Sometimes his dad would walk near a seller sitting in a lawn chair and catch the seller’s eye and hold it. But he’d keep on walking, and, as if it were an afterthought, he’d flick his thumb toward the air conditioner in question, saying, “I’ll give you five bucks for that.” He would use other sorts of movement to mesmerize his adversaries—a snap of the fingers, a shifting of the shoulders, a cocking of the head, which tended to make people lean toward him. He would also lower his voice and use long pauses to achieve the same effect. Above all, his dad would make himself a picture of confidence. That was the central rule of negotiating, he told Paul: You had to be confident in order to look confident, and that meant you had to be prepared to walk away from something you really wanted if you couldn’t get your terms. And if you never walked away, you weren’t negotiating hard enough.
Paul was mindful of his father’s sayings on every subject, but the one that haunted him—“You’re all the same”—made him feel he had to make a separate life away from home. He didn’t expect or receive much recognition for his accomplishments: first place in an MIT-sponsored chess championship for youngsters when he was in fourth grade, first place in the Boston Science Fair when he was in sixth, fourth place in the National Toy Design Award Competition in eighth. His parents didn’t come to watch when the Latin School played for the soccer championship of Boston, even though Paul was on the team, or to the concerts at Symphony Hall and the Hatch Shell on the Esplanade, where Paul played his trumpet in the Latin School’s jazz band. Paul forgave them. His parents couldn’t possibly have gone to all their seven children’s games and concerts, and maybe they felt that if they couldn’t go to one child’s performances, they shouldn’t go to any. He thought of himself as flourishing in secret. The sheer size of his family made this easy to pull off, and it also often left him free to do much as he pleased, to roam the streets and subway tunnels of Boston during the school years and to play at what used to be called juvenile delinquency during the summer.
When Paul was a baby, his parents bought a ramshackle cottage—for $5,200—on Helen Street in the seaside town of Hull, a half hour’s drive from Boston. Every June the family packed up and moved there. His mother brought the toaster from Perham Street—no sense in wasting money on two toasters. And his father brought his tools and worked on fixing up their cottage in his usual that’s-good-enough spirit. Hull was a town in a pretty setting, but it wasn’t fancy like some other towns in the area—like Cohasset, where kids rode around in their daddies’ Porsches, Paul and his friends would tell each other. Hull had a yacht club. “But,” Paul would say, “they only drink Budweiser there.” The town had some public housing apartment buildings as well as seaside cottages, and it contained Nantasket Beach, huge and public and thronged with kids and, by the end of summer days, covered with litter. “Trashbasket Beach,” he and his summer friends called it.
Paul and Danny reveled in that town, often in the company of three other boys: “the Hull Five.” Paul and Danny got a pirate flag and painted the gang’s name on it, then they broke into the high school and raised the flag on its roof. They found a styrofoam mannequin’s head and torso and adorned it with a blouse borrowed from one of their sisters, and a wig and glow-in-the-dark eyes and lipstick. They mounted the figure on a broomstick and carried it around their neighborhood at night, tapping it against second-story windowpanes so that the people who looked out would see a woman floating in the dark.
Driver’s licenses opened up a whole new theater of operations. Paul installed a good stereo in one of his cars. In the very early morning hours, he and his buddies would drive the car to Trashbasket Beach, leave it in the best parking spot, then go home to bed. They’d return on their bikes once the crowds began to gather, and Paul would get his speakers out of the trunk, connect them to his car’s stereo, set them up on the sidewalk, turn on the music, and wait—it rarely failed—for girls to arrive in their bikinis.
Together, he and Danny created a remote-control system so they could shoot bottle rockets from under the rear end of Danny’s Camaro, sometimes at tailgating cars. Meanwhile, Paul began accumulating speeding tickets, often while driving his own secondhand and lovingly restored Camaro on the circuitous route from West Roxbury to Hull. He totaled two cars while in high school, one of them when he ran into a school bus on the Jamaicaway.
Paul, it seems, was capable in his youth of two very different kinds of behavior. In the abstract, this is not strange; teenagers are often contradictory beings. But it is hard to reconcile the images Paul drew of himself, of a boy often lost in ferocious anger, and the boy in a photograph from junior year in high school—thin and tall and gentle-looking, indeed almost feminine.
Serious fighting began for him in fifth grade. This was also around the time when the federal court began its attempt to integrate Boston’s public schools—by busing African American children into white working-class sections of the city. West Roxbury could not have been less integrated. In the census, the entire town was listed as 100 percent “white.” Paul found himself in homeroom with a tall and burly black-skinned boy, a new kind of person. The kid’s mere presence frightened Paul, and this meant he had to pick a fight with him. Paul fought him to a bloody draw in a school hallway, and they ended up in detention together, where Paul discovered that the guy was funny. They became friends, and through him Paul met one of his cousins, who was herself a cousin of Donna Summer’s. Paul didn’t get to meet her, but it was exciting to come that close to a famous singer.
