This Is Gonna Hurt (2 page)

I
grew up in Huntington Beach, California.

When you think about that city, certain impressions come to mind. And one of the most popular is surfing in the sixties. White kids surfing. But it wasn't only white kids, even though that's what the Beach Boys would have you believe. Believe it or not, Mexicans surfed too. And fished. And hung out at the beach. And drank beer or smoked a joint with friends if there were no parents around.

If you were a Mexican kid growing up in Huntington Beach, this is what you did.

My father was Mexican. My mother was Anglo. They liked the water, too. I remember my parents this way…

My father's name is Samuel Ortiz. He was born in Santa Ana, California, in 1944. His family was also originally from Santa Ana, although the Ortiz family did come here from Mexico at some point. Names, dates, and places are hard to remember, but my father would tell me stories when I was younger. He was in the army in the sixties. He ran with local gangs a bit when he was growing up, but mostly he hung out with car clubs like the Night Owls, who would cruise around Santa Ana in their tricked-out cars.

My father graduated from high school, but he did not go to college. He started out as a carpenter and worked as a contractor before forming his own company. He was a successful craftsman and a great artist.

My mother's name is Joyce Robles. Before that she was Joyce Johnson. Before that she was Joyce Simmons. She was born on the island of Hawaii, in Hilo, in 1948.

My mother was the oldest of six sisters. Her father, Herman, served in World War II. Her mother, whom I've only ever referred to as Grandma, died when I was nine years old.

My mother did not go to high school. Things were tight, moneywise, for a family with six kids, so my mother stayed home to take care of her sisters while her parents worked. She did it grudgingly. I remember conversations with my mother where she said that her dad was hard on her when she was growing up.

Maybe that's why she married her first husband at such a young age.

Her first husband's name was Louie Simmons. I met him once, but I don't really know much about him. She was with him for eight years and had three kids with him, all boys. Jimmy, Mike, and Marty, each born three years apart.

That's when she found my father.

My mom and dad's courtship was simply a matter of my dad sweeping my mom off her feet. He was a good-looking guy and he was very nice to her. They started going out and one thing led to another and they became a couple.

They began living together in 1974. They were never married on paper—it was like a common-law relationship. They were very loving to each other. My father never cheated on my mother and he never beat her.

In 1974, my father went to prison for eleven months. It went down like this…

He and some of his friends were driving to a rock concert. They had some pills and some dime bags of pot in the car. The police pulled them over, took one look at my father with his wild hair and crazy looks, and thought that the weed belonged to him and that he was a dealer. The weed wasn't his and he wasn't dealing, but he was found guilty and did his time.

The first house my parents lived in was this real nice place in Huntington Beach. They stayed there for a while and then they moved to Santa Ana. My mother got pregnant and she had a baby boy. They named him Cesar Sebastian Ortiz. They were ready to stop having children at that point, but Cesar died of SIDS when he was four months old.

If Cesar had lived, I never would have been born. But after Cesar died, my parents wanted to have a kid together so badly that they tried again.

I was born Jacob Christopher Ortiz on January 23, 1975.

My dad was six foot five and my mom was five foot seven, and I was a very big kid. I weighed eleven pounds, eight ounces at birth, and by age one, I weighed forty-five pounds. I wasn't fat; I was just this husky kid. When my mom held me, I measured from her kneecaps to the top of her head.

My father gave me the nickname of Tito when I was about a year old. Tito translated into “tyrant,” and it kind of fit because even at age one I was a very bold and bratty kid. But it was apparently mostly in a good way.

My mom would always tell me that everybody always wanted to be around me and talk to me because I constantly gave off this positive kind of energy.

I had a typical relationship with my older brothers. They would beat me up and then turn right around and take care of me. Jim was eleven years older, and he seemed to be the one who would always look out for me. Mike would always tease me and mess with me, and Marty used to beat the shit out of me all the time.

As the youngest, it always seemed like somebody was doing something outrageous to me. Like the time my brother Mike and I were playing on the roof of the house. He thought it would be funny to tie me to the chimney with duct tape and leave me there. I was scared and started screaming. I must have been up there screaming for two hours before my aunt Linda heard me and came to the rescue.

We led a pretty idyllic life. We were living at the beach. My father went to work every day and my mother was a stay-at-home mom, taking care of us kids. As I got older, my brothers and I would spend a lot of days walking down the alleys behind our house to the beach. I used to go swimming and do a little boogie boarding. We would go lay out in the sand and play like regular kids.

Sometimes we'd bring a football and every once in a while one of us would throw the football at somebody's stuff while they were in the water. When we went to retrieve it, we'd grab people's wallets so we'd have money to buy stuff.

I was too young to know that what I was doing was a crime. It just seemed like another fun thing to do.

