Chapter 9

Tina decided we should be married on the third of August. When I asked her about why she had picked that particular date, a Monday, she refused to answer, laughing when I kept after her about it, telling me I didn't really want to know. I asked Sherry, but she wouldn't tell me why her sister had picked that date either.

Sherry wanted to know when Danny and Kaitlyn would be coming out. At least I knew why she was anxious about that. I'd spoken with them on the phone twice since Tina had set the date. They were excited for me, and promised they would be ready to come whenever I wanted them to. Kaitlyn's mom would be staying in their trailer, watching the grand kids for them. Kaitlyn told me that Mona was really excited about her being invited to attend my wedding. Everything seemed in readiness at that end.

Kaitlyn also told me that she had gotten Danny a big contract with a homebuilder over in Palmdale. He'd be building and installing screen doors and window screens for the two hundred and seventy two new houses that the builder was putting up between Palmdale and Oak Hills.

Kaitlyn told me they would make more on that one job than Danny had ever made from a whole year's work in the past. I didn't ask her if she gave that builder any "special" incentives to induce him to give her the contract.

In July, I took both girls on a trip to Lake Tahoe. It was a combination birthday/business trip. Tina and Sherry turned twenty five years old on the nineteenth. Because of their trusts maturing, with all the assets being distributed to them, it was a very significant birthday for them. Sherry's money was being transferred into another trust that had been set up for her protection. She was happy about this arrangement, as were her parents. I was relieved that she would be protected from any possible predator's. Even Tina seemed to approve of how her father had set things up for Sherry.

Lake Tahoe was beautiful, and we had fun, in the casino, on the lake, and in our suite. The suite was really lavish, up on a high floor, so that we had a sweeping panoramic view of both the lake and most of the surrounding mountains. Tina and Sherry both ran out and bought pencils and spiral sketching pads. Each morning they'd get up early and stand by the big picture windows, making their sketches and putting little notes along the sides and bottoms of the pages of the drawing they were working on. Most of these notes were about colors and contrasts they were seeing, and about where the light was coming from. They told me the notes would allow them to better paint the pictures, at a later date, when it was from their sketches alone.

It took me two days to get an appointment with a group of families living in a remote commune over on the California side of the Sierra Mountains. They manufactured cow bells and braided hemp, turning all of it into another unique style of wind chime. They called them "Spirit Singers", and each of their bells put out a slightly different sound from all the other bells woven into the braid. I'd purchased one on Ebay, for nine dollars, plus shipping costs. It came to twenty dollars, total cost, delivered to my front doorstep.

I really liked the melodious sounds these bells made. To me, it seemed very soothing. I wanted to speak to whoever was in charge and try to secure the exclusive marketing rights for them. I had rented a four wheel drive Jeep for the trip out to where the commune was situated. Henry Galt, my contact with the commune, had warned me that the roads leading up to their village were difficult to navigate in the Summer, and almost impossible for any motorized vehicle, other than snow mobile, in the late Fall, Winter and early Spring. Their commune was situated at 6,750 feet of elevation.

I left the casino hotel at six in the morning, hoping to cover the eighty miles in an hour and a half. I expected to be gone overnight if the negotiations looked promising. Tina and Sherry had opted to remain in our suite, drawing more sketches. Driving cautiously, and only getting lost three or four times, I finally made it to where I was going, at two thirty that afternoon. Eight and a half hours to cover eighty miles. I'd put one hundred and twenty miles on my odometer, needing to backtrack, after missing several turnoffs. I was apologizing for being so late for our meeting, but Henry, and the other three "village elders" were amused at my explanation of where I'd gone wrong.

Their amusement about all my many travails before arriving to meet with them was as nothing when compared to my own amusement after they first showed me their stockpile of unsold "Spirit Singers". Saying their business model was a complete failure would be a fair summation. Counting their one sale to me, they'd sold a grand total of sixteen of them. Even their freight expenses had turned out to be more than they'd charged successful bidders for shipping the purchased chimes.

This wouldn't have been so terrible, except for two things. One, they'd invested the lion's share of all remaining communal money when they were out purchasing all the equipment necessary for doing the pouring and casting of their own bells. They were starting from molds they'd hand created themselves. Number two, was what they'd just shown me. It was a salvaged tin Quonset hut, filled to the rafters with thousands of these bell sets, already manufactured and woven together by hand. They had bet everything on being able to sell these rope and bell chimes on Ebay. Having found it this wasn't working, they had no money left to try anything different.

