As we’ve been traveling and writing, I’ve made an effort to include stories from our past lives when they intersected in some way with our current situation. Like finding a model of a pyramid in a museum and then sharing the humiliating pulse-pounding story of my having to be rescued from the top of that selfsame pyramid years ago.

I’ve even created a tag for those posts, so if that’s your interest you can pull them all up from the Personal History tag. There’s only a few now, but there will be more. Other than their inherent amusement value, those stories are also a way to make sure that our children, Sam and Ruby, have stories about our lives from before 2022, when we started our travel adventure and created this blog.

Death Becomes Us

A few years before we hit the road, Dorothy and I docented my mother’s surviving partner, Ben, through decline and death. That experience left lasting marks on us, both in terms of how we want to manage our own ends and how we want to manage what we leave behind.

My mother, Jackie, had died about seven years before Ben, by her own hand. She was 88, and while the physical decline had long since started she still had enough marbles to recognize that her mental acuity was diminishing, the clarity to recognize where that process was heading, and the will to choose not to go there. Her decision was the ultimate act of agency.

Ben had taken a different tack, deciding that he wanted to live as close to forever as he could manage. That path led him to a memory care unit, which was the only safe place for him given the level of minding he required at that point. Some months into that stay, Ben confessed to me that he thought perhaps my mother had had the right idea after all. But by then that decision had been taken out of his hands. He was watched 24/7 and he no longer had the ability to assert agency in the same way that my mother had. That door slammed shut when he entered the facility.

Jackie arranged her life so that she kept her agency until her last breath. Ben arranged his life so that his agency was removed before he was done with it. That’s more than a little instructive.

Our net takeaway from the end-to-end experience, covering both Jackie’s and Ben’s deaths, is that it’s better to leave a year early than a day late. That last year is unlikely to be our best year ever, and the risk of being even a day late making that decision is catastrophic. Here’s to getting the timing right.

Hit The Road, Jack

But there was a pre-death takeaway, as well. As Ben was declining mentally, Dorothy put together a memory book for him, so he’d have an anchor as he drifted further away. But Ben’s house was an unorganized mess, and even when Dorothy unearthed something that seemed meaningful he could no longer identify all the people in pictures, or what certain documents meant. Despite that, Dorothy was heroically able to assemble a significant memory book, and Ben referred to it often and found joy in it.

But the things Ben couldn’t identify amongst the detritus were just lost. They no longer had any meaning or value, which was just sad. We committed then and there that we’d never leave that sort of chaos for Sam and Ruby to clean up.

We were already downsizing to hit the road and leave as little behind as possible, but this brought some focus to that effort. Now we weren’t merely downsizing, we were also going to curate, so that what was left made sense and had context. We only kept art that had some personal relevance. We sorted all of our scanned photos into years and events and moved them to a family-accessible cloud service, which also hosted all of our scanned and foldered documents (no more paper). We reduced our belongings to only those that had meaning. We know that Sam and Ruby will thank us. Posthumously.

Which brings us back to the blog. Part of layering in some of the personal history came from that same curatorial impulse, the desire to leave behind for our children a moderately coherent story about our lives. If we took the time to do that with our photos, documents, and artifacts, we should surely do it for our stories. They know at least the outlines of most of the meaningful stories (that we’ve chosen to share – that thing with the snake is nobody’s business), but probably not all of the details and specifics.

Not every story worth sharing from our past is going to neatly fit into some corner of our travel narrative, so I’m going to offroad here, and share a story that is utterly unrelated to our travels. If you’re here for the pretty pictures of exotic locales, you can stop now. Because I’m going to tell a story about my mother’s mob ties.

Ambition!

This story starts way back when we were newlyweds freshly divorced. We had moved from San Diego, then primarily a Navy town, to the more welcoming arms of San Francisco, where several of our friends had preceded us, smoothing our entry.

December 31, 1980. New Year’s Eve with our friends, where a pact was made. We all had shitty office jobs, but we were obviously too smart and too creative as a group not to explode into success. We agreed that evening to join forces as necessary, as a collective, to help bring anyone’s brainchild to fruition. Dorothy and I were the first to move from talking to doing, and with another of our cohort, Yvonne, we started Sleaze Magnets: Painfully Trendy Accessories.

