by Jorja Leap
Parks were often the site of wars between the rival gangs or between the police and the homies. But, at other times, they also provided a respite from the action. “It’s important for kids to have a park so they won’t run the streets,” Mario explained. “When I was Big Spider—part of my neighborhood—I spent all the time on the streets. I got jumped in to the Pacoima Criminals when I was thirteen, and I never looked back.”
He was the eldest son in a single-parent family, with a mother who worked all the time. His story sounded achingly familiar.
“I never knew my dad, he was always incarcerated,” Mario told me. I had quickly learned that “incarcerated” could mean three days in county jail or a life sentence in Folsom. No one talked about being in prison or in custody. No one differentiated a local lockup from a maximum-security prison. Instead, this five-syllable word covered everything. I had also learned that incarceration and drug abuse were the two major reasons homies did not know their fathers—and Mario was no exception.
“I came here illegally when I was three,” Mario told me. “I didn’t have papers, and no one cared. I went to school and I was a really smart kid. I got good grades on IQ tests and all that. But I was always running the streets after school. My dad wasn’t around—he was back in Mexico—and it was just my moms and me. Everyone kept warning her that I was in a gang. She didn’t believe it.” He admitted to me that he was identified as a leader within the Criminals. Involved in violent crime early on, he made the rounds through the juvenile halls and probation camps of the LA County system. Eventually he graduated to Los Angeles County Jail—CJ, as he and every other homie referred to it. This story was becoming fairly typical. I was wondering if I was going to meet any gangbanger—past or present—unacquainted with the juvenile-justice system.
This was exactly what juvenile-justice advocate Carol Biondi had taught me when she explained about camp-bangers. “You can’t imagine the damage the camps do,” she insisted. “The staff is so busy filling out paperwork, they don’t spend time with the kids. In the camps at Challenger, they have a fight club 24/7.” Mario was no exception: the camps were his training ground.
“I was just doin’ what I had to do,” he offered, a terse explanation for a youthful life of crime.
I knew he wasn’t telling me everything he did coming up through the neighborhood. Instead, he showed me pictures that were strictly gangsta. The shaved head, the tattoos, the look of fierce combativeness. I knew there was more.
“But through all that, I thought, I wanted to go back to school. I really did. But I had to be straight to go to school. I couldn’t kick it with the neighborhood. I thought, well I’ll just try one class.”
Mario was intelligent and charming. I could just imagine teachers responding to him. He soon confirmed my theory, explaining, “Teachers liked me.” He negotiated the long slow climb, through community college and a bachelor’s degree at Cal State Northridge. There were the inexplicable detours.
“I never missed class. Never. Except for once. There was a knock on my door and I answered and the next thing, I felt heat.”
He had been shot at close range in the side of the neck; he showed me the scar. When I asked Mario why, he said, “I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. All I know was I saw the light. You know how they tell you when you’re gonna die you see the light. I saw the light but I said, I’m not coming.”
This was a much-rehearsed and repeated line of Mario’s. It was invariably met with gasps from the audience when he spoke in public. Strangely, it never had the desired effect on me; it always felt a little too staged, too practiced. I did not find this part of his story authentic. I knew he was leaving things out.
What Mario did not leave out of the story was his next stop after finishing college: graduate school at USC, where he earned a master’s degree in social work and became the poster child of the university, which featured his grinning face on its website. “You too can make a difference,” read the tagline over his biography. Mario was a winner. He was living proof that things could turn out more than okay. He was twenty-eight years old, at the top of his game. He hadn’t simply aged out of the gang; he had left voluntarily, a shot caller walking away from the neighborhood. He joined CIS full-time, with a fancy title, director of job development, and a small salary paid out of a grant from the US Department of Labor. But his passion was working with youth, and we spent several hours driving around the neighborhoods of Pacoima.
After spending several hours with Mario, I got in at about 3:00 a.m. Mark was waiting up for me. We both wanted to stop fighting—so we agreed to disagree. Instead, we had reached a truce of our own, and in the days that followed, I worked hard to preserve the balance between us. On the phone we talked about what we were going to have for dinner, not what Crips or Bloods or the Avenues were up to. And we were typical parents, worried about Shannon’s school performance and academic demands. At Paul Revere Middle School, she possessed an aversion to math and a strong facility for English and social studies. The DNA might have been absent, but she was turning out to be my daughter in so many ways. A few weeks into the spring semester, her English teacher passed out a class assignment for a term paper that would include a research question, a literature review, and interviews with two people. I was furious.
“She’s only in eighth grade for God’s sake,” I complained to Mark. “She will burn out at the rate she’s going.”
Mark was much calmer about the project until Shannon reported her research question: “Why do people join gangs?”
“No,” he said very quietly.
“I’m so proud of you, I’m so happy you want to do this. That’s a great question!” I ignored Mark completely and threw my arms around Shannon.
“No. No, no, no. Think of another question,” Mark said.
