Jurisdiction
The walk to my office at 1916 East First Street used to take me five minutes. I’d pass Second Street School and watch parents cling to the chain-link fence, transfixed by their kids as they filed into the school building. They wouldn’t leave their posts until they saw their kids walk into class. Closer to my office and before the alley was Junior’s apartment. In his forties, Junior drank “forties” all day. He’d be nursing a large, cold one, even at 7:30 a.m. as I arrived to open Homeboy Industries. Most days you’d see him hanging out his window, on the second floor, shirtless, no matter the weather. He was wiry and feisty and, despite my two decades of urging “recovery” on him, alcohol didn’t seem to obscure his goodness—it pickled it—it was as “out there” as his shirtless torso surveying the world from the second floor.
One day as I’m walking past, lost in my own thoughts, I fail to see him. Then after I had gone beyond his apartment and the alley, Junior screams full-throttle,
“LOVE YOU G-DOG.”
This stops me in my tracks as it does a few other people. I’m always startled by the ready way folks and homies tell you that they love you. This was not always so available to me in my own Irish-Catholic background. You knew people loved you, but words never brought you to that knowledge. In the barrio, people tell you. I retrace my steps and am now standing under his windowsill, looking up.
“Thank you, Junior. That was a very nice thing to say.”
Junior waves me on, as if papally blessing me as my day begins.
“Oh, come on now, G, you know,” he says, spinning his hand in a circular motion, “You’re in my . . . jurisdiction.”
I can’t be entirely sure what Junior meant. Except for the fact that we all need to see that we are in each other’s “jurisdictions,” spheres of acceptance—only, all the time. And yet, there are lines that get drawn, and barriers erected, meant only to exclude. Allowing folks into my jurisdiction requires that I dismantle what I have set up to keep them out. Sometimes we strike the high moral distance of judgment—moving our protected jurisdictions far from each other.
This is also, largely, the problem in the groupthink of gangs. They just can’t seem to see one another as residing in the same jurisdiction. “We are the guys who hate those guys” is the self-defining assertion of every gang. The challenge is getting them to abandon the territory of their gang and replace it with a turf more ample, inclusive, and as expansive as God’s own view of things.
In the late ’80s, the gangs of the Pico-Aliso Housing Projects largely “Just Said No” to drugs. They’d sell them but didn’t use them. Hard drug usage made you liable to provoke conflict with otherwise friendly gangs or, if you sold drugs, it would upset your business. One gang in particular was an exception, and PCP was its drug of choice. Members of this gang would walk up the hill to the Clock Store, an abandoned tienda with a looming clock stuck at a little past three. They would score their PCP—paying for “dips,” dousing their cigarettes in little vials of the drug—maybe once, perhaps twice if they had the money.
Then they would return to their barrio with their “kools” and get high in the safe confines of their neighborhood.
One evening, Flaco and three of his confreres make the trip to the Clock Store. But instead of delaying their gratification, they get high right there. This leads them to take the shortcut home—by traversing the 101 Freeway. When I get to the hospital that evening, the doctor, standing by Flaco’s bed, peers down on the unconscious twenty-one-year-old and renders his verdict.
“I have never seen a body hit with such impact and still live to talk about it.”
This, apparently, is the good news. The bad: the car had crushed Flaco’s right leg and ripped his left arm clean off his body.
I hadn’t slept much that night and was decidedly, as the homies would say,
“in a bad move” the next day. I was just barely getting accustomed, at that stage in my ministry, to the daily dread of disastrous things that always seem to befall those who are suspended already by the thinnest of lifelines.
I’m heading out of the church parking lot, walking toward Pico Gardens, and I see a clubhouse of gangsters congregating by the church’s bell tower. This is not uncommon, as the church has become a welcoming space for them. This gang is an enemy to Flaco’s gang. I walk past and greet them, and as I turn the corner, I can hear one of their group, Gato, say loudly, “I’m glad that shit happened to Flaco last night.” The gathering explodes in laughter.
