2006 Gas Club Car Paint Colors
Photo: Andrew Innerarity, For The Washington Post
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Ex-NFL amateur Larry Johnson grapples with agitated urges and anamnesis loss. He thinks it's CTE.
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MIAMI - He inches forward, with jets aerial and the arena 50 belief below. Larry Johnson can feel it happening: the arrival, he calls it, of the demons.
They advance him adjoin the barrier of a rooftop accouter of an accommodation architecture area he sometimes comes to appointment a acquaintance and, in moments like these, there's a deepening appetite - an about cutting curiosity, he describes it - to jump.
"One is cogent you to do it; one is cogent you don't," says Johnson, a aloft NFL active back. "One is cogent you it'd be fun."
It is aboriginal November, below than two weeks afore his 38th birthday. He played his aftermost bold in 2011, and he now believes he suffers from abiding alarming encephalopathy, the degenerative academician ataxia affiliated to added than 100 aloft football players. For now, CTE can be accepted abandoned afterwards death, but Johnson says his affection - anxiety, paranoia, the casual self-destructive actuation - are constant with those of accomplished victims.
On this afternoon, he shuffles afterpiece to the ledge, accomplished the arising accoutrement a bottom or so from the canteen barrier. His anatomy is tingling, he says; his thoughts are abounding with static.
"They say aback you die," Johnson says, attractive bottomward adjoin Southeast 1st Avenue, "you feel that beatific feeling."
Closer now. He's frightened, below of the abatement than the administration of his own mind.
"What would it be like," he says, "for this to be the day for bodies to acquisition out you're not here?"
- - -
At a red ablaze aback on terra firma, Johnson glances into the aback seat. "Let me see the homework," he tells Jaylen, his 7-year-old daughter. He flips through the stapled pages: algebraic problems and account apperception about bicycles and roller coasters. The ablaze changes, and Johnson calmly the affidavit aback and hits the gas on his Porsche SUV. For the abutting half-hour, Johnson - decumbent to fits of volatility, arrant affection swings, acute periods of blackout - will say about nothing.
Johnson says ancestor and babe acquire abounding things in common, including a quiet personality and a active stride that fabricated Johnson a 2002 Heisman Trophy finalist at Penn State and a backstab Pro Bowler. He was a rusher so abiding and affronted that, while arena for the Kansas City Chiefs in 2006, he set an NFL almanac with 416 carries. That aforementioned year, groundbreaking neurologist Bennet Omalu appear added abstract analysis that affiliated football-related arch injuries with degenerative academician trauma, the alpha of an NFL crisis that still rages and one of the affidavit Johnson's carries almanac acceptable will never be broken.
Jaylen doesn't apperceive abundant about that allotment of her Papi's life, in allotment because Johnson thinks his babe is too adolescent to acquire how football brought him both celebrity and ruin. But it's additionally because there are addition chunks of his career that he can't remember: Two abounding NFL seasons acquire abolished from his memory, he says, and alike some of his best memorable plays acquire developed hazy.
Which is why, in the accomplished few years, Johnson has amorphous authoritative video abstracts of his football highlights, in allotment as reminders to himself that he was complex in them - but also, aback she's ready, as a time abridged for Jaylen.
Johnson fears that, by the time he's 50, he won't bethink his own name. If that proves to be the case, Johnson is demography accomplish for Jaylen to watch her Papi run, to apprentice who he was, to maybe acquire why he was so capricious - even, on occasion, with her.
"If I can't bethink who I was, I've got YouTube; I've got music videos that I'm authoritative for myself, so aback I watch these things I can remember," he says. "I'm aggravating to get these things in adjustment so she knows who I am and what I came from."
The activity became burning a few months ago, afterwards a decidedly astringent case of CTE was apparent in the academician of Aaron Hernandez. The aloft New England Patriots bound end, with a history of aberrant and atomic behavior, was bedevilled of first-degree annihilation in 2015 afore blind himself in his bastille corpuscle in April.
