Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

Colonial Mirror, a couple of big buildings near the docks in Brooklyn, was funky compared to the slick California factory I’d seen, but it turned out more mirrors. Abe, a big man with a friendly grin, wearing a business suit, showed us around the place, introducing us to a few of his employees: Blackie, a dark fireplug of a man who ran the loading crews, and Louis, the Puerto Rican watchman and neighborhood “manager” who was eventually knifed across the street in a card game he ran. Abe hired local talent, and his factory was seldom molested.

Abe asked what it would take to get us to move to New York. Don and I had discussed this and had come up with a package we believed would make Abe choke; we’d find out how serious he was. I said, “You make us partners and officers in a subsidiary called Mirage Design. You pay all our moving costs; pay us twenty thousand a year [this was considered pretty good in 1975] and ten percent of the profits.” Then I tacked on health insurance and paid vacations. Wham!

Abe had a look on his face to suggest we were a couple of astute entrepreneurs putting the clamps on him. He smiled and said, “I think we can handle that.” My heart sank. Should’ve said, how much you willing to pay? Forgot all my goddamn car-selling training.

A few days later, Abe and his dad, Benjamin Weiner, flew down and inspected our operation. Mr. Weiner, though expressing shock at the crudeness of our makeshift operation, was nevertheless impressed that we actually made the mirrors ourselves. At the airport in Orlando, the Weiners declared we had a deal.

We visited Gainesville before we left Florida, inviting our friends to a restaurant south of town for a party. I partied hard, got too drunk, stumbled into the men’s room, and fell down on the tile floor for a nap. When I woke up, I saw a guy drying his hands with a wad of brown paper towels staring down at me, his face screwed up with disgust.

CHAPTER 7

June 1975—Dressed in a three-piece suit, Abe pushed a cart through a department store in Staten Island, loading it with sheets, pillows, plates, silverware—to furnish an apartment he’d gotten for us—commenting on each item’s suitability. Don and I weren’t allowed to make a choice: Abe knew best. It was funny to see a millionaire worry about such minutiae.

Our new factory, a Colonial Mirror warehouse on Twenty-eighth Street near Fourth Avenue, about four blocks from the docks in Brooklyn, was a shabby building in a run-down neighborhood. Abandoned cars littered the street and the warehouse was surrounded by low, drab apartment buildings. Most of the people in the neighborhood were Hispanics who’d work for the minimum wage, which is one reason why people set up factories in Brooklyn.

Inside there was nothing except some pallets of glass and seventy-five hundred square feet of concrete floor. The place was hot in the summer and cold in the winter. My stomach sank. We were expected to create a mirror factory in this warehouse and fulfill outstanding orders to Disney in just a few weeks. Should I tell them now I didn’t know how to create real factories?

I was having terrible hangovers in the mornings. This was new. My mother-in-law, Constance Hartwell, a shrink with alcoholic patients, always said I was doing serious damage to myself with alcohol. Was she right? She’d been sending me vitamin B pills for years with little notes saying they might help prevent permanent brain damage, the sweetheart. Okay. I knew normal people who drank wine with their meals. I could be moderate, too. I switched to wine. I drank wine before, during, and after meals until I was drunk enough to fall asleep. Still had hangovers, but not as bad.

Don and I discovered very quickly that we really knew nothing about setting up factories. All we really had was the courage to try doing the things we thought might work.

Patience and I had rented the bottom floor of a two-family house in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. We gave Jack a key and he took care of himself. Jack was growing up fast. At eleven, he was going to school in the neighborhood and learning to play basketball at the local court. Patience and I were rarely home until dinnertime. We had gotten into a routine of twelve-hour workdays, shorter Saturdays, off Sundays. (Patience and I were together twenty-four hours a day, something many people can’t do and stay married. I think our previous debacles brought us closer together.) Our only friends, other than Don and Celeste, were Bill and Emmy Smith, who lived in Manhattan.