Paranoia, The Wild West, Hookers, Epilepsy

I screamed, “That fat, no good, son of a bitch". Pep Lough retorted, "He ain't so fat".

We were talking about a guy with whom I had many years of a love/hate relationship which included a lot of pot holes and a lot of smooth roads. Our relationship was a mix of love fests and threatened law suits (one of my favorite things).

Gordon Stollery was one of the few people that God blessed with unbelievable charm. He could charm a snake out of a tree. He was also a brilliant business man but whose word bordered on useless.


Changing his mind, often and mostly always, was Gordon's specialty. He often drove my fucking blood pressure to unsustainable levels, but in the end he had more pluses than minuses and I grew to love him, but it wasn't easy getting there. Even my first meeting with Gordon was one for the books. An ex-best friend of mine Donald Textor, who at the time was the senior oil and gas analyst at Goldman Sachs (aka Goldman Sucks) introduced me to Gordon. We had dinner at Lutece, very terrific and upscale (aka expensive). I paid.

Elaine Textor, great gal, and my most recent ex-wife Betsy, were there too. All five of us snapped shit when a very pregnant woman at the adjoining table went into what turned out to be an epileptic fit which included that poor broad rolling around on the floor. While the woman quickly recovered, I still, some 30 years later, remember that hair raising experience. Thank God I haven't had epilepsy, though I've had zillions of fits. Up like a rocket, down like a stick is my mantra but with no threat of swallowing my tongue, in spite of two ex-wives’ sincere wishes that I would both swallow my tongue and then choke on it.

My notion was to raise a natural gas gathering systems, private equity fund to be invested in Canada and managed by Gordon's company; a financing method that had never been done in the Canadian oil and gas business. My proposal to Gordon was that I would raise $US100 million ($US500m adjusted for inflation). Gordon in turn would finance the fundraising and I would go on the board to protect the investor's interests. Gordon had a tough time wrapping his mind around the idea that I could raise $US100m for his $C75m his public company, Morrison Petroleum plus financing me. According to Gordon the success of the deal, and it was very fucking successful, catapulted him into the elite of the independent oil and gas business in Calgary.

Calgary, for me, was the last of the Wild West towns. If you weren't always looking over your shoulder and paranoid to boot, you were going to get fucked. And in those days my paranoia wasn't strong enough. But my paranoia did catch up quickly with reality.

Before Gordo, I had consulted for Great Basins Petroleum, a company based in Calgary and run by Jack Wahl. Jack was the ultimate 'piece of work’. He was born in Illinois, went to school in Oklahoma studying petroleum engineering. Started as a petroleum engineer in the States then moved around for tax reasons, like a whore on Saturday night. Jack renounced U.S. citizenship to become a Canadian citizen for a more favorable tax consideration. Then he took on citizenship of the Bahamas to avoid Canadian taxes. Jack was not a straight up crook though he could be very misleading and always on the edge. His promises had the earmarks of trying to grasp a slab of mercury slithering around in the palm of your hand. Really tough to do.

Jack, as a speaker, was very fucking boring. He also insisted on slides with his presentation. I pleaded with him not to use slides. The lights went off. Jack started talking, everyone started dozing off. The last time I organized a lunch/presentation for about 150 analysts, stock brokers and money managers at the World Trade Center in N.Y., Jack was so outrageous that even in my greed I made it the last time ever. He included in his presentation slides a drilling prospect that sounded terrific. After the lunch I commented that I didn't know that Great Basins owned that prospect. He said the company didn't own it but was negotiating for it. I went nuts. He had talked up a prospect that he didn't own as though he owned it. That was the last time in the Great Basins public relations barrel for me.

A few months earlier Jack commissioned me to find him a buyer for that piece of shit. Not negotiate, just find him a buyer. I was to be paid $US75k (1970 dollars). After finding him a buyer he refused to pay me and I went off the wall. His CFO knew of the arrangement, was authorized to write up to $US25k and pleaded with me to settle, without a lawsuit, for the $25k, which I did. Jack had a super smart knock out wife and as a hunter, a collection of trophy heads to go along with his trophy wife. I missed seeing his wife again but not Jack and his God damn hunting souvenirs. He was a total bum.

My most memorable event in Calgary was when I stepped into the elevator at the International Hotel, one very cold night and there was a young, not too attractive, gal already in the elevator. When the doors closed she grabbed my scrotum and asked if I would like a 'trick'. I was so startled that I didn't even get a hard on. No, I didn't succumb to her hand charms.

