tai-chi-one.com

I have learned to hate driving a taxi, more because of dispatchers than the people riding in them. Most dispatchers are former cab drivers who basically hated humanity in the first place and their light shined through to the people who run the cab companies who hate humanity also and see the value of hiring a dispatcher who thinks like them. Every dispatcher aspires to be like Louie from the TV series Taxi. The majority of taxi customers are people who can’t afford cars and insurance, or are too drunk to drive, or lost their license because of not taking a taxi when they were too drunk to drive. In most cases taxi customers appreciate the service provided. It’s a job, but the hourly-wage psychotic control-freakish dispatchers and thieving cab drivers make it a war.

My laptop computer came by UPS at the same time I got the taxi job. I needed the axe and paid for it by descending into the lower realm of hell, driving a cab in a small town where you were at the mercy of the dispatcher to give you work. With a decent map, the town of Wilmington can pretty much be clocked in a day. It takes a little bit longer to learn the short-cuts and hidden neighborhoods, but on the whole it ain’t Paris.

I was put in training without pay under an old closet queen who drove as though his true calling was to be a security guard in an old folks’ home. He carried with him a general contempt for the people he picked up and delivered, even after they gave him money above the meter for doing his job. He was a good candidate for dispatcher because of his attitude, but the slothfulness of his thinking kept him out of the realm of being a master back alley manipulator, another quality of a sought after dispatcher. He had been driving much too long. I had blood on the brain and the last thing I wanted to have to do was drive a cab.

I spent two ten hour days with the queen, most of the time parked in parking lots waiting for a call. In real cities people put their hands up in the air and flag you down, you take them where they want to go and they give you money sometimes and then they get out. Then you drive where people are abundant until someone else puts up their hand while you work the radio bidding on calls in your immediate vicinity. It can be interesting, an adventure. In a small town like Wilmington for the most part you inhabit a zone in a pecking order until a call comes through to the dispatcher and then you’re at the mercy of how the dispatcher wishes to give out the call. On the whole, generally there just weren’t that many calls and dispatchers have been known to hold back good calls for a favored driver if they are not next in line for a call. When a less desirable call comes through, the next driver gets the call and the better job goes to the favored driver. That is the reason cab service is poor in a small town. It’s called feeding and it happens quite frequently with arrogant nonchalance.

I knew what I was walking into after the second day of training with the queen, but I had a ton of un-returned phone calls from the blood project to pay for. On my third day they assigned me to a cab. Being a new driver you are also assured of getting the worst equipment that the company can manage to patch together. The first day I had to switch cabs in the middle of the shift because the meter went out. In the three weeks that I drove I was towed in a half dozen times. I was more acquainted with the tow truck driver than with any of the dispatchers and they wanted it that way. It’s hard even for a dispatcher to constantly stick it up your poop shoot if they have to look you in the eye very much. They learn in the big cities to stick the dispatchers in a back room where they maintain some sense of anonymity.

I called Craig often to see how his health was. He was fading quickly but still willing to go on camera. I wasn’t sure if we could use him in the ten- minute piece, but with his knowledge of hemophilia and AIDS and his commitment to the project to lose him would be a travesty. I called the woman from public TV and pressed her.

“I’m working on it,” she said.

I didn’t understand that. She had suggested the short piece in the first place and asked for a script. I complied. I bought the tapes. This was a pattern with which I was becoming very familiar. You start out with a vision and someone says, “Give me this.” And you give it to them. They say, “Okay, now give me this.” And you do that. All the while they have no intention of holding up to their end of the bargain. And Craig was dying.

I mentioned to Craig that BG had stopped returning my calls, and he told me that she had cut him off also. I thought that she might be dealing with major depression as opposed to being a fair weather friend. But Craig really needed her, and she lived right around the corner from him. I had trouble understanding that. She had known Craig since he was a child at camp, yet she couldn’t be there. How deep was this depression thing? I didn’t know—I had to let it go.

I was fired from the cab company after having enough of being towed in and passed over one too many times. I delivered shiny new condoms to the dispatcher and bosses and said, “If you’re going to screw me, use one of these because I don’t want to catch anything you have.” I knew that I wouldn’t be running for mayor of Wilmington any time soon.

Christmas was coming, ho, ho, ho. I went to the other cab company in town and learned they had an agreement with the first that 30 days had to pass before one company would hire someone who had worked for the other.

The woman from public TV promised me a crew for December 28^th to video- tape Roscoe. He was dying but he really wanted to go on camera. I didn’t even have money for gas. There was one more cab company at the Beach that also covered Wilmington; they sat at the airport and waited for planes. In a town where you can watch from the bar when the plane lands and pulls up to the gate you can imagine the amount of traffic there is. I had been driving for them for a couple of days and on the Saturday before Christmas I had been waiting at the airport for an hour and a half. A plane was due in, and I got a call on the cab radio to go have tires put on across town.

“Huh?” I questioned.

“You heard me,” the dispatcher said.

“Okay,” I said. I left my spot, first in line, and began the drive across town. “Am I getting paid for this?” I asked already knowing what the answer would be.

“No,” said the dispatcher, “it’s going to be a busy weekend and that cab is unsafe.”

“I figured as much,” I answered, “are you going to pay for the gas?”

“We’ll give you a couple of dollars credit for gas.” he answered.

I went to the specified tire service center and waited for two hours on the Saturday before Christmas, while the tires were changed and re-aligned and so on. After the work was done I called in on the radio, “What do you want me to do now?”

“Go back to the airport,” the dispatcher said.

“10-4,” I answered. It happened to be the day I was scheduled at the plasma bank where I could pick up fifteen dollars for my time, and the plasma bank was on the way back to the airport. I pulled into the plasma bank parking lot and called in. “I’m going to check out for a while.”

“What are you doing?” the dispatcher inquired.

“I’m giving blood,” I answered. I turned off the cab and walked into the plasma center. While I was having my blood pressure checked the phone rang and it was for me.

“What are you doing giving blood on my time?” came the frantic voice from the other end.

“I’m taking lunch,” I said.

“You’re giving blood!” the voice shouted.

“Do you have anything against giving blood?” I answered, maintaining my blood pressure.

“You’re in my cab!” the voice shouted.

“Are you paying me for taking me away from the airport when a plane landed to sit me across town in a garage for two hours?” I said.

“Turn in the cab,” the voice said.

“Sure,” I said.

