The first night I went out my mother wondered what had taken me so long, but her eyes filled with tears when she learned that I’d come home with large orders from every one of her customers and even a few new ones. “You’re better at this than I am,” she said.
In many ways, that experience turned out to be life-changing for me. I’d gotten a taste of success in sales and I liked it. I was good at it. And it made money. My mother paid me fifty dollars commission for what I’d done. I felt as rich as Howard Hughes.
It was a pretty good gig until some of the kids whose houses I went to told the other kids at school what I was doing. They started calling me “Avon boy” and asking if I liked wearing girls’ makeup. Not long after that I stopped.
Chapter Fourteen
We value most that which is elusive, which is probably why women were of such interest to me.
—CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY
I didn’t date much in high school. I was interested in girls—more like obsessed with them. They fascinated me. I know that’s not profound or anything—pretty much all boys that age are fascinated by girls—but since I had no sisters, they were truly alien creatures.
My sophomore year, in math class, I sat next to a pretty girl named Tina. She was petite, fair-skinned, and blond with radiant blue eyes. She told me that her parents had emigrated from Helsinki, Finland. I had no idea where that was.
Tina was not as shy as I was. She was sweet to me and told me that she thought I was “cute.” At the end of one class I slipped her a note asking her if she would be my girlfriend. As she read the note a big smile crossed her face. She looked at me and nodded. I walked her home from school.
Tina was my first foray into the world of women. She was also my first kiss and brought out feelings that had lain dormant inside me. I’d usually walk her home from school even though she lived a half mile in the opposite direction from where I lived. Sometimes, on weekends, we’d walk up to the mouth of the canyon to kiss. Even though I was too young to think of such things, I wanted to marry her. I wanted those feelings to last.
Our relationship went on like that for about three months before one afternoon, as I was walking home from Tina’s house, two pickup trucks roared past me, then pulled to the side of the road. The doors flew open and eight of our school’s football players got out. Half of them were linemen and practically twice my size. The one exception was Stan Fuller, the varsity team captain and quarterback. He wasn’t much bigger than me, but he had his posse.
“Hop in, Gonzales,” Stan said. “We’re going for a ride.”
I was surprised that he even knew my name. I was a nobody. I was afraid. “Where are we going?”
“Just giving you a ride home,” Stan said.
“I’m good. My home’s not far from here.”
“I know where you live. That’s why we’re going to drive you.”
I stood there trying to hide my fear. “Really, I’m good.”
“Don’t be such a chicken,” said a hulking, baby-faced kid with yellow hair. “We ain’t gonna do nothin’ to ya.”
The way the hulk said it pretty much assured me that they were going to do something to me.
“Really,” I said. “No worries.”
Stan’s expression hardened. He walked up to me and grabbed my arm. “Get in the truck, Gonzales.”
I knew I had no choice but to get in with them. I thought of running, but they would have just chased me down anyway. I’m pretty sure all of them could have outrun me. And even if I had miraculously escaped, they would have just hunted me down at school.
God loves me.
They put me in the backseat of the first truck between two husky football players. My shaking legs looked like thin branches next to theirs.
One of them said, “You’re that kid who sells makeup.”
I didn’t say anything, just compulsively tapped my foot on the ground.
We drove up to an isolated campsite near Shanghai Creek about fifteen minutes up Ogden Canyon. My anxiety grew with each mile. When we reached the campsite the trucks pulled up next to each other and everyone jumped out.
Baby-face grabbed me by the shirt and dragged me out of the truck to the ground and kicked me in the stomach. I couldn’t believe how hard he had kicked me. As I struggled to catch my breath, several of the linemen lifted me up and held me while they took turns slugging and punching me.
The beating went on, as near as I could tell, for at least fifteen minutes. After one shot to the gut I threw up, which made everyone laugh and presented a new opportunity to my assailants. One of them grabbed me by the back of the head and pushed my face into it.
“Eat it, you Mexican dog. Eat your vomit.”
They couldn’t make me, but they rubbed my face in it until my nostrils were full of puke. Still, I barely made a sound. I knew that more reaction caused more violence. I had learned it at home.
After they had all gotten in their hits, Stan kneeled down next to me. “Stay away from our girls,” he said. “White girls and spics don’t mix, get it?”
“Yes.”
“I hope you do, because this little exercise was just a warm-up. If any of us see you with one of our girls again, we’re not going to drive you up here in my truck, we’re going to drag you up here behind my truck. I’m going to tie a rope around your feet, tie the other end to my hitch, and we got ourselves a Mexican piñata. Got me?”
I didn’t answer. Stan tightened his grip. “You got me?”
“Yes.”
“Say ‘yes, sir,’ ” he shouted.
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes, sir, what?”
“Yes, sir. I got you.”
He looked me in the eye, then threw me down. “You stink like puke,” he said. “I’m going to have to wash spic puke off me. Let’s get out of here.”
They got back into the trucks. The wheels of the second truck spun dirt on me as they drove away.
God loves me. God loves me. God loves me.
