May 28, 2025 • 28 mins
In Emmy’s first relationship post-transition, she learns that jealousy is not love, and that what she witnessed as a child isn’t what romance needs to look like.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
This podcast has content that may not be appropriate for
all audiences. You'll hear about some difficult subjects like domestic
violence and suicidal thoughts. Listener discretion is advised. Episode one,
Love Hurts. My name is Emmy. For as long as
(00:24):
I can remember, I've been looking for love. I grew
up in San Diego, where it's always warm and sunny.
My street was filled with palm trees and kids running
around everywhere. San Diego is called America's finest city. I'm
growing up there. I dreamed of a future filled with romance,
(00:46):
filled with peace and happiness, America's finest future. Since I
was a kid, I wanted to be the perfect housewife.
But that wasn't gonna be easy because to the world,
I was a little boy. I couldn't dance the way
(01:08):
I wanted or moved the way I wanted. I didn't
feel like me. I wanted stability, but what I had
was violence, drug use, and chaos. My San Diego wasn't
always a sunny place. It was painful, so I tried
(01:30):
to escape. I tried to pretend like I lived in
a totally different place. In movies and TV shows, I
pretended for so much of my life just trying to
fit in. But pretending got really hard. I started drinking
(01:50):
and I was reckless. To be honest, Pretending even made
me feel like my life wasn't worth living. Yeah, but
fourteen years ago I got sober, I started my transition.
(02:14):
Life as a sober woman was completely new. In so
many ways, it was the most authentic I've ever felt.
But in other ways, I felt like lots of us
do in new situations, like I was faking it. And
(02:35):
when I finally started dating the men that I dreamed
of all my life, I tried to act the parts
I'd seen on screen, play the characters I thought they
wanted me to be. But was any of that really me?
After so long, it's hard to separate out who I
am from who I let myself become. So if I'm
(02:58):
ever going to find love, I have to go back.
I have to understand who did I pretend to be
and why what did each version of me settle for.
Maybe then I can figure out who I really am
and what I deserve, and maybe this experience will mean
(03:19):
something to you too. I'm Emmy and this is Crumbs,
my love story. It's a show about the things we
settle for and the bits of ourselves that make us
who we are. Mm hmm Emmy hard working Latina seeks cool,
(03:51):
down to earth guy, sober and fun looking for romance,
love language, passion. The first person I dated after I
transitioned was Jason. It was two thousand ten. At this
(04:12):
point in my life, I'm living full time as a woman.
It's kind of like the lights went on right I
started seeing in color, and I'm navigating womanhood and I'm
experimenting what it's like to date different men. So I'm
dating casually here and there. Nothing serious, lots of hook
(04:37):
ups and it was fun. I only had about almost
two years of sobriety. I was going to a lot
of twelve Step meetings, so a relationship wasn't something that
I was really looking for at the time. And then
I walked into this meeting at the Stream and Center
that I would attend regularly, and that's when I saw
(04:59):
Jason for the first time. He was very handsome. He
was about six ft, very nice chisel jaw, kind of
a wide nose, very full lips, hazel eyes, and he
had this curly long hair. I felt him staring at
(05:22):
me and just checking me out. It was like, Okay,
this guy's into me. I could tell who is he.
So after the meeting, we're cleaning up the room. You
start folding chairs and helping out around the meeting, and
(05:46):
one of my friends came up to me with Jason
and I learned then that Jason was a new resident
at the treatment center. My thought, well, fuck, that's just
great a newcomer in the program. Dating a newcomer is
frowned upon in the twelts the program in a parameter recovery.
(06:09):
It's called thirteen stepping. And I see the significance of
it because when you're a newcomer in the program of recovery,
you don't need any distractions, romantic distractions, right, because if
anything were to go wrong and you don't have the
tools necessary to deal with a breakup or disappointment or
(06:32):
something bad, you're gonna go out and use or drink.
And I thought, well, do I really want to get
involved with the newcomer. I love the attention he was
giving me. He told me I was beautiful, and that
made me feel good. And then Jason asked if you
could have my phone number. I didn't think he was
(06:57):
going to call, And then he called that very night.
