Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (39 page)

T
HERE
’
S A REASON WHY
car insurers charge higher premiums for young drivers, and why young offenders are—or at least should be—treated with more leniency in the criminal justice system. Adolescence is a stage in life with its own dynamic. Teenagers have the capacity to perform as adults—they can produce children, drive cars, and kill people—without the life experience to always put those abilities to good use. They are more likely to take risks and less likely to understand what those risks entail. They are experimenting not only with substances (alcohol and drugs) but also with relationships (sexual, familial, social) and lifestyles. They are
working out what kind of person they want to be, and in that process they are about as likely to make sound judgments as the elderly are to make rash ones.

This is not simply a social and cultural process—a period when young people figure things out and have fun before settling down. It’s a physiological one. And its primary driver is not hormonal—though of course hormones have a lot to do with it. At that age our brains are actually changing.

“The brain is a collection of cells that communicate with one another using chemicals called neurotransmitters,” explains Daniel Siegel in
Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain.
“During adolescence there is an increase in the activity of the neural circuits utilizing dopamine, a neurotransmitter central in creating our drive for reward. Starting in early adolescence and peaking midway through, this enhanced dopamine release causes adolescents to gravitate toward thrilling experiences and exhilarating sensations.”
¹

This dopamine rush, explains Siegel, a psychotherapist and clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, has three distinct consequences: a tendency toward impulsivity, addiction, and hyperrationality. The latter, he explains, can lead to a greater propensity to take risks. “[Hyperrationality] is how we think in literal, concrete terms. We examine just the facts of a situation and don’t see the big picture; we miss the setting or context in which those facts occur. With such literal thinking, as adolescents we can place more weight on the calculated benefits of an action than on the potential risks of that action.”
²

Add to this combustible cocktail a brain that is more prone to novelty seeking, heightened emotional intensity, creative exploration, and peer-group socializing, and you have the recipe for the most volatile, vulnerable, exciting, and challenging period of most people’s lives. “While most measurable aspects of our lives are improving during adolescence,” writes Siegel, “such as physical strength, immune function, resistance to heat and cold, and the speed and agility of how we respond, we are three times more likely to suffer serious injury or death during this time than we were in childhood or than we will be in adulthood. This increase in risk is not
‘by chance’—scientists believe it comes from the innate changes in how the brain develops during this period.”
³

Such behavior is arguably not only natural but necessary. A bid to break through the borders of childhood and strike out on our own as apprentice adults involves facing fears and assessing danger. Notwithstanding the perils, if we didn’t go through this stage then we might be ill-equipped to mature at all.

“A similarly lowered risk threshold—indeed, a new pleasure in risk taking—likely propels nearly grown birds out of nests, hyenas out of communal dens, dolphins, elephants, horses, and otters into peer groups, and human teens into malls and college dorms,” write Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers in
Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing.
“As we’ve seen, having a brain that makes you feel less afraid enables, perhaps encourages, encounters with threats and competitors that are crucial to your safety and success. The biology of decreased fear, greater interest in novelty, and impulsivity serves a purpose across species. In fact, it could be the only thing more dangerous than taking risks in adolescence is
not
taking them.”
⁴

Greg had another term for all of this. He called it hardheaded. No matter how often he warned Gustin, his son just wouldn’t listen. “I told him, ‘I’m fifty-seven years old, man. I’ve been living longer than you, dude. I can tell you what I been through in fifty-something years in ten minutes if you’d listen. You gonna go through the same thing.’”

Greg, who thanks to his roguish good looks can still carry off denim jacket and trousers with white sneakers, really did have some stories to tell. “I used to tell him stuff we used to do. You know, I sold drugs. I gangbanged a little bit. But yo, man. You see me now. I go to work every day. I knew that that life weren’t nothing.”

Gustin was Greg’s eldest son. He has several children from different “baby mamas” and is clearly a devoted father—quick to bring out pictures from holidays and home—but he’s not exactly a doting one. When I ask him how many children he has, he stumbles. “I got . . . let me see,” he says, listing them to himself quietly while counting on his fingers. “I
got . . . three girls . . . and four boys.” Then he pauses. Something’s amiss. He recites their names to his fingers once more, as though doing his multiplication tables. He forgot one. “I have five boys and three girls,” he insists. The youngest, whom I saw after day care one day, is just two.

His warnings to Gustin came from bitter experience. About twenty years ago, Greg was shot by some “random dudes” he hung out with in Goldsboro. “You don’t know these niggas like I know them,” he told Gustin. “’Cos they shot me. I got shot messing with these same cats. Just hangin’ in the street with them boys. Gettin’ high a little bit, and they tried to rob me. They shot me in both of my legs. . . . I had to hide in some bushes. But I got away. I thought they were my friends. But then jealousy set in. We started makin’ a little money. They tried to rob me. Then they shot me.’”

Pointing first to his left leg and then his right, he says, “I got a long scar right here. I got a bullet hole in this leg. And a bullet hole back here where they bust my vein open. Shot me in both of my legs. I limped back to my apartment, and my baby’s mama called the rescue car for me.”

