There Are No Children Here (14 page)

By the time LaJoe learned what had become of Terence, she couldn’t win him back. Friends would inform her if they sighted her son, but when she got to the specified location, Terence was long gone. Once, she confronted Charles.

“I want my son,” she told him.

“Terence is my son. He belongs to me,” Charles replied.

LaJoe tried everything. She even went to the police. If they could find him, they would bring him home; there he stayed for a few weeks before taking off again. She asked a friend of hers who was a social worker and from the neighborhood whether she’d talk with Terence. But LaJoe couldn’t get Terence to visit the friend.

Paul also tried. Despite his estrangement from LaJoe and his habit, he never stopped caring about the children. For a short
period, he owned a car and took the children on a Saturday or Sunday outing to a nearby park. He didn’t think Terence or the others knew about his involvement with drugs—Terence didn’t—and, more than anything, he didn’t want his children to repeat his mistakes.

One afternoon, early during the time of Terence’s wanderlust, Paul grabbed his son by the collar. “C’mon, Terence, we’re going up there and I’m going to talk to this son of a bitch. He ain’t going to put nothing else in your hands when I get through with him.” A friend offered Paul a pistol for protection. He turned it down and dragged Terence to the diner where he had heard Charles hung out.

In the parking lot, Terence stood silent, his eyes riveted to the pavement. “Is this Charles?” Paul asked. “That him? He the one that give you the drugs and what-not?”

“Yeah,” Terence muttered. He couldn’t lie to his father.

Charles sauntered up. He tried to explain to Paul that if this was what Terence wanted to do, Paul should let him do it.

Paul felt his temper rising, and he began to shake. His stomach churned. “What you mean, this what he want to do? You’re taking advantage of him. The boy can’t think for himself. He’s only twelve years old. He don’t know what to do for hisself.” Paul paused. “Man, if you put some more drugs in my son’s hands, I’m going to do something to you.”

Charles just stood there. People began to surround the two men. To Paul they seemed to appear out of nowhere. From the barbershop. From a nearby fish market. From the diner. And from across the street. One had a hand buried in a brown paper bag. “Hey, bro,” he asked Charles, “you want me to pop him?” Charles waved him away. He didn’t say anything more. He just cleared a path and let Paul leave with a sullen and scared Terence. Paul felt so weak, his knees nearly gave out. As for Terence, “he slowed down for a long time after that,” recalled Paul, “but then Terence, he at times would disappear. He would just disappear and stay with friends.”

LaJoe and Paul lost Terence to the neighborhood. It is not unusual for parents to lose out to the lure of the gangs and drug dealers. And the reasons aren’t always clear. In one Horner family, a son has become a big drug dealer, a daughter a social worker. In another, one boy is in jail on a gang-related murder,
another has set up a neighborhood youth program. Some parents simply won’t let their children leave the apartment even to play in the playground. A common expression among the mothers at Horner is “He ain’t my child no more.” Micki, James Howard’s mother, would tell LaJoe, “Thank God I got a thirteen-year-old child who’s still mine.”

Lafeyette, who was six at the time, knew only that his brother sold T’s and Blues, though he didn’t understand until later years what that meant. Lafeyette considered Terence his favorite brother, and remembers Terence giving him $5.00 to $10.00 whenever he saw him. Lafeyette would see Terence in the street and, in full run, throw his arms around him.

“C’mon, Terry, let’s go home.”

“Naw, man, I gotta take care of my business,” Terence would reply.

“C’mon, brother.”

“Here’s five dollars. Now go on. Tell Mama and them I say hi.”

“Okay, I’m gonna tell Mama and them what you said.” Lafeyette would pause again, still hopeful. “You gonna come home tomorrow?”

“Yeah, I’ll come to see how they be doing.”

“You gonna come?”

“Yeah, I’m gonna come.”

Sometimes Terence would feel guilty and return home for a night or two. But mostly he kept on about his business, selling drugs. Sometimes when he ran into Lafeyette, he would treat him to a hot dog and french fries at a local diner. Lafeyette would be perched on one of the diner’s stools, his legs dangling, while Terence went outside to sell his drugs. Pharoah, who was only three at the time, was too young to remember Terence’s wanderings.

