Word on Street: Young Toughs, Same Old Story : Gang life: Orange County teens are drawn to the groups despite the violence and risks involved.

Rick is sitting there, nerves of steel, going on about his family and gang life and all his other exploits. Though only 17, he has the distinct sound of a person for whom childhood was short-lived and long ago abandoned. For one thing, he wants you to know he had no father. But that’s cool. Because, really, who needs one? Hell. He had his older brother. And that was fine. A lot of kids should be so lucky. Sure, his bro was a gangbanger, but so what?

“I would see these guys come over, and they had the guns and they were real close, you know, so I thought it was happening.”

So it wasn’t long until Rick was “jumped in” to a gang too. Man. You should have seen that. Got initiated the hard way. But that was cool. That’s the way you get in. Everybody does it. Everybody did drugs too. So it wasn’t long before Rick tried that for the first time. And then a second time. And then, shoot, it was nothing after that.

Remember the time he went on that two-week binge? God. No sleep. No grub. Just cocaine. And crack. And speed. And just about anything else a kid can snort or sniff or swallow to help him escape from this world for a while.

You see, says Rick. Drugs “make you see things. Makes you all paranoid. Makes you think people are other people.”

Speaking of other people, the conversation turns to the topic of Rick’s 2-year-old son. Yeah. Got one of those too. You know how it is. And for the first time, this tough-talking, swaggering teen with time-worn clothes and eyes to match sits up in his seat. And the boasting about the drugs and the robberies and the drive-by shootings comes to a halt. There is even talk about making a “change.”

If only he knew how.

“The only way to change, I guess, is to leave the neighborhood,” he says. But that means leaving his gang, the only place he can call home. “And how do I do that?”

One of an estimated 17,000 youth gang members in Orange County, Rick isn’t the only one who has wondered about making a change. Their world, though, is unlike the world most of us are familiar with. Maybe the only thing harder than leaving it is living in it.

Hear for yourselves.

*

The day after his 14th birthday, Francisco followed his homeboys into a garage. It was time to get branded.

One week earlier, three of these guys had beaten him bloody. All at once. They had then handed Francisco, his lip ripped, nose dripping, a beer. “It lasted about a minute,” he remembered. “But when you’re getting it from three guys, and they’re bigger, it feels like a long time.”

They dubbed him “Rascal” because he was little, but he was tough.

Now, inside the garage, the veteranos pulled out a box filled with the various tattoos that decorated their bodies, and asked Francisco where he wanted it.

The boy with the shaved black hair and barely visible mustache pointed to the back of his pimply neck. That’s where it hurts most, he knew. And even a shirt collar wouldn’t hide the inch-high Old English letters spelling out his new gang’s name. He’d been hoping to join a gang since he was a kid, and now he wanted everyone to know.

“I know (gangs are) bad for me, but I just like it. They are bad, I know they’re bad, but I’m there because I want to be there. . . . They’re bad, but they’re good to the members,” said the Huntington Beach resident, now 15. “I’ve liked gangs since I was little. I was just fascinated. The way they dressed . . . their attitude . . . they didn’t care, they were cool.”

He started out scrawling graffiti with a local crew called Mexicans Taking Control when he was 12 and lived in Los Angeles County. They wrote MTC everywhere. They got in fights with other crews, stole some stuff. Then they started selling drugs.

“It becomes a gang little by little,” he said of the tagging crews that have proliferated around Southern California. “They don’t even know it.”

MTC got boring. Francisco started high school. Soon he joined his neighborhood gang, East Side Paramount.

“I had nothing to do,” Francisco said. “I didn’t want to hang around anybody but gang members. I don’t like regular people. I don’t know how to talk to them.”

He’s been in the gang for a year and a half, and said he’s never been arrested. He drinks and has experimented with drugs, but the only things he’s ever shot at are a dog and a cat.

“I liked getting chased and chasing fools. It’s scary while it’s happening, but it’s fun. I just like the adventure,” he said. “You don’t have to do drugs, you don’t have to shoot, nobody forces you. Basically, you throw parties. That’s what it’s about, partying, kicking back with the homeboys. . . . When you’re bored, you go to the neighborhood, and somebody’s always doing something. It’s your home.

“It’s dangerous, but I don’t really care. They say it’s risky being in a gang, but it’s risky walking down the street. Everything’s risky. I like taking risk. Basically, I like adventure. The thing I don’t want is a boring life.”

Francisco’s mother had tried to keep him out of trouble. When they watched television together, she fretted over the violence and warned him not to join gangs. She refused to buy him baggy, gang-style clothes. She disapproved of his gang-affiliated friends.

But Francisco said he just lied to her. When he came home bruised after his initiation beating, he told her someone had attacked him in the street. A week later, when she woke up to see his fresh tattoo, he told her they’d forced him to do it.

Finally, after a shooting outside their Paramount apartment, she picked up and moved to Huntington Beach.

“I just keep trying to get him out of the gangs,” said his mother, who works in a motel. “I feel like crying, I don’t know what to do. I always talked to him and everything, but he still did it anyway.

