Always Running (2 page)

Ramiro is one of the statistics, although he’s not a number to me—he’s my son. I have discussed extensively in writing, in the media, and in front of countless audiences
my
particular contribution to Ramiro’s breakdown and eventual imprisonment. Essentially, I neglected Ramiro and my daughter, Andrea, after their mom and I broke up. Years later, when they came to live with me in Chicago, they were resentful pissed-off teenagers. As one can imagine, I had a hard time trying to be the father figure they desperately needed. Even still, there are those who have made Ramiro’s ordeal a focal point to attack me and my book.

How can I claim my book has changed lives when my own son is incarcerated? Doesn’t this prove these kids aren’t worthy of help?

My answer would be an emphatic no. As Ramiro’s father, I had no choice but to step up to the plate, to become the father I should’ve been when they were younger. But I was also in the process of healing. After many failed tries, I finally took part in a recovery program and became sober after seven years of drug use and twenty years of drinking, a sobriety I have maintained for a dozen years since mid-1993.

Now I had no excuses. I could focus on my son’s ordeals. I could be a better husband, friend, father and leader.
Always Running
contributed immensely to my personal healing. Writing about my violent gang life, the drug addictions, the rages and fears, proved to be risky and extremely difficult, but deeply cathartic.

Eventually, I reconciled with Ramiro, now 30, even while he was imprisoned in various Illinois Department of Corrections facilities. I couldn’t bail him out of the trouble he was in, but I wouldn’t abandon him either. I’ve promised to stand by him and provide whatever assistance he needs to become strong and wise from this prison experience. He promised he would do well so he could get out in 14 years with good time—he wants to be a father to his three children and an active participant in the communities of imagination and hope we’ve been working toward. At great risk, he left the gang life. He’s also been a teacher’s aide, helping other prisoners.

Recently, Ramiro wrote: “When
Always Running
was first written, it opened my eyes to some of the things you have experienced, and some of the changes you have made in your life … [T]hings would have been a lot worse for me if you did not try to make an effort to help me escape from some of the craziness. … I am grateful for you always being there for me. Even when we did not get along and our relationship was estranged, you still stayed a presence in my life. We accomplished a lot together, and one of those accomplishments was YSS … it helped us to stay connected. [Ironically] my coming to prison is what helped us to become closer. We finally have a true father and son relationship. That should be a new message for fathers from your book: Don’t wait until your son goes to prison to finally get to know him.”

I’ve learned a lot from Ramiro—it wasn’t always me who did the teaching.

I’ve come a long way since
Always Running
first saw the light of day. But this journey would not have been possible without the immense patience, love and support of my wonderful family: my wife Trini; our two sons, Rubén, 17, and Luis, 11; my 28-year-old daughter, Andrea; and my grandchildren—Ricardo, Anastasia, Amanda Mae and Catalina.

Also I have to recognize my mother, Maria Estela: Despite years of not talking to each other, and a battle with cancer that she’s overcome, we’re now very close (my father, Alfonso, died in 1992 before
Always Running
came out). And my brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, and countless uncles, aunts and cousins (a few of them had problems when my book was first published but, in time, became my biggest fans).

I also have to thank Alexander Taylor, Judith Doyle and the board and staff at Curbstone Press of Willimantic, Connecticut, who first published
Always Running
and continue to support my work—as well as the publishers and editors of Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster, who have kept the paperback version of
Always Running
in print (more than 20 printings as of this writing).

And I thank all the teachers, librarians, parents, students, law enforcement officers, judges, booksellers, writers, rehab counselors and community activists who have ensured my books remain on the shelves, in the hands of young people, and have also helped in fighting the censorship attempts, allowing new generations to enjoy and learn from this story.

I was not a good father or a good son, but I learned. I was not a good poet, but I never stopped writing. I couldn’t put two words together when I spoke, but now no one can shut me up. I had a hard time dealing with my addictions, my rages, but somehow, some way, I overcame them.

The fact is I failed at everything I tried to do, but I kept working at it, failing some more, not giving up, so that eventually, at age 51, I’ve begun to center my life, get control over my destructive impulses, and become someone my wife, my kids, my grandchildren, and my community can learn from and respect.

