Chapter 89

Two days after we went back to work on the recipe Bart declared it acceptable. I celebrated by taking Bart out to dinner. Since I was buying I got to choose. We went to a family style steakhouse in Williamston.

After a heavy meal, I settled down with a cup of tea and the computer. I didn't slip into the chat room until Bart was up in what had become his part of the studio. It was his part, even though I managed to navigate the open stairs at least three times a week for showers. That and the boxes at the end of the open stairs held my clothes. At least I no longer had to ask him to bring fresh panties down to me.

My leg had healed enough so that I could go without the cloth bandages long enough for a careful shower. That made it a lot easier to stay sweet smelling.

The next day I planned to break down the lab. We had setup it up in the display area of my studio to test the recipe and that was done. I had no idea what my plan was exactly but I was tired of being surround by tools. I wanted my studio back to do with as I pleased.

That night in one of the three chat rooms I visited, I met an older man. He had the screen name of 'Dark Daddy.' When he messaged me, I expected him to ask, have you ever dated black or did I like men with huge cocks. When he didn't ask either I was curious. I made it a habit to let the men tell me what they wanted to share. I also shared a glamorized version of my life. At least as much as he seemed interested in knowing. The man called 'Dark Daddy' really managed to capture my imagination.

We traded experiences. I cleaned mine up a little and I expected he had exaggerated his a little. His sounded a little unbelievable, I thought. He and I discussed sex until I was pretty turned on. I quickly left him so that I could masturbate. After I left the chat room I turned off the computer, then went to bed. It was in the bed where I masturbated to the memory of the mysterious Dark Daddy.

Over breakfast with Bart at the Dairy Queen I remarked, "Since yours was the final judgment, we can now move on to the manufacturing and marketing stages of the Irish tea. We have two blends of Irish tea. So we advertise it on area TV. We organize a website and solicit comments on the site. "Then use those in our advertisements. It is going to take a while, but if we stay with it we will be okay."

I suddenly heard the ghost say, "You can't go wrong with an investment in sin."

"Where the hell have you been," I said quietly so as not to scare hell out of Bart.

"Around. You have someone looking out for you. Just keep moving forward girlie," Liam said.

"Girlie my ass," I said. But I looked up to see Bart staring at me smiling. "Okay I talk to myself some."

"So what do we do about making this Irish Tea?" Bart asked.

"Let's keep our overhead down till we know what is what," I suggested. "What do you think?"

"Yeah, what we don't need is to invest a lot of money into a product we can't move," Bart agreed.

So we manufacture two days a week for a while. We did that till we could judge the demand and then meet it. We don't have any packaging equipment so we farmed out a simple package. Once it was delivered we did our own packing by hand. We even carried them in my truck to a pickup point for UPS.

We did need an industrial kitchen steam cabinet or two. Just to breakdown the fiber in the stalks, so we bought five of those from the Industrial Kitchen Supply company. That and the chopper blender is all we really had to have to start the manufacturing of the tea.

So when the cardboard boxes and the envelopes, which held the tea, arrived from the private printer in mobile everything was ready. They cost at least twice the amount we could have made them ourselves but it was down to a cost of business and moved on. It was likely we would always farm out that kind of thing. I doubted we would ever want to invest in machinery for that kind of thing. It would be a lot of machinery we might just have to turn around and sell. Things might not work out or we just might want to change packaging we were still feeling our way along

Then again it was like Liam had said, "Nobody ever went broke investing in sin". I could use that to justify buying anything I really wanted for the business.

It could be a long time before we were profitable, but we wouldn't be draining our bank accounts either. Our only continuing expense would be Hannah, if we kept her on after she finished with the chopper, which was only a day or so away.

"So what do you think about Hannah?" I asked.

"What I think is that neither of us wants to do all that shit ourselves. You aren't well enough to stand there feeding stalks into the chopper, and I'm not going to do all the grunt work myself."

"So are you saying I should pay her to do what I should be doing. I mean I kind of see that, but then it is also a business expense."

"So we keep her. If nothing else she will help with our tax problem next year," Bart said. "I figure we can put out one to five hundred boxes of tea a week with just the three of us.