I turned in the cab and went back in the truck to donate plasma. I called Craig and told him I would call the day after Christmas to make sure he was ready to be interviewed on the 28^th the anniversary of my father’s death. Craig was in a lot of pain but he was still willing.

“My skin tone isn’t that good,” he gasped.

His family was with him. They didn’t need me there, so I figured I’d better go see my family. I had some decisions to make. I drove the truck up to Baltimore to spend Christmas, and shake off some of that Southern Style Hospitality I was becoming too familiar with. I called Craig the day after Christmas. BG was there with him and took the call. I gave her the number where I was staying. She called me the next day and said that Craig Epsom-Nelms had died. I passed the news on to the woman from public TV—the shoot was off.

<!– /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:”"; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –>

I got my day in court with Muffy and her mom. I was networking again just pleased as punch, communicating with other people who basically wanted to kill me.

“Why are you here, young lady?”

“He owes me money.”

“She didn’t show up for work, anywhere,” I said.

The Judge threw the case out–Done.

Roscoe was yellow the last time we had lunch with BG at a soda fountain in Carey. We had hamburgers and chocolate malts. He was still willing to go on camera. I had a part written which I had shaped to his background. I pressed the woman from public TV for a crew and post production. I told her time was running out. She told me to buy Beta tapes for their camera which I did. I wanted to shoot in film but she had only video to offer.

“This is a drama,” she said referring to the script.

“Of course,” I said. “What did you expect?”

BG went with me to interview a mother with a nine-year-old child for the short video. I had sent the last of my money to pay for the computer. We had our range of generations from the hemophilia community from the new generation to Warren Jewett, representing all the eras from pre-treatment to the present day. The entire history of hemophilia was a drama. That’s what drew me to the story. The fact that we could portray it in documentary style using very capable people made it all the more appealing. We also had Dale Brisson and Brent Runyon and Craig Epsom-Nelms from the North Carolina Hemophilia community, and Richard Atwood and Stephen Pemberton representing the history and treatment break throughs, and possibly a Clotter from Greenville who would be the white coat. After the meeting with the young mother and child BG, Linda Robertson, took me out for sushi, more like a last meal than a celebration.

“I go into hibernation in the winter,” she said over raw cod and ice cubes.

“Take a Librium,” I said.

I dropped in on BG when I returned to Carolina. She told me she was fascinated by suicides. I told her that perhaps this was dangerous for a manic depressive but she said it was only a hobby. After I told her about ritualistic suicides I had read about in Joseph Campbell, such as tying a rope around your head with the other end secured to a pliant tree and lopping off your head, with the honor in proportion to the distance the head flies, she never mentioned suicide again.

I confided that it didn’t look very promising for funding from the industry. She reminded me of the support letters from the doctors and the list of possible sources of money that the doctor had given me. I had been hoping for additional support from the Boss Mark Scudiery, at that time, but he also offered nothing more than kind words and a good rah rah. I even asked BG if she wanted to become more involved and she restated her limitations.

I got home to find a letter was waiting from small claims court setting a date for the confrontation with Muffy. I felt the buzzards gathering. No matter how much time, effort and personal money was going out the door, the bottom line was that nobody really cared. I had read a telling line in an interview with a songwriter—Julie Gold who had written “From a Distance”—“Nobody really wants you to succeed, and when you do, they all say that they knew you could do it all the time.” I still had some money left and Rhoda Apple up North had offered her old laptop for a thousand dollars as soon as she upgraded; I was completely out of touch with what was going on in the computer world at the time since my existing computer was a glorified word processor that served my needs at thee time. I put money for the laptop on the side. Above all I had to continue working as though funding would come and the film would be made.

I learned of an upcoming media arts conference in Wilmington and was given the name of a woman who might be helpful with the production end. I attended the conference and went after her to no avail since she was too busy and I had no money. The only memorable thing that I got from the conference was a speech a man from London, England who owned a camera supply company. Joe Dutton’s speech was casual and fragmented but he possessed a sincerity and love for film that went beyond material gain. He owned a camera supply company.

Back in the 1950s there had been a strong connection between Chapel Hill and Oxford, England with regard to hemophilia treatment and research. I thought that this might interest the Englishman since he stressed some historical spiritual connection between England and Wilmington. I passed the Englishman a proposal and hounded him all weekend for an appointment, stressing the scope of the story and practically begging for leads on funding. He finally gave in on the last night and we met for breakfast the morning after the conference at a local restaurant called Whitey’s. I told him the entire history of the project and we both cleaned our plates. That was it.

Another speaker at the conference was a woman from public TV who spoke of passion for the arts and film, something that she pointed out was beginning to wane in the quest for profit and prestige. She seemed sincere and I exchanged cards with her. I was surprised that Fabio wasn’t a speaker at the conference, since his Foundation was supposed to be a godsend to independent film makers.

I called Fabio shortly thereafter to see how supportive he still was. “You’ve got to kiss ass,” he said. “That’s the only way you’ll get any money.”

I told him that Brad had dropped out and I needed help in the fundraising.

“You mean you’ve lost your expert,” he said.

I thought this was a strange comment coming from a man to whom I had given constant updates about the contacts I had developed. I realized that he simply didn’t pay attention and was quite the asshole.

“I have more experts than NASA, motherfucker,” I said knowing that as a term that gets their attention every time.

“You called me a motherfucker,” he said with some excitement in his voice.

“I used it as a term of endearment,” I said.

“You called me a motherfucker.” he said.

I saw Fabio at a film festival and conference in Raleigh shortly after the conference and Fabio was there. The relationship with the North Carolina Film Foundation officially ended when Fabio treated the project as a joke and called the King, Dr. Brinkhaus a charlatan. He didn’t even know the man. I walked to the trash can and emptied a perfectly good cup of coffee, walked back to Fabio, patted him on his little bald head—expecting to find nubs of horns because I figured he had sold his soul—and said, “Good-bye, Asshole.”

I was finally realizing that these conferences were social gatherings more than educational events, places for networking—all well and good if you’re into that stuff. I had invested a month in conferences on hemophilia and film, spending money and schmoozing with more people than I cared to know. It all seemed more anti-art than creative, though the film festival did offer a showcase for works that never otherwise get screened. It was a political game. But I just wanted to make the film.

I called the woman from public TV and set up an appointment where I asked for help in shooting a short segment to demonstrate the ultimate goal. I told her I needed ten minutes of footage to show. She said to get a script together and she would see what she could do.

