by Mr. Francisco “Frank” Gonzalez, RJ Donovan State Prison, San Diego, CA
“It is never the wrong time to do the right thing.”- MLK
The other day, I was sitting in my anger management group wondering how do you cram 27 years of an incarcerated life into a few hours of a BPH (Board). Then I looked up to see the above quote. I then realized, I have to sincerely apologize to everybody for the harm I have caused and for the gathering I doubt people were jumping out of bed for, and for that I truly was sorry.
As I write this I am overwhelmed with emotions I never felt before. I am a nervous wreck and stressed out. Never in my life have I experienced these feelings or the strong remorse I am feeling. You have to understand I have been an angry person for a very long time and was blinded by my own pride and rage.
It was like the 5 second light switch went off and on in my head telling me “It shouldn’t be so complicated or hard expressing the truth of what I feel.”
As the saying goes the truth shall set you free. The fact of the matter is “insight” is something you have to truly think through and feel. You cannot make this stuff up and you can’t conjure up what 28 years of meditation has taught me, “Be patient, be wise.”
The book, We’re All Doing Time by Bo Lozoff, changed my life forever for the better. It gave me the peace of mind I lacked most of my life due to the anger, rage, and suffering I felt. There was a time in my life no one could tell me better. Right or wrong did not matter, I was going to do what I wanted. I was a young 16 year old kid that knew it all and looking back I was a hard person to deal with.
The perception was that I was a badass looking for trouble on every corner. I had built up a reputation of being violent and based it on respect. I stabbed and beat people thinking I would get respect. I had a total disregard for the rules and regulations. At the end of the day all it got me was a BPH date pushed from 2013 to 2020.
I wasted good years of my life. I lost my teenage years to violence due to a lack of true understanding. I was selfish in many ways. By the time I arrived to prison from the California Youth Authority CYA (DJJ) I was sent straight to administrative segregation (Ad-Seg) in Wasco State Prison with escape charges from CYA. I was never the same after that experience and that is how the prison gang life started. I had low self-esteem and it was not hard to do the wrong thing. The mantra was “do what you gotta do.”
The translation was do whatever you want. I want to begin with my early childhood memories of being happy. I was remembering those days as a happy six-year old kid. We lived in a barrio and I remember my father clearly, Guadalupe Gonzalez, as an intelligent hard working man. He was confident, generous and a man just full of life. He was just starting his own contracting business. He was an honest business man and his reputation got him plenty of jobs and never cheated a client .
The barrio we lived in was called Rosepark, in La Colonia. For the most part we lived in a happy bubble of our own and as kids we barely noticed the gang violence that was around us. We lived across the street from a park and one of the rules was never cross the street to the park without permission. The first time we broke that rule, I busted my head open on the concrete curb to the sandbox.
Luckily, my younger brother James was following me because by the time I hit the curb, he was in tears running home to tell my mom what had happened. Blood was gushing out. Strangely, I felt more shame for violating my parent’s rule. I knew then that I would have to face my father’s rage.
Though my father was a good man. He had a world famous temper, a temper I would later inherit. That I would later realize that it was a problem; my father’s temper and his alcoholism mixed and it would rear its ugly face. The day I had to be driven to St. John’s Hospital for some stitches was a never forget moment in my life, as I got scolded the whole way there.
I just sat there in the “Emergency” room waiting, worried more about the anger that I caused. I was in the waiting room wondering if I would also get spanked. As I recall that memory, I realize that it is the first time I actually call my father an alcoholic, who later became a reckless careless drunk that caused and was involved in a deadly car accident.
Nonetheless, my father was the only true role model. I realize that there is still pain in these memories were my father was good to us, but had a severe defect. His drinking would become the undoing of our family. As he became more and more successful his drinking became worse. His business flourished. As we benefitted, life was better almost even lavish for an upper middle-class neighborhood in the Northside of Oxnard, CA.
It was my mother’s dream home come true. All we needed was the white picket fence. We have this huge backyard with three trees. There was a tangerine tree, grapefruit, and lemon tree that we used to water every day. I can vividly remember the house on 1825 Natalie Street Place. We had this big fireplace. We were also enrolled in a private Catholic School. We had to wear the uniforms and the nuns were strict. Our Lady of Guadalupe was a school like no other.
The things I learned are lessons that I will forever carry with me. Know that this is about “Insight” but you have to understand my childhood to see where my criminal behavior and my anger problem really began. I want to also understand the causative factor involved in my anger. I have another problem involving alcohol which I have struggled with the past three decades of my life. I am currently sober, but the disease is a lifelong battle with addiction. The addiction is another thing that is more of a learned behavior probably from low self-esteem.
I saw my Father’s alcoholism become violent where eventually he was arrested for being drunk in public. It’s hard admitting that he was an alcoholic because it is stain no one wants in their family history. As the drunk incidents escalated we could only endure what would be a tragic life we were facing. I remember my mother’s fear as she would see him in drunken rage.
I remember that part of my childhood so vividly that it should be a crime that I have these memories burned into my brain. The trauma of seeing my father in the ICU at St. John’s Hospital. I will never forget that feeling of being sick and not understanding my cousin Williams’s speech about having to be the man of the house and taking responsibility of my brothers and sister. It has to be one of the worst things I ever heard as a kid of about eight years old. We were standing there in front of an elevator. He gave me that spiel as my father lay in a coma.
