I’m not sure when I first learned that Dave Newton had lung cancer.  I suspect it was before I got back to the States.  He was my great friend, business partner and mentor.  It was very difficult to hear of his condition, particularly in terms of survival rates.  The 5-year survival rate for Stage 1 lung cancer patients is only 45%.  For those diagnosed as Stage 4, only 1% will still be drawing breath five years hence.

Soon after my return, I gathered my team leads.  In a real Asperger moment, I announced that we needed to envision a future without Dave.  This pronouncement struck my team as insensitive, reprehensible, and cruel. I admit their sentiment caught me by surprise.

But it didn’t stop me making my pronouncement to others.  I took to saying that while Jim and I provided the brawn for client delivery, Dave and Amy were the brain and heart.  I lumped them together because they were inseparable.  They had lived, loved, worked and played together from the start.  And now that Dave was sick and Amy was caring for him, neither one was very much around .

It wasn’t long until I told Dave and Amy how I felt.  They both brushed my ‘lose our brain/heart’ metaphor aside, insisting they would always be around.  But, as time wore on, that was less and less the case.

No one wanted to acknowledge that Dave was dying.  So the company plodded on as if everything was fine.  But in reality, we were stumbling.  Meetings ended without decisions, often with the words, “We need to bring this one to Amy and Dave.”

I pushed the line that we needed to play the hand we were dealt and make decisions where we could. But I suffered from a hard-earned reputation for being a jerk.  Few colleagues were inclined to follow my lead on ‘taking charge’, so the corporate lethargy ground on.

Then I took badgering Dave to a whole new level.  “We’ve got three choices, as I see it,” I said repeatedly. “One: you can get better and the two of you can resume your Directors’ roles. Two: we can recruit some senior talent to replace your ‘hearts and heads’. Or three: we can sell the company.  ‘One’ isn’t going to happen, so that leaves two or three.” Over a several month periods, I sensed I was wearing them down.

One day, after I’d been back about a year, Dave came in and said, “Amy and I have decided we should sell the company.” The pronouncement was particularly notable because Dave tended not to speak like this.  He was too inclusive to use a phrase like “Amy and I have decided”. They both worked hard to ensure that our decisions were consensus-based.  His blunt talk of selling took the air out of the room. Even I, who had been pushing for this, felt myself gasping for breath.

It was ok for me to say that Dave was dying, but for him to allude to it? That was simply not allowed.  He was a fighter, I reminded him.  He didn’t even know how to quit.  But he told me this time I was wrong.  He’d made peace with his limited future and wanted to ensure he used his remaining energy to do what was best for the company.

Once Dave made his mind made up, there was no changing it.  He poured himself into finding us a buyer.  He analyzed our competitive landscape and figured out who had the most to gain by acquiring us. Then he set about wooing the top three candidates.  He didn’t tell them that we were selling.  Rather he seeded them with reasons why buying a company like ours would be good for them.  It didn’t take long for the seeds to sprout.

A rule of thumb is that professional services firms are worth half their full year’s revenue.  So, with forty million in expected revenue in 2010, we pegged our worth at twenty million bucks.

One of our prospective buyers was SRA International.  They were a 7,000 employee company with 1.5 billion dollars in revenue. We knew and liked them and had a shared history.  When we formed the company, they had helped us out by lending us office space. They wouldn’t even take our offered rent payment two months later when we moved out. (In 2015, Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) bought SRA.  Combined, the newly named CSRA had revenues of 5.5 billion and 20,000 employees.  Giving the plot away, this number included 400 professionals from our staff).

I had developed a ‘quick no/slow yes’ adage about business.  It said that losses came as fast as a gut punch but wins trickle in.  Winning was more like a ‘maybe’ moving to a ‘probably’.  Wins came in so slowly that you were never sure when they actually arrived.

To my surprise, Dave got SRA to quickly bite.  He landed the deal within a couple months.  But then my adage kicked in.  The deal was more like a string of caveats. ‘We’ll buy you for 10 million.  But we’ll give you up to another 10 million if you reach this impossible level of new sales.  And if you do it every year for the next three years. Without losing any key personnel.  While transforming yourselves to look exactly like us.  Without losing your identity because that’s your Brand.”

