Here's another story about Steve and my drug and booze fueled misadventures in Florida:
My forty-something brain, caught in the amber of nostalgia, fixates on those glorious days when Steve and I carved our particular brand of chaos across the Florida panhandle, circa 2008-2012. One memory surfaces with crystalline clarity—a night that has embedded itself in my neural pathways like shrapnel from some beautiful explosion.
Not far outside Tampa, headed inland toward the sweaty armpit of America's peninsular appendage, sits a small swamp town called Ocala—at least I think it was Ocala, time having performed its usual slight-of-hand on geographical certainties. Once you've tasted the salt air of the Keys, the rest of Florida reveals itself as what it truly is: America's equivalent of a sweaty, fat woman's asshole.
But in this particular asshole of geography sat Skipper's Smoke Shack, a dive bar that served food capable of inducing religious experiences and, more importantly, had earned its reputation as the premier venue for that beautiful bastard child of punk rock known as psychobilly. If you've absorbed The Misfits into your bloodstream, you understand the sonic DNA we're discussing.
This was the era of the Geico gecko's media saturation campaign, when that twangy rockabilly song by The Legendary Shack Shakers first crawled through television speakers into America's collective unconscious. JD Wilkes—incredible artist, singular human specimen—fronted this band, and the commercial's success had catapulted them from regional obscurity into national touring status. They were scheduled to desecrate Skipper's that weekend.
Steve materialized at my condo door at precisely 6 PM, his entrance choreographed with the casual presumption of Cosmo Kramer invading Jerry's apartment—unannounced, uninvited, inevitable. I was still imprisoned in my corporate monkey suit, that despised uniform of capitalist servitude, tie knotted like a noose around my neck. Steve, cool as liquid nitrogen, produced his calling card: a substantial bag of cocaine, the universal key that unlocked every adventure in his considerable arsenal.
The mathematics were simple: I possessed the only driver's license and vehicle in his shrinking social circle that hadn't been permanently alienated by his particular brand of chicanery. Everyone else had ostracized him completely, cutting him from their lives like a malignant tumor. So it fell to me to pilot our expedition to Ocala. Fortunately, we shared dual addictions—psychobilly music and pharmaceutical enhancement—and Steve's pockets bulged with hundred-dollar bills, his twice-my-paycheck salary (despite working half my hours and reporting to me, he made double my income because he was simply the best goddamn salesperson I'd witnessed in twenty-five years of marketing warfare).
We folded ourselves into my aging VW Jetta and began our pilgrimage. I'd never visited Skipper's, but everyone in our music scene knew its mythical status. I'd been wanting to make this journey for months. I'd never heard of The Legendary Shack Shakers by name, but their music had infiltrated my consciousness through that Geico commercial, corporate jingle transformed into gateway drug.
The bar squatted beside black swamp water where alligator eyes surfaced and disappeared like prehistoric surveillance cameras. Inside, the ecosystem revealed its magnificent absurdity: girls assembled from Southern Gothic fever dreams, wearing cut-off jean shorts and flannel shirts tied around their breasts like they'd stepped directly from the Dukes of Hazzard soundstage into three-dimensional reality.
Steve and I wore our little cocaine jar necklaces, complete with miniature spoons—practical jewelry for the pharmaceutical enthusiast. I nursed a gin and tonic with religious devotion while he systematically dumped hundred-dollar quantities of blow into every straight Jack Daniel's he ordered. Despite consuming enough stimulants to trigger cardiac arrest in large mammals, he maintained his characteristic calm, cool collectedness, grinding his teeth while I felt my skin threatening to explode outward from internal pressure.
The band emerged like a vision from World War II. JD Wilkes wore a military jumpsuit that looked authentically period—which, I would learn later that evening, it actually was.