Thus ensued a manic flurry of product development, using found objects and drugs. We filled aquarium tubing with telephone wire and beads to make bracelets. We put colored plastic rods in the toaster oven and twisted them into spirals for earrings. We made skinny ties. And we applied fabric paint to store-bought pantyhose.

We didn’t know how to get the products into retail, so we took an ad out in the happening West Coast magazine of the time, Wet, for mail order fulfillment.

If you replied to the ad, we sent you a handmade two-sided color copy of our catalog.

You’ll be surprised to learn that we weren’t a roaring success. We were better at making things than marketing and promoting them, but we were also lucky to be unsuccessful, as most of the pieces required a ridiculous amount of hand labor to produce. We were literally decades ahead of Etsy’s I-have-no-idea-what-my-labor’s-worth business model.

So we had our little catalog and our pile of oh-so-hip punk products, and everyone we showed them to had the same response: “Cool. But can we get some of those pantyhose? Those are amazing.” So what Sleaze Magnets had truly done was push us to create a lot of products quickly, one of which was clearly worth pivoting to pursue on its own. Thus did Sleaze Magnets, having outlived its usefulness, die.

What would rise to take its place wasn’t immediately obvious. The Sleaze Magnets hosiery had been created with fabric paint and broken off Q-tips. Not only was that inadequate for any but the simplest of designs, it was impossible to scale. We imagined large rooms full of small women with tiny hands and an industrial supply of Q-tips (did I mention the drugs?), but that clearly wasn’t going to work. In order to make a business of it, they would need to be printed.

That turned out to be a thornier problem than anticipated. At the time, what little printed hosiery existed used dye sublimation inks, which printed one side at a time (leaving an unprinted river on each side of the leg) and basically dyed the fibers. So if you printed a square shape, that shape would distort when stretched around a leg. There was a reason they never caught on. They looked like shit. We needed to print images on a porous, flexible substrate that would hold their integrity when stretched.

I took our hosiery and our Q-tip samples to a bunch of silkscreen ink manufacturers and explained what we were trying to do. Every single one of them told me the same thing: that what we were trying to do was physically impossible, no one’s ink would do that, and if it was possible, someone would have done it already. Certainly not us children.

And here is where I learned a lesson that would follow me my entire life: the value of Strategic Ignorance. The problem with subject matter experts is that they have marinated in the agreed upon wisdom of what is and isn’t possible in their domains. They’re experts. They know.

But those experts are often blind to the way that the components of their domain can be mixmastered into new shapes, outcomes that are still possibilities if you bring enough ignorance to the table. I built what passed for my career on Strategic Ignorance, never knowing enough about any one thing that I was an expert who couldn’t imagine off-label solutions. Fairly obviously, that made my resume a tough sell.

What did we do when faced with the rejection of our very premise? We bought a screen printing head, which lived on our dining table, and every type of ink we could get our hands on. And for six solid months I printed and permutated until I cracked it: solid images that would hold their integrity when stretched in any direction. I had solved a problem no one else had solved because I had no fucking idea it was impossible. Well, not quite. I had been told it was impossible. By experts. I just chose not to believe it.

The highlight of this process, and, to be honest, one of the highlights of my life, was taking our printed samples to the ink manufacturer. He flipped through the sample ring with wide eyes. “Jesus Christ, whose ink does this?” Your ink. “Impossible. Our ink can’t do this.” Oh, it doesn’t get any sweeter.

But we weren’t out of the woods. The ink I’d found that could be coaxed into doing our trick was a thermoplastic ink, requiring heat to set. It turned out that the temperature required to set the ink was just a couple of degrees below the char temperature for the hosiery. At that point I was printing in a rented garage and curing the ink under heat lamps, so I didn’t exactly have fine-grained control over the temperature. I burned a lot of hosiery before we were able to set up a proper factory.

Once we were able to (fairly) reliably produce printed pantyhose, we faced another problem: who, exactly, the fuck were we? We were complete unknowns, with no track record and not just a new product but an entirely new product category. At that point, none of the department stores or top boutiques were carrying any printed hosiery. Because there wasn’t any.

