Slow Work

David had decided to change. Sixteen years old, back in school for the first time

“in the longest” and working part-time for me at Homeboy, David liked living in his own skin again—or perhaps for the first time. He enjoyed being as smart as he was discovering himself to be.

One day he lands in my office and seems to want to try his hand at small talk.

“You know,” he says, “I ran into a man who attended one of your talks recently.”

I give a lot of talks, and David has accompanied me several times.

“Really,” I say, “that’s nice.”

“Yep,” he says, “he found your talk . . . rather monotonous.”

“Gosh,” I say, with some dismay, “really? He did?”

“Weeellll, actually,” David says, “that didn’t happen. But I just need practice using bigger words.”

I suggest that he practice on somebody else.

* * *

After Mass at Central Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles, I spot a kid named Omar, seventeen years old, whom I had known for some years. I actually never knew him “on the outs”—only in a variety of detention facilities like the halls or

camps or in a placement. He never seemed to be out very long before he’d find himself swept up, yet again, in gangbanging and life on the streets.

He gesticulates wildly at me, as he is being led back to his unit. “Come see me.” He mouths his unit, “KL.”

I locate Omar in the dayroom of Unit KL. He knows the drill. He quickly sweeps up two plastic chairs, whose backs are carved with gang graffiti, and carries them away from the others, landing near the windows, out of earshot. He tells me he’ll be leaving on Thursday, and I can’t help but think I will be bumping into him yet again in one of these county-controlled facilities. After a half hour, I eye the clock on the wall and tell Omar, “Gotta go, dog.”

“Why so fast, G?” he asks. I stand.

“I have an anniversary Mass at the cemetery for a homie I buried a year ago.

So, gotta go.”

Omar stays seated and is uncharacteristically pensive.

“Hey, G,” he says. “Can I ask ya a question?”

“Sure, mijo, ” I say, “Anything.”

“How many homies have you buried . . . you know, killed because of gangbanging?

“Seventy-five, son.” (This was some years ago. If he asked today, it would be more than twice that number.)

“Damn, G, seventy-five?” He shakes his head in disbelief, his voice a bare hush now. “I mean, damn . . . when’s it gonna end?”

I reach down to Omar and go to shake his hand. We connect and I pull him to his feet. I hold his hand with both of mine and zero in on his eyes.

“Mijo, it will end,” I say, “the minute . . . you decide.”

The moistening of his eyes surprises me. He grabs my hands in his.

“Well,” he says, “then, I decide.”

“Omar,” I tell him, “it has always been as simple as that.”

“How many things have to happen to you,” Robert Frost writes, “before something occurs to you?”

Change awaits us. What is decisive is our deciding.

* * *

says his name is Grumpy. He only offers his gang moniker and seems tougher on the first bounce than most kids are.

“Look,” I say, fishing one of my cards from my pocket, “call me when you get out, and we’ll remove your tattoos for free.”

Now, usually when I say this, the response is nearly always the same. They grab the card and stare at it and say something like, “Really? . . . wow . . . for free? . . . firme.” But not Grumpy. He doesn’t take my card. He looks at me, as the homies would say, “all crazy,” and on total LOUD status, says, “Yeah, well, why’d I get ’em if I’m just gonna take ’em off?” He’s huffy and belligerent. This almost never happens. In the face of this rare occurrence, I become quite placid and find my preternatural calm voice.

“Well,” I say, “I don’t even know you—but I KNOW why you got all these tattoos.”

“Yeah,” louder still, he says, “Then why’d I get ’em?”

“Well, simple,” I say, as quiet as he is loud, “One day, when you weren’t looking, your head . . . got stuck . . . up your butt. That’s right, dog, you straight-out keistered your cabeza. So,” and I force my card into his hand, “you call me . . . the minute . . . you locate your head.”

Not my proudest moment, but as the homies might say, “I don’t let myself,”

which is to say, you get crazy with me, I tend to get crazy back. I’m working on it.