I double back, and I am instantly in a red-faced fury. The conventional wisdom in working with gangs would say that you never put a homie on “the front page.” I do not care about this at the moment. I get in Gato’s face and give him a banner headline.
“Sabes qué, mijito. I love you and am down for you, and I love Flaco and am down for him.”
Now I am nearly nose-to-nose with Gato, and I say, “Don’t you ever . . . talk that way . . . in front of me again.”
This is a risky confrontation, but I am too pissed off to care.
“ ’ Spensa, G,” he says, in a voice ten years younger than the one he used minutes before. Some of the others chime in and share the remorse. “Sorry, G.”
“Come on, G, don’t be mad.”
Homies are good on regret, bad on restraint.
I barrel past them all and resume my march to the projects. I’ve had a handful of moments like this in my two decades working with homies. There were times when the futility and irrationality of the gang mind-set threw me into this frustrated place, which would occasionally play itself out like the scene above.
Sometimes, you just can’t think of much else to do but shake your fist and get red in the face.
The next day I’m driving out of the parking lot, and right outside is Gato. He flags me down, and I lower the window.
“Hey, G,” he says. “Give me a ride, yeah? To my lady’s?”
I tell him to get in and buckle up. I can feel his desire to repair what transpired the day before and am humbled at his taking the lead in this.
“Where ya goin?” he asks.
“To the hospital,” I say, “to visit Flaco.”
Gato says nothing. We sit in something of an icy silence. His lady lives only in Pico Gardens, so it’s not much of a trip, and the silence is bearable.
When we arrive, he thanks me, shakes my hand, with the homie handshake, and opens the door to leave. He hardly makes it outside, when he sits back down.
“Do me a paro, G?” he says. “You tell Flaco that Gato from ___ gang says,
‘Q-vo’ and that I hope he gets better.”
“I will do that,” I tell him, with a smile, and real admiration for the stretch this represents.
Gato makes to get out of my car again, then rapidly returns to take his seat.
“Um, G,” he says, “I mean . . . don’t tell my homies I said that.”
I tell him that his secret is safe with me.
Sometimes you’re thrown into each other’s jurisdiction, and that feels better than living, as the Buddhists say, in the “illusion of separateness.” It is in this
place where we judge the other and feel the impossibility of anything getting bridged. The gulf too wide and the gap too distant, the walls grow higher, and we forget who we are meant to be to each other.
Somewhere, in the jurisdictional locale where judgment used to claim us, a remarkable commonality rushes in, and the barriers that exclude are dismantled.
The poet Rumi writes, “Close both eyes to see with the other eye.” But finding and seeing, beyond our sense of being separate, our mutuality with the other is hard won.
Bridging the gulf of mutual judgment and replacing it with kinship is tricky indeed.
* * *
Chepe and Richie need to get out of town. They haven’t committed a crime, but it’s just a matter of time before America’s Most Wanted comes calling. Their constant risky behavior and failure to ever be cautious has an expiration date.They are from the same gang and walking the tenuous line that separates them from bona fide trouble and innocent enough kicking it. I think they need a momentary change of venue.
I have been invited to give several talks in Bakersfield and Ridgecrest, so I snatch up Chepe and Richie for the road trip. We’ll stay at my sister Maureen’s house in Ridgecrest. Chepe and Richie have their own rooms and their own beds (a first), and my sister has waiting for them their own personal towels with
“Richie” and “Chepe” embroidered on each.
We break up our trip with dinner at Coco’s, a restaurant a notch above Denny’s and a notch below, well, every place else. A very imposing woman with a missile-silo hairdo is serving as our hostess this evening. She stands behind this reception counter and glowers at the three of us—well, really, only at Chepe and Richie, shaved heads, tattooed, and in all their baggy-clothed gangster finery. I hold up three fingers to indicate the number in our party, and she budges not at all from her rock-solid, mad-dogosity. I play charades with her.
