Small Room Under Stairs
Do you know what it’s like to get down and dirty with a Playboy bunny when you’re only eight years old? Well this is how it happened with me.
The hallway closet in our house on Santa Maria was a nifty place. It had a Watts line in it from the previous owners, which consisted of a lot of mechanisms. But even better than in the closet was under the closet.
One day, my older brother Britt said, “Johnnie, come with me.” I got down on my hands and knees and followed him through a small opening in the side of the house. I was on my stomach, inching forward on the dirt with the pipes of the house above my head. The going was slow and we passed several walls and traversed a hundred feet or more and then I saw Britt disappear. Upon inspection he had climbed up a small hole in the wood. I followed. I found myself in a small room that was a room under the stairway. I thought it was super neat. A playboy magazine was in there. Britt said he found it in there and it was to stay in the room forever.
For some reason I never went back in after that day. Perhaps due to all the dirt and grunge. Plus I knew where to find a Playboy magazine in Britt’s collection, little did he know (I also knew where his gun was hidden in a secret compartment of his desk).
One day, years later, I decided to go look for the Playboy magazine in the secret room. I got there, entered the room but the magazine was gone. What a disappointment but a lesson in how good looking, sexy, women seem to vanish in the wind.
Venetian Pool
This story is very similar to the one about tree tag in the special tree but perhaps a bit more interesting. If you’ve never been to Venetian Pool in coral Gables, you must go, no matter where you live. It’s the most special pool, perhaps in the whole world. I’ve seen a few pools on a mountain side in Guadalajara, Spain that come close but they only come close and are no match for Venetian Pool.
Venetian Pool is a natural pool with real caves and cliffs. It is very, very large and looks like something you’d find in a perfectly designed Italian village in Venice.
As a child, I became an expert on every inch of Venetian pool. Why? For tag. To be able to get away from three eager siblings was a daunting task. I’ll break with my own code of silence on some tricks to Venetian pool. I’ve never told anyone until now, that is, if I consider my computer to be someone and I don’t so it’s still a secret for now.
I’d swim into a cave and I’d make sure that they all saw me go in, though they were counting to 20 with their eyes shut. Then I’d swim through the hole in a wall leading to another cave. I’d catch my breath and swim under water all the way out of the cave and to the opposite side of the pool, into a sort of corner. But if was an ordinary corner they would have found me. This area has a small indentation in the wall. I’d sneak into the indentation and when they would come by I’d go under water and hold my breath until they were gone. I could look out from behind the edge of my hole and see when they were coming.
I think the cliff diving area was out of bounds because it faces my hiding spot.
I can’t tell you how much fun we had at that pool. Tons. There was a small candy shop in the main building which they did away with after 10 years or so. I was so sad. It was such a quaint store, just made for kids, like out of a story book of Hansel and Grettle.
I hope you go to Venetian Pool one day. It has a small beach for you to hang out on. If you have kids, bring them. They will never forget it. It can be as much or more fun than Disney World.
Tree Tag in the special tree
My younger sisters Nancy and Miriam and my younger brother Robert (David was not born until later) and I had a very special tree in the Northwest corner of our house on Santa Maria. We had other trees on the property. We had two huge Fichus trees, perhaps the largest in all of the Gables and they were fun to climb but the special tree was unlike any tree I had ever seen or have seen since. I wish I knew the species but I don’t (the tree has been dead for some time now)
Anyway, the tree was about forty feet high and forty feet wide. It had what seemed like zillions of branches veering off in all directions. Throughout the maze of a hundred branches that were all close to one another, we played the most fun games of tag.
My grandmother installed a jungle gym under the tree so we’d come home from school, climb up the jungle gym and into the tree.
It was the three of them against me usually. They hardly ever caught me eventhough each of them is a fine athlete. I had too many places to go to and I was the oldest and tallest of the four. I’d perch on a limb and just as they were about to get me I’d leap through the air and onto another branch. We all had the tree figured out but I was too fast and slick. I’m not bragging at all, just telling it the way it was. Just ask Nancy if you don’t believe me.
Beach Property & Penrods
Back in about 1986, I was asked by Day McKee to be on a South Beach committee to bring Spring Break to Miami Beach. Fort Lauderdale had just passed new laws prohibiting certain vehicles from traveling on the main drag and other prohibitive legislation was putting a damper on spring break in Fort Lauderdale.
I accepted. A group of us and the Vice Mayor flew around the country with promotional material. Having grown up in Miami and in the real estate business I knew South Beach (all of the beach for that matter) would explode one day. The day was soon approaching.
