1• • •The Fireman
Ryan, Javier, and two African American boys who had played no part in the fire incident were hauled into an office, where two resource officers, who were assigned to the school by law enforcement, were watching the security monitors. They were seated around a conference table. The principal, Jordan Thompson, directed Officer Taylor Bailey to roll a videotape. The boys were shown some grainy surveillance footage of the minutes before the fire. As the tape progressed, Ryan’s lean five-foot frame slumped in his chair. As soon as I get home, he thought, my mom’s going to beat my ass.
Thompson asked to pause the tape. “Who’s this kid with the white shirt?” Silence. Ryan’s and Andres’s faces weren’t recognizable on the tape, but the administrators matched their complexions and hauled in Ryan and Javier. They were among the few Puerto Ricans in the school and were considered troublemakers by the administration.
Bailey and the dean, Christopher Anderson, towered over the four boys. Thompson, fatherly at first, now turned threatening: “I hope you guys know that we already called the police, and y’all are going to jail.” The prospect of getting locked up had never crossed Ryan’s mind. It was just a stupid prank. But Thompson kept hounding them, and after fifteen minutes Ryan was trembling and on the verge of tears. He had grown claustrophobic in the cramped room. As a boy, he had been locked in bedroom closets by an older cousin when they visited their grandmother’s house. He still had nightmares of dying in his sleep and awakening in a tightly shut coffin from which he couldn’t escape.
Desperate to conclude the ordeal, he finally stood up and pushed his chair back. “I’m the kid with the white T-shirt. I’m right here.” He unbuttoned his blue shirt to show them. He was sure Thompson was bluffing about calling the police.
“Who is the kid next to you?” Thompson asked. Ryan kept mum for a while but eventually caved to repeated interrogation. “It was Andres!” he blurted out. The other boys shot him dirty looks. He had violated the most basic rule: never snitch. Andres wasn’t on the administration’s radar. He was a mostly rule-abiding student and had kept a low profile at Grover Washington. Now Anderson brought him in.
Up until two officers from the Philadelphia Police Department walked in the door, Ryan still had hope that he would worm his way out of this mess with no more than the usual consequences. The school officials showed the police the tape, and Ryan and Andres admitted their part in the fire. Javier was suspended for three days for his presence at the scene while the two African American boys were dismissed. Had it really been necessary to involve the police? No one had been hurt. Surely the school administrators could have handled the situation internally? But they had made their fateful decision, and there was no turning back. They had washed their hands of the problem, even as they knew what the criminal justice system did to boys who looked like Ryan and Andres.
Anderson scanned Ryan’s socks—purple with Tinker Bell patterns, borrowed from his mother. “They’re going to love those socks in the Youth Study Center,” he taunted, referring to the city’s juvenile detention center. Reality finally started to sink in. Ryan’s mother had warned him once that if he ever got arrested, she wouldn’t come to pick him up. He knew his mother didn’t make idle threats, so when the officers said his mother could retrieve him at the station, he started spiraling. “Y’all don’t get it; my mom already told me that she’s not coming to get me,” he protested. The officers weren’t interested. They handcuffed Andres and Ryan and paraded them through the building to their lockers. When Ryan started showing signs of resistance, one of the police, Officer James King, grabbed fistfuls of his collar and pants to keep him in line.
Kids pressed their faces to the narrow windows in the classroom doors to catch a glimpse of the duo’s walk of shame. A few of them darted into the hallway only for their teachers to corral them inside. “Ryan’s getting locked up,” they singsonged. He was the man. But a cocky swagger masked the fact that he was actually scared witless. He had watched countless arrests in his neighborhood, but this was the first time he was on the other end. This was real. With no playbook to ease his panic, a torrent of questions filled his mind, each escalating in severity: Will I be allowed to return to Grover Washington? How long will they keep me in custody? When am I going to see my mom again? Will someone try to rape me in jail? Ryan no longer felt autonomy over his body.
