An Angle on the World

by Bill Barich

  I talked to a Rebel who was carrying a big ghetto-blaster. He came from a good family and kept a decent average in school. He owned a stereo, a TV, and a VCR. He had an electric guitar. Still, he spent much of his free time in the streets. He said that the Rebels had recently put together a party pad in a vacant lot near a freeway. They had carted in a couch and some old chairs, and in the evenings they’d gather with their musical instruments, their amps, speakers, and girlfriends. They would build a fire and mess around, not making a lot of noise, but an old lady in a house by the pad had complained, and the cops had come around and busted them.

  The bust was nothing, really, just a minor harassment, and the Rebels were already back in business, planning a kegger at a local park that weekend. “Drop by and check us out,” he said.

  Rahsaan shook his head. “It’s too cold out there, man.”

  The Rebels said that was O.K. It made the girls cling to them.

  In summer, the action around Hawthorne shifts to the coast—to Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach. The Rebels would drift with that tide, and so would the Insanity Boys, driving to the ocean in caravans and raving for adventure. They would brush up against Compadres, Little Watts, and Lennox 13. If they went north, to Venice, they’d run into hard-core Crips and Bloods, as well as motorcycle gangs. They’d meet beach rats, surfer punks, and skateboard stoners eager for a fight. In time, one of them would mistakenly respond to a challenge. According to Marianne, he would do it fearlessly, as if in a dream. “When you’re a kid, you’re not afraid of anything,” she said. “You don’t think you’re ever going to die.”

  * * *

  The kid Manuel Velazquez was looking for—I’ll call him Jody— is fifteen, white, and big for his age. Manuel gave me his case history as we set out from Sylmar one morning. Jody lives in a middle-class valley town, in a quiet neighborhood of apartments and single-family houses.

  He has one brother. His room is large, private, and plastered with posters of punk-rock bands. “You’d have to use a scraper to get them off the walls,” Manuel said. Jody wears the same clothes for days on end and often needs a bath. He smokes, drinks, and does almost anything on a dare. His father is dead, or simply missing—Manuel wasn’t sure, because he had heard different stories. His mother has an administrative job, but she works long hours, and Jody spends much of his time alone. Since his last birthday, he has done poorly in school, and his behavior has become much more radical. “Fifteen,” Manuel said. “That’s when they start pushing everybody’s buttons.”

  A frustrated kid learns how to manipulate his elders, provoking them, forcing them to drop their masks. In class, Jody ragged his teachers and gave them little respect. At home, he was disobedient. When a riot broke out at his high school, with punks and stoners battling each other, he was fingered as a ringleader and expelled. He transferred to another school, but his gang activities had increased. He was arrested once for a petty offense. He kept pushing his friends, wanting them to be more outrageous. When the other gang members backed down from a fight with some rivals, Jody accused them of being cowards and “talking smack.” So they got rid of him—“jumped him out”—turning him into a free agent, a wanderer.

  From the moment Manuel met Jody, shortly after the riot, he had tried to make the boy aware that he was heading for serious trouble. When Jody got arrested, Manuel said to him, “You think it’s cool to be busted, don’t you? Well, it isn’t. The next time, they’ll drag your mother into court. They’ll insult her, maybe tell her she’s unfit. Are you going to allow that to happen?”

  But he doubted whether Jody was paying much attention. The kid was headstrong, and Manuel was amazed to see him following the same course that had led so many Hispanic teen-agers to disaster. This course could be mapped out, step by step. After failure in school and a few casual brushes with the law, a kid begins to view himself as an outsider, beyond redemption. He will reject everyone who has rejected him. His loyalty to a gang grows, and he is drawn more deeply into crime. He may confirm his status as a lost one by buying a weapon. In the streets, a handgun costs about twenty-five dollars.

  Sometimes Manuel compares a kid like Jody to an apple that has fallen from a tree. “People can see it lying on the ground, but they don’t pick it up,” he told me. “They wait for a while. They ignore it, go do something else. Then, when they finally reach down and touch it, they find out it’s rotten.”

