Deceived by Love

The roots of violence were not only evident in my own home, but in some of the communities where I grew up.  At the age of three, I lived in Cudahy and the most striking memory, which I will never forget, was waking up one morning, and seeing that the house across the street from me had been burnt to the ground.  Staring at the rubble, I wondered if anyone had died.  Standing on the sidewalk, I listened as the adults talked about what had happened the night before.  Gang members had thrown a motif cocktail through the window of the house in the early hours of the morning.  “What is a motif cocktail?” I asked an older boy.  “It’s a bottle filled with gasoline, you stick a rag in the top of it, light it, throw it, and then it explodes,” he explained.  “Only the little boy is alive.”  “Everyone else died,” he said. The adults chattered back and forth about how the young boy was the lucky one.  He happened to be sitting on the toilet when the explosion occurred.   I felt sad for the little boy who was all alone and who had lost all of his family members in an instant.

It wasn’t long before my mother got remarried, and we moved to Bell Gardens.  This neighborhood wasn’t any better or different than the one that we had just moved from.  To me it was worse because it was much nosier.  Every weekend men and women would roll in on their motorcycles and go next door to party.  They would drink, yell, fight and act like fools as they staggered into one another.   Although, I never understood what the fights were about, it was still frightening to me as a small child.  Many times, I was awakened out of a sound sleep.  Who could sleep from all the commotion that went on?  As a result, I developed an irregular sleeping pattern. 

It was during the 1970’s, when my mother and stepfather legally separated.  We ended up moving to Compton, California.  First of all, it was quite a culture shock moving to this community.  Not only was it extremely violent, but there was such an intensity of hostility that existed in the community. Violence was regularly broadcasted on the television and radio.  It was strange watching shoot outs between the police and “radicals” on a regular basis.  Even though so much chaos existed in this community, you just learned to cope because it was a normal part of growing up.  From our apartment house, we were never allowed to walk down the eastside section on our block.  At the end of the street, was a hangout where gang members congregated. People were constantly hanging out on the street dealing drugs down there.  Every time, the police went down there it always ended in a shoot out.  When you heard the sound of gun shots, you learned to hit the floor and stay there until it was safe to get up.

One of my playmate’s who lived across the street from me had walked down to the corner store with a group of her friends.  Needless to say, she made the mistake of walking down that end of the street.  Well, a gang member had grabbed her and groped her. It wasn’t exactly the kind of neighborhood where the police responded quickly to take a report or properly investigate.  When, she told her father what had happened he took matters into his own hands. He picked up his shotgun, loaded up his car with his friends, and sped off to settle the matter.  I only know what happened after the fact.

Anxiously, my playmate pleaded with me to come over to her house and she kept insisting that she had something to show me.  As we walked across the street to go over to her house, she filled me in on the details of what had happened before and after the gory gun battle.  She took me by the hand, led me into the bathroom.  Then, she began showing me the splotches of blood that were splattered all over the bathroom.  There was blood in the bathtub, in the sink, on the shower curtain, and on the wall.  There were towels all through the house that were used to soak up the blood from the gunshot wounds.  Carefully, my friend began picking up the towels by the ends of the corner, dragged them into the bathroom, and threw them into the bathtub.  I stayed as long as I could with my friend, who was alone, and in shock.  At the same time, I couldn’t help but ask myself what kind of world do we live in?