“I tried to move, but if I move more it’s going to be the same thing. He likes to hang with people like that. I guess everywhere we go we’re going to have the same thing.”

Francisco, the youngest of her four children, said he still commutes to Paramount to hang with his homeys.

Once upon a time, Francisco was on the honor roll. Even now, the ninth-grader reads at a 12th-grade level, though his writing and mathematics skills are far below where they should be. But he’s been kicked out of schools in two counties. College doesn’t look very realistic.

“If I die, I don’t want to die with a schedule, all organized,” he said. “I don’t want to be a robot,” he said. “I don’t want to get up at a certain time, go to a certain job. I just want to have fun.”

*

“Wimpy,” a 17-year-old Westminster High School student, strolled from class last week and headed for a nearby liquor store to play video games with seven members of his gang.

Later, he sat on a curb along busy Golden West Street, sucked deeply on a cigarette, and talked about how his gang is preparing for battle.

“Everybody has a violent mind right now,” Wimpy said. “Everyone has to have a gun. The cops have them so we do too.”

“It’s scary. You never know when you’ll die. It could happen when you walk down the street. It could happen right now while we’re sitting here.”

Khoi, 18, a member of another gang in Westminster, blamed the escalating gang violence on younger gang members--kids as young as 9--who seem desperate to prove themselves. “They want the cash, and the girls, and the nice cars,” Khoi said, “but they want to get a name so bad now, and be like the big boys, that they mess with people they don’t even know. And they’re going to get taken out.”

“They got these guns, (but) they’re too young to even know how to use them, and they’re afraid to ask because they want to look cool,” he said. “And they’re not afraid of anything, because they don’t know enough to be afraid.”

“There’s no stopping guys like that. If they’re not afraid of getting killed, how do you think they’re going to be afraid of getting caught?”

*

Nicole used to make good grades in school. Got along well with her mom and four brothers and sisters. Did what she was told.

“I never did anything. Never cussed, never smoked, never drank,” she said. “I was the angel of the family. I was all good.”

Five years ago, Nicole’s mother remarried and the family moved to Huntington Beach. Trying to defy her hated stepfather, Nicole began to hang with a bad crowd. At 12, she started smoking cigarettes. Then, drinking beer. They’d go to a park, cruise the streets or rent a hotel room. Just partying.

Generally, she rebelled against everything her stepfather said. Eventually she ran with gangs and got in trouble. She was caught in stolen cars, violated her probation and was kicked out of school.

“He thinks he can tell me who to hang out with, but I tell him ‘no.’ He’s not my dad,” she said. “He thinks he can hit me but I hit him back. He can’t tell me what to do.”

Nicole, now 15, said she never joined a gang, but she knows what’s out there. She’s dated gang members and has many friends who are affiliated. Once she knelt in the back seat of a car while bullets from two rival gangs whizzed past. The car was hit, but she wasn’t.

Despite the danger, Nicole stuck with her gang friends.

“I just liked hanging out with them,” she said. “The gangs that are really active, killing people, I don’t like them. But some of the gangs that are just kicking back, they’re cool. . . .

“They can’t do anything to stop (gangs) unless the people that are in it want to stop it,” Nicole said. “They can’t go around taking their guns away because they’ll just go get more guns. If you really want to be in a gang, it doesn’t matter what anybody says to you, you’re still going to join.”

*

The violence wreaked by the soldiers of the ‘hood reaches not only the streetwise but the innocent. Just ask Lupe Acosta, who now has only memories of her 15-year-old son--a stack of curled photographs--in a small, green shoe box.

Poised on the edge of her sofa in her quiet Santa Ana home, she gingerly pulled off the box’s cover. There smiled her son Omar, at a birthday party; she held the photo in her hand and quivered.

“My friends said I wear a lot of sadness on my face, but what can I say?” said Acosta, a 35-year-old laundry worker.

Almost four months ago, cross-fire from a feud involving a Garden Grove gang killed Omar, a keyboardist and singer in a church choir.

Omar was waiting in his parents’ car while they bought food at a convenience store. They had parked across the street from St. Callistus Catholic Church in Orange, where they planned to meet other families on their way to a religious retreat.

But when his parents returned, Omar was on the ground, wheezing. He had been shot through the heart when a bullet entered the car. A priest from St. Callistus gave him last rites in the parking lot.

Now the Acostas are trying to help their other sons, Hector, 8, and Jose Luis, 17, recover.

“Sometimes when we’re in the car, Hector says, ‘I want to see Omar, Mommy,’ ” Acosta said. “And I have to say, we can’t see Omar, because he went to the sky--but he can see us.”

*

On Friday, Lupe Acosta found herself at the Holy Sepulcher Cemetery in Orange again, this time for the funeral of a young man who used to pass by her home when he was younger.

The priest’s blessing had barely ended when buddies of the dead young man began flashing gang signs over his casket. They posed for pictures for their friends, who pulled out pocket cameras and clicked away.

