Connecting : It’s the Basic Need to Belong and Be Heard That Can Draw Children Toward Gangs and Violence--or Slowly Turn Them Away

The man in front of me holds the knife a hand’s width from my face. I don’t move. For the next 60 seconds, I will use only my eyes and ears. My hands are at my sides. Eight-inch blade, I notice, brown-leather handle, dulled from use. I’m surprised by the thickness of the shank of steel. It must weigh half a pound, I think for no reason. Then I look away, half instinctively, half remembering a presentation at my daughter’s high school where the kids were told that if accosted by someone with a weapon, don’t focus on the weapon. I look at the man: About 45 years old; 5 feet, 8 inches; 170 pounds, dark coffee-color skin, triangular beard, smiling eyes. He’s happy. “That’s a knife,” he says, satisfied.

I note the mix of street twang and South America in his too-soft voice. Then another voice speaks. It belongs to the boy beside me. “It’s not sharp,” he says. I can hear his youth in his voice, curious, wanting to challenge, but for all of that, uncertain. The man’s eyes open a little, and I notice a spark of light fly out of them. “You think it’s not sharp?” he says. “Give me your hand.”

“No way,” says the boy. He puts a foot of distance between his shoulder and mine, but I can still feel the tension in his body. Then the man speaks again. His voice is even softer than before, his face relaxed, his eyes revealing even more light as he looks right at the boy. “I wouldn’t cut you, brother,” he tells the boy. “I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you at all. Straight up?” No one speaks. Then, “Straight up,” says the boy. “For real?” the man checks in. He needs to know the boy believes him. “For real.”

The moment is over, but in the room where I volunteer with 12 teen-age gangbangers and kids at risk of becoming one, more than one boy is relieved. Sitting on the sagging couches and chairs of this community center in South-Central Los Angeles, the boys laugh and poke each other to let out the tension. But I can see in their eyes that the man’s message has penetrated deeply. More deeply than an eight-inch blade. Someone in their lives has whispered in a voice that demanded to be heard, “I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you at all.”

And in this room of kids, here because they have been hurt and, in turn, have hurt others--out of fear, anger, poverty, hopelessness and confusion--these are words they haven’t heard too often, if ever, before. These are words they can’t afford to miss. So even though they may not yet completely trust the man with the knife (a former gangbanger like me who had help turning his life around and hopes to offer the same help for as many of these young ones as he can), and even though they lean back casually against the torn couches with the practiced indifference and nonchalance they feel they need just to get down the street, I can see that something inside of them leans forward, as if to catch a trace of something invisible and rare. Straight up.

I was a boy very much like them. Their faces, their voices, flash and echo a face and voice I recognize as my own. Of course, that was a long time ago in New York City, and my crew and I wouldn’t have been caught wearing the saggy-baggy outfits these boys wear. Or the shaved heads! We were more the stiletto type. Tight. Cool. Dress like a blade, you are one--all the danger held coiled inside, ready to spring without warning. But for all of that, as I look at their faces and hear what they are willing to say to the group and what they can’t yet say, I see that their feelings are the same as mine were then: The fear behind the strut. The terror and pain of feeling so invisible. The bewildering self-hatred that rises up inside when they ask themselves why they did what they did, and so often come up empty for an answer.

Their words move through me like ghosts of my own young blood as I listen to them and read what young people locked down in Juvenile Hall have written about their lives.

Life, life, you can’t be like this. --Jeremy

there’s no one that could help you / help you understand what to do / with those starving bones of you --Evan

Once upon a time I had a dream that someday I would be / locked up and they would charge me with murder and it came / true. --Arthur

DESIRE I want / sunlight in / my hands. / I want water / like my mothers / smiles / to cover / me / I want / my arms / from behind / my back --Jesse

*

I look around the room as each of the boys responds to the question posed by the man with the knife and tells the group what offense he committed to prompt the court to put him in this program. Oddly enough, there is no boasting. Some of the boys even stare at the carpeted floor as they tell the group what they have done. For, as one boy wrote, “If you win you lose/on project street.” The list holds no surprises: sale or possession of illegal substances, grand theft auto, possession or use of gun/knife/ice pick or other weapon, destruction of property, theft, robbery, brawling. These children (as young as 8) have had a hard bite taken out of them in their immediate circumstances, and in the culture at large, by unremitting abuse or neglect from their parents and society. And since no one in their lives has made any other options meaningfully accessible and clear, they have been biting back in confusion and rage to provide for their needs. To paraphrase James Baldwin: While children don’t always listen to their parents, they rarely fail to imitate them.

