“Yes,” she said. “They are very angry. And the only thing they can do with that anger, pretty much, is to harm each other over trivial matters.”
She took in some of her whiskey. She sat still for a moment and let it work.
“Something has to matter,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly right.”
“Are there turf issues?” I said.
“Sure, but a lot of the extreme violence grows out of small issues between individuals. Who dissed who. Who looked at my girl, who stepped on my sneaker.”
“Something’s got to matter.”
“You get it, don’t you,” she said. “I didn’t expect you would. I figured you’d be different.”
“It has always seemed to me that there’s some sort of inverse ratio between social structure and, what… honor codes? Maybe a little highfaluting for the issue at hand, but I can’t think of better.”
“By honor do you mean inner-directed behavior? Because these kids are not inner directed.”
“No, I know they’re not. I guess I mean that nature hates a vacuum. If there are no things which are important, then things are assigned importance arbitrarily and defended at great risk. Because the risk validates the importance.”
Erin Macklin sat back in her chair a little. She was holding her whiskey glass in both hands in her lap. She looked at my face as if she were reading directions.
“You’re not just talking about these kids, are you?” she said.
“Any of them got families?” I said. “Besides the gang?”
“Not always, but sometimes,” she said. Outside a siren whooped: fire, ambulance, cops. If you live in any city you hear sirens all the time. And you pay no attention. It’s an environmental sound. Like wind and birdsong in the country. Neither of us reacted.
“Often the families are dysfunctional because of dope or booze or pathology. Sometimes they are abusive, the kind you see on television. But some times they are Utopian-my kid can do no wrong. My kid is fine. The other ones are bad. It’s the myth by which the parent reassures herself, or occasionally himself, that everything is okay. And of course it isn’t and the pressure on the kid to be the source, so to speak, of `okayness’ for the family adds to his stress and drives him to the gang. Sometimes the kid is the family caretaker. He’s the one putting food on the table-usually from dealing drugs-nobody asks him where he got the money. He’s valued for it.” She raised her glass with both hands from her lap and drank some more of the whiskey.
“If you’re dealing,” she said, “you have to be down with the gang where you’re dealing.”
I stood and went around my desk and poured a little more whiskey into her glass. She made no protest. She had settled back into her chair a little; she seemed in a reverie as she talked about what was obviously her life’s work.
“Then there’s the other myth. The bad-seed myth. The family that tells the kid he’s bad from birth. One of my kids got shot in the chest and was dying of it. I was there, and his mother was there. `I told him he was no good,‘ she said to me. `I told him he’d end up with a bullet in him before he was twenty. And I was right.’ ”
“What a triumph for her,” I said.
The whiskey seemed to have no effect on her, and she drank like one who enjoyed whiskey-not like someone who needed it. She smiled, almost dreamily.
“Had a kid, about fifteen, named Coke. Smart kid, had a lot of imagination, felt a lot of things. He knew the numbers, one in four, and he was sure he was going to be the one. So, because he was certain he’d die young, he set out to impregnate as many girls as he could. Even had a schedule set up, so he could achieve the maximum possible pregnancies before he died.”
“There’ll be one child left to carry on,” I said.
“Unfortunately there are twenty or thirty children left to carry on. All of them with junior high school girls for mothers, and no father.”
“Did he die young?”
“Not yet,” she said. “But he’s not around for those children.”
“They were a stay against confusion,” I said.
“A continuation, a kind of self,” she said, “that would survive him when the world he lived in overwhelmed him.”
“And he never identified with the three out of four that don’t die violently in youth,” I said.
“No. The life’s too hard for that kind of optimism.”
“Seventy-five percent is good odds in blackjack,” I said. “But for dying, it would not seem a source of much comfort.”
“Where I work,” she said, “there is no source of much comfort.”
“Except maybe you,” I said.
She smiled a little and sipped a little more whiskey.
“Isn’t it pretty to think so,” she said.
“Well,” I said, “a literate ex-nun.”
“Anything’s possible,” she said.
