Townie Tales: The Man with the Yankees Tattoo
For the random people who find this blog by accident while looking for information regarding their medical condition, welcome! Also just drink less and lay off the fried food, liver will heal up in no time.
But for anyone who doesn’t know, I live in Boston.
And I love living in Boston. The weather is dogshit for 7 months out of the year, but it breeds a shared commiseration — about the cold, about the sidewalk salt that’s ruining all of our shoes, and about our collective desire to move somewhere warmer even though we both know we’re going to die in Walpole.
It’s a nice community full of an eclectic range of characters. It’s like a small New York, but with much worse nightlife and a much lower likelihood of getting stabbed in the face by a guy dressed as Elmo.
As such, I like to go outside and take a nice 45-60 minute stroll every day. Partially, because I’m trying to lose some lbs (new year, less of me), partially because my body generates enough heat to power a studio apartment so the cold has no effect on me, and partially because I like to see what the city has to offer.
I find it truly enjoyable to go out with no agenda or destination and observe the people of this city like Batman or a socially inept genius desperate for human contact. But of all the types of people I encounter on a regular basis, my favorite has to be the townies.
Townies are the OGs. They’re the people who lived here long before our yuppie asses were born and will be here long after we die somehow. And Boston townies are a special breed.
You’ve likely seen depictions of them in any Mark Wahlberg/Matt Damon/Ben Affleck movie.
Or if you’ve spent some time off the main strip in Southie.
Or if you went to any Sox/Bruins/Pats game in the 2000s before the ticket prices got so high that the only people who can afford to go are finance bros who are just “happy to get out of the office for a little bit,” he says jokingly while drinking a mini bottle of red wine and wearing a jersey over a collared shirt to let everyone know that he came straight from work. Disgusting.
Bottomline is that townies make Boston what it is. They keep the edge that we need to win championships and heckle local politicians. They make sure that the rich suburban twenty-somethings who had everything handed to them by daddy, (shoutout me and everyone I know), know that Boston was theirs first. Then they get REALLY mad if you point out that it was technically the Native American’s first. They hate preppies. They hate that Southie is gentrified. And they would probably hate this blog.
And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
You need townies to give the city some personality and establish Boston’s identity. And they make whatever activity you’re doing in Boston that much more enjoyable. And by and large, they’re salt of the earth people who just like to give us suburbanites shit. I have had many great townie run ins over the years. Just off the top of my head there was:
The time some guys in Southie heckled my buddy’s gf for wearing a Harvard Sweatshirt. They did the fake impressed voice and said “Ohhhhhh Hahvahd girl.”
The time a hammered dude at the Bruins game turned to the stranger at the urinal next to him and said, “Hey bud, what’s ya full name?”
The time I got stared the fuck down by two guys smoking cigs outside a nameless bar in Southie because I was wearing Nantucket reds and a Vineyard Vine shirt. Hundred percent deserved it.
These were all classic encounters in a long string of funny, weird, and wild interactions with quintessential Boston guys. But today’s Townie Tale is so preposterous that it merits further explanation. So without further adieu, I give you:
The Man With the Yankees Tattoo
Our story begins on a blustery yet dreary day in late January. A day not wholly unlike today (it literally was today).
I found myself wandering around Boston’s financial district, an odd place for a semi-unemployed blogger who doesn’t view showering as a daily necessity. I was out for my daily Average Guy Amble™ exploring new territory and being guided solely by my whims and whichever crosswalk sign had the walk symbol on as I approached it.
Wind whipped off the smooth sides of the soulless buildings that comprise FiDi, trapping me in a vortex (shoutout Slap Cup) of freezing air. Hurriedly, I put my hood up, and my head down, as I began the brisk trek back to my apartment. I was slightly chilled, but not altogether bothered. I had my headphones in, my favorite podcast on — there are worse things than a little cold.
