Aaron Wirtz talks meth, prison and redemption: ‘The story is about God’s hope’

In an adulthood filled with pivotal moments, there’s one that stands out to Aaron Wirtz.

It’s not when he became the outrageous Super Car Guys pitchman nor when police raided his west Wichita home. It wasn’t going to federal prison for possessing methamphetamine with the intent to distribute it, nor was it getting sober, falling off the wagon or getting sober again.

Instead, it happened in the Butler County jail, where Wirtz went voluntarily before his conviction because he couldn’t get clean through the treatment program that the court system offered.

Though that was a striking, sad day that Wirtz described as “that classic scene in the movie where the door slams shut and you realize, oh, this is actually happening,” that still wasn’t quite the turning point for him.

It came several weeks later, after the meth was out of his system, after he’d gotten in a normal jail jumpsuit instead of the padded yellow dress he was forced to don while on suicide watch.

Bored, Wirtz asked for a book. He was given a Danielle Steele novel and was not amused, though he read it.

Then, the avowed atheist, who grew up with religion and whose middle name is Christian but who somehow got off the Christianity track, asked for a Bible.

“My plan was to read the Bible and kind of make fun of it for something to do,” Wirtz said.

He turned to Chapter 4 in the Book of Judges. He read how Jael smote Sisera with a tent peg, and as sharp as that blow was, Wirtz said something bigger struck him.

“When your mocking laughter is reverberating off the cement walls of the jail, it’s maybe not as funny.”

He kept laughing and then began crying at the same time.

Though not physically sick, Wirtz said he was “vomiting out from the pit of my stomach all of these things I was holding onto.”

“I believe that was the Holy Spirit’s way of breaking through my pseudo-intellectual atheist stronghold,” Wirtz said, “which he did with one mighty strike of Jael’s hammer.”

It gave him the impetus to keep reading the Bible, to start studying it and, finally, to begin memorizing it and reciting whole books for himself and others.

“That, to me, is the beginning of the story.”

Drunk as can be

Wirtz, who just turned 43, had a pretty typical Wichita childhood.

Born at Wesley, he then “grew up with a pretty strong dose of church,” flourished in theater and dance and graduated from Northwest before going to Wichita State.

Wirtz said he was not a hard partier, at least not at first. In fact, he was in a band, Bliss on Tap, that made fun of that lifestyle.

Then he got drunk a few times.

“I should have recognized even early on, I was never a casual drinker. To me, to drink alcohol was to get as drunk as you possibly can.”

Though there is addiction in his family, Wirtz said he learned in jail that having an addiction is a bit like having a cold.

“Knowing where you got the cold is only helpful up to a certain point.”

Wirtz began going to raves. Ecstasy, ketamine and meth followed.

“It’s a pretty easy transition. You just wanna stay high longer.”

Wirtz said no one forced him to do drugs. He said he didn’t fall in with the proverbial wrong crowd.

Before long, though, “I had burned all of my bridges. I had lost most of my possessions. My life had really gone downhill pretty quickly.”

Around 2008, he was able to get sober, although it wasn’t through Alcoholics Anonymous. Wirtz said he “bounced in and out of the program multiple times” and had issues with it since it espouses a higher power as one of its tenets.

“That may have been part of what went wrong. I was so hostile to anything spiritual.”

After dropping in and out of college for about a decade, he finally finished his degree in English, too.

Not knowing what to do next, Wirtz decided to get a master’s degree in fine arts. He taught at WSU in his first two years of the program and then, during his third and final year in 2013, he took a job as social media manager with Ride Auto Group to promote its Subaru of Wichita and Super Car Guys brands.

Wirtz said he didn’t know anything about social media but had adjacent skills with video and music.

“People actually make a living doing YouTube and Facebook?” he said he remembered thinking.

“It was a cool moment in time to feel like, oh, here I am kind of dipping my toes into this brand new way of thinking.”

Moves like Jagger

The original person Super Car Guys chose to be a pitchman couldn’t do it because of a noncompete contract, so with Wirtz’s background in theater and dance, he stepped up.

