An American Summer

by Alex Kotlowitz

  The next morning Eddie left for his job running a cutting press at a factory that made calendars and greeting cards. Halfway to work he impulsively veered off, picked up some fellow gang members, and drove to the intersection where the shooting had occurred, looking for someone, anyone, from the rival gang they suspected of shooting Rico. They had with them a .357 Magnum, and Eddie insisted on holding it. They couldn’t find anyone.

  Eddie visited Rico in the hospital and then, after he was released, at his house. “He was depressed,” Eddie recalls. He didn’t come outside. He didn’t laugh anymore. He got around by wheelchair. At one point Eddie asked him, Hey, man, how long before the doctors find a cure, before they fix your nerves? Rico glared at him, at his naïveté. I just want someone to suffer the way he’s suffering, Eddie thought to himself. I’m feeling this anger. I’m feeling this rage. I’m like, ‘Okay, you know what? They shot one of our guys. We’re going back.’ About a month after the shooting, Eddie got word that some rival gang members were hanging outside, on a nearby side street, and so he asked his girlfriend at the time to come by and drive him over there in his Caprice station wagon. Eddie had jacked up the car on hydraulics so that it rode high. It was more a practical decision than an aesthetic one. This way if he got rammed from behind, there’d be more damage to the other car than to his. Everyone in the neighborhood referred to it as “the War Wagon” because of the bullet holes in the doors and back panel.

  Eddie convinced Flako to lend him his gun, a .380, which Flako did reluctantly, urging Eddie not to do anything stupid. Flako was placid and humble, and Eddie always thought that he seemed out of his element. A year and a half later, Flako reportedly threw himself out of a third-floor window, and Eddie sometimes wonders if his distress didn’t find its roots in what Eddie did with that gun.

  I’ve talked about this July day in 1994 numerous times with Eddie, and each time he grows distant, almost as if he’s retreating into that evening, still trying to make sense of what he did, still trying to take it back, still thinking of all the signs that he should’ve heeded. A hesitant Flako. A nearly empty gas tank. An initial pass-through in which the streets were empty. As they rolled down the side street a second time, past a row of modest single-family homes, Eddie spotted a group of seven or eight young men, none of whom he knew, hanging on the curb, and as he pulled up he saw one reach into his waistband. To this day he doesn’t know if the man had a gun on him, but Eddie jumped out of the station wagon and shot at him three times, and then shot at the others, who took cover behind a car. He then raced to his car, and he and his girlfriend took off, headed for his house. There he parked the Caprice in his backyard, on the lawn, so that it was tucked away, out of sight.

  The next day a thirteen-year-old boy whom Eddie had recruited for the Latin Kings stood outside Eddie’s house whistling. Eddie opened his window and waved him up. The boy had with him an article from the Sun-Times which read in part: “William Stuckey, 18, of the 6100 block of North Washtenaw, was critically injured in an apparent drive-by shooting while standing on a porch…Six shots, two of which struck Stuckey in the abdomen, were fired from a passing blue station wagon…Stuckey was pronounced dead around 5:30 a.m. at Mt. Sinai Hospital Medical Center, said hospital administrative supervisor Betty Gammon.”

  This is you, the boy said, his voice dripping with pride. That’s not me, man, Eddie told him, sending him along his way. He sat there on the edge of his bed mulling over the realization: I killed someone.

  * * *

  —

  Every July 17, the anniversary of the shooting, Eddie fasts and visits with people who are struggling, often because they’ve lost a loved one to murder or to prison. He’s asking for forgiveness, not from anyone else but rather from himself. He thinks of this as his day of atonement—though honestly, he spends virtually every minute of every day trying to prove himself, that he’s worthy, that he’s worthy of friends, of lovers, of having children, really of life. I suppose the right thing to do would be to ask forgiveness from his victim’s family, but Eddie doesn’t feel he’s earned that privilege, if you can call it that. At least not yet. He once declared, “I don’t feel like I’ve done enough to honor his life.” And so this is what he’s doing—raising a family, working with youth in the streets, marking each anniversary of the murder. He knows, somewhere deep down, that it will never feel like enough. The best he can hope for is to get close.

