‘I am a bit bigger now’

“It made me feel better about myself. At the time I was so f--kin’ hurt,” Boland said.

“I said to myself, well, nobody is going to hurt me again. … I drunk a dozen beer, I felt eight foot tall and 10 foot wide.”

Besides being sexually abused, he said he was grabbed by the throat and punched in the face numerous times at the orphanage.

He would spend hours sitting in the window staring out towards the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet across the street, hoping his parents would come and get him.

He took off and hitchhiked to St. Lawrence and stayed with a relative after a chance meeting, and then was reunited with his mother. He said he never revealed the abuse to her.

Boland, then in his late teens, said he was walking down Water Street in St. John’s one day, drunk. He saw the Mount Cashel raffle — a longtime charity event — and said English was in the back, spinning the prize wheel. He asked English if he knew him. “He said, ‘ You look like one of the Boland brothers.’ And that’s when I struck him and said, ‘I am a bit bigger now than 11 or 12.’”

Boland claims the police came and challenged English as to whether he was pressing charges, and an officer looked at Boland as he was leaving and said, “I guess you are a bit bigger now, eh b’y?”

Boland said his marriage failed and he laments the effect his life of going back and forth to jail has had on his kids. He said he wants to do the right thing. “My goal this time when I get out, I got to focus on my children. I’m 49 years old, and believe you me, do I want to be here? No indeed, I don’t want to be,” he said, adding he was so ashamed at the beginning of this stint, he avoided phone calls with his kids. “The sorrowful thing about it is I love my children.” This past spring he said he was on Water Street in St. John’s and should have walked the other way from his ex-girlfriend, with whom he had a toxic relationship. Instead, he hooked up with her, wound up in an altercation and then went back to prison yet again.

In prison, he attends AA meetings, but can’t open up about the abuse.

“I done that anger-management program about 50 times over the years,” he said.

His compensation for the abuse is pretty much gone, he said — used to pay bills, as well as street loans he’d taken out.

“I guess what hurts me over the years, if we had to remain on the Burin Peninsula, how would my life be today? Would it be the way it is now?” he said.

“It’s time to stop this life. … My record is getting to the point right now where I have to clean my act up. If I keeps on this way, they are just going to put me away for the rest of my life.

“For what? The sake of a bottle of beer.”