Boys Enter the House Read online

  Somehow, among the many exits and windows, Sam eventually found a way out. He made a beeline for his home, where he flew through the door several minutes later, dusty and dirty, his pants ripped along the inside seam. He’d fought his way through it and was now laughing excitedly over the incident.

  But he quickly got to business, asking his younger brother for a toy gun.

  “What do you want that for?” Randy Stapleton asked his brother.

  “Well, when they shoot us and we run,” Sam replied.

  “It’s a toy gun,” Randy reminded him.

  “They won’t know that,” Sam said.

  With that, he went out the door.

  The Gents scattered, and Sam won the day. He won most of his fights over the years, except one his brothers both remember. A boy at Stockton School had lured Sam to the bathroom, sucker-punching him from behind as he walked in. Later, black and blue, Sam came home fuming over his loss, promising it would never happen again. “And it never did,” according to his brother.

  “‘You need to get those kids out of the city,’” Billy Kindred’s sister, Syble, remembered aunts and uncles telling their mother, Lola.

  For some of the kids in the family, the fresh air and the open spaces in the country were enticing. They had often spent time down in Guilford, Indiana, where their uncle Frank owned a farm and where, for a time, he’d trained Billy as a horse jockey. Even for a city kid, Uncle Frank admitted, Billy “was like a pro.”

  But Billy was primarily a city dweller, having adapted from an early age. He was in eighth grade at Stockton by then and he had his friends to keep him busy. His younger brother, Michael, however, begged their mother to let him stay the summer down in Indiana on Uncle Frank’s farm. He reminded her that long-distance calls wouldn’t increase their phone bills, since they no longer needed an operator to connect them.

  Like all his siblings, Billy maintained a close and protective bond with Michael. They’d torn up the neighborhood with BB guns together. When the kids got a 10-speed, Billy would put his siblings up on his shoulders and take them for rides.

  Even though Michael was only ten and sometimes got bad headaches, Lola agreed to let him go. In Indiana Uncle Frank presented Michael with a pony named Baby. The boy and the horse developed a fast bond during rides around the property.

  On a June day in 1973, Uncle Frank took his bulldozer out on the property for work. Over the sound of the engine, he’d hardly noticed another relative running through the fields and waving his arms. Michael had ridden Baby into the pond on the property. By the time Frank was able to grab ahold of the boy and pull him out, it was too late.

  Frank called north to tell Lola the news.

  For days after the drowning, Michael’s pony Baby was inconsolable. They would hear him wailing at the edge of the pond. The pony was so distraught that it became wild and too dangerous to retame. Uncle Frank had no choice but to put the pony down.

  Syble Kindred has often suspected her little brother, prone to seizures, had had an episode and fallen into the water. In any event, the death became a turning point for the family.

  Ten-year-old Michael was buried in a grave in Indiana, not far from where the state met both Ohio and Kentucky, where Lola had already buried another son, a stillborn. Heartbroken again, Lola decided it was time to be near the children she had lost and laid into the earth. “My poor old mom,” Syble lamented. “That’s when she moved to Harrison, Ohio.” The town was not far from Michael’s grave in Indiana. While some of the siblings, now married, remained in Chicago, Billy and Syble came with her.

  Around sixteen by then, Billy’s time there did not last long. He missed life in Chicago. He missed friends like Danny Jockell, back on Kenmore Avenue. He missed urban mischief, like when he and Danny would slip into nearby Graceland Cemetery, where city sounds melted away among the trees and graves, almost like you were back in the country. They’d swim in the cemetery pond until police came to chase them off with pepper guns.

  Only a teenager, Billy went back to Chicago to live with friends and, for the most part, try and take care of himself. He dropped out of school and started working odd jobs like painting and repairing buildings. The need to prove himself, not only to his family but the other young men of the neighborhood, continued to shape and drive Billy. But he was still only a teenager, jolted by hormones and pent-up anger. With his friends, they found new ways each day to vent their boyish frustrations.