I wrote the script in a week based on information I had gathered, shaping it to the best possible combination of my contacts from the community, and began passing it around for factual content. In the meantime, Craig helped gather letters of support from the National Hemophilia Foundation and Hemophilia Resources of America. These were only words, but even an encouraging word is nourishing when the unreturned phone calls and rejection letters mount. A number of funding sources said it was a good project but it didn’t fit into their current line of interest. Dale Brisson procured a letter from the North Carolina Hemophilia group, and they became our new fiscal sponsor through which to channel funds if any funds ever materialized with the need of a non-profit benefactor. I followed up on even the vaguest contacts and faded business cards from the National Meeting with faxes and letters and phone calls and enthusiasm. Nada.

I called Susan Resnik and sent her the new letters of support and the script, explaining our need to produce a short piece with the North Carolina hemophilia community before we proceeded with the national story. She kept me linked in by introducing me to another one of the people she had interviewed, Larkey Deneff in Oregon. Larkey spoke of the blood shield laws in many states that prevented hemophiliacs from recourse against the fractionators, where blood products were treated as a service and not a product. This struck a nerve with me because at the plasma bank they told me I was being paid for my time and not my plasma. Larkey was another hemophiliac dying of AIDS who just wanted to get the story out there. The victims only wanted their day in court where the deck wasn’t stacked against them. Contact with Larkey also kept me focused on the shorter film, which would involve the North Carolina hemophilia community, as a stepping stone to the bigger picture.

I stayed in Craig’s room the last night of the meeting. He had a 9:30 a.m. flight out of Philadelphia airport. In the morning, after I was packed and ready, he was still ingesting his great abundance of pills with his factor nearby ready to be infused for the flight home. It was after 8:00 a.m.
“I don’t know if I’m going to make my flight,” he said looking at his watch. “Maybe I should just call and change it to a later flight.”
“Do you want to make your flight?” I asked.
“I would like to get home, I’m exhausted,” he said as he fixed his works for the infusion, “but it’s one of those things you get used to hemophilia and AIDS, there’s just so much to do.”
“Craig,” I said, “if you want to make the flight, be downstairs by nine and I’ll get you there on time.”
“It’s a big airport.” he said.
“Is this bag packed?” I said grabbing his larger suitcase.
“Yeah, but I still have to check out.” he said.
“Butt in line. I’ll see you at nine out front,” I said on my way out the door. I didn’t know where the airport was exactly, but I had time to find out. I took the elevator to the lobby where people were already checking out and shared the elevator down into the garage with others with baggage. I found the car easily and found that the gas gauge was on empty. I was relieved to see the sun shining when I pulled out of the garage. The top went down before I paid my way out of the hotel, filled up the tank and got directions, then headed back to the hotel. It was a few minutes to nine when I pulled up front of the lobby and Craig was right on time.
“Are you sure we can do this?” he asked holding his duffel bag like a baby.
I took the bag from him and heaved it into the back seat and he climbed in the front.
“Buckle up,” I said as we peeled away from the hotel and in no time were on the road, making every light on the way to the highway.
“Does this thing have air bags?” he yelled above the rock and roll music on the radio.
“If they go off in a convertible they become balloons,” I yelled looking up at the bright blue sky.
Roscoe looked up at the sky and grinned from ear to ear. “Yes!” he shouted.
By the time we hit interstate 95 we hit 95 and kept gettin’ up. We made the airport terminal by 9:15 and pulled to the curb near a skycap. While Craig pulled himself out of the car I tried to bribe the skycap to get his luggage to the plane.
“Stand in line,” he said. I looked back at the line with a dozen people stretching their necks to see that order was maintained.
Craig struggled with his duffel and I grabbed the suitcase out of the trunk. We left the Stang at the curb and rushed into the terminal to the first screen to see where his gate was.
“I sure am glad I infused,” he said.
After getting our bearings I grabbed the duffel bag from him and said, “Let’s go for it.”
We ran through the airport and got lucky at the metal detectors. Craig kept up the pace right behind me, hopping on his good leg with the bionic knee more often than not. I got to the gate only seconds before Craig hobbled up grinning from ear to ear and out of breath. Everyone had boarded but the gate was still open.
“I made it,” he said full of adrenaline and vigor. He took his duffel and a stewardess took his suitcase and walked him right on the plane. “I did it,” he exclaimed as he hobbled out of sight. I knew right then that Craig would be in my corner until the end.
I quickly made my way back to the front of the terminal where a dozen or so people were still in line for the sky cap. I climbed in the red Stang and headed South with a handful of business cards and no real prospects. It had been, however, my first personal pitch to the national hemophilia community. I was reassured that there was no other film in the works about the hemophilia community that wasn’t specifically targeted at the hemophilia community. But it had been an expensive weekend, even without the cost of a room. The entry fee, car rental, fuel, parking, long distance calls, copies of the proposal and letters, clothes, food and drink and tobacco all made it necessary to get back to the cave and dig in. I knew that I had to find help within the film community in Wilmington to help on the fund raising end. Gathering material and putting it together, bringing order out of the chaos was what excited me most, like plucking the prime fruit from an overabundant tree and creating a golden pie, not too sweet and not too tart. Dessert.

