EPISODE 5

I got back to my room, took a shower and got dressed.  The shower helped wake me up out of the fog I was in and I was feeling alert by the time I hit the elevator and started my way downstairs.  The ballroom where SlipNot was holding its meeting was on the second level of the hotel, tucked away in a labyrinth of conference rooms.  SlipNot had rented out three of these rooms, but instead of being adjacent to each other, they were spread out throughout the entire floor, making it easy to get confused.  I took a couple wrong turns, stepping first into a meeting of travel agents and then into another one that appeared to be of some kind of sex toy manufacturers.  The display of multi-colored vibrators along the left wall looked like something out of the barroom set from the Star Trek: Next Generation cable TV show.  After a quick walk through, taking time to carefully examine a pile of edible fruit-flavored condoms, contemplating just what the etiquette was for consuming them, I headed out the door, down the hall and into the main SlipNot conference ballroom.

Bosco had arranged for me to demonstrate one of his more ingenious marketing tools.  He and Allan had rigged up a tiny video camera with a 200X lens to a laptop so that it would take close-up pictures of a person’s scalp.  They could then upload the pictures to a Web site that Allan had designed allowing the user to do an analysis of the deterioration of the hairline.  These pictures were so detailed that you could actually see the individual follicles.   The idea was that if you could show someone how much hair he or she had already lost, you could then get them to wondering how long it would be before all the hair up top was gone.  In many ways, this camera gimmick told a lot about how hair was sold.

When I first started working for Bosco, he took me aside one day and asked me if I understood our clients.  I don’t recall exactly what I answered; something to the effect that I thought they lacked self-esteem.  He smiled and shook his head.

“No, Michael.  That sounds like a cheap TV commercial.  No, the reason our clients call us is that we show them how much pain they have.”

I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about and it must have been pretty obvious because Bosco took a long breath and continued.

“Look, let’s say you’re a single guy and you go out to bar to try to find someone who’ll come home with you.  Now, you may not be the best looking man in the place.  You might even be ugly as hell.  It doesn’t matter.  You can still always get laid, any night you want to.

“You’ve got to look over the women at the bar, size them up.  One of them will go with you.  You just need to listen to her and get her to tell herself that she’s more afraid of going home alone than you are.

“If you aren’t good looking enough to get the girl, then make her feel desperate enough that she has to take you.”

I rolled my eyes, but Bosco insisted.

“We’re not about selling to greed or glamour.  We don’t sell our clients.  Our job is to ask questions.  Specifically, we ask coldly clinical questions that are designed to elicit an emotional response.

“I’m not kidding,” he said evenly.

I walked into the ballroom and saw that it was filled with a couple hundred people already.  On the stage towards the back of the room, a quartet was banging out salsa music.  Some of the attendees were dancing while the rest milled around and spoke to one another.  I was trying to take it in when someone sidled up to me and put a hand on my right shoulder.

“Michael!”

I looked over and there stood Frank Rotella, one of SlipNot’s biggest clients and also one of my favorite people on Earth.  He had a face that just lit up when he turned his attention to you.  He was impeccably dressed, as usual.  A guy he’d met in Florence years and years ago made his tailored Italian suits for him.  Frank flew over to see him every couple years and always came back with the most amazing outfits you’d ever seen.  That day, he was wearing a light yellow suit that appeared to be made of linen, a silk charcoal shirt, and solid cream colored tie.

“You want to see something amazing?” he asked.  I figured there wasn’t much more astonishing than the way he was dressed, but Frank nodded his head out to where the people were dancing.

“See that guy over there in the green sport coat?” Frank asked.  About 20 feet away from us, a man who looked to be in his late fifties was slowly gyrating to a mambo tune.  His upper body barely seemed to move, although his feet shuffled enthusiastically to the beat.  His eyes were closed as he danced by himself to the music.

 “Watch this.”

Frank put his hands to his mouth and shouted “Hey!  Phil!”

The guy on the dance floor didn’t appear to hear him, so Frank yelled louder a second time.

“Phil!  Over here!”

With that, the dancing man whipped around to his right to see who was calling to him.  Unfortunately, the hair on top of his head didn’t keep up with the rest of his body and it all flew wildly through the air, landing on the floor, a few feet away from him.  He quickly reached down, plopped the wig back on his head and waved over to Frank before continuing his dance.

