Introduction

By Phillip Kay

On December 15, 1994, a firebomb exploded on a subway train underneath Lenox Avenue in Harlem severely burning 13-year-old Arnell Austin. Police initially suspected that Kamron Warren, 16, who was also injured in the blast, had been carrying the device in her bookbag when it accidentally went off. They would not speculate as to the motive, and their suspicions later turned out to have been unfounded. At the time, however, few people who heard the news seemed to find it doubtful or peculiar that a girl Kamron's age would be involved in a crime of that nature, and that was perhaps inevitable. By the early 1990's, violent behavior on the part of young people-particularly as it was being portrayed in the news media-had already become so vicious and pervasive that allegations like these scarcely raised an eyebrow anymore. Just three months earlier, a 13-year-old had been arrested for killing four people in the firebombing of a Bronx grocery store. And not long before that, a group of teens were charged with setting a homeless man on fire as he slept in a local park. Meanwhile, the number of gun homicides involving adolescents nationwide had nearly quintupled, and words like "wolfpack" "drive-by" and "nine millimeter" had become a part of Americans' everyday speech.

Children growing up in this kind of climate confront a host of terrifying experiences and palpable threats. They live with a constant sense of menace in their homes, schools and neighborhoods and often suffer the sudden, wrenching loss of friends, family and cultural heroes. And they have to make tough choices about how to survive. Things Get Hectic is a collection of stories, letters and essays by nearly a hundred such young people who have come of age in a particularly vicious period in our history. The book begins in a neighborhood in Queens, New York, where a dirty look between two strangers leads to a spray of gunfire and teenagers armed with box cutters and hammers send one another to the hospital without really understanding why. It ends in the South Bronx apartment of a woman who has just lost a son to "friendly fire" in the Persian Gulf war. Along the way, there are first-hand accounts by teens who are in the midst of dealing with beatings and rapes by parents and boyfriends. We're right there in the room with 15-year-old Grismaldy Laboy as she gets the news of her cousin's murder and again when word comes that his accused killer has been acquitted of all charges. We hear how, for 21-year-old Wunika Hicks, the murder of a favorite rap star conjures up memories of watching her own father gunned down in the street and the near-total disintegration of her family that followed. We also meet teens here who do violence to themselves, attempting suicide or sticking their fingers down their throats after every meal, and others who take their frustrations out on unsuspecting strangers. The writers discuss the physical and verbal assaults they endure daily at the hands of strangers on the street, police officers, and people in the media and the different ways they themselves have flirted with violent behavior.

The teenagers' individual responses to these kinds of experiences are every bit as varied as the experiences themselves. Ana Pines decides not to alert the authorities about the way her friend's mother is abusing her. "Why should the adults at the [child welfare] hotline be any different from the ones on my block?" she concludes. But confronted with a similar situation, Jessica Cabassa ignores her mother's advice to "leave it alone" and calls the cops. Where one writer defends his decision to carry a gun, another decides that owning one would only make him feel invincible and render him even more vulnerable in the end. Yet another opts to arm herself with chemical mace only after a long discussion with her mother of the attendant fears, risks and benefits.

Not all their choices involve weapons, revenge or despair, however. Allen Francis attends an alternative rock concert so that he can experience "slam" dancing. Julio Pagan travels upstate with his buddies and shoots "the enemy" with paint pellets from expensive toy rifles. And Melissa Chapman spends the summer training with the Israeli army. For others, writing graffiti and taking karate lessons provide an outlet for their rage. "It was like I was exploding for all the times I kept quiet to avoid an argument or backed down from a fight," Allen tells us.

