Coffee heat rising

Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

Mall as Gym?

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So we just knew there has to be something worthwhile remaining amongst America’s dying suburban malls.

And no doubt of it, most of them are dying. Not too long ago, I commented on Scottsdale Fashion Square, Arizona’s answer to Rodeo Drive. That entrancing venue along with an open-air shopping center are about the only retail malls in the Phoenix area that can be said to thrive.

Friend of mine and I made a grand tour of Scottsdale Fashion Square a few months ago and found the commerce pretty lively. The rich, after all, are always with us. And when there’s only one Prada store in the whole state, well…

So yesterday SDXB, who appears to be dying of boredom out in lovely Sun City, announced that he wished to schlep to Scottsdale and spend some time hanging out in that august realm.

We arrived shortly after 10 a.m. and were greeted by — wouldn’t you know? — a friendly concierge, who apologized for all the construction. The place was pretty much torn apart, though the stores were trying to do do business around the chaos. Probably because of said chaos, the place wasn’t as crowded as it had been, but new and even more ridiculously upscale stores had been moved in.

We spent about 5 hours trotting around. Then we went to a couple of freestanding stores in central Phoenix, which required us to not walk but RUN across two  major thoroughfares, twice. By the time we headed home, we had gotten our exercise, free, thanks to a three-story shopping mall and a spread out sprawl of storesl

And therein lies a strange tale:

We observed that all the Majorly Fancy-Pants Retailers — Armani, Bulgari, Kate Spade, Jimmy Choo and a slew of others — are clustered together on the west end of the mall. The middle-brow stores that you’d expect to see in an ordinary shopping mall anchored by a department store or two are banished to the east end of the mall, down by the entrance to the movie theater and the greasy-smelling food court.

Hm. Interesting strategy. In effect, they end up with two malls: Rodeo Drive on the Desert and yet another plain-vanilla shopping ghetto for boring chain stores full of Chinese products: J. Jill, Ann Taylor, Express, and on and mind-numbing on.

Remains to be seen how that will work out. Personally, my guess is that most of the custom will go to the elegant stores, and the Chinese-junk stores will languish. Why even bother to go out to buy that junk, when you can order it on line? But why not go out and buy from a Brighton or a Cartier when you are Mrs. Gotrocks, you can afford it, and you have nothing else to do? And no, you’d never be caught dead in a dowdy piece of J. Jill fatlady junk designed to fall apart in six months?

How d’you think this will go, dear readers?

It Lives! It Moves!

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Holy mackerel! She’s HEALED! It’s a miracle…

Seriously: woke up this morning, for the first time in living memory, completely pain-free: no back pain, no hip pain, no headache. It’s been weeks since I’ve felt this well.

To what to attribute the Divine Generosity?

Well, we had a gentle rain spread over two days. It probably washed a lot of the dust and pollen out of the air. Spring is sproinging here, meaning the bermudagrass lawns and a lot of similar weeds have already leapt to life. I’ve had a nonstop headache for day after day after unending day, accompanied by a stubbornly stuffy head.

Add to the air-laundering job the fact that two days ago I sought recourse in the Flonase bottle. I don’t like to use it, because one of its side-effects is glaucoma. Thanks: the Adventures in Medical Science have been fun, but now it’s time for someone else to enjoy them. 😉 But I figured a few days or couple weeks on the stuff isn’t going to blind me right this minute.

And, probably more to the point: on the ninth, I decided to knock off the blood pressure pills. Over the following three days, as the stuff has worked itself out of my system, I’ve felt better and better — and today I’m pretty much back to normal.

Three factors in that decision:

1) In the month since I started the amlopidine regimen, I’ve felt just completely, utterly dragged out. Immobile. Literally, I’ve felt so wrung out that I’ve stopped walking the dogs (wasn’t that brisk one-mile walk what we were supposed to be doing to treat the blood pressure???), stopped caring for the yard, stopped doing the laundry, stopped writing…you name it, I’ve stopped it. Some days I have sat in an easy chair or in bed with the computer on my lap and done…exactly nothing. I haven’t finished the current chapter of Ella’s Story because I haven’t had enough strength to dream up what comes next.

Interestingly, among amlopidine’s side effects are fatigue, exhaustion, and lethargy…

2) I suspect the surprising new hot flashes — which themselves drive up the blood pressure — have something to do with the side effect of amolipdine described as “warmth.” Obviously, if the manufacturer described this phenomenon as what it is — a fuckin’ hot flash — no woman over the age of 50 would agree to swallow the stuff. That of course would be counterproductive to the goal of getting every Baby Boomer in the land on blood pressure meds.

