The Mansion

6,500 square feet. My hometown, the same streets I grew up on. I moved in on October 15, 2014, at twenty-one years old, with a C300 and a 350Z in the driveway and rooms in that house I never once walked into. When I was eleven I drew floor plans of a house like that by hand. This one had more floor than the drawing did.

I partied in it like the rockstar I thought I was. It was full of people most nights and I could not have named half of them. First cocaine at my own New Year's Eve party, in my own house, with a room full of people I had invited. First strip club on my twenty-first birthday in Atlantic City. Then about $300K into strip clubs over the next six months.

That is all true and I am not softening any of it. It happened, I chose it, and nobody made me. Twenty-one years old with more money than sense and a building big enough to hide the fact that nothing in my life had any structure in it.

That is the part I actually think about now. The house had structure. Load-bearing walls, a roof that held, rooms that knew what they were for. I did not. I had a company, and I was giving it two hours a week.

Two hours a week. The thing that bought the house, the cars, the parties and every dollar that went across a stage in Atlantic City, and I was giving it two hours a week. It was still doing numbers, so I told myself it was fine. It was not fine. Businesses that get two hours a week die. Mine was already dying while I was standing in the biggest house I had ever been inside, and I could not see it from in there.