A PERSONAL VIEW : The Reality of Living in Watts: It Depends on How You Look at It

I live in Watts.

It’s as simple as that.

I’ve lived here since October.

No, I’m not a crusader who is championing the cause of the downtrodden by living “in the community.” The fact is that I bought a house here, a nice little two-bedroom stucco place with front and back yards, a fireplace and a two-car garage. The street seemed OK and the price was right.

The idea was to fix it up and sell it quickly for a tidy piece of change. So far, I haven’t quite completed the former, which has vastly hindered my ability to make good on the latter.

Consequently, I still live in Watts.

Two-Block Stretch

My house is on Alvaro Street, a two-block stretch between 112th Street and 114th Street, one block east of Central Avenue and just north of Imperial Highway.

Alvaro dead-ends on the north at 112th Street Elementary School. Smack up against that school is Verbum Dei High School, a private Catholic boys school noted for a championship basketball program whose players powered UCLA’s program in the early 1980s. One even made it to the pros. People where I live also know it for its stiff academic standards. A Verbum Dei graduate was a Rhodes Scholar.

On each side of Alvaro are little stucco homes. Some lawns feature what I call the California cut; the grass that looks like somebody trimmed it with a pair of scissors. Many are bordered by tidy white fences and, inside, sculptured shrubs hug the fronts. A few, like mine, don’t look so good from the outside. They could use some paint, and the lawns are not quite up to community standards.

The people are an eclectic mix. On my block live two nurses, a teacher’s aide, a U.S. government purchasing agent, a doctor’s receptionist, a security guard, a truck driver-warehouseman and a gaggle of retired people, like Mr. Carter, who worked for 30 years at McDonnell Douglas Corp.

Next door to me, at the corner of 114th Street, is Tabernacle of Faith, a Baptist church that bustles almost incessantly. Seems like every night they are doing something, though I’ve never ventured in to find out just what.

In the summer, the church runs a free lunch program, and during the school year, it operates an elementary school. Mrs. Milligan’s grandson, dressed neatly in his pressed white shirt, black bow tie and black trousers, strolls by my house like clockwork every morning on his way to class.

On Saturdays, I’m sometimes awakened, too early to my liking, as the church-sponsored Boy Scout troop runs through marching drills. It’s a pain, but how can you complain?

That’s the neighborhood I saw when I first looked at my house.

It was a while before I began to see what was right across the street from the church.

There sits Nickerson Gardens, a low-income housing project built in 1951.

Dismal, Foreboding Place

Nickerson, an easy rock throw from my front yard, has the dubious distinction of being referred to by the media as “the most notorious housing project in Los Angeles.”

At first glance, Nickerson is a dismal, foreboding place, a sprawling collection of worn, dingy structures teeming with the jobless, the underemployed and retirees. Families of eight, nine or 10 squeeze into two-story units, many with plywood where glass windows used to be.

Children are everywhere. Their mothers, mostly unwed teen-agers or those just past 20, huddle inside their homes, waiting patiently for the county to send their welfare checks.

There are gangs, though I never really see them. And winos, who pass my house every morning on their 7 a.m. run for a breakfast of beer or cheap wine at the corner liquor store. And drug peddlers, mostly from somewhere else but who slip into the neighborhood and mark off their turf along the winding streets or parking lots that dot the area.

Unemployed black men look ominous as they while away the day on corners and outside doorways.

But if you cast aside your middle-class perceptions, and the fears that go with them, you see that Nickerson is a diverse community of people--poor people struggling against the odds, trying to maintain some kind of dignity.

You begin to notice the people in Nickerson with well-tended lawns in front of their doors and brightly colored, carefully tended flowers growing under their windows. The sprinklers and water hoses come out early in the morning and late at night. You see the pets, and doormats, the little amenities that say, “This is my home, and I’m gonna do the best I can with it.”

You see neighbors waving friendly hellos, people smiling and chatting quietly, and playful children reverently referring to adults as “Mr. this” and “Mrs. that.”

I walk through Nickerson often, at all times of the day and night. I am cautious, but not petrified.

There Is Reality

Still, Nickerson is not where anybody really wants to live, including the people who are there. There is crime, there is tension, there is neglect.

But Nickerson Gardens at its worst is not Watts, just as the impoverished Bryant Street-Vanalden Avenue neighborhood is not Northridge. Unfortunately, that reality is lost on most people.

