Just How Screwed Up is Boston's Sewer System?

If you could change anything in your life, would you change anything? No. Of course, I knew you'd say that. Now ask me. Would you change anything? Everything. Every single fucking thing. Everything. Do you have any regrets? Yes! All the fun of my life is fun. Someone said, well, if you change everything, you might not be where you are. And I go, yeah, I'll roll the dice. I could be fucking better off. You never know. You know, I mean... Well, I learned from all my mistakes. All of them. I hated every fucking one of them. I felt terrible every fucking mistake I've ever made, but it's made me a better person. I'm still making mistakes, brother. Yes, me too. I'm still fucking making mistakes. Me too. Always. You know, I don't want to. It's just part of being a person, man. Everybody makes mistakes. Look, I try to be a good person. I always have tried to be a good person. And sometimes, how do you try? The more fucking people misconstrued or misunderstand. Oh, for sure, yeah. That's what makes me want to do bad things. The people? Yeah, like your neighbor. The guy who lost the brain. Oh, yeah. Or the gravitron. I mean, I wouldn't encourage you to say his name on the show. No, I know that. I know it, but you know. You see how I feel. And I'm a good... I had told this guy he could cut down trees to improve his view. Stuff like that. I was nice. His parents loved me. His parents said, oh, that's when he's the nicest guy you won't believe. He's a little crazy, but I used to let him come down, eat the food off the trees. Everything they want. I hope he's listening right now. I hope he's getting nervous. Yeah, he's very wealthy. He's very... Nobody's born wealthy. Yeah. That's a terrible place to be for a man. That's a terrible place to be for a man. I mean, if I had a son, I'd fucking kick him out of the house, make him go fend for himself. I really would. Not me. If I did that to my kid, he'd end up blowing sailors at Fleet Week. Look what you made me do, daddy! Look what you made me do! I mean, I would... But a man grows up without his own money. You mentioned a pepper. Yeah. How many peppers did you have for a year? Oh, my God. I had hundreds. I had three roots. Yeah. A couple hundred a piece. I had the Herald for a while. My main staple was the Globe. I did the Herald and I did the New York Times for a while. I did the Herald Globe, New York Times and the Cambridge Chronicle. No shit. Wow. And every now and then my father felt bad for me. He goes, you're not going to be able to do it. You better have more than you can do. Get in the car. And he'd be whipping him out the window for sure of me because he worked for the Herald as a lunar type operator. And he was proud of me for work. And somebody goes, three, four, but what are you nuts? Do one paper. Like most of them write them. But you can make real money if you did that. That saved me while I was doing stand up because it gave me money. I didn't have to have a regular job. I could get up in the morning and I could deliver newspapers from 5 a.m. to 7.30 a.m. Worst job you ever had. Worst job you ever had. Construction, for sure. Some of those construction gigs were rough. Really rough. Yeah. And it depends on the company you work for. I work with my buddy Jimmy Lawless and we built a wheelchair ramp for a Knights of Columbus Hall. Right. And all fucking summer. I mean, it wasn't even all summer. I mean, I think I quit after like three weeks. But all we did was carry cement and pressure treated lumber. That's all I did every day. Cement and pressure treated lumber out in the sun. And by the time 5 o'clock would roll around or whatever it was when we quit, I didn't have anything left. I would just eat and fall asleep. And then I'd get up in the morning and do it again. But it taught me something. If you want to be a laborer for life, this is what life is. And this is a fucking tired you're going to be. You better figure out what you want to do with your life and get after it. Because at the time I was probably like 18 or 19. I'll never forget how hard it was. 21, I went to the National Laborers Training Center in Hopkington, Mass. Where they teach you how to be a laborer. Teach you? Teach you how to be a laborer. And the same thing with cement and the pressure treated lumber that I forgot on your skin. It made you all itchy. Oh, you get splinters and they get infected. Oh, every day. It's all chemicals and shit. And from there I'd leave and I'd go to be a lifeguard. And then after lifeguard I was janitoring a couple of bones. It's all at one time when my dad got sick and I was dead care family. But then I was a sewer truck operator, which was a great job. They used to have a claw on the back of a big, big giant pickup truck. You know what I mean? What else? You'd swing it out and you'd pick up the top of the sewer and then you'd put the clam in and you open it up and you'd pick up. And I went to every bar room in Cambridge and said, got a lot of complaints about the stink coming out of your sewer right there. And they go, really? Yeah, I can take care of it. Really? Why don't you have a beer? All right. Shit, face. You