Whole idea. Three people. Sit at table. Eat food. Each concept comes with its own accompanying gesture. I know exactly the origin of her displeasure, and I volley some of my own right back at her. I judge her just as surely as she judges them (barriers that exclude, all around, please). Finally, she blinks, grabs at three menus, and emerges from behind the desk, waving at us to follow her. She sighs with exasperation, not one bit happy that we have chosen Coco’s for our dining pleasure. We follow the hostess’s beehive through the restaurant, and let’s just say we apparently are no longer in East LA. All the diners stop what they’re
doing, silverware suspended in midair, and a disquieting silence descends on the place. All eyes turn toward us as we move uncertainly through the divided sides of tables and customers.
Richie stage whispers, “Everybody’s looking at us.” I douse his concern.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
Everybody was looking at us.
We get to our table, in the nether bowels of the place, way beyond where the others are enjoying their meals, until we showed up.
“We don’t belong here,” Chepe whispers, as we settle in our booth in the projects section of Coco’s. “We should go someplace else.”
“What are you talkin’ about?” I say, trying to dampen their paranoia.
“There’s just pure, rich white people here,” Richie pleads.
“Yeah,” Chepe clarifies, “Them people who be eatin’ Grey Poupon ’n’ shit.”
“Would you guys just relax. Our money is just as green as their money.”
Richie excuses himself and delicately announces that he needs to “TAKE A LEAKIAZO.” Maybe there was one, or possibly two, people in the restaurant who actually didn’t hear him broadcast where he was going. While he’s gone, the waitress deposits a slew of menus—the special menu, the summer menu, the sizzling platter menu, the regular ol’ menu. When Richie slinks back into the booth, he eyes this laminated array set before him and asks, “Are these ‘the things’?”
“The things?” I helpfully ask.
“You know, ‘ the things. ’ ”
“The menus?”
“Oh, come on, G,” Richie says with a sigh, “You knooow I don’t speak
‘rich.’ ”
This was their first time in a restaurant—where you actually sat down, a waitress came to you, and you didn’t have to order by pointing at a luminous plastic picture of a cheeseburger.
Variations on this theme have always been bountiful. I’ve had homies in restaurants actually think they needed to clear the table after eating. Once a homie said, “Can I give a tip to the waitress?” and when she arrived, he said,
“Just say no to drugs.” His homie adding, “Don’t run with scissors.” The restaurant, to the gang member, is a foreign land indeed.
Our waitress is an entirely different story from the frozen and awkward reception we seem to be getting from everybody else. She puts her arms around the “fellas,” calling Chepe and Richie “Sweetie” and “Honey” and bringing them refills (“and we didn’t even have to ask”), with extra this and more of that, and supplying the Tapatío on demand. She is Jesus in an apron.
Later, as we walk to the car, they talk about our waitress. “She was firme. ”
“Yeah, she treated us like we were somebody.”
We have a chance, sometimes, to create a new jurisdiction, a place of astonishing mutuality, whenever we close both eyes of judgment and open the other eye to pay attention. Reminding each other how acceptable we are and lavishly providing free refills and all the Tapatío you need. Suddenly, we find ourselves in the same room with each other and the walls are gone.
One of the great fonts of sadness in the prison system and the Youth Authority in California is the heightened division between the races. At the reception center of the Youth Authority in Norwalk (SRCC), once a month I celebrate two Masses back-to-back in a multipurpose center.
At roughly 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. on a Sunday, the wards are brought in and sit on metal folding chairs. They are almost all Latino. In the early days, my helpers, those who set up for Mass and did the readings, were Jerome (African American), Larry (Caucasian), and Juan (Latino). They were great friends, and their bond seemed to jar, somewhat, the racial boundaries so tightly held in these places. When I first arrived there, they schooled me on my responsibilities and seemed to confuse my first Mass at SRCC with “my first Mass ever.”
“We will have the Offertory.” Larry explains as if (as the homies say) this was “my first barbeque.”
Juan picks up: “The Offertory is when we bring you the gifts.” Juan enunciates like I’m not a native speaker—in any language. “The gifts,”—Jerome brings us home—“are the bread and the wine.”
