An Angle on the World

by Bill Barich

  When news of the Avenue Bar massacre came over the television, I was in the Wellington Park, and I went into the lobby pub to watch the reports. The physical sensation in the aftermath of such violence is always the same—a queasiness in the pit of the stomach, as if you were in a plane that had taken a sudden drop in altitude. I stood next to a middle-aged man in a cardigan who was muttering about the stupidity of terrorists, and we struck up a conversation. When I told him I was a writer, he grew wary, but in time he turned friendly, and introduced himself as Stan Wright. He was a Protestant, his father had been in the military, and he’d recently returned to Belfast to take over a large company that supplies educational materials to schools. His wife and children, he said, were still in Dublin.

  Wright was the first person I met who talked about the guilt many Protestants feel over the indignities that Catholics have suffered in Northern Ireland. A Catholic discussing the Troubles tends to be high-minded and proud, fiercely confrontational, and in no doubt about the ethics of the matter, while a liberal Protestant will lower his eyes or look away, or remark on how disgraceful the situation is, just as liberals from the American South used to do during the civil-rights movement.

  The comparison is apt, for there’s a Belfast version of a redneck who, instead of promoting peace and understanding, tries to join a paramilitary group, or a right-wing lodge, like the Orange Order, where men old and prematurely old drink to the ascendancy of William of Orange. Catholics, for their part, are fascinated by the experience of American blacks and by the rise from slavery, and books like Roots are often assigned to secondary-school classes.

  When I mentioned to Wright that I had found a positive, even a hopeful, side to daily life in Belfast, he nodded vigorously and invited me to visit his company, where both Protestants and Catholics were employed, in about a sixty-forty ratio. The company operates from a warehouse in Newtownabbey, some five miles from the city center. There’s a field behind it, and during summer teen-agers gather to indulge in the usual skull-bashing and hurling of epithets, although, as Wright noted dryly, they’ll take a break if a good soccer game is on TV.

  Wright once had a job with Xerox, in London, and he’s brought an enlightened style of management to the company. His workers find it exhilarating. Even with the boss out of earshot, they told me how pleased they were to be able to play a radio while they were loading trucks, or to wear jeans to the office every now and then. Some old-line Belfast firms are downright Victorian, enforcing strict dress codes and docking laborers for each lost minute on a time sheet, so the slightest acknowledgment that employees have rights causes a stir.

  What I saw in the warehouse was another example of how Protestants and Catholics are willing to cooperate if they’re given a chance. One young Catholic woman, a clerk, offered me an account of her journey to visit a Protestant co-worker at home, on the Shankill Road. “My mother warned me never to go there,” she said, with a laugh, “but it wasn’t bad at all. I thought the men might be carryin’ pitchforks, you know?” It isn’t that people expect the past to be erased, much less forgotten, but that they don’t want their future to be limited by its follies and its excesses. In Ulster, there’s a middle-ground constituency waiting for a politician brave enough to articulate its concerns.

  For Wright, doing business in Belfast has some peculiarities—not being able to deliver orders because of a roadblock, for instance. There are problems with phones going dead, and with graffiti. Hooligans hit the warehouse at night, scrawling UDA or PIRA in crimson, and you can’t just paint over the letters, because the neighbors might construe that to mean you were in league with the other side. So Wright has to call in the municipal authorities with buckets of whitewash. Other small problems plague him, too, but he has decided to stay on. As I was leaving, he shook my hand and gave me a pen-and-pencil set—an ideal gift for a writer, he joked.

  * * *

  In the days before I left Belfast, there was a big explosion at the Royal Ulster Agricultural Show, at Dalmoral Showgrounds, on the outskirts of town. No one was hurt. The R.U.C. said a gas main had blown, while the I.R.A. claimed it had set off a bomb to kill some R.U.C. security men. The I.R.A. did not accept credit for the bomb that went off near a military base in the Falls, slightly injuring three civilians and two soldiers, and destroying a Chinese takeout joint. Patrons of the Laurel Leaf bar next door heard a “deafening blast,” then found the ceiling collapsing, its pieces splashing into their pints.

