SUMMER IN THE BARRIO

The key turns in the ignition and the pickup explodes with sound as a battery of amps ramrods enough juice into the night to fry the carbon off the engine. Another week survived, seven days endured, for this: Saturday night, party night, cruising night.

The eight pickup trucks are lined up at parade rest, side by side in the shopping center parking lot, tailgates toward Bristol Street, noses toward Edinger Avenue, wiped clean one last time, tires Armor-Alled on the spot.

Saturday night, party night, cruising night, time to put the trucks on display, ride up and down the streets of Santa Ana, look for the promised parties. Those with jobs and those without, kids on summer vacation and young men with jobs too tough and pay too low, singles looking for dates and unmarried fathers on a night out, a minority who belong to gangs and a majority indifferent or hostile to the gangs.

Summer in the city, in the barrio.

The teen-agers of the various beach communities can while away their hours on sandy shores next to the Pacific Ocean while the youngsters of most of the inland areas have more money and more options than the teen-agers of Santa Ana--particularly the Latinos in Santa Ana, especially the Latinos in the barrios of Santa Ana.

The Jerome Pool in Santa Ana is popular in the long, hot summer, but it’s closed Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. And on Tuesdays and Thursdays, it’s open only from 2 to 4 p.m.

Memorial Pool in Santa Ana is popular too, in fact the most popular of the city’s four pools. But a major renovation of the pool did not start until mid-April. Once, it was thought that the pool could reopen July 16. Now the city figures that maybe it can open July 30. Much of the summer will be over then.

The Boys Club, YMCA and Salvation Army run summer programs in Santa Ana, but most of their participants are 12 or younger. The older youngsters don’t want to hang around with the younger ones.

Governments and private businesses have summer job programs, but not all the teen-agers who want jobs get them.

Santa Ana teen-agers say their parents worry about them during the summer. So do the police.

Lt. Robert Chavez of the Santa Ana Police Department says there is a “natural tendency” for young people without jobs, camps or some program to “congregate and sometimes get into trouble.”

Tom Wright, the Orange County Probation Department supervisor of the gang violence suppression unit, says gang activity increases in the summer. Years ago, he said, “summer was just kind of the lull” for gang depredations. “Now it starts picking up as school ends, and it gets hot all summer long. . . . And mainly it’s because these guys don’t work, don’t want to work or can’t get a job and they’re just out there.”

For those without work, time can hang heavy.

“Yeah, I get bored,” says Nellie Vasquez, 16. The previous day she got out of bed at 10, went to Lake Perris with friends and was back to her Santa Ana home by 3:30. At night, “I partied” and got home at 1:30. She does not understand the word “curfew,” but when her friends explain, she shrugs that her mother prefers that she be home by 1 a.m.

No matter how boring the summer, vacation beats school, she says. Ahead of her lie weeks of “visiting my boyfriend, going to the beach, kicking back with my home girls.”

Patti Hinojosa is 14 and a ninth-grader. She waits with Vasquez in the parking lot, eyeing the pickup truck club members and wondering what this Saturday night will bring.

“I love everything about summer,” says Hinojosa, a bubbly teen-ager with sparkling eyes. Yesterday brought the trip to Lake Perris. Monday will bring a trip to the Orange County Jail to visit a friend behind bars.

Jose (Eddie) Gomez is in the parking lot too. He has come with a pickup truck club member specifically to cruise. Gomez is 19 and either unemployed or on summer vacation, depending on whether he returns in September to the school where he dropped out in February, four months shy of graduation.

Gomez’s brother is in a San Francisco-area prison whose name he can’t remember, one year into an eight-year sentence for “everything; you name it, he did it.” Gomez’s mother has sent his brother a television for his cell, so he figures at least the brother isn’t too bored.

Gomez himself tries to steer clear of the law. “I can’t afford to get in trouble, I’ve got a 17-month-old baby,” he explains. He lives separately from his child’s mother because “we’re having some problems right now.”

Gomez’s sister, Aurora, dates Gus Orellana. Her name is on the right side of the rear window of the camper shell that Orellana has attached to his Toyota pickup. Orellana, who lives with his brother, sister and parents in a neat tract house three blocks over the city line in Garden Grove, is sergeant at arms of the Exhibitions pickup truck club, whose bylaws bar drug users and gang members. Orellana, who works a 40-hour week at a large hardware and garden store, stands with other members of the Exhibitions next to their machines in the parking lot, waiting to cruise.

Thousand-dollar sound systems blast out of the pickups, fighting rival tapes on competing trucks waiting for the light at Bristol, battling sounds coming from the pickups of members of the Sensations club, just driving in to use the parking lot next to the Jack in the Box.

A Sensations member has hydraulic lifters on his low-rider truck. Four inches separate the ground from the bumper in the normal position; chrome touches asphalt when the lifter clicks on. The truck seems to kneel magically on its right front wheel like a motorized circus elephant. The lifter lets the driver circle the Exhibitions gathering on three wheels, nearly defying gravity and drawing jeers from Exhibitions members.

