When I first met Jimmy, he was supervising an intern named Donte Lewis. Donte had gone through the RSVP program twice (the first time he didn’t finish, so he started from scratch again) and had recently been released from San Bruno, after serving just shy of his four-year sentence. Sitting in Yerba Buena Gardens with coffee and cigarettes, he told me how several years earlier, he’d been out of jail for under a week when he and his friend Mooch drove over to Donte’s ex-girlfriend’s house. Donte wasn’t supposed to be there. He had a restraining order out against him—the result of an earlier kidnapping charge after he caught his girlfriend, Kayla Walker,1 with another man one night and he’d wrapped her in a sheet and dragged her down the stairs to a waiting car. But most of his clothes were at Walker’s house since they’d lived together on and off for years, and as far as he was concerned, she was still his girl, restraining order or not. He called her his “bitch.”
Mooch gave Donte a lift, and he scaled the deck railings from the first to the second floor and slid open the glass sliding door of Walker’s apartment. He remembers hearing Ja Rule blaring from her bedroom. When he stormed into her bedroom, she was there, in SpongeBob SquarePants pajama bottoms, and another guy was in the room with her, clothed, and sitting in the opposite corner. A guy they called Casper. Donte pulled out a Colt .45, aimed at her, and Casper went for the gun. “This ain’t for you,” Donte remembers shouting. In the melee, Walker ran out of the room. Casper attacked Donte and they tussled on the bed; Donte elbowed Casper in the face, and broke free, still holding the gun. Casper escaped the apartment and ran out into the night. Donte stormed after Walker.
He found her in the living room, phone pressed to her ear. He didn’t want dispatch to record his voice, so he mouthed to her, “Is that the cops?” She didn’t answer, but her eyes, he remembers, “were hella scared.” He hit her over the head with his gun and she started to fall. He pulled her up by the hair. The phone dropped at some point, though Donte doesn’t know if the police were still on the other line or not. He hit her three or four more times, until he thinks she may have passed out; she was foaming at the mouth. “I knew I had to kill her,” he says. “No way was I going back to jail.”
He stood over her, pointing the gun down. At six foot two with long, blond-tipped dreads and tattoos covering his arms and legs, he was an intimidating figure. He and Walker had known each other more than five years, since he was fourteen and she was thirteen. She’d been his girl the whole time, and now he had to kill her.
But Mooch intervened, pushed him toward the door.
Then the two heard sirens. They fled the apartment and ran round the corner to where Donte’s aunt lived. In a small dirt patch at the entrance to her apartment, Donte buried the gun. Then he ran inside, climbed up into a loft, and there began a five-hour stakeout with the police. He had a bottle of Rémy Martin up there with him in the loft and part of a joint, and he smoked it, and then drank from the bottle until he passed out. He woke up with a police light in his face.
After his release from San Bruno in November of 2014, Donte moved into a halfway house, where I met him. He spoke of his past with both fear and awe. In East Oakland, where he’d grown up, the culture was “music, big rims, guns, and killin’.” If you didn’t have a thirty-round clip on a Glock, then you weren’t a man, he told me. Violence was a way of life. Even if you didn’t want to be part of it, it was impossible to stay neutral. No one had a choice. He called it Baghdad. Said it was war all the time. He saw this now as part of the “male role belief system.”
When Donte first met Kayla, he’d rarely used her given name. Everybody called their girlfriends “bitch.” As in, “That my bitch.” Donte was tall and lanky, with hazel eyes and a tattoo on his neck that said death over dishonor. He and Kayla had gotten together so young, long before they knew who they even were in the world. They were practically babies, playing at a relationship. It’s true of so many relationships where violence lurks—short courtships and very young people—and sometimes those become the patterns that stick for the rest of someone’s life. You could see it in Michelle and Rocky’s relationship, too. Donte and Kayla had been together on and off for years, but still he had any woman he wanted on the side. He’d never thought of how he was treating her, never thought of gendered stereotypes or how culture played into his actions. In prison, while he was going through the RSVP program, he’d read the book Emotional Intelligence and begun taking classes in psychology and sociology. He had a seven p.m. curfew while he was on probation now, but he said he didn’t mind. It kept him off the streets at night when the temptations were great. But it was hard to live. His internship paid him just about $700 a month after taxes, he said. He had a cast on one arm because he’d punched someone about a split second after his release from jail and had nearly lost the Community Works internship. He claimed to be deeply sorry for having done it, and the cast was a visual reminder, he said, of how big the battle was—the violent versus the nonviolent him, past versus present, ignorant versus knowledgeable. He had big dreams. He wanted to finish his community college degree, then maybe his bachelor’s. He wondered about becoming a psychologist. What would that be like? Could that even be something that was possible? Could he eventually help other guys like him?
