We drove through South Boston Southie to everyone who isn’t a tourist or a newscaster past strings of drab three-deckers, packed like a line of Port-o’-Potties at a rock concert. Southie amazes me. A good percentage of it is poor, overcrowded, relentlessly unkempt. The D Street housing projects are as bad as anything you’ll find in the Bronx  dirty, poorly lit, teeming with angry, crew-cut punks who roam its streets with bloodlust and baseball bats. During a St. Patrick’s Day parade a few years ago, a very Irish kid with a shamrock on his T-shirt wandered in there. He ran into a pack of other Irish kids who also had shamrocks on their T-shirts. Only difference between his T-shirt and theirs was that his said “Dorchester” in green over the shamrock and theirs said “Southie.” The D Street kids solved the difference by tossing the kid off a roof.

We were driving up Broadway, past the babies in curlers pushing babies in carriages, past the double- and triple-parked cars and the “Niggers Stay Out” spray-painted on a store grate. Broken glass glittered from the darkness of filthy curbs and trash blew from under cars into the street. I thought of how I could step from this car and poll twenty people here, ask them why they hated “the niggers” so bad, and maybe half would probably tell me, “’Cause they got no fucking pride in their communities, man.” So what if Broadway in Southie was identical to Dudley in Roxbury, if slightly lighter?

We crossed into Dorchester, rode up around Columbia Park and down into the neighborhood. I pulled in front of the church and we could hear the phone ringing as we climbed the stairs. Busy day. I caught it on the tenth ring. “Kenzie-Gennaro,” I said.

Angie dropped into her seat as the voice on the other end said, “Hold on. Someone here want to talk with you.”

I took the receiver with me as I went around the desk and sat down. Angie gave me a “Who is it?” look and I shrugged.

A voice came on the line. “Mr. Kenzie?”

“Last time I checked.”

“This Patrick Kenzie?” The voice had an edge to it, someone not used to dealing with smart-asses.

“Depends,” I said. “Who’s this?”

“You’re Kenzie,” the voice said. “How’s the breathing?”

I inhaled audibly, sucking it way back and expelling it in a long rush. I said, “Much better since I quit smoking, thanks.”

“Uh-huh,” the voice said, slow like freshly sapped maple. “Well, don’t get too used to it. Might be all that more depressing when you can’t do it no more.” The maple voice was thick but light, a hint of lazy Southern afternoons hidden behind years of Northern living.

I said, “You always talk this way, Socia, or you just in a particularly elliptical mood today?”

Angie sat up and leaned forward.