An American Summer

by Alex Kotlowitz

  One time he responds to an incident where three people have been shot, including a seventy-three-year-old grandmother. Two hundred people press against the yellow crime tape. The police point Tasers at a gaggle of agitated young men, the red lasers lighting up their white T-shirts like it’s an arcade game. They shout back, Fuck the police. A construction worker who lives in the neighborhood tells a sergeant that it wasn’t always like this and that he does what he can to talk to the youth. Three boys who look to be maybe fifteen hurl insults at the sergeant, and though the sergeant tries to be patient, he eventually approaches one of the boys, twirls him around, and handcuffs him. A man in his thirties, a golden retriever at his side, embraces a police officer, turns around, and mutters, Too much violence. It’s too much, and then collapses on the sidewalk and has a seizure. “It was one of those moments when I realized everyone was damaged,” Pete told me.

  As the summer progresses, Pete continues to record the numbers, but his senses feel heightened, like he can hear and see things that used to feel out of reach. He begins to offer commentary as well.

  It’s about the gun laws, Sup McCarthy says. So far no other mention of other factors.

  In the Austin neighborhood: “All these people wanna grab guns and nobody got target practice,” she said.

  Someone just dropped off a woman at a hospital, GSW [gunshot wound] to the buttocks. She doesn’t know how it happened.

  Sleep all day, to wake up for night life.

  “He doesn’t know he’s dead yet.” A police supervisor.

  Crime fighting strategy: Cold front, storms to break heat wave today.

  A man with (what appears to be) an AK-47 tattooed on his forehead was charged with a shooting in Uptown. Story soon. #chicago

  Safe Passage crime scene. 6100 S Indiana. 2 people shot, 10 casings (at least) on the ground.

  Heavy rain begins to fall on Bridgeport. What I wouldn’t give to be home, in bed, with a window open right now.

  Geez, what a night.

  He tells Erin, “Next summer I’m going to plan it better and take a break.” He makes a list of the things he wants to do: watch Lord of the Rings, ride a bike through a forest preserve, cook and spend more time with friends and with Erin, go ice fishing. He’s gained weight. His right eye twitches. Erin tells him he looks mean even when he’s resting. He needs a break. But he can’t look away. In fact, the longer he spends chasing the violence, the more he needs to linger, to hear from those still standing. He knows how they feel. He knows their anguish, their fury, their fear, their will to go on. The violence, the trauma, he realizes, has this paradoxical narrative. It isolates people. He knows that, all too well. It especially used to unnerve Erin when she’d find him in the living room after a shift, with six opened Coronas, the TV on, Pete asleep on the couch. She urged him to spend time with his friends, but he wouldn’t. He couldn’t, really. But he found comfort in talking to people in the streets, people who had seen what he’s seen, people who had a lot more at stake than he does. The violence, he tells me, also pushes people together. He gets a tattoo on his left forearm, a quote from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses: “The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.”

  Sitting outside Christ Hospital (second time in two weeks I’m writing on a 5-year-old boy shot) and I met another GSW victim, from last year.

  July 4th weekend: 67 people shot this long weekend, 11 dead. Ages 5-72.

  I love this city but it can be tiring.

  Chapter 6

  Father’s Day

  JUNE 15…JUNE 16…JUNE 17…

  Mike Kelly, who’s forty-four, lives on the twenty-first floor in a high-end high-rise along the lake called the New York, a nod to its exclusiveness and to Chicago’s Second City insecurity. It’s a two-bedroom apartment, which Mike keeps pristine. It’s been a long day, not because he’s done much but rather because he’s feeling somewhat sorry for himself. He just ended a five-year relationship, the longest he’s ever had, and he can’t quite figure out why it didn’t work. He’s been napping and is now cleaning: refolding clothes in his closet, scrubbing dishes, washing the windows and the mirrors with Windex. His overweight six-year-old Lab, Lucky, lies on his bed in the living room, and Mike coaxes him up to take him for a short walk. At 8:30 Mike’s son is coming by, once he gets off work, and it’s the one thing Mike is looking forward to. It’s a tradition. Every Father’s Day the two of them get together for pizza, and sit on the small balcony which overlooks both Lake Michigan and the downtown skyline, and there they talk about things they don’t talk about with anyone else. Mike calls his patio their “dome of silence.” For both, their lives have been shaped by secrets, secrets from each other, secrets from others, secrets from themselves. For both, holding on to those secrets have left them floating, alone, with only each other to hold to. They are each enshrouded in silence, silence about what really matters.

