On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (30 page)

Josh worked long hours, so we didn’t see him much. Then the cops stopped him while
he was driving with two friends from 6th Street. The officers searched the car and
found a small amount of cocaine behind the front seat, and all three men were arrested.
Josh made bail quickly enough to keep his job with the doctor, and the case went to
trial a year later. The doctor let him take off work to attend the almost monthly
court dates, and at the sentencing persuaded the judge to give Josh three years of
parole instead of time in prison. Later that year, this doctor also got the judge
to expunge Josh’s record—the only time I had heard of a judge doing this. Later, Josh
described these events as a turning point: if it were not for this man, he would have
done time and come home a convict.

In the summer of 2007, Chuck was shot and killed outside the Chinese takeout store,
where he had gone to buy dinner for himself and his younger brother Tim.
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Tim had been standing just a few feet away and watched his brother fall. The 4th
Street Boy who shot Chuck had apparently become fearful that Chuck, though unarmed,
was going to shoot him first. Actually, for the past two months Chuck had been working
hard to squash the ongoing conflict between the 4th Street Boys and the 6th Street
Boys that had begun a few years earlier, when Tino killed Jay-Jay at a dice game.

It could be that Chuck’s peacekeeping efforts in this and other conflicts made his
death more of a blow for his family and friends and for the neighborhood as a whole
than the deaths of other young men whose funerals we attended every few months. For
Tim, Chuck’s death meant the loss of the only father figure he had known.

There was little time for Tim to grieve. With many of the core members of the 6th
Street Boys locked up that summer, the expectation to avenge Chuck’s death landed
squarely on his fifteen-year-old shoulders. In anticipation of his retaliation, Tim
received near daily calls and texts from the 4th Street Boys that they were going
to kill him, and by the end of July he had been in three shootouts. It was a chilling
way to come of age, and one that those of us watching events unfold seemed unable
to stop.

At the time of Chuck’s death, Josh had already moved out of his mother’s house on
6th Street and was living with a roommate in the suburbs. He had landed a job doing
administrative work for the medical
research branch of a pharmaceutical company, and was earning a sixty-thousand-dollar
salary. He began getting calls at work from Tim, who said that 4th Street was shooting
at him and he needed a place to stay. A couple of times, Josh took a long lunch break
to pick Tim up on 6th Street and take him to his apartment for safekeeping. Meanwhile,
some of Josh’s coworkers found out about his expunged record for cocaine possession.
To make matters worse, they overheard several of his conversations with Tim about
flying bullets. Josh soon lost his job and went on unemployment for a number of months,
and then for a bit longer when President Obama extended it. Didn’t help, he said later,
that he was the only Black man working on the floor.

Josh could no longer afford his apartment outside the city and moved back in with
his mother on 6th Street. In the first few months, he’d frequently talk about the
wrong moves he’d made, or how things might have gone differently. He seemed to feel
that he was largely responsible for losing the job and had been insufficiently appreciative
when he had it.

A few weeks after Josh moved back to the neighborhood, we were walking to the corner
store to buy beer when a young man of maybe fourteen approached him in the checkout
line.

“Heard you was back on the block. Welcome home.”

“Yeah, I just moved back not too long ago.”

“That’s what’s up. You back to take what’s yours, Old Head?”

Josh’s face crumbled, clearly humiliated at the suggestion that he might go back to
selling crack, as he’d done as a teenager.

“No, I’m not back back. I’m just job-hunting right now . . .”

“Okay, okay,” the young man replied, unconvinced.

When we got back to the block, Josh laughed it off, but in that moment all the confidence
and pride of being the neighborhood success seemed to flood out of him. Years later,
he would bring up this incident as one of the most humiliating of his adult life.

During two years of unemployment, Josh occupied himself by looking after the guys
on 6th Street as well as their struggling family members. He visited his friends in
jail and prison; he wrote them letters and accepted phone calls; he sent them some
of his unemployment money for their commissary.