Calgary in those days was loaded with hookers. They would walk up and down 4th where some hotels were located or hang out in front of a 'club' called The French Maid (Not my style. Too lowdown, even for me). In the winter they rode the elevators propositioning guys, sometimes by grabbing their balls. Never worked for me.

Ole Gordon, sometimes hateable, but in the end very loveable..…for another blog.

Sammy Glick, Sherry Netherlands Hotel, Losing Inches

 

'Work hard, and, if you can't work hard, be smart and if you can't be smart, be loud.'

Sammy Glick in What Makes Sammy  Run (1941 Best Seller)

Me and Sammy Glick.....Being the only Jew, in a Scollay Square, Boston Irish outfit cured me of looking for fist fights. While ensconced with the 241st Signal Corps group, I mostly had the shit kicked out of me in fist fights. I did win one that I remember, but I don't know who ended up looking worse, me,or my opponent. 'Me' would be my bet. I certainly don't remember one time while in the Army when I could say: 'You should see the other guy'. The girls would say that I was 'cute' and I wanted to stay that way.

Both in and out of the Army I mostly took Sammy's admonition to heart. I resorted either to being loud, which I really enjoyed, or being a coward. Either alternative was much better than having my face tattooed. Much easier on my nerves as well.

Like one night in New York at the Sherry Netherlands Hotel Bar. In those days (late 60's) the Sherry was as upscale as one could find in the Big Apple. I had become a hotel snob and if the hotel wasn't priced above my pay scale I wouldn't stay there. I was, and still am, a hotel snob.

The bell hop from the Sherry, had gone, at my request, to Nathan's in Times Square to pick up some hot dogs, fries and knishes for me and my two friends. Plus extras of everything for the bartender and anyone else that was hungry (A midnight snack). That hot dog, knish, fries and stuff eaten at the fancy fucking bar, earned me permanent expulsion from the Sherry.
  
There were two guys and a gal at a table down the bar from us. The gal got up to go to the ladies and looking at her I said to one of my friends,"Too bad that gal is so fucking fat. She is really good looking." 

Since I have a voice that could cut glass one of the guys with the gal heard me. He jumped up, stormed to my table and shouted at me in anger, "Get up, you dirty-son-of a bitch and come on on outside, that's my wife you insulted". I was very drunk but not so drunk that I wanted the shit kicked out of me so I said to him, "Not a chance, I'm a coward". He went berserk. Called me everything but a fucking milk cow but couldn't get me to move my fat, lower case, bronx, jewish ass out of my chair. I was very drunk, but not so drunk that I thought that I was a white Joe Louis....

My most memorable fight  was while I was in the Army and stationed at Fort Worden,Washington. Being fresh from New York City and Fort Sill, Oklahoma I was confrontational as hell and did tell, a few, if not many, of my fellow recruits that they were hicks and that they didn't know shit. But the army didn't think,that I knew shit either. I was put on a two days on/one day off schedule, working in the kitchen. Doing nothing but peeling spuds, washing enormous pots and pans and mopping floors,12-14 hours a day. I was on permanent KP (Kitchen Police) duty. I had mouthed off to the First Sergeant my first few days there and he marked me 'lousy'. For certain.

One morning at reveille a guy who was an armband acting sergeant ordered me to do something that I took exception to and I told him to go fuck himself. He went nuts and told me to meet him in the woods on a hill in the Fort at lunch time. I hadn't yet had been hammered by the Scollay Square Boston Irish, so I eagerly accepted. That piece of arrogance got me knocked on my ass right away.

We squared off, at lunch, and he promptly knocked me down. When I hit the ground I remembered that the asshole had been a professional wrestler in civilian life. He then jumped on me with me calling him everything but a milk cow. While screaming obscenities at him I looked around and saw a fallen branch that was just a little bigger than a baseball bat. I quickly grabbed the branch, my Bronx came out, and I screamed, 'Listen you son of a bitch. If you don't let me up I'll beat your fucking brains in with this club'. He was really stupid, but not stupid enough to challenge me with the club in my hand.

The fight ended. But I had added fighter to my quickly earned reputation at Fort Worden as a hard assed, loud mouthed NY Jew and I loved the reputation..That was pre-pot belly. I was 6"/1 1/2 and weighed 165 with a body fat content of no more than 10%. Now I am shrinking, slightly less than 5"11 and weigh  178 in the morning, right after getting out of bed and taking a piss, with a body fat content of at least  22%, that's 40 lbs of pure ugly fat as opposed to around 16 pounds of fat.

