by Ryan Gattis
We’re in the 8600 block, Vermont Knolls. This has all the makings of a grudge burn, but it could be insurance too. Somebody set a Korean-owned furniture store on fire next door and it spread to the adjacent building with a sandwich shop—VERMONT SANDWICH SHOP, FOOD TO GO, the sign says, and then a phone number that’s blackening—but next to it is the Universal College of Beauty. Neither looks retrievable. They were already pretty far gone when we get there. No genuine possibilities of recovery, but we can put it out.
I never turn my engine off. A 50-gallon tank will last you six hours or thereabouts if it’s full when you start. McPherson lays an inch-and-a-half and I watch the pump pressure, but I don’t need to stay right on top of it. Hoses pump at 125 gallons per minute, which would give me about four minutes for one line if we were tank only, but we’re not. I do only have one coming off, and Suzuki’s jockeying it, arching a stream onto the roof while two other lines from another engine douse what’s left of the front window. I throttle up the pressure to 150 pounds per square inch, and the fire’s getting pretty well knocked down now, as gray smoke and steam shoot out of every available opening. I run a supply line from the hydrant to mine to top off the water tanks before we pull out.
Part of my job is to see the big picture, to react before there’s a need. I failed Gutierrez, which is why I’m extravigilant with the civilian bystanders here. I scan faces twice, but none look like gang members. They look like parents, families. In fact, there’s a loose group of older folks across the street, watching us. They’re taking pictures, video too, like we’re entertainment.
One guy wearing shorts, slippers, and no shirt has a big camcorder propped on his left shoulder and his eye to the eyepiece. He’s sweating, and his skin is shiny, almost blue-black at this distance. What’s more, he’s holding a sandwich in his free hand and eating it. Now, I’m no cop, but if I was looking to make an arson arrest related to a sandwich shop currently ablaze, I’d start with asking some questions of the smart guy eating a ham-and-cheese on the same street at whatever-o’clock-in-the-morning—I check my watch—at 04:02 in the morning.
Before it’s 04:08, CHP stretches the perimeter one more block down, near to where there’s a National Guard unit, and the STL sends two engines down to put out another fire that’s starting up, but we stay on what’s left of the furniture store, even though you can see the skeleton of the ceiling peeking through smoke now. It tells the tale. This building’s gone.
There’s a helicopter overhead—looks like Channel 7—shining a light down on us like we’re at the bottom of a deep, dark hole. The people who live around here, they know what that actually feels like. They know how ugly life can get. Everybody else, the people sitting at home, watching this unfold on television, they have no idea. Those are the people shocked by the riots. They can’t comprehend them because they don’t understand the other side. They don’t understand what happens to people with no money who live in a neighborhood where crime is actually a viable career path when there are no other opportunities, and I’m not excusing it or condoning it or saying it can’t be avoided, but I’m saying that’s how it is.
And let me tell you something else, those people don’t have any idea what it’s like to roll as a rookie EMT in my district, one of the heaviest gang-involved areas in the gang capital of the world. You can never explain to them what it’s like to come on a scene as a first responder and see someone with multiple stab wounds—nine in the upper chest and five in the stomach, including one long rip that cut the outtie belly button in half, like somebody actually tried to gut this little ten-year-old gangbanger like a fish—and here he is, this child, crying, leaking snot down his cheeks and bleeding to death right in front of you, unable to do much else but gulp because he’s got a punctured lung. Of course, you don’t even think, you do your job. Sure, if he makes it, he’ll have to live the rest of his life with a colostomy bag but you don’t think about that then, you do what you were trained to do. You provide that vital quick fix and get him sent to County Hospital, and later when you call to check in, you hear you managed to save his life and for a little bit, it feels like your job is worth it—valuable, even—hell, you can even point to it with pride and say, Look, I’m making a difference.
