Death Is Contagious
Max Cerda
In 2011 and 2012, while more than 900 people were being murdered on the streets of Chicago, creative-writing students from DePaul University fanned out all over the city to interview people whose lives have been changed by the bloodshed. The result is How Long Will I Cry?: Voices of Youth Violence, an extraordinary and eye-opening work of oral history.
Told by real people in their own words, the book contains the extraordinary stories of 34 Chicagoans. This is one of them.
The Jan. 10, 1984, edition of the Chicago Tribune contained a special full- page display of mug shots—the faces of gang members from all over the city who had recently been sentenced to prison for murder and other brutal crimes. One of the most menacing mug shots on that page belonged to a teenager with a childlike face, a muscular neck and a fiercely defiant scowl. His name was Max Cerda—and a few years earlier, he had been convicted of two murders and an attempted murder.
Nearly three decades after that story appeared in the paper, Max Cerda stares at his old mug shot with a look of wonder and sadness. Sentenced to prison at age 16, he spent 18 years behind bars. Now he sits in the Humboldt Park office of the Latino Cultural Exchange Coalition, a group he co-founded in prison with Jose Pizarro, who was another one of the murderers pictured in that 1984 Tribune story. In those days, the two men were members of enemy gangs. Today, they work together to help ex-offenders re-integrate into society and to encourage teens to stay out of gangs.
On the day we visit, Cerda is holding an anger-management class for ex-of- fenders and at-risk youth. Although the young men tease him with greetings such as “Wassup, Old School?”, he clearly has their respect. At 50 years old, Cerda still has the thick black hair of his youth, which he pulls back in a ponytail. His world-weary face is calm and gentle-looking—but when he talks about the past, his dark eyes can go dead.
When I look at the face in the newspaper, I see anger, hurt, fear—just a lost kid chasing an urban illusion. I thought that life was about killing and dying. Nothing else.
You know, there’s a myth that kids who join gangs come from broken homes and stuff like that, and I’m sure that’s true in a lot of cases. But in my case, it was not true. I came from a good family. My mother came from Mexico, and my father, he was a Tejano; he was from Texas, from Browns- ville. A lot of my uncles and my grandfather—I was named after him, Don Maximo—moved up to Aurora, Illinois. Then they just eventually moved into the city, perhaps just like most Mexicans and immigrants at that time, just trying to find opportunity.
Where I lived in Little Italy—Taylor Street and Loomis—it was a beau- tiful neighborhood. I’ll never forget it. I still go there today when I have problems in my mind and I gotta clear it out. There’s a park there, and I can still see me and my father having a race on the sidewalk.
My father was a foreman for Acme Supply. He always had his shirt pock- et full of pens. And it’s funny, because today I’ve always got my own shirt pocket full of pens, and every time I reach for them, I’m always thinking about my old man. He used to come from work to take me to the park. We’d get some ice cream or buy some peanuts from the Sicilians who used to push the peanut carts on our streets. It was nice, man. It was my father. He passed away while I was in the joint at Menard.
I was an altar boy when I was young. But one day, a friend and me got kicked out of there because we saw the Communion wine and we drunk that wine up, and we was eating the holy bread like potato chips, man. I was just restless back then. I didn’t want to pay attention. I was a smart-ass. Every elementary school that I ever went to, I got kicked out of. I mean every one: Notre Dame, McLaren, every one, even Montefiore, which was a reformatory school.
I didn’t take nothing seriously. Didn’t care. The only time I cared was when they said they was gonna tell my father, ‘cause my father played no games, man. He put it on me. I used to get whooped hard. I used to get welts on my back that’d be there for days, man. I couldn’t lay on that side.
Fifth, sixth grade—that’s when things took a turn. This was by McLaren Elementary School, in Little Italy. This was outside on the playground. I re- member this one kid, I don’t know if he was Italian or not, but he was white. And he said something to me, something racial, and I don’t know why it bothered me because I never thought about, you know, being Mexican or nothing like that. But I was seeing people fight all the time, and I guess I was just waiting for somebody to say something to me. And this kid did. And I beat him down. I stomped him like he was on fire. I just couldn’t stop. I felt empowered, man. I felt like, “Damn, I’m not taking shit from nobody. I’ve been whooped so much at home, I ain’t taking shit from nobody on the streets.” I didn’t know it then, but I know it now. I know it now. It was exciting. It was contagious. It was like finding a gun.
When I was about 11 years old, my father bought a house up here on the North Side, by Avers and Iowa. I didn’t wanna leave Little Italy. I kept tak- ing the bus back to the old neighborhood to see my friends, but like a year or so later, I got to know young kids, Mexican kids in Humboldt Park. They was in gangs, so I fell into a Mexican gang called the Latin Diablos, and we were fighting the Puerto Ricans. But eventually, I ended up becoming part of that same Puerto Rican gang we used to fight.