They delivered an absolutely transcendent set. To this day, this performance ranks in my personal top five concerts, exceeded only by that miraculous night when Steve and I were wandering St. Petersburg's bar district and stumbled into a dive bar with fewer than twenty people watching Trent Reznor perform an acoustic set solo. Literally Trent fucking Reznor, no advertisements, no public announcements—he'd simply materialized in St. Pete and decided to visit a dive bar the same night we happened to wander in. But that's another story for another time, assuming this series proves successful, which I doubt judging from my recent Substack engagement. You'd think fifty thousand subscribers would generate more than ten likes per story.
But I digress. JD the singer embodied kinetic energy in human form, never ceasing movement throughout the entire set. He played harmonica, danced, sang, performed stand-up comedy—everything a rock star should master to manipulate crowd dynamics into pure ecstasy.
I leaned toward Steve: "This guy has to be on even more blow than both of us combined." He laughed in agreement.
Midway through the set, during a song called "Blood on the Bluegrass"—about the Roderick Ferrell vampire murders that had stained Florida not long before this performance—Steve simply rose from his chair and walked to the center of the stage. I had never witnessed this man dance in my entire acquaintance with him. What emerged was the most awkwardly magnificent avant-garde interpretative dance performance I have ever observed: Steve, dressed like some hybrid of South Park goth kids and post-apocalyptic Mad Max villain, his skin pale as fresh snow, moving like he was auditioning for a musical so far off-Broadway it existed on another planet.
The assembled hillbillies stared in complete incomprehension. I heard one large redneck specimen declare, "Look at that little faggot dancing like a faggot"—a perfect example of Central Florida's intellectual sophistication. But I digress.
Then something magical occurred. After the song concluded, JD Wilkes began stripping off his jumpsuit down to his tighty-whitie underwear and threw it directly to Steve. Somehow Steve had anticipated this moment—his hand was already positioned in the air as if he intended to catch something that hadn't yet been thrown.
Steve caught the sweat-soaked garment and waved to the crowd, who stood awestruck that this amazing performer considered this dancing fool worthy of receiving his jumpsuit as a personal souvenir.
Twenty minutes after the show ended, we were sitting at the bar when JD approached and settled beside us. He explained that the jumpsuit had belonged to his uncle in World War II or something similar—I couldn't hear clearly because I was eight gin and tonics deep and my brain felt simultaneously imploding and exploding from the cocaine saturation.
Steve and JD conversed like old friends until my dumb ass interjected with the obvious question: how much blow did Mr. Wilkes consume before a set to generate that level of energy?
He looked at me and laughed. "You see this drink in my hand?"
"Yep."
"It's just water. I don't use drugs or drink. I just got natural energy."
Afterward, he shook our hands and waved goodbye as Steve and I began scanning the crowd for single women to accompany us back to our hotel room.
I really miss that guy. I hope he's still out there somewhere, acting as weird as ever with zero fucks to give anyone. The world is his oyster and he's going to shuck that thing raw until the day he either dies or it ends.
I had a good friend growing up named Joe Ross. We nicknamed him “ooh ooh” because he was always saying that. He vanished like that except he took his few belongings with him in his VW bus but, not a word to anyone. Twenty-three years later I was reading the credits in a Rush, Exit Stage Left album cover and got to the area listing the stage hands. There it was listed as Joe “ooh ooh” Ross.
Just in case you are bricklayer 33 club and you think I revealed some secret information. His name wasn't even Steve. That is just a placeholder for the fact I never asked him his real name.
not bricklayer, am just another Brazilian man who saw too much of himself in this text. Much more than I would have liked, everything has a price in the end. And I didn't want to have paid to see it.
For anyone that wants to hear more about Steve - here's a small story about the mentally retarded girl with Tourette's Syndrome he hooked up with at my old condo.
