Read the first three chapters.

CHAPTER ONE

Go get the red brush

My earliest childhood memory is mom chasing Dad around the coffee table with a knife.

Dad got caught cheating again.

I was born on March 29, 1978. They separated in 1981 and divorced shortly after. Billy, my older brother, and I stayed with Mom. We saw Dad on weekends. Whatever had happened between the two of them, we still loved the guy despite his faults.

He drove a delivery truck for Hostess. He'd park in front of Mom's house, open the back, and let the neighborhood kids take whatever they wanted. That's one of the pictures I have of him from those years. Dad pulling up with a truck full of treats and opening it to everybody.

At home, there was Dean.

Mom married him around 1985, but he'd already been in our lives for a few years. From day one, he introduced Billy and me as his boys. He stepped up when he was needed and fell back the rest of the time. He didn't need to make a production out of being there.

His real name wasn't even Dean. It was Robert. Bob.

Some drunk in a bar had started calling him Dean one night. The guy wasn't being disrespectful. He was too drunk to remember who he was talking to, and Bob never corrected him. He answered to Dean for the rest of the night.

And for the rest of his life.

Always smiling. Everybody loved him. He taught me to ride a bike in the Mee & Ramme funeral home parking lot on the corner, back when we lived in Old Irving Park, on Springfield a few houses north of Irving Park, right off the alley. I went to daycare at Lydia down the street and kindergarten at Belding Elementary on North Tripp. The only thing I clearly remember about that school is a lockdown because the Simon City Royals and the Gaylords were fighting out front.

Not the alphabet. A gang fight. That was Chicago in the 80’s.

We lived on the first floor of a two-flat. Upstairs were Dad's brother, Uncle Nick, and Aunt Anna with their boys, Nicky, Mike and Carl. Nicky was the oldest. Billy and Mike were the same age. Carl and I were born the same year, and we were close. I absolutely adored Anna. Anna grew up in Alabama and her sweet, southern personality remained for her entire life.

In the 80’s Uncle Nick was getting his janitorial business going. When Dean lost his job, Dad helped arrange for Nick to hire him.

My father helped get my mother's new man get a job with his brother. That's how likable Dean was. The family arrangement took a little explaining.

There were things about him I couldn't have understood as a little kid. He'd grown up in Bridgeport when the Italian mafia was in its heyday, knew notable names and was well respected around the neighborhood. He was also a fence.

A fence buys and sells stolen goods. Like a black-market convenience store.

We had the new gadgets. Disc players, Beta, VHS, the Commodore when computers started coming into people's houses. Whatever the new thing was, Dean seemed to have it. When the city was ready to kill each other over Cabbage Patch dolls, we had a garage filled to the ceiling with them.

He hadn't grown up with much. His father died early, his mother was an alcoholic, and his grandmother raised him. The family story was that they'd eaten so many eggs when they were poor that the smell made him nauseous as an adult. He had a strained relationship with his family, but he loved his sisters. He helped raise his sister Kathy's kids, Robert and Adriana, too. Billy and I weren't the only kids who had him as a father figure.

He'd belonged to a neighborhood gang, the Casanovas. I heard he'd been banned from Chinatown after throwing a guy through a glass window and over a second-floor balcony. I wasn't there. I don't know what happened. It was one of the legendary stories people told about him.

Those stories came out of a city divided into Italian and Irish neighborhoods, Black, Mexican and Puerto Rican neighborhoods. People defended their territory. The Dean I knew had come out of that world, but you'd never have guessed it from meeting him. The guy had the biggest smile. If you were family, a friend or somebody from the neighborhood, there wasn't much he wouldn't do for you.

Dad's Hostess truck, the cousins upstairs, Dean teaching me to ride a bike. It was a fun time in my life. I don't want that to be lost just because things went sideways later.

Eventually, Mom, Dean, Billy and I moved to 33rd and Parnell in Bridgeport. I started first grade at Santa Lucia and met kids I'm still friends with today.

Across the street was the B&F Turgeon parking lot. We drew a strike zone on the warehouse wall and played fast-pitch. We didn't need a ride or somebody to organize a league. Our concrete field was right outside our door. I loved baseball with my friends. Put me in Little League, with a schedule and somebody telling me where to stand, and I lost interest quick.