See, back in the day when I was gangbanging, we had what we would call our yo-yos, our peewees, our juniors, our seniors. I was a peewee, and we did something wrong. So one day, the juniors and the seniors called a meeting in the garage and we all got whooped bad by these older guys. That made us mad, so we made peace with the Puerto Ricans. We became one gang. We kicked the older guys out of the neighborhood and that’s where it began. When we were able to overcome these older guys, I realized, “Damn, we really do got power.” It was an illusion, but I believed it.
It wasn’t about the girls; for me, at least, it wasn’t about the girls. It wasn’t about money or fancy cars. We didn’t have none of that. Hell, we all had bikes. Regular bikes. Schwinns. It was about the camaraderie, man. We looked out for each other. And we protected the neighborhood. There was no burglaries in our neighborhood. There was no purses being snatched.
But when the gunplay got involved, that changed everything, man. Ev- erything changed. People started getting shot. You know, nothing serious at first. The leg or the back or something like that, but then this one guy got killed, and we realized that this is life and death. It just escalated from there. It just didn’t stop.
Raymond, Raymond Cruz, was the brother who died in my arms. The first time I ever saw him was when I was still a Latin Diablo. You know, Ray- mond’s Puerto Rican, and I remember they sneaked up on us, and he threw a brick at me. I said, “Man, I’m gonna get this punk, whoever he is.” But then, after my gang and his gang united, we became real cool, man. He got me into salsa—the Fania All-Stars, Willie Colón, Héctor Lavoe, all of those guys. He turned me on to a new world of music.
His mother used to live right behind our house, and that’s how we got close to him. My ma loved him. He used to come to the house beat up, cut up. My mother would sew him up, take care of him. My mother was like his personal doctor. So yeah, we got close like that, man. We just ended up getting real close.
He was two years older than me. He was 18, going on 19. He decided to leave the neighborhood and move to Maywood and get a job at Zenith. He was so happy he had just got that job.
I was always telling him, “Man, come back to the ’hood. We need you, man. You know, shit is happening over here. We need you.”
And he kept saying, “Man, you need to give that shit up. There’s too much stuff going on right now. A lot of people getting shot at, people getting killed. Why don’t you come hang out a couple weeks by me in May- wood, man? Let this shit blow over.”
Finally, after like a month or two, I was able to talk him into coming back to pick me up, just to spend some time with me—and we ended up getting ambushed. We got ambushed. This happened April 18th of 1979.
It was on a one-way street. There was a car, an LTD Ford, parked in front of us. And they threw up gang signs. I threw up gang signs. I was the passenger and, when I opened my door, I heard another car come right behind us. And by the time I looked back in front of me, the guys that were in the first car came out firing.
I dove under the dashboard. I do not understand to this day why I did not even get wounded. Both them guys put their guns in the car, and I did not get hit one time. But they ended up shooting Ray. They shot him 13 times.
I remember hearing him gargling for air, and when I heard the other cars take off, I stuck my head up and I looked up at my brother, and I seen he was full of blood. This was in the afternoon, about 2:30. The kids were coming out of school. There was a candy store right on the corner and I ran to tell the lady at the store to call the ambulance. When I got back to the car, there was an old Puerto Rican lady holding his body. Half of his body was in the car and his head was hanging out. I put my arms under his head. When I did that, a big…a big thing of blood…could’ve been his brains, I don’t know…came down. He was squeezing my left thumb. He had a bullet hole underneath one eye and his other eye was looking straight to the sky. He took his last breath. When that happened, I went straight to the dark side.
The night we buried him, it was like five of us walking around, trying to find the enemy. We were hurt. Full of anger. Full of pain. I didn’t worry about getting locked up. I didn’t worry about dying. I was looking for death, bro. I was running right into it, head on. The next day, I was arrested for murder.
I was 16 years old, but I was tried as an adult. I fought my case for a year and a half or two years. In 1981, I got found guilty and sent to Joliet. From Joliet, I went to Menard. And then from Menard, I went to Stateville. And then from Stateville, I went to medium-minimum joints. You know, getting transferred from hole to hole to hole. I was incarcerated from the age of 16 till the age of 35. It was something else, man. It was something else. Prison was something else.
I did a total of five and a half years in solitary confinement. I would do 18 months one time, one year another time, six months one other time. A lot of people go to the hole and they find the end of the world. For me, I found a new world. I found a world of self. That’s where I learned how to think. It’s where I learned how to read. It’s where I learned how to cry. I needed that so much.
Once, I was in the hole at Menard. And this brother next door to me, his name was Pops. He was from the Hells Angels, he was a biker. He looked like those bikers from the movies, man. Long hair, short, ugly, mean-look- ing. You know, for real. But he was a beautiful, beautiful brother, man. A beautiful brother.
When I first got there, he goes, “Hey little brother, how you doing? I’m a biker.” He was trying to help me out, but I was so ignorant I thought he was representing.
“Biker? I don’t give a fuck about a biker. I’ll chop your ass up.” And he just says, “You know what, brother? I’ll talk to you another time.” So then, like a few weeks later, he asks me, “What are you in solitary for, man?” And I started telling him, kinda explaining to him, but he goes, “What does your ticket say?”
I go, “My ticket?”
