No Father's Son
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The JZA
- Posts: 9042
- Joined: 07 Dec 2018, 13:10
No Father's Son
Pops tired of her nagging
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Caesar
- Chise GOAT
- Posts: 13875
- Joined: 27 Nov 2018, 10:47
No Father's Son
Arturo been funneling all the money to Leslie while working as a mule for the cartel because he got a thing for blondes.
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redsox907
Topic author - Posts: 3837
- Joined: 01 Jun 2025, 12:40
No Father's Son
he was still 10 when he got the Honda, since it was the Christmas after the Spaceship Incident when he was 10. I did type 13 twice, which is fixed
Trying my best to include date anchors on important moments so that ya'll understand where we're at chronologically. I could put the years in the Chapter titles as well if that would help
i.e. Chapter 2: Unraveling (2002-2004)
maybe we'll get some truth, but will we ever get the whole truth?
racial. Just cause he's a traveling Mexican, now he's in the cartel!?
Maybe he's just a POS with two families and struggling to keep them separated now
FORREAL
like bihh, ain't you living the life?! WHO PAID FOR YOUR NEW CAR!?! ME
ignoring the fact I sabotaged your attempts at independence
had to throw in the blonde reference-
redsox907
Topic author - Posts: 3837
- Joined: 01 Jun 2025, 12:40
No Father's Son
Chapter Three, Part One: The Departure
My father’s abrupt departure on Christmas night at first seemed to be a relief to Mom. For the first time in months, she’d started acting like her old self. She started going back to the gym, started dressing up again, and even went on a shopping spree for the both of us. When I asked if my father had called, or sent her some money, Mom simply told me that she’d pressured Leslie into giving her more access to the funds. And that was all she said about the subject. By March, even though we had yet to see or hear from my father, Mom looked more like herself than the shell she had been for the two years following the Spaceship Incident.
Then the paranoia started.
It began with a black SUV parked down the street that Mom seemingly obsessed over. Then a pair of men in suits at our favorite coffee shop, who were suspiciously not even drinking coffee in their corner booth. With my 13th birthday approaching, not only had we still not heard from my father since Christmas, but the black SUVs became a regular occurrence in our daily routine. So had mysterious men in suits, acting nonchalant, but clearly out of place around Las Cruces. Sometimes at the coffee shop, sometimes the grocery store. Once, in the stands of my middle school basketball game.
But that was nothing compared to what happened next. My 13th birthday had been a rare day with no SUVs, no strange men in suits, almost like they’d known the weight of the day sat heavy without my father and had given us a break. Mom picked me up after school and we made a stop to my favorite bakery, Sweets & Treats, to get my favorite cheesecake for my birthday.
Then we got home and saw the front door wide open, with one of the SUVs parked in the driveway. Mom made me wait in the car while she went in the house, trying to keep me calm by saying maybe my father had surprised us with his return.
Mom couldn’t have been in the house for more than five minutes before the same two men in black suits emerged, both carrying black duffle bags. They didn’t look my way, just got into their car with practiced precision, and left. I waited for Mom to come out, heart pounding, and after five more minutes, I could wait no longer.
I found her in Dad’s office, hunched in the corner crying. In the middle of the room was a small, empty safe that I’d never seen before, sitting in front of a cutout hole in the drywall. She wasn’t hurt, or at least didn’t look injured, but no matter what she wouldn’t answer me. She just sat there, crying, staring at the safe. Eventually, I gave up trying to get an answer out of her and slumped against the wall next to her; the cake in the car forgotten, the presents in the den left untouched.
After that, Mom stopped leaving the house entirely. The confidence and rejuvenation she’d experienced at the beginning of the year was gone; she was back to being the shell of a woman again. Even worse, she seemed timid and scared to do or say anything. She wouldn’t even make calls to Leslie, having me act as the liaison to set up weekly grocery deliveries. As a result, I stopped doing any extracurricular activities at school, not wanting to further inconvenience Mom. In fact, just like Mom, I became a recluse as well. Aside from school, I was at home with Mom, not wanting to leave her alone in her paranoid and seemingly delirious state.
I wouldn’t even let Jose and Bobby come over anymore, not wanting them to report back to their parents the deterioration of Mom’s mental state. After the men in suits left on my birthday, after she finally pulled herself together enough to leave my father’s office, I’d stated I was going to call the police, file a report. Do something about the men who had been harassing us for months. In a final show of emotion, my Mom freaked out, making me promise not to say anything, to anyone.