I’m acting as if I’m taking mental notes, Hmmm . . . bread . . . wine . . . tell me more.
“And then,” Jerome says, proceeding, “I will come over with a bowl, and I will pour water over your fingers.”
He leans in, furtively, and manages a whisper, “so, you know . . . you can wash your iniquities.”
I told him I was able to scrub the heck out of my iniquities before I got there.
But thanks anyway.
Once before Mass, the Catholic chaplain, Tom Moletaire, tells me that Juan is going to sing a solo after communion. We had never had singing in all my time coming to this place, and I congratulate Juan before the Mass begins. The moment arrives, and Juan steps up to the microphone and begins to sing a cappella.
It’s jaw-droppingly bad. What comes from this kid’s pipes is some vague sound of small-animal torture. We are all stunned. I quickly check the faces of the couple hundred wards sitting there. They can be, shall we say, a tough bunch.
They are agog, and the singing is so bad that the part of their brains that handles laughter doesn’t get the message in time. They stare flabbergasted. The first Mass ends, and I find myself assiduously avoiding any contact with Juan. I do not have a clue what words to put together on his postcommunion canción.
Soon enough, the seats are filled again, and Mass number two is launched.
Now, I just presume Juan won’t attempt this a second time. But sure enough, communion ends, and Juan steps up to the microphone with seemingly no lack of confidence. And he accomplishes something I would not have thought possible. It is worse than the first time around. It is an outtake from American Idol. Again, no catcalls or giggles, not even shifting in seats. The congregation is frozen comatose in the sheer awfulness of it. Now, after this Mass, there is no avoiding it; I have to say something to Juan without failing the lie-detector test.
“Juan,” I say, with my hand on his shoulder and Larry and Jerome closing the circle around him, “You know, uh, it takes a lot of courage to READ in front of people, but it takes EVEN MORE courage to get up and SING in front of people.”
Then Jerome steps up and places his arm over Juan’s shoulder. “And it takes EVEN MORE courage to get up and sing . . . when yo ass can’t sing.”
In an instant, I’m preparing myself to break up a fight. But just as quickly, the three of them have a meltdown of laughter, and soon they are on the floor of this multipurpose center, convulsing and smacking each other. We seek to create loving communities of kinship precisely to counteract mounting lovelessness, racism, and the cultural disparagement that keeps us apart.
* * *
In the spring of 1993, when I am in tertianship, I find myself on a prison island in the Pacific Ocean off Mexico. Islas Marias, Mexico’s “Alcatraz,” is a twelve-hour barge ride from Mazatlán. The Jesuits celebrate fifty years of service there during my three-month stay. I live by myself (sleeping on a mattress in the sacristy of a small chapel) in a remote part of the island called Camp Bugambilias, where nearly eight hundred colonos (inmates) make bricks, tend livestock, and do a variety of other tasks of manual labor. Men are allowed to live with their families in simple bungalows, but the vast majority of the imprisoned are single men who live in dilapidated dorms. I make bricks with them all morning long, have Mass in the afternoon, and play dominoes at night.We even put on quite an elaborate Passion Play during my brief stay. I eat with the colonos, and the food is unspeakably bad, right out of the Dickens cookbook.
“Gruel” does not do justice to what they slop on our plates. I lose forty pounds.
At brickmaking one morning (which, by the way, means we play in the mud, pour the stuff into wood slats, let it bake in the sun, then stack these tabique high to build walls), Beto, a daily mudslinger with me, tells me to meet him at noon at the lieutenant’s garden.
“Bring your backpack” should have been my first clue that we are headed for trouble. Beto is tremendo: mischievous, funny, in his midthirties, always longing to dance right near the ledge of danger and dangle himself there in defiance of all reason. I have already seen him run afoul of the lieutenant, an exacting and spectacularly mean man, who runs Camp Bugambilias. Beto, by the way, was excellent as Peter in our Passion Play.