After Chuck’s death, Josh tried to keep Tim from getting killed,
which was more than a fulltime job. He also tried to persuade Miss Linda to allow
Tim to go to Virginia and stay with relatives, at least until the drama died down.
But she refused to let Tim leave, and accused Josh of trying to take her last remaining
son away from her.

Finally, Josh got Miss Linda to take Tim down South, away from the dangers of 6th
Street. On the morning of their departure, we sent them off on a Greyhound bus with
a cooler filled with sandwiches, chips, and fruit. But Miss Linda and Tim ran out
of money two weeks later, and came back home. Apparently Miss Linda could find no
relative willing to keep Tim, including his father, who had promised to do so before
they made the trip.

“He a fuckin’ nut,” Tim said, hiding his hurt.

Josh and I started traveling back and forth together to visit Reggie and other incarcerated
friends, pooling gas money and sharing the driving. Together, we tried to keep Tim
safe from the guys who killed his brother. We hadn’t been close in the years before
this, but with Chuck dead, and many more of our mutual friends in jail, we were united
by our bond to the men no longer with us. We also commiserated and joked about the
difficult relatives these friends had left behind, with Chuck’s heavily crack-addicted
mother, Miss Linda, being first on that list.

As we drove together to jails and prisons, I soon realized that Josh faced a series
of dilemmas in dealing with men on the block as well as with their relatives. These
weren’t the same dilemmas that young men dipping and dodging the authorities faced—they
were particular to a clean person with dirty friends, not unlike some of the dilemmas
I myself had experienced in the neighborhood over the years.

First was the dilemma of balancing his job and his middle-class life with the chaos
and emergencies of his poor and legally entangled friends and neighbors. This he’d
failed at when his efforts to help Tim after Chuck’s death cost him his corporate
job.

But Josh’s clean identity also meant that people asked him to do things that they
couldn’t ask of dirty people. After Chuck died, his paternal grandmother gave a speech
at his midnight vigil, urging his friends and neighbors not to retaliate. She seemed
to mean it at the time, but in private the next day she asked Josh to buy the guns
that the remaining 6th Street Boys would need to support the coming war
with the guys who had shot her grandson. As the only member of the 6th Street Boys
with no felony convictions, pending criminal charges, or parole supervision, it fell
on him, she said, to gear up. Josh was torn. Should he buy these guns? Guns that would
avenge his best friend? These guns wouldn’t be just for vengeance, either. By this
point the friends of the man who had shot Chuck were driving by 6th Street, shooting
at innocent bystanders and leaving neighborhood residents terrified to come outside.
The 6th Street Boys needed something to fire back with. In the end, however, Josh
didn’t buy the guns—or if he did, I never found out about it.

Another time, a guy on the block came to Josh and asked to borrow three hundred dollars
because the cops had taken the money he needed to pay back his “connect” (supplier)
when they stopped and searched him. He said that the man he’d gotten the crack from
would probably kill him if he couldn’t pay him back. Should Josh give this man the
money and help him avoid a beating or even death? But then he’d have access to more
crack on commission, which could get him locked up, or shot later on. In this case
Josh didn’t loan the man the money, but he did let him hide in his apartment for a
week.

Bail was another tough decision Josh faced. These payments require the payer to show
ID at the bail counter, so the person who takes the money to the basement of the Criminal
Justice Center in downtown Philadelphia needs to have a real ID, and one that isn’t
going to return holds or warrants when it’s run through the system. Not surprisingly,
then, when a young man on 6th Street got arrested, his family often would gather the
money and ask Josh to go to the office and pay it. Should Josh help bail out his neighbors
and their family members? What if they were shot, or rearrested for an even worse
crime, while home? On the other hand, he also expressed his concern that if he didn’t
help the family get the young man out, whatever happened to the young man in jail
would be his doing, like the time a neighbor was stabbed in the stomach in the jail
cafeteria the week after Josh refused to help his family make bail and get him home.

