According to the girls and another eyewitness, Jesse pleaded for the guy to quit choking him. “If you don’t stop squeezing, I’m going to stick you,” he said. When the guy didn’t stop, Jesse took a penknife out of his pocket and stuck him.
That did the trick. The guy released his grip and took off. He subsequently went to the hospital for repairs (the knife blade only went in about half an inch), and he gave a statement to the cops in which he described “a young assailant with a scarred mouth.” Based on that description and the location of the fight, the police put two and two together. In short order, my son was arrested and taken into custody.
The case went to trial and I was livid when Jesse was sentenced to five years in a young offenders’ detention center a hundred miles away in Bowmanville, Ontario, but I shouldn’t have been too surprised. Just before court started, a French-Canadian security guard spoke to me to inform me that he had passed by the judge’s chambers earlier and overheard the police talking about my son in a very negative fashion. In his strong accent, the guard said, “Your son—he go bye-bye!” He was right. My recently turned 13-year-old son was found guilty. To put it bluntly, the judge simply refused to consider testimony of eight eyewitnesses—seven girls and an impartial adult male, all of whom said that Jesse had only resorted to using his penknife after the beefy interloper ignored repeated pleas to stop choking him. “I choose not to believe them,” the judge wrote in his ruling. “The victim was assaulted without provocation.”
Jesse went into custody and was sent to Sick Kids hospital for a psychiatric assessment before sentencing, in accordance with the court ruling. I was asked to attend the interview but it didn’t go as well as I might have hoped. In the psychiatrist’s view, since my son was found guilty of assault without provocation, he was obviously looking for a sense of remorse but he wasn’t getting any. Jesse still stuck to his story that he was being choked and he had to resort to stabbing the massive 270-pound complainant to save his own skin. Jesse basically told the psychiatrist that he wasn’t guilty of assault without provocation; he was guilty of saving his own life. I bolstered my son’s argument by totally agreeing with him. That proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.
In his report filed to the court, the judge described me as an interfering parent supporting the outlaw stance of a threatening menace to society. He also recommended that I shouldn’t be allowed to visit my son in jail for at least six months. Fortunately for me, the superintendent at the Bowmanville Training School saw things my way after a couple of aborted visits and I was allowed to visit Jesse on a regular weekly basis, much to my delight (and Jesse’s). Although he’d fallen way behind in school (he told me the extent of “learning” at Bowmanville was discussing the previous night’s hockey scores), he was determined to catch up. He went on to record the highest IQ of any student in the remedial high school diploma program he registered in, and after graduating he set his sights on going to college to fulfill his dream of becoming a game warden.
That dream died after Jesse’s accident on the dirt bike.
Even after I found out he was using heroin, in a lot of ways I was still clueless. What did I know about kicking the stuff? I told myself my son was tough enough to quit, but when I think back, did I really believe he could accomplish that without help, without rehab, without really wanting to? I was so ignorant and stupid about not understanding how god-awful and all-powerful that drug is that I thought he could beat it without any real intervention on my part.
Once again, it was a case of me being oblivious to the obvious. From the outset, Lynne knew what we could be dealing with, going back to when she asked the doctor to take Jesse off Demerol because it was so addictive. But I never considered the awful progression as our son tried to cope with his pain. I never in a million years thought it would eventually lead him to heroin. And once he was hooked, it was just a matter of time before Georgie Lee and Steven followed. Jesse was the youngest of the three, but he had the strongest personality. In retrospect I can rationalize that it was pain that brought him to that horrible choice, but his brothers didn’t have that excuse.
On February 18, 1985, Lynne and I took the family out for dinner at a neighborhood steak house. We’d recently started seeing more of each other, and it looked like we might be able to patch things up and get back together. Lynne was happy and relaxed, and I remember feeling good about having everyone together again. Well, almost everyone. Mitch was in Guelph, going to school, and Jesse said he wanted to stay home. It was still a crowded table, with Vanessa, Georgie Lee, Stevie, his wife, Jackie, and their daughter, Rachel, and we spent a nice evening catching up with what was happening in each other’s lives. When it was time to say goodnight, Lynne and the girls went back to her place and Georgie Lee and Stevie went home with me.
What happened next changed my life—and the lives of every member of my family—forever. Georgie Lee was the first one in the house, and in a matter of seconds I heard him shouting, “Pops! Pops! Something’s wrong! Jesse’s sleeping, but he’s making funny noises. He’s on the floor.”
When I ran into the bedroom I saw a .22-caliber rifle lying near Jesse and a pool of blood on the floor. He was making a noise like he was snoring.
In my ignorance about what to do, I grabbed the phone and called for an ambulance. Then I called the doctor who lived next door. He refused to come over because of the gun. And it took 45 minutes for the ambulance to arrive! My son never had a chance. He might have still been alive when I made those calls, but in the meantime his lungs filled with blood.
Jesse was dead on arrival at Humber Memorial Hospital—the same hospital we had driven to after Lynne gave birth to him on the front seat of the car 20 years earlier. Our son was too early to be born there and too late to die there. The attending physician walked up to me and said, “He’s gone.”
