An American Summer

by Alex Kotlowitz

  * * *

  —

  I attended Sheldon and Aries’s trial, though Ashara in the end chose not to come. She couldn’t take off time from her job, and moreover she worried it would be too emotional, too draining, especially if they got convicted and sentenced to long terms. Aries, in black-rimmed glasses, with a tailored goatee and his short hair in cornrows, wore his tan jail-issued outfit, which announced its size in big, bold letters on the front of the shirt: XL, as if the size of the defendant was the only thing that mattered. (His brother wore a 3XL.) When he testified, he spoke quickly, in an effort to reduce his stuttering, and told the judge how he had joined his brother to sell a gun and how everything had gone terribly wrong. When asked by his attorney why he sold the gun, Aries replied simply, “Because my brother asked me to.” Aries and his brother’s attorneys argued that Aries and Sheldon acted in self-defense. Both were found guilty of second-degree murder.

  Before sentencing, Judge James Linn lectured Aries and his brother: “I know the amount of street violence that Chicago is going through is beyond horrific. It is appalling, shocking, frightening. With that said, it is not my responsibility nor my task to hold Mr. Smith and Mr. Sanders responsible for everything else that is going on in the world. I can only hold them responsible for themselves. They are two very different young men. They are half-brothers, but…it doesn’t seem like they are brothers at all because their backgrounds are so dramatically different.

  “Mr. Sanders had never been in trouble in his life. I read some letters today that were submitted to me where people truly care about him and actually looked up to him and respected him. How he got in this situation I can’t fathom. I don’t understand how what seems to be a decent person could make terrible judgments and get involved in something like this.”

  That, of course, was what Ashara had been asking herself.

  The judge then sentenced Sheldon to twenty-eight years and Aries to five years. Since he had already served two and a half years, he would be released in a few days.

  * * *

  —

  Months after Aries came home, Ashara flew to Chicago for a weekend, both so she and I could have more time to talk and so I could sit down with her and Aries together. The way Ashara explains it, Aries’s involvement in this murder unnerved her, sickened her, but it also forced her to reconsider her hostility toward him and others she had grown up with. The experience seemed to reveal a part of Aries he’d worked hard at hiding. In his letters to her and in their phone conversations, she sensed his vulnerability, she saw his sensitivity, his thoughtfulness. Aries has confided to Ashara that he can’t fully fathom his involvement in this murder. He thinks about Brewer, the victim, because he had a young daughter, too. Ashara says Aries seems subdued, mournful, ashamed. In court at his sentencing, he apologized to Brewer’s family: “I know that no amount of words, written letters or tears, or anything else I could think of that would show the magnitude of my grief, remorse and sorry. What has happened has changed me and given me the time to understand how valuable life is and has taught me that I have so much at risk. I realize that something I felt so careful about, violence, has so deeply affected me.”

  It took this bloodletting for Ashara and Aries to reconnect. Ashara stopped running and for the first time faced what she was running from. I think back on the Cormac McCarthy quote Pete Nickeas, the reporter, had etched into his forearm:

  The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief

  The deepest community one of sorrow

  Ashara began talking with Aries’s brother Sheldon as well, and then visited him in prison in downstate Illinois. Sheldon told Ashara he felt like he had let Aries down, and that he has trouble getting past the fact that he killed someone. Ashara relished their conversations, and thought that he, like Aries, seemed exposed and vulnerable. “You think you need to be strong and prove that to people,” she told me. “But in jail you’ve hit rock bottom. It’s not about what you’re drinking or wearing or how many girls you have.” Sheldon and Aries, she told me, “just softened my heart.”

  * * *

  —

  We met at the Greenline coffee shop on the South Side. Ashara and I drove together, and as we pulled into a parking space on the street, a car shot past us, honking. Ashara rolled her eyes. “It’s Aries,” she said. “He thinks he’s a hot shot.” Aries then pulled a U-turn, sped back, and pulled into a space, wheels screeching. “He’s showing off,” Ashara declared. She wasn’t happy. It was not an auspicious beginning for this gathering.

