One wild life. A whole universe of stories.

I met the man I called Fat Alex on Gay.com. We met up in Balboa Park around midnight. We talked business, and somehow I ended up working at Lending Gateway. Southern California was in the middle of a mortgage boom, and Alex could make the next deal sound like the one that would get us both rich. In my recollection, his past included an Orange County luxury-car theft operation and an assumed name. I still wanted in.

Alex had once weighed nearly a ton, as I remember it. He told people he’d lost the weight through diet and exercise. My understanding was that he’d had gastric bypass surgery. He wanted to be the face of Trim Teams, a weight-loss program founded by Ken Crawford. I liked the pitch enough to put $100,000 into the venture with Ken. I never saw that money again.

I was by Alex’s side when he went in to have the excess skin removed. By then, he’d introduced me to what he called “happy pills,” which came through his cousin Stevie by way of Tijuana. I got hooked. While Alex was in surgery, I stole some of his pills. I cared about him. I did it anyway.

I’d put company expenses on my personal Amex because I thought the next deal would cover the last one. When the mortgage market crashed in 2008, I was left facing roughly $500,000 in disputed charges and filed for bankruptcy. When things fell apart between Alex and me, I hooked up with his boyfriend to get back at him.

Alex had a hell of a sales pitch. So did I, especially when I was selling something to myself.

In my twenties, I was right in the middle of San Diego’s gay porn scene. I knew Brent Corrigan and Brent Everett, was friends with Keith at Helix Studios, and got to know the guy who owned MiamiBoyz. His dream was to get out of porn and open a Subway franchise. The first time he saw me in person, he asked my model friend, “When are you gonna get Evan to do porn?” He didn’t realize I was in the room. I said, “Never.” He laughed. We stayed friends. Just friends.

In 2007, I let a friend shoot a porno in my North Park condo. I hosted the models. I was pretty, I was smart, and I was obsessed. My Laguna Beach friends were part of that era, too. We had adventures in Hancock Park, Hollywood, and San Francisco. I wanted to be around famous people, and I wanted some of that fame for myself.

After the 2008 crash killed the mortgage business, I went to work at My Lineage, selling family-history products to military customers. I was good at selling and needed a paycheck. Around then, I reconnected with Andrew Tony. His sugar daddy, Dave, took us to the Bellagio for Andrew’s birthday. As I understood it, Dave was a diplomat from Mexico City with a wife and family back home. Andrew and I went off to party with other people. Dave wanted me to have a threesome. I said no, and he made me feel like I’d mooched the trip. Meanwhile, as I remember it, Andrew took about $10,000 in cash Dave had tucked away in his luggage.

I loved being wanted. I kept confusing sex for love. When somebody famous wanted me around, I took it as proof that I was finally somebody, too.

In 2012, I was living with a porn performer I was dating. One night, during an argument about another guy coming over, he choked me. He moved out, and we broke up.

I was in Hawaii with Andrew when I ran out of pills. I already had a job interview lined up back in California, so I cut the trip short. I didn’t get that job. The offer from Chosen Foods came right after.

George Todd hired me when Chosen Foods was still small. I remember being around the tenth employee. I sourced ingredients, negotiated with suppliers, and helped make avocado oil central to the business. George was one of the hardest-working founders I ever met. I could spend the day getting a supplier to call me back and the evening trying to figure out where I’d get my next pill. I was trying to get off them, going through withdrawal and crashing. When my doctor cut me off, I started buying pills on the street.

I remember members of George’s family harassing me for being gay. A new sales hire who was friends with the family joined in, as I remember it. One day, the husband of George’s daughter Natalie yelled at me in the warehouse. George didn’t step in. I wanted more than a paycheck. I wanted a seat at the family table, and I kept waiting for George to say something.

Around the time Sesajal was in talks to take a majority stake, I remember Luis from Sesajal mocking me for having started as an assistant. He said only women were assistants. Meanwhile, I heard Luis and other sales guys sexualizing new staff, and I got the impression that how attractive they found a woman could help get her hired. As for me, one night I invited a Grindr hookup into the office after hours. He ended up beneath my desk. Yes, really.

I thought George was exhausted and his family was pushing him to sell. It looked like greed to me. I told him I thought he should keep going. I couldn’t take the way I was being treated anymore, so I quit. When I left, Gabriel Pérez Krieb from Sesajal took me to P.F. Chang’s in La Jolla. I remember him giving me a check for signing an NDA. I think it was around $10,000. At the time, that felt like a lot of money.

Sesajal took a majority stake in 2017. The avocado oil I’d helped build kept finding its way into more kitchens. I believed there could have been millions in it for me if I’d stayed and shared in that growth. Instead, I walked away with a check and the feeling that I’d been pushed out for being gay.