Some five months later, someone gives me a slew of Lakers tickets, enough to fill the parish van with the pandilla mugrosa (a group of trouble-making little ones from Pico Gardens, who all seemed to have a common allegiance to bad hygiene, an allergy to bathing). It was when the Lakers still played in the Forum, and we had been blessed with seats not in the nosebleed section, but in the cerebral hemorrhage section. The gaggle of project kids was running up ahead of me, but I took my time climbing the stairs. Suddenly, in about fifteen of the aisle seats, a group of Camp Munz youth all stand to salute me. “Hey, G,” one says,

“It’s us from Camp Munz.” They come into focus for me. They are all in their camouflage garb—given free tickets as well. I shake the hands of each one, seated all behind one another on the aisle. The hollering, “DOWN IN FRONT,”

does not make us speed up our greeting. We’re all mutually excited to have bumped into one another. I’m nearing the end, and the third to the last vato is Grumpy. We fix on each other, and I extend my hand to his. He refuses to shake it. I think, Not good. There is a beat before, quite unexpectedly, Grumpy throws his arms around me and squeezes tight. He leans into my ear and whispers, “I get out Tuesday . . . I’ll call ya Wednesday . . . I wantcha ta . . . take my tattoos off.”

Teilhard de Chardin wrote that we must “trust in the slow work of God.”

Ours is a God who waits. Who are we not to? It takes what it takes for the great turnaround. Wait for it.

* * *

“Okay, dog, I got an interview for you,” I’d tell Leo, a nineteen-year-old dropout, who’d pass most of his day just kickin’ it with his homies in the projects. Leo was a short, squat, exceedingly likable kid you could not resist wanting to help. Often I would set something up—an interview—a chance of a chance of something, and his enthusiasm never waned. “Yeah, firme, ” he’d say.

And when the designated moment arrived, Leo would leave me hangin’ in the designated spot. I’d wait and he’d never show up. This happened to me more than a handful of times.

One evening, late, I’m standing with some homies in the darkness of one of the project archways. At some distance, in the nearby parking lot, I can see Leo running up to a car and making a sale. He’s counting his money and walks toward our poorly lit archway. When he arrives, he looks up and is mortified to see me, to know that I’ve witnessed this entire transaction. The expression he’s sporting is cara de cachado.

“’Spensa, G,” he says, “La neta, I didn’t even see you there. My bad.”

“No need to apologize, mijo, ” I say to him. “You taught me something tonight.”

“I did?” Leo says, confused, yet obviously interested.

“That’s right,” I say. “Tonight, you taught me that no amount of my wanting you to have a life is the same as you wanting to have one. Now, I can help you get a life—I just can’t give you the desire to want one. So, when you want a life, call me.”

And I walk away more than a little discouraged. I contemplate a career change—crossing guard perhaps.

Some months later, Leo did call me.

“It’s time already,” he says. I knew exactly what that meant.

“So, what caused the lightbulb to turn on?” I ask.

“Well . . . today . . . I was watching Jerry Springer. ”

Apparently, people throwing chairs at each other wakes your ass up—who knew?

“And they had a commercial ’bout that ITT Institute—where ya learn shit, and I think, maybe I’ll call G, you know, and get me one a’ them . . . careers.”

Now Leo had a superhuman affinity for animals. He was the St. Francis of the projects. Though pets were not allowed in the projects, people had them nonetheless. Folks would bring their pets, the crippled dog or cat, and somehow Leo had his healing way with them. They’d “drop their crutches” and be good as new.

I’d just met a veterinarian at a talk I gave, so I called him. He hired Leo right away—first to clean up the dog poop and the cages. Then Leo learned to bathe the animals and even give them shots. Now he’s a supervisor at an animal shelter. It wasn’t long before Leo had got himself “one a’ them . . . careers.” It was worth the wait.

Sometimes you need to walk in the gang member’s door, in order to introduce him to a brand-new door. You grab what he finds valuable and bend it around something else, a new form of nobility. You try to locate his moral code and conform it to a new standard that no longer includes violence and the harboring of enemies.

* * *

A homie named Psycho, nineteen, has been dead a month, and fifteen of his homies are insistent on going to Resurrection Cemetery to mark this thirty-day moment. I pile them all in the parish van, and we find the nearly fresh dirt and turf where we had gathered a month before. The family has yet to secure enough funds to place a piedra with his name, but the homies know where he is “resting in peace.” In fact this becomes, for homies, the veritable last name of all their dead: “Psycho Rest-in-Peace.”

