All Involved (30 page)

“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 passes out right beneath my SIC and falls backward, smacking his head on the concrete.

When that happens, all hell breaks loose.

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.

MAY 3, 1992

4:09
P
.
M
.

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.”

We went to continuation school at Vista together, me and Clever. Well, until I dropped out anyways.

“Hey,” I say, to him and to everybody, and swipe off my headphones even though they're not on anymore cuz it's rude, and I can't be looking rude around here. Never.

When Clever calls me tagger, he says it like talking down to me, like taggers ain't about shit, like I'm a little kid playing grown-up.

But I write FREER now. I used to write DOPE. But then I heard someone around Hollywood was writing it too, so I said
fuck that
and quit. After that I went for ZOOM, which I used for like two weeks and gave up, but not cuz someone else was writing it, cuz I hated how my
Z
's looked and a double
O
was boring to write. They always just looked like giant cartoon eyes to me.
Garfield
eyes.

I like FREER way better than either of them anyways, cuz there's tons of kicks and loops possible with double
R
's and double
E
's but also cuz it
means
something. When I first thought of it, I got obsessed with it, cuz I meant it, like,
look at me, motherfucker, I can do this crazy shit because I'm way freer than you ever thought you could be
. It's like a statement. If I wasn't freer than you, then how could I get up and write my name wherever I wanted?

On the streets people know FREER cuz he gives the least amount of fucks out of anybody. Except for maybe CHAKA or SLEEZ. Those guys put in work on another level. But to be honest though, I do give a fuck, especially in this neighborhood.

“I just wanted to pay my respects for Ernie,” I say, and just in case people might know him as something different, I also say, “for Ernesto.”

A big guy, I think it's the one called Apache, says, “Oh, you just wanted to pay respects, huh?”

The FREER inside me wants to tell him that I just said that, but I only nod.

Big Fate's on the grill, sticking thermometers in stuff, moving sausages around, slapping burgers into buns on plates and looking to hand them off. There's a loose line of people kinda hovering around him, waiting to scoop some . . .

For a sec I stop and think,
They're like his solar system, these people. He's the sun and they revolve
. I should prolly grab my notebook out and write that down cuz I like it, but my hands are still shaking a little and it feels like I got a badger rummaging around in my stomach like it's cabinets, like he's hungry and looking for stuff to eat and coming up disappointed.

FREER never has badgers in his stomach. FREER writes his thoughts down whenever the hell he feels like it, dammit. And you
know, FREER's even the kinda guy to tell people to wait so he can write shit down. That's who FREER is. But me, I keep my hands in my pockets when I say, “Is Lupe here?”

Fate weighs me up for a sec and then says, “Nope.”

“Um,” I say, “do you mind if I ask where she's at? Maybe I could wait if she's coming back.”

“She's at her mother's place,” Apache says.

“Where's that at?” I'm not trying to pry, just trying to pay respects, you know?

“Can't say,” Apache says.

I nod and say, “Okay, um, is Ray here then? I just wanted to, uh, give my condolences to the family, for Ernesto.”

I might still be fuzzy. But, man, some weird vibes pass between people in their looks when I say Ray's name. Heavy stuff. Apache looks at Clever and Clever looks at his hamburger like it needs to be studied, and Big Fate mashes a patty down on the grill where it spits and sizzles.

Eventually, Fate says, “So you know this merger's going down, right?”

Of course, he has to change the subject on me and bring up the one thing I've been dreading more than anything. More than needles under fingernails. More than eating grasshoppers dipped in rat guts. I'm not trying to be a gangster just cuz my tagbanging crew's getting absorbed into Big Fate's click. I'm
really
not trying to do that.

“Yeah,” I say, “I heard.”

“So you made your choice or what?”

When he says choice, he means quit tagging and disappear or keep tagging and join up. But the way he says it, it's not a choice to him. He wants me to join up is what he wants. I'm trying not to panic here, trying not to sweat this more than I already am, so I think I have to talk up school again. It's bought me time with Big Fate before.

“You know, I been going to continuation school again—”

Clever cuts me off. “No, you haven't,” he says.

Man
. He burnt me good on that one. I look at him, and he looks at me and shrugs. This fine Chinese chick he has behind him kinda looks at me cold too, like she thinks it was a dumb play for me to say that and for a sec, I don't even care, cuz I would totally bone her.

Big Fate doesn't look up from the grill. He says to me, “You haven't?”

That sharpens me up. Brings my attention right back.

“I'm enrolled for next semester,” I say, “just starting back up. I had a little problem I had to take care of. But I'm trying to do the right thing. Get my GED.”

Big Fate doesn't care. He says, “Everybody knows shit's changing, and you've had a pass up till now cuz of your dad, but that expires next time I see you.”

My dad's been in San Quentin since I was like eleven, so six years ago. My mom says he was a big man, had the juice card around here and everything. He put Big Fate on, kinda trained him up for what he's doing. People used to say he was real smart. But I guess Big Fate's smarter, huh? Cuz
he's
not doing life in prison.

But I'm not my dad and I'm not trying to be him, or Big Fate, or anything to do with this click. I don't care if my name came from my dad saying I could eat through anything when I was a kid, that I was just a little Termite. That name's not really me now. I grew out of it. I'm FREER.

And anybody that's actually got some art to them, that cares about their letters and inventing new styles, not just some hard-core vandal for the absolute punk rock fuck-off-itude of it, they're all nerds and rejects. All of them. Me too, man. I love me some fucking Bode
Cheech Wizards
. I love
Star Wars
and I still got them faded x-wing fighter sheets. I'm a thrift-shop-raiding, four-for-a-dollar LP junkie. Don't matter if the vinyl's scratched up, fucked up, whatever. At that price, they're worth it for the covers. I put those up in my room with tacks. Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, man. Martin Denny. Henry Mancini. All the sound tracks I got came from there.
I record them from my dad's old turntable to cassette cuz he sure isn't using it. And that's just me. Every other writer is weird in his own special ways. All of us are just some fucked-up little smart kids born in the wrong places.

Well, that's not entirely true. I mean, we're not all smart. Some of us are just fucked up or drugged out, but we do get fixated on shit. That's tough news too when there's no outlets for us but to write on the world. No avenues except
actual
avenues to getting your name out in the one city where all that matters is if you're fucking famous, where all that matters is if you're white and on a billboard twenty feet tall, or in the movies, or on TV. But I don't got those routes. I'm Mexican,
raza,
the hidden race.

Well, hidden unless you're Cheech Marin, or fucking
L.A. Law
Jimmy Smits. And I'm not. Nobody cares about me that way. I'll never have a face that's known. But I got letters. I got those. Five little letters that when people see them, they see my soul somehow, and they know that the guy that did that doesn't fuck around. That guy puts in work. My letters say something more too. They say I'm here, you know? They say I did that. They say I exist.

Somebody opens a back screen door from the kitchen and yells out to Big Fate that he has a phone call and he tells whoever picked up to take a message, but then the person says it's from up the street and he stops.

“String that out here then,” he says to the guy and then to me he's like, “You can go. Next time I see you, though, it's time to fucking choose. It don't matter who your dad is. Sure would be good to have you in though. Keep it family business.”

“Thanks,” I say, and I'm not really sure what I'm thanking him for but he's got the phone in his hand now so I'm backing out, nodding at Clever, avoiding Apache's look and skirting around the house to the driveway and then to the sidewalk as fast as I can.

Cuz if I didn't know it before I walked into the middle of Gangsterland today, I need to get out, like, all the way out. Out of L.A. even. Go to Arizona or something. My mom's sister out there owns
part of a dry cleaners in Phoenix. She's always writing me to come out, to leave this life behind, and that sounds pretty damn good right now.

I need money to do that though.

I make a quick little list in my head of who owes me. It starts and ends with Listo. I can sell some stuff to Fat John and Tortuga too, and I can maybe hit up Gloria. That should be something.

First comes the legit stuff. I worked three days last week on the Tacos El Unico truck before this whole thing started and it got shut down. But the stand has been open all the way through the riots, 24/7, and my boss hasn't been putting me on. I know something about him though, and he's about to know I know.

It's what FREER would do.

I press play and I'm back to the mix tape and it's back to John Williams, the end of it anyways. I'm just starting to calm down as I walk, taking deep breaths and everything, when I notice how much of a ghost town this is right now. There's nobody out. None. Windows closed up. No lawns getting watered or mowed. And I guess it's not for me to wonder, but why were Fate and them having a BBQ anyway?

Couldn't be because they're strategizing how to absorb tagbangers. That'd be too scary. I walk in silence for a bit, feeling heavy. It's tripping me out what graffiti evolved into in L.A. It started in the riverbed back when it was being built in the 1930s, straight-up hobo carvings and tar pieces and shit. There's
placas
from zoot suiters back then too. And all respect to the East Coast, but they didn't invent
shit
. CHAZ was doing
Señor Suerte
back when New York fools were just learning how to write their names on walls like some little fucking babies. In L.A., we've always been more advanced. But then things got crazy. When my generation came up, it wasn't just about tagging no more. It was about tagbanging.

It used to be you put your name up and that was it. There were beefs if somebody was crossing your name out or going over it, but it grew up into something else, a whole new beast. Right now this graff scene is basically the Wild West cuz now my generation's running the streets. It's not just pioneers and piecers anymore, guys who want to do big, filled-in letter pieces that don't bother nobody. Kids my age, most of us come from bad places and we don't like being disrespected. That's how graffiti got violent. And when it got dangerous to tag, people started going together to paint in groups, and eventually those groups got bigger and got tighter and formed crews, and if the crew got big enough, it became a click with multiple crews all over the place.