What It’s Like To Have Your Face Slashed

Scarred for Life

We were classmates throughout junior high school and high school, Jose and I. Thrown together in 6th grade shop class, and with similar interests in music and television, we quickly became friends. Not best friends, but we were cool. As we got older, we both accumulated other ‘friends,’ and while we still gave each other a pound and headnod in the hallway, we weren’t exactly BFFs.

Jose became just someone I knew.

One day, in 1998, when we were juniors at Port Richmond High School, in Staten Island, Jose showed up with what seemed like a never-ending line of stitches on his face. They ran the length of his cheek from his right ear to the corner of his mouth. It was clear that someone had slashed him. Maybe it was done with a razor blade, a box cutter or maybe a knife. I didn’t know. I just knew that he was a victim, and that he’d likely wear that scar for life.

“I got jumped by a bunch of Bloods,” he told me in the cafeteria, brushing off the attack in a showy bit of machismo. “It’s whatever. I’ll see them again.”

I left it at that— ask no questions, hear no lies— and never really wondered about what happened to those gang members, whether Jose got his revenge or what. Eventually his stitches came out and he returned to normal. Whatever normal was for him. He was just someone I knew who had some shit happen to him, because shit happens to people. You grow up in a certain type of environment, and there’s a lot of those people. You might even be one of them yourself.

Years passed by, we both grew up and life took us in presumably different directions. Jose would not be the only person I’d encounter who had his face slashed— a Buck 50, in ‘urban’ slang, because it requires 150 stitches to close— but I never asked anyone any questions about it. A Buck 50 is not a scar you feel comfortable asking about, because you don’t want to make a person feel funny about the fact that it happened to them. I just assumed it was usually a case of wrong place, wrong time, or something like that. I never really stopped to think about what kind of affect that scar might have on a person’s life. How it can shape their being. It’s their face, their presentation to the world, essentially.

In my early twenties, I still lived at home, and occasionally shopped at one of those big name pharmacy-cum-grocery stores that line so many of our streets these days. I would usually go in there late at night to buy some snacks or whatever, and one day I saw Jose behind the register. It was about 3 AM and he was literally the only person in the entire store besides me. He asked how I was doing. I told him I was well. He said the same. I paid for my 2-pound bag of cherry Twizzlers and kept it moving.

A few months ago I was visiting my father, and needed to go to the store for something. We went together. It was evening, not the middle of the night though, and yet here he was, still working at the same place— my old friend Jose. Again, we exchanged pleasantries, and I didn’t think much about this occurrence. I was just concerned with getting back to my dad’s house and continuing whatever it was we were doing. Eating, or something.

One day, weeks later, I was on a NJ Transit train and when the conductor came to punch a hole in my ticket, I realized that he had some sort of facial deformity. It looked like he may have been affected by an acid burn. I had all sorts of questions floating around in my head. I wanted to ask him about what happened, but not in a way that would make him feel uncomfortable. I was just genuinely curious about the story behind his scars. I wondered if anyone ever asked him, or if, like me, they were too afraid of hurting his feelings to do so. I got off the train without saying a word.

But because I saw the conductor with scars on his face, it got me thinking about people I knew who had been tragically scarred. My mind instantly thought back to everyone I knew who had been in some sort of street fight, and who had the physical scars to show for those harrowing experiences. It got me thinking about my own scars, and how I may have covered them up. It got me thinking about Jose.

A week passed by and as I was driving home from Manhattan one night, I stopped at a Shop-Rite in the middle of Staten Island to pick up some groceries. It was late again, around 3 AM, and I didn’t imagine that I’d see anyone I knew. I rarely do. But when I got on the line, the person ahead of me looked back, and I realized it was my old pal— Jose. Again, we did that dance where we say what’s up and opt to just not talk much. What would we really have to talk about now anyway? He paid and began to walk away.

“Hey Jose,” I called out. “Hang back a sec. I want to talk to you about something.”

He slowed his footing and waited for me to pay for my stuff. I grabbed my bags and began to walk out with him. Fifteen years later, I was going to ask him about what happened during one unfortunate day, in one unfortunate moment, in his otherwise decent life.

“Let me ask you something, and I hope this doesn’t come off the wrong way,” I said. “That scar on your face. I remember that happening when we were in high school. What really happened?”

And then he began his story. He was walking down the street one day in Mariners Harbor, not far from where he lived, and not terribly far from where we went to school. He was a few blocks away from the public housing projects there, blocks that he’d walked down a million times, as he’d grown up in the area. But on this day, he happened to be wearing the wrong color. He was wearing red, and that was a big no-no.

Back in the late 90s, the Bloods had just made their way to New York and were beginning to infiltrate the pockets of impoverished areas throughout the city where gangs typically propagate. On Staten Island, kids who in years prior would ordinarily ‘click up’ in loosely-oriented street gangs, were now starting their own ‘sets’ of Bloods. Many were anxious to make names for themselves.

So on that fateful day, as Jose happily trod down the street— wearing a red shirt, despite having no intention of joining a gang or being down with one— he was made an example of.

“They jumped me,” Jose explained. “Ten Bloods. They held me down, pinned my arms on the ground, and then one of them cut my face with a razor blade. They left me there.”

He was left beaten and bloodied, perhaps to die. He managed to somehow get up and get help.

We were both only 16-years-old at the time, so I was interested in how his parents reacted. He told me they took him to the hospital, and they were concerned, but there was ultimately not that much they could do. What could they do, really? It’s not like they could just pack up and move to a better neighborhood.

“Did you ever see any of those kids again?” I asked. “What did you do?”

“I did what I had to do,” Jose said. “The main kid— the one who cut me— I saw him out somewhere not that long afterward and I stabbed him up. And that was that.“

I wasn’t that sure if I believed what he told me. He’s posturing, I thought. Jose always seemed like a good kid, and though looks can be deceiving, I don’t remember him having that “I’m going to stab you” vibe. He was too chill. Also, had he done that back then, I imagine things would have quickly spiraled out of control, and that we might not have been standing in a parking lot on this hot summer night. He couldn’t stab a member of the Bloods and have them not finish what they’d already started on his face. Because that’s how that narrative always seems to go.

“Looking back, I’m not sure if that was the right reaction,” he continued, without prodding. “If saw that kid today, I might not try to stab him. I don’t know what I’d do. Would I want to kill him? I might. I just don’t know.”

I wondered if people ever asked him about the scar on his face. If he ever thought about it. What it symbolized for him. How it changed him. He was just a kid then. His whole life was ahead of him.

“I’m not in a position where I meet a whole bunch of new people every day,” he explained. “I’ve been working at the same place for ten years, so me having this scar is just something I have to the people who know me. I see it in the mirror when I wake up. It’s a part of me.”

And then he told me something that really answered a lot of what I wanted to know. That his scar wasn’t just physical, it hadn’t just placed itself smack right there on his face. Sure, that was there and wasn’t going anywhere, but the attack left him scarred on a much deeper level.

“Until this day— even though I probably haven’t talked about it or even thought about it in years, until you asked— that experience affects me,” he said. “Because that happened, I’m probably not an outgoing person now. And when I’m around big crowds, I tend to feel very uncomfortable. Because something bad can happen. I’m not afraid. But you never know, right?”

Having had my own traumatic experiences— perhaps not quite in the same vein— I told him I knew just what he was talking about.

“It’s good to see you, man,” I said.

“You too,” he replied.

Jose got in his car and drove off into the night. I got into mine and did the same.

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