The whole language, p.18
The Whole Language, page 18
Society has long assumed that youth in gangs hope for something better beyond the barrio, a future full of possibility. These youth, goes the assumption, would want to avoid having those dreams cut down. Clearly that assumption is wrong and so is our reliance on it. Sure, gangs cause problems, but it’s also true that problems cause gangs. We have a high regard for isolating symptoms and a very low regard for addressing undergirding problems. These young people can’t just say no to gangs, unless we offer to help them to just say yes to life, to a tomorrow that holds something better for them. For it is equally true that no gang member goes on “a mission” (a foray) into enemy territory hoping to kill. They do it because they are hoping to die.
I met Charlie at sixteen years old and I asked him, “What do your homies call you?” “Jehovah’s Witness,” he said firmly. I asked him why that might be. “Cuz I always be going to the homie’s house each morning, knocking on their doors.” What gave him an early rise was a household filled with terror and heartache. What Somali poet Warsan Shire says about the plight of refugees could be said of Charlie: “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark… unless home chased you, fire under feet.” Once I got to know him better, he confided, “I’m just waiting to die or get locked up.”
Jaime tells me, “At fifteen, I OD’d on PCP. The doctor said I destroyed thirty-five percent of my brain.” Then he considers all this and adds, “But we only use ten percent of our brains anyway. So, I think I’m good.” We can wait to die, and it looks like this sometimes. The homies will say of someone, “He’s chasing death.” Our living can be cut off at the pass if we aren’t connected to hope. Fire under feet. Death will come; no need to chase it. So, we decide to help each other find our true inheritance now.
We had a Good Friday service in a youth detention facility that included the reading of the Passion. The homies had the different roles, like Jesus, Pilate, and “the crowd.” They kind of got into shouting, “Crucify him. Crucify him!”
Afterward, I was checking in a with a homie named Oliver. I asked how he liked the service. “First of all,” he said, “I knew how the story was going to end.” This really made me laugh and compelled him to say with a smile, “So, I made your Good Friday… even better?”
One must look death in the eye to affirm it as the most real and single most important event of one’s life. We say yes to the necessary culmination of life. Freud had two reluctances: to confront death and to yield. The wise person practices death. The mystic practices and yields to resurrection. Good Friday… even better. “Life is a dream,” the Sufis say, “and death is waking up.”
Yes, the necessary culmination of life. It is said that Chief Roman Nose of the Cheyenne, and all his people, believed he was immortal. Safe to say, they were all right, every day of his life, except one. We were discussing death in my office and a homie turned to another and said, “Look, dawg. Have you ever opened the newspaper and read the headline: ‘MAN LIVES FOREVER’? Hell no.” Don’t wait for your last breath but for your next breath. Toward the end of Saint Ignatius’s life, he forbade himself to think about death, as the idea of it gave him such consolation. More like that.
I was a hospice grief counselor in Boston from 1981 to 1984. I only had two clients, Debbie and Jack, both of whom contended with cancer for over three years. Debbie was an elderly, sweet Irish woman and I accompanied her until she died. It was a privilege to come to know her family as well. My other client was a man named Jack who was exactly my age, married, and with a young son. Jack answered the door when I first visited, and when we both laid eyes on each other, in unison we said: “Oh shit!” We were a mirror image: same hair, age, glasses, body weight, and shape. Ten minutes later, his wife walked into the living room and said, “Oh shit!” It was a story we’d retell over the long two years before he finally died. It was a singular gift to accompany Jack and it was one of those heart-altering times of my life to pay attention to the dying of the light of him and of my own mirror image.
Show me a mystic who believes in hell, and I will think you’ve located someone who is not a mystic. But all mystics agree that there is another world and have chosen to see it in this one. I’m in an International House of Pancakes with Chino and Johnny. It’s evening and they’re ordering dinner. The waiter asks Chino, “Soup or salad?”
“Yes,” Chino blurts.
Johnny leans over, “Fool, you have to pick one.”
“Oh, well, a salad.”
“Salad dressing?” The waiter’s eyes are at half-staff, not one bit happy that Chino seems to be indecisive.
“What’s that one called, G?” Chino asks me. “You know the one?” Chino commences to do a hula dance, right there in the booth, arms elegantly undulating to the left and right. I let this big, lumbering gang member continue his dance for some time, already knowing full well what he means. This has made the waiter’s eyes widen to two fried eggs.
“Um, Thousand Island?” I venture finally.
“Yeah, dat one,” Chino says to the waiter, gesturing for him to write it down.
Once the waiter has taken our orders and left us, I turn to Chino. “Okay, can I believe you just ordered a salad dressing doing a hula dance?”
“I can’t help it. Thousand Island always reminds me of Hawaiian jainas [females].”
A mystical sense of paradise contained in the infinite present. It allows us to let go of the desire to expect anything beyond this moment. A hula dance in an IHOP booth or our next breath.
My office can be like that of a doctor, inasmuch as I don’t leave until everyone has been seen. This usually takes me well beyond closing time—sometimes, several hours beyond it. I can see in the reception area that there are two left, Danny and Moy. They both are little guys, best friends who grew up in the projects. The two rush into my office and occupy the seats right in front of me and blurt in unison, “FINALLY.”
