Ben is out of jail again. Five minutes ago the phone rang and I picked up. The gentle voice of a twenty-nine year old man who flew above the violence and hopelessness of his circumstances, informed me quietly that the judge had moved him from Riverside County Jail to a halfway house. Ben had found the soft spot in a California judge’s heart – Only he could do that! A convicted multiple offender, and she’d said ‘You seem like a good man. I don’t want to see you spend the rest of your life in prison.’ She was right. Ben is one of the best men I’ve known. But he’s spent more of his adult life in prison than out.

Twenty years ago I’d been in the asphalt yard of my studio in South Central Los Angeles. Behind an eight foot high chain-link, razor wire fence, I hefted boxes of clay from a pallet around back of the three thousand foot Quonset hut, where kilns, molds and potter’s wheels hidden from street view, announced my presence to no one but high flying pigeons. It doesn’t pay to advertise in South Central.

Outside the fence, two young boys tossed a football, and the nine year old with nappy head and Cheshire cat smile beamed through the wire hexagons, calling to me, “Yo, Mister! Lemme in!”

I looked skeptically at the kid with the football in his hand and challenged his trust. “Throw your ball over.”

Ben squinted through the chain link, then looked back at the ball for a brief moment, making the risk assessment. He cocked his arm and tossed the football in a high arc over the razor wire. I caught it, hesitated for a moment like I might just walk away, then unlocked the gate and let the two kids in.

I asked the grinning kid his name. “Benjamin Deprince Land,” he announced, glancing at the bags of chemicals and the triple beam balance gram scale I used to measure the glazes for the pottery I manufactured. “Wow! You guys into some heavy shit around here!” he exclaimed.

A gram scale and bags of white powder – “No, no, no! It’s just glaze chemicals… for the pottery.” I pointed to the shelves of vases and platters.

Ben raised his hands and eyebrows in mock ignorance. “Whatever you say, man. You don’t have to tell me nothin’.”

“No, really!”

“It’s okay with me,” Ben shrugged and turned away to look through the rest of the studio, shelves of ware, huge clay forms pierced, carved and molded, all much less familiar to him than bags of white powder and a gram scale.

So next day after school, Ben showed up, grinning face yelling at the gate until I came out and let him in. He walked in like he owned the place and confided to me,“You know that kid I came in with yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“You shouldn’t let him in here. He’s a thief. He’ll lift anything not nailed down. You know what I mean?”

“And I should let you in?”

“Yeah, of course! I ain’t no thief!”

I went on working while Ben made himself at home. Sometimes he helped out around the place. Sometimes he just sat around and told stories. During breaks we threw knives, sticking them into improvised plywood targets hung on the corrugated iron door. Ben would tell me about life on the streets.

“You know them Rasta’s across the street?” I remembered – My first day arriving at my newly rented studio in South Central, I pulled up in front of the padlocked gates. In the driveway opposite, in the yard of a tiny stucco house, five forbidding-looking men with long dreadlocks glared over at me suspiciously. I weighed my options for a moment, then strode directly across the street, into their yard, and stuck my hand out to the six foot two face that glowered down at me.

“Hello!” I beamed, introducing myself, briefly revealing my reason for existing. A few seconds of silence followed, and five faces opened, laughing at the hilarious white man who was stupid enough to intrude.

“Yes, I know them a bit,” I told Ben.

“I was walkin’ past that dude’s house last night, and him and his girlfriend was havin’ a fight. Man, his clothes was flyin’ out the window, and along with it was flutterin’ hundred dollar bills all over the street!”

“Did you pick any up?”

“You crazy, man?! I ain’t takin’ no drug dealers money!” Ben knew how to survive on the streets. There were rules you didn’t break.

Ben would come in every day and perform a new rap he’d composed at school. But he couldn’t read, so one day I scrawled a few words on the huge chalkboard I used to design my work, and tried to teach him. He was nothing but frustrated. The next day I came into the studio and my eight foot chalk board was covered in wild, off color graffiti. Cowering in the corner, Ben waited for me to be pissed at him.

“Damn, Ben!” I said impressed. Every profanity was perfectly formed and spelled! I erased an F, replacing it with a B. “What’s this say?”

Ben was still paralyzed, waiting for the obscenity to sink in. Then he quietly sounded, “Buck?”

I whooped and we spent the afternoon permutating all the profanity he seemed to be able to spell easily into a vocabulary. Despite his school teacher’s diagnosis of dyslexia, he learned to read in just a few months.

Ben’s tagging name was ‘The Rat’, emblematic of his street smarts, so I improvised a rap about Ben’s exploits on the acoustic guitar I kept around the studio. He loved it till I got to the chorus “He was a lover, he was a fighter, he was a rat!” Every chorus Ben would screech out, “I ain’t no rat!”

