Chapter 1
The Tightrope, a story in four parts
MAY 4…MAY 5…MAY 6…
Marcelo Sanchez’s memory of the next twenty-four hours is hazy, mostly because he’d been drinking. First Hennessy Cognac mixed with the energy drink Monster. Then, later, Heineken. Five days earlier Marcelo had turned seventeen, and I suppose if this night was the first time you’d met him, the events that followed wouldn’t seem out of character. Marcelo had recently purchased from Men’s Wearhouse a slim-fitting, shimmery blue suit, a black tie, and glistening black dress shoes which he had intended to wear to the junior prom the next night at De La Salle Institute, a prestigious Catholic school on the city’s South Side. He’d asked his new girlfriend, Tania, to be his date. He planned to take her to Rosebud, an Italian restaurant downtown, and with a friend had scanned the menu online to figure out in advance what he would order. But because of an incident at school—where he held on to a cell phone stolen by another student before turning it in the next day—the school had barred him from the dance. Nonetheless, he planned to wear the suit to take Tania out to dinner tomorrow night, and was trying it on when a neighborhood friend, Daniel, stopped by to ask if Marcelo wanted to join him at a nearby party.
Marcelo is a handsome teen, his sleepy eyes and dark, full eyebrows lending him an air of thoughtfulness. But his hesitant smile—a small uptick of his full lips—contains a glimmer of mischief, a look as if to say, “Who, me?” He’s a bit of a wise guy, someone who teases and jokes, so deadpan sometimes it’s not clear where the teasing ends and the jabbing begins. He lacks physical grace. He moves like a marionette, his movements stiff-limbed. He’s short—five foot three—and sinewy, his features angular. He has an overbite, which he’s self-conscious about—along with his height—but what’s most noticeable about Marcelo is his skittishness. He’s easily distracted. He often laughs nervously. He bites his fingernails. More often than not, when he’s seated, one of his legs—usually his right—drives like a jackhammer, sometimes so exhausting him that he plants a hand on his knee in an effort to halt the pumping, or at least to slow it down. He takes medication—Wellbutrin—for his anxiety. Much of this can be directly attributed to the fact that within the past two years he’s been stabbed, coming out of a barbershop, and then shot, just outside his house. But more on that later.
What you need to know here is this: at De La Salle, Marcelo had for the past year gotten all A’s, except for a B in math this past semester. He was a remarkably hardworking student. It was, to be sure, a delicate balancing act. During the week he studied two to three hours a night. Come the weekend, he’d hang out with his friends from the neighborhood, and though he’d left his gang, the Latin Kings, he danced along the periphery, still cavorting with his old running mates. He knew that he couldn’t keep up this double life for long. Some of his friends referred to him as “the stupid smart kid.”
Marcelo can be shy, and so at the party he drank quite a bit. He can’t remember how much, but it emboldened him enough to approach a cute girl wrapped in a tight dress and tell her that she looked familiar and that he was eighteen, neither of which was true. Around midnight Marcelo wandered outside and in the gangway alongside the house smoked a Newport with his best friend, Javier. At that point four squad cars pulled up. Marcelo thinks it was because someone had reported a gun there, but he isn’t sure. He didn’t wait around to find out. He and Javier hopped into the car of Daniel, his friend who had driven them there, and took off. Daniel had a friend with him who was so drunk he was falling in and out of sleep, and Javier, whose cell phone had been stolen a week earlier, swiped the sleeping friend’s phone from his pants pocket. Marcelo didn’t learn this until they got dropped off at his house for the night, and Javier, who was staying over, proudly displayed his new acquisition. Together they laughed at Javier’s slyness. Fully clothed, Marcelo fell asleep in his bed while Javier crashed on the sofa in the living room.
Early the next morning Marcelo awoke to the persistent ringing of his cell phone. It was Daniel, who demanded his friend’s phone back, and soon Daniel and his friend showed up at Marcelo’s house. Javier returned the phone. Daniel suggested to Marcelo and Javier, Let’s go hit stains. Let’s go rob someone, let’s leave our mark, let’s leave our stain.
I ain’t even trying to go, Marcelo said, reluctant to rob strangers.
Come on, man, what the fuck, I got the whip, Daniel replied, a reference to the fact that he had a car.
Javier, who needed a phone and needed money to help pay his family’s rent, seemed excited by the prospect. He nudged Marcelo, who, tired and hungover, relented. The four of them piled into Daniel’s SUV, which belonged to his mother, and they drove around the neighborhood looking for a mark.
To be fair, Daniel’s memory of the events of this morning differs from Marcelo’s. He says that when he came by Marcelo’s house, they all jumped in his car to get breakfast at a local taqueria, and that the robberies were in fact Marcelo’s idea. Marcelo denies that and told me, “I’m just there, like an idiot.”
As they drove by Curie High School, on the city’s southwest side, they spotted a teenager wearing headphones, lost to the beat of his music. A half-block ahead they pulled into an alley, and all but Daniel, who was driving, jumped out of the car and rushed the young man, who took off running. Javier hurled an empty beer bottle, hitting him in the back. The victim tripped and fell, and within seconds the three were on him. All Marcelo remembers of the assault is that he kicked the young man while he was on the ground. Javier snatched his iPhone and his wallet. Marcelo felt empowered, in control. It was, he said later, “like a high.”
Back in the car, they soon pulled up alongside a teen in a black hoodie, and Marcelo noticed a slash through the teen’s right eyebrow, an indication that he belonged to a rival gang. Marcelo leaned out of the passenger-side window and false-flagged, pretending to be a member of the same faction. What up, Folks, Marcelo hollered. (For a few decades now, the city’s gangs have been divided into two sides, Folks and Peoples, a linguistic distinction which to outsiders seems like splitting hairs. Folks. Peoples. It is almost as if they are declaring that we’re one and the same rather than they’re on opposite sides.) The young man replied, That’s right. Fifty-nine—a reference to his street. This was the gang that had shot Marcelo a year earlier, and so at that point nothing else seemed to matter. “This was more personal-type shit,” Marcelo recalls. He jumped out of the car and punched the boy hard enough that his nose bled. During the scuffle, Marcelo began to have a flashback, reliving the moment he had gotten shot. This happened periodically and it scared him, an almost out-of-body experience which felt too real. His anger turned to rage, and he kicked the teen while he lay on the ground. “It was instinct,” Marcelo told me. “I saw him and lost my mind.” They left the teen bloodied, lying on the sidewalk. Marcelo jumped back in the car and they continued trolling.