But a month and some weeks later, you’re out on those same streets having to assist the coroner with a body pickup—because God forbid they ever have the budget to do that on their own—and as you approach the decedent designated for transport at the bottom of a drainage ditch, you find that they haven’t sheeted him yet, and it’s with a slow-creeping horror that you realize you recognize the wounds—the scars, the placement on the ribs and the stomach, the long one on the gut where there’s not much of a belly button anymore, only a purple scar that looks shiny in the dark—and you recognize those before you actually recognize the face. He’s still ten. He’ll never be older because they didn’t bother stabbing him this time. This time, they just executed him, shot him in the back of the head. So you picked him up all those lifetimes ago and you fixed him for what? To alter the course of his life, to change it for the better? No. You bought him a few more days in hell is all you did. That’s it. All you did was prolong his death. How does that feel?
There’s a truth in that somewhere and maybe it’s this—there’s a hidden America inside the one we portray to the world, and only a small group of people ever actually see it. Some of us are locked into it by birth or geography, but the rest of us just work here. Doctors, nurses, firemen, cops—we know it. We see it. We negotiate with death where we work because that’s just part of the job. We see its layers, its unfairness, its unavoidability. Still, we fight that losing battle. We try to maneuver around it, occasionally even steal from it. And when you come across somebody else who seems to know it like you do, well, you can’t help but stop and wonder what it’d be like to be with someone who can empathize.
Nurse Gloria draws me in so much because it’s obvious she understands this whole world, not just half of it. I don’t need to explain everything to her, because maybe I don’t even need to explain me. She’s seen this hidden side just like I have. She knows what death looks like, and what futility feels like. She carries it with her, this weight. I can see it in how she moves, how she talks—
“Hey, Yanic,” Suzuki says, “check this out.”
He’s next to me, holding his hand out, gesturing for me to open mine too, so I do. I look up and notice McPherson’s on Suzuki’s hose as Suzuki puts an iron-gray bullet in my palm, one with a smashed tip and no jacket, still a little warm. I must give him a look—how in the hell?—because he mimes shooting a gun straight up at the sky, makes a bang with his mouth and then traces the trajectory with his finger, scoring it with a little whistle, as it goes all the way up and all the way down before plunking him on the helmet with a flick of the fingernail. I turn it over in my palm, but it’s not like I’ve never seen ordnance before.
We sweep the station roof after every New Year’s and Fourth of July, finding more small-caliber stuff than you’d ever believe, but it’s just that right now there’s so goddamn much of it. Feels like I’ve seen more buckshot on the street tonight than painted lines. It’s the volume that staggers me. How many firearms are there in L.A. city anyway, conservatively speaking? 360,000? That’s roughly 1 percent, less than one gun for every hundred residents. Trust me, there’s no way gun ownership, both legal and illegal, is anywhere near that low but we’re being conservative here. Let’s also just say that an outrageously high 10 percent of them have been fired once in the last forty-eight hours. Now that’s presuming 36,000 guns were fired only once during the worst conflagration L.A. has ever seen, worse than Watts. Sure. You think a gangbanger is ever going to shoot a gun just once? Even still, that’d be 36,000 bullets. Thirty-six. Thousand. You’d get the same number if 5 percent of those guns shot twice, or only 2 percent shot five times. Part of me wants to dismiss it, call it completely crazy, but I actually can’t. If anything, the total is too low, but what’
s more chilling is that we’re not out of the woods yet.
“Let me have it back,” Suzuki says. “I’m gonna give it to my kid.”
I say, “Why do you want your kid having a bullet?”
“I don’t know. Drill a hole through it, put it on a chain so he can wear it. Tell him it hit his old man once and he stopped it like Superman.”
It’s still warm when I give it back to him. I don’t know if that’s because of his hand or that it was so recently fired. Then again, I don’t know that I want to know.
6
When the flare-up down the block is overhauled, the STL tells us we’re going to an RTD bus depot in Chinatown for some R&R because the forward command post at Fifty-Fourth and Arlington was too impacted with other emergency personnel vehicles, so we do a quick pickup and go up Vermont to Manchester, then Manchester to the Harbor Freeway and head north. We convoy to Downtown and instead of taking the 101, we exit at Fourth Street, take it to Alameda, and turn left. It doesn’t seem the best route, all things considered, but I figure whoever is routing us knows something I don’t, so I don’t carp.
