Ron Perleman, Ken Langone, Stanley Druckenmiller, Cipriani's

Not seeing any pigs flying, I checked out of my Carlyle Hotel suite. This epiphany came to me when I shared an elevator with Herb Allen of Allen & Co after sharing one with Anne Bass of the Fort Worth Bass family the day before. My living in the 1980's at the Carlyle in a $15k a month suite suddenly seemed ludicrous, hideously insane and plenty fucking stupid.

When I shared the elevator at the Carlyle with Herb Allen, a very big time investment banker, I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing here? A lower case bronx jew like me belongs in the Carlyle when pigs fly'. Nouveau riche for sure. I immediately walked to the front desk and told them that I was blowing the whore house. I happily, pissed away the pre-paid portion of my rent, walked across the street, made a deal with the manager of the Surrey Hotel and moved into the Surrey that day.

Staying at the Carlyle was some kind of a totally whacky experience but I felt like a pig in shit living there. At the Carlyle, the bell hops acted as though they were guests and contributed to the surreal royalty atmosphere. They thought that being around big shots made them big shots and they looked down, with discernible disdain, at no name schmucks like me. How I loved snapping their ‘wanna be’ royalty asses to attention with four letter word shows.

But since over tipping has always been my shtick I quickly bought my way into their acceptability. The room service people absolutely 'loved' me. Buying the 'love' of people who survive on tips is a slam dunk. Just takes a total, fucking disrespect of money. Those poor souls will, when getting big tips, positively fawn over you. Which does get to be fucking boring. And while currently busted on my lower case bronx, jewish ass I would do it all again. Even though at 90, I've out lived (aka: outspent) my money and sadly, my sex life. Viagra no longer works. As Willie Nelson so famously said, 'I'm sorry that my dick died before the rest of me.'

Living in New York City is for the rich or the young. The rich have cars and drivers. Getting around is a big fucking deal. For the young, New York has almost everything they want to do. Knowing that getting there is a huge pain in the ass doesn’t bother them at all. It's just part of the rhythm of their New York City lives.

Making New York wildly expensive was super easy for me. I spewed $100 bills to maître d's of Michelin rated restaurants like there was no fucking tomorrow and always insisted on paying when with others.

Eating at the long gone American Place with Stanley Druckenmiller more than several times a month was always fun. One ridiculous but fun dinner I had with Stanley was in my suite at the Carlyle. I had invited Stan to have dinner and watch a football game on TV. Since The last time that I had watched TV was in pre-remote days, using a remote was beyond my technology skills.

I went nuts trying to get that piece of shit TV to function before Stanley showed up. In the end I waited for him to get that fucking thing working right. The meal itself was very expensive but surely not memorable. But the server loved serving and I loved being served. And being with Stan, who is a born again genius and a great philanthropist was always loaded with laughs.     

Cipriani's, a non-Michelin rated restaurant, with mediocre, over priced food had become almost a second home for me. It is in the Sherry Netherlands Hotel. It was like going to a Broadway show every day, with laughs galore. Women with bodies of Auschwitz survivors and boobs by Dow Chemical were the order of every day at lunch. The combination of hookers, trophy wives, kept women and captains of industry plus celebrities was something else again. The manager Hassan and the maître d’, Sergio, were unbelievably great hosts and were wonderful to me. Hassan walked around telling diners his joke if the day. He and Sergio became 'family' for me.

A real star luncheon diner was the financier Ron Perelman who is a litigator's dream. He is one of the three most dangerous people in the world. 'A Jew with a lawyer'. My bet is that if Perelman isn't suing someone he must feel that his life is empty. He would sweep into Cipriani's with an entourage including disciple and business partner Don Drapkin. What a pair to 'draw to'. Drapkin learned the art of law suits well. He recently sued his mentor Perelman, the Master Litigant and beat him to boot. Actually the two deserved one another.

Perelman, being a big shot, got the same table, near a window, whenever he showed up. Living in a non-kosher life style incited Perelman to eat kosher as though eating kosher would redeem him. Very smart guy, a billionaire but something less than a weed to me. Didn't ever really meet him, though he nodded to me in Cipriani's. But then I really didn't want to meet him. No way was I going to suck up to that bum.

The other side of that coin is Ken Langone, a very close friend of Druckenmiller's. Ken is a street smart guy who has made billions but is as common as an old shoe. Ken is religious, spiritual, huge-hearted and a really smart guy. While living at the Surrey I would continue to play big shot and eat at the Carlyle where Ken and I had breakfast one Saturday morning. Ken was going, after breakfast, to visit a Home Depot store. Ken co-founded Home Depot.