We were always going on family trips. We'd go to Disneyland and places like Casper Park and Lake Elsinore, where we did a lot of camping and fishing. We liked being outdoors. One time we drove up to Pismo Beach, which is up the California coast, in our VW bus; this was when you could still drive your cars on the beach. We went out there and our van got stuck in the sand and we ended up waiting there until late at night when a bunch of bikers came by and helped pull us out. Those were the good times.

Even though they were not his biological kids, my father took in my mother's children and basically treated them as his own. And for the most part, my half brothers treated him with respect. There were the arguments, but for the most part things were settled peacefully. Except for the time my brother Mike, who was always a little crazy anyway, got mad at my father and tried to set him on fire.

My dad had gotten into it with Mike for some reason. When it was over my dad went to bed. But Mike was still pissed. So he snuck into my dad's bedroom, splashed some lighter fluid on him, and threw a lit match at him. My dad jumped up and put the fire out before he was seriously burned. Mike got a serious whipping for pulling that stunt.

At one time or another we all acted out and got punished. I remember getting whipped with a belt once because I stole some money from one of my father's friends. Whenever we would get a whipping, it wasn't about abuse, it was about us learning. And I definitely learned not to steal money from my dad's friends.

Dad and I used to go hunting quite a bit, and he would let me shoot guns even though I was still a tiny kid. I remember one day we were out hunting and my dad let me fire a twelve-gauge shotgun. I fired and the kickback from the shotgun knocked me on my ass and I started crying. My mom was pissed off when she found out.

“Why in the hell did you let him shoot a shotgun?” she yelled at my dad.

But I got into plenty of trouble on my own. I was kind of a smart-ass even at a young age. There was the day that I almost set the backyard on fire. A bunch of cut grass had dried and had been piling up for a couple of weeks. I stacked up all the grass and started flicking lit matches at it. The pile caught fire just about the time my mom came home. She yelled at me and gave me the “Wait until your father gets home” speech. My dad came home and I got a good ass-whipping.

Sometimes it seemed like we got hit a lot. But my parents never really beat us.

We would get a whipping if we got out of line, but it was never anything serious. It was more of a serious scolding than anything else. I remember my mom slapping me in the head a couple of times when I was younger. While I'm not in favor of physical abuse of any kind, I do believe that a good whipping once in a while helps keep a kid in line. So I believe my parents were right in what they were doing.

I started preschool at age five at Eader Elementary, which was at the intersection of Pacific Coast Highway and Magnolia in Huntington Beach. My parents were kind of into the hippie thing back then, so haircuts were not a big priority. Consequently I had hair down to my ass on that first day of school.

The other kids jumped on that and began making fun of me. They would say things like, “There was a little girl and his name was Jacob.” I remember coming home crying and telling my mom. She said, “Well, I guess we'll just have to cut your hair.” So they did and I ended up with a Mohawk. That worked out pretty well for the weekend, but by the time I went back to school the next week, my head was completely shaved.

And then I was teased for being bald. Kids can be pretty cruel even at that young age. But for the most part I got along pretty well with everyone. I was a leader in school, probably due to a combination of my size and attitude. I wasn't afraid of anything, and if I told somebody to do something, they usually did it. Sometimes there would be problems with the other kids. One day I was playing on the playground slide and one of the kids called my mom a bitch.

“What did you say?” I remember saying.

“I said your mother is a bitch,” he answered.

Well, I got real mad and pushed the kid off the swing he was on and made him cry. I got in trouble for that. The teacher wanted to know what happened, but I wouldn't tell on the guy. There was a code even at that young age that you did not snitch on anybody.

I told the teacher that he was talking about my mom, but I wouldn't tell anybody what he said. My mom got called to the school to pick me up and she wanted to know what happened. I said, “This guy called you a fucking bitch.” She told me to watch my mouth. I cussed a lot back then and the teachers would always wash my mouth out with soap.

Then there were the drugs.

My parents smoked pot. It was part of that seventies hippie thing that was going on at the time. My dad and mom grew up in the sixties and they always used drugs. They were real stoners. In fact, there was an issue of
Time
magazine in the 1970s that covered this big outdoor California rock festival called the US Festival. And if you look real closely at one of the pictures, you can see my dad with his big Afro and he sure looked like he was having a good time.

They would smoke with their friends at parties and after work. It wasn't an addiction so much as a lifestyle; it wasn't hurting their day-to-day lives. Dad would always get high, but he was able to go off to work each day and do his job. Mom was always good about getting us up and making sure our clothes were clean, we were fed, and our needs were taken care of. We would always see them smoking. It didn't mean a whole lot to me at the time. It was just something my parents and their friends did, and it always seemed to make them mellow.