On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (27 page)

SEVEN

Clean People

In the neighborhood of 6th Street, many young men become entangled with the police,
the courts, the parole board, and the prisons. Their girlfriends and female relatives
sustain raids and interrogations, and spend some amount of time managing these men’s
legal affairs. Still others in the area come to orient themselves around the police
and the prisons because they are providing underground support to the legally compromised
people around them.

And yet, the neighborhood also contains many who keep relatively free of the courts
and the prisons, who go to school or work every day as the police chase their neighbors
through the streets. Not only women manage to stay “clean.” While 60 percent of Black
men who didn’t graduate from high school have been to prison by their midthirties,
¹
this means that 40 percent have not. Though many of the men who haven’t been incarcerated
are nevertheless caught up in court cases and probation sentences, the neighborhood
also includes a good number of young people who successfully keep their distance from
criminal justice institutions that occupy the time and concern of so many others.

This chapter describes four groups of people in the 6th Street community who are carving
out a clean life for themselves as their friends and family go in and out of prison
and the police helicopters circle overhead. Through these portraits, I describe the
variety of relations that clean people come to have with those involved with the police
and the courts, how they make sense of their situation, and how they view those on
the other side.

INDOOR GUYS

In March of 2004, Mike got sentenced to one to three years in state prison. As I traveled
to visit Mike on the weekends, I kept in touch with some of his friends and relatives
who wanted to know how he was doing. But having not yet formed independent relationships
with his friends and neighbors, I had no reason to hang out on 6th Street in Mike’s
absence. As I tried to figure out how to return, I met another group of guys who lived
in an adjacent neighborhood, roughly fifteen blocks away.

Lamar lived in a three-bedroom row home with an older man who had some cognitive disabilities.
Lamar’s mother had arranged for her son to live with this man as part of a small caretaking
business that she operated from her house a few blocks away. The disability checks
the man received from the government were enough to cover the house’s mortgage and
his food, so in exchange for living there rent free, Lamar made sure the man ate regular
meals and didn’t burn the house down with his smoldering cigarettes. In her own home,
which she shared with Lamar’s father, his mother housed three other men with similar
disabilities.

Most evenings after work, Lamar’s friends came over to his house to drink beer and
play video games. His job as a security guard on the University of Pennsylvania campus
meant regular hours and working behind a desk, leaving him free after 5:00 p.m. and
full of energy for the evening’s video game matches. His house was an ideal bachelor
pad—warm and roomy but not too well kept, and with no spouse or mother or children
hanging about. The older man he watched spent most of the time in his room, listening
to records.

Lamar’s friends were roughly the same age as Mike and Chuck, and they, too, hung out
together as a unit—but they had no dealings with the police or the courts and, from
what I could tell, very few connections with others who did. They had legal jobs:
security guard, maintenance man, and convenience store clerk; jobs with uniforms and
IDs and the formal paychecks large companies print out. When they lost those jobs,
they relied on the generosity of friends and family rather than seeking income in
the streets.

These young men drank beer instead of smoking pot; many of them had monthly or random
piss tests at their jobs. And rather than shoot the shit on the back steps or in the
alleyway, they spent their leisure time playing video games indoors. They didn’t need
thermal wear or heavy boots in the winter, because their houses were well heated and
they spent very little time outside.

As Lamar and his friends parked their cars and made their way toward the house every
evening, they passed another group of guys in hoodies and black jeans standing on
the corner. They didn’t talk to these men, exchanging only a slight nod as they passed.
I imagined that these young men were much like the ones I had gotten to know around
6th Street: caught up in the police and the courts, and likely selling drugs hand
to hand.

Lamar and his friends played just one video game—Halo. The game’s premise was modern-day
urban warfare: the players hid from the opposing team and tried to kill them with
machine guns. Lamar had two small TVs going in the living room; these he connected
to four controllers each, so that eight of his friends could play against each other
simultaneously. Like many other single men in their twenties and early thirties, the
guys amused themselves with this game until the wee hours three or four nights a week.

Much of the evening’s conversation concerned the game:

“Nigga, I
told
you he was coming around the corner! That’s
it
, you
done
!”

“I ain’t fucking with you no more, man. I can’t keep taking these hits . . .”

Lamar’s two closest friends were Darnell and Curtis. Darnell was a rotund man in his
midtwenties who worked as a manager at a health research firm just outside the city.
He told me he made about forty thousand dollars a year, which was less than half the
salaries of his two sisters, both of whom had advanced degrees and lived in the ’burbs.
Darnell’s girlfriend had a young son and, as she often reminded Darnell, had put herself
through college while raising him. She was now finishing a degree in legal services.
Her baby’s father, who lived in Virginia, earned almost six figures, a point she frequently
raised with Darnell during their heated arguments over his lack of ambition. In contrast
to
the scene with his sisters and girlfriend, at Lamar’s house Darnell was the richest
and the best educated—in fact, other members of the group periodically accused him
of thinking he was better than they were and sticking his nose in the air.

Lamar’s other close friend, Curtis, was in his late twenties and did maintenance for
a chemical plant in South Philly. He told me he had been a drug dealer in his youth,
but had abruptly quit when his daughter was born. He spoke little; Darnell referred
to him as a “deep well.”

The only woman who hung out with this group was a heavy and very pretty woman named
Keisha who worked as a phlebotomist at a local hospital. After passing the six-month
drug screen at her job, she resumed her pot smoking, though Lamar made her take it
out on the back porch.

“I love blood!” she’d say after a few puffs. “It does something for me, what can I
say.”

From what I could gather, Keisha and Lamar had never been intimate, but had been friends
since childhood. After Lamar’s best friend died in a car crash during their senior
year of high school, Keisha had taken his place as Lamar’s closest confidant. She
didn’t play video games but hung out many evenings with the guys.

