discipline known as Paul Mills American Kenpo Karate.
Most 21-year-olds think they’re unstoppable, but the power I wielded as a gun-owning, martial arts-trained bartender and part nightclub-owner in Vegas convinced me that I was absolutely invincible. And maybe I was just plain crazy, which is pretty common in Las Vegas. An opportunity presented itself, and I opened my own nightclub, called JD’s, in the old Calamity Jane’s building on Fremont Street, complete with live bands and mosh pits that required almost nightly visits from the police. All the while, I was drinking and partying with the customers, matching shot for shot, spending my money on ridiculous toys, going on all-night runs, and telling myself, “I could do this forever,” as I convinced myself that I was the one person who had found all the keys to a perfect life.
Within a year’s time, I had run the club into the ground and had put my future, my health, and my relationship with Lisa in jeopardy.
For Lisa, life with me was a constant adrenaline rush, and like with anything else, adrenaline is great in small doses, but eventually it wears you out. She lived with steady, high doses of adrenaline, she began to lose her taste for the partying, and she could see that I was spinning out of control. It was a tough position for her to be in, considering that not long after we began dating, I began training her to bartend at Dylan’s. She was a witness firsthand to the dangers of intoxication, with both drinking and with the nightclub, partying lifestyle. A few years into it, she decided that this life wasn’t really for her. She decided to follow in her father’s footsteps instead, and took the tests necessary to become a commissioned law enforcement officer for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.
She had joined the force out of her desire to find exciting work, but also to do work that inspired her and contributed to bettering the world in some way. She has always been a protector at heart, and this field suited her much more than slinging drinks and getting drunk.
She found all that, but she was also surprised to find that being in law enforcement, in itself, was an existence that was a little too stable for her liking. After all, Lisa was also exposed to the easy-cash, VIP-treatment lifestyle. Her fellow officers would talk about “putting in their twenty years” and making their career million. And Lisa’s first thought was, “Twenty years to make a million dollars? A million for your entire career?
Will a million dollars even be a lot of money in twenty years? Some people make a million dollars in a month!” While that was great money for law enforcement, it was not what she wanted to do for the next 20 years to earn it.
Like I said, she and I both see the world very differently from most people. Intuitively, even as she was establishing a good career as an officer, and enjoyed the work, the mission, and the power of her badge. But Lisa also knew that there was something else out there that suited her better. There had to be. Until then, this would do for the short term.
On a nightly basis, Lisa’s job in law enforcement meant anticipating the unexpected. She never knew who she was going to wind up interacting with each night, how they would act, or what bizarre situations they might be part of. Many of them were addicts, and many of them unpredictable and often dangerous. Then, she’d come home after a shift to face even worse: her own husband, fresh off a three-day run, hungover, hating himself, and pissed off at the world. Her worry was her constant companion; she expected that any day, she’d get the call reporting that I was dead or injured, or that I might end up in jail with her “customers.”
SIDEBAR:
I feel it’s important to state that
many are happy working a career
they love and the money that
goes with it. But also to look at
your dreams and long term goals
and ask yourself if the current
situation you are in is the means
or way you will get there. You can
then re-evaluate what your next
steps are on accomplishing your
dream, is it being an employee,
self-employed, business owner
or investor and what do you get
to do or change to get there. As
mentioned in the Introduction,
the sidebars are Lisa’s additional
input throughout the book.
Instead of that keeping me on the straight and narrow, it actually had the opposite effect. I hated myself for what I was doing to Lisa, and that self-hatred caused me, ironically, to drown my sorrows in booze, to party even harder to silence the noise in my head. I’d grown up in a stereotypically Irish family of alcoholics, and this is all I knew of coping with pain; people in pain drank.
So I kept drinking, and Lisa, too afraid to start the fight that would inevitably happen if she confronted me about drinking, said nothing. She knew that fighting with me would accomplish nothing: It wouldn’t stop me from going out, and it would ultimately only make us both feel worse.
This wasn’t the strong, independent Lisa I had married, the one who had struck out on her own, moved to Las Vegas from South Dakota to start a new life and had become an officer. That Lisa spoke her mind, but this Lisa had lost her voice with me. She felt responsible for my addiction by continuing to enable it, not wanting to deal with it, and sad that our relationship seemed to be eroding by the day. The only thing that kept her with me was that, on rare occasions, she saw glimmers of the innocent, ambitious 20-year-old she’d fallen in love with.
Plus, part of her blamed herself. She wondered if she should have seen my addiction coming, or if she had enabled it. After all, I had trained her to bartend, too, and she’d spent plenty of time at the clubs with me.
Wasn’t she supporting that lifestyle, even being rewarded for it? As a child, she’d watched her parents and grandparents drinking beer and cocktails, eventually getting louder and bawdier as the nights wore on. In her experience, alcohol made things fun. It had made our time together fun, too. Working together in the early part of our relationship, she reasoned, had kept us close, but could it now be tearing us apart?
The fact that we were flush with cash seemed, at the time, like a sign that we were making all the right moves. In retrospect, it only exacerbated the problems we were having as a couple. We’d leave the bar with a wad of cash every night, and as fast it came in, we spent it on racy cars, lavish dinners at expensive Vegas restaurants, and wild nights at the swankiest clubs. We felt like high rollers, tipping $50 and $100 bills like they were Monopoly money. The feeling that we were royalty was very seductive. The joy of being carefree overshadowed any doubts we had about our lifestyle.
We lived for many years in the bliss that only comes with ignorance. But we were anything but free. I was, in fact, completely trapped by the choices I’d made, and the environment we were in. I was undoubtedly in the trap of addiction. But we were also trapped by our lifestyle; we’d created such a luxurious lifestyle for ourselves that we now felt as if we had no choice but to keep doing what we were doing.
It was about this time that we saw The Matrix and drove home, silent, each of us thinking about Neo (but too afraid to admit it out loud), “That’s exactly how I feel. I’m trapped in a life I don’t want.”
The Bottom
Our lives continued this way for years, as we hid behind our jobs, our money, and our belongings in order to avoid the real problem staring us in the face: my addiction. By late 2001, I had blown through nearly all of the money we