Up The Down Staircase

A 'minimally invasive procedure' is a procedure that is like a minor operation. Both are something that someone else has. My 'minimally invasive procedure', on Tuesday, is a result of a bum aorta (heart) valve.

Breathing hard after sex was fun. Breathing hard after walking 150 steps, while a laughing matter, ain't fun. But it is one whole hell of a lot better than the alternative of not breathing at all. 

Or so I'm told but not by people who have died. They ain't talking.

Between the Transcatheter Heart Valve Clinic (Now there's a mouthful.) at the Stanford Hospital and the VA Palo Alto Health Care System (Another mouthful.) a 'minimally invasive procedure' procedure has been prescribed for me by outstanding medical professionals. GE Health Care testing equipment was enormous help in getting medics to their conclusion.

TAVR is the acronym for Transcatheter Aorta Valve Replacement, another mouthful and the name of this 'minimally invasive' procedure. A catheter with a new aorta valve attached is inserted in the groins and guided to the heart where, through some magic hocus pocus, the defective valve is replaced with the new valve.

Didn't Google TAVR because using Google for every kvetch was making me into borderline hypochondriac.

In the olden days open heart surgery was used. Nothing minimal about that. At 92 or even younger, open heart surgery sounds like a death defying operation. It ain't 'minimally invasive'. Check that out with Bill Tichy.

Being a curmudgeon does not prevent me from recognizing the efforts that Judy Baer, Dr. Patricia Nguyen, Dr. William Fearon, Zoe Magee and Dr. Giacomini have all made on my behalf. And the countless number of technicians as well.

A few recovery days in the hospital and this Old Bronx Jew (92 in a few weeks) will be ready to tear life up one more time. Can't wait to stop breathing like a stuck hog bleeds when I take a whiz. Just standing still shoots my heart rate to bad. Taking a whiz is an exercise in stamina.

Making money, riding my stationary bike for 45 minutes, being able to walk several miles, lifting weights, learning Spanish and telling someone to suck eggs out of small holes slowly or take a flying fuck to the moon are all on my agenda.

Which includes traveling to the Big Apple, London and acting like a big shot one more time. Maybe King Kong, aka John Myers, will take me to Rao's so that I can hob nob with gangsters and bankers.

Yeah, I am looking forward to living and doing with optimism and a drive for serendipity for another bunch of years. Living on the edge too.While my dick has sadly died, the rest of me is raring to go.

~

'God's Banker' Archbishop Paul Marcinkus....A Partial Reprise

"Bernie did you see those Swiss guards when you checked into the Vatican?  And you know my secretary Mauvi don't you? Well, Mauvi and those Swiss guards get paid. Don't bring me deals that don't bring me income."

The only thing the Bishop didn't say was 'Are you fucking stupid or what?'

This was my second visit to the Vatican to promote a deal to Archbishop Paul Marcinkus. I knew that the Bishop was big time but later found out how big. The Bishop was all over the newspapers. And not in a good way. But I didn't read newspapers in those days.Would have cut into my drinking time. The choice between reading newspapers or booze inhalation was a no-brainer.

The Bishop was a priest from Cicero, Illinois. Very personable, had huge hands, smoked like a chimney (Pall Mall, unfiltered or a pipe) and who was as competent to run the Vatican Bank as I would have been.Which was not at all. The Bishop didn't have the necessary paranoia. I am paranoid but not very fucking smart.

In the beginning the Bishop and I had one thing in common...smoking in size. The Bishop was 6'4" and a good looking guy. It was hard for me to think him abstinent.

Lloyd Hand, former 'greeter' for Pres. Lyndon Johnson and DC lobbyist, had introduced me and a colleague to the Bishop and I had stayed in touch with the Bishop. Fed my misplaced fucking ego to say that the Archbishop who ran the Vatican Bank and I were friends.

And so down the tubes went a proposal that I made to Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the President of the Vatican Bank and Governor of Vatican City. I had developed a personal relationship with the Bishop over a 10 year time span and he had agreed to see me regarding an oil and gas royalty deal.

The deal was dependent on successful wildcat drilling to generate income. Turned out that the guy in charge of the drilling couldn't find his ass with either hand much less oil or gas with drilling equipment. He didn't find even a fucking mouthful of oil or gas.

But the Bishop proved that he did have some common sense (aka street smarts) and he turned down the deal which turned out to be a bad bet on a bad concept. But I stayed in touch with the Bishop.

At one point, after the Bishop was back in the States, the Knights of Columbus had been looking for him and they called me, a Jew from the Bronx, to find out where the Bishop was.

