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  When he returned to his company, he was crazy. He was freaked out that he shot the guy. Plus he was a bad-ass anyway. He emptied his magazine in the ground in front of his commanding officer. Told him to dance. That earned him a dishonorable discharge, to say the least, and by the time he came back to California, he was a complete alcoholic and madman. The war had really fucked him up. My mom said when he got home from the war, he used to jump up from bed in the middle of the night and shout, “Where’s my Tommy gun? Where’s my Tommy gun?”

  I was born a few years later, on October 13, 1947, and by that point we were bone fucking poor. But even as I got older, I never knew just how bad off we were. My mom was a great cook and she could make do with things, so we always ate good. I went around hungry a lot because I never had any money. If I wanted to eat, I had to go home and either wait for Mom or cook something myself. I was cooking for myself when I was eight years old. I saw what my mom did. I could boil spaghetti and take canned tomatoes or fresh tomatoes out of our garden. I could make tomato sauce. It didn’t seem poor to me. My mom was clean as a pin. Our house was spotless. Our clothes were always laundered. She ironed them, stayed up until four in the morning doing ironing for other people and then ironed our clothes.

  My mom always had a chicken coop and we always kept chickens. Whenever we moved (which was a lot), we took the chickens. We never owned a house, and we were always leaving my dad because he was a terrible alcoholic who beat up my mom. When my dad would come home drunk, we’d sneak out of the house in the middle of the night and go sleep in the orange groves. Mom hid blankets wrapped in plastic bags, a flashlight, and little stashes of water and food out in back, ready for the times we had to jump out of the window in the middle of the night.

  It was always on payday. He got paid on Thursdays, and when he wouldn’t come home directly after work, Mom would begin making plans. He’d come home drunk, start yelling and screaming. He never beat us kids, but he’d thump my mom around. Everybody in the family hated my dad, but they were all scared of him. My sister Velma hit him over the head with a baseball bat one time, because he had my mom on the ground. She came up behind him—she was about twelve years old—and bashed him in the head and bloodied up the place bad. My mom got up and we ran. We got out of there.

  So we’d leave my dad, and once he was left alone, he would lose the house. He’d stay there, wouldn’t go to work, and wouldn’t pay the rent, until he’d get kicked out of the house by the cops. He usually got thrown in jail. That was the standard end result of his binge. Sometimes he’d get in the car and get thrown in jail for drunk driving. We’d have to go find a new house every time and move, or my mom would borrow a trailer that her father owned. But somehow we’d always end up with my dad again.

  Right before I was born, my mom had a miscarriage. She didn’t want to get pregnant. She hated my dad by then. She knew he was crazy and didn’t want another kid. She just wanted to raise the kids she already had and get the hell out of the marriage. She had known that for a long time. She had a miscarriage and immediately got pregnant again. She was bumming. She didn’t like to tell me that, but later on in life she pretty much told me. “You’re lucky to be alive, boy,” she said. “If I’d have had that other baby, if it wouldn’t have been a miscarriage, I never would have had you.” I loved my dad, but he was crazy.

  For some reason, my dad was tough on my older brother, Robert. Dad would call him “flea-brain” and my brother would start crying, which only caused Dad to make more fun of him.

  “Wahhhhh,” he would say. “You sound like a damn siren, you little shit.”

  He hated my sisters, too. When they turned into teenagers and started seeing boys, that was when the whole thing blew out. He got so drunk he beat up one of my sister’s boyfriends. That was the end of the deal for him and my mom.

  I was his favorite. I was the king. I was “muscle-brain.” He called me Champ, like I was the next champion of the world. He would introduce me to his buddies. “Hey, here’s Champ,” he would say. “He’s got a left hand on him.” He was going to make a boxer out of me. Every day, I’d come home from school, and if my dad was there, he’d make me train. He’d make himself a BLT—he was a big BLT man—and sit there in his work clothes, ready to go to work.

  “Put on the gloves,” he’d say. It wouldn’t matter if I’d brought a friend home; my dad would say, “Put on the boxing gloves with your buddy here.” He’d make my brother get on his knees to box me. He made me box every day. He’d put on the gloves with me, and teach me. He would take me to gyms and make me hit the heavy bags. “Step into it and twist your body,” he would tell me.

