Fire in the Ashes (12 page)

After the officer had done his best to comfort her, and given her instructions about going to the morgue, because the body had to be identified, she told me, “I was
on ‘automatic’ for a while. I sent Armando off to school. I couldn’t cry. I was numb. I sat there on the sofa and was staring out the window. ‘What have I done? What do I do?’ I called a friend. She wasn’t home. I called my older sister, Ana. I went there to her house. But I couldn’t talk to her. I ran outside to her backyard. It was raining. Finally, she came out and made me come inside.”

Her sister, she said, “was good to me. She held her arms around me. She made me drink a cup of tea. Then she brought me back to my apartment.”

Soon after that, she said, her younger sister came. Then co-workers from her job arrived. “I was fortunate that the man I worked for was compassionate and kind. He came directly to my house and handed me the money I would need to bury him.

“Then my sisters took me to the morgue. Then they took me to pick out a casket. Then I had to find a church that would do the burial. The Catholic church that I attended said they couldn’t do it. They told me that I lived in the wrong zip code. I’d been there a week before to pray to God to help me. But they wouldn’t bury him.” She had to find another Catholic church so she could have a funeral for Silvio.

Her mother, she said, offered her no comfort. “The first thing she told me when I said that he had died? ‘It’s your fault—for having him.’ She’d never been a mother to me. But from that time on I hated her.”

For a long while after that, she said, “I hid from myself. I turned my feelings outward—into anger. I was angry at God, angry at the Catholic church, angry at my mother.” In the end, however, she turned her anger inward and was forced to ask herself if she
was
, in fact, to blame for never having found a way to save him from himself. All the early efforts she had made, the visits to museums and concert halls and restaurants and other nice and interesting places
in Manhattan, all those efforts to expose him to some of the normal things that children in the safer and less troubled sections of New York might ordinarily enjoy—was there ever any chance at all that this would make the slightest difference for a boy who’d seen what he’d already seen and whose chosen avatar of the triumphant and exciting life had been a movie character, who came to his own demise, as it happened, in a hail of bullets, by the name of “Scarface”?

“That movie was a curse to him,” Ariella said. But it was not the only curse, as she knew well, which is why she kept on questioning herself.

Ariella’s capability for level-headed thinking was badly shattered by her guilt and sorrow about Silvio. But even as she struggled to dig out of the depression she was in, she had to make the best decisions that she could for her surviving son.

“I kept my job but cut my hours so that I could be here with Armando from the time that he got out of school. My biggest worry now was how his brother’s death was going to affect him.”

Armando, she reminded me, had still been very young when they were in the shelters. “He hadn’t seen the things that Silvio had seen or, if he did, he was still too innocent and young to have ‘connected’ with them.” So the time when they’d been in the Martinique and similar hotels, she felt, had not affected him directly. “The influence was indirect. He learned things from his brother.…

“He was always hand-in-glove with Silvio. He looked up to him. And more and more, once Silvio began to win his stripes among the kids he knew here in the Bronx, he
saw him as a leader, as a kind of hero to the boys who hung around with him.”

Silvio, as she had said, thought he was invincible. “Armando had believed this too. And even after Silvio was gone, he still held on to this idea somehow. His brother, in his mind, was
still
indestructible.”

Ariella wanted him to give up this idea. “I needed him to understand that Silvio was not the hero he believed. His brother had destroyed himself. But I was not my normal self. My guilt was eating me alive. So, even though I was there with him more than I’d been with Silvio, I wasn’t there in the way Armando needed me to be.

“Meanwhile, we were still in the same neighborhood. Drug use, which was bad already, was increasing at the time. The biggest drug lord was a very scary guy whose sister was a friend of mine when I was in school, before he started selling drugs—or, anyway, before I knew that he was selling them. He was named George Calderon. His sister’s name was Lourdes, but people called her Sugar. Later on, she got a good job as a clerk at Lincoln Hospital. She seemed like a nice person.” It was not until her brother took over the area, Ariella said, that she realized that her friend was in the business with him, “although I guess it isn’t so surprising when you realize how much money he was taking in.”

