This Is Gonna Hurt (3 page)

The reason my parents' smoking pot was not a big deal to me was because my brothers used to smoke pot and they turned me on to it when I was five years old. Getting high at age five was not so great. I would remember getting head spins that would knock me over and I would have these real bad headaches afterward. It sucked. It just didn't feel good. I also started drinking beer at age five.

My parents weren't concerned because they didn't know we were doing it. They never knew about it at all. We always got away with it, though I never thought about it in those terms. Maybe it was because I was so young. I just felt like they were doing their thing and I was doing mine.

Everybody was getting high and loaded. It was a carefree life.

W
hat my parents went through in the sixties with drugs was kind of what my brothers and I were going through in the eighties. We grew up in the punk rock days. The music and the lifestyle were huge in Santa Ana and Huntington Beach. There were these record stores all over the place, and bands were playing in clubs and in people's backyards. Punk rock was not about peace and love, as our seventies childhoods had been.

The punk thing was very much about rebellion and aggression, something that kids in our neighborhood could relate to. Everybody was into the scene. The music was wild and crazy and had a message that kids were into. Drugs and booze were a big part of that scene. It was all about getting high, being into the music, and partying. But it was still the mellow stuff, pretty much pot and beer for me. I had no idea about things like heroin.

Until my parents started mainlining.

But for my parents, getting into heroin and ultimately becoming addicts was a gradual thing. And not by design. At least not at first. In fact, I guess you could say that my parents became addicts by a simple twist of fate.

It was around 1982 that my father had a cyst removed from his tailbone. He was in a lot of pain after the operation, and the drugs the doctors were giving him weren't easing his pain.

One day my uncle Reuben came over and said, “Try some of this stuff. This will take away the pain.”

What he gave my father was heroin.

My father tried it. It worked on his pain. But he also got hooked pretty quickly. Then he turned my mom on to it. I don't know if they were hesitant to try it at first. After all, this was 1982 and nobody really knew how addictive that stuff was.

Pretty soon my father and mother were both hooked. And things began to change.

All of a sudden I noticed things going missing around the house, things like TVs, and I soon figured out that my parents had to be selling our possessions to get money for the drugs. Then there was no food in the house. Things got so bad that we'd sometimes go through people's trash cans to try and find something to eat. And when we did have a few bucks for food, we would always eat things like beans, rice, and tacos. But mostly any money my parents had was going toward feeding their habit. It wasn't long before I realized that they seemed to be high all the time.

My parents had started out just smoking it. But they began hanging out with people who were mainlining it and pretty soon they were mainlining it too.

Heroin had become a big part of their lives and so it became a big part of their kids' lives as well.

Dad and Mom didn't even try to hide their drug use from us. I knew when they were doing drugs because there was always the smell of matches. When I smelled the matches I could tell my parents were cooking up the drug, which is why, to this day, the smell of burning matches makes me very sick.

It had reached a point where watching them shoot up became a part of my daily life. After school or playing outside, I would walk in on them and they would quickly hide their works and try to act like nothing was going on. But I knew. There were times when they were getting high right in front of me; the only thing that separated us was a curtain.

I remember looking at that curtain and seeing the outlines of the spoon and the needle as their habit grew worse.

My father stopped showing up for work. He had gone from having a full-time job to just doing occasional odd jobs—a couple of weeks here, a couple of weeks there. He was doing just about anything he could to bring in money to feed their habit while my mother continued to stay home.

By the end of the first year of their addiction, it had gotten so bad at home that I did not want to be around my parents at all. Especially when they were high, which seemed to be all the time. I would come home from school and as soon as they came home I would leave and go hang out with my friends or just wander around the streets.

My parents didn't care. As long as I was home before the streetlights went out in the morning, they were fine with me being gone. I tried to stay away from them and what they were doing as much as possible and tried to lead as normal a life as I possibly could.

I was always getting into mischief, nothing real heavy, just kid stuff. Sometimes it would involve drugs. One time I snuck out of the house and went down the street with a friend to a place that had pot plants growing in the yard. In our neighborhood at that time, drugs had become a part of a lot of people's lifestyles and so it was not uncommon for people to have pot plants growing in their yards. And no one was trying to hide them either. My friend and I decided we were going to steal the plants.

So we went to this house, jumped over the fence, hack-sawed the plants off, threw the two big bushes over the fence, and took off. As we were going home, we were trying to decide where we were going to hide the plants. Then I looked up and saw my dad walking down the street toward us. He looked pissed.

