MangoZeen

A short story by Peter Nolan Smith

Published PINDELYBOYZ 2005

Teachers in the 1960s spent countless hours instructing their students about free will. Every voluntary act was supposed to shape the dull clay of our destiny and parents created a land of ‘no’ bordered by fences of ‘don’ts’ to guide us to an untroubled future. No kissing. No drinking beer. No rock. No long hair. No dancing too close. The 10 commandments expanded into an ever-shifting universe of good versus evil almost impossible to interpret once you were beyond the reach of parental guidance.

LOUIE LOUIE became #1. Boys and girls made out at the Mattapan Oriental Theater during Saturday matinees. Our hair crept over ears and shirt collars like uncut lawns. Our parents responded to these harbingers of rebellion by grounding us, banning friendships, and declaring certain places off-limits. We were basically good kids, however no temptation proved irresistible than the Quincy Quarries outside of Boston.

For nearly a century these stone works had provided building material for the cities of New England. The granite helped lighthouses to withstand winter storms. The first railroad in America had been built to extricate the carved blocks from quarry. None of this mattered to us, since skyscrapers were constructed of glass and steel, not stone.

The workers were laid off and the water pumps shut. Water rising the springs flooded the quarries to a few feet below the ground and soon teenagers from the South Shore had a swimming hole faraway from the watchful eyes of parents, teachers, and police. We called the Hole of Heaven.

Adults thought otherwise and called for action. Quincy city officials responded to the pressure and devised various ways to shut down the quarries. They dumped old telephone poles into the water. We used them for logrolling contests or wired them together for sunning rafts.

In August 1963 a selectman from the shipyard suggested spilling refuse oil from ships into the quarries. Three tankers were parked overnight, intending to unleash their foul black liquid into the main pool with the dawn. The quarries seemed doomed by pollution.

That evening I was observing a meteor shower behind our split-level. Bats flapped their wings in the summer night and the hum of cars on Route 128 emanated from another planet. The suburban silence was shattered by a whooshing boom and a flaming mushroom cloud roiled over the woods. Seconds later two more fireballs scorched the night sky.

The next day’s newspapers reported vandals had torched the trucks. Those loving the Quarries recognized these anonymous arsonists as patriots in the struggle to preserve a time-honored rite of jumping from the Rooftop’s cliff into the spring-fed water as a passage from childhood to manhood on the South Shore.

Our parents had forbidden the act, our teachers had warned of the danger, and the police chased us from the premises. We were twelve and a little wild. Their collective disapproval was all the encouragement twelve-old boys needed on a warm summer day in 1964 to climb Rooftop’s cliff.

While watching the divers of Acapulco on Wide World of Sports, we had boasted, “We can do that.” yet the sheer drop of fifty feet paralyzed us on the slant slab. The older teenagers on the ledge clucked out calls of chicken and my best friend, Chuckie Manzi, said, “There are five of us, right?”

We nodded meekly and he said, “I’ll go first, you’re second, then you, you, and you. We yell out ‘Geronimo’. Are you with me?”

None of us had come to not jump and we shouted, “Yes.”

Without warning Chuckie threw himself off the cliff. His cry of ‘Geronimo’ died with a splash into the water. He shouted my name and I ran until only air was under my feet. I plummeted off-balance and smacked into the water, ready try it again, and the gleam on Chuckie’s face confirmed he was with me 100%.

With a shriek our friends appeared high overhead suspended in mid-air before falling in arcing trajectories. One landed on his side, another on his belly, and the third cannon-balled into the water. They broke surface and we howled for joy.

We had done it and we did it again and again throughout that summer and 1964, 1965 and then 1966.

By 1967 America wasn’t the same America as in 1964.

San Francisco hippies were dropping acid and longhairs in the East Village demonstrated against the war fought by boys from the South Shore. Cities were burning in the US and Asia. None of us at the quarries were old enough to understand a change was in the air, for that year the South Shore lived a legend about three boys acting as one.

Donnie, Lee, and Eddie.

Their names were on every teenager’s lips. How they had stopped a fight at the River Club in Mattapan. How they were the best dancers at the Surf Nantasket. That nobody dressed sharper and no one kissed better. They were too good to be true and I suspected they were a myth. I was wrong.

Teenagers from all over the South Shore hung out at the Clamshack. My girlfriend, Kyla Rolla, told me they were at Wollaston Beach. ”I saw Donnie Lee, and Eddie with my own eyes.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Then go see for yourself.” She handed me the keys to her sister’s Vespa. I pulled on my football helmet.  Wollaston Beach was 15 minutes away. I parked the Vespa by the curb and asked a girl in a bikini, “Have you seen Donnie, Lee, and Eddie?”

She lifted her hand to point, I never saw where. A fist smacked into my head. It didn’t really hurt. I was still wearing the helmet.

I wheeled around to face six older teenagers in leather jackets and pointy-toed boots. They were ‘rats’ and hated anyone dressing ‘mod’ like me. Chinos, a Sta-press shirt, hair over your ears were stupid reasons to fight. I would hear stupider later in my life.

“Take off your helmet.” The biggest one had a tattoo on his forearm. It was an anchor.

“Why?” Football helmets were good in a fight.

“Because I said so.” he was used to people doing what he said.

“Okay.” A crowd was gathering around us.

“Who invited you to this beach? I’ll tell you. No one. Your type is unwelcome in Wollaston. Now you’re going get what you deserve.”

My beatings in 8th grade had taught me that if an aggressor spoke about fighting, he was usually serious. I clocked the greaser with my helmet and he collapsed onto the sidewalk like a jellyfish.

