* * *
—
Kathryn and Eddie were married in an Orthodox church, and after the two-hour ceremony, on the steps of the church, their friends and family (including his brother Gabriel, the Iraqi-war veteran, who is now married and raising three children) were greeted by a mariachi band. Nine months later, Kathryn gave birth to Salome. Then two years later she had twins, also girls, Melania and Viviana. Eddie loves being a dad. He dances with his daughters, sometimes under a strobe light to the sounds of house music. He reads to them. He has sleepovers, spreading out on their bedroom floor with them. He drives them around in his 1957 Chevy Bel Air, which they love. (Eddie cherishes classic cars.) “Eddie’s a phenomenal dad,” Kathryn told me. “I’m there for utility purposes.”
Eddie’s always moving. He has to. If he stops, the memories flood back. He can’t let them in. He’s tried finding ways to relax, to ease the stress. He loves amusement parks, and so one summer day he spent twelve hours with his cousin at Six Flags, riding every heart-stopping ride there, from the Raging Bull to Batman: The Ride. Kathryn says he was sick for days afterward. “It was not a good way of calming down,” he concedes. He loves the casinos, mainly roulette, and while he’s quite savvy about it (I’ve been with him on a few occasions, and he’s come out ahead each time), that can get expensive. Sometimes he’ll disappear into their attic to shuffle through his 10,000-plus baseball cards. In bed late one night, his heart beating fast, he couldn’t sleep. He tried talking to Kathryn, even though she was half asleep. Kathryn says he thinks about death a lot, and that night he talked about what if something happened to his daughters. He worried about his colleagues at work, he worried about Kathryn. He worried about himself. He had worked himself up so that he had a massive headache. He couldn’t get back to sleep. He prayed aloud. After that night, at Kathryn’s urging, he spoke regularly with a close friend who’s a psychologist—and he discovered gardening. Kathryn had suggested he give it a try, but he initially resisted because he felt it fed into the stereotype of Mexicans as landscapers. He planted some lavender and mint and found it so soothing that he went on to spend hours in the backyard, adding rose bushes, tulips, and other flowers. Sometimes he’d be out there until two or three in the morning. The smells. The beauty. The chirping of the crickets. He just felt at peace.
Eddie eventually left CeaseFire to become the executive director of the YMCA’s violence prevention efforts, and there he got the idea to connect combat veterans like his brother who struggled with PTSD with gang-involved youth, both to mentor them and to let them know they aren’t alone. The flashbacks, the fitful sleep, the anger, the overwhelming sadness, the forgetfulness—they’ve been there. The program, Urban Warriors, was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and on CBS Sunday Morning. Other cities have looked to replicate the program. He met with police officials and with the mayor’s staff. Eddie replaced his preppie sweaters with tailored suits. He had an effect on people. Kathryn’s sister ended up teaching in a prison because of Eddie. Anderson, a boy Eddie had mentored since he was thirteen, told me, “I want to do for other youth what Eddie did for me.” My son, who’d gotten to know Eddie, wrote about him in response to a college application question asking him to write about a hero.
The vets Eddie worked with at Urban Warriors seemed indebted to him. One, Alberto Boleres, who suffered a traumatic brain injury after driving over an IED in Iraq, saw himself in the kids he was mentoring. One of the boys talked about how he couldn’t hug his mom, how he couldn’t show emotions, and Alberto thought to himself, That’s me. Eddie helped direct Alberto to counseling at the local VA hospital and then encouraged him to go to college, which he did. “When I talk to Eddie, he’s like a father figure,” Alberto told me. “I know it sounds weird, because we’re the same age, but some of the talks I have with him are deep…Eddie’s the reason I’m in school.” Eddie developed this quiet charisma, and people found themselves drawn to him.
But the one person Eddie couldn’t seem to win over was Kathryn’s mother, Elena. Though she had warmed to Eddie, she didn’t share Eddie’s past with anyone, and she never asked Eddie about it. Over the years Elena struggled with her weight and her health, and she’d recently been having trouble walking and trouble staying awake. She was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension and cirrhosis of the liver. She needed a liver transplant. Over the course of the year she spent many weeks in the hospital, until her final visit in the summer of 2015, at Loyola University Hospital, where her husband, Kathryn’s father, worked. She went into septic shock. Her organs began to shut down, one after the other. Kathryn and Eddie went to visit her, leaving their five-month-old twin girls and Salome with Kathryn’s brother. When they entered Elena’s small room in the ICU, much of the floor space occupied by her bed and various medical machines, Eddie shut the door behind him, and as Kathryn stood by the door to block the view of passing nurses, Eddie pulled a paper bag out of the diaper bag he’d been carrying. “Mom,” he said, “I got the contraband.” She loved the food from Portillo’s, a local chain, and she just smiled. She could only manage two bites of the hamburger, but in a tired voice she told Eddie, Oh, this is so good. Thank you.
