Robert E. Brown. Tales from the Land of Entrapment

Everyone takes a beating sometime.
Part II. Alex the pacifist.

After Alex's wounds healed he never looked quite the same. He was never an attractive man, but like the post car crash Mark Hamill, he just looked kinda.. not quite right.

With the fight beaten out of him, Alex discovered his sensitive side. His hair slowly morphed from Dee Dee Ramone to a tame Robert Smith. Still dirty, still dyed black but it slowly took on a mushroom form. While the guys were sitting in the yard drinking 40's, Alex began hanging at the kitchen table with the girls, quoting Smith lyrics and listening to the Cure. This new kinder and gentler persona (along with the shit load of drugs he began dealing) created a small entourage of hot chicks around him. "What can I say man, I'm a lover now, not a fighter." This culminated in Alex scoring a full fledged hard bodied jailbait trophy girlfriend on his arm. Jen was absolutely every bit as bitchy as she was double take beautiful. None of us could wrap our drunken, drug addled brains around this new hippie emo Alex or his pornstar bodied knows she's hot shit girlfriend who seemed utterly in love with him. We called it the Jen riddle. A simple one question quandary. "Why are they together?" They stayed a couple into their late 20's and for what ever reason Alex continued to stick around a crew that now smelled his weakness.

After all the bullshit Alex the Bully had put everyone through and the confusion and irritation over the Jen riddle, Alex turned from lil' general to court clown. Over the next few years his nick names included the troll, the nome, rat boy and the littlest pussy. He worked with several of our crew at a deli called Baggin's and they dubbed him Bilbo, placing a sign in the kitchen saying "you must be this tall to work the grill." Of course it was 3 inches taller than Alex. People would stick notes to his back at parties and pee in his litterbox. He never fought back again, even when it was in his very best interest to do so.

I had just turned 21, barely in Albuquerque for a year. Most of the Lost Cauces gang still lived in... Lost Cauces. I had shacked up with Jennifer and we regularly made the 3 hour journey to visit them in her beat up hand me down station wagon. We heard Alex and Jen had moved into a barrio downtown and we set out to find the party. We turned onto his block in the hispanic ghetto where there was a street party going down. We slowed down just long enough to see about 20 pairs of white wife beater tee shirts and tan dickies all circled and fixated on a low rider in the driveway, hydraulically bouncing up and down to a vibrating booming beat. "Uh, yeah, wrong party." Alex's house was at the opposite end of the block. But his party wasn't what what I expected at all. The door was open and there was probably about 14 guests in the front yard and living room. About 10 of them were girls and 4 were guys, including my little brother. All underage, most in high school still. They all jumped up and greeted at the sight of a townie elder statesman and in proper fashion I ignored them. "What the fuck are all these kids doing here?" I snapped at Alex.
"Nah, it's cool. I know them." He mumbled with breath that reeked from pot.
"Where's Jeremy and Keith?"
"They're at a party at the river."
"Where's John?"
"Everyone went to the river."
"Well ditch these kids and lets go to the fucking river."
"Dude, Brian and Vic are coming back in an hour, then we'll all go."

Irritated and refusing to socialize with these inferior minors, I went outside and took Jennifer to the far end of the porch. With my back turned to the party I popped open my cheap bottle of wine. About 3 minutes later I heard over my shoulder "Yo esse, the Vario King Cobras are here to welcome you to the hood."
I turned around and three very large old head vato gang bangers were walking inside. They were older, in their late 20's-early 30's with standard issue goatees, shaved heads and covered in latino gang tats. They were bouncer big, at least 250 lbs each and they had just crashed Alex's underage jailbait party. There were wolves wandering among the sheep.
"Shit, those dudes are VKC." I whispered to Jennifer with urgency.
"I thought you guys were friends with VKC?" she asked, a little confused.
The Vario King Cobras were a local hispanic gang. We had friends who were members but that didn't say much. VKC was a generational barrio gang and whole families and even neighborhoods were members. Through those friends we had brokered drug deals and even attended VKC parties, but it always felt tense and unsafe around the older, more serious members.
"If I try and drop names, they'll just accuse me of trying to suck up. It'll just give them an opening to stomp me."
I had seen this situation played out plenty of times before. They would fuck with people at the party until they got bored. Then there was a 100% chance that someone would get their ass kicked and a good possibility Alex's house was going to get trashed. It was just how it worked, our crew would have done the same. But our crew was absentee and these were only the scouts, there was a whole yard full of drunk homies right down the street.

I though extracting the gang bangers from the house without bloodshed would be tricky. But with Alex as my backup, I found it would be impossible.

My Company