Full of Heart: My Story of Survival, Strength, and Spirit Read online

  “Ma’am, get back in your car, or I’ll take you, too,” he warned. Even that didn’t quiet her down. The officer looked over her head at me. “Son, tell your mother to simmer down or she’s going to make this situation worse,” he said.

  She finally backed off, and I was helped into the backseat of the cruiser.

  I tried to explain the ticket situation to the officer, and I apologized for my mom’s behavior. Once we arrived at the station, he removed my handcuffs. After I waited for him to check my explanation of the tickets, he finally returned and handed me over to my mom.

  And we were off again. Despite the delay, we made it to Dalton around nine o’clock on Saturday morning.

  Dalton springs up from the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Home to about thirty thousand people, it has two claims to fame: It’s the hometown of TV broadcaster Deborah Norville and the Carpet Capital of the World. But I didn’t care about home furnishings and I didn’t know who Deborah Norville was. What I liked was the town’s vitality, something I believed was lacking back in Hope. I also noticed it had a sizable Hispanic community.

  That afternoon, Irma and her family took us for a drive to Fort Mountain State Park. This is the southernmost portion of the Blue Ridge range, which extends northeast all the way to Pennsylvania. The highest peaks are in North Carolina and Tennessee, but the vistas in this part are still breathtaking.

  As the weekend progressed, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was where I was meant to be.

  “Hey, Mom, what do you think of this place?”

  She was taken with it as well.

  The next day, our last of the visit, was spent driving around Dalton looking at the stores and businesses. We took another trip into the mountains, where we swam in a lake, still ice-cold from the spring runoff. My mom and Irma watched from a nearby picnic table, talking.

  The next morning we hit the road back to Hope—but I was already plotting a move. I had been frustrated by the shortage of opportunity in Hope. The lukewarm ambition among my classmates and the scarcity of people like me—other than my friend Juan—frequently made me feel like an outsider there. And once I had my sights set on football, I understood that Hope wasn’t the place for me. My goal of playing pro football was still ping-ponging around in my skull, and I’d always heard that the game was king in places such as Texas, Florida, and Georgia. If I were there, I thought, maybe someone who could offer me a bigger opportunity would see me play.

  I’ve never been the most patient person, and now that I had Georgia in my sights, I wanted to get there as quickly as possible. I felt sure that if I didn’t go after my dream right away, it would evaporate.

  My mom was very reluctant to leave Hope, however. She had a great job at Tyson Foods, where she’d recently been promoted. She was making more money than everyone but her supervisors, had a 401(k) and paid vacation. This was a huge deal for a woman who’d bused tables for so long, and she was afraid to leave it. Would she be able to find another job like that in Dalton?

  Irma was also encouraging us to move, and she assured my mom it was a smart thing to do. Mom finally relented.

  I was ecstatic about my mom’s change of heart. I thought this was going to be a great new beginning for both of us.

  After she went to bed that night, I yanked all our pictures off the wall and piled them up and found a few boxes for our things.

  “What did you do?” she yelled the next morning.

  “You said we were moving,” I answered, “so I started packing.”

  She rolled her eyes. “We can’t go right now! We have to pay our bills and save our money.”

  Later that week, Irma called again to check on our progress. The economy was in a downturn, she told us, and job opportunities in Georgia were starting to decline, too. If we delayed any longer, we could find ourselves in a tight spot.

  I decided it made sense to move right away. Celestino was keen to see what opportunities were out there, too. So he and I hatched a plan to go for a few weeks over the summer and look around, try to find work. If it didn’t happen, we’d return to Hope and that would be that.

  On June 14, 2001, we celebrated my eighteenth birthday. My cake was topped by my baby picture and eighteen candles. But the gift was what I really prized—a seventy-five-dollar one-way Greyhound ticket out of Hope.

