An American Summer

by Alex Kotlowitz

  I’m at a loss of words for my feelings have emotionally drowned me. What do I say? And when I finally bring myself to express what I feel, how do I say it without glorifying, gloating or advocating what I did? And when is saying sorry enough? Or does enough even exist?

  For the first few years, on the anniversary, he felt like his victim, or his spirit, had entered his cell. He knows it sounds New Age-y, that it makes him sound off-kilter, but he was deeply distressed by the experience. “You know, I felt like there was somebody else in that cell with me,” he told me. “And it wasn’t ’cause I was seeing this shadow, this black shadow, in the form of a human being. I couldn’t see the face or anything. It was just black. And it wasn’t really a shadow, ’cause a shadow you can see behind it. You couldn’t see behind this. And the only thing I remember is just praying and saying, ‘Man, you know I’m sorry, bro. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what happened. I’m sorry for, you know, you know, your mom. But man, just work with me. Be with me. Help me out.’ ” At the time he was so scared he was trembling. He prayed. “I still remember his face. I still do. That’s not something that goes away. I forget sometimes, like, damn, I can’t remember how he looked like, but then days later or weeks later, I’m like, damn, his face comes back…Some of the events that took place that day have faded away. Some of the details. But the things I actually felt that moment for the most part are still there.”

  By his third year in prison, Eddie decided he’d devote that day to remembering his victim. He’d fast and do something for others in need, often people he didn’t know. In prison he made meals—usually burritos made with dehydrated rice and beans, sliced summer sausage, onions and green peppers swiped from the kitchen, ramen noodles, ketchup, mustard, and mayo—and handed them out to inmates who couldn’t afford anything at the commissary. He also made personalized greeting cards fellow inmates could send to a girlfriend or a family member. Sometimes he drew landscapes, which were coveted because of the lack of scenery inside, and gave them away as well.

  He took classes. He read. He pulled away from the gang. His brother Gabriel, who served two tours in Iraq with the Army, mostly as the gunner on a Humvee, visited when he could. Eddie asked him to come in his dress greens. He wanted to show him off, and on some level to let the guards know there was more to him than what they saw. Sometimes Gabriel was joined by their youngest brother, Fernando, who was in the Marines. Gabriel, who was soft-spoken and had a gentle demeanor, told Eddie stories of war, stories he couldn’t shed. He told Eddie about the time he had come upon a teenaged Iraqi boy raping his twelve-year-old sister and of punching the father, who clearly had sanctioned the assault. He told of the time another soldier killed a farmer for sport and recorded the kill in a notebook. Or the time in Sadr City when they raided the home of a man suspected of manufacturing IEDs. Gabriel could hear a baby crying inside, wailing. And at the doorway the man’s wife, a large woman, tried to block Gabriel from entering. Gabriel struck her in the face with the butt of his M16. Or the time his roommate got blown up by an IED, and seeing his body riddled with metal fragments. He was unrecognizable. And the thing about it, he lived, disfigured, his face reconstructed. Or the time the gunner in the Humvee behind him got shot by someone on foot, and Gabriel couldn’t shoot back because of the crowds. Gabriel told Eddie it was hard, that he’d been drinking a lot, two bottles of Jack Daniel’s a day, that he’d kicked his longtime girlfriend out of the house, that he couldn’t stand the sound of babies crying, that he couldn’t sleep, that he couldn’t tolerate crowds, that when driving he’d sometimes forget where he was headed, that he had tried college—majoring in biology—but had trouble remembering what he’d read. Gabriel explained that he had to keep busy, that if he slowed down, if he was idle, he’d start daydreaming and it would all come back. He told Eddie he’d been diagnosed with PTSD. To Eddie, Gabriel seemed defeated and tired and lost. And he thought to himself, That’s how I feel. I can’t sit still either. Or I get flooded with memories, moments I’d long forgotten. So I try to keep busy, not to slow down, not even for a minute. During one of the visits, Gabriel told Eddie, I went through my own shit just like you went through your own shit.

