Angel Dust

He stood trial for a murder. He was 14 at the time of the crime. Two years later, he still looked every bit the child, dressed in a clean white shirt one size too large. Black hair slicked back, eyes deep-set, he wore a sheepish, puzzled expression, and it took us less than a week to convict him. We were the jury, 12 men and women who knew nothing about his life because his life was inadmissible.

Then I read Sandro Meallet’s novel “Edgewater Angels,” and some of the blanks filled in. Here’s Meallet’s 12-year-old narrator, Sunny Toomer, describing in his word-fusing street talk one particularly bad stretch of time:

“Almost immediately ... me, Will Man, and all of the fellas went on this monthslong crimespree that’d started up so fast and furious even we’d been caught off guard by it. While it’d happened, we pretty much lost control .... We drove ... almost every night in these ritzy rental cars we’d GTA’d from the just-across-the-street-from-us cruiseterminal, robbed uncountable houses, fenced all our crimegotten goods, and habitgambled most of our money away.”

Toomer is a good stand-in for the kid we convicted of murder and for the nearly 5,700 other juveniles living in Los Angeles who are drawn to the crazy life. Toomer doesn’t get arrested in Meallet’s story, but he comes close. GTA’d is grand theft auto. Toomer lives with his mom (dad’s long gone) in Rancho San Pedro, the projects just off Harbor Boulevard next to the port. It’s a noisy neighborhood.

“Violence; ever since five I remember it a problem. That was the first time moms broke through the apartment yelling for us to hit the floor while she shut down all the lights .... Then I heard the pop, pop, pop just outside the door, a wild shouting, another closer pop, and finally the fastfootted running across our front lawn ....”

In a series of loosely related chapters, Meallet describes Toomer’s life, beginning with a brief summertime reverie when he and his friends follow the train tracks down Harbor Boulevard to the wharf, where they drop lines into the water, hoping to snag a mackerel or bonita. It’s a sweet picture that quickly cracks with a murder-suicide, a sudden turf war and a moment of madness, brought to a halt by the police. “When the tazer finally hit Skeeter he did like a just-landed fish for a stretch and then was out. Afterwards he got uncuffed, strapped, and recuffed, wrists and ankles, to the gurney of the finallyarrived ambulance, which sped off and out of the Ranch with lights and siren in a fullscreaming flash.”

Meallet, who grew up in Toomer’s neighborhood (escaping into college on his skills as a basketball player), captures this world with mixed results: At its worst, the narrative jumps from one event to another, leaving one to wish for a more integrated story line. At its best, though, Meallet’s ambition--to humanize lives often demonized--shines through, belonging as it does to that genre of books that grapple with adolescence and survival in the meanest of circumstance. Think Claude Brown’s “Manchild in the Promised Land,” Piri Thomas’ “Down These Mean Streets,” Jess Mowry’s “Way Past Cool” and, most comparably, Danny Santiago’s 1983 coming-of-age novel “Famous All Over Town,” la vida loca en Los Angeles seen through the eyes of graffiti artist “Chato” Medina.

Two years younger than Chato, Toomer is the same tough-sounding, soulful kid, ducking and weaving between his home life and the street, his private thoughts and his crew. And he’s good at it, wielding his poetry slam language like a weapon.

But compared to “Famous All Over Town”--a rather affecting portrait of one family’s personal apocalypse and of the corrosive effects of racism--”Edgewater Angels” is something less grand: an account of a family that never was. Read these books together, however, and you’ll see how far L.A. has drifted in the 18 years since “Famous” was published.

Gone are the neighborhoods we associate with gangs, the barrios east of the river, portions of South-Central; instead we’re in one of the city’s more far-flung and least scripted backwaters, San Pedro. Gone are ethnic divisions; skin color matters less than affiliation. Gone too--and most regrettably at that--is any political rage. Rather than attempting to imagine the reasons for the allure of delinquency, as Santiago does in his portraits of the police, the teachers and the economic forces that change Chato’s life, Meallat seems to take gang life--and the poverty and marginalism--for granted. More curious is that the evil portrayed in “Edgewater Angels” lies less outside the projects--with the exception of the LAPD--than within it: Meallet is content to pin most of problems on the fatherlessness of the children.