When I first worked on MaryRuth Organics, the vitamins were being mixed by hand in small batches at JoAnn Cuddigan’s warehouse in Brea. David Ghiyam had gone from teaching Kabbalah to building a wellness business alongside MaryRuth. Through EP&A, I brought in Sean Evenson at Northwest PharmaNaturals and helped reformulate the morning and nighttime liquids for mass production. A formula that works by hand in a warehouse still has to work in a factory tank. We had to get the ingredients, labels, and certifications right, and the production date kept slipping.

I was working all the time, still hooked on pain pills, and hooking up whenever I had a minute. My grandmother died, and I spent some of the money she left me on a Cadillac. I still thought a new car was going to do something for me. Mostly, it gave me somewhere nice to sit while I waited for the factory to call.

The delays at Northwest ate through my money. David wouldn’t help cover the shortfall. In the meantime, he paid me commissions on other white-label vitamins I sold him through The GHT Companies, a supplier I already knew in Vista. I remember the owner calling me wild in an email. Fair enough. The commissions still didn’t cover my bills, so I went to Chicago to stay with Andrew.

In Vegas, Andrew had looked like a damn model, head to toe in Gucci and Louis Vuitton. In Chicago, he was living with his tall, loyal best friend in a huge early-1900s house near Wrigley Field. He smoked a lot of weed and seemed suspicious of everybody by then. As I understood it, the market had turned on Steve, his sugar daddy, and Steve couldn’t keep paying the bills. The house was headed for foreclosure, there was no buyer, and Andrew was getting by on almost nothing.

Then Andrew and his friend wanted me to sell my Honda so they could get a Mercedes. I saw the look in their eyes. I knew that look. I’d worn it myself. Maybe Andrew had changed. Maybe I had. I knew what it felt like to look at a friend and see a way to get something I wanted. I didn’t want to be that guy anymore. That was the last time I saw Andrew.

I went back to California and took a job with Kenny Morrison at Venice Cookie Company while I was still working with David and MaryRuth. I was trying to keep EP&A alive through the delays and the fallout at the factory. When the relationship finally collapsed, the brand went forward with the formulas I’d helped develop and the manufacturing relationships I’d brought in. I was left with EP&A and the debt. The story that started with hand-mixed vitamins in Brea eventually reached Beverly Hills and, as I remember it, a reported $35 million mansion once linked to a porn star.

Then, in February 2026, Michelle Kwan appeared in a MaryRuth Organics commercial during the Winter Olympics. I recognized the products. I went looking for old emails, contracts, and business records. I thought I was going back to figure out what had happened to one deal. I wound up going back through thirty years of my life. That’s how Millennial Misery Stories got started.

After I left Andrew’s place in Chicago, I went back to California and took a job in Los Angeles with Kenny Morrison at Venice Cookie Company. Kenny had played Atreyu in The NeverEnding Story II. Now California was opening up recreational cannabis, and I thought he had a real shot at owning the market. I was still working with David and MaryRuth through EP&A. That relationship fell apart while I was working for Kenny.

I thought Kenny’s burned-out crew was holding him back. Michael, the very tall gay manager, drove me nuts. I thought he was a dingbat. There were kitchen fights, an older woman with a dog, a cash room, and a workday edible I badly misjudged. I could see what the company could become. I couldn’t get through a day there without losing patience.

Outside work, I was still deep into oxy. When my L.A. dealers ran out, I’d drive down to San Diego to buy pills. I spent what felt like every spare hour online looking for hookups in West Hollywood, playing rich in a fake Rolex and a fake Louis Vuitton jacket. I was miserable. One night, a guy messaged me about a laptop I’d listed on Facebook Marketplace. It turned into a hookup, and I got robbed. He got my phone. I got out of the car.

Eventually I’d had enough of the nonsense at Venice Cookie Company. I quit and went to work at Jarrow Formulas.

“Where have they been hiding you?” That’s how I remember Jarrow Rogovin greeting me. The man who helped put probiotics on the map taught me about art and flirted with me in a way that made me laugh. We could start out talking about a painting and end up on why American civilization was about to collapse. I liked him. I also recognized some of my own anger in him.

I knew Andrew before I met Fat Alex. We reconnected around 2009, when the mortgage business had collapsed and Alex and I were falling out. Dave, Andrew’s sugar daddy, took us to Vegas for Andrew’s birthday. Andrew and I went off to party with other people while Dave stayed behind. At the time, I was mostly thinking about where we were going next.

Years later, I was reformulating the MaryRuth liquids through EP&A and struggling to pay my bills. Andrew let me stay at his three-story townhouse near Wrigley Field. He was more guarded than I remembered, and I remember thinking he might lose the house. He had plenty to worry about himself. He still opened the door for me.