Jumped In

 Jumped In: What Gangs Taught Me about Violence, Drugs, Love, and Redemption (Leap, Jorja)

One. Napalm

Don’t go believin’ anything unless you see it. And even then, don’ be too sure. —Big T. I cannot say exactly when I saw my first dead body. Probably my earliest experience with one was when I was around eleven years old and my grandmother was diagnosed with brain cancer. My mother’s reaction was that I should go, as soon as possible, to a funeral, any funeral. There was a crazy kind of logic to this. Open caskets were de rigueur at Greek Orthodox funerals. My mother wanted to protect me from being surprised or upset when I eventually gazed upon the body of my soon-to-be-dead grandmother, who was terminally ill with brain cancer. She also decreed that I wear navy blue, because I was far too young for basic black. Consequently, my attendance at this first funeral was preceded by a shopping expedition. From then on, death and new outfits would be inextricably linked in my mind. And so, wearing a navy blue dress with white piping and matching jacket, I saw my first dead body. The body itself belonged to a distant and elderly relative and resembled nothing so much as a mannequin in a dress shop for “mature” women. I felt curiously detached. I had the same feeling eight months later when my grandmother actually died. Somehow the body remained abstract, unreal. Since then, I’ve been to many funerals and have seen a lot of bodies. These ceremonies involved godparents, aunts, uncles, and extended family. What I looked at seemed more some sort of cosmetic marvel—carefully made up, well dressed and artificial—a stand-in for the person who had died. I finally saw the real deal—bodies without benefit of a mortician’s makeover—when I was a young social worker at an LA County hospital emergency room. The bodies there had, for the most part, met some grim ending. Dead of a gunshot wound or decapitated in an auto accident. They were so freshly dead, they often appeared to be twitching (and in some cases were). These were the bodies of the barely departed, yet they still failed to register within me, emotionally. Even more extreme experiences awaited me beyond the ER. Several years later, serving as a UN volunteer in post-war Kosovo, I saw bodies in varying states of decomposition, twice at mass burial sites. Still I looked upon them with detachment, an example of “man’s inhumanity to man.” Until a summer night in August 2002. I do not remember all the details of this particular night. All I know is that some switch got flipped for me—all my cells turned over—and nothing was the same. It is after midnight, and I am standing inside the yellow police tape blocking off part of a neighborhood intersection in South Los Angeles. Small bungalows and ramshackle apartment buildings line both sides of the street, in an architectural style that can best be termed “urban depressed.” Each one comes equipped with burglar bars and dark screen doors, and behind the mesh it is possible to make out the faces of people peering out the windows tentatively. The more brazen among them—old women and young men—mill around in groups outside their houses or on the sidewalk or in the street, their expressions registering hostility or suspicion. Children play in the street, and even though it is summer and school is out, I keep wondering, What are those kids doing up? They should be in bed; they should be asleep, until I realize how idiotic this all sounds given the level of noise and confusion rising up from the street. I am struck by how strange it is that they are playing in the middle of all this, and I wonder if it’s nothing out of the ordinary, just another summer night, just another crime scene. A police helicopter flies noisily overhead. Four black-and-white patrol cars are parked at varying angles in the middle of the street, their headlights outlining three teenage boys lined up against a chain-link fence with their hands cuffed. The three adolescents appear so young, it looks like they haven’t even started shaving yet. There is another boy. He resembles the other three children in every way except one. He is lying in a pool of blood and his body is being photographed and probed by members of the Los Angeles Police Department. He is nameless, unknown, and he is dead. I cannot stop staring at the body as the blood slowly spreads on the pavement. It is impossible to turn away. My heart is beating and I am thinking, Whose baby is this? Whose brother? Whose grandson? He is frozen, forever, dead. I am trying not to cry. The three handcuffed youngsters deny having any idea who he may be. Whatever the question, they uniformly mumble, “I d’know.” The police officers show varying signs of sadness, resignation, anger, and detachment, establishing a makeshift command post and dolefully noting that the shooting is “gang related.” They are taking notes, making jokes, and gossiping. One woman wearing the LAPD uniform looks over at me and we exchange nods of recognition. I have a grudging respect for Sergeant Mitzi Grasso, a small, wiry force of nature. She has just finished a term as president of the Police Protective League—the officers union. She, for one, is not talking about gangs. Grasso is focused on a work-schedule