As soon as I got home, he called me from
a pay phone at the dreatment center. He wasn't allowed
to go out of the treatment center unless it was
on the past to see his mother, or to go
(07:17):
to a doctor's appointment, or to look for a job,
so we didn't have the ideal first date situation. Our
dates were made up of going to a meeting together
and I'd maybe get to talk to him for a
few minutes before he had to leave to his dream
and center. Then as he phased up into having more freedom,
(07:44):
I'd be the one to give him rights to his
doctor's appointments or therapy sessions. Or he'd say he was
going to go out and pass with his mom, but
he'd actually come hang out with me and we'd have
dinner at home. Jason had already been with trans women
in the past, but he had never really dated one seriously.
(08:07):
He said he was open to it, and we jumped
into it pretty fast. He started calling his girlfriend. That
was very fast. Shortly after he met me. We'd go
to meetings together, and he did introduced me to his
friends as his girlfriend, which felt very nice. He was
good looking, I was good looking. You know back then
(08:27):
Brad and Angelina were like hottest thing, so they called
us like the brand Jelina Twelp step recovery. I swore
that's what they called us. So being someone's girlfriend was
so important to me at that time when we were
in a relationship, because I hadn't really had a serious
(08:49):
relationship free transition. Even though he demonstrated confidence, he was
very insecure, and so with that insecurity came a lot
of jealousy. There were times when I couldn't be at
the treatment center, that I wanted to be with my
(09:09):
friends so that I wanted to do other things, and
he'd be blowing up my phone, just calling where are you,
Why aren't you answering why aren't you here? So he
begged and he pleaded that I did I give him
that security that I was with him and that I
wasn't cheating on him. I didn't like anybody controlling me
(09:30):
or telling me what to do, so I'd hang up
on him and I'd break up with him. Every other day.
I would say things like it's over, and then fifteen
minutes later he'd be knocking on my door, banging on
my windows, like open the door. It's not over we're together,
and so I could see the jealousy and I'm like,
(09:50):
this guy really loves me. I provoked the drama because
then he would have I'm running and ask for forgiveness
and say I will do whatever you want me to
do to be in this relationship because I love you.
And that's what I thought was real love, right is
(10:11):
somebody fought hard to be with me, they must love me.
When I went to college, he would visit me every weekend,
and one day we were at the Denny's on campus.
We ordered dinner, we were going to go home and
(10:33):
watch a movie. We were walking back and one of
my classmates was coming and he said, hey, how's it
going and smiled. Well, that pissed Jason off, and right
away he's like, are you fucking him? Like, no, he's
a classmate. Where do you get this from? Well, he
(10:55):
was very smiling and chatty with you. Jason, that's normal,
we're in a class together. You're nothing but a fucking horror.
And he grabbed the cheeseburger that he had in his
hand and slapped it on my face and that cheeseburger
just went flying, and I felt humiliated that he was
doing this in front of so many people outside of
(11:18):
the Dennis. We rushed to the apartment where I was living,
and I remember thinking, Wow, he wanted all of my
attention only for him. Oh. I would see these red
(11:41):
flags and I'd paint them green because finally I had
somebody who wanted me for who I was, who accepted me.
The fact that he needed me in his life to
be okay and that he called me his girlfriend in
front of everyone made it seem like we were doing
okay because I had this warped perception of what a
(12:05):
healthy relationship is supposed to look like as a seven
year old kid, I was always very grown up for
(12:25):
my age. I don't really remember having a normal childhood
where I would go play and have friends over like.
I don't remember that being my childhood. My childhood really
consisted of the hustle and bustle of having a heroonetic
mom and doing her hustles with her. Oh so, my
(12:54):
relationship with my mom was a little different than a
typical relationship. Since she was only fourteen years older than me.
I always saw her like a big sister. Right, she
had already been into the heroine, and she had been
in and out of jails. I never knew what we
were going to get into or what was going to happen.
(13:15):
Sometimes we'd be shoplifting at stores and I wouldn't know
if she was going to come out or not. I
was always scared that my mom was going to get arrested,
get beat up by cops, or that I was gonna
be taken away from her. I think my entire childhood
I felt unsafe. But a big portion of my life,
(13:38):
my childhood life was lived at El Boyo. El Boyo
wasn't sunny see at all. It's right on the U.
S side of the border between Tijuana and California. It's
a town of only like thirty thou people, but it's
one of the busiest ports of entry in the world.
