PIMPS WHORES AND PATRONS OF VIRTUE

By SJ Manning

In this highly entertaining, informed, and intellectually challenging collection of personal anecdotes, essays, satires, ideologies and musings from his life, author Steve Manning delves anecdotally into the wonderful and often incomprehensible world of the human condition and spirit in all its spellbinding complexity.

PIMPS WH

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: Jan 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781649906250

SJ Manning

Some people collect stamps, memorabilia, music, dolls, Zippo lighters, bottle caps, stamps, Happy Meal toys, rocks, bad habits ... Manning collects People and Stories. Steve asserts to lead a preposterously fulfilling life. That tends to happen to people who will try and fail to read everything in print and online, talk to anybody about anything, anywhere, anytime. And then try to live all of that. His "Life Is Not A Dress Rehearsal" and "A Life Without Passion Is A Life Not Worth Living" philosophies are on his omnipresent imaginary teleprompter. He was born and raised until his teens in Communist Romania. After a delightful stretch as near homeless in Rome, with a great escape story to tell, his family finally settled in Woody Allen's den of mediocre intellect, Los Angeles, where he continues to reside. Enduring La La Land made possible by hard-earned access to the rest of the world, courtesy of Boeing and Airbus aircraft, and well-used and beefy-limits credit cards backed by success in business. Large fingers notwithstanding, Steve has been pounding his keyboard for many years, right through a highly accomplished business life. He is credited with the origination of prominent creative and empirical concepts, strategies and techniques widely used today in the marketing and advertising world. Steve is a recognized expert in a number of fields including marketing, advertising, corporate governance and conflict resolution. He is also a consultant to typically successful people and businesses on a variety of matters, disciplines, challenges, and issues real and often imagined. Many of Steve's written pieces have been widely circulated around the world. His white papers, treatments, compositions, analyses and position papers are frequently requested by boards and CEOs to complement their vision. As are speeches (and eulogies) he has been asked to pen... His passions are his family of fantastic women, his challenging friends, few and all much smarter than he, writing for fun and profit, competitive tennis and skiing, everything horsepower, and public speaking on two continents. His Clean Thoughts On A Dirty Wall is the most unique and intelligent social, political and all-about-life opinion, ideas and debate community site on earth, presently on hiatus to the chagrin of its worldwide constituency. In his daily four to five hours of idle time, he sleeps really well and asserts to never snore.

Book preview

ÚGENE

ENTER ÚGENE

E

arly afternoon, that Sunday, mother opened the door to a large, handsome man, whose bountiful swept-back gray hair matched his impeccable gray suit. He threw his arms around Mother and announced, I’m your cousin Úgene! Handsome woman, she was. My father, sitting at the dining room table with my uncle Alex, uncle Alex getting his just about daily intellectual drubbing from my father, took notice of the good-looking man giving Mother a substantial bear hug and asked who he was. Cousin Úgene restated his claim to be a cousin.

Thus, enter Uncle Úgene.

Actually, thus enter Uncle Úgene and his two very large Pullman suitcases. To my great alarm, the suitcases were just about large enough to fill the small living room in our apartment, also my sleeping quarters. He dumped those on the floor and told Mother that one of them was for her. With that, he unceremoniously tossed its contents on the floor: nothing but hotel towels! I soon learned that taking towels from hotels was a passion bordering on obsession for Uncle Úgene. As I entered my adulthood, I discovered that I shared that passion with uncle Úgene. I did refine the expression of that passion by only taking towels from the finest hotels. I have bills after the fact from some of the finest hotels in the world to show for that. Appears they inventory those five-hundred-dollar-a-piece bath towels. Uncle Úgene was a classic addict: an ill-gotten towel was a prize, its origins notwithstanding. The second suitcase's contents were also for mother, although temporarily. He wanted those back. Lots of laundry.

