Full of Heart: My Story of Survival, Strength, and Spirit
DEDICATION
For my sister Consuelo, whom I love very much, and for my beautiful daughter, Lauryn Anabelle, and in memory of my sister Anabel, who left far too early but remains in our hearts
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
PROLOGUE
May 2003
CHAPTER ONE
Boy Meets World
CHAPTER TWO
American Dreams
CHAPTER THREE
Hope
CHAPTER FOUR
Football Dreams
CHAPTER FIVE
Running Out of Hope
CHAPTER SIX
Uncle Sam Wants Me
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Crucible
CHAPTER EIGHT
Twilight
CHAPTER NINE
Who Will Love Me Now?
PHOTO SECTION
CHAPTER TEN
Burn Paradise
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A Long Road Home
CHAPTER TWELVE
Getting Back on the Bike
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Welcome to Hollywood
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Full of Heart
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
PROLOGUE
May 2003
Whenever you’re ready.”
My nurse, Mike, pointed to the mirror in front of me.
It had been twenty-six days since I’d hit the roadside bomb on a road in Iraq, twenty-six days since I’d been medevacked to Landstuhl, Germany, the largest military medical center outside the United States, and then here, to the burn unit at Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas.
“You won’t see the same face you remember from before,” said Mike. “But it’s going to get better. Just know that.”
People had admired my looks all my life. My bright smile. My soft, curly hair. I didn’t ask for the compliments, but I came to expect them. I got used to being the guy everyone looked at. Now, after suffering third-degree burns over 34 percent of my body, including my face, hands, and torso, I needed to look at myself.
My eyes met the mirror. My heart jumped. I blinked and turned away. That’s you, I thought. You have to look. I forced myself to turn back.
As a kid I’d been terrified by the disfigured slasher Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street film series. Now he was here, in this hospital room, looking out at me from my own reflection.
I pushed the mirror away.
Mike reached out to put his hand on my shoulder. “I know this isn’t what you expected to see, but you’re not going to look like this for the rest of your life.”
Rage bubbled up inside me. “Look at my face!” I screamed at him. The force of my own voice surprised me. “You don’t understand,” I said, struggling to control myself. “I’m nineteen years old and I have to live the rest of my life like this. What am I going to do?”
CHAPTER ONE
Boy Meets World
Just two months after my mother, Maria Felix Zavala, a four-foot, eleven-inch firebrand of a woman, arrived in Texas in 1982, she met a man named Jose Martinez. He swept her off her feet with all the promises of love.
Maria was an illegal immigrant from El Salvador with no money and no English. She had chanced everything to come to the United States to make a better life. She had scraped and borrowed the funds to pay the coyote to bring her first across the borders of Guatemala and Mexico and then into America, risking her life crossing a raging river she could not swim and dodging the immigration agents who waited for people just like her. But worst of all, she had left behind in the care of her mother two young daughters, Consuelo and little Anabel, who had been born with no bones in her feet. Since Anabel couldn’t walk, my mom was determined to prosper in the United States so she’d be able to buy her daughter a wheelchair.
Jose was from Monterrey, Mexico, but he’d been in the United States for a while and spoke English well. Like Maria, he was also quite short, but he was tall in attitude and had long, curly hair and straight white teeth.
Maria was working for a woman taking care of her three young children while the woman was at work. Someone whispered to Maria that the woman was a prostitute. Maria didn’t really care what her employer did for a living, but the fact that she’d never paid Maria for her work was a big problem. So when Jose impulsively invited Maria to move in with him and his family, it seemed like a godsend.
“I’ll take care of you,” he said.
She quit her job and settled in with her new family. Unfortunately, her new mother-in-law didn’t like Maria: She wanted a virgin for her son, and she knew Maria already had two children back in El Salvador. Maria tried to ignore the negativity because she wanted to be happy.
But Jose had trouble keeping jobs, and money quickly became an issue. He wasn’t going to take care of her after all.
And then Maria found herself pregnant. She was determined not to let anything hold her back, so she got a job taking care of a two-year-old boy and cleaning his parents’ house for eighty dollars a week. She scrubbed the toilets, swept and mopped the floors, and washed and ironed the clothes, all while chasing the busy toddler.
Little by little she managed to save a few dollars, and by December 1982 she’d begun to send some money back to her mother for the care of her daughters. As the months went by and her belly expanded, Maria worried about the stability of her relationship and speculated about whether Jose would be a responsible father. Or if he’d even be around for his child.
“It doesn’t matter,” she convinced herself. “I’m going to work hard. I’m going to raise my children real good.”
One day Jose disappeared without a word. Three days passed before he bothered to call.
“I’m in Shreveport,” he said. He had two jobs there in Louisiana, construction and restaurant work. “In a couple of weeks, I’ll come back and get you. We’re going to start a new life together!”
