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The next day Ducc was ready to fire on his own. When it got dark, Ducc and a few others headed on foot over railroad tracks and through alleys to the enemy neighborhood. This time Ducc was carrying a deuce-deuce, a .22-cal. pistol. The rival gang was waiting, armed and hidden, but Ducc spied two on the street who weren't even looking at him because, he says, "I'm so small." He fired and hit one of them. "I saw a lot of blood," he remembers. He froze, so shocked he was unable to move. One of his homeboys snatched him up and ran back to their neighborhood. The momentary paralysis was not held against him: it was then that he was awarded the nickname Little Ducc, after an older, respected gang member.
Hate among Los Angeles gang members isn't personal; it's an attitude. Ask Ducc why he shot, and he says, "Cuz he was an enemy." Ask him why he was an enemy, and he shrugs and says, "Cuz." It's part of an outlaw code Ducc lives by but cannot define. Ducc says he never felt any remorse. "I wasn't going to cry about it, because he was an enemy and I wasn't going to feel sorry for him," he says. But didn't he feel anything? "For a while I got drunk, to hide my feelings," he mumbles.
It wasn't long before he began feeling that a .22 was insufficient firepower. "A deuce-deuce doesn't seem like it do anything." He and a friend tried a .357 magnum, aiming it at a dog. They missed the animal, but the kick was so strong, "it threw both of us back against the wall." He settled for a .38.
Ducc was arrested two months earlier on an ADW (assault with a deadly weapon), one of many brushes with the law. His family history is standard for the neighborhood: his mother died when he was five; his father, a first- generation gang member, has spent the past five years in prison; his older brother, 17, is also in the gang. What little care Ducc has received came from his grandmother. Ducc happens to be bright -- smart enough, in fact, to be discovered by the I Have a Dream Foundation, which selects gifted ghetto kids and pays their college tuition if they complete high school. Ducc, however, hasn't gone to class much since the fourth grade.
Ducc's prison diagnostic-evaluation sheet notes that he suffers "low self- esteem." Ducc says that belonging to a gang is about obtaining "respect." Respect and disrespect make up the reigning ethos of the streets. Kids seek respect by joining a gang, then prove themselves by punishing someone outside the gang for an act of disrespect. In Los Angeles you "dis" a rival gang by uttering an irreverent nickname; "cheese toes" is a slang word for Crips and a sure way of provoking a gun battle.
Gangs have existed in Los Angeles since the turn of the century, but they have been turned into small armies by drugs and money and the violence that goes with them. Combat has changed from bare knuckles and knives to random shots at an enemy who is tracked from a distance, is usually faceless and is therefore all the easier to gun down without remorse. Not all gang members deal drugs, just as not all drug dealers belong to gangs, but the flow of drug money has infiltrated every crevice, creating a hyperinflation of shooting.