Sex in Maseratis, Bribery in Mexico
10 years ago an odd twist of fate involved me in a rather perverse situation of seemingly limitless decadence and excess.
In my budding career as a nightclub and party promoter, I would canvas parking lots downtown with glossy flyers for my upcoming events, before young people spent more time on social media than they do watching TV, this was quite effective marketing.
I had my cell phone number on these flyers and one day during my lunch break at my corporate office job I received a phone call from a rather pompous man named Eric who was apparently a much bigger deal than me; another party promoter who threw parties with really big bands all around the country. I was a bit skeptical but eager to network so I stayed in touch with him, he’d call me and we would talk shop about the entertainment biz. Eventually, he invited me to meet him at a nightclub whose owner he knew. Eric was an eccentric character, dressed like a rockstar with his striking blue eyes accentuated by mascara which kind of made him look like an Egyptian deity. He was freakishly confident and had the swagger to match his striking style. He quickly proceeded to get into an argument with his cute blond girlfriend, she left and we bonded over a couple of bottles of vodka comp’d for us by the manager of a nightclub.
I’d quickly learn that Eric was a real magnet for drama — breaking up with girlfriends, getting kicked out of apartments, hitting on guys’ girlfriends, getting into shouting matches at bars — but he was fun and he did seem to know a ton of cool people that he introduced me to so I continued to hang out with him. He met this odd older gay wealthy man named Ed and called me one day excited to announce that Ed was going to finance his party promotion business which up until then seemed to mostly just exist in his imagination. Which I didn’t really believe until one day when Eric showed up at my apartment in a very hip-hop white Cadillac Escalade that Ed had apparently just bought as a company car for the new entertainment company they had just incorporated. That night over bottle service in trendy lounge downtown Eric proposed that I join the firm as chief marketing executive. I’d be paid $35 hourly to coordinate marketing and “network.” I hated my corporate job and my last party had lost money so, of course, I accepted the job offer.
Ed had a suspicious amount of money to invest imprudently in Eric’s vision of a global entertainment brand. We took “fake it till you make it” to the extreme with 22-inch chrome rims on the Cadillac, really fancy business cards, taking limos to ladies’ nights, ads in local fashion and lifestyle magazines, shopping sprees in Vegas, drinking gold Ace of Spades bottles of champagne, “Networking” trips to Phoenix, and grandiloquent press releases that I wordsmithed for the media.
You might think, I see what’s going on here! Eric must have been having gay sex with Ed. That’s why he was investing in your business… I suspected that a bit myself because Eric did originally meet Ed through his side hustle as a freelance massage therapist which seemed just a little gay but I spent a lot of time around the two and I never saw anything that made me think they were fucking. Eric was very heterosexual and I think Ed was just very lonely.
I quickly learned that Ed was tormented by the internal demons of his dissociative (or multiple) personality disorder. The real Ed was a mild-mannered retired banker and accountant but his alternate personalities were party monsters; one was a woman, one was a straight man, one was a malicious asshole that would mean mug us and talk shit, and one was a reckless young man that just wanted to party, get laid, and score coke. These personalities would emerge when Ed was drinking, sober he was his reasonable self but after a drink or two they would come out and weirdness would ensue. Interestingly, he would communicate with his alternate personalities by leaving them voicemails on his phone.
Eric’s own dark sides, alcoholism, along with self-delusions of grandeur and celebrity were magnified by Ed’s deluge of angel capital into his ostensible start-up. He started drinking at inappropriate hours of the day and he certainly enabled Ed’s excesses. One hungover morning we went browsing at the Mercedez-Benz dealership, a few hours later Ed was writing a check for the downpayment on a second company car, a brand new black SLK350 convertible sportster. This magnificent car would only survive about three weeks of their insanity though, another hungover morning they were driving the car downtown, Ed was behind the wheel when his malicious personality emerged who hated Eric’s guts. He screamed at Eric, “I’m going to fucking kill you!” And slammed on the accelerator, running a red light at high speed and crashing into a sedan, wrecking both cars. I could barely believe it myself when Eric called me crying to tell me that Ed had crashed that gorgeous German beast of a car. Oddly, Ed was racked with guilt for destroying our prized corporate toy. A day later on a whim, Eric and I pulled the Cadillac into the customer parking lot of Ferrari of Denver. History repeated itself and Ed was shortly writing another big check to purchase a Maserati Granturismo with three miles on the odometer.
