The Hooker Book

1992 - 2005

 

The last day I had a job was June 1, 1992. Since then I've been scratching out a life as a consultant and a coach.

There was some low hanging fruit at first; people I knew who were ready to do a marketing strategy project and others who could use my advertising agency management experience.  

Via my buddy Michael Daren I became a student of Dan Sullivan, The Strategic Coach. He taught entrepreneurs and consultants a very smart time management system. It gave me an idea about how I could be a specialized coach.

In November at a networking event I met a lawyer named Steve who asked me what I did. I said “marketing coach” for the first time. He said “I need one of those” and hired me. I wasn't exactly sure what to do but I dived in.

With Steve I developed my own technique to coach and a marketing paradigm for people who sell personal services.

The hurdle for people who are the product they sell is that their ego gets in the way. The ego has a protective function. It guards us from making mistakes, being silly or setting ourselves up for rejection. You probably know that when you're in sales, rejection goes with the territory. And rejection is doubly painful if what you're selling is you.

The main thrust of my marketing coach work is to get my clients to go out to lunch more. The purpose of these lunches is to cultivate better relationships with people who can become clients or more importantly referral sources. I think lunch is best for cultivation but other meals or coffee work, but not as well.  Creating a great list of potential lunch partners is very coachable as is being persistent in inviting the best prospects. Of course it takes overcoming fear of rejection to send a steady stream of invitations.  A big part of my work is to get clients to overcome ego invented excuses why they can't go out to lunch more.

My elevator speech became “I help lawyers make more money” which many find funny.  But never  divorced people.

Over the years I've coached many professionals aside from lawyers including therapists of all sorts, doctors, dentists, consultants, accountants, golf teachers, a handyman and even people searching for a spouse.

Around 1995 I was having coffee with Mike a friend who was also a coach and consultant. Mike is The Meeting Doctor. Organizations hire him to help them learn how to run better meetings. At the time his business was still embryonic so he had his fingers in other things.

Mike told me how he was colluding with his brother in Denmark to import specialty soap into Canada. It didn't sound like a good idea to me. It was a diversion from his meeting doctor business. I thought his ego was protecting him from risking the rejection of marketing his meeting doctor self. Rejection wouldn't be as painful if it was the soap being rejected.

I asked Mike how much money he thought he would make in the soap business. After some analysis we decided it would be about $100 per hour if things went well. That's good but meaningless unless compared to how much he could make as The Meeting Doctor. Well, after some discussion, Mike admitted on a good day he was earning $300 per hour doctoring meetings.

Then a random thought wormed its way out of my hypothalamus. I looked Mike straight in the eye and blurted out “would a $300 an hour Hooker turn hundred dollar tricks”.

And that is how The Hooker Book was born.

It sounded like a good idea at the time. The dogma underlying my marketing Coach work certainly applied to the world's oldest profession and I had a wealth of ideas that would expand nicely into a self help book.

A little research showed that while there were several books on the market written by successful madams and many on self-marketing nothing like my idea had been done.

An early task was to find a publisher. I had recently met an executive from Harper Collins at a networking event. I called him. Without ever having a meeting or getting anything in writing he told me he liked the idea and that I should write the book and he'd publish it. Easy peasy.

Over the next few months the idea crystallized to the extent that I outlined 24 chapters with 24 paragraphs that got my wealth of ideas down on paper.

Then it became obvious I didn't have the discipline to write the book myself. I had a lot of other things going on in my life which in retrospect I could use as an excuse but the truth is I just don't have the attention span to tackle anything more than a short story. Yes I know a 24 chapter book is very similar to 24 short stories and should be easy to write in 24 days. Not by me, though.

One of my key marketing strategies is expressed in the popular aphorism ‘do what you do best and delegate the rest’. The ability to delegate is a key attribute of good marketers. So I decided to delegate the writing of the book by hiring a ghostwriter.  I had recently won some money in the stock market so I could afford it.