It was like a bolt out of the blue. The ache and the overwhelming sense of loss that crushed my heart at that moment will always be with me. I lost my son in the cruelest way possible, and like anyone else who has ever gone through such a horrible ordeal I couldn’t help feeling that I failed him. I knew Jesse was an addict, but in my stupid, naive way, it never occurred to me that he would die. Somehow, I felt he would be okay—but he wasn’t. The unimaginable despair of being an addict made him lodge that rifle barrel against the roof of his mouth and pull the trigger. And when Jesse died, I knew my other two addicts would die one day, too. It was just a question of time.
It’s been nearly three decades, but not a day goes by that I don’t think of Jesse. Ever since he died, I can’t go to sleep without having a light on. Darkness concentrates my misery, like I’m suffocating.
Other reminders of who he was and what he meant to those who knew and loved him sometimes come from the most unexpected sources.
In the fall of 2008, my pal Chuck “Spider” Jones was working out at a Toronto gym when a stranger approached and asked if he could get a message to me. After introducing himself as Paul Allman, the guy handed over a book, a note and a photograph. The items ended up in Spider’s desk for a couple of years, but in the fall of 2010, at a press conference for a boxing event in Mississauga, he took me aside and gave them to me.
The book was And No Birds Sang by Canadian author Farley Mowat. The photo was of Jesse, taken decades earlier on a school field trip to Arizona and New Mexico. In the note, Allman wrote that he and Jesse had been friends since they were 14.
“One day at school, between classes, Jesse was reading a book that looked interesting and I wanted to read it as well,” Allman wrote. “I asked if I could borrow it when he completed it. Jesse agreed, but cautioned me that it was a gift from his grandparents and I better not lose it. Well, after all these years, here it is. Please cherish this book as I have. Not a day goes by without a thought for Jesse. The picture is how I remember my friend.”
I was stunned. I think the photo was taken around 1980. Jesse looks about 16—and happy. During that particular field trip
, after getting into some kind of tiff with one of the adult chaperones, he took off from the group. Angry and upset as he was, he still somehow remembered that former light heavyweight champ Bob Foster was a sheriff in Albuquerque. Bob had fought on the undercard of my third bout with Robert Cleroux in Montreal on August 8, 1961, but as much as I admired his talent over the years, he was never more than a casual acquaintance. Still, Jesse had heard me say many times that Bob was one of the greatest light heavyweights in boxing history—and a nice guy, too.
I was really surprised that Jesse had the wherewithal to contact Foster. Thankfully, Bob smoothed things over with the chaperone and talked my son into rejoining the class. Years later, after Jesse died, I got a chance to thank Bob in person when we ran into each other at the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, New York.
I still choke up when I look at that photo, but I feel blessed to have it. I just regret that I’ve never been able to track down Paul Allman to thank him for his kind gesture. I’d like him to know how grateful I am.
IF Georgie Lee and Steven weren’t full-blown addicts before Jesse’s death, it didn’t take them long afterward. They’d both already spent a lot of time behind bars for robbing drugstores to get the pills they craved when they couldn’t buy heroin, and after their brother died, their quest for smack became all-consuming.
When they had money my sons would hook up with a dealer in the bar of what was then the Parkdale Hotel, a skid row dive near where I once trained at the Toronto Athletic Club. Stevie later told me that as soon as the guy showed them the white stuff in the palm of his hand, just looking at it, in the flash of one single second he and his brother would both crap their pants. With feces running down their legs, my sons would hand over their dough and amble into the bathroom. Once inside, they’d roll up their shirtsleeves, heat up the white stuff in a teaspoon, suck it up in a syringe and shoot it into a waiting vein. Only then would my handsome sons clean themselves off.
I get sick to my stomach every time I tell that story to young people in my presentations at schools, because I realize all of them (and now everyone reading this book) will harbor images of my sons shooting heroin into their veins with excrement still lumped in their pants. It’s very painful for me to talk about Steven and Georgie Lee that way, but if it helps deglamorize drug use, it’s worth it. In the minds of some kids, the drug-induced deaths of rock stars and actors like John Belushi, River Phoenix, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix are cool. In movies like Pulp Fiction and Scarface, the drug lifestyle is portrayed as sexy and cool. I call it a seduction of imagery, because the movies never show addicts crapping their pants.
My sons bought into that seduction—and that’s why I think they would want me to talk about it truthfully. In the beginning, they didn’t know they would start shaking and sweating at the anticipation of another hit, or that they would get so excited at the sight of heroin that they would soil themselves; nobody does. I don’t think anyone who’s not an addict can imagine what it would be like to covet something so strongly that when you see the object of your desire, you lose total control of your bodily functions. Only drugs can make you do that.
Both of my sons overdosed again and again, but during the two-month stretch from mid-December 1986 to February 12, 1987, Stevie OD’d 15 times—including once at a police station. Can you imagine? By definition an overdose is when you ingest enough drugs either orally or intravenously that you’ll die without proper medical intervention, so it’s a miracle he didn’t kill himself long before it actually happened.
