When I see Jimmy Espinoza again, several years have gone by. All those months he’d been unable to keep the weight on? All those lunches of giant burritos and refried beans, but he’d stayed skinny as a swizzle stick? Turns out he’d relapsed. Gone back to drugs. Dove right back into the shit he’d worked so hard to pull himself out of. Took himself to a live-in facility just blocks away from the sheriff’s outpost where he taught ManAlive. He called me on my cell on a Saturday night. It’d been a tough road, he said, but this time he was determined to keep at it. To stay nonviolent. To kick his drinking. To keep his job. To be better, stronger, tougher at all of it, to admit to his weaknesses and through admitting them, by copping to the struggle, he’d grow stronger. Community Works held his job for him. When I asked him how he felt about the book, whether or not he still wanted me to write about him, he paused on the phone for a moment. Then said, “Fuck yeah. This is the real shit. My life is a struggle every day. Every damn day.”
He finished a yearlong live-in rehab and was back at the sheriff’s office, teaching the curriculum. He’s healthier than he’s ever been. He’s got weight on him now, starts his days with push-ups, ends them with visits to the weight room at his local gym. We compare biceps. He lived in a rehab house for addicts for a few months and then got his own place. He raises his hand first if anyone asks who here is a fuckup, needs to remind each and every class that he’s one of them. He leads not just the ManAlive curriculum at San Bruno now, but a narcotics anonymous group for the guys, and then he speaks at churches and community centers around the area, and he doesn’t pretend that any of it is easy.
This is the battle, for him and for all the guys he works with, this pull toward their previous life. Toward drugs, toward the streets, toward the life he used to live. He feels it in his stomach, in his mind. He refers to heroin and coke as princesses, fairy-tale women, Snow White and Cinderella, he calls them. The parallel makes me squirm, but I don’t call him on the potential misogyny, because it feels unfair to point this out at the moment when he has the fortitude to take himself to rehab and he is really truly trying. The drugs are beautiful, sexy, gorgeous, beckoning women, women lying on white sheets in soft lighting, calling to him, seducing him. Not three-dimensional, in-your-life women, but temporary lovers. Terrible temptresses, tormentors. He knows that they would offer a moment of ecstasy in exchange for that dread-filled, belly-deep knowledge that comes with failure, with committing violence against his own body, as he might put it.
He’s been granted a second chance. And a third. And a fourth. He’s lived one life, two, three, seven. He’s on his last life, he thinks. He makes vows to the guys in his groups, to his family, to the men and women who live at the treatment center with him, to the batterers and the alcoholics and the users and the addicts, to the man who takes his monthly rent check, to his children and the women he once both loved and abused, and to his coworkers like Reggie and Leo. He vows and vows and vows and most days he gets to the end of the day and feels a kind of bone-deep relief to have made it once more. Of all the vows he offers the vast constellations of people, his deepest vow, he says, is to himself.
He writes on a private Facebook page about the struggle. The seduction of those two. Snow White and Cinderella. How beautiful they are to him. How tantalizing. But he won’t succumb. Not this night. And hopefully not the next either. Beyond that, he can’t see, or won’t look. He’s not hibernating, he says. Not hiding out. Just staying away from the places that suck him in, the visceral, associative memories with certain corners in the Haight, certain windows where he can look up and remember entire universes: “This girl, she lived up there in that apartment,” he had told me one afternoon, pointing up above a storefront that sold expensive urban menswear, “and I used to sit up there and watch my girls.” His girls, it’s in the image. Man. Window. Muscles clenched. Response system on high alert. I can picture him as the bear.
He’d go somewhere else to get high. Kept that shit to himself. A wasted pimp is a vulnerable pimp. A strung-out pimp loses girls, loses territory. No one knew for a long time that he was using. He’d shoot up in some motel room, lay diagonal across the bed and feel like shit. Beat himself up in his mind for being a waste of a human. But it didn’t stop him. None of it stopped him.
A scar above his right eye, nearly hidden by an eyebrow, six teeth missing. He laughs at what he looks like. Like a gangster. Like a hoodlum. Like the kind of guy you’d never bring to meet your daddy. But he talks about love. His grandmother died at ninety-seven, and it tore him up, and he wrote about how much she loved him. How she’d watch ten, twelve cop cars careen up the street at night and pray they weren’t coming for her grandson, Jimmy. How she knew he pimped. He’d sometimes bring his girls over to her house, and she’d fix them all something to eat, and she’d look at those girls and say, “You know you working in monkey business and this one here’s the monkey,” and she’d point to Jimmy.