More easy peasy. An ad in the Globe.  A meeting with the first responder, a female lawyer who didn't like practicing law and was working as a freelance writer.  A deal to pay her $250 per chapter was struck. We had six or seven meetings to turn over the outline, explain what everything meant and decide on a creative idea to carry the original idea.  3 months later I had my book.

The book was pretty good. The title was Everything I Know About Marketing I Learned From High Priced Call Girls. I had dreams of seeing it in its own garish display at the front of every Cole’s store in Canada.

The book was written from the perspective of four working girls and nicely presented my ideas. I had a few friends and clients read the book. They liked it well enough to give me very positive reviews I could use for promotion.

Unfortunately when I called my publisher at Harper Collins he was gone and the person who replaced him said my book didn't fit their current plan.

Oh. Oh.

I made a pretty good effort to find a publisher.  I even hired one of my daughter’s friends to research and send letters to almost one hundred publishers.

The only offer I got was from a tiny internet publisher.  The kind who didn't print books until there was an order. All promotion was thru his website which marketed dozens of business books none of which would sell more than a few hundred copies. It wasn't perfect but if that's what it was that's what I settled for.

Altogether six copies were sold.

Sometimes I wish I'd never followed this itch. In retrospect there were a number of reasons not to. But what's life if you don't follow your dreams.

My Rabbi Life Coach

2017

I've been an atheist since I first heard about God. Now, surprising even myself, I've hired a rabbi to be my life coach. Here's how that happened.

When I was 6 years old my parents tried to force religion down my throat while severely restricting  candy going down the same throat. As a result I've grown up as an atheist with a sweet tooth. Yes, I can be an annoying contrarian.

From the age of 13 until later in life, as I lay in bed, as I fell asleep, I thought only about girls. Before that I had a more cosmopolitan imagination. I had war and god on my mind.

Before the age of 13 some nights I'd fall asleep playing war games under the covers.  I'd have a Tommy gun and the aliens would be attacking from every direction. I'm sure you're as thankful as I am that I survived.

Other nights, before the age of 13, I'd be lying in bed testing god. I'd lay there calling him every name in the book daring him to take the bait and put an end to me and my insolence. I'm sure you're as thankful as I am that I survived. Are you OK with him as my pronoun for God?

Since that time I’ve had lots of exposure to my Jewish religion. But I’ve never wavered from being an atheist.

Religious holidays have been a great pleasure. Jews celebrate often. We have a saying that describes most of our holidays. “They tried to kill us. We survived. Let's eat.”

Bringing my children up to practice Judaism offered pleasure, a chance to see them learn, to enjoy themselves and to grow into our vibrant and well fed culture.

Through volunteer work in the Jewish community I have had access to travel, smart people, leadership opportunities, a chance to make a difference and many rewarding moments.

But I never took to the religious side. One Saturday morning when I was 17 I was in a Synagogue on San Vicente Boulevard in Beverly Hills. I was determined to give God a chance. I tried very hard to understand what going on, what people found attractive about services. What I was missing. It didn't work. I didn’t find God or what others found stimulating.

I’ve been back to services many times but only to satisfy what other people wanted me to be doing or to avoid the shame of not being there when it was appropriate.

And my wife and I, except for a short period, haven’t been members of a synagogue. That was an opportunity for community we didn’t choose take advantage of.

We aren’t joiners. And even when we are members of something, like a golf club, we don’t get socially involved. I have been at least subconsciously aware that I was missing something. I know many people who are joyously involved.  

My brother, differently, was very involved in synagogue. He attended services regularly. In fact, in his last years he was notably present often at three different synagogues. He wasn’t married so his religious affiliation was a big  part of his life.

When he died I made contributions to all three synagogues. A year later I was called by the executive director of one of those synagogues for a follow-up donation. And that’s how I met Rabbi Dan Rand.

Dan and I hit it off during that call. We agreed to go out for coffee. It was my pleasure to do so. I like meeting new people. It was his as well, but also his work. I was a living, breathing candidate to join his synagogue.

