Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  “I could handle it if he were one of these kids all dressed in black, with blue hair and piercings,” Carol said. “Even tattoos, if they’re not gang-related, are fine. Even if he were gay, fine. I can never be fine with violence, and I wonder if that’s why he chose it. They’ve got his back. Why do they have to have his back? Does anyone have your back? My medical insurance has my back. One thing he’s proud of in the gang is that he tells other people what to do. He’s always on that cell phone barking out orders in Spanish. I said to him, ‘Look, I tell people all the time what to do, because I teach first grade. Would you consider it as an alternative?’” But Carol also admitted that she is in part responsible for who Krishna is. “You know me as who I am now, and I know you like me,” she said sadly. “But believe me—I wasn’t the same person then, and you wouldn’t have liked me so much.” She also thought that the complexities of being part white were too much for her son. “He’s too scared to be himself. It’s hard for mixed-race kids to stand up and say, ‘I am neither here nor there; I am myself.’” In a letter Krishna wrote me, he said, “It would make sense to tell you who I am, even though sometimes I don’t even know. Always classified as a ‘spic’ for my language, culture, looks, and demeanor, but always teased, ostracized and not fully accepted by my Latino brothers for being a ‘half-breed.’”

  Krishna loved giving tutorials about gang life. “The Hispanic gangs in California have been going since the 1900s,” he told me one evening. “I’m not putting down black gangs, but there’s more loyalty and honor with us. Gangs didn’t really start as criminal organizations; they degenerated into that. But, look at the people in Enron, stealing old people’s retirement funds. I, myself, or any of my homeboys, that’s a rule, that you can’t fuckin’ jack old people. That’s despicable.” When I met Raul three years later, I saw that Krishna was echoing the tone of his father’s earnest moral instruction. Most of the kids whom I interviewed for this chapter spoke correct English when they first met me and then relaxed into patois. Krishna spoke broken gang language, full of obscenities, until he relaxed, at which point he spoke perfectly grammatical English. Was his gang mode a defense to camouflage the sensitive person he really was? Or was he an incredibly hard guy who could manipulate people with his apparent softness? Krishna himself has no idea of the answers to these questions.

  In the final month of his sentence, Krishna went out every day to a job and could leave the premises in the evenings with a responsible adult. I had applied for permission to take him to dinner. When we had sat up nights in the Home School, he would talk about how he wanted to go to college. Now as he tucked into a sirloin, his fixation was the gang. “Those are my people,” he said. “I ain’t gonna be sacrificing my loyalties just for living under Carol’s roof.” I mentioned that I had been interviewing Karina Lopez, and he laughed. “You heard her boyfriend died? My boys did that.” He actually thumped his chest. “I saw her the day it happened, in the med unit, crying her ass off. I laughed.” Karina later confirmed the episode: “He didn’t have anything to do with the murder, but he sure enjoyed it.”

  I told him that it was hard to reconcile all this with the boy full of dreams with whom I’d played Scrabble a few weeks earlier. “They’re all part of one person, though,” he said. “My counselor just made me do an assignment on what a psychopath is. After reading twenty characteristics, I stopped, because it was scary. I love my hatred—it’s so strong and sort of pure and real. And I kind of hate love, like I feel it’s always false and disappointing, everyone saying they love me when they just want to control me. I love hatred and I hate love. So is that enough for me to be a psychopath? I don’t think I’m evil. I hope not.”

  Three days later, Krishna went to his job and didn’t come back. To run away when you have two weeks of transitional living remaining is ludicrous; instead of walking out with a clean record, he was on the lam. After three months, he was picked up in south Minneapolis and returned to the Home School. When I saw him there, I expressed mild surprise that he had stayed in a town where every policeman knew his face. “I went to the Greyhound station twice to buy a ticket to LA, but I was having too much fun here,” he said. He complained that Carol had reservations about having him move back home. “Did my mom let me down?” he asked. “I don’t think she let me up to begin with.” Carol was sad. “He somehow missed the lesson on delayed gratification,” she said to me. “I wish you could take over being his mother.”

