Red - My Uncensored Life In Rock Part 1

Red.

My Uncensored Life in Rock.

by Sammy Hagar with Joel Selvin.

FOREWORD.

BY MICHAEL ANTHONY.

I first saw the Van Halen brothers play when I was going to Arcadia High School, on the eastern edge of Los Angeles. It was during a student fair held on the football field, and the band was called Mammoth. It was just Eddie Van Halen on guitar, his brother Alex Van Halen on drums, and a guy named Mark Stone playing ba.s.s. Eddie did all the vocals. They played Cream, Grand Funk railroad, and the Who. Eddie nailed every single note of every song, exactly like the records. first saw the Van Halen brothers play when I was going to Arcadia High School, on the eastern edge of Los Angeles. It was during a student fair held on the football field, and the band was called Mammoth. It was just Eddie Van Halen on guitar, his brother Alex Van Halen on drums, and a guy named Mark Stone playing ba.s.s. Eddie did all the vocals. They played Cream, Grand Funk railroad, and the Who. Eddie nailed every single note of every song, exactly like the records.

After high school, I belonged to a band called Snake. Pretty original name, I know. We opened a show for Van Halen at Pasadena High School. Now they had a vocalist. I remember sitting around the parking lot after the gig, talking with Eddie.

Fast forward to my second year at Pasadena City College, and through a mutual friend I got hooked up again with the Van Halen brothers. They wanted to get rid of their ba.s.s player and asked me to come and jam with the two of them. That's when they asked me to join the band.

We played everywhere that we could. These guys were serious about working hard and taking the band somewhere. We did parties, clubs, you name it, anywhere that the gas money would take us. After playing all night, I'd basically sleep in my car when I was supposed to be in cla.s.s. I was getting ready to make the choice-school or the band-when my dad kicked me out of the house.

The Van Halens were just normal guys. We all partied a lot and, being brothers, they fought a lot. They would always hug and make up later, but they would get into these disagreements and we'd have to pull them apart. Didn't matter where-they'd start pounding on each other, but before long they'd be crying and hugging, saying, "I love you, man." Those two had a connection, not just brotherly but musically, too. Ed wanted to hear Al in his monitor. Al wanted to hear Ed in his monitor. They played off each other.

Before Sammy showed up, we were all pretty devastated. It looked like the band had possibly come to the end after Roth left. When we'd first signed with Warner Bros., friends in the business told us that five years was a good life span for a rock group. We figured we may have had our run. The label wasn't very enthusiastic, either. They didn't even want us to continue to call the band Van Halen. Eddie and Al didn't know what to do. They tossed around names of singers and we did have a couple of unknown guys come in and sing with us because we thought that bringing in somebody already known would change the dynamic of the band. That didn't work, and n.o.body knew what to do until Claudio Zampoli, Eddie's car mechanic, suggested that he call Sammy.

From the first moment I shook his hand on the day he came to Van Halen's 5150 Studios, I knew this guy had a vibe. We had never met before, but I was a big fan: When we'd worked with producer Ted Templeman recording the first Van Halen alb.u.m, we told him to make us sound like Montrose-we wanted that big "Rock Candy" sound.

Sammy was a breath of fresh air. We went out to the studio to play him some music. We played and he started singing along. Whatever Eddie could play, he could sing. We all looked at the engineer, Donn Landee, and just went, "Oh, f.u.c.k." It was like the clouds cleared, the skies opened up, the sun came out, the birds were singing, the animals were dancing. It was like, "Amen! We've got ourselves a band." He was the perfect missing piece of the puzzle.

We were blown away. We made ca.s.settes and sat there with the engineer. I just remember saying, "We've got ourselves a band." We'd been all down and out and hadn't known what we were going to do. This was the answer to our prayers. This was the kick in the a.s.s we needed. This was...f.u.c.k, this is it.

I played the ca.s.sette for my wife, Sue. It was just the lyric Sammy came up with off the top of his head, which later became "Summer Nights." She went nuts over what she heard. She could tell. You can get together with guys and jam, and I've done that many times in bands, and some of them are great, some of them you just go through the motions. But magic like that is once in a lifetime, if you're lucky.

All of a sudden we're taking it to a new level. Not only do we have this guy who can really sing, but now we've got another guitar player, too. It was something new, something different, and Eddie was really into it. Sammy was the key. He was the guy who took us to a new, higher plateau with Van Halen.