To most people, it is as though Watts is an isolated outpost, where the problems that afflict the poor of this city begin and end. And the people who live there carry some strange communicable disease that threatens even the most casual observer.

Recently, a friend visiting me from out of town called someone in another part of the city for directions to her house in Fox Hills. When he told her he was in Watts, the response was, “Get out of there right away!”

There are areas poorer than those in Watts. Take a ride north on Main Street, beginning at Imperial.

Some Nice Areas

And there are nice areas in Watts. Try the homes all down Pace and Parmelee and Mary avenues and Zamora Street right next to Will Rogers park. I’d take one of those any day.

But nobody believes it. And even when they see it, it doesn’t matter. It’s still Watts.

To be quite honest, when I moved to Watts I suffered to a lesser degree from many of the same mistaken perceptions. And they became magnified as I tried to make a home out of what had been a vacant house used by vagrants for overnighters and adolescents for drinking and sex.

First off, I put a fence across the back yard, which had become the community shortcut to the corner market at Central Avenue and 112th Street.

Someone tore a hole in the fence and the traffic continued. I repaired it and put up another fence in front. They tore a hole in both. Nobody tried to break in. They just went to the liquor store. Then I repaired the fence and got two large dogs. Problem solved, at least as long as the dogs are there.

But by then I felt under siege. When I came home everyday I wondered if my house had been burglarized. I would worry about it at work. I began to resent the people. I trusted no one. In my mind, a tidal wave of evil and meanness threatened to wash over me from the housing project across the street. It was them against me. I bought a pistol and a switchblade knife.

Gone, Forgotten

Now, I don’t even know where either pistol or knife is.

I don’t know when it happened, but somehow I began to see people where threatening faces used to be. And as I did, I began to relax, and my community came alive for me.

I began to see victims instead of assailants. Neighbors--some friendly, some not--dealing with a set of circumstances over which they have limited control.

Take Bobby. Bobby, who’s in his mid-20s, wants to work, at least he says he does. Because he doesn’t have a job, he spends much of his time hanging out in the Nickerson parking lot across the street from my house. He washes cars and runs errands. Anything to collect whatever change he can.

Bobby is on probation for a felony. He says he can’t get a job because of his record.

Lost Olympics Job

But he needs a job to take care of two children he fathered. He says he had a job with the Olympics, but that ended when they found out about his record. It would be simple for him just to sell a little drugs. It’s there. Many people do it.

Angelo, who lives a few doors down, is 21. For months he held a part-time job at a grocery store. The problem was they wouldn’t give him any more hours. His girlfriend is expecting a baby soon and they want to get married. You try making it on $100 a week.

Angelo could make more in one day selling pot than he could in a week on his job, so he did. Then they put Angelo on full-time, gave him a promotion. End of dope.

Angelo desperately wants a career, a chance at a job that’s going to count. I’ve seen his spirits rise and fall as people have dangled opportunity in his face, only to snatch it back.

There are lots of people around like Angelo. And then there are folks like Slick, a fuzzy, scuzzy fellow with half his front teeth missing who sleeps nightly in a car in one of the parking lots of Nickerson. My grandmother would describe him as “trifling,” which means you’re about two notches below lazy. The people in Nickerson describe him the same way.

Blows His Money

He’s stabbed at a few jobs, but he doesn’t want to work. He admits it. And what money he gets he blows. He took $100 recently and spent it on drugs and alcohol, getting him and the boys high, and then the next day he asked me for a dollar. He already owed me $10. You like Slick, you wish he would do better. But you know he won’t.

Directly across the street from me is Mr. Carter. Mr. Carter struggles to help his daughter, who lives next door in Nickerson, raise her four children, ranging from 2 to 16. He has lived in his home since 1957. During elections, he is a clerk at the polls at 112th Street Elementary. He’s being doing that since 1968. He spearheaded the Neighborhood Watch program for the street. His wife died not long ago and before she passed away he promised her that he would see the grandchildren through high school. The oldest, Angie, dropped out this year.

And then there is Rhonda, a 15-year-old who could pass for 18. I liked Rhonda right off, her big, open face and wide grin. She’s the first person I ever saw whose eyes really did sparkle. Oh, she was fast, had a bad mouth, but underneath it all, she was a good person.