I meet Beto as planned, standing with my backpack (like a menso, I might add) outside the lieutenant’s home. He has a flourishing vegetable garden filled with all the things none of us had tasted in a very long time. Beto arrives, says,
“Wait here,” and kangaroos himself over the garden fence. Before I can get out
“What the hell are you doing?” Beto is snatching up carrots and tomatoes, peppers and lettuce. He’s holding his T-shirt stretched in front of him, hopping down the aisles of the garden, tossing in zucchini, eggplant, and a couple of lemons for good measure. I’m in a panic. I have heard often of what passes as punishment in the camp.
If a colono, for example, “escapes” to the mountains (leaving the island is unthinkable—too many sharks), the entire camp is given even worse food until they capture the inmate, who is carried into camp, tied on a stick, hanging from legs and hands like an iguana, and is soundly beaten. I never witnessed any of this—but the stories are numerous. I only see the lieutenant’s constant yelling and public humiliation of the colonos.
I am doing some involuntary jig outside the fence, looking in all directions and whining quietly, “Hurry, hurry.” Beto leaps over to my side of the fence, looking seven months pregnant, takes my backpack (thank you very much), and fills it with the purloined produce. “Let’s go,” he says, and hightail it we do. We run like crazy people to a spot Beto has set up a bit north of the dorm and secluded enough among the trees and the brush. He has a pot and starts a fire.
He’s been carrying a cloth sack that seems to have a life of its own. This is due, entirely, to the presence of a very large, live iguana rustling inside. Catching iguanas is also strictly forbidden and punishable by beating with a very large stick. Beto guts the iguana, and it begins to simmer in the pot (and, yes, it tastes just like chicken).
I watch as he dexterously wields his knife around the carrots and slices and dices the other vegetables. I help where I can, stirring the concoction, but mainly staying out of Beto’s way. He knows what he’s doing. I admire his earnestness
and the care with which he prepares our caldo de iguana. The aroma nearly brings tears to our eyes. I haven’t smelled something so savory and delectable in a long time. It is longer still for Beto.
As the smoke from lunch makes its way beyond the trees, we begin to receive visitors. A colono shows up and asks what we’re up to. I watch Beto to see how he’ll treat the intrusion. He tells the old man, “We’re making caldo de iguana.
Join us.”
I’m moved by the ease with which Beto lets this guy in and smoothly adds some water to the pot. The man tells us that he has something back in the dorm, and in short order he appears again with a small ball of crumbled old newspaper.
He peels it open and there is a clump of coarse salt he had been saving for just the right moment. Beto tosses it in. Shortly another uninvited colono shows up, and Beto adds again to the simmering pot some accommodating water and more vegetables. This inmate does the same retrieval of the safely guarded ingredient back in the dorm. This time it’s a slightly shriveled jalapeno pepper. It’s diced and added to the mix. Another arrives, same inclusion, same retrieval. This guy has a rusted, small can of tomato paste. Once they figure out how to open it, it, too, goes in.
Maybe there are eight of us or so when the meal finally gets served. Plenty to go around and just as tasty as it could be. Everyone brought his flavor to this forbidden pot of iguana stew, and keeping anyone away and excluded was unthinkable to this band of prisoners. Alone, they didn’t have much, but together, they had a potful of plenty.
* * *
No question gets asked of me more than, “What’s it like to have enemies working together?”The answer: it is almost always tense at first. A homie will beg for a job, and perhaps I have an opening at the Bakery.
“But you’re gonna have to work with X, Y, and Z,” naming enemies already working there. He thinks a bit and invariably will say: “I’ll work with him, but I’m not gonna talk to him.”
In the early days, this would unsettle me. Until I discovered that it always becomes impossible to demonize someone you know.
* * *
I take two recently hired enemies, Artie and Danny, to Oakland for a talk I’m to give. They will man the table in the front and sell Homeboy and Homegirl merchandise. The trip is excruciating as they will not speak to each other. I carry the ball entirely in the conversation and only occasionally do they grunt assent or nod, “uh-huh.”Before the talk, we’re standing on the terrace at our hotel, overlooking a boardwalk along the water, near Jack London Square in Oakland. We stand there in silence watching the people below. I give up trying to keep things conversational.
