True Notebooks

by Mark Salzman

  “OK, Mr. Strong, in your experience investigating street gangs, in particular Crips, have you ever heard the expression ‘What’s up, cuz?’ before?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what does that mean to you?”

  “Well, it could mean several things. If this particular Crip is in his own neighborhood and he sees one of his fellow gang members, then ‘What’s up, cuz?’ could be just like a greeting, like Hi, how you doing or what’s going on. If he were to meet someone he wasn’t sure who they were, it’s a way of announcing who he is and what area they’re in. So depending on what their response is it would be something different.

  “It can also be given out as a challenge. If he sees someone he knows of a rival gang or rival neighborhood, that could be a definite challenge that something is going to jump off.”

  “And what do you mean by ‘that something is going to jump off’?”

  “If it’s somebody he’s had trouble with before or somebody he’s after and he’s confronting them, it’s like ‘What’s up, cuz?’ and it would be an immediate gun battle at that point.”

  “What would it mean if some Crip asks someone he thinks is a Blood, ‘What’s up, cuz?,’ and he had chased him with a gun on another occasion?”

  “It would tell me that either he was determined or he meant that he was going to do someone harm, that other person.”

  “With a gun?”

  “Well, I would assume so. Most every gang incident within, Jesus, California and other states is involving a gun. Very seldom it does not.”

  When it came her turn to cross-examine the witness, Ms. Rose leapt on the key part of his testimony:

  “I’m just trying to get this straight. You’re saying that between a Crip and a Blood, all assaults involve a firearm?”

  “That or a knife. Pretty much all the time, I would say. Yeah.”

  When she asked him to estimate the percentage of crimes involving gangs in which a weapon was used, he gave her the figure of 90 to 95 percent. She turned to the jury and stared as if she couldn’t believe what she had just heard, then promised to show that this claim—along with his claim that the phrase “What’s up, cuz?” usually led to gunfire—was ludicrous.

  Mr. Kinion kept his redirect examination brief. Referring to a case they had both worked on ten years earlier, when Mr. Strong was the investigating officer, Mr. Kinion asked, “Do you remember whether or not this was a Crip shooting, a Crip shot a Blood in a drive-by?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what was the words that Mr. Johnson used before he shot the victim in that case?”

  “What’s up, cuz.”

  Kevin’s lawyer turned to face the judge. “That’s all I have. Your honor, at this time if the court pleases, the defendant will rest.”

  Will rest? I assumed I must have heard him wrong; he couldn’t be finished. He had called only one witness, someone who was not even connected to the case on trial. Wasn’t Kevin going to testify?

  The prosecutor called Detective Mason back to the stand for a rebuttal. She reminded the jury that he had been with the Torrance police department for over thirty years, and was still working there, unlike Mr. Strong, who had been retired for more than six years. She asked Mason if he had done any gang sweeps, where the police round up suspected gang members and search them, at the very mall where the crime had taken place. Yes, he answered, he had supervised many gang sweeps there.

  “Were any guns ever recovered in any of those sweeps?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever worked crimes against persons, for example, not rising to the level of homicides?”

  “Yes, I have.” He described a recent incident where a bunch of Crips and Bloods got into an argument, tried to ram each other with their cars, then got out of the cars and fought with their bare hands. Several of the Bloods were beaten so severely they had to be hospitalized, but no guns had been used.

  She asked if he knew of any fistfights that had been preceeded by someone using the phrase, “What’s up, cuz?”

  “Some of them were, yes.”

  “And those didn’t involve shootings?”

  “No.”

  After that, the prosecution rested. The jury was sent home for the day while the judge and the two attorneys debated which instructions to give the jury.

  I left for Idaho the next morning to attend a weeklong conference, so I could not go to Torrance to hear closing arguments or wait for the jury’s decision. Since the outcome looked gloomy, I did not want to disturb Kevin’s family by calling them for updates while I was away. I decided to wait until I got back to Los Angeles to hear the news.

  I came home on a Friday night and went to juvenile hall the next morning. As I crossed the dayroom, Kevin waved at me from the kitchen, a spatula in one hand and a jar of salsa in the other. He was back in his orange prisoner’s garb. If he had been acquitted, he would have been released. “Want some chips, Mark? I heated ’em up.”

  “I’ll take some, sure.”

  He put a few onto a paper plate along with a dollop of salsa, handed it to me, then busied himself right away with stirring something on the hot plate.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  He didn’t look up. “Guilty. One count of murder, two attempted murders. I wasn’t surprised.”

  I let him stir for a while, then asked how he was holding up.

  “I’m OK. At least it’s over.”

  “I’m sorry, Kevin.”

  “Yeah. But thanks for bein’ there. It was good to see some friendly faces out there.” He spooned the mixture from the hot plate into a large plastic bowl, then added, “I’m not supposed to get sentenced till the end of the month, so I’ll be around for a while. I gotta stick around to help break in the new guy.”

  “What new guy?”

  “The one in the library. Sills wants him in the class.”

