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Overview
“After the dramatic announcement, and once sure we were all looking at the tragedy playing out before us, she took a bottle of sleeping pills out of her purse, and swallowed the entire contents, using vodka as the lubricant.” —excerpt from page 44
Through determination, a deep faith in God, and belief in himself, Douglas MacKinnon has taken the pains of his childhood and turned them into the fuel of compassion. Through his words, you can do the same.
A Memoir with a Message
It’s impossible for most of us to imagine what it would be like, as a nine-year-old child, to have your own mother empty her .45 pistol into your cardboard bedroom wall, bullets flying above your head, as you hold your baby sister close to protect her. We can’t imagine this, but Doug MacKinnon can. Doug can do more than imagine—he can remember.
This very personal memoir is both heartbreaking and highly inspirational. In it, Douglas MacKinnon weaves his astounding story as a desperately poor child and his triumphant transition from living in abject squalor to becoming a White House writer who now has the political influence to change the system—especially as it affects children.
But this book is more than the story of one man’s personal journey; it is a memoir with a message. Through this message, the author not only inspires readers to move beyond their own difficulties, he also calls both political parties to task for their shameful neglect of tens of millions of Americans. You’ll be riveted to the story, moved to compassion, and inspired to see the world through new eyes.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781451607901 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Howard Books |
| Publication date: | 02/28/2012 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
1
A Stabbing Precedes the Gunfire
It really does hurt to get stabbed.
I had just landed a punch to the side of a rival’s head. As he yelped in pain and fell out of the way, I felt a hand grab me by the right shoulder and spin me completely around. A millisecond after completing the turn, I saw a knife blade arching up toward my midsection. I instinctively turned sideways to shield my stomach and chest. While successfully protecting those vital areas, I was not able to avoid the force of the blade.
The tip of the switchblade, which entered the minuscule muscle of my skinny thirteen-year-old bicep, immediately struck calcium. A white haze of pain filled my eyes, as my lungs sucked in enough oxygen to let out an earsplitting scream.
The reason I got stabbed in the first place was that some of my friends and I were involved in an old-fashioned West Side Story–type gang fight. Back in the day, in my never-dull corner of the Dorchester section of Boston, it was not about what neighborhood you were from but which street you lived on. Some friends and I met up with some territorial individuals from a rival street, and before anyone knew what was happening, it was on.
Since this was circa 1969, and we weren’t yet smart enough to call ourselves a “crew” and carry “nines” or “Mac-10s,” this instant and fierce disagreement was waged with pipes, boards, fists, and the occasional knife. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t get hit with a board, pipe, or fist.
I got stabbed. I was the victim of a very violent crime at a very early age. But when I thought about that episode a few months later, I knew that between myself and the older kid who stabbed me—he was sixteen and already a career criminal—I was, by far, the more fortunate. I say that for three reasons.
First, simply and most important, I was able to spin my stomach and chest away from the blade and take the strike in the arm. This particular rival was not trying to frighten me or wound me. He meant to kill me.
Second, about one second after I was stabbed, one of my buddies caved in this guy’s chest with a five-pound cobblestone rock. The collision between rock and human body was not pleasant. While I never got all the details, I think the contact was enough to break a bone or two and send him to Boston City Hospital. A facility that—at least at that time—made medieval practitioners of the dark arts look advanced by comparison. Having been to that alleged center of healing a few times already in my young life, I knew better than to go back—even if blood was pouring out of a large hole in my tiny arm.
Ignorance is sometimes a wonderful thing. Having never been stabbed before, I did not know enough to assign the knife wound the importance it deserved. To me, it was no big deal. Like everything else in my life, I’d just fix it myself.
I just took my shirt off, wrapped it around the dripping hole in my arm, ran the few blocks back to our apartment, went into the bathroom, unwrapped the now blood-soaked shirt, and poured some of my father’s rubbing alcohol directly into the cut.
Mistake.
