Forsaking All Others Read online

Now the small woman said, “You must use your strength to get these riches in America.”

  Teenager nodded. “I am going there now.”

  “Do you have someone to advise you in America?”

  “This woman called Mama. She is going to be a saint. They give me her address.”

  “Listen to her. She will tell you what to do.”

  Teenager paid the woman five dollars. Lydia and he got into the pickup truck and started for the airport. Teenager’s arm hung out the window and the sun warmed it. It was October of 1966 and another life fashioned by the sun and the water was coming to the place made of cement and steel.

  1

  STATE OF NEW YORK, Department of Correctional Services.

  4/6/76

  Parole Hearing, Albion Correctional Facility.

  Case of Ramon Solivan, 73C748

  Commissioner: Lewis Constable

  Q. How old are you, Teenager?

  A. Twenty-seven.

  Q. For a guy of twenty-seven you were in and out of trouble for a long time, right?

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. I can tell you straight out, Ramon, that this board looks at your record very seriously. And you were found guilty by a jury verdict.

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. Well, we take the jury system very seriously around here. If a jury says you’re guilty, then we give that quite a bit of weight.

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. Do you admit your guilt at this time?

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. How do you feel about this crime you committed?

  A. I am sorry.

  Q. For selling dope.

  A. Yes sir. I am sorry for selling dope.

  Q. You are now credited with six hundred and eighty-one days jail time. And you were found guilty of possession of drugs and conspiracy to sell drugs and assault second on a police officer. And you received a five-year maximum sentence on each count, but they are to run concurrent.

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. Are you a junkie?

  A. No sir.

  Q. Why on your misbehavior report does it show that you entered another inmate’s cell and beat him?

  A. That was a bad guy started a fight with me.

  Q. Let’s get back to your crime. How many fellows were involved with you in your crime?

  A. Three.

  Q. Benny Velez, Nector Lopez and Ramin Negron.

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. So far as you know did any of them go to trial?

  A. Nector Lopez and me.

  Q. And Ramin?

  A. He copped out.

  Q. Took a plea?

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. It doesn’t say here that he took a plea. It says here that he was found cut into parts and left in an empty lot.

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. Why do you say he took a plea?

  A. Because that is what he did, he told them he was guilty.

  Q. And then he got killed?

  A. This I don’t know.

  Q. It says here that he got killed before he got to court.

  A. This I do not know.

  Q. Let’s go to the start. Here you are nineteen and you assault and rob a cab driver. Was this in the Bronx?

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. Was narcotics involved here?

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. You were involved in quite a few assaults prior to this?

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. How many would you say?

  A. Not many. I just come here then from Puerto Rico.

  Q. So when you started your criminal career, you were about nineteen?

  A. More or less, yes sir.

  Q. And those other fellows with you belonged to a gang called the Teenager gang?

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. And you are known as Teenager?

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. Considering the fact that you were continually in trouble in Bronx County with crimes of narcotics and assault, how can you expect to get parole today?

  A. I don’t have any plans of associating with these people I was with before.

  Q. Well, you saw enough of Ronald Schiavone while you were here. He has an organized crime folder. Seemed you were his bodyguard around here. Do you plan to see him on the outside?

  A. Never.

  Q. Now your gang was named after you?

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. And you are going to stay away from them.

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. The New York Police won’t be happy to see you coming back to the Bronx. Certainly the reports from this institution or even the reports from the reception center weren’t too good.

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. And you were given one month credit for jail time before your trial. So you are locked up almost two years now.

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. And on a five-year bit you’ll have until October of 1977 to go on parole.

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. That’s over a year and a half from now.

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. I wonder, I really wonder, and so does the board wonder, whether you can make it on parole over that period of time. What do you think?