  We pull up to a red-brick three-flat and are greeted at the first-floor apartment by a diminutive woman, her hair a deep red. Doris Hernandez gives Eddie a hug. She’s dressed in a lime-green pantsuit and orange flip-flops. She’s rubbing her eyes as if we’ve woken her from a nap. She invites us in, and Eddie hands her a white rose. “For you,” he says. She seems flustered, but thanks him.

  We take a seat in her compact living room, on a green velvet couch. Doris, who had trained as a pharmacist in Colombia, immigrated to the U.S. twenty-four years ago. She now works as a seamstress; her sewing machine is sitting in the corner. While she reads and writes in English, she prefers to speak Spanish. Eddie has known Doris for a year. She’s one of the original members of the group Eddie helped put together, of mothers who have lost a child to the violence. But he’s never told her about his past, that he killed a man, and so for the first ten minutes, as we sit on the couch, Doris on a chair, Eddie explains why he’s here. He begins by referencing Doris’s son, who was shot and killed a year earlier.

  “I was in the same thing as Freddy, from a very young age. I fought with my parents every day. A lot of days it had to do with alcohol. My dad. And there was a point where I couldn’t take it anymore,” he tells Doris. “Although it’s hard to believe I felt more relaxed in the streets than in my house.” He recounts the story of his friend Rico and how he was shot and paralyzed. And then he chronicles his vengeance. “From that moment on,” he says, “I knew my life had ended.” He never bows his head, never asks for sympathy. He’s not looking for that. From anyone. He just wants her to know. He feels it’s only right. “Today is the day nineteen years ago when I took William’s life,” he says. “He was called William.” This is the first time I’ve heard him refer to his victim by name, and he tells me later that that’s progress for him, that it’s been really difficult for him to say his name rather than calling him “my victim.” He apologizes to Doris for not telling her all this earlier.

  “I admire you,” Doris assures him. “Because the day they killed my son I didn’t feel hate for the kid that killed him…I preferred being on the opposite side. That’s the truth. Because I think it would be harder on a mother knowing that her son took someone else’s life.”

  Eddie looks away. I don’t think Doris meant for Eddie to take this observation personally. But Eddie knows that it’s true. His own mother, whom he adored and who adored him, moved to Texas three months after his arrest, in large part because she didn’t want to have to explain to others what her son had done. She felt disgraced and embarrassed.

  Eddie had something else to tell Doris, too. Something that he’d been carrying like a weight around his neck. The night her son, Freddy, was killed, Eddie had been driving through the neighborhood. At one point he pulled alongside a maroon van. The occupants stared him down, as if they were trying to take measure of him, and Eddie knew then that they weren’t from the area. He worried that they were here to inflict damage, to instigate a fight. He had a dilemma. If he told the guys in the neighborhood that there was a maroon van filled with outsiders driving around, he worried they would shoot at the men in the van. When Freddy was killed, no one could identify the shooter, but people described the van they arrived in: it was maroon. It was undoubtedly the same van Eddie had seen earlier.

  “You could’ve called the police,” Doris suggested.

  “But the thing is, I wanted to follow them,” Eddie explained, not that he would’ve taken them on, just to ensure they didn’t cause trouble.
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br />   “You never wrote down the license plate?”

  Eddie shook his head, wondering now whether he should’ve shared this at all. But that’s Eddie’s problem—he shares everything. He can’t help himself. Most angle their memories to reflect the best in them. Eddie’s too honest for that.

