A REPORTER AT LARGE
THE UNWANTED
In a Los Angeles suburb where schools and parents faltered, the American Dream was replaced by drugs, neo-Nazism, and despair.The hardest hit were Mindy Turner and her friends.
By William Finnegan
FILM companies used to come to the Antelope Valley, in northern Los Angeles County, to shoot high-desert scenes. It was empty country, a good backdrop for Westerns. Now they come when they need to burn down or blow up a housing tract. In 1992, for the fiery climax of "Lethal Weapon 3," Warner Bros. used a development called the Legends, at Avenue J and Thirtieth Street West, in the city of Lancaster. The Legends had become available after its financing failed, leaving unfinished forty-eight large, Spanish-style homes, each named after a legendary American (Babe Ruth, Marilyn Monroe). Mel Gibson and Danny Glover went on a memorable rampage through the tract. When I drove through its curving streets last year, I found a wasteland (tumbleweeds, shopping carts, graffiti-covered sofas) surrounded by a high brown wall.
The transformation of the Antelope Valley from rural desert into modern suburbiawith neighborhoods, literally, to burnwas very sudden, a historical jump cut. In 1980, the combined population of Lancaster and Palmdale, the Valley's two main cities, was sixty thousand. By 1994, their combined population was two hundred and twenty-two thousand, and today estimates of the Valley's total population range as high as four hundred thousand. This hyper-expansion was first sparked by housing prices in Los Angeles and its nearer suburbs, which soared during the nineteen-eighties, and by white flight from an increasingly Latino and Asian city. The Antelope Valley had been considered too remote for commuters, but the completion of the Antelope Valley Freeway, snaking over the San Gabriel Mountains, helped change that. In the Antelope Valley, one could buy for two hundred thousand dollars a new house that might cost four hundred thousand in the San Fernando Valley. What was more, the air was cleaner and the streets were safer. The commute to jobs in the city was longeran hour longer, at least, each waybut that was the trade-off. And so it was that the desert brought forth swimming pools and convenience stores beyond number, and wide empty streets as far as the eye could see.
Then, in 1990, the Southern California economy, staggered by cutbacks in the aerospace and defense industries, fell into a deep recession. Los Angeles County alone lost more than half a million jobs, and property values throughout the region collapsed. In the Antelope Valley, abandoned housing tracts began to dot the subdivided desert. Boarded-up shopping centers and bankrupt school districts followed, along with a wave of personal financial disasters so severe that USA Today dubbed Palmdale "the foreclosure capital of California."
And yet the Antelope Valley's population has continued to grow. Between 1990 and 1994, Palmdale was the second-fastest-growing city in the United States, Lancaster the sixth-fastest. As a rule, the Valley's newest residents are poorer and darker than their predecessors, live in more crowded lodgings, and are more likely to rent. Still, the Valley remains, in a county where whites are a minority, overwhelmingly white (sixty-eight per cent), home-owning, and politically dominated by conservative Republicans of the pro-growth, anti-tax stripe. And the reasons most people give for moving out from the cityless crime, less smog, cheaper housinghave not changed. The Valley remains particularly attractive to families with children. Indeed, it has been called "the last great breeding ground of Southern California."
For anyone who has spent time there lately, this is a scary thought if only because growing up these days in the Antelope Valley seems to be, for many kids, a pretty harrowing, dispiriting affair. This may be true today of growing up in America generally, but the Valley's supersonic growth has led to overcrowded, often chaotic schools; according to the high school district's superintendent, nearly forty-five per cent of the entering students do not finish with their class. The teen pregnancy rate is also alarmingly high. Juvenile crime is a major problem, usually attributed to "unsupervised children"to, that is, the huge number of kids whose parents can't afford after-school care and often don't return from their epic commutes until long after dark with neighborhoods devoid of adults from early morning to night, the most popular youth crime is, naturally, burglary. A sheriff's department spokesman in Lancaster estimated that fully half the Valley's children are unsupervised after school. He also said that there are now, not coincidentally, more than two hundred youth gangs represented in the Valley.
I GREW up, a generation ago, in Woodland Hills, then an outer suburb of L.A., and when I started spending time with teen-agers in the Antelope Valley I figured I had a head start on understanding their world. As it turned out, my youth might as well have been spent in Kathmandu for all the clues it gave me in this new realm. There was a street war raging in Lancaster between a white-supremacist skinhead gang known as the Nazi Low Riders and a rival gang of antiracist skinheads who called themselves Sharps. This obscure, semi-doctrinal conflict fascinated me long before it escalated to homicide, as it eventually did. And yet no adult, I discovered, could shed any real light on it. I needed a native guide, and I found one in Mindy Turner, who, at seventeen, was already well embarked on the kind of casually terrifying existence I was starting to regard as common.
She was living with her mother, her younger brother, and an older half brother in a four-bedroom white stucco ranch-style house in Lancaster. Her mother, Debbie, worked behind the counter at Thrifty Drugs; she had bought the house with the settlement she got after her husband, a crane operator, was electrocuted on the job in 1989, when Mindy was in elementary school. Mindy recalled, "They came to get me at school and said, Your dad's gone to be with your dog and your grandpa in Heaven. I've never gotten over it. Whenever I get sad, I start thinking about it and just cry." Debbie remembered Mindy being deeply troubled by the idea that her dad had never been baptized, and thought that that was probably why Mindy later became a Mormonbecause she wanted to be baptized herself. Actually, before Mindy became a Mormon she had wanted to become Jewish. But that had turned out to be too much work. Becoming a Mormon was relatively easy. All this was before Mindy got addicted to crystal methamphetamine and became a Nazi, in the ninth grade.
Mindy and her mother shared blond good looks, but Debbie was hearty and outgoing, while Mindy was pale, fashionably thin, moody, intense. Her manner oscillated with unnerving speedfrom jaded worldliness to girlish enthusiasm, from precocious grace to gawkiness, from thuggish cynicism to tender vulnerability. She spoke in quick, fluid bursts, as if she had to express each thought before she changed her mind.
In her mother's day, Mindy's looks might have made her a homecoming queen. But Mindy stopped going to school while she was in the tenth grade. "I'm not a people person," she told me. "I didn't like all the little gossip circles that went on there."
Mindy had always been a good student, earning B's, but had slipped academically in junior high (as a disturbingly high number of American girls do). In the seventh and eighth grades, she became first a "hesher"into heavy-metal music and smoking marijuanaand then a "hippie," into reggae and smoking marijuana. She also became sexually active. Her lovers were mostly older, some were much older. "I was kind of looking for a father," she told me.
Mindy's Nazi period had various sources. Spike Lee had helped get her into it, she said. She and a friend had gone to see "Malcolm X." They found they were the only whites in the audience, and a black guy had asked them sarcastically if they were in the right theatre. "That's why I hate Spike Lee," she told me. "Because he's a racist. And that's when I started thinking, If the black kids can wear 'X' caps, and Malcolm is calling us all 'white devils,' what's wrong with being down with white power?"
Her real political inspiration, though, was methamphetamine, which is also known as crank, crystal, ice, or simply speed. The leading illegal drug in the Valley, methamphetamine is a powerful addictive stimulant whose longtime consumers tend to suffer from paranoia, depression, hallucinations, and violent rages. The Nazi Low Riders were one of Mindy's speed connections. "They're all tweakers," she told me. (Tweakers are speed addicts.) "Speed is just so cheap here. And it makes you feel so powerful, so alert."
