Business With a Gift for Giving
In the weeks after he opened his video arcade, Richard Chipres would sit wide-eyed in the rear of the modest storefront and watch a parade of taggers and gangbangers straggle in, their caps pulled down tight over their eyes, their street swaggers full of menace. Some of the teens had battle scars he could see; others, he knew, had weapons hidden beneath their baggy clothes. But Chipres steeled himself and reached out to them, convinced that he could get beneath their tough exteriors and help them overcome the empty allure of the streets.
“You should have seen these guys,” said Chipres, who opened the arcade on Harbor Boulevard nine months ago. “Real tough customers. I was pretty leery of them, but I wasn’t scared. Not too much.”
While the youngsters come into the arcade looking for a 25-cent distraction, they--like the six foster children that Chipres has taken into his home--find in the 54-year-old an unexpected father figure.
By respecting and befriending the area youth, Chipres has earned the arcade its status as neutral territory. All gangs’ grudges and graffiti tools get checked at the door.
“We don’t write here. Everybody knows not to touch this place,” said James, a tagger and frequent arcade customer who declined to give his last name. “Richard told us that he would be shut down if the place was all covered, and we like him too much. He doesn’t treat us like we’re nothing. He makes you feel like a friend.”
That friendship, and the guidance that comes with it, can help fill a void in the youths’ lives, Chipres said.
“All the problems with the kids today--the drugs and gangs and graffiti--all of it can be cured by good parents,” he said. “Kids aren’t born bad. These kids, if they aren’t loved, what are they going to do? They go looking for it, and the closest thing they can find are their friends. Gangs are just families for kids who give up on their parents.”
Chipres and his wife, Angela, know firsthand the costs of unraveled families and wayward youths. They hear it everyday in the crying of their foster children, among them Cynthia, 4, who was beaten by her mother and sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend.
And they see it in the photographs they have of a serious, handsome boy named Leo Huiochea,a local teen the Chipreses took under their wing after his parents moved away in 1990. The memory of the 16-year-old--gunned down by gang members in February, 1991--spurred Chipres to open a place for children and even inspired its name.
“See, ‘Leo’s Arcade’--that’s the name of the place,” Chipres said, pointing to a recently finished tagger-style, fluorescent mural on the wall behind a row of video games. “I think he’d really like the place. Maybe if it were here back then, maybe Leo wouldn’t have been out on the street, you know? Maybe he’d be safe. Maybe he’d be alive.”
Chipres’ voice trailed off as he looked around at the late afternoon crowd of young children and teens hunched over games, intently wreaking havoc on computer-generated ninjas and aliens. Instead of loitering or wandering the streets the youths have a place to kill time, laugh, buy fruit drinks and, in general, be kids.
And Chipres is there to hand out some encouragement or free advice.
“I don’t have a change machine,” he said, smiling in a conspiratorial manner. “If they want quarters, they have to come to me. That way I can get to know their names.”
First their names, then their problems. Chipres’ son, Adrian, said he sees the process from his vantage point as the arcade’s assistant manager.
“He knows everybody real well, on a first-name basis,” Adrian Chipres, 20, said. “And a lot of these kids tell us their problems. Some of them are foster kids, a lot of them are on parole and stuff, or they’ve got parents on drugs. Or they’re into drugs. And my dad always tries to talk to them and help.”
For Jay Arnez, 16, one of the arcade’s regulars, Chipres has been someone whom he can turn to when life takes a turn for the worse.
“Richard is somebody I can talk to,” Jay said. “Most adults just talk at us, but Richard listens.”
Jay, who says he has often run afoul of local police because of his ties to the Menace to Society tagging crew, believes that area aerosol vandals know Chipres will not tolerate their illegal handiwork. Chipres once scolded him after catching him leaving his mark with shoe polish on a nearby curb. Customers who violate the fighting or vandalism rules can expect to be banned from the arcade for days or weeks, Jay said.
“He’s strict. He’ll take control, and I like that,” Jay said. “But, you know, he’s upfront about what he’s doing, and he’s always fair. If you screw up, you lose.”
Chipres accompanies that firm hand with an outstretched, open one. Sometimes it’s a $10 loan, other times it’s agreeing to speak to a parent or parole officer on behalf of a troubled teen. Sometimes, Chipres will help a convicted tagger find jobs to work off court-assigned community service hours.
Usually, he said, he tries to find ways “to just make them feel like kids.”
When the smell of weekend barbecues from a nearby apartment complex had some arcade regulars complaining that they had no family outings, Chipres helped them organize a carwash to buy hamburgers, hot dogs and chicken. He then watched as half a dozen tattooed street toughs--half of them with time served in Juvenile Hall--turned into giggling youths while they comically mastered the grill and gorged themselves on the food.
“The trick is, if you treat them like normal kids long enough, they slip and they start acting like normal kids,” Chipres said. “At first they like to act all bad, and you have to say, ‘OK, fine, you’re tough,’ now let’s have a good time. Some will walk away because they’re too hard-core, and they’ll end up in jail or worse. . . .”
“But most of them you can get to,” Chipres said. He stopped jingling a handful of quarters and his eyes grew serious.
“Hey, those are our kids out there with the guns; they’re our future. They’re not somebody else’s kids, they’re all ours. And we have to get them back. If not, we’re the criminals.”
