Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (24 page)

When the oil bust came, this new clientele moved on, and the speculators were suddenly left with vast property portfolios and no tenants to fill them. They found new customers by slashing rents, eliminating the “no children” rules, and forgoing background checks to draw in low-income migrants, primarily from Mexico and Central America. Within a decade, Gulfton had been transformed in Houston’s imagination from trendy “Swingersville” to the “Gulfton Ghetto” and soon became notorious for gang crime.

Bellaire Gardens is one of those complexes. It sits between a store selling bridal wear and highly flammable-looking dresses for quinceañera—the celebration of a girl’s fifteenth birthday—and the back of a Fiesta supermarket, a Texas-based Hispanic-oriented chain with garish neon lighting that makes you feel as though you’re shopping for groceries in Vegas. Opposite are a pawn shop, beauty salon, Mexican taqueria, and Salvadorean restaurant.

The complex comprises two, two-story apartment buildings and is laid out in a square with a swimming pool and laundry room at the heart of a larger courtyard. The apartments are brick and in a poor state of repair. Each one has a porch, where plants, bicycles, and barbecue grills wait for warmer weather. Marlyn was always happy there. “It was very nice,” she says. “He loved that place. We knew the neighbors. Nothing bad ever happened. They all grew up there so they all loved it.” She lived there for eight years. They moved once, incidentally to a complex where Camilla’s family was also living at the time. But she missed Bellaire Gardens so much she soon returned.

They lived in an apartment overlooking the swimming pool in the central courtyard; Camilla’s unit lay on the periphery, closer to the entrance past the laundry room and just a minute away. Marlyn didn’t approve of Camilla’s family. She knew them well enough to say hello to them but had never visited their apartment and was none too keen on Edwin’s spending so much time there. She heard they dealt drugs and feared that Camilla might lead Edwin astray. “She’s my best friend, she won’t do anything to me,” Edwin told her. But Marlyn was not convinced. Camilla had a sense that Marlyn was not a fan. “Your mom keeps looking at me weird,” she told Edwin. “She doesn’t like me.”

But although Camilla came from more difficult circumstances, she was also much more focused at school and aspirant than Edwin. He went to school to mess around, but she had goals. She wanted to be a pharmacist. She played snare drum in the school band. She was getting good grades. None of her siblings had done well in school. “She was a bright girl,” said one of her teachers. “She could have been the one.” When she felt down because she had performed badly academically, she would get upset and Edwin would try to cheer her up. “Let’s go chill with some home boys and smoke some weed,” he’d suggest. “I can’t because I have to stay for band practice,” she’d tell him. Her nickname for him was McLovin, after the hapless character in the teenage movie
Superbad.

The Southwest Cholos run this neighborhood, complex by complex. There is no avoiding them. “They start them really, really young,” a
teacher at Lee High told me. “In elementary. Third grade, fourth grade. And that’s just how it is for kids.”

What defines gang membership are extremely subjective and loose criteria. Gang leaders don’t hand out membership cards. Sometimes there is initiation. However, since gang affiliation can be a guide to criminal activity and allegiance, with at least semiformal codes and boundaries, authorities are constantly trying to demarcate a more definite way to identify them.

Almost inevitably, such proscription falls back on stereotypes. In a 1999 article in
Colorlines,
it was pointed out that “In at least five states, wearing baggy FUBU jeans and being related to a gang suspect is enough to meet the ‘gang member’ definition. In Arizona, a tattoo and blue Adidas sneakers are sufficient.” In suburban Aurora, Colorado, local police decided that any two of the following constituted gang membership: “slang,” “clothing of a particular color,” “pagers,” “hairstyles,” “jewelry.” Black people comprised 11 percent of Aurora and 80 percent of the gang database. The local head of the ACLU was heard to say, “They might as well call it a black list.”
⁴

