The steel door to our apartment was my security blanket. Behind it I was safe from the school castrator. I was safe from muggers. I was safe from other kids. My fear of assault was as constant as the bellowing of my lungs; I was only occasionally aware of it, only when it had ceased to be breathing and turned into panting.

My mother had instructed my sister and me over and over again about what to do in certain emergency situations. This preparing for the worst made me more afraid on a day-to-day basis, but that was part of her point. She had programmed us with a series of computer-like algorithms. “Do whatever someone with a gun says to do,” was one of her instructions, “unless they tell you to get into a car. Never get into a car with anyone. Run or scream.” Another stricture: “Always lock the door. Never open it until you have a) asked who it is, b) looked through the peephole, c) recognized who it is, or d) seen that it’s the police.”

Not until I encountered people who grew up with unlocked screen doors did I realize that not everyone lived most of their waking hours behind a steel barricade. Not until I met people who lived in one- or two-story homes did I realize that most kids don’t worry about beer bottles raining down on their heads from the balconies above, as I did on Friday and Saturday nights. Taking out the garbage, I always opened the door to the incinerator room with trepidation, terrified that someone would pounce on me. When I picked up the laundry from the washing machines in the basement, there was occasionally a character lurking in the shadows–and not merely one from a child’s imagination. In these instances I would scurry up the stairs to the lobby and wait for the elevator there rather than sit in the basement with the potential predator. Often I told my mother about these shadowy figures, and she would summon the authorities to go down and inspect the scene; sometimes arrests were made. If an elevator stopped and I didn’t like the look of the person inside I wouldn’t get on, feigning that it was going in the wrong direction. But the place I feared most of all was the stairwell–and with good reason, for more than once someone was raped or mugged in there.

Whenever all the elevators were broken, I would have to walk all twenty-one flights of that windowless cement hole. On some floors the lights were out, and I would transverse a story or two in complete blackness. Other times I would force myself to confront my fear, choosing the stairwell instead of the elevator for a flight or two. The gray, graffitied fire route wove itself into my nightmares. I dreamed I was trapped in it; I was fleeing something, my legs tiring with each passing moment, and there were no exits.

By early in my childhood I had cultivated a keen sense of caution probably not unlike that developed by soldiers in the bush. Walking down the street, I had an awareness of what was going on around me that someone who grew up in the suburbs would have had great difficulty acquiring. However, several events kept my illusions of my own streetwiseness and security in check. The first came when a family was robbed and killed a few blocks from us. The assailants gained entry to the victims’ house by dressing up as policemen. That changed my mother’s door-opening rule; I was now to keep the police waiting until I had called the station to confirm that they had been sent over.

The second event happened to us and completely shattered my sense of our apartment as a fortress. One weekend we went to visit my grandparents and left the kitchen window open. On the twenty-first floor this should not have been a problem, the biggest risk being that rain might come through the window. However, a cat burglar tied the fire hose to the railing around the perimeter of the roof and swung into our apartment. Once inside, he ignored the sticker my mother had posted that read BEWARE, WE PARTICIPATE IN OPERATION IDENTIFICATION, NYPD and waltzed out the front door loaded down with our belongings, which my mother had etched with a secret code that the police could track in the case of an event such as this one. The burglar must have made several trips, because he took our television, our radio, the silverware that my parents had gotten as a wedding present, our plates and glasses, even a couple of pieces of furniture. When we got back from Pennsylvania, we saw the door ajar. My father made the rest of us wait in the hallway while he tiptoed into the apartment. He surveyed the damage, noticed the open kitchen window, slammed it shut, and locked it. My stairwell nightmares were soon replaced by bad dreams about a robber floating twenty-one stories above ground, hovering outside our window. In my dreams he looked like José, the overdose victim portrayed on the Avenue D mural. He had the same goatee and devilish smile.

Not much later the burglar struck again. We returned from a trip to find the door once again ajar, this time with a trail of blood leading over to the window, which we had closed and locked. That, however, had not deterred this daredevil. He used the same tactic as the first time, but on this occasion crashed through the window glass like the star of an action film. There wasn’t much left to steal, so he took the few bottles of wine my father kept. We went to a friend’s home for a few nights while my father slept in the apartment, hoping to catch the robber and bean him with his Ted Williams baseball bat, but the crook never returned.

My parents decided that the only thing we could do was to install gates in the windows. Unfortunately, they ran in the thousands of dollars, money that we didn't have. The cheapest alternatives, which cost several hundred dollars – most of our savings – were black steel bars that were bolted into the window frame and could not be removed except by taking apart the entire window jamb. From then on we lived in a prison-like apartment unit, wriggling our hands through the bars whenever we wanted to open or shut the window.

Thanks to their days on Seventh Street, when their television was chained to the radiator, my parents were familiar with being robbed. But this was the first time it had happened to me. Crime and violence were not uncommon in our area, but they always seemed to happen elsewhere and, I believed, could be avoided, like the beer bottles falling from the sky. Even the castrations at school didn’t feel like a personal threat; I merely had to avoid the bathroom to avoid danger. But the prospect of someone crashing through our twenty-first-floor window was frightening on another level. It meant I was not even safe in my own bed, not even behind our locked double-steel front door. In short, there was nothing I could do to escape risk. Only in retrospect did I realize that break-ins were not a common occurrence for most families in America and that having bars on the windows was not normal.