I grilled them about what their true costs were, even helping them with things like depreciation of their casting equipment and any labor time spent carving out the bell molds themselves. It took me two hours, but we finally arrived at an approximation of their true cost of manufacturing each unit. I told them it was around five fifty per manufactured unit.

Another complication with our negotiations was the fact that these bell chimes had a religious component for all members of the commune. Maybe a spiritual component would be a more accurate way to state things. They weren't as much religious as spiritual.

Not all the hemp they were growing was being used to weave their bell chimes either. By seven that evening, just from sitting outside with them in a tight little circle while we talked, I was having the contact high of my life from all the smoke that kept floating around me.

They were anxious to sell off the "Spirit Singers" they had already made, and then give the whole manufacturing idea up. They were fine with the idea of now admitting that it was simply an unsustainable idea for extending their spiritual outreach program. Between the twenty or so families in the commune, there were about fifty people who enjoyed working on the bell chimes.

Henry told me that they could assemble two hundred units, with about four hours of the joint steady effort of all those who were involved in the project. He then told me that four hours a day was about all anyone wanted to contribute to the undertaking. That was also the limit that the various non involved village members would be willing to either encourage or support. He said the elders had long ago issued a decree stating that a twenty hour work week should be a sufficient contribution of time from any member.

Henry's main worry was that, because of how the "Spirit Singer" project had failed so completely, some of the village men would now need to go away from the village just to earn enough money to keep everyone fed and clothed over the coming Winter. Their monetary reserves were depressingly low. His words, not mine.

When I'd asked him how many "Spirit Singers" he had ready for immediate sale, he pulled a piece of paper out of his back pocket and rattled off the exact count, 3,245. I then asked him how much he'd take for all of them, delivered to me in Connecticut? That led to a full conference between all the adult villagers in the commune. I stayed where I was sitting, not too confident that I'd be able to stand, even if I'd tried to. The marijuana they grew was very potent, and I was totally wrecked, just from spending so much time in the heavy cloud they'd created, while we all sat there, discussing their situation.

"Could you see your way clear to giving us eight thousand for all of them? In addition to paying us back whatever money it ends up costing us to mail them to you?"

"You don't just mail over three thousand bell chimes, Henry. That would cost you a fortune. Besides, you can't sell them for less than they cost you to make. That's not how you run a business. You'll wind up losing your asses if you do what you just finished telling me. If they cost you five fifty each to make, just for the cost of the materials, not counting all your labor costs, you need to get more than that for them. Twenty thousand, maybe even twenty five, if you want to show even a halfway decent return for all your efforts."

"We'll take whatever you think is fair, Jimmy. We can take them down the hill for you, but it might be better if you arrange for shipping them to your store. Can you do that?"

All the original "Elders" were back sitting down with me again, and I noticed all of them were puffing away on their water bong's while they waited for my reply. I was lost in a tiny reverie of my own, wondering if these commune people took in paid visitor's, like a dude ranch. We could call it the dope ranch. I was giggling a little, thinking about what a blast it would be for Danny and Kaitlyn to spend a few days visiting up here.

"Where were we again? Oh yeah, I remember now. I can't answer your last question without knowing what you plan to do after you sell those "Spirit Singers" you already have. If this is just a closeout sale, and I can't ever lay my hands on more of them, then that's one price I can pay. If it is just the first of many deliveries, meaning that I take them on as a permanent part of my business line, then that's a different thing altogether, and I can afford to pay you more for them. Does that make any sense? I'm not sure if it does or not."

I think it was around this time that I actually took my first hit on one of those bong's. I'd been refusing to puff on them for the past few hours, but I could already tell I'd gotten loaded anyway. Time was kind of getting away from me by then anyway, and I had already started feeling a little hungry too.

I remember mentioning to someone that I could stand to eat a little something, and one of the woman started bringing us all bowls of some kind of soup with honey butter slathered cornbread. I ate three helping's, and then pigged out even more on these dynamite brownies another woman had brought over for our dessert.