I began the next day with a bagel and coffee in the Lobby Cafe. It was my last shot at the exhibitors. I made the morning rounds of the booths, handing out proposal packets and pitching the film. At lunchtime I found Sherry at the Boss’s booth and we escaped in the rain to Chinatown for tea and octopus soup. She told me how much money there was in the home-care industry. It didn’t take much math to figure out. Ten serious “severes” came to over a million dollars a year gross. The amount of mark-up was a bit of a mystery for an outsider, but I could only guess that deals were cut all the time on volume and connections. The industry had become a massive but tightly secretive beast that fed on itself and the community it served. The community didn’t have very many choices because they were so small and blood products were so specialized. Prophylaxis was being promoted especially to the younger families for preventing joint damage. “Infuse and infuse often” was the catch phrase, and your child will have a normal childhood. What the home-care industry offered was service and convenience, like having water delivered as opposed to getting bottles at the grocery store. Support systems and education were also offered by some home-care companies. For a community that’s spread out home-care provided a link, a network, breaking the isolation that for the hemophiliac was a given in the past when many died before adulthood.
Sherry spoke of how her husband had been a race car driver up until the last week of his dying from AIDS from contaminated factor. Presumably her husband had also had a great mind and good teeth. We stopped at a Chinese grocery store where I bought a box of dried ginseng, and then drove back to the hotel where I made my last round at the funding spoon in the Exhibitor’s hall, pitching and handing out proposals to deaf ears, surrounded by others giving pitches about their services and products and handing out brochures and proposals.
Craig passed me a book that had been financed by the industry. He introduced me to the author, Lureen Kelley, a real dish and the mother of a young hemophiliac. She hadn’t been struck by AIDS in her family. Her son was born after the big problem had been corrected and he used a recombinant factor derived from genetically engineered Chinese hamster ovary cell linings. Laureen was a bit of a celebrity in the hemophilia community. She had written several books and published a news letter directed at the younger generations, all financed by different segments of the industry. The generations of hemophilia had been split apart with the younger, new families of hemophiliacs separating themselves from the older generations because of the stigma of AIDS. Laureen was that open-minded link who was looked up to by all generations and the industry.
Right then it dawned on me. The industry spent money to advertise internally. Their giving back to the community was pure unadulterated advertisement which also offered great service benefits. Like Coca Cola they advertised profusely, but their market was focused and small. A patient for life to a home-care company could mean millions of dollars in profits and most found a factor product that they liked and stuck with it. The older generations were suing the pharmaceuticals—why should they help to tell their story. I was pretty much dead. I was an outsider who wanted to tell the whole story. I continued to pitch with enthusiasm as the outsider with an objective point of view, knowing that this is not what anyone wanted to hear.
The hall closed and the only event left was the ball, funded by a pharmaceutical company. I showered and changed in Craig’s room, then drove over to the aquarium in Camden, New Jersey where I danced with the dish and smiled at the spoon and drove off in the Stang in the rain.
.
Hey diddle, diddle
A rock and a skittle
The Buddha came out of the moon.
The turtle just laughed and kept it real short
And The Queen disappeared from the room.

My friends Patti and Joe had coffee ready in the morning. Patti went off to work and Joe, a night shift worker, bought breakfast. We hashed over hash at a Denny’s near the Interstate. Joe made a sincere contribution to the project by paying for a tank of gas without knowing whether I’d be returning that Friday night.
“I might get lucky,” I said regarding the new day in a hopeful, non-delusional manner. The old friends you cherish, because once upon a time you exchange light and share experience and trust and the mutual light still shines. It’s a rare thing.
Back in Philly, I parked in the under-belly of the hotel and took the elevator to the lobby for a coffee at the cafe and time to plan my attack. The Exhibition Hall seemed the likeliest place to corner the industry people. It was open for both a morning and an afternoon session. There were some classes that seemed interesting, but since no one else was going after money for the project, that had to be my priority. There wouldn’t be another opportunity for personal contact with so much of the industry until the next annual meeting. I had to grab business cards and pass out proposals even if most people thought the idea was a joke.
I trudged through the Exhibition Hall and systematically attempted to identify key members of each team at a booth. I told the story of the progress of the film, being totally open and honest with corporate types who had perfected their masks as attractive crash dummies—and who had probably been selected to work the shows because of general non-offensiveness and yay team spirit. I felt totally naked, bouncing from one booth to the next, not a part of anything or any group, with only a vision still evolving. And all the while, I knew that absolutely no one got it.
Craig must have sensed my isolation and by the time the morning session was finished he caught up with me. I needed air because of the suffocation I was feeling in the hotel. We walked a couple of blocks to downtown.
“I want to get this other knee replaced,” Craig said, limping across the wide streets of Philly. “The fake one doesn’t hurt.”
The fake one didn’t hurt. The knee that was a part of his body since birth was a problem, but advanced science and technology had created something that didn’t hurt, a release from the pain. Craig told me how AIDS was now dominating his life more than hemophilia, though the limp and the pain was a result of hemophilia. We had lunch at a little Italian restaurant where he had linguini and I had a Caesar Salad with anchovies. Craig gave me a list of the prime companies I should go after first so I wouldn’t be spinning my wheels through the entire weekend. If there was time I would hit them all at least twice. Craig had a double room to himself, and he offered me the other bed when he found out that I had commuted to Maryland the night before.
On our way back to the Hotel we passed a group of people handing out flyers on a street corner. The Radical spoke with compassion to all passers-by about the meeting taking place off campus about the blood contamination. It was the Committee of Ten Thousand, COTT, a group formed under the assumption that 10,000 hemophiliacs and their families had been infected with HIV. Craig was a member of the committee. One of their founding members had a class action suit pending against the pharmaceuticals and the meeting was an update. I told the Radical about the film and he volunteered his services as a sound man if we made it out to California. The Radical was severe factor VIII deficient and positive. I passed on the meeting because I thought that the film might get money from the people that they were suing. I didn’t feel that there would be any conflict of interest if I were to get money from the pharmaceuticals because we were dealing with the history of hemophilia and not just the AIDS era.
At the hotel Craig pointed out Dana Kuhn from COTT, a mild factor IX, who very seldom had to use clotting factor. He was a minister by profession. In the early eighties he hurt his ankle while playing basketball and went to a treatment center in Nashville where they infused him for his injury. He became infected with HIV and unknowingly infected his wife, who died of AIDS. He didn’t have the limp but he had the bug. I ran into the Prince, a severe factor IX with the limp, who had also unknowingly infected his wife and lost her to AIDS. Then there was smiling Dale, the severe factor IX, who had escaped the bug and had a new daughter. Six months earlier I had never knowingly met a person with hemophilia in my life. I had become obsessed with the story, unable to cope without an infusion of money to allow me to tell it as I was discovering it. I only wanted to make a film. There was no turning back. It was a material thing. It’s what I had to do—gather material.
Craig suggested that I sit in on a talk by black a woman from South Carolina who had sons with hemophilia and AIDS. There were less than eight other people in the room ranging from health-care professionals to hemophiliacs with AIDS. The woman had come to the meeting with the promise she would remain anonymous because she feared the community in which she lived in South Carolina. It was a small room and a small gathering and still she was afraid to give her real name. It was an American gathering.—AN AMERICAN VALUE.
The afternoon exhibitor session was much of the same for me, bouncing from booth to booth with the hope of hitting on that one sensitive ear. I learned that The Boss was hosting a hospitality suite and magic show that evening. I ran into October in the lobby. She remembered that I had helped her load her car weeks earlier at the Greenville conference. I told her about the magic show as she was on her way out the door for dinner.
“I like magic,” she said.
Chief Clotter, Dr. Gil White, was in the Lounge at the bar off the hotel lobby with a bevy of nurses from the hospital in North Carolina. All the tables were full and he took his scotch at the rail. It was the first time I had seen him since dinner with the King, Dr. Brinkhaus.
“How’s the movie coming?” he asked.
I was startled at first because I didn’t recognize him until he said “Clotter.”
“I think I’m dead,” I said enthusiastically with a touch of wishful thinking. “Nobody here is going to put up any money for this thing.”
“How long will it take you to complete it?” he asked pointedly. “That’s the chief concern,” he added, “would you finish it?”
“Of course I’d finish it, if the money was there,” I said seriously.
“Could you do a short film first, say less than 30 minutes, so they could see what you had in mind?” he asked sincerely.
“Sure, but it’s still going to cost about thirty thousand dollars or so to do it right. And I’m up against a blue suited stone wall.” The doctor who was wearing a blue suit.
“Don’t quit,” he said, “Be like the clinging fire.”
I took a deep breath as the Doctor and his professional harem excused themselves and disappeared through the lobby and out the front door. I moved over to where Brent and Slacker, a twenty something severe factor VIII HIV positive, were guzzling drinks at the rail. “The clinging fire,” I said.
Brad flicked a lighter and held it up to my face. “You need a light,” he said.
I pulled out a Pall Mall and sucked smoke and rubbed the amulet on my chest, deciding I’d better retire to the garage to change clothes for the evening. I had Craig’s room number but he was nowhere in sight and the garage seemed like a safer retreat than the front desk at the dinner hour.
I took the elevator down a few levels and searched for the red Stang, finding I had parked it in one of the more open spots in the garage. I stashed my Foundation satchel and found fresh khakis and a black shirt laid out in the trunk. The traffic was moderate but people seemed more concerned with finding their way through and out of the maze than watching a gray bearded man change clothes. I was so totally self-absorbed at the time I changed without hesitation or hindrance at the opened trunk of the car.
I ventured back up into the hotel and found the hospitality suite that The Boss had arranged and stoked up on shrimp and a few Gin Rickeys, returning my focus to others. I met a redhead called Sherry whose husband had had hemophilia and died of AIDS. She worked for The Boss and greeted me like a friend. I found a seat at a round table and met some people from the Northeast who felt free to use their names even though they were affected by hemophilia and AIDS. One woman who had lost several sons had written a book about how she had been lied to when the contaminated factor was distributed to the community, but she couldn’t get it published. There were so many stories, so many, so very many.
The party moved to a conference room where a stage had been set up for the magician. The Boss, a magician in his own right, performed first with the fast hands of a pickpocket and the panache of a well-liked priest. The other magician merely continued. October showed up halfway through. I took her down on South Street in the red Stang with the top down. We stopped in a little Italian restaurant and drank red wine by candle light while an opera filled the room like a liquid and October capped the day like a cherry. I spilled my glass and stained the white linen table cloth. We left after that. Cheese.

