In Farmington there isn’t a ton to do on the weekends. Well, there isn’t a ton to do anytime. We had to make our own excitement. That usually meant driving out to a remote spot and drinking whatever we could get our hands on. When I turned sixteen I was actually able to buy beer myself instead of making someone’s older sibling do it. I never got carded. That was something I was really proud of. It wasn’t until much later that I figured out it was an insult.
I blame the fact that my face aged faster than me on the time I was visiting my dad in California and we fell asleep on the beach. I came back to Arkansas with a blistered face and my mom yelled about how she wasn’t sure my face would ever recover.
“You might need surgery!” she yelled.
I was in a panic. It healed completely, but I’ve still always looked ten years older than I am. I’m positive it has nothing to do with smoking and drinking at an early age. No way.
My favorite place to hang out in high school was called Muddy Fork. It was a fork in the road, and it was muddy. There wasn’t a lot of effort put into naming our hangouts, which is very similar to how my mother named our pets. We had a dog that liked to dig holes; his name was Digby. We had a cat that was afraid of everything; his name was Fraidy Cat. We had a kitten that we found that was tiny—“like a chigger,” my mom said. So she named him Chigger. You get the idea. If you don’t know what a chigger is, be grateful. They really itch.
Weekend destination spots had to be changed once the local cop caught on. It was always a sad moment. Lots of memories had been built in those places and we didn’t want to have to start over. Also, we were lazy.
I remember distinctly the night that we had to leave Muddy Fork for good. My friend Jason was playing “Life Is a Highway” (not the Rascal Flatts version, the other one) on his brand-new fifteen-inch woofers. There was a period when I was in high school that the bigger your speakers, the bigger your popularity, so all the guys tried to outdo each other. He kept screaming “I’m gonna ride it all night long.” I didn’t know if he was talking about his truck or his drunk girlfriend, but he was loud. Blue lights flashed, we all got in our cars, and Muddy Fork was left in the dust. We always found a new place, though. After Muddy Fork we had the Power Lines, which, in retrospect, was incredibly unsafe.
The next destination that became popular was The Woods. It was a place in the woods. You’ll catch on soon. The Woods was where we went after the Twin Bridges—the spot in the middle of town with two bridges that looked exactly the same—was no longer cool. We decided to have a bonfire there. You’d think coming from a family of volunteer firefighters I’d put up a little resistance to the idea, but instead I just said “Hell yeah!” and helped throw wood and trash into a huge pile. We had to stop going there one night after a guy we called “Hippie” caught his face and ponytail on fire when he tried to light the bonfire with a Bic lighter.
My favorite thing about high school was being on drill team. I was pretty amazing at doing the Running Man so I was a shoo-in the first year I auditioned. I took it pretty seriously.
The main reason to be on drill team instead of cheer-leading was that the girls were a lot more fun than the cheerleaders, and by “fun” I mean “slutty.” Also, you didn’t have to do a backflip, which I couldn’t. Most of the cheerleaders went to the Baptist church on Sundays and loved to talk about their virginity. By the way, most of them got knocked up right after high school. I guess holding off from sex for four years made those girls go nuts the second they graduated. I was smart: I had sex in high school so that I knew what I was doing once I got out in the real world.
Like any teenage girl, I had my share of heartbreaks. Most of my high school years were spent in love with a guy named Bucky. His real name was Daniel, but he preferred to be called Bucky. His dad went by Butch and his brother went by Buddy, so he isn’t really to blame. He also didn’t even have buck teeth, so the whole nickname was a real waste. In my defense, he was on the football team and he had a mustache. You can’t stop that kind of destiny. The Southern girl in me thought I needed to eventually settle down, be stable and be in love, and Bucky was the one.
To this day, or at least to the day I finished this chapter, my mother still works at the funeral home. There aren’t many in town, so pretty much everybody who has a family member who dies goes to Moore’s Chapel. It’s how I get to keep up with people from my past. She was thrilled to call me the day that Bucky came in for his aunt’s funeral to tell me how things had turned out for him.
“From what it sounds like, he lives in a two-bedroom apartment with his wife and four children.”
The Southern girl in me dodged a bullet.
