I knew this guy once. Paul. A real dreamer, the kind of guy America loves to build up just so it can have the pleasure of watching him fall. He had it all at the start, the whole goddamn setup. Found a beautiful woman, saddled up with her, and they popped out a kid—a beautiful blonde girl who looked just like him but had her mother’s grace.
He was at Stanford on a swimming scholarship, for Christ’s sake, studying to be a mechanical engineer. Standing over six feet tall, broad shoulders chiseled out of chlorine and hard work, a real young man’s swimmer’s body.
He was the whole fucking American postcard. The kind of guy you see in a magazine and hate on principle. The kind of guy who doesn’t know he’s already standing on a trapdoor, just waiting for the world to pull the lever.
His dreams were big, stupid, and golden. He had his eyes on the Olympics. But his back had tried to quit on him, and there was no other goddamn option if he was going to make a run at it. He had to get stronger, leaner.
So he became a fucking alchemist in his shitty little kitchen. He wasn’t a chef. He was a madman. He’d go down to the butcher and get the cheapest cuts, the gristle and sinew they were about to throw to the dogs. He’d take that sorry excuse for meat and drown it in some unholy concoction of berries, maple syrup, honey, and God knows what other weeds he pulled out of the ground.
He’d let it sit there, stewing in its own sweet poison, then stick it in a smoker until it was dry and hard as a coffin nail. He was obsessed with it. Not the taste. The numbers. The grams of protein. The cold, hard science of turning cheap shit into pure, uncut fuel.
And it worked. His body got hard as a goddamn stone, a machine built on a foundation of cheap meat and pure, uncut desperation.
And the jerky, it was delicious. Too damn delicious. That’s where the trouble always starts. People started asking about it. “Jesus Christ, Paul, where do you get this stuff?”
So, the dreamer starts dreaming. He gets ideas. He slaps a logo on the thing—some cartoon Indian squaw in a tipi, because he was fascinated with all that noble savage bullshit. A real piece of art.
He starts his big marketing campaign. He’s driving back and forth to Stanford, and his beautiful little daughter is in the car with him, a prop in his little hustle. He’s got her sticking her head out the window at stoplights, handing out samples of his meat. People would take a bite, their eyes would light up. “Jesus, kid, this is delicious!” It was the oldest trick in the book: use something beautiful and innocent to sell your shit. And it worked. A little business was born, just enough money trickling in to keep the wolves from the door.
And then the punchline. The big, cosmic joke. Paul, the dreamer, the alchemist with the smoker in his backyard, he makes the goddamn Olympic team.
He goes. He swims. He wins the fucking gold medal.
Just like that. The whole world laid out at his feet. A beautiful story. The kind of story that makes you want to look over your shoulder, waiting for the other shoe to drop with a goddamn hammer.
And with that gold medal comes a little money, sure. But more importantly, it comes with the people. The network. The sponsors, the endorsements, the handshakes in rooms full of men in expensive suits who smell like money and bullshit. The cash starts to trickle in. Not rich-man money, not yet. But you start getting a taste of the real richness: knowing the right people, the kind of people who can open doors you didn’t even know existed.
Every dime he made, he poured it right back into that goddamn beef jerky business. He was traveling the world now, showing off that piece of gold hanging around his neck. In Australia, he meets some guy. “Listen,” the guy says, “I’ve got a cattle farm. There’s a slaughterhouse right next to it. You bring the recipe, I’ll front the money. We can process everything right here, sell it worldwide.”
So Paul, the dreamer, he takes his perfect little family and moves to goddamn Australia. He’s out there counting cows, herding them around, looking good in a cowboy hat, playing the part. He masters the whole process—the marinade, the smoking, the packaging. He turns his little kitchen alchemy into a real commercial product. And it’s still delicious.
Then Nestle comes knocking. The big one. The goddamn giant. They offer him two million dollars for the whole operation. He and his wife, they’re excited. Of course they are. They sign the papers. Two million dollars.
He’s made it. He has the connections. He has the money. They spend a little time in South Africa, living the good life, washing the taste of the slaughterhouse out of their mouths, before finally making their way back home to the mainland, to a new life in Oregon.
The American Dream, right? A gold medal, a beautiful family, two million in the bank.
