Pulling Out of a Dive

Checkout time is now.

Jack Williams knows this. He lies awake at night in his four-bedroom house, surrounded by his new life and NFL future, and waits for the nightmares.

“I look at the ceiling . . . and I get scared that I’ll end up back in one of those holes,” he said. “I tell myself, ‘Never.’ ”

Checkout time is not noon, despite what appears on the faded signs at the cheap motels where one of the Southland’s toughest college football players lived while growing up.

Checkout time is not 3 p.m., when his parents would hastily collect everything and move out on days they couldn’t pay the bill.

Checkout time is right now, right here, at Azusa Pacific, where Williams is defending NAIA player of the year and senior leader of the defending national champion Cougars.

He no longer shares beds and floor with his family in cramped rooms where you pay by the day and live by the hour.

But, as if those rooms were in the Hotel California, he’s wondering if he can ever leave.

Jack Williams, 23, knows that this is his first and last chance.

“My time to get out and never look back,” he said.

Those touchdowns he scores as a running back? For the times he sprayed air freshener on his clothes to get rid of the smoky motel smell.

Those tackles he makes as a safety? For the times he ran to the front of nearby houses so friends picking him up would think he lived there.

When returning kicks and punts, he’s running from the constant blare of a motel television set that allowed him peace only with sleep.

This 5-foot-11, 210-pounder has appeared in two-thirds of the team’s plays this season, and little wonder.

The field feels like home, unlike the Apollo Motel, or the Super 8, or the Motel 6.

The field also feels safe, unlike during those years when Williams grew up in a unique and desperate form of poverty.

His usually unemployed parents, unable to afford deposits for even a rundown apartment, tried to provide a foundation for him and four siblings in the most transient places on earth.

Mostly they lived in the since-sold and refurbished Apollo, in Downey, in an area of low-rent strip malls, sharing a parking lot with a liquor store.

One of his sisters was actually born in Room 203. They usually lived in Room 115.

Mom and Dad would sleep in one bed. Three children in another bed. Two others on the floor.

They used a small portable stove for dinner, the bathroom for washing and drying clothes, and a nearby cul-de-sac for pretend.

“Whenever friends would come pick me up, I would tell them I lived in a real house behind the motel,” Williams said. “I would climb up on the fence, wait until I heard a beep, then act like I was running out of that house. Like James Bond 007.”

Williams learned about more than embarrassment at the Apollo.

He learned about sex from the prostitutes down one hall--”As kids we realized it was about having a different guy every hour.”

He learned about drugs from the dealers down another hall--”Before I quit everything at 17, I did every drug known to man.”

One day during his freshman year at Downey High, he also learned about consequences.

Finally old enough to be aware and angry about his living conditions, he screamed at his father to find a job. His father screamed back, and soon they were rolling around the floor wrestling.

Williams’ brother called the police, but before they arrived, Williams’ father had ordered him out of the room for good.

He has not lived with his family since.

Williams spent the rest of his high school years with the family of a friend, then lived with other families before settling in his mother-in-law’s Downey home with his wife.

Little wonder Williams did not play serious football until he was a senior at Downey High, and only on a bet.

Little wonder he now plays as if trying to make somebody pay.

“There’s many times he could run outside, but he just tries to knock guys out,” said Peter Shinnick, coach of the fifth-ranked Cougars. “He could go around people but, instead, he goes over them.”

Everywhere, he does this.

That fight with his father? They’re still rolling around.

A scout from nearly every NFL team has seen Williams play college football.

His parents, who live in a trailer in Downey, never have.

He is expected to be taken as high as the fourth round in next spring’s NFL draft, probably as a safety.

Said his father, Earl, “People are talking about him playing in the NFL? We didn’t know he was that good.”

Said his 20-year-old sister, Evelyn: “What is he, a quarterback?”

Williams remains in contact with his family only through his 13-year-old brother, who lives with Williams and his wife during the school year.

Checkout time is now, and on his way out, Jack Williams is throwing away the key.

“If I make the NFL, I’m taking my little brother and we’re gone,” Williams said. “Football is my gift, my way out.”

Alice Callaghan, advocate for the impoverished and director of the downtown Las Familias del Pueblo Community Center, said such determination in the children of motel families is not surprising.

“These are usually kids whose parents live not just week to week, but day to day,” she said. “It’s an extraordinarily unsettling thing for a child.

“They have a dream, they hold on to it tenaciously because there is so little to hold on to in real life.”

Jack and Evelyn used to feel so trapped, they would leave the room to knock on all the other doors in the motel, offering to empty patrons’ trash for cash that they could use during lengthy visits to the liquor store.

“If I could take it all back, I wouldn’t raise them at a motel,” Earl said. “But it was a choice of putting a roof on their head, or them being homeless.”

Williams’ parents want to be part of their son’s life again, but they say it’s hard without a car.

Said Earl: “How can we get to his games?”

Nobody could be blamed for thinking Williams wouldn’t amount to much. After all, the only reason he played high school football was because as a junior, he bet his buddy he could make the team in spring practice and be listed higher on the depth chart.

“Then I actually made the team as a starting running back,” Williams said. “So I just stuck with it.”

At the same time, his surrogate family, Maria and Galo Rodriguez, were giving him the big house and family dinners that his parents couldn’t.

“He came to us, he didn’t know how to dress, didn’t know how to act,” Maria Rodriguez said. “But you know, he cleaned up real nice.”

He cleaned up enough to succeed at Long Beach City College, then at Brigham Young for a year before his homesick wife brought him back to the Southland.

And next? Could he really go from the Apollo Motel to the Westins and Hyatts of the big time?

“A lot of people told me I would never change,” Williams said. “I’ve heard it 100 times. ‘You’re white trash, and you’ll always be white trash.’ I’ve never believed any of them.”

He pulled out a wrinkled piece of paper. It was an NFL scouting report with his name on it, praising him for everything from ball reaction to personal character. It most certainly was not white trash.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at [email protected].