by Jodi Compton
“We played soccer together in junior high,” she said. “Remember?”
“Holy shit,” I said. “Serena?”
“Yeah,” she said, laughing. Then: “You’re at the front of the line.”
I bought my pho; she bought hers, and we moved off to the side to talk. She remembered that I used to hang out with “that Southern boy,” and that I’d been studying Latin. I asked her where her family had gone after eighth grade. She explained that her father had hurt his back and couldn’t do farm work anymore, so their family had come to L.A. looking for industrial work for her mother and aunt.
Then she said, “Did you ever get to West Point?”
I’d felt my mouth drop open slightly and couldn’t answer right away. First, because she must have heard that secondhand; I knew I hadn’t told her about what had been, back then, an unlikely dream. Second, because it brought up the fresh pain of saying, Yes, I was there; no, I didn’t finish.
“Yeah,” I said. “I was at West Point for a while.”
She said, “So what happened?”
“Didn’t make it all four years,” I said. “That’s a story for another time.”
Sometime after midnight we were in her car, or what I thought was her car. I was driving and she was in the passenger seat, leaning forward laughing, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s wedged between her thighs. I forget what story I’d been telling or she’d been telling, just that we were both laughing and laughing and then she’d said, “Slow down, okay, esa? You’re speeding. We can’t afford to get pulled over.”
And I’d joked, “Why, is this car stolen?”
And she’d said, “Yeah, it is.”
That was when I sobered up and really looked at her, and I realized that what I’d been registering as a birthmark high on her cheekbone wasn’t; it was three tiny dots, the tattoo that symbolized la vida loca, the gang life.
At that point I had a choice: I could have drawn on the battered last of my West Point ideals, said, This isn’t cool, and then found a place to pull over and walk away.
Instead, I said, “For how long?”
Serena knew I meant how long had she been in the life. She said, “Since I was fourteen.”
I said: “I’ll slow down.”
That was how I learned what happened to her in the eighth grade.
Gang life is popularly associated with the cities, but it’s been in the rural areas a long time. In our small school, Serena had drawn the attention of Lita, a leader in a girls’ gang. She recruited Serena, who’d said no, she couldn’t, her parents wouldn’t understand.
The next day, Serena heard that Lita had called her out. Serena’s refusal to join had been a loss of face for Lita, a slur on her pride. From now until Serena gave in and let herself be initiated, no day would pass without the prospect of a fight with Lita or one of Lita’s girls.
Serena wasn’t stupid. She chose to have sisters instead of enemies.
“Looking back,” Serena told me, “it was the best thing that could have happened. I wouldn’t have wanted to come to L.A. a total virgin. When I got here, I knew the life. Well, sort of. Nothing can prepare you for what it’s like in L.A.”
What most people don’t realize about urban gangs is how small their individual territories actually are. Many people have the vague idea that Gang A is on the East Side and Gang B on the West Side. In truth, the part of L.A. that Serena and her family moved to was like a checkerboard: Various Latino gangs-or rather, small splinters of the gangs, called sets or cliques-were spread out in small pockets throughout. A gang member could walk for only a few blocks, be in enemy territory, then a few more blocks and be safe again. Bitter, fatal rivals lived right on top of each other. It was impossible to ever feel truly secure.
It also made the question of gang allegiance an open one. Regardless of who controlled your particular stretch of your particular street, there was always a chance you could claim a different clique or an entirely different gang.
But virtually every young person claimed. Everyone needed protection, familia. Those who had no gang affiliation were in the worst of all worlds: considered untrustworthy by everyone, always at risk of being attacked, with no one backing them up.
Serena’s older brothers immediately claimed the 13th Street clique, or El Trece. Serena wasn’t unwilling to follow in their path, but this time her qualms were different from the ones she’d cited to Lita. She looked at the neighborhood girls who had affiliations to Trece and didn’t like what she saw.
“They weren’t really down,” she told me. “They were just hoochies who slept with the guys. They didn’t even get jumped in. They said they didn’t have to, they were ‘already down,’ whatever that means.” Her voice had filled with scorn.
