death caused Francine to go into a yearlong depression. She continued to do the best she could to make John happy. In fact, she spoiled John. Making good money as an executive at the Stride Rite shoe factory in nearby Roxbury, Francine lavished John with the best of everything. He had the finest shoes and clothes, the latest toys, and his hockey equipment was the envy of his blue-collar neighborhood friends. Suddenly, it all went away.
Perhaps if Francine had complained sooner about the pain in her calves and thighs, things would have been different, but a year after Richie’s death, Francine suffered complications from her diabetes.
“She went in for open heart surgery, and they took her legs,” John’s cousin Debbie recalls. “Gangrene had set in. She was a very, very pretty woman. A beautiful mix of Italian and Indian. She looked like Liz Taylor. But when they took her legs, that’s when everything went downhill.”
Francine’s depression grew worse. Her self-image was shattered. She was given big, heavy prosthetic legs that she lacked the strength to maneuver. She was an invalid left in the care of a fourteen-year-old boy.
“I think it was at this point that my life and my view of it changed,” John considers aloud. “I was mad at God and the whole world for bringing so much pain to my life.”
John’s sisters, Sandra and Linda, who were eighteen and sixteen years older than John, respectively, were busy with their own growing families. They thought Richie’s widow, Sonny, who still lived upstairs, was helping to take care of things, and she thought the sisters were, but it all fell upon John’s shoulders. He was left alone to cook, to clean, to shop, to give his mother her insulin shots, and to get her to the bathroom for showers and all other purposes. It was humiliating for both of them.
John loved his mother and did his best for her, but he was helpless when it came to her weakening heart and her overwhelming sorrow. Those things took her independence, her will, and ultimately her life. Francine Willis was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital in Stoughton for additional care and rehab, but she died there. John was effectively an orphan at fifteen.
“He was extremely angry,” Debbie recalls. “That’s when the anger started. That’s when he stopped being Johnny. He started being something else.”
John never cried over his mother’s death, and he didn’t talk to anyone about it. He received no consolation from his sisters. In fact, the only conversation he had with Linda was at the wake when he scolded her and accused her of being stoned. He was only at the wake for ten minutes before he stormed out, and he didn’t attend his mother’s funeral.
That is the line of demarcation in John’s life. There was the time before his mother’s illness and death, and the time after. His life, his mood, and especially his path were forever altered. The spoiled, happy-go-lucky kid from the neighborhood had been transformed. The boy had prematurely become a man, and that meant fifteen-year-old John Willis was a soldier. From the day his mother died, he was ready for a fight. He’d fight any kid in the neighborhood and beat him senseless without fear of repercussion. He fought for survival. He fought back tears and sorrow, and even joy, and every emotion that began to scratch the surface. But his demons? Those he chose not to fight. His demons ran free.
Under normal circumstances, John would have been sent to live with either of his two sisters. He’d continue going to high school and upon graduation, he’d either find a job or go on to college. Other kids have endured greater hardships and gone on to live successful, respectable lives. But there was nothing normal about John’s circumstances.
First, no one wanted John. There was no family member, no teacher, no hockey coach, no Department of Child Services that reached out to help. He lived for a while at Linda’s apartment on Branch Street in Quincy with her husband, Vinny, and their children, but he was clearly not welcomed there. The apartment was too crowded, and the parties were wild. So John returned to live alone on the first floor of the house he’d shared with his mother.
Left to pay his own way, he dropped out of school and took a job with Vinny installing windows. He lived on a steady diet of Burger King hamburgers and fries, and steroids. He got the food from Debbie, who worked at Burger King, and he got the steroids from a couple of guys at the Universal Gym in North Quincy. He went from being a chubby kid to a ripped bodybuilder pretty quickly. Those who knew he was on steroids assumed the drugs were the cause of his abrupt and angry outbursts. They didn’t understand his rage went much deeper than that.
John survived that way for a year until Brant Welty, a close friend, told him he could get work as a bouncer if he said he was seventeen. John referred to him as his brother. They had known each other since elementary school, but after John’s mother passed, Brant’s family had welcomed John into their home as often as they could. John would never forget that kindness.
Brant had always been a good kid. As a seven-year-old, he washed car windows in Kenmore Square outside Fenway Park. He was a straight “A” student in elementary and middle school, and his employment record included time at Burger King, a Greyhound bus station, and his father’s watch and jewelry store in the Back Bay. Brant excelled in high school at Boston English in Jamaica Plain, and was offered a scholarship to Dartmouth College, but opted instead to become a jeweler like his father.
Meanwhile, John took a job as a bouncer at Narcissus, a Kenmore Square nightclub in Boston. The manager of the club, John Pop, didn’t know or care that John was only sixteen. The club needed bouncers who were unusually large, barrel-chested, and muscular, and John fit the description. They also liked the anger and fearlessness emanating from John’s eyes.
John took his job seriously. He ignored the loud music and the pretty college girls, and simply stood with his arms folded across his chest. John had been warned that the Asian gang kids from nearby Chinatown could be ruthless and violent, but his nervousness around them dissipated with each encounter, and he came to respect their excessive politeness. He was also envious of the expensive clothes they wore, the fancy cars they drove, and the money they flashed.
“All the things I want out of life,” John thought.
One night, a fight broke out between a group of preppy college kids and a young Chinese man named Woping Joe. John knocked one of the assailants out cold, but not before Woping Joe had been maced.
“So, I took Woping Joe to the back and began helping him rinse his face,” John said. “I turned to get some help and stared at six pissed-off-looking gangsters.”
The gangsters were late coming to Woping Joe’s rescue and assumed John needed a good beating, or worse. John stood his ground. His eyes darted from one face to another. There was a lot of indecipherable shouting in broken English, but he clearly heard the word “kill” several times, and he noticed the group had more than one gun and several knives.
“He cool,” Woping Joe loudly repeated several times, and after a brief discussion in Cantonese, Woping Joe was able to convince the small mob to file out of the bathroom. Woping Joe turned back and handed John a card with a number on it.
“Hey, white boy,” he said with a smile. “Here’s a number to call.”
John didn’t know why he saved the number, but as another bitter winter descended upon New England, he would soon discover it was a fortuitous decision. When he was unable to pay the heat or electric bills on a bouncer’s wages, his sister-in-law, Sonny, shut off the utilities on the first floor. John routinely came home from work, wrapped himself up tightly in a blanket, and lay down on his kitchen floor. He was sixteen years old, freezing cold, hungry, and alone in the dark.
One night in January of 1987, while the snow piled up outside