But in our case it was necessary. After we installed the bars, my nightmares finally waned. I felt protected from the outside world. I also felt safer playing indoors; prior to the window guards, I had always been nervous whenever my friends and I played catch or tackle football or tag in the house. I feared one of us would hurl ourselves through the window or, more realistically, toss a ball or toy through the glass and kill a pedestrian all those stories below.

Often I hung on those black bars, my hands gripping them so tightly that the cartilage of my knuckles shone white through my skin, as I stared down at the other project kids playing whiffle ball or ring-a-levio or manhunt. Manhunt was my favorite project game, and I would cross the barrier of the bars anytime to play. While kids could play caps or ring-a-levio throughout the entire year, manhunt was reserved for the hottest months. The game was simple. One person was selected as the hunted. He got a fifteen-minute head start and could hide anywhere in the housing complex. Soon afterward, the several dozen or so boys would go out in search of the hunted. The prey could not go into apartments but had to stay in the public spaces such as hallways, alleys and rooftops. If no one found him the game could last all day.

After a year or two of playing manhunt I got quite skilled at it. I enjoyed being hunted, outwitting kids several years older than myself. In fact, I was only ever caught once, and that was the last day I played. I was supposed to be cleaning up my room. Instead I sneaked out of the apartment around the time I knew manhunt would be commencing. I immediately volunteered for the role of the hunted, and when the game started I took off to the project basements, which were linked into one huge, dimly lit cavern. My strategy for that day was simple: I hid in a dark corner of one of the less well-known rooms in the basement, shimmying up the pipes and perching overhead, careful not to touch the steam conduits that would have scalded me. Several times I heard approaching footsteps and whispers and held my breath, but for the most part this was a quite relaxing, even boring, tactic. It lacked the heart-pounding adrenaline rush that came with an on-the-move strategy, where one always stayed just a step ahead of the posse. I was so well hidden that at one point that day I even took a nap, checking my watch every so often as I waited for the five o'clock hour to approach, signaling the end of the game and victory for me.

My mother spoiled my plans, however. Furious that I had disobeyed her by sneaking out, she stormed into the central area of the project, grabbed the first kid she saw and demanded to know where I was.

“I dunno,” responded Angel, who despite his name and his timid answer was one of the tougher kids around. “We’re looking for where he’s at, too.” She listened as he recounted the rules of the game to her. Then he ran off and reported his encounter to some of the other kids. A group of them collected around my mother, following her like a brood as she stalked me–and trampled on the entire premise of the game. She marched into the central security office and asked if she could sit in front of the video monitors. Aided by her maternal instincts, she watched as the images flickered across the screens, one after another. Eventually she recognized my figure and asked the guard to freeze on that shot. The guard explained to my mother exactly where I had installed myself and how to get there, and then she descended into the basement to retrieve me, trailed by the manhunters, who were eager to watch me get a whipping.

I wish she had hit me. I heard the sound of a whole bunch of footsteps coming toward me. “Oh snap,” I remember hearing one of the kids say. “Now he’s going to get it.” Somehow I knew instantly that this was no mere pack of kids that had come to win the game or even to beat me senseless. I could feel my mother’s presence. I turned to see who was approaching and made immediate eye contact with her.

“This instant,” she said, and nothing more.

The kids surrounding her were all shaking their hands rapidly, our signal for someone getting busted. “Ooooh,” they said as they made this gesture, which looked as if they were trying to signal the spiciness of something they had just bitten into.

I hung down from one of the pipes and dropped to the ground. My mother immediately grabbed me by the ear and dragged me alongside her. Instead of weaving our way to our own building in the underground passageways, she took the first stairs she saw out of the basement and into the bright June light. Kids followed, taunting me. “You lost, you lost to your momma!” they yelled as she dragged me through the playgrounds so that everyone could see. We passed the coach of my little league baseball team, Los Piratas, who was sitting on the bench, smoking his menthol cigarettes. Right then and there she gave me my punishment: she wrapped her arms around me and gave me a big kiss, overemphasizing the smacking sound of her pucker. I ran home and cleaned up my room. The pleasure of manhunt had been forever spoiled.

In retrospect, manhunt was not a strange game for us to be playing. Unlike baseball or football, it taught us important skills for life in the “ghetto.” It trained the hunted to evade both criminals and the police, who in that neighborhood were deemed equivalent. And it socialized the hunters to adopt a posse mentality, one that would become institutionalized among those who joined the local gang, the Junior Outlaws. It may have been through this sense of group unity that my peers achieved the sense of security that forever eluded me.

