Ok, the boss says he needs me to “man up” so he can get you readers interested in this book that he’s trying to push. Easy for him to say. He’s had a pretty normal life. Mine has been about as far from normal as you can get. Although, now that I think of it, I guess that’s what will make a good book.
Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah. I was depressed as hell, telling you about my parents dying during my senior year of high school. As I said, up until that point, my life was going pretty damn well. My grades were great and I had a beautiful girlfriend named, Lisa. Life was perfect, until it wasn’t.
My parent’s death hit me hard. Yeah, I know that would hit any kid hard. However, it sent me into a spiral into darkness that almost consumed me. I stopped going to classes, stopped hanging out with anyone. Fortunately, it was the end of the year, and the only thing left for me to do was take the finals. Being a sudden orphan caused the school administration to cut me a lot of slack, and I was allowed to just take the tests and not have to walk for the graduation ceremony.
And, I broke up with Lisa.
Actually, it was worse than that. I just left. When drowning in grief, you make stupid decisions. My most stupid decision was shutting everyone left out of my life. In my muddled brain, I thought she would be much better off with a normal life. Besides, I reasoned, I was off to Yale and she was going to Florida State. Long distance relationships are dicey in the best of circumstances. Throw in a severely depressed orphan with dwarfism, and you have a recipe for a crappy life ahead.
That bone-headed decision would have tragic consequences for both of us. More on that later.
My time at Yale is a blur. I channeled my depression into getting lost in my studies. I had no personal life. If I wasn’t in class, I was at the Law library. My meals were at a local Irish pub where I would take up a booth in the back, surrounded by my law books and greasy plates of boxtys and foam-lined empty pint glasses of Guinness.
I didn’t form any real friendships at Yale. My dark moods, atrocious eating habits, and strange appearance, earned me the nickname of, Gimli. You know, the dwarf from The Lord of the Rings.
I take that back. I did make one minor friend. There was a guy in my dorm that was a computer whiz. My PC was crap, and I lost an important term paper. He not only recovered the file, he super-charged my computer, and hacked me into all sorts of databases that made my studies much easier, as well as get me some cool free video games. However, the best thing he did for me was clue me into the ground floor of several startups that would eventually lead to the Dot-Com boom. My parent’s inheritance allowed me to get heavily invested, and paved the way for many things to come. Yeah, I eventually cashed out before the bust. I have a gift for seeing when the feces is about to hit the fan.
Graduating from Yale Law School two years early, I was recruited, sight unseen, by a high-end Atlanta law firm. When they saw the package they had hired, they had the legal prudence to not make my dwarfism an issue. In time, they came to value how my strolling into a courtroom immediately took the opposing counsel of guard, and allowed me to tear their case apart while they tried to recover from the shock.
Life was good, at least financially. My personal life was nonexistent. My dark moods and long office hours led to relationships that rarely lasted longer than three dates. Drinking was beginning to become an issue. Hell, it had been an issue for a few years. However, it began to affect my health and my work. After ending up in the ER with a heart arrhythmia that took me off an important case, the senior partner at the firm benched me, and told me to take a month off and get myself straight.
It was a turning point in my life.
I’ll tell you about it next time.
