THE CliffR Project

CHAPTER 1, CHAPTER 4, CHAPTER 26, CHAPTER 34

HOMEPAGE

THE CliffR PROJECT

PART 2 - ‘The Salad Flower Days’

THE SALAD FLOWER DAYS

CHAPTER 26 The sum of all fears is a movie, the fear of all sums is a

The terrorists have been routed from Afghanistan, sort of. Saddam Hussein’s regime has been booted from Iraq, sort of. Saddam faces the music in a court trial, sort of. And the Americans absolutely distain all truth to the rumor that they are only in it for the oil. The Presidential election of two thousand and eight will be very interesting. The Democrats are going to have to get at least twice as many votes as the Republicans just to break even.

On the other hand, Mars made it safely past Earth without falling out of orbit in 2003, the US government fell out of orbit over the hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, and Mankind seems to be turning more and more positive all the time. Except of course for the small handful of radicals for whom nothing is sacred but the past and who want to cram their traditions relentlessly down everybody else’s throats or you die.

I think it’s a simple case of misery liking company. If two or more believe like they do then it justifies their conviction. Which therefore by default can’t be entirely stupid. So by making as many others believe what they do they automatically cover off any self doubts they might have about their gullibility. It’s called self serving cause.

On the other hand, the world politic has rallied together for the first time in the history to censor a maleficent member. Hussein got the bum’s rush the hard way. On the other hand Greydie and I have just been forced to finish a year and a half of selling flowers in bars and taverns after a twenty year layoff. Now there’s equality.

As soon as I get our domain name Look.com back on track after the second time it’s been stolen, it looks like I’ll be looking straight down the snout again at a huge potential fortune from website www.look.com. Money is god.

To refresh the minds of any of you readers coming out of Part 1, or to inform any you who aren’t, I made a decision years ago to have enough money by the age of sixty five that I wouldn’t end up on a cot at the Salvation Army. I euphemistically called it ‘The CliffR Project as the title for this book.

The time is up and past and I recently lived living exactly six blocks away from the stupid place. Not to worry though. If the universe unfolds the way it should in the next little while, I will make it through in spades. A bit of a close call on the timing though don’t you think.

CliffR is because my first name is Clifton, Cliff for short. My middle name starts with R. As explained in Part 1 called 'The Incessant Knock of Opportunity', I have punted big money opportunities on more occasions than some people can count. So many in fact over the years that you had to start thinking the movie ‘Dumb and Dumber’ had the wrong plot.

In my own defense let me just say again that the problem wasn't so much for dimwit as for not being on the ball enough at all the right times. In other words, really stupid.

On the other hand let me say that life has been anything but a bore. So much so that I started writing down this saga of memoirs about seven and a half years ago, just around when it had started to look for a certainty that I would be ending up on that cot at the Sally.

The flower selling part of the sage didn't specifically start on the back roads of Montana as I said at the beginning of Part 1. It actually began three years earlier on the cobblestone streets of Vancouver’s Gastown, hitting the bars.

It started innocently enough, by the same process that has been starting up successful businesses since man first learned to walk upright. Namely, by a fluke.

After I had been kicked out as manager of the MYTD rock in the fall of nineteen sixty nine for hopelessly mismanaging their rock star aspirations, I knocked around Vancouver for nearly a year. Then I came into association with a group of people who were living mainly by making leather crafts and selling them off the street.

Leather crafts had become quite fashionable in the aftermath of the hippie era, sort of like tooling up for a new future. In fact it was through leather craft outlets and wholesale that the Tandy Corporation built up enough cash clout to eventually become a huge mega corporation including the giant Radio Shack under its big leather belt.

A couple of my newfound friend's girlfriends, were flower girls. Specifically, this meant that similar to most major cities in the late sixties and early seventies, Vancouver had flower girls all over the place. The girls typically dressed in long gowns and used pleasant smiles to sell wrapped roses from a wide wicker basket to upscale patrons in upscale restaurants and clubs.