His friends rat-packed me in revenge.

I ducked, bobbed, and weaved through a medley of punches and kicks. One blow rocked me in the temple. I stumbled to the ground and a boot to the ribs knocked the wind out of my lungs. This was worst than 8th Grade.

Abruptly the beating stopped and an older teen helped me to my feet, asking, “Are you okay, kid?”

“I think so.” My nose was bleeding, but unbroken.

Two of my attackers were lifting their fallen friend from the pavement, while the others stuck their hands in their pockets, as if they had been onlookers.

The girl in the bikini stood under the arm of a tall, tanned, muscular Italian teen.

I thanked him and he shrugged with utter cool. “I didn’t like the odds. My name is Donny Lianetti.”

“D-d-Donny Lianetti?” I was stunned by the miracle of three people melting into one body.

“Have we met before?” He squinted with suspicion.

“No, no, I thought you were three people. Donnie, Lee, and Eddie.” I lifted a finger with each name.

He clapped me on the shoulder. “That’s funny. Donny, Lee, and Eddie. Maybe we’ll see you around.”

I saw him at the Surf Nantasket, Paragon Park, The Rexarcana in Marshfield, and several other teenage hangouts. He waved each time and continued on his way. From another male this might have been an insult, but I was happy with any attention Donny Lianetti showed in my direction, for his fame was rocketing that summer with a series of swan dives from the quarry cliffs.

Each successful plunge reinforced his aura of divinity and we figured he would stop at Rooftop. He didn’t and announced Donny announced a dive from Brewster’s rail bridge.

On the 4th of July.

For our brave men in uniform.

At noon.

That 4th was a warm day.

Slightly after Eleven O’clock Chuckie, Kyla, and I began the long walk through the woods to the quarries. On the way we greeted kids from other neighborhoods. I had a reputation for protesting the war. Today no one was speaking about Vietnam, the Red Sox, or their summer vacation. We spoke about Donny. He was our hero. Some stories might have been lies. I proudly retained yellowing bruises to prove mine was true.

By the time we mounted the rocks to Brewster’s rim, our number neared a hundred. The crowd was mostly boys and young men. Chuck’s sister, Addy, was with Dennis Halley. Several of her girlfriends were hanging by the bridge over the quarry. They had come to see Donnie Lianetti demonstrate that teenagers don’t die.
Peering over the edge, I gazed at an uneven wall slanting to the bottom. The water appeared a mile away and I gulped from fear.

If anyone could survive such a dive, it was Donnie Lianetti. He appeared on the bridge in cutoff shorts. We clapped wildly and the girls’ collective sigh confirmed he was as much their dream date as he was our hero.

Raising his arms to quiet us, Donnie spoke with a clear voice echoing off the steep stone, “Thank you for coming to honor our boys overseas. If you don’t mind, give me a little quiet. You guys ready?”

We looked at each other, but his words had been directed far below to the floating figures acting as his safety crew. It was at this moment that we heard sirens of the police coming to stop Donnie. They were too late and Chuckie asked, “He isn’t gonna dive, is he?”

“No way,” the greaser beside me said through an exhale of cigarette smoke. “No one’s that crazy.”

Donnie pushed off from the steel beam, his arms spread as featherless wings to guide his headfirst plunge. We held their breaths and his body accelerated to become an incoming ICBM. Halfway down he must have realized the risk in diving and tried to correct for a feet-first entry.

He ran out of space.

A huge plume exploded from the water and the crowd groaned with the collective memory of a painful belly flop, although landing on your stomach from a hundred and fifty feet was a matter of life or death.

“See, I told you he was chicken to dive,” the greaser said with a smirk.

We ignored his insult. Our eyes were riveted on the surface. Donnie had yet to re-appear. His friends frantically clawed to the point of impact and dove under the water. When they bobbed up with Donnie, the crowd cheered and our hero raised his hand in triumph.
The arrival of the police cut short our celebration. I grabbed Kyla’s hand and we scattered into the woods, leaving the quarry as deserted as it was thirty-three years in the future.

While Donnie Lianetti and his friends had escaped, his name had faded from fame, as we turned our worship to Hendrix or Morrison. In 1970 I grew my hair and moved into a collegiate commune in Allston. One morning I was hitchhiking on Commonwealth Avenue and a Cadillac stopped in Kenmore Square.

The brunette behind the wheel was beautiful. Her longhaired passenger huddled against the door in an OD slouch. They were a strange couple. Crossing Brighton Avenue he turned around and said, “You’re the guy who thought I was three people.”

“Donnie?” His face was twisted on one side and he was losing his hair. Our idol had fallen to earth hard. “What happened?”

“You must have seen my great dive. This is the reward I’ve been living with. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not angry. My father sued Quincy and with the settlement I’m set for life. I can walk and Sheila loves me. We have two kids. So don’t say, “Sorry.” I heard enough of them to last a lifetime.”

Donnie Lianetti settled into his seat with a pained sigh. “Hey, tell Sheila how handsome I was.”

“He was a God.”

“He still is in his own small way.” She rubbed his head like she worshipped for other reasons than we had.

“Thanks, we’ll be seeing you around.”

I left the car and Donnie Lianetti vanished forever.

I finished college and moved to New York. I traveled the world, living in Paris, Germany, Mexico, and Bali. People said I was a man without a country. They were wrong. I knew exactly where was my home and early on the morning of July 4, 2000 I deserted my East Village apartment for New England.