  I asked if he would like me to speak on his behalf at his sentencing hearing, and he nodded. “My lawyer said you should write it down first and send it to the judge, that way it becomes part of the record. Just in case, you know, somethin’ comes up and you can’t make it that day.” He gave me a few more chips, then shooed me out of the kitchen. As I passed by the staff room, Mr. Sills waved me in.

  “You stealin’ my chips?” he asked.

  I closed the door behind me and sat down in the chair facing his desk. “I went to Kevin’s trial last week,” I said.

  “I heard. I heard his defense lasted half an hour.”

  “Something like that.”

  Mr. Sills nodded. “That’s a little less than average, but not by much.” Then he pointed toward the library. “You got kids waitin’ on you in there. Around here, you focus on what you can do, and you find a way to live with the rest.”

  His blasé reaction to Kevin’s trial upset me. I had seen the two of them interact many times and I knew that Sills had become like a surrogate father to Kevin. They loved each other. Was this all the man had to say now that Kevin was only a sentencing hearing away from life in prison?

  I waited, but Sills said nothing. I stood up from the chair. “Who’s the new guy?”

  “His name’s Toa. If you don’t like him, let me know.”

  The new guy sat at the far end of the table, keeping to himself. When I entered the room, he stood up to show respect, but didn’t smile or look directly at me. He was the most intimidating kid I’d ever seen, inside or outside of juvenile hall. He must have weighed close to three hundred pounds, and what wasn’t muscle looked like either bone or scar tissue.

  “Welcome to the class,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Everybody call me Toa.”

  “Is that a Samoan name?”

  “Half of one. You don’ wanna try pronouncin’ the whole thing.”

  “What’s your first name?”

  “Mark. But just Toa’s fine.”

  I greeted the others, who were not teasing Toa the way they usually teased someone new to the clas
s. No one sat too close to him, either; they gave him a wide berth.

  “You heard about Jackson?” Benny asked.

  “Just now, yes.”

  “He’s not the only one who got stuck. Renteria got sentenced to eighteen to life, and Duc took a twenty-year deal.”

  I looked at Duc, who nodded.

  “How come you still here, then?” Victor asked Duc. “Ain’t you s’posed to be at county, or in the Box, like Renteria?”

  “They let you stay longer if you take a deal,” Benny explained.

  “How come?”

  “ ’Cause guys who take deals don’t try to commit suicide.”

  “Oh.”

  Since the buster incident, relations between Victor and Benny had improved. They had stopped bickering and sometimes even sat next to each other.

  “I wrote poem,” Duc said. “Poem how I feel about everything.” He handed it to me just as Kevin came into the room. I was still adjusting to the news about Kevin’s verdict, and didn’t feel like leading a discussion, so I suggested Duc read his poem aloud to start the class off.

  THIS IS MY LIFE

  Because of my friends, my parents are suffering.

  Because of my friends, I joined a gang.

  Because of my friends, I shot someone.

  Because of my friends, I was sentenced to twenty years.

  I call collect, but my friends don’t accept.

  I write letters, but my friends never write back.

  I feel regret, but it is too late.

  I confessed, but the judge gave me twenty years.

  I write this poem to apologize to my parents.

  I write this poem to apologize to the victim.

  I write this poem to criticize my friends.

  I write this poem to ask for fairness.

  “I don’t agree with that poem,” Toa said, shaking his head.

  “Why not?” Victor asked.

  “He sayin’ it all because of his friends. I say everything you do is done by choice.”

  “What about peer pressure?” Benny asked.

  Toa shrugged. “What about it? He chose his friends. You always got options to choose from.”

  “Not everyone gets the same options, though,” Benny pressed.

  “You preachin’ to the choir,” Toa said. “I got dealt shitty cards just like you, but it’s how I played ’em got me in here. Whatever you into, you in it by choice.”

  “So you sayin’ we deserve to get locked up for life for one mistake we made?” Victor asked, getting heated up.

  “I’m sayin’ if you want the benefit, you gotta face the consequences. Same goes for society. They want the benefit of lockin’ kids up and throwin’ away the key? They playin’ they cards wrong. They gonna face the consequences.”

  I asked him what he thought the consequences of adult sentences for juveniles would be.

  “Most of us gonna get out someday, right? Teen gangbangers be steppin’ out of the pen after twenty, thirty years of livin’ like animals, comin’ of age in a place where nobody trusts nobody, bein’ treated like less than a piece of shit. Wha’chu think they gonna do? Most they family be dead by then. What they got to live for? Revenge. Nothin’ else.”

  Suddenly all of the boys were talking at once. Toa’s prediction transformed their frustration into anger. It took me ten minutes to get them to settle down enough to write, but when they wrote, they wrote quickly. Dale, who usually read last and even then had to be prodded, asked to read first.

