An Angle on the World

by Bill Barich

  At the range in Northridge, I inquired of a clerk what sort of pistol I should buy to defend myself. Without hesitation, he recommended a German Ruger. “Reliable,” he said. I held a Ruger in my hand, feeling the heft of it, that stunning sensation of being armed.

  In my motel room, I was reading lots of papers. That morning, in the News Daily, which is published in the valley, there was a story about a Northridge woman who had been mistaken for a burglar and shot with a .30-30 rifle while she was delivering papers. A jury had awarded her four hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars in damages. Another story told of a Los Angeles narcotics officer accidentally shooting a fellow officer in the thigh while trying to hit an angry Rottweiler. Another story told of an argument in the Chimneysweep Bar, in Sherman Oaks, that had spilled out into the streets, where one customer shot another with a handgun.

  Yet another story told how three youth-gang members, ages sixteen to eighteen, had been seriously wounded in a sidewalk shooting on West Venice Boulevard, in downtown Los Angeles. The shooting took place only hours after Assistant Chief of Police Robert Vernon announced a tough new approach to enforcement that would rid the city of gangs. He gave few details.

  * * *

  In Hawthorne, a suburb south of the valley, crack was making its usual inroads. Because the processed cocaine came in chunks for easy smoking, it was often referred to as rock. For about twenty-five dollars, you could buy three or four tiny rocks—enough to keep you high for maybe an hour. In part, the drug’s popularity was due to a scarcity of good-quality marijuana on the streets. Various state and federal efforts had helped to dry up the weed supply, pushing dedicated users in a much more serious direction.

  A crack high is a fast trip up and a fast trip down, with none of the mellowness of marijuana, and people often experience an intense desire to repeat it. Even those who’d never tried cocaine before were investing in it, because it was so neat and clean—no sniffing, no sinus problems or bloody noses, no dirty needles. Crack was cheap, available, and formidably addictive. The demand for it had brought out dealers by the score and pitched several gangs into a heated competition for turf.

  “On some corners you’ll see five or six dealers,” Joe Alarcon told me when he picked me up at a 7-Eleven store in Hawthorne on a quiet Tuesday night. Joe, a square-jawed military type, plans to go into police work when he finishes a college course in business economics. His partner, Jeffrey Harper, grew up in a dreary housing project and made his way out of it with the help of a dedicated mother and a talent for putting a basketball through a hoop. He has been with Youth Gang Services for four years—a year longer than Joe—and he can spot a deal going down from a distance of better than two hundred yards. In the course of our rounds, he and Joe would show me parks, bars, restaurants, and even taco carts where dope was being openly sold.

  Almost as soon as we left the 7-Eleven, we were in an apartment complex near Inglewood, where a drug bust was going down. The police had sealed off both ends of the block with cars and motorcycles. About fifteen men and women in handcuffs were sitting on the pavement. Street lamps cast an eerie yellow glow over the scene, while residents gathered in doorways, holding coffee cups or cans of beer. They had the dazed expressions of those who gather at a fire or an auto wreck, wanting to know what has happened and yet somehow unable to process the information. The apartment complex was a nice one, with bougainvillea and jacaranda creeping over trellises, and palm trees swaying in a light Pacific breeze.

  Such arrests are common in Los Angeles County and have the effect of briefly interrupting the flow of commerce. A dealer makes so much money on crack or heroin that he or she can hire an attorney and be back at work in a day or two. Some gangs keep an attorney on retainer, and they are sophisticated in other ways, as well.

  For instance, a teen-age runner may wear a pager on his belt, get his instructions over a radio, and make his deliveries on a motor scooter. In certain areas, drugs are transported from point to point on school buses. In serious cases, where large quantities of cocaine are involved, an arrest creates a vacuum and leads to a battle between gangs for the relinquished turf—“gang-banging,” it’s called. One weekend while I was in the county, nine youth-gang members, all Crips and Bloods, died in fighting over turf in south-central Los Angeles.

