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    Inside the Crips: Life Inside L.A.'s Most Notorious Gang
    Inside the Crips: Life Inside L.A.'s Most Notorious Gang
    Inside the Crips: Life Inside L.A.'s Most Notorious Gang
    Ebook415 pages6 hours

    Inside the Crips: Life Inside L.A.'s Most Notorious Gang

    By Ann Pearlman, Colton Simpson and Ice-T

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    About this ebook

    Inside the Crips is the memoir of the author Colton Simpson's life as a Crip--beginning at the tender age of ten in the mid-seventies--and his prison turnaround nearly twenty-five years later.

    Colton ("C-Loc") Simpson calls himself the only gang member ever allowed to quite the Crips--and one of the few to survive into his thirties. Simpson--son of a ballplayer for the California Angels and a mother who was relentlessly rough with her sons after their fathers left her--became a gang member at ten. Inside The Crips tells the remarkable--and at the same time, all too common--story of gang life in the 1980s in immediate and descriptive prose that makes this book a gripping true-life read. Inside The Crips covers the rush that comes from participating in gang violence and the years-long wars between the Bloods and Crips. Simpson's story also puts the reader in the middle of the struggle between the Crips and corrections officers in Calipatria prison. It covers gang life from the mid-seventies to the mid-nineties, and introduces characters it's impossible not to care about: Simpson's fellow gangbanger Smile; and Gina, the long-suffering friend and mother of two sons who married Simpson in prison.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateDec 24, 2013
    ISBN9781466860995
    Inside the Crips: Life Inside L.A.'s Most Notorious Gang
    Author

    Ann Pearlman

    Ann Pearlman is a writer of both fiction and nonfiction books, including Getting Free: Women and Psychotherapy and Keep the Home Fires Burning: How to Have an Affair with Your Spouse, Inside the Crips, The Christmas Cookie Club, and A Gift for My Sister. Her memoir, Infidelity, was nominated for a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize and made into a Lifetime movie by Lionsgate. Also an artist, she recently illustrated a short story, Other Lives, which is available as an ebook. 

    Read more from Ann Pearlman

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    • 5/5
      Colton's brutal honesty and transparency about his experience is healing for broken and tormented souls trapped in the vicious cycle of recidivism and the streets. His painful portrait of his own despondency serves as a powerful advisory of what lies ahead for any lost souls looking for validation in bangin.
    • 2/5
      Meh, not the best written and a bit hypocritical given the main subject was busted for a jewelry robbery two years later

    Book preview

    Inside the Crips - Ann Pearlman

    ONE

    Transformation

    There is an abundance of hope, but none for us.

    —Franz Kafka

    Events are lined up like dominoes falling so fast I don’t have time to think about one before the next one tumbles. Most of my life, I’ve been at war. If there’s a time before war, it’s the time before remembering.

    And so my first memory is when I am four and in a motel room down the street from our home. It’s Los Angeles, 1969. I race matchbox cars on a light stripe on a brown rug. The sun shining through venetian blinds creates my road. Damon, my brother a year older, crashes his blue car into my truck. Bam. Krr, he growls and knocks my truck from the road to lie on its side, the small wheels spinning.

    I look up to complain about my brother’s violence and see my mom. She stands with one leg bent, sliding the strap of a shoe over her heel as she tilts toward the wall, supported by her outstretched arm. The wall is in an unfamiliar room in a motel, but I don’t know why we’re in a motel so close to home. This is my first memory of my mother as she leans, her long hair waving toward her waist, a slice of sun dazzling over a dress the same color as her beige flesh. Her face is oblivious of her splendor, of us. The only thing that exists is gliding the black strap over her heel. Nothing else is important but that moment. Not me, not Damon, not the room with the pale green walls. This moment, this brief space is my peace, her paused on one leg like that, her palm on the wall. As I notice her, I realize how fine she is, her face is that restful. Like the statues of the Madonna in church. I’m splashed with the shafts of white light and her glory. Safe. I am safe.

    Wham. A man backhands her and she crumbles onto the unmade bed, hair splayed out. I only see the man’s back, and then as he turns toward me, a brass buckle on his belt, his navy pants. I don’t see his face; I don’t know who he is. These images contain no sound, just pictures. There is no blam his fist makes on her cheekbone. I do not hear a groan, or a surprised gasp for air from my mother. She falls silently to lay on the bed over a green and gold comforter. She doesn’t move, doesn’t rise.

    And me. And me? I cover my head with my arms and cry.

    My mother sits up, wipes her nose. Her feet are on the floor, but she doesn’t stand, doesn’t go after him, and doesn’t defend herself. Just allows him to tear away at her beauty and end our harmony. He’s gone. I don’t remember the door slamming as he leaves.

    Why didn’t she sense her danger? How could she have been so innocent?

    I should have seen it coming. Something—a movement, an expression, a sound, and a gesture—must have warned me. I need to pay more attention.

    Why didn’t she fight?

    *   *   *

    After that I see less of my father. He’s away for weeks playing baseball for the Los Angeles Angels, and brings home joy and soap wrapped with decorated paper and shampoo in small bottles from his hotels. And then my brother Marc is born light skinned, lighter even than my mother, a baby pale as a fish. Blue squiggly lines run under his skin.

    I can tell Moms loves him the most.

    When my father sees him, he shakes his head, sadly. The baby doesn’t make Pops seem huge by contrast, but turns him frail in spite of his hard arms. My mother and father fight all the time now. Then one day, Pops calls the police. He tells them, Her new boyfriend is always threatening to shoot somebody. I want you to witness this. The stereo system is all I want and I’m outta here.

    My father has angular features, a high beaked nose, and cheeks that cave under his bones. Colton, Pops leans his elbows on his knees so we’re at eye level, I’d take you with me. But she won’t let me. And I have to leave or my temper will get someone dead or someone serving time. Then he stands. You’re my son and I love you. He places his palms on my shoulders. A baseball he’s given me is clutched in my hand. Remember. Always remember. You, Colton, are my son. He leans back on his heels. I tried to get custody of all of you, since she’s so harsh, so evil and conniving, using her beauty as a trap. Pops stands and crosses his arms. But she flirted her eyelashes at the judge, acted meek while she cried about how much she loved her sons. So. He nods at the burgundy velvet sofa, the wood dining table, the white ceramic lamp as though counting, as though counting something, saying good-bye. Every motion resounds through his body in a dance of tendons and muscles. It’s all hers now. But, Colton, you have my temper, so watch yourself, he warns.

    Pops is everything I dream of becoming—tall, respected, a celebrity. The police help him load his stereo and jazz records into his car. He drives away.

    We’re alone with Moms. Your father don’t care about you. He ain’t no good, Moms shrugs as she winds a strand of hair around her curling iron.

    Pete, a White man with a red face and soft flesh around the middle, moves in. He’s not long lean and lanky like Pops, built like a tank rather than a rocket. He plays I Can See Clearly Now and Witchy Woman over and over. I miss Coltrane and Miles.

    We’ll go hunting for rabbits, he booms, but first you have to learn how to shoot. One day, he lines up tin cans on the fence of our backyard and shoots at the cans. Ping. Ping. I come out and he hands me the .38. Here. He shows me how to sight the target, lining up the little bar between the arms of the V, and to slowly pull the trigger. When I pull the trigger, power surges through my arm, my shoulder, but my bullet topples the can. Just like that I find my

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