Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
Sometimer's is better than
Alzheimer’s.
For me and you.
Alzheimer's? My great
daughter-in-law Lisa was visiting her Mom at a Senior Living Assisted Facility
when a 95 year old woman resident in a wheel chair, called Lisa over and asked
Lisa in hushed voice if Lisa could keep a secret.
When Lisa said she could indeed
keep a secret the 95 year old woman said in a conspiratorial voice, "I'm
pregnant and I don't want my partner to know. I have three eggs in me that I'm
trying to poop out.” When you're 95 and think that you're knocked up you have
Alzheimer's.
Sometimer's is what my good
friend Joaquin's father has, though when that nice old man spins out of
control, his actions can be unfucking real. Like when last fall, he was found
with an umbrella in one hand and a hose in the other, watering his plants,
oblivious to the fact that the plants were being rained on too. (He was
standing in pouring down rain.)
Wondering whether, at 90 ½, I
have Sometimer's on the way to Alzheimer's is a major concern of mine
especially when I spend 10 minutes, desperately looking for my reading glasses,
only to find the fucking things on my nose.
When memories of C. Arnholt Smith,
the Allessio brothers and Iron Head Mike Cohn came into my stream of
consciousness the other day I was as happy as a clam in mud. Those memories
date back to the late 70's so all is not lost. Or is that a sign of dementia
when you remember long ago things but can't remember that you have your fucking
glasses on your nose?
Smith is described in a history
of the San Diego Padres, the baseball team, as a "Prominent San Diego
business man whose interests included banking, tuna fishing, hotels, real
estate and an airline."
That history left out two very
important parts of Smith's life. He was a close friend and big time supporter
of Richard Nixon and Ole Blue Suit spent time in the slammer.
Smith was an all time con man who
was the equivalent of a Mafia Don but without the violence. Smith would fuck
you for practice, even if it didn't do him any real good. He just didn't want
to forget 'how'. The litany of Smith's dishonesty could fill a few volumes.
My experiences with Smith started
at a breakfast with him and Iron Head Mike Cohn, at the then new Westgate Hotel
in San Diego. Smith always wore a bright blue suit and drove a blue Cadillac
which has always seemed weird to me.
Even the hotel, had the ear marks
of a fraud. Smith caused the hotel to be built and hired his wife to be the
interior decorator. Great for San Diego, Smith's wife and for Smith. Not so
great for the lenders who supplied the money.
Mrs. Smith went to Italy to buy
marble for the lobby and believe it or not, for the parking garage as well.
Each room had its own color scheme for its furnishings. When the bed covers or
anything out of a particular room needed to be sent out for cleaning that room
was shut down because of its individual decor.
The hotel did upgrade the street
and area in which it was built, which had been hard core. It was loaded with
tattoo parlors and cheap bars for the sailors. Hookers on that street were
there for anyone looking for a quick orgasm and the probability of getting a
'dose' not a concern.
Part of Smith's 'empire’, a small
part, was his control of a horse operation. Smith controlled Ruidoso Downs, a
quarter horse track in New Mexico, Sunland Park in El Paso, a horse training
facility in Oklahoma and an over the top track near DelMar in California which
was waiting for an approval of a license to become a full fledged race track
and was being used, in the interim, as a horse training facility. Built
entirely out of adobe brick.
Smith and Iron Head Mike asked me
at the breakfast to do a tour of those facilities and come up with a notion of
how to monetize all those fucking properties for which I would get paid $3,000,
a month, in 1975 dollars, plus expenses.
Iron Head Mike, no Phi Beta Key
candidate, thought that because of my farming experience and having owned
horses (all of two, at different times, both disasters ) that I could come up
with a solution to solve Smith's horse operation's cash flow problems. Having
just begun the recovering alcoholic cycle and not even having a checking
account, it seemed like a dumb ass conclusion but since they were going to pay
me I was all over that notion, like a pig in shit.
My first stop was Ruidoso Downs
to look the place over and to watch the biggest quarter horse stake race in the
U.S. The starting gun went off, took a second to look down at my program and
missed the God Damn race. Horses run a quarter of a mile in a blink of the eye,
or so it seemed.
The rest of the 'tour' was
unfucking believable and deserves blogs of their own.
And my solution was laughed out
of the room by Smith as being ludicrous and stupid. What was the solution?
Instead of leasing out the
fucking horse stalls for training, my suggestion was to sell, as condominiums,
the fucking stalls and charge monthly maintenance fees. In 1974 that concept
was unheard of and the geniuses considered me to be a clown wearing a bow tie
(love Hermes bow ties). That approach, years later, became a common place
practice in the world of horses.
The next blog will be about how
Smith, as Chairman of United States National Bank, lined his pockets in many
ways which included hypothecating the same piece of property several times.
Smith with the Allessio's moved
the S.F. Yellow Cab Co. around like a checker on his own contrived checker
board.