It wasn’t anything you could have made a high-school counselor see, but Serena Delgadillo was an overachiever. One short year after she tried to refuse Lita’s initiation, Serena shaved her head, borrowed her older brother’s flannel shirt and chinos, and went to Payaso, the leader of El Trece, and asked to be jumped in. Her brothers vouched for her toughness, and Serena, bloody and bruised, became a member of the gang.
Serena had to prove herself over and over again, backing up her guys, stealing cars, driving getaway, lying to the cops, and doing a six-month stretch in the California Youth Authority camp. It was the ironically familiar refrain of a woman in a man’s job: She had to do twice as much as the guys to get equal standing with them. Through it all, she kept her head shaved and her clothes masculine. Sometimes the cops mistook her for a boy.
“I have a picture,” she told me that night, “but it’s at my house.” She looked up at me, slyly. “Unless you’re afraid to come to the hood to see it.”
“Let’s go,” I’d said.
She lived in a one-story house of pale yellow stucco, with an orange tree in the yard and bars on the windows. A motion-sensor light flashed on as we walked up the driveway. Not surprisingly, the dead bolt on the front door was probably the newest and most expensive thing about Serena’s home.
It wasn’t dark inside, though it was dim. We came into the kitchen, and Serena peered over a cracked Formica counter into her living room and then raised a finger to her lips. I followed her gaze and saw a rumpled sleeping bag. It rustled, and a girl stuck her tousled head out and looked at us.
“Quien es la rubia?” she said. Who’s the blond girl?
“Nadie,” said Serena. No one.
The girl withdrew back into her nest.
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
“You know what I mean,” Serena said mildly. “Are you hungry?”
We didn’t talk much while she cooked, out of consideration for the girl sleeping in the dining room. As she heated water to boiling and poured in some short-grain white rice from a ten-pound sack, I looked around the kitchen. There were photographs on the refrigerator, and the subjects were all male-some school pictures, others obviously taken to establish gang cred, as the boys posed with guns and cars. All, though, were bordered with colored paper. On the margins were roses and virgenes and the initials q.d.e.p.
“What’s q.d.e.p?” I asked Serena.
“Que descansa en paz,” she said quietly.
“These guys are all…”
“Dead,” she confirmed.
“No girls?”
She said, “I’ve got the roll call for my hermanas on my leg.”
“Your leg?” I echoed, not understanding.
She hiked her right foot onto the counter and pulled up the cuff of her pants so I could easily see the tattooed letters qdep high on her calf, and underneath that, two names: Tania and Dreamer.
I asked, “How did you decide whether to use the given name or their gang name?”
“Well, Tania didn’t have a moniker,” she said. “She wasn’t in the life, she was just kicking it with some homeboys who were on their porch and got blasted in a walk-up shooting.” She put her leg down.
Noting the way the names would descend to her ankle, I sai
d, “What happens when you run out of room?”
She said, “Maybe I’ll get out of the life.”
* * *
When she was done cooking, Serena and I carried our late-night meal into her bedroom. Just before I followed her in, though, I heard the sleeping bag in the dining room stir, looked back, and did a slight double take.
Serena switched on a lamp and shut the bedroom door.
I said, “Either the girl out there has three legs, or there were two girls under that sleeping bag.”
“Yeah, there were.”
“Are you that low on blankets and sleeping space?”
“Well, the spare bedroom’s taken, and so is the living-room couch,” she said. “But the girls just like to be close. They’re not gay, it’s just that they like to feel…” She trailed off. “It’s safety in numbers. It’s just something you have to understand.”
“Sure,” I said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
We sat on her bed and ate, and then Serena reached under the bed for an old wooden box. She rummaged inside and found a Polaroid of a group of teenage boys, all with heads shaved, in voluminous shirts buttoned only at the top, and creased khakis. Serena tapped her finger on one of them, sitting on “his” heels in front. “That’s me,” she said, “at sixteen, when I was banging hardest.”