issue and I hear her saying, “Look, the mayor is going to listen because he wants to be reelected.” Meanwhile, the dead boy’s body is being covered and prepared for transfer to the coroner’s office. Several conversations are going on at once, and no one is speaking in hushed or respectful tones. Talk ricochets between a discussion of which gang sets are currently warring and a debate over who might be selected as the next chief of police for the LAPD. I hear snippets of gang names—the Grape Street Crips, the Rollin 60s, Florencia, MS-13—coupled with speculation over how Bill Bratton, the current favorite to become chief, will get along with Mayor Jim Hahn, given how frequently Bratton, as New York City commissioner, once clashed with Rudy Giuliani. Police radios crackle. Even though everyone is tuned to the same frequency, the multiple radios set up an echo chamber—it’s almost like the police operator is channeling a rap singer—and the new locations of police activity reverberate through the night. “Two-A-Fifty-One: handle a 211 in progress at Seventh and Alvarado, Code 3. Suspects are three male Hispanics armed with a gun attacking a transient at the bus bench.” “Two-A-Ninety-One: handle an unknown-trouble 911 open line at the Hamburger Stand, Seventeenth and Vermont, Code 3.” It’s all static interrupted by voices interrupted by more static—until there is almost a rhythm to the cacophony of noise. The radio operator keeps announcing streets, intersections, locations, incidents. It is the city of Los Angeles as performance art, courtesy the LAPD. The police helicopter continues to circle overhead and I can hear its blades cutting the air. The co-pilot directs a spotlight down on the organized chaos, which will endure for approximately an hour and then be restored to normal, with no traces left of “the crime scene.” And inexplicably, over and over in my head, there is the antic voice of Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, declaring, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” The noise and the people and the warmth of the night feel altogether unreal, as if I have stumbled upon the filming of some television cop show. Instead, it is 2002, and the city of Los Angeles is experiencing one of the bloodiest outbursts of gang violence on record. And I am standing in the middle of it. I am one of the few non-uniformed individuals here. I am one of the few white people inside the yellow tape. I am one of the few women here, and I am definitely the only woman not wearing a police uniform. I do not fit in, and I cannot stop staring at the body of the young boy. His skin is light, coffee colored and unmarked. It is the skin of a child—there are no blemishes, no signs of a beard. This boy—not yet a man—looks impossibly young, on the edge of adulthood. He has no tattoos, and his hair rings his face in soft curls, partially covered by a sweatshirt hood. I keep looking at his skin, almost wanting to reach out and touch its softness. I keep my head down until my tears drain out, then I look up past the boy’s body at a beautiful, silent man wearing a beige T-shirt, black jeans, and a menacing expression. His black skin shines in the streetlight and his eyes are olives, angry and impenetrable. Khalid Washington, the silent man, looks back at me, but we do not acknowledge each other. We are not speaking—yet. We will call each other in a few hours and meet in the late morning at a small barbecue restaurant in South Los Angeles and talk quietly about what happened, dissecting who might be involved, who might retaliate, and what he has done in the early-morning hours. This is later. Right now, I cannot acknowledge Khalid’s presence in front of the LAPD and I am frightened by the rage that I see in his eyes. He is recently released from prison and is working as a gang-intervention “street worker.” In the eyes of the LAPD he is just another knucklehead, just another gangbanger probably getting into trouble, connecting with his homies and trying to avoid arrest. He is an outsider here, muttering “Muthafuckas” under his breath as a uniformed officer approaches him and, ignoring me completely, asks, “Can I help you, sir? Did you know the deceased?” “No, I did not know the deceased,” Khalid enunciates with exaggerated formality. The officer stares at him and masks a demand as a question. “May I ask what you are doing here?” “I’m a street interventionist with the Unity Collaborative,” he announces tersely. “I got a call from Bo Taylor, who heard about the shooting. We were called in to try to help stop any more shooting or retaliation.” He produces a business card that the officer considers while grimacing. The officer’s eyes narrow. “Mind if I keep this?” he asks while pocketing the card. Khalid shrugs. The exchange is brief but speaks volumes. They hate each other. The current law-enforcement ethos equates joining a gang with losing one’s virginity. It’s a permanent state, and you can never go back, no matter what you may claim about your purity. Khalid may or may not still be gang affiliated. I would bet he is. But it really does not matter. The only thing of which I am certain is that he is going to leave the scene soon to connect with individuals who belong to conflicting sets and