The N.L.R.s' hangout was the Malone household, in a run-down neighborhood in downtown Lancaster. Andrea Malone, a single parent, had three teenage boys, all white-supremacist skinheads, and she worked long hours, giving the kids the run of the house. Mindy, who had grown bored with Mormonism, became a regular there, snorting speed, smoking dope, and becoming fast friends with the N.L.Rs. They called her a "skin bitch," but she refused to shave her head. "My dad always said he loved my long blond hair, so I wouldn't cut it off" she told me. She and the other N.L.R. girls ("They called us Property of the N.L.R.s, not members. It's this weird thing") fought with girls from rival gangs, including Sharps. But Mindy claimed she'd never taken part in random attacks on black people-something the N.L.R.s specialized in. "I just used to sit in the car and watch, while they'd get out and be, like,'Go back to Africa, nigger,' and beat people up."
At first, Mindy's mother had no idea what was going on. "I talked to Mrs. Malone on the phone a few times," Debbie told me. "She seemed really nice. I used to drive Mindy over there, and the Malone kids and some of the others used to come over here. I knew they were prejudiced, but as long as they acted civilized they were welcome. I even took them roller-skating."
The N.L.Rs were into tattoos: swastikas, skulls, Iron Crosses, lightning boltsthough lightning bolts were permitted to be worn only by those who had killed a black person. Mindy got a big swastika on one hip. ("My mom got really mad when she saw it.") Her skinhead friends were also into guns. In early 1995, one of her boyfriends, Jaxon Stines, drove with a group of N.L.R.s by the house of another boy whom Mindy had been seeing, and fired shots through a bedroom window, aiming for the other boy's bed. No one was hurt, but Mindy was picked up by the police for questioning, and Jaxon pleaded guilty to attempted murder.
Debbie was by then deeply alarmed about the company her daughter was keeping. Mindy was severely strung outa full-tilt tweaker, with a daily habit. She had lost a lot of weight. She rarely slept. Finally, she became so dehydrated that she had to be hospitalized.
While she detoxed, with her mother keeping her skinhead friends away, Mindy seemed to snap out of her gang-girl trance. "I just realized I didn't hate black people," she told me. "Also, I'm totally infatuated with Alicia Silverstone, and she's Jewish. I've seen 'Clueless' like eleven times. So how could I be a Nazi?"
But the N.L.R.s did not take apostasy lightly. "They started calling my house, saying they were going to kick my ass. They started driving by here, throwing bottles at the house." Two N.L.R. girls, Heather Michaels and Angela Jackson, were particularly incensed. "Angela said she was coming over here to kill me. I was scared, but I told her, Fine, come over, whatever. But she never came. Heather, especially, is really, really mad at me. They all say I'm a race traitor."
Debbie Turner took measures. She had an electronic security system installed around the house. "It got really bad after Jaxon went to jail," she told me. "They started coming by here. I was afraid they were going to shoot at the house. It was very scary." Debbie was also paying for a series of painful, expensive laser procedures to remove Mindy's swastika tattoo. The final cost for erasing the tattoo would come to four thousand dollars.
And that was how Debbie and I talked about Mindy's tour with the N.L.R.s during my first visits to the Turners' houseas a nasty accident whose scars were now being, not without cost, erased. Mindy was even back in school, through an independent-study program.
At the same time, we all knew that things were more complicated. For one thing, Jaxon had been released, after just six months in jail, and he and Mindy were seeing each other again. "Me and Jaxon have been through so much together," she told me. For example, a few weeks after her seventeenth birthday, she had had an abortion. "I wanted to keep it," Mindy said. "Because I knew that if Jaxon and I ever broke up I would still have some communication with him, because we would have a kid together. But then we decided we just weren't mentally ready for it. We fight all the time. And I was afraid that if we had a kid and Jaxon stayed friends with those people the kid would be brought up around all that hate."
Jaxon's gang status was actually ambiguous. He hung out with the N.L.R.s, and they considered him one of them, but he didn't publicly "claim" N.L.R. In any event, his association with the N.L.R.s extended no automatic protection to Mindy. She had therefore turned to the antiracist Sharps, her erstwhile enemies, for protection. The Sharps, however, were in no particular hurry to help herleaving her in an even more vulnerable position.
She and Jaxon did indeed fight all the time, about almost anything. Raves, for example. Mindy indicated a poster on the wall in her bedroom, advertising something called the Insomniac Rave. "That was so great," she said. "It was the first real rave I went to. Dang! It was in Hollywood. Raves are like big parties, with all different races dancing. I took Ecstasy at the Insomniac Rave, and I danced all night." She sighed. "Jaxon can't stand it that I go to raves," she said. He says I don't act white. But what is acting white? Me and him have been getting drunk almost every night lately, and I ask him, What do you think black people do that's so different from whites? They just sit around getting drunk and listening to music. Drive around in cars. Just like us.
KICKING around teen-age Lancaster, I sometimes felt as if I had fallen in with a thousand little cultural commissars, young suburban ideologues whose darkest pronouncement on another kida kid deviating from, say, the hard-core punk-anarchist line on some band or arcane point of dress-was, inevitably, "He's confused."
Mindy's own "beliefs," as she called them, were eclectic. Her brave and principled rejection of racism, even her devotion to Alicia Silverstone, did not mean she had embraced enlightened liberalism in all matters. She still had a soft spot for Adolf Hitlershe claimed she was the only N.L.R. to actually study Mein Kampfand her all-time-favorite leader was still Charles Manson. My mom thinks I'm sick, but I think he's cute, she told me. In a weird, gross way, I think he's attractive. He has the real fuck-you blood. He acts as his own lawyer. He talks for himself. I've read some of Helter Skelter. I wouldn't, like, buy a poster of him and put it up. My mom wouldn't let me do it if I tried. But I don't think it would fit my room, anyway, with all my nice John Lennon and Beatles stuff.
The walls in Mindy's room were indeed adorned with Beatles posters. Her father, she said, had been a big John Lennon fan. But she also loved Trent Reznor, of Nine Inch Nails, whose best known lyric was I wanna fuck you like an animal! I asked about a framed photograph, set next to her bed, of a shirtless, tattooed young man. The picture was obviously taken in prison.
That's Madness, she said. He's twenty-three. He says he's in love with me, but he knows I can't get over Jaxon. He's in for armed robbery. I didn't know him too well before he went to jail, but then we started writing letters. He's S.F.V. Peckerwood.
The Peckerwoods are a white gang, known mainly for mindless violence and methamphetamine dealing. They're big in the Antelope Valley but, some say, they're bigger in the San Fernando Valley, or S.F.V. They're biggest of all in prison. Madness has his beliefs, Mindy said. He believes whites are better than blacks. But he knows I don't think like that, so we don't talk about it.
Mindy was by no means the only girl I had met in the Valley who had a prisoner boyfriend. I asked her what it was about guys in jail.
It's sick, I guess, she said. But I just find it really attractive. I guess it means they're capable of doing something really spontaneous, without regard for the consequences.
Like shooting somebody.
Yeah. They're adventurous. And they're tough, usually. There's nothing else to do in there but work out.
