Gang Leader for a Day (20 page)

One day Clarisse, the prostitute, walked into Ms. Bailey’s office. There were several women already in front of her. Ms. Bailey’s assistant, Catrina, was writing their names and noting exactly what each of them received.

“You got something for me today?” Clarisse asked, a lilt in her voice. Then her eyes landed on me briefly, but I didn’t seem to register. She smelled like liquor; her blouse was undone so that one of her breasts was nearly popping out. Despite the cold weather, Clarisse was wearing a black miniskirt and sliding around perilously on high heels. Her face looked vacant, and her mouth was frothy. I had never seen her in this condition before. She had told me herself that she didn’t do drugs.

“You’re messed up,” Catrina said, peering over her thick glasses. “You need to shower.”

Ms. Bailey was in the next room, speaking with a tenant. “Ms. Bailey, look who’s here!” Catrina called out. “Ms. Bailey, you need to tell her to get out of the office!” Catrina turned back to Clarisse and shot her a disapproving look.

Ms. Bailey came out and told Catrina to calm down. Then she motioned for Clarisse to come inside. As she closed the door, she rolled her eyes at me and sighed. I couldn’t make out the whole conversation—it was unclear, in fact, if Clarisse was talking at all— but some of Ms. Bailey’s proclamations were plainly audible.

“Get yourself clean or you ain’t getting nothing! . . . Don’t embarrass yourself, coming in here high on that shit! . . .You call yourself a mother? You ain’t no mother. You
could
be one, if you stopped smoking that junk!”

The door opened, and Clarisse stumbled out, tears in her eyes. She dropped her purse and then, as she stopped to pick it up, tripped and fell, ramming into the pile of donation baskets. As she tried getting up, Clarisse vomited, some of it landing on the baskets.

Catrina and I jumped over to help her. Both of us slipped on the vomit. A strong wind blew in from outside, and the smell filled the room. Clarisse resisted our help, but she couldn’t manage to get up by herself. Her pretty face had turned pale and pasty.

“Grab her and get her out of here!” Catrina yelled. She had to say this two more times before I realized that she was talking to me. “Sudhir! Grab her and take her home. Now!”

I tried being delicate with Clarisse. She was falling out of her clothes, and I didn’t quite know how to touch her. She began throwing up again, and this time it landed on my arm.

“Sudhir!” Catrina yelled.

Clarisse was on all fours by now. She was drooling and heaving, but nothing came out. This time I wrapped my arms around her stomach and yanked her up. I figured I’d better get her out of the office even if I had to drag her.

“That bitch don’t want me to feed my babies,” Clarisse moaned. “I need food to feed my babies!” She started looking around frantically—for her purse, I realized.

“Clarisse, just a few more feet,” I said. “I’ll get your bag, don’t worry. But let’s get you out of the office.”

“My bag!” she wailed. “My bag, I need my bag!”

She started kicking and flailing, trying to make her way back inside the office. With one last effort, I heaved her upright, causing us both to stumble and slam against the gallery’s chain-link fencing. She sank back to the floor. I hoped I hadn’t hurt her, but I couldn’t tell.

As I turned to retrieve her purse, I saw Ms. Bailey, standing in the doorway. She held the purse in her hands.

“Is this what she wants?” Ms. Bailey asked. “Is it?!” I nodded. “Look inside. You want to help this lady, then look and see why she wants her bag.”

I shook my head, staring at the floor.

“Look!” Ms. Bailey snapped at me. She strode over and held the bag up to my face. I saw a few condoms, some lipsticks, pictures of her daughters, and a few bags of either heroin or cocaine.

“Have to have that fix, don’t you, baby?” Ms. Bailey asked Clarisse, sneering. We all stood there for what felt like an hour but was probably only a few seconds. Catrina tried to interrupt, but Ms. Bailey waved her off.

“Go ahead, Sudhir, take her home,” Ms. Bailey said. She bent over to stare down at Clarisse. “If I see your babies coming over and telling me that they ain’t eaten no food in three days, I’m taking them away. You hear?”

Ms. Bailey turned and left. Catrina, with a disinterested look, handed me some paper towels. I bent down to wipe the vomit and tears from Clarisse’s face. She didn’t resist this time when I helped her up.

