The Other Candidate

I admit that when Joe Connolly announced he was going to make a run for the L.A. City Council, I could hardly wait to talk to him. There was an off-the-wall column waiting.

Joe is one of the town’s great characters, a fearless graffiti-fighting vigilante who jumps into the face of gangbangers and tells them to straighten out or move on.

At 45, he radiates the kind of energy that gets him up at 5 a.m. and keeps him up until midnight, prowling the streets and the alleys, looking, talking, warning and thinking.

A conversation with Joe is mostly a monologue by Joe. All that fire burning inside him fuels an intensity that keeps a listener backed against a wall as he hurls thunderbolts of words. All you can do is cover up and wait for an opening.

You get the idea. The guy is fun to write about because there’s something there, something that explodes and sizzles and lights up a neighborhood. Firecrackers and Roman candles.

So when he says he’s running for council in the 5th District, I hustle out to his green, Westside condo on Hayworth Avenue, the street he helped clean up, and begin waiting for the room to move.

I get the movement OK, but tears come with it.

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It shows sometimes how little we know about one another, even in my kind of business, where knowing is important. It shows how much we can hurt inside and not reveal it.

I’ve known Joe Connolly for years. I first wrote about him in 1996 when he began calling himself a graffiti guerrilla and was going around town confronting taggers and painting out what they were scrawling.

He got permission to add his own words to walls and fences, like, “Dear Graffiti Vendors: You Will Earn No Respect Until You Stop!” and “Graffiti No Longer Accepted Here.”

City Hall pretty much ignored Joe, because he made them nervous with his combustible zeal. Even an effort to give him a plaque for his work in cleaning up the city went nowhere.

Fed up with the bureaucracy, Joe started talking about running for council way back then, but now he’s doing it for real, trying for the job in the Westside-San Fernando Valley district held by Mike Feuer, who is going for city attorney. Part of Joe’s motivation was the death of a son last year.

Adam was 10 years old, the light of his life, a boy who accompanied his dad everywhere, even confronting gangbangers. They were as close as any father and son had ever been.

Adam went with a group of kids on a school outing near Mammoth. The day was cold and rainy, but they found a pond and decided to go swimming. Although he was a good swimmer, Adam went under and never came up. No one knows exactly what happened. The boy Joe loved more than life was gone.

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Never the kind of guy to sport jewelry, Joe wears a bracelet now that says “Adam Lives in Me.” His loss is a grief that never goes away, lying in silence beneath the volcano of his emotions. He can’t mention Adam’s name without choking up.

“I’m going to save the city for him,” he says as we sit in his living room, his manner oddly hesitant. I had tapped into a well of emotion I’d never expected.

At first, Joe burned with the same kind of energy that had ignited him the last time we’d met, leaning into his words, gesturing, forcing me backward by the thrust of his unpunctuated volleys.

He talked about the speeches he’s given all over town, the kids he’s turned around by talking to them, the graffiti he’s gotten rid of and the neighborhoods he’s made livable.

And he talked of incidents that define him, like the confrontation with an armed gang member, just out of prison, who started cursing him because Joe was talking to the guy’s girlfriend, an ex-prostitute he was trying to help.

Joe, who was raised on the south side of Chicago, looked the banger in the face and said, “I’m not afraid of you. I want you to understand who runs this part of the city. It’s not you. It’s me.” Then Joe drove off, leaving the guy open-mouthed.

A former carpet salesman, he quit his job to prepare his run for office next April. He still spends his days doing what he’s always done, plus building an organization for his campaign. His wife works. They have a baby daughter Joe adores. But she can never fill his emptiness. It’s when he talks about that hole in his life that Joe’s mood softens.

“I’m going to save other kids for Adam,” he says, mixing characteristic bombast with a voice that chokes slightly. “If you don’t think so, give me money and step aside.”

Then he pauses and says: “Part of me died with my boy. I’ve got to do this for him.” And the room is filled with an immense and overpowering silence.

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