Orion Avenue’s Apartments Become Both Refuge and Jail

In the emancipated hours between the end of the school day and dinner time, the court of 8960 Orion Ave. turns lively. Children skitter up the stairs or roller-skate on the concrete, and the sounds blaring from open doors stake out each apartment’s musical turf.

Rancheras mostly, the country music of Mexico. Downstairs, Junior favored rap, while a man named George moved his speaker on the landing and, in a cowboy hat too big for his head, sat listening to 1940s swing records.

But it doesn’t take long to notice that few of the children ventured outside the iron gate at the front of the building. Some, like Aurelio, 9, whose mother is gone all day cleaning houses, were forbidden to leave their apartments at all. During school breaks, he watched TV and played video games.

Our building, like every other on this block of Orion Avenue, is both refuge and jail cell.

Out back in the parking lot, the older boys would get up afternoon games of touch football. Their playground had the gritty feel of a prison yard, fenced in by chain link topped with barbed wire.

“When you’re in the apartments, it’s all right,” said Lupito, a 17-year-old whose real name is Jose Nievez. “But when you go outside, I don’t like that.”

His teammate, Mike, 13, is even more fearful. “It would scare me if I lived where Malena lives,” he admitted. Magdalena “Malena” Rivas, the building manager, lives in an apartment next to the street.

Outside are the drug dealers and gang members. Outside, there are shots in the night, squealing tires, the flapping of a police helicopter.

Behind their locked doors, inside the bars and iron security gates, the residents of Orion lived a separate existence.

“I can’t tell you about the streets, that’s another world,” Hilario Martinez, 29, apologized one day. Hilario, a day laborer, lived in an apartment with 11 other people that overlooked the street where everything happened.

His was an extraordinary act of self-delusion, perhaps, but a necessary one for people on this street in North Hills. Inside their stucco fortresses, normalcy was the greatest need of all.

Finding Community

There were about 100 of us, living in 36 units. Day laborers, construction workers, security guards, gardeners, and maids for the wealthy who returned home to Orion only on weekends. They came to the San Fernando Valley from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Puerto Rico. Three of the adults we met were born in this country.

Many teetered perpetually on the economic brink. Rent time at the end of the month was a time of tension. Then, they would show up at our neighbor Ampy’s door to borrow a few dollars. She received $590 a month in disability from her job at a plastics factory, and so was considered a good bet for a couple of bucks.

But she was reluctant to give her money away. She needed it for her two teenage sons. “We like to eat well,” she admitted. “Whenever we want to eat fish we walk down to the market and get one for each.”

This was luxury.

In spite of her resistance, she often opened up her wallet because she knew how it felt to be without. This was something we saw over and over again, as the people here found ways to build community in the midst of want.

Malena, for instance, looked after George Navarro, 62, known as Chupacabra because he had the same elfin looks some ascribe to the mythical, blood-drinking creature of Mexico. He dressed in black and spoke in such a high-pitched garble--something he learned as a child in Puerto Rico as a defense against taunting--that most could not understand him.

“They think I’m crazy,” he said.

The manager took him shopping so that he wouldn’t spend his money on batteries instead of food, and occasionally cooked him a steak to relieve his diet of salami sandwiches. When his electricity was cut off, Malena ran an orange extension cord into his apartment until he settled his bill.

In many ways, life behind the bars also could be surprisingly convenient. We found we could obtain almost everything we might want without leaving our apartment.

Vendors flooded the building daily, ringing bells and shouting like hawkers at a ballgame. There was steamed corn on the cob slathered with mayonnaise, pork rinds, ice cream, pizza, tamales, tacos, meat pies, fruit, candy.

If you needed a soda to go with that, Rosa Soriano sold them for 50 cents out of Apartment 23. Nobody drank diet around the two-story building, so Rosa didn’t stock it.

Rosa wore many hats. She was the one people turned to for vitamin shots and sensible advice, whether it was the young mother who didn’t know what to do about her child’s upset stomach, or the woman whose husband beat her for taking a shower in the afternoon when he wasn’t home.

Rosa came to the United States on an errand to buy a sewing machine and return to El Salvador to open a business. Instead, she fell in love with Maury, 10 years her junior, and stayed. Now, she uses the machine to earn a little extra money sewing clothes for the neighbors.

Engine trouble? Edgar Melendez in Apartment 10 trained at the Instituto Tecnico Vocacional for three years. He could fix you up right in the parking lot. As he worked, bent over the fender of an old Toyota, neighbors gathered around with beers in their hands and talked quietly, like men in the company of men anywhere.

He doesn’t recommend the United States to new immigrants. “If you know how to do something it might be worth it,” he said. “But if you don’t have a skill, forget it.”

Edgar had a wife and four children in Guatemala, to whom he dutifully sent $200 a month. He would like to return to his family, but they need the money he sends until the children are out of school. The youngest is 10.