“Tito, get your ass over here right now!” he yelled at me.

I was kind of scared. I didn't know what to say. So I held out one of the pot plants.

“Dad, look what I got for you,” I said. He wasn't mad anymore.

One time my brothers Mike and Marty and this friend of ours named Larkin found out that this house in Lake Elsinore had these huge pot plants growing. So we drove all the way up to Lake Elsinore, snuck into the yard, chopped down this huge plant, put it in a tarp, and drove with it all the way to Huntington Beach.

All the way back, we were praying that we wouldn't get stopped by the police. When we got back, we all took some of it. I gave some to my mom and dad, who were stoked, and then ended up selling some to a friend of mine. I was supposed to get twenty bucks for it. But he only had ten so I let him slide.

I guess you could say that was the first time I did a drug deal.

The obvious sign that my parents were full-blown addicts was that they barely smoked pot anymore. They used to smoke around us all the time and there would always be weed laying out all around the house. But now it was mostly heroin. And heroin cost a lot of money.

Since all the money we had was being spent on drugs or, if we were lucky, food, my parents never had money to pay the rent. We started moving from place to place on a fairly regular basis. We must have moved at least four times by the time I turned seven. We would get into a place, fall behind on the rent, get kicked out, move to another place, have enough for the first month's rent, and then the same thing would happen again.

And because we were moving around so much, I was always in and out of different schools. By the time I reached the second grade, I had been in and out of Keppler, Smith, and Wilson in Santa Ana. Actually, I got kicked out of two of those schools for not showing up.

I was feeling so insecure and sad about what was going on with my parents that I basically had no interest in going. A lot of times I would leave for school, decide I wasn't going to go, and end up jumping on a bus that would take me down to Newport Beach, where I would spend the day fishing.

Shortly after I turned six, my three older brothers went to live with this guy named Walter Blanchard. It had become impossible for my parents to support all of us kids. Walter Blanchard was not any relation to us. He was like a friend of a friend who said he'd take my brothers in and watch them while my parents did what they had to do to get to where they needed to be. He knew what was going on. By that time a lot of people did.

The thing with Walter Blanchard was not done legally. It was as simple as my parents approaching him and asking, “Can you do us a favor and watch our sons?” Over the next few years, I would get together with my brothers for birthdays and holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving. It was fun seeing them when we got together, but I really didn't have any feelings of loss when my brothers left. I just felt that I wanted to be with my mom and dad.

By the time I reached age seven, my parents were always fighting about money or some shit about drugs. They could have cared less about what was going on in their kids' lives and we felt it. One night I heard them screaming at each other and I was like, “Gosh! I wish they'd stop fighting!”

Then all of a sudden I heard this loud bang.

Not too long before, my mom had gotten a car from my grandpa, an old Buick. My dad had parked it on the street by our house in this really dark area. That night when my dad heard the bang, he yelled, “What the fuck!” and looked out the front door.

The Buick grandpa had given us was all the way up on the driveway, and a Mustang had crashed into it from behind. This guy staggered out of the Mustang, all bloody from head to toe and totally hammered, and took off running. My dad was so pissed off that he ran after him, grabbed him, and brought him back to our house, where he held him until the police arrived. The guy was arrested for drunk driving and for totaling our car.

My parents got some money from the accident and they went right out and spent it on drugs. But the relative peace of their newly funded high didn't last very long. Pretty soon they would be screaming and hollering about money again. They were running out of ways to feed their habit.

Sadly, my father came up with one more idea.

I
've always been a person who speaks his mind. Ask me any question and I'll give you an answer. As far as I'm concerned, nothing is off-limits.

But there's one thing about my life that really touches me and it's something that not many people know about. I am kind of reluctant to talk about it. But I don't feel as though people will truly understand what I've gone through in my life unless they hear this too. So here it is…

My mother became a lady of the evening when I was eight years old.

My father was barely working and wasn't bringing in much money. So he and my mother started talking about her going with men for money and eventually my father pushed her into it. My mother never wanted to become that kind of woman. But at the time, for them, it seemed like there was no other way to support their drug habit.

It started gradually at first, but it would get worse. I remember I would be at home and I would look outside and my mother would be waiting for guys to come and pick her up. I pretty much knew what was going on, and it was painful for me to watch.

There were times when I just had to get away from the situation and I would go down to Newport and fish. Sometimes I would be fishing on the pier and a car would pull up and it would be my mom with some guy. She would take me to someone's house and I would stay there until she was finished, and then she would come and pick me up.

