Van Halen; 1983 Facing Fear, Trust, & Self-Assurance...

Once I outlined this book and began working on it, one thing became clear to me. Modern storytellers all seem to be aware of something I learned quite a while ago: you are your own worst enemy, or more specifically, your fear is. Whether it is the Marvel Cinematic Universe and all the heroes at one point or another having to confront and control their fears, biographers show our favorite real-world heroes conquering what's holding them back (spoiler alert: it's fear). Nobody is working against you but you; nothing is holding you back but your own negative selftalk. Sometimes you just need to take a leap of faith. A disclaimer should forward this story: this took place in the early ’80s when kids were still invincible; I'm kidding, but you really should take the concept from the following story, not the activity itself. One day, I was hanging out with my older brother, Howard. I think he was fourteen at the time, putting me at about eleven years old. He and some of his buddies were going to go out and invited me to come along. It can be quite hard to express just how much a younger brother wants to be included in whatever the older one is doing; all I can say is it's pretty strong.

There's hero worship and admiration there that can be as blinding as it is inspiring. He invited me along, but only under the condition that I must be “as tough” as they are; whatever they do, I have to do as well and be able to keep up. Well, again, just like the bond between brothers, there was the universal law of boyhood to consider: any offer to demonstrate how "tough" you were had to be answered. This was long before any kind of softness was tolerated in a young man's culture. In the era of Stallone and Schwarzenegger, there were two things a boy could be: a tough guy or a sissy. Coupled with trying to impress my brother’s friends, I was beside myself with excitement and overeager to prove myself worthy of the big kids’ company. But what were they going to do? Behind the house we were living in at the time was a forest with a river running through it. At most, it was ten feet deep and probably twenty feet wide. It was pretty deep for its width. Running over this river was a train bridge, the wooden trestle-type with no paths along the side. We had started running toward this spot, the rest of them yelling, picking up the pace, laughing, and shouting, "We're gonna miss it!" With a sinking feeling, I had an idea what they were looking to be on time for.

Sure enough, we get to the tracks just as the train comes around a curve. It's not moving too fast; the curve forced it to slow down. Howard yells, "Hide!" The oncoming train sent us scrambling down to the side and hunching down behind some bushes so the conductor couldn't see us as the train passed. Once it had gone by a little bit, Howard shouted again. "Run!" This sent us scrambling after the rear-most train car. I wasn't sure at first what we were running for until I saw one of his buddies grab the ladder attached to the side of the train car and hoist himself up. One by one, they grabbed on and pulled themselves on board. Now, the train couldn't have been moving more than ten miles per hour. It was just creeping along, really, but it weighed hundreds of tons, and I was eleven. There's no stopping a train without slowing down first, so any misstep and you are losing a toe, foot, or leg, for sure. It was foolhardy, the whole thing. It was the kind of happy lark we pull as kids that makes our blood run cold thinking about it as adults. The whole hiding business was because the conductors really will call the cops on you. After all, they quite literally cannot stop. Some of those super-long, multiengine trains, weighed down with coal or iron, take almost a full mile to slow down and stop! But we were dumb kids, as invincible as we were ignorant.

So I ran! Tripping over my own feet, doing my best not to stumble over the wood ties, I ran as fast and as hard as I could. The rest of them had made it and were cheering me on. Legs pumping and a burgeoning young adult ego on the line, I gave it my all and reached the train with a huge jump. I am not sure what I thought they were going to do once everyone was on the train, but jumping right back off again was not what I had in mind. Sure enough, the older kids ahead of me on the train began jumping off, sailing through the air and landing in the river. My brother insisted “they did it all the time.” To be honest, I was terrified, and I think my brother saw that once I got up on the train. Still, I had to jump at just the exact right moment, or I'd smack into the riverbank and break a leg or worse! I was too young to know that I would have to jump a little before my target, so my forward momentum would carry me as fast as the train was traveling. When it came time to jump, my brother yelled, “Jump!” And I jumped. It was absolutely a leap of faith indeed. I clung on until the last possible second, and I remember my brother saying I HAD to jump when he said jump or else the train would take me all the way to China! Well, the rest of them were off already, and the train was speeding up! So at the exact moment I heard my brother yell at the top of his lungs, I left my fear on that train, and I JUMPED!