(14:01):
And right on the edge of the town was Al Boyo.
It was a shady ass restaurant and it was full
of drug addicts, drug lords, you name it. You could
go there to get a job, eat some roasted chicken,
get a coke, get some heroin. It was the one
(14:23):
stop shop for drug addicts. My mom would go do
her drug deals there. She'd go sell anything that she shoplifted.
She'd go look for work, a little side hustle, and
she'd bring me. I was her little companion. My memory
(14:44):
is a little fuzzy, but I do remember driving to
a boy We'd get out of the car, walk in
and it's just like any fast restaurant, right There's booths,
people coming in and out, Mexican music playing, lots of
(15:07):
conversations happening, somebody nodding off in the corner. We'd walk
up to the counter. My mom would get me something
to eat. She said, Okay, go sit down, and then
shed go talk to her friends or her connects, whatever
it was she was yelling. That day, my mother met
(15:27):
Ico at It Boo. I remember him being just a tall,
tough looking kind of thug. I'd be sitting in the
booth at Boyo, just playing with whatever toys I had,
or eating chicken, just distracting myself or even observing people.
(15:48):
So when my mother would go to the bathroom with
Geogle to do drugs, I was a little was frightened
of what was going to happen. He Go had this
reputation of being really tough street fighter. He was one
of the best fighters of sen at the time, so
(16:10):
everyone was kind of scared of him. At first, I thought, well,
this is just another one of my mom's boyfriends. I
didn't know he was gonna be around for a while.
He going. My mom had my sister shortly after they met,
and that's probably one of the reasons that they stayed together.
(16:38):
So there was this time we were living with Ara
and I was hanging out with the kids in the
block who were writing these little gold cards called avalanchas,
and you know, I would always get picked on. I
would get picked on for being overweight, for being feminine.
I think I was about eight or nine years old.
(17:00):
One of the older kids, he was probably around fourteen.
He destroyed my avalanche on my little gold cart. He
just destroyed it. I was so sad and I went
home crying, and Ko was furious. He didn't like anybody
picking on me, so he stormed out of the house.
(17:21):
He went towards the kid, picked them up by his
shirt and said, don't you ever and scare the living
hell out of him. Well, yes, Ko came up to
my defense, But not only did he come up to
my defense, he also went out bought wood and built
(17:43):
me the best go cart anyone in that neighborhood had.
I didn't ever get picked on after that, So I
remember then fighting a lot, and that's when I noticed
(18:04):
the abuse and the abusive behaviors from Gigo towards my mom.
Gigo doesn't really have people's skills. His actions this way
of communicating our through violence, and that's exactly what happened
when theever they would have a disagreement, he hit my mother.
(18:28):
Even though she had black eyes and she was beat up,
my mother would act like everything was okay. They get
over pretty quickly and act like nothing ever happened. I
remember coming home from school one day we were living
in Mexico at the time, and walking into the door
(18:51):
and everything was so quiet. It seemed like nobody was home.
But the entire house was upside down. There were things
thrown everywhere. There was like I remember it was right
before Thanksgiving, and there was like a frozen turkey in
the middle of the hallway. There was clothing everywhere. It
(19:14):
was a mess. It looked like a hurricane had come
through the house. And I remember walking into my mom's
room and she was laying there and I could see
the marks on her face and she was pregnant at
the time. And very shortly after that, beating she miscarried.
(19:42):
I don't remember her ever talking to me about it.
This is when I would escape into TV and just
try to block it out of my mind. I would
really get lost into Brady Bunch or leave it to
(20:02):
Beaver and Just. I think, just watching these TV shows
with the perfect families that have sit down dinners together,
they go on vacations together, they asked each other how
their day was in school. Mom's actually caring for their kids,
and I thought that that was what I wanted, right,
That's what I wanted to be when I grew up,
(20:24):
very different than like my mom and Igor. It was
totally aspirational. I didn't see the path to getting this
TV family. All I knew was the chaos and violence path.
It seemed like in real life that was the price
of having someone love you. Yeah. Prior to Jason, I
(21:02):
had been having casual sex with people and we were
having breakfast one day and I got a text message
from a random number and it's someone that I had
known from before dating Jason, and it was just a
(21:22):
dick pick surprise, Hello, big old dick, just on my screen,
and Jason flipped the funk out rightfully, so he grabbed
my phone, and he threw it on the ground, smashed
it and went from zero to one and a split
of a second, and you know, we struggled a little bit.
