Slanged, Dissed and Dogged : L.A.’s New Generation of Jargon

EVER SINCE Moon Unit Zappa described her untidy toenails as “grody to the max” and turned Valley Talk into some thing of a national dialect, Los Angeles has been informally crowned the nation’s capital of colorful contemporary speech.

It’s not the stuff of dictionaries, fer sure . But while language theorists assert that cholo and gag me with a spoon will probably have no influence on standard English, such words help establish in- and out-groups, especially among the city’s youths. As USC linguistics professor Dr. Edward Finegan points out, “When we want to set ourselves off from people, we mark our speech in a different way.”

Jargon is the second line of demarcation between any Us and any Them (the first is clothes); it is through jargon--from hubba hubba to hep cats and illen hard-- that we define who we are and how we live--our funny, poignant and, sometimes, violent selves.

Here, then, are four sketches of young Angelenos, who refine and perpetuate most of the jargon by which, for better or worse, they map off their turf.

ON A SATURDAY night all 12 speakers at the Factory are blasting Depeche Mode’s “kinda new ro music,” as Vincent Giannone describes it. Giannone, 19, is a salesman at this fashion shop on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, which, with its live disc jockey, is an ersatz club scene for junior highers, grommets , kiddies, as Giannone tags them.

Giannone is a Val who sees himself as a club crawler, a surfer punk. Yet, menaced by Venice locals who snake his waves and low-riders down the hill from his home in Burbank, he secures his identity by looking sharp--in post-punk sartorial chic.

His hair, as he describes it, is “bleached blond, black roots, brown on the top, white on the ends, shaved on the sides.”

He “can’t stand it” when people pull their socks up to their knees. “I roll my socks down to my ankles and wear really weird pointy shoes with stripes and stuff on ‘em,” he says.

He likes “ totally bitchen “ guys (who wear padded shoulders and baggy pants) who’ve “ got their stuff wired, “ but the store gets a mixed crowd, from death rockers to full Hanks.

They come in to buy the muscle shirts , the “ cherry “ creepers and the kind of monkey boots the “ Oi “ boys wear when they’re trashin ‘ around .

Giannone knows there is more to life than looks; nevertheless, his world is defined by what he wears and how he speaks.

“Kids in California nowadays are just like that, stuck up. They’re tough and really macho, and if you’re not their kind they won’t talk to you,” he says.

On the Hollywood club scene, Giannone talks hip: “What’s your be-bop ?” “What’s your hip-hop ?” “What’s up, ski ?” When he sees a “slutty” girl who’s badly dressed he snatches a line from the rap group Run-D.M.C.: “That skeezer’s really illen hard .”

“It’s just the lingo that you can talk or you can’t,” he says, proud of belonging. Yet, straining against stereotypes, Giannone stands half-molded, somewhere between alienation and a hip universality.

“Everybody’s basically the same, that’s what I’m trying to say. I just don’t like the way they dress.”

ON AN IRON-GRAY Saturday, Clarence Engram is doing what he likes best, rapping with his buddies on a street in South-Central Los Angeles.

I’m cold dissing sucker M.C.s with just one rhyme,

and I’m the one that busts rhymes all the time ...

I’m much much smarter than Maxwell Smart.

You sleep with the light on ‘cause you’re scared of the dark.

Engram, who uses the handle Mr. Crime, thought up the lines one day at camp --a juvenile correction facility--where he spent some time. Much of the creative language of his grass-roots raps finds its etymology in jails, drug-dealing and gangs. These are the forces that pull on Engram, who, at 16, could turn to the streets or go straight.

He lives where the city’s most violent gangs--the East Coast Crips, the 8 Trays, the Carnales--live, where gang-bangers cover walls, houses, even trees with arcane graffiti.

“ I’m 7 4 East Coast Crip Blood Killer O.G. to the max. Better known as Loco C. What that c like, Cuz? “ goes an elaborate verbal challenge of a Crips gang member meeting a potential foe. In Engram’s world, gang-bangers get loced out on 8 Ball and make careers of slangin’ ‘caine while disdaining the skeezers, sprung on crack.

Engram used to be an A student in English, and he’s still a fresh rapper. In the verbal dueling of the speeded-up poetry, he doesn’t bite rhymes and he doesn’t get dogged or dissed .

Still, like everybody, he knows the murder rhymes:

I jumped out my ride with my Uzi by my side

. . . and everybody died.

