From 1997 But Reads Like Now: The Unwanted: The American Dream Replaced By Drugs Neo-Nazism, Despair [thenewyorker]

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/12/01/the-unwanted

December 1, 1997 Issue

The Unwanted

In a Los Angeles suburb where schools and parents faltered, the American Dream was replaced by drugs,  neo-Nazism, and despair. The hardest hit were Mindy Turner and her friends.

By William Finnegan
November 24, 1997

Film companies used to come to the Antelope Valley, in northern Los Angeles County, to shoot high-desert  scenes. It was empty country, a good backdrop for Westerns. Now they come when they need to burn down  or blow up a housing tract. In 1992, for the fiery climax of "Lethal Weapon 3," Warner Bros. used a  development called the Legends, at Avenue J and Thirtieth Street West, in the city of Lancaster. The Legends  had become available after its financing failed, leaving unfinished forty-eight large, Spanish-style homes,  each named after a legendary American (Babe Ruth, Marilyn Monroe). Mel Gibson and Danny Glover went  on a memorable rampage through the tract. When I drove through its curving streets last year, I found a  wasteland (tumbleweeds, shopping carts, graffiti-covered sofas) surrounded by a high brown wall.

The transformation of the Antelope Valley from rural desert into modern suburbia—with neighborhoods,  literally, to burn—was very sudden, a historical jump cut. In 1980, the combined population of Lancaster  and Palmdale, the Valley's two main cities, was sixty thousand. By 1994, their combined population was  two hundred and twenty-two thousand, and today estimates of the Valley's total population range as high as  four hundred thousand. This hyper-expansion was first sparked by housing prices in Los Angeles and its  nearer suburbs, which soared during the nineteen-eighties, and by white flight from an increasingly Latino  and Asian city. The Antelope Valley had been considered too remote for commuters, but the completion of  the Antelope Valley Freeway, snaking over the San Gabriel Mountains, helped change that. In the Antelope  Valley, one could buy for two hundred thousand dollars a new house that might cost four hundred thousand  in the San Fernando Valley. What was more, the air was cleaner and the streets were safer. The commute to  jobs in the city was longer—an hour longer, at least, each way—but that was the trade-off. And so it was  that the desert brought forth swimming pools and convenience stores beyond number, and wide empty  streets as far as the eye could see.

Then, in 1990, the Southern California economy, staggered by cutbacks in the aerospace and defense  industries, fell into a deep recession. Los Angeles County alone lost more than half a million jobs, and  property values throughout the region collapsed. In the Antelope Valley, abandoned housing tracts began to  dot the subdivided desert. Boarded-up shopping centers and bankrupt school districts followed, along with  a wave of personal financial disasters so severe that USA Today dubbed Palmdale "the foreclosure capital  of California."

And yet the Antelope Valley's population has continued to grow. Between 1990 and 1994, Palmdale was the  second-fastest-growing city in the United States, Lancaster the sixth-fastest. As a rule, the Valley's newest  residents are poorer and darker than their predecessors, live in more crowded lodgings, and are more likely  to rent. Still, the Valley remains, in a county where whites are a minority, overwhelmingly white (sixty-eight  per cent), home-owning, and politically dominated by conservative Republicans of the pro-growth, antitax  stripe. And the reasons most people give for moving out from the city—less crime, less smog, cheaper  housing—have not changed. The Valley remains particularly attractive to families with children. Indeed, it  has been called "the last great breeding ground of Southern California."

For anyone who has spent time there lately, this is a scary thought—if only because growing up these days  in the Antelope Valley seems to be, for many kids, a pretty harrowing, dispiriting affair. This may be true  today of growing up in America generally, but the Valley's supersonic growth has led to overcrowded, often  chaotic schools; according to the high-school district's superintendent, nearly forty-five per cent of the  entering students do not finish with their class. The teen-pregnancy rate is also alarmingly high. Juvenile  crime is a major problem, usually attributed to "unsupervised children"—to, that is, the huge number of kids  whose parents can't afford after-school care and often don't return from their epic commutes until long after  dark. With neighborhoods devoid of adults from early morning to night, the most popular youth crime is,  naturally, burglary. A sheriff's-department spokesman in Lancaster estimated that fully half the Valley's  children are unsupervised after school. He also said that there are now, not coincidentally, more than two  hundred youth gangs represented in the Valley.

I grew up, a generation ago, in Woodland Hills, then an outer suburb of L.A., and when I started spending  time with teen-agers in the Antelope Valley I figured I had a head start on understanding their world. As it  turned out, my youth might as well have been spent in Kathmandu for all the clues it gave me in this new  realm. There was a street war raging in Lancaster between a white-supremacist skinhead gang known as the  Nazi Low Riders and a rival gang of antiracist skinheads who called themselves Sharps. This obscure,  semi-doctrinal conflict fascinated me long before it escalated to homicide, as it eventually did. And yet no  adult, I discovered, could shed any real light on it. I needed a native guide, and I found one in Mindy Turner,  who, at seventeen, was already well embarked on the kind of casually terrifying existence I was starting to  regard as common.

She was living with her mother, her younger brother, and an older half brother in a four-bedroom white  stucco ranch-style house in Lancaster. Her mother, Debbie, worked behind the counter at Thrifty Drugs; she  had bought the house with the settlement she got after her husband, a crane operator, was electrocuted on the  job in 1989, when Mindy was in elementary school. Mindy recalled, "They came to get me at school and  said, 'Your dad's gone to be with your dog and your grandpa in Heaven.' I've never gotten over it. Whenever  I get sad, I start thinking about it and just cry."

Debbie remembered Mindy being deeply troubled by the idea that her dad had never been baptized, and  thought that that was probably why Mindy later became a Mormon—because she wanted to be baptized  herself. Actually, before Mindy became a Mormon she had wanted to become Jewish. But that had turned  out to be too much work. Becoming a Mormon was relatively easy. All this was before Mindy got addicted  to crystal methamphetamine and became a Nazi, in the ninth grade.

Mindy and her mother shared blond good looks, but Debbie was hearty and outgoing, while Mindy was  pale, fashionably thin, moody, intense. Her manner oscillated with unnerving speed—from jaded  worldliness to girlish enthusiasm, from precocious grace to gawkiness, from thuggish cynicism to tender  vulnerability. She spoke in quick, fluid bursts, as if she had to express each thought before she changed her  mind.

In her mother's day, Mindy's looks might have made her a homecoming queen. But Mindy stopped going to  school while she was in the tenth grade. "I'm not a people person," she told me. "I didn't like all the little  gossip circles that went on there."

Mindy had always been a good student, earning B's, but had slipped academically in junior high (as a  disturbingly high number of American girls do). In the seventh and eighth grades, she became first a  "hesher"—into heavy-metal music and smoking marijuana—and then a "hippie," into reggae and smoking  marijuana. She also became sexually active. Her lovers were mostly older; some were much older. "I was  kind of looking for a father," she told me.

Mindy's Nazi period had various sources. Spike Lee had helped get her into it, she said. She and a friend  had gone to see "Malcolm X." They found they were the only whites in the audience, and a black guy had  asked them sarcastically if they were in the right theatre. "That's why I hate Spike Lee," she told me.  "Because he's a racist. And that's when I started thinking, If the black kids can wear 'X' caps, and Malcolm  is calling us all 'white devils,' what's wrong with being down with white power?"

Her real political inspiration, though, was methamphetamine, which is also known as crank, crystal, ice, or  simply speed. The leading illegal drug in the Valley, methamphetamine is a powerful addictive stimulant  whose longtime consumers tend to suffer from paranoia, depression,hallucinations, and violent rages. The  Nazi Low Riders were one of Mindy's speed connections. "They're all tweakers," she told me. (Tweakers  are speed addicts.) "Speed is just so cheap here. And it makes you feel so powerful, so alert."