It was a short hop from Baltimore to Philadelphia with no other expectations than adventure. I was totally unprepared to attend a conference. I didn’t have the money to return home for extra clothes, and certainly no accommodations were in the budget. I knew people who would be there and I had no qualms about imposing on someone for floor space, but I didn’t expect any offers.
What I had heard about previous annual meetings is that the HIV hemophilia community had been making noise and protesting with death masks and picket lines. The general feeling was that the pharmaceutical industry and the National Hemophilia Foundation had burned the community with betrayal and indifference over the fact that so many in the community had died of AIDS and the number of deaths was increasing rapidly. This was over ten years after the HIV blood contamination, and with the exception of Ryan White, the devastation of the hemophilia community by AIDS had been a minor news item buried in the deluge of information. The hemophilia community had a very small political voice and they were basically at the mercy of the industry and government that had poisoned them in the first place. The Institute Of Medicine report on the blood supply didn’t own up to any negligence but made strong recommendations to prevent similar problems. The Senator who had introduced the Ricky Ray Bill, to compensate hemophiliacs who had been infected with HIV, did so with reference to the IOM report as well as the lobbying of the mother of the boy for whom the bill was named. Ricky Ray, like Ryan White, was a young hemophiliac who had been driven from school because of AIDS. The Ray family had also had their house burned down. Ricky Ray died when he was fifteen and neither Elton John nor Michael Jackson showed up to hold his hand.
In search of a place to sleep I dropped in on some old friends in Port Deposit, Maryland, about an hour from Philly. I hadn’t seen them in a few years but they were old trusted allies. Patti gave me an earth pendant on a silk band to wrap around my neck for protection. She said it was a centering device, so I guess it was mainly to protect me from myself.
My motives were pure, to tell a story, but the fact that the story wasn’t already out there made me believe that there were those who preferred the story be left alone and resolved within the “family” and extended family, the industry that manufactured the factor concentrates. Many lawsuits had been flying around for years, some resolved in quiet settlement and others dismissed as ungrounded. Though the focus of “the project” was hemophilia and not specifically AIDS and hemophilia, the less the public knew about hemophilia, the better off the industry would be in defending the lawsuits. Hemophilia could be treated as an aberration that happens to certain families and that was their problem. I had gotten another letter of support from another Doctor besides Brinkhaus, who stated that he was satisfied that we would tell a balanced story and he recommended that industry fund it. I had copies of the proposals which were far from perfect, but they were something to go on. Even if I couldn’t get support from the industry at the national meeting, at least I could gain a little more insight into the interconnected facets of hemophilia.
It was raining in Philly when I arrived at the hotel for the meeting. I had picked up a few items of clothing on sale at a mall, an expense that I considered over-indulgent, but my tee shirts and jeans would have hardly been appropriate for the entire weekend. I parked the red Mustang in the garage under the hotel and planned to use it for changing clothes since the barriers and pilings holding everything up and together provided some privacy.
Craig had mentioned that he was on staff for the conference, otherwise I was pretty much on my own. I had called Brent and said that I would be there, but he was still somewhat distancing himself from the project though he had said it was okay to keep his name in the proposals. He was still there but not all there.
I wasn’t trying to fake a limp as I walked up to the counter to register as a consumer, but an old football knee injury was bothering me. I also didn’t try to hide my teeth hoping that they would think I was one of the ones that didn’t know how to work the system yet. The limp was everywhere but people with hemophilia seemed greatly outnumbered by helpers, hunters and health professionals. Once I was signed in for the weekend at the cheaper price I stated my business (and admitted my healthy condition) to anyone who would speak to me. Since I generally had nothing in common with anyone besides being a human being I didn’t have to speak very much. I was totally out of my element—working a crowd—I saw any group larger than three as a potential lynch mob. I had no business being there but I had to do it.
Dale had told me how he enjoyed the National Meeting since it brought him together with so many of his “Blood Brothers” from around the country. That was their “brotherhood,” their group, and that connection was obvious throughout the hotel. But the meeting was organized because what was wrong with the brothers’ blood generated a lot of revenue. Everywhere there were signs: “sponsored by,” “funded by,” “through the generosity of,” hinting at the love/hate relationship of the industry and the consumer. We bring you factor on a silver platter to your door. Give us money. There it was, on the Streets of Philadelphia, Woodstock 3—drugs—the manufacturers, dealers and users having a party, exchanging information and making deals.
I didn’t see any of the protesting that I had heard about the previous meetings—splattered blood and so on—but the topic of AIDS was hard to escape. Most of the generations with the limp were long term positive or had full-blown AIDS. Rooms were set up for safe sex instruction and coping. There were support groups and women and teenaged children dealing with AIDS. Susan Resnik’s dissertation had shown how the hemophilia community had become a community since 1948, before which time hemophiliacs were pretty much on their own without treatment, voice or fellowship. They were still having a lot of problems, but now they had the opportunity to communicate with those who could help, including their “blood brothers.”
I sipped coffee at a cafe in the hotel near the entrance to the lobby and felt quite the outsider but still in awe of the proceedings having read about the early days, that history. I tried to put things in their proper context, historically and pragmatically. To the best of my knowledge, no other film specifically about hemophilia was yet in the works. It was a great story. There had to be money somewhere. The community members I had had contact with thought it was a go od idea. The Doctors had written letters in support. Susan Resnik was an enthusiastic prime expert. Richard Atwood was a wealth of factual information. BG, Linda Robertson was a great community contact. Craig Epsom-Nelms was a story in himself and his unselfconscious openness was truly a joy to experience in a world that generally criticized and hated. He was also a great community contact, and wanted the story of hemophilia told. Brent also wanted the story told, but not enough to jeopardize his job with the pharmaceutical company.
After contemplation and coffee at the café, I got my paperwork together, found a copy shop and put together forty proposals including the letters of support. I went back to the hotel, saw Brent, Craig, the Roman, Dale and others and then attended my first official Opening Session where the new Executive Director spoke of his goals for the National Hemophilia Foundation. At the end of the day the Exhibition Hall opened for the first time with free food and an open bar sponsored by a pharmaceutical company. Brent had a booth there where he distributed his newsletters about HIV not causing AIDS, among other groups with booths expressing views or selling things, home-care companies, the Red Cross, pharmaceutical companies and anything any way related to hemophilia. A variety of opinions abounded. It was truly an American event. On the whole the dress was casual but the number of dark blue suits was staggering.
Brad introduced me to The Boss, Mark Scudiery, from New Jersey who had been one of our initial funders and continued to offer support through his North Carolina staff, BG and Wayne Ward. The Boss staffed his booth with his Jersey group. He looked like Bruce Springsteen in a dark blue suit and worked the crowd like a professional pickpocket, engaging his prey with a warm smile and definite sincere concern for the community he served; he gave back to the community a lot of what he took. The Boss wanted the film made, but of course his first concern was making a living. This was good. I was hoping the other home-care companies would see the value in supporting a film about the community it served, that members of the community supported. We were dealing with a still-living history, including the King, Dr. Brinkhaus who in his late 80s was still vigorous and sharp enough to make an impact on a screen.
Craig introduced me to numerous people and I pitched everybody whether they were wearing a suit, walking with a limp or carrying a plastic bag of goodies. I had to get the word out, I thought. I always felt this sense of urgency as though my hair were on fire to get this thing to the next step before time ran out. I got absolutely nowhere but exhausted. After a few beers and some food, the opening day came to a close and people began to disperse to the hospitality suites. Brent went off with his drug company buddies. Craig was kidnapped by some New York chicks. I paid my way out of the garage and drove back to Port Deposit, Maryland where I slept in a bed and prepared for the next day’s battle. Hump.

