A Youth in Trouble Can’t Leave the Gang Life : Delinquency: As a detention sentence ends, ‘Michael’ says he’s still loyal to his ‘set.’ Teen-ager was convicted of auto theft, drug possession.

Michael, a 16-year-old whose real name cannot be used, whose face cannot be shown, could be the poster child of a generation of lost teen-agers.

*

He is a gang member. He comes from a single-parent home. His only male role models have been fellow gangbangers. He drinks, smokes cigarettes, has sex, and, at times, has robbed, beaten and even shot people. He has also seriously considered killing himself.

Now, after serving a nine-month sentence at a juvenile detention facility in the San Fernando Valley, he wants to be invisible.

“I need to keep a low profile,” Michael said during a recent interview. “A lot of people are looking for me. I jacked (robbed) a lot of people, done a lot of crazy stuff. People might want to kill me.”

Even so, he said quitting is out of the question. Gangs impose a vise-like loyalty upon the young men and women who join them, offering the protection, friendship and respect of others.

Michael’s loyalty dates back to a time when his gang served as a surrogate family of sorts. His mother was ill and few others cared about him.

“To me, I’ll probably never leave the neighborhood behind,” he said. “I’m still from the set.”

Michael paused for a moment, searching for the right words. “Those are my people,” he said determinedly. “For life.”

As a gang member, though, Michael’s longevity is not assured.

According to several recent studies, the lives of 16-year-old gangsters are often nasty, brutish and short:

* Gang members are 60% more likely to die by homicide than are members of the general population.

* Gunshot wounds are the leading cause of death among all teen-age boys and are particularly high among gang members.

* Arrests of youths 10 to 17 years old for violent crimes increased 50% from 1985 to 1991.

* Youths ages 12 to 17 are assaulted, robbed and raped at a higher rate than people of any other age group--victims in 23% of such crimes, although they make up only 10% of the population.

* A recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention blamed a 154% increase in the teen-age homicide rate on gangs and the dispersion of firearms among young people.

“Criminals are getting younger; victims are getting younger,” said Wesley Skogan, an urban affairs professor at Northwestern University. “It’s a combination of bravado, hopelessness, access to firepower and the allures of the drug market.”

Michael views his own gang involvement through an odd lens, one that creates two apparently contradictory images--but images Michael insists are not contradictory at all.

Although he says he’s going to devote more time to school and athletics, he also insists he can remain part of his gang. Somehow, he says, he can avoid gang violence without having to avoid the gang itself.

It appears Michael knows, but won’t admit, that joining a gang has put him in an odd sort of double jeopardy: If he tries to get out, the gang might retaliate; if he stays in, his life continues to be a risky proposition because of the occupational hazards of gangbanging.

“You just can’t say, ‘I don’t want to bang no more,’ ” explained his probation officer, Stephanie De Furie. “If you try to quit, you are betraying them, breaking an allegiance. You are a traitor.”

For most of the last seven months, his mother and counselors have tried to convince him that quitting, despite its risks, is still better than staying in.

Until Christmas Eve, he was a resident of the Health Care Children’s Campus, a private, nonprofit center in Van Nuys for boys and girls ages 12 to 17. The 180 kids living at the complex of buildings have all had trouble of some sort--they’ve missed too much school or committed a crime or their parents simply couldn’t handle their adolescent growing pains.

The more troubled, like Michael, are referred to the center by juvenile court judges who want to give them a last chance before gangs, drugs or other dangers put them on a trail that could eventually lead to prison.

When they were in their homes, many of the children now living at the campus saw few alternatives to gang membership, said the center’s director, Kim Brandi.

“A lot of what is going on is normal rebellion and moving away from the family,” Brandi said. But “these days, there’s more societal pressures overlaid with the normal problems. Kids feel they have to protect themselves. They say there’s no escape in their community from being in a gang. They’re scared.”

Michael’s reluctance to quit his gang is not surprising, experts say. But even as gangs provide an antidote to the confusion of adolescence, membership in them means never letting your guard down, said Manuel Velasquez of the city-funded Community Youth Gang Services.

“Right now, things like Pop Warner (football) and Little League baseball aren’t exciting anymore,” said Velasquez. “But what these kids don’t realize is that being a homeboy is hard work. It’s a full-time job, a whole lifestyle.”

