CHAPTER FOUR
My family had just made our latest move to a house on the corner of McFadden and Bristol in Santa Ana. Nothing had changed. My parents were still doing drugs and doing whatever they had to do to get the money for the drugs. And because of that I was spending a lot of time on the streets.
The first time I got into a one-on-one street fight I was twelve years old.
It was in Garden Grove, California, and I fought against some Asian kid. I don’t remember his name. But I remember that the whole thing was as simple as him saying something about one of my friends and my sticking up for him. We were standing face-to-face and then all of a sudden he slapped me real hard in the ear. I started crying and I ran home.
I learned something that day. You’ve got to watch out for those ear punches.
I never went back to try and even the score with that guy because I was scared to death of him.
Not too long after that, I got into my second one-on-one fight. There was this kid who was trying to bully me. I stood up to him and punched him real hard. He fell down, started crying, and ran away. He never bullied me again.
That kind of evened the score.
By the time I had those fights, I had already been jumped in and jumped out of one of the toughest gangs in the Santa Ana area. They were the baddest of the bad. They were F Troop.
I didn’t really know who was who at first. There were just a bunch of guys hanging out and getting into shit. Most days I was hanging out on the streets with a lot of the neighborhood kids, and some of the older kids, the guys fourteen to sixteen, were in gangs. I was nine at the time but I was pretty mature and streetwise for my age, so people thought I was a lot older.
Most of the guys I was hanging with were members of F Troop. Even before I actually knew anybody in the gang, I knew what they were about. I heard all the stories, how they were the in crowd at the time. Those were the people I wanted to be around. They were one of the biggest gangs in Santa Ana.
It wasn’t like I asked to be in F Troop, and they didn’t exactly approach me to join the gang. I had been hanging out with some of the members for a while and they basically said that if I wanted to keep hanging out with them, I had to join the gang. So finally they asked, “Do you want to get jumped in?” And when I said yeah, they said, “Okay, tomorrow we’re going to meet here and you’d better be here.” I looked at it as a friends kind of thing and wasn’t really afraid.
Being jumped in is an initiation beating. You have to walk this line of about eight kids, usually four on a side. As you walk the line they all beat on you and sucker punch you and you have to take it to prove you’re strong enough to join their gang. At the end of this line there’s always one guy who gives you the final beatdown.
At first, I wasn’t really afraid—I didn’t give it much thought. But all of a sudden, that night, I started getting scared. I wasn’t sure if they were going to shoot me or stab me.
According to the rules, I basically had to let them beat the shit out of me and I could not fight back. But I kind of got the feeling that they would look up to me if I did fight back. So I started walking the line and as I was getting hit with all kinds of punches, I started getting angry about halfway down the line. I knew if I didn’t put up a fight, these guys were going to beat the shit out of me. So I started trying to defend myself a little bit and I hit a couple of guys pretty hard. I reached the end of the line and the beating stopped. I had a bloody lip and a swollen eye, and they told me I was part of the family now.
I liked the idea of the family thing. My parents knew nothing about F Troop or what I had been doing with them. They were too busy getting high all the time to care about me. So it was like F Troop had become my family.
JOYCE ROBLES
I had no idea that Tito had joined that gang. It was all a secret. I wasn’t all there in my mind so I really didn’t know. When I did find out later, the idea that he was in a gang scared me to death.
F Troop was always into some kind of bad shit in the neighborhood, and I got right into the swing of things. We would tag and spray paint on walls. We did a lot of drugs. I did pot a lot and PCP a couple of times and, of course, I drank. F Troop was also into stealing things to get the money to buy drugs and stuff.
Sadly, given my background, I was pretty good at stealing. I would steal stereos from cars that we’d break into, or we’d go into stores as a group and walk out with car stereos, candy, and alcohol. It wasn’t like we were stealing and then trying to sell the stuff. We would take orders from people wanting certain things.
Stealing was easy for me because nobody really paid any attention to a small kid. Once in a while we would get caught, but we would just get a slap on the hand and then they’d kick us out of the store.
There was a lot of violence in and around F Troop. But it never seemed to go beyond just beating the shit out of people. A lot of the violence was gang-on-gang action. If other gangs were on our turf, we’d beat them up. That happened a lot in Centennial Park, where we hung out. It was pretty much our turf. One day we came across three members of a rival gang there, so we just beat the crap out of them. That they were there was all it took to justify a beatdown.
There was no technique involved in gang fighting. You would just sling, throw blows, punches, kicks, and tackles. Sometimes we would use baseball bats and chains. All we wanted to do was hurt them, beat them down, and make them cry.
But I never used a gun or a knife. I never killed anybody or beat anybody real seriously. There were a couple of times when F Troop wanted to use guns, but I said no way. I was afraid; using guns and knives was way too serious for me. But I was more than up for throwing blows.
When I was in F Troop, there was always the chance of things getting out of hand and going too far. I could have ended up in jail or worse. I was an angry kid, but it was a controlled anger. I believed in what my gang stood for, and the guys were friends and family to me. So yeah, while I was definitely an angry kid, it was never an anger that was going to get me into real serious trouble as long as I was careful.
But the funny thing was that even though I was into a lot of shit with F Troop, I knew the stuff I was doing wasn’t good. Something in my heart was telling me that I wasn’t being a good person.
