2
I’ve never had strong feelings about the God-versus-Darwin debate, but if I ever doubt that humans evolve, I have only to look back at my life. I’m only twenty-four, and already I’ve left a series of selves behind me: Army brat, West Point cadet, aimless L.A. twenty-something, San Francisco bike messenger, and now, second-in-command to a rising Latina gangster.
I know where you probably got hung up: Go back to the part about West Point—what was that? Yeah, it’s true. I don’t recommend it, but here’s how, in five easy steps, you get from being in the top fifteenth percentile of your class at the United States Military Academy to jacking trucks in the desert.
Step One: Get diagnosed with a tiny but inoperable brain tumor that severely blunts your fear and compromises your judgment, thus disqualifying you from Army service and wiping out all your plans for the future. Step Two: While sober and obeying all traffic laws, accidentally hit and kill a child who darts from between parked cars on Wilshire Boulevard. Step Three: In an attempt to make symbolic amends for that death, get involved in protecting a pregnant runaway from a mobster. Nearly get killed, twice. Step Four: Survive that and come home only to get slapped down by the one person you’ve loved and counted on since childhood.
That was my cousin, known to the world as Cletus Mooney, the Grammy-winning music producer. To me he was simply CJ. We’d been born ten days and nearly a thousand miles apart, and met for the first time at the age of eleven, when my mother and I, shortly after my father’s death, had moved in with his family in their farmhouse outside Lompoc, California. CJ and I had taught each other to kiss in the shade of the willow tree outside his parents’ home. It wasn’t right to say we were “inseparable,” because I’d gone to West Point and he’d gone to L.A., to find a way into the music business without a single contact. But our emotional bond had been unbreakable. Until New Year’s Eve and that disastrous phone call.
Here’s the difference between rich people and the rest of us: When most of us have arguments with the people we love, we slam out of the house, let the screen door bang shut behind us, and walk around the block a couple of times until we cool off. But when you’ve got the kind of money CJ now had, you don’t have to stop at a block or two. You can let the screen door bang shut behind you and be halfway across the world. Which is basically what he did. At first CJ had been back east, recording at a friend’s studio in New York City, but now he was in Africa, traveling and looking for talent in the music clubs of Dakar, Nairobi, and Accra. No one knew when he planned to come back. God knew he hadn’t left any contact information for me. I’d sent him a postcard with my new address on it but hadn’t gotten any response.
Which brings me to Step Five: Go lick your wounds with an old friend, a career criminal whose antisocial ways increasingly make sense to you.
That was Serena. When it came to personal evolution, she made me look like a piker. If you knew me at twelve, you’d recognize me at twenty-four, and not just because I still have the same port-wine birthmark high on my right cheekbone. That couldn’t be said of Serena.
When I’d first met her, back in the seventh grade near Lompoc, she resembled the telenovela character Betty La Fea, with harsh black bangs cut straight across her forehead and braces her immigrant family went into debt to afford. She’d also had an unbecoming layer of baby fat on her face, though she wasn’t at all overweight; she’d been a speedy and accurate striker on the soccer team where I was a midfielder.
By ninth grade, in the halls of our high school, Serena appeared as a proto-gangbanger, outlining her lips in pencil three shades darker than her lip gloss and shaving off her eyebrows to redraw them. Then, after moving to Los Angeles with her family, she’d reinvented herself as a virtual boy, with a shaved head, Pendletons, and khakis, and run with the Thirteenth Street clique, or Trece. After a stint in jail, she emerged visibly feminine again but no less committed to la vida, and she’d formed a clique of girls she called her sucias, supposedly a “girls’ auxiliary” to Trece, but who banged just as hard. Serena had dreamed since childhood of a past life in Vietnam—choppers hovering over the jungle, chaos and fighting—and believed herself to have been an American GI who’d died over there. That was the source of her gang moniker, Warchild, and her conviction that life is war, this time around no less than the last.
The coach who knew the twelve-year-old soccer player, the teachers who shook their heads over the fourteen-year-old underachiever, the gang-suppression officers who ran down alleys after the sixteen-year-old gender-bending chola—none of them would recognize the woman she’d become now. And in fact, conventional wisdom said it was virtually impossible for Serena to be what she was at age twenty-five: the leader of El Trece.
