It was just about 10 years ago that she walked up my steps and rang my bell and proceeded to rant and cry and generally curse the ground I walked. She was a middle-aged woman, heavyset with short hair, a pale, fleshy face, a thick Eastern-European accent. She lived on the next block. What brought her to my door was the fact that I had written about her teenage son and the oafish criminal act he had been involved in. She was so enraged that she willed herself to confront me in person. She twisted and grimaced before me, choking on her words, tears coursing down her cheeks.
“You think you can write anything! How would you feel? I hope you’re happy now! To hell with you!”
Words to that effect.
There was nothing I could say in my defense, because she was not there for discourse. I did wonder, however, if she had directed the same rancor at her son. He and some of his friends, all of them about 16 years old, had committed a dead-of-night burglary of a nearby tavern. Their caper was discovered by the landlord, whose barking dog led him to the basement, where he found the boys hiding in a storage area with several stolen cases of imported beer.
I recounted the episode in a newspaper column. I did not use the boys’ names or cite the locale of the burglary. The police were called in, but because of the boys’ ages and other factors, no formal charges were pressed. The point of the piece was: the maddening issue of juvenile criminal justice in your own back yard. Should the boys have been arrested and forced to face a judge? If the owners of the tavern–who refused to file charges–extracted a vengeful personal pound of flesh from these kids, would that do any good? And finally, given the boys’ ages and their lack of good sense, was this the end of their criminal careers, or just the beginning?
This boy’s mother, however, would have none of it. She wished me eternal damnation, turned and hurtled off. I never encountered her again. A few years later she moved away, leaving only the memory of her tortured wrath, the wrath of a mother defending her son.
–
I am a dog walker. I have been escorting Rudy, an Airedale, for nine years now. I pass by the angry mother’s former apartment several times a week and silently acknowledge her. Not far away lives another mother with a similarly wayward son. Our paths have never crossed, though fate is about to be tempted.
As a dog walker I have an opportunity to snoop on my neighbors, to gaze into their front windows as I wait for Rudy to investigate exotic smells emanating from shrubbery. Rudy is a degenerate sniffer, so these things can take a while. Nobody suspects me of anything. Besides voyeurism, it is a chance to gossip or scan young mothers and their drooling offspring. These madonnas tolerate me because of Rudy, even when he anoints their children’s cheeks with a stew of bacteria from his gamey snout.
A few years ago on the same block, I met a man I’ll call Jeff. He has a house, a family and a Jack Russell terrier that Rudy finds mildly engaging. A young guy, maybe 35, and strong with calloused carpenter’s hands, Jeff has lived in the neighborhood for four or five years. He is full of good humor and a talker.
What Jeff and I came to talk about was the alley kids. A group of a dozen or so, boys and girls but mostly boys, teenagers who live on the block or nearby and who hang out, grow acne, spit, smoke and mope like teenagers have done for generations. When these same kids were younger, they played spunky alley games or pickup basketball scrimmages that reminded Jeff and me of our youths. We knew most of them by their first names.
About a year or so ago, however, things changed. The alley games gave way to general shiftlessness, furtive pot-smoking and dealing, graffiti and rubbish can fires. The group took on a surly, curled-lip presence and tossed around blue language like spitballs. The epithet of choice, particularly among the boys, was “bitch.” It was a general put-down, not necessarily anti-female or anti-dog, usually aimed at each other. Yet even adults who crossed the group were likely to get a guttural rendition of it.
As last spring and good weather set in, the alley kids hung out more and got decidedly more brazen in their alley hi-jinks. Garage windows were broken. Garbage was thrown into back yards. Garages and even rear porches were broken into and burglarized. Jeff’s property was in the heart of their presumed turf and frequently was defaced and trespassed. Jeff, however, openly confronted the group and became more and more of an adversary.
“If one of those little gentlemen tells me to commit an indecent act upon myself one more time,” he told me over the dogs one night, “I swear I’m going to rearrange his dental work.”
Words to that effect.
His oath had a universal feel to it, a vow sworn in anger and frustration at one time or another by every property owner in every teen-besieged neighborhood in every town across the land. I nodded and harrumphed like a kindred spirit.
What happened shortly after, however, was more than idle block talk. One day as Jeff walked with his wife, kids and the dog, one of the alley boys, a wiry kid of 15, rode his bike into the five of them and nearly injured Jeff’s wife. She yelled at him and he responded with an “(Expletive) you, bitch.” Then he sped off down the alley.
Jeff detonated, and took off on a mad, block-long dash in pursuit of the kid on the bike. Running as he had not run in years, he circled the block and managed to cut off the kid at the alley’s end. With a quick lunge he forced the startled kid and his bike into a cyclone fence. The kid fell to the ground and immediately went into the modern-day victim’s howl: “You touch me and I’ll sue you!”
Jeff, panting and sweating, pressed his shoe onto the kid’s chest and pinned him like a wriggling crayfish to the asphalt.
“Don’t you–ever–talk to my wife like that again,” he said.
The kid, still held fast, started blubbering, “I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry-I’m sorry.”