The taxi drive to Penn Station was quick. The national holiday had emptied the streets. The north-bound Amtrak train made good time along the Connecticut shore and arrived at the route 128 Station on time. My father was waiting by his car. For a man nearing 80 he looked good.

“You want me to drive?” I asked, having heard about his recent accident. The car showed no sign of damage.

“I’m fine. Get in the car.” While driving through the town cemetery to visit the grave of my mother and youngest brother, a squirrel had jumped onto the path and my father had swerved into the scenery.

“Police said it was a miracle you didn’t hit a gravestone.” I sat in the passenger side and strapped the seat belt over my chest.

“Oh, that.” He started the car and drove out of the station. “I still have good reaction skills for a man my age.”

He proved this statement by beeping the horn at a passing car and cursing the driver as a fool.

Luckily the traffic was light. Everyone was already on the Cape. We breezed over the Sagamore Bridge and reached my older brother’s cottage in Cotuit within seventy minutes. As we pulled into the driveway, my brother checked his watch. “Good time, Speed Racer.”

“Only because there are no squirrels.” My father strained with a groan, pushing himself out of the car. The weight he gained after my mother’s death was a permanent addition to his tall frame. “Any white wine on ice?”

My brother hugged him and then me. “Just opened a bottle especially for you.”

Halfway through his glass of Chardonnay, my father fell asleep on the sofa. My sister-in-law and brother resumed preparations for a pre-fireworks BBQ. “Take the kids to the beach. And drive slowly, the cops love giving tickets for speeding.” 

The town beach was less than five minutes away. Finding a parking space took ten. About two hundred families were spread across the narrow strand of sand. My niece and nephew insisted on planting our umbrella in the center of them. They were almost teenagers and this was more about meeting kids their own age than swimming.

Eating too.

I gave them $10 to hit the refreshment stand and then strode to hightide mark. The water was cold. I picked my way through the stones deposited by the waves. The sandy bottom was a relief. Most swimmers stayed within twenty feet of shore. The drop-off to deeper water was sharp.

I lowered my body into the sea and dove under a small wave. My underwater voyage took me out over my head and I surfaced to see gulls wheeling in the peerless blue sky. Children’s laughter splashed across the water. Adults languished on floats. 90% of them would be lobster red by sunset. It was fun, but not the type of swimming about which I dreamed and I breast-stroked to shore.

Back at the blanket, my niece and nephew were munching on potato chips with their friends. One with sunglasses asked, “How old are you, mister?”

“50.” It sounded old to me too, if you added on the ‘mister’.

“50?” He lifted off his shades. “My old man is fifty and he don’t look like you.”

“That’s because I don’t have any kids.” I didn’t even have a wife. Not even an ex. My only family was the one into which I had been born in 1952 and I loved them. We were all Red Sox fans after all.

For dinner Frank barbecued burgers and dogs. I drank wine with my father. We played cribbage and he won most every game. After Wheel of Fortune he went to sleep. We walked over to the baseball field and sat on the wooden stands, watching fireworks explode over the harbor. The finale had the crowd oohing and aahing like babies after a whiskey toddy.

Several high school friends accepted my brother’s invitation to come back to his house. Our rapid-fire conversation revisited 1960s. Their kids joked that we were dinosaurs. I proved we were only wooly mammoths by playing a CD of British Invasion hits. The teenagers grimaced upon hearing us sing WILD THING. My brother shook his head, when I did an air guitar. Everyone went home slightly before midnight.

“Time for bed.” Frank took the wineglasses out of his wife’s and my hand.

“Party-pooper.” His wife and I were discussing his likeness to George Bush.

“Someone has to mow the lawn in the morning.” He was shorter than the 41st President. I kissed his wife on the cheek and walked down the hallway to the guestroom. My father was lying on his back in the bed nearest the door. His snoring was louder than normal and Frank asked, “You can sleep through that?”

“No problem,” I answered and stuck two wads of wax in my ears. 

“See you in the morning.”

The night air was thick with humidity. Mosquitoes formed different attack patterns to suck my blood. Few got through the strong breeze of the fan set on 3. A stupor should have been my next destination, however my father’s rumbling snorts served as a trumpet call to anyone on this side of the dead. The balls of wax were useless. I kicked at his bed and he cleared his throat with a phlegmatic rumble.

“I wasn’t snoring, was I?”

“Like a truck stuck on ice.”

“Sorry.” He rolled over and regained unconsciousness within seconds.

The snores shook the room and I went out to sleep on the living room couch.  Without a fan the mosquitoes had better luck with their strategies. I wrapped the thin sheet around my body, so that only my nose was unprotected. My mosquitoes showed no mercy.

Slightly before dawn I returned to the guest room. My father’s breathing was silent as a baby after drinking mother’s milk. It took him a couple of minutes to sense I was in the room. He opened his eyes with a series of blinks at the rising sun.

“You sleep good?”

“Like I was on a bed of nails.”

“Probably all the wine you drank.” He squinted at the rising sun.

“Anyone else awake?”

“Just you and me, Pop,” I replied and helped him out of bed.

“Then let’s have breakfast.”

We arrived at the local restaurant slightly before 7am. The NY Times and Boston Globe confirmed no news happens on holiday weekends. An article about the construction on the Central Artery filled four columns and I said, “Says Quincy is using the rubble from the Big Dig for landfill.”

“Yes, the town’s filling the quarries.”

“They can’t do that.” The quarries were reputed to be bottomless.

“If you have as much money as the Big Dig, the impossible is possible. Besides what do you care?” He was no stranger to my concern.