The Bishop was a terrific guy. He loved playing golf and I would send him, from time to time, golf books and boxes of golf balls. He would "try" to convert me. He never gave up though I told him that I was born a Jew and would die a Jew. He spent his last days in Sun City preaching in nearby communities.

He was "for decades, one of the highest ranking American prelates to the Vatican serving Popes John XXX III, Paul VI and John Paul II." But at the end of the day, he was in many ways a simple learned priest, from Cicero, Illinois without a financial background. The Bishop also lacked the deep seated cynical trait that is so crucial to being a successful money manager.

Sadly, he became embroiled in two scandals where one principal, a banker named Calvi, was found hanging beneath a bridge in London. Calvi had been a friend of the Bishop and was convicted of fraud. That association cost the Vatican Bank over $200 million. Previously, the Bishop was involved with a shadowy character named Sidona, with Mafia connections, who died in prison in Milan after drinking a cup of coffee laced with poison. That friendship cost the Vatican tens of millions or so it is said.

At one point the Italian government indicted the Bishop but he confined himself to Vatican City for a few years until the indictment was dropped.

The Bishop was, for me, a marvelous man who added significantly to the richness of my life and I cried when I learned of his death from Mauvi, his secretary. It was rumored that he was "banging" Mauvi who was not my cup of tea. She was, for me, a lovely woman with the sex appeal of a sore ass.

And no, in the twenty five years of knowing the Bishop I never did a deal with him as being his friend became the paramount feature of my relationship with the Bishop, may he rest in peace.

~

Booze & Broads

Making extra bucks in the service as a GI, while not leaving the base, was a prime goal of mine but not easy to come by.

Bartending at the Enlisted Man's Club at Camp Kohler became my goal. 3.2 beer was as hard a drink as you could get. Drinking 6 bottles of 3.2 beer would get you to the latrine often to take a whiz but without getting a buzz on. 3.2 beer tested your bladder capacity. At 20, bladder capacity is minimal.

As a patron, the club seemed sane. As a bartender it was a madhouse. I made 50 cents an hour and all that I could steal or drink but I was too fucking slow, as a bartender, to steal. Everyone was screaming at me for their fucking beer. Who had time to even think of stealing or drinking? Also the Sergeant in charge of the mad house kept his jaundiced eyes on the bartenders' hands to be sure that the money went into the register and not their pockets.

I think the beer cost 10 cents a bottle. A carton of Chesterfield cigarettes did cost 50 cents. Civilians had a hard time getting cigarettes so I would send cigarettes to 'my girl' who, sadly for both of us, became my wife after the war.

American Tobacco, during the war, took the color green out of Lucky Strike cigarette packages and launched a campaign entitled 'Lucky Strike Green Went To War'. Chesterfields were my choice of coffin nails. I never did understand why 'Lucky Strike Green Went To War' became a slogan for American Tobacco.

Smoking, drinking and hallucinating about women were the GI's 'hobbies' of choice. Newspapers were unavailable and who the hell cared. No headphones for music or even individual radios. We lived in a soldier's world. Life was easy and uncomplicated. Sleeping while standing up and leaning against a wall wasn't a challenge. Easy done.

It seems like no one had ever heard of alcoholism in those days and our sex lives mostly consisted of 'wet dreams' or 'jackin off'. I often wonder when I turned into a 'sincere drinker' and then an alcoholic. For me it seems that my addiction really started with the WWII 'going away parties' for the guys leaving for the service. No girls, just a bunch of teenage guys getting roaring fucking dunk and loving it.

AA taught me that booze can be as big an addiction as drugs or sex, if you can get the sex.

How else could a dumb Jew from the Bronx feel totally worthwhile? Drinking gave me a leg up. Certainly not from listening to the 'Princess' who had an exquisite memory of every asshole thing that I ever did and I did plenty of them. The good things I did were instantly snuffed out of the 'Princess's' memory bank. I always felt worthwhile while sliding into the bag.

In AA a standard line is that your best day drunk wasn't as good as your worst day sober. Now that is, for me, pure bullshit.

I always like to talk about a fabulous menage a trois that I had with two hookers from Mozambique in Paris. The only problem is that I don't remember what happened but it had to be fabulous because I ended up with zero dollars in my pocket.

~

Oats, Corn and Schlongs

Nothing goes straight down, not even the stock market, except a 20 year old's schlong right after getting laid or right after masturbating. An old man's schlong has permanently turned into a dripping faucet always pointed down, limp. Check that out with Willie Nelson....

Wonder of wonders, Ole Orange Hair aka Donald Trump's, hair is turning blond and he's becoming a man of God. Insisting that he is a man of only the truth. It's like thinking that the Pope will become a Muslim.

Commodity traders, unless they quit early when they are ahead, die busted on their asses and rightfully so. They become powerless over their own bullshit. They really believe they can predict prices.

