Fire in the Ashes (32 page)

The years in middle school for too many children in the Bronx, as in other troubled sections of New York, have proven to be killing fields in academic terms, as well as psychologically and socially. Thousands of students in other cities too, even when their elementary schooling has been relatively good, come out of their middle schools and go on to high school with severe impairment of their basic skills. Whatever assets they’ve acquired in the elementary years seem to be transmuted into deficits by the time they enter the ninth grade.

High school was a time of misery for Angelo. As hard as he tried, he could not keep up with the subject-matter content of the courses students had to take in their ninth- and tenth-grade years. In September, 2006, when he expected to begin eleventh grade—he was seventeen by now—he was
told he hadn’t been promoted, because he’d failed so many courses in the year before.

Humiliation, injured pride, placed him in a state of mind in which he found it difficult to focus on his lessons and pay attention to his teachers in the classes he was taking for a second time. Like many other students who are held back from promotion twice or more before they are eighteen, Angelo had lost the motivation to keep on. Early in October, he dropped out of school.

I had not seen Angelo for two years at the time—it would be another two years before I caught up with him again. This was in part because my mother, then my father, passed away during those years and there was a period when I didn’t travel to New York at all. When I did begin to go back to the Bronx, I found myself preoccupied with students, or with former students, who were still in the South Bronx and still associated somehow with St. Ann’s.

I knew that Angelo was still in Harlem, but I never knew exactly where he lived or if he had a phone. As has often been the case, I kept in closest contact with those of the students who were easiest to reach or who called me on their own to tell me when their phone numbers were changed. When I inquired about Angelo, nobody around St. Ann’s seemed to know what he was doing now. Ariella said she’d seen him once or twice in the streets around the church but that he was with his friends and didn’t stop to talk with her.

The next time I saw him was in 2009, by which time his mother had moved back to the Bronx. We met on St. Ann’s Avenue as I was coming up the block from the corner store. He made it obvious that he was glad to see me—as always, a hug, right in front of everybody passing in the street—but he also looked concerned. We went up to the garden on the hill behind the church. It was early evening. We sat down on the grass.

He told me right away he’d been in trouble with the law
and had been arrested something like a dozen times since he had left middle school. In seven of these cases, he was taken to the Tombs, a complex of detention centers in Manhattan where detainees can be held while their case is being processed and while waiting for arraignment. In theory, they must be arraigned or else released within one day but, because of court delays, this sometimes can take longer.

When I asked him what he’d done to end up in the Tombs, the reasons that he gave me seemed of such a minor nature that I had to wonder if he was leaving something out. Once, for example, he was on the subway platform waiting for a train when a group of young, unruly men about his age created a disorder that led to their arrest. The transit police apparently believed he was part of the same group and asked to see his ID card, but he said, “I didn’t have it with me.” So they arrested him as well. He was released to his mother, with no charges, early the next morning.

Another time, he had used his Metro card to go through the turnstile—legally, correctly—but after he went through, a man behind him who, he said, looked very poor (“I thought that he was homeless”) asked him, as a favor, if he would swipe him through. Only a week before, Martha had done the same for me, since I had no Metro card, when we were going through the turnstile at Brook Avenue. Martha, of course, wears the collar of a clergywoman, and she’s a white person, and I was dressed in my suit and tie from Harvard Square.

Not so with Angelo. A transit officer apparently was watching him and, he said, “beckoned to me with his finger,” and informed him that it was illegal to do what he had done. “He checked my record and he saw my previous arrest. I also jumped a turnstile once when I was younger, and that was in my record too.” So that was the second time he was taken to the Tombs.

Yet another time, he’d been standing on a corner,
somewhere in East Harlem, close to a street where a robbery had taken place a short time before. A police car, he said, swerved up on the curb. The officer said he “fitted the description”—“light-skinned Hispanic male, white T-shirt, close-cropped hair”—of the person believed to be the perpetrator of the crime, even though the same description would have fit at least a dozen other men or teenage boys who were in the neighborhood at exactly the same time.

Again, however, a visit to the Tombs.…

When I said that Angelo told me he had been “in trouble with the law,” I did not intend by this to indicate that he had committed crimes, or crimes of any magnitude, like the crimes, for instance, that Christopher committed and for which he’d been convicted to a term of seven years. But the simple fact that Angelo was standing on that corner for no apparent reason, or no reason that he could explain, and probably the more important fact that he was often hanging out with boys who
were
committing crimes, exposed him to suspicions on the part of the police that were easily predictable.

In at least one situation that led to his arrest, his role was not as innocent and passive as in the other cases, but involved an element of participation on his part that, as he conceded to me later, was “my own stupidity.”

“I was on 110th Street, near the gate to Central Park,” he told me, when a wild fight broke out among the boys that he was with. One of the boys, a friend of his, was being beaten by another boy who, he said, had thrown him to the ground and then “was kicking him” and “stomping him” with heavy cleated boots. Angelo jumped into the fight and struck the bully who was beating up his friend with a knuckle-punch that nearly knocked him out.

The entire group ended up in court. Two of the boys, who, he said, had weapons on them when they were arrested, got seven months in jail. Angelo, the youngest
of the group, was ordered to return to court for a separate hearing. When he returned, he was released without being charged, but was lectured by the judge, as he knew that he deserved to be, for letting himself be drawn into the fight.

Throughout the years since he’d dropped out of school, Angelo told me, he’d been looking for a stable job. None of the jobs he found, however, lasted very long. One was with a construction firm for which, he told me, he was “doing stock,” but it was a seasonal job and ended in four months. Another job, one he said that he enjoyed, was for a man who was renovating brownstones in a part of Harlem in which gentrification by white families had begun. But this, too, was a temporary job and, like the other, “off the books,” and it ended shortly.

