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Few gang members use crack, the community's best-selling drug. Kids don't need to see TV public-service ads of a man frying an egg to know what crack does to the mind. They see it all the time on the streets and in their homes. "It makes people go out of their heads," says Edgar, 15. "My friends would stop me if I ever tried it." His mouth pursed with disgust, J.J., 15, says, "It makes people skinny and ugly." In South Central the only thing worse than a "basehead" is a "strawberry," a woman addict who trades sex for crack. J.J.'s mother is a basehead, and probably also a strawberry, but he won't discuss her. He'll fight anyone who does.
Most gang members are in their late teens and early 20s, but kids as young as ten or eleven readily join. They are called "wanna-bes" and are looked on even by the cops as apprentices in the trade. Yet it doesn't take much for a wanna-be to earn full stripes. According to Henry, 13, a Grape Street Crip, the only difference between "little gangsters" and "big gangsters" is firepower: little gangsters use .22s or .25s; big gangsters, .38s or Uzis.
Henry has a much stronger sense of being a Grape Street Crip than a Mexican American or an Angeleno. Ask him about his family, and he'll talk about his "homies." He knows the odds against surviving gang life. "I might get killed one day," he says. "My uncle did." His uncle, a Florencia gang member, was shot in the back with a .45 when Henry was ten. His uncle was Florencia because he lived in that neighborhood, but that was long ago, and Henry has always been Grape Street. "I don't like Florencia, I never did." One reason is that he had to stop playing football in a nearby park because Florencia claimed the territory. That happened when he was nine, before he became a Grape Street Crip, but gang members prize their memories almost as much as their weapons.
Henry doesn't sell drugs or commit robberies. "I just like gang banging," he says, meaning hanging out with his friends. He witnessed the mortal consequences of gang banging when he was eleven: a 16-year-old homeboy was shot twice in the head by some guys from "Colonia Watts." Henry was hanging out on the next street, heard the shots and ran over to find the boy sprawled on the street, his blood seeping onto the concrete. "I was mad, everybody was." Henry didn't get a chance to vent his anger until much later, for a different shooting by a different gang. After Florencia gang members shot a Grape Street member in the leg, the Grape Street gang had a meeting, and Henry and two other friends volunteered for the mission. "I wanted to do it," he says.
They walked 20 blocks, entered the Florencia neighborhood through back alleys and just started firing. "I shot three times, and the second shot hit one of them," Henry recalls. "The others jumped behind a car, but this guy fell down. I could see the blood, and I could hear him calling out." Henry remembers his heart racing as he headed home, where "I just calmed down." Of the shooting, he can only say, "It felt weird, I dunno, just weird."
He was carrying the .25 when the cops arrested him on the street the following day. He wasn't wearing colors; few members do so anymore, since gang emblems are as open an invitation to arrest as carrying a semiautomatic rifle. But just the fact that he was dressed in low-slung black trousers, Nikes and a Pendleton shirt gave him away.