This Is Gonna Hurt (5 page)

I
finished my sophomore year with a 3.46 grade point average. Want to know what I did on my summer vacation? I stole a car.

And went to jail.

This is the way it went down. My friends and I used to go up and down streets and if the cars were open, we'd get in there and take the change, stereos, speakers—anything in the car we could get something out of or sell. This one time I had been drinking with some friends and we hit this car. I pulled the visor down and the keys dropped right into my lap. I decided to take it for a cruise.

I started the car and drove it around for a while. It was a stick shift and I didn't know how to drive stick shift, so I was grinding the shit out of it but driving well enough to get around. After a while I pulled into Eric's driveway, but I couldn't stop and ended up slamming into one of his aunt's cars. Instead of calling my parents, Eric's family called the cops. The cops came and arrested me for grand theft auto.

I went to court, was found guilty, and was sentenced to juvenile hall for a total of thirty-nine days.

The biggest thing I had to get used to in being institutionalized was having to live by a strict schedule. You were up at six in the morning. You had your breakfast pushed through a slot in your cell door. Then you'd go to school for four hours, come back to your cell for lunch, and then go back to school for another hour and a half. Then it was dinner, shower after dinner, and, for me, a lot of push-ups and triceps workouts.

I avoided having problems with other inmates by just keeping my nose out of other people's business. But there was this one kid who tried to give me a hard time. I just turned around, punched him in the stomach, and knocked the wind out of him. I turned and walked away. No one ever bothered me after that.

Once summer vacation was over, I was back at school. And once the wrestling season started, I was the same good student. When it came to wrestling I was suddenly real goal-oriented. I wanted to get the most pins. I wanted to be a CIF (California Interscholastic Federation) champion. I wanted to be a state champion. By that time I had grown to six foot one and weighed around one hundred eighty-five pounds.

Paul Herrera took over as wrestling coach my junior year. He was like a big brother to me. He was like the dad I never had. He'd wake me up for school in the morning. He made sure I kept my grades up and stayed eligible. That year we were first in league and second in CIF.

But once wrestling season was over, I went back to being a hood.

My friends and I would stake out houses. We'd see when people would go off to work and when they would come back. We'd watch a house for three or four days, then watch for another week, and then that third week we would wait for them to go to work, bust out a side window, unlock the house, back a car in, fill the car up with stuff, and take off. We did that for a good four months. It was going along fine for a while, and then we nearly got caught a couple of times and we finally decided to stop doing it.

I turned seventeen that year. I loved wrestling. But when I wasn't on the mat I always seemed to be looking for trouble. Or, as it sometimes happened, trouble came looking for me.

One day I was standing in the hallway at school with my girlfriend Heather and this guy walked by and said, “Hey, you fucking cunt!” I turned around and said, “What did you say?” He got right up in my face and said, “I called her a fucking cunt. What are you going to do about it?”

I said, “Are you serious? I'm going to beat your fucking ass!”

He was standing there with all his buddies and I was by myself so he was acting real brave. He said, “We'll see.” And then he turned around and walked away. The next day I came to school and he was standing by himself in the cafeteria. I came up behind him and shoved him super hard. He turned around and his eyes were all wide.

“Remember you talking your fucking shit?” I yelled at him. “What are you going to do about it now?”

I punched him once, dislocating his collarbone and breaking his shoulder. I looked at him real hard for a second, then turned around and went off to class. Two periods rolled by and I was sitting at my desk when all of a sudden the door opened and John Ortiz, the campus cop, walked in and told me to get up. He said that I was under arrest for assault, handcuffed me, and took me out of the classroom.

I went to trial, was found guilty, and was sentenced to juvenile hall for twenty-three days.

It was pretty much the same situation as the summer before. I was really cool and because of that nobody really messed with me. One day one of the teachers in juvenile hall came up to me and said he had heard I had wrestled in county. I told him I did and that I wished that I had some way to train in here. He asked if I had ever thought about running. It turns out that there was a five-K run coming up and if I wanted, he would make sure that I could do it. There was an incentive, of course. If I did it, I would be able to get sodas and candy (which were a luxury in that place) and I would be able to work out in the weight room. So I went ahead and did the five K and actually ended up taking fifth place. But I couldn't walk for two days afterward because I was so damned sore.

A week before I was set to get out, this kid came up to me and said, “Listen, homes, you're not going anywhere. We're going to fight, you're going to be extended, and you're going to be here just as long as I am.” I told him that wasn't happening.