Sam and I hit it off like a steam locomotive. We became friends in a way I had never been with anyone else in the band. The whole band caught the spirit. Nothing was going to get in our way. It was nothing less than a rebirth of Van Halen. There was a lot of energy flowing through that studio when we were working on the 5150 5150 alb.u.m, ideas coming left and right, all fresh and exciting. alb.u.m, ideas coming left and right, all fresh and exciting.

With Sammy, we had real melody. He was just a great all-around musician. Eddie could say, "Hey, Sam, I got this idea," and Sammy could pick up a guitar and go, "Yes, but what about this?" That was all new with us. We started to become a much more musical band.

With Sammy in the band, Van Halen went through the roof. The band scored a string of number one multiplatinum alb.u.ms. We ruled the arena rock world and played before capacity crowds night after night for more than ten years. We were the world champion hard-rock band and Sammy took us there.

As everything started to fizzle with Sam, I stood by and watched it all happen. I had that comfort zone in Van Halen and I wasn't about to give it up. They were my band.

When Sammy was forced out of the band, and they were working on whatever the deal was for Sammy to leave, I wasn't really a part of those discussions. I just did what was politically correct. I'm sure there were a lot of things that the Van Halen brothers were keeping from me at that point, things that they just went ahead and did.

Eddie Van Halen wanted to be in total control. Al was going along with everything Ed did. Ed took the reins and was just looking for a p.a.w.n or a puppet. After Sammy left the band, we didn't really do anything again for years until Gary Cherone joined in 1998.

When Sammy went out on the road with Roth, they thought it was a carnival. Eddie made it clear that he didn't want me to go out with them. I had jammed on some shows before with Sammy and he wasn't pleased about that. But I was just the ba.s.s player. My last name's not Van Halen. I didn't feel I was doing anything wrong. I thought I was flying the Van Halen flag. Ed called me when he heard I might appear as a guest on some of the shows. I wasn't going to do the full tour, but Sammy asked me if I'd come out and play a few dates. I was totally into it. I remember Ed saying, "You're not going to be part of that circus, are you?"

When the idea of a Van Halen reunion tour came up, I wasn't in any of those discussions, either. I do know that Eddie didn't want me to be a part of it. I was the traitor because I went over to Sam's camp. He couldn't understand why I couldn't sit home and do nothing until he decided that we were going to do something.

He wanted to put me on salary, and eventually Sammy, Alex, and even our manager gave up some of their percentage to get me something like 13 percent. It wasn't like I needed the money. The only reason I did that tour was because Sammy was doing it. To do that tour, I signed away pretty much any future rights I might have had to anything Van Halen. If Sammy wasn't there, I wouldn't have even considered it because, by then, I felt like an outsider to the brothers. Somehow I played the shows.

Some nights Eddie would hug me and go, "Mike's back. You're playing so good, man." Other nights onstage, he'd look at me like he was looking right through me, like I wasn't even there. I spent a lot of time keeping my eyes on Alex during those shows, just trying to keep it together. Eddie would say to me, "Look at me all the time."

During rehearsals, Ed would question me about changes in some of the songs. I'd have to change what I played, knowing that was the way it went. The first few rehearsals, Eddie didn't even show up. Alex and I were jamming to all the keyboard songs because we had that on tape. Sam would come in and sing. Everything was sounding good. Then Ed would come in and change it all around. I saw Eddie doing an interview and he actually showed the guy where he marked the neck of his guitar so that he would know where to come in. How we held that together for as many shows as we did, I'll never know.

We'd meet up for sound check midafternoon on our way downstairs at the hotel. Eddie would get in the elevator, ripped-up jeans, no shirt, bottle of wine in his hand. That's where it would start, and he'd take it right through the evening.

At the last show on that tour, Eddie came walking in backstage and he had drawn all over his face and chest with a Sharpie pen. Alex made him wash his face before he went onstage, but the guy was a total f.u.c.king wreck. After what happened during the show, I did not even want to fly on the same plane with him. I didn't say good-bye after the show. I never spoke to Eddie Van Halen again. I found out he replaced me in the band with his son, Wolfie, the same time everybody else did-when he gave his big press conference.

After they fired Sammy, I didn't talk with Sam for a long time. Van Halen was my band and I stayed with them. I might have made a couple of comments about Sammy in the press, about his work, but for the most part, I was going along with the brothers. I never slammed Sammy. We had been friends. We were friends right up until when he was fired. After that, if those guys found out that I even spoke to Sammy, that would have been it for me.

It was my wife who encouraged me to go out and play with Sam again. She saw how miserable I was sitting around the house. It was the best therapy I could have had, because I was paranoid about my playing. I might have quit playing ba.s.s altogether. After what I went through with those brothers, h.e.l.l, I was paranoid about everything.

