17
Jax Is Really Alive
Chapter 20 Recap
Jax discovers that some Paralorns believe that Slivens are evil. Ryland goes into the computer system and changes the program to keep Jax and the kids safe by making them Paralorns.
Tara reveals she isn't sleeping with Ry anymore. He flies them to Charming and drops them off.
Hale holds a meeting to discuss finding the boys. Juice appears claiming he wants to help. He also says his name is JC because Juice is dead.
Chapter 21 Juice Gets Made
Author's Note This is a short history of Juice just hitting the events that shaped him. It has his most important history and it explains key plot points in SOA. To get to this portrait, I looked at Juice at the end of SOA like an answer to a math equation and then I figured out what it took to get to the answer. For the key plot points of SOA, he is looking back after his death from the advantage of being reborn or resurrected thanks to the alien part of him. Just as Tara and Jax realized hard truths about themselves after they died, Juice did too.
This chapter isn't essential to Jax Is Really Alive, but it may provide clues to what his true intentions are when he volunteers to help Jax and Tara find their boys.
I was never a Juice fan. The first season I watched was Season 4 when Juice was beginning his downward spiral, so I think that had a lot to do with it. I have since watched all the seasons multiple times with the exception of the last two seasons. They were just so dark.
After writing this, my feelings for Juice have changed. He's not my favorite character, but I see why he is the way he is and I have compassion for him, especially since he is so brutally honest about the last part of his life. He's a damaged, flawed man who is torn between trying to right the wrongs of the past and getting vengeance.
His mother always called him Juan Carlos. He hated it, but when you're a kid, you just have to put up with stuff. He had to put up with a lot from his mother. She was nuts. Really actually crazy. When you're raised with crazy, that's your normal. You think everyone's mother is like that.
He didn't remember his parents ever living together, but his father visited him often and even took him for whole weekends sometimes. He was a cook at a diner and wanted to get his own food truck. He would make him the best breakfasts with fried potatoes, bacon, pancakes and scrambled eggs. His dad used to give him piggy back rides and he even taught him how to ride a bicycle. He told him he wanted him to come live with him all the time, but he couldn't tell his mother his plans.
A few weeks before his sixth birthday, his father quit coming around. He asked his mother and she told him she didn't know where his father was. He'd discovered by this time when he asked his mother questions, the answers could change. He kept asking about his father, hoping he would get a better answer. After asking his mother at least six times, she told him his father got shot when he and a friend tried to rob an old lady in a parking lot. The bottom of his world fell out that day.
He would never see his father again and he would never be able to escape from his mother. And what really happened to his father kept changing. He waited awhile and asked his mother about his father again. He was hoping for a different answer that wasn't that his father was dead.
His mother told him a very dramatic story about his father being a meth cook and that the lab blew up, killed him and caught his apartment on fire. He kept asking and he kept getting different answers; the only common point was that his father was dead.
It wasn't until he'd become a teenager that he had used the internet to find out what happened to his father. There had been a convenience store robbery. Shots were fired. His father used his body to shield a pregnant woman and he had been killed. His father was a hero.
That was one of the rare times that he confronted his mother with her lies. He demanded to know why she hadn't told him the truth. His mother shrugged and said she didn't know. Finally, as his voice grew louder, his mother broke down and admitted that his father made a choice to die. He had been selfish when he saved the woman because he had a son he needed to live for. Leave it to his mother to take a heroic selfless act and turn it into something selfish.
He also discovered some online legal records showing his father had filed papers to take custody of him away from his mother saying she was an unfit mother. He really had been telling him the truth about wanting him to live with him.
With his father gone, he had no refuge from his mother. When she enrolled him in kindergarten, she told his teacher that he was autistic, that he'd been normal until he got some vaccinations and then he'd suddenly gone all autistic. His mother went on to tell the teacher that she had fought for him and got him treatment. She also worked with him and the autism disappeared. She loved making herself into a caring and fierce mother.
When he was in second grade, they moved and his mother enrolled him in a new school. She told them that he was dyslexic and she had worked with him to retrain his brain to see letters correctly. Once again, she portrayed herself as this great mother. It was always about her.