With plenty of time to think, I had made my own deduction about the chain of events. It all went back to the Spaceship Incident. I had planted a seed of doubt in my father’s head that we could not be content with his hectic schedule, despite all of the assurances he had given us, despite all of the lavish gifts. After I had shown a lack of contentment, it planted a seed of doubt in Mom’s head and she began questioning father as well.
But despite how bad things had gotten, I refused to believe my father had completely abandoned us. Maybe he was punishing us for our lack of confidence, but so long as Leslie kept supporting us on my father’s behalf; there was a chance, a sliver of hope that he would forgive us. Hope that we could go back to being the happy family I thought we were while growing up.
Then the final rug was pulled. One week after school got out, May 28th, 2005, Leslie’s phone went dead.
No voicemail, no forwarding address. Just a dead line.
I told Mom that something must have happened at her office, since we always called Leslie on a main line. She begrudgingly agreed to drive down to the small office Leslie had in a strip mall on Mesquite Street.
The building was vacant, a ‘For Lease’ sign hung in the window. It looked like it had been vacated for weeks, making me shockingly realize it had been three weeks since I’d heard from Leslie.
She’d set up a larger than normal grocery delivery at the beginning of May, explaining she was taking a family vacation. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but Leslie had never taken a vacation, as far as I knew. And she had never mentioned a family until that moment.
I don’t know what I expected out of my Mom in that moment, but her cool and calm demeanor reminded me suddenly of my father. She didn’t panic, didn’t get hysterical. Just turned around and drove us home.
I heard her attempt to call my father again, something she’d tried multiple times over the past few months to no avail. Heard her call Leslie. Heard her call 411 and ask for a listing on Leslie Fletcher. That was when her calm finally broke, as I heard her screaming into the phone that “Yes, she was sure Leslie existed.”
Finally, sometime past midnight, Mom came to my room. She didn’t offer an explanation, didn’t have any answers.
She simply told me to pack. When I asked where we were going, she started crying.
“I don’t know,” she said, “but we have to go.”
My father’s abrupt departure on Christmas night at first seemed to be a relief to Mom. For the first time in months, she’d started acting like her old self. She started going back to the gym, started dressing up again, and even went on a shopping spree for the both of us. When I asked if my father had called, or sent her some money, Mom simply told me that she’d pressured Leslie into giving her more access to the funds. And that was all she said about the subject. By March, even though we had yet to see or hear from my father, Mom looked more like herself than the shell she had been for the two years following the Spaceship Incident.
Then the paranoia started.
It began with a black SUV parked down the street that Mom seemingly obsessed over. Then a pair of men in suits at our favorite coffee shop, who were suspiciously not even drinking coffee in their corner booth. With my 13th birthday approaching, not only had we still not heard from my father since Christmas, but the black SUVs became a regular occurrence in our daily routine. So had mysterious men in suits, acting nonchalant, but clearly out of place around Las Cruces. Sometimes at the coffee shop, sometimes the grocery store. Once, in the stands of my middle school basketball game.
But that was nothing compared to what happened next. My 13th birthday had been a rare day with no SUVs, no strange men in suits, almost like they’d known the weight of the day sat heavy without my father and had given us a break. Mom picked me up after school and we made a stop to my favorite bakery, Sweets & Treats, to get my favorite cheesecake for my birthday.
Then we got home and saw the front door wide open, with one of the SUVs parked in the driveway. Mom made me wait in the car while she went in the house, trying to keep me calm by saying maybe my father had surprised us with his return.
Mom couldn’t have been in the house for more than five minutes before the same two men in black suits emerged, both carrying black duffle bags. They didn’t look my way, just got into their car with practiced precision, and left. I waited for Mom to come out, heart pounding, and after five more minutes, I could wait no longer.
I found her in Dad’s office, hunched in the corner crying. In the middle of the room was a small, empty safe that I’d never seen before, sitting in front of a cutout hole in the drywall. She wasn’t hurt, or at least didn’t look injured, but no matter what she wouldn’t answer me. She just sat there, crying, staring at the safe. Eventually, I gave up trying to get an answer out of her and slumped against the wall next to her; the cake in the car forgotten, the presents in the den left untouched.
