No Matter How Loud I Shout (14 page)

There we found ourselves giving three guys orders to get down on the floor, which they did. My home boy went and grabbed a guy by the shirt, pulled him up and took him to the other room. After five minutes, they came back, my home boy with four ounces of
yeska,
gold chains, and money. As I turned around to see what he had, one of the
vatos
grabbed my rifle and I was struggling with him as I yelled for my homie to help me. But he had left the premises.

Cartoon's reading is interrupted here by a burly detention officer, who opens the door and peers into the library. He eyes each kid, that sizing-up look cops and prison guards always seem to wear. The eyes settle on Cartoon. “Santos. Time to go.”

A chorus of protests from the other kids draws a glare. I beg for five more minutes, and, after a moment, the man relents, shaking his head as if we were all wasting our time. But Cartoon gets to finish his story.

It was only I left there with three individuals which I was struggling with for my life. They beat me to the floor. I still had my rifle, they were hitting me with bottles and bats. Finally, they managed to take my rifle.

I was on the floor, dazed from the beating I had received. One individual placed the rifle in my mouth. At that moment, I saw my little girl, mom, my barrio, and the girl I loved. I knew I was gonna die, so all I did was throw up my barrio.

I heard one
vato
say, “Kill him, kill him.” I saw the guy holding the rifle in front of me. I saw his finger squeeze the trigger. All I heard was click. . . . Click, click, click. Nothing. The gun got jammed on me.

Then they called the police on me. I laid there halfway dead from the beating I received, wondering why the gun didn't go off, why my home boy left me, but most of all thinking of my baby. Not to mention Tiny. She is always on my mind.

The police came, arrested me, placed me in the patrol car, took me to the nearest hospital. There I was for three or four hours, doing checkups on me. Nothing broken but my heart. Knowing I was coming to jail to do some hard time.

Cartoon looks up and says, “The End.”

The room is silent. Every page of the little college blue book Sister Janet had scrounged up for each kid to write in had been used, even the unlined blue cover page, filled up by this world Cartoon lived in, where the juxtaposition between being too shy to hold a girl's hand and bursting into someone's home armed with a rifle is not considered extraordinary, and where making his gang's identifying hand signal—throwing up his barrio—is an honorable way to die. He has been a gang member since age eleven. He knows no other world. Seventeen at the time of his arrest, he is unfailingly polite, soft-spoken, and articulate, an eleventh-grade dropout with a long record of minor juvenile offenses, all of them impulsive and unplanned, set in motion by others—just like this latest one, this charge of armed robbery he now faces in adult court.

One by one, the boys in the class begin to applaud his story. Cartoon is beaming now. It is the first story he has ever written. It is the first time anything remotely linked to scholarship seemed enjoyable to him.

“I didn't know I could do this,” he says, almost breathless. “Do you think I should write more?”

I tell him yes, absolutely. I praise his work lavishly. I tell him he has set an example for the class, that he has shown them, with effort and heart, that they all could tell stories with drama and humor and emotion. He looks like he is about to cry for a moment. He did not expect anyone to like what he wrote, he says. Now he promises he'll send more stories from County.

Two detention officers appear at the door then, arms crossed. “Let's go, Santos,” the first one calls. “You're outta here.” The almost giddy mood abruptly evaporates. Cartoon leaves, the excitement his story generated fleeing the room like air from a balloon. The other boys fall silent. There will be no more stories read or written this night.

A short time later, I leave Central Juvenile Hall. It is almost nine o'clock, and a cold snap has gripped the LA Basin, chill and damp enough to turn
my exhalations into steam. On the loading dock, I see a line of eight boys waiting in the cold, stripped of their orange juvenile coveralls—along with their legal status as juveniles. They are wearing only white T-shirts and gray cotton trousers, and they are linked together by thick belly chains. They shiver in the dark, shifting from foot to foot, waiting to get into a sheriff's black-and-white van, bound for the Los Angeles County Jail. I hear one of them weeping, and what had been an abstract concept—this notion of trying juveniles as adults—suddenly hits home. This is how it is done, coldly, clinically, as if moving commodities from one warehouse to another. I spot Cartoon among these eight new “adults.” He was not allowed to bring any personal items with him—not his story, not his letters, nothing—just a stick of deodorant and a toothbrush, whatever he could stuff into the top of his socks. You're not allowed to carry anything during these transfers, and your clothes have no pockets.

Something makes Cartoon look up then—he had been staring at his feet—and he sees me peering at him through the chain-link fence. He gives me a wave and a weak smile, and I wonder what will become of him.

I learn later that a judge sent him to prison for four years. I never heard from him again.

T
HE
evidence before Judge Dorn is clear.

Three weeks earlier, John Sloan departed the department store where he worked as a clerk, and met his buddy Richard. They had plans to cruise the night streets of the coastal city where John lived, as they had done many nights before. This time, though, they were not looking for girls or parties or places to hang. They were in search of a likely victim to rob and terrorize.

The two teenagers had planned it well, they thought. They were even dressed down like gangbangers in dark, baggy clothes, though the dangerous image they hoped to project seemed somewhat deflated by their mode of transportation for the evening. True gangbangers would have picked up a G-Ride—the hottest car they could steal, the “G” standing for “gangster”—but John had only his yellow Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, a cutely underpowered gift from Dad.