(21:47):
He pushed me around, and that was the first time
that Jason put his hands on me. I locked myself
in the bathroom and I had marks on my face,
on my neck o. He said, you're going to be
by yourself until you learn how to be a faithful woman.
And he blocked the doorway so I couldn't get out,
(22:08):
and I just remember feeling so powerless over that. I
was tired of crying. I was physically exhausted, and I thought, well,
maybe I should jump out the window. I just cried
myself to sleep, and then I tried to pretend like
(22:29):
nothing ever happened. That's when our problems really started. I
had a trip planned. It was a vacation that Jason
(22:49):
didn't want me to go on, but I went anyway.
One of my cousins got married in Naples and Jason
couldn't come. I couldn't leave the country being on parole,
and I remember the flight being eighteen hours long. We
landed in Rome, and when I got there, Jason was
(23:10):
nowhere to be found Jason had disappeared for three days.
I would call his mother and she didn't know where
he was. And eventually I got ahold of him and
he's like, oh, I was at the casino. I'm like
for three days, Like, who does that? Obviously somebody on drugs.
(23:35):
So he was using drugs, God knows what else he
was doing. And he would get really possessive, like what
are you doing? Who are you hanging out with? Are
you fucking anyone? Like, jeez, I'm on vacation with my family,
none of that stuff is happening. Calmed down the night
before the wedding, he's like, I don't believe that you're
(23:57):
in a hotel room by yourself and you're not fucking anyone.
And Mike Jason, I'm not fucking anyone. I'm on vacation
with my family. It's like, we'll turn your skype on.
Because there was a time difference. I had to be
sleeping while he was awake, and so he wanted to
(24:18):
watch me sleep just to make sure that I was
asleep alone. If that was what it was going to
take for him to just be calm and at peace,
I was willing to do it. So I slept with
my skype on. It was in Italy that I realized
(24:46):
that I couldn't go on like this. I was on
this hamster wheel where I was hoping that this relationship
would work, but the price I was paying was too high.
And I remember her coming home from Italy. I spent
the night at his house, and the very next morning
(25:06):
I woke up and I just looked at him, and
I felt such disgust just by looking at him. I
didn't want to be my mother all over again. I
looked him and I said, Jason, I can't do this anymore.
I'm not in love with you. He flipped out. He
(25:31):
looked at me and he said, got the funk out
of my house, and I did. And when I met
up with him again to get the last of my things,
he looked at me and he said, you're just a
fat tranny who's never going to find anyone to love her,
and I hope you die of aides and he sped off,
(25:59):
and you were he was, I mean from he was
coming from a place of rejection, of hurt. It was
still hurtful to hear it. I'm never going to find
anybody who loved me. He wanted me to feel alone.
There was a part of me that was relieved after that,
(26:19):
but there was also that fear that what he said
was true, fear of never finding anyone to love me.
He meant so much to me, being my first relationship
as emmy. I wanted the relationship to work out because
(26:43):
I didn't think I was going to come across a
lot of men we're going to accept me and want
to date a trans woman and take them seriously. So
I felt that this was the only version of love
that I was eligible to receive. I was settling for
this crumb of love, this crumb of attention that came
(27:05):
in the form of jealousy. Somewhere deep down, I knew
there was more that I could get out of life,
but I never felt like I could ask for it.
I never felt like I could actually get things that
I wanted, and I thought that if I asked for more,
(27:26):
I might end up with nothing. But in the end,
what good is a crumb? So on the next episode,
I do ask for a little more, but will that
be enough? Crumbs is a production of My Heart Radios,
(27:58):
Michael lu Podcast Network, and Solo in association with Trojan Horse.
It's produced by Margaret Catcher and and edited by Jazzmind,
Rometto and Alex Gumetro. Original music by Daniel Peter Schmidt
and engineering by Manuel Executive produced by Gisevances and Conno
(28:19):
Burn for I Heeart, Alex Bumeto for Trojan Horse, Joshua Weinstein, Jazzmind,
Rometo cal And and me emio Lea special thanks to
Monissa Hendrix, fernand Estrava and Sara Mota. Listen to Crumbs
on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(28:41):
you get your podcasts.
