More bad luck: my sister, Susan, was home when their kerosene heater exploded in their rented house. She and the kids got out, but they lost all their belongings, including the thesis Bruce was working on for his master’s degree. Things were not going well.
Strategic withdrawaclass="underline" Patience and Jack and I moved to the Shack, a run-down house in a low-rent part of town. Wind slipped between the warped clapboards of the Shack as it slowly moldered, listing, back into the earth from which it had come. I felt terrible about it—I was a failure as a provider. Couldn’t seem to get money together.
We lived on a tight budget at the Shack. We ate six chickens a week on food stamps. Patience made our own bread. We never bought more than five dollars worth of kerosene at a time for the heater. Heating the breezy Shack was a hopeless task anyway. Patience and I had a feather bed; Jack, now ten years old, slept under twenty pounds of blankets. Luckily, Gainesville is a sunny place in winter and you can get warm during the day.
I sat in the sun a lot, thinking about what to do next.
It was cold. I noticed how warm the sun was. Had an idea. Found some scrap copper tubing under my neighbors’ house. The neighbors, Joe Leps and Nikki Ricciutti, were friends, so I grabbed the tubing. I bought two cheap door mirrors and cut them into two-inch strips. I fastened the strips next to one another on a frame. I angled the mirrors so each one reflected light onto the copper tubing that I zigzagged back and forth four times and set above the mirrors. When I aimed the frame at the sun, the mirrors collected the light and focused it on the pipes. I hooked up a garden hose and ran some water through the tubing. Came out steaming. Wanted to do more with solar energy. First needed to collect some of the money that was all around.
Mirrors became important in my life. I didn’t have to solve any puzzles like: If a mirror image is switched left and right, why isn’t it switched up and down? Mirrors became important because they focused money into my pocket.
Some people Bruce and I knew were importing reproductions of antique English pub mirrors—mirrors with the label designs of whiskey and beer companies on them: Old Uam Var, White Label, O’Connell and Flynn, and so on. They sold these to gift shops for $125 and these guys offered to give us half that for each one we sold. We went to see them unloading the mirrors at a warehouse in Gainesville. I took a close look and saw that the designs were silk-screened on the back of glass, then silver was somehow put on over that and the backing was painted on last.
I decided to sell pub mirrors with Bruce.
We sold many mirrors to people who had too much money.
While we were unloading a new shipment of mirrors from England one day, the English guy importing these beauties by the container load, Mike, asked me—the art major—if I thought I could make one. I thought: in principle, in theory, probably not. I said, “How much is it worth to you?”
“Two thousand to set it up.”
“No problem.”
I decided to make mirrors.
Mike brought over a smaller mirror from England with a picture of Mickey Mouse on it. When he asked if I thought it would sell, I told him, yeah, but Disney would sue him into the gutter.
“Why not sell them to Disney?” he said.
We went to Disney World and met with a buyer named Tom. Tom loved the mirror and immediately notified somebody in England to sue whoever made it into the gutter. Then he said, how much?
Too much.
Mike and his sales manager, a friendly, freckled man, Don Holmes, and Bruce and I formed a new company. We decided the only way to get the price low enough for Disney was to get a big mirror maker to make them for us. I flew out to see the big-time mirror maker at his California plant with two prototypes I’d made and the separations I’d made them with. I dropped off the stuff at the plant and was told I could pick up the production samples in four days.
I drove up Highway 1 to Carmel, where I knew good old ex-Major Robert Giraudo lived. He and his wife seemed really pleased to see me. Giraudo had built a beautiful circular home in the hills overlooking the Pacific. He was a banker now. He and I shared stories about what we’d been doing since the Army, and then talked about the good old days at Wolters. We both drank, but I drank more. Actually, by this time, I drank so much everyone took it for granted that I showed up at their houses with a drink in my hand. I drove with a glass of bourbon in my lap. I thought this was normal. Giraudo started laughing when I mentioned our daily races home after work at the Army.
“I thought I was going fucking crazy that day!” he said.
The back way out of Wolters was a gravel road that went by a spillway next to a lake. After skirting the spillway, the road went straight to the main highway, about two miles away. Giraudo and I used to race each other through the base to get to the road. The first one to the road won, because there was no place to pass after that. Giraudo drove like a combat pilot, too, and the results were pretty even. One day, Giraudo had cut me off and beaten me to the road. I tailgated him, our game being to attempt to pass each other even though it was impossible; it was a wonderful careening romp. When he went into the turn around the spillway, I sailed over the embankment in the family Volvo, crashed down onto the spillway, and raced across, spraying water like a speedboat. I bounced up the road bank on the other side, lurched onto the road, spinning wheels and throwing gravel. I saw Giraudo slide around the turn in my rearview mirror. His car jerked when he saw me. He tried to catch up, waving his arm wildly out his window, but I sped off. When I walked in the door at home, Giraudo was on the phone. “You son of a bitch! How did you get ahead of me? I couldn’t fucking believe it was you. I thought it was somebody else with the same kind of car. I stopped and waited for you, you bastard, but you never came!”
We had a good laugh over that. Giraudo finished the evening claiming that I was doing much more than he with life, me being out doing deals with Disney and all. Well, sure, okay. I didn’t feel very good about what I was doing. Actually, I thought it was about the pettiest bullshit I’d ever come up with—Mickey Mouse mirrors? I was doing it for the money. Giraudo, banker with big house in Carmel, thinks I’m doing more with my life?
Woke up the next morning with a hangover and had breakfast with Giraudo, watching hummingbirds feeding on his terrace. We said good-bye.
I drove down Highway 101, which wanders among the steep cliffs right along the seashore from Carmel to Los Angeles. I stopped and bought a gallon of California wine I decided to drink on the way.
Drinking in the morning puts a glow on the day. I enjoyed the view and hummed some tunes. I knew I would have to keep drinking all day to avoid a big letdown, but that was what I did anyway. I wondered occasionally if I was drinking too much—no one I knew, except my father, drank like me—but I figured it was alcohol that was keeping me however sane I was.
Saw a girl hitchhiking and stopped. I was in the mood for company. When she got close to the car, I saw a guy appear from behind some bushes.
“He’s my boyfriend,” she said. “Do you mind giving us a lift?”
“Why not?” I said. I knew the trick, but I didn’t care.
“Thanks.” She got into the front seat and scooted next to me. Her boyfriend, a small guy with a Levi jacket and a tight mustache, got in next to her. I got back on the road.