“You join for protection,” explains one of Edwin’s teachers. “Even if you’re not cliqued in, so long as you’re associated with them, you’re good. You have to claim a clique to be safe. If you’re not, if you’re by yourself, you’re gonna get jumped.” This is what makes the term
gang-infested
so loaded and so unhelpful. Many young people in certain areas are gang members in the same way that Soviet citizens were members of the Communist Party and Iraqis under Saddam Hussein were in the Baath Party—there was precious little choice. In and of itself their gang affiliation doesn’t tell you much. To treat all affiliation as complicity is to write off children in entire communities for being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

When it came to the Southwest Cholos, Camilla was a devoted member; Edwin was not. Though nobody said it, one gets the impression that his immaturity would have been a liability. He was a wannabe. “They accepted him,” says Ms. Thomas. “He hung with them. But he wasn’t in yet.” His mother knew nothing of this. But then parents rarely do.

W
HEN
I
WAS SIXTEEN
, I went on a camping holiday to Germany with a friend. On the way back to England we stopped in a small Dutch border town called Nijmegen. The first thing we did was go to a “coffee shop” and buy as much marijuana as we could. It might have potentially lasted us for a couple of weeks, but my friend and I stuffed it all into two huge joints. We went for a walk, bought packets of cookies, bags of potato chips, and pastries, sat in a clearing behind a housing estate, and smoked them both. We laughed uproariously and lay down for what seemed like hours, either rambling like fools or in total silence. Eventually the police came. They asked us questions in Dutch. We thought their accents hilarious and kept on laughing. They told us to go back to the campsite, but when they saw us head off in completely the wrong direction—we had no idea where we were—they circled their van around and picked us up.

At the site, they made us show them our passports and train tickets. “There’s a train that leaves here this afternoon that will get you to the Hook of Holland in time for the night boat,” they told us. “You should be on it.” By this time, even though we weren’t quite thinking straight, we knew we were in trouble. We scrambled to pack our things—not easy when you’re as stoned as we were—and sheepishly, still not fully sober, we went home. My mother was pleased to see me, but surprised because I had come back a day early. On the mantelpiece was an unopened envelope with the results of two O levels—standardized tests given to secondary-school students in the UK—that I’d taken in politics and economics. I’d received A’s on both tests. If anyone had asked her how my summer went, she’d have told them I’d had a lovely holiday and did well at school. She had no idea I’d ever smoked marijuana, let alone about my brush with the law in the Netherlands. As far as she was concerned, her A-student son couldn’t wait to get home, and so he returned from his adventure prematurely.

Parents may have perfectly loving, functional relationships with their children but still, particularly in the children’s teenage years, have precious little idea what they’re getting up to. Of course, there may be signs
that an adolescent is having sex, taking drugs, or drinking. But they may not be obvious, the parents may miss them, the child may be incredibly good at covering his or her tracks, or the parents may avert their gaze in a mixture of discretion and denial. It is possible to transgress any number of boundaries and still keep curfew, achieve acceptable grades, and be civil at home. Parents may have known their children longer than anyone else and understand their impulses better than anyone else. But that’s not the same as actually knowing what they’re doing at a given moment.

Marlyn, like most parents, had a very different understanding of what Edwin was doing than what he was actually doing. She knew he was messing around in school. How could she not, given the number of times she’d been called in? But beyond that, she was less aware of what he was getting up to. When I asked one school friend, Diego (not his real name), what he did when he hung out with Edwin, his response was brief and to the point: “Play soccer and smoke blunts.” Gabriel said that, among other things, they liked to smoke. On his Facebook page Edwin refers to smoking quite a bit. “Man just snook out of ma house and went to go smoke a joint with ma homegirl Camilla-fukkin high-B).” There are several posts declaring things like “Everything’s better when you’re high”; one post displays a picture of a woman with smoke pouring from her mouth and the words “Blaze it up.” For a few months in July, his Facebook cover photo was a marijuana leaf surrounded by smoke. There were signs.