  We started looking for Jody in Van Nuys. Manuel parked on a broad boulevard and led me through a vacant lot where beer cans were strewn among knee-high weeds. Punks hung around there, he said. A night club called Hot Trax was nearby, and a murder had occurred outside it a few months ago—a Vietnamese teen-ager had shot a white kid in an argument over a girl. To the best of Manuel’s knowledge, the victim was the first white gang member in the valley to die in a shooting. But the police refused to classify it as a gang-related homicide, because the Vietnamese youth did not belong to a gang.

  That bothered Manuel. He believed that the killer would not have used a gun if he hadn’t been outnumbered—white kids had been taunting him, waving sticks and baseball bats. While the victim was stretched on the pavement, a friend dipped a finger in his blood and wrote “FFF” near his body. That fact vanished from newspaper reports in a matter of days, and Manuel felt that the white community was protecting itself, denying that its gangs existed.

  In grade school, Manuel had first begun to distrust whites. He was a good student, but the only prize he ever won was for jumping rope. Academic awards went almost exclusively to white children. As a boy, he came to expect such subtle forms of discrimination, and when he was thirteen, predictably, he joined a neighborhood gang. He remained a member until he was stabbed during a fight at San Fernando High. He remembers being caught in a pack of kids, wrestling, shoving, and punching, when, out of nowhere, a blade flicked into sight and thrust itself from the tangle of bodies into his upper chest. It left a small puncture below his right collarbone. All the classrooms were locked, most of the teachers were in hiding, and police sirens wailed in the distance.

  Manuel ran away with the rest of his gang. They urged him to go to a hospital, but he was afraid. He was also afraid to go home, because then his father would have to be interrupted at work, and that would mean even more punishment. At last, he stopped at an emergency room and let a doctor apply butterfly bandages. His wound seemed miraculous to him, an initiation into another phase of the gang process, and it convinced him that he was on a path that would lead him to prison or an early grave. So he quit and underwent counseling at school to help him with his anger. “We did role-playing,” he told me with a smile. “I even got to play a mean white person, man.”

  In Van Nuys, there’s a General Motors plant, where his father has worked on the line for more than twenty-five years. “One thing I’ll always remember about my father is the back of his hand,” he said. “But I understand it, you know? He had a hard life. He kept having to go back and forth across the border, bringing in family. My great-grandmother, she was in the Mexican Revolution. She dressed up as a man to smuggle troops around. My grandfather was a bracero for a while, working in the fields. He had thirteen children. He got arrested once and did a year in jail. He died of alcoholism.

  “My mother and father used to take us to Mexico City, so we’d know where we came from. They wanted us to know our culture. Diego Rivera is still my hero. The way he combined art and politics. His feeling for people. Once, my father told me if I ever went to work in a plant he’d really be angry with me. He even got mad at me when I took this job. I think he wanted me to finish college, but for me college just obstructed learning. In my neighborhood, I grew up with about twenty boys. Eight of them are dead now. Some committed suicide. You could consider them almost like brothers to me. People say, ‘Why did it happen?’ But it’s really ‘Why did we let it happen?’ Who are you going to blame it on, really?”

  All afternoon, we looked for Jody. I had a feeling that Manuel
was tracking a ghost from his past, seeing himself in the boy, trying to break a cycle before it completed itself in destruction. We cruised through parks, checked shopping malls and pizza parlors. Again, I saw the drugged kids walking the streets. Sometimes, on the periphery of schools, they stood by playground fences with their fingers threaded through the mesh and stared at the buildings in a posture of intense longing. In the United States, only about seventy per cent of all teen-agers graduate from high school. The percentage is lower in the San Fernando Valley.

  In the late afternoon, Manuel admitted defeat. He thought about phoning Jody at home, but Jody’s mother had forbidden him to do it. Manuel had visited her once to express his concern, and she had become so upset with his talk of guns and violence that she called him names and threw him out.