gangs. He will try to negotiate a cease-fire of some sort, after the shooting, to prevent retaliation and further bloodshed. The agreement will be fragile, informal, and with luck will hold for a few days, weeks, or months. There is no way of knowing if it will work or if the violence will continue. And in the end, Khalid will never get credit for any lives saved. I don’t know if I trust Khalid. While I have spent time alone with him, I have never felt completely safe. Some of it is sexual tension; some of it is the impact of listening to his seemingly endless supply of stories about shooting people, the force of his telling me, “I’ve felt the fuckin’ blood running through my hands.” I don’t know if he is lying, and I definitely don’t want to ask. Still, I recognize his strengths. He is tough, angry, and articulate. He is also a natural-born leader. Of course, if I utter those words in front of the LAPD, they will fill out a field interview card on me and I will undoubtedly join Khalid on the federal crime database or the CalGang list. So far I have been completely ignored by the cops. I don’t feel particularly afraid in this situation, because my badass rebellious streak has kicked in. Just in case that isn’t enough, there is one man nearby who would step in if any of these uniformed officers started to hassle me. He is wearing the lightweight, short-sleeved LAPD summer uniform and he is neat, pressed, and in complete control. He has one star on each lapel indicating that he is a commander—only one of seventeen—in the LAPD. He is standing quietly by, although everyone present is deferential and respectful toward him. No one knows we are seeing each other. “Dating” seems too idiotic a word to describe the texture of our relationship. No one knows that four hours earlier we left his home thirty miles northwest of Los Angeles and drove into the city together. Mark Leap is nowhere near me, though; he is engaged on the far-opposite side of the incident—talking to several other uniformed officers about what has happened. Instead, David Gascon, an assistant chief, has hovered around me, practically on top of me, all night. He is blissfully unaware that I have arrived with Mark Leap. Instead, because he knows I am “working on the gang problem,” he just assumes I have shown up after learning about the shooting. He probably even believes I have come to find him. With a kind of territoriality that I suspect is imprinted in the DNA of every sworn member of the LAPD, he takes for granted that I am there to stay with him, under his protection. He begins lecturing me on what has occurred at the crime scene. Khalid Washington looks on with disgust as Gascon asserts, “We’re never gonna know who did this. And it doesn’t matter. They’re gonna go on killing each other.” His voice is authoritative. I smile involuntarily. This is the same voice that officiated at the media event of 1994: the press conference during which Gascon had to admit that the LAPD had inadvertently “lost” murder suspect O. J. Simpson, adding that the football great was currently on the freeway in a white Ford Bronco driven by Al Cowlings. The intervening years have not been kind to Gascon. He has lost out in his bid to become the next chief of police. Gascon also possesses critics within the power structure of the LAPD and LA city government. Tonight he is an unwelcome reminder wearing a polo shirt, a symbol of the recent bad press that outgoing chief Bernard Parks and the LAPD have received. Gascon is well into his lecture on how the gang problem should be solved. While there is confusion all around, he holds forth as if there is no noise, no helicopter cutting at the air above him. It’s clear that he knows what he is talking about, but the trouble is he is slightly off in his logic. He is deriding the whole idea of gang interventionists—all within earshot of Khalid Washington. “Y’know, you got cops who think some of these interventionists are gonna help us. But they’re nothing but double agents—gangsters who know how to talk to the powers that be.” I am distinctly uncomfortable with this conversation. The gunshots I keep hearing do not appear to be the only threat to my safety in these early morning hours. Why am I here in the dark, on this anonymous street in South Los Angeles, in the middle of the night? I should be at home in my cottage in Rustic Canyon, sitting on my patio, finishing a glass of wine. Instead all my nerve endings are on red alert as I watch and listen and try to stay still when I hear the popping sound of gunshots. What am I doing here? I suppose I could be glib and say I am here because of my personal and professional commitment. I have a reputation to uphold, after all. I was this tough little UCLA professor who studied violence, writing and lecturing on the “gang problem.” The gang problem consists of stories and police reports and rumor. There are accounts of young women being subjected to brutal gang rapes. And descriptions of suspected snitches getting their tongues cut out because they have shared information with the police. And if that’s not enough, there’s always the media. For the past few days a video has been making the rounds on the Internet, offering up a drive-by shooting filmed in the kind of bloody