  Each morning in Uptown began similarly. As Billy’s best friend, Danny Jockell, retold it, you showered, got dressed, and went out into the street. “You’d see a couple of your buddies sitting on a stoop across the street down a few houses,” Danny said. “You’d walk over there, and you’d sit down.”

  For a good part of the morning, you and your buddies spent time exchanging news about the neighborhood.

  “’Cause there was always something,” Danny explained. “And then you’d sit there, and you’d pool your change together and see if you had enough to get a few beers, and we’d be sitting there, scraping up our moneys, and here would come Billy down the street. ‘Hey, asshole! Get over here, we’re trying to scrape up some money, how much you got?’”

  Once there was enough, you waited for a friend or acquaintance to drive by and give you a ride to the liquor store. From there, with beers finally purchased, you would go to the lakefront or Montrose Harbor to swim. “We’d sit there and drink beers and get drunk and either look for a fight or something, because nothing good happened after a few beers,” Danny went on. “That was our purpose, I guess, to leave the ordinary doldrums and get in a crazy state of mind.”

  Later in the evening, the beers mixed with marijuana or sometimes even cocaine, though it was hard to come by when you were already strapped for beer money. “And then you’d hear an argument, people yelling, and you’d take off running to see what’s going on.” Whether it was another group of boys your age or another race, tensions rose fast when substances had passed around.

  “And then you’d start picking up rocks,” Danny said, “and after you start throwing rocks, they peel rubber and try and take off. ‘We’ll be back, we’ll be back!’ And next thing you know, there’s about six or eight of us standing around waiting for them to come back and somebody says, ‘Hey, how much money you got? Let’s get some more beer.’”

  For a young man in Uptown, this was your day. In between sips of beer or tokes of grass, you waited for the next fight, no matter how long it took to show up. You waited for some insult to fly, some temper to spark, some reason to use your fists just so you could find some order in the jumbled emotions and hormones firing around in your brain. And because your friends were your role models, your connection to the world, and because they were just as angry and confused as you, you found yourself caught in a never-ending cycle of violence. “You didn’t think about bettering your life,” Danny said. “You’re just wondering what’s going to happen today. Whatever life threw at you that day was what you were going to pursue.”

  Danny remembered a guy in the neighborhood, Joe Tregenza, a bit older than he and Billy, but someone who treated the younger guys like them with kindness, like equals. They looked up to him and enjoyed spending time with him. Danny went as far as describing Joe as one of his “favorite people.”

  But underneath all that, Danny recognized Joe was lonely, and “pondering his future.” Neither Uptown nor Chicago itself had made good on its promise of prosperity or opportunity for Joe. Like the other boys, Joe was searching for something to let him know his worth.

  Billy himself would feel that need, and Danny too, as they moved through adolescence.

  Joe Tregenza, however, never made sense of his life in Uptown. One day in 1976, at the age of twenty-four, he put a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger.

  Randy Reffett ran along the razor’s edge of Uptown like the others.

  In 1974 he was fourteen and walking through the alley behind the Magnolia Super Market when two guys jumped o
ut and fell upon him, stabbing Randy in the heart, lungs, and liver, according to his brothers. While no one knows for sure exactly who attacked him, and some are hesitant to say, Chris Reffett believes it was part of an initiation for the Latin Kings.

  At the hospital, Randy barely survived, held together by 160 stitches in his chest. X-rays that would later prove vital to his family were taken of his upper body. But within a few weeks, Randy was up and running again, roaming around Uptown without any fear or worry, though perhaps a bit more cautious in his routes and surroundings.

  And while Randy fought—and fought often—he also left room in life for other things. At Stockton School near his home, Randy was an admirable student. In 1973, as a seventh grader, he had perfect attendance, even taking part in extracurricular activities like softball and Boy Scouts.

  Clyde thought of his brother as a bit of a neat freak. His hygiene was immaculate for a neighborhood where kids their age often went dirty from play or neglect. Like his contemporary, Billy Kindred, his clothes were always perfectly creased, every hair on his head combed into a wavy pattern, drooping just above his brow.