The N.L.R.s' hangout was the Malone household, in a run-down neighborhood in downtown Lancaster.  Andrea Malone, a single parent, had three teen-age boys, all white-supremacist skinheads, and she worked  long hours, giving the kids the run of the house. Mindy, who had grown bored with Mormonism, became a  regular there, snorting speed, smoking dope, and becoming fast friends with the N.L.R.s. They called her a  "skin bitch," but she refused to shave her head. "My dad always said he loved my long blond hair, so I  wouldn't cut it off," she told me. She and the other N.L.R. girls ("They called us Property of the N.L.R.s, not  members. It's this weird thing") fought with girls from rival gangs, including Sharps. But Mindy claimed  she'd never taken part in random attacks on black people—something the N.L.R.s specialized in. "I just used  to sit in the car and watch, while they'd get out and be, like, 'Go back to Africa, ----er,' and beat people up."

At first, Mindy's mother had no idea what was going on. "I talked to Mrs. Malone on the phone a few  times," Debbie told me. "She seemed really nice. I used to drive Mindy over there, and the Malone kids and  some of the others used to come over here. I knew they were prejudiced, but as long as they acted civilized  they were welcome. I even took them roller-skating."

The N.L.R.s were into tattoos: swastikas, skulls, Iron Crosses, lightning bolts—though lightning bolts were  permitted to be worn only by those who had killed a black person. Mindy got a big swastika on one hip.  ("My mom got really mad when she saw it.") Her skinhead friends were also into guns. In early 1995, one  of her boyfriends, Jaxon Stines, drove with a group of N.L.R.s by the house of another boy whom Mindy had  been seeing, and fired shots through a bedroom window, aiming for the other boy's bed. No one was hurt,  but Mindy was picked up by the police for questioning, and Jaxon pleaded guilty to attempted murder.

Debbie was by then deeply alarmed about the company her daughter was keeping. Mindy was severely  strung out—a full-tilt tweaker, with a daily habit. She had lost a lot of weight. She rarely slept. Finally, she  became so dehydrated that she had to be hospitalized.

While she detoxed, with her mother keeping her skinhead friends away, Mindy seemed to snap out of her  gang-girl trance. "I just realized I didn't hate black people," she told me. "Also, I'm totally infatuated with  Alicia Silverstone, and she's Jewish. I've seen 'Clueless' like eleven times. So how could I be a Nazi?"

But the N.L.R.s did not take apostasy lightly. "They started calling my house, saying they were going to kick  my ass. They started driving by here, throwing bottles at the house." Two N.L.R. girls, Heather Michaels  and Angela Jackson, were particularly incensed. "Angela said she was coming over here to kill me. I was  scared, but I told her, 'Fine, come over, whatever.' But she never came. Heather, especially, is really, really  mad at me. They all say I'm a race traitor."

Debbie Turner took measures. She had an electronic security system installed around the house. "It got  really bad after Jaxon went to jail," she told me. "They started coming by here. I was afraid they were going  to shoot at the house. It was very scary." Debbie was also paying for a series of painful, expensive laser  procedures to remove Mindy's swastika tattoo. The final cost for erasing the tattoo would come to four  thousand dollars.

And that was how Debbie and I talked about Mindy's tour with the N.L.R.s during my first visits to the  Turners' house—as a nasty accident whose scars were now being, not without cost, erased. Mindy was even  back in school, through an independent-study program.

At the same time, we all knew that things were more complicated. For one thing, Jaxon had been released,  after just six months in jail, and he and Mindy were seeing each other again. "Me and Jaxon have been  through so much together," she told me. For example, a few weeks after her seventeenth birthday, she had  had an abortion. "I wanted to keep it," Mindy said. "Because I knew that if Jaxon and I ever broke up I  would still have some communication with him, because we would have a kid together. But then we  decided we just weren't mentally ready for it. We fight all the time. And I was afraid that if we had a kid and  Jaxon stayed friends with those people the kid would be brought up around all that hate."

Jaxon's gang status was actually ambiguous. He hung out with the N.L.R.s, and they considered him one of  them, but he didn't publicly "claim" N.L.R. In any event, his association with the N.L.R.s extended no  automatic protection to Mindy. She had therefore turned to the antiracist Sharps, her erstwhile enemies, for  protection. The Sharps, however, were in no particular hurry to help her—leaving her in an even more  vulnerable position.

She and Jaxon did indeed fight all the time, about almost anything. Raves, for example. Mindy indicated a  poster on the wall in her bedroom, advertising something called the Insomniac Rave. "That was so great,"  she said. "It was the first real rave I went to. Dang! It was in Hollywood. Raves are like big parties, with  all different races dancing. I took Ecstasy at the Insomniac Rave, and I danced all night." She sighed. "Jaxon  can't stand it that I go to raves," she said. "He says I don't act white. But what is acting white? Me and him  have been getting drunk almost every night lately, and I ask him, 'What do you think black people do that's so  different from whites? They just sit around getting drunk and listening to music. Drive around in cars. Just  like us.' "

Kicking around teen-age Lancaster, I sometimes felt as if I had fallen in with a thousand little cultural  commissars, young suburban ideologues whose darkest pronouncement on another kid—a kid deviating  from, say, the hard-core-punk-anarchist line on some band or arcane point of dress—was, inevitably, "He's  confused."

Mindy's own "beliefs," as she called them, were eclectic. Her brave and principled rejection of racism,  even her devotion to Alicia Silverstone, did not mean she had embraced enlightened liberalism in all  matters. She still had a soft spot for Adolf Hitler—she claimed she was the only N.L.R. to actually study  "Mein Kampf"—and her all-time-favorite "leader" was still Charles Manson. "My mom thinks I'm sick, but  I think he's cute," she told me. "In a weird, gross way, I think he's attractive. He has the real fuck-you blood.  He acts as his own lawyer. He talks for himself. I've read some of 'Helter Skelter.' I wouldn't, like, buy a  poster of him and put it up. My mom wouldn't let me do it if I tried. But I don't think it would fit my room,  anyway, with all my nice John Lennon and Beatles stuff."

The walls in Mindy's room were indeed adorned with Beatles posters. Her father, she said, had been a big  John Lennon fan. But she also loved Trent Reznor, of Nine Inch Nails, whose best-known lyric was "I  wanna fuck you like an animal!" I asked about a framed photograph, set next to her bed, of a shirtless,  tattooed young man. The picture was obviously taken in prison.

"That's Madness," she said. "He's twenty-three. He says he's in love with me, but he knows I can't get over  Jaxon. He's in for armed robbery. I didn't know him too well before he went to jail, but then we started  writing letters. He's S.F.V. Peckerwood."

The Peckerwoods are a white gang, known mainly for mindless violence and methamphetamine dealing.  They're big in the Antelope Valley but, some say, they're bigger in the San Fernando Valley, or S.F.V. They're  biggest of all in prison. "Madness has his beliefs," Mindy said. "He believes whites are better than blacks.  But he knows I don't think like that, so we don't talk about it."

Mindy was by no means the only girl I had met in the Valley who had a prisoner boyfriend. I asked her what  it was about guys in jail.

"It's sick, I guess," she said. "But I just find it really attractive. I guess it means they're capable of doing  something really spontaneous, without regard for the consequences."

"Like shooting somebody."

"Yeah. They're adventurous. And they're tough, usually. There's nothing else to do in there but work out."

Mindy invited me to go with her and some friends to a rave in Hollywood a few days later. "Maybe Darius  can come, too," she said. Darius was Darius Houston, one of the Sharps to whom Mindy had turned for  protection. Darius is half black, half white, and was probably the N.L.R.s' least favorite skinhead. "I don't  think Darius really likes me," Mindy said. "Because when I hung out with the boneheads"—this is a generic  term for racist skinheads—"I used to call him a ----er. All the Sharps have good reason to hate me."

I asked Mindy if she might be hoping to become a Sharp herself.