Of the three straight guys in the firm I managed to be the one that devirginized the Maserati — had sex in it — I was seeing this ditzy blond with ginormous tits and one night I scored the Maserati’s keys. I reclined back in the sumptuous red leather seats while the blond gave me a very committed blowjob but it turned out that it’s very tricky to have sex in the tiny interior of an Italian sports car. We climbed out, dropped our pants in the dimly lit parking garage, slid back inside and she rode me reverse cowgirl as sexy tunes wafted out of the Maserati’s exquisite sound system. We were still faking it but it sure felt like we’d made it! I will never be as cool as I was at 23 years old driving that car to the club.
Early in my career in the entertainment biz, I’d befriended this guy who was a popular local rapper. He recommended this book The 48 Laws of Power. It turned out to be just what I needed at the time, the book illustrates 48 different amoral principles of power dynamics with fascinating historical anecdotes. The Machiavellian tactics it explained showed me how to navigate the perverse politics of our little cash-drunk company; making myself useful and deftly exercising frame control with Ed who had the money and Eric who had the power.
The insanity of this chapter of my life reached its crescendo when we impulsively decided to book a stay at an all-inclusive resort in Mexico during spring break. The drama started as soon as we touched down in Mexico. The fourth guy in the company, Patrick, was flying out on a flight about two hours after mine. I waited and waited and Patrick didn’t arrive on the flight that he was supposed to. I called the airline and the flight had indeed arrived in Mexico but Patrick was not on it. About four hours later I finally received a call on my cell phone from the longest phone number I’ve ever seen in my life. I answered and it was Patrick, we’d been drinking before getting into the limo that took us to the airport, and apparently, Patrick kept drinking at the airport and on the flight to Miami. He saw the old ashtrays on the airplane and drunk, craving for a cigarette, lit one up while on the flight! Which he got into a lot of trouble over, in Miami he talked his way out of being arrested by the FBI for what’s apparently a pretty serious infraction and was put on another flight to Mexico (and a blacklist of passengers not allowed to be served alcohol on a flight!)
Drunken antics ensued in Mexico; we clubbed till 8 AM, took vodka shots at noon, licked waitresses at Hooters, and Ed and Eric were on a nonstop mission to score questionable Mexican cocaine.
One drunken morning, we got in this silly competition to see how far off our 13th-story balcony we could throw room service plates, things escalated and we ended up throwing the patio furniture off. There was a barrier wall so nobody was walking below in our impact zone — we weren’t trying to kill anyone! The next day we noticed that the room was leaking water so we foolishly demanded a room upgrade and were moved to an even nicer room with an amazing view of the Caribbean. The next night three large security guards barged into our room and informed us that we would be leaving immediately. Ed was furious to be kicked out, especially after they made him pay a $500 fee for the destroyed furniture, as we stormed out of the hotel they informed us that the police had been called and we would be arrested. Fortunately, Ed had been sleeping with a local Mexican guy who taxied us around, he came and picked us up and the cops stopped us anyway and we had to bribe them. We had to find somewhere to stay, it’s next to impossible to find somewhere to stay in Cancun in the middle of spring break. We drove from hotel to hotel inquiring and we finally checked into what was probably one of the most opulent resorts in the whole town, Agua Cancun where the decadence continued, in between room service and the two palatial suites Ed rented we ran up a $3000 bill in two nights!