So for the next three years we met for coffee roughly once a month.

Our pleasure was to discuss politics and religion. I’m a severe political junkie. I’m very knowledgeable. Dan was happy to get my take on news of the day.

Now, while Dan is an administrative rather than a pulpit rabbi, his learning is extensive. And he is really smart about the religious side of things. With my atheism 180 degrees at odds with his beliefs we had a lot to disagree on.

I have spent some time testing my beliefs so I have some substance underpinning my point of view. For example, some years ago I took a course ‘Where Was God During the Holocaust?’. The conclusion our class came to is that either there is no God or that he was off playing golf somewhere and missed World War 2 entirely. I’ve also listened to many intelligent podcast debates between believers and atheists.

From mid 2013 to mid 2016 Dan and I argued a lot about God over coffee. Dan, once even sent me to a friend of his, a specialist in arguing with atheists. That didn’t work. I remained unconvinced.

My arguments with Dan were titanic. Sometimes loud. Sometimes entertaining for others in the coffee shops where we met. We’re both strident when excited.

These meetings were among my happiest times. I respected what Dan had to say and I wanted to dig into his great intellect further and more frequently.

So I engaged Dan to coach me about the tenets of the Jewish religion.This is generically called Torah study.

For the purposes of our conversation I agree that God exists and participate differently than I did before. Instead of arguing God’s existence I ask questions to dig deeper. Let’s say I go with the flow to see where it’s going.

We’re both having lots of fun and experiencing lots of intellectual stimulation.Each meeting includes a warm up where we discuss what's going on in each other's life. Sometimes I can offer Dan some professional advice from my own know how. And then we choose a topic or a question for the day and Dan contributes a point of view from the Torah. The topics we choose usually relate to some drama that's going on in my life.  

This has been a U turn in my life. I haven’t changed my atheist view but by ignoring what I think, I walked through a door to a big new room of exciting ideas.

A Memorable At Bat

April 19, 1985

Baseball and the boys of summer don’t owe me a thing.

Toronto didn't have a major league team when I was growing up. So when I was seven, in my final act as a social justice warrior, I chose the Cleveland Indians and the Pittsburgh Pirates as my two favorites. On the day I made my choice, Cleveland was in first place in the American League. Pittsburgh was in last place in the National League. I thought that was fair and it jump-started my lifetime affection for baseball.

Cleveland was on TV many Saturdays, so they were a practical choice for me. The Pirates sailed into baseball history in October of 1960, when they won a classic World Series. They also won in 1971 and 1979. The Indians have yet to win since 1948, which was the first World Series after I was born.

Later on, I was a Dodgers fan when I lived in LA in the sixties and a Blue Jays fan after their debut on that snowy day; April 7, 1977.

I joined a fantasy baseball league in 1984. My team, Margie's Marriage Counselling, named for my wife's business, included 25 American League baseball players selected from various teams filling all the normal positions. I was the owner/general manager and the fantasy fun was competing against others by comparing stats, making trades, dropping underperforming players and discovering phenoms.

Our owner egos were tied to the success of our players. If one of our pitchers was knocked out in the first inning, we would be devastated. If one our hitters had a four RBI game, it would be ecstasy.

At first, before the Internet gave us a steady injection of up-to-date news, we were mostly out of touch with how our players were doing until we checked the morning papers – unless we were watching or listening to a game and got some real-time news. Emotions could go from the sub-basement to the roof in a matter of seconds as news filtered in.

I was at the Blue Jays game the night of April 19, 1985 to see them battle the Baltimore Orioles. I had a few players in the game, but I remember only one because it was a memorable night for both of us.

Fritz Connally was a young player with little more experience than a rookie. I had drafted him onto my team because having a big strong guy like him playing for the Orioles was generally a good thing.

He came up to bat for the second time in the game in the top of the fifth inning. Facing him was Doyle Alexander, who had been throwing a perfect game throughout the first four innings, but was suddenly faltering.

