My Life in Pilsen

Quietly, my 6 year-old son spread his body on the carpet floor, immersed in opening his world through reading.

Suddenly, he jumped off the floor like a desert mouse avoiding a hungry snake. His twisted kinetic dance turned his body towards his bedroom. I then heard the random pronouncement of "I am going to make Spongebob" fade in the living room air as he raced to his room.

Kids are like that. Random thoughts redirecting energies for the next task of play.

About 90 minutes later, my son reemerged from his lair with a plastic Spongebob made from Legos.

Legos are great toys, as long as you do not step on them while walking barefoot through the house. They allow a child to drive a thought into action; to transform imagination into a creative piece of child art.

I do not buy the Legos kits that build specific things. I buy the plain box of assorted Lego blocks in various colors. I leave it to his imagination to create somethings sans an instruction sheet. Artists do not color by number.

We are all artists, we are all poets. We are all capable of creating. As children we are in tune with these natural qualities. Some of us disconnect from these qualities as we travel through the chapters of our lives.

I try to provide the materials for my son to nurture the human desire to create. There is always paper scattered on tables and floors. Scissors, crayons, colored pencils, and markers abscond from designated storage containers seeking to avoid the oblivion of being exiled inside plastic pencil containers. The evidence of a boy creating is always present in our cluttered home.

I indulge him with the things he needs to play with. I bought a large box of copy paper from Sam's Club so he could have plenty of paper to draw on. He has a tub of pencils, pens, colored pencils and other writing utensils for his use to create. Sticks of glue await his calling.

I do not urge him, I do not guide him. I let him be who he is.

I try hard not to be a parent who lives vicariously through his children. I do not need my son to absolve my failures by pushing him with the things of my past.

Still, I am glad to be able to provide him the things I never had as a child.

Someone once asked me what my favorite toy was when I was a child. My initial response from my quickest neural transmissions wondered "what kind of silly question is that?" I did not verbalize that thought. Rather, I answered that when I was a child, we were very poor and I had few toys other than some plastic soldiers and cowboys and Indians that I bought with my paperboy earnings at the Woolworth's on 18th Street.

The person who asked me was saddened by my response. I was never sad by the scarcity of toys in our home. I turned the soldiers and cowboys and Indians into baseball players. I would find things to use as tiny bases and line up the figures into position. I would use a marble as a ball. I developed a card game where I would try to simulate an actual baseball game by drawing a card and then drawing another card. An ace followed by a deuce would be a home run. A king followed by a deuce or a three would be a triple. I cannot remember all the combinations I made, but it was complex. I had much fun playing this game.

My family thought that I was crazy playing this game in my make-believe world. I never once heard "hey, that is clever" when I played. I only absorbed the befuddlement from others.

I told the person who asked me the question about my favorite toy, that I always wanted Lincoln Logs but I never had a set. I told the person that I would look at the toy section in the Sears catalog, and that I would stare for long periods of time at the ad for Lincoln Logs.

I would look at the picture and I would imagine that I was actually playing with the Lincoln Logs. My imagination was so strong that I was actually building a fort and playing with the figures in the fort. Imagination is a strong quality in a child.

I became so deeply involved in my imaginary play via the Sears catalog that it was no different from physically having the toy. I had to deeply engage myself with my imagination to get beyond the reality of being too poor to actually have the Lincoln Logs.

Play is about imagination. I was using my imagination, even if I could not physically hold the Lincoln Logs. I was still playing with them.

I still craved them. I was never sad about not having them. My mind was always engaged in a pretend world to deal with the harshness of poverty. I remember once when all we had to consume for dinner was a cup of coffee. I put sugar in it and I slowly sipped every drink, imagining as if I was enjoying a grand dinner of every imaginable food.

But I never lusted after what I did not have. I never felt as if I was missing out because I lacked what the other kids had. I created my own games and became the weird kid living in his strange world.

I was always the weird kid in the neighborhood. Different drumming sounds heard only by those standing outside the peer produced "do not cross" tape.

