I knew I’d let down Dad. He was still recuperating, still in rough shape, and while he surely was upset, I also knew even then that there was nothing I could do that would stop his love. He was the strictest of any of our friends’ parents—we had a curfew; if we stayed over at a friend’s house we had to call him at midnight. Yet if you screwed up and it wasn’t something done out of meanness or intended to be hurtful, he would love you through it. So many parents use withdrawal as punishment for their kids. That was never my dad.
This consequence was more his style: I started working twelve-hour days as a gofer at a construction site right behind our house. It was the worst job I ever had. Once, when they were building cinder-block foundations after a huge storm, I had to wade up to my waist in clay mud to mark where the blocks were. The guy operating the backhoe scooped out a huge pile of mud and water and, when I wasn’t looking, dumped it right on top of me. He thought it was the funniest thing in the world.
I wanted to walk off the job right then—I should’ve walked off. But I knew I couldn’t. That’s how badly I’d screwed up in New Jersey.
Beau didn’t take his first drink until he turned twenty-one, when it was legal. He drank socially after that, then quit at thirty. One reason: Dad and his vocal aversion to alcohol. Growing up, Dad had watched relatives he adored—smart, learned, working-class guys—as they engaged in these grandly intellectual conversations around his grandmother Finnegan’s dinner table. Then he’d watch it all devolve into disturbing drunkenness.
Some of his relatives had struggled with alcoholism since high school. He saw it as a problem that loomed large in the family history. It scared him. He made a conscious choice not to be seduced by it and he encouraged Beau and me to do the same.
Beau could. I couldn’t.
I was anxious to get to college. My first day at Georgetown I went and talked with the football coach. I ran a fast forty-yard dash and he told me to suit up—definitive proof that Georgetown football ain’t Alabama football. I played for about two weeks. It was awful. On the one hand, I was a walk-on on a team where everybody already knew each other from preseason workouts. On the other hand, because of the two-a-day practices, starting at 6 a.m., I missed out on everyone in the dorms staying up late and getting to know each other there. Not the most social person to begin with, I felt like I wasn’t meeting anybody. While Beau joined a fraternity at Penn, that option did not exist for me at Georgetown. Besides, I would never put myself in a position of letting someone decide whether or not they were going to choose me. I knew what my reaction would be to someone in that situation: Fuck you.
I was homesick. Dad knew it. He would call with some excuse he made up about needing to remain overnight in Washington and invite to me stay with him at a hotel near the Capitol, where we’d have dinner and hang out. It was the only thing that made my first few months bearable. Though things got better, I never really settled in at Georgetown.
I drank, but usually not more than everybody else. I had a natural governor to help keep it in check: I didn’t have the money to drink a lot in bars, though I did find ways around that. At the Tombs, a popular student spot, if you had enough money to buy a pitcher and knew the bartender, you could keep getting the pitcher refilled. There were times I arrived for brunch with friends and didn’t leave until 2 a.m.
I spent most free weekends visiting Beau at Penn or working a part-time job parking cars for a valet company. I also became friends with several young, progressive Jesuit priests and got involved in various campus groups. These included Agape, a retreat program for spirituality; and the school’s Center for Immigration Policy and Refugee Assistance, one of the country’s first justice reform groups for immigrants.
Between my junior and senior years, I spent a month in Belize with the Jesuit International Volunteers—a kind of Jesuit-led blend of the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps. With a dedicated priest named Father Dziak and nine other students, we established a summer camp program for disadvantaged children in the little coastal town of Dangriga that’s now taught in several other countries.
Another priest, Bill Watson, encouraged me to join the Jesuit Volunteer Corps for a year in the United States after I graduated, pointing out that there were communities in just as much need here as there were internationally. I signed up straightaway and was slotted to serve on an Indian reservation in Washington State. The four student volunteers who had been there the previous year all chose to stay, however, so I was offered a spot at a church in Portland, Oregon, instead.
I worked out of a small food bank in the church basement. I remember single mothers coming in who didn’t have food for the week, or had their utilities shut off, or were being threatened with eviction. I’d advocate for them by calling the utilities to get their heat turned back on, or talk with social services to make sure their families weren’t tossed out of their homes. I’d later deliver essential groceries from our food closet, mostly to seniors and mothers with small children who had no transportation. In the afternoons, I’d help with an after-school program for kids between grades three and six whose parents would then pick them up after work.
When