don't know how many sidewalks I pulled up for getting to close the clam. Boom. Eddie, sitting the sidewalk people down, I go, you got a cover for me. And they would build this up. They need a drink too. We'd be shit-faced in a bar room. The Port of House Cafe, a mass app. Oh my God, the shine people. Where did you do the shine cones? What'd you do with the hole until you fixed it? Well, we'd get one of those movable shitters and we'd put that on one side. And then we'd get the cones. But the guys would come and if you had the right crew, they could fix that sidewalk in a couple of hours. Wow. Just smooth it out. Well, Massachusetts always has fucked up sidewalks. Or fucked up concrete. Every way you drive, all the asphalt's fucked up in the winter. Joe, how about the highways? First, we're going to do this mile section in Saugus. That's good. Now we're going out to Springfield. Leave that. Right? And then that's not finished. How about the big dig? How much longer did that take than it was supposed to take? That's one of the biggest corruption schemes in all of the history of construction. I know. The big dig was supposed to cost. The big dig was supposed to cost $1.8 billion and be done in seven years. The big dig is still not finished and it cost $28 billion. That's $26 billion over. That's like going through a dry clean. How much you clean my pants? $12. You go back the next one. That'll be three grand. Three grand! We ran into some problems. Everyone made money. When I was living in Malden, they were working on it. That was in 1988. Yeah. And they still work with it. Joe, they put up four ton tiles with Elmer's glue and they thought it was going to – that's what happened. Really? Oh yeah. Look, 51 million. You were originally 51 million. Oh my God. It's still not done. It's still not done. How is it not done? It says constructed in 91 to 2007. Joe, believe me. I drive there all the time. This part's still not open. It took them 15 years to open up the tunnel to the airport. It says it's on December 31st. It's official. Boston's Big Dig will be done, The Washington Post, in 2007. Okay. But it's just still fixed. All right, Joe. Here's the – the centerpiece of the Big Dig is the Zacom Bridge. It was named after a guy named Lenny Zacom. Do you know who he is? No. Okay. Nice guy. Community organizer. Philanthropist. Wonderful person. Jew. Jew will blow that bridge up. So I swear to God, right? Lenny Zacom. Nice guy. And I'm a friend of the Jews. I married a Jew. I was in the tribe. I know your secrets. Don't fuck with me. I'll expose you. So I'm not like Eli Omar. I kill the Jews. I love the Jews. They're very good sex. Now what happens, they had eight people from Cambridge who were against the Lenny Zacom Bridge being there because it cast a shadow on the Charles River preventing the fish from being in the river to go out to the ocean and spawn. Really? Yeah. First of all, anything in that river should not be allowed to recreate or spawn. But secondly, a shadow is stopping a fish? What the fuck do you think fish do at night? Oh. Come on. Who said that it was doing that? Was there a real – like biologists were saying this? No. Eight ugly women from Cambridge. We hate everything. We're killing the fish. We're killing the fish. It's a dirty brown river. Running for president. Oh, that's fish. That is a brown river. Oh, you can walk across it on a good day. Has it gotten any better? You know, Joe, I got to tell you, it really has. It has gotten better. But you can still see sewage when people are rowing. Yeah, it's bad. You know, Dave, well, I used to live in Newton. I used to live in Newton Upper Falls across the street from like a section of the river. And we used to see carp in it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then one day I was out there walking around and I saw some bubbling in the water and I watched a condom bubble up to the surface. And I realized it was a sewer pipe that was broken. Yeah. It was leaking raw sewage right into the fucking river. That's where it goes. Yeah. Do you know, in Fenway Park, when you were a kid, the groundskeeper was Joe Mooney. And Joe Mooney was famous because nobody but nobody stepped on that grass. No one. Even Yawkey. He was like a crazed man. And since then, my friend David Miller, he's one of my dearest friends because I wanted to learn all about grass because I smoked it. And smoking is easier than growing it and growing it. But he, when he took over, when the sewers would back up in Boston, they would flood Fenway Park. And when the water receded, they'd be actually fish flapping in the infield. And we have pictures of it. It's where you can pull that shit up. And where did they come from? How did they get in there? From the river, from the Charles River. And they'd back up and whatever's in those sewers would come out. But through what port? Like how did they get into the grass area? Oh, the water would rise from where the water would drain out of the ballpark. It would come back in and fish would. And fish, there's pictures of fish flapping on the field at Fenway Park. I don't know how you, yeah, you can Google, Google that. Ticky Ticky. Is