Dramatic Rescue
Torres’s own family was in trouble. When his mom and dad weren’t fighting, they weren’t around at all. His dad put in long hours as an auto mechanic while his mom worked on an assembly line putting together hearing aids; the plant on Austin was an hour-long commute from their home near 91st and Stony Island. When Torres was in junior high his parents sent him to live with his aunt in Humboldt Park, but he got homesick after a year and a half and moved back in with his folks. He started going to Bowen High School at 89th and the Skyway and found the school divided into three warring camps: white, black, and Latino. Not that the Latinos were united; the Mexicans, many of whom came from families that had lived on the south side since World War I, treated Torres and his Puerto Rican friends as interlopers.
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Most of the time they would just cut class and hang out at the park. “Police officers would come around and say, ‘What are you doing? You’re supposed to be in class.’ And you’d run.” This was in the late 70s, and when his gang fought, Torres claims, they fought with chains. “If there was a gun, one person was allowed to carry the gun and that was it. That was just in case someone from the other side had a gun.”
A week after the stabbing, Torres’s gang planned to skip school and “figure out some payback.” But that day a theater troupe was performing at Bowen, and Torres found himself being herded from homeroom directly to the school auditorium. He figured, “I’ll go to the auditorium, and then I’ll leave before we go in.” At the entrance Torres saw people unloading some lighting equipment from a truck, then a set piece. “I was very curious,” Torres recalls. “OK, I thought, I’ll go in and see what they’re doing and then I’ll leave.”