  Inside the coffee shop, I offered to get Aries something to eat, but he declined. “You said you wanted breakfast,” Ashara chided. He replied that just a cup of coffee would do. Ashara didn’t let up. “But you told me we’d meet and you could have a good breakfast.” They went back and forth like this for a few minutes, and then I steered them to a table by the window. “This is the story of our lives,” Ashara told me. “We irritate each other.” She then turned toward Aries. “You’re irritating,” she told him. “You’re a bug.” He shot back, “She remind me of my little sister. And she’s only four.”

  I both laughed and cringed. It was like they were kids again. I asked them about growing up together, and Ashara said, “We were like a cat and a dog in a cage together. But we love each other.” Aries wasn’t having any of that. “She talk too much,” he retorted. “She had a crush on me.”

  “I had a crush on you?”

  If I were making this all up, if I were writing fiction, I suppose this is where Ashara and Aries would fall in love, but that’s not where this goes. It’s messier than that. As real life often is. In the wake of Aries’s arrest, Ashara had come to realize that she was selling herself and others short. She came to realize that young men like Aries have so much going against them, not the least of which is feeling like they don’t fit in. Because of race. Because of class. Because of geography. She had by now experienced it firsthand herself. When Aries got out of prison, he couldn’t get his postal job back because of his felony record, and so he landed work at Eataly, an Italian food market and restaurant, where he buses tables for $6.95 an hour plus tips. He lives with his grandmother, since he can’t afford his own apartment. “I felt like Aries was the first black man in my life who really let his guard down,” Ashara told me. “Aries really shifted me.”

  Aries doesn’t talk about that day much, but he has confided in Ashara that it haunts him, that he can’t get past the fact that he had a part in someone’s death, that he got himself into that situation in the first place. But today, at the Greenline coffee shop, he seemed, if not blustery, then chary and in a place that felt, well, too familiar to Ashara. It especially upset Ashara that when Aries talked about his time in the county jail, he did so without any acknowledgment that it had been really tough on him.

  She fidgeted in her seat. She leaned into Aries. And then gazed out the window, and then glared at him, as in the moment when he asserted, “I don’t remember being mean to her. She always told on me. She cried a lot.” Of course I cried a lot, Ashara thought to herself. I had a lot to cry about. My dad bailing on us. TJ’s death. Kyle’s. You having a kid at sixteen. You and your brother…Her thoughts drifted. Shit, I still have a lot to cry about. It irked her that Aries, who had in his letters seemed so open and reflective, now acted as if he had something to prove. When I asked Aries about whether his time in jail had been difficult, he seemed dismissive, telling me that because he’d been associated with a gang, he felt protected. Ashara rolled her eyes. He seemed self-conscious, and at one point said, “The good that came out of it, me and her had a friendship.” I’m not sure Ashara heard that. I think she had pretty much checked out by then. From her purse she pulled out a small plastic bag containing two honey buns and dropped them in front of Aries. “From my mom,” she said, and then she stood and walked outside.

  Aries and I continued to talk for another half an h
our, mostly about the details of the shooting, most of which I already knew. I could tell it was exhausting for him. “It is what it is,” he said in resignation, knowing there was no way to rewrite that moment. I knew from Ashara that beneath the bluster he had trouble making sense of what had happened, that he thinks about it every night when things are quiet, when there’s nothing to distract him, that he wonders how much he’s to blame, and wonders about Joseph Brewer, who like him had a young daughter.

  We got up to leave, and when we walked outside, I couldn’t find Ashara. Aries nodded toward her car. She was sitting behind the wheel, and he went by her window to say goodbye. She stared straight ahead. She was fuming. Aries stood there making faces, trying to get her attention. Finally she rolled down her window a few inches, just enough so Aries could hear her. “See you,” she said. She rolled the window back up, and we drove away. I realized she’d been crying.