  We left the apartment complex, made a few turns, and passed a shoddy liquor store. In its parking lot were two Mercedeses, a new Trans Am, and a stretch limo. It is impossible to estimate the size of the drug trade in Los Angeles County, or how many millions of dollars it generates.

  “We used to have a Chevy Malibu,” Jeffrey said. “Everybody thought we were narcs.”

  “Guys pretend to be narcs,” said Joe. “They put on a cheap suit, drive around, flash an open wallet, and rip off dealers,” he said. “It’s not hard to do.”

  In another neighborhood, we passed through an alley behind some sleepy little bungalows. A concrete wall nearby had recently been painted over, so no graffiti were visible. The county has several projects to discourage kids from applying their tags. Workers from Project Heavy paint over writing as quickly as possible, but they can’t keep pace with the many young authors at play. For the owner of a broad canvas, such as a warehouse, graffiti removal can be a significant expense. National Paint has developed Anti-Graffiti Clear Coat, which forms a sort of varnish on a building and allows writing to be cleaned off with solvent. At National, business is brisk.

  Youth Gang Services teams sometimes intervene on behalf of property owners and bargain with gangs about graffiti. Joe and Jeffrey had just negotiated a truce with Tepa, a Hispanic gang, and they were congratulating themselves on its success—no marks on the wall—but then they found “Tepa” scrawled on the trunks of two palm trees.

  Around ten o’clock, we drove into a housing project and saw a boy on a bicycle, alone, riding around in circles. He had two or three sweaters on, and also a hooded sweatshirt, and he had pulled the drawstring of the hood tight, so that only his face from eyebrows to chin was showing. He was ten years old, and both his older brothers had been in a youth gang. One was in prison; the other was dead.

  The boy lit up when he saw Jeffrey. “Hey, Harps!” he cried happily. “When you going to play us in basketball, man? We are going to whip you, Harps. You know it’s true. Me and my homeboys, we are going to do in Youth Gang Services the way Louisville did in Duke in the N.C.A.A.s. My vertical leap is very strong, man. I am getting very far up into the air.”

  “His vertical leap’s very strong,” Jeffrey mused to Joe.

  “Hey, Harps, it is! So listen, when you going to bring around a team to play us?”

  “May be on Saturday. Can you be here on Saturday?”

  “On Saturday?” the boy said. “We can be here.”

  The history of the streets is often a history of failure compounded over generations. The boy was in school now, Jeffrey said, and was doing reasonably well, but it would be difficult to keep him there. His parents were hardworking, they were trying with him, as they had tried with their other sons, but they had few resources. Every day, the boy met gang members around the project, and they were slowly sucking him in. Did he have the courage, the machismo, of his brothers?

  Every day, the boy rode his bicycle home from school, rode it through the parking lot where his brother had been shot. He knew all the details of the murder. His brother was walking home from the movies with his pregnant girlfriend when somebody from an enemy gang rolled out from under a car, pulled the trigger of a rifle, and killed him.

  * * *

  Marianne Diaz-Parton, the leader of Youth Gang Services Team 14, in Hawthorne, comes from an affluent suburban family. When she was growing up, she had spending money and all the clothes she wanted, and she made straight A’s in school. She was contented enough as a child, but once she reached adolescence she started to rebel, and joined a tough youth gang—pulled toward it by the usual mix of drugs, sex, and power.

  Hawthorne was newly integrated at the t
ime, and there was racial tension in the schools. Marianne was thrilled to be able to stroll into class and know that she did not have to take any insults from white girls. She had backing, and it meant so much to her that she vowed to do anything for her gang. Her bond to its members was almost mystical, a primary source of her identity, and when somebody in the gang’s chain of command, a higher-up, asked her to drive to Santa Monica and shoot some rivals Marianne did it.

  She was fortunate in that she failed to kill the two teen-agers she shot. The Lennox police investigated, and they arrested her within days of the incident. Marianne was surprised by the gentle treatment she received. Nobody beat her or shook her down. She did not suffer any hassling until she went to prison. She got a fairly mild sentence, and ended up serving three years.