He was true to his word. The couple settled in northwest Louisiana in a town called Bossier City, along the east bank of the Red River across from Shreveport. A growing city of about fifty thousand people, it was home to several riverboat casinos as well as Harrah’s Louisiana Downs, a Thoroughbred and quarter horse racetrack. There were ample service-sector jobs, but Maria was six months pregnant by then. No one would hire a woman in that condition, so she sat in the couple’s apartment for months, watching Jose come and go and feeling more and more distant from him.
He seemed to prefer killing time with people whom Maria considered “good-for-nothings” instead of working. He earned a license to operate semitrailer trucks, telling Maria, “Now all I have to do is get a trucking job and we’ll have it made.” It didn’t happen.
The atmosphere grew tense. One evening, the two were in the bedroom, arguing. Jose had had a bit to drink. He kicked Maria in the leg, and she fell, crying.
“I hope you lose that fucking baby,” he said.
But she didn’t.
On June 14, 1983, she gave birth to me at the LSU Medical Center in Shreveport. A snapshot from that day shows me in the arms of my smiling parents. You’d never know what my father had wished upon me just a few weeks earlier.
It’s Latin American tradition to observe a period of cuarentena, or quarantine, for forty days after the birth of a baby. New mothers recuperate and receive special care from other women, especially another mother or a mother figure, while they bond with their babies. But this was America, and the notion of cuarentena was a dated fancy
for a woman in my mother’s circumstances.
Two weeks after I was born, my mother handed her bundle to the neighborhood babysitter. Struggling to control her roiling postpartum emotions, she forced herself to turn and walk away. Each day for eight hours my mom pushed a vacuum, hauled trash, and scrubbed toilet bowls in offices in Bossier City. By the time she returned home to me, her breasts would be heavy and aching, her back would throb, and she’d wonder how she could leave me again the next day.
When she’d cry at work, heartbroken, her coworkers would look at her irritably. “You just had a baby,” they’d say. “It’s not like you’re going to die.”
She kept working and my father kept working, and I grew into a chubby, smiling infant. The three of us were a little family unit, struggling but making it. Until we weren’t.
One day my father was grumbling about my mom to one of her girlfriends.
“If you leave her, you’ll have to pay child support,” she told him.
“I’ll go back to Mexico before I give her a dime,” he replied.
In March 1984, when I was nine months old, my father vanished again. This time two weeks passed before my mom heard anything. A neighbor came to our apartment with a letter from Jose. He wrote that he wanted us to join him in his new town, DeLand, Florida, about halfway between Orlando and Daytona Beach. There, in what was sometimes called the Athens of Florida, we could be a family again.
The neighbor offered to help my mom pack up, but her trust in Jose already was frayed. The man she’d come to know was not dependable, and she wasn’t willing to go out into the great unknown without some security.
“If he wants us, he can come get us,” she said.
She wrote back to him, telling him what he needed to do to bring our family together. The post office returned the letter: undeliverable as addressed. She tried more than once to send it, and then she kept it for a long time as a reminder. Someday she wanted to be able to show me why I don’t have a father.
So there she was again: all alone with a baby in her arms—in addition to no papers, no car, no English, and no money. Her oldest brother had recently made it to Shreveport, so we moved in with him for a month, but my uncle was a mean drunk, “a macho man.” But as long as she was able to pay for my diapers and milk, she considered it a good day.
Then my mom met the lady she calls her guardian angel, my godmother, Alejandra.
Catholic parents are expected to have their children baptized within months of birth, and my parents were obligated to designate godparents, or padrinos, for me. But my mom didn’t know anyone in Louisiana, so I was eleven months old before she was able to bring together my padrinos. Her method was pretty unconventional: At Jose’s work she had met a nice man named Lupe who offered to serve as my godfather. He told my mom he’d bring along his girlfriend to the church for the baptism, and she could serve as godmother. Enter Alejandra into our lives.
Once she learned about our situation, Alejandra invited us to crowd into her little house, even though she had five kids of her own. Alejandra helped my mom land a job cleaning tables and serving chips at a Mexican restaurant. She’d work from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m. and then report back at 5 p.m., frequently working until midnight. She paid Alejandra’s thirteen-year-old daughter forty dollars a week to watch me.
In the meantime, my mom had become involved with a Salvadoran guy named Miguel, a friend of her brother’s. Always practical, she appreciated that he spoke English and could drive—she couldn’t do either yet. Once I began to talk, I started to call him “Daddy.” After four months at Alejandra’s, we moved in with him and made our home there for several years. Miguel and my mom parted company because, she says, although he was a good man, he didn’t have any dreams. I don’t really remember anything about him.
But despite the hardships and setbacks we endured, my mom’s pride remained intact. My mom dressed me up in the best clothes she could afford from the dollar store. One evening after her shift, she picked me up at Alejandra’s, where Alejandra and her kids still looked after me. Alejandra handed her one of my shirts; her husband had cut it into shreds with scissors because, Alejandra said, “It’s ugly. He’s a beautiful child. How can you dress him like that?”