detail that only Quentin Tarantino fans could love. The gang problem involves a world where tattoos are not merely decorative but threatening and sinister. I think of the adolescent who had let’s fuck tattooed on his eyelids, along with his friend, who had fuck you on his cheek. There is a multiple choice of personal motives for me. I am here because I am looking for a solution. Or to give kids hope. Or to help save lives. I am here for all of the above but I am also here for the strange sort of electricity that’s in the air. Along with all the danger and sadness, at every crime scene there is a pulsating high. This night, like other nights, I am feeling it again. And I find the excitement narcotic. Standing between Dave Gascon and Khalid Washington, I hear a low series of pops—more gunfire—and the cocktail of terror and excitement drives up the adrenaline of everyone inside the yellow tape. One of the cops calls out, “There’s a shooter!” and for a split second everyone freezes. I am a walking, talking, multiple-personality disorder of fear. I am scared that Khalid will discover I am on a first-name basis with some of the LAPD; I am frightened that this familiarity will incite his mistrust or, worse still, his anger. But I am also scared of the LAPD and how many of these Boy Scouts on steroids have demonized every adolescent in the vicinity; I am frightened someone may shoot at them or that they may shoot at the wrong person. I am afraid of the random, rampant danger in the air. And there is no doubt in my mind that in an instant, someone could drive by and shoot into the crowd—campaigning to be immortalized as a cop killer. More than anything, I am overwhelmed, knowing that at any moment, if something were to go wrong, someone could die—including me. And still there is the body of the young boy. Who was he? As if listening to my internal monologue, one elderly woman, probably a grandmother, observes, “Just a baby, just a baby,” shaking her head as she walks back to her white frame bungalow. It is another forty minutes before things settle down. After the body is taken away and Khalid Washington disappears into the night and the cops drive off to their next radio call and people go back to hiding behind their locked doors, I linger at the scene. And I cannot stop thinking, despite the noise and the chaos and the resignation of so many involved, about him. That nameless boy, his body the first to reach me after so many funerals, so much death. I am crying again. I keep thinking of H. Rap Brown’s folk wisdom, “Violence is as American as apple pie.” I keep thinking of the fifteen-year-old who told me he was “just trippin’, just trippin’” after he shot the four-year-old son of a rival gang member. I keep thinking of Father Greg Boyle and his motto, “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.” I am standing on the street, thinking of the body and becoming aware of the noise of the freeway traffic a few blocks away. Its steady and persistent hum tells me that life in Los Angeles goes on, oblivious, despite this dead boy, despite the violence, and despite the “gang problem.” I don’t realize it yet but it is one of those very few moments in my life when, as the saying goes, a door opens and the future begins. Because of this night, I feel alive and determined to understand.

Eight. Poor Black Woman

According to a panel of experts at a forum at University of California, Los Angeles, on Monday, America is just as vulnerable to attack as it was on 9/11, with street gangs funding terrorist groups and also draining resources from law enforcement agencies working to head off future attacks. —New York Times, May 23, 2007 Spending time with the homies and homegirls had brought a new dimension to my research. I was deeply involved in trying to figure out what interventions truly helped gang members. I was also invested in their lives. By early 2007 I had completed several evaluations and had been asked by noted civil rights activist and attorney Constance Rice to serve as one of a team of experts for the groundbreaking report she was writing on gangs in the city of Los Angeles. Connie keeps referring to me as a “gang anthropologist.” And I want to be in the field—living with homies, learning more, filling the gaps in my knowledge. Because of this, I am in Nickerson Gardens with Saint, whose real name is Ronald, or Ronny, Dawson. Ronny grew up here, in a three-bedroom unit with twenty-nine other people. “It was a lot of fun. My dad was gone and when I was four my mom got addicted to crack and my granny took custody of me. I don’t know what happened with my granny—nine out of her ten kids were addicts—but she raised all the grandkids. I loved school and had great grades. I played every sport—football, basketball, swimming—up to Jordan High.” Ronny brags that he never missed a day of school because “I got a welfare lunch every day.” The plastic tiles stamped “subsidized lunch” were all that stood between Ronny and starvation. “My granny was poor. She never had enough money. Most times that lunch was my only food.” Ronny tries to portray his childhood as one continuous house party. But there is always deprivation. His life embodies the national statistic showing that more than one-third of all