“Can you believe that? Frank chuckled.  “The bastard doesn’t believe in tape or adhesives or nothing.  He just lets it all hang out there.”

He shook his head.  “I can’t believe I’m in the same business with guys like that.”

Frank was a perfectionist in everything: his clothing, his manners (which were impeccable), and his work.  I knew him from the first time I had worked with Bosco.  It was almost two years before I found out that he wore hair himself.  The job he’d done was so good that you simply couldn’t tell it wasn’t his.  The color blended perfectly, the hairline was natural, and he always had his best stylist cut it in for him.  He felt strongly that he should be a walking advertisement for the high quality work his studios were capable of.  Like all studio owners, he required that his technicians wear hair, if they were thinning on top.  He also made sure that their hair looked as good as his own.  Rotella Hair was something he was proud of and he wanted to make sure that he and his employees had every reason for that pride.

I guess I really respected Frank.  He was one of the good guys.  He was generous too, giving money to charity and lending wigs for free to cancer patients while they underwent chemotherapy.  He wasn’t the only studio owner to do this.  In fact, it was common practice in the industry to offer wigs to people who’d lost their hair while undergoing chemo.  It was just that Frank never made a big deal about it.

“You don’t call attention to your good works,” he once told me.  Frank was a devout Catholic and he would no more brag about his charitable work with the hospitals than he would about how much he put in the collection plate on Sunday.  He was a proud man, but not prideful.

He was also funny as hell.  The little gag with Phil and his flying hairpiece was a good example of his spontaneous flair for making a joke.  He knew that Phil wouldn’t care if his hair suddenly took flight, but he also was aware of the humor of the moment, particularly in context of where we all were.

We chatted briefly and then I had to beg off.  I still had to get my laptop set up so I could show the micro camera and the Web site.  Frank let me go, but only after I promised to meet him later for a drink.  

***********************

The next installment will be posted on October 7.

If you'd like to read the entire book today, GO HERE.

EPISODE 4

Bosco was sitting at his desk when I came in.  He smiled warmly.

“There’s Michael!” he said, motioning for me to sit down.

“Hey Bosco.”

“Glad to see you back, Michael.”

He picked up his phone and punched in 3 numbers. 

“Allan, can you come in here for a minute?”

He hung up and looked back at me.

“I want you to meet Allan.  He’s been taking on a lot of your old job and working with me on some of the changes around here.”

I looked around and noticed that most of Bosco’s normal clutter was missing.  When I’d worked for him before, there had been all sorts of brochures, notepads, hair samples, videotapes, DVDs and stray paper lying in piles on his desk and all over the floor.  Today, all of that material was gone and the office looked almost empty, except for Bosco’s desk and chair, a long table with 3 computers set up on it, and the chair I was sitting in.

“We’re moving Michael.  I sold the whole company to SlipNot.”

SlipNot was Bosco’s biggest account, a huge firm that had hair factories all over Asia, distribution centers on both coasts of the US and its corporate headquarters in New York City.  As Bosco stood up from behind his desk, he appeared even taller than I’d remembered.  Then again, when you’re only 5 foot 4, everyone seems pretty tall to you.  I guess Bosco was about 6 foot; he had a deep tan from spending time outdoors, riding his horses and taking care of his horse farm.  He really loved those animals and during the summer, it wasn’t unusual for him to skip out of the office at around 3 to spend the afternoon taking trail rides with his wife, Leah.  Leah was quite a character herself.  When she and Bosco were first married, Bosco had an old donkey.  It was ancient.  From what I heard, Leah was after Bosco to do something about it.  All the damned animal would do is stand around inside the barn and shit.  She got tired of cleaning it up and so one day while Bosco was out of town on a business trip, she hired a backhoe to dig a big hole in the field.  She led the donkey out to it and shot it.  Then she had the backhoe guy move the donkey into the hole and cover it up.  Bosco came back and he walked all over the farm, looking for the donkey.  When he couldn’t find it, he asked Leah what had happened to it.