  My dad was left-handed, so he could pop you totally unexpected, like southpaws can. Even if you know how to fight a little bit, lefties come backward at you. Plus, he was a hard puncher. Some boxers have that gift. There are just guys who can punch. There is something to the magic of timing, how you put your weight, and all these things. Being a southpaw and knowing how to punch, he just knocked people out. He was a one-punch wonder.

  Because my dad hit so hard, I learned how not to get hit. By the time I was eight years old, I was getting really fast. I would stand on the outside and move in. He’d try to hit me once in a while and I’d weave. He loved that. He used to really brag it up about me. My brother was bigger than me. He could hit harder. I didn’t want to get hit by him, either, so I just kept becoming faster. In and out, in and out. I had a great left jab for a little kid. I used to beat up my neighbors, my buddies. I’d give them bloody noses and my dad would give me a quarter.

  Starting when I was four years old, my dad drilled into me that I was going to be the champion. But my mom was practical. “We’re going to go pick fruit this week,” she would say, “and you’re going to go pick raspberries for thirty-five cents a crate”—which meant, at my age, maybe two crates a day—“and you’re going to work all summer so that you can buy some shoes for school. Otherwise I can’t afford new clothes for you.”

  I WAS ALWAYS into cars. When I was, like, three years old, I used to stand up on the backseat and lean on the front seat where my mom and dad sat. Going down the road, my dad would point out cars and say, “What’s that?” I could name them all—that’s a Ford, that’s a Chevy, a Studebaker. It was a game we used to play when we would go to San Bernardino to see my grandmother. When I was seven years old, I got a bike, and every October, when the new cars would come out, my pals and I would ride our bikes over to the car dealers a couple miles away to look at all the new cars. There was a Ford dealer, a Chevy dealer, and a Plymouth/Dodge dealer. We’d go around in the parking lots and lift up the hoods and look at the engines. I did that all the way until the Cobras came out at Don Mouff Ford in Rialto. I went over to see the first Mustang when it came out. I was always into it. I’d buy models of all these cars and work on them all day.

  I was a straight-A student, the smartest little guy. When I was in fifth grade, before there was PBS, they took a busload of kids to the Los Angeles educational TV station. They only took three kids from my school and filled up the bus with kids from other schools in the district. I was a math genius. You could lay numbers on me and I could do all the math—fractions, decimals, divide, multi-ply—in my head, just like that. I could go to a world map with no names on it, name the country, name the capital, the river, and could spell everything. Another kid could type eighty-five words a minute or something. Somebody else could do something else. It was a big deal at the time, a reward for only the best students.

  I was a hustler, not a thief like my grandpa. I would take our lawnmower and walk around the neighborhood and knock on doors. I had a paper route. I’d ride my bike ten miles to my aunt Maxine’s house to wash her car. We didn’t have a telephone, so I couldn’t call her. I’d just show up.

  “Aunt Maxine,” I would say, “I need some money. What do you got?”

  She’d put me to work. She was real nasty, but she loved me. She was my dad’s little sister, so she and my dad
grew up as the two babies of the thirteen kids in the same house with one outhouse. She never had kids, and she really took to me. She was a real discipline type. She would work me from ten in the morning until six at night. She would feed me lunch, and then feed me dinner. She would make me take a shower and clean up. She’d wash my clothes, and I would go back home on the bike. She’d give me a dollar. A dollar was a lot of money for me. I would work for that. My brother never did that. My sisters never did that, but I did it. That’s why Aunt Maxine loved me. She said on her deathbed, “You were never afraid to make an honest living.”

  My grandpa might have been a thief, but he was a great chef. He’d take us fishing. He could shoot deer, skin them, and then cut them into steaks in the backyard. He’d make his own wine and can his own food. He’d kill game, catch fish, and always kept a garden next to Grandma’s and his trailer. He was always canning, making soups and stocks. Sometimes it seemed to me like my grandpa could do anything. He and Grandma were renaissance people, and they always went back to the same trailer parks. Whenever they were around, I’d go see them. I knew if I stopped by, he would feed me. He could really cook. You could smell his trailer a mile from the trailer park, and he was constantly in the kitchen. That was the Italian way.