  Amerikkka hasn’t been the America we were promised. For centuries Amerikkka has been spitting in our faces and making this world a much better fucked-up place. Instead of colleges, more schools, and programs to help those who need help, they spend all our money on more penitentiaries and everything else to keep us away for perpetuity. Instead of dealing with the problem, they figure keep us away in solitary for a long time will solve the problem but it just creates more habits. They have been hiding our history for years and teaching us false information about the past and our ancestors. Fuck Amerikkka. Treat us with disrespect, switching the situation against the world. Now we hating.

  Duc read next. He had written about some of the bad things that had happened to him since coming to this country. Among other humiliations, he described being taunted by a member of the staff at the Sylmar juvenile facility just before coming to Central:

  He said, “Are you suck dick?” I was very mad and told him, “You suck my dick,” and he locked my ass down for three days. At that time I wanted to take off on him but think about my case and I had to hold my anger.

  Victor accused society of judging young people without knowing the circumstances that led them to become criminals:

  They don’t know what it’s like when you come from a family that didn’t have a father there to guide you in the right path. They don’t know what it’s like when there is nothing to eat when you come home from school. They don’t know how it feels when your mother tells you that you need to quit school to get a job, because there ain’t enough money for food. They don’t know because they come from rich families with parents and money to buy food and pay for their kids’ education so they could grow up to go to college to become the judges, lawyers, D.A.’s, prosecutors, politicians, and all them others that are making the laws to put us away for life.

  They don’t know what it’s like to grow up not having a role model in your life.

  Even Benny, who usually emphasized the positive in his writing, let some anger show through:

  To put it in simple words, jail is a place that separates people who got caught breaking the laws from people that have not gotten caught breaking the laws—the “innocent” people. I agree it’s a punishment for those that do care about their freedom, but jail is not a place that makes a person rehabilitate. Jail is just a place that separates people. In it, there are staff that give you rules. It doesn’t teach a person anything. It all depends on the person—if he or she wants to learn.

  With Kevin’s trial still fresh in my mind, I had a hard time listening to these complaints without saying: Yes, you’ve been hurt—but what about all the damage you’ve done? Are you any better than the people you’re blaming? If you think it’s unfair that society judges you, what gives you the right to judge society? You say you’re just defending yourselves when you shoot at your enemies, you’re just trying to survive when you steal cars or rob stores—aren’t people like me just defending ourselves by locking people like you up?

  When it came Kevin’s turn to read, I wondered what his complaint would be. Would he blame the legal system for not providing him with a better attorney? Would he blame society for not taking better care of him after the death of his parents? Would he express a sense of betrayal over the fact that, after being encouraged by adults to improve himself while in juvenile hall and then doing so, it hadn’t made any difference to his future at all?

  MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

  To the Loser Who Reads This:

  I am sitting here on the verge of death, thinking about what purpose I served on this earth, and to tell you the truth I can’t think of a good reason for me being created. I wish I could have done more but I was caught up in the wicked ways of the world, and now I’m gonna die by the world. I hope that you read this message and take heed: Be somebody, don’t just be an average person, make a difference in the world. I didn’t get a chance to because of my ways, but I know that if you try to help others you will have a better life than mine! I would enlighten you on some more things but I’m starting to see bright flashes. I think I’m about to die.

  The only reason I addressed this letter to “the loser who reads this” is because only a loser would pick up a bottle on the beach. So I hope you get your life together because—

  “Becausewhat?” Dale asked.

  “He can’t tell you,” Toa said.

  “Whynot?”

  “That where he dies, fool.”

  Kevin nodded.

  Toa tore his sheet out o
f the notepad, smoothed it out on the table in front of him, and said, “I’m new here, so I kept it simple. I wrote about my partner.”

  “Your crime partner?” Benny asked.

  “You could say that.”

  “Mark says we’re not supposed to write about our cases. For our own protection. It could be used against you.”

  “My whole life is my case,” Toa said. “Don’t matter what I write.”

  Someone who made a big difference in my life was my partner. Well, I should say my ex-partner, hate. Hate was always there for me at night when I was all alone and the air-conditioning was on too high in my room. Hate would keep me warm. I should say he was like my father ’cause for the seven years that my father was gone, hate taught me how to speak, hate taught me how to love, and eventually hate taught me how to hate. My best friend, my mother, my father, hate was all that. Hate helped me grow, or was dat wrong? I asked myself this question one day when I was lookin’ into a six-by-nine mirror in my cell. I was wearing somebody else’s clothes, underwear, and socks full of holes. Hate had left me to duel with misery and pain. Thanks, hate.

  25 / Father’s Day

  “You teach in K/L, right?” the guard at the key trailer asked. “I don’t think you’ll be havin’ class today. Some kinda rodeo or somethin’ goin’ on.”

  I got my visitor’s badge anyway and passed by three pickup trucks, each towing a horse trailer, parked in the spots reserved for sheriff’s department buses. The boys from E/F, K/L, and M/N—the high-risk offenders’ units—sat on the ground as three cowboys, each standing next to a horse, explained the fundamentals of horsemanship. As I got closer, Mr. Granillo waved me over to a shady spot under a tree.

  “It’s Wild West day,” he said. “These guys come every year.”