New Haven Noir
Page 17
* * *
And in a way, this is where this story really begins:
With Lionel coming in our front door one evening, left ear and head bleeding profusely, shirt collar and right sleeve ripped, scratches on his face and hands.
As soon as he was safely inside, he slid down the wall in the front hall in relief, and we gathered around him as soon as we saw what had happened.
“Jesus, Lionel, what the hell!”
“Whoa.”
“Oh man.”
Roger hustled to the kitchen and brought back a couple of wet towels to start cleaning up the wounds, to get the blood off and see what we were dealing with.
Lionel said nothing in response. Smiled up at us dumbly, vacantly, probably a little in shock. Then shook his head in annoyance, embarrassed in that Midwestern way to be drawing so much attention.
The cops got there pretty quickly.
Lionel did his best to describe the kids. “Three of them, officer. About fifteen years old.” He described their sweatshirts. Gray. Baggy jeans. He didn’t remember much more. “A lot was happening, officer.”
I noticed that Lionel didn’t mention their race. But for cops in that neighborhood at that time, you didn’t have to. In that Edgewood section of New Haven, 1976, you’d only mention if they weren’t black.
“How’d you get the head wound?”
“The one karate-kicked me.”
Wow.
“Kung fu kind of thing. I was not expecting it,” said Lionel, formally.
Jesus. Trying it out on you. Like kicking an inflatable clown.
The problem was, we learned, the cops couldn’t do much. “Look, if you’re right and they’re fifteen, then it’s juvenile. They’re not yet sixteen. Thing is, they didn’t pull any weapons, they know what they’re doin’, these kids, they’ve already learned what they can and can’t get away with as far as the law. That’s why he karate-kicked you. That’s why they punched you. ’Cause that’s not gonna land ’em in anything too serious.”
Officer Perez, I remember. Stocky, bushy mustache, alert black eyes. A messenger, a repository of street knowledge. Translating it all for us.
“See, their parents don’t trust us, think we’re the enemy, so they instruct the kids to lie to us, and they defend the kids, accuse us of exaggerating the events and even fabricating the charges, and as juveniles they and their parents retain a lot of rights, so a lot of times we can’t even get to square one with kids like this. We’ll go look for them, Mr. Patton, and we might even find them, and might even get them into the juvie system, with your testimony and if you’re willing to skip a lot of class time, but I do want to point out to you that when they learn it was you who brought charges, and they go back home as they eventually will, they’re only gonna have it in for you more.”
I find this line of logic infuriating, of course, but Lionel has a completely different reaction, which trumps my fury.
Lionel adjusts his glasses. “Well, look, they’re not bad kids, really.”
What?! Kids who just karate-kicked you in the head? Punched you in the face?
Perez stops writing for a moment. Clearly distracted by what he’s just heard.
“I mean, look what they’re faced with. The deck is stacked against them,” says Lionel, who looks at the cops, at us, and then reveals the rest: “I asked them why they were doing this.”
The second cop—Landry, tall, freckled—is genuinely confused. He blinks twice, trying to understand. “Wait. You asked them . . . why?”
“Yes. Why are you doing this, fellas? I wanted them to explain themselves.”
Fellas. I could hear him saying it. Good God.
“I mean, you know, beyond the sneakers and the jacket,” says Lionel. “In a larger sense. Why?”
Wanting three fifteen-year-old thugs, apparently, to stop and examine their own motives. To look into their own souls.
Perez taps his pencil against his chin a couple of times. “During the attack, you asked them why?”
I see the cops exchange glances with one another, and then Perez glances at me.
“My questions only seemed to make them angrier,” Lionel acknowledges.
Making philosophical inquiries of fifteen-year thugs on Edgewood Avenue.
“Why did they do this, officer? Why do they behave this way?”
Now turning the philosophical inquiry to the New Haven Police Department.
Perez looks at me. Asks wordlessly: What planet is your roommate from?
Nebraska, officer. The planet of Nebraska.
