“There he is against the telephone pole,” Victor said.
We’d been sent for an ETOH – a drunk on the corner of Park and Hungerford in front of the Immaculate Conception Church. The man wearing a Boston Celtics jacket lay on the ground, his back against the pole, snoring.
Victor gave him a gentle nudge in the side.
The man opened his eyes and smiled at Victor like he knew him.
“Hey dude, whass up?” he said to Victor.
“What hospital, Henry?”
“I don’t wanna to go to the hospital? I wanna go to ADRC,” he said. “I need rehab.”
“But you’re on the banned list,” Victor said.
“No, I’m not.”
“Remember you called yesterday and we tried to take you. They said you were banned. Every time you go there, you go AWOL on them.”
“They won’t take me?”
“Not today, they won’t.”
“Forget it then.”
“We can take you to one of the hospitals.”
“No, they’ll just tie me up. Leave me here. Is a nice day.”
“You don’t want to go, you have to get up and walk away.”
“Can’t I stay here?”
“No, because they’ll keep calling us. This is a busy street. People don’t want to be stepping over you. You have to move on.”
“Help me up.”
Victor gave him a hand to his feet.
“You got a dollar?”
Victor shook his head.
“I served my country.”
“I respect you for that.”
“Can’t hurt to ask.” He looked at me now. “How about you, big man? For a brother?”
“You want a sandwich?”
He shook his head. “No, I wanna a drink. I want to get shit-faced. You understand?”
“Sure do.”
“You want to lie down,” Victor said. “Just don’t lie where people can see you. You don’t move on, the cops’ll be next.”
“All right.” He help his arm up to me and I helped lift him to his feet.
We watched him wander off down Hungerford.
Victor spoke into the radio. “463 clear L-Lima.”
“Okay 63, got you clear.”
We sat in the ambulance while Victor wrote up the paperwork.
Just up the street I could see a short man in a pinstripe suit in front of the El Mercado, shaking hands with passerbys, while two young men in blue blazers and ties handed out flyers. A cameraman filmed as the diminutive man clasped his hand over an old woman’s. As she spoke, he nodded.
“That’s Senator Shrieb,” Victor said.
“I’ve heard of him,” I said. I’d seen him when I was out in California. He was giving a speech at a hotel I worked at briefly.”
“Yeah, he wants to run for President someday. See the man and woman standing with him,” Victor said. A Hispanic man in a suit and sunglasses and a tall extremely attractive Hispanic woman tried to steer people the Senator’s way. “The man is Perry Santiago. He is a city councilman -- big in the Democratic Party. His brother’s a lawyer for Champion Ambulance. The woman is Helen Seurat. Sidney Seuss’s daughter. Don Seurat’s ex-wife.
“She’s quite a story. She’s adopted. When Sidney and his wife started the business they were a one family ambulance service. One night they got called for an unknown behind one of the buildings in Rice Heights. It was a baby, not three hours old. No one claimed the baby. The Seuesss adopted her. Nice girl – Sidney spoiled her, particularly after his wife died. They brought her up in private schools, country clubs. Now she’s trying to hookup with the Hispanic community.”
“So they’re together?”
“For now. Santiago, like Don Seurat, is a ladies man as you can see. He likes to wear the nice suits and go to the parties and get his name in the paper. Helen works for the literacy program. She is a nice woman, but very high maintenance. With Don working so hard, and with his roving eye, their marriage went kaput. Even though Don gets plenty on his own, he’d take her back in a minute.”
Even from the distance of fifty yards I could see just how great her beauty was. She was tall with light brown skin and long raven hair.
“Don can’t stand Santiago,” Victor said. “Aside from taking his wife, Santiago keeps trying to get the city to give our territory to Champion.”
“Wouldn’t Helen be opposed to that?”
“I don’t know. Sidney’s partners are in a fight over what to do with the business. I think Helen wants them to sell. I don’t know. It’s hard to figure. I just come to work when I’m in the book and go where they tell me. As long as my paycheck clears at the bank, I’m not complaining.”
“That’s a good way to be.”
“The Senator wants to learn something valuable, he should talk to that old man over there,” Victor said.
A man with a weathered leathery face sat in a wheelchair in front of a bogata, smoking a cigarette watching the scene on the street.
“That’s Papi Ruiz. He started one of the first gangs in the city years ago when Puerto Ricans were being exploited. That changed. I used to be best friends his grandson Hector. Hector Ruiz, you’ve heard of him?”