When my feet left the train car, it felt like I was going to crash into the nearside riverbank. But as we soared into the air, we demonstrated Newton's First Law and conserved our momentum, sailing forward and out over the water, landing precisely in the deepest point of the river. We made it; we were alive! Was it stupid? YES! It was stupid without a doubt. People can and sadly do die messing around with trains every year. To my eternal embarrassment, we would go on to do this again and again during the time we lived near the trestle, risking life and limb for fun and an adrenaline rush. Not just fun, though, but a lesson I took with me and value still to this day. No, not just profound respect for trains but a feeling that I could push through fear; if something was daunting or intimidating, it’s possible to take it head-on and make it happen. When confronted with something challenging, it can be the hardest thing in the world to not charge into headlong, but when something is inevitable, it is best to anticipate it and deal with it as directly as possible. Find an established place to cliff jump. Having been warned about the dangers of submerged hazards, though, maybe I should recommend finding a high dive someplace! It is excellent practice to note what you are afraid of and take steps to control or even undo that fear. You can't always rely on life offering you lessons; sometimes, you must go out of your way to find them. For instance, I would learn to get over a fear of confrontation by way of a bully named Ralph, but it was another lesson that, in hindsight, was truly not the right move in the first place! You should find fears to push through, especially when you are young. The brain is still flexible in youth, the connections between thoughts and memories much more fluid than in adults. Break bad habits and create good ones; push through things you are afraid of and know you have no reason to be afraid. Being afraid of the dark is silly, but being afraid of a dark alley at 2:00 a.m. might be prudent. Don't be reckless or endanger yourself, of course, but find a controlled fright and take the plunge, like that literal plunge in my hometown. It was foolhardy and dangerous, yes, but it taught me to trust the experience of others, as well as my own abilities. The grown-up part of me wants to steer you toward a pool with a high dive, but the young crazy kid in me wants you to seek out that train trestle bridge over a river. I think the second part of that story is relatively foundational to decisions I made later in life. The whole train-river-jump exercise—at least that first time we did it —was absolutely a team-building event. Adult me is a little embarrassed to admit we would go on to make that jump dozens of times. But while the rest of them had done it before, I had not. I took it on faith that they had done so and obviously lived through the experience. Putting my literal life in other people's hands would be something the military instills in its recruits, but it was not something I already knew at that time.

Trust the recon; trust people (who have earned that trust), and you will have not only closer friendships, but you'll save yourself some misadventures too. While I felt I had mastered the wilds behind my house, the bigger kids in junior high school would prove to be quite another matter. Who would have thought that a future decorated member of the US Army Rangers was picked on and bullied as a kid? Well, most anyone whose memory of middle school was intact, I wager. If you managed to get through school without anyone ever singling you out for targeted abuse, you're a very lucky individual, indeed. More times than not, we suffer the random assault of a generally unpleasant idiot who spreads their bullying around evenly. Sometimes, however, there seems to be one particular jerk who will decide to target the same kid every chance they get. I hope like hell you don't have anyone in your life that you need to direct this kind of lesson at. Maybe you are in middle school or high school and can use this advice directly. Perhaps it's just a different kind of bully—the browbeating, verbally abusive, condescending narcissists that never grew up because they never got popped in the jaw by a kid who was sick and tired of their BS. Whatever the case, sometimes overbearing personalities can only be deterred by a show of strength.

His name was Ralph. He was a little bit bigger than me at that age, which I was always self-conscious about. I wasn't used to being talked to the way he talked to me. It was my first actual conflict that I can recall that felt like it could end up in mortal combat. Okay, maybe not mortal combat, but a fistfight at minimum. He knew he was creating fear, as bullies do, and used it against me just as carefully as a surgeon with a scalpel. Or at least it felt like that at the time. But it felt a bit more like a nut punch than an operation: blunt and stupid. The kid was sucker punching me with words, and it kind of freaked me out and, quite frankly, REALLY pissed me off. It was the oldest trick in the bully book: name-calling with a smug, evil grin. In hindsight, I now know that he called me every name in the book until he found the one that affected me the most. I barely even knew that "faggot" was derogatory when I was that age, but as a child of the '70s and '80s, I just knew it was "bad." It's not like I was even homophobic; it was a matter of childish bravado and uncontrollable temper more than anything. And the close talking, his persistence, and the tone he used. People had called me that before, but it never got under my skin. I wound up bottling my rage until it blew. It wasn't until after losing my patience and my temper that I was able to push through my fear and really sock that little son of a biscuit right square in the mouth. I hit him so hard that it knocked him backward to the ground. I then proceeded to jump on top of him and kept on swinging! If you can picture the scene from A Christmas Story where Ralphie is on top of the bully spewing expletives, that is what happened with me. God, I love that scene. Giving in to my rage like that led to my eternal embarrassment.

