Teen: Daniel (And Marcus, in absentia)

FEATURES:

• Runs on Coca-Cola
• Knows how to use a condom
• Does dishes

I met Daniel (pictured) and Marcus when I moved into their East Village neighborhood— the “Loisaida”—six years ago, and Marcus stole my BMX bike. I retrieved about 90 percent of the bicycle (minus rear-wheel pegs and pedals), and subsequently struck up a wary, “Hey, what’s up?” type of friendship with the brothers over their ensuing teenage years. They are beautiful boys—overtly dangerous and intimidating to be sure— but both have these even-more-lethal clear eyes and sweet smiles that have captivated me over the last half decade. Marcus, now sixteen, is in jail for crimes that far surpass bicycle pinching, and Daniel, newly eighteen, is trying to finish high school, help pay for his two-year-old son’s Pampers, and not get stabbed.

When Daniel came over to my apartment on a recent Friday night, I asked what Marcus had been nabbed for, and while Daniel had no problems sharing even the most intimate details of his own life (including but not limited to practicing how to use a condom in school using a banana), he was somewhat evasive about his brother’s sins. Something about being involved, but then not being involved in the robbing and beating of a man. There had been drug-dealing, possession, weapons charges, trespassing, and other priors which ultimately conspired to land Marcus in jail for a good amount of time. He had also been a member of the Crips.

“Marcus has a mouth,” Daniel admits of his brother, as he meticulously straightens the magazines on my kitchen table. He is aligning the corners and edges with each other and the cracks in the table, creating the perfect stack. “It’s hard to talk to him about life, though, because he doesn’t listen to nobody. Over the years, we saw him change. I mean, everyone changes, but he got bad—smoking, stealing, breaking chairs over guys’ heads at parties.”

His stature was the first thing I noticed about Marcus. Daniel is lithe and fluid, of normal height, but his brother is extremely short for his age, with this rigid, little-man posture and gait, an almost tangible aura of anger preceding him. When he first stole my bike around age twelve, I thought Marcus couldn’t have been any older than eight or nine. Daniel says that Marcus’s attitude and size mark his brother in jail. Indeed: shortly after being sentenced and incarcerated, he showed up on Daniel’s doorstep, covered in blood.

“One night he was sleeping, and he knew these guys were going to stab him, so he stayed up and waited to stab them first. Then he escaped down the fire escape and rode the subway home.” Marcus was returned to his juvenile detention center in the Bronx when cops found him hiding at an aunt’s apartment a few days later.

Daniel’s and Marcus’s mother doesn’t sleep until she knows her kids are home safe at night. She’s an alcoholic; vodka is her drink of choice. Their dad...