American Outlaw Part 44

AFTERWORD.

I press down on the gas pedal, feeding the engine. I am leaving Sierra Tucson, gunning up 77 North. Wind flies in the lowered windows of the car, cold and clean.

I fumble for the radio, watching the road, searching for the dial with my hand. I turn on the power: static.

I merge onto Highway 79 and open her up. The needle on the speedometer climbs to seventy miles an hour. Then eighty. Then ninety.

My speed keeps climbing. I see it in the dust that hangs in the air above me. One hundred. One hundred five. One ten.

The desert sun is getting low in the sky as I head west.

I slide the sunroof open, and I think about Jesse and Chandler and Sunny. How excited I am to see them. To be with them, as the new person I've discovered after the pain and triumph of this last month.

Entering rehab had been like committing suicide. I'd been at the end of my rope in life-pushed to a limit, no end in sight. Some mornings at Sierra Tucson, I experienced a quiet euphoria that I would imagine the suicide jumper feels when he steps off that fateful ledge. Turmoil put him up there, willing to end it all, but when falling through the cool air to his demise? He has to feel some peace and quiet. I wonder if that feeling lasts forever. I hope so.

One twenty, one thirty. My speed keeps going up until the scenery blurs. Cacti streak by my window.

So much has happened in such a short amount of time. It makes you realize just how much of a razor's edge we walk in life. In the blink of an eye, everything we have can be gone. If I've learned anything from the life I've lived, it's that through adversity, something good always comes.

My foot presses down on the gas pedal a little more. I blast through the desert, wind whipping at my face, toward home.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

I would like to thank Judge Diesler from the Riverside Juvenile Court. I am sure that if he wasn't as hard on me as he was, I wouldn't be around today to write these words. He just gave me the maximum sentence every time without bothering to look up at me. I never actually saw his face all of those times I was in front of him. I wish he were still around, so I could shake his hand.

Would also like to thank the following football coaches: Gil Lake Dave Perkins Coach Bradshaw Coach Reed These guys were not afraid to spit in my face and tell me I was wrong. They filled a huge gap in my life and gave me the discipline I needed to make it.

I would also like to thank Jennifer Bergstrom for letting me do things my way.

Also a heartfelt thanks to Jeremie Ruby-Strauss, because he told me, "Thank your editor, f.u.c.ker!" And to Jen Robinson, for getting the word out.

Last, would like to thank Sam Benjamin, for taking my lifetime of stories and making them into an actual book.