by Ryan Gattis
I kind of pause after that, not for effect or nothing, but cuz I have to.
I must take too long too, cuz Payasa says, “What happened?”
“There was this car seat in the back,” I say, “you know, for babies?”
“Shit,” Payasa says. “What happened?”
“What happened is, I didn’t get Booger. That fool ran off.”
“Fuck Booger! What happened to the baby?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I mean, all’s I heard was crying, like, really loud crying and screaming from the backseat and the car’s swerving back and forth and speeding away, and all I can think about is all that glass in the backseat, you know?” I shake my head remembering it. “All that glass.”
Payasa’s kind of angry now. “Did you ever find out? Like, was everything okay?”
“No,” I say, “I never did find out. I tried, but nobody heard nothing about a hurt baby, and I never saw that car again, not by the park or anywhere else.”
“Come on,” she says, “really? Never?”
“Babies come to me in my dreams sometimes,” I say, “all cut up.”
“That’s messed up,” she says.
“Yeah, it is,” I say, “but what I did was messed up too. And I only told you that story to say that doing this shit sticks to you. Cuz I don’t ever want you looking at me and thinking it all just slides off. That’s all’s I’m saying, Lil Clown Girl. That’s it.”
She gets quiet then, and I don’t know what to say, or if I even made my point, so I wait a little before saying, “If Fate’s for real making you move out, maybe it’s not such a bad thing, you know? Being out of the neighborhood for a little? I mean, if you were out, what would you do? Have you even thought about that?”
She pushes her head back into the headrest and stares at the ceiling. After a little while she gets a smile, a small one, but it’s there, so I call her out.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she says. “It’s stupid.”
It’s not stupid, I want to say, cuz that’s the first smile I seen on you since before Ernesto was lying up in that alley. But I just wait. I give her time. I try to memorize what it looks like on her face. Bigger than Mona Lisa’s. It crinkles her nose a little at the top when she does it, between her eyebrows.
“I’m kind of into the idea of seeing Elena,” she says.
“Wait,” I say, just to get it straight in my head, “the one that wanted us to cap Joker and tell her she sent it? That one?”
“Exactly the one,” she says and licks her lips a little like she’s thinking of doing something else with them, something good.
“There you go,” I say, “crazy love.”
She kisses her teeth with one of them loud, sharp tsk sounds. “Hold up, I did not say it was love.”
“Have it your way. She’s loca but fine as hell. The ass on her,” I’m saying but I kind of fade out there cuz I’m thinking how good Elena looked in jeans and how nice it would be to take two big handfuls of her, and I get lost in that fantasy for a second and can’t really finish what I was saying, so I’m just like, “Man.”
I just say it for effect, you know? But Payasa knows exactly what I’m saying and she laughs at me. Whyever she’s doing it, it don’t matter. It’s good to hear her laugh. One of the best things about Payasa is you never got to worry about talking to her like she’s a girl. You can say whatever the fuck you want usually and it’s cool. She’s a homie like that.
“Yeah,” Payasa says. “Man is fucking right. I’m working on her.”
That gives me a mental image real quick and I trip on it for a few blocks.
“Damn” is all I can think to say, but I figure I should maybe keep Payasa talking about Elena cuz it seems like it’s keeping her mind off everything else heavy. “You thinking she’ll actually switch up off of guys? Why?”
“There’s always a chance,” she says, “especially if I can get her seeing me like her protector now.”
“Like, a knight in shining armor?” I look at Payasa and she nods her head up a little and smiles that secret smile again, only this time it seems to say she knows things about women I never even knew existed, and she does it so confident that I don’t even doubt it’s true. “So defending her honor and that?”
“Women care about that shit,” she says. “They need to feel safe.”
“You say it like you aren’t one,” I say.
I pull us up to the curb on Louise, right in front of Oso’s. There’s a light on inside, and I see my aunt moving back and forth in front of the kitchen window, hovering over the sink like she’s washing vegetables or something. Just from seeing her like that, with her hair all pinned back like she’s been sleeping, I know Oso got her up. She spoils him more ever since Cricket died, lets him eat all hours of the day or night when he’s hungry. It don’t matter when he asks, she’ll get up and make him something.
“I’m not a woman like how Elena’s a woman,” Payasa says when I shut the car off. “A girl like that, she needs somebody to take care of her. Someone like me, I need to take care of somebody. That’s just how it goes. That’s nature. The roles don’t change much just cuz we’re both chicas. That shit’s ingrained. That shit’s human.”
I shrug cuz I’m gonna have to take her word for it, and I open my door, but when the cabin light goes on above our heads, Payasa catches my arm and I can tell she’s not done talking, so I pull my door closed and the light snaps off.
She says, “Is this over, like over-over? Is it gonna cool down with Joker and Trouble and Momo out?”
“I don’t know,” I say, and I really don’t.