The way it worked was she would come home after being with a customer at night and would give me money to go get some food. I usually went to the Mexican restaurant that was about five blocks away from the house. Then, with whatever money was left, she would get her drugs and get high.

I know my mother hated what she was doing. She hated every second of it. But she also knew that the money she was making was supporting her and my father's drug habit. My father didn't feel any jealousy or anything about pushing her into that kind of life. None at all. All he cared about was getting the money and getting high.

I found out years later that when my mother went with men, she would act like she was somebody else. She would play out a fantasy in her head so she could escape the reality of what she was doing.

My mother had some run-ins with the law, but she was never in jail for more than a night. My father never went back to jail. Considering the shit he was doing, I guess you would have to say he was lucky.

But the one thing about my parents, even with all the shit that was going on with them, was that they still insisted that I go to school. Nobody in school—not friends, not teachers, nobody—knew what my life was like. They didn't have a clue because I wouldn't talk about it.

Kind of like what my mother was doing when she was with men, I was living a fantasy when I was in school. When I went to school, I would think that I was just like any other kid. My mom would pick me up and drop me off. A lot of times I would just walk.

I was pretty much a C student. I had a lot of problems with English classes even though my parents were strictly English-speaking and that's what was spoken in the house. I had problems reading. My favorite subjects were geography, science, and math. But learning was tough for me. Between the second and fourth grades, I never went to school for a full year. But I made it to enough classes and got good enough grades that somehow they passed me.

Sometimes I would get suspended because I acted out, looking for the attention I wasn't getting at home. I would start fights, sit in the back of the class and throw things, stuff like that.

When I wasn't in school, I was stealing. I would go to places like Kmart and steal clothes and food. I had picked up on my parents' habits. Stealing was the only skill I had. When we didn't have the money to buy things, we would steal them.

I really didn't want to spend time at home—except when it was time to watch pro wrestling on television. My mom told me that when I was young, I would come into the house, get completely naked, grab my blanket, and sit in front of the television watching wrestling. I was fascinated by it. I loved Hulk Hogan and all the trash talking and, of course, the action. I was convinced that it was all real. My mother once told me that I turned to her one day and told her that my name was going to be up in lights someday. I guess that's when the dream was born.

It was about this time that my parents were finding it impossible to keep a roof over our heads and we basically became nomads. Between the ages of eight and nine, I remember staying in a lot of motels, places like Motel 6 and Best Western. When we couldn't afford a motel we'd sleep in our car. For a time we had this tiny trailer that we would park in people's backyards and stay there. Sometimes we would stay in people's garages.

I had friends, but I always made some kind of excuse as to why they couldn't come over to my house. I was ashamed and embarrassed to have them see that I was living in a motel or in somebody's garage.

We used to get food stamps and government cheese and milk. We were on that whole government-issue deal. On Christmas, we'd go and have Christmas dinner with homeless people. That was my memory of Christmas for a lot of years. It was all pretty sad.

I had been getting high for a long time, but I was eight when I started getting heavily into shit. I was hanging out with these guys who were always looking for ways to get high. I started off sniffing paint and glue, but eventually we did whatever we could get our hands on. I wasn't in a gang, but I was definitely hanging out with some tough street guys.

Things were bad, but I can remember some bright spots.

Every once in a while my father would take me out on a fishing boat called the
Hellena
with his friends. We had done a lot of fishing before, and it had become my thing. I would read about fishing a lot. We would be out on the ocean catching fish and as they were pulling them in, I would be able to call out their names. One of the deckhands, a guy named Mark Thompson, said, “How do you know about those fish?” When I told him I read about them, he was real impressed.

“Have you ever thought about working on a boat?” he asked me one day.

I told him I hadn't.

He said, “Why don't you come out and I'll show you a few things. You can scrub the boat down and I'll let you fish for free.”

That sounded cool to me. So every chance I had, I would go down to Newport Landing. My mom would drop me off, I would work on the boat, and my mom would pick me up at night. For me it was a total getaway. It was a few hours where I didn't have to see my parents doing drugs.

My mother did her best. She tried. But to this day, I still have hatred toward my father.

I hate him for what he put us through and because he could never be man enough to talk to me about it. But when my dad wasn't high on drugs, he could be very loving toward me.

I remember the times when I would lay on his chest and we would watch television and just talk about things. I remember his smell and his hairy chest. At that time, those things were very comforting to me. There was a little happiness for me with my parents.

They had good hearts.