She shook her head, and said, "Most people here say, 'Mindy Turner? Oh, you mean Nazi Mindy.' So I don't  want to start being Sharp Mindy. I want to be just Mindy. If somebody asks me what I am now, I just tell  them I'm Free Unity. That's not a gang. It's just what I believe."

"Sharp" stands for "skinheads against racial prejudice." It is not, as I first thought, a local Antelope Valley  sect. Skinheads claim Sharp throughout the United States, in Europe, and even, reportedly, in Japan. There  is no formal organization—just an antiracist ideology, a street-fighting tradition, and a few widely  recognized logos, usually worn on jacket patches. Sharp's raison d'être is its evil twin, the better-known  white-supremacist and neo-Nazi skinhead movement.

All the Antelope Valley Sharps, I found, were amateur social historians, determined to rescue the skinhead  movement—or simply "skinhead," as they call it—from disrepute. In their version, which seemed broadly  accurate, the original skinheads emerged in England in the mid-sixties out of other youth cultures—notably  the "hard mods" and the Rude Boys, stylish Jamaicans who wore porkpie hats and listened to reggae and  ska. Skinheads were clean-cut, working-class, nonracist ("two-tone"), and tough. They loathed hippies, for  reasons of both class and hygiene, loved soccer and beer, fighting and ska, scooters and Fred Perry tennis  shirts. For a detailed history of skinhead, the Antelope Valley Sharps all urged on me a book, published in  1991, in Scotland, called "Spirit of '69: A Skinhead Bible."

By the seventies, the movement had been hijacked, according to the Sharps, by the anti-immigrant National  Front in England. And it was the second wave of British skinhead that crossed over to the United States, in  the late seventies, as part of the great punk-rock cultural exchange; by then neo-Nazism and white  supremacism were definitely in the mix, and a host of unholy alliances have since been formed between  racist skinheads and old-line extremist organizations like the Aryan Nations, White Aryan Resistance, the  Church of the Creator, and the Ku Klux Klan. After a decade of hate crimes and racist violence, white- power skinheads have become increasingly familiar figures in the American social landscape, particularly  among teen-agers, who tend to know much more about them and their apocalyptic views than adults do.

"The boneheads are looking forward to a race war."

"They're all on some harsh drug."

"Somebody's got to stand up to these guys," Darius Houston said.

Six or seven Sharps were sitting around Jacob Kroeger's mother's house. Jacob, a sardonic eighteen-year- old, still had his hair, but he was about to shave it off and become a full-fledged Sharp—a "fresh cut." His  mother was often away with a boyfriend, leaving the house—a modest ranch-style bungalow in a seedy  older tract—to become, at least for a while, the Sharps' main hangout. They were a picturesque lot, in boots  and braces, extra-short ("flooded") jeans, and Andy Capp-type "snap caps." But the mood that evening was  rather grim and besieged. It seemed that a girl from the N.L.R.s had called Christina Fava, Darius's  girlfriend, who is white, a "----er lover" in a hallway at Antelope Valley High School. A black student  named Todd Jordan had become involved on Christina's side, and the next day a half-dozen N.L.R.s had  jumped Todd on a deserted athletic field, stabbing him five times with a screwdriver. Todd was now in the  hospital. Christina, for her part, was transferring to a new school.

Somehow, I said, being a Sharp seemed to mean, more than anything else, a lot of fighting with white-power  skinheads.

I was wrong, I was assured.

"It's the music, the fashions, the friendships, the whole life style."

"It's like a big fuckin' family."

"Everybody's got everybody else's back."

"It's all about working class."

This curious, almost un-American class consciousness among the Antelope Valley Sharps turned out, upon  examination, to be a very American miscellany. The kids themselves came from a wide range of  backgrounds—everything from two-parent middle-class families to drug-addled welfare mothers who had  dumped them on the streets as adolescents. For some, "working class" meant simply having a job—any  job—as opposed to being a "bum." For others, it was synonymous with "blue collar," and it distinguished  them from richer kids, who might decide to be skinheads and buy all the gear but weren't really streetwise  and so might just have to be relieved of their new twelve-hole Doc Martens.

There was, in fact, much more to the Sharps than rumbling with the boneheads. For Darius, in particular,  Sharp was a G-dsend. An orphan since his mother died, when he was thirteen, he had been a skateboarder  and punk rocker before discovering skinhead. As a half-black kid in a largely white town, being reared by  various white relatives, he had always been something of an outsider. Skinhead, as he understood it, was a  complete, ready-made aesthetic and way of life. Darius identified, he told me, with its underground energy  and its music—he was soon playing bass in a multiracial ska band called the Leisures. Because the idea of  a black skinhead drove neo-Nazi skinheads wild, Darius had been fighting on a regular basis for years. He  was a skilled fighter, but the backup that the other Sharps provided was still, for Darius, a lifesaver. Going  to school had become too dangerous, so he was on independent study. After graduating, he said, he planned  to join the Navy and become a medical technician. (Christina, for one, didn't think he was serious.) He was  eighteen, beefy, soft-spoken, watchful, with skin the color of light mahogany. When we met, he was  homeless and was sleeping on a couch in Jacob's mother's house.

In every gang, the crucial question about any member is "How down is he?" Among the Sharps, one of the  most indisputably down was Johnny Suttle. Twenty years old, half Mexican and half Anglo, he was  diminutive but super-aggressive. He worked graveyard shifts at a Taco Bell, took classes at the local  community college, and, I found, had a great deal to say about skinhead. Skinhead was about loyalty—to  your class, home town, soccer team, and nationality, according to Johnny. Thus, if a Japanese or a Chinese  skinhead decided to beat up a foreigner, it was O.K. "Because they're just defending their country, and that's  good," he said. "The thing is, America is not a white man's country, never mind what the boneheads say. It's  a melting pot. And we're about defending that."

Johnny always seemed ready to weigh the moral dimensions of violence. I once heard him deliberate one of  the timeless questions: Was it ethically permissible to drop bonehead chicks before taking on the  boneheads? The answer, ultimately, was yes. While it was not right to hit females, bonehead chicks were  simply too dangerous to leave standing while you fought their boyfriends. They would probably stick a knife  in your back. Ergo, they had to be dropped at the outset. Q.E.D.

The Nazi Low Riders, while dedicated skinheads, were not skinhead-history buffs. They were, however,  keen on Nazi history. "We believe in Hitler's ways," Tim Malone, a leading member, told me. "But that don't  mean we worship him. He was smart, but he was a homosexual. I think what he did with the Jews was right,  mainly. They was coming into Germany, buying up the businesses, treating the Germans like slaves."

Chris Runge, another N.L.R., who explained to me that Hitler had actually been working with the Vatican,  seemed to be the theorist of the Lancaster clique. He was nineteen, hairless, blue-eyed, pale-skinned, with a  worried seriousness that was occasionally interrupted by a big, goofy smile. "I'm basically what you call a  political Nazi," he said. "A lot of these Nazis out here are unorganized. They're mostly street skins, doing  the dirty work. I want to start getting them organized. Democracy doesn't work. As you can see right now,  it's falling apart. But Nazism is about a society with no upper class, no lower class. We'd have equality. We  wouldn't have homelessness—because we keep the factories going and everybody has a place. With a Nazi  government, we'd just take out all the unwanted and start over again—even whites, if they're doing the same  thing as the ----ers are." Chris gave me one of his big, blue-eyed smiles.

He grew serious again. "White supremacism just comes from seeing what's happening in society," he said.  "We're going down." Though Chris's mother was, by all accounts, a serious tweaker, his grandfather, he  said, was an executive with the Xerox Corporation—a point of reference, perhaps, for his bitter assessment.  Chris himself had dropped out of school in the tenth grade and had been convicted for participating in the  same drive-by shooting that sent Jaxon Stines, who was his best friend, to jail. And Chris had "found the L- rd" in his cell, he said—an experience that may have softened some of his judgments. Of Mindy, for  instance, Chris merely said, "She's confused. She's young." This was notably gentler than the  pronouncements of other N.L.R.s on the subject. Chris even showed some self-awareness when he talked  about his life. He told me that his mother's ex-husband used to beat her so badly when he was drunk that she  would come lie in bed with Chris in the hope that it would make him stop. It didn't. "And that's a lot of the  hate I got inside me now," Chris said quietly.