*

The Carson neighborhood where Michael grew up, north of Wilmington, is a place of the half-life: a community where many children focus on making it to age 18 or 21, instead of on living full, productive lives.

According to Michael, the rules are simple: If you don’t have a gun or belong to a gang, you aren’t safe; you do whatever it takes to get by; and finally, parents live lives that don’t often intersect with those of their children, a division that makes adulthood even more of an abstraction.

“I’m scared to grow up because there are a lot of obstacles,” Michael said. “Paying the bills, stuff like that. For me, it’s hard . . .”

Because many of the kids living in the center have had little structure in their lives, the center’s solution is to offer a schedule that is a grinding rote.

Michael knew it by heart:

Up at 5:30 a.m with his roommate--an hour before everyone else, by choice. Shower, clean his room, attend morning meeting, go to school, eat lunch, go back to school, attend afternoon meeting, do an hour or so of recreation, eat dinner, attend evening meeting, participate in activities and return to his room by 9:30 p.m. Every smoke break had a scheduled start and end time.

“Meeting” is a catch-all word for a wide variety of sessions, from counseling sessions to less formal get-togethers to review events of the day.

The center’s front gate is in a tall, black fence, where visitors can enter only if buzzed in. Exterior walls are topped with barbed wire. Until his release on Christmas Eve, Michael got passes to go home on weekends, but was not allowed to leave on weekdays.

*

During a conversation before he left the center, Michael is more adult than child. He is watchful, and during silences he nervously picks at specks of dust on his clothes or his immaculate black suede “Guess?” sneakers.

His hair, worn in cornrows, is neat, as are his clothes: knee-length denim shorts, white socks pulled high, a black knit shirt worn over a white T-shirt. An embroidered blue cross dangles from around his neck.

His room, like the rest in the boys’ dormitory, is blue, a shade that matches the pillowcases and blankets.

Though signs of gang affiliation are banned, a blue bandanna hangs from the back of his doorknob.

“We’ve got the tightest room” in the center, he said proudly, showing off dresser drawers stuffed with neatly folded clothes, closets filled with hanging shirts, and, in his night stand, a thick stack of letters wrapped in a rubber band, next to a Bible. “I’ve always been neat,” he said.

Because he is thin, Michael said, he was the target of older boys who thought he was a weakling. In defense, he became a fearless street fighter and a discriminating collector of firearms.

Now, he can rattle off the caliber and manufacturer of semi-automatic pistols the way other kids recite batting averages, and he grows impatient if his listener can’t quite follow what he views as common knowledge.

He recalls paying for his first gun--a .22-caliber pistol--with a half ounce of marijuana when he was 11 years old. Then he moved up in firepower to a .380-caliber, which he bought for $50 from a guy on the street. He got his other handguns--a 9-millimeter Glock and a .25-caliber pistol--from fellow gang members who burglarized a gun shop during the 1992 riots.

Eventually, the palm-sized .25-caliber became his “school gun,” the one easily concealed at school in his back pocket. But on the street, he favored the powerful .380.

His mother, a high school English teacher who describes herself as religious, knew Michael was hanging around with a tough crowd but until recently did not know about the guns or even that he was a full-fledged gang member.

“Like a lot of other parents, I was in denial for a long time,” she said.

Michael started going bad, she said, when he was 11 and she was bedridden with chronic fatigue syndrome.

“I was very strong, had a very positive role in his life, and then for him to see me like that,” she said. “I could barely take care of my kids. I just wanted to give up on life.”

Michael doesn’t talk about about his father, who was divorced from his mother when Michael was too young to remember. But, he said, he does understand what not having a dad around meant. “That’s the problem, I had no (male) role model,” he said.

A 32-year-old brother whom he barely knows is in prison in Texas, though Michael doesn’t know why. His 21-year-old sister recently graduated from Cal State Dominguez Hills. An 18-year-old brother is mentally retarded.

With little guidance at home and little to hold his attention in school, Michael’s delinquency started young.

