by Bill Barich
Whenever he has a chance, he stops to read graffiti. He has an honest passion for them. He sees the walls of the valley as a huge bulletin board on which gang members scribble their encoded secrets, and he unravels their writing as raptly as a cryptologist. He is fond of the tunnels, or pedestrian walkways, that cut beneath freeways. The tunnels are about forty feet long and ten feet high, and have inviting walls of white stucco. If necessary, Manuel will get down on his hands and knees to look closely at a mark; he doesn’t always watch for broken glass. I soon grew accustomed to trailing behind him as he led us on tours, using the antenna of his radio as a pointer.
“This here, it’s the ‘A’ for ‘Anarchy,’” he said in one tunnel, touching a black “A” in a circle. “You find a lot of these. Punks write them. Half the punks, they don’t know what anarchy means. They just try to shock you. Same with swastikas. You tell them what a swastika means, they wish they didn’t write it. Here’s ‘FFF’—‘Fight for Freedom.’ That’s a white gang. Some of them are into white-supremacist stuff. Adolf Hitler, Charlie Manson. Lot of stoners been in here, man. Look how many band names are in here. Iron Maiden. Metallica. Ozzy. Look, Joe, here’s a Mad Whip Thunder.”
“All right!” Joe said.
“Most of this is just kids showing off, you know?” Manuel said as we continued through the tunnel. “They get a thrill out of it. But this one here, it’s bad. See this?” I saw a name in red spray paint. Through it ran two parallel strokes in icy blue. “The blue, he belongs to a Crip gang. The red, he’s a Blood. All the black gangs in L.A., you’re either a Crip or a Blood. Bloods wear red. Crips wear blue or black. You remember how Richard Pryor used to do that cripple-legged walk in his night-club act? Crips walk that way sometimes. This Crip, he snuck over into the Blood’s territory to make that mark. It’s bold, man. It cancels him out. He’s challenging the Blood, saying he’s not afraid. If he’d got caught over here, he would have been in trouble.”
Trouble can mean a beating. It can also mean death. Gangs like to get rid of an enemy with a drive-by shooting. Bystanders are often hit, too. A gang member under the age of eighteen usually pulls the trigger, because he has special status under the law and is less likely to be tried in an adult court.
In prison, he joins a prison gang to protect himself. The most important ones in California are Nuestra Familia, Mexican Mafia, Black Guerrilla Family, and Aryan Brotherhood. Like most street gangs, they are formed along racial lines. They offer expert instruction in mayhem. Only about eight per cent of all California inmates are gang-affiliated, but they account for ninety per cent of prison crime. When a killer is released at the age of twenty-five, having served the maximum term allowable by law, he returns to his neighborhood as a hero. In Hispanic gangs, this is part of a cycle known as la vida loca—the crazy life.
“It didn’t use to be that way,” Manuel said. “When we were coming up, if you killed somebody or got caught at anything you were stupid.”
“Now they get a tattoo to advertise it,” Joe said. “If a kid dies, he’s really famous. His name goes up on walls.”
“Lot of ‘hope-to-die’s around, man.” In addition, there are “wanna-be”s —kids eager to be in a gang, eager to make a reputation by being bold, bad, or insane. This is not always easy to accomplish. In traditional gangs, where the power structure is rigid, only a handful of members are hardcore criminals, and they are likely to be specialists. A gang might have a knife expert, an expert driver, and perhaps ten or twelve others with specific jobs to do. The rest of the gang is composed of between seventy-five and a hundred members. Their function is mostly social.
They go to parties, hang out, and dress in a prescribed style, but they keep a distance from the inner circle. All this changes during a gang war, when everybody becomes bold, bad, insane, and probably stoned.
Every month, Manuel files a report on what he has learned in the field. He charts trends, and ranks gangs according to their potential for violence. His report is combined with reports from other teams, fed into a computer at Youth Gang Services headquarters, in East Los Angeles, and stored in a permanent file.