In John's waistband, though, he could feel the comforting, fearful weight of the .380 blue steel revolver he had scored for a hundred bucks on the street in LA. John had asked around at school and soon learned how to find a gun seller who catered to juveniles, a nameless man who tooled around certain neighborhoods with a trunkload of stolen weapons, dealing everything from Saturday night specials to AK-47s for gangbangers and anyone else with cash to burn and someone to kill. The dealer even threw in bullets, five of them, when John handed over the cash. A computer check of the serial number on the gun John picked up would later show no recorded owner, which meant it was stolen somewhere between the manufacturer and the distributor. Crates of weapons get walked off the docks of UPS and other shippers all the time, many of which then end up in the hands of kids—one of the gun industry's great, unreported scandals. Guns can be shipped with no more security than soap powder. Even for a kid like John, with no criminal record and no real street savvy—other than what he picked up from TV and music—finding firepower had been shockingly easy.

“How about over there?” Richard suggested, pointing to a parking structure that served a shopping center and a post office. It was a Sunday night, past 10:00
P.M.
, and the place was deserted. But there was a man driving into the structure, probably to mail some letters. He was alone. Perfect.

“Let's check it out,” John agreed, stopping a block or so from the garage. Force of habit made him lock his car—thinking more about his stereo than of getaways—and the two boys dashed into the parking structure. They hid behind a green Pontiac near the post office.

Each boy wore surgical gloves copped from John's dad. Doctors always had rubber gloves around the house. The boys also had bandannas tied around their necks and pulled up over their noses Old West bandit–style, the old-fashioned kind that bikers and cowboys like to stuff in their back pockets. John's hands were shaking, even though he was certain he would never be caught. He was too smart. Always had been, all the way back to his days in the private elementary school, when his recitations of memorized Bible passages earned him red ribbon after red ribbon.

Even back then, the pressure had been there. The red ribbons were not a source of praise at home—they were expected. Like the A's on his report card. He was the oldest child, the standard-bearer, the perfect son.

“Let's get him right at the car,” Richard suggested, as they watched a middle-aged Hispanic man pull in and park. John nodded. They would wait until the man was out of his car, vulnerable and exposed.

Things had gotten so complicated. His father was the original self-made man, having moved to America with his Korean parents at age seventeen. Just about John's age. The elder Sloan went right to work, earned enough money to put himself through medical school, then established a thriving practice and bought a home in one of Southern California's finest, safest, shiniest communities. Now it was supposed to be up to John to carry on the family's good name.

For a long time, he had earned the grades, joined in the church activities, watched over his younger siblings. He impressed teachers as a shy, sensitive, bright kid. He was a gifted artist, could draw anything. At night, he and his mother would read the Bible together before bed.

“Should we wait until he mails his letters, or get him right away?” Richard hissed.

“Let's wait,” John said. He wanted just a little more time to think.

This was the problem: John saw himself as an American kid, born to French fries and skateboards and reruns of
Gilligan's Island.
But his parents were traditional Korean immigrants, with values that set them apart no matter how badly John wanted his family to assimilate. They couldn't understand that he did not want to follow in his father's footsteps, that he was sick of being the perfect son, that their expectations for him, once a source of pride, now seemed like an imposition.

A recent high school consolidation of three small campuses into one large one had made things worse for John—his new campus was racially polarized, making the immigrant heritage he wished to forsake all the more relevant. Anglos hung with Anglos at his school, Hispanics with Hispanics, Asians with Asians. Bigotry was fashionable. There had been fights, even something close to a race riot. John had been picked on by some Latino kids he took to be gangbangers. Only kids with gang alliances seemed secure and unafraid, he observed, their lives fraught with purpose and belonging. Somewhere along the line, he realized he wanted to be part of that.

That was when he met Richard. Firmly on the loser track, John's new best friend was a zero in school, chronically truant, with an arrest record for theft. Kicked out of John's high school, he attended a continuation school—a two-hour-a-day scholastic warehouse where the emphasis is on logging time in “independent study.” But to John, Richard was freedom. Here was someone who didn't give a shit about his family, about school, about the future. Another child with an immigrant father, he was openly contemptuous of tradition. And from his brief stay in Juvenile Hall on
his theft charge, Richard claimed to know all about gangs—how to dress down, how to throw your weight around, how you have to band together with others who have the same color skin to protect yourself. Learning to imitate the dress, manner, and attitudes of gangsters was not only fashionable, but an ego boost for John.

In the space of a few months, John became an uncommunicative C student, the honor roll a thing of the past. Teachers and counselors started putting him in the “at risk” category when they discussed his performance—at risk for failure, or worse. They urged him to live up to his potential, but he preferred to hang with Richard—at first learning from him, then leading him, and finally outdoing him. He didn't need money—he had plenty of cash available to him—yet there he was in that parking garage, stalking prey, ready to rob at gunpoint.

“All right, let's do it,” John whispered, and they sprang up, raced around the Pontiac, and confronted a middle-aged man as he was opening his car door. John had his revolver out—he didn't even remember drawing it from his waistband—and saw that it was pointed at the man. He saw his victim's eyes grow wide with fear, and for the first time, John understood the truly seductive nature of gangbanging: the genuine power. This guy was about to piss his pants. Because of him.

“This is for real,” John yelled. “We're not playing, Mexican motherfucker.”

“What's going on?” the guy blurted, as if there were any doubt. Then he pleaded, “Look, I'll give you whatever you want. Just don't hurt me.”