After that, Mom stopped leaving the house entirely. The confidence and rejuvenation she’d experienced at the beginning of the year was gone; she was back to being the shell of a woman again. Even worse, she seemed timid and scared to do or say anything. She wouldn’t even make calls to Leslie, having me act as the liaison to set up weekly grocery deliveries. As a result, I stopped doing any extracurricular activities at school, not wanting to further inconvenience Mom. In fact, just like Mom, I became a recluse as well. Aside from school, I was at home with Mom, not wanting to leave her alone in her paranoid and seemingly delirious state.
I wouldn’t even let Jose and Bobby come over anymore, not wanting them to report back to their parents the deterioration of Mom’s mental state. After the men in suits left on my birthday, after she finally pulled herself together enough to leave my father’s office, I’d stated I was going to call the police, file a report. Do something about the men who had been harassing us for months. In a final show of emotion, my Mom freaked out, making me promise not to say anything, to anyone.
With plenty of time to think, I had made my own deduction about the chain of events. It all went back to the Spaceship Incident. I had planted a seed of doubt in my father’s head that we could not be content with his hectic schedule, despite all of the assurances he had given us, despite all of the lavish gifts. After I had shown a lack of contentment, it planted a seed of doubt in Mom’s head and she began questioning father as well.
But despite how bad things had gotten, I refused to believe my father had completely abandoned us. Maybe he was punishing us for our lack of confidence, but so long as Leslie kept supporting us on my father’s behalf; there was a chance, a sliver of hope that he would forgive us. Hope that we could go back to being the happy family I thought we were while growing up.
Then the final rug was pulled. One week after school got out, May 28th, 2005, Leslie’s phone went dead.
No voicemail, no forwarding address. Just a dead line.
I told Mom that something must have happened at her office, since we always called Leslie on a main line. She begrudgingly agreed to drive down to the small office Leslie had in a strip mall on Mesquite Street.
The building was vacant, a ‘For Lease’ sign hung in the window. It looked like it had been vacated for weeks, making me shockingly realize it had been three weeks since I’d heard from Leslie.
She’d set up a larger than normal grocery delivery at the beginning of May, explaining she was taking a family vacation. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but Leslie had never taken a vacation, as far as I knew. And she had never mentioned a family until that moment.
I don’t know what I expected out of my Mom in that moment, but her cool and calm demeanor reminded me suddenly of my father. She didn’t panic, didn’t get hysterical. Just turned around and drove us home.
I heard her attempt to call my father again, something she’d tried multiple times over the past few months to no avail. Heard her call Leslie. Heard her call 411 and ask for a listing on Leslie Fletcher. That was when her calm finally broke, as I heard her screaming into the phone that “Yes, she was sure Leslie existed.”
Finally, sometime past midnight, Mom came to my room. She didn’t offer an explanation, didn’t have any answers.
She simply told me to pack. When I asked where we were going, she started crying.
“I don’t know,” she said, “but we have to go.”
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djp73
- Posts: 11525
- Joined: 27 Nov 2018, 13:42
No Father's Son
Homeboy better start slinging that ball if he wanna support moms
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Soapy
- Posts: 13745
- Joined: 27 Nov 2018, 18:42
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redsox907
Topic author - Posts: 3837
- Joined: 01 Jun 2025, 12:40
No Father's Son
why he gotta sling it. maybe he gonna follow in Padre's footsteps and be a mysterious mexican
there are lots of reasons Black SUVs and mexican men could be following them
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redsox907
Topic author - Posts: 3837
- Joined: 01 Jun 2025, 12:40
No Father's Son
Chapter Three, Part Two: Running
The next two years were a blur of new places and new faces, with the same underlying fear on Mom’s part no matter how far from Las Cruces we got.
The day after Mom announced we were leaving, she’d taken anything of value down to the local pawn shop to scrounge up as much cash as she could. The money my father had stashed in the house was taken by the strange men on my birthday, and with Leslie MIA, she had nowhere else to turn. When she returned from the pawn shop, we hopped into her Grand Cherokee and headed north.
I wanted to let Jose and Bobby know I was leaving, have them get a message to our other friends, let them know I was okay. But Mom forbade it, simply stating it wouldn’t be safe. I don’t know how many times on the drive to Clovis I asked her why we had to be so secretive, what was going on, to just tell me anything. Her stoic expression never changed, she just simply explained we had no choice.
Finally, out of desperation, I brought up my father. I practically screamed at her, the first time I remember raising my voice since I was a toddler, “What is he going to do when he comes home and we’re gone!?”
