door, and in under a couple of minutes he said, “I need to make a phone call.”
“There's a phone right here in the room,” I replied.
“No, I need to use a pay phone,” Johnny said. “I'll be right back.”
What I didn't realize was that he took my car keys and the wedding money, which was approximately $500. No Johnny, no car, and no money. I was ashamed and embarrassed. I didn't know what to say to people and felt very alone. I was sitting in that room thinking, “What the hell am I going to do now?”
I called my mom just so someone knew where I was. “Change of plans, mom. We didn't go to the Sheraton hotel, we're at this motel.” She asked why. “Oh. It was closer,” I lied. I was too embarrassed to explain. I spent that night alone, scared, and put furniture up against the hotel room door.
The next morning, before 7 a.m., there's banging at the door and I thought, “It's Johnny!” I ran to the door and opened it, but it was my mom standing there crying.
“What's wrong?” I asked.
She wouldn't stop hugging me and kept saying, “Thank God you're OK.”
I asked again, “What's wrong?”
She had her car parked outside and said, “Get your stuff. We've gotta go.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“The hospital.”
“Why?”
“Somebody called. Johnny's passed away. They found him dead in your car and was pronounced DOA [dead on arrival] at a fire station in the South Valley. He was then taken to UNM [University of New Mexico] hospital. You need to go to identify his body.”
As we walked into the hospital, my head was all over the place. All of a sudden I heard screaming and yelling, and in a flash I saw Johnny run right past me. I was looking at him in this hospital gown, and his butt cheeks were showing because he didn't have underwear on. He didn't even notice me as he ran past, and I looked at my mom and said, “Is this a sick joke?” In the meantime, hospital staff, security, and police were chasing Johnny. I was standing there with my mouth open.
My mom and I left, and as we were driving up a busy road I saw somebody running. It was Johnny. We pulled over beside him and he jumped in the car and said, like we've just done a bank job, “Let's go, let's go!” We drove to my grandma's house and as soon as we got in, he fell asleep like the dead for two days.
That was my first twenty-four hours as Mrs. Johnny Tapia.
Teresa Tapia
Chapter 1
Baptism of Hell
“Life doesn't run away from nobody. Life runs at people.”
—Joe Frazier
Albuquerque, New Mexico, is geographically situated in a bygone era of gunslingers and fast drinkers. The Wild West, from 1865 to 1895, ingrained itself in America's folklore, and when John Lee Tapia was born there on February 13, 1967, it's as if he picked up the baton, ran with it, and left a trail of smoke behind him that immortalized Mi Vida Loca.
Was Johnny Tapia boxing's most tortured soul? Arguably. Known by boxing aficionados as a colorful multiweight world champion, Johnny stared death in the face more times than would seem physically possible.
As a seven-year-old boy, he was given his first taste of how quickly the circle of life can end for an individual at any given moment. While on a bus as part of a school field trip, Johnny was sitting next to a woman named Concha, who was heavily pregnant. The bus hit a rock while going down a mountain road, went off a cliff, and Johnny flew straight down the bus and cracked his head open, lying there barely conscious. Concha was also propelled out of her seat, through the bus window, but was then jammed between the bus and the tree. Her blood was literally dripping on Johnny as she died in front of his eyes.
This, however, was not the episode that would affect Johnny's mental health for the rest of his life. The day his mother Virginia gave birth to him, he was already absorbing second-degree shock: His father was murdered when his mother was pregnant with him. But it was a horrific episode that took place eight years later that was the beginning of the end for Albuquerque's most decorated boxer and New Mexico's most infamous athlete.
On May 24, 1975, an uncharacteristically tearful Johnny was taken to his grandparents’ house while his mother was looking forward to going out dancing. He described her as wearing dark blue slacks and a beautiful white blouse. She was the most important person in his life, the human being he owed everything to. His best friend, his parent, the person who loved him, encouraged him, dressed and fed him.
Johnny pleaded with her not to go, claiming he had a bad feeling he couldn't explain. Something in the pit of his stomach wanted to be with her, protect her, and under no circumstances did he want her to go dancing. His mother had been on the sore end of a violent relationship a couple of years before, during which Johnny had intervened with a steak knife, stabbing the boyfriend to defend her. He was only five. His intervention worked on that occasion, and perhaps he sensed that air of vulnerability again.
Unable to fight back his tears, Johnny begged his grandparents to let him go to the dance. At this point, his mother handed him a Snickers bar as a treat, which acted as the necessary calming tool. From that day forth, before every fight, amateur and professional, he had to have a Snickers bar. As Johnny took the candy, his mother kissed him and said, “I'll be back tomorrow.” She then headed off.
Despite the short-term comfort of the candy, Johnny, unable to sleep, remained an emotional wreck and spent the whole night looking frantically out the windows, waiting for his mother to return. He kept telling his grandparents, “I want my mom, I want my mom,” but he was unloading on deaf ears.
Then came that haunting memory: the last time he would see his mother alive. Looking out of the back porch in the middle of the night, Johnny saw a pickup truck with two men riding up front and a woman tied up inside it. He was even convinced that his mother locked a frightened stare with him for a split second. He immediately went and woke up his grandparents, describing vividly what he'd just witnessed, right down to the color and type of truck (which would later match police reports). His grandparents dismissed his cries for help and instead punished the little boy for waking them up. Johnny's mother never did come home.
Soon after Johnny spotted the truck, his mother was driven to a remote gravel pit in the Southwest Valley of Albuquerque.
Johnny's interpretation of the attack as a little boy was that she was tied up and stabbed twenty-seven times with an ice pick, but the coroner's reports would confirm it was actually a screwdriver and an open pair of scissors. It was such a brutal attack that one of her breasts was almost completely severed.
Somehow she managed to crawl out of the pit, and when nearby workers found her, it looked like she had been aiming to crawl to the local houses in the distance. They called the police instantly and described her as wearing a red blouse—her white shirt was no longer recognizable amid the blood-drenched scene.
As the days went by, Johnny kept asking his grandparents what was going on. Nobody from his family called the police, but three days after he'd last seen her, Johnny was in the living room when there was a knock at the door. It was a family member holding a newspaper, showing an article to Johnny's grandparents about an unidentified woman wearing unique jewelry. The woman had been found brutally attacked and was in intensive care. The family member said, “Isn't this Virginia's jewelry?” The grandparents confirmed, “That's hers,” then rushed down to the hospital without Johnny.
Virginia was in a coma, hanging onto life from a thread, but nonetheless still alive. She then received one last visit that ensured