An American Summer

by Alex Kotlowitz

  “The what?”

  “Fu Manchu.”

  “If anything, this is helping me,” Marcelo says, stroking the scraggly hair growing from his chin.

  “That’s what I’m saying. That’s your Samson hair right there. Don’t cut it off.”

  “Yeah, I’ll just get bored and I’ll play with it. I need to tame it.”

  “You eating good?” Tom asks, concerned that Marcelo looks bonier than usual. “You eating at school?”

  “Yeah, I mean, I’m eating every day, so I’m good.”

  “Get the hot lunch!”

  Marcelo laughs.

  “Do you have any friends at school now?” I ask.

  “Uh, a couple. I mean, they’re obviously white kids.”

  “Why do you got to say it like that, man?” Tom asks. “You sit together at lunch and study together and stuff?”

  “Yeah. I can tell they’re really good kids. Like they’re positive.”

  “What’s their names?”

  “Uh, one is Connor, the other one is Rob, and the other one is Michael. There’s a lot, so that’s pretty cool.”

  “Do they ask you about yourself?”

  “Yeah, but I’ve put my distance. I just say that I’m just from the city. I transferred over here, you know, obviously for better grades and stuff, but I don’t tell them anything. I don’t.” Marcelo shifts in his seat, sits up, his right leg pumping.

  “Yeah? Why?”

  “ ’Cause they’re not going to understand at all. At all at all. It’s like everything over there is so comfortable.”

  After Marcelo’s arrest, De La Salle refused to take him back. Scott Donahue, the priest who runs Mercy, convinced his alma mater, St. Viator, a Catholic school in the northwest suburbs, to take a chance on Marcelo, and so Marcelo gets up every morning at 4:30 to catch a commuter train to Arlington Heights, a forty-five-minute ride. St. Viator is a school of privilege, and Marcelo marvels at the wealth of his fellow students. “They drive some wild-ass cars,” he tells me. BMWs. Porsches. Range Rovers. “I look at my life and I look at their life and my life sucks.” The other students ask him where he’s from in Chicago, and Marcelo is purposefully vague. “South Side,” he says. They’ll respond, It’s crazy over there. Is there shooting? Marcelo brushes it off and tells them, Nah, not that I know of. He doesn’t think they’d understand. Besides, he says, “Getting shot is not cool at all.” He’s excused from gym class so that he doesn’t need to wear shorts, which would expose his ankle bracelet, a source of great embarrassment. In the coming months, he’ll run into trouble on two occasions. One time, two sheriff’s deputies came to Mercy to take Marcelo in. According to their records, Marcelo had thirty-seven violations, meaning he had gone places he wasn’t authorized to go. When they showed up at Mercy, Marcelo was working in the cafeteria, and got so upset he started shaking, then went to the bathroom to throw up. Fortunately, at Mercy the staff records each resident’s whereabouts every thirty minutes, and it became clear that there had been a malfunction on the sheriff’s end. The other time, in the fall, Marcelo, who had moments where his mood turned dark, called his girlfriend, Tania, from the train station and urged her to meet him downtown, which she did. They sat in a park, and Tania told Marcelo she was mad at him for not going to school. “I just wanted things to stop for a minute,” he told me. He was tired of the constraint and decided he needed a day to stretch his legs. “Sometimes I don’t trust myself,” he told me. Again a deputy sheriff came by later that day to arrest Marcelo for violation of his house arrest, but he was so taken by Marcelo’s honesty and directness that he let it slide. Other than that incident, Marcelo abided by the rules of house arrest and electronic monitoring for 488 days, or for a year and four months, after which the prosecution inexplicably shifted its stance and agreed to reduce Marcelo’s charges to a misdemeanor, to which Marcelo pled guilty.