Ken was looking for a placement agent to help solicit funds from pension funds for a private equity fund he was organizing. My good friend, Ed Spiegel of Goldman Sachs, suggested me to Ken who I had met previously.  And this is when I made the fucking huge mistake of a lifetime.

Having read the preliminary document I had concluded that the deal had a major flaw where 25% of the money could go into one venture capital deal. That ''flaw' was compounded by the choice of the manager of the fund. He had been an investment banker with Lazard Freres. There was no way, in my view, that a fee driven background would work in an acquisition/operating environment. In those days this schmuck, Bernie, fancied himself as the investor's protector. But I was right in both instances. At the end of the day the investors got their money back, the manager ended being a lot richer and I fucked up, again.

My huge error was in playing genius and not recognizing that I was missing an opportunity, on some level, to associate myself with a very, very smart, successful business man, Ken Langone. Ken has touched a lot of lives, all of which were better and richer for Ken's touch. I was too fucking stupid not to recognize that.

Yeah, one more jackass time I had taken the 13th unwritten AA step.....I had become powerless over my own bull shit. And too clever by half.

Roger Staubach, Richard Rainwater, Money Disappearance

Bye, bye $80,000,000 1980's dollars.

$80m 'soft circled' by a few pension funds but destroyed when Roger Staubach accepted a $1,500,000 investment in his company by Richard Rainwater.

Texas real estate, had taken a heavy hit in the 80's when oil prices collapsed. Houston and Austin were particularly hard hit and looked to me, to represent great investment values. And I had convinced Roger that Staubach Co. should be the GP of a private equity, real estate investment fund while I was to be the Placement Agent and partner in the deal.

Through an FDIC executive I had met Roger Staubach, who turned out to be an all time, all time, great guy including being modest to a fault. Associating with Roger grew to be a great privilege for me. Roger who wouldn't say shit if he had a mouthful had some difficulty with my foul mouth, but survived it.

Roger is a spiritual, devout Catholic and the Church has been a great beneficiary of Roger's spirituality and money.

Staubach Co. in those days was primarily a placement company for companies that were moving or setting up facilities in different communities. Roger's group would scout out the new town for employee housing, warehouses and manufacturing facilities.

Roger was a perpetual motion machine, an incredibly hard working guy. The only thing he was missing, I told him, was a broom stick shoved up his ass. Punctuality and Roger weren't even kissing cousins. We missed a flight to Detroit to see Chrysler when Roger Dodger, That Almost Always Late Codger was late to the Newark Airport. A very upset Jew would have described me perfectly.

If Roger had a fault it would have been his penchant for his endless presentations of the deal to the potential investors. He tended to go on and on and did sometimes generate glassy eyed audiences. For me, with the attention span of a moth on a hot light bulb, those presentations were excruciating. At a presentation in Pittsburgh to top executives of the now deceased National Steel, I did suggest to the group, in an effort to liven things up, that Roger did have a tendency to take the 13th AA step, not in the big book, where you become powerless over your own bullshit.

Roger and I were at Muscle Beach (aka Venice, California) where we were to meet with Jim George, the then head of the State of Oregon Pension Fund. Roger and I were walking down the street when a guy startled both Roger and me when he walked up to us, saluted Roger and said "To a great American". In Manhattan another guy walked up to us to shake Roger's hand and said 'God bless you.' You can multiply those experiences ten fold....It was a wonder to me that Roger always kept his modesty.

When, in the interest of full disclosure, I told the guy from the State of Delaware that Roger was bringing Rainwater in as an investor in Staubach Co. the Delaware guy said, 'Count me out. I don't want to be on either side of the table with Richard Rainwater. Dealing with Rainwater once was plenty enough for me.' This in spite of the fact that Rainwater had built a reputation as a very smart money manager, managing money for the Fort Worth Bass brothers.

I pleaded with Roger to pass on Rainwater but it was like pissing into the wind. When the other potential investors heard that Delaware had kissed off the deal, so did they. Pension funds tend to be like fucking sheep. Bye, bye $80m in soft circles and over a year of my life plus several hundred thousand dollars of my own money that I spent on travel and entertainment expenses. I too had become powerless over my own bullshit and in the end, suicidal to boot.

