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followed that with a three-mile run. During the run, less than three hundred meters from the finish line, my vision started to blur to the point that I couldn’t tell the people from the trees. I kept pushing harder. Woke up on my back looking up at the timekeeper—a senior chief petty officer in a khaki uniform.
    “Did I break seventeen thirty?” I asked him, referring to the course record of seventeen minutes and thirty seconds.
    “Seventeen twenty-eight, you maniac,” he answered.
    “Then I’m okay.”
    Most people have no idea of what their full potential is. One of my mottos is Blood from Any Orifice. Because I figure that if you don’t push beyond what you think your limits are, you’ll never know your true abilities.
     
    I’ve always tested limits. People who know me say that despite my intensity, I appear to be soft-spoken and relaxed. Truth is, over the years I’ve learned to manage the almost uncontrollable fire burning inside me.
    But I put my parents through living hell growing up.
    I was a bad kid, and I’m not proud of the fact that I was a lousy role model to my younger brother, sisters, and friends. My parents were good, kind, loving people who deserved better than what I gave them.
    My dad loved his country so much that the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor he quit high school to join the Navy. He became a distinguished stunt pilot. On the last day of World War II, an officer ordered him and fifteen of his fellow sailors to stand on the platform of an aircraft carrier so that they could be ceremoniously lowered down to the dock.
    But the platform mechanism broke and they fell sixty feet. My dad broke his back. One sailor died. Since then he had a soft spot for disabled vets—volunteering long hours at the local VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) and serving as the state commander of the VFW in South Carolina. He ended up working as an executive in large insurance companies, and he still liked nothing more than to make other people laugh and have a good time.
    My mom was a Limestone, Maine, homecoming queen, the valedictorian of her class, and the salt of the earth—totally dedicated to her family in every way. She was born premature, weighing three pounds, in an early February blizzard. Her parents didn’t think she would survive, but they put her in the kitchen oven to keep her warm until the storm eased up enough for them to get her to a hospital.
    She had a quick, sarcastic wit that made all of us laugh. She and my dad were like a comedy team at parties—the local Stiller and Meara.
    And I was their first son—a bat-out-of-hell, shit-kicker motorcycle punk. I popped out of my mother’s womb with a wild, crazy energy that has never let up.
    We lived in various spots throughout New England—Limestone, Maine; Orange, Connecticut; Nashua, New Hampshire—but I consider Methuen, Massachusetts, to be my childhood home (it’s also where my dad was born). It’s situated in the northeast part of the state, right across the border from Rockingham County, New Hampshire. Back in the 1970s, Methuen and nearby Orange were considered Mafia towns. Methuen was rough but bucolic, with ponds, streams, the Merrimack and Spicket Rivers, a bird sanctuary, and lots of forested land.
    I was into giving myself impossible challenges from the start. Beginning in second grade, one of my favorite activities was to go into the woods and walk for hours in a random direction, then try to find my way home.
    By fourth grade, I was sneaking smokes on the school playground and building go-carts out of shopping-cart wheels and scraps of wood. My buddies and I would slip out at night and meet at the cemetery, which had this wicked long hill. We’d fly down it in the dark, screaming and often crashing into headstones. Part of me knew what we were doing was wrong, but I was young and filled with wild, anarchic energy, and it was so much damn fun.
    By fifth grade, I’d graduated to minibikes, which led to dirt bikes and