The Gangstas of Godwin Park
They were rich, white, and barely old enough to be in high school. They lived in the online world, strutting their toughness and their fascination with violence on their MySpace pages. And then one night, the line separating the virtual from the real vanished, and a sixteen-year-old boy from one of Houston’s nicest neighborhoods lay dead.
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If you are the parent of a teenager, as I am, you know what I’m talking about. The sound of a constantly ringing family phone is no more; it has been replaced by the clicking of the computer keyboard or the beep of a cell phone announcing the arrival of a text message. Teenagers have their own virtual universes, which are free from adult supervision at a time when threats to their health and well-being have never been greater. The list of factors to blame is long and obvious: easy access to drugs (many of which Mom and Dad are taking legally), easy access to alcohol (ditto), easy access to sex (either in real life or through cable TV or Web porn), as well as more-familiar pressures such as divorce, rampant materialism, and absurd academic demands. But there is one development that is unique to this generation of teenagers, and that is the omnipresent glorification of violence. Kids are bombarded with it—on television, at the movies, in video games, in music, and on the Internet. Street culture has married technology, and the result is a nightmare for parents and a siren song for kids. The difficulties of being a teenager haven’t changed, but society has, leaving those kids prone to risk taking drawn to ever more dangerous activities. To make matters worse, everything happens at breakneck speed, making rational thought and reflection nearly impossible. (It’s notable that among rich kids under intense academic pressure, the drugs of choice are ecstasy, weed, and prescription painkillers—substances that soften the world and slow it down.)
The easiest way to observe this shift is by logging on to MySpace.com. The Web site was created in 1998 as a place for musicians to promote their bands. (It was acquired last year for $580 million by conservative billionaire Rupert Murdoch, which will be ironic only until it starts making money.) MySpace quickly caught on with teenagers, who began designing their own Web pages with their own photographs, favorite music, personality quizzes, and messages from friends. To protect against Web predators, kids can set up private sites where only people they know can visit (a concept that parents can trust only at their peril).
It is salient and glaringly metaphoric that the way one makes a MySpace page is by creating a Web identity—the kind of psychological shape-shifting that teenagers do so naturally, as they change their minds about who they are. So, appropriately, there are kids on MySpace who worry about eating meat, the Iraq war, and global warming, as well as football, baseball, soccer, their golden retrievers, and what they are going to do this weekend. But a sampling of Web pages of kids who go to Bellaire reveals something darker, and it’s certainly not exclusive to that school—an affinity for extreme profanity and degradation of all sorts. Fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls strike poses they must have learned on MTV, often in bikinis or underwear, with T-shirts that say “I’m a hustla.” The boys use screen names like “PimpiN At Its FinesT” or “Bitch … Moneys All I Think Of.” On one questionnaire, a student states as the goal he would like to achieve this year, “bone a mom.” A great many kids list their income as $250,000 a year, though whether this is what their parents make or what they assume they will make one day is anyone’s guess. The patois would give Bill Cosby a coronary: “I always got luv for ya fly ass white boy u ma nigga fa real” one girl wrote to her boyfriend. Drugs are bought and sold as casually and guiltlessly as if they were candy. Q:“do u still want those GG the yellow ones?” A:“yeh I do want them if u got I want em tomorrow.” Though the kids often sound very affectionate, that love is laced with a sharp slap of brutality and anger: “haha i love u 2 babicutass … hottgirl,” for instance. If all this is just virtual posturing, as some therapists suggested to me, the rebellious anger behind it seems very real.
Some of the angriest kids were those in Godwin Park that night, most notably Warren Payne and his friend Steven Lopez. The two had been pals since middle school, and it was Steve who would shield Warren’s wounded body in Godwin Park. Warren’s father was a successful patent attorney, and they lived in a McMansion not far from Bellaire High. Steve’s father was a handyman for an apartment complex in nearby Linkwood. Steve shared a cramped apartment with his parents, his sister, her lover, their baby, and, occasionally, his older brother Jeffrey. But the differences in the boys’ backgrounds didn’t matter. What they had in common was a passion for the gangsta life embodied by the hip-hop music they loved. Even though Steve was a teddy-bearish, baby-faced fifteen-year-old who struggled with school in the real world, the photo he posted of himself on his MySpace page showed him smoking a blunt under a profane caption. He featured pictures of murdered rapper Tupac Shakur, Al Pacino in Scarface, and Robert De Niro in Goodfellas.
On Warren’s site, in addition to the hooded man with the Glock, he put up photos of himself shooting the bird, photos of cough syrup bottles and marijuana, and photos of condoms. He listed his hometown as “Screwston.” Both boys liked to refer to their friends, black and white, as “niggas.” As different as they were, the common denominator of their lives was music and the violent anger it expressed. If that anger had more basis in Steve’s circumstances—cramped quarters, no money, an obstructed view of the future—than Warren’s, it nevertheless reinforced in Warren a nihilism that had as its source upper-middle-class ennui.
While the majority of teens will, as always, graduate from high school in one piece and go on to become responsible citizens, those who are vulnerable economically and psychologically are finding it much harder to avoid the proverbial bad choices, coming of age on their own, with too few role models to bring balance to their lives. This fact was brought home to me during an interview with a Bellaire sophomore who suggested, without irony, that making drug deals had helped her to grow up. “When you do drugs, you learn to watch your back,” she told me. “It teaches you how to treat people. When you are around drug dealers, you can’t act stupid. You have to be cool and collected. You learn to sit there and keep to yourself; you learn to say the right things to the right people. I used to be a lot more outgoing. Now I’m more calm and collected.”
Hence, reality and virtuality become the same. Or, as Phillip Guerrero, the homicide investigator in charge of the Finkelman case, told me, “The kids I’ve talked to don’t appreciate the value of life. They think it’s a big game.” The nature of teenage rebellion today—just like that of their parents in years past—reflects the essence of the culture, distilled to a discouraging purity, and the death of Jonathan Finkelman becomes a parable for how easily the bad in American life now drives out the good. Sometimes it happens gradually, almost invisibly, and sometimes it happens swiftly, with the squeeze of a trigger on a dark winter night.
WHEN JONATHAN’S FRIENDS REMEMBER HIM, they bestow upon him the ultimate high school accolade: He always said hi. Moving through the halls of Bellaire with an eager, big guy’s gait—head down, shoulders a little hunched, smile omnipresent—he was never too busy to throw his arms around a friend. “Even the black girls, which a lot of the white boys will not do,” one remarked. At socially stratified Bellaire, this was no small thing. For many decades after its founding, in 1955, the school was all white and earned the nickname Hebrew High because of its hardworking, ambitious Jewish students, zoned to attend Bellaire from their homes in Meyerland. Today, Bellaire still looks like the only high school in a small town: The architecture is blocky and unexceptional, numerous parks and playgrounds are located nearby, and the local city hall, police station, and water tower (with “Bellaire” written across it, in a gay, cursive swoop) are just a block or two away. The neighborhood carries the same name and is, in fact, an incorporated city surrounded by Houston. Bellaire High, however, draws students not only from Bellaire but also from nearby Houston neighborhoods.
It is inside the school that the changes in Bellaire are most obvious. One is diversity; in the halls you see whites, blacks, Hispanics, and East and Central Asians. Another is class: Bellaire is divided by income level in a way it never was before. In the mid- to late eighties, as Houston began to recover from the oil bust, families were drawn to the large oak-and-pine-shaded lots of Bellaire and adjacent Meyerland, where they could tear down modest ranch homes and build mini-mansions. (In 1986 the average cost of a house in Bellaire was $75,000; it is now $500,000.) Even better, they could send their kids to great public schools. If crime rose slightly—a series of violent burglaries swept through the area in 1987—it didn’t really matter. Residents could by then afford to pool their cash and hire private patrols, sending the crime rate back down. Sometimes, too, the rent-a-cops were a lot more lenient than the real thing. “I live in Meyerland” was a common refrain among kids who were caught speeding or with contraband, in hopes they’d get off light.
Meanwhile, the demographics of the nearby apartment complexes that were part of the Bellaire attendance zone were changing too. Built for boom-era white singles, who fled once the economy cratered, the complexes soon became home to struggling immigrants eager to move into better housing and send their kids to good schools and to black families trying to get away from the old inner-city wards. To keep whites from leaving, the high school added International Baccalaureate programs to its Advanced Placement offerings, and as the surrounding neighborhoods changed, more and more affluent Bellaire parents pushed to get their kids into these classes. But these outstanding academic programs created, over time, a school within a school, in which the smartest kids with the most advantages took the IB and AP tracks, while everyone else was relegated to classes that, for various reasons—discipline problems, less talented teachers, lower standards—just weren’t as good.
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