This podcast has content that may not be appropriate for
all audiences. You'll hear about some difficult subjects like domestic
violence and suicidal thoughts. Listener discretion is advised. Episode one,
Love Hurts. My name is Emmy. For as long as
(00:24):
I can remember, I've been looking for love. I grew
up in San Diego, where it's always warm and sunny.
My street was filled with palm trees and kids running
around everywhere. San Diego is called America's finest city. I'm
growing up there. I dreamed of a future filled with romance,
(00:46):
filled with peace and happiness, America's finest future. Since I
was a kid, I wanted to be the perfect housewife.
But that wasn't gonna be easy because to the world,
I was a little boy. I couldn't dance the way
(01:08):
I wanted or moved the way I wanted. I didn't
feel like me. I wanted stability, but what I had
was violence, drug use, and chaos. My San Diego wasn't
always a sunny place. It was painful, so I tried
(01:30):
to escape. I tried to pretend like I lived in
a totally different place. In movies and TV shows, I
pretended for so much of my life just trying to
fit in. But pretending got really hard. I started drinking
(01:50):
and I was reckless. To be honest, Pretending even made
me feel like my life wasn't worth living. Yeah, but
fourteen years ago I got sober, I started my transition.
(02:14):
Life as a sober woman was completely new. In so
many ways, it was the most authentic I've ever felt.
But in other ways, I felt like lots of us
do in new situations, like I was faking it. And
(02:35):
when I finally started dating the men that I dreamed
of all my life, I tried to act the parts
I'd seen on screen, play the characters I thought they
wanted me to be. But was any of that really me?
After so long, it's hard to separate out who I
am from who I let myself become. So if I'm
(02:58):
ever going to find love, I have to go back.
I have to understand who did I pretend to be
and why what did each version of me settle for.
Maybe then I can figure out who I really am
and what I deserve, and maybe this experience will mean
(03:19):
something to you too. I'm Emmy and this is Crumbs,
my love story. It's a show about the things we
settle for and the bits of ourselves that make us
who we are. Mm hmm Emmy hard working Latina seeks cool,
(03:51):
down to earth guy, sober and fun looking for romance,
love language, passion. The first person I dated after I
transitioned was Jason. It was two thousand ten. At this
(04:12):
point in my life, I'm living full time as a woman.
It's kind of like the lights went on right I
started seeing in color, and I'm navigating womanhood and I'm
experimenting what it's like to date different men. So I'm
dating casually here and there. Nothing serious, lots of hook
(04:37):
ups and it was fun. I only had about almost
two years of sobriety. I was going to a lot
of twelve Step meetings, so a relationship wasn't something that
I was really looking for at the time. And then
I walked into this meeting at the Stream and Center
that I would attend regularly, and that's when I saw
(04:59):
Jason for the first time. He was very handsome. He
was about six ft, very nice chisel jaw, kind of
a wide nose, very full lips, hazel eyes, and he
had this curly long hair. I felt him staring at
(05:22):
me and just checking me out. It was like, Okay,
this guy's into me. I could tell who is he.
So after the meeting, we're cleaning up the room. You
start folding chairs and helping out around the meeting, and
(05:46):
one of my friends came up to me with Jason
and I learned then that Jason was a new resident
at the treatment center. My thought, well, fuck, that's just
great a newcomer in the program. Dating a newcomer is
frowned upon in the twelts the program in a parameter recovery.
(06:09):
It's called thirteen stepping. And I see the significance of
it because when you're a newcomer in the program of recovery,
you don't need any distractions, romantic distractions, right, because if
anything were to go wrong and you don't have the
tools necessary to deal with a breakup or disappointment or
(06:32):
something bad, you're gonna go out and use or drink.
And I thought, well, do I really want to get
involved with the newcomer. I love the attention he was
giving me. He told me I was beautiful, and that
made me feel good. And then Jason asked if you
could have my phone number. I didn't think he was
(06:57):
going to call, And then he called that very night.