Mindy invited me to go with her and some friends to a rave in Hollywood a few days later. Maybe Darius can come, too, she said. Darius was Darius Houston, one of the Sharps to whom Mindy had turned for protection. Darius is half black, half white, and was probably the N.L.R.s' least favorite skinhead. I don't think Darius really likes me, Mindy said. Because when I hung out with the boneheadsthis is a generic term for racist skinheadsIused to call him a nigger. All the Sharps have good reason to hate me. I asked Mindy if she might be hoping to become a Sharp herself.
She shook her head, and said, Most people here say, Mindy Turner? Oh, you mean Nazi Mindy. So I don't want to start being Sharp Mindy. I want to be just Mindy. If somebody asks me what I am now, I just tell them I'm Free Unity. That's not a gang. It's just what I believe."
SHARP stands for skinheads against racial prejudice. It is not, as I first thought, a local Antelope Valley sect. Skinheads claim Sharp throughout the United States, in Europe, and even, reportedly, in Japan. There is no formal organizationjust an antiracist ideology, a street-fighting tradition, and a few widely recognized logos, usually worn on jacket patches. Sharps raison detre is its evil twin, the better-known white-supremacist and neo-Nazi skinhead movement.
All the Antelope Valley Sharps, I found, were amateur social historians, determined to rescue the skinhead movementor simply skinhead, as they call itfrom disrepute. In their version, which seemed broadly accurate, the original skinheads emerged in England in the mid-sixties out of other youth culturesnotably the "hard mods" and the Rude Boys, stylish Jamaicans who wore porkpie hats and listened to reggae and ska. Skinheads were clean-cut, working-class, non-racist (two-tone), and tough. They loathed hippies, for reasons of both class and hygiene, loved soccer and beer, fighting and ska, scooters and Fred Perry tennis shirts. For a detailed history of skinhead, the Antelope Valley Sharps all urged on me a book, published in 1991, in Scotland, called Spirit of 69: A Skinhead Bible.
By the seventies, the movement had been hijacked, according to the Sharps, by the anti-immigrant National Front in England. And it was the second wave of British skinhead that crossed over to the United States, in the late seventies, as part of the great punk-rock cultural exchange; by then neo-Nazism and white supremacism were definitely in the mix, and a host of unholy alliances have since been formed between racist skinheads and old-line extremist organizations like the Aryan Nations, White Aryan Resistance, the Church of the Creator, and the Ku Klux Klan. After a decade of hate crimes and racist violence, white-power skinheads have become increasingly familiar figures in the American social landscape, particularly among teenagers, who tend to know much more about them and their apocalyptic views than adults do.
The boneheads are looking forward to a race war.
They're all on some harsh drug. Somebody's got to stand up to these guys, Darius Houston said.
Six or seven Sharps were sitting around Jacob Kroeger's mother's house. Jacob, a sardonic eighteen-year-old, still had his hair, but he was about to shave it off and become a full-fledged Sharpa fresh cut. His mother was often away with a boyfriend, leaving the housea modest ranch-style bungalow in a seedy older tractto become, at least for a while, the Sharps' main hangout. They were a picturesque lot, in boots and braces, extra-short (flooded) jeans, and Andy Capp-type snap caps. But the mood that evening was rather grim and besieged. It seemed that a girl from the N.L.R.s had called Christina Fava, Darius's girlfriend, who is white, a nigger lover in a hallway at Antelope Valley High School. A black student named Todd Jordan had become involved on Christinas side, and the next day a half-dozen N.L.R.s had jumped Todd on a deserted athletic field, stabbing him five times with a screwdriver. Todd was now in the hospital. Christina, for her part, was transferring to a new school.
Somehow, I said, being a Sharp seemed to mean, more than anything else, a lot of fighting with white-power skinheads.
I was wrong, I was assured.
Its the music, the fashions, the friendships, the whole life style.
It's like a big fuckin family. Everybodys got everybody elses back Its all about working class.
This curious, almost un-American class consciousness among the Antelope Valley Sharps turned out, upon examination, to be a very American miscellany. The kids themselves came from a wide range of backgroundseverything from two-parent middle-class families to drug-addled welfare mothers who had dumped them on the streets as adolescents. For some, working class meant simply having a jobany jobas opposed to being a bum. For others, it was synonymous with blue collar, and it distinguished them from richer kids, who might decide to be skinheads and buy all the gear but werent really streetwise and so might just have to be relieved of their new twelve-hole Doc Martens.
There was, in fact, much more to the Sharps than rumbling with the boneheads. For Darius, in particular, Sharp was a godsend. An orphan since his mother died, when he was thirteen, he had been a skateboarder and punk rocker before discovering skinhead. As a half-black kid in a largely white town, being reared by various white relatives, he had always been something of an outsider. Skinhead, as he understood it, was a complete, ready-made aesthetic and way of life. Darius identified, he told me, with its underground energy and its musiche was soon playing bass in a multiracial ska band called the Leisures. Because the idea of a black skinhead drove neo-Nazi skinheads wild, Darius had been fighting on a regular basis for years. He was a skilled fighter, but the backup that the other Sharps provided was still, for Darius, a lifesaver. Going to school had become too dangerous, so he was on independent study. After graduating, he said, he planned to join the Navy and become a medical technician. (Christina, for one, didn't think he was serious.) He was eighteen, beefy, soft-spoken, watchful, with skin the color of light mahogany. When we met, he was homeless and was sleeping on a couch in Jacob's mother's house.
In every gang, the crucial question about any member is "How down is he?" Among the Sharps, one of the most indisputably down was Johnny Suttle. Twenty years old, half Mexican and half Anglo, he was diminutive but super-aggressive. He worked graveyard shifts at a Taco Bell, took classes at the local community college, and, I found, had a great deal to say about skinhead. Skinhead was about loyaltyto your class, home town, soccer team, and nationality, according to Johnny. Thus, if a Japanese or a Chinese skinhead decided to beat up a foreigner, it was O.K. Because they're just defending their country, and thats good, he said. The thing is, America is not a white mans country, never mind what the boneheads say. Its a melting pot. And were about defending that.
Johnny always seemed ready to weigh the moral dimensions of violence. I once heard him deliberate one of the timeless questions: Was it ethically permissible to drop bonehead chicks before taking on the boneheads? The answer, ultimately, was yes. While it was not right to hit females, bonehead chicks were simply too dangerous to leave standing while you fought their boyfriends. They would probably stick a knife in your back. Ergo, they had to be dropped at the outset. Q.E.D.
THE Nazi Low Riders, while dedicated skinheads, were not skinhead history buffs. They were, however, keen on Nazi history. We believe in Hitlers ways, Tim Malone, a leading member, told me. But that dont mean we worship him. He was smart, but he was a homosexual. I think what he did with the Jews was right, mainly. They was coming into Germany, buying up the businesses, treating the Germans like slaves.
Chris Runge, another N.L.R., who explained to me that Hitler had actually been working with the Vatican, seemed to be the theorist of the Lancaster clique. He was nineteen, hairless, blue-eyed, pale-skinned, with a worried seriousness that was occasionally interrupted by a big, goofy smile. Im basically what you call a political Nazi, he said. A lot of these Nazis out here are unorganized. They're mostly street skins, doing the dirty work. I want to start getting them organized. Democracy doesnt work As you can see right now, its falling apart. But Nazism is about a society with no upper class, no lower class. Wed have equality. We wouldnt have homelessnessbecause we keep the factories going and everybody has a place. With a Nazi government, we'd just take out all the unwanted and start over againeven whites, if theyre doing the same thing as the niggers are. Chris gave me one of his big, blue-eyed smiles.
