On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (14 page)

By her own and Tim’s accounts Miss Linda had been quite stalwart up until this point,
but the third raid and the lengthy interrogation seemed to weaken her resolve. When
Reggie came around later to pick up the spaghetti she had prepared for him, she begged
him to turn himself in. He refused.

A week later, Miss Linda was coming home from her boyfriend’s house and found her
TV and clothing dumped in the alleyway. Her father, Mr. George, told her that he would
no longer allow her to live there with Tim if she continued to hide Reggie from the
police:

This ain’t no damn carnival. I don’t care who he is, I’m not letting nobody run through
this house with the cops chasing him, breaking shit, spilling shit, waking me up out
of my sleep. I’m not with the late-night screaming and running. I open my eyes and
I see a nigga hopping over my bed trying to crawl out the window. Hell, no! Like I
told Reggie, if the law run up in here one more time I be done had a stroke. Reggie
is a grown-ass man [he was seventeen]. He ain’t hiding out in my damn house. We going
to fuck around and wind up in jail with this shit. They keep coming, they going to
find some reason to book my Black ass.

Mr. George began calling the police whenever he saw Reggie in the house, and Miss
Linda told her son that he could no longer stay there. For two months, Reggie lived
in an abandoned Buick LeSabre parked in a nearby alleyway.

Here under extreme duress, Miss Linda nonetheless refused to tell the police where
to find Reggie. And though she ultimately begged him to turn himself in, and then
kicked him out of the house when her father threatened to evict her, she never gave
her son up to the po
lice. While Reggie was sleeping in the Buick, she kept in close touch with him, supplying
him with food almost every evening. Her neighbors and family, and Reggie himself,
seemed to believe that she had done the best she could, better than anyone else could
have done. The evening the cops took Reggie in, I sat with Miss Linda and some of
her neighbors. She poured Red Irish Rose wine into small plastic cups for us.

MISS LINDA: Well, at least he don’t have to look over his shoulder anymore, always
worried that the law was going to come to the house. He was getting real sick of sleeping
in the car. It was getting cold outside, you know, and plus, Reggie is a big boy and
his neck was all cramped up. And he used to come to the back like: “Ma, make me a
plate,” and then he’d come back in twenty minutes and I’d pass him the food from out
the window.

Brianna, Chuck’s girlfriend, responded, “You ride harder than any bitch out here,
and Reggie knows that.”

THE RIDER REBORN

Veronica was eighteen when she met Reggie, who was nineteen. She had been dating one
of Reggie’s friends, though not seriously, and this man never had much time for her.
He would leave her with Reggie while he was busy, and as Reggie put it, one thing
led to another. Soon Veronica was spending most evenings at Reggie’s. Chuck and Tim
were starting to call her Sis.

“At first I couldn’t fall asleep,” she told me a few weeks into this relationship.
“I was scared the bugs would crawl on me at night. You really have to love a Taylor
brother to sleep in that house.” Indeed, the kitchen crawled with roaches, ants, and
flies; the floors themselves looked like they were moving, as if you were in some
psychedelic bug dream.

One night, Veronica woke up thinking that the roaches were crawling on the bed again,
only to see Reggie scrambling to make it out the window while yelling at her to push
him through. This was not easy, as Reggie is a young man of substantial girth. Then
two cops busted
through the bedroom door and threw Veronica out of the bed. They cuffed her to the
bed frame for an hour while they searched the house, she told me the next day, even
though it should have been plain to them that Reggie had fled through the still-open
window, which naturally would be shut in February. She said they told her they’d find
out every illegal thing she did, every time she smoked weed or drove drunk, and they’d
pick her up every time they came across her. They would put a special star in her
file and run her name, and search her and whoever she was with whenever they saw her.
They told her they had tapped her cell phone and could bring her up on conspiracy
charges. Despite these threats, Veronica couldn’t tell them where Reggie had run,
because she simply did not know.

Later that day, Reggie called her from a pay phone in South Philly. Veronica pleaded
with him to turn himself in. He refused, and she told him then and there that they
were through.

