LOS ANGELES _ Garry "Twin" Dorton walked up to his childhood home, past the tree trunks that had shielded him from bullets many a time.
It was about 7 on a summer evening, still light out. Inside, they had given up waiting on him and cut the cake. He said "happy birthday" to his grandmother, ducked into the bathroom and headed out again.
As always, she implored him to go straight home and not hang out.
This was his block of Van Ness, lined with the impossibly tall, wind-bent palm trees featured in movies about South Los Angeles _ the backdrop for his heyday as a leader of the Rollin' 40s Crips, dealing crack, tooling around in a Mercedes-Benz, warring with the Bloods across 48th Street.
The monikers "Big Twin" and "Twin 1" were his birthright for being six minutes first out of the womb. Everyone knew Garry and Jerry, the identical twins from Van Ness, with their reddish hair, heavyset builds, down-to-earth charm and matching "40s" tattooed on their forearms.
In recent years, Dorton had turned from the dark side to good, using his street cred to mediate between rival gangs and mentor young people. At 48, with five children, he had settled into modest prosperity as a gang interventionist for the city with a side gig providing security for film shoots, such as John Singleton's "Snowfall."
But there is a hard truth to gangbanging. You can never leave it behind, no matter how cleanly you live.
Something from your past, or a minor conflict from the present, can come back to bite you in a world where people settle their scores with gunfire.
