It is Spring 2026, and I have been sitting with a quiet mental distress for about a week now.
My good friend Brandon — high school teammate, college basketball teammate, roommate, and one of the genuinely great ones — is fighting for his life. His wife found him unresponsive last week.
If you are young, the weight of that sentence may not land. When I was young, I understood life and death mostly through episodes of ER. I am older now, and my education has continued — unfortunately, through experience. Lately it feels like things are being taken from us, one by one.
Brandon’s medical crisis is just the latest. Days before Christmas, another friend was taken off life support. Her young life never made it to 40. Brandon had just celebrated his 50th birthday in early March — a beautiful turnout of friends and family, the kind of night that reminds you why people matter. And this is what follows?
Ashley had been working her way back from liver disease, once covered under the strong health benefits of the Culinary Union. Brandon had recently been laid off, with all the weight of life still pulling on his wallet — and I suspect, quietly wearing on the will of his larger-than-life 6’6″ frame.
I understand. Father Time is undefeated. But why does this keep happening?
No one is promised tomorrow. And sometimes, when the pressure of tomorrow gets too heavy, we lean a little too hard into today just to offset the weight. It’s been said too many times, but it needs to be said again: health insurance in this country is an absolute joke.
Recent GoFundMes for Vegas friends and colleagues tell the story. Ritchie Slone, battling throat cancer. Brian Wolfe, fighting prostate cancer. Doug Linton, who I met years ago at Little Buddha, and who — along with his best mate Chris Thompson — would come visit me at Steiners just to catch up. After Doug passed last year, Chris said it best: “Do we want to go look at tits? Yeah, but let’s go see the big guy — fast on the pull and usually has a story with some soul.”
RIP Ashley. RIP Doug. Keep punching, Ritchie, Brian, and Brandon.
So where is the “me” in all of this? It’s coming. But I am increasingly trying to work on the “we” — and in doing that, defining the “why.”
Six years ago, I was bartending at McMullan’s Irish Pub. I don’t know how it got into me — it’s not family lineage, not a generational thing — but I genuinely love pub culture. I worked with people who cared, that small-business feeling of all hands on deck. My title was bartender, but the job wore many hats.
I walked away from that in the summer of 2021. I did the smart thing and got my union pour card. For the first time in my career, I was actually thinking about what younger people in hospitality rarely think about: pensions and health insurance. I gave up something that felt good in the present to protect something in the future.
Lately, I’ve been wondering: if Brian Wolfe had the same Culinary benefits I have, would a routine screening have caught his prostate cancer sooner?
Maturing is fun.
I work as a bartender at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas — coming up on five years now. I’d like to think the care I’ve put into that space has made it better. Small things: local craft beers on tap, specialty cocktails made with real ingredients, actual ice spheres and Luxardo cherries in an old fashioned, hand-written chalkboard menus I rotate quarterly to catch a different passenger each time. Banner years for the first few. Real pride in the work.
But lately? Things are being taken again.
Reduced health benefits. Back pay disputes. Vague successorship language. Technology clauses. Pension contributions. A contract negotiation that has dragged on for over five months — on a contract that was already five years past due. Both sides carry responsibility for that delay, and I say that with full transparency.
Here’s what concerns me most: we are roughly 400 union members spread across 21 or so DBE locations at this airport. Compared to the thousands represented under MGM or Caesars umbrellas, we are small. And a union looking for its next big fish may not be applying the same urgency to 400 workers that it would to 40,000.
The DBE — Disadvantaged Business Enterprise — program was created in the 1980s with genuinely good intentions: to give underrepresented businesses the opportunity to operate in major airports, including the 8th busiest in the country and 19th globally. Like a lot of government programs, it has since been shaped and reshaped to serve interests it wasn’t designed for. Not one of the DBEs operating in this group stays within the financial scope the program was built around. That is not a secret. It is simply never discussed.
Recently, a video was posted explaining the contract currently on the table. It appears that labor law attorney Deanna Fornbush has advised her clients to run the clock — that we will break under the weight of extended negotiations.
I started this piece with the emotional weight because that is where it lives for me. As I finish, I wonder sometimes if any of it is worth it — because the system that is supposed to make me feel secure about my future is currently making me feel the opposite.
While my friends literally fight for their lives, I am sitting here putting words on paper.
But maybe that’s exactly the point.
Watch the video. Understand the contract. And ask yourself who is actually supposed to be protected here.