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Growing Pains

By Alex Urevick

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I was around twelve or thirteen years old when the cruel reality of the human condition was forced upon me.

My middle school had just let out for the day. I was waiting for my mother to give me a ride home and decided to walk to a nearby drugstore and get myself a soda. I crossed a small street, walked through a parking lot, down a block and onto the main shopping street in the area, where I purchased my coke. As I left the store I had an uneasy feeling. Hordes of kids walking up the street in a general commotion, screaming at each other and anybody else who walked by. I walked faster as a few shouts of “White Boy!” reached me. I crossed the busy street and headed back down the short block towards my school, nervously sipping my soda.

After a few hurried steps I noticed a large group of guys, maybe ten or fifteen deep, across the street from me. They were huddled around one boy, like a football offense around a quarterback. All of the sudden the boy in the middle turned towards me. Our eyes met. I saw his mouth moving and then the ten to fifteen other boys synchronously turned their heads towards me. “Oh shit!” I murmured. I tried not to panic as the boys began to hurry across the street in my direction. My heartbeat grew louder, and I started to feel weak as I hurried through the parking lot. The safety of the school was now in my sight. One of the boys, the “quarterback,” caught up to me.

“Hey man, how’s it going?” he said to me, a friendly look on his face. “Why you in such a rush?”

“I’m aight,” I replied. I could hear the footsteps and whisperings of the rest of the crowd coming from behind me. Too scared to look back, I kept my eyes fixed on the boy walking next to me.

“Yo, let me get a sip of your soda,” he said, pointing to the bottle in my hand.

I looked at the bottle and pictured it shattering over my head.

“No.”

“Aw, come on man, why you gotta be like that? All I want is a sip.”

“No. Get your own soda.”

Suddenly the boy’s face transformed, hatred and anger filled his eyes. This was the first time I can recall seeing that glimmer in the eyes of another man, somehow it seemed very familiar. “Get him!” someone behind me yelled. The boy threw his fist at me. I saw it coming as if in slow motion, but did not try to dodge it as it hit me in the mouth. Somebody grabbed me from behind and threw me to the ground. I curled up into a ball, covering my head with my hands as they stomped me with their boots and sneakers. After a few good kicks I could hear someone screaming, “Get the fuck off that boy! I gotta baseball bat you little punks!” The stomping stopped and as I uncovered my head I could see the group of guys running off in various directions.

“Are you aight?” the middle aged woman who scared them off asked me as I headed towards my school in a daze.

“I’m okay, thank you.” I responded. I stumbled back into my school, trying to fight off the tears I knew my classmates would turn into ammunition for teasing.

My split lip was the only visible injury I sustained from this inauguration into the life of a teen in Germantown. The blood that filled my mouth gave me my first real taste of the cruelty and fear that was life in Philly; I would taste it many more times.

The fear of getting robbed, jumped, or worse was an everyday part of my teenage life. It fed the despair that grew in me, a despair it seemed I shared with the rest of the city. Everywhere I looked I saw a world in decay.

I was in for more eye-opening experiences as I entered high school. I had gone to small private schools for my entire life, and now I found myself in an environment more akin to a junior prison than an educational institution. The building that housed the school was converted from an old factory. It was a large gray building; all of the windows were covered with metal gates. It was hard to tell whether these gates were meant to keep students in or others out. Our schoolyard was a large concrete area with two small basketball courts, surrounded by large barb-wired fences. It reminded me of the prison yards you see in movies, complete with rough-house basketball games and the occasional fight. Our “cafeteria” included a hotdog cart and a few vending machines.

The school was located in one of the worst parts of North Philly, in the middle of an area renowned for its crack and angel dust dealers. I never ran into any problems on the way to school in the morning—I guess crack-heads and scumbags sleep in. Getting home from school was another matter.

Between my school and the subway lay about six blocks of empty practice fields, owned by nearby Temple University, and streets you’d be wise not to walk on alone. At the end of each school day police would stand at each corner of the trek, ensuring that most of the students made it as far as the subway without incident. Every day, at around 3 PM, you could witness the flood of students flocking safely towards the subway. If, however, you happened to miss the subway migration, you were on your own; the cops only manned the corners for a half hour. This meant that if you left school late, whether because of extra curricular activities or detention, you had to walk those long blocks unprotected. As the class loudmouth I was constantly given detentions.

One day after detention a friend and I made our way to the subway. We decided to take a shortcut through a playground; a game of street basketball was being played by a bunch of neighborhood guys. We walked through the crowd, jumped through a hole in the playground fence, and crossed a running track. When we neared the opposite side of the track I happened to look back towards the basketball court. Two guys jumped through the hole in the fence and began walking quickly in our direction. “Aw fuck,” said my friend. He didn’t need to say more—we began to run. I looked back; the two guys were running after us. We booked out of the field, down a block, around a corner, and into Temple’s indoor sports facility, where we thought we’d be safe. Once inside, we slowed to a fast walk, and made our way to the exit on the other side of the building. We didn’t get far before I heard the footsteps of our pursuers; they were right behind us.

“What the fuck you runnin’ from?” one of them yelled as we turned to look at them.

“Nothin,” I replied, “we’re late.”

“Don’t give me that shit, you pussy,” he began, as a strange look came over his face. “Wait a minute,” he continued, turning towards my friend. “Ain’t you from 19th Street?”

“Yeah,” replied my friend.

“Yo, I know your cousin,” the stranger said before reminiscing for a minute with my friend about life on the North Side. And then to his friend: “These guys is cool, let’s get outta here.” As they began to walk away from us one of them opened his jacket. “You guys ah lucky,” he laughed as he displayed the large knife under his jacket, “We was gonna shank yo ass.”

I didn’t go to detention again.