Every so often when we met, which we did more often now, Angelo would tell me he was “going back to school” and, every time he told me this, he would sound entirely earnest and sincere. But there was a terrible naïveté, as I would repeatedly discover, in what he had in mind when he spoke of “school” and what he believed the schooling he was thinking of was going to deliver.

He was easily attracted by
profit-making firms that offered a degree or some other document, which, as prospective applicants were told, was going to prepare them for occupational employment. One of these firms, called “TCI”—which stands for Technical Career Institute—advertised “associate” degrees or “associate occupational degrees,” for which it charged $6,000 for each of four semesters. What Angelo had no way to know was that the attrition rate at TCI was a catastrophic 81 percent. Fewer than one in five of those who had enrolled in TCI learned enough, or stayed with the program long enough, to receive degrees in what the catalog issued by the institute described, in an obscure location, as “150 percent of the normal time.…” How many of that 81 percent who did not receive two-year
degrees by the end of three years may have done so after four or five or more years was not stated in the catalog, which leads one to suspect it was very few.

Angelo knew none of this. I didn’t, either, until somewhat later. All I knew was that he talked about it constantly, and with the highest hopes, over the course of several months. Suddenly, he never spoke of it again.

Another time, he was attracted to “a school,” as he mistakenly described it, which, he said, would prepare him for a job (guarding municipal buildings, I believe), give him a certificate, and arrange for his employment. He saw the advertisement in the New York Daily News.

When he told me of his interest, I asked my assistant to see if she could locate any information about this institution. The only source of information she could find, after an extensive search, was a consumer website in which former clients of the firm, some of whom were from the Bronx or Brooklyn, issued
warnings to potential applicants.

“Beware,” said one. “They prey on your desperation,” said another. “The training is a joke.… You get a fake certificate and they send you on your way.…” “I tried to get my money back,” but the company “refused.” “It needs to be shut down.”

What comes across from all of this, as I look at notes I made on the intermittent conversations we were having in New York, is the high exhilaration that would lead him every time to think that any of these programs would represent a magic key to open up whatever door appeared to stand in front of him. At one point—he was not yet twenty-one—he told me that he’d signed up for a program to obtain a GED. But, as he belatedly discovered, and as my assistant was able to confirm, the instructors in the program were not licensed teachers, had no experience or background in remedial instruction, and had not been given the pedagogic training they would need to give a student who had little
more than elementary-level skills the preparation it would take to get through the exams.

One of the questions that obviously comes to mind is why he kept on wasting time looking into programs that never led him anywhere, instead of turning for advice to someone well informed who was right there on the scene and who would have guided him—Martha could have done this—to any of a number of good nonprofit agencies that could offer realistic preparation for the world of work or for the GED that he was hoping to achieve.

Once, when he was seven years old, another child at St. Ann’s, an older girl named Stephanie who sometimes helped the younger ones, asked Angelo, “What grade are you in?”

“I had to repeat,” he said.

“What grade did you repeat?”

“First grade,” he replied, looking up at Stephanie. “How do you pass first grade?”

“It’s hard,” she answered, trying to be kind to him.

“Yes. It
is
. It’s hard,” he said. “All that work! And now I have to do it all again.…”

Thirteen years had passed since then. But, as grown-up as he was and as tough as he believed that he could be, it seemed as if the puzzled seven-year-old boy in him remained. How do you do it? How do other people do it? Why are these things so difficult for me when other people seem to find them easy?

Sometimes, when he told me of his feelings of perplexity about a goal he thought he was about to reach but which once again had slipped away from him, I found that I was thinking of a child’s toy, a little boat without an anchor, spinning in a circle as the currents drew it off in one direction and then pulled it in another. Unfortunately, one of the strongest of those currents was his unwise and persistent
loyalty to a circle of acquaintances whose unhealthy patterns of existence, as he should have known by now, were not good for him. His inability to rid himself of these acquaintances was now about to lead him into making an unfortunate mistake.

In the summer of 2010, Angelo was standing with a friend outside of a corner store in Harlem—he called it “a loosie store”—where people could buy cigarettes for fifty cents apiece and where, he said, the owner of the store was working with drug dealers for a portion of the profits—and possibly also for his own protection.

Angelo’s friend was dealing drugs, which Angelo insisted unconvincingly that he did not know before that time. Like many other dealers in the Bronx and Harlem, Angelo’s friend did not keep the drugs that he was selling in his own possession. Instead, he left them stashed inside the store.

“A Puerto Rican guy,” said Angelo, “comes up to my friend and asks him for
manteca
,” which is a term, in Puerto Rican slang, meaning dope or heroin. Angelo’s friend—whom he calls “this idiot”—“isn’t thinking fast. He wants to make the sale. He tells him, ‘Go inside that store.’ ”

His friend, he said, waited outside for a moment, then asked Angelo, “Come on with me into the store,” as if this were a casual matter, which it obviously was not. This is the point where Angelo, as he was about to learn, made the worst misjudgment of his life.

“I followed him into the store.…”

His friend, as it happened, was under surveillance by narcotics officers. The man who asked him for
manteca
was
an undercover agent. “He slapped the cuffs on both of us.” Angelo was brought to court and charged with sale of heroin. He was sent to Rikers Island while awaiting trial.

His attorney—he was fortunate to have a good one—cautioned him that if, as Angelo intended, he insisted he was innocent, it could be as long as twelve months, even more, before the prosecution was prepared to bring the case to trial. During that time, unless he had the large amount of money it would take him to make bail, Angelo would remain in prison. If he was found guilty when he finally went to trial, it was possible, because of his prior record of arrests, that he might face a sentence of as long as four to seven years.