“I killed it, Bosco,” she was supposed to have told him, “and I’ll do the same to you if you ever do anything to piss me off.”  I was never sure whether I should fear the same treatment were I to cross Leah, so I had made it my life’s work to keep out of her way.

Bosco strode across the room and poked his head out the door. 

“Allan!  Are you coming?” he bellowed down the hallway.  He walked back to his desk and sat down just as a 6 foot plus tall giant came through the door.  He looked to be about 5 years or so younger than me, with more hair on his head than I had and a lot more on his face as well.  Without saying a word, he placed a chair that he’d brought with him next to mine and sat down.

Bosco introduced Allan and began a detailed description of how the company had been sold and what that meant to us.  It turned out that SlipNot had been courting Bosco even while I was last working for him.  All three of us would be moving to New York in 3 weeks to become SlipNot employees. I would be working with SlipNot’s sales staff and with Allan on new marketing and advertising strategies.

“It’s going to be a tough project” Bosco assured us, “But there’s a fuck of a lot of money to be made.  You guys are going to get real jobs for the first time in your lives.  Hell, Allan might even have to get a haircut and Michael, you’ll have to actually have to wear a tie!”

I don’t think I even owned a sport coat back then, or a tie, or a pair of slacks for that matter.

By that fall, I owned a couple sport jackets, several ties, five pairs of slacks and a suit.  Allan was pure though.  He’d refused to adopt the company dress code and had arrived in New Orleans with a pair of khakis and three polo shirts.  Neither of us was dressed for work though as we’d purposely booked an early flight so that we’d have a few hours to tool around the French Quarter before our 3 o’clock meeting with Bosco and the SlipNot brass.  Apparently, Bosco had found an even earlier flight.  He strode up to us, beaming.  He greeted us warmly and then studied us carefully.

“You look like shit,” he announced.  “Go get changed and head upstairs to the main conference room on the second floor.  There’s a sign in the hallway that’ll point you there, so you can’t miss it.”

“I thought we weren’t presenting until later this afternoon,” Allan pointed out.

“You need to do a meet and greet” Bosco replied.  “A lot of our clients have already arrived and you need to schmooze ‘em.”

“I’m going to grab some lunch first,” I said.  We were in one of the great cooking cities of the country and I can promise you that there was no way I was going to miss an opportunity to feed at the trough. 

Bosco protested, but he finally agreed that it would be a good idea to grab a quick bite before heading into work.  He liked the idea so much that he joined us.  He suggested the Redfish Grill, but I prevailed on him and we walked another couple blocks to the Cajun Cabin.  During the evening, the Cajun Cabin is a noisy nightclub that features local Cajun music and a lot of drunken patrons shouting to be heard.  At lunchtime, the place is almost as loud with the sounds of tourists and locals enjoying some of the best home style gumbo, alligator sausage, crawfish etouffee, jambalaya, and shrimp creole you can find in the French Quarter.

 

You walk in the door and the smells from all of those rich dishes just goes right through you.  People were laughing and shouting to each other from table to table, there was music blasting through the stereo, and you could hear the oysters being shucked at the bar on the right side of the room.  I stepped over to the barstool closest to where a guy was plating out a dozen oysters and motioned for Allan and Bosco to join me.  Allan sat down beside me and Bosco took up the next stool.

“And good afternoon, guys” the oyster shucker greeted us, “What do you need?”

Bosco made it clear he didn’t want oysters and so he and Allan consulted the menu.  I smiled and ordered a dozen oysters and a pint of Abita Amber Ale.

“No, sir” the shucker replied.  “I don’t think that’s going to work.”

“No?” I asked.

“No.  I think you’ll order a dozen and then I’ll serve you what you need.”

Oysters are dirt cheap in New Orleans.  They’re not the salty delicacies a Malpeque is or a Blue Point oyster might be.  They’re a little bland actually, when you compare them to the varieties harvested in the North Atlantic.  But that in no way diminishes them.  Like any good oyster, the Eastern oysters of the Gulf are salty and their flesh literally explodes in your mouth when you bite into one.  I had one guy at a raw bar on Long Island once try to convince me that the best way to eat an oyster was to let it touch the front of your tongue, so as to enjoy the taste and then let it slip whole down your throat.  My feeling is that unless you taste the entire oyster by biting into it, you’ve missed the whole point of the business.