  Doris seems unfazed. She opens up in return and shares her son’s story. A few years ago her son, Freddy, took a beating to get out of his gang, so he could become a neutron, she explains, meaning that he didn’t identify with one gang or another. But then he spent the next three years at home. “Literally like a prison,” she explains. “The curtains were drawn and he didn’t let anyone open them. He slept with three or four knives under his pillow. Why, I don’t know.” She tells Eddie that periodically a rival gang spray-painted their garage with slogans she couldn’t fully decipher, but she knew that they were meant as threats to her son. “He lost all interest in life,” she says. “He didn’t want to live.” She continues, “That day, it was like five in the afternoon, a Friday. A lady had come by giving me some clothes to repair. I thought Freddy was going to ask me for money, but he would never ask me for anything. If his sneakers were ripped, he wouldn’t ask me for a new pair. He told me he was going to some friend’s house to watch movies.”

  She trails off. She doesn’t finish the story. She doesn’t need to. “You are fortunate,” she tells Eddie. “Life gave you that opportunity and you grabbed it. My son did not grab the opportunities. Many people threw their hands out to help him, and he didn’t stick out his hand from his pocket.” She holds her hands out to Eddie. “I forgave him a long time ago,” she says of the person who murdered her son. But in this moment it feels like she is telling Eddie, It’s okay. I forgive you.

  * * *

  —

  A month after Eddie shot and killed the rival gang member, the police came for him, and Eddie confessed and pled guilty. He was sentenced to twenty-nine years, which with good time meant with any luck Eddie could be out in fourteen and a half. His mother, who felt tarnished by Eddie’s crime, was also worried about his younger brothers and sisters; she sold their house and moved the family to Pharr, Texas, just along the Mexican border, first moving in with Eddie’s grandmother, then ultimately purchasing a home. She also needed the sale money to pay the lawyer. In those first few years in prison, Eddie by his own admission was a handful. Because he called the shots for his gang in prison, the authorities moved him around, trying to limit his influence.

  In the winter of 1996, a month into his time at Menard, a maximum-security prison at the very southern tip of the state, Eddie noticed that the people most feared at the prison were those who signified their gang affiliation, especially his fellow Latin Kings, who had crowns tattooed on their neck or their forehead or the back of their shaved head. So Eddie made an appointment with a prison tattoo artist to get a crown on his neck, along with the name of the street where he grew up, Spaulding. The cost was $30 worth of goods from the commissary. That night before his appointment, as he lay on his top bunk in his cell, the yellow light from the watchtower reflecting along the walls, he thought to himself, Hey, dumbass, you got an out date. These guys are going to be here forty, fifty years. I’m going to go home. He couldn’t sleep. And the next morning he canceled the tattooing. It’s not to say that Eddie didn’t continue to associate with the Kings. Over the coming years he got a palm-sized crown tattooed on his back and another on his left biceps. But these could be covered up. He was thinking ahead, looking for a way out.

  Eddie saw reasons all around him for vigilance. The story of another inmate, whom everyone called Mingo, was legend inside the prison. Mingo had been sentenced to two years for armed robbery, a sentence short enough that he could look forward to his out date the moment he walked in. As Eddie tells it, Mingo was slow—maybe he had learning disabilities—and one night (this was many years before Eddie entered prison) an inmate who belonged to the Simon City Royals, a white gang, and who continually disrespected the Latin Kings despite warnings not only by rivals but also by members of his own gang, was stabbed by a Latin King member while watching a movie. As he stumbled out, Mingo, who also belonged to the Kings, added to his wounds, allegedly stabbing him one last time. At least that’s what Eddie heard. The white inmate died, and Mingo was the only one caught and charged. He was given an additional fifty years. Eddie met Mingo, a fair-skinned, beefy man now in his forties. As the story went, Mingo’s two brothers became police officers, and they and his father essentially disowned him. He had nobody—except for his mom, who stood by him. He had a reputation in prison for being able to repair anything electrical, from homemade stingers (devices to heat water) to radios. But he was viewed as a cautionary tale. You may think you don’t have much time. You may think others have your back. You may think you have a future. But in prison things change. And they change quickly, on a dime. So tread carefully—and smartly.