“The quarries are national treasures.” This was a sacrilege to the years of summer fun in their emerald waters. They were on the national heritage trail. It couldn’t be true.

“The town should have closed those death traps long ago.” My father jabbed a finger at the newspaper. “Sixteen people died in the quarries since 1960.”

Undoubtedly the quarries had been a magnet for accidental drownings and drunken mishaps. Many of the stories about the bottomless pits were urban legends, the most famous was of a kid jumping off Shipwreck’s craggy prow and landing on a submerged car. An antenna pierced his arm. This gruesome tale was retold each summer, as if the accident had occurred recently, although its origins were lost in the haze of myths.

“Thousands die on the highways and no one’s closing them.”

“People use the highways.”

“And I swim at the quarries.” Only last year I had leapt off Rooftop to prove I wasn’t old to my nieces and nephews.

“A man your age shouldn’t be doing that.” My father slammed the table. The salt-and-pepper shakers bounced in the air. The other diners turned their heads. They were vacationers with little interest in a heated debate about the Quarries.

I raised my hands in surrender. “You’re right, but I still can’t believe this.”

“Read it again and weep.” My father returned to the Scrabble puzzle, while I scoured the article for the slightest hint of reprieve.

Twenty billions dollars were being spent on 100,000 commuters and the town of Quincy was burying my favorite swimming hole with the excavated dirt from the nation’s largest highway project.

Boston’s congestion could have been more easily solved by giving 25,000 drivers $800,000 to commute with the train or stay at home like Lotto winners. Fewer cars. Less traffic. More roads. More traffic.

My math was illogical to the project planners, or motorists obsessed with a ridiculous need to race to the malls, the fast food chains, and their houses. After breakfast my father told Frank he wanted to go home. My brother begged us to stay. We had been best friends most of our life and now our hours together each year could be counted on fingers instead of stars. I asked my father, “What’s the rush?”

“I like sleeping in my own bed. No one’s saying you can’t stay.”

My brother smiled at my father. “No, if he goes, I won’t worry about his driving off the Sagamore Bridge.”

I kissed my brother and hugged his wife. I’d see them on Labor Day. My father was already in the car. He blew the horn. Almost 80 and he had places to go. The road to Boston was clear. Everyone was making the Fourth a long weekend. My father and I listened to NPR. He rarely dropped below 75. Arriving in our hometown I could tell he was happy. At his age familiar places made him feel good, but I had someplace else to go and said we were out of OJ. “I’ll buy some at the supermarket.”

“I know where you’re really going. You’ll see that the quarries are gone. About time too.” He waddled into the house. “When you come back, we’ll have fried clams at Wollaston. That will make you feel better.”

I loved him most of the time, but hated hearing him say what I suspected was the truth, but I had to find out for myself and drove his car to the other side of the Blue Hills. At the entrance to the quarries water gushed over a granite block.

QUARRY HILLS GOLF COURSE had been carved in Gothic letters.

Only pumping the pits dry could have created this fake waterfall. A Mack truck groaned uphill on a national holiday. Praying the over-laden truck was heading to another destination, I headed to the old footpath leading into Granite Rail.

A chain link fence bannered with NO TRESPASSING signs zigzagged through the woods. No fence or sign was keeping me out.

Scrambling through the underbrush I slipped through a hole cut in the wire and ran to Rooftop. The rusting iron bridge still spanned Brewster’s Quarry. Once a terrible emptiness spread its maw below this structure. A deadly drop, though a summer day in 1967 had proved that ‘impossible’ is only a word for people unwilling to defy death.

No one was jumping into the Million Gallons. Excavated dirt filled the fearsome abyss to the brim. Josephine’s, where girls swam nude, was buried by a mound of stones. Gone were the ‘lungiefish’, the echoing shouts of naked boys, shooting guns at the cliff faces, and drinking beer underage.

Staggered by this destruction I shuffled to Rooftop and stared at the pit. A truck was parked by its edge. Rubble cascaded into the sluggish water. My heart fell over the cliff and tears dropped from my eyes Everything I loved was getting old and going south for the winter.  My father, me, and the quarries. I shut my eyes. South was only a foot away. It was a distance too far for me and I opened my eyes.

Next summer imported grass would cover a par-3 fairway leading to a treacherous green. Some caddie would learn to play the carom off the cliff face like Yaz fielding liners off the Green Monster. The caddie would tell his friends about the kid who jumped off Shipwreck and got his arm pierced by a radio antenna.

And the view from Rooftop would be the same as the first day Chuckie and I had stood on the stone ledge looking over into the chasm. Chuckie lived in Weymouth. I’d call him to join us at the Clambox. We’d order a large box of bellied clams and root beers. We would talk about the quarries, the Surf Nantasket, and Warmouths. The quarries weren’t gone. They were below me and all around the hills. Only the water was missing and if a vandal firebombed the pumps, it will return to the beauty of its past to become the present, which will always be the future.

It sounded crazy, but someone had to act without reason. If not me, then someone to protect those places you love. Shutting off your lights, refusing plastic bags and walking are progress in the ecological revolution, but aren’t enough, otherwise the Neponset Marshes, the Pongkapog Bog, and the Sand Bar in Squantum Bay will join the Quincy Quarries as a fading memories of something good gone forever.

And trust me you wouldn’t like their disappearance and somewhere on the South Shore Donnie Lianetti knows that the Hole of Heaven will exist forever, if only in our memories to be shared with those that come behind us, because some things money can’t buy.
 

