CHAPTER THREE
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.
JOYCE ROBLES
I know I made a lot of bad decisions, but I never slept with men for money. I would go with men, play games with them, and then rip them off. But as far as laying down with men for money? No. I ripped them off. They left with no money but they left without me too.
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.
JOYCE ROBLES
Of course Tito knew what was going on. I’m sure in his mind, he had to know. He worried about where I would go at night and where I was coming up with all the money.
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.
JOYCE ROBLES
We lived in a trailer for a while that was next to a campground. Haitian gypsies were living right next door. One day Tito came running up to the trailer and told us that there were narcs in the front yard. We all ran out of the trailer, jumped a fence, and ran to a friend’s house to hide.
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 theHellena 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.