In Brooklyn: A Wolf in $45 Sneakers

By James Wilde

Baby Love sits on the stoop, rolling the largest, fattest joint in the world. He wastes little: in go twigs, seeds, everything, until it seems as big as a torpedo. Other joints are tucked over each ear, and more are secreted in plastic bags under his hat. It is Friday night, the night to get high, get drunk and strut. Baby Love's entire wrecking crew is here, sprawled over cars, squatting on the sidewalk, jiving. There is Shistang ("He be cool with dice"), Little Spank, Gugu, Snake Eyes, Shilo, Spider Man, Daddy Rich, Little June, Snatch Pocket Earl and Snootchy Fingers.

"We be in the streets hangin' out an' gettin' high," says Baby Love. He is a very skinny, very small, very lethal 14-year-old. His eyes are slate gray, flashing to blue when he laughs. Mischief is etched across his face as a bittersweet smile. Like his crew, he is dressed in mugger's uniform: designer jeans, T shirt and $45 Pumas, the starched laces neatly untied. A wolf in expensive sneakers, Baby Love is a school dropout, one of more than 800,000 between the ages of 14 and 17 in the U.S.

Baby Love inhabits a world few white folks ever see, a Dickensian hell of cheap thrills, senseless deaths and almost unrelieved hopelessness. He lives in Brooklyn's Bedford Stuyvesant section, one of the oldest black settlements in the U.S. Unlike the burned and ravaged South Bronx, ten miles to the north, Bedford Stuyvesant does not resemble a war zone; most of its owner-occupied row houses, brownstones and churches are more or less intact. But high unemployment and a 60% dropout rate among black high school students make it a very dangerous place. One Bed-Stuy precinct, the 77th, has the highest murder rate in the city: 86 killings last year.

Baby Love is trapped. He can barely read or write, even though he would have been in the seventh grade this year. Because he is nearly illiterate he could never hold even the meanest job for long. He has been running wild so long now that he may be beyond redemption. Ghetto children today are seduced much earlier by drugs and the street, some of them as young as eight or nine. That is the time they need help. Sinbad Lock wood, a Bed-Stuy street artist who tries to wean boys like Baby Love away from the streets to painting, says, "It be the parents' fault, they gets rid of the kids by sending them to the candy store where they be buying reefer and beer. These kids ain't no monsters-they be raising themselves, that's all."

Baby Love is almost always stoned. He rises late, plays basketball in the park or galactic-warfare games at the pinball arcade all day. If there is any money left over, he and Daddy Rich go to karate movies. He juggles four chicks with Casanova skill, and he makes enough from gambling and stealing to be a real "sportin' man."

For Baby Love, stealing means survival. He is the best gold-chain snatcher on the block. "I pretends to be making a phone call when the bus be comin' along," he explains, "so the driver won't warn the passengers. Then when it be by, I's leapin' in the air with my hand through the window and gone befo' anyone sees." He breaks into laughter, slapping skin all round. He has been caught five times this summer for pickpocketing. At Macy's he was caught boosting eight blue Izod Lacoste shirts in his Adidas bag. He has just finished 60 days' probation.

Baby Love lives on the fourth floor of a crumbling, turn-of-the-century tenement with his aunt and legal guardian, Cora Lee. He sleeps on a stained mattress in a small room he often shares with his cousins, Butter and Buckeye, and with an army of roaches that waddle fatly across the floor. His two younger sisters, Shantia, 11, and Sarah, 8, are also in Cora Lee's charge. Baby Love's mother, Rose, stays there too. They are all receiving welfare payments.

There have been three bad fires in Baby Love's building in the past couple of years. The fifth floor is gutted. He and his crew now use it as their clubhouse. Baby Love uses the roof as an escape route from police. He jumps across a yawning chasm to the next building, then he is down the stairs and away. "We be doin' this when we drunk," says Baby Love with an impish smile. A born hustler, he is slick at pool and dice. He gambles Friday nights in front of BeeGee's candy store with men who feed him chiba chiba, a Puerto Rican expression for an especially potent kind of marijuana, the reefer that zoots you out.