We knew the only solution available to us was to dress the part. We’d need top-flight branding and sales material to even get the meeting with buyers. We had to get the small things right so buyers could plausibly infer that we’d get the big things right: manufacturing and fulfillment.

We engaged our network and had a logo done. We did the branding and design ourselves. We hired a sales manager with experience selling to department store accessories buyers. And we built an absolutely insane handmade swatch book out of thick plexiglass and shiny machined bolts. At the very last minute, the night before our first sales meetings, I silkscreened the logo onto the plexi cover. One shot to get it right, fuck it up and no catalog. Nailed it! And the next day we closed our first sale, to I. Magnin in San Francisco.

A new star was born: Gambit by Dorothy Jones.

Bang, Zoom, To The Moon…

And thus were a fateful series of dominos tipped.

First up: delivering to I. Magnin. If the goal was to grow the business, we needed to bring solid sell-through numbers to buyers, so we had to make I. Magnin work. Our first challenge was packaging.

At the time, I was spending a lot of time in hosiery departments in San Francisco. A lot of time. So much time I began to be escorted out. Because I was just standing still and watching. But not in a creepy way.

I was watching people shop. And what I saw was that shopping looked a lot like reading a magazine. If you watch someone reading a magazine, there’s a back-and-forth scanning motion as pages are turned, until something on a page catches attention and arrests that movement. I saw the same thing in hosiery departments.

A shopper would walk in and the head scanning would commence. Then something would catch their attention. What were they looking at when that happened? What caught their eye? Sometimes that would be it, and the scanning motion would start back up. But sometimes they’d walk towards what had caught their eye. Then they might walk off or they might pick the product up. They might put it back or they might buy it.

To make a sale you had to successfully navigate each of these chained decisions, one at a time. You had to arrest the scanning motion. You had to motivate a closer look. You had to induce handling the product. And then you had to close the sale.

Watching women negotiate that space was like a master class in product marketing. The combination of physical packaging, graphic design, and product characteristics could lead a customer successfully through that decision tree or push them away.

Stores only had two ways to display hosiery: Hanging on wall pegs or stacked in tiered bins. The hosiery stacked in bins were in flat packs with a notch at the top to display the product. The notch was adequate to display the color of the hose, because that was the product’s only visual attribute. But it wouldn’t work for our product, which had an all-over pattern. That tiny notch would never show enough of the product. We’d just look like colored tights.

On the other hand, the wall racks displayed hosiery in half-width packs, where you could see the entire package. With a generous window on the package, we could show enough of the product to close the sale. If we could get past the head scanning, induce the approach, and get women to pick the product up in the first place.

The ideal solution to stop the head scanning was some kind of branded merchandising, like a custom rack with signage and only our product. But department stores charge for that placement, on top of the cost of producing the materials. Not practical for the I. Magnin test, and certainly not a scalable business model. We’d need to solve the problem through packaging.

I’d noticed that products didn’t really stand out on the wall racks. They just kind of blended into an undistinguished wash. But there were products that consistently halted the head scan, even if they didn’t consistently induce the approach. Those were products with strong graphic elements on the packaging. But they still looked like individual products. If we could pair strong graphic design with something that pulled the multiple products into a visually cohesive unit, faking a paid merchandising solution, we’d not only stop the head scanning, we’d get the approach. Then when a customer saw how different and unique the designs were compared to everything else in the store, we’d get the pickup for a closer inspection. Then the quality of the design would close the sale. All four steps leading straight to the cash register.

So we cut a deal. We’d deliver in a flat pack, as commanded. But if we didn’t get good sell-through numbers, we’d take the product back and repackage it at our expense in half packs. I. Magnin agreed that they would then hang them on the wall as intended. We’ll try your way, and if that doesn’t work you’ll try our way.

They had sold through over the weekend. 100% sell-through in two days. Unheard of. We had the package, we had the sell-through proof, we had everything we needed to tell the story and roll this product out nationally.

Well. Almost everything.

We didn’t have anything approaching the capital it would take to truly launch this product. We had a tiger by the tail, but without the tiger. Just tail.