“We went to visit the other day, Trigger Rest-in-Peace Mom,” a homie might say. And it is very common for young women to identify themselves on the phone this way: “This is Blanca. Sniper Rest-in-Peace baby’s mom.”

We encircle the grave and no one speaks. The homies stand with their hands in their pockets and stare at the ground, this resting place. I look the other way as homies sneak off and steal flowers from other graves and place them on the

ground in front of us. They smoke and several of them light a frajo for Psycho and then rest it burning on a tuft of grass below.

Carlos, a skinny and impossibly tall homie, not yet eighteen, starts to sob. The circle of us surrounding Psycho’s marker is complete, and Carlos is now convulsing with a renewed grief, inconsolable in what has now become full-body heaving and wailing. I can sense the circle is disquieted by this. Footfalls shift and tap, and though no one looks at Carlos, they are all clearly uncomfortable with this display. I don’t sense that they judge it false or inappropriate, only a manifestation of some gate they would rather not have opened. Sensing the signal the group is sending, I put my arm around Carlos and walk him away from the circle. He is awash in mocos and tears and seems not at all concerned with mopping up after himself. He sobs resolutely while I stand there with him, arm draped lightly over his shoulder. There is more than grief here. He tells me, between his insucks of breath and jags of crying, that he was with Psycho earlier in the day, before he was killed that night. Just the two of them walking in the hood.

It occurred to Psycho to tell Carlos of a premonition. He knows he is going to die soon. “But if anything happens to me,” he tells Carlos, “I know you will take care of everything.” Carlos has been carrying this for thirty days and has told no one. “Taking care of everything” only means one thing in gang parlance: kill the one who kills me. It means revenge—fast and sure and clear. Carlos is a pimply teenager who drank in excess and joined a gang some years earlier when he discovered that the man he thought was his father was, in fact, his stepdad. The earthquake of this revelation sent Carlos into an odd free fall, hardened anything that was soft, and somehow lodged him tight in this crevice of hard drinking and serious hanging with gangsters. At the core, though, he frankly didn’t want to carry the burden of avenging this death.

“And you have taken care of everything,” I whisper to him, trying desperately to find another door for him to exit. “I mean, who organized all the car washes that paid for his funeral? You did. Who has been so present to Psycho’s mom and sister during this whole time? It was you. You hardly ever left their side, comforting them. Who has helped me more in calming down the homies so they don’t do something stupid and regrettable? Only you, dog. Only you.”

I lean on him and plead my case, my closing argument. “In fact, son, I think you may be the downest vato I’ve ever known. Neta. I mean, you took care of everything.”

* * *

His more purposeful older brother, Memo, sums up Joey’s level of maturity: “He always be actin’ his shoe size—eight.” This shiftlessness has become his life, and for all the pointing I make in the general direction of possible exits, all are politely shrugged away.

Joey shows up one morning at my office, and his smile seems to come from a deeper, surer place than usual.

“Get ready to be proud of me,” he says, settling in.

“Okay, I’m sitting down—fire away.”

“You are talking . . . to an employed vato right now.”

“Serio, dog? Felicidades. So where you workin’?”

Joey turns around to make sure no one is lurking nearby.

“Now that’s the thing, dog,” he says, lowering his voice and moving closer to me. “You have to promise not to tell the homies.”

I agree.

“Well, I’m workin’ at Chuck E. Cheese,” he tells me.

“Well . . . that’s great, son,” I assure him, feeling my nose grow. “But what do you do there?”

“But that’s the thing, Gee, you can’t tell the homies.”

I nod.

“I’m the rat.”

The mascot, a rat, IS Chuck E. Cheese.

“Wow . . . I mean that’s great.” I try and convince him . . . and myself.

“No, it ain’t . . . it sucks. The rat suit is aaaallll hot, and it be hummin’ in there, and the kids be buuuuuugggggiiinnnn. They be pushing you and putting chicle on you.”