“No, should I have?”
“You’ll hear of him you stay working here long enough. He’s the leader of the most powerful gang in the city. He’s in jail now, but he may win his appeal. Maybe you’ve seen him when he was on Sixty Minutes?”
“I don’t watch much TV.”
“He was on Sixty Minutes. He took over the gang when his older brother Ramon was sent to jail for murder. Hector was amazing at first. He had his boys doing community services projects, food banks, helping old ladies with their groceries, organizing athletic events for the kids. They are not a gang, but a social club, committed to cleaning up the neighborhood, teaching pride to young people. He had people fooled. He is charismatic. He was always on TV giving sound bites. For a while things did seem better. The shootings were down. He engineered a truce with rival gangs.
“The drug trade, while still going on, was off the street corner, making it harder for the cops to pin it on the gang. Then Hector’s brother Jaime got shot on the corner of Park and Lawrence. A drive-by -- he got hit fourteen times. We expected hell to break loose. The city flooded the streets with cops. The governor sent in state troopers. But there’s Hector out in the street, preaching peace. He seemed like a man transformed. They held a candlelight vigil. He got written up in Time magazine, profiled on 60 Minutes. The next thing you know Hector is going to win the Nobel Prize the way they’re talking about him.
“Then one night we’re sitting down at Capitol and Broad and we hear the pop pop pop sound of gunfire. ‘463, shooting, Park and Lawrence, multiple victims.’ ‘451, shooting Hudson Street.’ ‘472, Main and Capen.’
“Turns out he’s unified several of the smaller gangs into one, and coordinated an assault on their chief rival. Five fatalities, another ten wounded. One rival is thrown dead on the steps of 50 Jennings Road – the PD station. He’s been tortured. The trigger finger of his right hand is cut off. They found it in his rectum. The cops couldn’t pin any of it on Hector. Every time they got close to getting the story, somebody else got shot. They finally got him on a drug possession. I think they planted a joint on him. I know he was too smart to carry himself. He claims he is a political prisoner.”
“And you and he were friends?”
“We were like blood.”
“Yet he’s there and you’re here?”
“That’s how it worked out. At first, his older brothers and his grandfather tried to protect him. They wouldn’t let him have any part of the gang life. He was going to be the one that did well in school and went to college. One day when we were thirteen, some rival gang members had come down Hamilton, and were spray-painting their graffiti in our neighborhood. When they were spotted, they jumped back in their Camaro and took off. Hector’s little sister Maria was in the street. They slammed into her. She was killed instantly. The same thing as happened later; the cops knew there would be trouble so they locked down the neighborhood. They arrested his brothers just to get them off the street. Two nights later, the driver was found tied to the rear of a stolen car that was smashed driverless into the clubhouse of the rival gang, his corpse was dragged over a hundred yards. After that Hector was in the gang.”
“And you never joined.”
“I tried to, but Papi Ruiz wouldn’t let me. Maybe it was because he had known my father and felt he should look after me. He taught his grandsons to be tough -- to not back down. The gang thing he started was for protection, but it changed. Everyone fighting each other. He couldn’t save them – they were too much like him. So he chose me to save. ‘Little Bull’ he called me.”
He was quiet for a moment, then nodding toward the Senator, said, “This is a poor neighborhood,” he said, “but it is not about welfare and food stamps, it is about what you hold inside, how you see yourself. It is about pride. That is what Papi would tell the Senator.”
We watched as the Senator and his staff got into a black Lincoln that pulled up for them, and they were off, gone from the world of Park Street. Helen Seurat and Perry Santiago got into a white convertible and drove slowly back East on Park Street. Santiago had his arm around her like a high school boy around his Saturday night date.
Papi Ruiz lit another cigarette.
“I want to show you something,” Victor said. “Take a left on Zion.” He directed me around the corner and pointed to a billboard, overgrown with vines. “Check that out.”
There was a picture of the Senator, standing in front of the Capitol. “Joe Shrieb for Senate, Leadership for Connecticut.” The paint had faded and peeled. Someone had graffitied “Lolpop” on it. “You know what that means? Lollypop. It’s a dis. Gangs spray it over other gang’s graffiti. That’s been there for years. Nobody has told him. That’s how much the big politicians know this community. He has no eyes on this street.”
Our radio cackled, “483, Respond to Park and Spring, man shot in the leg. On a one.”
“Summer in the city,” Victor said.
I hit the red lights on.
