A Savage Lost

Book excerpt: Getting bludgeoned to death is not as much fun as it sounds. The thought occurred to me as my own brutal death unfolded one night under a street lamp. Most people come to that conclusion without taking things that far, but I never was that kind of person. A pair of tennis shoes and some boots shuffled on the pavement for leverage. Rocks ripped into my scalp. A white rope of snot hung from my lip. Life never flashed before my eyes, only shame as I lost my bowels. The story doesn't end in the streets of Peru, and I didn't die that night. It was just another day in the life of Riley Michael Chapman. I started using needles and overdosed on heroin when I was only seventeen. Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans could not keep me from smoking crack, and the barrel of a gun against my head in the ghettos of Baton Rouge could not keep me from thinking about another hit. Before I was twenty years old I was homeless in San Francisco, and it only got worse after that. My parents paid a man to find my body in the morgues of Lima while I was kidnapped in Peru. I watched the woman I loved sell herself to Mexican drug dealers in Denver and spent three months fighting for my life in a Portland hospital while a bacterial infection devoured my spine. This is the story of how I got out alive.