Enrique tells me, “So, they are introduced at the hair salon and Pepe says, ‘Sure... Maybe.’ He was sober that day. Two weeks later, she’s there again, my dad rolls in fucked up and basically goes, ‘Hey, you’re the one who wants to get married, right?’ And she’s desperate... “So they go get married. And this is Nevada, so you can get married in 30 minutes. Afterward, he says ‘OK, see ya. I’m headed back to the bar.’ A few weeks later, he comes to the shop and she’s there, and he’s sober again. ‘Hey. So yeah, we’re married. Do you want to go grab a cup of coffee?’ And the rest was history...” His parents’ marriage was tumultuous, mainly because of his father’s drinking and upbringing. “My father had a long history of hardcore alcoholism and abuse. My dad had seven brothers – two died of AIDS, one of them is in life in prison in Colorado and if he gets out, he goes to life in prison in Texas. Just a very mixed-bag family.” Enrique is realistic about his empathy for his dad: “He had a lot of abuse in his upbringing... extreme generational trauma. So I kind of give him a pass for that, but I don’t really give him a pass... I give him a 20% pass and then 80% he was just a fuckup.”
But the flashy money-lined streets of Manhattan are a far cry from his roots in Phoenix, Arizona, where he grew up poor in a volatile household with an alcoholic, often-absent father.
American Consequences
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