I want us to talk a little bit.
And so I would appreciate any comments, any questions.
No criticisms, please.
Nah, I'm just kidding.
But anything-- Anybody want to start?
Go ahead.
Are you still mad about Bubba?
Oh, for saving my life?
No.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm glad I'm here.
I'm telling you.
I'm glad I'm here.
You know, I've been very fortunate.
I've been so fortunate because I don't deserve
to be here because of me.
Far better people than me were killed the first time they got
shot at, the first time they OD'd.
I've been fortunate because I went through this.
I've been shot at, never got hit.
I'd OD, came back.
I went to the jails, got in and out, and I'm still here.
And so, in many ways, I have to be thankful for that.
But the other side of it is that I have to be responsible.
I feel responsibility because I'm here and they're not.
Do you have a religion?
[LAUGHS] I was baptized Catholic.
Are you still one?
No, I'm never a good Catholic.
And you know why?
[LAUGHTER]
I'm a very spiritual person.
I think that makes a very terrible Catholic, sometimes.
[LAUGHTER]
And I don't want to down people who
are Catholics because I work for the Archdiocese of Chicago
and I know a lot of great Catholic people.
But I, personally, just do not believe
that a church or celestial being or any of those things
have meaning for me.
I believe that it's all within us.
That God power we all have.
And we can all tap into that.
Yeah?
[MUFFLED SPEECH]
Well, I took the heavy drugs from age 12
to 18, including heroin.
The way that I could get out of that was an intensive two-month
where some of the people from the Chicano movement,
outside of money--
it wasn't money; it was them to save my life--
pulled me into a housing project in San Pedro,
kept me there out of the drugs, educated me,
went through a whole intensive two-month process
to get me out of the heavy drugs.
But I think what happened in my case is that I
saw the politics behind it.
I understood that heroin was a political weapon.
And when I began to see that, I began
to see I didn't want to be part of that.
But the problem is this--
I drank for 20 years.
Heavy drinking.
I went through four marriages.
I really wasn't a good father to my own kids.
Two years ago, I went through a Rational Recovery program
to stop that drinking.
And so I still carried something with me.
The gang warrior still has that sense of the fighting
and not necessarily knowing why or who and you--
it's like a Vietnam vet you have post-traumatic stress disorder.
And especially if you've been on the battlefront and all
your homeboys are dead and you're still there,
because you keep thinking, why me?
And you carry it through your relationships
and you beat your wives and you hurt your kids
and you're drinking.
And I've seen so many people-- it
happens the same kind of thing.
I will tell you one thing writing the book was probably
one of the most important healing things
I could have done.
And in many ways, I say I wrote the book to save my son,
but I will say that I believe my son saved me.
Yeah.
Thank you.
[MUFFLED SPEECH]
Yeah.
That's a good question.
It's a very hard thing to tell these stories.
We all got them.
All of us.
It's so hard.
And partly, it's part of our culture, también.
That you don't tell people nothing.
You go through it, you never tell people.
I took a big risk doing this.
What I had to do-- because I'm not going to I'm not no snitch.
I'm not going to tell nobody nothing.
I changed people's names.
I rearranged situations.
It's all based on real things that happened.
[MUFFLED SPEECH]
Yeah.
I did that because I just didn't want
to reveal things that I know about what happened.
Some of the deaths, some of the things that went on.
I didn't want to hurt anybody who's still alive.
It's like protecting not just the innocent but the guilty.
You know?
This is my story.
And I decided that I would tell it from my viewpoint.
But I will take full responsibility for it.
What happened, however, is I didn't
have any problem from anybody.
Homeboys, even this guy from Sangra came up,
he'd read the book.
You know what I mean?
There may be people-- most people did not.
Know where I got my problem from?
My family.
My own family.
And my mother, of all people, who I love very dearly
and she's a great person.
And her main thing was that I--
in the beginning of the book, I talk
about the past, of my family from the Mexican Revolution.
My grandfather, the alcoholism.
My dad got arrested in Mexico.
He had to escape from Mexico.
All these things that she says, you know what?
Those are stories that we take down but we don't tell people.
But I'm going to tell you something else.
The biggest thing that got her going
was that she always told us about her great-grandmother,
who was a full-blooded Tarahumara indigena.
And I always thought very highly of this.
I was very proud.
And my mother said, you don't tell that to people.
And I know where it comes from, is that whole idea
that you know what, most Mexicans don't know what
Indian tribes they're from.
And you kind of keep it out, you don't talk about it.
She had a connection that she could still talk about.
But her thing was, you don't tell the world that you
had a full-blooded Tarahumara.
You know what I mean?
It's like--
And so I realized that it was mixed in with a lot
of different things.
I feel it's important to tell these stories.
We need to do it.
We can't have a movement without our literature.
We can't have a struggle with our poetry, without our stories
out there.
And there's a lot of ways of doing it.
Some of it is oral and everything,
but we need to have them out there.
And I don't mean to expose people.
I don't mean to open up old wounds.
I don't mean to just hurt people.
But the idea of trying to go through that healing process.
There was a mother whose son is in the book.
And she lost two sons.
And she told me that she was--
when she read it, she was very upset
because her son's name was in there.
And I had a talk with her and I wrote her a letter.
I told her, of course, I did not never want to hurt her.
No way, no, it was not about that.
But I did tell her about how important it was to not let
those deaths die in vain.
That they needed-- we needed to bring them out.
And I was going to do everything I could to protect and secure
her participation or whatever but that these stories had
to be told.
And that particular friend--
son of hers was one of my best friends.
And this is-- and I wanted to honor him.
And I think she took it very well when I explained it.
So I don't know how to get around except that I do
think it is a risk.
And you've got to be real careful
and-- but I feel that the story's
got to be told in some form.
We can't just hold them in all the time.