All Involved (19 page)

You know what's hilarious though? What the news thinks of all this burning. The guys on television go on and on about how they can't believe people are torching their own neighborhoods. They think it's sad, some kind of thoughtless, primal rage thing. It's not. It's mostly planned and it's one of three things—grudge, mayhem, or insurance. By the way, this isn't an official definition or anything. It's just what I think. It's grudge if one guy doesn't like the other guy for whatever reason, so he takes advantage of the chaos to do something about it, so even the race stuff, like what the blacks are doing to the Koreans, goes here. It's mayhem if you're deliberately setting it for the heck of it, or if you're trying to cover a crime, or using it as a distraction to draw emergency assistance elsewhere so you can commit a crime somewhere else, which the gangs definitely do. They did it before the riots, they're doing it during, and they'll do it after. In fact, I can tell you right now that I really don't look forward to this summer. All the shit going down now is going to require retribution, if not in the next few days then later, into the summer even. The last and likeliest, it's insurance if you've got a business in a run-down part of the city and it's not making as much money as you want but you do have fire insurance and you've been paying hefty premiums on that policy for damn near too long and then one day the racist cops get acquitted and all of a sudden up pops the opportunity to torch your own premises and get away with it—all you have to do is blame gangs or looters, so why not?

When I first heard the verdict, I was sitting next to Charlie Carrillo
on the bleachers at Peck Park in Pedro. Carrillo's 53s, but we went to high school together and now we play on a local baseball team. I'm a catcher. It's the most important position on the field so far as I'm concerned. You could play a pickup game without a shortstop if you really, really had to—you know, eight on eight—but without a catcher? No chance. The catcher is the constant. He calls every pitch, and he's there through every pitching change. Without him, there is no game. Anyway, we'd just finished practice and we had a little radio between us that was going.

So I was sitting next to Carrillo as the newscaster reads out the particulars about the jury acquitting Briseno, Wind, and Koon—which reminds me, what kind of unfortunate name is that for a cop in a race case anyway? There's also mention of failure to reach a verdict on Powell, but something else bugs me.

As I'm unbuckling my leg pads, I turn to Carrillo and say, “How come the news makes such a big deal about all the white cops? Briseno isn't white, is he?”

“I'm pretty sure it's Briseño,” Carrillo says, “which is Hispanic.”

Carrillo's Hispanic too, so he would know.

“It's not exactly fair saying he's white if he isn't,” I say.

“It suits a story, I guess. White versus black.”

“Yeah,” I say, “but it's shading the facts.”

“Big deal,” Carrillo says, “they do it all the time. No accountability in that line of work, you know that. The day someone on TV has to write an incident report on a fuckup and admit responsibility for it like we do, that's the day no one wants to be a newscaster anymore.”

“True,” I say, “but I'm not sure it matters now. All hell's going to break loose.”

I called in right after that and asked if they needed me at the station, but I got told that since I was scheduled for the next day, I should just come in then.

So I did, after all hell really had broken loose, more than anybody thought. Of course, I didn't know then that our esteemed black
mayor, Mr. Tom Bradley, was going to go on television and say it was time to take it to the streets or something to that effect. The guys at the station wouldn't shut up about that. They couldn't believe it. They felt betrayed, like he threw us under the bus when he said that—put us at greater risk—and I get that, I feel betrayed too, but I'm a realist. It would have exploded regardless. Do you really think people were sitting at home, waiting to see what the mayor said before they decided to riot? Me neither. Crips were out and around Florence and Normandie before Bradley even went on television.

I'm looking at the aftermath spread out before me as I try to prepare myself to get back in the thick of it. From my seat, it looks like Los Angeles has been air-raided. It looks like bombs went off. Pockets of orange blaze on either side of the 110, some in pits of black, here and there, because the fire knocked out the electricity on the block, and not for the first time I think this is what hell must look like. There are no stars tonight and there haven't been any for two nights straight. The canopy of black smoke hanging in the basin is too thick to see through.