On the way downstairs, they passed the stairwell where Andres had first lit up the scraps of paper. Ryan stopped and spun around to glare at Anderson. “Can you stop dragging my fucking hoodie on the floor?”
“Watch your mouth,” Officer King countered. “Don’t talk to him like that.”
“Can’t you see he’s dragging my shit on the floor?” Ryan snapped.
Anderson told him to shut it and keep walking. Only days earlier, Ryan had written in a short essay, “Next week will be spring break I really hope it is fun for me and my family This is so because we haven’t done anything fun in a long time.” Near the front entrance, Ryan’s gym teacher, who was fond of him, witnessed the grim scene as he was heading out of the gymnasium. He shook his head in disappointment.
* * *
SINCE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, Ryan’s teachers had repeatedly called his mother to complain about his antics. Ryan interrupted instruction, refused to do work or obey rules, constantly got out of his seat, threw chairs, flipped tables, took ill-timed naps, kicked walls, slammed doors, and ridiculed other students. He had endless energy and desired only to run around, play, and dish out wisecracks. Rayni, a Puerto Rican– Nicaraguan woman with long straight black hair and light skin, couldn’t believe the shenanigans Ryan got up to at school. At home, he was largely well behaved. He said his prayers. He washed the dishes. He went to bed on time. She thought he was two-faced: Dr. Jekyll at home and Mr. Hyde at school. Suspensions piled up. His disciplinary woes came at the expense of his academic performance. He scored in the lowest brackets on the annual state standardized tests and chalked up dozens of absences.
School administrators initially ignored Rayni’s attempts to obtain a psychological evaluation for Ryan. Developing an Individualized Education Program and providing high-quality special education was not cheap, requiring sums of money that the federal government consistently failed to appropriate. The lack of funds for special education created a decades-long crisis that persisted in chronically money-starved school districts like Philadelphia.1
Frustrated by the runaround, Rayni had confronted the principal at James R. Lowell Elementary School. “Do you think I’m here because I want to collect a check for my son? Do you really think I want to label my child?” Her request was finally granted. If Ryan hadn’t had a mother who was savvy enough to soldier through a byzantine bureaucracy until she was satisfied, would anyone have looked out for him? Ryan was given a diagnosis of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Further testing placed his verbal and nonverbal reasoning skills in the average range. It wasn’t easy getting him through the arduous examination. “He proved to be impulsive, manipulative, oppositional, and even somewhat sassy, mimicking the examiner,” noted the report. “However, he sat for almost three hours and with firm but kind redirection, completed the testing.”
The antidote was Ritalin—the typical treatment for restive boys in the city. Rayni was happy to report that the medication helped to check some of his impulsive behavior, but Ryan wasn’t on the same page. The drug gave him heart palpitations and made him feel lethargic. Some mornings he would lodge the pill in his cheek and spit it into the trash when his mother wasn’t looking.
This was the simple and convenient solution: to drug Ryan in order to fix his apparent psychological defects. Perhaps it wasn’t that Ryan was ill-suited for school but that school was ill-suited for him; repressive schooling had suppressed and punished his natural proclivity for play and exploration by forcing him to sit at a desk, shut up, and raise his hand for permission to speak and use the bathroom.2 Submitting to a rigid authority for seven hours a day was an affront to Ryan’s very being, and Ritalin was unable to resolve that.
A few blocks from their one-bedroom apartment on Fifth Street in Olney, Lowell was Ryan and Avry’s fifth school in less than three years—economic and housing instability forced the family to move often. As Philadelphia’s population swelled during the early twentieth century, architect Henry deCourcy Richards designed dozens of public schools in the city, including Lowell, which was named after the poet and abolitionist. Built between 1913 and 1914, it was a three-story concrete edifice designed in the Classical Revival style with brick walls, terra-cotta and granite trimmings, and seventeen classrooms.3 The rooms were old and dreary. Students screamed and jumped on their desks at the sighting of rats and mice. The water in the fountains tasted awful, especially during the warm months of the year. Building reports indicated lead in the drinking water and the presence of lead paint, asbestos, and an assortment of asthma triggers.4
The best parts of Ryan’s day were gym and recess. Like most elementary schools in the city, Lowell didn’t have a playground, so the kids chased each other and played dodgeball on the cracked concrete parking lot.5 Ryan and Avry talked in the hallways and ate lunch together. They found school meals less than appealing: packaged mini-pancakes and French toast sticks for breakfast and lukewarm pizza, mac and cheese, chicken nuggets, and tater tots in plastic boxes for lunch.