I go with him to the sheriff’s satellite office, see one of his new classes. It’s the place I visited years ago, when Donte was still his intern, except tonight he’s in an upstairs room. About a third of the class are newcomers, which means they’ll be tuned out. They sit in their circle of seniority. They wear oversized sports jerseys, too-big jeans, paint-splattered T-shirts. There is an exhaustion to these men, many of whom have put in full days at work and are now court-mandated to be here. Some of them began this program in San Bruno and are finishing it out here as part of their probation. I sense open hostility from more than one. A calendar from the prior year is stuck in June. Several tables are pushed to one side of the room.
The airy rush of traffic whooshes outside. County jail is nearby and the headquarters of Airbnb is just beyond the jail. That’s what San Francisco is like to people like Jimmy who don’t live off the Silicon Valley gravy train: it’s a place of dichotomy. Chain-link fences with busted-up liquor bottles on one curb and a block down a local brewpub sells fifteen-dollar pints to hipsters.
Jimmy starts with the first point of the curriculum. Accountability, he says. What does it mean?
“Stage one: it’s to stop my violence,” one man says.
In San Bruno all the guys in his program are pre-sentencing, which translates to their best behavior. Sitting up straight like the best kids in the class. They’ve been plucked away by all those triggers in the external world—relationships, drugs, alcohol, gangs, guns, whatever. In jail it’s just them and their stories and time. And let’s be clear: Jimmy’s included in that. His job helps immensely. He’s not fooled himself enough to believe that his determination to live a clean, violent-free life isn’t bolstered by the mere fact that he’s surrounded by support, including a paycheck. But out here in civil society, all those old triggers and ways of living are pulling at these guys. Their friends, their hustle, their women. Half the room looks like they’re one good breath away from dreamland. One guy has his elbows on his knees, staring into the carpet. Another’s eyelids flutter. Three of the men here tonight are wearing ankle monitors under their pant legs. One has a monitor on each leg.
But Jimmy’s not some PhD from a fancy university. He’s one of them. He understands their struggle from the inside out. Not from a book and not from research—not, frankly, how someone like me understands it, intellectually—but from the gut. And I’ve watched enough sessions with him to know that he sees those guys who think they’re invisible. The ones who come in drunk. The ones who fall asleep. Who slump over. Who stare him down while he talks. He sees them. He knows. Once in a while, he’ll have to “bounce” someone out of class, someone who comes wasted, or who won’t participate, and then the courts will find out, and Jimmy says sometimes the dude winds up right back in the classroom he was bounced from.
“Accountability,” Jimmy says. Four ways they get into a moment of fatal peril. The first is denial. “I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me.” The next is minimize. “To lessen the impact of my violence,” he tells them. Words like “but” and “only” are clues. “I only hit her once. I only pushed her a little. But she came at me first.” Blame and collusion are the other two ways. “She hit me first,” he says. “She was in my face.” That’s blame. Collusion is, say another guy is sitting there beside you. “Oh, dog, you going to let her talk to you like that? Yo, man, if I was you, I’d let her know what’s what.”
Jimmy tells them if they stay away from those four behaviors, they’ll never see him again “… unless you’re at the park watching the Giants.”
They laugh. Jimmy reminds them of the story of Kelly, how he kidnapped her. The second of his three defining stories; most of them have heard it before. “Everything that was on that police report was 125% true. Everything she said was absolutely true,” he says. He lowers his voice and takes a step toward them, his body bent in an arc, leaning toward them, pulling them into the moment. And it works. They’re starting to sit up and pay attention to him. “And you know what? Every police report that’s involved me, ever? I did it. I don’t have the experience of being falsely arrested. I don’t have the experience of having someone lie on me. And that’s what I’m trying to get you guys to see. I know that and it don’t make me special, but I know no one’s ever lied on me. It’s all true. And that’s what keeps me here. I don’t want to have to live looking over my shoulder. I don’t want to live with my partner and every time I walk in the house, she’s frightened, because of my impact.”