Because of the kindly year round Vancouver climate, flower girls had in fact been plying their trade around the city for decades. Their routes stayed limited to the fore mentioned high class hot spots and plushier up town restaurants.

My friend's girlfriends were Janie come lately's, and were only able to cobble up a small route through Gastown. Gastown had just recently sprung up like a Phoenix out of the ashes of the dismay and decay of Vancouver's original skid row. Gastown was now an artsy, city endorsed locale of trendy clubs, restaurants, and boutiques.

By another quirk of the odds, Gastown was inadvertently started from scratch by none other than another acquaintance of mine from high school some fifteen years earlier. Eugene for a change wasn’t Jewish. Who in fact lived in the big house I mentioned in Kerrisdale in Chapter 2, which had a giant Hollywood facade gracing the outside and rec room furniture gracing the inside.

Eugene's family, while not notoriously rich were nonetheless not without a dollar or two. Plus they were directly related to the notoriously rich. Plus Eugene had married extremely well. I mean some guys have all the luck.

Eugene's wife was the daughter of a very wealthy Vancouver civil engineer. Her father’s Engineering company had just built the gigantic Answar Dam in Egypt for example. In other words not your average chopped liver engineer.

Her father was a consummate engineer through and through. Her mother had to follow engineering type instructions for every aspect of their everyday daily existence. Even the bathroom wall supported a list for the cleaning steps she was expected to adhere to or else a big shit up would ensue. She finally decided enough was enough and she took a powder.

I learned all about this because the daughter was one of Greydie’s close gal pals in his last year at university. He was also pretty chummy with her mother in a yakky way, who told him all the sordid details as an never ending story.

You could hardly blame the Father though. Being a world renowned high level engineer, everyone had to follow his directions to a tee or a bridge or something might fall down and bean somebody.

So Eugene was indeed sitting on the sidelines of a not inconsiderable chunk of money.

The situation which had spawned Gastown was not unlike that of a drowning man waiting for a straw to grasp. Vancouver was home to one of the lowest frequency and most despairing skid row locations on the planet. Being a major sea port, Vancouver was, probably still is, also home to one of the main North American ports of entry for heroin from the Pacific Rim.

You figure it out. Half the denizens down there looked like Fagan from Oliver twist hiding in the shadows to sell you something like lightning in a bottle from China.

In the late sixties Eugene and some associates came up with the unlikely idea of converting one of the most dismal of all the derelict skid row hotels into a trendy artist's garrote. A pretty risky undertaking considering the location, but the price was right.

The re-done place was to feature nice little private living quarters for the tenants, plus a large open communal area for TV and relaxation not unlike the style of an Indian Guru's Ashram.

The units rented out overnight. Evidently having a collective nose for recognizing the smell of money, Eugene and his associates immediately gobbled up a sizable chunk of the skid row real estate around the place and unofficially called it Gastown.

The city of Vancouver, smelling an even stronger aroma of fine touristy roast in the blend, got with the program and made it official. The city pronounced its official endorsement by repaving the rotting concrete streets with distinctively styled red bricks. I haven't been to Vancouver in some years, but I would have to bet by now that Gastown covers at least a half square mile of the Eastside downtown perimeter or more.

Our typical routine for the day was to prepare our flower girl's baskets for the upcoming evening’s entrepreneurial sojourn. One day we happened to be over in North Vancouver which sat slapped smack alongside the base of the mountains like a skirt. That was Vancouver’s number one picture book claim to fame. That, and of course the year round golfing, sailing, fishing, swimming, skiing, necking, etc, etc.

We had all arranged to meet in a local burger joint for dinner. The girl’s unfixed flowers were in the back of a station wagon. Our plan had been to and fix them fast into the tight little flower and fern presentations the girls sold from their baskets starting right after dinner. One of the girls called to say they were going to be late by an hour or more.

We had been sitting around at a small strip mall doing nothing. Well now we had nothing to do for another hour or so but to sit around doing nothing even faster. We proved that being bored is the mother of inspiration.

