Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

I swallowed as he turned and left, nodding as I watched him walking down the pier, back to his place. The accusation echoed inside me. A drunk? I’m a drunk? Coming from a pimp, the word drunk had special impact. I leaned over the railing and let the bottle fall into the waves.

The next morning I picked up the prototype Disney mirrors and caught a plane home.

Tom the Disney buyer was furious when I got back. He’d gotten a call from the California mirror maker asking how he liked the prototypes. I wasn’t too surprised—the guy was just trying to take the account away; it’s business. Tom was mad because he thought we were going to make the mirrors. Tom said that unless we made them ourselves, he’d have to buy them from the California guy. Disney mirror business was folding up before my eyes.

Don Holmes called that night. He had a solution. He had a very rich friend at Cape Canaveral who’d back Don and me to set up mirror production. Just Don and me. No room for Mike or Bruce. Don’s rich friend had a giant warehouse where we could set up the factory. Yeah, but if I did this, I would be abandoning Bruce. We worked together. We started this company. “The company is dead, Bob,” Don said. “The Disney deal is going to the California guy if we don’t make them.” Truth hurts.

I decided to start a mirror company with Don.

I went with him to Cape Canaveral to meet the rich guy, John McLeod.

McLeod was an old, lean, silver-haired hawk who glared and yelled at people. He leaned across his desk and stared at me. He was good, reminded me of some of the Army bullshit—staring into people’s eyes to make them nervous. “You can get this thing going for five thousand?” he said, almost shouting.

“Right. I’ve already got suppliers for all the stuff we need, and I know how to make the mirrors.”

“So what would you do if I said okay, here’s the five grand?”

“You give me the five thousand today, John, and I’ll have a contract from Disney tomorrow.”

McLeod smiled. “You can get a purchase order from Disney tomorrow?”

“Yes.” Maybe.

“Great. A man of action. Do it.”

Don and I drove to Orlando the next morning and told Tom about our new backer, and our new company, Mirage Design. Gave him the price he wanted. We left Orlando with a purchase order for twelve hundred mirrors.

McLeod was impressed. He invited us out to dinner with a bunch of his friends and bragged about our Disney deal (”Fucker said he’d get a purchase order from Disney and damned if he didn’t!”). He told us we had two rooms at a seaside motel, all expenses paid, while we got our factory organized.

Despite a warning from one of McLeod’s former friends at the motel—McLeod says these things, but he exaggerates—we took John at his word and lived it up. We had expensive dinners two nights running and one night I spent two hours on the phone telling friends all over the country I’d made the big time. When next we saw John, he was livid with rage about my phone bill, claimed we were con artists abusing his generosity, and insisted that we sign a contract he’d just had drawn up that turned all the money we made on the first Disney order over to him. He’d pay us two hundred a week to live on. We signed. Without McLeod, we had nothing.

For weeks Patience and I, Don and his wife, Celeste, and Don’s brother, Jeff, washed sheets of glass and cut them to size. I made the photo silkscreens. Don and Jeff printed the designs, I silvered the mirrors, Jeff sprayed the backing paint on, Patience and Celeste framed the mirrors and put them into boxes. We were a feverish band of hardworking desperadoes.

The pressure to make the mirrors on time made everybody tense as snakes. Disney insisted on timely delivery; McLeod said we were goofing off. One night, Don and I got into an argument about me being on the phone too much. What? Hey, I’m the brains here. I make the deals—Don grabbed me by the throat. Don’s a strong man, but I could feel he wasn’t squeezing to kill me, just pissed. I stared at him until he let go. Then I went on a rampage, yelled about asshole ingrates trying to murder me, and broke some mirrors. Everybody started screeching like a tribe of panicked baboons and got it out of our systems. Then we went back to work.

We finished the first batch on time, rented a truck, and delivered them to Orlando.

Don went to New York City looking for cheap frames and met Abe Weiner, a mirror maker from Brooklyn. Weiner was impressed by a Aubry Beardsley mirror I’d made. He said that Don and I should come back up and talk to him. He wanted to make decorated mirrors, and we knew how.

I told Don the guy was bullshitting us. Weiner called us a couple of times in Florida. I was still suspicious of his generosity. He was persistent. He asked us to fly up at his expense and talk about it. “Just talk, that’s all I ask.”