Gang Slogans Back Him Up Against Wall

At least twice a month, Bruce Gardner trudges out in the morning with a bucket of paint he sloshes over graffiti sprayed across a 6-foot brick wall fronting his small stucco home in East Los Angeles.

The wall has become a billboard for graffiti and the 78-year-old man, who has half a lung and suffers from emphysema, prostate cancer and heart problems, said it has been that way since gang slogans started showing up a year ago at the little beige house across the street from Garfield High School.

Nearly everyone he has turned to for help--from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to neighbors--have advised the sickly old man to move or give up the fight.

But two weeks ago, a local benevolent group that funds a graffiti removal service in the area took over the job of repainting Gardner’s wall.

“We made him part of our route,” said Mary Loya, operations manager with the Maravilla Foundation, a private, nonprofit organization that provides services to low-income people in East Los Angeles. “We’re going to take care of his graffiti as long as our contract with the county holds out.”

It was reinforcement Gardner needed, even though many say he is fighting a war he cannot hope to win.

“I wish to God I could ignore it, but this is my home, my castle,” Gardner said, wheezing and struggling for breath in the bedroom of the home he bought in 1948. “I can’t ignore it; I’m not built that way. . . . I’m an old man now. I have dear memories of my wife here. I can’t help it.”

Mary Catherine, Gardner’s wife of 51 years, died of a heart attack in 1981. Ever since, his closest companions have been the Bible and ham radio beside his bed.

The house, where the couple lived for four decades, is crammed with old photographs of family and friends, and knickknacks that he accumulated over the years with his wife. A small bureau beside the bed was covered with medicine bottles. A vial of nitroglycerin tablets dangled from a bent paper clip attached to his shirt pocket.

“I don’t want to punish anyone,” said Gardner, a retired electrician getting by on disability Social Security payments. “I just want them to leave me in peace.”

Gardner’s war of nerves with local gang members took a turn for the worse in October when he began receiving threatening telephone calls and gang members started throwing beer bottles against his front porch at night. Sheriff’s officials said a tap installed on Gardner’s telephone in October was unable to trace the calls that were apparently made from a car phone.

“When the sheriffs come, they call me and say, ‘We saw the sheriffs at your house today,’ ” Gardner said. “It scares me. I want to be left alone, that’s all, please.”

A neighbor called Gardner’s plight “a pity.”

“They paint the wall, he paints over it, they paint it again,” said the neighbor, who asked that her name not be used. “I’m not about to go out there and say, ‘Hey, don’t do that.’ They’ll come back later and shoot me.”

Sheriff’s Sgt. William Rivera, who has responded to dozens of calls for assistance, from Gardner and others like him, said, “I wish I had a solution for Mr. Gardner.”

“I saw the wall,” Rivera said. “I said, ‘I know this must be frustrating for you. Why don’t you try ignoring this for a while rather than battle these kids we can’t catch? Let it go and repaint it.’ ”

For now, the work of the Maravilla Foundation will help.

But a long-term solution may not be as easy to find.

“I don’t know what we can do,” said Carlos Rodriguez, field representative for Assemblywoman Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Los Angeles), whose district encompasses much of East Los Angeles. “We’re open to suggestions.”