I’ll never forget the expression on her face. Her face seemed to fold in on itself in grief before she steadied herself and blankly said, “Your father isn’t coming back.”
I don’t know if it was the finality in her voice, or simply the drastic range of emotion she exhibited while saying it, but something told me not to press the subject.
It was the last time we spoke about my father for quite some time.
292 miles later we were in Clovis, New Mexico. But if I thought that would be the extent of our move, I was terribly misguided. Six months later, in December of 2005, we were on the move once again, after Mom swore she saw the same Black SUV from Las Cruces outside the diner she worked at.
Guymon, Oklahoma was the next stop. Luckily, Mom had enrolled me in homeschooling—citing her LDS upbringing as justification—which made the frequent moves easier. Mom once again started working menial jobs, hotel cleaning at night and waitressing during the day, while I focused on my studies. But idle hands find trouble, so they say. Mom was too busy to keep a stern eye on me, a far cry from the Las Cruces days when she monitored my every move like a hawk.
I didn’t start looking for trouble, but at 5’7 at just 14 years old, it naturally found me. I was at the local YMCA playing pickup ball when I first noticed a group of high school kids eyeing me from across the gym. They approached me, fanning around me to intimidate me, before the kid clearly in charge demanded that I “pay the court fee.” When I told him I didn’t have any spare change, he demanded my shoes. They weren’t the nicest shoes anymore, a leftover pair of Jordans that my father had bought a size too big so I could “grow into them”, but they were mine. And honestly, one of the last real gifts my father had given me. When I refused, he stepped closer and told me he wasn’t asking.
I hadn’t been in any fights at Loretto, had never had a reason to. It was a smaller Catholic school and catered to a “higher clientele” than the neighborhoods we lived in after. This was one of the small details of my previous life, as I began to call it, that I took for granted.
Thus, I’d never had to deal with a confrontation to this degree before. So I did the only thing I could think of.
I punched him in the nose. Felt his bone break under my fist and watched the blood start gushing. A few of the volunteers in charge of the YMCA saw the commotion and began rushing over. If Mom’s flight from Las Cruces had taught me anything, it’s that we can’t trust anyone anymore. So I ran.
I waited almost two weeks before going back to the YMCA, hoping for the commotion to die down, hoping the kids wouldn’t be there anymore. But of course, they were.
However, instead of threatening me again, the leader - Jorge - gave me a quick head nod and told me I had earned their respect. They hung around playing basketball and eventually, we started hanging out almost every day. That became my routine, school work in the morning while Mom was home between jobs, then out with Jorge and the guys in the evening, often into the late evening. Definitely later than school age kids should have been out, but either the guys’ parents didn’t care, or simply worked night jobs like Mom and never noticed.
In the early portion of 2006, hanging out with Jorge and the gang was when my slow descent into the world of petty crime began. I didn’t know at the time how similar my exposure to the world of crime was to my father’s so many years earlier in his hometown of Ocotlan. It started innocently, them asking me to hold something at the store before we ran out, unbeknownst to me at the time. It was never anything major, but it felt like it. Shoplifting at the local department stores, getting new electronics, or clothes. Often holding up other kids at local parks, much like they intended to do to me when we first met.
During the last week of May, 2006, during a shoplifting trip south to Amarillo, I saw the Black SUV again. There weren’t any discernible features that I could remember about the vehicle to confirm, but I knew in my heart it was the same one. It was parked in the lot outside of Dillard’s, which had become one of our go-to spots on these trips, and even with no one inside of the cab at the time, I just knew soon there would be one, maybe two, Mexicans in black suits behind the glass.
As if on cue, two men emerged from Dillard’s as we were walking in. I tried not to make eye contact, to drift into obscurity, but I felt the one closest to me eye me as I passed, heard him stop in his tracks as I walked inside. I looked back over my shoulder as we rounded the corner, safely inside the building, and saw they were both looking at me.
I ran. I didn’t tell Jorge or the gang what was going on, simply bolted. They exchanged glances and followed behind me as I took the alley back to Jorge’s vehicle that we had parked two blocks away. When they asked what had spooked me, I lied. Told them I saw security pointing at us as we walked in. They didn’t question me, but I could feel them eyeing me as I kept my eyes glued to the rearview mirror the entire trip back to Guymon.