Batman said, “Chicks like the car, right?”
Right. Well, I was ready to find out. My first stop when I cruised into the DC area was to see the fascist water man. He was out for the afternoon so I parked in the back of his warehouse, garage and office complex to hide the North Carolina license plates and waited. Passivity was not one of my strong points but I knew that a little bit of a wait and a lot of dancing might get me to Philadelphia for the annual meeting for the National Foundation. Craig had told me that if I registered as a consumer it would only cost me a hundred dollars to gain access to the conferences and festivities. The money from the initial seed money for R&D was long gone to pay car rentals, lawyer fees, phone bills, stationery and mailings—necessary expenditures because of the size of the project we had proposed. Brent was smart—he saw the crunch coming and jumped ship. From the number of contacts I had been gaining, it had also been a good move for the project which was continuing to evolve in focus and scope.
The fascist water man finally arrived back at the warehouse accompanied by the father of the boy who had died. The man had been the German’s most trusted employee. I smiled my jagged edged smile and said, “Here’s Sullivan.” Mister J was startled when he saw me. So I danced for him. I explained why I needed the money that was two weeks late. I reminded him that this was the last of it, and that I had let him off the hook for the next year. I talked to him about his four kids, especially his young daughter, and how lucky he was to have them healthy. Nothing that I said really mattered. What mattered to me was that I never lost my temper, never threatened and resisted the temptation to stuff him into one of those five gallon glass bottles and roll him down the hill into a nearby stream like a message in a bottle. The way I had been spending the money, to learn about the bleeding disorder community, was my egotistical self-righteous ticket to justification. And if he didn’t cut me a few checks, the project was dead. No trip to Philadelphia, no rented car or gas or phones or anything, because no one else was buying in yet. Dozens of phone calls and proposals had been unanswered and delivered. It seemed totally hopeless.
The fascist water man cut me a few checks spread out over the next six weeks. That was my income. That’s how long I had to make any headway. I planned to use every dime toward moving the project forward, the documentary about the history of hemophilia. It was only a Drop of Blood to him. It was my life, do it or die.
The fascist water man was losing the boy’s father, the only delivery man he really trusted. His loss would only be sleep. The boy’s father, an ex-marine, was crushed by the loss of a son. I wondered how the people had felt who had lost sons, infected by the blood supply and the stupidity and ineptness and greed of others. We die. That’s it. This is it. Do the acts we perform in this life make any difference in how or when we die? This is what went through my mind. Should I feel any less for the loss of the man’s son, who had wronged me, than for the lives of people I didn’t know? I had wished the boy harm because he had done me wrong, and I felt no remorse over his death, but I was affected by the pain that his father had to live with. Who was harmed more, the boy or his father? I looked at death as a part of life and even the deaths of those I was close to never affected me anymore once father and mother were gone. Mom and Dad would visit the cemetery plot and stone they had picked out for themselves. They taught me something great. I saw those deaths as the end of their allotment of time which after my grief allowed my life to move forward. Life is precious. I cherished their memory as all memories and all that happens every day in my own allotment of time, only despairing in the mundane and commonplace thought and action at a time when there are no horizons, only lack of money. “The Kingdom of heaven is spread upon the earth and yet you do not see it,” said Joseph Campbell quoting Christ and the Gnostic Bible.
I visited my younger brother and sister and their children and my friends in Baltimore. None of them understood what I was doing or why I was going to a hemophilia meeting in Philadelphia. We had fun anyway. At my younger brother’s patent redneck bar I found out the chicks liked the car. The next day I would be in Philadelphia but the night gave me a young blonde, published poet barmaid and a six-pack of beer into the wee small hours of a warm clear October morning with the top down and the seats pulled back while she read her poetry and I revved my engine to flamenco music and life. You get what you need.
Rupert says, “You can rhyme if you want to.
But you better beware, ‘cause I really don’t care
If your spelling’s all that great—Babe.