Her head sank back into her pillow. She told Kathryn and Eddie that she was feeling depressed and alone. The family doesn’t understand what I’m going through, she complained. This is so hard. I’m feeling claustrophobic. I can’t leave this room. All I can do is watch TV. I’m so bored. Kathryn didn’t know what to say. Eddie smiled. I know what that’s like, he reassured her. Elena looked bemused. Eddie explained, Mom, that’s what it was like to be in prison. Eddie went on to describe his cell, saying that he knew how wide it was because if he spread his arms (which he performed for her), he could touch both walls.
How’d you survive? she asked.
You just had to. People did things to help me. My family was with me, Eddie told her. Once Elena had told Kathryn she couldn’t imagine what kind of parents would raise a child who ended up in prison, so Eddie wanted her to know how loving and loyal his family had been.
It must’ve been lonely, she said.
You have to have faith.
He described the dinners in prison, always ground turkey and soy, which he detested. (To this day he can’t eat ground turkey without getting nauseous.) That sounds gross, she said. Eddie wasn’t telling her all this to make her think he had it worse. It’s just that he had found a connection and was taking full advantage of it. And Elena, for the first time, seemed curious about Eddie’s life. She wanted to know how he had managed. Lots of reading and letter writing and studying, Eddie told her. And, of course, his painting. Elena opened up. She told Eddie and Kathryn that she was scared, that at night her heart would sometimes go into shock and they had to use paddles to revive her. She asked them about her grandchildren. The conversation lasted maybe fifteen minutes, but in that time she and Eddie shared more with each other than in all the time before. A nurse came in to change the sheets, and so Eddie and Kathryn each kissed Elena on the cheek and took the remaining hamburger to hide in the diaper bag. I love you, Mom, Eddie told her. She died five days later.
At her funeral, Eddie was awed by those who attended. The janitor from Kathryn’s grade school; every Christmas Elena had made a Greek holiday meal for the custodial staff. A former grade school teacher of Kathryn’s who had gone through a painful divorce; Kathryn’s mom had counseled her. Another teacher whose husband traveled a lot; Elena would bring her premade dinners. “I learned a lot at the funeral,” Eddie told me. “She gave a lot of herself. She cared about people who were often overlooked…I realize now that it wasn’t that she didn’t want someone like me in the family. I think she simply wanted the best for her daughter. She was anticipating the challenges.”
* * *
—
One day, after Eddie had given a eulogy at the funeral of one of the Iraq war veterans involved in his program—he was shot and killed driv
ing on the South Side, not in the Middle East—he seemed shaken. We stopped to get something to eat at a tired-looking taqueria, taking a booth near the door. He left his suit jacket in the car and loosened his tie. He leaned over the table, and at first I thought he wanted to tell me something, but I realized he was just fatigued, more so than usual. I asked him how he was doing, if he’d thought about seeing a counselor again. He laughed and told me that just the other week his boss had told him, You think you’re good, Eddie. You’re helping everyone else, but who’s helping you? He informed Eddie that he’d arranged for him to see a counselor. This isn’t optional, he told Eddie. On telling me this, Eddie sighed and muttered, “I hope it’s just one time.” I laughed, only because of course Eddie’s wife is a therapist, and he more than most knew the toll that losing friend after friend can take on one’s spirit. And one counseling session, he knew all too well, wasn’t going to cure anything.
Sitting there, Eddie told me a story. When he was twelve years old, there was an abandoned two-story brick building, a former state office facility, in his neighborhood, and while it was boarded up, you could enter it by pulling down the fire escape ladder, climbing to the roof, and letting yourself in through an unlocked door. Eddie and his friend Sergio periodically sought refuge here, away from the craziness of the streets. Sometimes they would just lie down on the rooftop and soak in the sun, or Eddie would try to catch the attention of a girl he had a crush on who lived across the street. Sometimes they’d meander through the empty building, spray-painting their names or knocking holes through the walls, though the novelty of that wore off quickly. On this particular occasion, early evening, he and Sergio had climbed the fire escape to the roof, and then, guided by the day’s remaining light streaming through the building’s windows, made their way to the basement, just poking around, kicking at empty beer bottles and syringes, evidence that they were not the only ones who used the building.