I had inside information that Penrods was going to build a multi million dollar building on land leased for basically nothing. The location was first street and Ocean Drive.
I was on break from U of Penn at the time. I also had the most beautiful and charming girlfriend in Miami.
What I would do would be purchase the first building next to Penrods. It was going to be mine for sure. I could feel it with certainty. I had the money to do the deal.
My mom had received one of the largest divorce settlements in Florida history of three million in after tax cash to be paid over ten years and her million dollar house, $500,000 in Jewels and a million or less in other property. My mom had about $200,000 in the bank and she would have given every cent to me at the asking to buy cars or whatever I wanted. And I did want. I wanted the hotel and it was for sale for about a little over $500,000.
I could have purchased it probably with the cash and the owner holding a purchase money mortgage but my plan was to keep negotiations to zero and come in with all cash. I needed about $300,000 more.
While this is going on in my head, I had a roommate named Peter Weinbach who was telling me to come back to school. He said that I could always make money but there was one opportunity to go to school. Also, my girlfriends grandmother told me to go back to school. But I wasn’t listening to them!
I decided to go to the easiest place to get quick money and that was Metropolitan Mortgage. My mom’s house was free and clear and the deal could be done the same day probably or within a few days.
I was in the office of Metropolitan Mortgage and things were going well. Boy does this hurt to think of this in such exact detail. The mortgage broker left the room and I picked up the phone on the desk and called another bank. I was curious to see how much more I’d be paying in interest at Metropolitan though I truly didn’t care. I was just curious.
Just as I was hanging up the phone the man walked back in the room and asked me who I was calling. When I told him a bank, he lost all control and started yelling. Very unprofessional. I was so disturbed by his behavior that I left the bank with my mom by my side.
I decided to go back to school after that day. If I had just put the phone back down two seconds earlier.
Six months later, I returned form school to find an article in the Miami Herald. It showed a photo of the same hotel and the headlines were something like, “hotel goes up in value more than any other property in Miami’s history.” It made me sick because not only did I not finish school but a judge took the control of my mom’s money away from her and placed a bank as guardian of her money (the second such case in Fl history, I think) . to make matters worse I had lost my girlfriend due to some stupid mistakes that I never would have made if I had stayed in Miami.
I drove out to the hotel. That day I got sick. Not mentally sick but physically sick. I had lost my one chance to make it big and it’s as if I had thrown it away in pride that I could do such a thing and go back to school. I probably would have become a major developer on the beach as it had not even taken off yet.
Instead I had to deal with the likes of Heinz First (story herein).
Nancy and the Swing
My younger sister Nancy and I went to Alexander Montessori, near kings Bay, when we were kids. I was very protective of Nancy and we had a close relationship.
The playground had all types of fun rides. It was my favorite place. There was a metal wire that hanged from one side of the playground to the other and we could grab onto a device and fly across the playground like James Bond.
One sunny day I was swinging on a hippopotamus or something like that. It was a large animal that was attached to a swing set, something that you don’t see very often.
I was swinging when a teacher called my name. There was a phone call for me. I saw my sister Nancy and asked her to save my swing, that I’d be right back.
When I came back a few minutes later, Nancy’s whole face and body was bloody. She was gushing blood from a wound to her head. Nancy had done as I had asked and saved my swing. A boy came along and took it from her and she protested even as he was swinging and got bashed in the head.
Good thing we were all hard headed. I remember the incident as if it were yesterday. Nancy bears a scar, on her forehead, to this day. Nancy, show Steven the scar if you can find it.
My Cars
I’ve had so many cars, I’m not going to list them all. Three in particular come to mind. My first car was a hand me down from my older sister – a reddish ____________. I can’t stand red cars but I had no choice.
I met a girl and I slept at her house somewhere in the Kendall area. No fooling around or sex, I just slept there because back then I was real shy, didn’t know what to do and plus I was waiting for a special someone.
In the morning the girl became fearful that her mother would see me and I had to leave the house quickly.
I got into the ____________ and I drove away. I was still half asleep. I was driving down a street and I passed a stop sign that was hidden by some branches. I saw it coming…
I car, going about 50 mph, hit me on the front, passenger side and spun my car around so I was facing the direction that I had just come from. I was fine. I looked out the window and saw a car hobbling or wobbling down the road and then curve into a yard.
