On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City Read Online Free PDF Page B

threatened to send him away to a juvenile detention center. Ronny
     began to carry a gun at thirteen, and at fifteen he shot himself in the leg while
     boarding a bus.
    Ronny was also an excellent dancer and, in his words, “a lil’ pimp.” The first time
     we had a real conversation, we were driving to various jails in the city to find where
     Mike was being held, because the police had arrested him earlier that morning. We
     were sitting in my car, and Ronny asked how old I was. I told him my age at the time:
     twenty-one. After a moment he grinned and said, “I’ve been with women older than you.”
    Soon after we met, Ronny made a name for himself in the neighborhood by getting into
     a cop chase from West to South Philly, first by car and then on foot through a gas
     station, a Laundromat, and an arcade. He spent most of the next six years in juvenile
     detention centers in upstate Pennsylvania and Maryland.
    ALEX
    Alex had grown up a few blocks off 6th Street, but he hung out there all through his
     childhood and became good friends with Chuck and Mike in high school. He lived with
     his mother, but when he turned fifteen his father had reconnected with the family,
     which improved their circumstances substantially. His dad owned two small businesses
     in the neighborhood, and Alex got to hang out there after school.
    By twenty-three, Alex was a portly man with a pained and tired look about him, as
     if the weight of caring for his two toddlers and their mothers were too much for him
     to bear. He had sold crack and pills on the block in his teens and spent a year upstate
     on a drug conviction. By his early twenties, he was working hard to live in compliance
     with his two-year parole sentence. He worked part time at his dad’s heating and air-conditioning
     repair shop, moving to full-time hours by the end of 2004. Sometimes Mike and Chuck
     grudgingly noted that if their dads owned a small business they’d have jobs, too,
     but mostly they seemed happy for Alex and hoped he could keep his good thing going.
    ANTHONY
    Anthony was twenty-two years old when we met, and living in an abandoned Jeep off
     6th Street. The year before, his aunt kicked him out of her house because she caught
     him stealing from her purse, though Anthony denied this. He occasionally found day-labor
     work in light construction, sometimes getting on a crew for a few weeks at a time.
     In between, Mike sometimes gave him a little crack to sell, though he was never any
     good at selling it because he put up no defense when other guys robbed him. “Living
     out here [in a car], I can’t just go shoot niggas up, you feel me?” Anthony explained.
     “Everybody knows where I’m at. I ain’t got no walls around me.”
    When Anthony and I met, he had a bench warrant out for his arrest, because he hadn’t
     paid $173 in court fees for a case that ended that year. He had spent nine of the
     previous twelve months in jail awaiting the decision. Soon after, two neighbors who
     knew that Anthony had this bench warrant called the police and got him arrested, because
     they said he had stolen three pairs of shoes from them.
    “Where would I even put three pairs of sneaks?” Anthony asked, pointing to the backseat
     of the Jeep.
    “He probably sold them,” Mike said, “for food and weed.”
    When Anthony got sick with what looked to be pneumonia, Chuck started letting him
     sleep on a blanket on the floor next to his bed in the basement, sneaking him in through
     the back door after his grandfather was asleep. Chuck’s mother, Miss Linda, let Anthony
     stay even after Chuck got locked up later that year, though Anthony’s tax, she said,
     would have to go up. In angry moments Anthony complained bitterly that he would never
     be able to leave Miss Linda’s for his own place, because she continually stole the
     money he was trying to save from his pockets when he was asleep.
    .   .   .
    The legal issues that Chuck and his friends on 6th