“Let me talk to Dad, sweetheart, and then the three of us can discuss this.”
Shannon ignored both of us and continued blithely on. “I want to interview Mom and I want to interview a gang member.” After her announcement she went happily up to her room, taking the stairs two at a time while Mark glared at me.
“She can’t do this. She can’t. It’s not safe. It’s not even safe for you. You’re gonna drag her to go see someone from 18th Street or MS-13 or the Rollin 60s and the next thing I know, you’ll both be dead.”
“What are you talking about?” I wasn’t even angry. I was shocked.
“All right. I know I’m overreacting. And I know you won’t do that. And I know I can’t stop you from going out. But you’re an adult and she’s a child and she can find another research question. She doesn’t need to go and talk to any gang members. It doesn’t need to involve danger. I don’t care. I don’t want her doing this. She’s trying to figure out what you’re doing, she’s trying to understand it, and this isn’t the right way. Something could happen to her or to you while you’re with her.”
I was actually pretty impressed with Mark’s psychological insight. I knew Shannon wanted to comprehend what was driving me out—night or day—into situations that involved weapons and bullets and drugs and rap music and other strange, exotic, and unnamable dangers. But I was having a hard time understanding my husband’s terror.
“I’m glad you understand about Shannon. But I want to know, what is frightening you?”
“You know what I’m afraid of.” Mark looked downward, studying the floor carefully.
I was angry and frustrated and started to cry. “I don’t understand, I don’t. All I feel is you trying to control me.”
“I’ve lost everyone in my life. I’m afraid I’m gonna lose you.”
I had never felt so unutterably a marital failure as at that moment. While I had empathy to spare for the homies in the neighborhood, I had failed to remember my husband’s terror. It was thirty-four years in the LAPD combined with a lifetime of loss.
The first time Mark and I went out, we exchanged the G-rated versions of our personal histories. I laughingly told him I had been m
arried and gone through “the worst divorce in human history.” I should have kept my mouth shut. Instead I learned, elliptically, that he had been married more than once. A month later he came to my house for dinner and told me the more detailed version of his personal history. His first wife had died after twelve years of alcoholism and a terminal case of cirrhosis of the liver. His second marriage, a rebound after the devastation of the first, ended after two brief years. His third marriage, to Shannon’s mother, had been a happy union until a lump on his wife’s collarbone turned out to be a rare form of cancer that killed her within six months.
And still this was not the end.
Six months into our relationship, Mark and I were talking on the phone one night when I asked him about his mother. These questions were pretty de rigueur for me, the child of psychotherapy. “She died when I was fourteen,” he told me.
“What happened?”
“She died from burns and smoke inhalation. She had an accident and burned to death.”
“I’m so sorry. How did it happen?”
“I’ll tell you another time.”
What could be so disturbing that he’d have this much trouble talking about it? I wondered. I was the orphan of a man who had died of cancer. There were only so many ways Mark’s mother could have burned to death. A kitchen fire? An auto accident? Trapped in a burning building? Perhaps there had been a fire and Mark had escaped while his mother had not. The real answer was more disturbing than any of the scenes that ran through my head. A few months later, sitting on my patio, Mark explained.
“My mother was an alcoholic. She drank until she went to sleep. She started in the morning and drank all day. Usually she was asleep by the time we got home from school. But one day I was home with my sister and another girl. We were playing records in my sister’s room. I noticed something strange about the light coming from underneath my mother’s door. It wasn’t right. I opened her door and saw that she was on fire. She was drunk and fell asleep while she was smoking. The cigarette dropped and caught her nightgown on fire.”
He paused for a moment.
“That was when they didn’t worry about whether or not nightgowns were flammable,” Mark continued quietly.
“I ran in and tried to save her. I kept trying to put the fire out and hold her and her skin started coming off on my hands. My sister called for an ambulance and finally one got to the house. I had to ride in the ambulance, sitting next to her body. They took her to the hospital and she died a few days later. I couldn’t save her.”
I was ready to start arguing with Mark about Shannon going to meet with gang members when I remembered this conversation. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to understand why Mark tried so hard to control me. And Shannon. It was time for me to stop. Stop being so defiant. Stop being so insensitive. Start seeing that Mark was scared too. He had lost so much already. He didn’t want to lose Shannon and he didn’t want to lose me.
“Honey, I know you’re afraid. And I am not going to let anything happen to Shannon. I would never take her anywhere dangerous. And I would never take her out at night. We’ll go after school to CIS and she can talk to Mario. He’s a social worker, he’s the real deal. He was in a gang but it was fifteen years ago. He’s perfect. She’ll probably fall in love with him. You can even come with us.”
It was the last line that got him. I never included Mark. That was just bad juju all around. But after my offer, Mark visibly relaxed.
“I don’t need to go.”
“Look, you can go to CIS if you go during the day . . .” He caught himself. “I mean if you’re taking Shannon—not you, you alone . . .”
“I know, sweetheart.” I smiled.
“Just during the day. I don’t want her there when the sun goes down.”
“You got it.”
A week later we drove out to CIS. I stayed in the lobby talking to Blinky while Shannon interviewed Mario behind closed doors. An hour later she emerged with eyes as big as saucers. She was enthralled.
“I told her she was wearing the wrong colors. She’s wearing her mama’s colors, she should be wearing my colors, USC.” Mario hugged me and whispered, “She’s really special.” He promised he would be at my class at UCLA to talk about his life in two weeks. I felt like I had been delivered.
Being brought up in a Greek household, the notion of an evil eye was consumed along with my morning oatmeal. You should always be careful—according to the evil eye—because if you don’t remember it when things are good, something bad will happen. I forgot about all of this once I started spending time with gang members. There was no need for the evil eye—these gangbangers had it encoded in their DNA. If that weren’t enough, sometimes it appeared on their tattoos. You didn’t have to worry about something bad happening—it always was happening. Only good outcomes shocked gang members—when someone went to a party and didn’t get shot, when someone actually got and kept a job. When someone managed to kick drugs. But I had reason to believe. To forget about the evil eye. Things really were better. Mark and I had reached a new level of closeness. And Shannon had begun to understand my work.
Mario offered Shannon a portrait of redemption. He talked to her about his childhood and teenage years and how his life had changed. A week later she came home from school and reported, “The teacher was so interested in my paper. She asked me all kinds of questions. She said it was great.”
I was full of myself.
Shannon and Mario developed an ongoing relationship via e-mail. He advised her about schools. She was a shy girl and felt comforted by this smart, sensitive young man who responded to her appropriately, like a big brother. Mario appeared and spoke to my class—four hundred undergraduates listened to him, so silent you could hear their breathing. We continued working together, interviewing homies throughout the gang-infested sections of Pacoima.
“I don’t mind your going out with Mario; he’s smart—although there’s something about him, I can’t put a finger on it,” Mark told me.
I laughed but asked what he meant.
“Something just goes off inside of me—call it cop’s intuition.” Still, I went to meet Mario about an hour after that discussion and Mark packed me a snack. I shared most of it with Mario until we stopped to talk with three young homies, all at the edge of thirteen kicking it on a street corner, outside Section 8 housing. It was eleven at night. They should have been home asleep and instead they were smoking bud and hanging out.
“Hey, Spider,” they called out to Mario.
Mario and I got out of the car.
“This is my homegirl, Jorja. I call her Mama because she’s got a little girl. She’s helping out at CIS. She wanted to talk with you.”
It was heartbreaking. The three of them had no parents, no family to speak of. One lived with a foster mother, one lived with his sister, one lived with his mother, who “isn’t home all the time. She do drugs.” Who cared for them? This was the cartoon of gang activity. I kept hearing Greg Boyle’s voice in my ear: “Kids who join a gang aren’t running toward something. They are running away from something.”
“Did you go to school today?” Mario asked.
The three heads all hung down.
“No, man, no.” The three were in middle school. It was unclear when they had last gone.
“We gotta do something about it. How ’bout we all go out and get something to eat and we talk about you goin’ back to school?” Mario asked kindly. The five of us trooped off to Denny’s, and the three boys attacked the Grand Slam specials as if consuming their last meal on earth.
There were many nights like this with Mario, who worked far beyond his hours and his job description. His official work was to try to teach gangbangers “job skills.” But, in fact, he was always on lookout in the community, watching for the youngsters in danger of nosing over the line. He sometimes called to talk with me about DCFS and how to keep the kids out of the system. It was a never-ending nightmare that we shared. I felt comforted that he was out there
and got used to phone calls from him at all hours of the day and night. Most of the time the news was bad. However, in late January he had left a message, excited. The security detail at the Academy Awards had contacted him. They wanted him to train kids to work as “stagehands” behind the scenes. “I’m gonna train some of my homies, Mama,” he told me. “Show them a different life.” The local paper got hold of the news and decided to run a human-interest story on Mario.
Still, there were things about Mario that did not add up. Mark started laughing when I told him Mario was getting ready to buy a house. “Oh yeah, that’s what a social worker can afford on $2,000 a month,” he observed.
“But it’s in Pacoima, for God’s sake,” I told Mark. “Not Encino or Sherman Oaks.”
And then there was the Mercedes that he drove. But that too was easy to explain. It was an old sedan, a diesel, dug up from a used-car lot for $3,500. Finally a former student who was now a USC professor, Annalisa Enrile, called to tell me that Mario was running a club in Mexico. “It’s a real bangin’ club, Jorja,” she laughed. “We should go down to Baja and check it out.” I was so preoccupied trying to figure out what I could say to make this fly with Mark that I forgot to ask how a gang interventionist was buying a house, driving a Mercedes, running a club, and planning to go to law school. It didn’t add up, but I wasn’t working my mental calculator until I got the call.