African American children live below the poverty line. When I ask if being poor bothered him, Ronny thinks for a moment. “It wasn’t that I minded being poor; everyone was poor. I just hated being poorer than anyone else in the neighborhood.” But Ronny’s family created a ready defense. They were the Marine Corps of the projects. They took their liabilities—poverty and multiple children—and turned them into strengths, organizing their own neighborhood, the Hillbilly Bloods. But this also makes it impossible for Ronny to ever leave the gang. I catch on immediately. They’re not just his neighborhood—they’re his family. Literally. How is he going to leave that? This sounds all too familiar. I was raised in a neighborhood that was My Big Fat Greek Wedding cut with anxiety. Every action—real or contemplated—was subjected to the litmus test of “What would the Greek community say?” The infighting and rivalry and psychological retaliation prepared me—in the most perverse way—for life with the neighborhoods. This is in no way meant to minimize gang lethality—it just means that underneath, we all get jumped into something that we’re not sure we can ever leave. When I was young my family’s propaganda maintained that there was nothing better than being Greek. We went to church every Sunday, not only for religion, but also for the sense of community. Our social life was exclusive—we interacted with Greek American families. My suburban neighborhood tract in Torrance, California, featured Greek households on literally every block. On top of that, my father served on the board of the directors and my mother sang in the choir of the Greek Orthodox church conveniently located fifteen minutes away. We vacationed with Greek families—usually our cousins. My brothers and I even went to Greek church camp. No aspect of our life remained Greek-free. Our doctors, our dentists, our babysitters—everyone was Greek. And the whole rationale for this existence was the expectation that we—my brothers and I—would perpetuate this pattern into the next generation. It was a gang. We had colors and a language and loyalty. And control. It was all the same—whether you grow up in a neighborhood or in the Greek community. You would be secure and someone would have your back, but you would never know freedom or independence. You would never grow. Your wings were clipped in full view of the crowd. I felt controlled from the moment I could walk. Of course, one of my childhood responses was to obey. But the other response was to run. I knew that I could not stay. I was going to suffocate. I was going to die. I had to get out of the gang. I was good at escape. When I turned four years old, I was found on a street corner about a half mile from home, holding the hand of a friendly stranger, wearing a T-shirt that said i love my daddy. I ran away from home, I ran away from Sunday school, I ran away from Greek school and the six-fingered, sadistic Greek instructor. But I always came back—first because I had to, then because I wanted to. I grew up and out. But still, in unguarded moments, the cunning, indirect, and manipulative Greek girl would burst forth. I wanted my family and the Greek neighborhood. I wanted the warmth, the familiarity. I insisted on taking a family vacation with my brothers, their spouses, and their children, and I attempted to control everything, quietly, behind the scenes. You just can’t leave the gang. As if listening in on my thoughts, Ronny declares, “We are not just Bloods, this is my blood. They are my family.” Ronny’s family has also passed down a history of violence. He traces all of it to his father, who still checks in occasionally. “My daddy was never around all the time, he still isn’t.” In his family romance, Ronny’s father juggled two wives and three sons, never living with one family full-time. But Ronny maintains, “My daddy loved my mama till she started doing crack. Then they fought. It’s ’cuz she drove him crazy. He lost control and beat her. Then he left. He had his wife, my mama had crack, and I had my granny.” But his father’s violence was not strictly domestic. There had been trouble in Louisiana, where his father killed a man and did time in prison. Ronny relates this story with nonchalance, adding that his father’s other two sons—his half brothers—also murdered people during the Los Angeles gang wars of the mid-1980s. “What happened to your brothers?” I ask. “They’re both dead,” he says flatly. “I’m the only son my daddy has left.” “So you’re the third generation of violence,” I offer. “Yeah, the cycle has gotta be broken.” Ronny could truly go either way. He starts to talk about what went down two nights earlier, when the LAPD showed up at his auntie’s house to arrest his cousin, Little Joey, for murder. “What happened?” I ask. “Little Joey went to West LA to see his girlfriend. He was in Crips territory and they cornered him. He had to shoot his way out. The cops got him.” “Does he have a lawyer?” I am already looking up numbers in my cell phone. “Oh, he told them he did it.” “What?” “Why are you surprised? He did it. So he told the cops. But I am thinkin’ maybe he can get off on—whacha call it?—self-defense. He went there before to see that girl and some guys from the set told him, ‘Don’t come back or we gonna kill you.’ I think he could say he did it because they were gonna kill him.” “One little problem,” I snap. “He had a gun—that shows premeditation. And I’m sure he didn’t buy the gun at Sears.” Ronny is unfazed by my sarcasm. “You’re right. Oh well. I guess he’s gonna do time.” There is a resignation to Ronny that comes from years without. Without parents. Without money. Without anyone to take care of him. While I am thinking about this, we both see an eleven-year-old riding around on a bike and Ronny motions with his chin. “That’s me. You wanna know what I was like back in the day, look at this little homie, Darius.” Darius rides up to exchange greetings with Ronny, eyeing me suspiciously. Ronny responds with the same line he uses on everyone in the projects. “That’s Jorja, she’s my godmother.” Satisfied, Darius rides off and we walk over to a two-story unit and stand outside the security door—a heavy-duty screen made out of steel. The smell of marijuana comes wafting out. Ronny’s cousins and friends are inside smoking a combination of bud and crack and God knows what else. When they see me through the grille they start joking, then invite us in. “This yo’ first time at Nickerson Gardens, little mama?” “She’s a cute little spinner, Saint. Mama, you been here before?” Ronny doesn’t even have time to launch into introductions before I start talking and laughing with them. They offer me some of their spliff, but I decline. “No, I was here before any of you were born. In the ’70s and the ’80s, I worked at Martin Luther King Hospital.” I leave out the fact that most of the time I came to the projects I was there to pick up children for placement in the foster-care system. “You was at Martin Luther King?” One homie is suddenly interested. “Yeah. I loved it there.” “You saw me born! I came through there. I was the little baby with an Afro!” He is suddenly excited, high, and the air fills with laughter. He is choking on smoke, and Ronny and I walk him outside to breathe fresh air. As if on cue, a black-and-white pulls up and the police jump out of their car so rapidly they leave the doors open. They are running across the grass. “It’s the popo,” I observe, and Ronny starts laughing. “Yes it is. They gonna arrest someone,” he adds. His prediction comes true while Darius rides by on his bike, watching carefully, collecting data. We all witness two men who look to be in their twenties being handcuffed and pushed into the back of the police car. “They got Little Devon,” Darius reports. “Little Devon is so stupid, he got hisself arrested by a rookie. What a dumbass.” The arresting officer looks up, walks over to where we are standing, and asks what we are doing. Darius’s assessment is accurate; this is a rookie. I doubt the LAPD officer has even started shaving. He begins to give Darius and Ronny a hard time until he looks at me and pulls up short. “Ma’am?” He is tentative. “Yes?” I truly don’t want to say a thing. I don’t want to introduce myself. He is a rookie and this is South LA, but I don’t want to take the one–in-a-million chance that he is going to recognize Mark’s name. I am prepared to remarry my ex-husband on the spot and reclaim my old identity. “May I ask what you are doing here?” I want desperately to tell him, No you may not, this is wrong. But I tell him that I am a social worker meeting with my client. That suffices and he moves away. Ronny, meanwhile, starts complaining about the LAPD and their constant “fuckin’ with everyone in the projects.” This is not the friendly, easygoing Ronny—he morphs into angry-black-man mode. Destiny, his girlfriend, has warned me, “You gotta be careful with Ronny. You know he has four personalities at once.” Right now I am getting a look at gangsta Ronny—Saint. “It’s not fair, it’s not fuckin’ fair,” Ronny says, hitting the side of a building in frustration. “I know, I know,” I tell him. “Shit, I gotta go. I gotta go talk to my homies about this.” Ronny takes off abruptly. I can’t remember where I parked my car. Darius rides back by and I ask him to help me. I don’t want to wander around alone. “I need to find my car, can you—” “Yo’ ride is a Prius—yeah, I know where it is.” I had forgotten about hood intelligence. Darius leads me to the car. I give him five dollars and he rides away happily. I go home that night, thinking about the LAPD. I don’t say anything to Mark. I really don’t want to deal with his reaction. I have also gone silent because we have been fighting constantly. It’s not about gangs; it’s about counterterrorism. It’s clear that there is an insane amount of money being spent protecting Los Angeles from (drum roll here) terrorist activity. I am finding this all laughable—except for the fact that there has been what the LAPD likes to call mission creep. The war against terrorism has slowly started to include talk of the need to “fight urban terrorism in our communities.” Increasingly Mark has been talking to me in his “official business” tone of voice about terrorism on the streets and in the neighborhoods. It doesn’t help that while I am driving home after Ronny has abandoned me, I hear Mark on the radio discussing how terrorist organizations are raising funds by selling counterfeit purses at swap meets. He is about to