Once that first letter was in hand I called Fabio, still believing he was serious about helping independents in film. Well, I was as independent as they get, but then Fabio began instructing me on how to become not so independent and more sociably acceptable. “If you want to get money for this thing,” he said, “you’ve got to kiss a lot of ass and go to the right parties.”
And I figured he was right. But I was so abrasive, and my teeth were so bad, that whenever I went to kiss ass I ended up biting. I had a very difficult time not being myself. I felt it very natural to try to be nice to people, hold doors and say thank you and so on, but I had trouble with small talk. I could not bring myself to say, fine thank you, how are you because it seemed insincere to say that all the time when everybody knows well that we are not fine. There’s quite a bit of work to be done on this consciousness thing. If everything was fine there would be no need to “kiss ass.”
After the dinner I had to lay low until the next payment from the fascist water man, so I turned in the Intrepid and worked the phones, keeping in touch with Craig and BG and others, all the while sending out proposals and calling foundations. Craig had written a letter of support from ACE about AIDS in the blood disorder community and why he felt the story had to be told.
“I need money,” I said in every phone call and proposal. Nothing happened.
When it came time to head North to pick up money from the fascist water man, I went by Triangle for a car. Since they took a signed check and didn’t deposit it until I returned, it didn’t matter that there was no money in the bank. The only car they said they could give me was a candy apple red Mustang convertible. I was only expecting to be gone for a few days so I packed lightly and drove over to have lunch with BG and Craig and thank him for the letter.
The King, Dr. Brinkhaus had mentioned a colleague at the hospital who might be able to direct us to the major funders we needed because of his international connections. Over lunch I discussed this with BG and Craig.
“Call him up and go see him,” BG said with her eyes wide.
I called and made the appointment with the man for that afternoon. When I got back to the table Craig asked me if I had planned on attending the annual meeting for the Foundation in Philadelphia later in the week. He gave me the information I would need to find the hotel and said that he was attending. Brent had mentioned the meeting and planned on having a booth there. BG said that Dale, the Roman and the frizzy blonde from Camp Carefree would be there, as would BG’s boss from New Jersey.
“The entire hemophilia industry is represented there,” she said.
“I have to see the fascist water man first,” I said.
After lunch we dropped Craig back at his office and BG and I went to see the man in Chapel Hill. We spent a short period of time together and he gave me an unedited copy of the 1995 Institute of Medicine Report on HIV and the Blood Supply, “An Analysis of Crisis Decision Making.” “Oh, no,” I thought, “more blood stuff to read.”
“Don’t tell anybody where you got this,” he said.
That remark changed everything. I thought the report was the sacred Torah of the Blood Supply. The blood supply doesn’t just affect the hemophilia community in a country where everybody is fine, thank you, and traffic accidents and violence and burn victims are a normal part of everyday life, not to mention knife happy surgeons. And the hemophilia community is the “canary in the coal mine” when it comes to the safety of the blood supply. Whatever contaminates the blood, they get it first.
The man also gave me a list of companies that might be interested in funding a project about hemophilia. I dropped BG back at her apartment and then headed North in the Red Stang to see Mister J the fascist water man. The weather was fine. I drove with the top down, and I was fine, thank you, how are you?