  Krishna began what I was to recognize as a predictable cycle. As long as he was locked up, he was capable of optimism and hope, qualities that dissipated when he left his confinement. Now, he wanted to stay in gang life but not commit crimes, and he planned to do this by writing plays to be performed by gang members. He would beat their knives into scripts, their guns into production values. After describing to me the plot of one of his stories, he became abruptly ruminative. “I’m a banger. That’s just the easy way out for me. That way I know where I stand. Whereas, when I’m trying to be positive, I don’t really know where I stand—and I don’t really know how committed I am to being positive.”

  I had heard a great deal about his father and wanted to see if Raul was the gentle sage of Krishna’s raptures or the manipulative creep I’d heard about from Carol. Three years after I met Krishna, he was free and planning a trip to Guatemala. I proposed to his father that I visit at the same time. Raul wrote back, “You are welcome any time. You do not have to spend your money and time in a hotel. It will be our pleasure to have you with us so we can meet and talk freely.”

  Raul was warm and courtly and instantly likable, a small man with thick, black, wavy hair; he looked almost Asian and was dwarfed by his towering son. They met me at the airport; I threw my bags in the trunk of their elderly station wagon, and we headed to Krishna’s grandparents’ house, where I was given a room ordinarily reserved for visiting grandchildren, which had on the dresser, incongruously grouped, a light-up Santa Claus, a gigantic Mr. Potato Head, and a portrait of the pope.

  Raul told me that he and Carol had loved each other. “Before we married, I said, ‘I don’t accept a marriage that leads to divorce, especially if there are children.’ But she left anyway, and she wanted to have them with her, which she hadn’t earned and couldn’t do properly.” We stayed up talking late that night, and Raul returned over and over to the language of morality. “I don’t think this thing we see is the real Krishna,” he said. “The real Krishna is that sweet boy who went up to visit America five years ago. The good side will come out on top, but whether it does so before he gets locked up for life or killed in a shootout I don’t know.” Later he said, “I can understand being willing to die, or to spend your life in prison, but not for a gang. Krishna needs a cause.” Raul looked at me with sudden frankness. “Can you help him find one?” he asked.

  In the morning, we went to an Ananda Marga school in an impoverished district called La Limonada. The children, three to six years old, were taught in two rooms, one above the other in a concrete bunker with a tin roof. Raul and Krishna were greeted with songs and a little dance, Krishna awkwardly receiving these salutations. The teacher asked if Krishna would give the kids English lessons, and he replied that his tattoos and gangster look would get him into trouble in the neighborhood—an excuse that clearly upset his father. Then Krishna said he had to bounce, so Raul and I drove to a small apartment on the outskirts of town and met a dozen Ananda Marga devotees from various countries. We meditated on faded prayer mats and talked about good and evil over a shared bowl of lentils.

  That night, with bravado, Krishna took me to a gang-dominated part of the city, where he introduced me to the local Sureños. Everyone had guns and gang tattoos, and at one point we heard gunfire outside the room where we were gathered—and yet it felt weirdly like meeting someone’s fraternity brothers on a college campus. I understood for the first time how Sureños could feel both utterly dangerous and uniquely safe. The gang was itself a horizontal identity, and crime served a f
unction in Krishna’s life not unlike the role that Deafness or dwarfism played in other lives I’d examined, not unlike the role that being gay played in my own life. I kept remembering the letter in which Krishna had said he couldn’t tell me who he was because he didn’t know. His mother had attributed the confusion to being biracial, but it also reflected the question of whether he was his mother’s son or his father’s, American or Guatemalan, good or evil—a catalog of dialectics too long to enumerate. In that ugly room in an ugly neighborhood he knew exactly who he was, which allowed him to relax as I had never seen him relax before.