There was a lot of laughing going on, and I'm pretty sure I saw people making out and playing with each other. One thing I do remember for sure, was me waking up, some time later, from what must have been an all night long nap. I'd taken my nap lying right there on the ground. When I woke up again, I was all alone, except for this huge mongrel dog who was laying down a few feet away. He opened his eyes when I sat up, but then closed them again, right after.

I needed to piss, really bad, and my mouth was so dry I couldn't even work up any spit. I had a bad headache as well. A woman with a small boy in tow, came walking past me, so I asked her if there was a restroom I could use, or maybe someplace where I could wash my face and rinse out my mouth? She told me she was taking her son to the bathroom and I could follow along with them.

There were these three big outhouses out in the woods, about two blocks away from the village. I thought it was very inconvenient to have them way out there, and I told her so. She just laughed at my big city ways. Lily and Jonah, her four year old son waited for me to finish up with my business, then she led me back to the village and over to where their communal kitchen was located. I had a big jar of apple juice, homemade she claimed, and a few more pieces of that leftover cornbread. I asked her if there were any more of those tasty brownies left, but she just smiled and told me no.

I was finishing up the last of the cornbread when I saw Henry walking over to me. I apologized to him for drifting off like I had, telling him that I wasn't really used to smoking marijuana.

"Yesterday you were getting ready to tell us what you'd pay for our bell's, but then you keeled over, fell asleep and never finished. Should I go get the rest of the elders, so we can finish up our meeting?"

"Why don't you first tell me whether or not you plan to keep making the bells, if I buy up all the one's you have in storage now. If you do decide to keep on making them, I think I'll be able to sell all you're able to make in the future."

"If we knew we'd at least break even, we would probably want to keep making them. The "Spirit Singers" are a gift from all of us here, one we wanted to make to the earth. Making money on them would be a very acceptable thing, but it isn't necessary to any of us that we do so."

"Jesus, Henry, you make it too easy for me to squeeze you hard, when you keep telling me stuff like that. You take all the fun out of negotiating with you."

"Jimmy, you're the businessman here, not us. Our main goal is to get more of nature's music out into the world. If we cared about money, would we be living out here, like this? We want to be left alone out here, to live our lives harmoniously, in tune with the natural order of the earth. Our village is forty years old now. I was born right here, and have lived here all my life. It's been a good life for me. Two of my sons left the village once, wanting to go out into the world, to see what it was like for themselves. They both returned to us in less than three months. Others have gone away and stayed gone. This was their choice to make and we take no issue with them over it."

"Seven dollars each, and that's about twice what I've been paying for the other wind chimes I usually buy. I'll need five thousand more a month from you, at a minimum, and that would mean you'd have to have 200 made a day, for twenty five days each month, or else you could work an extra hour and make 250 a day and only need to make them for twenty days a month. You'd need to deliver them to a place I'd tell you in Sacramento, so I could get them shipped out to wherever I'd need them. They'd need to be in boxes too, one hundred forty four to a box, or else seventy two to a box, you take your pick which. You buy the boxes, and you pack and double check them before every delivery. This won't work if you smoke too much of that dope of yours, and then forget to count how many you put in the boxes."

Henry laughed, nodding to indicate he knew that could easily happen.

"That's okay in the summer, loading things up and running them down to Sacramento, but not the other eight months of the year. It would make more sense for us to deliver whatever we had ready as soon as the roads were cleared for travel each Spring, and then right before the first snow comes, around September sometime. Probably late May, and early September, but we'd need to lay in a lot of metal to be able to cast that many bells. We do most of the work in the cold months, when there isn't too much else for any of us to be doing here."

Henry met with me and the other elders again, but by now I knew Henry was the one who was really in charge of everything. I found out what they needed in the way of raw materials, and the usual prices they paid for them. Naturally, they were getting royally hosed by their suppliers.

Henry and I started the whole negotiating thing all over again, working out a deal where I supplied everything they needed in the way of metal, including delivering it to their village, then paid them three dollars a unit profit, delivered in Sacramento, to whatever warehouse I had decided to deal with.

I even agreed to replace their bell making equipment, whenever it needed replacing. Since we were entering in what amounted to a partnership, they were happy to get a check for $16,000.00, in full payment for all their current inventory.

