It was a normal football play during a normal football practice, a Tuesday night in August 2008, not long after school started and not long before the team’s first game of the season. They were working on kickoff returns. Joey was on the front line of blockers for the side that was returning the kickoff. The kicker accidentally popped the ball up, a short kick, so all the players were running toward one another. Joey was hit and fell backward. He smacked the back of his head on the ground. “Joey, you all right?” someone shouted. “Good, coach!” Joey replied, and then ran back to the huddle.
A couple of minutes later, Joey took another hit to the head. Again, nothing remarkable. But this time, Joey walked toward Sue on the sidelines. “Sue, I just feel weird,” he said.
“OK, let’s take your helmet off,” Sue told him.
He said his legs felt wobbly. She told him to sit down. She looked into eyes. His pupils blew out. Then, his legs gave out, and he fell into Wilson’s arms before collapsing to the turf. “We gotta call 911!” Wilson yelled to Kluver. Inside his skull, Joey’s brain was bleeding, just like Kluver’s friend Matt Hanke’s had some two decades before. Standing over Joey on the field, Kluver’s mind flashed back.
Joey was in the midst of a full-blown seizure. His whole body went rigid. Out of his mouth came a terrifying groaning noise. Wilson lay next to him and spoke directly into his ears: “Stay with me, Joe, stay with me.” She rubbed his sternum. Wilson cut off his jersey and pads just in case the EMTs needed to use a defibrillator. It was twelve or thirteen minutes before the ambulance showed up. The EMTs put Joey on a stretcher. The ambulance idled. The EMTs weren’t going fast enough for Wilson: “Why aren’t you guys moving? His brain is bleeding! He’s not going to come out of it until they drill a hole in his skull!”
Kluver got in the back of the ambulance. Joey was breathing but unconscious. The EMTs intubated him to ease his breathing. The ambulance raced up and down the hills of US Highway 69, past the grain silos, past the miles of farmland and forest, and then the miles of strip malls and chain restaurants, sprinting toward the emergency room at Blank Children’s Hospital in Des Moines. The entire drive, Kluver thought Joey was going to die. In Indianola, Wilson, who was still at practice, kept calling Joey’s mother, but her phone was off. His dad was on a golf course and couldn’t be reached. Wilson sent an assistant superintendent to pick up Joey’s mother and drive her to the hospital.
Back on the field, nobody knew what to do: A teenage boy had just collapsed on the field, and the head coach had jumped into the ambulance headed to the hospital. So the defensive coordinator, Myles Easter Sr., piped up with a plan: They would continue the practice. They had a game coming up. Plus, they had to get the boys’ minds moving, not staying focused on Joey. Fifteen minutes after the ambulance had left, Zac Easter’s knee got clipped on a play, and he hobbled off to the sideline with a strained medial collateral ligament. It would keep Zac, then a junior, out of practice for a few days.
By 7:00 p.m., the entire football team and the players’ parents—more than a hundred people in all, including Zac Easter and his father—had gathered in the waiting room at the hospital. Doctors explained to Joey’s family that he had severed a vein that runs through the brain, and it was bleeding. Surgeons removed a flap of bone from the fifteen-year-old’s skull to relieve the pressure. The surgeon explained the uncertainty: “He could walk out of here tomorrow, he could be here for months, he could die tonight.” A chaplain prayed with the family.
For the next three weeks, Joey remained in a coma in the intensive care unit. He developed pneumonia, so doctors put in a tracheostomy tube. Almost every afternoon, Wilson and Kluver made the drive from Indianola to Des Moines to visit Joey and his family in the hospital. His head was swollen. They prayed over him as they watched his body shed weight. After three weeks, like in a movie, Joey suddenly woke up from the coma. His mother was at his bedside. He could talk, but not well, so he gave his mom a thumbs-up.