  But my grandfather could argue, and my grandmother didn’t back down. They were always misplacing shit and he’d blame her for it. It was all they’d argue about. There was nothing else to argue about.

  “Where’d you put it?”

  “I told you, Sam, where I put it. If it’s not there, it’s not my fault.”

  “Son of a bitch, then where the hell is it?”

  Then they’d get into it. But my grandpa, at the end of every argument—I can hear it in my head today—he’d say, “Hard luck son of a bitch,” and that would end the argument. That’s all he would say. “Hard luck son of a bitch.” I guess my grandma thought, “You know what? You are,” and she’d lay off him. I guess they had some hard luck or something, because she bought into it every time.

  My grandfather was scared to death of my dad. He had no idea how to stand up to the man. Compared to us, Grandpa had money, but he wouldn’t help my mom out. She would have to be broken down on the side of the road, out of gas with four hungry kids in the back, before he’d help, because he was afraid my dad would beat his ass. He had good reason to be afraid. My dad didn’t want anybody helping my mom leave him. He was a drunk, and he needed somebody to take care of him. And he would beat anybody’s ass, including Grandpa’s, if they helped my mom leave him.

  One time they were all camping and my dad got drunk and started chasing my mom around the campground. My dad could be something of a sex maniac. When he was drunk, he would come home and want to fuck. My mom would not be into it, because he was violent, and that would just make him pissed off. He would thump her, and probably rape her. My mom wouldn’t talk about those kinds of things, but I’d walk in on them all the time in the daytime. I’d open the door and my father would be throwing it down.

  So here were my parents and grandparents camping together, when my dad started chasing my mom. But my grandpa thought he was chasing him, which made him start running around the car. My grandma had a few belts in her and she was a feisty Italian lady. She picked up a big rock and tried to hit my dad, but missed and smacked my grandpa right in the face. “Daddy screamed like a woman,” Mom always said. Hard luck son of a bitch.

  My mom used to really try. She’d go back to him and try, try, try. We’d go find another house. We’d go on welfare half the time. My dad would clean up, go back to work, and pull it together. He would kiss her butt. “I’m so sorry, I’ll never do it again.” I heard that shit so many times, it was fucking ridiculous. Growing up, that’s all I heard. “One more time, I’m leaving you for good.”—“I promise you, I’ll never do it again.” They’d go to church on Sunday for two or three weeks, but soon enough, he’d pull the same shit.

  The longest my dad was ever sober was nine months. It was the happiest time of my childhood. We lived in the same house for nine months—an eternity—a nice, big house we rented. My dad made $80 a week. We thought we were living. We bought a brand-new 1956 Mercury station wagon with wood on the side. We actually had Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter in the same house with the whole family. Just like every other time though, it all fell apart.

  Work only kept his drinking going. He would get in trouble there, but he never lost his job, which helped keep the routine in place. His boss at Fontana Kaiser Steel and another guy at the plant were alcoholics like my dad. They all went to AA meetings together, so he always had his job. These guys would let him come back. He’d go on a drunk for a month and he could come right back to work. That’s the way my dad always sobered up; finally one of his buddies would come get him and they’d put him in an AA meeting. My mom would take him back, we’d find a new house, and the cycle would start all over again. We lived in every damn house in town.

  As I grew older, it got kind of thin. People knew. You would go over to somebody’s house and—small town—my dad would have already been in a fight in a bar with the kid’s father, which basically meant that I wasn’t welcome.