anybody can find it in the stream? I'm sure we can. You got anything? David Miller has written like eight books online. I went there. John Henry invited me to come up and sit with him on my birthday one night at Fenway Park. This is years ago, about 10, 12 years ago. And he said to me, he says, Lenny, you want to go sit in my seats? I said, yeah. So when he bought Fenway, he extended the seats out two more rows. So he has TVs. I mean, it's right next to the bar. So I'm sitting there with him. He goes, if you could meet anybody in the ballpark, in the organization, who would you like to meet? He goes, what? You want to meet Manny or Big Papa? No, I want to meet the groundskeeper. Why? I said, you just had Jimmy Buffett out here. Two nights in a row. There's not a plate out of grass. Look at that. It's the most beautiful grass, beautiful lawn in the world. He gets on the phone. David, would you come down? He said, Mr. Clark, I go, oh, you know me, man. I've been dying to meet you. So we go to his office. Yeah, I leave John Henry. I go to the groundkeeper's office. You want to meet the lawn? Yeah, right, right. So then I invite him and his wife and kids down to my place. And they come down to the vineyard. Three weeks later, they sent me Lenny Clark Fenway Park grass seed. My lawn looked like Fenway Park. It was the most amazing lawn. It's like shit now, but you- What kind of seed is it? Magic seed. Magic seed. Jack and the Beanstalk. Like beanstalk seed. Joe, they were going to carve Lenny in my lawn. I said, no. It was- That's hilarious. When I bought it, when I bought this property, it was all overrun. One day I was out smoking a joint and I was picking up paper, you know, because I'm a land baron, you know. And I go, holy shit, my, what's wrong? There's a stone wall back in my house. It's surrounded by stone walls that you couldn't even see because the tickets and the brush was all overgrown. The next day she must have had like eight trucks in there and they- I have stone walls surrounding my entire estate. And you just didn't know? Didn't know. You couldn't even see them. Wow. How weird. And then I added to my lawn. I had like maybe half an acre of lawn. I got like three acres of lawn. That's a lot of lawn. That's a lot of lawn. Too much work. Too much work. Who mows all that shit? Basilians. Basilians. Yeah. Daddy's not good with the lawn mower. I'm not good. Daddy let me use power tools. Even off silver. No power tools for Lenny. Fish make good fertilizer. Yeah. So if they did die, you got something? It's not a good reference photo, but this is a photo of a fish on- Derek Fenway. You take off. Joe. Joe. There's a story to go with. I had a couple of years before work, the Red Sox, January 2001 at Fenway Park. I sat down with previous 30 year heads ground keeper, Mr. Joe Mooney, to discuss the nuances of Fenway. Joe said, David, if it really rains hard, the dugouts flood because of the crown and the old field. I wasn't surprised because I'd seen that before in Milwaukee County Stadium. He then say, if it really, really rains hard, the antiquated city storm drains will back up and water will come out of the manhole covers in Fenway's concourse and then flood the concourse. If it really, really, really rains hard, the first base camera pit will fill up with water and the fish from the Charles River a mile away will swim through the city drain pipes and swim into the camera pit and then swim out onto the field. I said, wow, Mr. Mooney, that's wild thinking he was pulling my leg. I went home and told my wife, you won't believe the stories that Mr. Mooney tells. Fast forward to April, Friday night before the Red Sox home opener on Monday, the overnight forecast was for two to three inches of rain. So we put the tarp on the infield when the rain stopped early Saturday morning, we would receive almost three inches of rain. I walked behind the home plate towards the Red Sox dugout to check the conditions of the warning, warning track. And I couldn't believe my eyes when I looked at saw a fish laying on the grass. I looked around for Joe thinking, I put a great prank on me, pulled a great prank on me, but I didn't see him anywhere. I walked over to the camera pit and sure enough, it was full of water. I turned around and looked towards the infield. I saw seven more fish between the camera pit and second base in my rush to get the tarp off now sunny skies and get ready for my first Red Sox opener. I unfortunately threw all the fish away. I have wished since then I could have saved the fish and had them displayed for my office, my home and for Joe. But at least I made time to take this photo. And since then I've had it hanging on my office wall. Joe, one of my favorite words is vindication. That's vindication. I answered every question that you asked me, which I couldn't, you know, Alex quickly put. It's Joe, you know, that's why you laugh when people say, oh, that's that he makes this shit. How can I make this shit up? That makes sense. It makes sense though. It's so close to the Charles River. It makes sense. Yeah. Like a mile away, right? Oh, unbelievable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.