I’m around six years old, it’s 1962, and I’m no longer a ward of the state, stranded with my sister in a prison-style children’s “home.” I’m right there, on the pages of the Los Angeles Times, laughing, with a big tortoise in my hand.
In those days, many foster homes were reluctant to take in siblings, especially Chicano children, but the Baker family took us in, and now they were being celebrated as “Foster Parents of the Year.” They’d gone the distance, fostering the children of two pachuco gangsters who were now serving time for manslaughter and armed robbery. The Bakers had given us a home and a new way of life on the other side of the tracks: in the white, middle-class section of San Gabriel.
To the northwest of San Gabriel is the San Fernando Valley. To the southwest is the poorer, unincorporated East Los Angeles area where my father was from. And right in the middle of San Gabriel, in the old part of the city, you have the Chicano barrios, surrounded by white neighborhoods. When I was a kid, the houses in the barrios were older and smaller, a lot of wooden constructions dating back to the immigration streams from the beginning of the twentieth century. We lived on the outskirts of the barrios. They were close by, but to us, they might as well have been in another world. We were now “white kids,” growing up in a Mormon family.
One of the things they talked about in that LA Times article—and that’s why they had me holding up the tortoise—was the animals. They were painting a picture of a childhood paradise: a caring, loving, Middle America environment with a whole bunch of exotic animals. They had chickens, monkeys, cats, rabbits, a tortoise, a snake, and even a tarantula in a cage. It was almost like a mini-zoo. The trouble was, the picture that was being painted had cracks in it, and the reality of our life with the Bakers was a different story.
It was cool having those animals to play with, but a zoo needs a zookeeper and that’s what we turned out to be, and more. We cleaned up after the animals and pretty much everything else in that house. My sister especially really ended up being a child laborer of sorts. There was always a pile of laundry for her to do, and constant cleaning and tidying up. She was the house servant up until her late teens, serving the foster parents.
It didn’t take Vicky and me long to realize what our foster parents’ approach to parenting was going to be: it was basically to beat the Mexican out of us. I remember going to the store with my foster mother as a kid when she picked up this wooden meat tenderizer. It was like a mallet, flat on one end, with these pyramid-shaped bumps on the other. She picked up the mallet, glared at me, and told me that, if I misbehaved, she was going to use that thing on me. That definitely got my attention. I knew she wasn’t bluffing.
Every day before school I had to go ’round the house and empty all the wastepaper baskets. One day I came home from school and she jumped on me saying, “You didn’t empty the trash properly. What’s this?” She pointed to a wastebasket with trash still in it, hit me, and sent me to bed. She’d always send us to bed after a beating. But this time, all of a sudden I woke up to her thrashing me with a dog leash, shouting, “Why didn’t you empty the trash?”
So I said, “You told me to go to bed!,” then went downstairs.
Vicky and Jenny (the Bakers’ biological daughter) were sitting in the kitchen doing their homework, and when I went to empty the trash, my sister said, “Freddy, why is your leg bleeding?”
There was a big gash there, and my foster mother said, “Where’s that from?”
“From where you hit me, just now.”
And then she hit me again.
“Don’t tell lies. I did not do that.”
And she kept on beating me. When my foster mother left the room Jenny came up to me and comforted me. To her, Vicky and I were her siblings, and she would get upset by the way her mother treated us.
The foster mother would beat us almost on a daily basis. Normally with a belt. She’d grab us by the arm and whack us around the legs, the back, anywhere she could make contact. Sometimes she would chase after me, whipping me with her belt, sometimes she’d punch me. One day she threw a brush at me, and it hit my foot and a toenail came off. I couldn’t run for a while after that.
Even though we were going to school with the white kids, and we grew up in the white section of San Gabriel, we were never made to forget our Mexican roots. Our foster parents were really prejudiced; they hated all the other races. And it would all come out after the foster dad had downed a few drinks. They were Mormons, but he was a closet drinker. One day, Vicky said to me, “Hey, Freddy, come here. Take a look at this.” Looking into the garage, we watched him pull down a bottle of vodka and secretly swig away. We also found bottles under the car seats. When the vodka kicked in he would get meaner as the night progressed. Then he’d walk past us muttering, calling us “dirty, rotten, lazy Mexicans.” We’d hear it at the breakfast table, too. He would read things in the newspaper then say out loud, “The goddamned Mexicans stabbed someone again, they should all be locked up.” Yeah, the foster parents had quite the hatred for Mexicans. For them, all Mexicans were violent drunkards and carried knives. But they didn’t just go on about Mexicans; they had a thing for the blacks too. At the time of the Watts riots, I remember thinking that Martin Luther King was a bad guy because whenever he was on the news the foster parents would say things like, “He’s the one. He’s the instigator, the cause of all the trouble.”
