The back streets of Roslindale are very lonely at 9 p.m. on a Saturday night. But State Sen. Joseph F. Timilty is hanging out in his campaign-hired mid-sized blue Mercury--parked in a gas station that probably never opens on Saturday nights. There is a very Greek-looking young man standing on the passenger's side of the car, leaning in the window, and briefing the candidate.

Across the street, the St. Nectarios Greek Orthodox Church community center is falling apart. There was a fire last year at this outpost of Roslindale's new Greek-American community; the walls are wood where they should be concrete; the concrete is peeling faster than the congregation is repairing. Inside the community center basement there is a small snack shop and about 30 tables covered in light blue grease cloths. The turnout is much smaller than it should be a couple of weeks before the election. About 45 Greek-Americans are sitting at the tables, chatting uniformly in Greek, and awaiting the candidate. There must be 300 donuts lying neatly arranged on the tables, but nobody has touched them. A young woman is manning the McDonalds-loaned drinking vat, but nobody seems to be interested.

"The other one's been in too long," a youngish male Greek-American explains in somewhat halting English. "Change is a good thing." Timilty walks into the room and there is more than polite applause, but it can't fill the room. There is an introduction--a slew of Greek words--and a smiling "Thank You, Mike," from Timilty. The candidate is in a dark blue pinstripe suit and blue shirt, replete with sideburns struggling to complete the Jerry Brown young-but-responsible look. The voice is all wrong--too high--bouncing off the yellow and beige walls in the basement.

"There are 'those of us who want to preserve our ethnic heritage," Timilty tells the crowd. "There are those of us who believe that the Greek-American ought to be recognized even when it's not election time." With the subtlety of a bulldozer, the senator paces his way through his speech. He finishes with a smile and that certain anxious Timilty look--"I hope that the next time I come here you'll all be here," he says as he begins his round, "but that I'll have a different job." Joe Timilty wants to be mayor of Boston.

***

This is not the first time, of course, that Joe Timilty has made that wish. Back in 1971, when he didn't even make it past the preliminaries. Timilty already had his heart set on City Hall. He made that wish again in 1975, when he got past the preliminaries but was narrowly defeated by Kevin H. White. And this fall, after White thrashed him in the preliminary by 14 per cent, Timilty once again made that wish.

"Do you want to see the same old Timilty-White show?" Boston School Committee President David Finnegan asked over and over again while campaigning in the preliminaries. Yes, Boston voters answered on September 25, but now they may be having second thoughts. Although the names are the same, this time there are a couple of differences.

In a couple of words, this campaign has been incredibly boring. Not that it hasn't descended into personal attacks--you can count on the mayoral race to do that, if nothing else--but it just hasn't had any punch. Unlike 1975, when corruption generated a lot of political flak, there has been no big issue. Campaign news has slid into the back pages of the newspapers. A real "lets-get-it-over-with" mood has spread throughout the city.

A series of more exciting events, moreover, has combined to take any edge off an election that was hackneyed the day it began. After the preliminary was over, The News was The Pope and it stayed that way until the pontiff left the country. A couple of weeks later, the Kennedys et. al. came to town to dedicate the John F. Kennedy Library. Kevin White was there--in the back row of the platform with some Boston Pops oboe blasting in his ear. And Joe Timilty was there too--with a camera, looking to attract attention to himself while snapping shots of the really big guys. In the middle of all this, a black football player was shot and paralyzed and racial violence came back to haunt Southie High. And it snowed in October. Boston has had an exciting fall season, but none of the hoopla has been generated by the race for mayor.

The other differences of course is that this time Joe Timilty's neck is really on the line. Timilty has a lot more to lose than another election and the $25,000 loan he took out before the preliminary. If the state senator is relatively young in years, he's twice his age in political saleability and getting older each time he runs. If there was little personal animosity between the two perennial opponents the first time they played this show, there's a whole lot now. Like Peter the Great in Sweden, Joe Timilty has regrouped and come back to take on the King again. The King's name is not Charles, though. It's Kevin.

***

Kevin White is standing on a street corner in the North End and smiling from ear to ear. He's not too far away to be talking about Quincy Market and his downtown accomplishments with some lady who lives just off of Prince St. But, as always, the mayor is thinking about something else. White's familiar figure struts up the street and what's left of his now-white hair glows in the cold sunshine. If he's not already there, the mayor is fast approaching mid-life crisis. If he's not mayor of Boston again, there's not much else that Kevin White wants to do. If Timilty has his neck on the line. White has his pride to lose this time--and probably some of his ego. And in his sometimes arrogant manner, the mayor has spent his $1.5 million and pulled out all the stops.

This election has featured some vintage White. If there is anything damaging being thrown around, it's all the stuff about the rising numbers of city employees and the mayor's bureaucracy/campaign staff. Timilty has failed to exploit issues, like the always wasteful and sometimes illegal activities of the Office of Cultural Affairs. White, meanwhile, has displayed unusual arrogance and, in keeping with the Richard Daley model, has gotten away with it. "I don't stop work at 5," he's told us several hundred times, "Why should they?"

In any other city, there would be a lot of yelling and screaming over White's refusal to debate Timilty on television. But in Boston, only Timilty is yelling--and not loud enough. White has even refused to appear on the same platform as his challenger. "What we don't want are joint appearance which are going to use the mayor's prestige to bring Joe Timilty publicity," says Stephen Crosby, the mayor's campaign manager. And people have actually bought this line. All the Boston Globe could gurgle is that White "does not lack for chutzpah."

It's not as if Kevin White would have nothing to talk about in a debate with Timilty. But it's more fun to use the issues as a backdrop for personal attacks. So White has labelled Timilty a "basic barroom drinker with general tastes" and accused him of floating all over the issues. "I believe he cannot run this city and I think everyone in the business knows it but the public," the mayor says, "I can see him now getting elected saying. 'Uh, what do I do now?"' Timilty hasn't hesitated to step into the fray, of course. When asked about possible names for his seventh child, he said he hadn't considered the name Kevin because it is synonymous with weakness. The senator has compared the mayor to a Tammany Hall leader and Richard Nixon. And the daily press conferences he's held to draw attention to himself have featured posters like that one that has White's photo next to "Wanted. The $89 Million Bandit," a.k.a. The Mayor.