Underground Man Part 9
Past Failures and Personal Reflections
Hey Revivalists! We’re nearing the end of our time underground, working our way to another collapse. Part 10 will conclude the Underground Man and I’ve already been interviewing The Outlaw for the next series. If you have ideas, or topics you’d like to see fleshed out or turned into sequential illustrations, please send my way! In the meantime thanks for your continued interest and attention! I’m really lucky that I get to spend anytime at all doing this stuff. I have my family and you all to thank for that!
More than any plant or chemical substance, I was addicted to wishful thinking—the compulsive, chronic craving to be someone else. A few lines of cocaine and double Jamesons relieved me of it, made it easy just to say 'yes' to life as it came. It actually would've been perfect if I could consume responsibly—which I always thought I could. I couldn't. The compounds that made me feel okay destroyed the people I loved. The best I could do with that dilemma: I crafted a tragic backstory, collected convenient excuses, and cast myself as the lead in "The Ballad of the Misunderstood Genius."
The truth was simpler and more embarrassing: I was just another mediocre, middle-class, son of privilege, terrified of living the kind of life that peaks in high school.
The pattern started in 2003.
I was perpetually barefoot, clutching an acoustic guitar and toting around my unread copy of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test -- props in the romantic rebel story I was writing. I imagined myself as a red-headed Dean Moriarty, overlooking that Kerouac's heroes wound up broke or dead.
I paid two hundred bucks for a rusted-out MX6, and couldn’t wait to escape my screw-ups, the suburbs, and the Midwest: land of my youth. Two other aimless, teenage, indigents-by-choice climbed in with me, and we set out to rediscover the Pacific Ocean with bad tags, bald tires, and a bottomless case of PBR.
With a combined IQ of room temperature, we decided to avoid I-70 because it seemed “too obvious”. Instead, we went north first, as if the cops on I-90 were just up there directing traffic and handing out cookies. Funny enough, due to our overconfident speeds we were stopped near the Badlands and questioned by a frustrated trooper who caught my fraudulent plates but couldn't haul us in because his dispatcher was out to lunch.
A few hours after we’d been freed, a sunburned, Zorro-dressed man materialized on the shoulder like a desert prophet, thumb out. We held a five-second symposium about whether three idiots trafficking drugs should pick up a stranger. Before we could decide, “Bryan” and his gunny sack were already in the backseat, telling us about the government chips in his teeth. Perfect - now we had a witness.
That night I was sure we were all about to die. I woke up in the backseat at 3 AM to find Bryan somehow in the driver’s seat, practicing his Tokyo drifts on mountain roads, one hand on the wheel, the other wrapped around a can of Four Loko - because apparently near-death experiences go down better with guarana and malt liquor. By the time we reached the ocean, each one of us looked like we’d aged ten years.
The next morning, we sat with old friends in the dry grass in front of a poorly kept mobile home on a small plot of land outside O’Brien, Oregon. We were passing around a bowl of hash and a crystal ball. There we were, four aspiring drug entrepreneurs, using a crystal ball like Hufflepuffs to smoke hash in a field of bone-dry grass. The ball kept sending the beam of sunlight onto random patches of dead vegetation while we scrambled to redirect it, looking like a slapstick routine to any DEA agents watching through binoculars.
We spent the rest of that week visiting the home of White Cloud, a native Sioux man who kept a feather at the end of his Remington, and wanted to demonstrate his earned immunity to scorpion venom. Cliff jumping, tubing, and panning for gold kept us busy for a few day while the locals prepared our cargo in an inconspicuous full-size spare. The fun ended when one of my compatriots took a few quaaludes by mistake and spent the night face down in the scorpion infested gravel. Sometimes you just get a gut feeling its time to hit the road.
After somehow not dying, getting arrested, or setting the Pacific Northwest on fire, we drove back in half the time it took to get there. I celebrated my good fortune by proving I had the decision-making skills of a concussed squirrel. I took the cash I'd promised to send back to our new Oregonian friends and disappeared to follow Phish on tour - because nothing says "responsible drug dealer" like joining a traveling circus of tie-dyed, glow-stick throwing optimists. I could make up the difference before anybody noticed - the same flawed reasoning that got me into trouble.
It’s always like that for me. I’ve got everything figured out, until I’m avoiding phone calls, looking over my shoulder, and making up lies to cover old ones. The result: I spent a year paying back a couple of guys who would clap you on the back one second and threatened to snap your thumbs the next. Every Saturday night they showed up at my job to take my pay. Soon it just became another scene in the ever thickening prologue to my eventual big break.
A decade later, my life looked different on the surface - wife, three young daughters, and all the trappings of domestic responsibility. But underneath, I was the same person, just with better camouflage. My delusions had only grown more sophisticated.