Uncle Alex's critically annoying total recall was only matched by his general uselessness in all other things—well, he did have a significant reputation for prowess with married women. In other words, his long memory was matched only by the length of his penis, or so it was fabled (hmm, he lived with us for years, and I recall not being particularly impressed). He and Father were joined at the table by the now-unjacketed Uncle Úgene. Actually, Uncle Úgene was in boxer shorts and a wife beater. What transpired was typical of my two uncles and very unnerving to father: my perhaps-undocumented new uncle and Alex spent the next six hours going over every family member both recalled, everyone they knew—in the case of Uncle Alex, that was equivalent to the entire adult populations of several countries—everyone they met in labor camps in the forties, and everyone that had made the news up to that day in the preceding century.

A touch past midnight, father gave up on the family thing, Uncle Alex stated that he was going to stay with his research for the foreseeable future, and Uncle Úgene announced that he was hungry again and spending the night on our living room couch. Later for me.

Worse. He told me that he had a structural problem with his bones and he needed frequent massages to relieve the severe joint pains he experienced all the time. I was not only displaced from my couch, I was looking at having to massage that guy. Uncle Úgene. I was happy to learn that what he wanted me to do was to literally walk up and down on his back. From the neck to his lower back. I suggested that my two hundred pounds would break his spine. His belly laugh suggested otherwise. The sounds coming from that beast as he lay on the floor and I walked up and down on his back for the next half an hour—years later, courtesy of a couple of Spielberg films, I learned that those sounds were quite Jurassic in nature.

The more I walked, the more he roared; the more he roared, the more I walked.

That was my first night with Uncle Úgene. He on the couch, sleeping in his starched, ironed, and pleated underpants, and I on the floor, no longer alone in my bedroom, unable to satisfy myself as any self-respecting sixteen-year-old boy should do regularly.

Of course, Uncle Úgene was down to those shorts while getting his back massage, my mother's presence of no concern to him. After all, he was among family.

Turned out that Uncle Úgene was a dealer in very special and unique art, the kind of stuff that only the people who knew wanted, and price was never an object. The kind of stuff that people sold only if they could buy something similar, just better. So between his trips back and forth among the clients, each trip with a mandatory and less-than-productive stop in Las Vegas, he made some adult money. By the way, he lived in Canada. We, in Woody Allen's intellectual anchor, LA. Back and forth he went from home to LA, always staying with the family.

Each trip set off yet another sojourn for Uncle Alex into his immense memory to find a trace of a relationship between Uncle Úgene and us. Mother and father gave up. Hell, Uncle Úgene was cool in most respects—the towels came in handy, although their value fell far short of that of the immense quantity of quality food he consumed.

And I walked a few hundred miles on that wailing beast's back in our living room and if mother's admonitions pertinent to self-gratification were accurate, probably saved my eyesight.

Never let important stuff out of your sight, he told me.

I came to understand that meant things of value that one did not own. Uncle Úgene did not believe much in shipping stuff. Insurance was a concept invented for lesser men than he. He had the stuff with him. All the time. So back and forth he went between Canada and LA, with stops in a couple cities in the United States mandated by peddling the stuff and the mandatory stop in Las Vegas. He had no clients there. He just always made a stop there.

Of course, airplane travel was not conducive to having the stuff with him. So back and forth he went by car, occasionally with a small trailer behind his car. Always a new Oldsmobile. Always new. Always an Oldsmobile. At least they started out new at the beginning of each trip.

Uncle Úgene would fill his small trailer and drive across the country and some of Canada with his stuff. Other people's stuff, to be accurate. The way it worked was that client one wanted something that client two had. Client two did not want to sell it, did not need to sell it. Unless of course he could get the other thing that client three had. So back and forth he went until somehow everybody got something they wanted more.

Claude Monet was his trade.

And, of course, he made the obligatory stops in Las Vegas.