The things we’d done last winter had only raised her profile in the neighborhood. There was more than one version of events in circulation, but basically it was said that Warchild had punked this Italian mobster up north, stolen his grandbaby (or baby, in some inaccurate accounts) right out from under his nose, and gotten away clean.
Of course, Tony Skouras had been Greek. And Serena had taken the baby out from under the noses of hospital staff, not Skouras and his people. And it was me who’d found the kidnapped Nidia Hernandez, arranged a safe home for her baby after her death, and paid the price in the brutal torture session in which I’d lost my finger. But I was philosophical about how much credit Serena got for things I’d done. It wasn’t like I really needed that shit to stick to me. And it made a great addition to the Warchild leyenda.
When she came back to town after the Skouras business, she’d begun paring her sucias down to a core group of dedicated older girls. Hoodrats who only wanted familia to drink and party with no longer needed apply.
This was the state of affairs when the leader of Trece, Payaso, had been arrested and sentenced to a year in Chino, leaving behind a very unexpected edict: “Warchild’s in charge.”
Granted, it was temporary. Serena had understood that he probably had an ulterior motive: Another male might not so easily relinquish his role once Payaso returned from prison. Serena might have seemed the safest choice. That was a viewpoint she didn’t acknowledge publicly. Respect from males was hard enough to come by and to keep.
So she’d installed me as her new lieutenant and protection, dismissing her old second-in-command, Luisa “Trippy” Ramos, as a dangerous loose cannon. Trippy, furious and resentful, had defected to Tenth Street, Trece’s nearest rivals. This wasn’t as rare as you might think. Once ganged up, bangers loved to say that their affiliation was por vida, but the truth was that gang sets or cliques lived so close together that after a slight or betrayal it wasn’t unheard of for a gang member to switch loyalties, or “flip,” to another clique.
I’d been happy to see the last of Trippy. On the surface she’d seemed a lot like Serena: strong, coolheaded, not easily scared. It took time to see that she was, underneath, psychologically unstable, with an almost nihilistic need to fight. She was a bully, too: I’d heard her brag about beating up a pregnant girl and knew she had no qualms about jumping rival girls three or four on one. She’d hated me as well, to the point that she’d sometimes spoken about me in the third person when I was in the room, as though I were absent, or not fully real. She’d never believed that Serena would advance me ahead of her, hence her outraged defection to Tenth Street.
But after she’d gone, I’d learned that there were other people in Serena’s neighborhood who couldn’t understand why she would give pride of place to an Anglo girl. Serena had met the criticism coolly, saying, “Insula was my homegirl before all these other homegirls, back in the 805, when teachers thought she was gonna be a soldier girl and I was gonna go to secretarial school someday.”
In time it became part of the Warchild mystique that she had a white, blond, ex-military chick as her second. It was as if Serena had an exotic weapon; I was her ivory-handled switchblade. And Serena knew that having me around made her safer. I had training that her other girls didn’t. I was a good fighter and shooter. When Serena and I were out on the street, I always had my Browning at my side and, often, a baby Glock on my ankle. But the other part of that was this: I wouldn’t shoot unnecessarily. I respected guns and what they could do, and I was careful in a way Serena knew her girls wouldn’t be.
Funny to look back on it now, but I hadn’t wanted to become a sucia. It was a commitment she’d extracted from me last year, when I’d asked her for Trece’s backup in taking on Tony Skouras. When I took my beating and joined, Serena had given me the street name “Insula,” Latin for island. She’d meant it as “someone alone or separate,” and that had reflected the understanding that we’d both had, that I was joining her clique mostly in name. Neither of us had foreseen that after the Skouras business was over, I’d become her lieutenant. I hadn’t foreseen coming home to L.A. so restless and angry.
Some of that anger was because of the brain tumor, which had stolen away my Army career and much of my future. I had been in my third year at West Point when things went wrong, except it didn’t feel wrong. I was simply never afraid. That wasn’t normal for someone at a military academy. The curriculum was designed to push you out of your comfort zone. Jump out of this airplane. Walk into this room and get gassed without a mask so you’ll always remember what it feels like. Compete at the levels we’ve set for you or you’ll go home in civilian clothes and everything you’ve done here will be for nothing. It was supposed to be frightening. Except then it wasn’t. In my third and fourth years, “What the hell” had practically been my mantra: What the hell, I’ll go first. What the hell, I’ll try it. I don’t care. I’ll do it. I’m not scared.