She tucks her chin down kind of and frowns at that, and that’s how I know I called it right before. She actually wants it to be over. Lil Mosco never would’ve been like that. He would’ve wanted war for a long time, any and every opportunity to get wild. He would’ve loved it. Payasa, though? She doesn’t. She just stepped up and did what she had to, when she had to do it.
“Somebody’s always related to somebody, huh?” She sounds exhausted how she says it, like she’s a granny. “Or homies with somebody?”
“You’re not wrong,” I say, “but if you don’t like how you pay, don’t play.”
That might seem cold to say to somebody who just lost her only two brothers and the whole front side of her house, but she knows it’s just true, and somebody’s got to say it to her. Might as well be me. I watch her rock in her seat a little, and I open my door just so I can see the white cabin light on her face again and I think I might try a portrait of her black-and-gray style. You know, use a tiny little model brush and model paints, the kind that even when after they dry, they still shine.
To my Lil Clown Girl, I say, “You hungry? Looks like my aunt’s cooking in there, and trust me on this, if she’s fixing up enchiladas, you don’t want to be missing them.”
“I could do that,” she says. “But after, could you maybe take me to mi mamá’s?”
I’m not the chief, I’m the brave, but I figure I could make an exception, just for her. Just this once.
DAY 5
SUNDAY
THE POLICE WERE ALSO TELLING GANG MEMBERS THAT THE NATIONAL GUARD WAS, IN EFFECT, A MUCH, MUCH BIGGER GANG. THEY FELT THOSE WERE TERMS THE GANG MEMBERS COULD RELATE TO.
—MAJOR GENERAL JAMES D. DELK,
COMMANDING OFFICER OF NATIONAL GUARD FORCES
ANONYMOUS
MAY 3, 1992
3:22 P.M.
1
Let me get one thing straight: I am the Big, Bad Wolf and as far as anyone who needs biting is concerned, I do not exist. Tonight I am tasked with assaulting a number of gang-involved residences, and I can tell you that I am personally going to enjoy it. Due to the extralegal nature of this operation, however, I cannot tell you who I am or where I work. Technically, I cannot tell you what I do, either, not as a day job, but this is a matter of extraordinary circumstanc
e, so I can walk you through what I do when I do it, and you can fill in the rest in your head. First, however, some background is needed.
Currently, I am in command of two transport vehicles carrying sixteen men south on the bone-dry concrete bed of the Los Angeles River. We entered the culvert via a tunnel entrance beneath the Sixth Street Bridge. Channelized with concrete by the Army Corps of Engineers over a period of years beginning in 1935, the basin is more road than river, and today it will serve as both our bridge and back-door entrance into South Central. We are en route to a residence wherein multiple known gang members reside and conduct illicit business. Prior to this mission, my team was stuck in a hurry-up-and-wait scenario because, in my opinion, no one at the top had the stomach to sanction our deployment until one hour ago. Up to that point, we had been on standby, sitting on a forward command post for the LAPD and all emergency services.
This was particularly frustrating to my team and me because police and National Guard forces all over Los Angeles have been engaged in standoffs and skirmishes with domestic enemies more skilled in urban guerrilla combat than most foreign combatants. This is not a view you are likely to hear espoused in public, but it is the correct one. Such situations occur because this city is effectively Balkanized. What you have in Los Angeles is a particularly toxic mixture of citizens with disparate cultural backgrounds and belief systems, but what you have above all is a highly fragmented gang population numbering roughly 102,000. (When I was first briefed on this number, I said, “That is not a statistic, sir; that is an army.”) In 1991 alone, this group was responsible for 771 murders in the city—over two per day.
It gets worse: LAPD had a directive to protect gun stores citywide when the riot began. They failed. Over three thousand guns (nearly all semiautomatic, although some fully automatic rifles) were looted in the first two days. Though verified, this number has not been made public, and neither has this: nearly all remain unaccounted for. As such, it is operationally necessary to know that black and Latin gangs in this area are heavily armed.
So you know where I am coming from: when I use the term black, it means something. As my southern-raised father frequently said to me, “You was born black, and you’ll die that way.” I grew up in Watts, pre- and post-1965 riots, and Los Angeles today is very different from Los Angeles then. I was born in Lynwood, at St. Francis, April 1956, because there was no hospital in Watts at the time. When I was nine, my own neighborhood rioted in response to the arrest and beating of “that Frye boy,” as my mother referred to him since she knew his mother, Rena, from church. Lynwood was still considered a nice place for whites then, and my mother herself took the bus there to clean houses. I find it unnecessary to further detail my early life, so I will simply say I shipped to Vietnam in 1974 and did two tours. Afterward, I went career army before taking early retirement to accept a certain job, with a certain U.S. governmental agency that I cannot currently name. That is all I can tell you about me, but I felt it vital to be clear that I have a personal stake in this mission. It is on my patch, so to speak.