Earlier in the day, I’d asked Jimmy how many interns like Donte he’d supervised over his four years as a group leader. He rolled his eyes, said, “Shiiiiiit. I dunno.” Too many to remember them all. On his desk, a paper plate held a steaming enchilada and refried beans. His coworkers and others at the sheriff’s office were always giving him a hard time about his weight. Skinny as a swizzle stick, but he ate like a horse. His brown jeans were held up by a black belt on its last hole, bunched up around his waist.
How many had gone on to become group leaders? I asked. Of those interns he’d supervised.
“None,” he said. “Only me.”
The odds were against Donte, and he knew it. “The old me got a whole lot more ammunition than the new me,” he said. The simplicity and the truth of his statement stuck with me. He, too, spoke like he was still in the gang, still working the streets, but then every once in a while, he’d shoot out some unexpected phrase that showed the new him, like this one time when we were sitting in the lobby of a fancy hotel in downtown San Francisco, sharing a basket of organic strawberries while conference goers in lanyards murmured past, heels clicking with intention on the marble floor, and he was in the middle of the story of how he and his homies called women “bitch.” Girlfriends, yes, but even sisters and mothers were bitches. Sometimes, “my old lady.” No woman had an identity; no woman had a name. “By calling her a ‘bitch’ all the time,” he said, suddenly, “what I was really doing was taking away her humanity.”
Both Jimmy and Donte were employed by Community Works, an Oakland-based organization that runs antiviolence and justice reform programs. Community Works also creates various arts and education initiatives to address violence and the impact of incarceration on prisoners and their families. One night I sit in on a group led by Jimmy and Donte together, part of Donte’s training. Like all the courses Jimmy teaches that are not in San Bruno, this one is taught at an outpost of the San Francisco sheriff’s department. Some of the night’s attendees began with RSVP in San Bruno, but they’ll finish the class here, in this weekly ManAlive program. Men occasionally come to ManAlive voluntarily, but not many, and those who do attend voluntarily take the course not here in the sheriff’s office, but in churches or community centers, at groups facilitated by people like Hamish Sinclair, who still runs multiple meetings every week.2 Of the night’s eight participants, four are Hispanic, two Black, and two white. They are all court-ordered to attend. Most had felony convictions, but a few have misdemeanors. Most have multiple issues, too: weapons or other criminal charges, drug or alcohol abuse, mental health concerns. As ex-cons and ex–gang members, Jimmy and Donte have social capital with this population. They understand the rules and language of the streets, know intimately the struggle of being surrounded by violence and trying to break free from the behavior. They meet here in their groups weekly, and if they make it to the end, they’ll have spent a year on what boils down to trying to teach these men self-awareness: of who they become and what they look like when they’re violent, of how their violence affects those around them, and of alternative responses to stressful situations.
Many of us on the outside of such a world tend to see something like intimate partner violence in a silo, a problem all its own that needs addressing all its own. Social service interventions have tended to treat such problems singularly, too. But a home with intimate partner violence might also have child abuse, alcoholism, and employment or housing instability. Traumatic brain injury or other serious medical conditions might be present. Education may not be a priority or may not be available or may be compromised. Treating just one of these doesn’t mitigate the issues that arise from the others. Treatment programs, not to mention research, are understanding this more and more, that problems are multidimensional and thus treatment must be, too.
The office we’re in is within a grimy two-story building tucked away between warehouses with windows overlooking pastures of concrete and asphalt, and the traffic noise of an overpass nearby. The place looks like it hasn’t had a face-lift since the postwar years. Paint so old that in the right light, it’s turned yellow. A hand drawn picture of Elmo kissing Nemo is taped up on one wall. Another bears a poster: How do you stop a thirty-year-old from beating his wife?
Talk to him when he’s twelve.
Donte gathers dry-erase markers and wet wipes. Participants wander in, slowly, as if this is a kind of torture for them—which, perhaps, it is. “Who’s the scribe tonight?” Donte asks. One man in sunglasses with teeth grills says it’s him, writes on the whiteboard, Separation cycle exercises—Denial, Minimize, Blame, Collude. Some of the men arrive straight from work, others from wherever they’ve been hanging around all day. They nod to one another, crack a one-liner here or there. Someone whispers to the scribe. He laughs, says, “Shit, man!” Then he turns to me. “I apologize for my language, ma’am.” It’s like a play in which the actor suddenly breaks the fourth wall. I want to not be noticed; but I’m a white, middle-class, middle-aged woman with a notebook sitting amid dreadlocks, shaved heads, and goatees, low-slung jeans and sports jerseys, overpriced trainers. I may as well have just walked in from a movie set. Or into one. Unlike at San Bruno, I’m not asked to participate for this night.
