The Brother Bulger

EVEN IN RETIREMENT, BULGER MAINTAINS a robust schedule. He still gets up early every morning to take his walk around Castle Island, and goes to church every Sunday at St. Bridget’s. He spends a lot of time with his family, which now includes 30 grandchildren (“I have my own precinct,” he says), and keeps a busy social calendar, lunching with friends and local politicians and turning up at events like the annual Profiles in Courage dinner and August’s state legislators conference, where he drew big laughs introducing the winner of the Bulger leadership award, and was later seen furtively wiping away tears after historian David McCullough’s stirring keynote on the importance of education. He gives the occasional eulogy—like the one delivered at the funeral of a hard-luck court officer he hired—and has turned up as a guest on The Literati Scene, the cable-access show helmed by legendary Beacon Hill socialites Smoki Bacon and Dick Concannon.

Known as “the Beam” while he was growing up in the Southie projects, for his habit of reading by desk lamp in his room late into the night, Bulger remains a big reader. At various points we discuss Cullen Murphy’s Are We Rome?, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (a guilty pleasure), The Last Hurrah, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (“I like the nastiness of it”), an essay on understanding politics in the journal First Things (which he had fully annotated before giving it to me), and Christopher Hitchens’s vicious takedown of Mother Teresa, another guilty pleasure that Bulger likes for Hitchens’s audacity and writing style. “I haven’t been skewered by him,” he says. “He doesn’t know I exist. But I think the screwing would be more tolerable.” All this is set against the work of his hero Samuel Johnson, which functions as a sort of literary and philosophical background music. Bulger’s e-mail address even references Imlac, the wise old teacher who leads a naive, pampered prince into the world in Johnson’s Rasselas. (“Inconsistencies,” says Imlac to Rasselas, “cannot be right, but imputed to man, they may both be true.”)

One morning, Bulger and I arrange to have breakfast at Mul’s Diner, an old greasy spoon on West Broadway in Southie. Across the street is the 6 House, a martini bar that used to be Triple O’s, the Whitey Bulger haunt that played host to some unspeakably gruesome spectacles in its day, and would appear in the news again soon after our visit, when a man is stabbed to death inside and the specter of Whitey is raised yet again. All around are massive luxury condo complexes in varying stages of completion. Amid the stream of young professionals walking to the Broadway T station, a wan, emaciated drunk toddles over to me and strikes up a conversation. It’s five of 9, and he’s just killing time before the packie up the street opens. His name is Rocky. After a summary of his recent woman problems, he tells me he used to box in Brockton.

“Hey, City of Champions,” I say. “Rocky Marciano.”

“I beat him,” Rocky says, his eyes narrowing.

“You beat Rocky Marciano?”

He nods and smilingly shows me his fist, then heads off. When Bulger shows up a few minutes later, I tell him about the guy’s boast.

“Great,” Bulger says. “He should write for Boston fucking magazine.” He takes a seat in a booth. “I swear a lot lately for effect,” he says, with a slight shake of the head. “I justify it, though.”

Mul’s is a favored breakfast spot for politicians and media, and while Bulger eats his breakfast—Egg Beaters, sliced tomatoes, and a piece of toast—Police Commissioner Ed Davis, Globe metro columnist Kevin Cullen, fashion designer Joseph Abboud, and Virginia Senator Jim Webb all come by to say hello. Bulger greets each one warmly, and warns a fidgety Webb about the folly of seeking esteem through the press.

We get to talking about Southie, first about his role in the 1970s busing crisis. It’s a topic he brings up frequently. Bulger’s outspoken opposition to busing married him to the base that would support him for the entirety of his Senate reign, but because of the perceived racist overtones, it also made seeking higher office impossible. In fact, you could argue that the two things that had the most lastingly bad impact on Southie in the latter half of the 20th century were busing, which Billy fought tooth and claw, and Whitey, who flooded the neighborhood with drugs and guns. Of course, this was before gentrification all but wiped the slate clean.

Bulger tells a story about taking the Summer Street bus home not long ago with his wife of 47 years, Mary, and not knowing a single person. “Life has moved on,” he says. “Things are always in a constant state of change. We know it from Heraclitus, you can’t step in the same stream twice, right?” While he says this, he writes his favorite quote from Solon—“I grow old, ever learning new things”—in Greek on a napkin and slides it across the table to me. Several of his nine children have moved away, Bulger says, done the shuffle to the South Shore and, in one case, Chicago, but he’s content to stay. “I like it,” he says. “It’s live and let live. They say, ‘Hi, how ya doin’,’ go on their way. Also I think they have a healthy skepticism about things.”