  A. I want to try.

  Q. Why?

  A. Because when the parole is over I plan to go back to Puerto Rico and live again with my mother.

  Q. You weren’t working.

  A. I was working.

  Q. I see no jobs listed here.

  A. Well, I worked.

  Q. How much were you making at this job of yours?

  A. This guy gives me one hundred fifty.

  Q. Apparently you weren’t making enough to satisfy yourself if you became involved in the crimes that are explained here.

  A. It wasn’t the need for the money. It was just the guys I was hanging out with.

  Q. How do you plan to support yourself and your wife and children while you’re on parole?

  A. I have this job painting rooms in apartments.

  Q. I see that. Now, do you think you have done fairly well in here despite your background and your ability?

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. In what way?

  A. I was thinking about when I get out on the street to finish school out there. Go to a community college.

  Q. Do you have a drinking problem?

  A. I didn’t ever do that.

  Q. Do you have a drug problem?

  A. No sir.

  Q. But when we look back at the crimes you committed, robbery first, grand larceny first, assault first, assault second, possession with intent to sell, and these were just a few of the things you did out there. Three homicide arrests. Now you know and I know that you don’t get arrested for homicide for nothing. Even if you’re let go immediately, the arrest still indicates you’re around serious trouble.

  A. No sir.

  Q. No?

  A. The police break my chops.

  Q. With homicide arrests.

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. They arrest you for murder just to be pests.

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. This is the longest period of time that you ever were in prison.

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. And you feel you learned something out of this.

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. All right, Ramon, we’ll take everything into consideration when we make our decision.

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. Think there’s any chance at all that you’ll stay out of trouble?

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. Or would you get yourself right back in?

  A. This is the last time I will ever be in these places.

  Q. You can’t afford it, whether you are here or in Puerto Rico, with this record.

  A. My record will be good enough to let me out.

  Q. You’re pretty sure of yourself.

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. I have to tell you that I’ve seen a lot better records.

  A. Soon I will be out.

  Q. You’re pretty sure of this, aren’t you?

  A. Yes sir.

  Q. Well, we’ll
let you know.

  A. That’s all right.

  2

  THE COLLECT CALL FROM Prison came at six o’clock at Ana’s Bar on East 138th Street, in the South Bronx. Benny Velez, who worked for Teenager as a drug peddler, shrieked when he heard the voice. He slapped his hand on the bar when Teenager told him that he had a chance for parole.

  Two others, Boogaloo and Albertito, got on the phone, and Benny Velez, deciding to make the world a total delight, put a small plastic box, large enough to hold a ring or some medicine, on the bar. Using a dollar bill, he took cocaine out of the box. Without bothering to go to the men’s room, or even to turn his back to the window on the street, Benny made lines of cocaine on the bar, put the bill to his nose, bent down and took a great sniff of barroom air that became enchanted as it went inside him.

  “Teenager!” Benny Velez shouted.

  Maximo Escobar, the tallest person in the place, sauntered to the phone, grinning. Everybody in Ana’s Bar watched as the neighborhood celebrity, Maximo, shouted in Spanish to the neighborhood legend, Teenager. Teenager wanted his wife taken to see Mama, so that Mama could pray to the saints and get Teenager released. Of course he could do that, Maximo said, for he had intentions of seeing Mama himself. To say hello, not for voodoo. But he would see to it himself that Teenager’s wife, Lydia, saw Mama for a ceremony.

  “Mama told him on the phone he would be out of jail by July,” Benny Velez said. “His saint is always right.”

  “The prisons are so crowded that they let everybody out when they do minimum time,” Maximo said.

  “His saint, that’s the one who must do it,” Benny said.

  Maximo didn’t want to argue. “What does he do when he comes home?” he asked.

  Benny shrugged. “He comes here to be home.”

