Fire in the Ashes (19 page)

“So I talked with Shirley Flowers, since she lived on Beekman Ave, and she agreed to help me get some neighbors out to help us clean the lot.” (Miss Shirley, who passed
away three years ago, was a wonderful friend to children in the neighborhood. If it was evening and a mother hadn’t yet come home, she’d bring the children into her house, cook them dinner, and, if she thought they needed it, she’d bathe them. During the day, she’d sit outside and keep a close eye on the avenue.)

Without Miss Shirley, Antsy said, she never could have organized the parties. But, as it happened, she got other help as well. “The first time we did it, a week before the party, two of the dealers stopped me on the street. They came right up and said hello. You know me—I say hello to everyone. ‘Ma’am,’ they said, ‘we’d like to help. Is there something we can do?’

“ ‘You can start by helping us get rid of all this junk,’ I told them. And they said they’d do it. And they did it, and they did a real good job.

“So Shirley and I cooked up things we knew the kids would like. Hot dogs. Macaroni. Chicken wings. Rice and beans. Somebody brought paper hats. It was a great party.…

“I love people,” Antsy said. “Leonardo, too. Doesn’t matter who they are. We had parties out there every year until he got older.”

Life at home in their apartment frequently was like a party too. On the weeknights Antsy kept things quiet because Leonardo had his school assignments to complete. But on the weekends and on summer nights, “the place was full of children.” Sometimes, she said, “I had seven kids sleeping over, every place that they could fit. On my bed. On the sofa. On the quilts and blankets that I spread out on the floor. Next morning, get them up, give them breakfast, take them up to Concourse Village, take them to the movies.…

“Once,” she said, “after I had sent them home, a mother called me on the phone. ‘Have you seen my boy?’ It turned
out her little boy was hiding in the closet. I called her back and said, ‘I found him. I’m sending him right now.’ Leonardo found this very funny. It turned out the two of them had planned it.”

His asthma, she noted, disappeared when he was twelve. “That was the year after the burner was shut down.” She could not be dissuaded from her firm belief that the two things were connected, as they probably were. Statistics released by the New York City Department of Health would certainly support her. Once the incinerator ceased its operations, hospitalizations for asthma in the Mott Haven area rapidly declined. The figure dropped by more than half within the next three years. Whether or not this was the reason for Leonardo’s freedom from the bouts of wheezing he had undergone since he’d been a little boy, his mother rightly looks upon the termination of the years in which she had to keep her windows closed even on the hottest days as a major victory for people in the neighborhood.

During his years in middle school, Leonardo continued to attend the program at St. Ann’s, not only for tutorials but for the creative projects offered by the church and for the atmosphere of unembarrassed intellectuality that was encouraged there. As one of the most successful students in the neighborhood and one of the most outgoing children at St. Ann’s, Leonardo now received an opportunity given only to a handful of the children in our inner-city schools. He was recruited by a good New England boarding school when he was in eighth grade, in 2001, to go there for his upper-secondary years.

His mother went with him for his formal interview and to meet some of the teachers and admissions people, whom she questioned closely. It was as if it were they, and not her son, who were being scrutinized to determine if they
measured up to expectations. But I knew that, after all her questions had been answered, she would not turn down this opportunity for Leonardo.

Unlike many inner-city kids who are recruited by prestigious boarding schools, Leonardo had no problems in adjusting to the academic pace. “He came into the school at cruising speed,” one of his teachers told me; and, with his social confidence, he struck up friendships easily and soon became a leader among students in his class. His friends, as I recall, anointed him “the Mayor,” because he seemed to have an easy gift for getting other students to agree to social plans that he enjoyably concocted. Along with all the rest of what appeared to be his relatively effortless accomplishments while he was there, he was also an athletic star, the captain of the football team, even though he’d never played much football in the Bronx.

“He was the only black kid on the team,” his mother said, which was “no big deal to him” because “he knows exactly who he is” and, she added, “never had to play those ‘black-is-better’ games in order to establish his identity.” This, she felt, was why he didn’t focus much on other students’ race or class so long as he could see that they respected him and liked him, which they obviously did.