After the jerky money, Paul started wearing the skins of the people around him. He learned how to talk like them, how to think like them. He was a goddamn chameleon. It was a high point in his life; people started to know him by name. He wasn’t just some jerky man anymore; he was an inventor. A dreamer who actually made shit happen.
During his travels, another one of those simple, brilliant ideas hit him. A barbecue grill. But not just any grill. He figured out a way to set the coals so they’d burn up, not down. More efficient, better heat. He designed this little stainless-steel marvel that folded up into nothing, perfect for backpackers, for Boy Scouts, for the goddamn military. They were buying his kits for Desert Storm. It was a great idea, born from a mind that didn’t know how to quit.
He found a fabrication plant next to a train line, arranged the shipments by rail. They delivered the raw material, they stamped it out, they assembled it. It was another rags-to-riches story, a thriving business. They even made the local paper, a picture of him and his three adult kids, all of them smiling, helping with the business. The whole goddamn American Dream, playing out in real time.
But the dream is a hungry beast. The business got so big he felt like he needed help. He brought in another guy, a real suit, to be the CEO, to take it to the next level. And for a while, the guy did. Things were looking good. The numbers were climbing.
Then, all of a sudden, the revenue starts to drop. Files go missing. Something’s wrong. Something’s missing from the books, a quiet bleeding that no one can explain. Paul starts asking questions. “Why aren’t you sharing this with us? What’s going on here?”
And then the whole goddamn thing blows up.
The FBI comes knocking. Not with questions, but with warrants. Secret recordings. And here’s the real kick in the teeth, the part that turns a business failure into a Greek tragedy: Paul’s own daughter had to wear a goddamn wire. His little girl, the one who handed out jerky samples from the car window, now with a microphone taped to her chest, recording conversations for the feds.
Turns out the new CEO, the slick bastard Paul trusted, was connected. The real deal. The mob in New York. They were using the whole damn barbecue business as a front, a way to launder their filthy money, skimming it right off the top while Paul was busy dreaming about his next invention.
The CEO goes to prison, but only after a long, public trial that drags the whole family through the mud. The family is terrified. This isn’t some local squabble; the goddamn mafia is involved. It’s a federal case, a whole different kind of fear. The business, once thriving, once the subject of feel-good newspaper articles, has to file for bankruptcy. Liquidate everything.
And the design for that brilliant little barbecue? It’s now public domain. Anyone can make it.
He’s left with nothing. Again. Standing in the wreckage of his second empire, with nothing to show for it but the taste of ashes and the memory of his own daughter wearing a wire.
So now he’s just another ghost himself, surviving on the fumes of his old reputation, on the network of people who still remember his name. He ends up at some resort up the coast of California, a place that’s turned into a spiritual retreat for people with too much money and not enough soul. Paul’s there, licking his wounds, the heavy, greasy weight of his failure pressing down on him, the ghost of a man trying to remember how to make something, anything, that the world won’t just chew up and spit out.
Then one day, this Native American man comes up to him. A quiet guy, with eyes that have seen a thing or two. He asks for a moment of Paul’s time. He puts a hand on the back of Paul’s neck, pulls him a little closer, and just looks him dead in the eye. There’s an instant there, a silent, heavy moment where the whole goddamn world seems to stop.
Then the man pulls away, turns around to grab something, and reaches for Paul’s hand.
“Try this on,” he says, and he slides a sterling silver ring onto Paul’s finger. It’s shaped like an eagle’s head, heavy and cold. It fits perfectly.
“It’s yours,” the Indian says, his voice low and flat. “You need it more than anybody.”
And to this day, Paul swears that goddamn ring opened his eyes to something else. Something other than the hustle, the money, and the long, slow fall.
So now Paul’s got that magic eagle ring on his finger and he’s floating around in a spiritual cloud. He hears about these white buffaloes up on some reservation in New Mexico. A sacred herd, a divine calling, all that bullshit. The only problem is, they’re not being taken care of. They’re just another beautiful, neglected thing in a world full of them.
So Paul, the dreamer, he gets another one of his grand ideas.
He talks to the Indians who don’t want the buffaloes anymore, and he figures all he needs to do is find someone who does. He works his old network, gets some funds, gets the buffaloes transported to Oregon. Gets some feed, some fencing. But it’s not enough. A sacred herd, it turns out, still eats and shits like any other animal. It’s a constant goddamn drain.
