Greg Yance looks out a window of the Michigan Avenue luxury hotel where he is staying. From this vantage point, 39 stories up, his West Side home turf looks as peaceful and sunny as the day, nothing like the life-constricting place he remembers from his years running with the Vice Lords, slinging drugs and doing other things about which he will only say, “I plead the 5th.”
Yance has been in posh downtown hotels before, he says, but this is the first time with what he terms “legal money.” He is a guest of the cable channel HBO, and right now he is in the suite of the famous actor whose first directing project was to film the story of Yance’s life redeemed.
The 27-year-old ex-gang member beckons Charles Dutton over to the window. Greg points out the Cabrini-Green building where his father was shot to death when he was 8.
Yance tells how his father died: Hanging out with one guy who some other guys came looking for. They both got shot. His dad ran to the stairwell and collapsed.
“The ambulance came and got that guy, took him to the hospital,” he says. “My dad was in the hallway bleeding to death.”
“These (buildings) are Cabrini-Green,” says Dutton, taking in the nationally infamous public-housing complex. “To look at it from here it looks like . . .”
Yance completes the sentence: “Like a nice community of apartments.”
“You got Vice Lords on this side, Gangsters on that side,” he tells Dutton. “What they do–I ain’t gonna say `we,’ ’cause I, uh, I plead the 5th–they get up in those buildings and shoot at each other. That’s how that little kid, Dantrell (Davis) got shot.”
Dutton asks where in Chicago the little kid nicknamed Yummy, Robert Sandifer, was shot.
Someone else brings up Eric Morse, the boy who was tossed out a window.
In Chicago a handful of inner-city youth become famous because their lives go to waste. Greg Yance has achieved a small measure of renown–one that will surely grow when his movie biography, “First-Time Felon,” debuts on HBO Saturday (8 p.m.)–for the opposite reason. He is standing above the city today because he was lucky enough to get arrested for selling heroin at age 21.
He was also lucky enough to go to a boot camp for first-time felons instead of prison, lucky enough to be at the camp when the Mississippi River experienced a 100-year flood, lucky enough to be called on to sandbag a series of Downstate towns and have his yeoman efforts portrayed in the national media, lucky enough to have caught the eye of a reporter who called to check on him, then followed him, months later, as he looked in vain for jobs in downtown Chicago.
And he was smart enough to take it all in and let it change him. He is changing still.
“Let me tell you this,” he says later, over coffee in the Four Seasons Hotel’s elegant dining room. “In the process of making the movie I just found out I had a damn sense of humor. I just found out I could talk to anybody. I just found out at the age of (expletive) 26, that I got a sense of humor.
“When you’re selling drugs and stuff you’re very . . .–he passes his hand across his face–“shield up.”
Yance now lives in Jacksonville, Fla., with his fiancee, a woman from Ghana whom he met in Jacksonville while “First-Time Felon” was filming there early this year.
He was a consultant on the project, making friends with the cast and crew, including his movie doppelganger, the actor Omar Epps, who does an uncanny portrayal. When Yance first heard Epps as him, through headphones, he playfully flipped off the sound man. He thought the man, was playing back a tape recording of his own voice.
Dutton was skeptical of having his subject on the set. “You wonder if the guy’s gonna be a jerk or negative or ignorant,” he says. “But Greg was so great, man. He helped when he needed to help. He stayed away when he needed to stay away.
“I wanted to do a story about a young man trying to discover his humanity. If he had another picture in mind, we wouldn’t have fared well.”
That is very much the true story, Yance says: “I discovered my humanity, and I didn’t have none. `I ain’t gonna sit and wait for death; I’ll make my own.’ That’s how I was thinking.”
Yance came back to Chicago after shooting was over in March, he says. But he was still talking on the phone to his fiancee, and “every day I wasn’t with her, it was like harder and harder to breathe.”
So he moved to Florida, where he is waiting on a background check to take a job counseling young criminals. To earn money in the meantime–and he laughs at the irony of it–he is a phone solicitor, making calls to raise money for the Police Benevolent Association.
Asked when he plans to get married, Yance says he is still not sure. “See, I’m one of those people, you know, you gotta realize that I’m still not the average Joe. She’s making me into the average Joe, which I love. I never had the experience of being the average Joe.”
Later in the interview, he is more forceful: “I just want to be a common goddamn man, that’s it.”
The story the movie tells–with a power and overriding dignity that does Dutton credit–is of how Yance took his first tentative steps on the road to being ordinary, and of how hard that can be for someone who has to answer “yes” when the job questionnaire asks about felony convictions.
Illinois’ four-month boot camps were set up to help ease prison overcrowding, on the theory that a dose of military discipline might help some young men find the strength to turn their lives around.
But it wasn’t just boot camp that did it for him, Yance says. He only took the boot camp option thinking it would get him back on the street that much sooner. The real catalyst for Yance was the 1993 floods and, more specifically, his experience in Niota, Ill., a farm town that would eventually be devastated by the rising waters.
“At the time, I was not thinking about changing my damn life,” says Yance. “If the flood wouldn’t have happened, I’d probably be locked up, have gotten like 426 years.”
Even as the sandbagging efforts started, he was not with the program. He got press because he was goofing on the reporters who would ask questions, saying ultra-correct things about the inmates not being able to do it without the guards, then laughing with his fellow inmates over how lame he sounded.
