The NAFTA Blueprint

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  Next, I told Helena about an old friend of mine, Simon ‘Baby-Face’ Radowiski. He was an Armenian Power gang member and a drug dealer in a cyclical process of violence. He was Ukrainian but he grew up with a large group of Armenian hoodlums, which is why he joined their street gang. I went to his house unannounced, a once meticulous perfectionist with OCD-type hygienic tendencies learned in prison, had now become a decrepit, worn-out father of four and an abused, abusive partner. He was overwhelmed to see me. His thick arched eyebrows seemed to leap off of his skin, which now reminded me of Helena’s. His leathered skin turned into a bright vermilion shade with a bouncing smile that stretched across city blocks as he wrapped his chiseled, muscular, steroid-pumped arms around me.

  He often worked out in his backyard and I wondered if he still did steroids and smoked primos a few times a week with his maddening crowd. Perhaps he couldn’t believe I was there in the flesh, it was a genuine smile mixed with surprised glee, and then the kids came stumbling and scurrying into the living room to greet me as well. Meanwhile, his Armenian girlfriend glanced over at me, also with a genuine smile although I speculated she was inebriated because her reading glasses were fastened on unbalanced to her face, while she clenched a glass of stout beer.

  They were beyond being lovers or boyfriend and girlfriend, with the children running amok and the domestic violence. I reckon they hated each other only gravitating towards one another because of routine. They were, like many other couples often became, just partners in crime, domestic crime. Baby-Face took me outside to smoke a cigarette. He wanted any chance to avoid her. I noticed he had a lot of new tattoos across his body. He now had a big ‘South Side’ tattoo on his head with Armenian Power thirteen in cursive handwriting on his neck. He looked menacing, maniacal. He told me he had tattooed his head on his last prison stretch, I was nervous smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer on his porch, drug dealers and gang members always had enemies lingering around.

  Well, we spoke for hours, but the majority of the conversation was redundant and one-sided, he cried at a point when it was too overwhelming to suppress the tears. And what was it about―his relationship and the drug market. The economic crisis had reached the black market. Many of his customers began growing their supply or buying from certified clinics, it wasn’t the same. He could no longer afford his mortgage, it had been about six months since he had last made a payment…I related. His relationship concerns were the same as I had remembered. The domestic violence had always existed only it was now on a daily basis instead of sporadic, which is why his girl’s glasses were plastered on her face sideways. Earlier he had punched her in the face, causing her to break an ashtray on his head. He hated her, he wanted to kill her, and I believed he was capable of it.

  After a few hours of listening to that cyclical process it became unbearable. I tried sharing the story I was working on about NAFTA but he found it unfathomable, he didn’t care. In the past he had looked to me for guidance. I was his muse, but he was beyond being institutionalized in the street life. These people were like what Karl Marx had maintained about the impoverished class. They couldn’t even conceive of their problem, it was too luxurious to think with creativity. At some point Baby-Face had anarchist leanings from back in the Ukraine, I wanted to exploit that, but his concern was feeding the children. He had gone too far with this lifestyle, I knew one day he would do something cunning, it wouldn’t surprise me. I would anticipate it with absolute fervor. So I left. I couldn’t continue listening to his tedious depression. I had my own relationship concerns to mope about. Over the next few days I caught up with some other friends, to have a social network was once again refreshing, but it wasn’t until I saw Sonny Robles in the Men’s Central Jail in Downtown Los Angeles that I suffered a terrible blow.

  Sonny Robles was a West Los Angeles gang member from the street gang―Lennox 13, which is a community nestled between the LAX airport and Imperial Beach. You can’t picture this unless you’ve been there, but Los Angeles is subdivided into regional blocs and the West Side is one of those regional blocs. I used to work at the J. Paul Getty Museum where I met this kid nicknamed ‘Youngster,’ a good friend now―he grew up in Lennox around the gang thing like I did with Armenian Power and some associates of the Russian Mafia. He introduced me to all types of people from the Lennox underground where I kick-started my career.

  We often exchanged stories from the street life that many others could not relate to. From the university or work experiences, we created an impenetrable bond of secrecy. Youngster had a friend, Sonny Robles, who had been imprisoned for murdering a DEA federal informant, a direct assassination straight from the Mexican Mafia. It all seemed very exhilarating. As a journalist I wanted to investigate this story further, which I then began visiting him in prison. We decided to write a biography about his personal experiences, which I’m working on. If you haven’t noticed I’m working on numerous novels. Every journalist wants to be a novelist. It’s making the transition that’s the problem…and the lack of time.

  So anyway, he became a prison correspondent to whom I sent published articles, reviews, life stories, and international photographs. A few years ago, Sonny Robles and Sebastian Salaberri collaborated on a political ideology. Sebastian is a political scientist and city planner currently living in Northern Italy, in Torino, doing a master’s degree in urban planning. They wrote a manifesto, The Southernist Treatise, a philosophical and political essay about the political culture of Los Angeles Mexican-American street gangs. I edited it for them and helped them get it published in the underground. Sonny had served out an eight-year sentence for the assassination of a snitch, but before they released him, the D.A. charged him and his cousin with a double-homicide case that occurred before he went to prison, with the death penalty attached to it. He began fighting the case from prison, and after months of fighting the case, the D.A. dropped the death penalty charge, but they were still pursuing a―life without the possibility of parole decision. Life in prison, it sounded horrendous.

  The cousins received a hung jury in court. This was recent, just about a few weeks ago, a close call. But nine jurors found him guilty, and now they’re going through a re-trial. There’s a lot going on with him at the moment because he’s now a gang drop-out and rumors are spreading in prison that he’s a defector or even possibly a snitch…I saw him in the infirmary with other hospitalized inmates.

  Rumors spread that there was an assassination attempt on his life and that he was stabbed, but he lifted up his shirt to show me there were no scars on his body from stab wounds. He was in the infirmary for other reasons, but he didn’t say. The visiting section where he and I spoke was nothing like I had ever seen before, there were squared bars, almost like checkered-pattern steel bars with a plastic coating. I mean―I couldn’t even see his complete face. He said he was locked in his own cell given two hours of recreation on Sundays. It sounded horrible, worse than Siberian prison conditions.

  Whatever time he serves for the rest of his conviction, he’ll remain in that confinement. I had the opportunity to see him for about two hours, he did all the talking…about the problems with his family, about the problems with other gang members, about monetary concerns, about his soul being plundered by humanity, he was starting to break down. At one point he stopped speaking and put the phone on the table while tears gushed out of his eyes, his head nodded in despair―a solid grown man who was like a Jedi knight…was collapsing into the dimness of his environment.

  I thought about Baby-Face Radowiski, he was collapsing as well, I wished there was something else I could do besides listen, for both of them, but there wasn’t. It was their destined paralysis of institutionalism, and all I could do was try to comprehend. After I left the Men’s Central Jail, I returned to my parent’s house and sulked in bed for hours. That’s when I realized I wanted to return to Texas, I wanted to return to Helena―if I may be so bold
, and I did tell her that but she ignored it. I wanted to return to the story and continue investigating the NAFTA blueprint.