But as I turned to walk in the direction of Faneuil Hall, something stopped me in my tracks. Someone was yelling. Loud enough that despite my noise-cancelling headphones, years of ear wax buildup, and my general obliviousness to my surroundings, I could hear him clear as day.
Now normally I pay no mind to such noises. After all, every city has those mentally unwell folks who scream for no reason. But this yelling was different. It was coherent, targeted even. It sounded oddly…familiar. I popped out my left headphone and confirmed what I thought I had heard.
“The Yankees fucking suck! They can suck my fucking dick!”
Immediately, I burst out laughing. I, like most rational Americans, have a blind hatred for the New York Yankees and anyone who supports their wretched cause. And though I’m normally opposed to bothering people just minding their own business, if you have the audacity to wear Yankees shit in Boston, you can and should be heckled everywhere you go.
With a smile, I turned behind me to see who the orator of this prophetic prose was. It was a man, normal in stature, of moderate build. He was dressed plainly — a logo-less hat and a black hoodie.
And his eyes were fixated on his target.
There in front of him, waiting patiently at a crosswalk, was another man of equally unintimidating stature and build. This man seemed rather unexcitable, and did not appear to have initiated the conversation. He also paid no heed at all to his taunter, only once glancing nervously over his shoulder as he counted down the moments until the light would turn.
The townie in the hoodie repeated his jeers a couple more times hoping to provoke a reaction, but none was given. A few seconds later, he carried on down the street.
I was stuck in a brief state of amused shock. “Yankees suck” isn’t an uncommon phrase to be uttered in Boston. But to scream it at a stranger with real vitriol, not just playful disdain, was slightly bizzare to me. It was like a scene out of some God awful Boston movie where the writer was basing his dialogue on the dialogue of other Boston movies.
What made the scene all the more strange was the fact that the recipient of the verbal battering didn’t appear, at least as far as I could tell, to be wearing any Yankees apparel. He had a hat on that I couldn’t see the front of, so I rationalized it must be a Yankees hat, the foremost expression of one’s douchebaggery. So being the proud Bostonian and Yankee hater that I am, I turned and gave the heckler a thumbs up.
Perhaps because I offered a sign of approval, or perhaps because I was wearing a hoodie that features Snorlax sleeping on the Nike symbol, the man nodded and smiled at me. He even took out his headphones and began to converse.
“The Yankees fucking suck dude I’m telling you.”
I chuckled and expressed my agreement as we continued our suspiciously same-paced walk. I’m normally not huge on striking up random conversations on the street, but this guy seemed spirited and had given me a good laugh so I figured I could humor him for a block.
But then something turned. He kept saying that the Yankees suck, over and over. A sentiment certainly worth repeating, but an odd one to perseverate on in the company of a fellow Sox fan. Unsure of my role in this one-sided dialogue, I simply commended him for his commitment to Yankee hating. And then he said it.
“Yeah dude, I got fucking stabbed in North Station for it.”
I stared at him inquisitively, sure I had misheard him. But without uttering another word, he lifted up his hoodie, untucked his shirt, and bared the right side of his abdomen to me.
There it was, plain as day — a MASSIVE scar stretching at least 6 inches across an area that almost definitely contains some vital organs.
Now the vitriol in his voice started to make sense. This man wasn’t angry at the man he encountered on the street. He was just generally angry at the Yankees because his rival fandom got him FUCKING STABBED.
No longer wishing to converse with a man whose taunts are capable of escalating to knife play, I stopped at the end of the block and waited at a crosswalk leading to a street I didn’t need to go down. As he walked away, he yelled some sort of addendum to the story that I can’t imagine was particularly wholesome. I smiled and nodded assuredly, my enjoyment of this quirky interaction now fully waned.
He carried on down the street, yelling the occasional “Yankees Suck!” into the cold New England air. Soon he disappeared altogether into the burgeoning Boston night. But even though his presence was now gone from my view, his scar, his Yankees tattoo, remains permanently burned into my brain.
Best of luck to that dude. Hope he finds peace. Yankees fucking suck.
