Not sure how this eluded me so long, but read up.
Billy Baker: The first time I saw Robbie Concannon’s penis was in the early ’90s at a party on the top floor of a triple-decker in Southie.
It was one of those kill-me-it’s-so-hot summer nights, and you can plug in only so many air conditioners before the fuse blows and the house goes dark. When the lights came back on, I noticed the room wasn’t as bright as before; the lamp next to me had a pair of shorts covering it. Before I had time to think it through, a lean, curly-haired kid in his early twenties was standing there wearing nothing but sneakers and a smile. “Do you want to see the terrier?” he asked a group of young ladies. It was a rhetorical question, because he immediately turned away from the girls, tucked his junk between his legs, and bent over. So this was Robbie Concannon, the crazy kid from Dorchester I’d heard all about.
When I was growing up in Southie, there were really only three things we ever talked about: girls, sports, and some crazy stunt some kid pulled. There were lots of kids pulling crazy stunts in the Irish neighborhoods—that place unto itself centered in Southie and reaching into Charlestown, large swaths of Dorchester, and pockets of the South Shore. Hollywood has done a great deal to mythologize the Boston Irish Guy, building stock characters whose motivation is booze and drugs and crime. But the things that motivate the real legends in the neighborhood are far more benign—a simple desire to make your friends laugh, to entertain the troops, to be talked about. A guy’s reputation hinges on delivering bits of comic chaos. In this world of larger-than-life characters, Robbie Concannon was as big as they come. Every story about him seemed to top the last one.
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