Transcript
Steve (0:00)
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Jack Wagner (1:16)
Welcome to Other World. I'm your host Jack Wagner. This episode revolves around a guy named Antonio who grew up kind of bouncing around all over the place between many different locations and circumstances, sometimes living with his mom, sometimes with his dad, and sometimes on the Navajo reservation with his grandma. In his teenage years, Antonio found himself getting in trouble a lot and this made his already tense home life even more difficult. And it was on a night when Antonio found himself in some serious trouble that he ended up seeing something completely unexpected. This episode is called the Runaway and you're listening to Otherworld.
Antonio (2:09)
Hello, is this Bobby? Yes, it is. At its core, the science you can't argue with I was worried about is up in the sky. It's almost frustrating that it's happening. I'm literally I'm gonna die. Its limbs were just like wrong. Everybody moves back into the light even if it's takes them a minute. My name is Antonio. I am 37 years old. I currently live in Los Angeles, California and I work as a designer, specifically in UX and interaction and I also DJ on the side as well. I was born in Utah and I am quarter Navajo. Like a quarter like Native American and Spanish. Half white. I grew up kind of like all over that area and I spent a lot of time on the reservation when I was a kid, so I'd always go down to the Navajo Nation. I think part of, like, being like, mixed race is like, you know, you don't really have a step family. And I guess segregation was kind of like a thing. And a lot of those people from that era were still kind of, like, young. And so it was just one of those things where it was kind of weird to be a mixed race kid growing up. And so my white side and Hispanic side really didn't take me in too well. So I always spent a lot of time with the Navajo people. They never asked me about, you know, my race or anything or any background. They just kind of accepted me as family. And so I spent a lot of time with my grandmother, speaking Navajo, learning Navajo, keeping up with the traditional ways with the reservation and my cousins and my family out there. I became very close to them in particular when I was younger. My mom married a insurance broker out in Los Angeles, and we moved out to Santa Clarita and we got a place out there. My father had moved to Phoenix, Arizona, around that time. And so it was one of those things where I was kind of like back and forth between two places, and I was kind of far away from the res. But the beautiful thing about living in California was, like, there were so many people from so many different backgrounds that it didn't really matter who you were. You know, it was just like, these. This is my friend. These are my friends. These are the people over here. Oh, that's cool. Like, you know, you're German. Oh, that's cool. Like, you know, you're. You know, you're Dutch or whatever, or like, you're this, you're that. We never worried about, like, shallow stuff like that. You know what I mean? It was all just about, like, having fun playing, you know, that one game with the pole, with the ball that goes around. I can't remember what it's called, but it was just really nice. And so I always enjoyed my childhood out here. My mom's husband had become, like, pretty abusive because he wanted, like, the best out of me. I think he thought, like, I was, like, not very well disciplined or something. So he would take it upon himself to kind of like, hit me, yell at me, put me down. He took away. I remember he took away, like, everything out of my room one time where I only had my bed to sleep on, and he threw everything in the garbage. Yeah, I just. I remember collecting cans out of the garbage can when I was a Kid to take them into this recycling place down the street from my house in Santa Clarita. And I'd get a little bit of money back, and I'd go over to Jack in the Box and, you know, get the Jumbo Jack for a dollar. Yeah, it just. It was just kind of like a really surreal thing. I didn't realize how bad it was until I got older, you know, After I graduated elementary school in California, I made the obvious decision to go live with my dad. I thought that would be better. My dad is gay, so he has a. A boyfriend. It's kind of like one of those things, like, back in the day where it was kind of frowned upon, you know what I mean? But he was, interestingly enough, a part of this rodeo association called the igra, which is the International Gay Rodeo Association. And so I learned how to, like, ride a horse. I learned how to herd sheep. I, like, learned how to even break horses. Just being like a little. Little cowboy kid, I guess. You know, My dad had a big truck, you know, a very masculine man, you know, and you would never know this guy was, like, into dudes, really. I mean, it was, you know, because we'd go to the grocery store and, like, women would hit on him, and, you know, he would always turn them down and stuff and be like, oh, yeah, like, I've got somebody. You know what I mean? I've got a man. He was never afraid of being gay. That's just how he was, you know? But his partner, he. He started kind of getting really aggressive with me kind of again, like, I started getting, like, the same kind of abuse. And I