He was such an odd person. This other time, this guy I grew up with came down to Florida after he learned I was living down there and just showed up at my condo and was like ‘Can I stay on your couch for awhile?’ and we went to school together so I was like sure Jeremy whatever. So a few months later, I realize Jeremy is literally batshit insane from eating ounce after ounce of magic mushrooms all the time when we were still in high school. He meets this girl that has a brain disorder where she will randomly urinate herself and begin going into convulsions during stressful situations. He invites her over to my place one night to apparently ‘show her off’ or something? I don’t really know what he was thinking. I think he was angry I was dating a bikini model back in them days before I turned into a misanthropic, anti-social hater of all things fun. Anyways, Steve just happens to show up that night with his obligatory bottle of top-shelf Jack and a huge bag of cocaine. Steve would often take a cruise to Puerto Rico that his friend owned and would smuggle back ounces of cheap coke. He used to always say his favorite ‘drink’ was Jack and Coke…aine. So I got my mentally ill weirdo friend and his equally weird girlfriend and this guy that stepped out of some hipster drug drunk planet of cool and he has the two of them blowing lines of coke and piss drunk. At one point, she begins to flirt with Steve and this girl was not at all attractive but Steve really did not care what a woman looked like. She started going into a spasm, it was basically a seizure… and Steve convinces her to go to my guest bedroom and spasm on his face. My friend Jeremy sat in my kitchen almost crying for the next hour as I sat there wondering how my life got so strange and listening to the sounds of this girl moaning in her tourette’s syndrome brain disorder orgasm spasms for the next hour. Steve comes out soaked in her urine and just says, ‘mind if I use your shower?’ while Jeremy stared like he wanted to kill him. It was so awkward and amazingly hilarious. I wish I had filmed the stuff we used to do together. I’d be a Youtube millionaire off that content.
eh not so cool anymore. my liver is failing from 30 years of whiskey drunkeness, i am out of shape because i no longer date so no longer give a fuck about taking care of my body, and i have zero friends because i quit doing drugs and drinking.
My definition of being “cool” has always been someone who is 100% genuine all of the time regardless of who is around. Also someone who has a more Libertarian stance in that they live and let live without encroaching on others.
Your liver will heal if allowed. The healthSCARE system put out a myth that organs do not refer are but, they do. If this is what you wish to do, it’s very important to eliminate all seed oils and bad carbs as NAFLD is as bad or worse than that caused by alcohol. As I said, it just depends on what you want to do. For anyone who has been good to others throughout their life, death is the ultimate reward. As far as living sick, everyone has their limits. There certainly are things that are worse than death.
I hope that the time you have left will not be in agony. The worst part about dying is getting there. Well, unless you are told you have to come back as the spirit does not easily fit back into the body it so readily came out of.
He was such an odd person. This other time, this guy I grew up with came down to Florida after he learned I was living down there and just showed up at my condo and was like ‘Can I stay on your couch for awhile?’ and we went to school together so I was like sure Jeremy whatever. So a few months later, I realize Jeremy is literally batshit insane from eating ounce after ounce of magic mushrooms all the time when we were still in high school. He meets this girl that has a brain disorder where she will randomly urinate herself and begin going into convulsions during stressful situations. He invites her over to my place one night to apparently ‘show her off’ or something? I don’t really know what he was thinking. I think he was angry I was dating a bikini model back in them days before I turned into a misanthropic, anti-social hater of all things fun. Anyways, Steve just happens to show up that night with his obligatory bottle of top-shelf Jack and a huge bag of cocaine. Steve would often take a cruise to Puerto Rico that his friend owned and would smuggle back ounces of cheap coke. He used to always say his favorite ‘drink’ was Jack and Coke…aine. So I got my mentally ill weirdo friend and his equally weird girlfriend and this guy that stepped out of some hipster drug drunk planet of cool and he has the two of them blowing lines of coke and piss drunk. At one point, she begins to flirt with Steve and this girl was not at all attractive but Steve really did not care what a woman looked like. She started going into a spasm, it was basically a seizure… and Steve convinces her to go to my guest bedroom and spasm on his face. My friend Jeremy sat in my kitchen almost crying for the next hour as I sat there wondering how my life got so strange and listening to the sounds of this girl moaning in her tourette’s syndrome brain disorder orgasm spasms for the next hour. Steve comes out soaked in her urine and just says, ‘mind if I use your shower?’ while Jeremy stared like he wanted to kill him. It was so awkward and amazingly hilarious. I wish I had filmed the stuff we used to do together. I’d be a Youtube millionaire off that content.