They moved again in the middle of third grade. This time she told them that he was special ed. She told him he was only average, but in a room full of "retards" as she called them, he could really shine. It didn't matter that his records didn't show that he was in special ed, she insisted the school put him in special ed classes. They agreed until they could test him to find out what was best for him. His mother coached him to do badly on the tests, so he could stay in special ed and be a superstar. She told him to think of the answer and then pick any answer but that one. He followed her instructions and scored low enough that he could stay in special ed where he was the top student. He enjoyed being the smartest kid in the room, but he was also bored.
His teacher caught on by the end of the school year, so he was placed in a regular classroom for fourth grade. Once again, his mother claimed it was her parenting that caused this to happen. She loved playing the great mother, but it was just a role and it was always her accomplishment. She had fixed him.
When he and Tig had been tasked with stealing a truck from Unser to transport guns to the Indian Hills charter (Season 1), he had dosed the Doberman watchdog with crystal. Instead of dying or at least passing out, the dog had been amped. He hadn't thought it through. Tig had asked him if he were retarded and he'd said no.
He'd had a flashback to the day he was sitting in that ugly gray office with his mom trying to con the school's counselor into believing he needed to be in special ed. She'd had a surprisingly easy time of it.
They lived in a small one bedroom apartment, but he had his own bedroom of sorts. She found a broken card table in someone's trash and brought it home. She fixed the broken legs with duct tape and put a blanket over it. That became his bedroom. His mother told him it was a tent and he was camping. When he got bigger, she got another card table from a Salvation Army and his tent got bigger.
Truth was always a moving target. Once he asked his mother if it were raining. She told him it wasn't. He looked outside and discovered it was pouring rain. He asked her why she hadn't told him the truth. He remembered this look on her face like she smelled something bad. She told him if he knew the answer to the question, he shouldn't have asked her, then she told him that somewhere it wasn't raining so her answer had been correct.
There was the usual constant stream of men that came and went from the apartment. They didn't beat her or physically or sexually abuse him, so he had it pretty good. None of them ever stayed longer than a few weeks until Tony, a Puerto Rican widower with two daughters aged five and seven. He didn't stay overnight. His mother stayed overnight with Tony leaving him alone. He was nine. She told him not to use the stove, light fires or open the door to anyone. In her own way, she cared for him. She made sure he always had bread, lunch meat and potato chips so he could make his own dinner.
After she had been seeing Tony for almost a year, she told him they were getting married and he would live with them. He would even have his own real bedroom and he wouldn't have to sleep on the floor under a card table. He needed to do just one thing—lie about his father. She told him Tony hated black people. If Tony found out his father was black; Tony would throw him out of the house. He would have to live on the streets and suck old men's dicks for money and there would be nothing she could do about it. He had been scared to death, just as she intended.
She took all the pictures of his father and burned them. From that point on, she told him to tell everyone that his father was Puerto Rican and he'd been killed in a drive by shooting. She rehearsed him on the details over and over so he told the same story consistently.
It was only as an adult that he appreciated the irony of his mother making sure he got his story straight—something she could never do except about his father being Puerto Rican and not black. That was the only story she could tell consistently.
She made him feel there was something wrong with him because he was part black, so hiding it became his new normal. Even after his mother died when he was seventeen, he still lied about his father. Sometimes, he even began to believe the lie. He began to think that she might have lied about his father being his father. She lied about everything, why not that?
Life with Tony and his two daughters had actually been pretty good. He didn't yell at him or hit him. He tolerated him and there were times when he was actually nice like the year he bought him a second-hand computer for Christmas.
His mother became paranoid believing the government was watching her. She didn't know why the government would be watching her, but there were times when she was sure she was going to be arrested. Like an addict needs drugs, she needed drama and chaos, so she created it.
He believed his mother's need to create chaos caused his OCD and his need to keep things neat and orderly. It began when he first moved in with Tony after his mother married him. Everything had to be neat and lined up in his bedroom or he couldn't go to sleep. The more chaos his mother created, the more he needed to create order in his world. It began to extend beyond his room. The bathroom he shared with his stepsisters had to be neat and orderly. He was constantly cleaning up after them, but he knew better than to complain. Those were Tony's girls and Tony would take their side. All he could do was clean. Eventually, he was cleaning the whole house except the bedrooms of the girls and his mother and Tony's room.