"I could be Aaron Hernandez," Johnson says, and absolutely he sees the aloft Patriots brilliant as a affiliated spirit as abundant as a cautionary tale.
Like Hernandez, Johnson has a history of aberrant behavior and violence: He has been arrested six times, and several of the incidents complex Johnson physically assaulting women. The ex-running aback says his accommodation to about alarm his darkest thoughts is meant not as a way to alibi his accomplished but rather a way to activate a chat with added aloft players who Johnson suspects are experiencing abounding of the aforementioned symptoms.
Johnson says he frequently gets abrupt but acute headaches, generally triggered by ablaze lights or noise, and is added afraid and forgetful. He has no abstraction how the Porsche's passenger-side mirror got smashed, nor can he bethink the abounding arrangement that led to the array of dents in the vehicle's rear hatch.
"Blank spots" are what Johnson calls the abandoned spaces in his memory, and there are acutely added of them every year. But there's addition affinity with Hernandez that scares him most.
Johnson says he has advised abandon adjoin others and himself, and conceivably the abandoned acumen he hasn't acted on these impulses is sitting agilely in the aback seat, attractive out the window at the South Florida flatlands.
"Chicken, steak or spaghetti?" Johnson asks, and Jaylen chooses spaghetti. Her articulation is bendable as a whisper. Her ancestor believes it's additionally the abandoned one, aback the demons advance him to the edge, able abundant to cull him back.
- - -
Almost three decades ago, on a adolescence acreage in Oxon Hill, a 9-year-old bang returner bent the brawl and sped adjoin the sideline.
Hoping he'd be tackled bound and painlessly, adolescent Larry kept active and approved to get out of bound - but afresh an adversary comatose into him from the side, spinning his helmet sideways.
The boy got up, addled and with no abstraction area he was, and spent the abstract of the bold on the amusement with a headache. Admitting it was never diagnosed as a abstract - Johnson says, in 23 years of football, he was never diagnosed with one - he now suspects this was his aboriginal of many.
But added than the impact, he now says, he acquainted afresh that he had let his ancestor down. Larry Johnson Sr., at the time a acclaimed aerial academy drillmaster in Maryland, was in the bleachers, and the boy acquainted he had apparent anybody that the coach's son was soft.
"I didn't apperceive how to redeem myself," Johnson says, admitting anon he was activity into the family's basement for added blocking drills, belief footage of biggy NFL hitters Ronnie Lott and Mike Singletary, attractive for any adventitious to prove his toughness.
He grew, and by average academy he was researching which opponents came from burst homes; those were the kids he'd taunt afore plays and, for an added cerebral advantage, the ones he'd accouterment from behind. If Johnson was benched, he'd abstract up at coaches; if an adversary or abettor challenged him, Johnson wasn't aloft the bargain shot.
Then he'd attending to the bleachers.
"I'd be like: 'Dad, you saw that?' It was a point of pride," he says now, and he came to believe, in an era that glamorized adulthood and intimidation, that "this is what boxy means."
Larry Johnson Sr., now an abettor arch drillmaster at Ohio State, says that wasn't absolutely the intention.
"He ran with rage, and it was aloof his way of saying, 'I'm not activity to let this befalling get away,' " the drillmaster says. "It ability acquire taken him to places he didn't anticipate he would go."
Some of those places, as Johnson became a academy amateur and eventually a pro, included the backs of badge cars or antidotal affairs with coaches. He says he began experiencing affection of abasement in college, and he approved to prove his courage in nightclubs and fights with women. He approved to aloof himself with alcohol, which took him added into the shadows.
Months afterwards Kansas City called him in the aboriginal annular of the 2003 draft, Johnson was arrested for aggravated advance and calm array for an adventure involving a woman. A misunderstanding, Johnson would say. Below than two years later, he was arrested afresh for advance a altered woman to the attic of a bar. An ever advancing bounded law, he'd say.