At the height of his power, from 1987 to 1992, Calderon was renting sections of the sidewalks to lower-level dealers. “Once the city started moving homeless families here,” she said, “his business was exploding” because so many of those people had already been addicted.

I’d heard stories about Calderon before, some of them from a former dealer who had rented space from Calderon and who told me that the drug lord ran his operation from a building on a corner of St. Ann’s—which, Ariella said, was only one block from the church.

“It’s important that you understand that all this was
wide-open. People were terrified of Calderon, because he was ruthless if someone didn’t pay him. But in the eyes of teenage boys hanging out there in the streets who saw him in his fancy chains and flamboyant clothing, he was a celebrity. And because the stuff he sold was good, people who were desperate for drugs knew they could depend on him.” When he died—he was shot in 1992, a year before I came there—“he was given something like a presidential funeral right here at St. Ann’s.…

“Anyway,” she went on, “up until the day he died, Calderon controlled one side of St. Ann’s Avenue. On the other side—I mean, on
this
side of St. Ann’s in the Diego-Beekmans—there was another group of dealers called the Wild Cowboys. So this is what I mean in saying it was all around us. This is what Armando saw every time I let him out to play and every day when he came back from school. You couldn’t get away from it.”

Armando was eleven in 1989 when his brother died. “By the time he was twelve, dealers in the neighborhood began to give him small amounts of money.” This was not, she said, an act of generosity or because some of the dealers had been friends with Silvio, although Armando might have seen it in that way. It was a prelude, she explained, to the next stage of entanglement, one in which young people of his age were used to carry drugs for older dealers.

The reasoning behind the use of children in this role, Ariella said, had to do with the degree of punishment that would be meted out to children, as opposed to grown-ups, who were caught in the possession of narcotics. A dealer who was sixteen years of age or more would, if he were caught, be tried before an adult court. If he was convicted, depending on the circumstances and amount of drugs that he was carrying, he stood the risk of being sent away for a good stretch in prison.
A boy of twelve or thirteen, on the other hand, would be brought before a family court,
where a hearing would take place and the evidence would be considered. In extreme cases, he might be consigned to juvenile detention. That would be the worst. Far more frequently, he would simply be remanded to his parent or his guardian with a lecture and a warning.

As a consequence of this, a child of Armando’s age could be very useful to drug dealers at a relatively small risk to himself. Thus it was that, even as his mother was clamping down on him more strictly and severely than she’d done with Silvio, and succeeded for a time in keeping him at home with her at night in the apartment, and making sure he did his homework and that he went off to school each day, Armando nonetheless was growing more familiar with that other world, “the life,” with all the dangers and attractions that it held, which had seemed so glamorous and so exciting to his brother. Before another year had passed, Ariella would discover she was every bit as powerless to keep Armando from the streets as she had been with Silvio.

At the same time, although his school attendance was much better than his brother’s, the schools in which he was enrolled were among the most deficient in the New York system. At his elementary school, P.S. 65, Armando had been diagnosed with “learning disabilities,” but the school did not provide him with the specialized instruction required under state and federal legislation for a student who had been identified as having special needs.

“They gave the kids with special needs teachers with no expertise and expected parents to accept this. You know, ‘minority parents don’t make waves.’ And even if you did complain, it didn’t make a difference.… So even though he failed his courses they would pass him on from grade to grade. He wasn’t learning, but they kept promoting him and sent him on to middle school.”

The middle school he attended—one of two failing schools to which most children in the neighborhood were
regularly steered—was no more attentive to his needs than his elementary school had been. But, once again, he was promoted automatically and subsequently sent on to a high school, known as Monroe High, one of the city’s bottom-rated schools, where
four of every five kids who came into the ninth grade had been ejected or dropped out before their twelfth-grade year. But even a much better high school would, I’m fairly sure, have found it difficult to make a difference in the way that he was heading by this time.