We rode bikes and hung out at Armour Park. The restaurant owners kept us going with gravy bread, and we drank water from the hose. If we had money, we paid. If we didn't, they fed us anyway. People had grown up there, or they were related to somebody who had. It wasn't a neighborhood where you had to look far for a connection.

I found that out during a rock fight.

We were throwing rocks at each other across the street. I heaved one up, and it came down on a passing car. Everybody ran.

I didn't.

The owner took me home. She was our neighbor's cousin. Of course she was.

Dean looked at me. “Mikey, you couldn't run with everybody else?”

We lived close to Comiskey Park. People from the neighborhood worked there as vendors, security, whatever needed doing. Opening day was one of the best days of the year. The White Sox were a big enough deal that, as I remember it, nobody expected us to be in school.

All summer, Billy, the other kids and I stood outside getting autographs. Harold Baines signed everything we had. Everybody got one. I don't remember him ever turning us down. Pretty good on the field, an absolute gem off it.

Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire walked right by without looking at us. The Bash Brothers could have learned a little customer service from Harold.

On the Fourth of July, the adults closed the streets for block parties. They brought truckloads of illegal fireworks from Indiana. We played baseball and tag while they put on a show. Our neighbor Ruth's grandmother made homemade ice cream. It was a predominantly Italian neighborhood, so naturally there was food as far as the eye could see.

I was even an altar boy.

The other thing I remember clearly about St. Lucy's is my second-grade report card. I changed a D to a B.

In different color ink.

My first attempt at improving my academic record needed work. I got grounded for the entire summer. Pretty harsh for a first offense, especially when the fast-pitch field was across the street. I could look out the window and watch my friends having the time of their lives. The game hadn't gone anywhere. I was the one who couldn't get to it.

Around that age, Billy and I started checking the house when we got home from school to see what kind of mood mom was in. A clean house gave us a decent chance of a good night. A messy one meant we were probably in for it.

Mom had an old hard plastic red brush. Her preferred method of keeping order in the house. I'm still convinced the handle was made from concrete. She ran a tight ship.

She'd also make us go get it for her.

That's the part that stays with me. We had to retrieve the weapon she was going to beat us with. Those were some long walks to the bathroom.

By third and fourth grade, we had more bad days than good. Dad's place was an escape. We spent time at a bar called The Family with my uncles and cousins, playing pool and darts. Merrimac Park was across the street. It was a pretty good time.

On Sunday mornings I got up before everybody else and watched cartoons. Dad got up and made his not-so-famous egg scramble. I loved that scramble. Then he blasted Bruce Springsteen and cleaned the apartment.

He'd met Rocky, and they eventually married. At first she was nice and courteous. I didn't have much of an opinion about her. She was background music. I was there for my dad.

I knew what to expect at his place. His mood stayed consistent. I could watch cartoons, eat the scramble and enjoy being there without first checking the house to figure out which kind of evening I was going to have.

Back at home, Dean kept coming through.

Christmas of 1987, when I was nine, I wanted one thing. A bike called the Brake Dancer. All white with purple accents. Not a bike like it. That bike. I'd never wanted anything more.

Christmas morning, I ran downstairs and looked by the tree.

No Brake Dancer.

I kept the disappointment to myself. I wasn't a spoiled kid, and I wasn't going to announce that Christmas had failed to meet my expectations. I opened what was there. Some cool things. When we were finished, I started throwing away the wrapping paper.

Solid little Christmas. Just no bike.

Then Dean told me to get his socks from the laundry in the basement. Nothing unusual about that. I went downstairs.

There she stood, with a big bow on her.

The Brake Dancer.

There might as well have been a ray of sunshine shining down on that machine of beauty. If you could bottle the thrill I felt and sell it on a street corner, it would put heroin out of business in its first afternoon.

I rode around the neighborhood like a peacock. The boys wanted to be me. The girls wanted to be with me. At least that's how it shook out in my head.

In 1988, when I was ten, I was out riding with my friend Ricky. We were on 31st Street, just east of Halsted, when four Black guys on bikes surrounded me. One asked to ride mine.