  I asked if she was okay. She shook her head. She wouldn’t talk. We turned the corner, headed south on a side street, and in front of us a woman had stopped in her car to back into a parking space. Ashara left her little room to maneuver, and so we sat there in a standoff, the woman in front of us honking, yelling out her window, “Move, bitch!” while Ashara refused to budge, despite my suggestion she back up a few feet. “She can get in,” she muttered, her lips pursed, her ire now with a clear target. Soon we had a line of cars behind us, honking as well. Five minutes passed. More epithets were hurled. Finally the woman ahead of us carefully maneuvered into the parking space, and as we passed I could hear, “Fuck’n bitch” hurled at us. Ashara was crying. We rode in silence to her mom’s apartment, where my car was parked, and when we got there, I asked if it was something I had said. No, she told me. It was Aries. It was being back in Chicago. It was remembering that she didn’t fit in anywhere. She told me that when Aries was in jail, when they exchanged letters, she had felt like herself for the first time. She felt she understood Aries and TJ and Kyle. Even her father. It was, she said, as if Aries had pulled off his mask. And hers fell away as well. She told me that when she’d read those letters in the privacy of her bedroom, it was as if “Aries brought me back to my roots. In a sense, I was wearing a mask, too. Aries was saying, ‘You could be Ashara again. You can be just you.’ This is me. I’m North Philly. I’m South Side. I didn’t feel afraid anymore.”

  She was gripping the wheel so tight her knuckles had whitened. She looked straight ahead, into the distance. The Aries she had just seen wasn’t the Aries she saw in those letters. Vulnerable. Playful. Thoughtful. Reflective. “I didn’t think it would be so hard,” she said between tears. “It’s crazy, because I love Aries, but I love what’s beneath all the extraness. He really is a cool guy. If I could get him outside of him trying to front, then we’re good. I think he’s still trying to prove himself to people.” She paused, shook her head. “I’m on his side.”

  Chapter 11

  Day of Atonement

  JULY 15…JULY 16…JULY 17…

  Eddie Bocanegra, who’s thirty-seven, scans the flowers in the floor-to-ceiling cooler: the red, orange, and white roses, the red and yellow tulips, the white lilies. He tells me that he loves the panoply of colors, but as is his wont, he digresses. “I really like trees,” he tells me. “Especially willows.” He pauses. “They look kind of sad, but they also look so calm. It’s like they’ve seen a lot.” Kind of like you, I think to myself. With his hair closely cropped and his stylish rectangular glasses, along with his buttoned-up blue shirt and gray slacks, he resembles a prep-school graduate. The look is purposeful, one he’s honed in recent years. “I asked myself, How do I dress in a way that the police don’t hassle me and the gang leaders don’t recognize me?” he once told me. In the winters he used to tie a sweater around his neck, but he worried that that looked too preppie, that it made him look like a pushover, so he abandoned that touch. He tells me that if he dresses as if he walked out of a J.Crew ad, people won’t make assumptions. Or they’ll make different assumptions. Maybe they’ll think he’s a college graduate or a businessman or a professional. They’ll take him more seriously.

  Women find him quite handsome. He has full, dark eyebrows and a small goatee. He’s a wiry five-foot-nine and exceedingly polite—and apologetic. About everything. For being late. For saying the wrong thing. For sounding immodest. His eyes, though, sometimes seem out of sync with his demeanor. Even when he’s laughing, his eyes, partially shut, sometimes surrounded by dusky circles, are the eyes of a willow tree: sad and calm and filled with experience. He is clearly someone who has seen a lot. Maybe too much.

  The young, fresh-faced florist asks, “What can I get you?” Eddie’s unsure. He apologizes for taking so long. “Give me a second,” he tells her, lifting his right hand to rub his chin. Nothing comes easily for Eddie. He ruminates on just about everything, from where to eat lunch to what to wear to a meeting. It’s his nature. He asks me what he should get, and I shrug my shoulders. “Okay,” he tells the florist, pointing at the roses. “I’ll take three. One red and two white.”

  While the florist wraps the flowers—“Separately,” Eddie asks—he strays yet again. “The time in prison really fucked me up,” he tells me. “Touching and all that.” He pauses. “I never really thought I could love, not this way.” He’s speaking of his four-month-old daughter, Salome, whom he adores and thinks about all the time. “Now when I hold Salome, I hold her so tight I feel like I’m going to break her.” He pays for the roses, and the two of us climb into his 2008 Chevy Impala (Salome was born in the backseat) for the first visit of the day.