He grew serious again. White supremacism just comes from seeing whats happening in society, he said. We're going down. Though Chriss mother was, by all accounts, a serious tweaker, his grandfather, he said, was an executive with the Xerox Corporationa point of reference, perhaps, for his bitter assessment. Chris himself had dropped out of school in the tenth grade and had been convicted for participating in the same drive-by shooting that sent Jaxon Stines, who was his best friend, to jail. And Chris had found the Lord in his cell, he saidan experience that may have softened some of his judgments. Of Mindy, for instance, Chris merely said, Shes confused. Shes young. This was notably gentler than the pronouncements of other N.L.R.s on the subject. Chris even showed some self-awareness when he talked about his life. He told me that his mothers ex-husband used to beat her so badly when he was drunk that she would come lie in bed with Chris in the hope that it would make him stop. It didnt. And thats a lot of the hate I got inside me now, Chris said quietly.
THOUGH I stopped by the Malones house many times, I never saw Andrea there. She worked in a plastics factory in Pasadena, more than an hours drive away, and, according to Tim, she left the house at dawn and got home only late in the evening. When I first met Tim, who was seventeen, he had just spent two months in jail: he had been locked up as an accessory in the Todd Jordan stabbing, but had been released for lack of evidence. He was wiry and well built, with close-cropped dark hair and, tattooed on the back of his neck, an Iron Cross. He described himself as more of the Gestapo Storm Trooper type than a political Nazithe type thats ready to go to war over things. Theres gonna be a race war around the year 2000.
Tims father had been a Hells Angel, he said, so, he told me, his Nazism was kind of inherited. His dad drank, did speed, and abused his motherthat was why his parents broke up. The family had lived in a predominantly black neighborhood in Montclair, east of Los Angeles, where Tim, at the age of ten, joined a local Crips set for self-protection. He was the middle brother of three, and his joining a black gang did not please his brothers. Both my brothers was punk rockers, into speed metal, and they used to beat me up, trying to teach me a lesson, he said. I thank them for it now. You gotta stick with your own race. Now aint nothing I hate more than a wiggerwhite nigger.
Tim and his brothers, Jeff and Steve, became skinheads after moving to the Antelope Valley four years ago and meeting the local neo-Nazis. They were soon a warm little nest of vipers. We're all family, Tim said. Even the little kids. Troubles son, whos only, like, nine months old, already knows how to Sieg heil. Tim imitated an infant giving a Nazi salute, and laughed. (Trouble was the street name of Robert Jones, one of three N.L.R.s charged with firing into a parked car full of black people in Lancaster in 1995. He was recently sentenced to twelve years.)
Among the many kids who were usually around the Malones house were some who could not have been more than ten. I wondered if their parents had any notion what kinds of things their children were seeing and hearing there. The attractions of the place as a hangout were not mysterious. It was like a childs idea of a pirates den, scruffy and run by tattooed brigands. I even got the feeling sometimes that a rough, retrograde, neo-communal sort of social experiment was being conducted. A boy would be opening a can of beans to heat up on the stove. Someone would bellow, "Only bitches cook in this house!" The boy would drop the can, while onlookers guffawed. Angela Jackson, one of Mindy's tormentors, would tear herself away from the TV and finish opening the can, declaring herself "a skin bitch, a Featherwood." This giddy, Pleasure Island atmosphere darkened, I thought, after the feud with the Sharps produced its first dead youth.
DARIUS said he would gladly go to the rave with us, and Mindy seemed pleased. There was some question about whether Mindy herself would be able to go to the rave, however, because her mother had grounded her after finding her passed out, stark naked, on her bed with her head next to a bowl filled with vomit. Too much vodka with Jaxon, Mindy told me. It was now two days later, and still several days before the rave which we ended up skipping in any case, after Jaxon accused Mindy of really wanting to go to Hollywood to "fuck niggers."
We were now waiting for Jaxon to come over, so that he and I could talk, and Mindy still seemed to be feeling hung over.. "I hate light," she said. Her voice was flat and small. "My mom thinks I'm a vampire because I sit in my room with the music on and no lights. I wont even take acid if the sun's out."
Mindy loved LSD. She also liked cocaine. "Because it makes your mouth numb. I like to be numb. Speed lasts longer, but it makes you paranoid, so you end up doing stupid things."
The stupid things she'd done on speed seemed to be legion. "Like, once Heather and Angela and I were tweaking, and we saw two girls holding hands and we were really grossed out. We just said, We're going to show them thats not allowed. We didn't have any weapons, but we really stomped them. One girl had to go to the hospital."
I remarked that I had recently read in a newspaper that "young men use methamphetamine for sexual stimulation." Mindy scoffed: "When Jaxon's tweaking, I could dance naked in front of him with a porno on the TV, and he still wouldn't be interested."
She went outside for a cigarette. Her mother didn't allow smoking in the house. I joined her in the back yard, which had a small swimming pool and a basketball hoop. From where we sat, we could see Mindy's thirteen-year-old brother, Matthew, in the kitchen. "Matthew's one of the reasons I quit the Nazis," Mindy said, her voice suddenly full of feeling. "He's going to play basketball and football in high school, and he's going to have to be able to get along with black people. And it won't work if he gets into something disgusting like I did."
I noticed, not for the first time, a clacking corning from inside Mindy's mouth. I asked about it. She stuck out her tongue. It was pierced with a heavy silver stud. "I've had this for a long time," she said.
She also had a ring through her navel, above which she had her name tattooed in longhand. Her mother absolutely couldn't understand that tattoo. "I mean, your own name? Why?" Debbie asked me. "Is it so that some guy can look down there while you're doing it in case he forgets your name?"
I once asked Mindy what she wanted to be when she grew up.
"Exotic dancer."
Debbie, I felt certain, was unaware of this ambition. She also didn't know that Mindy was not going to school. Her independent-study program required her presence only one hour a week, but I knew she had quietly abandoned it. "Where is he?"
It looked as if Jaxon might not show, but at last he whipped into the driveway. Mindy jumped up, sat down, jumped up again. Jaxon came into the yard through the chain-link gate, a lean, wary-looking figure in a white T-shirt. He nodded at me, glanced at Mindy.
"We're going camping," he said. "Can I go?" Mindy asked.
Jaxon didn't reply. He and I went inside and sat at the dining-room table. Mindy followed us in. "Where are you going?" she asked.
"Cottonwood."
"Can I go?"
Again, Jaxon didn't reply. He was a pale, good-looking kid with deep-set eyes and a large, unfortunate silver ring through his nose. ("I hate it. It makes him look like a bull," Mindy said.) His head was shaved except for a small, wispy patch on top. Mindy watched him miserably while we talked.
He had recently turned eighteen, he said. He had been kicked out of school in the ninth grade for fighting and truancy, and since then he had bounced around, living here and there, including a stint with his father, an unsuccessful rock musician who drove a school bus in Northern California. "I've hitchhiked all up and down California," Jaxon told me. "Every place is just as boring as this is." He had a studied jadedness, a cool anger in his eyes. He was plainly intelligent. He had got his high-school diploma by passing an equivalency exam at the age of fifteen. Since getting out of jail, he had been living with his mother and stepfather in Palmdale and working as a repair-line operator for the phone company, where his mother was a computer technician.
Mindy interrupted, pleading and petulant: "Can I go camping with you?" Jaxon ignored her.
"Have you got sleeping bags?" I asked Jaxon.
