THE NARRATIVE ARC
I Needed a Mentor. Instead, I Became an Accomplice
It would be nearly a decade before I realized what was happening to me
Looking back, what struck me wasn’t the harshness of the words — my mentor was often verbally abusive — but how they seemed to come out in a single screech.
“Don’t you ever fucking hang up on me!”
Virgil — we’ll call him Virgil — was typically volatile, or bombastic if you were being generous. It was funny at first, which sold the idea that it was harmless. The goofiness of his performance, the outlandishness of his near-constant joke threats, were a sleight-of-hand trick to pull focus from the facts: this was a man who defaulted to coercion to get his way.
But recently, the goofiness had given way to mania.
His gloating had given way to what were, in retrospect, genuine delusions of grandeur. I became aware (against my will) that he was using hard drugs and having numerous extramarital affairs with people he introduced to me as “potential business opportunities.” He’d gotten in some legal trouble for brandishing a handgun at a couple during a New Year’s Eve party.
This last one pulled me deeper into the growing maelstrom. He tasked me, as his assistant, with…