It is, however, not as if this situation were created overnight. I can tell you from personal experience that nothing got solved after Watts, economically or otherwise, and yet, I do not exaggerate when I say the powder keg is significantly bigger than it once was. Only 7,900 officers and sheriffs police this city of almost 3.6 million, and county of 9.15 million. (Consider the nearly 102,000 active gang members against this number of officers.) As it stands, this is the worst ratio of all the major urban areas in the country, and yet, it is even worse when one considers the size of the policing area. Los Angeles County is a beach blanket. It is flat and it is spread out north-south from the port encompassing San Pedro and Long Beach up to the Pasadena foothills and the San Fernando Valley, and west-east from the Santa Monica beaches to the desert of the San Gabriel Valley.
For the sake of comparison: the Watts riots took place in six square blocks of my old neighborhood. It was contained accordingly. However, on the first night of our present civil unrest, fires extended over 105 square miles of city and county area in South Central. As a result, curfew was about as well enforced as Prohibition, because policing an area of that size, with that large a gang population, even during the best of times, is extremely arduous. But during a civil disturbance the likes of which this nation has never seen before? Well, it simply is not possible. That is the bad news up to now, but here is the good: it changes tonight.
At the FCP, I spoke to a number of fellow Vietnam vets, National Guardsmen mostly, but some CHP, and some police. Nearly all of them spoke about how similar their emotions are now to when they were “in country” over two decades ago. They mentioned the unknown. They confessed to having difficulty recognizing the enemy. I understand both, but my team is not tasked with defending shopping malls. We are targeted, guided by an L.A. Sheriff’s Department Homicide liaison with exceptional knowledge and reliable informants within the South Central gang world. He selects our targets, and we do our job. In short, we are the payback.
“Don’t worry,” I told the old-timers in the chow line organized by the good folks at the U.S. Forestry Service. “I know who the enemy is, and not only am I going to break his ribs for you, I am going to look him in the fucking eye when I do it.”
The sentiment, I must say, was much appreciated. Every day and every night since this began, gang-involved thugs have been threatening guardsmen and cops all over this city. I have yet to meet a guardsman who does not have a variant on this story: gangbangers drive by slowly, showing off their guns while pointing fingers at the men in uniform and saying, “We’ll come back and kill you after dark.”
In my line, that is considered a terrorist threat and deserves swift retribution. That is the angle from which we must approach this situation, because desperate times call for desperate measures. Within the EOC, there are already rumbles that the situation citywide is now contained on a level that would allow the curfew to be lifted tomorrow, so our mission is for tonight and tonight only. We have less than twenty-four hours to send a very loud message.
The silver lining to the chaos of the last five days is this: there is no possibility of what we are about to do blowing back on us. We go out, we teach the bullies a lesson so they know who is bigger and badder, and then we go. It is caveman stuff, but it also happens to be the only language every gang understands.
Our engagement parameters are twofold: one, we are to spend no more than six minutes at any given property, and two, we may act in any way we deem appropriate, so long as we do not fire unless fired upon. I agreed to both in the EOC, but I remain a realist. The one thing you can count on when on the ground is circumstances changing. All the same, I could not help myself in our mission briefing when some desk-riding, newly flown-in marine commander with more stripes on his sleeve than sense told me that not firing unless fired upon was the only thing separating us from the gangs.
“Separating us, sir?” I said to his overly serious face. “We are a gang.”
You should have seen his jaw loosen. He is not my CO, and I do not report to him. He was only informed of the mission as a matter of professional courtesy. The gang parallel always seemed perfectly obvious to me, but I suppose it is not.
In this vehicle, I have a handpicked crew of highly trained men. We are all wearing identical tactical uniforms of green suits and helmets. We have a common goal of “rolling up” (as the parlance goes) on another gang and reminding them as forcefully as possible where the line is. This is something gangs also must do from time to time. Whether in turf or conduct, there is a line, even among criminals, and in a civil disturbance situation, again, the likes of which this country has never seen before, humans tend to forget where that line is.
Until now, that is. Now, the line gets redrawn. Now, we are more dangerous than we have ever been because there is no oversight and, best of all, we do not have to do paperwork on it in the morning. No forms. No narrative. No reports in triplicate. It is about as pe
rfect as a government-run operation ever gets because it is dead simple, and technically, it will never be recorded as happening.
We have no names sewn on our uniforms now. We are as anonymous as the wind. What we do will exist only in whispered stories. Only the bad guys will ever know we did this, and they do not count.
I have issued one directive, and one directive only: aim to maim, and when you do, maim for life. I tell my men this, and I also amend our first mission parameter.
“Do not, I repeat, do not wait to be fired upon,” I say as our vehicle hits a bump and keeps going. “If anyone so much as aims a gun at you, you cancel his fucking Cinco de Mayo.”
2
So with what I have revealed so far firmly in mind, I would ask you to do one thing. I need you to steel yourself. Take a breath if needed. When we do what we must, I would advise you not to get soft. This begins with viewing our prospective targets neither as victims nor as people, but as unpunished criminals getting a dose of the only medicine they understand. I would recommend heartily that you not pity them. The criminals we are targeting, they have it coming and they have had it coming for a long time. Most important, they will know that they have brought this upon themselves.