In addition to these close friends, Lamar’s game nights included two of his cousins.
One did heating and air-conditioning repair at the University of Pennsylvania and
lived with his girlfriend and their new baby in a middle-class Black suburb just inside
the city. He was also sleeping with Keisha, this relationship having started long
before he met the mother of his child. Keisha had a live-in boyfriend, and saw Lamar’s
cousin on the weekends at Lamar’s house. His cousin explained to me that Keisha could
never be his official, full-time girlfriend, because she hung out with men too much,
plus she was a cheater. Keisha was also about one hundred pounds heavier than his
baby-mom, and he enjoyed her fuller figure in private more than in public. For her
part, Keisha seemed happy with her live-in boyfriend, so long as she could still see
Lamar’s cousin on the weekends.

Lamar’s other cousin was a thin young man of eighteen. This cousin had grown up mainly
in a group home, and was unemployed for most of the time I knew him. Near the end
of my time in the neighborhood,
though, he landed a job at a downtown Wawa, a popular convenience and hoagie chain.
Lamar and I often visited him there, and sometimes picked him up from his shift, since
he had no car.

Bit by bit I came to learn about Lamar’s family. His mother, the woman who owned the
house in which he lived and who ran the care-taking business, was actually his adopted
mother—his birth mother had given him up when he was a small boy, owing to her crack
addiction and poverty. Lamar’s father was a continuing crack user, and was supported
entirely by Lamar’s adopted mother, who cared for him as well as three other men with
mental disabilities. He’d come to Lamar’s house about once a week to drink beer with
the guys. He bobbed and weaved and smiled a lot, and Lamar tolerated him with kindness
and patience. At one point when discussing with me his cousin’s upbringing in the
group home, Lamar said, “If not for my mom, that would have been me. That woman’s
a saint.”

One thing that distinguished Lamar and his friends from other groups of guys who played
video games together—for example, the young men I’d encountered in the dorms of Penn’s
campus—was that they lived in a neighborhood in which lots of other young men were
getting arrested and locked up. Their indoor life, with its legal pastimes and thrills,
meant that they weren’t out in the streets. Indeed, when Lamar or his friends would
run into someone they hadn’t seen in a while, their answer to the question “How you
doing?” was often “Staying out of trouble.” Perhaps this signified that although they
might be unemployed or not advancing in their careers, they weren’t out there getting
locked up, and this in itself was an accomplishment.

This isn’t to say that Lamar and his friends had no dealings with the justice system
whatsoever. A few months after we met, Lamar completed the payments on some speeding
tickets and recovered his driver’s license. Another one of his friends had his license
suspended for an unpaid moving violation and was working on getting it back. But this
seemed to be the extent of their legal entanglements and civic diminishment. After
eight months spending most of my evenings at Lamar’s house, I hadn’t taken a single
field note that contained the word
police
. No officers busted down Lamar’s door. I never observed him receiving a phone call
that a friend or relative had gotten booked. Once in a while
we heard sirens outside, but no one looked up from the video game to investigate,
even when they seemed close by. Whomever the cops were looking for, it didn’t concern
them.

One outdoor activity in the warmer months that did involve a few brushes with the
authorities was drag racing. Lamar and his friends liked to refurbish old European
cars, especially Volkswagens, and soup them up to be racing cars. They spent hours
adding accessories or changing the suspension, and then we’d sometimes go out to the
races at the empty strips of road out past the airport. Some of the guys who came
to the races were Cambodian and Laotian, others Latino. Once we also drove to a convention
in Maryland. Drag racing could have gotten them arrested or injured, but mostly Lamar’s
friends came to the races as spectators, to admire the other cars and watch the races.
We always managed to leave before the cops showed up, and compared to the professional
and leisure activities of the 6th Street Boys, the drag racing seemed quite benign.

Nine months into my time with Lamar and his friends, I observed an incident that revealed
a great deal about where they stood in relation to the guys I had come to know over
on 6th Street. It was the only time I saw any one of them come face to face with a
man on the run.

Lamar called me one afternoon and said, “I got some news.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yup. I just found out my mom died.”

“What? Oh my god. I’m so sorry.”

Turns out it wasn’t his
mom
mom who had passed but his birth mother, a woman he barely knew.

Lamar went back and forth about whether to attend the funeral—he’d been recently fired
from his security guard job for lateness and didn’t have money for a suit, or even
black pants. Could he just wear jeans? His friends and I finally persuaded him to
go, and to show our support, his cousin, Keisha, and I came along. We all wore jeans.

The funeral was held in a very small church, the coffin made of simple wood. Lamar
hardly recognized anyone there, as most of the attendees were from his birth mother’s
extended family, which he had never gotten to know. Later that day, he admitted to
me that his adopted mother had paid for the bulk of the funeral and burial costs,
though she hadn’t attended the service because she felt she might be unwelcome.

Partway through the sermon, a man a bit younger than Lamar came to sit next to us
in the pew. He wore coveralls and smelled of marijuana and clove cigarettes. His hair
clumped haphazardly around his face, and he peered around at the other funeral attendees
with visible concern. Lamar smiled an embarrassed and knowing smile, and told us that
this man was his brother. We introduced ourselves to him and shook his hand.

“How you been doing?” this man asked Lamar.

“You know, staying out of trouble.”

“Yeah? That’s good, that’s good.”

“Yup. How you been doing?”

“Hanging in there. I can’t stay too long—I got, like, three warrants on me.”

“Oh yeah?” Lamar said, with a small chuckle.

“Yeah. I just wanted to, you know . . .”

“Okay. Well, it was good to see you.”

“Yup . . .”

When the man left, I asked Lamar how long it had been since he’d seen his brother.