Through their tales of victimization, survival and resilience, these young writers show the determination to rise above their environments. "I knew from experience that there were already enough evil and menacing people in this world," writes 15-year-old Robin Chan. "I didn't want to become one of them." Their stories are peppered with scathing critiques of the world they're forced to grow up in. "As long as they kept us quiet, the adults could pretend the problem didn't exist," they tell us. And to the feeble excuses the writers are occasionally offered, they respond: "I'm sorry; black eyes, swollen cheeks and overflowing tears don't 'just happen'-not in my opinion." No one knows better than teenagers how thoughtlessly or hypocritically we adults are capable of behaving, nor is anyone more eager to set us straight when we do. The writers also denounce state sponsored violence wherever they find it, from world leaders like George Bush and Sadaam Hussein to local law enforcement like the officers who brutalized Rodney King or the ones who put a choke hold on Anthony Baez for playing touch football too close to their patrol car. When 16-year-old Natalie Neptune, who's just about ready to file her application for citizenship, hears what police allegedly did to Abner Louima, she's not sure if she likes what becoming an American stands for. "Why should I be a part of this country," she asks, "if I have to fear the people who are supposed to protect me, just like my parents feared the police in Haiti?"

The incidents recounted here are dramatic enough, but much of what the stories have to offer is not in the events themselves but in the telling. Suzanne Joblonski writes about "Sam," a young man who sits next to her in criminal justice class (and on whom she seems to have a slight crush). When Sam fails to show up one Monday morning, Suzanne learns that he was shot and killed over the weekend, apparently over a pair of sneakers. But she doesn't merely give us a soundbite about how disturbing that was. She provides her own frame for the experience-how the young man wanted to go into the military, for example, and ultimately become a corrections officer, how others in the class wanted to become cops, lawyers and social workers. There are no budding teachers, artists or engineers here-even before Sam is killed they already seem to have imagined their futures as falling on one side or another of some kind of war. And Suzanne's message for Sam's teenage killers is strangely compassionate: Plan ahead. Find something to look forward to.

In another moving story of the death of a schoolmate, a young woman named Yvette describes watching her best friend, Maribel, stabbed to death on the subway ride home from school. "I remember when I was younger I asked my mother why, in the movies, people spat up blood," says Yvette. "And she said it meant they were dead. That's how I knew Maribel was dead." How many of those of us who came of age in the 60's and 70's were watching movies in which people spit up blood before we were old enough to understand what that meant? On the one hand, such movies may have helped prepare Yvette to cope with her friend's death. On the other, the confusion and terror instilled by a lifetime bombarded by those same images may have helped Maribel's young assailant feel the need to strike first.

Which brings us back to Kamron Warren, the 16-year-old whose bookbag suspiciously exploded in flames that afternoon on the #3 train. It wasn't until a week after the incident, when another, bigger bomb exploded on a train underneath New York's financial district, that investigators determined the original device had in fact been planted by Edward J. Leary, a 49-year-old unemployed computer consultant from suburban New Jersey. Suspecting Kamron was an unfortunate mistake, but given the extent of youth violence in our cities, a mistake almost anybody could have made.

The one mistake we must never permit ourselves to make, however, is to underestimate the toll violence takes on young people's psyches, on their schoolwork, their friendships-not to mention the kinds of self-destructive behavior it leads them to. If we learn nothing else from the teenagers in this book, it's that every time a bomb or a handgun goes off in the vicinity of a child in this country it's because adults, directly or indirectly, helped put it there. We all helped create the material conditions that made it possible for that to happen, and all of us have failed in our communal responsibility to provide a safe world for our children to grow up in. Violence is not about age or hormones or, genetics. It's a response people of all ages and cultures learn and internalize over a lifetime and, with a little support from their communities, one they have it within themselves to unlearn and overcome.

The press didn't seem to take much of an interest in how the third degree burns on young Arnell Austin's legs were healing or how Kamron, her family, and her friends felt about the false allegations that had been leveled against her. As a society, we seem to be primarily concerned about the damage teenagers like these have the potential to inflict on us. If we ever want to do something about violence in America, it is high time we began trying to understand what it is like to be 13 years old and have to ride the #3 train to and from school every day with bombs going off all around you.