The upcoming years would be difficult for Joey. He learned to speak again in speech therapy. His food came to him through an IV in his nose until he learned how to swallow properly. He went through physical therapy and occupational therapy. He returned to school in November with a one-on-one associate accompanying him. His short-term memory was terrible, his cognition not nearly what it had been. His personality changed in a way that many people’s personalities do after traumatic brain injuries. He became much more honest, almost to a fault, as if he had zero social filter. He developed a love-hate relationship with football; he still looked back fondly on his years playing the sport, and yet he recognized this was the sport that nearly killed him. For years, he struggled with alcohol and drugs, saying those were the only things that made him feel normal. Some days, he’d be drunk by noon. His parents put him in an in-patient Christian-based home for teens and adults struggling with substance abuse. He didn’t go to college even though his two brothers went to elite private colleges.
In time, Joey found his own path. He got a part-time job at the local Fareway grocery store, unloading trucks starting at 5:00 a.m. These days, he works out three days a week. He reads Christian devotionals in the morning and at night. He goes to church weekly, and to Christian youth group meetings at Simpson College.
But when he was in the coma, his parents didn’t know what his new normal might someday look like. First, they just wanted him to live.
While Joey was still in the coma, the Indianola High School football team took a vote. The players wanted to do something meaningful for their teammate. They decided to recognize Joey for his toughness on the football field as well as his toughness as he recovered from the injury. Even though he wasn’t conscious, they hoped their little gesture would be appreciated, and perhaps give him a small mental boost. Zac Easter and another teammate drove up to Des Moines after a football practice one evening and went into Joey’s hospital room. Zac presented him with one of the coveted Indianola football T-shirts: BIG HAMMER.
Six
The Roller Coaster
“I want to tell my own life story,” Zac Easter typed, “just in case something ever happens to me and I’d rather tell my own story through my eyes about my secret struggle before anyone tries to tell my story like nothing was wrong. I swear on everything in my life that I am telling the truth and telling my life story exactly as I remember it because for me, I can finally take off my mask I wear every day. I realize that some of this might be shocking for some of you reading this because I am an expert at waking up every day and putting on my fake mask to do everything I can to not show any weakness, and not let anyone know what I’m actually going through and why I actually do some of the things I do. I was always able to disguise a lot of my actions in the eyes of other people by making it look like I was just extremely motivated or something like that.
“Working out was my only escape when I realized something wsa off with me from the concussions. For years, working out has been the only thing that actually made me feel human again and made me feel less depressed. The only way I knew how to handle my depression and feel good inside was by my on my faith in god, listening to music, lifting, and running. Many people just thought that I was super motivated and determined to be army special forces, but in reality I kept up the super muscle image to look tough on the outside when I was really crying everyday on the inside . . . Obviously this was able to only help for so long before working out stopped taking me to my happy place where I was free of the internal pain. It’s hard to hold back tears even now when I think about the times I was feeling so down from depression that I loaded up my .22 rifle or shotgun and put it to my head, and instead talk myself out of out by going for a run in the trails out back and coming inside to lie to my about how I’m such an army badass and how I’m going to be special forces.”
It was cold in the timber.
The Easter men had woken up well before sunrise on December 5, 2009, eaten a hearty breakfast, packed up their firearms, and hopped in the pickup, headi
ng west. Barely a month before, Zac had played in his final high-school football game. The concussion he had suffered in that game would end his sporting career. Wrestling, a sport that’s insanely popular in the upper Midwest during the long, windy months of winter on the plains, was no longer a possibility for Zac. Sue Wilson had refused to clear him. But no school trainer could stop him from one of the most joyful experiences of winter for an Easter man: hunting deer with his dad and his brothers.
To get to the family’s timber—that same land that had been homesteaded by the boys’ great-great-great-great-grandfather, Jacob Stickler, a century and a half before—the Easter men drove up and down the gravel roller coaster that bisects farm fields near their house, onto the pavement, over Interstate 35, past the huge industrial chicken farm, past the white house at the top of the hill where Zac’s dad grew up, and right onto Heritage Avenue. The truck’s headlights shone in the darkness as the Stringtown Cemetery, where generations of the Easter family had been buried, appeared on the left. On the right was the big metal gate leading to their property.