If
Always Running
didn’t help anybody, at least it brought miracles and magic into my life. It saved me. And this is good. Let me tell you. This is really good. Where I can appreciate the stillness of the morning instead of endure the screams in my head, where I don’t have to lose myself to the slow suicide of drugs and alcohol, as I’d done for 27 years, where I can be thankful and humbled before the world, before our immense tasks as revolutionary thinkers and doers, not just for the present, but for the Long Run, seven generations hence.

This is good, let me tell you. This is really good.

—Luis J. Rodríguez, Spring 2005

T
HERE IS NO ABSOLUTE
peril except for him who abandons himself; there is no complete death except for him who acquires a taste for dying.

—Jacques Rivière

“We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.”

—Antonin Artaud

L
ATE WINTER CHICAGO, EARLY
1991: The once-white snow which fell in December had turned into a dark scum, mixed with ice-melting salt, car oil and decay. Icicles hung from rooftops and windowsills like the whiskers of old men.

For months, the bone-chilling “hawk” swooped down and forced everyone in the family to squeeze into a one-and-a-half bedroom apartment in a gray-stone, three-flat building in the Humboldt Park neighborhood.

Inside tensions built up like fever as we crammed around the TV set or kitchen table, the crowding made more intolerable because of heaps of paper, opened file drawers and shelves packed with books that garnered every section of empty space (a sort of writer’s torture chamber). The family included my third wife Trini; our child, Rubén Joaquín, born in 1988; and my 15-year-old son Ramiro (a 13-year-old daughter, Andrea, lived with her mother in East Los Angeles).

We hardly ventured outside. Few things were worth heaving on the layers of clothing and the coats, boots and gloves required to step out the door.

Ramiro had been placed on punishment, but not for an act of disobedience or the usual outburst of teenage anxiety. Ramiro had been on a rapidly declining roller coaster ride into the world of street-gang America, not unexpected for this neighborhood, once designated as one of the 10 poorest in the country and also known as one of the most gang-infested.

Humboldt Park is a predominantly Puerto Rican community with growing numbers of Mexican immigrants and uprooted blacks and sprinklings of Ukrainians and Poles from previous generations. But along with the greater West Town area it was considered a “changing neighborhood,” dotted here and there with rehabs, signs of gentrification and for many of us, imminent displacement.

Weeks before, Ramiro had received a 10 day suspension from Roberto Clemente High School, a beleaguered school with a good number of caring personnel, but one which was an epicenter of gang activity. The suspension came after a school fight which involved a war between “Insanes” and “Maniacs,” two factions of the “Folks” (“Folks” are those gangs allied with the Spanish Cobras and Gangster Disciples; the “People” are gangs tied to the Latin Kings and Vice Lords, symbolic of the complicated structures most inner-city gangs had come to establish). There was also an “S.O.S.”—a “smash-on-sight”—contract issued on Ramiro. As a result I took him out of Clemente and enrolled him in another school. He lasted less than two weeks before school officials there kicked him out. By then I also had to pick him up from local jails following other fighting incidents—and once from a hospital where I watched a doctor put 11 stitches above his eye.

Following me, Ramiro was a second-generation gang member. My involvement was in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Los Angeles, the so-called gang capital of the country. My teen years were ones of drugs, shootings and beatings, and arrests. I was around when South Central Los Angeles gave birth to the Crips and Bloods. By the time I turned 18 years old, 25 of my friends had been killed by rival gangs, police, drugs, car crashes and suicides.

If I had barely survived all this—to emerge eventually as a journalist, publisher, critic, and poet—it appeared unlikely my own son would make it. I had to begin the long, intense struggle to save his life from the gathering storm of street violence sweeping the country—some 20 years after I sneaked out of my ’hood in the dark of night, hid out in an L.A. housing project, and removed myself from the death-fires of
La Vida Loca.

La Vida Loca
or The Crazy Life is what we called the barrio gang experience. This lifestyle originated with the Mexican
Pachuco
gangs of the 1930s and 1940s, and was later recreated with the
Cholos.
It became the main model and influence for outlaw bikers of the 1950s and 1960s, the L.A. punk/rock scene in the 1970s and 1980s, and the Crips and Bloods of the 1980s and early 1990s. As Leon Bing commented in her 1991 book
Do or Die
(HarperCollins): “It was the
cholo
homeboy who first walked the walk and talked the talk. It was the Mexican American
pachuco
who initiated the emblematic tattoos, the signing with hands, the writing of legends on walls.”