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posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 11:23 pm and filed under Fiction - comments feed | leave a comment | trackback url

A short story by Peter Nolan Smith

Published PINDELYBOYZ 2005

Teachers in the 1960s spent countless hours instructing their students about free will. Every voluntary act was supposed to shape the dull clay of our destiny and parents created a land of ‘no’ bordered by fences of ‘don’ts’ to guide us to an untroubled future. No kissing. No drinking beer. No rock. No long hair. No dancing too close. The 10 commandments expanded into an ever-shifting universe of good versus evil almost impossible to interpret once you were beyond the reach of parental guidance.

LOUIE LOUIE became #1. Boys and girls made out at the Mattapan Oriental Theater during Saturday matinees. Our hair crept over ears and shirt collars like uncut lawns. Our parents responded to these harbingers of rebellion by grounding us, banning friendships, and declaring certain places off-limits. We were basically good kids, however no temptation proved irresistible than the Quincy Quarries outside of Boston.

For nearly a century these stone works had provided building material for the cities of New England. The granite helped lighthouses to withstand winter storms. The first railroad in America had been built to extricate the carved blocks from quarry. None of this mattered to us, since skyscrapers were constructed of glass and steel, not stone.

The workers were laid off and the water pumps shut. Water rising the springs flooded the quarries to a few feet below the ground and soon teenagers from the South Shore had a swimming hole faraway from the watchful eyes of parents, teachers, and police. We called the Hole of Heaven.

Adults thought otherwise and called for action. Quincy city officials responded to the pressure and devised various ways to shut down the quarries. They dumped old telephone poles into the water. We used them for logrolling contests or wired them together for sunning rafts.

In August 1963 a selectman from the shipyard suggested spilling refuse oil from ships into the quarries. Three tankers were parked overnight, intending to unleash their foul black liquid into the main pool with the dawn. The quarries seemed doomed by pollution.

That evening I was observing a meteor shower behind our split-level. Bats flapped their wings in the summer night and the hum of cars on Route 128 emanated from another planet. The suburban silence was shattered by a whooshing boom and a flaming mushroom cloud roiled over the woods. Seconds later two more fireballs scorched the night sky.

The next day’s newspapers reported vandals had torched the trucks. Those loving the Quarries recognized these anonymous arsonists as patriots in the struggle to preserve a time-honored rite of jumping from the Rooftop’s cliff into the spring-fed water as a passage from childhood to manhood on the South Shore.

Our parents had forbidden the act, our teachers had warned of the danger, and the police chased us from the premises. We were twelve and a little wild. Their collective disapproval was all the encouragement twelve-old boys needed on a warm summer day in 1964 to climb Rooftop’s cliff.

While watching the divers of Acapulco on Wide World of Sports, we had boasted, “We can do that.” yet the sheer drop of fifty feet paralyzed us on the slant slab. The older teenagers on the ledge clucked out calls of chicken and my best friend, Chuckie Manzi, said, “There are five of us, right?”

We nodded meekly and he said, “I’ll go first, you’re second, then you, you, and you. We yell out ‘Geronimo’. Are you with me?”

None of us had come to not jump and we shouted, “Yes.”

Without warning Chuckie threw himself off the cliff. His cry of ‘Geronimo’ died with a splash into the water. He shouted my name and I ran until only air was under my feet. I plummeted off-balance and smacked into the water, ready try it again, and the gleam on Chuckie’s face confirmed he was with me 100%.

With a shriek our friends appeared high overhead suspended in mid-air before falling in arcing trajectories. One landed on his side, another on his belly, and the third cannon-balled into the water. They broke surface and we howled for joy.

We had done it and we did it again and again throughout that summer and 1964, 1965 and then 1966.

By 1967 America wasn’t the same America as in 1964.

San Francisco hippies were dropping acid and longhairs in the East Village demonstrated against the war fought by boys from the South Shore. Cities were burning in the US and Asia. None of us at the quarries were old enough to understand a change was in the air, for that year the South Shore lived a legend about three boys acting as one.

Donnie, Lee, and Eddie.

Their names were on every teenager’s lips. How they had stopped a fight at the River Club in Mattapan. How they were the best dancers at the Surf Nantasket. That nobody dressed sharper and no one kissed better. They were too good to be true and I suspected they were a myth. I was wrong.

Teenagers from all over the South Shore hung out at the Clamshack. My girlfriend, Kyla Rolla, told me they were at Wollaston Beach. ”I saw Donnie Lee, and Eddie with my own eyes.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Then go see for yourself.” She handed me the keys to her sister’s Vespa. I pulled on my football helmet.  Wollaston Beach was 15 minutes away. I parked the Vespa by the curb and asked a girl in a bikini, “Have you seen Donnie, Lee, and Eddie?”

She lifted her hand to point, I never saw where. A fist smacked into my head. It didn’t really hurt. I was still wearing the helmet.

I wheeled around to face six older teenagers in leather jackets and pointy-toed boots. They were ‘rats’ and hated anyone dressing ‘mod’ like me. Chinos, a Sta-press shirt, hair over your ears were stupid reasons to fight. I would hear stupider later in my life.

“Take off your helmet.” The biggest one had a tattoo on his forearm. It was an anchor.

“Why?” Football helmets were good in a fight.

“Because I said so.” he was used to people doing what he said.

“Okay.” A crowd was gathering around us.

“Who invited you to this beach? I’ll tell you. No one. Your type is unwelcome in Wollaston. Now you’re going get what you deserve.”

