Father’s Twisted Footsteps Trip Son

CHICAGO —  At first, he thought he could save his son.

So he would chase him down trash-filled alleys and over fences, too old to run after someone half his age but too scared to stop.

And he would hustle to the police station, persuading the police to let him take his boy home, promising he would get him help.

Back then, Luis Rodriguez was determined to steer his son, Ramiro, away from the bloody life of gangs he had wallowed in a generation earlier in Los Angeles, when he nearly ended up as one more tattooed corpse in a morgue.

Twenty-five years ago, Rodriguez was a gangbanger, hopped up on drugs or booze, willing to firebomb a house or spray a crowd with gunfire, whiling away his days in jail cells instead of classrooms.

He was the kid doing the running.

But Rodriguez grew out of it. He made a life for himself. He became a writer and poet; people paid to read his words, to hear his voice.

Ramiro, too, would grow up, Rodriguez told himself, and find his own way.

So when his son sank deeper into gang clutches, Rodriguez fought to free him in every possible way. Good schools. Family counseling. A psychiatric hospital. A youth group they formed together.

He even gave Ramiro a written blueprint of his errors--a painful autobiography of his own gang-cursed days.

It was not enough.

Today, Rodriguez, 45, tours the country, speaking of lessons learned. He calls it a sentence, community service for crimes he has committed.

Ramiro has just begun another sentence: At 24, he is in the early days of a 28-year prison term for attempted murder.

*

It is a squinting bright day outside, but the school auditorium is damp and dim as the squat man in the navy blazer utters words he hopes another father’s son will hear:

“I was 11 when I joined a gang.

“At 12, I was doing drugs.

“At 13, I started getting arrested.

“By the time I was 17, I was charged with attempted murder.

“Before I was 18 years old, 25 of my friends were dead.”

Luis Rodriguez, writer and poet, is for the moment reciting the facts of his own resume, the history of a boy who doubted he would survive to become a man.

He has come this day to address about 100 juniors at Holy Trinity High School who have read his autobiography, “Always Running.” He has come to tell how the sins of one generation were passed on to another, how history repeated itself and tore apart his family.

“I’m not here because I did a lot of things right,” Rodriguez said, clutching an open book of his poetry in a silver-ringed hand. “I’m here because I made a lot of mistakes.”

*

“I clasped the screwdriver and walked up to the beaten driver in the seat whose head was bleeding. The dude looked at me through glazed eyes, horrified at my presence. . . . ‘Do it!’ were the last words I recalled before I plunged the screwdriver into flesh and bone, and the sky screamed.”

So wrote Rodriguez in “Always Running.”

But his life story didn’t begin the way you might think.

He grew up with loving parents. His father, an educated man, was a high school principal in Mexico who dreamed of golden opportunities across the border. But he never mastered English and ended up cleaning animal cages in a college science lab in California.

The Rodriguez family moved around Southern California. By age 13, Luis, nicknamed “Chin,” for his jutting jaw, was a full-fledged gang member, dabbling in sex, drugs and crime. Soon afterward, his mother kicked him out.

“I was a raging kid,” he said, sitting in his cramped living room, the crook of his thumb on his left hand tattooed with a cross and three rays, symbol for la vida loca, or “crazy life.”

And a crazy life it was.

Luis snorted, smoked, shot and swigged his way through his teenage years. Aerosol cans. Mescaline. Methamphetamine. Heroin. Vodka, rum, tequila.

“For me the drugs and violence were the best thing,” he said. “I didn’t like school. I didn’t like family.”

What he did like was the gang, and he was eager to prove his mettle.

“When the guys wanted soldiers to do jobs,” he said, “I was the first one to go. Shoot somebody? Firebomb their homes? Anything like that I was game for. I loved the adrenaline rush.

“The whole thing,” Rodriguez said, “was just one big suicide journey.”

His quick wits helped him wriggle off the hook many times, but he still wound up in juvenile detention halls and jails in Monterey Park, East Los Angeles and Pomona. Rites of passage, he assured himself.

But times were changing.

The Los Angeles riots were over, the government was helping inner cities and do-gooders were streaming into his neighborhood.

They saw something in Rodriguez that he didn’t see himself: a good speaker, a leader, a kid with a flair for words.

They encouraged him to return to high school, where he wrote a column for the student newspaper. He discovered the fiery rhetoric of Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X, Claude Brown, and decided one day he would tell his own story.

But Rodriguez was a Jekyll and Hyde: He could impress a school counselor in the morning, then go on a drive-by shooting that night.

At 17, he was charged with assault with intent to commit murder. But the case was dropped. Then after a run-in with his own gang, he decided to quit.

“When I left the gang,” he said, “my thing was I’m never going back. It was a closed door.”

By 21, Rodriguez was married with a son, Ramiro. Soon, his daughter, Andrea, came along.

But the young man who had survived as a thief, armed robber and burglar had to do something different--honest work. So he tried various jobs, from truck driver to carpenter to steelworker.

All the while, he dreamed of becoming a writer. Finally, it became a reality. First he worked at a newspaper, then, having moved to Chicago, he founded his own press and immersed himself in poetry. He married for the third time.

His children visited each summer; they would camp, go to the beach and amusement park.

Then one day, Ramiro’s mother called from California.

“Your son,” she told Rodriguez, “needs a father.”