Bucky was kind of a ladies’ man, which was directly related to being able to grow a mustache at sixteen. He drove an El Camino because he thought it was mysterious. He believed that it was cool because nobody really knew if it was a car or a truck. He had a pair of the big woofer speakers like the other guys, but there wasn’t a place to put them in an El Camino, so he had them installed behind the seat. Anytime I rode with him and he turned the music up I was thrown violently forward. But I just kept smiling.
He didn’t seem to have a lot of interest in me at first, which made me really like him. We were “going together” on and off, but it took several rounds of dating for Bucky to finally refer to me as his girlfriend at school. Although my friends would try to tell me that he was not worth it, I just wrote it all off as commitment issues. I knew the type—my dad was one of them. Bucky just needed to play the field a little, but eventually he’d give in to our obvious passion and we would light the world on fire.
Even though we were technically together, I didn’t feel like I really had Bucky’s attention. I thought for sure there was something I wasn’t giving him. I went through it over and over in my head and realized that the one thing I hadn’t given him—my virginity—was standing in our way. If this relationship was going to go further, I was going to need to hand over my vagina.
Bucky chewed. It’s common in the South. I’ve seen toddlers do it. His tobacco of choice was Copenhagen. Men who chew always keep a spit cup handy. They use the same one and empty it when it’s full. It’s disgusting. Bucky kept one in his bedroom on his windowsill. He said that way he could just dump it out when it was ready. It seemed to me it would have been much easier to just spit out the window.
Once I decided that he’d be my first, there was no going back. Almost all of the other girls in my class had already had sex, with the exception of the Baptists. I had waited long enough—I was fifteen and I wasn’t getting any younger. Bucky was very open to the idea of being my first, so it didn’t take much for him to come up with the place and time. His parents were going away for the weekend, and since he was seventeen and a senior in high school, they trusted him to be alone. We immediately planned our rendezvous.
I was nervous when I got to his place. I wasn’t old enough to drive yet, so Lindsay dropped me off. This was one of the moments I was irritated that my mom put me in kindergarten when I was four. Apparently she couldn’t wait to get me out of the house, but I hated being younger than all of my friends.
When we pulled up to Bucky’s driveway, she and I sat silently in the car for a moment.
“You sure?” she asked.
“I’m sure,” I told her.
“Make sure he wears something,” she reminded me.
“If he forgets, I’ll just take a long bath. Kristy says that works.”
I got out of the car, tightened my scrunchie, smoothed out my floral spandex shorts, and headed for his front door. Lindsay backed slowly out of the driveway, and I could hear the Thelma & Louise soundtrack coming from her speakers.
“You’re a part of me, I’m a part of you …” Glenn Frey crooned.
I turned to the front door and knocked. It was now or never.
Bucky answered the door wearing football pants and a do-rag. He smiled, spit into a plastic cup, and motioned for me to come in. I’d been in his house before, but this time everything seemed different. I knew his family didn’t have a lot of money, but suddenly instead of “poor” they seemed “quaint.” Instead of “dirty” the house just looked “unkempt.” I was giving him excuses for the way that he lived. I still do that; I’m working on it. But at that point he was leading me to his bedroom. And I really needed to like him before we got there.
There was no time wasted on Bucky’s side. I was there to fuck him, and he was in a time crunch. On the way to his room, he stopped only once, to show me his football helmet that his dad had mounted on the wall. On the front it said “Wheat.” I didn’t understand.
“Shouldn’t you have gotten your name put on the front of the helmet? And if you wanted to use the name of a bread, why not everybody’s favorite, ‘Wonder’?”
He scoffed at my ignorance. “Wheat is short for Buckwheat, which was derived from Bucky, which is my name.”
“Actually your name is Daniel.”
“My name is Bucky.”
“Bucky is a nickname. You nicknamed your nickname?”
“Whatever, Miss Straight-A’s. Let’s go get down.”
We continued on to the bedroom and Bucky pushed the door open, then stepped aside so that I could enter. The smell of chewing tobacco wafted past me. Bucky led me by the hand to his bed. I was in a daze. He gently pushed me down, then awkwardly fell on top of me. He was pretty heavy and I couldn’t breathe.
“So … heavy … just can you … ouch,” I muttered. My air was being cut off.
“Sorry, baby.” Then he moved more to the side. “Hold on, I have a surprise for you.”