  After returning from walking Lucky, Mike puts on some freshly pressed shorts, a polo shirt, and boat shoes and sits on his living room couch and waits.

  * * *

  —

  It’s 1993, and Mike, who’s twenty-four, is living hard. He sells real estate, making money hand over fist, and during lunch he goes out with the boys, usually to what they call “the chink place” or “the spic place,” where they boast of their sexual exploits. On occasion they head to Heavenly Bodies, a nearby strip club, where Mike always brings a wad of cash and pays for a lap dance the moment he walks through the door, which he follows with a couple of vodka tonics. And then he goes back to the office.

  On the weekends Mike sees his favorite uncle, Mike, whom he’s named after. Like Mike, his uncle is short, but stockier and muscular. He’s a brawler and had been a heavy drinker until he gave it up—the drinking, that is. Sometimes Uncle Mike would take Mike out on Lake Michigan in his 34-foot power boat. There they’d smoke cheap cigars—Macanudos—which his Uncle first gave Mike when he was fourteen, instructing him, Don’t inhale it like an idiot. On the boat Mike’s uncle would regale him with stories of his past. The green scar on his forehead? He’d gotten into a barroom fight, and they held him down on the floor and burned cigarettes into his skin. Or Uncle Mike would offer lessons on women. The definition of confidence, he informed Mike, is that you rent the room first and then you go look for the girl. He taught Mike how to play poker, not to be an “ace kicker,” that is, not to blindly hold on to your aces. And together they’d watch John Wayne movies. To Mike, Uncle Mike was like a god. Mike wanted to be like him, to have everyone afraid of him, as they were of Uncle Mike. And Mike knew that he was Uncle Mike’s favorite. Uncle Mike didn’t even have a relationship with his own kids.

  Mike is baby-faced, with blond hair, well coiffed, parted on the side. Were it not for the bags under his eyes, he could pass for a high school student. He wears shirts buttoned at the collar. When he isn’t partying, he’s selling homes, seven days a week, sometimes twelve hours a day. He made $75,000 the previous year, good money for someone in his early twenties. One day his boss pulls him aside, tells him he needs to slow down. In fact, he demands it. Mike resists, but his boss won’t budge. He tells Mike he needs to take a day off from work each week, just chill or volunteer somewhere. Mike’s not the type to sit still, so he volunteers at an orphanage which he’s learned about through his church. He thinks to himself, I’ll go there one day a week, satisfy my boss, and then, well, drop it. When he tells his boss his plans, his boss seems surprised. Mike laughs. I’m gonna teach those buggers how to drink, Mike tells him.

  The orphanage was situated in the western suburbs, and when Mike got there, he didn’t like what he saw. The staff called the kids names, like “retard” and “fat,” sometimes prefacing them with racial slurs. The staff hijacked the one television and watched the shows they wanted to. They seemed arbitrary in their punishment, one time marching the
kids around like they were convicts, their hands on each other’s shoulders. One boy in particular returned the verbal lances hurled by the staff. Victor was a wiry nine-year-old African-American boy. He had a coffee-colored complexion. An uneven haircut. A grin that was notable for the overbite and for the cheeks that expanded as if he was hoarding nuts. He was cute but temperamental. Mike asked about him, and learned from the staff that Victor had a lot swirling inside him. His mother had abandoned him and his five siblings. Victor, who was the oldest, would steal food from local bodegas to feed his brothers and sisters. Mike also learned that Victor had been in and out of ten foster homes, mainly because he kept running away or because his temper scared those around him. But it was clear that Victor had much to be angry about. This center was a place of last resort, and given his age and his behavioral issues, it seemed unlikely that he’d find a home. Mike saw something of himself in Victor—hotheaded and stubborn, someone who had a storm raging inside, a storm no one could see. “He was a handful,” Mike recalls. “But as long as you would talk to him like a human being, he would listen. He just wanted to be treated fair, like any kid would, and the staff, that wasn’t their way.” Mike and Victor became close, and the reason Mike kept going back week after week was to see Victor. They would play video games or watch movies, or Mike would watch Victor ride his bike or play basketball. One time Mike had to break up a fight on the basketball court between Victor and an older girl. Victor seemed so angry, Mike thought.