Ryan’s teachers at Lowell talked up Grover Washington as he and his classmates prepared to transition to middle school. Unlike Lowell’s decaying carcass, the middle school’s building was only a few years old. They would make new friends and have new teachers. They were moving into the next phase of their lives. But when the fourth-grade class toured Grover Washington, Ryan was not allowed to attend. In what was his final suspension, he sat in a narrow, dim room next to the classmate he had earlier smacked with a book. Lowell was finished with him. When he went back there years later, his old gym teacher recalled,“When he was here, he ran this school.”
In Ryan’s mind, Grover Washington would be his fresh start. He would leave his old larks behind and buckle down on his education. Fifth grade initially proceeded according to plan. He loved having a locker and transitioning from class to class. He felt grown up. He also developed a passion for the drums, something he had wanted to learn for years. At Lowell, he had attended a performance of the school band and was awed by its talents. When he asked the music teacher if he could try an instrument, he curtly replied, “No. You don’t have what it takes.” The teacher had heard of Ryan’s less-than-stellar reputation.
The new school year started well, but as time went on, the monotony of the traditional academic classes paled in comparison to the thrill of roaming the hallways, and it became too tempting for Ryan to resist. “Hallways all days,” as he described it. Ryan and some other students would press up against the windows in the classroom doors and urge their friends to join their escapades. One of their favorite activities was drawing graffiti using fat Sharpie markers they stole from the art room. To build up his stature in the graffiti crew, Ryan’s artwork needed to be visible around the school. Inspired by Marc Eckō’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure video game, he started defacing walls and doors with “SAVE was here,” “SAVE the World,” “SAVE Your Ass,” and “SAVE 2008.”
He made sure to throw out the markers when he was finished and meticulously scrub smudges from his hands to wipe away the evidence. But he got in trouble for violating other rules, particularly the “Prohibition of Disruption of School” and “Prohibition of Fighting.” Some comments on his numerous disciplinary slips read: “Out of seat and left classroom. Refused to take textbook—waiting for security to come and get him.” “Ryan was punching and hitting Alex in the lunchroom.” “Did not come up with class from lunch. Received no permission to go somewhere. Stopped by Mrs. Evans so they could get a pass at 11:53 but lunch ended at 11:30.”6
Like many underfunded urban schools, Grover Washington had adopted the broken-windows theory of policing in its disciplinary practices, which holds that tolerating minor quality-of-life violations will allow serious crime to fester. Based on that approach, low-level infractions, such as disorderly conduct, willful defiance, and truancy were penalized and sometimes criminalized, causing suspensions to surge and fueling the criminal justice system.7 Studies showed that students who were suspended or expelled were much more likely to drop out of school altogether.8
In the 1990s, amid a tough-on-crime political agenda and panic over juvenile “superpredators,” hysteria over school discipline erupted. Political scientist John J. Dilulio coined the term to refer to savage, murderous juvenile criminals who “pack guns instead of lunches” and “have absolutely no respect for human life.” It was later invoked by First Lady Hillary Clinton while on the trail stumping for her husband’s reelection: superpredators have “no conscience, no empathy … first we have to bring them to heel.” In 1994, the year juvenile arrests for violent crime peaked, President Bill Clinton signed the Gun-Free Schools Act, which effectively mandated states to enact legislation that would impose a minimum yearlong expulsion on any student who brings a firearm to school or else risk losing federal funds. Although juvenile and school crime fell as the decade progressed, zero-tolerance policies for violence, weapons, and firearms became ubiquitous in schools.9
Five years after the enactment of the GFSA, two Columbine High School seniors perpetrated a grisly massacre at their school, leaving thirteen people dead and more than twenty wounded. The Columbine shooting altered the American imagination and galvanized sweeping political change that transformed school security measures. Schools installed thousands of resource officers along with metal detectors and security cameras, especially in poor urban schools disproportionately attended by African American and Latino students.10
From time to time, racial drama erupted between students at Grover Washington, the majority of whom were African American. As Puerto Rican kids, Ryan and his brother Avry were sometimes targeted and beat up. Both were slim and had close-cropped black hair. Their pale gringo skin made some think they were white. Kids called them racist slurs such as “spic” and “wetback.” Ryan wasn’t the type to brush it off and walk away. When challenged or threatened, Ryan would fight, but he wasn’t usually an instigator, more a joiner than a leader. Yet he would always defend himself, heeding the macho code of the streets and standing his ground. Nobody was calling him a pussy without facing retribution. Avry, however, was a model student who almost never fought or got into trouble.