Saw Himself Reflected in Son

At 13, Ramiro was a baby-faced kid who was resentful of his absentee father and harboring a secret: He had been physically abused by men his mother knew.

So a new home, even with a father he didn’t know well, was promising.

“We loved our father . . . but we never felt like we had a real relationship with him,” Ramiro said. “It could have been any man to get us out of our situation, for a month, or at least for a weekend.”

Home was Humboldt Park, on Chicago’s near West Side, a melting pot of Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and blacks--and some of the most intense gang activity in the city.

Soon the trouble began.

Ramiro was bright, but he was tossed out of or quit three schools. He fought. He sold and used drugs--cocaine, acid and “wicky” sticks, a combination of reefer and embalming fluid.

Rodriguez didn’t like what he saw, because he saw himself.

He imposed 10 p.m. curfews. He banned TV. He demanded to meet Ramiro’s friends. The angrier he got, the worse it got, with his son sneaking out in the middle of the night--just as Rodriguez had done years earlier.

“You ain’t going to be in no gang,” Rodriguez told Ramiro, trying to barricade the doorway with his fireplug body. Ramiro scurried around him, down the stairs.

“I didn’t know it at the time, but now I know that he didn’t want me to follow in his footsteps,” Ramiro said, his almond eyes flashing. “He didn’t want to see his son join a gang, but I needed something, man.”

Like his father, Ramiro found security in the gang.

“I had more of a relationship with them than I ever had with my father,” he said.

Every now and then, his father pulled him out of the life, once signing him into a psychiatric hospital, where Ramiro flashed gang signs, hurled a chair at a staffer and ended up in leather restraints.

After his release, he returned to the streets.

“You’re going to use what you know,” Ramiro explained. “It’s just like any businessman on Wall Street. They play the stock numbers. That’s what they know. . . . The drugs, the guns, the violence. This is what we know.”

Then two things united father and son.

Rodriguez wrote “Always Running,” and it made the New York Times’ list of notable books in 1993.

The details were a revelation to his son, who knew only sketchy details of his father’s past.

Father and son formed a group, Youth Struggling for Survival. This was no anti-gang crusade. Every kid was accepted as is. The group tried to divert their energies into artistic, spiritual and community activities.

Rodriguez and his son also bonded on a book tour. They were an appealing made-for-TV duo: the father who had rejected gangs, the son still in the gang’s grip.

“I had no intention of getting out,” Ramiro said. “I’m not the kind of person when I join something, I leave it.”

“The last Mohican,” said his father, who watched Ramiro’s buddies mature and marry while his son clung to his gangster ways.

Then came real trouble: Ramiro was arrested in two drive-by shootings. He wasn’t the gunman either time, but at 18, he was an adult, facing the possibility of doing serious time.

Rodriguez rode to the rescue again, even while battling his own demons: a serious drinking problem (up to 25 beers a day, he said) that he has since kicked. He hired a lawyer and lined up people to testify to Ramiro’s good deeds with other kids, just as folks had rallied around him long ago.

Ramiro was sentenced to boot camp, where he flourished.

“This is your break,” Rodriguez counseled.

“I’m going to change,” Ramiro promised his family.

For a while, he did. Then the pressures of work, college and everyday life mounted, and everything unraveled.

“He really wanted to be in the streets,” his father said.

Ramiro sees it another way:

“I wasn’t strong enough to take my own life so I found how to do it in other ways. I guess I just really wanted to die.”

*

“There’s a small but intense fire burning in Ramiro. . . . He’s made it so far, but every day is a challenge. Now I tell him: You have worth outside of a job, outside the ‘jacket’ imposed on you since birth. . . . Stop running.”

Those were the final words of “Always Running.”

Seven years after those lines were written, Ramiro has nowhere to run.

He’s inmate No. B72006 at Menard Correctional Center, serving time for attempted murder. In 1997, Ramiro got into a scuffle with a truck driver, shot him and fled, leading police on a chase. He shot at two officers; neither was hurt.

This time Rodriguez could not save his son.

Sitting in a prison visiting room, Ramiro ran a hand nervously through his shoulder-length black hair, twisting it into a ponytail. He talked about writing poetry, his regret in not turning to his father as his world collapsed and his painful separation from his three children by three women he didn’t marry.

He has never held his youngest in his arms. His oldest, 6, will be 18 before Ramiro is eligible for parole.

“I really love my family and I really love my kids . . . but I just didn’t love myself,” he said. “I really don’t think I would be here if I asked my father for help.”

*

His speech over, Luis Rodriguez thinks of his son.

“I tell you,” he said, smiling with the memory, “he was a really beautiful little boy.”

Ramiro was a chatterbox who would wave at strangers from car windows and give his toys to others.

Now, Rodriguez has two more sons to raise, and when he speaks to them of Ramiro, he always has good things to say.

But when he is alone, he blames himself for not being there when Ramiro was younger.

He regrets not giving him the stable family life he needed. And he can’t help but be haunted by his son’s long sentence.

Ramiro is hundreds of miles away, but he’s never far from his father’s thoughts.

There are powerful poems his son wrote. There are smiling photos of Ramiro with his brothers and sister on the living room shelves. There are phone calls and visits to prison.

But there’s still a father’s lament.

“You just can’t say,” he whispered, “that I didn’t have a hand in this.”