At 10 years old, his mother kicked his dad out of the house for cheating. Alone with his brothers and sisters, Vance’s mom raised their family while attending school. She met a new boyfriend who was a foot taller than her and arms twice as wide, a boyfriend who would smoke cigarettes in their living room and then brazenly graduate to smoking weed, in the face of everything the children’s father once stood for. Vance hated this man and he let his mother know it. One day Vance stumbled upon the boyfriend and his friends rolling around the bedroom with needles sticking out of their arms, then chasing after and molesting his sisters. Vance’s mom told her boyfriend to leave and he answered with his fists. He beat her. Senseless. Of course the children lunged at the boyfriend as cubs to an elephant, but he wiped the floor with them. None of ‘em, including Vance’s mother, would show their bruises at school that week.
This was the first time he had laid a finger on her but it wasn’t nearly the last. Every time the boyfriend would smack her in the kitchen or the hallway or the living room, Vance would hurdle the countertops and try with all his heart to get in at least one clean punch before landing back in unconsciousness. And so it went, until one afternoon Vance came home to a police scene where he discovered the boyfriend had beaten his mother to a bloody pulp, dragged her into the street, picked her up over his head and tossed her like a ragdoll into oncoming traffic. When Vance got to the hospital, his mother was unrecognizable due to her head’s swelling to a cartoonish degree, and all the tubes, and invasive apparatus. Vance returned home, took a baseball bat, and also took the boyfriend’s kneecaps with him.
When she woke from her coma, she swore he’d never return. That she was over him, but after years of the same story, the kids knew better. They also knew he was visiting her in the hospital (after all, he was in the same hospital with noodles for legs). And so when his mother came home, no one was too surprised to see the boyfriend sitting in the corner with casts on. The boyfriend initiated, “Although Vance is only 12, I’m scared of him, so either he goes or I go.” His mom looked at Vance and asked – no, requested – that he leave. He couldn’t believe it. He left.
He slept on the street for a week. The next week, the roof of a nearby McDonald’s. Vance was scared, he was only 12 years old. He was a 6th grader. He had lost his father, his mother had abandoned him, she had chosen this stranger over her own flesh and blood and it ripped him apart. After a couple weeks, his grandparents came and found him, and attempted to raise him – but as all grandmothers and grandfathers do — their hearts full but their will sapped and defeated from years of testing — they gave Vance a long leash that was just enough to reach the neighborhood gang. Vance had finally found a family, or a perverted semblance of one. He would die for his brothers, and so he was shot twice at age 13. A couple years later, 6 more bulletholes drilled mercilessly into his teenage frame, as he lay there with blood spilling into the jaws of an unforgiving alley. He knew he could walk, so he did, into a market and the arms of a Latino couple, the wife screaming, “Mijo! Mijo!!” And when he woke up in the hospital room days later, the same two by his bedside.
Vance probably knew his life had to change, but he probably didn’t realize how much his life would the morning he was driving his girlfriend to the movie theater. Parked on the side of the road, they witnessed two of his friends beat and mug a guy. Then, as Vance’s friends walked away from the writhing body, one turned around as if he had forgotten something – as if he had dropped his hat or his wallet at the scene - pulled a gun and popped a couple rounds into the kid’s head. Stole his life. The gun returned comfortably and effortlessly into his waistline, disappeared by the shirt that cascaded over it like a curtain call. The two glided nonchalantly down the block. Vance’s girlfriend’s screams weren’t nearly as loud as his utter shock and bewilderment at what his friends had done.
I think Vance had played this part over in his head a million times because at that moment, 11am, noon, whatever it was – in broad daylight – the universe had unfolded a crossroads in his life. He chose to catch up to his friends, give them a ride back home, and demand the answers to questions that had no answers. His girlfriend would later make demands of her own, that they go to the police, but Vance was sworn to the code of the streets (the only family he had) and wouldn’t snitch. She told the cops anyways and they lassoed Vance in. He wouldn’t snitch. They threatened him with jailtime. He wouldn’t snitch. He was only 16, ain’t no way they were gonna get him.
Vance was tried as an adult and convicted as an accessory to murder. 25 years to life.
The first day in, the inmates gave him a choice. Either go and stab that guy or you’ll suffer the same. He did as he was told and secured a permanent gig in solitary confinement – for 11 years. His mother visited. She came looking for him, but why, he asked, hadn’t she looked for him all those years before? Before the streets had devoured him and robbed him of a future, before his body was pincushioned by bullets, before he woke up every day here in isolation and despair? But she had, she cried, she had chased after him. It was a misunderstanding, she never wanted him to leave, and she had slept on the streets those first two weeks also, not returning home, not relenting in her search for her son.
Vance broke. He never knew she had looked for him, and that she had never really stopped.
And so they repaired their relationship over the years, and Vance’s mother swore to get him out of the hole. She met Father Greg Boyle of the nation’s largest gang intervention program, Homeboy Industries, after seeing him speak and explained her son’s dire situation, and Father Boyle said he would help. But Vance was skeptical, because his parole hearings were like begging forgiveness of a wall. He was stuck in there forever, these men would tell him, their cold sentence lacerating him like razor wire. Nevertheless, Vance and his mother continued to write letters, correspond with the Governor, Vance and Father Boyle kept in touch….
Then he got the call. He had 72 hours to leave the premises. Vance cried again, he gave away his belongings, he sat in his cell scared to death now. Frightened of the world beyond - the only world he had known for the past 29 years of his life. Three decades from the same vantage point – what would life be like from another?
The morning of his release, he eagerly called his family, but their reception wasn’t as warm as expected. They were crying. Vance was confused, were the tears of joy for his return? “Vance,” his sister sobbed into the phone, “Vance, mom died last night.” This once-hardened gang member, a ruthless and dangerous python of the ghetto, was now no stranger to crying. Vance, the accessory to murder, wept once more.
He had dreamt of beaches and skies but for a time, Vance wouldn’t leave his mother’s coffin at the mortuary. He would stand there, he would speak to her, he would write letters to her. He then went on to work with his mother’s friend, Father Greg Boyle, at Homeboy Industries, where the patrons and fellow staff members would marvel at his oratory skills. Vance had become quite a speaker from years of watching awards show acceptance speeches, and now he continues to lead and instruct others with similar stories to share them. He got his own apartment; it wasn’t furnished with much beyond a lamp, a couple milkcrates and a minuscule television set, but he couldn’t stop locking and unlocking his own door with his own set of keys. He’d walk around the block and then do it again, and again.
When asked what’s next for his life, Vance says, “3 things. I want to graduate college. I want to be a homeowner. And I want to get married.” He adds with a wry smile, “And it doesn’t necessarily have to be in that order.”
