Welcome to California, Bitch.

I didn’t want to move to California. Why did my dad have to break a chief of police’s jaw? Couldn’t he just for once have exhibited some self control?

Now I was in a car driving from Miami to Los Angeles. I’d been here before. The first time, I watched from the rear window as my poor granny waved goodbye and cried as they took her six-year-old granddaughter away from her. That time, we were headed for New Haven, Conn. and I was too little to care. But at 15, I was leaving some close friends behind.

I sat in the back seat and cried for the first eight hours and then we did what we always did on trips like these; we stopped for the night at a Howard Johnson’s Hotel. The hotel was famous for its 28 ice cream flavors long before Baskin-Robins came out with its 31 flavors. My mother loved ice cream and this was dad’s way of keeping mom happy.

After a good night’s sleep, I did what I usually do after a total nervous breakdown — I move on. I get this from my mother.

We settled into an apartment in Burbank just weeks before I was to start eleventh grade. I turned 16 in August and was trying to adjust to my new surroundings. My father drove me to Burbank High School and I began my first day wearing hot pants, a cropped top, and platform shoes. I was tan, blonde and scared, but I wouldn’t let anyone see my fear. I get that from my father.

I was approached in the first week by a guy named Carlos. He was the second person to talk to me at this new school. The first was Joanne, a skinny half Italian-half Scottish girl with long black hair split in the middle like Cher. She was my first friend in California and we would quickly discover that we had many things in common, including our Italian upbringing and our love of Rod Stewart and Sly and the Family Stone.

My first encounter with Carlos was in front of the school.

“Where are you from?” Carlos asked in a broken English accent.

I had no interest in this greaser. I’d had Cuban boyfriends but this guy was nothing like them. He was good looking with dark eyes and brown skin, but his hair was styled in a pompadour and he wore pressed polyester slacks high above his waist and a polyester button down shirt. The Cubans I hung out with were classy rock and roll guys with light eyes and long hair. This guy, I would later learn, was Mexican. I’d never been exposed to Mexican guys in Miami.

“Can I take you out sometime?” he asked.

I made up some kind of excuse about having a boyfriend and went on my way. But the guy was persistent. He found out where I lived and showed up on my doorstep. I stood back as my father answered the door.

“Who the fuck are you?” my father asked.

“I’m here to see your daughter.”

“Go away,” my father said.

“What’s your problem, vato?” he asked. (This was going to get bad fast)

My father grabbed him by the neck, pulled him down two stairs and threw him in the swimming pool, polyester pants and all.

I would again see Carlos in the school halls, but he avoided all eye contact.

Two weeks later, I was walking across the grass walkway in front of the school to class. I still only had one friend and she was nowhere in sight.

“Hey, bitch,” this Latina chick yelled. “HEY BITCH, COME HERE!”

I turned around to see two girls approaching me. One had long black hair ratted at the top, heavy eyeliner, fake eyelashes and long painted nails. The other looked like she just stepped out of a Mexican jail.

“I’m Carlos’ girlfriend,” she said. “You fuckeeng him bitch?

Before I could answer, she grabbed the front of my hair and slammed my head into her knee. I fell to the ground and the two of them began kicking me in the head until I was unconscious.

I remember waking up in the hospital with my father, my mother, and my new friend Joanne by my side.

“You have a concussion,” my mom said. “You need to stay here overnight.”

A few years before, I was hit by a car in Miami while walking to school. I was thrown into a curb, knocked unconscious, and put in the hospital for a few days. The diagnosis was a skull fracture that was described to my parents as a fracture that resembled an egg breaking at the top causing fracture lines along my skull. This concussion concerned the doctors because the beating could cause the fracture to re-open.

Joanne had a look on her face that was beyond concern. She looked nervous as she tried to motion some kind of sign language to me. I wasn’t getting it.

“Your friend Joanne told me who did this to you,” my dad said,

I’d seen this look before. When a kid threw a sprinkler at me causing ten stitches in my knee, my father took care of things. We never saw him or his family again. When a nun hit me in the head with a hole puncher, my father pushed her into a wall and told her if she ever touched me again, she’d be seeing Jesus Christ sooner than she planned.

But this time was different. He had a look in his eyes I’d never seen. It was the look of a concerned father combined with cold, silent rage.

I would be able to return to school in a few days, but things would be different. Very different.