More press arrived, some of them national; making their reports with the You Know You Want Some posters in the background. The two girls who worked at the restaurant were suspected of tipping off the Locos and wouldn’t go on camera for fear of reprisals. People who lived in the area were interviewed. They said the gangs were really bad, there’s too much violence, somebody should do something, and the neighborhood didn’t used to be like this.
Kaylin Kennedy had come in second in the LA’s Hottest Weathergirl rankings. Kaylin didn’t know what she hated more, coming in second or being called a weathergirl. She told Doug she wanted to be a reporter or she was leaving and he started her off doing features. A man with the world’s largest collection of Flintstone memorabilia. A kid that carved whistles for the troops overseas. A potbellied pig that could say I love you.
Kaylin was thrilled when Doug said she could cover real stories but this was her first week and she was already having second thoughts. Yesterday, she and her cameraman Roddy covered a brush fire off the 210 Freeway. It was ninety-seven degrees, the wind blew her hair to shit, and the smoke aggravated her asthma. Then she broke a heel and had to interview the fire captain barefoot and stepped on an anthill.
Now she was in Hurston about to interview a gangster involved in the gang war. It seemed hotter here than at the brush fire and the air had some kind of grit in it. The backdrop for the interview was a stucco wall crawling with indecipherable gang graffiti that made it seem like a foreign country. The gangster towered over her. He had on a black cap with a C on it and a blue kerchief over his face. A sawed-off shotgun was nestled under his arm like he was about to go duck hunting.
“Let’s talk about your weapon, sir,” Kaylin said. “Do you have it with you all the time?”
“Hell yeah,” Stokely said. “This shit ain’t no game. It’s a muthafuckin’ kill zone out here, you feel me? I ain’t strappin’ I ain’t surviving. Niggas could roll up on us right now.”
“So you believe your life is in danger standing here talking with me?”
“Uh-huh, and I believe your life is in danger standing here talkin’ with me.”
“Let’s talk about the war itself. Could you tell me what’s behind it? The reasons the war started?”
“This shit is ongoin’, you know what I’m sayin’? The latest flare-up ain’t no muthafuckin’ surprise. This shit is business as usual.”
“Could I ask you to tone down the language? This is for broadcast.”
“I don’t give a shit what it’s for and I ain’t tonin’ down nothin’. You don’t like how I’m dropping it get the fuck up outta my hood.”
Kaylin’s armpits were dripping and she was losing her patience. She remembered being in the cool studio bantering with Ted and Patricia and pointing at imaginary clouds on the green screen for ninety seconds. Roddy was nodding at her to keep going.
“You were saying the violence is business as usual?” Kaylin said.
“This is the hood,” Stokely said. “It’s live out here. You don’t get a nigga ’fore he gets you your shit is over.”
“Is this war about drugs?”
“In an offshoot kinda way but that ain’t the heart of it. This shit is about respect, you feel me?”
“That’s a term I hear a lot, respect. What does it mean to you?”
“It means it don’t matter who the fuck you are or what you got to say. If I feel like you defyin’ my will? I’ll put your ass down on the spot.”
“Let me see if I understand. You’re saying that respect is not challenging you in any way about anything by anyone. Is that the idea?”
“That’s it in a muthafuckin’ nutshell.”
“Can you tell me if there’s a racial component to the war? African-Americans versus Latinos?”
“I ain’t got nothin’ against Latinos per se. I’ll shoot a nigga no matter who he is.”
“Do you have any idea when the war will be over and the people of Hurston will be safe again?”
“Niggas wasn’t safe before the war. Why they gonna be safe after it’s done?”
Kaylin signed off. Stokely pulled his flag down and lit up a joint. “Want some?” he said.
“No, thank you,” Kaylin said. The weed smelled like somebody pissing on a pile of burning leaves. Stokely offered a hit to Roddy, who shook his head but smiled as he did it. “Can I ask you something?” Kaylin said. “There’s a question I hear all the time but I’ve never heard a satisfactory answer.”
Stokely took a hit and held it in. “Yeah, what?” he said, squeezing out the words, his eyes watering.
“How come it’s okay for you to use the N-word but it’s not okay for someone like me?”
“Let me make it real for you,” Stokely said. “If a nigga calls me a nigga I know what he means. But if you call me a nigga you might mean nigga.”
The gangster left and Roddy packed up while Kaylin stood in the shade of the news van and smoked a Marlboro Light. She’d asked the gangster the right questions but after editing bleeped out all the profanity there’d be nothing left but adverbs and pronouns. Maybe the job would get better, she thought. She’d get used to it, toughen up, get hard-nosed and courageous. Be one of those women reporters wearing a flak jacket and crouching behind a mud wall because the rebels were shooting and talking to Anderson Cooper via satellite. Yeah, she could see herself doing that.
Frankie La Piedra Montañez was the Locos’ shot caller. His shaved head was all angles like a Stone Age cutting tool, his mouth the same shape as his drooping mustache. He was shirtless, a thicket of tattoos on his chest and arms. A grinning skull in the middle of a spiderweb. A cholo and a hot chica wearing sombreros and ammunition belts. The letter M on a palm print with the caption in Spanish: When the hand touches you you go to work, and the Aztec war glyph to show pride in his heritage.
Frankie was a carnale, a high-ranking member of the Mexican Mafia, the prison gang also known as La Eme. The Locos bought their drugs from La Eme distributors and kicked back a percentage of the profits. They did this voluntarily because every homie knew that someday he’d go to prison and if La Eme had a beef with you you might as well stab yourself twenty times with a sharpened spoon handle and save them the trouble.
Frankie called an emergency meeting and the Locos gathered in the amphitheater in McClarin Park where people played chess and ate their lunches around the dried-up fountain. They fled when the gang showed up. “Those fucking Violators came up from behind like the fucking cowards they are,” Frankie said. “Supposedly we had something to do with robbing Junior but that’s like bullshit, that’s like an excuse so they could attack us. It’s like they’re throwing down the gauntlet, like they can intimidate us, like we’re going to back down.” The gang yelled their defiance; tick tocking their heads, waving their straps, and talking shit. Frankie raised his arms for quiet. “It’s war,” he said. “No mercy, no quarter, shoot on sight. Somebody looks wrong to you take ’em out first and ask questions later.” Frankie looked solemnly from face to face. “The Violators have to pay in blood for what they did to us,” he said. “This is our mission and we gotta take it all the way. We can’t let our fallen brothers die in vain. They were Locos, nuestra familia, and they will live in our hearts forever.”
Expecting retaliation, the Violators traveled in packs now, nobody walking around solo or sitting on their front porch smoking a joint. Kinkee, Sedrick, Hassan, Omari, and Dodson were eating chili dogs on a cement picnic table behind Hot Dog Heaven, a spot you couldn’t see from the street. A building had been demolished on one side of the restaurant. Nothing left but piles of old lumber, broken concrete, and rusted rebar. On the other side, European Auto Mart, Trone over there checking out the rides.