Somebody came up with the brilliant idea of grabbing some of the flowers and running them around the plaza shops to see if any of the store staffers would be interested in buying a couple.

We each grabbed a small handful and headed out. Twenty minutes later we were all back, empty handed. All sold out. Hmmm. Like a good hip swivel when you see it we were definitely onto something here.

We quickly adopted the habit of buying a larger than normal stock of flowers for the girls every day, then using the extras to go out late every afternoon on plaza blitzes. That quickly expanded into whole afternoon blitzes.

Why not, a hip swivel is a hip swivel. Plus it beat the pants off the money we had been making from the leather crafts. Plus Vancouver and the surrounding area had a slew of juicy plazas.

Eventually one of the guys got the brilliant idea of hitting the beer parlors and taverns at night along downtown Granville Street and Gastown. That wasn't as trivial as it may sound. Flower girls had been doing Vancouver's class establishments for years.

Doing bars and taverns down Vancouver’s notorious Granville Street run sounded a lot like putting a fish in your mouth and jumping into a Polar Bear pit. It was simply out of the question for flower girls, they would have been eaten alive.

The idea that someone of somewhat sterner stuff, like maybe a guy who used to play football or something could get away with it, was somewhat compelling though. Of course if you stop to think about it, it could very easily have gone the other way and he could have come out of there looking a tad sliced and diced and not as a figure of speech.

Public percepts being what they were in those days, lisps from a guy selling flowers might easily have been perceived where none existed. So the potential risk for your basic thump out was not farfetched.

However the idea stayed compelling enough to eventually become a risk worth taking as the payoff if it worked could very well be interesting.

It was indeed another good call. The Rambo test guy came back the first night with money falling out of his pockets and a huge big grin on his face. Granville Street had loved it.

Pretty soon all the guys except myself were covering clubs and bars all over the down town area every night of the week. The modus operandi was pretty crude compared to the sophisticated presentation of the flower girls. The guys simply crammed the flowers into a wastebasket full of water, headed out the door wearing blue jeans and a tee shirt, and yakked it up with the folks like Harry selling ties.

Before long, my flowering friends discovered that things went a lot better when they were better dressed. So they moved up into dress slacks and nice shirt. Eventually the dress code upgraded again into a sports coat. Sports coats then became the men’s flower selling equivalent of long skirts and dresses for the next ten years.

Likewise we quickly learned that ‘being there’ superseded the need to fast talk up sales and we settled into letting the flowers do the talking and chit chatting the customers as the side man. The number one mode of conversation on the planet when high risk stakes are in play.

On the other hand the waste paper baskets stayed on as the fixture of choice for a long time. Not because they were classy but because waste baskets were the only conveyance capable of carrying the big pile of flowers needed for a good night's run without breaking the flowers or the seller's back.

Around the mid seventies, very large plastic vases capable of holding a ton of flowers for very large table displays suddenly appeared on the scene which were adopted faster than Martins to a bird house. Thus both gals and guys became classy and convenient looking according to their kind. Glass vases were never popular, for the obvious glass house risk of a bad accident.

Even though the night time bar routes had settled down into a predictable routine, I still refused to go out. My reason was the same as why high school reunions work. If you haven't made it big by the time the reunion comes around, you don't go. If you have, you go so you can waft yourself in everyone's face.

Since I had came from high school in Vancouver, I didn't want to run into old classmates or other acquaintances who might therefore think that my selling flowers for a living was, well, rather sad. So I stayed right out of the night time stuff except to help get the flowers ready every day.

Ironically enough, the idea of men selling flowers table to table in bars and restaurants wasn't new to the world. Just new to the western world. In Europe, the tradition of flower men went all the way back to the tradition of flower girls.

Instead of long gowns, the men wore suits, bolo ties, and flat hats somewhat in the fashion of Spanish flamenco dancers. They were highly respected and called, 'Rose Gentlemen' or in Austrian ‘Der Rosenkavalier’. In North America we were called 'Flower Man', and now in the new Millennium, also ‘Flower Guy’ and 'Flower Dude'.

