by Ryan Gattis
Past the Rio Hondo confluence of the Los Angeles River, there is a drive-out that leads onto Imperial Highway. We leave the riverbed there, utilize the access road, undo the fencing, and enter the street. I double-check the Duncan Avenue address obtained from our LASD Homicide liaison with our tactical drivers. Although I specifically requested that our liaison be detailed to my unit, I was rebuffed. He would love to be, he said, particularly to see the looks on the faces of these “little Mexican fuckers” when they get some justice, but he cannot risk someone recognizing him. He was at this same address last night, and he questioned one of these gangbangers as well. He still polices here he said, whereas we are “just visiting.” I told him I understood.
As we have the element of surprise, standard procedure is to assault the residence frontally. However, we have eyes-on in this case and have been informed that there is a gathering currently occurring in the back patio area. In addition, we know that a driveway borders the north of the property. As such, I have ordered one squad of four to disembark the tailing vehicle halfway down the block and flank the residence with weapons high in order to bottle up the gathering and funnel any runners back into the patio while the other squad from our tailing vehicle assaults frontally, and the two squads aboard my vehicle will cut off a lateral escape route.
As the flanking squad departs, they pass a possible gangbanger traversing the sidewalk away from the target residence. It is reasonable to assume he may be leaving the gathering so we confront him. He immediately puts his hands up and does not attempt to warn anyone of our presence. When he is told to get down in the grass and spread-eagle, he complies and is searched for weapons. He is clean. He is told to stay where he is, he nods that he understands, and my squad proceeds to the flank.
I have a newly adopted issue, German-style helmet that I am still getting used to, and I am wearing kneepads, thigh pads, and a Kevlar vest—basically, about as much padding as a football player. In my right hand, I am carrying a retractable tactical baton made of solid steel, also German in design and issue. At full extension, it is twenty-six inches long. It weighs one pound and seven ounces and it is a startlingly effective piece of equipment when in the proper hands. For a moment before the vehicle comes to a full stop and we jump, I feel invincible.
On my call, we exit the vehicle and spread out in formation as one of our targets yells, “Goon Squad’s here. Get the fuck out!”
I smile at that description. Goon Squad is not far wrong.
When we enter the patio, equal portions of food and drink splatter the concrete. Plates and cups get dropped as various gangbangers attempt to escape. This patio hosts a propane grill and two small picnic tables with benches built in. The area is concrete and roughly twenty feet square. The back edge abuts a metal fence three feet high. Beyond it is the front yard of the next house, dotted with close trees. Those targets attempting to jump the back fence freeze on the very top of it when they see the barrels of multiple M-16s poking through foliage. Upon seeing them, they scramble right back over the fence to the patio, and now they are mine.
There are nineteen gangbangers present. Most have the look of scared rabbits ready to bolt at any opportunity, but there are a few cool customers in this bunch, and that is good. It means they are likely operating under the notion that we are here to arrest them and that it will happen in an orderly fashion. We are not, and it will not.
Of my sixteen men, all have sidearms, but eight carry the same metal baton I have, and the rest are equipped with M-16s. Much has been made in the news about lockplates installed in National Guard weapons, rendering them incapable of automatic firing. I assure you that is not an issue for my unit. Should it become necessary, we can and will go fully automatic. As previously instructed, one of my men removes an empty box from the vehicle in the driveway and opens it.
“Let’s make this easy,” I say. “Those of you who are packing, put your weapons in that box right fucking now. Safeties on if they’re not already on.”
They do as they are told. It takes less than a minute for two of my men to pack the box up and secure it in one of the vehicles. This is where the fun starts. We have five minutes to truly ruin this party.
I make my way to the chef, the one standing over the grill. Our liaison marks him as the leader.
When I go toe-to-toe with him and show him I’m the bigger man by a few inches and twenty pounds, two gangbangers rise from the nearest table. One is wafer thin, but the other has an Indian look to him and is thick in the neck like a wrestler. My second in command steps between them and me while locking and loading his weapon. The racking of a bullet into the chamber of an automatic weapon is an extremely effective sound. It demands obedience.
They back up then, these two tough guys, but they certainly do not want to. A pretty little Asian hides herself behind the skinny one then. I have no idea what she is doing in a place like this. However, intel did indicate that this gang was not averse to using female members, so I note her presence accordingly.
I turn my attention back to the chef, and he looks at me with a stare that gives absolutely nothing away. He holds a metal spatula in his right hand, but it is frozen above the grill, the surface of which is brown with meat scrapings. When little runnels of clear fat fall from the spatula, they sputter and hiss on the hot charcoal below.
“You,” I say, “Mister Big Fate, have got to fucking stop killing people.”
He does not respond to that, but he does not need to. I nod to my SIC, who steps forward and holds his weapon in the ready position. At six foot four and two hundred and thirty pounds of muscle, he is a machine built for one thing and one thing only, and that is to hurt. When Big Fate (honestly, I cannot understand these names for the life of me) turns to look at my SIC, my SIC butt-strokes his skull. At that point, it is safe to say that Mr. Big Fate hits the concrete faster than a paratrooper without a ’chute.