  * * *

  —

  Eddie did the unimaginable. He took another human life. I suppose for some that might be all you need to know. For others, it may be all you want to know about him. And that’s what Eddie fears the most, that this moment is him. That there’s no other way to view him. That he deserves to be a pariah. That it’s shaped him. It is, after all, why I’m writing about him. It’s one of the first things you learn from Eddie. He can’t help himself. He feels that you need to know this about him—to know it from him, not from anyone else.

  On this day nineteen years ago, Eddie killed another man. Eddie was eighteen. It was payback. Eddie had joined the Latin Kings to protect his two younger brothers—he reasoned that this way he could keep the gang from recruiting them—and because he wanted to escape the alcoholic rages of his father. He also concedes that the gang had an allure to it. “Walkin’ to grammar school, in third grade, I seen this group a people hanging out,” he told me. “I was like, Damn, they seem like they got their things together. You know, they got a nice car. They got the girls. They were dressed sharply. They distinguished themselves from everybody else who lived in the community. They had so much pride in themselves. And to me, that’s what attracted them to me.”

  Both of Eddie’s parents had immigrated from Mexico and carved out a reasonably good life in the city’s main Latino neighborhood, Little Village. His father worked as a body man, repairing damaged cars, his mother in a factory that produced calendars and greeting cards. They purchased a wood-framed, two-story home, and when Eddie became a teenager he and his uncle dry-walled and painted the attic so he could have his own space. They laid thick blue carpet and hung curtains on the one window. There Eddie collected baseball cards and other baseball paraphernalia, a hobby encouraged by his dad, who loved the sport. In fact, his fondest memory of his father was of lying in bed with him at the age of nine watching the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. By the age of seventeen, Eddie had grown distant from his dad, but he also had collected over 10,000 baseball cards, which he stored in albums and shoeboxes. When his friends visited the attic, they seemed puzzled by Eddie’s hobby. One fellow gang member simply blurted out, You collect this shit? On the wall he had hung posters of Nolan Ryan and the 1989 Chicago Cubs. He framed baseball cards of Tom Seaver, Andre Dawson, and Mark Grace. In a bookcase he displayed auto
graphed baseballs. And he hung lots of pennants, mostly from the Cubs, his favorite team. Eddie also was an artist, and on one wall he had painted a mural of Mickey and Minnie Mouse break dancing.

  In the streets Eddie earned a reputation as a swift and effective car thief, mostly of American-made cars from the 1980s. With a screwdriver he’d peel the casting from the steering column and reach in to toggle the ignition switch. Because he wasn’t all that strong, he’d stand outside the driver’s side and put all his weight into turning the steering wheel so that he could break the steering pin. He had another method as well. When he was twelve, his dad lost his key to their Cutlass Ciera, and with a device ordinarily used to pull dents out of cars he popped the ignition open and then with a screwdriver started the car. Eddie, ever observant, utilized that dent puller for his own purposes. He used the cars mostly for joy rides or what was called “ramming,” using it to crash into newer cars owned by rival gang members. He would park the stolen cars in the parking lot of the local high school, Farragut, and lend them to friends. Before long he had a nickname: Bandit, shortened by some to B.

  Eddie had a fierce sense of loyalty, both to his family and to the gang. One late summer night when he was eighteen, he was in the attic organizing some newly purchased baseball cards when two friends, fellow Latin Kings, drove up in a four-door sedan. Eddie right away noticed the shattered back window and bullet holes in the trunk and on the passenger side. His friends told Eddie that two of his other friends, Ricardo Garcia and Alberto Gonzalez, had been shot. They were known as Rico and Flako (pronounced “flaa-ko”). Rico was a big guy, six years older, muscular, one hundred pounds heavier and half a foot taller than Eddie. He was Eddie’s protector. One time Eddie got into a fistfight with another kid and Rico intervened, placing his large hands on the assailant’s throat and instructing him, Don’t fuck with my guy. From his friends, Eddie learned that Flako had been shot in the thigh and immediately released from the hospital, but Rico had lost all feeling and movement below his waist.