When he was thirteen, his mother warned him about how girls used pregnancy as a way to trap boys and he had better make sure he never got a girl pregnant or he would get tossed out of the house. This time, she'd left out the part that he would be homeless and forced to suck old men's dicks for money.
He followed his mother's direction though. He used condoms whenever he had sex even when the girl said she was using birth control pills. He had never had a serious girlfriend. His longest relationship lasted six months. At the bottom of it all, he was afraid all girls would turn out to be like his mother and he was self-aware enough to not want to repeat that pattern.
His mother left and reconciled with Tony at least six times each time taking him and going to stay with a friend for a day or two.
Near the end of her life, Tony was finally done with her. They were still living with Tony in his house, but his mother and Tony were in the process of getting a divorce.
She didn't want the divorce. Tony had the nicest place she'd ever lived in and he was a good provider. She took a bottle of sleeping pills. He never believed she meant to kill herself. He always thought she had timed it so Tony would find her and get her medical help. It was a manipulation. She thought Tony would stay with her either because he would realize how much he still loved her or he would feel guilty over her trying to kill herself. Tony had to work overtime unexpectedly, so he didn't discover her in time.
Tony let him live with him and his daughters until he finished high school. His relationship with his stepfather improved without the constant poison of his mother and her destructive lies. His stepfather died of a heart attack a few years after he'd finished high school. His stepsisters had married and were busy with their lives, so he decided to go to Charming and see if he could find any of his mother's family.
He came up empty. His grandmother died leaving not a single living relative behind. He liked the small town and decided to stay. When he lived in New York, he'd worked at an internet café. That's where he learned his computer hacking skills. Charming wasn't an internet café sort of town, so he got a job at Lumpy's gym. He began to bulk up thanks to his use of steroids.
He used the move as an opportunity to re-invent himself. He was tired of looking like everyone else. He was just one of the many brown haired, brown-eyed, brown skinned people who were quickly forgotten. He didn't want to blend in anymore. He got a motorcycle, a Mohawk and head tattoos. Now everyone would remember him. He no longer used his much hated name of Juan Carlos and went by Juan.
His motorcycle needed work so he brought it to TM. He liked the guys and began to hang around the MC's clubhouse. He had always been a loner, but he enjoyed hanging around the guys.
Clay became a father figure to him. He had been ridiculously happy when Clay gave him the nickname of Juice because he used steroids. He'd never had a nickname. He quit using steroids a short time later because he was worried they would shrink his junk. Still, the nickname stuck.
He thought Clay looked at him as a kind of adopted son. He was even more sure that was true when Clay sponsored him when he moved from hang around to prospect.
SAMCRO needed him because they needed someone who was tech savvy. He was good with computers and had learned a lot about electronic surveillance online. Clay also needed someone else he could depend on to vote his way.
He loved the club—the rides, the excitement of minor law breaking, hanging out with the guys and the easy availability of pussy. He loved feeling that he belonged. It was a first for him. He felt cool for the first time in his life. He wasn't sleep walking through his life. He was actually living it. He was just a little hazy on just how far outside the law the MC operated.
Violence had never been part of his life. He blended in with his environment and walked his own path. When he got jumped in the chicken man's van (SOA Season 3), Salazar and his crew took his cut. He hadn't put up much of a fight for it. When Alvarez returned his cut, Jax told him to make it right and Salazar was shoved into the middle of a ring formed by SAMCRO and the Mayans. He had hit and kicked Salazar trying to make a good show of it, but the truth was he didn't enjoy fighting. Even when he worked at Lumpy's gym, his job duties were limited to taping hands, spotting guys when they lifted weights and keeping the gym neat and organized.
He had been stunned when he had to serve time for the church assault. Thanks to Jax's clever manipulation of ATF bitch from hell June Stahl, they got the minimum sentence. It hadn't been so bad because they were locked up together.
The day they got out of prison should have been the best day of his life, but instead, it was one of the worst because he had to kill for the first time. For business reasons and to retaliate for Jax getting shivved in prison, they wiped out most of Putlova's crew.
