Dom and Matt were deep in Counter-Strike marathons. Matt had flunked college for it. One night I saw his playtime on Counter-Strike: Source—over 30,000 hours. By 2 a.m. he’d be on Rum and Dr Pepper while Dom smoked himself hazy. Utilities—cable, heat, electric—went unpaid. I covered them.
I never tallied my own hours at the tables, but I was just as checked out.
One afternoon, I was hitting a weed pipe on the patio at noon. Janine walked out and stopped. Like a good mother, she condemned Dom for smoking pot all day and not doing anything, she instead took pity on me. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. The look was enough. It carried disappointment without contempt, and that was worse. It said: You’re here, but you’re not living.
Around thirty-nine, I started reading Jung. The phrase that stopped me was Puer Aeternus—the eternal child. Gifted early. Protected by intelligence. Floating above consequence. When I first read it, I saw Dom immediately.
What took longer—miles of walking, thinking, replaying old scenes—was seeing that this had once been me too.
At twenty-five, I wasn’t innocent. I was insulated. A child with a bankroll. I harmed people by vanishing, by withholding presence, by treating connection as optional when it asked something of me. I called it youth. I called it the grind. I didn’t call it what it was.
Eventually, I stopped granting myself that exemption.
Janine was an adult in every sense. Over time, I realized it was her I admired, not Dom. Not the philosophizing, not the clever reframes that turned failure into misunderstood genius. Janine worked. She moved. She followed through. She cared fiercely about her son, enough to move mountains for him.
That was the pull she had with people.
At twenty-five, when Dom drove me to the casino, something shifted. Those car rides were the only times I didn’t feel completely alone. We talked—about life, meaning, whatever passed for depth back then. It felt like connection. In retrospect, it was stalling.
After sessions we’d sit on the patio, fog rolling in off the water. He’d smoke a joint. I’d have a cigarette. No audience. No scorekeeping. Just presence. That was what I needed then.
Years later, I heard from Nick that nothing had really changed. Dom still couldn’t own his mistakes. People who’d known him for years didn’t argue with him. They just disappeared.
By then I’d logged fifteen million hands. He hadn’t cracked a hundred thousand.
Years later we crossed paths again in that borrowed multi-million-dollar mansion in Ventnor. Live free. Just cover utilities. When I arrived at twenty-eight, the house felt wrong. Too quiet. Too hollow. Windows open in winter, massive stone fireplace roaring for contrast. Gas bills climbing into the thousands. A problem left untouched.
Before I played that tournament, Dom asked for five percent of me. Casual. A small hedge. I said yes anyway.
Back at the house, on the second-floor patio, I reached into my pocket, fanned out his cut in crisp hundreds, and flung them into the air. Bills fluttered around his feet. Tiny fit Puerto Rican Alyssa stood there, mouth agape, not sure what had just transpired. She wanted a relationship with Dom—clearly, openly—but Dom avoided taking any risk there, the same way he avoided most things that might cost him comfort. She even wanted me, or at least the version of me she thought she saw, but I wasn’t in a position to ground myself yet. Alyssa was just an innocent bystander who, luckily, didn’t get stuck in our whirlwinds.
It took years to understand that it wasn’t the money that mattered, and it wasn’t even the spite. What I was reaching for in that moment was power. I wanted to feel above something because I didn’t know how to ask for what I actually needed. I didn’t need leverage. I needed friends who cared about me and how I actually felt—not people who mistook proximity for connection.
I confused being seen with being powerful, and for a long time, that confusion passed as adulthood.
He took the money without a word.
There was a stretch of years where Dominick and I looked almost identical from the outside. Smart. Capable. Funny when we wanted to be. Both of us drifting. Two men old enough to know better, but still waiting for something to force our hands.
He had an overprotective but awesome mother. I had a stable father. He didn’t have the confrontation of a male figure to tell him he was wrong. In my house, wrong was addressed early. In his, wrong was softened.
Nick, our mutual friend, was playing a $600 satellite to win a Main Event seat. He later won it. I’d like to think I helped in whatever way I could. Coconut water. Being there. Showing up.
Dominick was probably smoking pot on a patio. That would fit him.
Dominick was staying ten minutes away in an AirBnB.
He couldn’t leave it.
Ten minutes.
I told him to fuck off because he wouldn’t walk the ten minutes. No speech. No explanation. Just a refusal to tolerate what I saw as inertia.
I was driving since New Jersey to Las Vegas. It took days. He couldn’t submit to a point of seeing my side. It’s always about him, at least in my eyes. Or at least that’s the story I told myself, clean and convenient.
I remember standing there after sending the message, not furious, not shaking, just settled. A line had been drawn. Whether it was leadership or ego, I couldn’t yet tell. It felt decisive. It felt final.
I ghosted him after that. I still don’t miss him. Maybe I was wrong but I was driving since New Jersey to Las Vegas. Distance made the judgment easier. Silence did the rest.
In my mind I had shown up. In my mind that mattered. Effort was a currency, and he hadn’t spent any. I valued motion. I had little patience for stillness that looked like avoidance.
It had been a few years earlier when I read close to 100 books. I stopped doing drugs. I had no hobbies beyond escaping through drugs before that. Now I had discipline. Structure where there had once been fog.
Weights in the morning. Long walks. Pages dog-eared and underlined. The kind of solitary repetition that feels like building something even if no one else sees it. The kind of repetition that looks like growth from the outside and feels like insulation from the inside.
It was isolation, upgraded. But at least it was forward momentum. Forward, even if not outward.
Dominick was still ghosted by his childhood friends.
He remained in the same apartment, the same rhythms, the same reluctance to step into discomfort — at least from what I could see from a distance. From my vantage point, he hadn’t moved.
I moved.
He didn’t.
But moving forward and leading are not identical acts. I was confronting myself. I wasn’t confronting other men. I was improving in private, not correcting in public.
He didn’t have a male figure to tell him he was wrong. I did. My father would have told me. And he would have said it plainly.
The difference between us may not have been willpower. It may have been pressure. One of us had been pressed. The other had been protected.
Our relationship ended when I was thirty-one. I didn’t understand it then as an ending so much as a necessary cut. I still thought momentum equaled health. It took years to see how much damage I was carrying. I didn’t realize how broken I still was until I landed back in a mental hospital at thirty-nine, then again shortly after. Back to back. That was when it became clear that growth without connection had only refined the isolation. I had been moving. I had not been healing.
Years later I heard Dominick was teaching pickleball. A game for forty-year-olds, designed so seventy-year-olds can get out of the house. He was thirty-nine. Close enough to my age.
He had been supposed to be working at NASA. Instead it was weed, and teaching something he’d played high fifteen years ago.
I had changed. Dom had not.