When Sammy and I started talking again, we reconnected on a human level, not really anything that had to do with music. We became even better friends. He helped me out through a couple of rough times. It wasn't just about the music anymore between me and Sammy. We became good friends just for the sake of being friends.

He is the most upbeat, positive guy in the world. He loves life. He only happens to be a singer and play music, too. And another thing-he's no bulls.h.i.tter. If Sammy says it happened, it did. There's n.o.body else anywhere like him. I don't know how to put it. Sam is one crazy motherf.u.c.ker. But I mean that in only the best possible way.

-MICHAEL ANTHONY DECEMBER 2010.

1.

HARD LUCK SON OF A b.i.t.c.h.

When I was growing up, Fontana, California, was all orange groves, grape vineyards, and chicken ranches. I could eat oranges, grapefruits, and tangerines all f.u.c.king day if I wanted. I had to walk through an orange grove just to go to my next-door neighbor's house. There really was no neighborhood. It was long before tract homes. At the corner of each of the long country blocks, there were these big, ten-foot-tall cement tanks with open roofs on them, called water weirs, which fed water to the houses from clean, clear Lytle Creek in the foothills. The water weirs had a float on them, and when the water got too low, the float would kick on and they'd fill back up like a toilet. Each one had a ladder going up so guys could service them, and kids would drown in them all the time. We always heard a rumor that some kid got polio from one of them. But it was our drinking water and it was ice-cold. In the summer, we used to jump in and swim. Not swim, but dunk down, get cooled off, and climb out. I don't want to say we'd p.i.s.s in them, but we did.

My dad moved to Fontana because he heard the steel mill was hiring. When I was born in Monterey County Hospital in Salinas, California, Dad and Mom had been picking lettuce in the fields and living in a camp where everyone else was Mexican. The Kaiser Steel Mill-the first steel mill west of the Mississippi-pretty much made Fontana. Growing up, every kid in Fontana was just trying to get through high school to get a job at Kaiser Steel. We thought it paid great. Originally, you didn't even need a high school diploma, but, as Kaiser Steel built up, and other plants opened up, making pipes or big beams, you needed a high school diploma. Unless, of course, they got a big order and needed the people. Then they'd hire anybody, and lay you off when they got the job done. But everybody was happy to go there and make whatever they were paying.

It was a brutal job though, working at a steel mill in a 160-degree heat, pieces of hot metal flying out at you. My dad worked in the open hearth, the hottest, hardest work in the plant, where they pour the ingots into big troughs and make steel. Molten f.u.c.king steel. He came home with his clothes drenched from sweat, and he used to take salt tablets every day before he went to work. He had probably the lowest job on the totem pole, and they moved his schedule almost every week. He would go from swing shift to graveyard shift to day shift. Sometimes he'd come home at midnight and go to work again at six in the morning. He got burned real bad one time-the side of his face was completely taken off. Just from the heat. It wasn't steel hitting him. It was that he got too close or there was a flare-up or something and it just f.u.c.king ripped the skin off his face.

My dad's parents had been migrant farm workers who came out from Kentucky on a covered wagon. They'd picked cotton all the way through Texas, and my dad was born in Texas. Two kids were-that's how long they were in Texas. They had thirteen kids. He had a younger sister, but he was the youngest boy. My dad was handsome and athletic, but he was a bad little f.u.c.ker. He would beat the s.h.i.t out of his big brothers. My uncle told me my dad chased his big brother, my uncle Charlie, up a tree. My dad sat there, smoking a cigarette, waiting for him to come down to beat his b.u.t.t. Charlie slept in the tree rather than take an a.s.s-kicking from my dad.

My mom, Gladys, was born in Los Angeles. Her dad came over from Italy when he was eleven years old and never learned to speak, read, or write English. He and my grandma-she was Italian, too-never owned a house. They lived in a trailer and were always on the move. He was a chef and he went where the work was. He cooked in Yosemite and went up to Klamath when the salmon were running. He would hunt and fish and work only when he had to. During the winter season, he would cook in Palm Springs, make these huge buffets at the lodge where President Eisenhower stayed. But when the season was over, he'd pack up, take all his money, steal everything he could out of the restaurant, and take off in the middle of the night. The guy was a complete thief-a real crook, my grandpa. And a p.r.i.c.k, too. Once in a while he was nice. I'm named after the f.u.c.ker, Sam Roy. They raised my mom and her sister that way. She grew up in a tent and didn't finish seventh grade.