The foster father was a “Jack Mormon.” That’s slang that goes back to nineteenth-century America. It basically means someone who is no longer active in, or a lapsed member of, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but who still has a good relationship with the church. The foster mother was active, which meant we were very involved with the Mormon community. With the Mormons, it’s a lot more than just going to church on Sunday. There are all kinds of activities including Boy and Girl Scouts, sports, outings, summer camp, and a mandatory midweek service called “mutual.” They called it “mutual” because the whole idea was that Mormon teenagers would get together and have shared experiences where there is “mutual” respect and support for one another. I was about ten when I started going. I actually enjoyed it because we had lots of different activities and it was a chance to be with friends. The sweets and the snacks were a big highlight for me. Those activities, and even going to church, were a break from the tyranny we experienced at home. That was something I couldn’t understand: how my foster mom could be so sweet and loving at church, singing hymns like an angel, but then would turn into this monster once we arrived home.
There was very little teaching of the Gospels; we were mainly exposed to the Mormon doctrine of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, which I started doubting at a very young age. But I knew enough about the teachings of Jesus Christ to know that my foster mother was definitely not practicing what she was preaching.
Looking back, I think she was mentally unstable; it’s the only reason I can think of for some of the things she got up to, especially her sadistic streak. She did mention, quite a few times, that she had been beaten by her mother and former husband, so maybe there’s some psychology there. I used to get into trouble a lot and one day, as a punishment, she got the idea of dressing me up as a baby and then inviting her friends into our bedroom to mock and humiliate me. I guess she didn’t realize that one day I was going to rebel against all that. I had my father’s blood in me, and even though he was a long way away, I’d definitely inherited his rebellious nature.
The foster mother also exploited the bond between Vicky and me, and our fear of being split up. When she got mad she would say, “That’s it. I am getting rid of you!” and threaten to put us back into the orphanages, other foster homes, boys’ and girls’ homes, or whatever. But Jenny would protest, yelling and crying, especially when she saw that her mother was serious about sending us away.
There was always fear growing up: fear of catching a beating, fear of losing my sister, fear of the foster dad drinking, and fear of what my foster mother was going to do next.
After a while, that kind of treatment is going to have an effect. In school, when the kids were asked to draw a picture, my sister never used colors, she always used a black crayon, for everything. Today, teachers would pick up on something like that but back then it was ignored, even by the foster care agent. That was the world we lived in; there was no one to confide in when it came to our experiences in that home. Every few months the state would send an agent ’round to conduct an inspection. This was mainly a health and safety check to make sure that we weren’t being exposed to dangerous chemicals or living in a fire hazard or that guns and knives weren’t in reach, and that the environment was clean. Well, it was clean all right because Vicky and I had to do all the scrubbing and cleaning before the agent came ’round. The agent would go through a checklist and tick everything off—except us. Our physical condition wasn’t on that list. In all those years, Vicky and I were never sent to a doctor for a health check, which meant that the foster parents didn’t have to worry about any marks or bruises seeing the light of day. That only left the testimonies of two small children. But the foster parents had all that covered. They were “Foster Parents of the Year,” so who was going to believe us, two small kids? The agencies and the public were led to believe that we’d lucked out with the Bakers. In their eyes they were model foster parents. Just before the agent arrived, we were always warned by our foster mother, “Don’t you dare say anything!” The agent would take us out for an ice cream and ask us questions, but we were scared. We didn’t know what would happen if we opened up about the emotional and physical abuse. Would that mean that the authorities would step in and shut down our foster home? Would we end up in an orphanage—or worse, in different orphanages? Or would we end up in a more abusive situation? All that insecurity, along with the fear of getting thrashed as punishment for opening up to the agent, meant that we kept our mouths shut.
That said, it wasn’t all bad, and we did have some great times. The Bakers were very holiday-oriented and went all out on Christmas and Easter, and we always took a summer vacation trip. Life was different when we were on vacation, especially up at Big Bear Lake Resort, San Bernardino County. I loved the freedom of running all over that mountain, having other vacation friends, hiking everywhere and looking for lizards. Big Bear City was really cool-looking; it almost had this Wild West feel to it. My foster uncle was the first guy to build a cabin up there, on top of a hill. You had to climb over fifty steps to get up there. He was in construction and was able to build his cabin all the way up on this plot of land against a barbed wire fence, beyond which was a nature reserve, and you couldn’t go beyond that fence.