I went to say hello to a neighbor entertaining company and found myself face-to-face with a ghost from my wilder days. This particular spirit materialized every few years, always bringing the faint scent of opportunity and imminent disaster. He had fascinating stories about living and skateboarding in South Africa, being in the military, and his rock climbing trips. His manner was charmingly bold, funny, and he brought great weed. Months later he came over for dinner.
Note: Starring in your own tragedy means needing a redemption arc. Mine came after years of self-destruction, when I hit a low where I started reading self-help books and thinking kale might save my soul. Another big performance: The Spiritual Awakening, performed by a man who couldn’t return library books on time. I traded cocaine for quinoa and started doing yoga, though mostly just the corpse pose, which I’d been practicing for years anyway. I still smoked enough pot to qualify as a small-scale agricultural operation, but now I did it while listening to Buddhist monks on CD. Nothing says spiritual growth like getting baked and contemplating impermanence. I’d just read The Celestine Prophecy and wanted to see your energy. But I still struggled with basic everyday tasks, tasks that other people seemed to do without hesitation: paying bills on time, making appointments, keeping a job, etc. I was tired of feeling inadequate, and since I didn’t know how to be a part of, I thought I better skip that step and just figure out how to be better than. It never occurred to me that this need to prove myself extraordinary was indicative of a deeper problem.
At dinner, my friend discovered the latest prop in my performance: words I'd scrawled on a posterboard, a personal mission statement that read like a cross between Tony Robbins and Jack Kerouac. It was meant to be my character's turning point, but instead became the setup for yet another spectacular plot twist. It impressed him so much that he asked if he could take me climbing and discuss a business opportunity. As negotiators, we were like two drowning men convincing each other we knew how to swim. Here I was with a suspended license and a history of spectacular failure, telling as a guy who'd done time for mailing weed to Switzerland about the “Speed of Trust”. The gods must have needed a laugh. A week later, in what felt like a scene change too absurd even for my ongoing production, he was belaying me down a fifty-foot ravine near a Silver mining town called Red Cliff, Colorado. I'd gone from wannabe Buddhist to wannabe mountaineer in the time it takes most people to decide what to watch on Netflix.
We camped, climbed, and trimmed weed in off-season ski lodges. I lost myself in the fantasy of becoming some kind of outlaw tour guide entrepreneur. Soon I was dreaming up ways to drag my family into it. I know! We'll buy an old school bus... I convinced myself this was brilliant, conveniently forgetting how all my previous schemes had ended in disaster. I persistently asked to carry a few pounds back home with the hope that I could continue living that way indefinitely. As long as I could pay the bills, the family would have to go along with it.
In what I imagined was strategic honesty, I decided to share carefully selected stories from my past failures. It was calculated damage control - getting ahead of any rumors while convincing myself this time would be different. Even my attempts at truth-telling were manipulation. The main grower, Eli, asked, “Why take risks when you have a family?” He’d already been raided and thought my motives were inconsistent. “They are the reason,” I told him. He’d been talking about his daughter’s softball team, and he was the one paying us and taking the risk on me even if my friend was vouching.
I didn't consider what it would take to be honest and have integrity. Once I fixed on an outcome, I rewrote reality on the fly, spinning whatever story seemed most convincing in the moment. My intentions were true. I was the most sincere fraud you'd ever meet, craving approval like an understudy begging for a chance at the spotlight. I did well until I became overly ambitious and suffered a lapse in judgment.
Looking back, I see how each "opportunity" followed the same tragic script: a chance encounter that felt like destiny, a seductive vision of a better life that looked suspiciously like every other failed dream, and my performance as Someone Who Doesn't See Obvious Warning Signs. The trap house incident should've been my wake-up call, but even near-death experiences couldn't compete with my addiction to fantasy.
It happened months earlier. Even as I pulled up to that house on Liberty Street, warning bells rang in my head. I had gotten good at ignoring reality and dismissed them as anxiety. In service of my master, I walked straight into what should’ve been my last bad decision. Through what I can only assume was a cosmic joke, I was mistaken for someone important by three guys in ski masks - in August - who seemed to have learned their interrogation techniques from watching Zero Dark Thirty. They tortured me for information I didn’t have and forced me naked under a mattress so they could shoot me without blood splatter. If the true owner hadn’t come home then, I don’t know if they’d have backed out. The shock, terror, and the feeling of being utterly powerless to defend myself left me sick with fear, paranoid to leave the house and alienated even further from the increasingly unfair society.
Here's the truly insane part - the kind of plot twist that would make even soap opera writers say "too much": A few weeks later, I followed my obsession back to the same place, with the same cast of characters who'd nearly gave me my season-ender. I told myself this was method acting at its finest, staying in character as the fearless antihero who keeps his enemies close. I was just too committed to my role to admit I was starring in a tragedy. I was proving how disconnected I'd become from my survival instincts. The owner became my main connection, as if I was determined to tempt Fate.
