All Over but the Shoutin' (34 page)

I got a good country raisin’

and an eighth grade education

Ain’t no need in y’all a-treatin’ me this way

30
New York

I
t is late afternoon in the newsroom of the
New York Times
and I have just turned in the story that will make or break me. It is only my second story, but I have written it with no concessions, no second-guessing of what will or will not get in this newspaper. The story sounds like me. It is gothic, dark, personal. I think it is good. But it doesn’t matter what I think, only what they think, the editors in that meeting, the mystical Page One Meeting, where stories are dissected by great minds. I watch the door like a doomed man watches a gallows being built. I cannot fail here. I cannot fail again. Finally it swings open and the editors file out, and I see Joe Lelyveld, the managing editor and soon to be the executive editor, walking toward me. He is not smiling.

He stops at my desk and leans against it. I do not remember exactly what he said but it was something to the effect of, “I know we said we would try to get you some gentle editing, but …” and my heart froze.

“… but we had to change the comma in your lead.” And now he is smiling, and I know I have been had. I do not mind at all. I only hope he does not notice that my laughter is laced with something not too far from hysteria.

This, I think, is the cold and austere
New York Times
? This is the cold and unapproachable Joe Lelyveld? All I know is, at that exact moment, the debacle of Los Angeles that I had carried around like some clinking leg iron fell away, and I thought I might be OK. I would not, I thought, have to go back to Alabama in shame. I might still have to, someday, but not now. Not now.

I don’t know if he planned it that way, if he even knew how I felt. Maybe he did. People say he is a smart man.

I
t took me just a few weeks to learn that much of what was said about the
Times
was woefully out of date, or just plain wrong. Most of the editors I worked for had a simple mission: Go find the best and most important stories, and put them in the newspaper.

It was the directive that Mike Oreskes, the metro editor, gave me before I even began work. For the next six months, through one of the coldest, nastiest winters on record, I roamed that giant, confusing place, but to say I searched for stories would be a lie. I did not have to search. New York hurled stories at you like Nolan Ryan throws fastballs. All you had to do was catch them, and try not to get your head knocked off.

The newsroom, at the time, was a crowded, noisy, dusty dungeon of a place, where the reporters worked practically shoulder to shoulder. Some of them were nice to me and some of them treated me like I was going to get their newspaper dirty if I touched it with my pedestrian hands. I could feel the old chip on my shoulder pressing down, down, heavier than I could remember it being in a long while. But that was fine, too. Just because they let you in the school door doesn’t mean they’re going to invite you to the dance.

Instead, I found my friends on the photo staff, a collection of delightful, smart, cranky, streetwise and often fearless artists and weirdos who knew this city frontward, backward and sideways, and consented to let me ride along. If not for them, I would have surely floundered, helpless. Instead they dragged me along to good story after good story. I felt like a freeloader, but we did find us some tales to tell.

One sticks fast in my memory. With a long-haired, bearded man of Puerto Rican heritage named Angel Franco, who referred to me almost fondly as “big, dumb white boy,” I set out to report a story that carried me deep into the real New York, another story about living and dying and that fragile, shivering place in between.

At least once a week in the New York papers, there had been stories of chilling murders in the city’s tiny groceries, what most people here called bodegas. In the past year, fifty people had died behind their counters, making it the most dangerous job in New York, more dangerous than fighting fires or fighting crime, even deadlier than driving a livery cab. Mind-boggling holdups ended in gunfights and cold-blooded executions. People killed for a hundred dollars, for twenty, for the joy of hearing their guns go “bang.” Most of the victims were Hispanic, but there were Chinese, Koreans, Haitians and Middle Easterners, too, trying to make a living one pack of M&M’s at a time in Washington Heights, the South Bronx, East Harlem, Bushwick Avenue.

I wanted to hear those stories from the mouths of the people who lived behind those counters day after day. But this time I would see the fear, feel it, as they did. It made for a newspaper story, a New York story, that is as honest as I have ever done.

Harlem, March 1994

“O
ne man has already died behind the counter of the grocery where Omar Rosario works,” I wrote, “murdered in a tiny business where customers pay in pennies and promises. Before he goes to work he slips on his bulletproof vest, slides a black 9-millimeter pistol into his waistband, and gives himself to God. It is early on a Wednesday night and the store’s lights gleam like new money among the dead street lights at the corner of 139th Street and Edgecombe Avenue. The door opens and a young man with a puny mustache walks in, one arm hidden deep inside his baggy, half-open coat. Rosario thinks he has a machine gun or sawed-off shotgun. Rosario takes out his pistol and eases it halfway into the pocket of his pants, his finger on the trigger. He faces the man and lets him see the gun in his hand. He wants to make it clear that if the young man pulls a gun, he will kill him. The young man drifts around the front of the store as the last two customers walk out, but everywhere he goes Rosario is beside him, as if in a dance. They stare into each other’s eyes for five minutes, silent, and the tension is sickening. Finally the young man turns and goes out. Rosario stares out the door, gun in hand. His face is pale.”

I did not even know what was going on at first. The young man squeezed by me at one point in the cramped store and I felt, through his jacket, through mine, the hard shape that could only be a gun.

Only when Franco eased up beside me and said, softly, “We have stepped in it,” did I really understand what was happening. There was no place to hide in a store like that, no place to run. They were between us and the door. We just had to stand and watch and hope that when it started, the shooting, it would be quick and clean. But I had little faith in that. When two country boys pull their pistols and start popping’, chances are that they will hit what they are shooting at. They practice, blowing beer cans off fence posts, or stalking deer through the pines. But city boys can’t shoot for shit. It is why they kill so many children and innocent bystanders. They keep their guns in their waistbands because they like the way it feels against their skin, but they are amateurs at killing.

