Let’s Get It On! (7 page)

Elaine’s mother’s side of the family had come from money. Elaine’s grandfather had run Farmers Insurance, a nationwide operation with millions of customers. I wouldn’t say Elaine’s family was rich, but she lived in a middle-class neighborhood and got most everything she wanted.

Elaine’s mom, Lynn, was always working. She was a computer wiz at a time when one computer system would fill an entire room. Lynn was a little savant who could write super complex computer programs, but nobody knew how she did it.

Elaine’s father, Ted, was a smart man and had graduated from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. He’d even worked on the rockets that allowed the Lunar Excursion Module to land on the moon, but from the day I met him, Ted never had a job, and I never figured out why.

I usually have a hard time respecting someone who doesn’t work, but I always seemed to get along with Ted. I also would not have normally associated with someone like him. Not only was he an intellectual, but he belonged to clubs that had table tennis and pellet pistol shooting and was always trying to figure out what activities he could beat me in. These clubs definitely weren’t the types of places you’d find me in on my own, but it made him happy, so I went along.

I always thought Ted should have been a politician. The man loves to talk and meet people. If it’s a homeless guy on the street, Ted will strike up a conversation like that guy’s the most interesting person in the world.

Ted’s gift for the gab got us all into some sticky situations, and sometimes I had to jump in and get us out of them. One time, Elaine and I went on vacation with Ted and Lynn to Cabo San Lucas. Ted struck up a conversation with a little Norwegian man sitting at a nearby table during breakfast, and before we knew it, we were all on a boat with this perfect stranger heading off for a day of diving.

The boat driver dropped us off on a shore about twenty-five feet long and ten feet deep. While the Norwegian and Ted prepped the diving equipment, Elaine and I swam. Then I noticed a boat hauling ass in our direction. Once it got close enough, I could see the Federales symbol on its side. I left Elaine in the water and started swimming for shore.

It was as if we were in a scene of a Chuck Norris movie. Two of the four uniformed men, one of them toting an AR15, jumped out of the boat, grabbed the Norwegian guy, and proceeded to kick the shit out of him. Ted started yelling at me to help the guy, but I glanced at the officer holding the AR15, then at Ted as if to say, “Are you fucking kidding me?” then back at the Federales, who dragged the Norwegian man onto their boat and split his chin on the rail.

It turns out our friendly tour guide had been warned numerous times not to poach business from the local dive shops.

Diplomat Ted tried to tell the Federales they didn’t need to use so much force on our Norwegian guide, but I told him to can it and tried instead to negotiate our trip back to shore. The head Federale said another boat would be by shortly to pick us up, revved his engine, and sped away with his men just as quickly as he’d arrived.

There we were on a shore that was about to go bye-bye with the tide coming in.

Minutes, then hours passed with nary a boat in sight. Ted kept talking, trying to minimize his involvement in marooning us in the middle of Cabo San Lucas Bay.

Meanwhile, it was obvious to me that we’d soon be climbing the rocks. I said good-bye to Elaine, put on some fins, dove into the water, and started swimming in the direction of the harbor. About an hour of swimming later, I made it to the marina.

By the time I returned to Marooned Island on a rented boat, Elaine and her family were huddled on the rocks like a pack of pelicans. Ted tried to sputter out his reasons why he shouldn’t be blamed for all this, but the last thing I remember was telling him to just shut up and sit down.

My fishing improved over the years: a dorado (mahi-mahi) I caught in Mexico

I know everybody has crazy stories about their in-laws, and I have a ton I could tell you about Ted that still make me chuckle. Unfortunately, Elaine never really got along with her dad, so I felt like I was always trapped between them trying to keep the peace. Based on my own experiences, especially my own relationship with my dad, I valued family greatly and always felt she should try to work things out with her own dad.

I figured he loved her and Elaine just didn’t understand him. I always encouraged her to talk to him, but it would take me years to understand her point of view. I learned later that just because someone is family doesn’t mean you have to love them, like them, or even put up with them. Some relationships work, and some don’t.

Whoever came up with that “for better or for worse” phrase was a freaking genius. When Elaine met me, I was living on the edge. Some days I think back and wonder why she wasn’t scared off altogether. I guess I was lucky she was into the rebellious type, because I had plenty of that to go around.

I was a big, immature twenty-year-old powerlifter who thought he could handle just about anyone. I know now there were plenty of people who could’ve handed me my ass, but back then I was a six-feet-four, 300-pound guy who thought he was invincible.

At the time, I was driving a Jeep CJ-7. I was so big the back of the seat had broken off at its hinge and I couldn’t sit in it anymore. I started driving Elaine’s car, a tiny Datsun truck, with the window rolled down so my arm and shoulder could hang out to give me more room.

One night, I was driving Elaine home so she could change for a party. When I slowed down at a stoplight, I saw a green MG compact sports car ahead of us with its top up and the rear window open. Then I caught the driver’s eyes.

“What the hell is that guy winking at?” I asked.

“Certainly not at you,” Elaine said.

That was it. I snapped. I pulled up behind Mr. Green MG, honking my horn and flashing my lights to get him to pull over.

Instead, he turned in to a McDonald’s drive-thru, where I boxed him in from behind. Then I jumped out of the truck, went up to the driver’s door, and told the guy to get out of his car.