3) The stuff in fact is doing nothing to stop the spikes in blood pressure. Although it indeed has driven the moments of normal BP down into the 110/70s, nevertheless, the jumps into the 130s and 140s persist. One particularly annoying and stressful day, after I’d squirted the nose with Afrin (well known for jacking up your blood pressure), the numbers hit 141/93, an alarming state of affairs. Two hours later, though, the average of six readings was 107.2/65.8, and by dinnertime (when readings are normally at their highest) another set of measures averaged 116.7/74.7 — hardly indicative of the stroke that I’m told is imminent.

Is it really even driving normal, un-spiked blood pressure down? Well, consider: this morning’s set of blood pressure readings, after feeding and hassling with the dogs, banging around the house, brushing teeth, washing face, and all that routine Brownian motion, average out to 112.7/79.2. The highest in this set of six readings was 122/83. The lowest was 107/78, though the lowest diastolic reading was 69.

Given that before I started taking this drug, I regularly had readings in the 120s and occasionally in the 110s… I suspect this stuff isn’t doing enough good to make it worth feeling like sh!t all the time.

So…what is the explanation for the spikes into the 140s and even occasionally the 150s?

Welp, I believe the issue is a combination of chronic allergies that produce a nonstop headache and passing episodes of vertigo plus what can only be described as excessive sensitivity to stress.

Ever since cardiodoc demanded that I test my BP several times a day, I’ve kept a spreadsheet. In it, I’ve recorded what was going on around me…so whatever progress was happening at any given time is enshrined in Excel.

Think of that. 😉

Sooo…. What I did was build a set of categories of stressful circumstances that seem to occur regularly around the Funny Farm:

  • Headache
  • Pain, chest (mastectomy scars tend to ache; not cardiac-related)
  • Pain, other (like, say, the hip and the back)
  • Hot flash
  • Annoyance (including work stress)
  • Anxiety
  • Alarm (startling events)
  • Excessive salt consumption
  • Light-headedness
  • Drugs, other (i.e., Claritin, Afrin, Flonase)

This produced data for another spreadsheet: one that lists the dates of all the spikes, the highest reading for each event, and the average reading for each event.

Twenty-one such events have occurred since January 9. Of them, 15 have been associated with pain and 16 with annoyance, anxiety, or alarm.

Obviously, there’s some overlap — since I was in pain for several weeks after having hurt a hip in the frenzy to exercise by way of bringing BP down with “lifestyle changes,” any of the other circumstances can occur with it. At one point, the pain from the hip injury/bursitis was so intense I could barely walk up the hall from the bedroom to the kitchen.

Looks suspiciously like causality to me…

So what are the sources of “annoyance/anxiety”?

{chortle!} When you have the personality of a hummingbird, lemme tellya: everything annoys and enrages you. We have the following most common causes:

  • barking dogs
  • jangling phones
  • computer hassles
  • Cox’s interminable fuckup of my phones and computer system
  • polemic disguised as scholarship
  • time pressure
  • worry over health issues (i.e., over the BP matter)
  • having to take these time-consuming, nervous-making BP measures twice a day

I do not know when I have flown into a rage so soaring as the one engendered by Cox Communication. I’m still mad…but there’s nothing I can do about it, so have given up fulminating.

Pain is a form of stress. So are anxiety (nagging worry; 30-minute low-flying cop helicopter buzz-overs, reading or listening to the national news) and alarm (jangling phones and doorbells, potential cardiac symptoms at two in the morning). So what we’re really looking at here is 31 instances of stress associated with 21 blood-pressure spikes.

Admittedly: sometimes normal and low BP readings occur in the presence of one or more of these circumstances. Apparently, not all pain causes a spike; not all aggravation causes a spike. But that notwithstanding, every spike is associated with one or more of the listed factors. And every hot flash is associated with elevated numbers.

Maybe what I need is not blood-pressure meds but a tranquilizer.

Bourbon, anyone?

 

Another Fine Day in the ‘Hood…Another “Fine” Apple Product

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Y’know, just once it would be nice to sit outside on a beautiful afternoon and not have one’s loafing interrupted by a police chase.

