Johnson had two dominant seasons with the Kansas City Chiefs, rushing for a combined 3,539 yards in 2005 and 2006. In the latter season, he set an NFL record with 416 carries. But he was cut loose by the Chiefs less than three years later, and his NFL career was over by 2011.

Whether it was brain injuries, immaturity, celebrity or some combination, Johnson says aggression became “a switch I couldn’t shut off,” and after a while Jay-Z cut him off via email for being arrested so often, Johnson says, and Mýa once stopped him from jumping from a window.

After two more arrests and a suspension, the Chiefs released Johnson in 2009 after he insulted his head coach on Twitter and for using gay slurs toward a fan and reporters. Years after trying to adapt his personality to an unforgiving game, Johnson found himself too volatile for the NFL. Over his final two seasons, with Washington and Miami, he carried the ball six times.

“Those two combinations, of being angry and not being able to shut that switch off, started to disrupt who I really was,” he says. “And it was just waiting to eat me up.”

Sound and fury

They’re in the living room now, Papi and Jaylen, surrounded by walls undecorated but for the blotchy spackling compound behind them. That’s where, a few years ago, Johnson punched through the drywall.

Jaylen was there, and Johnson says he sent her upstairs before making the hole. The way he describes it, the best he can do sometimes is to shield her view.

“Did you think it was something that you did?” Johnson recalls asking Jaylen afterward, and the girl nodded. “I had to explain it: It’s never your fault.”

But her little mind is expanding quickly, and he worries that these will be some of her earliest memories. And so he tries. It might not seem like it, he admits, but he tries.

On this afternoon, father and daughter play a racing game on Xbox — bright colors, loud sound effects, rapid movement — and after a few minutes, Johnson pauses the game and walks onto his balcony. He stands alone for a minute or two, hands clasped behind his head; he’ll say later he felt the onset of a headache and needed to step away.

He returns, and now it’s homework time. Johnson has high expectations for Jaylen, and he believes the universe was making a point when it gave him a daughter. How better to punish him for shoving or choking women than to assign him a girl to shepherd through a world filled with Larry Johnsons?

“My greatest fear is my daughter falling in love with somebody who’s me,” he’ll say, and he believes if he’s honest and tough with Jaylen, she’ll never accept anyone treating her the way her father treated women.

With the sun filtering between the blinds, Johnson plays with her curly hair as she slides a finger across her sentences.

“All people,” Jaylen reads aloud, and her father interrupts.

“No,” he says. “Why would it say ‘all people?’ It . . .”

He stops, sighs and presses two fingers into his eyelids. She looks back at him, and he tells her to keep reading. He rubs his hands, massages his forehead, checks his watch. He’ll say he sometimes forgets she’s only in second grade.

They move on to her page of math problems: twenty-seven plus seven.

“How many tens?” he asks her.

“Two.”

“And how many ones?”

“Seven.”