“He dropped out a month before the end of the ninth grade,” Ariella said. “I wasn’t thinking clearly. I didn’t know as much as I do now about some of the special schools to which he might have been admitted. So I let him stay at home for the last weeks of the year. At least I thought that I could keep him out of trouble here.”

But, as she said she should have learned from her experience with Silvio, she realized quickly that her hopes that she could keep him safe at home were, “to say the least, naïve.”

He never did go back to school. “What I mean,” she said, “is that he wouldn’t
stay
in school on any routine basis after that.” And, by the time he was sixteen, he was no longer merely an apprentice to the older dealers, serving as their courier. “He was selling” and, she said, “other dealers were recruiting him,” because he was apparently so good at it. “And no matter what I did, he was slipping out at night, sometimes after I had gone to sleep, or if I went out to the store or was at a tenants’ meeting right here in the building.”

I asked her if she’d thought, prior to this time, of taking out a PINS petition on him, as she’d done with Silvio, but she said, “It didn’t work for Silvio. They couldn’t keep him in the home. If I couldn’t get Armando under my control, I did not believe a group home like the one where Silvio had been was going to change anything.”

At seventeen, Armando was arrested by police with a
weapon on him. “A friend, he said, had slipped a loaded gun into his pocket”—although, because I’ve heard this explanation many times from others who were caught with weapons on them in the street, I had to wonder whether he was telling her the truth. In any case, she said, “When I went to court with him, the judge released him to my custody”—perhaps because it was his first arrest. But this may not have been the favor to him that it seemed, because “within a matter of days he was back there in the streets again.”

He continued selling drugs but, for now, not using them, at least so far as Ariella could perceive. “He was smoking weed,” she said, but this was so common among adolescents in the area, as it is today with kids of the same age in white suburban neighborhoods, that it didn’t cause her the alarm she would have felt if she thought that he was getting into hard narcotics.

She had much greater reason for alarm when he was arrested one year later for possession of cocaine and heroin on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He was given five years on probation. “But, a few months later, he was tried again, this time on ‘conspiracy to sell,’ and was given four to nine. They let him out in four and a half. When he came out he was a different person.”

As was the case with Christopher, Armando had acquired a lot more of the skills of criminality while he served his sentence. He’d also gotten deeper into using drugs—“this was
while
he was in prison,” Ariella emphasized—and not simply selling them. “When he went in, he was smoking weed. By the time that he came home, he was using heroin. He’d become addicted.…

“It took about a year,” she said, “before I could get him to go into rehab, which he stuck to for a while.” But after a time, instead of shooting heroin, he was drinking heavily,
and when he was drinking he’d become combative. “ ‘No one’s going to mess with me or I’m going to kill them.’ ”

He was tough but, like his brother, not as tough as he believed. “When he was very drunk one night and offended someone at a party, the guy that he insulted stabbed him in the arm, cracked his skull, and cut off two of his right fingers.”

Soon after that, he went back to heroin—“using it and dealing it,” she said. He’d been twenty-two when he got out of prison but, because of violations of parole, he was back in prison, or at Rikers Island, seven times during the next four years.

Ariella told me only recently that Armando had been married while he was in prison, or between his prison stays, and had had two children. Looking back, she wondered if this might have been his ultimate salvation. His wife had never given up on him. “She was constant in her loyalty. She had known him since she was thirteen. When he came back from his final sentence, she was there to make a home for him.”

While he’d been in prison in the years when he kept breaking his parole, she had brought the children with her when she’d gone to visit him. The older child was a boy, whom I never got to know. The other was a little girl, whose name is Inocencia and whom I’ve met several times, a three-year-old when he was serving his last sentence. “When they came to bring him back to jail that final time, it happened to be on the baby’s birthday. They took him away in front of her before she had her party.…