Another one laughs, says, “Check it out. Fatal peril club right here.” They understand fatal peril as the exact instant when a man’s sense of expectation is most threatened. What the world owes him, what his own sense of self demands. Something challenges him—maybe his partner says something, or does something, and he reacts. Maybe a guy in a bar insults him. Maybe some coworker tells him he fucked up. It’s a split second that changes everything. Eyes narrow, chests pump, fists clench, muscles tense, blood rushes. The body language is almost universal, running across race and class and culture, sometimes even species. A man, a lion, a bear. The body reacts the same way. Fatal peril. A moment that, Jimmy and Donte hope to eventually show these men, is a decision. Violence as a learned behavior. We don’t know it, but we have another word for fatal peril. “Snap.” On the news, the mourning neighbor, the crying coworker: he just snapped. But the snap is a smoke screen, a cliché, a fiction. The snap doesn’t exist.
It is week twelve of their curriculum. They focus on just one man tonight, named Doug, as he recounts the single primary event that got him in trouble. Sinclair used to call this exercise the Destruction Cycle, but he renamed it the Separation Cycle because the pedagogical point to him was that it’s meant to show how a person separates from what Sinclair calls his “authentic self” in a threatening moment, and it’s this separation that allows for violence to happen.
Doug sits at the head of the circle. “I’m nervous, man,” he says.
“Pretend you’re on Sixteenth and Julian talking to your homies,” Jimmy tells him. One of Jimmy’s many jobs before RSVP was driving a cab. He often relies on the metaphoric value such an experience offers: what it means to sit in traffic, how one’s knowledge of routes can help you avoid where traffic jams up. Every time I leave the office, he asks me which way I’ll tell the cab to go, then checks his watch—is it rush hour? He eventually offers a series of directions so complicated that I give up after the first four or five turns. That he does this repeatedly is endearing. He never wants anyone to suffer through traffic. And traffic is like violence: there’s always another avenue to take to avoid it.
Jimmy addresses the rest of the group. “I need you guys to stay focused right now,” he says. “Don’t collude if you hear something that to you appears to be funny. He may describe how he assaulted his partner and you laugh and he may shut down. What we did to our partners is not funny, so let’s be delicate with that. Let’s treat that in a mature manner. This work is serious. It’s not funny.”
Among the many tattoos on Jimmy is one across his forehead: saint. Then in back: sinner. Jeans hang from his gaunt figure, and he wears an oversized white T-shirt, his belt hanging like a snake halfway down his thigh. Says he can’t keep the weight on. No one knows why. Coworkers tease him. Skinny motherfucker. Jimmy’s got a secret, though. Why his ribs show, why his jeans hang low.
“I need, like, ten seconds,” Doug says. I can see his hands slightly tremble as he holds them between his legs.
“Just breathe, man,” Jimmy says. “Just let yourself know you’re alive.”
Donte has been told by one of his supervisors to talk more, to intervene if he feels inclined. If he makes it through the yearlong internship, he’ll be guaranteed a full-time job with Community Works as a facilitator, like Jimmy. He’s six months in now. A lot of people have a lot of hopes on him, not least of all himself. But there is still a staggering amount of work in front of him to accomplish. Getting off probation and turning his internship into a real job with a real paycheck and then finishing up his college degree. So much lost time to make up for. I felt, when I was talking to Donte earlier in the day at the park, that even the ability to envision “psychologist” as a career was something brand new to him, that looking to the future rather than just surviving the present was a whole different way of moving through the world.
“My girl went to another pimp once,” Jimmy says. “I raped her. That’s terrible. That is terrible, bro. You have feelings. This isn’t you. But it was you that day.”
“That’s me, too,” says another.
A third says, “I got forty-two weeks in [to the program] and I re-offended. Went back to jail.” Started the program all over again.
“I violated my restraining order and I’m back here,” says another. They’re like a football team at halftime in the locker room when the outcome of the game is so close it’s unpredictable. They’re pumping each other up, letting Doug know they’ve all been where he is now, that no one here is innocent.
“I fed off women who had no dads, women who were sexually assaulted,” Jimmy tips back on the legs of his chair for a moment, then slams back down. “And then I stole their souls.”
Finally, Doug begins. His ex-girlfriend, Ashley, had been in her bedroom and Doug was over. Just hanging out. They’d broken up a week before and were trying out this friend thing. She was texting, drinking Wild Turkey, teasing him a little. She told him she couldn’t stop thinking of some other guy. “It makes me feel that fatal peril, when I think about it,” Doug says.