Bucky stood up and went to his dresser. He got out a condom and winked at me. He then rummaged through a few cassette tapes, found the one he wanted, and popped it into his ghetto blaster. He pushed “play” and the lyrics to Too $hort’s “Don’t Fight the Feelin’ ” filled the room:
Say ho
yeah you
Can I ask you a question
You like to fuck?
Oh, you don’t want me to talk to you like that
Will you like to make love?
“Our song,” Bucky whispered into my ear. I racked my brain trying to remember why this was our song. It didn’t seem that romantic. I was also pretty sure we didn’t have a song.
I saw you walking down the street, and I had to stop
Turn up the radio and drop the top
I see you look so good, and you’re so fine
Young tender, would you be mine.…
I shook my head. “I don’t think this is our song.”
“Of course it is. It’s always the song that is our song when I have a girlfriend.”
“So it’s your song and when you have a girlfriend it’s their song, too?”
“Not their song, it’s our song.”
“But then it isn’t our song if it’s your song with all of your ex-girlfriends.” I started to tear up. This wasn’t going as planned.
“No, baby, this is for you. I’ve never played it for a virgin before,” he said proudly.
Suddenly he was on top of me. He pulled down his pants, then mine, and before I knew what was happening I had lost my virginity. I looked up and noticed that he had knocked his spit cup over. Brown saliva trickled down his window as the Too $hort song continued:
Your name is yuck mouth, you don’t brush
Gotta cover your mouth like this
They call you yuck mouth
You refuse to brush, no sweetheart you can keep that kiss.
I wriggled to get free from Bucky’s grasp. This was really embarrassing. I just wanted to get out of the way of the fallen saliva moving directly toward my head. Unfortunately I didn’t make it in time. Bucky jumped up and got me a towel, one of the only caring things he’d done that day, and probably during our entire relationship. Right after he wiped his armpits with it, he handed me the towel to clean the spit off my face.
If you’ve never had sex for the first time with someone playing trashy rap with a mouth full of chew, keep it that way. I passed it off as fine because I had nothing to compare it to. Now the whole thing reminds me of a crime scene. I still have nightmares.
From that night on, Bucky and I became a real couple. Much like Ricky Walden, he didn’t waste time telling people at school what had occurred between us the night before. I had every right to be upset with him, but I wasn’t. He pacified the whole thing by presenting me with his class ring. It was about ten sizes too big for me. I wrapped tons of yarn around the base of it so that it would fit my finger. I decided that him giving me his ring meant that me giving him my hymen was okay. We were officially together. The only thing that scared me was that he was a senior and I was a junior. I couldn’t imagine what school would be like next year without him.
When I turned sixteen and needed my first job, Bucky put in a word for me where he was working, which was at Hardee’s. It felt really romantic to be working side by side with my boyfriend. We were in the trenches together. We already had Friday night football and now we had fast food.
I started as a cashier. I took people’s orders and filled their bags with cheeseburgers and thanked them for choosing Hardee’s. It didn’t take long for me to get restless; I really wanted to work the drive-thru. Bucky scoffed at me.
“Everybody wants to work drive-thru. That’s where the respect is.”
“Okay, well, can you train me? I think I can pick it up pretty fast. I hate working the counter. It’s too much interacting with people.” Later in life, when I had to wait tables for a good fifteen years, this would really wear on me.
“You’re joking, right?” Bucky asked. “You think you can just waltz in here and work drive-thru? You ain’t even done fry detail yet. Just wait your turn.”
I couldn’t understand what the big deal was. I wanted to wear that headset so bad. I couldn’t stand having to talk to people face-to-face anymore. Plus, at the drive-thru window you could slip free burgers and drinks to your friends. It was a position of power.
Bucky wasn’t a ton of help in moving me up at work. He told the manager that I should learn to make biscuits like everyone else. For weeks I had to come in to work at 5 A.M. on Saturdays and Sundays to fill aluminum trays with biscuit mix. It was much worse than the breakfasts at the fire department. At least at those all I had to do was serve. Now suddenly I was a cook, too? This is bullshit.
At school we had something called “Colors Day.” It was like homecoming, but for basketball. I was voted onto the “Colors Day Court” as a Junior Maid. This was a really big fucking deal in my mind. It meant people liked me. It meant that even though I wasn’t one of the Baptists, I was accepted. I had to buy a nice dress, get my hair done, and have someone to dance with during the “royalty number” at the big dance that took place after school. Of course, I asked Bucky.