Weirdly, just before our Mexico trip, Eric had fallen madly in love with this rather mediocre woman who he’d hooked up with after a boozy night at a gay bar — she was a practicing pagan witch. There seemed to be a telepathic connection between the witch, Patrick, Eric, and Ed. She was keeping tabs on us and could send them messages somehow. It was very strange and just accentuated the craziness of the whole week but it didn’t stop Eric from talking to her nonstop on my cellphone and running up a $700 international minutes bill.
I was growing increasingly distraught at the egregious opportunity cost of wasting what must have amounted to at least six figures on partying and toys instead of spending it on actually building a business and organizing events. One sober day I carefully worded an email to Ed and Eric urging a modicum of fiscal conservatism which was met with scorn and the docking of my salary. The firm did manage to organize one event, which predictably flopped, Ed spent about $20,000 to throw a benefit event at an enormous ballroom attached to Invesco Stadium where the Denver Broncos played football and only about 100 people showed up. A failure that I certainly had something to do with being the #3 guy in the firm and marketing director. I was in well over my head; I had less than a year’s experience as an event marketer and the target demo of the party was Denver’s gay crowd who I really didn’t have much connection to. The event was ostensibly to benefit an AIDS charity that Ed was marginally involved with but benefits are kind of just marketing bullshit, it means that a portion of the proceeds of the event will be contributed to a charity, that portion could be 50%, 10%, or none. Mostly the money is just going into the hands of the organizers.
Not wanting to be further implicated in the extravagant idiocy of this ridiculous excuse for an entertainment company I finally resigned. I certainly don’t regret the whole affair, while there was a ton of dysfunction, they never asked me to do anything wrong that violated my business ethics. The only person that really got screwed in the whole endeavor was Ed and clearly, Ed liked getting screwed. It was tremendously fun and a once-in-a-lifetime learning experience. I learned…
- Businessmen who begin bragging as soon as you meet them are bad news and likely full of bullshit.
- “Faking it till you make it” kind of works, it will open you up to opportunities you really don’t deserve but then you actually have to do some damn work.
- Money magnifies your dark sides.
- Intemperance with booze and drugs is a sure sign of bad character. It’s not something that should be overlooked.
- Be careful of the people you do business with, money and profit should not be the sole factor determining who you deal with.
- Mental health is no laughing matter, if you hang out with crazy people because they are just so much fun, they’ll try to drag you into their insanity. If you end up in the hospital or jail you have only yourself to blame.
- Gays have a different set of moral and social standards. I’m not saying they are all bad but they aren’t just like normal people — as they like to remind us constantly, they are deviants.
The important thing to understand is that this playboy life of getting blowjobs from fast women in fast cars was a product of my intention and visualization, not dumb luck.
Five years prior to that I wasn’t getting blowjobs from anyone, I was just another aimless 18-year-old high school graduate making $9 an hour trying to figure out what the heck to do with his life. A pickup artist ebook I had downloaded had me complete the exercise of mapping out what I wanted my life to be like in five years. I spent some time writing out things like…
- I wanted to be a socialite; a guy who spent his evenings carousing in stylish bars and nightclubs.
- I specifically visualized myself in fly suits going to meetings downtown.
- I didn’t want to be an office drone or laborer, I wanted to be a guy that creatively made deals for a living.
- I imagined myself living in a cool condo or apartment in a cosmopolitan neighborhood.
- I visualized myself behind the wheel of sports cars and luxury automobiles.
- I imagined an adventuresome life of novelty seeking.
- And of course, I imagined myself as a seducer.
And that’s pretty much the life I got, not just for the months that I worked for Ed and Eric but for much of my 20s. I wish that PUA ebook had told me to also visualize and write down the quality of character of the kinds of people that I would get involved with. Before you start manifesting into existence a similar rockstar life for yourself soberly consider that of the four of us involved with this crazy company two are now dead and in the ground, all that unbridled hedonism really didn’t work out well for them.
I got what I wanted because I defined it, visualized it, and wrote it down. So can you!
Create a 5-Year Self-Determination Flowchart
It’s well said that…
We often overestimate what we can achieve in a year and underestimate what we can achieve in five years.