"I've only got a mummy bag." Mindy scurried down the hall in search of camping equipment.
Jaxon's parents divorced when he was three, he said. "My brother was the good little preppie. He never got caught for anything. I was the bad one. I shaved my head when I was, like, nine. They were sending me to shrinks from the fourth grade."
Surprisingly, considering that he had long been warring with the Sharps as part of the N.L.R. cohort, Jaxon said he esteemed Darius's beliefs. "Darius has the right idea," he told me. "We've talked. In fact, he used to be vegetarian straight-edge. That's no drugs, no drinking, no sex-nothing. Not too many people can follow that." But Jaxon's sympathies were decidedly with the racist side of the skinhead schism. "I'm not, like, Mr. Nazi. And I know some black and Mexican people who are cool. But the majority of them are just welfare-mooching scumballs. I don't want to hear your sob stop, about how my great-great-grandfather owned your great-great-grandfather." Jaxon's sneer deepened until it severely distorted his face.
He went on, more calmly, "Whether I like it or not, I'm racist. My mom doesn't agree with me. She's not prejudiced. But I like to consider myself less ignorant than most racists. They're all preparing for race war, race war. But it's never going to happen." He shrugged. "I'm just proud of what I am. But being proud of being white doesn't mean I'm proud of every piece of white trash out there snorting speed."
Mindy reappeared, lugging an armful of gear for the camping trip, including an old, square-bottomed sleeping bag, which she displayed proudly. "Where is Cottonwood?" she asked.
JAXON was right: his mother didn't agree with him. A political liberal with a degree in anthropology, she lived with her second husband and her two sons in a big, cathedral-ceilinged house in a gated community. "I dont know why Jaxon holds those racial views," she told me. "I keep hoping it's just a teenage rebellion, and he'll grow out of itthat it's not how he is." Other parents I visited in the Antelope Valley seemed equally mystified by their kids' passionate "beliefs."
Schools failed to provide most parents and children with any common cultural ground. Sheldon Epstein, a high-school principal in Lancaster, who had a cheerleader daughter, told me, "My wife and I are big-time supporters of our daughter's school. But most of the kids are just not bonded with their schools, so for them that school-spirit piece is missing. It's the parents who have school spirit now, not the kids."
The fact was, however, that among the tens of thousands of parents who worked over the mountains, relatively few had the time or energy to involve themselves in their children's schools (or any other community activity). And then there were all those too consumed by their own troubles even to rear their children. I found, that is, a startling number of kids in the Valley being reared not by their parents but by their grandparents. Various explanations were offered for this phenomenon, the commonest being methamphetamine addiction among parents, and particularly mothers. The situation was starkly reminiscent of the better-known syndrome that has left so many African-American grandmothers rearing the children of their crack-addled daughters in the nation's inner cities. In the Antelope Valley, it was white families falling into poverty who were being hit hardest by speed.
Between 1970 and 1995, the poverty rate for children and adolescents in California more than doubledit is now twenty-eight per cent. And just as crime rates tend to track closely with poverty rates, vast amounts of the state's public spending have been diverted during this period to law enforcement and the penal system. The California prison budget in 1975 was two hundred million dollars. By the year 2000, it will approach five billion dollars. The money for all these jails and prisons has come more or less directly out of the state's higher-education budget. When I graduated from high school, in 1970, California had what was often described as the finest public university system in the world. That was then. Between 1991 and 1994, the state's higher-education system lost two thousand professors and two hundred thousand students to budget cuts. Meanwhile, University of California tuition in 1995 was, in constant dollars, nearly five times what it was thirty years before. The situation in the schools is no better. When I was in junior high, the state's public schools enjoyed the seventh-highest per-pupil spending in the Country; by 1995, California's per-pupil spending ranked forty-seventh nationally.
Nancy Kelso, a middle-aged lawyer in Palmdale who has many juvenile clients, rejects the view, which she says is common among her peers and Colleagues, that they grew up in a Golden Age, when children obeyed their parents and ordinary people felt safe and God was in his Heaven. "I remember the Red Scare," she told me. "I remember suffocating pressure to conform. I remember a lot of bad things." She also remembers, however, a radically different opportunity structure. "When I graduated from high school, in 1962, it was like a deala contractbetween the adults and me," she said. "All I had to do was get a B average and halfway behave myself and I was guaranteed a free education at a top public university, like Berkeley. My four siblings and I all took advantage of it. Our dad was a five-dollar-an-hour non-union machinist in Los Angeles. We all became productive, responsible citizens. I tell you, I would have a lot more anxiety about what was going to become of me if I were growing up now."
In 1996, Palmdale High School, out of a graduating class of about four hundred, sent exactly six students into the University of California system. Less than ten per cent of the class went on to any four-year college at all.
Listening to Nancy Kelso, I kept thinking of Chris Runge grumbling about "the unwanted." He and his friends look forward to a "Nazi government" whisking this surplus population from sight. Of course, he and his friends undoubtedly feel that they themselves are the real "unwanted." And they are not wrong. But one of the ironies of their predicament is that the withdrawal of resources from education and other social services is fundamentally racistthat is, it is primarily a withdrawal by older whites from the support of those aspects of public welfare, including public education, which seem to benefit a large number of non-whites. And yet the collapse of educational opportunity caused by this withdrawal is suffered by all non-affluent children and families. "Affirmative action" is merely the name that many whites give to their sense of disfranchisement.
Issues of race and opportunity are particularly loaded in the Antelope Valley. Esther Gillies, the director of a center for abused children in Lancaster, put it bluntly: "Black families who move to the Valley are often moving up. White families who move to the Valley couldn't make it down below." While I heard many whites complain about lower-class blacks and Latinos settling in the Valley, I often sensed that they were really more concerned about middle-class minority families. Todd Jordan's family lived in a grander house than any of the white-power kids who stabbed him did. I talked with black parents who pronounced themselves delighted with their new, racially integrated neighborhoods (the Valley has developed so fast that the insidious patterns of residential segregation have not taken root), but even they expressed wariness about staying on once their children reach high-school age. In the words of one well-educated black mother of three, "That's when the white-supremacist thing seems to kick in."
I DID meet white kids in the Antelope Valley who were college-bound. Natalie Blacker, for instance, was the editor of the school newspaper at Quartz Hill High. Natalie was one of Mindy's idols-"I'm totally in love with her" was how Mindy put itand was friendly with the Sharps. A feminist, Natalie had started a consciousness-raising group for girls at her school. (Her idol was Naomi Wolf.) She nagged her friends not to let their boyfriends treat them badlyJaxons cavalier treatment of Mindy was, she told me, a great example of what girls should not put up withbut she cheerfully acknowledged the depth and staying power of the sexism and racism she opposed. She was shocked, she told me, when Mindy fell in with the boneheads, and delighted when Mindy renounced them. "But you really have to be strong to do that, to stay neutral here," she added. "This is a place where everybody feels the need to be in a clique."
THE THREE TREES
Late day. A wash of claret at the window.
And the room swells with the odor of quince,
tin-sharp and dank, as the acid creeps down
through the etch marks. He dips the foreground languidly,
Rembrandt, so thickets will darken, the horse
and lovers resting there, the bamboo latitude
of fishing pole, the shadowed river.
