“Are you Blood? Are you Blood?” she demanded.
Roslyn, petrified, said nothing. Then, a man she’d never seen, and has never seen again, a ghost dressed all in white, suddenly appeared. “She’s cool,” the apparition said and disappeared. The girl lowered the gun and Roslyn left.
In urban centers of the global drug trade, such as the City of Angels, a parastate now operates a system of deterrence even more powerful than a legitimate state can operate. In addition, the misguided policies of the War on Drugs have themselves contributed to an acceleration of violence. Tragically, this simply entrenches the power of the parastate, which over and over again gains its first recruits because they need protection.
I am trying to make visible something that remains even to this day invisible.
It is not invisible because I am bad at seeing.
It is not invisible because I am bad at hunting.
It is not invisible because I am bad at researching.
I don’t fail to see its whole shape because I am oblivious or keeping my head in the sand. The beast below the turbulent waters of Los Angeles is invisible because it is illegal. We have made the beast invisible by desiring drugs and making our own desire illegal. We have made the beast invisible by lying to ourselves in this country about who we are.
We can even measure the size of this invisible world. For each of the last ten years, Americans have annually spent an estimated $100 billion on illegal narcotics. We are, remember, the leading consumer in the world. This annual expense is one-sixth of our national budget for defense. Or put it this way: it is roughly double the annual budget of the CIA. Imagine all the covert activity the CIA conducts all over the globe. Double it. And then imagine it all happening here, at home, in the U.S. of A. This is the size of the invisible world, an invisible world far more powerful than the CIA. And we expect a small intervention here, a small charitable act there, to rescue people? The angels have turned their backs. They have turned their backs on people trapped between the warring states. And thus many millions are gone.
As we now know, when Karen moved Michael back to Los Angeles, where she had steady employment, the police had 47 percent of African American men in Los Angeles between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-four in their gang database. Reread that. In 1992, the Los Angeles Police Department had 47 percent of African American men between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-four in their gang database. It doesn’t really matter if that many young men were actually gangbanging or if it was merely that the police believed them to be doing so. Nor does it matter if all of these young men were selling drugs or were only believed by the police to be doing so. In the context of residential segregation, the logic of social networks is such that once half of a particular group of young men in a city either are or are thought by the police to be involved in gangs, either are or are thought by the police to be involved in selling drugs, all of the young men in that group in the city will be affected by the world of gangs and the punishments applied to it. The question was not whether to live in this world, but only whether it could be survived. Survival would have required Michael to stay indoors, alone every day, or to have ventured out every day never any further than to his rooftop.
Some do survive, and you will find, I think, that they have often stayed indoors.
When Karen did move her family back to Los Angeles, blindly, she had to help her kids navigate a world she could not see. She could not see it because it was and is illegal. Prohibition incapacitates parents. It deepens the dark secrecy of adolescence. In the absence of a clear line of sight, meaningful choice-making is impossible, for parents and also for the young. If a person has been blindfolded, do we fault them for falling into the pit?
29.
THE END
I headed off to England for graduate school after graduating from Princeton in June 1993. Michael and Roslyn were dodging the truancy officer that same month. By the fall, Nicholas and Roslyn had both dropped out of school and left home. Nicholas was living with a friend of his mother’s and hanging out with his girlfriend who, after graduating from Claremont High, had moved, too, and not very far away from where he was in downtown L.A. Roslyn headed to a Jobs Corp program in San Diego. Karen’s kids were mostly grown. Only Michael, her baby, was left, the youngest child of a family’s youngest daughter.
Karen of course apprehended that the frequent disruptions in Michael’s life were dangerous. As she had done for him over and over, she sought continuity and she sought men. Believing he would be better off if he kept up his Nation of Islam connections with the men in Simba, she decided to send him back to Claremont for his freshman year of high school. Through the men from Simba, Karen found him a placement in Pomona in a homestay with a woman they trusted.
But the woman, as it turned out, had a son and the son was a gangbanger. When the woman agreed to take Michael in, the son wasn’t living at home. But then he returned. Michael liked hanging out with him, so Karen wanted Michael out of that environment. To remove him from danger, she brought him home again to her in the middle of the school year, just after the Northridge earthquake.
Karen didn’t, however, bring Michael back to the Inglewood neighborhood, where he had been flirting with the Queen Street Bloods. With her eldest child now living with his girlfriend, her girl off to Jobs Corp, and her baby gone to Pomona, Karen had thought she had an empty nest. She had given up her expensive three-bedroom $1,000-a-month house in Inglewood in favor of a small one-bedroom apartment on Imperial Highway, blocks away from where she’d first moved the big kids and baby Michael when they set out on their journey as a family. Now, when Michael returned to her, she enrolled her precocious baby in an advanced college program at nearby Southwest Community College, a program for high school students that gets them through their high school curriculum and into the first phase of college all in four years. This seemed like a reasonable choice, but deep down Karen was still a country girl. She didn’t know that Southwest Community College was Crips territory, and that these gangs were bigger, stronger, and more violent than those in the Inglewood neighborhood.
