“He’s fast, ain’t he?” Chris said to the five high school coaches who had stopped by to watch practice. “Real smart kid, too. And a good kid, never gets in trouble.”
Isaiah and some of his other teammates couldn’t help but peek at Chris huddled with the coaches. Isaiah had told Chris about his desire to go to Poly Prep, and Chris had assured him that he would get him there as long as he kept his grades up and played to his potential. Before practice, Chris had told Isaiah that a Poly Prep coach would be at the field. The boy felt an adrenaline rush.
“Isaiah!” Chris shouted, waving him over. Only a few on the team would be called over to meet coaches, and the call sounded almost the same each time: “Somebody here I want you to meet.”
Isaiah jogged over and shook hands with the coach.
“Nice handshake,” said the coach, who wore a blue hat with a silver P on the front. “Are you familiar with Poly Prep?”
Kids with Poly Prep potential like Isaiah and Hart—Chris knew he didn’t have to worry about them. He just had to give them a platform and let them fly.
GIO SAW THE missed calls, the texts. He knew the adults in his life were worried. He’d been spending more and more time out with his friends.
It was a beautiful time to be outside, warm, bright, and welcoming, and the streets seemed to sizzle with beautiful people. Young women floated up Pitkin Avenue, in tight jeans, pristine Jordan’s, and low-cut V-necks, white earbuds dangling into purses, eyes looking past the staring preteens and the young men stepping out of the sneaker store carrying shoeboxes in big paper bags. These young men dressed with precision. Their snapbacks tilted to the side at just the right three-quarter angle. Their fitted jeans hung tightly below their hips with just the right sag, exposing a flash of boxer-briefs. Their T-shirts were crisp. Their watches popped with loud colors. And their sneakers, of course, looked fresh out the box.
Pitkin Avenue buzzed in early spring. Men and women lined up along the sidewalk by the Dominican food truck, and the smells of hot sauce, roasted chicken, and plantains hit anybody who walked past. Old women in long dresses rolled carts filled with grocery bags and old men in newsboy caps limped by on canes. Small children waited at the bus stop with their parents, arguing, say, about whether the tooth fairy gave money even if you couldn’t find the tooth. A man standing in front of a tattoo parlor offered deals through a megaphone: “30 percent off! Tattoos, 30 percent off today!” Buses squealed to a halt then growled back to life. A car stopped at the light, windows down, bumping Drake.
People are funny, you don’t even know ’bout the shit that I been through…
The scene was not much different from many avenues in many other neighborhoods across the city, many other neighborhoods across America. The main thing that made these streets different was that these were Gio’s streets. He’d gotten to know them well, though he had lived in Brooklyn for only a few months.
Gio wasn’t just out there to people watch. He needed to escape for a short while. He needed to be away from home. Some boys had been showing up at his building to wait for him. It had started as a small dispute—talking to the wrong girl, somebody feeling disrespected—but the conflict had heated up as the boys puffed out their chests, refused to back down. Gio lay low at a friend’s place, spent a couple of nights there, kicked back. Then he returned home. His mother was angry and flustered. Two officers gave Gio a lecture about staying off the streets. After they left, mother and son argued. Gio took off again. And again, his mother didn’t know when he would come back. She called Chris.
“I’m just going to the family court,” she said in a tired voice.
“They will take him then,” Chris warned.
“They can take him. He’s out of control, totally out of control. Nobody can get through to him. Cops spoke to him. I don’t know what anybody can do anymore.”
Chris stayed silent, and she went on.
“He says, ‘Oh mommy, those guys looking for me. Those guys are outside ready to get me.’ I say, ‘You don’t understand. You don’t understand. You think this is a joke.’ Every time I talk about Giovanni I get so upset. I just want to go to the court. I’m mentally stressed. I don’t know what to do.”
