Undead L.A. 1 (38 page)

He's a bit of a whack job. That's all I'm saying.

In fact the only reason he's with us today is because he was sleeping on top of his RV, passed out cold, when the end of the world as we know it happened. Fucker slept through it and woke up to amazing sets firing in Breakwater. He'd been surfing and watching the people on the beach for over an hour before he figured out it wasn't another Brad Pitt movie.

And another thing, I swear he's on permatrip at this point. It's like he’d done acid one too many times and never came back down. He can be pretty scary at times, but he's cool if you know him. He's never hurt my friends or me at least. That's gotta count for something.

There were also the new arrivals. Guys who'd spent plenty of time visiting Venice and selling everything on the boardwalk from mushrooms to lousy rap CD's, told other guys back home in the hood how the beach was up for grabs. They brought bangers with them, all falling under a new banner of leadership brought together by a single group, One Blood Gang. Bigger and more brutal, this new tribe walked the streets straight down toward the water taking everything they saw of value along the way and killing anyone who didn't join them. They were acting without any hesitation or remorse, as if they didn't have a conscience. Bronan said they walked directly here from their inner city streets. They came from Slauson, from Western, from Normandy, out far past 54
th
street, walking and looting and burning as they went. They moved up toward Culver City and Venice like a firestorm of chaos and destruction with their loud engines roaring and their fierce war chants. By the time they ran through Marina Del Ray we knew they were on their way, but we still didn't take it all that seriously. You see, it wasn't anything new to us.

“
A lot of gangs have come through Venice over the years,” Bronan explained one day while we were chilling at Abbot's Habit over on Abbot Kinney.

He spoke in between hungrily scarfing down some week-old pastry. Venice had turned into a bicycle paradise by then, like something out of Burning Man. The weirdest part was not hearing the helicopters pulling their low buzz fly-bys anymore, the kind that used to shake the apartment windows day and night without warning. Enforcers from DLU worked in shifts to keep the streets clean of zombies, a thankless task to be sure but one that required constant vigilance. It was like a fresh start in a lot of ways – no laws, no rules, but still love and respect. It was simple. You either had it or your union membership was revoked. That means those who didn't play along got taken out by the backside of the breakwater and had their brains painted across the dark rocks. It didn't matter much because that section of the break didn't pop off during the winter sessions. It'd be long cleaned out by the time a new summer rolled around.

“None of them stayed around long,” Bronan continued, licking the sticky sugar crumbs off the deep grooves in his dirty hands. “There's a reason for that. Venice belongs to its residents, even though outsiders own it. Slumlords own all the properties around here, all the rentals. Or they used to anyway. That's why so much shit goes down out there on the boardwalk. They were sitting up in their beach mansions on the water in Malibu looking down their noses at us. You think this kind of shit happens in their neighborhood?”

“
Hell no,” I quickly responded. It wasn't good to disagree with Bronan in an argument, or to take too long to answer back for that matter. You didn't want to give the guy the impression you were ignoring him. You didn't want him to think he needed to get your attention is all I am saying.

My mind darted briefly to the winter before the madness had started. A homeless man had fallen through my neighbor Jen's screen door one night. Her screams were louder than a siren. I took a bat with me for protection, but I didn't need it. The guy was incoherent and unresponsive, but it turned out he was just playing possum. We sat trying to get him to respond to us for almost a half hour, but all he did was moan and cry. When the paramedics arrived, he sat straight up and begged for morphine.