Fifteen minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1986, I was streaking across Toronto with Steven overdosing on the front seat beside me. We were headed to the Addiction Research Foundation (ARF), a renowned drug treatment facility with an infirmary. When I burst through the front door with him slung over my shoulder, the first person I saw was the attending night nurse, Joanne O’Hara. She had previously worked with Lynne at Northwestern Hospital and had sought solace from my wife after losing a daughter to sudden infant death syndrome.
Joanne told me to carry Stevie to the infirmary, where she stripped off his clothes, put him on a cot and covered him with a sheet. A minute or two later a doctor showed up, but his prognosis wasn’t very hopeful: “Mr. Chuvalo, we will work on your son and try to revive him,” he said. “If we are successful, we’ll either keep him here or move him to a hospital downtown. Come back in 30 minutes.”
When I returned half an hour later, Joanne was waiting in the foyer.
“How’s Steven?” I asked.
“He’s not here,” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
“We revived him and propped him up on the edge of the bed. All of a sudden he punched the doctor and knocked him down, then he grabbed some clothes, got half-dressed and took off.”
What she was telling me didn’t seem possible; there was a foot of snow outside and it was 20 degrees below freezing. I went to the infirmary to see what my son had left behind: a pair of work boots, one sock, undershorts, undershirt, a heavy bomber jacket, gloves, a toque and a scarf. That meant that all he had on was one sock, a pair of jeans and a short-sleeved nylon shirt. And I knew he’d be on the hunt for more drugs—if he didn’t freeze to death first.
I went to every hellhole I could think of downtown, but there was no sign of Stevie. After a couple of hours, I gave up and dejectedly went home. That’s where I found him. He was unconscious, stretched out face-first on the floor. At the tip of his outstretched fingers was a half-empty bottle of Valium. Another OD.
This time I took him to Humber Memorial, and they revived him. A couple of days later Stevie told me that when they first revived him at ARF, all he could think about when he saw the doctor was how to get the drugs he’d stashed at home from a previous heist. That’s how powerful his craving was. After he knocked the doctor down and made his escape, my son walked and ran 17 miles in 20-below zero temperatures just to get those pills—all the while passing people who thought he was just another drunken New Year’s celebrant.
Two and a half weeks later, on January 17 (Muhammad Ali’s 45th birthday), at four o’clock in the morning, I found Stevie on top of a snowbank just a block from the house. A couple of hours earlier, my daughter-in-law Jackie called to say that he had taken off in the middle of the night, so once again I went into search mode. By this time, me bursting through the emergency entrance at Etobicoke General shouting, “Overdose! Overdose!” had become a common occurrence, but on this occasion my son’s exposure to the elements made it more serious. After seeing his ashen face, the nurses immediately started cutting off his soaking-wet clothes with razor blades. As they placed him naked on a stretcher and wheeled him into the ER, I started to pray.
After a few minutes one of the nurses came out and told me that Stevie’s body temperature was so low that if it dropped just one more degree, he would die. I braced myself for the worst … and kept praying. After what seemed like an eternity, his body temperature started to rise and he pulled out of danger.
The last of Stevie’s 15 overdoses in that two-month period happened on February 12, 1987. I’d made the 45-minute drive to Hamilton early that morning to do a real estate transaction, and on my way home I was listening to the one-o’clock news on the car radio when I heard my name in the lead story: “The sons of former Canadian heavyweight boxing champion George Chuvalo—George Lee Chuvalo and Steven Chuvalo—were apprehended and arrested this morning for robbing Armour Chemists, a drugstore at the corner of 401 Highway and Islington Avenue …”
In retrospect, I should never have left Steven and Georgie Lee home alone. When I left the house that morning, they were wired, badly in need of heroin. Not having any money, they opted for their second choice: prescription drugs like Valium, Seconal and Fiorinal. They put a hatchet and a butcher knife in a gym bag and walked two miles to the store. When they stormed in, brandishing their weapons, the terrified druggist fled to the back of the shop while a female clerk calmly st
ood her ground as my sons filled the gym bag with jars of pills from the shelves.
By the time the police arrived on the scene, Stevie and Georgie Lee had already fled down an embankment and followed the meandering course of the Humber River for a couple of miles to make their escape—all the while dipping into the bag and swallowing handfuls of pills. They finally made their way to a bus stop but had no money for tickets. After selling some pills to a guy at the stop, they bought some bottled water, got on the bus … and started swilling down more pills. Ten minutes—and three stops—later, they stepped off and promptly collapsed on the sidewalk, one brother neatly stacked on top of the other. It would have been cartoonish, like something out of Laurel and Hardy or the Keystone Kops, if it wasn’t so pathetic.
That stunt earned Stevie and Georgie Lee sentences of two years less a day at the Ontario Correctional Institute in Brampton. In a way it was a relief, because OCI had a very good reputation for rehab, and I thought they would really get some help kicking their habit. The two of them had been incarcerated so many times (the total eventually reached 23 different facilities), but they’d never made a serious effort at rehab before. I thought this might be the time.
One morning seven months after my sons robbed Armour Chemists, Lynne got a telephone call from a sergeant with the Toronto police department. He called her at Northwestern Hospital, where she was an electrocardiogram technician.
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