The next morning, Mom came home from work early. She never came home from work early, but I immediately surmised why. She was ghost white, practically frantic, and I knew before she even said it that she’d seen the Black SUV.
She announced we were moving again. When I asked her, “Again?” It wasn’t a question about moving. She knew it and simply nodded her head. By this point, we knew the routine.
The next stop was McCook, Nebraska. We quickly fell into the same routine, Mom working, me homeschooling, playing sports, and looking for trouble. Instead of waiting for a new group to link up with, I simply went solo. But this time, I wasn’t stealing for a thrill. I stuck to only lifting what I needed. Food or drinks after sports, stuff for the house that I knew we needed and Mom couldn’t afford.
But as slick as I thought I was, Mom started catching on. When the food she had in the house started lasting longer than usual, when things she mentioned needing suddenly showed up, she started asking questions. I told her I’d started volunteering to do yard work for families at the Y— there was no shortage of farms in the neighboring areas of Nebraska. I don’t know if she believed me, or simply didn’t want another worry on her plate, but she dropped quizzing me after that. Thankfully, I found another hobby to help keep me from spiraling further into petty crime, although I never fully stopped shoplifting.
During that summer I started meeting up with another group of high school kids, but they were the polar opposites of Jorge and the gang. They were all football players, whose sole focus was earning a promotion to Varsity when the school year kicked off. I hadn’t played organized football since my final Pop Warner season in 2004, before everything went sideways, but despite that I could hang with them, barely. They all played defense for McCook Senior High and started teaching me all of the things I had missed since I quit playing. Brady and Clint were both defensive tackles and took me under their wing, teaching me when we weren’t working out. Things like Gap Control, reading the offensive line to decipher a pass or run, how to use my hands and leverage to shed blocks, and what lanes to shoot the gap on blitzes. They were all foreign concepts previously, but I dove into them just like my school work.
I tried convincing Mom to let me enroll at McCook that year so I could play football—my grades would easily transfer as I’d maintained a nearly flawless 4.0 GPA while homeschooling—but she refused. I kept meeting up with Brady and Clint for workouts and even went to some of their games, but just as quickly as I fell into a somewhat normal routine, we had to run again.
In December, a process server had tracked my Mom down on behalf of Pioneer Bank. The unpaid mortgage had finally been reconciled by the bank and they were going to foreclose on the home. However, once Mom informed them that my father had purchased the house well before they got married and she had no forwarding address for him, they left. Two weeks later and the Black SUVs started appearing again. Apparently, when the process servers found Mom, so did they.
Finally, in January 2007 I returned home to the front door of the small apartment we rented kicked in. We didn’t live in the best part of town, not by a long shot, so the break-in wasn’t completely out of place. But as routine as it appeared on the outside, both Mom and I assumed the worst.
Next stop was Jamestown, North Dakota. Surely nearly 1,400 miles from home would be enough distance. And while we didn’t see any Black SUVs in Jamestown, my petty thievery finally caught up with me. Perhaps they simply didn’t overlook small time shoplifting as much in Jamestown as they had in McCook, or maybe it was my darker complexion that sold me out. But regardless of what led to it, in May of 2007 I was arrested for shoplifting at the Buffalo Mall.
The basketball shoes Mom had gotten me for my 15th birthday that year were far from stylish, more akin to a 30 year old Dad than a 15 year old kid that was desperately trying to earn his place at his fourth home in the last 18 months. So I decided I was going to lift a pair of the new LeBron Zooms that had released a month prior. Surely, a month later no one would be keeping an eye on them.
Wrong. The clerk spotted me the moment I walked in and as soon as I picked up the shoe box and turned toward the door, I was surrounded by a pair of towering men. And when I say towering, that’s coming from a 15 year old kid who was nearly 6’0 already. They pulled me into the back and questioned me and I’d be lying if I didn’t expect one of the two Mexicans in black suits to slip into the small cramped office and whisk me away.
Instead, it was the weary and tired face of my Mom who showed up. I’m not sure what sob story she gave them, but they let me go with a warning, informing me that if they ever caught me shoplifting at the Mall again they would press charges.
I expected tears, or yelling. Something. But the years of running and terror had drained my Mom of any significant emotions. She told me she blamed herself, because she knew how I’d slowly been slipping into bad habits, but had avoided addressing them, not wanting to add further stress.
“I’m tired, my son.” I remember her telling me and somehow that broke my heart more than any punishment could have.