Down below, there is a sweet old couple, probably married well beyond fifty years. They are holding hands. Danny elbows Artie and points at the old couple.
“That’s disgusting.”
“Cómo que ‘disgusting’?” I turn on him. “It’s sweet. It’s an old couple.”
“Still,” Danny says, “it’s disgusting.”
“What are you talking about?” I press him.
“Well, it’s only obvious.” Danny points one more time as the couple disappear from sight. “They’re under the influence of Viagra.”
A completely silly joke by anyone’s standards, but Artie and Danny collapse in howling and high fives.
Some passage has been cleared, and they both choose to move through it. An artificially silly wall has divided them, only to be brought to rubble by an outrageously silly thing.
A footnote: Artie and Danny become great and enduring friends, whose friendship has to be kept secret always from their own homeboys.
Thomas Merton writes, “We discover our true selves in love.” Nothing is more true than this in Artie and Danny. Love never fails. It will always find a way to have its way.
Before Homeboy Industries grew too huge, I used to walk new hires to their job site and introduce them to their coworkers.
“Clever” seems eager to begin at Homeboy Silkscreen, and at twenty-two years old, he has assured me, he is ready to retire his jersey from the barrio. He moves with me easily through the factory, shaking hands cheerfully with those printing shirts or catching them as they are spit through the conveyor-belt dryer.
Even enemies he greets and looks them in the eye.
Until he turns a corner and sees Travieso, a twenty-four-year-old from an enemy hood. In unison, they stare instantly at their feet, some mumbling takes place, and there is a great mutual shifting of body weight. They do not shake hands. I think, Hell, he’s just finished shaking hands with all sorts of enemies.
I discover, sometime later, that the hatred they hold for each other is profundo. Not only is this a neighborhood pedo, this is also personal. Some delito has transpired between them, and the breach is beyond repair. I can sense this much in the moment, even before the details get filled in later.
Their eyes are still epoxied to their Nike Cortezes. “Look,” I tell them, “if you can’t hang working together—please let me know now. I gotta grip a’ homies who would love to have this jale.” They say nothing, so that’s that.
Some six months later, Travieso finds himself surrounded in an alley, greatly outnumbered by members of an enemy gang who beat him badly. While he is lying there, they will not stop kicking his head until he is still and lifeless, and then they leave him. Someone gets him to White Memorial Hospital where he is declared brain dead and left on life support. The doctors wait for forty-eight hours to secure a flat read, and then they can officially declare him deceased.
This allows time for relatives to journey to Los Angeles.
I am speaking at St. Louis University and fly home. I have seen a great deal of horrifying things in my lifetime—nothing, however, compares to the sight of this kid (a wonderfully, gentle-souled kid) with his head swollen many times its size. It is breathtaking. I can barely keep my eyes trained on him as I smear sacred oil on his forehead and we say good-bye in the pull of a plug.
In those first twenty-four hours after his death, I am in my office, late at night, and the phone rings. It’s Clever.
“Hey,” he begins awkwardly, “that’s messed up . . . ’bout what . . . happened to Travieso.”
“Yeah, it is,” I say to him, brought back to this hollow area of my soul, which this sadness has carved.
“Is there anything I can do?” Clever asks, with oddly high energy, “Can I give him my blood?”
This last offer sucks the breathable air out of the atmosphere for both of us.
We can each feel the other tremble in silence. Clever takes the lead and punctures the quiet, with great resolve and unprotected tears.
“He . . . was . . . not . . . my . . . enemy. He was my friend. We . . . worked together.”
* * *
Close both eyes; see with the other one. Then, we are no longer saddled by the burden of our persistent judgments, our ceaseless withholding, our constant exclusion. Our sphere has widened, and we find ourselves, quite unexpectedly, in a new, expansive location, in a place of endless acceptance and infinite love.