  The same went for girlfriends. I had this one girlfriend, Pat, when I was in eighth grade. She was my first love—eighth grade, slow dancing. I didn’t have a car, so I’d walk her home from school and then I’d walk home, about three miles each direction. Her parents wouldn’t let me come in the house because her father had gotten in a fight with my dad in some bar. I thought they were rich. He was a contractor or something and had a little bread. They lived in a nice, big tract home. One day her mom took pity on me and invited me in the house. She knew I was a nice kid. I stayed for dinner, and I was so fucking uncomfortable it was ridiculous. We went in the den and slow-danced and made out. It was getting late when her dad came in to tell me I had to leave. I started to walk out and Pat started in on her father, “Oh, Daddy, give him a ride home.” They had a brand-new 1960 Thunderbird. What a car. I got in that car with that guy, and he didn’t say one word. I didn’t want him to go to the house, so I had him drop me off on the corner—“This is good, let me out here.” He burned rubber getting out of there, not to show off. He just wanted to get rid of me. It made me feel really bad. And I wasn’t a bad kid at all. Not yet.

  FONTANA WAS COMPLETELY segregated. If you looked at the geography of the town, Sierra Avenue ran from one end of the town to the other, right down the middle. Route 66 ran through Fontana—that was Foothill. The next street up was Baseline, and black people had to stay on the other side of that. Down at the southern tip of Fontana was Valley. Mexicans had to live down there. If you came down into the little shopping area in town, the cops would harass you. White people would beat up black people. I saw it with my own eyes. If a black guy was walking down the street, a carload of white guys would pull over and beat his ass.

  My dad never had a black friend, I’ll tell you that. No black guy ever came back to our house. If my dad ever worked next to a black guy, if any black guy ever worked alongside whites at Kaiser, he never told anybody. The “n” word was prevalent in my house. My dad never laid a hand on one of his kids, ever, except one time with my brother. My mom was ironing, and my dad came home from work at four in the afternoon. He was covered in black soot. We were usually in school and didn’t see him come home from work. My brother shot his mouth off. “Look at Daddy,” he said. “He looks like a nigger.” Dad ripped the cord out of the iron and beat my poor fucking eight-year-old brother with an ironing cord. Mom had to pull him off.

  My dad could be uncontrollable. Back when he was boxing, he’d been suspended from fighting because he attacked the referee who wanted to stop the fight. After he wasn’t a fighter anymore and no longer had his license, he would go to the fights with my uncle Cleo, who was married to my mom’s sister. And—this is how screwed up my family was—Uncle Cleo was also my dad’s nephew, even though he was the same age as my dad. It was uncle-sister-brother-a
unt-and-nephew all in one. Uncle Cleo loved my dad. They were asshole buddies from day one and they would go to the fights on the border in Calexico and Mexicali.

  “Your dad, hell, man, he wasn’t afraid of nobody,” Uncle Cleo told me.

  They’d be watching the fights, passing the whiskey back and forth, and there would be a couple of quick knockouts. Dad knew the fights were going to end early unless they could make a couple more matches, so he would go backstage, drunk as hell, and do some shadow-boxing. The promoter would say okay and he’d go in there—just take off his shirt and street shoes, put on some boxing gloves, and fight. My dad weighed, like, 135 pounds, a few pounds heavier than his fighting weight, and he’d fight guys around 175 pounds. He would go in there and get his head beat in. He would keep getting up. He wasn’t even in shape. He’d just go in there swinging. He’d get five bucks.

  My father didn’t have much of a fight career, but it turned out he did write himself into the boxing record books. Years later, I was watching Tommy Hearns fight for the light heavyweight championship and he kept knocking the other guy down. I was living in Mill Valley, watching TV. One of the commentators said, “That’s got to be the record for the most knockdowns.” Somebody obviously went and looked it up, and a couple of minutes later, the announcer said, “No, the record is held by Manuel Ortiz, who knocked down Bobby Hagar twenty times.” How fucked up is that?

  He would beat up the neighbors. He would beat up his brothers. Any time we had a family reunion on Thanksgiving, everything was fine until afterward. He and his seven brothers, their nieces and nephews, they’d all start playing pinochle. You’d hear, “Oh, you son of a bitch! Boom.” Shit would start flying. The women would run out of the room. “Get the kids out of here, Robert just jumped Leroy” or “Robert’s fighting Carl.” It would take all his brothers to hold him down and chill him out. That’s the way he was. Fucking crazy. I dug it. I watched through the window. He was such a bad-ass.