‘There were no tough guys in that place, only losers.’ : A Long Road Back

Ricardo Resendez covers his eyes when he talks, a gesture designed to both help him remember the past and simultaneously shut it out. As he does, a tattooed gang symbol on his right wrist glares like an imprint of evil, establishing a link through the shadows to a prison in North Carolina a lifetime ago.

He is seated in the living room of his small apartment in Panorama City, an enclave sheltered from the outside world by the nature of its construction and by double security gates, not unlike the barriers once imposed by a cell Resendez is called upon now to remember.

His effort is prompted by a question: What does an ex-gang member who spent 25 years in prison for two murders tell kids who are either gang members or who are exposed to a gang environment?

Resendez remains silent for a moment, then, searching for the proper response, says slowly, “The question they ask most is how it was being with all those tough guys.”

“What do you tell them?”

“I tell them there were no tough guys in that place, only losers.”

He removes his hand from across his eyes.

“I tell them I saw people butchered and thrown off the fifth tier and scalded with boiling water.

“I tell them I saw psychos kill people they had never even spoken to.

“I tell them I saw guys throw paint on a prisoner and set him on fire. I tell them about the smell of burning flesh and about hearing the screams. . . .”

Resendez sighs heavily and lights another cigarette, his third in a half-hour.

“I tell them not to go through what I went through.”

What Resendez went through comprised a long trip on a road of good intentions that ended, predictably, in hell.

With an IQ measured at 142 and a passion to help kids that is almost evangelistic, Resendez is now taking his message to the streets of the Valley in tones hardened by his own history and characterized by an ability to evoke imagery that is both savage and compelling.

He was a member of the Primera Flats gang in East L.A. when both he and his mother decided that the petty trouble he was getting into was bound to escalate into bigger problems unless he got out of the barrio. He sought freedom at age 17 by joining the Army.

But horror, not salvation, lay in the caprice that brought him one humid summer night to a town outside Fort Bragg, N.C., where he was a member of the 82nd Airborne Division.

It was June 2, 1961. There was a fight that involved a friend of Resendez’s and someone he had never seen. The stranger pulled a knife and was about to use it. Resendez tried to intervene and the stranger slashed at him, ripping his shirt.

Resendez remembers, “Something snapped.” He drew his own knife in a blind fury, went after the stranger and, at the end of a murderous scuffle, stabbed him once.

The man died and Resendez was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to prison for 30 years. He had just turned 18.

“I remember walking across the yard that first day. There was this big guy watching me. Each time I took a step, he’d whistle.”

Resendez whistles the tune himself, a slow, elephant-walk melody laced with hostility and insinuation.

“I said, ‘Who you whistling at, you pig-faced son of a bitch?’ I wanted to kill him, but another Chicano said he’d take care of it. I never saw the whistling guy again.”

They were not easy years. Resendez worked at eight different road camps throughout North Carolina and 13 times ended up in solitary confinement, mostly for insubordination.

“They fed us dog food twice a day,” he says. “The bulls called it ‘monotonous diet’ and some of the prisoners said it was a liver mush. But it was dog food. Sometimes they’d dump it into our bowls right out of the can.”

Five years after he entered prison, Resendez tried to escape. A guard was killed in the effort and a new sentence was slapped on the old one: life plus 140 years.

He thought he would never see the outside again, but sentencing laws changed in the South; his case was re-evaluated, and two years ago Resendez, at age 43, was returned to a world he could barely remember.

Since then, he has worked at eight different jobs, all of which were somehow wrong. The past clings to him like a leper’s cloak. Even the job he liked, working with kids through the Latin American Civic Assn., ended unhappily.

Then, one night at a Laundromat, gang members surrounded Melendez. One of them ripped off a crucifix that hung on a chain around his neck. Resendez went home to get a knife, thought about it, and returned to the gang empty-handed. He told them who he was and what they could grow up to expect if they continued on their current path.

Since that chance encounter Resendez has spent most of his time trying to talk kids off the street, working at real jobs when he can but mostly counseling the young vato locos on his own not to do what he did, not to be what he was.

“I tell them,” he says, “ ‘Don’t be like me. Don’t be a fool.’ ”

He sighs heavily again and covers his eyes, and keeps them covered for a long time.