This went on for another two years until I was about twelve. And the funny thing was, by that time, I was probably doing more drugs than my parents were.
It still both angered and saddened me that they were heroin addicts. But there was really nothing I could do. Although I would sometimes try. I remember sneaking into the house sometimes when they weren’t home and hiding their works. But then my father would come home and get real angry when he couldn’t find them. When he asked me, I flat out told him that I had hidden them so they couldn’t do drugs anymore. But all that did was make my father direct his anger toward me and eventually I would tell him where the works were.
But like all drug addicts, my parents eventually reached rock bottom and made the decision to try and do something about it. They both started taking methadone, which was supposed to help you get away from the effects of heroin. It’s hard to say what my father was thinking at the time, but my mother was just tired of the addiction and of having to do what she had to do. Using methadone was helping her, but my father’s habit was just too powerful for him to do what he had to do to keep their relationship together. The methadone treatment just wasn’t working for him.
That he continued to get high was very obvious the few times we tried to have a father-and-son moment. We used to go to the movies a lot, and he would usually be high as hell. I would be watching a movie and I would turn to my dad and he would be nodding out. He did that several times, and we would always end up leaving the theater.
My mother was still seeing men at the time, and she ended up meeting this guy named Michael Johnson. He was a cool guy who had just come out of a marriage. They ended up falling in love, and Michael asked my mother to marry him.
We were still in Santa Ana and I was still running with F Troop. But one day something happened that changed all that.
I was hanging out with a few of my friends. We were all leaning against this van and all of a sudden this car pulled up. Someone in the car wanted to know where we were from, which in those days meant he wanted to know our gang affiliation. I don’t remember who said it, but somebody yelled, “F Troop!” The next thing I knew, I heard this bang and the guy standing a couple of feet away from me just dropped. I thought,Holy shit!
All of a sudden there were bullets flying everywhere.
Everybody scattered. I jumped over a brick wall. You could hear the bullets hitting the wall, the sound of metal hitting stone. I took off running and headed straight home. The guy standing next to me was killed. A few inches the other way and it could have been me. I was lucky. Almost dying had a big impact on me at that moment. I knew this was not the life I wanted.
Word of the shooting got back to my mother and she said, “That’s it, we’re getting out of Santa Ana. Pack your bags; we’re leaving.” I couldn’t argue with her. Santa Ana was a rough place, and there were rival gangs everywhere.
My parents had separated by this time. My father had gone to live in my grandmother’s house. To be honest, I don’t remember much about the day they broke up. I was excited that my mother had given up going with the men and the drugs and that I was getting a second chance to be around a lifestyle that was different than what I was used to. Looking back on it, all I can say is that my mother getting up and leaving my father like that was a very strong, brave thing to do.
I wasn’t going to have to worry about my parents doing drugs anymore and I could stop making excuses and start bringing my friends around to my house. It seemed like for the first time in my life, I would have a chance at a normal life. But there was one more thing I had to deal with before we left Santa Ana.
I had to get jumped out of F Troop.
It wasn’t like it is now in gangs where you can be killed if you try to get out. All I had to do was get the shit beat out of me again. So I went to the gang and told them I was leaving town and it was like I thought. They said, “You got jumped in, you’ve gotta get jumped out.” So I went through the whole thing. I got beat on again. But this time, when the first guy who punched me, I punched back. At one point I had four guys on top of me at once and I was getting stomped into the floor. But I was fighting back the whole time. Finally it was over and I was all bloody again. But I hurt a few guys too. The guys in F Troop wished me good luck and told me to have a good life.
And just like that I was out of the gang life.
We moved back to Huntington Beach when I was thirteen and ended up renting Walter Blanchard’s house. A lot had changed with my brothers since we had last been together. Jim had a girlfriend and had moved in with her. Marty moved back in with us. Mike was in juvenile hall for assault. Mike was the first one in our family to use cocaine, and that put him over the edge. Drugs really fucked up his brain.
I was staying away from gangs and that kind of thing, but not long after we moved back to Huntington Beach, I still found myself in situations where I would have to fight.
I entered junior high school at Dwyer Middle School. Even though I was no longer in a gang, I thought that I was still a bit of a gangbanger and I dressed the part. There was this Mexican kid named Mario Munôz, and for some reason he had a problem with the way I was dressed. One day we stood off in the hallway and he said, “Let’s fight.”
Well, everybody gathered around and started yelling, “Fight! Fight!” I told him to meet me in the park after school so we wouldn’t get in trouble. That afternoon, the final bell rang and we all ran to the park. I had a Mercedes-Benz hood ornament that I had ripped off a car and was holding it in my hand. Mario had nothing. I swung at him and missed. Suddenly somebody in the crowd threw a chain to Mario.
Wow! This is not fair at all,I thought.
Then somebody threw me a skateboard.
Now I had a weapon. All of a sudden it was fair.
Mario swung at me with the chain and I blocked it. Then he swung again and hit me in the back. I dropped the skateboard and I started crying. I tried to swing at him again, but he swung first and hit me on the top of my arm.
All of a sudden my brother came running across the park. Our house was right across the street, and he was looking out the window when he saw what was going on. He ran up to us, tried to stop the fight, and ended up getting right in the middle of it and chasing Mario away.
Huntington Beach. Santa Ana. It was just one fight after another wherever I went. But at least now I was home.