I ate my dozen oysters and finished my ale.  The shucker refilled my glass and placed another six oysters in front of me.  I thanked him and continued to eat.  When those were gone, another four appeared.  Bosco, who’d ordered a bowl of shrimp gumbo, was enjoying the scene and he chided me for eating so much. 

“Jesus!” Allan exclaimed in mock disgust.  He’d detailed his dietary needs to the bar waiter and been offered an enormous salad made from hearts of romaine lettuce, tomatoes, julienne vegetables, and cucumber slices.  His remark was not directed at his lunch, but rather at the appalling sight of me downing this third offering of raw oysters.

The shucker just laughed.  “I think you’re done now,” he told me and he took away the empty plate from in front of me.

I sure was.  The second ale was beginning to give me a low-level buzz and combined with the richness of the shellfish, I felt a lot more up for a nap in front of the TV than an afternoon of meetings and presentations.  But Bosco was there to stop me.  He produced the company credit card, paid the bill and herded us out the door, back to the hotel.

***********************

The next installment will be posted on September 30.

If you'd like to read the entire book today, GO HERE.

EPISODE 3

We landed in New Orleans sometime just after noon.  This was a couple years before Hurricane Katrina had come ashore and the levees had collapsed.  The ^9th Ward was still intact and the French Quarter was a prized destination for college kids, weekend bingers, and conventioneers.  Allan and I fell into the third group. 

Allan had gone to grab a bottle of spring water at a vending machine inside the airport.  He was a health nut, which contrasted nicely with my own gourmand attitude about the world.  Concisely put: food is to be eaten and beverages are to be drunk.  Allan bought into that concept, but only part way.  The list of things he wouldn’t eat was nearly as long as the one that was comprised of all the beastly little items I prized most when dining.  Allan was a vegetarian - I, an omnivore.  He avoided meat, mushrooms, and anything from the onion family.  I felt that anything short of cat entrails could be cooked in a combination of all of the above.  Entrails however must be cleaned and steamed in the tradition of classic Cantonese dim sum.

When it came to keeping fit, Allan was driven.   He ate his strict diet, hiked and ran, keeping his body in fine tone.  He never drank alcoholic beverages either.  Given how much time we spent traveling around the country, I could not imagine how he dealt with the near psychotic expansion and depression of stress and exhaustion.  He always swore that living clean eliminates all stress.  I contend that it just leads to boredom.

Allan purchased his water and we walked down to the long line of people looking to book themselves on one of the shuttles to the hotels.  We were staying at the Renaissance, just a couple blocks from the bottom end of Bourbon Street, a short car ride really, but our employer had decided it was best if we took a $15 shuttle instead of a $38 a day car rental.  It didn’t make much difference to me, although Allan really wanted to drive.  He always liked to knock around the cities we visited by car, whether he knew his way around or not.  Actually, he had an amazing sense of direction.  He’d come to an intersection, look both ways, ask me which way I thought we should go and do the opposite.  It worked almost every time.

Our driver wasn’t a big talker, although he did point out the Superdome (you’d have to have been asleep, with your head pressed against the right side window to have missed it) and Harrah’s (dozing on the left side this time to achieve the same effect).  We arrived at the Renaissance about 45 minutes after we’d gotten into the shuttle, which wasn’t bad, even though there’d been absolutely no traffic to contend with.  Things are just a little slower when you’re south of where I come from and I happen to like that sensibility.  I worked in New York, where one good friend of mine joked that all the people looked like they were walking with the most intense urge to take a leak and that they might let go at any moment.  I prefer to take my time when I walk, which is something that Allan and I always shared.

Allan got out first and stretched his legs.  He was almost a foot taller than I and sitting in the cramped shuttle bothered him.  I shuffled out behind him, grabbed my bag and we headed inside.  We were standing in line at the check-in when I saw Bosco.

I first met Bosco Ignatz when I was 37.  I was broke and he offered me a job, selling hair. 