  * * *

  —

  Doris embraces Eddie as we say our goodbyes. In the car, Eddie is unusually subdued, wondering if, given all that he confessed to Doris—about seeing the maroon van and knowing its occupants didn’t come from the neighborhood—he’d let her down. “We’re going to visit Jorge’s mother,” he tells me. Jorge Ruiz was the gang chief who watched over Eddie from outside prison. Eddie first became aware of Jorge when he was in his early teens, and would play arcade games—mostly Centipede, Pac-Man, and Galactica—in the rear of a bar. On occasion a group of Latin Kings in their twenties would enter. One would distract the manager while the others would pop the video games open with screwdrivers and empty them of their change. “It was Jorge and his crew,” Eddie told me. “I was in awe of him.” As Eddie got older, he’d see Jorge driving around in his brown Oldsmobile Delta 88, and then he got to know him once he joined the Kings. Jorge was a ranking Latin King, a “Supreme Inca.” Jorge would have the younger Kings practice what to do if interrogated by the police. He told them to be mindful of what they were wearing, especially when in other neighborhoods. Jorge, for reasons Eddie never fully understood, encouraged him and one other boy to pursue college. Eddie got arrested. The other boy graduated from Brown University. It feels self-contradictory, someone so committed to the streets and yet someone so above it. Someone committed to maintaining order through beatings and worse, yet someone committed to seeing some of his protégés move on. Two years before Eddie came home, Jorge got arrested, charged with drug conspiracy. He was convicted and sentenced to twenty years. “I try to make sense of people like Jorge,” Eddie told me as we pulled up to a single-family home. “Really good people, someone who would watch after you even though they’re caught up in this stupid mess.”

  Maria, Jorge’s mother, invites us in, and we gather at her small kitchen table. Maria has a booming voice, like she’s trying to be heard in a noisy restaurant. Her fingernails are painted to resemble the American flag. Eddie hands her the red rose along with $50 which he asks her to send to Jorge. He explains that Jorge protected him while he was in prison, that Jorge told other gang members to leave him be. He tells Maria that Jorge pushed him to continue with school, and he lets her know that since he’s been out of prison he got his BA from Northeastern Illinois University and is now working toward his master’s at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration.

  Maria wipes away tears. “You know, he worries about you,” she says. Maria, who seems agitated, tells Eddie that federal agents recently raided her house, presumably looking for guns, and that afterward the neighbors on both sides stopped talking to her. And then they each built a fence. It clearly enraged her. She was speaking so loudly I almost thought it was for the benefit of the neighbors. “What do they know?” she huffs.

  Afterward, in the car, I tell Eddie that I can understand why the neighbors might want to distance themselves. The minute this comes out of my mouth, I regret it. “Imagine my neighbors one day realizing they’re living next to a murderer,” Eddie tells me, clearly seeing the connection. “How do you think that makes me feel?” I wasn’t sure whether he was talking about my comment or a scenario in which his neighbors find out what he did nineteen years ago. Either way, I suppose, Eddie was telling me he was marked, that people would make their assumptions about him. He was basically repeating what Maria had said of her neighbors: What do they know?

  * * *

  —

  After fourteen years and three months, Eddie was released from prison and moved in with his cousin. On his second night out, his cousin held a homecoming celebration. At one point Eddie retreated into a bedroom to get away from the clamor. As he sat on the bed, playing with a Chicago Cubs bobble-head doll, his six-year-
old nephew walked in and grabbed the toy. The head came off. What the fuck! Eddie yelled. Eddie wanted to slap him, and after his nephew left, Eddie burst into tears. His cousin came in to comfort him. Why am I having all of these fuckin’ crazy thoughts? Eddie asked. And to himself he thought, I don’t know if I can do this.

  Eddie had been mandated to meet with a therapist as part of his parole, but he found her judgmental and unhelpful. Once he found someone he trusted and whom he could open up to, he began to steady himself. He sold fireworks which he’d buy in neighboring Indiana and he worked as a tattoo artist, a lot of Rest in Peace etchings along with tombstones and crosses. Finding work as an ex-felon is extraordinarily tough, but he got hired by an antiviolence organization, CeaseFire, where his job was to suss out disputes in the street and interrupt them before they erupted into something more. It meant walking the same streets where he’d grown up, running into the same people. It was hard on him. He’d stand outside with gang-affiliated teens, trying to get to know them, and he worried that passersby, his neighbors, would see him and think that he’d returned to his old ways.

  He found himself thrust back into the violence he so wanted to leave behind. One nineteen-year-old who Eddie had been mentoring was shot in the side by a rival gang member, and his friends were pushing Adam to seek revenge. Eddie visited Adam in his family’s basement apartment, and, standing in his cramped bedroom, Adam pulled his shirt up to show Eddie his wound and the colostomy bag, which he complained about because of the odor. Eddie saw himself in Adam, in his wariness and cockiness, and tried to rein him in by asking questions, by gently prodding. Adam seemed distant, and Eddie worried that Adam’s friends’ influence would supercede his. When he left Adam’s, he seemed unmoored. “Am I really helping?” he asked. “Some people I can’t. As much as I want to, they don’t want help.”