Ezra Taft Benson, the Eisenhower Secretary of Agriculture, was my inadvertent commodity mentor. A most important lesson that I learned from Secretary Benson is to never try to outguess government action and its impact on markets of all stripes.

In the early 50's I was slopping hogs, milking cows, feeding cattle, losing my ass while trying to become an Iowa farmer. Talk about pissing into the wind. It was a joke that I took seriously. A Bronx Jew, trying to farm in Iowa, was on its face, one giant step to being fucking stupid. Strike three came quick.

It was the early 50's and oats were selling for .65 cents a bushel with a government support price of around .80 cents. I was all over that like a pig in shit. Not having ever dealt with a commodity broker I went to a broker's office and with 10%, 6.5 cents down, bought 2 carloads of oats (5,000 bushels of oats).

I was like a blind hog finding an acorn.Oats skyrocketed to $1.20/bushel. I decided that it was time to sell. Not knowing that the broker was a phone away and I could call the order in, it was three days before I got to the broker's office.We were putting up hay...couldn't afford to gamble that it was going to rain and raise hell with the hay crop. By then oats were back in the 90's but it was still one hell of a trade. I had put up 6.5 cents per bushel and got back about .35 cents. Now I was a genius. All you had to do was ask me.

Being a self proclaimed genius prompted me to get into the corn business.Corn was selling, below parity, for around $1.55/bushel and I bought 3 carloads (6,000 bushels) and watched corn erupt to the upside to around $2.50/bushel.The guy at the grain elevator in Swillpale, Iowa (aka Swaldale) who I told that I was going to sell, dissuaded me by showing me write ups predicting $3.00 corn.

To a Bronx Jew the written word is the fucking gospel, so I didn't sell.

Eisenhower had been elected President, appointed Ezra Taft Benson, Secretary of Agriculture who gave me my most memorable commodity trading lesson.

Benson proclaimed that he only believed in price supports in times of disaster thereby causing a fucking disaster.Corn went down the limit every day for days and I was barely able to get out even. In those days a 1/4 of all workers in the US were in agricultural related work and the Secretary of Agriculture had a ton of clout. And clout me he did. A great inadvertent mentor.

Never fucked with the commodity business again.When I became a stock broker and started following oil prices I did so and still do, with morbid fascination. A market prone to manipulation was great for Marc Rich but not this Jew. 'Competing' with Marc Rich would be like having a death wish.

~

Easy Come, Easy Go

'Blow it out your barrack's bag.' was the Army substitute for, 'drop dead', 'you're full of shit' or just plain, ordinary 'fuck you'. 

 

The Army had, in common with today's geeks and nerds, its own language and phrases. In the Army there was an element of in your face honesty that is pretty well hidden in civilian society.

The path to a medical education is to live a long time. I get to have doctors explain the kvetches that come with living longer than planned. And while it ain't peaches and cream it is often laughable.

The first bike crash that landed my sorry ass in the Stanford Hospital ICU  for a week put me on the road to becoming a borderline hypochondriac and getting a PhD in Heart Problems. Google became my lord and master.

Being in an ICU of a teaching hospital like Stanford means having a bunch of fresh faced interns scaring the hell out of me every time one of those self anointed geniuses stopped by to check on me.

Having bounced off the bottom several times, optimism and resilience are in my DNA. But those doctors wired me for sound.

This one doctor hammered me daily with my having 'aortic stenosis'. Since I didn't have my iPad to google 'aortic stenosis ' and cater to my budding hypochondria I was fucked until I finally asked him what the hell aortic stenosis is.

Pretty simple: Aortic stenosis is when the opening in the aortic valve which feeds blood to the heart has closed significantly, forcing my heart to alway be in over drive. Bye, bye stamina. Not enough blood to my schlong and hard earned blood to my heart.

Then after my stay at Stanford and one more bike crash (At 88, I was still macho-pacho and still the same at 91 3/4) a terrific VA/Stanford cardiologist, Dr Patricia Nguyen, told me that I needed an aortic valve replacement if I wanted to continue to fuck the actuarial tables of the Social Security system and keep getting my VA disability benefits for any meaningful period of time.

As a schmuck who thinks that he can beat any physical problem with fitness I turned Dr. Nguyen down for several years. But now, having the energy and stamina  of a wet noodle, I have decided to go to the TAVR procedure where they insert a catheter into your groin with a ballon containing a new aortic valve and push that sneaky, slippery, little mother up to and into your heart.

Using some kind of hocus pocus or black magic the healthy valve replaces the el sicko valve with a healthy valve. At the end of the day TAVR (Transcather Aorta Valve Replacement)is a great substitute for open heart surgery. 