He steps back toward the whiteboard, straightens up, rubs his hands together. He’s wearing beige Dickies and trainers. “You guys following me a little?” he asks.
One guy says, “No.”
Jimmy smiles, says, “Well, you’re going to hear it every week, dog. Don’t even worry. The work starts at fatal peril. Break that word in two. Fatal means dead, right? Peril. Deadly danger. You know, you’re driving down the highway and someone cuts you off and you’re like, ‘Fuck!’ Your hands come up”—he demonstrates with his hands, a defensive posture.
One of the guys says, “Your manhood’s been challenged.”
Jimmy nods. He tells them their heart rate increases, their muscles go hard, their face goes into a grimace. It’s all subconscious. They won’t know it, but it’s the limbic system’s response to threat. He demonstrates, outsized, clownish, and they laugh.
He says how they all learned as little kids that boys don’t cry. “Our dad or mom said, ‘Don’t cry now. Shake it off,’ right? Why not? It hurt. Why not cry? What’s wrong with crying? Boys didn’t get to cry because they were in pain, falling on gravel, but my daughter? Man. She was scooped up and held and kissed, and my son was told to stop crying.” He shakes his head. “Now, with the education I got, I’m like, ‘Come here, little man. I feel like crying with you. I know that hurt. It’s okay. Cry.’ ”
He talks about how he grew up believing women served men because he watched his grandmother and his female cousins all make the food and bring the food and clean up the food, and the boys sat watching the ball game. What were they all being taught? And now he’s a grown man and he knows, because he had to learn, how to feed himself, how to make his own damn omelet. “I had no concept of appreciation,” he says of his past girlfriends, of Kelly. “I never had a bad partner. I had a bad attitude.”
“You sure did,” one of the guys says. Jimmy laughs.
“I got a lot of people that love me,” he says, but in his younger days, he says he wasn’t worried about them. How ridiculous it seems to him now. He used to worry about impressing other men, other pimps, other street punk gangsters like he used to be. “I’m worried about the motherfuckers I don’t know. I want to be this male-figure motherfucker. And when I’m busy impressing the person I don’t know, I’m hurting the people that love me.” He says this was his inner hit man. The inner compulsion that tells men to be violent, that hides men from their authentic feelings, that reinforces this male belief system. “We call our image the hit man. Why? ’Cause the hit man moves in silence. The hit man doesn’t come outside in the street. He’s not driving around in a big ole Cadillac, blasting tunes and smoking a blunt. Motherfucker’s out in the suburbs, owns a construction company, you know? Three kids in Catholic schools.” He’s moving around the room now, bouncing back and forth like he’s boxing. Every hit man is different. Depends on the inner lies he makes you believe. Jimmy says his is the “manipulating, womanizing, aggressive bastard.” He stops moving. “Every one of those words is deep when you’re talking about a crime against your daughters.”
It’s that thing, right, where men can relate to wanting their own daughters kept safe, kept from men like themselves, but somehow it doesn’t extend to their partners. This view has always sat uncomfortably with me; must we always see ourselves, our own stories, to make someone else’s mean something? Can’t we just believe that all people should be safe and not just those who resemble our own mothers and daughters? Is relatability necessary for empathy? And there was something else, too, about Jimmy. When I told him I had to talk to Kelly, get her side of the story, talk to his kids, maybe, or his parents, he would go quiet. I talked to his dad once, but his dad didn’t seem too happy to see him talking to a reporter. He said so right in front of me. “You gonna talk to her all about you?” he said, gesturing toward me. Jimmy said it was all right, but his father shook his head a little. But then Jimmy just sort of disappeared when it came to me talking to these people, his family. He said he didn’t want them re-traumatized, which I understood. We all keep our families safe. But here’s the other question I asked: “Why do you get to decide for grown women—daughter, mother, ex-girlfriend—who they can talk to and who they can’t?”
That’s when Jimmy stopped talking to me.
Eventually, I did talk to Kelly, his ex. She agreed to go on the record. All of their mutual friends, their family members, everyone already knew the story of Jimmy and Kelly, she told me. Kelly called herself Jimmy’s “lead story.” She understood that her history was part of his mission toward nonviolence, and toward his own recovery. She didn’t particularly like that she had to sacrifice her own privacy for his recovery, and for the recovery of men she’d never meet. But she’d made her peace with Jimmy, rebuilt her life, and said she’d learned enough that she would never take shit from any man ever again.