“The reason I started gang-bangin’,” wrote one young man now living in Juvenile Hall, “is because as I grew up people were telling me how crazy and down my father and uncles were. That influenced me to start bangin’ and wanting to get a name for myself. . . . “

But a child’s need to feel protected, wanted--to feel heard--does not go away. And if families and society do not meet these needs, life as a member of a gang can begin to look attractive. When racial, social and economic circumstances have torn families apart, children lack supportive and protective homes, and they will try to create a substitute that satisfies their needs. Unless they’re offered constructive solutions to their problems, and directly experience the effects, such children will most often create “solutions” that cause them to continue to hurt others and themselves.

Homeys. Homeboys. Homegirls. The words in this context are relatively new to our national vocabulary, but the situation they reflect is not. Listen to the language of it. Homey, the safe sense of “there’s no place like home.” But these homeys are different, and the feeling of safety they offer each other is often found in the steel grip of a gun.

Many young people have shocked us by revealing that they are willing to kill or die for their “homeys.” “I love my homeboys. I will kill and die for them,” one wrote while incarcerated. “I will take care of them. I’ll be there in bad times and good times and show them that I care. . . . I will give them what I have. . . . They’re my only family I got and the only people I care for.”

Listen to the statements of tenderness banging right up there against the statements of violence. Are they really so far from what most people feel is instinctively and morally justified in their own lives? Wouldn’t most people you know say that though they would never consider it possible in other circumstances, they can imagine doing these very same things for their “family”? And isn’t there a kind of fierce, if sad, pride in their tone when they say it?

This feeling of belonging and having people depend on you is one of the primary reasons children join gangs and move into criminal activity. And the combination of personal and historical conditions in their lives makes such a “decision,” half-conscious at best, a subtle one: A child can shift incrementally from innocent to social misfit or criminal. I know the painful truth of this only too well because of the life I lived on the streets of my working-class neighborhood in New York City, where eventually I walked the frightening path from being a sensitive, intuitive, thoughtful child to becoming a “youthful offender” and gang member. Except for the recent prominence of drugs and the money to be made dealing them, much of what I lived through is still ground sadly covered by too many young people today.

*

I carry with me a very clear sense of my own young foot covering the ground of my New York neighborhood, trying to avoid being knocked over by the dangerous forces I encountered every day as a pre-adolescent, adolescent and teen-ager. I’m talking about being able to just get down the street without having to face any number of bullies (often the kids beaten by alcoholic fathers) who would not miss an opportunity to take me out on the spot because I was a sickly child, weaker than they were; without running into the gang of 8- to 10-year-olds known as the Shamrocks, boys my age who chased me down and, inevitably catching up with me, held me, spit into my face, punched me in the head or stomach and kicked me while they threatened to cut me with beer-can openers or knives.

I’m talking about trying to get out of my parents’ apartment and down the street without running into my own father, a hard-working man, a loving man even, whose sudden and arbitrarily angry physical violence had taught me that, without warning, I might be stabbed in the hand, time and again, at dinner with a fork--drawing blood--for displeasing him. Or I might have my head slammed into a door or wall of our apartment, or be hit with the back of a two-foot-long wooden clothes brush for some infraction, or have my face slapped in the house or on the street or in a restaurant before he pulled me out of my seat by my hair and dragged me out onto the sidewalk, where he would issue a stern and terrifying warning of the possibility of harm if I didn’t “straighten up” (since apparently my nervous energy at the table, the accumulation of all the fear I constantly felt, was too much for him). And then, after a slap in the face, I’d have to stifle all the fear and humiliation and walk calmly back in as if we had simply gone out together to what? Have a little private joke? Man to man?

In large part, this was my physical and emotional reality until my teen years. Neither in my home, nor on the street, did I feel I was safe from sudden violence. It might come from those who said they loved me or those who clearly hated me, but the violence would come--if not one day, then the next.

I was unsafe at home, unsafe in the street, a sensitive child who had spent a great deal of time in a sickbed (no wonder) tended by an equally sensitive, frightened, depressed mother who became glued to me through the vehicle of my constant childhood illnesses. She trapped me there with her need, creating even greater resentment and tension for me with my father, since the female attention of the household was reserved for the son. Where was I to go? The closer I moved to my mother’s realm or “hid in my mother’s skirts,” as my brother used to taunt, the further I moved from any chance to be a man as it seemed to be defined in the violent atmosphere of my youth. And yet this “male world” of the streets and my father held only terror.

