Bread and Bread

Working at Homeboy Industries comes with a certain cachet. Most liberal-to-moderate people love the story of the radical priest who rode his bicycle into the middle of gang fights and refused to see gang members as evil incarnate. Today even law enforcement gets the basic axiom that “hurt people hurt people.” In grant applications, I boast about working with the “least likely to succeed.” Tour groups pull up to our headquarters by the busload, partly because people with tattooed faces are still something of a sideshow attraction, but partly because they’re moved by the idea that all these tatted-up gangsters have changed their lives for the better. Sometimes tourists sit for hours in our postage stamp of a garden, listening to stories of pain, confusion, relapse and redemption from literal killers. So it’s hard to remember what things were like back in the day. In 1988, when Homeboy was a tiny jobs program at Dolores Mission Church, gang members were the subject of fear-mongering

Wind River is an intense, beautifully made movie about a hunter and an FBI agent investigating the death of a young woman on a Native American reservation in snow-strangled Wyoming. The landscape is a character in itself, often a villainous one. When 18-year-old Natalie Hansen (Kelsey Asbille) is found barefoot in the snow, six miles from anywhere, raped and bleeding, the medical examiner can’t list homicide as the cause of death because technically the cold killed her. This creates a jurisdictional nightmare, because Agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen) can’t call in FBI assistance unless it’s officially a murder. But there are only six cops (led by Graham Greene, who plays the part with world-weary humor) on the whole reservation, so without backup, the investigation is fucked. Getting the weather report. The snow holds tracks and covers them. Blizzards shut down roads and obscure views. Long shots of snowmobile caravans making their way across a white snow-desert conjure ima

Every few months, a shoebox appears on the reception desk at Homeboy. It’s covered in paper printed with grainy photos. Sharpie or ballpoint pen explains who died: someone’s mother or brother or homie. A few times it has been a trainee, although never one I knew personally. Once it was a baby. Rarely is it anyone over fifty. There’s a slit in the top of the box for folded bills. At this year’s mandatory open-enrollment meeting, our insurance brokers talked about HMOs vs. PPOs, inpatient vs. outpatient, FSAs and co-pays and preventative care and cancer. Everyone watched with glazed eyes. When the brokers got to the life insurance section and mentioned funerals, the room buzzed. Everyone knew exactly how much a funeral cost. I didn’t know Roxy well, but I didn’t have to ask “Which one was she, again? Did she work in the bakery?” The first thing I noticed about Roxy was that she was beautiful—like undeniably, Disney-princess beautiful, with big dark eyes, dimples and long strai