We would still get in trouble but my foster mother seemed to be nicer when my foster uncle was around; she would be more conscious of her actions and would never spank me in front of him. When he was going through a hard time he’d set up a trailer in our driveway, in the back. I used to love it when he was there. He smoked, drank, built cabins, and always had beautiful women with him. To me, he was the coolest guy.
All this time, I never heard from my birth mother, but my father sent us letters. The foster parents never read them out. I knew that he was sending them, though. They told me he was sick, in the hospital. I remember thinking it was strange that he was in the hospital for so long, but being a child I didn’t dwell on it so much. The only contact we had with our blood family was with my father’s sister, Aunt Chita, and her mother, Grandma Mary, who lived in El Monte. Aunt Chita was the youngest of the siblings and the life and soul of the party. She liked her drink and she would always be hugging and kissing me saying, “You are so cute. You look just like your father.” She didn’t mention anything about him being in prison. I guess they must have come to an agreement with my foster parents because they stuck to the same story, that he was in the hospital. My grandmother said that he loved us and that he was a good man. The subject of my mother never came up much, probably because she never wrote to us, but I do remember my grandmother saying she was a bad woman and nobody knew where she was.
It turns out—as I found out in my twenties—that my dad was a prison tattoo artist. He painted these beautiful portraits of Vicky and me, and one of Jenny, too. One of mine was painted from my kindergarten class photo.
My dad’s brothers were also inside, in different prisons. One of them was a hardcore gangster guy, George. In my late teens, I ended up in the LA County jail, and an older sergeant approached me and said, “You’re Negrete, huh? You know, you look like somebody. Years ago, we had this DUI case, when I was a rookie sheriff, and we got in a high speed chase with this guy. He ended up running over some people. When we got to the scene, two people were dead. It was my first night on the job.” That was my uncle George. He was given life without parole, and he died in prison. My dad’s other brother, Peter, was also a prison tattoo artist, and he worked in the metal shop, so he framed my father’s portraits of us. Our foster mother put the pictures on our bedroom wall, so even though we had no contact with our father, and he had no idea what we were going through in the foster home, there was a connection, through his artwork.
In those days, in San Quentin and Folsom, my father had no access to tattoo machines, not even homemade ones, so he used an ancient technique: hand-poking. Hand-poked tattoos go back a long way—they’ve even found hand-poking tools in Egypt dating back to 3000 BC. And the technique has been used in many different cultures, especially by the Japanese and Polynesians. Many traditional Japanese tattoos are still made using this technique; they call it tebori. Even the Aztecs (Mexicas) and Mayans had centuries-old tattoo traditions before the Spanish came as conquerors and outlawed (often with death) such practices.
In prison, the first thing my father would have had to get a hold of was a needle—either a real sewing needle or the sharpened edge of a guitar string. In Polynesia or Japan they use sticks, animal bones, or bamboo. Then he would have wrapped a cotton thread around the needle, leaving a bit of the needle sticking out, and it would have been attached to some kind of tool, maybe a toothbrush. When the needle is soaked, the thread acts like a reservoir for the ink. In prison, ink is hard to come by, so prisoners burn newspapers, baby oil, cotton, the heel of a shoe, Vaseline, plastic spoons, anything, to create soot. And then they mix it with water. In Russia, they used this technique back in the days of the Soviet gulags and they even mixed the soot with urine or shampoo to make the ink. To create the tattoo he would have poked the other guy’s skin, over and over, many times in quick succession, so that the ink from the thread flowed into the tiny holes that were being created. And that’s how he would have built up the lines and the shapes—dot by dot. It’s painful, and if the artist doesn’t have much experience, the tattoos can look pretty rough.
As I grew older, I began to question the whole “your father is in the hospital” story. But the more questions I asked the more trouble I got into. Still, the truth was going to come out sooner or later. As I got older and started rebelling, eventually ending up in Central Juvenile Hall when I was twelve years old, I was finally told the truth. The reality, that my father had served time in a maximum-security facility, was thrown in my face one day when my foster mother said I was going to end up just like him, in prison. That, and the fact that our mother had been in prison too, came as a bit of a shock to both Vicky and me. Maybe the Bakers were just trying to protect us, but we definitely weren’t happy that we’d been lied to all those years.
They say that about one in five foster kids will either run away from home at least once or abandon the foster home completely and go and live with friends. It’s also pretty much accepted that foster care is a highway to homelessness, arrest, and incarceration. And that’s how things played out for me on that road trip: I ran away from home.
