John Gafford

What choices did you make that changed the direction of what you were trying to do?

I needed that in my village, you know?

Yeah.

So you had a lot of people show up.

Do you have any people kind of go away because of this?

I think part of it is I kind of came through not the jail stuff, but at one point I was the GM of what Esquire magazine called the number one nightclub on the East Coast of the United States.

And that was Cobalt Lounge in Atlanta.

And then after kind of the Ray Lewis debacle of the Super Bowl of 2000, that kind of ended that club, right?

It kind of dried up.

And what I realized was in a weird sort of way was, again, I went through a depression after that because my whole avatar, my whole...

my whole self-worth got wrapped up in that job.

Like, because there was much like probably you in LA at that time, there was no place I could not go.

I waited for nothing.

I paid for nothing.

It was velvet rope clicking everywhere I went.

And everybody wanted to be close to you because of what you were.

And then when that went away, well, now all of a sudden it was like, well, whoa, how many people around me are real and how many people were around me because of that?

And it kind of made me jaded for a long time on relationships and very suspect of people going forward.

Like, you know, is it about what I can give you or is it about who I really am?

Did any of that happen to you?