I took the two hundred and forty five odd "Spirit Singers" with me, back to Lake Tahoe, figuring to send them out to my biggest wind chime customers as a sample of the new line. When I got back to our suite, the girls were still sketching, but they did tell me they'd gone outside the hotel and worked on other sketches of some of the "A" frame and other styles of cottages they'd happened across in their little journey outside.

Both girls had really liked the sounds my Ebay bells had made, and they played around with one of the boxes full of "Spirit Singers" I'd brought back with me. It was soon apparent that every set of bells made a slightly different sound in the wind. All were pleasant, but the girls and I each had picked out our own personal favorite set.

We had the big birthday dinner in our suite, catered by four members of the hotel's staff. We had bacon wrapped prime filet mignon steaks, with baby mushrooms cooked in a light buttery gravy, red potatoes, and asparagus topped with a real nice Hollandaise sauce. Later on, to top it all off, we had this pretty little chocolate confection for dessert. The confection came with a lit birthday candle stuck in the two servings of it that were meant for the girls. We also enjoyed a large bottle of a very nice Merlot with dinner, followed by a much smaller bottle of sweet Muscato to go with our dessert.

After dinner, we went right to bed and worked off all those calories. Dinner in our suite, even with four servers in attendance, only came to a little over twelve hundred dollars, and that included a cash tip of a hundred dollars for each of our servers.

I stopped off to see a casino host right before we checked out, and was able to get a thousand dollars knocked of our total bill. This was given to us as a complimentary discount, for all the gambling the three of us had done while we were there.

I thought that was very fair of them, considering that Sherry had won over five thousand dollars when we were all playing "21" one of the nights, and Tina and I had only ended up losing about two thousand each. We'd played pretty long on one night, maybe six or seven hours each, but only for an hour or two each, the four other days. I'd missed one day of gambling completely, because of my business side trip.

I went online and found a warehouse that would handle shipping for me in Sacramento, setting up my account with them over the phone. I then wrote Henry a note, sending it to to his post office box, with the address and the phone number for the warehouse, along with my new identifying account number at the warehouse that he needed to use when making his deliveries to me.

I found a metal foundry over in the Bay area that quoted me much better prices on the iron and other trace metals that went into casting the bells. This represented a substantial savings over what the commune had been paying for their raw metal needs. I'd already anticipated being able to do this when I made my deal with Henry.

Henry had agreed to rent a storage place in the small town nearest where the commune was located, and he had also agreed to have someone there in the town to accept delivery on all the metal I had told him I'd order. Getting from the village to the town in Winter, using a snow mobile with a freight sled towed behind it wasn't a very big problem for them to be able to manage. Henry said several different members of the commune traveled back and forth from there all the time, even in the Winter.

When we left Lake Tahoe, on July twenty third, we drove our rental Jeep back down to the airport in Sacramento. From there, we flew to San Francisco airport, on a small commuter airline, then took a major carrier non stop back to New Jersey, where we hopped in the Navigator and drove straight back home.

Right after I'd gotten back from Rhode Island, I'd driven over to see Mr. & Mrs. Axelbland at their home. I handed him my personal check for $994,000.00, telling him that I was returning the money I'd overcharged him for those two paintings I'd sold him. He finally took the money from me, but not before telling me, over and over again, how happy he and his wife were to have had the opportunity to finally be able to make their peace with Christina. I told him that Tina and I had set our wedding date, telling him it was to be August 3rd. The Axelbland's looked at each other when I named the date, but didn't comment on whether or not that date had any significance for either of them.

All Tina's mom kept saying about the date was that there was too little time for her to be planning a complete wedding and the wedding reception. She kept complaining that we were giving them less than three months to prepare everything they'd need.

"Tina said to tell you we can just get married when we're out in Lake Tahoe for the girl's birthday, if that would make it any easier for you?"

When Tina and I had first started talking about getting married, Sherry had told her mom. At that time, Tina's parents probably weren't expecting to even get an invitation to the ceremony. Right after I came back from Providence, and the three of us got back together again, all that had changed. We had decided to put my plan in motion. I'd known, from the very beginning, that Tina would need a very good reason for allowing her parents to participate in our wedding. The plan I'd outlined for what Danny and Kaitlyn might be doing at the wedding with her parents had supplied all the incentive she'd needed to be willing to include them.