I got out and ran down to the car. I looked in and there was a woman with her head on the steering wheel and she was not moving. The car was still running. There were eggs on the floor of the car. Some people were around talking about getting into the car, through the locked doors. I left matters in their hands and went inside the house where the car had landed to make a phone call. I called my mom and said, “you’re not going to believe what just happened.” She said, “you were in an accident.” Mothers seem to know things.
I don’t remember what happened after that but I did know that the woman was fine.
Now I wanted a Schirocco. My dad said no and purchased me a white Firebird with a red interior – horrible. But it was my car and I dealt with it. I owned 2 soon to be 3 condominiums by this time and I could have sold them and purchased a Ferrari but I stuck with the Firebird. I knew my dad was modest and I understood it. He had come from a poor family and he wasn’t going to buy me a $30,000 car.
Then, soon after I graduated from high school I went out and purchased my own car, with my own credit and cash. The cash, $5,000, was given to me by my grandmother for my birthday and the credit was my own. I had perfect credit at 18 perhaps some of the best of any kid in the nation with condo’s to my name and a perfect payment history on various loans and credit cards.
I purchased a limited edition Saab. It was black with a beige leather interior and I think it was turbo. It had special rims that were something like alloy and special trim all around the car. The rear window had black vents and the windows had a plastic shield that I had never seen on any other car as did the sun roof.
The car looked like it was ready to take off. I would pull up to other Saabs and feel a bit ashamed that my car looked so much better than theirs. Mine was better looking by far. You could hardly tell they were the same company. I mean, someone goes out and spends all that money on a car and then another Saab pulls up to it and makes it look like junk.
Heinz First and the Hotel
I finished with Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania and returned, prematurely, to Miami to work in the commercial real estate field. I had long since had my license. However, in 1986, there was a real estate recession and it was tough going.
I was searching Miami Beach for a listing or a deal and I came upon the son of the owner of a medium sized hotel, on the beach side (East side). The son and I hit it off real well and it turned out that I would put a deal together -- not to list but to buy the building. The owner would hold a lot of paper, millions, but I needed several hundred thousand to make the deal work. I was not getting along with my dad at that time so I had to turn to another source of income.
Through Don d’Adesky I found a man named Heinz First. He owned a charter business from Europe to Miami Beach. His clients stayed in whatever hotel they wanted to on the beach of in the Miami Area. Here was a captive audience. Mr. First had the customers to fill up the hotel day after day and to keep it full.
Mr. first and I were to be partners. He came out to meet me and to look at the hotel. He was a very large man, very fat. I recall him walking up on the roof of the building to inspect it. I admired that but found it hard to believe that he could do it.
I spent a lot of money renovating a room facing the water and hiring a model and photographer to make a brochure of the hotel. To renovate the room I picked up a man on the side of the road who had a sign that read I will work for food. The man turned out to be a great worker. He slept in the room. I brought him food and paid him money. When The room was finished I purchased a large, new, TV and VCR. I left them in the box and was to plug them in the next day. In the morning I came back to the room – and guess what? The TV and the worker were gone. No biggy.
The deal was in the works with a contract and the closing was coming up. A week before closing, Mr. First died of a heart attack. The deal died as well as I did not pursue it. I’ve always known that I’m a great dribbler.
One day, many months later, I was driving and saw the man who stole my TV. I called the police and we all met up on the side of the road. I was yelling at the man, saying, "“ gave you a job, a place to live, food and money and what did you do?” “You stole my TV.” The police told me to shut up and that they could not arrest him because I did not actually see him take the TV.
Cool Poems etc., in Spanish
My step-mom told me the following when I was in Spain.
Por falto de un Claavo, se perdio la heradura
Por falto de la heradura se perdio el caballo
Por falto de un caballo se perdio la batalla
Por falto de la batalla se perdio la guerra
Y todo por falto de un clavo.
A Central American girl named Glafe taught me the following:
Estaba la calavera sentada en una butaca
Entonces la madre le dijo
?Hija porque estas tan flaca?
Now the trick is to substitute one vowel for all the vowels in the above saying. For example, out of a, e, I , o ,u let’s pick I and substitute it into the above for all the vowels.
Istibi li ciliviri sintidi in ini bitici
Intincis li midri li dihi
?Hiji piqii istis tin fici?
It sounds funny and generates a good laugh. You can do the same with the other vowels. It may take a few days to get good at it. It’s like having your own language, especially if you switch the substitute vowel as you go along.
My good friend Miriam Andarez taught me the following, by Jose Marti, that almost every Cuban knows.