But having had dinner with Rainwater and his first wife at Roger's house I did understand the refusal of the potential investor to deal with Rainwater. For starters, Rainwater set a very high bar for unbelievable arrogance though he did suck up to Roger. And when Rainwater's then wife would try to join in to the dinner conversation he would cut her off and start talking, treating her just as though she was an idiot. Rainwater had a weight problem and he had Maryanne Staubach make a special dinner for him.

Rainwater exuded arrogance. One of my kids, Matt, went to see Rainwater who kept him waiting for about 45 minutes. The Great Man let Matt into his office, bragged to Matt for around 20 minutes about successful investments and then dismissed him. Never bothered to ask Matt why he, Matt, was there to see him. Make no mistake, Rainwater was a genius investor and has made hundreds of millions of dollars but I wouldn't piss in his ear if his head was on fire.

Being around Rainwater was like spending time with a red neck relative. Spending time with Roger Staubach, a true gentleman and family man with a spirituality and an exceptional business man, was one of the great, upbeat experiences of my life.

Balance, NIH, Italian Alzheimer's

Baur au Lac, Switzerland

When people tell me that I'm a nice guy, I tell them not to repeat that to anyone else as I have a reputation to maintain as a loud, foul mouthed, asshole. Gives my life great balance.
 
You gotta’ have balance in your life. You need people in your life that like you and people that dislike you. So I am grateful when I'm told that someone thinks that I'm an asshole. Gives me balance.

Also, if everyone I meet likes me I would have to be an innocuous, people pleasing son of a bitch. So it's a blessing for me to be told that XYZ called me a prick and XYZ gets at least a one star Michelin style rating from me. Being able to award a five star rating to those who dislike me enough to wish me dead is really a blessing. My two ex (thank God that there were only two) wives got really close, from time to time, to deserving a five star rating. But there was no way, as much as I needed their dislike that I was going to bend to their wishes and drop dead.

Paul Schupf gets a 5 Star Dislike Bernie rating from me. Schupf, while not Italian, suffers from Italian Alzheimer's. (Italian Alzheimer's is where you forget everything except the grudge.) To balance his virulent feelings about me which are so strong, I need ten likes to offset his dislike of me. 

While he is a very bright guy, a big giver to Colgate, he tests the outer limits of frugal and boring. He has both my sympathy for what he is and my thanks for disliking me. "Please don't tell anyone that you even know me." were my parting words to him in front of the Baur au Lac in Zurich. Two weeks in London and Europe with Schupf had made me suicidal. I had all but forgotten that self-perceived genius until I found out recently that he has been nursing a dislike of me for 30 years. I felt a surge of gratitude. He is still putting balance in my life.

A way to, inadvertently, generate dislikes and bring the NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome to the surface is to get hired by the CEO to help with the company's Investor Relations program. The underlings of the company immediately resent you and their Not Invented Here sickness blossoms in full bloom. Actually my first ex-wife, Bonnie, 'invented' NIH. 27 years of shitty ideas was my record with the Princess.

NIH is deadly in a marriage and not too swift in business. In business you do have to make a lot of friends to balance the number of people with NIH that you piss off. Bill Goff was a great example. He wore Gucci shirts that were embossed with a 'G'. Bill was the Vice President of Sabine Royalty whose CEO was Ashley Priddy, who was a giant in the independent oil and gas business in the 70's. Ashley was very prim and proper, wore a jacket at all times, even in the office. I met him at The Tennis Ranch in Carmel Valley. He would play mixed troubles wearing a blue blazer and white ducks. Ashley was a fabulous human being. Called me, one time, a 'dumb Jew' because I wasn't asking enough money of him.

Bill Goff's office was next to Ashley's. I would go on a four letter word binge, very loudly so that Goff could hear it which in turn catapulted him into Ashley's office. I really enjoyed being an asshole and wiring Goff for sound. Just a little payback for his trying to knock down every idea I ever had. Ashley asked me not to do it ('Do you have to do that?') but I told him that pissing Goff off made me feel warm all over, like a clam in mud. Goff was, for sure, a 3 Star Dislike Bernie aficionado. Ashley was too smart to dismiss my ideas. On the other hand I needed Goff to put my Like/Dislike Ratio in balance.

Roses are red, violets are blue, don't contract NIH. It's really bad for you. 

Whiskey, Smoking & ED, A Dog That Didn't Talk

Anyone getting close to or beating 90 and still fantasizing about having breathtaking sex is my hero. But I didn't need having sex to be short of breath even when I was 40.