Though I stopped by the Malones' house many times, I never saw Andrea there. She worked in a plastics  factory in Pasadena, more than an hour's drive away, and, according to Tim, she left the house at dawn and  got home only late in the evening. When I first met Tim, who was seventeen, he had just spent two months in  jail: he had been locked up as an accessory in the Todd Jordan stabbing, but had been released for lack of  evidence. He was wiry and well built, with close-cropped dark hair and, tattooed on the back of his neck,  an Iron Cross. He described himself as "more of the Gestapo Storm Trooper type than a political Nazi—the  type that's ready to go to war over things. There's gonna be a race war around the year 2000."

Tim's father had been a Hell's Angel, he said, so, he told me, his Nazism "was kind of inherited." His dad  drank, did speed, and abused his mother—that was why his parents broke up. The family had lived in a  predominantly black neighborhood in Montclair, east of Los Angeles, where Tim, at the age of ten, joined a  local Crips set for self-protection. He was the middle brother of three, and his joining a black gang did not  please his brothers. "Both my brothers was punk rockers, into speed metal, and they used to beat me up,  trying to teach me a lesson," he said. "I thank them for it now. You gotta stick with your own race. Now ain't  nothing I hate more than a wigger"—white ----er.

Tim and his brothers, Jeff and Steve, became skinheads after moving to the Antelope Valley four years ago  and meeting the local neo-Nazis. They were soon a warm little nest of vipers. "We're all family," Tim said.  "Even the little kids. Trouble's son, who's only, like, nine months old, already knows how to Sieg heil." Tim  imitated an infant giving a Nazi salute, and laughed. (Trouble was the street name of Robert Jones, one of  three N.L.R.s charged with firing into a parked car full of black people in Lancaster in 1995. He was  recently sentenced to twelve years.)

Among the many kids who were usually around the Malones' house were some who could not have been  more than ten. I wondered if their parents had any notion what kinds of things their children were seeing and  hearing there. The attractions of the place as a hangout were not mysterious. It was like a child's idea of a  pirates' den: scruffy and run by tattooed brigands. I even got the feeling sometimes that a rough, retrograde,  neo-communal sort of social experiment was being conducted. A boy would be opening a can of beans to  heat up on the stove. Someone would bellow, "Only bitches cook in this house!" The boy would drop the  can, while onlookers guffawed. Angela Jackson, one of Mindy's tormentors, would tear herself away from  the TV and finish opening the can, declaring herself "a skin bitch, a Featherwood." This giddy, Pleasure  Island atmosphere darkened, I thought, after the feud with the Sharps produced its first dead youth.

Darius said he would gladly go to the rave with us, and Mindy seemed pleased. There was some question  about whether Mindy herself would be able to go to the rave, however, because her mother had grounded  her after finding her passed out, stark naked, on her bed with her head next to a bowl filled with vomit. Too  much vodka with Jaxon, Mindy told me. It was now two days later, and still several days before the rave —which we ended up skipping in any case, after Jaxon accused Mindy of really wanting to go to  Hollywood to "fuck ----ers."

We were now waiting for Jaxon to come over, so that he and I could talk, and Mindy still seemed to be  feeling hung over. "I hate light," she said. Her voice was flat and small. "My mom thinks I'm a vampire  because I sit in my room with the music on and no lights. I won't even take acid if the sun's out."

Mindy loved LSD. She also liked cocaine. "Because it makes your mouth numb. I like to be numb. Speed  lasts longer, but it makes you paranoid, so you end up doing stupid things."

The stupid things she'd done on speed seemed to be legion. "Like, once Heather and Angela and I were  tweaking, and we saw two girls holding hands and we were really grossed out. We just said, 'We're going to  show them that's not allowed.' We didn't have any weapons, but we really stomped them. One girl had to go  to the hospital."

I remarked that I had recently read in a newspaper that "young men use methamphetamine for sexual  stimulation." Mindy scoffed: "When Jaxon's tweaking, I could dance naked in front of him with a porno on  the TV, and he still wouldn't be interested."

She went outside for a cigarette. Her mother didn't allow smoking in the house. I joined her in the back yard,  which had a small swimming pool and a basketball hoop. From where we sat, we could see Mindy's  thirteen-year-old brother, Matthew, in the kitchen. "Matthew's one of the reasons I quit the Nazis," Mindy  said, her voice suddenly full of feeling. "He's going to play basketball and football in high school, and he's  going to have to be able to get along with black people. And it won't work if he gets into something  disgusting like I did."

I noticed, not for the first time, a clacking coming from inside Mindy's mouth. I asked about it. She stuck out  her tongue. It was pierced with a heavy silver stud. "I've had this for a long time," she said.

She also had a ring through her navel, above which she had her name tattooed in longhand. Her mother  absolutely couldn't understand that tattoo. "I mean, your own name? Why?" Debbie asked me. "Is it so that  some guy can look down there while you're doing it in case he forgets your name?"

I once asked Mindy what she wanted to be when she grew up.

"Exotic dancer."

Debbie, I felt certain, was unaware of this ambition. She also didn't know that Mindy was not going to  school. Her independent-study program required her presence only one hour a week, but I knew she had  quietly abandoned it.

"Where is he?"

It looked as if Jaxon might not show, but at last he whipped into the driveway. Mindy jumped up, sat down,  jumped up again. Jaxon came into the yard through the chain-link gate, a lean, wary-looking figure in a white  T-shirt. He nodded at me, glanced at Mindy.

"We're going camping," he said.

"Can I go?" Mindy asked.

Jaxon didn't reply. He and I went inside and sat at the dining-room table. Mindy followed us in. "Where are  you going?" she asked.

"Cottonwood."

"Can I go?"

Again, Jaxon didn't reply. He was a pale, good-looking kid with deep-set eyes and a large, unfortunate  silver ring through his nose. ("I hate it. It makes him look like a bull," Mindy said.) His head was shaved  except for a small, wispy patch on top. Mindy watched him miserably while we talked.

He had recently turned eighteen, he said. He had been kicked out of school in the ninth grade for fighting and  truancy, and since then he had bounced around, living here and there, including a stint with his father, an  unsuccessful rock musician who drove a school bus in Northern California. "I've hitchhiked all up and  down California," Jaxon told me. "Every place is just as boring as this is." He had a studied jadedness, a  cool anger in his eyes. He was plainly intelligent. He had got his high-school diploma by passing an  equivalency exam at the age of fifteen. Since getting out of jail, he had been living with his mother and  stepfather in Palmdale and working as a repair-line operator for the phone company, where his mother was  a computer technician.

Mindy interrupted, pleading and petulant: "Can I go camping with you?"

Jaxon ignored her.

"Have you got sleeping bags?" I asked Jaxon.

"I've only got a mummy bag."

Mindy scurried down the hall in search of camping equipment.

Jaxon's parents divorced when he was three, he said. "My brother was the good little preppie. He never got  caught for anything. I was the bad one. I shaved my head when I was, like, nine. They were sending me to  shrinks from the fourth grade."

Surprisingly, considering that he had long been warring with the Sharps as part of the N.L.R. cohort, Jaxon  said he esteemed Darius's beliefs. "Darius has the right idea," he told me. "We've talked. In fact, he used to  be vegetarian straight-edge. That's no drugs, no drinking, no sex—nothing. Not too many people can follow  that."

But Jaxon's sympathies were decidedly with the racist side of the skinhead schism. "I'm not, like, Mr. Nazi.  And I know some black and Mexican people who are cool. But the majority of them are just welfare- mooching scumballs. I don't want to hear your sob story about how my great-great-grandfather owned your  great-great-grandfather." Jaxon's sneer deepened until it severely distorted his face.

