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 […]