“Pero, mijito, I’m proud of you,” I tell him, “But what woke you up enough to go apply for a job?”

Joey gets sober and clear-eyed, and there is no doubting, for him, how he was led to this moment and place and rat suit.

“In two months, my son’s gonna be born. I want him to come into the world and meet his father—a workin’ man.”

That’ll do it.

* * *

“Here’s the deal—check out my shoes, G. I mean they to’e up from the flo’

up—do me that paro, yeah? And buy me some shoes?”

I figure the sheer repetition of this moment with Bugsy should come at some price to him.

“Ok, I’ll buy you the shoes—but first you have to answer this question correctly.”

Bugsy seems game.

“First, I have to set the stage, before I ask the question.”

I am charmed by Bugsy’s intensity; his attention is total.

“One day, the phone rings, and one of our workers, a sixteen-year-old homie named Manuel, answers it. ‘Homeboy Industries, how may I help you?’ Well, it’s a collect call, and we always accept collect calls, so Manuel does. On the other end, calling from County Jail, is a twenty-year-old from an enemy neighborhood to Manuel—though neither knows this yet.

“ ‘May I help you?’ Manuel says to the twenty-year-old.

“The jailbird growls at him, ‘WHO’S THIS?’

“Now Manuel thinks: ‘I could say, “Lucky,” my gang placa,’ but nah—so he says, ‘Manuel.’ And the twenty-year-old gets even more lokie.

“ ‘WHERE YOU FROM?’ (a provocative question, wanting to identify his gang).

“Manuel says, ‘Please hold,’ turns to Norma, my assistant, and says, ‘Norma, could you handle line three, please?’ ”

Bugsy could not lean in more. To do so would put him on my side of the desk.

“Now,” I continue, “That’s the setup, and here’s the question. Which of these two vatos was the REAL man? The sixteen-year-old or the guy who was twenty?”

Bugsy leans back now, and he knows he’s getting a new pair of shoes.

“Oh, come on, G,” he half-laughs, “That’s easy.”

“Well, then,” I say, “Who?”

“Well, obviously, the sixteen-year-old.”

“Why him and not the older vato?”

“Well, cuz the sixteen-year-old didn’t play that little-kid stuff—that gangbanging masa,” he says, as dismissive as he could be of such behavior.

“Very good, my dog,” I say to him. “I’ve got good news and bad news for you. The good news: you’re getting brand-new shoes. The bad news: you know the twenty-year-old vato, calling from jail . . . THAT WAS YOU, CABRÓN, WHEN YOU CALLED COLLECT TWO MONTHS AGO!”

Bugsy winces slightly.

“Yeah, I sorta thought that’s where this story was goin’.”

* * *

These are the calls I cannot bear getting: “They’re shooting in Aliso.”

This one comes at midday, and I am sitting in my office, our reception room filled with homies in line to see me.

I excuse myself and race to my car. The details are these: Two gang members have entered enemy turf and are “crossing out” their enemy’s placas (their gang monikers) when a group of enemigos spot them, holler, and begin to run toward them. One of the two invading homies pulls out a gun and shoots wildly, attempting to dissuade the approaching enemies on foot. No one is hurt, but a bullet does travel to our Alternative School (DMA) on Mission Road, punctures a window, and a shard of shattered glass slightly cuts the face of a mother who is in the school’s office. She is taken to the hospital.

I’m not sure why I even go to the projects when I receive one of these calls. I suppose you go because you’re called. I’m never entirely sure what people’s expectation of me might be. You mainly just stand with folks as they catch their breath and wait for their blood pressure to settle. This day, traveling west down First Street with considerable speed, I see Johnny and Bear on the wrong side of the street, in enemy territory. They are shirtless, running and desperate to get to

the right side of the street. I know immediately these must be our marauding, spray-painting gang members. I get confirmation of this when they spot me driving toward them, and I can read their lips, “OH SHIT.”

