Film Inspiration

I didn't get home until six tonight. I have been helping a nineteen year old gang member pass English so that he will be able to graduate this June. He has told me that he knows that without a high school diploma, he stands almost no chance at a productive adult life. This young man has been is a gang since his early adolescence, when he was abandoned to the streets, and his body sports a few knife wounds and a bullet wound. I can only guess what wounds, if they could be inspected, scar his heart. He shows up every afternoon at dismissal. He has to come back from vocational school out of town to meet me. And yet he has done so, every day, and right on time. His sad eyes wince slightly when he talks about his past, and when he tells me that he is too afraid to leave the gang, the only group of people, however dysfunctional, that have been a real family to him. I have heard this story again and again over a forty two year teaching career. The wrinkles the wince creates seems to say "It doesn't matter." "It's not important." The hurt in his eyes tell a different story. His eyes don't lie.

In 1961, the movie musical West Side Story was released into the movie theatres. While the inspiration for the story was Shakespeare's play, Romeo and Juliet, it was inspired by the murder of Michael Farmer, a crippled teen, in New York City. He was stabbed sixty-seven times. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was a gang killing. He was a Balkan, an Anglo gang, killed by the Dragons, a Latino gang. These gangs were the prototypes of the Sharks and the Jets in West Side Story. I saw the movie in the summer of 1962. I was sixteen years old, and almost every one of my adolescent friends saw it. It was the talk of every teen party that summer. Some of my friends thought the gang bond "cool." Some loved the dancing and tough attitude. I, alone among them all, wondered how I could work with these troubled teens and save them from themselves. An odd reaction from a teen whose parents expected him to be a lawyer.

I entered St. Peter's College in Jersey City at the age of seventeen. Two months after I entered college, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Three days later, his assassin was assassinated. By the time I was twenty, I was looking for summer work between school terms, and found a job in the Anti-Poverty Unit of the New York City Housing Authority. I worked there for three summers. This unit was responsible for hiring teens to keep them out of gangs and off the street. Over those three years, I worked with a number of former gang members, including some of the Dragons who killed Michael Farmer. I faced gang violence and saw drug death on project rooftops. I was hooked. So it was no surprise that in the spring of my senior year, instead of going to law school, I decided to teach.

While the first fifteen years of my career were spent in private school, far from the gangs of New York, I spent my summers working with "suburban gangs," gang wanna be's who didn't die in gang violence, but in automobiles in drinking and driving accidents. But the M.O was the same. No one cared for them. They didn't care for themselves either. When I worked in NYC in the '60's I learned quickly that I cared. I had cared since I first saw that movie, and was troubled by the pain I saw on the screen, immortalized in the song from the movie, "Officer Krupke."

And forty-two years later, I still care. So tomorrow, I will come back from an all-day meeting I must attend and sit down with my gang member, and help him get that diploma. And I will care for him, until he learns how to care for himself.