From Sylmar we drove toward Pacoima. It is a blue-collar town, where the tract homes are sometimes in need of paint and the lawns in need of cutting. Its poorest sections have a faded, gray look, as if they had been ineptly copied from an original. Although it was about two o’clock and most schools were still in session, there were teenagers and children wandering on nearly every block. I would glance out and notice a drugged boy or girl ambling along in herky-jerky steps. Manuel knew many of them by name. When he waved, they would make their determined way over to us and carry on a brief, disjointed conversation. They had the abstracted quality of astronauts touching base with earth.
In a housing project covered with graffiti, we came upon a teen-ager, Hispanic, a member of a traditional gang, who wore the classic outfit of a cholo—a flannel shirt buttoned up to the neck, a pair of baggy black khakis with a split cuff, and a hairnet over slicked-back hair. (The baggy pants are good for concealing a weapon strapped to a leg.) His teeth were rotting, and his eyes were glazed. He was standing in the middle of a street with two friends and told us happily that his court-appointed lawyer had just helped him to beat a rap for possession of PCP. As he spoke, cops on horseback, looking grandly out of proportion, cantered through the project, shaking their nightsticks and searching for drugs.
“They took me in, man!” the teenager said excitedly. “They confused me with somebody else. They got me in there, and then they had to set me free!”
“So how’s it been?” Manuel asked.
“Real quiet. Nobody’s looking for any trouble.”
On a block outside the project, a girl flagged us down and asked for a ride. She had a user’s pale, indoor skin, splotchy and dull. Joe knew her. She had recently tried to sell him some recording equipment, brand-new, at a cut-rate price, insisting that her boyfriend didn’t need it anymore. Now she gave Manuel directions as he drove, being very explicit about which streets to avoid. When we dropped her off, in a residential area, she drifted foggily toward two young men who stood yards apart in frozen postures.
“Now she owes us,” Manuel said. He would keep tabs on her, seek her out as an informer.
Around the corner, we pulled up to another teen-ager. Manuel was quite fond of him. He said the boy was honest and smart, a good kid. “So what’s happening, man?” Manuel asked as he shifted into neutral. “I thought you were supposed to be in school.”
“No, man,” the boy said. He had a goofy smile on his face. “I couldn’t take it anymore.”
“So what are you going to do now?”
“Get a job, maybe. Do some kind of work.”
“Maybe we can help you.” Youth Gang Services had contacts, a few job training programs.
The boy was acting jumpy. “Yeah, well, O.K.,” he said, and he dashed off.
“You know why he didn’t want to talk, don’t you?” Joe asked.
“Too stoned,” Manuel said. “PCP.”
PCP is phencyclidine. Originally synthesized by Parke-Davis in 1956, it was intended to be a new, nonvolatile analgesic and anesthetic. It worked fairly well, but it caused some severe side effects, including hallucinations of the schizophrenic variety. People complained of feeling dead, or as though they were dying. PCP first surfaced as a street drug in the nineteen-sixties, when it was sometimes sold as LSD, mescaline, or THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.
From the beginning, dosage control has been a problem, and users routinely flip out. PCP is usually smoked in small quantities, added to marijuana or ordinary cigarettes. Some users say it produces a mild, drunken euphoria. They feel giddy, a little numb in the extremities, and don’t know what their bodies will do next. They lose their inhibitions. In gang-related homicides, the killers are often under the influence of the drug.
Because a PCP high can be mild, many teen-agers think of it as a harmless substance. In fact, the drug is insidio
us. It collects in brain cells and body fat, and users may suffer terrible flashbacks, physical disabilities, and severe depression. Overdoses are still common. A user can go into PCP psychosis and develop a “light or flight” reaction—ready to run from or tackle anything spooky. Such users become truculent and superhumanly strong. Cops tell stories about kids doing pushups on a freeway, drowning in a shower stall, and gouging out their eyes.
Once at his house, Manuel gave me a clear-glass vial that had formerly contained liquid PCP and asked me to sniff it. It had a strong chemical odor. Young dealers dip Sherman cigarettes in the liquid and sell them as “Sherms.” A vial costs between a hundred and a hundred and fifty dollars, and translates into a profit of about five hundred dollars. In the valley, a teen-ager can also buy marijuana, prima (a joint sprinkled with cocaine), LSD, methamphetamines, cocaine, crack, and heroin. The only category of drugs not currently in favor is downers.