  During that time, she learned a lesson about misplaced loyalties. A deputy sheriff from the Lennox gang squad, Ken Bell, used to visit her, urging her to make something of herself, to use her intelligence, but not one member of the gang she was willing to die for ever came to call. Gang members did not send her money for cigarettes, they did not mail her magazines or books, they did not write her a single letter or postcard. She could have rotted in the joint for all they cared, so she turned against them and decided to change her life.

  I said, “Suppose they had visited you—what then?”

  “I don’t know what would have happened,” Marianne replied.

  We had this conversation at the Youth Gang Services office in Hawthorne, a utility shed in a large municipal park. Marianne and her partner, Rahsaan Cummings, had finagled it from the county, and though they’d cleaned it and swept away the cobwebs and bugs, it was now thickly layered with dust and furnished with chairs off the scrap heap.

  Marianne is twenty-seven years old, with long auburn hair feathered away from her face. On her right hand she has a chola cross in blue ink—a souvenir tattoo from her gang days—and when I asked her where she got it, she laughed, and said, “Any homeboy with a sewing needle can give you one of these.” Marianne was sniffing. She had a cold, and she was going to be wed on the weekend, and complained that her energy level was low. “I usually move faster than this,” she told me. I thought she was moving plenty fast; in motion, she looks inexorable, full of purpose. “It’s not only poor kids who get into trouble,” she said. “It’s rich kids, too.”

  When Marianne and Rahsaan work a shift together, Rahsaan usually drives. He drives with flair and agility, and makes the wearing of a seat belt automatic. From approximately eleven- thirty in the morning until one o’clock in the afternoon, they shuttle back and forth among three or four schools, so there isn’t much waste in the operation.

  One of the places they visit is Lloyd, a “continuation” high school, which caters to kids who have been bounced out of every other school and are on a last-chance mission to get an education. Lloyd is not as big as San Fernando High, but it also has two security guards, armed with nightsticks, and they were on the front lawn enjoying the sunshine when we arrived. Marianne knew one guard well, having traded information with him in the past, and she shook his hand through an open car window. “So how you doing, man?” she said.

  “It’s been real quiet,” the guard said. He was a cheerful black man in his late twenties, who did not show any particular attachment to his uniform. He seemed to regard it as a strange and slightly humorous circumstance of his life. “Real, real quiet.”

  “I heard that problem kid, he dropped out again.”

  “Yeah, he did.”

  “Well, if you see him around, you tell him to cool it,” Marianne said. “Little Watts”—a hard-core youth gang in the neighborhood—“is looking for him.”

  “Little Watts are packing heavy,” said Rahsaan. “I heard they bought some Uzis.”

  “Uzis?” the guard said. “Is that right?”

  I asked Rahsaan where a bunch of teen-agers get weapons like that. “From the same people that give them rock cocaine,” he said.

  “That rock is bad stuff,” said Marianne. “Girls in the projects, they’ll do anything for a twenty-five-dollar piece. They lose all self-respect.”

  Information continued to make the rounds. The Compadres had just shot a guy. Lennox 13 was also preparing for more action, having lost some members to prison. “They courted in twenty new guys in Fullerton,” said Rahsaan.

  “A Crip got shot over on a Hundred and Fifteenth and Simms, man,” Marianne said. “For two hundred dollars. Can you imagine that? Two hundred lousy dollars! They shot him bad, man. He’s never going to have any babies.”

  The other security guard came over to the car. He was black, too, and new on the job, but he was already thinking about advancing himself. He wanted to know how much workers at Youth Gang Services got paid.

  “They start you at eleven hundred a month,” Marianne told him. The guard began to back off. “I make fifteen, but I’ve been there for a while. You get medical and dental. You’re working for the agency, you know? It’s a good job, but it’s no picnic.”

  I had been collecting statistics, and I added this one to my list. For trying to save the lives of teen-agers, you earned eleven hundred dollars a month. For trying to teach teen-agers, helping them to better themselves, you earned about seventeen hundred dollars a month—slightly more than a mail carrier. For graduating from law school and dealing with the legal problems of teenagers, you earned about forty-five hundred dollars a month. For working at a TV station and making a documentary about teen-agers in gangs, you earned about eight thousand a month. For being a movie star and killing teen-age actors with a prop Uzi, you earned an incalculable sum.

