UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS PART 1 : THE PATH TO FURY : EPILOGUE : ‘Scripture says something good comes for those who love God. There’s got to be something good that comes out of this for the black man.’

The weekend brought a sooty civility to Los Angeles and its neighboring cities. It was quiet. The curfew remained in place. Five thousand guardsmen patrolled the streets.

William Hong cleared the debris from his liquor store and figured he might reopen by midweek.

“You have to do something, you have to keep going,” he said. “What else can I do? I have payments to make to the bank. I have to keep going.”

On East 89th Street, Nettie Lewis counted her blessings. Her family was safe, her home intact. Her daughter had kept her beauty shop open throughout the riots on a street where businesses were burned and looted. Crazy? Perhaps. But the shop was spared.

Yet there would be a price.

“We working people are going to have to pay for this,” Lewis said. “I’m sure my house taxes are going to go way up. Everything I pay for is going to go way up.”

Her local drugstore was gone. The video store where she rented tapes to entertain her grandchildren was looted and trashed. The laundry was burned out, sending people as far as Cerritos to wash their clothes. And the many guns seized from pawnshops and sporting goods stores spoke of more gunfire in a neighborhood that already had too much.

“They built it back from 1965. It took them a long time but they did,” Lewis said. She is 57. Would she live long enough for the community to be rebuilt again? “I doubt it.”

For Basiliso Merino, who once saw so much hope in Los Angeles, the riots were the last straw. First the low-paying job, then the daily crime, and now this. He’d had enough of America, of its “streets paved with gold.” He planned to move his family back to Mexico in June, when the kids would be out of school.

“It’s impossible to live peacefully here,” he said. “The security of the family is the most important thing. Money is secondary. In Mexico there’s also problems, of course. But things are more under control there.”

Restaurateurs Nancy Silverton and Mark Peel, having watched the riot lap so close to their seemingly untouchable Mid-City neighborhood, were staying put. In some ways, Silverton thought, it did her family good to share an experience with the inner city.

“This is reality,” she said. “Beverly Hills is not Los Angeles. Brentwood is not Los Angeles, just like New York and Los Angeles are not the rest of the country. This represents the whole of Los Angeles. It was important for myself to be a part of it, to feel the fear and the tension in my life. I can’t be really angry at anybody. In one sense, it seemed so terrible, and in another sense it seemed so necessary. This country does have to be cleansed.”

In South Los Angeles, Laura Price told her children to be optimistic.

“Scripture says something good comes for those who love God,” she instructed. “There’s got to be something good that comes out of this for the black man.”

The political system she lives under was another matter.

“I’m not so sure that I believe a black person should believe in the system anymore,” she said. “Because if there are people who can sit on a jury and hear people admit to lying and then say they’re not guilty for lying, how can you believe in a system? How can you believe in something you see doesn’t work?”

In Simi Valley, where people do believe in the system, Steve Frank wondered how his city would be perceived.

“I’m very much concerned about this continual racial division and pigeonholing,” he said. “Not all white people were defendants in this case. Not all black people were victims in this case.”

He looked forward to former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s visit to the Reagan library in Simi. Hadn’t Reagan made the world welcome democracy? That’s what Simi Valley represents, he said: “People in Russia would get down on their hands and knees to live in a place like this.”

In Southwest Los Angeles, Marcus, satisfied with his pay-back, felt no remorse.

“We did it for Rodney King,” he said. “We did it for Latasha Harlins. That’s why the Koreans got it. We want to send a message that we don’t want to be f----d around no more. It’s time for everybody to leave us alone. We need to be respected.

“You see that thing the other day where the Republicans had that dinner and raised $9 million? Every one of those people spent maybe $2,000, $3,000, maybe $5,000. How come they can’t help the homeless guy on the street?

“Maybe this will bring the community together,” the young man said. “It brought the Crips and Bloods together. On Knudsen Dairy on Slauson near Van Ness, it says ‘Crips and Bloods together forever.’ One thing the police don’t realize, now there are more guns in the street than ever. If we have to go to war, we will.”

Dr. Louis Simpson, the psychiatrist who lost hope so long ago, who described gang members as “Buicks” being churned out by society’s assembly line, saw little chance of redemption.

