This is a story in progress, because it’s a story of a life. That life has been largely criminal. And although the man at its center says he wants his life to be different from now on, this is not a feel-good tale. Not yet.
I met Donte Keeton while covering Occupy Long Beach’s Mayday protest march, during which I asked several people along the group’s downtown route for their impressions. A polite, smartly-dressed young man was gathering petition signatures near the courthouse as the marchers passed by. Somehow my questions led him to reveal that he was a convicted felon, recently released from prison, working to get his life on track.
His seeming earnestness and his willingness to be forthcoming intrigued me. Two weeks later I asked for the unvarnished truth, which he delivered. He’s neither hero nor victim in the way he unpacks his life history, just someone who did not react well to difficult origins, and who now seems to want to do better.
Will he? That’s up to time and chance. And Donte Keeton.
***
Sadly, it’s an inner-city upbringing common almost the point of cliché. Drug-addicted mother. Multiple children. Multiple fathers, none of them involved in their children’s lives. Off-and-on homelessness. Grandparents picking up the slack.
“She always had drug problems as long as I remember,” Donte says of his mother. “It was from living with my mother where I got a lot of my life experience from.” He recalls “the funny smells in the bathroom when I was 4 or 5,” which he later understood to be crack. “We’d be in hotel rooms, and she’d come out of the bathroom looking funny.”
She was dead before he started high school. “I’d say I got really introverted [at that point],” he says, “paid attention less in school.”
It didn’t help matters that a childhood spent largely in the Valley — interspersed with stints at his grandparents’ in Compton and a women’s shelter in Long Beach — led to his being teased by his Compton High schoolmate for “talking like a white boy. […] Kids in Compton are a lot more aggressive. […] You gotta learn to adjust. […] I used to get in fights a lot.”
Donte tried to keep his head down. He eschewed gangs for sports, a combination that led to his being chased home one day because he beat out a gang member for a spot on the varsity baseball team.
Eventually he could no longer cope with Compton life. “I tried to talk to my grandmother one day and tell her, ‘I just can’t go to this school no more,'” he says. “But she didn’t want me to go nowhere else, so I ended up checking myself out of school, forging a fake paper of emancipation to legally check myself out of school. And I just never checked back in.”
That was Donte’s junior year. A substitute teacher who had befriended him allowed him to stay with her for a few months, but then her house went into foreclosure.
“And that’s when I hit the streets hard,” he says. “[Prior to that,] I might have been stealing stuff out of stores here or there, but it became a whole different world, know what I mean? Because I met some people who were full-fledged gang members, and I was hanging out with them.”
Although he never officially joined any gang, he was living the life, stealing cars and selling them. “That kind of where I developed the lifestyle of being addicted to fast money,” he says. “I went from being 17 and always being poor to going to the mall and buying $2,000 worth of clothes. So I spent the next couple of years just ridiculously focused on that, like, ‘Oh, I gotta get money.’ I’ve done everything, honestly: I’ve robbed, stolen out of stores; I’ve been a pimp; I sold drugs, almost every drug imaginable….”
Stints in county jail followed, then prison. But for Donte the legal consequences for his transgressions were insufficient deterrents: “It didn’t register that what I was doing was wrong, because I’d be back on the streets with a pocketful of money again, new car again, you know, so….”
But that changed when he came home in 2005. Donte was living in a hotel in downtown L.A. selling drugs, when he met Rachel, a drug addict with $600,000 in the bank (a wrongful-death suit related to the loss of her father). She quickly became his girlfriend, and the two were together for almost two years.
“I blew through, like, a hundred thousand dollars of her money before she asked me what I wanted to do,” he says. She gave him money to start a music production and photography business, which proved successful. “I had just bought a home in Seattle and had my own business running for a year,” he says, “so I had started slowing down.”
But old habits die hard, and Donte kept his hand in the game, still focused on money and flash.
“Being in the streets, there are some parts of it that are really fun,” he says. “When I sold dope, it’s like being a ghetto superstar. […] I’ve had so many new cars and bought thousands and thousands upon thousands of dollars in jewelry. I’ve always been a real flamboyant person; I like to be seen. […] Because I didn’t have nothing growing up, it was a big deal to be having things.”
Ironically, Donte ended up back in jail for a parole violation unrelated to criminal intent: in Washington he had taken up hunting, and during a routine traffic stop in L.A. his hunting crossbow — considered a deadly weapon, the possession of which violated one of the terms of his parole — was found in the back of his truck.
During his 10-month jail sentence (during which Rachel succumbed to her addiction), Donte felt he had come to prefer honest work. But upon his release he was not able to secure employment, and he backslid and was busted again — this time for robbery, which got him four years in jail. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he blew his chance to receive firefighter training when his girlfriend got caught trying bring him meth, which garnered nine months in solitary confinement for him and a four-month jail term for her.