Mom and Dad got married when she was fifteen. Mom always said all the girls liked him in high school. My dad had dreams. He wanted to be a big-shot kind of guy. He liked hanging around big shots. Bob Hope used to let him caddy on weekends, when he was growing up in Palm Springs. She was sixteen years old when she had my oldest sister, Bobbi. Practically the day she had the baby, as soon as she came home from the hospital, she got pregnant again with my other sister. My sisters Velma and Bobbi are nine months apart.

My father could beat up anybody. I was so proud of that, growing up. He was such a bad-a.s.s. When he was younger, Bobby Hagar fought bantamweight. He won his first eight fights by knockouts. He was a little guy, five foot eight, same size as me, but that son of a b.i.t.c.h could hit-he could have been something. But he got drafted during World War II, shortly after he'd gotten my mother pregnant again with my brother, Robert. My father shipped out as a paratrooper. He'd never even been in an airplane and suddenly he's jumping out of them. On his first jump, over a battlefield in France, his parachute went way off course. He tangled in trees and smashed his face into a tree trunk. He had a Tommy gun and, as he was coming down, he was scared, so he sprayed the ground with bullets. He banged into the tree and broke his jaw. He cut himself down. He dug a hole, and stayed in a foxhole for a few days. His jaw was killing him. He was disoriented, obviously all banged up from hitting this tree, but he had his gun. Nearby was a German soldier, also separated from his unit, and they played a fox-and-mouse game until my dad killed him in a shootout. I think it really screwed up his head. Killing someone one-on-one isn't like shooting people you don't know. My dad lived with this guy for a couple of days, sneaking around, not sleeping at night, really not wanting to mess with each other, but every now and then, taking a potshot.

When he returned to his company, he was crazy. He was freaked out that he shot the guy. Plus he was a bad-a.s.s anyway. He emptied his magazine in the ground in front of his commanding officer. Told him to dance. That earned him a dishonorable discharge, to say the least, and by the time he came back to California, he was a complete alcoholic and madman. The war had really f.u.c.ked him up. My mom said when he got home from the war, he used to jump up from bed in the middle of the night and shout, "Where's my Tommy gun? Where's my Tommy gun?"

I was born a few years later, on October 13, 1947, and by that point we were bone f.u.c.king poor. But even as I got older, I never knew just how bad off we were. My mom was a great cook and she could make do with things, so we always ate good. I went around hungry a lot because I never had any money. If I wanted to eat, I had to go home and either wait for Mom or cook something myself. I was cooking for myself when I was eight years old. I saw what my mom did. I could boil spaghetti and take canned tomatoes or fresh tomatoes out of our garden. I could make tomato sauce. It didn't seem poor to me. My mom was clean as a pin. Our house was spotless. Our clothes were always laundered. She ironed them, stayed up until four in the morning doing ironing for other people and then ironed our clothes.

My mom always had a chicken coop and we always kept chickens. Whenever we moved (which was a lot), we took the chickens. We never owned a house, and we were always leaving my dad because he was a terrible alcoholic who beat up my mom. When my dad would come home drunk, we'd sneak out of the house in the middle of the night and go sleep in the orange groves. Mom hid blankets wrapped in plastic bags, a flashlight, and little stashes of water and food out in back, ready for the times we had to jump out of the window in the middle of the night.

It was always on payday. He got paid on Thursdays, and when he wouldn't come home directly after work, Mom would begin making plans. He'd come home drunk, start yelling and screaming. He never beat us kids, but he'd thump my mom around. Everybody in the family hated my dad, but they were all scared of him. My sister Velma hit him over the head with a baseball bat one time, because he had my mom on the ground. She came up behind him-she was about twelve years old-and bashed him in the head and bloodied up the place bad. My mom got up and we ran. We got out of there.

So we'd leave my dad, and once he was left alone, he would lose the house. He'd stay there, wouldn't go to work, and wouldn't pay the rent, until he'd get kicked out of the house by the cops. He usually got thrown in jail. That was the standard end result of his binge. Sometimes he'd get in the car and get thrown in jail for drunk driving. We'd have to go find a new house every time and move, or my mom would borrow a trailer that her father owned. But somehow we'd always end up with my dad again.

Right before I was born, my mom had a miscarriage. She didn't want to get pregnant. She hated my dad by then. She knew he was crazy and didn't want another kid. She just wanted to raise the kids she already had and get the h.e.l.l out of the marriage. She had known that for a long time. She had a miscarriage and immediately got pregnant again. She was b.u.mming. She didn't like to tell me that, but later on in life she pretty much told me. "You're lucky to be alive, boy," she said. "If I'd have had that other baby, if it wouldn't have been a miscarriage, I never would have had you." I loved my dad, but he was crazy.