Then inks it allmixed sky, three dappled trees
and presses the intricate net of it
to the white-bleached etching sheet below: one skein
of storm aligning the nothingness, one hay cart
rich with villagers. At the window now
a fading to ochre. And beyond,
through the streets and valley at the base
of a hillock thick with three trees, a hunter
is ringing a treble bell, its quick bite
driving the field birds to the sheltering grasses.
Around him, dark in their earth-colored clothes, others
are throwing a slack-weave net
out over the meadow and stuttering birds.
And up from their various hands quick fires bloom,
rush through the beard grass, the birds bursting up
to the capturing net, some dying of fright,
some of flames, some snuffed by the hunters
like candles. A breeze begins, slips through the tree limbs.
Slung over each hunter are threadings of birds,
strung through the underbeak. Pleatworks of plentitude,
down the back, the curve of the shoulder.
They offer their warmth in slender lines,
as sunlight might, through the mismatched shutters
of a great room, the long gaps casting
their crosshatch. As if time itself might spin them all
down some vast, irreversible pathway
haycart, hunter, small bowl with its blossoms of quince
and the simple patterns resting there
barred everything back from the spinning.
-LINDA BIERDS
An ambitious effort to get teenagers to channel this need to belong into their school lives was under way at Lancaster High, which opened in the fall of 1995. Students wore uniforms; teachers wore red, white, and blue. The curriculum was demanding and old-fashioned-"fifties style," according to Beverley Louw, the school's dynamic first principal. "Our hope is that we can create the culture, and that way not lose our students to the kinds of fragmented subculturesthe heshers, the skinheads, and so onthat you find kids joining elsewhere."
But after six months at the helm of Lancaster High Ms. Louw already sounded pessimistic. She had too many students whom she couldn't help, she saidkids who arrived at school with too many deficits. Besides that, the Sharps and the neo-Nazis were already fighting at her school.
Antelope Valley officials tend to say that white-supremacist skinheads are less of a problem than they seem. The police say the boneheads are dwarfed in number by the black and Latino gangs who have moved up from Los Angeles. The most obvious gang tension in the Valley, though, was not between the Bloods and the Crips but between the Sharps and the neo-Nazis. If you went to Brunswick Sands Bowl, a bowling alley on the Sierra Highway, in Lancaster, the jacket that caught your eye, worn by a spike-haired teen-age punk, would be the one with a huge patch on the back snarling "NAZI PUNKS FUCK OFF." Or if you went to the only real teen hangout in Lancaster, a coffeehouse called Hang'n Java, which had a pool table, music, and an Internet connection, you could find a tense conference taking place at the counter between the owner and a group of Sharps. When I went, I found her throwing them out. She supported them, she maintained, but she could not risk their business, because if the boneheads saw them in there they'd come back at night and shoot out her windows. "And I can't pay the insurance," she said tightly.
THE police may not have wanted to acknowledge the dimensions of the problem, but for Darius Houston white-supremacist violence seemed inescapable. I once asked him what it felt like to be the target of so much bonehead ire.
Darius looked embarrassed. "Even white powers are people, so you have to respect them," he said. Then he added, "Unless they don't respect me. Which they don't." He shrugged. "Most skinheads fight. It comes with the book. It comes to you."
Once, at a rock concert I attended with the Sharps, I saw just how much of it tended to come to Darius. It was an oi show in San Bernardino. Oi music is a hard form of punk rock, and it appeals to the whole range of skinheads. The headliners at the San Bernardino show were a cult band from Britain called The Business. The Antelope Valley Sharps were deeply thrilled to be seeing them, and when we got to the concert, which was held in an old wrestling arena near the San Bernardino railroad tracks, there were several hundred skinheads inside, most of them white but many of them Latino or Asian. Cliques milled around, exchanging elaborate tribal greetings with other cliques and having their pictures taken together. All was mellow, all was unity, I was assured. No boneheads had come. A couple of punk bands played, and there was some moderate thrashing in the pit, so I retreated to one of the wooden bleachers that rose on three sides of the arena. And that's where I was, looking down on the crowd, when the Orange County Skins arrived. They were in uniform and in formation. Their uniform consisted of black combat boots, white trousers, and the white tank tops known as "wife beaters." Their formation was a sort of flying wedge, which knocked people aside with swift, efficient violence as they swept toward the middle of the pit. There were no more than thirty of them, but their paramilitary coordination overwhelmed each bit of startled resistance. They easily seized the center of the arena, turned to the stunned crowd, and raised their arms in Nazi salutes, bellowing, "White power! White power!"
There was a lengthy pause, during which everyone seemed to consider the boots of the invaders. Whoever approached them first was certain to get his teeth kicked in. Then the crowd rushed the boneheads, and a bloody melee began. It seemed to be all boots and fists. Security at the door had been very tighta guard had even taken away my pens, tartly demonstrating how someone could jab out my eyes with one of themso the possibilities for injury presumably had some limits. I caught glimpses of Sharps I knew, flailing awayparticularly Darius, who is tall and, as a black skin, seemed to be the focus of a great deal of Nazi fury. But Darius stayed on his feet, blessedly, and seemed to have plenty of help as he spun and kicked and punched. The Nazis were badly outnumbered but preturnaturally fierce.
Then I saw Darius running toward the rear bleachers, where I was perched. He was holding one eye pawing at it frantically-and zigzagging blindly through the crowd. I had a horrible premonition that he had been stabbed in the eye. I ran down the bleachers to meet him, and tripped and twisted my ankle. A security guard had to help us both stagger out through a back door into the rain. Darius, still pawing at his eye, threw himself face first into a puddle. He splashed water into his eye. "Somebody maced me," he shouted. I felt a rush of relief. Darius rose up, blinking, gasping. "It's O.K.," he said. "It's O. K. I can see." The door behind us flew open, and another casualty came reeling out. Darius sprang to the door, caught it, and, without another word, was goneback into the roaring fray.
WHAT the Orange County Skins did at that oi show?" Mindy said. Her tone was petulant, scornful. We were sitting in her room. "These boneheads out here could never think of that. They're just into speed. The original Nazis did no drugs, didn't smoke pot, drink beeranything. They just trained for war, twenty-four seven. These guys out here have no right to call themselves Nazis. That's why I don't like them."
This, I thought, was new. Mindy had previously disliked the N.L.R.s for a lot of reasons, but not because they failed to emulate Hitler's men properly. And, for the record, many of Hitler's elite troops were in fact tweakers. But Mindy was upset. It seemed she had been jilted by Jaxon for a younger girl, named Casey.
"O.K., I'm not fifteen and six feet tall with two pierced nipples!" she wailed. Casey was apparently all these things. "O. K, I'm immature and selfish! I was spoiled when I was young. But he is so selfish, so conceited, so immature, so arrogant!"
I didn't argue.
"Plus, he won't give me my baby blanket back. My dad gave it to me. It's my security blanket. I'm all Give me my blanket. He's all Give me my CD.
"I would have gone to jail for Jaxon," she went on bitterly. "For that drive-by. They didn't have anything on me. I had an alibi. But I would have gone."
Debbie was just coming in from work. "You tell him about how you're going back to school or I'm going to send you to live with Grandma?" Debbie asked. She had discovered that Mindy was skipping her independent-study appointments and had grounded her. Mindy carried off the groceries that Debbie had brought home. "My mother still lives in Canyon Country" Debbie told me. Canyon Country, a set of suburbs slightly closer to L.A., was where the Turners lived before they moved to the Antelope Valley. "It's better for kids, I think Mindy would probably never have got into all this bad stuff there."
