Hero of the Underground: A Memoir

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Review “ Hero of the Underground gives us a portrait of red-blooded jock as monster dope fiend. It’s a savage, unsparing, eye-popping ride through the dark soul of big money, endless drugs, American manhood, and our national past time---self-destruction. Ex-Cornhusker Jason Peter writes like a soulful badass, and we’re lucky he lived to tell the tale. Had Hunter Thompson been a football player instead of a fan, this is the book he’d have written. Flat-out, mash-your-face-in-the-dirt amazing.” --Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight "Bruising... more harrowing than usual. Peter’s narrative relentlessly focuses on the brutalizing facts, and it is free from the macho posturing and self-congratulatory navel-gazing common in recovery memoirs. Nightmarishly honest." --Kirkus Reviews"Wow, I am not sure how to express how unsettling this wound up being, for me. The book is a sledgehammer. When I think about the book, I feel this sort of hollow whistling in my chest. Jesus." --Nancy Rommelmann, New York Times bestselling author of The Real Real World “I enjoyed the hell out of this book, sped through it like a crack fiend. There will be a lot of interest in this part of the world because of his Cornhusker ties. Nebraska is God’s country, but God, as Peter says, is Tom Osborne.” --Poe Ballantine, author of Things I Like About America and God Clobbers Us All From Publishers Weekly Peter, a star at the University of Nebraska's storied football program in the late 1990s and a first-round NFL draft pick, details his short, frenzied life as a drug user and veteran of the treatment center circuit. It started with painkillers in college, which turned into a full-blown addiction as he battled an array of injuries that ended his career by his late 20s. With plenty of money and time available, Peter's partying escapades eventually led him to freebasing cocaine and turning his upscale New York City apartment into arguably the world's most expensive heroin retreat, complete with a live-in junkie stripper girlfriend. Avoiding self-help urgings and self-congratulations, Peter (who is now clean) and O'Neill have crafted an unflinching look at the dark side of a life devoted to pleasure. Peter's recollection of his college glory days is a little overbearing, but the book's power lies in his honesty in detailing the depths of his despair from seeking the next high. (July) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One Are You The Guy? I WASN’T AFRAID OF DEATH. How could I be? I lived under death’s shadow every day. When you swallow sixty Vicodin, twenty sleeping pills, drink a bottle of vodka, and still survive, a certain sense of invulnerability stays with you. When you continually use drugs with the kind of reckless determination that I did, the limit to how much heroin or crack you can ingest is not defined by dollar amounts but by the amounts your body can withstand without experiencing a seizure or respiratory failure. Yet at the end of every binge, every night of lining up six, seven, eight crack pipes and hitting them one after the other bam! bam! bam! every night of smoking and snorting bag after bag of heroin… after all of that, when you still wake up to see the same dirty sky over you as the night before, you start to think that instead of dying, maybe your punishment is to live—to be stuck in this purgatory of self-abuse and misery for an eternity. Sometimes you start to think that death would come as a blessed relief. I found myself contemplating death again. Only this time I wasn’t going to leave it to chance. I was going to buy a gun, load the thing, place the barrel in my mouth, and blow my fucking brains out. I sat on my parents’ sofa as I pondered this. All I needed was a gun. And all— Of my problems— Would be— Solved. This had all started the night before. It started in the way that life-shattering events, like suicides or murders, usually begin, with something so small, so meaningless, that it is almost comical. It started with an argument over a television program. Diane had been on my last goddamned nerve, ever since we had driven from my apartment building in New York to my folks’ house in New Jersey. They were out of town and had asked me stay there to watch the house and look after the dogs. Our heroin habits were again out of control, so we talked it over and decided that we would take the opportunity to kick dope. The plan was this: We would take a small amount of heroin with us. Week one, I would start to kick. Diane would use enough dope not to get sick so that she would be able to look after me and get me through the worst of the physical symptoms. Then, when I was feeling better, Diane would kick, and I would nurse her back to health. It seemed like a simple, obvious plan. What could possibly go wrong? Doctors will tell you that kicking heroin is like having a severe flu. They will reel off a list of symptoms: runny nose, runny eyes, muscle aches, stomach cramps, fever, the chills, insomnia, diarrhea, nausea… I mean, it doesn’t sound like a walk in the park, but it’s hardly as bad as having your vertebrae crushed under a 300-pound offensive lineman, right? Well, as any addict can tell you, doctors—for all of their good intentions—really don’t know shit. Comparing heroin withdrawals to the flu is like comparing getting hit by a truck to falling off a tricycle. I don’t care how severe your flu is, it’s unlikely that you’ve seriously considered throwing yourself out of a window, just to make the screaming in your head go away and the agony in your body stop. Heroin withdrawal is the nearest thing to hell that the living ever get to experience. We barricaded ourselves in my parents’ house. I had gotten a prescription for a new drug called Subutex from one of my doctors, a little white tablet that dissolves under the tongue. Supposedly it would help with the withdrawals. I also had Xanax to help me sleep. Diane carried the heroin and cocaine, and I resigned myself to a very unpleasant seven days. By the time I reached day three, the huge flaw in my plan became apparent. Withdrawal sickness tends to come to a peak around the third or fourth day. You are vomiting, shitting yourself, your body is twitching and spasming so hard you can involuntarily throw yourself out of bed. You feel like you have white hot sulfur in your veins instead