I feel lucky and blessed for that experience. I also feel blessed to have a child that I can help nurture with his creativity and imagination.

There were times in my life when the incredible pain of depression weighed so heavy upon me that I ingested things that would have killed most people. Instead, I once awoke in a strange car and soon spent a day in a jail cell, or another time I was in an emergency room drinking awful tasting charcoal to absorb a multitude of ingested substances. That attempt resulted in a week in a psychiatric unit.

Life was once a twisted, knotted string of horror.

Yet, here I am-still alive. I am not depressed. I have gone far and beyond what I once thought was impossible. I was certain that my depressed destiny was suicide. Now, It saddens me whenever I read about someone fulfilling this most unnecessary of false destinies.

Depression is the greatest liar of the human experience.

I am now filled with hope. I am alive and thankful for it. Most importantly, I am entrusted with a child to love and care for. I realize that his road in life is being paved today with the experiences I share and create with him. Then, I do realize that perhaps I do live vicariously through him. It is not with baseball triumphs or Lincoln Logs. It is just with the simplicity of the absence of crazy abuse in his life.

I am the luckiest man in the world to have that chance to provide a child that opportunity of living in a safe environment where his main concern in life is "where is the box of Legos?"

Life is very good.

My son, when he was 4,in his home-made Spongebob Halloween costume. It was made with a huge paper bag and some inexpensive material from the arts and craft store.

My son lost his first tooth last Sunday, March 28. He turned six about three weeks earlier. He quickly told me about the Tooth Fairy. Although I do not participate in the free flow of fairy tales like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, I also do not fracture them with the realism of adulthood. Sometimes our myths are tools to help guide our transitions in life. While I will not lie to my son, and tell him that Santa Claus is real, I find no harm in his absorbing the available information that surrounds him that tells him otherwise.

In time, he will find his own realities.

My son searched for his tooth that unexpectedly fell into the carpet. Luckily I vacuum on the months with 30 days in them (kidding), and it was March, so it was not hard to find the small piece of tooth. My son explained to me how he needed to put it under his pillow and then the Tooth Fairy would come at night, while he slept, and exchange his tooth for some money or a Visa gift card.

No, he did not say Visa gift card.

While my son and his mother searched for the fallen tooth, I thought to myself that I needed to record this event in my calendar. March 28, 2010, my son lost his first tooth.

March 28th has deep meaning to me. There is not a March 28th that passes when I do not think about when I became a fugitive from justice, when I started on the mad, unrehearsed flight from all I knew to all I now am.

It was not an easy road to travel.

I was arrested in February of 1978 for armed robbery and burglary. At the time I was a straight A student at Northeastern Illinois. But that was only for one semester. I was barely weeks into the second semester when I was arrested. I was also working full-time as a night clerk for the post office. I sorted mail by machine for the zip code 60618. I would work all night, ride the L train home, get my books and breakfast and then head to the North side for school.

I wanted to go on to earn a doctorate in History and teach at the university level. I had it all planned out.

Mice and men.

I had dropped out after my second year of high school. Now, I was in college trying to improve my lot in life.

I was finally on a right path, but I forgot to extract the bad habits and the bad associates from my life. The right path in life is never paved with street gangsters and addictions.

Using twisted logic, I thought that it would be disloyal to shed the "friends" I had just because I was going to school and working full-time. I was no better then they were. I could not be disloyal. I had a fierce sense of loyalty. If not for loyalty I would be dead.

Fatal error in judgment. They were not friends.

It was true that I was no better than the others. But I had dreams, hopes, and goals. My behavior was getting better. Yet, my sense of loyalty was too strong to break away from these "friends."

They were not friends. They were people who shared bad habits with me. I did not see or know the difference between the two. My street sense of loyalty blinded me from any real common sense that would have told me that my goals would be hard, if not impossible, to achieve by living the same old lifestyle with the same old people.