Our sales manager hooked us up with a potential investor. Let’s call him Dr. Howard Greenspan. Dr. Howard was very impressed, and said that he would fund a sales trip to the New York department stores, and if we came back with enough orders he’d make an investment of a specified size. Whose amount escapes me now, for reasons that will become clear.

We wrote paper at 100% of the stores we saw in New York. 100 fucking percent. Dr. Howard was in. In exchange for his investment he got 51% of the business.

Now we had a new set of problems. It turns out department store orders had drop dead dates. Who knew? If we didn’t ship by a certain date, the orders would cancel automatically. We can’t recall exactly now, but we think it was just six weeks. You know what else we didn’t have when we went to New York, besides capital? Product to print on. A place to set up a factory. Equipment. A fucking clue what we’d just let ourselves in for.

We went to work. We ordered product to print on and buttloads of ink. We rented a space and had an industrial heater delivered, the kind with a precise thermostat and a speed-controlled conveyor belt. We were still using the screen head from our dining room. We were ready in… two weeks. Ah, youth.

Which was good, because we had process to invent. It took a fair amount of tinkering to perfect the temperature and belt speed of the drying unit so the ink was properly cured and the pantyhose wasn’t damaged. Scaling the process up from one-at-a-time to constantly introduced challenges that needed to be resolved. But I think the biggest challenge was… I was the only one on the team who knew how to screen print. I would have to personally print every pair we’d sold.

And it’s not like I was an experienced screen printer, or had had any training. I taught myself to screen print during the prototyping process, and it worked, so I guess I was doing it right?

In the final crunch to pack and ship I pulled two consecutive all nighters, with the occasional nap on top of the nice, warm drying unit. Unsurprisingly, our reject rate went through the roof. Only about half of what I printed turned out to be usable product. The rest got piled in a heap.

After we shipped and I slept for a few days, I went back to that reject pile and couldn’t for the life of me find the flaws that had sent them to their doom. In addition to printed hosiery, I also appear to have been producing hallucinations.

This was our hard launch, so we were, on a parallel track, preparing marketing. We did a photo shoot with a photographer whose studio was in the same building as our new factory space. We paid for ads to announce our arrival, one in Women’s Wear Daily and one in Vogue. After that we relied exclusively on editorial coverage rather than paying for advertising, but we wanted to make a splash.

We couldn’t afford to pay Vogue for front-of-the-magazine placement, so we figured we’d be stuffed in the back. They liked the ad so much we got premium placement. And a little boost of controversy.

It’s hard to make out from the above, but the roster of our kickoff clients included Henri Bendel, Neiman-Marcus, Bloomingdales, Nordstrom, Saks, Marshall Field, Macys, B. Altman… A murderer’s row of major department stores and high-end boutiques. We arrived hard.

That was July 1982. By January 1983 Vogue was giving us free ink. This photo was by Irving Penn. It made our hearts stop to be photographed by Irving Penn.

After we filled those first orders we scaled up for real. We hired production staff that I trained on our methods, we created an order management system, we set up a shipping department, we hired new sales reps, and we started cranking out marketing material.

Our very first catalog wasn’t even a catalog. When Dorothy went on some of those first sales calls she noticed that buyers would clip photos they liked and tack them up on their cubicle walls, so we decided that we’d cut out the middleman and deliver single page product shots designed specifically for that purpose. We saw those over and over on subsequent sales calls, as nearly every buyer had them up on their walls.

And here was a little more of that lovely controversy. Between the Vogue ad and the product shots we got a reputation for… spiciness. The girl-girl shots were especially good for riling up the peasants. We just thought it was good art direction.

Meanwhile, we’re lining up press interviews for Dorothy and sending her on multi-city tours for in-store promotions. We amassed a ridiculous amount of press and editorial coverage, all of it glowing, all of it free.

In addition to the core innovation, actually printing on hosiery, Dorothy introduced two other bombs to the industry: fashion colors and seasonal designs. Except for intentionally gaudy tights, hosiery had previously come in hosiery colors. Dorothy changed that, coordinating the hosiery colors with the dominant colors for the fashion season.

Buyers were delighted. They were shocked, before being delighted, when they learned that each season’s patterns would be different. We had a fresh Spring and Fall line every season, with older patterns sent out to pasture. No one retired hosiery designs. If it was on offer, it was on offer forever. We married manufactured scarcity to FOMO, for everyone’s benefit. Dorothy singlehandedly made the hosiery business into a fashion business.

