ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Three Suitcases, Two Hundred Dollars, and a Job He Lied His Way Into
NOVOCAINE FOR MY SOUL
Ron Dillon worked the door of the largest strip club in the world, sixty thousand square feet of marble hallway, surveillance monitors, and cash that never stopped moving. Before that: a radio booth, a mortgage desk, a worship stage under different lights. Novocaine For My Soul is what he saw in between. Six hundred entertainers. An owner’s son on a ladder screaming into a PA system. A man in a charcoal suit he turned away and never forgot. It isn’t a confession, and it isn’t a cure. It’s logistics. What the job cost, what the desert took instead, and who was still standing when the suits went down the trash chute.
“Recovery isn’t a sunrise. It’s learning how to walk on a leg that healed wrong. Functional. Painful. Yours.”
Explore the Life, Work, and Words of Ron Dillon
Ron has worn nearly every hat imaginable: on-air radio DJ, worship leader, 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. Today, Ron is back in Chicago operating his creative ventures alongside his wife and business partner, Veronica. Read the story, explore his manuscript Novocaine For My Soul, or reach out for speaking and media inquiries.
The Suit and the Backdrop
These are the photos that used to make it look like the good life. Sapphire’s step-and-repeat, the branded backdrop, the practiced smile next to the cocktail girls and the entertainers. At the time this was the proof that the plan was working, that a guy who showed up with three suitcases and a made-up resume had actually landed somewhere. It took years, and a lot of wreckage, to see these pictures for what they actually are: a man in a good suit, standing in a room built to take everything from everybody in it, smiling because that was the job.