I imagine he was urine- drenched. It sounds as if you are like me in that we are walking miracles to still be alive. It also seems that like me, you need to write a book about your life experiences. I’ve had a rather crazy life for sure being born a sensitive, taking LSD 806 times I an attempt to fix what was wrong with me and be “normal”, experiencing death three times in an 11.5 hour period, going through a time warp while driving through Arkansas, and on and on…. I would have no idea what to title my autobiography other than maybe.. “Don’t Try This at Home!” LoL
I'm 43 also and started my career in inside sales, which was a boilerroom. This hit close to home and the range of characters in a sink or swim sales phoneroom is its own ecosystem worth study and a sitcom. I was 1 of our top salesman and always dreamed they hung my headset from the raptors. I saw everything from blatant fraud, sleeping your way to th etop and even a suicide.
The good memories, laughs, and aquaintances are hard to forget. I was hustling advertisement, were you in a wolf of wallstreet complet sham, as I know you've done some more recent stock stuff? If Steve has a unique last name, look him up on truepeoplesearch or fastpeoplesearch.com, its free and knowing his roundabout age, you'll likely find him or his mobile.
When describing him not being human, it's important to know Hebrews 13:2 ;) 😇🪽
I don't literally think he was an alien. It is literary indulgence. Just art.
As for what we were selling, yeah it was basically a Wolf of Wall Street boiler room. I feel disgusting about working there. One day, about a year after Steve vanished - I had just been promoted to one of the top managerial positions after several managers just did not show up to work again. I was told they had been transferred to another location without warning. A week later, it was payday and I was coming in early to hand out checks with my co-manager. We approached the building and just as we started getting to the entrance, half-a-dozen black SUV's came flying into the parking lot. Seconds later, men in body armor and brandishing fully automatic rifles were rushing towards us as several men in cheap, Men's Warehouse-style suits and wearing dark aviator glasses began sauntering slowly towards us with their FBI and FTC badges drawn. One of them was holding two sets of handcuffs. The two of us just stood there dumbfounded. I was only 28 at the time. My only experience with interacting with law enforcement was one time as a teenager when I was driving to Buffalo late one night and pulled over to the side of the road to take a quick nap because I was afraid of falling asleep at the wheel. The cop assumed I was intoxicated and forced me to do a breathalyzer. The cop was a complete asshole so I expected the same treatment from these federal agents. They informed us that the owner of the company had been illegally billing the credit cards of the customers for several years and when he learned that he was being investigated, he took off back to Italy where he was from. This had happened the previous week, likely the same time that the real managers all skipped town with him. Their apparent plan was to to take two mid-level employees, promote them to top-tier positions, and then have us take the fall. However, these feds were fully aware we were just a couple of middle management nobodies. They interviewed us, asked us if we knew anything they didn't, and then sealed off the office with yellow tape. We had to post up there as the two shifts arrived to get their checks and had to tell them all, 'Sorry, none of us are getting paid because our boss was a lying piece of shit that stole $15 million dollars from our customers.'. That was a really shit day for me. I felt so bad. A lot of these employees were parents. I had to deal with a lot of crying women living paycheck to paycheck that day. I was owed nearly $5,000 for closing a deal the previous week and never got paid. Biggest sale of my life up until that point.
Here's another story about Steve and my drug and booze fueled misadventures in Florida:
My forty-something brain, caught in the amber of nostalgia, fixates on those glorious days when Steve and I carved our particular brand of chaos across the Florida panhandle, circa 2008-2012. One memory surfaces with crystalline clarity—a night that has embedded itself in my neural pathways like shrapnel from some beautiful explosion.