  Maximo picked up his beer. He would not embarrass Benny by saying anything bad about Teenager. Maximo despised drug peddlers; at the same time, he loved Teenager. Maximo was twenty-three, four years younger than Teenager, and he came from a shack in Ponce that was two doors down from the one in which Teenager had been born. One of Maximo’s first memories in life was being five years old and watching Teenager climb to the roof of a car and sit there, cross-legged, as the car bumped down the street without the driver realizing anything. When the car paused at the corner, Teenager jumped off. Over the years, no matter what Teenager perpetrated, Maximo never could feel total disgust; that they had sprung from the same landscape was more important. And if asked to choose between Teenager, even if found selling heroin to babies, and some fat Irish detective or little Jew judge, Maximo found it no contest. And as he thought of Teenager now, Maximo smiled. He began to realize how much he had missed Teenager, with those fifty-two-inch shoulders and the eyes that turned into cat slits when you told him something funny.

  Maximo could see Teenager, his chin rising, his great head sitting on those huge shoulders, on the morning the clerk in the subway change booth started trouble.

  Maximo, his right arm wrapped around a pyramid of schoolbooks, had gone into the subway at 8:00 A.M. and held out his high school pass.

  “That’s no good until tomorrow,” the man in the booth said.

  “They just gave it to me yesterday,” Maximo said.

  “I don’t care when you got it, it’s no good until tomorrow.”

  “What should I do?” Maximo asked.

  “Pay thirty-five cents.”

  “I don’t have any money,” Maximo said. He didn’t. Nor was there any money in his house. His mother had been laid off for two weeks, and each day she went out into the hall and borrowed two dollars and used it for dinner.

  “Thirty-five cents,” the change-booth man said.

  “Have a nice day,” Maximo said. He walked to the turnstile, lifted himself onto it, swung his legs over and began walking down the platform. He looked into the darkness at the head of the tracks to see if the train light showed.

  There was shouting behind him, from the change booth, and Maximo heard footsteps. He turned to see a stocky policeman coming after him.

  “I have my train pass from school,” Maximo said, holding the pass out.

  “What did you jump the turnstile for?” the cop said, walking toward him.

  “I have my pass,” Maximo said.

  The cop’s hand came out and grabbed Maximo’s hair. The cop yanked the hair and Maximo’s books spilled from his arm. The cop dragged Maximo off the platform and into an alcove by the change booth used for storing cleaning equipment.

  The cop pulled Maximo’s head up. “You’re going to get the beating of your life,” the cop said. He slapped Maximo across the mouth. The slap made a noise so loud that a woman near the change booth, seeing what was going on, gasped. Hearing her, the cop let some of the anger drain from his eyes. He pulled Maximo to the stairs, kicked him in the shin and sent him up.

  “I dropped my schoolbooks,” Maximo said.

  “Why don’t you come down and get them?” the cop said.

  Maximo, his eyes wet with frustration, went back to his building. He was about to go into the doorway when he heard Teenager calling him from the corner.

  “Hey, what’s the matter with you?” Teenager said.

  Maximo told him. Teenager punched Maximo on the arm. “That’s all right. Come on with me.”

  Teenager went down the stairs to the subway two at a time. Maximo followed him. Teenager went by the change booth, loped up to the turnstile, slapped his palms on it and vaulted the turnstile, his legs folding under him, more easily than Maximo had ever seen anyone do. The cop, standing by the change booth, watched closely.

  “Come on,” Teenager said to Maximo.

  Maximo went up to the turnstile and lifted himself over it.

  “Go get your books,” Teenager said.

  The cop called to them.

  “That’s all right,” Teenager yelled.

  As Maximo picked up his books, the cop came up to the turnstile.

  “That’s all right,” Teenager said again.

  “You didn’t pay and that kid didn’t pay,” the cop said.

  “That’s all right,” Teenager said.

  “I said you didn’t pay,” the cop said, his voice rising.

  “That’s all right.”

  The cop took a closer look at Teenager and remained on the other side of the turnstile. His voice went high enough to quaver. Teenager swung his shoulders and he and Maximo walked away from the cop, who did not come after them.

