(Cue theme song from “The Jeffersons”… Hey-Hey we’re ah movin’ on up!!) As 1996 arrived I finally got my chance.After being on a waiting list for seven whole years, I was able to move up to the penthouse of our building; top floor-center apartment, wall-to-wall floor-to-ceiling glass, a private balcony covered in my hand-grown flowers and vegetables, and a great view of the downtown Columbus skyline.
As you can see, I'm pretty good at growing flowers. One year I had four big palm plants out there... so the neighbors began referring to my balcony as "Gilligan's Island." Here are samples of recent balconies over the years…
In photo number…
1. Well, that’s part of my view anyway. This is a shot down my balcony railing. I found some
planters that would just barely fit in the space between the bottom of the railing and the floor of my terrace. There are all different kinds of petunias that I trained to trail over the balcony in a multi-colored “waterfall”.2. Another year I had white, peach, pink, red, purple and lavender geraniums in the floor planters, along with yellow and orange giant marigolds. It was the first year I got brave and tried growing tomatos in 5-gallon buckets. The hanging baskets have trailing petunias and geraniums. If you look at the pictures long enough you can smell the flowers.
3. Those big red flowers are Hawaiian Hibiscus plants. A friend of mine manages a drug store that sells live plants every spring. On the first day of the sale, I was amazed to see Hibiscuses for $4.99 each!?!. I went in to ask him if my eyes were deceiving me and nearly fainted… They were supposed to be $24.99 each and had been mispriced. He was so grateful that he let me buy as many as I wanted at $4.99. I got the three of the variety that grow like a 4-5 foot tall tree, as opposed to the bush. To the right of them are my infamous bragger tomatos.
4. Ahhhh the wonders of Miracle Grow. There’s actually a comical aspect to my balcony that I’ve never taken a photo of. A couple of years back I hung up two big wooden birdhouses on opposite ends of the ceiling of my overhang. About two months later I heard the chirping of baby wrens… from both little houses.
A commotion arose out there one day and I looked to find a male wren flying from one house to the other and then back again. At first I thought he was stealing food or nesting material until I realized that I had a little “Payton Place” going on. The cocky little male bird actually had two wives and families!!!
A really dumb move to have two wives living next door to each other. Eventually they worked it out and there was peace……until it was time to teach all those kids how to fly. They would fumble out and down to the floor; only to be bewildered as to which house they should try to get back too.
5. I’d learned my lesson after the previous year when I put up four tomato plants, because I wound up giving a ton of them away when I couldn’t eat them fast enough. My landlord had a small fit because he was worried about them falling off the vine and hitting people below… which never happened.
If you look close enough you’ll see that nestled in the bucket with the tomato plant is a green bell pepper plant.
Do I need to describe the spaghetti sauces I and my neighbors made that year?
6. If you look carefully at the very top of this shot, you see the roof of my terrace. After the tomato plants grew 8 feet tall I had to run twine between each of the hanging basket hooks to train the tomato vines to grow sideways… otherwise they’d have tried to top the roof!
Yes, my neighbors were beginning to call me Oliver Wendell Douglas of "Green Acres," with his corn stalks on his Park Avenue terrace. The only thing missing was Lisa sneezing.
Life on the road had taken its toll on my body. What with all that pasta and fast food on the go, and hotel room service catering, it was playing hell with my waistline. With less and less time in the gym, I lost my fantasy physique nearly as fast as I’d gained it.
Oh well, I got to be a “hunk” for only about a year and a half of my life, but then just like Cinderella’s gown and slippers-at midnight, I was becoming the out of shape troll I was before I started all of that weight training. It’s true what they say about being a slave to a muscular body-you have to constantly maintain it 24/7 or all those muscles turn to flab… no worst-make that blubber, unless you’re on steroids, which I refused to use...
...but I was very tempted… oh so tempted.
I found out later that some of the things my co-body builders were injecting me for pain or muscle spasms were indeed steroids and I'd suffer greatly for my ignorance in allowing them to intorduce me to them...
I sometimes go back and look at those pictures from that era and shake my head in disbelief that I actually looked like that. It all comes at a price though, because you wonder if you get opportunities because of your skill or your looks. You also pay for it in health problems later in life... just ask Ahnold the Governator.
