Hero of the Underground

Book excerpt: This New York Times bestselling gritty memoir Hero of the Underground offers a no-holds-barred look at the twisted underbelly of a seemingly perfect life. Jason Peter, an All-American football player, captain of the National Champion Nebraska Cornhuskers, first round NFL draft pick. . . and heroin addict. I wasn't afraid of death. How could I be? I lived under death's shadow every day. When you swallow sixty 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 by dollar amounts but by the amounts your body can withstand without experiencing a seizure or respiratory failure. . . . 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. "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