Terence missed his family. The first Christmas away, he heard from friends that his father had been robbed of several hundred dollars. A few days later, a young boy showed up at LaJoe’s doorstep and asked for LaJoe Rivers. “That’s me,” she told him. The boy, who couldn’t have been more than ten, thrust an envelope into her hand and then dashed out of the building. LaJoe, sensing that he might be a friend of Terence’s, gave chase but quickly lost him. When she opened the envelope,
she found $500 and a note from Terence, telling her that he’d heard of the robbery. The note asked her not to come looking for him.

Terence eventually grew tired of belonging to Charles; he wanted to be with his family again. What finally brought him home was an incident that at the time seemed minor to LaJoe but that Terence would talk about in later years as if it had happened the day before.

“My mom, she give me anything I want,” he recalled. “She wasn’t doing that no more. She stopped giving me anything. She just got fed up. There was one particular day, I didn’t have no money. I just had all drugs on me, and I told her to give me ten dollars. She was at the bus stop, getting ready to go shopping, I’ll never forget, on Damen and Lake Street. She told me no. She just said, ‘I ain’t got no money.’ I said, ‘Okay, okay, Mama.’ She got on the bus. I sat there, you know, like, man, my mama just forgot about me. It was just she was fed up with me.

“Yeah, I’ll never forget it ’cause I caught her coming back. She had some grocery bags with her. I helped her carry the bags. That’s when I got to slacking up. I started staying home. My mama started talking to me. That was just a little lesson there. My mama was giving me everything I wanted. I was getting everything I wanted. Then she told me no. She was real aggravated, real angry at me, frustrated. She said, ‘You don’t listen to me no more.’ And that hurted me. That was the first time she ever turned me down.”

Terence returned home. But the troubles didn’t end. He ran with a fast crowd. He and his friends shoplifted and broke into video games. He became the one who would jimmy open the machines. Some of the money went to drugs. Terence had started dabbling first with marijuana and then Karachi, the smokable heroin mixture.

He briefly joined the Disciples, who at that point oversaw his end of Horner. He got caught up in a few gun fights and had at least one friend killed. But he abandoned the gang because, while he was serving one month-long stint in detention, the members didn’t visit him. He still has tattooed on his right arm the gang’s insignia: a six-pointed star and a pitchfork.

Also, like many of his teenage friends, he became a father; he had three children in all, a boy and two girls. Like his mother,
he had his first child when he was fourteen. As tradition dictated, the child was named after his dad, Terence, though everyone called him Snuggles.

There were times when Terence tried to slow down, and, for a while, he shined shoes at the airport or just hung around at home. But by the time he turned eighteen, he had been arrested forty-six times for crimes ranging from disorderly conduct to purse snatching.

For six months, from the summer of 1987 through January of 1988, fifteen taverns in the Nineteenth Police District on the city’s mostly white north side reported robberies, sometimes as many as two a month. Two to four black males would pry open video games and run off with the change. In one instance, it amounted to $1500 from one machine, though usually it came to somewhere between $200 and $500 per game. The police say that in that same time period as many as thirty other taverns in adjacent districts reported similar crimes.

The robbers almost always worked the same way. Two teenagers would find a working-class neighborhood tavern where, early in the day—they never worked at night so as to avoid crowds—the clientele would be older and less likely to resist. The thieves concentrated on video poker games, a popular sport in many a bar even though it was played only for the thrill; the game returned winners no money. Since these machines took one-dollar and five-dollar bills, they tended to hold more money than other video games. While one of the youths would dance and shout in false excitement to allay any fears that they were in the bar for a purpose other than to play the game, his cohort would insert a long screwdriver into a narrow crack that ran down the front of the machine, and, using it as a lever, jimmy open the coin box. They would empty the coins into their pockets—they wore oversize overcoats for the purpose—and then race for the door, escaping by car or bus or the El. When four teenagers instead of two pulled off the theft, one sat down at the bar for a drink—usually a soda pop, since he was under age—and distracted the bartender with conversation while the others pried open the machines.

The police considered these “nuisance” crimes, because no one was hurt or, for that matter, even threatened. Also, the
robberies didn’t involve huge amounts of money. Nor was any other property taken. But north side barkeepers had been complaining regularly to the police, at one point even calling a community meeting. The police said to alert them if any suspicious people came into the taverns.