Later, Vicenta Gonzalez, the dead youth’s mother, squeezed through the crowd surrounding the open grave to sprinkle the first handful of dirt on the coffin of Juan Manuel Gonzalez, a 19-year-old gunned down during a flyer party.

On the weekend he died, Nov. 20-21, four other young people died in Orange County, three in gang-related shootings. Two of them are now buried in the same graveyard.

*

Rick, the 17-year-old, who is from Santa Ana, sits at the Los Pinos youth detention camp off Ortega Highway, where he is serving a nine-month sentence for drug possession.

He talks about going straight. He says he’d like to find a job and stay away from marijuana and cocaine so he could help raise his young son.

He bristles at the thought of being seen as a “raker,” someone who ditches his gang. “How do I do that?” he asks.

But, casting his eyes downward, Rick says he doesn’t want his son to grow up without a “man in the house like I did.”

“The only way he’s not going to have a dad is a bullet. . . . I’m never going to desert him.”

Times staff writers Jodi Wilgoren, Greg Hernandez and Jeff Brazil and correspondent Geoff Boucher contributed to this report.

Special Report: Troubled Turf

Sunday: The countywide growth of gangs and its toll.

Today: Street talk about living in the line of fire.

Tuesday: Leaders, residents, gang members seek answers.

Wednesday: Coverage of Orange County’s first anti-gang summit.

Thursday: What works in fighting back against gangs.

Street Culture

Many Orange County gangs have varying levels of affiliation, and activities that range from social to criminal. These are some common gang terms:

* Associates: Peripheral gang members who might belong to the gang, but are not involved in its leadership or criminal activity.

* Checked: To get warned by fellow gang members, verbally or in the form of a beating, for being out of line.

* Claim: Identify with, or belong to. When asked, “Who do you claim?” or “Where are you from?” gang members typically respond with their gang name or gang sign.

* Colors: Gangs choose certain colored clothing to identify themselves, often shoelaces, hats, bandannas or other accessories.

* Do the train: To have sex with a string of male gang members as initiation into the girls’ branch of a gang.

* Gang: Defined in the California Penal Code as “any ongoing organization, association, or group of three or more persons, whether formal or informal, having as one of its primary activities the commission of crimes . . . which has a common name or common identifying sign or symbol, whose members individually or collectively engage in or have engaged in a pattern of criminal gang activity.”

* Gang-banger: Gang member. “Hard-core” members are those who commit crimes.

* Gat: Gun.

* Homeboy or homegirl: Fellow gang member, friend. Often shortened to “homes” or “homeys.”

* Hood: Neighborhood.

* Jumped in: Initiated. Typically, a recruit is beaten up by members of the gang to test the newcomer’s toughness.

* Jumped out: Expatriation ritual. A beating by fellow gang members that is more severe than that received for initiation.

* Party crew: Gang-like group whose purpose is to cruise the streets, hang out and drink.

* Plaque: Gang graffiti.

* Rack: Shoplift.

* Ranker: Someone who quits a gang.

* Rank out: To deny gang membership if, in fact, in a gang.

* Signs: Most gangs have hand signals. They “throw signs”--make their hand signals in public--to identify themselves. This often starts fights or shootouts between gangs.

* Tagger: Someone who does graffiti vandalism.

* Tag-banger: Tagger who commits crimes in addition to graffiti.

* Tagging crew: Gang-like group of taggers who scrawl the groups’ moniker on public or private property to claim it as their turf. Different from traditional gangs, which revolve around turf or profit, these groups exist to spread their “mark.”

* Veterano: Spanish for veteran. Longtime member or leader of a Latino gang.

* Wanna-bes: Those who dress like gang members but do not actually belong to a gang.

Sources: Police, community outreach workers and gang members

Researched by JODI WILGOREN / Los Angeles Times

* Times Link 808-8463

What advice would you give to officials meeting at Orange County’s first gang summit? To record a brief comment for possible publication, call TimesLink and press *8110.

Cuales son los consejos que Ud. daria a los delegados que van a asistir a la primera reunion que se hace para combatir a las pandillas en el condado de Orange? Para dejar grabado un comentario breve, que posiblemente se use para un articulo del diario, llame la linea telefonica TimesLink y marque la tecla * y los numeros 8300.

The Warning Signs

Police officers, school officials and community organizers say that parental awareness and responsibility are crucial to helping keep kids out of gangs. Though none of the following are definite indicators of gang membership, authorities suggest parents be concerned if their children:

* Stay out past agreed-upon curfew.

* Have strange markings on body, books or other belongings.

* Have friends who have been arrested, are on probation or are at Juvenile Hall.

* Have friends in a gang.

* Stay out all night at an unknown friend’s house, with or without permission.

* Have seen their grades drop at least one level in a year.

* Have changed their attitude toward school and now lack respect for authority and school rules.

* Often go out without parents’ knowing where they are or whom they are with.

* Seem to be drinking or using other drugs.

* Have personality swings from fits of anger and rage to alienation and lack of family interaction.

* Disobey rules.

* Seem impossible to control.

Source: Orange County Anti-Gang Resource Directory