  Obituaries still ran on the second page of every paper, and the nostalgia column in the Irish News, a Catholic sheet, told how in 1921 a citizen, John Smyth—incidentally, of the Catholic faith—had been shot dead by Protestant gunmen as he was proceeding to his home.

  Though I had been in the city for less than a month, I knew that when I met people for drinks or dinner these incidents would not be mentioned, or would be mentioned only in passing, with disgust—tossed aside dismissively, considered too boring for further comment. It was inevitable that somebody at a pub would make a joke about a fire sale of eggrolls, just a little charred, going on at the Laurel Leaf. There were many jokes about two new portable toilets that had been installed downtown—coin-operated models from France, which the Deputy Lord Mayor blessed by being the first customer. For additional comic relief, everyone turned to the plan of an architectural consultant, who was bandying about a scheme to build a new hotel in the Falls, near where another hotel had closed after a bombing attack, in 1983. This palace would have eighteen rooms and a twenty-lane bowling alley.

  In Belfast, things are almost never so bad that a laugh can’t help. A “craic,” the locals call it, as in “It cracks me up,” and whenever I heard the expression I’d think of a fissure through which all kinds of pressure and negativity could be released. A line from a poem by Louis MacNeice also kept rumbling around in my head: “Belfast devout and profane and hard.” This appraisal of the place still seemed accurate to me—as accurate as it must have been when MacNeice, who grew up in a brick row house, wrote it. The toughness of the city both shields and hides its heart, and serves, too, as a mask for slow, steady signs of change.

  The taxi-driver who took me to the airport was a woman. She and her husband had recently bought a nice house in the country, at a bargain price, from a police officer who was departing in a hurry, under death threats from the I.R.A. As we wound through the Falls, she pointed to the spot where an angry mob at a funeral had beaten and shot to death two British soldiers last winter. Here was my final taste of sightseeing, Ulster style.

  Down the street, we came to a roadblock. All around it troops were swarming, taking a bead on pedestrians with their rifles while simultaneously pinning three men against a car, and for the first time I felt the sort of worry every person in Belfast must know intimately—a worry that one’s luck has run out. As the saying goes, “He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” But a soldier merely waved us through, not even bothering to ask a question, and I made it to my plane in plenty of time.

  The New Yorker, 1988

  The Crazy Life: Youth Gangs in L.A.

  The first time I met Manuel Velazquez, he greeted me awkwardly, unable to shake hands. He had cut himself on a broken bottle while crawling around in a tunnel to read a new graffito, and a doctor at a local clinic had sewed him up with seventeen stitches and wrapped the wound in cotton, gauze, and tape. Manuel was stoical about his injury, seeing it as an unfortunate but perhaps necessary consequence of his job, which is to keep teenage gang members in the San Fernando Valley from killing one another in wars.

  In Los Angeles County, there are an estimated fifty thousand youth-gang members, and about a hundred of them are expected to be murdered this year. In the old days of youth-gang warfare, the days of Blackboard Jungle and West Side Story, a boy might arm himself with a knife or a homemade zip gun, but now in times of trouble he has access to .357 magnum pistols, hunting rifles with pinpoint scopes, and Uzi semi-automatics from Israel.

  Manuel works for
Community Youth Gang Services Project, a private, nonprofit organization.Under the auspices of the city and the county, Youth Gang Services operates a twenty-four-hour hot line and has teams patrolling fourteen sectors of Greater Los Angeles where gang activity is heavy. There are four people on each team, and they pair off as partners and work nine-hour shifts. Five days a week, from Tuesday through Saturday, they hit the streets at eight o’clock in the morning and do not quit until the bars and discos close, at two.

  They drive Dodge Colts and carry two-way radios and identification badges, but they do not have any weapons or powers of enforcement. On their rounds, they inspect graffiti, listen for rumors of impending battles, and spend a lot of time chatting with gang members. With the lightest touch imaginable, they try to save lives. There are moments in the field when they seem to be doing open-air therapy, taking in all the wild, eccentric griefs of the young.