My sister, who was sitting outside at the time, told me you could hear my scream several streets away. Fortunately, my parents, who were already in a vodka-induced coma in their bedroom, never heard a thing. After screaming from the shock of the alcohol and almost passing out on the bathroom floor from a pain that seemed much worse than the actual stabbing, I pinched the cut closed as tight as I could, put some folded toilet paper over it, and then used a couple of feet of white hockey tape to secure my battlefield bandage in place. While archaic, I still felt it was better than whatever treatment my attacker eventually received in that dungeon of a hospital.
The third reason I felt I was the luckier of the two of us was that not long after this guy was discharged from Boston City and recovered, I was told he was found shot in a local park.
His demise is what my friends and I fought off almost every single day as we trolled the streets and alleys, desperately trying to stay one step ahead of those determined to hurt us.
As I tried to recover from the physical and mental pain of my knife wound, the only things I had going for me at the time were a tremendous chip on my shoulder—which pertained to just about everyone—some inherited natural intelligence, and a PhD in street smarts. I had no intention of giving anyone the satisfaction of seeing me fail.
I was born in a hospital in Dorchester, Massachusetts. At the time, Dorchester was an ultratough, blue-collar section of Boston, filled with mostly wonderful, hardworking people; it’s a place I will always be proud to call home.
Dorchester was never the problem. Poverty, homelessness, and hopelessness were the problems; and they were manufactured by two people—and two people only—our “parents,” John Mac Kinnon and Marie Carmel Mac Kinnon. These two individuals were not only full-blown alcoholics, but complete hedonists who saw their three emaciated and damaged children as obstacles to be crushed on their egocentric path to self-destruction.
By the time I was seventeen, our family had moved a total of thirty-four times. For those of you who, like me, are not fond of math, that’s an average of once every six months. None of the moves were voluntary—some, in fact, were quite disturbing and violent.
© 2012 Douglas MacKinnon
Table of Contents
Part 1 A Memoir 1. A Stabbing Precedes the Gunfire 3
2 A Two-Year-Old's Introduction to Poverty 7
3 Me, Baby Jesus, and My First Crime 9
4 In Desperate Search of Gold at the End of the Rainbow 13
5 Crashing a School Bus for My Sister 16
6 A Grandmother's Love and a Peek at Normalcy 21
7 Sunday Dinners and My Escape from the Kids' Table 25
8 My Little Project and the Effects of Too Much Alcohol 28
9 JFK's Assassination and an Eviction 30
10 A Book Provides Escape While Planting a Seed 34
11 Poor Public Schools for Me… Please 37
12 A Nine-Year-Old Fires a Weapon in Self-Defense 41
13 Ducking Bullets Fired by Our Mom 44
14 A Gift Makes a Difference 51
15 The Caped Crusader Saves Our Lives 55
16 Shining Shoes, Darts, and the She-Beast 58
17 The Broken Bunch 70
18 Insane Friends and Armed Robbery 72
19 The Wrong Side of Crime and Attempted Murder 78
20 Don't Excuse the Inexcusable 84
21 A Minority Greeting and a Beating 91
22 Rolling Pennies in the Dark 94
23 The Deception That Gave Me a Chance 99
24 Writing a Novel at Seventeen 103
25 The Square Peg in the Round Hole of College 106
26 A Bridge Too High 111
27 The Agency Offers an Out 114
28 A Campaign Door Leads to the White House 125
29 Shedding Tears with the President 132
30 John P. Kennedy Jr.-A Man and a Day to Remember 141
31 The Secret Service Thinks I'm a Threat 151
32 A Presidential Election Hangs in the Balance… and My Tiny Role in the Outcome 155
33 My Patrick 172
34 Am I Insane? 181
35 Breathe and Count for Something 184
36 WTP? 188
Part 2 A Message
1 Poverty Is Not Partisan 197
2 Poverty's Unsung Heroes 200
3 Poverty-A Ready-Made Excuse for the Weak of Mind and Faith 204
4 Ignorance and the Poor 209
5 Political Correctness and Affirmative Action-Enemies of the Poor 218
6 What's So Wrong with Hard Work? 221
7 Never Afraid of the Abyss 224
8 That's All… for Now 229