God, that was a long fucking time ago. 50 years have years have whipped on by. I smoked at least 4-5 packs of 'coffin nails’, also known as Chesterfield's every day. I smoked even while bike riding in Portola Valley. I did have to stop when I needed to light up the next one which was often. Lighting a cigarette while pedaling was not, for me, possible. I gave up riding 'no hands' when I was about 16.

The family dog Haaken, a Norwegian Elkhound, went with me on my rides. Haaken didn't talk. He never said 'You shouldn't have done that'. He was perfect company. I didn't have to say 'I'm sorry. It's all my fault'. I could talk to Haaken without worrying about a fucking answer. How lucky was I that I owned a dog that couldn't talk.

I was desperate to stop smoking and thought, stupidly, that shrinks could help me stop. No chance. They were too fucking busy squeezing my money tit like milk out of a cow all the while trying to convince me that I was a latent homosexual and that being married and still masturbating made me one 'sick' son of a bitch.

Shrinks don't understand that to get a long time married man to stop masturbating, just get him a divorce. Shrinks are huge going after symptoms like smoking, drinking, eating too much and jacking off. The hell with attacking the 'sickness' itself.

In Portola Valley where we lived, we had a yearly neighborhood New Year's Day blow out. TV Football, booze, hors d' oeuvres and steaks made for one hell of a party.

Some smoked dope. I, at least, turned down smoking dope. Booze got me in plenty enough motion. 'Rammers' were the order of the day. Right before dinner some son of a bitch would yell, 'time for the rammers'. So after hours of serious drinking (wine hadn't yet caught fire) we would ingest at least two, big gin martini's with very little, if any, vermouth which would then shoot us over the fucking moon without our moving our feet. You felt like King Kong, omnipotent, indestructible, a great lover and a fucking genius.

At the 1973 party I noticed that Bill Kelly, a serious drinker and smoker, wasn't smoking. He told me that he had 'institutionalized' himself at the St.Helena Health Center, in Napa Valley, for a week.

Run by the Seventh Day Adventists, its mission was preventive medicine. The 'treatment' centered around physical activity. No religion. (Though I will say that if I could get around to believing in Jesus Christ, I would become an Adventist.).

Drinking booze and smoking while at the Center got you thrown out of the program. I told Bill that the Princess and I would go there. He cautioned me that the two of us to go through that trauma together was a very bad idea, unless we were prepared to have one of us strangle the other. An opportunity that I wasn't going to give the Princess.

So up to St Helena went the Princess with me as her chauffeur. A week later I picked her up. She was all virtue and self righteousness. The Princess no longer smoked, which made her, in her mind, a superior human being. A legend in her own mind, maybe a Saint. What a pain in the ass.

A few weeks later it was my turn in the barrel. Naturally the Princess was tooooo bizzzzy to drive me to St.Helena. And I knew that if I had a car available I would never survive a non-drinking, non-smoking week without driving off and cheating. So, I chartered a small two engine plane (a one engine bird was too fucking scary for me) and flew to St.Helena.

We landed at a strip in Calistoga located behind a filling station. I asked the attendant at the filling station how to get a cab to go to St.Helena. He looked at me like I was a bull with a bastard calf, laughed and said, “Are you kidding me? This town has a population of 3,000, a ton of serious drinker's bars, a famous alcoholism treatment center, mud baths attached to motels but no cabs."

So I offered him $25 (1973) and he drove me in his pickup truck to the St.Helena Recovery Center with me smoking like a chimney in Alaska. As we pulled into the grounds, my last, ever, pack of smokes went out the truck window and with it, the beginning of the end to a self destructive life style. Booze was next on my 'give up' list of two to hopefully be replaced by sex.

A few months later booze went the way of smokes and another new life began. Tennis, women, lots of laughs and new careers. I went from being a functioning, smoking, alcoholic to just a functioning alcoholic followed by becoming a non-smoking, recovering alcoholic no longer suffering from ED (old age brought it back).

Shrinks never understood that smoking a lot, drinking a lot and erections don't work well together. All the analytical bull shit in the world wouldn't snap that little son of a bitch back to attention. Abstinence was the answer. However, it did survive booze and cigarettes but not time. As Willie Nelson said, "I'm sorry that my dick has died before the rest of me." An old man's lament.