I was still driving the tricked-out Cobra T-bird on art business trips and as the seasonal business cooled down around the end of October of 1997 I used it to deliver pizzas in. I decided to give a needy assistant manager the Volvo 240 DL that I was looking to get rid of, as a gift that he could recondition for his son. On the way to a delivery near my home downtown, I took him with me so he could drive it back to the shop. I laughed and showed him how the mighty big-block Ford could press you into the seat, and pointed to the tack and told him we were already doing 100 MPH, which actually was reading 1000 RPM.
The idiot actually believed it, and as thanks for my generosity, the bastard reported me to the company for doing 100 in a 45 zone!!! They forced me off delivering and gave me an inside job. The previous year, I'd been presented with a big bonus check (in the thousands) for going ten years without a single at-fault accident or ticket. I was getting offers from a competing company to come over to them as a delivery consultant and guidebook writer anyway, so I bid so-long to them the following March.
With Jet’sArt custom Illustrations and Jet’sArt custom business forms going full-time now, I had a staff by then who’d research what color that old hotel used to be or if any pictures of a long forgotten founder of a town were still in existence.
I was becoming a successful businessman with art clients, invitations and more flirtations in the adult film industry on the west coast and/or New York-mostly as a writer and an occasional line producer.
Being on the road all the time also cuts into your social life, and the more I worked, the less I had time for a lover.
I'd lost several lovers because of my absences, though life on the road was never lonely. I was determined to change that too, by staying closer to Columbus and finding most of my art clients locally. I was afforded more time at home, and stared working on my other hobby... gardening. (Cue theme song from "Green Acres"
As I said before, I’d discovered that I was good at writing map/guidebooks for pizza shops. The manuals would have streets sectioned off by color instead of map coordinates, and included hand-drawn apartment complex maps and instructions on how to get to all streets in a given area. I’d devised a system whereby a brand new delivery driver would be able to route deliveries without any help on the first day he worked, just by delivering only to one color on the map, which was listed on the delivery ticket. Just to make sure my instructions were accurate,
I’d drive the delivery routes there for a while in order to see/record/offer suggestions for any problems that a driver might encounter. As I stayed home more, I actually began enjoying delivering pizzas as a sideline.
In June of 2000 I actually had two different major pizza chains bidding against each other for my books.
I paid cash for a white Sebring convertible (which is what I usually rented when I was on the road), which I used to drive to business stops in Chicago and the surrounding states, ah the good they do die young. With its untimely death and more improvements to my bank account, I went looking to put a major down payment on a brand new set of wheels that had caught my eye on a whim.
On July 17th of 2003, I picked out an inferno red '04 Chrysler Sebring convertible to tool around in. At the time I thought leasing a car was like renting a car-only for a longer period. The company that owned it took care of the maintenance and upkeep, and I paid for the gas. Boy was I wrong about that! But I leased it anyway, not caring about the expensive required insurance. Unbelievable as it sounds, it turned out to be one of the smartest moves I’d ever made.
It still boggles my mind that my family never caught on, or even asked how I could afford such cars on a pizza man's earnings.
A good friend and client of mine in Pittsburgh had a computer lab and asked me if I wanted to beta-test a voice command system he was working on and hoped later to sell to Chrysler. He’d originally built one for the T-Bird and wanted me to road test the new and improved version.
Nowadays, if you hear people talking to their car you don’t bat an eye, it’s becoming commonplace, but back then, they would look at me funny when I'd walk up to my convertible and then tell it to start, turn on its sound system, change the CD and even tell the top to go up and down... that was until the car actually did it right before their amazed eyes! Back then it was really fun to watch people's reaction.
From what I understand some of the technology actually made it into cars and I’m kind of proud that I might actually have had something to do with that. I would send him e-mails of problems I was having with mine, and he’d work out the bugs and send me new breadboards or software fixes for it. The remote top now appears on the new Sebring hardtop Convertible!
As my business and reputation grew, I was spending less and less time at home again. We have a great private gym in our apartment complex, but I rarely got to use it as more time was spent out of state. A few times, I tried recapture that fleeting body that I used to have, but I'd get caught up in some distraction and gain the weight back and lose the muscle tone I'd gained. I’d find out later I was a diabetic and didn’t know it.
