Bad choices can kill, Brooklyn writer from projects shows youths in novel
Tuesday, June 29th 2010, 8:03 AM
In the young adult novel "Secret Saturdays," fatherless boys face the lure of violence, drugs and gangs on some of Brooklyn's meanest streets.
It's a world first-time author Torrey Maldonado, 37, knows all too well, having spent his own youth in a Red Hook public housing project.
"I decided to write a book on choices," said Maldonado, now a teacher at Intermediate School 88 in Park Slope. "There were a lot of struggles and a lot of points where I could have been in such a different place than I am now."
Like the half-Puerto Rican, half-African American buddies in his book, Maldonado was raised by a single mother in a neighborhood in which he said boys with an intellectual drive were dismissed as "soft."
"As a male, I was taught to be tough, and the culture of the projects also encourages that behavior," Maldonado said. "One of the constant struggles I faced was family members and people in the neighborhood telling me to 'put down the pen.'"
Maldonado credits his mother, a social worker who ran a GED program, with setting him on the right path. "She tried to buffer me from the neighborhood."
It wasn't always easy.
Unchallenged at PS 27, he frequently ditched class to run wild with friends, and his absences nearly got him held back in the third grade.
Instead, his mother fought to get him transferred to PS 15, led by legendary Principal Patrick Daly, where he knuckled down academically.
There were consequences: In middle school, he was chased and beaten up by a group of former friends who had taken a harder road, he said.
Years later, while a student at Vassar College, he ran into one of them again at an upstate prison where Maldonado was tutoring, and where the young man was doing time for Daly's murder, Maldonado said.
When he began teaching, he saw those same decisions played out over and over again among his students.
He wrote the book hoping they would "see that a lot influences their choices, yet they can make other choices - to be themselves and follow their own path," he said. "I wanted kids to take a walk though familiar settings but see those settings with new lenses."elazarowitz@nydailynews.com
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