When he pulled the trigger, all he could think of was the man who killed his father. Did that never caught murderer ever think about the man's life he took? Did he ever wonder if that man had children that had been left without a father? Those questions haunted him after he'd killed his target. He tried to think of it as putting a round through a target, but he knew it was more. He kept thinking about the people who loved the man.
He hadn't shaken off the murder when Roosevelt showed him a file with a picture of his father. If he'd been smarter, stronger and tougher, he would have denied that it was a picture of his father, said his mother was a whore who had no idea who his daddy was, his birth certificate stated he was Hispanic and his father's name wasn't on it. He should have told Roosevelt to go fuck himself.
Instead, he acted reflexively. He had to keep the black secret at all costs. His mother taught him that and that training just took over.
Roosevelt told him if SAMCRO found out he was black, they would strip his patch, force him to cover his ink and beat or even kill him. It was Roosevelt's version of his mother telling him he would be homeless and sucking old men's dicks.
He tried to tell himself that he was saving SAMCRO from RICO, kind of like Jax had with the ATF. He even managed to lie to himself for awhile and tell himself that he was acting in SAMCRO's best interests because he didn't want to face the truth—that he was weak and a coward.
He should have gone to SAMCRO and told them Roosevelt was trying to blackmail him into helping with a RICO case against them by faking paperwork saying his father was black. He had just needed to be a little smarter and a little tougher.
Roosevelt asked for a sample of the coke that SAMCRO had muled back from Arizona and he got it. Of course, being the screw-up that he was, he fell asleep and didn't return the brick to the storeroom after getting the sample. When Miles caught him with the brick, shooting him was a reflex. He didn't make any conscious decision to kill him, but he didn't have any choice. If the MC found that he'd taken the brick, they would have killed him.
Killing Miles was even worse than killing the nameless Russian guy. He knew Miles. He made extra money painting houses, had a live-in girlfriend named Rachel who was pregnant with their first child and had an invalid mother he helped. He kept thinking about the child Rachel was carrying who would never know Miles. He'd had at least had a few years with his father.
He became consumed with self-hatred. He was haunted by thoughts of Rachel, Miles' unborn child and Miles' sick mother. He caused so much misery for them. It was because he was weak and didn't stand up to Roosevelt and it was because he was a screw up for not taking the coke sample and returning it.
Miles was buried in an unmarked grave without his patch, just another person who disappeared without a trace. He struggled with knowing that Rachel and Miles' mother didn't even know he was dead. Rachel called him asking for help finding Miles. He used to wonder how long Rachel and his mother would live with the hope that Miles was still alive before finally accepting that he was dead.
He was consumed with so much self-hatred; he couldn't take it anymore. That's when he tried to kill himself, but, being such a screw up, he'd failed at that too. He'd walked through the mine field (Season 4, episode Call of Duty) without regard for his safety. Getting blown up would have been a relief. It would end the constant shouting in his head about the hell he had unleashed on Miles' loved ones.
As time passed, the shouting subsided and he worried that was even worse. He didn't want to be Tig or Happy. He didn't want to be a cold-blooded killer. As much as the self-loathing hurt, it was better than being numb.
After Roosevelt tipped him off that Jax knew he'd been the RICO rat, he did a lot of soul searching. He had never been close to Jax. In truth, he was jealous of him because he was tall, blonde haired, blue-eyed and movie star handsome. He was also charming, smart, mentally and physical tough and a natural leader. It didn't seem fair for someone to be born with so many advantages. Jax was the person he wished he could be.
The next morning, he went to Jax's house and asked if he could earn his way back. He had no idea if Jax would make a deal with him, but he bet his life there was a way back for him. He knew being a rat was a death sentence. He didn't want the club he loved to kill him.
His only shot at staying alive was to either run or make a deal with Jax. With the passage of time, the life he had been so desperate to take when he tried to hang himself, he was even more desperate to keep.
He agreed to help Jax get the ammo he needed to kick Clay out of the club. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that if Jax could prove that Clay was using the Nomads to undermine his leadership, Clay would likely find himself meeting Mr. Mayhem. As it turned out, Clay only got kicked out and not killed thanks to Bobby. It was only temporary.