  I had been surprised to be drawn to the world of the Deaf, but it was much stranger to be seduced by this world. Yet from the inside, gangbanging was hospitable. I did not like hanging out with the Sureños any more than I’d liked my morning with the Ananda Margis and their lentils, but I did not like it any less, either. I knew that many of the people in that room had committed murder. They were kind to me, however, as a kindness to Krishna, a consideration for which he was clearly starved. That cordiality felt authentic and embracing. I had assumed that hanging out with the gang in the slums of Guatemala City would show me the toughest part of Krishna, but instead, it showed me the most vulnerable. Criminality is an identity, and like any other form of organized brutality—football, war, arbitrage—it can beget great intimacy. The social imperative is to suppress criminal behavior, but that should not preclude noticing the identity. I deplore violence, but I recognize the military intimacy it allows men who have no other occasion to bond. Indeed, I recognize that the conquests by which the map of the world is drawn derive from the loyalty and aggression of young men.

  My last day in Guatemala, Raul had arranged for Krishna’s grandfather to drive me to the airport. “Hey,” said Krishna. “You want me to come with you?” A little gallantly, he picked up my suitcase to take to the car. During the drive, he told me about Guatemalan poetry, and I mentioned Elizabeth Bishop’s poems from Brazil, which capture the displacement between the two Americas. I quoted some favorite lines, and he borrowed a pen to write them down. I had expected simply to be dropped off, but at the airport Krishna grabbed my suitcase out of my hand again, accompanied me inside, and picked a good line for me—good, he explained, because he could really be into the girl at the counter. He waited until I had checked in and escorted me to the security zone. I walked into the secured area, then turned around, and he was waving at me. “Thanks,” he called out. “For what?” I asked. “For coming. For everything,” he said. “I’ll miss you, man.” He coughed, looked embarrassed, and hurried away. That image of him, almost forlorn, printed itself on my heart; for a gleaming moment, I saw the sweet Krishna whom both Raul and Carol had described.

  Krishna moved back to Minneapolis to live with his mother again, and the next I heard, he had been shot and was in critical condition; he’d lost a kidney and part of his gallbladder, and he had lacerations on his liver, a collapsed lung, and “catastrophic” bleeding. When he left the hospital, Carol asked him to find someplace else to live. “If they come to finish off the job,” she said drily, “I don’t want it happening in my house.” After that, he was mostly on the run, but when I couldn’t reach him on his ever-changing cell numbers, I was able to keep up because he returned to his mother’s house to do his laundry and ironing. Five months later, Carol took him back. Then Krishna challenged some gang members, and they shot up the house. Ashoka, who had been on a long visit, returned to Guatemala the next day; in a letter she left for Krishna, she wrote, “I used to think you just needed focus, but now I feel like it’s a slow form of suicide and I don’t want to be part of it.” Carol said, “So I’m losing both my children again.”

  A month later, Krishna got sixteen months for assault. This time, he went to the big house. When I visited, he apologized for the fictions he’d told me. The gang had disappointed him by then; one of the Sureños in the incident had turned state’s witness. “I mean, don’t join the gang if you can’t understand; we have rules, we have bylaws, there is stuff you have to do and stuff you can’t do.” I proposed that if following rules were so attractive, he might as well follow the ones set by the US government, and he laughed. Krishna called Carol every week. “He calls me because he’s allowed to,” she said. “I have been so stupid to keep thinking that those speeches about doing better meant anything. I asked, ‘What about that optimism you expressed in the play you were writing?’ and he said, ‘Those were just words.’ Where’s the reality? I’d give anything to be able to find it. Even if it’s ugly, really, really ugly, I could accept it, if I could only see it, even for a few minutes. That’s my dream.” She looked at me sadly. “Andrew, I know you better than I know my son.”