  On Saturday, June 16, Celestino and I boarded the bus for the fifteen-hour ride back to Georgia. It stopped in Memphis at dinner-time and I called my mom to let her know we were okay. We rode on through the night, the bus making stops in towns along the way.

  We rattled over the Georgia line and into a town called Dalton, but it was dark, the place was deserted, and we were tired, so it didn’t register that we were in the Dalton, which is how we found ourselves in the Atlanta bus terminal several hours later. The next bus back to Dalton wasn’t until morning. We spent a long night in the station, alternately trying to sleep and playing pinball, making sure we didn’t miss our bus. The people-watching was fantastic. I was fascinated to see people from different walks of life—homeless, elderly—who wandered the halls. Who is that man? I’d think. Where’s he going and what’s his story? I wondered if I’d look like them in twenty or a hundred years.

  At ten the next morning we made it to Dalton, greeted by handshakes at the bus terminal by Irma’s husband, Javier.

  Monday morning, we hit the ground running. “I’m getting a job today,” I told Celestino. I was beyond determined and would pound the pavement until someone hired me.

  Irma let us borrow their minivan. Our first stop was Shaw Industries, a furnishings, flooring, and carpet manufacturer. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. My only previous job experience was working as a dishwasher at Little B’s Mexican and Steak House in Hope. It took some time to fill out the applications because I had to do Celestino’s as well as my own, since his English was limited. I did the best I could, trying to accurately represent his work experience back at the poultry plant in Hope. I had to guess at his education level, because the system in Mexico is so different from ours.

  When I finished and handed the documents to the receptionist, she asked us what positions we were looking for.

  “Anything you have,” I said, hoping my smile would make a difference.

  She told us to take a seat and wait; someone would look over our applications and see us soon. We waited, and waited, and waited. After lunch we were called into individual interviews with a couple of Shaw reps. Mine was from Guatemala. I think his name was Rene, too.

  “I only have experience in a restaurant, but I’m willing to learn any position because I want to move here,” I told him. I really had no clue. I just knew I had to get a job for this move to happen.

  That evening we called my mom to tell her the big news: We had jobs!

  The next day, Tuesday, Celestino and I attended orientation at Shaw, where we were briefed about our jobs, the safety rules, the pay scales, and the history of the company. I learned I would be a forklift driver for a shipping and receiving plant. I’d never driven a forklift in my life, but that didn’t bother me. I only cared that I had a job, and this job was going to pay me $250 a week—good money for an eighteen-year-old.

  That night I reported to work for the 11 p.m. to 8 a.m. shift, graveyard. My job consisted of unloading rolls of carpet off the eighteen-wheelers and storing them in the warehouses. I was a little nervous because the other men there seemed to be old hands; they looked at me like, “Who the hell is the new kid?”

  I wasn’t very good at the job. It was nerve-racking work and I was afraid to mess up and lose this precious opportunity, but I found a way to make it through my shift every night. It was exhausting. I’d punch out in the morning, pick up Celestino at his workplace down the road, and be showered and in bed by 9 a.m. There wasn’t a whole lot to life.

  One night I was talking to another worker about playing football in Dalton. “Do you know which schools have the best football programs?” I asked him.
He told me Dalton High School had a forty-plus-year streak of winning seasons. Good to know.

  But before I could even think about football season and my senior year, I had a more pressing goal: saving enough money for a place to live. My mom arrived in Dalton on July 4 driving a U-Haul truck packed with our belongings, a trailer with her car riding on it following right behind her. She squeezed in with us into Irma’s crowded little house.

  The Monday after she got to town, my mother went to Shaw to apply for a job. She wasn’t as lucky as we had been. “We’ll call you,” they told her, and sent her on her way. Celestino and I carried on at our shifts and saved our money. We continued to live off the generosity of Irma.

  But when my mom got the callback offering a job in the factory a few weeks later, we celebrated with a Mexican dinner out.