Jeff scoffed at him. “You’re not sorry. You’re a punk,” he said. “And if you do anything like that again, this is the least of what you’ll get.”
Then he took the boy’s baseball hat, flipped it onto a nearby garage roof, and walked off.
The boy’s contrite mood held for little more than 10 minutes. Apparently no worse for wear, he rustled together a dozen of his buddies in the alley in back of Jeff’s house. They started shouting, throwing rocks and banging on his garage door. When Jeff came out, they taunted and threatened him. A neighbor lady called the police. Two unmarked squads, whose occupants were no strangers to the alley kids, showed up and, after a melee of more curses and threats, broke things up.
Then the mother got involved. That evening, the mother of the bike rider, a woman as young as or younger than Jeff, appeared at his door and began ranting at him for “beating” her child, calling him, among other things, a “lunatic.” Jeff, among other things, told her to rein in her kid before he got into real trouble.
The next day, as Jeff was working in the neighborhood, two uniformed police officers who, Jeff was to learn, were not from the district, drove up and put him under arrest. Jeff was incredulous, then outraged, but unable to dissuade the officers. A district sergeant appeared and wondered why they couldn’t work things out without an arrest. The two officers said nothing doing, they were here to arrest the man. Jeff was taken to the district station and booked for assault.
News of Jeff’s arrest, along with varied and, of course, embellished accounts of his fracas with the boy, swept the neighborhood. Sentiment ranged from outright condemnation–“No adult should attack a kid!”–to wholesale approval–“It’s about time someone stomped on those jerks!” and all points in between.
For his part, Jeff made bail and stayed out of sight. The alley kids, however, were just getting started. In the following weeks, three of the boys, including the one Jeff leveled, were arrested for two neighborhood burglaries. One of them was of the house of the boy’s next-door neighbor, who had gone away on vacation. Taken was the usual: a VCR and other small valuables. The VCR, it turned out, was fenced at a nearby VCR repair video shop.
As if that were not enough, the three burglary suspects were rearrested on charges of threatening a witness when they intimidated the son of one of their burglary victims. All in all, the trio, not one of them older than 16, had gone from being alley irritants to entrees in the court system. News of their misdeeds exonerated Jeff in the eyes of most neighbors, but he still faced a court appearance.
In the meantime, beat cops were leaning on the alley habitues with regular sweeps. These are kids, one cop remarked, who do not want to be arrested or put in jail under any circumstances. (Jail to gangbangers, he added, is no more than an inconvenience.) Despite their swagger, the alley ne’er-do-wells have parents to answer to and neighbors to contend with.
Yet that did not keep the group from baiting and harassing Jeff. Flowers in his yard were uprooted and clay pots were overturned. His garage door was continually defaced with graffiti. Yet by summer’s end, things in the well-patrolled alley had quieted greatly.
At the end of September, Jeff went to court. For $350 he had hired an attorney who came highly recommended for this kind of proceeding. Jeff was one of the few adult defendants in a courtroom filled with adolescents in baggy pants, accused of every kind of public nuisance. In most of the cases, the complainants did not show, and the punks smirked and went free.
Jeff did not smirk, but the complainant in his case also did not appear. The boy’s mother, once certain that Jeff was a lunatic, and who had been able to convince someone in the police department to arrest her son’s assailant, did not even take the time to testify against him. After a brief conference with Jeff’s attorney, the judge dismissed the case and Jeff, his day shot and his wallet lighter, went home.
He thinks now that he should also move away, that he is a confrontational person and one day the alley kids will again light his fuse. He is not afraid for his family, but he hates the notion of their being hassled or somehow made less than comfortable in their own neighborhood.
Jeff’s neighbors urge him to stay, to refuse to give the jerks the satisfaction of driving him out. He is every neighborhood’s flawed knight, they tell him. However ill-advised and visceral, whether out of rage or righteous indignation, he dashed after the little miscreant and, in the name of mortgage holders everywhere, slammed him. Even took that baseball cap, the one with the curled, cocky visor, and sailed it like a Frisbee onto a rooftop. Most every other neighbor would not dare to joust with the barbarians, would wilt and retreat, afraid of retribution in the form of broken windows or defaced garage doors or slashed tires or any other kind of petty, vindictive vandalism. Not to mention an assault charge.
And still others of us are wary of the enraged mother.
Besides, the neighbors remind Jeff, even these kids will grow up, maybe even mature and, if there is a God, move away.
In the meantime, maybe they’ll get some medicine from their parents. The kid burglars, including the one Jeff assailed, were put under house arrest and appeared in juvenile court to answer to the charges. They burdened their parents with attorneys’ fees, court scoldings, and time wasted. They burdened themselves with police records. Being 16 or under gained them varying degrees of probation from a Juvenile Court judge who, no doubt, had seen a lot worse. Nevertheless, the boys are persona non grata in the neighborhood, particularly among burglary victims who got back little if any of their stolen property.
The kid Jeff leveled, however, got his baseball cap back and continues to wear it, the visor curled and pulled low over his eyes.