As anyone in the industry will tell you, men have been using potions, lotions, and dead animal hides to cover their balding heads for thousands of years.  The ancient Egyptians were big believers in the afterlife, but they were even more ardent adherents to the concept of facial and cranial hair coverings.  This gave me pause to reflect.  How would you feel if your body was exhumed and it was discovered (among other things) that you had a toupee strapped on your decidedly posthumous forehead?  Well, aside from the fact you were stone cold dead, I suppose not a hell of a lot.  However, it’s a little like that weird thing that mothers used to tell their sons about always putting on clean underwear in the morning. Somehow this was supposed to be helpful in the unlikely event that you were be struck by a bus that day, rushed to the hospital and the doctors and nurses were then forced to remove your pants to treat you.  At least they would know you were a “nice boy” when they called for a priest to administer the last rites.

I started off with Bosco by making telephone calls to people who’d responded to one of those late night infomercials that touted a mysterious way of restoring a man’s (and presumable, a woman’s) balding hairline.  I talked to people, mostly men, who wanted to know if I could grow their hair back.  They all wanted to know how I was going to do it.

So did I.

Initially, Bosco wouldn’t tell me what the secret process was.  Every time I would ask, he’d smile and tell me that knowing would make me less effective as a telemarketer.  I had to be able to honestly tell these people that only the consultant at the hair studio knew the answer to their questions. In that way, I could book an appointment.  It turned out that I was pretty good at it and soon I was filling up hair replacement studios for Bosco’s business and for his clients’ businesses as well.

Bosco was the best known of a group of consultants who sold their expertise in sales and marketing to hair replacement studios throughout the US and Canada.  He was quite something to watch when he worked with a single client or a larger group in a seminar.  His lanky body would sway ever so slightly when he tried to stand still, so he moved around almost constantly when he was upright.  The only time he ever could keep still was when he was seated.  Likewise, his manner was far more sedate when he sat than when he was standing.  He spoke more slowly, turned things over in his mind a little longer and appeared far more relaxed.  Sitting in a meeting with him could be a very pleasant experience.  He made you feel at ease and used this to probe you by asking questions and carefully gauging the reactions he got.

After four years of booking Bosco’s appointments and helping him with his consulting business by cold calling for new clients among the vast list of hair studios that he had worked with over 20 years in the business, I left.  Bosco had told me that I was a good salesman, as good as any he’d ever trained, but the fact that I was embarrassed to talk about my job made me less effective.

“You don’t have to believe in what you sell,” he told me once.  “That’s convenient, but not necessary.  But you can’t hide from it either.  I bet you’re ashamed to tell your friends that you sell hair.”

“I don’t sell hair!” I protested.

“That’s right, you sell advice to people who sell hair.”

“Right.”

“But what do you tell people when they ask you what you do for a living?”

He was right, of course.  I felt like a complete idiot about it.  But how the hell you explain that you sell consulting services to people who glue someone else’s hair to other people’s heads?  There’s just no way to make that sound right.  The more I thought about it, the less I found I could deal with it.  So, I left.

Almost seven years later, I walked back into Bosco’s office.  I’d left my job working for a computer network design company.  I’d sold a ton of equipment, but after the dot com collapse in 2000 and 2001, at the 8% markup that the market then would bear, my end was laughable.  So, I’d called up Bosco and asked if he needed a salesman.  He’d chuckled and told me I was welcome anytime I wanted to drop by.  A few weeks later, I gave my notice and told Bosco I was on my way.

***********************

The next installment will be posted on September 23.

If you'd like to read the entire book today, GO HERE.

EPISODE 2

The door slid open from right to left and I stepped into the vault.  I took the cylinder with my right hand and stuffed it into my bag.  I pushed as much air (or toxic gas) out of the bag as I could and tied it up at the neck.  Then I turned around to leave.  But of course, the inner door to the airlock had closed.  The guard went to an intercom and spoke through it.

“I have to void the airlock.  Are you going to be okay?”