During these years of my early adulthood I felt that there was no worse place to be in the world than Philly. I was robbed at knife or gunpoint on more than ten more occasions; I was almost always within one block of where I was living at the time, which added to my general unease about walking the streets. I was jumped a few more times, though I was never seriously injured. There was also a general bleakness to life in the city. Poverty and the crack epidemic combined to create a feeling of resigned despair.

However, I would learn that things could in fact get worse, much worse. In the ninth grade, around the time when I was chased on my way from high school, I got the chance to witness first hand just how bad things could get on a trip to El Salvador.

I went to El Salvador as a representative of an interfaith group that my Synagogue belonged to. The group had “adopted” a relocated village in El Salvador and raised funds to help. Former refugees of El Salvador’s bloody civil war had founded the village a few years prior to our trip. The villagers originally came from many different parts of the country, but they lived together in the same refugee camp in Honduras. I’m not sure why they decided to move back to El Salvador, but when they did they simply packed up the camp, tin roof homes and all, walked back and resettled in an abandoned part of the countryside. The money we were bringing to them was to be used to buy goods that the village could not afford, but desperately needed—two cows.

We assumed, as we planned the trip, that we were running a bit of a risk. After all, we were bringing money to a village located within one of the areas controlled by the FMLN, the guerilla group fighting against the government. By chance, however, we happened to arrive in El Salvador three days after the end of the war was announced. A feeling of euphoric relief filled the air as we made our way from San Salvador to the countryside.

For a while as we wound our way along the mountainous highway, a large volcano dominated the landscape. “That mountain is owned by the President of El Salvador,” our driver told us.

“The whole thing?” I asked.

“And all of the fields around it, too.” the driver answered, referring to the patchwork of coffee and banana fields that surrounded the volcano. Ownership of these and other fields was one of the primary issues that led to the civil war. The rebels were fighting for more equal distribution of the land while the government fought to protect the interests of the rich coffee and banana exporters.

We turned off the highway and up a bumpy dirt road. After a half-hour ride through the jungle, we reached a cleared area. Across the road from the clearing, in a sparsely wooded area, there was a party under way. We pulled over to ask what all the fuss was about and were told that the regional FMLN commander was on his way to the area. A few moments later we heard a noise in the distance. Soon, a blue UN helicopter touched down in the open field. The FMLN leader and some UN men, with their signature blue hats, emerged from the chopper and headed into the fiesta. We lingered for a few minutes, then returned to our van and headed on our way. Before we left, one member of our group was able to arrange for a dinner meeting between the FMLN commander and us that night.

The dinner was a typical Salvadoran meal—beans, tortilla, and salt. The FMLN commander was a typical politician. He spoke about the glorious struggle against the greedy capitalists that were enslaving and starving the country, and evaded all of our questions like a true pro.

After dinner there was a small party to celebrate of the commander’s arrival. As we left the dining area I noticed something different about the village—men were standing around mingling with the women. When we first arrived, earlier that day, men were conspicuously absent from the village, all of whom were, for the most part, either off fighting or dead. Now, with a cease fire at hand, the soldiers had emerged from their mountain jungle hideouts.

I was hanging out with a girl my age from the interfaith group. We got the opportunity to talk with one of the soldiers. He was 13 years old, one year younger and a good six inches shorter than me. His machine gun was taller than he was by a few inches—standing on its butt the rifle came up to my eyes. The three of us talked for a few hours. He told us about his time in the jungles, the friends he had lost, and his reason for joining the FMLN—his friends had all joined and he was afraid he would be kidnapped by the army and forced to fight against his buddies.

We woke up the next morning to find all the soldiers gone, having gone back into the jungle. After a breakfast of beans, tortillas, and salt, we toured the village, which was now left with very few men. The remaining men were all either too old or young to fight, or had been crippled in some way by the war. The village itself was made up mostly of the tin roofed houses that one encounters in third world countries. However, there was one newer section of the village where they were building brick houses, made possible by a brick making machine that had been donated by Americans a year or so prior to our arrival. As we walked around it was hard not to notice the fat bellies on many of the children. “Well,” I said to my father, “at least they’re not starving.”

“Alex,” my father replied “their bellies are big because they’re full of gas. It’s a sign of malnutrition.”

After our stay in the village, our group headed back to San Salvador for a few days. We toured neighborhoods that had been battlegrounds, the walls of the buildings pockmarked with bullet holes. We visited an orphanage for street kids, most of whom were under the age of ten, and many of whom were addicted to sniffing glue. We also took a tour of the convent where the three American nuns who were raped and murdered by four Salvadoran soldiers once lived. We viewed picture albums full of grisly photos of the murder scene. Not only had the nuns been murdered, but their heads had been completely blown apart and their bodies mutilated, so that only piles of bloody pulp remained. I remember looking at one picture and just barely making out a bottom jaw, signifying that the mess around it was once part of a head. Though this scene was made particularly gruesome by the vocation of the victims, I was told that this sort of thing was not an uncommon occurrence. The U.S. funded military of El Salvador was renowned for its cruelty.

When I returned to America, my friends asked me what it was like in El Salvador. “Fuckin crazy,” I understated.

I now knew first hand that things could get much worse than what I was experiencing in Philly. This probably should have made living in Philly seem better. It didn’t. What it did do was open my eyes to just how cruel people are. Where I lived, people were killing each other, or themselves, over drugs, over money, and sometimes for fun. In El Salvador I saw a whole nation tortured to ensure that coffee and bananas would still be grown on her fertile soil. I was fourteen years old and was awakening from my dreamlike childhood to find that there was cruelty and inhumanity everywhere I looked; even the banana in my lunch bag and the coffee my parents drank in the morning was tainted with the blood of others.

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Alex Urevick is a student at the New School's Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science.  He can be contacted at [email protected].

© 2003 Me Three