Reggie put Veronica “on blast,” telling his friends, relatives, and neighbors that
she had cut him loose when the police started looking for him. He then began seeing
Shakira, a woman he had dated in high school.

The next day, Veronica called me in tears: Reggie had told everyone on the block that
she wasn’t riding right, that she didn’t really give a fuck about him, and that she
was out as soon as shit got out of hand. He told her he would never have expected
it, thought she was better than that.

As Veronica retreated from 6th Street, Shakira stepped up to help Reggie hide. She
met him at his friend’s house, and spent the next few days holed up in the basement
with him. She arranged for a friend to bring them food. In the meantime, the police
raided Miss Linda’s house, Veronica’s house, and Reggie’s uncle’s house. But they
didn’t visit Shakira’s house or question her family, which seemed to allow her to
preserve her role as a brave and loyal person. I went to see her and Reggie on the
third day.

SHAKIRA: I been here the whole time, A. When they [the police] came to his mom’s we
was both there, and he went out the back and I been here this whole time.

REGGIE: She riding hard as shit.

ALICE: That’s what’s up [that’s good].

REGGIE: Remember Veronica? When she found out the boys [the police] was looking for
me, she was like: click [the sound of a phone hanging up]. She’d be like, “I see you
when I see you.” Shakira ain’t like that, though; she riding like a mug [motherfucker,
i.e. very hard]. She worried about me, too.

We didn’t hear from Veronica for a few weeks, and then the police found Reggie hiding
in another shed nearby. They came in cars and helicopters, shutting down the block
and busting open the shed with a battering ram.

When Reggie could make a phone call, he let Veronica know that he wasn’t seeing Shakira
anymore. Veronica wrote him a letter, and then she started visiting him. It took three
hours on the bus to get to Northeast Philadelphia where the county jails are, because
the routes don’t line up well. Veronica had never visited a guy in jail before, and
we’d often discuss what outfit she could wear to look her best while complying with
the jail’s regulations.

As Veronica made the weekly trek to the county jail on State Road, Reggie’s friends
stayed home. They didn’t write; they didn’t put any money on his books.

Every day, Reggie voiced his frustration with his boys over the phone to me:

Niggas ain’t riding right! Niggas ain’t got no respect. G probably going to do it
[put money on his books], but Steve be flajing [bullshitting; lying]. When I come
home, man, I’m not fucking with
none
of these niggas. Where the fuck they at? They think it’s going to be all love when
I come home, like, what’s up, Reggie, welcome back and shit. . . . But fuck those
niggas, man. They ain’t riding for me, I got no rap for them when I touch [get home].
On my word, A, I ain’t fucking with none of them when I get home. I would be a fucking
nut for that. Brandon especially, A. I was with this nigga
every day
. And now he’s on some: “My bad, I’m fucked up [broke].” Nigga, you wasn’t fucked
up when I was out there! I banged on that nigga, A [hung up on him].

Despite their continued promises to visit and to send money, after three months not
one of Reggie’s boys had made the trip. Only Veronica came. She wrote him about two
letters every week, with him writing two or maybe three letters back. Sometimes she
and I would go together to visit him. On Reggie’s birthday, Veronica wrapped a tiny
bag of marijuana in a twenty-dollar bill and smuggled it to him in the visiting room.

One afternoon, Veronica and I were sitting on Miss Linda’s second-floor porch playing
Spades with her. Though usually quiet, Veronica spoke for the longest I’d heard:

Ain’t none of his boys go visit him, none of them. . . . The only people that visit
is me and Alice. Like, that should tell him something. Your homies ain’t really your
homies—I’m the only one that’s riding. I’m the only real friend he got. Who’s putting
money on your books? They said they was going to put some on there, but they ain’t
do it. The only money he got on his books is from me and you.

It seemed that Veronica, who had dropped Reggie while he was on the run, who was humiliated
as a weak and disloyal person, was now, through the work of visiting and writing letters,
reborn a faithful and stalwart companion.

A woman can also salvage her relationship and self-worth by gradually letting the
details of a man’s confinement fade, and joining with him to paint her conduct in
a more positive light. Eight times I noted that a woman visiting a man in custody
would join with him to revise the events leading up to his arrest and trial in ways
that downplayed her role in his confinement.