We built Ben a pigeon coop and he worked chores around the studio and to earn some money to buy ‘rollers’ – pigeons that will flip in the air on command. He led me from 69^th and Hoover, down Western. There are very few businesses you can see from the streets in South Central. Across from my studio was a pawn shop, J&B Burgers on the corner of Hoover that served delicious-for-the-first-bite meals through iron bars. The hand painted sign on the game room across the street read ‘Don’t feed my ladies no crack cause they ain’t got no tits and ass already’; above, a huge billboard with Latina Miss America announces ‘You can be anything you want to be!’

A mile and a half from the studio, an undistinguished door onto Western Avenue opened to an immense warehouse, filled with a thousand cages and more pigeons than I’d seen in my life. The place was buzzing with collectors and hobbyists. Ben opened a cage and gripped a bird, finger and thumb expertly pinning wings to sides, examining the yellow alien eyes for signs of temperament.

We left with half a dozen birds in a cardboard box. Ben preened them and prized them until the day he arrived home after his curfew and found his mother had opened the cage and let the birds out to punish him. She smashed the cage to sticks.

Ben’s mother was Cathy, an imposing woman, maybe three hundred pounds and half a head taller than me. She would take the welfare check she received for raising her children, cash it and give the money to Ben’s older sister, who would buy drugs from a wholesaler she knew, and turn them around on the street for a profit. That’s how the family got by – South Central business.

That was small stuff though. The real wars in South Central were about territory, and they went on at night. If I stayed at work late, shortly after dusk pistol battles would announce the evening, soon punctuated by shotgun blasts and Uzzi spatter that lent a staccato rhythm to near every midnight. In the mornings when I arrived back from my insular Westside home, more often than not, yellow coroner’s bands would announce the site of last night’s territory battle.

But in the day, South Central wasn’t a dangerous place to be, as long as you weren’t competing for business. There were no homeless on the streets, no muggings. No one bothered me when my beat up truck pulled up in the mornings. Ben was my ambassador to the streets, so that even though he was just twelve when the riots came, I had special protection.

As time passed, Cathy began to trust me, and let Ben come and go as he pleased as long as it was to the studio or on weekends to my Westside home, where Ben would hang out with my girlfriend and her daughter (an adopted niece) – he was a big brother in our odd little family. I remember extracting a group snapshot taken in one of those instant photo booths at a mall. Glancing at the motley collection of faces smiling back, my three year old grinned, “My family!”

My girlfriend smiled wryly, “A Mexican, a Jew, an Indian and a Black! Quite a family.”

Then Cathy called me one day. “Ben’s locked up in the asylum.”

“What happened?!”

“I just couldn’t control that boy anymore. With that temper! I just took him down and had him committed.”

It had been a couple of years I’d known Ben, and he’d grown quite a bit. Now he’d become big enough that his mother’s threats and beatings no longer intimidated him. He’d take the extension cord from her when she tried to whip him. Just a few weeks ago she’d called me on the phone, “You gotta talk him down,” she told tell me. “He’s got a chair, says he’s gonna whoop us!”

I got on the phone with Ben. “I can’t take it no more!” he said. “They just pushin’ me too far!”

A year before Ben had come running into the studio one morning, teary-eyed. “What happened, Ben?”

“My momma’s boyfriend beat her up. I wanna kill him, But I’m too small!” he wept. “He gone now, but it keep happenin’!”

After Ben calmed down I told him that there was only one reason a man would beat on a woman, and I held my thumb and forefinger and inch apart. He looked at me puzzled.

“Really small dick.” Ben laughed at my joke, but never forgot the point.

So as Ben threatened his mother and sister with the chair, I spoke to remind him over the phone, “You know the only reason a man beats a woman?” I could almost see the smile creeping over Ben’s face. He put down the chair, and for a while there was peace.

Afraid of how this had all played out, I went right over to visit Ben at the asylum. First thing he came up to me beaming and he asked, “What I have to do to stay here? They treat me good. The food’s good. We play ping pong and pool. These people crazy, but they like me! You think if I cut myself they maybe think I’m suicidal and let me stay?”

Shortly after Rodney King was video taped being beaten without provocation by cops, the riots came to South Central. At 4:45 I drove my pickup down 69^th to Hoover and headed back home on Western. Five minutes later a man was pulled from his truck at that corner and beaten. The South Central Riots began there.

Days of pillaging and looting set South Central on fire. The news media reported as the battle front moved toward the affluent Westside. But every day Ben called me with first hand reports on what was really going on over there in the streets. He was having the time of his life! He was just twelve, but he could get along with anyone, Black, White or Hispanic, Crip or Blood. Even in the middle of a street war he was in his element.

But after three days he was done with it. He called me up and asked me to come get him. Cathy overheard and grabbed the phone from his hand and said to me, “Steve! You still white?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t come.”

