The Gangster Wannabes Get Roofed

Our Northern California neighborhood was white bread boring up until the late 80’s. Situated in a mostly a blue collar town with very little violent crime no one saw the wave of super crimes coming our way until it was so far gone most people thought nothing short of a Soviet nuke would clean it up.

In 1987 all of the apartments one block over from our condo were bought up by the state and turned into low income housing. I suppose in the hopes of bettering their lives the state moved people from the inner cities in Oakland and San Francisco into the apartments, but in the end left them there to rot. They didn’t provide them with any jobs, education to get jobs, or any assistance for them to try and make a better life. I guess the state just assumed being out of the ghetto would be enough for them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But when your boots are made of concrete and the straps were cut off at the source over a century ago there isn’t much leverage you can generate. Within months the people in those apartments had gone back to the life they knew, the life of the street.

On top of this an over glamorized Hollywood version of gang life was making its way into the movies, television shows, and of course music videos creating a generation of middle class teens that were trying to emulate a lifestyle of which they only saw the sensationalized highlights. And by 1987 crack cocaine was well established in the area with crystal meth just a few years behind it.

I remained the scared white kid in the neighborhood way too afraid to join any of the gangs that roamed the infamous Sycamore Street one block away, but I knew the colors, Red on the east end and Blue on the west. It was hard for me to believe that they were less than a mile apart, but crossing over some invisible line wearing the wrong colored t-shirt could mean a very violent death.

My connection to all this was mainly through the white kids I went to school with that took the tentative, but dangerous steps deeper into the gang world. Usually it would start innocently enough with baggy clothes and a gold chain or two, then maybe a pager, then one day they would show up to school with a beat up face, a new arrogant pride, and a flat refusal to wear any color other than red or blue. A gun and a tattoo often followed. In some cases, it even meant a drive-by shooting to cement their place in the gang. The point of no return came shockingly fast for many of these kids.

Down the street from where I lived there was a small park. It was on the ass end of the Antioch Cruise. Cruising in the 80’s and 90’s was popular pastime for the teens and gangs in town as a way to blow through the boring weekends. The cruise snaked through the small town for a few miles from the old part of town on the waterfront of the San Joaquin River down to the freeway ending near the K-Mart on the east end of Sycamore Street. When the police didn’t have the K-Mart parking lot closed off cruisers would cut through it and loop back up Mahogany Street, my street, to get back to Sycamore that it ran parallel with. At the end of Mahogany, just before they turned down Dogwood, little Marqius Park sat there lonely and unoccupied most nights.

I imagine at one time it had been some city planners wet dream to have the tiny park sitting in the heart of this low middle class suburb, but then the gangs came. The playground equipment that wasn’t broken all to shit had become advertising space for taggers and gangs. Other than an occasional elderly person walking their dog very early in the morning I never saw anyone using that park for anything remotely recreational once the gangs moved in.

I would drive by the park almost every day on my way to high school and later on my way to work after I graduated. The covered picnic benches in the center of the park were almost always occupied by three or four guys wearing either red or blue shirts depending on which gangs were controlling it at the time. Nearby there was a maze of side streets, apartment complexes, and a long tangled greenbelt that ran alongside Highway 4 just behind the north end of the park. This made for perfect cover when the cops showed up and the gang bangers and addicts had to evacuate. At night gunfire would sometimes erupt in the park. I had an old beige VW Squareback that I parked on the street because of an oil leak that had one of its windows shot out. The police told me it looked like a ricochet from a .45, most likely the park, had bounced off the street and blown my window out.

There were entrances on the south and west end of the park and the gangs would stake younger kids there as lookouts. Most of them were relatives of the older gang members. They were always 10–13-year-old boys. They were allowed to wear the gang’s colors and were on the fast track to become full-fledged members once they were old enough.

Often small groups of other boys would hang around with them after school. The small soccer field was a deserted wasteland that didn’t do much other than collect dog shit. That left the battered area where the busted and rotting playground equipment sat. This is where the young mostly white taggers and wannabe gang members hung out. They didn’t have any credibility, but they still called themselves the Northside Thug Syndicate and tagged as much blank space as possible with NTS. A group of about twelve teenage boys would be there every afternoon with their boomboxes, spray paint, and faux gangster swagger. Their colors were black and silver like the Oakland Raiders (LA Raiders in those days), mainly because none of the larger gangs wore those colors and they could get away with it.

The picnic bench gang members were connected with bigger gangs in Oakland, Richmond, and the Bay Area. They had all grown up living the life before they relocated to Sycamore. They weren’t interested in the middle class white kids whose street creds only went as deep as the MTV gangster rap videos they watched endlessly. When one of the wannabes would wander too close to the picnic benches they were ignored, clowned, or runoff with extreme hostility. But the white kids mesmerized by the televised version of that life that seemed so much more exciting than the one they were living weren’t going to be so easily denied.

One of the young lookouts named Roof was an older boy, around 16 years old, who had some serious mental problems and had stopped going to school. Nobody seemed to know exactly what was wrong with him. Once a month though, he would go into long loud screaming fits, pull out his hair, strip down to his underwear and run through the neighborhood attacking parked cars until either the cops, other gang members, or his family members caught him and calmed him down. But he was the younger brother of one of the high ranking members of the gang that was controlling park at that time, a twenty year old legend called “Jump Town”. Because of this connection he was allowed to act as a lookout when all of the other kids were in school.