I said no.

Another pushed me off, took the Brake Dancer and left his. I was standing there with a broken-down Kent.

Bike-jacked at ten years old.

I held the bike he'd left with my fingertips. I was scared I'd catch a disease. That was what my ten-year-old brain had taken from the way adults talked about Black people in the neighborhood. I cried the whole walk from 31st and Halsted to 33rd and Parnell.

Mom and Dean were furious. I'd never seen Dean angry before. Now I understand that he was angry about what had happened. At ten, I heard the yelling and the questions about why I hadn't fought back, and I thought he was angry at me.

I was ten. My bike was gone, and now I had to answer for how it was taken from me.

Dean went out in his car to look for it. Mom called the police. The officers who came seemed angrier than Dean. To me, it looked as though those kids had crossed a neighborhood boundary and somebody was going to pay for it.

They put me in the back of their car and took me to the projects. They kept telling me to pick somebody out. They didn’t care who. I hadn't been around many Black people. I could register that the people they showed me were Black. I couldn't identify a face.

I didn't identify anybody. The officers dropped me home. My bicycle was still gone.

Later when my little brother Bobby needed a bike I paid it forward and gifted him a GT Performer. The hottest bike of the time. He was as thrilled as I'd been that Christmas. Big-brother shit.

Dean came home and asked where it came from.

“Mikey,” Bobby told him.

Dean didn’t need to hear anything else. He knew the deal. Without hesitation he threw the bike in the back of his van and took off. An hour or so later, he came back and put it in the garage.

Same bike, just painted red now.

The guy just knew what to do.

Back when Billy and I were still living with Mom, Dad and Rocky planned to buy a house in Buffalo Grove. About thirty minutes from the North Side. Dad told me he could see a difference in me and asked how things were at home.

I told him. He asked Billy. Billy told him, too.

He offered a solution. An escape plan. The hard part was telling Mom.

Billy and I worked out the conversation. I'd open with a soft jab. He'd come in behind me with a left hook of facts. We agreed who would say what before we went into the living room. There wasn't going to be any improvising in front of her.

“Mom, we need to talk to you, and it's important.”

She turned off the television and looked at me.

I gathered my courage, pushed the fear aside and said, “Billy has something he needs to tell you.”

I'll never forget his face. We'd planned this together, and I'd handed him the whole thing. To this day, I don't think he's forgiven me.

He told her. She lost her shit.

Dad paid four hundred dollars a month in child support, a lot of money at that time. If we left, that money went with us. I wasn't thinking about household bills or what losing the money would mean to her. I wanted to live with Dad. I can see how stressful that could have been for her now looking back. I wasn't doing that math then.

She sent us to our room. A couple of hours later she came in and had me stand in front of her.

“We're going to have to get lawyers and spend money and fight this out. Knowing this, you still want to do this?”

Billy wasn't answering this one for me.

I looked her dead in the eye.

“Yes.”

She cracked me so hard across the face I can still hear it today. Then she told us to get out.

We called Dad. He came and picked us up. He asked what had happened, and we told him.

Pretty uneventful ride to our new home.

CHAPTER TWO

The Best Wannabe This Side of 294

We moved to Buffalo Grove in 1989.

At first, Billy and I had bedrooms on the second floor, down the hall from Dad and Rocky. Then Rocky got pregnant, and we moved to the basement to make room for the babies.

The basement was one big space. No walls dividing it into bedrooms. The stairs ran through the middle. The little ones needed to be near their parents. I understand that part now. The message I heard at the time was pack it up and head to the basement. The important kids are on their way.

I had wanted to live with Dad. Nobody had talked me into leaving Mom. I'd stood in front of her and said yes when I was asked. We had come from a strict house in a nice but tougher neighborhood, and now we had more freedom than we knew what to do with. I wanted to get away from what was happening at Mom's, and I wanted to be with my father. I got both. Knowing what to do with the freedom was another matter. What I didn’t know then is I would barely see dad Monday through Friday with him working and going to the gym. The weekends were the highlight reel.