With the clean up of dress code from tee shirts and jeans to jacket and slacks, by the time the summer of nineteen seventy two came around, the fellows had a great route up and running including restaurants, clubs, lounges, and even pizza joints. In general they were selling anywhere flower girls weren't.

Also during this period, the net price per flower also frequently up-sized. The original price was, 'pay whatever you wanted'. That had a nice folksy ring to it but didn't work out. The problem was that the 'whatever you wanted' usually resulted in, ‘not enough to pay the bills’.

The fellows had started out buying end of the road flowers from the wholesalers for the bars and taverns. For the flower girls, a much better grade of flower was used.

A flower purchased from a flower girl in a classy restaurant had at least some chance of winding up in a vase somewhere the next morning. The future for a flower bought from one of the flower guys in a screaming beer parlor full of drunken skunks was not so bright. The need for higher quality flowers was not so great.

The price was officially raised to a quarter, then to fifty cents, and then finally to a dollar and the guys also started using the better grade flowers. Plus they started putting little green water caps called ‘water pics’ on the bottoms and coaching the purchasers on how to keep the flowers fresh until morning.

Picture yourself explaining carefully to a bleary eyed two hundred and sixty pound jack hammer operator how to make a flower last longer and you get the picture. The unofficial re-structuring of the mass consciousness had officially begun.

Because of the success of the nifty little water pic things for extending the life of table floral arrangements and the like, the Water Pic brand now fronts everything from kitchen water purifiers to electric tooth brushes. And how does YOUR garden grow.

Another little piece of history also came as result of this summer of nineteen seventy one. By that summer, Gastown was already making quite a name for itself. Students and others from far and wide had inundated Vancouver for the summer to check it out. The visitors were all thus greeted by the grinning faces of our guys romping through the bars and clubs every night unloading flowers by the bucket load.

It evidently must have looked like a pretty good idea. Because that fall, flowers routes suddenly sprung up in bars and taverns all over North America at a dollar a flower. Which eventually becoming a permanent part of every local scene like Natchos and Buffalo wings even to this day.

The parallel popular idea of selling flowers off curbside came from a completely different source. Albeit at roughly the same time. A guy calling himself 'Sunrise Industries' in Arizona, the company that is, started setting summer students up at curbside every summer to hit the cars going by. And thereby also hit on a good one.

The overhead was negligible. The sellers stood at street corners holding a handful of posies in their hand and thrust a big pasty grin into the open window of your card every time you stopped for a red light. The authorities eventually shut them down and a handheld windshield squeegee eventually replaced the handful of posies.

Some of the original idea has stuck around though. Every Valentines, Easter, and Mothers Day weekend buckets of flowers magically appear on just about every major intersection in every city. Then just as magically disappears the day after.

For my part, I stayed active in most of the daytime plaza blitzes. I still stayed out of the nighttime bars and clubs. Like I had said before, this was not through cowardice or fear of getting my brains thumped out. It was merely the cowardice and fear of running into old acquaintances and getting my humility knocked off.

One evening about six months into the thing, one of the guys called in a panic because they were short a seller for the evening. “No way”, I said, “not a chance, forget it, don’t even think about it”. I persevered. He persevered even more. I finally gave in and out I went.

To make a long story short I had the time of my life. It turned out way huge. Plus I came back with a not insignificant tidy little sum for my efforts. Not too shabby after all I thought, thus hooked I was.

Also, it turned out that my worry about running into old acquaintances was a ghost panic. The numerous acquaintances I did run into only wanted to know how much money I was making selling the things. No different than high school reunions after all.

Gradually I filled in on more and more nights. Gradually the business continued to expand and expand until eventually there were enough new places for me to come on board full time. Little did I know that this would be the start of a flower selling odyssey which would see me all across Canada and back, twice. Plus for a time, way down into the states.

CHAPTER 1, CHAPTER 4, CHAPTER 26, CHAPTER 34