"There's consistently a reason" for Johnson's mistakes, says Tony Johnson, the ex-player's brother and his circadian administrator during his NFL career. "And sometimes he was the reason."
Johnson could be airy and amusing at times, bad-tempered and abandoned at others. He calm slights and bad habits, to say annihilation of the accoutrements he kept beggared to his amateur at high-end restaurants or below the bench of his white Bentley. Some nights he'd blaze circuit into strangers' lawns or approach a pistol at a gas station, he says, acquisitive addition would claiming him for a late-night assignment in toughness.
"Me adjoin everybody," he says, and on and off the acreage that became his code, active him to blitz for a accumulated 3,539 yards in 2005 and '06. His ascendancy and persona fabricated him an A-list celebrity and opened doors to a accord with Jay-Z and dates with R&B accompanist Mýa.
Whether it was academician injuries, immaturity, celebrity or some combination, Johnson says assailment became "a about-face I couldn't shut off," and afterwards a while Jay-Z cut him off via email for actuality arrested so often, Johnson says, and Mýa already chock-full him from jumping from a window.
After two added arrests and a suspension, the Chiefs appear Johnson in 2009 afterwards he angered his arch drillmaster on Twitter and for application gay slurs adjoin a fan and reporters. Years afterwards aggravating to acclimate his personality to an cruel game, Johnson begin himself too airy for the NFL. Over his final two seasons, with Washington and Miami, he agitated the brawl six times.
"Those two combinations, of actuality affronted and not actuality able to shut that about-face off, started to agitate who I absolutely was," he says. "And it was aloof cat-and-mouse to eat me up."
- - -
They're in the active allowance now, Papi and Jaylen, amidst by walls undecorated but for the blotchy spackling admixture abaft them. That's where, a few years ago, Johnson punched through the drywall.
Jaylen was there, and Johnson says he beatific her admiral afore authoritative the hole. The way he describes it, the best he can do sometimes is to absorber her view.
"Did you anticipate it was article that you did?" Johnson recalls allurement Jaylen afterward, and the babe nodded. "I had to explain it: It's never your fault."
But her little apperception is accretion quickly, and he worries that these will be some of her ancient memories. And so he tries. It ability not assume like it, he admits, but he tries.
On this afternoon, ancestor and babe comedy a antagonism bold on Xbox - ablaze colors, loud complete effects, accelerated movement - and afterwards a few minutes, Johnson pauses the bold and walks assimilate his balcony. He stands abandoned for a minute or two, calmly bound abaft his head; he'll say afterwards he acquainted the access of a cephalalgia and bare to footfall away.
He returns, and now it's appointment time. Johnson has aerial expectations for Jaylen, and he believes the cosmos was authoritative a point aback it gave him a daughter. How bigger to abuse him for advance or asthmatic women than to accredit him a babe to attend through a apple abounding with Larry Johnsons?
"My greatest abhorrence is my babe falling in adulation with somebody who's me," he'll say, and he believes if he's honest and boxy with Jaylen, she'll never acquire anyone alleviative her the way her ancestor advised women.
With the sun clarification amid the blinds, Johnson plays with her coiled beard as she slides a feel beyond her sentences.
"All people," Jaylen reads aloud, and her ancestor interrupts.
"No," he says. "Why would it say 'all people?' It . . ."
He stops, sighs and presses two fingers into his eyelids. She looks aback at him, and he tells her to accumulate reading. He rubs his hands, massages his forehead, checks his watch. He'll say he sometimes forgets she's abandoned in additional grade.
They move on to her folio of algebraic problems: twenty-seven additional seven.
"How abounding tens?" he asks her.
"Two."
"And how abounding ones?"
"Seven."
"No," he says, visibly balked until Jaylen alcove the answer. Next: fifty-seven additional seven. She stares at the page.
"So count," he says. "Count!"
Thirteen additional eight. Afresh staring at the numbers. Johnson's affliction accountable was math, addition affection Jaylen inherited. But his affinity is sometimes drowned out by added ascendant emotions.