So one drunken night I agreed to accompany three other "friends" to a "bums hotel" on Allport, a few buildings south of 18th Street, where lived a man who was harassing the love interest of one of one the "friends" who was named Ulysses. He went by the name Ricardo Martinez. He was an undocumented from Mexico. He bounced names.

I was there as a sign of strength. I had a rep in this circle as a fearless fighter. Ulysses was going to tell the harasser to leave his girlfriend alone. Actually, she was more than a girlfriend (I hate that term). They lived together and had a child together.

The "bums hotel" was a sleeping rooms only (SRO) which rented rooms by the week and month. The room came with a dingy bed, roaches, and a beat-up dresser. Every tenant shared a bathroom and a small kitchen.

It was about 1am when we arrived. Ulysses opened a door to a room without knocking. A group of older men were playing cards. The man that Ulysses was targeting was not there. I apologized for the intrusion. One of the card players told us that the man we were looking for, Rodney Rangle, was down the hall in his room.

Ulysses knocked on the door and Rodney opened it slightly. Ulysses pushed the door opened and we all walked into the room. Rodney was a small, under-nourished looking man. He had a shoe box filled with meds on his dresser. My immediate thought was why did Ulysses ask me to come with him?

I warned Rodney that he had to stop harassing Ulysses' mate. Before I knew it, one of the guys who was with us took out a knife. He put it to the throat of Rodney. I told the guy, who was named Luis, to put the knife away. We did not come here to hurt anyone. But Luis ripped a chain off the neck of Rodney. Another guy, Pedro, started to walk out of the room with Rodney's television. An armed robbery was taking place. I was not part of this.

Things happened so fast. I was more concerned with Rodney not getting stabbed than I was with anything else. Luis was an ex-con who was out on parole for armed robbery. He had served a few years in state prison where he joined the Latin Kings for protection. He was a crazy guy who was prone to violence.

Luis was some peripheral guy who would come to get drunk at the apartment that I shared with Pete "Star Wars" Garcia. I was not sure if I could have any influence over him to keep him from stabbing Rodney.

My only focus was to keep Luis from stabbing Rodney.

We were in and out of the room in minutes. Pedro was already in Ulysses' car with the television. We drove back to my apartment.

I was tired and I went to bed. Ulysses, Pedro, and Luis had discussed what to do with the television. They decided to take it to the owner of the carnita's place on the 1700 block of 18th street to see if he would buy it. Pedro knew him well. He was a former worker who also lived for free in the basement so he could wake up early to start cooking the daily batch of carnitas.

My room mate Pete had recently bought a pound of marijuana with the hopes of selling it by nickle bags. He had sold only a few bags. Luis, Pedro, or Ulysses pilfered the almost one pound of marijuana after I went to bed.

Pete woke me up after he discovered the theft of his herb. It was about 9am. I was seriously hung over.

I told Pete that we would walk over to Ulysses's apartment to recover the smoke. We lived at 1618 West 17th Street in the rear 2nd floor apartment. Ulysses lived 5-6 blocks from us on Allport, in the building just south of the SRO. When we arrived there, Ulysses claimed to have known nothing of the marijuana. He denied stealing it. I did not believe him.

We left. As we were walking down the stairs of the building, Rodney was walking up with the police. Rodney recognized me and told the cops that I was one of the four in his apartment. The cops handcuffed me. They went upstairs to arrest Ulysses.

Not smart to rob a man who lives next door to you.

I spoke to Rodney in Spanish. I told him that I had nothing to do with the robbery. I reminded him that I stopped Luis from stabbing him. Rodney told me that if his television was returned that he would not press charges against me. I told him about the carnitas place where the television might be at.

Ulysses and I spent the night in lock-up. Some cop came over and accused us of other home invasions in the area. At this time they actually thought that they had arrested the people responsible for these multiple crimes. They thought that I was a heroin junkie. They kept telling me to admit to the home invasions. They told me that I would have a hard time withdrawing from heroin. They could help if I told the truth.

I knew nothing about any home invasion.

