Danny Trejo - Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption, and Hollywood

Trejo

My Life of Crime, Redemption, and Hollywood

Danny Trejo

with Donal Logue

Trejo is a story of survival, of power, of transformation, and ultimately, of love. Hollywood couldnt have written a script this dramaticthis is the real-life rebirth of a man who wrote his own story in life and now finally shares it with us.

Eric Garcetti, mayor of Los Angeles

I was incredibly fortunate to shoot Blood In, Blood Out inside San Quentin, the Big House. We had three hundred active inmates working every day as extras next to the eleven actors Id cast for the main roles. Danny Trejo was a graduate of Q, so in addition to playing Geronimo in the film, he served as my unofficial prison advisorhe knew the territory intimately. We shot in cell block C, on tier 5, in the actual cell where Danny had spent two years of his life. It wasnt just that Trejo was the real dealhe turned out to be a terrific actor.

Taylor Hackford, director and producer of Blood In, Blood Out

This is more, much more, than a celebrity memoir. Its a gutsy, wrenching, inspiring account of personal redemption and one mans discovery of a higher purpose, written as though Trejos life depended on it. And once you read his story, youll know that it does.

Walter Kirn, New York Times bestselling author of Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, A Mystery, and a Masquerade

Danny Trejos unflinching, exquisitely written memoir, Trejo, unpacks his extraordinary journey from the hole at Folsom Prison and the notorious B Section at San Quentin to the dizzy heights of leading roles in Hollywood movies. As famous in Los Angeles for his work in addiction and recovery as for his acting, this is also a narrative of someone finding the path out of hell and helping others escape with him. Trejo tells his story with grace, humor, humility, as well as a terrifying immediacy during the more violent portions of his troubled early years. Add Danny Trejos name to those of Chester Himes, Nelson Algren, Malcolm X, and Jimmy Santiago Baca, men who served hard time and came out the other side to teach us about living life to the fullest in the now.

Adrian McKinty, New York Times bestselling author of The Chain

For Maeve, Danielle, Gilbert, Danny Boy, Theo, and Sam. Family is everything.

To all the incarcerated men and women throughout the world, know that through God all things are possible. You cannot only make it out of your current circumstances, but you can know a freedom and happiness you never thought possible. You cant even dream the kind of life you can have. I love you and Im praying for you every day.

1949

Mary Carmen ran in our room yelling. She said, I found a mudda cat! Her sisters Coke; Cokes twin, Toni; Salita; and I followed her to the alley. These were my cousins. We shared a room at my grandmothers house, and we never rolled anywhere without each other.

Ive always been in a gang of some sort, even if it was five- and six-year-old girls.

Lying next to a trash can in high grass was a dead cat with big tits. Mary Carmen was right. She was a mother cat.

A group of men stood outside a factory, smoking.

One of them said, Get away from that thing. Cant you see a dog got to it?

Salita said, We have to save her babies. Where are her babies?

We searched through the grass and up the alley for kittens but couldnt find any.

Coke had the idea to bury the cat and give her a proper funeral. We had to hurry because the evening was spreading out against the sky. We got a stick, pushed the cat onto a piece of plywood, and carried her to my grandmothers backyard.

The ground was harder than I thought. After a few minutes of digging I wanted to quit.

Its probably deep enough.

We slid the cat off the board and covered her with dirt. Just then, my dad burst out the back door.

What the hells going on? If you kids dont get in this house, Im going to smack some asses.

A mudda cat died, said Mary Carmen, but my dad had already disappeared back into the house. Blackie, our dog, slipped through the screen door and started pawing at the grave.

No, Blackie, no! I said.

We tied Blackie up to keep the mother cat safe. Salita made the sign of the cross and we started to pray.

Later that night my uncle Art came running into the house, his shirt torn and bloody. He said hed gotten jumped in a bar off San Fernando Road. Without missing a beat, he and the rest of my uncles grabbed sticks and bats and ran out the door.

About an hour later the men of the family swaggered back into the house, bragging about how many people theyd fucked up. My grandma grabbed us kids and made us kneel with her in the corner of the living room to say the rosary. I watched out of the corner of my eye while our abuelito stomped around, pumping his fist, yelling about how macho we Trejos were. My uncles were laughing, passing beers, doing play-by-plays of what had gone down. My grandmother made us pray louder.

Looking at my cousins and me, kneeling in prayer for the second time that day, youd never guess that every one of us would go to jail or prison. But we did. No matter how close to God my grandmother wanted us to be, we were already on a path. We were Trejos. If my family had a legacy, that was it.

And youd never guess that the baddest of the badmewould make it out of the prison system and instead of dying in the street as a stone-cold junkie and killer, Id end up being shot, stabbed, decapitated, blown up, hanged, flattened by an elevator, and disintegrated into a pool table until my eyeballs rolled into the pockets in a career that made me the most-killed actor in Hollywood history; that Id meet presidents and have murals of my face painted on walls in different continents; that companies would want me as their spokesman because I was not only loved but trusted; and that Id have an official day named after me in Los Angeles. Because the Danny Trejo who I was before I got clean and became a drug counselor, or before the world got to know me through my acting career, was no one anyone would want to paint or honor. Because back then, I was the Mexican you didnt want to fuck with.

Part One ESCAPE

Chapter 1 SOLEDAD

1968

I felt like shit. I was high on heroin, pruno, reds, and whiskey.

I was three years into a ten-year stretch, which for a Mexican was more likely to be a twenty-year stretch, a life stretch, a death stretch.

I always figured Id die in prison.

It was Cinco de Mayo 1968, in Soledad State Prison. To Mexicans, real Mexicans, Corazn Mexicans, Cinco de Mayo doesnt mean the Mexican day of independence (its not); it doesnt signify the day the Mexicans defeated the French at Puebla; it doesnt even mean the fifth of May. Cinco de Mayo means Get bail money ready.

I was already inside, so no need for bail.

Mexicans had been planning a un chingn volar