Losing the R

I should have known at the point I met Bobby on the Fourth Floor of Houston Hall in September 1967 that Boston would be a unique cultural experience.

"Nick Pak? I'm Bobby Deutch. pissa to meet you."

I'd arrived in the Massachusetts zone.

I know it's different today: Some is generational - Caroline talks different than Teddy; Some is homogenization - lots of out-of-state and foreign students stayed in the Boston area after the high-tech boom. But forty years ago almost 50% of Tufts students came from Massachusetts; Harvard was being fed by a number of exclusive New England Prep schools - Andover, Middlesex and Exeter, to mention three -and there was a distinct ethnic flavor in Boston, best caught in the accent and phrases of its citizens. It was as heavy as "Da bums" in Brooklyn and "y'all" in Alabama, and, to those of us from outside "the Commonwealth," just as amusing.

No one was immune. It was the MTA conductor and Bobby Kennedy; Mayor White and Tony C.; the President of of Tufts and the janitor who cleaned up the mess in our halls. I must admit, I'd always thought the stories about "Park yer caa in Havid Yad" were apocryphal, but I came to see that a Boston teenager could leave the city for forty years, live in the jungles of the Amazon, speaking only a unique native dialect, and the morning he was scheduled to address graduate students in Linguistic Anthropology at Radcliffe, ask the concierge at his hotel in Harvard square: "Will there be a caa to take me to the yaad?"

When I got into drugs, we turned the reality of Massachusetts' speech into a more elaborate fantasy. We would wonder: when they were six years old, did Boston area youngsters take a special one year class to learn "Bostonese?" If they failed, did they end up sounding like people from Hartford or Providence?

Certainly failing the class resulted in expulsion from the Commonwealth. Maybe "noth, to New Hampshaa." We could imagine parents weeping hysterically as accent challenged children were forced into the awaiting paddy wagons. The vehicles were marked - "Nashua New Hampshire Resettlement Program." Resettlement Day had to be a sobering reality for all seven year olds. This was when you came of age', like a first communion or Bar Mitzvah. The event was memorialized by a tattoo scrolled on the heels of the Chosen Ones: "KOTA." Keeper Of The Accent. Always, indelibly there, a reminder of the heritage and the sacred responsibility.

KOTA classes meant weekly until the children were 16. They would practice inflection, dropping "R's", and mindlessly repeat signature words: pissa, bitchin, wickid; bitchin wickid, pissa; bitchin pissa, wickid; wic id pissa, bitchin, and so on.

Again class, again.

KOTA was an inside joke. The whole fantasy came to several of us when we were really stoned, and it just took a barely audible "kota" to get us hysterically laughing while feeding the munchies at Nick's Pizza surrounded by locals. They were good enough people - "Good Will Hunting" was fairly accurate in its depiction of the non-Collegiate youth of Somerville - and we didn't hassle them, or vice/versa. We laughed at a fantasy, not at people. Most of the time we knew the difference.