She told me Jimmy had been the first person she felt ever treated her well, at least in the early days. He had a lot of money, and he was nice, though she also says he was a “predator.” Years later, when she did finally work up the courage to leave him, she said people told her she was “giving up” on him. She felt a lot of guilt, but she never went back. Her daughter, she says, has a great relationship with her dad now, but it’s got nothing to do with Kelly. She and Jimmy are co-parents, nothing more to her. When I questioned whether she believed he really had changed, she said yes, but she also said she believed she could probably trigger him again in a minute. It kept her at arm’s length from him.
Just before we hung up, I asked if she thought a violent man could ever truly become nonviolent. She thought about it a moment. “I think they can become ninety percent nonviolent. But there’s a small part of them that you can never fix.”
For his part, Jimmy never spoke to me again.
Jimmy told me once about how he knows women want to “fix him.” That he recognizes a certain fetish women have with a survivor story, a formerly violent man who’s been reborn as a man who doesn’t fear his own vulnerabilities and feelings. Nothing sexier than a man in touch with his emotions, right? When I look at his Facebook page, I can see that he’s not lying. With every post, women are dripping with platitudes, inspired by his story of survival. He said one woman once flew across the country to meet him.
And it makes me a little uncomfortable. It might even piss me off a little. Men like Jimmy are not remarkable. They’re not noteworthy. They’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing—which is not beating up women. If there’s any triumph at all, it is in their very averageness. David Adams is skeptical, too, of this potential fetishization our culture has with a good survival story. It’s the potential narcissism, again, the charisma they all naturally seem to have in the first place. “They can become charismatic loose cannons,” he told me once, “who never really took responsibility for their own abuse.”
Jimmy leans against the whiteboard, his voice with that gravelly whisper again. “I was born and bred in a street gang,” he says. “I could go right back fully into the life right now. Right now. I had a four-month relapse in 2014. I came back in April 2015. You know what, guys? I live a beautiful life. I keep myself around positive people. I’m going to hit the gym after this, and then I’m going to have something good to eat. Grab a shower and get in bed.”
“That’s a good life!” one of the guys says.
“It is,” he nods. “I might even hit a ten-o’clock AA meeting. I’m a fucking mess. I got room to work. I don’t need to fix you. I need to fix me, because I’m the problem. And I want you all to make it, but you know what? The reality is, the guy on the right won’t make it, but the guy on the left will. Ten percent of you will make it. I sat in those seats for two years. I didn’t get it. I didn’t want to put down drugs, stop my unhealthy relationships, the streets. I stayed fucked up. And you’re not going to make me lose no sleep. That’s the bottom hard truth. I’m not an enabler and I’m not a babysitter. So if you want to come to sleep every week, I feel bad, bro. Because whatever got you here, that same situation is going to happen again, hella times, and if you don’t know this material, man, you’re going to do exactly what you did last time … and I’ll just sit like a motherfucking bird watcher. Jail’s like Lake Tahoe, man. It’s always open. Be here, and be present.”
And this brings Jimmy to his third story, the one I only heard once and could never verify with anyone from his family. The one that guts him the most. It’s not a long story, or an unusual story. But he calls it the most painful day of his life. “Twelve years old,” he says. His daughter was sexually molested, by someone they all knew.
“I had to make some serious decisions,” he tells them. “Either I go and knock this motherfucker’s head off, because I had all the right reasons, you know? Do some time for the next thirty years, but it’s not a big deal. I’m a gangbanger anyway. I live comfortably in every facility, any facility. Do I kill this motherfucker or do I not do a thing?”
That’s what he thinks his decision was in the moment when he received the news. Kill the guy, or not. But really, he says, he realized that wasn’t his decision at all. The decision was actually “Do I make it about me and go kill this motherfucker? Or do I make it about my daughter, and be there for her?” If he kills the guy, he takes himself out of his daughter’s life at the moment she needs him the most.
“Shit,” one new guy whispers.
“I’m going to make sure, each and every one of you, that your partners are not afraid when you go home,” Jimmy says quietly. “I work front line for the victim, and I want to see you better your life, because that’s one more safe woman in the world.”