  * * *

  The Insanity Boys have always been a good-time group—no big trouble, nothing terrible going down. They party on weekends, do a little writing, maybe drink some beer and do some smoking. About forty of them were gathered in the parking lot at Hawthorne High School, milling around a white Nissan truck at recess. They were teen-agers in all their abundant variety–stubby, gargantuan, brilliant, stupid, shy, aggressive, utterly normal.

  The Insanity Boys come in many colors. They dress in a myriad of styles. The truck’s owner was a short, curly-haired kid in a Harry Belafonte calypso shirt and blue clam digger trousers. He told me that the truck had once been stolen and stripped, but the cops had found it for him in Huntington Beach. “I had to go down there to get it,” he said.

  “You expected them to deliver it to you?” asked a friend.

  The Insanity Boys were listening to Power 106 on a radio. Power 106 is popular with youth gangs, playing a dance mix of up-tempo songs which covers a spectrum of eternal teen verities. Almost all the vocalists are female, and they sing in high, quavery voices, as if they were heading for a date to the prom. When men sing, they use unthreatening falsettos, a la Michael Jackson. The big hit that spring was Miami Sound Machine’s “Bad Boy”:

  Bad, bad, bad, bad boy

  You make me feel so good

  Marianne was not in the mood to let the Insanity Boys lounge around and sunbathe. She felt that they were slipping and sliding, losing their focus. For one thing, they had written up the walls of a new shopping mall. “You know you’re not supposed to be writing in there,” she lectured them. “I don’t want to see your names when I do my shopping.” But she was much angrier about some other writing they had done. A dude from Little Watts had crossed out an Insanity Boys graffito, and they had retaliated by making marks that linked them to Lennox 13. “You think you know about Lennox 13, but you don’t,” she told them. “If you get involved with them, you’ll be gang-banging pretty soon.”

  “If trouble comes to us, we’ll be ready,” one kid said.

  Rahsaan corrected him. “You think you’re ready.”

  “I’m not saying we’re looking for trouble. But if trouble comes, we’re ready.”

  “You’re not ready,” Rahsaan said.

  “Little Watts is packing, man,” said Marianne.

  “Then we’ll pack, too,” sai
d an Insanity Boy. He had braces on his teeth and weighed about a hundred pounds.

  “Don’t you be talking like that,” said Marianne, glaring at him. “You think it’s a game. It’s no game, man. You don’t need to be involved with that stuff. You got all kinds of opportunities around you.”

  A tall, pudgy teen-ager who did not belong to the gang appeared on its fringes, lifted a foot, and extended a sneaker for us to examine. The sneaker was slashed in three or four places, cut to ribbons. “That crazy dude, he just came up to me out of nowhere,” he said, laughing. “He came up and used his knife.”

  Across the parking lot, a few Rebels were chatting among themselves. They were white kids, stoners, fifteen and sixteen years old, and they wore the obligatory heavy-metal t-shirts. But, more than anything else, their hair set them apart, flowing from their heads in such lush cascades that I was reminded of a Breck-shampoo ad. Every ounce of protein in their bodies appeared to be concentrated in those follicles. After Rahsaan introduced himself, he jived for a while, warming them up. “So you been going to classes, man?” he asked a Rebel who bore an uncanny resemblance to Jimmy Page, of Led Zeppelin.

  “Somewhat,” the Rebel said, rather nervously.

  “So you into music, man?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you play?”

  “I’m a singer.”

  “That’s cool,” said Rahsaan, not missing a beat. “What’s this I hear about Satanism. You Rebels, you into that?”

  “Aw, no,” the Rebel said. “We just mainly party.”

  The Rebels wanted Rahsaan to arrange a football game with another gang. Like many youth-gang members, they enjoyed sports but hated coaches, uniformity, and rules about hair length.