Talk about your forlorn hopes… 😉

This afternoon I ensconce myself on the back porch, put my feet up on a chair and the computer on my lap, and start pasting and formatting chapters 2 and 3 of Ella’s Story into the Plain & Simple Press website.

And, by dayum! before I can even format the first heading, along come not one, not two, but THREE cop and TV helicopters. As it develops, a band of armed robbers committed some crime on the far west side. One of them made his way into east Phoenix (so we’re told) and hijacked a woman’s car. When the cops threw down a bunch of tire-busters, he jumped out and hijacked another woman’s pickup.

From there he led the cops on a merry chase, ultimately running up Conduit of Blight Blvd, across Gangbanger’s Way and into SunnySlop, where he abandoned the truck and ran into his mom and dad’s miserable slum apartment. They caught the poor schmuck, but not before considerable property damage was done, large numbers of taxpayer dollars were expended, and an abrupt end was brought to anything resembling peace and quiet.

It gets tiresome. Once again I had to pack up everything, call the dogs inside, lock up all the doors, and forget any silly ideas about enjoying my backyard.

Speaking of silly ideas, remember that great Apple slogan, “It just works”?

Have you noticed how they’ve stopped using that?

Presumably because the operative phrase is now “It just doesn’t work.” And lest you think that is not a widespread phenomenon: it is Tuesday afternoon just now. The SOONEST I can get this practically brand-new MacBook in to the purported “Geniuses” to see if they can and will fix it is 4:15 — the height of rush hour — next Friday afternoon!

The key for the B character has stopped working. The only way I can type a letter “B” is by copying and pasting it.

Look this up on the Web and discover it’s a known issue that’s been happening since 2016!

How long do you suppose it takes Apple to fix a thing like this?

My other two Macs are upwards of nine years old, and they’ve never had a key just stop working.

uying Purchasing this pricey little bastard was a big mistake. Clearly, it was time to go back to the PC, with all its equally annoying headaches. At least a PC is relatively cheap — when it craps out you can go buy a new one.

The magically self-disabling “b” is not the only irritant with this keyboard. The keys are slightly larger and slightly further apart than they were on earlier models. Result: every third time a finger reaches for a key, it either hits the wrong key or it hits two keys. This means what once used to be a fast, accurate typing style now produces a mish-mash of typos: to wit, gobbledy-gook.

Looks like it’s time to go out and get an inexpensive PC from Costco and re-learn Windows. Then figure out how to get all the MacData into Windows format — shouldn’t be hard, because every file that matters was produced in Office programs, and they’re all stashed on DropBox. But it will add to the endless hassle factor.

Endlessly.

Copy, Paste….B b

Wining Time

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Time to sit down and swill a nice glass of Kirkland’s best.

The days swirl past like water flowing down the drain. And at this age…well, that’s a pretty apt metaphor. It’s been a very busy few hundred hours of late, some of them fun and some of them not so much.

Today started out pretty fun: A special choir session in the morning, in which we got some extra-special coaching from our professional musicians, met some new choir members, and had ourselves sorted out by timbre and reseated here, there and yon.

Even though one must yodel all by oneself, in public before an audience that does include the aforementioned professional musicians, I always get a kick out this process. It usually results in a set of new seating companions, which is cool because it allows me to get to know more choir members…otherwise, being the recluse that I am, I would cling to the few friends I’ve made and never get to know anyone else. So this is good. One of my favorite Chamber Choir singers is now seated to my right, a lovely singer with a wonderful, effervescent personality who seems, unlike moi, to be afraid of nothing and no one. To the left, a quiet woman who has been around for awhile but whom I’ve never had (or made…) an opportunity to come to know. AND we’re right down in front, meaning no climbing up and down and balancing on bleacher-like things. It’ll be a little harder to see the director from the new vantage point — and that is something I rely on simply because I’m just not that experienced, as singers go. But I think as long as we’re standing, it’ll be OK.

Yesterday was a bitch, as it developed.

Last night we finally moved the current wave of copy back to our journal editor. But not without a fiasco of the first water.

Working on revamping the Plain & Simple Press website and not making much headway, I’m figuring it’s about time to knock off and go do the day’s required fucking blood pressure test. This is the best time of day, when the numbers are at their lowest ebb…and that is a desideratum, because we wish to keep Cardiodoc at bay. I’ve not yet taken a pill, but it’s about time because part of the gaming of the system entails dropping one of these minuscule doses, waiting about an hour, and then running the hated gadget. This results — well, unless the ambient temperature is in the low 60s, as it can be — in a fine set of numbers in the mid- to low 110s.

