William K. Richardson did not set out to become a writer. He set out to become a DJ. That dream landed him a job at a Memphis nightclub called 2001, where he spun records for eight hundred drunk dancers on New Year’s Eve 1979. He was eighteen years old and thought he had life figured out.

He did not.

The DJ gigs kept coming. So did the boxing matches, the broken hands, the college football tryout that went nowhere, and the teaching certificate he earned after failing out of school twice. Richardson spent thirty years standing in front of high school English classrooms and another twenty-one years behind turntables. He coached wrestling teams that won respect from richer schools. He fought professional fights that left him with headaches and stories. He also watched his mother bury a marriage to a violent man and then buried her too soon.

What Richardson never did was marry. He never had children. That absence haunts every page of his memoir. He lives now in Naples, Florida, with his younger brother Keith, not far from the beach he never visits. He still works out daily. He still carries his father’s violence in his posture. And he finally, at sixty-four, sat down to write the truth about a life that looked successful from the outside and felt empty in the places that counted. This is his first book. He hopes it is not his last.