The character he created was obnoxious but funny, even talented with dance moves and physical tricks on a trampoline and exercise ball, among other things.

In a Wichita Eagle video from those days, Wirtz likened what he did to that of his hero, Harpo Marx, and “the old vaudeville performers, where it looks very wacky and madcap, but you can tell that behind the scenes there’s actually quite a bit of discipline.”

Immediately, the ads got noticed, for better and for worse.

“A lot of people did not like them; however, the cash register told a different story,” Wirtz said.

“I was completely unprepared for, like, what a kind of paradigm shift (it was), I guess in terms of who am I?”

He moved into more of a marketing manager role, creating the reaction and then managing it.

By 2017, Wirtz said the ads had run their course, and for him, the notoriety did, too.

“I had developed an anxiety disorder that was legitimately crippling.”

Some days, he didn’t want to leave the house. Others, he wore disguises.

Wirtz started his own production company, CurveBreak Video Marketing, and would joke about his anxieties during marketing presentations.

“That was my way of trying to talk myself into overlooking the fact that there was something very, very wrong.”

He said he received death threats and was the target of a swatting incident before he even knew what that was. Police were called to his house after a false report of a hostage in Wirtz’s basement.

A local comedian pulled a prank where he encouraged others to simultaneously send a crude message to Wirtz’s phone.

Once, he noticed someone videotaping him jumping rope at the gym.

Then, of course, there were continuous disparaging comments on social media. People accused Wirtz of being on drugs, even though he said he wasn’t at the time.

“As someone who was already struggling with mental health issues, things like that, every single comment . . . would just wreck me.”

Now, Wirtz said he looks back and wonders, “Man, what was the big deal? I really made more out of that than there was.”

Still, he said, “The picture that social media can paint can really warp reality.”

Nothing rational

Wirtz said he and Super Car Guys had already amicably parted ways when he made the decision to go to a 2017 Halloween party outside of Wichita and drink.

Though he said he can’t fully explain why he did it, Wirtz said it likely had to do with a number of feelings: his anxiety, his growing anger at AA’s 12 steps and the idea that he deserved a bit of fun.

“None of it’s rational.”

Wirtz likely took drugs that night, too. He said he can’t remember. He blacked out.

“That was a night I probably should have gone to the hospital, and someone instead pulled out their phone.”

A video quickly circulated showing Wirtz staring in front of him as he slowly waved his arms as if he were trying to discern an apparition.

Then came the inevitable media call. Was it a joke? Or was something wrong?

“I remember that day very well when you called,” Wirtz said. “For the longest time, I felt that that moment represented the beginning of the end.”

He was certain it was the end of his marriage, his career, his reputation.

“It reinforced this idea that I am alone.”

Except he wasn’t. Wirtz said he had support from family and friends, but he said something stronger was at work within him.

“The devil roams around like a prowling lion. . . . They get their prey alone. That is why addiction works on loneliness.”

Wirtz didn’t exactly spiral just then. It took him until mid-2018 to find a new meth connection, and then he focused his complete attention on it.

“It was just kind of like, screw it. It will certainly change what you care about.”

He gave up pursuing video work.

“There’s really no such thing as a recreational meth user that I know of.”

His marriage collapsed even before he turned to selling meth.

Wirtz said he pretty much expected to be arrested.

“I had an idea it was probably just a matter of time.”

That’s about all he could imagine ahead for himself. Wirtz was living an existence that he said was “harmful, reckless, sloppy, damaging.”

He said he’d already internalized that life was over.

“Then, what did it matter?”

‘A sense of relief’

When Wirtz gave up trying to get sober on his own and entered county jail in March 2021, he said “almost immediately what I felt was a sense of relief.”

“There was no way that I would have been able to get off this stuff without just being locked up.”

Jail was harder than prison, he said.

In his year and a half there, Wirtz said, “I never stood on grass.”

He had no pillow. No dental floss. No jump rope or weights.

In comparison, the federal minimum security prison camp he went to in Yankton, S.D., in 2022 was luxurious.

