“You Don’t Want to Know What We Do After Dark”
On the streets of southwest Houston, violent gangs are out of control, dealing drugs, robbing businesses, and protecting their turf at all costs. For one longtime member, each day comes down to two simple questions: Will I have to kill? Will I be killed?
Luther Randerson says: To be sure, the border fence is an eyesore; but an anti-personnel mine strip along the border, while probably being effective, would endanger our wild life. Does Mr Lewis have a better way to keep the illegal bastards out? Luther Randerson, Midland, Tx (March 21st, 2011 at 5:15pm)
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I’m not sure whether to believe the last half of his sentence. I ask him if it’s true that someone shot at him the previous week. “Yeah, coming out of a convenience store off of Rampart. Someone drove by in a black car and a bullet came my way,” he says. “F—ing Cholos.” He then tells me he’s moving from one apartment to another, just in case.
I originally heard about Alex from Charles Rotramel, of Youth Advocates. Every day, Rotramel has his twelve counselors travel to gang-ridden areas throughout the city to meet gang kids, and in 2004 one of them came across Alex. (There used to be other groups who did the same thing, but they now have trouble getting funded. Much of the government funding they once received goes, in the post-9/11 age, to homeland security. There is a Mayor’s Anti-Gang Office, but it has only six counselors to cover the entire city. Because the Houston City Council will not devote any of the city budget to the Anti-Gang Office, except to fund two staff positions, it too has to look for grants to keep its doors open.)
To the surprise of everyone at Youth Advocates, Alex had shown up at the Youth Advocates building off Interstate 45, far from the southwest neighborhood. He said he wanted to check out the break-dancing program—and “check out the girls.”
“We figured it was his way of saying that the gang life, for all its excitement, was starting to get to him,” says Rotramel, who has recently moved the Youth Advocates office to southwest Houston. “You see it happen so often to so many gang kids as they start hitting their twenties. They know they are not happy, they can’t sleep at night because of the stress, and they’re worried that the cops or the other gangs are finally going to catch up to them. And here is one place where an option is presented to them of a life that’s different—a life of pizza and listening to music and not having to think about drive-bys.”
When I see Alex in September, I ask him if he’s thinking that the time has come to leave.
“What do you mean, ‘leave’?”
“Leave the gang,” I say.
As we’re having this conversation, we’re walking into a neighborhood pupuséria, a restaurant that specializes in El Salvadoran food. Immediately the customers stop talking. I assume that they have turned silent because they realize that a member of the feared Mara Salvatrucha, showing his blue, has arrived.
“No, El Bolillo,” says Alex. “They’re used to gangsters. Gabachos never come in here.”
He orders two beers, both at the same time. I ask him again if he thinks about leaving. But instead of answering, he tells me a story about a girl he had met a year ago. She was fourteen, known as a “Cholita”—which meant she got passed around sexually among the Cholos. “I didn’t care,” says Alex. “When I met her, it was a whole different story for me. My insides felt different. She knew I was carrying out assignments to get rid of Cholos, but she still cared about me. I never had anyone care about me as much as she did, and I had never cared for any girl like I did for her. I’m not lying to you. My insides felt different.”
They maintained a secret relationship for several months. He borrowed, or perhaps stole (I was never able to get the truth out of him), a car and took her to an Olive Garden south of Houston near the Johnson Space Center—“the one place where I knew I wouldn’t find any gangsters.” He went to Jewelry Dog USA at the Sharpstown Center and bought her a fourteen-karat gold necklace with a medallion that read “LOVE.” She, in turn, went to Jewelry Dog USA and bought him a grill—a metallic mouthpiece, popular among rappers, that had MS-13 written across the front plate.
When a friend heard about the relationship, she told him it was just like Romeo and Juliet. Alex, who knew nothing about the ill-fated love affair, says he went to a video store and rented three different versions of the movie. “And we watched them all. All of them. One with Leonardo DiCaprio, another with somebody else, and a real old one. That one was my favorite.”
“A veterano with MS-13 has watched Romeo and Juliet,” I say quietly.
“Oh yeah, El Bolillo, and I also got that damn West Side Story. Too much f—ing music.”
There’s a silence, and Alex finishes one of the beers. He then returns to the story and tells me that the girl’s mother learned about him. She realized that if the Cholos got wind of the relationship, which they inevitably would, her daughter would be killed. One day, the mother and daughter disappeared. “They went to Central America somewhere,” he says. “I could never find out. Right before they left, I told my girl that we were going to get married and leave Houston and start a new life with a baby. I told her we could go to North Carolina.”
“Why North Carolina?” I ask.
“I’ve never been there, but I know it’s far away. I told her I’d always wear a shirt so no one would see the tattoos—so no one would find me. I cried like a baby when she was taken away from me.”
A COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER I return to southwest Houston and head to the apartment where Alex is staying. When I walk in, he is hanging with three of his homeboys. Blaring out of a boom box is a rap song that sounds like gunfire. “We’re survivors, still standing,” the rapper shouts in Spanish.
Alex isn’t looking good. His face and body are bruised. One of his lips is puffy. There’s a fresh scar across one of the tattoos on his left arm.
“F—ing Cholos,” he says.
He tells the other homeboys and me that he had been walking alone the previous afternoon down Rampart Street toward the Bellaire Square apartments. A group of Cholos had driven by in an old Lincoln, the front seat pushed all the way back. One Cholo had leaned his head out the window and shouted, “Cholos controla!”
“F— you, you punk!” another Cholo had shouted.
“Then what, Alex?” asks Julian, one of the homeboys. Julian is only thirteen years old. He was “clicked in” to the gang a couple of months earlier, and he worships Alex. At his middle school, he proudly tells other students that he is part of Alex’s “crew” and that he is doing “missions” with him. (When I had first met Julian, I had asked him what those missions were. He had grinned confidently and said in as forceful a voice as he could muster for someone who had barely reached puberty, “Mr. Reporter, you don’t want to know what we do after dark. You really don’t want to know.”)
“What did you do, Alex?” Julian asks again. I realize I’m holding my breath. I want Alex to tell us he kept his head down, refusing to take the bait. I want to believe that Alex has not traveled too far down a certain road to be able to retrace his steps.
But Alex says, “I did what I had to do for the gang, my homito. I threw down. Chunked them our sign.”
According to Alex, the driver of the Cholos’ car hit the brakes and everybody came after him. Alex started running, but one of the Cholos was far faster than Alex expected. He pushed Alex to the ground. Another Cholo raced up and began kicking him in the ribs.
“But the f—ing putos didn’t see my knife,” says Alex, El Rata. “I got the leg of one of them, then I slashed some motherf—er’s arm. That got them the f— outta my face. And then I was gone. Ran down an alley and was gone.”
“Now what?” asks Julian, his eyes gleaming.
Alex shrugs and stares at Julian. “What do you mean, ‘Now what?’ They come back at us. And we come back at them.”
Alex shrugs again, and just like that, he seems ready to talk about something else. He looks over at me leaning against a bare wall, taking notes. He gives me a smile. “Hey, El Bolillo, take us out to eat on your credit card,” he says. “Come on, you know we need our fruits and vegetables.”
We head out the door of the apartment and walk down the stairs and into the parking lot to my car. Instinctively, he pauses to see who else might be in the parking lot. He looks to the left, then to the right. He looks toward the street to see what cars are coming his way.
“Come on, El Bolillo. Let’s cruise.”
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