I’ve spent most of my adult life in rooms most people never see.
The truth is, I was in those rooms long before I was an adult.
I grew up around the back side of things.
Loading docks. Convention halls. Service corridors. Union men. Truck drivers. Carpenters. Freight guys. Characters who seemed larger than life. Men who could build an entire city overnight and disappear before the people who came to enjoy it ever knew they were there.
As a kid, I didn’t completely understand the world I was watching.
I do now.
There is the world everyone sees — the over world.
The lights. The stages. The executives. The customers. The celebrities. The handshakes. The finished product.
And underneath it is another world.
The underworld.
The docks. The labor. The freight. The favors. The relationships. The arguments. The handshakes that mean something different. The people who know how things actually get done.
I’ve spent my life moving between the two.
In some ways, I think that’s what I’ve always been: a conduit between the underworld and the over world.
And after more than four decades of watching those worlds collide, I’ve decided to write down what I’ve seen.
DOCKSIDE: Memoirs of an Invisible Man.
This isn’t a business book.
It isn’t a leadership manual, a corporate autobiography or a collection of carefully sanitized stories designed to make everyone look good.
It’s the story of a life lived mostly behind the curtain.
A childhood spent watching.
An adulthood spent doing.
And a career spent standing in places where you can see both sides of the wall.
There will be trade shows and freight. Road stories and family stories. Mentors, characters, victories, disasters, cities, docks and probably a few stories that some people assumed would disappear when the trucks pulled away.
But more than anything, Dockside is about the invisible people.
Because I’ve learned something after all these years:
The people you don’t see are often the people making the world you do see possible.
I know them.
I was raised around them.
I became one of them.
And somewhere along the way, I realized I had a story to tell.
I’m going to write it the same way I lived it — one memory, one city, one character and one dock at a time.
Someday, when my last truck is loaded and my last show is out, I’ll release it.
Until then, I’m writing.
DOCKSIDE
Memoirs of an Invisible Man