By high school his fights had assumed a pattern. A friend and sometimes even a stranger who was small or weak or in some way vulnerable would be getting picked on by a tough kid, and at once Paul would feel hand-shaking fury, as if he were the one being bullied. He would rush to intervene. There was the kid, later jailed for attempted murder, who went after a friend of Paul’s on Dent Street, a block over from Perham. He and Paul faced off, pushing each other in the chest, and then Paul put his foot behind the tough kid’s foot and shoved him backward, tripping him. Then he jumped on him and started punching. There was the time at the gym when another tough kid, a very big kid, was trying to take a ball away from a friend of his, and Paul got in between them and said, “Hey, fuck off,” and the kid squared himself up, and Paul, thinking I have one shot, punched him in the jaw as hard as he could. The kid fell and started crying. “My big brother’s gonna beat you up,” he wailed.
“Dude, you could beat me up,” said Paul, standing over him. “Why do you need your big brother?”
Paul thought of this as bullying bullies. He was playing the vigilante. But he couldn’t account for his most terrible fight. A smartass kid at the bus stop. Paul banged the boy’s head on the sidewalk. When sanity returned, Paul got up and backed away. To his relief, the kid got up and ran. For days afterward, the scene kept returning, and Paul would think I could have killed him. God, I could have killed him.
Two of his brothers knew about some of his fights, but even best friends from high school were astonished when, years later, Paul recounted his days of brawling. One former girlfriend said the news distressed her: “That was not the person I knew. I thought he was the smartest boy in the whole world. I thought he was the sweetest boy in the whole world.” She remembered him as confident, even a bit competitive, traits she found attractive. He wasn’t content, as she was, to be just a cashier at the local drugstore, he had to be the head cashier. And yet he was kind to everyone under him, especially to her, always making sure at the end of their shift that her drawer contained just the right amount of cash. She was both “shocked” and “dismayed,” she said, when she ran into him years later and he told her that he often went to nightclubs nowadays. When he was her boyfriend, he was shy and serious. His idea of a fun date was to sit in the ’68 Camaro that he’d rebuilt and customized, and wait for people to come by and say, “Hey, nice ride.” She said, “He really liked that. I thought it was neat.” But she also liked to dance and sing, and he never wanted to go out on the t
own, which was one reason they broke up. “I cried in my room all weekend,” she said.
A high school girlfriend who used to go to Mass with Paul remembered his taking her on dates to the Boston Public Library, where he would help her with her homework. He carved their initials in trees and in the snow, and one time he artfully printed them, via his computer, on a huge piece of paper, the first letters of their names drawn with tiny versions of the same letters.
She thought he was the perfect boyfriend, and her mother thought so, too. Unlike Paul’s parents, hers came to see him play in the jazz band at the Hatch Shell. One time she told him she wanted a phone in her room, and he said, “I can do that,” and then came to her house and hooked up an extension. She smiled at the memory. “Then we could talk for hours.” She remembered being very impressed when he showed her his video game, and she swore she would always remember his telling her, “I like the way you think.” She called this “the best compliment I ever got in my life.” Decades later, she read Paul’s own account of fighting and drug dealing as a teenager—in an interview published in a magazine called Entrepreneur. She preferred her version of him. “He was sweet and gentle. I never knew him to fight, smoke pot, or even swear! And over thirty years later, that is how I will always remember him (no matter what he says!).”
Paul was a boy who, feeling shy, made himself gregarious, who always had plenty of friends and was never long without a girlfriend, who loved being on a team and especially in a band, who worried when he sensed anger in the house and wished that he could cure it, who was often in ardent pursuit of “fun” and was devoted to breaking rules and yet was rarely without a job, and was so conscientious that one time, feeling too ill to drive after a night on the town with some buddies, he took a taxi to his post as head Medi-Mart cashier. The taxi cost him more than his entire day’s pay, and his father scolded him for the extravagance.
In later years, Paul and all his siblings compared their memories of family life in the presence of a psychologist. Afterward, Paul concluded, “There are seven different versions of our childhood, all of them true.” Some versions were sunny. The one most nearly like Paul’s came from his older brother Tim, who remembered weddings that their whole family had attended, all of the English boys and girls sitting silently at a table while members of other families danced and socialized. Tim imagined people whispering, “Look at those English kids.” At seven, Tim had become convinced that theirs was the weirdest family on the block. “You didn’t talk about family business outside, or for that matter within the family.”
But these were the feelings of one who had fled—Tim set out on his bicycle for California and never returned for good. Paul was still in high school then, and the departures of older siblings were mournful events. He felt the age-old sadness, the feeling that he was being left behind and that the family was crumbling. Paul had just started high school when Ed left for the chess-programming job in Florida. Why is he doing this? Paul had thought. Then Tim left, and then his oldest sister, Eileen. Paul had never felt especially close to those three, they were so much older. He began writing to Eileen, however. He sent her detailed instructions about writing to another sister who was going to a local college. He told Eileen to compliment a sister who had joined Weight Watchers: “When you write to us next (YOU BETTER WRITE SOON AND A LONG LETTER) say, ‘Oh my gosh, you look skinny!’ ” He closed the letters, “Love always, your little brother Paul.”