  Rahsaan Cummings works in the Hawthorne area, south of Los Angeles. Rahsaan is in his early thirties and wears shades, black Levi 501s, and a gold chain. When he frowns or scowls, he gives an impression of ultimate toughness. Like most of his peers at the agency, he is intelligent and street-smart, as well as hyperconscious of how the image of youth gangs is manipulated in the media.

  One afternoon, at Hawthorne High School, I heard him discuss this with a few members of the Rebels, who were on their lunch break, standing around and combing their hair. The Rebels are a white gang, and Rahsaan did not know them well, so he broke the ice by saying,

  “You Rebels? Yeah, you are. I’ve been seeing you dudes over by the 7-Eleven. You’ll be buying your beer, smoking shit, having that shit in you.”

  The Rebels thought this was funny and cool, and they opened up, and soon the talk turned to a TV documentary that had aired recently. Nobody had liked it, because it was too sensational and falsified issues.

  “You know how it is,” Rahsaan explained. “People come down here, they have a concept in mind. Then they just find what they need to fill it.”

  The landmark work in the sociology of gangs is Frederic M. Thrasher’s The Gang, published in 1927. Thrasher was a founder of the Chicago school, a methodology that stressed the importance of interviews and direct observation. In pursuing his study, he observed more than a thousand Illinois gangs before arriving at his well-known theory that gangs are largely a phenomenon of immigrant communities.

  According to Thrasher, they represent an ethnic group in transition, waiting out its adolescence until it can be assimilated into the mainstream. The underlying assumption is that the attractions of a so-called “normal” life—a job, a family, a house in the suburbs—far outweigh the attractions of a life of crime. Over the years, Thrasher’s ideas would be repeated, with variations, in many other studies, monographs, and books, and they still echo in current sociological theory, coloring the way youth-gang members are perceived, making them seem distant, opposite, always somewhat less than human.

  In Los Angeles County, there are Hispanic youth gangs whose histories go back almost a century, involving three and sometimes four generations of men. There are black gangs of such size, sophistication, and economic well-being that they put many small corporations to shame. There are gangs of Chinese teen-agers who run gambling emporiums as skillfully as old Vegas hands. When immigrants come to Southern California, their children form gangs—Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, Honduran, Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, Guatemalan. There are Samoan gangs and gangs from Tonga, and they feud with each other just as their ancestors did on the islands. Increasingly, in affluent suburban towns, there are gangs of white teen-agers, kids from decent homes, who—the saying goes—“have everything,” and still take to the streets.

  * * *

  In many ways, the San Fernando Valley is the quintessential suburb of Los Angeles. It lies roughly northwest of the city center and has more tract homes and shopping malls than the entire state of Maine. The valley does not make you think of surfboards and blue skies but of hot rods, toreador pants, and men with crew cuts—all the icons of the nineteen-fifties. Its twenty or so linked towns have a generic look, enhanced by thousands of franchises, and the differences among towns are registered in terms of money, not style or philosophy. A wealthy neighborhood is merely a poor one transfigured, with greener lawns, bigger swimming pools, and better-quality ranch houses. There is a tendency to see the valley as either a beautiful fulfillment of the American postwar dream or a nightmarish wasteland, but it is an actual place, with actual problems, and those concerning wayward teen-agers often wind up in the lap of Manuel Velazquez.

  The house that Manuel rents from his wife’s family is in Sylmar, a quiet town at the northern tip of the valley, where you still find horses and corrals on the borders of subdivisions. When I made my first trip to visit him, he was sitting in his living room nursing his battered hand.

  Manuel is twenty-seven years old, of medium height, and put together solidly, with the broad chest and muscular shoulders of a college wrestler. He has a few extra pounds above his belt, but they don’t make him look soft—they just add to his mass and density. His hair, wavy and black, falls over the collar of his shirt, and his round, rather Indian face shows little emotion unless he knows himself to be among friends. His manner toward strangers is polite but wary. If he is distrusts somebody, he may run that person around. He has run certain observers of the youth-gang scene up hillsides and down dismal alleys in search of scoops. The scoops fail to materialize, being no more substantial than snipe. There is an air of calm about Manuel, a gentleness. In his three years on the job, he has been punched, kicked, scratched, bitten, and almost shot in the line of duty.