He went on, more calmly, "Whether I like it or not, I'm racist. My mom doesn't agree with me. She's not  prejudiced. But I like to consider myself less ignorant than most racists. They're all preparing for race war,  race war. But it's never going to happen." He shrugged. "I'm just proud of what I am. But being proud of  being white doesn't mean I'm proud of every piece of white trash out there snorting speed."

Mindy reappeared, lugging an armful of gear for the camping trip, including an old, square-bottomed  sleeping bag, which she displayed proudly. "Where is Cottonwood?" she asked.

Jaxon was right: his mother didn't agree with him. A political liberal with a degree in anthropology, she  lived with her second husband and her two sons in a big, cathedral-ceilinged house in a gated community. "I  don't know why Jaxon holds those racial views," she told me. "I keep hoping it's just a teen-age rebellion,  and he'll grow out of it—that it's not how he is." Other parents I visited in the Antelope Valley seemed  equally mystified by their kids' passionate "beliefs."

Schools failed to provide most parents and children with any common cultural ground. Sheldon Epstein, a  high-school principal in Lancaster, who had a cheerleader daughter, told me, "My wife and I are big-time  supporters of our daughter's school. But most of the kids are just not bonded with their schools, so for them  that school-spirit piece is missing. It's the parents who have school spirit now, not the kids."

The fact was, however, that among the tens of thousands of parents who worked over the mountains,  relatively few had the time or energy to involve themselves in their children's schools (or any other  community activity). And then there were all those too consumed by their own troubles even to rear their  children. I found, that is, a startling number of kids in the Valley being reared not by their parents but by  their grandparents. Various explanations were offered for this phenomenon, the commonest being  methamphetamine addiction among parents, and particularly mothers. The situation was starkly reminiscent  of the better-known syndrome that has left so many African-American grandmothers rearing the children of  their crack-addled daughters in the nation's inner cities. In the Antelope Valley, it was white families falling  into poverty who were being hit hardest by speed.

Between 1970 and 1995, the poverty rate for children and adolescents in California more than doubled—it  is now twenty-eight per cent. And just as crime rates tend to track closely with poverty rates, vast amounts  of the state's public spending have been diverted during this period to law enforcement and the penal  system. The California prison budget in 1975 was two hundred million dollars. By the year 2000, it will  approach five billion dollars. The money for all these jails and prisons has come more or less directly out  of the state's higher-education budget. When I graduated from high school, in 1970, California had what was  often described as the finest public-university system in the world. That was then. Between 1991 and 1994,  the state's higher-education system lost two thousand professors and two hundred thousand students to  budget cuts. Meanwhile, University of California tuition in 1995 was, in constant dollars, nearly five times  what it was thirty years before. The situation in the schools is no better. When I was in junior high, the  state's public schools enjoyed the seventh-highest per-pupil spending in the country; by 1995, California's  per-pupil spending ranked forty-seventh nationally.

Nancy Kelso, a middle-aged lawyer in Palmdale who has many juvenile clients, rejects the view, which she  says is common among her peers and colleagues, that they grew up in a Golden Age, when children obeyed  their parents and ordinary people felt safe and G-d was in his Heaven. "I remember the Red Scare," she told  me. "I remember suffocating pressure to conform. I remember a lot of bad things." She also remembers,  however, a radically different opportunity structure. "When I graduated from high school, in 1962, it was  like a deal—a contract—between the adults and me," she said. "All I had to do was get a B average and  halfway behave myself and I was guaranteed a free education at a top public university, like Berkeley. My  four siblings and I all took advantage of it. Our dad was a five-dollar-an-hour nonunion machinist in Los  Angeles. We all became productive, responsible citizens. I tell you, I would have a lot more anxiety about  what was going to become of me if I were growing up now."

In 1996, Palmdale High School, out of a graduating class of about four hundred, sent exactly six students  into the University of California system. Less than ten per cent of the class went on to any four-year college  at all.

Listening to Nancy Kelso, I kept thinking of Chris Runge grumbling about "the unwanted." He and his  friends look forward to a "Nazi government" whisking this surplus population from sight. Of course, he and  his friends undoubtedly feel that they themselves are the real "unwanted." And they are not wrong. But one  of the ironies of their predicament is that the withdrawal of resources from education and other social  services is fundamentally racist—that is, it is primarily a withdrawal by older whites from the support of  those aspects of public welfare, including public education, which seem to benefit a large number of  nonwhites. And yet the collapse of educational opportunity caused by this withdrawal is suffered by all  nonaffluent children and families. "Affirmative action" is merely the name that many whites give to their  sense of disfranchisement.

Issues of race and opportunity are particularly loaded in the Antelope Valley. Esther Gillies, the director of  a center for abused children in Lancaster, put it bluntly: "Black families who move to the Valley are often  moving up. White families who move to the Valley couldn't make it down below." While I heard many  whites complain about lower-class blacks and Latinos settling in the Valley, I often sensed that they were  really more concerned about middle-class minority families. Todd Jordan's family lived in a grander house  than any of the white-power kids who stabbed him did. I talked with black parents who pronounced  themselves delighted with their new, racially integrated neighborhoods (the Valley has developed so fast  that the insidious patterns of residential segregation have not taken root), but even they expressed wariness  about staying on once their children reach high-school age. In the words of one well-educated black mother  of three, "That's when the white-supremacist thing seems to kick in."

I did meet white kids in the Antelope Valley who were college-bound. Natalie Blacker, for instance, was  the editor of the school newspaper at Quartz Hill High. Natalie was one of Mindy's idols—"I'm totally in  love with her" was how Mindy put it—and was friendly with the Sharps. A feminist, Natalie had started a  consciousness-raising group for girls at her school. (Her idol was Naomi Wolf.) She nagged her friends not  to let their boyfriends treat them badly—Jaxon's cavalier treatment of Mindy was, she told me, a great  example of what girls should not put up with—but she cheerfully acknowledged the depth and staying  power of the sexism and racism she opposed. She was shocked, she told me, when Mindy fell in with the  boneheads, and delighted when Mindy renounced them. "But you really have to be strong to do that, to stay  neutral here," she added. "This is a place where everybody feels the need to be in a clique."

An ambitious effort to get teen-agers to channel this need to belong into their school lives was under way at  Lancaster High, which opened in the fall of 1995. Students wore uniforms; teachers wore red, white, and  blue. The curriculum was demanding and old-fashioned—"fifties style," according to Beverley Louw, the  school's dynamic first principal. "Our hope is that we can create the culture, and that way not lose our  students to the kinds of fragmented subcultures—the heshers, the skinheads, and so on—that you find kids  joining elsewhere."

But after six months at the helm of Lancaster High Ms. Louw already sounded pessimistic. She had too many  students whom she couldn't help, she said—kids who arrived at school with too many deficits. Besides that,  the Sharps and the neo-Nazis were already fighting at her school.

Antelope Valley officials tend to say that white-supremacist skinheads are less of a problem than they seem.  The police say the boneheads are dwarfed in number by the black and Latino gangs who have moved up  from Los Angeles. The most obvious gang tension in the Valley, though, was not between the Bloods and the  Crips but between the Sharps and the neo-Nazis. If you went to Brunswick Sands Bowl, a bowling alley on  the Sierra Highway, in Lancaster, the jacket that caught your eye, worn by a spike-haired teen-age punk,  would be the one with a huge patch on the back snarling "nazi punks fuck off." Or if you went to the only  real teen hangout in Lancaster, a coffeehouse called Hang 'n Java, which had a pool table, music, and an  Internet connection, you could find a tense conference taking place at the counter between the owner and a  group of Sharps. When I went, I found her throwing them out. She supported them, she maintained, but she  could not risk their business, because if the boneheads saw them in there they'd come back at night and shoot  out her windows. "And I can't pay the insurance," she said tightly.

