A TASTE

“Gangbangin’a be around forevah…we don’t die, we multiply.” – Bookie; ranking member, Blood Stone Pirus, east side south Central

The gangsters had many things in common. They were non-Caucasian. They were raised in a one or no parent family. They were from lower economic stratums. They had used illegal drugs. They had not—and never would—graduate from high school. They had been shot or shot at. They had a friend or family member killed or wounded by gunfire. They had carried, owned, or had access to a handgun. They had fired a gun. They had been an inmate behind bars. They had been a patient in a hospital.

As gradually and as naturally as possible, friendships began to bud between several of the G’s and me. I went to lunch with them in the ‘hood, gave them occasional rides home after school, and yakked with them at midmorning breaks and in bogus counseling sessions. At times it was easy to forget they were at a continuation school for a reason.

Junior was on the fast rise up the ranks of the 27th Street Ghetto Boy Gangsters, a Latino gang with a reputation for partying heavy and busting the gats often. He was ice and muscle and had a face that could freeze a striking cobra. He made Lefty look downright cheerful.

Junior was 17 and had the reading level of a second grader. He read out loud to himself with his index finger under each word. At the end of each lesson in the book, there were questions about the story. Junior read so slowly that by the time he finished, he’d forgotten most of the details.

When I was in junior high school I was flunking American history. I had more urgent concerns on my mind than homework. One day after class, my teacher pulled me aside and told me in a caring voice, “I know you’re capable of doing better.”

She asked if there were problems in my home. I denied it.

She gave me her home phone number and said, “I care about you, you’re a good kid. But you need to study after school, if you can. Please call me at home if I can help you with anything at all. I’m here for you.”

That was the first time anyone had ever taken a personal interest in me. That was all it took. Within weeks I was her top student, and I would develop a lifetime passion for history.

Junior was reading a story about horses. He read out loud to himself and moved his finger under each word.

“In the yee… year,” he read haltingly, “in the year one hun… hund… hundred…”

I’d been there several weeks by then, and occasionally hung out in the classrooms between counseling stints. I slid into a chair next to Junior.

“Did you see ‘The Terminator’?” I asked him.

“Huh?” he answered, looking up at me.

“The movie ‘The Terminator’. You see it?”

He seized the opportunity to stop the lesson. “Yeah, yeah, man that’s a cool movie.”

“Remember when the camera was inside his head and you could see all the numbers and stuff on the screen, like you were scanning through his eyes like a computer?”

“Yeah, yeah—how he did that, Homes?” Junior asked, eager for any excuse not to hit the books.

“Try it,” I suggested.

“Whachu mean?”

“Pretend you’re that terminator guy. Scan the words quietly, with no finger.”

“Awrite.”

After a bit, he got the hang of reading silent and finger free.

“Now turn the words into pictures in your mind,” I instructed.

“Awrite.”

When he started smiling while he read, I knew he’d gotten that down, so I instructed him, “Now put yourself in the pictures—ride them horses. The crazier you make the picture in your head, the easier it’ll be to remember.”

“Awrite,” he said. “…Uh …kin’ I do it with some naked bitches?”

“Uhh …awrite.”

As he read, the grin spreading across his face revealed a gap where a tooth had been knocked out. In an instant, Junior, the hardass gangsta from the ‘hood, was transformed into a goofy kid whose head you wanted to rub your knuckles across. Soon he was chuckling infectiously while he read.

None of the other gangbangers had ever seen Junior crack a smile. When he was done reading, he recalled everything in the story. And he offered me his bitch, a primo and a valium.

* * *

The young gangsters were individualists in every meaning of the word. They found what comfort and humor they could in their wretched surroundings and, as much as possible, came and went at their own pace. These were not the regular, local high schoolers, the “normal” kids. They were the cast-offs, the ones who’d crossed one too many lines somewhere along the way.

It all honed down to one truth: these were little boys virtually forced by their environment, their upbringing, their parental role models, their birthright, their lot in life, to become urban guerrillas, soldiers of a modern ghetto, tyrannized by prejudice, suspicion, and drug-fueled violence. Their eyes had witnessed so much carnage in a world created for them—not by them—that they were without passion. Yet, they overflowed with it.

The one dependable consistency in their scattered existence was tragedy, their faithful companion.

They each had an innate knowledge that their lifestyle was not right, not honest, not good, not fair. It was just the way it was. However, as surely as they could place the blame on a parent or guardian for having laid a cracked foundation upon which to build their lives, the responsibility for correcting that skewed beginning eventually fell to each individual and to no one else. The day would surely come when each must look in the mirror and say to the man behind the haunted eyes, “Straighten yourself out. Or take yourself out.”

A pine box was the quickest way out. Crip Lil’Iron was the first student to go, the victim of a drive-by shooting less than a month after school began.

No more need to hide your eyes against the storm, lil homie. It’s all over.