For some reason, my dad was tough on my older brother, Robert. Dad would call him "flea-brain" and my brother would start crying, which only caused Dad to make more fun of him.

"Wahhhhh," he would say. "You sound like a d.a.m.n siren, you little s.h.i.t."

He hated my sisters, too. When they turned into teenagers and started seeing boys, that was when the whole thing blew out. He got so drunk he beat up one of my sister's boyfriends. That was the end of the deal for him and my mom.

I was his favorite. I was the king. I was "muscle-brain." He called me Champ, like I was the next champion of the world. He would introduce me to his buddies. "Hey, here's Champ," he would say. "He's got a left hand on him." He was going to make a boxer out of me. Every day, I'd come home from school, and if my dad was there, he'd make me train. He'd make himself a BLT-he was a big BLT man-and sit there in his work clothes, ready to go to work.

"Put on the gloves," he'd say. It wouldn't matter if I'd brought a friend home; my dad would say, "Put on the boxing gloves with your buddy here." He'd make my brother get on his knees to box me. He made me box every day. He'd put on the gloves with me, and teach me. He would take me to gyms and make me hit the heavy bags. "Step into it and twist your body," he would tell me.

My dad was left-handed, so he could pop you totally unexpected, like southpaws can. Even if you know how to fight a little bit, lefties come backward at you. Plus, he was a hard puncher. Some boxers have that gift. There are just guys who can punch. There is something to the magic of timing, how you put your weight, and all these things. Being a southpaw and knowing how to punch, he just knocked people out. He was a one-punch wonder.

Because my dad hit so hard, I learned how not to get hit. By the time I was eight years old, I was getting really fast. I would stand on the outside and move in. He'd try to hit me once in a while and I'd weave. He loved that. He used to really brag it up about me. My brother was bigger than me. He could hit harder. I didn't want to get hit by him, either, so I just kept becoming faster. In and out, in and out. I had a great left jab for a little kid. I used to beat up my neighbors, my buddies. I'd give them b.l.o.o.d.y noses and my dad would give me a quarter.

Starting when I was four years old, my dad drilled into me that I was going to be the champion. But my mom was practical. "We're going to go pick fruit this week," she would say, "and you're going to go pick raspberries for thirty-five cents a crate"-which meant, at my age, maybe two crates a day-"and you're going to work all summer so that you can buy some shoes for school. Otherwise I can't afford new clothes for you."

I WAS ALWAYS into cars. When I was, like, three years old, I used to stand up on the backseat and lean on the front seat where my mom and dad sat. Going down the road, my dad would point out cars and say, "What's that?" I could name them all-that's a Ford, that's a Chevy, a Studebaker. It was a game we used to play when we would go to San Bernardino to see my grandmother. When I was seven years old, I got a bike, and every October, when the new cars would come out, my pals and I would ride our bikes over to the car dealers a couple miles away to look at all the new cars. There was a Ford dealer, a Chevy dealer, and a Plymouth/Dodge dealer. We'd go around in the parking lots and lift up the hoods and look at the engines. I did that all the way until the Cobras came out at Don Mouff Ford in Rialto. I went over to see the first Mustang when it came out. I was always into it. I'd buy models of all these cars and work on them all day. into cars. When I was, like, three years old, I used to stand up on the backseat and lean on the front seat where my mom and dad sat. Going down the road, my dad would point out cars and say, "What's that?" I could name them all-that's a Ford, that's a Chevy, a Studebaker. It was a game we used to play when we would go to San Bernardino to see my grandmother. When I was seven years old, I got a bike, and every October, when the new cars would come out, my pals and I would ride our bikes over to the car dealers a couple miles away to look at all the new cars. There was a Ford dealer, a Chevy dealer, and a Plymouth/Dodge dealer. We'd go around in the parking lots and lift up the hoods and look at the engines. I did that all the way until the Cobras came out at Don Mouff Ford in Rialto. I went over to see the first Mustang when it came out. I was always into it. I'd buy models of all these cars and work on them all day.

I was a straight-A student, the smartest little guy. When I was in fifth grade, before there was PBS, they took a busload of kids to the Los Angeles educational TV station. They only took three kids from my school and filled up the bus with kids from other schools in the district. I was a math genius. You could lay numbers on me and I could do all the math-fractions, decimals, divide, multi-ply-in my head, just like that. I could go to a world map with no names on it, name the country, name the capital, the river, and could spell everything. Another kid could type eighty-five words a minute or something. Somebody else could do something else. It was a big deal at the time, a reward for only the best students.