My beatings in 8th grade had taught me that if an aggressor spoke about fighting, he was usually serious. I clocked the greaser with my helmet and he collapsed onto the sidewalk like a jellyfish.

His friends rat-packed me in revenge.

I ducked, bobbed, and weaved through a medley of punches and kicks. One blow rocked me in the temple. I stumbled to the ground and a boot to the ribs knocked the wind out of my lungs. This was worst than 8th Grade.

Abruptly the beating stopped and an older teen helped me to my feet, asking, “Are you okay, kid?”

“I think so.” My nose was bleeding, but unbroken.

Two of my attackers were lifting their fallen friend from the pavement, while the others stuck their hands in their pockets, as if they had been onlookers.

The girl in the bikini stood under the arm of a tall, tanned, muscular Italian teen.

I thanked him and he shrugged with utter cool. “I didn’t like the odds. My name is Donny Lianetti.”

“D-d-Donny Lianetti?” I was stunned by the miracle of three people melting into one body.

“Have we met before?” He squinted with suspicion.

“No, no, I thought you were three people. Donnie, Lee, and Eddie.” I lifted a finger with each name.

He clapped me on the shoulder. “That’s funny. Donny, Lee, and Eddie. Maybe we’ll see you around.”

I saw him at the Surf Nantasket, Paragon Park, The Rexarcana in Marshfield, and several other teenage hangouts. He waved each time and continued on his way. From another male this might have been an insult, but I was happy with any attention Donny Lianetti showed in my direction, for his fame was rocketing that summer with a series of swan dives from the quarry cliffs.

Each successful plunge reinforced his aura of divinity and we figured he would stop at Rooftop. He didn’t and announced Donny announced a dive from Brewster’s rail bridge.

On the 4th of July.

For our brave men in uniform.

At noon.

That 4th was a warm day.

Slightly after Eleven O’clock Chuckie, Kyla, and I began the long walk through the woods to the quarries. On the way we greeted kids from other neighborhoods. I had a reputation for protesting the war. Today no one was speaking about Vietnam, the Red Sox, or their summer vacation. We spoke about Donny. He was our hero. Some stories might have been lies. I proudly retained yellowing bruises to prove mine was true.

By the time we mounted the rocks to Brewster’s rim, our number neared a hundred. The crowd was mostly boys and young men. Chuck’s sister, Addy, was with Dennis Halley. Several of her girlfriends were hanging by the bridge over the quarry. They had come to see Donnie Lianetti demonstrate that teenagers don’t die.
Peering over the edge, I gazed at an uneven wall slanting to the bottom. The water appeared a mile away and I gulped from fear.

If anyone could survive such a dive, it was Donnie Lianetti. He appeared on the bridge in cutoff shorts. We clapped wildly and the girls’ collective sigh confirmed he was as much their dream date as he was our hero.

Raising his arms to quiet us, Donnie spoke with a clear voice echoing off the steep stone, “Thank you for coming to honor our boys overseas. If you don’t mind, give me a little quiet. You guys ready?”

We looked at each other, but his words had been directed far below to the floating figures acting as his safety crew. It was at this moment that we heard sirens of the police coming to stop Donnie. They were too late and Chuckie asked, “He isn’t gonna dive, is he?”

“No way,” the greaser beside me said through an exhale of cigarette smoke. “No one’s that crazy.”

Donnie pushed off from the steel beam, his arms spread as featherless wings to guide his headfirst plunge. We held their breaths and his body accelerated to become an incoming ICBM. Halfway down he must have realized the risk in diving and tried to correct for a feet-first entry.

He ran out of space.

A huge plume exploded from the water and the crowd groaned with the collective memory of a painful belly flop, although landing on your stomach from a hundred and fifty feet was a matter of life or death.

“See, I told you he was chicken to dive,” the greaser said with a smirk.

We ignored his insult. Our eyes were riveted on the surface. Donnie had yet to re-appear. His friends frantically clawed to the point of impact and dove under the water. When they bobbed up with Donnie, the crowd cheered and our hero raised his hand in triumph.
The arrival of the police cut short our celebration. I grabbed Kyla’s hand and we scattered into the woods, leaving the quarry as deserted as it was thirty-three years in the future.

While Donnie Lianetti and his friends had escaped, his name had faded from fame, as we turned our worship to Hendrix or Morrison. In 1970 I grew my hair and moved into a collegiate commune in Allston. One morning I was hitchhiking on Commonwealth Avenue and a Cadillac stopped in Kenmore Square.

The brunette behind the wheel was beautiful. Her longhaired passenger huddled against the door in an OD slouch. They were a strange couple. Crossing Brighton Avenue he turned around and said, “You’re the guy who thought I was three people.”

“Donnie?” His face was twisted on one side and he was losing his hair. Our idol had fallen to earth hard. “What happened?”

“You must have seen my great dive. This is the reward I’ve been living with. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not angry. My father sued Quincy and with the settlement I’m set for life. I can walk and Sheila loves me. We have two kids. So don’t say, “Sorry.” I heard enough of them to last a lifetime.”

Donnie Lianetti settled into his seat with a pained sigh. “Hey, tell Sheila how handsome I was.”

“He was a God.”

“He still is in his own small way.” She rubbed his head like she worshipped for other reasons than we had.

“Thanks, we’ll be seeing you around.”

I left the car and Donnie Lianetti vanished forever.

I finished college and moved to New York. I traveled the world, living in Paris, Germany, Mexico, and Bali. People said I was a man without a country. They were wrong. I knew exactly where was my home and early on the morning of July 4, 2000 I deserted my East Village apartment for New England.

