Let’s Get It On! Read Online Free PDF

start fighting. I got smacked one time too many and snapped, grabbing the guy’s cap and punching him in the face. I was swiftly ejected from the game.
    On the sidelines, my coach ripped into me. “You won’t become anything. You can’t control your temper. You’re useless to me.”
    All I could hear was my dad: “That’s awesome. Way to go, John!”
    Meanwhile, the other parents stared at him like he was an escapee who’d forgotten to take off his straitjacket.
    My dad wasn’t the typical parent, and I wasn’t the typical water polo player. A lot of these kids had grown up swimming competitively, which must have been nice for little Stevie with all his 100-meter butterfly medals. There was never any contact for these kids, however, and when little Stevie got hit and his nose started bleeding, his parents thought he would die.
    With that kind of player out there, you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I probably hold the distinction of being the first water polo player ever kicked out of the Junior Olympics. I wanted everyone to be afraid to come near me so I’d have more room to hustle my ass up and down the pool.
    At Glen A. Wilson High School in Hacienda Heights, the football team during my junior year was the strongest squad my school had ever produced. Most of my friends were on the team and questioned my choice of surf over turf. They even started bashing the water polo team, so I made a challenge to them.
    “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I’ll go on the football field and do any drill you want against anyone you want; then you can come into the pool and drill against any of us. We’ll see how you do.”
    I knew I could handle any defensive or offensive football drill, but if they got in the pool, they would probably drown. Nobody took me up on the offer.
    When I got behind a cause, I pushed it to the hilt. I had a T-shirt printed up with balls stuffed inside two nets dangling side by side. I think you get the visual. It read, “It takes balls to play water polo.” I was suspended a day for wearing it to school, but my dad was proud of me for standing up for what I believed in.
     
    In high school, I was proud, confident, and considered a jock. I didn’t do clubs because they weren’t the cool thing to do. I was one of the guys pranking teammates by rubbing Icy Hot in their straps. Sports and friends—that’s what it was all about.
    From the age of sixteen on, I always had a girlfriend and was never home. I was into dirt bikes, and when I was old enough, I graduated to street bikes. I saved enough money from my summer job as a pool lifeguard to buy my first bike, a black Yamaha XS850. The one thing I didn’t do was drugs—no pot, acid, mushrooms, or any other illegal substances.
    My dad was scared to death of his kids doing drugs and wouldn’t have a user under his roof. He brought home pictures of overdose victims to show us more than a few times. In the pictures, we’d see people with stuff coming out of them that wasn’t supposed to or corpses bent in unnatural positions and staring vacantly at us with flies on their eyes.
    It worked. I’ve never taken any kind of recreational drugs to this day. I can’t say it was entirely the pictures, though, because I think I was more scared of my dad and what he’d do if I touched them.
    Alcohol was another story entirely. From the age of five, I’d been allowed to drink. If my dad was hanging out with friends and I wanted a drink, I could get a sip from my old man’s beer can or even have one of my own.
    I drank with my friends throughout high school. One time I got so inebriated that I crushed my friend’s nose with a headbutt and didn’t even remember doing it. I didn’t like being out of control like that and not being able to remember anything, so at age twenty I cut back on drinking.
    Genetics and economics took care of that for me eventually anyway. By the time I’d reached adult size, it would take twelve beers to give me a buzz