The cops could not handle the truth. They wanted arrests that would lead to convictions. They did not care if the truth or the facts were altered in the pursuit of justice.

While we were locked up the police went to the carnitas place and discovered that the owner did buy the tv. He was not arrested. He was a "customer" of the cops. He paid a "fee" to the cops to sell beer in his restaurant without a license.

Coincidentally, Luis lived across the street from the carnitas place. The owner of the place, Guero, told the cops that Luis was with the guys who sold him the tv. He never snitched on his former employee Pedro. Pedro was never arrested, or questioned, in the crime. Luis was arrested minutes later.

Later that afternoon two cops took me out of lockup. We went into an office. I repeated my story of what happened. They told me if I wanted to go home I had to sign a paper that reflected the story I had told. I was there just to scare the guy from harassing the mate of Ulysses. I had no part in any armed robbery.

I signed the paper and was returned to lock up. I was not released. I was bailed out the next day by the sister of my room mate.

13 months later I would find out that the cops had me sign a paper that they used to type up a false confession.

I expected to be released. I committed no crime.Although I did not know it at the time., I am sure that the others had planned to jackroll Rodney Rangle.

Here I was now charged with armed robbery. I thought that I had thrown my life away. I was charged with two felonies. To make matters more worrisome, Illinois had recently passed a new law that categorized armed robbery as a Class X felony punishable from 6-30 years in prison.

One day I was working full time at the post office and attending college full time as a straight "A" student; the next day I was facing 30 years in prison.

A friend had told me about a lawyer who was at a free legal advice clinic in Pilsen. She gave me his number. His name was Eloy Burciaga.

There is so much more to the story. These are just a few of the events.

Burciaga recommended a lawyer who did nothing for me. He is now a prominent Cook County Commissioner.

I drank myself into oblivion. The worry of serving 6-30 years was too much for me to handle.I soon quit school and my well-paying postal job.

I regressed into hustling behaviors to finance my daily drinking binges.

Luis thought that I had turned him in and he vowed to have me killed when I went to prison. He had spent a few years as a Latin King in prison. I took his threat seriously. If I was drunk I did not have to worry about a prison sentence that could easily become a death sentence for me.

I hit the depths.

On March 28th of 1979, I made my monthly trip to Maywood to attend court. There was one continuance after another in this case. Now it was ready to come to trial. Rodney was there ready to testify. My attorney, Lawrence Suffredin made his first appearance in a year. His first thing out of his mouth was "Do you have any money?"

I tried to have a public defender represent me. I asked the public defender of Luis if they could defend me but they said that they were defending Luis. They were trying to get our cases severed because the story Luis gave them was far different from what happened.

I was too depressed, too deflated to pursue the matter with the public defenders office. When Luis' public defender refused to defend me, I thought that I could not be defended by their office. I had no income. I was eligible for their services.

I had told one of Suffredin's associates that I no longer was employed and that I had no funds to compensate them. I wanted to be defended by the public defender.

For one year I was without any real representation. A woman from Suffredin's office would show up every few months to ask for money. My story was the same. I had no money and I wanted the P.D. to defend me.

Not once was there a motion made on my behalf. I was never told about the confession.

But there he was, a year later, asking for money. From his point of view I was probably a disposable low life.

This was when I first found out about the "confession." He said that I needed to plead guilty to a reduced charge and serve four years in prison. I wanted to go to trial. I did not commit armed robbery. He said that it was fruitless since I signed a confession. I wonder why I could not have found out about this before, and had a chance to challenge it.

Not that it would have done any good. Chicago cops at this time were also torturing suspects to elicit false confessions.

It took over 25+ years for the legal system to get that scandal to the surface.

But I could not go to prison. I considered any prison sentence to be a possible death sentence.

Judge Kiley called for a lunch recess. He said that a jury would be called and that the trial would commence today.

I jumped on a CTA bus and somehow ended up in Utah months later.

It was one of the best moves I have ever made.