Years later, my mother told me that when I was 5, my kindergarten teacher said to her, when they met in the street, “We’ve got to do something to save your little boy with the golden eyes.” No one ever followed up.

*

I am 10 years old and playing in the local schoolyard with a friend who feels safe to me. He is one year older than I am, but because we are so much alike physically and emotionally, I feel I can trust him. Suddenly, without warning or provocation, this boy punches me as hard as he can in the solar plexus, knocking the wind out of me, and then stands over me looking down to where I have collapsed onto my knees. He does not offer a hand to help or an explanation, but watches with great curiosity as I heave and gasp for air. When I can get up from the pavement, I do and, feeling hurt by the betrayal, walk away without a word.

Twenty years later, this same person calls from another city and asks if he can stay at my house, since he will be in town on business. I say yes. The first night he is there, I ask him if he recalls the incident and he replies, “Vividly.” I ask, “Why did you do that?” and he says, “You know, I was so scared in those days and so tired of being beaten up, I just needed to know that I could connect--and I knew because you were weaker you couldn’t retaliate.” (Listen to the delicious unconscious use of the word connect. Violence as connection, as the vehicle of connection with someone else very much like oneself, perhaps in ways one can’t bear or has come to despise; and, importantly, violence as a connection with aspects of the self and the collective experience. A way to belong.)

Two years after that scene in the schoolyard, I have not yet learned the lesson in evidence everywhere around me--to betray myself and my needs by hiding behind the collective mask of brutal indifference. I read, play and listen to classical music, love friends and family easily, feel and dream deeply, am vulnerable to subtle senses of people and things and my intuition, pray nightly for my teams to win--and still pay for all of it in the neighborhood and at home.

One day I am in the seventh-grade schoolyard and, during a game of stickball, get into a fistfight with a boy I know and like, not one of the “bad boys.” I feel oddly confident of myself, and I actually swing my fist toward a boy’s face for the first time in my life. But just before making contact, my hand automatically opens, and I end up slapping him. Over and over again I try to punch him in the face, but I just cannot. My fist just will not stay a fist. In the crowd of boys that gathers to enjoy the fight, someone shouts, “He hits like a girl!” When my opponent realizes this, he rushes me and throws me to the ground and pounds my head into the pavement until there is blood all over and the others pull him off me. I end up with a mild concussion. My father picks me up from the nurse’s office at school and mentions, in passing, “I guess you’re not much of a fighter.”

On two occasions I am targeted for sexual assault by two different men in their 20s. Once by a Korean War veteran who is known in the neighborhood to be a little crazy since the war and who reputedly had a metal plate in his head to cover a skull wound. Another time by the local parks and recreation teacher, who enlists four teen-age boys to hold me down during the assault. I am terrified. During both attacks I manage to stop the assault by grabbing, in the first instance, a hammer, and in the second, a baseball bat that happened to be within reach. I swing at the heads of these men with all the fear I have inside me. The boy who couldn’t close his fist now has learned to grip a weapon for dear life. Not long after , I abandon my “nice” friends, half aware that I am doing this because I cannot suffer any more fear and shame, and start hanging out with tougher boys. I mask who I am and change my manner of dress, speech, walk and general physical appearance. I am becoming known in the neighborhood and at school as a “hood.” Conscious that I no longer want to be a target, I lift weights three times a week with a new friend who is three years older, the son of a cop who moved into the neighborhood from East Harlem. He is confident and tough. I put on some weight and develop muscles. Some of the guys I now hang around with on the corner don’t really accept me, and even attack me, but the gang leader who has taken a liking to me provides some protection. I have yet to prove myself.

Then one night, my friend Rico and I are jumped by eight or nine punks in a different neighborhood. The next morning, I ask the gang leader if he and some of the guys will come with me to find them, and he says yes. I ask to borrow his ring, which has some solid metal cutting edges on it, and put it on. About 10 of us go up to the other neighborhood. I spot the ringleader of the boys who jumped me--oddly enough, he is a wimpy guy like I had been--and I go up to him as my friends surround us. Within 10 seconds I hit him squarely in the nose with a closed fist, breaking his nose, and I don’t stop hitting him until he can no longer move as I kick him in the head with my boots.

