Dead End Kids: Gang Girls and the Boys They Know

6. Misery

6 Misery By the time social life stabilized after the bust, the humid summer of 1995 had been replaced by the crisp air of the 1995-96 football season. Kansas City loves Chiefs football, and the town was alive and bubbling with the excitement. On Fremont, leafy trees towered over small, two-story, wood frame houses and endowed the street with a feeling of calmness and serenity. It was a facade. Over the early fall of 1995, the owner of the QT on Truman, the place where Wendy had harangued a young girl walking across the street, purchased and tidied the abandoned shack two houses downhill from Wendy's. It was the house the Fremont boys had used as an arsenal. Teresa and two of her three children moved into the shanty in December 1995 and stayed there through July 1996. Teresa's house replaced Wendy's as Fremont's main chill spot, although her house didn't have the intense drug and social action Wendy's had had. Cara and Wendy drifted off after the bust, but most of Fremont's hardcore stayed on Fremont and hung out at Teresa's. House of Pain, Cain, Lucky, Wayne, Taco, Steele Bill, Afro, Poodle Bitch, Netta (one of Teresa's younger sisters), Chica Bitch, Christina, Rosa, and others came and went with more freedom than they had had at Wendy's with Jackie controlling the front door. At Teresa's there were no responsible adults to be found anywhere. Cara's temporary residence at Wendy's had been lost with the bust, and she moved back into Cathy's duplex on Gladstone. She stayed there until January 1996, when she rented an apartment at 5403 Smart, in Northeast Gangsta territory, just a few blocks north of The Ave. When Cara wanted to join me, I'd pick her up and we'd drive to Fremont. Cara and I walked up the dozen broken-concrete steps leading to Teresa's front door. As we walked she turned her head slightly to the left, gazing uphill, the direction from which Northeast, La Familia, and Southside 86 Misery 87 came to harass Fremont. Cara's head twist and slight paranoia were old habits. Cara banged at the door with the back of her hand. The painted-over doorbell was dead. "Who's it?" shouted someone from behind the locked, thin, and unpainted wooden door. This is the customary greeting. Only a fool opens a front door without verifying who's standing on the outside. Bust paranoia was still high. "Cara ... and Mark." "Who?" "Mark ... ya know, the writer." An arm pushed back the heavy wool blanket covering the two sash windows on the left of the front door. Hair, a forehead, and eyes appeared in the space between the blanket and the window. I heard the door unlock. We walked in. In the summer of 1995 I had prowled around this house. It was then piled high with filthy broken furniture and rusted metal chairs. In the spot I stood now, a box of hollow-point .22 bullets with five missing had sat on top of a torn, stained mattress. Since then the owner had cleaned out the garbage and installed a gray-striped industrial carpet. The scene I walked into this day was distorted and odd and had a surreal quality to it. What my eyes saw I wanted to be a staged drama, not real life being played out in front me. In the middle of the floor was Kevin, thin and shirtless, wearing unbuttoned and unzipped jeans; his legs were splayed into a V-shape, his feet covered by off-white cotton socks with soiled bottoms. Standing above him was Teresa, 100 pounds overweight, with hair unwashed, uncombed, and matted. Her pouching stomach sagged toward the floor and was exaggerated by tight jeans slicing through her midriff, dividing her obesity into upper and lower waves of blubber. "Fuck that," Teresa hurled insults into the black receiver of the telephone as if to intimidate a phone company representative with her verbal ferocity and skills at hurling insults. Teresa shouted insults into the phone as Kevin shouted insults to her, which she was supposed· to shout into the phone. Teresa also shouted insults at Kevin, he shouted some at her, and in an irrational chorus of anger and obscenity they both shouted threats of law suits into the telephone receiver for the benefit of some unknown, underpaid telephone worker. "Fuck that, fuck YOU...