They stop and bolt down an alley. This incenses me. Suddenly I am both Starsky and Hutch. I’m driving like I’ve placed a flashing red light on the top of my car, careening down the alley, narrowly nicking garbage cans and swerving to miss refuse and car parts. I see the shirtless ones take a left, and I follow. I don’t know why I’m doing this. Quite apart from the infuriating midday shooting is the fact that they run when they see me. This is new and just pisses me off. I barrel out of the alley, and they’re gone. I circle the neighborhood for some time and give up. I go to the scene of the shooting and calm down the aggrieved homies who have had their neighborhood dissed and check in with the school and make sure they are rebounding. I get a report of the woman with the piece of flying glass lodged in her cheek, and I go back to where I think I might find Johnny and Bear. I park and walk and turn a fortuitous corner, and there they are, sitting on the front porch of Bear’s girlfriend’s house. They get to their feet at the sight of me, and I hold out my hand to stop their flight and say quickly, “Nope” as in, “Oh, hell no—you are not going anywhere.”

I summon them off the porch and signal them to join me by the short gate and fence that fronts the property. They are still shirtless, still sweating from their great escape.

“Don’t you ever . . . run from me . . . again.” I begin calmly and stay in this tone—though I’m as enraged as any father snatching his four-year-old out of the street as a car approaches. You don’t realize how grateful you are that your kid is safe—you are just furious at what his wandering out there could have brought you all. I came to always feel this outsize stress—coming from some deep, primordial place within me—wanting to protect and yet feeling a Garpian dread that the “undertoad is strong today.” Pre traumatic stress syndrome, if you will.

Even now, I spend much of the day just bracing myself. It’s infuriating and death-defyingly stressful when, consciously or no, the kids you love cooperate in their own demise.

Johnny and Bear predictably have more remorse about fleeing me than they do about their foray into enemy turf. I have pieced things together enough to know that Johnny was the lone shooter. I turn to him and know exactly how I want this conversation to end. “Oh, by the way, Johnny, I thought maybe you’d want to know—no one was seriously hurt when you shot just now.”

He neither protests nor proclaims his innocence. He just continues to listen with some intensity. “A woman was standing in the school office when one of

your bullets shattered a window. A piece of glass cut her face, and she went to the hospital. She’ll be okay. Just thought you’d like to know.”

I walk away and say nothing more in my leave-taking. Then before I get very far, I come back. “Gosh, Johnny, I almost forgot this part. The woman with the cut face—yeah—that was your mom, son. Your mom. She’ll be okay. Just . . .

thought you’d like to know.”

Johnny blanches at this, and all his blood drains right out of him, leaving him white and speechless. It only feels like Johnny and Bear think this is all a game

—placing themselves in danger, recklessly firing a gun, holding in no regard the lives of so many. The outsider will invariably draw this conclusion. Yet they are comrades in despair, and their inability to care for their own lives consistently plays itself out in the abandonment of all reason and surely all hope.

* * *

We mistakenly place our trust, too often, in the righteousness of our wind, though we rarely get evidence that this ever transforms anything. Inmate and guard alike at Folsom Prison (where I did a stint as chaplain) always said the same thing about the other: “I don’t want them to mistake my kindness for weakness.”

Sooner or later, we all discover that kindness is the only strength there is. I can remember listening to a kid at a probation camp read at Mass from 1

Corinthians 13. If you’ve been to as many weddings as I have, you go numb as you hear, “Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is blah, blah, blah.” Your mind floats away. You start wondering if the Dodgers won last night and remind yourself to move your clothes from the washer to the dryer. But this kid started to read it like it mattered and it, as the homies would say, “woke my ass up proper.” He looked out at everyone and proclaimed with astounding surety:

“Love . . . never . . . fails.”

And he sat down.

And I believed him.

Every day, you choose to believe this all over again and want only “to live as though the truth were true.”

In my early, crazy days doing this work with gangs, I will admit I was totally out of whack. I’d ride my bike, in the middle of the night, in the projects, trying

to put out fires (“Put that Uzi down”; “Now you sure you wanna shoot that guy?”). Trying to “save lives” is much like the guy spinning plates on Ed Sullivan, attempting to keep them from crashing to the floor. I’d look for the wobblers. Who was about to smash into a million pieces?—and then I’d be frantic to keep that homie from self-destructing. It was crazy-making, and I came close to the sun, to the immolation that comes from burning out completely in the delusion of actually “saving” people.