I promised her I wouldn’t do it again. No matter the circumstances, I’d earn what I needed, one way or another. She smiled, as if expecting me to rise to the challenge of bettering myself, or striving to do better than my previous circumstances.
The Black SUVs I expected to arrive shortly after my arrest, since they had to run a background report on me, never came. But despite that, we would be on the move again by the middle of the summer.
The hotel chain my Mom had been cleaning for since we arrived in Jamestown had another residency opening up in Havre, Montana and due to her exemplary track record, had recommended her for a promotion to “Lead Housekeeper” at the new location. It would be a step up from the menial jobs she’d worked since we left Las Cruces and with enough pay where she wouldn’t need to work two jobs to support us. When she was reluctant at first, her boss, Elenor Chadwick, offered to help her find a place and even put in the down payment.
She later told my Mom as we were packing to move that she knew Mom was running from something, and from what wasn’t her business, but she didn’t want her to miss out on an opportunity to find a place she could finally rest.
That drive was where I first read The Goblins of Eros, a book that would help shape my redemption later in life. I didn’t know then how a book that was simply grabbed on a whim would help refocus and define the second half of my life.
As we were driving, Mom started reminiscing about my desire to play football. In an attempt to pique my interest about the move, she relented. “If you can stay out of trouble when we get to Havre, I’ll enroll you in school so you can start playing football again.”
The next two years were a blur of new places and new faces, with the same underlying fear on Mom’s part no matter how far from Las Cruces we got.
The day after Mom announced we were leaving, she’d taken anything of value down to the local pawn shop to scrounge up as much cash as she could. The money my father had stashed in the house was taken by the strange men on my birthday, and with Leslie MIA, she had nowhere else to turn. When she returned from the pawn shop, we hopped into her Grand Cherokee and headed north.
I wanted to let Jose and Bobby know I was leaving, have them get a message to our other friends, let them know I was okay. But Mom forbade it, simply stating it wouldn’t be safe. I don’t know how many times on the drive to Clovis I asked her why we had to be so secretive, what was going on, to just tell me anything. Her stoic expression never changed, she just simply explained we had no choice.
Finally, out of desperation, I brought up my father. I practically screamed at her, the first time I remember raising my voice since I was a toddler, “What is he going to do when he comes home and we’re gone!?”
I’ll never forget the expression on her face. Her face seemed to fold in on itself in grief before she steadied herself and blankly said, “Your father isn’t coming back.”
I don’t know if it was the finality in her voice, or simply the drastic range of emotion she exhibited while saying it, but something told me not to press the subject.
It was the last time we spoke about my father for quite some time.
292 miles later we were in Clovis, New Mexico. But if I thought that would be the extent of our move, I was terribly misguided. Six months later, in December of 2005, we were on the move once again, after Mom swore she saw the same Black SUV from Las Cruces outside the diner she worked at.
Guymon, Oklahoma was the next stop. Luckily, Mom had enrolled me in homeschooling—citing her LDS upbringing as justification—which made the frequent moves easier. Mom once again started working menial jobs, hotel cleaning at night and waitressing during the day, while I focused on my studies. But idle hands find trouble, so they say. Mom was too busy to keep a stern eye on me, a far cry from the Las Cruces days when she monitored my every move like a hawk.
I didn’t start looking for trouble, but at 5’7 at just 14 years old, it naturally found me. I was at the local YMCA playing pickup ball when I first noticed a group of high school kids eyeing me from across the gym. They approached me, fanning around me to intimidate me, before the kid clearly in charge demanded that I “pay the court fee.” When I told him I didn’t have any spare change, he demanded my shoes. They weren’t the nicest shoes anymore, a leftover pair of Jordans that my father had bought a size too big so I could “grow into them”, but they were mine. And honestly, one of the last real gifts my father had given me. When I refused, he stepped closer and told me he wasn’t asking.
I hadn’t been in any fights at Loretto, had never had a reason to. It was a smaller Catholic school and catered to a “higher clientele” than the neighborhoods we lived in after. This was one of the small details of my previous life, as I began to call it, that I took for granted.
Thus, I’d never had to deal with a confrontation to this degree before. So I did the only thing I could think of.
I punched him in the nose. Felt his bone break under my fist and watched the blood start gushing. A few of the volunteers in charge of the YMCA saw the commotion and began rushing over. If Mom’s flight from Las Cruces had taught me anything, it’s that we can’t trust anyone anymore. So I ran.
