Well first there was blackjack. I went to a Card house to play poker, did okay there. But sat down at the blackjack table playing 3 seats for $100 or $200 at a time. Lost maybe 4K the first trip, then went back again and lost another 4k, bought back in from the cashier for another 2k, which I all lost.
Then last night I found this stupid online blackjack site with live dealers over video. Some of the videos of a guy playing it were super popular on Youtube. Lost another $2500 there.
So at that point I'm down about 12.5k. And I knew about a website that lets you essentially play roulette with Bitcoin. I had to use a proxy service to connect through a Mexican IP address. When I finally got my account funded I realized they had a max bet on each spin of around $3500. Of course I wanted to just do one spin for the whole amount. I promised myself that if I won, I would never gamble again. I was pretty drunk at that point, and just said fuck it and did one spin for $2500, lost it. Another spin, won it back. Upped the bet to the max of $3500 and then just mashed that stupid button. Boom Boom Boom, three spins, all losers. And it was gone. It took about 30 seconds total once I started betting.
It took me about 15 minutes for the gravity of what I did to set in. I downed a whole bottle of champagne, opened the next bottle of wine (a very nice one) and started drinking it. Then I started to cry. I don't think I've cried in years, and never like this.
I knew I needed to talk to someone. It was 3am. It was pretty selfish of me to start dialing, I realize that today. First tried to call my best friend who has long been my drinking buddy. Thankfully he didn't answer. I think he would have helped me rationalize what I've been doing to myself. Second call, to another friend who didn't answer.
I made one last call to a friend in a different time zone. We're not super close, but he's always struck me as just the nicest guy you could ever know. When the phone was ringing I was chanting "don't pick up, don't pick up". He answered on the last ring with a friendly "good morning", and then he just listened. Didn't judge at all. I told him everything while downing the last bottle of wine. For an hour. I confessed things I've never told anyone. Close to the end of the call I puked in the sink, and then finished the bottle. I asked him if he had any alcohol around to have one last drink with me. He didn't have any, he was at a hotel with no mini bar, but he had mouthwash, which apparently has some alcohol in it. So he downed the small bottle of mouthwash as I took the last drink of the wine. I told him I was going to do AA. It wasn't even his suggestion. He never once judged me or presumed to tell me what to do.
I hope to look back at this in years and laugh. I really hope that phone call saved my life and want to work every day to never go through that again.