Ryan’s school career became an eternal cycle of headaches for Rayni, composed of seemingly daily phone calls and meetings with the principal. At one point, she requested a transfer for Ryan, but it was denied. The school employed every available disciplinary device short of expulsion to correct his behavior, such as Saturday detentions and out-of-school suspensions. By now, it was obvious that Grover Washington was not going to be the site of transformation that Ryan had anticipated. In fact, his behavior deteriorated.
One afternoon, Ryan was rummaging through boxes at his grandmother’s hair salon and came across dozens of pornographic DVDs. “That bastard!” she screamed upon realizing it was her partner’s collection. A few moments later, she told Ryan, “You can sell these films.” He happily obliged. He had been a veteran hustler since Lowell, where he had sold Juicy Fruit and Doublemint gum for a quarter a stick. One day in math class, he unzipped his backpack and discreetly pulled out a DVD with a nude woman on the cover.
“Yo bro, look at this,” he told his friend Adam, whose eyes lit up. “Can I get one?” Adam whispered. Ryan sold his first DVD for $3 and began giving out a few complimentary copies, just like dealers did with drug samples in his neighborhood, so students could vouch for the quality of his product. He never personally watched them, out of allegiance to one of Biggie Smalls’s commandments: “Never get high on your own supply.”
Demand spiked, and Ryan hiked the price to $7, even $10, and sold some fifteen DVDs. He blew his profits on a new pair of Nikes and snacks like chips, Snickers, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. At home, he kept his backpack of bootlegs near his bed and carried it wherever he went, raising his mother’s suspicions. She was attentive to the slightest variations in how Ryan and Avry acted, looked, or walked.
Rayni tossed and turned in bed. She wanted to know what was in that backpack. She assumed the worst. What if he was selling drugs? Or worse, using? She saw how her brother’s cocaine addiction and drug dealing had destroyed his family. She turned to her fiancé, George, and asked him what to do, but he mumbled that he didn’t know and fell back asleep.
Around six in the morning, after staying up most of the night, she went to the door of Ryan’s room and got down on her hands and knees. As she contrived how she would punish him if she found drugs, she crawled to the foot of the bed. Ryan sometimes woke up during the night and did push-ups, but he was fast asleep. The edge of the backpack rested on the footboard. Rayni reached for it and opened the zipper.
Her heart thumped as she looked inside. Relieved that he wasn’t hoarding drugs, she was now puzzled by the pornos. “What the fuck is this, Ryan?” she yelled, holding up his bag. “Where the fuck did you get this from?” Ryan stirred awake and rubbed his eyes. “They’re not for me. I’m selling them,” he said.
“Who is giving them to you to sell?” Rayni asked, beginning to calm down.
“I can’t tell you,” he replied.
“Ryan, I’m going to beat your ass.”
Ryan confessed that her mother had said he could hawk them. To his surprise, Rayni said he could sell the last batch of DVDs. And she didn’t even demand a cut. The family had so little money, and she trusted that he wasn’t watching them.