One evening that winter, after Ramiro had come in late following weeks of trouble at school, I gave him an ultimatum. Yelling burst back and forth between the walls of our Humboldt Park flat. Two-year-old Rubén, confused and afraid, hugged my leg as the shouting erupted. In moments, Ramiro ran out of the house, entering the cold Chicago night without a jacket. I went after him, although by my mid-thirties I had gained enough weight to slow me down considerably. Still I sprinted down the gangway which led to a debris-strewn alley, filled with furniture parts and overturned trash cans. I saw Ramiro’s fleeing figure, his breath rising above him in quickly-dissipating clouds.

I followed him toward Augusta Boulevard, the main drag of the neighborhood. People yelled out of windows and doorways:
“¿Qué pasa, hombre?”
Others offered information on Ramiro’s direction. A father or mother chasing some child down the street is not an unfamiliar sight around here.

A city like Chicago has so many places in which to hide. The gray and brown brick buildings seem to suck people in. Ramiro would make a turn and then vanish, only to pop up again. Appearing and disappearing. He flew over brick walls, scurried down another alley then veered into a building that swallowed him up and spit him out the other side.

I kept after Ramiro until, unexpectedly, I found him hiding in some bushes. He stepped out, unaware I was to the side of him.

“Ramiro … come home,” I gently implored, knowing if I pounced on him there would be little hope he’d come back. He sped off again.

“Leave me alone!” he yelled.

As I watched his escape, it was like looking back into a distant time, back to my own youth, when I ran and ran, when I jumped over peeling fences, fleeing
vatos locos,
the police or my own shadow in some drug-induced hysteria.

I saw Ramiro run off and then saw my body entering the mouth of darkness, my breath cutting the frigid flesh of night; it was my voice cracking open the winter sky.

Ramiro was born just prior to my 21st birthday. I had been working in a steel mill in Los Angeles. His mother, Camila, not yet 19, was an East Los Angeles woman who grew up in one of East L.A.’s roughest barrios. Yet Camila and her five sisters, with the help of their mother, managed to stave off attempts to pull them into the street life there—even having battles on their front porch with the
locas
who tried to recruit them.

The media likens Los Angeles to a “Beirut by the Beach.” For 1991, police cited these statistics: 100,000 gang members, 800 gangs, nearly 600 young people killed. Parts of the city, particularly the public housing projects, have been called “ungovernable.” These stats have been used to create a hysteria against black and Latino youth. Police in L.A. have practically instituted martial law in the inner city. Michael Davis in his book
City of Quartz
(Verso Press, 1991) says that by 1990 the various law enforcement “operations” to destroy gangs (using helicopters, infra-red lights and made-over armored vehicles—not far behind what was used in 1991’s “Desert Storm”) detained or arrested 50,000 youth, in South Central alone.

“The Crazy Life” in my youth, although devastating, was only the beginning stages of what I believe is now a consistent and growing genocidal level of destruction predicated on the premise there are marginalized youth with no jobs or future, and therefore expendable.

Camila’s brothers weren’t spared. One of them became active in a barrio gang, and later a heroin addict and a convict. Another brother got jumped and stabbed seven times—but survived. And an older half-brother was killed while trying to exact some, revenge one night near the Mexican border.

Later, her nephews from an older sister got involved in the gangs and one of them was murdered outside his home at the age of 17 (but not before he fathered a baby).

When Ramiro was two years old, and his sister only 10 months, Camila and I broke up. About seven years later, I moved to Chicago. After being left behind, Ramiro failed miserably in school, although he had been tested as a gifted child. He ran away from home a number of times. Once when he was about 10 years old he hopped a train from L.A. to Chicago, but police pulled him out of a boxcar before he passed the city limits. When he turned 13 years old, he came to stay with me. Because of what Camila and I had been through, we tried everything we could to keep him out of the “life,” even after we divorced and lived a couple of thousands of miles apart. But often there was too much against us.