As they danced, I slipped the notebook into my back pocket. I figured it was unwise for a man about to hold up a store to see me recording it for the readers of the
New York Times.
Then I heard the soft click of Franco’s camera. He was literally shooting from the hip, the camera hanging from its strap, down around his waist. He was trying to be as quiet, as discreet, as possible, but to me every frame he snapped off seemed like a tap shoe on a tile floor. I was worried about getting shot. He was doing his job. Franco is not an amateur. He hits what he aims at.

When it was over, Rosario walked out to stand in the cold rain with an employee, Pablo Mendoza. They scan the street, waiting for the man to come back. A half-hour later they are still there, watching. I am embarrassed. I feel like I’m in the way of something important. I guess survival is pretty important.

I ask him why he faced down the man, why he didn’t just give him what he wanted. But Rosario, whose hands shake as he wipes his face, tells me he cannot trust the robbers anymore to take the money and go. “I do not resolve it, if I do not act first, he will take my money, make me lie down on the floor, and shoot me in back of the head,” he says. There is no posturing here, only a young man who is tired of being scared every time the door opens.

“Not one bullet will I use to protect a piece of candy,” Rosario says. “But I will kill ten before I let one pull a gun on me.” The previous owner of the store, Henry A. Medina, was killed on November 16, 1992, by two men in ski masks. Medina was opening the register to give them the cash when one man shot him in the heart. His killers were never found.

“When I leave here, I am like a bird in the air, flying,” Rosario said. “I am free.”

“Rosario thinks he can sense the spirit of the previous owner wafting around the place late at night,” I wrote. “He believes in God. He likes to think that maybe it is an angel. But there are no angels on Edgecombe after dark.” I had no right to say that.

I
did not even know what a bodega was when I came to New York City. It means, basically, “store,” but I learned it can also mean freedom, respect, dignity.

For a week or so, Franco and I drove from tiny store to tiny store, interviewing people who had lost loved ones to bullets, talking to people who had narrowly escaped death. It would be wrong to say that we found that life is cheap there, behind the rows of breath mints. It is not cheap at all. People like to glamorize the high rollers on Wall Street, when they write of New York. They should come down here, to Leon Bodega at 289 Bushwick, to see what risk is all about.

“Domingo Leon, the 40-year-old owner, has a bullet hole in the arm of his leather jacket,” I wrote. “The dry cleaner took the bloodstain out, mostly. Domingo Angeles wears the pants he wore when he was shot in the hip. He still has the bullet, lodged deep in his lower back. The difference between rich people and poor people is that poor people still wear the clothes they were wearing when they were shot. They save them from the emergency room floor. Along with a friend, Manuel Celado, who was shot twice in the chest, the men are survivors of a violent bodega robbery last year. But no one died. ‘Milagroso,’ Leon said. The men are all members of an extended family that draws much of its income from the bodega. It does not make anyone rich, but it is exactly what Leon was searching for when he left Moca, a village in the Dominican Republic, more than 20 years ago. He saved his money and opened in 1982. No one holds the keys to his livelihood, so no one can make him bow his head. People who have never been poor, who have never had to live on their knees, do not understand what it means to him.

“On Feb. 23, about 10
P.M.
, four young men burst into the bodega and one put a gun to Celado’s head. Leon grabbed at it, in reflex, and the robbers started shooting. Angeles grabbed the gun of one young man and the hammer chewed a groove in his hand as the man jerked over and over on the trigger. Finally one of the bullets hit him in the hip. He lay on the floor, pretending to be dead, quietly praying the men would not shoot again. One robber dragged the bleeding Celado into a storeroom and started beating him in the head with a gun, trying to make him tell where the store kept its money. When Leon ran into the room the man shot him in the arm and ran. A few hours after being shot, while Celado and Angeles lay in the hospital, Leon was back at the cash register of his bodega. Blood still seeped from the bandage. ‘I have nine children,’ he said. Angeles was back at work a few days later. He is still in pain, the bullet grating against muscle tissue. He thinks of finding safer work, but refuses to leave his friends in danger.”

Celado almost died from his bullet wounds. Now he just sits thin and frail in a dark car outside the bodega, serving as the lookout. It is his job to spot suspicious people, and warn his friends. He will shout “holope!” and run inside and lock the door.

We left him there, sitting in the dark car, left them with their dangerous lives, to have some oxtails and rice and drive on to the next tragedy. New York is a supermarket for tragedy. Its streets are just aisles, and the selection is first-rate.

We make one more stop, on Fulton Avenue in the South Bronx. Behind the cash register, an inch-thick, bulletproof plastic shield surrounds Antonio Mueses like a security blanket. He still feels cold inside it. Mueses and his brother, Rafael, used to run the bodega together. Afraid of the killings and shootings they read about in the newspaper, they hired a man last summer to put up a shield. The man took the money but did not build it, and on July 25 his brother was shot dead. His brother had two children. “If the man had built the shield,” Mueses says, and shrugs. The shield looks like a good one, though, nice and thick.

T
he story on the bodegas ran at the bottom of the front page. People told me it was a “real New York story,” and I was proud of it. A friend told me that I “lent dignity” to the people in it, but that was wrong. All I did was write what was there. I would have sent a copy of it to my momma, but I decided to wait, for a happy one.

It would be nice to believe that people back in Alabama were following my stories in the
New York Times
, but that would be a lie. You have to drive an hour to even find one, and then it costs a dollar. Who has a dollar for a paper?

But now and then other papers would run my stories, off the
New York Times
wire, and someone would cut them out and send them to my momma. She started a new scrapbook.