In one letter, he described an evening he was spending with their father in the house on Perham Street. “It’s 11:45 pm and me & Dad are having a stubborn contest to see who will go upstairs first. He’s being absorbed by the stupid box as usual. Its his own new color one he got from BGC for his 40 yrs. We’ve been sitting here for an hour. As soon as I go upstairs though he will go up and knock on the bathroom door.” A page later Paul added, “Dad keeps half snoring & then yawning. That last snore did it. I quit! You win Dad! I can’t take it! I’m going to bed! Arrrrggghhhh!” Not the most flattering portrait of his dad, but this was a Friday night when Paul always had fun things to do, and he had chosen to spend it with his father.
3
In tenth grade at Boston Latin, Paul had received career counseling and had been told he should become a priest, a therapist, or an actuary. “What’s an actuary?” he had wondered. College counseling was offered in eleventh grade, but he had skipped it. He didn’t care about college. He was going to become a professional musician.
Twenty-six of his fellow students got into Harvard. Paul graduated near the bottom of his class and didn’t apply to Harvard or anywhere else. By the time his mother learned that his SAT scores entitled him to free tuition at the state’s schools, all the deadlines had passed except the one at the Boston branch of the University of Massachusetts. She insisted that Paul visit. He enrolled, but only because he learned that the school had a student jazz band. The campus was situated on the seashore, on Columbia Point, facing Dorchester Bay. Its monolithic buildings, only eight years old, didn’t live up to the setting. Fellow students called the campus “the prison” and “the fortress.” It was a commuter school, in prestige not far above a community college.
In his first days there, Paul often found himself sitting at the back of classrooms, imagining old classmates surrounded by the grand-looking buildings of Harvard Yard. And I’m at UMass Boston, he would think. He thought of his old friend Mike from Hull, now at Boston College, another first-rate school. He’d had the same chances as Mike and the others, and he’d blown them. He was just a screw-up, at a school that looked like it was built for screw-ups.
One day early in the first semester, Paul was sitting gloomily in a social sciences class when the instructor invited the students to debate the morality of the Vietnam War. Within moments, the room came alive for Paul. The man to his right, it turned out, was sitting in a wheelchair because of wounds from Vietnam. The older man in the chair to Paul’s left had lost a son to the war. Listening to them felt like a lesson not just about history but also about social class—about his own people, the class of Americans who had done most of the fighting in Vietnam. My friend Mike is not having this experience, he thought. He’s with kids in polo shirts over at BC.
A door had opened for Paul. A humble place like UMass Boston had its own virtues, once you really let yourself in. There were many night classes, which meant Paul could work his way through college, as many other students had to do. There was also the jazz band and the chance to learn about other cultures, and not just from books but in person.
One evening, Paul was walking down a windowless, fluorescent-lit hallway in one of the buildings of the fortress when he heard an odd concatenation of sounds—quick, sharp slaps of wood on wood and loud exclamations in an Asian language. He stopped at once, then followed the sounds into the student lounge, where two young men were playing what looked for a moment like chess. But the pieces weren’t the standard figurines of chess. They were identical wooden disks differentiated only by Chinese characters painted on their flat round tops. The young men played fast, slapping their pieces down on each other’s pieces, then slapping those captured pieces onto the table beside the board with exclamations that seemed to put those noises into words. The whole thing seemed more tactile than chess, athletic as well as cerebral. Paul thought, I have to learn how to play that.
Paul made friends with the students. Both were Vietnamese, and the game, they told Paul, was called xiangqi—pronounced approximately shung-chee. Its origins are obscure. It might be several hundred years old or a thousand, and had long been the most widely played board game in China, which meant it was almost certainly the most widely played game in the world. It was also popular in Vietnam, where one of the young men had earned a sort of living as a xiangqi hustler. The other student was named Trung Dung. One time Paul took him out to lunch in his Camaro, and he had to show Trung how to put on a seatbelt. For his part, Trung taught Paul how to play xiangqi and beat him at it relentlessly over the next several year
s. Paul stuck with it regardless. He read books about the game. He searched for opponents, carrying his own xiangqi set to places like the Asian student lounge at MIT. He spent much of his scant free time in Chinatown, watching the old men play.
UMass proved to be the place where Paul found his vocation. He had arrived there still believing he would become a musician. He had no other plan. He had been working part-time for his brother Ed’s new company, coding music and sound effects into video games. But he thought of programming as a hobby, not as the sort of thing one studied in college, let alone as part of a science. When he saw a listing for a class called “Introduction to Computer Science Using Pascal,” he thought he might as well check it out. It was a lecture course, with about a hundred students in a big windowless room. After a few preliminary classes, the professor started assigning homework, and by then Paul felt in the mood for doing some. In one of the first assignments, Paul had to write a procedure, an algorithm, that would make a computer sort a list of numbers in reverse order. Sorting was a classic problem with myriad applications. It had been solved in many elegant ways over the brief history of computing, but all the members of the class, including the instructor, were supposed to invent their own solutions. At the next session, the instructor unveiled his code, writing it out boldly on the board. Peering from his seat far back in the room, Paul saw that his own algorithm was shorter than the professor’s. It would do the job faster, he thought. He was surprised, and he was pleased. I’m way smarter than this guy, he thought. And then he thought, I could do pretty well at this stuff.