The taxi drive to Penn Station was quick. The national holiday had emptied the streets. The north-bound Amtrak train made good time along the Connecticut shore and arrived at the route 128 Station on time. My father was waiting by his car. For a man nearing 80 he looked good.

“You want me to drive?” I asked, having heard about his recent accident. The car showed no sign of damage.

“I’m fine. Get in the car.” While driving through the town cemetery to visit the grave of my mother and youngest brother, a squirrel had jumped onto the path and my father had swerved into the scenery.

“Police said it was a miracle you didn’t hit a gravestone.” I sat in the passenger side and strapped the seat belt over my chest.

“Oh, that.” He started the car and drove out of the station. “I still have good reaction skills for a man my age.”

He proved this statement by beeping the horn at a passing car and cursing the driver as a fool.

Luckily the traffic was light. Everyone was already on the Cape. We breezed over the Sagamore Bridge and reached my older brother’s cottage in Cotuit within seventy minutes. As we pulled into the driveway, my brother checked his watch. “Good time, Speed Racer.”

“Only because there are no squirrels.” My father strained with a groan, pushing himself out of the car. The weight he gained after my mother’s death was a permanent addition to his tall frame. “Any white wine on ice?”

My brother hugged him and then me. “Just opened a bottle especially for you.”

Halfway through his glass of Chardonnay, my father fell asleep on the sofa. My sister-in-law and brother resumed preparations for a pre-fireworks BBQ. “Take the kids to the beach. And drive slowly, the cops love giving tickets for speeding.” 

The town beach was less than five minutes away. Finding a parking space took ten. About two hundred families were spread across the narrow strand of sand. My niece and nephew insisted on planting our umbrella in the center of them. They were almost teenagers and this was more about meeting kids their own age than swimming.

Eating too.

I gave them $10 to hit the refreshment stand and then strode to hightide mark. The water was cold. I picked my way through the stones deposited by the waves. The sandy bottom was a relief. Most swimmers stayed within twenty feet of shore. The drop-off to deeper water was sharp.

I lowered my body into the sea and dove under a small wave. My underwater voyage took me out over my head and I surfaced to see gulls wheeling in the peerless blue sky. Children’s laughter splashed across the water. Adults languished on floats. 90% of them would be lobster red by sunset. It was fun, but not the type of swimming about which I dreamed and I breast-stroked to shore.

Back at the blanket, my niece and nephew were munching on potato chips with their friends. One with sunglasses asked, “How old are you, mister?”

“50.” It sounded old to me too, if you added on the ‘mister’.

“50?” He lifted off his shades. “My old man is fifty and he don’t look like you.”

“That’s because I don’t have any kids.” I didn’t even have a wife. Not even an ex. My only family was the one into which I had been born in 1952 and I loved them. We were all Red Sox fans after all.

For dinner Frank barbecued burgers and dogs. I drank wine with my father. We played cribbage and he won most every game. After Wheel of Fortune he went to sleep. We walked over to the baseball field and sat on the wooden stands, watching fireworks explode over the harbor. The finale had the crowd oohing and aahing like babies after a whiskey toddy.

Several high school friends accepted my brother’s invitation to come back to his house. Our rapid-fire conversation revisited 1960s. Their kids joked that we were dinosaurs. I proved we were only wooly mammoths by playing a CD of British Invasion hits. The teenagers grimaced upon hearing us sing WILD THING. My brother shook his head, when I did an air guitar. Everyone went home slightly before midnight.

“Time for bed.” Frank took the wineglasses out of his wife’s and my hand.

“Party-pooper.” His wife and I were discussing his likeness to George Bush.

“Someone has to mow the lawn in the morning.” He was shorter than the 41st President. I kissed his wife on the cheek and walked down the hallway to the guestroom. My father was lying on his back in the bed nearest the door. His snoring was louder than normal and Frank asked, “You can sleep through that?”

“No problem,” I answered and stuck two wads of wax in my ears. 

“See you in the morning.”

The night air was thick with humidity. Mosquitoes formed different attack patterns to suck my blood. Few got through the strong breeze of the fan set on 3. A stupor should have been my next destination, however my father’s rumbling snorts served as a trumpet call to anyone on this side of the dead. The balls of wax were useless. I kicked at his bed and he cleared his throat with a phlegmatic rumble.

“I wasn’t snoring, was I?”

“Like a truck stuck on ice.”

“Sorry.” He rolled over and regained unconsciousness within seconds.

The snores shook the room and I went out to sleep on the living room couch.  Without a fan the mosquitoes had better luck with their strategies. I wrapped the thin sheet around my body, so that only my nose was unprotected. My mosquitoes showed no mercy.

Slightly before dawn I returned to the guest room. My father’s breathing was silent as a baby after drinking mother’s milk. It took him a couple of minutes to sense I was in the room. He opened his eyes with a series of blinks at the rising sun.

“You sleep good?”

“Like I was on a bed of nails.”

“Probably all the wine you drank.” He squinted at the rising sun.

“Anyone else awake?”

“Just you and me, Pop,” I replied and helped him out of bed.

“Then let’s have breakfast.”

We arrived at the local restaurant slightly before 7am. The NY Times and Boston Globe confirmed no news happens on holiday weekends. An article about the construction on the Central Artery filled four columns and I said, “Says Quincy is using the rubble from the Big Dig for landfill.”

“Yes, the town’s filling the quarries.”

“They can’t do that.” The quarries were reputed to be bottomless.

“If you have as much money as the Big Dig, the impossible is possible. Besides what do you care?” He was no stranger to my concern.

