It’s my hope that these stories will help upend what we think we know. Trauma splinters memory. Soldiers who have fought in war speak of holding on to fragments of remembrance, like a disjointed slide show which periodically gets stuck on a single image, on a single moment. This collection of stories, I realize now, mirrors that. It’s how I remember the summer, in slivers which I keep coming back to, trying to make sense of the moments I’ve witnessed and the stories I’ve heard, trying to sort out what is true and what I and others have misremembered. The novelist and Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien has talked about how the atrocities and nastiness of battle get in your bones. The same can be said for young and old living in certain neighborhoods in our cities. You have to fight—and fight hard—not to let the ugliness and inexplicability of the violence come to define you. With just one act of violence the ground shifts beneath you, your knees buckle, and sometimes all you can do is try as best you can to maintain your balance. There are those who right themselves and move on, but for most, their very essence has been rattled.
Not long ago, over lunch at a restaurant, I asked Pharoah how much he remembered of that evening from nearly twenty years ago. “I can’t get it out of my mind,” he told me. He said the cabdriver, a middle-aged white man whose name I later learned was Michael Flosi, engaged him in conversation, that he wanted to know all about Pharoah. When Pharoah told Flosi he was headed to Southern Illinois University, Flosi told him, “God must have really blessed you.” Flosi shared with Pharoah that he’d been saving for years to move his family to Texas and that the move was imminent. “He seemed so happy,” Pharoah told me. When they pulled up to Pharoah’s mom’s house, the young men leaped into the cab as Pharoah was getting out.
It’s here at this restaurant that I come to realize how much this incident is a part of him. In recounting that afternoon, Pharoah seems in a different place. One minute he is sitting across from me in the booth, and then he scoots out as if he’s getting out of a cab. He recoils as if someone’s just jumped in front of him. He’s not present. Instead he’s there, in that moment. Pharoah tells me he ran to the porch, and then after he heard the gunshot he returned to the cab, which had rammed a parked car. Flosi, he says, was slumped over the steering wheel, and the windshield was splattered with blood. (What Pharoah doesn’t remember is that according to court records he later called the cab company to find out whether Flosi had lived.) Pharoah at this point looks around. His eyes are wide with fright. He’s hyperventilating. In the middle of the restaurant he’s crouching, as if trying to disappear. I tell him to sit down. I have to tell him again. “It’s like I’m there,” he says. “I’m out of breath.” The violence is in his bones.
There are so many like Pharoah who carry the violence, who keep moving forward enshrouded in its aftermath. Yet there doesn’t seem to be a sense of urgency, especially among the rest of us. “We’re in the midst of an epidemic,” Don Sharp, a Baptist pastor and longtime friend, told me. “If people were dying of some kind of disease, there’d be all kinds of alerts, but it’s become a way of life for us, and that’s dangerous.” I often think of a Chicago Sun-Times front page from a number of years ago. The banner headline read “Murder at a Good Address.” The story reported on a dermatologist who was discovered bound and brutally stabbed at his office on luxurious Michigan Avenue. I admired the headline for its brazenness and honesty. Its subject was one of 467 murders that year in the city, though the others didn’t warrant such attention, mostly because who would want to read a feature with the headline “Murder at a Bad Address”? In Chicago, the wealthy and the well-heeled die headline deaths and the poor and the rambling die in silence. This is a book, I suppose, about that silence—and the screams and howling and prayers and longing that it hides. Over lunch that day, Pharoah told me, “There’s a lot of stuff I want to forget.” This book is written with the hope that we won’t.