But as the higher purpose of what they were doing sank in, gradually he began to learn, he says, that “everything that was taught to me was not true.” He saw a different side of the human experience than he knew from the street life where he grew up, near Cicero Avenue and Madison Street.
“I’ll give you an example,” he says. “To this day, I can go to the West Side, and I can see somebody get his brains blown out while I’m eating ice cream. I will continue to eat my ice cream, and I will walk right over the damn body ’cause I been there, done that.
“I went to boot camp. And I saw people working hard, saw how the devastation of the river come to town. That messed me up. People are thinking like, `You`ve seen people get shot.’ That’s supposed to mess you up. I’m like, no. But this messed me up. It was just a whole community came in and were helping each other, people who didn’t even know each other. `What’s your name?’ `Jack.’ `Well, come on, Jack.’ It was like that.”
In Niota, he saw in real life the birds and animals he had before only experienced through television shows on Public Broadcasting. He worked hard, alongside other people–black, white, Hispanic–and was thanked profusely for his efforts.
It seems sappy in the movie, almost too much, when the inmates, and Yance especially, have to be almost pried off the levee they have built when the river starts to overwhelm it, too much when they refuse to eat the townsfolk’s food because they couldn’t save the place.
But that is what happened, Yance says, although there are other points where the movie takes what he calls “dramatic licenses.” Most prominent among them is that his best friend, a man nicknamed Pookie, was shot to death, but was not shot to death for the reasons the movie implies.
“He didn’t go to jail with me and he didn’t snitch on nobody to get out,” Yance says. “Please put that in the paper.”
Yance begins to choke up, makes the cut sign across his neck to indicate he can’t talk about his fallen friend.
Yance came out of boot camp, in July, 1993, all “gung ho and hoorah,” he says.
Then he sat around the house for three months on electronic monitoring, having to cancel job interviews because he couldn’t reach the official who had the authority to let him leave his house.
When he was allowed to leave, his efforts were to no avail. Nobody wanted a felon, Yance says, not even one who could produce a glowing recommendation from the head of the boot camp and a New York Times clipping about his heroic disaster-relief efforts.
Once, he went back into a department store personnel office to recover the hat he had forgotten, he says.
“I see my damn application got thrown in the garbage. I could have said something (out of frustration) then, but it was just like the discipline from boot camp kicked in.”
When he got despondent, his mother, in one of the movie’s most powerful scenes, was there to buck him up, to insist that he not give up like his father had.
The movie ignores–probably wisely, for dramatic reasons–how media involvement helped Yance. But despite his perserverance, nothing broke for him until December of that year, when the New York Times reporter who had done the story about the boot campers fighting the flood called, decided to take his word that he really was trying to go straight, and came to follow him around the city.
“I walked their (behinds) off, all over downtown, till my damn shoes are, like, leaning,” he recalls. “The reason I wanted ’em to come down was I thought with a photographer and a white lady beside me, and I fill out an application, I thought I’d be called quick. You know what? I did not get one damn call.”
He got dozens, however, after the story ran, including solicitations to come work with animals as far away as Montana and Japan. The story had detailed that his camp nickname was “Nature Boy” for his fascination with the natural world.
The article also led movie producer Len Amato, a Chicago native, to buy the rights to his story, for a sum Yance won’t reveal but says is not overwhelming.
He felt used by the first job he took, which was supposed to be to work with ex-prisoners but ended up being home renovation and, in his mind, a ploy to help his employers get publicity.
“When the publicity ran out, the work ran out,” he says.
He got a Forest Preserve District job he calls his dream job, working in the forests with other laborers. But that turned out to be seasonal. He has sold magazines and encyclopedias door-to-door.
Yance allows that he made mistakes in employment, using his heart instead of his head to decide what jobs to take using his heart instead of his head.
“I want to go with my heart, because I didn’t get a chance to do that when I was growing up,” he says. “I want a chance to reverse some of the damage I did.”
It is in chronicling the frustrations of his post-prison job search that the movie is most poignant.
“You leave out of the boot camp or the prison with all this positive energy,” Dutton says, “and you go back out on the street corner and nothing’s changed. The minute you get out of that door it’s like walking through Dante’s inferno. You’ve got so many things trying to divert you and bring you down. So all that positive energy all starts to dissipate ’cause there is no follow-up program. There is nothing once you get out, and that’s the hypocrisy of the system.”
Dutton frames his movie with Yance in a hotel room, despondent over his inability to get work and apparently planning to commit suicide.
It never got that bad for him in real life, he says, although he did tell the scriptwriter, former Chicagoan Daniel Therriault, that if his only choice would have been to start selling drugs again, he probably would have killed himself. And he appreciates the dramatic effect of the scene.
“I’m very uncomfortable with it, but I understood how important it was,” he says.
“White people are gonna say, `This is just a black film.’ But when they see this part, it’s gonna, like, grab ’em and keep them involved in the movie. And that’s great because the movie is not supposed to reach only people who went through what I went through.
“I want to reach, like, the executives, people that own businesses, (who) think, `Well, I thought all felons was thieves.’ When a fella comes in with `F’ on his papers bring him in to your office and ask him why he got it. Ask him what he achieved. Don’t throw it in the garbage.”