  The next time Krishna was released from prison, he took his ACTs and sent the scores to several colleges, including UCLA, which was his first choice. But before his applications could be processed, he accompanied four fellow gang members on a drive that culminated in the shooting death of a member of the Vatos Locos gang. He was charged with aiding an offender for the benefit of a gang, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to eight years in Minnesota’s Stillwater maximum-security prison.

  Krishna could have found community elsewhere if he hadn’t been too petrified to try. He was certainly smart enough to go to UCLA; he hid behind bluster to avoid risks that scared him, and the guns he toted were only transitional objects, a flashier edition of Linus’s security blanket. His freshman year shimmers on a dreamed horizon; to his “what is” there is a vast “what might have been,” and he is haunted by it. Finding a horizontal identity can be life’s greatest liberation, but it can also be crushing, and in this case, the figurative prison consigned Krishna to a literal one.

  Stillwater has a vast grayness. Krishna looked spruce whenever he entered the visiting room, but his idealist streak had dimmed. “I don’t hate Carol anymore,” he said to me one afternoon there. “I used to think she was the one who had made me powerless, but now I think she loved me in whatever way she knows how. I just felt so powerless growing up, not getting to choose where to live, and I finally realized, I joined the gang so I could feel really powerful. And what’s the upshot? I’m totally powerless again, right back where I started—only this time, I did it to myself.”

  Carol said to me, a few weeks later, “He wanted to work with the oppressed, to be with his people, with the disenfranchised Latinos. But what has he done? He gets them to kill each other. He lands them in prison. The people he says are his people—they’d be better off without him.” I asked her if she thought she would be better off without him, and she said, “I’ve been without him the whole time. I don’t really miss who he is at all. But who he was—I’m pretty sure I’m right about who he was, and I miss that person so much. And the person I thought that person would turn into, I miss him, too, with all my heart.”

  • • •

  No other group of people has given me more confused information than these juvenile criminals. They didn’t trust or like adult, white, male authority figures, and their knee-jerk dissembling was part of what had landed them in prison in the first place. More fundamentally, though, they didn’t grasp their own reality. They didn’t know for sure what had happened; their narratives were all conditional.

  Jail concentrates human emotions because it confiscates so many normal human actions and robs the inmate of so many ordinary decisions: what to eat, when to eat it, when to shower, and on and on. When you are not on the street, fending for yourself, running from crime to crime, taking drugs that banish the world, you are compelled into reflection. In this pensive state, prisoners dwell on love and hate, on reunion and vengeance. They contemplate how to get back at whoever put them in the box; virtually all the prisoners I met blamed someone else for their incarceration if not for their crime. They also long for the people who offer them succor: a husband or wife, a boyfriend or girlfriend, the prisoner’s children, parents whose relatively untempered love becomes a cherished souvenir of innocence.
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  The wrongs Krishna had endured were far more real to him than the ones he’d inflicted on others. I met other kids, though, who seemed to have become criminals to give some objective weight to a previous and crippling sense of guilt. One boy I befriended at the Home School, Tyndall Wilkie, had a fight with his mother, a preschool teacher, when he was six and told the school nurse that she had been abusing him, then repeated the story to the school social worker. She hadn’t abused him; he just wanted to get her in trouble. Tyndall and his sister were put into permanent foster care; his mother was banned from teaching for five years. His whole life unfolded in the shadow of this error.

  Mitt Ebbetts, a gang kid at another prison, described how, when he was eight, his mother would leave him in charge of his younger sisters, cautioning him never to answer the door. One day, the knocking was so insistent that he couldn’t ignore it. It was the police, responding to a neighbor’s complaint about the children being left home alone. They were taken from her care and caromed from foster home to foster home. Like Lord Jim, Mitt was haunted by one error; he felt he had ruined his mother’s and sisters’ lives and so eviscerated his own moral center. His later offenses, drug peddling and assault, fulfilled his need for self-punishment. The legend of crime is that it is spurred by parents who hurt their children. The legacy of crime is that children hurt their parents. Often, the pain attached to that transgression blots out all other remorse.