  The area Manuel patrols covers about twenty square miles. He once took me to El Cariso Park on the outskirts of Sylmar, so that we could see the town from above. On the way, he kept pointing things out. He stopped by an open meadow where hang gliders were sailing to earth from an outlying mountain, and pointed to an extravagant ranch in the distance. “That used to be Clark Gable’s,” he said, in his melodious voice. “Some nuns have it now.” As we drove toward higher ground, he showed me some cracks in the road and told me that an earthquake had caused them. He has lived in the valley almost all his life and prides himself on knowing everything about it.

  In time, I learned which franchise has the best hamburgers (Bob’s Big Boy), where to watch Valley Girls in action (Sherman Oaks Galleria), and what the trendy kids at San Fernando High School were driving (Nissan and Toyota trucks, and VW bugs with nose bras).

  On that first morning in Sylmar, Manuel informed me in a casual way that a friend of his, Joe Mendez, was going to drop by to talk about youth gangs and music. As if on cue, Joe pulled into the driveway, made a sharp right, and parked on the lawn. He is short, slender, lithe, and energetic. He has hair that reaches almost to his waist, prominent tattoos on both forearms, and a heart-shaped earring in his right ear.

  Although Joe plays in a heavy-metal band, Mad Whip Thunder, he disapproves of some heavy metal music, and he had brought with him a few albums by the groups that were hottest in the valley—Slayer, Venom, and Wasp. He gave me the album covers to look at, and I saw gore and half-naked women in bondage. An axe severed a head. Here were whips, chains, and cartoony slaves in iron masks. “Welcome to Hell,” it said on a Venom album.

  The primary audience for heavy-metal music is teen-age boys. In the San Fernando Valley, they form gangs, either as stoners or punks. Manuel began to notice their emergence five or six years ago, and he remains fascinated by them. These gangs, almost exclusively white, have no inner-city roots, no history, and their members do not come from poor families. Hispanic gangs are known as traditional, because they follow well-developed patterns of behavior, and also because it is traditional for a boy to join one to prove his manhood. In their actions, they are predictable, while the new white gangs keep flying off in odd directions.

  All gangs are territorial by nature, but the territory that many punks and stoners wish to claim is more imagi
nary than real, a sort of psychological free space to which parents and teachers won’t have access. At the start, they were innocent of crime and fought only in self-defense, but they are slowly becoming more aggressive—selling dope, running schoolyard extortion rings, and buying weapons on the black market.

  In the living room, Manuel has a big stereo, and Joe played a Venom album on it. The music had the typical blazing electric sound of heavy metal, though maybe a bit faster, louder, and more diffuse. I couldn’t understand the lyrics, but Joe said that they were evil, satanic, and harmful. In his opinion, heavy-metal bands had gone too far in trying to upstage one another. Both Manuel and Joe believed that their influence was profound. In the streets, they said, arguments often began over the relative merits of bands.

  Gang members adopted the clothes, mannerisms, vices, and ideas of rock stars. If a heavy-metal star got busted for drunk driving and manslaughter and did only thirty days in the county jail—that had happened to Vince Neil, the lead singer in Mötley Crüe—they saw it as proof that the system was corrupt. It was cool to drink, cool to flout the law. An intelligent kid might be able to react to heavy metal as theatre, Manuel believed, but a dull or confused kid took its messages seriously. If a kid had no parental guidance, no filter between him and the music, its anthems, however bizarre, burned into his brain with all the power of gospel.

  * * *

  The Colt that Manuel drives is gold and has a Youth Gang Services sticker on a window. I rode with him that afternoon, and so did Joe. On a night shift, Manuel tries to make three loops through the valley, but he seldom completes them, because there are seventy-one gangs around, and a certain percentage of them are always doing something wrong. Day shifts are much easier: Manuel works schools and parks, record stores, malls, and burger joints.