Not far outside Tampa, headed inland toward the sweaty armpit of America's peninsular appendage, sits a small swamp town called Ocala—at least I think it was Ocala, time having performed its usual slight-of-hand on geographical certainties. Once you've tasted the salt air of the Keys, the rest of Florida reveals itself as what it truly is: America's equivalent of a sweaty, fat woman's asshole.
But in this particular asshole of geography sat Skipper's Smoke Shack, a dive bar that served food capable of inducing religious experiences and, more importantly, had earned its reputation as the premier venue for that beautiful bastard child of punk rock known as psychobilly. If you've absorbed The Misfits into your bloodstream, you understand the sonic DNA we're discussing.
This was the era of the Geico gecko's media saturation campaign, when that twangy rockabilly song by The Legendary Shack Shakers first crawled through television speakers into America's collective unconscious. JD Wilkes—incredible artist, singular human specimen—fronted this band, and the commercial's success had catapulted them from regional obscurity into national touring status. They were scheduled to desecrate Skipper's that weekend.
Steve materialized at my condo door at precisely 6 PM, his entrance choreographed with the casual presumption of Cosmo Kramer invading Jerry's apartment—unannounced, uninvited, inevitable. I was still imprisoned in my corporate monkey suit, that despised uniform of capitalist servitude, tie knotted like a noose around my neck. Steve, cool as liquid nitrogen, produced his calling card: a substantial bag of cocaine, the universal key that unlocked every adventure in his considerable arsenal.
The mathematics were simple: I possessed the only driver's license and vehicle in his shrinking social circle that hadn't been permanently alienated by his particular brand of chicanery. Everyone else had ostracized him completely, cutting him from their lives like a malignant tumor. So it fell to me to pilot our expedition to Ocala. Fortunately, we shared dual addictions—psychobilly music and pharmaceutical enhancement—and Steve's pockets bulged with hundred-dollar bills, his twice-my-paycheck salary (despite working half my hours and reporting to me, he made double my income because he was simply the best goddamn salesperson I'd witnessed in twenty-five years of marketing warfare).
We folded ourselves into my aging VW Jetta and began our pilgrimage. I'd never visited Skipper's, but everyone in our music scene knew its mythical status. I'd been wanting to make this journey for months. I'd never heard of The Legendary Shack Shakers by name, but their music had infiltrated my consciousness through that Geico commercial, corporate jingle transformed into gateway drug.
The bar squatted beside black swamp water where alligator eyes surfaced and disappeared like prehistoric surveillance cameras. Inside, the ecosystem revealed its magnificent absurdity: girls assembled from Southern Gothic fever dreams, wearing cut-off jean shorts and flannel shirts tied around their breasts like they'd stepped directly from the Dukes of Hazzard soundstage into three-dimensional reality.
Steve and I wore our little cocaine jar necklaces, complete with miniature spoons—practical jewelry for the pharmaceutical enthusiast. I nursed a gin and tonic with religious devotion while he systematically dumped hundred-dollar quantities of blow into every straight Jack Daniel's he ordered. Despite consuming enough stimulants to trigger cardiac arrest in large mammals, he maintained his characteristic calm, cool collectedness, grinding his teeth while I felt my skin threatening to explode outward from internal pressure.
The band emerged like a vision from World War II. JD Wilkes wore a military jumpsuit that looked authentically period—which, I would learn later that evening, it actually was.
They delivered an absolutely transcendent set. To this day, this performance ranks in my personal top five concerts, exceeded only by that miraculous night when Steve and I were wandering St. Petersburg's bar district and stumbled into a dive bar with fewer than twenty people watching Trent Reznor perform an acoustic set solo. Literally Trent fucking Reznor, no advertisements, no public announcements—he'd simply materialized in St. Pete and decided to visit a dive bar the same night we happened to wander in. But that's another story for another time, assuming this series proves successful, which I doubt judging from my recent Substack engagement. You'd think fifty thousand subscribers would generate more than ten likes per story.