I was a hustler, not a thief like my grandpa. I would take our lawnmower and walk around the neighborhood and knock on doors. I had a paper route. I'd ride my bike ten miles to my aunt Maxine's house to wash her car. We didn't have a telephone, so I couldn't call her. I'd just show up.

"Aunt Maxine," I would say, "I need some money. What do you got?"

She'd put me to work. She was real nasty, but she loved me. She was my dad's little sister, so she and my dad grew up as the two babies of the thirteen kids in the same house with one outhouse. She never had kids, and she really took to me. She was a real discipline type. She would work me from ten in the morning until six at night. She would feed me lunch, and then feed me dinner. She would make me take a shower and clean up. She'd wash my clothes, and I would go back home on the bike. She'd give me a dollar. A dollar was a lot of money for me. I would work for that. My brother never did that. My sisters never did that, but I did it. That's why Aunt Maxine loved me. She said on her deathbed, "You were never afraid to make an honest living."

My grandpa might have been a thief, but he was a great chef. He'd take us fishing. He could shoot deer, skin them, and then cut them into steaks in the backyard. He'd make his own wine and can his own food. He'd kill game, catch fish, and always kept a garden next to Grandma's and his trailer. He was always canning, making soups and stocks. Sometimes it seemed to me like my grandpa could do anything. He and Grandma were renaissance people, and they always went back to the same trailer parks. Whenever they were around, I'd go see them. I knew if I stopped by, he would feed me. He could really cook. You could smell his trailer a mile from the trailer park, and he was constantly in the kitchen. That was the Italian way.

But my grandfather could argue, and my grandmother didn't back down. They were always misplacing s.h.i.t and he'd blame her for it. It was all they'd argue about. There was nothing else to argue about.

"Where'd you put it?"

"I told you, Sam, where I put it. If it's not there, it's not my fault."

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h, then where the h.e.l.l is it?"

Then they'd get into it. But my grandpa, at the end of every argument-I can hear it in my head today-he'd say, "Hard luck son of a b.i.t.c.h," and that would end the argument. That's all he would say. "Hard luck son of a b.i.t.c.h." I guess my grandma thought, "You know what? You are," and she'd lay off him. I guess they had some hard luck or something, because she bought into it every time.

My grandfather was scared to death of my dad. He had no idea how to stand up to the man. Compared to us, Grandpa had money, but he wouldn't help my mom out. She would have to be broken down on the side of the road, out of gas with four hungry kids in the back, before he'd help, because he was afraid my dad would beat his a.s.s. He had good reason to be afraid. My dad didn't want anybody helping my mom leave him. He was a drunk, and he needed somebody to take care of him. And he would beat anybody's a.s.s, including Grandpa's, if they helped my mom leave him.

One time they were all camping and my dad got drunk and started chasing my mom around the campground. My dad could be something of a s.e.x maniac. When he was drunk, he would come home and want to f.u.c.k. My mom would not be into it, because he was violent, and that would just make him p.i.s.sed off. He would thump her, and probably rape her. My mom wouldn't talk about those kinds of things, but I'd walk in on them all the time in the daytime. I'd open the door and my father would be throwing it down.

So here were my parents and grandparents camping together, when my dad started chasing my mom. But my grandpa thought he was chasing him, which made him start running around the car. My grandma had a few belts in her and she was a feisty Italian lady. She picked up a big rock and tried to hit my dad, but missed and smacked my grandpa right in the face. "Daddy screamed like a woman," Mom always said. Hard luck son of a b.i.t.c.h.

My mom used to really try. She'd go back to him and try, try, try. We'd go find another house. We'd go on welfare half the time. My dad would clean up, go back to work, and pull it together. He would kiss her b.u.t.t. "I'm so sorry, I'll never do it again." I heard that s.h.i.t so many times, it was f.u.c.king ridiculous. Growing up, that's all I heard. "One more time, I'm leaving you for good."-"I promise you, I'll never do it again." They'd go to church on Sunday for two or three weeks, but soon enough, he'd pull the same s.h.i.t.

The longest my dad was ever sober was nine months. It was the happiest time of my childhood. We lived in the same house for nine months-an eternity-a nice, big house we rented. My dad made $80 a week. We thought we were living. We bought a brand-new 1956 Mercury station wagon with wood on the side. We actually had Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter in the same house with the whole family. Just like every other time though, it all fell apart.