  Marcelo’s industrious. He wrote nearly two dozen prisoner advocate organizations around the country until he got one to help fund a trip for him and his family to visit his father at a federal prison in West Virginia. He nags and steers and protects his younger brother, Omar, who’s now an honor roll student at De La Salle, Marcelo’s old school. They have dinner together every Thursday. Marcelo’s mom has moved out of the neighborhood, so that when Marcelo is off house arrest he can visit her. “I was ashamed,” she told me. “But now I’m so proud of Marcelito. He doesn’t think like a kid anymore.” From Mercy, Marcelo had written his mother a long letter of apology. Marcelo’s trying to get his best friend, Javier, who participated in the robbery spree, out of the gang. Marcelo told him, I’m not going to fuck up my life just because you’re fucking up yours. He finally got the bullet taken out of his leg, and though he asked to keep the bullet as a reminder—“a souvenir,” he called it—the police took it as evidence should there ever be a case against the shooter. He’s still dating Tania, who has aspirations to become a social worker and who has stood by him even though for two years they could get together only at Mercy. And Marcelo got into DePaul, a Catholic university in the city, where he plans to major in accounting.

  Marcelo still gets agitated easily, and as his older brother, Elio, says, he’s “spookalacious.” That is, he spooks easily. He’ll cross the street if he sees a car with tinted windows. He won’t walk in his old neighborhood. He tells me that when a driver honks at him, “I want to beat his ass.”

  “The light and dark forces in Marcelo are fighting,” Tom says. “You see the battle in Marcelo’s eyes. It’s probably why we fight for him so much. It’s why he’s beloved around here. We know he’s a good soul.”

  * * *

  —

  Many months later I visit Marcelo on a Sunday afternoon, and Tom is there, too. This time we meet in a boardroom on the first floor of Mercy. Marcelo’s limping, as he’s just had the bullet removed and is fighting a subsequent infection. He’s in a DePaul sweatshirt and sweatpants, and he has put on some weight and grown his hair out, both of which make him seem older—and healthier. He’s in this strange place, between worlds, trying to figure out where he fits in, how, or if what he’s done in the past has shaped who he is now. He proceeds guardedly, fiercely independent, resolute to make this work on his own terms. He worries about being judged, and especially when it comes to family, he holds things close.

  “You hear from your pops?” Tom asks.

  “He’s not doing really good. His health. He’s on painkillers. His back. I just want to spend time with him when he gets out of prison. Seventeen years. He needs to stay alive. That’s why I tell my girlfriend’s brother—he’s fourteen—to shut the fuck up, to stop yelling at his dad.” He pauses—and grins. “I’d be a good youth worker.”

  “Yeah, you love to drop the f-bomb.”

  “It gives texture to the conversation,” Marcelo says with a glint in his eyes. He then gets reflective. “I feel like everyone here looks at me differently.”

  “Is it something I’m saying?” Tom asks. “Something I’m doing?”

  “I know you care about me, but I feel like you look at me differently. I feel like I betrayed you.”

  “A lot of that shit might be your own shit. Was I disappointed that this happened? Yeah. Great people make stupid-ass decisions…You are who you are. Is this going to define you? Or is it going to motivate you? I’m just saying.”

  Marcelo deliberates for a moment, his right leg pumping. “Sometimes,” he says, “I feel like I’m in this alternate universe.”

  Chapter 20

  False Endings

  SEPTEMBER 18…SEPTEMBER 19…SEPTEMBER 20…

  As the summer wound down, the days growing shorter, a chill blowing through the streets, some in the city, mainly those in positions of authority, declared that all was looking up for Chicago. Police Superintendent McCarthy touted the numbers—the lowest murder rate since 1965—and publicl
y bemoaned the city’s image as a place riddled with violence. “We’re struggling with perception,” he declared. In early September, Mayor Emanuel appeared on the David Letterman show. Letterman made the observation that people warn, “ ‘Oh, don’t go to Chicago. The violence is unbelievable.’ ” Letterman asked, “Now, tell us why people say that.” Emanuel replied, “Actually, it’s on its way down.”

  It seemed the summer would quietly melt into fall. Then, on a Thursday night, September 19, a group of men, women, and children casually gathered in a park in a neighborhood known as “Back of the Yards” because of its proximity to the long-ago-shuttered Union Stock Yards. While some played a pick-up basketball game and others threw dice on the side, two men approached. One carried a semiautomatic assault rifle and the other a .22-caliber revolver. Without a word, they knelt down on the basketball court and opened fire. Thirteen people were shot, including a three-year-old boy; the bullet entered the back of one ear and exited his cheek. Somehow, everyone survived. The shooting made national and international news. The mayor interrupted a trip out East and flew back to Chicago. Clearly the summer had not quite ended.