Chris and his coaches had seen all this before. For nearly two decades, they had watched kids age out of innocence. These years of early adolescence tested all boys. These were the years when boys began to forge their identities in relation to the world around them. When they stepped out of the fragile bubble their parents and coaches tried to keep them in. When they chased the cool. When they yearned to escape childhood and prove manhood. When the discipline and obedience they had valued in their younger days now threatened to make them look like suckers. To the coaches, a boy just needed to make it through these years alive and on track. If a boy could just get to high school, still thinking about grades and football aspirations, still dreaming about his future, still eager to make it out of the neighborhood, he’d already be steps ahead of many of his peers. Then he could go off to college someplace, away from the pressure, and he could return to Betsy Head during summer breaks and speak to the younger boys about how he made it through those years. But all that was far off.
In the meantime, there were mothers working two jobs who had trouble keeping their sons under control. There were abusive households. There were families without a home, who shuffled between shelters and relatives’ living-room floors. There were arrests and court dates and prosecutors who threatened time in juvenile detention. When a kid had it really rough, Chris had him move into his mother’s house, down the street from the park. Chris called his mother’s place the “refugee house.” His brother Jeff called it “the shelter.” By their estimate, more than 50 Mo Better kids had lived with Lillian Legree.
The support helped save many boys. The 10-year-old who’d walk two miles from Canarsie to Betsy Head until Chris found out and paid for his MetroCard: he was now playing football at a four-year college. The 11-year-old whose probation officer brought him to Mo Better as an alternative to juvenile detention: he was now a starting running back for a top high school. One 14-year-old was convicted of armed robbery, but the coaches wrote the judge a letter that convinced him to send the boy back to Brownsville instead of to a detention facility. He was allowed back on the condition that he lived with the Legrees and remained on the football team. The boy was now a starting running back at a Division II college. Several times a year, some former player’s parents would show up at Betsy Head out of nowhere to thank the coaches for keeping their son on track years ago and tell the coaches how well he’s doing now. Studying to be a dentist. Going to college in California. Managing a restaurant. Starting his own business.
Yet there was no telling who would get saved. Getting saved meant getting lucky. It meant staying free and alive. Pup stayed on the streets late into his teens, through his high school football years. “Pup was one of the kids we worried would be six feet under in a matter of time,” Coach Vick said. But he made it out. He went to college upstate. He got a job, a wife, and kids. The Boogeyman stayed on the streets, too. He’d lived with the Legrees for some months during his early teens, but dove deeper into the street life as he got older. He didn’t get lucky.
Chris and his coaches knew that not every kid would be saved. A boy had to be lucky, but he also had to make an effort. He had to show at least some willingness to use the support the program offered. If Gio didn’t choose to come to practice, Chris believed, there was little a coach could do. He had spent several days looking for Gio. “You know who he hang out with?” he’d asked one of Gio’s teammates.
“I know he’s out there on Kings Highway,” the boy said. “Out by the Green-something Towers. Kingsbay or something. That’s where he say he be.”
But Gio wasn’t at practice and he wasn’t answering Chris’s calls. With Gio again missing, Chris dialed his number once more, then twice more. Nothing.
ON EASTER, AFTER practice, Chris updated the coaches about Gio. Th
ey gathered under the shade of a tree near the front of the park.
“Man, I had just told him to stay out of trouble a couple weeks ago,” Esau said.
“How’s the family situation?” Gary asked.
“Mom’s trying hard, but he’s new here and he goes to 588,” Chris said, referring to the troubled public school Gio attended.
“Never had a chance at 588,” said Gary, shaking his head.
“Keep an eye out if you see him,” Chris said.
Beyond the coaches, a joyous atmosphere enlivened the park. Several boys wandered over into the crowd that had gathered for the afternoon’s festivities. Plastic eggs dotted Betsy Head’s field. A marching band from a nearby high school performed, and when they finished a DJ played music that boomed through the neighborhood. A step team danced on the track. Small girls in sundresses and small boys in pastel button-downs shuffled across the field gathering plastic eggs. Spectators sat watching from the red cement steps behind the baseball diamond. Many in the crowd wore light green shirts that read “Happy Easter Antiq” on the front and “No child deserves to die” on the back. Smoke from a grill rose above the party.