When Fritz came to bat, there was no score, no one out and three Orioles on base; Fred Lynn had walked to open the inning. Mike Young was hit by a pitch and Jim Dwyer singled. Now the bases were loaded.  

It could have been a mismatch because Alexander was a highly paid veteran ace. But early in the season, Fritz was showing well. His batting average was in the high 300s.

I'm shy. I rarely do things that make me stand out. So I was a perfect Toronto fan at the ball games. Reserved and polite.

And that's the way I was thru the first few pitches of Fritz’s at bat, along with the other 20,213 fans, very few of whom had any idea who he was.

I had pretty good seats. Everyone near me was a Blue Jay fan, subdued with the Orioles up, the bases loaded and Doyle Alexander in a jam. But this time, because I was a Fritz Connally fan, I was far from subdued.

As the pitch count added up, got to 3 and 2, a full count, and extended pitch after pitch with foul balls, my temperature was rising. As was my voice. As was my butt off my seat.

As each pitch was thrown, I was screaming louder and louder at Fritz to crush the ball over the short left-field fence. He rose to the moment with one foul ball after another.

To put the final pitch of his at bat in perspective, while I have a vivid picture of it in my mind, I didn’t remember who I was with that night, when it happened, or even who won. I had to do Internet research to find out.

But I can tell you, on the 14th pitch of the at bat, after nine loud foul balls, Fritz Connally hit a screaming line drive that curved toward the left-field foul pole about 30 feet off the ground. And when that the ball cleared the fence for a grand slam home run, I sat back down, smiling in my own reserved way.

By the way, I had to locate and contact Fritz Connally personally to get the detail that it was a 14 pitch at bat. My memory was 13 pitches.

Vietnam on My Mind

1964 – 1992

I’ve grown up with Vietnam as a troubled tenant in my brain.

The war in Vietnam got hot late in 1964 as I was finishing high school. It ended a decade later in the sad scene of desperate people reaching for the runners of a US embassy helicopter already in flight.  

During those years and for many afterward, Vietnam -- the war news drama, the history, some participants, some victims, the refugees, the memorials, the books and the movies -- have had a place in my life.

This memoir topic came to me recently when I started reading a book called Plague and Cholera. I picked it up because I thought I would learn about the science behind the cures for those awful diseases. It was about those things and lots more. It was also a biography of a Swiss doctor, Alexandre Yersin, who lived in Vietnam from the 1880s until the 1940s. It told his story of building the Nha Trang branch of the Pasteur Institute, where he found the vaccine for the Plague.

Nha Trang was familiar to me because it was a principal US naval base during the Vietnam War. Yersin built his summer home in the nearby mountain community of Dalat, also a familiar name. He did all this decades before the war we know and the revolution before it, that ended French colonialism in Vietnam.

A couple of years ago, I was reading all the books of the American author Ward Just and happened on American Romantic. I was surprised by the story. Set in Vietnam before the escalation, it's about a botched CIA mission to gather information about the Viet Cong, then still in the shadows. And it's about life in Vietnam before it got really bad. When there was still a touch of civility The contrast between before and after the war added another plane of sadness to the long story

I was on a foreign student visa during the sixties when I was a high school and university student living in LA. That meant I was not draft-eligible, but all my friends were. And virtually every male my age I saw day-to-day had been assigned a draft lottery number.

But we lived on the good side of the tracks, so almost all of them had some sort of deferment. Mostly because they were in college. So while there was guilt hanging over my head because I didn't have to worry about the draft, it was muted because no one close to me was biting his fingernails. As was usual for me, good luck piled on other good luck.

There was one exception. Rod Lovett. Rod was a fraternity brother I met in 1969 when he came home from two years in Vietnam. He lived in the frat house as I did. We had a lot in common, but we were not good friends even though, like me, he fit in well on the unstructured meter.