I status-check and inform Cap that I'm under a quarter tank of fuel, and if I am, the unspoken truth goes, everybody else is too. Cap relays this. It's the crucial time when the Strike Team Leader will either decide to fuel us all the way up wherever we can and maybe stay out another six hours, or head to R&R to do that and take on some new hoses in the meantime. All he says to Cap over the radio is thanks though, which doesn't help tell me which way he's leaning. This has an implied meaning too—shut up and do your job.

We don't have as far to go as we thought because we get called off a Slauson fire and told to exit sooner because we're closer to another one. There's a structure fire on Manchester and Vermont, half a block south. I do my job and get us there. CHP do theirs, too, locking down the block at both ends, giving us the whole street to work
with and more important, two exits. I face out on Vermont, my nose pointing toward Manchester because it's the most viable escape route.

We're in the 8600 block, Vermont Knolls. This has all the makings of a grudge burn, but it could be insurance too. Somebody set a Korean-owned furniture store on fire next door and it spread to the adjacent building with a sandwich shop—
VERMONT SANDWICH SHOP
,
FOOD TO GO
, the sign says, and then a phone number that's blackening—but next to it is the Universal College of Beauty. Neither looks retrievable. They were already pretty far gone when we get there. No genuine possibilities of recovery, but we can put it out.

I never turn my engine off. A 50-gallon tank will last you six hours or thereabouts if it's full when you start. McPherson lays an inch-and-a-half and I watch the pump pressure, but I don't need to stay right on top of it. Hoses pump at 125 gallons per minute, which would give me about four minutes for one line if we were tank only, but we're not. I do only have one coming off, and Suzuki's jockeying it, arching a stream onto the roof while two other lines from another engine douse what's left of the front window. I throttle up the pressure to 150 pounds per square inch, and the fire's getting pretty well knocked down now, as gray smoke and steam shoot out of every available opening. I run a supply line from the hydrant to mine to top off the water tanks before we pull out.

Part of my job is to see the big picture, to react before there's a need. I failed Gutierrez, which is why I'm extravigilant with the civilian bystanders here. I scan faces twice, but none look like gang members. They look like parents, families. In fact, there's a loose group of older folks across the street, watching us. They're taking pictures, video too, like we're entertainment.

One guy wearing shorts, slippers, and no shirt has a big camcorder propped on his left shoulder and his eye to the eyepiece. He's sweating, and his skin is shiny, almost blue-black at this distance. What's more, he's holding a sandwich in his free hand and eating it. Now, I'm no cop, but if I was looking to make an arson arrest related
to a sandwich shop currently ablaze, I'd start with asking some questions of the smart guy eating a ham-and-cheese on the same street at whatever-o'clock-in-the-morning—I check my watch—at 04:02 in the morning.

Before it's 04:08, CHP stretches the perimeter one more block down, near to where there's a National Guard unit, and the STL sends two engines down to put out another fire that's starting up, but we stay on what's left of the furniture store, even though you can see the skeleton of the ceiling peeking through smoke now. It tells the tale. This building's gone.

There's a helicopter overhead—looks like Channel 7—shining a light down on us like we're at the bottom of a deep, dark hole. The people who live around here, they know what that actually feels like. They know how ugly life can get. Everybody else, the people sitting at home, watching this unfold on television, they have no idea. Those are the people shocked by the riots. They can't comprehend them because they don't understand the other side. They don't understand what happens to people with no money who live in a neighborhood where crime is actually a viable career path when there are no other opportunities, and I'm not excusing it or condoning it or saying it can't be avoided, but I'm saying that's how it is.