When Mike was twenty-four and his children were three and six years old, he began
dating a woman from North Philly named Michelle. Within a month they had become very
close: Michelle’s three-year-old son started calling Mike Daddy, and Michelle’s picture
went up on Mike’s mother’s mantelpiece next to his graduation picture and the school
photos of his son and daughter. He started spending most nights at her apartment.

Michelle was the first Puerto Rican woman Mike had ever dated, and he had high hopes
that her ethnic background would signify strong
loyalty. “With Spanish chicks,” he said, “it’s all about family. Family is everything
to them. Black chicks ain’t like that. They love the cops.”

Michelle and Mike both explained to me that Michelle was nothing like the mother of
Mike’s children, Marie, who so frequently called the police on him. Since Michelle’s
father and brothers sold drugs, she was used to the police and the courts, and wouldn’t
cave under their pressure. With strong memories of her mother struggling with her
father’s legal troubles all through her childhood, Michelle told me that she was a
second-generation rider. She also said that she loved Mike more than any man she had
ever met, including her son’s father, who was currently serving ten years in federal
prison.

Michelle’s loyalty would be tested three months into their relationship. Mike missed
a court appearance, and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. Upon hearing the
news, Michelle assured me that nothing—not the cops, not the judge, not the nut-ass
prison guards—would break them apart.

At around four o’clock the following Friday morning, she phoned me sobbing: the cops
had knocked her door down and taken Mike. He tried to run, and they beat him out on
the sidewalk with batons. She said they beat him so badly that she couldn’t stop screaming.
Why did they have to do that? They had already put him in handcuffs.

At the precinct, the police kept Mike cuffed to a desk for eighteen hours in the underwear
they had found him in. The next morning, they brought Michelle down to the station
and questioned her for three hours. Then they showed Mike Michelle’s statement, which
detailed his activities, his associates, and the locations of his drug-selling business.
When he got to county jail, he wrote her a letter, which she showed me:

Don’t come up here, don’t write, don’t send no money. Take all your shit from my mom’s,
matter of fact, I’ll get her to drop that shit off. You thought I wasn’t going to
find out that you a rat? They showed me everything. Fuck it. I never gave a fuck about
you anyway. You was just some pussy to me, and your pussy not even that good!

Mike spread the word that Michelle was a snitch, and this news was the hot topic for
a few days between his boys on the block and those locked up.

Incensed and humiliated, Michelle explained to me that Mike had no right to be angry
with her. He clearly didn’t care about her. In fact, despite all his claims to the
contrary, the police had shown her the text messages and phone calls that proved he
was still seeing Marie. Not only that, but Mike had tried to pin the drugs on her
and to claim that the gun in the apartment belonged to her father. Michelle wrote
him a scathing letter back:

I should have known that you were still messing with your baby-mom. I felt like a
fool when they showed me your cell phone calls and texts at 2 and 3 in the morning.
And don’t even try to tell me that you were calling your kids, ’cause no 7 year old
is up at 2 a.m. Did you think I wasn’t going to find out you tried to put that shit
on me? I read every word. That bitch can have you.

With concrete evidence of Mike’s infidelity, Michelle came to see that Mike did not
value or respect her: their relationship had been a sham. She began to regard her
past association with him as sordid and shameful, and her present efforts to protect
him humiliating. At the same time, the police were showing Mike that she had betrayed
him. Injured and humiliated, he rebuffed and belittled her just as she faced indisputable
evidence of his duplicity, and confronted the possibility that this man who didn’t
love her might let her hang for his crimes.

Two days later, the cops took Michelle out to the suburbs where Mike had been selling.
According to the police report, she gave up his stash spot, his runner, and all the
customers she knew about.
¹³

A friend of Mike’s explained it like this:

The girl said, “Fuck it, I’ve only known him for three months, I want to keep my kid.”
Plus, her mom is in a nursing home, and she has custody of her two little sisters,
so you know they told her they was going to kick her out the spot (the Section 8 building)
and take her son and her sisters and shit. She has too much on the line. That bitch
ain’t think twice. She was like: What do you want to know?