With a 9-year-old son and two little girls aged 3 and 2, Laura’s sister Dotty and her husband Walter were experiencing the same shortage of sexy time.
Every now and then we’d have a chance to break free, like when the four of us had flown to New York to finalize the sale of our business. While Walter and I were signing contracts, Laura and Dotty had run out and bought matching slutty outfits, then met us in the hotel bar pretending they were two hookers, ‘Angel’ and ‘Destiny’. After that epic session, Walter had called up his friend, a jeweler named Sednicki, and special-ordered two diamond-studded ankle bracelets with Laura and Dotty’s ‘hooker’ names on them.
Seeing our wives wearing these was going to be fun!
March – Coffeyville, Kansas: Hiding in Plain Sight
In the 15-plus years I’d known him, the Kansas City mob boss Salvatore ‘Quiet Sal’ Bartolo always displayed a warped sense of humor. When I asked him for help to smack some respect into my oldest daughter Olivia’s then-boyfriend Brad after he’d knocked her up, Quiet Sal sent two seriously scary dudes, a Mr. Green and a Mr. Orange (jokingly named after characters in the movie ‘Reservoir Dogs’). It only took a burning Corvette and a friendly chat with Brad’s father to set everything right.
At Olivia and Brad’s wedding, Sal sent Mr. Green to the reception and give me the Luca Brasi speech from The Godfather before delivering a new minivan as a wedding gift. I found that particularly hilarious. That was also when I learned Mr. Green’s real name: Walter Connor, the same Walter Connor who’d become my business partner and, later, my brother-in-law.
Five years ago, when I told Sal about Walter falling in love with Dotty, and how her young son Trent was his new best friend, the old man sent Walter a new car with “IT’S A BOY” written on the windshield, wisecracking that Walter had gone from being a bad-ass to a dad-ass. I had to admit, as gangsters go, Sal was pretty darned entertaining. That Sal took such delight at his own jokes just made him even funnier.
Sal struck again the day Walter and I were huddled in our cabin office, sorting through old Stronghold Corporate Security paper files to determine which should be shredded and which to forward on to the new owners at Cryptodira headquarters.
Hearing the potato-potato-potato sound of a Harley motorcycle engine coming up the drive, we exchanged surprised glances. The McFarland family farm, situated on Goodlin Road outside of sleepy little Wellston, Oklahoma, was not exactly the kind of place motorcyclists were ever drawn to.
Walter pulled his Raging Bull.454 out of its holster, and I certainly didn’t object. Given how not that long ago our farm had been attacked by Dotty’s abusive ex-husband Sonny and his meth-head friends, I’d come to believe it was better to have firepower and not need it, than to need it and be without.
While Walter stood watching from the cabin door, I walked out to greet whoever had arrived. I was a little surprised to see a rider dismounting from a classic red 1947 Harley-Davidson ‘knucklehead’ motorcycle. This was typically a bike you saw in museums or on TV shows, not one used as a daily rider.
The rider was also atypical; a tall thin man with a ponytail, he was wearing a 1950’s-style buckskin fringe jacket, matching buckskin pants, a pair of round vintage goggles perched on his face. A fringed leather courier’s bag was slung over his shoulder. He walked up and bowed to me with a flourish, like it was Versailles in 1643 and I was King Louis XIV.
“Good morning, fine sir,” he said with an exaggerated phony French accent, “I am the messenger known as Hermes, and I seek Messrs. McFarland and Connor.” The thought occurred to me that this might be how the guys in my high school drama club ended up when they got older.
I heard Walter walk up behind me, and the sound of him sliding his Raging Bull back into the leather holster. His deep voice rumbled, “You found us, what do you need?”
The man reached into his bag and pulled out two brown crackers, handing one to each of us.
“The fuck is this?” Walter asked.
I was two steps ahead of him. “This is probably a singing telegram,” I said, “which makes these…”
The courier finished for me, “Singing tele-graham crackers! Well done, Mr. McFarland!” Then he began to sing, quite badly, I might add:
“You are invited to dinnnnnner
As Sal Bartolo’s guessssssts