So he gets another idea. He shaves the wool off those white buffaloes. All that beautiful, sacred hair. He takes it over the hill to the Pendleton factory in Milwaukee, Oregon. He walks in there, probably still smelling faintly of buffalo shit, and lays out his plan. “I want to make blankets,” he says.
The guy at Pendleton, probably bored out of his skull, he likes the sound of it. “Leave the wool here,” he says. “I’ll call you in a couple of weeks.”
A few weeks later, Paul is killing time, probably telling his life story to some pilot who’s just waiting for his plane to be repaired. Paul, he can talk for hours, spin a tale, make you believe in anything. He’s got this guy eating out of the palm of his hand. Then the phone rings. It’s Pendleton. “I have your stuff ready,” the guy says.
Paul tells the pilot he’s with that he has to go. “I’ll go with you,” the pilot says. “Keep you company.”
They drive the three hours to the factory. The guy from Pendleton comes out, all excited, brings them into his office. He pulls out one of the blankets. And it’s beautiful. The white buffalo hair, clean and conditioned, woven into one of those designs only Pendleton can do. It’s exactly the dream Paul had in his head.
“I’m glad you like it,” the Pendleton guy says, smiling. “So, if you could just write me a check for fifteen thousand dollars, you can have all of them.”
And just like that, the dream dies. Paul’s face falls. He doesn’t have fifteen grand. He doesn’t have fifteen hundred. He tries to make a deal, sell them on consignment. The guy says no. Business is business.
And then, the pilot, the stranger who came along for the ride, the one who’s been listening to all these stories of failure and hope, he picks up one of the blankets.
“I’d like to buy this one from you,” he says to Paul. “I’ll give you fifteen thousand dollars for this one blanket.”
And just like that, the goddamn miracle happens. The Foundation to Save the White Buffaloes is born from the wallet of a complete stranger. Every year after that, they sell those blankets for thousands of dollars, all for the charity.
Sometimes, the universe just hands you a winning ticket, right when you’re about to burn the whole goddamn casino down. It’s a sick joke, but sometimes, it’s a beautiful one.
The gentleman who bought the blanket? The pilot who just happened to be there? Turns out he’s some big shot from Iowa. A goddamn peanut king. Claims he has the largest peanuts in the United States. He hears Paul’s story, sees the magic ring, the buffalo wool, and he wants in. He makes a deal with Paul to do something with his giant peanuts for the white buffalo charity. And you know what? You can find them in Trader Joe’s now. A clean, white label with a picture of a white buffalo on it. “The White Buffalo Peanuts.” Another goddamn miracle, born from a chance encounter and a good story.
But this new Paul, this spiritual hustler, he was staying busy, sure. But in reality, he and his wife were just scraping by. When I met him, he was in his late seventies, renting a house filled with the fancy shit he’d collected over a lifetime of adventures. It was a museum showcasing a life lived well, or at least a life that looked like it was lived well. Pictures with Elvis. A piano with real ivory keys. Expensive glassware.
My kids went there once, and they walked around with their eyes wide open. “Are they rich, Dad?” they asked me.
And that was the trick, wasn’t it? It wasn’t about the material things. It was about how he held himself. He carried himself like a king, even when he was broke. Little did my kids know, Paul was living paycheck to paycheck, another dreamer just trying to keep the lights on.
He was a master of the illusion, a man who understood that in America, looking rich is often more important than being rich.
It started, as most disasters do, with a phone call out of the blue. An old friend of Paul’s from college, a ghost from back when they were both young and dumb enough to believe in all the promises the world makes you about achieving things.
This friend, he’d been out in the goddamn Nevada desert, digging in the dirt. Said he’d found something using satellite photos, some weird-ass vein of off-color clay that looked different, felt different. He needed to get a sample tested, certified. He needed Paul to help him make it look legitimate.
And the talk started then. The usual whispers that have been ruining men for centuries. “If this stuff is what we think it is, Paul,” the friend said, his voice probably buzzing with that dangerous, uncut hope, “we could start a business. A real one.”
It was the oldest song in the world. The one about striking it rich in the desert. The one that always ends with someone getting screwed.
And Paul, the poor, earnest bastard, he was already humming along.