“Downtown isn’t so bad,” Suzuki says from the back.
Cap smirks. He’s riding shotgun again. To his credit, he hasn’t said anything about the blood.
“Yeah,” I say, “I thought it’d be worse, but I guess there isn’t much worth looting around here.”
Downtown has been bombed out since the ’70s when building owners gave up, sold cheap, and took their money to the Westside or the Valley. At the same time, slumlords got to work making it the least habitable place in Los Angeles. Skid Row wasn’t great to begin with, but it went from gutter to holding cell. The era of the seasonal worker and the hobo died when the city started knocking down cheap housing, the produce markets were slowing down or moving elsewhere as regional supermarkets took over, and Skid Row ceased to be a place for migrant farmworkers and more a pit stop for the mentally ill, the drug inclined, or both. By the time the ’80s rolled around, crack made all that permanent. Now there’s not a whole lot left around but the courthouse, silent-film-era hotels that need more than a coat of paint to get their glamour back, abandoned burlesque houses on Main, and a bunch of empty warehouses.
As we cross over Third Street, I see two women pushing strollers with no kids in them but plenty of toys, boxes and boxes of them, just like they were out shopping at Macy’s or something. One has a scar on her face, from her ear down her cheek. It’s keloided and looks like a tusk almost. It’s not the same, but it reminds me of the gangbanger’s shoulder scar, and that starts the dominoes inside me. I hate him all over again. I want to drop a brick on his face and see how he likes it. The thought makes me smile a sick smile, but then I’m thinking of Gutes. The bloody aftermath. The way his tongue looked when it moved. And it’s all I can do just to stare at buildings as they pass.
The slow motion is stuck in my head again. The cinder block dropping—the sound of it landing—I remember how it made two, a crunch first when it hit the jaw and then a thud when it hit the ground, and I shiver. That gangbanger’s face was the worst part. I never thought it was possible to sneer and smile at the same time until I saw it, and I’ve seen the aftermath of a lot of desperate things done by a lot of desperate people, but this was something else. I make the promise to myself, he will pay for what he did. I will find him. A gangbanger like that? He has a record, guaranteed. You don’t just roll out of bed one day and decide to brick a fireman. You work up to it.
McPherson interrupts my train of thought by saying, “Wonder what happened there?”
As we cross over the 101, I see what he’s talking about and it suddenly makes sense why we didn’t take it to get where we’re going. Beneath us, a vehicle is on fire. There doesn’t seem to be any reason for it being there, just a Jeep shooting up smoke. It’s under control though. I read the number of the engine hitting it with a hose. It’s 4s.
Suzuki points out how there’s no one parked at Union Station, and no one at the Olvera Street marketplace either. When we pass Ord and Philippe’s on the corner, my stomach tells me I’m hungry. The French dip sandwich was invented in L.A. Not many people know that. It was invented at Cole’s, supposedly for a customer with dentures who couldn’t eat a hard roll so a bartender gave him a little bowl of meat drippings to soak the bread in and soften it up, which eventually became known as au jus. Around here, you pick a side. Personally, I like to dip it in the jus myself, so I’m a Cole’s guy, but it seems like everybody in 57s prefers Philippe’s, where they prep the jus in the kitchen and slather it on the meat themselves, almost like gravy.
Our destination is a bus depot on North Spring Street between Mesnagers and Wilhardt. It’s one of the only safe places to fill up in the city. Outside of emergency protocol, it’s an RTD depot, but now, it serves as a temporary FCP for the LAPD, and for us, a place to do R&R—resupply, use the bathroom, call home, and get some food. Since it’s a safe zone, it makes sense that it’d be relatively well protected, but it’s almost like something out of Mad Max, that movie where everybody needs gas for their cars and they’ll kill to get it. There’s something about that premise that makes too much sense about a city as car-crazy as Los Angeles, so I mention it and Cap nods, but neither Suzuki nor McPherson have seen it, so I don’t bother explaining and instead I tell the guys in the jump seats they’ll just have to see it for themselves. When the sliding gate with razor wire on its top opens, I pull in, right around a group of green-uniformed men with M-16s.
7
It’s later, while we’re saying good-bye to our CHP escort before they head back to their main command post on Vermont and the 101, that somebody—Taurino’s his name—calls the guys at the front gate ninja turtles.
This makes sense because they’re decked out in army green from head to toe. They’ve got thigh pads and funny-looking military helmets with the same green fabric stretched over them and dark visors hiding their eyes. They really do look like man-size turtles from a distance. Taurino doesn’t know if they’re FBI or ATF, but he thinks they’re federal because he saw them fly in to the National Guard base at Los Alamitos when they arrived from out of town.
“It looks like they’re getting ready to deploy, who knows to where,” Taurino says. “All I know is I’m glad they won’t be paying me a visit.”
I look across the lot to where he’s looking and see the ninja turtles boarding a black vehicle that looks like a cross between a tank and a giant Jeep with a flat front. It doesn’t have any identifying acronym on it. It’s just black, like a metal shadow. There must be at least twelve of them and they are kitted out like Special Forces. One guy even has a bandolier of shotgun shells like a Mexican bandit in a western. They look scary. There’s no denying it.
I bid Taurino good-bye and I turn away, but he says, “Hey, hang on a second.”
I turn back and he whispers to me that I’ve got dried blood on the back of my neck. He doesn’t need to say any more. I know it’s Gutierrez’s.
I force a smile for Taurino, say thanks, and move to my rig.
I don’t blame CHP for what happened to Gutierrez, but I don’t not blame them either. It’s complicated. When I’ve had a few days to process and replay it all in my head again, I can try to figure out who gets what blame and how much, because I’ll need to when it comes time to write up the report.
I give my rig a once-over with some surface cleaner set aside for anybody who needs it, paying special attention to the dash, steering wheel, and the captain’s seat where Gutierrez was. I’m okay through it. I keep everything in the right boxes and nothing spills out.
It’s not even dawn yet and Cap’s already off doing paperwork, but I head over to the chow station, grab some food, and have an early breakfast with Suzuki, McPherson, some 57s, and a couple more from our light force, as well as a few guys on R&R who trickle in from other crews. The food’s bearable. You can tell a fireman didn’t cook it, because if he had, it’d be better. There’s oatmeal, bacon, eggs
, sausage, tortillas, salsa, and some potatoes that have been sitting for a bit. I pick oatmeal and load it with raisins and two packets of sugar.
With this many firemen in one place, taking up five picnic tables on the depot tarmac with nothing to do but eat and stare at each other, it’s inevitable that we’ll wind up trading war stories. Sure enough, some guy from 58s—I don’t know him—starts it.
“You guys run into any trouble with human roadblocks?”
Most of us are chewing, but I nod yes and the other engineers do too, because of course we’ve encountered people walking into the road in front of us, trying to stop us from doing our duty at best, and at worst, turn us into sitting ducks for projectiles. One engineer tells a quick story about his rig getting pelted with rocks and how the two guys sitting in the back jump seats were basically exposed, but they just kept their helmets on and ducked down and nobody got hurt. Suzuki looks at me. McPherson doesn’t. But it’s obvious they’re both thinking about Gutierrez. I’m not ready to talk about that though, so I nod back at the guy who started all this because I want him to continue.
“Well, last night I’m in K-town, right? We just knock the shit out of a department store fire in Beverly Hills and we’re tracking back because we get told to handle something big on West Adams and Crenshaw.” He stops and checks to see if everybody’s listening, and we are, so he continues. “So I’m chugging east on Sixth and right after the Western intersection this kid runs into the street waving a gun.”
I say, “Pointing it at you?”
“No, more like pointing it in the air because he’s waving his hands frantically and trying to get me to stop for him. Now that I think about it, I’m not even sure he knew he was holding it.”