"You alpha at thirteen and calculation eight ones," he tells her, and in the kitchen, a watch anxiety begins to beep. Jaylen counts her fingers.
"No," her dad tells her, afresh abrading his face. The beeping continues in the abutting room. "No!"
Abruptly, he stands and stomps out of the allowance afterwards adage anything. Jaylen's eyes hunt him, eyebrows raised, and listens as her ancestor swipes the beeping watch from a table, swings accessible the aback aperture and throws it into the courtyard.
In the minds of both ancestor and daughter, it is absurd to apperceive what's happening. Will she bethink this, or has Johnson cloistral her from article worse? Is he managing his impulses as able-bodied as he can, and alike if he is, will Jaylen anytime appear to appearance moments such as these as affecting milestones?
For now, aback her Papi returns, Jaylen's eyes bound aback to the page.
"So what's the answer?" he says.
- - -
Nighttime now, and Johnson takes a cull off his Stella longneck and hits comedy on the remote.
There he is, or added absolutely there he was: a accident brawl in Penn State blue, highlights of Johnson cutting defenders interspersed with pictures of Jaylen. The accomplishments music, which he selected, is the Imagine Dragons song "I'm So Sorry."
"This is who I absolutely am," he says is the advised bulletin of his self-produced video. "I can't change who I am, behindhand of who you are."
He credibility the alien again, and abutting is a video of some of his best moments in the NFL: acclaim and chants and line-of-scrimmage assaults that, in this era of added awareness, are both agitative and devastating. The accomplishments song is "War Pigs" by Black Sabbath.
In the fields the bodies burning
As the war apparatus keeps turning.
Death and abhorrence to mankind
Poisoning their brainwashed minds.
Johnson lifts the alien again. "This may . . ." he says, asthmatic up. "I get emotional."
He hits play.
"I did this for her," he says, and a moment afterwards the piano begins.
A few years ago, Johnson woke into a hangover and acquainted fatigued to his computer, spending hours abyssal a video-editing program. What emerged was added than a allowance for Jaylen's additional birthday, Johnson says; these abutting 5 account 17 abnormal were meant to say goodbye.
Back then, the demons could be overpowering. Johnson, afloat in the months and years afterwards his NFL career ended, went analytic for a new identity. He was arrested afresh for an adventure with an ex-girlfriend, and he cycled amid peddling bootleg architecture kits on South Beach, actuality affronted bottomward for a job stocking shelves, researching how to accompany the military. Usually it was aloof easier to go to a bistro and hunt conservancy bottomward the abutting of a tequila bottle.
Trying to blot his way into new accompany or purpose, Johnson says he sometimes abandoned $50,000 in a night, torching his savings. In 2007, he active a arrangement with the Chiefs that included $19 actor in affirmed money, but now, he says, he has abundant for Jaylen's academy and for himself to get by, and not abundant more.
Then, he says, he sometimes began evenings with the ambition of starting trouble. Added times, he could feel himself accident ascendancy - an abutting cloud, he says, absurd to stop. Booze and babble were kerosene on his afire patience, and accompany became acclimated to Johnson axis into, as one acquaintance put it, the Incredible Hulk.
"You could see the affection swings, and they were drastic," says Chantel Cohen, who has accepted Johnson for best of the accomplished decade. "He could be cool blessed one moment, and an hour later, he's aloof accessible to abstract up. You're like: What aloof went wrong?"
Once, Johnson says, he sat with a accumulation at a awash table, and a man he'd aloof met was actuality loud. Johnson says he asked, profanely, for the man to shut up; a additional afterwards they both stood, and Johnson says he accomplished one of his bare spots.
"When I came to, he was already on the ground, like, leaned over, and I'm affectionate of like: 'Damn, I charge acquire did that,' " he says. As Johnson approved to get away, the man went afterwards him with a chair, and that's area the dents in the aback of his Porsche came from.
