More than 2,000 people packed into a Brooklyn warehouse for the occasion. Sheltered from a chilly November night, partygoers were treated to an open bar lit by red, green and blue strobe lights flashing across the makeshift club. The main event of the night was a performance by The Strokes. Wylie Aronow was swinging with his girlfriend as they listened to the live set, when she turned to him and uttered three surreal words: “You did this.”

Just a year earlier, Aronow was living “from bed to bath” with colitis, a disease that can cause chronic inflammation throughout the digestive tract. Illness forced him to drop out of college and caused him to languish for much of his early 20s. Now Aronow is better known as Gordon Goner, one of the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT…