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Wrong answer, buddy. I tried to rip his locked door off its hinge, and when I remembered the open back window, I fished inside, tearing out a big piece of his shirt and then a clump of his hair.

The guy was grabbing as much floorboard as he could, screaming for help while this big lunatic attacked him.

“Get out of the car, or I’ll crush it around you,” I said, and when he didn’t obey, I hoisted the tail end repeatedly as if I could shake him out.

Meanwhile, I was vaguely aware of Elaine standing there calling me every name in the book, which only enraged me more.

I beat the soft top down flat and jumped on the hood and trunk, denting both ends beyond recognition. I picked up the back of the car again and bounced it off the ground, bottoming out the suspension and crushing the underside. I was out of control and breath when I finally realized I had an audience. As the sirens gained, I jumped into the truck with Elaine and drove off.

“You’re a psycho,” she yelled.

She was right.

I was lucky I didn’t get caught.

Of all the times for me to go off the deep end, this wasn’t the best. You see, I had planned to propose to Elaine that night.

So I did the one thing I could think of to right this sinking ship. I bribed her.

Leaving her huffing away in the parking lot of an ice cream parlor, I went inside. A few minutes later, I reappeared with a tub of peppermint ice cream. It was Swensen’s, her favorite, and these 5 gallons would go a long way with a girl who weighed only about 115 pounds.

At least it was enough to get Elaine to agree to come to the party.

Outside of the house full of partygoers, I stopped her. “You have every reason in the world to turn me down, but if you would like to, I want to marry you.”

It was the worst proposal in the history of mankind.

2 Still she said yes, and for that I am eternally grateful.

Looking back on that day, I realize I felt as if that stranger had spit in my face right in front of the girl I was going to marry. I couldn’t let that happen. But my behavior spoke to a larger issue. I was heading down the wrong road.

I wouldn’t say I looked for fights, but I certainly didn’t back down when they fell in my lap. For some reason, they did a lot. It was probably because I was now bouncing in nightclubs and country bars.

My dad saw the writing on the wall. He knew I’d been doing steroids off and on the last two years, and it scared him because it fueled my aggressive tendencies when people pushed my buttons just right. “You’re going to kill yourself one of two ways,” he warned. “By getting into a fight or by driving your car or motorcycle so fast you crash and burn.”

After getting into a big argument with Jim Dena, the owner of Samson’s Gym, I left the powerlifting world. To make ends meet, I started picking up odd jobs: painting streets, working at a packaging company, taking on heavy lifting projects, and anything else I could find.

One day while I laid down cement blockades for parking spaces at Chapman University, the head of security drove by in his golf cart. “Do you want a job working security?” he said.

Drenched in sweat from head to toe and burning under the brutal sun, I gave him the no-brainer answer.

Being a security guard was quite boring. I didn’t have a gun or any real authority outside of the college campus, so I’d just cruise around in my golf cart, stopping to talk to people.

The “scenery” at Chapman was fantastic, but Elaine couldn’t stand me being around so many other girls. It didn’t pay well enough for me to argue anyway, so I lasted nine months.

That’s when I turned to what I knew: the police force. It was either go to jail for losing my cool in the wrong moment or put others there in my place. It wasn’t a hard choice when you thought about it that way.

With my dad’s overwhelming blessing, I applied for both the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the Los Angeles Police Department and waited to see which one would take me first.

You’d probably be relieved to hear that sheriff and police departments require a lengthy interview process,