In the meantime, he shared his $250-a-month studio apartment with a girlfriend for companionship. His may not have been a strictly moral arrangement, but it worked behind the bars.

“The bad is outside,” explained Miguel Hernandez, one of our neighbors. “We’re not outside.”

Some children rarely left their apartments.

Aurelio spoke to us through the window of Unit 6, not daring to open the door, with the curtain wrapped around his body so that only his face was revealed.

He knew he had been in the United States for three years. Beyond that he was uncertain. No, the 9-year-old didn’t know where his dad was.

One day, a visiting police officer asked Malena if she allowed her two daughters outside. She said they didn’t need to go wandering around by themselves. They had Nintendo, and they could watch the family’s $3,000 big-screen television, which dominated the living room.

“You mean they’re prisoners in here?” the officer asked incredulously.

Her facial expression dissolved into fear and confusion. She was trying to keep her children safe.

But there was a price to be paid for this fragile degree of safety. Some of the children, especially those locked away all day without playmates, seemed timid and younger than their true ages. Those brave enough to go out front where the gang drank and sold crack were more advanced, but they developed an almost frantic energy.

“Let’s play pachuco,” Agustin, of preschool age, said to his friends one afternoon in the parking lot. Pachuco was a simple game of catch, except for one detail. Whoever dropped the ball was kicked and punched into submission.

The children in the building next door played a game called “Drug Dealer.”

The Straight-A Student

We expected to find people leading desperate lives behind the bars. But what we actually found was a complex world, with winners as well as losers, and a few modest success stories to go with the tales of destruction.

At the top of the economic ladder were Elena Berumen and her two sisters, who brought in $3,100 a month and paid only $644 in rent. Elena, who worked in a factory, had a car and had saved $2,500 toward a condo. She could afford to take her daughter, Sonia, a straight-A student at Monroe High School, out for pizza whenever she wanted it.

Sonia, a tall, athletic girl known in the complex as “the quiet one,” was embarrassed to let her teachers and friends see where she lived. To her, the gang was more an irritant than a danger. The noise they made outside her window at night forced her to do her homework on the landing overlooking the inner courtyard.

In the early evenings, she sat there in a straight-backed kitchen chair, a history book on her lap.

Sonia knew education was her ticket out. Comparing herself to Benjamin Franklin, whom she was studying, she thought she had it pretty good. He had to quit school to go to work.

“I can do whatever I want,” she said. “I have papers, I’m bilingual, and I can go to school.”

But Sonia’s family was the exception.

At the bottom were the scavengers who collected cans and bottles. Even in this rarefied world, where a grocery cart full of cans earned just $4, and an equivalent load of plastic brought $5.50, there was stiff competition.

The most successful was Ruben Gonzalez, who had a pickup and ranged far and wide over his territory. Next were people such as Crescencia Lopez, a heavy woman from the neighborhood who padded along behind her cart packed with cans and bottles.

Last were two brothers, Jonathan, 9, and Eduardo, 7, who lived with their mother in a stuffy apartment beside the laundry room in the building next door. The woman had two jobs, selling cosmetics and working as a kind of bounty hunter for a medical clinic. She got $8 for each customer she delivered.

The boys didn’t have much, but they did have three pairs of shoes: one for school, one for play, and one broken, stringless pair for their job--rooting around in our trash bin after school for cans and bottles.

Eduardo was a sunny child and he tried to make the job a game, though when they ventured into the trash bin of an adjoining building they had to keep a sharp eye out for the manager, who had threatened to beat them for invading his garbage.

Jonathan, a fuzzy-headed, moon-faced boy who liked to watch the shopping channel on television, rarely allowed himself to be distracted from his work. When asked about church, he said crisply they didn’t go. “We don’t have time for that,” he said.

Even outside the trash bin, he was reserved and distant. His teacher at Langdon Elementary complained that he didn’t do his homework or play with other children, but had no idea why. One of the few times Jonathan’s stern countenance cracked was the day he let slip that his birthday was coming.

“When?” he was asked.

“Why?” he responded, alert and suspicious. If he revealed his birthday, might it be used against him somehow? The questioner said she might give him a present.

“Cans?” he asked, breaking into a wide, hopeful smile.

Jesus and Alejandra

Most on Orion Avenue were only days or weeks from desperation, so the slightest mishap could send them into a dangerous free fall.

Jesus Sanchez was more religious than most, so it was ironic that an act of God pushed him over the brink. A gardener, Jesus, 32, worked the big estates in the west San Fernando Valley. Then the fires raged across Calabasas in the fall, wiping out his employer’s business.

Soon, the refrigerator in Apartment 24 was bare and Jesus’ 3-year-old daughter was going to bed hungry.