The truck bumped over the rocky terrain—plenty of trucks have gotten stuck here on muddier days—and meandered down the hill. The Easter men got out, grabbed their guns, and strode into the timber. Generations of hunters in this family had stalked this land, all the way back to an ancestor who’d participated in Sherman’s March to the Sea during the Civil War. The men walked through a clearing and up a wooded hill. To one side were the tall cliffs above the meandering North River and Howerdon Creek, full of carp and catfish. Somewhere nearby was a cave where a World War I veteran, shell-shocked from the war, harmless, but with a spooky glass eye, had once made his home.
By 7:30 a.m., first light had crept over the horizon. The Easter men were strategically spread out through the trees on the side of the hill, connected by cell phones so they could text one another their hunting plans. Zac’s older brother, Myles II, had his doubts that they’d find any deer of note that day. He’d spent untold hours here during the bow-hunting season earlier in the fall and never saw a single thing worth a shot. But the other Easter men suspected deer might be running along the ridge of this hill, like they sometimes did. It was minutes after sunrise, which marks the moment when you can legally shoot at deer, when three or four shots rang out of the stillness. They came from the vicinity of where Zac was stationed, three hundred yards or so away from Myles II.
“What’d you hit, Elmer Fudd?” Zac’s older brother texted him.
“Just a monster ten-point buck,” Zac texted back.
Another text message popped up in Myles II’s phone: A picture of the ten-point buck Zac had just slayed. The antler rack was tall and wide. The deer was huge. The men struggled to pull it down the hill toward their truck. This was a big deal. The family would take this one to a taxidermist, and soon, the neck and head of the buck Zac killed that morning would be mounted on the living room wall, the biggest and most beautiful hunting prize the Easter family had ever bagged, Zac’s lifelong trump card over his brothers and even his father.
The highlight of Zac’s senior year wasn’t football. It was the 10-point buck he bagged in December.
This was good: A happy moment Zac would remember forever.
The rest of his senior year in high school was the furthest thing from good, and the furthest thing from happy.
“My senior year of high school was the worst,” Zac wrote. “I took pro hormones to get absolutely jacked and I don’t think the hormones helped with any of the concussions problems either. After my last concussion in high school my life went into the shitter on the inside. Back then I also wasn’t very self aware and had no idea that the concussions are what fucked me up. Something changed in me after that last concussion against Ankeny. My depression kicked into full gear and I started having symptoms of anxiety. My emotions have never been the same after the last football concussion either.”
Football was over. Soon, so was high school. Whatever the reasons—the head injuries suffered in football, the drinking and partying, the usual self-doubt any teenager experiences when transitioning from the safety of the family home to the uncertainty of the world beyond—Zac felt like a completely different person after high school. His parents didn’t notice anything amiss; he just seemed like a regular old eighteen-year-old kid heading off to college. Sure, there were some issues—a little anxiety, a little depression, a little homesickness—but it never seemed like anything more than the normal growing pains of a teenage boy learning to become his own man.
Zac decided to attend Kirkwood Community College’s satellite campus in Iowa City, two hours east of his parents’ house. His less-than-great grades meant attending the University of Iowa wasn’t a possibility at first, but he wanted that real college experience, so he decided to attend this community college near the U of I’s campus. Ask any student about the party scene there, and you’ll hear stories about the Ped Mall, the Pedestrian Mall in downtown Iowa City, adjacent to campus. It’s essentially Disney World for postadolescents, a carnival of debauchery on Friday and Saturday nights when school is in session. (Trust me—I’ve been there.)