Which was the long game, and the reason we’d branded the products with her name. We weren’t just building a hosiery business. We were laying the foundation for a fashion empire, leveraging Dorothy’s public name and profile to branch out into real fashion. We had, we believed, both tiger and tail. She had credibility and a built-in audience for whatever she did next.

Just for fun…

The Wheels On The Bus… Fall Off

Those of you attentive to narrative arc can see where this is headed.

Let’s not forget how very, very young we were during all of this. Dorothy’s the elder, so we were respectively 23 and 24 when we made our New Year’s pact with our friends. 24 and 25 when we built Gambit (officially Dorothy Jones & Co., in line with our plans for World Domination). 25 and 26 when we launched to the market. And 27 and 28 when it collapsed.

We had a meteoric two-year run. Made it ma, top of the world.

I said I’d explain why I couldn’t remember the amount of Dr. Howard’s investment. It’s because he never made it. After funding the initial sales trip and factory setup, he only ever took money out of the business. He never put in another cent.

He kept the two of us on such a short financial leash that we could barely buy groceries, claiming that there wasn’t enough profit to pay us a real wage. All while, we discovered later, he had himself, his wife, and his mistress on the payroll.

I built that factory. I knew our costs, I knew our sales, and I knew the fat margins I’d built into our pricing. 65¢ of every dollar of income was gross profit, and we had a lean, low overhead operation. I knew there was money there. But other than pay us, the other thing Dr. Howard failed to do was share the books, as he was contractually obliged to do.

We were still based in San Francisco, but spent a lot of time in New York on sales. We convinced Dr. Howard that it made more sense for us to be based in NYC and return to SF twice a year to do the factory work to produce a fresh line, and he doled out enough cash to get us there. But we truthfully knew that our future, whatever it might be, required us to be in New York.

So we moved, and once settled told Dr. Howard that we had the next season’s designs done, and we’d return to SF to put them into production as soon as he shared the books with us. No financials, no new season.

His response to that was to send a press release to Woman’s Wear Daily and all of Dorothy Jones and Co.’s creditors announcing that Dorothy had refused to release the next season’s designs and that the business was shutting down due to her malfeasance. He helpfully added that his share of the business was held in an asset-free shell company that was declaring bankruptcy, but that Dorothy was a general partner and thus responsible for any and all of the company’s debts. And, for good measure, here’s her phone number.

So…

Our backup plan, in the event that events transpired as they did, was that Dorothy had built herself into a bankable name, and other employment should be available. She was the Queen. As it happened, being under the cloud of dueling lawsuits, with even the availability of her name in question (yes, the rights to the Dorothy Jones name belonged to Dorothy Jones & Co., 51% of which was under the control of Dr. Howard) substantially tamped down interest in hiring her. She wound up snagging a part-time contract gig designing for Perry Ellis Hosiery.

I figured I could get a job in management at some sort of fashion accessories firm, only to be told that experience in hosiery in no way qualified me to work in the tie, or belt, or sock businesses. Seriously. Unqualified for socks. I referred to this as “Oh, you have experience marketing cigarettes, but you’ve never marketed menthol cigarettes. Totally different ball game.” So I office temped. I felt like a refugee who’d been a surgeon coming to the Land of Opportunity and driving a cab.

It was so thin that we couldn’t afford groceries but we had a Macy’s credit card and bought $13 melons in their basement gourmet shop. It was so thin (ba-dum-dum)…

What we learned in the aftermath was that Dr. Howard had done more than siphon off net positive cash flow. He’d been siphoning off income, leaving creditors unpaid. By the time everyone had lined up to try to get their cut from us, it added up to more than $500,000 dollars in unpaid bills. Befitting our status as prodigies, we were declared bankrupt, at 27 and 28, with over half a million dollars in debts and no assets.

If you thought it couldn’t get any worse, hold my beer. Please. We learned from the IRS that Dr. Howard had also declined to hand payroll tax withholdings over to the government. Not just the company’s share, mind you, but also the amounts withheld from employee’s paychecks.