  * * *

  Detective Randall Pastor, of the Burbank Police Department, was among the first in the San Fernando Valley to identify groups of white teen-agers as gangs. He is a big, bulky, physically intimidating man in his late thirties, and he serves as secretary to the California Gang Investigators’ Association, which has affiliates in nine other states. When I went to talk with him, he was waiting at the end of along corridor, looming outside his office with his hands buried in his pockets and his tie loose at the collar. In many police departments, the juvenile division is a joke, staffed by malcontents and officers heading for an early retirement, but there is nothing funny about Pastor. “They call us kiddie cops or diaper detectives,” he said, engulfing my hand in his.

  In the past, a cop in juvenile had little to do except roust truants, chase runaways, and lecture shoplifters, but in the eighteen years Pastor has been on the force juvenile crime has taken an exponential leap, even in small towns. In fact, Burbank is really just a small town, having grown up around Lockheed Aircraft during the Second World War. Its streets are clean and orderly, its municipal buildings fly the flag, and yet an increasing number of its teen-agers are threatening to run wild.

  At one point in our conversation, Pastor showed me a snapshot of some spiky metal rods that were used in a homicide last December. Three members of Burbank’s only significant Hispanic gang, high on PCP, had beaten up and then shot a Mexican teen-ager from Cypress Park, who had recently moved to the valley. The case had been turned over to the county’s hard-core prosecution unit, but other counties did not have such support systems. “Suppose a Crip gets paroled to Arizona,” Pastor said. “He takes with him everything he knows about crime and introduces it in a new area.”

  In Pastor’s jurisdiction, Burbank Punk Organization, or B.P.O., is the most active white youth gang, with between twenty and twenty-five members. In spite of its moderate size, the gang generates a tremendous amount of graffiti. Its crimes usually fall into the legal category of malicious mischief or vandalism, but for Pastor either category is too broad. In Burbank, white teen-agers have ripped the plumbing from a restroom at a drive-in. They have poured phosphorus on cars, blown up trashcans, and thrown the blade of a lawn edger through the window of a house. Pastor does not accept such acts as “innocent fun.” To discourage them, he likes to “shake, rattle, and roll,” making lots of very minor arrests, in the hope of creating a climate in which a kid has to think twice before he misbehaves.

  Not everybody agrees with Pastor that rowdy suburban kids ought to be classified as a gang. The argument goes, There’s a difference between making a youthful mistake—say, getting drunk and slashing someone’s tires—and conspiring to sell cocaine. When I asked Pastor about this, he produced a state-task-force report on youth-gang violence and read me its definition of a youth gang: “A gang is a group of people who interact at a high rate among themselves to the exclusion of other groups, have a group name, claim a neighborhood or other territory and engage in criminal and other anti-social behavior on a regular basis.”

  The task force considered the problems facing law-enforcement agencies, and it made a number of recommendations. In effect, the force suggested a major revision of the existing criminal code, stripping away many of the protections that are now afforded to minors. It asked for increased penalties for drive-by shootings and other gang-related homicides, and for the possession and sale of controlled substances. The courts should be allowed to detain juvenile probation violators for up to a year. There were provisions to ease the laws of search-and-seizure, and to amend the death penalty so that it could be applied to anybody who killed a witness in a trial.

  As a working cop, Pastor felt that such changes were necessary. The current laws did little to deter juvenile crime, and they sometimes hampered him in doing his duty. But he was also willing to address some of the cultural issues surrounding youth gangs, and he spoke about them in leisurely fashion for half an hour or so.

  “Kids today are out of control,” he said. “I don’t care if a kid is seventeen years old or three years old, he has to have rules. Parents are afraid of their kids. I can’t always blame them. Some of these kids in gangs are bigger than me. It’s hard for a single parent—especially for a woman. Around our house, my wife doesn’t let our children get away with anything. One time, my twelve-year-old daughter wouldn’t finish her milk at breakfast, and my wife marched down to the bus stop with a glass and made her drink it.