Work only kept his drinking going. He would get in trouble there, but he never lost his job, which helped keep the routine in place. His boss at Fontana Kaiser Steel and another guy at the plant were alcoholics like my dad. They all went to AA meetings together, so he always had his job. These guys would let him come back. He'd go on a drunk for a month and he could come right back to work. That's the way my dad always sobered up; finally one of his buddies would come get him and they'd put him in an AA meeting. My mom would take him back, we'd find a new house, and the cycle would start all over again. We lived in every d.a.m.n house in town.

As I grew older, it got kind of thin. People knew. You would go over to somebody's house and-small town-my dad would have already been in a fight in a bar with the kid's father, which basically meant that I wasn't welcome.

The same went for girlfriends. I had this one girlfriend, Pat, when I was in eighth grade. She was my first love-eighth grade, slow dancing. I didn't have a car, so I'd walk her home from school and then I'd walk home, about three miles each direction. Her parents wouldn't let me come in the house because her father had gotten in a fight with my dad in some bar. I thought they were rich. He was a contractor or something and had a little bread. They lived in a nice, big tract home. One day her mom took pity on me and invited me in the house. She knew I was a nice kid. I stayed for dinner, and I was so f.u.c.king uncomfortable it was ridiculous. We went in the den and slow-danced and made out. It was getting late when her dad came in to tell me I had to leave. I started to walk out and Pat started in on her father, "Oh, Daddy, give him a ride home." They had a brand-new 1960 Thunderbird. What a car. I got in that car with that guy, and he didn't say one word. I didn't want him to go to the house, so I had him drop me off on the corner-"This is good, let me out here." He burned rubber getting out of there, not to show off. He just wanted to get rid of me. It made me feel really bad. And I wasn't a bad kid at all. Not yet.

FONTANA WAS COMPLETELY segregated. If you looked at the geography of the town, Sierra Avenue ran from one end of the town to the other, right down the middle. Route 66 ran through Fontana-that was Foothill. The next street up was Baseline, and black people had to stay on the other side of that. Down at the southern tip of Fontana was Valley. Mexicans had to live down there. If you came down into the little shopping area in town, the cops would hara.s.s you. White people would beat up black people. I saw it with my own eyes. If a black guy was walking down the street, a carload of white guys would pull over and beat his a.s.s. segregated. If you looked at the geography of the town, Sierra Avenue ran from one end of the town to the other, right down the middle. Route 66 ran through Fontana-that was Foothill. The next street up was Baseline, and black people had to stay on the other side of that. Down at the southern tip of Fontana was Valley. Mexicans had to live down there. If you came down into the little shopping area in town, the cops would hara.s.s you. White people would beat up black people. I saw it with my own eyes. If a black guy was walking down the street, a carload of white guys would pull over and beat his a.s.s.

My dad never had a black friend, I'll tell you that. No black guy ever came back to our house. If my dad ever worked next to a black guy, if any black guy ever worked alongside whites at Kaiser, he never told anybody. The "n" word was prevalent in my house. My dad never laid a hand on one of his kids, ever, except one time with my brother. My mom was ironing, and my dad came home from work at four in the afternoon. He was covered in black soot. We were usually in school and didn't see him come home from work. My brother shot his mouth off. "Look at Daddy," he said. "He looks like a n.i.g.g.e.r." Dad ripped the cord out of the iron and beat my poor f.u.c.king eight-year-old brother with an ironing cord. Mom had to pull him off.

My dad could be uncontrollable. Back when he was boxing, he'd been suspended from fighting because he attacked the referee who wanted to stop the fight. After he wasn't a fighter anymore and no longer had his license, he would go to the fights with my uncle Cleo, who was married to my mom's sister. And-this is how screwed up my family was-Uncle Cleo was also my dad's nephew, even though he was the same age as my dad. It was uncle-sister-brother-aunt-and-nephew all in one. Uncle Cleo loved my dad. They were a.s.shole buddies from day one and they would go to the fights on the border in Calexico and Mexicali.

"Your dad, h.e.l.l, man, he wasn't afraid of n.o.body," Uncle Cleo told me.

They'd be watching the fights, pa.s.sing the whiskey back and forth, and there would be a couple of quick knockouts. Dad knew the fights were going to end early unless they could make a couple more matches, so he would go backstage, drunk as h.e.l.l, and do some shadow-boxing. The promoter would say okay and he'd go in there-just take off his shirt and street shoes, put on some boxing gloves, and fight. My dad weighed, like, 135 pounds, a few pounds heavier than his fighting weight, and he'd fight guys around 175 pounds. He would go in there and get his head beat in. He would keep getting up. He wasn't even in shape. He'd just go in there swinging. He'd get five bucks.