“I’d like to help those kids somehow, officer.” Blood still running down the side of his head. It hasn’t fully coagulated yet. “I’d like to change things for them somehow. Clearly they need help.”
Perez has had as much as he can handle. He takes a breath. “I think the most helpful thing you can do, Lionel, is stay out of their way. Be alert. Avoid them. I think that might be the most helpful behavior right now.”
When I close the door behind the cops as they leave, Perez turns back toward me and says, somewhere between annoyance and alarm, “Tell your pal to cut out the humanitarian relief effort.” He peers at me warningly. “Gonna get his ass killed.”
* * *
Lionel Patton. With black-framed glasses off, pretty good looking. Naturally modest in a way that hard-nosed Eastern Yale women liked. Khakis, white shirt. High school class president and valedictorian and captain of his high school tennis team. (I kid you not.) Skating lessons. Flying lessons. Chess lessons. Golf lessons. Lessons in everything. The well-bred, high-achieving Midwesterner—very much a Yale tradition. (A tradition that helps keeps Yale’s coffers full and flowing, generation after generation.)
Here at Yale, a music major. (Because he could. Because he was going back to inherit and oversee four thousand highly profitable acres of soybeans and corn, so he could major in any damn thing he wanted.)
And by the peculiar chain of circumstance that produced Lionel Patton, by the coincidences and alignments of his particular existence, he had never known anything but brightness, cheerfulness, good fortune. Not a moment of doubt or deprivation. By the concatenations of luck and privilege and advantage and happenstance, he had never confronted the forces of darkness. He went whistling down Edgewood Avenue. Literally. (I knew it because I had heard him—whistling the same French horn part in Mahler or Mozart that I heard him practicing at the house.) And when the forces of darkness swarmed around him, it was unexpected, inexplicable, and he was ill-prepared. It was an ambush, in a way, that went beyond the literal. Beyond Edgewood.
* * *
Once the cops were gone and Lionel was cleaned up, and he sat down with us (the bong on the wooden shipping-crate-cum-coffee-table between us—Lionel did not typically partake, though the rest of us felt that his encounter certainly merited a fresh bowlful), I felt the occasion called for a little bit of philosophical discussion from safely within our walls.
“Lionel, you can’t discuss motives and ethics and right and wrong with fifteen-year-old black kids on Edgewood Avenue.”
“I just want to understand why they would do this . . .”
“Why? ’Cause they wanted your sneakers,” said Roger.
“Why? ’Cause this is what they know. ’Cause this is what they see. ’Cause this is their world,” Larry said.
“Then we have to try to change it. We have to try to make things better for them.” He looked at us with bright resolution. “I’m gonna reach out to them.”
Oh Jesus.
“No you’re not.”
“Listen,” I said. “Marcus, Keneisha’s little boy? Six years old. He tried to hold me up with a sharpened pencil.”
“Serious?”
“That’s the world he knows. That’s what he aspires to. And you and I are not changing that in a semester.”
“But what if they see that I care about them? I’ll bring them a dozen donuts. We’ll get started on better footing, they’ll see I’m a nice guy.”
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br /> Donuts!
“Lionel, they know you’re a nice guy. That’s why they’re doing this to you.”
You have success, happiness, joy, privilege written so loudly on you, Lionel, they can’t take it. They can’t take you ambling up Edgewood, whistling. Whistling classical music at that.
* * *
The quest for understanding. The clearly marked trail of knowledge. It had been a way of life for Lionel, a unifying theme. But here, there was no understanding. That was darkness’s creed, the wild steed it rode, its trusty companion, part and parcel of its power. No understanding. Blunt irrationality. Comprehensive incomprehension.
* * *
Officer Perez was right about everything, I was sure. But he turned out to be wrong about the use of weapons.
The next time it happened to Lionel, there was a knife.
The knife changed everything.
But not in the way you think.
Not in the way any of us thought.
* * *
Same three kids. And feeling thrilled, victorious, adrenalized, invincible from the success of their previous encounter, no surprise, they were not done with Lionel.