And let me tell you something else, those people don't have any idea what it's like to roll as a rookie EMT in my district, one of the heaviest gang-involved areas in the gang capital of the world. You can never explain to them what it's like to come on a scene as a first responder and see someone with multiple stab wounds—nine in the upper chest and five in the stomach, including one long rip that cut the outtie belly button in half, like somebody actually tried to gut this little ten-year-old gangbanger like a fish—and here he is, this child, crying, leaking snot down his cheeks and bleeding to death right in front of you, unable to do much else but gulp because he's got a punctured lung. Of course, you don't even think, you do your job. Sure, if he makes it, he'll have to live the rest of his life with a colostomy bag but you don't think about that then, you do what you
were trained to do. You provide that vital quick fix and get him sent to County Hospital, and later when you call to check in, you hear you managed to save his life and for a little bit, it feels like your job is worth it—valuable, even—hell, you can even point to it with pride and say,
Look, I'm making a difference
.

But a month and some weeks later, you're out on those same streets having to assist the coroner with a body pickup—because God forbid they ever have the budget to do that on their own—and as you approach the decedent designated for transport at the bottom of a drainage ditch, you find that they haven't sheeted him yet, and it's with a slow-creeping horror that you realize you recognize the wounds—the scars, the placement on the ribs and the stomach, the long one on the gut where there's not much of a belly button anymore, only a purple scar that looks shiny in the dark—and you recognize those before you actually recognize the face. He's still ten. He'll never be older because they didn't bother stabbing him this time. This time, they just executed him, shot him in the back of the head. So you picked him up all those lifetimes ago and you fixed him for what? To alter the course of his life, to change it for the better? No. You bought him a few more days in hell is all you did. That's it. All you did was prolong his death. How does that feel?

There's a truth in that somewhere and maybe it's this—there's a hidden America inside the one we portray to the world, and only a small group of people ever actually see it. Some of us are locked into it by birth or geography, but the rest of us just work here. Doctors, nurses, firemen, cops—we know it. We see it. We negotiate with death where we work because that's just part of the job. We see its layers, its unfairness, its unavoidability. Still, we fight that losing battle. We try to maneuver around it, occasionally even steal from it. And when you come across somebody else who seems to know it like you do, well, you can't help but stop and wonder what it'd be like to be with someone who can empathize.

Nurse Gloria draws me in so much because it's obvious she understands this whole world, not just half of it. I don't need to
explain everything to her, because maybe I don't even need to explain me. She's seen this hidden side just like I have. She knows what death looks like, and what futility feels like. She carries it with her, this weight. I can see it in how she moves, how she talks—

“Hey, Yanic,” Suzuki says, “check this out.”

He's next to me, holding his hand out, gesturing for me to open mine too, so I do. I look up and notice McPherson's on Suzuki's hose as Suzuki puts an iron-gray bullet in my palm, one with a smashed tip and no jacket, still a little warm. I must give him a look—how in the hell?—because he mimes shooting a gun straight up at the sky, makes a bang with his mouth and then traces the trajectory with his finger, scoring it with a little whistle, as it goes all the way up and all the way down before plunking him on the helmet with a flick of the fingernail. I turn it over in my palm, but it's not like I've never seen ordnance before.

We sweep the station roof after every New Year's and Fourth of July, finding more small-caliber stuff than you'd ever believe, but it's just that right now there's so goddamn much of it. Feels like I've seen more buckshot on the street tonight than painted lines. It's the volume that staggers me. How many firearms are there in L.A. city anyway, conservatively speaking? 360,000? That's roughly 1 percent, less than one gun for every hundred residents. Trust me, there's no way gun ownership, both legal and illegal, is anywhere near that low but we're being conservative here. Let's also just say that an outrageously high 10 percent of them have been fired once in the last forty-eight hours. Now that's presuming 36,000 guns were fired only once during the worst conflagration L.A. has ever seen, worse than Watts. Sure. You think a gangbanger is ever going to shoot a gun just once? Even still, that'd be 36,000 bullets.
Thirty-six
.
Thousand
. You'd get the same number if 5 percent of those guns shot twice, or only 2 percent shot five times. Part of me wants to dismiss it, call it completely crazy, but I actually can't. If anything, the total is too low, but what's more chilling is that we're not out of the woods yet.