My father didn't have much of a fight career, but it turned out he did write himself into the boxing record books. Years later, I was watching Tommy Hearns fight for the light heavyweight championship and he kept knocking the other guy down. I was living in Mill Valley, watching TV. One of the commentators said, "That's got to be the record for the most knockdowns." Somebody obviously went and looked it up, and a couple of minutes later, the announcer said, "No, the record is held by Manuel Ortiz, who knocked down Bobby Hagar twenty times." How f.u.c.ked up is that?

He would beat up the neighbors. He would beat up his brothers. Any time we had a family reunion on Thanksgiving, everything was fine until afterward. He and his seven brothers, their nieces and nephews, they'd all start playing pinochle. You'd hear, "Oh, you son of a b.i.t.c.h! Boom." s.h.i.t would start flying. The women would run out of the room. "Get the kids out of here, Robert just jumped Leroy" or "Robert's fighting Carl." It would take all his brothers to hold him down and chill him out. That's the way he was. f.u.c.king crazy. I dug it. I watched through the window. He was such a bad-a.s.s.

It may sound like my dad was a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, but it's not that simple. He was the weirdest guy, and when he wasn't picking fights, he also had this big, soft heart-at least when he wasn't drinking. He would sit there and look at the mountains or the ocean and say, "Isn't that beautiful?" When he was sober, this tough, crazy b.a.s.t.a.r.d would say those kinds of things. I used to always think that was strange. I thought, "Wow, my dad's soft." It would rub me wrong when I would hear him say something was pretty or he would act real loving with me. I thought he was like a big, tough guy, and now he's acting like a sissy. I didn't know how to relate to that. It turned out he was real sensitive, too, but he never had a chance to show it. Back where he came from, the sensitive guy got his a.s.s kicked. He had to be tough. But I think he wasn't that way at all. I think he was like an artist. I got it from somewhere. He was a good singer. He used to sing to the radio. He'd yodel his a.s.s off. He was a trip.

Mom didn't leave him for good until I was about ten years old. It didn't happen all at once, and it started with a car. Somehow, between picking fruit and berries with us kids, ironing and who knows what else, my mom bought this old '36 Ford for thirty bucks, and she hid it on the other side of town. My dad didn't know. Then, when we left him, we could sleep in the car, instead of the orange groves. My mom would drive to orange groves and park in the middle somewhere where cops couldn't see you. Once in a while the police would come, but they weren't p.i.s.sed off. They would just say, "Lady, this is dangerous, you sleeping here with these kids. Please go park in a neighborhood or something." That's how personal the whole thing was in Fontana in those days.

The final straw came when my dad set the house on fire. It was following a gray year when Mom had taken a real stand and rented a house on her own. It was this f.u.c.ked-up old house, basically a chicken coop somebody converted, and it was only a block and a half away from where Dad lived. But that was the first time she said, "I'm staying here-we're done with this guy." A lot really happened in that gray year. She took a real job-went to night school to learn how to type and landed a job as a shipping clerk at a hosiery factory. Instead of ironing or picking fruit, she would work all day, pick us up from school, and take us to the field, where we would all pick fruit or whatever until sundown.

For a while there, it was back and forth, back and forth between the two houses, but then Dad fell off the wagon after a long time sober. It was payday. My mother came back from shopping with the money and he was gone. Uh-oh. He came home in the middle of the night. We scrambled out the window. Sometimes she would let him fall asleep and she would climb back in the window once he conked out. She'd spy on him and, when she was sure he'd pa.s.sed out, she'd bring us back inside so we could sleep in our beds instead of sleeping in the cold outside. We were living in this two-story house, and my dad fell asleep in the bedroom on the second floor while he had a lit cigarette. By the time we came home to see if he'd pa.s.sed out, we saw the smoke and went back in the orange groves. The fire department showed up and ran upstairs carrying hoses. My father woke up and started kicking everybody's a.s.ses. They had to put the fire hoses on him before they could put out the fire. The cops came and took him to jail.

He stayed in the burned-out house. That was the last of his having a house. Bit by bit, my mom would come in during the day, or when he pa.s.sed out, and take our stuff out of there. This time, she was gone for good. She was taking furniture. She took everything that we could use, everything that was ours. We were living in this chicken coop and my brother would walk to school past the old burned house. It only lasted about a month before my dad finally hit the streets. They threw him out of the house. But the last time my brother saw him there, he snuck up to the window and peeked in the living room without my dad knowing. He said Dad was parked on a wooden crate, sitting in that empty room in the burned-out house with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

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