Same cops—Landry and Perez. I’m glad they happened to be on duty that day, to come around to our Edgewood house again, to be there to experience the same disbelief that we all did. The same intersection of Yale and Edgewood. The same sobering result. The same rethinking of all our assumptions.
Because with the unfolding of that knife, the flash of its blade, something else unfolded and flashed in Lionel Patton. Some new edge was suddenly exposed.
The appearance of that knife, gleaming there in the afternoon sunlight—an expression of Edgewood itself? . . . of accelerating events? . . . bringing them literally and figuratively to a point?—the appearance of the knife changed the calculus. As it always does.
Held there, inches from his chest, arrogantly—creating pure power, pure powerlessness. Generating in Lionel a sudden complex math of threat, insult, terror, instinct, rage, memory, confusion, the formula’s coefficients arranging and rearranging themselves in milliseconds.
If you’ve ever had a knife held at you (and at that moment in time, New Haven, 1976, many of us had), then you know how it alters the moment.
And oh, it altered the moment for Lionel.
His French horn—his trusty French horn—unexpectedly, from stage right—swung into action. Twenty mighty, unexpected, highly effective pounds of defense—and offense, as it turned out.
He knew his weapon intimately, after all. He’d swung it onto buses, under desks, into car backseats, balanced it on bicycles, lugged it since the age of seven. He had total control of it. He could wield it. Hefting twenty pounds for over twelve years, your carrying arm and hand get strong. Unexpectedly, acutely strong. Uncannily precise. He was at one with it.
He punched the French horn case at the knife and knocked it out of the first kid’s fist with such force, and to such stunned surprise, that the knife tumbled to the sidewalk.
Clearly, three armed teenage thugs on Edgewood Avenue were not expecting the attack of a French horn.
And when the kid bent down to retrieve it, the instrument swung with equal force and violence at his head. He was literally dumbstruck.
And when the other two kids came at Lionel in blind, unthinking retaliation, he karate-kicked the first one—perfectly, effectively, in the gut—then swung the horn at the second, its twenty pounds catching him solidly in the lower back, sending him to the sidewalk doubled up in pain.
Like I said: French horn, All-Ivy.
Amid all the music and golf and chess and skating lessons back in Lincoln, Nebraska, Lionel had years of martial arts lessons as well, and had been sternly and repeatedly instructed never to deploy what he had learned; it was an art and a discipline, and such stern instruction it must have been, because his teachers could not imagine a circumstance in which Lionel Patton, bright-eyed, cheerful, upbeat, friendly Nebraska farmer’s son, would ever have to actually use it. But fortunately, into that meticulously developed cerebral cortex of his at that moment came a neural signal that perhaps this was the appropriate deployment of those long-honed martial skills. And maybe in the end that was fortuitous. Because it added the element of surprise—for Lionel himself, and therefore for his adversaries.
Like I said: lessons in everything.
A symphony of violence, with a French horn solo. You can hear the solo, can’t you? Heraldic sounding—but only in our imaginations. In reality, a solo of thumps and thuds.
And then, a final flourish, and a predictable one, as it turned out.
As the kids backed away, stunned—holding their heads, doubled up in pain, unsure what to do next—Lionel grabbed the knife off the sidewalk.
Did he hold it to their chests? To their throats? Turn the tables on them? Show them how it feels to have a knife held inches from you?
No, Lionel reverted suddenly to Lionel.
“I told them they should not be carrying something like this around and threatening people. I told them it’s wrong. And I confiscated it.”
Confiscated it. Good Christ.
And knife in one hand and French horn in the other, Lionel continued up Edgewood Avenue.
* * *
Those are the details of that afternoon, related first to us, and shortly thereafter to the astonished cops. With one notable difference.
“So what happened to the knife?” Perez asked him.
“I don’t know,” said Lionel.
That straightforward, honest Midwestern face. That do-gooder Boy Scout demeanor. “Things were happening so fast, I didn’t notice.”
“Too bad. It would make prosecuting this a slam dunk.”