He could move a lot of weed quickly. He helped me with the first loads I brought back to Kansas City, sometimes moving the entire load in one day. When I returned from a subsequent trip with double the amount, I gave it all to him to sell and congratulated myself. I didn't count on his debt to his coke dealer, a true psychopath with the means and will to harm. My severe shortcomings as a dealer/trafficker were my inexperience, lack of methods, and unwillingness to threaten harm to those who might rip me off. My best salesman showed no fear of recourse when he disappeared with $5600 of product, taking with him any chance of a positive outcome. Suddenly my story of redemption turned into just another cautionary tale. My partner who vouched for me was now caught up in my latest disaster.
I panicked. Here I was, the guy with the fancy mission statement on display, making bold claims about integrity and manhood while failing at both. When things got real, I fell apart: stalling, begging for loans, making promises I couldn't keep. When the pressure really came on, I broke down completely, crying like someone who'd just realized none of this was pretend anymore. The best I could muster was a hollow promised to pay back if I ever could, but he went to jail and I didn’t call. Before he went away, he started hanging out with another ex-military guy. One night while I was on stage singing and playing with my band, I saw he and his new friend walk around to the back of the club.
He'd been workshopping my failures with his friend, who decided to ad-lib some violence into the scene. That's how I wound up choke-slammed in the doorway, getting shaken down for cash in front of my audience - a piece of guerrilla theater that transformed my rock star fantasy into its final, pathetic act: me, curled up in the bass player's van like a cut-rate Hamlet, making revenge promises to the empty air. The critics were unanimous: my performance as Badass Drug Dealer had not been renewed for another season.
Vows made in crisis are like New Year's resolutions - they sound good until real life tests them.
For the next eight to ten years, I attempted to play it straight - or at least my version of straight, which was really just performing "Normal Guy" with better production values and a smaller special effects budget. The dreams of touring and music stardom faded like poorly designed props, but I kept watching them disappear as if waiting for an encore.
By 2018, when my third and final chance at criminal stardom appeared - because the universe loves a trilogy - I was thirty-seven and should've been old enough to read the genre: this wasn't going to be Ocean's Eleven. This was more like Dumb and Dumber Goes Drug Running. But addiction and I had a history, and I could talk myself into a new start with ease. I thought about my family, the ache of lost chances and Natasha's disillusionment. I told myself a different set of circumstances—a new locale, new risks—might change everything. I convinced myself I was a tragic figure, driven by circumstances beyond my control, forced to take drastic measures. The truth was I was terrified of the ordinary. It was the enemy. I ran from the ordinary straight into the same risks that had bankrupted me for twenty years.
I convinced myself I could be redeemed by a great act of sacrifice or success. I didn’t realize I was creating my own myth until it unraveled. More than any compound, I was addicted to lies and unrealistic hopes.
Natasha didn’t get a chance to opt out. I accepted the offer, went home, and started packing as if the decision was made - as if I was responding to some higher calling. Looking back, I can see the truth in her expression. She’d watched this movie before, seen me craft justifications for self-destruction. She knew the script. Disappointment is like a paper cut. It doesn’t bleed right away. There was no fight, no pleading or questions. She was tired of asking to be counted. She could tell that any words against my fixations would fall on deaf ears. She knew I’d have to find out myself, to chase my own destruction to the end.
I didn't see how predictable it all was, my history of moving the same pieces around in the wrong game. Each "fresh start" was just another remake of the same story, with different props and costumes. I didn't see this until I sat across from a man who used honest and direct language to pick apart my delusions. He’d say things like: “Funny, every time you find relief, it causes you to need more relief?!” He didn't buy my narrative of tragic heroism. “Sounds like you take everybody in your life hostage just like the way those men took ahold of you.” he’d say.
He saw what I'd been running from: every bold, reckless choice I'd made was to hide my fear of being accountable, of standing still to see the sum total of my actions. In my attempts to avoid becoming ordinary, I'd achieved something spectacular: I'd become the most predictable kind of fuckup, the sort of character who shows up in the first act of every cautionary tale, wearing a cape made of red flags.
But that reckoning was still several disastrous acts away. For now, I was busy polishing up my latest one-man show: "The Heroic Sacrifices of a Misunderstood Genius." I had my costume ready - cape and all - one foot out the door, ready to "save" my family from the terrible fate of bourgeoise normalcy. The same old script was burning a hole through my jeans, but I'd gotten so good at lying to myself that every rerun felt like an opening night. The house lights were dimming, the audience was settling in, and I was about to give the performance of my life - again.
These are so fucking good.