As they clowned around, they heard a rattling of something metal, someone pulling down the fire escape ladder. They froze. Eddie panicked. No one knows we’re here, he told Sergio. How the fuck are we going to get out of here? Sergio told him to be quiet. They tiptoed up the stairs to the first floor and then to the second floor, where they heard voices, two men who were clearly keyed up. Eddie and Sergio stepped into a small room and squatted so they could peer through a hole in the wall. They could make out two Hispanic men, maybe in their twenties, arguing with a skinny black woman. Eddie recognized all of them from the neighborhood. The young woman, everyone said, was a prostitute and a crack addict, and while Eddie didn’t know precisely what that meant, he knew from the way people spoke of her that it wasn’t something to admire. They couldn’t see a lot through the wall, but Eddie remembers one of the men yelling, Fuck you, bitch. Eddie then heard the sound of a fist smashing into a face, and he could make out the woman falling. She yelled, Help! Help!, her pleas rising and falling as if she was trying to catch her breath. Eddie and Sergio stayed where they were, both of them frightened—for themselves and for her. Because of the angle they had, Eddie couldn’t see what happened next, but he could tell from the grunts of the men that they took turns raping her. Eddie worried that they could hear his heart pounding. The boys sat there, their backs to the wall, waiting for it to end, waiting for the two men to leave. Eddie was sure they had killed her. Once they heard the men descend the fire escape, Eddie and Sergio stood and began the march to the roof, which meant, Eddie knew, they had to pass the woman, who lay on her back on the floor, completely naked. I think she’s dead, Eddie told Sergio. Should we call the police? She stirred, her small breasts moving with her short breaths, just enough to let Eddie know she was still very much alive. They kept on going, too afraid to call the police, too afraid of the guys they saw. “I knew it was all wrong,” Eddie told me as he recounted the evening. “I knew it. This stuff stays with you,” he added. “It fucks with you.”
This story was a preface to what he was really thinking. “I look at my little girls,” he said. He and Kathryn had a fourth on the way. “What would I do if someone were to do something to my daughters?” He then told me of a recent dream he had had. Someone—he’s not sure who—kidnaps his oldest, Salome, and Eddie stalks the person, eventually catching him. Eddie ends up taking him to his basement and there ties the kidnapper to a chair. Eddie pulls up a chair in front of him and sits down, a pair of wirecutters in hand. I’m going to ask you the question, he tells his captive. And if you don’t answer, I’m going to cut off a finger. He asks the question: Where’s my daughter? There’s no answer, and so Eddie cuts off a finger. He keeps asking, and he keeps cutting, so that in the end he’s snipped off three fingers. Blood’s everywhere. Eddie woke up sweating, and was so unnerved by the dream he woke Kathryn. He shared it with her, and, ever patient, she listened, nodding her head, rubbing his hands. This is the price of resiliency, she told him, trying to reassure him.
He didn’t seem to hear her. Am I capable of doing that? he asked. Am I? Here I am asking people to forgive me, but can I forgive others? That’s fucked up.
Chapter 12
The Two Geralds
JULY 24…JULY 25…JULY 26…
On the city’s near West Side sits one of Chicago’s few residences for men coming out of prison. It consists of three low-slung red-brick buildings surrounding a small courtyard where you can usually find a handful of men smoking, each standing alone, lost in thought. The buildings and the men appear tired. The men do what they can to avoid drawing attention to themselves. They don’t need trouble.
I came here to meet with some residents, and so we assembled in the basement of one of the structures, five of us: myself, a man from the residence, and three women from a women’s halfway house nearby. The women told stories. One, Pam, mentioned that her son had been killed and that the only way she could cope was to write down thoughts and then rip them up, as if that would somehow discard the memories of the day. Another, Alison, told the group, “I don’t have any fear. That’s my problem. Once my mom was murdered I had nothing else to fear. That shaped me.” Another told how she had become a bully. “It was like water to me,” she said of the violence she inflicted on others. The women all said they’d been in trauma therapy, which explained why they seemed so self-aware. The man, who was short and slightly built, sported a goatee and an intense expression, as if he were pondering the deepest of philosophical questions. He had deep-set eyes that locked on you when he talked. But he didn’t talk much. Early in the conversation he introduced himself as Gerald, and then he seemed to disappear. As the women reflected on their pasts, he folded forward in his chair, his head buried in his hands. He wore a blue hoodie and I couldn’t see his face, so at first I thought he might be nodding off, but then I realized he was in some discomfort. At one point he raised his head and asked the women where they found their therapists. He mumbled something about a fire, about four people dead, about not being able to get it out of his head. “I’m always afraid,” he told the others in a voice so soft they had to lean in to hear him. “I’m not afraid of dying. What I’m afraid of is losing my mother, of being in prison, of being a failure. I’m afraid of living.”
* * *
—
Here’s how Gerald remembers that night of the fire, twenty-seven years ago, almost to the day. It was July 24, 1986. Gerald was thirteen, though when he tells the story, he remembers himself as younger, as eleven or twelve. He lived with his mother, Gladys, and his younger brother on the first floor of a small, compact coach house set back from the street, along an alley in a struggling working-class West Side neighborhood. An elderly woman lived in the apartment upstairs. Alongside the coach house, in the alley, his mom had set up a basketball hoop, tying it to a utility pole for stability. She wanted this to be the place neighborhood kids hung out, so she could keep an eye on them. When the kids would gather and play pickup games, she’d make lemonade and Kool-Aid for them. Sometimes Gerald, w
ho liked to tumble, would lug a mattress to the alley, and he and his friends would practice flips, learning moves he could use later when he tried to make money break dancing on Michigan Avenue downtown. Gladys worked as an assistant manager at 16 Plus, a clothing store at a suburban mall, and had chosen this cottage because next door, in a larger home, lived her older sister, Heddie, and her five children. They could help each other out.
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