What we swallow to survive.
Ron arrives in Las Vegas with three suitcases, two hundred dollars, and the specific kind of shame that comes from being thrown out of someone else’s life. He takes a job as a bouncer at a gentlemen’s club because a man his size has no trouble getting hired. What follows is a two-year education in what it costs to enforce a system you know is wrong — to stand at a rope, sort men by the color of their skin, and call it the job.
Over several years as head of security and VIP host at the world’s largest gentlemen’s club, Ron learns the real curriculum: how to read a room for violence before it has a face, how to stand at a rope and sort men by the color of their skin and call it policy, how to watch human beings come apart for twenty-dollar bills and drive home and sleep. The club doesn’t create his capacity for moral compromise. It just pays him to keep proving it’s there.
Novocaine For My Soul is a memoir about institutional complicity — how a man signs on to a system one reasonable concession at a time until the concessions are indistinguishable from his character. It’s about the particular anesthesia of feeling necessary inside a machine designed to use people, and the decade of spiritual wreckage that followed when he finally walked out and discovered the numbness had traveled with him.
Underneath the club and the relapse and the slow rebuild is a theological argument Ron has been losing his entire life: that God is a transaction, that grace is a negotiation, that a man from the South Side earns what he gets and pays for what he takes. The memoir is the record of that argument — and what it finally took to lose it for good.
For readers of Kitchen Confidential, Beautiful Boy, and Educated. Complete at 103,000 words.
About the author
Ron Dillon
Ron Dillon is a Chicago-born writer, musician, and creator whose life story reads less like a traditional resume and more like a classic American noir. At twenty-one, he headed to California with a guitar and an appetite for the music industry, kicking off a decades-long journey through the beautiful and the brutal.
He has worn nearly every hat imaginable: on-air radio DJ, fine dining restaurant manager, and mortgage banker. He has also operated on the ragged edges of the night—surviving addiction, working the door as a strip club bouncer, and busking as a street-level typewriter poet. Influenced by the gritty realism of Charles Bukowski and the raw, observational hunger of Anthony Bourdain, Ron writes and creates from a place of hard-earned perspective, navigating high society and low-lit rooms with the same sharp eye.