In the end, Dave delivered on every aspect of every stipulation and we walked out with twenty mil. When my first of several large checks came in – my first ever for over a million dollars – I felt like crying.  The first check wasn’t quite TFI, but the ‘trickled yes’ had begun.

Over the course of the next 18 months the money slowly accumulated.  It eventually got to the amount I arbitrarily pegged as TFI.  Fifteen years after taking the gamble of starting the company, we had all won a major hand.  We each walked out with a couple of  million.  Except for Dave.  He was once again proven right in trusting his gambler’s instincts.  His additional 75k investment netted him double our average take.

We have friends, Patti and Steve, who ran a high end design and build firm.  They had done some terrific work remodeling our house.  The Washington Post even featured the renovation on the front page of the Real Estate section.  They were getting back from a trip to Costa Rica as we completed selling the firm.  Steve called me and asked me to come by.  There was an unusual tone of urgency in his voice. He was pouring over a set of architectural diagrams when I arrived.  He pointed at a three ring binder beside him saying only, “Have a look.”

Steve and Patti are some of the most well-travelled people we know.  And Nancy and I have always admired their style and taste. They are not flashy in the money sense but they live with elegance and attention to detail.  I asked Steve how he liked Costa Rica before opening the book. “It was great. As good a place as we have ever been. In fact we liked it so much, we bought a place.” He nodded again to the binder. “Have a look.” The binder contained a collection of photographs, brochures, floor plans and maps.   The map showed a long stretch of beach, noted only as ‘Turtle Preserve’.

“I found these great cabañas grandfathered into what is now the Parque National Marino Las Baulas.  It means ‘Leatherback Turtle National Marine Park’.  It is the largest nesting colony of Leatherbacks on the Pacific coast. These things are amazing.  Five feet long. 1,500 pounds.”

The photos showed a small group of bungalows gathered in a jungle garden around a common pool. Terra cotta roofs and titled porches, everything finished in burnished hardwoods. I looked at him in disbelief. He and Patti knew that Nancy and I had been scouting exotic locales for the past fifteen years.  We always kept an eye out for a vacation home in a rustic beach setting outside of the first world. “Goddamn it Steve,” I said, “You know Nancy and I have been looking for this very thing for years.”

He smiled and nodded. “I know. That’s why I got you the bungalow next door. They’re holding it for you until tomorrow.” I was dumbfounded. “Count us in,” I blurted out. We made our down payment the following week.  It would be several months before we got down there to check it out.

A group of German investors owned the units and the Costa Rican put up some conditions for the sale.  The Germans agreed to our using the place while they worked the final details out.

We managed to get down there a couple of times a year.  We returned from each visit knowing that we had lucked into a little slice of paradise. But, as time wore on, we found ourselves no closer to settling on the deal. Then, on one visit a few years later, I noticed a ‘for sale’ sign on a medium sized house. It was on a large plot fronted by a lovely titled pool. I had always admired the house, which we passed on our way to the beach.  I was fairly sure that it was beyond our means. Still, I knew the realtor and I figured it was worth asking about. He said he’d be there to show it to me in the afternoon.

Nancy and I were smitten as soon as we saw the place. It was decorated in colorful Spanish tiles.  A large veranda surrounded it looking out over a well-kept garden.  The place was open, airy, and lush. He told us that the owner wanted $250,000 for it.  That was half the figure I had in mind.  I said, “We’ll take it,” without a moment’s hesitation. He shook his head sadly, “Sorry. There are two offers ahead of yours.”

“When did it go on the market?” I asked.

“This morning,” he said.

“This morning and you already have two offers?” He nodded solemnly. “Look, you know me,” I pleaded. “I’m good for it. I can wire the money by the middle of this week.” He looked at me thoughtfully, nodded again, and said, “I’ll take it to the owner. I’ll let you know what he says.” We took possession of that lovely place by the end of the following week. As it happened, it was the same day we heard that the sale of the bungalow had finally gone through. Not exactly ‘two for the price of one’, but we’ve never regretted having both places. We’ve had over a hundred friends and family stay there and it has proven to be one of life’s great joys.