Rod taught me the only Vietnamese I know. “Toy dee com dow het.” This is the first time I've used it productively outside of a bar. It’s a way of saying so long. It translates to “I'm going nowhere at all.”

Rod committed suicide by jumping off a roof. This happened after I had returned to Toronto in 1970. I don't have any memories of spending long nights talking about Vietnam with Rod. I do remember him as a bit of a druggie. I guess he was masking and smothering his pain.

Rod’s was the second Vietnam War death that was personal for me. There was one earlier. And one later. More about those below. 

I first saw the movie Apocalypse Now very soon after it opened at the University Theatre in 1979. That was the first of at least six times I saw it on the big screen. And I've seen it often on TV. It's one of those special movies that give me endless pleasure even if I’m just seeing a ten-minute clip on YouTube. Others are Silence of the Lambs, Terminator 2, The Wedding Crashers and The Queen.

I think Apocalypse Now filled little holes in me that had been drilled while reading books about Asia by Joseph Conrad, George Orwell, Frederic Prokosch and Somerset Maugham. The images in the movie seeped into empty spaces I needed filled.

Around that same time, the crisis of the Vietnamese boat people emerged. These were about a million people who escaped the victorious communist regime in Vietnam in two waves after the war in 1974. The second wave left later in the 70s in perilous boat journeys. Those who survived ended up in refugee camps in Hong Kong and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. In 1979 Canada agreed to take in 60,000 boat people in private-public partnerships. I was the treasurer of a group that sponsored the Nguyen family.

My first job was to meet them at Pearson airport. They were late exiting into the arrivals area, so it was a very empty terminal late at night when we met. Mom, dad, granny and five children aged 5 to 15. I remember them uncomfortably wearing what were obviously Canadian government-issue big blue parkas. They looked like refugees from Alberta.

Our group had already found and furnished an apartment for the Nguyens on Woodbine just north of the Danforth. We drove there and they went to sleep. They were dog tired.

I stayed with the family as their treasurer for a couple of years as they found jobs and schools and worked and saved. I remember they had a really nice stereo system within a year. I also remember they spent much less than our budgeted amounts on food and other things. They knew how to be frugal.

Language was, of course, an issue. It took at least a year for me to learn that dad had been a carpenter in Vietnam, not a car painter, as he was in Toronto.

Sadly, they all did not survive. After four or five years, one son, aged about 15 by then, was killed trying to cross the 401 on foot. I never found out why. That was the third of the three deaths that were close to me.

But it was the first death that affected me most. And that had happened 10 years earlier.

In 1969, while working at my part-time department store job, my role was to move around the store helping cashiers. It was a ticket to socialize with anyone and everyone. I made friends with a pretty, skinny black girl named Cletus Moore. We were not friends, like to go on a date, but we shared a streak of irreverence and a sense of fun, even though we had different backgrounds. Cletus was the kind of person you love for their sense of humour and permanent smile.

One afternoon, and I remember this like it just happened, I approached Cletus while she was working at the costume jewellery counter facing the rear picture windows of the store. The light that bathed her could not have been brighter. And she could not have been in a darker mood. Cletus was saddened almost beyond recognition. Had a worst nightmare come true? Sadly, yes. She told me her fiancé had been killed in Vietnam. I did my best to console, support and sympathize. It was about her at that moment.

And privately it was also about me. This was my draft status double dose of good luck earning its just reward. From his side of the tracks, Cletus’s fiancé was a sitting duck from the day the war began while I was sitting on the beach protected by the luck of the draw. And now I'd have to live with justly earned guilt because I didn't play in the real-world side of the sandbox.

I felt that guilt vividly when I visited The Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. It had opened in1982. Of course it was controversial. It was different. Rather than being a flag-waving recreation of a battle, it is a silent subterranean vault-like monument with more than 58,000 names inscribed.

My visit in 1992 was maybe the most moving experience of my life. The feelings I felt for Cletus and her fiancé 23 years earlier ripped into my heart. I had a penance to pay. I was jolted by each name I read.

I still feel that pain today.