I remember that my last eight years in the streets were full of crime and addictions with drugs and alcohol. Though never did I imagine that my freedom would be completely taken from me in a tragic event that killed my friend/co-defendant Mark Estrada. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that I would spend my life in prison hell. I have compared it to a never-ending nightmare.
I had no understanding of remorse until I changed for the better. My life improved and so did my attitude and outlook on life. I’m still a work in progress and my forgiveness started with forgiving myself. I think that built my compassion, empathy, respect, responsibility and accountability. I started to make amends with the people that I hurt. Remorse in action is a lifetime of work.
It’s really no surprise that during my teenage years, I was drinking heavily and selling drugs on the street to put food on the table. Of course that is no excuse, it was my reality and living on the streets was not fun. Robbing and stealing was not what my parents taught me. Now I realized that I was in a lot of pain and drinking was a way to forget the pain I felt of seeing what was left of my father after the car accident that nearly took his life and devastated our lives forever.
The pain involved still hurts after my father died in what would be an ironic way. He fell into a coma and my sister pulled the plug on his life support.
All these years later it would take serious introspection to make me realize that I had low self-esteem problems along with the negative peer pressure were causative factors my life. All of it stemmed from my early drinking. All that coupled with some verbal and physical abuse from my mother who suffered from clinical depression.
The abuse was worse verbally as my mother would scream in anger. I have forgiven my mother and made amends. It took me years to find a way to express myself in a healthy way without the alcohol and drugs. I eventually changed my selfish and immature ways and it all goes back to that night that we got the phone call that my father had an accident. It made me selfish and immature.
After that night the rest of the day is a blur in my mind. That morning happened in June of 1985. As I think about it now the memory is like a flash.
Part of me still wishes for the life we had where we knew happiness and the joy of life. The car accident took our lives on a wild ride that never ended! ‘Till this day we still have questions about the accident and personally, I haven’t found that closure. Even after the death of my father, I didn’t find that feeling of moving forward. There forever will be those questions that will linger.
The day we spent in the hospital eventually would become the norm as my father spent weeks in a coma and then spent a year in the hospital in therapy. He was never the same as the brain damage left him with amnesia. He could not remember anything at all and had to learn how to do the things we take for granted like using a spoon and trying your shoes.
The time in the ICU stole whatever childhood I had left. I would often go days without seeing my mother while she was visiting my father in the hospital. But, damn my cousin William Castellanos and his damn speech. I still cannot get it out of my head, I was just standing there trying to grasp the new reality we had fallen into.
As I try to fill in the blanks, the story went, that my father had a huge pay day. He went directly to the Toyota Car Dealership and drove off the car-lot in a brand new Toyota 4×4 truck 1985 on a rainy night. He first went to my Tia Maria’s house to show off the new truck and share the news. My aunt and cousin noticed he had been drinking heavily and was talking about visiting my cousin Huero out in the Camarillo Mountains. They tried to talk him out of his plan, but he made up his mind to go see my cousin Huero, who was a caretaker at a ranch. Nonetheless, my tia kept telling him “go home to your wife and kids.”
He didn’t listen, he got in the new truck and drove away on that rainy night where they were the last ones to see him before he had the accident. One of my younger cousins was in the passenger seat but he walked away unscathed!
That phone call that woke us up in the wee hours of the morning was like nothing I have ever experienced again. The call from the hospital had a lady at the other end giving us the tragic news that affected my life as I stood there too stunned to do anything. I was in a stupor that lasted more than that night.
The word was that he was in a coma and he might not make it. We rushed to the St. John’s Hospital that was only a few miles from our home in the Northside of Oxnard. We got there and my aunt and cousin were already there waiting for us. After the surgeries my father lay there barely clinging to life in a coma. I saw my father for the first time in three days and the sight shocked then numbed me completely. The time my father spent in a coma seemed like a lifetime. I think that I became depressed but in the end coupled with my anger at losing everything my feelings turned into rage and greed. The greed lead me to the streets to sell drugs and engage in a lifestyle of criminality.
My idea of putting food on the table by any means possible was warped. And also I suffered from mental illness from seeing all of my mother’s suffering. At that time we did not believe in any mental illness and therefore, I suffered silently. For my poor mother it was like having an extra child at home when my father finally came home. Nonetheless, he came after spending a year in St. John’s Hospital where we were living with him through the time he spent in the hospital. It was soon after that the bills, all the hospital bills wiped us out and left us homeless.
We had to not only pay the bills from the hospital but the company of Toyota sued us for the cost of that new truck he crashed the very same day. The blue 4×4 Toyota truck was found practically wrapped around a telephone pole, that we also had to pay for to be replaced.
The rage I had made me a dangerous person, and that eventually led to the crime I committed were my friend Mark Estrada lost his life. The remorse I feel is tremendous and at times overwhelming. I spent years thinking about the guilt I felt.
I tell this story for the very first time to try to understand my own “insight” and hopefully grow from it. Sometimes you just have to do the hard work no matter how complex it may be. And in the process of the “insight” you will understand yourself better.
The past is just that, the past. My family specifically my mother always tells that “I’m a good person,” and that one mistake does not define me as a person. I believe her when she says it, because I know she means it from the bottom of her heart. I am truly sorry for the crime I committed. I apologize to the Paras’ and the Estrada family, to my community and society in general. I negatively impacted the lives of many people and can only make amends.
There was a time in my young life I could not see all this because I was not doing the work to redemption.
Sincerely seeking forgiveness
“Forgiveness starts with the self and ends with you showing yourself the ultimate kindness.” -Frankly Speaking
“Equanimity is achieved through the ever present mind.”