He lived recklessly and nearly died. Now he’s made a new life raising his young daughter. Then cancer struck. Still, he hangs on, grateful for . . . Another Chance

Cancer almost took Eric Hudgens, and as he watches his daughter Erycia play in the sand, he knows that still it might. Remission offers hope, but Hudgens trusts few things in life, least of all cancer.

In most ways, he is unafraid, even prepared for death, and when he looks back on his 53 years--the rippin’ and runnin’--what is truly amazing, he says, is that he has lived this long.

He was 49 before he finally settled down--retired from drug dealing, became the father and grandfather he never was before. The cruel irony is that cancer waited.

After undergoing chemotherapy and radiation two years ago, he had a stem cell transplant in December. So far, test results are in his favor, and he may soon return to his job building movie sets, but he chooses not to look far into the future. There is, he says, only one thing left for him to do before he dies.

He wants to be a father to this child in the sand, a child whose mere birth took him from the streets and brought him home. Four-year-old Erycia helped her father see life and family for what it can be, and now he wants to do the same for her.

Hudgens moved from Denver to Los Angeles as a child. By 12, he had stolen his first car. By 13, he was in juvenile hall. By 15, he was in a gang. At 16, he dropped out of school. And at 17, he started dealing drugs and eventually developed a taste for his own wares, craving the cocaine-induced velocity that shivered and surged through his veins.

He went from car club to motorcycle club and worked odd jobs all his life, from factory work to bodyguard. He lived life fast, never staying still for long. He recalls from his biker days an incident in which he was running from police on a lightning bolt built from a Kawasaki engine and a Honda frame. More torque, less weight. More speed.

Inside his coat pocket was cocaine, marijuana laced with PCP and a bottle of Cuervo Gold. He was doing 90 mph when he decided to turn at a Compton intersection. Laws of physics held true.

“I was supposed to die that night, but I didn’t. My head was supposed to go into this parked car, but some kind of way, it didn’t.”

And, so, he says, he was given a second life. He lived it much like the first one until his 4-year-old daughter Megan died in 1984 from leukemia. Her mother would call Hudgens and tell him he needed to come by the hospital to visit.

He told her he would, but it was usually two or three days before he showed up. He was in jail when she died. After his release, he quit using drugs but continued selling them.

When Erycia was born, her mother told him he would have to change or leave. No more dealing, no more fighting, no more trouble--words he had heard before. He didn’t want to change, but when he looked at Erycia, he knew he could not leave, even if he didn’t know exactly why.

In her, it seemed, he saw Megan. In her, he saw all eight of his children--by seven women--and he saw a chance for redemption. He vowed that he was going to be the kind of father he should have been to the others, most of whom are now grown.

It didn’t work out between Hudgens and Erycia’s mother, and he became the girl’s primary caregiver. Now with cancer, he figures he’s on life No. 3. He is calmer now, no longer living with his finger on the trigger. He thinks about family, what it should be and how he was absent from it for so many years. It took him a long time to grow, he says, but with Erycia he decided that he was going to do this one thing right.

It hasn’t been easy. As much as he wants to be a good parent, he doesn’t always know how. The most difficult part, he says, is understanding how a child thinks. Right now, Erycia thinks she would like his participation in building a snowman at a park in Winnetka, near his mother’s Reseda home.

His reply is straightforward, to the point, practical.

“There’s no snow,” he says.

A twinge of disappointment passes quickly from her eyes, and soon she is off to the slide. Hudgens keeps careful watch from a wooden bench near the playground and reminds her to pay attention to her movements or risk injury.

She says she will, but before leaving the park, she turns a corner and smacks into a pole. Tears pour forth, and Hudgens wraps her in his arms and rocks her. They are learning about life together. Next time, perhaps, Erycia will be more careful, and, perhaps, her father will find a way to make a snowman out of something besides snow.

*

In April 1997, Hudgens was losing weight. A lingering sore throat sent him to the doctor, and tests revealed advanced non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Without treatment, he was told, he had three to six months to live. He weighed his options.

He was tempted to go out in flames, he says, quit his job, live it up until the end. Spend it all, leave nothing. Offer no resistance. But what would become of Erycia?

Because he and Erycia’s mother are estranged, he didn’t want the girl to go with her. At the time there didn’t seem to be other options.

“My mom was too old,” he says. “I wasn’t going to give her to my oldest daughter. She has her own kids and problems of her own. I said, ‘It looks like I’m just going to have to fight this.’ So that’s what I been doing--fighting it every day and doing the best I can. It gets me down to the point where I want to give up, but I look at Erycia and she won’t let me give up.”