  He ran into former gang members. One late evening, under the streetlights by the parking lot at Farragut High School, where Eddie once kept his stolen cars, he came across Rico, the friend who’d been shot and paralyzed and for whom Eddie had sought vengeance nineteen years earlier. Eddie sat on a low concrete wall separating the school from a soccer field, and Rico, who was now in his early forties, rolled up next to him in his wheelchair, caressing a beer. Rico was dressed in a white T-shirt, his jet-black shoulder-length hair combed back. Rico seemed genuinely happy to see Eddie. It soon became clear that Eddie had never asked Rico about the day he got shot, and so Rico told him that he and Flako had run into rivals “and they lit me up, three times under the armpit, pointblank.” Eddie cut him off. “I was so angry, bro,” Eddie told him, “because I was picturing myself. Damn, I always thought if something happens to me I always knew, you and—rest in peace—Flako, you’d go out and take care of your business, too. And I did what I did, and as messed up as it is, I learned a lot from being locked up. Honestly, bro, it saved my life, the way I look at it. I was out there bad, bro.”

  “You trying to say it was a blessing you got locked up?” Rico asked skeptically.

  “To me it was, bro. The victim of my case, I owe him my life. Because of him, I’m where I’m at now,” Eddie explained. He then asked Rico, “If you were to go back, honestly, bro?”

  “If I was to go back?” Rico asked in disbelief.

  “If you went back to before you got shot, would you make the same decisions?”

  “There’s no such thing, man. I don’t have no regrets.”

  “Believe it or not, you got a lot to give. A lot of potential.”

  Rico seemed anxious to move on. They said their goodbyes, Eddie leaning down to hug him. As Rico rolled away in his wheelchair, a friend alongside him, Eddie seemed genuinely sad, knowing that Rico was still in the streets. “It breaks my heart, honestly,” he told me later. “To know that my friend who I admired, who I looked up to, you know, is doing the same thing he was doing…But I love this person and there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him now.” Eddie is a faithful friend, someone you can count on, but there are certain things Eddie wouldn’t do for Rico now. He knows that and others, like Rico, know that as well.

  * * *

  —

  On a summer afternoon, Kathryn Saclarides was driving through the streets of Cicero in her Ford Focus when she spotted a friend, Eddie Lopez, an outreach worker who had served time in prison and had recently opened a barbershop to hire people like himself. Kathryn was a therapist for a small nonprofit in Little Village. She stopped to chat with Lopez, and he introduced her to his old friend Eddie Bocanegra, who, he explained, was an outreach worker like himself. Kathryn thought it was a joke. Eddie, in his blue dress shirt and creased jeans, looked both conservative and nerdy. Eddie told Kathryn that he worked in the Little Village neighborhood and that he had been working with some kids who needed professional counseling, and so Kathryn asked for his card. Eddie laughed nervously. He didn’t have one, but pretended to fumble through his wallet. He wrote his name on the back of someone else’s card he had. Eddie found Kathryn strikingly beautiful, lithe and dark-featured. There was a serenity about her. Her voice was soft and soothing, and she seemed so comfortable with herself, a place Eddie aspired to.

  A few weeks later Kathryn began working with a couple of kids from Little Village, so she called Eddie and he went by her office to meet them. He seemed intense. He spent forty minutes talking about how he wanted to set up a support group for grieving mothers. Kathryn just needed help with these kids. They crossed paths again a couple of weeks later, at a local church, and Eddie ended up back at her office, and there Eddie told Kathryn everything. About his youth. About running with a gang. And about the murder. He immediately regretted opening up like this. Kathryn would later laughingly tell me, “He has no filter.” Eddie didn’t feel judged by Kathryn. She told Eddie about herself. She had spent her high school years in Northfield, a tony North Shore suburb, and attended Vanderbilt and then the University of Chicago for graduate school in social work. Raised Greek Orthodox, she also was deeply religious, which Eddie admired. Kathryn needed help with a teenage girl, Vanessa, who had cradled her older brother, Miguel, in her arms as he bled to death after being shot. Eddie spent time with Vanessa, invited her to art classes he taught, and accompanied her to the cemetery where her parents camped every day, barbecuing hot dogs and burgers and just sitting by Miguel’s gravesite, honoring him. Kathryn was moved by Eddie’s commitment, by his kindness toward Vanessa and her family. He again told Kathryn that he wanted to start a support group for mothers who had lost a son, and so together they created one.