  Hoarding my paychecks, I first paid the $400 for the outstanding ticket in Hope. By August 1, we had all managed to save enough for the $700 deposit on a two-bedroom apartment and the $175 weekly rent we’d spend to live there.

  Now it was time to focus on school and I was eager because the start of football practice was just a few weeks away. We visited Dalton High, home of the Catamounts. The football program reliably sent a handful of guys to college every year on athletic scholarships. Nine guys had gone to football powerhouses like the University of Georgia and Auburn the previous year alone.

  In a town like Dalton, high school sports brings the community together, and football is huge. Football means a sense of honor, pride, and tradition. Buzz Bissinger’s bestselling book Friday Night Lights, an account of a school in Dillon, Texas (a successful television series followed), could have described Dalton, too. If there was a Friday night game, you could be sure the stadium would be packed with five thousand or more spectators, some sitting in seats that had been bought and paid for by local families for years.

  Dalton High was about 60 percent Hispanic, 30 percent white, and 10 percent African-American or other race. I loved the fact that there would be so many students who looked like me.

  “I like this place already,” I told my mom, checking out the huge catamount (mountain lion) mural sweeping across one wall. I felt a good energy in the place and could imagine myself hanging out there.

  While my mom worked out the details of my transfer, I asked the principal for the phone number of the football coach, Ronnie McClurg. When we got home, I called him. As soon as he answered, I didn’t miss a beat. “Hi, Coach, my name is Jose Martinez. I just moved here from Arkansas for my senior year and I want to play for your team.”

  His response punched me in the gut.

  “We don’t take seniors unless you’re a starter or a first-team substitute,” he replied.

  I was devastated, but I held it in. “I understand your policy,” I said, “but all I’m asking for is an opportunity to try out for the team.”

  There was a pause as I waited anxiously, hearing only my racing heart. This man had my future in his hands.

  “Okay,” he said. “You can come out and we’ll see if there’s a slot for you.”

  I was too new to Dalton to know this at the time, but Coach McClurg was a venerated figure in the community. Now seventy-one, he was an educator for forty years—starting as a science teacher, moving into the physical education department, and spending the last decade of his career as Dalton High’s athletic director and head football coach.

  So if Coach McClurg said no, it was going to be no. Even so, I hung up feeling confident. While I’d never been the most talented on the football field, I had a tremendous amount of self-assurance and a strong work ethic. Even though size and speed weren’t in my favor, I had never let myself be pushed around by the bigger or faster players. I played harder than my size warranted. I was full of heart and the will to fight for my goal of making it to the top. I knew that my ankle injury wouldn’t allow me to play 100 percent—I was still hobbling from the surgery I’d had the previous spring—but I also believed I could compensate with guts and the sheer force of my personality.

  The first day of tryouts before the school year officially began was pretty awkward as I walked onto the field not knowing a soul, the other guys all staring at the new kid.

  Coach McClurg pulled me aside and grilled me: Where are you from? Why do you want to play football?

  My answers were straightforward: “I’m from Louisiana and Arkansas. Football is my dream and I love the game.”

  Coach lined us up on the field. I noticed during the drills that when some guys messed up and made a bad play, they’d walk off the field with their heads down. I immediately went over to pat them on the back. While the others were on the field, I clapped and yelled out encouragement. I’m sure the guys were wondering who in the world I was, yelling like that, but it felt so good to be part of a team again.

  After the tryouts Coach McClurg called me into his office. Heart pounding, I sat down.

  “I want you to know that you just made the team,” he said. “It has nothing to do with your ability and everything to do with your attitude.” That was a magic moment.

  I’d already learned back in Hope that football was key to my acceptance among the other students. Starting at a new school for my senior year would be especially challenging, coming in when the other kids had been forming bonds for years. I knew that being on the team would ease the transition. I decided something else right then: No more Jose for me. I didn’t want to use my father’s name—Jose—and Rene didn’t appeal to me. I was tired of going by that name and wanted to create my own identity. I told Coach McClurg to call me J.R. It was a new beginning, so why not go all the way?