Moy says, “We were waiting so long for you, our clothes were going out of fashion.”
I laugh and say, “Well, you know what Jesus says about the first and the last?”
Danny says, solidly, “Better late than never.”
With equal confidence, Moy says, “First come, first served.”
I look at them. It’s been a long day. “Close enough,” I say. Our antidote to misery will always be to stay close to such moments. It is how we dwell in the oceanic, the ultimate, singular place where God wants to be found. We won’t live forever, but we can always choose to live IN the forever.
In the spring of 1993, I was sort of in exile. I had finished my term as pastor of Dolores Mission and went on my prescribed time of Tertianship. This is a period of one year in the training of a Jesuit that comes roughly ten years after ordination. I was told that I would return after this year away and would do full-time work with gang members. Then, a sizable monkey wrench got tossed in the works and my Provincial told me this wouldn’t happen. It was complicated. The gang issue had indeed become pronounced at this time, and well, the powers that be thought, “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.” Sorry if I’ve turned the Vague-A-Fier on to its highest setting. Celeste Fremon’s book G-Dog and the Homeboys goes into greater detail.
So, the Provincial had a meeting with the people in the parish hall, and I’m told it was heated. I was not there. I was chaplain at Folsom State Prison. He made the mistake of telling them I had never been told that I would return. They admitted that they didn’t know what he had said to me privately, but they quoted back to him what he had said to them in a prior meeting. All the while, outside, a gang member was having a field day vandalizing his car. Yikes.
While I was exiled, I received a long letter from Edgar, a seventeen-year-old gang member, explaining in detail how he was now ready to hang up his gloves. Some years before, where, exactly, I can’t recall, but Edgar stopped in front of the window of a swanky architect’s office. There were elaborate and fancy models in the window, and he was captivated. I went back and stood next to him. He was hypnotized. “This is what I want to do, G. I want to design and build houses and shit.” We stared in silence.
His letter says, “Ya me canse [I’m tired] of all this bullshit.” He writes of how he wants to finish school, get a job, and marry his childhood sweetheart, Patty. About how he still wants to be an architect. He expresses effusive love for me at great length and asks me to do his wedding when the time comes. Then he apologizes profusely for being the one who trashed my “boss’s car.”
One month later, he was gunned down in front of Moon’s Liquor Store behind the church. Because of my “exile,” I was unable to do his funeral. But one of his homies, who was with him as he was breathing his last, wrote me: “He had this look on his face, G… like someone was talking to him.”
Edgar had told me once, “I don’t want to die without loving someone.” He was secure in this hope. No worries. I suppose that, in the end, we all want to “design buildings and shit.” We want to create and connect and love like there’s no tomorrow. One day there won’t be. How, then, to notice each other in the interim, so that we all possess that face, looking… like someone is talking to us. Still, it is this yearning of our souls that carries us in ways that are endlessly surprising and tenderly sustaining. Even death is afraid of that.
Chapter Eight
The Finishing Touch
I see Adrian in his hospital room. Multiple gunshot wounds riddle his body, but he will survive. And he’s too old for this. During the decade of death (1988 to 1998), when Adrian was “out there,” you’d understand it more. But this is twenty years after that time, and Adrian is a family man who shows up for work every day. The places where the homies live remain marred and marked, despite these personal changes, and a car passes by. Anyone will do.
“Are you in pain?”
“Damn, dawg… this pain… be kickin’ like Van Damme.” He manages a laugh, and it relieves me.
“You just missed Tony,” Adrian says.
Tony is his older brother by two years and also a gang member. Tony just got out of prison and had called me, collect, a couple of months before he was released. “Do me a paro, G… I need dress-outs. They don’t gotta be new, but I don’t want to leave here looking like Pee-wee Herman.”
Tony and Adrian survived a severely mentally ill mother. The tortuous imprint of their mom left scars they still try to sort through.
“Tony saw me here, in this bed, and he just broke down crying. It took him a while to stop.” Adrian says that he can only remember one other time when he saw his brother weep like this. “I was nine; he was eleven,” he says. “We fought over a toy and I told him, ‘Then I’m not your brother anymore,’ and he said, ‘Then I’m not YOUR brother either.’ And he cried just like he did right now.” Adrian allows this story to find its place in the narrative of his life. “We shared a bed together, so that night, we slept with our backs to each other. Finally, I reached out behind me and touched him on his back and said, ‘You’re my brother.’ And Tony said. ‘And you’re MY brother.’ ”
We reach back always to touch with tenderness, the reminder that what had us bound together in the first place still binds us.
The tender glance that “reaches back” is the revelation at Homeboy. The homies find the courage of their own tenderness. It creates a passageway that enables attachment repair. It restores a sense of security and mutual trust. Perhaps for the first time, resting in tenderness, the homies need not be defended, nor arm themselves for protection.
Many who have been in prison initially always have their backs literally up against the wall at Homeboy so that they have a view of the room at all times. It is quite common for homies to have difficulty, at first, closing their eyes during our meditation class. Homeboy longs to be a safe place and counterbalancing act of tenderness in the world. It is from this grounded heart-place that people are radically known.
