The Club, Vol 1 and 2

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If I had been careful and cautious and watched what I had said, I would never have come to know about “The Club", and certainly I never would have become a member and enjoyed the bizarre privileges which membership gives. For years I've known that some of my ideas were definitely not acceptable to most people, so I have to be very careful of what I say even among friends. All that time it had never occurred to me that there was any chance of actually doing the things I had thought about. My problem was simply not to let people know what I thought about.

I suppose it was the three martinis before lunch that got me started, but it was just plain old-fashioned good luck that gave me the proper audience for my slip, and turned what could have been a terrible mistake into wonderful good fortune. John Murphy and I were drinking our lunch at the bar in a swank restaurant just off Madison Avenue, as happens every now and then when you are in my line of business. I'm in charge of advertising for a big company that is pretty well known, so I won't stick my chin out by mentioning its name. And John Murphy is a vice president of a well known advertising agency who that year was handling our account, — a matter running into millions of dollars. This meant that he was duty-bound to be extra nice to me and buy me drinks and laugh at my jokes and otherwise brown-nose me, so as to keep me wanting his agency to have our account. John and I have hit it off pretty well for several years, business-wise, even thought we know almost nothing about each other outside of business. I know he is married and lives somewhere up in Westchester with his wife and a couple of kids, and he probably knows that I am divorced and live alone in an apartment on the east side of Manhattan.

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