Washington Post: Renovating From Afar; With the Right Builder, a Project Can Be Steered to a Happy End. Even From Africa.

Nancy and Michael Gehron had their Falls Church house renovated while they were out of town. Way out of town — with the Peace Corps in Madagascar, an island nation off the southeastern coast of Africa.

[Read more…] about 14.3 Costa Rica

But back to the sale of the company.  SRA wanted to show how our acquisition came with opportunities.   To demonstrate, they pulled me out of our group and dropped me into their newly conceived ‘proposal tank’. I wasn’t too thrilled about it as it took me out of my comfort zone and put me in a marketing role. But the proposal was for a $350 million contract to support all USAID’s software and system’s needs. They brought me on knowing I had worked on USAID systems in the field.  I had also followed AID’s IT operation with interest for several years. In fact, I had read five years earlier about CSC winning this very contract. I even remembered wondering at the time what kind of person ended up running such a significant systems job.  I even thought it might be something I’d like to do, but I couldn’t image how it could ever come about.

While a job this size was definitely punching above our weight class, SRA seemed to have a good handle on the work.   And they put an excellent senior guy in to run the bid. After grilling me for a while, he added me as his lead for software development and support. We slogged through a grueling round of proposal reviews and panel interviews.  Then, to my surprise, USAID awarded us the contract.

 

So I ended up running the very contract I had been dreaming about. It was tough going from the start, but I was able to make it all work.  I managed to assemble a terrific team and, in a short time, we learned to love the work.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Dave was putting the finishing touches on the merger.  He worked tirelessly to ensure all our staff were comfortable and well placed. He also fought hard to get our Vice Presidents placed in SRA as Vice Presidents.  This was difficult because the SRA title required a larger business base than any of us had. Even so, he got them to agree.

Most of us were fearful that the acquisition would cause us to lose the MNG ‘magic’.  But it was still intact two years into the acquisition – and we even managed to keep every one of our staff. Dave deserves most of the credit for this.  And he did it during the same six months he went through chemo and open heart surgery. On August the eleventh, almost on the day he collected the final payment on his millions, Dave died.  His funeral was the largest any of the more than 500 attendees could remember. Amy flattered me by asking me to do the eulogy.  Then she announced she’d endowed a charitable foundation in his name.

A year later, Nancy once again pulled her ‘career’ card.  She let me know we would be moving to Tanzania. Just before we left, we had an out-of-town guest for dinner. He saw my African headdress of Mami-Wata and admired it.  Then he told us about his own collection of occult objects.  He said he was so serious about their power that he kept them on an altar he had built in-house.

I had always felt conflicted about that mask.  On the one hand, I suspected it deserved some credit for delivering its long-promised riches.  But that idea was blasphemous.  Also, I was superstitious enough to wonder if giving the headdress away might result in me losing my payout.   I decided the time had come to break this delusory bond. Our house guest left with the Mami Wata mask. And I am happy to report that at this juncture I still have the cash.

I arrived in Tanzania with the kids in tow a month after Nancy arrived there. It was the eighteenth of August, 2004, and my fiftieth birthday.

I arrived in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, eager to begin writing again. And best of all, now that I had achieved total financial independence, I could write without worrying if it would generate income. I couldn’t believe my luck!

I was writing for two or three hours every morning from our small house on Dar’s Masaki peninsula.  It is the most fashionable address in a town whose name translates as City of Peace. After writing, I’d take our fat American lab for a slow run along the Indian Ocean. Then I’d shower, buy the local paper, and read it over lunch at one of the local cafés.

I’d been into that routine for a few weeks when our pup, Alika, abruptly sat down in the middle of the run.   She absolutely refused to budge. She was as sweet an animal as ever graced the Earth.  And she was generally so deferential that I decided to give in to her resisting our forward progress.  At least this once.

But the following day she sat down in exactly the same spot and I’d had about enough. The spot was at the top of a fifty meter dash along a narrow path through a patch of Prickly Pear cactus.  It was also the only stretch of the run that dipped below grade of the road along the cliff, so I dubbed it ‘the Valley of Death’. Alika (her name is the Malagasy word for ‘dog’) finally gave in to my ever more aggressive tugging.  Once she got up, she was fine for the rest of the run.

