Week 54: Music from a Catholic School Education 4

Part 4: Eye of the Tiger

I have one friend serving a life prison sentence for murder. We’re not as close as we once were, but at one point during those important years between twelve and fourteen we were the best of friends. This post, however, is not going to be an explanation of how someone’s life can lead up to stabbing a person to death with a Swiss army knife. Nor is it going to be an apology for, or a condemnation of my friend, even though and even before the murder, he was often misunderstood, and often did things that some might have not have agreed with. No, this is not going to be any of that. This is a story about my friend JC.

JC was one of a true band of brothers. At one point, I think his parents had a boy in every grade of our elementary school. Having been an only child of a single mother, I can’t even begin to imagine what it must be like growing up in a house full of boys, maybe you can. Either way, we were happy hanging out together that first summer we spent going to the beach every single day to boogie board. It was the first summer we were allowed to go to beach by ourselves, and it was the first summer we realized that there was something exciting about calling out to passing women in the crudest possible way we could come up with. We would see a woman walking along the shore, catch a wave and ride it right to the beach, then say completely offensive things like ‘hey mami’ and ‘ooooo’ almost loud enough for the passing woman to hear us.

Until one day, one of the women must have heard us. She regularly jogged down the beach, and we were always catching that wave as she jogged by. I’m sure we were a complete pest, but she never seemed to notice us. However, on this day, she stopped dead on her tracks, turned ninety degrees and dove head first into the ocean. Needless to say, we were on the brink of panic as we watched her swim out to us, but at the same time, our fevered pre-teen minds were making every effort to convince us that she had heard us, had liked what she heard, and wanted to lead us into the magical mystery world of sex between grown women and pre-teens. Of course what actually happened was that she said hello, introduced herself, and engaged us in a conversation during which we assented a lot, and said witty things like, cool and wow. And with that little bit of magic, she killed our little cat calling game, while at the same time leaving us feeling like we were just a little more grown up because of it.

That summer we started the tradition of eating pizza every day for lunch. At some point, every day, we would go to Hungry’s Pizza and eat a pie and play space invaders for a couple of hours. Then we’d go back to the beach. I think this was when I first noticed that JC had a bit of an extreme personality. One summer of pizza every day was enough for me, but JC eventually stopped eating anything that wasn’t pizza for several years. Well, that’s not true, he also ate hot dogs, boiled Oscar Meyer hot dogs, any other brand or method would not do.

But before that, my mom won a Radio Rock contest, the Disney character of the hour radio contest. One day upon my return to grandma’s from school, there on her porch were DJ’s Moonshadow and Johnny Vega, the stars of the morning radio show, El Vacilón de la Mañana. They had been waiting for my mom for about an hour because she had sent in an entry to their contest and they wanted to see if she knew the Disney character of the hour. My grandmother was busy distracting them with lots of beer and snacks, and I sat there and gawked at these two super stars with disco mustaches and Journey hair, until my mom finally arrived. But she had not been listening to the radio and didn’t know the Disney character of the hour. They didn’t care, they had a buzz, say any character, they said, and before she could finish saying Porky Pig, they were already congratulating her on winning four all expenses paid vacations to Disney World.

So my mom invited a friend of hers and I invited JC and off we were to the Magic Kingdom. JC and I were thirteen, the perfect age for Disney World, since we were not too old to have fun, but old enough to have fun at the expense of others. So we thoroughly terrorized the place. Well, to be honest, JC did most of the terrorizing, while I tried my best to keep up. He reached inside characters’ masks as we put our arms around them for a picture. Smile, my mom would say, as he tried to smack the people inside the Chip and Dale costumes on the back of the head. In the Pirates of the Caribbean ride he did his best to reach out for some of the gold coins which turned out to be fake. And at the Bay Lake, JC refused to return the mini speed boat after the allotted hour had passed. Several hours later he was being towed back to shore after he ran the boat out of gas. Apparently, he was trying to determine if Bay Lake was a bay or a lake. Watching him trying to get the most out of every attraction was a lesson I would not forget.

When we got back, it was time for high school, and for JC, boxing. He was, to put it mildly, an energetic kid, he talked very fast and moved even faster, and would often get into fights or any kind of crazy competition he could find. I bet I can run naked down the beach all the way to the point and back in less than 30 minutes, and other stunts like that. If he had been born ten years later he might have been a regular in one of those Johnny Knoxville shows. But this was Puerto Rico in the 80s so to curb his excess energy he decided to start boxing. His excitable personality, however, prompted him to fight as if he was fighting his way out of a swarm of bees. The bell would ring and he would dash out throwing as many punches as he could, as fast as he could. Of course, after a few minutes of this, he would be exhausted and his contender would then lay on him. So to improve his record JC decided to drop a weight division, maybe he’d have a better chance against lighter opponents. And for the first time in years he dropped his pizza and hot dog diet, and changed it to a watercress shake diet. He had to loose some weight, so every day for every meal he drank a watercress shake. A watercress shake is just what it sounds like, a bunch of watercress and milk in a blender, with a few raw eggs thrown in to make sure you get that Rocky Balboa edge. This diet didn’t last long, he not only dropped the weight, but also dropped his blood sugar so low he ended up in the hospital for a few days.