The trailer. Keeping with his belief that real men always had control of their important stuff, he would always stay overnight at motels where the cars were parked right outside the motel doors. That diminished the value of our relationship with him; motels seldom have bath-size, high-thread-count cotton towels worth taking. Of course, Uncle Úgene added a dimension to motel stays. He would have management remove a window from his room. He would back the trailer with its back gate wide open, flush with the open window of his room. He would then climb through the window into his room and have the window replaced. That way he was secure in his newly expanded quarters with his stuff firmly under his control.

Then there were trips without the trailer. Just Uncle Úgene, one item of stuff, a real schedule to keep, and some obscure reason for haste. Airplane ride? No. New Oldsmobile, Uncle Úgene's driving ensemble, and a forty-eight-hour trip from here to there. Actually, for him, that was ordinary and customary. Put on the drip-dry khakis, burned after each trip, the short-sleeve shirt, set the cruise control on ninety, and stop for gas and bathrooms only. Always eat while on cruise control—saves time and assures proximity to one's important stuff. Sleep was for lesser men with less important missions.

The food. Uncle Úgene was big on fresh fruit. Really big. Especially liked cantaloupes. Ripe, soft, aromatic cantaloupes. Very aromatic. Cantaloupes in alarming quantities. Stevie, he told me, nectar of the gods. We disagree there. Everybody in the know knows that Diet Mountain Dew is the actual nectar of the gods. So at the onset of each trip, Uncle Úgene would buy a crate of cantaloupes and subsist on those for the two or three days of his trip.

Wow. How does one cut and clean out the insides of a cantaloupe at ninety miles per hour while driving? According to Uncle Úgene, that lacks relevance relative to the compelling reasons for his haste and the near-orgasmic thrill of eating a ripe, soft, aromatic cantaloupe. All you need is cruise control, a knife, a spoon, and an open window.

That accounts for the new car for each trip.

Keep it until I get back. So I got to have a new Oldsmobile for a year while Uncle Úgene was fleeting about two continents, peddling stuff, always making a stop in Las Vegas. Hell, he would go from New York to Chicago and make a stop in Las Vegas. The Oldsmobile's odometer had precisely the miles that a one-way, cross-country trip generated. I had an expensive new car for a whole year! That was also the year when I had a head cold for about seven months. One can get that having to drive with all windows open all the time. Regrettably, Eau du Cantaloupe was not a big hit with barely-postpubescent ladies.

There were trips taken sans new Oldsmobile. Like the one during which Uncle Úgene was nailed twenty-eight hundred miles inside Mother Russia with no less than a railroad car full of Levi's 504s, of questionable origin. In 1968. Something about his brother having smuggled the jeans into Russia and costing Úgene some $400,000 to save his sorry behind from rotting in prison forever. Who knew he had a brother who was a quality rogue.

IT'S NOT THE THING, IT'S THE PROCESS

This is the first and most important lesson in understanding people and resolving conflicts, courtesy of Uncle Úgene. Was he ever right. I built a whole career on the back of that concept.

It's not the thing, Stevie, he bellowed, always with his arm around my shoulders. He was a tremendously physical guy. Always making contact. He enveloped anybody he was with, physically and verbally. No matter if he actually knew the person. Relative to mother, I thought that was just a convenient cheap thrill for him. Otherwise, he could charm the skin off a snake by just putting his hand on it and giving it an Uncle Úgene smile.

It's the process that makes one happy. Not the thing.

So there. At the time, I did not get it. But by then he was quickly becoming my idol—not for his sagaciousness but for what his wife told me about their wedding night. More on that later.

We went to the local discount drugstore on what Uncle Úgene described as a mission. I never quite saw a trip to the drugstore as a mission after the old guy with the bushy eyebrows threw me out when I tried to buy my first condom there. For years afterward going to the drugstore was more like that dream lots of boys have, the one where you absolutely have to go to school and you are not wearing any pants. I didn’t get that one until well into college. At about thirty-five, I also met the first pharmacist who did not have out-of-control, bushy eyebrows. At least I think he was a pharmacist: he could read any handwriting and dealt in controlled