Leaving Pomona, Michael moved with Karen to the apartment on Imperial Highway. Almost up under the freeway overpass, the apartment, nondescript in a concrete landscape, stewed in car exhaust. There were no trees here; no rooftops worthy of meditation. But Southwest seemed to give Michael what he needed: books and the outdoors. The soon-to-be fifteen-year-old flourished in his classes and joined the cross-country team, even running the 1995 L.A. Marathon with the team, fueled by his mom’s pasta dinner.
And he had a new chance to travel. Karen had earned her state license as a minister and was beginning to fly regularly to women’s leadership conferences. Michael went with her to D.C., Oakland, and San Diego.
Then came Michael’s junior year. During the summer before it began, he had looked for jobs. He tried grocery stores, seeking work as a stock boy or bag boy. His older cousin Marc had worked in a grocery store as a bag boy throughout his high school years. But Michael had no luck. At fifteen, he needed a work permit to work and he didn’t have one. Nor did he find an employer willing to work around that. His mother’s social network didn’t have anyone in it who could offer him a job either. In July, he went to Michigan for a couple of weeks to visit his Uncle William, Aunt Susan, and cousin Marc, himself now also a Princeton graduate. Michael admired his cousin’s forest green Volkswagen Passat.
Michael spent that August back home again, and now, once again, began to cause his mother worry. On those warm summer days, sometimes reaching 90 degrees, he maximized his time out of doors. He would leave the apartment and roam. Sometimes, four blocks away from their apartment, he would stand out in front of the house of a kid he’d come to know. His mother spotted him, lean and muscled from his long-distance running, standing shirtless in khaki trousers. This was gangbanging gear.
“There were two guys standing there and their parents. They had on t-shirts, and one of them had a hairnet. It just repr
esented the wrong environment,” she recalls. “You live up under the freeway bypass, not here,” she chastised him. Although he was standing only four blocks away from her apartment, it felt like a different neighborhood. When she asked him what he was doing, Michael answered, “Nothing, Mom. I’m just hot.”
Michael’s sister Roslyn, now seventeen, and discovering boys, was also home that August. They spent time together. Michael was out and about all over the neighborhood, she realized. He’d acquired a friend, Devonn, who was a Crip. They had actually met at church. This friend was a member of the Rollin 60s Crips, just as, according to some people, the pastor Andrew Rinehart had once been. With this knowledge, the blue décor of Rinehart’s church takes on a different meaning. About Pastor Rinehart, another cousin says: “When he practiced his ministry, he practiced it in these disenfranchised neighborhoods with these young people who needed help. These young kids who do participate in these activities still needed some place to go.”
Michael wasn’t sensitive to the blue-red color code. He understood it, but he didn’t feel it in his flesh. This is what his sister means when she says he was all over the neighborhood. He was crossing color lines. He hung out with Devonn, a Crip, but Roslyn also spotted him hanging out down the street from their mom’s apartment on Imperial in khakis and a red shirt, presumably a vestige of his association with the Queen Street Bloods. His sister marveled that he was able to move so fluidly through different territories, each of which should have been off-limits to someone who had been hanging in one of the other territories. One day he did come home with a black eye. He’d taken a beating for refusing to join a gang, he told her.
Another cousin, Pili, who was just two months older than Michael and who lived only a few blocks away, tells yet another story of what Michael was up to. He recalls riding the bus with his cousin back to the old Inglewood neighborhood and watching Michael get jumped back into the Queen Street Bloods. He says there were two different ways of relating to gangs. If you grew up in a neighborhood, you just were part of that gang and you didn’t have to do anything to prove your affiliation, so you could get away without gangbanging. But if you were a newcomer, someone who had moved around a lot, then, wherever you landed, you would have to prove yourself, clarify your loyalties, and declare your allegiances with actions. Michael was in this situation, Pili recalls.
Sometime that summer before their junior year, Michael and Pili both ended up spending the night at another uncle’s house. Probably they’d gone there to swim. The last week of August and first week of September brought an unbroken string of hot days. Karen happened to be out of town. Before the boys went to sleep, Michael said to Pili, “If I go out in the night, tell someone.” Michael didn’t go out, but Pili wishes he had told someone what Michael had said.
This is how Pili began to get a sense of the trouble brewing around Michael. Something else caught his attention, too. Michael had begun calling him “Cuz.” This is what members of the Crips call one another. Pili had grown up in and still lived in a Blood neighborhood. He never gangbanged, but even so the word “Cuz” discomfited him. “I can’t say the word,” he admits. Michael didn’t feel the force of these allegiances in his flesh, Pili realized, or Michael never would have called him this. But from Michael’s use of this word, Pili also realized that Michael did have some real involvement with the Crips as well as with the Bloods.
Up until the end of his life, Michael often called me “Cuz.” I never knew it had this other meaning, and the gang salutation wasn’t how he was using it for me. But it was a clue I might have seen and didn’t.