By this point our friendship had strayed. He was into boxing and watercress and I was into skateboards and weed. By skateboards I don’t mean the contemporary skateboarding-as-an-almost-Olympic-sport style of skateboarding, I mean the laid back 70s skateboarding-as-your-own-personal-moving-sidewalk style. And by weed I mean the culture of weed more than the actual smokeable material, since we could hardly ever get any of the smoky smoky, and when we did it was gone almost immediately. So I spent a lot of time riding my skateboard up and down the street mastering the fine art of not doing stuff, not cutting my hair, not changing my pants, not wearing a shirt, not taking off my hoodie even in 98 degree weather, and basically not giving a shit about anything. Though I did sit for hours at my neighbor’s piano trying to learn the piano part for Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic until her parents told her she should stay away from me because I was trouble. I don’t blame them, I’m sure I was stinking up their piano in more ways than one.

So while I was trying to become Tommy Chong, JC was trying to become Rocky Balboa. So we drifted apart, and soon I was off to college in Houston and it would be many years before I heard from JC again, about ten years to be exact.

He got my phone number from my mom and called me in Houston. He had been working for an airline for some years and had always been grateful for that trip to Disney World that I invited him on, so he was going to give me two first class tickets to anywhere I wanted to go. It was one of the nicest things anyone ever did. I was going to take my new girlfriend to Paris for New Year’s Eve, but we couldn’t get the tickets on time and we ended up going to Puerto Rico in January for the Fiestas de San Sebastian. It was a great trip, first class all the way, with a stop in New York City on the way there to see some friends and a stop in Miami on the way back to see JC and thank him in person.

JC drove us around Miami while telling us how he tried to convince a judge that he was innocent of the speeding charges against him because he knew how fast he was going because even though his speedometer was broken, he had his hand out the window and he knows he wasn’t going over 55. He laughed, and we laughed. Now in his twenties, JC was well aware of his distorted sense of velocity. He also mentioned how he had been laid off from his baggage-handling job at the airline because he had let through a dog in a box. But he was contesting it; his Panamanian doctor, Panamanian as in that he practiced in Panama, had him on a two Rohypnol a day prescription because of his hyper-activity and hyper-anxiousness. It was while he was in a Rohypnol stupor that the dog in the box got by him.

After we got back to Texas I talked to JC several times on the phone, and on another visit to Puerto Rico he met us there and we went out and had a great time. The last time I talked to him, he had a girlfriend, and was in love. He was going to send me some plane tickets so my girlfriend and I could go to Miami for his wedding. And then he stopped calling.

After some time, I started hearing rumors from other friends in Puerto Rico that JC was in jail, but I never trust rumors. In the past rumors have told me that friends are in insane asylums after taking too much acid, they’ve told me that friends are gay and prostituting themselves in New York City, they’ve told me that friends are dead in drunken car wrecks, and the rumors have been wrong almost every time. So I wasn’t going to just buy some rumor about JC being in jail. But I tried his phone and it was disconnected, and eventually physical distance and problems of my own making distracted me from trying to get hold of him, and the years went by.

At some point I started looking into JC’s whereabouts again. By now I had access to the internet, and access to a court transcript database where I found the court transcript for JC’s appeal. I am no judge or jury, nor an attorney, or even someone very knowledgeable about the law, but I like to read court transcripts. However, let me repeat that I have not spoken to him since before this happened, and I have reservations about sharing the stuff from the transcript since what happened there is not my story. And even though what I know about it is based largely on JC’s court testimony, I don’t fully trust the stuff people say in court even and especially because they are under oath. No one muddles up reality more than someone trying to tell the truth. Still I feel I owe you at least a basic version of the events as I know them.

It seems that shortly after our last conversation, JC broke up with his girlfriend, and went on a crack binge with a girl he knew. After about three days of smoking a lot of crack, his smoking friend, to get more crack, pawned two rings that had belonged to JC’s father, who had recently passed away. A fight ensued, and he picked up a Swiss army knife and she picked up an ice pick. They fought and he stabbed her until she passed out. He then went to sleep and passed out himself. After a while he woke up, cleaned up his house and threw everything into a nearby field and set it on fire. The fire was quickly reported and firemen put it out almost immediately. After putting out the fire they found the charred body of the girl amongst many of his personal bills. The police then went to his house and arrested him.

He got a life sentence. He appealed it and won the appeal, but on the retrial the first decision was affirmed.

For other parts of this series, click the link below and scroll down.