Memoirs of a Steroid Kingpin, Episode 17: “Overwhelmed with New Orders”

Over time, my routine became the same. Wake up; check iSteroids and Phantom Gym; answer emails and package any orders that came in that morning. Next, I had to collect Western Union payments sent to me for the orders I was shipping, then I dropped the orders off at the post office. Thenceforth, I would go to the gym and to work. While at work, I answered as many emails as possible throughout the busy workday. When I returned home at 11:30pm, I answered the rest of the emails, collected payment information, and packaged all of the orders to ship the following day. These quotidian tasks lasted until approximately 3am. It became so tedious that I began begrudging each order. My new packaging method included fastidiously wrapping each vial in bubble wrap, and I purchased little bottles in which to put the hundreds to thousands of pills I counted out diurnally. Packing a few orders was not too laborious, but packing fifteen or more orders a day on top of a full time Emergency Room job was enervating.

Every aspect became strenuous. I was picking up fifteen or more Western Union payments per day. Filling out the forms and waiting on the transaction process was tedious. I wanted to spread out my money collection, so it didn’t seem suspicious that I was picking up thousands of dollars every day. Furthermore, most Western Union locations only had a thousand dollars in cash on them at any time, so I had to visit multiple Western Union locations per day.

With the amount of money, emails, and orders I was processing routinely, I was forced to implement a minimum order to reduce the quantity of transactions. Most other sources invoked a one-hundred-dollar minimum order, however, after some consultation with more experienced fellow sources, I decided it was more prudent to implement a two-hundred-dollar minimum order. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to matter. Postliminary to executing a two-hundred-dollar minimum order, the quantity of transactions did not relent. In fact, not only did my clients simply order more, they ordered considerably more. My average order was increasing to well over the two-hundred-dollar minimum.

One day, I woke up exasperated from the previous day’s work. I packed fifteen orders the previous night, and was up until almost 5am. I had to do it all over again today. Today could not be as bad as yesterday, or the last few weeks for that matter. Maybe people were gearing up for their spring cycles, and business would soon die down. I couldn’t believe I was hoping for less business, but I could not continue at this pace. I fired up my new MacBook Pro, and opened my email from the company that hosted my website. What I saw caused neurons to divert from my prefrontal cortex (the reasoning center of the brain), to my amygdala (an instinctual part of the brain dealing with involuntary responses such as the fight or flight response), and initiate a flight response. In other words, my heart sunk, and I was afraid.

I had over two hundred waiting emails from this morning! It was going to take me many hours to answer all of these emails! I still had to go to work! I already had fifteen orders to ship, and fifteen payments to collect! How many more orders and payments would come from the inexorable purge of these emails? After adding the payments for new orders from these emails, I was going to have close to a hundred thousand dollars at my house!

This was too much. I was not a man who was predisposed to panic attacks, but if I have ever had one, then it was at this moment. My visage was one of fear and defeat. I commenced heavily breathing, I put my hand on my head, and I sat on my bed with my head down buried in my hands. I can’t keep this up. This has gotten out of control. I can’t do this anymore. I am going to get caught. This got too big. I am going to get into trouble for sure. How many years in prison would I get for this? I had to quit. I would fill all of the orders for people who have paid, but I wouldn’t take any new orders, and I would simply tell everyone I was done. I had to start unraveling everything I had built. I can’t. I quit.

Slowly, I started thinking of letting all of my clients and customers down. I started thinking of losing all of that potential revenue. I started thinking of making significantly less money. Then I began to think about Gene. When you say “I can’t”, you give in to mediocrity. Greatness has never been built on the words “I quit”.

All I could see in my head, again, were the relentless inculcation of memes glorifying the virtues of taking risks: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.

“Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” – Goethe;

“Security is mostly a superstition. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” — Helen Keller;

“It’s not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It’s because we dare not venture that they are difficult.” – Seneca;

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far it is possible to go.” — T.S. Eliot;

“What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it is another matter.” — Peter Drucker;

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” — Mark Twain;

“Go out on a limb. That’s where the fruit is.” — Jimmy Carter;

“I can accept failure. Everybody fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying. Fear is an illusion.” — Michael Jordan.

As I sat on my bed, my head slowly rose from being down in my hands. I imagine the song “Thunder Struck” by AC/DC should have been playing in the background,

“I was caught in the middle of a railroad track (Thunder);
I looked ’round, and I knew there was no turning back (Thunder)”.

As my head rose, this time, my countenance bore a steeled jaw with a look of confidence and determination.

Fuck that. I can do this.

NEXT >> Interlude 03 (In Retrospect – D.O.S.E.)

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Memoirs of a Steroid Kingpin (Table of Contents)

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Ryan’s Root’s real-life autobiographical story is a must-read account of his rise and fall as one of the largest anabolic steroid dealers on the Internet.

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