of blood, and your brain is literally screaming out for some heroin to take the pain away. As all this was going on, in would walk Diane, high as a fucking kite. Her pupils like pinpricks. Slurring her words. And I knew that in her purse there was enough shit to take all of my pain away. All I had to do was ask. You see, the relationship with Diane was not exactly an equal partnership. I knew that at the end of the day, if I asked her, she would have to give it to me. Because she knew that if she pissed me off too much and I kicked her out, she would be left with nothing, except a drug habit she had no way of being able to support. Diane had been a dancer when I met her. A truly beautiful girl with a body that could drive a man insane. She was also a very sweet, kindhearted person. She came into my life like so many of the others—we met at a club, we exchanged messages, and one day she turned up at my apartment with two or three other girls to party. Only Diane never left when the party was over. She stayed, and at this point we had been together for just under a year. She had changed. I had changed her, I suppose. There was no way that someone could live with me, could be around me for such an extended period without changing. When you live with someone who is high literally seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day you either leave… or you adapt. Diane adapted. When I met her she used drugs—maybe a little crystal meth when she danced, or coke recreationally. Normal people stuff. The stuff that is happening in homes and clubs all over the country at this very moment. After a year, however, Diane was snorting as much heroin and smoking as much crack as I was, and I was supporting her habit. Without me to continue funding her drug habit, Diane would be completely screwed. It was during this attempt that I realized that maybe Diane didn’t want us to get clean. After all, it’s an old story—if you take the drugs away from a relationship like this, often there is nothing left in their place. Maybe a part of her worried that if we weren’t high all of the time, I wouldn’t want her around anymore. It would have at least required a huge period of readjustment. Outside of getting high, we didn’t have much in common. At some point during the third day I had managed to hold down enough Xanax that I passed out in a dark, dreamless sleep. I don’t know how long I was out. An hour? Two? Maybe only a matter of minutes. Soon something started to bring me around… Then I smelled it. Something familiar. Something dragging me out of my cocoon of sleep. I started to become aware of my surroundings again. The duvet that I was wrapped in, soaked through with my sweat. The aches in every inch of my body. The relentless fucking daylight burning into the back of my eyelids. And the smell. That fucking smell. With a groan of disappointment, I woke up fully. I was curled in a fetal position. I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep. I became aware that Diane was sitting on the edge of the bed next to me. I gingerly turned around. "What the fuck…," I gasped, "are you doing?" She turned and looked at me. In her hand was a large square piece of aluminum foil. A pipe fashioned from foil hung casually from her lips. Her bleary, stoned eyes looked at me quizzically, before she fired up the lighter and carried on smoking heroin, right there, in the same bed where I was trying to get clean. "What the fuck are you doing, Diane?" She exhaled plumes of white smoke from her nostrils, and took the pipe from her mouth. "I’m staying well, Jason! So I can look after you. How are you feeling, baby?" I was furious with her, but too sick and weak to argue. Instead, I told her to give me the fucking dope so I could get well, too. I swear she looked relieved when I finally caved. This sudden change in our plans necessitated a trip back to New York. Once I was using heroin again, I realized we needed more. More of everything. We drove back to the city that night to have coke and heroin delivered to the apartment. My connections were always ready to deliver. It’s pure economics. I was everybody’s best customer, and there is no better working model for capitalism than the relationship between a dealer and his customer. If I called at 7:00 in the morning and he was dropping his kid off at school—he made sure I got my drugs first. Late for his mother’s funeral? He made sure I got my drugs first. So within an hour of making the call I had five eight-balls [? ounce] of cocaine and three bundles of heroin sitting on my coffee table. It was too late to drive back to Jersey. We decided to stay home, and we started our usual routine. I cooked up the cocaine with bicarbonate of soda to make freebase. We put the TV on, began to furiously smoke crack and snort heroin, the same thing that we had been doing daily for the past twelve months. A woman, in tears, was screaming at her boyfriend, about how she was going to keep her baby no matter what. I noticed Diane staring at the screen intently. "Fuck," I laughed. "I tell you. Diane… If you ever got pregnant we wouldn’t be keeping that baby." It was an innocuous enough comment, I thought. After all, we were heroin addicts with out-of-control crack habits. We weren’t exactly the models of stability. Whatever I was expecting from Diane, it wasn’t the reaction that I got. "How do you mean?" "I mean what I say. If you ever got pregnant, you wouldn’t be keeping that baby!" "What the fuck do you mean you wouldn’t be keeping that baby , Jason?" "You’re a fucking junkie, Diane! So am I! What… You’re saying you’d keep it if you got pregnant?" "I couldn’... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. About the Author JASON PETER grew up in Middletown, New Jersey. He was an All American and a member of three National Championship football teams at the University of Nebraska, co-captaining the championship team. He was also a National Football League first-round draft pick by the Carolina Panthers, where he played for four years before injuries forced him to retire. He is now married and lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he co-hosts a sports radio program, The Spread, for ESPN. For more information, visit www.jasonpeter.com.TONY O’NEILL is a poet and novelist whose books include Down and Out on Murder Mile and Digging the Vein . He lives in New York. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Read more