I held the photo by the edges and marveled at it, half in amazement that I would never have recognized her, but also because the picture reminded me strongly of something else.
I had a photo from my West Point days that looked remarkably similar. It was me in full camo, posing with my Sandhurst team. Sandhurst is the war-games competition West Point holds every year against the British and the Canadians. All of West Point’s companies field teams, who compete against one another as well as the foreigners. Every team has one female member, and I was chosen from my company.
Of course, the Brits kicked our asses-they do almost every year-but our company had a pretty good showing, and that day I was glowing with the pleasure of just being part of it. And then we’d posed for the photo in which I, like Serena, had to point out to people which cadet among the guys was me.
When I told Serena this, she looked at me in shared fascination. That was probably the main reason we didn’t hug each other around the neck at the end of the night and go our separate ways. The outside world would have said we were nothing alike, but we were. Those parallels cemented our friendship, and that friendship would set a lot of other things in motion.
In time, Serena told me about her dreams of Vietnam.
They had started in early childhood, around five or six. They weren’t frequent, but they were vivid and remarkably consistent. Serena dreamed of explosions and bloody chaos in the jungle. She dreamed of white and black men in olive drab. She dreamed of snake-silver rivers and huge machines that hovered in the air, the wind they generated beating the grass flat.
“It was Vietnam,” she told me. “I know what you’re thinking, that it’s Mexico, right? But I’ve never been to Mexico, and even if I had, my parents are from the north; it’s dry as Arizona. There’s no jungle there.”
Serena believed that not only had she served in Vietnam as an American GI, but that she had died there.
I must have looked skeptical, because she’d gone on. “I saw white men and black men in my dreams back when I’d only ever been around Mexicans,” she said. “Come on, where would I see a helicopter at that age? Five years old?”
“There are helicopters all over California,” I pointed out. “They’re in the sky all the time.”
“Way up in the sky,” she corrected me. “Not down low where the sound of the blades feels like your own heart beating.” She placed her fist on her sternum. “I swear, Hailey. The first time I saw a helicopter up close, on TV, I knew that sound. I had this feeling like someone walked over the place my grave is going to be.”
The dreams had stopped around the age of fifteen, when she’d been jumped into El Trece. “When mi guerra nueva started, I stopped dreaming about the old one,” was how she put it.
I don’t think Serena told many people this story. At least she said she didn’t. But she wore a pair of dog tags as jewelry, dangling low under her shirt. And somehow her gang brothers had sensed something of her beliefs, because among the cheery, innocuous gang monikers they gave one another-Droopy and Smiley and Shorty-they’d given Serena the name Warchild.
Two years after her juvenile conviction, Serena did a second stretch, this time in jail. It was there that she finally began to let her hair grow. Jail was a clarifying time for her. She was eighteen now. By middle-class America’s standards, that was barely out of childhood, but gangbangers aged differently. For them, twenty was virtually middle-aged. Serena, having survived to eighteen, was a veterana. She had some thinking to do about the future.
The movies spread an old, common misperception about gang life: the “blood in, blood out” thing. It was a saying that meant that your gang jumped you in with a bloody beating and you stayed in until you were cut down in a bloody premature death… or, if you tried to leave the life, that your own gang assassinated you.
The less exciting truth was that gang members left the life all the time, especially girls. It was por vida in name, but age and motherhood often slowed girls down, sidelined them from the life. Others went straight after doing jail time. A few were even “jumped out,” meaning they failed to be tough enough or ruthless enough for gang life, and were beaten by their gang as a contemptuous dismissal.
Serena was not married, nor was she tied down to a baby. And modesty aside, she was more than veterana, she was leyenda, a legend, because of her exploits with El Trece. There were plenty of Serena stories in the neighborhood, not all of them true. Serena had jacked a pharmacy not just for prescription drugs, but carried away boxes and boxes of contraceptives that she’d distributed for free among the girls of her neighborhood. Serena had gone into Crip territory, Grape Street, and robbed a crack dealer there. In the sexy clothes of an aspiring actress, Serena had trolled Westwood and Burbank, stealing Mercedeses and Jaguars right from under the noses of the Beautiful People.
A reputation is capital, and in jail, Serena began to think about how she wanted to spend that capital.
She realized that she wanted to lead a girls’ clique, a satellite to Trece, the kind she hadn’t found when she moved to the neighborhood. And when it came time to name her cliqua, Serena knew one thing: It wasn’t going to be the “Lady” anythings, an innocent naming convention some gangs borrowed from high-school athletics.
Serena named her girls the Trece Sucias. It didn’t translate directly to English. To call them the 13th Street Dirty Girls just didn’t say it. The name sucias could evoke different things, the nasty girls or the sexy girls, but it also suggested dirty hands, with blood and guilt on them.
For all the fearsomeness of the name, though, Serena had higher standards for her sucias than a lot of leaders would have set. She wouldn’t take girls under fifteen, the quinceanera year being symbolic of womanhood in Hispanic culture. That might sound painfully young to the rest of America, but in gang life, it was a high standard-it wasn’t uncommon for children to start banging at ten or eleven years old. And the two crimes that the Trece Sucias specialized in-car theft and pharmacy burglaries-were both nonviolent, if done with enough caution.
And Serena was careful. Her crew only knocked over a few pharmacies a year, at quiet suburban locations Serena carefully scouted, and while she and a trusted second raided the back for lucrative prescription drugs that Serena resold around her neighborhood, younger girls swept the shelves of Pampers, baby food, cough syrup, and OTC meds-all things desperately needed among the young mothers of the barrio.
It would be nice to imagine Serena as a kind of urban feminist Robin Hood, but I knew better than to indulge in that kind of fantasy. Violence was inextricable from gang life: grudges and retaliations, attacks and counterattacks, beatings and shootings. I heard the stories Serena
’s girls told, thinking I didn’t know enough Spanish to understand. And they routinely went around strapped, meaning carrying a gun.
But this lifestyle of retaliation and revenge was the price of having familia. In its perverse way, it was a virtue, the dark side of loyalty. Serena encouraged the same kind of loyalty among them that the guys had for one another. Unlike male gang members, though, girls affiliated with the same clique often fought viciously with one another, sometimes over gossip, more often over a boy. Serena said she’d never let her clique be divided over a man: “The sucias are for the sucias,” she told them. “We represent like the guys.”
I didn’t learn all of this at once, of course. But after that first night, Serena was surprisingly open with me, given that we’d hardly known each other back in school, and that I’d once been the straightest of straight arrows, Cadet Hailey Cain.
I think that Serena had been waiting for someone she could talk to. She had to front around the guys, with whom sharing her feelings would have been a liability. And she cared for her sucias, but they were little more than children, with short attention spans and narrow worldviews. There wasn’t anyone else like Serena in Serena’s world. The person who came closest, skin color notwithstanding, was me.
Maybe she understood, too, that I’d honored her when, in time, I told her the full truth about why I had to leave West Point.
I’d like to say that I was wracked with guilt over telling her something I hadn’t even shared with CJ, but it wasn’t true. I didn’t tell CJ because I knew he’d lie awake at night thinking about it. Serena wouldn’t. She understood about bad luck.
The day after I told her, we went to the Beverly Center, L.A.’s cathedral of capitalism, and did something the rest of the world wouldn’t understand but that made sense to us.
Perhaps it was inevitable that Serena started to kid me about getting initiated into her clique. She said I could become her second. I took it as gentle condescension. But she kept on it, asking me when I was going to take my beating, get jumped in for real. Slowly I began to realize that she wasn’t entirely kidding, and I began to understand. The things that set me apart from her sucias were, in fact, assets-chief among them my white skin and blond hair. Those alone would make me the ideal driver on a pharmacy job. I was the anti-profile; any LAPD officer would think twice before pulling me over.