This is not to say that I didn’t try to integrate and hold my own in the group. I studied karate with the express purpose of becoming tough enough to feel secure. My father and I took lessons from a black Muslim sensei named Rahim, formerly Robert. He had worked in the Brooklyn shipyards when there still was such a thing, scraping and painting the sides of huge vessels. He spent some time in jail and smoked marijuana on a daily basis. Robert became Rahim after taking up martial arts, studying with a Muslim sensei who inspired a life change in his pupil. Rahim quit his job, stopped smoking pot, and devoted his life to the Koran, supporting himself in a haphazard, catch-as-catch-can manner.

We were Rahim’s only white pupils, and I think he might have had reservations about sharing his skills with us but needed whatever work he could get. I encountered some cultural confusion during our training; each time he bent down to pray in the direction of Mecca I thought he was doing something karate-related, perhaps a stretch of some sort. Following his lead, I got in the habit of laying out a towel before each session, kneeling and bending until my forehead touched the ground, and mumbling as if I were reciting some of the Koran. Neither Rahim nor my father ever discouraged the practice. It came in handy when Rahim took us to a tournament in a huge mosque and cultural center in Brooklyn. I was overwhelmed from the moment I arrived; I had never seen a ceiling so high. The strange calligraphy that lined each entranceway and the low-relief designs that crawled up the walls and columns like vines seemed to grow and breathe in some mystical way. As Rahim escorted us into the mat-covered arena, some people stared at us through narrowed eyes as they noticed our whiteness. Everyone else was black; there were not even any Puerto Ricans at this event.

Then the call to prayer came over the loudspeaker, and the milling around ceased instantly; everyone fell into orderly lines. This transformation impressed on me the power of Islam – that a chaotic, seemingly menacing group of people could suddenly organize themselves into perfect rows, like schoolchildren more disciplined than any I had ever seen. Even my anti-religious father fell into line, and we all bowed to Mecca. The familiarity of this rite felt comforting, and once it had taken place the aura of tension dissipated, replaced by a sense of spirited competition. I won in the first round but lost in the second of the single-elimination tournament, but that was good enough. I had earned my yellow belt.

Though I had moved up a rank in the karate hierarchy, my association with Rahim did not achieve the intended purpose of making me feel safer and more secure in the neighborhood, and for a simple reason: within a year Rahim was shot and killed. Evidently, even a black belt did little against a gun; in fact, it may have been a detriment. By the account of his widow, Rahim had resisted a mugging, using his fighting ability to fend off his attackers until one of them pulled out a pistol and shot him. Somehow I imagined him dressed up in his karate gi, and being picked on because of his garb the way I was when I wore my outfit down in the playground. Others who knew him shook their heads and whispered to my father that he had been shot twice in the head at point-blank range. For once I listened quietly, discovering that I could learn more by not asking anything than by opening my mouth. The implication was that this had been no random robbery but that Rahim had been assassinated for a reason: drugs.

This was the first time that violence had entered our lives in a serious, personal way. I tried to envision Rahim lying motionless, dead, but I could keep him still in my mind only for as long as I imagined he could hold his breath; after about a minute he would spring up, gasping for air. I suppose they held a memorial service for him in the same mosque where my father and I had fought for our new belt colors, but we were never invited; not having seen his corpse, I still could not quite clothe Rahim in death. Eventually, I asked my father which story about the killing he believed. He raised his eyebrows at me, apparently shocked that I had heard the adult whispers going back and forth above my head. “I don’t know,” he said. “There are some things that we will never know.” He rubbed the scar tissue of his face and punched the plastic keys of his calculator a little harder than normal. My father always said more with his silences, his pauses, and the movement of his fingers to his face than he did with his words. He communicated the mystery and uncertainty of life in a way that my mother never could.

I wanted to think that Rahim had been the victim of random fate, of chaotic violence; however, this explanation seemed as forced and restless as my image of his corpse itself. Somehow I had already developed a keen sense that crime and violence in our neighborhood were not random at all but followed certain patterns. The great, dangerous they who committed crimes were neither unthinking nor uncalculating. Why, for instance, didn’t the cat burglar break into Kenny’s apartment down the hall instead of ours? Was it because we were white?

This innate sense that a larger order undergirded all the murders and stabbings and break-ins made them all the more eerie, as if they followed the scripted steps of a ballroom waltz. I wanted to believe Rahim’s widow’s version of events, but I couldn’t. At the same time, it didn’t sit right with me that his devotion to the Koran had been a sham, a lie to himself and to us. It sickened me to realize that the most disciplined, upstanding man I knew might have been involved in something illicit. It was as if the ordered rows of worshippers at the mosque had dissolved back into a noisy throng–that everything, not just Rahim, contained within it its opposite. It didn’t help that my father wouldn’t tell me definitively what had happened or that no one was ever prosecuted or even arrested for the crime. This lack of resolution gave me my first unsettling taste of powerlessness in the face of uncertainty. Rahim’s death preyed on my sense of morality like a dark lesion. Before it, there were lies and there was truth, but I always knew which was which and figured others did as well. But in this case no one would ever know what really happened; it was merely a matter of what each individual chose to believe. There were two truths, and there were none.