I lean down to his bleeding face and say, “You need to stop killing people!”
Repetition is the only thing that gets through to these animals. I know this because I am an animal myself. The only things I have learned over the years, I have learned because I have done them ten thousand times. Ask my current wife, and while you are at it, ask my two ex-wives.
Now that Mr. Big Fate is down, my SIC works on his upper right arm. It is ringed with a Mexican-style tattoo. After one particularly thumping strike, the spatula drops from his hand and clangs to the concrete. As it settles, my SIC hits the very same spot on the arm again, bringing the butt of his weapon down on the same inky swirl. This is his new target, and he keeps hitting the same spot every time I say a word.
“You,” I say to Mr. Big Fate.
Butt-stroke is a nice way of saying something awful.
“Need.”
It is when you disable an assailant with the butt of your rifle.
“To.”
Fully loaded, a service-ready M-16 weighs 8.8 pounds. When wielded properly, it is capable of generating more than enough force to break bones.
“Stop.”
My SIC hammers the biggest bone in the upper body, the humer-
us, in the exact same place, again and again.
“Killing.”
Under normal circumstances, it takes tremendous force to break the humerus, and that usually only happens in car wrecks or high falls.
”People.”
In this case, however, my SIC has hammered the same spot until it fractured, and then he hit that fracture until the whole bone snaps with a crack so loud that it sounds like somebody hit a home run with a wooden bat, that is how clean the crack is, and at that moment Mister Big Fate’s arm bends the wrong way, and he roars, but that is not the end of it, because my SIC decides to step on the part of the arm that now hangs limply. This, he grinds with the sole of his combat boot. He puts all his weight on it, my SIC does, all two hundred and thirty pounds. I do not care how tough you think you are. No one can withstand that kind of pain. Mr. Big Fate is no different. He p
asses out right beneath my SIC and falls backward, smacking his head on the concrete.
When that happens, all hell breaks loose.
3
The stocky one goes for my SIC while the skinny one jumps at me, full of rage. It is almost comical the way they both go down. The stocky one walks into a judo hold that my SIC takes to completion, popping his shoulder right out of its socket with a thumping crack. The skinny one, I hit him in the ribs with my baton and finish him off with a rap to the top of his skull. All his breath leaves him in a rush before he hits the concrete knees-first and tumbles over in a heap. Behind him, one of my men has the Asian girl down and raps her wrist with a standard-issue metal baton. I hear her bones break from where I am standing. She screams in pain, and the skinny one, with blood streaming down his face, yells her name.
“Irene!”
I believe that is what he says anyway. It is hard to keep track precisely, because whoever was not running before that happened is running now. They jerk like antelope for the fence and go over it, or they run for the house. It is chaos, but for us, it is effective chaos, because at this point, it is simply time to work.
I strike three to the ground before they can pass me and get to the back door of the house. I hit throats. I hit ears. I hit whatever presents itself as the most advantageous soft target.
My SIC stands over his two examples, bellowing so loudly that he does not need a bullhorn to be heard by everybody on the block.
“We know you’ve been looting,” he says. “We know where you got the shit hid!”
Our game plan is simple. We aim for joints and small bones mostly. We break hands. We break ankles. We break knees and elbows too. We are not especially particular. It is mainly an issue of strategic opportunity, of what presents itself as someone with little to no martial arts training attempts to defend him- or herself. In such an instance, there are multiple options: he or she might turn and run—in which case, trip with baton and go for an ankle; he or she might try to kick out at you—in which case, dodge and strike the knee or ankle of the standing leg; he or she might face up to you, and you might feint a strike to the head, which might cause your target to reflexively put up his or her hands—in which case, strike fingers, wrists, or elbows.
I have told my men it is remarkably like fast food. Just grab and go. Bend something back against itself and wait for the scream, then pull until it pops. Then do it again. Once you have done it once, it is easier to reexecute. Two in ten actually fight through a pain reflex that strong. The rest give up. Once he or she succumbs to horizontality, that is when you strike ribs to be absolutely certain he or she will not take another deep breath again without thinking of you and how hard you hit. For the rest of their short lives, they will think of you. Change lives tonight, I told my men before we rolled. Sometimes the best learning experiences on earth are the bad ones, and today we must deliver them.
It smells of burning meat now as I seek one more example to make. The stocky one is at my feet, crawling toward Mr. Big Fate as the girl cradling her limp wrist curls herself around the skinny one.
It’s the stocky one I grab by the ankle before whipping off his laceless shoe. He rolls to look at me, his eyes widening as I bring my club down on his toes, turning every single one on his left foot into bloody, hanging bits at the end of his sock. You have never heard anyone scream like he screams. When I am done, what is left of his toes looks like nothing more than smashed maraschino cherries seeping through his white sock. Tears of shock stream down his face when I break his ribs. I stop at six. God willing, this little monster will never run or breathe right again. Good. Slower criminals are better for everybody.
He whimpers as he wheezes though, this one.
“Shut the fuck up.” I’m breathing heavily when I say this to the crybaby. “You play, you pay. Nobody has to tell you that. Count yourself lucky I didn’t shoot your whole fucking foot off. Imagine that! Imagine having to be a criminal with a stump. Why, you wouldn’t even be able to run from me next time.”