When an uncle recruits Toomer to jack drunks on New Year’s Eve, it becomes his initiation: The uncle fears that without a man in his life, Toomer will never amount to anything. “But just remember,” he’s told, “this isn’t punishment against you or anything. It’s more like a tough kind of love.”

When a mom fights for the future of her son, dad, a prison-hardened vato, takes a proprietary role. “But I can guide him .... School’s just gonna make him into a square, babygirl. Sitting at a stupid desk, taking stupid tests, just to live the nine-to-five .... I’ll teach him everything he needs to know, ey, so he can become a man who’s sure of himself. And proud.”

And prison is a rite of passage. “That is something to be proud of, a trip to prison. So long as it’s not permanent, though. At every jail I ever went to I made friends. Good friends. Real communidad. People I respect and who respect me back. I have no shame of having that in my life.”

For Toomer, the violence is hardly surprising. When his uncles maliciously beat and maim a hitchhiker on a road outside of Las Vegas, he chalks it up to the victim’s foolishness, to the mistake of underestimating even “a single soul .... Especially if that soul was headed towards Los Angeles, a city filled to the brim with the violent and unstable.”

His uncles’ behavior is boiled down “to something like a Los Angeles frame of mind,” as if in a city filled with gangs, crooked cops, earthquakes, riots and smog (“not to mention all the heatwaves, droughts, and canyonfires it got, or even that occasional, believe-it-or-not flashflood”), such expressions of random cruelty are understandable. Perhaps this is the real measure of the hopelessness and urban nihilism that has progressively gripped the poorest parts of this city since Chato watched the homes on his street being bulldozed into dust just so the railroad could expand its business.

Yet just when Toomer’s world seems squeezed of any light, Meallet constructs a scene of surprising wonder: A homeless man, whom they will soon find dead, wanders by Toomer and his friends and turns to them and says something rather strange: “How wonderful you’ve become; like angels.”

The words haunt. “As if he’d understood a thing about us that we didn’t even know ourselves .... But why? I wondered. As I watched them I did suddenly notice something. An angelness. Not a wings and halos kind of angelness, but something that’d still had a special kind of goodness to it. A goodness coming from them simply being two young guys ... who hadn’t already become all hard and grown ....”

As the boys take the body of this man, convinced that they need to get rid of it or be charged in his death, they steal a rowboat, Huck Finn-style, and head out into the ocean, out of the harbor, past the lighthouse. They’ve wrapped the body in a sheet and tied cinderblocks to it, but at first it doesn’t sink. The sheets just start tearing away.

“Then, just as the green beacon swept past again, what looked like a steam started to rise from the tear and turn into a gaslike gather that just hung there in front of us. Then the gather did the beautifulest thing ever: it changed into something like a billion brittle goldflakes that started a slow and steady rise right up into the night sky, at the top of which they seemed to fix themselves into a cluster of stars that’d never ever been known of before.”

Toomer may be old before his time, but Meallet makes it clear: As much as he is seduced by the idea of being an adult, a gangster, free and respected, there is still room for magic--and love--in his life. Late in the story, accidentally cut by a knife, he milks the wound for all it’s worth--a fight, the rumor spreads and then a sudden shanking--and he takes his recovery in stride: “But the nicest thing to happen in a long long time was that moms had personally made me some meals to eat in bed, took my temperature four times a day, and dressed and redressed my bellybandages whenever it was necessary. And never once seeming to mind, either. For all I cared (which was more than a lot), my rest and recovery could’ve gone on forever.”

Yet sadly, Meallet’s children live in a world that too often doesn’t know how to offer that magic and love, and Toomer grows up, like Chato before him, hungry to be seen by a society that wants him to disappear, eager to be loved by a city that’s indifferent toward him, and if Meallet mutes the political rage in his story, perhaps it is our fault as much as it is his.

Drive-by shootings, the ever-present graffiti, random killings: Have the incessant gang wars in Los Angeles inured us to their causes? Credit “Edgewater Angels,” at the very least then, for throwing a light on lives that go for dark--dark, that is, until they surface imperfectly and most tragically as a murder conviction in a courtroom downtown for a kid whose face I will always remember.