Let’s Get It On! Read Online Free PDF Page B

and a case of beer to make me really feel it. Who wants to go through that, bathroom runs and all, to get a quick high? Not to sound cliché, but I don’t need a drink that bad to have a good time. Even today, I have only the occasional drink or two but nothing more than that.
    My dad’s view on drugs was fairly predictable if you knew him, but there were some things from my teenage years that I could never anticipate.
     
    My parents’ separation during the summer between my junior and senior years was totally unexpected. No one would have ever known it was coming. It wasn’t like they fought or anything like that. In the open, my dad always seemed loving toward my mom.
    I’d noticed that my dad seemed a lot more miserable the last couple of years, and it had caused some friction between us. I hadn’t liked being around him. I thought he was a pain in the ass, always pissed off. Whatever I did, it wasn’t good enough. If I scored four goals, there were still those two I missed. So I started drifting my own way and doing things completely the opposite of what he wanted.
    When my dad asked me not to remove the roll bar off the truck he’d bought for me, I did it anyway. When he confronted me, I turned my back on him to walk away. He threw me over the rail onto the living room staircase for disrespecting him.
    On the surface, the disagreement was about a rebellious adolescent trying to challenge his father. But there was more going on with my dad.
    Of course, you find out those things later in life. People get married and believe someone is a certain way, and things turn out differently. Some people are compatible; some are not. Over time, some grow together, and some drift apart.
    According to both my parents, my dad’s exit wasn’t particularly dramatic.
    “You’re not happy,” Mom pointed out as they lay awake in bed one night.
    “No, I’m not,” he answered.
    “Then just leave,” she said.
    My dad complied, stuffing some belongings into a garbage bag, then walked out the door while my sister and I slept.
    When I found out the next day, I was angry he’d hurt my mother’s feelings. I’m embarrassed to admit I punched a hole through the front door. When he came back to the house a few days later, I confronted him. Most importantly, I wanted to know why.
    He explained it all to me. He’d been unhappy for quite a while and had been trying to figure out how to take care of it. I think he’d thought of leaving when I was much younger, but he didn’t want me to grow up without him. He was just waiting for the right day, and to him this was it.
    For the first time in my life, I didn’t look up to my dad quite as much. He seemed much happier, though, and gradually we would spend more time together again.
     
    In the meantime, I took my frustration out in the pool. Coach Massey had been right on the money with me. In my junior year, the water polo team finished in second place in our league, and we qualified for the California Interscholastic Federation finals. In my senior year, I earned Sierra League first-team honors, was named the league’s player of the year, made all-CIF, and was an all-American honorable mention. Even without glowing SAT scores, I got a college scholarship.
    I chose California State University Long Beach because the water polo coach, Ken Lindgren, was also the assistant coach of the Olympic team. Even though CSULB was thirty miles from my house, I
had
to live on campus. I’d become friends with a rival player from Los Altos, and we’d decided to room together.
    At the age of seventeen, I set off for my first year of college in the fall of 1980. It was a rude awakening. At six feet three and 210 pounds, I was perfect for college water polo. But I was all wrong for college. I was young and free but didn’t have the right mind-set or the discipline for it.
    The professors didn’t give a shit if we went to class, and who was I to argue with them? Still, it certainly made a difference