I hit him right in the gut, he dropped, and I turned around and walked away. He didn't even touch me.

I got out and went back to school. It was time for wrestling and I had to declare an official weight for the CIF. I weighed 174 at the time and the coach wanted me to fight at 160, which meant that I had nine days to cut fourteen pounds before the official weigh-in. Fourteen pounds is not a lot of weight to lose in nine days, but for me cutting that weight was very difficult. So for the next nine days I was spending time in the sauna, doing jumping jacks, and riding the stationary bike. Finally it was the day of the official weigh-ins and I stepped on the scale.

I weighed 160.8. I was less than a pound over the limit.

I started crying and begging the CIF people to give me another chance. I went to the locker room and made myself gag so I could get more water out of me. After about a half hour of doing that, I walked back out and said, “Let's try it again.” My weight was 160 on the dot. The athletic commission passed me and let me go. That season we went to the CIF and took third.

By my senior year I had been put in remedial classes. A lot of it had to do with problems I was having at home. I was still doing a lot of shit, staying out late and doing drugs with my friends Nacho and Ricky, who were in a gang on the south side of Huntington Beach. But I wasn't into banging and all that crazy stuff by that time. If anything like that came up, I would just steer away.

I got into trouble when I wasn't wrestling, but during the season I was really solid and gung ho. And being that way might just have saved my life. Nacho called me one day and said that his gang was going to do a couple of drop-offs. They were getting paid money for it, and he said that I should come out with them. I said, “Man, I've got wrestling practice tomorrow. I can't do it.”

Nacho kept at me, saying, “You'll be cool and we'll be back real quick.” I kept saying I couldn't do it and finally he said, “All right, whatever,” and hung up. I went to wrestling practice the next day and didn't think anything of it. When I came home, the phone rang and it was Nacho's mom.

Nacho had gotten arrested. At the time he was in possession of a million dollars' worth of speed, five assault rifles, and five bulletproof vests that he was taking from one gang to another.

Nacho ended up getting twenty-five years to life. He's still in prison to this day. I could have been right there with him.

I'd like to think I have a kind of intuition about these things, that I know enough not to get involved in situations that don't sound right. But that thing with Nacho? I mean, who knows? Not being in the middle of that could have just as easily been plain luck.

I had a great senior year. I was CIF champion, I was number one in the league and number one in the county. My record was 56–3, with 36 pins. I got my name on the wall of the wrestling room. I was doing well.

And not too long after I turned eighteen, I graduated from high school. But even that didn't go off without a hitch.

June 14, 1993. I had my cap and gown and was all ready to go to the graduation ceremony when I was told that I couldn't cross the stage to accept my diploma in jeans and tennis shoes. I said, “What do you mean? I've done so much.” They said sorry.

So I ran home and got my brother's khaki pants that were too big for me, put on some black shoes, and ran back to the school just in time to graduate with the rest of my class. It had been a long, hard struggle, but I had finally made it. I graduated. My next question was, “Okay, what do I do now?” I didn't have any money from my parents to go to college. I really didn't have any expectations of what I wanted to do with my life. I was just happy that I graduated from high school.

I went through the summer not doing much of anything. Just hanging out. Partying. Doing drugs. As usual, I really did not have a clue what to do next. I sensed that I might be going down the wrong road and that I could very easily end up in prison or dead and that nobody would even remember me at all.

I was still living at home, but things were getting tense in the house.

I thought everything was okay between Mike and me. But then my mother came up to me one day, handed me $800, and said, “Your stepfather wants you to leave.”

And just like that, I was out.

M
y stepfather's position was that I was eighteen, I had caused too much fucking trouble in the house, and it was time for me to be a man and stand on my own two feet. And you know what? His attitude didn't really surprise me. I wasn't doing much around the house except getting high and getting into trouble.

I had to agree with him that it was time for me to go.

So I moved in with my brother Marty and his girlfriend. I agreed to pay him $200 a month in rent and I used the $800 my mother gave me to buy a car. So I had a place to stay and a car to drive around. All I could think at that point was, “Now what?”

For a while I continued to think about college. Paul Herrera had gone off to Ocean View to teach, and I had thought about hooking up with him again. But I didn't have the money to go out there and I couldn't get a wrestling scholarship because they were looking at guys who had done a lot better than me. And I knew I didn't have the grades to get into a decent college.

So I decided to just take whatever job I could get. I did a little bit of construction, but I didn't like it that much. Then I got a job with Allied Moving Services, which was hard work. I was working sixteen-to eighteen-hour days on an almost daily basis. It was at that point that I started doing methamphetamine in order to stay up and be able to work longer days.

