nights well others laid snug in their beds, Scooter laid in hotel rooms with any woman or man who would spare him a dime. I would always remember him as the bravest among us, though I never got to vocalise that thought out loud, I hope he knew it.

And then, there was me, Spencer Lewis. I was the youngest of my friends by two years and yet they always treated me as an equal. We had so much else in common that once I was accepted, my age never became an issue. Even apart of a group, I was the one who never quite fit into Maverick. My parents, Darla and Arthur Lewis, were far more stable than my friend’ s families. They owned an apartment and sent me to a private boarding school up north. I loved mechanics, the theatre and spent hours reading poetry novels, imagining myself in the beauty of worlds far removed from the violence outside my door. truthfully  I  had no business belonging there, except for some reason I did. Maybe because my friends decided I was worth keeping. 

Lambert always said the world didn’t make sense unless you looked at it sideways. Francie said the world never made sense and that was the fun of it. Scooter just wanted to dance through it.  And me? I was trying to find something good in it. Something holy.

We were between fifteen  and seventeen when it all happened. But time worked different back then. You grew up fast if you wanted to survive. By fourteen you were already a man or you were dead.

Francie Allard was sixteen  but he  looked about fourteen. Pale, wiry, black hair always falling in his eyes, too many jokes in his mouth to keep track of.  He was the only one of us who could make Lambert laugh when he didn’t want to, which was saying something. Francie was a mess. Undiagnosed dyslexia, malnourished, couldn’t read a sentence to save his life. But on the street? He was gold. Pure gold. Baseball, football, street hockey, you name it. Francie could outrun any boy and charm any girl. Except Jane Beau. He loved her. Since he was eight. She didn’t love him back. Not the way he wanted. But he never stopped trying. Francie always wanted more, more time, more games, more sugar, more laughter.

The problem was, his body didn’t want more. Not for long. He started coughing that summer. We laughed it off. Said it was the cigarettes. But by autumn, he couldn’t run a block without gasping. By December he was dead. Tuberculosis. Sixteen. Gone.

They buried him on New Year’s Eve. I still can’t look at fireworks without thinking of him.

Lambert Lee  had this way of looking at you that made your stomach twist, like he saw the ugliest part of you and didn’t even flinch. He’d run away from home at eleven and got caught up in Thiago Martin’s gang, the biggest in Maverick. Lambert wasn’t scared of anything. Not even death. But he was terrified of dogs. And of losing Francie. When Francie died, Lambert changed. He got real quiet. Stopped reading his horror comics. Stopped smiling.

They drafted him into the military in 64. Sent him to Vietnam. Said he’d be a chaplain. Said he was good with words. He didn’t come back. They never told us how he died. Just that he was eighteen. And he was gone.

Scooter Moore was smaller than all of us. Strange kid. Sweet kid. Always sketching dresses in his notebook, always humming country songs. He loved ballet. Loved Broadway. Loved birds, for Christ’s sake. He named the  pigeon he befriended down at the park Yoghurt. People didn’t get Scooter. Hell, we didn’t always get him either. But we loved him. Lambert protected him like a little brother. Francie called him Pretty Boy even though Scooter always blushed and looked away.  Scooter’s home life was hell. His mother’s boyfriends locked him in closets. He didn’t talk about it. We just knew. He was arrested in 67 for burglary. Trying to steal a coat, they said. No one bailed him out.

In 71, they found his body behind a club. He’d been beaten. Because he was queer. Or at least that’s what they said. Scooter didn’t even know what he was. But the world decided for him. He was the bravest of us all. And he died alone.

In the end I was alone. I was fourteen  when Francie died. Sixteen when Lambert left. Twenty one when Scooter’s name showed up in the paper. By then I’d already started smoking. Already married. Already working cases as a rookie homicide officer in Boston. I’d see boys like us getting thrown into the system and I’d think of Scooter. See bodies in alleys, think of Lambert. Hear a cough and see Francie’s hands shaking. People told me I was lucky to survive. But survival doesn’t always feel like victory. Sometimes it’s just silence.

I named my son Francis. I tell my daughters stories about the boys with comic books and football dreams. Sometimes I sit in the theatre alone and watch the same ballet Scooter loved. Sometimes I pray harder than I need to, just so I can still feel Lambert’s voice in my head, telling me God was a man with blood on his hands.

Most nights, I just remember. Because someone has to.

This is our story. Four boys. One city. One year. We had dreams bigger than our bodies. We had love bigger than our hearts could hold. But America  doesn’t let boys grow old. And so I tell you this before the world forgets. Before their names vanish. Before the moon takes me too.