Babe In The Woods

By Carmen Johns

It took me a long time to realize that I live in a bad neighborhood. In fact, it took me up until about three and a half months ago when a girl I knew named Lily Burk was abducted five blocks away from my house  and then killed. I moved to the outskirts of K-town when I was around eight years old, and the idea of merely spending time on my front porch alone, day or night has always seemed slightly unsettling- so why did it take nine years for it to really click? I guess it comes down to the fact that nothing nearly this scary has happened to me or someone I knew directly in all these years. When Lily was killed, as terrible a thing as it was, I didn’t immediately become hysterical and curl up in a ball under my comforter (as appealing as it may have sounded at the time). I began to really think about my neighborhood, and it all really began to sink in.

I remember the day (July 25, 2009), the time (I would pin it around 6:00 p.m.) the exact moment I found out that Lily had been killed.

Now, let me make it clear that Lily and I were not close in the least. She was someone whose company I found just lovely that I saw from time to time at various gatherings. Lily and I knew each other through our mutual bestie, Zoe. Every room in Zoe’s house has at least a couple pictures of Lily and her family in it, including some of the girls when they were wee little ones, so even before I ever went to a party or one of Zoe’s birthday lunches with Lily, I had a pretty good idea of who she was.

Surprisingly enough, Zoe wasn’t the one who broke the news of Lily’s murder to me. In fact, I didn’t talk to her about the matter for weeks. I’d called her brother, Jake, in search of Zoe moments after they stepped off the plane from their vacation in France. He picked up his cell, sounding placid as usual at first, telling me about bad movies he saw on the flight and a couple stories about the trip, mostly involving nutella crepes. The tone of his voice became more and more strained throughout the conversation. He’s a teenage boy—it was hard to pick up that any sort of tragedy had occurred (not to say he wasn’t deeply affected; it’s just how they talk). He finally spat it out. “Lily… she …she died. Yesterday.”

At this point, Jake nor anyone else had an idea of what exactly had happened since it had happened only hours before I spoke to him, but the pieces of the story slowly came together over the next couple days. Lily was said to have been running errands for her parents around 2:00 p.m. and somehow got abducted by a middle aged, unruly looking black man right outside the Bullocks Wilshire who, as it later came out, was supposed to be on house arrest with an ankle brace. Somehow he had been able to slip through the slimy cracks and he managed to get her to hand over her car keys. He proceeded to drive her from ATM to ATM down Wilshire, trying to get her to take money out for him but the card didn’t work since it was credit only. The man must have become frustrated in his search for quick cash and beat Lily brutally in the head and neck area and left her in the passenger seat of her car near 5th and Alameda. According to the police, she died around 5 or 6 that night but was found twelve hours later. The murderer was found only hours later with a crack pipe and Lily’s keys and cell phone. (The rest is self explanatory.)

With every new piece of info that landed in my lap, my mind reeled, my stomach lurched, everything happened to me that’s supposed to happen to you when you hear bad news, but what bothered me the most was that since I didn’t really know Lily all that well, I almost felt like it wasn’t my place to feel as sad as I was. But I couldn’t help it and I still can’t. I couldn’t have dreamt up a weirder more painful, tragic, heartbreaking thing to happen.

And now I feel like my eyes have opened. My neighborhood has gotten better over the years but it’s still crawling with crime and grime. I live a minute’s walk away from Shatto Park, a regular spot for gangsters and crack dealers. You can find people having sex in their cars or doing shady deals in questionable vans in front of my house at any given time between 8:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. I almost slid and fell on what looked like a heroin needle the other day, walking to my car. Not to mention that my house has been broken into and cleaned out twice in the past five years. And now I’m realizing- these things have become so routine in my life that I’ve never stopped myself and thought about how scary these facts are. It’s taken nine years to realize how blind I’ve been. It’s not like I don’t have any fond memories of my neighborhood at all- I do. I have very fond memories of walking our old cocker spaniel Henry or walking to the grocery store on those cool summer nights, however I still only ever felt 100% secure and safe when I was walking around with both my mom and step-dad; a happy little family unit, floating around at the surface of a melting pot of criminals.

When people who have heard about what happened find out that I knew Lily Burk the little bit that I did, and that this tragedy happened only a matter of yards away from my house, they always expect me to confess to them with wide eyes about how much more scared I’ve become of my crime-ridden neighborhood since then. When I answer, I feel my mind drift off to another place and I robotically give them an answer they expected to hear. “Yeah man it gives me straight-up chills to walk by there, even to walk to the Vermont/Wilshire metro and see the Bullocks. Even down my own block to go to Rite-Aid. Nothing’s ever stopped me from Thrify’s ice cream until now” (I promise my jokes are still this bad when I’m not trying to make something heavy into a lighthearted conversation). What I feel though, is that these fears have always been there in many shapes and forms, whether it was the questionable van or the syringe in my driveway. It was the faint silhouette of the hoodied gang, the shaking of the spray paint cans; it was the shadows of the grotty old hobos and the clanging of their shopping carts. My fear was once vaguely embodied by these faceless people, and this tragedy brought these people to life, sharpened the features on their faces. I guess I had been scared for a reason.

Babe In The Woods

By Devin Browne

Is there any real hope for us to ever be anything else when we’re young and white and living in neighborhoods like this one? When I first moved to MacArthur Park I woke up and walked to work when it was still dark out and all the men on the corners and in the parking lots were already up and always I tried to avoid them, but couldn’t. I remember one man once caught me staring down an alley that stank of urine and trash and he looked at me for a very long while until I gave myself away; I was afraid and he knew it. Later I learned to wear sunglasses, no matter the weather, and so I did not look at the men who whistled or the miqueros who stepped in front of me to ask ID Bonita? or at the men who slowed their cars to a walking speed and followed me down the street, yelling through their windows things I never heard because I did not take off my headphones to listen.

