November 2005

November 2005 marks the assault that left Andrew with a nearly thirty-stitch head wound and a question that endured long after the injury healed: why had Jeff O’Bannon chosen him? The episode begins as an attempt to revisit an old social world, but a beer bottle turns an ordinary night into a source of lasting shame, vigilance, and uncertainty. Much later, Andrew’s recognition of O’Bannon in Redmond gives that remembered violence a new and immediate consequence.

Setting and Return

Andrew and his friend Ritchie went to the Penalty Box after leaving a Celtics game early. The home team was down by twenty-five points early in the fourth quarter, and the two friends had come to the bar for a little nostalgia. In earlier years, Andrew had attended the Upstairs Lounge’s Friday-night dance parties with a small group of friends for almost five years, continuing even after the parties moved to a new venue in Allston. By November 2005, the Upstairs Lounge had long been shuttered; the return was to the bar below it, not to the old dance-room scene itself.

The Penalty Box was a rough, hard-drinking bar on Causeway Street, across from North Station and the Boston Garden. That night it was half full of Celtics supporters in green shirts. Andrew wore a twenty-year-old Robert Parish tank top, too small over a white long-sleeve shirt; Ritchie wore a new Paul Pierce jersey, despite having spent much of the game complaining about the player. These details place the attack inside an unremarkable evening of sports, old friends, and familiar surroundings, rather than in a planned confrontation.

Andrew later reconstructed the minutes before the assault as a sequence of absences and small exchanges. He and Ritchie had been inside for less than ten minutes. Andrew went straight to the bar for two Sam Adams drafts and carried them to Ritchie near the entrance. Ritchie was talking with a loudly drunk, middle-aged woman in a Bruins hoodie and jeans. She teased him, touched his arms and shoulders, asked him to dance despite there being no music, and eventually asked for another beer. Andrew encouraged the exchange; Ritchie played along with the prospect of dancing, inventing excuses while keeping the conversation going. The TV carried the muted commentary of Mike Gorman and Tommy Heinsohn over the Celtics blowout. In Andrew’s later account, this ordinary, sociable scene is also the last stretch of the evening he could piece together before the sudden attack.

The Assault and Its Immediate Aftermath

Andrew did not remember seeing Jeff O’Bannon before the attack. According to the police report and testimony, O’Bannon and two friends were at the bar. Andrew remembered a single slur from behind his left shoulder, delivered clearly rather than as a drunken shout. As he turned toward the speaker, O’Bannon smashed a beer bottle on his head. The blow and its follow-through opened a gash that required almost thirty stitches to close.

Andrew remembered the sound of breaking glass and a cold sensation on his head and neck, but not pain at first. Then the floor seemed to rush toward him. He remembered lying facedown with his eyes closed as people shouted, but not getting into the ambulance. During the ride, he insisted on sitting up. The violence had no explanation available to him in that moment: he had turned toward a voice, and the bottle had already struck.

At the hospital, Eric asked what had happened. Andrew began to answer that he did not know, then stopped himself before saying that he did not know what he had done. Shame, not only shock, marked his first encounter with Eric after the assault. That interrupted thought captures the injury’s psychological dimension: although Andrew had been attacked, he briefly approached the event as if he might need to account for having caused it.

The Account, and What It Could Not Explain

O’Bannon later pleaded guilty. In court, he said he had been drunk and not thinking clearly, and claimed that Andrew had accidentally spilled a beer on one of his friends. The account was patently false. O’Bannon also said that he and his friends had been looking for a fight, that his friends had egged him on, and repeatedly insisted that the attack did not reflect who he was. He further maintained that the slur did not explain the assault: it was a word he and his friends used without meaning what it actually meant.

Those explanations did not resolve Andrew’s central uncertainty. He knew the attack had involved hate, but continued to wonder why he, rather than Ritchie, had been targeted. He asked himself how O’Bannon could have recognized that Andrew was gay, whether he had simply guessed, and whether Ritchie might have been attacked had he been standing with his back to the bar. Andrew also considered whether O’Bannon had noticed him outside or inside the Boston Garden, or only after Andrew crossed the room to order the beers. The narrative supplies these questions without an answer, preserving the difference between establishing the assault and knowing how its target was selected.

A Memory That Reaches Forward

For years, the assault recurred in Andrew’s routines. He thought about it before boxing lessons and workouts, and before trips to the shooting range. For the first couple of years afterward, sleeplessness could lead him to spend hours searching the internet for his attacker. When he had exhausted what he could find about O’Bannon, he looked up other people with the same name, including a Los Angeles film art-department worker, a middle-school teacher in New Mexico, and a man in the 1940 government census. The searches ranged far beyond the person who had hurt him, a sign of how the name had become attached to the event in Andrew’s mind. One night Eric found him asleep in a desk chair and gently led him back to bed.

Andrew eventually stopped the searches and became less urgently watchful in public, but the hypervigilance never disappeared completely. In unguarded moments, he still worried at the question of why O’Bannon had chosen him. The assault’s afterlife is therefore not a simple progression from injury to recovery: the behavior changes, while the unanswered question remains available to return.

That return becomes literal when Andrew recognizes Redmond as Jeff O’Bannon. Redmond’s shaved head, age, and more-than-fifty-pound weight gain have altered his appearance enough that Andrew does not identify him immediately. Once he does, he tells Eric that Redmond is the man from the bar. Eric’s response is uncertain, and Andrew presses him on that uncertainty. The November 2005 attack thus becomes more than a backstory: a face once encountered in a courtroom reappears in the present under a different name, bringing the old violence into the family’s current danger. The interval between the assault and the recognition has not erased the event; it has made recognition itself a fresh crisis.