Finding a Refuge in Words : Culture: Writers workshop provides nurturing environment in which those battered by living among gangs can share their pain.

By DUKE HELFAND

Dec. 6, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

The story being read to the audience is about a homeboy named Li’l Beto who played clarinet in the school band and dreamed of becoming a musician and a gangster.

At 15, Li’l Beto chose the latter, a decision that cost him his life. One Sunday morning, while friends played baseball at the park, Li’l Beto lay in a gutter, his fragile body cut nearly in two by a shotgun blast.

The story, while tragic, hardly fazes the half a dozen people seated around the table. Instead, it strikes a familiar chord among these poets and playwrights from the street, all members of the writers workshop at the Homeland Cultural Center in Long Beach.

Every Saturday for the last five years, homeboys, homegirls and others have flocked to this refurbished artist’s studio near Anaheim Street, armed with sad and chilling tales about la vida loca-- the crazy life.

For the writers, the workshop doubles as a sort of communion where they can unload their burdens among people they regard as family. One at a time, they open their notebooks and read about worlds they keep guarded outside this room.

There is the story about Sleepy, who goes to prison at 18 for a murder friends say he didn’t commit, only to return a heroin addict. And the play about Angel, a frightened 15-year-old who refuses to call police after her boyfriend has raped her. And the poem about 7-year-old Mario, who plays dead on the bathroom floor as his drunken father points a shotgun at his head.

Mario Ybarra Jr., now 21, writes about his reaction to his father and that ugly incident in the autobiographical poem “Shotgun”: “I remember, I wished I could kill him. Pick up his gun and just kill him.”

The workshop participants are a mixture of young and old, virtuous and criminal. Among the core of eight to 10 writers is a single mother on welfare, determined to earn a college degree and become a kindergarten teacher despite a 10-year absence from school. Her fellow storytellers include a convict who writes from prison and his girlfriend, who reads his work to the group and tape-records the reactions.

Workshop director Manazar Gamboa is himself a former convict who serves as a father figure to the writers, a man with a keen appreciation for the streets where he grew up.

Although the city-funded workshop initially attracted writers from neighborhoods around the Homeland center, it has gained a modest following through word-of-mouth and now includes people from Wilmington, Glendale and Cypress. Today, the writers--ages 12 to 60--take their work on the road, reading at cultural festivals and bookstores in Long Beach and Los Angeles. They have published one collection of poems, and a second one is due out later this month.

Few of these novice scribes ever dreamed of writing stories, let alone poetry. Most have spent their lives on the fringe, dropping in and out of school or struggling to eke out a living in the impoverished sprawl of central Long Beach, where drug dealers and guns are as much a part of the landscape as the streets themselves.

“All of these people have gone through pretty hard situations,” said Gamboa, who spent nearly two decades behind bars for a variety of crimes, including armed robbery. “I know, because I experienced it myself.”

Many of the writers say they were intimidated at first by the written word--uncertain if they could get thoughts down on paper or whether their ideas would be any good. Indeed, much of the writing is unpolished on first reading--raw impressions about daily life, scribbled on pieces of paper.

But powerful stories also emerge from the poets’ notebooks.

Among them are tales by the prison inmate who belongs to the group. The man, a veterano gang member from Long Beach who asked that his name not be used, hopes his writing will deliver a message to young homeboys: Avoid trouble, or end up dead or locked away.

“I didn’t listen to nobody when I was out there,” said the 29-year-old man, who is serving a five-year sentence in North Kern State Prison near Bakersfield for a drug conviction. “I think if one person listens, that’s at least one life.”

The man said he was inspired to write the story about Li’l Beto, the young homeboy who played the clarinet, because of the cavalier attitude toward death he saw on the streets.

“You see, Li’l Beto chose to be a gangster like me,” he writes in the story, “Yo Soy el Cholo” (I Am the Cholo). “And just like a gangster lives, a gangster dies. And to all you youngsters out there, acting like little ‘foolios’ that think this can’t happen to you, think again! . . . We play for keeps! If you lose, you pay with death! And if you win, you’ll probably end up spending the rest of your life in prison with the other winners. Your best bet is to not play at all!”

For Deborah Sanchez, the group has provided an opportunity to cast attention on the poor and outcast whose lives might otherwise go unnoticed. Sanchez, a single mother, raised her son in the Dana Strand public housing project in Wilmington while she attended college and law school. She relied on welfare and part-time jobs to pay rent, and scholarships and loans for tuition.

