When your earliest memories were crime, drugs, guns, gangs, and violence—when your “career training” is survival and your role models live by the streets—how are you supposed to imagine a different life? From the outside, the road out doesn’t even look visible. That’s one of the reasons Orsis V. is so impressive: he’s carving his own exit route in real time, with the odds stacked against him in every direction.
And what makes it even wilder is that when you sit with him, Orsis doesn’t feel like a man built out of violence. There’s a sweetness to him. A gentle kind of humor. A softness behind the edge. It’s hard to picture the life he’s lived—until he starts telling the stories, and suddenly you realize he isn’t exaggerating. His memories move like a movie: the chaos, the speed, the adrenaline, the danger. Some of the stories are so wild they sound unreal—like being a teenager in 90s Los Angeles and landing a job at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, watching premieres and meeting celebrities like it was normal. Orsis talks about smoking weed with Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and even throwing up on Snoop Dogg’s shoes. It’s funny, almost unbelievable—until you notice the tattoos, the intensity behind his eyes, and the fact that he still has a bullet lodged in his head. One would never think at 17 he used to mob around the city on his bicycle in a psychedelic ghostbuster-induced state [a crack laced pcp dipped blunt] with an Uzi in his backpack—ready to take on anything the world was gonna throw at him, or “leave a good corpse,” as he puts it.
For Orsis, discovering a way of living life that keeps him alive, out of prison, and actually happy, has been a lifelong battle of the highest stakes. He has walked a very thin line and complicated balance involving a necessity to appease superiors, while battling serious drug addiction, staying out of the firing line of enemies, and constantly in and out of incarceration. It’s truly a blessing that he is alive and able to tell his story for us today. It seems like Orsis has always carried humor and edge in the same breath. The kind of personality that survives by staying sharp—even when life is heavy.
He was raised by his mother, a Guatemalan immigrant who came to the U.S. legally, worked constantly, and carried the kind of strict love that can feel like protection and pressure at the same time. Orsis remembers both versions of her clearly. He remembers fear—being disciplined hard, being whipped with a belt buckle at a young age. But he also remembers her imagination, the way she tried to give her sons joy even without money. “She would take me to Venice Beach and tell me it’s Hawaii, if I wanted to go to Japan, she’d take me to Koreatown…She sacrificed most of her life for me and my brother.”
By eight, Orsis experienced trauma as a result of sexual abuse that rerouted his entire emotional world. He was a happy kid before that, he says. After that, he became angry. Quiet. Hard. “Either you become a victim, or you become an aggressor.” He chose aggression—because anger felt like power, and power felt like safety.
By ten years old, Orsis was selling crack on Skid Row—picked up after school, hustling before he was old enough to understand what childhood was supposed to be. Orsis wasn’t just around crime—he was inside it. He talks about Skid Row like a battlefield economy. “When the cops would raid, my uncle would lock me in a porta-potty with the drugs and guns.” He remembers being ten years old, sitting in there for hours, waiting it out like it was normal.
School was never the center of his life, even though he went to good ones—Emerson, Palms, University High, even Beverly Hills High and Pacific Palisades. Orsis had flashes of intelligence and talent. “The only A I ever got was journalism and wood shop,” he says, laughing, because the teacher who taught both was a pothead. But Orsis didn’t care about grades—he cared about reputation. He cared about never looking weak. During the Rodney King riots, he got expelled for starting a race riot at school. He talks about looting Circuit City with his older brother—hauling out a big TV like it was a rite of passage. Even then, you can hear it: his life was being shaped by adrenaline, belonging, and the gravity of the street.
Then came meth. “I first shot meth in ’95,” and after that, his teenage years weren’t just unstable—they were explosive. Fights. Drugs. Gang politics. And when Carla, the mother of his child, got pregnant, Orsis tried—briefly—to play normal. He’d go to Labor Ready at four in the morning, work all day for forty bucks, give her the money, try to act like he could build something stable. But the truth was brutal: the streets were paying more than minimum wage ever could, and Orsis was already addicted to the fast life. He describes riding around Hollywood with his gun and Walkman, running his route through Sunset and Santa Monica like he owned the city. “That was my drug route, and on the way home I’d stop, pick up eggs…whatever we needed for breakfast.”
At seventeen, Orsis was incarcerated—facing serious time, fighting for his life. His mom and brother spent everything trying to keep him from being buried alive by the system. A lawyer got him a deal, but prison still became his reality. Inside, Orsis lived through violence, politics, and long stretches of isolation. He spent years in solitary. Years. “Three years behind the walls, no cellmate. No one to talk to. Just myself.” He read constantly—philosophy, human behavior, self-help—anything that could make sense of the mind he was trapped inside. He did meditation. Yoga. And somewhere in the silence, Orsis started to recognize something he hadn’t been able to see before: he’d been surviving, but he wasn’t living.
