Looking back on things, my dad feels to me now like a slave. He wasn't owned by a particular person or a particular company (though he did complain about the roofing company). Instead he was a slave to appetites and attitudes—none more than the cures of machismo, of needing to be a man's man and a tough guy.

So much of his trouble from his early hoodlum days to the violence of August 15, 1973 that began his death spiral, derived from embracing machismo. As a result of watching machismo kill him, all my life I've struggled with it the way people struggle with alcohol, with cocaine, with depression. 

"It's not for me, man," I've always said when machismo was offered to me in the form of speed metal, easy lays, beating up the defenseless. But I keep a bottle of it at home, just in case. Found that I've drunk from that bottle at times I can't remember, in ways I can't remember. 

1. BORN TO LOSE
2. YOU GOT BAD BLOOD
3. THE RAGE OLYMPICS
4. NEVER MAN ENOUGH
5. NICE GUYS FINISH LAST
6. BLAME THE KIDS