By 2010, Lou started to offer to do marketing work for some of his friends who ran large companies.
He worked the phones relentlessly until he secured several contracts that did well enough for us to pay the rent on our condo — mostly on time. And, he used frequent flier miles and hotel points (the only good thing about big charges on your credit card!) so he could set up meetings for himself all over the country.
Also, at the time, Lou’s niece was working for American Airlines, and she listed Lou as her primary person for her buddy passes — and thanks to another amazing Leslie in my life, Lou kept showing up exactly where he needed to be to close deals.
But as with every story about Lou, there are so many amazing coincidences and bizarre connections to the “right person at the right time” that it would take me about dozen more entries to chronicle it all for you. So I won’t bother. But let me just say, those first two and a half years — on what I think of as our first comeback trail — were full of big ups, and lots of disappointing letdowns.
Sadly, none of the projects Lou was consulting on in those early days were big enough to help us find a significant financial breakthrough. We were still struggling to pay our bills on time (or at all in a few cases), and I was suffering from mini-panic attacks whenever a creditor would call me. I took those calls incredibly personally, and often, I’d end up hiding in my closet, crying my eyes out after a creditor explained the realities of our situation to me — again.
But Lou did get pretty close to closing one game-changing deal.
In the summer of 2010, Lou started a marketing company with two 20-something-year-old partners who were very savvy with technology. It was a great partnership — and with Lou’s vast business experiences, and his new partner’s keen understanding of social media and technology, they developed a concept that turned out to be exactly like iCloud for gaming — just before iCloud was being widely marketed.
The guys were so close to making a huge fortune off of the licensing fees for their technology. But at the closing, Lou and his partners discovered that the programming partners were corrupt — they had been taking their money and faking the technology demos with smoke and mirrors all along. So the whole thing fell apart in one spectacular crash-and-burn moment in January of 2012.
I still remember the look on Lou’s face when he came home from the meeting where everything cratered. He left the condo that morning with so much confidence; but when he got home, he looked like someone had punched all of the fight right out of him.
It was horrible to find ourselves in this situation again.
I felt like the “its bitsy spider.” We put our all into that climb, only to be washed out in one big gully-washer of an experience. But it took me a little less time to get my emotional footing after that loss. I still went through my anger phase, and I cried. I figure my reaction was normal, but it was also padded with a layer of life experience now. I already had some burns on my legs from the long slide down from the top of the waterspout, so this tumble didn’t surprise me as much. It still sucked. But the shock was less griping the second time around, I suppose.
You might be wondering what I was doing while Lou was working his heart out for our survival.
Well… I was highly invested in everything Lou was building back then. But the truth is, I was too emotionally shot (or, you could say I was too chicken) to try to figure out how to keep my book tour going. So I shelved my plans, and I jumped in and wrote all of Lou’s business plans, and the content for the various websites that Lou was supporting for some of his small clients.
I also found a form of escape by writing two more novels — the sequel to Hurricane Season, and a totally new novel called, It’s Nothing Serious. The fiction writing really helped me escape for a bit every day. I allowed myself to get wrapped up into a world where I was in total control of what happens next — because in my real life, I had zero control. You might call it denial. It probably was. But I looked at is as creative coping.
During that time, I always wondered if I should just get a simple job. It wasn’t that I was afraid to work — I would’ve cleaned houses if someone wanted pay me! I had no pride left at that time — the good kind or the bad kind. I even applied to be a maid at the Ritz Carlton. To tell you the truth, I was very excited about the possibility of working as a five-star maid! Think of all the amazing cleaning tips I’d acquire! No one has ever walked into a Ritz Carlton anywhere in the world and not been impressed with how spotless and shiny everything is. But in the end, I wasn’t able to make the long-term commitment the Ritz deserved.
Darn.
You might remember, in one of my first blog posts, I gave you permission to judge my choices along the way, and for me, my lack of employment is one area where I’m filled with regret and judgment against myself. I think I should’ve gotten a job at a coffee shop or restaurant. If I had, I know I could’ve continued to write for Lou late at night, and while my own house might not have been as clean, at least we would’ve had a little trickle of more consistent income.
But at the time, I was still determined to believe that something Lou was working on would break, and we’d have things figured out again. Lou was getting the word out that he was looking for a gig, and there were quite a few companies outside of Sarasota that were expressing interest in hiring Lou. He had several interviews with companies in NYC, Dallas, and Miami, and so that would certainly mean we’d have to move. So I didn’t want to make a commitment to work for someone, only to turn around a short time later and say, “Oh, my husband figured things out, and so I can’t work for you anymore.” I already felt like a big flake because I couldn’t pay for my former life.
