As the music thudded around them, there was no hiding from Julia that this young homeless-looking man was attracted to her. And how could he not be? This lithe, pretty thing was stunning, with light brown skin, freckles sprinkled across her checks, and big eyes with fluttering lashes. She was exotic-looking too—half African American, half something else. She politely introduced herself as Julia and then quickly brushed him off, uninterested in a conversation with someone who looked like he hadn’t showered in weeks.
Julia assumed that was the end of it. But a week later she bumped into this Ross character again. Though this time something was different. Now he had shaved and was wearing pants—real pants—and shoes.
As they spoke, she was intrigued. He was funny, cute, and smart—so, so smart. He told her he was a graduate student at Penn State in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. When she asked what that entailed, Ross explained that he was working on research to verify rare properties in crystalline materials and worked in spintronics and ferroic materials. The school even paid him a few hundred dollars a week for his research.
Within a week this freshman found herself going to dinner with Ross at a sushi restaurant off Route 35 and then, a few days later, heading back to his apartment. As he slipped off her shirt on the couch, and as she did the same in return, Julia didn’t know a lot about the man she was about to fool around with, but she would soon learn. As he lay almost naked on top of her, there was a click at the front door and Ross’s roommates walked in. “Let’s go to my room,” Ross said as they giggled and ran out of the living room.
He led her down a stairway into a basement that was dim, with slivers of light leaking inside from the tiny windows.
To Julia it smelled almost like wet cement, mildew, or both. “This is your bedroom?” she asked in disbelief as her bare feet stepped on the cold concrete floor.
“Yes,” Ross replied proudly. “I live down here for free.” Julia raised her eyebrows as she stood in the middle of the basement, surveying the bizarre setting. There was a bed next to a space heater. Cardboard boxes were strewn about like a kids’ fortress. It looked like a prison cell.
She had figured Ross was relatively frugal on their first date at the sushi restaurant when he picked her up in a doddering pickup truck older than she was. On the second date she had learned that he didn’t care for material things either, when he arrived looking like a bass player in a Seattle grunge band. (Ragged shorts, a dirty shirt, and shoes that had previously belonged to someone from a geriatric home.) But as she sat on his bed in the basement, looking at walls of chipped, unpainted Sheetrock, it crystallized for Julia that Ross really, really didn’t have much money and really, really didn’t care for the objects most people lust after in life.
“Wait, why do you live down here?” she asked as they lay on the bed, Ross trying to pick up where they had left off on the couch.
He paused to explain that he liked to live economically to prove to himself that he could. Why pay for an apartment when you could live in this mildew-ridden castle for free? Julia scowled as he spoke. It wasn’t just about saving money, he explained. His lifestyle was also part of an internal experiment to see how far he could push himself to extremes without any wants or needs. For example, he had recently chosen not to shower with hot water for a month, just to test his own resilience. (“You get used to the cold after a while,” he bragged.) That wasn’t all. Over the summer, Ross proudly told Julia, he had survived off a can of beans and a bag of rice for an entire week.
“What about coffee?” she asked.
“I don’t drink it.”
“You’re so cheap,” she joked.
The shower and basement tests were only the beginning of Ross’s peculiarities. At the foot of his bed there were two garbage bags, which he casually confessed were his “closet.” One bag was for clean clothes, the other for dirty. Every item of clothing he owned—every sock, every shirt, and those geriatric shoes—was a hand-me-down from a friend.
“Oh, no, no, no,” Julia said as she batted her eyelashes at him. “We’re going to fix this; I’m going to take you shopping for some new clothes that actually fit you.”
“Sure,” Ross said as he went in to kiss her again.
But there were still things she wanted to learn about Ross. More questions about this strange yet brilliant man. “What are those books?” she asked, pointing to the pile of titles that lay near his bed.
At this query Ross paused and was attentive with his answer. He had explained to her on their first date that in addition to joining the NOMMO drumming club, he was also an avid member of a club at Penn State called the College Libertarians, a political group that met once a week to discuss libertarian philosophies and to read books on economics and theory. The books—penned by Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, and other visionaries—were what he read for fun when he wasn’t devouring applied physics papers.
When Julia asked what libertarianism was, Ross, without judgment, explained: everything—from what you do with your life, to what you put in your body—should be up to each individual, not the government.
If it hadn’t been for how smart Ross was, Julia might have walked out of the basement that day and never looked back. If it hadn’t been for how handsome he was, she might never have answered the phone after their early dates. And if it hadn’t been for Ross’s assertiveness, which young Julia had never experienced in a man before and needed more than anything at this sad point in her life, she might not have agreed to become his girlfriend in the coming weeks.
Instead she was deeply intrigued by this peculiar and possibly perfect man. He looked back at her, smiling as he leaned in to kiss her again. It was clear to her that Ross was smitten. She, in turn, tried not to let on how besotted she was becoming with him. But what wasn’t clear to either of them, as they rolled around on his dinky bed in the basement, was that the relationship they were about to embark on would be the most tumultuous romance of Ross’s and Julia’s adult lives.
And, for Ross, it would be his last.
Chapter 4
THE DEBATE
Students with backpacks and books rushed by one another as they shuffled into the Willard Building at Penn State. The lights inside the building flickered on as the fall sun set over campus. There, amid the normalcy of college life, Ross Ulbricht was pacing in one of the large lecture rooms, preparing for a school debate.
The room where he stood was wide and deep, with rows of chairs that would soon be filled by the students shuffling inside—all people who were there to hear tonight’s discussion among the College Libertarians, the College Republicans, and the College Democrats on a number of U.S. election–related topics, including whether drugs should be legalized in the United States.