by Jorja Leap
“If you are Latino or Hispanic or whatever, the worst part of county jail is reception—it smells like shit, you’re naked, you feel like you’re gonna throw up. Then once you go in, Southsiders have their spot. You’re set. But the blacks—they are at it from the time they get in. They don’t know what the fuck they are doing.”
Once he is out, Kevin unknowingly confirms Felipe’s description, offering up a primer on the black experience in jail.
“In jail Sureños get along and take care of each other—no matter what their beef on the street. But black gangs—we go to jail—it’s the same as on the street. Neighborhood Crips—NHC—they are fightin’ the 60s, 90s—they all gonna have the same enemies and they gonna get along with the same people. Let’s say a neighborhood shot up somebody on the street—let’s say a Hoover stabbed an Eight Tray, then they come in and it starts right away. Right there. In jail. I pretty much stayed out of it until one night there was a riot, I jumped up into it and I wound up in the jail hospital.
“I’m thinkin’, What the fuck am I doing? I decide I’m gonna get out of the hood and into school while I’m in there. After my seventh month, I got in school, I wasn’t gettin’ jumped, I’m learnin’ a lot.”
In jail Kevin earned his high school diploma. But once he’s discharged, he can’t find a job. Scrambling for a place to live, Kevin needs money. He starts selling crack and weed.
“I had to make a livin’,” he tells me defensively. “Then one night at my brother’s house I saw Homeboy on MTV. A light bulb came on and I rushed down to see Father Greg—I remembered him from camp. I started workin’ and I met my girlfriend, Elena. We were together for a month. Then I had to go back into jail. I went somewhere that I coulda avoided. Instead I listened to my homies—from the neighborhood.” This is a story I hear again and again—wrong place, wrong time—and the pull of the gang. Kevin was locked up again, for a violation of his probation, serving five months. When he was released, he returned to Homeboy Industries and married Elena.
“I know it’s not all perfect. I know what I got against me,” Kevin says, thoughtful. “I wanna make money. This makes me wanna do certain things, like slangin’ or goin’ back to the neighborhood, that I gotta fight within myself. It’s strange—I gotta fight myself to be a man.”
I hear an echo in Kevin’s words. My other lost boy, Ronny, could be Kevin Williams’s twin—except he is a Blood and Kevin is a Crip. Still, each possesses all the pieces that should lead to success, but nothing comes together. Both are charismatic, charming, and very smart. Both have long-term relationships with women who provide them with stability and financial security. And yet something is missing.
A month later, Ronny comes to work at Homeboy and immediately endears himself to the staff. Hector Verdugo, the head of security at Homeboy, takes him under his wing, suggesting that the two of them go to school together. When I ask Hector if he is serious, he laughs.
“I can see the two of us holding hands, skipping along, at community college, then at UCLA. You can help us get in.”
Hector then quietly adds, “No, I mean it. I’m serious.”
I want to believe him. The idea of Hector, the responsible leader from the Homeboy management staff, studying alongside Ronny, the favorite son of the Bounty Hunter Bloods—is irresistible. I ask Hector why he has chosen Ronny.
“He’s just so fuckin’ smart,” Hector tells me. “And he can get along with everyone.”
Hector leaves after we finish talking about Ronny. I am alone for a few minutes when a beautiful young woman comes to the glass door of Greg Boyle’s office at Homeboy. She is crying and has a split lip and a small bruise on her cheek that she insists came after she fell over a chair while walking in the dark. It is Elena—Kevin Williams’s wife.
Elena works as assistant chef to Patty Zarate, the head chef at the Homegirl Café, one of the businesses that provide jobs for homegirls as well as a small revenue stream at Homeboy Industries. She is hardworking and fearless. When the crew of waitresses at Homegirl refuses to wait on LAPD chief Bill Bratton, Elena dons an apron and struts over to him.
“No one wanted to wait on you,” she announces, “but I said I didn’t mind. And I’m gonna take your tip.”
Elena was born in Guatemala. When she was a year old, her father abandoned the family. Her mother moved to Los Angeles to work as a domestic, leaving Elena behind with her grandmother.
“I loved my grandmother,” Elena recalls. “She was the only mother I knew—my real mother, I had never seen. But when I was fifteen, my grandmother died. My mother sent money for me to come to California, to live with her. I didn’t have no one else. So I left.” It was a tortuous journey, led by a coyote.
“The things I saw on that trip,” she tells me, “you cannot imagine. I don’t know how I lived through it.”
She arrived in Los Angeles and learned that her mother had remarried and had two more children. There is tension, fighting, and Elena ends up being kicked out of the house. She stays with friends who are part of a neighborhood.
“I didn’t have money and I didn’t want to be a hooker. So I fell in with a neighborhood—MS-13—and they told me I could make money by faking auto accidents.” She is actually relieved when she is arrested. After giving evidence on MS-13, she receives a suspended sentence and goes to work at the Homegirl Café. When she and Kevin marry, they represent the dream of leaving the neighborhood, transcending the pain each had experienced to find something of meaning. Almost everyone at Homeboy marvels at the strength of their commitment to each other. But there are a few skeptics.
“Fear wins out over love,” Ronny warns me.
Now Elena is crying while she rubs her bruises and asking me to text Kevin. Maybe go and talk to him. I am ready to kill Ronny and Kevin, although not necessarily in that order. But I turn and ask Hector to explain all this to me.
“Kevin listens to his boys, his gang. He fights—too much,” Hector tells me. I already suspect that Kevin has been going back to his neighborhood and mixing it up. He gambles with violating probation. Elie has been e-mailing me to get a hold of him, warning, “Kevin Williams has already missed a court appearance and is on two grants of formal felony probation; his next stop on the merry-go-round may be prison.”
I call Maniac, who along with teaching me about tattoos is one of Kevin’s homies. We meet up again at Leimert Park in South LA. When I get there, he reassures me that Kevin will come into Homeboy in the next few days. Maniac is calm where Kevin is manic. He is not handsome but carries himself with quiet confidence, assessing me carefully through the lenses of his wire-rim glasses. He tells me that Kevin will eventually leave the neighborhood. I ask him why he stays.
“If you’ve gone up in the gang, you don’ wanna give up the status. You’re used to it; it’s feelin’ good. The shot caller is jus’ like the CEO of a corporation—he’s got alla things that give him rank. He knows if he retires, it’s all gonna go away. Maybe he can handle it. But probably he can’t. He’s gonna stay in his job till he dies. That’s me too.” He smiles at me. “I guess I’m inna state of transition. I wanna get out, but I don’t know if I can live without my status, my perks.”
We spend several hours talking. Maniac exhibits what Kevin and so many others lack—gravitas. He also possesses a cold center and the ability to perform a kind of detached calculation about the life around him. “I did my research,” he tells me. “I found out what the best gang was. It was the Rollin 60s. And I made up my mind I was gonna join that neighborhood.”
He makes his decision sound like he was picking a college. In the higher-education analog, the Rollin 60s are the equivalent of Brown University. Not as high profile as the Harvard and Yale of the hood—the Grape Street Crips and the Bounty Hunter Bloods—but insular and powerful.
“They are a dangerous gang,” Mark tells me later when I describe the exchange with Maniac.
“He’d be happy to hear you say that.”
As I say this, I cannot hel
p but think about the rather perverse long-term relationship Maniac carries on with the LAPD.
“They all know who I am,” Maniac laughs. “When they stop me, they always say, ‘Hey Maniac, how ya doin’?’ Just that way, those words.”
Maniac is smart. He is careful. Whenever he is stopped and searched by the police, he is holding absolutely nothing. Despite belonging to a neighborhood for more than a decade, he has never served time in prison. About once a year he gets locked up. Briefly. It’s always a quick trip to county jail on minor charges: possession of marijuana, discharging a firearm in a residential district. Only once is it serious—attempted murder—but even then the charge does not stick. He is Mr. Clean Hands.
“I don’t get emotional,” he explains. “If someone in my neighborhood gets killed, and everyone is sittin’ around cryin’, smokin’ dope, drinkin’, talkin’ about the homie, I don’ lissen. I go do my business, arrangin’ for things to happen. I gotta get a job done.”
He is calm and matter-of-fact, all business. Kevin is not this guy. Kevin is a confused, miserable mass of trouble, and it’s getting worse. In the days that follow, he doesn’t come into Homeboy Industries. He tells Greg he needs to make more money. He goes out on casting calls for TV shows, hoping to get hired as an extra, playing a gang member. Kevin is in for the easy fix—music videos, film roles—none of it is realistic and all of it is just around the corner. He keeps saying he has left his neighborhood. He is lying—to Elena, to me, to himself. Kevin stops answering my calls. This is when Elena calls me in fear, begging me to help her find him.
It’s clear that he needs some structure. Greg finally decides to try Kevin out in the Homeboy Bakery. A few days later, I check in with Elena to see how she is. She tells me that things are better at home and then asks, “Come see Kevin—he’ll be at Homeboy in an hour.”
I find Kevin late that afternoon, parking the Homeboy Bakery delivery truck. He is decked out in his uniform—white shirt and pants. He looks happy.
“I’m workin’ at the bakery, I’m feelin’ good. I’m workin’ on my rap CD. Now all I gotta do is get into school. Things are gonna get better, Jorja, I feel it.”
I smile and tell him that this all sounds good, that I am happy for him and for Elena. It’s one of the first times I don’t feel it.
Thirteen. The Streets Will Be Me
I try to think about what I’m gonna do when I leave the neighborhood. I can never think what it looks like.
—Louie Mora
I am thinking about Kevin and Elena while I sit in the middle of the new Pico-Aliso projects, watching Fabian Debora paint a mural on a back wall. It is an incredible piece of art, with vivid colors, portraying a mother and child. He is painting this in the place where he used to deal crack cocaine and engage in violence on a daily basis. But before painting the mural, Fabian had to reach out to members of his old gang—Cuatro Flats—to secure their permission to paint.
“I have to show the proper respect to them,” Fabian explains. “If not, they will paint over my murals. They may even try to shoot me. I am a little nervous. I may have to take some of my relaxing pills.”
Fabian is the poster child for redemption. In his days with Cuatro Flats, in between gangbanging he developed a reputation as a talented tattoo artist. He started out creating tattoos for members of his own neighborhood, but soon even members of other neighborhoods began visiting. The converted garage in his mother’s house served as a neutral zone where rival gang members sat quietly waiting until Fabian took the next customer. He was the kind of homie whose talent and charisma enabled him to engage with rival gang members. “I would just sit and work on the tattoos. I wouldn’t talk. All the neighborhoods knew that and they’d come to me. They just wanted a good tattoo.” Fabian and I have spent a lot of time talking about tattoos and art. His designs were complex and fanciful, interweaving gang names with scenes of indigenous life—the letters for “Cuatro Flats” would be entangled in the hair of an Aztec god. To keep going, he began dipping into crystal meth. When the ratio of time spent doing drugs to time spent drawing tattoos flipped, Fabian was a full-fledged meth head no longer designing anything but the madness in his brain. But even his meth-fueled paranoid delusions were fanciful until the night he ran wildly to the middle of the I-5 freeway, trying to chase “death.” The California Highway Patrol found him gripping the concrete wall that served as a center divider. The CHP stopped oncoming traffic to allow him to get across the road. Once safe, he ran desperately to avoid the three-year prison term for violation of drug probation that awaited him. “The next afternoon I gained a moment of clarity and remembered what Father Greg had wanted for me, to enroll in residential drug treatment.” Fabian had already failed multiple attempts at outpatient drug treatment. But the next day, he enrolled in his first and only course of inpatient drug rehabilitation at the Salvation Army drug treatment center. Fabian now heads up the substance-abuse program at Homeboy. But his real passion is his art, which is no longer limited to the small canvases of body parts but has expanded to fill entire walls.
I stare at Fabian’s painting, hypnotized, when he sits beside me and says, “I feel good. I didn’t have to take any of my relaxing pills. I am glad to be able to give this back to the community. And I want to apologize to all of the mothers here. It is part of my recovery. I am thankful I survived all of this. I could have died. But my art has saved me.”
The next day, I’m far from East LA, out trying to locate an address in Compton, currently the per capita murder capital of America. I pass Piru Street, birthplace of the Pirus, or the Piru Street Boys. I’m looking for Trayvon Jeffers, who is part of the senior staff of Homeboy. It takes time to find Tray. There are no addresses here, and GPS operates via word of mouth. Finally, I find Tray’s aunt’s house, where he meets me on the porch.
I have gotten to know Tray at Homeboy, but it has been only recently that he feels comfortable meeting me in Compton. His paranoia hangs out along with the two of us. It is one part PTSD and two parts street anxiety. Despite his protestations that he has left his neighborhood, I’m not so sure.
“I understand you’re doing things—that you go back to your neighborhood sometimes. And I know you don’t want to trust me. But you can.”
I’m taking a risk. Tray looks momentarily angry, but then speaks. “It’s takin’ a lot for me to open up—people can take advantage of you. Sometimes I can open up to it—sometimes I can’t. I try to check myself before someone else does.”
We start talking about leaving the neighborhood.
“It’s just so fuckin’ hard, it’s so hard. And you gotta have a reason to stop. To go away from the neighborhood . . .” Tray drifts away, thoughtful.
I try to read the silence. Tray was usually laughing, a jokester, the life of the party at Homeboy. People responded to him with affection. “I love Tray,” Hector told me. “He’s a stand-up guy.” But his girlfriend had called me, crying, because Tray kept texting her that he was going to kill her.
“You know, I’m supposed to stay away from here,” he tells me. “But I can come during the day. No one is out. They’re all sleepin’.”
Tray slowly opens up while we walk the streets, talking about what he did as a little boy. How his grandmother had taught him to stuff nickel and dime bags of heroin.
“My granny’s been doin’ heroin since I was born; my mother’s gone from PCP to cocaine to heroin. She’s got HIV now, but she’s still an addict. I never really knew my father. I first went to foster care when I was seven. My daddy was gone. I think he left my mom when she got pregnant with me. My mom was usin’ even then. The neighbors called social services and that was it. They came and got all of us. There were six of us kids—all with different fathers. They couldn’t keep us together, so they had us in different places. I was always in trouble when I was a kid—fightin’ and skippin’ school. The foster moms would start out likin’ me, but then they wouldn’t want anything to do with me. They would wind up calling social s
ervices sayin’ get that kid out of here. Of course, the last one had sex with me before she called social services.”
I’m not surprised. Tray is proud—puffed up with the sexual conceit of a man remembering an early conquest. “She wanted me. I had sex with one of my teachers too.” This happens at Markham Middle School, the lowest-performing middle school in Los Angeles and a focal point of black gang recruitment. “I liked the teacher but I didn’t do so good at school.” This is an understatement. His educational history is a sham—and includes an endless list of high schools—Manual Arts, Fremont, Crenshaw, Gardena—even an “opportunity transfer” to Palisades High, the school, I think ruefully, that Shannon is now attending.
“School didn’t last,” Tray tells me. “I started bangin’ when I was eleven. Robbin’. Fightin’. Doin’ drugs. I was in camp when I was twelve, in between all the schools, and I went to—y’know—all the usual ones.”
Tray recites the names of twelve different camps—the stations of the cross, homie style. He fathered a daughter at sixteen. But the summer before he turned seventeen, Tray hit the big time: he was jumped in to the Compton Piru clique.
The Piru Bloods claim both territory and celebrity connections. The late rap “mogul” Suge Knight, founder of Death Row Records, claimed a connection to the gang. Tracing the sets and subsets is like playing a weird version of “six degrees of Kevin Bacon.” Still, Tray tries to explain it to me.
“The Pirus are a gang under a gang, an alliance under an alliance. The Pirus got sets which got subsets.” What I understand from this labyrinth is that Tray was a Blood. I start asking about his old life, telling him to just nod if he has ever experienced something I bring up.