This Crazy Life

A baton-like instrument in the hands of a doctor shot tiny flickers of light into the patient’s arm, creating the effect of spot fires observed from a distance. An almost imperceptible clicking was the only sound.

Rosemary Estrada was the patient, and she watched with interest as the last vague images of a tattoo faded into the natural color of her skin, leaving a pale blush where it had once flourished in bold reds and blues.

The tattoo had said “Shirley R.I.P.” With it, under the sporadic light of a laser beam, went the symbolic memory of Estrada’s best friend, Shirley Sandoval, who was just 16 when she was killed in a gang attack six years ago.

With it also went Estrada’s final connection with the person she had been, a swaggering, tattooed gangbanger whose very presence once frightened those she came in contact with.

“I don’t want to be that person anymore,” she said to me one day in a small room of East L.A.’s White Memorial Hospital. “I don’t want to scare everyone I see.”

By removing the last of half a dozen tattoos that linked her to a violence-filled past, Estrada was also trying to end her family’s long association with gangs and to save her three young brothers from following in her footsteps.

Her mother, father, uncle and sister had all been gang members and Estrada had joined when she was 16. “Someone I knew was killed every other month,” she said as Dr. John Vanore ended the treatment that removed the tattoo.

“They were there one day and the next day they were gone. Shirley lived across the street. I still can’t imagine her not being there. . . .”

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Estrada, 22, is one of about 50 former gang members to have tattoos removed at White Memorial since the program began last April. Another 500 have signed up.

“There are no negatives here,” Vanore said earlier as we sat in his office at the hospital. “These are kids who are committed to a new life.”

He and a colleague, Dr. Craig Ball, are paying $50,000 of their own money to buy the $100,000 laser equipment that removes the tattoos. The hospital is paying the other half.

They see it as at least a small inroad into minimizing the impact of gangs in society. The laser light that erases the icons of gang attachments will, the doctors hope, remove their allure from the lives of those who once bore the symbols.

The most prevalent of the tattoos is three dots in a triangle that symbolize “mi vida loca”--my crazy life. The madness is evident in the fact that almost half the murders in L.A. County are gang-related.

“The attitude of the kids is that they’re never going to see 22,” Vanore said. “They live that crazy life a day at a time. It’s part of a feeling of despair that only a gang member knows.”

Those who want their tattoos removed register with Father Greg Boyle, a dominant figure in anti-gang activities on the Eastside. Gang images are removed free, others are taken off at a minimal cost.

One man had an obscenity across his forehead in letters an inch high and wanted it gone now! “I was once young and stupid,” he told Craig Ball. “I’m not that way anymore.”

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There are roughly 100,000 gang members in the county. Their deadly rivalries have bloodied our streets from Venice to Pomona and from Palmdale to Long Beach in wars that never seem to end.

As if that weren’t tragic enough, not just the gangbangers go down in fusillades of bullets fired from passing cars. Children die, their lives unlived, symbols of innocence erased in less time than it takes to be born.

I realize that removing a tattoo is a small step toward the day when gun-wielding young thugs are no longer terrorizing our neighborhoods.

I also realize that Vanore and Ball will benefit financially from their involvement. The tattoo-removal they’ll undertake for a fee will probably cover their share in purchasing the laser equipment.

But the beauty of the effort is that commitment is being translated into a reality that serves a larger purpose. There is no subtlety to the removal of a tattoo, and its disappearance--the elimination of human graffiti--creates a climate of change as clearly visible as gang symbols removed from a wall.

“As physicians,” Vanore said, “our lives are supposed to be dedicated to helping people, but medicine has become a business and its emotional rewards have lessened. This is a positive. We’re changing lives.”

Rosemary Estrada knew that when the last tattoo was erased from her arm. She walked away smiling, at last the person she has always wanted to be.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com