Between the game, having to sit on a makeshift throne for three hours, and the dance, I felt wiped out from my big evening. I went home immediately after the dance, opting to skip the after party at Rhonda Lewis’s house. Bucky said he was still going to go; my exhaustion certainly didn’t need to ruin his good time.
The next morning Bucky came wandering in to Hardee’s with a giant hickey on his neck.
“What the fuck is that?” I yelled the second that I saw him.
“That.” I pointed to the purple bruise. “That hickey. What did you do!” I started to cry.
“Oh, that. That’s not a hickey. Clint Pearson and I were messing around, and he pinched me.”
“Clint Pearson doesn’t have a thumb,” I yelled. “You can’t effectively pinch somebody if you don’t have a thumb!”
I dragged Bucky back into dry storage and demanded the truth. He confessed that he had made out with Rhonda Lewis. I was appalled. Rhonda Lewis was the most unattractive, manliest-looking girl you could ever imagine. Back then she was the queen of the basketball courts and I’m sure by now she’s the queen of some other woman’s vagina.
I became enraged. I started throwing thirty-two-ounce plastic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cups at him and calling him every name in the book, including Daniel, because I knew that would really get under his skin.
Having your boyfriend cheat on you at sixteen is devastating, especially when he is your first and you’re still trying to figure out how to get on the pill without telling your mom. You feel like all of the trust and air has been taken out of you. There was no way I was going to be the dumb girl that worked it out with my crappy boyfriend. I was simply going to move on and have sex with another guy as soon as possible to put this whole thing behind me.
Bucky was not happy that I broke up with him over the “incident” with Rhonda Lewis. Suddenly he was madly in love with me and couldn’t bear to face the idea of losing me. He stalked, called, and wrote terrible poetry that he left on my car. I saved all of them. I was sure I’d need them one day in court, or in a book about how dumb I was. Here’s to the latter:
For when we go out we won’t go dutch …
Don’t eat my shit
So I can lick your tit …
I have wrecked our lives
As if with knives …
So I depart
With a Fart …
Is that an apology? I was sure that he was losing his mind. He called me crying, begging for us to get back together. He said I should be his wife and we were meant to be. I don’t know what turned him this way; I assume it was guilt. I think it’s common for people to take things for granted until they’re gone, which was something I had learned from the band Cinderella and their song “Don’t Know What You Got (Till It’s Gone).” Bucky was also just about to graduate from high school and no colleges were interested in his 2.7 GPA or his barely impressive football skills. He was coming unraveled.
I was becoming slightly unraveled too, but I didn’t know it. I started paying attention to the Baptists at school. Those girls seemed so happy. They didn’t ever look hungover, and I was pretty sure none of them had ever had a urinary tract infection, which I was certain I had gotten because Bucky had been unfaithful. One Sunday I suggested to Lindsay that we attend the First Baptist Church.
Sitting in that church was an odd experience. Suddenly all the Baptists were saying hello to me, much more friendly than usual. They were welcoming me and Lindsay and letting us know that if we needed anything, to call them. I thanked them but assured them I wouldn’t need to call. I knew where the church was and as long as I showed up on Sundays, shit would start turning around for me.
The second time I went, I cried throughout the whole sermon. It felt like the right thing to do. At the end the preacher asked if anybody needed to be saved. I started having flashbacks to my night with Penny. I crossed my fingers and prayed that people didn’t start writhing on the floor. Then I felt myself stand up. I raised my hand and walked toward the front of the church. I needed to be saved. I have sinned. I wasn’t supposed to have sex, let alone a bladder infection. Maybe the preacher could wash all of that away. I turned to look for Lindsay and she was following me. I smiled—we were in this together.
Getting dunked backward into a tub of lukewarm water was not something I was expecting to do that day. I was definitely not dressed for it. There were plenty of people who I knew that were in attendance, and now I was committing to a religion I barely knew anything about right in front of them. Regardless, Lindsay and I were both officially cleared of our sins and could start our lives over.
I got home, dripping wet, and told Mom that I was an official member of the Baptist Church. I hoped she wasn’t going to be mad. She was Methodist and I didn’t want her to feel I was going against her, even though I had no idea if I had.
“Do you know what it means to be Baptist?” she asked.
“Sort of.”