How the fuck did I know?  I guess if the cylinder had been slowly leaking helium and I took a few breaths, the only negative effect would have been that I’d have sounded a bit like a cartoon character as I cursed the guard.  On the other hand, if there was something a bit more malevolent inside, then I might start to grow another arm out of my ass.  Or die. Two existential thoughts occurred to me right then: (1) when does the exploitation of the worker at the hands of his employer approach culpability in a potentially criminal negligent assault, and (2) how much longer I could hold my breath?  But it really didn’t take all that long before the gas had worked its way out of the airlock and the guard signaled that it was safe for me to enter it.  I stepped in, still holding my breath because whatever it was that had been floating around in the vault had followed me into the airlock and I glanced over my shoulder to watch as the door closed again.  I turned back towards the outer door and stared at the guard.

“Just one minute!” he shouted, not even bothering to use the intercom.

One minute!  Jesus, I’d been holding my breath for what felt like the better part of two!  I knew this wasn’t actually true though.  I’m usually only good for about 90 seconds.  With that cheerful thought, I tried to keep myself focused on something else.  When you’re in a stressful or dangerous situation, it’s good to concentrate on your breathing, which was clearly out of the question at that particular moment.  I decided to try monitoring my heart rate, which also proved to be a bad idea as it was hammering like hell.  I remembered reading in a textbook somewhere when I was in high school that carbon dioxide and water combine in your bloodstream to make carbonic acid as oxygen is absorbed.  The build up of this acid causes the amount of spinal fluid to drop in the medulla, which is the part of your brain that controls automatic functions, like breathing.  Eventually, the medulla gets pissed off and overrides your own efforts to turn red and then blue in the face as you refuse to take a gulp of air.  It’s a pretty unpleasant sensation all by itself and I gently cursed my high school biology teacher, Mr. Ashton, for littering my brain with this helpful information.  Combine all of this with being trapped in a small space while you watch the only person who can save your ass, while he struggles with the controls that might set you free, and you have all of the necessary ingredients for a full-fledged panic attack.  I stared intently at the guard and to my relief, the airlock door opened and I was able to step out.

“You okay?” asked the guard.

“Sure,” I gasped.  I looked at him and noticed that he was moving away from me, toward the front door to the room.  He opened the door and held it for me.  Nervously, he led me down the hallway to the stairwell.

“You going to walk, or did you want to take the elevator?”

“I guess I’ll take the stairs, since I’m here.”

“Cool!” he said as he hurried off to the elevator door, which was on the opposite end of the hallway. 

I took a look at the bag in my hand and realized that as long as I held it, I was the least popular person in that building.  It’s funny how things work out.  A few minutes ago, the guy had been happy as all hell to see me too.  I guess some people are just fickle.  I took the steps two at a time and in a couple of minutes; I was at my car again. I placed the bag on the back seat, got in and drove back to the Interstate. 

Everything seemed to go well until I hit the turnoff where 128 and Route 93 meet.  The traffic began to slow, as I had expected it might.  By the time I got to the tunnel at the Central Artery though, the whole thing stopped dead. I turned off radio station I had been listening to, switched on the tape I owned of the Grateful Dead’s September 3, 1977 performance and watched as all of the cars in front of me were methodically swallowed up by the darkness ahead, at glacial speed.  While I sat in traffic, I had one of those realizations that would have been a hell of a lot more useful to me had it occurred several hours earlier.  As most motorists know, one of the worst places to be in a traffic jam is in the middle of a tunnel.  The carbon monoxide that the internal combustion engine emits is one of the deadliest gasses on Earth, at least to humans.  I understand that plants love it, but not being so predisposed (I do not photosynthesize well – it’s a family trait), I have always made it my habit to roll up the windows and to put the air supply on “Recirculate” before entering a tunnel.  I put the windows up, turned the volume on the stereo to a near deafening level and settled back, as the car inched into the tunnel.  I must have been actually in the tunnel for several minutes before realized that I’d sealed myself into a very tight space again with my mysterious friend in the back seat.  I hurriedly glanced in the back and saw to my horror that the black bag had begun inflating!  Whatever the Acushnet Company had wanted out of their vault was threatening to pop the clearly unsuitable container that I had improvised for its transport to Don’s place in New Hampshire.