But I digress. JD the singer embodied kinetic energy in human form, never ceasing movement throughout the entire set. He played harmonica, danced, sang, performed stand-up comedy—everything a rock star should master to manipulate crowd dynamics into pure ecstasy.
I leaned toward Steve: "This guy has to be on even more blow than both of us combined." He laughed in agreement.
Midway through the set, during a song called "Blood on the Bluegrass"—about the Roderick Ferrell vampire murders that had stained Florida not long before this performance—Steve simply rose from his chair and walked to the center of the stage. I had never witnessed this man dance in my entire acquaintance with him. What emerged was the most awkwardly magnificent avant-garde interpretative dance performance I have ever observed: Steve, dressed like some hybrid of South Park goth kids and post-apocalyptic Mad Max villain, his skin pale as fresh snow, moving like he was auditioning for a musical so far off-Broadway it existed on another planet.
The assembled hillbillies stared in complete incomprehension. I heard one large redneck specimen declare, "Look at that little faggot dancing like a faggot"—a perfect example of Central Florida's intellectual sophistication. But I digress.
Then something magical occurred. After the song concluded, JD Wilkes began stripping off his jumpsuit down to his tighty-whitie underwear and threw it directly to Steve. Somehow Steve had anticipated this moment—his hand was already positioned in the air as if he intended to catch something that hadn't yet been thrown.
Steve caught the sweat-soaked garment and waved to the crowd, who stood awestruck that this amazing performer considered this dancing fool worthy of receiving his jumpsuit as a personal souvenir.
Twenty minutes after the show ended, we were sitting at the bar when JD approached and settled beside us. He explained that the jumpsuit had belonged to his uncle in World War II or something similar—I couldn't hear clearly because I was eight gin and tonics deep and my brain felt simultaneously imploding and exploding from the cocaine saturation.
Steve and JD conversed like old friends until my dumb ass interjected with the obvious question: how much blow did Mr. Wilkes consume before a set to generate that level of energy?
He looked at me and laughed. "You see this drink in my hand?"
"Yep."
"It's just water. I don't use drugs or drink. I just got natural energy."
Afterward, he shook our hands and waved goodbye as Steve and I began scanning the crowd for single women to accompany us back to our hotel room.
I really miss that guy. I hope he's still out there somewhere, acting as weird as ever with zero fucks to give anyone. The world is his oyster and he's going to shuck that thing raw until the day he either dies or it ends.
Great story! Really enjoyed it... great writing.
I had a good friend growing up named Joe Ross. We nicknamed him “ooh ooh” because he was always saying that. He vanished like that except he took his few belongings with him in his VW bus but, not a word to anyone. Twenty-three years later I was reading the credits in a Rush, Exit Stage Left album cover and got to the area listing the stage hands. There it was listed as Joe “ooh ooh” Ross.
haha that is awesome
Finally! Thank you, enormously.
Just in case you are bricklayer 33 club and you think I revealed some secret information. His name wasn't even Steve. That is just a placeholder for the fact I never asked him his real name.
not bricklayer, am just another Brazilian man who saw too much of himself in this text. Much more than I would have liked, everything has a price in the end. And I didn't want to have paid to see it.
just had to check lol i got some weird cult after me for some reporting i did a few years back and am paranoid to this day
Relax, I'm only a fan
For anyone that wants to hear more about Steve - here's a small story about the mentally retarded girl with Tourette's Syndrome he hooked up with at my old condo.
