THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020 23
Someone says to me, very glum, ‘I didn’t
do anything.’ No! You did... nothing.
That’s an action. You chose to handle
it. Doing nothing is doing something.
Ignoring someone is reacting to them.”
Afterward, Rivera looked bemused.
“I’m interested in this brick. Nobody
told me about the brick.” He paused.
“I’m glad I didn’t know about the brick.”T
he coronavirus pandemic hit the
Castle hard. Rivera was like a cap-
tain approaching a storm, battening
down the boat while planning to take
the waves broadside. Several residents
contracted COVID-19, and the decision
was made to stop accepting new resi-
dents—a painful departure from long-
standing Fortune Society practice—and
to shelter the entire population in place,
with the positive cases self-quarantining.
The Thursday meeting was moved to
Zoom. To attend remotely was oddly
reassuring in those first panic-stricken
weeks of the pandemic in New York;
having been through so much worse,
and accustomed to enforced isolation,
the Fortune community had a kind of
unfazed gaiety unique among the diffi-
cult interactions of the moment.
Then, in late May, after the standard
announcements of a Thursday meeting,
Rivera said, as smoothly as he could,
“S o, I have an announcement. I sub-
mitted my resignation today.”
There was a brief pause. “Resigna-
tion not accepted!” E. called out, cut-
ting through his usual cool with obvi-
ous pain.
“Resignation not accepted!” Easy called
out, in turn. And the cry went around
the gallery: “Resignation not accepted!”
Rivera tried to quiet them. “Now lis-
ten to me, it’s a decision I’ve made.”
E. was insistent: “You can’t just say
this. You got to explain this shit, man.”
Rivera told them that he was leav-
ing to become the executive director of
a “harm reduction” group, an organiza-
tion that promotes health among drug
addicts and sex workers, providing con-
doms, clean syringes, training in over-
dose reversal, and the like.
Eventually, the residents surrendered,
and began to congratulate him. “I’m
grateful for all you have done to help
me see the world more clearly,” one said.
Rivera was privately equivocal about
the reasons for his departure. Althoughhe disavowed any internal conflict, there
clearly had been complicated feelings
between him and some of the top
people at the Fortune headquarters. “I
would have loved to stay at Fortune,”
he said in early June. He was at home,
wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt and
sitting in front of a picture of the Bud-
dha—an accidental but telling juxta-
position. “But our values just aren’t well
aligned anymore.”
Rivera cited the society’s response to
the protests in New York and across the
country. “In organizations, you have to
be careful not to take a political stand—
but this isn’t political. And Fortune froze.”
He was frustrated that, even though the
staff was almost fifty per cent Black, it
took weeks for its leaders to speak out.
(“I didn’t realize how important it was
to make a statement because I thought
our actions spoke for themselves,” Page
said. “And that was a lesson learned.
We’re now making statements.”)
Still, Rivera admitted that he had
decided to leave long before the pro-
tests started. Conversations with oth-
ers in the organization suggest that
the issue was a familiar one, especially
within nonprofits. Sam Rivera, the char-
ismatic center of the operation, had lit-
tle executive power within it, and over
the years this had created some rubbed-
raw feelings between him and the peo-
ple who did. The same rule that holds
in a small regional theatre holds in a
nonprofit devoted to post-incarcera-
tion transitions: the charismatic figure
wins the allegiance of his clientele, at
the risk of alienating his colleagues,
who, without any malice or even con-
scious envy, become mindful of what
they see as his managerial deficits. Ten-
sion grows between the charismatic
person and the administrators, who
have a clear idea of the dogged and un-
glamorous work required to sustain the
institutional structure.
Page insists that the organization will
go on more or less intact. Angela Scott,
an eight-year veteran of the society, has
replaced Rivera. “I ran Thursday meet-
ing for years, and then Stanley did”—
the Fortune vice-president—“and then
Sam,” Page said. “Now it’s Angela’s turn.”
As with anyone who has left an or-
ganization to which he was devoted, Ri-
vera became more aware of Fortune’s
flaws and fissures in retrospect. “Wewas gonna lose it on this guy.’ What’s
it mean for you?”
“Lose control,” one person said.
“Rage,” another said.
“Rage!” Rivera echoed. “But you’re
gonna lose it. You’re gonna lose your
housing. You’re gonna lose your free-
dom. What causes it?”
One man tried to explain his suspi-
cion that a bunkmate in a homeless shel-
ter had taken money from his backpack.
“It’s hard coming from doing a whole lot
of time. You’re bunked with someone and
you know you’re getting robbed,” he said.
“And it’s hard, because, if you were up-
state or in another situation, you would
have acted in another way. We live in our
own minds. Man is mind. We first get
out—we’re getting that comfortability
back—and it’s hard to lose it, because
you live in a room with it. I spent more
of my life in prison than free. It’s hard.”
Rivera grew gentler: “Can I talk about
that? Your voice changed. I heard it.”
“It’s hard having something taken
from you. My life style—I’m not proud
of it—but I was a stickup kid my whole
life. I’m not used to having anyone take
anything from me. There’s nothing you
could do.”
“Here’s the deal,” Rivera said. “There’s
something you could do and you chose
not to. Don’t dismiss that, man! You
should be, like, this should be a celebra-
tion, man. Like, for real—‘I did that, and
I didn’t do what I would normally do.’
We all know what we could do. Many of
us have done it. Take the power—I chose
not to do that this time.” He glided into
the next thought. “Was anyone around
this week when I got stepped to?”
“When you got what?” Rothenberg
asked.
“David needs help—what is ‘step to’ ?”
“Someone came at him very aggres-
sive,” one person explained.
“He had a brick!” someone else added.
When a client had confronted him,
Rivera hugged the man, literally, until
the confrontation ended. The possibil-
ity of violence in the building had shaken
everyone.
Rivera hadn’t seen the brick, and was
startled to learn about it: “He pulled
out a brick? For real? Let’s hold that,
because I definitely want to know about
this brick. But I want to come back to
you, brother. Sometimes doing nothing
is the best decision we can make, right?