  He spent time with his brothers too. Once, he took them both to get amateur tattoos from a neighborhood kid in India ink. Randy, Clyde, and Chris (barely even nine years old) all sat as the ink-point etched their initials onto their arms. Chris’s tattoo said, “C,R,L,7” the last part standing for “Lucky 7.” Before they got home, Randy instructed his brothers to insist they’d done the tattoos themselves so as not to give up their friend.

  When they got home, their father quickly found out and went into an uproar. As Randy had instructed, the boys told their father they’d done the tattoos themselves. But Charlie, who had his own tattoos on his arms from his time in the Air Force, saw past that, noticing Chris, who was right-handed, had somehow magically tattooed his right arm.

  Eventually, the boys confessed, and Charlie went out into the neighborhood to rough up the amateur tattoo artist.

  Perhaps because of difficulties at home, but also difficulties on the streets, Randy took to working on his body. He, Sam, and another friend, Billy Carroll, would often work out together at the YMCA, lifting weights or boxing with the other teens.

  The boys had started growing into strong and handsome young men, catching the eyes of neighborhood girls. In Uptown, passing cars often slowed down or circled the block for a second look at young men standing out together.

  Danny Jockell remembered cars cruising up and down Kenmore, driven by older men looking for young men. Another resident, Gene Anderson, spoke about cars passing the public swimming pools, where young boys would often break away and meet up, out of sight, with the men in those cars a few blocks away. Everyone who lived in Uptown had some story about these interactions, whether they knew about it from their own experiences or heard it through the neighborhood grapevine.

  Chris Reffett remembered a man asking him to get in his car and help him get groceries. The story didn’t sound right to Chris, who ran off. He told another story of a neighborhood boy, held captive by an older man for several years before escaping at the age of sixteen. Episodes like this were so common in the neighborhood they barely made the news.

  James Stapleton watched as a boyhood friend flashed money one day in an Uptown snack shop. Typically, he and his friends never had enough for more than an item or two—maybe a cheeseburger, pop, or candy bar. On this day, James’s friend, who lived in the same building as the Stapletons, purchased multiple items with a fistful of bills.

  They questioned their friend’s sudden windfall.

  “All I gotta do is go into a guy’s apartment downstairs,” the friend said. He explained that the man, who lived in the same building with them, had asked him to come inside and go into the bedroom, where the man had the boy lie on the bed, wearing no clothes.

  What happened next was never fully elaborated, but the boy was paid. Although the boy saw nothing wrong in it as he happily ate his purchases, James knew something was inappropriate about the episode.

  When he went home, James told his parents about it. Bessie, never one to stand by quietly, promptly found the building manager, who confronted the man and issued an ultimatum: move out by evening or she would notify the police.

  The man gathered his things, moved out, and with his own two children, vanished from the building and from Uptown. James believes he saw the man sometime later near Clark and Diversey, by then a notorious location where young boys and older men often met up, haggled over prices, and drove off together along the winding streets of Chicago, vanishing as so many people in those days seemed to do.

  * For decades, residents of Edgewater looked to distance themselves from Uptown as much as they could, though the two neighborhoods were often recognized as one until 1980, when the city ratified it as community area 77.

  3

  CLASS OF 1973

  SOONER OR LATER, UPTOWN caught up with you.

  There was a straight and narrow line through the neighborhood, but it was wrought with obstacles, temptations, and other people waiting to pull or push you off that path. The last day that path seemed clear for some of them was June 13, 1973.

  Inside the auditorium of Stockton Upper Grade Center in Uptown, families gathered to watch their sons and daughters graduate from the eighth grade. The administration made speeches and handed out diplomas. Some students performed songs like “My Favorite Things,” or “We’ve Only Just Begun,” or the not-so-family-friendly “Touch Me in the Morning” by Diana Ross. Afterward, families stood out in the bright summer sunlight to greet one another or take proud photographs with their graduates.

