Izzy Battres
speaker
103 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Izzy Battres’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
We're Out of Time · Rock Bottom to HGTV: Izzy Battres' Journey of Faith and Redemption · 13 May 2025
podcast
No, I like that. You know that, you know, because usually you hear all the like madness and crazy stuff, but it was like, you know, the very beginning, like a Budweiser commercial. Yeah. Or Bud Light commercial. They show all the pretty women. Everybody's having a good time. Six packs, all of that stuff. But it kind of feels that way.
In the very beginning, you get all the sense of what the drugs do to you. I started off with drinking, then smoking weed, then dropping mushrooms, dropping acids, smoking PCP. You were smoking PCP?
And that's what you did. You dropped the PCP, put joints in PCPs. They call them lovelies. And that's what we did. Did you get arrested when you were a kid? I was. Did you go to jail? I did. Tell me about it.
No, it's not the worst thing. But it's a redemption story. And that's why I'm here. That's why we're hearing it. That's why we're here, you know, because there's a lot of people out there that find themselves in that place and they think they're never going to get out. There's no hope. And I'm just here to tell you guys that there is hope. So give it to me.
So I've always wanted to get out of the neighborhood, right? Because they say you're a product of your environment. So I wanted to get out. I joined the Navy. At 17, a Navy recruiter had to meet his quota. He says, you want to get out of here? I said, yeah, I need to get out of here because I'll end up dead before I'm 18. So he goes, okay, do you want to join the Navy?
I said, will you buy me a 40-ouncer of Old English? And he said, yes.
I don't remember his name. So he takes me out. I do the whole weekend up here in L.A. There's hundreds of kids, minorities, black, Hispanics, a few white guys. And we're all joining the armed forces, you know, Air Force, Marines, Army, Navy. I joined the Navy, made my allegiance to the flag, came back home, was leaving. I said, where's my 40-ouncer? No kidding.
Stopped off a liquor store here in L.A. Bought me a 40 ounce of Old English. Drank it in the back of his car on the way to my house. Told my mama, hey, I'm going to be gone. I joined the Navy. She's like, you did what? I was like, yeah, I just got to get out of here. My departure date was 1990, July 5th. I said, I got to party one more time.
Before I go off to become an outstanding citizen in four years. Well, that party got me into strong arm robbery and got me into jail. The day before going? The day, yeah. Before going out? Yeah. Wow. And I was already 18, so I had to go to the big boys, no juvenile hall. How long were you in jail for?
They gave me three years with the five-year joint suspension, and I ended up doing six months in the county. Oh, that sucks. Yeah, six months in the county. And instead of going to four years in the Navy, I ended up going down that route. And the judge said, you will never serve our country. Did you? No. Even after I got out of my recovery, I tried joining again. They wouldn't let you.
They wouldn't let me. I said, what about the National Guard? They're like, nah.
After I got out, you know, you go down the straight and narrow for a few days and then you go back and to your old ways and i went back to my old ways all the way down to i was 26 i you know i graduated into uh meth and that then the meth was my choice of a dope for 10 years you smoking it or shooting it i was smoking it off the foil paper the heavy duty reynolds foil paper with the big pin Yeah.
So, you know, I did that and I couldn't get that monkey off me. And it got pretty bad.
At my latter part of my run using meth, I couldn't speak a clear sentence. No. My brain was gone. Yeah. I'm seeing things. Everybody's after me. I couldn't even, I would mumble to people and I would, you know, you'd talk to me and I'd look at you and I'd want to say something, but the brain wasn't processing the words and I couldn't say them. That's right. That was at the end of my run.
And I was like, you know, you do a lot of dirt when you're running the streets and stuff like that. You do dirt. People do dirt with you. What's dirt? You know, causing pain, pain being caused by you, causing other people pain. You're just in that environment, right? You're just like the walking dead, right? People are just eating people. That's the way it is. Yeah. Right.
Right.
And the Victory Outreach home in Santa Ana went and petitioned the judge and saying, look, this man has a family. You're just populating the prison. He's going to come out worse. Why don't you give him a shot in our recovery home? And the home director named Pastor Joe Carrillo petitioned him. And he offered Rudy, hey, you could go into our home one year or go three years into prison. Right.
So mama didn't raise no fools. So my brother said, okay, let's go into the recovery home.
No, just working off and on jobs, you know. Okay. But yeah, you're stuck. You're just stuck. I heard that you now have treatment centers. I don't have treatment centers. I work still with the Victory Outreach Ministries. I thought you had one. No, we don't have a treatment. My wife and I don't have treatment centers. So the way that the ministry works at Victory Outreach... It's a nonprofit.
Sure. You know, like the lowest of the lowest, you're walking in. When I ran a treatment, I ran a treatment center. I was a home director. So after I got better my second year, I was a home director for five years. They put you to work? So in exchange for free living? Yeah, in exchange for free living. So I ran a Victor Outreach recovery home for several years.
Showing 21–40 of 103 · page 2 of 6
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