Fearless (7 page)

Although Adam had never quit anything in his life, he read the writing on the wall. He could not stand being sidelined and made the hard decision to put football behind him. His new sport was drinking, and his new “party friends” had a hard time matching Adam’s abilities with a beer funnel.

Over Christmas break their sophomore year, Adam, Jeff, Heath, and Richard slid into the bench seat of Adam’s black Ford F-150 pickup to head to a party across town. Within moments of their reunion—the first time they’d all been together since the previous summer—Adam elbowed Jeff in the ribs and said, “It’s like a day hasn’t passed, and here we are together again.”

Around midnight they were returning home on Central Avenue when a truck sped up to their tail, swerved back and forth, then nearly ran them off the road as it passed.

“They can’t do that in our town!” Jeff said angrily.

“Hell no!” said Adam. “Let’s slow these guys down.” Stepping on the accelerator, he pulled alongside the truck and shouted, “Slow down!”

Four guys in their early twenties looked over. “Yeah?” the driver yelled back. “Pull over!”

Both vehicles pulled off the road near McClard’s Bar-B-Q, then, as though straight out of a scene in a movie, the two groups of four got out and moved slowly
toward each other from the black night into the dim white glow of a nearby streetlight. The driver was the biggest, and like the others, he had both hands balled up in tight fists and came in swinging. “We’re from Little Rock!” he yelled. “You don’t want to f— with us!”

A solid right jab from Adam hit the guy square in the mouth, and a full-on brawl erupted between the two groups. Jeff took a hard punch to his ribs. Shoving back, he saw a stiletto blade in the shaking hand of the guy who had hit him, and felt warmth moving down his side. When he tore open his flannel shirt to look, the white undershirt was turning dark red and blood was pooling at his beltline. Anger surged to rage, and Jeff grabbed the guy by the hair, yanked him to the ground, and began pounding his face with the other fist.

“What the hell are you doing?” Adam yelled, pulling Jeff away. “You’re going to break his skull open!”

“He f—ing bladed me, man!” said Jeff, holding his shirt open and beginning to stumble.

Just as the guys from Little Rock jumped back in their truck and slammed the door, Adam let out what Jeff describes as a “primal roar,” charged straight at the front of the vehicle, and launched himself into the air. Clearing the hood, he rammed his head like a torpedo into the windshield, which caved in with a sickening thud—a spiderweb of cracks extending from the hole. After rolling off the side of the hood, Adam stood up.

The truck door swung open and there was a loud, ominous
chu-chunk
. One of the guys had chambered a round in a shotgun and leveled it at Heath, who raced for cover behind Adam’s truck.

Boom! Boom!
the shotgun went off, and Richard scrambled under Adam’s truck. When he stood up on the other side, he saw Jeff stumbling toward him, noticed the blood, and assumed he’d been shot. “Richard!” yelled Jeff. “Help me.”

Half carrying, half dragging a nearly unconscious Jeff to a retaining wall beside the truck, the friends ducked down as two more shotgun rounds blasted off. Blood had now soaked the front of both of Jeff’s shirts.

“If we don’t do something, Busch is going to die,” Richard said. Adam immediately jumped over the wall and ripped off his shirt. Shaking his fists in the air, he walked toward the guy with the gun, yelling, “If you’re going to shoot me, f—ing shoot me!” Visibly shaking, the guy didn’t say anything but also didn’t put down the
gun, so Adam kept walking until the barrel was only a couple of feet away and pointed straight at his chest. “Then I’m going to take my friend to the hospital.”

The guy lowered the gun.

By the time they’d rushed Jeff to the emergency room at St. Joseph’s Hospital, he was having trouble breathing and almost passed out while the doctor probed the wound. The knife had entered between his ribs—inches from his heart—and into his left lung, which was filling with blood and required immediate surgery.

As Jeff lay on a gurney in the pre-op room, a surgical nurse read his chart. “You’re a lucky young man,” she told him.

“Yeah,” he said weakly. “My friend saved my life.”

Details of the incident made the local paper the following day. Minutes after Adam and his friends had sped to the hospital, the police showed up at the scene. “They found a massive pool of blood, some brass knuckles, and a library book that had been checked out by guess who,” says Richard. “Adam Brown. It must’ve fallen out when he’d opened the door to his truck.”

Adam, Jeff, Richard, and Heath were questioned by deputies at the hospital and counseled to leave the speeding tickets to them and not pull over reckless drivers looking for a fight. Adam, in particular, was told that in the future he should “run from a loaded gun.”

That spring, Adam transferred to the University of Central Arkansas in Conway and changed his major from engineering to business administration. His heart wasn’t in either discipline. “He was pretty lost, no direction,” says Heath, who was continuing his degree in sports medicine at the same college. “The one thing he said he didn’t want to do was end up working for his dad the rest of his life. He said he wanted to do something big, something important; he just couldn’t figure out what that was.”

In the summer of 1994, Janice and Larry announced to their kids that they were renting a big beach house in the resort town of Destin, Florida, an opportunity for the entire family to have its first five-star trip together. Not long before they left, however, Adam told his parents he should stay home and get ready for school instead.

Though sad that her son would be missing this special vacation, Janice was proud
of Adam’s maturity. “We’re going to go and have fun,” she told him, handing him two hundred dollars when she hugged him good-bye. “Your dad and I want you to have some fun too. Go out to dinner, see some movies—you enjoy it.”

While the rest of the Browns enjoyed the beach in Destin, Adam planned a huge party at their house.