“When I look at a patient, I just see them all as victims,” he said. “They are victims of process, of economic contraction that is occurring all over the world, that is not only affecting them, but middle-class whites. . . . This contraction leads to the constant deforming of a person’s mind. Basically, we are all like molecules bouncing against each other, and we are all lost children.”

Kerman Maddox, having put so much energy into government, wondered if society might be ungovernable.

“I am not happy about that,” he said. “But people have expectations, and I’m not sure political institutions at the national, state or local levels can deliver.”

Jake Flukers wished for a new set of black leaders--people who lived in South Central, not on its more prosperous outskirts. People who walked the streets. “Get your own leaders, set your own agenda,” he said. He may well not be around to see it. When the GM plant closes next summer, he may be off to Louisiana, chasing another opening.

Richard Breen’s business survived. But he figured the long-term impact of the riots would subtract $2 million from the value of his six acres in South Central. Nevertheless, he would keep Daylight Transport where it was.

“I don’t know how lucky we’ll be the next time,” he said. “That’s the scary thing. We survived this one, but what about the next one?”

Thomas Souza wondered if anything he’d done in 27 years as a cop made a damn bit of difference.

“I came into the city with a riot, and I left with a riot,” he said. He had been thinking about four dead friends, cops killed in the line of duty, whose pictures hung in a place of honor on a wall at Valley Traffic Division. “I’m really thinking now how long I want to stick with the department. I don’t want to leave the city under siege. But I’m really thinking about whether to leave after this is over.”

Twenty-four hours after Art Washington confronted the people who looted his store, he was out in his truck, shopping for lumber to board up the broken windows. He was wearing the same yellow shirt and stained khaki pants as the previous day. Washington and his wife and daughter and 89-year-old mother, visiting from Chicago, had slept in the store to guard it.

A dozen people, some from as far away as the San Fernando Valley, trickled in to help clean up. Every once in a while, a teen-ager would troop across the parking lot to see if there were any shoes left in the shoe store next door.

Tim Howell Jr. was there to help his uncle Art with the cleanup. He sat on a railing, waiting for Washington to return with the wood. Mexican music blared from the mall’s seafood restaurant. Helicopters rumbled overhead.

Howell mulled an ethical question. He had not looted Wednesday or Thursday. He had stayed indoors. But when he was helping to clean up the shoe store, he had found a pair of Nikes that fit him, and he had kept them.

Was he a looter?

He decided he wasn’t.

The UCLA student was straining to pull meaning from the violence. Everybody was. Everybody seemed torn--between a visceral satisfaction that people had risen up against injustice and a profound sorrow at what this anger had wrought.

“This is the only way black people know how to take back their community,” said Yvette Whitfield, 26, as she came out of the Mexican restaurant with her 4-year-old son, Antonio. “I’m not condoning it,” she said evenly, “but how else are we going to do it? The politicians, they can’t get anybody who’s in there who’s not in it for the money, the power.”

Would the riots make a difference?

“Black people will be more together,” Howell said. “I think they’ll come together more. They’ll say, ‘Yeah, what we did was wrong, but it made a point.’ See, a lot of the young people, they’re happy, they don’t see what’s going on. I wasn’t here in ‘65, but I know something about tearing up your own property.”

“You don’t own any property,” interjected Byron Chatman, 35, an unemployed actor. The business people who were looted or burned out “ain’t coming back,” Chatman said. “Not that we need ‘em, because they’re jacking us. Costs a dollar and a half to make those sneakers in Taiwan they sell here for a hundred dollars. We don’t own nothing.”

“Some blacks own businesses,” said Dorcas Chandler, 37, who works in Washington’s store.

“You don’t own nothing,” Chatman said. “Just because your name is on the lease doesn’t mean nothing.”

Art Washington drove his pickup truck, loaded with plywood, into the mall parking lot. It was 5 in the afternoon. Two hours before curfew. Tim Howell Jr. and the other nephews waiting for Washington had to get to work. The discussion was suspended. The contradictions that swirled around them would not be resolved.

Life was like these shattered windows. Sometimes, all you could do was nail a new piece of wood over the broken glass, wait until the madness died down and start over.