Dad and Rocky had Andrew and Aaron. Mom and Dean had Bobby and Joey. I loved all four of my little brothers. When they were small, I played with them and liked being around them. I took them for walks and to the park. I wasn't looking at a baby and blaming him for taking my bedroom.

I could love the kids and still feel out of place when I stopped playing with them. Dad and Rocky had their family. Mom and Dean had theirs. Billy and I had been there before either of those households existed. Somehow we were the ones who would feel extra.

Billy was the person who came with me. We could change houses, neighborhoods and the adults making the decisions. He was still my brother. I didn't have to work out what we were going to be to each other at the next address.

We were very different kids. I was happy in my room with a toy. Finding Billy meant parting the crowd around him. He was the MVP of his Little League. I was in right field looking at butterflies. Dean coached every team, so it wasn't as though I hadn't been given the opportunity.

I didn't resent Billy having the crowd. He could keep it. I didn't want all those people talking to me. I've always been comfortable in silence and in the background. He handled the attention like a seasoned professional.

He was loyal like a bulldog. After catching enough husky jokes as a little kid, he started working out and getting jacked as a teenager. He's kept at it ever since and he could fight, too. I could handle myself reasonably well. Won a few. Lost a few. But people knew I had an ace in the hole. Billy didn't need much encouragement when it came to protecting me.

Rocky was in her early thirties and hadn't raised children when we came along. We weren't exactly a starter kit. I can acknowledge that it was an adjustment for her while still remembering what living in that house felt like to me.

Most days, I felt invisible until there was something for her to yell about. The good snacks in the pantry weren't for Billy and me. Those were for her kids. I wore a lot of the same clothes. There wasn't much shopping for us.

When I went upstairs to take a shower, I passed a family portrait at the top of the stairs. Dad, Rocky and their kids. Billy and I weren't in it. I didn't need to be the star of the house. Walking past that picture was different from being left alone to play with a toy. I wanted to feel like I was part of the family in it.

After we moved in with Dad, Billy and I gave Mom some space to let things settle. She’d been pretty heated when we left. By the time I tried to call her, her number had already been disconnected. We went to the apartment on Parnell, but another family was living there. Mom was gone.

I had chosen to live with Dad. I hadn't chosen not to have a mother. I didn't have an explanation for the phone or the people at the old address. Neither one got me to her.

That's where the abandonment issues started. Dad and Rocky made enough to live in Buffalo Grove, but We were the broke people in a nice neighborhood. Or we weren’t and they just weren’t spending it on us. I didn’t have access to their bank account to know for sure. Regardless, nobody was paying for therapy. I was left to figure out what had happened with what I had, which wasn't much.

At school I was preparing for a problem the other kids weren't giving me. I started fifth grade knowing nobody, so I went in tough. Make sure nobody tried me.

Prison rules.

They were nice kids. Well-mannered. Predominantly Jewish. I'd brought a neighborhood security plan into a school that hadn't asked for one. Fifth grade itself was pretty uneventful.

I went to Aptakisic for sixth through eighth grade. My grades started slipping, but I got along with just about everybody. Making friends was easy. Doing the work and staying out of trouble, not so much.

I became the class clown. Turns out the kid who'd been content to sit in his room by himself could really work a crowd. Those parts of me have always lived together. I don't need to be the center of everything, but I can usually find something funny in any situation. The kids liked me. The adults were less impressed.

There was a bully, a big, burly boy. I swear he had a full beard. Walked around like an ogre pushing kids into lockers. I stood up for a kid so now his focus was on me. He made the challenge, I accepted. We met at the tracks like you see in the movies. He got me in a bear hug. I worked one arm free and punched him in the nose.

Blood everywhere. One extremely lucky punch.

BUT that one lucky punch became legendary, at least in our little world. I rode it for years. I'd come to fifth grade acting tough so nobody would mess with me, and now people had a story to go with it. I was now the tough kid with a reputation that needed to be lived up to.

Meanwhile, my cousin Mike was getting into gangs in the city.

He was only two years older than me. At that age, two years was plenty for me to assume he knew what he was doing. I idolized him. He was a second big brother, and the funniest person I've ever met. He walked into a room and people's faces lit up.

