A Detour Into the Other L.A., the Land of Anarchy

Sometimes you can drive any freeway in Los Angeles at the maximum speed, but sometimes there is a price for that freedom.

It’s 4 a.m. I’m en route to code seven--a lunch break--and I just about have the Harbor Freeway to myself. Moving along at 55 with nothing to slow me, nothing to distract me, is a wonderful feeling--something that the freeway planners and builders must have imagined.

The only intrusion is in my head--thoughts about what had just occurred. The diversion of a traffic jam would have been better.

He was 34 years old, a GSW--what the police and the hospital call the victim of a gunshot wound. This was the second time he had been shot. This time it was in the face. He lay sprawled on the concrete driveway, screaming in pain, his right eyeball blasted into bits. As he cried out, his voice was broken by the stream of blood that drained down his throat. He reached out with blood-soaked hands into the night air. Neighbors peeked out from the windows of their darkened houses. This wasn’t television’s version of violence. This was real. There would be bloodstains to remind them, come daylight. They would ask why?

There are two likely reasons for what was done to this man. Neither makes much sense. One is territory, controlled by the colors red and blue. If you happen to be sporting the wrong color in the wrong place--in this case a blue N.Y. Yankees jacket--then you can be given a capital sentence or maimed for life. The unintended irony was that the man’s blue jacket turned a deep maroon as his blood soaked in.

The other reason is greed. Drugs are big money for the street gangs. Eliminate a rival, increase your profits. An obscene and perverse capitalist enterprise.

Maybe he was shot because of the blue jacket. Maybe he was shot because he was in another salesman’s territory. Maybe it was a random thing.

The paramedics arrived--tired from calls that didn’t seem to stop all night. But they went to work with efficiency. Quickly they loaded the man into the rescue ambulance. There, in the light, the wound was examined. Two wounds, really. There was just a hole where the eye had been. And the cheek was in shreds. One of the paramedics gave his clinical assessment: The eye socket was the exit wound; the entrance was just below the eye through the cheekbone. “Look, you can see parts of the eye,” the paramedic said. Yes, if you looked, you could. Everyone looked.

At Martin Luther King Hospital the man was sped straight past other victims, including lesser GSW victims, into a trauma unit. There the medical staff looked; even the janitor looked, and others who happened past the open door.

The trauma-room staff members went about their work calmly, but their businesslike manner didn’t quite hide their aggravation and frustration: so many patients, so much bloodshed, night after night. And here was another GSW to the face, the second that night (morning). The other victim was shot through the bottom of the chin into the roof of his mouth.

As they cut the man’s clothes off, the medical team noticed the scar that started at the top of his chest and ended on his stomach.

“Hey, did you have heart trouble?” a doctor asked. No, the GSW said, he had been shot before. He lost a kidney that time. “Oh,” said the doctor.

The man would live, so we could leave. Had he died, there would have been more paperwork to do.

Not that our work was done. The officers back on the street went about doing their job: Find witnesses, find out what happened, find whoever shot him in the face. The people who were present when he was shot weren’t interested in talking to the police. The “homeboys” take care of their own.

Later--an hour, a day, rarely longer--there would be revenge: perhaps a homicide, perhaps only an eye for an eye. That wouldn’t have anything to do with the Bible. Only drugs, or the color red or blue.

It’s great to have the freeway to yourself at 4 o’clock in the morning. If you don’t have to think about the street.