I walked Clarisse upstairs to her apartment and led her to the couch. The apartment was dark, and I figured it would be best to let her sleep. In a back room, her two daughters were sitting on a queen-size bed. They looked to be about two and four years old and were watching the TV intently. I closed the door to their room and put a glass of water on the table next to Clarisse. The scene was a study in contrasts. The apartment was neat and cozy, with wall hangings and framed pictures throughout, some of Jesus Christ and some of family members. It smelled as if it had just been cleaned. And then there was Clarisse on the couch, breathing heavily, eyelids drooping, a total mess.

When I had first met her, on the gallery outside J.T.’s apartment, Clarisse had set herself apart from other prostitutes—the “hypes and rock stars”—who sold sex for drugs. Plainly, she had lied to me about not using drugs; I guess she’d wanted to make a decent impression. At this moment I wasn’t too concerned about her lies. She needed help, after all. But it was pretty clear that I had to be careful about blindly accepting what people told me.

I sat on a recliner next to the couch. “I’m afraid to leave you here alone,” I said. In the dim light, I couldn’t really make out her facial expression. But she was breathing heavily, as if she’d just gone through battle. “Let me call an ambulance.”

“I’m okay. I just need it to wear off.”

“What about the kids? Have they eaten?”

“Ms. Bailey wouldn’t give us nothing,” she whimpered, a stage past crying. “Why she treat me like that? Why she treat me like that?”

I felt a sudden urge to make sure her kids were fed. I went into the bedroom, asked them to grab their jackets, and walked them over to a local sandwich shop. I bought them cheeseburgers, chips, and soda, and on the way home we stopped at a small grocery store. I had only fifteen dollars with me, but I told the owner, a Middle Eastern man, that the family hadn’t eaten in a while. He shook his head— as if he’d heard this story a million times—and instructed me to get what I needed and just take it with me. When I told Clarisse’s girls that we were going to fill up a shopping cart, they looked like I’d just given them free passes to Disney World. While they grabbed candy, I tried to sneak in a few cans of spaghetti—alas, one of the most nutritious items on the shelves—and some milk, cereal, and frozen dinners. When we got back, Clarisse was asleep. I put the food away, broke out a few Ring Dings for the kids, and put them in front of the TV again. They fixed on the cartoon images as if they’d never been gone. Since Clarisse was still sleeping, I left.

Two days later I returned to the building. Walking through the crowded lobby, nodding at the people I knew, I felt someone grab my arm and pull me into a corner. It was Ms. Bailey.

“You’re sweet, you’re young, you’re good-looking, and these women will take advantage of you,” she said. “Be careful when you help them.”

“Her kids hadn’t eaten,” I said. “What could I do?”

“Her kids ate at my place
that morning
!” Ms. Bailey said. She tightened her grip on my arm and moved in even closer. “
I
make sure they eat.
No
children go hungry in my building. No, sir.” She tightened her grip even further, and it hurt. “These women need to do the right thing if they have a baby. You remember that if you have a child someday.”

“I will.”

“Mm-hmm, we’ll see about that. For now, be careful when you help the women. They’ll take advantage of you, and you won’t know what hit you. And I can’t be there to protect you.” I wasn’t sure exactly what Ms. Bailey meant.

I nodded anyway, mostly so Ms. Bailey would loosen her grip. When she finally let go, I walked up to J.T.’s apartment to wait for him. It was the second time I’d been warned that I couldn’t be “protected.” First J.T. and now Ms. Bailey. I decided not to tell anyone, including J.T., about the conversation I’d just had with Ms. Bailey. In fact, the conversation had put me so out of sorts that by the time I got upstairs, I told Ms. Mae I had some schoolwork to do and had to get going. She fixed me a plate of food for the bus ride home.

 
 

A few weeks later, Ms. Bailey invited me to the building’s monthly meeting. It was open to all tenants and posed one of the few opportunities for people to publicly voice their problems.

There were about 150 tenant families in Ms. Bailey’s building. That included perhaps six hundred people living there legally and another four hundred living off the books. These were either boarders who paid rent to the leaseholders or husbands and boyfriends who kept their names off the leases so the women qualified for welfare. There were likely another few hundred squatters or people living temporarily with friends, but they were unlikely to attend a tenant meeting.

Ms. Bailey didn’t seem all that enthusiastic about these meetings, but she let me know that she well understood their symbolic value. “They need to see that something is going on,” she said, “even if nothing is going on.”