My mom was outraged. She yanked me away and told Alejandra that they were through.
A waitress at the restaurant where my mom worked had an elderly mother everyone called Miss Mary, and she agreed to babysit me. But it soon became apparent that Miss Mary didn’t have the energy to look after a toddler. I became depressed because I missed Alejandra’s family. My mom was sad, too. She and Alejandra made up, and the babysitting arrangement went back to the way it had been.
It was so good for me to be back in that house. I loved to follow Alejandra’s kids around and play with them. I never stopped moving. Everyone called me Nay-Nay—short for Rene—and at Alejandra’s place, little Nay-Nay was the center of attention. I ate it up. I was born to be an entertainer, an artista. My mom says that when I would cry, all she had to do to get me to stop was pick up a camera and point it at me, and I was instantly all smiles.
I was an especially tireless talker. If I was at home with my mom or we were on the bus going somewhere, I’d start chattering. “Mom, what’s that? Why do they have that there?” Talk, talk, talk, questions and more questions. My mom says I talked as though I already knew everything. She thanked God that she wouldn’t have to fight to keep me in school as she may have had to do in El Salvador.
But her undocumented status nagged at her, weighing her down with an extra layer of worry. The United States follows the English common-law rule of “right of soil”: If you’re born here, you’re a citizen. Since I was an American, my mom considered herself the same. But Uncle Sam did not.
“La Migra”—the immigration agents—seized my mom the first time in 1985, when I was two years old. My mom was busy at work, helping the cook make the platters of tacos and enchiladas and setting up for happy hour. The next thing she knew, agents had lined up her and her coworkers against a wall.
“Where are your papers?” the agents demanded, going down the row of undocumented employees—several Mexicans and two Salvadorans. My mom was the sole woman. A few of the workers attempted to argue their way out of this jam, but that didn’t work.
My mom burst into tears as the agents herded her and the other employees into a van. “Please, I have a son!” she cried through the wire separator.
At the immigration office, they booked all the men, but they told my mom she could go. Plane tickets to El Salvador were expensive, they said, so she needed to save her money to buy her own. “Come back to the office in three months with the funds,” they told her. “We’ll help you get home.”
It wasn’t clear if they were giving her a break because she was the lone woman, because she had a child, or because the cost of the ticket really was the issue, but she’d take it any way it came. She wasn’t ready to give up her American dream.
By this time she had found very steady employment. She worked at her first job of the day, the Mexican restaurant, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Later in the afternoon she reported to her job as a kitchen helper at the Italian Garden, a Bossier City restaurant. She worked there until eleven o’clock or midnight—a job she kept for years.
The Italian Garden was a great place to work. The owners, Frank and his wife, Jan, were very good to my mother, and her coworkers had begun to feel like family. Once in a while I’d hang out in the empty banquet room, and by the time I was about six years old sometimes I’d even help the servers bring meals and drinks out to the tables. At closing time, I’d wash down the kitchen mats with a hose. I loved it.
At the same time, my mom had been working toward getting American citizenship. She’d contacted a New Orleans lawyer who was supposed to be able to help immigrants successfully apply for green cards. About once a month, she and I would take a five-hour bus ride to the city to check on her application. She had paid the lawyer several hundred dollars of her diligen
tly saved money, and then she’d waited, and waited, and waited.
Meanwhile, throughout her time in the States, my mom was haunted by the guilt of leaving her girls back in El Salvador. From the time I was very little, I sensed that I was keeping my mom away from my sisters, a feeling that was compounded on the rare occasions when my mom would become frustrated and lash out at me about our situation. But I didn’t have her, either, really, since she was always working.
This guilt, combined with the lack of progress on her green card, sapped her willpower and finally did her in. Her brother was planning a trip back home in April 1987. My mom decided that we would go back too—for good. She would finally put her conscience to rest and rid herself of the constant specter of potential deportation.
She called Frank at the restaurant. “I’m not coming in anymore,” she told him. “I’m finished with this place.”
“Don’t leave,” he said. “This is Nay-Nay’s country. If you go, he won’t have the opportunities he’ll have here.”
Frank called the lawyer and told him my mom was planning to leave. The lawyer got on the phone with her right away and echoed Frank’s pleas to her.
My mom looked over at me playing with my toys. She pictured me grown up, speaking fluent English, enjoying the possibilities America would offer me.
Okay, then, she thought. One day I’ll become legal and bring my girls here, too. She unpacked the suitcases.
She’d bought two identical pink ruffled dresses to take to my sisters in El Salvador. She sent the dresses to her brother and asked him to deliver them for her. At least her girls would have a little piece of her and know she hadn’t forgotten them. But one of my sisters never got the chance to wear her dress.
A few days later, my mom got a call from a cousin in El Salvador. It was the sort of call no mother should ever have to take. Her baby girl Anabel, just six years old, was dead.
My mom stood with the phone to her ear, not speaking.