The police may not have wanted to acknowledge the dimensions of the problem, but for Darius Houston  white-supremacist violence seemed inescapable. I once asked him what it felt like to be the target of so  much bonehead ire.

Darius looked embarrassed. "Even white powers are people, so you have to respect them," he said. Then he  added, "Unless they don't respect me. Which they don't." He shrugged. "Most skinheads fight. It comes with  the book. It comes to you."

Once, at a rock concert I attended with the Sharps, I saw just how much of it tended to come to Darius. It  was an oi show in San Bernardino. Oi music is a hard form of punk rock, and it appeals to the whole range  of skinheads. The headliners at the San Bernardino show were a cult band from Britain called The  Business. The Antelope Valley Sharps were deeply thrilled to be seeing them, and when we got to the  concert, which was held in an old wrestling arena near the San Bernardino railroad tracks, there were  several hundred skinheads inside, most of them white but many of them Latino or Asian. Cliques milled  around, exchanging elaborate tribal greetings with other cliques and having their pictures taken together. All  was mellow, all was unity, I was assured. No boneheads had come. A couple of punk bands played, and  there was some moderate thrashing in the pit, so I retreated to one of the wooden bleachers that rose on  three sides of the arena. And that's where I was, looking down on the crowd, when the Orange County Skins  arrived. They were in uniform and in formation. Their uniform consisted of black combat boots, white  trousers, and the white tank tops known as "wife beaters." Their formation was a sort of flying wedge,  which knocked people aside with swift, efficient violence as they swept toward the middle of the pit. There  were no more than thirty of them, but their paramilitary coördination overwhelmed each bit of startled  resistance. They easily seized the center of the arena, turned to the stunned crowd, and raised their arms in  Nazi salutes, bellowing, "White power! White power!"

There was a lengthy pause, during which everyone seemed to consider the boots of the invaders. Whoever  approached them first was certain to get his teeth kicked in. Then the crowd rushed the boneheads, and a  bloody melee began. It seemed to be all boots and fists. Security at the door had been very tight—a guard  had even taken away my pens, tartly demonstrating how someone could jab out my eyes with one of them— so the possibilities for injury presumably had some limits. I caught glimpses of Sharps I knew, flailing  away—particularly Darius, who is tall and, as a black skin, seemed to be the focus of a great deal of Nazi  fury. But Darius stayed on his feet, blessedly, and seemed to have plenty of help as he spun and kicked and  punched. The Nazis were badly outnumbered but preternaturally fierce.

Then I saw Darius running toward the rear bleachers, where I was perched. He was holding one eye— pawing at it frantically—and zigzagging blindly through the crowd. I had a horrible premonition that he had  been stabbed in the eye. I ran down the bleachers to meet him, and tripped and twisted my ankle. A security  guard had to help us both stagger out through a back door into the rain. Darius, still pawing at his eye, threw  himself face first into a puddle. He splashed water into his eye. "Somebody Maced me," he shouted. I felt a  rush of relief. Darius rose up, blinking, gasping. "It's O.K.," he said. "It's O.K. I can see." The door behind  us flew open, and another casualty came reeling out. Darius sprang to the door, caught it, and, without  another word, was gone—back into the roaring fray.

== "What the Orange County Skins did at that oi show?" Mindy said. Her tone was petulant, scornful. We  were sitting in her room. "These boneheads out here could never think of that. They're just into speed. The  original Nazis did no drugs, didn't smoke pot, drink beer—anything. They just trained for war, twenty-four  seven. These guys out here have no right to call themselves Nazis. That's why I don't like them."

This, I thought, was new. Mindy had previously disliked the N.L.R.s for a lot of reasons, but not because  they failed to emulate Hitler's men properly. And, for the record, many of Hitler's élite troops were in fact  tweakers. But Mindy was upset. It seemed she had been jilted by Jaxon for a younger girl, named Casey.

"O.K., I'm not fifteen and six feet tall with two pierced nipples!" she wailed. Casey was apparently all these  things. "O.K., I'm immature and selfish! I was spoiled when I was young. But he is so selfish, so conceited,  so immature, so arrogant!"

I didn't argue.

"Plus, he won't give me my baby blanket back. My dad gave it to me. It's my security blanket. I'm all 'Give  me my blanket.' He's all 'Give me my CD.'"

"I would have gone to jail for Jaxon," she went on bitterly. "For that drive-by. They didn't have anything on  me. I had an alibi. But I would have gone."

Debbie was just coming in from work. "You tell him about how you're going back to school or I'm going to  send you to live with Grandma?" Debbie asked. She had discovered that Mindy was skipping her  independent-study appointments and had grounded her. Mindy carried off the groceries that Debbie had  brought home. "My mother still lives in Canyon Country," Debbie told me. Canyon Country, a set of suburbs  slightly closer to L.A., was where the Turners lived before they moved to the Antelope Valley. "It's better  for kids, I think. Mindy would probably never have got into all this bad stuff there."

"The Antelope Valley sucks!" Mindy called from the kitchen. Debbie and Mindy had been having problems  over Debbie's boyfriend, Tom, who, over Mindy's objections, had briefly moved into the Turner household.

Mindy took me to meet her grandparents one evening, in their spotless, triple-wide trailer in Canyon  Country. While Mindy darted in and out of the living room, playing on her grandfather's computer—in this  house she seemed suddenly about ten years younger, as if she had magically regressed to a calmer, more  constrained, less sexualized, less bored self—I talked to Pearl, her grandmother, who was originally from  Nebraska. She was decorous and candid as she described her concerns about Mindy's future. Pearl, who  used to be a bookkeeper, now does fancy cake decorating and has been married to Jerry, her third husband,  for twenty-one years. When he came in, he kissed Mindy and told her the computer she was playing on was  going to be hers. He was getting a new one, and all kids needed a computer at home nowadays.

Looking after her as she skipped back to her new toy, he said, "Mindy is probably the biggest frustration I  have in my life now. I feel bad that I haven't been more of an influence on her." He told me, in strong  language, his feelings about Jaxon and his racist beliefs; I could see how he would have made a very strict  guardian. I tried to picture Mindy living with her grandparents, but could picture only a great clash and  meltdown.

"The problem is, society requires both parents to work," Pearl said. "Single parents also have to work. So  kids are left to raise themselves. That's why they have no respect, no discipline. There's no one to teach  them how to care, how to love, how to live. So they form these groups, and, right or wrong, those are their  families."

Various Sharps and N.L.R.s had told me the same thing, of course. But it was sadder to hear it from a  consummate grandmother in her big, clean, cozy mobile home.

A willowy ice-blond sixteen-year-old girl named Ronda Hardin, who was loosely associated with the Nazi  Low Riders, once unnerved me by talking, in a breathy, high, almost reverential voice, about "my hatred."  She smiled faintly when she said it, and yet the frame around everything she said, I thought, was a sense of  loss—loss of a marginal color-caste privilege that, in her mind, was supposed to keep black people beneath  her socially and, in that way, somehow prevent the worst from happening to her. Because she lacked that  reassurance, her beloved hatred seemed to be a main prop of her self-respect.

On the night of March 9, 1996, Ronda was in a little brown tract house on East Avenue J-4 in Lancaster. I've  heard at least two dozen versions of what happened that night, but a few facts are undisputed. The Sharps  were having a party. There were roughly fifty kids there, most of them white, not all of them antiracists. A  keg of beer was flowing. Darius, who was drunk, got into a dispute in the kitchen with Ronda, who was  wearing a bomber jacket with a Confederate-flag patch on one sleeve. The dispute may have been over the  patch. Darius may have choked Ronda. In any case, Ronda fled. After another boy tried to defend her and  got beaten up by the Sharps, Ronda, who had gone to the Malones' house and told the N.L.R.s what  happened, went back to the party with Tim and Jeff Malone.