The white wannabes hated him with a passion. They couldn’t understand why a “tard” like that was given a job and they were ignored.

A small group of them got together and decided to do something about Roofie. He was too unstable to consistently weed out who belonged in the park and who didn’t. He only seemed to understand that if you were black and wearing blue it was okay to be in the park. Often times he would attack the white kids when they tried to come in the park through an entrance Roofie was guarding at the time.

A kid who’s street name was Double Dome because he always bragged, “Some fool’s gonna get two in da dome,” was the current leader of the NTS. After a few bad run ins with Roofie he hatched a plan to “take Roofie out”.

Double Dome only shared his plan with two other members of NTS. One because Double Dome knew the kid’s dad had a loaded .45 automatic that could be easily stolen. The other kid, “Rap Kingster” was the biggest kid in the group and was nominally consider the enforcer in the gang. Though it was debated whether or not he could actually fight. Roofie had soundly beat the shit out of him a few months back when he tried to force his way into the park through Roofie’s spot. He’d been trying to convince Double Dome to take action ever since.

Double Dome was very good at manipulating people. The kid that was the head of the lookouts was a thirteen year old called “Tanj” because he was always drinking a certain brand of Tangerine soda you could only get at the little Mexican convenience store on the corner near his house. He made the schedule for all the look outs, had created a pager code to summon them to the park, and was responsible for relaying messages from the gang members to the other kids about police patrols, rival gang activity, and any rule changes. It was well known that Tanj would be getting his jump in party when he turned fifteen. And many people thought he would go far in the gang.

Double Dome had an in with Tanj simply because Tanj’s other job was to divide up the various drugs they sold into smaller amounts to sell on the street. Whenever he was working with pot he would always skim off some of the shake at the bottom of the bag and sell it to kids like Double Dome who didn’t know good weed from parsley.

Tanj hated Roofie almost as much as Double Dome and the NTS did. He considered him an incompetent waste of a charity case. “Mother fucker needs to be in a home or something,” he often said to those he knew didn’t have the ear of Roofie’s older brother Jump Town.

The Plan

Double Dome’s idea was simple and straightforward. Tanj would page Roofie at midnight on Wednesday since he knew Roofie couldn’t tell time and would show up at the park anytime he received a page from him. And the police patrolled that area heavily on Wednesday nights for some reason and the gangs played it low key on that night and avoided the park. Double Dome and Rap Kingster would be waiting in the park with the .45 the other kid stole from his dad. When Roofie showed up they planned on forcing him into the woods, up the embankment and on to the shoulder of the freeway. Once there they would push him out of the woods in front of one of the semi-trucks that regularly barreled down high way 4.

Double Dome reasoned that everyone would think that the crazy bastard had flipped out and ran on to the freeway to attack the semi and got himself flattened. Double Dome promised Tanj that they would steal Roofie’s pager before they killed him and dump it in the San Joaquin River so nobody would know Tanj made the fatal page. Double Dome didn’t consider phone records.

Wednesday Night

Everything went fairly well. Tanj made the page from a payphone on Sycamore, Double Dome and Rap Kingster hid in the park near the freeway waiting with the .45 tucked in Double Dome’s pants. Rap Kingster had a big hunting knife and a baseball bat that he’d sawed in half so it would fit in his backpack. Roofie showed up at 12:05. But he didn’t enter the park. He stood near the entrance he always guarded. They could see him shifting from foot to foot spastically. The wind was blowing down from the north that night and it was cold for a Northern California November night.

“We need that fucker closer,” Rap hissed to Double Dome. “I know, I know. Fuck! Maybe we can call him over.”

“Roofie! Hey Roofie,” Double Dome yelled. They watched him cock his head in their direction like a beagle, but he didn’t move.

“Fuck it. Let’s just go get the motherfucker,” Rap said. “Put the gun to his head and he’ll follow us.”

“Yeah, alright. Let’s go.”

They both walked towards Roofie crossing the field and heading towards the west entrance. Double Dome held the gun in his waistband to keep it from sliding down into his pants as he walked. He didn’t want to pull it until they were close enough to Roofie. Rap held the baseball bat and knife behind his back. As they approached Roofie looked right at them. They saw him swaying a little, but didn’t read the signs.

Roofie hit them like a typhoon, enraged that someone had gotten past him and into the park unseen. Double’s .45 had just cleared his waistband when Roofie’s flying knee rammed into his trigger hand causing the gun to discharge and blew his nut sack and left knee cap off. Rap had just enough time to time to scream, “Oh shit!” before Roofie started throwing wild hooks into the side of his head knocking him on his back with an insane Roofie following him to the ground. Desperate, he swung the bat and caught Roofie in the ribs. This slowed Roofie’s punches long enough for him to stab Roofie in the throat. As Roofie rolled off gurgled on the ground next to him drowning in his own blood Rap heard the first police cruiser scream to a stop at the park entrance. Rap looked at Roofie dying and then at Double writhing on the ground slowly bleeding out. He jumped up and ran for the freeway.

The truck driver said he came out of the bushes so fast that he never even had time to hit the brakes. A small white wooden cross with occasional flowers marked the spot where Rap got splattered all over the highway for almost year afterwards.

Double Dome entered Vacaville Prison a eunuch seven months after his wounds healed to do a life sentence. Unfortunately for him Jump Town was sent to Vacaville less than a month later and quickly cut Double’s life sentence down to zero with a well placed shank to Double Dome’s heart.