Mint Mobile Representative (28:16)
So I am from Boston and as you all know, my city had a pretty garbage week and I, like a lot of my fellow Bostonians, took it pretty personally because it was personal. Because when I think about Boston, I think about my people and I think about my family. Especially I think about my mom because she is the most Boston person that I know. Her name is Mickey. You call her voicemail and it says, you have reached the sprint PCs mailbox of Mickey O'. Malley. And she comes from this huge Irish family in South Boston. She's the baby of 10 kids and when I spoke to her last Friday when Boston was on lockdown, I said, mar, are you nervous about this guy running around the city? And she said, are you shitting me? I want him to come here. I dare him to come to my house. And my mom, like Boston itself, is this tough shit. And she was a born fighter. And when she was younger, from what I hear, she was quite the brawler. And one example, this oft told story about her is she was walking to Mass with my Grandmother one day. And in this little neighborhood shithead in south, he yelled after them, there goes Mickey Kelly with her big fat mother. And my mother walked over to the kid, punched him in the nose, and then walked into church like nothing had happened. And as she got older, she became a different type of fighter altogether. In 1987, when I was five years old, my sister Allison, my baby sister, died suddenly. And after that, I don't really remember her dying, but I remember my mother just constantly being around us and trying to make sure that we were all okay. And at the same time, right after my sister died, my dad, who was a pretty severe alcoholic, stopped drinking. And ironically, when he stopped drinking, that's when his health really started to decline, both physically and mentally. He was a very serious diabetic. And the worse his diabetes got, the more acute his depression got. And in my family, we sort of lived by the motto, like, go for the jugular or go home. And I remember one time my mother saying to my dad, you have your depression to keep you company. What does that leave for the rest of us? And my mom, who had been a stay at home mom for as long as she'd had kids when I was about 10 years old, had to go back to work and become the primary income earner for my house because my dad got too sick and had to go on disability. He was an insulin dependent diabetic. He took two shots a day to regulate his blood sugar and sometimes his blood sugar, he'd have low blood sugar reactions to the insulin and his blood sugar would drop as low as like 7. And to put that into perspective for you, my dad was the type of diabetic that we wanted to keep him about 100 to 140 blood sugar wise. And when he'd get to seven, that was very close to zero. And when you get to zero, there's no fucking coming back. You are dead. So one example of what it was like to live with my dad during this time was we were all sitting around watching TV and my dad went up to bed, and 20 minutes later we heard, boom. 170 pounds hit the floor above us. And at this point, I was probably, I don't know, 10 or 11. We all just knew what had happened. It was like, not our first time at the rodeo. And we all just got into triage mode and my mom just adopted this like, pathologically calm tone. And it would be like, joey, get upstairs and get your father off the floor. Tommy, go get his blood meter. Sean, get a glass, fill it with Sugar, and then top that with orange juice. And Maureen, get the glucose gone shot, and we'll reconvene in the bedroom. As these episodes started occurring with increasing frequency, it became clear to all of us that my dad's body just couldn't sustain this much longer. And sure enough, When I was 17, in 2000, my dad got diagnosed with cancer. And it was four very short months between the time he got his diagnosis and the time he died. The chemo that he was on took away whatever shred of ability he had to control his bodily functions. And I remember waking up one morning for school, and immediately I could smell human feces. And in the next room, I could hear my mom whispering to my dad, it's not your fault. You can't control this. This is just a part of getting better. It's just a part of getting better. Joe. Unfortunately, my dad never did get better. And after he died, we all basically had to relearn how to live. Suddenly, we could drink the orange juice that was in the fridge, and we could eat the jelly beans that were in the cabinet. We had spent my whole life anyway fighting to keep this man alive. And once he was gone, the only thing left for us to fight was one another. My senior year of high school, my mother said to me, I want to know where you're applying to college. So I wrote out a list, and I handed it to her, and she looked at it and said, there is not one fucking school in Massachusetts on here. She crumbled it up, threw it on the floor, and didn't speak to me for three months. Literally. We hold a grand. And nevertheless, the following year, I packed my bags and did go to college in Texas. And it was this amazing experience because, like, for the first time, I was able to just think about myself, and I was able to make my own decisions. And I discovered that I was gay. And it was fucking awesome. But it was also frightening because I didn't want to have to tell my super Catholic mother that. But I found a way to tell her at the