Two of Mo Better’s newest additions, brothers Donnie and Tarell, hustled through the crowd and found the line for the grill. They had lived in Brownsville when they were small, but their mother had moved the family around in the years since. There were five kids in all, and 10-year-old Donnie and 7-year-old Tarell were the youngest. They had resided in Far Rockaway, Queens, then East New York, then Virginia, where Donnie and Tarell stayed for about a year. Donnie liked Virginia. They lived with some relatives in a big house with a big backyard, a trampoline, and a small pool, and older cousins sometimes took him hunting. He didn’t know why they had to move back to Brooklyn.
The brothers lived in the same building as Gio and sometimes played with him at the park. Their family had been at the Castle for more than two years. “It’s violent,” Donnie said. “A lot of fights. But it’s cool, ’cause I know everybody there.” While Gio was figuring out his place in the neighborhood, Donnie was already comfortable with his surroundings. He and his little brother ducked beneath turnstiles and rode the subways around Brooklyn. They charmed adults into buying them candy, sunflower seeds, Chinese food. They walked around the neighborhood as if they were rap stars home from a world tour. “’Sup pretties!” Donnie liked to say to older girls he saw on the sidewalk. One afternoon, walking home from practice, they passed an auto-shop garage, where several men leaned over open hoods and flipped burgers on a grill. Tarell declared, “I hope some of that food’s for me! Better have it ready by the time I come back!”—which caused the men to break into roaring laughter.
During Donnie’s first two years back in Brownsville, he didn’t join Mo Better. He knew many of the boys on the team, but he preferred boxing. He was a very good boxer, his uncles had told him, with a right hook that could knock the snow off a roof. Recently, though, he had become bored by the sport. He had watched his older brother play high school football and decided that it was a better fit for him. “’Cause you could run around and hit and you have more space,” he said. “In boxing, all you could do is just stand in one small box and punch.” Donnie didn’t know much about football, the rules and strategy of it. All he knew was that one person had the ball, and opponents tried to hit him, and teammates had to hit those opponents before they hit the person with the ball.
Donnie was a rough kid. He got into many fights at school. When he was 9, a boy kept teasing Donnie’s girlfriend, so Donnie punched him in the nose. Blood was all over the cafeteria floor. “It just started pouring out,” he said. “These clumps.” When he moved back to Brooklyn in fourth grade, a classmate picked on him because he was the new kid. “Called me a pussy and a faggot,” Donnie said. Donnie knocked the kid’s front teeth out. He still had the marks on his right knuckles. “He thought I was an ordinary kid, but I don’t play.” A few months before Easter, Donnie began going to therapy sessions for his anger. It helped. He believed he was slowly learning how to control his rage, and he hoped to pass the lessons to Tarell. Tarell, Donnie said, was angrier than he was at 7 years old. The smallest frustration would send Tarell into a fury, throwing bottles against the wall or swinging open the door in a moving car.
On this afternoon, though, Donnie and Tarell were smiling and giddy as they reached the grill. Donnie looked up at the large man with the spatula. He smiled wide, showing the gap between his two front teeth, and raised his eyebrows––the face he always used on adults.
“Can I get a cheeseburger?” he said, his voice pitched higher than usual.
“You got two dollars?” the man said.
“No,” Donnie said. He frowned and looked down. “But I’m really hungry. We just finished football. Please?”
“A’ight, lil’ bruh,” the man said after a second of thought.
“Can he get one too?” Donnie said, tilting his head toward Tarell.
“I want a hot dog!” Tarell jumped in.
The man chuckled. “Yeah, I got y’all. Don’t worry.”
They walked to the long green benches on the other side of the park as they ate. A few of their coaches stood by the front entrance trying to recruit kids. Donnie and Tarell sized the boys up. “He look like he can play.” “I’d smash him.” “That boy big, how old you think he is?” They finished their food. Tarell tossed his napkin to the ground. Donnie gave him a serious look and Tarell picked it up and dropped it into the trashcan a few feet away.