That was such a noble thing—betraying someone who trusted him. Clay had always been pretty good to him, but when he had to make a choice, he made the one that kept him alive. He tried to console himself with the thought that Clay deserved what he got because he was working against the club. Loyalty to the club was above personal loyalty.
Jax wasn't finished using him to destroy Clay. He called him and instructed him to put Clay's gun, the distinctive gun Bobby had given to him, fitted with a silencer in his saddlebag. Later, Jax and Tig would use the gun to kill Damon Pope and some of his associates. Jax hid the gun and told Roosevelt where to find it, framing Clay.
Clay was saying good-bye to him, telling him that he loved him and he would miss him the most (Season 5 last episode). He thought he was going to Ireland with Galen and Gemma to begin a new life. Clay also told him that he knew he had helped Jax and betrayed him, but he understood he didn't have a choice because Jax had leverage on him with RICO.
He thought Clay was sincere, so he tried to help him one last time. He urged him to take his bike and run. Clay had no idea that the biggest betrayal was to come within minutes; he had helped frame him for Damon Pope and his associates' murders. Gemma was even in on it, lying about Clay not being with her at the time of the killings.
With Clay locked up, he hoped that the club could find its way back to normal. Less murder and more brotherhood, but it only got worse and more hellish.
Jax ordered him to kill Darvony, a junkie whose son brought a SAMCRO supplied gun to school and used it to kill. He had been the good little soldier and killed her. He told himself that he was doing her a favor. She was grief stricken and she was a junkie. Sooner or later, she would OD. He was cutting short her grieving. For awhile, he actually thought of killing her as a mercy killing.
He told Nero that Darvony was killed on Jax's orders. Once again, he'd put himself in Jax's crosshairs. Beneath his blonde good looks, Jax was a cold blooded killer. He just looked better doing it.
When Gemma killed Tara, he'd shot Roosevelt without even thinking. He had gone through that scene so many times and he never could get the answer. He didn't know if he killed Roosevelt to protect Gemma or if he killed him because he hated him and blamed him for all the RICO hell. In the end, he realized it didn't matter. Roosevelt was dead. Figuring out why didn't change that.
He came up with blaming Tara's and Roosevelt's deaths on the Chinese. He could have blamed it on a van of Satan worshipers passing through town. That kind of stuff occasionally happened in California. It's highly populated and there's a lot of insanity there. Either he or Gemma could have said they saw a couple of guys run to a van and take off. Or, they could have said nothing.
He knew the Chinese lie would set Jax on fire. It caused absolute chaos. His mother would have loved it. There was a part of him that enjoyed watching Jax go through hell until he realized he was on the same ride. He should have seen that coming. That was one of his fatal flaws; he couldn't see far enough ahead when he did shit. That was one of the reasons he was a follower and not a leader.
He spent a lot of time hating Jax, blaming him for everything. It was easier than facing the truth—he was weak. He couldn't fault Jax for exploiting his weakness. That's what leaders do. He was the president of a violent group of murderers. What did he expect? Disneyland? Jax was always going to do what was best for SAMCRO. That's why he was a leader.
It was all his own fucking fault. His RICO decision caused every bad thing in his life to happen. Still, he clung to SAMCRO with a pathetic desperation. He wanted to stay a member and he killed to keep his place at the table. He became a cold-blooded killer.
He hated Jax then and still had hate in his heart for him, but it was nothing compared to the hate he had inside for himself and for being the sniveling little bitch that sucked up to Jax, desperate to stay in SAMCRO. Even in the end of his fucking life, he'd gone to his death meekly, just wanting SAMCRO to know that he'd stayed loyal. What a fucking weak-assed loser!
The most painful self-realization was saved for after his death when he was looking back over his life. He wasn't violent. He wasn't a criminal. He wasn't a killer. He wasn't SAMCRO. He had destroyed his life and that of so many others trying to fit in.
And of course I didn't disclose whether Juice (now JC) is sincere in wanting to help find the boys or if he's going after Jax and he's using the boys or is going to use the boys to do that.