This is an excerpt from my full-life memoir, Un Fn Myself — my real story of addiction, recovery, fatherhood, and everything in between from 1984 to 2026, including the parts most people would cut out.
I told myself I wasn’t gambling again. I didn’t have any money anyway. I did still have a credit card, but I said I wouldn’t take a cash advance. Then I found the loophole. It doesn’t count if I use someone else’s money. One of my friends gave me $100 to play three-card poker, the game they all wanted to play. I blew it almost instantly. He told me that was it—he wasn’t giving me any more money because he was almost out himself. So I pulled out my credit card and went all in. I took a $200 cash advance. I didn’t even know how much credit I had left. I sat back down at the table and said, Fuck it. Vodka doubles. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right. I started pounding vodka doubles and playing three-card poker. I lost everything so I went back for the rest of the maximum I could cash advance which was a few hundred dollars more.
After everyone else gets wrecked at three-card poker, we hit the craps table. I’m down to my last couple hundred dollars, and I start betting again—$25, $50 on the pass line. Then it turns. I start winning. I push bigger. Suddenly I’ve got $200, then $300, then $400 riding on the pass line. I’m taking my winning off and going for the big win. The shooter is this guy who is absolutely murdering the table. The place is packed. Everyone is betting pass line and loading up the numbers, except for one miserable guy betting the don’t pass who keeps getting wrecked over and over.
The shooter comes out throwing sevens like a machine on the first roll. Seven. Another seven. I’m printing money. It feels unreal. The entire table is buzzing. Then he sets a four, and we all tense up. He rolls ten times—maybe more—and finally bangs the four. The table explodes. Chips are piling up in front of me. I’m stacking and stacking, barely able to keep track. When he finally busts, the momentum shifts and I give some of it back as the table cools off, but I walk away with two pink $1,000 chips, a $500 chip, and a stack of smaller ones. Thousands of dollars. I won ten times as much as I started with in less than an hour and I’m lit.
I’m so sloppy drunk that I drop one of the $1,000 chips on the floor without noticing. One of my friends—thank God for the friends I had—picks it up and hands it to me. Hey, you dropped this. I laugh it off, tell him thanks, say something stupid like, Yeah, I’m gonna need that thousand dollars. That’s the moment it hits me that I need to cash out immediately before I do something even dumber. I go straight to the cage and cash everything in. I’m holding more than $2,500 in cash. I feel invincible. Like a god. Untouchable.
My friends are done. They’ve had their run. Everyone won some money, everyone’s ready to eat. They ask if I want to go to dinner. I’m not even close to finished. I tell them no. I’m just getting warmed up. I tell them I’m heading to a Texas Hold’em tournament across the street at Caesars Palace. On my last two Vegas trips, I lost the last of my money at Caesars Palace and this time I’m determined to beat it.
Fortunately, Caesars Palace is literally across the street. I look over and see a limo parked out in front of our casino. I’m holding a thick wad of cash, and I don’t hesitate. Fuck it. I walk up and tell the guy to take me to Caesars. He tells me it’s a hundred dollars and asks if I’m serious since it’s right across the street. I pull out the wad of cash and show it to him. Take me across the fucking street. He does. I pay a hundred dollars to ride a limo for less than five minutes.
I walk into Caesars and buy into the poker tournament—something like $60. It’s a rebuy tournament, and I used to play a lot of Texas Hold’em, so I know the game. The problem is I only have $100 bills. Nothing smaller. I sit down and immediately start being an asshole, just shoving all-in hand after hand because the buy-in is so cheap. All-in. Lose. Rebuy. All-in. Lose. Rebuy. Eventually I win a hand and build a deeper stack, then keep shoving. I probably blow five or six hundred dollars just on rebuys, but I end up with a fat stack when the tournament hits the point where rebuys stop.
At that point, the cocktail waitress is circling constantly. Every time she comes by, my drink is already empty and I’m asking for another one. The problem is I still only have $100 bills. Normally you’d tip with chips or small bills. I’m not tipping her a hundred bucks, and in my drunken genius, I never think to ask for change. The poker room manager finally comes over and tells me I’m cut off from drinking. Instantly, my mood nosedives. I’m furious. The alcohol was propping up my confidence, my patience, my illusion of control. Without it, my attitude turns sour fast, and I start making stupid poker decisions. I flame out of the tournament almost immediately after that. I’m pissed because, in my mind, I was on track to win the whole thing. Instead, I walk out having blown close to a thousand dollars just on rebuys, with maybe $1,500 left in cash.
I drift back over to the craps table, this time alone. No friends, no cheering crowd—just me and the dealer moving the dice around. I start playing again, and somehow I bleed it down to $400, losing a thousand dollars like it’s nothing. Now I’m staring at my last $400, and I decide I’m going all in. I don’t want to limp back with scraps. I put the full $400 on the pass line. I roll a fucking four.
I’m instantly furious. A four is a terrible number in that situation. Roll a seven before the four hits again and it’s all gone. I’m doing the math in my head, cursing the odds, convinced I’ve just torched the last of my money. But somehow—against the odds—I hit the four. I leave the original bet, ride the momentum, hit another few points, and suddenly I’m over $2,000. I eventually lose the last $400 on the pass line, but I’m still sitting on about $1,600. At that point, even in my drunken state, I know I need to walk away. So I do.
It’s around 2:00 a.m. As I’m leaving Caesars, a beautiful prostitute tries to pick me up in the lobby—same thing that happened on a previous Vegas trip when I was alone. I brush her off, telling her I’ve got a hot wife at home. I’m half-flattered, half-disgusted, and mostly just exhausted. I walk back across the street this time instead of taking another limo, painfully aware that I’m still down money overall and lucky I’m not completely wiped out.