  Once, Victor told Mike that a staff person had stabbed him in the wrist with a pen, and he showed Mike the wound. At a game of King of the Hill, out of sight of the other staff, Mike grabbed the offender by the neck and wrestled him to the ground, in front of the kids. Mike and Victor had this in common: they didn’t take kindly to perceived injustices—and they both often reacted out of proportion to the offense in question. After the second time the staff led the kids around like prison inmates, hands on each other’s shoulders, Victor lost it. It was degrading, to him and the others, so he trashed the cafeteria, flipping over tables and throwing chairs. As punishment, the staff took away for three months the most important thing to Victor: his visits with Mike. But before they did, they let Mike see him one last time. Victor seemed cold and distant, unwilling to make eye contact. Mike assured him, Don’t worry, I’ll be back in three months. Victor snarled, No you won’t. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been abandoned. Mike felt Victor’s fury along with his resignation, as if he were saying, Look, they can do anything they want to me here. There’s nothing you or I can do about it. Victor thought to himself, Here’s yet one more person in my life who’s going to disappear.

  On the way home that day, Mike chain-smoked a pack of Marlboro Lights, one after the other in the span of ten minutes, and on that drive, he made a decision that he was going to adopt—or at least try to adopt—Victor. He knew it would mean a change of lifestyle. He knew that he’d have to dispel notions people might have: What’s a single man doing adopting a boy? He knew that he’d have to grow up quickly—learn to cook, quit the partying and smoking, pull back on the swearing and drinking, knuckle down at work. But mostly he worried whether it made sense for a white man to adopt a black boy. Whatever it took, he thought to himself, he needed to get Victor out of that environment. He called twenty or so agencies, looking for someone to help him with the adoption, and only one person called back: Jerry Harris, a caseworker at Maryville Academy, a home for abused children. “It was,” Jerry recalled, “one of the most unusual phone calls that I ever received.” Mike introduced himself and told Jerry that he was interested in getting this boy from a program into his home.

  He’s black, Mike declared.

  Okay, Jerry replied.

  And I’m white.

  Okay.

  Is that a problem?

  Not unless you think it’s one. Will you care for this kid?

  Absolutely.

  Color is nothing, then. Don’t worry about it.

  Jerry Harris, it turns out, was black as well.

  Mike underwent a background check, got approval to take Victor in as a foster child. So Mike went to get him, and when he got to the facility, he couldn’t find him. He was in a time-out, which meant the staff had him facing a concrete wall, hands behind his back. Periodically a staff person would walk by and knock Victor’s head against the wall. Mike found him, put his arm around him, and whispered, This is your last ten minutes here. You’re done. You’re coming home with me. Victor smiled, barely. When Victor finished his punishment, he told Mike, Let’s just go. He took nothing with him except for the clothes he was wearing.

  At his two-bedroom apartment, Mike had decorated Victor’s new room. Posters of Victor’s favorite Power Ranger, the green Ranger, and one of Michael Jordan. X-Men toys everywhere. A couple of stuffed animals. A new Schwinn. A comforter with an image of the Wolverine from X-Men. This is my room? Victor asked, his eyes wide with excitement. I don’t have to share this with anybody? Mike turned to the side to wipe away tears. All Victor wanted to know was whether this was permanent, whether they’d be able to stay together.