He looked at me as if he’d just dropped his grandmother off at church. “What’s the problem, buddy?” he asked innocently.

Wrong answer, buddy. I tried to rip his locked door off its hinge, and when I remembered the open back window, I fished inside, tearing out a big piece of his shirt and then a clump of his hair.

The guy was grabbing as much floorboard as he could, screaming for help while this big lunatic attacked him.

“Get out of the car, or I’ll crush it around you,” I said, and when he didn’t obey, I hoisted the tail end repeatedly as if I could shake him out.

Meanwhile, I was vaguely aware of Elaine standing there calling me every name in the book, which only enraged me more.

I beat the soft top down flat and jumped on the hood and trunk, denting both ends beyond recognition. I picked up the back of the car again and bounced it off the ground, bottoming out the suspension and crushing the underside. I was out of control and breath when I finally realized I had an audience. As the sirens gained, I jumped into the truck with Elaine and drove off.

“You’re a psycho,” she yelled.

She was right.

I was lucky I didn’t get caught.

Of all the times for me to go off the deep end, this wasn’t the best. You see, I had planned to propose to Elaine that night.

So I did the one thing I could think of to right this sinking ship. I bribed her.

Leaving her huffing away in the parking lot of an ice cream parlor, I went inside. A few minutes later, I reappeared with a tub of peppermint ice cream. It was Swensen’s, her favorite, and these 5 gallons would go a long way with a girl who weighed only about 115 pounds.

At least it was enough to get Elaine to agree to come to the party.

Outside of the house full of partygoers, I stopped her. “You have every reason in the world to turn me down, but if you would like to, I want to marry you.”

It was the worst proposal in the history of mankind.
²
Still she said yes, and for that I am eternally grateful.

Looking back on that day, I realize I felt as if that stranger had spit in my face right in front of the girl I was going to marry. I couldn’t let that happen. But my behavior spoke to a larger issue. I was heading down the wrong road.

I wouldn’t say I looked for fights, but I certainly didn’t back down when they fell in my lap. For some reason, they did a lot. It was probably because I was now bouncing in nightclubs and country bars.

My dad saw the writing on the wall. He knew I’d been doing steroids off and on the last two years, and it scared him because it fueled my aggressive tendencies when people pushed my buttons just right. “You’re going to kill yourself one of two ways,” he warned. “By getting into a fight or by driving your car or motorcycle so fast you crash and burn.”

After getting into a big argument with Jim Dena, the owner of Samson’s Gym, I left the powerlifting world. To make ends meet, I started picking up odd jobs: painting streets, working at a packaging company, taking on heavy lifting projects, and anything else I could find.

One day while I laid down cement blockades for parking spaces at Chapman University, the head of security drove by in his golf cart. “Do you want a job working security?” he said.

Drenched in sweat from head to toe and burning under the brutal sun, I gave him the no-brainer answer.

Being a security guard was quite boring. I didn’t have a gun or any real authority outside of the college campus, so I’d just cruise around in my golf cart, stopping to talk to people.

The “scenery” at Chapman was fantastic, but Elaine couldn’t stand me being around so many other girls. It didn’t pay well enough for me to argue anyway, so I lasted nine months.

That’s when I turned to what I knew: the police force. It was either go to jail for losing my cool in the wrong moment or put others there in my place. It wasn’t a hard choice when you thought about it that way.

With my dad’s overwhelming blessing, I applied for both the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the Los Angeles Police Department and waited to see which one would take me first.

You’d probably be relieved to hear that sheriff and police departments require a lengthy interview process, including a written test, an oral interview, physicals, background checks, and the all-important psychological tests.

At first, the LASD system seemed to be moving me through faster, so I thought I’d be heading there. When I went to complete the background info stage, I had to fill out all this paperwork on my family and personal life.

“I see your dad worked for the police department,” the deputy sheriff said as he looked over the paperwork. “Why aren’t you interviewing there?”

“My sister’s a deputy for the sheriff’s department,” I said, “and there seems to be more opportunity for me here.”

This deputy sheriff had worked for the Special Enforcement Bureau, which is their version of SWAT. “I really don’t know the LAPD, but we did some training with their SWAT Unit. There was this one crazy guy who would stick his badge pin in his arm.”

If I could’ve shrunk into the chair and disappeared altogether, I would’ve. He was talking about my dad. As he talked to other officers, my dad liked to sterilize his pin with a lighter and sit expressionless while he stuck the three-inch steel spike into his arm. He wanted people to think he didn’t feel any pain. His forearms had loads of tattooed dots, permanent marks from the burned carbon.

“Have you ever heard of him?” the deputy sheriff said.

I just looked at him. “I haven’t.”

It wasn’t that I was embarrassed. I just didn’t think they’d look at the relationship as a plus.
Yeah, let’s hire the son of the wacko guy.

In the hiring process, I also had to fill out a questionnaire that listed recreational drugs. As I’ve mentioned, I never tried anything other than steroids, which were legal at the time, and alcohol, so I marked that down, handed in my sheet, and waited to take the mandatory polygraph test.

Shortly after, a woman came into the room. “I don’t think you understand the way this test works. If you lie, you will be disqualified. It’s okay if you’ve experimented with marijuana.”

“I haven’t,” I said again.