Life is funny. Not always ha-ha funny. I was trying to turn my life around. My sense of loyalty that was dictated by my street smarts lead to my poor choices that short-circuited my long-term plans.

I had written a heart-felt letter to an affirmative action program from the University of Wisconsin. I explained my goals in life and the obstacles that I had endured trying to reach them. I think that my brutal honesty impressed them. They offered a five-year program, fully paid, for students they accepted into their program. I told them my story. They sent me a letter during the summer of '79 inviting me to an orientation for the program.

Why should I show up? It was a waste of time. I was headed to prison. Screw my dreams and goals of teaching at an university. I was stupid and always screwing things up. All I was good at was getting drunk.

Life is funny.

31 years to the date and I am sitting in Utah suburbia, within hearing distance from cows and roosters, and watching my son as he excitedly tells me about the process of the Tooth Fairy.

31 years ago I was facing the nightmare of prison. Now I am entrusted with nurturing the dreams of a 6 year-old who is protected from the horrors that I endured as a daily part of life.

He will never wake up with his penis inside the mouth of a relative. I was younger than he now is when that happened to me. When I think about his innocence, I am astounded how young I was, and the things I had to deal with at that tender age.

He will never be forced to eat burned eggs and then forced to eat the vomit caused from consuming the burned eggs.

His self-worth will never have to deal with daily savage beatings. He will never be sexually molested by a Father Dyer-like pedophile priest.

...he will be a complete stranger to the daily horrors of sexual physical, and emotional abuse. He will not be the hurt, vulnerable child who has to go back in time to protect himself.

31 years.

There is always hope. There is always a chance for healing. There is always room for growth. No one needs to be crippled by their past. I am beyond that hurt child.

Here I am with a son excited about the Tooth Fairy. Normality was once a fairy tale to me.

I have never talked about the Tooth Fairy with him. I wonder what other kind of subversive conversations his mother has with him at bedtime? Ha.

His mother left two one dollar coins in a baggie under his pillow and took the baggie with the tooth. The fairy tale deception was complete.

Although his mother reminded me to remind our son to check under his pillow the next morning, I forgot. It was not until 3pm the next day when he suddenly remembered- a Tooth Fairy epiphany- while we were talking about something else. He made a dash to his bedroom and returned with two one dollar coins in tow.

He was so excited about this process of trading old body parts for cash. What a great system! While I do not want to lie to him about fantasy creatures like the Tooth Fairy, Santa, or the Flying Spaghetti, I also do not want to discourage the creative process that comes with believing in such things when one is a child.

The monster now has a chance to nurture beauty in a child. I no longer believe that I am destined to always fuck things up.

Life is funny. It is nothing to laugh at.

Close your eyes,
Have no fear,
The monsters gone,
He's on the run and your daddy's here,

Beautiful,
Beautiful, beautiful,
Beautiful boy.

Beautiful,
Beautiful, beautiful,
Beautiful boy.

Before you go to sleep,
Say a little prayer,
Every day in every way,
It's getting better and better,

Beautiful,
Beautiful, beautiful,
Beautiful boy.

Beautiful,
Beautiful, beautiful,
Beautiful boy.

Out on the ocean sailing away,
I can hardly wait,
To see you to come of age,
But I guess we'll both,
Just have to have patience,
Yes it's a long way to go,
A hard road to hold,
Yes, it's a long way to go
But in the meantime,

Before you cross the street,
Take my hand,
Life is just what happens to you,
While your busy making other plans,

Beautiful,
Beautiful, beautiful,
Beautiful boy.

Beautiful,
Beautiful, beautiful,
Beautiful boy.

Out on the ocean sailing away,
I can hardly wait,
To see you to come of age,
But I guess we'll both,
Just have to have to be patient.
Yes it's a long way to go,
A hard road to hold,
Yes, it's a long way to go
But in the meantime,

Before you go to sleep,
Say a little prayer,
Every day in every way,
It's getting better and better,

Beautiful,
Beautiful, beautiful,
Beautiful boy.

Darling,
Darling,
Darling Sean.