Or she was fine as far as we got.  On our return, we once again descended into the Valley of Death.  The path through it was narrow enough that she had to trot behind me.  At the half way point, the cactus exploded and a large nearly naked man jumped out of a concealed blind. He smashed two bottles together, yelling, “Give me your money!” I jumped back and immediately assumed my often practiced karate stance.  I responded, yelling, “I’ll kill you!”

He looked startled for a minute.  Then he shook his head and laughed. “No. I’ll kill you,” he said, slashing at me with the bottle shards.  As I jumped out of the way, I yelled, “Alika! Attack!” In all fairness to her, it was the first time she’d ever heard the word.  She cocked her head and took a step back.  Too late, I realized she had been born without anything like an ‘attack’ gear. So I continued back-pedaling as he continued to lung.  Then, stumbling on the shattered glass, I lost my footing and tumbled to the ground. He was on me in a second holding one bottle to my throat as he dropped the other bottle to grab my hand.  Then he started to put my ring finger in his mouth.

“Goddamn,” I shouted, “Don’t bite my finger off.  I’ll give you the ring.” Again he began to laugh. “I’m not going to bite it off,” he said.  “I just need to get it wet so I can get the ring off.”

“That’s disgusting,” I replied, working to get the ring off by myself.  He took the ring along with my sunglasses and then he began to stand back up. As he did, I felt his hands run down along my legs. When they got down to my shoes, he quickly snatched them off as well.

I got back to my feet and noticed I was bleeding quite a bit from a gash below my knee.  I removed one of the shards of glass I’d fallen on as I watched him run off down the path.  Then I headed back towards the road.

The U.S. Ambassador’s residence was very close by so I went there and hailed his security team.  I explained that I was an ‘official’ American and I’d just been robbed across the street. “He only has two ways out and I watched the one leading north so he must have headed south.” The guard looked at me skeptically and then put his radio to his mouth. He started speaking Swahili and I didn’t understand a word.

Fifteen minutes later, I was still standing in the road trying to staunch my bleeding leg.  I told the guard that, as there didn’t seem any reason to stay, I’d be on my way. He nodded towards an on-coming pickup truck and said, “Give it a second.”

When the pickup pulled up, I saw three security guards in the pickup bed kicking the shit out of someone. “Is this the guy?” they asked, telling him to lift his head. Having noted my attacker had half his face melted from some ancient burn, I was able to confirm with yes, they’d caught the right guy.   “This your ring?” another asked, holding it aloft. “He was trying to swallow it when we tackled him. You better get that leg looked at and then we’ll meet you at the police station.” I thanked them and told them that this sounded like a good plan.

Several hours later I arrived at the station with my wound cleaned and stitched. The Embassy guards were nowhere to be seen.  The sergeant at the desk said that they needed a sworn statement from me. He also nodded toward the rear of the cavernous dark room. “And he wants to talk to you.”  I squinted to see who he was referring to but didn’t see anyone. Then he said, “You can go on back.” When my eyes adjusted, I saw that there was a heavy metal grate stretched across half of the back wall.   The flat iron took up more of the grid than the open space, making it difficult to see through.  As my eyes adjusted to the darkness within, I could make out a teeming mass of men.  Among them I noted the burnt visage of my attacker, holding a small boy aloft. “Mister, this man wants you to save him,” the child said in passable English. “He is begging you to let him out.” I shook my head in resignation before making my way back home.

That night I dreamed of him standing before a firing squad.  Before he died, I said, “I told you I’d kill you – and I meant it.” I woke with a terrible start. That morning, still troubled by the dream, I went to a local cafe and bought some food.  I picked up a bag of apples, some rolls and a small container filled with eggs. Then I made my way back to the jail. The officer at the desk said I’d have to get permission from the chief before he’d let me see the prisoner.  The chief gave me a hard look when I told him I’d brought food for my assailant. “What, are you a priest?” he demanded. When I assured him I wasn’t, he said, “Well, do you think we don’t feed our prisoners?” I replied that I understood that was left to prisoners’ families.  My assailant probably hadn’t had a chance to tell anyone he was in jail. The chief smiled, saying, “Yes, you’re right.  Prisoners have to arrange for their own food.” Then he told me to go wait in an adjacent room.