He bites his lip after that. He suffers in the loudest silence I have ever heard. At this point, I check my watch. We are at five minutes. Time is almost up.
The patio area has thinned out. By my count, two got away and that’s two too many. The meat on the grill has gone black, and it releases its own little towers of smoke. What a fitting microcosm that is, I think, Los Angeles as an untended grill, burning the meat unlucky enough to be stuck on top of it.
I count seventeen gangbangers down on the concrete patio. In their own ways, they are moaning, writhing, and/or gasping. It is not enough by half, but our orders are to get in and get out, so I order the withdrawal.
“We’re coming back whenever we want,” my SIC says to the stocky one trying for all the world not to look at what’s left of his foot. “We’ll confiscate all the shit you stole, but we won’t round you up, won’t stand you for trial, oh no! Next time, we’re just going to fucking shoot you.”
He waves good-bye in the creepiest way possible, my SIC. He brings his hand close to his face and just flexes the tips of his fingers down, like the way my son first learned how to wave at me.
For the record, I wish everything my SIC just said was true. It is not.
That is the biggest lie of our little operation tonight: we will not be coming back, no matter how much we might threaten it. Already we are back in the vehicles and moving on to a new location to deal with the next little batch of cancers. They are all getting done today before order is officially restored and curfew is lifted. All we are meant to do at this juncture is to keep them in line. We know they have been killing, but crime scenes citywide are cold, nonexistent, or wrecked. Arrest and prosecution is simply not going to happen at this stage. This is why the best-case scenario for law and order is a heavy-handed slap on the wrist—the kind that takes a great deal of time to heal, or might never heal, if we did it right.
Tonight, we will hit every notorious gang hangout or residence even remotely worth hitting, because the brutal truth is that there are too many criminals clogging the lockups in this city as it is. Department of Corrections was overburdened to begin with, but when over eight thousand people get arrested in four days, it doesn’t even begin to define the term strain. Systems have capacities and that one was reached on Day 3.
As I understand it, we are now only saving space for the special kind of dirt, the killers dumb enough to get caught in the act mostly. The arsonists, if we ever catch them. The ones we can actually build cases on and convict. Everybody else that is in our books as a known offender and we may or may not have information on, whether from tips or informants, we will visit tonight. We will throw some excellent surprise parties. It will not be enough, it will not be what they deserve, but it will be something, and with any luck, they will remember it the rest of their natural-born lives.
JEREMY RUBIO,
A.K.A. TERMITE,
A.K.A. FREER
MAY 3, 1992
4:09 P.M.
1
One, spiders sinking their fangs into my eyeballs. Two, getting pitched off the 710 overpass and belly-flopping onto the bed of the L.A. River so hard that all my bones break simultaneously. Three, finding a virgin city bus that no one ever graffed or scribed on before parked in a layup and I don’t have any paint to write my name with, and also I don’t have my mean streak, or my scriber, or anything. My cousin Gloria says I got a whatdoyoucallit? An overactive imagination. She’s right. I do.
But what I just said? Those are the three things that scare me less than going to the house Big Fate lives in to pay my respects to Ray and Lupe for Ernie, and I have nightmares about one through three all the time.
And I might still be a little high from this morning. But I’ve already waited too many days as it is. I never wanted to come, to be real honest with you. If I didn’t though, it would get noticed. Also, I need to find out when services are, cuz no one has heard anything, and my aunt has already asked me twice if it’s going to be
Catholic.
So I’m here, standing in the front yard of where Ernie used to live, a front yard that kinda smells like burnt paste for some reason, staring at a house with more bullet holes in it than I can count. I feel sick looking at it, a little dizzy. I don’t even know how he lived in this house.
I know Ernie didn’t get hurt here, but it still makes my legs feel like rubber cuz this is some for real shit and it definitely doesn’t help when my Walkman grinds like ka-ka, and it sounds like a train on tracks as it switches directions from side 2 to side 1 of my “Bombing Mix Tape, Vol.6.”
Side 2’s all rap. Side 1’s sound-track songs. I got it turned down real low cuz this is not the neighborhood to be caught slipping in. I submit as evidence this spectacular bullet-hole collection before me. I’m actually trying to count how many holes there are when the first song on side 1 pops into my ears and it kinda crushes me cuz I knew what it was but I forgot.
It’s the song from Star Wars about Luke’s burnt-up house. Uncle Owen’s dead. Aunt Beru’s dead. And now I got that scene associated with Ernie too cuz the song’s got like a, whatdoyoucallit, a weepy trumpet sound before the strings come in and jump up and down on the track like they own it. I just got to sidenote right here, and say that John Williams is the shit. Fact.
For a sec, and I mean for just a second, my brain switches gears then, and I think about how hard it would be to write my name in bullets on something. Prolly impossible.
I snap my music off with the stop button and I hear people in the back so I go up the driveway until I see people out on the patio. I got to be careful, I tell myself. I got to be observant, respectful, and I got to get away with whatever I can get away with.
When Clever sees me, he says, “Look at who it is, the tagger.”