“My testimony’s not enough?”
Perez looked at that big, honest face. A Midwestern French horn–playing Yalie. Assaulted by three black kids. And there were no actual stab wounds, anyway, thank God, so the knife was not crucial evidence anyway.
“Yeah, your testimony is probably enough.”
* * *
And it was.
Two of the three kids went straight into juvie. Their first port of call, their entry at last, into the criminal justice system. Where they no doubt turned from rambunctious, chaotic, delinquent fifteen-year-olds to angry, hate-filled, avenging adults. Where, as the overwhelming odds and statistics predict, they learned more violence. Committed more crimes. Graduated from menace to full-fledged criminals. Edgewood started them on their path. But Lionel Patton hurried them along it. Pushed them into the system, started their formal criminal educations.
The French horn case was permanently dented. The horn inside survived unscathed. I went to see Lionel performing Mahler’s Fifth.
It’s got a French horn solo.
The solo he’d been practicing incessantly. The solo he’d been whistling.
Lionel performed it with passion. With beauty.
He had walked to the performance. Walked Edgewood.
So I knew he had the knife onstage with him in magnificent Woolsey Hall.
* * *
A few weeks later, in the process of buying another dime bag, Roger and I were surprised to be invited into Keneisha’s apartment.
It was quiet, warm, a refuge from Edgewood Avenue, and a heartbreaking display of middle-class aspiration. Comfy couch. Big TV. Big stereo speakers. A song of consumerism. Not knowing anything else. Not aspiring to anything else. A living room filled with objects. Filled with want.
And amid our straightforward transaction, out of nowhere, with no preamble, but clearly because she wanted us to know, she confirmed my original deduction: “I tol’ them to leave you alls alone, you know. And they did too, mostly. But they couldn’t leave that one boy, they said. They tol’ me they just couldn’t leave that one boy. And I can’t control them.” She shrugged. “Ain’t nobody can.”
There is no understanding.
* * *
Knife in one hand. French horn in the other.
Not quite the same happy, cheerful Midwesterner. Never again.
Now taking that knife, a little bit of the streets of Edgewood, with him everywhere he walked. Just like his French horn.
Don’t mess with Lionel.
PART III
Death or Glory
Innovative Methods
by Alice Mattison
Lighthouse Point Park
A cloud obscured the sun as we rode down the shadowed driveway into the park. The staff ushered the kids off the bus, watching to make sure nobody strayed. Wind blew across Long Island Sound. The kids looked smaller here than inside the residence, though some were almost adults. The jagged line of teenagers moved toward the massive old stone lighthouse above the rocky beach, the restored carousel, and the pavilion with its picnic tables.
We let them hang out on the stony shore before lunch, waving them off the battered wooden fishing pier, which was posted with Danger signs. It was too cold for swimming. The water was gray, its surface broken by wind. Some kids didn’t go near the water, but others tried to see how close they could get without wetting their shoes, and ran back as the water slid forward.
I zipped up my windbreaker and pulled the sleeves over my hands. I’d been working as a clinician at the residence for a little less than a year, and this was my first picnic. I usually saw the kids one at a time for psychological testing and counseling, and some didn’t recognize me here. Maybe I looked different—they certainly did. I hadn’t known that Luis owned a Yankees jacket, that laconic Tiffany had a loud voice and spoke in obscenities.
We distributed lunch in the pavilion. Gulls wheeled and descended. Above the woods beyond the parking lot, two hawks circled.
Next the kids would ride the carousel, and after that, I’d been told, Dr. Frank always offered boat rides. The kids couldn’t learn Frank Gillingshurst’s last name, and by analogy some called me Dr. Jennifer, though I’m an MSW. Dr. Frank had driven his black pickup, with his boat on a trailer, and parked in a lot near the water. A staff member would go along on each boat ride, and others would keep an eye on those waiting on land. Years ago, a fifteen-year-old had run away from the picnic and was picked up by the police after hitchhiking halfway across Connecticut.