Chapter 1
The Tightrope, a story in four parts
MAY 4…MAY 5…MAY 6…
Marcelo Sanchez’s memory of the next twenty-four hours is hazy, mostly because he’d been drinking. First Hennessy Cognac mixed with the energy drink Monster. Then, later, Heineken. Five days earlier Marcelo had turned seventeen, and I suppose if this night was the first time you’d met him, the events that followed wouldn’t seem out of character. Marcelo had recently purchased from Men’s Wearhouse a slim-fitting, shimmery blue suit, a black tie, and glistening black dress shoes which he had intended to wear to the junior prom the next night at De La Salle Institute, a prestigious Catholic school on the city’s South Side. He’d asked his new girlfriend, Tania, to be his date. He planned to take her to Rosebud, an Italian restaurant downtown, and with a friend had scanned the menu online to figure out in advance what he would order. But because of an incident at school—where he held on to a cell phone stolen by another student before turning it in the next day—the school had barred him from the dance. Nonetheless, he planned to wear the suit to take Tania out to dinner tomorrow night, and was trying it on when a neighborhood friend, Daniel, stopped by to ask if Marcelo wanted to join him at a nearby party.
Marcelo is a handsome teen, his sleepy eyes and dark, full eyebrows lending him an air of thoughtfulness. But his hesitant smile—a small uptick of his full lips—contains a glimmer of mischief, a look as if to say, “Who, me?” He’s a bit of a wise guy, someone who teases and jokes, so deadpan sometimes it’s not clear where the teasing ends and the jabbing begins. He lacks physical grace. He moves like a marionette, his movements stiff-limbed. He’s short—five foot three—and sinewy, his features angular. He has an overbite, which he’s self-conscious about—along with his height—but what’s most noticeable about Marcelo is his skittishness. He’s easily distracted. He often laughs nervously. He bites his fingernails. More often than not, when he’s seated, one of his legs—usually his right—drives like a jackhammer, sometimes so exhausting him that he plants a hand on his knee in an effort to halt the pumping, or at least to slow it down. He takes medication—Wellbutrin—for his anxiety. Much of this can be directly attributed to the fact that within the past two years he’s been stabbed, coming out of a barbershop, and then shot, just outside his house. But more on that later.
What you need to know here is this: at De La Salle, Marcelo had for the past year gotten all A’s, except for a B in math this past semester. He was a remarkably hardworking student. It was, to be sure, a delicate balancing act. During the week he studied two to three hours a night. Come the weekend, he’d hang out with his friends from the neighborhood, and though he’d left his gang, the Latin Kings, he danced along the periphery, still cavorting with his old running mates. He knew that he couldn’t keep up this double life for long. Some of his friends referred to him as “the stupid smart kid.”
Marcelo can be shy, and so at the party he drank quite a bit. He can’t remember how much, but it emboldened him enough to approach a cute girl wrapped in a tight dress and tell her that she looked familiar and that he was eighteen, neither of which was true. Around midnight Marcelo wandered outside and in the gangway alongside the house smoked a Newport with his best friend, Javier. At that point four squad cars pulled up. Marcelo thinks it was because someone had reported a gun there, but he isn’t sure. He didn’t wait around to find out. He and Javier hopped into the car of Daniel, his friend who had driven them there, and took off. Daniel had a friend with him who was so drunk he was falling in and out of sleep, and Javier, whose cell phone had been stolen a week earlier, swiped the sleeping friend’s phone from his pants pocket. Marcelo didn’t learn this until they got dropped off at his house for the night, and Javier, who was staying over, proudly displayed his new acquisition. Together they laughed at Javier’s slyness. Fully clothed, Marcelo fell asleep in his bed while Javier crashed on the sofa in the living room.
Early the next morning Marcelo awoke to the persistent ringing of his cell phone. It was Daniel, who demanded his frien
d’s phone back, and soon Daniel and his friend showed up at Marcelo’s house. Javier returned the phone. Daniel suggested to Marcelo and Javier, Let’s go hit stains. Let’s go rob someone, let’s leave our mark, let’s leave our stain.
I ain’t even trying to go, Marcelo said, reluctant to rob strangers.
Come on, man, what the fuck, I got the whip, Daniel replied, a reference to the fact that he had a car.