It was also around that time that I began dealing drugs.

I had never really thought about dealing drugs before. Using drugs? Sure, every chance I had. Dealing was a different story. It was like stepping over a line that I wasn't sure I wanted to cross.

But one day somebody turned me on to some pot and I asked him if he could turn me on to some more because I knew a lot of people who were always looking to score. Then people started asking for meth and that's when I started dealing meth.

My conscience would bother me sometimes. There were times when I thought I was going down the same road as my parents. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I really didn't care. I was making money and taking care of business. And I was always very careful and very sharp when I was dealing. Never came close to getting caught. That went on for about a year. I was working, dealing, and once in a while I would steal food or things that I could sell.

For a while I worked as a bouncer at a club called Mazzotti's. Mazzotti's was a pretty easy gig for the most part, just checking IDs and monitoring the line and letting people go in and out. Normally, things at the club were pretty cool, but there were those times when stuff just happened.

One night this guy came to the front of the line. You could tell he really didn't know anybody, but he acted like he did. And he just walked right past me. I stopped him and said, “Hold on, man! There's a line here.”

He said, “I don't wait in any lines.”

My response was, “I don't know you. You wait in line.”

He said, “Whatever,” and then tried to walk past me.

I smacked him down and got him in a front headlock, picked him up off his feet, walked him out the door, and threw him into the street. This guy deserved to be made an example of and, at age nineteen, I was very much into making an example of people and putting them in their place.

Meanwhile, wrestling had gone out the window. I wasn't training anymore—there didn't seem to be any reason to.

It was around that time that I reconnected with Kristin.

We ran into each other at a house party one night and started talking. Not too long after that we started hanging out regularly. But just as friends. It went on like that for about a year. Then in 1995 we went to the movies to see
Interview with a Vampire
. Right in the middle of the movie I started getting real nervous. I was thinking,
Holy shit! We're on a date right now.
We went back to her apartment afterward and fooled around, but we didn't have sex. We both knew that we were falling in love. We were with each other every single day after that.

Everything about being with Kristin just felt right. She came from a really good family. Her parents were straitlaced. Her father was a CEO at a hospital and her mother was Mary Poppins. I felt that Kristin might have been acting out a lot because of her family background.

Although we were always together, we would not live together until 1996. Her parents were paying for her apartment. I still had to worry about coming up with rent money. I was still working at Allied Moving Services and dealing and she was working at a sandwich shop. We were both partying a lot. I still had no direction and no clue about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. But I was in a serious relationship for the first time in my life with somebody I loved. That felt good.

And everywhere we turned in our Huntington Beach neighborhood, there seemed to be music. Hard-core music.

I had always been into punk and the really heavy hardcore and metal. When I was in high school I would always have songs by the likes of White Zombie and Pantera blasting in the background when I was practicing my wrestling moves.

There was this band that used to practice near Huntington Beach that everybody said was fucking good called KoRn. One day Kristin and I grabbed our fake IDs and went to the Club 5902 to hear them play. We were standing in line when all of a sudden Reggie, a guy from my block, walked by. I yelled out his name and he turned around. We started talking and we told him that we were there to see KoRn. Reggie said, “KoRn is my band. I'm the bass player.” He got us right in.

The band started playing and a mosh pit immediately formed. I was right in the middle of it, knocking people down. I got real tight with the band after that and we would show up at their gigs at places like the Whisky or Fullerton College. The guys in KoRn were all party guys and we would always party together. Then they got real big and next thing you know they were driving around in BMWs and Mercedes. I was real impressed by their success. It was my first contact with people who had gone from nothing to being millionaires with lots of money and big cars. I wanted to know how I could get all that.

Kristin and I continued to make ends meet. I had this feeling that somehow I wanted the spotlight. And I knew that it wasn't going to happen by moving furniture and dealing drugs.

Later that year I was in a bar when I ran into Paul Herrera. We started talking and catching up on old times. He wanted to know what I was doing and asked me if I ever thought about wrestling again.

I told him I would love to but I would have no way of paying for it. He said, “I'll tell you what. I can guarantee you we can get you some financial aid. You've been on your own for the past two years and supporting yourself. And being Mexican, that should help you out a bit. I'll call Raoul Duarte, who is the wrestling coach over at Golden West College, and we'll see what we can do. Why don't you come down to the college tomorrow and meet with him.”