  And sure enough, when the double doors to Dalton High swung open in September, I made friends, both male and female, quickly. Soon, girls would sit next to me in class or during lunch and play with my hair, twirling it around their fingers. Some guys were annoyed that I was getting so much attention, and I really didn’t blame them. My well-considered response was always the same: “I’m the new guy—that’s the only reason they like me.”

  Tracy Gonzalez was my best girlfriend—friend who was a girl, I mean. We had a math class together and clicked right off the bat, like brother and sister. After games, we’d hang out at a place called Steak n’ Shake and annoy the waitstaff.

  Tracy complained that girls were always trying to befriend her to get to me. They’d ask her, “What are you and J.R. doing this weekend?” They interrogated her about which girls I was talking to, whether I liked anyone. She called me “the honey to the bees.”

  I certainly enjoyed basking in the attention of Dalton High’s women, but that fall I focused like a laser on football. Just football. I played outside linebacker on defense and I was on special teams. I was a role player and a motivator and helped the guys get better in practice by encouraging them and working hard myself.

  Every Thursday night after practice, all the team’s seniors would gather at the clubhouse in a beautiful gated community for what was called Senior Night. Many of the senior players’ moms would be there, and they’d cook us dinners of spaghetti or fried chicken. The players would gather downstairs where there was a pool table, couches, and TV. As the team leaders, we’d talk about the next night’s game.

  But early in the season, we received a huge jolt. I had my head down on my desk, as I often did during the first periods of the morning—my bad habits in the classroom had followed me from Hope—when a friend tapped me on the shoulder to rouse me. I lifted my head and there, on the television, I saw airplanes hitting tall buildings in New York City, flames erupting, firefighters lumbering in, and people running out. At that moment I couldn’t know how profoundly that event would change my life.

  After the initial shock of those images, I went back to being a typical teenager with visions of football stardom and girls.

  Our football team was having another fantastic season. We had a strong lineup, and there were early murmurings that we could make it to the state championship once again.
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br />   Antoine Simmons, one of Dalton High’s athletic trainers, used to practice his Spanish on me. Before a game, he’d always ask me if I was ready. “Listo?” he’d say.

  One night he asked me the usual question, and for some reason I answered, “Listo para guerra.” I’m ready for war.

  Our team enjoyed huge success. We made it to the state championship, although we didn’t win. But another five Catamount guys would go on to college on football scholarships that year.

  My first real girlfriend in Dalton was Daniela, a fifteen-year-old freshman. She rolled with the rich white girls and had a preppy air about her, but her family was Colombian and, like me, she was being raised by a single mom. It was no secret that I was a big flirt, but for some reason until Daniela I hadn’t committed to a relationship with anyone. That said, Daniela was sweet and definitely cute, but I never felt like I was in love with her, and I was careful never to tell her any different. Nonetheless, one night we talked about sex and she surprised me by volunteering that she was ready for it. She wasn’t my first, but I was hers. Since she’d never done it before, I tried not to be an ass, taking great care to make her comfortable in her nervousness. After that first time, we weren’t able to be alone too often, but when we were, we’d take advantage of the situation, if you know what I mean.

  In the early spring, I informed my mom that I wanted to go to college, too. Since I wanted to be a pro player, I needed to play the game at the university level. I didn’t care about the academics—I just cared about football. My mom, on the other hand, wanted me to go to college so that I could get a job in Dalton as a doctor, a lawyer, an architect. She wanted to see me wear a suit.

  A teammate of mine named Aaron Ward had a brother who was thinking of attending the University of West Georgia in Carrollton, about a two-hour drive from Dalton. The Ward brothers’ father, Ron, was the assistant principal at our school. Their step-mom, Susan, was a middle school English teacher. They’d always welcomed me into their home, and now they invited me and my mom to join them on a campus tour of UWG.