think, like, that's, like, the first time I ran away was when I was in Arizona. I was living out in Glendale with them in an apartment, and he was a wrestling coach, and he had pinned me on the ground and, like, was, like, contorting my body in a certain way to where I was in a lot of pain. I was really struggling. I was telling him to stop. He had this, like, really creepy grin on his face. And I hit him as hard as I could. Like, I remember just hitting him, like, right in the stomach. I knocked the wind out of him, and I was out of that door, and I ran into the desert for, like, I don't know, like, six, seven hours, eight hours or whatever. I came back. My dad, you know, really didn't side with me at all. I guess. You know, his partner had told him the story, and I was pretty nervous about it, and so I didn't know what to do. I was, like, really scared. I called my mom. My mom was living in New Mexico. She was getting a divorce. And she came from New Mexico all the way over to Arizona to come pick me up. She came in the middle of the night. I remember, like, I called her like, like that evening. And like at 3am or some shit like that, she showed up to the apartment and my dad was yelling at me. And we didn't talk for, like, five or six years after that, you know? And even to this day, like, I'll try to bring that up. Like, hey, like, that guy was, like, terrible to me. And he doesn't necessarily believe it. I don't know. It's just. I just think it's something that he can't process. And I have to kind of, like, accept that, you know what I mean? Because I even talk to my mom about these things, you know, And I think it's kind of like a hard thing for them to come to terms with. So I don't, like, blame them for it because they were never, like, abusive to me. But, like, it's like they also did nothing. You know what I mean? So I don't know if that makes sense. But yeah. So I would go to Utah after New Mexico because my mom was trying to become a teacher out in New Mexico, and it wasn't working very well. So she decided to move out to Utah. And we were living with my grandmother, who is a full Navajo. Things were really different for me out in Utah. Like, I didn't realize, like, I was brown, I think, until I moved back to Utah. And I started experiencing racism in middle school. You know, I would get in trouble with, like, the human resource officer all the time. He got in trouble too. He. I went to this middle school called Wall Quest Junior High. He grabbed my shirt, threw me against the locker and started calling me a spic in front of, like, all the kids. One of the kids reported it. He got in trouble for it. He got suspended. The police, like, had kind of, like, an idea of who I was. And I was just, like, the odd one out. And I would just get in trouble for, like, nothing, like, random things. Just arrested and led into a point where my mom was kind of, like, very distant, very, you know, not doing anything, getting, you know, randomly upset with me. I wasn't doing very well in school. I was having a hard time. I was getting bullied. I was, like, scared to go to school. The only thing I really had was, like, myself, my thoughts. And I kind of, like, thought about that time I ran away into the desert. And it kind of felt like a good thing to do. And so I started, like, you know, just running away. You know, anytime, like, I'd get in an argument with my mom or anything would happen, or, like, a partner that she was dating would just kind of, like, be abusive to me or whatever in any manner. I would just be like, okay, I can run, you know, I can get away from here. I can leave. I can go away. And usually what would happen is, like, I would run away. The cops would come, you know, to the house, like, after they call them, a certain amount of time. And I'd be gone for, like, one, two days, three days, five days, and so. Yeah. Where would you go? Oh, man, I used to go, okay. So the first thing I would do is I would go to the laundromat. I would get all the change that people would drop underneath there, all the quarters and everything. I would go stay with a friend or something, get some food, some. Some stuff to eat, Take the bus and just ride around town, not go to school, you know, just. There was a bus. Bus route in ogden called the 612. Pretty much just goes all over the Ross Hatch front. I would go out to Salt Lake City. I'd go to, like, the hip hop record store and kind of, like, just. I would look at all the records, and there was a virgin music store out there they put in after the Olympics, I think. And I would go out there. They sold vinyl out there. But, yeah, I'd be gone for a while. My friend's dad was in Iraq because the Iraq war was going on. His mom was, like, cheating on his dad, so she was, like, never home. So it was pretty much just, like, a house full of kids, you know what I mean? Like, all the time. So I was able to, like, stay at a bunk bed in a basement, Pretty much unfinished basement for majority of the time. And that was kind of like my second home, to be honest. I mean, because even when John, the guy that went to Iraq, came back, he kind of took me in as, like, a son almost, you know, So I would definitely just venture into those kinds of places. And I think finding money was my biggest thing first, you know, because I had to, like, figure out how to get from one place to another.