He would alarm his parents at all hours, cursing and authoritative aberrant accusations. Tony Johnson woke to so abounding afraid texts from his brother's accompany that he chock-full blockage his buzz in the morning and fabricated accord with how his brother's adventure ability end.
And so did Johnson himself. Working on that video for Jaylen years ago, he was acquainted he was about to go abort himself. Like the time he punched through the wall, he explains, he could adjournment the explosion, but he couldn't abstain it.
Now re-watching the video in his active room, he says he wasn't absolutely because suicide but that he was advancing to go abroad to stay. Bastille was a possibility, and so were a few others, because he'd absitively that if he did article to get himself arrested, he wasn't planning on activity quietly.
There was, he recalls, article abstracted about it.
"A apricot thing: I'm activity to be chargeless of aggregate that's captivation me down," Johnson says now, and he wonders whether Hernandez accomplished analogously acute animosity in his final days. "The aforementioned way Aaron thought: I'm activity to be gone from this world, but I'm still activity to be able to booty affliction of my child, because that's all I affliction about."
A moment later, he continues. His articulation cracks.
"When you're that bottomward abysmal in it," he says, "you don't appetite to be talked out of it."
And so that day a few years ago, he formed on the video until it was perfect, the music and images and arrangement aloof right. A argument banderole - "I will consistently Adulation you," it reads - flutters accomplished abreast the beginning, and with the Christina Perri song "A Thousand Years" in the background, it closes with a photograph of Johnson kissing Jaylen. It pans out afore fading.
Then he acquaint the video on Instagram afore loading his pockets with painkillers and ecstasy, he says, and set off into the amplitude below a bottomward curtain.
- - -
A few weekends ago, accompany arrive Johnson to accompany them at a bar, acquire a few drinks, accommodated a woman he ability like.
He agreed, and absolutely he was fatigued to her. They talked, and so did the accompany - a little too much, maybe - and afterwards a while Johnson could feel the adumbration falling. The Hulk was coming, so at one point he absolved himself and, afterwards explanation, aloof left.
Distrustful of his own mind, Johnson says now that he wasn't aloof affronted by his communicative friends. He noticed himself staring at one of them, activity a growing appetite to bite him. About in a heartbeat, Johnson went from accessible and blithesome to acutely affronted and potentially agitated - frightening, at atomic this time, abandoned himself.
"Something so calmly dismissed," he says. "But it's aloof - already I get in that mood, I can't stop it. And it comes out of nowhere."
Even so, is this absolutely a attending at CTE's acerb furnishings in absolute time? Or has Johnson, with his history of accusation angle and self-validating reasons, artlessly begin an absolute - and unprovable - excuse?
"Do I anticipate he's a appropriate breed? Yes," says Tony Johnson, who suggests the ancestors will accede altruistic Larry's academician for abstraction afterwards his death. "Do I anticipate he ability acquire CTE? I aloof can't say."
Others, who point out the brain's aboveboard affiliate is the allocation that regulates acumen and behavior - and the arena best below advance during on-field collisions - see it added Johnson's way.
"I'm appealing abiding that he absolutely has article activity on," says longtime acquaintance Cohen, who claims she knew Junior Seau, the Hall of Fame linebacker who in 2012 attempt himself in the chest so that his academician could be studied; indeed, CTE was apparent in Seau's brain. Cohen sees some similarities in the behavior of Johnson and Seau.
Johnson says years ago he was diagnosed him with type-1 bipolar disorder, a action he blames on arch injuries. Admitting this cannot be accepted in Johnson's case, academician abrasion experts acquire begin accessible links amid bipolar affection and mid-life behavior issues and CTE.
"Certain things appear in your life," he says, "that you aloof can't appear aback from."
After authoritative the video for Jaylen a few years back, Johnson says he spent the abutting 72 hours cycling from one affair to the next, adventuresome bar assemblage or badge or alike afterlife to accompany him down. Aback annihilation did, he kept going.
At one point he sat on a sidewalk, exhausted and disturbing to breathe, and anticipation of his daughter. She was active with her mother at the time; Jaylen's parents now allotment custody.
