The cautionary tale of Jason Peter

After reading an advance copy of former NFL first-round pick Jason Peter's riveting memoir about his grotesquely self-destructive life in football and as a drug addict so out of control that he used to take 80 pain and sleeping pills in a day -- 80! -- I called him Sunday and didn't know quite how to begin the interview. So I just said it.

"I'm shocked you're still alive."

"I am too,'' he said.

The first page of Peter's Hero of the Underground (with Tony O'Neill, St. Martin's Press, due out July 8) took me to the top of a roller coaster and dropped me straight down. In part, it reads:

When you swallow eighty Vicodin, twenty sleeping pills, drink a bottle of vodka, and still survive, a certain sense of invulnerability stays with you. When you continually use drugs with the kind of reckless determination that I did, the limit to how much heroin or crack you can ingest is not defined in dollar amounts but in the amounts your body can withstand without experiencing a seizure or respiratory failure ... when you still wake up to see the same dirty sky over you as the night before, you start to think that instead of dying, maybe your punishment is to live -- to be stuck in this purgatory of self-abuse and misery for an eternity.

Vicodin. Ambien. Cocaine. Crack. Heroin. GHB, the date-rape drug. Lots of others I've never heard of. He's not sure if he's been in rehab six or seven times. He's blown most of the $6.5 million Carolina paid him over a disappointing, injury-filled NFL career with the Panthers. Nights and weeks with prostitutes so numerous ... well, so numerous that his Madame at a high-rolling Manhattan brothel ran out of girls for him.

How did it all happen, this trail that led to one suicide try and thoughts of a second, when he'd use a gun instead of the drugs his body had built up such a tolerance to?

The condensed version: Peter grew up in Middletown, N.J., one of four children of a noted central Jersey restaurateur. He never played football until his junior year in high school, yet he was good enough and big enough (6-foot-5, 275 pounds) after a year of prep school to earn a full ride where his brother Christian was starring -- Nebraska. He played well enough there to be the 14th pick in the 1998 draft, by Carolina. But he could never stay healthy for the Panthers, and seven shoulder and neck surgeries later, he was cut in 2001 ... for his own good.

This is more than a book about a druggie who had a failed pro football career. It's a good look into the sordid world of how a pro football player survives when he feels pain every day of his life. And Peter doesn't blame Nebraska, the Panthers, the NFL or his family.

"I didn't want to put the blame on anyone for my drug use -- anyone but me,'' he said. "I've got great parents. I had all the advantages any kid would want growing up. I take all the blame for everything. There are guys who come out of the surgeries I had and they don't get addicted.''