Impressive. Very impressive. If that doesn’t get the guy off my neck, nothing will. 😀

Just as I’m thinking Get up, lady, and drop a pill, in comes a message from The Kid: where is Essay 4?

Essay 4? It’s on DropBox, in the Essay 4 folder. Of course (just unwittingly typed that “of curse”). Where we put it several days ago, and happy we were, indeed, to see the end of that fine document.

You understand: some of these authors are using their gilded efforts for P&T (promotion and tenure reviews). In its current incarnation, the journal seems to be absent anyone who even vaguely resembles a peer reviewer, nor does the copy seem to have benefited from the advice of an editor who is, shall we say, gifted with a jaundiced eye. The new editor appears to be inexperienced with wrangling creatives or unwilling to ride herd on the livestock. Articles are difficult to read primarily because they’re far from ready to go to press.

That is about the mildest I can get on this subject. And yes. I do remember my mother inveighing about “if you can’t say anything nice…” You can’t.

No, says The Kid. It is not on DropBox. Where is it?

Where, indeed? WhereTF? I search DropBox: and I know that is where I stored it because I no longer stash this stuff on my local disk. DropBox has a back-up/restore function, and supposedly Time Machine is also backing up DropBox.

She’s right. It’s gone. I search “All Documents” on my MacBook.

Not there.

WTF?

I fly to the big computer, fire up Time Machine, and search directories going back a week.

Not there.

By now, I am seriously freaking out.

I break into DropBox’s website, parse my way through the nightmarish techno-instructions, and search DB’s back-ups.

Not there.

Holy CRAP! This file, which was utter diabolical torture to read, is flat-out fucking GONE.

I email The Kid and tell her I’ll have to plow through the whole.god.AWFUL.thirty.god.DAMNED.pages again, which will take another full (agonizing) day.

So I go to open the hideous unedited original in Wyrd. Of course, when you open Word it proposes to “Open Recent.”

Hmmm….  No sign of the missing files in “Open Recent.” But what do we have at the bottom of the “Recent” list but a MORE tag….ah, yes.

Click on that. Select “this week.” Wait for some unholy number of files to register in Wyrd’s memory.

And lo!

There the little bastards are!

W-H-A-A-A-T??

W-H-E-R-E??????

The things are stored in a folder — that would be a “directory” for grown-ups who use Microsoft Windows — with a title that is a long, arcane number: D123455432211 or some damfool thing. Both of them: the clean edited copy and the marked-up copy.

WTF is D123455432211????

Not caring much until I can contrive to open the things and then save up to DropBox, I stash the files, open them, and confirm that yes, they are the edited and clean versions. These, I mail to The Kid and to myself, by way of ensuring that they will not get “disappeared” again.

Whatever a D123455432211 is, I’ve never seen anything like it. Search the Internet. Whatever terms I dreamed up, at this moment I do not recall…but something that I typed into Google called up the answer. As it develops, when someone sends you a MacMail attachment and you open the damn thing, MacMail will save it into a “Downloads” folder. It does not prompt you to save the file where you want it to go. It just quietly saves in some un-findable location where Apple wants it to go. To make it even more un-findable, MacMail will designate this folder with a zillion-character numeric title.

By the time our author’s fine piece of literature has resurfaced, I am simply beside myself with rage, frustration, and horror.

Not only have I neglected to run the damn blood pressure machine, by now I’m about 5 hours late in taking the hated anti-hypertension pill. Along about 11 p.m. I gulp down the drug and test the BP. Really, it’s not that high: in the 130s. One figure is in the dramatically high 130s; the rest are in the middle range. The last time I flew into a state of Extreme High Dudgeon, the gauge reached 165/105, presumably in the bust a blood-vein category.

Unfortunately, in the brave new world of the American Heart Association, anything above 129 is now regarded as “high blood pressure.”

Questionable though I suspect that to be, nevertheless Cardiodoc takes it as received wisdom from Rome. So sticking those numbers in the record is contraindicated.

This evening they’re back down into the 110s. Those, we keep.

I hate computers.

That notwithstanding, I’ve spent a fair amount of today rebuilding the Plain & Simple Press site so that I can offer content from two completed books and one work in progress for free to readers.

