of college baseball players came up and accused us of throwing something at their car. We hadn’t thrown anything at their car, so when they pressed the issue, I solved the matter with my fists. Even when I broke my neck on the high school wrestling mats and had a god-awful halo bolted to my head, I was still scrapping at the drop of a dime. As I already mentioned, something had snapped in my mind at a very young age and I couldn’t seem to turn it off.
My name started getting around. By the time I graduated from high school, people had heard about me two hours in every direction. It’s probably not something I should have been proud of, but I was. I wasn’t the best in school, and I didn’t know where I was headed or how long it would take to get there. My fists were something to count on, something that made me stand out. And besides, my reputation as a brawler got me a job bouncing in a bar three years before the law allowed.
At first sweeping the floor with barroom drunks was only a way to pay the bills. I was going to be a professional football player, end of story. I had done well on the high school field, and I wanted to jump right to the pros. When I realized that achieving such a goal was highly unlikely, I enrolled at Shasta Community College near my home to play ball, even though school was the last place I wanted to be. I played inside linebacker for two years, but because I had neglected to sit through even a few of my classes, I didn’t earn enough credit to go on to a university. Just as I was beginning to wonder if I might never fulfill my dream of playing with the pros, I got drafted by the Sacramento Bulldogs. It was a semipro team, but it seemed to me like I was halfway there.
It didn’t take long for me to realize the semipro ball was not even close to being in the same league as professional football. It was basically just a bunch of weekend warriors who got together to practice a couple of times a week, and the paychecks were so minimal they hardly put food on the table. So it was back to the bars, only now I was working in some of the big clubs over in Reno, which was just an hour or so drive from my home. I wasn’t all that happy about where I was or what I was doing. I was searching for something exciting, something to get my blood pumping, and then I heard about this Toughman competition they were having over in Redding, California. I was still bouncing in a couple of clubs in Redding, and since it wouldn’t be that far of a drive, I thought I would enter the tournament and see what it was all about.
Ihad no official fight training at that point, just what I had learned on the street. I didn’t have a flawless right cross or a string of savage combinations tucked away in my arsenal. But I did have several advantages over my opponents. First, I was strong. I had always been strong, and having fought for so long in the street, I knew how to use that strength to my advantage. Second, I had no fear. You would think that climbing into a ring in front of hundreds of people and putting your pride on the line would make a twenty-year-old kid nervous, but it didn’t. I felt just as comfortable in the ring as I did walking down the street. No sweaty palms, no cotton mouth. Nothing but a chest full of rage.
Although my first two competitors outweighed me by a good forty pounds or more, I ran right through them. I broke one guy’s ribs and knocked a couple of teeth out of the other one. When I stepped into the ring for the final match, my opponent never showed up. He claimed to be injured or something and skipped out the back door.
I got my hand raised and a nice wad of cash in my pocket. I would have competed in future events, but soon after my victory the city of Redding shut Toughman down. I guess at one of the events a whole slew of Hell’s Angels turned up to support their boy in the tournament, and when their boy lost a controversial decision, they incited a full-fledged riot. So, once again, it was back to the bars.
I tried to pull in cash wherever I could. I was working at the Premier Club in Reno, and every so often a group of male exotic dancers would come to the club to entertain the local women. I don’t know how it happened, but one night when these dancers were in town, a couple of the women in the audience talked me into putting down my flashlight, hopping up on stage, and then taking off my clothes. I did pretty good, made a nice wad of one-dollar bills, so I decided to stick with it. From that point on, every time the dancers rolled into town, I’d hop up on stage. As you’ve probably guessed, I was desperate for money.
I was going nowhere in a hurry. In addition to pealing my clothes off to make a couple of extra bucks, I was also beginning to party more and more. I’d stay out too late, pour down too many beers, get into too many fights, and then wake up the next afternoon and start all over again. I still had the goal of becoming a professional football player, but I realized if I waited around for that to happen I might be too fat or drunk to play. What I needed was something to identify with, a job that could make me feel a part of something. I didn’t want to be sitting behind a desk or pumping insecticide under somebody’s house. I needed a job that would make me feel proud, so I decided to join the Marine Corps.
When I broke the news to my father, he was irate. He’d spent nearly a decade trying to get rid of my anger. He’d spent countless hours by my side when I felt as if I were going to explode with rage. He’d gotten me into football and wrestling, drove me to every game. After all those years getting me to a point where I could function in society and live the life of a normal human being, he feared that the Marine Corps was going to revert me back to the bundle of rage I had been when the state dumped me on his doorstep.
“I don’t want you to become a professional killer!” he shouted and then threw up his hands and stormed off.
He didn’t talk to me for a week, but that didn’t stop me from following through with my plans. In the summer of 1984 I went down to Camp Pendleton in San Diego to begin my basic training. I had heard that Marine boot camp was weeks and weeks of living hell, but I didn’t find it all that hard. I blew through the physical training, which was their primary tool for breaking young soldiers down. What I did find hard, however, was not punching my superiors every time they got in my face. I mean, these guys got right up in my face, their spit pelting me in the eyes. And they were always barking orders—get down and give me twenty push-ups! Get down and give me a hundred sit-ups! I don’t think any of them knew just how close they were to getting their jaw broken.
But I guess I did OK keeping my cool because they made me platoon leader. They placed my bunk up at the head of the barracks so I could watch over the sixty other recruits. At first I thought being in a position of authority was great because it meant that I was turning out to be a good soldier, but then came the late-night inspections. If someone in the barracks didn’t shine their boots, the sergeant would flip my bed upside down. If someone forgot to make his bed, the sergeant would get in my face and let the spit fly. If someone forgot to put away his toothbrush, the sergeant made me do a hundred push-ups. There were over sixty men in that barrack, and at least one of them forgot to do something every single night.
I got my aggression out when we did hand-to-hand combat training. Instead of letting us beat on each other with our fists and feet, they gave us long sticks padded with foam and told us to go to town. As it turned out, I was just as talented with a pugil stick as I was with punches. I was knocking out guys left and right. I was shaping up to be quite a fine soldier, and my sergeants recognized that. They treated me different than most of the others. I was becoming somewhat of their poster boy, and I liked it.
Five weeks in, I knew that I was going to be a lifer. Just like my father expected, all that anger I had worked so hard to subdue came rushing back to the surface. I was already acquiring the mind-set that would allow me to kill. I wouldn’t have necessarily liked some of the things that the Marine Corps would have made me do, but I would have been good at it. They could have dropped me in a swamp in some third world country, and I would have done my best to kill everyone in that swamp. I might not have made it out alive, but I would have died with honor. That’s what my father had worried about. He knew me better than anyone, better than I knew myself sometimes. He understood the way I thought, the strange code that I lived by. He knew that the Marine Corps would turn me into a professional killer, and he was right.
Fortunately I didn’t have the option of taking that road. Six weeks into my training, the Navy discovered that I had broken my neck in high school. I had given that bit of news to my recruiting officer, and he hadn’t cared. Apparently, the Navy did. They wanted me out, but the Marine Corps didn’t want to kick me out. Here they had this young soldier