The meeting was held in Ms. Bailey’s office on a Saturday afternoon in December. Although it wasn’t very cold outside, the radiator was at full blast and the windows were closed. Ms. Bailey entered the steaming room and calmly walked past the few dozen people assembled on folding chairs, parking herself up front. She always sat down in the same awkward way. Because she was so heavyset, and because she had arthritis in her legs, she usually had to grab someone or something to help ease herself into a chair.

I was surprised at the small turnout. The attendees were mostly women and mostly in their mid-fifties like Ms. Bailey. There were, however, a few younger women with children and a few men as well.

Ms. Bailey deliberately arranged a sheaf of papers in front of her. She motioned for a young woman to open up the window, but it wouldn’t budge.

“Okay, this meeting is in session,” Ms. Bailey said.

A well-dressed man toward the back of the room immediately jumped up. “I thought you said you’d talk with those boys!” he said. “They’re still hanging out there, making all that damn noise. I can’t get no sleep.”

I assumed he was talking about the parties the Black Kings threw inside and outside the building.

“Did you make a note of that, Millie?” Ms. Bailey asked an old woman to her left. She was the official LAC recording secretary. Millie nodded while scribbling away.

“Okay,” Ms. Bailey said, “go on, young man.”

“Go on? I’ve
been
going on. I’m
tired
of going on. Each time I
come
here, I go on. I’m tired of it. Can you do something?”

“You got that, Millie?” Ms. Bailey asked, looking over the rims of her glasses.

“Mm-hmm,” Millie answered. “He’s tired of it, he’s been going on, and he wants you to do something.”

“You can probably leave out the tired part,” Ms. Bailey said in a serious tone.

“Yes, okay,” Millie said, scratching away in her notes.

“Will there be anything else, young man?” Ms. Bailey asked. He didn’t say anything. “Okay, then, I’m figuring you don’t want to talk about the fact that you’re living here illegally. Is that right? Now, who’s next? Nobody? Okay, then, we have some
serious
business to discuss. Before I take questions, let me tell you that Pride will be here on Tuesday registering all of you to vote. Please make sure to show up. It’s very important we have a good turnout for them.”

Pride was the organization I’d come across earlier, made up of ex-gang members and devoted to gang truces and voter registration. Ms. Bailey had already told me that she worked closely with them.

“What are we voting for?” asked a young woman in the front row.

“We’re not actually voting, sweetheart. You need to register first. If you’re already registered, you don’t need to come. But I want every apartment in this building registered.”

“Ain’t you even a little bit concerned that we’re just helping J.T. and the rest of them?” an older woman asked. “I mean, they’re the only ones who seem to be getting something out of this.”

“You want these boys to turn themselves around?” Ms. Bailey answered. “Then you got to take them seriously when they try to do right. It’s better than them shooting each other.”

“The voting hasn’t done a damn thing for us!” someone cried out. “So why are you so accepting of what they’re doing?” A chorus of “oohs” followed the question.

Ms. Bailey shushed the crowd. “Excuse me, Ms. Cartwright,” she said. “If you’re suggesting that I may be benefiting in any way by the voting stuff going on, you can just come out and say it.”

“I’m not saying you
may
be benefiting,” Ms. Cartwright said. “I’m saying you
are
benefiting. You get that new TV on your own, Ms. Bailey?”

This produced some more “oohs” and a round of outright giggling.

“Let me remind you,” Ms. Bailey yelled, trying to reestablish order, “that we ain’t had no harassment, no shooting, no killing for six months. And that’s because these young men are getting right. So you can help them or you can just sit and moan. And about my TV. Who was the one that give you fifty bucks for your new fridge? And you, Ms. Elder, how exactly did you get that new mattress?”

No one answered.

“That’s what I thought. You-all can keep up the bitchin’ or you can realize that every one of us is benefiting from me helping these young men.”

The rest of the meeting was similarly animated and followed this same pattern. Tenants accused Ms. Bailey of going easy on J.T.’s gang and personally benefiting from her alliance with them. She replied that her job was to help the tenants, period, and if that meant finding creative solutions to a multitude of problems, then she needed to be allowed such flexibility. To nearly every resident who complained, Ms. Bailey could cite an instance of giving money to that person for rent, for a utility bill, or to buy food or furniture. She plainly knew how to play the influence game. I’d been to her apartment a few times and, although she never let me stay for long, it was a testament to her skills: There were photos of her with political officials, several new refrigerators from the CHA, and cases of donated food and liquor. One bedroom was practically overrun with stacks of small appliances that she would give to tenants in her favor.