“Don’t use program words,” Jimmy says. Program words are an important context for understanding one’s actions, but in a Separation Cycle exercise, where a singular moment is deconstructed, they can also be euphemistic, a way of not taking ownership for one’s actions. It’s the difference between, say, I had a moment of fatal peril and I punched her in the eye. So the story comes first, and then the group together contextualizes the story within the pedagogical framework of the program, attaching certain elements from what they learned during the curriculum. This split second was a threat to your male role belief system, for example. And this split second was where you entered fatal peril. And this split second was where you separated from your authentic self.
Doug apologizes. Another deep breath, eyes fixed on his shoes. He launches into the story again. They’d been going through “issues” for about a week, and it was the last straw, and it “escalated.” Jimmy calls out this word, says it’s a program word, and Doug restarts. “It went from bad to worse … I remember she kept smiling, and a song was playing: ‘Friday, I’m in love.’ I don’t remember the artist, but every time I hear the song nowadays it reminds me of that day and it makes me really angry …”
“Stay on track,” says one of the guys.
This nudging, the language, the gentle urging to keep with the story is part of the curriculum. It shows how language matters, how much we can lie to ourselves, take ourselves off track to avoid responsibility, how we use words to frame our guilt or innocence, how easy it is to manipulate and how so often that manipulation starts inside our own minds, how we can minimize our impact on someone else. Later, the group will be harder on Doug, but for now, they let him talk.
“She kept smiling and rubbing it in my face that she had some other dude,” Doug says. She was buzzed by then and he grabbed the bottle, took six or seven deep swigs. “I felt like I was bein’ played, man … I invited her violence, told her to hit me and she did. I remember I took my arm and just gave her a hit across the face, and I think that left a mark on her nose … Later, she came at me again and at this point I don’t remember what happened. I remember being really drunk for like five minutes and I realized I was being violent and I walked out of her room and her grandma got in the way between me and her … I was half conscious at this point.” He stops for a minute, thinks, then says, “One thing, I hit the door and I pushed right through the door and hit the wall and left a good mark—”
“—pushed or punched?” Jimmy asks.
“Punched. I punched through the door, and I punched a hole or a dent in the drywall.” Doug goes on to say that he threatened to “split” the face of the other guy, and then he walked out of her apartment. The story emerges in pieces, only partially linear. He remembers things and backtracks. Her grandmother was there. He held Ashley back with his foot before he hit her. After he left her apartment, he heard sirens in the distance, knew they were for him, and sat on the curb to wait, hunching over to “make myself look as helpless as possible so I wouldn’t be restrained in a violent manner.” He says when the police came they poked fun at him, asked him if he was gay, if he was helpless, if he was racist.
It takes him maybe ten minutes to tell the story.
“Can I ask you a clarifying question?” asks Donte. They frame it this way, as a “clarifying” question so the participants know the question isn’t meant to antagonize.
Doug nods.
“When you say ‘held her back with my foot’ what was the position? I mean, what was you all doing?”
“I was laying in her bed,” he says, “and I tried to keep her away. I used my foot to keep her away.”
“When I put my feet on anybody, it’s physical violence,” Donte says.
Doug nods.
Jimmy thanks him for his honesty, rubs his hands together. When Doug said he’d “split the face” of the other love interest, it was a verbal threat, Jimmy tells the group. “Can I ask you a clarifying question?” he asks Doug. “Did you ever call her any names other than her own?”
“Yes.”
“What were they?”
“I remember calling her a slut,” Doug says. “I think I called her a ho.”
“That’s a big component. That verbal.”
Donte chimes in about the name-calling. “Listen, man, in order for me to put my hands on her, she’s not Ashley anymore. She’s a slut. You gotta rename her, see what I’m sayin’?”
Jimmy asks Doug to recognize how his body moved through the room that night. What was he doing with his muscles?
“Clenching them,” Doug says.
And what was his heart rate doing?
“Racing.”
Jimmy stands up for a minute, asks if Doug’s body was lax or stiff?
“Stiff.”
And then Jimmy takes on the posture, shows Doug and the group what it looks like. His back curves slightly like a boxer’s, his fists are clenched, his face hardens. He’s got one shoulder slightly jutting out, his weight on the balls of his feet like he’s ready to pounce. In the context of the room, which is relatively relaxed and quiet, it’s a startling juxtaposition, a complete epiphany for some of these guys to see how their body communicates a message even if no words are uttered.
“This,” Jimmy says, holding the posture, “is what she sees.”