  “If you don’t have responsible parents, you won’t have responsible kids. Yesterday, we picked up a girl for joy-riding. Her dad won’t take her back, so she has to go through the probation systems, which is a real pain in the butt. I get between two and five calls a week from parents who want me to take their children into custody. Everybody looks to cops or courts or social workers for relief. You’d be surprised how many kids in gangs tell me they want to be cops. They don’t have any role models. Sometimes there isn’t a person in the world who cares whether they live or die.”

  * * *

  One more time, Manuel and I went looking for Jody. He had heard from his co-workers on the night shift that the boy was hanging around Sylmar, where he had been transferred to yet another school. They didn’t know whether he was really attending classes, or even whether he still lived at home, but at least he was behaving himself.

  For a while after his punk gang dumped him, he had talked of joining a traditional Hispanic gang, which would offer him the boldness he’d been seeking. In exchange, he would be able to do favors for the gang, passing into neighborhoods where Hispanics couldn’t go. For Jody, this would have been a ticket to prison, so Manuel was glad to hear that he’d decided to cool it instead, apparently happy enough to be on his own.

  We left Manuel’s house on a warm morning in June. He wore his standard work outfit of jeans, high tops, and a shirt with the tails hanging out. He’d been on vacation for a month, and he was suffering the re-entry blues. In relaxing, he had let his defenses down, and he needed some time in the streets to develop the crust—like a surgeon’s—that enables him to deal with little doses of horror on a daily basis.

  We got into the Dodge Colt. It had a fresh dent in a fender where a woman had backed into it. As we drove, Manuel explained that his primary worry was that Jody would now fall into the juvenile-justice system. When a kid has to go before a judge, he works on his excuses. The excuses often have some validity, but for a kid in court they become a kind of passport, establishing his credentials as a “troubled youth.” The system is set up to cope with troubled youths.

  In Manuel’s eyes, it endorses failure. It makes a kid believe that failure has always been his destiny, that he has fulfilled, however perversely, his obligation to society. “Around here, every kid has problems,” he said. “Every kid has excuses. There are a million reasons to fail and only a few to succeed. That’s the truth of it. You shouldn’t lie about it. If you come up through the streets, it’s hard to get an education. It’s hard to get a job. But you can’t feel sorry for yourself. Because then you’re finished.”

  We were cruising through towns that were familiar to me now—through Pacoima, Arleta, Panorama City. The day was balmy, and as we st
opped at corners to talk to kids, I could smell a trace of chlorine in the air, the vapors off a swimming pool. I found myself recalling summers from my own teens, hanging around a suburban schoolyard to play baseball or meet girls, and I marveled at the remarkable innocence of that time.

  In the thirty years or so since Elvis Presley sang “Heartbreak Hotel” on TV, the music of young people had become more raw and aggressive, and often more despairing. The drugs they used were stronger, more addictive, and more widely available, and the traps that had been set for them were far more insidious. In a crucial sense, they were being denied the luxury of making a simple mistake—a few wrong turns, and they were strung out or in prison. That so many teen-agers had accepted all this as the given of their lives was an ongoing tragedy.

  Jody eluded us again that afternoon. For the moment, he was missing in action, maybe lost for good. At Manuel’s house, we parked the Colt and stood outside for a bit and chatted. I asked him if there was really any way to deal with gangs.

  “Just to deal with gangs, no,” he said. “You make new laws, criminals always find a way to get around them. If you want to deal with gangs, you have to deal with parents and families. You have to deal with schools. You have to deal with the whole environment.”

  Since gang activity was continuing to increase, spreading to new segments of the community, I wondered if Manuel had any hope that his work would make a difference.

  “You can’t get depressed about it,” he said. “You know, with the people on my team, I tell them they have to make their job fun—even though it’s a crummy job. It’s got lots of negatives, but lots of positives, too. Once you start an input into somebody’s life, you begin to influence them, you break the monotony. Some kids, they don’t know any other kind of life. What we do, it’s like throwing a wrench inside an engine. It screws up the structure.Suddenly, you’re a part of their lives. That’s good to feel. Sometimes it’s like I can almost control what’s going on. It’s like having a sixth sense. Like seeing into the future and controlling it. That’s when you know you’re doing your job.”