Dana White, King of MMA

I was working 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., and so I didn’t see Dana until the next morning.
When I got home, he told me he could not believe I was living in this place. The
apartment was a one bedroom, fifth-floor walkup. The street level of the building
was a butcher shop, and during the day, they would have rabbits hanging out front,
tied by their feet to the metal awning pole. There was always an entire row of them
to greet you at the front door of the building. We had a big beautiful house in Las
Vegas, a little over twenty-nine hundred square feet with five bedrooms, two
bathrooms, living room, TV room, dining room, den, and a pool in the backyard. This
one bedroom fifth-floor walkup was very different from what Dana was used to. I
loved it. Dana would eventually too.
After a few days, I told Dana he needed to get out and look for a job. He was not
going to lie around the apartment all day. I was working seven days a week for a
nursing temp agency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. After a week of coming home
every morning and finding Dana in my bed sleeping, I gave him an ultimatum: “Get
your ass up and find a job or get out.” He was nineteen years old and needed to start
being a little more responsible. When I got home the next morning, he was up and
out; but then I found a note saying he had gone to Maine.
Dana returned from Maine a short time later with his girlfriend, Brenda, whom he
had apparently been dating his senior year in Maine. In his absence, I had moved from
the Salem Street apartment to a larger one-bedroom apartment on Tileston Street.
Dana and Brenda had now both moved in with me. They were sleeping on the living
room floor on a stack of comforters. Brenda found a job right away at one of the
department stores at Downtown Crossing, and eventually Dana got a job working at
the Black Rose, a great Irish bar next to Faneuil Hall off State Street. The bar is still
there today, unlike so many other places that have long since disappeared. Dana, who
was a doorman and bouncer, did not work there for very long; it seems he was in
more fights than he prevented. The employees at the Black Rose were Dana's age and
Irish, right off the boat. The Irish are a lot of fun and have a great outlook on life in
general, and Dana got along with them really well. Dana and Brenda eventually
moved to South Boston and shared an apartment with four of the Irish guys he was
working with.