"The Antelope Valley sucks!" Mindy called from the kitchen. Debbie and Mindy had been having problems over Debbie's boyfriend, Tom, who, over Mindy's objections, had briefly moved into the Turner household.
Mindy took me to meet her grandparents one evening, in their spotless, triple-wide trailer in Canyon Country. While Mindy darted in and out of the living room, playing on her grandfather's computerin this house she seemed suddenly about ten years younger, as if she had magically regressed to a calmer, more constrained, less sexualized, less bored selfI talked to Pearl, her grandmother, who was originally from Nebraska. She was decorous and candid as she described her concerns about Mindy's future. Pearl, who used to be a bookkeeper, now does fancy cake decorating and has been married to Jerry, her third husband, for twenty-one years. When he came in, he kissed Mindy and told her the computer she was playing on was going to be hers. He was getting a new one, and all kids needed a computer at home nowadays.
Looking after her as she skipped back to her new toy, he said, "Mindy is probably the biggest frustration I have in my life now. I feel bad that I haven't been more of an influence on her." He told me, in strong language, his feelings about Jaxon and his racist beliefs; I could see how he would have made a very strict guardian. I tried to picture Mindy living with her grandparents, but could picture only a great clash and meltdown.
"The problem is, society requires both parents to work," Pearl said. "Single parents also have to work. So kids are left to raise themselves. That's why they have no respect, no discipline. There's no one to teach them how to care, how to love, how to live. So they form these groups, and, right or wrong, those are their families."
Various Sharps and N.L.R.s had told me the same thing, of course. But it was sadder to hear it from a consummate grandmother in her big, clean, cozy mobile home.
A WILLOWY ice-blond sixteen-year-old girl named Ronda Hardin, who was loosely associated with the Nazi Low Riders, once unnerved me by talking, in a breathy, high, almost reverential voice, about "my hatred." She smiled faintly when she said it, and yet the frame around everything she said, I thought, was a sense of lossloss of a marginal color-caste privilege that, in her mind, was supposed to keep black people beneath her socially and, in that way, somehow prevent the worst from happening to her. Because she lacked that reassurance, her beloved hatred seemed to be a main prop of her self-respect.
On the night of March 9, 1996, Ronda was in a little brown tract house on East Avenue J-4 in Lancaster. I've heard at least two dozen versions of what happened that night, but a few facts are undisputed. The Sharps were having a party. There were roughly fifty kids there, most of them white, not all of them antiracists. A keg of beer was flowing. Darius, who was drunk, got into a dispute in the kitchen with Ronda, who was wearing a bomber jacket with a Confederate-flag patch on one sleeve. The dispute may have been over the patch. Darius may have choked Ronda. In any case, Ronda fled. After another boy tried to defend her and got beaten up by the Sharps, Ronda, who had gone to the Malones' house and told the N.L.R.s what happened, went back to the party with Tim and Jeff Malone.
The boys went inside. Ronda remained in the car. A confrontation took place almost immediately, not far from the front door. Jeff Malone, a quiet nineteen-year-old whose gang name was Demon, waved a knife at a girl who approached him. She later said she had been trying to warn him to leave: Darius, standing in a knot of his friends, threw a cup of beer at Tim Malone. One of the Malones challenged Darius. The N.L.Rs were standing in close formation, their backs against a living-room wall. Darius ran toward them, a knife in his right hand. With his first thrust, he stabbed Jeff Malone through the heart. Jeff fell. His friends dragged him out the door.
Ronda ran to a neighbor's to phone the police. Jeff's friends drove him to the hospital. On the way, they tried to stop the bleeding. Tim was slapping his brother hard in the face, shouting, "Breathe! Breathe!" To the driver, he yelled, "Run this light! Go! Go!" It was only a few minutes' drive to Antelope Valley Hospital. By the time they got there, Jeff's body was cold. They carried him inside. He was pronounced dead an hour later.
"HOMEBOY deserved it," Johnny Suttle, the Sharps' ethicist, said. "He shouldn't have come to that party. He wasn't invited."
Johnny himself wasn't at the party. He was at Taco Bell, working. But he heard about the stabbing soon after it happened, arid he helped direct the Sharps' flurry of subsequent moves. A group of Sharps had bundled Darius away. They drove first to a cemetery behind Antelope Valley High, and there they all spat on the bloody knife and buried it under a bush. Next, they went to a park and cleaned up Darius, whose clothes and arms were covered with blood. Then, unaware that Jeff was dead, they dispersed for the night.
[section missing]
for saying Darius was fine," Mindy said suddenly. "It was true, thoughhe really was good-looking. But I've lost all respect for him now. If I saw him, I wouldn't even talk to him. I would just give him a dirty look."
After a few minutes' reflection, she went on, "I don't want to go back to being a bonehead. I don't want to have a label on me. But Tim says I already have one. He says I'm a 'gang-hopper.' "
It was news to me that Mindy was talking to Tim Malone. As it happened, Tim had just told me that the N.L.Rs were on strict orders to do nothing. The police were watching them, he said, expecting them to retaliate against the Sharps. This ceasefire might mean that Mindy herself was safe, at least temporarily, I thoughta hopeful possibility that I mentioned to her. She thought about it but seemed uncomforted.
Two burly young men had come into the coffeehouse and were standing behind Mindy. Both wore baseball caps, and both had goatees. I watched them idly, wondering if they were boneheads. Then, as they began to walk past us, one of them turned and gave me a startling look right in the face. It was a practiced, frightening, prison-yard challenge. I had never seen the guy before, but I now had no doubt that he was a neo-Nazi. He kept walking. The skin on the back of my neck was crawling. I was so distracted that I suggested we leave, and we did. Mindy, who hadn't noticed a thing, said she wanted to go home and finish a poem she had been working on for Mrs. Malone.
WHEN I asked Tim Malone how his mother was taking Jeff's death, he said, "Like she should. Hard and dry." That wasn't true, I found, when I talked to her. Mrs. Malone was tearful and despondent, and was wishing aloud that she had never moved her family to the Antelope Valley. "I wanted to get Tim away from the gangs in Montclair," she said. "But there are bad influences here, too, and my boys have gotten under their wing, and I'm hardly ever home to protect them." She knew almost no one in the Valley, she said, and added, "But I've met more people in the last few dayspeople just calling up to offer condolencesthan I'd met in the three years before this happened." Even Heather Michaels, one of the fiercest N.L.R.s, wasn't "hard and dry" when we spoke. "They didn't want no trouble," she said, meaning, improbably, the N.L.R.s who had rushed to the party that night. "If they wanted trouble, they would've taken guns. They thought there was just five or ten Sharps there. Then they get there, turns out it's like fifty or a hundred Sharps." Heather's eyes welled at the thought. "If one of us had killed this nigger, or even stabbed him, we'd all be locked up." Tim Malone said the same thing, calling the police treatment of Darius "reverse discrimination." He and Chris Runge and I were standing in the Malones' front yard. It was a sunny afternoon. Both of them were bare-chested and wore boots and jeans.
"Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and tenfold," Chris intoned. "Darius will get a lot worse than what Jeff got."
"That's right, brother," Tim said. To me, he said, "You know, we didn't expect Darius to be there. Because he usually runs if he thinks we might be coming." I asked what had happened.