I’d already planned on leaving L.A, long before the riots came. I’d sold my business to a young student from UCLA. I remember watching through the window the day he arrived, just two weeks before the riots. He pulled up at the gate, and the Rasta’s across the road glared at him. He looked back for a moment then averted his eyes, fumbled for his keys, unlocked and quickly drove in and locked the gate securely behind him. Fear is a special sort of insult in South Central.

During the riots when businesses were looted and burnt, my warehouse was ransacked. All of the materials the young student had brought to remodel the studio were taken, his work smashed or stolen. But the corner where my remaining work and possessions were housed was pristine and untouched – my protection.

Watching Ben come and go through the years, the neighbors had wondered in one by one. A few weeks after I’d met the Rastas, a tiny old lady named Violet, maybe four feet nine came up the driveway. She told me all about herself. She’d owned a ‘sportin’ house’ down in Texas. It’d been a top class joint with restaurant and ‘rooms for both the boys and the girls’. I finally understood that a ‘sportin’ house’ was a brothel.

After the riots Violet disappeared for two weeks and I worried for her safety. When she returned she explained to me. “Yep, when the riots came and they was lootin’ in them big department stores, I just paint my cane white and put on some dark sunglasses. I get a big shoppin’ cart and parked myself in front. They come out and load me up with all kinds of stuff. TVs, computers, you name it… I walk it back home, unload and then go back. They load me up again. I filled up my spare room. When the riots was over I sell it all and went for a trip back to Texas to visit my family.’

After the riots there was an uneasy peace in Ben’s home. South Central was subtly changed. A ghost of awareness of the real situation there haunted the Westside. South Central was harder for the well off to ignore for a while. Well meaning liberal zealots paraded projects where the residues of destruction in the ghetto were to be reconstructed into emblems of liberty – art of the poor, by the poor and for the poor. I remember during one of the infamous ‘reconstruction’ meetings, one Black man from the neighborhood standing up. We’d just been informed of a project touting a notorious Westside artist’s intention to build monuments from the residues of the riots. The Black man said, “For my part, I grew up here with everything I ever owned second hand. Does our art even have to be made of garbage?!”

Before I left L.A. Ben entered an apprenticeship program to become an auto mechanic. He attended after school and he loved it. He finally had leverage. Maybe he would be okay. That helped me a little with the guilt of leaving him behind in the luminous smog, anonymity and despair, spawned by the Los Angeles sprawl. A few months later Cathy pulled Ben out if his mechanic’s program to punish him for refusing to buy her cigarettes. Things got worse for Ben quickly after that.

I visited occasionally over the next years as Ben grew to manhood. Although he sprouted to six foot two and 220 pounds a sideways glance from me could still convince him I could take him in a wrestling match – a child’s perspective become fantasy long ago. Cathy died of emphysema, attached to an oxygen tank, spooning cornstarch from a box, chain-smoking cigarettes till the end. When that end came, Ben wept like a little boy.

So at eighteen Ben was on his own. After a few months on the street, he got married and set up house with a sweet Mexican girl he’d fallen in love with. She had a daughter. They lived in a housing project until his first child was born. Then the family was evicted – the apartment was not allowed to house more than three. Ben called me, desperate for a job. I called everyone I still knew in L.A. but no jobs were available to an intimidating Black man without a high school diploma or any real work experience.

But there were areas where Ben was skilled and experienced. He could get along with anyone. He knew everyone. Ben started dealing drugs, small time at first, to support his new family.

One night he slept over on the sofa at a friend’s house. Apparently the friend had offended the wrong person, because in the night someone entered the house, found Ben sleeping on the sofa, and put a gun to his hip, shooting him five times. They moved on and shot everyone else in the house, too. Ben died on the way to the hospital. He was revived five times. Three months later when he was finally released from the hospital he walked with a limp.

I flew him out to stay with me in my country home in Hawaii, but after just a few days the silence and unfamiliarity of the rain forest spooked him. Soon he was back in L.A. dealing again.

Over the last ten years, Ben’s been in and out of jail, always for possession or parole violations. His wife waited for him the first time he was locked up, but the second was too much. She left him. Ben took to the streets. Gangrene attacked his bad foot. When he was finally arrested for parole violation, the police rushed him to the hospital and two of his toes were amputated.

The time after that, it was half his foot. When the phone rang this time, Ben had just come out of surgery. His leg is gone from the knee down now. But he’s going into a program – a real structured one that might give him a chance he needs. He says it’s over. He’s done with drugs. He wants to see his children grow. He still loves his wife.

It’s hard to think of whether Ben made bad decisions. Three twenty-five an hour at McDonald’s or a hundreds of dollars a day on the streets with friends to back him up, so he could take care of his family. I don’t know. Is it really over? The doctor told Ben if he lets himself go again, it’ll surely be his life next time.