In July of 2011, Josh’s bad luck broke. After two full years of unemployment at the
height of the recession, he landed a job with another medical company. Within six
months he was promoted to assistant director. He again became too busy to look after
the 6th Street Boys or
spend his days arguing with their difficult and addicted relatives. He got full custody
of his son, who came to live with him in his mother’s house.

.   .   .

Josh’s ties to dirty people clearly played a role in his losing a well-paying management
job in the suburbs. Being on intimate terms with legally compromised young men also
presented him with a series of ethical dilemmas that those with their own legal entanglements
didn’t face, and which at times caused him considerable distress. On the other hand,
Josh’s devotion to the guys he had grown up with made the years of his unemployment
more meaningful and fulfilling than they otherwise might have been. And this community
welcomed him back whenever, in the subsequent years, he was spit out of the formal
labor market.

THE FANTASY (AND REALITY) OF BEING CLEAN

Those walking around with a warrant or a pending court case often blame life’s disappointments
on their legal entanglements. That is, dirty people often imagine that if they could
just get past these difficulties, many of their other problems would go away: life
would be easier, or better, or not so disappointing. Just as people in prison plan
the good times they will have when they get out, or the straight line they will walk
upon release, so those on the outside often talk about all the great things they will
do once their warrant is lifted, their case dismissed, or their probation term ended.
As a corollary, they sometimes assume that clean people have every opportunity for
success open to them. In Mike’s words, clean people attend more weddings than funerals.
If clean people aren’t leading the good life, it’s no one’s fault but their own.

These beliefs aren’t entirely untrue: research has shown that those who have gone
to prison do suffer from the experience, socially, civically, and economically, as
do their families. And because those who avoid incarceration tend to be better educated,
better employed, and better paid, the perception that clean people are better off
is also accurate. But the rosy image that dirty people hold of clean people’s lives
is not always matched by their lived experience.

For Miss Deena’s family, life was filled with disappointments. But they were the older,
more hidden injuries of class, race, and gender, not the more visible and readily
blamable ones that accompany a compromised legal status. A few of these disappointments
are worth mentioning here, as they have stayed with me despite the more traumatic
events I later encountered on 6th Street with the kinds of people Miss Deena and her
family were careful to avoid.

The first misfortune I witnessed at Miss Deena’s concerned her grandson Ray. When
we met, he was in his senior year of high school, and studying hard in the hope of
going to college. His best friend, Cory, lived a few blocks away and spent a lot of
time at Ray’s house, though he was quite shy around Ray’s family. Ray’s mom once mentioned
that she was happy to feed Cory, because his family had a lot of kids and really didn’t
have the money for a growing boy.

Like many teenagers, Ray and Cory were looking forward to the events and occasions
that mark the coming of age: getting a driver’s license, moving out of the house,
going to college, and, of course, attending the prom. What set Ray apart from Cory,
and from many of the teenagers I had come to know, was that at seventeen he seemed
convinced of his own bright future. Perhaps his mother truly had succeeded in insulating
him from the violence and poverty of neighborhood life, or in carving out a path for
him that would lead out of it. Ray looked forward to graduation and to college with
confidence, as if both were well within his reach.

Months before prom season, Ray began talking about the dance—who he’d take and what
he’d wear. He wanted matching outfits for him and his date, which he planned to design
himself and get made by a local tailor. When I’d come over for SAT prep tutoring,
he would show me his sketches of the different outfits, and I’d weigh in on the length
and fabric. The one he finally settled on looked a bit like a Batman costume to me,
but he seemed very enthusiastic about it.

Ray was eyeing two girls to be his date: Charlene, his on-again, off-again girlfriend,
and Desiree, the girl who cut and braided his hair. He had a big crush on Desiree,
and was hoping to get up the courage to ask her out in the coming months.

Every detail of the event was of great importance. One afternoon, we had a lengthy
conversation about corsages, in which Ray lamented that
girls change their hair so often nowadays that it would be very hard to plan the correct
corsage in advance. His mother overheard our conversation and joked that Ray inherited
a love of nice clothes and fancy occasions from her. She used to live for this kind
of thing.