Imperial and Euclid

Growing up next to Skyline Park carries with it some amount of implication. Poor, white trash, loc, Sur 13, etc… My parents moved there from Arizona in the 70’s. They struck out on their own with close to no money and a desire to escape their respective families and landed at 4380 Pala Street. A two bedroom house on the corner of Pala and Rytko with a little yard out back and the cul-de-sac five houses down. It was a bedroom community built before the reach of gangs had really taken hold of the entire southeast portion of San Diego.

By the time I was born in 1982, Lomita Park had been taken over by a set of Crips. Just to the south, Skyline Park was the front line of a turf war between another set of Crips and a bunch of local Surenos. Three miles away was the intersection of Euclid and Imperial, more commonly known as “the four corners of death”. You played in the street no later than when the streetlights came on. You never went to the park without your parents or older family member. You got used to your own backyard. Even still, the neighborhood had its influence.

Grade school was the first time you were out of the house for extended periods of time. I went to Knox Elementary. It was a stone’s throw away from and by way of “the corners”. The school was built on a slope that cut the school into two sections, the lower of which was referred to as “down field”. A block away from school was John F. Kennedy Park, home to the 47th St. Crips. “Down field” was technically their territory. The mostly abandoned apartment complex next to the gravel softball fields separated by a chain link fence with holes big enough to be gates, was their safe house. They operated with impunity for years in the early 80’s and by 1987, the first year I attended Knox, their power was not to be tested. Occasionally, the gravel field on our campus would serve as their own personal battlefield. One night, they shot a rival gang member to death outside of Mr. Dumanil’s classroom. The following Monday, we found shell casings the police didn’t bother to pick up.

By fifth grade, I was relatively immune to my surroundings. The three mile walk from my house to the liquor store at the corners where I would spend the $1.25 my parents had given me for lunch on two donuts and a small carton of milk, to school had become routine. I felt safe. After all, I was a little blonde haired, blue eyed white kid that stuck out like a sore thumb. The only people that ever spoke to me were the guys from 47th street.

Since I was seven I’d made it a point to walk out of my way, down Logan Avenue just one more block so I could walk down 47th. In those three years I’d gotten to know my friend Carl’s older brother, Jamal, pretty well. Jamal was nineteen going on thirty. He had been in and out of juvenile hall more times than I had years on this planet. He was jumped in at nine years old after which he celebrated by committing his first drive by shooting. He told me they gave him the sawed-off shotgun just so they could watch him fly backwards in the car. To their surprise, he took the recoil well and even hit what he was shooting at. Jamal always said it was a Sureno, but Carl told me it was really a Lincoln Continental parked outside of a house, which considering its size was not a true sign of impeccable marksmanship.

One morning, as I was walking down 47th to Carl’s house, I recognized a car driving by. It was an old Cadillac DeVille I’d seen every day across the street from my house on Pala. It belonged to the girlfriend of a Sureno that visited late at night. It didn’t make sense to me that he was driving down 47th until a few houses down I saw the driver step on the brakes. He slowed to a crawl and from out of the windows, three guns were drawn. Two were nickel plated revolvers and one was a black Tec-9, the latter of which I recognized because Carl had shown me Jamal’s. It was 7:10 in the morning.

Every morning I met Carl outside of his house on the corner of 47th and Ladner at 7:15 AM. I was five minutes early that morning because my parents hadn’t given me the usual $1.25. I figured I could kill time with Carl and maybe hear one of Jamal’s stories before we had to head on to school. When I saw the guns being pointed out of the windows, I looked up and saw Carl waiting on the curb with Jamal. At the time it seemed like everything had slowed down; as if when the driver of that car hit the brakes, he controlled not only the car, but time.

I watched Carl and Jamal talking for what felt like an eternity until the first bullets started hitting the cars around them. Carl rolled onto the ground behind Jamal’s Town Car. Jamal bailed the opposite way behind some other car that was getting turned into a colander. I turned my head to the DeVille. I stood wide eyed, mouth agape at what was transpiring a hundred feet from me. Meanwhile, Jamal had taken out his 9mm Beretta. My gaze turned back to him.
There he sat calmly against the side of the car as bullets flew by. Carl was in the gutter beside the car, crying for his mom. All the while, Jamal sat as if he were counting for hide and seek. Suddenly, the driver hit the gas and the tires screeched as they burned their tread into the street. Instantly, as if on cue, Jamal stood up and began firing at the car.

One of his bullets hit a back tire and the car spun out. After hitting several parked cars, the DeVille came to rest on its side about a block down from where Carl and Jamal were. I ran to them and got to Carl just as Jamal had opened the trunk of his car. I asked Carl if he was alright and he just nodded, almost as if he were in denial of what just happened. Above us, Jamal had retrieved a shotgun from his car’s trunk. He turned to me and stuck his hand out. In it was his Beretta. I stared briefly at it before Jamal opened his mouth.

“Hold this. They can’t trace a shotgun.” he said.

I barely had time to shake my head in agreement when he’d already handed the gun to me and begun walking towards the overturned Cadillac. I’d held his gun before but this time it was different. It was warm. It smelled of sulfur. It felt like power. I turned to ask Carl if he was okay when my head was whipped around by the sound of a shotgun blast.

I stared in sedate horror as Jamal emptied five shells into the car. Each blast sent a shiver through my body. Jamal never said a word. He just stood there as he calmly shot all three occupants of the car. After he was done, he turned towards us and began walking back. The gun in my hand suddenly felt heavy. It pulled my gaze down to it and mesmerized me. I wondered how such a little thing could cause what I just witnessed. Just as I felt I was starting to comprehend everything that had unfolded in the last two minutes, Jamal appeared above me and took the gun from my hand. He put it into his waistband and picked Carl up.

I stood up and looked at Jamal’s shirt. It was covered with what in my ten year old mind looked like a piece of spin art gone wrong. Its color was a velvety red and it smelled warm. Jamal knelt down and brushed some dirt off of Carl’s jacket and in a calm demeanor told us “Don’t worry about anything. Get to school and don’t say nothing about this. You understand?”

We nodded in stunned silence and turned around. I looked to Carl and he to me. We shared an understanding look and began walking to school.

Later I found out that two of the people in the car were Sur 13 Surenos. The third person was the girlfriend of one of them, the girl from across the street. Her parents were devastated. They couldn’t understand why she went out with the boy, let alone why she died. Holding that gun in my hand, I understood perfectly well.

Four years later I moved out of the neighborhood. I hadn’t seen Carl since I left Knox but I’d run into Jamal every once in a while. He started working at Huffman’s BBQ about a year after that morning on 47th street. I would pop in on the way home from school and he’d hand me a catfish sandwich and basket of fries. I guess it was his way of buying my silence. I rationalized it by thinking that they had tried to kill him first, but going home and having to look at the empty driveway across the street from my house on Pala made all of that seem moot.

A year before we moved, Jamal was killed by police as he tried to run from holding up a liquor store. He wasn’t armed and they shot him in the back six times. That night I went across the street to the house where the DeVille used to park. I didn’t knock on the door. Instead I sat on their doorstep and thought of what I would have told them.