In 2019, I reached peak cockiness. I went from living in my car the year before to building an Amazon book business that was on pace to do $100,000 that month. I was operating at a 25% margin, so I was making three times as much as I would’ve made if I had decided to go to graduate school and become a physical therapist.

I built my book business to this scale by sharing my journey on social media. I traveled the country selling books, and I made a bunch of content revolving around how I found books and sold them on Amazon. By showing people how I made money, I was able to help them build book businesses of their own that generated a few thousand each month. Then, I launched a business called restrictedinventory.com, where I would sell textbooks for Amazon sellers who couldn’t sell them, and almost all Amazon seller accounts after 2017 couldn’t sell textbooks because they were “restricted” by Amazon. But since my account was pre-2017, I could sell all textbooks. So all my followers and even bigger booksellers started sending me their restricted textbooks, and I’d list them on Amazon and pay them 50% of the profit when the books sold.

So many people knew about my business because I was very vocal on social media. People knew I was traveling the country, sourcing books, and hosting meetups.

When I was in Connecticut visiting one of my good friends, Steve Raiken (this was when we first met, so we weren’t good friends yet), I decided to host a booksellers’ meetup at a local bar. We had like five guys show up at the first spot.

The vibes were high. We were probably screaming words like “sales rank” and “eScore” increasingly louder as we pounded the beers.

We quickly bounced to another spot. I started dancing with a girl near the bar. I returned to my new bookselling friends; they had a vibe similar to Simba’s first friends in “The Lion King”—energetic but undeniably naive.

One of the guys, who must’ve been in his mid-40s, tried to impress some girls by showing them my YouTube channel. He googled my name, and my shitty thumbnails popped up on his phone. Then, he proceeded to ask how much money I had in the bank. I proudly toted 5k; I honestly thought that was a flex, lol. This was hard-earned book money. But she wasn’t impressed. Thinking back on that moment is cringe, lmao.

Perhaps this is why I decided to approach the next girls solo when we went to the dimly lit backroom bar playing Latin music.

I danced merengue with the first Latina I found while white people from Connecticut clapped offbeat.

Then, I approached some girl who apparently had a boyfriend right behind her, staring me in the soul the whole time I was shooting my shot, according to Steve Raiken.

I say all this so you get a feel for the wavelength I was on that night before all hell broke loose.

After chatting up the girl with a “boyfriend,” me and the bookselling “dorks”—me included in the dork classification—congregated in the back corner near the bar.

Bobby Finn, one of the booksellers with us, was approaching our circle with several beers in his hands. He clumsily dropped one of the 16 oz cans of beer, and it exploded all over my pants.

I started laughing hysterically, and the girls who got splattered with the beer behind me think I’m laughing at them.

They’re angry, and they start yelling at me, then quickly walk away.

I forgot to mention that there was a guy, who I’ll refer to as Flannel Shirt from now on, who got mad at me for “flirting” with his sister.

Flannel Shirt seems to be on the same team as the angry girls, even though I’m pretty sure they don’t know each other. He’s just friends with them because they’re also mad at me.

The girls disappear, and we continue our bookselling dork talk. The girls quickly return with shots of vodka and aggressively jab them toward my chest, emptying them all over my shirt. I’m unfazed still. If it was Flannel Shirt, I would’ve punched him.

They seemed to get more pissed that I wasn’t pissed and proceeded to yell at me. Before I know it, one of them swings at me, and I catch her hand. Another one of the girls starts swinging at me, and I catch her arm mid-punch. The third girl is attempting to swing at me too, but she’s behind the other two, so she’s just punching the air, lol.

Flannel Shirt gets behind me and bear-hugs me. That’s when I start to get angry. “Get the fuck off me, bitch,” I say.

Then, two huge security guards enter the battlefield. They ask, “Whose fault is this?!” Flannel Shirt points at me and says, “HIS!!!”

For some reason, I thought they wouldn’t believe him, but they did. Each security guard, who must’ve been 250 lbs, 6’4” each, grabbed one of my arms.

My feet were dangling off the ground like Kevin Hart during one of his comedy specials. As I’m being carried out, I remember being flabbergasted that they believed Flannel Shirt’s accusation, especially after shots were poured on my chest by some crazy bitches.

The security guards gently put me down outside the back door of the bar, but emotionally, it felt like one of those cartoons where someone gets tossed out of the bar and tumbles down a hill.

The rest of the bookselling crew joins me. One of the guys was a bow hunter, Matt Wood, and he had just sold me a bow earlier that day. I had it in the back of my Corolla and considered getting it out because Flannel Shirt was now at the back of the bar, cussing at me.

I told him to come to me, but he wouldn’t. I was ready to throw down, and the last few years I had been in a couple of fights in Nashville for equally silly situations (except one time a guy did take $10 from me and deserved the beating I gave him outside the restaurant Cookout). Perhaps I was like this back then because I had just finished wrestling in college, and every party we went to turned into a brawl with the football team or some other team with above-average-sized males, lol.

The night came to an end, and the energy was still high—the kind of energy you feel after a rivalry sports game. I blame this high energy for what I did next.

I told Bobby he had a place to stay, except the place was Steve’s living room floor. Remember, Steve went from barely feeling comfortable sharing his phone number with me a few months ago to me finagling my way to his living room floor. Now I invited some stranger to sleep there too.

In the morning, Steve comes down to a grown-ass man sleeping on his hardwood floor with some blankets. After Bobby left, Steve politely but firmly requested I never do that again. Several months later Steve and I actually decided to get an apartment and room together in downtown Miami, but I honored his request and never invited random grown ass men we didn’t know to sleep in our living room… lol.

Hopefully you enjoyed this recollection of events in Connecticut at the crazier booksellers meet up ever.

Much love,

Avery