The results come back, and they’re insane. The dirt, this clay, it’s got 99% of all the minerals in the world in it. A perfect cocktail of everything the earth has to offer. There are only a few places like it on the planet. It’s like Miracle-Gro on goddamn steroids. You sprinkle this shit on a dying tree, and it comes back to life. It was real. A genuine, honest-to-God miracle, pulled right out of the ground.
The plan was simple, clean. Perfect for a guy like Paul. They’d sell it to farmers. The first customers were in Africa, some connection he had. The results were outstanding. They were actually helping people grow food in places where nothing grew before. For a little while, it was a good, clean business. Paul was the president. He was happy. He thought he’d done it. He thought he’d found the one clean hustle in a world full of dirty ones.
But a good thing never lasts. Not in this country.
The talk started. Whispers at first, then louder. Talk about how big this thing could be. And with the talk came the money men. The investors. Guys in suits with soft hands and dead eyes, smelling a score. They started pouring funds in, and with their money came their ideas.
“Paul,” they’d say, their voices all smooth and reasonable, “this is great. But we need more structure. We need to take this to the next level.”
And Paul, the earnest fool, he listened. He bought into it. He and his board members, they decided they needed something more. Paul was the president, sure, but he wasn’t a “professional.” He wasn’t a “seasoned CEO.” They needed a real shark to take this thing out into the deep water.
So he went out and hired one.
The new CEO, he walked in with a thousand-dollar suit and a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. He was the kind of guy who had never had dirt under his fingernails in his life. He didn’t see a miracle; he saw a commodity. An asset. A ticker symbol.
His primary idea, the one he sold them in the boardroom with all his fancy charts and buzzwords, was to take the company public. Offer shares. Get more money on the stock market. He filed for a stock exchange immediately. The shares had value now. Real, paper value.
And the dirt? The miracle material? It wasn’t just for farmers anymore. Oh no. That was thinking too small.
“Put it on your face,” the new marketing team said. “It pulls the heavy metals from your skin, dries up your pimples.”
“Put it in a capsule,” the wellness gurus chirped. “It detoxes your whole system.”
“Put it in a fifty-pound bag at Home Depot,” the suburban strategists declared. “It makes your garden grow.”
And for a little while, against all the goddamn odds, the thing actually worked. The little startup was pulling in real money, built on something honest, something grounded in that Nevada dirt. It was a great moment, the kind that makes a man stupid with hope, the kind that couldn’t have happened at a better time.
But that’s the problem with finding something real that makes a profit. It always attracts the attention of the men who specialize in ruining good things. The investors, the suits, the sharks… they started to circle, smelling blood in the water. And Paul, the poor bastard, he thought they were coming to help him swim.
I ended up at a birthday party for Paul’s wife. One of those affairs in a beautiful restaurant where the wine costs more than your electric bill and everyone is smiling like they’ve got no secrets. Paul’s wife, she’d weathered with age, but she still played the part of a famous movie star, all grace and practiced charm. And Paul, he was sitting at the head of the long table, the king on his throne, holding court.
He fit the part, alright. The great all-American grandfather. He set the stakes so goddamn high, people couldn’t help but want to know more. When he told a story, the whole table would lean in, hanging on his every word like a congregation waiting for a sermon from a god they weren’t sure they believed in.
He was the patriarch of his tribe. And they were proud of it, proud to carry his last name. They reached for the same dreams he claimed to have accomplished, ate up his illusions, his grand visions, like a pack of starving dogs fighting over a scrap of rotten meat.
Then he taps his glass. “If I can have everybody’s attention,” he says, his voice thick with a practiced emotion.
And then he launches into the speech. The same goddamn speech every man like him eventually gives. It’s a well-rehearsed performance, and it always starts with the humility routine, the opening act.
He trots out the old ghosts of his business failures, polishing them up until they shine like trophies. The jerky business he sold too soon. The barbecue factory that went up in smoke. Then he throws in a casual, bullshit mention of “the mob,” just a little spice for the suckers at the table, a little cheap danger to make his story sound more interesting than it really was.
He gets all choked up, his voice cracking as he talks about the “hardships.” A real goddamn performance. You watch a man look back like that, and you know he’s not telling you a story. He’s painting a picture. A picture of himself as a survivor, a man who has walked through hell and come back with a good, heroic tale to tell at dinner parties.
“And today,” he says, his voice dropping to a dramatic whisper, “I want to give you something.”