He was quick with an insult. That's how the Baker side showed affection. If they loved you, you were probably going to hear something about yourself that you didn’t like, but it will be told in a way where even you couldn’t help but laugh at it. We weren’t a family of serious conversations.

He started hanging around the Simon City Royals from Central Park and Wilson. Somebody thought he looked like Vanilla Ice.

My cousin Mike became Vanilla.

The guys around him were the real deal. Face tattoos, the whole nine. Every one of them looked like they just came home from prison and were eager to go back. I didn't see him working to persuade anybody that he belonged. Being a gangster came natural to him. I was watching from Buffalo Grove, where I had nice kids to go to school with, friends of my own and Billy to look out for me. I didn't need a gang to make it through a school day. I wanted to be closer to what my cousin was doing anyway.

Vanilla had shown up for me plenty of times. He had a heart of gold. I could count on him, and that was part of why I followed him. He was the cousin who made everybody laugh and looked out for me. He was also still a kid. I can see that now more clearly than I could when I was relying on him for direction.

He brought some Royals out from the city and opened a section in Buffalo Grove. I recruited about ten guys.

We were in the basement when he came down the stairs pumping a shotgun. Shells flew across the room.

That got our attention.

He told everybody this wasn't a game. If they weren't ready to go all the way, they needed to get the fuck out of the basement.

Everybody stayed. They were too scared to leave.

I couldn't have been more excited. Time to get to work!

I spray-painted SIMON CITY ROYALS in huge letters on the fence along Weiland Road. Middle-aged Jewish Mortimer needed to know who the hood belonged to now.

The section lasted about a year. Something happened with Vanilla at Taft High School, but I never got the details. He ended up with the Satan Disciples from 25th and Washtenaw. As far as we were concerned, Buffalo Grove was done and forgotten.

Back to being your average schnook.

The neighborhood somehow survived the change in management.

I didn't lose interest when the section disappeared. I'd been following my cousin before we had a name to put on it. I kept following him after the name changed. School and the friends I already had didn't seem like enough. I wanted in on what he was doing in the city.

Toward the end of seventh grade, I found Mom.

She and Dean were at 37th and Emerald. Billy and I went to the door, and they let us in. I remember walking inside and the awkward silence. I said something like hey, Mom. She gave me a big hug.

I'd love to remember the whole conversation. I don't. The tension and that hug are what I have.

We were told she'd gone downhill after we left. She'd been put on medications and had a hard time for a while. I hadn't seen any of that. I'd been trying to reach her and finding strangers at her old apartment. What we were told after we found her was all I understood about the time she'd been gone.

Now we had an address that led to her. Billy and I started going every other weekend. I reconnected with old friends and spent time with Bobby and Joey. Mom went right back to being strict. For every minute I was late getting home, I got grounded for a day.

Not an exchange rate I recommend testing.

We had our weekends again, but something between Mom and me still wasn't right. It felt as though she and Dean had moved on with their new family. Finding her hadn't made all of that disappear. I could be glad to have her back and still carry what I'd felt when I couldn't find her.

Bobby and Joey became solid wingmen. Joey, the baby, had somehow developed a Boston accent. Never been to Boston. Didn't know anybody from Boston. No explanation. He kept it all through childhood.

The women found it adorable.

By eighth grade, I wasn't doing homework and was disruptive at school. I brought Jack Daniel's to a dance and got arrested.

They made Dad come to outpatient classes with me. He wasn't happy about his Thursday nights at outpatient drug rehab. My extracurricular activities were getting expensive in ways that had nothing to do with school fees.

I'd been smoking cigarettes since sixth grade. Tough-guy shit. I started drinking in seventh. Now Dad was playing drug Jeopardy because I'd decided to liven up the school dance.

I spent more time in Vanilla's basement, hanging out and listening to music. When I stayed with Mom, we met up in Pilsen. The same weekends brought me back to her, Dean, my little brothers and old friends, and put me closer to the gang life I wanted to join.

Mom still expected me home on time. She was willing to ground me when I wasn't. I wasn't doing any better with my choices outside her house, but on Monday I went back to Dad's.

Paroled from mom’s consequences.