The Exhibitions club swings out onto Bristol, up the street to McFadden, into the parking lot of yet another block-long shopping center.

Karyn Raciti, 21, roars into the lot and jumps out of her Pontiac Fiero with the license plate holder reading “Sworn to Fun, Loyal to None.” She chats with Exhibitions club president Fernando Silva. Raciti and her friend, Chanda Hobson, 18, jump into the back of Silva’s 1987 burgundy Toyota long-bed pickup.

The trucks parade back out onto the Santa Ana streets for another hour. Red lights break the formation; outsiders slip in between trucks. The leaders pull over, wait for the chaff to separate, move out again when all the trucks are in a row.

Raciti returns to the parking lot where she left her car, saying it’s been a fun night so far. “I’ve heard of the club before,” she says. “I’ve seen the trucks around.” The Orange Coast College student, who works part time during the summer, agrees to head to a party Silva knows about. Hobson, like Raciti a Costa Mesa resident, says she isn’t working right now. How will she spend the summer? “Kicking it.”

Midweek, early afternoon. Luis Orellana and Jose Gomez roll out of Orellana’s house, walking easy, glancing at the sky, heading out to see what’s going on.

For Orellana it is one of his too-few summer vacation days before he starts a job at Disneyland. For Gomez, it is another day of hanging out, reading want ads, thinking about what kind of a job to seek.

Their friend Gus passes them in his Toyota pickup as they ride through Santa Ana. Cross Gus’ house off today’s itinerary. Over to Junior’s house. Junior--full name Jose Martinez--just graduated from Santiago High School and doesn’t have a job yet. Most of the day is spent hanging around the house until Junior’s girlfriend gets off work at 4 p.m. Spend a couple of hours with her, he figures, then hang around the house some more.

The teen-ager the others knew only as “The Wild Man”--no one knew why--pedals up on his Schwinn bicycle. Orellana rags him about stealing it, getting it through a “five-finger discount,” as they say on the streets. “Wild Man” denies it staunchly, insists he bought it from this guy he knows.

Tito and Gavino come by Junior’s too. They are in their 20s, sipping cans of beer, shrugging off the question of their family names. Tito works drywall but took the day off. Gavino said he isn’t working just now.

“All they do around here (in the summer) is the same thing as in school,” Tito says. “Just hit the beach and hang around.”

Any weekday, noon. The line waiting for the Boys Club to open at 12:30 has already grown to two dozen. Ruben Alvarez Jr. climbs into the creaky blue-and-white school bus with the Boys Club logo on the side, cranks the engine and pulls out to play Pied Piper.

“There’s no doubt that our membership is vastly increased during the summer months,” says Sal Rubino, the club’s executive director. An additional 300 boys may enroll in a club that already has nearly 1,000 members.

The Boys Club is on Highland Avenue, a drug- and gang-ridden area of Santa Ana. Rubino says the area gangs consider the club neutral turf. The bus driven by Alvarez, the club’s “outreach director,” swings past five schools in Santa Ana neighborhoods each day, picking up boys whose parents won’t let them cross dangerous streets and gang jurisdictions by themselves. Some boys aren’t allowed off the street where they live; if their streets are on the bus route, Alvarez picks them up too.

On this day there are two separate drug arrests under way within two blocks of the club. On Cubbon Street, five people are sitting on a curb, guarded by a policeman. An undercover policeman, ski mask on his face to preserve his anonymity, talks to a partner.

“It’s really good for kids to see” the arrests, Alvarez says. “I push it too. I say, ‘If you get into drugs, this is what’s going to happen to you.’ They see it, they’re aware of it.”

At Russell Elementary School, 18 youngsters tumble into the bus. One jokingly shouts “ la migra. “ Another waves his green-and-white Boys Club membership card, yelling, “I have my green card.”

In the barrio of Santa Ana known as Santa Anita, there is “not a strong recreation program,” says Alvarez, who is 28 years old and was the 1975 “Boy of the Year” at the Boys Club. “We offer the kids an escape from their environment. . . . They barely got sidewalks until a couple of years ago. That’s the kind of a neighborhood it is.

“There are a lot of gang members there. We’re working with (younger brothers of gang members) to try to get to them before they get into the gangs and drugs and all that.”

The Boys Club has pool tables, a large gym, weights for teen-agers wanting to pump iron, computer classes and a library with books and magazines, including bound copies of National Geographic going back to 1922. Most of all, it has swimming, available a bus ride away at Santa Ana High School.

When the club opened 30 years ago, 90% of its members were white, 9% black, 1% Latino. By 1970 each group held about one-third of the membership. Now Rubino says nearly 90% of the members are Latino, 8% white and 3% black.

The club stays open from 12:30 to 7:30 p.m., giving boys in afternoon summer school classes a chance to drop by. But its budget and staff are small, and it is closed weekends. Many of the members come from overcrowded apartments heated in winter by an open kitchen oven and cooled in summer by an open front door. The club’s slogan: “Beat the heat with the club that beats the streets.”