Rocky was raised in Stockton, California, on the far south side. "Further you go, the worser it gets. And we lived at the very end."

Rocky’s father, Ronly Rontal, was a small-time hustler who drove a truck and often gathered with his friends to drink whiskey and play guitar on weekends. When he drank, he’d get violent. Rocky wasn’t the oldest or the strongest, but he was the bravest, and so the task of standing up to their father fell to him. It happened most often on the first and the 15th, when the welfare check came. Rocky’s father would take his cut first, for whiskey, and everyone in the household knew that come nightfall, there’d be violence. In preparation, Rocky’s brothers would dress him in layer after layer of old sweaters, and when his old man came home, Rocky would be ready, wearing this suit of armor, so stiff he could barely bend his arms. Inevitably, Rocky’s father would start in on his mother, and Rocky would step between them and get beaten with a nightstick, like the kind police use.

One night, when Rocky was 10 years old, it got even worse. He beat Rocky viciously and then locked him in the closet. Rocky’s mother, Maria, spent the night sleeping with her back to the door to protect her son from further harm. In the morning, she snuck the keys out of her husband’s pocket and opened up the closet door. Rocky was caked in blood. She kicked Rocky’s father out after that, an act of bravery for a young woman with little education and few prospects, suddenly alone, with six children to feed.

When Rocky was 13, a social worker came by the house to check in on his family. There was no food in the pantry, so Rocky and his younger brothers and his sister were sent to a shelter called Mary Graham House. The humiliation of that moment would sting, even decades later. His family had run out of food on his watch.

Rocky was in his 40s when he began to think about the true meanings of simple words.

Words like compassion. Understanding. Consideration.

In 2012, after 32 years inside, more than half spent in isolation, Rocky was released. He felt elated, anxious, and paranoid all at once. “What did I know about civilization other than what I seen on television?” Not much. He’d entered prison as little more than a boy and had never lived on his own. He’d joined one of the most violent prison gangs in California, risen in the ranks, and then left it behind. Now he emerged into a world he found disappointingly familiar. Stockton was the same, only more so. The violence he’d helped loose had become routine; the kids had learned from him, perfected the lessons in his grim example. Some of his homies were dead. His mother was dead. She’d ended up addicted to heroin, working the streets of Stockton. His brother Richard had died, too, in his own backyard, with a needle in his arm.

To read more of "The Ballad of Rocky Rontal - How do we forgive the unforgivable?" written by Daniel Alarcon, please visit https://story.californiasunday.com/rocky-rontal