Cultivo una rosa blaca en Junio como en enero
Para mi amigi sincero que me da su mano franca
Y para el cruel que me aranca el corazon con que vivo
Cardos ni ortigas cultivo
Cultivo la rosa blanca.
Speaking of Rolando, he’s one of the funniest people I know. One night a boy was coming over to their house in the Roads to pick up their young daughter of 18. This is a true story. The boy took a seat in the living room. Rolando began to question the boy. What does your father do? What this and what that? Then he asked, do you smoke pot? The boy said, “no sir.” “do you drink beer or alcohol?” Oh, no sir. Well then, what time will you have my daughter back home tonight. The boy said, “by 10 pm sir.” Rolando said to his daughter, “I don’t want you dating this goodie two shoes, he’s no fun.”
Haiti and the Sunken Boat
Don d’Adesky was my best friend since I was two. His father Pierre owned a resort in Haiti called Kiona Beach. Don and I would visit Kiona as kids and do all sorts of neat things. We’d skin dive in the pure blue green water and hunt for special shells that grew on the sea fans. Then we’d eat all sort of good food in the restaurant, For snacks we’d eat Keneps.
Then Pierre sold the resort and purchased another called Kaloa Beach that was larger and more elegant. At Kaloa we ha a go cart and we’d drive it all day. Besides ride horses, go carting is all we did for fun. Then we’d relax in the pool with a glass of Citroen and some Keneps and we’d be back out on the go cart. The go cart chain would always break and we’d get it fixed the same hour. Our plan was to venture into the far off mountains but we never made it that far.
One day my sister Nancy and Lisa d’Adesky (they were best friends too) asked us to come along on a boat ride. Don and I were having too much fun on the go cart. We said no.
When Nancy came back she relayed a most horrific story. A large boat full of Haitians was on the ocean and it capsized. There were boats nearby but the boaters would hit the Haitians with sticks and not allow them to come aboard.
Pierre swam under the capsized boat with a rope, tied it to the bow and using his boat tried to pull the boat upright.
The next day I was walking with Jo El, a big employee, and he told me that bodies would soon start to drift ashore. Sure enough Jo El found a few bodies. Lucky for me I didn’t see any. This story may not sound like much but when you’re a kid and your sister has gone through something so horrible, it takes on a whole meaning of its own and is a big deal.
Also, the concept of missing out on something because we said no. We were close to saying yes.
Angiosperm and Mr. Arnold
I, by my own volition, decided to go away to prep school to follow in my older brothers foot steps. After a lengthy tour of many school in New England, I was accepted at a few and decided to attend Middlesex Prep School in Concord Mass.
I had a biology teacher named Mr. Arnold. One day he made me memorize the definition of diffusion. “Diffusion is the tendency of like particles to flow from an area of high concentration to low concentration.”
Mr. Arnold was very tough. He was a military man and collected military mini soldiers. I’d go to his house, on campus, for help and see his collection and endure through a private lesson. Once he told me that he liked Jewish students – that we were smart because we had to study at an early age for our Bar Mitzvah’s.
Anyway, now that you have a little background on Mr. Arnold let me tell you what he did to me. Mr. Arnold told the entire class about the formation of a fern. The Angiosperm he explained was as small as a pin head and only present at a certain stage of the fern’s life. If any of us could go out into the forest and find one we would get extra credit of 5 points on our exam. But no one had ever found one.
I set out in the forest by myself to find and angiosperm. After hours and hours, perhaps it was days, it’s been so long, I can’t remember, I found an Angiosperm.
I took it in my hand to Mr. Arnold. He was in class. I handed it to him in his palm. You know what he did. He blew a gust of air into his palm and said, “where’s the Angiosperm?” I looked on the ground for it but could not find it, it was too small.
I should have learned a better lesson from the experience. Such as, rules of proof, the fickleness of tangible items, the agony of loss etc.. I’d learn all these things in the future though I already knew as you can see.
One page on the Power of Positive Thinking
The power of positive thinking can be displayed in a simple physical test that you can do on another person.
Ask the subject person to think of something bad. When they have the bad thought in their head ask them to raise an arm to the side as if a wing or a plane at 90 degrees. Tell them to keep the bad thought in their head. Then with one, two for more fingers push down on their arm. The arm will 9 times out of 10 go down very easily because negative energy is running through the body or for whatever reason.
Now ask the same subject to think of something good. Tell them to raise the same arm and keep the positive thing in mind. Do the same test by pushing down on the arm in the same manner and with the same strength.. The arm will be much harder to budge or will not move at all and there, voila, is the difference.