The Sanchezes lived directly across from us, but we knew nothing of the crisis unfolding behind their drawn curtains until Rosa Soriano spread the word. Then the neighbors came to their aid.

Rosa contributed cornflakes, soup and rice. She also took Jesus’ two small children in during the day so his wife could go to work.

“Even if the parents are not able to provide, God can,” she said.

The same spirit of community prevailed when there was something to celebrate in the neighborhood.

When Alejandra Hernandez turned 15, everyone in her building across the street chipped in to help raise $4,000 for her quinceanera party. There was a big cake, Cook’s champagne, beer and music fuzzing out of an old stereo system. The two transvestites in the building, who were rarely seen, caught the party spirit and came out and danced. The young men in white tuxes held them at arm’s length, but they held them.

When it came time for Alejandra’s special coming-out dance, everyone fell silent to watch the beautiful dark-eyed girl gracefully waltz from one earnest, square-shouldered boy to the next. And when she was done, something had indeed changed in her. The young boys who played at being her suitors in the dance stood back from her.

Out of nothing, with nothing, the poor of Orion Avenue had teased a vision of radiant opulence.

“Inside here it’s nice,” said one of the neighbors. “Everybody is so together. When someone has a problem, everyone helps.”

Economic realities caused the Rivas family in Apartment 5 to move one morning. Mario Rivas, 27, was a freelance auto mechanic, but couldn’t find enough work. His wife’s father said there was plenty of work in Texas, so they loaded all their belongings into a Nissan pickup.

Mario’s biggest problem was not the uncertain job market, but his wife Anna’s restiveness. Their two children lived with Mario’s parents in Guatemala. They had come to the United States to save money. They already had $10,000 for a house in Guatemala City. Now they were trying to save another $6,000 to furnish it.

“I miss the kids a lot,” said Anna, 24, shooting him a sharp look during a break from packing. She had given Mario a deadline. Eighteen months. Earn what you can and save every penny because after that, she was going.

This was the secret side of Orion Avenue. More than a few people living in poverty here owned stores, even small cattle ranches, elsewhere.

Melvin Argueta, for instance, was a 47-year-old construction worker who had lived with his wife on Orion since 1980. A while back, he bought a home overlooking the Pacific Ocean in his home country of El Salvador with $20,000 he saved here.

Shots on Halloween

On Halloween night, we discovered how little the world outside the bars had to do with the world inside. Returning to Orion after dark with bags of candy, we found the street devoid of trick-or-treaters.

It was a sad sight, but the heavy iron security gate had hardly slammed shut when ghouls and goblins and 3-foot-tall crones scurried up and down the stairs, banging on doors and barking out muffled cries of trick or treat. Shrunken as it was, it was still recognizably Halloween.

We set out a pumpkin and gave out candy until we ran out.

Down the street, however, the world outside was about to make its most brazen attack yet.

We had known trouble was brewing. A black gang had marked up the wall of a vacant apartment building, an insult to the Langdon gang’s pride. “We don’t even write on our neighborhood that much,” said Skrappy, one of Langdon’s leaders.

The black gang sent an emissary to Langdon, saying they were sorry. A young homie was to blame.

That didn’t salve the wound, especially after a young black woman moved into an apartment in the heart of Langdon territory.

Orion Avenue once belonged to the black dealers, but Langdon pushed them out and took over in the late 1980s. Since then, the gang has guarded its territory jealously.

That Halloween night, about 50 black youths were standing outside a party at the black woman’s apartment. A contingent from Langdon drove by and opened fire. One bullet lodged in the wall outside the manager’s window. Another came through the window and stuck in a kitchen cabinet.

Within days, the black woman moved out.

When shots rang out after midnight, we thought about going out. But we had investigated gunfire before, only to have the Langdon guys play dumb. We went back to sleep, suddenly understanding what our neighbor Hilario Martinez meant when he said the street was another world.

Times staff photographer Carolyn Cole contributed to this story.

Next: The gang outside the bars

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Living on Orion Avenue

Staff writer John Johnson and Times photographer Carolyn Cole lived for three months in an apartment at 8960 Orion Ave. in North Hills--a street in the San Fernando Valley where the local gang openly sold crack cocaine, intimidated residents and assaulted outsiders. The objective was to learn how people survive--and sometimes thrive--in one of the city’s poorest and toughest neighborhoods. Before they left Orion last fall, The Times’ team also found a strong sense of community, created by families struggling to achieve the American dream.

* Sunday: Orion Avenue, where borders of crime, culture and necessity define a separate existence.

* Today: For many, life on Orion Avenue means existence behind iron bars.

* Tuesday: Even for some gang members, getting out is hard to do.

* Wednesday: The problems on Orion Avenue are obvious, but the solutions elusive.

This series will be available in full on The Times’ Web site beginning Wednesday at http://preview.nohib.com/orion