I was never one for fighting outside of the occasional ass beating from my older brother, Howard. Walloping that kid is tough for me to admit, but it did make him leave me alone after that. For that matter, no one ever screwed with me again. Junior high was the last time I was small, meek, and targeted for ridicule. By the end of high school, I had grown up and filled out a bit more. At the risk of being immodest, I was popular with the ladies too, which I only admit to illustrate how far I came in four years. Of course, this was also the era when playing guitar was considered cool, so what happened next probably had something to do with the popularity I gained by the time I graduated Apex High School in 1981. The Ralph incident (which I like to refer to as "Sunday Bloody Sunday" even though it was on a Tuesday) taught me more than how to throw a punch. I learned that my fear was worse than what I was afraid of. He turned out to be nothing more than a little punk, loudmouthed and arrogant. He was nothing but an obnoxious jerk, and I had let him get the best of me. After I punched him, the fear he had filled me with for so long entered him, and I saw in his eyes the realization that he was no bigger than me, no better than me, and no better than anyone. In general, I've seen intimidation and the threat of force have the same effect. You just can't let your fear show in a situation like that. We're all afraid sometimes, but when the chips are down, you cannot let it paralyze you. At the same time, you can't allow it to cause you to do something stupid either. At some point in your life, you've probably seen dudes go through this elaborate ritual to avoid actual fighting: standing toe to toe, staring at each other, talking loud trash, and sometimes, literally, thumping chests? Just as in nature, challenges between members of the same species are almost always settled through non-violent displays and seldom deteriorate into actual fighting. And for the record, of course, I got in trouble. So, before you go off just popping everyone in the mouth who pisses you off, you must know that unless you are in a ring with a ref or at least a few rules, fighting is going to have consequences, even if it's just bruises and a loss of respect from your friends and family. Because let's face it, folks, nobody respects a violent solution. Nobody ever proved a point with a fist beyond basic defense. Yes, there is no shortage of jerks in the world (and they seem to be multiplying, sadly), but unless they come in swinging at you directly, I promise it would be in your best interest to leave them be. As the saying goes, some people are cruisin' for a bruisin', so even a pacifist should know how to pass a fist. Violence shouldn't be used to solve a problem, but neither should you just roll over and take it when someone is committing violence against you. I mean, come on. I enlisted into the United States Army right out of high school.

I know as well as anyone there is a time to make peace and a time to make war. I do have to say that my dad was proud of me for standing up for myself. One evening at the dinner table, as I was complaining about Ralph, he looked over at me. "Tell him that if he opens his mouth like that one more time, you'll put your fist down his throat!" "So what do I do if he opens his mouth again?" I asked. "You put your fist down his throat!" he stated, with no irony. The truth is that this kind of scared me a little. Because now my own father had just taken away any reason for me to continue running from this sad excuse of a human being. I would now actually have to make a stand, and of course, as you know by now, that's precisely what I did. Once all was said and done, I was punished, reprimanded by the school, and I think I was suspended for several days. Ha, well, truth be told, dad took me out for ice cream after school one day during that time, if memory serves me. School and the military both have the same kind of idea— fighting among yourselves is never allowed (outside of formal, refereed bouts, of course), and both parties will be punished no matter who started it. In this case, that was fine by me because while I did throw the first punch, it was something I had to face. After all, while I didn't feel guilty, I knew I had messed up. Going through a bit of tussle like that taught me a good deal about fear. That old chestnut "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" rings as true today as it did when it was first spoken. While being afraid of a bully is one thing, how often do we hold back out of fear in life? Fear of the unknown, fear of change, fear of getting hurt.

If we go through life avoiding pain at all costs, we go through life avoiding growth. Fear nothing if it is in the name of positive change. We expect growing pains in your legs and arms as kids get bigger, but mental growth can elicit just as much if not more pain than that. By the time I jumped off the train and socked Ralph in the mouth (see what I did there?), I was quite confident. There was one undiscovered place of fear, though. A terror that grips the heart of every mortal and seldom lets us go. I am talking about the fear of being in front of a crowd! Almost universal, the feeling of having many eyes upon yourself is some people's worst nightmare. And while I was strangely attracted to being the center of attention, clammy palms and butterflies in my stomach froze my blood and stilled my feet. But I would eventually make a run at that phobia with the help of my friend, Tom Mauk, who had a shared love of music and was encouraging me to pursue my dreams of being on stage. Who would have thought that a skinny kid and a future army ranger and special operations soldier would be able to hold his own on stage in front of huge crowds as a guitar-playing rocker?

