CHAPTER TWO
What 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.
JOYCE ROBLES
While Sam was in the hospital, he came down with pneumonia. At that point the doctors gave him morphine, and when he came out of the hospital, he was so strung out, he couldn’t sleep or do anything. So he called his brother Reuben.
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.
JOYCE ROBLES
I was in love with Tito’s father. If he had said let’s jump off the Empire State Building I would have done it. So when he started snorting heroin, I started doing it as well.
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.
JOYCE ROBLES
At first the kids didn’t notice the change. We would still go camping and go out on fishing boats and continue to do normal family kinds of things. The only difference was that we would make sure we brought some junk with us. We would be on a fishing boat, and we’d sneak into a bathroom to do the heroin and then we’d be able to get through the rest of the day without any problem.
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.
JOYCE ROBLES
Anything we had of value in the house would be sold for drug money. At first Tito’s father would steal things from work to sell. Eventually things got so bad that he ended up selling his business. It reached the point where he was so hooked that he would just lay in bed for days. And besides, he didn’t have the guts to do any big things to get money. So I was the one who kept a roof over our heads. I was the one who would go out and steal stuff from stores and then take it back and try to get a refund. At that point everything we did was on the sly. We did not want the neighbors to know, so we did whatever we had to do to hide it.
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.
JOYCE ROBLES
Tito was my baby. That was the only reason I kept him with me when the other kids went to live elsewhere.
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.