  Dale Landingin was there that day, crossing the stage to receive his diploma. With plaid-striped pants and long black hair touching the tops of his shoulders, Dale signed yearbooks and posed for pictures with teachers and friends in their best outfits. In one picture, Dale stands with his arm around a teacher, both smiling. Another shows him standing alone on the sidewalk, growing tall in his plaid bell-bottoms. And one more yet of Dale, a month shy of his fourteenth birthday, tilting his head to lock lips with a young girl in the summer light as other students linger on the sidewalk around them.

  “He was the cutest boy in the school,” remembered Cindy Carrera, the girl in the photograph. She doesn’t recall when she first met or even saw the dark-haired boy. Maybe in class or maybe in the hallways, floating through a sea of other preteen faces at Stockton during seventh grade in 1972. Most likely, they had class together or met through mutual friends. His real name was Frank, but everyone called him Dale.

  When Cindy met Dale, his hair was shorter, though it would soon grow out into his signature wavy mane. While Dale was slight, or “compact,” he was also becoming handsome. His looks reflected his mixed heritage: Filipino from his father’s side and white Southern roots from his mother.

  Cindy and Dale spent whatever part of their days they could together. Separated during class, they typically met after school, wandering north to Gooseberry Park, or Goldblatt’s Department Store, or anywhere the city streets took them. Cindy lived with her grandparents and was generally not allowed to invite friends over. Instead, Dale had her over for dinner at his family’s apartment on Lawrence Avenue near the lakefront in Uptown.

  Cindy found a seemingly ordinary family living in a modest apartment. Dale’s mother was quiet yet beloved by her son, whose devotion Cindy noted even for someone on the cusp of his teenage years. His father was louder, overseeing Dale and his four sisters with firm attentiveness.

  Although she was nervous, the girls in the family, including Dale’s mother, welcomed Cindy to the home and slyly took note of Dale’s affection for her. His family had come most recently from Brooklyn; Cindy herself had moved to Chicago from Portland, Oregon, but had been born in New Mexico. And now she and Dale had found each other in Uptown.

  She knew only bits and pieces of Dale’s story, but it’d started in South Carolina, where his father had met his mother, Dorothy, and
where his two oldest sisters had been born. Although they’d left Dale’s oldest sister with Dorothy’s mother in South Carolina, the family moved on to Delaware, where he was born, named Francisco Jr., or Frank. His father nicknamed him Del, after his birth state. It later evolved to Dale.

  From Delaware, Dale and his family had made their way to Brooklyn, where he began to develop a fun, puckish personality fighting to escape the confines of their two-bedroom apartment on Hopkinson Avenue, where his parents preferred to keep the kids safe from the dangers of urban life outside.

  In those early childhood days in Brooklyn, whenever they were allowed out, Dale spent a good deal of time with his second-oldest sister, Denise. Although she had girlfriends and an older sister to play with, Denise preferred to join her brother on adventures through the neighborhood.

  “We threw rocks at each other,” Denise remarked. Pretend wars spread through the empty lot or up to the rooftops and back down the rickety fire escapes.

  Denise was more than just his playmate; she was his confidant and protector. In his earliest days Dale often asked Denise—or Niecy, as he called her—questions about girls in his classroom. When the music of James Brown became big, Dale would often try to mimic Brown’s distinct dance style at recess or in the hallways.

  “In the schoolyard one day in Brooklyn, they made fun of him,” said Denise, who remembered Dale coming over to her in tears. “I had to go beat the guys up.”

  Much like Uptown, Brooklyn stewed in its own cauldron of homegrown discord, amplified by poverty and ethnic tensions.

  “I would open the paper up every Sunday,” Denise recalled, “and I would look through the crime section murders that happened.”

  And each day, she had many to read about. After 1963 crime rates rose steadily in New York City, with Manhattan and Brooklyn trading the title of “deadliest borough.” Rapes and “youth crime” rose alongside murders well into the 1970s. Multiple branches of New York’s mafia lived and died on the streets of Brooklyn.