He took his first drink at eight years old at his father's wedding.
By the time he was 30, half his skull was made of metal, his wife had tried to have him taken off life support, and he'd survived seven brain surgeries after a six-week coma that should have killed him. He'd also been a bartender in Vegas gay clubs under a stage name, taught English in Shanghai, smoked heroin on a balcony in Barcelona, and left a trail of wreckage so wide it touched every person who'd ever loved him.
This is not a feel-good story about recovery.
This is the story of what happens when a kid from Boston - raised on chaos, Catholic school, and the rotating cast of stepfathers his mother brought home - turns self-destruction into an art form. It's the story of a man who burned through cities, substances, and people the way a fire burns through a dry forest: fast, hot, and without regard for anything in its path. It's the story of what the night world really looks like from inside the clubs, the deals, the lives that get swallowed whole, and what it costs to walk away.
It's also the story of what comes after.
After the coma. After the metal skull. After the wife tried to pull the plug. After learning to be a father to the daughter he nearly lost, along with everything else. After the years of grinding, inglorious work of staying sober one day at a time - the AA meetings, the amends, the sponsor who refused to let him quit, and the quiet, unglamorous courage of showing up for a little girl's breakfast every morning when every fiber of his body remembered how good it felt to disappear.
And then there's what his brain became.
Seven surgeries and a reconstructed skull left him with something he never expected: a mind that sees patterns other people miss. A mind that recognizes predators, because he'd spent a lifetime running with them. A mind that can't look away from what it knows is happening in the dark to kids, to the vulnerable, to the ones no one's watching.
He spent years being in danger. Now he's the one hunting it.
Raw, unflinching, and relentlessly honest, If It Fits In It Gets In is a memoir that refuses to sanitize addiction, romanticize recovery, or pretend that surviving makes you a hero. It's a book about the things we do to ourselves, the things others do to us, and the thin, razor-wire line between the person you were and the person you might still become - if you're willing to fight for it.
The title comes from something a trans cocktail waitress said in a Vegas nightclub. You'll never forget it once you read it.