I waited almost two weeks before going back to the YMCA, hoping for the commotion to die down, hoping the kids wouldn’t be there anymore. But of course, they were.
However, instead of threatening me again, the leader - Jorge - gave me a quick head nod and told me I had earned their respect. They hung around playing basketball and eventually, we started hanging out almost every day. That became my routine, school work in the morning while Mom was home between jobs, then out with Jorge and the guys in the evening, often into the late evening. Definitely later than school age kids should have been out, but either the guys’ parents didn’t care, or simply worked night jobs like Mom and never noticed.
In the early portion of 2006, hanging out with Jorge and the gang was when my slow descent into the world of petty crime began. I didn’t know at the time how similar my exposure to the world of crime was to my father’s so many years earlier in his hometown of Ocotlan. It started innocently, them asking me to hold something at the store before we ran out, unbeknownst to me at the time. It was never anything major, but it felt like it. Shoplifting at the local department stores, getting new electronics, or clothes. Often holding up other kids at local parks, much like they intended to do to me when we first met.
During the last week of May, 2006, during a shoplifting trip south to Amarillo, I saw the Black SUV again. There weren’t any discernible features that I could remember about the vehicle to confirm, but I knew in my heart it was the same one. It was parked in the lot outside of Dillard’s, which had become one of our go-to spots on these trips, and even with no one inside of the cab at the time, I just knew soon there would be one, maybe two, Mexicans in black suits behind the glass.
As if on cue, two men emerged from Dillard’s as we were walking in. I tried not to make eye contact, to drift into obscurity, but I felt the one closest to me eye me as I passed, heard him stop in his tracks as I walked inside. I looked back over my shoulder as we rounded the corner, safely inside the building, and saw they were both looking at me.
I ran. I didn’t tell Jorge or the gang what was going on, simply bolted. They exchanged glances and followed behind me as I took the alley back to Jorge’s vehicle that we had parked two blocks away. When they asked what had spooked me, I lied. Told them I saw security pointing at us as we walked in. They didn’t question me, but I could feel them eyeing me as I kept my eyes glued to the rearview mirror the entire trip back to Guymon.
The next morning, Mom came home from work early. She never came home from work early, but I immediately surmised why. She was ghost white, practically frantic, and I knew before she even said it that she’d seen the Black SUV.
She announced we were moving again. When I asked her, “Again?” It wasn’t a question about moving. She knew it and simply nodded her head. By this point, we knew the routine.
The next stop was McCook, Nebraska. We quickly fell into the same routine, Mom working, me homeschooling, playing sports, and looking for trouble. Instead of waiting for a new group to link up with, I simply went solo. But this time, I wasn’t stealing for a thrill. I stuck to only lifting what I needed. Food or drinks after sports, stuff for the house that I knew we needed and Mom couldn’t afford.
But as slick as I thought I was, Mom started catching on. When the food she had in the house started lasting longer than usual, when things she mentioned needing suddenly showed up, she started asking questions. I told her I’d started volunteering to do yard work for families at the Y— there was no shortage of farms in the neighboring areas of Nebraska. I don’t know if she believed me, or simply didn’t want another worry on her plate, but she dropped quizzing me after that. Thankfully, I found another hobby to help keep me from spiraling further into petty crime, although I never fully stopped shoplifting.
During that summer I started meeting up with another group of high school kids, but they were the polar opposites of Jorge and the gang. They were all football players, whose sole focus was earning a promotion to Varsity when the school year kicked off. I hadn’t played organized football since my final Pop Warner season in 2004, before everything went sideways, but despite that I could hang with them, barely. They all played defense for McCook Senior High and started teaching me all of the things I had missed since I quit playing. Brady and Clint were both defensive tackles and took me under their wing, teaching me when we weren’t working out. Things like Gap Control, reading the offensive line to decipher a pass or run, how to use my hands and leverage to shed blocks, and what lanes to shoot the gap on blitzes. They were all foreign concepts previously, but I dove into them just like my school work.
I tried convincing Mom to let me enroll at McCook that year so I could play football—my grades would easily transfer as I’d maintained a nearly flawless 4.0 GPA while homeschooling—but she refused. I kept meeting up with Brady and Clint for workouts and even went to some of their games, but just as quickly as I fell into a somewhat normal routine, we had to run again.