"We saw him in there, standing with his friends, and when he saw us he started bouncing up and down." Tim demonstrated. I had seen Darius do that fighter's bounce, during the melee at the of show in San Bernardino. "Then somebody offered me a beer, and when I went to take it Darius threw a cup of beer at me. I caught it, threw it down, and called him on." Tim demonstrated his quick reactions, his forceful challenge. "'Come on, nigger, let's go! Right now! Then I spit in his face."
Nobody else had remembered the scene this way.
"Then four guys rushed me, and Darius came in behind them, low, and reached around me and stuck Jeff I saw it go in. It was a pocketknife, with a black handle. Jeff didn't even know he'd been stuck. Then he looked down at his shirt and saw it. He went, 'Fuck you, nigger!'" Tim imitated Jeff crouching, both middle fingers raised before him like guns. Again, nobody else remembered anything like this. "We dragged him to the car, and we beat the shit out of him on the way to the hospital. 'Wake the fuck up!' But he died before we got there."
We stood and watched the traffic pass. I asked if Jeff had said anything in the car. "No," Tim said. "But I know what he would have said: Get that nigger!" Tim and Chris looked at each other, their shaved heads slowly nodding.
I FOUND Darius somewhere in the suburban wilderness of Orange County. We met at a Taco Bell. Christina and a Palmdale skinhead named Juan were also there. Juan had been in the group that spirited Darius away from the party after the killing. Darius looked much the samea little warier, less abashed, slightly exhilarated. We had talked on the phone a few days before, and I had asked how he felt. "I'm going to be more mellow," he had said. "I was sick the first couple of days. I haven't felt that feeling since my parents died. Some people probably get off on it, and some people don't like it. I don't like it. It's weird. You've taken somebody's life, and they're never coming back on this earth. At the same time, you feel happy, because he was, like, your enemy."
I ran Tim Malone's version of the killing past Darius and Juan. When I got to the part about Jeff's noticing he had been stabbed, throwing up his middle fingers in defiance, and bellowing "Fuck you, nigger!" Juan and Darius gaped.
"He did what?"Juan said. I told them again.
Juan and Darius looked at each other. Darius laughed. Juan shrugged. "O.K.," Juan said. "They want to go out in a blaze of glory. That's cool. They can have their story."
In Darius's version, the boneheads had arrived with two knives. Darius had kicked one of them loose and then picked it up. That was the knife he had used to stab Jeff. None of the other witnesses I interviewed had seen this kick, or anything like it. Darius, I thought, didn't look abashed enough as he told this story.
Sitting in that Taco Bell and talking to the boys, I watched Christina from the corner of my eye. She fidgeted, checked her watch, said. nothing. I noticed her studying Darius, her expression both cool and oddly contented. This fugitive skinhead was her main project now, even the center of her life. Other kids in the Antelope Valley were starting to talk about her with awe: her black boyfriend killed a bonehead; he was in hiding, she stuck by him, defying her parents. It was a romantic role, far larger than ordinary Valley teenage life.
After Christina and Juan set off on the long drive back to the Valley, Darius took me to meet some new friends he had made. "It's a good thing I cliqued up with some other heads," he said. "Because Huntington Beach is just a few miles from here, and that's where the O.C. Skins are from. I need people to watch my back."
Darius's friends lived in a vast low-rise apartment complex. We passed through an empty white brick foyer and were buzzed into a courtyard that seemed to ramble on for blocksthrough plots of grass and stands of tattered bamboo, past a lighted swimming pool, around a thousand plastic tricycles and abandoned toys. All the ground-floor apartments had sliding glass doors without curtains. Behind them, virtually in public, people watched TV, ate sushi, and scratched their bellies, oblivious of path traffic like us. There were Asians, Latinos, blacks, whites, bikers, yuppies, buppies, old Samoans, young Cambodians. It was a Free Unity world, I thought. It felt like a vision of the next American century: ramshackle, multiracial, cut-rate. White supremacists, it struck me, fear the future for a reason: it's going to be strange and very complicated.
Darius's friends weren't there, but some other guys were, and they let us in. They looked like skaters. Two were white. One was Asian. They were smoking a bong, listening to music. Darius and I sat on a couch to one side and talked. He was staying with one of his three half brothers, not far away, he said. He was thinking about moving to Germany. First, though, he was going to enroll in the local community college to learn German. Then he thought he might join the Navy. In the meantime, he thought Christina should move down here. It was too dangerous for her in the Antelope Valley now.
THE first time I talked to the Lancaster prosecutor in charge of investigating Jeff Malone's death, he shared with me his feelings about gang killings in general. "I say lock'em all up in a room and prosecute the survivor," he said. I took this to mean that Darius did not have to fear prosecution.
Later, when a decision was officially made not to prosecute, the same assistant district attorney explained his reasoning to me. The victim and his friends had gone to a house where a hostile or opposing gang was having a party. The victim had a knife. He attacked Mr. Houston. Mr. Houston's claim that the knife he used belonged to the victim or to the victim's friends was not credible. But it was not illegal for him to possess that knife inside that house. There were conflicting eyewitness versions of the attack. It was certainly not a particularly vicious attack The fact that a single knife thrust had killed the victim was simply bad luck. The crucial question for the prosecution was whether a jury could be persuaded that the killing had not been self-defense. That seemed unlikely. The victim was a Nazi skinhead, who would not be viewed sympathetically. Mr. Houston was on his own turf, minding his own business. "I'm not saying Mr. Houston is a great guy," the prosecutor concluded. "He's not. He's a jerk You need to call me in about six months to see if he is still alive. I do not believe he will be."
To the Malone family's bitter contention that it was really because Jeff was a skinhead from a poor family that no one would be prosecuted for his death, I could think of no rejoinder. It was true.
SO families flee the city for far-flung suburbs, but the evils they hope to escapedrugs, gangs, violent crimeflourishwherever they land. Why? I kept recalling Mindy's grandmother's remark about how kids were being left to raise themselves. If most parents must work outside the home, the obvious institution to take up the caretaking slack is the school. There are American communities that have begun to reckon with this imperative, but they are a small minority and the Antelope Valley is decidedly not among them. Beverley Louw's attempt at Lancaster High to replace the baroque array of "fragmented subcultures" that students tend to join with an old-fashioned, school-based culture was the exception. And her frustrations arose from more than just her students' academic deficits. "Everything is in such flux, which unsettles kids," she told me one afternoon in her office. "The homelessness among kids here is just enormous. It's invisible to outsiders, because they dont live on the streets, but they move from place to place, living with friends or relatives or whatever. And lack of supervision is the key, I believe, to most of their problems." Ms. Louw looked out a window onto a windblown parking lot, then went on. "I had a straight-A student commit suicide when I was principal of the continuation school. The kids said she did it on a dare. Her father came to the funeral in a yellow leather suit. I couldn't believe it. A yellow leather suit."
Martha Wengert, a sociologist at Antelope Valley College, said, "This area has grown so fast that neighborhoods are not yet communities. Kids are left with this intense longing for identification." Gangs, race nationalism, and all manner of "beliefs" arose from this longing. I thought of Debbie Turner's inability to comprehend Mindy's enthusiasm for the likes of Charles Manson and Adolf Hitler. "The kids reach out to these historical figures," Dr. Wengert said. "But it's through TV, through comic books, through word-of-mouth. There are no books at home, no ideas, no sense of history." One thing the Valley's young people knew, however, Dr. Wengert said, was that the economic downturn of the nineteen-nineties was not cyclical, that the Cold War was over and the aerospace and defense jobs were not coming back.