Ten years later, heroin entered the picture. It humbled him in a way violence never did. “Heroin kicked my ass; it made me soft. It beat me down.” He describes being dope sick, desperate enough to accept disrespect and humiliation—things he never would’ve allowed in his earlier years. He went to community college—Los Angeles Valley College—and earned an associate degree while still hustling. He was in and out of county jail dozens of times, wrapped up in heavy cases, close calls, and consequences that stacked on top of each other. And yet, through all of it, he kept saying the same thing: God was still there. He got acquitted of charges that should’ve buried him. Doors opened when they shouldn’t have.
One of the biggest shifts came in 2016, when Orsis faced something he couldn’t fight with fists: his brother’s schizophrenia. Watching his mother handle it, seeing mental health up close, changed him. Orsis moved in with them—senior housing, one bedroom. “My brother slept on the couch, I slept by the door on the floor. I didn’t care.” And that’s when Orsis made a decision that cut deeper than any prison politics: “I don’t want to die in prison. I want to be there for them.”
He talks about a spiritual awakening that started in jail through the MERIT program—a rare program where, for once, he had to function like a human being again, not just a number or a soldier. “I’ve lived in hate for so long, and love just seems beautiful.” Little by little, he started choosing different actions. Different responses. “The only thing you can do in this world is respond with love.” It didn’t erase the addiction overnight, and it didn’t delete the past—but it cracked open a new future.
Fast forward: grief hit him hard. His brother passed in 2023, then his daughter’s mother shortly after. Orsis collapsed into relapse. “Every time I get loaded, my allergic reaction to getting high is breaking out in handcuffs.” He spiraled—fentanyl, desperation, depression, not showering, crying on his mom’s couch, feeling like he didn’t deserve to live. Not suicidal, he says—just empty. And then, December 3rd, 2024, he was hit by a car, an opposing gang trying to take him out. His health was failing, his diabetes was worse, and his relationships were breaking.
He started going to a methadone clinic, slowly cutting fentanyl down. But he knew his truth: “People like me, the only way I can truly get clean is being locked up.” And then came May 18th—an acid trip, fentanyl, breaking down crying, begging God for help. “Please remove this addiction from me. Please make me a better man…for myself, for my mom…for my daughter.” The next day, May 19th, something strange happened: he left his dog behind. He left without taking anything. He went to the clinic. He came back. And he got arrested.
County jail should’ve been the same nightmare it always was. But Orsis describes that arrest like it was divine timing. He landed in a cell with someone he knew from the past—someone who told him, “because of you, I changed my life.” A man who went from gang-banging to working a real job, rebuilding himself. It felt like a sign. Orsis believed he’d get reinstated probation, get released, go to NA. But then his friend Heather—someone who had once been part of his story in addiction, and now had years clean—told him about a place called Beit T’Shuvah.
“Only if you’re ready,” she said.
Orsis didn’t hesitate. “Dude…I’m fucking ready.”
And within weeks—before the system could swallow him again—Beit T’Shuvah stepped in. Interviews came. A chance came. A door opened. In a strange, almost poetic twist, he landed in a sewing dorm after sewing with his mom on the outside—earning a vocational certificate that made him break down crying. “I cannot deny it, that’s God working in my life.”
When he finally arrived at BTS, Orsis wasn’t sure he belonged. He sat far away, watched, judged, and stayed guarded. But the walls started to come down. The staff were patient. People were consistent. Criminals and Gangsters Anonymous transitioned from annoying to empowering.
One of the biggest turning points for Orsis at Beit T’Shuvah happened early on with Ash, a counselor. Orsis had a phone he wasn’t supposed to have—not for anything wild, just to watch movies and talk to his mom. Ash called him out and pushed him to be honest. Orsis got heated, snapped back, and it turned into a tense moment. Carrie Newman stepped in, helped him slow down, and put it in perspective—but what changed everything was what happened next. Orsis went to apologize, and Ash met him with something Orsis didn’t expect: real honesty. “I’m gonna be honest with you, you made me feel intimidated.” That line hit Orsis hard—because it showed him how heavy the mask still was, even when he wasn’t trying to wear it. In that moment, something cracked open: he realized he didn’t want to be feared anymore.
Orsis came from a life built on chaos and survival—live fast, die young. But standing inside Beit T’Shuvah, he says it clearly: “I don’t have to live like that no more. I’m trying to live in the light…to be that change I want to see in the world.” He’s got his eyes on a new kind of life for himself, one where he can take care of his mother, spend time with his daughter, and be the kind and loving person he truly is.
He tells it like this: he spent years building a mask so tough it became his face. But Beit T’Shuvah started peeling it off—slowly, painfully, honestly. “I didn’t want to hurt anybody anymore, that’s not me.” Orsis started cutting hair, finding confidence, finding purpose. And he started living by a new rule: destiny is built from what you do every day. Not one big moment. Not one grand speech. The little consistent actions. Checking on people. Showing up. Choosing love. Because that is who Orsis is…and always has been.