be interviewed on PBS’s Frontline by the correspondent Lowell Bergman, my longtime hero. I don’t know whether to feel proud or angry or embarrassed. “Hi, honey, I’m home from the swap meet,” I snap in lieu of describing my day in Nickerson Gardens. “I think a terrorist just tried to sell me a counterfeit Prada bag.” Mark ignores me as I continue. “But I’m not worried, ’cuz I heard what you said on the radio. I’m so relieved that this is what my tax dollars are being spent on.” “Y’know, you don’t even know what you are talking about,” Mark begins, with exaggerated patience. He has adopted the tone of a math teacher explaining division to the class idiot. “This is not a small thing. We are talking about millions of dollars being funneled into overseas accounts. This is what is financing terrorism across the globe.” I really think I am about to lose my mind. “You want to explain to me why it is so important to watch swap meets carefully, while patrols have been cut in East LA and there was a big shootout in Nickerson Gardens two days ago?” “Here we go,” he mutters. “Poor black woman.” This phrase had its origins in a major fight that was still a sore spot for Mark and me. A month earlier, I had arrived home drained after spending time with the family of a young homie who had been shot near Athens Park in South Los Angeles. It was unclear whether he was an active member of any neighborhood. All that was certain was that a sixteen-year-old boy would be facing the rest of his life paralyzed from the chest down. I wanted nothing more than to curl up in my husband’s arms and cry. Instead, I was greeted by the sight of Mark hurriedly making arrangements to leave the house. “You can order something from Emilio’s,” he instructed. “They’ll deliver. Shannon already circled what she wants on the menu.” All I saw was the uniform and all I heard was his officious tone, so I started screaming: “Where are you going?” “Will you control yourself?” he whispered. “I don’t want Shannon to hear you yelling.” This was all I needed to hear to raise my voice another decibel level. “Stop telling me what to do! Stop being so controlling!” Then in a triumph of intellectual reasoning, I added, “You’re acting like an asshole!” “Calm down.” This was the “license and registration voice” I knew so well. In the past, Mark had told me stories of soccer moms swearing a blue streak when he stopped them for speeding. He would ignore the profanity while adding charges to their citation. As the women screamed he would write, “Driving without a seat belt,” and “Brake light out,” and “License expired”—all visible offenses that would add to the ticket’s grand total. He was maintaining the same pleasant tone with me while I screamed like a banshee. “Look, I’m not supposed to tell you this,” he began. Here we go, I thought. I wasn’t fooled. This was the sweetener. All cops used this with wives and family. You were let in on some important, inside information—so inside it was probably just being reported on the local news—to help you understand why your husband, boyfriend, father was running out the door. When Mark and I were newlyweds, the long-suffering wife of the chief of operations advised me, “Honey, get used to being alone. They’re gone all the time.” I had absolutely no intention of accepting this reality. “Just tell me where you are going,” I repeated, now using a normal tone of voice. “There’s a guy who killed two cops in Colorado and they think they’ve got him trapped in Long Beach. So the LAPD has set up a command post along with the Long Beach PD to get him. We’ve got thirty men on overtime and I’ve got to get there as soon as possible.” That only enraged me further. “You don’t have to go to this.” “No? This is my job.” Mark was just starting to show signs of agitation. “No it’s not. Your job is to run the counterterrorism bureau and babysit John Miller. Please just tell me how someone who may or may not have killed two cops in Colorado relates to counterterrorism. Please. Tell. Me.” The mention of John Miller was not good. By tacit agreement, Mark and I stayed away from the subject of the man who was, on paper, Mark’s superior. Early in his tenure, Bill Bratton had brought along Miller—who was his best friend—to head up the counterterrorism bureau, which had been designed and implemented by Mark. Bratton frequently pointed out Miller’s wide-ranging experience, which included a stint working as Barbara Walters’s co-anchor on 20/20. This did not exactly endear him to the troops. But Miller was a good guy who constantly sought Mark’s counsel and acted responsibly, given his limited law enforcement experience. Despite all this, the favoritism evident in his appointment was a particularly vicious thorn in Mark’s side and a topic I generally avoided. But not tonight. Mark looked at me sharply. “Look, you know, it’s about the murder of a cop. I’ve got to go.” “You’re all a bunch of maudlin idiots. You’re gonna spend a lot of taxpayer money on overtime hunting this guy down because he killed a cop. Meanwhile, a mother was shot and killed in South Los Angeles last weekend. Was there one hour of overtime spent on her? No. Because it was a poor black woman. You don’t fucking care.” “Look, I’ve gotta go.” He walked over to kiss me good-bye and I ignored him. After he left, Shannon came down wide-eyed. “You and Daddy were having a fight?” She was half-questioning and half-observing. “Yes, and I don’t want you to get scared. We were just fighting over the way the LAPD investigates certain cases with lots of energy and ignores other cases—particularly those involving poor people.” The ongoing brainwashing of my only child diverted me from my fury. Mark rarely interfered in the education of Shannon; for that I was grateful. When I had come into her life, she was attending a summer camp run by Calvary, a fundamentalist Christian group. This was a desperate choice, made at the last minute, after Mark was unable to enroll Shannon in a school-sponsored summer camp. I had known Shannon precisely two weeks when she announced, “I have something wonderful to tell you.” I narcissistically waited for the declaration that she would love for me to be her new mommy. Instead I had to check my facial expression when Shannon continued, “I found Jesus.” It took all my self-control not to ask, “Was he lost?” and smile while thinking, I have gotta get to work on this kid. That had all changed. Recently Shannon had arrived home from school and announced that it was important to be honest and say she was an atheist because people who were agnostic were just afraid to tell the truth. She also believed George W. Bush was probably the Antichrist. But right now she was focused on my anger at Mark. “Do you mean how Daddy doesn’t care about gangs and you do?” Shannon was well aware of the never-ending argument about how much money was spent on counterterrorism and how little was spent on gangs. While Mark was tasked with spending $50 million in government grants, negotiating how money would be allocated—City Fire, Information Technology, Emergency Response—I was working with community-based organizations that were lucky to get by on $100,000 a year. Greg Boyle did not receive any government funding at Homeboy Industries to support his work on job training, tattoo removal, mental health services, drug counseling, and education. From that night onward, whenever we argued about gangs and counterterrorism, Mark would try to end the conflict by joking, “Poor black woman.” “Dad doesn’t always understand what people go through—especially people in Watts. They are poor and they commit crimes. That’s wrong, but it doesn’t make them terrorists.” “When we went to the Watts Towers you told me lots of people there weren’t gang members. Is that what you mean by ‘poor black woman’?” I was happy to settle for this small victory. Shannon and I moved on to the take-out menu. A few days after the swap-meet argument, however, Mark and I continue to argue. “It’s not ‘poor black woman’ and you know it,” I say. “It’s the inequity of the whole situation. You should have been with me two days ago with Ronny. The LAPD is just hassling people in Nickerson Gardens for nothing. And they don’t even understand the gang problem.” It only increases my fury when Mark responds, “Look, the gang problem has been around for a long time. It’s not gonna get better—and after 9/11 we need people to feel safe.” “It’s wrong,” I insist. “People are not afraid of terrorists. They’re afraid of getting killed. They’re afraid of Florencia and the Rollin 60s. In the hood, the Twin Towers don’t mean the World Trade Center. They mean the county jail. That’s what’s real—18th Street is real.” But I know we are arguing about money and what Mark had said on the radio and the emphasis on counterterrorism because we really don’t want to talk about the elephant in the room. Mark is afraid. And, even though I didn’t want to admit it, so am I. It had all started about a week earlier, when a gang interventionist named Mario Corona told me, “There’s a rumor on the street your husband is LAPD.” I never volunteered that I was married to a cop, nor did I hide it. I also knew that street intelligence on outsiders was pretty limited. The neighborhoods knew about one another and who came into their territory, but they knew very little about people in the outside world. I was never involved in any arrest. I kept telling people nothing was going to happen to me. But Kenny Green had told me the story of Gil Becerra, and it had an impact. Gil Becerra had functioned as a gang interventionist. He had impressive bona fides—he had been in the US military and on the streets. None of this had saved him from what occurred when he got in between two rival gangs, trying to negotiate a truce. He was beaten and left for dead. He sustained multiple broken bones and now had permanent back injuries that made it painful for him to walk or stand up straight. But for me, the critical issue lay in the phrase “gotten between two rival gangs.” I was convinced that as long as I didn’t plant myself between warring neighborhoods or interfere in gang activity, I would be okay. I also was careful never to go into a violent situation without someone from a neighborhood along for the ride. When Mario told me about the rumor, I told him I was always careful. He listened patiently but warned me again. “You gotta be careful. If these guys find out that you’re married to someone who is a cop, they’ll kill you.”

DMU Timestamp: March 28, 2013 23:38