I am wailing on him and want to keep going, but my friends stop me because a woman starts to scream for the police. We run through the streets, all of us, elated, happy, powerful. I fight back a moment of regret, look down at myself and see that I am covered in blood. But it is the other boy’s blood this time and, feeling an odd combination of shame and pride, I wear it like a conqueror’s flag. Ironically, it is Mother’s Day. I am asked officially into the gang. By eighth grade I have been kicked out of the special classes for bright and talented music students and put in the room set aside for troubled kids and kids already in trouble with the law.

One day, I am accosted outside my junior high school by a Puerto Rican gang because I have insulted one of their own. There are about 30 of them, and I am there with just two friends from my gang. I have a knife open in my hand, which is hidden in the pocket of my trench coat. I hope no one can see my hand shaking.

After I am twice told by their leader, a guy named Cisco, to apologize, and twice I refuse, I feel something on my chest. I look down and see that he is holding a gun right at my heart. I feel my moment. I know I will not apologize, though no one could blame me if I did. I say something to him that, in his poor English, I feel he will misunderstand as an apology but which is really an insult. If it works I am cool beyond belief. If it doesn’t work maybe I am dead. I am so out of touch with who I am, I don’t know why I am doing this. I just do it. It works. He puts the gun down, warns me and the gang leaves. My friends tell me I am crazy, and we all laugh together and go for a smoke. As we walk away I hear the story already being told by the kids in the crowd that gathered to see the fight.

All during this time, and in the years that follow, I continue to enjoy listening to classical music, reading and keeping other aspects of a private life alive. One friend I felt I could trust, a girl, reminded me years later that I once broke away from a very pleasant and somewhat complicated philosophical conversation we were having as we walked down the hall in high school, threw a boy against the wall, threatened him, hit him so hard he collapsed to the floor, and then continued our conversation as if nothing had happened.

Despite the palpable resource of love and tenderness my mother provided in my life, I grew determinedly tougher. Before I was out of ninth grade, I had hit one teacher with a chair (the guidance counselor who began a discussion of what was bothering me by calling me a Nazi), tried to stab another teacher in the back with a sharp instrument, took part in gang fights, used force and weapons to mug and rob people and rolled neighborhood drunks on Saturday nights to get some money. Distorted as it may seem, I “connected,” and though it meant I got shot at by rival gang members, battled with police and lived a life that didn’t fit my deepest nature, at the time it did fit something. It was the best solution I was able to come up with to answer the years of shame, abuse and fear. But this solution did not succeed in making me immune from all emotion or moral concern. It only created more shame, abuse and fear within me. This time, however, there was no way to escape the perpetrator. It was me.

*

The autumn I entered 11th grade, I went to pick up my schedule. I was dressed particularly sharp to let everyone know not to mess with me, teachers included. Time and again, you had to get your message out right from the start to command the respect you needed to keep you safe. I walked into the room for my math class, and before I knew it I was taking a test the teacher had handed out to see what we knew. Indifferent to the result, I finished up quickly and sat there staring out the window. The teacher called me up to the front of the room and asked to see my paper. Then, while I stood there, she looked it over.

“Come with me,” she said. We went into the hall and she said, “You’re in the wrong class.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you got everything right in 10 minutes,” she smiled. “You should be in the advanced class.” She looked as if she expected me to be pleased.

“No, I shouldn’t,” I told her. She looked at my paper again. “I really think you should. You’re going to be way ahead of the rest of this class, and you’re going to be bored.”

“Look,” I said, “I got out of all those classes, and I’m not going back. Besides, I’ll be quitting school this year anyway. I’m 16. So leave me alone.”

She looked at me, right at me, and then said, “OK. I don’t mind having someone smart in my room. Go back inside.”

Brief and insignificant as it may seem, that was the beginning of the change that has led me to live a life beyond anything I might have imagined. I have thought about that quick exchange many times over the years and asked myself, “Why that one? Why that time?” Certainly other teachers had said encouraging things. I can only say that I believe I was caught by the almost conspiratorial way this teacher implied, “I know you. You’re all right with me. I’m on your side.” And then didn’t demand anything I couldn’t bring myself to give. In the weeks, months and years that followed, during which this teacher slowly reeled me in, she never once wavered in her commitment to me, or in her willingness to help me discover those things that I could use to nurture my own soul.