* * *
As you ride through the streets, there’s a bad moment that comes when you understand that what you’ve been witnessing is not an isolated phenomenon but a pattern, even a way of life. For me, the moment came in a run-down neighborhood of a valley town when Manuel stopped outside a tract house where two teen-agers were standing in a littered front yard smoking cigarettes and holding hands. I’ll call them Bud and Lydia.
Bud was Hispanic. Lydia was white. Manuel wanted me to meet them, because they belong to a new type of stoner gang, in which races and sexes mix freely. Bud had a sparse mustache. He wore a black heavy-metal T-shirt and a ballcap. He looked like a kid who knows how to fix things and ought to be working in a shop or a garage. Lydia wore a sweater and tight jeans, and when she spoke she said everything at least twice and kept picking invisible bugs off her arms. Her parents didn’t know she was in a gang—that’s often the case with white kids.
While Bud talked music with Joe and a couple of other gang members, Lydia leaned against the car and asked Manuel about a summer softball league. She had played in it the year before, and her team, all gang girls, won a pennant. She was excited about the softball league, because it had been a significant achievement for her to get to the games, all thirty-six of them, and stay straight enough to show off her athletic ability. During the games, nobody was allowed to drink or do dope—not even homeboys from the neighborhood, who were rarely in a sober condition. Almost the entire season had passed without a fight, and then some gang guy from Van Nuys turned up at a game with a shotgun and spoiled a perfect record.
“So, Manuel,” Lydia said, flicking her hair from her face. “Are we going to get our trophies, or what? We were supposed to get some trophies.”
“That guy ate cheese on us,” Manuel said.
“He ate cheese on us?”
Manuel nodded. A cheese-eater is a rat. This cheese-eater had promised to donate two hundred dollars for trophies, but he had not come through. The softball program itself cost only a few hundred, but Manuel had no funding for the coming summer. He couldn’t bring himself to tell Lydia. Kids in gangs are hard to motivate, and they lose faith quickly. In softball games, Manuel sometimes has to change the rules to let them have an extra strike or two at bat. They hate to lose, because losing is all they know.
The gang rented this tract house and used it for parties and hanging out. A thin woman, slightly older than Lydia, stood in the open doorway, balancing a baby on a hipbone while she smoked. She had the casual grace of somebody relaxing on a beach. Lydia thought she might be pregnant herself, but Bud was denying that he could be the father. While she was complaining, a late-model sedan pulled up at the curb opposite us and the air began to crackle.
The young man who got out of the driver’s side was about twenty years old. His hard little eyes took in everything at once and simultaneously rejected it. You could tell that he was never going to be pleased or satisfied—not by drugs, sex, or money. Some combination of forces had turned him sour, and he was in the business of spreading that sourness, using it to taint, to misrepresent, and to control. He didn’t make a move toward our car or do anything to acknowledge our presence, but he informed us wordlessly that he was on to us.
The other gang members were drawn toward him. I felt a knot of fear in my stomach. It came not from any imminent danger but from the possibility that something nasty could easily occur. I found myself considering escape routes, looking around for objects to duck behind. The young man was a time bomb. As we pulled away, Manuel told me that he had already been arrested twice for attempted murder. He had beaten both raps.
* * *
San Fernando High School, home of the Mighty Tigers, is Manuel Velazquez’s alma mater. It is famous in Los Angeles for producing first-rate athletes and being tough. In Manuel’s senior year, the football team played its games at night, and all the Mighty Tiger fans were searched, so they’d be discouraged from attacking their opponents.
“We used to say, ‘We lost the game but not the fight,’” Manuel said as we fell into line behind some VW bugs and imported trucks that were creeping, low-rider style, around the school building. Classes had just let out. About five per cent of the students at San Fernando High are gang members, Manuel thought, and their extracurricular activities require the attention of two armed security guards. There is also a narcotics agent from the Los Angeles Police Department, and I saw him peering, oblivious of parody, over a row of hedges.
