Echoes of the Last War

There are roughly 9 million people in Los Angeles County, living lives that range from exquisite joy to paralyzing sadness.

Look closely and you’ll find scoundrels and saints among them, each in his own place in an immense pattern of endless activity.

Look closely and you’ll find times of high anxiety and suffocating boredom, and all those shades of deepening gray between the harsh extremes.

Look closely and you’ll find Ricardo Resendez.

He moves in a world difficult to define because it straddles two realities, both of which seem oddly illusory.

One was a prison world he knew for 25 years, a world of almost inhuman incarceration and explosive violence.

The other is the twilight world he inhabits today; twilight because the two existences of Ricardo Resendez overlap, and the past follows like the shadow of a wolf.

The bars are gone but the prison remains.

Resendez is a man with an IQ measured at 137 who spent half a lifetime in a North Carolina prison for killing a man who was attacking his friend.

It happened in 1961. At the urging of his mother, he joined the Army to escape East L.A.’s gang violence. He ended up in Ft. Bragg, N.C.

When his friend was attacked by a knife-wielding stranger, Resendez says, he intervened and the stranger slashed at him, ripping his shirt.

Something snapped, he remembers today, and at the end of a murderous scuffle, the stranger lay dead. At 18, Resendez was sent off to rot in one of the most brutal prisons in America.

I met him at the end of all this. He had been paroled into a world he barely remembered, and was trying to rebuild his life.

He was living with a woman he loved dearly, had a job he liked, and was spending free time among gang members telling them they were swaggering their way into hell.

Such was the sterling nature of his conduct, his five-year parole status was reduced to minimum supervision.

If there were hints that he could never break free of his past, they came in flashes of memory.

“I’d be eating or driving or just doing nothing,” he says, “and suddenly remember a guy in prison who’d been doused with paint and set on fire. I’d hear the screams and smell the burning flesh.

“It would just pop into my head and I’d try to get it out, but it would come back again and again. . . .”

A psychologist would later describe it as the same emotional affliction that affects veterans of war. She called it a post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Resendez calls it a nightmare.

Memories of war have a way of distorting reality, if only for a little while, and of turning quiet moments into calamity.

Resendez discovered that truth through eight different jobs, by losing the woman he loved and by a flare of temper that put him behind bars for two terrifying weeks.

Hired as a laborer by the city’s Department of Water and Power 13 months ago, Resendez got consistently good evaluations . . . until last July.

He became involved in a verbal dispute with a fellow worker. The other man says Resendez threatened to kill him and his family.

Resendez says it was nothing more than a disagreement born in stress and there wasn’t anything remotely resembling a death threat.

Were it not for his prison background, he says, the confrontation would have been dismissed as a minor flare-up. Resendez apologized and thought it was over.

It wasn’t.

He was jailed for possible parole violation, then released two weeks later when it was apparently decided that no violation had occurred.

But his job with the DWP remains in jeopardy. He has been served with a discharge notice and is appealing. Meanwhile, he is out of work and if he doesn’t get his job back, his parole status will once more be in jeopardy.

“I’m afraid,” he said the other day in his tidy Panorama City apartment. “I don’t want to go back to prison. I was making it, I was doing impossible things and then everything seemed to go to hell.

“It’s hard to get over the past. I can’t even get mad without someone thinking I’m going to commit murder.”

Conflicting viewpoints of the clash with his fellow worker make it difficult to determine which Ricardo Resendez walks the world today: the man struggling to break from his past, or the man doomed to live it to the end of his days.

I asked him, and he said, “I was in one world that was 25 years long. You know, man, it isn’t easy to just step out of it and into another.”