And from this heart-place, we try to be a light that folks can see by. We live in “Love’s confusing joy,” as Rumi calls it. This kind of tenderness is deeply courageous and requires, I suppose, a bit of tenderizing on our part. A homie named Poncho just always wells up with tears at the drop of a hatful of affection. He said to me, plaintively, “I don’t know why I’m so tenderoni.” (Some new awful Chef Boyardee product might be called “Tenderoni.”) He confided to me once: “I’m just an emotional person. I even cried at The Wedding Singer with Adam Sandler.” But I would remind him of this huge gift he has, the very thing that allows him to greet others with awe, honesty, and human welcome. Poncho came to know that being “tenderoni” was the scaffolding that held up his ability to be a father and in a relationship. It was the “whole language” and the particular dialect of God that sustained him.
I first met Poncho years ago on an elevator at General Hospital. He was with his lady, heading to visit her sick father. He was drunk. “I know who you are. You only help vatos from the projects.” Poncho’s gang was from way outside the projects. This was a common criticism I had to contend with in the early years. Initially, the gang outreach was only to members of those eight gangs in my parish. Later on, the effort was expanded to the sixty gangs, ten thousand gang members, in the Hollenbeck police precinct. But this was a charge often leveled at me, especially if alcohol was lubricating the speaker.
“Give him my card, if he ever gets sober,” I said to his lady as I got off on my floor.
Poncho did get sober and walked through our doors at Homeboy. He accompanied me on a speaking tour once, along with one of his enemies, and we found ourselves stranded and completely lost (pre-GPS) in Burlingame, California. We were late and trying to locate this retreat house. I saw two elderly, highly coiffed ladies standing by a Cadillac. “Ask them, dawg, where’s the retreat house,” I said.
Poncho was not having it. “You shitting me? I ain’t asking them. People in neighborhoods like this, they be having nine-one-one on speed-dial.”
He’d been shot and hit three times, sending him to the hospital for fairly long bouts of recuperation. He’d been shot AT more times than he could recall. “I always walk on the side of the street that has more cars,” he’d said. I dropped him off last when we returned to Los Angeles. “I wish my dad could have seen me doing good. He only saw me messing up.” I had buried his father a year before.
“Well,” I told him, “he’s seeing you. He’s watching from heaven—smiling and proud.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” he said, “but it’s not the same.” Then he perked up. “Imagine my dad and me, both of us going to work in the morning, and at the end of the day—arriving home at the same time? Imagine?” The whole trip seemed to shift his entire thinking and organize his narrative thus far. What he had conjured here was enough to propel him that much more forward and cemented some inner resolve.
His lady called and wondered why we were late. Our flight was delayed two hours. He explained, then hung up. “Hmm,” he said.
“What is it?”
“She was worried about me. I don’t know. This is gonna sound weird. That feels proper. I never had anyone worried about me before.”
I pulled up in front of his house, and got out to hug as he left, after pulling his bag from the backseat. He hung on to me and whispered: “I feel like I known you… all my life.” I told him I felt the same. And, of course, he needed to wait before going into his house. He had served himself up a big bowl of Tenderoni.
* * *
Love’s confusing joy. Sometimes at weddings, I clarify the vows. They don’t say: “In good times, I’ll be happy. In bad times, well, not so much. In sickness, I’m gonna be down, but in health, IT’S ON!!!” No. It says: “In good times and in bad; in sickness and in health…” What? I will be joyful. Choosing joy in all the confusion, no matter what, is transformational. The proverb is right: “Those who wish to sing, always find a song.” Choosing to find a song changes any circumstance. And hope becomes the passion that thinks it is all workable and possible.
It is tenderness that helps bring the focus to delighting in the moment in front of you.
It’s closing time, in the ’90s, and the troops are leaving Homeboy’s little storefront we called home. Folks are waving and there are choruses of “Al rato” and “See ya tomorrow.” Everyone held as gently as they’ve come to expect. Topo is in the top five most imposing characters to have ever worked at Homeboy. He still looks like he’s stepped off the weight pile at Folsom’s B Yard. He makes it toward the front door and one of his co-workers—a rival, in fact: Giovanni—is seated in the reception area on a very worn couch. “So whatcha gonna do now, Topes?”
Topo thinks and then announces his ironclad plans to the gathered. “I’m gonna go home… and take me a bath.” He steps to leave, and as he stands in the doorway, he swings around with a great flourish. A cape would have served this moment nicely. And with a dainty elevating of his hands, he announces: “Calgon—take me away.” Before Topo actually leaves, he’s gratified with the laughter and applause, everyone finding a song in delight.
At Homeboy, we don’t want healing to be deferred. Now is the time. Here is the place. These are the people you can walk with. It is precisely this culture of kindness that stimulates the body and soul to heal itself. Since we are all walking wounded together, it is only tenderness that is mutually transformational. It can lead us all to awakened hearts. Calgon, take us away. For what we choose to address matters. This is why we choose healing over, say, conflict resolution, because we want to actually get underneath what’s there. Nothing festers, if we do this.
