CHAPTER FIVE
Iguess you could say I was still pretty much a juvenile delinquent after we moved back to Huntington Beach.
My life was a little bit more stable without all the drug shit going on in the house, and although I was still hanging around with some tough characters, I was not in a gang anymore. But I was reaching out for attention more than I had before because I still wasn’t getting it at home.
Almost immediately, I began causing trouble at Dwyer Middle School. I hated to wake up in the morning and I would be late a lot. I know I set a record at Dwyer for having the most detentions in a single year in the history of the school. I think the tally was something like sixty-four. While I was at Dwyer I was sent to the school psychologist a couple of times and my parents were brought in. Everybody knew I was troublesome. I was a lousy student and a bad kid so they just pushed me into the eighth grade. All they wanted was to get me out of the school as soon as possible.
I was still doing drugs. And my mother knew it. I remember she would find out that I was sniffing glue and she would tell me not to. I would tell her “Okay” and then go off and sniff glue again. Nobody could tell me what to do at that point. And I never did drugs alone. Because as far back as I can remember there was always somebody around who was doing them too.
I remember when I was in the sixth grade, there was this guy who lived in an apartment across the street from us. He had this old beat-up Cadillac sitting out front that was spray painted with the initials LAPD. I wasn’t sure at the time, but I thought he might have been a musician or somebody heavily into music. We used to hang out and smoke pot.
I had a friend named Nathan in the seventh grade, and we were both into cocaine at the time. We’d steal stereos and shit and sell them on the black market to pay for our habit. We’d go buy the cocaine, hook it up, and smoke it. For little kids, we knew a lot about drugs. We knew how to make rock and smoke it. During that time I also took acid, mushrooms, and PCP. A lot of that stuff was just a onetime thing. I would try just about anything at least once. Except heroin. I knew enough to never go near that. But besides heroin, I was into a lot of crazy shit for a young kid.
Like the time my friend and I attempted a strong-arm robbery of a complete stranger. One night I was drinking with some friends and we decided we were going to rob somebody. So we went down to this bar called Taxi’s. After a while this guy came out of the bar and we jumped him. He managed to get away and run back into the bar. A minute later he came running out after us with a bunch of his buddies and we took off.
They were chasing us down the street. It was then that I decided to let them catch up with me, so I slowed down and joined the group that had been chasing us. I was yelling stuff like, “Let’s get those guys!” and they thought I was one of them. They kept running, and I broke off from them and went home.
Easily the highlight of my junior high school crime spree was when I snuck into the post office and stole the American flag that was hanging there. I ended up keeping that flag for years, until one day I was looking for it and it had just disappeared. Ironically, I think somebody stole it from me.
I started my first year of high school at Huntington Beach High School. My freshman year was more about learning who I was at school than actually learning anything academic. I wasn’t sure if I was in the right classes or who I should be hanging out with. I looked a lot like a white kid, but I was still hanging out with the Mexican kids.
There was Ricky and Nacho—guys I had known from my elementary school days. After school, we would always go out and cause some kind of trouble. We’d run around town spray painting walls, do drugs, go fishing, and, of course, steal things like fishing poles and all kinds of other stuff.
We never had problems with the law. We did everything so clean that we never got stopped or caught. I have no idea how I got so good at stealing. Practice, I suppose. But sometimes I think it was God looking over me, saying that he was going to let me get away with this stuff for now.
I was still a virgin during my first year in high school. Not that I wasn’t interested in sex. When I was growing up I used to watch porn with my brothers, and I was very curious when it came to sex. I had heard stories from guys, and I was real anxious to find out what it was all about.
Then shortly after my sixteenth birthday, I got involved with this girl named Danielle. She was an older woman—a junior and a cheerleader. One thing led to another, and I finally had sex for the first time. It was my first real relationship with a woman. Danielle and I were on and off for about eight months, and then we broke up.
I continued to see my father once in a while for holidays or just to hang out. I still loved him no matter what. But he was still on drugs and I didn’t trust him. And with good reason.
Before my parents split up, when I was way into fishing, I remember getting two brand-new fishing poles. Not long after getting them, I put them out behind the house before I went to bed. I woke up the next morning, and the fishing poles were gone. Later I found out that my dad had sold them to get money for drugs. That hurt. When I turned sixteen, I got a moped from a friend and my dad asked me if he could borrow it. When he hadn’t returned it after a few days I went to see him and he told me he sold it to get drug money. I was really disappointed in him.
As messed up as my dad was, toward the end of my freshman year I can honestly say I was well on the road to being a serious juvenile delinquent.