As soon as I got home, he called me from
a pay phone at the dreatment center. He wasn't allowed
to go out of the treatment center unless it was
on the past to see his mother, or to go
(07:17):
to a doctor's appointment, or to look for a job,
so we didn't have the ideal first date situation. Our
dates were made up of going to a meeting together
and I'd maybe get to talk to him for a
few minutes before he had to leave to his dream
and center. Then as he phased up into having more freedom,
(07:44):
I'd be the one to give him rights to his
doctor's appointments or therapy sessions. Or he'd say he was
going to go out and pass with his mom, but
he'd actually come hang out with me and we'd have
dinner at home. Jason had already been with trans women
in the past, but he had never really dated one seriously.
(08:07):
He said he was open to it, and we jumped
into it pretty fast. He started calling his girlfriend. That
was very fast. Shortly after he met me. We'd go
to meetings together, and he did introduced me to his
friends as his girlfriend, which felt very nice. He was
good looking, I was good looking. You know back then
(08:27):
Brad and Angelina were like hottest thing, so they called
us like the brand Jelina Twelp step recovery. I swore
that's what they called us. So being someone's girlfriend was
so important to me at that time when we were
in a relationship, because I hadn't really had a serious
(08:49):
relationship free transition. Even though he demonstrated confidence, he was
very insecure, and so with that insecurity came a lot
of jealousy. There were times when I couldn't be at
the treatment center, that I wanted to be with my
(09:09):
friends so that I wanted to do other things, and
he'd be blowing up my phone, just calling where are you,
Why aren't you answering why aren't you here? So he
begged and he pleaded that I did I give him
that security that I was with him and that I
wasn't cheating on him. I didn't like anybody controlling me
(09:30):
or telling me what to do, so I'd hang up
on him and I'd break up with him. Every other day.
I would say things like it's over, and then fifteen
minutes later he'd be knocking on my door, banging on
my windows, like open the door. It's not over we're together,
and so I could see the jealousy and I'm like,
(09:50):
this guy really loves me. I provoked the drama because
then he would have I'm running and ask for forgiveness
and say I will do whatever you want me to
do to be in this relationship because I love you.
And that's what I thought was real love, right is
(10:11):
somebody fought hard to be with me, they must love me.
When I went to college, he would visit me every weekend,
and one day we were at the Denny's on campus.
We ordered dinner, we were going to go home and
(10:33):
watch a movie. We were walking back and one of
my classmates was coming and he said, hey, how's it
going and smiled. Well, that pissed Jason off, and right
away he's like, are you fucking him? Like, no, he's
a classmate. Where do you get this from? Well, he
(10:55):
was very smiling and chatty with you. Jason, that's normal,
we're in a class together. You're nothing but a fucking horror.
And he grabbed the cheeseburger that he had in his
hand and slapped it on my face and that cheeseburger
just went flying, and I felt humiliated that he was
doing this in front of so many people outside of
(11:18):
the Dennis. We rushed to the apartment where I was living,
and I remember thinking, Wow, he wanted all of my
attention only for him. Oh. I would see these red
(11:41):
flags and I'd paint them green because finally I had
somebody who wanted me for who I was, who accepted me.
The fact that he needed me in his life to
be okay and that he called me his girlfriend in
front of everyone made it seem like we were doing
okay because I had this warped perception of what a
(12:05):
healthy relationship is supposed to look like as a seven
year old kid, I was always very grown up for
(12:25):
my age. I don't really remember having a normal childhood
where I would go play and have friends over like.
I don't remember that being my childhood. My childhood really
consisted of the hustle and bustle of having a heroonetic
mom and doing her hustles with her. Oh so, my
(12:54):
relationship with my mom was a little different than a
typical relationship. Since she was only fourteen years older than me.
I always saw her like a big sister. Right, she
had already been into the heroine, and she had been
in and out of jails. I never knew what we
were going to get into or what was going to happen.
(13:15):
Sometimes we'd be shoplifting at stores and I wouldn't know
if she was going to come out or not. I
was always scared that my mom was going to get arrested,
get beat up by cops, or that I was gonna
be taken away from her. I think my entire childhood
I felt unsafe. But a big portion of my life,
(13:38):
my childhood life was lived at El Boyo. El Boyo
wasn't sunny see at all. It's right on the U.
S side of the border between Tijuana and California. It's
a town of only like thirty thou people, but it's
one of the busiest ports of entry in the world.
(14:01):
And right on the edge of the town was Al Boyo.