So when Marlyn, looking for evidence of why he was behaving badly at school, brought his hands to her nose and smelled marijuana, it was a surprise only to her. She says Edwin cried and asked for forgiveness. He told her his hands smelled like that because he was helping Camilla roll a joint. It’s the kind of story a mother believes because she wants to. But then there were other stories few mothers could reasonably imagine. That summer, Edwin and Camilla had become embroiled in a feud with a boy called Stevie G. (not his real name), who was affiliated with a rival gang, La Primera (LP). His girlfriend had moved into the Bellaire Gardens apartments to live with her aunt and tried to befriend Edwin and Camilla. But they neither liked nor trusted her. She was in LP, and they
figured she was feeding information back to her boyfriend. “We talked a lot of mess about her on the Internet,” says Camilla. When Stevie G. heard about their insults, he was livid. Earlier in the fall he’d come to Camilla’s apartment, had threatened her, and had trash-talked Edwin. Not long before that, he’d shot at Camilla’s brother when he was hanging out on Bissonnet Street. Camilla and Edwin thought they needed to protect themselves if Stevie G. ever came back. So they pooled what little cash they had and bought a gun, which they stashed at Camilla’s house. “But we were thinking like little kids,” says Camilla. “I didn’t really know anything about guns. I just know you shoot with it and that’s it.”

On Saturday morning, November 23, as Kenneth and Stanley’s deaths lit up social media, Edwin slept in. Marlyn had made flour tortillas, which were his favorite, but he said he didn’t feel like eating them and asked for sausages and a couple of eggs instead. He was a picky eater, and Marlyn wasn’t interested in wasting food. “You’d better eat them both,” she told him. He said he would, and as he ate he took some sausage from his plate and put it in her mouth. They chatted about school and his friends. He’d just met a new girl and claimed he was going to ask her out on Monday. He asked Marlyn for ten dollars so he could buy the girl a burger. “What about Joanna?” his mother asked, referring to another girl he was interested in. “She’s with somebody else,” he said.

For the rest of the afternoon, he lazed around the apartment, going upstairs to play PlayStation and then returning to his mother’s room, where he lay with his legs over hers, while his phone charged and Marlyn watched television. It was unseasonably chilly that night for Houston—overcast and breezy with winds gusting at twenty-seven miles per hour. Edwin was cold and snuggled with Marlyn, coaxing her phone from her so he could check his Facebook page.

Around 5:30 p.m., just as Brandon was calling for a pizza in Marlette, Edwin put on his socks and asked if he could go to hang out with Kevin on Bissonnet Avenue. Marlyn said no, it was too cold and it was getting dark. Then his younger siblings had another idea. At the back of the Bellaire Gardens complex were some abandoned apartments where they’d recently found some puppies. Edwin hadn’t seen the puppies yet, and
the kids asked Marlyn if they could go and feed them. Marlyn agreed, so long as they all went together. She prepared some rice and shredded meat to feed to the dogs. They all left together, and she stood at the door watching them as they turned the corner. “Be careful, and don’t go anywhere else,” she shouted after them. But as soon as the door was closed, Edwin peeled off, telling his siblings he was going back to get his coat but instead doubling back to visit Camilla. “He knew if he’d asked me I’d have said no,” says Marlyn.

When he arrived at Camilla’s he looked like he’d just woken up. “I’ve come to see my best friend,” he told her. “Your best friend’s on Bissonnet,” she told him, teasing him in the knowledge that his first choice had been to hang with Kevin.

They chatted for a while, and then Edwin asked where the gun was. She thought her brother had taken it because of Stevie G., but when she checked it was still there. She gave it to him. Neither was remotely familiar with guns. He cocked it and then took the clip out. For a lark he pointed it at her and made out like he was going to shoot her. Then he gave it to her. “Make out like you’re gonna shoot me,” he said.

Although Ms. Thomas cannot speak to the veracity of anything that happened that night, from what she knows of Edwin this scenario rings true. She refers to Edwin as a “
What if?
kid,” chasing hypotheticals as a dog would chase a car. “He’d say, ‘Miss, what if I drop out of school?’” Ms. Thomas recalled. “And I’d say, ‘What if you live under a bridge?’ ‘Hey Miss, what if I walk out this door right now?’ ‘What if you get suspended?’ That was where his mind was at.”