He’s excavating the body’s limbic system response to a threat, like seeing an animal in the wild under siege. And Donte and Jimmy push Doug to drive home the point. What would this look like to someone else in that room? This fist-clenching, heart-racing, stiff-postured person?
It would look intimidating.
It would look scary.
It would look bad.
That’s the beginning: notice your body.
Next comes language. Some of this becomes obvious immediately. Substituting a slur for a partner’s name, for example. But language in general is more subtle than this. It works at both the conscious and subconscious levels. Painfully, word by word, second by second they go. Don’t say “pussy.” Don’t swear. Don’t say “my old lady.” Don’t say “ho,” “slut,” “woman.” Use proper names. Use the term “partner.” Maintain eye contact with the person you’re speaking to or with the group. Sit up straight. No slumping. When describing the incidents that landed them in the place they’re in at the moment, they have to use “I” statements, possessive pronouns. It’s not “our” violence or “men’s” violence or “society’s” violence. It’s “my” violence. Own your violence. Be accountable for your violence.
When they do this exercise in San Bruno, it may take an entire morning. Hours to deconstruct an event that in real life may have been just a couple of minutes long. The guys don’t have to pick the inciting incident that landed them in jail, though most do. They are asked to notice every little detail that they can possibly remember: their body language, their heart rate, their breath, their muscles, their tone of voice, their words, their feelings, the sounds and smells. One day sitting in Jimmy’s group at San Bruno, he asked them how long they thought it took them to get from yelling at their partners to being in the back of that cop car? The guys guessed twenty minutes, twenty-five minutes, half an hour, maybe an hour. “No,” Jimmy told them. “Ten minutes. Bam! There you go, brother.” Minutes to go from a man to a bear to an inmate. But tonight, with Doug, they do the whole exercise in under two hours.
We coerce, Jimmy tells them. They coerce themselves, their victims, their kids. It’s taking them away from themselves. Jimmy says they have to be willing to take action. That awareness plus action equals change. I can see him looking around the group, guy to guy. “I’m going to speak on that for one fucking second,” Jimmy says, standing up. “I’ve been aware of shit my whole life. I’m aware of everything that I ever did in my life. Lying, cheating, stealing. I heard ‘Don’t sell drugs’ all my life. ‘Don’t do drugs, don’t put your hands on girls.’ I heard that all my life, but I did it anyway.” A guy with his elbows on his knees sits back in his chair. “This is important, guys. How do I get the willingness to stop my violence?” He waits a beat, looks around the circle. “If I don’t look at the destruction that I caused, then I’m not going to give a fuck.”
That moment becomes Jimmy’s second story. What is the worst thing you ever did to someone? That was the day he kidnapped the woman he loved. Nearly killed her. The mother of one of his beloved four kids. His ex-partner, Kelly Graff. They were estranged and Jimmy was pissed. She was his woman. He’d get her back. He called her, said he had $500 for her, and could she come pick it up? She made him promise he wasn’t up to anything, and he promised. That’s the coercion. Then he says he went and rented a U-Haul truck, after which he got himself very, very high, and he waited. Waited till he saw her car come from down the block, and when she was just there, a breath away from the U-Haul, he put it in reverse and slammed on the gas, rammed into her car as hard and as fast as he could. Could have fucking killed her. Then like a panther he was at her car door and pulling her out while she was screaming. He threw her in the back of the U-Haul and shut the gate, then drove to her house. Power and control. He was wasted; he hadn’t slept in a couple of days. He was a dumbass. His current self shakes his head in disbelief at his former self. They got to her house—the house he used to share with her—and he got her out of the truck and pulled her inside, and that’s where he says his memory stops. Maybe they fought a little. Maybe he slapped her around. He’s pretty sure he walloped her a couple of times. He can’t remember, but he says he went to sleep. He slept and when he woke up, she was gone, and he knew he was fucked. Dumb fuck. How could he have gone to sleep? He ran out of the house to a taco place on the corner that they all frequented, and a guy at the taco place said Kelly had been in there earlier with a girlfriend, freaking out, scared out of her mind, and that she was going to the police. And Jimmy ran and ran. Right into hiding.
Kelly remembers it very differently. Jimmy showed up at her work one day claiming his grandmother had died. Kelly knew how close he was to his grandmother, so she thought he was telling the truth. But the minute she stepped outside with him, she could tell he was lying. They’d been together since she was sixteen and he was twenty-six. Now they had a young daughter, and Kelly was twenty-one.