It was a shady ass restaurant and it was full
of drug addicts, drug lords, you name it. You could
go there to get a job, eat some roasted chicken,
get a coke, get some heroin. It was the one
(14:23):
stop shop for drug addicts. My mom would go do
her drug deals there. She'd go sell anything that she shoplifted.
She'd go look for work, a little side hustle, and
she'd bring me. I was her little companion. My memory
(14:44):
is a little fuzzy, but I do remember driving to
a boy We'd get out of the car, walk in
and it's just like any fast restaurant, right There's booths,
people coming in and out, Mexican music playing, lots of
(15:07):
conversations happening, somebody nodding off in the corner. We'd walk
up to the counter. My mom would get me something
to eat. She said, Okay, go sit down, and then
shed go talk to her friends or her connects, whatever
it was she was yelling. That day, my mother met
(15:27):
Ico at It Boo. I remember him being just a tall,
tough looking kind of thug. I'd be sitting in the
booth at Boyo, just playing with whatever toys I had,
or eating chicken, just distracting myself or even observing people.
(15:48):
So when my mother would go to the bathroom with
Geogle to do drugs, I was a little was frightened
of what was going to happen. He Go had this
reputation of being really tough street fighter. He was one
of the best fighters of sen at the time, so
(16:10):
everyone was kind of scared of him. At first, I thought, well,
this is just another one of my mom's boyfriends. I
didn't know he was gonna be around for a while.
He going. My mom had my sister shortly after they met,
and that's probably one of the reasons that they stayed together.
(16:38):
So there was this time we were living with Ara
and I was hanging out with the kids in the
block who were writing these little gold cards called avalanchas,
and you know, I would always get picked on. I
would get picked on for being overweight, for being feminine.
I think I was about eight or nine years old.
(17:00):
One of the older kids, he was probably around fourteen.
He destroyed my avalanche on my little gold cart. He
just destroyed it. I was so sad and I went
home crying, and Ko was furious. He didn't like anybody
picking on me, so he stormed out of the house.
(17:21):
He went towards the kid, picked them up by his
shirt and said, don't you ever and scare the living
hell out of him. Well, yes, Ko came up to
my defense, But not only did he come up to
my defense, he also went out bought wood and built
(17:43):
me the best go cart anyone in that neighborhood had.
I didn't ever get picked on after that, So I
remember then fighting a lot, and that's when I noticed
(18:04):
the abuse and the abusive behaviors from Gigo towards my mom.
Gigo doesn't really have people's skills. His actions this way
of communicating our through violence, and that's exactly what happened
when theever they would have a disagreement, he hit my mother.
(18:28):
Even though she had black eyes and she was beat up,
my mother would act like everything was okay. They get
over pretty quickly and act like nothing ever happened. I
remember coming home from school one day we were living
in Mexico at the time, and walking into the door
(18:51):
and everything was so quiet. It seemed like nobody was home.
But the entire house was upside down. There were things
thrown everywhere. There was like I remember it was right
before Thanksgiving, and there was like a frozen turkey in
the middle of the hallway. There was clothing everywhere. It
(19:14):
was a mess. It looked like a hurricane had come
through the house. And I remember walking into my mom's
room and she was laying there and I could see
the marks on her face and she was pregnant at
the time. And very shortly after that, beating she miscarried.
(19:42):
I don't remember her ever talking to me about it.
This is when I would escape into TV and just
try to block it out of my mind. I would
really get lost into Brady Bunch or leave it to
(20:02):
Beaver and Just. I think, just watching these TV shows
with the perfect families that have sit down dinners together,
they go on vacations together, they asked each other how
their day was in school. Mom's actually caring for their kids,
and I thought that that was what I wanted, right,
That's what I wanted to be when I grew up,
(20:24):
very different than like my mom and Igor. It was
totally aspirational. I didn't see the path to getting this
TV family. All I knew was the chaos and violence path.
It seemed like in real life that was the price
of having someone love you. Yeah. Prior to Jason, I
(21:02):
had been having casual sex with people and we were
having breakfast one day and I got a text message
from a random number and it's someone that I had
known from before dating Jason, and it was just a
(21:22):
dick pick surprise, Hello, big old dick, just on my screen,
and Jason flipped the funk out rightfully, so he grabbed
my phone, and he threw it on the ground, smashed
it and went from zero to one and a split
of a second, and you know, we struggled a little bit.