Johnson went home, slept it off, and not continued afterward, he says, he awash his buying pale in a club on South Beach and bargain his assimilation of adamantine liquor. He still begin agitation sometimes, including a 2014 arrest for aggravated array involving addition man, and Johnson says he has aback fabricated added changes.
He confused out of a contemporary high-rise in Miami and into a quiet townhouse in Fort Lauderdale, got rid of his guns, took a job with a nonprofit that uses the arts to coach disadvantaged children. Johnson additionally abdicate analysis and banned to booty his assigned medication; he says it's because he's bigger able to administer his impulses himself. All these years later, it's still Johnson adjoin everybody - alike himself.
He has, added recently, abounding his bookshelf not with reminders of his arena career but with photographs of Jaylen and her paintings. If accompany allure him out, added and added he turns them down.
"You affectionate of actualize your own prison," Johnson says. "I've affectionate of barricaded myself in my ambience [with] assertive things that I can handle. That's affectionate of how I exhausted it."
That's accessible aback his babe is actuality - Jaylen spends best weekends with her ancestor and weekdays with her mother in a adjacent boondocks - and a claiming aback she's not. On the nights he's alone, Johnson is added acceptable to sulk or alcohol or adventure into the base of his active mind. If she's here, bedtime is at 8:30, and they comedy amateur or watch television or draw.
"She's, like, a acceptable aberration I have," he says. "She sees article in me that best bodies will never see."
Occasionally they watch football together, Jaylen in her Penn State or Kansas City jersey, and she asks why the announcers sometimes say his name. He explains some of it, and actual anxiously he has amorphous to explain some of the rest.
"Papi," he says he tells her, "used to be absolutely bad."
He doesn't action abundant more, and admitting he's ambiguous what the approaching will bring, Johnson says he wants to acquaint her his accomplished adventure eventually.
Johnson abstracts that in seven added years, or aback she's 14 or so, Jaylen will be old abundant to blot the abstruse attributes of her father: the activity of the affair and the introvert, a man able of abandon and tenderness, the being he absolutely is and the one he wants to be.
He wants his apperception to adhere out at atomic that long. Jaylen ability not like what she learns, but he wants to be present for those conversations.
His better fear, if he were to abandon now, is that Jaylen wouldn't bethink him; his second-biggest is that she would.
"That scares me added than anything," he says. "Sometimes it scares me to tears."
- - -
He's active again, council the Porsche south on a artery not continued afterwards sunrise. Jaylen, who like her Papi is not a morning person, is comatose off in the aback seat.
Earlier, the vehicle's aback latch wouldn't close, and in the 20 or so account since, Johnson hasn't said a word. He weaves through traffic, occasionally affecting 90 mph, and a radio bartering plays a doorbell sound. The accent repeats again. And again. Johnson jabs his feel into the preset button to change the station.
He cracks his knuckles, sighs loudly, checks his phone.
He looks abaft him occasionally, Jaylen comatose or cartoon abstract circles on the glass. She's spending the abutting few canicule with her mother, and Johnson is already afraid about the accessible time by himself. What if accompany alarm and ask him to go drinking? Or if addition crosses him at the amiss moment?
How will he acknowledge this time if the demons come?
For now, she's with him a few added minutes, so Johnson parks the Porsche and lifts her from the aback seat. He carries her adjoin the elementary academy and kisses her audacity as they cantankerous the driveway and abatement into a band of students.
The band starts moving, and he tucks in her shirt and kisses her again. "I'll see you this weekend, okay?" he says, and afresh he turns adjoin the crosswalk.
He's abandoned again, larboard to face the abutting few canicule - and whichever affections and impulses are cat-and-mouse - with his apperception as his abandoned company. He looks abaft him to see Jaylen toddling adjoin the entrance, and with little added than ambiguity ahead, Johnson stands on the barrier and waits for her to alluvion out of afterimage afore stepping, finally, off the edge.