He thinks Bruce Lee is a cool dude, but "Richard Pryor is the Man," says Baby Love. "He got power." The violence Baby Love sees on the screen is not much different from what he faces on the street. He was 13 when he first saw a man blown away--with a shotgun. He has faced down a few gunslingers himself. He sometimes carries a .25 automatic. "All my friends got guns," he says. "We go and try and shoot birds in the park." Trees are beaten to death in ghetto parks. Youngsters, too, get killed on summer evenings when there is disco music in the air. Tough, mean young men shoot it out like Western heroes of old. The dead are dumped in trashed buildings. Some of Baby Love's friends did not live through the summer. A cheeky dude like him risks death or injury every time he steps outside. Being small does not help. He was always getting beaten up until he learned to steal. Now he can bribe would-be assailants with reefer. He sometimes spends $20 a day on the stuff.

On Friday nights the crowds along Fulton and Nostrand avenues ebb and flow like a tide. Dudes are gambling up and down the streets. The sweet smell of reefer is everywhere, and wine bottles are passed around. Up the block, twelve-year-old hookers teeter on high heels, flouncing their boyish hips. There are drunken brawls, skin-and-bone addicts overdosing, police sirens screaming and the rattle of the el in the distance.

A procession of dudes pauses to talk to Baby Love. Most have done hard time. Some push dope, many are boozers. All have bitter wisdom. Crocodile comes by waving a bottle of vodka, his eyes gleaming yellow. He tells Baby Love, "Wait till you do hard time, boy. They'll pat your butt, they'll feel you. You'll come home swishing like a girl." A huge dude, his muscles rippling, speaks in a cool bass: "I got a pah" of $600 lizard shoes and I got silk shirts. I'm the Man, boy. I changes my clothes 15 times a day. Learn to hustle girls, and you can wear dark shades and sharkskin suits and ride a big white Caddy." Riff the horn player sniffs in disgust. "You've got to have dignity, boy, you be nothing without dignity. The only way to beat the Man is be going to school. Go back to school, boy."

Baby Love sneers. He stands up. "I'm goin' get all I wants," he says, "and I don' care if I gotta steal to get it. I'm not afraid of doin' time so long as I kin do it fast." Then he goes up to the clubhouse with Daddy Rich. He lies on a mattress puffing on an El Productocigar hollowed out and filled with chiba chiba. There is a bottle of 150-proof Bacardi rum by his side. The cassette player throbs and, for a moment, Baby Love is warm and secure, at peace and flying high.

Baby Love's real name is Curtis Anthony Devlin. This is the one he uses in family court. "He ain't bad, you understand," says his Aunt Cora. "He just don't like school. And there is no one here he minds." Cora is trying to get Baby Love into a Roman Catholic residential school in upstate New York that specializes in problem children. "But I don't know if he'll stay there. One thing I do know--if he keeps on stealing gold chains he's going to be in a heap of trouble, and that's for sure."

Where did Baby Love go wrong? His mother, Rose, 31, does not deny that she was a drug addict. "I'm an alcoholic too," she adds. She gave up legal custody of her children to Aunt Cora last year. According to Rose, Baby Love's father is an alcoholic, a drug addict and a bisexual. He was doing time at Attica during the prison's 1971 riots, shrugs Rose, and "he flipped his brains. That's why I divorced him." His father beat Baby Love up often with his fists, says Rose, and once he did so with an extension cord. When Baby Love retaliated with a piece of heavy steel pipe, she recalls, his father took him to the police and demanded, futilely, that he be locked up.

Baby Love rebelled against his mother when she started sleeping with other men. He was only five. She says, "My Curtis steals anything he can get. It is my fault. He saw me steal a woman's pocketbook. It had a lot of money in it. Curtis, he gets high on money now. It's all he wants, that an' reefer."

Despite all the stealing, the drugs, the barely suppressed rage, Baby Love can be polite, almost genteel. He is gracious at table; he learned manners from his grandmother. He can keep house, wash dishes, do the marketing and look after his sisters and baby cousin. He is the only one who can get his mother off the streets when she is drugged and nodding. Once, when she nearly overdosed, he dragged her from the kitchen, poured hot and cold water on her feet and burned her arms with a lighted cigarette to revive her.

Baby Love walks with a slight limp. His mother explains that he had a serious accident while playing ball in the streets when he was four. He was run over by a car and his left leg, right arm and most of his ribs were broken. Rose then did one of the few constructive things she has done in her sad life: she sued the driver and got a settlement of $3,000, which is now in trust. Baby Love will get the money when he turns 21. If he lives that long. --By James Wilde

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