JOYCE ROBLES
I remember coming home one day during Tito’s sophomore year in high school and finding Tito, Nacho, and Ricky doing drugs in our backyard. I chased the boys away and then took Tito in the house. I just snapped. I told Tito that those boys were going down a wrong path and they wanted to take him with them. There were tears rolling down his face. The next day he brought over Eric Escobedo, who was a good kid. Nacho and Ricky kept coming around for a while, but I told them not to stop by anymore.
I started hanging out more and more with my friend Eric Escobedo, who was on the high school wrestling team. We wrestled a bit and I remember him throwing me around like a rag doll. But it seemed kind of cool, so I thought I’d try this wrestling thing out.
When I walked into the wrestling room to sign up, the first thing I asked was, “Where’s the ring?” The coach was a guy named Bob Rice and he told me that there was no ring in wrestling and that I was thinking about professional wrestling, which, he said, was totally fake.
“It’s not fake,” I told him.
But whether it was fake or not, I suddenly felt that, in wrestling, I might have found something that worked for me. It was a one-on-one sport, and the only person who could make me better was myself. I didn’t have to depend on anybody else.
I was a pretty small kid, so the coach had me wrestle a couple of the varsity guys just to see what I could do. They were throwing me around pretty good, but at one point, I caught a guy in a headlock and started to pull back on his head in imitation of what I had seen the pros do. The coach stepped in and said, “No, you can’t do that. You’ve got to put his arm in there.” That was my official introduction to high school wrestling. The coach showed me the move and I began to hit some of the varsity guys with it. I thought,Wow! This is cool!
But I had a lot to learn.
The first person I actually wrestled in a real match was this kid named Michael Biss from Westchester High School. The match started, he shot in, took me down, cradled me, put me on my back, and pinned me in the first period. I got up and was so mad that I started crying and yelling. Then I asked Coach Rice what had gone wrong. “Well, he took you down, put you in a cradle, and pinned you,” he said.
“What’s a cradle?” I asked.
Coach said, “I’ll show you tomorrow at practice.”
My attitude at that moment was that I wanted to know what had happened, why it happened, and what I could do to fix it and make it better. Coach showed me the move and how to get out of it. Eric and I would practice during class and stay after class to practice some more. Drill after drill, repetition after repetition. On the weekends we’d go back to Eric’s house and we’d drill some more.
I won my second match. Pinned the guy with a head and arm hold. I was immediately put on the varsity team in my freshman year and I lettered on my very first try. I was a pretty happy guy.
My stepfather, Mike, was big into sports and NASCAR racing, and he was always telling me stories. He was a pretty good guy, but I was pretty rebellious against him because he wasn’t my father. I stole his car a couple of times. He never hit me, but I would get grounded a lot. He did as good a job as he could at the time.
JOYCE ROBLES
My husband, Mike, and Tito were getting along pretty well. Mike was a strict, hard-labor kind of guy, but I remember the really nice things. Like the time he sewed Tito’s first wrestling letter on his jacket. Tito would occasionally make some money on the fishing boats, and Mike would automatically double whatever he made.
Things changed once I got into wrestling. Now all of a sudden I was forced to get good grades; if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to wrestle. So when I started my sophomore year I was doing my homework, trying to get to school on time, and putting in an effort to learn. I couldn’t just get by anymore. I had to get good grades or I couldn’t compete.
As soon as wrestling season was over, I was back doing the same old shit, going out and partying with friends, stealing shit, and doing drugs. But during wrestling season I was home all the time. Some of my friends started asking if I was going to become a professional wrestler. All I would do was laugh at them and say, “You never know what’s going to happen.”
By the time the freshman-sophomore season started I was wrestling on the varsity squad in the 152-pound weight group. That year I ended up with a 25–15 record. I was one of the top wrestlers on the team. One of my more satisfying victories came when I stomped this kid Jerry Bohlander. Remember that name. Jerry ended up figuring in my future plans.
Because I was on the wrestling team, people started to notice me. All of a sudden I wasn’t just the big guy who was always getting into trouble. Now I was hot shit.
But I was far from a ladies’ man in high school. I was a shy kid when it came to girls. There were girls who I liked, but I was just too shy to say anything to them. I did have a girlfriend in high school named Heather. We dated for about two and a half years, and then she broke up with me to date somebody else.
I met Kristin during my sophomore year. Her family was originally from Arizona, then they moved to Nebraska for a while, and then to Huntington Beach. I remember walking to my classroom one day as Kristin walked by. I turned around and said, “Shit! That chick’s hot.”
I had no idea that she even knew I existed. For better or worse I had developed a reputation around school as being a tough guy. So my guess at the time was that she probably would not have been interested in me because she thought I was some kind of hood.
I told my friend Eric Escobedo, “There’s this chick; I don’t know her name. She has sandy blonde hair and she’s hot!” Five days later Kristin and Eric were going out.
I told Eric he was a fucking asshole.