On May 29, 1985, my father saved me from death by soccer. In fact, he did the life-saving a few days prior, in altogether non-dramatic fashion, when, over dinner, he forbade me from attending the European Champions' Cup Final between Juventus and Liverpool at the Heizel Stadium in Brussels. As a result, I wasn't among the 39 who died there after an assault by Liverpool fans, followed by a stampede and a deadly crush in the section where I would have been.

This was the time I had a tough training run on the Arkansas River in which I dumped my crew of fellow trainees into Three Forks rapid, into rocks and, unknowingly, into rebar, sharp and ugly metal. Two of the crew were unnerved from the rebar, the rest from the amount of rocks they had to swim through before I got them back in the raft. Two hoisted themselves back into the boat as I reached for the others.

This is about the old lion and the young lion. This is about the moderate and the progressive. This is about a father who’s the same age as the four girls who got blown up in Birmingham and a son who married a white woman in Montgomery without the city bothering to blink. This is about the soldier and chef who raised a college professor.

But it’s not about that.

If I’m from anywhere, I suppose it’s Iowa. I was born there but left when I was two, my father hauling my mom and my older sister and me across nearly 1,000 miles of interstate to Wilmington, Delaware, where he took a company job selling industrial tools. It would be almost four decades before I returned. Any memories of the Hawkeye state cast during those early years must have been ousted rather swiftly by generic pastoral renderings, the likes of which adorn the glossy calendars in pharmacy checkout lanes.

You are driving into the mountains. This is the first thing you notice as you move deeper into Western Pennsylvania. The second is the message on the dashboard: Low tire pressure. A patter of rain starts. The sky darkens; the sun retires early in January. It’s probably best to pull over. Call someone, but who? You don’t know anyone in the Pittsburgh area. Scroll through the contacts in your phone; dial the first number that makes sense.

To me, the word Punk describes a certain type of people, a certain lifestyle. Punks are extreme in their look. Extreme in fashion and behavior. Punks are loud and proud and in your face. They don’t adhere to any rules. For example, a punk girl might choose to not shave her armpits or legs. She simply lets her body do what it naturally does; she does not alter it. Punk can be anything from dreadlocks, hair in its most unaltered form, to bright intense dyed colors, spiked up with hair cement into sharp inhuman angles.

Listen:

My mother texts me from my dead father’s phone on the third day of the National Football league draft. She promises she only texts me from his phone as if that will placate the sheer terror that overwhelms me every time his name pops up on my lock screen.

He’s been dead less than two months.

Too soon, mother. Too soon.

To keep us out of trouble, my mom put us in karate class. I hated the pajama pants and all the superstition. But before I knew it, I was lined up and bowing to some guy in a karate gi with an American flag design. Since Mom was frugal, we took classes in the recreation room of the church. Sensei Gomez only charged $20 a month.

Over time, I enjoyed it. I made friends with Freddy, or Speedy as we called him. Like a champion chess player, he would predict your move, evade and strike you all in a blink.

He was sitting on the couch when he got the call. They called it a couch though in actuality it was a futon left by the previous renters of the apartment and perhaps even the renters before them. No one knew the origins of the futon. No one had been around long enough to trace all of its stains.

On the tennis courts, Edward was the new guy—the greenhorn, the rookie—though not necessarily because of his age. At 64, he figured he was on the young end, but maybe not the youngest. They were playing doubles on two courts—eight guys altogether. He was the eighth. The others had apparently been playing every morning since they (he and his wife, Ellen, God rest her soul) moved to the Cape.

I wandered into the grand ballroom of the Genesis Convention Center in Gary, Indiana, where Bob Uecker was the featured guest at a sports card show. Among the smell of egg muffins and beer farts, overweight middle-aged guys hovered over three rows of tables full of plastic-wrapped card displays and open binders. Piles of sawdust and roofing nails from last week’s home show littered the same red, blue, and yellow kaleidoscope carpet as my friend Jared’s bar mitzvah thirty years ago.

The habitual smokers lit their cigarettes in front of the pachinko parlor. Their grey hair was plated to their heads, their faces scarred by age, their suits disheveled, and eyes reflecting a dull gleam. In an almost perfect unison, lulled by an exhaled cloud of smoke, they let their heads fall back onto the wall in a movement of fatigue. As the parlor doors slid open, the sound of metallic balls rattling in plastic trays, coins clinking, dropping into slots, the siren call of mechanical voices, all boomed in their ears.