Grace isn’t a sunrise you wait for.
It’s a pursuit.
Novocaine For My Soul follows several years as security and VIP host at the world’s largest gentlemen’s club: the promotion that came with a price, the dress code that was never about dress codes, and a faith that kept surfacing in the middle of nights built to make sure it never would.
Written the way the job was worked
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 he doesn’t expect is how good he’ll be at it — or what being good at it will cost him.
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.
Inside the Book
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.
“Testimonials, as authentic endorsements from satisfied customers, serve as potent social proof, significantly inspiring trust in potential consumers.”
“Testimonials, as authentic endorsements from satisfied customers, serve as potent social proof, significantly inspiring trust in potential consumers.”
A working-class noir written from the inside out.
Ron Dillon walked into Sapphire, the largest strip club in the world with a resume he mostly made up. They hired him on the spot.
Novocaine For My Soul is what he carried out the other side of that door: a memoir about surveillance rooms and tip envelopes, about a relapse that nearly killed him, about a God who kept turning up in the one building Dillon was sure He’d stay out of. Written in the same spare, unsentimental register as Bukowski and Bourdain, this isn’t a book that tidies up the wreckage to make it more comfortable to read. Dillon just tells you what he saw.