God bless Dr. Nguyen, her TAVR running mate Judy Baer and the rest of the VA Palo Alto Health Care System's great people.

Actually, I want to die in an airport or on an airplane, preferably the Concorde. Reminds me of another Army expression, 'I hope you die with a hard on.'...The ultimate curse.

~

Sex And The Married Italian Man

The 'Should we go bankrupt or public?' of the olden days has now been replaced with 'Should we go bankrupt or raise private equity money'? 

If there is an after life, then God willing, I will come back as an Italian. Italians seem to have a looser view of life than guilt ridden Jews or Irish Catholics. There are no Jews and Irish Catholics without guilt. 

My closest friend, for many years, until he left this world for the next was an Italian: Roland Biancalona.

Roland always maintained that his 'happy marriage' was held together by him having a mistress on the side and that cheating on the mistress as well, meant keeping his wife and mistress content.

In later years, when Roland was having trouble getting it up more than once or twice a week he conned his wife Dottie by asking Dottie if she was as disinterested in sex as he was. Her answer, "Yes" took the pressure off of him to try to accommodate Dottie, his mistress and occasional screw with his dying schlong. 

The amazing thing about Roland was that he was short, fat, partially bald with crooked teeth and he still charmed women right out of their clothes, as any true, blue, Italian man is expected to be able to do.

He loved to travel SAS and seduce those leggy, knockout, blond Scandinavian flight attendants. How he worked-in a Scandinavian airline to fly back from Italy was amazing. 

One time Roland,on a flight back from Europe, volunteered to give a flight attendant a tour of the Bay Area.

He then invited the great looking, Swedish flight attendant to dinner at his home and to spend the night. Suffice it to say she accepted the invitation which sent Dottie, his wife, out the roof. 

Worse, at about 1:00 AM, Dottie heard some noise downstairs and discovered Roland having sex (aka screwing) the flight attendant. For Dottie, who was a Catholic that converted from Methodist, divorce was not an option. She 'repaid' Roland years later, by having him cremated rather than divorce him.

He had always told me that he wanted a burial near his Father who he adored. Dottie wanted him to burn in hell.

Roland was, with one exception, a devout Catholic. He went to church every week. The exception was taking communion which, apparently, requires confession. He wouldn't go to confession and tell the priest that he had been fucking anything that would hold still. Roland said that the priest would insist that he stop his dalliances. No chance. No confession.

Make no mistake. Roland had a heart as big as all outdoors.We ate lunch three or four times a week, mostly at the North Beach Restaurant, talking about chasing pussy, stocks and laughing like crazy. Roland's upbeat personality was contagious.

Personally, I have just crossed another one of life markers. Am now 91 3/4 years old with a dripping schlong and aortic stenosis but loaded with optimism while looking for a new career before the fat lady sings.

~

George C. Scott

'$50 says that it's George C. Scott!!!'

Sitting, pre-lunch, at the bar of the North Beach Restaurant in San Francisco in 1968, with my good friend Roland Biancalana, I saw two guys at the end of the bar belting 'shots and beer' like there was no tomorrow.

Having just returned from a trip to NY with my kid Joe and having taken Joe to see the play Plaza Suite with George C Scott, I recognized Scott. So, I said to Roland, who poo pooed my observation, '$50 says that it's George C Scott'.

Roland got off of the bar stool and started walking towards Scott. I screamed at Scott, 'Don't tell the son of a bitch who you are. I'll split a $50 bet with you.'

Naturally Scott had no interest in $25 and told Roland who he was. Scott and his friend continued on their awesome drinking binge, virtually inhaling 'boiler makers'. And I was fucked out of $25.

But I have always felt an attachment to Mr. Scott even if he didn't know or care that I was alive.

The most fun part of the trip to NY, was hearing Joe, at the play, in a shocked voice say, 'Pop, the guy is putting his hand up the woman's (Maureen Stapleton's) dress.' It was the first, last and only time in Joe's life where something sexual surprised or shocked him.

Joe lived with a gal while they were both students at Utah State In Logan, Utah. Their landlord, a devout Mormon, threw them out when he learned that they were living in sin. I was drinking and smoking up a storm in those days and went crazy when ash trays were nowhere to be found in Logan. And unless you had a bottle on your hip, booze was out.

A memorable trip. Princess enjoyed my pain and suffering.

Getting my Purple Heart in the mail was no big deal. With or without the Purple Heart I have always felt blessed that I was given the opportunity to serve as opposed to Ole Orange Hair (aka Donald 'Elmer Gantry' Trump) with his four student deferments and one (the last one) medical. All hat, big mouth, no cattle.

~