I sit down somewhere and eat alone, trying to sober up and prepare for the absolutely miserable plane ride I know is coming. My flight is early and I feel like death. Eventually I make my way back to the hotel. I turn my phone on and start blasting “Fack” at full volume as I walk into the our two rooms. All my friends are asleep, trying to rest for their early flights. I’m yelling, turning on lights, shouting lyrics, and jumping on their beds. I’m genuinely amazed none of them beat the shit out of me. They finally calm me down and get me back into bed. I’m flashing the wad of cash I still have like it’s proof of something, even though I almost lost everything. I pass out.
The next morning is worse than my last trip home from Vegas in 2010. On the plane, I feel disgusting in my own body. I’m sitting in the window seat, farting uncontrollably, my digestive system completely wrecked from the night before. I feel nauseous, bloated, and filthy. I force down California Pizza Kitchen food even though I’m terrified I’m going to throw up on the plane. Somehow, I make it back to Sarasota in one piece without vomiting.
The next week I go to my friend’s wedding. Everyone is getting fucked up. I don’t drink—not because I’ve had some breakthrough, but because I’m still shell-shocked from Vegas. I manage about a week, maybe two, without drinking. Then three days after their wedding, I drink again. Nothing dramatic. Just another relapse folded quietly into the routine.
Then April 21, 2014 arrives—the last night I ever drank. It starts like any other drinking day, except this time there’s a strange clarity underneath it. It’s a Monday. My ex-wife is at work. My dad’s memorial is the following week. This is the last stretch where I’ll have a full week where I can binge drink all day without having to show up sober for something heavy. And I remember thinking, very clearly, I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to deal with my ex-wife being furious. I don’t want to roll the dice on whether this is finally the night I cheat, or blow up my marriage completely. I don’t want to see what happens next. Then the other voice kicks in immediately. You coward. Quit being so weak. This is your last chance to drink. Everything sucks. You won’t be able to handle it. Drink now while you still can. So I drink.
After a couple of liquor drinks—each with a couple shots—I settle into that familiar zone. The tension eases. The anxiety softens. I fire up Call of Duty: Black Ops II Zombies, the Origins map. I’m blasting “Fack.” I’m locked in. And I play out of my fucking mind. I get to round 71 solo, which at the time puts me among the top runs in the world. I absolutely slaughter zombies. I finish the entire solo Easter egg. I’m drunk, doing laundry, pissing constantly, completely absorbed, and genuinely proud of myself. From the inside, it feels like competence. Mastery. Control.
My ex-wife gets home right after I finish—six or seven hours later. She looks at me and tells me she can’t do this anymore. She says she can’t stand being in the house with me drinking. She says she’s going to pack her stuff and go to her parents’ house. And I respond with something that still makes my stomach drop. I tell her that’s fine. That I don’t care. That I’d rather drink without her there anyway.
Then I hop on Diablo III with one of my college friends. My ex-wife doesn’t leave, though I wish she would. When she’s around, I can’t quite drink properly. I’m resentful of her presence. While playing Diablo, ask my friend over voice chat if he ever thinks about cheating on his wife. He’s shocked. He tells me I’m out of my mind. He reminds me how hot and kind my ex-wife is. He asks why I would even think that way. I tell him I don’t know—but that I think about it all the time.
After my friend goes to bed, I’m still not satisfied. I need more stimulation. The drinking hasn’t filled the hole. And my life outside the bottle is collapsing. My finances are wrecked. I’ve burned through money drinking and gambling and thinking short-term. I chased sales instead of results, pissed off clients, and now my business is sliding downhill. I’m barely able to make minimum payments. Everything feels unstable, precarious, and exhausting. And I’m still drinking, knowing full well it’s killing me—and feeling completely unable to stop.
I take $500 off a credit card and find some gambling website based in China. There’s some bonus if you deposit that much, and $500 is the maximum you can put in per day, so I do it. I load the money and start playing Texas Hold’em—mostly heads-up. I take it slow at first, pretending I’m being disciplined, even though I’ve already been drinking for more than twelve hours at this point. My ex-wife has gone to sleep. She didn’t leave because her mom encouraged her not to give up on me or our marriage when it got difficult.
After a while, one table isn’t enough. I get bored. I open a second table. Then a third. Eventually I’m playing four tables at once. That’s where it falls apart. When I play one table, I can actually think. I can read patterns, feel the table, use probabilities and intuition even online where there’s almost no data to interpret. Playing four tables while drunk turns all of that off. I’m not thinking anymore. I’m just clicking buttons and bleeding money. I burn through almost the entire $500. The last $100 is tied up in a one-on-one heads-up game.
And there I am again, recycling the same sick desperation I’d fallen into years earlier—trying to manipulate a stranger online into letting me win, begging like everything depended on it. It was a manipulative, desperate bottom. They destroy me and take the last of my money.
That still isn’t the end. The very last thing I do while drinking that night is open customer support chat and try to get them to let me deposit another $500. They tell me I can only deposit $500 once per day. I tell them it’s after midnight, that it’s four or five in the morning, that it should count as a new day. The support rep calmly explains that I deposited four hours ago and I have to wait another twenty hours. I keep pushing until it finally sinks in that I’m done.
I don’t finish my last drink—about an inch of liquor and vodka melted into the bottom of a diet Dr. Thunder with half-melted ice. Earlier that night—after maybe three or four liquor drinks, six to eight shots in—I had this strange thought while walking around the house: This is the last time. It came out of nowhere. I remember immediately laughing at it internally. Are you fucking kidding me? Yeah, right. I dismissed it completely. There was no way this was the last time. Absolutely not. I crawl into bed around five or six in the morning. My ex-wife is just starting to stir, getting ready for work. I pass out. That was the last night I ever drank.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.