“The quarries are national treasures.” This was a sacrilege to the years of summer fun in their emerald waters. They were on the national heritage trail. It couldn’t be true.

“The town should have closed those death traps long ago.” My father jabbed a finger at the newspaper. “Sixteen people died in the quarries since 1960.”

Undoubtedly the quarries had been a magnet for accidental drownings and drunken mishaps. Many of the stories about the bottomless pits were urban legends, the most famous was of a kid jumping off Shipwreck’s craggy prow and landing on a submerged car. An antenna pierced his arm. This gruesome tale was retold each summer, as if the accident had occurred recently, although its origins were lost in the haze of myths.

“Thousands die on the highways and no one’s closing them.”

“People use the highways.”

“And I swim at the quarries.” Only last year I had leapt off Rooftop to prove I wasn’t old to my nieces and nephews.

“A man your age shouldn’t be doing that.” My father slammed the table. The salt-and-pepper shakers bounced in the air. The other diners turned their heads. They were vacationers with little interest in a heated debate about the Quarries.

I raised my hands in surrender. “You’re right, but I still can’t believe this.”

“Read it again and weep.” My father returned to the Scrabble puzzle, while I scoured the article for the slightest hint of reprieve.

Twenty billions dollars were being spent on 100,000 commuters and the town of Quincy was burying my favorite swimming hole with the excavated dirt from the nation’s largest highway project.

Boston’s congestion could have been more easily solved by giving 25,000 drivers $800,000 to commute with the train or stay at home like Lotto winners. Fewer cars. Less traffic. More roads. More traffic.

My math was illogical to the project planners, or motorists obsessed with a ridiculous need to race to the malls, the fast food chains, and their houses. After breakfast my father told Frank he wanted to go home. My brother begged us to stay. We had been best friends most of our life and now our hours together each year could be counted on fingers instead of stars. I asked my father, “What’s the rush?”

“I like sleeping in my own bed. No one’s saying you can’t stay.”

My brother smiled at my father. “No, if he goes, I won’t worry about his driving off the Sagamore Bridge.”

I kissed my brother and hugged his wife. I’d see them on Labor Day. My father was already in the car. He blew the horn. Almost 80 and he had places to go. The road to Boston was clear. Everyone was making the Fourth a long weekend. My father and I listened to NPR. He rarely dropped below 75. Arriving in our hometown I could tell he was happy. At his age familiar places made him feel good, but I had someplace else to go and said we were out of OJ. “I’ll buy some at the supermarket.”

“I know where you’re really going. You’ll see that the quarries are gone. About time too.” He waddled into the house. “When you come back, we’ll have fried clams at Wollaston. That will make you feel better.”

I loved him most of the time, but hated hearing him say what I suspected was the truth, but I had to find out for myself and drove his car to the other side of the Blue Hills. At the entrance to the quarries water gushed over a granite block.

QUARRY HILLS GOLF COURSE had been carved in Gothic letters.

Only pumping the pits dry could have created this fake waterfall. A Mack truck groaned uphill on a national holiday. Praying the over-laden truck was heading to another destination, I headed to the old footpath leading into Granite Rail.

A chain link fence bannered with NO TRESPASSING signs zigzagged through the woods. No fence or sign was keeping me out.

Scrambling through the underbrush I slipped through a hole cut in the wire and ran to Rooftop. The rusting iron bridge still spanned Brewster’s Quarry. Once a terrible emptiness spread its maw below this structure. A deadly drop, though a summer day in 1967 had proved that ‘impossible’ is only a word for people unwilling to defy death.

No one was jumping into the Million Gallons. Excavated dirt filled the fearsome abyss to the brim. Josephine’s, where girls swam nude, was buried by a mound of stones. Gone were the ‘lungiefish’, the echoing shouts of naked boys, shooting guns at the cliff faces, and drinking beer underage.

Staggered by this destruction I shuffled to Rooftop and stared at the pit. A truck was parked by its edge. Rubble cascaded into the sluggish water. My heart fell over the cliff and tears dropped from my eyes Everything I loved was getting old and going south for the winter.  My father, me, and the quarries. I shut my eyes. South was only a foot away. It was a distance too far for me and I opened my eyes.

Next summer imported grass would cover a par-3 fairway leading to a treacherous green. Some caddie would learn to play the carom off the cliff face like Yaz fielding liners off the Green Monster. The caddie would tell his friends about the kid who jumped off Shipwreck and got his arm pierced by a radio antenna.

And the view from Rooftop would be the same as the first day Chuckie and I had stood on the stone ledge looking over into the chasm. Chuckie lived in Weymouth. I’d call him to join us at the Clambox. We’d order a large box of bellied clams and root beers. We would talk about the quarries, the Surf Nantasket, and Warmouths. The quarries weren’t gone. They were below me and all around the hills. Only the water was missing and if a vandal firebombed the pumps, it will return to the beauty of its past to become the present, which will always be the future.

It sounded crazy, but someone had to act without reason. If not me, then someone to protect those places you love. Shutting off your lights, refusing plastic bags and walking are progress in the ecological revolution, but aren’t enough, otherwise the Neponset Marshes, the Pongkapog Bog, and the Sand Bar in Squantum Bay will join the Quincy Quarries as a fading memories of something good gone forever.

And trust me you wouldn’t like their disappearance and somewhere on the South Shore Donnie Lianetti knows that the Hole of Heaven will exist forever, if only in our memories to be shared with those that come behind us, because some things money can’t buy.
 

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