The two hundred dollars covered the kegs.

Word of the August 4 party spread widely, even to neighboring counties. By nightfall the house and backyard were a sea of people. Soon the roof was doubling as a high dive for the shallow pool, with Adam cheerfully leading the charge with a front flip to laid-out belly flop.

The crowd continued to swell, pushing the fence over to make more room in the side yard. Drunken youths were in the street when police arrived to send most of the partygoers on their way. “That party,” says Heath Vance, “was a raging success, but it was also a disaster.” Aside from the destruction to the Browns’ home—a toilet ripped from the floor, a window shattered, the fence trampled—Adam reconnected with a young woman he’d known in high school named Cindy Gravis.

At age twenty, Adam had drunk his share of beer and was no stranger to southern whiskey, but he could count on the fingers of one hand how many times he’d smoked marijuana, which he’d told his buddies always made him feel like a loser. After a night of “getting friendly” with Cindy, however, when she pressed up against Adam and suggestively said, “You wanna get high?” his response was, “Well, yeah. Absolutely.”

The following morning when Adam’s uncle Charlie drove to work at All Service Electric, which was still based in the Browns’ garage, people were sprawled on the front yard, sleeping it off among the shrubs. Inside, Charlie found Adam with a trash bag, picking up cups and beer cans.

“Please don’t tell my mom and dad,” said Adam, his eyes wide at his uncle’s arrival.

“You get this all cleaned up—and fix that toilet,” Charlie said, surveying the damage. “But if they ask me, I’m going to have to tell them. I’m not going to lie.”

When Adam went to Wal-Mart to pick up the supplies he would need, Grandma
Brown was working at the front door as a greeter, a job she’d had for years. Feeling guilty, Adam fessed up, telling his grandmother that he was trying to clean up the aftermath of a party that had gotten out of hand.

“Just how bad is it, Adam?” she asked as he exited the store with a cartful of cleaning supplies, a Wal-Mart employee following him with the new toilet on a dolly.

Not wanting to spoil the Browns’ vacation, Grandma Brown waited until their last day in Florida to break the news: “Adam had a big party while you were away. I thought you should be aware.”

All the way home, Manda steadfastly defended Adam to their parents, maintaining that it was no big deal if Adam had some friends over for a little party—till she found that her closet had been rifled and some clothes were missing, her jewelry box had been pillaged, and her bed had been more than just slept in. Adam suffered his sister’s angry glare and the disappointed looks from Janice and Larry, especially once Janice discovered that more than fifty items had been stolen or broken, including a family heirloom quilt so stained that a partygoer had tossed it in the trash.

That Adam felt terrible was obvious. He told his family he’d make it right, and Janice replied that some of this could never be made right. He was going to have to earn their trust again.

For the rest of the month, Adam hung out with his new girlfriend, Cindy, and her friends after work and on weekends. “They were a different group than Adam knew in high school,” says Larry. “They’d never stick around for long; they’d come by the house, grab Adam, and off they’d go.”

Then Adam informed his parents that he’d decided to take a break from school to figure out what he wanted to do with his life. The truth was he didn’t want to leave Cindy. He began to party away his paychecks from All Service Electric and was soon learning the ropes of the drug world in and around Hot Springs with Cindy as his partner and guide. On weekends, after work, or in the middle of the night, they’d go for a drive that always ended at a drug house, hanging out for hours on dirty couches around coffee tables cluttered with beer cans, ashtrays, and drug paraphernalia.

At first Adam stuck to marijuana and alcohol, but then Cindy introduced him to crystal meth, followed by her drug of choice, crack cocaine. She told Adam that he could never fully understand her unless he did the drug too.

“The first time I did it,” Adam explained to a friend, “I knew I had sold my soul.” For a few minutes he experienced what he described as “euphoria,” and from that moment forward he smoked crack almost every day. Each time he came down off the high, the only thing he could think about was when he could do it again.

Too enamored of the drug to fear it, Adam believed he would simply quit when he wanted to. He viewed this world of drugs as something he was just passing through. It didn’t bother him that the two thousand dollars he’d earned working for his parents was gone less than two weeks after his first taste of crack, money that was spent supplying himself, Cindy, and many of the addicts he met—buying single hits for them the way one buys a round at a bar.

Adam continued to live at home and work for All Service Electric until the end of 1994, when Janice and Larry moved to a nearby farm with a big barn for the offices and workshop of their business, which had continued in its success. Still hiding his addiction from his parents and closest friends, Adam couldn’t ignore it himself. At work, he couldn’t concentrate and felt a quiver in his muscles, a yearning that, try as he might, he could not ignore. As soon as the day ended, he would temper the shakiness with alcohol until he could smoke some crack, and once again life was beautiful.

The Brown family had no idea what was going on under their noses: outwardly, Adam was the same old Adam, though perhaps a bit distracted and a little paler than normal. Aside from work, his parents didn’t see much of him, and Manda and Shawn were off living their own lives, Manda attending college and Shawn employed as a pharmacist in Little Rock.

Likewise, close buddies Jeff, Heath, and Richard saw Adam only occasionally. They knew Cindy was a bad influence and that he spent a lot of time getting high with her and had even tried cocaine, but their concern was limited because on the phone he sounded the same as always. Adam would get over it soon enough, they figured, with no clue as to the full extent of his addiction. And get over
her
. After all, he’d always done the right thing.

“He’ll be all right,” Jeff told Heath during a discussion about Adam. “He’ll figure it out.”