By inclination, Manuel is an artist, and he has fond and slightly rueful memories of a former art teacher at the school. “Her name is Melanie Taylor Kent,” he explained once. “You ever heard of her? She does silk screens. Mayor Bradley has some. So do some Hollywood stars. She’s really well known, man. I can’t believe how bad we treated her sometimes. We were always being rude. One time, she kicked me out of class, and I didn’t think I’d ever come back. But I came back. She was a good teacher. Her way of teaching was the classical way. You got to dominate the basics—same as with yourself. I used to think I’d be a regular kind of painter, but now all I care about is murals. Other people can paint clowns. I don’t want to be painting any trees or flowers.”
For inspiration, Manuel looks to Los Tres Grandes—Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros. When he was a student at nearby California State University, Northridge, he dropped out, travelled to Mexico City, and lived there for eight months, studying their work. This was a fine time for him, a time of growth and change, during which he began to understand more deeply his connection to Hispanic culture. He came away from it with a feeling that he owed a debt to his family and neighborhood.
In the valley, he has painted murals on the sides of church annexes and schools. His subject matter is always optimistic, and, even in the drabbest circumstances, his colors are bright and radiant. When the summer Olympics were held in Los Angeles, in 1984, Manuel got a commission to do a mural on a parking garage, and he enlisted several gang members to help him. He called the mural “Wall of Dreams.” It showed children going through transitions, getting older, dreaming. They turned into teachers, lawyers, doctors. He remembers the stifling heat, and also a French cyclist who—against the warnings of Manuel’s apprentices—left his bike unattended for a minute to tie his shoe. Somebody made off with it, and the police brought in helicopters and rousted every house in the vicinity.
Manuel stopped every now and then to chat with students. In dealing with teenagers, he follows a single rule: he must never be ahead of them or behind them but always with them, refusing to patronize, granting their world an absolute integrity. He will discuss a pimple, an insult, or a bad lunch. Without comment, he listens to the most baseless complaints, the most absurd bragging, and the grossest expressions of self-pity. He is not always approving, but he shows his disapproval so lightly that it turns into compassion. In his view, every teen-ager in the valley is a potential victim, easily swayed, easily hooked on drugs, messing around with a number of things whose power he or she cannot fathom.
It happens on occasion that Manuel becomes especially involved with som
eone. He introduced me to a beautiful girl who was sitting on the front steps of the school and strumming a guitar. Around her were many admirers, each in hot pursuit. Manuel was trying to keep her from falling into the trap of a teen-age marriage. She was interested in music, so he sometimes arranged for her to go to Mad Whip Thunder concerts, and he went by her house and talked with her mother and sisters, hoping to forge a link that would let her see that her life was open, not closed.
Another kid was on Manuel’s mind in those days—a big, rebellious kid from a white punk gang in another section of the valley. The kid had been missing from his usual hangouts for about a week, disappearing into a maze of shopping malls and video arcades. Manuel wanted me to meet him, because the kid was flirting with the border that separates mischief from trouble, but he didn’t know when he would make contact again. He thought we should go look for him in about a week.
* * *
Around Los Angeles County, when you are bored or lonely or have time to kill you take to the freeways, joining seven million other licensed drivers on loops, cloverleafs, and figure eights, and wishing you were many miles closer to the ocean. One morning, I drove from Burbank, where I was staying, to Reseda, in the western part of the valley, and visited Metal Blade Records to pick up a catalogue. Metal Blade has been in business for three and a half years, producing albums by local bands and licensing imported records from Europe. Metal Blade has an impressive list. It handles Slayer, Bitch, Malice, Satan, Tyrant, Destruction, Hellhammer, Sodom, Nasty Savage, and Future Tense.
Turner’s Sporting Goods, in Reseda, has a gun counter that stretches along one wall of the store. In glass display cases, there are Walthers, Smith & Wessons, and Berettas. At Turner’s, a 9-mm. Uzi semi-automatic costs $599.99. It weighs about eight pounds, has a collapsible stock, and—with the right parts—can be converted in a few minutes into a fully automatic weapon, firing countless rounds. I found a brochure on the counter advertising Firing-Line indoor shooting ranges, which are open to the public seven days a week.