I told Paul that I was working the next day and couldn't make it.

Paul just looked at me for a second and then said, “Well, take your choice. What do you want to do?” I went home that night and went to bed, but I couldn't sleep. I stayed up all night thinking about what Paul had said. I got up the next morning, looked in the bathroom mirror, and I didn't recognize myself.

I was six foot two, one hundred eighty pounds, and I was out of shape. I had black circles under my eyes, pimples all over my face. I looked like a drug addict. It was all the meth and the alcohol. I really didn't know the person who was staring back at me. At that moment I had a reality check.

I called my boss Monday morning and I told him that I couldn't come in that day.

“What do you mean you can't come in today?” he yelled. “We need you here. We don't have an ass to fill your spot.” I told him that I had to talk to some people at school, that I might have an opportunity for a scholarship. My boss said, “You don't come in today, don't worry about coming in again, you'll be fired.”

“In that case I quit,” I said, and hung up the phone.

So I went down to the school and walked into Raoul Duarte's office. We talked for a while and I told him I wanted to see what we could do about getting me into school. We went down to the financial aid office and pretty soon I had financial aid that was paying for my tuition, my books, and part of my rent. All of a sudden I had another chance to come back and wrestle.

I started at Golden West College in the fall of 1995. I moved to a place that was closer to school. My major was physical education and my minor was special education. At that point I wanted to be a teacher. I thought it would be cool to be able to give something back to kids.

When I first got to school, I knew I wanted to stick with it and make it work. Kristin was totally in my corner. She enrolled as well, and we ended up taking some classes together. She would pat me on the back and support me. And it was working. I was doing my homework. I was showing up for school every day. Once in a while I would be late, but most of the time, I was on time.

I like to think that I was using the opportunity to learn some things rather than just use college as an excuse to wrestle. Looking back, it was like I was taking classes that I sensed would help me at some point in the future. The big thing for me was the speech classes I took. Those classes taught me how to be comfortable speaking in front of large groups. I learned that if I could engage people in a way that made sense to them, then they would listen and then, hopefully, the next time they would understand.

I was real excited the first day I showed up for wrestling practice. So was the coach. Until he saw the monitoring band around my ankle. At first the other wrestlers thought it was some kind of jewelry. It was really the result of my latest brush with the law.

Shortly before I started at Golden West College, I was arrested for burglary. A friend and I had gotten drunk one night and decided to go hit some cars for stereos. This time we got caught. I was given five days in the Orange County Jail, which I served without any problems, and then was given thirty days of house arrest. I couldn't go more than a hundred yards from my house unless it was to go to school or wrestling. Kristin was pissed. She really busted my chops on that one. She kind of understood, given my upbringing, but boy, was she mad at me for jeopardizing my chance at having a future.

The coach had no complaints once he saw me wrestle. I would cover the ankle monitor with a protective pad during practice. I actually shorted the monitor out one time because of all the sweat getting into it and it had to be replaced.

Once I started wrestling, I began to do things that pointed to the beginning of the larger-than-life Tito Ortiz. I started dying my hair a different color before each tournament. I did that just because I wanted to, but I found out that people who didn't normally go to wrestling tournaments started showing up for no other reason than to see what color my hair was that week.

I was awesome that first year. I did well in the state and regional meets and had the most pins. I went undefeated and I won the state title. It was hard work, but I really dedicated myself.

To the point where I almost killed myself.

At one point during the season, I had to drop down from my walking-around weight of 205. So I started running. I ran for days trying to get that weight off. One day I was out running and I told myself, “I can't run anymore.” I collapsed in front of a Taco Bell and just lay there. I called Kristin to come and pick me up. She pulled up and just stared at me laying on the ground.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

I was fine, but losing that weight was such a hard cut that I decided that whatever my walking-around weight was, it was going to be the weight I would wrestle at from now on.

Although I put a lot of my energy into the sport, the reality was that I had no real interest in pursuing it professionally at that point. My plan was to get my degree in physical education and work as a wrestling coach and as a special education teacher. During my first year at Golden West, I received a phone call from a friend of mine who was a wrestling coach at Marina High School. He wanted to know if I was interested in being his assistant. Since my career was going in that direction, it seemed like a way to get my foot in the door.

I was passionate about working with those kids and making them better both as wrestlers and as people. I was only a bit older, so they could relate to me. I was their confidant; if they had problems with girlfriends or things at home, they would come to me. It was funny, the first person to ever give me a bloody nose in a wrestling ring was one of those Marina High kids.