  * * *

  —

  Three years later, in 2016, the number of people killed in the city would soar to 795, a 61 percent rise from the previous year. Another 4,369 would be wounded by gunfire. It would be the deadliest year in Chicago in two decades. Nobody could offer an explanation. The University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, a think tank on urban violence, examined weather (it was no hotter than past years), city spending on social services (which remained stable), and changes in policing, among other factors. In an unusually candid report, the Crime Lab concluded, “What caused Chicago’s sudden surge in gun violence in 2016 remains a puzzle.”

  The shooting doesn’t end. Nor does the grinding poverty. Or the deeply rooted segregation. Or the easy availability of guns. Or the shuttered schools and boarded-up homes. Or the tensions between police and residents. And yet each shooting is unlike the last, every exposed and bruised life exposed and bruised in its own way. Everything and nothing remains the same.

  For those who buried their loved ones in the summer of 2013, what’s left in death’s wake? I was once told the story of a mother who stood her daughter’s coffin upright so that she wouldn’t be remembered for the way she was left to die, lying in the street. People find a way to defy death’s touch.

  The interviews I conducted for this book were the toughest I’ve ever done. It’s not that people were emotional—they were at times—but rather it was that often for the first time people were giving voice to memories and feelings they’d held tight. Many spoke with a surprising candor. One man talked about getting shot and paralyzed by a close friend. A sixteen-year-old girl recounted saving the life of a woman—a complete stranger—shot in the neck. A young man spoke about his obsession with finding the person he suspected of murdering his father—twenty years earlier. They’d spin yarns. They’d cry and laugh and scold. It was no doubt cathartic. And then they’d vanish. They’d stop returning phone calls. They’d unfriend me on Facebook. They’d not answer my knocks on their doors. I understand. Violence has a way of catching up with you. Best not to stand still. Best to keep moving. Violence has a way of making you feel sullied. Best not to raise questions. Violence has a way of taking over your narrative. Best not to let it shape who you are. Violence has a way of exposing cracks in your universe. Best not to speak of those you love. Cathlene Johnson, who owns Johnson Funeral Home with her sister, once told me, “Your death will tell on you.” And what she might have added, on everyone around you as well.

  I have deep admiration for those in these pages. They spoke with such honesty and thoughtfulness and often kindness about the moment when the tectonic plates on which they walked shifted and quaked, leaving fissures so wide their journeys momentarily halted and then took unexpected turns. I, too, was shaken, often by the fury and mistrust vented by the storytellers at those around them, including me. I remember once David Kelly, a Catholic priest who has spent twenty-eight years working with youth in the city and who has comforted both the living and the dying, told me, “Void is even worse than hate. If you have hate, at least you have something.” And so I came to understand people’s capacity to hold on, to aspire, to move forward—and, yes, hate—even when there is good reason to give up.

  People have a capacity to keep going even when their world has been shattered. We all long for connection, for affirmation that our lives matter. I can’t shake a brief encounter I had that summer of 2013. Schwab Rehabilitation Hospital is a kind of way station for shooting victims, a place for those who have lost use of some of their limbs (sometimes all their limbs). It’s an edifice of tragedy and hope. One afternoon at Schwab I was introduced to a thirty-four-year-old man, Edward, who was there with his mother. At the auto repair shop where he was employed, Edward had been shot in a robbery by a man wielding an AK-47. He’d lost his right leg to an infection and so he was in a wheelchair, rolling toward the exit after a physical rehab session. His mother did all the talking. “It’s embarrassing,” she told me. “When people learn he was shot, they think he’s a bad person, that he had to be selling drugs or that he was gangbanging.” Edward seemed uninterested, like he wanted to be somewhere else. I didn’t even think he was paying attention to what his mother was telling me. As mother and son turned to leave, Edward, a burly man in a gray T-shirt, twisted around in his wheelchair, faced me, and in a surprisingly commanding voice issued a directive: “Don’t forget about me.” He then pivoted and rolled away.