On January 15, the police received such a call from Lawry’s Tavern on Lincoln Avenue, a street that had had four thefts over the previous two days. Two young black males had come in, one of whom ordered a Coca-Cola. Neither looked old enough to order a drink. Three plainclothesmen hurriedly drove to Lawry’s, entering separately so as not to arouse suspicion. A few minutes later, as the three men watched from different ends of the bar, the two boys walked over to the video poker machine and began to play it. Then, suspecting that the three new customers might be police, they surreptitiously stashed their screwdriver behind a nearby radiator. They played two games, but as they started to leave, the police stopped them at the door and placed them under arrest. From one of the boys, they recovered a set of keys to other video machines; they also found the screwdriver. The police drove the boys to the precinct house, charged them with a misdemeanor, and took pictures of them in the hope that if they continued their robberies, bartenders would be able to identify them. The younger of the two, Terence Rivers, was the more easily identifiable: he wore his long hair combed straight back and down to his shoulders, at the time an unusual hairstyle. Moreover, Terence was slightly built, rangy and short.

When, two weeks later, four black males robbed Ann’s Longhorn Saloon and one of them was identified as Terence, it was reasonable to conclude that, in fact, he had broken into yet another video poker game. Only now he was an adult, which meant that the penalty would be much stiffer than a month or two in the juvenile home.

Ann’s Longhorn Saloon fit the profile: a working-class tavern in a sleepy, north side residential section of the city. The bar sits on a two-block commercial strip with another tavern and assorted small businesses; the El tracks cross at street level with automatic barriers that rise and fall with the coming of each train; they give the area the feeling of a small town.

Rebecca Mitchell, or Ann, as she preferred to be called, the bar’s tender and owner of eight years, was a large, buxom redhead who retained her Alabama drawl. She had decorated the walls with life-size posters of scantily clad, busty women, an American flag, and, above the cash register, a Confederate flag. Beneath the Southern emblem and above the register protruded the bar’s trademark: a set of longhorns measuring about seven feet from tip to tip.

The storefront was deeper than it was wide. The counter, almost twenty feet in length, extended from the door to the rear. It was to the right, just as patrons walked in. On the opposite wall sat the jukebox, which played mostly country and western music, and two video poker games. They had been burglarized five times in the past two years.

On the afternoon of January 28, Johnny Adams, a youth not much older than Terence, walked into Ann’s Longhorn Saloon, sat down at the bar, and ordered a 7-Up and a bag of potato chips. He had been in once before, just briefly, a few days earlier, so he knew the layout of the tavern. A few minutes later, another black youth walked in.

“Hey, man, what’s up. You still standing around here?” he asked Johnny. They pretended they hadn’t seen each other in a while. Johnny “lent” him some quarters to play the video game. Two more friends entered the bar and joined him.

Ann Mitchell knew what they were planning. She had seen them nervously walk by the tavern just a few minutes earlier. They had been whispering to each other, most likely detailing how they would pull off the heist. As Johnny’s friends started playing the poker game, Ann told him she had called the police. He ran to his friends, who had already cut open the padlock with bolt cutters and taken $200 from the machine. (Ann, like some of the other bar owners, had padlocked the machines to make them more difficult to pry open.) They emptied the change into their pockets, and as they raced out the door, one of the two patrons jumped off his bar stool.

“Get your ass back!” Johnny yelled at him. Ann says Johnny brandished a knife and nearly stabbed the patron in the back. Johnny denies having a weapon. The four youths sprinted out of the tavern into a waiting car, returning to their home, Henry Horner.

Three days later, on January 31, someone knocked on LaJoe’s door. “It’s the police,” a voice said. LaJoe let them in. “We’re looking for a Bobby Anderson. He here?” one of the officers asked. Terence used an alias; Anderson was LaJoe’s maiden name.

Terence sauntered out of a back room. He told LaJoe he hadn’t done anything. She asked the officers not to handcuff her son in front of Lafeyette and Pharoah, but they did so anyway. When the cuffs clicked behind his back, Terence’s head dropped as if it had been held up by a string. “They ain’t gonna bring you back,” Lafeyette muttered. Pharoah said nothing. And as Terence was led out of the building, Snuggles, then two, yelled from a second-floor window where he lived with his mother, “Chumps, let my daddy go! Let my daddy go!”