At the end of eighth grade, somebody introduced me to China white.

Heroin.

I remember the first time like it was yesterday. I hugged a toilet bowl and threw up uncontrollably. Naturally, I had to have more.

I went back after that. The second time was pure bliss. That's when I understood why people threw their lives away for it. The first experience had given me a perfectly good reason to walk away. I preferred what happened the second time.

I had Mom back. I had Billy, my little brothers and friends in both neighborhoods. I had weekends in the city, my cousin's basement and a drug I wanted again.

I was still a kid who could get grounded for coming home a few minutes late.

CHAPTER THREE

A Part of Something

By freshman year, I kept asking Vanilla to make me a Satan Disciple. He kept saying no. He knew the family would blame him for bringing me in, and he was trying to look out for me. I wanted him to back me up. As far as I was concerned, looking out for me was getting in my way.

Our little suburban experiment had ended when he moved on. This time, I wanted to go with him.

Johnny D. understood the appeal. His mother had moved to the suburbs, too. He idolized his older brother, Fila, a shot caller with the Maniac Latin Disciples' John Coonley branch. Johnny D had grown up in it. We were two displaced city kids, and we bonded over that.

I was already telling people in Buffalo Grove I was a Satan Disciple. All lies. Vanilla hadn't let me in yet. I was doing a pretty good job of collecting enemies, though.

There were other gangs around, and not many Folks, the side I was claiming. The Latin Kings in Mundelein hated me. The Latin Kings in Palatine hated me. There was an offshoot of the Conservative Vice Lords that, yes, you guessed it, hated me. It was me and Johnny D and a few displaced Lady SGD’s from 88th & Houston. If you ask me, those Lady SGD’s had more heart than Palatine and Mundelein combined.

Vanilla hadn't agreed to anything, but I was claiming a side and disrespecting other people's gangs like I had an army behind me. They didn't need to check whether I'd finished the enrollment process. The trouble was real even when my membership claim was bullshit.

The first day at Stevenson, some juniors were staring at me in the common area. They were affiliated with the other side. Maybe they were just wannabes, like me. I didn't wait to find out.

I went over, dropped their gang sign and had some words with them. Fuck it. Meet the problem head-on.

Prison rules.

A security guard grabbed me and took me to the dean before I'd gotten much farther into my first day.

Five-day out of school suspension. First five minutes of my high school career. I did try to make a strong first impression.

I made a lot of friends in the short time I was there. I could get along with people, make them laugh and have a good time. I had friends. What I couldn't seem to do was stay in school with them.

During sophomore year, I heard that the Kings from Mundelein were planning to come to Stevenson after school the following Friday to jump me.

I took the warning to Roberto, a good friend of Vanilla's. They called Roberto Outlaw. Respectable nickname. His answer was to bring a gun and shoot them if they came.

I met up with him, got the gun and brought it to school with the confidence of Denzel in Training Day. Except I was a kid, and this was a suburban high school that held a top 10 ranking across the country. The confidence was getting a little ahead of the situation.

I went to show Johnny D what I had in my backpack. Toward the end of my next class, I was called to the dean's office. Somebody must have seen it or heard us. I don't know who or what they noticed. It was labeled an anonymous tip in the court records. When they went to search my locker, I knew what they were going to find.

I grabbed the bag and took off.

I got away. The only time I ever successfully ran from the authorities. Temporarily, anyway. I'd avoided the locker search and was on the run for the first time.

By the time they caught me, I'd gotten rid of the gun. I was counting on my understanding of “no body, no murder.” What were they going to charge me with if they didn't have the gun?

Wrong.

They charged me anyway. I was convicted, got probation and was kicked out of school. The criminal justice system apparently had its own ideas about evidence. I distinctly remember the judge admonishing my father for having a public defender in the case while looking at his bank account.

That was the end of Stevenson for me. Asked to leave, if you wanted to put it politely. Arrested and hit with a restraining order would be more accurate.

Roberto came from a world where claiming something meant being treated accordingly. He didn’t understand the concept of a wannabe. I'd gone to one of my cousin's friends with a problem I'd made in the suburbs, and I'd carried his answer into my high school. There was an actual gun in the backpack I showed Johnny D. Getting away with the bag and getting rid of the gun hadn't made any of it unhappen.

