How Did It Get This Bad?

On the night that “West Side Story” opened at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium there were two gang-related shootings in L.A. County.

Just about the time Tony and Maria were falling in love during the first act of the 1957 musical, a 20-year-old man was being shot in the face a few miles away.

And just as the Jets were singing and dancing to one of the show’s funniest tunes, “Gee, Officer Krupke,” a 17-year-old boy was being shot in the chest not far from the first attack.

The man survived, the boy died. It all had to do with gangs.

The show was about a young couple falling in love against the background of warfare between the Sharks, a Puerto Rican gang, and the Jets, a white gang, in New York City.

The couple was a 1950s Romeo and Juliet, star-crossed lovers kept apart by what was considered then an outrageous display of street violence in America.

How times have changed.

The shootings of two human beings in today’s Los Angeles hardly stirred any of us. The Times carried a five-inch story while most of the electronic media ignored it completely.

Both shootings were dismissed as “gang-related,” as though the notation somehow exonerated all the rest of us from any blame in the violence and removed us from the dangers that the phrase inspired.

But then why not? It’s no big deal anymore. There were more than 7,000 gang killings in L.A. County during a 15-year period ending in 1994 and I doubt that the rate has slowed much since. We’ve just become accustomed to the pace.

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I realize that theatrical presentations are rarely intended to reflect reality, but they do serve as metaphors of the times in which they’re presented.

“West Side Story” hit the Broadway stage when gangs “rumbled” and zip guns were the deadliest weapons on the street among the kids who wore the colors of their neighborhoods.

I grew up in the era when fair fights in empty lots were the end result of group friction, sans weapons of any kind but fists. We wrestled each other in the dirt and swaggered off battered but alive.

Zoot-suiters were around then. They wore stompers--thick-soled shoes--and carried switchblades, but they were far away and nobody worried too much about them. I was in Oakland and the zoot-suiters were in a place called L.A.

Somewhere along the way “rat packs” developed on the streets, and we began to see Saturday night specials appear, small-caliber handguns a guy could stick in his waistband or a jacket pocket.

Even so, there was something more romantic than violent in the nature of youth gangs, and I guess that’s where “West Side Story” was rooted. A young couple--a Romeo and Juliet--could fall in love despite the differences in their backgrounds or the color of their skin.

But Romeo and Juliet were tragic lovers, and when Romeo--Tony--died in the street, the performance ended with members of both gangs joining to carry off the dead.

And they all lived happily ever after.

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That was make-believe. Reality poses a different set of circumstances. We’ve got about 100,000 gang members in L.A. County today and most have arsenals to chose from.

They’ve got handguns, shotguns and assault weapons with such evil fire-power that they can wipe out entire families with a single drive-by. The existence of high-powered cars elevates the get-away factor to a degree that encourages the little thugs to keep on shooting.

And it isn’t just other gang members they’re taking out. Almost three-quarters of all child and adolescent murders in the county are, yes, gang-related. When you spray a crowd with an AK-47, the likelihood is you’re going to bloody a lot of innocent people. There goes Romeo. There goes Juliet. There goes a love that never was.

In the past few years, a lot of individuals and organizations have joined to try and minimize gang violence. I’ve known gang members themselves who, mellowed by maturity, have looked back in horror at their own atrocities and are working hard in the streets to atone for the blood they once spilled.

One wonders, however, where we all were years ago when kids were first getting their hands on guns, and gang encounters were escalating from weaponless rumbles to bloody drive-bys.

Where were we when our kids were becoming either killers or victims?

“West Side Story” seems quaintly dated in an era when thousands die in their teens and love has nothing to do with it. And yet the words of Doc, a character in the story, remain valid in today’s L.A., when he says to members of both gangs, “What does it take to get through to you? When do you stop? You make this world lousy.”

Ah, yes.