When she saw that he’d coerced her to come out, she fled back into her office, where there was security. Jimmy, she told me over the phone, found her car in the parking lot and lit it on fire. The car had been brand new, and the San Francisco fire department called to give her the news. It was she who’d rented the U-Haul to move out of their apartment, she said. After Jimmy burned her car, she borrowed a car from a friend of her mom’s, but Jimmy stalked her, jumped in the passenger seat when she left work. He had a knife and she remembered him saying, “You’re leaving me, bitch.” She’d spent years as his punching bag. He manipulated her, coerced her, scared the shit out of her. He stalked her constantly, wouldn’t let her socialize, accused her of cheating. “I’m not leaving you,” she lied to him. “We just need a break.” She was “trying to calm him down, because I didn’t know what he was capable of.” They picked up the U-Haul together, she said, and drove to their shared apartment, a basement apartment she described as a “dungeon.” She managed to convince him that she was hungry, and he let her go and she told me she “ran like it was the last second of my life.”
She went straight to the police station with her cousin, where she says they initially asked her to go back to her house and get the knife and bring it in. “I said, ‘Are you crazy?’ ” She said they weren’t interested in helping her at all, but they did eventually put a warrant out for his arrest. In the meantime, Kelly had lost her car, her home, and eventually her job (she was laid off after 9/11). It was the lowest point in her life.
One morning, just days after the U-Haul incident, she went to drop off their daughter at preschool and Jimmy was hiding out near the school. She says he made her take their daughter out of school and for eight days he held the two of them in a hotel room at gunpoint. What happened in those eight days is off the record, per both of their requests.
She says she was finally able to manipulate him and get away.
He says he turned himself in.
Memory is fickle in the midst of trauma.
When he described this moment in his life to me, he remembers being on the run, in hiding, spooked by every siren he heard, keeping his gaze averted. He was so high he was hallucinating half the time, Kelly told me. And so maybe he truly doesn’t remember all that much.
But eventually he was caught, and they both said the prosecutor wanted to charge him with kidnapping and assault with a deadly weapon, but Kelly says she felt bad for him and recanted a lot of her statement. When she tells me this, over the phone, it’s clear she can’t believe she was once that woman, the woman who recanted. In the end, he pled out. He said he was sentenced to four years; she said he served just over one.
Regardless, this is when he found RSVP and he learned about what he’d done, to himself, to Kelly and their daughter, to his community, to the rest of his family. He tells the guys in his group how violence has a ripple effect, how he hurt Kelly, which hurt his children, his parents, her circle of friends, and on and on. Violence is a darkness that migrates into a community, infects it so that it multiplies. When Donte talks about East Oakland as Baghdad, I think this is what he means, exactly what Jimmy is talking about. How one violent act by one person begets another. How violence matched with more violence never really solves any kind of problem. I have an ex-husband who spent his entire career in the military and he used to say to me that the problem with having a gun, no matter who you are, is that its presence automatically puts you on a side. You are no longer neutral. Violence, it seems to me, does the same thing. It splinters individual people, yes, but it also splinters families, communities, cities, countries. This is what Jimmy is trying to get at with his own story.
The names Jimmy has for himself—“bottom-feeder,” “low-life motherfucker”—are street lingo, a kind of gritty poetry, cred with the homies in the classes. But here, let’s call him what he really was in that moment and on that day. He was a domestic terrorist. That’s what terrorists do. They terrorize. All the men in the RSVP wing of San Bruno and beyond. They’re the terrorists in our midst, purveyors of a horror that many people today, including some of our country’s leaders, feel is simply a “private” matter.
Jimmy served his time and just before his release, he says he got a letter from Kelly. She hadn’t written him the entire time he was locked up. And he remembers her letter ending with this sentence: Please don’t kill me. (She says her letter was in response to one from him in which he allegedly refused to pay her child support.)
He tells this story with a shake of his head, the remorse threading itself through his body language. How many women across time? I think. How many have pled this same sentence? Women around the world, in a thousand languages, across the centuries, the span of human existence. Please don’t kill me. See how polite we women are? We say “please” when we’re begging for our lives.
“That poor girl,” Jimmy tells the class, with Doug still at the head of the circle. His voice is practically a whisper now. “That poor, poor girl. She went around asking my friends if they thought I was going to kill her when I got out.” The room vibrates with his story, this terrible thing he did, and how he crawled his way back to his own humanity.
“And that girl is my best friend today,” he says. “She totally has my back.”
Kelly refuted this characterization. She believed he had changed, believed he had “learned to accept what he’s done, and he knows it was wrong.” She said he was more humble today. Probably at the best place in his life. But still. “I will never allow myself to be alone with Jimmy again in my life,” she said.
Jimmy waits a beat. Every guy in here has a similar story, and every guy in here will be where Doug is tonight. Jimmy looks at Doug. “When you started drinking Wild Turkey, brother, you were doing violence to yourself. That’s where it started, right?”
