A couple of minutes later, a Love Gang guy came to me and said, “I’m going out there. She just looked through the window with that ‘Rescue me’ look in her eye.”
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Love
I kid you not. At one point, all four Vietnamese voices together began to sing,
So . . . I did a thing. I got a tattoo. On my face.
I no longer practice a faith that is determined by a list of the correct beliefs. However, I live in a culture where the contracting kind of Christianity dominates the landscape.
“Went and knocked up some other woman. Got hisself some other kids. But we was his first childs. He just left. How do you do that?!”
Frank smiled. Then he asked, “Does your iced tea have healing powers?”
It’s a very public space, and most everybody knows if you leave something, it’s kind of at your own risk. So the barista reminded her of that, to which she turned and said to everyone in the room, “This is my food. I’m coming back for it. Nobody eat it. K?”
Tears welled up in his tough-man eyes, and he said, “They beat my other cat to death. I couldn’t let this one die.”
But sometimes the mountain of failure and shame is just too big, too hard to climb, and the path is impossible to trek alone.
There he was, lying unconscious in a pool of his own blood. I pushed my way through the gathered crowd, caught the eye of one of the cops, and announced, “I know this guy. I have all his information.”
One even felt like an inquisition, in which my answers were to be discussed amongst a group of “elders” who would make a determination to uninvite me from a previously scheduled event.
I didn’t know Melvin when he committed his original crime. I do know that he was twenty-two when he was convicted. How many of us did stupid stuff when we were young adults?
He was filthy. Dirt and grime in every orifice. Hair matted in unintended dreadlocks. His clothing reeked of bodily fluids. Immediately it became clear that he has not been taking his medication.
the next piece of information that got back to me on the community grapevine was: THEY ALL TOOK TURNS SLEEPING WITH HER THAT NIGHT!!!
I turned to little Jewel (who is nine) and told her she had to stay in the car. Her eyes were wide and full of tears.
Little Mary was a prostitute—not the street-walker type—well maybe sometimes, but not the leopard skin, mini-skirt and high heels type. For Mary, sex was a currency, as is the case for so many women living in poverty.
While I hear Churchians talking about how “the poor are poor because they make poor choices,” I daily watch single mothers working at the drudgery of minimum wage jobs that just cannot pay the bills, and daily facing the temptation to dance (and more) in the strip clubs on our street
The policeman stepped out of his car, and the young man who had called breathlessly rattled his complaint. “These guys are gonna beat me! They threatened to hit me! I didn’t do nothing to them, but they’re gonna kill me! Some of them are Juggalos and some of them are Crips. They’re gonna kill me!”
“This is the original revolution: the creation of a distinct community with its own deviant set of values.” John Howard Yodel
Being “born again” means starting over and coming into the world as something new, something different. It’s a total overhaul, an extreme makeover that gives us a complet
ely new outlook on life. It means a revolution of values