One day, my foster mother was beating me with a belt and said, “I’m going to get that meat tenderizer.” She was threatening me with that thing all the time, pulling it out and saying, “I’m going to spank you with this,” so when she went into the kitchen, I darted into her room, opened the drawer, and grabbed the stash of money I’d earned from mowing the neighbors’ lawns. There was about fifteen dollars in there, which was quite a bit of money back in the 1960s.
I was a crafty little guy. I snuck out of the house and had my route all worked out. We had a tree house, so I jumped onto that, and from there I got onto our garage roof, jumped onto the neighbor’s wall, then to another wall, onto another neighbor’s garage roof, and within a few minutes, zoop! I was nearly three blocks away.
There were hitchhikers everywhere back then—even girls would hitchhike alone. So I hooked up with a friend of mine and we hitchhiked down to Seal Beach. About twenty-eight miles south of San Gabriel, in between Long Beach and Huntington Beach, Seal Beach has always had a wild reputation. It used to be known as “Sin City,” going back to the Prohibition era when the city was well known for its speakeasies and gambling joints.
When I arrived there in 1967, they were building the second-stage Saturn rockets for the Apollo missions in a construction facility off Seal Beach Boulevard. Hippies were everywhere, and no one cared about clothes or shelter. The place was full of beach bums. On Main Street, and down by the beach, there was a big surfer and psychedelic scene. Bands like the Byrds were playing in local clubs at the time, though I was too young to get inside. They had a little beach town strip with a Taco Bell and a McDonald’s, so that’s where I would go to eat.
Back then there were “surfers” and “beaters.” I was more of a surfer kid, even though I didn’t actually surf at all down there. In those days, surfing was looked down upon because it was associated with delinquency and being a rebel. There were a lot of other runaways in the city and we all—about thirty of us—slept under the pier. There were lots of drugs as well. You had “reds,” which were barbiturates, depressants, with names like rainbows, red devils, yellow jackets, and pink ladies. And there were “whites,” amphetamine tablets. And then there was LSD—acid.
I dropped my first tab of acid on that beach at eleven years of age. That was a freaky experience. In those days, the acid was strong and the hallucinations were very vivid and three-dimensional. Fortunately, I didn’t trip on my own. For the most part we sat in a circle laughing and talking about our hallucinations. When we started coming down off the trip we took a walk around the town. That’s when things got scary. I got so paranoid. Everywhere I looked I saw a melting face. And, if I looked long enough, it got worse, as people’s faces transformed into devilish and demonic forms.
My friend got picked up by the cops and was taken back to San Gabriel, which meant that my foster parents knew where I was, so they came down there looking for me. One day, I was given three red devils and some alcohol. I couldn’t even walk. I kept falling down. I was so out of it. I couldn’t balance myself at all and a police officer picked up on it. He pulled into a driveway on the beach, where there were a bunch of hippies, and they knew he was headed for me, so they surrounded the car, saying, “Hey, officer, what do you need?” so I could get away. He opened the door and shouted, “Everybody. Get out the way, now!” Then he pointed at me: “You.” I was under arrest.
I was sent to Orange County Juvenile Hall. I actually liked it there because it was full of surfer kids, but because I was from San Gabriel they transferred me to the T and V units at Central Juvenile Hall on Eastlake Avenue. The T and V units were for kids who were thirteen and under, and I was twelve years old at the time. It was a small section, fenced off, and we didn’t have any contact with the older kids.
At that time in my life, I was seen as a white kid, and I also identified with being white. I never mentioned that I was Mexican until I was in the higher grades; my foster parents instilled this sense of shame in me about being Mexican. Any weakness was blamed on me being a lazy Mexican, and they were always ranting on about Mexicans.
So in Central Juvenile Hall I was this white Mormon surfer kid, and all of a sudden I was locked up with Chicanos and African Americans. I don’t remember any other white kids being there. It was a real culture shock. I hated it there and wanted to go home, so my foster parents came and picked me up. Initially, they treated me like a king. They bought me a hamburger and were kind to me, but within a few days the situation went right back to normal, and the belt was out again. But, this time, it was different. Something had changed. I’d tasted freedom out there at Seal Beach and I wanted more of it, so, no matter how much my foster mother beat me, I kept on running away, making my escape with my usual route, darting over the walls and rooftops.
One day—when I was around twelve, thirteen years old—I was outside, sweeping the yard, and my foster mother came out yelling, belt in hand. I got mad and my temper flared. I stood up and said, “Don’t hit me.” She looked at me, her eyes popped out, all surprised, and she went back into the house. That was the last time she ever tried to lay a hand on me.