Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion by Gregory Boyle

Author:Gregory Boyle [Boyle, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2010-02-14T05:00:00+00:00

6

Jurisdiction

The walk to my office at 1916 East First Street used to take me five minutes. I’d pass Second Street School and watch parents cling to the chain-link fence, transfixed by their kids as they filed into the school building. They wouldn’t leave their posts until they saw their kids walk into class. Closer to my office and before the alley was Junior’s apartment. In his forties, Junior drank “forties” all day. He’d be nursing a large, cold one, even at 7:30 a.m. as I arrived to open Homeboy Industries. Most days you’d see him hanging out his window, on the second floor, shirtless, no matter the weather. He was wiry and feisty and, despite my two decades of urging “recovery” on him, alcohol didn’t seem to obscure his goodness—it pickled it—it was as “out there” as his shirtless torso surveying the world from the second floor.

One day as I’m walking past, lost in my own thoughts, I fail to see him. Then after I had gone beyond his apartment and the alley, Junior screams full-throttle, “LOVE YOU G-DOG.”

This stops me in my tracks as it does a few other people. I’m always startled by the ready way folks and homies tell you that they love you. This was not always so available to me in my own Irish-Catholic background. You knew people loved you, but words never brought you to that knowledge. In the barrio, people tell you. I retrace my steps and am now standing under his windowsill, looking up.

“Thank you, Junior. That was a very nice thing to say.”

Junior waves me on, as if papally blessing me as my day begins.

“Oh, come on now, G, you know,” he says, spinning his hand in a circular motion, “You’re in my . . . jurisdiction.”

I can’t be entirely sure what Junior meant. Except for the fact that we all need to see that we are in each other’s “jurisdictions,” spheres of acceptance—only, all the time. And yet, there are lines that get drawn, and barriers erected, meant only to exclude. Allowing folks into my jurisdiction requires that I dismantle what I have set up to keep them out. Sometimes we strike the high moral distance of judgment—moving our protected jurisdictions far from each other. This is also, largely, the problem in the groupthink of gangs. They just can’t seem to see one another as residing in the same jurisdiction. “We are the guys who hate those guys” is the self-defining assertion of every gang. The challenge is getting them to abandon the territory of their gang and replace it with a turf more ample, inclusive, and as expansive as God’s own view of things.

In the late ’80s, the gangs of the Pico-Aliso Housing Projects largely “Just Said No” to drugs. They’d sell them but didn’t use them. Hard drug usage made you liable to provoke conflict with otherwise friendly gangs or, if you sold drugs, it would upset your business. One gang in particular was an exception, and PCP was its drug of choice.

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