INTRODUCTION:

CHICO ESCAPES

He wasn’t a fugitive. At least, that’s what a quick search on the internet revealed. Never mind that the SWAT Team had just surrounded his house and he was presently sitting on my couch, a safe 15 miles from the scene. His mom had just called and frantically told him, “Chico. Do NOT come home. They already got Gordo!” Apparently, the twenty cop cars with the paddy wagon accessory defied the most current information provided on the county’s website and now Chico and I had nowhere to go. He couldn’t leave because the poe-poe’s were intent on finding him. I couldn’t take him anywhere because of the appearance of aiding and abetting a twenty-first century criminal with a seemingly twentieth century warrant. He was broke and I wasn’t going to give him a penny for anything that could be described as providing help for him to escape. And if the thought of abandoning him to alert the police had even crossed my mind, Chico surely would have wrung my neck before my first step had even made it out of the door. So we were stuck. My old pal Chico had essentially taken me hostage in my own home.

I guess the tip-off for me that morning should have been Chico’s phone call at dawn. “I’m going to come over and make you breakfast,” he said matter-of-factly, before I could even figure out who was calling me so early. Years before, Chico and I had grown as close as brothers when I volunteered as a counselor at a youth center encapsulated with omnipresent black bars bolted to all of its windows in a tough part of town. Chico and his gang of homeboys did a good job at pushing most all of the other youths out of the program back then, thus leaving these bald-headed, budding gangsters behind with practically all of my attention to spare.

Nobody would have called Chico the leader of the gang per se, after all, it had formed in large part for its members’ growing distaste for authority, but most everyone would have agreed that Chico was its primary instigator of violence. His street smarts never left him on the losing end of a confrontation, but it was only after his state-mandated incarceration had ended did his closest friends suffer a spike of stabbings, shootings, and bloody beatings. Finally, Chico had just fled to Mexico to get away from it all before it had a chance to end up getting him more than it already had.

That’s why Chico’s offer of a spontaneous, good-willed breakfast should have caused me to raise my eyebrows. All Chico had ever brought before was trouble… and now that I hadn’t seen him for years, he’s back on the U.S side of the border bringing me pancakes or eggs or something?

I still had not even gotten out of bed yet, but I immediately began to dread his arrival. After Chico had left San Diego and the rest of his homeboys started drifting away into the responsibilities of adulthood, I had spent one ill-fated year in law school before I began my first steady-paying job as a substitute teacher. Being harassed and harangued by eighth graders every day was harmless compared to risking my life on a daily basis trying to keep Chico and his friends on the straight and narrow a few years back.

I hadn’t drifted too far down memory lane when the doorbell rang. I opened the door and there was Chico. He had a head full of hair. That was different than when he ran with the cholos up here in San Diego. Maybe things were different now. Maybe being reminded that I was still a mainstay in someone’s life was going to be worth the early-morning wake-up call. Chico’s face was still torn up from using meth a few too many times, but his smile easily beamed past the undeniably visible effects of his destructive behavior as a teenager. As he stood there on the doorstep of my apartment – empty-handed, no less – we didn’t need any small talk to make up for the time that had elapsed since we last saw each other.

“I thought you told me that you were going to bring me breakfast!” I snarled, not yet as awake as he was.

“I said that I was going to make you breakfast,” Chico replied, ever so nonchalantly. “I didn’t say that I was going to bring it!”

Shouldn’t I have known better at this point? How long had I been hoping for syrup and waffles from this guy and yet how many times had I ended up with a sticky situation on my hands and never any waffles to show for it? “Here’s three bucks. Go down to the liquor store on the corner and get some milk. Then you can come back and make me some damn cereal, how would you like that?”

Chico laughed and dutifully went on his way. Even now that he was a few years into adulthood, I found it strange as his muscular frame bounded down the stairs of my apartment complex that he would still take my orders as I feebly stood there, groggily barking orders to him in my pajamas. The problem was never that he was disrespectful to me, it’s just that he’d also have this nagging habit of taking orders from one of his older friends that told him to go grab a baseball bat or a golf club and crack open a rival gang member’s head with it, too. What was he doing here, I wondered. And how come I had just sent someone who I hadn’t seen in practically three years to go get a gallon of leche before we even had a chance to say hello?