They were sitting on the bench, their legs dangling, when a woman ran into the park with a frantic look on her face. She went up to the coaches and said, “A girl jumped in front of the train!”
“When?” said Esau.
“Just now. Right in front of a mother with three kids. You could see her! She was all cut up.”
The coaches walked to the Saratoga station a block down. Donnie and Tarell followed. They took in the scene. Dozens of people stood at the base of the stairs, looking up at the tracks. Police officers stood in front of the stairs. The station is closed, they told commuters, take the bus.
“I was sitting right there,” a young man in a gray hoodie said to an older woman in a green parka. “I woulda done something if I knew.”
“It was probably the same one that was crying,” the woman said. “There were a bunch of people that saw it and didn’t do nothing to console her.”
“You see people crying all the time,” the young man said. Then he added, “She was young.”
“Nobody saw this woman crying and said nothing,” the woman said, her voice turning angry. “They see her crying and say nothing. Everybody into their damn iPad and this and that and the other and see somebody crying and they don’t say nothing.”
A fire truck pulled up. The cherry picker lifted a firefighter to the tracks. Behind the crowd, a stream of people in bright dresses and button-downs strolled out of Betsy Head. A woman with two small boys approached. The boys each held a balloon animal from the Easter-egg-hunt party. “Somebody jumped?” she exclaimed. “Oh my God.” The three of them stood there, beneath the tracks, for a few minutes, then walked away, toward the bus stop. When the cherry picker came down, the firefighter held a body wrapped in a white sheet.
“Yo, that’s crazy,” Donnie said, still looking up.
“Donnie,” Tarell said.
“What?”
“You think it hurt?”
“I dunno,” said Donnie. Then after a pause, “Probably for like a second.”
“You think it hurt a lot?”
“Yeah.”
They stared up at the tracks in silence.
“Can we get another hot dog?” Tarell asked.
“Yeah.”
When they returned to the park, it was nearly empty. People were filing out. The music had stopped. The DJ said into the microphone that everybody had to leave “due to a situation.” Several police officers waved people toward the exits. Police cars blocked the streets sur
rounding the park. More officers entered the park and marched around the edge of it. A woman at the side gate asked an officer what was going on. The officer said that somebody had reported shots fired at Betsy Head Park.
SUMMER WAS COMING. Now Mo Better shared Betsy Head field with the Latinos who played baseball while blasting salsa music from speakers, and sometimes a well-hit ball would roll into a football drill and the boys would step back so the outfielder could run in and pick it up. Now the lady with the Italian ice wheeled her cart through the park, and the boys asked their parents and coaches for two dollars and crowded around her after practice. The days were hotter now, and at the end of one Saturday morning practice, a 9-year-old boy passed out, and Coach Vick had to carry him into his mother’s car.
The nights were lively, filled with more people outside, gathered in courtyards and in front of fast-food joints and streaming out of house parties. Brownsville locals understood summer and what it meant and what it brought. “It’s getting hot,” Vick warned the boys one day. “I know you wanna hang out. Stay away from knuckleheads.” The previous summer, Brownsville’s blocks were alive from the afternoon until long past sunset. People converged on stoops or set up chairs on the sidewalk. Laughter, chatter, and music often filled the air. But having so many people outside for so long brought dangers, too. In the summer, beefs that had gone dormant during the winter were back in play. “Now that everybody’s out and about, you might see somebody you had a problem with and now y’all gotta deal with that,” said Jay, a 15-year-old from Brownsville. “Gotta be on guard in the summer.”
Locals feared that the coming summer would bring more shootouts. Some, like Coach James, were all the more worried because the police were now forbidden from using stop-and-frisk, which the NYPD cited as an important tactic for getting guns off the streets. For years, officers stopped anybody they deemed suspicious and patted them down. Cops used this tactic in Brownsville at a disproportionate rate. Though the neighborhood’s population made up 0.2 percent of the city’s, around 3 percent of NYPD stop-and-frisks happened here.
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