Billy had been hanging out with gang members from the South Side, on the opposite side from the one I was trying to join. His friends knew to leave me alone. Whatever sides we claimed, I was still his little brother.

I only know of two people who got kicked out of Stevenson for bringing a gun. Me, and Billy the year before. Rocky was mortified. We were making quite a name for the family.

Someone had been shot on the South Side with Billy's gun. The police followed the telling from one person to another until they reached him. He admitted passing it to somebody on the school bus.

They could pinpoint the day and time the gun changed hands, weeks after it happened. Could you imagine? Your guys telling that loud. I think it changed how Billy looked at the life. The people who were supposed to be loyal had supplied a pretty detailed accounting.

He did a couple of weekends in juvenile detention. While he was out of Stevenson, he went to Ombudsman for a couple of hours a day to keep up with classes. Then Stevenson took him back.

As I saw it, Billy was the trophy, and they wanted him back on the football field as soon as possible. I didn't have that kind of value to the school. It seemed easier to send me somewhere else and preserve their stats than to put the same effort into keeping me there. That was my view of it, not a conversation I sat in on. I resented the difference.

Billy went back and worked on his grades. I went to places that would take me and found ways to get thrown out of those, too. I resented what I saw as a difference in the help we got. We had both brought guns into the same school, but we weren't making the same decisions afterward.

When I got arrested for the gun, Rocky told the prosecution I'd intentionally burned her son Andrew with a cigarette.

It never happened.

Dad didn't hear about the accusation until a couple of years later. To my surprise, he confronted her. She said she'd seen a mark on Andrew and that it “could have happened that way.” That was her answer.

I had done plenty of things I could be held responsible for. That wasn't one of them. I can say that without pretending the rest of the case had come from nowhere.

After Stevenson, they referred me to a school called Central. It was a behavioral-disability school, and they wanted absolutely no part of me. Most of the gang-affiliated kids there were Kings, and I was the best goddamn wannabe SD this side of 294.

Barrington High School had a behavioral-disability program and accepted me. That didn't last either. I got kicked out for truancy. I had managed to find a place that would take me, then couldn't be counted on to show up.

Around that time, Billy started dating Karen. I loved Karen. She treated me like her little brother. Her friends got good grades and were college bound. Billy was spending time with her and working toward being one of those kids who left for college.

He didn't pick on me or beat me up for entertainment. We didn't really fight. There was one memorable exception, in the basement at Dad's.

I don't remember what started the argument. I was heated, and I had the television remote in my hand. I threw it across the room with everything I had.

The remote seemed to move in slow motion. I watched it cross the room and hit Karen square in the face.

I froze. Time froze. For what felt like several minutes, there was no sound. Probably ten seconds.

Then Billy came at me. I ran for the stairs, but he caught me. Always the athlete. He beat the shit out of me until Dad heard us and got him off.

It was meant for Billy. It hit Karen. She'd been good to me, and there wasn't an explanation that was going to make what I'd done any better. It was the only time I remember Billy putting his hands on me that way. Can’t say I blamed him.

I kept at Vanilla. By then he'd met Johnny D a few times and knew his family was the real deal. I used that: turn me out SD, or I'd go with Johnny D and become an MLD.

Vanilla caved. If I was going to join, he wanted me close enough to watch over me. He'd spent all that time refusing to be the one who brought me in. I had made the alternative watching me join somewhere else, away from him. I was happy the manipulation had worked.

On Thursday, Vanilla told me to come over Friday night. When I got there, he sent me to the basement.

About half a dozen big, tattooed guys formed a circle around me. My cousin came down the stairs, looked at me and said, “Do it.”

For the next three days, I got the ass kicking of my life.

When I say days, I mean minutes. Each one felt like a day.

I stayed on my feet. Afterward, I shook up with everybody. The guys in that basement finally accepted me. I'd spent all that time using their name and pushing Vanilla to get closer. Now I was part of it.

I'd been suspended, expelled, arrested and put on probation before those men ever let me in. I still wanted their acceptance. Now I had it. I wasn't standing in that basement adding up reasons to regret it.

