Up Till Now: The Autobiography

switch, and when it goes on, I lose sight of the potential consequences of my actions. I take risks that I shouldn’t take, but I can’t seem to help myself. My family has accepted the fact that they can’t stop me. In fact, once, as a Father’s Day gift, my daughter Leslie and her husband, Gordon Walker, gave me a certificate to go skydiving. This wasn’t something I’d ever spoken about wistfully, but they decided it would make me happy to jump out of an airplane. And of course it did, although admittedly I screamed all the way down.
    I don’t know why I put myself in these situations, but I continue to do so. Perhaps because I’m afraid I’m going to miss something? So sometimes I find myself in the middle of a precarious situation, wondering, what the hell am I doing here? Am I crazy? In 2005, for example, I agreed to participate in the largest paintball fight in history to raise money for my therapeutic riding program. I had a wonderful idea—well, it seemed like a wonderful idea at the time—I would film the entire event and sell the DVD to raise even more money. But if it was going to be good entertainment it needed to have a spectacular opening. I’ve got it! This epic paintball battle was going to take place in Joliet, Illinois, and I would paramotor up the Ohio River and land on the playing field.
    Can you really do that? the organizers asked me.
    Why not? I responded. Once again, I was about to find out exactly why not. The preparations went very well. Four thousand people paid one hundred dollars each to participate. I was going to be the captain of one team, the greatest paintball player in the nation was going to be the captain of the opposition. I had been paramotoring several times; basically, you put a seventy-five-pound engine with a propeller and a parachute on your back and take off. It’s a glorious experience—I’ve flown with flocks of birds—but it also can be very dangerous; people have died doing this. Generally you fly about a thousand feet high at ten or fifteen miles per hour, holding a dead man’s throttle in one hand and the controls for your parachute in your other hand. By holding down the throttle the propeller createsthe wind in your parachute that keeps you aloft; when you release the throttle the engine stops and you float down and land gently. In theory.
    I took off about ten miles from the playing field. It was a beautiful morning and I was following the Ohio River. I was about six hundred feet high and my hand began to sweat because I was unfamiliar with the equipment. The throttle began to slide out of my hand and I dropped to five hundred feet. It was then I noticed that there were potentially lethal power lines alongside the river. I began to sweat a little more. If necessary, I thought, I could land in the river, I’m a strong swimmer—but then I realized I was not a strong swimmer with a seventy-five-pound engine strapped to my back and wrapped in a parachute. I descended to four hundred feet.
    The only thing keeping me in the air was that throttle and I was holding it down with my pinkie. I didn’t have enough altitude to release my grip and quickly grab hold again to restart the engine— besides, I was too nervous to attempt that. So I just held on with my pinkie, pressing down as hard as I could, literally holding on for life. And suddenly I realized I was in the middle of another why-amI-doing-this moment. Why am I risking my life for a stunt?
    I barely made it over the river. As I looked down and saw the thousands of people gathered there for this paintball war looking up, for the first time it occurred to me that all of them had exactly the same thought in mind: I’m going to shoot Captain Kirk.
    The object of a paintball war is to compile points by shooting enemy soldiers, capturing his flag, and shooting his commanding officer. Shooting me. The primary rule governing the battle is that there is no primary rule: everything is legal. You can cheat, lie, do anything you can to score points. For example, I had paused for lunch when one of my soldiers walked into my tent—and confessed he was actually a spy sent to shoot me. He’d changed his shirt to get through my lines. “But I can’t do it,” he said. “I love you and I can’t shoot you.”
    “Yes, you can,” I said, and so our plot was hatched. He took me prisoner and we marched back to his headquarters. Unfortunately, aswe got close I began to feel a sharp, throbbing pain in my left