“When my girl got all that time, it made me realize, like, […] I was still trying to be slick,” he says. “[…] Even though I cared for her, I realized I wasn’t really loving her the way I should, because I put her in a situation where she could get in trouble, because I was thinking I could always be slicker. […] So I started thinking, like, ‘How much is it going to take before I get my life taken away and I’m behind bars forever?’ [… And] when I put her in the line of fire, it made me be like, ‘Man, not only am I fucking up my life, I’m fucking up hers.'”
Donte says it was then he started to remake himself. He earned his GED in prison, scoring in the 90th percentile even though his preparation consisted only of two weeks brushing up on math skills. “That made me be, like, ‘Man, you actually are a little smarter than you thought you were,’ you know?” he says. “So when I was in jail, I started actually dreaming, making goals for myself again. […] I figured if I had a business once, I could do it again.”
But first things first. He knew upon his release in April that he would be lucky to land any job at all, so when one of Donte’s high-school friends hooked him up with the job gathering signatures, he was glad for the opportunity.
“It’s hard, because it’s real humbling,” he admits. “But I’ve been through so much worse than coming up to people and asking them to sign petitions. As long as I feel like I’m doing something legit, I’m okay.”
His parole officer, John Lee, agreed to speak with me about Donte only because he believes Donte is in earnest about finally trying to walk the proverbial straight-and-narrow.
“I call a duck a duck and a goose a goose,” Lee says. “If he was garbage, I would tell you, ‘No comment,’ you know? […] He seems focused and is trying to earn his way. […] So far, so good. […] He’s dealing with the normal struggles of all parolees right now: bad economy, prison record, very little state resources to assist [him]. [… The signature-gathering job] let’s me know that he’s trying. Something is better than nothing. He has the pride to do take whatever opportunities are available to him.”
Lee does not sugarcoat the difficulties that will confront Donte for a long time to come.
“I tell my guys that [job] applications go in three stacks: high-school grads, college grads, and people who have to check that box that says, ‘Felony.’ [… Moreover,] you have people with degrees working at Burger King right now.”
Lee laments the lack of resources available to help parolees transition back into society, a lack that he feels is often the difference between some of his charges being able to hack it on the outside. That’s one of the reasons he gives them his personal cell-phone number, inviting them to call him any time with a real problem. “‘I’d rather talk you off the cliff than write a report on you,'” he relates telling them. “My goal is not to send people back to prison; my goal is to keep them out of there.”
Lee’s best advice to people like Donte is to distance themselves from the people and places where in the past they have found trouble.
“Like my dad told me, everything comes down to location, location, location,” Lee says. “If you’re in the same place doing the same stuff, you’re going to get yourself involved in the same (excuse my French) shit. [… Moving forward] comes down to focus and patience. If it was easy to be rich, everyone would be rich. Nothing worthwhile is easy.”
Donte talks as if he gets this now, but he realizes real change is an ongoing commitment to a different lifestyle — a commitment that will not always be easy.
“Now it’ll be 9 o’clock at night and I’ll be in bed with my girl watching some regularly-scheduled program, and I’ll know that somewhere in one of the places I used to be is action,” he says. “But I have to enjoy being still and being comfortable with myself.”
He would like to start a nonprofit to help at-risk youth, putting to good use his own difficult upbringing and subsequent bad life choices.
“Twelve to 16 is, like, the most pivotal stage for a lot of minority kids, especially males,” he says. “I didn’t have any real role models […] I have a lot of little nieces, and I can hear them trying to run game on my grandmother. I know where they’re going before they get there. [… For me,] a strong male role model would have made a world of difference. […] If I had had someone sitting me down and teaching me, ‘This is what a man’s supposed to do….’ I’d been calling myself a man for a long time because I thought [that] since I raised myself that I was a man, that [the fact that] I’d done and seen so much makes me a man. But it doesn’t, you know what I mean? Now, at the age of 28, I feel like I’m just becoming a real man.”
***
There is no happy ending here, not yet. Donte says that currently he is looking into starting college, and he just landed a telemarketing job. But he has too much history to fool himself into believing the choice to become a productive member of society is anything but an ongoing one — a choice that may not always be as easy as he’d like.
“I’ll see a nice car and I’ll think, ‘Man, I could be in that in three months,'” he admits. “But it’s not worth the risk. […] The risk and reward is not the same to me now as it was when I was younger.”
Donte will probably never read Being and Nothingness, but he would have no problem relating to Sartre’s description of the man who has forsworn gambling, only to realize as he passes the gaming table that his oath, no matter how sincerely made, has no power to bar him from placing a bet:
[The oath] stands behind me like a boneless phantom. It depends on me alone to lend it flesh. I am alone and naked before temptation as I was the day before.
Whether Donte Keeton falls back into his old ways or progresses down a different path will be determined not by his words or history, but by what the man does.