(21:47):
He pushed me around, and that was the first time
that Jason put his hands on me. I locked myself
in the bathroom and I had marks on my face,
on my neck o. He said, you're going to be
by yourself until you learn how to be a faithful woman.
And he blocked the doorway so I couldn't get out,
(22:08):
and I just remember feeling so powerless over that. I
was tired of crying. I was physically exhausted, and I thought, well,
maybe I should jump out the window. I just cried
myself to sleep, and then I tried to pretend like
(22:29):
nothing ever happened. That's when our problems really started. I
had a trip planned. It was a vacation that Jason
(22:49):
didn't want me to go on, but I went anyway.
One of my cousins got married in Naples and Jason
couldn't come. I couldn't leave the country being on parole,
and I remember the flight being eighteen hours long. We
landed in Rome, and when I got there, Jason was
(23:10):
nowhere to be found Jason had disappeared for three days.
I would call his mother and she didn't know where
he was. And eventually I got ahold of him and
he's like, oh, I was at the casino. I'm like
for three days, Like, who does that? Obviously somebody on drugs.
(23:35):
So he was using drugs, God knows what else he
was doing. And he would get really possessive, like what
are you doing? Who are you hanging out with? Are
you fucking anyone? Like, jeez, I'm on vacation with my family,
none of that stuff is happening. Calmed down the night
before the wedding, he's like, I don't believe that you're
(23:57):
in a hotel room by yourself and you're not fucking anyone.
And Mike Jason, I'm not fucking anyone. I'm on vacation
with my family. It's like, we'll turn your skype on.
Because there was a time difference. I had to be
sleeping while he was awake, and so he wanted to
(24:18):
watch me sleep just to make sure that I was
asleep alone. If that was what it was going to
take for him to just be calm and at peace,
I was willing to do it. So I slept with
my skype on. It was in Italy that I realized
(24:46):
that I couldn't go on like this. I was on
this hamster wheel where I was hoping that this relationship
would work, but the price I was paying was too high.
And I remember her coming home from Italy. I spent
the night at his house, and the very next morning
(25:06):
I woke up and I just looked at him, and
I felt such disgust just by looking at him. I
didn't want to be my mother all over again. I
looked him and I said, Jason, I can't do this anymore.
I'm not in love with you. He flipped out. He
(25:31):
looked at me and he said, got the funk out
of my house, and I did. And when I met
up with him again to get the last of my things,
he looked at me and he said, you're just a
fat tranny who's never going to find anyone to love her,
and I hope you die of aides and he sped off,
(25:59):
and you were he was, I mean from he was
coming from a place of rejection, of hurt. It was
still hurtful to hear it. I'm never going to find
anybody who loved me. He wanted me to feel alone.
There was a part of me that was relieved after that,
(26:19):
but there was also that fear that what he said
was true, fear of never finding anyone to love me.
He meant so much to me, being my first relationship
as emmy. I wanted the relationship to work out because
(26:43):
I didn't think I was going to come across a
lot of men we're going to accept me and want
to date a trans woman and take them seriously. So
I felt that this was the only version of love
that I was eligible to receive. I was settling for
this crumb of love, this crumb of attention that came
(27:05):
in the form of jealousy. Somewhere deep down, I knew
there was more that I could get out of life,
but I never felt like I could ask for it.
I never felt like I could actually get things that
I wanted, and I thought that if I asked for more,
(27:26):
I might end up with nothing. But in the end,
what good is a crumb? So on the next episode,
I do ask for a little more, but will that
be enough? Crumbs is a production of My Heart Radios,
(27:58):
Michael lu Podcast Network, and Solo in association with Trojan Horse.
It's produced by Margaret Catcher and and edited by Jazzmind,
Rometto and Alex Gumetro. Original music by Daniel Peter Schmidt
and engineering by Manuel Executive produced by Gisevances and Conno
(28:19):
Burn for I Heeart, Alex Bumeto for Trojan Horse, Joshua Weinstein, Jazzmind,
Rometo cal And and me emio Lea special thanks to
Monissa Hendrix, fernand Estrava and Sara Mota. Listen to Crumbs
on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(28:41):
you get your podcasts.
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