A short time later, two officers arrived flanking my assailant who entered crawling on all fours. Before I could offer him the food, one of the police grabbed it and opened up the sack. “Sorry, but you’ll need to have a bite of something first. Pick whatever you want.” I chose a roll and took a bite. Then my eyes bulged wide as I grabbed my throat and began to choke, staggering around.

They reacted in horror, unsure what to do, until I let up on my obvious little act and told them I was joking with them.  All three of them got a hoot out of that. When they offered him the bag, he eagerly took an egg. To my embarrassment, the egg ran down his hands when as cracked it open.  But he swallowed the remaining raw yoke down anyway. “I’m so sorry,” I apologized, “I thought they were cooked.”

“Never mind,” he replied. “It was just what I needed…and it tasted really good.”

In the end he drew me a map of his section of town and pointed out where his people lived. I promised to get word to them that he was being held, and the police returned my wedding ring on my way out.

By way of getting closure, I went to check on him sometime later in the year.  The police said they’d transferred him to another prison.  They didn’t have any more information than that.

Shortly thereafter, I began working for the Dar Guide, Tanzania’s largest circulation magazine.   I’d gotten to know some investigative journalist by then.  I filled one of them in on my efforts to check on the prisoner.  I said I’d give him fifty bucks for anything he could find. He got back to me and confirmed that they guy was eventually released.  I was relieved to know I hadn’t killed him after all.

Here I need to go back a bit to lend the next episode context.  One night, shortly after I’d returned from Peace Corps my brother Bill and I were sitting around having a couple beers.  He mentioned a woman he was spending a lot of time with and I asked if they had anything serious going on.  He said, “Oh no, it’s not like that.”  And I said, given how attractive I thought she was, he must be either blind or gay.  Bill responded, “Yep, I’m that.”

I was pretty sure he wasn’t blind, so I realized he was telling me he was gay.  He was my best friend and yet somehow I had never thought about his sexual orientation. He said he had kept it to himself because it upset a lot of people.  I assured him his secret was safe with me.

Only it wasn’t because I am notoriously bad at keeping secrets. So I almost immediately began causing him pain and embarrassment.  He was good about dealing with all the problems my big mouth created.  Suffice it say he didn’t remain in the closet long once he shared in confidence with me.  I apologize for that.  Then, within a decade, he let me know he had tested positive for HIV.

In those early days, AIDS was a death sentence.  For newly infected and on treatment, today, it is more of a chronic condition.  But 37 million people have died from it and a million more are still dying every year.  Every minute of every day two people die from AIDS.

Back when Bill got infected, people knew the primary pathway was same-sex sex.  Discrimination and stigma became the norm.  They still are, but to a somewhat lesser extent. Without hope of survival, many of those who suspected they might be infected decided not to find out. Brother Bill was one of those. By the time he got tested, Bill had full blown AIDS.  His doctor told him he only had two years to live.

The closest my Asperger’s Syndrome has ever allowed me to get to empathy was on his fortieth birthday in New York. I met him at a high-end cocktail lounge he frequented. I had on one of my three-year old daughter’s fake diamond stud earrings as a joke.

“You asshole,” he blurted as soon as he saw me. “You knew I’ve been wanting one of those and so you had to get one first.”  I let him stew in it for a while.  Then I pulled the paste-on earring off.

A few martinis later I watched as a tattoo parlor artist put a hole through Bill’s lower ear. The guy said Bill had bought both earrings, and he’d be happy to pierce my ear for free.  At that moment, it seemed like a pretty good idea.

I hardly noticed Bill’s blood on the needle…but there was hell to pay when Nancy found out. We checked the internet and found out that she was right about a shared needle as a viable pathway. She cut me off from unprotected sex until I tested clean for HIV.  That night, I realized for the first time what Bill’s death sentence meant to him.  I felt tears run down my cheek.  But then it probably wasn’t empathy. It is more likely I was crying for myself.

It has now been thirty years since the doctor told Bill he had two more years to live.  His partner, Bob, died of AIDS twenty years ago.  But Bill is in the tiny group called ‘those the longest surviving with AIDS’.    He remains hale and hearty to this day.