It was another ten minutes before I could walk. It took me two hours to stagger home from where they’d driven me. It was nighttime. I was just glad my father wasn’t outside the house as I came in.
The next day I told Tina that I couldn’t see her anymore. She cried and asked why, but I never told her. I was too humiliated. Whenever I think back on that time, I wish I had. A couple of weeks later I saw Stan and Tina walking down the hall holding hands.
Chapter Fifteen
There are some who would gladly put you through hell under the auspices of saving you from it.
—CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY
Never believe things can’t get worse. It was a Saturday afternoon and I was out raking leaves when my brother, Mike, walked up to me. He looked nervous but excited.
“Charles, come here.”
“What?”
“I got something to show you.”
I followed him into the house. As I walked into our room he got on his knees and reached under his mattress. He brought out a Playboy magazine. The cover was a picture of a naked woman sitting in a massive cocktail glass. “Look what I found.”
I knew what it was, I’d seen kids with Playboys at school, but I’d never seen one up close. I took it from him. “Where’d you get this?”
“It was in a Dumpster.”
I knew it was wrong to look at that type of magazine, even though I wanted to. Our pastor had given a sermon on it once. “He that looketh at a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery in his heart.”
I gave the magazine back to him. He looked at me with surprise. “You didn’t even open it.”
“You shouldn’t have that. It’s not good.”
“You’re such a goody-goody.”
“At least I’m not going to hell.”
Still, the magazine haunted me. I was sixteen and had never seen a woman naked. Sometimes just knowing that it was under Mike’s bed made me tremble. One night, after Mike was asleep, I got it and took it into the bathroom. I had ju
st opened it on the counter when my father opened the door. I quickly grabbed the magazine.
“What you got there?”
“N-nothing.”
“You got a skin mag. Give it here.” I handed it to him. “Where’d you get this?”
I couldn’t implicate my brother. I could, but it wouldn’t help any. It just meant he’d be beaten too. “In a Dumpster.”
“You know you’re going to hell for looking at that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you know what hell feels like?”
“No, sir. I think—”
Before I could finish, his fist caught me above the jaw, knocking me to the floor. Then he came at me like a madman, swinging wildly.
In all the times he’d gone after me, he’d never done so with the fury he showed then. I thought he was going to kill me. He beat me unconscious. I don’t know how long I’d been out, but I woke alone and in the dark, lying in a pool of my own blood and urine. I tried to crawl up on my forearms but I couldn’t take the pain.
I lay there shaking for several minutes, then flopped myself into the bathtub, fully clothed, and turned on the water. The water came cold at first, then warm. My entire body felt broken. The water ran over me, washing the blood and stink from me. I looked up through the darkness at the stream of water. I pulled off my shirt and my pants and lay back.
I must have passed out again because I woke to cold water. I leaned forward and turned it off, fighting the urge to vomit. Then I leaned over the side of the tub. My thoughts spoke fiercely. They lied. It was always a lie. If there is a God, he hates me. He always has. I hate him back.
Chapter Sixteen
I don’t know if I’ve chosen a different path or if I’ve just finally started noticing my surroundings.
—CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY
Something fundamentally changed that night. Something deep inside of me died. Or woke up. I threw away my Bible. I threw it out back with the other trash. I would have burned it but I figured that it wasn’t worth the trouble. The next Sunday I told my mother that I wasn’t going to church anymore. She asked me why. I told her it was just a waste of time.
I started hanging out with Mateo, an older Mexican boy my mother had warned me to stay away from. She sold Avon to Mateo’s mother and said their home was a bad environment.
Mateo lived six blocks from me in an even poorer neighborhood than mine. His father was in prison. Mateo had spent twenty-six weeks in the Ogden Juvenile Detention Center for burglary. “Juvie” he called it. From the way he told it, it was like going to college to learn a trade. He wore his time there like a badge—like someone who has run a marathon or climbed Everest.
He introduced me to beer, the Mexican kind, and whiskey and tequila. I also began smoking with him, cigarettes at first, then marijuana. He used some harder drugs, but I had enough sense not to go there.
Mateo had a pretty sister a year younger than me named Gabriela. She was as wild as Mateo and almost as streetwise. Sometimes she would smoke with us. She knew a lot more than me about boy-girl stuff. My mother had taught me the basics of sex, but with Gabriela, it was like a sport or something. Before long I was spending as much time with her as I was with Mateo. At least once a week we’d skip school and go up into the canyons to fool around.
I stopped caring about grades or school or even what the nuns said. I no longer cared whether or not I graduated. I got suspended from school for the first time after being caught smoking cigarettes on school grounds. My mother was disappointed in me but she never told my father. I think that after what he’d done to me for the Playboy, she was afraid he might kill me.
My life began to change in other ways. Just after I turned seventeen there were three major changes in my life. First, I had a growth spurt. I grew nearly three inches and put on twenty-five pounds. I filled out. I was a man.
Second, I discovered that I was a direct descendant of Jesse James. I don’t know why my mother had never told us before. I think she might have been embarrassed by it. It came out one night when all four of us were watching television and there was a preview for a TV western about Jesse James.