In December, a process server had tracked my Mom down on behalf of Pioneer Bank. The unpaid mortgage had finally been reconciled by the bank and they were going to foreclose on the home. However, once Mom informed them that my father had purchased the house well before they got married and she had no forwarding address for him, they left. Two weeks later and the Black SUVs started appearing again. Apparently, when the process servers found Mom, so did they.
Finally, in January 2007 I returned home to the front door of the small apartment we rented kicked in. We didn’t live in the best part of town, not by a long shot, so the break-in wasn’t completely out of place. But as routine as it appeared on the outside, both Mom and I assumed the worst.
Next stop was Jamestown, North Dakota. Surely nearly 1,400 miles from home would be enough distance. And while we didn’t see any Black SUVs in Jamestown, my petty thievery finally caught up with me. Perhaps they simply didn’t overlook small time shoplifting as much in Jamestown as they had in McCook, or maybe it was my darker complexion that sold me out. But regardless of what led to it, in May of 2007 I was arrested for shoplifting at the Buffalo Mall.
The basketball shoes Mom had gotten me for my 15th birthday that year were far from stylish, more akin to a 30 year old Dad than a 15 year old kid that was desperately trying to earn his place at his fourth home in the last 18 months. So I decided I was going to lift a pair of the new LeBron Zooms that had released a month prior. Surely, a month later no one would be keeping an eye on them.
Wrong. The clerk spotted me the moment I walked in and as soon as I picked up the shoe box and turned toward the door, I was surrounded by a pair of towering men. And when I say towering, that’s coming from a 15 year old kid who was nearly 6’0 already. They pulled me into the back and questioned me and I’d be lying if I didn’t expect one of the two Mexicans in black suits to slip into the small cramped office and whisk me away.
Instead, it was the weary and tired face of my Mom who showed up. I’m not sure what sob story she gave them, but they let me go with a warning, informing me that if they ever caught me shoplifting at the Mall again they would press charges.
I expected tears, or yelling. Something. But the years of running and terror had drained my Mom of any significant emotions. She told me she blamed herself, because she knew how I’d slowly been slipping into bad habits, but had avoided addressing them, not wanting to add further stress.
“I’m tired, my son.” I remember her telling me and somehow that broke my heart more than any punishment could have.
I promised her I wouldn’t do it again. No matter the circumstances, I’d earn what I needed, one way or another. She smiled, as if expecting me to rise to the challenge of bettering myself, or striving to do better than my previous circumstances.
The Black SUVs I expected to arrive shortly after my arrest, since they had to run a background report on me, never came. But despite that, we would be on the move again by the middle of the summer.
The hotel chain my Mom had been cleaning for since we arrived in Jamestown had another residency opening up in Havre, Montana and due to her exemplary track record, had recommended her for a promotion to “Lead Housekeeper” at the new location. It would be a step up from the menial jobs she’d worked since we left Las Cruces and with enough pay where she wouldn’t need to work two jobs to support us. When she was reluctant at first, her boss, Elenor Chadwick, offered to help her find a place and even put in the down payment.
She later told my Mom as we were packing to move that she knew Mom was running from something, and from what wasn’t her business, but she didn’t want her to miss out on an opportunity to find a place she could finally rest.
That drive was where I first read The Goblins of Eros, a book that would help shape my redemption later in life. I didn’t know then how a book that was simply grabbed on a whim would help refocus and define the second half of my life.
As we were driving, Mom started reminiscing about my desire to play football. In an attempt to pique my interest about the move, she relented. “If you can stay out of trouble when we get to Havre, I’ll enroll you in school so you can start playing football again.”
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Caesar
- Chise GOAT
- Posts: 13875
- Joined: 27 Nov 2018, 10:47
No Father's Son
Taking down notes that this fella is a criminal to slander him how y'all do great father and son Caine Guerra. Playing football in Havre, Montana is fucking crazy though. Bro about to be the only Mexican in 1,000 miles.
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redsox907
Topic author - Posts: 3837
- Joined: 01 Jun 2025, 12:40
No Father's Son
So, what you're saying is if Ms. Sara had intervened earlier in Caine's life, maybe he wouldn't become a convicted felon on probation? Or would he ignore his mamà and do so anyways.
Cause Ms. Briggs-Leon shut that shit down in a heartbeat and Armando didn't want to break his Mom's heart any further
Being the token cholo also means he's the fastest mofo in them parts