This required a refresher course in rudimentary coding. Needed to figure out how to build an internal link in a web page. You understand: once, back in the dark ages, I knew how to do this. That was when my mind was young and elastic. Today: phbphphbhphphbbbt! I do not want to know it and so I have forgotten all that arcana.

Okay. I now know how to do it. Again. Probably will not remember until tomorrow. But for the nonce, code that can be self-plagiarized is installed in one of the new pages under construction.

I should take the dogs for a walk, it being not even 8 p.m. Exercise is needed for dogs and for human. But…

One is given pause.

An admired friend of mine, one of the most elegant European women I have ever met, lives within walking distance, in a tiny development of patio homes that fronts right on Central Avenue. This is within easy walking distance of the Funny Farm.

She reports that a couple nights ago someone came to her door about 9:00 p.m., rousting her from whatever she was doing and alerting her German shepherd. Fortunately she has a steel security door.

When she opened her front door, she found a guy on the other side of that security door foaming obscenities at the mouth and waving a gun around. He was in some kind of rage, he was trying to get in, and he threatened to shoot her.

She being a woman of some self-possession kept her cool, closed the door on him, and called the cops. He was gone by the time the gendarmes showed up. But as you can imagine, she was somewhat alarmed.

She speculated that he was a transient, as he was dirty and probably high on the usual drug of choice in our parts — meth.

Mmm hmm.

Well, I walk these dogs at night all the time, partly because in the summer it’s the only time they can walk on the hot pavement and partly because I’m busy from dawn to well after dusk. I never see anyone — sketchy or otherwise — wandering around after dark here. The bums are sleeping in the alleys, and the residents are nailed to their TV sets.

But just now I think…maybe not.

If there’s some drug-addled animal out there waving his gun around and threatening elderly women, I really do not want to meet him at night. Not in the daytime, either, but especially not at night. My gun is heavy and I do not even know where my father’s holster is stashed. Nor do I especially fancy the prospect of keeping two wackshit dogs under control while I try to defend myself against a wackshit human.

And so, to pour another glass of wine.

Prosit!

 

Trump: What could he be thinking?

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Or DOES he think?

There have, in the past, been times when a person of good will could have been embarrassed to be a citizen of this great country: Vietnam, the Nixon fiasco…before our time, the Spanish-American War, the long period of slavery.

But my God. The mere existence of this President in the White House is a profound embarrassment.

More than that: he is a menace to our country’s future and to its citizens’ social, moral, and financial well-being. In time, all this tarry stuff  he emits is going to come back to bite us all. To what extent, for example, can we expect to do business with other countries — whether commercial or diplomatic — when our leadership has no credibility? And how much worse is it going to get?

You cannot remain the greatest nation on earth when you are led by a man whose heart is full of hate and whose mind is incapable of reason.

You say the stock market is up? At what cost, hm? You really want to get rich on hate?

And even if you do, or if you simply don’t mind one way or another as long as the dimes are pouring into your purse: what goes up must come down. The market clearly is overheating. Did you notice that while a grateful Walmart was handing out its pittance to its miserable workers (renowned for their general dislike of their employer), its parent corporation was throwing TEN THOUSAND WORKERS out of their jobs? Before long we can expect to see the same thing we saw at the end of the Bush administration: a sharp fall, waves of bankruptcies, massive unemployment, homes lost as jobs are lost.

What do you suppose will happen when — it’s looking more and more like “when” and not “if” — the discord wrought by this madman leads to the shut-down of our government? Believe me, friends: this will not be good for any of us.

In Britain, a prime minister who made such a donkey of himself, who proved so eminently that he cannot lead with competence, and who embarrassed his country with his careless, race-baiting blather would be forced to resign.

Too bad we don’t have the balls to make that happen.

The Red Tuxedo

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Who knows what secrets lurk in the hearts of women? Ever wonder…first, at the secrets you held when you were a young thing, and second, what became of those secrets? One of mine is the Man in the Red Tuxedo.

The Man entered my life in my sophomore year at the University of Arizona, introduced to me by a friend I’d met in the dorm.

Jim was not a good man. To the contrary. He was the kind of man who was attractive to women who are attracted to the Dark Side. And I, decidedly, was one of those women. He hung around briefly that year and then he left, and I was privately glad to see the dust rising from his heels.

Several years later, though, he resurfaced. How exactly he found me, I do not recall. But he did. I had graduated from college, landed a piddling little job, and had recently moved into an apartment. So it was early in 1967.