Nicholas tells the story of his younger brother’s summer and start of junior year differently yet again. By now Nicholas—nineteen years old—lived in San Pedro with his girlfriend, Sharon, and their infant daughter. He’d finished his Army Reserve training the previous spring, and was now looking for a job as a security guard while also keeping up his monthly Reserve training sessions. Michael was developing something of a relationship with Sharon’s older sister, Linda, and sometimes he joined all of them in San Pedro. To Nicholas’s eye, Michael was thriving. He was doing well in the new school program at Southwest College. He was running track. Michael never wore colors or other gang clothing. He seemed to have avoided full-fledged gang membership. But he had “bread”; he had the clothes and shoes that he wanted. Nicholas didn’t think anything of it. He remembers one incident, though, that brought fear. He, too, had an experience standing on the street with Michael just outside his mother’s apartment on Imperial.
Fool in a brown Cadillac rolled up. Guys from Denver Lane rolled up, banging on us. Guy’s holding like he’s ready to draw. Michael had some nice clothes. We knew if we said the wrong thing or did the wrong thing, I knew it would be a bust. “Ugly Cuz. Are you all Cuz?” He was saying this and that. He just saw two dudes that he didn’t know.
Nicholas had known about Michael’s flirtation with the Queen Street Bloods, but he had thought it was over. He knew he didn’t have any involvement with the Denver Lane Bloods. And it never occurred to him that his brother might be developing an association with the Crips.
Karen’s story, too, possessed its own contours. She never suspected Michael of participating in gangs. He didn’t wear colors that she ever saw. He didn’t have any of the outward telltale signs. He was doing well in school. He seemed to be off to a good start in his junior year. She worried when she saw him hanging out in the wrong place, but she was concerned about what might happen, not about what was happening. She had enough confidence in Michael that she traveled to Florida at summer’s end seeking answers to lingering questions about how her mother’s long-ago death from gallbladder surgery. She left $500 in her bedroom, the rent money, and asked Roslyn and Michael to give it to the landlady.
But when she returned, the money was gone, and the landlady hadn’t been paid. The screen door was damaged and her bedroom had been turned topsy-turvy. Karen suspected Michael of faking a break-in and taking the money.
A week or so later, Michael brought Karen $500. “To help you with the rent,” he said. When she asked him where he got it, he wouldn’t say. She refused it, telling him, “It’s blood money.”
Then Michael started spending time out after his curfew. His mother thought about calling his probation officer, but a friend from her church counseled her against it. He had begun the semester earning straight A’s on quizzes in his math class, but then the grade suddenly dropped down to an F. Karen had conferences with Michael and his teachers. They told him that he was smarter than this, but he countered, “I don’t want to be smarter than this.”
Her last day with her boy was Friday, September 15. Michael didn’t have school. He went to work with his mother, and after he spent some time hanging out in her office, she took him over to the Los Angeles Public Library, which was not far from where she worked. That Friday was payday, and the plan was for Michael to meet up with her at the close of business for a shopping trip. He wanted new pants. They were supposed to meet right in the library where she had left him. Michael was gone, though, when his mother went back for him. “I know where I left him. I was there and he wasn’t there.” She is adamant.
In the days before cell phones, Michael and his mother had no easy way to reconnect. After an exhausting day at work, she went home, leaving a message for Michael just in case.
Michael eventually did make it back to her office. Her coworkers relayed to Michael the message that he should head on home by bus, which he didn’t do. We do know he came to the neighborhood, but he didn’t go home. He did catch a glimpse of his mother driving up the street, perhaps having gone out on another errand, but he ducked into a laundromat to hide. She caught a glimpse of him, too, through the window, and went around the block to check, but when he saw her car come round again, he dodged behind the machines.
After the laundromat, he went to Devonn’s house, his friend who was a member of the Rollin 60s Crips. That Friday night, Devonn’s mother mentioned to K
aren at church that Michael had been at her house that day.
Karen asked that she send him home, but Michael did not come home.
Nor did he come on Saturday. Karen next knew about Michael only when Devonn’s sister knocked on the door on Sunday morning and told Karen that her baby had been shot.
In the ambulance, Michael told his own story quite differently. He said that he had not been home for a week. He said he had found the gun two and a half weeks earlier. This would have been just when the rent money disappeared. He said first that he found the gun behind a McDonald’s near his mother’s house, and then changed his story to say that he found it in a garbage bag full of clothes on a walkway running alongside one of the Rosecrans apartments. Perhaps he was trying to protect his mother by putting more distance between her and his activities.
Michael, it seems, stole his mother’s rent money to buy a gun. This must have had something to do with his deepening gang affiliation. He had had an acknowledged association with the Queen Street Bloods. Yet he also called the people around him, including his cousins, “Cuz.” And on that September morning, he was out and about seeking revenue and action with a Crip. The police, though, never identified the crime as gang-related; next to the question “Gang member?” on their report, they checked no.
Michael was not in their gang database, nor did he ever, when he finally did get tattoos, ink in a gang symbol. He wasn’t actually prepared that mid-September morning to be violent. He had acquired a gun, but he did not use it. He held back, it seems, and got shot. Stealing was in him. That we can see. But shooting was not, not then. The gun sounds most of all like somebody else’s idea of what Michael needed to do to prove himself.
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