Then my tumor, so small and unknown, outed itself. My fearlessness brought me too close to the edge of a high bluff in a training exercise, and I fell. A precautionary MRI showed the tiny white glowing spot in my amygdala. Inoperable, the doctor said, and no matter that it was slow-growing and I was in perfect health otherwise, the “emotional anomalies” the tumor was causing made me unfit to serve as an officer in the United States Army. And it wouldn’t stay asymptomatic. I would not celebrate my thirtieth birthday.
But the truth was, I’d been dealing with the collapse of my life’s plan for a long time before I became Serena’s lieutenant. The simmering resentment that I felt when I came back from San Francisco couldn’t fairly be blamed on that. Nor was it even how badly Skouras’s men had punked me up north, their mutilation of my left hand. No, to be honest, a lot of my anger was about CJ.
So my career as Insula, Warchild’s second-in-command, began in earnest. I needed to be needed, and I found that in the sucia life. It was me who had seen that if the pharmacy robberies Serena pulled two or three times a year were profitable, truck hijackings would give us a bigger haul at a fraction of the risk. And on the streets I was Serena’s protection. In private I was the confidante she needed more and more.
Serena was under an appalling amount of pressure. I think I was the only one who saw what her new status cost her. Because in the gang life, even when things are good, they’re never really good. Gangbangers call it la vida loca, but privately I thought of it as cura nigra, or “black care,” the Roman phrase for trouble and worry. I’d seen the graffiti at the edges of her neighborhood, left by rivals, that said SUCIA KILLER and WARCHILD 187. The first time, I’d smiled bitterly, thinking, This is how the glass ceiling breaks in the ghetto, with death threats on a wall.
The pressure didn’t come just from rivals on the street. There were rumors that Magnus Ford, the feared LAPD gang-intelligence officer, had taken an interest in Warchild.
Gang suppression is one thing. It’s a war of attrition, hassling the street-corner guys, making petty arrests that often don’t stick, doing intervention with the youngest gangbangers who might still be saved. Gang intelligence, or organized-crime intelligence, is something else. Magnus Ford was the quiet force behind the arrests of several high-level Mexican Mafia shot callers. There were rumors that he was a fed planted within the LAPD. Nobody knew what he looked like. He was apparently so valuable that he was never photographed, not for the newspapers, not even on law-enforcement websites.
Thinking ahead, Serena had taken steps to protect herself from threats on both sides of the law. For example, the rented house that I used to call “Casa Serena,” with the orange tree out front and the couch or floor space for any of her homegirls who needed it, was no more. Serena was now living NKA, or “no known address.” Sometimes she crashed with her homegirls, other times with her brothers, occasionally, when money permitted, at a Vietnamese café-bar where they rented rooms upstairs for assignations. The main thing, for Serena, was that no one know where she slept.
She didn’t ever acknowledge the stress she was under, but for several months she’d been having stomach pains; intermittent, but sometimes bad enough that she’d retreat to one of her sleeping places and lie down, handing off her pager to me and telling me to TCB—take care of business—for a while.
I’d told her more than once that she should see a doctor. She said the pains always went away. I said they always came back. But she still hadn’t been through a clinic door.
I guess that all this is a long explanation of why I stayed at Serena’s side: My most subtle and unspoken role in our relationship was not just to protect her from danger but to keep her from being a danger. The odds had been against her getting even as far as she had. Age twenty-five was past time for a hardcore gangster to be in the grave. I knew that Serena knew this, that she thought about the endgame and the money that would fund a transition to a better life. And I knew she was willing to take risks to get it.
What I’m saying is, increasingly I saw Serena as a loaded gun. I was the safety on that gun.
Or maybe this is all a lot of justification, of the type I told the drug-company truck driver I didn’t do anymore. Pare it down to its simplest, and it’s this: Some people like to say the greater the sinner, the greater the saint. What they don’t tell you, I guess, is that the reverse is also true.