By the time he was 10, his “school” day included very little schooling. “I would go to school, get high, ditch school before lunch, and then go get some ‘40s,’ ” he said, referring to 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor. “Really, I was drinking ‘deuce deuce,’ ” he said, using the street lingo for a 22-ounce bottle of malt liquor.

At one corner store, he was a regular. “This one shop owner, he would say, ‘All you do . . . is come here and buy Newports and deuce deuce,”’ says Michael. “He was all right.”

For a while, life was good. He sold marijuana to classmates, avoided class, had fun. “I had the money, the weed, the girls, everything,” he said.

Along the way, he was befriended by some older kids and was then “jumped in,” formally inducted into the gang, while in junior high, he said.

“I was just learning to slang (sell) dope, jack (rob) people; that’s the mentality: whatever it took to get money,” he said, his rapid-fire speech peppered with slang. “I wanted to be the one in the six-four (1964 Chevrolet Impala lowrider) hopping, with bitches (girls) inside, going around the street.”

He got kicked out of junior high when he and a group of friends beat a student. Michael said the student had called him a “punk.”

Afterward, he drifted to three other junior high schools before reaching Carson High in the 10th grade.

As his gang activity increased, it was not only his mother who was kept in the dark, but also most of his non-gang friends.

“I was quiet,” he said. “I was low-key.” He said his friends “knew I was selling weed but didn’t know how much I was into” other criminal activity.

What did attract his friends’ notice though, was his lack of attendance in school. After the first few weeks of his sophomore year, he rarely showed up.

“I’d go like once every Friday, or every other Friday,” he said. “People were saying, ‘Damn, what’s up with you in school?’ ”

When he was high on marijuana, he was relaxed. When he wasn’t, his hair-trigger temper got the better of him, leading to many fights and, by his count, 10 or 15 instances of shootings.

“If a car honked, I would shout, ‘Who are you honking at? Come on,’ ” he said, rising from his chair to imitate a fighting stance. “People would look at me like I’m crazy. I’d just tell them I was the wrong (person to mess) with.”

Increasingly, he was haunted by thoughts of suicide. “If I wasn’t going to die (on the street), I was going to kill myself,” he said. “I didn’t care about anybody.”

His fatalism spurred him on to even greater risks.

About the same time, he took part in two bank robberies under the guidance of an older relative, he said.

During one of the holdups, Michael remembers pointing a gun at a bank teller and ordering her to recite the alphabet as a delaying tactic. She hesitated. “I had all this power with my gun and standing over her,” he said, standing up himself to demonstrate. “I told her, ‘Bitch, Do you want to die over the ABCs?’ ”

The woman began reciting.

*

In the end, it was Michael’s mother who finally turned him in to the police, not for the robberies--which she says she knew nothing about, but for taking her car without permission.

“I knew when I was taking him in, I knew I wouldn’t see him again” for a long time, she said. “I cried so hard, I nearly went crazy over it.”

Said Michael: “She’s a good mom. I just let her down.”

Convicted of auto theft and drug possession, he received a six-month sentence to the center so that he and his mother could receive family counseling. Later, three more months were tacked on because he was unruly at first, Brandi said.

Now, however, his mother, the center’s staff and his probation officer are pleased with his progress. He is held up to other center residents as a role model and commended for not joining a group of friends who once ran away from the center.

Michael, however, hates the place, hates being locked up. “You are away from your family, away from your people; it’s bad,” he said. But, he concedes, “In a way though, it’s good because it’s changed me.”

After he gets home, his mother has promised to buy him a car, Michael said, and the family is going to move “where nobody knows me.”

During his last days locked up on the campus, one of his favorite pastimes was to sit atop his desk and stare out at the fence, squinting to see beyond it.

“I look out the window, and I see barbed wire,” Michael said. “Then I look at the sky, and I know that there’s something out there waiting for me. That fence is in the way.”

He wants to play on the new school’s football and basketball teams. Though he hasn’t touched drugs or alcohol since he’s been at the center, he acknowledges the temptations. “I’m probably going to get high, but not 24-7,” or 24 hours a day, seven days a week, he said.

And his gang?

He’ll remain a gangbanger. He just won’t break the law anymore, he said with adolescent logic.

“If they call me to do some dirt, I’ll have to tell them what’s up,” he said. “They’ll respect what I have to do.”