The Cabin at the End of the World(44)
Andrew shouts at the others. “Redmond isn’t his name! You assholes using fake names, too? Did God tell you to do that?”
Adriane still has her hands over her face. “What the hell is he talking about?”
Sabrina says, “No, none of us are using fake names. Same for you guys, right?” Adriane and Leonard say, “Yeah,” and “Of course.” She looks distrustful of Andrew, afraid of him and what he’s saying.
“That dead guy out there, the one you killed. His name is Jeff O’Bannon.”
“Jeff O’Bannon?” Eric repeats the man’s name out loud and then says it many more times in his creaky head. It’s a name he knows, or a name he should know and should be able to put a face to or summon a dossier of significance for.
“He’s the guy who attacked me in the bar, Eric! It’s him!”
Andrew
A hockey bar by name, the Penalty Box was a hard-drinking dive eschewing the ironic, hipster faux charm that might now be associated with the term dive bar. On the corner of Causeway Street, across from North Station and the Boston Garden, the bar was on the first floor of a brick-and-cement, two-story rectangular shoebox of no recognizable architectural style beyond industrial. It had one square front window next to a cavelike entrance chiseled out of the brick, above which perched a yellow sign with thick black letters. It was generally patronized by mean drunks, people spending their last dollars or loose change, or amateur-hour assholes fluttering in pre-and post-Bruins and Celtics games. In the late 1990s, the tiny room above the Penalty Box, called the Upstairs Lounge, was a local music hot spot and used to host what were called “pill dance parties” every Friday night. Eighty or so people would jam into the dark and grimy room with a DJ playing Britpop. Pre-Eric, Andrew and a small group of friends attended the dances religiously for an almost five-year run, including after they moved the pill dances from the Upstairs Lounge to a new venue in Allston.
In November of 2005, Andrew and his friend Ritchie decided to go to the Penalty Box (the Upstairs Lounge having been long shuttered up) after ditching a Celtics game early for a glass or two of nostalgia. The bar was half full with the green shirts of other Celtics game attendees who had given up on the home team as they were down by twenty-five points early in the fourth quarter. Andrew had on a twenty-year-old Robert Parish tank top that was too small for him over a white long-sleeve T-shirt. Ritchie had a new Paul Pierce jersey on even though he spent most of the game complaining about the player’s shot selection and perceived lack of foot speed.
In the intervening years, Andrew has curated a carefully pieced together timeline of nonevents prior to his attack: He and Ritchie were in the Penalty Box for less than ten minutes. Andrew made a beeline for the bar upon entering and ordered two Sam Adams drafts. He doesn’t remember seeing Jeff O’Bannon or his two friends sitting at the bar, which was where they were according to the police report and testimony. Andrew carried the two beers over to Ritchie, who was near the entrance and talking to a middle-aged woman wearing a Bruins hoodie and jeans. Tall and rail thin, she was loudly drunk, and when she wasn’t wiping greasy hair out of her face, her hummingbird hands were all over Ritchie’s arms, shoulders, and back, and Ritchie couldn’t have been more amused or pleased. Andrew doesn’t remember her name. He gave Ritchie a beer and they clinked their plastic cups. The woman told Ritchie he looked like Ricardo Montalbán when he didn’t look anything like him. She told Ritchie that Andrew was cute but not as cute as he was. She laughed at her own joke but there was a lag between, so he couldn’t be sure why she was laughing. Andrew pretended to be offended at his second-class cuteness status. She asked Ritchie to dance even though there wasn’t any music playing, only the TV audio of Mike Gorman and Tommy Heinsohn calling the blowout game in muted, eulogistic tones. Andrew egged Ritchie on, telling him to go ahead and dance. Ritchie said things like, “I don’t know. My quads are sore from my run this morning. Maybe. I have an inner-ear problem and I get dizzy if I spin around. I’m thinking about it. I’m missing the baby toe on my left foot so I always list to the right. Sounds like fun, but . . .” She interjected with “oh yeahs” and more pleas for a dance and now a beer, as her demands increased with the extended negotiating. Andrew thought she was pleased to simply have this conversation continue. Ritchie wasn’t flustered in the least (like Andrew would’ve been) and started to ask her questions (“So, where are you from? Come here often? Will the Celtics ever be good again?”). Ritchie clearly enjoyed building the suspense of will-he-or-won’t-he. Then Andrew remembers Ritchie asking, “What was the name of the last guy you danced with in here?” She smiled and waved a hand in the general direction of the opposite side of the room like her previous dance partner was still there and she said, “That fucking guy, his name was Milton” (Andrew interjected, “Like the city?”). “Yeah. He was no fun. Wouldn’t let me feel him up.” The three of them shared a big laugh, and then O’Bannon was behind Andrew, over his left shoulder, and he said, “Faggot,” and it wasn’t a wild, out-of-control shout, and it wasn’t slurred or sloppy. It was clear, concise, and dismissive, a one-word statement of argument and justification. Andrew turned to his left, toward the speaker whose face he would not see in person until the two of them were in the same courtroom. As he turned, O’Bannon smashed a beer bottle on his head, the impact and follow-through cutting a gash that needed almost thirty stitches to close. Andrew remembers hearing the smash of glass, but there was no pain, and instead a flash of cold on his head and neck, and then he was looking at the floor, which began getting closer very quickly. He remembers lying facedown with his eyes closed and people shouting. He doesn’t remember getting into the ambulance, but he remembers insisting upon sitting up during the ride. He remembers the inexplicable feeling of shame upon seeing Eric for the first time at the hospital. When Eric said, “Oh my God, what happened to you?” Andrew whispered, “I don’t know . . .” and stopped so he wouldn’t say I don’t know what I did. O’Bannon later pled guilty and told the court he was drunk and not thinking clearly and that Andrew had accidentally spilled a beer on one of his friends (which was patently false), and they then were looking for a fight and his friends egged him on, and he said repeatedly that that wasn’t him, wasn’t who he was.