Well, we immediately started dating again. My parents had badgered me into breaking up with the true love of my life, who himself was…we might say, not the best of all possible men. Ultimately I would have shown that guy the door on my own initiative, but because of the circumstances — long story short, my parents inflicted a surprisingly effective variety of emotional blackmail — I missed him very much, felt guilty about having dumped on him, and wanted a man. So, we became an Item.

A fairly rocky Item, because, as I say, he was not a good man. My mother, so happy was she to see the end of the guy I’d been dating for the prior three years, deluded herself that he was a wonder and a joy and the handsomest thing that ever came along.

He was handsome, in a rough way. More or less. When he was sober.

Jim came from Yuma, where his supposedly widowed mother still lived. He claimed to be living off the proceeds of a large inheritance, which, he said, had been put in trust for him. Every now and again, he would make a drive to Yuma to “rip off some cash from the trust.”

So he said.

What we’re saying here is that there were no visible means of support…

Jim was active in the Republican Party here in lovely Arizona. He had attached himself to a Yavapai County congressman as a kind of informal man for all seasons. Because he had been treated, in the past, for some kind of mental illness, he could not run for political office, but he dreamed of becoming a power behind the power — a small-time, primordial Steve Bannon, I guess. His mentor was not a great guy, either. One of the chores he assigned to Jim was scouting up prostitutes to entertain visiting politicos, of whom a few would drift through in a fairly steady stream.

Jim and this state representative had attended the 1964 Republican convention that nominated Barry Goldwater, where they involved themselves in a number of petty acts of vandalism intended to support their hero. An early rendition of “dirty tricks,” you might say.

One day, Jim decided to accompany me and my mother on a shopping trip to Diamond’s Department Store, at that time one of the most upscale merchandisers in the state. It was on a par, I’d guess, with Saks Fifth Avenue today. If such stores thrived now to the extent they did in the mid-twentieth century.

Remember S&H Green Stamps? In those days, Diamond’s dispensed them. My mother collected them and furnished our house with the Target-quality Green Stamp give-aways. She collected assiduously. Keep that factoid in mind.

So at Diamond’s, Jim directs us to the men’s department, saying he wishes to buy a red tuxedo and wants to view the store’s offerings. Forthwith, a salesman shows our man his wares, and they indeed do find a red-toned tuxedo jacket. It’s not a scarlet number like the one in today’s FaM banner, but black with some kind of pattern — probably paisley — limned in red.

He buys himself the red-patterned jacket, a cumberbund, a bow tie, a vest, a pair of black slacks, and such like, racking up a handsome bill. All this, he pays for at the register with cash.

The delighted salesman hands him a stack of sheets filled with Green Stamps, eliciting a blank look from Jim.

It used to be you got one stamp for every dime you spent at a participating merchant. I don’t clearly recall the amount Jim spent. The figure that sticks in my mind is $600, but that seems unlikely. A quick cruise through Amazon suggests that today a tuxedo jacket and trousers go for something between $160 to $360; a vest, $16 to $50; a cumberbund, $7 to $23; bow tie, $6 to $20; suspenders, $5 to $10, for a total price ranging between about $200 and about $460. Presumably today’s clothing all comes from China and so is, in relative terms, much cheaper. But given the difference in the value of a buck, I think he spent about $200.

In 2017 dollars, that would be $1,499.51.

So…it is no wonder that when he turned to my mother and, with a courtly flourish, offered her the entire pile of Green Stamps, her jaw dropped to the floor.

From that day forward, my mother thought Jim was the most wonderful thing that ever walked the surface of this earth.

There was a lot she didn’t know about Jim.

In due course, though, I figured him out and told him to take a flying eff at the moon. His response was to commit a rape and then, thank God, to leave. Good riddance to exceptionally bad rubbish.

Time passed. About three months after I had married, the phone rang. It was my old college friend, the one who had introduced me to the dashing Jim.

Had I read the report in the morning paper about Jim? she asked.

Well, no.

Jim had been arrested driving across the desert from Yuma, carrying the largest haul of cocaine that had, to that date, ever been confiscated in Arizona.

Ha haaa! So! That was the “trust” and the source of his mound of cash money: the Mexican Trust. 😀

Ay, caramba!

What became of Jim after that, I do not know (mercifully). Never heard from or about him again.

That was the Man in the Red Tuxedo.