  Eddie was seeing someone at the time, but he fell for Kathryn. I knew Eddie then, and I did what I could to encourage him to ask her out. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t imagine what she’d see in him. And then there was his past. Why would someone so accomplished and so smart and so beautiful want to date someone convicted of murder? “I had to bring myself into reality,” he told me. This went on for weeks. They’d have lunch together. They’d sit in his car, talking, sometimes into the early-morning hours. Eddie would tell her everything—overshare, he said. He told her about this one friend, who at fifteen was stabbed at a cotillion and bled to death in the backseat of a car on the way to the hospital. He told her he had trouble retaining things, except for his time in prison. That, he remembered with such clarity it felt like it had all happened last week. He remembered small details, like the cell numbers of his friends.

  I’d try to get Eddie to take that leap of faith, to tell Kathryn how he felt—and he’d pass, make excuses, put himself down. “We’re not even in the same ballpark,” he’d tell me. Once Kathryn asked him, What does it take for a girl to know if you’re interested? But Eddie totally missed it. He couldn’t imagine she was talking about the two of them. As it turned out, Kathryn really liked him, admired his thoughtfulness, his gentleness, his modesty. Sometimes after Eddie would tell her stories of his past, she’d go home and cry, wanting to figure out how to help him.
He finally told her how he felt, and once it became clear that Kathryn had feelings for him, too, he went to Kathryn’s dad to ask permission to date her. Kathryn is old-fashioned that way. As is Eddie. Eddie and Kathryn’s father, Ted, met at a sports bar, and Ted, a colon and rectal surgeon, immediately took to Eddie. “I wanted to make sure my daughter wasn’t going to be abused, that there weren’t character flaws that would make him violent. But all you have to do is meet him,” he told me. He warned Eddie, though. Eddie, do you know what you’re getting into? he asked rhetorically. You’re asking to date someone more spiritual than Mother Teresa. She spends half a weekend in a monastery. Eddie smiled and told him, Love will find a way. Kathryn’s mother, Elena, though, had misgivings. How would Eddie find work? How could he take care of a family? What would he tell their children? What if they got pulled over by the police—would they find out who he was, what he’d done, and take him in? Why not marry another Greek Orthodox? With intention, Eddie would call Kathryn’s mom to let her know about any accomplishments. When he received his BA from Northeastern. When he got admitted to the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration. When he got invited by the State Department to travel to Spain to talk about violence prevention. When he got invited to cochair the mayor’s public safety commission. He wanted her to like him, to trust him. Before he and Kathryn got engaged, he converted from Baptist to Greek Orthodox, something he did as much for Kathryn as for her parents. But Kathryn’s mom told her, We all know this is going nowhere, so you should end it now.

  * * *

  —

  It’s dusk, and Eddie has one last visit, to the mother of Adam, the boy who’d been shot and who Eddie had mentored. We find Adam’s mother, Rita Garcia, sitting in a lawn chair in her backyard, dressed in T-shirt, shorts, and sandals. Her son, aged five, and her grandson, who is two, play nearby. Eddie retrieves a plastic bucket from elsewhere in the yard, turns it over to use as a seat. He hands her his last rose. “I’m really thankful for you letting me into your life,” he says. He tells her about the day, about his seeking penance. Rita is a member of the moms group. “I feel conflicted being at those meetings,” Eddie tells her. “All these moms looking for the perpetrators, and here I am having taken someone’s life.” Eddie seems tired at this point, his chin resting on his hand. “I don’t see you that way,” she tells Eddie. “You’re someone who picked himself up and kept moving forward.” She pauses. “I feel like I’m on both sides, too.” Her oldest, Adam, a year and a half after he’d been shot and after Eddie had intervened, was stabbed multiple times by a rival gang member and died shortly afterward in the hospital. Another son at the age of fifteen was convicted of murder. He was present for a killing and is serving twenty-two years. Rita confides in Eddie that after her son was arrested, two boys came to her house, one armed with a handgun, and told Rita they would kill her youngest children if her son testified against the others in the case. They then cut the electrical wires to her house, just to remind her that they were there. Her five-year-old, she tells Eddie, started peeing in bed at night and was too afraid to go to school. Uncharacteristically, Eddie has little to say. He shakes his head, both in empathy and in disgust, and gives Rita a hug before heading out into the night.