I had become enough of a moving target that I figured maybe Cleo had forgotten about me. When I let the dog go she was so pissed off I thought I was dead meat. But we simply ignored each other. I didn’t get any more voice mail from Muffy, but I did get a letter demanding two hundred and thirty dollars for her not showing up for work either for the project or her kitchen job. She said she was going to take me to court. I immediately sat down and responded in writing about the necessity of keeping appointments and showing up for work, also mentioning the fact that she had never returned any of the books I had loaned her nor the tai-chi tape.
I was somewhat relieved that my work had taken me out of the small town. I had needed a change of scene. I knew, however, that if we got funding for the film I would be looking locally for the necessary technical support staff, except for the camera man who was still willing to come down from Baltimore for the filming. If things turned out to get really petty locally, the man up North could muster together a crew and bring them with him. The plan was to be ready to run through the entire alphabet a few times, keeping every option open, being ready to act at a moment’s notice. There had to be extreme flexibility.
BG set up an evening appointment with Warren Jewett, the Judge. I called Stephen Pemberton the day before and suggested that Dr. Brinkhaus might wish to see the Judge again. Another 20 year reunion was in the works. The meeting was for the next day.
Around noon the next day Stephen called to say that the King would love to join us, and he planned on bringing his wife, another doctor and his wife, and Stephen and his wife.
“The King, Dr. Brinkhaus took the liberty of making reservations at the Varsity Club on campus, if that’s okay with you.” he said. “It’s a fine restaurant,” he added.
“Stephen, you’ve got to be kidding. Of course, it’s okay with me.” I said. “I don’t gotta wear a coat and tie, do I?”
“I don’t even own a sports coat,” he said, “but I will wear a tie.”
“Okay,” I said, “you wear the tie and I’ll wear the coat.” This got a rare chuckle out of Stephen.
Craig, BG, the Judge and his wife and me were to meet them at 6:00 p.m. in the lobby of the club. I called BG and said I was on my way, and asked her to call Craig and the Judge and everything would be hunky dory. I scurried around and found three hundred dollars to pay for the thing—hoping three hundred would pay for grub for eleven people at a “fine” restaurant. This tapped everything I had, even the car rental money.
After running around for an hour after money and getting cleaned up, I got to BG’s in two hours, but she had yet to speak to Craig or the Judge. She walked around the apartment brushing her mane, with a cigarette hanging out of the side of her mouth as she talked.
“I’ve left messages and the Judge knew he was on for tonight anyway, he just didn’t know what time,” she said, removing the cigarette just long enough to pop an ice cube in her mouth.
“Was Craig on for tonight?” I asked, planting myself in a comfortable chair in the living room where framed pictures were stacked against a pile of boxes.
“He’d die if he missed this,” she said, swinging her hair to the other side and sliding the cigarette to the other side of her mouth at the same time. “No, I haven’t talked to Craig. His office said he was in Greensboro.”
I lit a cigarette from the one I had been smoking. “Are you moving?” I asked.
“I’m manic. I’m re-arranging the apartment.”
She finished brushing her hair and got on the phone. She left a surprisingly calm message for Craig on his answering machine and then another for the Judge. She had this way of speaking in an even tone no matter how much emotion her body language exposed.
“Why don’t you run around the corner to Craig’s and leave a note in case he doesn’t pick up his messages when he gets in,” she told me in the same tone.
I was out of my gourd sitting there so the safest thing for me to do was get moving even if only for a short trip. It was a bit after three, and we figured it would take an hour to find the place and park, plus half an hour to retrieve the Judge. I drove over to Craig’s and posted the note on his door. When I got back to BG’s, she had gotten through to the Judge.
“The Judge won’t be ready until 5:30,” she said.
I called Stephen at the hospital and told him that we wouldn’t be there until 6:30. He excused himself from the phone, returning in a few minutes.
“The King, Dr. Brinkhaus said he had already made plans to be there at six. We will wait for you in the lobby,” he said.
I hung up the phone. “Oh shit, BG.” I said, “They’ll be waiting for us in the lobby.”
She broke out in a big smile. “He’s used to it,” she said.
“I’m not. I hate to be late.” I said.
She took the cigarette out of her mouth, stuck her face in front of the mirror and slammed on her bright red lipstick.
“You must drive your husband crazy,” I said.
“He’s used to it,” she said.
I planted myself in the chair in the living room and lit another cigarette. It was after 4:30 when we left BG’s apartment and tried Craig one last time. His car was there when we pulled up. We parked and went to his door and knocked.
“Oh, there you are.” he said, “I just called you. What’s the emergency?”
“Get ready now,” BG said calmly, “we’re having dinner with the Judge and Dr. Brinkhaus.”
“Now?” he said, “I can’t go to dinner, I’m a mess.”
“Craig, get your shit together right now. You are having dinner with the King, Dr. Brinkhaus.” BG spoke calmly with her eyes riveted to Craig’s as though she would surely kill him.
“I don’t feel well,” he said, “I had a rough day.” He looked at me in my sports coat. “I don’t have anything to wear.”
“Craig,” she said. “Wear a dress if you have to, but get ready.”
“Oh, all right,” he said. He disappeared into his room.
I was hoping he wouldn’t come out in a dress but I thought I’d live with it anyway. He appeared in a few minutes without tie or coat or dress but ready for dinner. We made our way through traffic across the town of Carey and arrived at the Judge’s by 5:30. We parked in front of his house and BG sent me in to get him, even though I had never met the man. BG climbed into the back seat to give Craig the lowdown on the day. The Judge answered the door and invited me in. He told me to wait right there while he finished a phone call. I counted the minutes while he spoke loudly of futures and patent rights, finally hanging up the phone, limping over and showing good teeth in a smile.
“My wife had to work late,” he said, “she won’t be joining us.”
I counted quickly. That meant I only needed money for grub for ten.
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “This should be fun,” I lied.
The Judge sat in the front seat with me and spoke of how his childhood was in the 1930s when there was not suitable treatment available for hemophilia. He was an inventor and a businessman, and was HIV positive. On the ride he told me how Chapel Hill had been known as the “Athens of hemostasis” in the 1950s. It was after 6:30 when we arrived at the Varsity Club, so I dropped everyone at the front door and went for a parking space. I parked at the first spot I saw even though it required some kind of sticker, and raced into the lobby where the doctors were suited up and waiting for us. Everyone looked marvelous. It was more of an event than I had imagined. We walked in together and were seated around two round tables with the King, Dr. Brinkhaus deciding the seating arrangements.
“We’ll switch around for dessert,” he said.
I sat with Stephen and his wife and Chief Clotter, Doctor Gilbert White, the other doctor, and his wife. The King, Dr. Brinkhaus and his wife—also in her eighties—sat with the members of the hemophilia community. There was the scene: The King with his Queen, The Judge, The Bitch Goddess and the Fairy Godfather at one round table, and the Vampire, Chief Clotter, the babes and me at the other.
After dinner the King, Dr. Brinkhaus switched seats with Chief Clotter and sat next to me over sorbet and coffee.
“Where did you do your graduate work?” he asked me.
“Doc,” I said, “I graduated from Archbishop Curley High School and they threw me out of Full Sail Center for the Recording Arts film school. The film is a good idea. And as you well know, it isn’t simply the idea, they’re a dime a dozen, it’s what you do with the idea.”
I thought I was dead. Kay had told me that the only people the King, Dr. Brinkhaus valued were MDs, and all I had to offer was my BS. But we had fun.
Stephen passed me the letter of support that the doctor had written and then informed me that the King, Dr. Brinkhaus was picking up the check. I was ecstatic. And I still had cash in my pocket. I also had a parking ticket and a fine. Tada.