There is an old Zen fable that describes the plight of a man who ends up jumping over the edge of a cliff to escape a tiger who saves himself by grabbing onto a vine before he hits the bottom.  He looks below him and sees another tiger waiting for him to fall.  He looks above him and observes that mice are nibbling at the vine.  I felt a bit like that troubled gentleman at that moment in the tunnel with my ever-expanding plastic bag, faced as I was with the choice between breathing highly concentrated auto exhaust or whatever toxic nasty was filling up the garbage bag in the rear seat of my car.  The traffic wasn’t moving and I realized that I had placed myself in an airlock, surrounded by toxins for a second time in as many hours.  Clearly, I must have been some kind of genius to do so.  It was the only explanation.  I contemplated my own version of the tale of the tiger and the mice for another 45 minutes though before I was through the tunnel and into the more comfortable flow of traffic that led out of the city and back to Vermont.  I drove to Don’s house and heaved a fully inflated contractor’s bag of god-knows-what unceremoniously onto his front porch.

The next day when I went by Don’s office to collect my money, I made a point to ask him what had been in that cylinder.

“Oh, it’s best you never know,” he said with a shy smile.  He counted out my money and slid it across the desk to me.  “I really appreciate you taking care of that for me, Michael.  Acushnet is an important client of mine.”

“How does that work?” I asked as I put the bills in my pocket.

“Well, they ask me to consult on some of their product lines.  I help them with details that concern the materials they might want to use.”

“The college doesn’t care that you moonlight?”

“I don’t make it their business to know.”

“You know,” I said, while I watched him lean back in his chair and fold his arms over his chest, “you’re being pretty fucking inscrutable right now.”

Don started to laugh.  His shoulders bounced up and down while he did this.  As I mentioned, Don had a great laugh and he was literally turning red as he let loose.  It got to you, watching him so happy and so I always found that I started to smile every time he did this.  Don thought this was the funniest thing he had heard all day, maybe all month and so when he finally calmed down a bit, I pointed to him.

“You gonna tell me the joke?” I asked.

“Sure,” he replied.  “The guys down there at Acushnet paid me $2000 to get that cylinder out of there.”

“So, what was in it?” I asked again.

“Fucked if I know.  I sent you down to get it, so I figured it didn’t make any difference.”

“But I left it on your porch!”

“Oh, that’s okay.  I’m not going back home for a while.  The college is out all of next week.  I thought I’d go to Maine and see some friends.  By the time I get back, that damned bag you put over the cylinder will have popped and it’ll be safe to throw the whole mess in the dumpster.”

There were two lessons to be learned from this:

(1) The concept of environmentally sound disposal practices had a bit of evolving to do.

(2) If someone offers you a pile of cash, you had better be ready to earn every bit of it.

***********************

The next installment will be posted on September 16.

If you'd like to read the entire book today, GO HERE.

EPISODE 1

When I was 23 years old, I knew a guy named Don Martin who had a gig at the Dartmouth College Physics lab.  He called me up one afternoon and asked me if I wanted to make a quick $300 in cash.   This was some real money back in 1980 and it could cover my share of the rent in the 3-bedroom apartment I shared in White River Junction, so I knew from the beginning that I was all in. He was a slow moving, slow speaking man.  At times, he appeared to be older than his 54 years.  His head was almost completely bald and what little hair he had was grey. He had a serious look on his face most times, but his faint smile signaled an innate sense of humor.  He had a great laugh too.   He smiled at me as he spoke and continued with his instructions.  

“I want you to drive to Acushnet, Massachusetts.”  Don said.  “That’s right to the east of New Bedford, Michael.  There’s a lab there that’s owned by the Acushnet Company.  They make golf balls and stuff like that.  Anyway, go to the lab and ask to speak to whoever is managing the vault today.  There’s a cylinder in the vault with a slow leak that they want me to take from them.  It’s small, maybe only weighs a couple of pounds.  All you have to do is drive down, pick up the cylinder, drive it back here and leave it on my front porch.  I’ll pay you tomorrow.”

I got Don to throw a full tank of gasoline into the deal and off I went. 

The drive down Route 89 is one of the prettiest in the whole state of New Hampshire.  There is almost no development along the highway and for about 60 miles all you see is forest on either side of the road.  Once you reach the end of 89 and head south on Interstate 93 though, you are presented with a 50-mile shot down to Boston.  I was pretty lucky and only spent about 15 minutes in the traffic that normally turns what is laughingly referred to as the Central Artery into a glorified parking lot.  Acushnet is about 60 or so miles south of Boston and once I was clear of the city, I literally flew. 