He goes, “Yeah, that yellow paper that they give you—your disciplinary report.”
I said, “Oh, I…I…don’t know what the fuck this says.”
And now he’s got this little mirror he’s sticking through the bars of his cell so that he can see me. Now we’re looking at each other in the mirror.
He goes, “I don’t mean no disrespect, but do you know how to read and write?”
I go, “But I ain’t stupid.”
And he says, “Little brother, I’ll work with you, man.” And, I mean, he taught me. At night, he would write the vowels—you know: a, e, i, o, u. For a rugged-looking dude, he was smart, man. He was fucking smart. I mean, he got me to start to read, and I was a straight knucklehead. I was in 10 or 12 schools and none of them could do it. But he did it.
Acquiring the ability to read, it transformed me, man. Like we say it in Spanish, la cultura cura. Culture heals. And that’s what healed me was cul- ture. It made me positive. One thing for sure it did, it helped me to stop see- ing my so-called enemy as my enemy and to start seeing him as my brother. Before that, man, I was so into gangbanging, I was in a trance—a trance of hate and confusion. You know, like a terrorist. To me, I was a soldier. I didn’t see myself as a criminal. I wasn’t a dope-dealer. I seen myself as a soldier.
I hit Stateville in 1984. That’s where I met Jose Pizarro, the guy I work with now. But back then, I was still banging against his group. I was People, and he was Folks; he was the enemy. The first time I saw him was on the gallery, the walkway in front of the cells. Stateville is a roundhouse. It’s like a big-ass birdcage, and you can see everything. And they would be over there, and we would be over here, sizing each other up. Jose was his chief of security—personal security for the leader of his gang. And I was a security guy for my guys, so I knew that if we was ever gonna hit his chief, we had to hit Jose first.
We had this one brother in Stateville, Luis Rosa. He was a beautiful, intelligent brother. He preached to us about Latino awareness and Latino unity. But I wasn’t educated then. I couldn’t understand. That shit sounded like Chinese to me. I thought it was too late for peace, ‘cause too many brothers had died.
But after I went to solitary a few more times, I really got an understand- ing of myself and what it means to be Latino and everything. I started read- ing the history of Mexicans, what we went through with my father, what my grandfathers and them went through. I kinda started feeling what Luis Rosa was talking about then. I had an awareness, an awakening. And when I came out of solitary, I got involved in what Luis and these other guys were doing.
I guess that’s what really got me and Jose Pizarro close to one another; we both started preaching Latin unity, you know. We didn’t say to each other,
“Hey, you go talk to your guys; I’ll talk to my guys.” We didn’t have that agreement. It just happened like that.
I had to explain to my guys, “This is what I feel, bro. I feel we’re wasting our lives. We’re killing ourselves for no fucking reason. This is crazy. This shit’s gotta stop.”
In fact, I even had to kind of manipulate the situation a bit to make it seem as if this unity was a good criminal enterprise for us. For me, it was all about Latino unity for real. But to have them understand it and accept it, I had to present it in a way where, you know, this would expand the criminal concept of what we’re doing as an organization: As a united mob, we can do more shit.
When we had our first meeting between the two sides in the chapel at Stateville, nobody sat down. Everybody was standing up. Everybody had their knives on them, pipes. Everybody had vests in case we got stabbed so it wouldn’t penetrate. It was hilarious. It was serious as hell, but it was hilarious. It was funny and scary at the same time, man. Nobody sat down, but we talked. We presented our case. Jose did it for his group, I did it for mine. That night, I figured one of two things was gonna happen: If I live to the morning, this is gonna work and, if not, I’m gonna get hit tonight. But it did work. This was in the early 1980s. We’re out here now in 2012, incorporated and in the heart of Humboldt Park.
Death is contagious. It is, man. Especially when you’re lost and you’re confused and you got everybody around you telling you this is what you’re supposed to be doing. It’s so contagious, it becomes part of you. If you ain’t hit somebody in one night—jump them, beat them up, shoot them, whatever—you can’t even sleep well. I couldn’t sleep well till I knew I hit somebody that night.
Yes, I was part of that stupidity and that madness. I believed in that crazy shit. Just like these kids from Afghanistan who come from a war-torn state, I was coming from a war-torn state of mind. But when I look at that mug shot of myself at age 16, it also reaffirms who and what I am today. It tells me that, no matter how bad our past was, it’s not how the story begins. It’s where it leads to and what kind of legacy we leave behind. That people can change.
I’m proud of who I am today and what I’ve done and what I’m trying to accomplish. Getting kids out of gangs, helping parolees prepare for rein- tigration into society and working with mothers who lost kids—it’s a form of redemption. But all that stuff that happened with me years ago when I was younger, it don’t go away. You know, man? It just really don’t go away. Guilt, remorse—you’re like, damn, man. Especially when I see a mother on TV crying that one of her kids got killed. There’s times when I think about the moms I may have made cry. And it, it just, it really just fucks with me. It don’t go nowhere. The more humble you become, the more remorseful you become. You know?
—Interviewed by Miles Harvey