He reveled in grass, trees and squirrels. There was a dog-training program.

“Because so many things had been removed from my life, all of a sudden everything was awesome.”

Even dental floss.

In jail, he had started to watch church services and listen to podcasts on religion. He learned to meditate, and he began to accept the full weight of the actions that landed him there.

As he continued to read the Bible, Wirtz said, it changed his relationships in and out of jail.

At prison, as he sat openly and read the Bible, “Other people would sit down and have questions.”

Typically, prison talk vacillates between boasts from the glory days of crime and tales of cops supposedly screwing people over, Wirtz said.

The Bible, however, prompted powerful conversations.

Wirtz also began tutoring other prisoners to help them get their GEDs. He called that a profound, life-changing experience he didn’t anticipate.

“What they were teaching me was perseverance.”

His students would see his Bibles — Wirtz called himself an NIV guy for the New International Version — and inevitably ask questions, too.

Wirtz had his own office, and his boss gave him time to spend there alone, memorizing books from the Bible.

The first he chose was the Gospel of John.

“I don’t know why I chose something so long. There are 21 chapters.”

By saying verses over and over, making them make sense in his mouth, Wirtz said he’d reach new understandings and levels of meaning. He said it’s something that’s meant to be shared as well.

“It’s not about showing off,” he said. “It’s about transmitting information the way it used to be, which is just eye to eye and heart to heart and person to person.”

Wirtz said the time he spent in prison ministry “was really one of the most beautiful times of my life, from sunup to sundown. I had found a way of living with purpose.”

He also recited books from the Bible at a couple of field trips to churches outside of prison. As he shared Scripture, Wirtz began to see a new path for himself, too.

“I developed this vision of what my place in all of this would be.”

Wirtz doesn’t belong to a particular denomination now, though he said he enjoys the stability and warmth of families at church and sharing the Bible with them.

“What I bring to them is the fire, the excitement and penetrating truth of this book.”

The road forward

After getting out of prison on Halloween 2024 — kind of a bookend to what got him there — Wirtz approached an employer he’d done some video work for previously.

“I’m coming to you in humility. What I did was wrong. I just need a chance.”

He hoped to have a warehouse job but instead was offered a marketing position.

“I was pretty stunned by that.”

Wirtz said he prefers to keep the name of his employer private.

Though he enjoys teaching, Wirtz does not want to teach full time. Nor does he want to be a pastor.

He said he sees his Scripture recitation as a ministry, and he wants to make that a regular part of his life.

Wirtz has already done that once in a church setting since leaving prison, and he’s going to again at 6 p.m. Thursday at the First United Methodist Church in downtown Wichita. It’s the rescheduled official kickoff of his Scriptural Memorization Ministry, and he’ll be reciting the 21 chapters of the Gospel of John.

“I’ve got a lot of hope to give,” Wirtz said. “I have a message of hope to bring them that this is not all there is.”

Wirtz said he wakes at 4 a.m. daily to practice Scripture for two hours before work. Sometimes after work, he’ll go to a yoga class or an AA meeting. Sobriety maintenance will be lifelong.

Though he’s sober, Wirtz said, “I don’t have it beat.”

Occasionally, he’ll see friends, and Wirtz said his relationship with his parents is better than just about ever. His child is in his life, too.

“It’s a pretty quiet life.”

Wirtz suspects his days on camera are permanently over.

“I’d be surprised if anyone would ever want to hire me considering what’s happened.”

He’s trying not to think too far down the road.

“Where I am today is very present focused.”

Wirtz said he wouldn’t change how things have unfolded in the last several years or the journey he’s currently on.

“One thing that I learned in prison is that God has a schedule, and that schedule is not my schedule.”

While he still may struggle sometimes over the value of his life, and while Wirtz admitted “what I did was absolutely wrong,” he’s also newly confident in some ways.

“I’m back in a place where I love my life again.”

That’s why in addition to sharing Scripture, he’s also sharing his story.

“The story is about God’s hope.”

This story was originally published June 16, 2025 at 4:04 AM.