That same week I caught this old pusher with a salty gray beard trading crack for sex with two underage teen girls in my driveway. They were rocking up and getting off right there between the parked cars and my living room window. When I threw open my front door and ordered them to leave under penalty of getting their heads bashed in, the old pimp quickly put away his junk and zipped up. He was all apologies, hands raised, head hung low in shame as he slunk out of my driveway with the agility of a wispy shadow, his words fading like a serpent's hiss before they even reached my ears. The girls, on the other hand, were in the throes of a wild crack high. They transformed into screeching banshees, outraged by my interruption. Their frail, young, exposed bodies trembled with chemical rage as shrill cries of hatred and frustration rang out from their open mouths. Their eyes looked solid black, like demon spawn. I didn't back down an inch. You can't in Venice! That's how people get hurt. I pointed my bat right at the closest girl’s head and let her know I would pop her melon open like a fucking piñata if she didn't take her freak show on the road. The intensity of their ear splitting screams could be heard echoing down the small drug alleys just off the boardwalk as they retreated into the darkness, a cacophony of witch's curses mixed with cocaine fever dreams.

A week later, a homeless man raped that chick from Missouri in the park across from my bedroom window and killed her. It was in all the papers for a while, probably because she was a white girl. The cops didn't show up for over an hour. They never caught the guy. It was just another typical Venice off-season, the same as it had been all my life really. You get used to it after a while, the helicopters and the blood and dog shit and trash and broken glass on the streets.

“This land is cursed land,” Shiloh would say to me. “For a lot of people. They'd have been better off not coming here at all. Over by where that Indian store plays music on the boardwalk. Between that and the drum circle. Cursed. All the stabbings happen there. The sand thirsts for blood. An innocent trip to the Sunday drum circle out there could lead to you being arrested and found guilty of a crime you never committed, or to you getting stabbed in the chest with a broken beer bottle. You remember when that guy drove his car onto the boardwalk and killed that couple on their honeymoon from Italy? Guess where that happened? All I'm saying is that you just never know.”

The tourists would stop coming around and the homeless would have less people to beg from. That's where the trouble usually started. During the warmer months they'd have all the food and drug money they needed, not to mention balmy and accommodating weather. They could pass out right in the sand or on a patch of grass in one of houses sporting white picket fences along the narrow walk streets that separated Speedway and Pacific Boulevard. Violent crime went down during these periods. Car break-ins went up. If someone got shot or stabbed, it was gang related – rivals fighting over turf. Sometimes it was as simple as two different crews visiting for a day of sun and fun at the beach, and then getting into it at the basketball courts. Signs were thrown, no one would back down, and gunshots would ring out. It happened once every summer, usually right at the start. I shit you not. Venice Beach local enforcers didn't like it when people got out of line at their house party, so to speak. That's when they'd talk to the current gang controlling the area, aka the leaseholder. If the leaseholder wasn't up to handling it the area might be put up to bid, with word going up the grapevine through the prison system where the shot callers resided. Enforcers would then hand out retaliation as best they could.

“You're goddamn right it didn't happen up in Malibu,” Bronan roared, slamming his flat palm on the table to more dramatically make his point. My heart skipped in my chest and I flinched slightly, but tried not to let on that he'd gotten me. He was always playing pranks like that on me. “So what do you think the locals did when it was their turn to call some shots? They did what they saw being done to them. It's a vicious circle because it's all we know. We treated our streets like they were the slums, and we were renting them out, too. We made deals with the drug lords to push product in our alleys to the down and out. We had to, man. It was either that or let the violence eat us up. Shit's not going to be like that again. We won't let it now. We can't. This is our only chance to take it back and get things right – and it took hell on earth for it to happen.”

But soon, despite Bronan's protests, One Blood members were walking the streets right along with us. We'd been expecting them to come in guns blazing and take us head on, but instead they'd slipped into us like water mixed with water. A few turned into several and then several turned into the vast majority. Soon things started to get heated. They were pushing to see what happened. The fight was over almost before it started.

Their leader, Taylor Jackson, was a three-time felon at age twenty-eight and one of the most ruthless and organized killers the West Coast had ever seen. He had the charisma of Ted Bundy and the cold eyes of Richard Ramirez. He didn't just have regular gang members – but like a celebrity serial killer made famous by tabloids and TMZ, the guy had a whole fucking fan club!