Javier, who needed a phone and needed money to help pay his family’s rent, seemed excited by the prospect. He nudged Marcelo, who, tired and hungover, relented. The four of them piled into Daniel’s SUV, which belonged to his mother, and they drove around the neighborhood looking for a mark.
To be fair, Daniel’s memory of the events of this morning differs from Marcelo’s. He says that when he came by Marcelo’s house, they all jumped in his car to get breakfast at a local taqueria, and that the robberies were in fact Marcelo’s idea. Marcelo denies that and told me, “I’m just there, like an idiot.”
As they drove by Curie High School, on the city’s southwest side, they spotted a teenager wearing headphones, lost to the beat of his music. A half-block ahead they pulled into an alley, and all but Daniel, who was driving, jumped out of the car and rushed the young man, who took off running. Javier hurled an empty beer bottle, hitting him in the back. The victim tripped and fell, and within seconds the three were on him. All Marcelo remembers of the assault is that he kicked the young man while he was on the ground. Javier snatched his iPhone and his wallet. Marcelo felt empowered, in control. It was, he said later, “like a high.”
Back in the car, they soon pulled up alongside a teen in a black hoodie, and Marcelo noticed a slash through the teen’s right eyebrow, an indication that he belonged to a rival gang. Marcelo leaned out of the passenger-side window and false-flagged, pretending to be a member of the same faction. What up, Folks, Marcelo hollered. (For a few decades now, the city’s gangs have been divided into two sides, Folks and Peoples, a linguistic distinction which to outsiders seems like splitting hairs. Folks. Peoples. It is almost as if they are declaring that we’re one and the same rather than they’re on opposite sides.) The young man replied, That’s right. Fifty-nine—a reference to his street. This was the gang that had shot Marcelo a year earlier, and so at that point nothing else seemed to matter. “This was more personal-type shit,” Marcelo recalls. He jumped out of the car and punched the boy hard enough that his nose bled. During the scuffle, Marcelo began to have a flashback, reliving the moment he had gotten shot. This happened periodically and it scared him, an almost out-of-body experience which felt too real. His anger turned to rage, and he kicked the teen while he lay on the ground. “It was instinct,” Marcelo told me. “I saw him and lost my mind.” They left the teen bloodied, lying on the sidewalk. Marcelo jumped back in the car and they continued trolling.
The next boy they came upon carried a bookbag and wore skinny jeans. “He looked like a lame,” Marcelo told me. He handed over his phone, a Cricket, with no resistance. Here you go, he said, I don’t want no problems.
Then at a bus stop they came upon a boy on his phone. He looked to be roughly their age. They piled out of the car, and before the boy could flee, Javier hit him in the face. Let me see your phone, Marcelo demanded. The boy handed it to him, and Marcelo threw it back. What’d you do that for? Javier asked. Look at that shit, nigga, Marcelo replied. It’s that Cricket shit again, worth thirty bucks. They hit the boy with empty beer bottles, so hard he later needed stitches in his scalp.
Marcelo wanted to go home. He was drained, both physically and emotionally. He didn’t so much have regrets as he did a sense that this was no longer him. And yet, if he was being honest, he got a rush from the morning’s events, almost a high. What was it about hurting someone that gave him satisfaction? he wondered. He insisted they drop him off at his house, and as they cruised back to their neighborhood, they stopped at a traffic light. An unmarked police car cut them off, and two plainclothes officers ordered them out of the car. They were quickly surrounded by half a dozen squad cars. Marcelo, who had removed his shirt because of the heat, sagged into the car seat, one hand tightly clutching his T-shirt. The police arrested the four friends and charged them each with two counts of robbery, one count of attempted robbery, and one count of aggravated battery.
The next day in bond court, in a hearing that took no more than a few minutes, a judge set Marcelo’s bond at $300,000, which meant that his family needed to come up with $30,000 to get him released. That was an impossible amount for his mother, who worked at a Styrofoam cup factory, and so it appeared that Marcelo had hit a dead end, that he would sit in jail until his case came to trial, which, given the way things moved in the county courts, could be anywhere from a year to two in the future. Marcelo thought to himself, I’ve been leading a double life. It’s over. I fucked up.