Leonardo’s original recruitment to the school was occasioned by the eagerness, familiar in some of the other well-endowed New England schools, to make a place for “disadvantaged children” in its student population. But Leonardo was not truly “disadvantaged” in the sense in which that term is usually meant by those who also have a tendency to layer on another label, “culturally deprived,” in speaking about kids who come from places like the Bronx. In cultural terms, indeed—because of the grounding he’d been given by his mother from his early years—as well as in his psychological development and in his mastery of social skills, he was possibly
less
deprived than many of the
economically advantaged kids who were his friends and classmates.

Several of the friendships that he made during those years of school would prove to be enduring. Some of the boys from very wealthy families would later drive down to New York and spend weekends in the Bronx with Leonardo and his mother, hanging out in their apartment. Antsy’s home had always been, and it remains, a magnet for young people.

Leonardo went to college in upstate New York. It’s possible that he arrived at college with an excess of confidence that did not serve him well at first. In his freshman year, his mother said, “he fooled around too much. His grades were a disaster.” His first-semester GPA was 1.50, she recalled. “I told him that it sounds like someone’s body weight. I didn’t think that it was possible to score so low!”

That first semester “messed him up so much he had to do an extra year to graduate.” But he did honors work from that point on and won his degree in sociology “with a GPA of 3.4,” Antsy told me proudly.

He had to work for all five years while he was in college to supplement his scholarship—“all sorts of jobs, Barnes & Noble, UPS …, and I sent him money when I could to pay for extra college fees and things like health insurance.

“He told me that he missed my cooking so I used to cook a dinner for him every week or two. I’d wrap it up in foil, put it in the freezer, then when it was frozen hard I’d send it up by overnight express.” As mature as Leonardo had become by now, she said, “he was still my baby. I had to keep him happy.”

Starting in his second year, and more so in the next three years, he told me he had made a point of taking courses outside of his major, including several courses related to psychiatry and to developmental abnormalities. “I’d always had an interest in becoming a psychiatrist, so I
interned at a nursing home for people with severe disorders, schizophrenia, deep depression, and advanced dementia.”

I asked him why, with his interest in psychiatry, he’d settled upon sociology as his field of concentration. He said it was because he recognized how many years of further study it was going to entail if he studied medicine and, given his financial situation, “I had to wonder whether it was really in the stars.” At the same time, “I thought of sociology as something broad enough so that I could take it, if I wanted, in a number of directions.”

He also said, “People had been telling me I’m not a bad performer, so I took two courses in performance art.” I didn’t know exactly what the term implied and asked him if the courses he had taken focused upon theater—acting in a work of drama, for example.

“Not exactly,” he replied. He said he wasn’t really drawn to “speaking someone else’s words.” He said he liked to improvise. “That’s what I actually enjoy. One of my teachers said that maybe someday I should give it a real try.”

Last winter, after he’d been out of college for six months, when I stopped by briefly at his mother’s home, he told me he was working temporarily in a clerical and managerial position at the city’s major produce market, which was nearby in Hunt’s Point. “In terms of salary,” he said, “it isn’t a bad job for now. And it’s kind of interesting, checking out the orders that we send to these expensive restaurants and luxury hotels.” But he emphasized that this was “just a short-term thing,” a way to earn some money and to buy him time to take the pressure off so he could do more thinking about possible careers.

Meanwhile, he said, he was writing scripts for a stand-up act that he was performing, when he got the chance, in some of the smaller clubs where amateurs were given opportunities to see if they could capture the attention
of an audience. He was very organized in explaining this to me: how important timing was, how much planning had to go into working through a script that might end up being less than seven minutes long. “Sometimes, though, even when I’ve worked for hours on a script, I’ll get up there and I’ll think, ‘What the hell? Why not just say something that I’ve never tried before?’ You know, something that just pops up at that moment in my mind?” Those, he said, were usually the lines that got the most applause.