The boys went inside. Ronda remained in the car. A confrontation took place almost immediately, not far  from the front door. Jeff Malone, a quiet nineteen-year-old whose gang name was Demon, waved a knife at  a girl who approached him. She later said she had been trying to warn him to leave. Darius, standing in a  knot of his friends, threw a cup of beer at Tim Malone. One of the Malones challenged Darius. The N.L.R.s  were standing in close formation, their backs against a living-room wall. Darius ran toward them, a knife in  his right hand. With his first thrust, he stabbed Jeff Malone through the heart. Jeff fell. His friends dragged  him out the door.

Ronda ran to a neighbor's to phone the police. Jeff's friends drove him to the hospital. On the way, they tried  to stop the bleeding. Tim was slapping his brother hard in the face, shouting, "Breathe! Breathe!" To the  driver, he yelled, "Run this light! Go! Go!" It was only a few minutes' drive to Antelope Valley Hospital. By  the time they got there, Jeff's body was cold. They carried him inside. He was pronounced dead an hour  later.

Homeboy deserved it," Johnny Suttle, the Sharps' ethicist, said. "He shouldn't have come to that party. He  wasn't invited."

Johnny himself wasn't at the party. He was at Taco Bell, working. But he heard about the stabbing soon after  it happened, and he helped direct the Sharps' flurry of subsequent moves. A group of Sharps had bundled  Darius away. They drove first to a cemetery behind Antelope Valley High, and there they all spat on the  bloody knife and buried it under a bush. Next, they went to a park and cleaned up Darius, whose clothes and  arms were covered with blood. Then, unaware that Jeff was dead, they dispersed for the night.

But the news was soon flying around town. Jacob Kroeger, the fresh-cut Sharp, was lying in bed a couple of  hours later when he got a phone call. He jumped up and woke his mother, brother, and sister. Within  minutes, they had packed their bags and moved to his grandmother's house. Some of Darius's relatives were  also on the move before daybreak. N.L.R. death threats were already in the air.

Johnny called the police in the morning, and he liked what he heard. The police had interviewed a number  of witnesses, and to them the killing sounded like self-defense. Johnny, who knew where Darius was hiding,  agreed to bring him in for questioning. He did so, and Darius was questioned but not arrested. Darius then  went deeper into hiding, with some relatives in Orange County.

The killing became a crossroads of sorts for the Sharps. Johnny took a hard line. "We gotta get more  aggressive now," he told me. "You always gotta show the boneheads you're crazier than they are. That's the  only way they won't fuck with you. If you punk it and run, you're finished."

Jacob, on the other hand, decided to let his hair grow out—"to hang up my boots and braces," as he put it.  When I asked him why, he looked nonplussed. "Why? Death, that's why," he said. "This is just not a win-win  situation." His friends understood, he said. He would still back them up. He just wouldn't claim skinhead.  Like many Sharps (and ex-Sharps), Jacob was angry at Darius. "Why did he do it? He had no right to play  G-d, to take another man's life. And now we all have to lie low. We can't go out and get drunk, like we used  to. We just have to stay in our houses and watch for boneheads."

Jacob's house was actually empty. As the Sharps' old hangout, it was now too dangerous to live in. In fact,  less than a week after the killing Jacob's entire family moved to Utah, where his mother's boyfriend had  relatives.

The Sharps as a group seemed intent on putting Jeff Malone's death behind them as fast as possible. They  joked about "that killer party," and soon began referring glibly to "the time Darius shanked that fool."

Natalie Blacker, the college-bound feminist whom Mindy admired, had been at the fateful party, talking to  Darius, just before the trouble started. "It's so terrible," she told me. "Darius has so much potential." She  had mixed feelings about her friend Christina's reaction to the tragedy. Christina, who, as Darius's  girlfriend, was now in real peril, had chosen not to lie low. She still went to school, still worked in a shop  on Lancaster's main drag. She talked to Darius on the phone regularly, and drove down to see him every  chance she got. "I mean, it's great that she's so loyal," Natalie said. "But girls around here can be too loyal.  Sometimes it's like Christina doesn't realize that he killed someone."

Mindy realized it, and she was devastated. We were sitting in the Hang 'n Java coffeehouse, in Lancaster, a  week after the killing, and she could not seem to take her eyes off the floor. "I keep thinking about this one  time with Jeff," she said. Her voice was low and dull. "It wasn't that long ago. We were at a party, and he  was on a trampoline, just jumping up and down, and he was so happy. We went back to my house, and he  was hungry, and all I could find was a can of pork and beans. He wouldn't even let me heat it up for him. He  just ate it cold. I can't get that out of my mind."

The Malones were about to bury Jeff, but Mindy was not invited to the funeral. "They should think about  what Jeff would want," she said. "Jeff would want me there. But I'm not a Nazi, so I'm not welcome." She  sighed. "I think I'll go buy this Danzig CD Jeff liked and listen to it while they're having the funeral. One of  his favorite songs is on there. He sang it to me one time when we were lying on his bed. I had such a crush  on him. He always had a crush on me, too. I remember one night lying on the roof of his house, just rubbing  Jeff's head until we both passed out."

Tears were trickling down Mindy's cheeks. We sat and sipped coffee in silence for a couple of minutes.

"The N.L.R.s will never forgive me for saying Darius was fine," Mindy said suddenly. "It was true,  though—he really was good-looking. But I've lost all respect for him now. If I saw him, I wouldn't even talk  to him. I would just give him a dirty look."

After a few minutes' reflection, she went on, "I don't want to go back to being a bonehead. I don't want to  have a label on me. But Tim says I already have one. He says I'm a 'gang-hopper.' "

It was news to me that Mindy was talking to Tim Malone. As it happened, Tim had just told me that the  N.L.R.s were on strict orders to do nothing. The police were watching them, he said, expecting them to  retaliate against the Sharps. This ceasefire might mean that Mindy herself was safe, at least temporarily, I  thought—a hopeful possibility that I mentioned to her. She thought about it but seemed uncomforted.

Two burly young men had come into the coffeehouse and were standing behind Mindy. Both wore baseball  caps, and both had goatees. I watched them idly, wondering if they were boneheads. Then, as they began to  walk past us, one of them turned and gave me a startling look right in the face. It was a practiced,  frightening, prison-yard challenge. I had never seen the guy before, but I now had no doubt that he was a  neo-Nazi. He kept walking. The skin on the back of my neck was crawling. I was so distracted that I  suggested we leave, and we did. Mindy, who hadn't noticed a thing, said she wanted to go home and finish a  poem she had been working on for Mrs. Malone.

When I asked Tim Malone how his mother was taking Jeff's death, he said, "Like she should. Hard and dry."

That wasn't true, I found, when I talked to her. Mrs. Malone was tearful and despondent, and was wishing  aloud that she had never moved her family to the Antelope Valley. "I wanted to get Tim away from the gangs  in Montclair," she said. "But there are bad influences here, too, and my boys have gotten under their wing,  and I'm hardly ever home to protect them." She knew almost no one in the Valley, she said, and added, "But  I've met more people in the last few days—people just calling up to offer condolences—than I'd met in the  three years before this happened."

Even Heather Michaels, one of the fiercest N.L.R.s, wasn't "hard and dry" when we spoke. "They didn't  want no trouble," she said, meaning, improbably, the N.L.R.s who had rushed to the party that night. "If they  wanted trouble, they would've taken guns. They thought there was just five or ten Sharps there. Then they get  there, turns out it's like fifty or a hundred Sharps." Heather's eyes welled at the thought. "If one of us had  killed this ----er, or even stabbed him, we'd all be locked up."

Tim Malone said the same thing, calling the police treatment of Darius "reverse discrimination." He and  Chris Runge and I were standing in the Malones' front yard. It was a sunny afternoon. Both of them were  bare-chested and wore boots and jeans.

"Vengeance is mine, saith the L-rd, and tenfold," Chris intoned. "Darius will get a lot worse than what Jeff  got."

"That's right, brother," Tim said. To me, he said, "You know, we didn't expect Darius to be there. Because  he usually runs if he thinks we might be coming."