Today, the 35-year-old Sanchez is a prosecutor in the Los Angeles city attorney’s office. But she remembers the humiliation during law school of appearing for job interviews in jeans--the only clothes she could afford--when others arrived in sleek suits.

Her work is about the world she comes from and people who, like her, were disadvantaged. In one poem, “Yesterday’s News,” she recalls her days in the housing project, waiting with a neighbor named Vicki for the mailman to arrive with welfare checks.

“ Vicki clings to the edge of the world trying to convince me nobody cares , that no one will come to save us , but I still believe that I am not forgotten .

“And so we talk about yesterday’s news, like it was a good movie, saving the stories about what we saw outside our window last night for some other time when the calmness has vanished.”

Like Sanchez, other members of the group also use their writing to find relief from personal pain.

Lorena Trejo, the single mother on welfare studying to become a kindergarten teacher, has relied on poems and stories to cope with bouts of depression. Trejo lives alone with her 5-year-old daughter in a cramped apartment in Long Beach. Writing, she says, helps her vent frustrations she could not broach at home or with friends.

“Some people go jogging. Some people listen to music. I write,” said Trejo, 28, whose boyfriend has been locked up most of the 13 years they have been a couple. “I pull out pen and pencils and let it go on paper.”

One of the first poems she wrote after stumbling onto the Homeland group four years ago dealt with visits to her boyfriend.

“I hate being in this situation,” she wrote in “Separation.”

“Men are seated on one side and families on the other . . .

“Some cry, some smile, others appear to be happy, but inside they’re feeling helpless . . . “What causes you to keep coming back to this place? Freedom is so much better . . . “

Trejo’s involvement in the group also helped her academically. She barely squeaked by in high school with Cs and Ds, avoiding assignments out of a fear of writing. By participating in group writing assignments at Homeland, in which she explored her personal life, Trejo says, she gained confidence in her abilities.

Now, certain that she can express herself on a blank page, Trejo is enthusiastic about her classes at Long Beach City College, where she is a freshman. In one class, Trejo recently volunteered to read a personal essay aloud, something that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.

Like Trejo, others credit the close-knit group at Homeland with helping to build their confidence. “The workshop always helps me discover things about myself,” said Melissa Bates, 30, who travels from Cypress to read her poetry and the work of her boyfriend, the prison inmate. “It has changed my life.”

Or, as Trejo put it: “This is where we do our healing.”

Friendships have grown beyond Homeland’s front door. Writers now keep in close touch outside the workshop and say they look forward to Saturday afternoons, when the group meets.

“It’s a really big thing to come here and see everybody,” said Tina Demirdjian, who comes from Glendale. “It feels really good to come home. It’s like growing up as babies.”

The writers credit Gamboa, the workshop’s energetic leader, with creating an intimate atmosphere and keeping the group running so long.

When the workshops are in progress, it is clear Gamboa is in charge. He does not hesitate to tell writers to shut up when they are disruptive. But he also encourages the tentative ones. “Slow down, homeboy,” he told one burly teen-ager at a recent session as the youth mumbled quickly through a poem. “Read loud, homeboy.”

The 60-year-old Gamboa, a striking figure with a stark white beard and a mane of bushy gray hair, says his bumpy life has given him an appreciation for the pressures faced by many in the workshop.

Gamboa, who lives in Silver Lake, spent 17 years in California prisons for a number of offenses including possession of heroin. During four prison stints, he found salvation in writing. He studied grammar, poetry, psychology, history, always with dictionaries at his side.

In the nearly 20 years he has remained crime-free, Gamboa has published collections of his own poetry, run writing workshops for juvenile offenders and served as president of Beyond Baroque, a well-known literary group in Venice. He established the Homeland writers workshop in 1989 after the center’s director, Dixie Swift, saw his work in a poetry magazine and asked him to start the group.

In the years since, Gamboa has developed close personal ties with several members of the workshop, who say he understands their problems as few others do.

“For some reason, Manazar is able to reach me like the (high school) teachers couldn’t,” Trejo said. “He is familiar with the lifestyle I have been through.”

The inmate who participates in the workshop looks to Gamboa as a sort of role model. As Gamboa did in prison, the man keeps a dictionary in his cell and uses the reference book to learn new words.

“Most people like me are not going to make it out there,” the convict said of life outside prison walls. “Manazar beat the odds. There ain’t too many people like that, and I want to be one of them.”