With Lionel coming in our front door one evening, left ear and head bleeding profusely, shirt collar and right sleeve ripped, scratches on his face and hands.
As soon as he was safely inside, he slid down the wall in the front hall in relief, and we gathered around him as soon as we saw what had happened.
“Jesus, Lionel, what the hell!”
“Whoa.”
“Oh man.”
Roger hustled to the kitchen and brought back a couple of wet towels to start cleaning up the wounds, to get the blood off and see what we were dealing with.
Lionel said nothing in response. Smiled up at us dumbly, vacantly, probably a little in shock. Then shook his head in annoyance, embarrassed in that Midwestern way to be drawing so much attention.
The cops got there pretty quickly.
Lionel did his best to describe the kids. “Three of them, officer. About fifteen years old.” He described their sweatshirts. Gray. Baggy jeans. He didn’t remember much more. “A lot was happening, officer.”
I noticed that Lionel didn’t mention their race. But for cops in that neighborhood at that time, you didn’t have to. In that Edgewood section of New Haven, 1976, you’d only mention if they weren’t black.
“How’d you get the head wound?”
“The one karate-kicked me.”
Wow.
“Kung fu kind of thing. I was not expecting it,” said Lionel, formally.
Jesus. Trying it out on you. Like kicking an inflatable clown.
The problem was, we learned, the cops couldn’t do much. “Look, if you’re right and they’re fifteen, then it’s juvenile. They’re not yet sixteen. Thing is, they didn’t pull any weapons, they know what they’re doin’, these kids, they’ve already learned what they can and can’t get away with as far as the law. That’s why he karate-kicked you. That’s why they punched you. ’Cause that’s not gonna land ’em in anything too serious.”
Officer Perez, I remember. Stocky, bushy mustache, alert black eyes. A messenger, a repository of street knowledge. Translating it all for us.
“See, their parents don’t trust us, think we’re the enemy, so they instruct the kids to lie to us, and they defend the kids, accuse us of exaggerating the events and even fabricating the charges, and as juveniles they and their parents retain a lot of rights, so a lot of times we can’t even get to square one with kids like this. We’ll go look for them, Mr. Patton, and we might even find them, and might even get them into the juvie system, with your testimony and if you’re willing to skip a lot of class time, but I do want to point out to you that when they learn it was you who brought charges, and they go back home as they eventually will, they’re only gonna have it in for you more.”
I find this line of logic infuriating, of course, but Lionel has a completely different reaction, which trumps my fury.
Lionel adjusts his glasses. “Well, look, they’re not bad kids, really.”
What?! Kids who just karate-kicked you in the head? Punched you in the face?
Perez stops writing for a moment. Clearly distracted by what he’s just heard.
“I mean, look what they’re faced with. The deck is stacked against them,” says Lionel, who looks at the cops, at us, and then reveals the rest: “I asked them why they were doing this.”
The second cop — Landry, tall, freckled — is genuinely confused. He blinks twice, trying to understand. “Wait. You asked them... why?”
“Yes. Why are you doing this, fellas? I wanted them to explain themselves.”
Fellas. I could hear him saying it. Good God.
“I mean, you know, beyond the sneakers and the jacket,” says Lionel. “In a larger sense. Why?”
Wanting three fifteen-year-old thugs, apparently, to stop and examine their own motives. To look into their own souls.
Perez taps his pencil against his chin a couple of times. “During the attack, you asked them why?”
I see the cops exchange glances with one another, and then Perez glances at me.
“My questions only seemed to make them angrier,” Lionel acknowledges.
Making philosophical inquiries of fifteen-year thugs on Edgewood Avenue.
“Why did they do this, officer? Why do they behave this way?”
Now turning the philosophical inquiry to the New Haven Police Department.
Perez looks at me. Asks wordlessly: What planet is your roommate from?
Nebraska, officer. The planet of Nebraska.
“I’d like to help those kids somehow, officer.” Blood still running down the side of his head. It hasn’t fully coagulated yet. “I’d like to change things for them somehow. Clearly they need help.”
Perez has had as much as he can handle. He takes a breath. “I think the most helpful thing you can do, Lionel, is stay out of their way. Be alert. Avoid them. I think that might be the most helpful behavior right now.”
When I close the door behind the cops as they leave, Perez turns back toward me and says, somewhere between annoyance and alarm, “Tell your pal to cut out the humanitarian relief effort.” He peers at me warningly. “Gonna get his ass killed.”
Lionel Patton. With black-framed glasses off, pretty good looking. Naturally modest in a way that hard-nosed Eastern Yale women liked. Khakis, white shirt. High school class president and valedictorian and captain of his high school tennis team. (I kid you not.) Skating lessons. Flying lessons. Chess lessons. Golf lessons. Lessons in everything. The well-bred, high-achieving Midwesterner — very much a Yale tradition. (A tradition that helps keeps Yale’s coffers full and flowing, generation after generation.)
Here at Yale, a music major. (Because he could. Because he was going back to inherit and oversee four thousand highly profitable acres of soybeans and corn, so he could major in any damn thing he wanted.)
And by the peculiar chain of circumstance that produced Lionel Patton, by the coincidences and alignments of his particular existence, he had never known anything but brightness, cheerfulness, good fortune. Not a moment of doubt or deprivation. By the concatenations of luck and privilege and advantage and happenstance, he had never confronted the forces of darkness. He went whistling down Edgewood Avenue. Literally. (I knew it because I had heard him — whistling the same French horn part in Mahler or Mozart that I heard him practicing at the house.) And when the forces of darkness swarmed around him, it was unexpected, inexplicable, and he was ill-prepared. It was an ambush, in a way, that went beyond the literal. Beyond Edgewood.
Once the cops were gone and Lionel was cleaned up, and he sat down with us (the bong on the wooden shipping-crate-cum-coffee-table between us — Lionel did not typically partake, though the rest of us felt that his encounter certainly merited a fresh bowlful), I felt the occasion called for a little bit of philosophical discussion from safely within our walls.
“Lionel, you can’t discuss motives and ethics and right and wrong with fifteen-year-old black kids on Edgewood Avenue.”
“I just want to understand why they would do this...”
“Why? ’Cause they wanted your sneakers,” said Roger.
“Why? ’Cause this is what they know. ’Cause this is what they see. ’Cause this is their world,” Larry said.
“Then we have to try to change it. We have to try to make things better for them.” He looked at us with bright resolution. “I’m gonna reach out to them.”
Oh Jesus.
“No you’re not.”
“Listen,” I said. “Marcus, Keneisha’s little boy? Six years old. He tried to hold me up with a sharpened pencil.”