Penalty Box

Penalty Box was a neighborhood bar whose changing uses made it a site of both Andrew’s earlier nights out and the attack that remained with him for years. In November 2005, a return there for nostalgia with his friend Ritchie became the setting of Jeff O’Bannon’s assault on Andrew.

Setting and History

On Causeway Street, across from North Station and Boston Garden, Penalty Box occupied the first floor of a plain, two-story brick-and-cement building. Its square front window sat beside an entrance cut into the brick like a cave; a yellow sign with thick black letters marked the otherwise industrial-looking exterior. Inside, it was a hard-drinking dive patronized by mean drunks, people spending their last dollars or loose change, and fans arriving before or leaving after Bruins and Celtics games.

The building’s upstairs room had a different history. Called the Upstairs Lounge, it became a local music hot spot in the late 1990s, hosting Friday-night pill dance parties where roughly eighty people crowded into a dark, grimy room to hear Britpop. Before meeting Eric, Andrew and a small circle of friends attended regularly for almost five years; the parties continued after moving to a new venue in Allston. By 2005, the Upstairs Lounge had long been shuttered, but the old association with dancing and music gave Andrew and Ritchie a reason to visit Penalty Box for a taste of nostalgia.

The 2005 Visit and Assault

In November 2005, Andrew and his friend Ritchie left a Celtics game early and went to Penalty Box for a little nostalgia. The bar was half full of green-shirted fans who had also given up on the home team, down by twenty-five points early in the fourth quarter. Andrew wore a twenty-year-old Robert Parish tank top, too small over a white long-sleeved shirt; Ritchie wore a new Paul Pierce jersey despite having spent much of the game criticizing Pierce’s shot selection and lack of foot speed.

They had been inside for less than ten minutes. Andrew went straight to the bar for two Sam Adams drafts, then carried them to Ritchie, who was near the entrance talking with a loudly drunk, middle-aged woman in a Bruins hoodie and jeans. She touched Ritchie’s arms, shoulders, and back while teasing him and urging him to dance, though no music was playing: only the muted television audio of Mike Gorman and Tommy Heinsohn calling the game. Ritchie prolonged the exchange with joking excuses, and Andrew encouraged him to dance. When she asked for another beer, Andrew took her increasingly elaborate demands as a sign that she simply wanted the conversation to continue.

The three laughed together over her story about a previous dance partner named Milton, who, she said, had refused to let her feel him up. Then Jeff O’Bannon appeared behind Andrew’s left shoulder and used an anti-gay slur in a clear, dismissive voice. Andrew turned toward him; O’Bannon smashed a beer bottle over his head. The blow and its follow-through opened a gash that required almost thirty stitches. Andrew remembered the glass breaking and a cold flash across his head and neck, then the floor rushing closer. He later recalled lying facedown with his eyes closed as people shouted, and insisting on sitting upright during the ambulance ride, although he did not remember getting into it.

Aftermath and the Bar's Enduring Meaning

The attack followed Andrew out of Penalty Box into the hospital, where seeing Eric brought an unexpected feeling of shame. When Eric asked what had happened, Andrew began to answer that he did not know, then stopped himself before voicing the thought that he did not know what he had done. That unfinished explanation exposes how the assault’s violence reached beyond the wound: the slur had made Andrew feel marked, and even while injured he was at risk of treating the attacker’s hatred as something he might have caused.

Jeff O’Bannon later pleaded guilty and told the court that he had been drunk, that Andrew had accidentally spilled a beer on one of his friends, and that the group had then been looking for a fight. The account was false; O’Bannon also said repeatedly that the attack was not who he was. Andrew’s memory of Penalty Box preserves a sharper sequence: a brief visit, an ordinary conversation, a slur delivered without a shout, and a bottle swung as Andrew turned. The bar thus remains not merely the setting of an assault but the place where its contradiction took form: O’Bannon disavowed the meaning of his violence, while Andrew continued to bear its bodily and psychological consequences.

The Attack's Return in Memory

The assault continued to shape Andrew’s relationship to danger long after the wound had healed. He thought about it before boxing lessons and workouts and before trips to the shooting range. For the first couple of years afterward, sleeplessness sent him searching online for Jeff O’Bannon, then through the digital lives of people who shared that name. He even spent a night examining the 1940 census for another Jeff O’Bannon. The searches eventually stopped, and Andrew became less likely to scan public places over his shoulder, but the vigilance never disappeared entirely.

What remained unresolved was not why the attack was hateful, but why Andrew had been singled out. He wondered how O’Bannon had identified him as gay, whether another man might have been attacked if he had stood differently, and whether O’Bannon had followed him from Boston Garden or chosen him only after seeing him in the bar. O’Bannon’s later claim that the slur meant nothing to him could not resolve those questions. Penalty Box stayed fixed in Andrew’s memory as the place where an ordinary exchange turned, without warning, into a bodily mark and a lasting uncertainty about how violence had found him.

That memory becomes consequential again when Andrew recognizes Redmond as Jeff O’Bannon. He explains the delayed recognition by Redmond’s shaved head, age, added weight, and bloated face. Eric is unsure whether Andrew has identified the man correctly, but Andrew insists that it is the same person. The recognition joins the bar’s past violence to the danger of the present: Penalty Box is not only where Andrew was attacked, but also the source of the knowledge that lets him identify his attacker years later.