When the Road Leads Back

Every once in a while you hear about someone born in hell who moves on to a better life and never looks back at the dark place of his origin.

People like that disassociate completely from an environment they can’t believe they ever occupied, where death rises with every dawn and stays up until well past midnight, walking the streets, looking around.

I’ve known a few guys who finally busted out of subcultural enclaves that demanded compliance with a way of life that was at best destructive and at worst inhuman.

I never blamed them for leaving, but I did wonder why at least one or two of them never went back to illustrate by their presence that busting out is possible, walking away an option.

Then I met DeCarlo Noble. He’s a black man of 33 who once stalked the city with one of the most violent street gangs in L.A. but began to see himself ending up like his best friend--lying face-down in his own blood on a nowhere street corner for a nothing cause.

So Noble left L.A. and reinvented himself in Portland, where in a few weeks he’ll receive an M.D. from Oregon’s Health Sciences University. That alone would qualify him as special, a guy who made it and moved on.

But what impresses me most is that he wants to return to the neighborhood he abandoned and help change things. That’s the path least taken, the trail back, and I believe he’ll do it.

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Noble’s is a classic story of why kids sometimes fall off the edge and why so few of them are able to crawl back up to the high ground.

He was the middle son in a family of 10 children who grew up in a two-bedroom house in South-Central L.A. Their father was a grade-school dropout, a former Texas sharecropper who worked as a handyman.

Poverty and environment had already planted the seeds of destruction in the family, and a divorce nurtured the anguish already growing among them. Hitting the streets was the thing to do, and gang membership was an element of survival.

Most male members of his family had brushes with the law, Noble says. Three brothers did time in prison; one is still there.

He began running with the predatory Rolling 60s by the time he was 13. “My whole world was gangs then,” Noble said in a telephone interview. “The blue rag and an earring were my trademark.”

His life began to unwind in a haze of drugs and booze as he became the “little partner” to the big-time gangbangers who were doing the killing and dealing. It would only be a matter of time before Noble would be doing the same. That’s where the first path leads. That’s where the edge begins.

But even though he’d dropped out of school, he never lost interest in books, and somewhere in the enlightenment of learning he began to realize, on the verge of robbing a jewelry store, “how stupid I was.”

A cousin perceptive enough to understand that Noble was worth saving bought him a one-way ticket to Portland where a sister lived. Noble took it and began moving away from the edge.

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I heard of him from a colleague who’d seen a story in the Portland Oregonian about this man who had left the mean streets of L.A., gone back to school and was about to get his medical degree.

It was a good story, but one that smacked faintly of a recurrent theme, that if you ran away from this terrible place everything would be OK. Breaking chains that link one to a slavery of the spirit isn’t a bad idea, but coming back to change things requires a special kind of commitment.

By wit and luck, Noble managed to survive where others around him ended up behind bars or, like his best friend, dead on the street. He came out of it with no prison record and no drug addictions, steering free of the hard stuff for the brief high that weed and a hash pipe offered.

Today, he has a wife and three children. “God was looking out for me,” he says by way of explaining his survival. And to pay God back, he’s talking about returning to L.A. after a four-year residency program to serve the underserved areas of his youth as a medical doctor.

He also wants to establish a foundation for kids trying to make it out of despair and into college, the way he did, struggling away from the edge inch by inch until the edge was no longer a precipice in his future.

You’ve got to admire a guy like that whose experience teaches that sometimes the path least taken is the path that leads home again, where commitment waits and change is in the wind. It’s the toughest trail of all.

Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com