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mean, if you could lie on a skateboard and roll down the alley to see how many pins you could knock down with your head, that would be cool.”
    Mom looked at me with the worried expression she always gets when I remind her of Dad. A few weeks later, she made me go see a “counselor.”
    That’s what she called him. I’m sure she was afraid that if she used the word psychologist , I might weird out. To Mom’s generation, I think, going to see a psychologist meant you must be crazy or something is horribly wrong with you. These days, lots of kids see them and everybody’s pretty cool about it. Going to a shrink didn’t bother me at all.
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    Mom couldn’t really afford the psychologist, but she thought it was important to figure out why I had this compulsion to do dangerous things all the time.
    Dr. Carreon was a nice enough guy. He didn’t have me lie down on a couch or anything. He just asked me to tell him about the situation, so I told him how much I loved jumping off things.
    â€œWhy do you think you need to play with danger like this, Johnny?” Dr. Carreon asked.
    â€œI don’t know,” I replied. “It’s fun, I guess.”
    â€œIt’s fun, yes. But perhaps there are other reasons. Things are not always what they seem on the surface. Sometimes people have very unusual reasons for doing the things they do.”
    â€œLike what?” I asked.
    â€œFor example, some kids in your school probably wear unusual clothing, or they get tattoos or pierce parts of their body. I suspect that many of these kids do that not because they like it, but because they hope to draw attention to themselves. It’s an attention-getting device.”
    â€œI don’t care if anybody’s watching me.”
    â€œThen you obviously don’t do it to get attention,” Dr. Carreon said. “Maybe you simply have a Type T personality.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œA Type T person is a natural risk taker. Some scientists believe risk taking is part of the American personality. People like George Washington, Lewis and Clark, and Amelia Earhart were probably Type Ts. They became national heroes because they took chances. But previous generations had to take risks every day. They had to worry about wild animals eating them. They had to worry about diseases like polio and influenza killing them. They had to worry about global wars. These days, life has become so comfortable that we don’t face many challenges. Type T people want to find out what their limitations are. So they go in for extreme sports. They become gamblers. Or they risk their savings on the stock market. Or…maybe they become stuntmen.”
    â€œHmmm,” I replied, not knowing what else to say.
    Dr. Carreon waited nearly a minute before posing the next question.
    â€œYour father was a stuntman, correct?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAnd he died performing a stunt?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œHow did you feel about that, Johnny?”
    â€œBad.”
    â€œCan you elaborate?”
    â€œHe went over Niagara Falls in a boat that was supposed to turn into a plane. It never did.”
    â€œBut how did it make you feel ?” he pressed.
    â€œAwful.”
    â€œPerhaps there is a genetic component,” Dr. Carreon mused. “Your father may have passed on a thrill-seeking gene that controls the flow of certain chemicals in the brain.”
    â€œMaybe,” I replied. So what if he did? I couldn’t do anything about my genes.
    â€œOr perhaps you’re angry about your father’s death and you channel that anger through self-destructive acts. On the other hand, you may be angry with yourself , believing you were somehow responsible for your father’s accident. Maybe—just maybe—you have a death wish. Maybe your father did too. There could be any number of reasons why you do these things. I think we should explore this more tomorrow,