She got this strange kind of respect from people. She would see two boys riding their bicycle too late at night and demand an explanation. And they would give her one.

Sage of the Street

People like Mr. Curley, the sage of the street, took great pride in Rhonda. She made good grades in school. She was courteous. She made you feel good about young people.

But then something happened. Part of it was adolescence, and puberty and part an oppressive mixture of negative influences that seem to relish smothering the life out of anything good in Watts. Like concrete poured over grass. Some of the grass gets through, most of it dies.

Rhonda started ditching classes. She wanted me to write phony excuses for her. She didn’t want her parents to know. I told her I wouldn’t, that school was vital, but I relented just to get her over the hump one time. But she kept cutting classes.

Then came sex, and a boyfriend, a piece of nothing who fancied himself a dope dealer. Rhonda started talking about quitting school. I got Slick to talk to her. I’ll say one thing for Slick, at least he tried to do something good this once. He told her to stay in, so she wouldn’t be like him. But she didn’t listen.

She ran away from home and lived with her boyfriend. She came back, but no school. Another boyfriend came along. Now she is pregnant, for the third time in nine months. Her first pregnancy ended in miscarriage, the other an abortion. Rhonda also sells a little cocaine. She thinks its cool.

‘Still Not Too Late’

“We held high hopes for her,” Mr. Curley said. “We thought she was going to make it out of here. It’s still not too late.”

There are lots of Rhondas. They idle past my house daily. Confused, misled. Like the 15-year-old virgin who asked me “How much would you charge to break me in?”

I watch beautiful young girls thrust into womanhood by ignorance, uncaring men and some warped concept of male/female relationships. They trade sex for affection, thinking it’s the same thing. They have babies “for” men who won’t be around when the children are born.

You watch them stumble and there’s nothing you can do. You talk, but nobody listens. It hurts to see a person deteriorate before your eyes, shut off from any chance of life. You want to show them a world, a better world, that there is something much greater beyond this. But you are one, and they are so many.

And your friends, the people you work with, play with, they don’t understand. You bring up Rhonda in conversation, they don’t really want to hear it.

Change the Subject

“That’s a shame,” they say politely. And then they ask me where I am going on vacation, or we talk about concerts and the last party they went to, or the sale on Melrose or. . . . And you go home to the Rhondas.

Which gets to a problem. There are not enough men in Watts. Oh, there are plenty of males. They strut their maleness at every turn, conning their lovers out of part of their welfare check, recounting their sexual encounters in street corner wolf sessions.

But they are not men. Not like Jimmy. Jimmy lives across the street, one house up; him, his wife and five children. His oldest is 28; his youngest is 3. I like Jimmy, but more than that, I have a tremendous amount of respect for him.

Jimmy is a survivor. Whatever it takes for his family, he brings it home. He’s street smart and family strong. He coaches the neighborhood youth league teams in baseball, football and basketball. He cares about something. He stands for something. He’s not perfect, I’m sure. But he’s there.

In my neighborhood, you need something or somebody to be there, because all around you the world is trying to tell you that you don’t count. It’s some of the same people who look at you strangely when you tell them you live in Watts.

Different in Watts

Life is different in Watts.

In the stores, you’re not a customer so much as a body ferrying money, and the fastest way and with the least amount of effort with which they can get it from you the better. Service is almost a forgotten term. Selection is a joke. Prices are high, so those who have the least pay the most.

“Well, go somewhere else,” you say. When you are without a car, as many are, it decreases your options considerably.

Liquor stores are the banks, and the department stores are the guys selling counterfeit clothes.

When the city picks up garbage, trash is often strewn everywhere. They wouldn’t do that in the Wilshire District. There are empty lots filled with decay and debris. They wouldn’t be there in Ladera Heights. Why me?

No restaurants, save a chicken house here, a hamburger place there, and in most of them there’s no seating. Name a nearby movie house.

Never See the Beach

Kids grow up and have never seen the beach. Vincent counts on his fingers visits outside South Los Angeles as though they were trips to another city.

“I’ve been to Marina del Rey once, Sunset Boulevard once, Magic Mountain once. No, I haven’t been to Disneyland.”

They become, as one young woman so eloquently put it, “people without dreams. They live from day to day.”