Gustin would generally dismiss these warnings as the chidings of a fretful old man out of touch with the mood of the moment. “Oh Dad, you scared, man. You old school. This is our time now. That stuff is old.” (Whenever Greg imitates Gustin as an adolescent, his voice drops half an octave and slows a couple of beats, dragging the syntax through the sentence with all the energy of a teenager hauling himself out of bed.)

G
REG SEPARATED FROM
G
USTIN
’
S
mother, Melissa, when Gustin was about four. Gustin stayed with his mother for a while before he and his brother, also named Greg, moved back in with their father when they were around seven. But when Gustin reached his early teens, the boys bristled at the boundaries Greg was setting and moved back in with their mother in Raleigh. “Daddy too hard,” Greg said, mimicking the whiny voice of his boys when they were younger. “He won’t let us do this. He won’t let us do that.”

But life didn’t end up being too rosy at their mother’s either. After a short while, Melissa rang Greg to tell him it wasn’t working out. “She called me up to come and get ’em. I went to get ’em at the roller-skating rink because they were getting ready to talk back to her and stuff,” he explains. Gustin lived with his older sister for a brief period, but that didn’t go too well. “She drove him down here and dropped him off because her boyfriend didn’t want him staying with her no more. His sister’s boyfriend and Melissa’s boyfriend got mad with Gustin and put him out. So she brought him to me.”

Greg took them in but thought moving the boys to Goldsboro at that age was a bad idea. “I said, ‘Man, you shouldn’t have brought him down here. These little niggas down here don’t want nothin’. And they got these guns. And he’s gonna get in some mess.’”

Goldsboro (population thirty-seven thousand) sits halfway between Raleigh and the Atlantic coast, but it’s off the interstate and on the road to nowhere in particular, with a quaint downtown that is mostly closed by seven o’clock. Wikipedia lists twenty-nine notable people who have come from Goldsboro. Its most famous progeny include Chris Richardson, a contestant on the sixth season of
American Idol,
and Thomas Washington, a First World War admiral and hydrographer with the US Navy.

Being from New York, Greg finds attitudes in Goldsboro limiting and backward. “This is the dirty South right here,” he says. “These people round here twenty years behind the time. They still let white people keep them in slavery round here by Uncle Tomming. I say you don’t need to Uncle Tom no more. We got a black president. That’s over with. We equal with everybody.”

Daina says, “They didn’t care about him because he was black. He didn’t come from an affluent family. His mother and father weren’t pillars of the community.”

Jasmin, Greg’s twenty-eight-year-old girlfriend and mother to his youngest child, agrees. “They’d get at you about the dumbest stuff here,” says Jasmin, who grew up in California. “About the color of your car,
your hair longer than theirs, your house smaller than them. It’s crazy. And that’s just the black people. We ain’t even talking about the white people. We don’t mess with them.”

Gustin had certainly had it with Goldsboro and planned to move to Raleigh the following Monday to live with his mother, who said she would let him have her apartment while he enrolled in community college. That was the plan, anyway. Greg approved. “I told him there ain’t no jobs around here. The only reason I’m still here is because I’m working at Walmart. If I didn’t work at Walmart I’d be working at Raleigh.”

Greg was an involved and engaged father. Every other Saturday, he took the boys to the Golden Touch barbershop. When the tax rebate came every year, he would share the spoils. Daina was impressed by the home-cooked meals he would make. “I mean from scratch. Like he’d make his own biscuits. Not pop and chips. Who does that?”

“They were like buddies,” says Jasmin. “They had their ups and downs, but they were like buddies.” Some of those downs were petty. One Thanksgiving, when Gustin could not have been more than thirteen, Greg took the kids to Daina’s house in a stinking mood. “He was flaming,” she says. “And I was like, ‘It’s Thanksgiving, what’s the problem?’ And he takes the scarf off Gustin’s neck and says, ‘That’s the problem.’ He had a hickey. The problem was the girl was eighteen, nineteen. Greg was livid.”

Every now and then, Gustin would “borrow” Greg’s cologne or the car without permission or a license. Over the summer, Greg had promised Gustin some sneakers but hadn’t been able to afford them, which Gustin felt was justification for calling him a “liar” and chastising him for going back on his word. The “yapping with his hands” would also stoke the embers of whatever strife was in the house. “He liked talkin’ back,” says Greg. “Normal eighteen-year-old stuff. ‘Clean up your room.’ ‘I ain’t gonna clean up no room.’ Wanting to sleep all day. ‘You need to cut the grass today.’ ‘Okay, I got it.’ Come back and the grass ain’t cut. Stuff like that. Simple stuff. Basic stuff.”

For his part, Gustin seemed to appreciate Greg, even if he felt he spread himself too thin. “My dad’s okay,” he told Daina. “He’s cool. He’s just got too many kids. He don’t even remember my last birthday.”

But over time, the “basic stuff” accumulated into more serious conflict. As well as the girls climbing in through the window, there were the boys hanging out at the house. It was bad enough that at times Gustin was running around in the streets, but increasingly he seemed to be bringing the streets home. At one point Greg threatened to deprive Gustin of his privacy completely. “You don’t pay no rent in here, bro, so I might just take the door off those hinges and you be like in the penitentiary. No door. Every time I walk past I can look in your room.”

“I didn’t do it,” he told me. “But I threatened to.”