You could owe a million bucks in income tax and the IRS will talk to you. They’ll negotiate a settlement. They’ll take cents on the dollar. Reluctantly, but they’ll rationally balance the cost of enforcement and the settlement offer and negotiate. But if you die owing $10 in unpaid payroll taxes they will hunt down your heirs. They will take nothing short of every fucking cent they’re owed.

How did we learn this? From our IRS agent. At 27 and 28 we not only had a freshly minted bankruptcy, we also had an actual specific IRS agent assigned to Dorothy’s case. Who we went to visit. Who explained to us that the government was about to put a lien on her wages (such as they were) in order to collect what they were owed. But he was also kind enough to recognize our circumstances and give us some advice.

That advice was for Dorothy to get pregnant, have a baby, and leave the workforce. It wouldn’t keep the government from placing the lien, but it would probably keep them from pointlessly trying to enforce it.

Sweet! A path out at last.

Obviously, we didn’t do that. We just rolled the dice and hoped we’d be OK. Which in this regard, at least, we were. We were clearly so pathetic that it wasn’t even worth the effort for the government to file the lien. Instead they focussed on Dr. Howard, who actually had enough money to pay the tax bill. It took the IRS over ten years to dig past all of the fancy shell companies and strike Dr. Howard’s actual assets, but they eventually got their money. As the prophecy foretold.

Back in real-time, we were wallowing in an existential crisis. To go with our financial crisis. But at least we were fucked in New York City, right? We spent I’d say the next six months trying to figure out how this had all happened. Sure, sometimes you’re walking down the street and you get hit by a meteor. Bad things do sometimes happen through no fault of your own. But sometimes the fucking is so enormous that you just have to bear some personal responsibility. Acknowledging that Dr. Howard was a scumbag and a thief, we were desperate to figure out what we had done that made the fucking possible. Because we never wanted to be fucked like that again.

Aside from the value of Strategic Ignorance, there was one more life lesson to be pulled from this, what I call the Brass Ring Fallacy: There is no opportunity so once-in-a-lifetime that it’s worth shucking your common sense and strolling blithely into risk. A red flag is a red flag is a red flag. Had we been bulls we’d have everted.

But we weren’t bulls. We were very stupid children and Dr. Howard sniffed us out from get-go.

We were convinced that we were a capital investment away from the kind of success most people can only dream about. We were convinced that it was worth the risk to grab the brass ring. And we were convinced that we had no other options. The first of these beliefs was basically true, and the others couldn’t have been more ridiculously wrong.

We had one more critical decision to make in the rubble of the aftermath: to sue or not sue. There was no question that we had been wronged, and in a demonstrably provable way. We had been torted up the ass. Without lube. The question was whether we wanted to go through what it would take to prevail. It would mean that for some unknown but not trivial number of years we would be consumed with the lawsuit. It would take our time, attention, and money. We could focus backwards, on making right the wrong that had been done to us, or move forward, smarter and tougher, and make sure that we were never fucked again.

As hard as it was, we decided to move forward. And you know what? We have never been fucked again. It’s been tried, but we can smell it from a distance. We have been fucked by a professional, dude, don’t even bring that weakass shit. We have somehow been able to keep ourselves open to opportunity while having a finely tuned bullshit meter to keep the bad guys away. We came out of that experience, at 27 and 28, with the kind of education that many people never get in their entire lifetimes. We were seasoned.

And here’s another thing. We both really like who we are. And who we are is, in no small part, the result of this particular experience. This was the forge in which our adult selves were fired, and we like our adult selves. That makes this experience, however painful it was at the time, a net positive for us. We are, counterintuitively, grateful for it.

Mommie Dearest

“Jesus, dude. Talk about burying the lede. You’re at almost 6,000 words and nothing about your mother’s mob ties.”

OK, OK, I hear you. Exceptionally long setup, but at long last the punchline.

Amidst all this, as the extent of the fuckery became clear, dear old Ma and I are chewing it over. She is a robust 58, and it’s just a few years after my father, Stan, had died. As we’re discussing the depth and breadth of what’s been done, she says to me, “Do you want me to have him taken care of? I know people. Nothing that could possibly be traced back to you.”