end of my sophomore year of college, naturally, when we were in the middle of a huge fight. And I screamed at her, I'm gay, and you have to deal with it, Ma. And I don't really remember the conversation, but for her saying, it's going to be a very, very hard life for you. And she did her best to make sure that it was a hard life for me, because for six years after that, she and I did not speak or really see each other. And during that time, when I was 21 to 27. I sort of checked out of my own life, and I started smoking pot, like, all day, every day. And I was just drinking anything that you would put in front of me and snorting anything that you would put in front of me. And I just let my debts pile up around me to the point where my credit was in the three hundreds. And I got, like, you know, a bunch of tattoos and I got my ears pierced because who was gonna stop me? And then, like, it was interesting because I was never a violent kid, but I suddenly started finding myself getting into, like, lots of fist fights. And they mostly happened when I was out and drinking. And I would hear somebody call someone a faggot. Whether the person was me or one of my friends or just a stranger, I would get into a fight about it, like, set off that O' Malley trigger inside of me. And at 24, I decided to move back from Austin to Boston in large part to help repair my relationship with my family. And that first couple of years back in Boston was filled with lots of failed attempts at reconnecting. I would go to family parties they were at. As soon as I would enter, my mom and my siblings would leave, leave, and I would call my mom and leave emails from my mom, and she just wouldn't return to them. So it became pretty clear to me pretty quickly that my mom didn't have any interest in being a part of my life. So I just gave up on it for a little while anyway. Then when I was 27, I was living in an apartment in South Boston, around the corner from the house my mother grew up in, interestingly enough, that my aunt owned and was letting me stay in. And I was living on the third floor. And I remember one night I was standing on the back porch looking down about 40ft to the patio out back. And I don't know, I probably smoked a bunch of pot and drank a bunch of whiskey that day, and I was just feeling pretty down. I was chained, smoking cigarettes, and I kept flicking them and just watching them fall and. And cascade sort of past the two porches below mine. And every time one would hit the ground, the lit end would sort of explode like a firework against the pavement. And it all looked like very peaceful and easy. And I found myself envying these cigarettes that were falling to the ground. And I realized that, I mean, I didn't want to kill myself, but if this was living, I knew I didn't want to be alive. And I knew from there it was a very slippery slope to Actually wanting to jump. So I did the only thing I could think of when I was feeling completely out of control. And I called my mom, and I blocked the number so that she wouldn't be able to screen my call. And she picked up, and I told her who it was. And she said, oh, hi, Tom. Good to hear from you, darling. And it was like, first of all, she'd never called me Tom before. And second of all, it was this completely bullshit tone in her voice that I had known because she used to use it whenever one of my aunts called that she didn't want to talk to. And I just. She was being fake, and I was ready for a real fucking fight with her. And I went at her, I was like, do you care? Do you actually care how I'm doing? If you cared, mom, you would answer one of my phone calls or one of my emails. You would not leave parties with when I walked into them. So if you cared about me, why wouldn't you do those things? She got really silent and she said, what's the matter with you? What's going on? And her voice shifted, and it was the same voice that she used to use with my dad when he was really sick. And I said, I can't do this anymore, Mom. I can't fight with you. I feel incomplete without you. And if I'm not going to have you in my life, I don't want to live it anymore. If you are still my mother, you will come over here right now and we will fix this. She said, I can't come over there right now. I have to go to a meeting for work. But as soon as it's over, I will come over there, Tommy. I promise. Give me one hour. I will be there in one hour. Can you wait one hour? And I said, yeah, I can wait. And I waited one hour and then two hours and then three hours. And my mother has never been on time for anything in her entire life, including my father's funeral. And after she showed up three and a half hours later, I wasn't angry. I wasn't upset. I was just so happy to see my mom. We went into my living room and sat on the couch. We started talking, and we argued a little bit and sort of swapped blame and shared our resentments. And after a minute, we kind of looked at each other and smiled and realized, we don't need to be fighting against each other. We can be fighting for each other. And that night, we started a conversation that we have continued to this day. And as she left, she gave me the best hug that I had ever gotten in my life because I worked so hard to get that hug from her. And she took my face and she put it between her hands and said, I have to ask you something serious. What the fuck were you thinking getting your ears pierced.