But just when his buoyant business was about to come to an end, he found a new supplier. One day, Ryan cut school with his friend Samuel, a short, chubby Black kid. At his house, Samuel showed him his father’s overflowing box of more than a hundred adult DVDs and let Ryan take an armful. He didn’t know about Ryan’s business nor did Ryan disclose what he would do with the DVDs, expecting that Samuel would insist on a share of the profits.
With the replenished stock, Ryan revived his side hustle for a few more months. A student got caught with one of the DVDs, but he didn’t rat Ryan out.
* * *
GROVER WASHINGTON WAS near the SEPTA regional train tracks, a strip mall, Tacony Creek Park, and long stretches of row homes. One day after school, Ryan and his friends were exploring the neighborhood and came across a gate at the bottom of a mound of dirt. They climbed through an open hole, scampered through wild vegetation, and ended up on the train tracks. They began regularly using the route as a shortcut to get to the other side of the neighborhood. Word of their discovery quickly spread among the students.
With rising cases of children being hit by trains, SEPTA workers held an assembly at Ryan’s school to discourage the students from going onto the tracks. Ryan ignored their advice. He lived by the credo espoused in the film Paid in Full. In one scene, as he munched on chips, the main character Rico told Ace, a fellow drug dealer whose head was bandaged from a gunshot wound, that the shooting shouldn’t derail him from the street life: “Niggas get shot everyday, B.” The line stuck with Ryan. He had often seen or heard of random shootings and car crashes. Shit happens all the time, he figured. He wasn’t going to let that change how he lived. He was invincible.
On a day when Ryan ditched school, he, Samuel, and another friend, Peter, a wiry Asian boy, started wandering south on the curving tracks. When they made it to Olney Station, an employee on the platform began screaming, “Get out of the way!” A northbound train was approaching. Ryan and Samuel jumped off the tracks onto the grassy dirt path, but Peter was stuck, so he had to duck underneath the platform, just in time. Ryan was hyped up as adrenaline coursed through his body. He thought, How am I still alive? But flirting with death didn’t sour their fascination with the tracks. It had the opposite effect: they kept going back.
On another adventure, Ryan, Avry, and their group of friends discovered an abandoned rusty yellow school bus parked diagonally on a dead-end street. Some of the boys lobbed a barrage of rocks to bust open the windows. Ryan and a few others jumped onto the hood and giddily kicked at the windshield with their sneakers. They didn’t have much collective strength and made no more than a dent.
Ryan and Avry then climbed aboard to investigate as stale dust filled their lungs. The seats were tattered, and the bus looked as if it had been retired years ago. As Ryan poked around, a rock sailed through an open window and nailed him in the head.
“Who hit me?” Ryan demanded as he disembarked. Nobody confessed. Suddenly, he felt hot sweat dripping down his neck. But when he touched it, his hand was smeared with blood.
Avry took a closer look at his head. “Ohhhhh shiiiit, you’re bleeding a lot.” Panicked, the brothers ran the few blocks home and prepared a plausible story for their mother. Ryan told Rayni that some unknown kids had thrown rocks at him and his friends. Inspecting his head, Rayni didn’t think the injuries were serious enough to warrant a trip to the emergency room. A pro at dressing his wounds, she applied New-Skin liquid bandages and told him to avoid napping for awhile in case he had a concussion.
Ryan spent hours every day engaging in free-wheeling play, expending his restless energy in mostly harmless ways. It could have been worse. He could have joined one of the neighborhood youth gangs, such as TNT, Paper Boys, or Dollar Crew, and gone around sticking up random pedestrians for cash and electronics. But his boyish mischief did not emerge out of a vacuum. Few of the children of North Philadelphia had even an inkling of the enrichment programs, music lessons, and sports teams that their counterparts in wealthier neighborhoods took for granted. They had plenty of time to stir up trouble.
Copyright © 2023 by Nikhil Goyal