She looked like she had something to say, but she bit her tongue. “You’re free to believe in anything you want to believe in. But I suggest you put on a new T-shirt before you catch a cold.”
I went to church for a couple more weeks. I knew that Farmington was a “dry” town but you could buy alcohol when you got five miles down the road into Fayetteville. I also knew that in both towns no liquor was sold on Sunday. I used to solve that by driving to Missouri on Sundays to buy beer. It would have been easier to just stock up on Saturday nights, but that was my way of not accepting the rules. It was not until I went to church and started hanging out with the Baptists that I realized they were responsible for the weird liquor rules. They had a lot of rules that I was not expecting, but I was trying to roll with it.
One day the pastor told me that I was going to have to quit drill team. I thought he was joking.
Apparently Baptists in Farmington didn’t believe in dancing. I explained to him that it was my senior year and that I’d probably make captain, which is as prestigious as you can get. Surely he didn’t expect me to hang up my pom-pons for a church, especially this late in the game. He explained that in his religion, which was now my religion, they don’t believe in dancing for amusement; it had to be for a purpose.
“It is for a purpose. It’s for halftime,” I fired back.
He wouldn’t budge. “It just isn’t something that we can condone.”
“But all of the cheerleaders are Baptists. How’d they get around this?”
“They don’t dance. They cheer,” he said confidently.
“But they do the splits and climb on top of each other to make a pyramid. Is that for a purpose?”
He sighed and told me to make my decision. I was furious. I thought about all of our school dances. Those girls were always there, and always dancing. When nobody was watching, they did what they wanted. The pastor didn’t show up for dances, but he sure showed up for the football games. I felt like I was surrounded by a bunch of hypocrites.
There was no way I was giving up the one thing I loved doing to keep a bunch of people from sneering at me. I was pretty sure that God didn’t care if I did the Running Man. I figured He just wanted me to be a good person.
I decided that my relationship with God was solid enough that I could dance and believe in him at the same time. I’d seen Footloose and I didn’t have a train yard to run out to and do my routine in in secret, so I just stopped going to church. I didn’t really quit that church just to remain on drill team, even if that is a better story. I quit because I felt like people weren’t honest about what they did when they weren’t in church. I don’t see the point of only believing in something on Sundays.
My senior year I made captain. My team gave me a whistle with my name engraved on it, which I wore proudly. I was still getting hounded by Bucky, but at least he’d graduated so he wasn’t at school every day. He occasionally left notes on my car, but it was not as frequent since it now required a special trip for him.
I started dating a guy named Tony. He and I were good friends but he was also close with Bucky. We decided to be together, even though we knew it was going to affect their friendship. Tony told me that our song was “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” by Bryan Adams. It was used in the movie Robin Hood and it was all about how a guy’s love for this woman was worth fighting for, just like Tony thought ours was. I didn’t think it was a perfect song choice but in the romance department it certainly beat anything by Too $hort.
“Is that our song or is that your song with all of your girlfriends?” I challenged.
“What? It’s our song. What kind of person would have the same song for every girlfriend?”
I kissed him.
Bucky heard about me and Tony, but neither of us would admit to him that it was true. Because of that, Bucky spent his free time trying to prove it. When our class took a trip to the state fair, he tailed the bus hoping to catch Tony and me hanging out together. He was behind us the whole time, thinking nobody would notice him. He still drove an El Camino—everybody noticed. He even went into the fair and attempted to talk to me. Every time I looked behind me, he was approaching. We just kept turning corners to lose him. I’d run into a bathroom while Tony got in line for a funnel cake. I was so embarrassed, and all I really wanted was to ride the Tilt-A-Whirl.
Finally Bucky’s letters to me became so rambling and off track that I told Tony I thought he might be clinically insane or on drugs. Tony said that he didn’t think Bucky was on drugs.
“Did he ever do any around you?”
“No way,” I explained. “I won’t tolerate any drugs.”
“But I smoke pot,” he said.
“Oh, pot is fine. I smoke that sometimes when I’m in the mood. I just won’t do drug-drugs.”
“Like what? Cocaine?”
“Cocaine is the worst! Have you ever read any of the Sweet Valley High novels? In one of them this girl Regina decided to try cocaine for the first time and her heart stopped. I mean, she died the first time she tried it! I told Bucky about that, so I don’t think he’d ever do cocaine. Did you read that one?”