  Maximo preferred to think of Teenager in this way, the protector on the subway and the kid sitting atop the car in La Playa de Ponce, rather than as a drug seller to be hated.

  Besides, on this day in the bar Maximo Escobar had more important uses for his anger. Earlier in the day, before he had taken his five-hour bus ride home from school to start the Easter recess, Maximo had been interviewed by a man from Mobil Oil. It took place in a room on the second floor of the Law School building. The man from Mobil Oil was in his midforties and his name was Bo Watson. When Maximo entered the room, Bo Watson stood up. Bo Watson’s handshake was firm and his gray-blue eyes locked on Maximo’s. Watson then looked Maximo up and down. Bo had no trouble with Maximo’s color, which was a shade off white. His eyes paused on Maximo’s shoes, which were black, pointed, high-heeled and spit-polished.

  “Maximo,” Bo Watson said, “I am very glad to meet you.”

  As Maximo sat down on the near side of a chrome and wood desk, he pulled an envelope out of his shoulder bag. He handed the envelope to Watson, who pulled out the résumé , and took a pair of bifocals out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

  Maximo’s résumé gave his address: 1523 East 138th Street, the Bronx, New York. It said that he had attended La Escuela Maria Puente, Calle Colon, Ponce, Puerto Rico. Then P.S. 263, the Bronx; Intermediate School 224, the Bronx, DeWitt Clinton High School, the Bronx; Lehman College, the Bronx; and now Harvard Law School, Cambridge. He was presently in the top tenth of his class. Under the section
headed “Work Experience,” Maximo had listed that he had worked for the last three summers at Cutti’s Superette on East 138th Street.

  “This is very impressive,” Bo Watson said. “Is this the South Bronx?”

  “Yes,” Maximo said.

  “Is it as bad as they say?” Bo Watson asked.

  “It is very bad,” Maximo said.

  “Have you ever been arrested?” Bo Watson asked.

  “No,” Maximo said.

  Bo Watson jotted down a series of notes on a Mobil Oil employee interview form. Maximo saw that next to the word “Appearance,” Watson wrote, “student, Spanish, medium build.”

  Watson put down his pen, looked up from the form, held out his hand and walked Maximo to the door.

  “You’ll be hearing from us,” Bo Watson said.

  Sure would, Maximo knew. A Harvard Spic was the hire of the year. In the last two months, he had received one hundred letters from corporations. Two days before, the man from ITT hadn’t even bothered to make notes; he simply asked Maximo to let them know when he would like to begin his career with them. Maximo was tempted to go back inside the room and tell Bo Watson that he had lied, that in fact he had been arrested in the South Bronx. He wanted to see Bo Watson nod and say, “Well, I’m sure that’s all done with and you’ll have a fine new life with us.”

  It had been that way all through school. Nobody at Harvard openly patronized him; they were beyond that, and they even had seen one or two live Puerto Ricans in the years before Maximo. But they did want him to know at all times that he was different from his people, that he was better. This was done best at wine and cheese parties. For three years, every time he turned around, there was a wine and cheese party thrown by some woman named Pebble, whose husband taught Constitutional Law. Maximo decided that wine and cheese was the standard Protestant way to teach a Puerto Rican how to dispose of Spic-ishness.

  Maximo met Teenager’s wife, Lydia, two nights later in front of the building where Mama lived on Southern Boulevard.

  “Have you got the picture?” Maximo asked.

  Lydia stamped her right foot several times on the sidewalk. On the phone, Mama had told her to get a picture of the judge who sentenced Teenager and to put it in her shoe and walk on it. Lydia didn’t know where to find such a picture, but she went through a newspaper and found a photo of Senator Russell Long at a natural gas hearing and, figuring that judges and senators were the same, tore out the picture, tucked it into her shoe and went around stamping her foot on the face of Russell Long, as extension of the judge. This act, Mama had assured her, would cause the judge to become seriously ill and the prison gates to open for Teenager.