'Those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end.'....Fiddler On The Roof..

Roses are Red, Telluride, King Kong, No Kisses

                    >> 'Roses are red, violets are blue, God invented shit to be
                    along side of you.'
                    >> 'Roses are red, violets are blue, shit rises to the
                    surface, along with you.'
                    >> 'Roses are red, violets are blue, gotta look over my
                    shoulder, doing business with you.'
                    >> Roses are red, violets are blue. Your kid sucks toes, how
                    about you?'

The independent oil and gas business was, for me, an open penitentiary and unless you believed that paranoia improves peripheral vision you were sure to be fucked. You were dealing with people looking for black gold (oil and natural gas) that was as many as 3-4 miles and more below the earth's surface, so taking advantage of two legged animals (people) was like shooting fish in a barrel. In the Texas oil fields the New York investors were often called 'their Jewish mullets'. For the non-sports people, a mullet is a fish that's easy to catch. Make no mistake. I cherish the many fruitful, fun years I spent in and around the old time oil men. They lived like there was no tomorrow. They were a once in a lifetime experience and genre.

One day I was breaking bread with King Kong (a/k/a John Myers) who at that time was EVP of the GE Pension Trust when KK brought up an oil and gas investment that the Pension Trust had made in a partnership managed by Torch Energy. He was uncomfortable with J.P. Bryan, the CEO, which led to his being concerned about GE's $65 million investment.

KK's DNA contains a mass of street smarts. He is a graduate of the Queens, NY schools of stick ball, stoop ball and kick the can. His MBA and PhD are in street smarts. KK briefly outlined the deal that GE was in with Torch. I told him that he was right; GE was getting fucked (and without being kissed). At one point, after my 'educating' him, King Kong summed Bryan to Connecticut where the confrontation culminated in KK inviting Bryan outside for a shootout with fists not guns. Chicken shit Bryan declined the invitation. I would have too.

Naturally, initially, KK questioned my judgment since I hadn't seen any of the documents. I pointed out that the nature of deal made it an automatic limited partner fucking. A few days later King Kong phoned and asked me if I would look at the deal and negotiate for GE an exit from the partnership with Torch. I would be paid on success. Done deal though I did question whether other button down GE big shots would accept me. In spite of my Brioni suits, Hermes bow ties and monogrammed Turnbull and Asser shirts, my Bronx fuck 'em attitude always shone through all of that superficial nonsense. Thank God.

I hardly fit, with my foul mouth and long hair, the button down GE image. King Kong guaranteed me that he was not about to expose the GE hierarchy to me. So he didn't allow me past the Pension Trust. We had some words when he flat out refused to allow me to introduce Leo Hindery, President of ATT, to a very high ranking GE corporate executive because KK was sure the executive would take exception to my clothes. That really pissed me off, a lot. I was walking around dressed in about $6,000 worth of clothes though I always seemed to need a haircut. Leo's character never was discussed only my clothes.

Turns out that King Kong was right for the wrong reason. Leo turned out to be, in spite of his business success, a total flake. A terrible human being that John Myers didn't trust from day one.

I started, happy as a clam in mud, ready to put my paranoia in motion. First I discovered that the GE investment guy who recommended that piece of shit to the investment committee had been the beneficiary of J.P. Bryan's 'hospitality' many times. The father of the toe sucker would fly the GE guy, on a private aircraft to Telluride, Colorado from Houston to ski and stay at J.P. Bryan's house and then fly him back to Houston. Mr. Ethical would fly commercial back to Connecticut and recommend the investment and speak highly of his illicit backer, J.P. Bryan.

In looking at the numbers of the deal, I was horrified but not surprised to see that Torch bought packages of oil and gas properties, kept the best ones for itself and unloaded the poorer ones on the partnership. And charged unbelievable fees. G.E. and its partners were Torch's milk cows and Bryan pulled on those teats mercilessly. And the dollars flowed to Torch. The investors were getting fucked without being kissed.

I met with Bryan, in an effort to extricate GE, several times in the Bay Area. He would blow in on his burner. I would meet him at the private jet terminal just outside of SF or at a downtown hotel. Also, we spoke on the phone quite a few times. Without a filter between my brain and my mouth I said some really dumb things about the CEO of the Pension Trust. They weren't necessarily wrong; they just didn't need saying.

While all this bullshit was going on, GE assigned a kid who couldn't find his ass with either hand to work with me. He got his job at the Pension Trust courtesy of his father-in-law, a very high ranking GE executive. We spoke every day. I sent him books on the oil and gas business. I ran a school for that ungrateful jerk.