Doug nods, picks at calluses on the palms of his hands.
“Pushing her away is violence to her, right? Hitting her in the face three times, too. And punching through the wall. You told the guy you’d split his face, right? That’s verbal violence right there, that threat.”
Doug is nodding, acknowledging the contextualization of these actions.
Behind Doug, the guy with teeth grills is writing it all down on a whiteboard, circling what the moments mean. Drinking is “self-violence.” Calling names is “verbal violence.” Punching walls is “physical violence.”
“Can I ask you a clarifying question?” Jimmy says. “What was your first fatal peril?” The first time, in other words, he can identify his male role belief system being challenged.
In the pedagogy of ManAlive, the male role belief system is what society tells men to expect. In group, Jimmy or Sinclair or whoever is leading will often stop and ask the participants to offer some examples of the male role belief system: man does not get disrespected. Man does not get lied to. Man’s sexuality does not get questioned. Man is the authority. Man does not get dismissed. Woman should be submissive, obedient, supportive to man. When a man’s belief system is challenged, he goes into fatal peril and that is the moment where violence is a choice. ManAlive uses a kind of hokey phrase for this moment: when a man’s “inner hit man” comes out and his “authentic self” disappears. A hit man operates in silence, alone. A hit man blends into a crowd, destroys people in stealth, then disappears. A hit man takes no responsibility. A hit man has no moral center. Jimmy points out to Doug that when he is in a moment of fatal peril, Doug is not only not noticing his partner, he is also no longer noticing himself, his own feelings, his own needs, his own body. He is simply reacting to the challenge that’s been made to his belief system, and it’s in this kernel of conflict where a decision to become violent or not resides. One man who’d gone through the program said he had learned to literally take a step backward to try to recalibrate his mind and his body in such a moment. Sometimes an adjustment this small is all they need to remind themselves to stop, take a breath, don’t escalate.
Jimmy asks again when Doug first went into fatal peril.
“When she told me she couldn’t stop thinking about the other guy,” he answers.
“I been that right there,” one of the guys says.
Donte chimes in. “When you said you had decided you all were going to be like friends, that to me sounds like denial.” Doug nods. He wanted her back. He was denying his own feelings. “When you say ‘I’ve never been so drunk in my life’ that kinda sounds to me like blame. And you said she came at you—that’s kinda like blame again.” Blaming the liquor. Blaming her. Blaming everything and everyone but himself. Doug acknowledges that Donte is right.
They go on in this way for another twenty minutes. One of the guys points out his body language when the police showed up, how Doug was sitting there on the curb waiting for them, trying, as he said, “to make myself look as harmless as possible.” That sounded like “minimizing,” the guy told Doug. So Doug was in denial about his own feelings, and his own part in the violence. He blamed her and he blamed the other guy, and he threatened them verbally and physically, and he minimized his role in all of it, and it’s all right there in what his body did and what his words were.
Perhaps the most significant challenge to this entire program is that men who’ve gone through it—either RSVP or ManAlive—are still operating in the same world as before they went through the program. The guys in San Bruno? They have it so much easier than the guys who are in the outside world, trying to live a nonviolent life where everything and everyone around them hasn’t changed. Donte talked to me about this earlier in the day, how his mother and grandmother saw the change in him, but also didn’t trust it. How even he himself didn’t trust it. And he didn’t have any kind of equation for how to even out the imbalance of his life, except time.
Before they leave for the night, Jimmy asks the group about intimating. About how to be intimate. It’s something they’ll learn more in another stage of the curriculum. Doug says, “Listen and disclose.” The “listen” means listening to their partners, but also listening to themselves, their feelings, their own bodies.
“There’s no judgments here, man,” Jimmy reminds them. “No advice, no judgments, no opinions.”
Donte thanks Doug for his courage, sitting up there at the head of the circle for hours, having one of his worst moments laid bare for a group of strangers. “Seeing the expressions on your face. Them was the same expressions on my face ’cause I really hurt somebody that I loved—you feel me? So I want to say thank you for doing the work. I really want you to see the violence that you did to the person you supposed to love. Thanks, bro.”
Doug nods, takes a deep breath and lets it out, then laughs, because he noticed his body in the moment and recognized the relief it was expressing.
Two months after the group’s meeting with Doug, Donte disappeared. He didn’t return my texts or e-mails. I tried calling the two mobile numbers I had for him, and left message after message. Nothing.