It wasn't bad enough that we still had to deal with zombies and the camps that had sprung up along the boardwalk in the safe zones. Now we had to fight off the living as well. But here's the thing, we're from the bottom so we're used to it. We don't run. We couldn't run even if we wanted. We have nowhere to run to, you see. This is our home. We're welcoming as shit and all. Hell, we used to get over a million visitors and three shootouts every single summer. But nobody comes to our house and shits on the rug and lives to tell about it. At least that's how Shiloh put it.

“They had to be taught a lesson,” Shiloh said while making coffee from fresh grinds, using water he'd boiled with canned heat. He was a transplant from some all-white town up in the Appalachian Mountains who came out West with the high school sweetheart he'd met at an all-Christian academy. They eventually married, but they didn't really seem to have much of a plan at first. He got a job just off the boardwalk making coffee for locals and became part of the neighborhood in a big way. He was almost always high, but he was one of those stoners who told amazing and hard to believe stories with so much detail that it made you wonder if they might just be true. He was a wealth of knowledge on what was happening in the hood, plus he was crazy entertaining. His hobbies included conspiracy theories, Hollywood trivia, porn, and martial arts.

Shiloh's wife, Mary Beth, took to spending her days at Gold's Gym nearby and soon began training to fight in the UFC. She wanted to be the next Ronda Rousey, who also came out of Venice. Soon she was attracting a lot of attention with her natural abilities, skimpy outfits, and crippling arm bar, causing opponents to submit in under a minute. She got picked up by a local promoter and began fighting and pulling in sponsors fast. She took over supporting them both full time, and they could finally afford to eat more than cheap pupusas from the one dollar shack across from Shiloh's work at the Venice Grinds. A few months later she left him for a woman and moved down to Redondo Beach in South Bay, a white-washed Caucasian paradise full of affluent earners and their overly entitled trust fund kids. Last I heard she was fighting in Vegas and dating men again.

She's probably dead by now. Most people I used to know are. It's just a fact of life. Most people don't have what it takes to survive in this world the way it is now. There were tons of suicides from what I’d heard, after the Zedsters started walking around. Caesar told me they found these perfectly normal looking bodies just laid out straight. OD's mostly. He said he was going through an apartment and found this smoking hot naked chick in the bathtub with both her wrists slit. He said he couldn't take his eyes off of her lying in the red water, that it was hauntingly beautiful like something out of a museum.

Shiloh stayed because he was one of us now. It was obvious to anyone with eyes. And hey let's face it; South Bay was no kind of environment for a free soul like him – he was the kind that finds compromise tantamount to creeping death. He thrived in her absence, losing weight and gaining his confidence back. He dated plenty of hot chicks he met at the local bars like Townhouse and The Whaler and Nikki's, but after marrying the first woman who let him go all the way he felt he had a lot to make up for, sexually speaking – a lot of notches left to carve onto his belt – so he didn't settle back down again. He knew fucking everything about how Dogtown ran. I mean everything. Either that or he was completely full of shit. To this day I still don't know which it was.

“Back in the day there were enforcers who kept things in line out on the boardwalk. They kept it cool so the cops wouldn't have to come in. Taking on One Blood wasn't all that different for them, except now their hands weren't tied by the fear of being arrested and hauled off to jail to rot for life. Things got messy real fast. You better believe it.”

In no time at all, word got around that the original inhabitants of Venice Beach were not going to be pushed out. It only took killing a few of their lieutenants for them to get the message. After that came the truce. That's when the rules were put into place.

They get the beach after sunset. They get the streets too, unless you're higher up that is. And even then it's not suggested you tempt fate unless you absolutely have to do it. They also get everything east of Lincoln, including where I used to spend most of my days – Venice High. I've still got some amazing acid in my locker at school, but I could never go back for it now. It's probably gone anyway. I guess I don't need to be tripping on anything stronger than weed, not with everything that's happening down here. We got whole farms of weed now. Entire apartment buildings dedicated to it with guys who do nothing but move the plants from one window to the next all day long chasing the sun. We could practically use it for currency at this point.