My father, beer in hand, turned to my mother and said, “There’s your kin. You gonna watch that?”
“No,” she said.
Then my father turned to Mike and me. “You know your mother’s great-great-grandfather was the famous Jesse James, the celebrated murderer and train robber. You boys got outlaw blood in you.”
I don’t know what effect my father hoped this would have on me, but likely not the one it did. For the first time in my life I felt like more than a cypher and a punching bag. I didn’t know much about James other than that he was a famous outlaw, but I knew he was feared and dangerous. I wanted to be both those things. I went to the library and got every book I could on Jesse James.
What I read fascinated me. Jesse James’s father, Robert James, was a pastor and a hemp farmer. He died when Jesse was only three, leaving Jesse and his brother Frank to be raised by their mother. When the Civil War broke out, the brothers enlisted for the South. They became Confederate guerrillas, which is how James gained his reputation as a bushwhacker, scalping Union soldiers and cutting up their bodies after they were dead.
James may have been the first criminal in history with a flair for public relations. He formed an alliance with the editor of the Kansas City Star, who published letters from James that proclaimed his innocence. In addition, the editor wrote admiring editorials that portrayed him as a type of Robin Hood, gaining James public popularity. It was said that when he robbed a train he would look at the men’s hands to see if they were laborers. If they were, James wouldn’t rob them. True or not, it made good press.
Jesse James was my mother’s great-great-grandfather. Jesse James had married his cousin Zerelda (she was the one who cared for him after he was shot in the chest by Union soldiers as he tried to surrender) and had two children by her: a boy, Jesse Edward James, and a girl, Mary Jane Susan James.
Jesse Edward, a lawyer, married Stella Frances McGowan. Jesse Edward had poor health and subsequently moved his family to California, where the weather was more agreeable. They had four children, all girls. Their fourth daughter, Ethell Rose James, was my mother’s grandmother.
For a boy who grew up hating his ancestry, this was a major epiphany. For the first time I had an identity of value—a birthright. I was blood kin to a legend. I was a James. And Jesse James didn’t run from fights, he started them. He finished them. I believe that had something to do with the third and biggest change of that year. I stood up to my father.
It happened on a Friday evening in October. It was what my brother and I called “shoebox night”—the night of the month that my parents took out the shoebox that they kept all the bills in. They would dump the pile of bills out on the kitchen table and begin going through them to determine what they could pay that month.
My brother and I hated that box. The appearance of the shoebox was a harbinger of pain—the lit fuse preceding a massive explosion.
That night, as usual, my father began heating up like a steam kettle, gradually at first, then growing louder and angrier until he was cursing and throwing things. Then he began hitting my mother. I shouted at him to stop and he took off his belt and came at me.
Something inside me snapped. For the first time in my life I didn’t back down. My father hit me several times with his belt, raising welts on my arm, but its sting didn’t even make me flinch. I didn’t feel anything but rage and fury. I was a wild animal. I was Jesse James.
I went at him, slamming him up against the kitchen wall so hard that he temporarily blacked out and slid to the floor. Then I kept hitting him until my fists were red with his blood and he impotently held up his arms to block my assault. Then he began begging me to stop. He was actually crying. Like a baby.
Finally my mother, at first too much in shock to do anything, stopped me by wrapping her arms around me.
I stood back, tears st
reaming down my face as I looked at him in disgust. “If you ever touch any of us again I’ll kill you. Do you hear me? I’m not afraid of you anymore, I’ll kill you!”
He just looked up at me, his face covered with blood and his nose broken, shaking with fear. I had heard it said that most bullies were cowards, but it had never occurred to me just how much of a coward my father was.
I ran out of the house. When I returned home six hours later, the house was dark and quiet. As I got into bed my brother told me that my father had sobbed for nearly an hour.
My father left for work early the next morning before I woke. In fact it was nearly three days before I saw him again. I prepared for another assault, but he just cowered. He never touched me again.
Chapter Seventeen
The throne is cracked, the scepter broken. The king has fallen.
—CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY
There is a scripture in the Book of Isaiah that reads, “Those who see you will gaze at you, Lucifer, they will ponder over you, saying, ‘Is this the man who made the earth tremble, who shook kingdoms?’ ”
I suppose, in my realm, in my kingdom, this passage described my father. And now he was fallen. Still, the biggest change in my relationships wasn’t with my father but with God. Just like my father, I had moved on. I had tried to be good and put my faith in the merciful and loving God they preached about at my mother’s church, and I had suffered for it. From my experience, God was neither merciful nor loving, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to protect me. I had to do that. The message from the universe was crystal clear: believe in yourself, because God doesn’t care. I adopted a new mantra: There is no God but me.
Although I appeared confident, deep inside I was terrified. It’s bizarre to say this but, in a way, having an abusive father created a twisted sense of security. Perhaps, subconsciously, I believed that if he could beat me, he could also protect me. But now that my father was humbled and broken, so was our home. It always had been broken, but now there was no longer the illusion of stability. The foundation had crumbled. The king had been dethroned.
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