  A Note on Reporting

  When I set out to report this book, my intention was to spend the summer of 2013 reporting and then come fall begin writing. I imagined it would be a fast turnaround. I was so wrong. I should’ve known better. To capture just a snapshot in people’s lives would have been both unfair and incomplete, and so as many of these stories unfurled in the months and years to come, I stayed with them. Time has a way of revealing things.

  These stories, I suppose, are subject to a little trickeration (a word I first heard uttered by an older former gang member). Many of the tales, as I’m sure you’re now well aware, move back in time as well as forward, in some cases taking us well beyond the summer of 2013. I think of each of these chapters as a kind of portal into the particular tale at hand. It requires, I know, a small leap in both trust and temporal imagination.

  Over the course of four years I interviewed roughly two hundred people, most of them numerous times. Some asked for anonymity, and so in a few stories I changed names to protect people’s privacy. For this book I interviewed people in their homes, at their jobs, over a meal, or, in the case of Marcelo, over regular Sunday chess games. I attended bond hearings and trials, hung out on street corners and on front porches, attended funerals and vigils, visited people in prison, showed up at crime scenes, spent time at a funeral home and in a hospital trauma unit, and on one occasion drove from Chicago to Texas with Eddie, to spend time with his family. That summer of 2013, I also embedded with a homicide unit on the city’s South Side, and while it was both exhilarating and enlightening, I ended up not using any of that material, mainly because it felt too familiar. Nonetheless, my time with the detectives in that unit informed my reporting.

  In recreating moments from the past, I tried when possible to interview more than one person who was present. I also relied on several thousands of pages of documentation to flesh out people’s stories and to ensure their accuracy. These included police reports, criminal records, civil court records, trial transcripts, medical examiner reports, school records, hospital records, records from the Independent Police Review Authority, journals, letters, surveillance video, and in a few instances video or audio recorded by local reporters. All quotes in quotation marks I heard firsthand. Those in italics I reconstructed, when I could with the help of more than one person who was present at the time.

  In my reporting I wa
s especially informed by those in the field, including the work of Ted Corbin, a Philadelphia emergency room physician who runs a program for shooting victims called Healing Hurt People; Father David Kelly, who runs Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation in Chicago; Eddie Bocanegra, who founded the program Urban Warriors and now runs an antiviolence effort at Heartland Alliance; Kathryn Bocanegra, a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, who runs two groups of grieving mothers and who has worked with youth reeling from the violence; Susan Johnson, the executive director of Chicago Survivors; Jens Ludwig, Harold Pollack, and Roseanna Ander at the Chicago Crime Lab; and those I’ve spent time with over the years—including Ameena Matthews, Alphonso Prater, and Tim White—who are in the streets putting their own safety at risk in an effort to stem the violence.

  Acknowledgments

  My deepest debt is to those in these pages, for their candor and thoughtfulness and their trust in me to tell their stories. Their courage and openness inspired.

  Myrna Roman taught me so much. As did Cobe Williams whose gentle ribbing and regular conversations kept my spirits up. So many in Chicago gave generously of their time and their insights. My time with each of you profoundly informed my reporting. Michelle Gittler, Tony Thedford, Bob Garza, Kristi Battolini, Crystal Smith, Anita Stewart, Jamie Kalven, the staff at Mercy Home for Boys and Girls, Cathy Johnson, Maria Pike, Don Sharp, Carolyn Frazier, Shobha Mahadev, Evelyn Diaz, Mike Morrissey, Donya Smith, Carol Reese, Jeffrey Granick, Leonetta Sanders, Annie Purtell, Miles Harvey, and Janey Rountree. Juliana Stratton alerted me to Marcelo’s story. And a big thanks to Carey Stephenson, who introduced me to Ramaine’s family, and to Bob Fittin, who introduced me to George Spivey.

  To Dave Isay who one evening in the spring of 2013 called me excitedly from the New York subway suggesting the idea for this book. He insisted, “This is the book you were meant to write.” I hope he was right.