Of course I knew that I did not belong here. I knew as well that I might even be in danger here, but it didn’t seem to matter then because it was all part of the story and the story was what I cared about. I remember walking one morning past the men who wrap flowers to sell on the corners and the sidewalks where they worked were strewn with petals and some of the boys were only sixteen and had walked across deserts to get here and I could see the sun rise over the downtown skyline behind them and I knew that I didn’t want to be a reporter any place else. Everything was illegal here and everyone was up to something. The women on 7th Street seemed to be pushing strollers with babies in them, but were really pushing, and selling, strollers with hot tamales tucked underneath baby blankets. The stores on Alvarado said they were discount stores for kitchenware and small home appliances when what they really meant was that their sales clerks in the window were prostitutes who did business at the Oasis Motel.

So my reasons for living here were never about whether or not the neighborhood was a “good” neighborhood, but whether or not it was an “interesting” neighborhood. This justification worked some, but not all, of the time. My first year in MacArthur Park I did not have a car and so I took the train, sometimes very late at night, and I would step off the escalator and into the deserted street, fair and alone, and it was to fight fate then not to feel afraid. All I could do was run (the strategy was to appear strange rather than desirable) and I did: in skirts, in heels, for blocks and blocks, until I arrived home, at my apartment building. On nights like these I did not care, at all, that my neighborhood was interesting. All I could think about were the headlines, humiliating and unsympathetic, that might later explain what had happened: White Girl in Heels Runs Through MacArthur Park After Midnight, Gets Shot. Sometimes it was worse; sometimes I heard a line not that I had imagined but that I remembered. It was harder to dismiss, then, and it only sounded all the more panicked if I tried: Devin, will you try not to be such a babe in the woods!

All of my brothers and sisters admit to keeping lines from our father around; we play them when we either know that they’re true or when we fear them to be. In this case, since the scolding happened in my hometown, a place so insistently safe and suburban it’s often called a “bedroom community,” I had thought at first that it was not true, that he was overreacting. We were  grocery shopping and I put my wallet in the shopping basket and forgot about it until the cashier held it up and asked, “Is this yours?” My dad looked appalled, really twisted his face in a cringe, like he had again caught my brother throwing dirt bombs in the new swimming pool and yelled, “Devin, will you try not to be such a babe in the woods!”

So often since then I have heard this. I mean over and over again: in a dress, with my laptop, walking from my car to apartment at night. It is a line heavy on alert, but thin on specifics; last month I parked my car in front of my building at 9 p.m. and I did not like at all the guy walking towards my building — his hoodie, his cigarette, I don’t know — and in this moment I decide try not to be a babe in the woods means wait until he’s gone before getting out of my car. In the end it isn’t enough. As soon as my key makes contact with the gate I feel a hand on my skirt, squeezing. “Hey baby, cómo estás?” he says.

Part of the problem is that the line is a terrible one and even if it doesn’t become a track that I commit to memory and play all the time like I do try not to be a babe in the woods, I will still hear it, as hey baby, cómo estás is part of the neighborhood ambiance — and now, forever, when I do, risk the reminder of this guy, grabbing me. The other problem, of course, is that he is grabbing me. I am not sure what to say to him, really. All I want is for him to go away and it’s been awhile since the self-defense class I took in the eighth grade so I tell him I’ll call the police and he says “No, baby.” I tell him I’ll gouge his eye out with my key (I have no idea how to do this, by the way) and he offers me his cigarette. One twist is that I speak English and he apparently does not, and neither does anyone else on the street. The couple I try to appeal to (“Excuse me, but this man is really bothering me!”) look away when they hear what is not Spanish. I take the same line to a man outside of a hardware store on the corner, screaming it this time from a block away, and I don’t know if the man on the corner heard or not, but the guy in the hoodie did and he leaves. I run inside to my apartment and put down my blinds and decide tonight is the night for pepper spray.

Of course I have known many more dangerous things to happen in other nicer neighborhoods, but the settings in those cases are such that the victims cannot be fairly I-told-you-so-ed. They have done the best that they can. It is to no fault of my parents that their house, in a gated community, near Palm Springs, was robbed; they pay guards and have a security system installed. When my car was smashed on a nice street in Echo Park, when my roommate was raped in the room next door to mine in a house we shared in Silver Lake, I felt, in both cases, that it had simply been a rash of bad circumstance, proof that there is no such safe place. I suppose only part of me believes this then, for it is in MacArthur Park alone that I hallucinate in headlines. White Girl Walking Alone Near MacArthur Park with Expensive MacBook Gets Mugged. They are always of the same formula: stark in their absence of surprise, unforgiving, almost accusatory at those of us that could be someplace else.

So now I have pepper spray, the 2 million SHU formula, police-strength, in a dispenser patented for its speed and accuracy, with refills and an internal safety that apparently prevents spraying by a preschooler. I will say that it was not a totally happy day when the pepper spray arrived; the man on the cover of the package that was being sprayed in eyes was old and in a beenie and likely homeless and this made me feel bad, like I was now part of the problem. So it is with things that are meant to sting. I like carrying it and I like holding my finger on top of the button when I get out of my car at night and I do not like to think about whether a babe in the woods is a babe still, even with Spitfire Point & Shoot Pepper Spray on her key chain.

The other option is to leave the woods altogether, another story.