Atabrine, Whiskey Courage, Shrinks

Artistry by Sean Conroy oceaninashell.com

And then there was Atabrine, prescribed by one fucking shrink or another.

Shrinks, for me, were interchangeable with their demonic cures and their mind stretching reasons for everything that was happening. The Dow Jones Averages went down? There had to be a sub-conscious reason for the decline. My wife hated me? It was all my fault. A shrink’s mother’s milk was/is, GUILT. Yeah, in capital letters.

Getting me into a fucking shrink's office was my first ex-wife's primary mission in life. And like a dummy I was a shrink's mullet for 23 years, on and off. Mostly on. But it pleased the Princess.

Shrinks seldom cure problems. Covering them up with cockamamie reasons and 'cures' are their specialties. Smoking dope while watching porno movies was one shrink’s cure for our sex problems. That schmuck didn't understand that I hated smoking dope and my first ex-wife hated me. Particularly, inside of her.

Atabrine is just another demonic notion. It’s supposed to make you sick if you drink booze, wine, beer or anything with alcohol in it after you take one of the pills. And did those sons of bitches work? A thousand percent effective. Actually, after taking a pill and then drinking I thought that I was going to die and couldn't.

One time, after taking one of those asshole pills in the morning, I went to Denver to set myself up for a screwing by an oil mail named Bert Ladd who was my first motivator in becoming paranoid. After finishing my business with Bert (it was a turnaround flight day for me), I stopped at the Brown Palace and in my eagerness to feel like shit had a few belts.

Then sitting in First Class I ingested at least six of those little bottles on the two hour flight. As soon as I stepped off the airplane I knew that the Atabrine was doing its duty. I didn't have to think of committing suicide, I thought that I had already done it.

I sat down in a chair as soon as I deplaned. Some guy I knew and didn't like, came by took one look at me and suggested he call an ambulance. He said that I looked absolutely 'gray' and generally terrible. No way that I was going to please him and give my first ex-wife yet another reason to rail at me so I just sat there until I was able to walk, went to valet parking and proceeded to put everyone driving on Hwy 101 at risk. Fortunately, I got home safely, didn’t kill anyone en route and since my wife didn't care, she never asked how I felt or how my day went.

As long as I supported her I. Magnin habit and didn't bother her she was fine. I never took another Atabrine pill and it took a few more years for me to get my tired ass to AA.

My first ex-wife's father was a Romanian immigrant not a Romanian ignorant. His wife, my first ex-wife's mother, would complain that he didn't ever tell her what was going on. He got around that by consulting her about things that he really didn't want to do. Dora would always advise against doing whatever he suggested. (The negative gene that my first ex-wife inherited.) That device turned off the flowing of the tears of the 'you don't tell me what you're doing', faucet.

Once in a while he forgot to set her up, which always led to the 'you don't tell me what you're doing' tears and all. I seldom played that game. First, I did whatever I wanted to do then I told the Princess. Then indignation and tears flowed. Selling the Princess on every cockamamie notion that I had was more than I wanted to do particularly when it concerned the kids. Thank God that I had more good ideas than bum ideas. But I always did strive to be perfect like the Princess and my critics.

I was often operating on 'whiskey courage' which helped, like crazy. Yeah, Atabrine was the invention of the devil and perpetrated by an army of devils. But, with all its faults, it was another step towards AA. Atabrine, for me, was as useless as teats on a boar pig.

In the middle of my huge drinking problem, I decided to quit smoking. Smoking and drinking, but not fucking, are joined at the hip. Alcohol, erections and sex, unless you're 22, don’t work well together. Chesterfields were my self-destructive weapons. Between 4-5 packs a day, every day was my quota. Always living by the credo that 'moderation is fatal' (and plenty fucking boring) I was a real live chain smoker.

First I shipped the Princess's ass to the St.Helena Recovery Center in Napa Valley. The friend that recommended the place said that 'joint occupancy' by husband and wife would lead to murder of one or another. When the Princess came home (it was 7 days) full of virtue and self-righteousness (characteristics that my kids inherited) and giving me shit about my smoking, I went to St.Helena. The Seven Day Adventists who ran the place figured out how to make quitting smoking something less than a death defying experience and convert it into a life changing experience.

In turn, after I quit smoking and then drinking, I helped the Adventists set up their alcoholism program.

'Roses are red, violets are blue. If you drink or smoke too much, the St.Helena Recovery Center is the place for you.' ...And if you weigh too much as well.