But Engram also raps about Martin Luther King Jr. and his “big fresh dream.” A neighbor provides the human beat box, contorting his lips in a rhythmic bass accompaniment as Engram punches out the lines, his only sign of stage fright a wringing of his plaid shirt.

After the performance, he trots across the street to a house where an older crowd is gathered on the stoop. Engram starts talking fast as a neighbor gazes hard, sizing him up--a wanna-be who could wind up an O.G. or a poet.

TRISTAN WELSHis closed up in a surf shop like a sunflower in a coffin. The lone sales man, he sits behind the cash register watching the beach bunnies scurry down to the Santa Monica strand. There, so close he can almost feel the spray, the silver-tipped waves glint and beckon to him.

“It’s a killer day,” he says wistfully.

Welsh, who is 19 and wallpapered with freckles, surfs in Venice before he goes to work. Surfing “gets pretty aggro “ there, the dudes (those who can surf) against the kooks (those who can’t surf) and the Vals (kooks whether they can surf or not).

“They (Vals) get snaked on every wave,” says Welsh. “You take off in front of them and they go over the falls and they get drilled, they get worked hard, seriously dogged. Like they just be drown-ded. “ Welsh gives a sound like a coyote yelp: “ Y-e-a-o-w .”

T-shirts with “Cowabunga” labels and “Hang Ten” logos are displayed in the shop, but Welsh wouldn’t be caught dead saying such things. “Oh, God! That went out with the Beach Boys,” he hoots.

When a friend drops by he greets him with “What’s happ’nin’, Holmes?” But when a young man comes in wearing a brand-name T-shirt and a single earring, Welsh mutters, “Dance-club type stuff.” He gets short johns for the newcomer, whom he’s pegged as a wanna-be , a grem, a lop , a dork , a dweeb , a jerk. “Probably a Val.”

Outside, a group of pretty teen-age girls skips down the sidewalk. “Hey, look at those little beddies ,” Welsh whoops. A middle-age man with glasses strolls by with his clean white socks pulled up toward his Bermuda shorts. Welsh peers out at him and observes, “Fred Flintstone doing a heel-toe express, on the cruise patrol, checking out the beach.”

On Welsh’s day off, he’s going to Oxnard, where the waves are double overhead , cranking top-to-bottom. One imagines him out there at dawn-- stoked on a dream session-- the way he is in a photo on the wall, flying along a wave, rebounding off the lip, slashing, shredding, blasting.

“Y-e-a-o-w,” Welsh howls. “It’s hard to work.”

JESSE MARTINEZ was just about born on a skateboard. That’s how long he’s been at it. Martinez, 23, is well-known in Venice, the best-known skater’s haunt in the country. Today, he’s down by the beach watching his pal Julian Stranger do a few curb slappies, leaping like a jack rabbit on and off the sidewalk.

“Yeah, that’s burly, really gnarly ,” says Martinez as trucks grind on the pavement.

Yet Stranger complains: “This kinda skating is kinda wimpy. Just dorking around on a curb.”

Still, a row of little guys is out gawking, school kids sitting on their skateboards painted with demons and daggers, the meaner-looking the better.

“They watch us take the curbs and they’re baffled,” says Stranger, who executes a variety of ollies --a fakey ollie , a manual ollie , a 180-degree ollie . Martinez has a friend who can ollie up onto the hood of a car.

But Martinez is moving from street style to vertical pro. The original vertical skating was done in back-yard pools; Martinez recently skated a Beverly Hills pool a couple of days ago. “It got bulldozed the next day,” he says.

So Martinez and Stranger mostly ride the walls in Venice.

“It’s 90 degrees without any transition ,” Stranger says.

Martinez: “You just kick turn up the wall.”

To demonstrate his invention, Martinez ollie s over the potholes to the red brick wall of the Venice Pavilion. He positions his foot behind his truck to keep his nose light, so that it will make the vertical slide. Then he hurtles toward the wall.

The board bangs against the bricks, then leaps onto the wall, flashing up and back as quickly as a razor slash.

He shows off the new creole slide , shimmying for a few precarious seconds across the wall, executes the still-hot street plant , a one-armed handstand made as he whips his board off his feet with the other hand, and performs the currently “in” trick, a yo - yo, a street plant in which he holds his board on his feet as he flips over on his hand.

“I’m going to skate till I die,” he says, starting to hurl himself once more at the wall. “Or at least until my bones can’t handle it anymore.”