  Eddie had his family, who remained with him and who visited twice a year, driving the twenty-two hours from their new home in Texas. Eddie also had a high-ranking Latin King, Jorge Ruiz, who kept an eye on him from the outside. Ruiz put the word out with other Latin Kings that they were to keep their hands off Eddie, that they weren’t to bother him, to try to recruit him into their prison ranks. He told Eddie he needed to get himself an education, and every month or so Ruiz would send Eddie a hundred-dollar money order so he could buy food and art supplies at the commissary. Eddie had taken up painting, mostly oils, and he painted landscapes and cartoon characters and, on commission, portraits of inmates, in which he’d draw them in expensive tailored suits, which he’d copy from GQ magazine. He made and sold greeting cards which he would personalize for inmates. He also became a tattoo artist, using guitar strings and a small pin powered by a Walkman radio. For ink, he melted plastic chess pieces.

  “The worst enemy I had in prison was myself,” Eddie told me. He worried constantly about what lay ahead once he got out. No one’s going to hire me, he thought. And so he envisioned buying a hot dog cart which he could wheel around his neighborhood. He’d be his own boss. He wouldn’t have to rely on anyone else’s goodwill. In the first few months he was locked up, his girlfriend broke up with him—and Eddie worried, too, that he’d never find someone to grow close to, that once any right-minded woman learned of his past, she’d run. At night he’d lie on his bed unable to sleep, his headphones on, listening to oldies on the radio. He’d imagine meeting a woman he liked after prison, and then would try to calculate when he would tell her about his crime. He’d want to prove himself first. That he was hardworking. Of sound values. He even imagined how he’d dress when he got out: like a preppie, buttoned up and conservative.

  Eddie once shared with me that after he got out, he had lunch with an academic who was hoping he could convince Eddie to appear on a panel with him. Do you think people in prison have hope? the scholar had asked. Eddie soon realized this was merely a rhetorical question, that the scholar already knew, or thought he knew, the answer: that prison sapped one of hope, of any sense of future. That prison diminished your sense of self. It’s funny, I think Eddie on some level would agree with part of this, but he became agitated, at least inwardly. He tried not to show it. He didn’t want the academic to know that he’d gotten to him. Eddie politely but firmly declined the offer to join the man on the panel. I think what so bothered him is that it’s only human nature to have hope. Without it, you have nothing. It’s about as close to death as one can get without actually dying.

  In those early years in prison, Eddie tried to intimidate. He fought. A lot. But, he thought to himself, even that craziness, that desperate urge to survive, is an emblem of hope. At first he wanted to get by. Then, slowly, as he enrolled in classes, as he learned to paint, as he got closer to his family, he wanted to grow. He learned to hold his tongue with correctional officers—though it was hard. He once got caught in the gallery with a guard who didn’t like him, who thought h
e was too slick, too uppity, and the guard told Eddie to put his hands behind his back. Eddie complied, and then looked as the guard craned his neck, left, then right. Eddie later realized he was looking to make sure they were out of sight of any cameras. The guard sucker-punched Eddie in the stomach, so hard that Eddie doubled over. He folded me, Eddie recalls. Eddie remembers looking up, and the guard, who the inmates called Vanilla Ice because of his uncanny resemblance to the white rapper, smiled. For Eddie, the messed-up part was that Vanilla Ice took pleasure in it. Eddie held his tongue. He kept his hands behind his back, almost as an act of defiance. And only later, in the privacy of his cell, lying on his upper bunk, did he cry. Not because of the physical pain, but because of the humiliation. He did that many nights—though quietly and in the dark so that no one could see.

  Eddie spent many hours trying to figure out who he was. He had killed someone, and to reconcile that with who he imagined himself to be was virtually impossible. He couldn’t make sense of it. Not then. Not now. Every July 17 the world seemed to close in on him. In his prison journal, he struggled to make sense of what he did. On one July 17, in 2002, he wrote:

  Today marked 8 years since the victim in my case was killed.

  Written in the passive voice—he couldn’t bring himself at this point to concede what he had done. In another July 17 entry he wrote: