by Jorja Leap
“It’s so quiet,” I observe.
“It’s not like it was when I was coming up and part of my barrio—there was shooting every day. I mean every day. We had base heads, but they were part of the neighborhood. They would stay awake in the early morning hours from three to five while all of us homies would be sleeping. They would watch over things. Nothing really happened from six to ten—people would be getting up and taking their kids to school.”
But in the past decade, VNE had pretty much disappeared from Estrada Courts. First there was the injunction, then, with the advent of CLEAR (Community Law Enforcement and Recovery), the LAPD’s “weed and seed” strategy, violent gang members were locked up. It’s no surprise that CLEAR was heavier on the weed part of the equation. Felipe readily told me, “They really got the neighborhood out of the projects.” CLEAR was also aided and abetted by the Clinton administration’s “one strike” housing policy mandating that a family be removed from public housing if one of their members was convicted of a violent crime.
Now, in the quiet daylight, there were a few grandmothers, a handful of drunks, and a man selling fruit.
“I guess CLEAR changed everything,” I say.
“No. What has really ripped the community apart was glass.” Felipe was reinforcing everything I already thought about the impact of crystal meth—glass. “You never knew what the homies would do with it though, because glass would make you talk. One homie could put it in a cup of coffee and then give it to another homie—like it was sugar. Except it would make them say all kinds of things. They could find something out and use it against someone.” It was interrogation via getting high—no waterboarding required.
“I would never deal it in the projects,” Felipe insists. “I knew that it was doing crazy shit to the community. What can I say? Business was good.” Felipe never acknowledges guilt. But I have noticed that he spends an inordinate amount of time in Estrada Courts. He talks about “mentoring the youngsters” and “building up the community.” Ever the businessman, he still makes a little money on the side, in charmingly legal ways. He runs a crepe concession stand at street fairs and concerts, employing homies who are reliable and willing to work a twelve-hour shift. Shannon sees him when she goes to daylong music festivals to see indie bands. Felipe watches out for her and gives her free food.
“I’m glad I got out of the life. Look at what happened to Louie.”
“I know,” I tell Felipe. “I can’t stop thinking about him. When is he gonna get out of prison?”
“I don’t know, homegirl,” Felipe tells me. “I just don’t know.”
I had believed that Louie Mora, like Felipe, was ready to leave the neighborhood, particularly once he fell in love with Veronica. When she got pregnant, he rarely left her side, awaiting the birth of their little boy. The relationship confused me. Veronica was beautiful. But Louie Mora—there was no good way to describe it—was the most ridiculous-looking gangbanger I had ever seen. He was Alfred E. Neuman in tattoos, with a set of teeth that would make an orthodontist cry. Strangely, he was a member of the Avenues, a gang that took its name from the less-than-poetic designation of a series of streets in Northeast Los Angeles beginning with the word “Avenue” and ending with a number, like Avenue 64. The Avenues was an established neighborhood, allegedly controlled by the Mexican Mafia and not amenable to police intervention. They dealt both drugs and drive-by shootings with alacrity.
“The LAPD could never get a grip on them,” Mark told me. We both knew Avenues territory quite well. Shannon rode horses nearby. Mark would watch while she practiced her trot at a rickety barn that shared space with the LAPD equestrian team, I would get my hair cut nearby in Glassell Park, and then the three of us would eat pizza at a local Italian restaurant.
A few blocks away, the Avenues controlled both territory and distribution of their product by practicing excessive violence against anyone who ventured into their area, particularly African Americans who the neighborhood wanted to relocate ASAP—preferably in a cemetery. The LA Times ran several features amid community outcry about “black on brown” crime. The Avenues caught the attention of the federal government and the Los Angeles DA, Anthony Manzella, who prosecuted them for “hate crimes” based on federal law.
All this time, I would take Louie Mora out for pizza in Eagle Rock and try not to stare at the AVENUES tattoo six inches high on the back of his skull, which he refused to cover by growing his hair. I thought he was pretending to be part of the neighborhood. Besides, he insisted, “I don’t wanna bang. I just wanna be with Veronica.” But once the baby was born, there were problems.
Veronica would come into Homeboy Industries, crying. Louie had gone out gangbanging. Louie had not come home. Louie had gotten drunk. Finally, Louie came into Homeboy and I begged, “Please stay home. What you’re doing is dangerous.” Greg and I both sat on either side of him while Greg cajoled him.
“Here we are, the president and vice president of the Louie Mora fan club,” Greg began. “We want you to stop. We want you to stay at Homeboy, where you are safe. We want to make sure you don’t go back to the gang.” Louie listened but promised nothing.
In September I took a working vacation. Mark and I flew to Switzerland, to attend a World Health Organization conference on violence prevention. While speakers discussed the worldwide epidemic of violence, back in Los Angeles there was a huge gang bust of the Avenues that involved the FBI and videotape and RICO charges of racketeering and conspiracy. I thought of Alex Sanchez. I was beginning to wonder why these things kept happening when I went on vacation. Louie Mora was one of the people caught on tape. The Los Angeles Times described him as a “notorious drug dealer.”
“It’s very sad. He’s going away for a long time,” Greg told me when I called him to find out what happened. And now, six months later, Felipe and I were still talking about Louie Mora.
“I think he’s gonna be in prison forever, Jorja,” Felipe says flatly. “You don’t know how hard it is to leave the neighborhood. It took me a long time to finally let go. And we have to watch out for the youngsters. They can’t even start gangbanging.”
“But Louie had everything . . . and he loved Veronica . . . why couldn’t she stop it?” The rush of words comes out before I even know what I am saying.
“I don’t know. I just don’t know,” Felipe answers.
I think of Joanna. She is alternately open with me, then guarded. Felipe is more straightforward. He is also willing to risk himself. A week later, when I meet him for lunch, Felipe tells me he has something to show me.
Three new poems.
“I am tryin’ to get in touch with how I feel. I guess this is how I do it. Y’know, I learned in the gang-intervention training we all have PTSD. We all have trauma.”
Felipe is the exception. Poetry is rarely the homie defense against emotional pain. The majority seek the treatment most readily available: 24/7 self-medication.
Sixteen. Self-Medication
Pulling back on the plunger
sucking up any compassion, love or life
that’s left in my body.
Emptiness swallows me whole,
blood running down my arm like a tear on my mother’s
face reconfirming her own thoughts of failure,
re-inflicting the pain and abuse my father once laid upon her.
Now dead from the same poison I yearn for.
Memories running through my head like blood through the river of my veins.
Nothing left to live for is a thought that invades my mind. Like soldiers in a
foreign country, reeking of broken promises, dirty stairwells and nights that
never end.
Sickness interrupted.
Sunlight embraces my face, thoughts of my own children
flutter through my mind like
butterflies on a sunny day.
New hope found in a child
clinging to the cracks of his father’s broken heart.
—Josep
h Holguin
In late summer, Kevin Williams spirals downward. Fabian Debora tells me he suspects Kevin is using crystal meth.
“I know you are close to him, so I thought you might want to know. Some people saw him at a party and said he was blown out of his mind.” About an hour later, Hector Verdugo tells me that while Kevin was working the Monday-night shift at the Homeboy Bakery, Elena went out with some girlfriends. Kevin accused her of cheating on him, and there is gossip that he beat her up.
“They’ve got a strange relationship, those two,” Hector remarks.
That night Elena calls me, crying, and says, “Kevin is having so much trouble, he tried to . . . to hit me.” She chokes the words out. “He says I’m doing crazy things—things I would never do. He thinks I’m having sex with alla his friends.”
Things get worse. Two weeks later I sit in on meeting between Greg and Kevin McNally, the bakery supervisor.
“Kevin is a mess—I suspended him five days for no call, no show on Monday morning.” McNally chooses his words carefully. Running the bakery is not an easy task; he tries to maintain order and produce baked goods while managing a group of homies from multiple cultural backgrounds and rival gangs. But it’s Kevin Williams’s inconsistency that’s on his mind today.
“I can’t do without him, but he’s not showing up,” McNally says. “He’s suspended.”
Kevin misses a week of work, and the following Monday he comes storming into the office where Greg and I are talking.
“They won’t let me clock in, G,” he says angrily. “I just wanna come to work!”
Greg soothes Kevin, but it’s a temporary fix. He tells Kevin to go sit outside in the lobby and wait until our meeting ends, pretending we have things to discuss. Once the glass door closes, Greg and I both simultaneously start talking.
“He’s crazy and manic—,” Greg says.
“I can’t believe what’s happening—,” I begin.
Both Greg and I had hopes for Kevin and Elena. But now he’s presenting with the Siamese twins of gang problems: mental illness and substance abuse.
“I think he’s decompensating,” I offer.
Greg nods. “He keeps talking about people at Homeboy dissing him. It’s paranoid,” he adds. “Y’know, whenever we talk, he’s still very sweet with me. But I don’t know what he will do to someone else.”
A few minutes later Greg calls Kevin in and tries to get him to see a therapist. Kevin refuses and leaves. For the next three nights, Elena texts me, terrified that Kevin is out with his neighborhood. He misses a second week of work at the bakery and his fate is sealed. I am with Greg and Hector when they tell Kevin he is fired. Kevin screams, “Fuck you!” then storms out.
I am suddenly frightened. I think of Tray. Is Kevin going to be next?
“Don’t worry,” Hector tells me. “He’s gonna be back. He’s gonna leave the neighborhood again—eventually. This is what they all go through. They go back and forth, all the time.”
Greg is less certain.
“He’s been shot at a couple of times,” he muses. “I’m sure he’s using drugs, but you know there’s something else—there’s something off about Kevin. It’s psychiatric. I truly think he is mentally ill.” Greg goes on empirical evidence. If someone abandons Homeboy “voluntarily”—not because they are arrested or killed or locked up on a parole violation—Greg believes something is wrong with them. Why would anyone willfully reject a helpful and hopeful environment? It is a sign that they are not ready to leave the neighborhood. But I keep wondering about Kevin. Is it drugs or disorder or both? And I worry what will happen with Elena.
I finally reach Kevin on his cell phone and he sounds strange. He’s talking at an elevated pitch: his words form one long sentence. He tells me he’s taking his final paycheck to go downtown, buy some merchandise, and then set up shop on the Venice Beach Boardwalk. Two weeks later I see him on the boardwalk and he doesn’t recognize me. It takes him several minutes until he suddenly grins and says, “Jooorjjjaaa on my mind at Homeboy Industries.”
We talk for a while, and he assures me he has not gone back to his neighborhood. I don’t know what to think. Gang life provides a kind of malevolent but available structure for many homies. They know what to expect: violence, intimidation, threat—it’s home. So many of them come from families of abuse, and the neighborhood mimics what is familiar. Without the gang, homies can be thrown into a kind of rudderless confusion. The most common response to this confusion is drug abuse. It’s self-medication, pure and simple. Someone like Kevin—not working, not locked up, not banging—just doesn’t know what to do. He takes drugs to soothe himself.
It seems like everyone is using drugs—it just depends which ones. The younger homies and homegirls rarely indulge in anything stronger than marijuana. They “just smoke bud” or get drunk. However, as time and violence take a toll, some veer into hard drug use. I meditate on this while I try to call Kevin, but his cell phone has been disconnected. This happens frequently with gang members—they use one cell phone number for a few months. Then they throw the cell away and start over again. I can’t get used to this and I have to keep asking for numbers. It is not lost on me that I have had the same cell phone number since 1998.
Kevin Williams is not the only person I am having trouble contacting. I try calling my cousin Nick, but now his cell phone is disconnected. While I am at Homeboy, waiting to meet a homie who is being discharged from county jail, I start phoning family to find out what’s happened to Nick.
“I don’t know,” my brother Chris tells me. “I haven’t heard from him since he left rehab. And now he’s in danger of losing his license. I think he’s living in his car. If you hear from him, let me know.”
I get off the phone and look at Hector and Fabian, who are sitting with me in Greg’s office. They momentarily avert their eyes while I will myself not to cry. I try to explain.
“He’s the most brilliant person I know, but he’s not smart enough to stop doing drugs. He’s lost everything—his wife, his children, his house in Hancock Park, his medical practice—but all he wants is meth.”
“I was an addict, Jorja,” Fabian says and comes over to put his arms around me. “I was just like him. I was blown every day for five straight years. No one could help me. You can’t help him. He can only help himself. I know we say the same thing over and over again—he has got to want his own recovery.”
“But it’s meth . . .” I begin. Meth, or glass, creates a dual sensation of hyperalertness and exhilaration that lasts for several hours. It is much more addictive than heroin, and coming down from a hit of meth frequently causes depression and violence.
“I don’t know if he’s gonna make it,” I tell Fabian, who understands self-destruction. I didn’t know him at that time but I have seen a photograph of Fabian at the height of his meth addiction, and he looks like a cadaver in a Dodgers hat. The photograph is mesmerizing, but it bears no resemblance to the well-groomed artist who wears his long, shining black hair in a braid and insists, “I can’t take any drugs or drink any liquor, I’m an addict.” Fabian’s recovery is his badge of honor. He also takes no prisoners—you are either in recovery or not. Period.
Fabian and Hector start talking about the toll meth takes, and I recognize Nick in their description. Fabian explains what happens to the mouth and teeth—the jaw locks, the teeth rot and fall out. “We all get meth mouth—one way or the other. For me it was the jaw,” he tells me.
“Your cousin has resources; he’ll make it,” Fabian continues. “But what the fuck are we gonna do with Kevin? He reminds me of Milagro—he drives me crazy.”
Fabian doesn’t need to say more than this. Milagro Diaz is a painful topic for Fabian, for Greg, for Hector, for everyone who knows him. Along with Fabian, he belonged to an East LA gang, Primera Flats. Both left the neighborhood. But while Fabian had art, Milagro found a less positive replacement for gang life—heroin.
A month before, I had interviewed Milagro. He was
clean and attending AA and working at Homeboy Industries. I invited him to speak at UCLA and encouraged him to stick to his recovery. Of course, I told Mark, “We have to help him.”
Mark just listened patiently and then asked me what color paint I wanted to use in the kitchen remodel. He had heard all this before. And he was much more focused on the plans for renovating our cottage—his new, full-time job. After thirty-seven years, Mark had retired from the LAPD. This event had occurred without much public fanfare—a rarity in the Los Angeles Police Department. A long career of service, like his, was usually marked by a huge retirement celebration, complete with slide show, inappropriate jokes, and maudlin displays of emotion. I had sat through too many parties for Mark’s colleagues—other deputy chiefs and commanders—who were clearly ambivalent about breaking the final tie with the department. You can never leave the gang.
Mark rejected all this, announcing he didn’t want a party. While his colleagues tried, unsuccessfully, to change his mind, I braced myself for the tsunami of change I was about to encounter. Mark without the LAPD—what would that be like? And what would his emotional reaction be? I was frightened. Mark’s attachment to the LAPD was the longest of his life—outdistancing his childhood and his marriages, including ours. I didn’t know what was going to happen to our relationship. More than one LAPD wife had warned me—usually at a retirement party—“Wait until Mark retires—you’re gonna go crazy. Your life is gonna be over. Your marriage will never be the same.”
Only this last prediction turned out to be true. The day Mark and I moved his personal belongings out of Parker Center signified the beginning of a major change in our relationship. I knew this when Mark threw his uniforms into the dumpster behind LAPD headquarters.
“Don’t you want to keep these? At least one of them?” I asked.
“Why?”
“I don’t know . . . it’s . . . it’s been such a big part of your life. Something to remember it by?”