He was such an odd person. This other time, this guy I grew up with came down to Florida after he learned I was living down there and just showed up at my condo and was like ‘Can I stay on your couch for awhile?’ and we went to school together so I was like sure Jeremy whatever. So a few months later, I realize Jeremy is literally batshit insane from eating ounce after ounce of magic mushrooms all the time when we were still in high school. He meets this girl that has a brain disorder where she will randomly urinate herself and begin going into convulsions during stressful situations. He invites her over to my place one night to apparently ‘show her off’ or something? I don’t really know what he was thinking. I think he was angry I was dating a bikini model back in them days before I turned into a misanthropic, anti-social hater of all things fun. Anyways, Steve just happens to show up that night with his obligatory bottle of top-shelf Jack and a huge bag of cocaine. Steve would often take a cruise to Puerto Rico that his friend owned and would smuggle back ounces of cheap coke. He used to always say his favorite ‘drink’ was Jack and Coke…aine. So I got my mentally ill weirdo friend and his equally weird girlfriend and this guy that stepped out of some hipster drug drunk planet of cool and he has the two of them blowing lines of coke and piss drunk. At one point, she begins to flirt with Steve and this girl was not at all attractive but Steve really did not care what a woman looked like. She started going into a spasm, it was basically a seizure… and Steve convinces her to go to my guest bedroom and spasm on his face. My friend Jeremy sat in my kitchen almost crying for the next hour as I sat there wondering how my life got so strange and listening to the sounds of this girl moaning in her tourette’s syndrome brain disorder orgasm spasms for the next hour. Steve comes out soaked in her urine and just says, ‘mind if I use your shower?’ while Jeremy stared like he wanted to kill him. It was so awkward and amazingly hilarious. I wish I had filmed the stuff we used to do together. I’d be a Youtube millionaire off that content.
Ya know… you seem quite cool yourself. Maybe he saw you the same way that you did him.
eh not so cool anymore. my liver is failing from 30 years of whiskey drunkeness, i am out of shape because i no longer date so no longer give a fuck about taking care of my body, and i have zero friends because i quit doing drugs and drinking.
My definition of being “cool” has always been someone who is 100% genuine all of the time regardless of who is around. Also someone who has a more Libertarian stance in that they live and let live without encroaching on others.
Your liver will heal if allowed. The healthSCARE system put out a myth that organs do not refer are but, they do. If this is what you wish to do, it’s very important to eliminate all seed oils and bad carbs as NAFLD is as bad or worse than that caused by alcohol. As I said, it just depends on what you want to do. For anyone who has been good to others throughout their life, death is the ultimate reward. As far as living sick, everyone has their limits. There certainly are things that are worse than death.
ha no my liver is fucked bro. it's failing. alcohol induced fibrosis. i got maybe 5 years tops.
I hope that the time you have left will not be in agony. The worst part about dying is getting there. Well, unless you are told you have to come back as the spirit does not easily fit back into the body it so readily came out of.
Baaahaha. A 400 pound woman with a five-o’clock shadow. Hilarious but, terrifying.
He was such an odd person. This other time, this guy I grew up with came down to Florida after he learned I was living down there and just showed up at my condo and was like ‘Can I stay on your couch for awhile?’ and we went to school together so I was like sure Jeremy whatever. So a few months later, I realize Jeremy is literally batshit insane from eating ounce after ounce of magic mushrooms all the time when we were still in high school. He meets this girl that has a brain disorder where she will randomly urinate herself and begin going into convulsions during stressful situations. He invites her over to my place one night to apparently ‘show her off’ or something? I don’t really know what he was thinking. I think he was angry I was dating a bikini model back in them days before I turned into a misanthropic, anti-social hater of all things fun. Anyways, Steve just happens to show up that night with his obligatory bottle of top-shelf Jack and a huge bag of cocaine. Steve would often take a cruise to Puerto Rico that his friend owned and would smuggle back ounces of cheap coke. He used to always say his favorite ‘drink’ was Jack and Coke…aine. So I got my mentally ill weirdo friend and his equally weird girlfriend and this guy that stepped out of some hipster drug drunk planet of cool and he has the two of them blowing lines of coke and piss drunk. At one point, she begins to flirt with Steve and this girl was not at all attractive but Steve really did not care what a woman looked like. She started going into a spasm, it was basically a seizure… and Steve convinces her to go to my guest bedroom and spasm on his face. My friend Jeremy sat in my kitchen almost crying for the next hour as I sat there wondering how my life got so strange and listening to the sounds of this girl moaning in her tourette’s syndrome brain disorder orgasm spasms for the next hour. Steve comes out soaked in her urine and just says, ‘mind if I use your shower?’ while Jeremy stared like he wanted to kill him. It was so awkward and amazingly hilarious. I wish I had filmed the stuff we used to do together. I’d be a Youtube millionaire off that content.