Since the cancer, he has lost 60 pounds and much of his strength. Before, he was muscular and toned. Now he can hardly do a single push-up and becomes winded easily. Sometimes, he says, he looks at himself in the mirror and sees a stranger.

Hudgens prided himself on his physical prowess. A weightlifter and student of the martial arts, he could outwork people half his age, according to Todd Chaney, who was a project manager at Scenery West in North Hollywood, where Hudgens has worked almost five years.

“Eric is one of those incredible people,” Chaney says. “He’s genuine. There’s no clock-watching with him. He’s there to get the job done. He’s always up and positive. . . . It’s been difficult to watch someone so strong and active become weaker and smaller. He’s half the size he used to be.”

When Hudgens was diagnosed with cancer, he confided in Chaney, and conversations eventually focused more and more on Erycia and what would happen to her if cancer prevailed.

Finally, one day, Chaney called his wife, Marilyn, from work.

“What do you think if we were to adopt Erycia?” he asked.

It was an easy decision for both of them. Chaney paged Hudgens that night to discuss possibilities.

“Basically, we offered up, and evidently it was something he wasn’t going to ask for, but it had been something he had been praying for,” Chaney says. “He’d been around our house and saw how our children were being raised and how we handled things, and he wanted to see that for her.”

They say they will do for Erycia whatever they can in whatever role they play in her life. Rayann Blackstone, Erycia’s mother, insists she will take her daughter in if something happens to Hudgens. The reason she doesn’t take her now, she says, is that she sees how important Erycia is to him. Hudgens says he’s planning to do the paperwork to ensure Erycia’s adoption by the Chaneys, although Blackstone insists she’ll fight it.

Hudgens has been blunt with Erycia about his health, and she has her own understanding of death. One day Chaney was driving her and his two children to a movie when she announced, “My daddy’s going to die.” Chaney was caught off-guard. “His body will be in the ground,” she said, “but his head will be in heaven.”

*

Hudgens had a dream in December while hospitalized for the stem cell transplant. Vicious clowns were chasing him through a maze of streets, and as he turned each corner, escape grew farther and farther away. He was trapped.

That’s how he feels sometimes when his past and the cancer catch up with him. The mother of another daughter is seeking child support. The IRS is waiting too. He has legal matters to tend to, and he wants to change the spelling of Erycia’s name to Erykah. He will take care of it all, he says, when he is back to work and drawing a paycheck.

“It almost makes me want to take back to the streets, start hustling again and try to get things back together. . . . The money they give me for disability, I could go take that and make me some money, but I have her to raise, so I can’t be doing that. I want her to grow up to be somebody.”

People have told him that they don’t know how he does it, how he copes with downpour after downpour, a constant cloud swirling overhead. So far, he says, he’s still standing, trying to remain optimistic, but on March 18 he was brought to his knees.

He expected to die before his mother since he was the one who had squandered so much of his life and he was the one with cancer.

“I kept asking God why her instead of me,” he says of her death following a stroke at 70. “I’m wondering why the hell I’m still here. It kind of puzzles me ‘cause I don’t understand. He could have let her stay longer.”

Now he wants to be the parent to his children that his mother was to him. Although most of them are grown, he has a 9-year-old daughter in Seattle and a 15-year-old daughter living in the Los Angeles area.

The older ones have seen the change. Kevin Hudgens, 33, lives in Texas. He says his father tried to be there for him as a child, but his lifestyle got in the way. For Kim Hudgens, it’s too late.

Sometimes she sees how much Erycia means to her father, and she wonders why he wasn’t there like that for her. At age 31, it still hurts, she says. She has three children of her own now, a fourth on the way.

“We’ve become closer,” she says. “I love him, but it’s too late for him to be a father to me now.”

He visits her and her children in L.A. a couple of times a week. He has not apologized for his absence, but in the only way he knows how, he says he is trying to build a sense of peace and family.

“I neglected my kids. . . . I wanted to see them, but my life, I can’t explain it. It’s so hard for me.”

But in Erycia, he has this chance. He prays for 10 more years of life, when, he says, she will be able to begin to live on the momentum of her own decisions.

He wants her to have good memories of him, of how he rocked her in his arms and taught her lessons in life. Perhaps, in time, there will even be a memory of the two of them building a snowman out of sand.

Duane Noriyuki can be reached by e-mail at socalliving@latimes.com.

“I said, ‘It looks like I’m just going to have to fight this.’ So that’s what I been doing, fighting [the cancer] every day and doing the best I can. It gets me down to the point where I want to give up, but I look at Erycia and she won’t let me give up.”