People think they have an idea of what kind of person joins a gang. The guys I knew came from all kinds of backgrounds. They were cooks, barbacks and janitors. Some owned businesses and some were mechanics. They had jobs and families. Some of the same men you could run into at work were the men you could run into on the street. Each had his reasons for being there.

I felt abandoned. I felt like nobody cared. I also lacked discipline, had a rebellious streak and kept making my own decisions. Plenty of people had worse home lives than mine. The rules were explained to me. Nobody tricked me, promised me something false or pressured me to join. I wasn't doing it because I needed protection.

I wanted this. Tupac wanted this for me. Vanilla had been the one saying no.

I was running away for months at a time, hanging out in the neighborhood, gangbanging, doing drugs, going to daytime parties and hooking up with girls. Dad and Rocky had their family at home, and our last name seemed to be attached to every crime in the area. Rocky remained mortified. I was having the time of my life.

By the time Billy and Karen left for Southern Illinois University, I was sixteen and knee-deep in gangs and drugs. We'd already been seeing less of each other. He was with Karen, getting his grades up. I was getting kicked out of schools and disappearing for months.

I didn't want to be left to deal with the family on my own. But he had worked to be able to leave, and I knew he needed to go. We were on different paths before he packed up for college.

I hoped it would never end.

Probation violations finally bought me sixty days in St. Charles juvenile detention. I'd been in Lake County juvenile already. St. Charles was the little big league, and the idea was to scare me straight.

I ended up knowing guys there and generally speaking had a pretty good time. I'd once been the new kid at school without a familiar face. Now I had a social circle in juvenile detention.

I've always had a sense of humor, especially in dark situations. Turns out people like being around somebody who makes them laugh. Even murderers and especially people doing time. I wasn’t there for 5 minutes before I saw Joker in the dayroom. Joker as the name suggests was hysterical, but he also liked to shoot Latin Kings so he was going to be hanging out for a while. I knew Joker from the neighborhood, he grew up on two four. His family had been in the life for generations so unlike me, his choices were limited. St. Charles didn’t have the scared straight moment the judge was hoping for. I walked out with more contacts.

When the two months were up and it was time for me to parole, Dad said I couldn't come home.

I can't really blame him now. I was into some dark shit, and what I was doing could have followed me through the door. There were younger kids living there. I wanted somewhere to go, but I was bringing a lot more with me than a bag of clothes.

Mom said I could stay with her. Dean was on board, of course. We'd found each other again and had our weekends. Now they were taking me in from juvenile detention, with a gang affiliation, probation problems and a heroin habit. I wasn't the Mikey who had left for Buffalo Grove anymore. Letting me come home was no small thing.

I met Nikki at that time. Nikki was our neighbor in Oaklawn, came from an awesome family and was a good girl. We went to her homecoming dance together. I left the Jack Daniels at home for that one.

Mom tried to enroll me in high school. Hard pass from all of the local schools. The only place that would take me was a behavioral-disability school in Robbins on 139th & Pulaski called Aspen/Summit.

That school was worse than St. Charles.

I was the only white guy at Aspen/Summit and the only Folks member. No allies. Four Corner Hustlers, Black Stones and Vice Lords were there. I fought every day and didn't win many. Nobody was especially committed to keeping it one-on-one.

After I got jumped in the hallway, I called Vanilla for a ride. He came with three carloads of guys.

The same people who'd been so tough when it was just me turned into track stars when the numbers evened out. Vanilla had come through. The guys who'd jumped me left me alone.

The school threatened to call the police if I came back. Another place had asked me to leave, if you wanted to put it politely. I was running out of ways to describe being kicked out of school.

My cousin had shown up when I needed him. I don't forget that. I still didn't have a school I could go back to.

I held on to my resentment toward Mom. We weren't sitting down in family therapy and sorting it out. I took it out on the world. She'd given me somewhere to stay, and I didn't treat that as something worth protecting.

I went back to the street. Before I left, I stole whatever jewelry and cash I could find in the house.

Mom and Dean had taken me in when I needed somewhere to go. That was my thank you.