I imagine he was urine- drenched. It sounds as if you are like me in that we are walking miracles to still be alive. It also seems that like me, you need to write a book about your life experiences. I’ve had a rather crazy life for sure being born a sensitive, taking LSD 806 times I an attempt to fix what was wrong with me and be “normal”, experiencing death three times in an 11.5 hour period, going through a time warp while driving through Arkansas, and on and on…. I would have no idea what to title my autobiography other than maybe.. “Don’t Try This at Home!” LoL
If we posted it on YT, they would probably remove it for unacceptable content.
I'm 43 also and started my career in inside sales, which was a boilerroom. This hit close to home and the range of characters in a sink or swim sales phoneroom is its own ecosystem worth study and a sitcom. I was 1 of our top salesman and always dreamed they hung my headset from the raptors. I saw everything from blatant fraud, sleeping your way to th etop and even a suicide.
The good memories, laughs, and aquaintances are hard to forget. I was hustling advertisement, were you in a wolf of wallstreet complet sham, as I know you've done some more recent stock stuff? If Steve has a unique last name, look him up on truepeoplesearch or fastpeoplesearch.com, its free and knowing his roundabout age, you'll likely find him or his mobile.
When describing him not being human, it's important to know Hebrews 13:2 ;) 😇🪽
I don't literally think he was an alien. It is literary indulgence. Just art.
As for what we were selling, yeah it was basically a Wolf of Wall Street boiler room. I feel disgusting about working there. One day, about a year after Steve vanished - I had just been promoted to one of the top managerial positions after several managers just did not show up to work again. I was told they had been transferred to another location without warning. A week later, it was payday and I was coming in early to hand out checks with my co-manager. We approached the building and just as we started getting to the entrance, half-a-dozen black SUV's came flying into the parking lot. Seconds later, men in body armor and brandishing fully automatic rifles were rushing towards us as several men in cheap, Men's Warehouse-style suits and wearing dark aviator glasses began sauntering slowly towards us with their FBI and FTC badges drawn. One of them was holding two sets of handcuffs. The two of us just stood there dumbfounded. I was only 28 at the time. My only experience with interacting with law enforcement was one time as a teenager when I was driving to Buffalo late one night and pulled over to the side of the road to take a quick nap because I was afraid of falling asleep at the wheel. The cop assumed I was intoxicated and forced me to do a breathalyzer. The cop was a complete asshole so I expected the same treatment from these federal agents. They informed us that the owner of the company had been illegally billing the credit cards of the customers for several years and when he learned that he was being investigated, he took off back to Italy where he was from. This had happened the previous week, likely the same time that the real managers all skipped town with him. Their apparent plan was to to take two mid-level employees, promote them to top-tier positions, and then have us take the fall. However, these feds were fully aware we were just a couple of middle management nobodies. They interviewed us, asked us if we knew anything they didn't, and then sealed off the office with yellow tape. We had to post up there as the two shifts arrived to get their checks and had to tell them all, 'Sorry, none of us are getting paid because our boss was a lying piece of shit that stole $15 million dollars from our customers.'. That was a really shit day for me. I felt so bad. A lot of these employees were parents. I had to deal with a lot of crying women living paycheck to paycheck that day. I was owed nearly $5,000 for closing a deal the previous week and never got paid. Biggest sale of my life up until that point.