The town of Acushnet is just on the east side of the bay that makes up New Bedford Harbor.  I drove over the bridge that spans a narrow place in the harbor, arriving in Acushnet at about 3:30 in the afternoon.  Normally, I might have brought a surfcasting rod along with me and done a little fishing, but I was anxious to get back to Vermont.  After all, I still had to pick up my package and negotiate the traffic through Boston one more time.  I could have just delayed my departure from Acushnet a few hours until the traffic cleared out, but I also reasoned that I didn’t know what in the hell Don’s leaking cylinder held or how quickly whatever it was happened to be seeping into the local environment.  I contemplated that thought quickly and made a necessary correction: whatever it happened to be would very soon be seeping all over the inside of my car.  Before stopping off at the lab, I went to a hardware store and picked up a box of black contractor bags.  You can almost fit the contents of an entire pickup truck inside one of these things and they’re stronger than hell.  I figured that I could contain whatever splooge might reside in the mysterious cylinder if I wrapped it up in three or four of those bags, at least long enough to get it to Don’s front door.  Then it was his problem.  I parked my car in front of the Acushnet building, took four bags out of the box, stuffed them in my backpack, and headed in.

I had to go through a security checkpoint at the entrance area of the Acushnet lab.  The guard there didn’t seem too impressed with me, or the crappy used Chevy Chevette I had driven up in.  Maybe he just didn’t cotton to my “Reagan for Shah” bumper sticker?  But once I’d identified myself and said that I was there to pick up something from “The Vault”, his whole demeanor changed.

“We’ve been waiting for you!” he said excitedly as he led me through the main door.  We went through a long hallway and down two flights of stairs.

“You can take the elevator back up, if you like,” he explained.  “Just let me know.”

I pondered that statement for a second.  Just how big was this thing?

He seemed to sense my confusion and added, “You can take the stairs if you prefer, it’s just that we’d like it out of the building as quickly as you can manage it.”

We exited the stairway and entered another hallway.  At the center of the hall, there was a large glass double door that opened with a keypad.  After the guard entered the appropriate code, the doors opened into a room and we walked in.  There was another glass door maybe ten feet from the entrance, with what appeared to be an airlock behind it.  The guard walked up to a keypad on the right side of the door and entered another code.  The door swung open, exposing a small chamber – the airlock that I had so brilliantly detected a few seconds before.   There was another glass door on the other side of the airlock and a long stainless steel bar that ran across its equator.  On that bar was a blue button.

“When the first door closes behind you,” the guard said as he looked at me with great concern, “Make sure that it’s completely shut before you hit the blue button on the next door.”

“Okay,” I replied.  I peered beyond the second glass door and saw a cylinder sitting on a shelf.  If was small, not much bigger than a motorcycle shock absorber.  So this was the Big Bad Wolf?

“I mean, you might want to put on your safety gear now,” the guard suggested as he looked at my backpack.

My what?  I had a handful of plastic bags between me and what was now assuredly Armageddon.  I swore to myself that if I survived this, I was going to kill Don, $300 or no $300!  I reached into my backpack and retrieved one of the bags.

“That’s what you brought?” the guard asked.

“Yup,” I replied with as much calm as I could contrive.

“No shit!  I figured you’d at least have a HAZMAT suit or an oxygen mask.”

“Not for little jobs like this,” I said as I walked past the guard and into the airlock.  The door shut behind me and I heard the seal click.  I looked at the pathetic bag in my hand and realized that the chamber of the vault was likely filled with some kind of gas.  I hadn’t taken my eyes off the cylinder since I first spotted it.  It seemed benign enough, which indicated to me that, given present circumstances, it was anything but.  I ran down my options and recognized that they were somewhat limited.  I could either tap on the door for the guard to let me out before the situation got even further out of hand, or I could blunder onward and hope for the best. I really needed the $300 and concluded that this thought would have to be enough inspiration to sustain me.  I took a deep breath and pushed the blue button on the inner door.

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The next installment will be posted on September 9.

If you'd like to read the entire book today, GO HERE.