‘Homeboys’ Learn Peace at Pomona Auto Garage : Crime: A former gang member hires youths--then teaches them that there are better tools than pistols.

At first, George Gallardo and Joe Pineda “mad-dogged” each other, silently staring each other down as if looks could kill.

They already knew each other from years on the streets of Pomona, where Gallardo’s homeboys had shot at Pineda’s homeboys and Pineda’s homeboys had shot at Gallardo’s.

But after a week of working side by side at the R and R Custom Detailing shop, these two teen-age members of warring gangs have discovered that they can live in peace, at least for a few hours a day.

“At first, I didn’t like the idea,” said Pineda, 17, a member of the Sur Trece gang in South Pomona. “But now, we just kind of shine each other on. I don’t disrespect him and he don’t disrespect me.”

Gallardo, 16, a member of Twelfth Street, one of the city’s oldest and largest Chicano gangs, returns the compliment.

“We just try to keep it cool in here,” he said. “Just do our work and don’t be startin’ nothin’. Out on the street is something else.”

In a city where increasing gang violence has contributed to a record 39 homicides so far this year, there is a truce in this cinder-block garage on 2nd Street.

Its owner, Ruben Guevara, a former gang member, does something that few employers would consider today: He pays $4 an hour to gang-bangers--young cholos with criminal records and street-tough wardrobes--just to teach them that there are better tools than pistols for earning a reputation.

Also, this hulking man, who is known as Ice Box, makes a point of hiring teen-agers from warring gangs. So the kids who are waxing the cherry Chevy one afternoon could just as easily have been shooting up each other’s turf the night before.

About all Guevara asks in return is that no weapons be brought to work and respect be practiced in the garage.

“I try to be like a father to them,” said Guevara, 35, who left the streets in 1974 after being placed on probation for his role in several gang fights. “I’d give them the shirt off my back, just as long as they keep their word and try to work together as a family.”

It helps to have a big stick backing up such soft talk, and Guevara, a bearded giant of a man with enough girth to fill the pants of two homeboys, inspires awe as he paces through the garage in his blue shop apron barking orders to his wards.

“Look at me,” he said, with a hearty laugh and an 18-inch-long screwdriver gripped in his meaty hand. “I’m big.”

In the two years that Guevara has had the shop, he has hired a number of youths referred to him by the Los Angeles County Probation Department. Others he knew from the streets.

And a few, including Gallardo and Pineda, came from the Soledad Enrichment Action Center, which operates an alternative school for high-risk youths just across the street from the garage.

“Ruben is somebody who can talk to these kids for real,” said Lydia Maldonado-Calzada, director of the Soledad school. “What better role model than somebody who’s like one of your own.”

Guevara, who joined the Twelfth Street gang while a student at Ganesha High School in the early 1970s, credits his reform to a probation officer who urged him to channel his energies into a local car club.

Through that experience, Guevara honed his automotive skills, learning to sandblast, steam clean, paint and buff old clunkers into sleek riding machines.

“I’m working now with the kids of guys I used to run around with . . . guys who are still in the penitentiary,” Guevara said. “I figure, if I grab these kids now and keep them busy, maybe I can help them avoid making some of the same mistakes.”

Yet nobody should think that his garage is a church of instant miracles. Allegiances among the estimated 1,300 gang members in Pomona are deeply rooted, with some youths coming from families in which gang activity has been a way of life for several generations, police say.

Even those who have the benefit of Guevara’s example find that the lessons of the garage are often hard to apply to the cold facts of the streets.

Ask Pineda, who lives with some homeboys in the Sur Trece neighborhood, and whose big problem is that his mother is renting a place on Twelfth Street turf and he doesn’t want to risk going over to visit her.

He says he’d like to settle down someday and not have to look over his shoulder every time he leaves the house. But for now, his homeboys are all he’s got.

“I don’t go looking for problems,” he said. “But my homeboys, we’re like family. Say, your homeboy kills my homeboy. I’ll go kill two of yours. That’s just the way it goes. Back and forth.”

Still, Gallardo wonders if maybe, just maybe, with a good job and the right woman, he could break that cycle. If he believed they stood a chance, he’d take his 15-year-old girlfriend, who’s already three months pregnant, and go somewhere far away, maybe even join the Army.

“I’d like to get away and forget about all this,” he said. “I don’t want my kid to grow up here. I don’t want him to die young.”