Eventually as the economy cooled, I found myself at home more than traveling too, and pizza delivery was to temporarily become my primary source of income. Why? Well it's hard to explain, but creating art is something that I enjoy... when it became a business and I had to churn them out as a living, suddenly the fun is gone.
Oh don't get me wrong; I was still putting out good work, just not as often... To paraphrase the Righteous Brothers "I'd lost that lovin' feeling."
I tried my hand at being an office manager for a good friend’s restaurant. I found out later that he wanted me to run the place into the ground as a tax right off. By the millennium he’d consumed all of his profits in cocaine. I hung in there through the disputes and bounced payroll checks, not wanting to be the first rat to abandon ship. A week later his mother came in and fired me, since no matter what was thrown at me I wouldn’t quit.
I got a phone call from the supervisor of “the Pizza Shop” wanting me to do a custom delivery map and guidebooks for a new area they were going to try to dominate. That led to another and another, until I had a little office/cubbyhole at their headquarters where I could cut and paste maps together and over-use their photocopier.
With a new supervisor, came objections of how much it was costing. Never mind that I was saving them tons of money on the time it took to train new drivers.
I went back to delivering pizzas… with the occasional trip to San Diego.
When you travel a lot, even if you can afford to pay cash, you inevitably use your credit cards to make airline, rental car and hotel reservations on-line. If you don’t pay attention, they can add up on you, especially if you have money to spare. 2004 rolled around and when resolutions were considered, I decided to forgo extra expenses like health insurance and started paying down a $20,000 credit card debt by sending Visa $1000 to $1250 a month and MasterCard $600, and did it without it even denting my budget.
With each passing year the economy slowed, and my business clients started cutting back on interior and advertising budgets. Clients couldn’t afford my landscapes for their offices and waiting rooms either. I found myself delivering pizzas more to make ends meet, but the tips were great towards those credit card bills; besides I liked the people I worked with. As the year progressed I'd spend more and more time in Columbus and delivered full time and did artwork less.
It wasn’t really a problem, in fact I was thinking of trying to heal the rift between myself and my father by getting some investment advice, because I had quite a tidy sum in the bank by then.
I'd still fly to San Diego on "business" occasionally. During the big fires I contributed cash backing to convert one of our warehouse/studios to temporary living quarters until they could get the insurance companies to help. I didn’t want a payback, I just liked helping people, I’ve lost count of how many people keep trying to read something sinister into that.
By October I'd completed all of the contracts I had for client’s Thanksgiving and Christmas graphics and newsprint ads. I settled into a well-deserved two-month hibernation over the holidays before I’d have to start working on “President’s Day” and Valentine stuff for the first quarter of 2005.
As usual by mid- October I’d get bored and “antsy”.
One particular pizza chain considered "full time" 33 hours!?! It was a good way to make fast extra money for big payments toward paying off my credit cards. It also meant extra pocket money towards Christmas presents and expenses if I wanted to fly out to see family in Pittsburgh or Oregon.
One thing I loved to do was to determine which of my friends were the neediest, then determine what I could do to help. This usually entailed driving around at about 3AM Christmas Eve, and leaving two or three bags of groceries on several doorsteps and sneaking away hopefully unnoticed. There were also the Christmas cards taped to the window of a friend’s front door window with an unsigned money order for between one or two hundred dollars.
No one had to know I’d done it. I knew and that was all that mattered. I’d start planning these sneak attacks months in advance, and have the route and a budget planned out by early October.
Little did I know it wouldn’t happen this year…
As the 2004 election went into a fever pitch, I chipped in and bought a bunch of copies of "Fahrenheit 911" to give out as door prizes at a sponsored "get out the vote" event at some of the local gay bars. One of the highlights was getting to meet John Kerry when he was in town along with Christopher Reeve's wife. Well, that's stretching it a little, I got to shake his hand for all of maybe five seconds, and exchange some chit-chat before he moved on to the next volunteer in the row. Four years later I'd be furious with him for dumping John Edwards to support Obama for president. I wasn't a big Edwards fan, but doesn't loyalty count for anything anymore?
November 2, 2004 I did my best to vote Bush out of office.
Four days later my life as I knew it would come to a crashing end. Not all at once mind you no, it is a slow painful death that almost five years later is still grinding me under its heel…