Holy fuck! On the one hand, awesome to know that someone cares enough about me to have murder committed on my behalf. On the other hand, well, murder. And who are these “people” that she knows? Jesus.

So I stutter something back about what a lovely offer that is, but that I’m not prepared to go that far.

“Fine, fine, I understand. But you know, your father had a rule. ‘Don’t fuck with what’s mine.’ You’re mine, you’ve been fucked with, and since he’s not here that’s my job now.”

Man, if you squint it’s almost sweet. But then she goes on.

“OK, the man’s a doctor, right? He works with his hands. And you know where he lives. So he walks out of his house one day and as someone passes him on the street they reach out, break his hands, and just keep walking. Good enough, right? No. We wait until he’s healed up, and we do it a second time. The bastard will never leave his house again. Or work. And an asshole like that has plenty of enemies. He’ll never have a clue.”

That’s… a lot. Especially from your mother. If I remember correctly, my response to that was “Jesus Christ, remind me to never piss you off.”

I mean, where do you start? I don’t honestly know what’s scarier. That she could conceive of such a plan, seemingly off the cuff (or even worse to contemplate, what if it wasn’t off the cuff? What if she’d done it before?), or that she had the resources to execute it. Who are these “people?”

In a million years I could never have conceived of that plan. Murdering the guy, sure. But breaking his hands? Twice? Where does that even come from? I regret very little in my life, but I definitely regret not asking her about this episode before she died. But I have a theory.

When I was a wee bairn Stan and Jackie owned a furniture manufacturing company (the entrepreneurial gene seems to be dominant), Jacklyn Manufacturing. What a softie he was. I remember playing in the giant pits of foam.

They wholesaled to furniture stores, so buyers were big ticket. Nobody was there to get a single chair, and they were coddled appropriately. One way the buyers were coddled was that the catalog for the furniture featured nude models on all the beds, sofas, and chairs. Hubba hubba. I know this because I found the box of prints. Talk about a formative experience!

The other way they were coddled, which I didn’t learn about until I was an adult, was with… companionship. Jackie had a rolodex, and she made sure that each traveling buyer was provided an appropriate friend for the evening. It was a simpler time. Still. Your mother may be a boss, but mine was a pimp.

Here’s where the conjecture comes in. I find it hard to believe that either Jackie or Stan traveled in circles where they had direct contact with a rolodex full of women of negotiable morals. Although your parents are, inherently, unknowable. I find it easier to believe that in the manufacturing business they had come across someone who did have that access, and could provide it to them for a cut.

And that somehow Jackie had maintained that relationship and was able to leverage it for a murder or maiming for hire scheme 20+ years later?

It doesn’t make any sense, but any other potential explanation seems both less plausible and more frightening. So I’m going to stick with this. The stories we tell ourselves.

Coda

How did this eventually all wrap up? As I mentioned, it took over a decade but the IRS finally got to Dr. Howard. Which validated, I think, our decision to let it go. If it took the IRS, with their vast resources, ten years, what could we have accomplished?

We survived the dark years in the immediate aftermath and went on to other exciting adventures and exploits, without ever once getting within hailing distance of a fucking. So, yay us.

The contract for Dorothy Jones and Co eventually lapsed and Dorothy got the rights to her name back, although that didn’t make much practical difference. Her Broadway career as a costumer didn’t require that she market herself by name, but it did make the decision to relocate to New York before the shit hit the fan look prescient.

Some years after all of this Dr. Howard tracks us down and calls. I pick up the phone, and he explains that he’s had a come-to-Jesus moment, or whatever a Jewish doctor has, and he’d like to meet with Dorothy, in a very public place of her choosing, so he can apologize for his foul deeds in person.

I tell him that the forgiveness he’s seeking is between him and his god, and we’ll have nothing to do with it. Above our pay grade. Instead, I suggested that he might go fuck himself. Although I’d have taken cash, had it been offered. Pointedly, it was not.

The entire episode isn’t so much a funny or sad or angry story anymore. It’s just a fact from our past, however much it’s informed our ongoing present. All I can say is that it’s nice to be past the part of our lives where the knowledge and wisdom we picked up at such cost matters. It’s good to be old.