I couldn’t stay there long that day, because I had a meeting scheduled at the church and I’d also promised Ariella I’d come by to talk with her. Before I left, however, Leonardo said there was “some other stuff” he wanted to discuss with me. I told him I’d be sure to plan ahead for us to have a longer talk at a time when neither of us had to rush away. The next conversation we would have was going to open up some deeper and more sober aspects of his hopes, as well as his self-doubts, about the shaping of his long-range plans. But, first, a few more words about his very interesting mother are in order here.

Leonardo’s mother had been through a lot more turbulence and anguish in her life than I had fully realized up until quite recent times. People in the neighborhood thought that Antsy was a ball of fire. With her quick wit, her rapid repartee, her small body moving swiftly (she was barely five feet tall) as she clipped along the streets to go to the many meetings she attended or to one of several jobs she had throughout those years, and with the endless fun she seemed to get from having kids around her in her home, playing with them in her baseball jacket in St. Mary’s Park,
I used to think of Antsy like a force of nature nobody could stop. She looked very young; she still does. She’s in her late fifties now, but she could pass for thirty-five or forty.

It wasn’t until a year ago that she told me she had had a problem with severe depression (“scary feelings,” “racing thoughts”) for much of the time that I had known her. She attributed the onset of these feelings to the period after she left Syracuse and moved into the Bronx and her husband’s infidelity was driving her, as she put it, “up the wall and down again.” But I wondered also if her years of using drugs during those “hippie” days, as she had spoken of the period when she was in her twenties, might have been a factor too. “I was trying to find joy,” she said, “but it brought me misery.”

The problem was exacerbated, in the years when Leonardo was in college, after she was injured in the course of work at a home for people who, she said, were “mentally impaired.” Her patients, she explained, were women in their twenties, “a few of them as old as thirty-five,” whose emotional and cognitive capacities were those of children in their early years. “Some of them could fold sheets, match up silverware and plates, simple tasks. Some were autistic. One of them didn’t talk. Another one repeated everything I said. I thought of them as little girls and I came to love them.”

Her injury occurred when she came upon a member of the staff, who she said was poorly trained, “throttling one of the girls with whom I’d been working.” The patient was “a twenty-three-year-old with a mental age of seven who was always craving food. Her hunger was insatiable. She’d dig her hand into a peanut-butter jar when nobody was looking. She’d scoop it up and shove it in her mouth and wipe her fingers on her face. It would be all over her.…

“One day she was caught. And when this member of the staff took the jar away from her, the patient grew so
desperate she slapped the woman in the face. The woman started choking her.

“I walked into the kitchen and I had to force the woman’s hands apart and pull her off my patient, who was backed against the wall. When she finally let her go, the patient fell and I fell over with her. I was underneath her.

“I didn’t know until the next day that my lower back was hurt and I’d messed up my sciatic nerve. I only knew I had a sharp pain just above my hip. My supervisor said to go and see a doctor but not to tell him this had happened while I was at work.

“So, you know me and my big mouth. I went to the hospital and, of course, I told them everything.”

Antsy tried to keep on working after that. “I started reading all my patients’ histories. No one ever showed this stuff to me before. Staff members weren’t expected to examine the case histories. I told my supervisor: ‘There needs to be more information and more education given to the staff.’ He said he’d hold a meeting to discuss this. But his main concern was that I would tell somebody what was going on.

“Some of the people on the staff were good. One of them told me other patients had been beaten too. So I told this to my supervisor, and he asked me, ‘Have you talked to anyone about this?’ I said, ‘Yes. I told my doctor and my priest.’ I told him, ‘You can’t treat retarded people like you do.’ ”

They never got to fire her. She had to quit because she was in too much pain. For a long while after that, she said she found it hard to sleep, or clean the house, or climb into the bath, or go out to the store or to St. Ann’s. But the physical pain was “not as bad as the frustration that I felt at being cooped up here in the apartment all that time.” She fell, she said, “into the most horrible depression.” Even when the medicine her doctor gave her managed somewhat to reduce
the pain, “it was a struggle to get up each morning and go out the door.”