The whole table goes quiet. The grandkids are already starting to tear up. His two boys, grown men, are looking at him with that wet-eyed reverence. His daughter is a mess. They’re all hooked, waiting for the punchline.
He was working his whole life, he said, with one goal: to leave a legacy.
He pulls a stack of envelopes from his sport jacket. Each one has a name on it. His children, his grandchildren. He hands them out, one by one, like he’s the Pope handing out goddamn blessings.
“These,” he announces, his voice full of theatrical weight, “are all my shares to the company I created.”
He lets that sink in.
“Right now,” he continues, waving a dismissive hand, “they’re only worth two cents a share, so don’t go cashing them in tomorrow.” A little chuckle from the crowd. “But once we go public, once the product line expands, the financial advisors say they could go up to twelve, maybe twenty dollars per share. What you have in your hands,” he says, his eyes sweeping the table, “is millions and millions of dollars. It will be worth that. I strongly believe it will, in the next couple of months.”
It was a great, heartfelt moment.
I looked at him, and in that moment, I saw the man society expected me to be. The kind of man who gets back up after every fall, who keeps chasing that classic American dream no matter the setbacks, until he finally catches it. It’s a story our culture celebrates, that kind of relentless resilience. You could feel the social pressure in the room, and I could certainly feel it from his daughter, a quiet push in that same direction.
Our culture loves that kind of story, the one about noble failure. It’s almost a religion. And his daughter, she was right there beside me, whispering the sermon, pushing me toward that same path.
He wasn’t giving them millions. He was giving them a lottery ticket. A piece of paper soaked in his own hope and salesmanship. He was giving them a promise, and a promise is cheap currency. It wasn’t a legacy; it was him offloading the risk of his latest gamble onto his own family, all while making himself look like a generous patriarch. He got all the glory of the grand gesture, and they were left holding a piece of paper, just hoping it would turn into something real.
And his family, they were all crying. Not because he was giving them a fortune, but because he was giving them what they always wanted: a part in his story. They were crying because it was a beautiful performance, and they were a beautiful audience.
I watched the whole spectacle, this masterpiece of theater, and I thought about it. The man who builds a legend on a foundation of failures, who convinces his own family that a two-cent lottery ticket is a winning hand. The man who just wants to be remembered as a patriarch, a provider.
But the new CEO and the board, they were under pressure from the investors to meet the requirements for going public. They sat Paul down in one of those cold, glass conference rooms, probably poured him an expensive bottle of water, and told him, in the most professional way possible, that he was being sidelined.
For the “shareholders,” they said. So everyone would have a “clear understanding of the company leadership.” So he could be a “team player.”
And Paul, being the earnest and trusting man he was, he went along with it. He nodded and smiled and signed the papers. He signed away his presidency. He signed away his future stock options, his salary, his real stake in the company he had started with his own two hands.
He walked out of that room a rich man on paper, but in reality, he was just a founder who had lost control of his own creation.
With the keys to the business now in his hands, the new CEO—the professional Paul had hired to “take it to the next level”—began making his moves. He offered shares to the first and second-tier investors before the stock ever went public, diluting its value from the very start.
Then came the side deals. Shipments of material that weren’t on the books. The company’s assets were being quietly siphoned off, even as the official reports to investors painted a beautiful picture.
The stocks, that grand promise of millions, never really had a chance. They never climbed out of the penny-stock range, just sinking lower and lower over time. The final act of the transition was to remove Paul, the founder, from the picture entirely. A clean, quiet removal.
Last I heard, the shares were trading at point-zero-zero-nine. A long way from the twenty dollars a share he had promised his crying family at that birthday party.
That grand inheritance he handed out in those envelopes? That legacy?
It was junk. Literally junk bonds. Worth less than the cheap paper they were printed on. A perfect ending to another American dream.
So Paul and his wife, they didn’t end up living the rich life. The millions from the miracle dirt turned to dust, just like most of his other ventures. They kept renting, kept stressing, the walls of their small houses seeming to close in a little more each year.
The wife’s health started to fade, and in her decline, she would often remind him of past ventures. “You sold that beef jerky place for two million,” she’d say, her voice thin. “Three years later, Nestle sold it for twenty million.” She never let him forget it. For every venture he was proud of, every time he built something with his own two hands, she was there to remind him that in the end, there was never enough money to sustain a life. She called him a fool, and the quiet truth of it just hung in the air between them.
