Fortunate Son

At the trial Thomas’s court-appointed lawyer, a kind old man named Sam Neiman, said that Thomas was a virtual orphan, that he’d lived by his wits since a very early age. He said that the system had failed the boy. He was illiterate and wild. There was no proof that he was firing at the police. He dealt drugs because it was the only way to survive.

The prosecutor was a young white woman, Flora Pride.

“The fact remains, Your Honor,” Flora said, “that Mr.

Beerman was a willing member of the Tremont gang. He has been implicated in at least one homicide, a Raymond Smith, 1 7 0

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also known as RayRay, and he dealt drugs every day for the past three years. He resisted arrest with violence and was wounded by policemen afraid for their lives.”

The judge sentenced Thomas to nine years with the juvenile authority in the hope that they might rehabilitate him.

“I’m sorry, son,” Mr. Neiman told him after the trial. “If you were tried as an adult, the sentence would have probably been less. But as it is, the system was against you.”

Thomas thanked his lawyer for being nice to him, and then he was taken to a prison camp for boys on the outskirts of the eastern desert.

Many things happened to him there. Between the guards and the boy gang leaders and the cramped life of lockdown, Thomas suffered. He was slashed, gang-raped repeatedly, beaten, and then punished by the guards for being a trouble-maker. But he learned to ignore his wounds and humiliations when he wasn’t actually faced with them. At night he would sink to his knees on the stone floor and feel his mother in the earth.

He was in the worst child prison because he had been convicted of a violent crime. No one thought he belonged there, not even his torturers. After a year or so the punishments and molestations ended. He remembered how to read in the classroom he was brought to three times a week. He spent as many hours as he could in the library and fell under the protection of a bigger boy named Bo.

Bo wasn’t tall, but he was the strongest boy on their floor, maybe in the whole facility. He liked to have Thomas around him on the yard, called him his “bad luck charm.” And when other boys would ask him why he’d want something like that, he’d say, “Without bad luck I wouldn’t have no luck at all.”

At the age of fourteen, around the same time that Eric 1 7 1

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faced off with Drew, Thomas was transferred to a minimum-security home in Los Angeles. Three days after he got there, he wandered away.

He was outside on the gray wood porch, and there was no one else there. He hadn’t had a walk down a city street in so long that he said to himself that he’d just go around the block.

But when he got to the end of the block, he took one left and kept on going.

For three days he traveled across the city on foot. At night he slept in alleys behind pizza restaurants that provided his dinner in their overflowing Dumpsters. He couldn’t eat the cheese, but the crusts kept him from starving.

He asked directions in the daytime and finally made it to Monique’s apartment. An old man lived there now so Thomas went to Bruno and Monique’s old house.

Their parents told Thomas that Monique was living in Compton. After some hesitation they gave him her address.

When he made it to her street it was already evening.

She lived in a white house that had a lawn behind a wire fence and toys on the porch.

The door was open, but the screen was closed. When Thomas rang the bell, a chubby little girl came to answer.

“Hi,” she said.

“Lily?”

“Uh-huh. Who are you?”

“I’m Thomas.”

“Do you know Harold?”

“I know your mother,” the escapee said.

“Mom!” Lily shouted, and then ran into the house.

Monique came lazily to the door wearing a big blue robe.

When she saw Thomas her eyes opened wide.

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“Lucky?”

“Hi, Monique.”

“Lucky, what you doin’ here?”

“I wanted to see you and Lily. She’s big.”

While Monique and Thomas talked, a shadow came up behind her.

“Who’s this?” a man’s voice said in a tone neither friendly nor unfriendly.

“This is Lucky, Harold,” Monique said.

“What does he want?”

“He’s my friend.”

“He looks like a bum.”

Harold was a tall man with bronze skin, a receding hairline (even though he didn’t look much over thirty), and a large, powerful-looking belly. He had no eyebrows at all, small eyes, and large hands.

“He’s my friend,” Monique said with authority.

“What does he want?”

“Come on in, Lucky, and go have a seat in the living room.”

“Oh, no,” Harold said. “I ain’t havin’ this ratty-lookin’ niggah sittin’ on my new furniture.”

Thomas held back, but Monique said, “Come on in, Lucky. Harold ain’t gonna touch you if he know what’s good for him.”

“Monique,” Harold said. That one word carried a whole chapter of information.