Zac spent plenty of nights striding down the Ped Mall his freshman year, chasing skirts and skirting cops. The community college campus was small, with buildings dedicated to automotive collision repair and horticulture and swine and beef education. But one of the best parts for Zac was that it was just three miles down the road from Kinnick Stadium. There, nearly seventy thousand fans on fall Saturdays filled the parking lots to tailgate and the bleachers to cheer on the Iowa Hawkeyes football team. The stadium was named after a person who was the Platonic ideal of what a football player aspired to be: Nile Kinnick, the 1939 Heisman Trophy winner (and soon-to-be law student) who Iowans expected would someday become governor, perhaps even president, until he was killed in 1943 as a navy aviator during World War II.
On the surface, it seemed like college-bound Zac had a world of possibilities in front of him.
It would have been a dream to take the gridiron wearing the black-and-gold helmets of the Iowa Hawkeyes, but Zac had known for years he was never going to be a Division I football player. He was still steeped in a football mentality, though, so he spent the summer before college filling his body full of those prohormone supplements and pumping iron. Even at his most fit, Zac still noticed his flaws in the mirror before he noticed his brawn. He wanted his body to be ripped, even if punishing workout sessions meant more punishing headaches. At the freshman orientation session before classes started, he ran into a friend from high school, a fellow diehard Green Bay Packers fan from Indianola named Jake Powers, and later that afternoon the two went looking for apartments together. Jake was as workout obsessed as Zac, so once they moved in together, instead of sleeping in beds, they would sleep on couches, set multiple alarms for 4:00 or 4:30 a.m. to make sure they woke up, and go to the gym together for intense training sessions.
Mostly, Zac had a typical college experience: beer and girls and wild nights, with the occasional classes mixed in. One time, Zac’s younger brother, Levi, was visiting for the weekend. Zac was napping when there was a fight in the apartment building. During the fight, someone shoved Levi. A friend called Zac to wake him up. Zac jumped out of bed, sprinted down the hall, and tried to destroy the person who’d shoved his brother. Zac busted a door down trying to chase the guy. The cops were called. “I had to grab him, give him a bear hug, and get him out of there,” Jake recalled. Another time, Zac and his roommate were out at a party. They found a backpack sitting on a sidewalk, and they picked it up: free backpack! “It was one of our drunker nights,” Jake laughed. A kid followed them home, shouting, “That’s my bag! That’s my bag!” They ignored him. The kid called the cops. Just as the two roommates were about to get on a bus to go back to their apartment, police cars showed up: “Throw the bag on the ground!” one of the officers called out. They were arrested for public intoxication and thrown in the drunk tank with other drunk college kids.
At 5:00 a.m., a fight broke out when one of the drunks peed on someone who was sleeping. Worse still: The next morning, Zac’s older brother was playing in a collegiate football game an hour away, and Zac and Jake were supposed to meet Zac’s parents at the field before the game. Jake was worried; Zac’s dad had been his football coach, and Jake was scared of him. “The whole time we were driving over there, we were like, ‘I really don’t want to have to face your dad right now,’ ” Jake said. By the time they made it to the game, it was the middle of the first quarter. Zac’s dad was sitting alone at the top of the bleachers, quietly analyzing the game. After a bit, the boys, hungover, worked up the nerve to climb the bleachers and talk to him. “You’re not going to believe what happened to us last night,” Zac said. They told Myles Sr. the story. “So you guys went to jail?” he said, eyebrows raised. He shook his head. “Hope you learned your lesson.” And that was that.
College was fun, but it was the destructive type of fun that masked Zac’s bigger issues. He didn’t really want to be in college per se. Academics were never his thing. He was there to party, and he was there because he thought that would be the only way he could get back to being the fun, happy-go-lucky Zac Easter from high school: Odie from Garfield, that perpetually upbeat dog who was always everybody’s friend. But in classes, he felt stupid. He struggled with reading. He struggled writing even a one-page paper. Getting his brain to focus for a single period was a struggle. The depression led to drinking, and the drinking led to more depression, and more depression led to more drinking, and so on.
“Some nights I’d lie in my bed crying wondering what happened to me,” he wrote. “I started talking to god and my faith is what carried me though some serious suicidal thoughts.”
Love, Zac Page 12