The kid did confirm my suspicion that Bryan was seducing most all the institutional money managers, not including Betty Sheets of IBM, but including the GE guy with luxuries like picking them up at the airport in limos, putting them up in suites, giving them carte blanche spending privileges at the hotel gift shop, entertaining them, on and on. Maybe a 'hostess' or two. As I told KK, Bryan was in both the oil and gas business and in the entertainment business. And most of the managers went for it all -- hook, line and sinker, mouths wide open. Just like mullets.

In the midst of all this, I found that Bryan, that asshole, had unbeknownst to me illegally taped all our phone conversations, printed them out, highlighted my dumb comments about the CEO, and then sent them to the CEO who went berserk. When he found that I was going to sue Bryan (we all know that one of the three most dangerous people in the world is a Jew with a lawyer), he shagged my lower case Bronx Jewish ass back to Connecticut twice and threatened me, and even King Kong for hiring me, with dire actions if I went through with the lawsuit. I went from hero to bum quicker than you could tell Bryan to take a flying fuck to the moon.

In lieu of the lawsuit, I started sending 'roses are red etc', Stanford picture postcards every week to Bryan. Each one, I hoped, really unpleasant. It got to the point where Bryan's attorney called the GE attorney to try to force me to stop. I told the GE attorney to tell Bryan's attorney to suck eggs out of small holes but slowly.

Thanks to basically my efforts, GE retrieved their $65 million plus a treasury rate of return. After the settlement, the 'student' never returned another of my phone calls. But I laughed all the way to the bank.

Rabies, Scabies, Falsies

 

"You have scabies.", so said the pharmacist at Boots on Piccadilly Circus in London. He went on to comment that I needed to be more careful of the hotels in which I chose to stay. Cleanliness was indeed next to Godliness he continued. Staying at Claridge's, where the sheets are changed daily and the rooms cleaned to perfection every day, wasn't a high enough cleanliness standard for him.

Meanwhile, I was one big fucking itch and was in no mood for a hygiene lesson. Two days and nights of scabies was something for Hitler not this lower case, sorry assed, bronx, jew. Apparently, I had contracted scabies on one of those not so clean London trains from Aberdeen, Scotland. An all day ride on a rattler and shaker. 

Reminds me of when the doctor told the Princess and me that our first kid was a boy. Since I had knocked up the Princess on a train ride from St. Petersburg, Florida to Baltimore and Johns Hopkins, I had become convinced that the Princess was going to have a girl. I was sure that having sex on a rattler and shaker had shaken the balls off of the baby. Another bad bet. 

When I got back to London from Aberdeen the itching seemed to subside so the following day I went to Luxembourg where the fucking itch returned in force. I took Epsom salt baths which turned out to be a really stupid idea. Warm water and scabies love one another. But, then, I didn't know that I had scabies. In those days Google wasn't even somebody's wet dream so I was going on intuition which, in that instance, was as worthless as teats on a boar pig.

By the time I returned to London the following day I was one big fucking itch. I promptly went to Boots (It was night, after doctor's office hours.) rolled my sleeves up and showed the pharmacist my arms which were covered with very small black spots. He took one look and said, “You have scabies.” At first I thought that he had said 'rabies' and I went nuts. “Rabies at Claridge’s?”, I screamed. “I haven't been near a fucking dog much less been bitten by one.” English style, the pharmacist put up with this ugly American and slowly spelled scabies with a ‘s’ not rabies with an ‘r’. 

He gave me something for the scabies, cautioned me to send all of my clothing out to the cleaners and the laundry and to be sure that never wore the same suit two days in a row and change my shirt, underwear several times a day and send the lot out to the laundry and cleaners before wearing them again. 

A few weeks later, while still domiciled in London, my teeth started bothering me. I felt like the one horse shay and I was coming apart at the seams, one problem at a time. I soon discovered that you only know whether your dentist is worth a fiddler's fuck several years after he’s collected his fee. 

In an effort to look like a movie star and attract younger women I had my teeth capped in Palo Alto. A few years later I was in a hospital in Amsterdam in real tooth discomfort. From there to the Queen's dentists office on Harley Street in London and from there to a dentist's office in Palo Alto with many destinations in between, where, at 60 years of age, I lost all my teeth.

Falsies indeed, thank you Dr.Yamada, but then I should have known that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's year and I really look, in the mirror, like a sow's ear, every toothless morning.