Chapter 2
Mother’s Day
MAY 11…MAY 12…MAY 13…
On July 24 of last year, the Southtown Star, a suburban newspaper, ran a short seventeen-sentence story with the headline: “Man Shot to Death in Park Forest Had Drug, Weapons Convictions.” The article went on to rattle off the background of the murder victim, Darren Easterling. It read, in part:
A man who was shot to death Sunday on the street in Park Forest was a felon who in the past two years had multiple convictions on drug and weapons charges, according to officials and court records….
As of late Monday afternoon, Park Forest police had no suspects in custody in connection with the shooting, in which at least one other man was injured….
According to court records, Easterling pleaded guilty to felony possession of a controlled substance and possession of marijuana in January 2010. He also pleaded guilty to unlawful use of a weapon in April 2011 and was sentenced to three years in prison. Easterling was released on parole in November 2011, according to Illinois Department of Corrections records….
Darren Easterling, who was 25 and shot multiple times, died at the scene.
* * *
—
Lisa Daniels is long-bodied, willowy, and tall, with a handsome, stoic face atop a long, slender neck. She wears hoop earrings, which sway as she walks, her strides purposeful and quick. She works as an administrative assistant to a vice president at the Museum of Science and Industry. She’s thoughtful and preternaturally poised, but on this Sunday morning, this Mother’s Day, she lay in bed wracked with self-doubt. Her bedroom sat in the rear of her newly renovated second-floor apartment in Englewood, on the city’s South Side. She had closed the blinds to block the sunlight and pulled the covers over her, creating a protective cocoon, all in an effort to keep everything and everyone at bay. A few months earlier she and her husband, to whom she’d been married for fourteen months, had finalized their divorce, and just two days ago a friend had called to tell Lisa that her ex now had a girlfriend. Lisa already knew about the girlfriend, since that was in part the reason for their split, but she was distressed that it was now public knowledge. It stung. She wanted to disappear. She couldn’t bear explaining herself to friends or family. She felt like a failure. She had failed her marriage. And she had failed her son.
This was the first Mother’s Day since she’d lost her son, Darren Easterling (he had his father’s name), ten months earlier, and she thought she had been managing reasonably well. But in the wake of her broken marriage, she felt deep shame. Her husband had left her. So had her son, which is at least how it felt. She had raised him with love and a strong moral compass, but he had wandered. “I just didn’t want to get up,” she told me. “I didn’t want to face anything. That’s always been my coping mechanism. When I’m feeling really bad, I close myself off.” It was, she said, the darkest she’d felt since the funeral. But it was also a moment when her life began to take another turn.
* * *
—
I met Lisa Daniels through a
friend, Kathryn Bocanegra, who’s a social worker and who’s married to someone you’ll meet later. Kathryn, who runs two support groups for mothers of children lost to the city’s violence, talks about “complex loss,” a term used informally among social workers and therapists working in our cities. They came up with the designation because they didn’t believe “post-traumatic stress” captured what people grappled with, since there’s nothing “post” about their experience. Grief in places where the conflict is ongoing, Kathryn believes, is messy, without a straight line forward, without a map. “The way that people deal with that loss can vary dramatically,” Kathryn told me. “Some want vengeance, some want accountability. Others feel like even with that that won’t accomplish anything, so they become activists. And some want to pretend it never happened.”
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote that grief takes place in five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Come to Chicago. I dare you to find those stages. I dare you to chart grief. Someone dies a sudden, violent death and the natural order of things breaks apart. You see it in the streets of the city. When someone’s murdered, street shrines arise, in summer with the ubiquity of perennials. They decorate the spots where blood has been shed. On street corners. In an alley. By a porch. In a park. At a gas station. Outside a convenience store. At these locations, on sheets of posterboard taped to buildings or lampposts or fences or trees, friends and family leave notes of love and regret and anger.
An American Summer Page 2