Eventually, it all becomes so very tiring. So, you ask yourself, “Why does this have to be? Who is responsible?

“Why are teen-age girls having babies when birth control is so readily available? It’s all so terribly, terribly wrong. Why are there boarded-up houses and buildings and empty lots begging for investment, with no takers? People here could own homes, they just don’t know how. There is a pool of cheap labor, and nobody wants to build a plant.

No Good in Prison

“What good does it do anybody if Dino, pressed for money, is busted for selling $5 worth of marijuana and goes to prison, where I foot the bill.

“Why shut all the helpless in a place where nobody can help anybody. Nobody next door or around the corner can say they are hiring at his plant, because the neighbor hasn’t a job or an inkling of where one is? How can these children go to school every day and come home with heads as empty as they were the day before?

“Where are the middle-class blacks, safe in their leased Mercedes and BMWs and good-paying jobs, who are now plucking some of America’s fruit because people like these lit a fire that scorched a nation’s consciousness. Do they think they have suddenly arrived because they are so eminently qualified? They are the beneficiaries of Watts. Where are they?”

Eventually, you question everything. You look to the institutions that serve the rest of the city. Why can’t the cops stop drugs? They do it everywhere else. Where are the politicians and their promises?

I look at my colleagues at the newspaper. Don’t they care?

No Longer Cute

Suddenly, the cute pictures in the paper of white kids eating licorice stop being cute.

No, I am not especially moved that another of the sextuplets died. I see dying babies everyday, theirs is just a slow, protracted death.

USA for Africa makes my stomach turn. People who cannot lift one finger for people in the neighborhoods from which they came can become so compassionate for people around the world? Where was their consciousness two years ago. Watts was here.

I despise J. Paul Getty Jr.’s $62.5-million gift to Great Britain’s National Gallery for art acquisitions. I love art, but just the interest off that money for five years could turn my whole neighborhood, any neighborhood, around. Aren’t people more important than art?

Everything becomes a frenzied blur. Nothing makes sense. It all hurts.

And then we, the media, do “Watts, 20 years after.”

Working for Improvement

I stopped in the other day to say hello to Ted Watkins, president of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee, one of the nation’s most successful anti-poverty programs. For 15 years, the committee, through a massive array of programs and projects, has been working to build up the area.

His phone was ringing off the hook. On one line was the Today Show, with an offer of a limousine to zip him to a 4:30 a.m. remote broadcast from their Burbank studio. On the other line was a Dallas newspaper reporter requesting an audience. Watkins had already been interviewed by the wire services, a number of other newspapers and radio and television stations. Then there are the panels, and the mayor’s dog and pony show.

It is like this every five years for Watkins, when the media does Watts. This year it’s even more so. Watkins has a little more notoriety, thanks to a segment on “60 Minutes.” And this year, Watts is a bigger story. Something about 20 years has that special ring to it.

As Watkins juggled appointments, I looked past him through the big plate glass window that opens onto the expansive parking lot. The line for food stamp recipients stretched out from the entrance of the building next door deep into the parking lot where welfare mothers, their children in tow, picked over merchants’ wares looking for a good bargain.

What About Next Year?

And as I watched them, I wondered, “Who will call Ted next week, next month, next year to see how Watts is faring? Who will give him an ear when budget cuts threaten whatever foothold his programs have afforded these people? What will they write if he has to tell 60- and 70-year-old women that he can no longer feed them at his senior citizen centers?

Who will care then, when it’s not 20 years after?

I still plan to sell my house. I need a bigger place. My two sons are coming to live with me and I want another room in case my mother, who retired this year, wants to come out and stay for a while.

There are neighborhoods in and around Watts that interest me, but I’ve always wanted to live up in the hills, since I cannot afford to live by the ocean.

If I don’t move nearby, oddly enough, I’ll miss it. I like the people. I like talking across my fence with Mr. Carter, and I’m looking forward to seeing Jimmy’s football team this year. I’ll miss Ms. Fuggins and her next hobby. And a few blocks away there’s a real nice park with two lakes where I go running with my dogs. I’ll miss that, too.

Constructive Anger

But I take something with me. Watts has rekindled in me a constructive anger that I hope I will never lose. I cannot believe that the human suffering and destruction in the Wattses scattered across this city have to exist.

Someone is responsible. Someone has to do something.