After the corn flakes – Chico always called every single type of cereal “corn flakes” – and after his mom’s disturbing phone call some thirty minutes later, it became clear that Chico was in some type of trouble yet once again. And this was how it always was with Chico since the first day that I met him as a sixteen year old who had just been released from Juvenile Hall a few hours before. Assault with a deadly weapon, he had said, proud of the deed, but remorseful that he had to tell me. Probation violation. Drugs. Another assault, this time in broad daylight in a Burger King parking lot. I was afraid to imagine what they didn’t catch him doing. Finally he had just fled to Mexico to get away from it all before it had a chance to get him more than it already had. Yet here we were once again sitting around my old rickety coffee table playing checkers as if the manhunt going on for him somewhere outside was either just a fantasy or merely another routine occurrence in the ’hood that didn’t require much more than a second thought anymore. But wait a minute. Was I the only one playing checkers who was worried that twenty cops may come busting through my door at any second? That their pistols would be pointed at our heads before either Chico or I could say, “King me”? That, given Chico’s unblemished record of escaping the deadly skirmishes that he had been so instrumental in creating, he might risk my mortality to save his own?

I watched Chico gauge his next move. He was about to beat me again, he just knew it. His eyes gleamed with victory. Why do you have to be so destructive, Chico? Why can’t you just play by the rules, like you do so well on this checkerboard?

Chico’s pupils darted from right to left, left to right, studying the board carefully for one last time. Steadily, purposefully, he prodded each of his checkers across the perfectly flat and congruent squares to the other side of the board, ensuring a certain victory. Screw your college degrees, his smile gleefully sang, I’m still smarter than you.

There would be a different type of coronation that took place by day’s end, however. Before Chico’s mom would send somebody over to my house to pick up her wayward son close to midnight, there was a great commotion in the alley below my second-floor balcony followed by the sound of screeching wheels. But they were not the Michelins of the police. These were the synthetic wheels of skateboards, whose eighth-grade owners had suddenly swarmed in and were chattering like magpies outside. I hadn’t known Chico when he was these kids’ age, but I had seen his seventh- and eighth-grade report cards. All A’s and B’s.

Knowing that Chico’s turn for the worse occurred sometime between being an honor-roll, middle-school student one moment to becoming a ninth-grade dropout the next, I watched these young, happy skateboarders down below act completely oblivious to the danger that awaited them in these streets as they grew older. Some of the students would have been in the very same classes that I was originally scheduled to teach that day before my unexpected visitor came along. If Chico was any indication, it was just a matter of time until these harmless little guys transformed into the mean and tough cholos of the years to come. Kids in this neighborhood, see, didn’t just slip through the cracks. And just as the dives and spills on that day proved, the cracks that stretched across this alley and all of the other rough-and-tumble streets around here would make these skateboarders slip, fall, and land awfully hard on the unforgiving cement at any given second. Yet while these kids jumped back up after every splash to the ground, my experiences with Chico’s crowd told me that, eventually, some of these students of mine would never get back up.

“Chico, come look,” I said, motioning for him to come closer and peer out through the blinds that we had kept drawn for the entire day. “Look at those little kids down there. Do you think… that… things would have been different if I had known you and your friends back then?”

This old cholo, this ex-con, this felon on the run, this good friend of mine started to slowly shake his head from side to side. My heart was undeniably crushed. Wasn’t there some other way to make those kids any different than what Chico’s life had sadly become? No matter how many choices were made available, would the results always remain the same? But then, still without saying a word, Chico’s entire body started methodically rocking forwards and backwards as if seething in retrospect. When he finally spoke, there was no pride in his voice this time, only regret.

“We wouldn’t be the way we are,” Chico said.

Those are the last words that I remember Chico telling me. Later that night, a car with dark, tinted windows would take Chico back to Mexico, but my mind kept spinning faster than the wheels on Chico’s ride had disappeared into the darkness. Was the next generation destined to follow him into this urban abyss? Could the situation in this neighborhood be changed? Did different outcomes exist, or would all efforts just be akin to indistinguishable corn flakes in the end?

Chico’s words on the day he took me hostage gave me a renewed sense of hope. I spent a lot of time thinking about how Chico’s body language answered my question about the kids in the alley quicker than his words did. His initial wistfulness, which I had mistaken for doubt, displayed a hunger for a time long ago when he was still in control of his actions, his destiny. He shook his head in acknowledgement that he had let those days pass and that he no longer had reason to look forward to his future.

Then, when his body shifted, and he started rocking in a forward motion, Chico’s pockmarked face saw that the future could be different, at least for the youths playing in the alley. Chico may have lost the agency to change his own circumstances, but he didn’t think it was too late for this next generation to change the realities that lay ahead of them in these streets. All they needed was to find a road that was smooth enough to get them to the other side of the checkerboard that allowed them to make strategic moves as they advanced forward and captured achievements all the way across their childhoods until they made it safely to adulthood. And so it was. On the night of Chico’s disappearance, nudged onward with his encouragement, an idea was born for a program that would eventually become called Reality Changers.

As I set out to put together a structure strong enough to get inner-city teens off the streets and into the best colleges in the United States, for many years success seemed more than elusive. What kept me going were Chico’s words that forever echoed in my head. “We wouldn’t be the way we are,” Chico kept telling me. “We wouldn’t be the way we are.”

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