I took a break in 1992, and in the stillness of meditation and the sweetness of surrender I found a place of balance and perspective. I found consolation in a no doubt apocryphal story of Pope John XXIII. Apparently, at night he’d pray:

“I’ve done everything I can today for your church. But it’s Your church, and I’m going to bed.”

Before, I guess I never really went to bed—available 24/7 to respond to any call and at the ready to talk homies off the ledge.

A touchstone story happened not long after I returned from my time off. A homie, Pedro, who works for me now as a case manager, was then a greatly troubled kid filled with a measured rage and resentment he submerged beneath first heavy drinking and then crack cocaine. Pedro, among the gentlest and most kindhearted of homies, disappeared, eventually, into his own netherworld of substance abuse. He was seemingly oblivious that he had left us at all. Daily, I’d see him and offer rehab. He’d gently decline with a sweetness that never grew defensive.

“Oh thanks, G, but I’m okay.”

You never stop asking, and sometimes the “no matter whatness” prevails.

And so it did with Pedro. I drove him to his rehab north of Los Angeles, and he began the long, hard (slow) work of returning to himself.

Thirty days into his stay there, his younger brother, Jovan, enfeebled by similar demons and displaced in the same chemical dependence, did what homies explicitly don’t ever do. He put a gun to his head and an end to his pain.

Homies, more often than not, just decide to put themselves in harm’s way when things turn bleakest. They just take a stroll into their enemy’s domain.

Gangbanging is how they commit suicide. And any shooter is never “going on a mission” (foray into enemy territory) intending to kill—but rather, hoping to die.

Jovan’s homies were unfamiliar, then, with this new language, so direct, bypassing the slow dance with danger that eventually gets you to the same end.

I call Pedro, and he is, of course, devastated. But since he is now thirty days sober, he allows the pain passage to his core and doesn’t permit the hurt to waste time, languishing in some distant way station. He lets all the sadness in, and this

is new. I schedule to pick him up for the funeral and make a point to emphasize that I’ll be driving him back right after the burial.

“ ’Course, G. I wanna come back here.”

I make the trek to the mountaintop and feel inadequate, as I always do, in accompanying such loss, especially as huge as this one felt.

Emily Dickinson writes, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, that sings the song without the words and never stops at all.”

I’ve come to trust the value of simply showing up—and singing the song without the words. And yet, each time I find myself sitting with the pain that folks carry, I’m overwhelmed with my own inability to do much more than stand in awe, dumbstruck by the sheer size of the burden—more than I’ve ever been asked to carry.

Pedro is out front waiting for me, and we greet each other with abrazos and a minimum of words. We hop in the car. Any worry I have about what “to say”

gets punctured by Pedro’s insistence to tell me about a dream he had the night before.

“It’s a trip, G. I had this dream last night. And you were in it.”

And in this dream, Pedro and I are in this large, empty room, just the two of us. There are no lights, no illuminated exit signs, no light creeping in from under the doors. There are no windows. There is no light. He seems to know that I am there with him. A sense, really, though we do not speak. Suddenly, in this dark silence, I retrieve a flashlight from my pocket and push it on. I find the light switch in the room, on the wall, and I shine this narrow beam of light on the switch. I don’t speak. I just hold the beam steady, unwavering. Pedro says that even though no words are exchanged, he knows he is the only one who can turn this light switch on. He thanks me for happening to have a flashlight. He makes his way to the switch, following the beam with, I suppose, some trepidation. He arrives at the switch, takes a deep breath, and flips it on. The room is flooded with light.

He is now sobbing at this point, in the telling of the dream. And with a voice of astonishing discovery, he says, “And the light . . . is better . . . than the darkness.”

As if he did not previously know this to be the case. He’s weeping, unable to continue. Then he says, “I guess . . . my brother . . . just never found the light switch.” Possessing flashlights and occasionally knowing where to aim them has to be enough for us. Fortunately, none of us can save anybody. But we all find ourselves in this dark, windowless room, fumbling for grace and flashlights. You aim the light this time, and I’ll do it the next.

The slow work of God.

And you hope, and you wait, for the light—this astonishing light.

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