Joe’s not the brightest bulb in the chandelier but he learned his lesson.
Michael Estabrook
Joe was in sales
virtually his whole life ever since
he got out of the Navy. Because
he never went to college he
ended-up selling business forms, typing
papers, letterhead and computer
documents so it was rather boring. But he
worked in the “Big City,” in New York City
and had some big accounts there
or almost some big accounts
there so he found it all-in-all to be
pretty exciting. What he liked
most was the partying, all the women,
the martinis at lunch, Manhattans and wine
at dinner, beer on his golfing
weekends with an important client
or his boss. And he liked the national
sales conventions, too, when all
the boys got together to
talk about the latest in paper products,
and how they’d be
cracking their biggest prospects soon,
yes real soon, and they’d
stay out till the wee hours watching
the girls go-go dance while getting smashed
out of their gourds. When he
was 58 years old
Joe attended his final
national sales meeting it was down
in sunny Tampa/St. Pete where he got so
drunk he passed-out right
in the shower with the hot water running
over him until finally Owen, his roommate,
shut it off so he could get
some sleep. Joe got
badly scalded on his right side and arm,
the skin bubbling and blistering,
peeling off in big
pieces leaving ugly thick scars you can see
to this day. He also had a heart attack
from his drunken bout
with the hot shower, and almost died.
“But,” his wife Dorothy liked to say, “Some
good comes out of everything.” And she
must’ve been right seeing as Joe
hasn’t had a drink since, and he’s
about to turn 73.
