Neighbors Stick to Their Guns--Even Under Fire

SANTA ANA —  I’m living in denial. I tell myself I’m not, but I must be. There I sat New Year’s Eve, my friend from Tustin beside me, hitting the mute button on the TV remote control so he could hear the gunfire erupting all around us.

The closest shots sounded as if they were coming from the street of houses beyond the back yard. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop! My God! was that an automatic rifle? Boom! Boom! Do the neighbors have a bazooka?

Well, it got so noisy I suggested we go get Thai food--thereby spending another New Year’s Eve fleeing Santa Ana.

I didn’t grow up in a war-torn country. I didn’t grow up in Santa Ana. Hell, in Whittier we could ride go-carts down the street and play kick-the-can well past midnight New Year’s Eve. So I’m caught off guard by my resignation to this rain of bullets.

It only sounds bizarre when I hear myself telling someone else about it (“we’ll be going to Long Beach this year--yes, the gunfire, you know.”)

It was different that first New Year’s Eve, 1987. The gunshots began with nightfall--waves of rapid-fire shots. My then-boyfriend and I froze in place, frantically looking around the living room for possible cover. Too many windows facing the street. What about the spare bedroom? No! no! that’s where the shots are loudest. What is going on out there?

By 8 o’clock the racket was mounting in our new neighborhood. We called the police. We would learn only later that police switchboards were so overwhelmed by gunshot reports that officers only responded when someone had been wounded.

We fled to the drive-in, where it was uncharacteristically quiet with only three trucks besides ours. Over champagne and takeout food we tried to forget we’d just signed escrow papers on our first house. Surely the line “hail of gunfire” would have stuck with me if a realtor mentioned it.

The next morning I rode my bike to the home of the Neighborhood Watch president, prepared to shower him with my indignation. Steely faced Bob, a no-nonsense retired schoolteacher, introduced me to the pipe he hid under furniture and called his “metal persuader.” I don’t know why, but he did.

Then he led me to every spot on his property that had been riddled by bullets: rain gutters, a kitchen window ledge, a screen door. And I thought I was furious.

He told me that it was a Mexican custom to ring in the New Year and other holidays by shooting off guns into the air, and that Santa Ana’s large immigrant population still engaged in such celebration.

Bob stomped around his yard, fuming over how he would recoup the costs to repair his gunned-down aluminum fixtures. He said the city of Santa Ana had known this gunplay persisted and there had been no prevention campaign mounted; consequently an expensive lawsuit was waiting to happen.

Over the years, as people sat watching TV in the living room and lay sleeping in beds, bullets fired into the sky had on their return to earth pierced walls and ceilings of homes, wounding several people. One of them was a child. Enough was enough.

I called a friend at home who covered Santa Ana for The Times, urging him to look into a story. OK, I was kind of dramatic and, all right, shrill, if you must know. “This guy on my block was standing there holding shell casings in his hands! I saw the bullet holes myself!”

But in the wake of the New Year’s Eve cacophony, Bob (he had no metal persuader, just a notebook and pen) found legions of complaints from residents and a municipal government that vowed to educate the city’s population about the dangers of random gunfire.

And the city did. Flyers were circulated door to door. Public access cable stations ran announcements. What seemed so obvious--what goes up, must come down--was explained. And that, I thought, was that.

But I haven’t been home any New Year’s since. This year found me barricaded in bed with a horrid flu.

I realized not much has changed since my first New Year’s Eve in Santa Ana. Gunfire still pockmarks the night, and we neighbors gather curbside the next day to compare palms full of spent shells, clucking over the crazies who ring in the new year this way.

Oh, I’m sure it’s not as bad as the past. As I hit the remote’s mute button, pausing for dramatic effect, I tell my friend Ted some New Year’s Eve folklore. About the time when an officer approached an intersection to find a guy blasting an assault rifle into the sky.

“He just turned his patrol car around and drove off.” Ted has several cop friends. Even he was impressed with that.

Several of my neighbors never entertained the idea of calling the police this year. That’s not to say we lack faith in them. There was an officer cruising our street around 10. But what was the point?

“I remember the first or second year we lived here, we were amazed,” recalled my friend, Lewis, who lives around the corner. “We thought, ‘Wow! That’s a lot of firecrackers.’ ”

He laughs at his own naivete, as though he and his wife should have known that our otherwise quiet neighborhood would be riddled with gunfire. “It kind of sounded like rain. Anyway the next morning, we found spent shells in our driveway.”

Now Lewis and his family also spend their New Year’s Eve away from home, in their case a cute house whose corner lot affords a sizable yard for the two kids.

I rationalize that I have no kids to imperil, but I know Lewis is trying to do the right thing by his own.

His wife is a first-grade teacher working in the city, and he is a newly self-employed architect with a business run from home. He needs to stay in expensive Orange County, home to all of his industry contacts and the only place he’s worked since 1978. Their beloved grandparents live close. And the reasonable rent allows them to live in a home roomy enough for each child to have his own bedroom.

But their two children don’t. They share a bedroom on the interior of the house, just in case.

You may be thinking, how could you guys do this? But it’s one night of the year. And we all make these little sacrifices to some degree every day. It’s why someone dreamed up shopping baskets that allow women to lock their purses to the cart.

I enjoy telling friends about how friendly my block is, how my neighbors and I meet--can you take this--even without a garage sale or homeowners association. We swap garden sprinklers and borrow eggs and check on each other when something looks amiss.

And Lewis, well, I met Lewis one morning last summer when he knocked on my front door, wanting to prune bird of paradise leaves off my plant.

He said his mother from Costa Rica needed them to make tamales and that he would bring some by for me to try that weekend. I didn’t know what to think but somehow sensed that a triple-ax murderer wouldn’t have been able to hold up a conversation like he did on the front lawn. I think we talked about the neighborhood, how he should trim leaves from both sides of the plant for balance (two landscapers are we), and how glad we were not to have to check this for a violation of CC&Rs.;

Lewis now ponders the trade-offs between macro and micro for his family. He sighs and says, “It’s a strange society we live in.”