Dispatch From the Hood : WAY PAST COOL, <i> By Jess Mowry (Farrar Strauss & Giroux: $17; 272 pp.)</i>

“Way Past Cool” is a gut- wrenching, heart- breaking suspense novel about black gang life in Oakland. The author, Jess Mowry, is a terrific, visceral writer. This book crackles with authenticity, a wonderful sense of place that makes the story all the more disturbing.

Like Hubert Selby’s “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” or Warren Miller’s great novel “Harlem” (a book that should be in print permanently), Mowry’s book is a report from the front lines of George Bush’s America. The story is deceptively simple. Two rival Oakland gangs--the Friends and the Crew--of 14-16-year-old teen-agers fight over a ragged, bombed-out piece of turf in Oaktown, gang slang for Oakland.

Playing both gangs off against each other is a 16-year-old drug dealer named Deek, who cruises the “hood” in his black Trans-Am, with his bodyguard sleek, street-wise Ty.

The novel is structured like a thriller. Though we get to know members of both gangs (Lyon, who spent his first night on Earth stuffed in a Dumpster by his mother until she had a change of heart and took him out; the twins Ric and Rac, who function like a 12-year-old hit squad), it’s Ty and his little brother Furball (Danny) whom we grow to care about. Gradually it comes clear that Ty has not been totally lost to the streets. He’s got heart and brains and remembers his father, who sold scrap for a living.

It’s that memory--as well as the humanity of his mother, plus his intelligence and sensitivity--that sets him apart from his doomed friends. “Ty shrugged and popped another Heineken. ‘You gonna die nigger die happy.’ He remembered how in the late afternoons, after they’d sold their day’s earnings at the scrap yard, he and his dad would sit down and sweaty and shirtless in the truck and split a quart of Colt 45 before going home. Ty used to like the malt liquor with a great Popsicle. They talk about all sorts of stuff, things a dude just no way could ask his mom. And supper had always tasted so . . . good with a half a quart of Colt already inside him. Ty remembered his dad’s strong man smell. Danny needed something like that.”

Ty is at war within. He is capable of extreme violence, but he also loves his brother. Eventually Ty meets Markita, a 16-year-old unwed mother with a 2-year-old son. Like Ty, Markita understands that the code of the streets (“way past cool”) is in actuality a death trip. Not that she’s immune to style. She digs Ty because he’s cool, and in spite of his act. But at heart, Markita has seen too much death.

“Over the years Markita had heard a lot of things going on in that alley; snatches of slurred talk from wine heads and crack kids; screams, fighting, gunshots and even the carefree laughter of children. She remembered playing there herself, one time sitting and giggling on the slashed front seat of an abandoned car, watching through the shattered windshield while her friends acted and danced on the hood. They called it their drive-in movie game. Bodies had been found: stabbed, shot, OD’ed, or just with their hearts worn out at 14. Once there’d been a body stuffed in a Dumpster and last summer, a little homeless boy who cops said had been killed and half eaten by rats.”

Markita falls in love with Ty, whom she both makes love to and nurtures like a mother.

To reduce this book to a conventional thriller is to do it a grave injustice. “Way Past Cool” is deeply touching as well, and stirred me to a real anger. It’s proof that literature is far from dead. Unless you are emotionally dead yourself you simply cannot read about 14-year-old kids who are discussing Capt. Kirk one minute and talking about taking dirt naps, “their term for being killed by a dealer,” or buying a new Uzi the very next.

Mowry hasn’t lost sight of the fact that these are just kids, kids who are the living embodiment of the great lie that is called the trickle-down theory. In the past eight years, all that’s trickled down to Ty and Danny and Markita is a nameless appetite for televised violence and the slick image-conscious of ad men and professional cynics. What these kids are left with is in every way a jungle that the Deeks of the world rule with an immoral cunning.

Of course, Ty and his friends feel that the police and the law are stacked against them. Markita carries a can of Mace with her to try and fend off thieves and rapists. She knows it’s against the law to have it unless she’s 18 and has a license, but it’s just about the only thing she can do to protect herself, short of Ty’s answer: carrying a revolver.

Mowry employs lyrical writing and often witty dialogue to paint a picture of hell. And it’s to all our shames that the world he describes is reproduced in South and Central L.A., Detroit, New York, Baltimore, D.C. and just about every other major city.

This novel isn’t perfect. The ending is soft and tries for a measure of hope which nothing in the book even remotely suggests might happen. Still, it’s a brilliant piece of work from a young writer with a big talent.

Sadly “Way Past Cool,” brings to mind another black writer’s prophecies. In the ‘60s James Baldwin promised white America that if they didn’t start getting their act together there would be the “fire next time.” A few years later, riots erupted in our cities. Now Mowry shows us the black population is in far worse shape than ever before.

Eventually, the anger of those left out of the system will be turned against a government run by and for the rich, people who have washed their hands of their impoverished black brothers and sisters. When that day comes, we will all pay heavy dues. Unless we read books such as the one written by Jess Mowry and wake up, we can look forward to another long hot summer.