Now to change a negative into a less negative, imagine your problem and look at it through the reverse end of a set of binoculars so that it will seem very distant. The good or positive things in your life, magnify them and bring them closer by looking at them in through the imaginary lens of the same binoculars but turned the proper way. This is something that I read somewhere.
Another neat thing to do is when someone says something negative to turn it into at positive. You can do it with almost any negative sentence, for example, the traffic is so heavy that I just hate to drive around the city. You could respond that it gives the driver a chance to see all the sights, to look for, for sale signs or it’s a chance to pull over and work out or get a bite to eat. I just made that up in a second, so you too can make up your own and turn someone’s experience from bad to good by adding a new perspective.
These sorts of things remind me of the time when my dad was studying Neuro- Linguistics Programming (NLP) at a seminar in Texas. They would teach people to be in tune to others and to pick up on body language and verbal cues. For example, if someone is speaking about how good something felt, the listener would want to respond with something to do with touch, not with sight or sound, as in well the sky is purple today and it is thundering out..
Not related to positive thinking but related to NLP is the ability to read certain things from a person’s eye movements. For example, if a person first looks up when asked a question, we know that this is recalling a visual recollection. If they look down they are recalling a kinesthetic or emotional recollection. The sides mean something too as does middle left and right, upper left, upper right etc. By looking at a person'’ eye movements over a period of time, you can determine what their “primary representation” is, i.e., it will either be visual, auditory or kinesthetic. And you can see what the secondary is as well. You can then establish a better rapport with the person by speaking in his/her representation.
Dad & Shoe laces
My dad grew up in a poor neighborhood of Boston named ___________.
His friend’s father,_________________, owned a leather shop. The two boys decided to fashion the leather scraps into shoe-laces. They walked around Boston selling them. My father played the clarinet and Saxophone. They would ring the buzzers of a building while my dad would play the instruments and they would sing a song. It went like this. “We have all kinds of shoe laces here, we have all kinds of shoe laces here, we have brown ones, we have black ones, we have leather and silk ones, we have all kinds of shoe laces here.”
People would come down and from around and buy the laces. They made lots of money.
One day my dad’s younger brother Marvin had a box of shoe laces and was going to sell them. My dad, seeing this, took Marvin’s box and threw it into the water.
Both my dad and _______________went on to become inordinately successful in the business world.
How I met and saved George Washington
I possessed no time machine. It happened one night, many years ago, I was driving down Brickell Ave and I noticed a large, late model vehicle traveling slowly and veering in and out of the center lane. I pulled beside the car and looked into the window which was down. I saw an older black man who looked disoriented. I yelled to him and told him to stop his car. I went over to his window. He asked me how to get to the Homestead area. Immediately I knew that the was disoriented and I decided to take control of the situation. I told him to wait. I did something with my car and then I took control of his car and was driving it to a nearby Church on Brickell. I saw that the man had a beer in his hand and I took hold of it. I asked if he were drunk and he said no. The beer, in a brown bag, was heavy and hardly a sip had been taken from it. I asked him his name and he said Washington, George Washington. At that point I figured the guy was an ingrate and drunk.
We entered the parking lot of the church. I asked him for some identification and he handed me his wallet. I looked at his ID and it said Reverend George Washington. Upon further questioning he said he was a diabetic. I figured he was suffering from a diabetic coma.
A man came out of the church and assisted me. He determined that we needed some orange juice so I drove home and returned with the orange juice. As soon as Mr. Washington took a sip, he regained complete composure. We called his wife and she was on her way over.
Mr. Washington explained that he was feeling ill so he purchased the beer as a remedy. In fact, the man was not drunk at all.
I thought about what might have happened if I was not perspicacious and had not evaluated the situation as I did. He could have killed many others on the road or at least landed in jail.
His wife and family showed up and were crying and thanking me. It was quite touching. So, that’s it, that’s the story of how I met and saved George Washington
Mortgagor and mortgagee
Do you know the only difference between god and a lawyer? God doesn’t think he’s a lawyer. If you want to have fun with a lawyer, test his knowledge or if you want to make $50 on a simple bet – ask the lawyer who is the mortgagor and who is the mortgagee. Ask, is the mortgagor the borrower or the lender? Nine out of ten will get it wrong unless they are a real estate attorney and then sometimes they still get confused.
The mortgagor is you the borrower and the mortgagee is the bank.
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