I asked what had happened.

"We saw him in there, standing with his friends, and when he saw us he started bouncing up and down." Tim  demonstrated. I had seen Darius do that fighter's bounce, during the melee at the oi show in San Bernardino.  "Then somebody offered me a beer, and when I went to take it Darius threw a cup of beer at me. I caught it,  threw it down, and called him on." Tim demonstrated his quick reactions, his forceful challenge. "'Come on,  ----er, let's go! Right now!' Then I spit in his face."

Nobody else had remembered the scene this way.

"Then four guys rushed me, and Darius came in behind them, low, and reached around me and stuck Jeff. I  saw it go in. It was a pocketknife, with a black handle. Jeff didn't even know he'd been stuck. Then he  looked down at his shirt and saw it. He went, 'Fuck you, ----er!' " Tim imitated Jeff crouching, both middle  fingers raised before him like guns. Again, nobody else remembered anything like this. "We dragged him to  the car, and we beat the shit out of him on the way to the hospital. 'Wake the fuck up!' But he died before we  got there."

We stood and watched the traffic pass. I asked if Jeff had said anything in the car. "No," Tim said. "But I  know what he would have said: 'Get that ----er!' "

Tim and Chris looked at each other, their shaved heads slowly nodding.

I found Darius somewhere in the suburban wilderness of Orange County. We met at a Taco Bell. Christina  and a Palmdale skinhead named Juan were also there. Juan had been in the group that spirited Darius away  from the party after the killing. Darius looked much the same—a little warier, less abashed, slightly  exhilarated. We had talked on the phone a few days before, and I had asked how he felt. "I'm going to be  more mellow," he had said. "I was sick the first couple of days. I haven't felt that feeling since my parents  died. Some people probably get off on it, and some people don't like it. I don't like it. It's weird. You've  taken somebody's life, and they're never coming back on this earth. At the same time, you feel happy,  because he was, like, your enemy."

I ran Tim Malone's version of the killing past Darius and Juan. When I got to the part about Jeff's noticing he  had been stabbed, throwing up his middle fingers in defiance, and bellowing "Fuck you, ----er!" Juan and  Darius gaped.

"He did what?" Juan said.

I told them again.

Juan and Darius looked at each other. Darius laughed. Juan shrugged. "O.K.," Juan said. "They want to go  out in a blaze of glory. That's cool. They can have their story."

In Darius's version, the boneheads had arrived with two knives. Darius had kicked one of them loose and  then picked it up. That was the knife he had used to stab Jeff. None of the other witnesses I interviewed had  seen this kick, or anything like it. Darius, I thought, didn't look abashed enough as he told this story.

Sitting in that Taco Bell and talking to the boys, I watched Christina from the corner of my eye. She fidgeted,  checked her watch, said nothing. I noticed her studying Darius, her expression both cool and oddly  contented. This fugitive skinhead was her main project now, even the center of her life. Other kids in the  Antelope Valley were starting to talk about her with awe: her black boyfriend killed a bonehead; he was in  hiding; she stuck by him, defying her parents. It was a romantic role, far larger than ordinary Valley teen-age  life.

After Christina and Juan set off on the long drive back to the Valley, Darius took me to meet some new  friends he had made. "It's a good thing I cliqued up with some other heads," he said. "Because Huntington  Beach is just a few miles from here, and that's where the O.C. Skins are from. I need people to watch my  back."

Darius's friends lived in a vast low-rise apartment complex. We passed through an empty white brick foyer  and were buzzed into a courtyard that seemed to ramble on for blocks—through plots of grass and stands of  tattered bamboo, past a lighted swimming pool, around a thousand plastic tricycles and abandoned toys. All  the ground-floor apartments had sliding glass doors without curtains. Behind them, virtually in public,  people watched TV, ate sushi, and scratched their bellies, oblivious of path traffic like us. There were  Asians, Latinos, blacks, whites, bikers, yuppies, buppies, old Samoans, young Cambodians. It was a Free  Unity world, I thought. It felt like a vision of the next American century: ramshackle, multiracial, cut-rate.  White supremacists, it struck me, fear the future for a reason: it's going to be strange and very complicated.

Darius's friends weren't there, but some other guys were, and they let us in. They looked like skaters. Two  were white. One was Asian. They were smoking a bong, listening to music. Darius and I sat on a couch to  one side and talked. He was staying with one of his three half brothers, not far away, he said. He was  thinking about moving to Germany. First, though, he was going to enroll in the local community college to  learn German. Then he thought he might join the Navy. In the meantime, he thought Christina should move  down here. It was too dangerous for her in the Antelope Valley now.

The first time I talked to the Lancaster prosecutor in charge of investigating Jeff Malone's death, he shared  with me his feelings about gang killings in general. "I say lock 'em all up in a room and prosecute the  survivor," he said. I took this to mean that Darius did not have to fear prosecution.

Later, when a decision was officially made not to prosecute, the same assistant district attorney explained  his reasoning to me. The victim and his friends had gone to a house where a hostile or opposing gang was  having a party. The victim had a knife. He attacked Mr. Houston. Mr. Houston's claim that the knife he used  belonged to the victim or to the victim's friends was not credible. But it was not illegal for him to possess  that knife inside that house. There were conflicting eyewitness versions of the attack. It was certainly not a  particularly vicious attack. The fact that a single knife thrust had killed the victim was simply bad luck. The  crucial question for the prosecution was whether a jury could be persuaded that the killing had not been  self-defense. That seemed unlikely. The victim was a Nazi skinhead, who would not be viewed  sympathetically. Mr. Houston was on his own turf, minding his own business. "I'm not saying Mr. Houston is  a great guy," the prosecutor concluded. "He's not. He's a jerk. You need to call me in about six months to see  if he is still alive. I do not believe he will be."

To the Malone family's bitter contention that it was really because Jeff was a skinhead from a poor family  that no one would be prosecuted for his death, I could think of no rejoinder. It was true.

So families flee the city for far-flung suburbs, but the evils they hope to escape—drugs, gangs, violent  crime—flourish wherever they land. Why? I kept recalling Mindy's grandmother's remark about how kids  were being left to raise themselves. If most parents must work outside the home, the obvious institution to  take up the caretaking slack is the school. There are American communities that have begun to reckon with  this imperative, but they are a small minority and the Antelope Valley is decidedly not among them.  Beverley Louw's attempt at Lancaster High to replace the baroque array of "fragmented subcultures" that  students tend to join with an old-fashioned, school-based culture was the exception. And her frustrations  arose from more than just her students' academic deficits.

"Everything is in such flux, which unsettles kids," she told me one afternoon in her office. "The  homelessness among kids here is just enormous. It's invisible to outsiders, because they don't live on the  streets, but they move from place to place, living with friends or relatives or whatever. And lack of  supervision is the key, I believe, to most of their problems." Ms. Louw lookedout a window onto a  windblown parking lot, then went on. "I had a straight-A student commit suicide when I was principal of the  continuation school. The kids said she did it on a dare. Her father came to the funeral in a yellow leather  suit. I couldn't believe it. A yellow leather suit."

Martha Wengert, a sociologist at Antelope Valley College, said, "This area has grown so fast that  neighborhoods are not yet communities. Kids are left with this intense longing for identification." Gangs,  race nationalism, and all manner of "beliefs" arose from this longing. I thought of Debbie Turner's inability  to comprehend Mindy's enthusiasm for the likes of Charles Manson and Adolf Hitler. "The kids reach out to  these historical figures," Dr. Wengert said. "But it's through TV, through comic books, through word-of- mouth. There are no books at home, no ideas, no sense of history." One thing the Valley's young people  knew, however, Dr. Wengert said, was that the economic downturn of the nineteen-nineties was not cyclical,  that the Cold War was over and the aerospace and defense jobs were not coming back. ♦

Published in the print edition of the December 1, 1997, issue.

William Finnegan has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1987. His book "Barbarian Days" won  the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for biography.