The White Fence Gang
Homeboys of Boyle Heights
It was three o’clock in the morning. I figured it would be safe; my accomplices and I might get away with our caper.
I lay prone, propped up on my elbows, looking out the back of a 1970-something Ford station wagon, tailgate down, clutching a Nikon to my face while being driven fast through the Third Street tunnel underneath Bunker Hill in Downtown LA. Two battery-powered flash units gaffer-taped to the roof of the Ford and synced to my camera’s shutter shot short bursts of light like automatic weapons fire at the two shiny Chevys chasing us neck and neck, strobing them like disco dancers in the dark. Incandescent sparks flew from the backs of both cars as though they had Roman candles for exhaust pipes, each time their drivers lowered pneumatic steel plates under their chassis to scrape the street like the flints in a Zippo lighter. I further characterized an expression of the cars’ speed on film with a slower-than-stop-action, one-eighth-second shutter speed — “dragging” the shutter, remember? — in tandem with motion-freezing flash, which made the cars pop out in sharp contrast against the blacktop and the ambient light reflected off the tunnel’s grimy walls. Picture comic book superhero The Flash running at full tilt with a blur of color trailing behind him.