Some remarkable thought and writing has gone into the subject of childhood and the roots of violence. To my mind, none is more striking than the work of psychoanalyst Alice Miller. In “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing &the; Roots of Violence,” Miller writes: “In order to be able to develop, children need the help of adults who are aware of their needs, who protect them, respect them, take them seriously, love them, and honestly help them to orientate themselves. When these vital needs of the child are frustrated and the child, instead, is abused for the needs of the adult--beaten, punished, maltreated, manipulated, neglected, or betrayed, without the interference of a witness--then the integrity of the child will suffer a lifelong hurt.”

She goes on to say that when the anger a child feels (which is a healthy response to the circumstances causing harm) is forbidden and the child can find no sanctioned means to release it, this stored-up anger will be forcefully and destructively vented against others or against himself. Add to the anger a child’s experience of helplessness, fear and lack of hope, and it is not too difficult to understand why he might retaliate with destructive acts.

But Miller offers some hope. “An abused child,” she tells us, “will not become either a criminal or mentally ill if . . . he meets a person who clearly realizes that it is not the beaten, helpless child, but his environment, which is crazy.” These people must declare themselves, by their actions, to be allies and trustworthy friends of the child. This is what my teacher did and why I allowed her to help me help myself. It is what the man with the knife and I and others hope to accomplish in our weekly meetings with the kids. This ends the child’s isolation and loneliness as that child faces the frustration and helplessness that distresses him at every turn. This provides a witness to the child’s pain and potential, and the guidance, encouragement and support a child needs. It holds up a new mirror in which a new face may gradually come to be seen. One the child recognizes, truly, as his own.

To the extent that we provide this, both as a society and as individuals, we can save or destroy a life. Children are the mirrors of our own feelings about life itself, about possibility, joy, a future. Starting at the very beginning of their lives, children learn kindness when kindness is the order of the day, and they learn insensitivity, cruelty and viciousness by the same means. And so, as mirrors, they cast back the face of the world as it has been given to them. If we hate the image in the mirror, can we really justify blaming the mirror for what we have placed within its borders?

*

In our weekly meetings we mirror as much as we can. The work is difficult because lives are on the line. One day you think you’re getting through to one of the kids and the next week you discover the powerful demands of his environment have pulled him out of your grasp again. But success is not a stranger to our group. One day, just before the start of the weekly meeting at the community center, a young man who had attended for two years pulled me over to the side.

“Jose, how you doing?” I said to him. “You’re looking good.” Jose had originally been busted for ‘jacking people with a gun.

“I decided to get out,” he said. I could hardly believe what he was saying and he could see it. “I’m done banging,” he told me.

“All right!” I said. I gave him my hand. “I’m proud of you, man. How did it go down with your guys?”

“It was OK,” he said. “I’ve been banging since I was 9 and they all know I been down with them every time. I just told them last night I’m cutting my pants.”

“That’s good, Jose. I can’t stand those baggy pants you guys are wearing.” We both laughed. Then I asked him, “What are you going to do?”

“Well,” he said, “I been thinking about it. You know, I’ve been coming here and listening all this time, and my mom’s getting at me about why you doing this and why you doing that and also I got three brothers and I been watching them, too. How they live. One of them’s going back to jail this week for drugs, but the other two have families and houses near Sacramento. One’s got his own truck and the other works for a bus company.”

“That’s good, Jose,” I said. “They’re making good lives.”

“I know,” he said.

“So what about you? You can make a life, too, you know. I’m sorry about your brother this week but you don’t have to go down like he is.”

“I know. I been thinking maybe I’d like to be a probation officer. Do you think I could do it?”

In that moment, this 19-year-old sounded like a very small child.

“I know you can, Jose. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because you’re a bad-ass and you could relate to those guys.”

He laughed. “That’s true. But I’m not as much of a bad-ass as you are.”

“No, you’re not,” I told him. “Maybe one day you’ll be hanging out here helping these guys make the step you just made.”

He laughed again. “Maybe,” he said. Then a serious look came into his face. “How do you get to be a probation officer? You got to go to school, right?”

“Right. But you can do it.”

“You think I can?”

“I know you can, Jose. If you can make the step out, you can do anything you want to do. You’re a good man. I’m proud of you today. Let’s go inside and tell the other guys.”

“No, no, no. I don’t want to make a big deal of myself,” he said.

But we did.