The grand legacy he was so desperate to give his family was the American Dream: work hard, save your money, and retire a king. That was the sermon he preached. He wanted to hand them a kingdom. Instead, he just showed them how a man could build a dozen castles and still end up living in a rented room.
His two boys chose a different path. Last I heard, one was a roofing inspector, the other a contractor. They married, lived quiet, blue-collar lives. But they seemed happy. They had learned a lesson their father never did: that maybe the game wasn’t worth playing in the first place.
But his daughter, she was still chasing it. In her fifties now, still climbing the corporate ladder, still trying to be that “corporate person,” convinced that the next rung would finally lead to something real.
After his wife passed away, Paul, with the energy he had left, did what he always did best. He put on his suit, turned on the charm, and used his networking skills to find a new situation. He ended up with a wealthy widow down in Huntington Beach.
He spends his days now watching the sunsets from a deck he didn’t build, drinking wine he didn’t pay for. They say he’s finally enjoying life, no more trying, no more building. Just… enjoying.
And that’s the final irony, isn’t it? The man who spent his whole life trying to be a self-made king ended up living comfortably in a house someone else built. His grand American legacy wasn’t a fortune he created, but a quiet retirement he inherited.
A perfect, pathetic, all-American ending.
Some guy said to me once, probably over a beer, his breath smelling of bullshit and cheap peanuts, “James, how many people in this world can say they were a millionaire?”
A good question, I guess. At my peak, I was swimming in the top three percent of earners in this whole goddamn country. Me. A latchkey kid from Lynwood, California. Pure white trash, blue collar to the bone, with nothing but grit and a bad attitude. And I was up there with the kings, for a little while.
I got to celebrate achieving that great American lie, the dream they sell you in the movies. That was one kind of party.
But then, I got to do something most of those lucky bastards never do. I got to celebrate a second time, when I lost every last goddamn penny of it.
Think about that for a minute. Any asshole with enough luck and a strong back can claw his way to a fortune. It’s been done. They build their little empires, they sit on their piles of gold, and they die scared of losing it.
But how many of them can say they’ve done both? How many have built the whole damn sandcastle, right down to the last perfect turret, just to feel the beautiful, cleansing power of the tide as it comes in and washes it all away, leaving you right back where you started?
Standing there, with nothing but the wet sand and the truth.
Most men only get to celebrate the climb. A real man, a man who’s really lived, he gets to celebrate the fall, too. And I’ll tell you, the view on the way down is a hell of a lot more interesting.
That’s why Paul’s story was so goddamn important to me. After watching him, after seeing the whole pathetic, beautiful, doomed spectacle of his life—the trying and the failing, the trying and the failing, the one brief flash of success just before the next spectacular goddamn failure—I knew.
I knew I was done. I knew I was not going down that road, no matter how much I loved his daughter. And Christ, I did. But that was the final, brutal lesson. That was the reason I packed my shit and left Bend for Sedona. I wanted nothing to do with Paul’s life.
I didn’t want to be the guy who tries again and again and again, a man addicted to the beautiful, stupid hope of the next roll of the dice. Yeah, he got lucky sometimes. There was excitement in it, sure. The thrill of the gamble. And then there was the inevitable failure, the crash, the wreckage.
In the entrepreneur world, they have a nice little saying for it: “If you don’t try, you can’t fail.” They say “failing just means you tried.” Bullshit. Failing is just a prettier word for losing. And Paul, for all his charm and his big ideas, was a professional loser. He just did it with more style than most. All that, while the rest of the world, the smart sonsabitches who know the game is rigged, just collect their steady paycheck and take the weekends off.
Don’t get me wrong. There was nothing to disparage about Paul. He was an incredible person, a magnificent wreck. There was something in him, some wiring, that made him believe he was a good man, a great man, even as he was driving another venture into the ground. He’s still alive today, I’m sure, still selling some new dream to some new sucker.
But even our heroes, even the men we envy for their fire, sometimes they give you the lessons you need. And it’s not always the one you expect.
Sometimes the best thing a hero can do for you is show you exactly how to die. And I looked at Paul’s life, that long, slow, noble suicide on the altar of the American Dream, and I said, “No, thanks. Not for me.”