Finally, after several months of trying, I got hold of someone at Community Works. Donte had been caught riding in a car with a gun owned by the driver of the car and the police rearrested him. As a term of his probation, Donte had been required to stay away from all firearms—his own, those belonging to others, just anyone’s. He also had a nugget of crack in his pocket at the time and he was back in prison, awaiting trial. He’d been assigned a public defender. I called the public defender multiple times, and wrote him several e-mails, but he did not respond to requests for an interview. Donte faced up to fourteen years in prison, if convicted. If he was very lucky, he’d get one.
All the time he’d wanted to make up, the college degree, the job at Community Works, the chance to rebuild his life? I wondered what he was thinking of it all now. Donte was a young Black man facing a system that did not give lucky breaks to young Black men very often, if ever. He had a serious criminal history. He had no money for a decent lawyer. His chances, as I saw them, were nil. He’d wind up just another violent man fated to the life he’d always known, carried along by forces he couldn’t fight alone. As far as I could tell, Donte had been honest with me. He didn’t pretend to be a good guy. He knew he’d fucked up. And he’d told me, too, how impossible it was to live on an intern’s paycheck in San Francisco. When his time at the halfway house was over, he’d planned to move back to his mother’s house, smack in the middle of the neighborhood that set him on his troublesome road so many years earlier, not because he wanted to, but because he had no choice. Of course, I thought. Of course he had a rock of crack in his pocket. What else is he going to do? He’s got a job, and a seven p.m. curfew. Community Works, Jimmy Espinoza, RSVP, they were all doing everything they could for Donte Lewis, but they were all also fighting the same systems with their other priorities, and with racism and classism embedded into their architecture, with limited resources and limitless need.
I wanted to talk to Donte, but I didn’t have his mother’s or his grandmother’s phone numbers, and there was no way to get hold of him by phone, of course. And then one night my cell rang. The Atwater Correctional Facility. An inmate was on the line, asking me to accept the charge. In fifteen-minute increments, I got Donte’s story.
It had been around midnight, and he was looking for a ride home. He’d moved out of the halfway house and lived with his mom and grandmother back in East Oakland. His sister’s “baby daddy” picked him up. The dude was drunk, but Donte didn’t consider not going with him. He’d recently been getting pressure from his new girlfriend about living with his mom, but what could he do? His take-home pay was not enough to live on under almost any conditions in the San Francisco area. But he had been trying to stay clean, stay on program, keep his head above water and stay focused. His boss had warned him not to hang out with anyone who’d get him in trouble, but he said he was fine. He had it taken care of.
He thought he’d just do a couple of little cash deals with some crack and get a small jump start on his finances. Nothing big. Nothing that was going to take him off his antiviolence program. That night, he had a little baggie in his pocket. Way he saw it, there was no other way he could ever hope to get out of his mother’s house for a long, long time. He was twenty-eight already, pretty old to be living at home.
The driver also had some weed on him. Shortly after Donte got in the car, sirens went off behind them, but instead of pulling over, the driver turned sharply, drove two blocks, and rammed into a wall. Donte claims he doesn’t remember anything after that. He woke up in the hospital, his lip and face all banged up. He’s pretty sure the airbag didn’t deploy. The cops found a Glock in the airbag compartment, hidden away. It wasn’t Donte’s. He claimed he didn’t even know about it. The floor of the car had a Glock magazine and some spent casings that had rolled around when they crashed into the wall. Donte’s blood splattered. He didn’t know where, but he knew it must have gone all over the car, because it was dripped down the front of his shirt, he later saw.
The accident hardly mattered. The drugs mattered a little, but not nearly as much as the gun. By being around a gun, he’d violated his probation—a charge that brought an automatic two years in prison. Add to that that if his DNA was found on the gun, on the magazine, on any of the spent casings—from, say, splattered blood—he was looking at a best-case scenario of four years, and a worst-case of many, many more, depending on the jury at trial. His boss from Community Works wrote him a character reference. He wanted to reach out to some of the guys from his group for character references. But his lawyer said not to bother; it would only anger the judge.
“The thing is,” Donte told me on the phone that night, “they already know me. They all already know me.” The judge knew him, the probation and parole folks, maybe even the police. Even if they didn’t know him, his record preceded him. “They know me from before, who I used to be. Nothing going to change their mind now.”
Donte’s case never went to trial. He pled out, like so many others in his position. Young. Black. Broke. Criminal histories. He got six more years, and this time it wasn’t a cushy little county jail, with community college programs and restorative justice and art therapy. This time it was federal, first at Atwater, and then, halfway through his sentence, they shipped him all the way across the country to a federal penitentiary on the border of Pennsylvania and New York, thousands and thousands of miles from anyone he knew or anywhere he’d ever been.
Then I tried Jimmy, but he, too, had seemed to vanish.