“Can’t say that I have read any of those. Sounds pretty intense.”
“Oh, you have no idea. You can borrow some if you want. I have them all.”
“I’m good. I don’t really like books.”
Eventually I broke up with Tony. I knew I was going to college the next year and I didn’t want to be tied down. I had big dreams and I couldn’t let a man stand in my way. I also knew Tony was not going to college, since you couldn’t major in pot. I decided to spare him what I went through when I was a sophomore and Brent Jackson went away to college. We had tried to stay boyfriend and girlfriend but eventually we grew apart. I was not interested in a boyfriend who couldn’t be in town to take me to PG-13 movies and Taco Bell.
When graduation day finally came around, my dad was a no-show. He had always said that he’d be there, but work was too busy and he couldn’t make it. I was disappointed, but I sort of got it. What was he going to do in Farmington? He wore a suit and tie and was probably afraid of cowboy hats. And it was a long trip for something not that rare; most people in the world accomplish graduating at some point. It actually taught me a good lesson: If you have kids, you may unknowingly disappoint them. It seemed like it was smarter to not overcommit yourself, then nobody could say you’d let them down. If you do what you want to do, you’re the only person who can feel slighted.
Bucky still didn’t give up when I started college. He heard, most likely through a phone tap, that Tony and I had broken it off. He thought now that I was out of high school maybe we could start dating again. I don’t think he realized that starting college meant I was moving forward rather than backward. He heard I was majoring in theater, so he called me up and told me that he was going to audition for a local production of Romeo and Juliet.
“They are holding auditions soon. I think I’d be a good Romeo since I have a lot of love in me. Plus I’m good at football.”
“But Romeo doesn’t play football …”
“He does now.”
I don’t have to explain to you what a rather large man with a mustache would look like running around in tights trying to speak in iambic pentameter. But since the only thing Bucky ever followed through on was not leaving me alone, the audition never happened.
After many phone calls I gave in and agreed to meet him for lunch. I was no longer working at Hardee’s. I had moved on to a respectable job at a real restaurant named Bert’s Grill & Bakery. It was like a chain restaurant, but not a chain. The owner was a recovering alcoholic, so the place didn’t serve alcohol. I always thought that was really selfish of him; it wasn’t his customers’ fault that he couldn’t control himself around tequila. I decided Bert’s would be a good place to meet Bucky for lunch. Since I hadn’t seen him in about a year, a public place where I knew people seemed like the right call.
When he walked in my stomach sank. He had a big fat gut and his mustache looked like it was growing toward it. I couldn’t remember why I had agreed to this meeting. He greeted me with a big smile and I attempted one in return. I then told him we should sit down before it got busy, which was code for “Let’s get in and out of here before anybody else spots us.”
We sat down at the table and one of my co-workers, Logan, came to take our order. He and I were good friends so I asked him to take care of us in case shit started to go south.
I immediately started to wonder if Bucky had ever been to a sit-down restaurant before. Questions like “What would you like on your baked potato?” and “What kind of dressing do you want on your salad?” threw him for a loop. He looked at me with panic in his eyes. He just kept answering, “Ranch.”
“You want ranch dressing on your baked potato?” Logan asked with a smirk.
“Yes, unless you think Thousand Island is better.”
I took over the ordering. “Just give him a baked potato with everything on it. And see if they can rush the food.”
I could tell Logan was getting a real kick out of the whole situation. In fact, all of the waiters snickered in the back, asking me who my date was. I should have taken him to a place that was dark and quiet and nobody knew who I was. When Bucky got up to use the restroom, I told Logan that he’d been in an accident and that he had suffered brain damage.
“I’m so sorry, Sarah. I didn’t realize. But it explains a lot.”
“It’s fine. Just please tell the others not to laugh at him. It’s rude,” I warned.
I suffered through the meal, finding comfort in knowing that this would be the last time I saw him. He suffered through his baked potato, uncertain why tiny green things were chopped up on top of it. I attempted to explain what a chive was but gave up when he said he had once gotten the chives from taking medication.
I guess he didn’t realize how poorly the whole thing went because he still called a few times after. Eventually he gave up, the clincher being when I changed my phone number. He left word through our mutual friends that I was missing out. He was going to be extremely successful with his new venture, which was the opening of a venetian blind cleaning business.