The Diary Queen breakfast should have been deductible since we did a lot of planning there.

The orders trickled in for the first several months. The business grew slowly but we were satisfied with the rate of growth. Then something happened that we didn't plan.

One of the big Hollywood action stars came to Alabama a few months after we began manufacturing and distributing our product. Neither Bart nor I read the newspapers, so we didn't know that a movie crew was down in the swamps making a picture. They had chosen the early spring hoping to avoid the bugs.

It was one of those movies where one man is running from a drug cartel kind of things. They had set the last scenes of the movie in the swamp. While the big ol movie star was in the area, he tried a box of our tea. It was in one of our first months, but he wasn't interviewed on one of those Hollywood entertainment talk show till we had been in business several months.

The host asked him about his new movie. "So Matt what was the thing that you enjoyed most about filming in Alabama?" the host asked, expecting an answer about the swamps.

"That's easy, the swamp people, and the Irish tea. That stuff makes one kick ass cup of herb tea, if you know what I mean. I can't find it here so a man we met down there sends me a box every week."

Before anyone could stop it the social media went ape shit over Irish Tea. One of the major networks came down to interview Bart and me. I avoided them, but Bart and Hannah had no problem at all talking about Irish tea.

"Now you know I can't tell you the secret, but we do things a little different. They say it makes Miss Sadie's tea a great bedtime drink for the ladies, and Boxer's tea just plain kickass," Bart said.

The next day orders started to pour into our little factory which put the little town of Mossberg on the map again. There was a lot of chatter on the net and a lot of people waiting when the empty shelves got replenished in the government owned stores.

During all those months my online friendship with Dark Daddy continued. He seemed to know just the right things to say to me. He offered me advice from an older man. I recognized that he was much older from his references to things that happened before I was born.

He began to flirt with me. It was gentle at first but it got pretty serious now and then. I truly enjoyed it. It was like a sexually charged Liam type relationship. We both were definitely masturbating while we talked. I didn't ordinarily do that because it takes so much more concentration for me to orgasm then it does for a man. The chat is usually distracting. However for some reason it wasn't at all distracting with Dark Daddy.

Since the business was picking up I didn't have a lot less on my mind, so it was probably easier to relax and just let it happen, than to go looking for sex. Either way I was enjoying the single minded sex. Of course I was also missing the touch of a man or even a woman.

We had seen summer change to winter while we worked the plant with just Bart, Hannah, and me. By the time spring turned to winter the orders were pouring in. Other government stores around the country were putting in orders. We actually got to the point where we couldn't get enough stalks to fill the orders.

We still made our plans at Dairy Queen, then Bart and I had our lunch most days at the diner. We also had several members of Miss Sadie's family working for us as casual labor. Life was good by the time we could finally relax for a change.

"You know we are working too damn hard," I said. It's time you flew Rita in again," I said.

"So does that mean you need to see Jeff again," Bart asked.

"I think it does," I agreed.

"So if Rita flies to Williamston we can have the place to ourselves," he asked.

"Yes it does," I agreed.

I had been driving the truck for a month or so. Jeff had been bugging me to either meet me in Williamston where there were at least acceptable motels, or drive to the Georgia college town.

Most likely he was out of money again. I had made him loans which would never be repaid, I was sure. His methods had built the business and the loans were small enough. Just a couple of thousand a year. Usually it went for buying books, so they came at the beginning of the two semesters.

I planned to leave at end of the shift on Friday. We had been up and operating almost eighteen months by then. We were running at full capacity. We might as well have been printing our own money. There was only one other player in the weed tea business and their tea was disgusting.

Before I left to meet Jeff, Bart came into the office. "I want to run something past you and just have you mull it over."

"Here we go again. You are going to say we need an addition and I'm going to remind you of Kodak," I said. "If the demand dries up, we could be stuck with buildings all over town."

"It isn't that. You already know how I feel about that. It's about buying our own pot allotment. We are at the mercy of the guys who grow the weed. The price on the shit they used to throw away just keeps going up. It's just stupid since we are about the only buyers the honest operators can find to sell to."

"I hear there are some moonshiners who will buy it. We are the only ones who have a license to buy it," I agreed.