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Hero of the Underground: A Memoir
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| List Price: | $24.95 |
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Product Description
I wasn’t afraid of death.
How could I be? I lived under death’s shadow every day. When you swallow eighty 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 in dollar amounts, but in 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.
Toward the end, 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 then all--
of my problems--
would be solved.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #287542 in Books
- Published on: 2008-07-08
- Released on: 2008-07-08
- Format: Bargain Price
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 304 pages
Editorial Reviews
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.
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
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.
Customer Reviews
RICK SHAQ GOLDSTEIN SAYS: "HOW COULD I BE AFRAID OF DEATH WHEN I SWALLOW 60 VICODIN 20 SLEEPING PILLS, & DRINK A BOTTLE OF VODKA
Have you ever been addicted to drugs? Have you ever known anyone addicted to drugs? Have you ever been involved in an intervention?
The first twenty pages of this biography of former Nebraska Cornhusker All-American -- three-time-member -- of an NCAA football champion -- a first round NFL draft choice -- and a short lived NFL player... Jason Peter... is so "mind-crazed"... drowned in paranoia... non-stop... "Pulse-pounding"... "Heart-throttling"... and so... absolutely embedded... in complete mental and physical "INSANITY"... that if the reader has not been personally involved in a similar situation... you will believe wholeheartedly that it was all contrived by the author.
Jason comes from a loving family with an older and younger brother, all of whom excelled in football. His older brother not only played at the University of Nebraska also, but had a successful NFL career. Younger brother Damian was destined to be better than both of his brothers. In fact, then Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz, while on national TV after recruiting Damian to play for the Fighting Irish said: "Damian Peter was maybe the best offensive lineman that Notre Dame had ever recruited." Damian then had a fluke accident diving into a swimming pool at a friend's house. Damian was critically injured, and was paralyzed, until a wonder "test" drug gave him his physical movement back. This led to the absolute, most pointed comments in the entire book, other than the wanton, depraved, decadent, debauched, degenerate, destructive, drug use, that asphyxiates ninety-five percent of the entire story. The entire time that Damian was in intensive care and recovery... and even when he came back to school to watch helplessly from the sideline... Holtz never once, even called his one-time "prized" recruit, to see how he was doing... or to wish him well. Jason unabashedly states: "I STILL WOULDN'T TURN DOWN THE OPPORTUNITY TO SPIT IN LOU HOLTZ'S "EXPLETIVE" FACE. EACH SATURDAY IN THE FALL WHEN HOLTZ MAKES HIS JOVIAL, DUMB-"BUTT" REMARKS ON ESPN, I HOPE HE KNOWS THAT THERE'S AT LEAST ONE FAMILY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SCREEN, THE PETER FAMILY, THAT KNOWS WHAT A PIECE OF SNAKE "CRAP" HE REALLY IS."
If there is a word that can make addiction seem like a graphic understatement... then that would be the word I would use to describe Jason Peter. He "DEVOURED" (Abused would be like saying a little baby kitten played with a ball of yarn.) ENORMOUS-MASS quantities of cocaine... heroin... crack... meth... continually, consecutively and concurrently. During one period in time, his cocaine use *ALONE* was *TEN-THOUSAND-DOLLARS-A-WEEK*. In addition to all the drugs listed above... NOTE: Potential reader... please clear your eyes and mind for this next statement: "HE ALSO MESSED AROUND WITH KETAMINE ON OCCASION. KETAMINE IS A CAT TRANQUILIZER."
The author should be thanking the Lord three times a day that he is alive, and there are incidents in the book where he could have been killed very easily, and there are times he attempted or contemplated suicide. No reader should view this as a happy "partying" book. I do believe the author did not show enough remorse, as he relives his drug saturated life, with a bit too much braggadocio. About the fourth or fifth time Jason was going to enter rehab, he rented a private jet for THIRTY-THOUSAND-DOLLARS, and bought TEN-EIGHT-BALLS- OF COKE, and SEVEN-BUNDLES OF HEROIN, and contracted for the services of two hookers for his flight to "salvation".
The author is lucky he's alive... and even luckier... that his family loved him enough to keep praying for him.
Awesome Book!!
I found myself not being able to put the book down...every spare moment I had I found myself back on the couch reading the book!! Jason does such a great job putting his life at that time in your mind so you feel like you know exactly what was going on with him.
A Harrowing Journey
I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested reading about the ravages of (and redemption from) drug addiction as it impacts on someone who, to the naked eye, "had it made" as an elite college athlete and highly regarded National Football League draft choice. The book is presented in a raw style that offers the reader a "real feel" for the author's struggle and the impact of drug addiction on his family.
The author did not find the "recovery, 12-step" model to be his treatment of choice, in the end. The extent to which his distancing himself from this form of recovery might dissuade others from approaching this source of help, is the only caveat I have for recommending this book, particularly for those who subscribe to or who might be helped by Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous.
Yes, as the cliche goes "different strokes for different folks," but AA and NA have worked for so many, that his disdain for these models of recovery should be taken, as intended, as only one man's opinion.
Overall, a very good read and fine profile of someone who has bounced back from the precipice of death.