  Immediately Mike started getting pushback from family and friends. Victor would come to his office after school to do homework, and one day one of Mike’s coworkers, a woman, came by his desk, and offered advice: Puppies belong with puppies and kittens belong with kittens. And then there was his family. Mike’s mother, whom he was close to, chastised him: You’re not ready. What do you know about being a parent? You can’t even cook. What about the drinking? “It scared the heck out of me,” she told me. Others in his family couldn’t stand the idea of Mike adopting a black boy. One family member asked Mike to stop referring to him as “my son” and instead to call him “my foster son.” The hardest blow came from Mike’s uncle, whom Mike idolized. His Uncle Mike told others, He better not bring that nigger around. If he does, I’ll kill both of ’em. He’s not family anymore. One day Mike’s mother asked Mike to pick up two cousins who were visiting from Ireland. When Mike pulled up at his uncle’s, the two cousins ran to his car, yelling, He’s getting his gun. He’s getting his gun. Mike drove off, and cut off contact with his uncle. Fuck him, he thought.

  And then in adoption court the judge wondered aloud whether Victor wouldn’t be better off with a black family. That would be great, but that’s not an option for him, Mike told the judge at one point. Nobody wants this kid, and I do, and I don’t know what else to say. Jerry, his caseworker, was so concerned that Mike would unravel in court that he carried cash should he be held in contempt and need to get bailed out.

  For four years the case dragged on. And then one day the judge was out ill and his substitute told Mike he had two minutes to plead his case. No, that’s okay. This is a waste of time, Mike sneered. She looked at her watch. You now have a minute and a half.

  Mike ranted. This is a joke. It’s been four years. The kid was on medication when he first moved in. He’s off medication now. He was flunking all his classes. Now he’s an A student. The kid is phenomenal. What else are we supposed to do? And he wants it. As he ramped up, the judge smacked her gavel down. This is ridiculous, the judge told Mike who interpreted her remarks as meaning the case would continue to drag on. Come back in two weeks, she continued. The adoption will be finalized.

  At the ceremony, Mike beamed with pride when Victor stood before the judge, his thin chest pushed out, and announced his new name to the court: I’m Victor Lee Kelly.

  And so Mike and Victor Kelly began to carve out a life together. Mike bought a home in a northwest suburb, Schaumburg, mainly for the schools and for its distance from the city’s street gangs. A stickler for cleanliness, Mike badgered Victor about the mess in his room, his fingerprints on the windows and mirrors. He set a curfew. Victor pushed back, but no more or less than any teen. When Victor got in trouble with a teacher for clowning in class, Mike took off from work and sat in the back of the classroom
for the day. Mike didn’t cook, so they went out—a lot, so much that at TGI Friday’s, their go-to restaurant, they eventually amassed 50,000 points, having spent $5,000 there. Every night before bed, they each told the other, I love you. Even when Victor left the house to go to school or to visit friends, Mike insisted. Mike’s mother, who immediately took a liking to Victor, still didn’t think her son was up to being a father, but when she complimented one of Mike’s coworkers for volunteering in the Big Brother program, Mike interrupted. Mom, what do you think I’m doing? I get nothing from you but this idiot friend does it for one day and you’re going to build a statue to him. That did it. “It hit me like a rock,” Mike’s mother, Cathy, told me. “I’m not giving my son credit for what he’s done or what he’s accomplished.” She got more involved in their lives. She babysat for Victor. She went to Disney World with them. She would have them both over for dinner. She insisted that Victor call her grandma. She and her husband, Mike’s stepfather, were the only ones in his family to embrace Victor.

  Victor at first thrived in Schaumburg, excelling at school, but as one of the few African-American students, he got pigeonholed by others as the go-to guy for drugs. And Victor, who’d never really had friends before, didn’t want to disappoint. As he entered adolescence, he fell—and fell fast. He sold marijuana. He got into fights. He connected with a street gang that had reached into the suburbs. Mike would call Jerry Harris, the caseworker who had helped him with the adoption, and Jerry in turn would talk with Victor. So did his grandmother. And his teachers. But it didn’t let up. Victor continued to sell weed, hiding it in one of the floor vents at home. He got into an altercation and threw a cookie jar at another boy; it shattered in his face. The police would come by, looking to question Victor about one incident or another.