In one year you’ll likely be pretty similar to what you are right now. It’s also pretty hard to say what your life will be like in 10 years, some people’s lives radically change for the better or worse in a decade. However, in half that time your life will likely still have a significant resemblance to what it is now. I strongly encourage you to make optimistic predictions about what your life could look like in five years in these areas…
- Business or career
- Education and learning
- Family and friends
- Finances
- Health and fitness
- Hobbies and entertainment
- Relationships and sex
- Things and toys
- Travel and adventure
- Where will you live?
- What would your average day or week look like?
Try to strike a balance between your wildest fantasies and a reasonable prediction of how you will be living if you practice your best habits with discipline. Look at your Coach.me dashboard (you should have set this up by now if you’re serious about thriving) and imagine those daily habits multiplied by 1800 (five years).
MindMeister is one of my favorite tools for organizing my thoughts and ideas. So I’ll suggest that you take 45–60 minutes (fire up Brain.FM for a 60-minute focus session) to create a flowchart in MindMeister which is free and takes just a moment to sign up for.
- I’ll suggest that you link the individual self-determination predictions to your habits in Coach.me.
- All of your 5-year predictions should connect at least loosely to your daily habits. If they don’t consider adding them to your Coach.me dashboard.
- Specificity is great. Actually, be arbitrarily specific.
Here’s mine; perhaps you can draw some inspiration or ideas from it…
The important thing is that you visualize and think specifically about what you want your life to look like in five years.
This is quite different from a vision board, which is just fantasizing…
I’d like a red Ferrari.
I’d like a supermodel girlfriend.
I’d like a yacht with a shark tank in it.
Whereas the 5-Year Self Determination Flowchart is specific organized predictions based upon habits and behaviors which can be measured and done daily or weekly.
I urge you to make time to do this now, shortly you’ll close this book and move on. Life will happen to you and you’ll forget about this exercise. Do it now.
The self-determination flowchart is a great thing to save and revisit, especially around January 1st. With the craziness of the holidays and the demands of family in the rearview, this should naturally be a more introspective period for you. This is an ideal time to consider how you’re doing, review your life, values, and habits along with your medium and long-term goals.
In Conclusion
Fate has cursed us with a costly physical imperfection that, if you let it, will define the mediocrity of your life and relationships. It’s probably the first thing people notice about you and it may always be. The mainstream self-help platitudes and advice will not get you that far. You need more powerful tools to wrench back control of your life from your selfish genes, the petty tyrants that surround you, and your internal demons.
For a long time, people have told me that I was quite smart and so I assumed that my success in living an extraordinary and very lively life was just the natural byproduct of my intelligence, even though I often felt very stupid and thought that I sucked at life about 90% of the time. But when I got into biohacking I tested my intelligence and discovered that I’m amazingly average, I have a 100 IQ.
So it’s not my inherent smarts (and certainly not my looks!) that have enabled me to thrive. It’s clearly the tools for personal transformation that I’ve yielded, at first awkwardly like Luke Skywalker swinging his lightsaber blind at the training drones while Obi-Wan Kenobi coached him but after devoted practice eventually with trenchant skill, finesse, swagger, and what the Italians call sprezzatura.
Those same tools are waiting for you.
To Summarize
- Hedonism is fun and it’s not bad but it is playing with fire. Practice a modicum of discipline, self-control, and long-term thinking along with your hedonism to really savor the greater pleasure over the lesser pleasure. Ethical hedonists are the ones who thrive in the long term, unprincipled hedonists end up as hopeless, lonely nihilistic losers or dead.
- With great opportunity comes interpersonal political intrigue. Either become the victim of the machiavellian power dynamics around you or read The 48 Laws of Power and study frame control to yield them to your advantage.
- If you want an extraordinary life full of amazing experiences, don’t leave it up to dumb luck. Write out, define, refine, and visualize what you want your life to be like in five years.
- What matters a lot more than your physical imperfection, your looks, and even your intelligence is the tools for personal transformation in your life.
