Were it not for my daughter, I wouldn't recognize the famous people whom I have met over the years. When I say "famous" I mean the celebrities and the trash, not the politicians. I can recognize over three hundred members of Congress and I can recognize thousands of fellow Republicans. The chair of the Republican Party in Southwest Kentucky is a celebrity to me, whereas, my daughter had to explain to me one time how it came to be that I had given some fellow named Steven Tyler financial assistance and advice.
Mr. Tyler was a rock musician from Boston who was in a band called the Jefferson Aerosmith or the Hot Buttered Beaver Bumpers--I cannot remember which. I came of age in the early 1960s, so all pop music sounds the same to me. There's a beat, a saxophone, and then you sing in a husky voice very fast, with lots of oohs and ahhs and the girls scream.
Financially, the fellow was a disaster. He came to my firm by way of being dumped on our front steps by some friends of his who wanted to unload him when he was unconscious--they made the mistake that many did in those days in Manhattan by thinking our building was a hospital. No mater how glum and unhappy we made the building, people thought it was a hospital and would regularly dump injured New Yorkers in the foyer and run away. Once in a blue moon, an ambulance would unload a gurney and roll into into the lobby and let the gurney roll across the floor until it inevitably went down the stairs into the basement or rolled into an open elevator. We would watch from 24th floor as the ambulance drivers would scatter and leave their patient in our building. A man who worked for me, briefly, named Peej found Mr. Tyler with seven needles sticking out of his arm and his face caked with what appeared to be watered-up baking soda. Peej, being ever the good citizen, cleaned him up, discarded the needles and brought him to me.
He mumbled a lot, and his eyes were winky-wonky, which means they rolled around a lot and blinked in normal light. He was a strange looking fellow who would burst into song and then cry, then laugh, then cry, then rock himself quietly for a moment before looking at his index finger and calling it Greg, and then he would burst into a song, cry, laugh hysterically, cry, cry some more, spin on the floor, do a backflip and try to lick the doorknobs. Other than that, he seemed perfectly fine to me. Music industry people are colorful. I should know! I was a pop star like Tyler at one point, but I believe my musical career came after he was unceremoniously dumped on our property. I think I met Tyler in 1982, if I'm not mistaken.
Anyway, the problem with his portfolio was easily explained by doing a simple examination of what was happening in his business situation:
He was EARNING exactly
no dollars and cents.He was SPENDING approximately
$7,987,897.34 per yearHe had NET WORTH of
negative $12,098,456.67Normally, you look at a client like that and you exclaim, "trust fund baby!" and you quietly have security escort them from the property. But because Mr. Tyler was a creative person who seemed to have numerous young women following him around, I accepted the challenge.
The first thing we did was, I assigned Peej to be his personal chef, confidante and friend. Peej had to teach Mr. Tyler to stop urinating in closets and to stop trying to lick doorknobs--really, where does a habit like that come from? And, Peej had to stop Mr. Tyler from spending money that he didn't have.
The second thing was, I negotiated away all of his publishing rights and his ownership of the Jefferson Aerosmith back catalogue of musical recordings for pennies on the dollar in order to give him about twelve thousand dollars to play with on the stock market. I leveraged a few offshore companies in the Orient with that money, quickly forcing through a deal whereby we dumped alarm clocks and cheap telephones into the European market--this created a wave of profits back into the company that covered our loans. I repeated the process with South America and Africa--dumping cheap products into those countries through trade loopholes and reaping enormous profits. Then, I liquidated the companies and transferred the capital to a Zurich bank, whereby I bought up wheat futures and made a massive killing when the Reagan Administration opened sales back up to the Soviet Union--yes, I had a little inside info.
That profit was rolled into a scheme to defraud the Mexican government on a land deal that I concocted with some bogus Swedish investors lined up as window dressing. They were compliant because they owed me favors for getting them out of a limousine rental company partnership with a crazed Lebanese man with ties to the Yakuza. The Mexicans lost 12 million US, I dispatched the Swedes with 300K and gave Steven Tyler exactly a hundred thousand dollars, and told him to spend it wisely. In four hours, he came back asking for more money, so I said what the hell and gave him twenty bucks and locked the front door. The rest of the money went into my pocket--all in a day's work. Even though I stopped giving him his money, he kept coming around. I think the problem was because his hobo town was nearby. He was mayor of a hobo town of some kind.
The third thing I tried to teach Mr. Tyler was to walk a certain way. A man walks with his arms flapping, always in motion, ready to fend off attackers or launch an attack.
Women sashay; men plunder.Not much of it sunk in. Mr. Tyler would often look at me and mumble something about being tired of walking around with banana peels under his arms and in clothes that smelled like they had been left under a car all night outside. That's actually where he slept--under a car in the alleyway outside of our building, at least for a time.
It was a sad day when sanitation workers destroyed his hobo town, drove off his band of hobo groupies and forced them all to stagger up Seventh avenue, wearing satin pants, gypsy shirts, and scarves from every part of their body. I tried wearing a scarf knotted around my neck once--abandoned the look. It made me look too ethnic.
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