Now, I do have to rewind because it's not like I just picked up a six-string and began wailing like a boss. No, because I wanted to be a rock star like almost every boy in that era, but no one is born playing music. Unlike every boy in the period, I knew what it would take to become a rock star, and I was willing to do it. Kids either can't focus on anything longer than a few minutes, or they latch onto it and focus on nothing else! The rock band, KISS, who I worshiped to my dad's dismay, had demonstrated that having big hair and playing rock music so loud it makes your ears bleed was without a doubt a viable path to becoming a millionaire. And all the great bands of the '70s and '80s proved it could be wilder, louder, and faster too. I asked my dad for a guitar, and he looked at me silently for a minute before replying. "I'll buy you a cheap guitar to learn on. If you learn to play it, I'll buy you a nice one." For the uninitiated, a good, quality guitar is not a cheap purchase; as a performer, you typically invest in one high-quality guitar and then have a few cheaper ones for practice and, occasionally, smashing on stage like The Who. Just like anything, I suppose, there is a tremendous range in price and quality. So, he was okay thinking about buying me a nicer electric guitar like a Gibson SG, but only if I actually learned how to play first. With all the excitement of a kid on Christmas, I ran right to my copy of Spiderman and flipped to the back where The US School of Music course regularly had advertisements, and I clipped out the order form to purchase a complete course on beginners’ guitar. They also sold cheap—I mean, really cheap—acoustic guitars to learn on. Perfect! Everything I needed in one place to start down the path to rock 'n' roll greatness. Back then, I think the entire cost was like $39.95. Ha! That, of course, was a large sum of money in the '70s for a young boy, but somehow, between my allowance and earning extra money working for my dad, I got it done!

I remember the day the package arrived. It was the cheapest and quite possibly the crappiest acoustic six-string on planet earth, but it was all mine, and I loved it! Well, I loved it enough to learn on it anyway. The rickety thing barely held a tune, snapped strings like floss, and made my fingers bleed. But I got my basic fretwork down and mastered a few chords. I'd practice for hours to the complete irritation of my family and going through chords and fumbling my way through songs until I got them down. The first song I ever learned to play was "Love Me Tender" by Elvis Presley. It was that song that convinced my dad to buy me a nicer guitar. While I wouldn't actually rock out on stage for many years, it got to the point where I felt good enough with my mic and amp that I would set up in our garage and make it look as if I was on stage.

By the time I graduated, I had played in a couple of small bands, nothing of any significance, just more about jamming and having fun. We never played any big shows, just friends and the occasional few nosy strangers. But it cemented what I had suspected: there was a part of me that had a taste and a burning desire to be in front of a crowd. A little corner of my brain now knew that I had the skills to be a rocker and performer, and I would grow up considering it a viable career option. Listen to me, please: You must step it up in life. Literally, take a step toward the mic and perform in front of people or take steps toward even the most daunting of goals. I live by a simple rule: regardless of how many people you get in front of, one or one thousand, ALWAYS leave them better off than you found them. Did you know that most people surveyed say they would rather die than speak in front of an audience? Even just a half-dozen people can make your heart feel like it's going to seize up and stop beating or fly right out of your chest. It can be hard enough for some folks to go to class or work and interact with people all the time. Well, try adding standing on an elevated stage facing an audience with all eyes on you and with amplification and spotlights! The fear of failure compounds. But all of a sudden, there you are. YOU are, for real, the life of the party, and knowing if you fail, the party is going to be lame. I encourage you to face your fears head-on. You don't have to be a rock star standing on a stage, but I firmly believe we're ALL rock stars in our own way. If you keep reading, I intend to prove it!

I'll finish with this thought: By the time I graduated from high school, I had gotten over many hang-ups that, in my opinion, hold so many people back. Wanting to put my newfound courage and skills to the greatest good and confident in my ability to overcome any obstacle, it was with a great deal of excitement that I enlisted in the US Army as soon I graduated. I entered the army on September 1, 1981, when I was only seventeen years old. Yep, I needed parental consent, which I'm pretty sure my dad had no problem giving! I remember the day they dropped me off at the MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Station) and my mom's words. "I won't have time to miss you because, with that mouth of yours, they'll ship your butt back home in no time!" Aaaand there you have it! Take the leap, stand up to the bully, and be ready to WORK for your dreams.